For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature 9780226068367, 9780226068374, 9780226034782, 2015017707

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FOR D IG N I T Y, J U ST IC E , A N D R EVOLU T I O N

For Dignity, Justice,

and Revolution AN ANTHOLOGY OF JAPANESE PROLETARIAN LITERATURE Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field

the university of chicago press Chicago and London

Heather Bowen‑Struyk is the coeditor of Red Love Across the Pacific and the guest editor for Proletarian Arts in East Asia, a special edition of the journal positions. Norma Field retired in 2011 as the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago. Her books include In the Realm of a Dying Emperor.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-06836-7 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-06837-4 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03478-2 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226034782.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book. Title page illustrations: see fig. 1, p. 5, for more information. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data For dignity, justice, and revolution : an anthology of Japanese proletarian literature / edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field. pages : illustrations ; cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-226-06836-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-068374 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-03478-2 (e-book) 1. Short stories, Japanese—20th century—Translations into English. 2. Working class—Japan—Fiction. 3. Proletariat in literature. 4. Japanese prose literature—20th century— History and criticism. I. Bowen-Struyk, Heather, 1971– editor. II. Field, Norma, 1947– editor. PL782.E8F67 2016 895.6'30108—dc23 2015017707 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents List of Figures ix Introduction 1

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Chapter 1. The Personal Is the Political 14 Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow 16 Kobayashi Takiji Red 25 Nakamoto Takako The Mother 34 Wakasugi Toriko A Statement of My Views in Response to Mr. Masamune Hakucho¯ 43 Aono Suekichi A Chronology of My Life 47 Kobayashi Takiji

Chapter 2. Labor and Literature 49 The Prostitute 53 Hayama Yoshiki 7 Apples 68 Hayashi Fusao 8 Prayer 75 Sata Ineko 9 Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness 91 Aono Suekichi 10 Going on a Field Trip? 97 Nakamoto Takako 6

Chapter 3. The Question of Realism 99 March 15, 1928 103 Kobayashi Takiji 12 The Linesmen 159 Kataoka Teppei 13 The Path to Proletarian Realism 172 Kurahara Korehito 11

14 On the Tendency of Proletarian Works to Become Formulaic 180 Hirabayashi Taiko 15 Covering Over the Essence 184 Sata Ineko

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

Chapter 4. Children 188 Hell 192 Kaji Wataru Death of a Cricket 204 Murayama Kazuko Elephant and Mouse 208 Murayama Kazuko Tetsu’s Story; Or, a Rope around Whose Neck? 209 Nakano Shigeharu The Question of “Reality” and “Unreality” in Children’s Stories 223 Makimoto Kusuro¯ Chapter 5. Art as a Weapon 227 Leafleting 231 Sata Ineko Letter 232 Kobayashi Takiji Shawl 235 Tokunaga Sunao The Bulletin Board and the Wall Story 238 Yi Tong-gyu A Farmer among Farmers 241 Hosono Ko¯jiro¯ To Qiqihar 244 Kuroshima Denji A Day at the Factory 246 Nagano Kayo Our Own Literature Course (1): A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage 249 Yamada Seizaburo¯ On Wall Stories and “Short” Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature 252 Kobayashi Takiji A Guide to Fiction Writing: How to Write Stories 255 Kobayashi Takiji

31 The Achievements of the Creative Writing Movement: An Assessment of Works to Date 260 Tokunaga Sunao Chapter 6. Anti-imperialism and Internationalism 261 32 Another Battlefront 266 Matsuda Tokiko 33 Hell of the Starving 280 Chang Hyo˘k-chu 34 On Antiwar Literature 321 Kuroshima Denji Chapter 7. Repression, Recantation, and Socialist Realism 329 35 Midnight Sun 335 Murayama Tomoyoshi 36 The Breast 364 Miyamoto Yuriko 37 Negative Realism: One Direction for Proletarian Literature 394 Kawaguchi Hiroshi 38 Proletarian Realism and “Socialist Realism”: A Study of Literary Method (1) 397 Moriyama Kei 39 Socialist Realism or XXX Realism? 400 Kim Tu-yong 40 Buds That Survive Winter 404 Miyamoto Yuriko Acknowledgments 409 Bibliography 411 Translators 429

Figures Figure 1. Assorted proletarian journal covers (1928–1933) 5 Figure 2. Comrades surround the brutalized body of Kobayashi Takiji (1933) 11 Figure 3. Nakamoto Takako at podium (1929) 26 Figure 4. Proletarian postcard (1930) 86 Figure 5. Page from “March 15, 1928” 143 Figure 6. Inside cover, Boys Battle Flag (1929) 191 Figure 7. Lecture tour in defense of Battle Flag and NAPF (1931) 228 Figure 8. “Overthrow imperialism” (1929) 262 Figure 9. Proletarian writers discuss works for Literary Review (1934) 330 Figure 10. Kobayashi Takiji memorial gathering (1935) 334

Introduction a proletarian snapshot At the opening of “Midnight Sun,” one of the last fictional selections in this anthology, heroine Kano Noriko emerges exasperated from an editorial meeting for a workers’ children’s magazine. Her comrades, she complains, “don’t understand how a real child thinks, they just stick to the theory. . . . If you try to foist that kind of stuff on kids, they won’t go for it.”1 “Midnight Sun” [35]2 is a roman à clef by Murayama Tomoyoshi, an avant-garde-turnedproletarian playwright, artist (who jauntily signed “Tom” to his artwork), and writer. “Noriko” is his wife, Murayama Kazuko [17, 18], an eccentric genius of prewar children’s literature and editor of Boys Battle Flag, the proletarian journal for children. She was also a letter writer and supporter extraordinaire of the men of the proletarian literature movement during their prison terms, including her husband and “Kimura So¯kichi,” her sympathetic interlocutor in this scene, the real-life Kurahara Korehito [13], the leading theorist of the movement in Japan. This verbal snapshot condenses several illuminating features of the movement, but before we consider them, we ask that you keep in mind Noriko’s complaint as you move into this anthology. Despite the commonplace view that ahistorically reduces all literature produced within a leftwing movement to “socialist realism” and understands this to be a mindless, propagandistic celebration of workers and tractors, these writers regularly warned one another of the pitfalls of formulaic writing. They strenuously debated the feasibility and desirability of adopting programmatic pronouncements from the Soviet Union, the nature of reality in Japan, and the means of translating it into writing that would reach readers of widely divergent literacy. For all their vigorous disagreements, however, our writers knew they were mounting a challenge to the very concept of literature in its historical and emergent forms. For the new readers they sought— the factory workers and tenant farmers who were cogs in the wheels of industrializing agriculture— 1. Murayama, “Midnight Sun,” this volume, 338. 2. Numbers in brackets refer to titles in this anthology. We follow the East Asian practice of family name first, and after providing a name in full, we use the family name in subsequent references, except in the case of writers who are commonly known by their personal names (notably, Kobayashi Takiji and Miyamoto Yuriko). 1

they needed a literature that “hits you smack where it counts,” as a factory worker told Kobayashi Takiji, who would become the most celebrated writer of the movement [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30].3 In order to have such impact, he urged in “A Guide to Writing Fiction,” it was crucial to keep in mind that “emotions function as the foundation of fiction,” while “art . . . provides a frame for expressing emotions.” He reminds his readers, comrades as well as the writers they hoped would emerge “from the factories, from the farms,” of the example of Shakespeare, whose “consummate skill with language” gave “eternal radiance” to his works.4 The snapshot of a complaining Noriko asks us to pause over the attention devoted to children’s literature by the leading— in this case, male— figures in the proletarian culture movement. (Nakano Shigeharu [19], whose name will be recognizable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with modern Japanese literature, also appears in this novella.) The beginning of proletarian children’s literature is usually dated to a 1926 farmers union uprising in northern Japan, in which tenant farmers withdrew their children from public school.5 Among the progressive educators and labor organizers who converged on the village to help out with the “proletarian farmers school” were elite university students, the soon-to-be members of a budding proletarian literature movement, who found the available teaching materials utterly inappropriate for poor, rural, and increasingly politicized children. They would begin to write their own stories and translate works by European revolutionary writers for this newly discovered audience. You will find some of the fruits of their work in chapter 4. These young intellectuals, inclined toward literature and philosophy, coming of age in the electrifying years following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, brought their love of the arts to the organized— optimistically revolutionary— transformation of society. As they confronted the challenge of communicating with and seeking the trust of urban workers and tenant farmers, it was only natural that the education of children would enter their agenda. Embracing this constituency sharpened their questions about language, form, and format— the how of expression, a project also being tackled by their rival modernist cousins of the “aesthetic” school. The what and for whom of their efforts were directed at the “real children” championed by Noriko. And that linked up with the central task of the movement: the accurate apprehension and expression of reality with the aim of transforming 3. Kobayashi Takiji, “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories,” this volume, 254. 4. Kobayashi Takiji, “A Guide to Fiction Writing,” this volume, 257. 5. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 16–24. 2 in tr o ductio n

it, the aim of what “Kimura,” that is, Kurahara Korehito, expounded as the aesthetic practice of “proletarian realism.” This leads us to the question, what do we mean by “proletarian literature”? The writers in this volume themselves used the term “proletarian” in Japanized pronunciation or its Sino-Japanese equivalent musansha (person/persons without property), so we adopt it as well. The OED takes us back to the “lowest class of Roman citizens,” who had nothing to contribute to “the State except children.” In modern usage “proletariat” refers to those who have nothing but their daily labor to sustain them. Recently, the term “precariat” has emerged to refer to those living in conditions lacking security or predictability, but that, too, doesn’t trip off the tongue. It’s symptomatic of our historical moment that we have no user-friendly term to refer to the many who belong to these categories, though the 2011 Occupy Movement may have given us a start with the formulation of “the 99 percent.” “Noriko” and her comrades produced literature as participants in a cultural-political movement inflected by Marxism and labor organization during an international “red decade” (1925–1935). Their literature was meant to contribute to the transformation of society by changing its readers, the relationship between readers and writers, and the nature of literature itself. Approaching proletarian literature in this way provides a useful framework for other kinds of questions, such as whether the term refers to the class background of the author, the class background of the readership, the nature of the subject matter, or the perspective adopted on that subject matter.6 We invite you to keep these questions in mind as you read our fictional and critical selections by men and women, Japanese and colonial subjects, writers from intellectual and other backgrounds.

a brief history The opening snapshot from “Midnight Sun” was likely set in 1929— that is, around the middle of the “red decade.” Only a decade, you may say, but in Japan, writers aspiring and established, indeed, the publishing industry as a whole, were affected by the explosive aspirations of those years. Two years after its inaugural issue in May 1928, Battle Flag, the leading proletarian journal, had a circulation of more than twenty thousand despite frequent banning.7 This figure, though modest by comparison with the half million 6. These are American writer James T. Farrell’s [1904–1979] categories that launch Barbara Foley’s examination, “Defining Proletarian Literature,” in Radical Representations, 86–128. 7. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan, 200. in t r odu c t ion 3

circulation of popular journals such as King, nonetheless suggests the tantalizing possibilities of mass readership for the movement. First of all, many proletarian journals were passed around from reader to reader because possession could be risky, especially in the workplace, with the result that actual readership was even higher than circulation numbers indicate. Secondly, proletarian literature had an undeniable presence in the commercial world. Kinokuniya, today a giant among bookstores, was founded in 1927 and successfully competed with its established rivals precisely by carrying publications such as Battle Flag. The store opened early when new issues arrived, and customers, many, if not most, middle-class urbanites, stood in line to snap them up before the police came to confiscate them around noon.8 We start our brief history with circulation statistics for Battle Flag because it was a movement organ that also reached a general readership. But more importantly, we want to emphasize the reach of proletarian literature: of the forty pieces collected in this anthology, only four were originally published in Battle Flag; the others come from twenty-four different highbrow journals, daily newspapers, feminist journals, proletarian journals, and modernist and other experimental publications— all part of the burgeoning milieu of modern Japanese literature. And that is just the original publication; a number of these works were collected and multiply republished in book form. While Anglo-American scholars of Japanese literature have tended to ignore proletarian literature, we can safely say it would have been impossible to bypass in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Donald Keene, the eminent scholar of Japanese literature and no sympathizer of proletarian literature, has estimated that “about 80 percent of the criticism published in literary or general (so¯go¯) magazines was by Marxists,”9 a gauge of the prominence of leftist views in the cultural world. Still, seen in isolation, proletarian literature might be no more than a quaint oddity. By the end of the 1920s, however, an impressive network of organizations existed in many countries, including Japan, France, Germany, Britain, the United States, China, and India. 10 In Japan, generalized concern for the underclasses, including outcastes, arose in the late nineteenth century as the hierarchial status system of early modern Japan was 8. Inoue Hisashi, in Odagiri Hideo et al., “Puroretaria bungaku,” 157. 9. Keene, Dawn to the West, 579. 10. A probing account of novelistic internationalism within a more expansive history than is offered here can be found in Denning, “The Novelists’ International,” 51–72. 4 in tr o ductio n

Figure 1. Assorted proletarian journal covers Top row, from left: “3L Day” (Liebknecht, Lenin, Luxemburg), Working Women (January 1933), design by Yorimoto Shirin (1902–1964); Boys Battle Flag (August 1929), design by Murayama ¯ tsuki Genji Tomoyoshi [35]; “Activities of the Culture Circle,” NAPF (November 1931), design by O (1904–1971). Bottom row, from left: Battle Flag (March 1930), design by Yanase Masamu (1900– 1945); Vanguard (January 1928), design by Murayama Tomoyoshi.

officially abolished and everyone became a “commoner” (and outcastes became “new commoners”). Soon, anarchists, socialists, and Christians began dedicating themselves to the cause of social justice as Japan went through a rapid course of modernization to join, however belatedly, the company of empire builders. Many of them became vocal critics of the imperialist RussoJapanese War (1904–1905). Some were accused of having sought to assassinate the emperor, the power in whose name such wars were fought. In 1911, twelve anarchists convicted of high treason were executed. These executions had the effect of cooling revolutionary ardors for a time, often referred to as the “winter years.” In the decade from 1915 to 1925, historical forces converged domestically and internationally to bring proletarian literature to the forefront in Japan. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and 1918 Great War Armistice signaled massive upheaval and reordering among the world’s great powers. Up-andcoming imperialist power Japan sought recognition for its accomplishments in the Treaty of Versailles, only to be rebuffed with what it considered to be racial condescension. Meanwhile, a huge Japanese expeditionary force had been sent to Russia as part of an Allied effort to combat the young revolution. Among those deployed was a conscript named Kuroshima Denji, whose antiwar and anti-imperialist works are included in this anthology [26, 34]. In 1919, the formation of the Communist International coincided with the March 1st Movement, which militated for Korean independence from Japanese colonization, and the Chinese May Fourth Movement, which protested the awarding of former German territory Shandong to Japan. Domestically, an increasingly organized labor movement, the 1918 Rice Riots, and the formation of the Socialist League in 1920 and the first Japanese Communist Party in 1922 were signs of momentum. But there was as yet no proletarian literature movement. That is conventionally said to have begun with the publication of a journal titled The Sower in Akita Prefecture in northern Japan in 1921. French ¯ mi (1894–1978), newly returned from France with literature scholar Komaki O a commitment to the pacifism and Marxism of Henri Barbusse’s (1873–1935) Clarté movement, established the journal with local writer friends. The following year, the coterie moved to Tokyo, to be joined by Aono Suekichi [4, 9] among others. The 1923 earthquake and subsequent repression forced its closure, though not before it managed to publish an exposé of the brutal treatment of leftists and Koreans in the earthquake’s aftermath. The group reorganized as Literary Front in 1924, which became the center of the proletarian literature movement. By 1928, debates and repeated factionalization led to the formation of NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio, the Espe6 in tr o ductio n

ranto name reflecting internationalist aspirations) and the publication of its organ, Battle Flag (see figs. 1 and 7). Even as the government responded to the boom in proletarian literature with repression, proletarian organizations actually expanded their activities, as demonstrated by the 1931 establishment of KOPF (Federacio de Proletaj Kultur Organizoj Japanaj, which absorbed NAPF), a cultural umbrella organization with a vibrant theater league, cinema league, visual arts league, photography league, and music league, as well as associated organizations for Esperanto, “militant atheism,” birth control, scientific research, and libraries.11 Not all writers in this anthology participated in these specific groups, although the majority came to align themselves with the Communist-affiliated wing. State repression mounted steadily along with expanded military ambitions following the Manchurian Incident of 1931. A flood of recantations was unleashed, and the Writers League, the pillar of the movement, “voluntarily” disbanded in 1934. The devastating loss of an organizational base, repeated or lengthy prison terms, and even recantation did not, however, mean the extinction of commitment to the movement. The buds in the title of our very last selection, Miyamoto Yuriko’s “Buds That Survive Winter” [40], would bloom with Japan’s defeat in 1945. Indeed, the prewar proletarians, once they were liberated from prison and censorship, and especially after the US occupation ended (1952), were more than ever determined to oppose imperialist war along with the revival of a repressive state. They started up new journals and republished prewar works in a remarkable burst of energy. While McCarthyism and the Cold War contributed to the dismissal of leftist literature in English-language scholarship, in Japan, despite sectarian splintering, the validity of a politically committed literature continued to hold until society began to undergo wholesale depoliticization. Instrumental in this process was the “income-doubling plan” announced after the crushing of pacifist aspirations with the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Ampo) in 1960. The rise of what would come to be called the “New Left”— another international phenomenon— turned many young leftists against a literature they saw as tied to the Communist Party. Many of them, moreover, found middle-class prosperity repressive. For them, a class-based politics was no longer compelling, while to those who were frantically enjoying consumer pleasures or anxious to do so, it was irrelevant. And the ideology of aesthetic autonomy— the idea that art having any goals outside itself was bound to be inferior, an idea utterly familiar to our

11. “Nihon puroretaria bungaku undo¯ no ayumi,” n.p. in t r odu c t ion 7

writers in the prewar era— was a constant factor in efforts to consign proletarian literature to the proverbial dustbin of history. It would be disingenuous to conclude this section without reference to the debacles and tragedies associated with historic and actually existing socialist states, notably the USSR (1922–1991), the People’s Republic of China (1949–), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1948–). Especially in the post– Berlin Wall, post-USSR era, the failure of socialist projects has encouraged some intellectuals to equate fascism and communism, in the process promoting the obsolescence of class as a social and analytical category, in contrast to race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. To allow Stalin’s crimes or the Great Leap Forward to obliterate the struggles and achievements of those who, like the writers in our anthology, pursued class justice under conditions of extreme, even life-robbing duress, only compounds a wrong. We can criticize the historic failures of the socialist project without dismissing its achievements or aspirations. Those aspirations found multifarious expression in the works you are about to read, drawn together in the category called “proletarian literature.”

why literature? We marvel today at how seriously literature was taken in the 1920s and 1930s by creative and critical writers and social activists, not to mention the state. Besotted as we are in the twenty-first century with a multitude of media, it is easy to overlook not only the dominance of print media but also the pride of place accorded the novel, a form considered as capable of representing everything from the greatness of a nation to the intricacies of the psyche. In contrast to the Soviet Union, Japan had a flourishing print culture that produced, among other genres, fiction appealing not only to elite and white-collar audiences but also to the toiling masses. Still, we might ask, why would activists not just focus on organizing? Aono Suekichi, a leading literary critic early in the proletarian movement, felt compelled to justify his focus on literature: “What made me take [literature] up again, after my understanding of social theory had deepened a bit, had to do with my grasp of the real nature of the superstructure and the meaning of struggle against it. I had experienced more than most people— no, I had all but risked my life experiencing the dangerously intoxicating power of literature. I was all the more aware of its true nature and attached great significance to the struggle against it.”12 By “superstructure,” Aono is referring to the Marxist concept that identifies the culture and insti12. Aono, “A Statement of My Views in Response to Mr. Masamune Hakucho¯,” this volume, 45. 8 in tr o ductio n

tutions of society, in contrast to the “base,” or the forces and social relations of production. It was precisely his familiarity with the privileged position of literature in the superstructure that drove Aono’s determination to tackle it alongside the struggles addressing the base. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), that giant of the Russian Revolution, famously objected to the notion of proletarian culture and art. Securing food and housing for all citizens after the devastation of civil war was his priority, a daunting task pursued in tandem with the equally staggering one of achieving universal literacy. For Trotsky, the material surplus and time span required for the development of bourgeois culture, as well as the achievements of that culture, were not to be ignored. The proletariat had to engage in the dangerous activity of learning “from [their] enemies.”13 Creating a new culture takes time because “it is one thing to understand something and express it logically, and quite another thing to assimilate it organically, reconstructing the whole system of one’s feelings, and to find a new kind of artistic expression for this new entity.”14 In the meanwhile, if the revolution succeeded in producing a socialist society, the proletariat itself would dissolve: in other words, neither was there the wherewithal to create a “proletarian culture” in the wake of the revolution nor was it an appropriate goal for the future. But we might argue against Trotsky that precisely because Japan was “prerevolutionary,” as our writers ruefully put it, it presented them with an opportunity to develop a “proletarian literature” by grappling with the doubleedged resources of a flourishing bourgeois mass print culture— that is, by learning “from [their] enemies.” After all, most proletarian writers, like Aono, were intellectuals formed by bourgeois culture. Their love of literature had been a path to their awakening to social injustice, and it was not far-fetched for them to use it, in the venerable words of Horace about the nature of poetry, to “delight” and to “instruct,” which here translate into giving the industrial workers and tenant farmers being robbed of their humanity the energy and dignity that come with the power to understand the makeup of the world. As Kobayashi Takiji wrote to his editor at Central Review, the very mainstream publication about to publish his Absentee Landlord, tenant farmers didn’t need to be shown “how wretched their lives were,” but “why they were wretched.”15 13. Trotsky, “Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art,” in Literature and Revolution. 14. Trotsky, Class and Art. On the translation of Trotsky into Japanese during this period, see Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 81. 15. Kobayashi Takiji, “Shokan,” 412–13. Notes to the selections in this volume and translations outside these selections are by the editors unless otherwise indicated. in t r odu c t ion 9

In this volume, Kurahara Korehito’s “Path to Proletarian Realism” is a momentous essay that theorizes historically the key questions about class struggle and its relationship to literature. Emphasizing point of view, Kurahara explicitly declines to prescribe content for “proletarian realism,” but he makes it clear that it will not consist of the unhappy ruminations of the comfortably situated male— that is, the “I-novel” that had become the centerpiece of modern Japanese literature. We should note, though, that proletarian literature didn’t consist of only prose fiction. It included every kind of poetic form then current in Japan (tanka, senryu¯ , haiku, free verse) as well as drama. But fiction was central to the literature movement, as literature was to the cultural movement. The members of the Writers League engaged in a prodigious amount of organizing alongside their writing, translating, and studying, all the while struggling to support themselves and their families and evade apprehension. Arrest, they knew, all too often entailed interrogation under torture. Despite its genteel reputation, literature—proletarian literature— was treated as potentially dangerous to the state and subject to constant surveillance and the threat of repression. The Communist and Socialist Parties were declared illegal and swiftly disbanded, but what about literature that vilified the wealthy or represented workplace injustice? What about characters developing class consciousness— prompting readers to do the same? The passage of the Public Order Law16 in 1925 made it illegal to challenge the emperor system or private property. In 1928, it was revised to include the death penalty. As we will discuss more specifically in the following section, writers and editors struggled with the bounds of legality. Movement organs more readily took risks with what they printed than commercial publications, but it is testimony to both the spirit of the age and the reputation of our writers that even highbrow journals continued to publish them albeit with more extensive self-censorship.

using this anthology Despite the great scope of proletarian cultural production, we’ve restricted ourselves to short fiction and criticism in this anthology with the hope that others will pick up where we’ve left off. Except for “Midnight Sun,” the longest novella in this collection, all the fictional works have been translated as completely as possible given the restrictions of the censorship regime, a subject to which we’ll return. Most of the critical pieces, on the other hand, 16. Although “Peace Preservation Law” is the common English translation for chian iji ho¯, we have opted for “Public Order Law” as an accurate and apt rendering. 10 in tr o ductio n

Figure 2. Comrades surround the brutalized body of Kobayashi Takiji February 21, 1933, at the Kobayashi home in Mabashi, Tokyo. Extraordinary police surveillance no doubt contributed to the circulation of this famous photograph without the photographer being identified and the dates varying between the twenty-first and twenty-second. The 2014 discovery of original glass plates by Ito Jun, son of Kishi Yamaji (1899–1973, member of the Writers League and inaugural chair of the Proletarian Photographers League), among his father’s belongings corroborates a statement by Kishi in an early postwar discussion with comrades that he took photos the night Takiji’s body was returned. (“Kobayashi Takiji no shi to sono zengo,” Shinnihon bungaku [February 1950]: 31.) Front left is Kaji Wataru [16]; the blurry figure to his left is Yamada Seizaburo¯ [28]; far right, Hara Sen (Proletarian Theater League, wife of Nakano Shigeharu [19]). (Gaidobukku Kobayashi Takiji no Tokyo Henshu¯iinkai, ed., Gaido bukku Kobayashi Takiji no Tokyo [Gakushu¯ no Tomosha, 2008], 42.)

have been excerpted. We have chosen to offer our readers a variety of works while still presenting a sense of the kinds of questions our authors debated. Rather than the one author, one title approach, we’ve tried to illustrate with multiple selections the kinds of roles our writers played in the movement. We show the interconnectedness of our writers by consistently cross-referencing works through the use of bracketed numbers. Chapter introductions as well as biographical notes preceding each title provide more information about the writers and the context of their activities, organizational as well as literary. We used the first published version of a work as the base text for transin t r odu c t ion 11

lation, indicating the year and source under each title, with the Japanese title included in the bibliography. Our writers worked under increasingly stringent conditions of censorship, and subsequent republications were frequently subject to increased redaction, if not outright banning. Although writing and images considered pornographic were the predominant targets of censorship, political writing, especially writing that brushed up against the 1925 Public Order Law, was also at risk. Since postpublication banning was the predominant form of censorship during the period covered by this anthology, editors and authors worked hard to avoid this costly outcome by preemptively censoring their texts, using mostly Xs, ellipses, and sometimes Os in place of words that risked running afoul of the authorities. Depending on context, readers of proletarian literature would have had no trouble guessing that XX stood for the two characters reading kakumei (revolution) or senso¯ (war). But when the Xs (or Os or commas or ellipses or asterisks) multiplied, or whole lines were suppressed (sometimes indicated, other times not), even the most practiced reader would have been unable to supply the missing text. Since our goal is not to mystify, wherever missing passages were supplied in later editions thanks to manuscripts or galleys guarded with courageous devotion, we have added them in, marking each instance as follows: word. Writers who lived on after the war often did more than restore what had been suppressed. We’ve included a few of those changes, too, and noted them. (We haven’t, however, marked corrections of simple inconsistencies.) And we have left in Xs, Os, and ellipses for which the intended words have never been recovered. When we use ellipses in excerpted texts to indicate that an omission is ours, however, we surround them with brackets: [. . .]. Our texts have frequent recourse to typographic usage that overlaps with, but isn’t identical to, the marks of self-censorship. The common Japanese literary convention of using initials or dashes or X/O for place-names and other proper nouns and the use of ellipses and dashes to indicate nonverbalized thought or hesitation are examples. The X’d elision of a street address or the use of an initial can be a protective gesture or a literary performance of suggestive anonymity, where the initial points to a plausible, actually existing locale. Our marked-up texts invite you to reflect on the effects of precautionary self-censorship and the interplay of that process with the developing conventions of modern prose fiction.17 17. See Abel, Redacted, especially “Epigraphs,” 143–53, and “Redactionary Literature,” 154–93; on the censorship regime in colonial Korea in relation to practices in the Japanese metropole and the development of modern literature, see Kyeong-hee Choi’s forthcoming Beneath the Vermillion Ink. 12 in tr o ductio n

As indicated in the chapter titles, the organization of this volume is principally by topic. “The Personal Is the Political,” “Art as a Weapon,” “Children”— these are not the usual categories of proletarian literature, but for that very reason, we think they enable readers to see past the boundaries erected by convention and time. Should you decide to start at the beginning, however, you will find that the organization is roughly chronological. We hope you will find that the parts speak to one another and the whole suggests the reach of their history, including its proximity to our own times.

postscript In 2008, after nearly two “lost decades” of economic stagnation in Japan, The Crab Cannery Ship, the eighty-year-old masterpiece of proletarian literature by Kobayashi Takiji, created a sensation by appearing on the bestseller lists.18 The image of a factory afloat in the frigid waters of the North— a prison house without exit, entrapping desperate people in deadly labor— was a flash that illuminated the present. Now, well into the twenty-first century, how should we face our moment of brutal inequality, endless war, and the destruction of our habitat? The writers in this volume found their world intolerable and they determined to change it. They didn’t think literature was sufficient for that transformation, but they were sure it had a role. We hope their stories speak to you.

18. Bowen-Struyk, “Why a Boom in Proletarian Literature in Japan?”; and Field, “Commercial Appetite and Human Need.” in t r odu c t ion 13

1 : The Personal Is the Political introduction When is your personal problem not just your personal problem? In 1969 American feminist Carol Hanisch (1942– ) insisted that the problems women were experiencing as largely personal problems, including gender inequality in the home and workplace, could be mapped neatly onto social structures of power with this simple question: “Who benefits from this problem?”1 In her essay “The Personal Is the Political,” she was responding to criticism that the emphasis of US second-wave feminism on raising consciousness was more concerned with the psychological (i.e., bourgeois therapy) and less concerned with the political (i.e., collective action). Responding that women are “messed over, not messed up!” Hanisch insisted that raising collective consciousness was not about individuals curing themselves but rather collectively realizing what objective conditions needed to be changed to combat their oppression. The stories throughout this anthology ask us to think about how personal tragedies happen because capitalism not only does not care to prevent them but benefits in various, often invisible ways, such as assuring a docile labor supply by inducing psychic and material precariousness. Injuries received on the job, sexual harassment, ethnic discrimination, miscarriages, malnourished children, and many other indignities of poverty show us how even problems experienced as deeply personal— such as a child’s loss of her father in “Hell” [16]— form a pattern of oppression that becomes apparent when we ask, “Who benefits from this problem?” The phrase “the personal is the political” seems to come straight from the proletarian movement, as the men and women of the movement addressed the problems of class, colonial, and gender inequality through deeply personal narratives of injustice. That the title in fact comes from US second-wave feminism and, moreover, that the slogan continues to resonate is useful because it reminds readers that collective action against oppression, like the kind seen in the proletarian movement, continues to be relevant. In a dispute over literary method in chapter 3, Sata Ineko ([15]; see also [8, 21]) shares the problems in her life— her husband has been arrested, her father has become unhinged, and her brother has become a “bum”— and 1. Hanisch, “The Personal Is the Political.” 14

states that “we can see in all of these [instances] a reflection of current social conditions.” The task of proletarian literature according to Sata? “We proletarian writers, even when dealing with something that happened in a single household or to one individual, don’t just scratch the surface of an event as if it had occurred in isolation. Rather, we take it upon ourselves to discern the social necessity of its occurrence and then give it concrete expression.” How does Sata understand the “social necessity” of her hardships? Her 1932 essay is a rebuttal of criticism offered by rival proletarian writer Hirabayashi Taiko [14] that proletarian works had become too “formulaic”; Sata rejects what she sees as a naïve understanding of proletarian realism as a “method of depicting reality ‘just as it is,’” and instead argues for “a method for taking a given phenomenon as it is and penetrating its essence in order to reveal the necessity of its occurrence. There can be no such thing as presenting reality simply ‘as it is.’ That is an empty expression, referring to what bourgeois realism imagines it has achieved in merely scratching the surface of reality.”2 The three short stories in this section invite us to “penetrate the essence.” “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow” ([1]; see also [5, 11, 22, 29, 30]), by the movement’s best-known author, Kobayashi Takiji, is a memory of a day spent with a beloved sister told by a now-grown man to a comrade. Like “Tetsu’s Story” [19] by Nakano Shigeharu, a harrowing boyhood account of a calligraphy demonstration before the crown prince, the framework of recollection in Taguchi’s tale makes available the events of the past as part of a system of oppression. Unlike “Tetsu’s Story,” however, “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow” stops short of revealing how this memory and the fate of his sister might have affected his decision to become “Comrade” Taguchi, leaving readers to make sense of it themselves. In Wakasugi Toriko’s short story “The Mother” [3], by contrast, the eponymous protagonist suffers first the loss of her son to illness and then her daughter to the socialist movement, but the latter helps her to see that her personal tragedies are part of a greater pattern. Like Maksim Gorky’s (1868–1936) Mother, translated into Japanese in 1929,3 the loss of a conventional family enables this protagonist to pursue a new, more socially just formation of a family; but in contrast to Gorky’s work, Wakasugi’s mother is led toward socialism by a daughter rather than a son. The hardships endured by the female protagonist of Nakamoto Takako’s “Red” ([2]; see also [10]) are depicted with a power combining the insights and techniques of both proletarian and New Sensationist writing 4 and in2. Sata, “Covering Over the Essence,” this volume, 185–86. 3. Fukuda, “Murata Harumi,” 546. 4. Bergstrom, “Revolutionary Flesh,” 314. t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 15

vites comparison with Hayama Yoshiki’s “The Prostitute” [6] and Kataoka Teppei’s “The Linesmen” [12]. Unlike those other stories, however, “Red” articulates what it’s like to inhabit a proletarian woman’s body— in this case, a perennially pregnant body, abused by a drunken spouse and then left to care for too many children without a living wage. These characters and narrators— male and female, young and old, rural and urban— experience hardships that might, individually, be regarded as bad luck, but together suggest a systematic oppression that begs us, following Sata, to penetrate their “essence in order to reveal the necessity of [their] occurrence.” The essays in this chapter are by two male leaders in the movement. The youthful experience of poverty led Aono Suekichi [4, 9] to embrace nihilism and Kobayashi Takiji to yearn for riches until they encountered, as Aono puts it, “the study of society’s economic system and socialist theory.”5 hbs

(1) Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow kobayashi takiji Translated from Weekly Asahi (April 1930) Virtually no women appear in “The Crab Cannery Ship” (1929), the work that catapulted Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933; see “A Chronology of My Life” [5]) to fame. The posthumously published “Life of a Party Member” (1933) made Takiji notorious because its instrumental treatment of a female character was thought to represent his own as well as Communist Party attitudes toward women.6 It may therefore come as a surprise that the challenges facing poor and working girls and women were a staple of Takiji’s fiction. His works (see [11] and [22]) bring us wives and mothers anxious about the cost of their menfolk’s political commitments, wives embracing those sacrifices, spunky factory girls taking on organizing responsibilities and brushing up against the challenges of comradely romance, still other young women whose political awakening is nipped in the bud by their obligation as caregivers, and, like the actual love of his life, women forced to sell their bodies.7 The torment of “Comrade Taguchi’s” sister is of a different sort. Like Takiji himself and his older sister, she receives from a benefactor the 5. Aono, “A Statement of My Views in Response to Mr. Masamune Hakucho¯,” this volume, 45. 6. Kobayashi Takiji, “Life of a Party Member,” in“The Crab Cannery Ship” and Other Novels of Struggle. 7. Field, Kobayashi Takiji, 82–108; Field, “Taki-ate shokan,” 503–18. 16 chapter o n e

chance to make a class leap. The uncomprehending boyhood eyes of Comrade Taguchi accentuate the anxieties of class “passing” for a young woman endowed with beauty and intellect. nf (Everybody’s had the experience of whistling without knowing it. You don’t know the name of the tune.— And then, as you go along, you say, that’s it, it’s that song. When this happens, it’s always the case that the song is carrying a forgotten piece of the past that’s mysteriously stuck in a corner of your mind. That’s according to Taguchi. There’re times when the song and the memory are related— but it can also happen that a certain song mysteriously brings out a scene that has no connection to it whatsoever. If only till the spring snow melts . . .8 Taguchi says that whenever he hears this song or finds himself whistling it, he remembers how he used to walk along the tracks on the cape in the early spring cold after the sun had set, leaning his sleepy body against his sister’s. Come to think of it, it was probably this song he was singing as he laid out his bedding. I must’ve been about ten years old— Taguchi began, pulling the ashtray close to his pillow as he lay on his belly.) My big sister was going to a girls’ higher school. There was no way our family could’ve sent her, but there was a certain person who put up a little money for this. Even so, no question, life was tough. When fall came and the grain harvest was supposed to be shipped off, my sister would no sooner get home from school than she would be off to the “hand-sorting factory” for export green peas. In other words, she was joining the night shift. These factories were usually on the second floor of seaport warehouses. Wives who lived from hand to mouth brought their kids along when they came to work as day laborers.— If you worked the whole day without stopping to piss, you’d make seventy, eighty sen. But only the pros could make that much. Fifty or sixty was more like it.— If you worked until eight or nine at night, then you’d get up to one yen. And then, on their way home from the night shift, some of the women would have to sell themselves in the warehouse corners, surrounded by those swirling piles of grains. My sister would work from four or so until nine o’clock and earn forty, fifty sen. There were no girls like her working in that kind of place. But she never

8. “Katyusha’s Song,” from Shimamura Ho¯getsu’s (1871–1918) staged version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Nihon kokugo daijiten, 2nd ed., s.v. “Kachu¯sha no uta.” t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 17

acted like she resented it. She said it wasn’t like she was one of those people who could afford to just go to school. There was a “volcanic ash company” near the house. If you took a bucket and went behind the factory, you could pick coke from the slagheap.— In winter this was a substitute for charcoal. You stick it in a bucket and punch holes all over the sides and you’ve got yourself a stove. It burns with a purple flame. Needless to say, we didn’t have a chimney so the whole house got smoky. Father went around with the rims of his eyes all red. Still, it was better than putting up with the cold.— You have to be there before anybody else has picked through it, said my sister, who’d get up earlier than the rest of us and set out. When she got home, her head would be all white from the cinder dust.— I’ve been coke picking, too, led by her hand. That year, the seas of Otaru were bustling with the first big catch of herring in five years.— In Hokkaido, people and money pour in or flee depending on whether it’s a good or bad year for herring. With a rope basket on her back, even a woman could earn two or three yen a day unloading the herring. If you knew how to dress it, you could make even more. There were never enough hands. After all, thousands, no tens of thousands of bushels of herring had to be unloaded and disposed of in the space of two or three days. — But my sister wouldn’t say she’d go. “You go one day, and you get a whopping two yen! Think of what a help that’d be.” Mother kept repeating herself. “But . . . I just don’t wanna do it! . . . See . . .” This wasn’t like my sister at all. “If you just go on Sunday, you’ll make as much as you do in a whole month. . . .” “It’s because it’s Sunday. . . .” My sister didn’t seem to want to spell it out. “Because it’s Sunday?” “. . .”— Sister was watching Mother silently.— “You know how the people from town come sightseeing . . . and . . .” And here she stumbled over her words. “And . . . well, my friends, you know, my friends from school. . . !” Mother started and looked into her face. “. . . !” It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that she hated the thought of being out there with a basket on her back.— My sister, in spite of everything, did have a bit of vanity. I don’t know if you can call it vanity in the usual sense. She just never brought home friends from school because our house was on the “wrong side of the tracks” and it was dirty.— It was the kind of house that rattled with the slightest bit of wind. So it was propped up with “stakes” in the back. The ceiling had no panels, so you could see the bare 18 chapter o n e

rafters, and the rain poured right in. The area was swampy, and the house was set on low foundations to begin with. When it rained, the tatami mats felt sticky to your feet. And underneath, you could hear the plop, plop of the water. The pieces of mud and straw glued into the wall had turned a dull brown from the rain and snow, and it would crumble wherever you touched it. In springtime, city folk would come strolling through this forsaken part of town by the sea. If she spotted any of her school friends among them, my sister would hide in the house and refuse to go out.— That’s the way she was. If there was a big catch, come Sunday, you could be sure that students and office-worker types from Otaru would come around for the “herring spectacle.”— You’d be in your navy-and-white quilted jacket, gaiters on your legs and cowl over your head, a basket on your back. They’d see you like that. This was something she couldn’t bear to think of. But in the end, it was decided that she’d go.— Sister stood biting her thin lip. I followed along after her that day. Jutting out to the shoreline, old Mt. Baldy separated Kumausu Village from Otaru. If you round the bumpy path under the cliff that looks like it’s about to cave in, then you come out to where you can see the whole fishing village in the gently curving bay. Scattered houses follow the mountain wall pressing against their backs all the way to the other side of the cape. Two tracks run through that narrow space between the sea and the mountain. The villagers use the railway as their road. So the trains blow their whistles the whole time as they pass right under the eaves.— No sooner than you think you’ve seen a puff of white smoke at the turn of the cape on the other side then it’s passing in front of the mountain, slipping in between the houses, coming at you in a rush. When it’s midway through the village, you suddenly hear the rumbling. . . . Most of the time, it was just a remote fishing village.— But when the herring swarmed, the entire stretch of sea became a cloudy white. Seagulls skirted the surface of the water in rings, crying like babies. The bay thronged with the boats around the “set nets” and the little boats with the “gill nets.” On the beach were planted lots of long red streamers and white streamers. They were banners celebrating a big catch. Not only was it a Sunday, but you could tell early on that it was going to be a fine day, so people crowded in not just from Otaru but even from Sapporo. Every train that stopped at the Otaru Harbor Construction Station or Asari Station was packed. City people of the kind you don’t see around here formed a line from the stations to the beach.— It also happened to be the t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 19

first day when, after six months of imprisonment in Hokkaido’s long winter, you could step into a flood of bright outdoor light. My sister, with a basket on her back, shrouded her face with a hand towel so that no one would recognize her. I was playing nearby.— The other women working with her could only stare in the direction of the pretty women coming from town. They chattered about their kimonos and their hairstyles. But my sister would not look their way. Two boards led to and from the sampans. You crossed one to unload your basket of herring, and then the other to go back, making a loop as you repeated the trek. Every time the herring were scooped up, their fresh scales gleamed silver. A fine-looking couple stood watching the spectacle together with their little boy, dressed in naval uniform with binoculars slung over his shoulder.— As for me, my eyes were glued to his Western clothing. I’d never seen anything like it. Not to mention the binoculars— you didn’t see that kind of thing often. And, without knowing it, I began to draw near him.— The boy saw me approaching. When our eyes met, he suddenly frowned. And then he must have tugged at his mother’s hand. She had been watching the basket carriers, but then, as if to say “Hm?”— she turned her gaze toward me. Feeling as if I’d done something bad, I began to back off. “You get back here!” I got a sudden poke in the back. My sister was standing there, frowning.— Obediently, I sat down on the sand near her equipment. I felt lonely but didn’t know why. There were lots of people standing around there, too. “As if we were some kind of show . . . what do they think is so interesting about this. . . !” My sister spoke in a low voice.— But she couldn’t lift her face to look in their direction. There seemed to be a young man and woman standing just behind where I’d sat down. From the corner of my eye I could see the lavender hem of a kimono, spotless white tabi, sandals that looked to be two or even three inches high, sharp-creased trousers and red leather shoes.— A walking stick moved without a moment’s pause. I managed to steal a glimpse of all this without turning my head. They were talking to each other. “Aren’t they hardworking, these ladies?” “Why don’t you try putting one of those baskets on your back, just like them?” “After you.”— And they smiled at each other. Other basket carriers looked in their direction. As they passed in front, 20 chapter o n e

none of the day laborers missed the chance to cast a glance over my head at the couple. My sister was the only one who didn’t. After a while, the two headed back. I was still sitting, listening to their footsteps fading away on the sand.— Relieved, I looked behind for the first time. Then I remembered a motion picture, the only one I’d ever seen. She looked like the woman in that picture, a beautiful woman like I’d never seen anywhere else.— When she disappeared around the corner in the distance, I gave up and turned around— and met my sister’s gaze. She’d been watching, too! I looked at her, my sister, wearing an indigo jacket stitched in a fish-scale pattern and sandals. She looked like a man.— Suddenly, for some reason, I didn’t like her so much anymore. I went off to play by myself until noontime. When I came back, everybody who was unloading the herring was sitting in a bunch, eating rice balls tossed in sweetened roasted soybean flour. This was the standard lunch for herring days. I got some from my sister. “Guess what. Some friends from school were there . . . all dressed up. I was so ashamed I just kept my face down. Thank goodness, they went away without noticing me.” I sat listening with my mouth stuffed. “Imagine, being seen like this,” she said, shamefacedly holding up her yellow-coated rice ball. “But it can’t be helped . . .” — And, as usual, she bit her lower lip. I had a job, too.— A lot of herring fell from the sampans into the sea while they were being scooped into the baskets. I’d fish for these with a long bamboo pole. That way, I’d catch twenty or thirty in the course of the day. More people started coming after lunchtime. Women in their finery would be standing here and there, watching. “That one’s not bad looking.” — This was from two or three young men who looked like office workers. “You mean she’s a ‘rare country bloom’?” Another one asked, laughing, “Which one, which one?” “That one over there.” The first one said, “The one that just came— the third one in line. . . .” I looked casually in that direction.— The third one was my sister! She must have noticed, too. She reddened and looked down. “Hey, wait a minute.” t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 21

One of them said.— “Poor thing. . . .” “Come on, she’s taking it as a compliment.” Two of them walked ahead. “Just one more time.” The other one stood, waiting for my sister to pass in front of them on the return trip. With her basket on her back, she was scarlet up to her ears. As she went by, he said, “She’s a looker, all right,” and ran to catch up with the others. He’d gone a fair ways when he turned to look back.— When he was out of sight, my sister lifted her head at last. Her eyes followed in his direction for an instant. I was only a kid, but seeing this gave me a funny feeling. Slipping the strap of the empty basket from one shoulder, my sister stepped out of the line. “My legs are so sore, I can’t pick up my feet anymore. I’m going to take a break for just a second.” The unloading zone was across the train tracks, quite a ways from the sampans and up a steep incline. The basket carriers, all in a line with their shoulders hunched over, would heave-ho to try to get a little bounce in their step as they climbed up.— Sister must have used her sleeve to wipe the sweat off her face, for slivers of herring scale were carved into her flushed cheeks like bits of silver paper. “Hey tootsie, I’m not gonna put too much in yours.” When a young woman came up, the fishermen would put two and a half scoops instead of the normal heaping three and help her up with a pat on the rump of her basket. “Damn lecher!” said the old wives when they figured out what was going on. The fisherman’s dark ruddy face broke out in laughter. “Got som’n to complain about, you shriveled bags? Don’t forget you used to be young, too.” — The lightened load was a help to my sister. Even so, it was hard going. “Where’re you from, sweetheart? Let’s go and have us a good time when we’re done.” So the fishermen would joke as they filled her basket. But my sister wasn’t the kind of young woman who could respond to that sort of thing. “I’ll lay out the bedding and be a-waitin’ for you. ” There were other women her age who were ready with a comeback. That day, I ended up getting into a fight. — All my buddies who were going after the spilled herring were the children of day laborers. They’d stand in the cold water, their kimonos rolled up 22 chapter o n e

to their bellies, dragging the herring close to them with the bamboo poles. But it wasn’t them that I fought. It was just about when we were all done.— A girl in Western clothing came over to us and said something. I turned bright red and fumbled. It was because I’d never talked to anybody who looked like this. “Are they for free?” That was what the girl was saying. I couldn’t answer in words, so I just nodded. The girl squatted and reached out with one finger to touch the herring I was dangling. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I made up my mind and said, “Want one? . . .” After I managed to get the words out, I turned bright red.— The girl looked pleased. I thrust a herring in her direction. She hesitated, looking like she was about to reach out, but then withdrew her hand. “Dummy! Leave that thing alone!” It must have been her big brother.— “It’s just garbage they pick up.— Filthy stuff!” He grabbed her by the elbow and led her away. It got to me, being put in a situation like that. What was I supposed to do with my hand, stuck out in her direction, holding on to a herring with a rope through its gills? I suddenly found myself right behind the boy. I don’t know what happened then. Crushed roe splattered on his cheek and shoulder— and a gill-less herring turned a somersault in my hand. I’d been swiping at the boy from behind with the herring. I was panting for breath. “Get ’im, get ’im!” My buddies were cheering me on.— The boy burst out crying and ran off. The girl, dragged by the hand, was having a hard time running over the rocks— she started crying, too. The girl kept looking back, as if she were frightened. When I saw her scared face, twisted from crying, I came to myself with a start. “Now what did you do? . . . Idiot! . . .” My sister gave me a poke on the head to go with these words. But there was something oddly comforting about her at that moment. The tension melted, and I felt the tears welling up. . . . I let myself lean against my sister and rub my eyes against her smelly apron, full of fish scales. Even after work, my sister wouldn’t leave until it was dark. She said she was ashamed of having her face seen. The train packed with sightseers chugchugged up the slight elevation as it rounded the cape. When it was on the other side, its winding body with brightly lit windows showed itself one more t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 23

time.— The lights came on in the boats in the offing. Their reflection cast a long tail on the dark surface of the sea. The train tracks were mounted on concrete high above the coastline. So you could hear snatches of conversation from the boats or the splashing water as if it were right nearby. The waves slapped gently against the bottom of the concrete. The chill night wind of early spring had stirred up. Tired, my body half resting against my sister’s, we walked the tracks back home. I was sullen and silent.— In the dark sky over the offing, a seagull let out a cry like a baby’s. It was desolate. Along the way, we would brush past men from the fishery. “Hey, good lookin’!” they’d call out as they went by. Each time this happened, my sister would grasp my hand. . . . She was tired, too. But from time to time, as if she’d only now remembered them, she’d start talking about the pretty women from town. Good times are going to come our way too, she’d say. We just have to keep doing our best and work hard.— That’s the way she was always thinking. I guess that’s why she kept working with a vengeance. Finally, she lapsed into silence.— Then all you could hear was the sound of our matched footsteps against the railroad ties. But from time to time I’d trip over a tie and pitch forward. I’d fallen asleep. Each time my sister’s body would drag me on. When we rounded the cape separating Kumausu Village from Otaru, the cold wind hit us with full force. But then the lights of Otaru spread out sparkling right beneath us. . . . I felt reassured.— And happy. “Hey, Sis, look how pretty it is! . . .” The words came out spontaneously. But it seemed like my sister only lifted her head.— I got the feeling she was crying. . . . (“That’s all there is to it.”— Taguchi said at the end.— “But it’s strange, you know, how I keep coming back to that one day.” Taguchi’s lips twisted slightly. “What about ‘If only till the spring snow melts’?” I asked. “Don’t know.— It was probably already popular back then, and . . . well, somehow . . .” — I hadn’t seen Taguchi in a long time. He’d spent four months at “the country villa” thanks to the mass arrests of the April 16 Incident.9 Two-year 9. Nationwide roundup of alleged Communists in 1929, following the 1928 massive roundup described in [11]. 24 chapter o n e

prison sentence, suspended for five. That was his status when he got out. He wasn’t in great shape physically, so it was decided he’d stay at my place for a while. Taguchi’s sister went through a lot to get through the girls’ higher school, and then she took a position at an elementary school in Furano. She’d send practically all her pay to her family. That was just like her, Taguchi said. She was the kind of big sister who’d walk ahead of him in a snowstorm, shielding him from the wind and making a path in the snow all the way to school.— This was something Taguchi talked about all the time. Thanks to his sister’s monthly payments, he was able to get through middle school and then enter a special higher school for medicine. Needless to say, Taguchi isn’t giving any time to his medical studies anymore.— For his sister who’d known nothing but poverty while she was growing up, becoming a doctor was the most likely way to “get rich,” and that’s why she’d sent him to that school. Then this poor sister got involved in a love affair. It ended badly. The guy was said to be the college-educated son of a big landowner. I’d heard somewhere that she wasn’t quite right in the head after that. It must have been a year later that she threw herself into that eerie Sorachi River. Her body never came up. Taguchi and I are good pals. But he never talks about his sister’s death. It’s completely out of the ordinary for him to tell the kind of story he told today.— I guess there was always something about his sister that made you feel she was lonely. I don’t know any of the details. And out of regard for his feelings, I’ve made it a point not to ask. It’s almost spring, time for the herring to come.— I’ll bet Taguchi’s thinking about his sister.) Translated by Norma Field

(2) Red nakamoto takako Translated from Women’s Arts (January 1929) Nakamoto Takako (1903–1991) was born to a self-described petty bourgeois family: graduating from the Yamaguchi Prefectural Higher School, she taught for several years before moving to Tokyo to pursue literature in 1927.10 Like Kataoka Teppei, she wrote her early fiction and

10. Faison, Managing Women, 87. t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 25

Figure 3. Nakamoto Takako at podium October 18, 1929, at Asahi Auditorium, Tokyo. Nakamoto Takako’s [2, 10] lecture, titled “On the Formation of World Monopoly and the Problems Thereof,” at the Women’s Arts fall lecture. (Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.)

criticism as part of Yokomitsu Riichi’s (1898–1947) modernist movement, New Sensationism. “Red” was published in Women’s Arts, which also published her well-known short story, “The Female Bell-Cricket.”11 Women’s Arts was a consciously feminist literary journal primarily by and for women receptive to proletarian politics. It published Matsuda Tokiko [32], Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21], Hirabayashi Taiko [14], Murayama Kazuko [17, 18], and, eventually, leftist males such as Kobayashi Takiji [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30]. By the end of 1929, Nakamoto renounced her experimental creative writing exemplified by “Red” and moved to Kameido to be near the female factory workers at the To¯yo¯ Muslin Factory (see “Going on a Field Trip?” [10]). There, she embarked on the harrowing path of a labor organizer working with the underground Japanese Communist Party. “Red” makes a valuable pairing with a better-known work, Hayama Yoshiki’s short story “Letter in a Cement Barrel” (1926), which depicts a worn-down husband. hbs Finally, the housework was done, and now Shigé, while keeping an eye on her youngest, three-year-old Sué, pulled out her worktable so she could get back to pasting together the envelopes she was making for piecework. The sliding paper door in front of her nose had faded to a distinctly antique hue, each thin sheet of paper the only thing between her and the bracing winds of the shifting world outside. Yet each sheet’s frame also served as a tiny window to that world, coolly organized into sections. The autumn sunlight angled in through the frames and threw countless bright bands diagonally across the room. As if by habit, Shigé peered out at the street from her worktable through a hole poked through the paper just even with her eyes. A group of children were gathered around the water spigot, talking and playing. Shigé’s next youngest, Tomo, was out there too, dressed in a filthy flannel apron and standing to the side. Letting out a deep breath, Shigé looked back over at her other children and then returned to her work. Sué amused herself at her mother’s side, contentedly sucking on a bell that had lost its clapper. Suddenly, Shigé raised her head, snapping to attention: Tomo was crying. Lifting her hands from her work, Shigé peered again through the hole in the door. Tomo was running toward the house with both hands pressed to his head and his voice raised in a plaintive wail, pursued by a crowd of rough-

11. In Tanaka, To Live and To Write, 135–44 t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 27

neck boys throwing rocks. Shigé hurried outside, gripped by a rising tide of rage. Tomo’s cries doubled in intensity when he saw his mother, and he clutched at her hands. Shigé glared at the boys, her son’s hands in her own. They made no move to flee, however, and in fact drew closer. Faced with the ferocity of Shigé’s gaze, they let the stones fall quietly from their fingers, but one boy, dressed in Western clothes and the tallest of the group, petulantly raised his voice: “Ma’am, Tomo’s the one who’s bad! I was giving my dog Shiro some bread and he snatched it on the sly!” Shigé kept glaring down at the children, but she felt her cheeks redden and her eyeballs grow hot. She was loath to bow her head before them. At the same time, though, she had no words with which to excuse Tomo’s actions. Shigé looked down at her pale child, and as she watched his tears clear new tracks down his grimy, dust-caked cheeks, she felt rage course through her. Still gazing down at him as he looked tearfully back up at her, she wordlessly slapped him hard across the face. Tomo squeezed out an even more piercing wail, shrieking as if he’d been set on fire. The children gathered around Shigé stared blankly up at her, openmouthed. Shigé pulled her crying, screaming child to her and headed, nearly running, back into the house. Tomo collapsed just inside the threshold, moaning in a low voice, and stayed there, unmoving. Hearing her brother, Sué suddenly began crying too. Shigé picked Sué up and sank down beside her son, her unfocused eyes staring off at some indistinct point in the distance. She could understand Tomo wanting some bread meant for a dog. His stomach lining had surely finished absorbing the rice gruel from morning and now he must be suffering horribly with nothing to distract him. Even so, she lacked the money to buy even one little piece of bread to soothe her innocent boy’s hunger. It made Shigé’s heart hurt, and it was this hurt that had found its outlet in her angry outburst. Cold drops trickled slowly down her cheeks as she sat there, immobile. That evening, like always, Kanenari staggered drunkenly home in a dim, thick fog. He reached the front door and fell there in a heap. His wife, who had run out to see what the racket was, looked down at her husband and furrowed her darkened brow. Clucking her tongue, she tapped his shoulder. Kanenari found himself unable to stir his lower body, and through sleepy, hooded eyes, he attempted to make out the murky figure before him. “What, am I home already?” 28 chapter o n e

