Work Guide · 2026-05-06 · Reading time ~ 6 min
The Bears of Mt. Nametoko — Miyazawa Kenji's Quietest Ethics Play
Miyazawa Kenji's short story about the bear hunter Kojūrō and the bears of Mt. Nametoko. A children's tale on the surface, an ethics play underneath. Read it in Korean on Pagera.
Pagera Editorial
"The story of the bears of Mt. Nametoko is a curious one." A light first sentence. By the end, you realize the curiosity is one of Miyazawa Kenji's heaviest meditations on what humans owe other animals — and what poverty does to that question.
Not the Galactic Railroad Kenji
Korean readers know Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933) mainly through Night on the Galactic Railroad and The Restaurant of Many Orders — fantastical, fairy-tale Kenji. There is another Kenji: the Iwate Kenji, who looks directly at the poverty, the labor, and the death of his mountain villages. "The Bears of Mt. Nametoko" sits at the apex of that second register.
The story is dated to around 1929 and was published posthumously after Kenji's death in 1933. Mt. Nametoko is fictional, but the Iwate dialect, the seasonal patterns, and the mountain economy in it are all drawn straight from the rural society Kenji actually saw.
Kojūrō, the Poor Bear Hunter
The protagonist is Kojūrō, who hunts bears across Mt. Nametoko. He doesn't enjoy killing them. Hunting is a job, no more. But bears die, because that is what a mountain hunter does.
What Kenji captures is the strange relationship between Kojūrō and the bears. The bears recognize him; he recognizes them. One bear asks Kojūrō for two more years of life, promising to come back at the end of those two years and let himself be taken. Kojūrō agrees. Two years later, the bear is dead in front of Kojūrō's house. The promise was kept.
The Poor Killing the Poor
The heaviest scene is not in the mountains. It is in town, where Kojūrō sells bear hides and gallbladders to a wholesaler at humiliating prices. The bear taken at real risk in the mountains becomes pocket change in a merchant's parlor. Kenji neither condemns the wholesaler nor pities Kojūrō; he simply describes the bend in the hunter's back as he accepts the price.
And then he writes one line that shifts everything: "If killing bears is sad, the poverty that forces a man to kill bears to live is sadder still." The fairy-tale frame is suddenly carrying a clear-eyed ethics.
Kojūrō's Last Day — The Bears' Reply
Old Kojūrō meets a great bear one winter and is killed by it. Before he dies, the bear says, simply: "Oh, Kojūrō. I didn't mean to kill you." The lifelong hunter, killed at last by a bear, dies in a moment shaped not as violence but as reconciliation.
Kojūrō's body stays on the mountain. When villagers come days later to find him, Kenji writes that the bears he had hunted across his lifetime were sitting in a circle around the body, as if conducting a wake. In the closing image the line between hunter and hunted, killer and killed, dissolves.
Why Read This Now
Three reasons "The Bears of Mt. Nametoko" still presses on a 21st-century reader:
- The ethics of human-animal relations — a serious literary attempt to take the killed animal's perspective seriously.
- The ethics of poverty and labor — a portrait of "the man who must do harm to live," drawn without sentimentality.
- The Iwate documentary layer — under the fairy-tale surface, the speech, work, and seasonal life of 1920s rural Japan are preserved as in amber.
Read "The Bears of Mt. Nametoko" in Korean on Pagera.