“The Canary” is a 1923 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in The Nation & the Anthenaeum on 21 April 1923, and later appeared in The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories. The characters themselves are the symbols: a lonely woman a dead canary a Chinese man who sold her the canary three younger men whom she cooks dinner for loneliness, intermingled with the theme of the housewife perhaps http://www.asahi-net.or.