Kanenari slid his hand down his face and expelled a breath ripe with alcohol. Instead of replying, Shigé just took his hand and dragged him into the house. She reached into his money purse to see what was left. When she withdrew her hand, she found a mere thirty-five sen, all that remained of a day’s wage of a yen and eighty sen. She stared fixedly at it, and then looked over and found herself returning her husband’s drunken gaze. All her anger and contempt bore down on him as he lay across the threshold like a rotting salmon still dressed in blue work clothes, and all at once, she threw the money in his face. “What’s wrong with you, don’t you understand about family?” Hit by this unexpected hailstorm, Kanenari leaped to his feet. “You idiot, now you’ve done it!” His dull yet agitated eyes fixed on his wife. Confronted with these sore, reddened eyes, Shigé blinked and looked away. She braced herself for the descent of the balled-up fist raised even now above her head. But Kanenari let it fall, powerless, to his side. Folding his hands together beneath his head, he lay heavily back down where he’d been. From there he glared pointedly up at the swelling outline of his wife’s belly. Shigé gathered up the scattered copper and silver coins and walked dispiritedly back to her worktable to resume assembling envelopes. For a little while, silence reigned. The only sounds to be heard in the sixmat room were those of her five children breathing steadily from where they lay sprawled, sleeping in a heap. Her husband returning drunk from work every day made Shigé truly wretched. Each day’s wage was sucked up in alcohol, leaving too little money to provide even three meals for her children. He’s a father of five, how could he be so thoughtless? The image of Tomo being chased by rock-throwing children earlier that day sprang to mind with sudden clarity. Not only that, but yet another life was struggling for existence within her body. What on earth did that man think he was doing, putting his family through all this?— As the room filled with the alcoholic fumes Kanenari emitted as he slept, Shigé’s throat worked with inexpressible resentment. She thrust aside her worktable and walked back over to her husband. Her two hands were already seizing him by the front of his shirt and shaking him. Kanenari brushed her bothersome hands away and headed toward the other room. Shigé doggedly pursued him and took hold of his collar again. “You really don’t understand what makes me go out drinking every night, do you?” No sooner had Shigé caught sight of Kanenari’s hand fanning out before her than it fell to strike her on the back. Her eyes filled with tears, but the t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 29

rage-filled gaze she fixed on her husband never wavered. Seeing his wife look at him this way, Kanenari kept striking her with the flat of his hand again and again. When he finally released her, she collapsed where she stood, flimsy as a rice cracker. Casting a sidelong glance at his wife as she lay there unresisting, her shoulders heaving like waves, Kanenari went into the kitchen. His hand sought the earthenware saké bottle and brought it to his ear. Hearing the bottom of the bottle laugh mockingly at him, Kanenari moved his head up to meet the bottle’s mouth with his. From the next day forth, Kanenari stopped going to the lumber mill. When Shigé found out that this was because he got in a fight with the foreman and hit him on the head, she decided to pay a visit to the foreman’s house with an elegant box of sweets. Of course, to buy the sweets, she had to pawn the obi she’d kept since marriage, her shabby trousseau. She couldn’t accept her husband’s behavior. It was clear what would happen to his household as a result of his actions, and yet he heedlessly went and did them anyway— Shigé muttered her complaints bitterly to herself. The foreman was not at home. In his place emerged a woman with a densely freckled face and a manner of recently assumed refinement. Weren’t you just a barmaid? Shigé thought. This woman, the foreman’s wife, slid the glass door of her house open a few inches and ran her eyes from the top of Shigé’s head to the tips of her toes in an unpleasantly exaggerated display of caution. Shigé ordered her malnourished, obstinate muscles to manufacture an expression of solicitous warmth. The quivering edges of her mouth as she tried to force an exaggerated smile made her look as if she were about to cry. Shigé presented her box of sweets to the foreman’s wife and began to stammer out her plea. Apologizing for her husband’s wrongdoing, pointing out the extreme poverty of their household, she beseeched the foreman’s wife that he be allowed to return to work. The foreman’s wife knit her brow and, after weighing the thickness and heft of the sweets in her hand, promised to speak to her husband when he returned. Shigé performed three polite bows before her freckled interlocutor and left the premises. Returning home, Shigé found Kanenari absent and all five children noisily crying. The police had just picked up him up. Suddenly faced with the fact that her actions had been so much wasted effort, Shigé sank down in the doorway and sat there in a daze. All this time she’d carefully hoarded that sash like hidden treasure, and she wished more than anything now to be able to take back the sweets she’d 30 chapter o n e

traded it for in vain. The empty stomach she’d been enduring suddenly grew unbearable. Even if life with Kanenari meant that every day’s earnings were converted immediately into saké, it still had meaning for her. Now that he’d disappeared completely, it felt as if the center had been plucked from her very existence. Shigé recovered her senses a bit and looked around her, but her house was like so much collapsing tofu, and it was impossible for her to see how or starting from where she could begin setting things right. After a while, Shigé paid another visit to the foreman’s house. She intended to plead with him to use his power to lighten the sentence against her husband, or at least hasten his release by even just one day. But this time, no one bothered to greet her or even notice that she was there. They’d probably already polished off the obi’s worth of sweets she’d delivered earlier. Shigé returned home, grinding her teeth angrily at the shameful treatment she’d received in return for her gift. As she stared down at the prints her feet were leaving in the dark soil, she reflected that it was a wonder she hadn’t lost her mind. Her husband, for his part, simply drank his troubles away and thereby managed to remain the happier of the two.— Shigé was brought up short as she realized that she didn’t have any idea how she was going to make ends meet. It now fell to her to provide food and shelter for six hungry mouths. Putting together envelopes for piecework simply wasn’t going to be enough. She sent her oldest children to a go-between so they could be farmed out as nursemaids and apprentices. She tried to put the younger ones up for adoption, but no one was willing to squeeze someone else’s child into their lives. Clutching her three remaining children to her, she decided to go out to the excavation site where a new, seven-meter-wide road leading out of town was being dug. Shigé mixed herself in with the other women as they labored strenuously all day in their red underskirts. Working this way, she was able to make a living, but she also hoped that all the hard work would help her miscarry the baby growing in her belly. She couldn’t imagine that the addition of yet one more life to her household would do anything but complicate an already tragic situation. It was a balmy autumn day. The sky was clear as polished glass and suffused with sunlight. The wind had died and the landscape around her stood still as a picture painted on a wall. Men pounded the red earth with picks and hammers, stripped down to just a thin shirt or no shirt at all. The finely honed edges of their tools sharpt h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 31

ened the autumn air as they arced above the men’s powerful muscles. The simple melodies of their work songs allowed their souls to be gripped by the sacred spirit in their labor. As she shoveled red earth excavated from the hill into a trolley cart and pushed it over to the road, Shigé’s lower abdomen started contracting, and it became harder and harder to remain upright. Eventually, she buckled at the waist and fell onto the soft red dirt. She felt movements in her belly as if the baby were kicking the walls of her uterus, and her lower abdomen felt squeezed by a nearly unbearable pressure. Shigé tried again and again to sit up, gnawing her lips in agony as she pressed her hands hard against her stomach. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” A leg clad in speckled trousers and yellow gaiters nudged Shigé’s shoulder. It was the foreman. “Noth— nothing. It’s just, my stomach hurts a little. . . .” “Don’t joke around with me. I’ve got no use for laziness.” The foreman still had his foot on Shigé’s shoulder, and he used it to shake her roughly. She had no choice but to haul herself to her feet, but she was too weak even to put one foot in front of the other. Her field of vision darkened and she sat back down on the mound of dirt piled up behind her. The foreman’s foot caught her hard in the butt. “Get going! The sun’s still high in the sky and already you’re complaining!” Lifted up and thrown like a rabbit, Shigé’s body landed near the empty cart. She pulled herself up, and slowly, she began to push the cart forward while leaning on it for support. Severe pressure in her abdomen caused her whole body to shudder. She had been enduring this pain for days now. She closed her eyes and pushed the cart. The cart started to roll down a hill, but Shigé, her body still supported by the cart, had fallen asleep. The cart’s speed increased dramatically as it approached a bend in the path, and once it got there, since no one was steering, it tilted to the left, and Shigé’s body slid into empty space like a falling leaf. Tracing a parabola as she flew, Shigé landed in a field at the bottom of a cliff. The cart continued to run off track until it stopped at the top of the embankment. The red earth that filled it unloaded into the field below and there it sat, uncaring, its huge mouth gaping dementedly, making no move to retrieve its load. 32 chapter o n e

After a little while, the other workers noticed the cart sitting there and investigated, thus finding out about Shigé’s fall. Eventually, Shigé was rescued and laid out on the withered grass that covered one of the surrounding plateaus. She recovered her senses after a bit and opened her eyes, the bright autumn sun penetrating her pupils as it bore down on her. She seemed to have been knocked hard on the back of the head and the butt, and as the tingling in her body dispersed like mist, she cried out in pain. Planting her right hand in the dirt, Shigé struggled to get up, but no matter what she did, her muscles steadfastly refused to respond. She closed her eyes and felt her consciousness fade again. “Hey! Get up! Can’t you get up?” A shoe prodded her shoulder. Shigé slowly pulled her upper and lower lids apart. “Get up and go home if you’re gonna sleep.” So saying, the foreman blew a cloud of tobacco smoke into the sky. Through it, Shigé could see shadows deepening in the autumnal folds of the far mountain range. Shigé rose and, moaning, started to walk. She cut a figure that looked as though it could be toppled by the slightest of breezes. The fetus in her stomach began to jump as she crawled into bed. Churning inside as if being wrung from her body, the movements of the child clambering madly toward the surface kept Shigé moaning throughout the night. And then, as the soft white fingers of dawn reached in through the window, Shigé’s period flowed once more after five months’ pause. The little fleshy mass that had blossomed in this red tide, now delicately shrunken, threw its fate a sidelong glance. The world was burdened with the seed of one less tragedy. Birthday and burial . . . a curtain rises, a curtain falls. A red song has begun— the sun’s song. It’s red. It’s red . . . . . . red . . . . . . red . . . ... ... Translated by Brian Bergstrom

t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 33

(3) The Mother wakasugi toriko Translated from Criticism (November 1931) Precocious Wakasugi Toriko (1892–1937) began participating in literary groups at the age of twelve, when she was training to be a geisha at the house where she was adopted shortly after being born to the mistress of a wealthy merchant. She disliked the business and, at the age of sixteen, took off for Tokyo, where she worked as a maid before managing to get a position as a reporter. She married Itakura Katsutada (1887–1973), a fellow journalist, later an instructor of English and a translator.12 The illegitimate son of an aristocrat, Itakura was able to provide her with a comfortable living. Both this story and “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow” [1] feature characters who hope against the odds that their hard work will pay off. It’s interesting to observe the ideology of hard work and dedication challenged in the fiction of writers who had in fact secured the possibility of a comfortable life. In 1925 Wakasugi published her first proletarian work in Literary Front, “Blazing Sun,” a story addressing workplace injustice. She would go on to join the Writers League, become active in MOPR (International Red Aid), the relief organization for detainees and their families, and edit Working Women with Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40] and Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21]. Arrested in 1933 for attending Kobayashi Takiji’s wake (see fig. 2),13 her chronic health problems were aggravated, leading to death in 1937. Wakasugi was pained by the gap between her comfortable circumstances and the world she had experienced in childhood, a gap that was clarified through her political commitment. Was she qualified to call herself a proletarian writer? she wondered to the impoverished Matsuda Tokiko [34]. Yet it was precisely those circumstances that allowed her to host study sessions for the “first-year” women in the Writers League. Matsuda vividly recalls the thrill of discussing proletarian works produced by their seniors in the supportive environment created by Wakasugi.14 Part of this thrill surely came from the opportunity to grasp gender and class oppression together. For Wakasugi, “proletarian literary theories were directly useful for acquiring a gendered viewpoint.”15 12. “Wakasugi Toriko HP.” 13. “Wakasugi Toriko.” 14. Matsuda, MTJ, 10:362–63, 374–76, 385–87. 15. Kobayashi Hiroko, “Wakasugi Toriko,” 128. 34 chapter o n e

“The Mother” not only shows awareness of social injustice but portrays women coming together to act on that awareness. That Mioko becomes an organizer in Kameido (part of the Nankatsu industrial area of Tokyo densely populated with female textile workers; see [3], [8], and [10]) is testimony to Wakasugi’s own commitment. nf and hbs After Mioko was fired, a stranger started coming by the mother’s house. It might be early morning or late at night, but he made no effort to call out a “Hello” or a “Pardon me.” He would wait lifelessly in the entryway for someone to appear at the door. “Is Miss Mio here?” That’s all he would say. High forehead, jet-black eyes, and slumped shoulders— the young man made an unforgettable first impression. Sometimes Mioko would go outside and they’d talk for a couple of minutes, and other times they’d leave together and she wouldn’t return for a while. “So . . . where does that fella come from?” the mother asked with an air of nonchalance. “We used to work for the same company.” Mioko, too, responded casually. But he didn’t seem like a company man— thought the mother. He seemed like a student or a worker. Yet for all that, he did dress neatly in a suit and tie. The mother had her reasons to dislike him. When he came around, she felt like he was slowly but surely taking her daughter away from her. “Don’t you think it’s best not to get too close to that fellow?” When the mother said such things, Mioko would shoot a stern look in her direction. The mother was heartily ashamed that her daughter had been fired from the company and hid the fact, even from Mioko’s older brother. But then, the newspapers ran headlines like “Devil Hand of the All-Japan Council of Labor Unions Reaches Out” and “Red Office Girls.”16 The stories explained in great detail how the organizational committee of the branch of the employees’

16. The All-Japan Council of Labor Unions [Zenkyo¯] was affiliated with the illegal Japanese Communist Party. Both “Zenkyo¯” and “red” were printed in the 1931 version, but X’d in the 1932 republication. This is one example of how redactionary practices with respect to censorship were subject to change, mostly in the direction of increased precaution. t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 35

union the women were trying to organize was discovered. And that is how everyone, including her brother, learned all about her being fired. Mioko’s brother, who had been a woodblock printer for a long time and now worked in the Printing Bureau of the Ministry of Finance, was in a foul mood that night.—My own job is shaky enough, what with my tuberculosis, but what if I lose it because of my little sister?! How would we eat? He became uncontrollably angry, as if she had done something terribly selfish. That evening the three were sitting sour-faced around the dinner table when the lattice gate opened softly. “Sounds like someone’s here again.” Mioko’s brother pricked up his ears. He put down his chopsticks. “Is that so— ?” The mother gave Mioko a furtive look. Mioko wiped her mouth with her apron, got to her feet in a hurry, and left the room. The mother strained her ears and heard what sounded like Mioko slipping on her clogs and going outside. She returned after about ten minutes. “Wouldn’t happen to be that Yamazaki, would it?” The mother had remembered the young man’s name from the first time he visited. “Uh-huh . . .” Mioko nodded without looking up. “Who the heck is Yamazaki?” Her brother bared his animosity. “That, that guy . . . I suppose he’s the one you call your leader, huh.” He said it with a deliberate sneer. Mioko acted irritated but didn’t say anything. Her brother had been selected from among the woodblock printers at the printing factory because of his skillful technique, and now he worked as an engraver in the Printing Bureau. As a result, he carried on like he was a master craftsman and Mioko couldn’t stand it. He was a laborer, but because he drew a monthly salary, he didn’t give a thought to even basic questions such as how young workers could improve their lives. Instead, he devoured articles in the bourgeois newspapers about leftist movements and, mindlessly accepting what they said, spouted off about this and that. “I don’t know what kind of man this Yamazaki is, but what in the world does he think he’s going to accomplish by organizing riffraff like you office girls and department store clerks. . . .” He was at it again tonight. Mioko thought it best to remain silent when her brother spoke of 36 chapter o n e

Yamazaki, but when the talk touched on the union, she couldn’t hold back any longer. “Brother, why are you talking nonsense?— We have a real workplace, you know.” Mioko was angered by her brother’s condescension and ignorance. “And just what d’you think you’re doing, you— of all people? You work in a large factory, but you’re all by yourself, at their beck and call, putting up with that long apprenticeship, drawing a measly monthly salary, carving karakusa day in and day out. . . .” By “karakusa,” Mioko meant the arabesque design on the bills. “There’s only one way to improve our lives— we’ve got to join the most actively confrontational union, the one without corrupt leaders, and band together to fight. . . .” “Who’d you learn that from? What a lot of nerve!” The minute trembling of his fingers showed his anger. “Where we are, we’ve got the All-Japan Council of Labor General Employee Union. You’ve got the Publishing Workers’ Union. As long as a workplace has people ready to protest, whether it’s a department store or whatever, the union’s ready to send out organizers right away.” Color rising in her cheeks, Mioko could have gone on forever. Beneath a lampshade barely grazing his forehead, her brother’s temples were pulsing and he looked like he might cry. “Mioko— ” he began, as he always did when he felt unable to contain his conflicted feelings. “I start doing what you’re doing, and just watch me get fired. And then who’s going to take care of this family?” The mother felt anxious watching the siblings feud. Wondering when her daughter became the sort of young woman who would say such things, she looked at Mioko’s still childlike shoulders and, to her surprise, found that she understood what her daughter was saying. But she also felt unbearable sorrow for big brother, working away in spite of his sickly body. The next morning, the mother woke up and found Mioko’s bed empty. The hours passed, but she didn’t come home. My daughter’s gone— the instant the mother realized as much, the image of that young man Yamazaki flashed before her eyes. But she didn’t have the slightest idea where he might live. Over a month passed. Some days it poured rain, and then the next day the hot summer sun t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 37

would appear. Here and there, talk would be of floods or landslides, but no news came about Mioko. The mother couldn’t forget about her for even one moment, and every day the mother’s emotions raged like the tempestuous weather. Then one day a letter arrived from a stranger— Ikeda Masa. The mother opened the envelope with shaking hands. I hasten to inform you that Miss Mioko was arrested due to her connection with Mr. Yamazaki. Her whereabouts were unknown until yesterday, when it was finally ascertained that she is being held at Y police station. Please proceed as quickly as possible to Y police station to negotiate her release. In our experience, it is best if a family member goes. In haste. The mother’s head was muddled with shock and joy. She quickly made her preparations and left. Once she got off the streetcar, she rushed through the gates of the police station, but was turned away on the grounds that the person in charge was not present. After that, she went every day. She bowed her head hundreds of times before the Special Higher Police. Then one evening, she finally obtained the release of her daughter. “Mioko— ” She looked at her daughter’s face, pale and translucent like wax, and she was overcome with emotion. It was now the season for a warm, lined kimono, but Mioko was still wearing the splash-patterned summer kimono she had on when she left the house. The mother pulled a jacket out of the bundle she brought and helped her put it on. Mioko grabbed hold of her mother’s shoulder to steady herself and descended the stairs of the police station. Once outside, the mother wept with a handkerchief pressed to her eyes. “Mother—why are you crying?” Mioko looked sharply at her mother out of the corner of her eyes. “It’s a disgrace, the way you’re carrying on— there’s no reason for it. I haven’t done anything wrong to make you bow your head before the police.” These were the first words that Mioko spoke to her mother after two months. My daughter’s changed— the mother thought. But she could understand how Mioko felt. Mioko’s brother had been bedridden ever since he vomited blood at work. Seeing his sister for the first time in a long while, his cheeks flushed quickly, but he didn’t say anything. 38 chapter o n e

Then one day, he spoke to her with a frankness that was uncharacteristic. “What was the name of that fellow? That’s it, Yamazaki, right? What’s he up to? He never comes to visit anymore.” “He’s been taken in.” “Oh— ” “By now, he’s probably been sent to Ichigaya.” “That fellow is a real man after all! Look at me. I get sick and I get the sack. No matter how much I struggled, it didn’t amount to anything. I guess I’m supposed to just lie here and wait ’til I die.” She could see his long legs stretched out toward the wall, sticking out from under the quilt. They were pitifully bony. One day, after she had been back half a month, Mioko left the house saying “I’ll be back in a bit— ” and then didn’t come back. By night, she still hadn’t returned. Because of what had happened before, the mother held back the tears and tried to think of what to do. Maybe she left a note— the mother searched Mioko’s belongings. There was nothing. Well, just one thing: a letter stuck in a notebook. It was a yellow, sealed letter. On the front was the following: No. XX, XXcho¯, Ichigaya, c/o Ikeda, Miss Aoki Mio. On the back, Yamazaki Jiro¯. —Aha! She read the letter intently. Small brush strokes filled the page. The calligraphy was so fine that it was difficult, and she had to skip through it. “I hear you’re changing workplaces, but unless there are circumstances beyond your control, it’s best not to change too frequently. And, get to know the others as much as possible, make lots of good friends, and meanwhile, gradually extricate yourself from your current environment.—Don’t give your brother a hard time. He’s a sick man, after all. Finally, if you think it is all right, please give my best to your kind mother.” She read the letter with her eyes full of tears. —That man who was dark as a bat on the outside had such gentle, loving emotion in him? At the end, there were requests for several books and clean laundry. Even the mother had a good idea where Yamazaki was. There was no sign of Mioko after that. Then one day at the local bathhouse, a neighbor lady called out to the mother. “My daughter says she ran into your Mio-chan about four or five days ago.” t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 39

“What? Where did she run into Mioko— ?” “Out in front of Kameido.” “I wonder if it wasn’t someone else. . . .” “No, my daughter went to school with Mio-chan for six years, you know.” “Well, how did my daughter look? “She had her hair back in a traditional style, she carried a lunchbox, and she was walking along with female factory workers. . . .” “Did she seem well?” “Hmm . . . well, when my daughter called out ‘Mio-chan!’ she abruptly hurried away.” The news she had long awaited was disappointing. But above all she hoped that Mioko was well. For two or three years her son had been inclined to miss work because of illness. But even when he was home he worked, saying his skills would deteriorate if he didn’t. The delicate lines, finer than hair, that filled both sides of a bill— they crossed one another with dizzying elaborateness. The mother felt cold shivers run down her back. She could see before her very eyes her son’s life being worn down, little by little, inside the exceedingly complex lines. “Mother— I’ve been a burden to you for a long time, haven’t I?” He sat up in the futon and looked at his arms and legs. “If I die, what will become of you?” “What will become of me? Well, I’ll be in big trouble if you don’t get better, won’t I?” “Whatever you do, you must find Mioko. Look, you might be able to find out where she is if you contact the woman who told you she was in police custody. You still have the letter she sent, don’t you?” “It says Ichigaya, Tomihisacho¯, No. XXX. Ikeda Masa— that’s what it says.” The next morning, the mother reached in to replace the hot water bottle, and when she touched the sick man’s leg, it was deathly cold. She tried to rouse him, but he gave no response. Unbeknownst to her, her son had breathed his last while turned to the wall. He had always been an eccentric and solitary man, so no one came to offer condolences. Then again, there was no way to let anyone know. What if I get fired? Who’ll take care of us?— Her son used to lash out at his mother and sister with these words. But he died without having lived a single day of youth— this was what made the mother feel most bitter. After taking care of a sick man for so long, now, for the first time, she felt released from the unproductive life of kitchen work and child rearing. 40 chapter o n e

Tomihisa in Ichigaya was a ramshackle neighborhood of tiny old houses. She asked people where the Ikeda house was, but no one knew. After walking in circles for an hour, she discovered the house at the end of a crooked, narrow dead end. “Is this the Ikeda house?” She entered through the lattice door and looked inside. It sure doesn’t seem like a normal house— she thought. The space was cluttered with books and tables and chairs. There weren’t any medical supplies like you’d expect for a doctor, and it was too messy to be a magazine company. Hmm . . . maybe she’s a night school teacher— wondered the mother as she stood there uneasily. A woman with dark glasses appeared and said, “May I ask whose family member you are?” “I’d like to speak with Miss Ikeda Masa— I am the mother of Aoki Mio.” “Miss Ikeda— ” The woman with the glasses called out to the back, and then, “Miss Ikeda is presently doing laundry. Please come in and wait.” There was the sound of water running in the kitchen. She sat down on a chair that had its frame exposed and took a look around. A small and a medium-sized room had been combined by removing the sliding doors between them and in the middle two giant tables squared off. Seated at one was the woman with glasses from before, and her pen continued to move without her casting a single sidelong glance. In front of where she was sitting, books were lined up like the storeroom of a used bookstore. There were books with Western writing, difficult-looking titles, and what appeared to be literary works. But it was something else that gave the mother an odd feeling. In the corner of the room was a very tall shelf, full of kimonos and hats like a pawn shop. What kind of place is this?—she kept asking herself. “I am Ikeda.” Masako appeared before her, in Korean-style dress. She was a young woman with big round eyes. After a lengthy greeting to Masako, the mother said, “I’ve had some word that Mioko is in Kameido, but I wonder if that’s true. . . .” “Miss Mioko? She is carrying on very bravely.” Masako’s large, childlike eyes twinkled. “Yes, she was in Nankatsu until recently.— But now she’s been moved to a new place.” “Then you’ve been getting news from her the whole time?” t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 41

“Yes, we’re very busy with our work here, so there isn’t proper time to meet, but we do keep up with messages.” “—Your work? What is it?” “We do work for an aid committee!” The mother had heard her daughter talk about the aid committee.—We are part of the aid movement working to support proletarian liberation activists who’ve been victimized, as well as their families. Despite the threats of white terror, we persist in hanging our sign publicly to offer aid to those victimized. Like a beacon in the dark sea. . . . Now that she knew what the space was, the mother took another look around the room. “Those books, they’ve all come from prison, haven’t they?” “Yes, they’ve made the rounds at Ichigaya and Toyotama.” “And this, what is this?” She pointed to a card on the table as though it were a rare object. “This? This is a card listing the victim’s name, care package contents, and other information.” There’s gotta be a card for Yamazaki Jiro¯ in here!— she thought. Strangely enough, ever since her own son had died, she had begun to think of Yamazaki. “And that— what’s that?” Now she was standing in front of the shelves that had previously given her great misgiving. There were five shelves. Hats and clothes had been paired for individual recipients. A fedora with Western clothes, a cabbie cap with a splashpatterned navy kimono, overalls with a cabbie cap, student uniforms with their stand-up collars, kimonos woven with stripes, and even spring jackets. Students, workers, small-time merchants— here was the miscellaneous clothing these men had worn. She rubbed her wrinkled hands and looked around. She felt the lingering warmth from the hot blood of everyone who had been wrapped in these clothes until the moment of their arrest. Spring, summer, fall, winter— white summer clothing, padded kimonos, overcoats, and hats vividly told the story of the season of the arrest. “No one has come to claim these?” she asked, her voice catching. “Yes, that’s right. There are many people who are alone, with no parents or siblings, who never receive a care package, not even once. There are also lots of people from fine families who cut their ties when they enter the movement.” —They’re all sons and daughters of the same blood! Unable to bear the excitement, she covered her face with her rough, large, bony hands. 42 chapter o n e

Before long, she moved in with Masako. She followed Masako everywhere, and strangers would have thought she was Masako’s real mother. Sometimes she even went to the police station instead of Masako. “Hey you— you’re from the aid committee, right?” “No, I’m XX’s mother.” “Ya want me to throw ya in with ’em?!” No matter how much they threatened her, she was undeterred. She went out every day with relief supplies. And whenever she did, she would accomplish her goal. “They’re no match for you, Auntie!” Praised by Masako, she responded with an air of pride in her experience, “That’s right, we can’t stop ’til we keel over— ” Her face was bright and cheerful. Wherever it was laundry day, she was the first to head out for that district. Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

(4) A Statement of My Views in Response to Mr. Masamune Hakucho¯ (excerpt) aono suekichi Translated from Central Review (November 1926) Aono Suekichi (1890–1961) was born on Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, to a landowning family whose fortunes declined soon after his birth.17 Although the autobiographical sketch translated here describes his childhood loneliness, ill-fated employment as a rural schoolteacher, and urban alienation as a university student, readers should also know what it leaves out: that he was a member of the first Communist Party (1922–1924), and that, after its dissolution, he went to Shanghai (1924) as part of the reconstruction effort.18 In contrast to Kobayashi Takiji, Aono, despite the key role his early writings played in Communist Party– led organizations (see “Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness” [9]), moved away from the party although not from socialism. He was not subjected to arrest until the crackdown on the Popular Front (1938–1939), whereupon his writing was severely restricted. After the war, he committed himself to writing and teaching as well as a range of activities including reviving the Japan PEN (poets, playwrights, editors,

¯ saki, “Aono Suekichi,” 17–18. 17. O 18. Nakajima, “Aono Suekichi,” 7. t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 43

essayists, novelists) Club and opposing the US-Japan Security Treaty (Ampo).19 The following selection, published between the two “purposeful consciousness” essays included in chapter 2, comes from Aono’s answers to a series of “puzzlements” professed by writer and critic Masamune Hakucho¯ (1879–1962) over his claims for proletarian literature. 20 Why bother to drag literature into the struggle for social transformation, questions Masamune. If you’re indignant about the capitalist exploitation of workers, why not tackle the problem directly instead of taking the “easy” detour of literature? In response, Aono walks his mentor through the basics of the relationship between economic base and cultural superstructure to clarify the role of culture in class struggle. In the excerpt below, however, he turns to his own biography to explain his commitment to the movement. nf [. . .] I lost both parents before I could form any memory of them. My earliest recollection is of an old-fashioned, middle-class household in decline, of many older brothers and sisters racked with anxiety about their futures, and of the abject poverty of the family of my wet nurse, whose bed had provided the only warmth I had ever known. It was not long before my nurse, afflicted with an incurable disease, hanged herself, and my only and beloved younger sister, upon finishing elementary school, crossed the seas and left my world. In boyhood there was nothing cheering for my eyes to fall on. Halfway through middle school, I became captivated by socialist thought and Naturalist literature. The socialism was abandoned within a year or two. But Naturalist literature penetrated me with the terrifying strength of an intoxicating drug. What I was shown was the ugliness that dominated reality in the wide world. I was shown the nature of the lives of lonely human beings. It was not my family alone that lived in cold darkness. Upon graduating from middle school, I resolved to make my way as a country schoolteacher, and with some hope in my heart, I took a position in a remote school in Echigo. What did I see there? The poverty of the villagers and the fateful misery of their children. Alcohol became my companion, and I embarked on a path of dissolution. Naturalist literature, tightening its grip, turned my heart toward nihilism. Twice I resolved to die. Each time, friends came to my aid. A brother-in-law, trying to effect at least a change of mood, made it possible for ¯ saki, “Aono Suekichi,” 18. 19. O 20. Masamune, “Bungei jihyo¯,” 265–71. This exchange is discussed in Keene, Poetry, Drama, Criticism, 564–68. 44 chapter o n e

me to enroll in Waseda University. There again I chose literature. But it was not in order to study literature. There was no break in my life as a dissolute, but that was not because I was finding pleasure in that life or in alcohol. So I continued until I finished school, whereupon I worked for one or two newspapers. For a time I worked frantically, like a machine. What did I see then? How this suffocating, tiny society was rigged. Gradually, during this time, the illusions produced by literature began to dissipate. I also consciously drove them away. What came to my aid here was the study of society’s economic system and socialist theory. For the first time, my heart began to know calm. The illusions induced by literature vanished without a trace. My gaze was fixed on social systems. Still, the force of habit being a frightening thing, I was not yet able to rid myself completely of novels. Nor did the nihilism disappear. Battling myself, I made a modest effort to engage in social activism.— For someone like me, there was neither the opportunity to develop nor the psychological leisure to find release in the “poetry that is surely the possession of all men and women in their youth since the beginnings of humanity.”21 Not that I was in any way born an unusual child. I abandoned literature for quite some time. What made me take it up again, after my understanding of social theory had deepened a bit, had to do with my grasp of the real nature of the superstructure and the meaning of struggle against it. I had experienced more than most people— no, I had all but risked my life experiencing the dangerously intoxicating power of literature. I was all the more aware of its true nature and attached great significance to the struggle against it. Taking up literature after a long hiatus, I decided to dedicate a part of my humble powers to that struggle.— I wrote once that the history of my inner life during the first half of my existence was a history of struggle against nihilism. The seeds were first planted by the art of the late [Kunikida] Doppo [1871–1908], which I clung to in my early youth. It was none other than the art of Mr. Masamune himself that brought these seeds to fruition. How I struggled against— and deepened— my sense of nihilism as I gazed on society and existence through the deep emotion produced by reading Mr. Masamune’s works in mid and late youth. When, after that long separation, I took up literature again, it was with the goal of hastening the demise of the literature of the bourgeoisie, including Mr. Masamune’s, and of intensifying the struggle by cultivating the literature of the newly rising class. That I am now exchanging words with Mr. Masamune

21. Ibid., 267. t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 45

in this fashion, turning my spear against my old mentor in the struggle with a tenacious past, naturally fills me with inexpressible emotion. If I were to spout some absurdity to the effect that the arts movement is the sole endeavor to be undertaken by those seeking to transform society, then comrades, and all of you who suffer in society today, do not hesitate to stone me. If I were to discourse on the arts and consider my work done, then comrades, and all of you who suffer in the world today, be the first to turn your whips on me. Mr. Masamune asks, “Can you not find it in yourself to seek elsewhere than in literature for an endeavor worthy of being a man’s lifework?” Fortunately, I am unable to embrace a thought so redolent of individualistic heroism. All I seek is to be a foot soldier in the great class endeavor of the proletariat, to select a site where I can be most effective, and to succumb there. The site of labor may change according to advances in actuality. What is important is not the site. It is how one exerts oneself at that site. What good does it do to be lazy at the so-called front line? Mr. Masamune [. . .] seems to think that I am attached to the idea of making a name for myself within the literary establishment and that I hunger after publicity. [. . .] If I had regrets about fame and hungered for publicity, why would I torment myself and go against the times, choosing a struggle with scant prospect of victory within the current system? Fame and publicity lie strewn like boulders in work that accommodates present-day reality. For my work, the rewards are always scarce. Were I to fall ill, I would lack the means for securing the most basic staples of rice and salt, let alone medicine. I have been unable to provide decent medical care for my wife, who has not looked healthy in fifteen years. Even if I spend several months laboring over a translation, it may be banned upon publication. What fame, what publicity, is to be found on this path? At present, to be sure, the proletarian arts movement has seen the light of day. But let reaction return, and it will sink to incalculable depths and require untold agony to be resurrected. Those who judge by appearance alone will mockingly announce the death of the proletarian arts. What honor, what applause can be found there? Even though I vowed to write without invoking shallow sentiments, I may have lost my equanimity. Nevertheless, what I have recorded here, though hardly exhaustive, represents the views I have come to hold. To Mr. Masamune who has given me the occasion to clarify my position to some degree and state my views, I must extend my gratitude. Translated by Norma Field 46 chapter o n e

(5) A Chronology of My Life (excerpt) kobayashi takiji Translated from A Collection of Proletarian Literature (1931) If a lonely childhood and youth, followed by early adulthood exposure to grinding rural poverty and then urban cynicism, led Aono Suekichi to socialist thought, first-hand experience of poverty in a close-knit family led Kobayashi Takiji to dream of the magical discovery of riches. Takiji grew up in the port city of Otaru (depicted in Hayashi Fusao’s “Apples” [7]) on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Connected by rail to the mineral and agricultural wealth of Hokkaido, Otaru, despite its enormous distance from Tokyo, became a commercial center with links to Asia and to Europe. It was, moreover, a naval port servicing Japanese expansionism. The combination of poverty and success in elite schooling that led to employment at the Hokkaido Colonial Development Bank put Takiji in an excellent position to observe the contradictions of capitalist development— the accumulation of cultural as well as material wealth, on the one hand, and the immiseration of people transformed into disposable labor, on the other. If study of socialist thought served to direct Takiji away from seeking individual wealth, it did so in tandem with experience— his own childhood; the abject circumstances of Taguchi Taki, the lifelong love whom he redeemed from prostitution; and first-hand observation and eventual participation in worker-farmer movements.22 At age twenty-nine, only two years after this piece was written, Takiji would be tortured to death at the hands of the Special Higher Police. The sketch he offers of his own trajectory seems an apt illustration of liberation theologian Leonardo Boff’s dictum “The opposite of poverty is not wealth— it is justice.”23 nf I was born in 1903 in the countryside of Akita. My mother says it was August 23 according to the lunar calendar, but the records in the village office say December 1. The village headman must have been the sort of easygoing guy who could be a character out of Gogol. My father combined tenant farming with working on a bit of land owned by his family. My mother was the 22. Field, Kobayashi Takiji, 81–127. 23. Quoted in McCarthy, “Pope’s Brazil Visit Puts Social Justice in Spotlight.”

t h e person a l is t h e p olit ic a l 47

daughter of a day laborer. They told me that after the harvest season, they would push trolley carts at neighborhood construction sites. Mother tells me stories about how they would grip their brakes as they tore around sharp curves at the edge of precipitous cliffs. When I was about four, my family couldn’t make ends meet anymore, and we moved to Hokkaido. We started up a mom-and-pop candy store at the edge of town. I lived there for twenty-odd years. Our family continued to live hand to mouth. On the long walk to school, I kept thinking about discovering a mine and letting my mother ride in rickshaws. I remember how my older sister worked for a company that processed volcanic ash. She’d come home with her hair all white and take a long time washing it. My younger sister would go to the slag heap and gather coke.— But a relative made a point of letting me get an education. I went from Otaru Commercial Middle School to the Otaru Higher School of Commerce. 24 During that time I worked at a bakery. In the summer, I’d pump oxygen for divers at construction sites. I was getting serious about striking it rich. When I graduated, I began to work at the Otaru branch of the Hokkaido Colonial Development Bank. That was 1924. It was just about then that a friend who had been involved in the “protest against military training incident”25 at the Otaru Higher School of Commerce urged me to read the works of Marx and Lenin and Fukumoto Kazuo [1894–1983], who was popular at the time. On top of that, there was the candidacy of Yamamoto Kenzo¯ [1895–1939], various study groups, and then the “March 15 Incident.” All of these were decisive for the direction I was headed in. I also devoured proletarian aesthetic theories and the works of people like Hayama Yoshiki [6]. I published “March 15, 1928” [11] in Battle Flag (November and December 1928). This is probably my “debut piece” in the ordinary sense of that expression. The following are my major publications since then. [. . .] I left Otaru for Tokyo at the end of March 1930. From the end of June until the end of January of the next year, I was in prison, and I was released on bail four days ago. I’m currently under indictment in two cases. Of the works I’ve produced to date, there isn’t a single one that I’m not sick and tired of. Now, I’m hoping to write something truly outstanding. Translated by Norma Field

24. Since 1949, the Otaru University of Commerce. 25. See the introduction to Hayashi Fusao [7] in chapter 2. 48 chapter o n e

2 : Labor and Literature introduction What is the relationship between labor and proletarian literature? On the one hand, the answer is self-evident: proletarian literature sought to represent the indignities and aspirations of those with nothing but their labor to sell. On the other hand, proletarian writers anguished over a felt gap between full-time laborers and themselves: many of them were the recipients of higher education, and some of them were even able to make money from their writing. In the midst of a heated debate in 1928 over how to popularize the movement, Hayashi Fusao [7] spelled out the worst fears of his contemporaries: “So far, none of the works we Japanese proletarian writers are producing have readers among the worker-farmer masses.” This is a problem, he continued, because “our works ought to have their proper readers among those very masses.”1 He concluded his article by repeating, “for the third time,” that “in order to stir up a tornado among the masses, we must produce works that will become favorites among the true masses, the workers and farmers!”2 What was the status of the labor movement when the proletarian literature movement was getting started? Isolated disputes in the late nineteenth century coalesced into a labor movement with large, organized strikes by factory workers as well as tenant farmers by the 1920s. It’s remarkable that the labor movement developed as it did despite Article 17 of the Public Peace Police Law (1900), which did not outlaw strikes or unions exactly but did prohibit “the act of ‘instigating’ (yu¯waku) or ‘inciting’ (sendo¯) others to strike, join unions, or engage in collective bargaining.”3 Tokyo’s industrywide union, the Friendly Society, was founded in 1912 by Christian Suzuki Bunji (1885–1946) with “recognition, respect, and community at the heart.”4 In 1919, it became the Japanese Federation of Labor (So¯do¯mei) and soon demonstrated political aspirations by condemning the 1918 Siberian Expe1. Hayashi, “Puroretaria taishu¯ bungaku,” 241. For an overview of the popularization debate, see Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan, 241–52; and Bowen-Struyk, “Rethinking Japanese Proletarian Literature,” 121–73. 2. Hayashi, “Puroretaria taishu¯ bungaku,” 241. 3. Garon, State and Labor, 30. 4. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, 98. 49

dition (see Kuroshima Denji [26, 34]) and advocating for universal manhood suffrage and, in 1923, for an independent Korea. 5 In this period of intense political debate, it’s unsurprising that in 1925 a rift formed between the “realists” (i.e., those willing to cooperate with capital) and the communists; the latter then formed the Japan Council of Labor Unions (Hyo¯gikai).6 Tenant farmer unions, too, were established throughout the country. The first national union, the Japan Farmers Union (Nihon No¯min Kumiai, or Nichino¯), was established in 1922 by Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) and other Christians, and although it, too, underwent a series of rifts, tenant farmer activism continued to rise: by 1927 there were 4,582 tenant farmer unions with 356,332 members, peaking at 4,810 unions in 1933, with membership declining with the onset of war.7 Tenant farmer struggles caught the attention of writers such as Kobayashi Takiji, author of The Absentee Landlord (see also [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30]), and the aforementioned Kuroshima Denji. In this volume, the selections from Nakano Shigeharu [19], Hosono Ko¯jiro¯ [25], and Chang Hyo˘k-chu [33] are examples of farmer literature. We should note, moreover, that it was the 1926 struggle over establishing a “proletarian farmer school” as part of the Kizaki Village tenant farmer strike in Niigata that launched proletarian children’s literature (see chapter 4). Even so, most of the writers’ energy went toward the urban proletariat despite the prevalence of the unifying term “worker-farmer masses.” There was disagreement between theorists about whether the tenant farmer system was a remnant of feudalism (therefore indicating Japan’s need to complete its bourgeois revolution before proceeding to a proletarian revolution), or whether this was an illusion, given that capital obtained as rent by rural landowners, including absentee landlords, was circulating just like other capital (meaning Japan was ready for a proletarian revolution).8 Debates on the world-historical situation of Japanese politics and economics were fueled by the contradictory and at times condescending “theses” on Japan produced by the Communist International (Comintern). In “What Is to Be Done?”(1901), Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) addressed the burning questions of his time: Could the systematic strikes and organized labor movement in 1890s Russia become revolutionary? He acknowledged the emergence of some degree of consciousness among the workers and 5. Ibid., 132. 6. Nimura, “Senkanki Nihon no ro¯do¯ undo¯: 1917–1940.” ¯ hara Shakai Mondai Kenkyu¯jo, “Daisampen no¯min undo¯.” 7. Ho¯sei Daigaku O 8. Hoston, Marxism, 223–50. 50 chapter t w o

organizers, “but the workers were not and could not be conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system.”9 This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.10 These were fighting words, dividing the Mensheviks from the Bolsheviks, who insisted on an intellectual vanguard to lead the masses to revolution. Among the many works translated into Japanese in the 1920s, “What Is to Be Done?” was especially important, although, to be precise, it was not the translation so much as Aono Suekichi’s (1890–1961) [4, 9] adaptation of “Re¯nin” that became pivotal in the development of the movement. Aono produced a partial translation in 1925 and, after that, a full translation with Sasaki Takamaru (1898–1986).11 In translation, the latter part of the section titled “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Class Consciousness of SocialDemocracy” became “The Purposeful Consciousness of Social Democracy” (emphasis mine), “purposeful” being an important element that he retained in the two essays on “purposeful consciousness” in 1926 and 1927 included in this chapter. After giving a nod to “naturally occurring” proletarian literature, Aono states that the proletarian movement needed to “raise the proletarian artists of natural growth up to the level of purposeful consciousness, to socialist consciousness.”12 Aono, however, was to be dismayed by the instrumental ways in which his message was received, and he attempted to correct such “misunderstandings” with a second essay published in January 1927. As historians of proletarian literature have noted, the movement was characterized as often by disagreements as by agreements, in part inspired by Aono’s essays. G. T. Shea writes, “The movement, which to this point had been a loose common front

9. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” 74. 10. Ibid. 11. Hirano, “Kaisetsu,” 411. 12. Aono, “Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness,” this volume, 93. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 51

of anarchism, syndicalism, and bolshevism, had set down for it here, for the first time, the foundation for a Marxist literature movement.”13 Some proletarian writers, such as Hayama Yoshiki [6] and Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31], were radicalized through labor struggle and became the worker-writers so desired by the movement. Hayama (1893–1945) worked as a sailor, roller skate boy (!), office worker, accountant at a cement factory, and news reporter. He was working at the Nagoya Cement Factory in 1921 when a worker fell in the burning ashes and died. This incident spawned both an attempt at organizing a labor union (for which he was fired) and one of his famous works, “Letter Found in a Cement Barrel” (1925).14 It was while he was in Chigusa Prison in 1923 for association with the first Japanese Communist Party (JCP) that he began writing such works as “The Prostitute” [6] that would become so famous. Tokunaga emerged on the scene with a popular novel, The Sunless Street, serialized in Battle Flag alongside Kobayashi Takiji’s “The Crab Cannery Ship” in 1929 (see fig. 7). The Sunless Street was based on Tokunaga’s experience in a printing press strike at the Kyo¯do¯ Printing Company in Tokyo in 1926. Tokunaga wrote an article explaining that his first priority was “getting [workers] to read it.”15 Naturally, not all proletarian writers came from such a background. Many had the privilege to enroll at universities, where they encountered study groups such as the New Man Society, the Social Science Research Group, or the Student Federation of Social Science (Gakuren). They studied Marxist books translated into Japanese or English, or translated them themselves. Key to all these groups was the understanding of labor, internationally and domestically, in the transformation of society. Early in the movement, theorist Aono Suekichi wrote “‘Investigated’ Art” (July 1925, January 1926), in which he argued the need to bring together the study of social science with the production of socially engaged art. Aono held up as an exemplar of proletarian literature Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), of which a translation, partially censored, by Maedako¯ Hiroichiro¯ (1888–1957) appeared in 1925, and urged Japanese writers to write exposés of working-class lives.16 Writers responded to the challenge: Hayashi Fusao, for example, was deployed by the Student Federation to direct a protest brewing in Otaru, and the result was “Apples” [7]. Conscious of the gap between themselves and the workers they sought 13. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan, 140. 14. Odagiri Susumu, “Hayama Yoshiki nempu,” 422–23. 15. Tokunaga, “Taiyo¯ no nai machi wa ikanishite,” 247–48. 16. Aono, “‘Janguru’ o chu¯shin ni,” 68. 52 chapter t w o

to depict, Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21] and Nakamoto Takako [2, 10] moved to “Muslin Alley,” home to textile factories in the Nankatsu industrial area of Tokyo, so they could support and document the labor struggles by women there. As historian Andrew Gordon has estimated, in the latter half of the 1920s, “roughly one-third of all factory workers in Nankatsu belonged to unions,”17 and there was a corresponding “dispute culture.” Vera Mackie writes of the 1930 To¯yo¯ Muslin strike that it “was one of the most violent strikes which involved thousands of workers, and has become famous as a ‘women’s strike.’”18 Sata Ineko’s story in this chapter, “Prayer” [8], is part of a five-story series based on her observations of young women drawn to the labor disputes spreading through the textile industry. The protagonist finds herself caught between a sweetheart union and the JCP affiliate, between male leaders and the factory girls, or between an appeasing Christian faith and the need to survive. Decades later, Sata recalled how she developed a lasting affection for the laconic north-country girls who risked arrest and incarceration as they developed unanticipated identities through their participation in labor struggles.19 hbs

(6) The Prostitute hayama yoshiki Translated from Literary Front (December 1925) Hayama Yoshiki (1893–1945) was born to a family of status: his father served as a samurai in the Ogasawara domain and then, after the Meiji Restoration (1868), as an appointed official in Kyoto. But Hayama insisted vehemently that he had a working-class background, dismissing his enrollment at Waseda University in his characteristically overblown manner by claiming he had asked his father to sell their house for tuition money and then squandered the four hundred yen in a couple of months.20 As noted in the chapter introduction, Hayama worked a variety of jobs, becoming radicalized through labor struggle and incarceration. The experience of working aboard a coal transport between Yokohama and Hokkaido’s port of Muroran formed the background for his novel 17. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, 176. 18. Mackie, Creating Socialist Women, 124. See also Faison, Managing Women, 87–93. 19. Sata, “Toki to hito to,” 437. 20. Hayama, “Nempu,” 519. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 53

Life on the Sea (1926), which, like “The Prostitute,” was composed while he was in Chigusa Prison for association with the JCP. These early works were celebrated by critics of diverse political and aesthetic tastes.21 Like Aono Suekichi [4, 9], Hayama stayed with Literary Front after the Comintern-led communists left and became a founding member of the Proletarian Masses Party in 1928. He eventually moved to colonial Manchuria and died on his way home after the war. It was some time before historians of proletarian literature would claim his legacy. The haunting tale that follows is about an inebriated sailor in port who has an epiphany about class consciousness in an implausibly erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical setting. Miriam Silverberg wrote of ero-guronansensu (as these three terms would shortly come to be combined in Japanese) that “grotesquerie is culture resulting from such deprivation as that endured by the homeless and by beggars” and that “nonsense makes a great deal of sense” when we examine it more closely. 22 The woman in the story tells the sailor that he does not really understand what he sees, a challenge to readers as well. hbs It should be noted that this work comes into being thanks to the goodwill of Sato¯ Otoji, warden of Nagoya Penitentiary. July 6, 1923

1 If someone were to ask me about what I’m about to write down here— “Hey, did it actually happen, or is it fantasy? Which in blazes is it?”— I’d be hard-pressed to say for sure it was one or the other. I myself have, by turns, concluded about this question, this incident, that I did experience something terrible, then wondered if it was all simply fantasy, just something I’d only imagined, for if I hadn’t . . . In the course of ten years this curious memory— I still don’t know if that’s what it is— has inscribed itself indelibly on my being in ever more elaborate and minute detail. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself; nonetheless, the strange things of this world we live in that are utterly incapable of expression by pen and ink far outnumber those that can be written down. For example, how many people have gone to their graves without saying or writing a word to anyone, still harboring within their breasts— or having themselves 21. Bowen-Struyk, “Rethinking Japanese Proletarian Literature,” 15–19. 22. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, xv– xvi. 54 chapter t w o

forgotten— any number of hidden, mysterious incidents? The fact is even I have time and again encountered countless things truly a hundred times stranger and more implausible than what I’m about to write here now. And those things are far more interesting, and are pregnant with meaning of a sort, yet for some reason, no matter how hard I try, I can’t put them down on paper. Even if getting them by the censor were no problem, nothing’s to be done, since I can’t write about them, even secretly. Yet I have managed to write a long-winded, tedious prologue. I was still a dissolute youth. My only clothes, of course, were the workman’s overalls that seamen typically wear. I had just returned from a tramp run to Europe a couple of weeks before. The ship was in dry dock. I had been drinking a lot. It was kind of hot and humid, a grimy evening toward the end of July, yeah, around 1912, I think. Reader Friend, these are not the minutes of a pretrial hearing, so please don’t push me for every last detail. It was sultry, hot and humid, and I was walking along the fashionable promenade with the plantain trees. This was Yokohama’s Yankee wharf, so a good many people of somewhat exotic aspect strolled along full of themselves. As I walked along, I had completely forgot what class I belonged to— Minpei, or Commoner, was my nickname— and forgot that some might find such a name offensive. Many foreigners were, as you would expect, out walking in their elegant clothes, clothes that were a pleasure to look at. No matter how vain I might be, no matter how I might try to muster my courage, you couldn’t expect me to be able to approach the young Japanese women. As cool as you please, I strolled along together with them on the promenade that was, to put it simply, like the inside of a magnificent department store display window. I was wanting— I blush to say it— very much for them to take note of my workman’s overalls, my head held high and my hands in my pockets. I should note here that had I been clearly aware of myself at the time I would never have intentionally become the buffoon. There was no doubt I apparently had a particular something on my mind, but as to what my thoughts were, okay, even if I had become suddenly aware of my thinking, then wondered what the devil I had been thinking about up to that moment, I wouldn’t have been able to recall, so rapidly were my thoughts spinning in my head, like a propeller in flight, you might say. But at the time I apparently had not had any such revelation. I seemed to walk with a sure-footed gait; objectively viewed, I appeared l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 55

brazen-faced, exasperatingly so. On top of which, I went back and forth again and again over the same ground, as pleased with myself as a first-class passenger sauntering along the salon deck. The streetlights came on. It was getting darker. I came to the T junction at the end of the main street and its single train track, the park off in one direction, Chinatown in the other. Had there not been someone there who would startle me so, I certainly wouldn’t have noticed that it was a T-junction corner. There was there, however, a guy who, out of the blue, confronted me and destroyed the belief I had embraced up to that moment that not a soul lived in this world who was worthy of my attention. “Hey, kid!” The man had jumped out of nowhere and planted himself in front of me, so close we were almost butting heads. “Wanna look-see?” he asked in a half whisper, his voice muffled, more a strangled groan from the gut. I stood there like a half-wit, glued to the spot. Everything had happened so suddenly; I stared hard into the man’s face, small and slug-like in its smoothness. I had no idea what he wanted with me. No matter how you cut it, he was certainly not a woman. “What’s goin’ on!?” I suddenly yelled. As I spoke two men came running like bellboys who had been summoned and seized me, one by each arm. I stood rooted to the spot, my mind working. There are three of ’em. This ain’t gonna be easy! Whose butt should I kick first? If I can’t outmaneuver ’em I’m gonna lose this dustup. Figure out your strategy, then go for it! Okay, Minpei? “Hey kid!” Slug said, taking a step back, “You don’t feel like buyin’ some fun for next to nothin’, the kind of fun young guys like?” “What the hell are you guys talkin’ about? How’m I s’posed to understand what the devil’s goin’ on? When you got a deal for someone, you put it to him so’s he can give you an answer. You fight if it’s fightin’ an’ steal if you’re gonna steal.” “You don’t got no clue. Don’t expect you to, ’cause it ain’t happened yet. Anyway, you got two coppers, ain’t you?” I stuck my hand in my pocket and brought out all the money I had and showed it to them. I’d cut short my drinking in a bar when I decided I couldn’t drink any more, so altogether I had seventy or eighty sen in small change. “Yeah, you got more than enough. Look here, carfare,” he said, leaving me only a single ten-sen coin for myself. I was cleaned out. 56 chapter t w o

“How ’bout it?” Slug asked. “Wanna go?” “Just paid my admission, didn’t I?” “This way,” the one who had grabbed my right arm said, moving ahead. I was on my guard. There were three of them, and what the devil were they going to show me for only fifty sen or thereabouts? And they had got the money up front. If in my innocence I thought I was really going to be able to see something, I was likely to see only stars. I suspected these guys had been following me before I ran into Slug and I’d been unaware of them. Wary or not, however, I was to see something equal to the money I’d paid, which was only right. I would not be seeing stars. Two of the men headed toward Chinatown. The street was lined with old brick houses that had apparently been built as soon as Japan had started trading with countries overseas. The area reeked of the exotic atmosphere one finds in the Chinese districts in Hong Kong or Calcutta. In the main, the structures were such that I couldn’t tell whether these were residences or warehouses. The two turned several corners, then went through a gate next to a house on the corner. The house was also a puzzle; you couldn’t tell if anyone lived in it. From the direction and distance we’d walked, I guessed we were on the backstreet next to the street that ran along the waterfront, where moments before I’d been strutting about like a bedraggled peacock. One side of the gate we passed through was rusted shut, the other side open only enough to admit one person at a time. We were confronted with a mountain of rubbish as soon as we went in. You couldn’t tell whether the stuff had been brought in from somewhere outside or from inside. Under the junk lay a trash bin, crushed flat by the weight, but still more junk had been piled atop this. I sensed it the instant we came through the gate: there was no house to go with the gate, a gate that should have been the gate for a particular house. Three tunnel-like pathways ran through the mass of junk piled up in an open space of barely eight square yards. Two of these pathways functioned as hidden avenues, one akin to a street in front, the other to a backstreet, one leading directly to the front, the other taking a hard left; the third, however, ran straight to our right some thirty feet, then at an angle of forty-five degrees to a structure that looked as secure as a strongbox, but one you would never find on any main street. A walkway clung to its wall like a bat. If it had been daylight, there would have been nothing remarkable about it, merely a fire escape attached to a warehouse wall, nothing to hold one’s interest, but now I shuddered as though someone had pressed the flat of a scalpel blade hard against my chest. I had a premonition. Once I had climbed the buckled stairs I would enter the warehouse. I would be inside, but it would be set up so that there was l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 57

no way I could get out, and there I would find it was a factory making the Six Spirits pill they have in China. There was no doubt in my mind that my liver would be cut out to make those pills. I scrutinized the top of the building to see if a power line had been brought into it. Perhaps they had a current that would not quite kill you, just let them remove your twitching liver while you were still alive. Because the Six Spirits pills they made would probably be ineffective otherwise. My thoughts ran on as I climbed up the stairway. And yet the pill, a miraculous cure that would raise you up from the dead, in its initial stage of manufacture would nonchalantly betray the recovery of health and the continuation of life, the singular and principal reasons for its existence, and, paradoxically, could come into being only by slaughtering me. If so, I asked myself, then just what was it that these Six Spirits pills could be likened to? And why were they necessary? Were they not the precise embodiment of the social structure today? Was this not exactly the same as taking life from the proletariat so that the bourgeoisie could live? But we have now come onstage.

