The Wild Geese by Mori Ōgai
Published 1913 · 48,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Wild Geese to read?
The Wild Geese scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- Meiji-period vocabulary of student life, moneylending and Tokyo geography, with terms of address and social gradation that the translation must approximate.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Ōgai's famously clean, doctorly prose in short sentences, complicated only by a narrator who slips between periods and sources.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete scenes carry a steady analysis of what money does to affection and of how little agency a woman in Otama's position has, delivered by observation rather than argument.
- Information density: 56 out of 100
- Meiji Tokyo's social structure, the university's place in it, the mechanics of usury and the position of a mistress are conveyed compactly and without explanation.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- An unnamed narrator reconstructs, thirty-five years later, a story he pieced together from two people who never told each other any of it, and he admits at the outset that the join is his own invention.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- The caged linnets, the snake, and above all the killed goose eaten at dinner while the woman waits, are worked with a precision that makes the last chapters almost unbearable.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- Every character's plan is defeated by an accident nobody notices. The narrator's calm forensic tone against the wasted lives he is describing is the source of the book's coldness.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- Okada leaves for Germany the next day, Otama's decision is never spoken, and the narrator ends by saying that the rest of the story would need another book, which was never written.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- A retrospective frame at thirty-five years' distance, with the narrator moving between Otama's household and the students' lodgings and openly stitching together two accounts.
How The Wild Geese is regarded
The Wild Geese holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.