2 It was a curious room, a room that had the feeling of the inside of a sardine can, a damp place that reeked of mold and was bare of everything, only a low ceiling, flooring, and four walls. In the middle of the room a single lighted lamp, glowing dimly, hung suspended like a leaf caught in a spider web. A patchwork of linoleum was cemented to the flooring here and there. There was no table, no chairs. It was savagely hot and humid; my whole body oozed sweat like an abscess oozing pus, yet I felt somehow, somewhere, it was cold. And besides the smell of mold, a peculiar, sickening stench assailed my nostrils from time to time. The odor seemed to have a presence like a mist hanging in the air. The room was huge, a good hundred mats in size if you were to lay down tatami, and by the light of what appeared to be a five-candle bulb, darker than a prison cell. I stood a while at the entrance as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. In a corner of the room in which I had assumed there was nothing, I could make out an object of some sort. It appeared to be raised up, supported by beer case lids or the like. To one side, a part that the lids did not obscure completely stuck out a couple of feet. Yet I still couldn’t make out what it was. In any case, I was a good distance from it and it was dark. I stared hard at the object, straining every nerve in my body. I began to shake and found it impossible to stand on my own two feet. I 58 chapter t w o

leaned back against the wall behind me. I stiffened my quaking legs, suppressing the desire to sit down where I stood. My eyes had become much more accustomed to the darkness, and I realized that what was sticking out was the lower half of a human being, naked. This would be the unneeded part, the ingredient for Six Spirits pills having already been extracted! A desperate strength suddenly rose within me. It was my duty to do away with the men who had brought me here. More than a duty, it had become an absolute imperative. Stealthily, I took hold of my seaman’s knife in my jacket pocket and eyed the scoundrel standing near me, waiting for my chance. He, of course, was watching me. Suddenly he broke the silence. “Go over there,” the scoundrel said as he started down the stairs. “You can do whatever you want. I’ll stand lookout for you.” My head swam as though I were dead drunk and my heart was even more agitated. My head and joints pained me as though I’d just received the beating of my life. I slowly approached the body. Each step forward intensified the stench in my nostrils. It was, as I had suspected, a corpse. Then I thought I heard the faintest sigh. But a corpse that breathed— that was ridiculous. Yet it sounded like breathing. Again and again I put this faint drawing of breath down to my ears playing tricks on me, or my nerves, but that’s what I sensed. The corpse is sighing. And simultaneously I was seized with the feeling that all the contents of my stomach were flowing back up into my throat. And yet— And yet, everything was now before my eyes. The scene confronting me was an utterly atrocious one. Behind the beer case lids lay faceup a woman of twenty-two or twenty-three; she was completely naked. She lay on top of a rotting tatami mat. Her shoulders heaved with each breath that she seemed to wring out of herself as though it were her very last. Muck that she had apparently vomited when she was still able to take food was spattered from shoulder to pillow, intermingled with dark blood stains. Her hair was matted with it. And her XXXXXX was stuck to XXXXXX.23 A sour stench rose from her head, and her limbs gave off the vile smell peculiar to cancerous growths. This abnormal reek was such that I doubted human lungs could withstand it. Her eyes were wide open and 23. This sentence contains the first of four excisions in the text as first published and the only time the type was simply effaced and not replaced with the customary Xs or Os. For that reason, we have struck through the twelve Xs inserted in postwar editions.

l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 59

her pupils seemed to fix themselves on me, but they were probably seeing nothing. Of course, she also appeared not to know I was rooted there before her nakedness. I stood at her feet, transfixed by the sight. As I stood there stock-still, competing thoughts, distinct and parallel, filled my mind: Here is a human being to be pitied; there is a woman to be pitied. Like two immobile lenses, my eyes projected their implacable gaze upon the corpse. And it was fitting to call it a corpse. I have a confession to make, a truly painful confession. If that which had lain before me had not been a naked woman but a naked man, I doubt I would have stayed where I was quite so long a time or that my soul would have felt such agitation. I had reached the peak of my excitement, an emotion that was beyond the power of words to express. I stood there gawking, having paid “two coppers” for “the kind of fun young guys like.” And the guy had told me as he left to do whatever I wanted. Of course, you couldn’t expect her to put up any resistance. Prostitutes were deprived of their legal ability to resist, but here the deprivation was physiological. As for sexual satisfaction, even she was preferable to necrophilia. For say what you will, she was still warm. And worst of all, I was a seaman and young in the bargain, so I was always panting for it. I would be able to do, as Slug had said, whatever I wanted. And doubtless there had been more than one or two young guys brought here as I had been. I have no way of knowing if every single one of them XXXX, but then again, I don’t think it’s possible to assert that each and all had shrunk back, either. Indeed, there is a tendency for one’s brakes not to work all that well on this particular road. At the same time, however, I was also entertaining another train of thought on a parallel track. She was as thin as a candlestick fallen atop a hot griddle. Her raven hair, which you’d expect to be still lush at her age, was matted with filth and blood, a discarded stiff-bristled broom. She had literally wasted away to skin and bones. A woman who had struggled since childhood with all the wretchedness of life, selling off the ultimate leavings of her labor, hung on to life in the end by trading on that which a woman ought not offer for sale, her virtue. Like the Six Spirits pills, which must take life in order to give it, and like all the proletariat, she had to tear off her arms and her genitalia and her nerves in order to fill her belly. She had destroyed herself to live. There was no other way. She must have thought something along these lines: 60 chapter t w o

“I so want to work! But no one will employ me. My lungs are ruined, having inhaled cotton waste in a factory where the air was too dry and the temperature too high. I was sent packing because I have consumption and can no longer work. But they can use me nowhere else, in spite of the fact that my aged mother and I cannot go on living if I don’t have a job.” At which point she must have spent the next several days wandering the city looking for work, going from factory to factory. Yet she must not have found anything. “I’ll sell my chastity.” Was she not then drained of the last drop of her vitality? And then found, at last, that she could no longer do any work at all. And now, finally, here she lies, no doubt awaiting death, having abandoned all hope of living.

3 I now wanted to know whether she could still talk. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I found myself completely unable to suppress the desire to ask her if she still wanted to live. To put it another way, I wanted to know just what in the world a human being thinks about who is in the condition she was in. Screwing up my courage, I moved much closer to her, squatting down at her feet, my gaze all the while not leaving her eyes and her body. Her eyes, too, followed me as I moved closer. This surprised me, and, idiotically, I blushed deeply. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that the idea that her eyes followed my movements may have been due simply to my imagination, so I waved my hand back and forth in front of her eyes, as a doctor does when someone is dying. She blinked. She could see. And her breathing was almost normal. At her feet I suddenly felt my strength drain away, and squatted down. She spoke. “Don’t be too hard on me, okay?” Her voice was weak, the words halting, but neither was it the utterance of someone who was dying. Her eyes seemed to tell me that whatever I did was okay, as long as I was gentle. I was outraged, righteously outraged. I resolved to crush the three slugs who were exploiting a woman in such a condition. “It looks like someone really worked you over.” I quickly glanced at the doorway. “Were you mistreated by someone?” It was now pitch-dark outside. The absurdly vast, pancake-flat room was like the glass housing of a smoke-clouded lantern. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 61

“How long have you been here like this?” I asked, trying my damnedest to remain calm. I was crouched down at her feet, so she stopped looking at me and stared at the roof above her. I was terrified that her eyes would find mine. In fact, to be honest about it, at the time I was a heroic, humane, continent young man. That was me, body and soul, so I did not want her to realize that I had fixed her OO in my searing gaze. Why was it only my eyes I was unable to subdue? If she were to see where I was looking she would surely have concluded that I was, after all, just like any other man. Were that to happen, I feared that my current heroic, humane behavior and reason would, at a stroke, offer no resistance to their own collapse. I was ashamed. This woman is provoking not one iota of sexual excitement in me. It would be a mistake even to entertain such thoughts. I’m looking at her. All right, I’m looking, but what’s the harm? Those were the excuses I provided myself. Given that she was a woman, I can’t deny that I felt an impulse. But that could never be in a situation like this. This woman was just skin and bones. And she was about to go to her eternal rest. I would ask this pathetic compatriot of mine just what sort of brutish things, what kind of base, shameful acts the men who had been coming into this room had committed. And I wanted to tell her their behavior had been detestable and to make a display of my own virtuous character. In time she whispered a response to my question. “Did you want to ask me some questions? It hurts when I talk, but if you’re not going to do anything else, I don’t mind talking a bit.” I turned beet red. Damn! She sees right through me, clear through. Once again a shudder ran through my body. And just what was it I would have her tell me? I already knew all there was to know, didn’t I? Besides, even if there was something I didn’t know, what could I expect from her, lying there painfully gasping for breath? And yet I had resolved to deliver her from this. But how would I effect this rescue? Isn’t XXXX the only means to rescue someone? If you lift up what is too heavy for you and drop it, you will, will you not, cause even more damage? Come what may, however, I was fated to hear but few words from her.

4 The guy who had earlier led me there appeared in the doorway as out of nowhere. He signaled to me that my time was up. 62 chapter t w o

Now I was flustered. If he were to come within hearing distance, I could no longer do anything effective that would better her fate in the slightest. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. What do you want more than anything else right now?” “What I would like,” she answered, “is only that you leave me just as I am now, without my having to move a muscle. I want nothing else.” The heroine of this tragic scene had betrayed my expectations. I had imagined, for example, that she would ask me to help her escape from the three thugs or to go straight to the police. I had the thought that this would probably be the last venture of her life, a life that had offered little to look forward to. It was, I had concluded, her only frail hope. Pitifully, she had been crushed by the heavy burden of her misfortune. It seemed to me she was now fearful of even entertaining hope. She was putting a curse on the world. They had all converged on her and pursued her into the abyss she now found herself in. And so it was she didn’t trust me either. How could there be despair so deep? “But if you stay here like this you’re not gonna make it. What I’m asking you is important. Should we get you to a doctor? Should I take you home?” This was her reply. “It goes without saying, I’d prefer a private room in a hospital or a villa by the sea.” “So listen, we can’t sneak out of here, so— ” Suddenly one of Slug’s accomplices came over and was standing wraithlike next to me, whispering in my ear. “Hey! This woman’s stark naked. And listen, she’s got TB real bad. And it was only two coppers. You can’t expect to have your fun forever for that amount of money!” “You son of a bitch!” I shouted, leaping at him. “You’re the ones who stripped her naked!” “Hold on!” he said, half groaning. He grabbed my hands. I shook them off and aimed a slap at the side of his head, but before I could connect I was staggered by a blow to my ear. “Okay, bully-boy,” I yelled, “I’ll work you over ’til you’re a dead man!” This time I clenched my fist and, swinging from the deck, my full weight behind it, landed an uppercut on the bridge of his nose. He hit me on the head as I swung, but this time my attack succeeded. He dropped into a crouch, blood dripping from his nose. I was bathed in sweat and panting for breath. The situation had taken this turn, however, so I had no choice but to flee with the woman— in my arms, if need be— before the other two came. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 63

“Okay, let’s get outta here! Then we can get you to a hospital.” “Kid, you’re really an idiot! I hope you haven’t killed him. He and a few other people have been taking care of me. What a mess you’ve made of it!” Our fighting had agitated her. There were tears in her eyes. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. “I sure as hell haven’t killed him! But what’re you telling me? This guy’s been supporting you?” “Right. He’s been taking care of me for a long time.” “In return for your flesh. That’s idiotic!” “Kid, these men never once violated me. You’ll understand when you get a little older.” I had fallen in an instant from hero to buffoon. The three thugs who were squeezing the last drop of blood from this wretched woman had turned into an utter enigma, as she herself had. Just what star were they born under, and what turn of fortune’s wheel had brought them here? And yet had I created this reality arbitrarily, on my own, to suit my own fancy? The man I had knocked off his feet rose groggily. “You snot-nosed punk! You got your goddamned nerve! Okay! Give it your best shot!” “Hey, my pal, I have no argument with you. I mistook the situation. I was wrong.” “You what? You ‘mistook the situation’? That’s a helluva thing to say! What was it you mistook?” “You three guys intimidated me into coming here, right? Then you showed me her like this, right? I thought you guys had made her your plaything and were still trying to bleed her white. I took you all for shameless bastards who would exploit her ’til her dying breath.” “Well okay, that’s mistakin’ the situation all right,” he said, the fight leaving him like air from a balloon. I wanted to ask him why they had laid her out stark naked in a place like that, and why they had put her on display. According to the woman, the men had done nothing wrong, and yet this was clearly beyond the pale. I wondered just how long they were going to keep doing it. I had now regained enough composure for some degree of introspection. At which point I began to feel an intense heat. It was the humid heat of bad lungs, the breath of which congealed when exhaled, to be immediately inhaled at the next breath. The stench of vomit and secretions surely from the cancer continued to assail my nostrils. My body felt unbearably weary. Perhaps I had exhausted my emotions in this bizarre affair. Having to say any64 chapter t w o

thing or observing any more of it was somehow just too much trouble now. I was ready to lie down anywhere and sleep like a baby. I stood up, suddenly annoyed that I had been sitting at her feet. “Well anyway, I think I’ll go home. Hey, I’m going.” Halfway through the doorway I turned back: “All you guys live here together?” “Yeah,” the man answered curtly, “this is our base of operations.” I went straight down the stairs and into the street. At the gate I looked back at the place I had just emerged from. I couldn’t see the stairs from there. The warehouse simply had its back turned to me, its walls like the high brick walls of a prison. The building was thoroughly run-down and dilapidated, so that one could not conceive of people going in and out of such a place; a mere glance could bring the smell of mildew to the nose. When I got out onto the boulevard I began walking, whistling as I went, and looking neither to my left nor right. As I headed toward the hiring hall I paled and flushed by turns.

5 I borrowed some money at the hiring hall. And I went drinking again at a bar for foreigners— in a brothel restricted to foreign clientele. Sometime after midnight I cut across the park. The arc lights pierced the lush greenery and wove an intricate shadow pattern on the ground. Thanks to my beer sweat, my body was sticky, as though encapsulated in dampness. Wild thoughts spun round in my head like blades of a fan. Hadn’t I been starved for sex? And hadn’t I become excited? Yet I triumphed over myself. Humph! What a fine piece of work I, Minpei, was! But wait a minute! I was damn near thinking like a capitalist! I hadn’t made the woman what she was. But I was strong. But I was weak. Weird. Either way is okay. Anyway, I hadn’t succeeded. I guess I didn’t take the bait that’d dangled before me. I’m not a gentleman, right? Even a gentleman would go ahead and do it, so I shouldn’t expect myself to hang back. But wait! I was hesitant, so maybe I can’t become a gentleman. Well, not to worry. I was again drawn back to the same place. It was late that night. The gate with the iron bolts was shut. It opened as soon as I pushed on it, however. I climbed the stairs. I put my hand on the door. I pulled on it. But— damn!— it didn’t open. I got flustered. If the door had opened in my direction, I’d sure as hell have been shoved off the landing and down onto the flagstones below. Use your head! I pushed on the door. It opened a crack; when I eased up on it, it closed once again. What the—! Someone’s standing lookout! l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 65

“Hey, it’s me!” I whispered, my mouth against the door. “Open up!” The door did not open, however. I now pushed against it with all my might. It moved not a millimeter. “Damn! They’ve locked the sonofabitch!” I said, spitting in disgust; I went down the stairs and out the gate. As I was stepping through the gate, one foot outside, one foot inside, someone tapped my shoulder. I started. “No need to jump outta your skin. It’s me. How was it? Have fun? Have a good time?” It was Slug standing there. “If she’s that way because of you guys,” I responded heatedly, “I’ll lay you bastards out!” “Well, you wanna know whose fault it is she’s ended up like that?” he asked. “I can tell you if you wanna know. It’s the rich guys. You follow me?” There was pity in his eyes as he looked at me. “How ’bout it? You wanna go again?” “I was just there now, but the door wouldn’t open.” “I don’t doubt it. I bolted the door.” I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t think there was another way to get in and out of that room. “You?! Where’d you just come from?” “Nothin’ to be surprised about. I came down the same stairs you did, one step behind you.” Damned Slug, you’re up to no good again! He wasn’t a silently gliding ghost, and he couldn’t have kept a step behind me without my hearing him, no matter how quietly he tried to walk. I had no need to pay her a visit yet again. I still had one yen left on me, but I couldn’t “buy” her again with that money. And yet I thought it would be a good idea to see how she was doing, for just five minutes. I don’t know why, but I wanted to see her one more time. I climbed up the stairs. Slug followed after me. I pushed on the door. Not surprisingly, this time it opened easily. As I took a step into the room I was enveloped at once, as I had been before, in the foul stench and the hot, oppressive air. I can’t explain why, but I had taken it for granted that this time the room would be completely different from before, but my intuition was off the mark. Everything was exactly as it had been. The woman lay behind the beer case; the only other people there were me and Slug. 66 chapter t w o

“Your buddies who were here a little while ago, where’d they go?” “They went home.” “Whoa, it wasn’t true when they told me they live here?” “They stay here sometimes.” “Then what’s the connection between her and you guys?” I asked, finally broaching the subject. “She’s our friend.” “Then how come you strip your sick friend naked, don’t give her any medicine, and to top it off, let men— complete strangers— amuse themselves with her?” “It’s not like we wanna, but if we don’t, she can’t get her medicine, and she wouldn’t be able to buy her eggs.” “Oh, then she’s taking medicine? But listen, don’t bullshit me. If you give her medicine, then strip her naked, it’s plus and minus equals zero, right? If you feed her eggs, then let a guy violate her, in the end she’s the loser, am I right? Where’s the logic in that?” “That’s beside the point. She’s not the only one who’s sick. We’re all sick. We’re the discarded dregs. We’ve all been overworked. We worked to eat, but our labor was done at breakneck speed and it’s worn us down to nothin’. She’s got TB and uterine cancer, and you can see I’ve got black lung.” “So you’re telling me you’re all prostituting her and eating off what she makes?” “We’re not prostitutin’ her! There are guys that are doin’ that kind of thing, but what I’m doin’ is standin’ guard over her and givin’ the heave-ho to guys like that. Besides, we don’t bring just anybody to her. That’d be reckless. You were walkin’ along in your workman’s clothes in the middle of the bourgeoisie, not the littlest bit embarrassed, lookin’ as pleased with yourself as a cabinet minister or somethin’, so we followed you. We’d get hauled off in a wink if we tried to drag in just anybody.” Slug went on. “Whadya think? You probably think it’s strange that we don’t all just die. You must think it’s dumb that we’re livin’ like maggots in a crypt, absolutely the dumbest thing we could do, but listen, you never know, we might do somethin’ useful if we keep on livin’. That’s the kind of crazy hope that keeps us goin’.” I had completely misread the situation. What a shameless fool I’d been! I went over to the other side of the beer case partition. She was lying there as before. A summer yukata now covered her nakedness. She seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were closed. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 67

I was looking at a martyr, not a prostitute. She appeared to me to symbolize the fate of the entire exploited class. My eyes filled with tears. I walked away, careful not to make a sound, and gave Slug, who was standing by the door, my one yen. As I gave it to him I grasped his wizened hand with all my might. I went outside. As I started down the stairway, tears fell from my welling eyes. July 10, 1923 Chigusa Prison Translated by Lawrence Rogers

(7) Apples hayashi fusao Translated from Picturebook without Pictures (1926) Hayashi Fusao is the pseudonym of Goto¯ Toshio (1903–1975), born ¯ ita City, Kyushu. He had an early familiarity with destitution: his in O father’s drinking forced his mother to work in a filature, the father to make straw sandals, and the child Toshio to sell them— an experience that would later yield the short story “Cocoons” (Mayu).24 Hayashi was nonetheless able to enter the Fifth Higher School and, from there, the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University. There, he quickly found students who shared his interest in anarchism and socialism. In October 1925, the Student Federation of Social Science dispatched him as an organizer to the port city of Otaru in Hokkaido, where a military exercise positing an uprising by “malcontent Koreans” at the Commercial Higher School, the alma mater of Kobayashi Takiji [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30], had led to a protest bringing together students, workers, and Koreans. News spread throughout the country and provoked solidarity protests, consolidating opposition to compulsory military education. “Apples,” which resulted from that journey, marked Hayashi’s literary debut in the February 1926 issue of Literary Front. The symbolism of the shiny fruit evoking the tree of knowledge is expanded to include modern health lore and the trickery of capitalism.25 While continuing to produce well-received stories, Hayashi studied and wrote about Marxist theory with Nakano Shigeharu [19], Kaji Wataru

24. Hayashi, “Hihyo¯ ni tsuite,” 29. 25. Kamei, “Hayashi Fusao no ‘Ringo.’” 68 chapter t w o

[16], and Yamada Seizaburo¯ [28].26 He also contributed to proletarian children’s literature by translating German socialist fairy tales.27 Like so many in the movement, he had his share of extended incarceration. In 1936, following release from his last stint in jail, he declared an end to his career as a proletarian writer. After World War II, Hayashi became close to Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) and in 1963 created a sensation by reviving the term the “Greater East Asia War.” “Apples” was first published in the February 1926 issue of Literary Front. This translation is based on a slightly revised version included in Hayashi’s Picturebook without Pictures, published ten months later. The collection is dedicated to the “fifteen hundred comrades” of the Student Federation, while this story has its own dedication to the Otaru Branch of the Congress of Labor Unions— an indication, perhaps, of growing consciousness on the part of Hayashi and his peers about the nature of their movement.28 nf December 1—Otaru I wrote about apples in my last letter, right? After we crossed the straits, looking out the window of the train bound for Otaru from Hakodate, I could see apple orchards with fresh snow clinging to the trees. I went on and on about how beautiful the combination of snow and apples was, didn’t I? Today, I have another story about apples. It was yesterday afternoon. Imagine sitting on a rock by the harbor, munching away at one of those wonderful Hokkaido apples. The snow that had been falling for days stopped for once and gave us a fine Sunday. White light filled the sky and the town was beautiful like clear glass. Chunks of melting snow, falling off house eaves turned purple from lamp soot, sparkled and splashed against the ground. This is the kind of landscape where the sound of jingling sleigh bells echoes off the branches of acacia trees. For a mainlander like me who had been in Hokkaido for less than two weeks, this kind of landscape was a novelty. While waiting on the pier for a buddy I’d promised to meet, I was feeling pretty good. Picture me biting into one of the apples I’d bought on the roadside— one so firm and huge it practically weighed a whole pound with a flavor so intense it pierces your taste buds. Then, suddenly from behind: “Hey.” 26. Sakamoto, “Hayashi Fusao,” 961. 27. Perry, “Aesthetics for Justice,” 150. 28. Thanks to Jeff E. Long for this observation. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 69

A guy called out tapping me on the shoulder. I turned around, and there was a good-looking man with a day’s stubble, like a cowboy in the movies, his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets and his chest puffed up cheerfully. “Hey,” I returned his jolly smile— but this won’t make any sense to you unless I tell you how I met this guy. It was a couple of days ago. A buddy of mine and I were sitting around a brightly glowing stove in the harbor tavern, the effect of the beer warming us up. There was a man at the table next to us, and this guy was at it again, head fallen forward on the table smack dab into a row of beer mugs, looking for all the world as if a row of glistening ice needles had settled around him. Three sheets to the wind, he was snoring loudly. The wall clock showed it was almost midnight.— Outside, sure enough, it was snowing. Then the door snapped opened and in walked another drunk. He made it in all right; then the guy stumbled around uncertainly until he bumped into the table next to us. Clinking noisily, the row of ice needle beer mugs knocked against one another. One of them rolled deliberately round and round until it fell onto the dirt floor and shattered. With that, the sleeping man woke up and in a thundering voice started hollering. Well, if that had been all, there’d be nothing to write about, but the thing is, he wasn’t speaking Japanese. Anyone could tell from the way he was hollering that he was probably yelling, “Goddamn it, watch what you’re doing!” But we didn’t have a clue what language he was speaking. The guy who’d hit the table didn’t know what to do, and blinking vacantly, he tried to apologize but only managed to bow repeatedly. With that, the other man quieted down, and for a while he looked around the tavern until, finally, he came to his senses. “What the hell, this is Japan, isn’t it!” At last, these words were unmistakably Japanese. When we talked to him later, we found that he was a seaman and that from the end of last year he had spent over a year wandering around the coastal waters off the Primorsk territory and had just returned home a couple of weeks ago. So when suddenly awakened from his drunken stupor, he’d become confused and started yelling in Russian mixed with a local Primorsk dialect. My buddy and I both roared with laughter. He also burst out laughing and so did the man who’d bumped into his table.— Since it was this guy who tapped my shoulder while I was having the apple, I wasn’t going to ignore him, right? 70 chapter t w o

“Hey, you want one too?” With that, I pulled the remaining apple from my right pocket in a show of camaraderie and offered it to him. “Oh.” He raised his thick eyebrows, but wouldn’t say whether he wanted it or not. “How about it.” I tempted him, sticking out the apple in front of him and rolling it around in my palm. Finally, he took the apple, but strangely enough, he seemed overwhelmed by emotion and plopped down beside me, falling silent as he continued to stare at the apple. What the hell! Did he see his dead lover’s reflection in the apple? Sensing my stare, he quickly turned away and looked offshore. While I was thinking to myself how odd this guy was— today this thing with the apple and before, him speaking Russian— I followed his gaze out to a steamship moored in the harbor. “I should tell you, huh!” “What?” Perhaps he sensed my skeptical look. Abruptly, he turned around, and looking me in the eye, he said, “I should tell you, huh.” Then, returning to his old jovial self, he flung the apple high into the air and caught it easily. “Now about this apple story, it’s a story about how people use apples to catch salmon. I should tell you, huh?” “Let’s have it.” Since he’d brought up the subject in such a lighthearted manner, I couldn’t help but reply the same way. “Let’s have it,” I answered, tossing the core of the apple I’d been eating into the water. Next, let me give you a rundown of this guy’s story. Bored already? I think not. This is going to be a bit long, but hear me out, okay. — Winter brings Hokkaido’s citizens spruce treetops capped in white, roaring fires in stoves, and tales that go well with the sound of trees splintering under the weight of a heavy snowfall. That very same winter brings snowstorms and starvation to Hokkaido’s workers as well as several months of unemployment, despite their desire to work. As the winter deepens, you’ll see marketplaces of desperation for the jobless setting up in port towns like Hakodate, Otaru, and Muroran. Those fisheries working the coastal waters off the Primorsk territory target this time of the year and take advantage of it. “See, just like those bastards over there.” He stopped talking and pointed to where a thin, white line of steam hung l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 71

over the hold of a freighter with a blue crane, its flags fluttering. You could also see a schooner of about 1,200 tons with a yellow mast against this silhouetted backdrop— it seemed to have an auxiliary engine. This was the boat that he’d been glaring at all along. — Every year, targeting this unemployment season, the schooner and the freighter are quickly converted into fishing boats, and workers are recruited for these boats bound for the coastal waters off the Primorsk territory. The owners of these boats provide meals and divide the number of salmon caught by the ratio of 1:2 between the boat owner and the workers. So every worker expects to receive around thirty salmon apiece, bringing altogether about seventy-five yen. Anyway, since these salmon are huge, the size of a person, they should bring at least two and a half yen each. It definitely sounds better than freezing to death in these snowstorms, so it doesn’t take long to gather thirty or forty workers. This was five or six years ago. Even he— a young migrant laborer who’d just made his way from the mainland to Otaru— was happy to find work catching salmon. No matter what, he’d found a job. On the surface, everything seemed fine as they set sail, but then they were sailing the northern seas in the dead of winter. Tossed about on those cold currents, the boat rolled all over the place, and the first couple of days he was holed up in the bottom of the ship vomiting and asking himself if he’d make it through this. Nevertheless, they arrived safely and on schedule at the fishing grounds. Then they began fishing for salmon. With a huge net and much noise, they hoisted up those massive fish. They worked without break, white light shimmering off the northern seas. In less than a week, the boat’s hold was full. “Up until then, things were okay, but here’s where the real story begins.” Saying this, he smacked the apple again for emphasis. — Just as they had promised, everyone received thirty-five salmon each. But just when we were ready to go home, something strange occurred. Slowly, everyone on board began turning yellow. The strength slipped away from our bodies, and with each passing day, our arms and legs swelled up grotesquely until they looked like daikon radishes that had been pickled too long. Being out to sea so long, the lack of vegetables had led to a scurvy outbreak on board. This was a leechlike scourge that often plagued those adrift at sea! We were already out of vegetables and the boat’s owner told us that we’d packed as many vegetables as we could on the boat. We couldn’t even turn back to our port of call on the Primorsk coast. And even if we did go back, the town’s surrounded by snow-packed fields, so where would you get hold of green vegetables anyway? 72 chapter t w o

“We were in a bind, you know, wondering what was going to happen to us. It was like an invisible leech sucking all the blood out of us, and it was happening right before our eyes without us being able to do anything about it.” Thinking back on that time, he grasped his arm tightly. “But just then,” he quickly continued and thrust the apple at me with his right hand. “These sons of bitches came along!” — The reason he said this was because just when the workers in their quarters had started showing the initial symptoms of scurvy, from out of nowhere the boat’s owner and the boat’s captain brought a barrel of apples onto the deck. We’ll trade you apples for salmon, they said. They’re telling us to trade our huge salmon that were each worth two yen and fifty sen even if you were giving them away for apples that at most would go for ten sen if you bought them at home!— “What pissed me off even more,” he said, “is that it’d be one thing if we were trading one salmon for one apple, but they wanted three salmon for an apple! What’s more, wasn’t each one of those salmon the fruit of more than a month’s hard labor? The bastards! But if you didn’t eat them you’d die of scurvy. Our lives were on the line. Everybody knew they were at the mercy of the boat owner’s trickery. Just think of our agony as all thirty-eight workers traded in our salmon for the apples. Yet, when we ate the apples, we finished everything from peel to core, leaving nothing. The apples melted in our mouths, the taste was so precious.”— The man turned the apple over and over in the palm of his hand. “As you can see when we got back to Otaru we were cleaned out, no different from when we left. But, thanks to the apples at least we had our lives.” Finishing the story, he grabbed the apple with both hands and skillfully broke it in half and vigorously bit into it.— So how was the story, did you like it? Now, I’ve got something to ask you. What? It wasn’t interesting? These are the kind of tricks they pull all the time. Boat owners, factory owners, merchants, stockbrokers, bankers— so you’re telling me these are common ways that all capitalists dupe us, huh? I see! Well, all right then, let me tell you another story. “Catching salmon with apples, isn’t that an interesting line of work?” He said this and spit the apple peel into the water then stared angrily offshore. Following his gaze, I found that he was glaring at that schooner with the yellow mast again. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 73

Hm? “So what do you intend to do about it, huh?” “Don’t you get it? It’s those bastards.” “What?” “Yeah, it’s them.” He lifted his hand and pointed toward the schooner. “Those bastards are at it again, they’re recruiting workers to go catch salmon off the Primorsk coast.” “Aha.” I found myself staring hard. “So what are you going to do?” “Well, I thought I’d sign up and let them treat me to some apples again.” “And then what, you’re telling me you’re going to come home emptyhanded again?” “No. I’m not the same person I was five years ago. Even a newborn will be a three-year-old once three years have passed. A bloke like me can learn to see a few things, too. And besides, who do they have on the other side? The boat owner, the captain, the navigator, and the manager, in all they have about five or six people at most. On our side, we’ve got at least thirty tough guys. If they try to tell us they’ve run out of vegetables, thirty guys will get together and grab the apples. Then we’ll hang on to the salmon we worked so hard for, and we won’t have to worry about scurvy. I can’t believe I didn’t work out this simple calculation years ago. So, now what do you think?” “Excellent!” I said, clapping my hands. “That’s the way!” “Humph.” His face turned rather sullen. Glaring at me, he then said, “Hey, you won’t tell anybody about this, right. If you were the kind of a guy who couldn’t keep this to himself, I wouldn’t be telling you this story, you know.” “What are you talking about?” “After all, you guys play the same kind of tricks, don’t you?” He said this and without warning stuck the back of his right hand under my overcoat’s collar and pulled it aside. Flashing from my undershirt was the membership badge for the Japan Congress of Labor Unions. He jabbed at it. And at the same time with his left hand he turned over the collar of his own coat and thrust his chest out so as if to stick the collar under my nose. I could see it. I could see the red ID badge of the Japan Sailors’ and Stokers’ Union on the chest of this magnificent comrade. He roared with laughter, and said, “I gotcha, didn’t I?” “I don’t think anything you do surprises me anymore,” I replied, laughing along with him. While he was still laughing, I stopped and stuck out my hand to him. That’s the end of my story. Before I go, let me give you one more piece of good news. Right on schedule, thanks to our buddies’ spirited struggle, Otaru will soon have a united worker’s union. We have organized more than 74 chapter t w o

300 dockworkers. The winter unemployment season is already upon us, but the first order of business is to organize the 1,200 dockworkers into a joint union. By the way, I was thinking I should send you some apples, but I also regret not having asked that guy how the boat’s captain managed to preserve those apples on board the ship. Respectfully yours I dedicate this work to my comrades in the Otaru Branch of the Japan Congress of Labor Unions in memory of the night we sat around the log cabin hearth, listening to the roaring blizzard as we discussed rebuilding the union. Translated by Jeff E. Long

(8) Prayer sata ineko Translated from Central Review (October 1931) Sata [Kubokawa] Ineko (1904–1998) was born to unwed teenage parents in Nagasaki. With her mother dying early and her father given to impulsive behavior, she was forced to leave school in the fifth grade and work in a candy factory. 29 Her life took a decisive turn when she met the members of the coterie magazine Donkey at a café where she waitressed. One of them was Nakano Shigeharu [19], who would become a comrade and lifelong friend, and another, Kubokawa Tsurujiro¯ (see figs. 9 and 10), to whom she would be married until 1954. With their encouragement, she published in 1928 an autobiographical short story, “The Caramel Factory,” to great acclaim in Proletarian Arts. (See also the introductions to [15] and [21] and fig. 7.) Christians, who accounted for less than 1 percent of the population, were disproportionately important in the early twentieth-century socialist and labor movements. It may therefore seem unfair that this literary representation and the one in Murayama Kazuko’s “Death of a Cricket” [17] are negative, but representations are as scarce in literature as in the secondary histories of the strikes addressed here. 30 One of Karl Marx’s best-known observations (attributed to Lenin in the story) has it that religion is “the opium of the people.” That statement, however, 29. Hirano, “Sata Ineko,” 562–63. 30. Even Suzuki Yu¯ko’s indispensable account documenting the great labor actions by women in Kameido does not mention Christians. Suzuki, Joko¯ to ro¯do¯ so¯gi. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 75

was preceded by religion’s characterization as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”31 Sata is often appreciated today as a prescient feminist for her 1936 work “Crimson,” which explored the tensions between her roles as writer, wife, mother, and communist, tensions exacerbated by her husband’s infidelities and the mounting tide of recantation. By comparison, the five-part series,32 of which the story translated here is the third, has been utterly neglected. It is a pity that readers should miss these lively portraits of young women working far from home, negotiating their friendships and antagonisms as they discover class consciousness. nf

1 Three or four girls passed through the hallway singing labor songs. Inside the room, Tat-chan, who was busy with something in her trunk, promptly joined in. “You going to go hear the speeches?” someone called out from the hallway. “Yeah, I’m going. Wanna go together?” “Sure. Wait for me!” Rushing footsteps echoed down the hallway. “Hurry up!” In the next room someone else began to sing. . . . and then a verse of another May Day song drifted in. An endless patter of footsteps accompanied by voices passed through the hallway. Tomiyo sat by the window turning the pages of Women’s Club, but she was listening to the singing and the footsteps. She had noticed someone peer into the room and turn away upon seeing her. Even Tat-chan, who shared the same room with Tomiyo, left without saying a word. I guess there’s going be another meeting with speeches tonight— Tomiyo lifted her gloomy face. The darkening sunset hung on the tip of the paulownia tree just outside the window. There was no breeze. In the ensuing hush, the horn of the tofu vendor drifted through the air. A white shop curtain hung serenely in front of the town ice parlor. I guess everybody’s going to the meeting— 31. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique.” 32. They are, in order of publication, “The Tears of a Factory Girl Union Official,” “The Little Official,” “The Prayer,” “Compulsory Return,” and “What Is to Be Done?”

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Watching everyone setting out together, excited and singing, Tomiyo felt a pang of envy. Wearily, she bit her finger and looked up at the blue sky. As she gazed up, she began to feel small, trembling sensations. Her nose stung and tears welled up in her eyes. Tomiyo gently closed her eyes, lowered the hand with the bitten finger, and joined her palms. No one was looking, yet she was somewhat embarrassed to take the posture for prayer. So she simply bowed her head and sat still. Dear God— Tomiyo prayed behind her closed eyes. Dear God, through your power, may the labor struggle end as soon as possible. And, may You avert all our dismissals. All those who are now demonstrating and causing trouble, they do so because they do not know You. Have mercy on them and forgive them. If the dismissals are revoked, I think everyone will be very happy. Please, through the grace of Your power— As Tomiyo prayed, a hushed sadness welled up once more. Tomiyo endured the rising sadness, holding it back with the clenched fist made by her clasped palms. She felt she somehow cut a sorry and pitiful figure. She remembered how, just now, someone had looked into the room, and though she had been sitting right there, the other girl had left without saying a word. Tomiyo, too, had deliberately ignored her. Since the dispute began, she had become reluctant to look people in the face other than her fellow churchgoers. Everybody treats us like outcasts— As she thought this, Tomiyo comforted herself by thinking of how she had prayed for those who excluded her. It was required of her to do so as a Christian. Nevertheless, for Tomiyo, it felt isolating to oppose the majority in the dorms where everyone did everything together. “It’s not like we’re against them.” The T. Muslin Factory where Tomiyo worked had announced the dismissal of 360 factory girls from the weaving division as part of its production cutback. All the employees had opposed this, and thus began the labor dispute. Ten days had passed since it began. Tomiyo, however, was not involved in the dispute. Yet not being involved did not mean that she was working, because the company had moved quickly to order a temporary work suspension. Nevertheless, she was not involved in the struggle. For Tomiyo was a Christian. At T. Muslin, there were about twenty Christian factory girls. With the approval of the company, a missionary from a church in Asakusa came to the factory once a week. The Christians would gather in the recreation room, where they would pray or sing. In order to increase the number of l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 77

new believers, they invited the other factory girls. For the believers, the elegant songs that came with Christianity and the polite language held a kind of charm. Such elegant songs and speech were completely absent from their own lives. And now polite, kind words that had never been part of their lives before were being directed at them. When they thought of this, these Christian factory girls would feel something akin to the vast love of Jesus Christ. And in the elegant songs—such elegant beauty that they had believed to be beyond their grasp—the girls thought that they might discover a single strand of light even within their present hopeless lives. Having resigned themselves to utter bleakness, they still yearned for something, and this provided them an outlet for such yearning. Religion for these young Christian girls of the T. Muslin Factory was not the awe felt by weaker beings for a powerful entity. Nor was it an impossible hope directed toward the far reaches of the heavens in renunciation of an earthly existence. It was rather an outlet for their desire to find something within the everyday life they led here on earth. The hope of the believers of T. Muslin notwithstanding, Christianity was absolutely spiritual. It could by no means be material. Accordingly, Christianity had created a rule that made factory girl believers promise never to participate in a strike. If the soup bowl in thy right hand be taken, surrender thou the rice bowl in thy left— that seemed to be the message. The hope these young believers entertained for their lives had at some point been replaced with tears of self-sacrifice awash in a sentimental violet. Standing outside the circle of T. Muslin’s company-wide struggle, Tomiyo and the others clung to one another trembling. They could not understand why the other employees turned a cold shoulder on them just because they weren’t taking part in the dispute.

2 Turning on a single bulb at the front of the recreation room, Tomiyo and the others huddled under it. The face of the female missionary who always came to the dorms had turned a dusky red under the light. The white collar of her under-kimono stood out against the neckline of her kimono worn tightly as if to bind her chest. Outside the recreation room, it was quiet. Everyone was probably at the meeting. The kind voice of the missionary continued on inside the bare recreation room. For these factory girls who worked in confinement surrounded by the sound of machines, the missionary’s voice sounded especially gentle. “I called on the administrative office today and listened to the company’s view of the present situation.” 78 chapter t w o

The young Christians sat up, as though they had been pulled back into reality. They looked up at the missionary. What had the company said? “The company exceedingly regrets having to request that you go home. They expressed their desire to do their utmost on your behalf. Yet, as you all know, the company finds itself in quite difficult circumstances because of the recession. Should we not also be thinking of the company’s situation? Moreover, the company intends to extend special consideration to you. We should abandon our own concerns and pray for our many sisters. We must submit everything to God, and simply plead to the benevolent heart of our Father.” The report of the missionary’s meeting with the company amounted to very little. Tomiyo and the others were dragged in circles only to be drawn back into the dream world of prayer. “May everything happen according to Thy will. . . . Have mercy on Thy sheep. For the sake of our many sisters, may this dispute be resolved without delay. Should a notification of dismissal be handed down, may we accept it as a trial Thou hast sent us and may we endure it in silence. Test our strength, O Lord. And grant us the strength to persevere.” Everyone trailed after the missionary’s prayer as though they were being dragged along. Lord have mercy on us, the girls prayed, the Passion of Christ on the cross etched in their hearts. “Thy will be done . . . and grant that the dispute be over as soon as possible. . . .” The figure of Christ on the cross stood in the way of their true hopes. They sat still with their eyes closed. A hushed sadness began to well up in their hearts. O Lord, may the dismissals be revoked. “Amen,” someone said gently. The word floated like a bubble on the surface of stagnant water. And then, immediately, others voiced that last word. With relief, as if it were a sigh—Amen. Usually, the T. Muslin prayer meeting would proceed with songs and stories of Christ’s Passion and love and then conclude. But that night it was decided to pray instead for the sisters of the T. Muslin Factory who did not yet know the love of God, pray until they came back from listening to the speeches. They prayed for their brothers and sisters who agitated recklessly because they did not know the teachings of God. In the opinion of the kind missionary, this would play a crucial role in spreading the teaching. Tomiyo bit her finger staring fixedly at the missionary’s face. How could she say such things in front of everybody who was struggling so seriously. . . . l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 79

3 The tread of countless footsteps echoed through the hallway of the dorm. The meeting had ended. The chatter of voices bounced off the hallway ceiling. The hall filled with the figures of girls wearing white work smocks or just their cotton summer kimonos. Someone in the crowd was speaking in a loud voice. “Whaddya think of the newspaper delivery guy’s speech?” Despite the roughness of her words, this girl smiled brightly, turning her face left and right to look around her. She was Tae of the Bamboo Room. She was being very brave since the dispute started, which made people whisper that she must be a Communist. She had white buckteeth. “The newsboy’s speech?” someone responded. Everyone recalled the newspaper deliveryman who had jumped into the evening’s proceedings and delivered an attack on the “no-good union reps.” “Yeah, that one. Don’t cha think what he said was true? It’s been ten days since the dispute began. All we do is go to these meetings. Don’t think that’s gonna do any good.” “You got a point there. Nothing new reported today, either.” “Right, the dispute’s going nowhere. We can’t keep counting on the union reps.” A girl up front stopped short, turned around, and responded to Tae’s instigation. It was the ever-energetic Yuki. Tae, who was waiting for Yuki’s response, kept going. “We’ve gotta stick together and fight and make ’em cancel them dismissals. Can’t do nothin’ just listening to them union reps.” “You said it!” “No objections!” The girls, who were tiring of a dispute made up only of meetings and speeches, were stirred up by the newsboy’s speech and now, given Tae’s instigation, began to grumble openly. Damn! Some modern labor action this is . . . Everyone grew agitated. Even those who came in later were asking, “What’s goin’ on?” and crowded in from behind. Then someone up in front turned around. “Them Christians are huddled together in the recreation room.” Yuki made out the words from the clamor. “What? Them Christians huddled? Christians, they’re usually so tame, but when it comes to the dispute they go against us and act like company tools.” “Right!” said Tae in quick response. 80 chapter t w o

“You think the union reps ever stopped to think about them traitorChristians? No, they protect them traitors when we need to be sticking together. This just proves they don’t really care about our struggle.” “Them Christians are against our struggle. Let’s go get ’em!” “No objections!” “Beat ’em up!” A group of antilabor Christians! Just the thought filled everyone with irrepressible anger. Tae’s effort to connect this issue to the union reps’ mismanagement was overpowered by the teeming crowd flowing toward the recreation room. Tae belonged to a local affiliate of the All-Japan Council of Labor. As she was pushed along by waves of people, she thought for a minute about union orders. Is this all right? She looked over at Yuki, a fellow member, who was also being carried away by the sea of people. The factory girls poured into the recreation room. “O Lord, may Thy power bring Thy wandering sheep . . .” The missionary’s sudden, fervent entreaty arrested the front line of the horde streaming into the room. The vanguard drew back a little and stood still. Yuki pushed her way through the crowd and came to the front. Then, pointing her finger at the group of Christians clustered close, their heads turned away and bowing ever lower in prayer, she shouted, “Everybody! Whaddya think of these Christians? Don’t be fooled by their ‘Amens’ and ‘O Lord’ stuff. When we’re all about to be sent home, they go and oppose the dispute. They’re just tools of the company. They might sound meek, but they’re traitors!” Yuki was growing hoarse. “That’s right. Don’t be fooled by religion. How can we let a fake religion like this sit and breed?” Tae’s face was bright red. “Get them double-faced Christians!” “Religion is opium. Lenin said so!” Shouts flew from the factory girls. Even Lenin’s words were flying about. At that moment, if you included the girls who were watching curiously from a safe distance, there were more than three hundred factory girls gathered in the recreation room. “Stop them Amens!” “Stop them Amens!” The same phrase erupted everywhere and reverberated. Tomiyo stopped praying and looked at the missionary. She seemed to be praying earnestly. The color drained from Tomiyo’s face, and her brows twitched slightly. She was about to burst into tears. To Tomiyo, the sight of the missionary ignoring the workers who were creating such an uproar was beginning to seem completely disconnected from her and the other workers. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 81

“Get outta here, you traitors!” The Christian factory girls had stopped praying and were now huddled close, clinging to one another’s bodies. Traitors! The accusations flew. Get ’em! Tomiyo heard their words clearly. Suddenly, the missionary’s voice, which had been carrying on with an air of heroic tragedy, broke into a loud tremble. “O Lord God, forgive us and save our many sisters who are causing this commotion.” For a moment, everyone grew silent. If anything, the missionary’s heroic prayer simply failed to reach Tomiyo’s ears. All she could hear were the angry words directed at her by the other factory girls. “Don’t be fooled! Don’t be fooled by the Amens!” A voice burst out as though to erase the voice of the missionary. “They’re stuck up! Get ’em!” They came pushing from behind with a roar. With that momentum the factory girls up front were shoved into the Christian factory girls. Help! The Christian girls cried out. They tried to get away. Hoist ’em up! The anonymous shout drove the crowd. The limbs of the Christian girls, lifted into the air, floundered helplessly. The sea of people formed rapid swirls here and there. The cheers of the factory girls muffled the Christians’ cries. When the missionary, her face ashen, opened her mouth wide to shout, her hair was gripped from behind and she fell flat on her back. Shoved by those around her, Tomiyo staggered. Tomiyo twisted her body and tried to escape. Suddenly, her feet were lifted up and her body was suspended in the air. Tomiyo instinctively shut her eyes as she struggled to hold on to something.

4 News of the disturbance soon reached the administrative office. Office workers in collared shirts and security guards dove into the riotous swirl of young women. Just as a factory girl gripped the hair of one of the Christians and dragged her down, she herself was clutched by a security guard from behind and forcibly pulled away. “Everyone, please stop the violence!” “Christianity has no connection with the company, so please stop being violent!” As the office workers restrained the crowd, the guards extracted the 82 chapter t w o

Christians from the hands of the other factory girls to take them into custody. “What’re you doing? How can you be so stupid! Why would you attack people who’ve done nothing wrong?” said one tall security guard as he looked over the crowd in a bewildered manner. At once appeasing and threatening, he cut an absurd figure. The factory girls were silent. They were silent and they were glaring at him. “Now, out of the way! Poor things.” The office workers left the recreation room with the weeping Christian factory girls. “Everybody outta here! Scoot!” The security guard tried to disperse the crowd. Emotions were still running high. Damn it, they’re taking us for fools. “Yeah, they sure are treating us like fools. The Christians are strikebreakers. They’re siding with the company. . . .” Even though words like this were coming out of everybody’s mouths, their feet were being steered by the guards. The crowd looked like it was about to disperse. “Hey, everybody! The company’s giving special treatment to the Christians! The company’s protecting the traitors!” The guard, in a panic, turned his eyes in the direction of the voice. “There’s nothing going on, nothing at all. Everyone back to their rooms. Now get back.” “Let’s go raid the office! They’re protecting the traitors there. Let’s go give ’em hell!” “No objections!” “Raid the office!” “Raid the office!” The swirling torrent had been given direction again and was flowing forcefully. The four or five guards vainly waved their hands and were carried away in the current. Get ’em! Get ’em! The torrent gave out a battle cry as it reached the courtyard in front of the office. The night air reenergized the sweat-drenched girls. The torrent swept up the stairs to the office. The stairs rattled noisily. From the window, the Christian factory girls could be seen weeping together under the office light. “Hey traitors! Come out!” “Come out you Amens!” The door had been locked. Those near the window banged on the glass. The glass fell with a crash. “Get ’em!” came the battle cry. The expression on the face of the yelling office worker was comical. Another window fell with a crash. An office clerk grabbed the phone. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 83

Hear, O workers of the world, the thundering May Day so— The massive chorus of the labor anthem began to surge into the night air. The factory girls gathered in the courtyard below the office were starting up a demonstration as they sang the labor anthem. Their numbers had already swelled to seven or eight hundred. All rooms were emptied; the entire population of the dorm had gathered. The demonstration released all the pent-up frustrations of the last ten days of the dispute. Night after night, the same, dull speeches. Had there once been an announcement indicating the slightest progress in the negotiations? The union representatives said, If we’re going to do this thing, we have to do it fair and square. We’re going to have a modern dispute. They throttled the employees. Absolutely no rough stuff. No drums. No singing. The company, being one step ahead, had already ordered an emergency work suspension. Then how could the workers flex their muscles, even though they said they were engaged in struggle? In the courtyard fenced in with corrugated zinc, the demonstration by seven, eight hundred factory girls frothed and surged; it formed lines and arced gracefully. Even in the dark, the figures clad in white smocks could be seen bravely raising their fists. The dark sky was expansive and clear with innumerable twinkling stars. The odor of sweaty bodies began to spread. A river breeze, smelling like a ditch, blew the odor from their bodies and caressed their faces. The broad, immense chorus poured forth, making the air tremble. Instead of beating drums, everyone raised their voices after every pause and kept the beat with rallying cries. For-e-ver exploi-ted, heave-ho Ye who have no pro-per-ty, A-rise now, heave-ho! Beyond the corrugated walls, the townspeople were in a state of pandemonium trying to catch a glimpse of the demonstration. It was past nine o’clock, but the summer night was still young. Some clambered up the walls. Others peered through gaps, and still others piled on top of them. Children shouted, the young male workers of T. Muslin and the commuting female workers all cheered the demonstrators on. The commotion outside was matching the energy within. After circling the grounds, the demonstration eventually moved in the direction of the factory. From the tail end of the procession, a voice called out, It’s Mr. Sunaga and them all! They’re coming. The chorus began to fall apart in confusion. “Ignore ’em! Keep up the demonstration!” This shout from a single factory girl shot through the commotion all the way to the other side of the wall. 84 chapter t w o

Tae was somewhere in the middle of the demonstration, but she saw Sunaga, the head of the Amity and Trust Committee, with five or six of the union representatives as they entered the courtyard. They were hurrying toward the demonstration. The angle of the lamps gave her a glimpse of the tall Women’s Division chief who prided himself on his good looks. He was knitting his brows in annoyance. Since the arbitration by the mayor and the commissioner was to be held that night, the union representatives were holding a meeting with the factory head at the police department. But a call from the office cut their meeting short, and they had come in order to shut down the factory girls’ demonstration in the courtyard. “Don’t be fooled by the no-good union reps!” Tae shouted with all her might. “The no-good reps are in cahoots with the Christians!” No-good! No-good! The Women’s Division chief stood on the steps of the office facing the courtyard. His figure stood out under the glittering light of the lamppost. The demonstration paused spontaneously. Everyone looked up at the Women’s Division chief. As though to impose his irritation on everyone, the division chief looked around with his brow furrowed and yelled, You! Workers! This union representive had just been forced to abandon a meeting with the factory head and rush back in response to a phone call from the office. He was about to embark on a speech to call an end to the demonstration. The hum of voices did not die down easily. He stood silent, by design. His strategy proved effective, for the masses did not yet suspect that he was not on their side. Listen to what the “chief” has to say. The workers’ agitation slowly subsided.

5 Since the night of the demonstration, the church in Asakusa had taken charge of the Christian factory girls. They were simply pulled out of the dorms until the dispute could be settled. Tomiyo was pensive. The girls never brought up the commotion of the other day. Yet during those moments of silence, most of them were remembering the swirling uproar. The missionary spoke of that disturbance as though it were a lamentable event. When she did so, only four or five of the factory girls joined in agreement. On Sunday, they entered the sanctuary to participate in the service. The figures of the factory girls seemed out of place in that imposing religious establishment. They somehow felt embarrassed and awkward amid so many “brothers and sisters” and kept their heads down. The minister used this occasion to speak of the suffering of the Christians of the T. Muslin Factory. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 85

Figure 4. Proletarian postcard Proletarian Photographic News Agency, 1930. Right: “Lecture in the cafeteria during the To¯yo¯ Muslin labor struggle with 3,000 female factory workers united.” Left: “Posters on the wall of the department chief’s office.” To¯yo¯ Muslin and Tokyo Muslin are noted for their fierce labor struggles, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The former was the site of Nakamoto Takako’s [2, 10] organizing and the latter the subject of Sata Ineko’s fiction. (Courtesy of the Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University.)

Tomiyo listened to the account with a dark, impassive expression. Even when the church members turned toward Tomiyo and the others, she continued to look in the direction of the minister. The missionary had described this young minister as a man of great learning, but in spite of his rich, throaty voice, his manner of speaking felt cold. When it came time for the hymns, Tomiyo merely stood and stared at her open hymnal and did not attempt to sing. In comparison to the affected, skillful vocals of the other believers, Tomiyo’s group sang tentatively, clumsily. As Tomiyo listened, she grew all the more withdrawn. Her expressionless face was hiding something firm and powerful. After the prayer meeting, there was a short break before a lecture by a visiting minister. The church members rose from their chairs. Here and there greetings were conveyed, genteel words exchanged, and a social hum began to fill the room. In this atmosphere, the other believers, hearing of the suffering at T. Muslin, and wanting to know what it had been like, approached Tomiyo and the others with kind words. Tomiyo bashfully forced a smile with her mouth, gave a half-hearted reply, then promptly held her tongue. She turned her eyes away from her inquirer’s face. The gentle, matronly believer who had spoken to her seemed embarrassed. She softly retreated to where her own kind were clumped together. There, the gentle, matronly accent gave way to boisterous banter. Tomiyo stole a glance, as if to glare at their flamboyant laughter. Three or four uneasy days passed. When reading the newspaper, Tomiyo scanned the pages for news about the dispute. When she heard the minister’s wife’s cheerful laughter or her beautiful singing, Tomiyo began to feel defiant. Such cheerful laughter and beautiful singing were utterly disconnected from the factory girls’ dismissals and their struggle. The behavior of the three or four workers who often spoke with this lady seemed obsequious and irritated her. In time, divisions emerged among the factory girls. The weavers, who had already received their dismissal notices, naturally came together to talk. It was inevitable that their conversation would turn to what would happen when they were forced to go home and the likely course of the dispute. Tomiyo was always there with her blank expression. Being reticent, she could not speak up.

6 It was dusk. To cool off after dinner, the factory girls had gone for a walk. Those who stayed behind were reading magazines or writing letters home in the room assigned to them. Tomiyo left the room without a word. When she drew near the sanctuary, the adjacent stone pavement, which she and the l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 87

other Christian girls had earlier watered down, looked cool in the deepening twilight. The pale purple lilies, in harmony with the dusk, were beautiful. The leaves of the poplar trees stirred in the wind. Tomiyo went toward the back and pushed the door. It happened to be unlocked, and the heavy, carved door opened without a sound. Tomiyo took off her sandals by the stone steps and entered the sanctuary. It was dark inside and a dim light from outside shone through the beautiful deep colors of the stained glass window. There was just enough light to show the neatly arranged chairs and the organ. Tomiyo walked with bare feet over the cloth that covered the floor. She was a little frightened of the dark, vacant surroundings. Tomiyo sat down on one of the chairs nearby. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands, and bowed her head. She felt herself growing solemn, and she almost began to cry. In spite of her resistance to the minister, his wife, and the social atmosphere of the church, she still prayed to and depended on this God. Tomiyo was in anguish. The anger of those workers involved in the dispute toward her and the other Christians: they had been knocked down, hoisted in the air, then dropped in a way that made them feel like all the blood had drained from them. Then there were the accusations—traitors, company tools. Tomiyo was trying to determine the right and the wrong of her actions that had made everybody so angry. What was happening with that struggle being carried out by the people who were so angry with her? While considering such things, she realized that deep down, she had always prayed for the employees to win. Was that wrong? After coming to the church, they had posted a letter, signing all their names, to the striking factory girls. Had they not written that they were praying for their victory? Asking whether it was wrong to pray for their victory, she sought God’s absolution, then proceeded to justify her desire. Tomiyo tried to resolve all these concerns by praying to God. Who else would solve these problems? Even if their ordeal was discussed at the church, had the issue of the struggle or their dismissal ever come up? Those issues were irrelevant to them. Tomiyo sat in a chair in the dark sanctuary, sobbing out her prayer alone. She prayed for her dismissal to be revoked. She prayed that they would win the struggle. And tonight, she was once again inquiring whether it was sinful to pray for these things. Because if I get sent back, that’ll mean so much trouble for Ma and Pa, too—Tomiyo thrust her own wishes before God. Then all of a sudden Tomiyo heard the sound of someone sniffling. She quickly raised her head. She focused her eyes in the direction of the sound. There was someone sitting near the front of the sanctuary who was also fac88 chapter t w o

ing forward and praying. Her hair was tightly tied back, and she was small. That looks like Yat-chan. Tomiyo stopped praying and stared at the back of the person who looked to be Yat-chan. The figure rose from her chair then turned toward the door where Tomiyo sat. “Yat-chan.” Yasu seemed startled then tried to regain her composure. “It’s me.” “Oh, it’s you. You scared me.” Yasu laughed weakly. “I came to pray, too.” Tomiyo spoke up first so that Yasu would not feel embarrassed about having come to pray alone. Yasu came by Tomiyo’s side and sat down. Then she sniffled again. “Are you crying?” Yasu nodded and, as she nodded, tears welled up in her eyes again. Yasu was younger and physically weaker. Tomiyo spoke as though to comfort her. “Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to the factory?” Yasu nodded and said in a feeble voice, “I wonder if the company will call us back right away after they send us home?” “I wonder.” Tomiyo’s response was wooden. This time Yasu was the one to keep talking. “Even if I do go home, there’s no way that I’ll be able to do any farm work because I’m too weak. Even so, I can’t go home and just sit around doing nothing. I’ll be in trouble if the company doesn’t call me back right away.” “I’ll be in trouble too,” Tomiyo said stiffly, as if she were praying. Yasu continued to tell her story. She had no time to dwell on Tomiyo’s stilted answer. Yasu seemed agitated. Her story began at the end of the previous year, when she was transferred from the No. 3 weaving machine to the No. 1 machine. At the time, the first and second groups of No. 3 machines were going to be refurbished, and the workers on those eighty machines were sent out to help at other machines. Nobody wanted to be sent to another group. But Yasu and the other Christian workers had volunteered to be sent to other groups. Yasu increasingly grew frantic, and soon, she was stammering and stumbling as her words came rushing out. Last winter, she had volunteered to be sent to a different machine, but this time, she didn’t want to be sent home, she’d be in trouble. Shaking her head, she looked at Tomiyo with bloodshot eyes. Tomiyo felt a twinge of worry. “Hey, it’s okay. See, you’ll be fine. I’m pretty sure.” l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 89

Tomiyo said these words then took Yasu’s hand. Yasu’s hand was burning; she was consumptive. Tomiyo felt sorry for her. Then she began to feel sorry for herself and was filled with emotion. Tomiyo bit her lip sharply and then blinked. The tears began to fall one by one. “Tomi-chan, you cryin’?” This time it was Yasu who asked cautiously. Tomiyo did not answer. Yasu continued, “You know what I prayed for? That I wouldn’t have to go home, even if I’m the only one. Sorry.”

7 The next day, Yasu was back to being her weak old self and only grinned when she saw Tomiyo. All day Tomiyo thought about the words that, flustered and stammering, she had gotten out the day before. And she thought about Yasu’s burning hand. But what was the life they had at the church? She and Yat-chan were worried sick about their dismissals, but the minister pretended like he didn’t know anything and that wife of his was always laughing like she was happy. Only the missionary came once in a while to pray with them. After that night, Tomiyo’s misgivings about the church deepened. She even appealed and prayed to God about these worries. Tomiyo’s doubts were still directed toward the church and the minister. But she had not yet realized her doubts about God. She even tried considering, in her characteristic way, what it would be like if all the factory girls at T. Muslin were believers who didn’t take part in labor struggles and who would go home obediently. That would be awfully convenient for the company. Tomiyo thought that somehow, that would be a lie. The antidismissal sentiments that she had renounced because of her faith were bubbling up. Yesterday, a letter had come from home saying that her younger sister, who had just completed grade school, would also have to be sent out to work. That Yat-chan, who was crying in the pitch-black darkness of the sanctuary, Yat-chan with feverish hands, even sickly Yat-chan, would be in trouble if she were sent home. That night, at prayer time, Tomiyo felt that she could no longer go along with the missionary’s song and dance and pray. She stole a glance at Yasu, who was praying in earnest. She’s probably praying for the dismissals to be revoked, Tomiyo guessed. From the farthest corner of the prayer room, Tomiyo glared at the missionary’s face. She sat still, thinking hard. It happened that afternoon. The white and red lights on the advertisment tower by Thunder Gate flashed on and off. People filled the streets, weaving their way through the trains and cars. A salty, cool breeze blew from the darkening Sumida River. 90 chapter t w o

On Azuma Bridge, there were many people clad in summer cotton kimonos headed in the direction of the park. In their midst was Tomiyo, still wearing her white smock, walking in the opposite direction from the park toward the Ebisu Beer Factory. Tomiyo had stolen out of the church alone. The salty air was comfortingly familiar to her. A salty wind also blew from the ditch next to the T. Muslin Factory. The ongoing struggle at the dorm to which she was returning felt very close to her. Strangely enough, she was not worried about the embarrassment of going back. That never even occurred to her. She was only determined to get back. Translated by Mamiko Suzuki

(9) Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness aono suekichi Translated from Literary Front (September 1926 and January 1927) These two essays by Aono Suekichi (1890–1961) were singularly influential in the early years of the proletarian movement. At the time, Aono was recognized as the leading critic of the movement (see [4] for biographical information), but readers will notice that the confident directives of the first essay (September 1926) are repeated as frustrated appeals in the second (January 1927). His attempts to clarify notwithstanding, the very meaning of “purposeful consciousness” continued to be debated as the phrase gained a life of its own and became a catalyst for reorganization of the movement.33 As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, Aono’s ideas here are adapted from Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?”(1901), which he had translated.34 Lenin was concerned with the formation of a vanguard, necessary for leading the masses who could not, on their own, achieve socialist consciousness. Aono, too, argues for a proletarian literature movement dedicated to inculcating “purposeful consciousness” among the proletariat, especially as they begin to produce their own literature, but he also writes that “an extraordinary flexibility would be called for before we could begin to apply such views to individual works.” As he later elaborates, “the literary contract” was not to be dismissed. Together 33. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan, 137–52; Bowen-Struyk, “Rethinking Japanese Proletarian Literature,” 20–22. 34. Hirano, “Kaisetsu,” 411.

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with these essays, Aono’s response to his literary mentor Masamune Hakucho¯ [4] provides clues to Aono’s understanding of the relationship between organized politics and literature. hbs

Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness (September 1926) If we were to ask why proletarian literature has arisen, the best answer, generally speaking, is that as the proletarian class has grown, so too has its desire for expression. We need not be troubled that proletarian literature began largely in the hands of the intelligentsia because that was merely a reflection of the class growth of the proletariat. Still less does it trouble us as we witness the truth ourselves, that proletarian literature is transferring gradually from the hands of the intelligentsia to the hands of the proletariat. There is, however, a matter that requires our attention: the development of proletarian literature and the development of the proletarian literature movement did not occur simultaneously. If we do not clearly differentiate between literature and the movement, grave mistakes will be made. The fact is that literature that treats the life of the proletariat, literature that gives expression to the life and desires of the proletariat, such literature has existed in Japan for quite some time. There are representations of the proletariat in works by established writers today, just as there were in works in the Naturalist period as, for example, in writings by Kunikida Doppo [1871– 1908]. Therefore, some wonder whether it is even necessary to use this new term “proletarian literature.” In the case of peasant literature, long before the so-called Arts of the Soil movement, for example, there was Nagatsuka Takashi’s [1879–1915] work The Soil [1910]. Surely we can go back to such a time to find the origins of the development of proletarian literature. The proletarian literature movement, however, began just four or five years ago, well after the first traces of proletarian literature. Given that, we might ask, how much difference is there between proletarian literature and its incarnation as a movement? This is an important question. The proletarian class grows naturally. As the class grows naturally, so too does its desire for expression. Proletarian literature is a concrete manifestation of this desire: we see the emergence of members of the intelligentsia who stand in the position of the proletariat, workers who write poetry, dramatists producing plays in the midst of the factories, and peasants writing stories and novels. Each of these is the result of natural growth. Insofar as these have grown naturally, however, they still do not constitute a movement. They have become a movement because— in addition to the natural growth— purposeful consciousness emerged. Without purposeful consciousness, there is no possibility of a movement. 92 chapter t w o

What is purposeful consciousness? There is cause for personal satisfaction in depicting the life of the proletariat given that the proletariat demands expression, but that is not the total class action of those who understand the purpose of the proletarian class struggle. When we awaken to the purpose of the proletarian class struggle, that, for the first time, is art for the sake of the class. When we are led by class consciousness, that, for the first time, is art for the sake of the class. And it is at this point when, for the first time, the proletarian literature movement can arise and, indeed, has arisen. Since the proletarian literature movement is a movement to inculcate purposeful consciousness— in contrast to the spontaneous literature of the proletariat— accordingly, it is a movement that participates in all classbased movements of the proletarian class. Because of that, the movement arose long after the appearance of the proletariat’s literary demands, and needless to say, it is none other than the reflection of the deepening of the class maturity of the proletariat. Even without a special movement, literature of the proletariat will develop and grow spontaneously. There is nothing that can suppress it. Moreover, it is because of the natural growth that the movement emerged in the first place and, indeed, has become inevitable. Natural growth, however, is in the last instance natural growth; without a force capable of guiding and elevating it, it will never be qualitatively transformed. A movement is such a force. To our point, it is the proletarian literature movement. There would be no need for a movement if such an external force for elevation, so to speak, were deemed unnecessary. Natural growth would be fine. The life of the proletariat can after all be depicted. And surely, poetry has been born from farming villages. Drama has been created between the intervals of the factory whistle. But consciousness of the purpose of the class struggle and class art will never, ever arise. The proletarian literature movement is fundamentally a collective activity in which proletarian artists who have become conscious of their purpose— namely socialist proletarian artists— raise the proletarian artists of natural growth up to the level of purposeful consciousness, to socialist consciousness. Therein lies the significance of the movement and its necessity. Why am I now saying this anew? Sad to say, I often come across those who, having confused proletarian literature and the proletarian literature movement, idolize naturally occurring things. Works aimed at the proletariat and works wrought by the hands of the proletariat are noble. If one is content with encouraging their natural growth and increase in numbers, however, there is no proletarian literature movel a b or a n d lit e rat u re 93

ment. Perhaps seen from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, proletarian literature as such is fine. But, proletarian literature seen from the proletariat will not settle for that. Certainly, one of the functions of the proletarian literature movement is to encourage natural growth. This function is, however, of secondary importance when compared to the function of raising purposeful consciousness. We must always fix our eyes on the matter of primary importance and advance. During the recent period in which proletarian literature has taken new strides, it is a particularly conspicuous phenomenon that its supporters and advocates have been increasing rapidly. I am pleased. When it becomes a question of what portion of them understands the function of the proletarian literature movement, however, I do not necessarily think we can rest easy. We have no choice but to fight back if the meaning of the movement is discarded or if there is a reversal toward idolizing natural growth. Lately, when I read the arguments advanced for the Arts of the Soil, it is hard not to recognize that they almost all take the mode of bowing down before natural growth. We would have to say there is no movement there. I think that from now on a movement for true consciousness of purpose must come about. Without it, there will be nothing but individual satisfaction and theoretical confusion. The proletarian literature movement, as everyone says, has reached the second stage of the struggle. In this case, the most vital thing to do is to firmly grasp what it means to be a movement. (August 2, 1926)

Further Thoughts on Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness (excerpt) (January 1927) I have already published an article entitled “Natural Growth and Purposeful Consciousness” in this same journal, Literary Front. My account was simple; even so, I thought it was sufficient for readers to understand what I was trying to say. But, from that one article, unhappily, have sprung more readers who have misunderstood than those who have understood. As far as I have seen, there appear to be none who have openly opposed my argument, nor are there any who have published doubts. Though it appears to have been generally approved, to me it seems that even more than the many who have understood are the many who have not understood how to apply the argument. First, I would like to try to present some of the manifestations of that misunderstanding. 94 chapter t w o

There are those who thought that my argument required that socialist purpose be clearly, or perhaps baldly, displayed in the literary works. Or, there are those who thought that my argument demanded restrictions on literary subject matter, out of a desire that literature depict the proletarian political struggle (socialist struggle). Or, there are those who thought that my argument might be questioning the value of works about emotions that grow naturally, such as proletarian dissatisfaction, hatred, and revenge. Or, there are those who took my argument as a demand for excessive intellectual elements in literary works. All of these, however, are mistaken understandings. I believe that if my readers were willing to reread that essay— simple as it is— those mistaken understandings would be cleared up. If I simply explain the gist of that essay, it is like this: even without a proletarian literature movement, proletarian literature would come into being. Literary works emerge from the factories and farms, and proletarianized intellectuals cannot help but write proletarian works. That, however, is naturally occurring proletarian literature; at the least it is not the proletarian literature movement. The proletarian literature movement must be something that instills a socialist consciousness (really, a pan-proletarian class consciousness) in that proletarian literature. In other words, the mixing of various ideologies that appear in naturally occurring proletarian literature— the fact of the matter is that there are bourgeois, petty bourgeois, indeed, even medieval ideologies mixed in— must be criticized, sorted out, and organized toward socialist consciousness. That is the task of the second stage of the struggle, I wrote. As you can see, my views were only meant to clarify anew the target of proletarian literature as adapted to the current stage; they certainly were not of a form or nature intended for direct application to individual proletarian works. I believe I have already suggested in my previous essay that an extraordinary flexibility would be called for before we could begin to apply such views to individual works. So long as we are talking about a work of literature, it must appeal to human— proletarian— senses and emotions. That is a fact that transcends time and space, just as it is a fact that humans must eat to live. Just because I demanded that proletarian writers grasp purposeful consciousness, there is no reason to think that I was urging that the literary contract be ignored. If I had said that, then it would cease to be a demand posed in the field of literature. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 95

It would be suicidal for proletarian literature if we were to impose limits on its subject matter. While it is true that the contemporary Japanese proletarian movement has entered the stage of political struggle, it makes no sense to demand that one select material only from the scene of political struggle. First of all, what is political struggle, what is political revelation? It is simply the struggle against all forms of bourgeois consciousness, implying the revelation of its true nature. The stage for this struggle is certainly not just “politics” in the narrow sense. I think it should now be understood that the demand for purposeful consciousness in proletarian writers does not mean that they are limited to the theme of so-called “political struggle.” [. . .] (Here I want to tell an anecdote. I had had the idea to write that article for six months, but my immediate motive for writing it was the result of having read and reread a volume of poetry that I received as a gift that had been recommended by some people as “pure” farmer’s poetry. To be sure, it sang the praises of the countryside. Nor would I suggest that the emotions of the farmer weren’t presented with sincerity. But the poetry combined medieval ideology and abstract pastoral adoration nonchalantly, without the poet being aware of it. To me, it wasn’t the perceptions or the emotions that were conspicuous, but rather the hodgepodge mixture resulting from natural growth, and that made me feel frustrated. Therefore, I “hastily” wrote down my ideas in my last essay that I rightfully should have spent more time thinking through.) [. . .] It is just that I believe, as Lenin has explained, that there are limits to proletarian natural growth. Expressing proletarian dissatisfaction, resentment, and hatred just as they are and leaving it at that means they will not be subjected to adequate criticism, analysis, or organized action. In other words, I believe that socialist consciousness is something that can be instilled only from outside. I believe that our proletarian literature movement is a movement to instill consciousness of purpose in the field of literature. [. . .] [. . .] As this movement develops, it will surely solve many of the problems remaining for us, and make them concrete and therefore clearly understandable. Indeed, we must make this happen. Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

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(10) Going on a Field Trip? nakamoto takako Translated from Women’s Arts (January 1930) Like Sata Ineko, who also appears in this chapter, Nakamoto Takako (1903–1991) believed that female factory workers were worthy subjects and potential readers of their own revolutionary narratives. And to that end, in October 1929, she moved to Kameido in Tokyo’s industrial area to participate in their lives at the To¯yo¯ Muslin Factory, organizing and teaching in Orimoto Sadayo’s Workers’ School for Women and organizing for the Communist Party– affiliated All-Japan Council of Labor Unions. Soon after the piece translated here was published, Nakamoto was arrested, just before the first To¯yo¯ Muslin strike of February 1930. After her release, she became a “housekeeper,” a woman called on to serve as a cover wife, for two successive Japanese Communist Party members before being arrested a second time in July 1930. She was tortured, which led to a miscarriage, then committed to a psychiatric hospital, and finally released on bail.35 She continued organizing underground, but when she was arrested for the third time for breaking parole, she was sentenced to four years of hard labor. In 1941, she married Kurahara Korehito [13], who had been released the previous year due to illness. Her work about the women of Muslin Alley, serialized in Women’s Arts for the first six months of 1932, remained unfinished due to increasing repression as well as personal factors, but it was published as a volume after the war. In addition to preparing her own translation of The Tale of Genji (unpublished), she wrote labor reportage and documented the USJapan Security Treaty (Ampo) struggles as well as antinuclear activism. She has yet to receive the critical attention she deserves. hbs I have been receiving all manner of advice and criticism from various quarters regarding my recent change of view and domicile. Some say, “There’s no need for you to go in that direction.” Others say, “You’re just copying Fujimori Seikichi” [1892–1922, novelist, movement member]. Still others say, “You’re just going on a field trip.” I’d like to offer a response to all these people. It is not only natural but necessary for a transformation of ideology to be accompanied by a transformation of lifestyle. If one were to stop with the mere transformation of ideology, wouldn’t that be tantamount to what is 35. Esashi, “Nakamoto Takako,” 720–21. l a b or a n d lit e rat u re 97

called idealist amusement? Or, if you prefer, let us call it idealist sport. Grasping proletarian ideology, which above all must be practical, necessarily requires a transformation of one’s life. At the same time, I do not believe that changing one’s lifestyle is the sum of what needs to be done. The attitude of merely conducting fieldwork— isn’t that precisely an odiously petty bourgeois attitude, and, indeed, its very essence? How could we stand armed with notebook and pen among the proletariat and nonchalantly gaze on their desperate struggle? To mouth leftist rhetoric while living a life having nothing whatsoever to do with the proletariat, or merely affecting to have ties, is utterly contemptible. The essence of the transformation of life is to situate oneself within the organization, to become an element of the collectivity, and to strive ceaselessly to put principle into practice. The regrettable habits formed within the bounds of the petty bourgeois existence that I led until just yesterday throw up numerous obstacles in the path of practice. Given current attitudes, it might be premature to determine what I will be. One of these days, presumably, someone will report on what I am trying to do. What will the council’s year-end campaign— “the year-end struggle week”— afford me? How will it instruct me? I am not advocating a merely idealist “October Revolution.” Translated by Norma Field

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3 : The Question of Realism introduction “Realism,” along with “real” and “reality,” has a complicated history, which at times emphasizes visible objects and actions, at other times, invisible concepts and processes.1 For all the complexities, it is hard to imagine anyone in the proletarian culture movement, or, for that matter, anyone identifying with socialism or with Marxian thought, not thinking of themselves as realists insofar as they believe in the existence of a world including but extending beyond their consciousness, needing to be grasped, analyzed— and transformed. It’s worth reminding ourselves, going back to the Homeric epics or The Tale of Genji, of the persistence of a realist imperative in world literature, transmitted as appeals by storytellers that they were presenting a true reality either denied by the dominant stories of the day or concealed by misleading appearance. Realism, at heart, is contestational. In our brave post-everything skepticism, “realism” is often treated as a tired name for tedious narratives about dreary circumstances— the whole project both uninteresting and offensive for naïvely presuming not only the actual existence of a reality “out there” but the very possibility of transmitting it in language. Exacerbating this situation is the frequent recourse to socialist realism as a dismissive name for all leftist artistic endeavor, as if the adjective and noun confirmed and intensified the opprobrium attached to each. (As discussed in chapter 7, however, socialist realism in the first instance designates a specific moment in the history of socialist cultural production.) We should keep in mind that the status of “reality” and “realism” were earlier challenged by the scientific and technological developments of the nineteenth century, which transformed both the look and substance of the world and the means for apprehending it, whether through instruments, such as the camera, or conceptual systems, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. In literature, with the movement known as Naturalism, human beings— characters— came to be seen as determined by nature, in the sense of physical and biological environment, as well as by socioeconomic conditions. Kurahara Korehito’s influential essay [13] translated in this chapter presents this movement as it developed in Europe as a precursor to “pro-

1. Williams, Keywords, 257–62. 99

letarian realism.” The word “realism” began to be used in Japan from the late nineteenth century, either in Japanized pronunciation or translated as shajitsushugi, suggesting the “copying” of reality. Actual practice, of course, involved selection and not literal copying, but the key role of “realism” in the works of such figures as Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯ (1859–1935) and Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), pioneers of modern Japanese literature, suggests a new reality pressing to find expression. In Soviet Russia the wholesale transformation of reality itself following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought new challenges to the notion of realism. Along with the overwhelming need to jump-start the economy in order to feed and house the citizens of the new society, the importance of producing a culture appropriate for that society was energetically acknowledged. A cornucopia of practical and theoretical questions emerged: Did intellectuals, obviously not of proletarian background, have a role in the movement? What about fellow travelers, sympathetic to the revolution but not party members? What kind of instruction could quickly produce worker-writers? Should literature be regarded as a tool for grasping reality, or for changing that reality? These are only some of the issues that we need to see in the “question of realism” as it unfolded in the Soviet Union. Carried over into Japan, they were also debated vigorously and put into practice to the extent possible in a prerevolutionary society— but one with a high literacy rate and a burgeoning mass print culture. If the authorities were bent on ensuring that revolution would never come to Japan, the proletarian writers were just as determined to have literature play a part in bringing it about. But they needed to grasp what the new literature should be in order for it to do its work on society. They had to understand developments in the Soviet Union and to translate new terminology into their own writing and organizational practices. This is the context for Kurahara’s “The Path to Proletarian Realism,” an exercise in literary history and a first guide to creative methodology for the young movement. Kurahara’s 1928 essay doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete direction for the aspiring proletarian writer; this would come in subsequent debates and reviews of actual works. In a follow-up piece one year later, he takes up two slogans adopted by RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, 1925–1932) when it became the dominant literary association of the Soviet Union in 1928: to depict the “living person” and to follow the principles of “dialectical materialism.”2 The first phrase was repeated by Japanese pro2. Kurahara, “Futatabi puroretaria rearizumu ni tsuite,” 201–2. 100 chapter three

letarians as if it were a mantra to ward off the danger of formulaic characterization— to no avail, according to the charges leveled by Hirabayashi Taiko in her essay [14] in this chapter. In fact, the apparently self-explanatory call for the “living person” amounted to a daunting challenge: to create characters recognizable from real life but with features selected to reveal the truth of social structure— in other words, a combination of “individual” and “type.” It’s the same principle invoked by Sata Ineko in her essay ([15]; see also [8, 21]) when she quotes her comrade Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40] observing that the seemingly disparate disasters recently befalling Sata’s family in fact made good sense once they were seen in relation to one another and to the state of Japanese society: it was “completely dialectical.” And this brings us to the second slogan, to write in accordance with the principle of “dialectical materialism,” something that Hirabayashi purports to endorse but Sata accuses her of not understanding. In order to arrive at our own understanding, we can start by taking the words separately and looking at “materialism” first. A recent definition of “realism” by Gregory Golley helps us cut to the chase: “There is a way of knowing the world that reaches beyond the limits of the human body. I will call this mode of perception realism.”3 Materialism is a mode of analysis relying on such perception. It addresses a reality, visible and invisible, that really exists, whether we are conscious of it or not. But no part of it exists— is real— in isolation, and that’s where the “dialectical” comes in. V. I. Lenin (1870–1924) once illustrated “dialectical” in contrast to “eclectic” thinking with a humorous riff on the tumbler by showing it was in itself neither a “drinking vessel” nor a glass cylinder nor a variety of other objects, but depending on its desired purpose, a projectile, a receptacle, a paperweight, and so on, with each purpose exploiting different features. Even a tumbler, he stresses, “is in flux, and this holds especially true for its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world.”4 Dialectical analysis of a phenomenon emphasizes “flux” because the interactions of its various aspects as well as with the “surrounding world” generate constant, multidimensional change. (For the element of antagonism or contradiction in dialectics, see the introduction to chapter 4.) What does dialectics contribute to our understanding of realism? It suggests, first of all, that no one feature is absolutely defining: a realist work can focus on individuals or groups, explore mental states or not, be formally experimental or conventional. As discussed in the introduction to chapter 5, purpose, including intended readership, plays a significant role in these 3. Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 1. 4. Lenin, “Once Again on the Trade Unions.” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 101

choices. For Bertold Brecht (1898–1956), “a work is realistic not once and for all, but by reference to its ability at a particular time and place to allow individuals to understand and to change the conditions of their existence.”5 This prompts us not only to question the “modernist” (or “aesthetic”) versus “realist” (“proletarian”) divide promoted especially by the self-proclaimed modernists of the 1920s and 1930s along with a succession of critics, but to recall the contestational dimension of realism and the transformative aim of proletarian realism. If realism is contestational, then proletarian realism calls for a classbased transformation. Bourgeois literati have been fond of labeling such class-based work “propaganda,” oblivious to how their assumptions mask the class nature of their preferred literature. In response, Joseph Freeman, the editor of a 1935 anthology of US proletarian literature, put it this way: If you were to take a worker gifted with a creative imagination and ask him to set down his experience honestly, it would be an experience so remote from that of the bourgeois that the Man in White would, as usual, raise the cry of “propaganda.” Yet the worker’s life revolves precisely around those experiences which are alien to the bourgeois aesthete, who loathes them, who cannot believe they are experiences at all. To the Man in White it seems that only a decree from Moscow could force people to write about factories, strikes, political discussions. He knows that only force would compel him to write about such things; he would never do it of his own free will, since the themes of proletarian literature are outside his own life. But the worker writes about the very experiences which the bourgeois labels “propaganda,” those experiences which reveal the exploitation upon which the prevailing society is based.6 Freeman’s political-aesthetic acuity foregrounds the properly contentious questions of whose reality and what aspects of that reality are worthy of representation. The explosive implications of such inquiry, when seen in relation to each other and the world, are revealed in the two fictional selections in this chapter. They are by the best-known and purportedly most orthodox representative of the proletarian camp, Kobayashi Takiji [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30], and a recent convert from the New Sensationist modernist camp, Kataoka Teppei [12], who brought those sensibilities with him in his “turn to the left.” Whereas Kataoka’s earlier work emphasized the fascination of sensory data and the technical means of their representation for their own 5. Goring, Hawthorn, and Mitchell, Studying Literature, s.v. “Realism,” 289. 6. Freeman, introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States, 12–13. 102 chapter three

sake, in “The Linesmen” they are incorporated into a gradual revelation of the human and technological structure of capitalist exploitation. Kobayashi Takiji’s “March 15, 1928” uses multiple viewpoints to depict a historic act of repression involving the extensive use of torture by the Japanese state. Both works have shock value, and they use it to cry out to their readers: This is what is really happening in your world. Whatever you thought before, now you know the truth. And you can’t stand by. Proletarian realism, in other words, comes with a demand. nf

(11) March 15, 1928 kobayashi takiji Translated from Battle Flag (November and December 1928) All over Japan, before daybreak on the date that became the title of this work, police roused leftists from their beds and hauled them off for brutal interrogation. The first elections under the universal manhood suffrage law had just taken place on February 20. Politicians with leftist backing had won 8 out of a total of 441 seats, but the cabinet of Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi (1864–1929) was not taking any chances. On grounds that they had violated the Public Order Law, which forbade challenges to the emperor system and private property, nearly 1,600 people were arrested. Japanese Communist Party (JCP) membership at the time was just over 400.7 In terms of numbers detained, Hokkaido, where this story is set, was third only after Tokyo and Osaka. 8 At the time, Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933; [1, 5, 22, 29, 30]) was still working at the Colonial Development Bank. Given the news blackout, he had to tell the world about the terror visited on his new and respected acquaintances, whom he’d met in study groups and campaigns for the Worker-Farmer candidate. Kurahara Korehito [13] published the resulting novella in Battle Flag in two parts. Despite extensive precautionary redaction by the editors, both issues were banned immediately after publication. They were widely read, however, and the unknown writer from faraway Hokkaido was launched as the bright star of the proletarian literary movement. Acclaimed for its depictions of police torture, the story was also admired, even by bourgeois critics, for its use of shifting viewpoint,

7. Mitchell, Thought Control, 81–87. 8. Ogino, Kita no tokko¯ keisatsu, 57–63. See also the introduction to [5]. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 103

which struck them as cinematic. (Takiji was in fact a big movie fan.) But it was the vivid descriptions of torture that so incensed the authorities, it is said, that they were determined to inflict the same punishment on the author once they ensnared him. And after his brutal killing, “We’re gonna do for you just like we did for Kobayashi Takiji!” became a common threat for leftists.9 This translation of the most severely redacted work in this anthology restores not only passages suppressed to avoid banning but others removed for literary or organizational considerations. These are marked by braces in addition to the usual strikethrough. The manuscript also included a long epilogue, deleted by editor Kurahara, depicting unyielding struggle by the prisoners once they were sent to Sapporo, as well as a provocative meditation by the intellectual Ryu¯kichi on why, despite the constant threat of arrest, the party cadre neglected to train the rank and file to assume leadership.10 A partial translation of this work was included in “The Cannery Boat” by Takiji Kobayashi and Other Japanese Short Stories (1933). This collection, long thought to have been anonymously translated “by various hands” according to a “Publisher’s Note,” is the work of New Zealander William Maxwell Bickerton (1901–1966), who, as an English teacher in Japan, was drawn to the Japanese proletarian movement by his students.11 Bickerton himself was arrested and tortured under the Public Order Law.12 nf

1 It was something Okei could never get used to. No matter how many times— no matter how many times it happened, it stunned, scared, and rattled her just like the first time. And every single time, her husband, Ryu¯kichi, would tell her to stop acting like that. But it was still too great a blow for a woman’s heart to bear. — The people from the union had been gathered upstairs debating some issues when Okei, climbing the stairs to bring them tea, overheard her husband’s voice saying, 9. Ogino, Kita no tokko¯ keisatsu, 9. 10. These passages were reproduced in KTZ, 2:539–43. 11. [Bickerton], “The Cannery Boat” by Takiji Kobayashi, iv. 12. “Japanese Translator Heroes: Max Bickerton”; Kano, “Makkusu Bikka¯ton,” 62– 63; Kozai, “Makkusu Bikka¯ton kaiso¯,” 137–38. Our thanks to Sato¯ Saburo¯ for leading us to this information. 104 chapter three

“I’m having a devil of a time raising my old lady’s consciousness.” “The revolution starts in the kitchen— it’s a formula you can’t change. You’re soft Ogawa, just plain soft.” “Honestly, when it comes to the old lady I’m snookered. . . .” “No way you can win a theoretical debate with your wife.” Everyone was teasing him. Her husband wrapped his arms around himself and murmured something in embarrassment. That morning he was brushing his teeth. She stood beside him at the kitchen sink, pouring warm water into the washbowl. “Ever heard of Rosa?” he mumbled through his toothpick, as if it had just come to him. “Ro-sa?” “Rosa.” “Well, I’ve heard of Lenin. . . .” “What an idiot,” he replied in a low voice. Okei had never felt the slightest inclination to know any of those things, or even to make an effort to learn them. She wouldn’t be able to remember them all anyway, and what difference would it make if she did? She knew “Lenin” and “Marx” only because her daughter Yukiko had told her. Once she’d learned them, though, she noticed “Lenin” and “Marx” were like buzzwords, constantly on the lips of all the union people who came by the house— Kudo¯, Sakanishi, Suzumoto, and her husband. Once, for some reason or other, she had said to her husband, “So Marx is like the god of the workers, right?” which caused him to turn to her with a surprised look and ask, “Where did you hear that?” His appreciation, however, didn’t particularly please her. That said, Okei didn’t harbor any ill will toward her husband and the people from the union, or the things they did together. Of course, the union people seemed scruffy and a little threatening at first, and they unnerved Okei. The impression that they were not easily approachable stayed with her for some time. But compared to the smirks and the fawning solicitude of the teachers who were her husband’s daytime colleagues, she felt much better chatting with these people. They didn’t dwell on the small things or nag at one another. In fact they were like kids, and they could send Okei into fits of laughter. They might hold back bashfully the first time they ate at her table, but by the second time they were asking for seconds. They pestered her for cigarette money and change for the neighborhood bath. But it was all done with such unaffected simplicity that Okei gradually began to feel a fondness for them. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 105

During the harbor-wide general strike, Okei had heard all kinds of terrible rumors around town. At first she couldn’t imagine how a strike organized by that Mr. Kudo¯ and that Mr. Suzumoto could be the awful thing she heard about. “But who, for god’s sake, is the strike actually awful for? For the rich? Or the poor?” That’s what her husband said. But deep down she couldn’t understand the logic. “It’s not about logic,” he’d say. In the newspapers, stories about the strike appeared in big bold letters almost every day. About how they were going to plunge the whole city of O into darkness so they could burn down the houses of the rich, about how they had clashed with the police and been arrested (with Watari and Kudo¯ among the names), about how the strike was the curse of the entire city . . . When Okei thought about how her own husband, Ryu¯kichi, was involved with the strike, spending practically every night at the union headquarters, she unconsciously furrowed her brow. Ryu¯kichi would come home with a face pale and puffy from lack of sleep, but stern. Okei would ask, “Is everything all right?” “A cop started tailing me on the way home but I shook him off.” Then he curled up on the futon. “Wake me up at five.” Okei sat by his pillow for a while. Even at such times, she had never tried putting into words what her husband was doing. But really, all this suffering, and the sacrifice of so many things, how much difference would it really make? The thought crossed Okei’s mind that the society everyone shouted about when they got excited— that proletarian society— didn’t look to be coming anytime soon. Then there was Yukiko, and she prayed that her husband wouldn’t bring real disaster down on them. What he was doing seemed like nothing other than a way to drive them straight into starvation, and there were times when a womanly discontent stirred within her. But Okei knew the many stories of the people in the union, and she knew the misery of the workers’ lives, so hard they couldn’t stand it, and didn’t need any theory to want to call the rich who squeezed them so hard “sons of bitches!” She also came to understand why the people at the union needed to channel that urge and expand the scope of the struggle. Though she had no way of knowing when her husband’s work might bear fruit, she did come to feel a certain pride that what he was doing was so ambitious and noble. The third time Ryu¯kichi was arrested his school fired him, and they had no choice but to try to make a living off a notions shop. This was bound to happen— Okei had known this in a vague way— but when it did, it left Okei’s 106 chapter three

head spinning as if she had been blindsided. But by then she was past the point of dwelling on it or grumbling. No longer tied to a job, Ryu¯kichi became more actively involved in the movement. It was from that point that the cops started dropping by the house. Okei felt a chill every time she saw a stranger hanging around in front of the shop. If that were all, she could have dealt with it. But there were times when these men would take a look at the nameplate, come into the house and say, “Why don’t you come down to the police station for a minute,” and drag Ryu¯kichi away. The sight of her husband being led out of the house by a couple of plainclothesmen was more than she could bear. When they had all left, an eerily lonesome, hollow feeling would linger for hours. Perhaps her heart was weaker than most, for it kept pounding for hours every time it happened. Okei would drift around the house, hands clasped over her chest, face as white as paper. —That was what Okei could never get used to. No matter how many times— no matter how many times it happened, it stunned, scared, and rattled her just like it had the first time. And every single time, Ryu¯kichi would tell her to stop it. But it was too great a blow for a woman’s heart to bear. On March 15 before dawn, they were woken from sleep, and their house was searched inside out. During the search they were not allowed to talk to each other, and after the five or so police and prosecutors had taken her husband away, Okei sat down in the middle of the floor for a long time, her mind strangely empty. It was some time before the first unbidden sob burst forth. That morning, Yukiko woke up with a start. She’d heard a noise somewhere. Instinctively, her wide-open eyes scanned the room. What time was it? Could it be morning, she wondered. From the next room she could hear five or six people making a racket. If it were the middle of the night, they wouldn’t be here. But all the lights were still on. It wasn’t morning. What was going on? The tatami in the next room creaked repeatedly as someone paced back and forth. “We’re going to check the next room.” She heard a voice she didn’t recognize outside her door. “It’s just the bedroom, there’s nothing there,” her mother said in a deliberately hushed voice. “Go ahead and check.” That was her father. “What if Yukiko wakes up . . .” Yukiko could only catch parts of what they were saying. She decided that if anyone came in, she had to pretend to be asleep. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 107

She could hear them taking things off the shelves, rummaging through newspapers, prying up the tatami, opening the drawers of the dresser one at a time— all the way up to seven. That’s all of them, Yukiko counted in her head. Then they started opening the cupboards in the kitchen. Yukiko felt a chill shudder through her from deep inside her body. No matter how she curled up or turned herself in bed, the chill wouldn’t leave, and her whole body started to shake. Her teeth suddenly began to chatter. Surprised, she bit down hard to stop them. She couldn’t hear a word from her mother and father. What were they doing? The only ones talking were the strangers. Lots of people visited her house. But the people who were here now were not the same kind. She knew instinctively that they were different, horrible people. The door opened. A wide shaft of bright light slanted suddenly into the room. Yukiko panicked and shut her eyes. Her heart was pounding. But still she opened her eyes a crack as she pretended to roll over in her sleep. Her mother stood with her arms folded over her chest, looking into her sleeping face. Her face was eerily pale. Her father stood to one side, watching the strangers as they searched. Perhaps because he was standing right next to the hanging lightbulb, his face looked strangely fierce. There were five strangers. One with a beard seemed to be in command of the group and carried a large black leather portfolio. He told the ones searching to do things. And they did exactly what he said. There were two uniformed police officers, and two more in plain clothes.— What had Daddy done? And what were these people doing? The strangers had their hands on Yukiko’s school things and were turning over her books and shaking them one by one. They scattered her toys on the floor and rifled through them. Yukiko found herself getting strangely worked up. Stinging tears welled up from deep behind her eyes. “Those are just the child’s. . . .” Yukiko’s mother said in a low voice from where she stood. The strangers mumbled a reply of sorts, but they didn’t stop. After going over everything in the room once, they looked around one last time and left. The door closed.— The room went dark, just as Yukiko was on the verge of bursting into sobs. Her father and Portfolio were talking about something in low voices. Their voices got steadily louder until Yukiko could hear what they were saying. “In any case you’ll have to come with us.” This was from Portfolio. “What do you mean, ‘in any case’?” 108 chapter three

“We don’t have to get into it here. You just have to come.” The man’s words were gradually getting curt. “What’s the reason?” “Don’t know.” “Then I don’t accept the need to go.” “Whether you accept it or not, we. . . .” “I’ve never heard anything so preposterous and unlawful.” “What’s preposterous? I keep telling you, everything will become clear if you come with us.” “Same old tricks.” “It doesn’t matter, trick or not.— You have to come.” Her father suddenly stopped speaking. He shoved the bedroom door open and came into the room. Her mother followed behind. The five men stood in the next room, looking in. “Pants.” He said to her mother in an angry voice. She brought out his pants without a word. He got one leg in. But he lost his balance with the other leg, stumbled, and missed a few times. His cheek twitched with tension. He got stuck putting on his shirt and necktie too— the necktie in particular refused to be tied. Watching, her mother reached out to help. “I’m fine!” her father rebuffed her harshly. He was unusually flustered. Her mother began to say something to him falteringly. “You’re not to talk to each other,” Portfolio broke in from the next room. The room where Yukiko lay went dark again. There was a confused din of footfalls as the group stepped down into the entryway.— The front door opened. The footsteps stopped for a moment, and she could hear people talking. Yukiko couldn’t stand it any longer so she stood up, still wrapped only in her nightgown. Instantly, the cold rocked through her, from her head to the tips of her toes. She opened the door a crack. Her father was seated, bending down to tie his shoelaces. The strangers stood around in the entryway. Her mother still had her arms folded across her chest as she leaned for support against a pillar, her face bluish white. The silence was unearthly. Suddenly— suddenly Yukiko felt that she understood. She understood completely. “It’s Lenin!” she thought. All these things are happening because of Lenin. Her father’s study was filled with all manner of books and there were a few pictures of Lenin hanging there. Now his face appeared clearly before Yukiko. With his bald head, he looked just like Yoshida, the janitor at school. Along with the pictures, there were all the songs the union t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 109

people sang with her father when they came over. Yukiko, with a child’s receptivity to song, had been able to master “The Song of the Red Flag ” and “The May Day Song” faster than anyone. At home or at school, wherever she was, Yukiko sang them together with “The Orange Tree” and “The Song of the Canary” without any inkling of what they meant. The people in the union often patted her on the head.— Her father wasn’t a bad person, and he would never do bad things. So as far as Yukiko was concerned there could be no other explanation than that it was all Lenin’s fault, and “The Song of the Red Flag.”— That was it. That had to be it. Her father stood up.— Yukiko’s teeth chattered like they did on nights when she was awake because of a fire somewhere in the neighborhood.— They all went out. At that moment her mother’s pale face stirred. Her lips moved as if to say something, but no words came out. Yukiko couldn’t hear them if they did. She noticed her mother’s fingers clutching at the pillar that supported her.— Her father fiddled with his hat for a moment and looked into her face. He unfastened a button on his vest that had already been fastened, and then refastened it. Uneasily, he looked into her face again.— When her father was halfway out the door he said, “Take good care of Yuki. . . .” His voice was dry and hoarse. He forced a cough. Her mother followed them outside. Yukiko dove back into her futon, turned facedown and, with her head pressed against the pillow, began to cry. As she cried she suddenly felt hatred toward the strangers who had taken her father away. “They’re the ones to hate. It’s them,” she thought. That made her sob even harder. Shaking with fear, she called out “Daddy! Daddy!” over and over, crying with all her heart.

2 It was as if the air had frozen solid and pale into the shape of all the places it had filled. There was no sound or sign of people.— The night was getting late and the biting cold sank right into the bone. It was 3:00 a.m. The crunching footsteps of five or six people suddenly sounded on the frozen snow of the street. The sound was coming from a dark alley. It resounded unusually loudly in the street wrapped in silence. The footsteps emerged into a slightly wider road lit by naked bulbs hanging from lampposts.— It was a group of police with their chinstraps fastened. They all clutched their sabers with one hand so that they wouldn’t make any noise. Boots and all (!), they burst into the Joint Labor Union and stormed up the stairs to the second floor! The members of the union had just gone to sleep an hour before. They 110 chapter three

had been finalizing plans for a March 15 rally calling for the dissolution of the reactionary “saber cabinet.” All the union members had been mobilized that evening to paste publicity bills around the city, conduct negotiations for a hall to hold the rally, and then there had been a standing committee meeting— it was two in the morning by the time they were done for the day. That’s when they were attacked. The seven or so sleeping union members jumped up as the police tore off their covers and kicked them with their boots. They stood up as heavy as logs and stumbled in circles, tottering around like they’d lost their bearings. Damn! thought Suzumoto. But in fact, he had been thinking, What if. With freedom of speech stripped away, here they were, forcing the issue, going for the jugular— trying to bring down the Tanaka cabinet. It was plain as day that the police would barge in on the day of the events, shouting “Break it up, break it up,” and take down every one of their speakers. They were ready for that. But what if— this was a little trick those bastards! liked a lot— they came around on the day before for a general roundup. That’s what this was.— Suzumoto saw it right away. Wearing only skivvies, Sakanishi, who passed for the union’s “blunt tool,” asked one of the cops he knew by sight, “What’s this?” “Dunno.” “Dunno? Quit screwing with me.— I’m half asleep.” Plainclothes officers had followed the others in and were starting to go through documents. “No wonder you guys end up in trouble, just hanging around in no-good places like this,” one of the patrolmen spit out venomously, loud enough so everyone could hear. He eyed the brazen Suzumoto who was standing there with a long beard looking just like the warrior Guan Yu. Suzumoto couldn’t be bothered to respond. “Try doing some work for a change. You’d get over these worthless ideas.” — Right, keep talking. Think anyone here’s listening to your shit? “Well all right then, why don’t you introduce me to one of those good jobs?” Sakanishi ribbed and laughed his usual good-natured laugh.— The people in the organization had Sakanishi pegged as a little slow. He didn’t adapt well and his work style was sloppy. But his good nature had a magic to it that made him impossible to hate. It was at that moment that Watari panicked and tried to run down the stairs. A policeman immediately blocked the way. “Where do you think you’re going?” Oh lord, Suzumoto thought to himself, seeing Watari’s behavior. And it t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 111

wasn’t only his behavior; his face had lost all trace of color. Watari was always the young Turk, working right up at the head of the front lines, solid as a “sheet of iron.” Watari’s not acting like Watari! Suzumoto had a strange foreboding. Surrounded by police to the front, back, left, and right, they all filed down the stairs. Apart from Watari, however, everyone was in high spirits. They were used to this kind of thing. One, then two slaps rang out. Whenever the group was into something, it was Saito who was always the one walking around proclaiming to anyone he could get his hands on, “We must harden ourselves for the struggle.” And it was he who was in the highest spirits now. He moved over to where Suzumoto was. “This could put a crimp in our plans for tomorrow. Gotta stay strong.” “Yeah, we’ll have to see it through.” Saito was about to say something more. “Hey, hey!” A policeman suddenly clamped his hand down on the back of Saito’s neck, muscled him around, and pulled him away from Suzumoto. “The people’s flag, the red flag . . .” Up front, someone burst out singing.— Then there was the sharp sound of a slap. “What the hell, you son of a bitch!” It was the voice of a person charging full body into a fight. The sound of a saber being used as a bludgeon mixed in with the sound of slapping. Everyone had their arms locked tightly together with the person in front and behind, and they stamped their feet deliberately as they walked. “Get off me!” Saito stood still and shouted with the full force of his small body. “Hey fellas! I’m not going to let myself get pinched like this without getting the reason. No way! I got something I wanna ask.” “Right. Right,” everyone agreed. Suzumoto was keeping his eyes on Watari. At moments like this, Watari usually burst out like a coiled spring together with everyone else, but now he stood there stock-still like a stake in the ground.— The policemen had circled up around Saito’s small body. The union members on the outside tried to wedge their shoulders in between the shoulders of the police to get into the circle, and the bodies struggling with one another created a small whirlpool. “Give us the reason goddamnit!” “You’ll see when you get there.”— It was the same story here, too. “See when we get there? You think we’re gonna let ourselves be dragged off to some stinkin’ room every time you say that?” “This is a human rights violation!” someone shouted from the back. One of the police seemed to have punched Saito. The circle of people 112 chapter three

suddenly swayed violently. The union members outside the ring tightened their fists, desperate to climb into the circle. The commotion suddenly escalated. “You bastards . . . you damn bastards!”— Saito’s voice came through in snatches, as he struggled to speak through something covering his mouth. “You bastards! No matter what you do to us here, this movement . . . if you think it’s just going to go away . . . fuck, you think it’s just going to go away?! Shit!” Everyone roared in excitement. Watari, who had been standing as if his mind was somewhere else now forced his wide shoulders and strong body into the whirlpool. When he saw this, Suzumoto breathed a sigh of relief and decided nothing was the matter after all. “’Less somebody gives us a real reason we have to go, we’ll fight this with every last drop of our strength!” Watari said steadily in a rough, low voice. His low voice always carried a mysterious strength to those who listened. Ishida stood apart from the fray, looking on quietly with his usual disgust at the heroics of the union members kicking up such a commotion. For Ishida, there were times to make a scene, and times not to— that is, times you absolutely mustn’t. Being able to distinguish these moments and behave accordingly wasn’t a retreat from the struggle. To Ishida, people like Saito might as well be afflicted with rabies. Ishida knew there were a lot of people in the movement who were Saito types. Whenever he saw them he tried to look the other way. The likes of them didn’t even deserve the insult “infantile leftism.” “Look at this, what are they trying to achieve here? Sure. The valiant heroes of the proletariat.”— Ishida spat on the floor next to him and rubbed it into the boards with the toe of his boot. When Watari jumped in, the unity of the men strengthened.— But at the same moment, seven or eight more policemen burst in through the entrance, and with their added strength, they overwhelmed the group in one push. Cracking the timbers of the entryway, everyone was pushed out the front door in a large swirling mass. The cold air slipped in sharp as razor blades from outside the door. It was just before dawn, twenty below zero, as cold as cold could be. On top of that, the men had just been kicked out of bed, so the cold hit them even harder. Everyone clenched their jaws and tensed their shoulders to control the shivering. The night showed not even the faintest sign of daybreak. Under a dark sky that still held snow, the streets were wrapped in a silence from deep beneath the earth. When the men walked, the snow-covered streets cracked with the t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 113

sound of something breaking. Ishida and Saito wore shirts sticky with grime under their corduroy jackets, so the cold went straight to their skin. The surface of their entire bodies began to hurt. Before long, their fingers and toes grew numb, and then began to tingle. They were brought out one by one, arms locked with a police escort. Shibata, who was not yet twenty and had just joined the union a week before, had been quiet from the start of the raid, his face strangely drawn, unable to utter a single word. Even so, when everybody yelled, he tried to make himself join in. But his cheeks had become like half-dried clay, moving in twitches but refusing to obey him further. I’m going to be hit with this kind of thing a lot from now on, so I better get used to it and be done with it, he thought. But this being the first time, it dealt a powerful blow to Shibata’s body. It was as if he had been laid out with a single punch. No matter what he did he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering and his body from shaking— and it wasn’t from the cold. Forming a single gray mass, they walked through the town from one street to the next. They pressed and rubbed their bodies together and deliberately put extra strength into each step to fight off the cold. The crunch, crunch . . . of twenty men’s boots echoed through the deserted streets. There was a strangely fierce silence among the members of the union. As they went on, a current of common feeling moved mysteriously between them. Like paper dipped in ink, it swiftly tinged every corner of their feelings. It was the singular feeling that inevitably arose when a group proceeded in the same direction with the same movements, a feeling that could crush and thrust aside all division among them. Guan Yu Suzumoto, Watari, Sakanishi the blunt tool, Saito, Ishida, and Shibata the new recruit, all had their own points of difference from the others, and therefore retained their individual existence as four or five members of the union. But now they slipped into a single group consciousness— a consciousness that had the same direction, same color, tone, and intensity for all of them, and they slipped into it ardently. That thing that awoke at times like this, that mysterious— and yet indispensable thing whose very existence made the iron unity of the proletariat possible, was precisely this feeling. {This didn’t mean, however, that the feeling simply denied all the differences, but that the differences taken for themselves would, upon attaining a certain intensity, necessarily undergo a dialectical sublation (and in so doing become even stronger), and thus it was a feeling of an open hand being gathered into a single fist, surmounting the individual.} The nine members of the union were no longer a sum made up of individuals but had transformed into a single tank. They locked their arms tightly 114 chapter three

with one another and put their shoulders together, fixing their dark, sharp eyes on the road ahead— as if they were all moving forward toward one and only one destination— moving forward toward revolution.

3 After her husband was dragged away like that, the house felt deserted, and Okei could no longer bear to be inside it. She decided to go to Kudo¯’s house to see what had happened. Kudo¯ was the union secretary, and he sometimes came to visit them. She wanted to see how the other people in the organization were faring, what this latest incident was about, and how far-reaching it might be. As she had half expected, however, Kudo¯ had been arrested too. — When the police made the raid on Kudo¯’s house, it was pitch-dark inside. “You! Get up!” One of the policemen shouted as he groped around, looking for the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The three children woke up and all began to cry loudly. The movements of the policeman pawing through the empty air as he searched for the light switch looked just like the mad kabuki character Yasuna dancing. In a moment a click, click could be heard of the switch being pulled in the darkness. “Huh? What gives?” “The lights don’t work.” Kudo¯, who had remained silent, now spoke up. Unlike the flustered policeman, his voice was infuriatingly calm. The Kudo¯s’ electricity bills were past due, and the lights had been cut off for two months. There wasn’t even enough money to buy candles or an oil lamp. When evening came, the kids were sent over to the neighbor’s to play and Oyoshi went out to the union. That’s how they had passed sixty days in darkness. “Bright lights for a bright home” was the catchphrase of the day, but lacking even a dim light, it wasn’t worth shit to them. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to run away,” Kudo¯ said and laughed. “It’s nobody,” Oyoshi was saying to her crying children. “It’s the same ones as usual. Nothing to get upset about, don’t cry.” One by one the children stopped crying. The Kudo¯ children were accustomed even to the police. The people in the union used to say, only half jokingly, to be sure, that Oyoshi was providing her children with an exemplary class education. They held her in high esteem. Of course, Oyoshi wasn’t doing this out of theoretical principle— she had been born the youngest child of a grindingly poor peasant family in Akita Prefecture. She quit elementary school after two years and was sent to work as a nursemaid at the landlord’s house until the spring of her fourteenth year. There she was hounded and abused by a mean t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 115

and petulant child strapped to her back, a master who beat her indiscriminately, and a mistress who was even crueler. For five years she was worked pitilessly without a single day of rest. When she finally returned to her own house, she was put out to work in the fields. She spent all day doubled over like a shrimp, causing the blood to flow down into her head and fill up her cheeks and eyelids, making them swell. At seventeen, she was married off to Kudo¯ in the next village. But just two days after the wedding (!)— right after the autumn harvest— she and Kudo¯ had to report to the neighborhood roads and works unit, where they were soon at work pushing trolley carts. When she got home every night worn out like a shredded rag, mountains of housework awaited her. Oyoshi moved back and forth between the trolley and the kitchen with the dizzied body of someone who had been beaten near to unconscious. Once, pushing the trolley in the scorching heat of the day, exhausted from menstruation and the new demands of married life, Oyoshi fainted, collapsing faceup. Life became desperately difficult after the children were born. It was then that Kudo¯, pushed to his wit’s end, strapped one wicker basket on his back and one on Oyoshi’s, and left the village one night after sundown. It was a dark night, filled with windblown snow, and the mountains howled. That was how they crossed over to Hokkaido. In Otaru, they both found work in an ironworks. But Hokkaido wasn’t as different from the mainland as people had made out. It, too, was not an easy place for Oyoshi and the children to live. But where else could they go? Where was there a place for them! Wherever the proletariat go, they’re squeezed through the presses like soybean or herring dregs. . . . Oyoshi’s hands dangled from her shoulders like crab claws, disproportionately large for her body. Her skin was rough like a tree root and stained pitch-black with dirt. The stain was so deep that it would never come out as long as she lived. When her children’s backs itched, Oyoshi would always scratch them, not with her nails but with the rough skin of her palms. The children loved the feeling when she did this. Over the span of her own lifetime, Oyoshi had come to know clearly the hateful, unforgivably hateful human beings of the world. Especially after her husband entered the union and began to work for the movement, they took an even clearer shape in her mind. Kudo¯ was unable to land a job after that. There were many times when he wouldn’t be home for a full week because of work for the union. Then Oyoshi, on her own— all by herself, had to work and take care of the children. But she was able to cope with the work with a spirit that she hadn’t had 116 chapter three

before. She went down to the shore to carry loads of charcoal, she sewed bags at the warehouses for starch and grains, she went to a sorting plant for export green peas, she took on all kinds of work. Nine months pregnant with her youngest child, her stomach bulging out, she carried bags of charcoal up to the warehouse from the barges along with all the other workers. The sight of her shocked a policeman who was on patrol, and managed to get her boss a reprimand. The sliding doors in their house were down to nothing but their bare lattice frames. The cold wind blew in, but there was no money to buy new paper for them, so they pasted up old issues of Proletarian News and the Worker-Farmer News that they brought back from the union. Stirring articles about strikes, and words like “FIRE” hung in big headlines, sideways, upside down, and half hidden. Whenever Oyoshi could snatch a free moment she read them a bit at a time. When the children asked, “What’s this? What’s that?” she took the opportunity to read to them out loud. The house had leftover posters, handbills, and magazine advertisements from elections hung all over the walls. When Watari and Suzumoto came to the Kudo¯ house, they let out a whistle as they walked around and around the room. “This is our house,” they exclaimed, delighted. . . . Kudo¯ stood up and got himself ready. As he dressed, he thought to himself that he’d be away for a long time this time. And if he was, the thought of how his family would survive without a cent left, stole heavily and gloomily into his heart. It was the same feeling he had had so many times before in this situation. {Even if he was a devil of a fighter for the proletarian liberation movement, this feeling of melancholy was the one thing he knew he would never get used to.} It was all right if he was together with everyone in the excitement of the union, but if he wasn’t, when he thought about the life that his wife and children led, the thought wrung his heart. {The proletarian movement was never going to be easy, even in jest. Never!} Oyoshi helped. When she had gotten everything together she said, “All right. Come back safe.” “Yeah.” “What is it this time. Any idea?” He was quiet, but then said, “How does it look, will you make it? I might be gone a long time.” “When you’re away?— No problem.” Oyoshi was as bright and energetic as ever. Though somewhat vaguely, the oldest child understood some of what was going on and said, “Come back safe, Dad.” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 117

“It’s families like this. Christ, they’re too much.” The police were shocked. “Like it’s the most natural thing in the world— the whole family comes out to send him off!” “If we broke down crying and sobbing over every little thing like this, we wouldn’t get very far with the movement would we.” Kudo¯’s answer was acid, to cut through the damp and darkness that was creeping into him. “Just keep talking that way, you trash, and I’ll show you a beating,” the policeman barked, his voice strangely worked up. “Take care yourself,” Oyoshi spoke. “Yeah.” He wanted to leave his wife with some parting words. But he wasn’t good with words and he didn’t really know what to say. When he thought about his wife going through more hardships (of course it wasn’t only his wife), he had an odd sensation of the strength draining away from his knees. “I mean it. We’ll get by somehow,” Oyoshi said once more as she watched her husband’s face. Her husband nodded without a word. The door closed. Oyoshi stood for a moment listening to the sound of the men’s footsteps outside. Oyoshi knew that these incidents could happen hundreds of times and even that wouldn’t be enough to create a society of their own. In order to bring about that society, they’d have to become the stepping-stones for those who would come after, they’d have to put their necks in the noose. She’d heard that when armies of ants moved, if they came to a river they had to cross, the ants in front would pour into the river, pile on top of one another and drown, offering their own bodies as a bridge for the ones who came after them. The young people in the union often talked about having to be just like ants at the front. And they were right. “There’s still a long way to go,” Oyoshi was telling Okei. Okei’s face darkened slightly, but she nodded excitedly to Oyoshi.

4 Oyoshi told Okei that the scope of the arrests this time had been surprisingly wide. Workers from XX Ironworks were taken right from where they worked, still dressed in their blue coveralls. The day laborers along the shoreline and the workers in the warehouses were being dragged away for questioning at the rate of five or ten a day. There were even two or three students involved. Even a company man named Sata who came to the study meetings every Tuesday night at Ryu¯kichi’s house was taken in two days later. 118 chapter three

Sata sometimes confided in Ryu¯kichi and the others about his family situation.— It was just him and his mother, and his mother had only him to depend on. She fairly shook with grief when she heard her own son had joined the movement. It had taken her eight years to get her son into a commercial college, during which she worked and worked until she had used herself up. It was as if he had survived by slowly eating away at his mother’s body. But his mother had always thought that when Sata got out of school and became a banker or businessman, she would be able to brag to her friends about his salary, spend long, carefree days drinking tea, losing herself in conversation with the neighbors, maybe taking a trip once a year to visit her hometown on the mainland, and then, when the bonus came in, a trip to a hot springs resort, just every so often . . . without ever having to worry again about the monthly bills, or making excuses, or going to the pawnshop, or having her things repossessed. For her this was a happiness that had no equal, like lying down on the veranda in a robe after getting out of the bath. Through the long, long period of her suffering (— and it really did feel far too long), his mother had thought only of these things, she had looked forward to them, and it was only because of them that she had been able to bear up through the misery. Just get to the office every day.— And like clockwork, a salary comes in at the end of every month.— What a beautiful, peaceful life it would be! Sata graduated from school and found a job. When he gave his first month’s pay to his mother, she took it, still in the envelope, and sat perfectly motionless with it resting on her lap. Before long, however, her body began to tremble, so slightly that you could barely see, and she pressed the envelope against her forehead over and over. Sata did feel a certain exhilaration, but at the same time thought, “How common and old-fashioned,” as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. A moment later he heard the bell in the small household altar downstairs being rung. He read until dinner. When he went downstairs, the table was set with more care than usual. There was a candle burning brightly on the altar, and the envelope had been placed next to it. “I offered it up to your father,” said his mother. It would have been fine if it had ended there. But Sata’s mother began to be concerned about all the new photographs that were being stuck on the walls of his room on the second floor. “Who’s this person?” his mother asked, pointing to someone on the wall right above Sata’s desk. The man was looking out of a face buried in a beard as thick as an Ainu’s. Sata snickered ambiguously. “Are you sure everything’s all right, dear?” was another of the vague quest h e qu e st ion of re a lism 119

tions she would pose not knowing where to begin. She took note of the increase in the number of books with bright-red jackets also. If a letter came with a return address such as “Worker-Farmer Party XX Branch,” she was thrown into a private panic and would hide it away in her inside pocket. When Sata came home, she would take it out and present it to him as if it were a secret and terrible thing. “You haven’t gone and become one of those politicals or something, have you?” Sata noticed that his mother’s face was becoming more gloomy with the passing days, and he knew that some nights she stayed awake, tossing and turning until morning. Often when he came home from work, he would see his mother sitting in front of the altar crying. There was no doubt in his mind that it was all because of him. For Sata, who had grown up in these particular circumstances, seeing his mother that way made him feel as if a pick was being driven into his heart. He consulted Ryu¯kichi and Okei about it at length. When Sata was on the second floor, his mother sometimes came up. She was coming up more and more frequently. She said the same things each time, in a subdued voice.— What difference can you make, just one person, what if something happens, what if we can no longer feed ourselves, you were never the kind of person to go out and do things that scare everybody, you’ve been possessed by something, your mother is praying for you every day, to the gods, to your dead father. . . . When it got to him, Sata shouted, “Mother, you don’t understand,” his voice on the edge of tears. “It’s more that I don’t understand what’s going on in your heart,” she said weakly, hunching her shoulders. When Sata couldn’t put up with it any longer, he stomped downstairs and left his mother alone on the second floor. But even downstairs, his emotions refused to quiet down. It’s mother who makes me so spineless. “Who would have thought that mothers were such a big enemy to us.” This was the agitated thought that came to him. After that there had been one more confrontation. Sata got up in a huff and suddenly shouted, “All right, all right, all right! Enough, that’s enough! I’m finished. I’ll quit just like you say. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’ll get off my back if I quit, right? I quit, I quit! Now leave me alone!” As if to fling his mother aside, he charged straight out the front door. But once outside, the opposite feelings came back to him. “She just doesn’t understand.” On the sixteenth, Sata heard from a friend that there had been a mass arrest of Ryu¯kichi and other union people. But the friend didn’t have any more idea than Sata about why they’d been hit. When Sata got home, he gathered up all his documents, took them over to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping, 120 chapter three

and put his things in order. Nothing happened that day. Though he breathed a little easier, he still wanted to go over to the headquarters to see what was going on. But then his friend came again and told him that large groups of plainclothes police were occupying the union and party offices and that it was too dangerous to go. People who were stupid enough to come by the union were being dragged away whether they had anything to do with it or not. Their own little Kobayashi had gone there completely unsuspecting on the afternoon of the fifteenth when plainclothesmen suddenly came storming out of the building and grabbed him. He was caught off guard, but immediately said he was a bill collector from the printer, there to collect a bill. The police told him no one was there so he couldn’t collect, and then sent him packing. Of course he then went straight around to all the union members’ houses and warned them. That’s what the friend told him. Good thing I didn’t go, he thought to himself. But it was on the seventeenth, while Sata was reading the evening paper, that the police came around to detain him. When his time finally came, Sata was surprisingly calm and collected. At the motion pictures and old-style theaters, he’d often laughed seeing people caricature the gestures of being “paralyzed with fear.” But now! When he came back down from the second floor where he had gone to get his overcoat, the sight that greeted him was his mother sprawled out on the floor in the corner of the room, her hands and feet quivering! Her lips shook, and it looked like she was trying desperately to say something, but couldn’t. Instead, her face, shockingly drained of any trace of blood, had frozen, leaving only her eyes to turn in their sockets. Her hands and her feet waved around as if trying to get purchase on something. But her body didn’t move at all. Sata stood there with the door open halfway, like a post that had been planted to the spot. Sata went out, guarded by three policemen. He cried to himself for a long time, trying to hide it from the policemen’s eyes, as he thought about his mother along the way. Returning from Kudo¯’s house, Okei walked along the city’s busiest street, the main road through Hanazonocho¯. It was still early evening, just after dusk, and the cold wasn’t so bad. Just as always in town, throngs of people were out walking, while the cars, omnibuses, and horse-drawn sleighs with bells attached ran endlessly to and fro. In front of a brightly lit show window, a couple, perhaps newlyweds, stood with their faces close together, talking about something.— Women wearing warm-looking coats and shawls, men wrapped thickly in camel hair overcoats, shop boys on errands, workers in t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 121

blue overalls carrying big empty lunch boxes, children . . . all of them rubbing shoulders with one another, chatting, hurrying along, or taking their time to walk. Okei felt a strange feeling come over her. Right now, in this very same city of XX, there was an enormous incident unfolding. But what connection did it have with this place right here? How could this be? Think of how many dozens— how many hundreds— of people were throwing their very bodies into the struggle, not just for anybody’s sake, but for the sake of the proletarian masses. How could it be that it was of so little consequence?— Okei didn’t know anymore. She felt not even the faintest ripple had made it here. Maybe it was because of the dirty way the government controlled the newspapers. Their dirty tricks! But everyone’s face, everyone’s attitude, they all seemed so bright, and satisfied, as they hurried along to their destinations. For whose sake are our husbands doing this? Okei felt strangely lonely and empty. Our husbands are being deceived! Oh stop this nonsense! But the dejection hovered stubbornly around Okei like a horsefly that wouldn’t leave her alone.

5 At dawn on the fifteenth, countless policemen hurried in and out of the police station with their chinstraps fastened. The same scene was repeated many times over. A car painted sky blue occasionally pulled up to the entrance. When the chug-chugging of the car’s engine was heard, the doors of the police station were flung open and policemen ran out to it, holding their swords down with their hands. With an emphatically loud backfire, the car would aim its tires into the ruts in the snow where the downhill slope started and, shimmying from side to side, slide down the slope and out of sight. A few minutes later, it would be back, to load more people and set out again. The jail was full. At the sound of the key clanking in the door, the people who were already chatting away freely inside the cell stopped talking immediately, trained their eyes on the door— and waited. When they saw that it was Watari, Suzumoto, Saito, Sakanishi, and the others being brought in, they sent up a spontaneous cheer. The policeman who was guarding them grew red as a cockscomb and drew himself up to shout at them, but it didn’t have the slightest effect. The fourteen or fifteen who’d been put together all knew each other well because they’d all been up on the front lines of the struggle. Everyone found a person to talk to and argued excitedly about the unlawful arrest. The voices of the seventeen or so men created an uproar in the room, and 122 chapter three

gaining confidence from being together, they were carried away by the urge to lash out in violence. Suddenly Saito curled himself into a ball and without a word began smashing his entire body against the wooden boards of the wall. Biting down tight on his lip, straining until his face turned red, he threw himself against the wall again and again, his neck bent slightly like a fighting bull. “Damn!” When he realized it wasn’t working, he began to kick the wall backward like a horse. Everyone followed suit, hitting and kicking the walls in their own way. Ishida (and he alone) paced back and forth in the middle of the room with his arms folded, occasionally talking to himself. The door opened again. But this time Watari and Suzumoto were called out. What was going on? With two of the leaders gone, the others all felt strangely discouraged. First one, then another stopped pounding the walls, until finally, everyone stopped. Ishida noticed Ryu¯kichi sitting in a corner with both legs thrown out in front of him and his eyes shut. “Even Mr. Ogawa!” he thought, and had the feeling that whatever was going on, it had to be tremendously serious. But at the same time, this familiar presence was something he felt he could depend on. “Mr. Ogawa,” Ishida said, going up to him. Ryu¯kichi looked up. “What is it this time?” Ishida asked. “Well, I don’t know either. I was going to ask Watari.” “The cabinet overthrow that’s supposed to happen today . . .” “I was thinking of that too, except . . . if it was that, it would be enough just to hold us for a day— but . . .” Everyone had gathered around them. They were all furious at having been yanked up and thrown in here without any explanation, treated like so many puppies or kittens. Ryu¯kichi was angry about it too. “Listen, this is how the law sets it out. Between sunset and sunrise, unless it’s been deemed there’s imminent threat to life or limb or property, or there’s evidence of gambling or illegal prostitution, no one can enter a residence against the will of the occupants— against the will of the occupants— all right? So what the hell, they attack us in the middle of the night while we’re sleeping! And arrest us without even telling us the reason! That’s just what the police are there for.” The workers listened intently, shouting “Damn right” and “Bastards” and stamping their feet. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 123

Ryu¯kichi was worked up. “But look, this is what it says in the constitution, right there in the constitution, all right?— It says, the subjects of Japan shall not face unlawful arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, or punishment without due process. So what about us? Can you point to a single instance where they followed proper legal procedure when we were arrested, imprisoned, interrogated?— This is fraud, it’s a pack of lies!” As if they’d been touched on the exposed nerve of a rotten tooth, the truth of this shot through their bodies, caught and writhing in the trap of injustice. “Hey, we should break down those doors right there and make them tell us what’s going on.” “You said it!” another agreed in excitement. “Make a damn lot of noise so it knocks ’em right outta bed!” “No, no. It’ll never work.” Ryu¯kichi shook his head. “Why the hell not?!” Saito turned his shoulders square at Ryu¯kichi and charged up to him, something he was apt to do even at the union office. “Once we’re in here like this, there’s nothing we can do. As a matter of fact, we’d just get ourselves hurt worse in the end.— Everything, our whole movement, has to take place on the outside of those walls, with the support of the masses! Five or ten people putting on a show of being wild and reckless doesn’t amount to a damn thing. That’s the basic rule we can’t ever forget, not even in our dreams.” “So, what, that’s supposed to keep us sitting on our hands here? Theories! Nothing but fancy theories!” Ishida was standing to one side, thinking, here we go again. Four policemen came in. Everyone started, then froze where they were. A short, brawny policeman, face covered in rough stubble, cast his eyes around the inside of the cell. When he finished he said, “You fellas can see this is a police station at least, right? So what the hell’s all the noise for!” The policeman went one by one, pushing everyone back with a jab to the shoulder. When he got to Saito, he drew his shoulder back quickly. The officer’s momentum carried his arms and body forward, sending him teetering. “You son of a bitch!” the officer said in an ominous voice, and in the next moment he had his body pinned up against Saito’s. Saito’s body described a half circle in the air before being thrown down with a dull thud against the clapboard next to Ryu¯kichi. The policeman heaved his shoulders as he breathed, and said in a slightly hoarse voice, “Everyone get this. If there’s any more noise out of you, you better be ready for what’s coming!” The policeman who came in behind read out names from a piece of paper 124 chapter three

and directed only those who’d been called to go out into the hall. The people who were called grumbled as they crouched down to go out through the small side door. There were six left now. Saito lay where he’d fallen. Just as he was trying to raise himself up like an inchworm, the policeman who’d thrown him down kicked him with his boot twice. A minute later more officers came in, one to each of the six men left behind, making it impossible for them to talk to one another. Ryu¯kichi sat under a small window that had been fitted high up in the wall. The light from a dirty, clouded lightbulb blurred everyone’s outlines, creating an atmosphere where everything that moved appeared shadowlike. As five minutes— then ten minutes passed, the light from the bulb, which had appeared yellow at first, seemed to grow strangely faint— and everything went pale. He watched as the room gradually changed to a color like the bottom of a deep sea. There was a splitting pain in one isolated spot somewhere in Ryu¯kichi’s head. Dawn must be coming, he thought to himself. {The cold of dawn sunk steadily into the core of his body, and intermittently, from the corners of the room, there came short, sleep-starved yawns. With a frown, Ryu¯kichi yawned too. But he felt like the dregs of something still lingered, making his head and chest foul and unpleasant.} The compound grew silent. It was a silence frozen solid. Occasionally there was the sound of someone in shoes scurrying down the hall. The footsteps stopped, then a door opened with a sound like cracking ice. There was a rush of confused footsteps, the sound of someone bound by the arms in a loud argument over something as they passed by. When that had finished, however, the somehow abnormal silence of that dawn returned. Somebody let out another small yawn as he passed by outside. “So goddamn tired. Can’t you just let me sleep,” someone murmured from a corner. “It’s dawn already. It’s getting light.” The officers’ faces were puffy and blank from lack of sleep too. Ryu¯kichi was leaning up against the wooden walls, his eyes shut. His body and mind were terribly tired. When he sat still he felt as if he were on a boat rocking broadly and peacefully from side to side. Whenever he was detained and got tired of his endless fantasies, imaginings, and memories, he tried to follow his usual habit of reviewing the important books he’d read, thinking through their questions and trying to link them up logically. He’d also review the ideas he’d put forth that had been debated in the union and the party and try to settle them. He started this now. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 125

He thought about the discussion that had come up at the last study group meeting over Marx’s theory of value and the Austrian School’s theory of marginal utility. He began to think it through from the beginning again, searching for relevant material in the books he’d read. . . . He was completely flustered. As he staggered and stumbled trying to put on his pants, he became conscious of a mounting disgust with himself. But the sound of that saber rattling there, as the policemen waited for him behind that one sliding door, made him panic. Yukiko would hear it; she would hear it any minute now. He knew that if Yukiko heard that sound, her heart would crack. “Daddy’s going on a trip with the people from school.” Yukiko’s big black eyes were looking up at him, wide open and bright. “Will you bring back something nice?” He swallowed hard. “Yeah! Nice things, lots of them.” Just at that moment, Yukiko spun her head toward the sliding door. Ryu¯kichi suddenly pressed his hands to his head. Plink! It was unmistakable, the sound of china cracking. Ah! He gave a suppressed cry, ran up to Yukiko, and hurriedly opened her shirt. Between her two breasts, stuck there like raisins, hung the porcelain dish of her heart. He looked, and there they were— tiny hairline cracks running through it! Ah! Ah! Ah! . . . ! Ryu¯kichi’s cries came in quick succession, as if he were choking. . . . When he opened his eyes, the pale and misty light of dawn had begun to come into the room. Everybody’s posture showed weariness— some had their large heads buried in their chests, others were half lying down, while others just let their hollow gazes float midway down the wooden wall opposite. Ryu¯kichi tried knocking his head lightly against the wall a few times. Part of the left side of his head, just one part, kept throbbing. He could feel the echoes of the half dream he had just had still ominously real within his heart. But by now Ryu¯kichi knew for himself that he could escape from the despair and sentimentality that was the rule when people were shut away in places like this. It was the unbearable pressure of a gloom that had no outlet— that afflicted everyone who was imprisoned and could sometimes even drive them crazy. Ryu¯kichi had seen more than one person withdraw from the movement solely because of it. Of course, Ryu¯kichi himself was also traversing this like a risky tightrope. Every time he was the object of unjust and cruel oppression, each time he suffered, the tips of what was left of his peripheral nervous system were ground down further. He felt that his heart, which had used to twinge at the smallest thing like the nerve crawling out of 126 chapter three

a rotten tooth (delicate in the contemptible sense), was slowly being tempered into steel. For Ryu¯kichi, however, this was literally “a life of continuous torture.” For a person like him who had an intellectual background, this was a training that he necessarily had to undertake as part of the process of truly entering the movement, not with his head, but with his body. And this was never an easy road.— It was like being caught and dragged by the hair along a zigzag course, up the steepest part of the mountain to boot. {Ryu¯kichi understood that the intelligentsia, because of their intermediate class character, tended to end up dangling in the middle, either collapsing before the robust footsteps that advanced from the farm and factory, or if they tried to join that movement, soon having to face the feeling that there was something in their temperament that just didn’t mix, or because of their knowledge, continuing to harbor to a greater or lesser degree, perhaps secretly, a regret and nostalgia for bourgeois culture.— And at the end of the day, he knew that the intelligentsia were often so intensely aware of all these things that they could hypnotize themselves into thinking they were no good, end up with nothing they could do, and then doing nothing. To Ryu¯kichi, struggling with all one’s might to find a reason not to do anything at all in the end was the most ridiculous thing imaginable. He also realized it was dangerous to think about such things too earnestly, as if one were bewitched. It was wrong even to waste that amount of time on such extravagance. Simply finding the next foothold on that steep slope, planting one’s foot and climbing up, was in the end doing something. When he thought of this, those pale people lost entirely in thought seemed strange beyond comprehension. If you’re always caught up in thoughts inside your head, it’s like being a bird that’s strayed into a room— it’s obvious you’re going to hit your head against the four walls. Enough thinking. You thinkers are too busy sorting out all your petty theories to act. No one’s ever built a house out of a theory! By now Ryu¯kichi had gotten used to detention almost to the point of being unconscious of it. Some of his comrades from Tokyo, when they talked about being arrested and going to the penitentiary (quite a high-sounding word!— it was just a prison, after all), would put a bourgeois twist on it and call it “going to the country house.” No matter how committed a fighter in the vanguard of the proletariat, no one was ever happy about going to the country house. But they were comfortable enough with it to be able to talk about it like this, something that for an ordinary person would be a fairly serious thing. If, being in the movement, you were always brooding about the possibility of being sent to prison, you wouldn’t be able to relax enough to sneeze! The movement wasn’t a sport played to pass the time.} — Ryu¯kichi gave a big yawn, as if to shake off the thoughts of Yukiko that t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 127

still clung mysteriously deep in his heart. In another corner Saito was using his fingers like a rake to sweep up his rather overgrown hair. When the time came for the shift change, the six officers who had been assigned to each prisoner left. Among them was one Officer Suda, whom Ryu¯kichi knew because he sometimes came by the house. When he was leaving, he turned to Ryu¯kichi and said, “Hey Ogawa. I’m just about at the end of my rope with all this.— It doesn’t matter if I’m off duty or anything anymore. My body can’t take it.”— His words seemed strangely heartfelt. He seemed too likable to go around kicking and stomping on people like a cop, and Ryu¯kichi had the unexpected feeling that he might just have caught a glimpse of Suda’s real nature. “Take care of yourself, pal,” Ryu¯kichi said to him, without sarcasm. “Take ca-re,” Saito threw out in a parting shot to the officers as they left. When all the other officers had left the room, Suda asked quietly, “Is there anything you want to tell your family?” Ryu¯kichi looked into Suda’s face, startled, and said nothing for a moment. Then he replied, “No— not really. Thanks. . . .” Suda nodded and left. The rounded shoulders of his uniform, bent slightly forward, looked very shabby. “Aah, I wanna smoke,” somebody said half to himself. “Hey, morning’s coming. . . .”

6 On his way to the bathroom, Saito, who was in the same room as Ryu¯kichi, thought he heard someone calling out “Hey.”— It was from inside a cell at the end of the hallway. He stopped walking. “Hey.”— It was Watari’s voice. It was Watari’s face too, pressed up against the inside of the small window. “Watari? It’s me.— What’s going on, you alone?” “Yeah, I’m alone. How’s everyone?” he asked in his usual deep, steady voice. “Everyone’s fine.— Hmm, alone, huh?” Alone. The thought got to him. The policeman escorting Saito had fallen a few paces behind, but was now catching up. “Take care, hear,” Saito said and walked on. Something about this doesn’t look good, he thought to himself as he walked. When Saito got back to the room, he told Ryu¯kichi about it. Ryu¯kichi stood silent, biting his lower lip as he always did. Ishida had run into Watari in the bathroom. They hadn’t been able to talk, but Ishida had seen his expression, solid and calm, hard as steel as always. 128 chapter three

“Have you ever heard of Bancroft?” Ishida asked Saito. “Bancroft? Never heard of him. Is he a communist?” “He’s an actor in the pictures.” “The what? You think I keep fancy stuff like that in my head?” When Ishida met Watari, he’d suddenly been reminded of a picture called Underworld, where Bancroft played a big-time robber. Watari— Bancroft. It was strange how closely the images of these two were joined together in Ishida’s mind. When they put him in solitary confinement Watari thought, just as he had when the union was raided, that the illegal movement he and the others were leading had been discovered. At the moment of the raid he had felt his blood drain right out of his face. That was the only time this had ever happened to him, and he’d soon returned to his usual self. When he finally plumped himself down, especially here in solitary confinement, he began to feel relaxed and expansive, like someone just coming home after a long trip faraway.— For Watari and for everyone involved, the movement was there to lay hold of you every morning, as if it sat there lurking, waiting for you to open your eyes. You had to run around with publicity bills, go visit comrades in factories and union branches all over the city, listen to their reports, consult, and designate responsibilities. Reports came down from the top. They had to be carefully adjusted to the local conditions and carried out in a number of altered forms. Committee meetings had to be held. And the acrimonious debates never stopped. There were mimeographs. Education activity and public addresses.— There was the preparation, the bills, the errands, the speeches, the arrests . . . People in the movement got dragged round and round like their bodies were caught up in a gyroscope. It went on every day without exception, running all the way out to who knew where, like an endlessly repeating decimal.— It was enough to make you say “Enough!” And in every aspect of it, they had to keep their spirits constantly pitched to their peak. But “the country house” had the effect of letting people take a break from that lifestyle. So apart from the sarcastic meaning, “going to the country house” also retained its original bourgeois meaning of rest. Nobody said this last part out loud though. Everyone tacitly understood that just saying that would get you branded as a defeatist. Watari sat with both legs thrown out in front of him, rubbing them from thigh to knee to calf to ankle— then back again— hitting his neck and shoulders with the edge of his hand, taking deep breaths, and yawning great slow yawns. It suddenly occurred to Watari that he hadn’t even had the time to yawn until then. This struck him as funny and he laughed out loud. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 129

For the past four or five days, he had been listening to Suzumoto sing, and at some point the lyrics had sunk in. “By night and by day my cell is dark.” He sang it now in a low voice, enjoying himself, savoring each word, and had a walk around his small, solitary cell. There was nothing on Watari’s mind. You could say that. Sometimes some disappointment did come back to needle him, like how today’s nationwide rallies for the dissolution of the reactionary cabinet couldn’t go forth, and how it would disrupt their movement even if only for a short time.— But in all honesty, and remarkably enough, these thoughts were no more important to Watari at this moment than the phantom thoughts, faint and disconnected, that float up on the verge of sleep only to disappear. Whistling as he walked, Watari tapped and rubbed on the wooden walls with his fingers. He was very much at peace. He didn’t feel the slightest gloom or melancholy at being put in prison. {He had been a stranger to those feelings from the outset. He didn’t have the delicate and refined sensibility of some schoolgirl.} But more important than this was that, for Watari, the understanding that they were thrown into prison precisely because they were defiantly fulfilling their true historical mission was perfectly unified with their suffering, the suffering that made them strike back, that made it impossible for them not to strike back. These were one for him, without need of a theory. He had never experienced his principles and beliefs as things that put a drag on him, as strictures that he needed to keep his impulsive actions in check. He’d never felt indebted to them; there was no heavy burden of conscience. Watari had never once felt that he had to give anything up, or that he was doing what he did for something like social justice. He acted from a raw feeling of hatred, without the slightest affectation. It was fair to say the feeling came straight from his depths. He also had a fierce tenacity. It was a tenacity that had no inside or outside, but stood out plain and bare, sometimes becoming a pillar that others could rely on, but at other times provoking a rabid hostility in the other members of the union. {Kudo¯ resembled Watari in many ways, but unlike Watari, he didn’t always declare his commitment so baldly. For that reason everyone half-jokingly called him “Engels.” They felt he was needed at Watari’s side at all times.— Watari was never of two minds. And there was no way he’d ever change that one mind, or let himself be swayed by other ideas. From the outside, this might have looked like an “iron will.” He always persevered doggedly.} He tossed his head, and impatiently brushed away the hair that kept falling into his face as he walked around alone in the cell. His short, thick legs, bowed outward like a judo player’s, gave the impression that his upper body 130 chapter three

rode on a solid foundation. He had a habit of walking slowly, coming down hard on his heel with each step. The outer edge of the heel was always the first part of his shoes to go, worn down at an angle like an ink stick used by a sloppy calligrapher. As he walked, he wondered how his comrades were getting along. What occupied him most was the thought that some of them might start feeling fear in the face of this kind of oppression. The longer they were here, the worse the situation would get, so he tried to think of a counterstrategy. There was a lot of graffiti on the walls, written with fingernails and pencils and what have you. When he got bored, Watari began picking them out and reading each one carefully. Of course, there were two or three large drawings of male and female genitals just like what you’d find anywhere. “Yes, I’m a thief. You got me.” “The police chief here is fated to die a harsh death.— A phrenologist.” “Fire, Fire, Fire, Flames, Flames.” (The writing in this one looked Futurist.) “If juvenile delinquents are not the people who take life most seriously of all, what pray tell are they? Ha ha.” “Hey socialists. Do somethin’ will ya?” “Why don’t you become a socialist?” Then, below a drawing of male and female genitals facing each other, “The tragicomedy of human life begins with a single prick and ends with one. Ahh.” “I can’t eat the food.” “Warden! A famous worm has attached himself to your daughter.” “You gotta be kidding. Who’s afraid of this place?” “Workers, be strong.” “Notice to those who enter here. Please refrain from writing graffiti as it is unsightly.” “Eat shit.” “For those who’ve been unjustly deprived of their freedom, graffiti constitutes the one place for release and hope. Notice to those who enter here. Write more graffiti.” “Workers are pretty uppity these days.” “You bastard, try saying that again. I’ll stomp you to death. Worker.” “Dear policeman. In the Yamada neighborhood there’s a married woman named Yoshida Kiyo who has three men. She carries condoms and goes around to sleep with them every other day. Please investigate.” “You one of them?” “My wife and children are starving. I hate this society.” “Yeah. Hate it up.” “Get a job.” “Get a job? Think about what a job’ll get you in the world today and then try saying that, you moron.” “Long live socialism.” Watari had vowed to write something every time he was inside. He’d already done it a few times. “I’ve finally landed in the care of The Law. A sad man.” “There are eight cops in Otaru whose wives prostitute for three yen a pop ’cause they’re hard up. Sincerely, The Peeper.” In an open space on the wall next to these, Watari started his graffiti, painstakingly making deep marks with his fingernail. When engrossed in t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 131

this task, he was able to pass a lot of time without noticing it. It was pleasurable work, like painting a picture. He wanted to write as much as he could. He pressed in with his shoulder and set to work. As often happened when he was absorbed in something, his tongue intermittently stuck out to one side, and he devoted himself to carving out each letter. Everybody listen up! The only reason this jail exists is to stick it to us poor folks. The police are like guard dogs bought by big money. They work for the rich with their huge garden walls so big they could be castles. Has a rich man ever been dragged in by the police, even once? But what we have to do now, instead of worrying all the time, is put our strength together and destroy the good-for-nothing rich and their pawns the authorities, and the good-for-nothing government along with them. Worrying only wastes tears. Spend all your time sobbing— you end up getting it just the same. Hey brothers! First thing, let’s join hands. And hold on tight. If the police think they can tear our solidarity apart with their blunt old sabers, let them try! We workers work and work and work until we’re about to pitch forward and bite the dirt. But we’re still poor. You ever hear such garbage? A world for working people— a world of workers and peasants. A world that’s kicked the shit out of rich people who live off interest and slash our wages for the hell of it. We’ll build that society. Hold out your hand. Grab my hand tight. Yes, you! And you, too! All of you, everyone! He worked at it for some time, and when he read back over it he was satisfied. With his hands thrust into the pockets of his corduroy trousers, he whistled as he got up close, and then backed away to see. Dawn was coming. When the lights went out, however, the room suddenly darkened until his eyes adjusted. He wasn’t able to see the graffiti on the wall. The pale dawn light was split into four by the window frame, and it came in at an angle of thirty or forty degrees. Watari suddenly let out a big fart. Following it up, he bore down and farted a few times in a row as he walked around. Watari had bad hemorrhoids, so quite a few came out. They stunk and lingered so that even he got disgusted. “Aw, shit! Aw, shit!” He raised his leg and farted again. 132 chapter three

It was probably around eight o’clock. The lock on the entrance clanked. The door opened and a policeman without a saber entered the room, his splittoed socks carelessly stuck in his straw sandals. “Out.” “I’m not a zoo animal.” “Idiot.” “Letting me go home? Hey, thanks.” “It’s interrogation time.” No sooner had he said that than he suddenly shouted, “God! What a stink!” and ran out into the hall. When he saw this, Watari laughed out loud. It was so funny, so, so funny that he couldn’t help himself. He bent over double and went into fits of laughter. Why the thing should be so funny, he couldn’t have said, but it was so ridiculous that he just couldn’t help himself.

7 Another five or six workers were brought in over the course of the day of the fifteenth. The room got too small to hold them, so everyone was moved into the open space in the martial arts training room. Half the room was tatami, and half was plain wood boards. Three sides of the room were made up almost completely of glass windows, so the light from outside at first dazzled the men who’d come into it from out of the dark. There was a large stove installed in the middle of the room. Most of the people there knew one another by sight, so they got to talking about different things when they gathered around the stove. There were four policemen minding them. They too came up to the stove and sat with their legs spread wide. At first everyone was quiet, ill at ease with the policemen there. But as they began to get bored, they started talking little by little, keeping half an eye on the police. They expected to be reprimanded at any minute and made to stop. But actually the police joined in, nodding and agreeing with the conversation. They were bored too. As the sun was going down, they let everyone outside. The prisoners filed out of the back entrance in a single line, did a half circle around the compound, and were led back in through the front entrance. It was the revolving door tactic to keep them locked up legally. Everyone’s face suddenly grew anxious. As they filed back into the training room, they turned to each other, asking what was going on. Now they all began to sense that the present detention was for something other than what they had thought. After drinking some salty broth with no solid food in it, and a rice-barley mixture that was t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 133

dry and crumbly and black as pitch, everyone gathered around the stove again. But the conversation had lost all its spark. Just after eight, Kudo¯ was called out of the room. Everyone stood there shocked, as they watched his receding form. The night deepened, and as the cold sank in, it sent shivers up the men’s backs where they stood near the cheap charcoal stove as it smoldered and smoked. Ryu¯kichi disappeared into one of the darkened corners to take out a padded kimono. Ishida followed him. “Mr. Ogawa,” Ishida said in a low voice, “I didn’t know if I should bring this up in front of the others so I was keeping it quiet.” Ryu¯kichi’s stomach started to hurt again, but he furrowed his brow and pushed it out of his mind. “What?” he replied. Somebody’s footsteps crunched along outside the training room. — It was a little while ago. Ishida had gone to the bathroom. Since they were being kept in different cells, the single bathroom they all had to share was the one place they could see one another— and, if they were lucky, talk. Whenever they went, they hoped they’d be able to take advantage of it. When Ishida went in, there was a thick, broad-shouldered man, his back turned toward him, washing his face in front of the long horizontal mirror that hung on the opposite wall. At the time, Ishida was thinking absentmindedly about something, maybe life on the outside. He went up beside the man and, suddenly— he, the man, lifted his head. Ishida’s gaze had been casting about aimlessly but now suddenly locked onto him. “Ah!” Ishida had definitely let out a cry. Something swept over him from head to toe, faster than the eye could see. He felt his body go as light as a shred of paper. Supporting himself on the side of the sink with one hand, he reflexively brushed his own eye and cheek with the other. A face!?— Could that be a face? It was swollen up a dark purple like a rotten eggplant, literally like the poisoned ghost Oiwa’s, and, what’s more, it was Watari’s! “I got worked over good,” he said, pointing at his own face with his finger. He gave a smile. A smile! Ishida stood there unable to say a word. He felt a spot below his heart grow ticklish and then begin to tremble. “But they didn’t get to me at all.” “Yeah. . . .” “I’m counting on ya to make sure the others don’t get creeped out.” That was all they’d had the chance to say at the time. “I’m convinced there’s something big going on,” Ishida said in a low voice, sounding angry. 134 chapter three

“Yeah . . . I think I might have some idea of what’s going on. But still, the critical thing is fear,” Ryu¯kichi said as he looked over toward his comrades and the policemen around the stove. “That may be true. But we also need to put a stop to the notion that to be a real fighter you have to put on a big show and kick up a storm right here at the police station. Behaving well at the police station’s hardly a sign of being paralyzed by fear.” “That’s true. Sure.” “That Saito,” Ishida said and looked over at Saito, who stood near the stove, gesticulating as he talked. “A while back, he was saying if you’re taken down to the police station and you’re the guy that gets the lightest punishment, then you damn well better hang yourself or something to make up for the shame or otherwise you don’t count as a fighter for the proletariat!” “. . . Uh-huh. But, you know, everyone in the movement feels a little bit like that . . . it’s a, it’s a kind of sentimentality. When you’re in the situation, you really do feel a little guilty toward your comrades. But of course, that’s something we always have to take every opportunity to correct.” Ishida looked at Ryu¯kichi. He was about to add something, but then stopped, and seemed to be thinking. “That said, though,” Ryu¯kichi continued. “It’s a pretty complicated thing. Because I mean if you tell them they’re caught up in infantile leftism or something like that right to their faces, you run the risk of pulling their passion right out by the roots. And that’s the source of it all. Granted the two are separate issues, though.” Ishida looked down at his fingernails and began to walk around the area where they stood. “Strikes me that the important thing is to take that passion as it is, and channel it along the correct course.— In the end it’s passion that’s really the biggest and most fundamental element, I think.” Something suddenly occurred to Ryu¯kichi and he stopped speaking. “There’s a saying that goes, without revolutionary theory, revolutionary action is impossible. You know it too, it’s that famous one. But as far as I’m concerned, that by itself’s nowhere near enough. There’s something big that underlies those words that’s left out because it’s so obvious, and that’s passion more than anything.” “But a passion that fizzles out like fireworks isn’t going to make it. A cow simply lumbers on, never giving up no matter what happens, and I think that that’s the passion we need, especially for our movement that demands such tenacious effort over the long haul.” “You’re right,” said Ryu¯kichi. “But passion is something that can be ext h e qu e st ion of re a lism 135

pressed in all kinds of different ways depending on the person. Our movement isn’t something you can do with two or three of your good friends. So on that, I think we have to be careful to foster a larger feeling— a feeling that ties all those things up tight into something higher— that binds them so all the differences can fuse together as far as possible. Speaking from the standpoint of the individual, that will always have unpleasant aspects, but it would be crazy to get tripped up just by that. There are some things about Watari that I don’t like either. And not just Watari. But I would never split from him because of it. If I did, we could never have an organized movement.” “Right, I see.” “We’re going to run into all kinds of difficulties from now on. When we do, it’s just this kind of thing that might cause a rift more serious than we expect. We really need to be taking these hidden issues more seriously, the ones that don’t look like they’re of much concern at all.” “Right, right.” Rather than nod, Ishida repeatedly muttered his assent. When the two went back to the stove, everybody was swapping dirty stories with the policemen. There were two or three workers saying they didn’t have any idea why they’d been brought in. From the outset they’d acted so nervous and looked so crushed that you couldn’t bear to look at them. But now they were laughing at the dirty stories, and sometimes pitching in. Whenever the conversation broke off and people were quiet, their faces went momentarily dark, as if they had come under shadows cast by running clouds. The thing Saito had been talking and gesturing about was female genitals. He was a good storyteller and he’d drawn everyone in. When he finished talking he said, “Say Ishiyama, could you spare a smoke,” and reached out his hand to a fat, balding policeman who’d been listening intently. Heh, heh, heh. With a vulgar laugh, Officer Ishiyama pulled a bent and crumpled Golden Bat from the inside pocket of his jacket and gave it to Saito. “Hey, thanks a million. Thanks a million. I think another story might be in order, this one with a little more detail.” He flashed Ishiyama a cunning glance and smiled. Saito carefully straightened the cigarette on the palm of his hand and then wiped it with his spit, wetting it so it would last longer. “No sir, wouldn’t want to waste it. I’ll take my time with her later,” he said and put the cigarette behind his ear. “— Isn’t there anybody who can just get things moving here?” someone in the corner said to himself. “. . .” Everyone tensed up at these words, feeling as if their own hearts had been caught in a flashlight beam. “I got dragged in straight from where I was working on the docks. I keep 136 chapter three

thinking how worried my family’s got to be. If I don’t work, the wife and kids don’t eat.” “Hey, it’s the same for all of us.” “. . . I’m up to here with this movement. I’m scared shitless.”— The words had an unusual immediacy. The person uttering them was a worker who had been in the union for quite a long time. “What gives with you?!” Saito spoke up. The worker clammed up at this rebuke. “Well?” Saito pressed, displaying his anger plainly. “Easy, easy.” Ishida put a hand on Saito’s back, indicating the policemen with his eyes. The worker’s name was Kimura, and though he had been with the union for a long time, he hadn’t done anything much to get noticed. He was always talking about how his work at the warehouse was too hard, how he’d heard that the labor union was there to improve the treatment of workers like him and that’s how he’d joined up. But getting dragged down to the police station caused him all kinds of trouble, and besides, he couldn’t understand why they had to go and do so many “bad things” anyway. He thought it was awful. He thought that a labor union should be able to work things out without resorting to stuff like that. He must’ve had the wrong idea. If this is what it is, he thought, he’d have to quit at some point. He’d just been carried along with the tide and got to this point without realizing it. Whenever something went badly, it immediately became an excuse and he’d refuse to budge from where he’d fallen off the path. In his work for the union as well, he wasn’t active in the least, only doing the tasks he was assigned, like a puppet. It had happened around the time of the general election. There were allegations that someone was tearing down the opposition candidate’s posters, and someone from the Worker-Farmer Party was going to have to be sacrificed to the police over it. Watari had asked Kimura to go and was giving him a lot of advice. “You might get beat up a little but just bear with it,” he said. “No way!” Kimura put an end to it with two words. Completely unprepared for such an answer, Watari gave a relexive “Huh?” and fell silent, staring Kimura in the face. “If I do that and the police hold me even one or two days, nobody eats, see? No way!” “You don’t understand anything about the movement we’re all in.” “It’s not like it is for you leaders. When you get taken to the police you guys get famous, you get a big name and all the glory.” Watari sucked in his breath and, unable to find any words, went silent. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 137

Ryu¯kichi, who was there at the time had thought, “This is getting bad. If the leadership and the rank and file start squaring off over things like this, we’re in trouble.” “If that’s the case, well, we can ask somebody else.” There was nothing else Ryu¯kichi could say.— For Kimura, the present incident provided the perfect pretext to quit the movement. If he got out of this one, he’d make a clean break of it. He’d already decided. “What a spineless rat.” Saito was remembering the episode with Kimura from long ago. He turned away from him deliberately. “Kimura, union members really have to act like union members. If all of us can’t keep it together, we’ll be in trouble, especially with this kind of thing going on. Least that’s how I see it.” Ryu¯kichi rubbed the front of his thighs, where they were getting itchy from the warmth of the stove. Kimura, however, stayed silent. Ryu¯kichi suddenly realized that even in their numbers, it was people like this who made up the core of the movement, even in a left-wing union known for its literal-minded militancy. The thing couldn’t be brushed off so easily. Shibata, who had recently entered the union on Kimura’s introduction, was hugging his knees and looking around at everyone. He slept on the same futon with Kimura, so he’d heard him talk straight from the heart about how crushed and defeated he felt. At first Shibata himself had felt defeated too. Getting attacked while everyone was sleeping at the union had drained the life from him. But he’d always thought that these were things he would just have to get over. He saw himself as inexperienced and insignificant in the face of them, so he tried even harder than the others. As a result he always paid careful attention to Watari’s, Kudo¯’s, Saito’s, and Ryu¯kichi’s every move, trying to discipline himself to such an extent that he might even have seemed too self-conscious. The present affair was like a merciless filtering for many different people. It was very sad to watch comrades slip through the holes one after another. In the end though, it was probably a necessary process.—No matter how much of a latecomer or youngster I am, I’ll be damned if I let myself fall through, Shibata thought. The talk around the stove languished for a while in the eddy churned up by the exchange. But then from no one in particular, the stories about women started again. At eight, they spread their beds out on the tatami and lay down two to a bed. Sleep was the one pleasure they were free to enjoy. If they could sleep, that is. There was a rummaging sound as everyone loosened their belts and took off their socks at once. 138 chapter three

“I’m gonna get to sleep and have me a dream,” someone spoke up. “A dream of prison, I bet. Can’t wait.” “Shit.” The others snickered. Like students on a school trip who had just gotten into their room, they stayed animated for a while. Occasionally one of the policemen shushed them. The top trim of their quilts had the grime of dozens of people stuck to it and felt like dried squid, cold and repugnant against the men’s cheeks. “Aaaaaah. What bliss,” came a voice muffled by a quilt. “Hell’s bliss?” Then from way over in another spot, “Need a nii-ice dream.” “Get to sleep now, sleep.” “You mean like when I’m with a woman?” “Who the hell brings that up in a place like this?” “Aaah. But I sure want to.” “Idiot. Who the hell is that?” “Who’s the idiot . . .” “Get to sleep now, sleep.” Words like these popped up here and there, each muttered in its own fashion. Then they gradually petered out, the gaps between them winning over. After twenty minutes passed, there were only the sounds of people talking in their sleep, as if they’d suddenly remembered something.— Then it was quiet. Outside the training room was a lonely street with many unlit stretches. There weren’t many people out, but sometimes the sound of wooden sandals could be heard, squeaking on the frozen snow of the road. Inside the police station, there was the voice of someone calling far away, but it sounded like it was coming from even farther. “Can you sleep?” Ryu¯kichi couldn’t sleep, so he tried speaking to Saito who was sleeping with him quietly. Saito didn’t move. He was asleep. I guess he’s already asleep, Ryu¯kichi thought. As he did he had to smile to himself because this was so much like Saito. Ryu¯kichi could still feel the pit of his stomach throbbing (though it wasn’t so bad), and as he rubbed and pressed it with one hand, he thought about many things. . . . “Hey there. Hey.”— Who could that be? he thought. And just when I was in the middle of reading such a difficult passage. He could feel irritation surging up. “Hey. Hey.” Someone grabbed his shoulder and yanked. Shit! Ryu¯kichi opened his eyes as he tried to turn over. He was terribly sleepy. He opened his eyes wide, as if he were staring at a double-exposed photograph, t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 139

struggling to fix the boundary between dream and reality. There. Right there in front of his eyes was the dirty, stubble-covered face of a large policeman. “Hey. Hey. Get up. Time for interrogation.” He gave a start. His body was half sitting up before he realized it. It was an old trick of theirs to drag you in when you were half asleep. The clank of the lock made an ominous sound in the quiet surroundings, and Ryu¯kichi followed the policeman out. Thirty minutes passed. A policeman brought Kudo¯ back in, looking frightful with all the blood gone from his face. But as soon as he’d gathered together the things he’d left in the training room, the policeman hurried him back out. In that instant, Kudo¯ looked around over everybody sleeping as if he had something he wanted to say to them. But he turned around, presenting his short, stout back to them, and went out.— The lock came down with a clang. The sound of the two men’s mismatched footsteps could be heard in the hall for a long time. The sound of people turning over, sighing, muttering in their sleep, bubbled up like methane gas from a swamp.

8 In the space of a week, the police rounded up labor movement activists, workers, even concerned intellectuals indiscriminately, over two hundred of them, as if they were pigs. Even someone’s younger brother who came to deliver a care package and had no relation to the movement at all was hauled in, punched up, and held for a week. But that was barely one one-hundredth of what happened. The interrogations began. In Watari’s case, even if it hadn’t been for this Communist Party incident, the police were out to get him by fair means “or foul.” First they tried to pry into the legal activities of the party and the union like a wedge and draw Watari out. It was something they always did. For his part, Watari was tearing around in the middle of it all just like a panther. Having snared him there, the police relished the chance to “half kill the bastard.” Watari wouldn’t utter a single word in response to the questioning. “Do whatever you want,” he said. “Meaning what.” The chief judicial officer and the agent from the special police were starting to get frustrated. “Meaning whatever you want.” “We’ll torture you.” 140 chapter three

“What’s a guy gonna do?” “Think you’re playing it like loyal Amanoya? Don’t go turning blue on us later.” “You guys don’t see too well, do you. Thinking I’ll talk because you torture me, or maybe things’ll give if you half kill me? You oughta know by now if I’m the bargaining type.” Now they were really frustrated. They thought, “It is Watari, after all . . .” and were inwardly troubled because he might actually mean it. The reason? If they couldn’t get even a single word out of this tough guy of the Communist Party for their “record of statement” (and because he was a tough guy they couldn’t kill him quite yet), it was their necks that would be on the line.— It was this above all that concerned them. Watari was stripped naked, and without so much as a word, they laid into him from behind with a bamboo sword. They beat him with all their strength, so that the sword whistled and whined and the tip bent backward with the force of the swings. He grunted, marshaling all his strength to the outer surface of his body, and endured. After thirty straight minutes of it, he lay on the floor curled up on himself like a piece of dried cuttlefish held over a fire. The last strike sent a groan through his body. Like a poisoned dog, his arms and legs were rigid and stuck up in the air. He shook with convulsions. And then he was unconscious. But from his extended experience of torture, Watari had grasped something similar to those masters of ki, who could calmly pass needles through their arms and grab hot tongs. Torture! When he felt the anxiety setting in— maybe because he’d naturally come to understand the fighting spirit that came with it— it didn’t get to him so much anymore. In this place the cruel tortures inflicted on the bandit Ishikawa Goemon and Amanoya Rihei weren’t just centuries-old legends. They were happening just as they had, right now. Of course, there was this, too. Article 135 of the criminal code: “All suspects shall be treated considerately and decently as a matter of principle, and must be provided the opportunity to make statements of the facts to support their case.” (!!) When they threw water on him he regained consciousness. This time their strategy was to lure him out. “Torture me all you want, you’ll just be making yourselves hungry.— I’m not saying a damn thing.” “We already know everything. Just spit it out and we’ll go easier on you.” “If you know everything, that’s perfect then. You don’t have to get in a knot about my crimes.” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 141

“Watari, if that’s the way it is, we’re in a spot.” “Yeah, what about me?— I have an immunity to torture.” Three or four of the torture specialists (!) were standing behind him. “You little shit!” One of them came up from behind, wrapped his arm around Watari’s neck and began to choke him. “It’s all because of this one little shit that Otaru’s all stirred up.” Watari lost consciousness once more. Whenever Watari went to the police station, he was forced to smile bitterly that people called these guys “officer” and looked up to them because they protected the “peace,” “happiness,” and “justice” of people in town. The root of bourgeois education lay in this methodology— the Law of Illusion. Their skill at flipping around who was on what side was really something to admire, and they spared no effort at maintaining it. “Hey, you listening? You just keep it up with your immunity to torture, we got word from Tokyo we can just kill you if we feel like it.” “Damn, finally some good news. No shit.— Kill me then. If you were telling me that’d be the end of the proletarian movement, I might even give it some thought, but it’ll just keep on coming no matter what. And that right there is why I have no regrets.” Next Watari was stripped and hung from the ceiling so his toes were two or three inches from the ground. “Hey, how about we take things easy this time?” Below Watari, a policeman with a third degree in judo tapped his dangling leg with the back of his hand. “Don’t push that easy stuff off on me.” “Not too bright, huh? This here’s a new technique.” “Whatever you got.” “Right.” But for Watari, this time it did get to him. They stabbed his body with thick needles like a tatami maker’s. With each stab, he felt his body shrink down to the size of a period, like he’d been touched by a powerful jolt of electricity, he twisted and turned as he hung, clamped his jaws together, and screamed. “Kill me, ki-ll me! Ki-ll me!” It hurt much worse than getting beaten with kendo swords, open hands, iron bars, or ropes. It was when he was being tortured most of all that Watari felt a pure, unreasoned resistance rise up within him like a flame against those “E-vil!!” capitalists. He believed that torture itself was the most direct expression of the pattern of capitalist oppression and exploitation of the proletariat. Whenever Watari began to waver, or feel his own confidence in his fighting 142 chapter three

Figure 5. Page from “March 15, 1928” Description of Watari’s torture from the first published version in Battle Flag (December 1928, p. 29). Xs, blank spaces, and parenthetical notes indicate preemptive editorial censorship. The page begins with the sentence “Now Watari was stripped and hung from the ceiling” and concludes with “Hey, we’re not here to impress you.”

spirit wane, he always thought about torture. When he went home after an unjust detention, dizzy just from trying to walk because of the torture he’d sustained, he would become so vividly conscious of class hatred that he felt it swelling up inside him. Especially to Watari and the like, it seemed that the intellectuals and students who came into the movement with the sense of “justice” they’d learned from the theories of Marx and Lenin, couldn’t begin to have this feeling, even in their dreams. “Can theory breed real hatred that swarms up like lice?!” Watari and Ryu¯kichi had had huge debates over it many times. With each stab of the needle, Watari’s body leapt. “Why the hell do we have nerve endings?” Somewhere in his mind, Watari was conscious that his head had flopped forward limply and his teeth were still clenched.— “Wake up!” were the last words he heard. He died three times. He regained consciousness for the third time. He could feel his body was unsteady like a scrap of paper, and his mind glazed like a layer of skin had spread over it. From here on out it would be “devil take it.” Because when his mind went off key like this, it worked like an anesthetic against the blows. The chief pulled out a chart of the Communist Party that the police had made. “Now look what we’ve got here,” he announced, trying to read Watari’s expression. “Wow. Z’amazing. Lookat zat— ” He spoke like he was drunk. “Hey, we’re not here to impress you.” The specialists were almost out of tricks. In the end, the police punched him up good and kicked him with shoes that had metal nailed to their soles. This went on for an hour without stopping. Watari’s body rolled around loosely like a sack of potatoes. His face had turned into Oiwa’s. After three hours of continuous torture, Watari was finally thrown back into his cell like so much pig offal. He lay like that until the next morning, groaning and not moving. Kudo¯ was questioned next. Kudo¯ handled the interrogation in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn’t put on any heroics for this kind of thing. He was able to respond in a variety of ways, giving more or holding back, controlling himself to suit the situation as it presented itself. The torture used on Kudo¯ was basically the same as it had been for Watari. But the thing that suddenly made him leap was when they stood him up barefoot and, with all their strength, kicked his heels with the toes of their boots from behind. The pain shot all the way to the crown of his head. He 144 chapter three

circled around the interrogation room two or three times as they did this. His legs went numb like pestles from the ankles down. The blood from his heels painted a circle in the middle of the room. As Kudo¯ shrieked (his voice was always like that), he leapt around the room like a scrawny horse. He finally sat down, completely limp. When that was finished, they took his hands, put them faceup on the table, and stabbed them with pencils with all their might. Then, as they often did, they put the pencils between his fingers and squeezed them closed.— When such techniques are carried out in succession, the intense shocks following one after another cause the nerves to lapse into an extreme state of exhaustion, and the person enters a momentary state of dementia (!). In that state, they were like an overstretched spring, unable to put up any resistance, and liable to fall into a careless “devil may care” attitude. That was when the police would pounce and extract any sort of confession they needed. It was the same approach in Suzumoto’s case too. He was interrogated immediately after them. In some sense, he underwent an even more dangerous torture. He wasn’t punched or kicked, but suffocated eight times (eight times!) in a row. From start to finish, the police doctor (!) held on to his wrist to monitor his pulse. They choked him and he fainted. They resuscitated him immediately and, not losing even a minute, suffocated him again, then resuscitated, and on and on. It went on eight times. By the eighth time, Suzumoto was staggering like someone completely and utterly drunk. He was perfectly numb. He couldn’t even tell if he had a head or not. The chief and special police and police torture specialists, the room and the instruments, kept fragmenting like an expressionist painting, and then coming back together. The interrogation proceeded with him in this half-conscious state of mind, like a child gripped by the shoulders and shaken by an adult. This is dangerous, Suzumoto thought. But he couldn’t even tell how he was answering each of their questions. Sata was put in a cell where there were four or five other men who’d been brought in for various things. It was on the outermost row of cells, with the interrogation room set off slightly, diagonally across from it. As the police were bringing him in, he had tried to convince himself by repeating over and over in his head that they were being treated like this because they were defiantly fulfilling their grand historical destiny. But his feelings said the exact opposite. He was completely done in. When he entered his cell, he saw his life go irreversibly dark. The feeling was like the moment someone covers his face with his hands and thinks Ahh! as he goes hurtling toward a cliff in a car he can’t control. Facing the complete finality of t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 145

that feeling, all the Lenin and Marx he’d ever read vanished. There’s no going back. There’s no going back. That single thought wrapped him up completely in multiple layers, like a kelp roll. And the cell, indistinguishable from the inside of a garbage can, darkened his feelings of despair by a factor of two or three. The room stayed uniformly murky, afternoon, morning, and night, and in the middle of it lay two tatami mats, dampened through and through like scraps of rag. It seemed that if you lifted them up, bugs and maggots and sticky lumps of rotten garbage would come wriggling out from underneath. The air was oppressive and unmoving and smelled like a toilet. It was air like the stagnant water of a ditch, and it seemed to leave a nauseating scum behind when one breathed. Though never on the front lines, he had always participated faithfully along with the others in understanding revolutionary theory and putting it into practice. But because he worked at a bank, he couldn’t help being different from workers who had lower living standards, in that their temperaments were born of such different environments and lifestyles. Normally he wasn’t aware of this. So long as he was working, such differences presented no obstacles to the movement at all.— But not even two days had passed before the air in the cell began taking a heavy toll on his refined body. He sometimes felt sick to his stomach and retched. But he never threw anything up. He stopped going to the toilet in the morning too, as he had always done at home. The crude diet and lack of exercise brought changes to his body quickly. On the morning of the fourth day, he forced himself to the toilet. He strained for thirty minutes but all that came out in the end were three parched turds the size of mouse tails. At the detention center he sat off by himself, like an island. He was at a loss as to how the others (at least seemingly) could talk so freely and easily with one another about all sorts of things while being in a place like this. Yet Sata soon got tired of sitting still in one place. He tried standing up and began to walk aimlessly around the room. But when he happened to lean up against a wall, he ended up staying that way for hours, lost in thought. He thought about his mother, who was undoubtedly more grief stricken than he. Couldn’t they have had that “modest but happy life” she talked about? But now he’d trampled on it, and as for the rest of his own long life? Prison and bitter struggle! He thought he could see it all too clearly— no chance of rest, driven forward, stumbling, forced to live a life of darkness. It even occurred to him that he’d stuck his nose pointlessly into something that wasn’t his business. Like a sponge that had soaked up its fill of water, his heart was drowning in sentimentality. 146 chapter three

There was a man nearing sixty who’d been a sneak thief for thirty years and had sharp eyes. “You poor fellow. This is no place for people like you,” he said. Sata’s heart swelled suddenly at these words, and he almost burst into tears. There was a part of him that didn’t even want to push the feelings down, but instead indulge in them and let himself drown in melancholy. If there hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it. As Sata got over some of the initial shock— which had come suddenly and been too hard on him, he began to make his way past such thoughts. If there wasn’t some sacrifice, there was no way their movement could carry on. This kind of experience was an invaluable lesson for those who just sat around not lifting a finger while letting themselves get all worked up about a world that was to appear fully formed right out of the blue after the revolution (obviously carried out by someone else).— Sata had regained enough poise to appreciate such things. But the middle-class ideas about the way of the world never stopped surfacing. If you just mind your own business and keep your nose out of other people’s things, you can have a nice modest life. When workers joined the movement, they did so because they were suffering, not for anybody else. It was something they did for themselves. But for Sata and the like, the thought that it was all “for the (other) people,” was like a dog straining to get loose of its chain, it would try to come bounding out the moment you let down your guard. Sata had been aware of the danger for ages, so when he realized he was about to slip into it, he was surprised at his own blasphemy. But Sata was unable to hold steady to this way of thinking. Every day, even in the course of a single day, the two opposing feelings came to him in turns. As they did, he became depressed, and then cheerful. Forced to stay in a single room for such an awfully long time without a thing to do, there was nothing else for him to think about. It was night, probably after twelve. The juvenile delinquent who slept next to Sata was shaking him awake. “Listen . . . listen. Can you hear it?” In the darkness, the voice coming from right next to him was strangely subdued. Sata didn’t know what he was talking about at first. “Keep still.” They both held their breath and strained with their whole bodies to hear. Their ears hummed loudly as they do late at night. Sata slowly came out of his sleep. “You can hear it, can’t you?” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 147

From far away, the sound of bamboo swords (it was definitely the sound of bamboo swords) came to his ears, as if someone was practicing kendo. Not only that— coming into the gaps between that was the sound of someone’s voice. But he couldn’t make it out clearly. “There, there . . . there, see.” The juvenile delinquent pointed out every time the sound got louder. “What is it?” Sata asked, keeping his voice low too. “Torture.” “. . . !?” He suddenly felt like a steel bar had lodged in his throat. “Listen closer. See, there, there, that’s the voice they’re wringing out of the guy on the receiving end. See.” Sata didn’t know what the voice was saying, but after hearing it just once, it sank straight into his heart, an indescribable cry of anguish that he knew he would never forget for the rest of his life. As he strained his ears to hear, his body began to quake as it did late at night watching a house fire, with the ominous sound of the fire bell ringing in the background. The very roots of his teeth chattered. His hand was clutching the edge of the futon without his realizing it. “Got it, I got it! Sounds like he’s saying ‘Ki-ll me, ki-ll me.’” “‘Ki-ll me’?” “Yeah, listen close.” They held their breath again and listened. From far away the cry came thin and piercing like the highest note of a violin, pricking their eardrums like the tip of a needle. Ki-ll me! Ki-ll me! That was it, that was definitely what he was saying. “See, see?” “. . .” Sata covered his ears with his hands and buried his face in the sticky futon that reeked of sweat. In his ears and the depths of his brain, however, he still heard that cry. After a while it stopped. They heard the sound of the door to the interrogation room opening, and both put their faces up to the small window to look out into the hallway. There were two people coming toward them, one of them being dragged, his footsteps confused. Under the dim electric lights, they couldn’t tell who it was. In the silence of the hallway they heard the ungh, ungh, ungh, of groaning, and a low but strong breath countering it. As they passed in front of the cell, they could hear the policeman’s voice, “You’re pretty stubborn.” That night Sata remained awake with his head throbbing, unable to sleep no matter what he did. 148 chapter three

Just the thought of torture made the flesh of his back ache as if it had cramped up. His kneecaps wobbled of their own accord, and he felt the urge to collapse right there in a heap. His throat went instantly bone dry. About two days passed. Sata was woken up by the policeman on guard. This is it! he thought. He was just about able to stand up. But his body was like a log and refused to respond to his will. He tried to say something to the policeman, but his jaw simply fell open and infant-like syllables poured out uncontrollably, “Bubabababa . . .” The policeman gave him a puzzled look and stopped the smoke rings he had been blowing. “What’s going on?” he asked. The investigation of Ryu¯kichi had begun with the three arrests while he was still working at the school. But it had seemed to him then that the police were more embarrassed than he was. They didn’t call him things like “boy” and “bastard.” It was always “sir.” They even acted as if Ryu¯kichi might be able to teach them something. That began to change, however, when Ryu¯kichi left the school and began to appear publicly as part of the movement. Sometimes they got confused and called him “sir” and “boy” together, but they were not subtle about their change in attitude. Even so, the police were far more civil toward him as an intellectual than they were to people like Watari, Suzumoto, and Kudo¯. Ryu¯kichi could only smile sheepishly about it. Watari had once said, “Mr. Ogawa, you’d be even more promising if you’d get properly beat up by the police just once.” Watari always went straight to the point about such things. “I’m more sensitive than you so it’s the same thing in the end.” Up until now he had never gotten more than a few slaps to scare him. But with this incident, the police were eyeing Ryu¯kichi almost the same way they were Watari and the others. And it hit him incredibly hard. There was a pulley set into a beam that ran across the ceiling of the interrogation room, and a rope hung down from either side of it. To one end of the rope, they tied Ryu¯kichi’s legs, and hoisted him into the air upside down. They then pounded his head into the floor, using him like a pile driver. With every blow the blood rushed downward like a torrent from a broken dam, until his head was full to bursting. His head, his face, were literally like a ball of fire. His eyes swelled up bright red and bulged out. “Help!” he screamed. After that, they stuck his hands in boiling water. Ryu¯kichi knew a number of comrades who had been killed by the merciless torture of the police. Some directly, some from the same circles, others he knew from newspapers and magazines. When their wretched corpses t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 149

were handed over, the police would say, as a rule, that the man had committed suicide or something to that effect. Even when everyone knew there was no way that could be true, who was there to hear their pleas? The courts? Appearances aside, the courts were thick as thieves with the police too. No matter what happened to you inside a police station, there was nothing you could do about it. What an interesting state of affairs. “This next one’s the star of the show,” the torture specialist was saying. Ryu¯kichi listened from inside his spinning head. Ryu¯kichi’s outer clothes were then taken off and he was beaten with three pieces of rope tied together. His whole body shrank from the sting. The ends of the ropes snapped across his chest full force and bit into his flesh. It was this that took the heaviest toll. His knitted winter undershirt was shredded into narrow strips.— He was staggering back down the hall, half held up on a policeman’s shoulder, barely able to support a body that seemed more than half no longer his own, when it occurred to him that the way he had thought about and feared torture, and made himself miserable to the core imagining its cruelty, was, now that he’d actually experienced it, nothing at all like he’d imagined it. When he finally found himself there— thinking, now it’s here, he realized the human body had a mysterious obstinacy to it. People would say, kill me, kill me, but actually at that moment, cruelty and suffering weren’t the issue at all. What there was was tension, stretched to its extreme, yes, its extreme limit. “People don’t die so easily.” That was the truth of it, Ryu¯kichi thought. But when he was put back in his cell together with the good-fornothing transients and beggars— or rather, when he suddenly realized that that was where he was, he fainted clean away. The next morning Ryu¯kichi developed a high fever. The elderly policeman minding him cooled his forehead with a damp rag. He talked in his sleep the whole time. He recovered by the following day and one of the good-fornothing transients said, “Your ramblings were really something.” Ryu¯kichi gave a start and tried to keep the man from repeating everything by going into a coughing fit. “What? What?” He was panicking that he might have said something foolish with the police minder there. Ryu¯kichi had read somewhere in a book that other countries had some ludicrous method of injecting you with a fluid during interrogation that would make you sleep-talk and used that to extract evidence. “‘Look, people don’t die so easily.’— Then a little later the same thing again, ‘People don’t die so easily.’ Don’t know what it was about but you just rambled on like that dozens of times.” Ryu¯kichi had been tensing his shoulders and holding his breath uncon150 chapter three

sciously, and now that he relaxed he suddenly let out an unnaturally loud laugh. But the laughter shook his body and he shouted, “Ow! Ow! Ow! . . .” in spite of himself. In the martial arts training room, people were saying that Saito was starting to go mad from being tortured. When Saito was questioned and the usual torture was about to start, he suddenly leapt up with a “Waah!!” and began running around the room flapping his arms and legs and body every which way, shouting “Waah, waah, waah!!” The policemen were dumbfounded and at first just stood there like posts. It gave everyone a weird feeling. Torture— as soon as it sank into his head, he burst out with a yell and went nuts— and then nobody could intervene. “He’s faking it. Get to work!” The chief judicial officer spoke in a low, cold voice as he held his pencil upside down, drilling it into the record of statement. Like awkward soldiers in a play, the policemen surrounded Saito, who was acting as mad as a runaway horse. They punched at him. After the first punch, everyone fell back into normal “torture mode.” It looked like somebody hit Saito square in the face with a horizontal blow from a bamboo sword. Blood spurted from his nose and scattered spectacularly, like fireworks. The front of his clothes got stained bright red before their eyes. He was jumping around, screaming “Waah, waah” (but his voice had a strange hollowness to it). His face turned bright red too. It looked like it had been raised up out of a pool of blood. “This isn’t working,” the chief judicial officer said. “Stop, stop. Bring in the next one.” Then so as not to leave a trail of evidence that might be followed later, the policemen took away the clothes slopped in blood. After that, Saito wasn’t questioned for ten days. For three of those days he was in the training room, and then moved to a cell. After the torture, everyone could see that Saito was in even higher spirits than before. But there was something abnormal about his high spirits— something unnatural. When people talked to him, his mind often seemed to be elsewhere, and oddly for him, he mumbled to himself while sitting quietly alone. Hordes of workers continued to be brought in, dressed just as they were when they’d gone out to work. Every day— relentlessly, for ten, then twenty days, the mass arrests continued. Off-duty policemen were roped in and put to work for fifty sen a day without exception. They were then run ragged from morning to the dead of night until their bodies were like konnyaku jelly. Due to the overwork, the policemen easily dozed off when they were assigned t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 151

to be minders. They even turned to the people they had arrested to confide about the hardships of the policeman’s life. For those who’d been tortured by them, and had had so many occasions to find out just how reactionary they were, getting this side of the policemen laid out before them was a strange thing. But it was true, they actually had this in common. It was just they’d been blindfolded in so many different ways and then fallen completely under a hypnotic spell on top of that. So what was to be done? Who would be the one to take off their blindfolds and wake them from their hypnosis?— Who would have expected, but these guys aren’t our real enemies, Ryu¯kichi thought along with the others. In the end it was so bad that the people who’d been arrested couldn’t help feeling pity for the policemen being worked so hard. Even in the most rundown factory they wouldn’t wring you out like this. “Look, I don’t even care what happens anymore as long as they just decide on something and do it,” a balding policeman who looked pale and irritable said to Ryu¯kichi. “I mean, listen to this. It’s been twenty days now— you hear me, twenty days— since I last saw my kids’ faces. It’s not even funny.” “Well, sorry for all the trouble, pal.” “If I come in when I’m off duty— I mean, if I’m dragged in, I get fifty sen. After I pay for lunch and dinner it’s gone, so it’s like I’m working for free.— In fact it’s not even enough for food. Who the hell do they think we are?” “Listen Mitobe (Ryu¯kichi knew his name), this probably isn’t the sort of thing I should be saying to you but the things we’re trying to do, I mean, everything stems right from what you’re talking about.” Officer Mitobe suddenly lowered his voice. “That’s the thing. Look, even we can see what you guys are really trying to do but . . .” “Could do without that ‘but,’” Ryu¯kichi said laughing. “Yeah.” The policeman didn’t move for a minute, as if mulling something over. “. . . No matter what you say it’s a hard life, not how it looks. Hey, you were a teacher right, so I can talk to you off the record. (Ryu¯kichi smiled ruefully and nodded.) The other day I thought my body was about to give out with all this running around, and so when I was on guard I fell fast asleep. Then just when I was settling into it, we get another roundup order. That was a letdown, I can tell you. So these four guys and I go out and we’re not happy about it. But you know what? On the way we all started talking about going on strike.” “Sure. Right. A policeman’s strike.” But the policeman looked surprisingly serious, so Ryu¯kichi stopped his joking. “If you’re talking strikes, there’s lots of people out there who can teach us a thing or two. All we have to do is learn from them. And with this thing going 152 chapter three

on nationwide and everybody going crazy, if we do it now it’s pretty much bound to be a bang-up success.” Ryu¯kichi felt himself being carried along with the momentum of the talk. “Whadda we want? For starts, give the station chief a good beating and then, oh ye-ah, just stretch out our legs and arms real nice, and for once— just once is enough— get a good night’s sleep. That’s it. Then there’s the thing about why the bastard station chief’s in such a good mood these days. He’s making a bundle off this incident with all the gifts of support pouring in from big landowners and rich people in the city. . . .” Ryu¯kichi pricked up his ears. “We got pretty carried away. Everybody said they’d had enough, and started walking real slow, on purpose. Then we decided to go somewhere to take a little break, so we stopped by the H police box to shoot the breeze.” “And then?” “Well, that was it.” “. . . . . . .” “This is a secret, but if you get them to open up, you’d see that pretty much all policemen are the same on this. It’s just that, being policemen, and having lived the policeman’s life a long time, they’re so screwed up, you can’t get them to act on what they’re really feeling.” Ryu¯kichi was visibly excited. It’s exactly things like this that are important, he thought. He looked at Officer Mitobe as if he were seeing him now for the first time. He felt a camaraderie as he looked at the policeman, resting on an upended tangerine crate, facing down the hall with shoulders that were thick and wide but rounded and hunched forward. He wanted to take the officer’s hand and grasp it firmly. The feeling of wanting to reach out and pat the shoulders of that old uniform, with the dandruff or dust gathered conspicuously on its epaulettes, and say “Hey, buddy” bubbled up and filled his heart.

9 It happened two or three days before Ryu¯kichi was taken out of the martial arts training room to be held separately. There was a worker he knew from the union named Kinoshita, who as the result of interrogation, had been removed from the training room and confined in cell 1 four or five days ago. At about 10:00 p.m., Kinoshita entered the training room with a policeman, and they began to gather up the things he’d left there. Ryu¯kichi woke up. “Hey,” Ryu¯kichi called to him in a lowered voice. Kinoshita looked toward Ryu¯kichi and seemed to shake his head ever so slightly.— “Transfer to Sapporo,” he said quietly. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 153

“Huh?” said Ryu¯kichi, then stopped as he felt his heart suddenly clutch up into a knot. Transfer to Sapporo was a phrase that, eight or nine times out of ten, meant it was time to give up hope. Ryu¯kichi remembered that Kinoshita had had long hair when he left the training room, but now realized that it was cut so short that he could see the pale skin underneath. “What happened to your head?” Kinoshita’s face went dark. “They gave me such a pummeling I just cut it all off.” When all his things were collected, the policeman urged him to move along. But on the way out, at the door, Kinoshita seemed to hesitate and say something to the policeman. The policeman came over to Ryu¯kichi and asked, as if it was a real nuisance, “Kinoshita wants to know if he can get a cigarette if you got one.” Right! That’s it.— Even at the union, Kinoshita was always getting cigarettes off people, one or two at a time, and smoking them like he really savored them. Ryu¯kichi was happy to be able to provide something, even just a cigarette, for the sake of this comrade getting transferred to Sapporo. It meant more than anything. He ran over to his things like someone in a panic and fumbled out a pack of Bats. But what the hell, there was only one pack, and a light one at that! When your luck’s down, it’s down. Three! There were only three cigarettes in it. Like a child who’d done something terribly wrong, his heart filled with remorse and he said, “Buddy, I only got three left.” “That’s fine, that’s fine! It’s plenty! Thank you, man, thanks!” Kinoshita reached out with his hands cupped together, like a child pleading for something. “One’s enough!” The policeman standing to the side suddenly snatched two of them. Stunned, the two men were unable to say anything at all. “Letting you smoke at all is already too much, get it?” What did he mean, “get it”?! Ryu¯kichi felt a rumbling fury rise up from deep within his body. But he said, “Please, as a favor. It’s only three measly cigarettes. And for Kinoshita here, cigarettes are his one special . . .” He didn’t let him finish. “Who do you think you are, telling me it’s only three measly cigarettes?” Kinoshita stood there silently, his expression rock hard. The palm of his hand where the one Bat still sat, trembled ever so slightly so that you could hardly tell.— When they had gone, Ryu¯kichi thought about how Kinoshita must feel. He was half in tears as he took the Bats the policeman had made him keep and shredded them to pieces. “Aw shit! Aw shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!!” 154 chapter three

Three days, four days, then ten days passed, but it wasn’t a length of time that could be measured quite that easily— its length seemed infinite. Nevertheless, Watari, Kudo¯, Suzumoto, and the like had some familiarity with the boredom of such places. Even if they weren’t all equally accustomed to it, with their stout and rugged nerves, they were able to withstand it better than Ryu¯kichi and Sata. Sata in particular was pitifully defeated. The place Sata was being held wasn’t so far from where Watari was. When evening came and Sata didn’t know what to do with himself, and there was nobody to talk to, and he was even sick of being irritated, he would sit there stupefied like he had gone half nuts, and then he would hear, from across the barrier of many doors, low singing. By night and by da-ay, My cell is dark Whatever the hour those devils Peer into my window It was Watari singing. Apparently the policeman on guard had stopped bothering with Watari. Let them peer all they please, My freedom is stolen My chains are strong.13 Sata could tell that when he got to the last line, “My chains are strong,” Watari was giving it all the force he could with that deep, strong voice of his. He always sang the last line many times over. He felt as if Watari’s feelings were coming straight into his own heart. This was something Sata could always look forward to. It was always in the evening. Normally, Sata would probably have dismissed this type of song with his favored derogatory term, “popular art.” But he had changed completely. It didn’t even have to be a song. He discovered that if he listened carefully, even the simple clatter of people walking outside, or the creak of snow-covered roads, had a complex harmony, and that in the muffled voice of people talking far off somewhere, he could sense an eerily delicate musical nuance. He became absorbed listening to the faint rustling sound of snow falling on the roof, for one— sometimes two hours. And when he did, it

13. Sung in act 2 of Maksim Gorky’s 1902 play that became famous in Japan as Donzoko (Lower Depths in English).

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would mingle with all sorts of fantasies and rescue his mind from boredom. He needed nothing more. He craved sound. If there was anything that could stir his heart and prove that it was in some small part still a living thing, it was sound alone that could do it. Normally, the kind of stories his juvenile delinquent cellmate told about picking up women or the wretched life of vagrants would never have failed to rouse Sata’s interest. But after two or three days he had had enough. Otaru was famous for its “promoters.” When they got an order from a business in the city, they would stand on the street corners dressed up like clowns and recite the advertisement with comic flair. Drums and flutes accompanied them.— Once they came to the neighborhood outside the jail. First came the sound of the wooden clappers, a sound so penetrating it could have sent a crack through the frozen air, and then the comical message. Swoosh!! There was a real rush inside the jail as everybody crowded toward the small square windows set high in the wall, as if they were storming a castle. The slow ones ended up getting the upper hand, as they jumped on the backs of the people in front. And behind them, there were still more.— Sata wasn’t the only one crazy for sounds! By night he often dreamt of his mother. Especially on nights after his mother had come to visit, he would doze off and dream of her, get to sleep again and dream of her, over and over until morning. When his mother came to visit, she would catch her breath after taking just one look at his face and say, “My you’ve gotten so thin. And your color is no good.” “I ask the Buddha every day to help get you out quickly.” His mother took out a dirty, wrinkled handkerchief and covered her face. When his mother said “the Buddha,” she meant his dead father. It pierced his heart to see how his usually tidy mother had let her handkerchief get so dirty. But as always, she sniffled and harped on things that he couldn’t make any sense of. He turned away from her. She seized the moment to reach out and straighten his kimono collar, which had gotten folded over. He sat still in that position, his neck turned awkwardly. He felt his mother’s smell right on his face. Back in the cell, he opened the package his mother had brought. Mixed up inside with lots of different things, he found some eye drops in a small square bottle painted purple. At home, he had been in the habit of always putting some eye drops in before going to sleep. “Nothing like ma, right? It was your ma come to visit?” The juvenile delinquent was sitting next to him watching him take off his kimono, and he spoke up when he saw the package. “I got a ma too.” 156 chapter three

Four or five days after that, Sata was released from the police station. He set foot outside with the feeling that he didn’t even know who he was anymore.— But it was the outside, definitely. There could be no mistaking it was the outside, twinkling in the bright snow. At the moment he stepped out he felt giddy. At any rate he was out! There was OO’s house. There was the XX shop. There was the XXX bridge. Each and every one of them was familiar. The sky, and the telegraph poles, a dog! Even the dog was really there. A child, a person, all the people were walking free, more than anything they were free! Aaah, I’ve come back to this world at last! He felt the urge to talk to everybody passing by— men, women, children— to laugh, to run around them. And he wasn’t overdoing it in the slightest. He couldn’t contain the joy that came bubbling up from deep down, making his heart tremble with excitement. “Finally— finally, I’m out!!” He began to cry in spite of himself. Once he started, the tears came and came, bursting out in pulses like the pounding of his heart. Paying no heed to the people walking in the street who were stopping to eye him suspiciously, he raised his voice and sobbed. He wasn’t thinking about anything. Not anybody other than himself, not anything! He didn’t have the emotions to spare. “I’m out at last! At last!!” — The news that Sata was out traveled from person to person, through the cells. Watari didn’t feel anything in particular about it. He thought it was a good thing because face it, there was no reason anybody would choose to stay stuck in a jail cell. He didn’t know Sata very well. Even though they were in the same movement, he just didn’t click with the white-collar workers— the intelligentsia. It wasn’t that he particularly disliked them, more like he just wasn’t interested. But Kudo¯ wanted lots more of the intelligentsia to come into the movement the way Ryu¯kichi did, for all the knowledge about different walks of life that they couldn’t get themselves. It would lend a needed breadth and depth to their movement that because of their lack of experience, tended so easily to descend into a headlong rush. Even with somebody like Sata, whose shortcomings were obvious, you just had to ask him to wait in the wings— until a role came up that only he could fill, and then he could make himself useful. Kudo¯, especially, thought that they still had a lot to do in this area. ••• The interrogations proceeded apace, according to the deranged methods of the authorities. They produced so many tales of cruelty that they can’t all be t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 157

written down here (that alone would probably take a whole book). The ones for whom the “facts” could be established were transferred to the Sapporo court by turns for pretrial hearings. Before the transfer, the chief judicial officers and the special police who had been at each of the questionings dipped into their own pockets (?) to have a rice and sushi feast delivered for everyone. They ate together with the prisoners, suddenly displaying a kindness that seemed to have been grafted on. “In any case,”— they’d slip casually into the flow (the flow?!) of conversation: “In any case, you’ll do fine if you say exactly what you said here during the interrogation. If you say anything different, your lack of sincerity will become an issue, and that’ll work against you in the end.” They repeated the same thing nonchalantly again and again in the midst of all the small talk. “You sure you’re allowed to wine and dine us like this?” Watari, Kudo¯, and Suzumoto knew exactly what was going on and were having some fun. “We get it. We get it. Our lips are sealed. It’s all just like you say.” They kept nodding their heads, half joking. First-timers Ishida and Saito accepted the food with strange looks on their faces. They knew something was weird, but they didn’t know that this was another trick of the special police and the chiefs. The reason was that if the confessions they’d written up with their own hands ended up getting overturned at the pretrial hearings, their jobs would be on the line, they’d fall out of favor with their superiors, and that would have a large impact on their promotions and future prospects. Watari and the others, who were fully on top of the situation, turned it to their advantage, wheedling the special police escort into buying them box lunches and sweet dumplings at the station on the way to Sapporo. “Come on, go easy on us. Don’t start asking the world.” Such was the eventual tone of the special police. By April 20, everyone detained at the Otaru police station had been transferred to Sapporo. Suddenly the station was deserted. Only the graffiti was left, standing out on the walls of the empty cells. As if by some pact, the walls that had contained them all bore the following phrases carefully carved into them, with hardly any variation. Don’t forget March 15! Long live the Communist Party! Engrave March 15 on your minds. Long live the Japanese Communist Party! 158 chapter three

1928/3/15! Kill the reactionary Tanaka cabinet! Long live the Communist Party Long live the Worker-Farmer Party Workers of the world unite Remember March 15. Don’t forget March 15 Make a government of the workers and farmers. Long live the Japanese Communist Party! Translated by Justin Jesty

(12) The Linesmen kataoka teppei Translated from Battle Flag (May 1930) Kataoka Teppei (1894–1944) was born in Okayama Prefecture to a large landowner and village headman with entrepreneurial ambitions. After his father went bankrupt, Kataoka still managed to dabble in French literature at Keio University and then in journalism before becoming a founding member of Literary Age in 1924. The new journal opened on the heels of the leftist Literary Front. The two were thought to represent opposing schools of resistance to Naturalism, the first representing “New Sensationism” and committed to experimental (also “modernist” or “aesthetic”) expression of the sights and sounds of a new age, and the second representing proletarian literature (“realism”), registering many of the same sights and sounds but as signs of exploitation to be overcome. Kataoka’s decamping to the proletarian wing in 1928 was the most celebrated example of a writer’s “leftward turn”— a dramatic illustration of the realist worldview within modernism as argued by the story’s translator, Gregory Golley. 14 In “The Linesmen” the limited hearing of the individual linesman is exponentially expanded through access to the visible wires and the invisible electrical impulses they carry. Much as Marxist analysis reveals hidden but real connections among disparate phenomena, the

14. Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 1–70.

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telephone network maintained by the linesmen allows them to place their cold suffering bodies in the world system. Arrested in 1932, Teppei recanted after a two-year prison term and became a writer of popular fiction. During the war, when his daughter Aiko told him that a teacher’s husband was reputed to be a “red,” Kataoka responded, “Your father used to be one, too.” He explained that he and others had tried to stand up through their literature to the injustices of the world and for peace. Once arrested, however, he had renounced those views in order to support his family, but he still believed they were the right views.15 This story was previously translated by Max Bickerton as “Linesmen” (see the introduction to [11]) and included in “The Cannery Boat” by Takiji Kobayashi and Other Japanese Short Stories (1933). nf

1 In the sky, below the earth, even at the ocean’s floor: consider the wires that stretch across the planet like a spider’s web. Think about it. Telegraph wires. Telephone wires. Countless wires above our heads, below our feet, stretched taut all around us. All over the world, without moving an inch, capitalists unite through telegraph wires, telephone wires ensconced in the mesh of this spider’s web; they organize themselves. To do what? To exploit and dominate the proletariat. For this purpose they’ve formed a league of mutual aid. The wind was blowing. It was evening in the suburbs of the great city. Telephone poles stood black against the sky, wires groaning in the wind. Near the post office stood a large utility pole— a special kind they call a “test pole.” Close to the crossbeam at the top of that pole was a small foothold called a “platform.” Investigating a problem in the wire, the linesman Tokimoto climbed up the test pole, making his way toward the platform. When he reached the top, he connected a portable telephone to the wires at the crossbeam and put his ear to the receiver. He was testing to find where the breakdown was. Was it “above” or “below” this pole? First he checked the line leading “up”— toward the city.

15. Kataoka Aiko, “Teppei to musume,” 457. 160 chapter three

“Hello,” he called out. He could hear faint voices in conversation coming from what appeared to be a cross connection in the city. “A finger. A finger,” a distant voice leaked out. “A finger. He says you can buy a pinkie or even an index finger. . . .” Damn, he thought. This is a strange conversation. A strange thing to be selling. Tokimoto’s curiosity was aroused. Pressing the receiver close to his ear, he held his breath. “About how much would that cost, a finger. . . ?” This time it was another, much clearer voice that sounded in his ear. “Maybe . . .” Once again the voice came from a distance. “An impressive thing . . . cut with a knife . . . lecture . . .” He could only hear fragments. Then the clearer voice said, “Anything up to a hundred yen and we can charge it as a cultivation club expense and— no, we better not over the phone. Could you come over to my quarters?” “Right. I’ll bring him with me. . . .” And that was all Tokimoto heard. He wanted to hear more, but it was no use. What sort of connection could there be between a finger and a cultivation club? Then he remembered the job before him, and the hand he was using to hold the receiver turned cold, and the groan of the wires trembling in the wind assaulted his ears with a sudden violence. Still, the connection between the cultivation club and the finger bothered him. Which cultivation club? Surely there could be no relation between a finger and their own Linesman’s Cultivation Club. Maybe it was the cultivation club for the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau. There might be a finger connection there. Dexterous fingertips meant efficiency for tobacco workers, after all. They used their fingertips to stuff tobacco into bags, didn’t they? That’s when Tokimoto remembered that, in three or four days, he himself would have to attend a cultivation club retreat. He thought cultivation clubs and things like that were bull. But all linesmen and communications employees and anyone else who worked for important government departments had to go— no exceptions. “Damn,” he said, before remembering once again that he had work to do. He remembered because the hand that held the receiver turned cold again, and the screaming of the phone lines in the roaring wind attacked his ears. The breakdown didn’t seem to be on the “up” line. He quickly connected his portable phone to the “down” line. “Hey! Is the repair up or down?” shouted the other members of his team, looking up from the foot of the utility pole where they’d gathered. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 161

“Down!” Tokimoto answered from above. It was the wind. A gale. There’d be more breakdowns to come for sure. Hey Brothers! Days like this are hard on all of us. He wanted to look down and tell them so, to commiserate. Then, standing up straight on the platform, his back tight against the pole, he looked out onto the darkening city. Against the dim light of a gray sky, the rooftops of the town and a seemingly endless procession of telephone poles stretched far into the distance. That’s reality, he thought. Because of all those telephone poles and telephone wires, we repairman have to slave away. And if we don’t, how are we going to live? It was the wind. It was the nightfall. It was Tokimoto, the linesman, standing on the platform of the test pole— working. He’d forgotten all about the dreamlike voices and the business of trading fingers. He prayed there’d be no snowstorm that night. . . .

2 Linesman Tamano So¯roku was on duty starting that night. He was sound asleep in the workers’ quarters at the central office. “Central office” means any of the various post offices where linesmen stay at night. For example, the jurisdiction of the Tokyo Communications Bureau is divided into various districts, such as the Saitama District or the Jo¯so¯ District, and each of these districts has about two hundred repairmen. But the repairmen are placed in groups of twenty or so at the various post offices in the area. At night, the linesmen on duty stay at these “central offices.” Night duty repairman Tamano So¯roku was sound asleep in the workers’ sleeping quarters at the XX Post Office of XX Prefecture. Suddenly he became aware of something impinging on his sleep. He was tired from his day’s work. Please let me sleep a little more, he thought. Don’t be so cruel. Let me sleep— He dozed on like that until finally he began to think: Look, I’m really tired. I don’t care who tries to wake me, I’ll do my best to stay asleep. But he had to wake up. He’d be fired if he didn’t. Deep down, he knew it was no use.— When he opened his eyes the phone was ringing. “Shit!” he muttered and jumped out of bed. He stood at the phone. “Yeah,” he said, still half asleep. “Hello,” began an impatient voice before hitting him with a kind of deluge: “This is the Tokyo test station. The Number One X, Y, and Z lines are all down. The A line is possibly down. All Number Two lines are down. This is urgent. Understand?” “Yes, sir. I’ll organize an emergency muster.” 162 chapter three

Hanging up the phone, So¯roku rubbed his eyes and tugged on a pair of soiled, sagging breeches. He looked up at the wall clock and yawned. “Two forty. It’s the middle of the damn night.” A dingy window rattled in the wind. Snow was flying hard against the glass door. “Snowstorm. What’s a snowstorm doing coming at a time like this?” he muttered, putting on his muddy rubber-soled boots. “Of course all the lines are down. Middle of the goddamn night.” When he went outside, his jacket flapped up and the snow flew against his eyes and nose. It’s a bad storm, he thought. There’s nothing to do but plow through like crazy. The head engineer of that office lived in Shizoku-cho¯, about five or six blocks from the post office. When So¯roku finally got there, he knocked on the door and called out. “We got a call from the Tokyo test station.” He kept pounding on the door. The least you can do is get out of bed, he thought. At long last, the Communications Bureau engineer, with his grade-five salary of eighty yen a month, got out of bed. Didn’t she look a little grumpy, the wife who had to get up in the middle of the night to see her husband off, he thought. Once outside, the engineer put on a sour face and ordered So¯roku to “call an emergency muster right away!” His pretentious little mustache had already turned white with snow.

3 Is it because the nation’s citizens would all be inconvenienced if telegraph and telephone service stops? Is that why officials are so quick to scream and repairmen have to run around in the middle of a snowstorm? If telegraph and telephone service stopped for a day, what loss would it be for the proletariat? And yet it’s the proletarian repairmen who have to go running around in the snowstorm, losing sleep. Any hesitation and they’d be chewed out and have their one yen ten sen docked for the day. The bourgeoisie have organized themselves amid all these wires that connect the country. They use them not only for daily business and speculation but for carrying out plots and schemes in the war against their enemy— the proletariat. “Five hundred tons of coal. Provide market quote. Urgent.” “Shipment of twenty thousand bags of rice arriving from Saigon on the twentieth.” “Will sell three thousand shares of Tokyo stock.” “Postal stock down twenty points.” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 163

“Secure Kanebo¯ at lowest price.” “Sell three hundred at two.” “Indications that Communist Party remnants entering your district.” “Send fifty operatives to XX station.” “XX maru arriving in port tomorrow. Search thoroughly. Party member disguised as businessman on board.” Then there are the telephones linking all the various police boxes, substations, and stations; the offices of the Special Higher Police and the Military Police. The vigilant hawk’s eye of the spy walking the streets looks around for anyone wanted for questioning among the proletariat. If he sees someone matching a description in a passing car, he rushes to the nearest police box and telephones headquarters. In an instant, bells are ringing in police boxes and stations all over. “Taxi number XXXX. Dressed in black coat, tortoise shell glasses, brown felt hat. Match with circulated photo of party member OO and arrest.” Within three minutes, a dragnet is cast across Tokyo. That’s how efficient the police phone network is for organizing the bourgeoisie.

4 Tamano So¯roku was scrambling through the snowstorm in the middle of the night. He went around knocking on doors from one end of the little town to the other, rousting his fellow repairmen and laborers. “All the lines are down! Emergency muster!” Rousting the men with this kind of trouble was a terrible job. The other workers were sleepy too, and no one felt very happy about being jarred awake. So¯roku could hear grumbling from inside the houses. “What the hell is a snowstorm doing coming like this?” “How should I know?” he’d yell back through the door. They all think I’m some kind of demon, he thought. They hate me more than anything. I wish they’d hate someone else. It’s not my fault. So¯roku wanted to cry. With a strange expression on his face, he went around knocking on the workers’ doors. Within an hour, eight linesmen including himself, ten skilled workers, and seven laborers hired for the day had gathered at the repairmen’s headquarters at the post office. “Looks like everyone’s here,” said the young head engineer. “So let’s get started. Kimura and Yamagiwa, you two station yourselves at the test pole till morning. Get there as quick as you can.” Some time after Kimura and Yamagiwa left, the phone rang in the cen164 chapter three

tral office. They were reporting from the test pole. The head engineer held the receiver to his ear. “Tokyo’s XX ‘down’ wire. Got it. Yokohama’s XX line, both ‘up’ and ‘down’ wires. Number Two? I see. All right, then . . .” Returning to the men’s quarters where the repairmen and workers were waiting for his orders, he sent them off organized into teams: one to attend to Tokyo’s “down” line, one for Yokohama’s “up” line, another for its “down” line, and one inspection team for the phone lines within town. The head engineer stayed in the central office where he would be in constant phone contact with the men at the test pole. There he waited for reports from the repair teams he’d sent off in all directions. He would have to be there until all the lines were restored— as long as that took. But “there” was inside a building. “There” a coal fire burned, steaming up the room.

5 So¯roku was assigned to inspect the “down” wire on Tokyo’s XX Number One line, accompanied by one skilled worker and three day laborers. The line running toward Tokyo from the test pole was called the “up” line, its opposite the “down” line. According to the report from the repairmen at the test pole, the breakdown on Tokyo’s XX line was on the “down” side. So¯roku’s team headed out in that direction, following the head engineer’s orders. Carrying a gas lamp to light their way, they passed the edge of town and headed north on the highway. Twenty-five miles ahead was the next communications office, where they were surely having their own emergency muster. If the breakdown was above the next office’s test pole, they’d be coming in So¯roku’s direction. In which case the two teams were likely to meet somewhere in between. Until that happened, So¯roku’s team would have to keep walking the twenty-five miles toward the next office. The storm wasn’t letting up at all. At 3:30 a.m., dawn was still a ways away. It was completely black. You couldn’t even open your eyes in all that wind. Snow made swirls of white powder in the light of the gas lamp. “It’s cold. Damn, it’s cold.” Heavy overcoats made it impossible to work, so the men wore wool under their jackets. Some of the day laborers didn’t even have that. The snow that accumulated on their bodies quickly soaked through their jackets and shirts, eventually reaching their skin. “It’s cold. Damn, it’s cold.” Every so often So¯roku and the other men would mutter this phrase, as if repeating a joke. If they hadn’t said it jokingly— if they’d said it in all seriousness— it would’ve been too miserable to bear. To t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 165

say “it’s cold” without humor in such extreme temperatures would surely have made them want to sob like children. Now it was pitch-dark. But they could hardly proceed with caution. Their purpose was to find the breakdown in the line, so until the dawn broke they had to keep walking, holding the gas lamp above their heads to light their way. That’s because the phone line itself was always above their heads, and they had no idea where the breakdown might be for the next twenty-five miles— between themselves and the next communications station. They had with them a bamboo pole, a portable phone set, copper wire for connecting the phone lines to the porcelain insulator on the crossbeam, and a ladder. At the end of the long bamboo pole was a hook used for brushing the snow off the top of the phone lines as they walked along. On a day like this all kinds of breakdowns occur: crossed wires, ground faults, broken lines. When the wind causes one line to tangle with another, that’s a crossed wire. When a utility pole goes down, the wires not only cross but they break. That’s a broken line. When the snow accumulates too heavily on the wire, the electricity flows to the earth making communication impossible. That’s a ground fault. So¯roku’s group walked for two hours. It seemed as if the line of utility poles continued forever along the highway. Dawn had come. The wind had died down and the snow had eased up too. White fields, white trees, and white mountains— the ordinary scenery of a snowy country road. “I’m starving,” yawned Kayama, one of the laborers. “Shall we have some noodles or something?” asked So¯roku. They’d entered a little village that looked like an old post town. Surely they’d have someplace to get noodles. “No one’s going to sell us anything this early in the morning,” said Machida, the skilled worker. There was a stone statue of Jizo¯ under the town’s fire lookout, and around the corner from that, an earthen bridge. The snow had completely stopped. The town had a noodle shop and a restaurant. And in between a sweet shop and a dubious looking “café” were some thatched-roofed farmers’ houses. Everyone’s shutters were still closed and it looked as if their fires had just been lit. A blue patch appeared in the eastern sky. Everyone was tired from walking. They hadn’t eaten since being jolted from bed the night before, and they’d been working all night. Their skin, previously soaked and frozen with snow, was now sticky and running with sweat. 166 chapter three

How far should they walk? The phone lines went on to infinity, no doubt leading to the gates of hell. How far should he have them walk? They kept walking. Their eyes grew heavy. Snot ran from their noses no matter how much they sniffled. It’s not that they had colds— but it made them reluctant to say anything. The door of a roadside restaurant opened and a girl in nightclothes peaked out with a dull expression, her makeup peeling from her face. “Hey there!” one of the men shouted. “Have fun last night?” Everyone burst into laughter. But the woman just stared blankly at the sweaty-looking men as they passed. The men too felt their energy wane and fell silent. Soon the shops receded into the distance. Leaving the village, they found themselves once again on a monotonous road running through rice fields. No one had the strength to say anything. They walked on in silence. The ladder and the bamboo pole were their greatest burden. Though their legs weren’t tired, they were completely spent from their waists up. How far should they walk? “Hope we find the problem soon.” “That’s for sure. It’s like trying to chase down the woman of your dreams.” “Or your worst enemy.” “We’ve been brushing off the snow the whole way so the damage might have fixed itself,” someone suggested, though he knew it was an empty wish. “All the snow up ahead should be melting in the morning sun, right?” “You’re saying we should turn back?” “In your dreams!” And with the same dispirited laughter, they all turned to look in So¯roku’s direction. “Don’t be stupid. If we go back now and it hasn’t fixed itself, the boss will be mad enough to shoot fire from his eyes.” So¯roku issued this warning as he walked, but with his head hanging. “I’d like nothing better than to be chewed out and fired. Who wants to do this kind of work forever anyway?” So¯roku shot a quick look at the skilled worker who’d said this. His name was Machida. Tall, with a thin yellowish face that he rarely shaved, Machida was well known for constantly muttering complaints. “Hey, you don’t like this work?” So¯roku asked him. “What’s to like?” “You went to the trouble of training for it, didn’t you?” “What, you think I should try to rise through the ranks like you?” “Laugh away.” Then So¯roku fell silent too. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 167

When a regular day laborer became a skilled repairman, he was considered a candidate for the still higher rank of linesman. Was Machida joking when he said he had no interest in a promotion? Wasn’t a skilled worker’s life far easier than a day laborer’s? Besides, at this point what other work could Machida do? Work wasn’t that easy to find. He’d have nothing to choose from but harder and lower-paying manual labor. The linesman Tamano So¯roku himself had been promoted from the rank of skilled worker. That was three years ago. His initial salary was one yen ten sen a day. The next year, that went up to one yen fourteen sen. Every year he got a four-sen raise. Getting a four-sen raise was an honor. Last year he only got two sen. So now he was at one yen sixteen sen a day. There were some who, after working as linesmen for ten or twenty years, got two yen twenty or thirty sen a day. Now they were the real big shots. The morning sun sparkled on the snow-covered fields. Finally So¯roku’s team reached a hill— a mountain pass surrounded on both sides by deep forest. The sunlight softened and they heard a bird’s wings beating somewhere. As they came out of the woods the road got suddenly very steep. At the summit, it turned sharply to the right. When he reached the top, the worker leading the way gave a shout. “Hey, I think we’re in trouble.” “Why?” So¯roku shouted back, out of breath. “This is going to be a bitch.” Ahead of him, all he could hear were the voices of the workers. So¯roku hurried ahead to look for himself. That’s when he saw the giant utility pole on its side, fallen in the snow. “This is the bastard that’s been causing all the trouble.” The lines had snapped. Everyone stood there, staring wearily at the scene. To raise the pole again and reconnect the lines was going to be hard work. They were starving and exhausted. “All righty then,” So¯roku said with a forced display of spirit. “Let’s get started.”

6 There was a pond at the bottom of the hill on the other side of the pass. When they got to the edge of that pond, they all collapsed in disheveled heaps in the snow or lay down on a stack of timber they found there. “How the hell much do you make anyway?” Machida said to So¯roku, as he got a light for his cigarette. “Me? One yen sixteen.” 168 chapter three

“Bet you get traveling expense on top of that— ” “With that, it comes to two yen thirty. So I’m thankful for days like this.” “You mean because you walk all day without eating or drinking, you can save the extra?” “Don’t be stupid,” he said, laughing. “But seriously, slaving away like this, the least they can give you is two yen thirty for travel expense. I’ve heard that head engineers who sit on their asses all day get ten or fifteen yen a day just for travel. When I think about stuff like that, the world begins to look like a pretty lousy place.” “Actually,” So¯roku said, suddenly lowering his voice, “some of the linesmen are thinking they’d like to do something about that. Organize or something. Myself, I think you’ve got to be careful about getting involved in all that— ’cause if you get fired where would you work? The unemployed in Tokyo are already killing one another for jobs.” He paused. “On the other hand, without us, who’re they gonna get to fix the phone lines? Even so, they only raise our pay two or three sen a year. Four if you’re lucky. They really must think we’re idiots.” As he went on like this, So¯roku suddenly remembered something. “The other day at the cultivation club, some bastard was going on about how linesmen were truly important to the nation and how great we were and everything.” “Flattery doesn’t cost them anything.” “Right. Besides, when other kinds of technicians go out in the field, their mileage is figured in. They get paid a certain amount per mile. What about us? Whether we go ten or twenty miles, we don’t get a single sen extra. If linesmen are so damn important to the nation, why do they only give us twosen raises every year? Why don’t we get paid for mileage?” There was the faint sound of snoring. Two of the workers were sprawled on their backs, fast asleep on the woodpile. “Hey!” So¯roku shouted at the two sleeping men, his anger having no other place to go. “Get up before you catch cold! It’s time to get to work.” His wristwatch said eleven fifty in the morning. The sun was reflecting off the surface of the snow. They’d been walking for eight hours. Their departure in the snowstorm the previous night felt like a dream. Let’s go. But how far?

7 The employee retreat at the Linesman’s Cultivation Club took place at a famous temple in the Shiba neighborhood of Tokyo. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 169

In attendance were fifty repairmen, thirty technicians and skilled workers, and twenty engineers and foremen. Among them was repairman Tokimoto. The series of lectures and courses went on for three days, during which time the men slept at the temple. Days were taken up with calisthenics and cleaning. Evenings, there were the usual lectures. These were compulsory, designed for the “cultural development” of the employees of the Communications Department. “The duties of the linesman will become especially important in time of war,” the lecturer told them. “All kinds of crucial codes and military telegrams will travel across your wires. Based on those telegrams, armies will mobilize, strategies will be devised, orders followed. Communication will control the fate of the nation. When you consider this, gentlemen, you who work to repair those wires, to keep those wires healthy, you are the physicians of the telegraph and telephone system. To that extent, the fate of the nation rests on your shoulders. Once you awaken to this mission, gentlemen, you will shun the influence of those foreign ideas that have become so popular lately and avoid doing anything rash.” War was coming, the lecturers warned. Members of the Communications Department must do their best to be obedient. Here in Communications they couldn’t afford to hide the necessity of war by presenting a pacifist facade as they might do in other departments. Here they made no bones about preparing for war. Their fear was that the linesmen might awaken to their identity as workers in time of war, that the proletariat might usurp the vast spider’s web of telephone and telegraph wires for their own use. It is the intention of every capitalist, when they prepare for war, to first strip every aspect of their rival power, the proletariat. That is what they were trying so hard to do now. It was the night of the last cultivation club lecture. In the lecture hall, the chairman introduced the speaker. “This man is a worker, just like you,” he said. “Tonight, in front of all you gentlemen, he has agreed to offer a confession. We can surely all learn a great deal from this worker’s humble experience. I ask that you listen carefully.” There was applause and a single man approached the podium. He wore a cheap suit of ready-made clothes and had a thin, angular face. Tokimoto thought he looked pretty seedy. “Gentlemen,” he began in an even voice that somehow clashed with his vulgar appearance. “Gentlemen, I’m ashamed of what I am about to tell you, but until last year, I was a member of the Japanese Communist Party, active in the labor movement.” 170 chapter three

The audience, having dismissed the man on the grounds of his appearance, suddenly tensed up at the words “Japanese Communist Party” as if they’d been hit with something. This is a dangerous man, they thought. But— why would such a person be “ashamed”? Why the humility? And why would he announce his party membership in front of all these people? Everyone was throwing furtive glances at the engineers. But they seemed calm. Their faces showed no signs of surprise. “Gentlemen! I gave up my body, my life, working for the Communist Party.” This lecture is getting a little strange, thought Tokimoto. “Working for the Communist Party”? Why not “working for the laboring classes”? The lecturer raised his voice a notch. “But what were the Communist Party officers doing while the members worked so earnestly? They were at geisha houses having a great time spending the money they got from Russia!” The speaker pounded the table, striking a pose of unbearable indignation. Suddenly Tokimoto knew it was a performance. Clearly the guy was a management stooge.— Tokimoto held his breath waiting to hear what he would say next. “That’s when I became thoroughly disgusted with the Communist Party. The principles sound plausible enough, but anyone who sympathizes with those principles ends up accomplishing nothing more than feeding the party bosses. Gentlemen, I repent.— I hereby confess. If you follow in my steps, you’ll meet with the same bitter experience I had. Therefore I wish to offer proof before your eyes, to demonstrate how much I repent my past crimes. I am not a traitor to the nation. I hereby pledge that I am a virtuous subject of His Majesty. And here’s proof!” The speaker produced something from his pocket. A knife. He placed his left hand on the table in front of him. With the knife poised to cut, he hesitated for a moment. Then he lifted his gaze toward the seats where the engineers sat. The engineers just sat there as if they were watching an opera. The lecturer spread his fingers on the table and brought the knife down on his little finger. “Ah,” he cried, and blood spurted out. The audience stood up in unison. The finger— rolled onto the tabletop, and the lecturer threw himself facedown onto the bloodstained table. Tokimoto left the lecture hall, his face pale as a sheet. The conversation he’d overheard four or five days before on the test platform— now he’d been given a vivid performance of the whole finger business. He couldn’t keep his whole body from shaking with anger and agitation. Translated by Gregory Golley t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 171

(13) The Path to Proletarian Realism kurahara korehito Translated from Battle Flag (May 1928) Kurahara Korehito (1902–1991) was born into comfortable circumstances in Tokyo: his father Korehiro (1861–1949) was not only a distinguished educator and parliamentarian but exceptional in his public support of his son.16 Kurahara was a precocious reader and writer of literature, which eventually led him to study of the Russian language. By 1928, following an extended sojourn in the Soviet Union, he emerged as the leading theorist of the proletarian literary movement. Arrested in 1932, he served without recanting until 1940, when he was released because of illness. In 1941, he married Nakamoto Takako [2, 10]. After the war, he participated in establishing the New Japan Literary Association, became active in the cultural affairs of the Communist Party, and extended his studies to religion and the Chinese classics. “The Path to Proletarian Realism” was published in the inaugural issue of Battle Flag, the organ of NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio), and instantly attracted widespread interest. Everyone knew that proletarian literature had to be realist, but what was proletarian realism, and how was it to be produced? Kurahara offers a provocative account of modern literature as an evolving history of bourgeois realism whose achievements needed to be absorbed and limitations overcome in the proletarian realist works that his comrades would write. His essay also poses a challenge familiar to any group that, given its experiences and its consciousness, mounts a challenge to the dominant vision of reality without thereby renouncing its claims to objectivity. As Terry Eagleton put it, “Objectivity does not mean judging from nowhere. On the contrary, you can only know how the situation is if you are in a position to know.”17 nf

1 When setting forth the problem of proletarian realism, I believe it is desirable to look at its difference from bourgeois realism. Generally speaking, what is realism? Insofar as it relates to aesthetics, re16. Kobayashi Shigeo, “Kaisetsu,” 448. 17. Eagleton, After Theory, 135; quoted in Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 46.

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alism is what lies in contrast to idealism, both of which arise from the artist’s attitude toward reality. If an artist holds to and wishes for a transcendental vision, thus remaking reality in accordance with this idée and describing it in those terms, the art thus produced is the art of idealism. On the other hand, if the artist relates to reality free from such subjective, transcendental preconceptions, if he strives to objectively describe reality as reality, then it is from this effort that the art of realism is born. Therefore, characteristically, idealist art is subjective, fanciful, metaphysical, and abstract, while realist art is objective, realistic, actual, and concrete. Thus, if one were to speak generally, one could say that idealism is the artistic mode of the declining class, while realism is that of the rising. I have spoken above regarding realism in a general sense, and using this meaning of the term, one would have to say that Polyclitus [fifth to early fourth century BCE] and Praxiteles [fourth century BCE] both, as well as Courbet [1819–1877] and Daumier [1808–1879], Monet [1833–1918] and Cézanne [1839–1906], Flaubert [1821–1880] and Zola [1840–1902], Tolstoy [1828–1910], Dostoevsky [1821–1881], even Saikaku [1642–1693] and Hiroshige [1797–1858] were all realists. Even as all their respective realisms shared equally objective viewpoints, however, historical realities affected these artists, and their art is determined by the social milieu of the time period as well as the particular characteristics of the class to which the artist belonged, producing in each classical, feudal, or modern realisms. I will not address classical or feudal realisms here. What is necessary to examine now is the last on the list— I will now move my inquiry to so-called modern realism. At the same time, I want to limit the subject of the discussion to the realm of literature. Modern realism, or, to put it another way, bourgeois realism arose in conjunction with the rise of Naturalism. Naturalism, as everyone knows, sprang up in the 1860s in France, centering on Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers [Edmond, 1822–1896; Jules, 1830–1870], Zola, Daudet [1840–1897], Maupassant, and others. Subsequently, in Germany, England, Russia, and Japan, this literary tide rose in the latter half of the nineteenth century (in the cases of France, Germany, and England) and the beginning of the twentieth (in Russia and Japan). Literary Naturalism in all these countries can be seen as a reaction against Romanticism. It is not, however, a reaction that simply arose out of boredom with Romanticism. Rather, as a general rule, one must remember that beneath the surface of any enormous change in the literary world are hidden the class divisions already present within the age. Behind the shift from Romanticism to Naturalism, then, lies the conflict between the declining class of landowners and the rising bourgeoisie. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 173

Romanticism was the literature of the declining landowning class. As is usually the case, the ideology of the declining class was fanciful, metaphysical, and traditional. In response, Naturalist literature took as its motto the return to reality, the demolition of convention, and the liberation of the individual. At the same time that this was of a piece with the ideology of the new bourgeoisie, it also bore many features common to the ideology of any emerging class. So it is in this way that Naturalism, the literature of the modern bourgeoisie, developed its version of realism. As with the literature of any emerging class, it strove to describe reality as it was, without any embellishment whatsoever. Despite these efforts though, the bourgeoisie remained constrained by history, and the realism produced faced one particular limitation. What was this? In the course of human history, the bourgeoisie’s mission has been the “liberation of the individual.” What the bourgeoisie achieved through this mission, it goes without saying, was their position in society and the principles on which their lifestyle depends. Those same principles, however, were themselves directly determined by the material and psychological conditions of bourgeois life itself. Naturalist literature also finds its starting point within the individual. Moreover, this is an isolated individual, completely cut off from the rest of society. Naturalist authors search for the eternal, absolute aspects of an individual, capturing “humanity’s biological essence.” Therefore, according to them, a person’s life is, in the final analysis, nothing more than the life of human instinct. This view was influenced by contemporaneous advances in biology and physiology, corresponding to the philosophy of metaphysical materialism, and most Naturalist authors actually did examine the whole of life from this perspective and describe it accordingly. Any part of life unconnected to human instinct therefore lay outside their field of vision. For our purposes, it will suffice simply to call to mind various representative works of Naturalism: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Maupassant’s Bel Ami and Une Vie, Artsybashev’s [1878–1927] Sanin, and so forth. In these works, a person’s whole life is reduced to biological essence, character, heredity, and so forth. To put it another way, one’s lifestyle— one’s entire attitude toward reality becomes thoroughly asocial and individualistic. In it we can see neither the individual dominated by society nor the oppression of the individual within social structures. Rather, all emphasis is placed on the individual. To make the individual life of a single person the only frame of reference—this is here where the inherent limitation of bourgeois realism lies. 174 chapter three

Within these limitations, however, these authors strove above all for objectivity and an attitude free from ideological bias. “Much as biology studies living things, novels too experiment with, interpret, and report fact,” said Zola. Flaubert expounds on a similar theme, saying, Even though the subjects are human, you must treat them just as if they were mastodons or crocodiles. One has horns, this other has a jawbone— if I say this, are you justified in getting angry? I examine these people, I stuff them, put them in a bottle filled with alcohol— that’s all there is to it. In your response, you must refrain from handing down moral judgment. First off, who are you, are you little toads? In this way, within their limits, these authors achieved objectivity. However, even as they advocated the objectivity of natural scientists, they failed to achieve that of social scientists, and this is the fundamental reason why their realism fails to describe society as a whole.

2 We can see that along with this sort of realism, another type also exists within the world of modern literature. Exemplifying this type are certain works by Zola, Hauptmann [1862–1946], Ibsen [1828–1906], Dostoevsky, and others. This realism differs from that of Flaubert, Maupassant [1850–1893], and others in that while the latter writers focus from beginning to end on the individual and only the individual, the former, while still adhering to a point of view informed by individualism, nevertheless at least take a stand in regard to society. If the writers discussed earlier reflect in their works the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, then these others’ works reflect that of the petty bourgeoisie. We can therefore refer to these works as petty bourgeois realism. The petty bourgeoisie’s position within capitalist society lies, as one might think, between that of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, destined to be under more and more economic and political pressure as capitalism continues to progress. What is more, members of this class can neither fully inhabit the position of the bourgeoisie nor intentionally move into the position of the proletariat, so their thoughts and actions are constantly fluctuating between the two. It follows that their views on economic and political matters for the most part stress harmony between the classes, while their views on intellectual and moral matters make them supporters of philanthropy, justice, and humanism. This sort of social existence is reflected in t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 175

their literature, and from this situation is born what we have dubbed petty bourgeois realism. Let us take Zola’s Germinal as an example. This interesting novel describes a coal miners’ strike, examining the social and economic dimensions of the event, and this in itself is a major improvement over works by Flaubert, Maupassant, and their compatriots. But Zola’s effort, correct though it may be in its attempt to describe a social phenomenon from a societal rather than an individualistic perspective, still finds itself limited by the author’s middle-class position, which renders him unable to attain the correct objective historical grasp on his subject matter. That is to say, the author fails to describe the coal miners’ strike from the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat, instead writing from a position of class cooperation— the novel ends with the strike’s failure, the matter falling into the hands of a conciliatory moderate. Of course, one can hardly blame him for taking a coal miners’ strike that failed and fell into the hands of a moderate and describing it just as it happened. Such must be the attitude of the author as realist. We cannot overlook, however, the way that Zola’s choice of subject matter, coupled with his description of it as if it really were a triumph of class cooperation, shows in many ways his petty bourgeois outlook. In fact, when responding to the bourgeoisie’s accusations that his work was revolutionary, Zola explained that his work was “not at all revolutionary, but philanthropic, appealing for sympathy and justice.” It is also irrefutable that he held very negative views of the first experiment in proletarian dictatorship, the Paris Commune. Hauptmann’s The Weavers has many features in common with Zola’s Germinal. As with the other work, it, too, takes as its subject social and economic matters, describing an uprising of laborers against capitalists. In terms of artistry as well, it must be counted as one of the superior works of Naturalist literature. In the three years following its initial presentation in Berlin in 1894, it was performed more than two hundred times and was regarded by Europe’s proletariat as their flagship work. Productions of the play have been shut down in many cities across Europe, while its translation was forbidden in imperial Russia, and it has been impossible to see here in Japan even now, in the Showa era. Nevertheless, it is possible, as was the case with Germinal, to clearly detect within this work the petty bourgeois view it shares with Zola’s work. First of all, we must direct our attention to the fact that in order to depict the struggle between capital and labor, Hauptmann chooses as his subject craftsmen of the 1840s instead of a modern labor strike. What is a craftsman in the forties? Not a member of the proletariat in the modern sense of the word, but a small-time business owner living what in many ways is a feudal 176 chapter three

lifestyle, suffused in feudal ideology— a petty bourgeois subject indeed. That a representative of petty bourgeois ideology such as Hauptmann found just such a “worker” to serve as the subject for his play can hardly be viewed as coincidental. When Hauptmann’s work was eventually reproached for being “socialist,” he responded by saying, in effect, “What I hoped for in writing this play was not to incite unrest among workers, but to give cause for reflection among business owners.” Following The Weavers, Hauptmann went on to write, in Florian Geyer, about farmers revolting in the sixteenth century, and from then on social motifs vanished forever from his writing. After examining these two most representative works of “social literature,” I think it unnecessary to stop and go over the works of Ibsen and Dostoevsky as well. The petty bourgeois views found in their realism (works like The Doll House and An Enemy of the People by Ibsen, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, etc.) should be evident to the reader without my pointing them out here. So far we have devoted ourselves exclusively to European literature, but now when we look at the Naturalism of our own country, we again discover two distinct strains of realism. One is typified by the works of Tayama Katai [1871–1930] (The Quilt, “The Girl Watcher”), Tokuda Shu¯sei [1871–1943] (Mildew, Festering), and their ilk, the other by Shimazaki Toson’s [1872–1943] Broken Commandment. Of course, one cannot consider either in isolation from the other, but it seems to me that the failure to distinguish between the two is the reason for critics’ failure to adequately appraise Naturalist literature. That said, I intend to address this matter at another opportunity.

3 Having discussed these two realisms in modern literature, we will now move on to the problem most directly related to our concerns, that of proletarian realism: What attitude should a proletarian writer adopt in the process of describing reality? The proletarian writer’s attitude toward reality must always be, above all, objective and realistic. He must look at reality free from ideological bias and describe it accordingly. It is in this sense of the term that he must be a realist, and further, as a member of the class now rearing its head, he must become the sole present-day heir to the legacy of realism. If this is so, then in what ways does proletarian realism differ from bourgeois and petty bourgeois realism? Bourgeois realism, as was stated previously, arises from an abstract “human essence.” In reality, however, there is no abstract “human” cut off from t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 177

society, and when one attempts to conceptualize such an “essence” plucked from society, from historical context— in short, from its environment, the result is mere abstraction, not reality. It is here where these writers fail in their consideration of reality, and it is here where they are limited as realists. Put another way, these writers could describe the fundamental aspects of a person’s individual life but could not situate it as a part of a social whole. Therefore, by the time they began to repeatedly produce love-at-first-sightbetween-a-barkeep-and-a-shopgirl stories, the value of their realism had disappeared completely. The proletarian writer must overcome this realism of the natural sciences and always strive for a social perspective on the individual. We must rebel against the method that dictates that we must always return to “individual essence” when considering social problems, and must emphasize instead one that compels us to strive to consider the societal dimensions of the problems of individuals. Petty bourgeois and proletarian writers, despite sharing this more socially aware standpoint, nonetheless naturally differ in perspective. Petty bourgeois realists, as was noted above, appeal to abstract ideas of justice and morality for solutions to social problems, and therefore, their viewpoint on society stresses class cooperation. What spurs social progress, however, is not cooperation between classes but the public and not-so-public conflicts between them, a fact easily proven by the course of history itself. It follows that this view of social problems from a perspective stressing class cooperation results not from an objective analysis of historical progress but rather from a biased, personal way of thinking. Therefore, as the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat intensifies, these writers necessarily find themselves having to side either with the reactionary bourgeoisie or the revolutionary proletariat. From that point on, the only realist able to simply view reality in its entirety as it evolves is the proletarian writer. More than anything else, the proletarian writer must strive for an explicitly class-conscious perspective. To possess such a viewpoint, after all, is to share the standpoint of the struggling proletariat. To use the famous words of VAPP (All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), the proletarian writer must “use the eyes” of the proletarian vanguard to see the world, then describe it accordingly. It is only through striving toward this perspective and stressing this worldview that one can become a true realist. The only people presently able to see the world as it is, in its entirety and within the context of its evolution, are the militant proletariat— the proletarian vanguard. The perspective of the militant proletariat should thus determine the themes of the works written by the proletarian writer. He must present the 178 chapter three

parts of reality most necessary and indispensable for the liberation of the proletariat, discarding those that are useless or incidental. Just as the bourgeois realist’s chief subject matter in his work was people’s biological urges, and the petty bourgeois realist’s was social justice and philanthropy, the proletarian writer’s is the class struggle of the proletariat. This is not to say that the proletarian writer’s only subject should be the militant proletariat itself. At the same time as he describes workers, he should also describe anything related to the liberation of the proletariat (farmers, people in small towns, soldiers, even capitalists), provided that in such instances he always writes from the perspective of class consciousness— the only objective perspective available today. What matters is the perspective of the writer, not necessarily the subject matter. What is most desirable is that the subject matter, to the extent allowable by the perspective of the author, encompasses the whole of modern life. Therefore, we must swiftly purge from our camp the notion that “only the proletariat engaged in struggle may be the subject of our work.” Above we saw how proletarian realism differs from bourgeois realism. But what can the proletarian writer inherit from these realisms of the past? First of all, he can inherit the objective attitude of these past realisms. Such an objective attitude is not a cold, indiscriminate attitude toward life and reality. Neither is it an attitude that transcends class. It is an attitude that strives to describe reality as reality, free of subjective bias or embellishment. It is this sort of attitude that has been lacking in the previous proletarian literature written in our country, and it is this that I want to stress now: as we look at the proletarian literature of Japan written up until the present, we frequently see a reality described that has been distorted by the author’s subjective bias and embellishments. Such work, however, not only lacks the attitude of the realist, but lacks the attitude generally found in superior works of art. What is most important to us is not to distort or embellish reality with our subjective viewpoint, but to discover within reality those things that correspond to the class-conscious subjectivity of the proletariat— it is only thus that we will be able, for the first time, to aid the proletariat in their class struggle with our literature. To sum up, first, we need to “use the eyes” of the proletarian vanguard, then, secondly, we need to describe what we see with the attitude of a strict realist— this is the sole path to proletarian realism. Translated by Brian Bergstrom

t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 179

(14) On the Tendency of Proletarian Works to Become Formulaic (excerpt) hirabayashi taiko Translated from New Tide (November 1930) Although men like Kurahara Korehito [13] or Aono Suekichi [4, 9] specialized in criticism and debate, most of the fiction writers in the movement were also vigorous critics. As the following two selections demonstrate, this was true of women as well as men, and their publication in mainstream venues attests to their appeal as literary figures as well as to general interest in the contested issues of the movement. Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972) was born in Nagano Prefecture to a once-landed family in precipitous decline. Determined to become a writer, she entered a women’s higher school, where she acquired the second ambition of becoming a socialist activist. Once in Tokyo, she became close to anarchists while holding jobs as a telephone operator, store clerk, and waitress. In the repression following the Great Earthquake of 1923, she fled to Manchuria with an anarchist lover. The death of a baby shortly after birth in a charity hospital became the subject of “In the Charity Ward” (1927), which brought her notice as a proletarian writer. Like Aono Suekichi, and unlike most of the writers in this volume, she was a member of the Worker-Farmer Arts League, opposed to the Communist-associated NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio). Her writing appealed especially to women awakening to the oppressions of family and capital. In the postwar era, after battling tuberculosis for many years, Hirabayashi resumed her writing and political activism, especially for women’s causes. She became increasingly conservative, and by the end of her life, was a prominent anticommunist spokesperson. In the article translated here almost in its entirety, Hirabayashi argues that despite Kurahara Korehito’s call for “proletarian realism,” proletarian works had become “formulaic,” a charge perhaps supported by a recent call for “diversification.”18 Eighteen months later, she repeats her criticism in an essay titled “The Term ‘Dialectical Materialism,’” which is the immediate occasion for Sata Ineko’s criticism [15] excerpted in this chapter. The problem, Hirabayashi argues, is that her fellow proletarian writers are insufficiently realist, let alone Marxist, because they start from slogans and formulas instead of the “great variety and

18. Kurahara, “Geijutsuteki ho¯ho¯ ni tsuite,” 192–98. 180 chapter three

richness of reality.” Sata takes her to task for declaring that such richness should be represented “just as it is,” a seeming endorsement of the most naïve version of realist transparency. But Hirabayashi, like Sata, an accomplished writer, knows that there can be no literal transposition of external reality onto the printed page. nf Too many works of proletarian literature tend to the formulaic. This is undeniable. We proletarian writers are more cognizant of this tendency than are bourgeois writers and critics and have no hesitation about criticizing it vigorously. We regard the current problem as only a “tendency,” however. Needless to say, our cause stands firm, above and beyond this tendency. In this sense, we possess a radically different consciousness from that of bourgeois writers and critics. Bourgeois writers’ consciousness labels this tendency as “the inevitable fate of proletarian literature.” For example, the Newly Rising Artistic School takes this to be one justification for its own existence. [. . .] Of all worldviews to date, Marxism is the most comprehensive. Because Marxism finds its basis in materialism, it demands that we be conscious of the great variety and richness of reality just as it is. Furthermore, because it is dialectical, it demands that we be conscious of reality dynamically, of small gradual change as well as dramatic qualitative change, to capture it just as it is, in the form of constant flux. In other words, Marxism demands that we capture every detail of reality, its myriad angles, its kaleidoscopic change. It furthermore teaches us to search for laws from within the richness and variety of that reality. Being the product of those who hold such a worldview, proletarian literature is destined to be the opposite of a formulaic literature. Reality is infinitely more diverse and complex than we can imagine. Proletarian literature is capable of grasping that variety and richness because it does not rely on ready-made concepts as do preexisting literatures. This is, however, only the potential of proletarian literature. It allows us to offer credible refutation to those who insist that it is proletarian literature’s fate to succumb to the formulaic writing currently in evidence. It will not, however, serve as a defense against the concrete instances of formulaic writing such as we find in our midst today. We must search for the causes of this phenomenon in the literary works themselves and banish this defect from proletarian literature. We must provide theoretical proof for the myriad possibilities of proletarian literature and at the same time demonstrate its potential in our actual practice of producing literary works. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 181

What is the root of this problem? Is it the materials used, the themes, or the formal aspects? It goes without saying that these components have a complex interrelationship; they do not function in isolation. Even if the root of the problem is hidden in one of these aspects, its effect will usually extend to the whole. In general, we tend to draw our materials from an extremely narrow range. Some people insist that this is the most significant determinant of the formulaic tendency. They are, however, entirely mistaken. Most of the people who ridicule us for a narrow range of topics themselves write more than 65 percent of their works about love relationships, which are, moreover, inspired by romances familiar to them in their own little worlds. (Take a look at the 1930 collection of Japanese fiction as one example.) In fact, proletarian writers, even those whose work tends to be autobiographically inspired, manifest more rich and varied ups and downs in their lives than most Japanese writers to date. We write about subject matter that differs from mainstream literary writers, so people take notice of the commonalities. From a distance, our works may thus appear to be all about the same thing. In fact, there is nothing narrow about the range of topics we write about. On the contrary, I would put it thus: in our works, the increase in formulaic writing has occurred in direct proportion to an unnatural expansion of the number of topics we treat. [. . .] The cause underlying the formulaic tendency of our works has nothing to do with the breadth or narrowness of the subjects we portray. Rather, the cause lies in the themes that form the backbone of our works. It lies in the recourse to formulaic themes. The fact that the variety of subject matter we treat has expanded unnaturally arose from the mistaken attempt on the part of writers to rescue their works from the trap of deploying formulaic themes. In order to escape it, we have run off to China, traveled to see the fishing industry in the Russian territories, to Hokkaido, and even all the way to Stockholm. The further we strayed from Japanese society, the place where we are most connected, however, the deeper we sank into this morass. Since the issue was the formulaic nature of our themes, and not of what we were writing about, we could not extract ourselves from the problem, no matter what exotic subject matter we came across. Complex materials have ended up flattened and the form of our works became uniform. What caused this situation? Generally speaking, it comes from the relative absence of realism in the writing of those of us who call ourselves proletarian writers— this in spite of our constant insistence on the importance of proletarian realism. At the root of this is the fact that not many writers truly 182 chapter three

draw social meaning from reality itself as it ebbs and flows before us, each and every day, to then turn it into the central argument of our creative work. The fact of the matter is that few proletarian writers are able to dig out themes from the fresh reality all around us. Instead, they choose their themes from Marxist formulas, or from Comintern or Profintern resolutions or orders. Of course, we should carefully study authoritative formulas and decisions and orders, and regard them as guidelines for our creative approach. Nonetheless, they are merely guidelines, and not the unique, living themes themselves. First of all, the place where a writer selects themes cannot necessarily be identical to the sphere of politics. For example, the new individual characteristics of workers that have recently appeared, or the new psychological currents of the bourgeoisie, are realms that are seldom or never mentioned in Comintern or Profintern orders. The specific characteristics of the proletariat, however, have a great deal to do with the sphere of politics. Writing about [Maksim] Gorky [1868–1936], [Georgi˘ı Valentinovich] Plekhanov [1856–1918] noted that novelists need to be the best social psychologists. It is precisely this realm, distinct from political issues, that we proletarian writers must study most fervently. This must be the place where we excavate our creative themes. Many years have passed since the virtues of proletarian realism were first sung. Nevertheless, practice has gone in the opposite direction. Certain people stray further and further from thematic realism, as they adopt proletarian realism only with respect to form, and in fact imitate Naturalism in their writing style. The core of proletarian realism, however, lies in the creative approach of the writer, and what she grasps from society, and what she tries to communicate to society. In other words, it is a matter of theme. Contemporary proletarian literature will be saved from its formulaic character if writers strive to achieve realism in theme, rather than treating it only as a question of form. Finally, I make this demand of proletarian critics. When, at this moment of crisis for proletarian literature, you write reviews of individual novels, I want you to stop focusing exclusively on socialist propositions. It is precisely that type of criticism that drags our literature in such unprofitable directions. Criticism is meaningless if it doesn’t consider the extent to which a work has managed to realize proletarian flesh and blood— in other words, the extent of its power to communicate. [. . .] Translated by Ann Sherif t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 183

(15) Covering Over the Essence (excerpt) sata ineko Translated from Daily Miyako (May 26–28, 1932) Like Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata [Kubokawa] Ineko (1904–1998) was a prominent woman in the proletarian literature movement. (For biographical information, see the introduction to [8].) In this stern piece directed at Hirabayashi’s criticism [14] of their comrades’ literature, Sata, like Kurahara Korehito [13], underscores the significance of the author’s perspective on her subject matter: she argues that Hirabayashi’s recent story “Downfall” not only fails to dramatize the structural necessity for the protagonist’s “downfall” from the viewpoint of class struggle but provides no narratorial perspective on it. In other words, Hirabayashi “shows” the central action of her story only superficially and fails altogether to “tell” her readers how to think about it. Aesthetic ideology has long favored “showing” over “telling.” Nevertheless, as US literary scholar Barbara Foley points out, interpretive commentary allows the proletarian writer to provide the reader with an “‘objective’ grasp of social forces” and a “revolutionary perspective” that exceed the protagonists’ experience and vision, thus freeing her of both the need to create heroic characters who strain credulity and the risk of provoking demoralization if she depicts failure. 19 Even this single exchange between Sata and Hirabayashi illustrates how debates within the proletarian movement, apt to be dismissed as sectarian difference, in fact dealt with abiding questions about literary method and purpose. At the same time, as Sata’s closing paragraph reveals, we need to remember the dire circumstances in which such arguments took place. nf

1 Recently, a number of things have happened to me all at once. On March 25, my husband, Kubokawa Tsurujiro¯ [see figs. 9 and 10], was whisked off to the police station. At just about the same time, my father lost his mind, and my younger brother became a nasty bum and ended up going to jail.20 My father’s illness turned out to be cerebral syphilis. The company where he worked had been absorbed by a giant corporation, which resulted in the 19. Foley, Radical Representations, 282. 20. In a later, collected version, “[. . .] turned into a bum. His whereabouts are still unknown” (SIZ, 16:51). 184 chapter three

elimination of a number of employees. Father was quite worried about his job. Then my younger brother, who had been jobless for quite some time, disappeared. My father wondered what would happen if this got back to his company. It was all he could talk about. That his illness showed up in his brain may not have been a direct result, but the anxiety he was feeling about his job, that is to say, his life, played a considerable role. When I told Miyamoto Yuriko about this, she shook her head and said, “It’s no accident, is it, that everything happened all at once. It’s completely dialectical.” Japanese society is currently suffering from a serious financial crisis. In order to get through it, the Japanese bourgeoisie have started a war. Three million jobless plus their families are still starving on the streets. At the same time, we note that the revolutionary Japanese proletariat, in conjunction with the international movement, is sufficiently developed to pursue the proper course even in the cultural field. This strikes fear in the hearts of the bourgeoisie, mired as they are in their own difficulties. My deranged father, my brother-turned-bum-and-sent-to-jail, and Kubokawa detained and incarcerated for taking part in the cultural struggles of the proletariat: the concrete manifestations may differ according to the disparities in the dialectical relations each has with others, but we can see in all of these a reflection of current social conditions. And therefore, that these developments took place at the same time is not accidental but in accordance with dialectical principles. We proletarian writers, even when dealing with something that happened in a single household or to one individual, don’t just scratch the surface of an event as if it had occurred in isolation. Rather, we take it on ourselves to discern the social necessity of its occurrence and then give it concrete expression. It is for this that we are currently engaged in an effort to master the “dialectical materialist method of creation.” This is something that cannot possibly be achieved by the vulgar and mistaken explication of the dialectical method recently offered by Miss Hirabayashi Taiko on the pages of the Daily Asahi:21 a method for presenting “the great variety and richness of reality just as it is in all its variety and richness”; “the manifestation of change— gradual, sudden, or dramatic— in reality, just as it is”; and for “turning into literature the look of every angle, of the bright spots and the dark, of the vicissitudes of actual society just as they are” [emphases Sata]. Not only would it be impossible to achieve a dialectical method of composition in this way,

21. Hirabayashi, “‘Yuibutsu bensho¯ho¯teki ho¯ho¯’ to iu kotoba.” t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 185

but Miss Hirabayashi’s interpretation of dialectics is reactionary. We will need to struggle against Miss Hirabayashi’s reactionary views as a part of our struggle to attain the “dialectical materialist method of creation.”

2 First of all, Miss Hirabayashi uses such expressions as “a literature doomed to be formulaic” or “literary themes derived from formulas” to reject the positive themes we have been trying to promote as being tendentious. Instead, in applying the method of showing “the look of every angle, of the bright spots and the dark, the vicissitudes of actual society just as they are” to depict the downfall of a man dragged away from the class struggle by his wife, in depicting it, that is, without showing the necessary basis for the downfall or the relevant social relations, and, moreover, without inserting the author’s worldview— in other words, according to the so-called “just as it is” principle— she has had to conclude the novel with the observation that the downfallen man felt happy (Hirabayashi Taiko, “Downfall”).22 Not only is this in no way a form of dialectical materialism, which seeks to reveal the essence and the laws of a given phenomenon, but in having recourse to the implausible practice of presenting the form of reality “just as it is,” it only scratches the surface aspects of the downfallen man, in effect covering over the reality. This is nothing other than a disarming of the proletariat in the cultural field and an attempt to draw it toward the side of bourgeois literature. Contrary to the method of depicting reality “just as it is,” the dialectical materialist method of literary creation is a method for taking a given phenomenon as it is and penetrating its essence in order to reveal the necessity of its occurrence. There can be no such thing as presenting reality simply “as it is.” That is an empty expression, referring to what bourgeois realism imagines it has achieved in merely scratching the surface of reality. What difference can Miss Hirabayashi claim for her own practice? [. . .]

3 Miss Hirabayashi says that to date, proletarian critics have “simply picked out Marxist theses from the works, and as long as they find them to be unproblematic as socialist theses (on the contrary, we are demanding positive themes [Sata]), have paid little or no attention to other aspects of the works” and praised them. This is not what criticism should be doing, she says. “Isn’t it the role of criticism to consider the work’s capacity to influence, its

22. Hirabayashi, “Tenraku,” 271. 186 chapter three

strength, and its nature?” she asks.23 “If it is devoid of the power to communicate, however beautiful its proletarian theses, the work will be unable to propagate them” (Hirabayashi). We are not here discussing “beautiful proletarian theses” themselves but rather works of art. Accordingly, it stands to reason that what is of concern to us are “immediacy, visibility, the illusion of lived experience— if a work is unable to sustain these effects, it cannot become a work of art” ([Aleksandr] Fadeev [1901–1956]). But this cannot mean, as Miss Hirabayashi would have it, that even if the content of a given work is inferior, its superior form should be acknowledged. To separate form and content is undialectical and, consequently, unacceptable as proletarian literary criticism. [. . .] I should add that although I have adopted Miss Hirabayashi’s language of “beautiful proletarian theses” here, this expression itself is not proletarian. We do not seek to use the suppleness of our brush in order to describe something that does not exist in reality, namely, “beautiful proletarian theses.” We proletarian writers take up phenomena observable by anyone and seek to explicate the essence that elucidates the truth of things that actually exist. At the same time, moreover, we strive to produce works with sensuous concreteness, preserving the “immediacy” of that which is depicted, works that might be turned to the benefit of the proletariat. Accordingly, it is in order to create art with the affirmative themes necessary for the actual struggle of the proletariat that we make an effort to grasp the creative method of dialectical materialism. I myself gave birth to a child during this crackdown. “To give birth to a child in the midst of a storm,” someone said, and I felt a little like that, too. “In the midst of a storm!” Does that mean the weather is normally fair, then? I realized that to think like this, that we were in the midst of a storm, was petty bourgeois. So long as I am engaged in proletarian cultural activities, sacrifices are inevitable. We must put to good use in our future struggles the lessons learned through such sacrifice. Translated by Norma Field

23. Sata has transposed Hirabayashi’s emphases. t h e qu e st ion of re a lism 187

4 : Children introduction Shall you say that the “children” of kings and the bourgeoisie, who want for nothing with respect to food, clothing, and shelter, have the same “feelings” or “everyday experiences” or “dreams” or “demands” as the children of beggars and the proletariat? Makimoto, “Puroretaria jido¯ bungaku” (17)

This ringing appeal for a proletarian children’s literature comes from Makimoto Kusuro¯ [20], author of stories and song lyrics for children as well as leading theorist of the genre. He goes on to rehearse the clichés about the sacred innocence of the “child” recently discovered to reside everywhere, including in the hearts of adults,1 and to excoriate “supraclass” artists and publishers. But patient examination of his words reveals sympathy for the notion that bourgeois and proletarian children also share features that deserve to be respected. In fact, Makimoto’s reasoning as developed throughout his work gives us a useful illustration of dialectical thinking. If, given the two groups’ antagonistic social positions, stories for bourgeois children were insufficiently nourishing and possibly harmful for proletarian children, the two still had in common a love of fantasy that distinguished them from adults. Or, as Samuel Perry observes of Makimoto’s fellow children’s writer Murayama Kazuko [17, 18] and the German Communist politician and theorist Edwin Hoernle (1883–1952), their “life and work . . . were shaped by the dual conviction that childhood was both a social fact diversely experienced in a class-divided society as well as a particular stage of human development, a stage that warranted a particular kind of reading experience closer to the imagination of the child.”2 Such a conviction made them supple in their judgment about the kinds of literature suitable for proletarian children: the value accorded science, for instance, did not exclude the embrace of imaginative stories. 1. Noted exponents of the “child’s heart” movement include the poet Kitahara Hakushu¯ (1885–1942), children’s writer Ogawa Mimei (1882–1961), and novelist Akita Ujaku (1883–1962). The last two subsequently participated in the proletarian culture movement. 2. Perry, “Aesthetics for Justice,” 161. 188

Makimoto’s thinking, as inspired by Hoernle (whom he translated) and the practices of other German leftists as well as comrades such as Murayama Kazuko, is reflected in the broad range of works published by the children’s branch of the proletarian literary movement. It probably shouldn’t surprise us that a movement aiming for the transformation of society should pay attention to its children. But how this was to happen was anything but self-evident. It’s worth pointing to a crystallizing event, the multiyear Kizaki Village tenant farmer strike in Niigata. A “proletarian farmers school,” established in the summer of 1926, attracted a diverse array of progressives, including members of the New Man Society of Tokyo Imperial University such as Kaji Wataru [16]. For many young intellectuals, this was a startling encounter with the unwashed, fierce, small humans for whom the condition called “childhood” seemed scarcely relevant. It was blindingly obvious that neither the textbooks of the state education system nor the beautifully illustrated magazines such as Red Bird (1918–1936) or Child’s Land (1922–1944), which inspired talented artists to create for that innocent child, could meet the needs of these children: the former were designed to secure their subservience and the latter were too pricey and, correspondingly, too experientially remote. Nor, given the young intellectuals’ emerging consciousness, was the ideology of individual misfortune, diligence, and luck purveyed in mass-market magazines such as Boys Club (1914–1962) desirable. In the same spirit that most proletarian writers wrote criticism as well as fiction and threw themselves into organizational work, many of them wrote for and about children, including Kataoka Teppei [12], Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40], Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31], Kobayashi Takiji [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30], and Nakano Shigeharu [19]. Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21] and Hayashi Fusao [7], who also translated children’s stories by German leftists,3 wrote memorable autobiographical fiction about themselves as children.4 In addition to his writing, Murayama Tomoyoshi [35] contributed striking graphics, illustrating, for example, his wife Kazuko’s stories (see figs. 1 and 6). It was movement theorist Kurahara Korehito [13] who had impressed on her the urgency of developing children’s proletarian literature and supported her vision of a literature for actually existing children over the theoretical proletarian child, as presented in the memorable passage in Tomoyoshi’s autobiographical recantation novella [35] discussed in the introduction to this volume and at3. Ibid., 150. 4. Especially famous are Sata’s “Kyarameru ko¯jo¯ kara” (From the caramel factory) and Hayashi’s “Mayu” (Cocoons). c h ild re n 189

tested by Kurahara’s prison correspondence. 5 For a time (1929–1931), these comrades’ efforts coalesced in Boys Battle Flag. Although the sho¯nen in the Japanese title of Sho¯nen Senki generally refers to boys, the publication was clearly directed at girls as well as boys, as in, “worker-farmer-boys-and-girls.” That poor girls, saleable into sex work, had an even shorter childhood than boys was also a subject for proletarian literature. 6 Issues included brief essays introducing “our heroes” such as Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919; see fig. 6); retellings of traditional tales that exposed and overturned their ideologies, as frequently done by German comrades;7 original short fiction; science lessons; poetry and songs; comic strips; and letters from readers. Resolutely internationalist, Boys Battle Flag not only described the lives of Soviet “pionı¯ro” (May 1929) but also the “young pioneers” of the United States (June 1929). Korean children were referred to in letters, brief columns, and full-fledged ˘ rini-nal, or Children’s Day (July 1929). An orphaned articles such as one on O Korean girl is a main character in Kaji’s “Hell,” translated in this chapter [16]. For critics who objected to the politicization of literature for adults, such a literature for children was at least as offensive. They did not, for starters, associate children with political life, nor would they have approved of it.8 But if we think of the children of striking tenant farmers, for instance, subject not only to material privation but teachers’ incomprehension and betteroff classmates’ taunts, who suffered doubly when they had to witness their parents’ humiliation— children subject only to the penalties and none of the advantages of a class-divided society— it makes sense that they should be politicized as they struggled alongside their parents. Not just the raw experience of hunger but the encouragement of teachers newly awakened to social injustice and the example of organized struggle helped politicize them. Faced with children bearing adult-sized burdens, the young leftist intellectuals were surely keen to help develop their class consciousness as proletarian children. But they also knew they had to take account of them as children. And so they experimented with content, eager to instruct but aware, too, that providing pleasure was hardly a frivolous matter. They also tried out rough-and-ready, egalitarian modes of address, especially in editorials. Sometimes they even did away with the polite spoken verb forms that had come to characterize narration in (bourgeois) children’s stories, although 5. Perry, “Aesthetics for Justice,” 136. 6. Kobayashi Takiji, “Kyu¯en nyu¯su no. 18”; Field, “Thinking about Form and Ideology,” 197–207. 7. Zipes, Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days. 8. Endo, “Pedagogical Experiments,” 49–53. 190 chapter four

Figure 6. Inside cover, Boys Battle Flag September 1929. Right: Table of contents, which includes Murayama Kazuko’s “Death of a Cricket” [17] as well as a short story by Makimoto Kusuro¯ [20]. Left: “Our Heroes,” spotlight on Rosa Luxemburg, and a black-and-white silhouette signed “Tom” by Murayama Tomoyoshi [35] (see also fig. 1).

the first three stories in this chapter all use this form. It’s possible to argue that proletarian children might also enjoy polite address: the factory girl in “Prayer” [8] finds this aspect of Christianity especially appealing. Of the fictional selections in this chapter, Nakano Shigeharu’s “Tetsu’s Story,” in contrast to the works by Kaji Wataru and Murayama Kazuko in this chapter, was presumably not written for children. Like Kobayashi Takiji’s “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow” [1], the core story of boyhood reminiscence is framed by the words of an adult narrator. What Nakano is able to do in this story is to dignify the suffering of a poor rural child by granting him interiority— that prized possession of the bourgeoisie— and retrospective insight into the structure of oppression. In conclusion, let’s go back to Makimoto. After differentiating the needs of the bourgeois and proletarian child, Makimoto proceeds to explore the characteristics they share as children, principally, their inclination to believe in the reality of “illusory” worlds. And in the essay translated in this chapter, he goes on to point out that “personification and symbolism” continue to play a conscious and unconscious role in adult lives. Thus, he takes his dialectical reasoning to a final, though unelaborated stage: the distinction— or contradiction, in the classical vocabulary— between bourgeois and proletarian children is real, but they have commonalities worthy of recognition; the distinction between children and adults is real, but they have properties shared by all humans. And to this we might add, the distinction between proletarian and bourgeois literature is real, each with its riches and incompleteness; but if we imagine their coming together, might we have a figure for a society that has overcome the injustice of class division? nf

(16) Hell kaji wataru Translated from Proletarian Arts (January 1928) Kyushu-born Kaji Wataru (pseudonym for Seguchi Mitsugu, 1903– 1982) became active in the arts and social movements as a student at Tokyo Imperial University. An energetic critic always at the center of tumultuous theoretical debates, he was an elected officer, organizer, creative writer, and even lyricist in the proletarian culture movement. After joining the illegal Japanese Communist Party in 1932, he was subjected to arrest, torture, and imprisonment before recanting in 1935 (see fig. 2). But that is when his story gets even more interesting. After release, a defeated Kaji went to Shanghai where, thanks to Uchiyama Kanzo¯ 192 chapter four

(1885–1959) of the Uchiyama Shoten bookstore, the famous salon for leftist Chinese intellectuals, he met an ailing Lu Xun (1881–1936) and other like-minded people. 9 Their warm reception helped Kaji to feel that the Japanese movement had not been meaningless. After war broke out with China, he organized the Japanese People’s Anti-War League. 10 Just as Kuroshima Denji [26, 34] denounced imperialist militarism, Kaji vigorously preached antimilitarism to Japanese soldiers and POWs. After the war, he returned to Japan and became active with the New Japan Literature Association. In 1951 he was abducted by a top-secret US intelligence unit, detained for a year, accused of being a Soviet spy, and pressed to become a double agent. In his later years, he published prolifically on his efforts to combat Japanese imperialism in Asia. In 1926 Kaji traveled with fellow students of the New Man Society to Kizaki Village, the site of a long-running tenant farmer strike. Recognizing the acute need for reading materials for proletarian children, he began writing for a children’s column in the Proletarian Gazette and elsewhere. 11 “Hell,” the short story translated here, brings his commitment to exposing the hypocrisies of imperialism to proletarian child readers. hbs Being a beggar was not a fun business. The maids of the big mansions would wave their brooms up in the air and shout in shrill voices: “Dirty runt! Go on, scram!” The saber-carrying policemen swaggered in front of the police box and would intimidate: “Hey! You can’t hang around here! Get moving!” The mean kids on their way home from school would pick up stones and hurl them as if they’d spotted a thief. Worst of all, the boss was a hot-headed bear of a man who stripped them naked and beat them until they were swollen whenever the day’s earnings were low. “You squirt! Slacked off again, eh? Get over here!” Orphaned Sho¯ichi and the other children headed out each morning scared and ashamed. Once winter came, cold, dry gusts blew through the streets. Then the gray clouds would spread farther and farther, turning into a snowstorm so violent that it was impossible to breathe. Through Sho¯ichi’s torn rubber boots, a biting cold stung the cracks of his sorely chapped feet. 9. Kaji, Jidentekina bungakushi, 232–33. ¯ ba, “Kaji Wataru,” 34–35. 10. O 11. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 21–22. c h ild re n 193

It was Christmas morning. A layer of white snow covered the oak forest and the orphans’ cabin on the city’s outskirts. Inside the cabin, sitting beside a brightly lit fire, the hairy old boss had a fierce gleam in his eye. He turned to the children and ordered: “Listen up, runts! Today’s Christmas. The city’s busy with people preparing feasts and celebrating. The takings are going to be huge. Slack off and you won’t be getting any dinner tonight!” Sho¯ichi suddenly remembered that it was Christmas. “Boss, so tonight’s the night that the man called Santa Claus is supposed to bring us presents?” “Little twerp! I’m the only Santa Claus you fools’ve got!” “But boss, does that mean you’ll be giving us presents?” The boss shouted back in a thunderous voice: “You good-for-nothing! Get out there and work!” Startled, Sho¯ichi flew out in a hurry. In the frozen city streets, even passersby were scant. As the dry wind blew, it shaved away at the street’s snowy layers and nearly took off Sho¯ichi’s bare, frozen earlobes. The fingers Sho¯ichi held tight to his ears were swollen purple. It was impossible for him to think about anything besides how cold he was. When the smell of baking sweets came wafting toward Sho¯ichi from the kitchen of a large house, he could only think about how much he wanted to eat them. Hearing how happy the children inside sounded as they sang their songs, Sho¯ichi was filled with sadness and blew on his freezing hands to warm them. Sho¯ichi was tough so he did not cry. Santa Claus is coming tonight. He’ll bring tons of presents for rich kids like them. But all we’ve got for a Santa is that boss of ours . . . and the only presents we get from him come straight from his fist. Sho¯ichi shivered in the cold. Not a single person turned to look in his direction. Suddenly, a grand two-horse carriage came rumbling along. Sho¯ichi knew better than anyone that those who rode in carriages like that had no more sympathy than they had dirt under their fingernails. People like them put bulldogs in front of their gates so that when unkempt-looking children got close, they barked loudly and snapped at them. Just once, I’d like to ride a carriage like that, Sho¯ichi thought to himself. I’m going to grab on and try going for a ride without anyone knowing, he thought. Sho¯ichi latched on to the back of the carriage while the driver, not noticing, drove the horses even faster. Bells ringing, the carriage sped along. Sho¯ichi found himself wondering what kind of beautiful person would be riding inside. Then he heard someone murmuring to himself in the carriage. “Let’s see . . . I can work on getting rid of him later, but in the meantime . . . 194 chapter four

lower the wages a bit more . . . yeah. Those Koreans, they work like horses, after all . . . as long as I squeeze the life out of them . . . hmm . . . good.” This guy’s a murderer! thought Sho¯ichi. He’s planning to suck the blood out of Koreans, he thought. Just you wait, you scoundrel! Abruptly, the carriage came to a stop in front of a beautiful Western structure. Waiting for the driver to open the door for him, a bald and portly man emerged and entered the house with an arrogant air about him. A horde of servants came to greet him. That’s him, the murderer! Sho¯ichi had completely forgotten his business of begging. Instead, he was thinking about how he’d much rather hang himself by the neck than lower his head to someone like him. There weren’t any passersby in the streets, let alone someone willing to open the door to a beggar kid. As he glared at the house that the beastly murderer had gone into, strong gusts blew snow into Sho¯ichi’s shirt collar. Instinctively, he pulled in his neck like a turtle. Then, a happy scene appeared before Sho¯ichi’s eyes: through the window of the house the rich man had disappeared into moments before, he glimpsed a decorated Christmas tree larger than any he’d ever seen before. On it were tied red flowers and blue-eyed dolls. The fire in the furnace burned brightly, and the children, who had finished decorating the tree, erupted in gleeful laughter. Sho¯ichi’s eyes were glued to the scene, as if his soul had been robbed from his body. He inched slowly toward the windowsill, as if something were pulling him along. At that moment, the children’s mother entered the room, bringing a plate of exquisite-looking sweets. Yelling excitedly, they grasped at the hem of their mother’s jacket. “Ma’am! Over here! Give me some, too! I’m starving! Hey!” Sho¯ichi’s hand inadvertently reached out and landed directly on the window. Everyone turned to look over. “It’s a thief!” “A thief! An armed robber!” “Daddy! I’m scared!” One of the girls erupted in tears. Within moments, the bald man appeared with a gun in his hand. It’s the murderer! Sho¯ichi jumped down from the windowsill and ran frantically. “You little thief! Get back here!” Within seconds, a bulldog-faced policeman came running after him. “No! Mister! You’ve got it wrong! All wrong!” c h ild re n 195

“What’s there to be wrong about? Beggars like you are all thieves! Scum!” “No! You’re wrong!” Against the fierce winds of the blizzard, Sho¯ichi and the policeman on his tail disappeared into a blur of white. Sho¯ichi had no idea where or how he managed to escape, nor did he know how long he’d been running. He was in front of a small shrine on the outskirts of town. When he turned around, he found that there was no longer anyone chasing after him. Sho¯ichi let out a sigh of relief. If your clothes are dirty, they all treat you like some thief. That bald scoundrel is much worse scum. It’s just that he’s got fancy clothes to wear. Tears of frustration trickled down Sho¯ichi’s face. When I grow up, I’m going to be a powerful man. They’ll pay for treating me like some thief. I’ll make them work like dogs! Just wait and see! Determined, Sho¯ichi bit his lip. But how can I become somebody powerful? . . . I can’t even go to school. And plus, when I get home tonight, the boss will just tell me I’ve slacked off again and I’ll get a beating. Sho¯ichi looked over toward the oak forest where the boss was waiting. The forest could be seen in the distance, at the foot of Red Clay Mountain on the other side of the city. It was in the opposite direction from where he’d run for his life earlier. He had come to an impossibly faraway place. It was long past noon. While running away, he had slipped and fallen, leaving a faint trace of blood on his ankle. Even if I head straight home now, it’ll be evening before I reach the cabin in the oak forest. Moreover, Sho¯ichi was completely exhausted. Roughed up by the harsh winds, he began to walk slowly. Sho¯ichi couldn’t walk another step. The cold felt like it would tear his chest apart. Completely starved, Sho¯ichi stopped and stood for a moment, dejected. He was near a church in the center of town, and the shadows cast by the trees and buildings had turned completely dark. In the still-distant oak forest, the bearlike boss would be waiting for him, whip in hand. Sho¯ichi could feel his eyes starting to tear. Am I about to cry? Come on, cheer up, cheer up! Sho¯ichi said to himself as he began to walk. The pointed roof in the shadow of the trees belonged to the church. A bright light spilled from the windows. On the other side of the window were the happy festivities of Christmas. There’s sure to be a nice, hot feast. Tears welled up in 196 chapter four

Sho¯ichi’s eyes. Suddenly, in the half darkness, Sho¯ichi heard the soft sounds of sniffling. Sho¯ichi started. Timidly, he looked around him until he found, crouched beneath the eaves of the church assembly hall, a small girl in pigtails. Poor kid, she’s probably a beggar. Sho¯ichi forgot his own sadness and got closer to the girl. “Hey, you there! Don’t cry! You’ll catch a cold!” Crouching down alongside her, Sho¯ichi gave her a pat on the shoulder. But the girl kept on crying. Sho¯ichi called out in a loud voice, “What’re you crying about?” Startled, the girl looked up. “You’re gonna catch a cold crying there!” “Oh! You scared me!” “You scared me too, all dressed in white and crying like that. I thought maybe you were a ghost.” “In my country, ghosts dress in all black.” “Oh! So you must be Korean. What’s your name?” “I’m Kyo¯-chan. Are you looking for your father, too?” “Nope, I’m not looking for anything.” “So you have a mother and father, then?” “I’m all alone.” “Why?” “Don’t know.” “Oh, I know, your father must be in hell, too.” Sho¯ichi was dumbfounded. “Why? You know where hell is?” “No, I don’t know where it is. That’s why I’m looking for it. See, my daddy he went to hell. . . .” The girl rubbed her eyes and started crying again. “Hey! Stop crying!” Sho¯ichi said, but the girl kept crying. Unable to comfort her, he didn’t know what to do. “Hey, I said stop, so stop it! If you keep crying, I’ll hit you.” Startled, the girl stopped crying. “You bully! Japanese are all bullies!” “That’s not true. I’m not really going to hit you. The only bullies are the rich people, my boss, and murderers. And the police are bad guys, too. But I’m strong.” “Really? So you’ll help me look for my father?” “Sure, I’ll find him for you. But tell me, where did he really go?” “They told me he went to hell.” “Are you sure?” “That’s what the rich man told me.— My dad hasn’t come home since c h ild re n 197

last night. See, I don’t have a mom. So every morning, when he goes off to work in the morning, I sit and wait at home. Our neighbor next door, and our neighbor across from us, too, they all go off to work. To Red Clay Mountain. You can see it— just past the oak forest, that small mountain over there. They go there and dig up the clay and carry it on trolley carts. They all work really hard. Just like always, my dad and the rest of them left for work yesterday.” “Through all that snow?” “Yes . . . but when it was evening, he didn’t come home, even though the other neighbors did. So I asked the lady next door if she knew where my dad was. But no one would tell me anything. The ladies wiped their tears and told me to be a good girl and wait. The ladies are really good to me, but I got so sad that I just cried. Then they started to cry, too.” Sho¯ichi sat still with his arms folded and thought. “That’s strange, it sounds like he really could’ve gone to hell!” “He really did go to hell. But he still didn’t come home this morning. So I went to Red Clay Mountain and I called out in my loudest voice, Daddy! Daaaddy! Then a man in a black carriage got mad and started yelling at me. If you want to see your daddy that much, then go visit him in hell! That’s what he said.” “Was he bald?” “Yes, bald and fat like a pig.” “It’s that scoundrel! Shit.” “Who is he?” she asked curiously. “He’s a murderer.” Sho¯ichi clenched his hands into fists. The girl watched him silently, and then began timidly, “You know, hell might be a really scary place.” “Why?” “When I was just at the temple, under the eaves, I heard a priest wailing, telling a story about hell.” “Traditional Naniwa-bushi singing, you mean? My boss is pretty good at it, too.” “Not Naniwa-bushi. He was just talking normally. It was about hell. Talking about how there are red ogres and blue ogres.” “Ha! That’s Ogre Island!” Sho¯ichi laughed so hard that the girl got angry. “No! It’s not Ogre Island! You don’t know a thing about hell.” “You’re right, I don’t know about hell. But I’ll go and find your dad for you.” “Really? So you’ll come with me to hell?” the girl said, her mood now restored. The snow, unrelenting, came down heavily. The two children huddled 198 chapter four

together quietly under the eaves of the church building. Then, a laborer on his way home from work saw them and said, “Poor kids,” and gave them the baked yam he had in his hand. The two shared the baked yam and filled their minds with thoughts of the place called hell. “Since it’s too dark tonight, let’s start looking for hell tomorrow.” Before long, the two fell asleep. The wind died down and the snow fell quietly in large flakes. Cheerful laughter from inside the church could be heard through the window. Sunlight was gleaming on the snow, and the two woke up wide-eyed. “I just had a dream about my dad. I’m sure we’ll find him!” “The weather’s fine today. Let’s go find something to eat first.” Sho¯ichi got up and peered into the window of the church. He could see the many sweets decorating the Christmas tree. Sho¯ichi tried pushing on the window. The window gave way and opened easily, so the two took some of the sweets on the tree and had their morning meal. “So, we’re off to hell. Which way is it?” “I don’t know either.” “Hey! I’ve got a good idea.” Sho¯ichi clapped his hand excitedly. “We’ll go to Red Clay Mountain, and grab the bald one. We’ll make him guide us to hell.” “That murderer?” The girl creased her brow worriedly. “That’s right, that murderer. Why not? We’ll nail him right in the eyes with snowballs. Then we’ll pin him down and make him tell us where hell is.” “That’s a great idea!” The two set out walking with a bounce in their step. The soft snow that had begun to disappear under the sunlight stuck to their legs and made them as thick as snowmen. Even then, the two never lost their footing and made their way toward Red Clay Mountain. At the base of the mountain, the Korean laborers were already hard at work moving the trolleys. The trolleys rolled heavily on the embankment that was now dangerously slippery because of the snow. The soft snow crumbled under any firm step. The laborers worked without rest, streaming with sweat. The rich man’s carriage had not yet arrived. “We’re going to wait for him to arrive with snowballs ready to fire, got it? . . . Quick! Here he comes, here he comes.” The two-horse carriage arrived with its bells jingling. Listen, the second that murderer gets out, we’ll aim straight for the eyes and smash ’em in. The carriage came up behind the two of them and stopped. Gripping their snowballs firmly at the ready, they waited. c h ild re n 199

Suddenly— BOOM! A loud thud was heard, followed by a pained howl. Looking behind them in surprise, they saw that a trolley had overturned. A man pinned under the trolley screamed painfully as he lay half buried under the red clay. The other Korean laborers turned pale and rushed over to their fellow worker. Everyone pooled their strength together and lifted the trolley, helping to release the man caught underneath it. His arm was broken, dangling limply from his shoulder. Blood streamed down and colored the snow a bright red. As more and more people gathered, one of them tore off his shirtsleeve to make a bandage. Everyone said encouraging things as they tended to him. “Let’s help care for him, too.” As the two hurried over to help, a sudden thundering voice was heard from behind. “Lazy good-for-nothings! Why can’t you hurry and get back to work . . . what? A broken arm? A broken arm, nothing! Keep working until the leg’s broken too, damn it!” Unnoticed, the bald man had gotten down from his carriage and was now stark, raving mad, shouting furiously. Everyone glared at the bald man with hate in their eyes. Then, a policeman who was standing guard in a different area approached them with a threatening look. Baldy put on more and more of a high-and-mighty air and shouted down to the Koreans. “Lazy good-for-nothings! Fifty trolleys are standing idle! Leave the cripple and get back to work!” Sho¯ichi was completely enraged. In an instant, he threw the snowball in his hand, letting it splash right in Baldy’s eye— whereupon Baldy let out a yelp and fell to the ground. “Get that little brat!” The policemen became angry and tried to grab him. “Get the girl, too! She’s a malcontent Korean!” The two panicked and began to run. “They’re getting away!” said one policeman as more policemen joined in the chase. Panting heavily, they came after them like a pack of dogs. “What’s going on? What’s this about?” cried out some bystanders as they, too, joined the chase. “A socialist! A malcontent Korean!” he shouted as he pursued them. Sho¯ichi panted and burst out, “We’re no socialists!” The policeman, also out of breath, retorted, “Liars! Korean sympathizers are all socialists!” “Besides, the way you’re running away is revolutionary!” one policeman 200 chapter four

heaved. There were many policemen and bystanders chasing behind. Soon, the children became too tired and were captured by the policemen who now looked like red ogres. “Mister! Let me go! I’m not a socialist!” said Sho¯ichi as he struggled to get free. “Darn brat, making us work so hard,” shouted the policeman. The girl, on the verge of tears, said, “We didn’t do anything! We didn’t do anything!” “Liars! You were loitering around!” “We came to look for hell!” “Idiot!” shouted the policeman. “If it’s hell you want, I’ll take you there!” Sho¯ichi and the girl looked surprised. “Really?” “Where is this hell?” “Come with me and you’ll see. It would serve you little brats right to be charged with political crimes against the state!” he heaved. Led by the ogre-faced policeman, the two entered a large building. In the deep recesses of the building was a dark, foul-smelling vault. Inside it were many smaller cells closed off with sturdy steel grates. Pushing the children into one of these cells, the policeman shut the creaking steel grate from the outside. There was a clanking sound as the padlock was clamped shut. “I wonder if this is hell,” Sho¯ichi said. The girl murmured, “I’m scared.” Toward the top of the dark cell there was one small window, letting in a little bit of light from the “earthly world.” At first, the two couldn’t make out a thing inside the dark cell. Eventually, their eyes grew used to the darkness, and they realized that the cell was surrounded by solid, square cell walls. “My father’s not here.” “No red ogres or blue ogres here, either.” Then, from the dark corner of the cell, laughter arose. “Ha, ha, ha . . .” The two pulled back in surprise. “There’s an ogre right behind you,” said the voice. Startled, Sho¯ichi turned to look behind him, but there was nothing there. Sho¯ichi mustered up all the courage he had and asked, “Who are you?” “Who am I? I’m a socialist.” Sho¯ichi and the girl finally relaxed and got a little closer. He was a powerful looking man. “Oooh, you’re just a socialist.” c h ild re n 201

“That’s right, I’m a socialist.” “They thought I was one of you and brought me down here. I’m no socialist, though.” The socialist laughed heartily. “You two seem like sweet kids. Come over here.” But Sho¯ichi and the girl were still hesitant. “But honest, you’re really one of the bad guys, though, aren’t you?” “I’m not one of the bad guys.” “Then what’s a socialist?” “Come closer. I can tell you all about socialists. . . . Hey! Weren’t you two sitting near a church last night?” The socialist stared intently into their faces. The surprised pair also looked closely and realized that it was the laborer who had given them a baked yam last night. “Hey, mister, it’s you!” “It’s the yam man!” The man chuckled and drew them into his arms. “Someone like you is a socialist?” “That’s right, someone like me is a socialist.” Sho¯ichi was confused and didn’t know how to make sense of it all. “But, mister, when I was out there, they said I was a socialist because I was with a Korean. So, mister, does that mean that socialists are the friends of Koreans?” The man laughed as he replied, “That’s right. Socialists are friends to people who are honest and good, and enemies to those who bully the weak.” “Then, mister, socialists are like the heroes of olden days!” Sho¯ichi was thoroughly delighted. The man laughed jovially. The girl pointed to Sho¯ichi and said to the man, “Mister, then he really is an honest-to-goodness socialist.” Patting their heads, the man said, “You two are good kids. How did kids like you end up in a place like this?” “We were looking for the place they call hell. Then the bad man in the carriage came over and started bullying my friends.” “So I threw a snowball at him.” “Well you did a good thing. But why were you two looking for hell?” “Well, mister, it’s because they say my daddy’s gone there. Is the place we’re in now hell? Can you help me look for my daddy, too, mister? Please?” The socialist man became wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you mean. No doubt, this place is hell, but . . .” the man tried hard to make sense of what she said. “Then that means my daddy is here! Daddy must be here!” the girl leapt 202 chapter four

up in joy. Then a thunderous voice boomed through the cellar. “Who’s making all the noise? Keep it quiet, or I’ll kill you!” “Oh! I’m scared!” the girl ran and clung to the man. Chuckling, the man said to her, “There, you see, that’s one of hell’s red ogres for you!” On the other side of the steel grate stood a policeman, glaring in at them like a bulldog. Before long, the policeman went away. “So that’s what they mean by a red ogre,” said Sho¯ichi to himself. The man stroked the girl’s head and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Go on, tell me again about your father. I’ll find him for you. ” The man drew the two closer to him again. Once more, the girl told the story of how her father had gone to hell. The man listened carefully and nodded at everything she said. Soon, his two large eyes filled with tears, and large teardrops began spilling down his face. The man’s arms that held the children grew more and more firm as he held them close. Sho¯ichi looked on, wondering. As soon as the girl had finished telling her story, the man held them tightly once more and rubbed his cheeks against theirs. “So mister, can you tell me where my daddy is? Is it true he’s gone to hell?” “No, that’s a lie. Don’t believe that. That evil murderer lied to you. Your daddy has gone to a far, faraway place, much farther away than hell. A place where there aren’t any ogres. He’s gone to heaven.” “Heaven is that far away, mister?” Abruptly, the girl became upset and burst into tears. Sho¯ichi also felt sad and couldn’t help the tears falling down his face. The man stroked their heads and said to them encouragingly, “Hey, hey, you two . . . don’t cry. I’ll find heaven for you. Don’t cry.” Wiping their tears, the two peered into the man’s face. “You two are such good kids. All good kids are promised a place in heaven. Don’t cry anymore. I’ll take you to heaven one day. Tell me you won’t cry anymore.” The two looked at the man’s face and promised him that no matter what happened, they wouldn’t cry. The man hugged them once more. “All right, then let’s make our way to heaven. Heaven is a truly fine place. But listen, you two. Heaven is really far away. And before we can get there, there’ll be a lot of scary, dangerous places we’ll have to pass through. Murderers, villains, and pitfalls: many other things will get in our way. You’ll have to make your way through all of these. You’ll have to be really strong, and not be afraid of anything that comes your way. But you’re both smart, good kids, so you’re sure to get to heaven.” The two of them watched the socialist man’s eyes carefully. They had a mysterious sparkle in them. c h ild re n 203

“I’m sure you’re going to make it. Strong kids like you will get there. But you see, kids, now’s not the right time. Since you have to pass through such awful places, you can’t go when you’re still small. You’ll have to be patient and wait a little longer, until you become big and strong enough to make it to heaven. You can be good and wait until then, right? Tell me you can wait until then.” Excitedly, the children both promised that they could wait. “Good. Then as soon as you two get out of here, let’s go to my home. I’ll take care of you until you’re big enough to make it to heaven. At my home, there are lots of other socialists living together. They’re all really nice men. You two can become socialists, can’t you? Tell me that you can be socialists.” Together, the two of them promised, “We can!” “You’re both good kids. One day, you’ll become great socialists and destroy the hell that’s in this world. You’ll kill those evil murderers that robbed you of your father. Once you’ve done that, heaven’ll be just within reach. Chin up! Come on, let’s raise our voices together!” The two shouted together, “Yay!” Translated by Mika Endo

(17) Death of a Cricket murayama kazuko Translated from Boys Battle Flag (September 1929) Murayama Kazuko (1901–1946) was a noted children’s writer in mainstream publications before she joined the proletarian culture movement. The oldest of ten children from a wealthy family from the island of Shikoku and a graduate of Freedom School, the progressive girls’ school started by pioneering woman journalist Hani Motoko (1873–1957), Kazuko began writing stories for children in the late 1910s while she worked at the Woman’s Companion Press, where she met her avant-garde artist husband, Tomoyoshi. Both became active in the Writers League. Their son Ado (1925–2002), in an engaging reminiscence of his mother, recalls how his father made line drawings for young women from the Woman’s Companion Press to cut out while his mother sketched the scenario for their animated film, The Three Little Bears.12 One of the very few women in the children’s branch of the movement,

12. Murayama Ado, Haha to aruku toki, 32–35. For the film, see Murayama Kazuko and Murayama Tomoyoshi, “Sambiki no koguma-san.” 204 chapter four

she was for a time chief editor of Boys Battle Flag. Whenever Tomoyoshi and other comrades were imprisoned, she busied herself with delivering books and laundry and with copious letter writing, later described as “care-package literature,”13 all the while encouraging the families of fellow detainees and sustaining her own household with her writing. She is the female protagonist “Noriko” in Tomoyoshi’s roman-à-clef recantation story, “Midnight Sun” [35]. Although Kazuko’s commitment to the cause was unwavering, virtually all her creative work, often illustrated by her husband (figs. 1 and 6), was published in nonproletarian venues. Most of her stories were geared to younger audiences and featured nonhuman protagonists, including animals, vegetables, or everyday household objects such as pots and pans. “Death of a Cricket” was her only story for Boys Battle Flag. “Elephant and Mouse” appeared nine months later in Child’s Companion, published by the Woman’s Companion Press. However much or little Kazuko’s stories foregrounded class consciousness, we can appreciate her role as its “first diplomat to the six-year-old Japanese child.”14 nf One day, even though there was an autumn chill in the air, a cricket went to town in a thin coat to look for work. The factory where he worked until just recently had fired him after he dropped a heavy typesetting tray and hurt his foot. The foot only swelled bigger and bigger, and no place would hire him. As day turned to dusk, Cricket began to shiver from the cold, so he decided to make his way back home. Suddenly, he felt a bucketful of filthy ice water come pouring over his head. He immediately grew faint and collapsed. When he came to, he found himself lying on a hospital bed. There stood the director of the hospital, Dr. Spotted Bee, who said, “Finally awake? Who are you and what do you do? You have a cold and a high fever. You’re here because you’re in a pretty bad state. Each day in the hospital costs two yen and fifty sen. Can you pay?” Startled, Cricket knew that he didn’t have enough money to stay there so he quickly tried to leave, but he didn’t even have the strength to get up. “I don’t have the money, doctor, but I can’t stand up so please let me rest here a while.” “This hospital isn’t yours alone. If I let you stay for free, then I’d have to let everyone else stay for free, too. Even children know that everyone must pay 13. Ichihara, “Murayama Kazuko,” 553. 14. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 26. c h ild re n 205

hospital fees when they come to a hospital. Plus, you’re not even a Christian, are you?” “But I’m in such terrible pain. Won’t you please let me rest here for just an hour or two?” “An hour or two? In thirty minutes, I have to go out to do my missionary work, so I can’t sit here and wait for you. Go home. There are plenty of people out there who are suffering from worse afflictions than you.” The hospital director ordered the doorkeeper Caterpillar to escort the cricket out of the hospital. Caterpillar worked all day at the entrance where no light came in, crouching in order to put away and bring out people’s shoes, breathing in dust and germs until he was consumptive. His face was as pale as bamboo, and his legs were so swollen from a disease called beriberi that he tripped and fell at least once for every five steps he took. He tried to help Cricket down from the examination bed, but his body was so sore and achy that there was no strength in his arms. Director Bee said, “Hurry up, I haven’t got a lot of time. What a weak good-for-nothing you are. Call in Inchworm from the pharmacy.” Just then, the pharmacist Inchworm was preparing some hiccup medicine for a wealthy young-lady bell cricket. But because he was so rattled when he was called in by the director, he mistakenly doubled the dose. Inchworm was the hospital director’s lackey. Even though he walked very strangely by stretching and contracting his body, this was considered to be quite attractive in the insect community. Inchworm always had a mirror hanging near him so that he could fix his hair and wipe his face and pretty himself while he measured out the medicines. Cricket continued to feel worse and worse, so he asked Inchworm, “Could you please ask the hospital director to allow me to stay here for a little while longer? Please, I beg you.” Inchworm took a long, hard look at Cricket’s sweaty, dirty clothes and made a sour face. “Why don’t you just go home? We have others to look after. We are so busy from morning to night, running around in circles with all this work. What nerve you have!” Inchworm stood next to Cricket’s bed and shook it back and forth, until the cricket eventually fell off. Cricket lay on the floor, unconscious. “He’ll come to as soon as he’s outside and gets some fresh air. Just take him out there,” ordered Director Bee to Inchworm. To Caterpillar who was still nervously standing in the room he said, “You there, you seem unwell. Why don’t you take some time off? Read the Bible and get some bed rest. That should cure you in no time.” 206 chapter four

“No, no, I can still work. If I quit working, my family will starve to death. I’ll work harder, so please let me continue to work,” said Caterpillar as he tried to hide the pain that was so severe it was making him short of breath. But Director Bee didn’t even bother to respond, and instead just looked at his watch, saying to Inchworm, “All right, it’s time. Let’s go.” Inchworm carried unconscious Cricket outside, and along with Director Bee, some nurses from the hospital, and other Christians from the town, they carried their drums and lanterns and sang the song of the Salvation Army as they headed out to town. Cricket had been tossed out near the hospital entrance. The cold pavement stole the warmth from his body, and he eventually died. No one had come to help him. On the hospital gates was a sign in large, bold letters that read salvation army charity hospital. When they had arrived at the center of town, Director Bee, who was beating the drum, said to Inchworm, “I’ll leave you to do the speech tonight. It can be any old thing. I’ve got a sick patient to attend to first,” he said and set off for rich young Bell Cricket’s house. “How are you feeling, Miss? We cannot take a single hiccup lightly in someone as delicate and fragile as yourself.” Director Bee administered the hiccup medicine while he began telling stories to the silent and temperamental young lady. She was in a disagreeable mood because the hospital director had arrived late. “Miss, allow me to tell you a funny story. Today, there was a cricket who came to our hospital sopping wet and asked to be allowed to stay without paying! He’s one of those laborer types and so brazen that Inchworm had to throw him out himself. Such behavior is unthinkable to refined people like you, I’m sure, but it seems quite prevalent among the lower classes!” “Oh, a cricket, you say? Then he must have been the one passing under my window when I threw out some dirty water earlier!” began the young lady amusedly, but as she was saying this, she abruptly began to spin two or three times, coughed up blood, and died right then and there. Director Bee was so taken aback that he nearly stopped breathing. “The medicine was too strong! Inchworm must have miscalculated the dosage. Oh! What will I do? O Lord, please bring this young girl back to life! I believe in your power, O Lord. Every night, whether lashed by rain or eaten by mosquitoes, I have toiled to spread your name. Please reward me just this once.” Thus he prayed as he took the young bell cricket in his arms, but the young lady never came back to life. Translated by Mika Endo c h ild re n 207

(18) Elephant and Mouse murayama kazuko Translated from Child’s Companion (June 1930) There once lived an elephant and a mouse. Elephant was selfish and mean, while Mouse was timid and scared of everything. This is the story of how these two became very good friends. You see, the two had very different personalities, and they never got along even though they shared a desk at school. The reason was that Elephant would always bring straw or bread crumbs for lunch, but when he saw Mouse eating meat or rice next to him, before long, he would begin to poke him with his long nose. “Mouse, that looks so delicious! How about sharing some with me?” Elephant would say. But Mouse was so intimidated that he simply cowered in his seat. And just like that, Elephant would help himself to Mouse’s lunch! But still, Mouse wouldn’t become angry. All he could do was sit there, shaking in his boots. Then one day, Mouse received a telescope from his uncle who had just returned from a trip overseas. Mouse brought the telescope to school. Elephant went up to him and asked, “What have you got there? Let me take a look, too.” But Mouse was afraid that rough Elephant would break the telescope if he let him borrow it. So he answered, “Oh, Elephant, this isn’t very interesting. Nothing you’d want to see. I’m just looking through it like this, see?” Elephant’s tail began to twitch. He was becoming angry. Mouse brought the telescope to his eyes to convince Elephant that it was just a bore. But instead, Mouse burst out in laughter. Elephant became more angry. Seeing Elephant become even more cross, Mouse was laughing even harder. You see, through the telescope, Elephant had become as tiny as a pea and seemed to be a mile away. Furious, Elephant decided that he had had enough and yanked the telescope from Mouse and took a look through it. “My goodness, what a grand mouse he is!” Elephant was amazed. He was looking through the telescope from the opposite direction, so Mouse looked as big and magnificent as a mountain. “Well, thanks very much, Mouse!” Elephant said as he returned the telescope to Mouse. Mouse looked tiny without the telescope, but now, somehow, he also appeared quite intelligent. Therefore, this time, he didn’t say “I’ll trade you my pencil for this” as he had always done. In time, Mouse grew less afraid of Elephant and helped him with arith208 chapter four

metic and reading whenever he got lost. The two became very good friends thereafter. Translated by Mika Endo

(19) Tetsu’s Story; Or, a Rope around Whose Neck? nakano shigeharu Translated from Battle Flag (March 1929)15 Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979) grew up in Ipponden, Fukui Prefecture. His father had been adopted into a landowning farm family, but initially, he made his career in the bureaucracy, with stints in Japan’s growing empire, notably the Korean Government General. Young Nakano’s immersion in rural life stimulated a lyrical sensibility and provided intimate acquaintance with the bleak conditions of tenant farmers, while his parents’ extended stay in colonial Korea laid the ground for comradeship with Korean leftists.16 The ties formed as he advanced from the Fourth Higher School to Tokyo Imperial University quickly took him to the heart of the proletarian literary movement. Virtually all the authors in this anthology were to become his comrades. (Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “Midnight Sun” [35] includes a fictionalized portrait of Nakano.) His wife, Hara Sen (1905–1989), was an actress in the proletarian theater movement. His younger sister Suzuko (1906–1958) was also a committed writer and a lifelong communist activist. Abolition of the emperor system was a key feature of the Comintern program for revolution in Japan and therefore a persistent concern for Japanese leftists. Nakano was able to take abstract arguments about the emperor system and translate them into the concrete world of fiction, even in the prewar era, when the risk of being charged with lèse-majesté loomed large. In this story, written about the time of Hirohito’s accession ceremony (November 1928), a visit by the crown prince not only imposes severe social and financial burdens on a village but precipitates a psychological crisis for the boy protagonist, with disastrous consequences for the entire village, including the notables but especially the boy’s family. nf

15. In the original publication, the title was followed by the words “Part One,” but Nakano did not go on to write other parts to this story. 16. Matsushita, Hyo¯den Nakano Shigeharu, 14–20.

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1. Tetsu Arrives from Fukui This spring in Awara, a hot springs resort, a dispute arose over where to lay the pipes that would bring running water into the village. When the landlords and their men tried to take over the meeting at the village assembly, Tetsu and his buddies surrounded them and took it back again. With their backs against the wall, the landlords gave up. But Tetsu and the others were arrested on some trumped-up charge having to do with climbing the ladder of the village fire tower, and thrown in jail for six months. The sentence they received at the trial was actually shorter than the time they had already spent in jail waiting for it. Tetsu filed an appeal with a higher court and came directly to Tokyo. I hadn’t seen Tetsu in a long time, so we had a meal together and got caught up. While we were talking, I suddenly remembered that Tetsu had spectacular handwriting. He and I went way back, but I hadn’t known about his handwriting until I saw the letter he sent me from the detention center. “You have an awfully fine hand!” I told him with admiration. “You telling me?” he laughed. “Do you know I was once asked to do an imperial calligraphy presentation?” Then a dark look came over his face. “Imperial calligraphy presentation . . .” Tetsu spat out the words. 2. And Tetsu Begins His Story I was in the fifth year of primary school, so we’re talking about fifteen years ago. The village went into an uproar when we were told the crown prince was making a visitation to our area. “The village dosama—that’s what they call a shrine in my area—has to be fixed up.” “The main road needs repairing.” “We’ve got to plant some trees to commemorate the event.” It was one thing after another. To make things worse, all this was to take place during the autumn harvest, the busiest time of year. But was our village really on the route of the imperial tour? Of course not! The automobile with the chrysanthemum crest was to pass through the town where the district office was located. To get there from the village, you’d have to walk one mile to the station and then go ten by train. Why, the same thing happened with the imperial accession ceremony a few months ago. There was a big fuss in this tiny village in Matsugaura County in Saga about turning a local shrine into an accession ceremony commemoration shrine. A huge commotion arose over repairing the roads and renovating the village shrine to commemorate the occasion. How on 210 chapter four

earth could tenant farmers, who could barely afford to pay taxes and rent, come up with two yen per household for that? But what they were up against was a ceremony involving the emperor. The big supporters of the event were the village chief, the village assembly, the influential people from all the surrounding hamlets, and, to top it all off, the police. There were, however, a number of communal bathhouses in the hamlet and overnight the walls were plastered with posters that said, “Nothing wrong with fixing up our village shrine. But if we have to sell our cows and our daughters to pay for it, the shrine gods won’t be pleased.” This stopped the village chief, the assembly, and the policemen dead in their tracks and the plan to renovate faded away on its own. The deity of our village shrine, Ugaya Fukiaezu no Mikoto, who’s supposed to be the ancestor of the first emperor, sure must be relieved. But I’m talking about our village fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago it was not like today, when sturdy young fellows are willing to walk over mountains in three feet of snow just to talk politics with the farmers. So, not only did we have to rebuild our shrine; we also repaired the main road. The project inhaled, slurped up, and sucked the very life out of the village. When the eve of the imperial visitation arrived, we were like those busted pumps at a well that creak and groan without being able to release a single drop of water. But at that very moment the heavens opened and a singular blessing was bestowed on me. “You have been selected from among thousands of students in the district to demonstrate your handwriting in the imperial presence,” I was told. My old man and old lady were so scared they started shaking. And the next thing I knew, they were having one argument after another. Ma would say, “We can do without this. . . . Why should Tetsu get mixed up in this business?” And Pa would fly off the handle and yell, “Can’t you get it through your head that this isn’t just anyone?” “So who is it then?” “He has to present his handwriting to the emperor!” “Not the emperor, the crown prince,” I yelled out from the corner. “So who is this crown prince?” Ma asked. “The son of the emperor.” “What difference does it make?” This got Pa even more worked up, and he would shout, “Don’t you understand anything, you idiot!” But he couldn’t shut Ma up. “Well, whether it’s the emperor or the emperor’s son, Master Kawada c h ild re n 211

says we have to buy Tetsu new clogs, new formal trousers, and a new hat. We couldn’t even buy him new clogs for New Year’s, so where’ll we get the money for new trousers and a hat?” Poor Ma then came up with the last straw. “Oh! And he’ll need to pay for the train!” In the end, though, Ma lost the argument. On occasions like this you have no choice but to get mixed up in business you could do without. There was one thing Ma and Pa agreed on, however. “It can’t be a good thing that this idea came from Master Kawada and Tetsu’s teacher, Miss Itano.”

3. Let’s Begin with Miss Itano Miss Itano was a lady teacher in my homeroom and I hated her guts. ¯ sawa, from Mie Prefecture, who was murdered on They say our friend O the occasion of an imperial ceremony a few months ago, was also a primary school teacher. So I guess they’re not all bad. But this dame was always slapping me on the wrist. I still remember the first time it happened. It was the day Miss Itano had ordered the class, “I want you all to write the syllables ra-ri-ru-re-ro.” On my cardboard writing slate, I dashed off a fine-looking line of syllables in the blink of an eye. When I looked over to see how the snot nose on my right was doing (I was at the end of the line so there was no one on my left), the kid’s cardboard was blank. But the little scum finally wrote out these syllables: ra-ri-ru-er-ro. When I saw his mistake I was beside myself with fear. And sure enough, the next thing Miss Itano did was tell us to stop writing and put our hands at our sides. Straw sandals scuffling over the floor, she walked down the aisles between the rows of desks. I knew for sure Miss Itano was heading to our row. Keeping my right eye trained on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, and the left toward snot nose, I whispered, “You fool, that stroke on the re goes on the other side!” But to Miss Itano it must have sounded as if I had said, “You fool, the old maid’s right over there!” I became flustered and snot nose was thrown into confusion. Therefore my left eye must have swerved from the teacher’s desk. This brought me a slap on the wrist. And it was a humdinger of a slap. I tried to ready myself when I saw the arm that would bring the teacher’s hand crashing down on me rise without a moment’s hesitation in the air. But I had no idea a slap could hurt so much. The fact was, it was a slap intended to inflict humiliation. 212 chapter four

With my head spinning, I vowed I would not let that bitch make me cry. Later I was able to get revenge on the bitch. By that time I was in fourth grade. (Boys don’t usually have women teachers after fourth grade, but I had Miss Itano all the way through fifth. Must be because there’s a shortage of teachers in the mountain schools.) One day the word “way” or “ambai” appeared in our reader.17 It happened to be the day when Master Kawada made one of his rare visits to our school. And his second son was in my class. The teacher asked the class, “Can anyone tell me what the word ‘ambai’ means?” No hands went up. Now, I thought this was an idiotic question. I mean, everyone just knows how to use a word like “way.” If someone asks what “school” means, you can say it’s a place where you learn. “Wind” is something that blows. But “way”? People just know. Finally the teacher had to answer her own question. “The term ‘way’ refers to how salty something is.” Salty! This was too stupid for words. “Teacher!” My hand shot up. “Then, is my big brother, who always stays at home because he’s in a bad way, too salty?” All the snot noses went home and told this story to their mothers, who could not read characters. “Is ‘way’ really about salt?” “I guess that must have something to do with it,” the mothers said. But this incident had consequences I never could have imagined. First, I was relieved of my duties as class president and the job was given to Kawada’s second son. (I had been the class president ever since third grade.) But Kawada’s second son was ranked just behind me in grades. Since it wasn’t because he was teacher’s pet that he got those grades, I didn’t think this was a big deal. What was a big deal was the other thing that happened. After the visit the schoolyard was awash in rumors. Kids were saying “Know why Master Kawada showed up in our school?” or “Didn’t you know he’s looking for a bride for his son?” or “Why does he want his son to marry 17. “Ambai” is a compound consisting of the characters for “salt” and “plum” and refers to the seasoning, or degree of saltiness, of salted plums (umeboshi). In modern Japanese, “ambai” can refer to seasoning, manner, degree, or way, including the way a person feels. It is a word familiar to everyone, even those who don’t know how it’s written, just as Tetsu says the mothers who can’t read would have no trouble defining “school.” He is flabbergasted by the teacher’s literal-minded pedantry that ignores the word’s meanings in everyday conversation. (Translator) c h ild re n 213

a teacher? Can you figure that out?” or “Don’t cha know? You get her for a bride, but a teacher don’t need to help with the housework. She’ll be bringing her salary home. . . .” The snot noses were just passing around mixed-up stories they had put together on the basis of tidbits of gossip they overheard at home, but they had the facts right. The unflattering words they had exchanged with gusto did not fail to reach the ears of Kawada’s number two son, or of Miss Itano and Master Kawada. The matchmaking between Miss Itano and Master Kawada’s older son (a graduate of Waseda University) was somehow or another brought to conclusion. But after Miss Itano joined Kawada’s household, Kawada’s harassment of my family became even more harsh.

4. But Now Let’s Talk about Kawada The person named Kawada was the biggest landlord in our village, and as is often the case, as the biggest landlord he was also the only landlord. Every tenant farmer in the village worked on Kawada’s land, and even among the few who owned their own farms, there was no one who did not rent some land from Kawada. When electrical lighting was installed in the village, when a narrow-gauge railroad was put in, when a new survey of the village lands was conducted, when the village road was declared a district road, and when the village school was moved to a new location over the opposition of the villagers . . . all these things were Kawada’s doings. Kawada had paid money to buy himself the title of “peer” at the time of the Meiji Restoration. By virtue of this, he was the only person in the village who was not a commoner. In addition, he was a member of the prefectural assembly, president of our credit union, and he put his man Nemoto, known to be a gambler, in the position of head clerk at the village granary. Along with being head clerk of Kawada’s granary, Nemoto was also in charge of carrying out the annual rice inspections for the district, so he had it made. Kawada’s real name had been Oshibuchi. But five or six years before the incident I am going to tell you about, he announced that he was changing it to Kawada. “Kawada was the name of a noble who was at the imperial court in the Namboku Period. After being beaten in battle by enemies of the Southern Court, he moved to this village. Upon arriving, he changed his name to Oshibuchi to escape persecution by the Northern Court. These are the origins of our village’s name.” (Our village was, indeed, named Kawada Village.) “Now that the Taisho era has arrived, the time has come for me to reas214 chapter four

sume my family’s original name. From this day forth the house of Oshibuchi will be known as the house of Kawada.” Kawada took a slab of slate or whatever, had this proclamation inscribed on it, and erected it on the hillside he owned. . . . It was too pretentious for words. Then something happened one year before the imperial tour came to our area, at the very end of the year. It was New Year’s Eve, but in our house that year, as in every other house in the village, there was not a sign of activity. The last day of the year was the day when Kawada assembled all the tenant farmers to treat them to an evening meal. The farmers would arrive quailing in fear. This was because Master Kawada would always make an appearance at the banquet, and it was a tradition among the farmers that you could tell by looking at him what kind of rents he would collect that year. The evening of the banquet, Ma and I were making rope for straw mats by the light of a small lantern. The cone-shaped mountain of rice that occupied one corner of the earthen-floored doza where we worked did not belong to us but was the rent we owed Kawada. (With the exception of Kawada’s home, few others in the village had tatami mats as floors. Most of us slept on straw mats that were set out over a floor of pounded dirt covered with several inches of straw and rice husks. Rooms like these were referred to as doza, or earthen-floored rooms, to distinguish them from rooms with wooden floors or rooms with tatami mats). This was the same room in which my older brother who was “too salty” had lain bedridden for three years, on a futon beside the door that led to the shed outside. The year the village lands were resurveyed, my brother, known throughout the village for being a dutiful son, had found part-time work loading and pushing trolley carts during the winter months, and one day a trolley went off the tracks, injuring him in the chest. He caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia, and as worsening health confined him to bed for month after month, he had become quite irritable. He was never seen by a doctor (they came to Kawada only rarely), over-the-counter medicine, predictably, had no effect at all, and eventually this brother I had been crazy about became so feeble I could hardly bear to look at him. Ma and I waited for Pa to return from the banquet, but there was no sign of him. We had completed one stage of the rope making, and now Ma was pounding adzuki beans in the mortar. “Pa’s late, isn’t he?” “Hmmm . . . I wonder what’s up.” c h ild re n 215

At that very moment we heard the sound of clogs grating on the pathway, and Pa lurched into the doorway, stone drunk, raving incomprehensibly. “Cowards . . . the whole lot!!!!” Some neighborhood men were trying to calm him down and gave us an idea of what had happened. Once saké had been brought out, Master Kawada appeared on cue to deliver his annual sermon. For some reason or another, this year Kawada’s lecture strayed to the topic of our teacher, Miss Itano (of course, she was referred to as Mrs. Kawada), and the next thing Pa knew, Kawada made a very nasty reference to an incident that had taken place at the school. Although everyone could see Kawada had gone out of his way to bring the matter up, the farmers listened in silence, until at one point, as Kawada blathered along in his harangue, he uttered something that made Pa lift his head. “What’s that? You got a swelled head because everyone calls you Master Kawada? You think we don’t know when you got your peer’s title in the Restoration you had all the fields in the village transferred to your name? . . .” People at the banquet began to get to their feet. If someone hadn’t wrapped up Pa’s box of food and shoved it into his hands at that moment, I don’t know what might have happened. Pa was furious, but he took the box and stormed out of the hall. His feet were unsteady so someone came up to help, but Pa raised a fist and told him to get out of his way. The fellow stood in the vestibule and watched him leave with his heart in his mouth. Just as expected, Pa had only walked a few yards over the stone path outside the door before he crashed to the ground. But then he picked himself up, turned around, charged back again, and stood, red-faced and cursing, in front of the entrance to the mansion. “And your fucking stepping-stones trip people!” Together with his words, Pa’s box, and the furoshiki it had been wrapped in, flew into the air and sailed into Kawada’s door, leaving it splattered with pieces of food that came spilling out of their containers. Then Pa ran around to Kawada’s woodshed and grabbed the ax that was there. The guests were shouting and looking for a way to escape. Pa carried the ax back to the place where he had tripped, lifted it in the air, and started striking the ground underneath. “Damn you!” He busted that stone into little bits. By the time the story was over Ma was crying. “What in the world did you think you were doing?” she asked. Our household, which is always in a bad mood anyway when the rent comes due, became even more gloomy the next day. “Ahh, heaven help us!” Ma was lamenting. “Landlords and tenant farmers were enemies from long ago. Who knows how he’ll try to get his revenge on us? And now what will happen with our rice? I can’t see any good coming from this.” 216 chapter four

My father would answer with a fearsome look in his eyes, “Can’t you shut up . . . idiot!” Of course, big brother didn’t say a word, and I was too scared to do anything but go on braiding rope. That night nothing unusual happened.

5. And Then Came the Sagitcho Festival Sagitcho is the name of a festival for children where the villagers gather bundles of new straw and bring it to the courtyard of the shrine. They pile the straw into a mound, and then the boys in the village make paper banners they attach to a male bamboo pole, and the girls make triangular paper balloons to attach to a female pole, and the bamboo poles are placed upright in the straw mound. The mound is set on fire with all the villagers gathered around. The paper banners catch fire, and the triangular balloons burst apart so the papers hidden inside them swirl out. This means that the boys will become capable workers and the girls will be good with their sewing needles. I was listening to the adults inspecting the paper banners one by one. Then they came to mine, which I had written on a series of five papers, each folded in half, and attached to one another. “Now this one’s well done, isn’t it?” “Beautiful.” “Did Tetsu really write this? What do you think?” “I wonder.” “I bet his big brother did it for him.” “You don’t say. . . .” I was about to stand up and set the record straight when who should appear before my eyes but Nemoto posing as an authority on these matters. “The characters are good, but then, we need to consider the paper.” The pieces of paper I had written on were as yellowed as the old cloth bag we use to strain the water from the well. I walked home completely crushed. 6. The New Year Begins and Rice-Collecting Days Arrive “Go ask old man Nemoto to come inspect the rice.” “Yes, Pa.” But when old man Nemoto came to the door asking “Is anybody home,” Ma and Pa were both out. “Is that Nemoto? Be sure you give us a maru!” Even my brother gave Nemoto a warm welcome that day. Maru, or a stamp in the shape of a circle, was the grade given to the rice of the highest quality. Nemoto thrust his measuring scoop smack in the middle of our mound of c h ild re n 217

rice and held it to the light, rolling a few grains between his fingers and biting down on a few others. Then he put the scoop back in his pocket without saying a word. “So how does it look?” my brother asked a bit anxiously. “Not up to grade.” Nemoto replied. “Not up to grade? But how can that be?” said my brother. Then he added in an obsequious manner I wasn’t used to seeing in him, “We threshed and dried it very thoroughly this year.” “You can say what you want, but this rice doesn’t even make the second grade.” “Nemoto!” My sickly brother dragged himself out of bed. I called out to him to stop, but it did no good. “What do you have against my family?” “Don’t make me laugh! What on earth makes you think I have a grudge against your family?” “Because for no reason at all you’re saying our rice isn’t up to grade!” “If rice doesn’t make the grade, it doesn’t make the grade. It’s as simple as that.” The two glared at each other for a few minutes. “And why did you say those things about Tetsu’s banner at Sagitcho?” “What happened at Sagitcho is one thing. But if you’re going to speak to me like this, you might as well not even waste your time growing these dregs.” “Dregs?” On his tottering legs, my brother managed to stand up. I tried to steady him with my arms. When he used the word “dregs” Nemoto was referring to the rice husks used for chicken feed. “I can’t believe he said our rice was chicken feed!” I said to my brother after Nemoto left. “Forget it,” said my brother. “Just get me a drink of water.” He crawled back into bed, but for quite a while afterward I saw his shoulders heaving every time he took a breath.

7. It Might Not Make the Grade, but It’s the Only Rice We’ve Got Ma and Pa walked through the main gate of the Kawada’s. They knew their rice had failed to make the grade, but my brother’d been mum about the argument that followed. And so it came to pass that once again their rice was said to be the equivalent of chicken feed, and Ma and Pa were taken to task unsparingly for it, after which they were told, “Under the circumstances, unfortunately, I can’t accept this rice as rent.” Ma could hardly hold back her tears. “Please take our situation into account and accept the rice,” she pleaded with Kawada. “This has never happened before.” 218 chapter four

“It may never have happened before, but that was a mistake. To put it bluntly, your rice isn’t fit for the dining table.” “But . . . we grew it right here in these fields.” “Then if the quality is poor you have only yourselves to blame!” But Ma’s pleas were so desperate— I can imagine her standing there with her weathered hands clasped together— that Kawada agreed to accept at least the rice they had brought with them that day. “However, I will have to ask you to sign some papers for me, in that case,” Kawada said. “Sign what papers?” “We can’t treat defective rice as if it were ordinary rice, you see. I don’t want to be so unreasonable as to say that for that reason we simply can’t accept it at all, so, all right, I’m agreeing to take your rice. But in order to balance our accounts, I’ll have to make the appropriate deductions from the price and have you sign an IOU letting us charge the remainder against what you owe us for next year.” An old trick. But today’s landlords have made it very modern. So Ma and Pa handed in their rice with an IOU attached to it. Ma stopped in at her sister’s house on the way home. Her crying must have been contagious, because pretty soon her sister was crying, too. “You signed an IOU? But so did I!” Then, as if giving in to her fears, she said, “Pretty soon they’re going to make it hard for us to go on living here.” At this point Ma lost her wits. “Any day now Master Kawada will take his revenge on us. Landlords and tenant farmers were enemies in a previous life. This was just the beginning. Who knows what he’ll do next? My sister told me he’ll make it hard for us to going on living here. Then it’ll be like that famine in the Tempo¯ days. They had to forage for grass sprouts in order to eat. Ah . . . I can’t buy Tetsu the clogs I get him once a year, and now I won’t even be able to pay for bad cooking oil and bean husks.” The next day my brother died quite suddenly. “Saegusa, you have a message from your family,” they told me at school. “Your brother has taken a turn for the worse,” said the old man from the house next to ours. By the time I had returned home my brother was dead. He had developed a fever and the strain was too much for his weakened heart. So, as I told you at the beginning, with all of this, it was not without reason that my parents were nervous about the fact that it was Master Kawada and Miss Itano (yes, she was Mrs. Kawada, but we still called her Miss Itano) who recommended me for the handwriting presentation. When Mr. Kawada went around telling people that he took great personal pride in my having c h ild re n 219

received this honor, we became even more suspicious. I stayed behind at school every day writing and rewriting the characters: The righteous and brave devote themselves to the nation.

8. The Day for Presenting Calligraphy to His Majesty Arrives I never knew how Ma and Pa came up with the money to pay for my brother’s funeral expenses. So it goes without saying that I was in the dark about how they managed to buy the new hat, new hakama, and new clogs I needed for the presentation. I even had train fare in hand. What they must have gone through! To this day, I don’t know the story. To top it all off, the evening before the event was to take place my father made an extravagant proposal. “Omine, go get us a cup of saké” he commanded my mother. My mother’s faced paled and she stood rooted to the spot. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to buy saké!” Ma took an empty vinegar bottle and slunk out the door. Morning came. I started off for the train station, escorted by Master Kawada and our school principal. (The school principal was a complete idiot, which is why I haven’t mentioned him before.) Master Kawada and the principal kept trying to strike up a conversation with me. But it was as if I couldn’t hear them. I was glum as a draftee going off to war. I spent most of the day in such a state and have no idea how I passed the time. The presentation took place on the second floor of the district office. But I couldn’t tell you what the auditorium looked like or what kind of people were there. All I could see in front of my eyes was the face of my dead brother. The faces of Ma and Pa as if straining to watch me make the presentation. The saké Pa offered to my brother’s tablet on the altar. The spanking new clogs I had just taken off and placed in the cabinet at the entrance to the building. And a big white sheet of paper bearing the dark, black characters, “The righteous and brave devote themselves to the nation.” My mind was racing. At last I stood from my seat and moved forward. I proceeded toward a large table. On the table lay a wide sheet of paper, with a very large inkstone and a huge brush beside it. I bowed repeatedly. 220 chapter four

Then I grasped the pen and dipped it in the ink. My hand shook as I lifted it to write. “The righteous . . .” But my brush never reached the paper. How could it have? Was there any way I could have ignored the characters traced in faint pencil strokes that floated up at me off that white page? The righteous and brave devote themselves to the nation. My brother’s face. The faces of Ma and Pa. The saké in the offering cup on the altar . . . my new shoes . . . hat . . . hakama. The characters I had practiced writing every day: The righteous and brave devote themselves to the nation. After all that, to come face to face with those traced words! Those barely visible pencil strokes! The whole thing amounted to one big dirty trick. I blacked out. The rest is a blank. In short, I went back home again.

9. Then What Happened? So let me get to the end of the story. What happened after I didn’t write the characters was that the prophecy of my aunt (my mother’s sister) who had told us, “Pretty soon they’re going to make it hard for us to go on living here,” came true. It became impossible for my family to stay in the village any longer. The imperial visitation had taken place. I had received the honor of being chosen to present my handwriting to His Majesty, but instead of writing the characters I had passed out. On account of that, Master Kawada had had to resign from the prefectural assembly, and the school principal had been transferred. But these things had nothing to do with my family. Ma spent every day in tears. Her sister came and cried together with her. Pa’s spirits sank. Some of the villagers came to the house. I suppose they were trying to come up with ways for us to stay. But I don’t suppose any of their suggestions were very useful. “Our debt will be written off. But in exchange we will have to move out.” In the end, it all boiled down to these inescapable facts. Once the decision had been made, Ma hanged herself. But that was neither here nor there. The fact was, whether Ma hanged herself or not, we were going to have to leave everything, even the family grave, behind us. When the day of our departure arrived, everyone in the village came to see us off. I caught sight of Nemoto in the crowd. We boarded the train. People pressed their faces against the train windows, but what could they say to us? Every tear had already been shed, and c h ild re n 221

every lament uttered. . . . Only ninety-one-year-old Jinkuro¯, from the Inaba household, came over and grabbed my father’s wrist, muttering in a frightfully raspy voice, “Omine-san put the rope around the wrong neck!” After long hours on the train we crossed the straits to Hokkaido. Two years later Pa died at Number 7, Second Street, Chikabu, Takasu Village, in Kamikawa County. The Kamikawa region was very cold, even for Hokkaido. At the age of fourteen I found myself living on the streets. But that was fine by me.

10. Now, Fifteen Years Later . . . It’s not as if nothing else has happened in the last fifteen years. No matter how much snow falls, the footprints made by the boots of people walking over it don’t disappear. The snow in the mountain passes and the area all around Kawada Village is full of such footprints. They quite literally trace out the paths of those who have become the activists in the countryside. The networks left in the snow by those crisscrossing footprints is one and the same as the network of activists in the rural areas. The matter of a prisoner who was tortured to death in a police station came up recently in the National Diet. Momozuki, the minister of the interior, made the ridiculous assertion that “the cause of death was illness.” And that good-for-nothing Asahara Kenji said, “Ah, that explains it,” and backed off. Heart failure killed my brother, my mother hung herself, and my father died old and broken down. But there’s no way I’m going to say, “Ah, that explains it,” and back off. I haven’t forgotten how the imperial calligraphy presentation became the pretext for running my family out of the village. I blacked out on the second floor of the district office. I lost that round. But they can’t keep me losing forever. The words Inaba Jinkuro¯ muttered in his raspy voice still come back to me. “Omine-san put the rope around the wrong neck!” I won’t repeat the mistake. Whose necks should the rope be tied around? The necks of those bastards and their families! We won’t get the wrong people this time. And if they say it’s “illness” that killed them, that’s all right with me. Translated by Brett de Bary

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(20) The Question of “Reality” and “Unreality” in Children’s Stories (excerpt) makimoto kusuro¯ Translated from Issues in Proletarian Children’s Literature (1930)18 Makimoto Kusuro¯ (1898–1956) is known as an important theorist of children’s literature, especially but not exclusively proletarian children’s literature. Born to a wealthy landowner, Makimoto was meant to become a doctor, but an interest in literature led him to Waseda University, from which he quickly withdrew, thinking that university was not the place for studying literature. 19 Plunging family fortunes soon led to tenant farming, but in 1926, with an essay published in Literary Front, he was on his way to Tokyo to join the proletarian arts movement. Active in many organizations as a theorist, children’s writer, and lyricist, Makimoto, together with Hayashi Fusao [7] and Eguchi Kan (1887–1975), inaugurated the NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio) children’s organ Boys Battle Flag in 1929. The following year he participated in establishing the New Education Research Institute, which used empirical research and creative writing to demonstrate the intellectual capacity of working-class children. With branches nationwide, including Okinawa and even colonial Korea, its publication, New Education, had a readership extending to Manchuria, Shanghai, and Taiwan.20 Such internationalism is also reflected in Red Flag (1930), Makimoto’s song collection for proletarian children, with a cover combining Japanese and Korean writing and content featuring a translation by poet Im Hwa (1908–1953), leader of the Korean Proletarian Arts Federation (referred to as KAPF, the initials of the official, Esperanto name, Korea Artista Proletaria Federacio) who became friendly with Nakano Shigeharu [19] and other NAPF writers during his stay in Japan. Given these manifest commitments, what should we make of Makimoto’s juxtaposing “peoples with less developed cultures” and children’s propensity to believe in “illusory world[s]” in the excerpt translated here? As Samuel Perry observes of such contradictions, “Traces of the evolutionist, ethnographic assumptions made even by 18. This essay is dated “October 14, 1928,” in the 1930 collection, but the original source is not given. ¯ ba, “Makimoto Kusuro¯,” 281. 19. O 20. Perry, “Aesthetics for Justice,” 188.

c h ild re n 223

Karl Marx about ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ societies in The Communist Manifesto still survived in proletarian writings with even the most radical of anti-imperialist assertions.”21 Readers might find it rewarding to compare Makimoto’s arguments about “reality” and “unreality” with those in Kurahara Korehito’s “Path to Proletarian Realism” [13] or those on socialist realism (see the introduction to chapter 7 as well as [37], [38], and [39]). By 1932, intensified repression led Makimoto to withdraw from active participation in the movement, although he continued writing for children and publishing theoretical essays until his health failed. (Issues in Proletarian Children’s Literature, in which this excerpt was published, was banned.) He never fully recovered his health, but after the war, he continued writing by dictation. nf [. . . T]here is a fundamental difference in the daily lives of adults and children. Consequently, adults and children differ greatly in their everyday habits, their awareness and outlook on daily life, their desires, and their hopes, as well as the indexes through which they assess their lives. Therefore their emotions are unlike in substance, resulting in different standards of “value” and “meaning.” Children’s stories and children’s literature must make the child’s world, sentiments, and worldview their ground and grow from there. As [Edwin] Hoernle [1883–1952] says, When it comes down to it, children’s stories are nothing more than freely conceived, imaginative versions of an Erzählung (children’s novel or story). The term “children’s story” is used first and foremost to refer to a story with strange, unrealistic events. Children’s stories are properly the kingdom of children under the age of twelve. This is because they depict the world in the same way that children imagine it, jumbling the possible and the impossible, the real and the unreal, leading to a world in which four-legged animals talk like humans, humans fly, and tools move about of their own accord. Why is this so? Children’s consciousness, which is that form of cognition produced by the senses, is generally poorer and less accurate when compared to that of adults. It is on the whole unelaborated. That is why they readily let their imaginations run wild. Sloughing off reality and plunging into an illusory world, they believe that this illusory world is real. Though

21. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 46. 224 chapter four

this tendency is also seen in peoples with less developed cultures, the facility with which children can enter this mental state is one of the prominent distinctions of their psychology. [. . .] The case is similar when we examine children’s freestyle drawings. In their abstract freestyle drawings, it is neither strange, unnatural, nor unrealistic to have stick-figures with flailing limbs, humans looking more like scarecrows and animals than real humans, or life-sized people barging into miniature houses. Some may insist that such abstract expression is only prevalent in the childhood years. While it is during childhood that they appear overtly at the surface, we cannot overlook the fact that internally and latently, they remain firmly entrenched well into our adulthood. Thus, not only do grown “adults” make conscious, measured use of personification and symbolism, but these also make their way into daily life naturally and without adults’ awareness. We must not forget that when children’s representational style sheds the abstract and the imaginary and moves to confront reality, it is not so much that such conceptualizing has disappeared, but rather, that the even greater strangeness and mystery of real existence is gradually penetrating their minds. Now their curiosity is more attracted to this reality, producing a determination to investigate it vigorously. (This curiosity is what children’s literature must fully engage in carrying out the educational mission with which it has been entrusted, and, moreover, what makes such a goal even possible!) During the daytime children are like adults, and mimic adult ways of living, but at night and in the darkness, or when they are all by themselves, they can only inhabit their original child’s world. Which is to say, they “[jumble] the possible and the impossible, the real and the unreal, leading to a world in which four-legged animals talk like humans, humans fly, and tools move about of their own accord.” It is therefore imperative that children’s writers not ignore the inner aspects of children’s daily lives and look only at children in daytime, when they are pulled into the adult world. They should not take this so-called realistic aspect of their lives and mistakenly believe that it is the defining element of the new children’s literature. Rather, they should use the so-called unrealistic and imaginary world as a foundation to lead and develop them toward the adult world, an adult awareness, and adult life. This is the task of children’s stories, and children’s writers should conscientiously take that as their duty. After all, the content of adult and children’s lives is different. [. . .] Nevertheless, strictly speaking, moral and pedagogical lessons for children can only be sought in the moral and intellectual standards of the adult world. [. . .] I would not dismiss either one of the expressive modes [traditional or rec h ild re n 225

alistic] out of hand, because whatever the mode of expression or the content chosen, one cannot determine in advance whether a story will indeed become a children’s story, and in fulfilling the mission of the children’s story, become a work of art. [. . .] But what I wish to call to the attention of writers for children is the issue of reality and unreality in these children’s stories. Owing to the nature of children’s stories, “reality” and “unreality” are not, as some would have it, a crucial matter. Of course, “realism” in a story does not have any new value in itself, and just as certainly, proletarian children’s stories are not obligated to employ this mode of expression. Whether a children’s story is new or old is in no way to be determined by form alone. What can be called new in children’s stories is a matter of its “quality.” That being so, in principle, children’s stories have a world of their own— and it is there— in the new awareness that comes from mixing reality and unreality, that children’s literature has a special literariness, that is to say, a distinctive quality that allows a subject to be taken up that normally cannot be taken up or would be difficult to take up in other modes. And it is by making the most of this singular capability that works of children’s literature are able to realize their distinctive raison d’être. Children’s stories are children’s stories: nothing more, nothing less. Those who would complain that an adult serving of rice cannot be served in a child’s rice bowl, or who would find fault with a child’s rice bowl for having a goldfish or a toy painted on it are utterly deficient in their understanding and sympathy for children. Even if a story is intended as a weapon for the proletariat, to turn its every aspect into a direct tool, or to reduce a variety of literary expressions into a single weapon in that fight is reckless. Just because we have cannons does not mean that we are ready for war. One other thing that must be made clear is that while it is permissible in our adult way of thinking to discuss “reality” or “unreality” based on scientific judgment, when we discuss children’s stories, we absolutely should not apply the same criteria for the child’s world. Even if the yardstick that we employ as adults is accurate and convenient, it is important not to forget that children have their own yardstick that they are accustomed to using. [. . .] Proletarian children’s writers must pay special attention to this issue. (The child readership and the differences among them, certainly of age, but also of class, social status, organization, and regional color must all be considered.) [. . .] Translated by Mika Endo

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5 : Art as a Weapon INTRODUCTION In the poem that opens this chapter, the speaker is poised in the moment before she deploys “art as a weapon”— in this case, an agitational leaflet. Art as a vehicle of protest may be as old as art itself. The rhetoric of art as a weapon, part and parcel of the language of class struggle and revolution, could be considered an instance of this venerable practice, but this twentieth-century usage, which aggressively challenged the principle of “art for art’s sake,” never failed to exercise bourgeois critics and writers of the “aesthetic school” (see [22, 29]) in Japan and elsewhere. They were inclined to declare art with a purpose, especially a political purpose, not to be art at all, or at best, an inherently inferior art. But the relationship of art and politics stirred heated debate within the proletarian literature movement itself. The major debates of that movement— on the popularization of art, on form and content, and on the relationship of artistic value to political value— are all pertinent to the short forms included in this chapter. Can the aesthetically valuable be melded with the politically valuable? Which is more important, form or content? Or are they an inseparable whole, in which artistic and political values merge in the cause of the proletariat? What kind of writing would best reach the various levels of that proletariat, from the highly literate printer to the virtually illiterate day laborer or tenant farmer? These debates were intensely intellectual, but the stakes were high precisely because the participants were agreed that they wanted to contribute to the actual transformation of society and not just score points with one another. Of the three categories of debate, popularization had the most practical urgency: How were the intellectuals who dominated the movement to create work appealing to industrial workers and tenant farmers? The first round of popularization debates took place in mid-1928, with Kurahara Korehito [13], Hayashi Fusao [7], Kaji Wataru [16], and Nakano Shigeharu [19] as key participants. Arguments ranged from whether it was desirable to distinguish between agitprop for the masses and genuine proletarian art; whether proletarian art could even be produced in a prerevolutionary society; or whether mass entertainment inevitably transmitted its ideology along with its forms and was therefore useless, if not harmful, for the goals of the movement. The creation of an expanded umbrella organization (KOPF, for Federacio de Proletaj Kultur Organizoj Japanaj) in late 1931 came with the directive 227

Figure 7. Lecture tour in defense of Battle Flag and NAPF Writers organized lectures and went on speaking tours to support their movement organs, not just by publicizing them but by fund-raising as well. This photo is from January 1931 at Tenno¯ji Public Auditorium, Osaka. Front row, from left: Takeda Rintaro¯, Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31], Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21], Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40]. Back row, from left: Tanabe Ko¯ichiro¯, Kuroshima Denji [26, 34], ¯ mori Sueko, ed., Yuriko kagayaite [Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1999], 24.) Hasegawa Susumu. (O

to locate the foundations of the cultural movement in the literature circles “at the factories, at the farms.” With this initiative came the promotion of new forms such as the “wall story,” “correspondence,” and “reportage” by industrial and agricultural workers. Kobayashi Takiji’s “On Wall Stories and ‘Short’ Short Stories” ([29]; see also [1, 5, 11, 22, 30]) suggests that this version of the genre— with possible antecedents ranging from premodern forms to the European contes to “aesthetic school” champion Kawabata Yasunari’s “palm-of-the-hand” stories1— developed in response to workers’ desires for fiction commensurate with their needs, given lack of time and disposable income as well as preparation for reading lengthy works. Takiji’s essay is an important statement of what unity of form and content meant for proletarian writers. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that even though the accessible placement of the “wall story”— in public places such as factory walls— was key to the genre, it’s unclear whether Japanese writers and readers were able to use it in this way: the extant compositions, including those given here, were all published in journals. Whether they were ever ripped out and pinned up, as described in the Korean example [24] is unknown. Kurumisawa Ken argues that the point of envisioning where the stories might be placed was to prompt writers (and illustrators and printers) to create their stories with a concrete sense of the readers who would gather there, with the story itself coming to life from that interaction.2 Kamei Hideo, reflecting on Takiji’s “Letter” [22], probably the best-known example of the genre, suggests that if these stories had been made conspicuous on a wall— a medium not, legally speaking, belonging to the workers but claimed as their site of expression— that in itself could have served as a spark for struggle. 3 At any rate, selections 22 through 26 suggest the range of the “wall story.” The international, especially German, inspiration for these forms is attested by a far more extensive treatment of “wall fiction” written for a Japanese readership by Otto Biha, editor of the Left Turn (Die Linkskurve), the organ of the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. Biha’s essay on “Burgeoning Forms of Proletarian Literature in Germany” appeared in Japan as part of a five-volume series edited by Akita Ujaku (1883–1962) and Eguchi Kan (1887–1975), General Course in Proletarian Arts, an extraordinary collection of theoretical analysis, historical reflection (on such a young movement!), and guides spanning the range of proletarian arts— visual, theatrical, cinematic, and literary— primarily in Japan, but also in Germany, 1. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 79–82; Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. 2. Kurumisawa, “Kabe sho¯setsu no shu¯dan geijutsusei,” 341–46. 3. Kamei, “Kobayashi Takiji no ‘Tegami.’” a rt a s a we a p on 229

the Soviet Union, and the United States. Takiji’s “Guide to Writing Fiction” appeared in the second volume of the General Course, following Tokunaga Sunao’s guide in the inaugural volume. Much of the advice is likely to strike the reader as sensible for any young, or for that matter, seasoned fiction writer. Together with Tokunaga’s “The Achievements of the Creative Writing Movement” [31], a retrospective assessment identifying areas for improvement, these reflections demonstrate the proletarian writers’ care for their craft and, in so doing, prompt us to reexamine the significant and superficial distinctions between proletarian and bourgeois literature. Together with the essays from Takiji and Tokunaga in this chapter,” Yamada’s “A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage” [28] illustrates the movement’s efforts to recruit not only new readers but also writers who were workers and tenant farmers by day. Yamada encourages them to try their hand at correspondence or literary reportage, a genre also discussed in Otto Biha’s “Burgeoning Forms.” When the literary wing of the movement was reorganized as one among many units (music, art, film, etc.) under the umbrella of KOPF in late 1931, “circles” were organized in factories and farm communities. (See NAPF cover, fig. 2.) The impetus was a call from the Fifth Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) in 1930. If workers were to be exhorted to put their experiences into writing, their effort needed to be acknowledged through publication. The Literary Gazette was one such site, carrying international and domestic news, reports of various circles, articles by major figures (Takiji, Tokunaga, Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40], Nakano, etc.), but also a page for readers’ prose and poetry, sometimes with prizes and evaluation. Every page had photographs, and original illustrations were as likely to accompany submissions by readers as well as by movement leaders. “A Day at the Factory” [27] is the only piece in this anthology by a writer about whom we know nothing beyond what appears here. It is paired with Yamada Seizaburo¯’s how-to piece [28], which includes a criticism of her composition. His discussion helpfully illustrates the political imperatives underlying promotion of the reportage form. However we assess his framework, as well as the appropriateness of his specific criticisms, we acknowledge the serious commitment the leaders of the proletarian literature movement made to encourage men and women who had never imagined themselves as writers to take up pen and paper. That so much writing, organizing, teaching, and editing persisted at this time is remarkable. Not only were key leaders arrested and imprisoned beginning in April of 1932, but of the thirty-three issues of the Literary Gazette published between October 1931 and August 1933, one was confiscated in its entirety and twenty-four were banned. With the tenacity of the forbidden, they still found their way to readers. nf 230 chapter five

(21) Leafleting sata ineko Translated from Fire Island (May 1929) A rare poem by Sata [Kubokawa] Ineko captures the drama of a crucial component of factory organizing— distributing leaflets to inform workers about what was happening under their noses and stir them to action. Sata (1904–1998; see also [8, 15]) threw herself into the proletarian culture movement as a major contributor of fiction and essays and as a dedicated editor of Working Women and, later, Friend of the Masses. Like Nakamoto Takako [2, 10], she lived among female factory workers in Nankatsu, organizing and narrating their experiences. When her husband was incarcerated, his care was added to her responsibilities of sustaining the family with her writing and supporting her underground comrades as a member of the illegal Communist Party— all with a baby on her back. Subsequent trips to the continent, sponsored by colonial institutions and the military, were to haunt her in the postwar years, but she quickly resumed her political and writing commitments and sustained them almost to the close of her long life. nf It is a dawn like cold, clear water the concrete chimneys of the confection factory floating whiter than white have not yet begun to spew smoke I crouch alongside the factory wall in the distance the sound of the train trails like smoke then floats away steadily the cold turns my toes into blocks of wood I feel like a freshly sharpened knife starting time is early two hundred women will come pushing through at once let the two hundred leaflets I’ve hidden pass into everyone’s hands with a spark The click-clack of wooden clogs approaching on frozen ground marking time like a pendulum clock I wrap my woolen muffler around my neck and stand the handbills make a crisp sound in my hands as they leave the warmth of my kimono bosom a rt a s a we a p on 231

there’s still no sign of the women on this corner, a straight shot to the confection factory who will come between me and them? without a sound, the chimneys have begun belching smoke Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

(22) Letter kobayashi takiji Translated from Central Review (August 1931) The best known of all “wall stories,” “Letter,” written in the script children first learn, was published as one of six examples of the genre in the very mainstream Central Review. At the time of its publication, 1968 Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari singled out “Letter” for praise: in contrast to the insensitivity to language displayed in the other five selections, he observes, there wasn’t a single needless word in “Letter”; nor, at the same time, was there anything exceptional that called attention to itself.4 Intriguingly, this is not the only instance of Takiji, iconic proletarian writer, receiving praise from Kawabata, champion of the “aesthetic school” fiercely critical of the proletarians.5 Kawabata’s praise, though, invariably refers to Takiji’s writing and avoids the content of his fiction. For Takiji [1, 5, 11, 29, 30], the literary and political demands of writing implicated each other, just as form and content were inseparable. As we’ve seen in “Comrade Taguchi’s Sorrow,” he was interested in the experiences of proletarian children and experimented with their portrayal. A tireless letter writer himself, he seemed to find the epistolary form especially conducive to presenting their voices. Even more, Kurumisawa Ken argues, the choice of the form reflects Takiji’s grasp of the essence of the genre, for what is a letter that doesn’t anticipate a response? Had this story-letter been posted near the factory gate (“this place”) where the events described could easily be imagined as taking place, the worker-readers could begin arguing about whether the father needed to die, whether his family needed to starve, what more could have been done— all the while comparing the fictional circumstances with their own reality. 6 nf

4. Kawabata, “(Bungei jihyo¯)”, 503. 5. Kawabata, “Sangatsu bundan,” 76–80. 6. Kurumisawa, “Kabe sho¯setsu no shu¯dan geijutsusei,” 347–50. 232 chapter five

Attention: All persons passing this place are to read this letter. Kimi-chan’s papa? He was sharpening a file at the XX, when a piece of the spinning stone broke off and hit him in the tummy. He fell down onto the floor, and they carried him piggyback all the way back home. Doc said to keep his wound cool with ice, but they didn’t have no money for that. That’s why Kimi-chan’s mama walked three big blocks to fetch cold water from a well. She musta headed out there four or five times, ’cause the reason for that is the water over there is coldest of all. Her mama kept on crying and crying and saying, Oh, why ain’t it winter no more? Her papa was crying too. And when Kimi-chan asked, It hurt Papa? he just shook his head. No, it don’t. And when she asked him later, It hurt Papa? he closed his eyes without saying nothing, and then he told her, Papa’s chest don’t hurt him at all. He looked up at Kimi-chan’s face, and whenever she wasn’t watching, he wiped away his tears. Kimi-chan’s mama was thin, too, and her eyes were all dark and hollow, even her hair was falling out. And I’d say all of ’em was practically starving. It was so damp inside that house of theirs that the floor was all sticky when your feet touched it. And whenever they came by from the factory? To check on him, you know? You could always hear ’em saying, Pew, it stinks in here! But that was just at first, ’cause soon enough they just stopped coming by at all. By the time Kimi-chan’s papa died, just about everyone forgot about the whole lot of ’em. Kimi-chan’s papa went beddy-bye for six months long, and just as soon as they ran out of things to sell, he went and died. But the day after that Kimi-chan’s mama went beddy-bye too. And she was even more skinny than Kimi-chan’s dead papa, and had less hair than he did. And that’s the reason why she had to go beddy-bye. They still had a bit of money from the factory leftover, but it wasn’t near enough, and that’s why they moved into that tiny room— up on the third floor of that old building about ready to fall down. With that steep staircase and all you gotta rest a couple times on the way up just to catch your breath, you know. And there’s dozens of people crammed up inside there making all kinds of scary noise. Sometimes people get into fights in the middle of the night and you can feel the whole building wobbling side to side. So there was Kimi-chan’s mama lying in bed, with her eyes looking dark and hollow, and not saying nothing at all. And you know how when you breathe, you can see your blankets moving up and down? Well, it was almost like her blankets didn’t move up and down no more. . . . And then one day her mama tells Kimi-chan to shake her whenever she wakes up at night, ’cause you never know, she said, I might just be laying here dead as a dog. Later that night Kimi-chan opens her eyes, and she was all shaking a rt a s a we a p on 233

and scared. She didn’t try saying nothing to her mama, but just stuck out her hand to give her a poke. It was only when she heard her mama answer in the dark that Kimi-chan stopped worrying no more. She ain’t dead yet! said Kimi-chan, breathing a sigh of relief, and turning onto her side. She curled herself up into a ball and went back to sleep again. The same thing happened to Kimi-chan just about every single night. But after a while, you know, Kimi-chan’s mama? She didn’t answer Kimichan so fast no more. And whenever Kimi-chan tried to wake her up, she could tell her mama was turning skin and bones. And then one time? When her mama opened up her eyes? She done whisper to Kimi-chan, It’s not gonna be long now. . . . A couple nights later something woke up Kimi-chan. She stuck out her hand to find her mama, ’cause she was too scared to talk out loud in the dark. But when she shook her mama? She didn’t wake up. And then, after a while? Kimi-chan starts shaking her mama harder and harder. And she starts yelling out loud, Oh, Mama, Mama! She could hear her own voice echoing in that dark room of theirs. But her mama? Her mama didn’t move at all. All of a sudden Kimi-chan screamed out loud. She jumped to her feet and tried to run outside. But she tripped on the way out and fell all the way down that steep set of stairs. And what a racket that made, being the middle of the night and all. But Kimi-chan’s mama? Sure enough, she was dead as a dog. The only ones left now are Kimi-chan, her baby brother, and her kid sister. And after falling down them stairs like that, Kimi-chan got bruised up enough to end up in bed. That’s why all the people living in the same building as them got together to hold a funeral for Kimi-chan’s mama. Everyone in that building’s so darn poor they figured best stick together to help one another out. But on the night of the wake, after everyone fell asleep? That’s when someone woke up and saw all the food on the altar done disappeared. And let me tell you, what a stir that caused! It wasn’t no cat or dog that’d eaten that food neither. Who coulda done it? we was all thinking. I was at the wake too. And when I happened to walk into the room next door, the room where Kimi-chan and them was sleeping, well, I near got the shock of my life and froze up on the spot. They’s just kids, I know, but there was Kimi-chan, her baby brother, and her kid sister gobbling down all the food we’d brought for their dead mama. And ’cause I wasn’t thinking straight, I done scream out loud. All the others then came running into the room shouting, What’s the matter, what’s the matter? Those three kids sitting there, gobbling up all that food like that. Well, to me, they seemed like goblins or something with them lips of theirs hanging open wide. 234 chapter five

They all asked Kimi-chan, What d’you think you’re doing, girl? But Kimichan? She just turned white as a sheet and didn’t say nothing at all. Then all of a sudden she starts crying. Tears are rolling down her cheeks, and she says ever since their mama died four or five days beforehand they didn’t have no food left to eat. They was so hungry their heads was spinning, and they got the pains in their chest, and they been lying down on the floor half dead all day long. And since they didn’t have no food to eat for so long, there wasn’t nothing gonna stop their eyes from popping out of their heads when they saw the offerings set out for the funeral. Kimi-chan wasn’t doing right by her dead mama, and she knew it, but with her kid brother and sister being so small and all, she just waited for when no one was looking, and then let them eat as much as they wanted. There wasn’t a soul in the tenement not crying after hearing Kimi-chan tell her story. Kimi-chan won’t be around for much longer. But even still she sometimes tells me things like this: Why is it that all XXXX people like us have our papas die, and then have our mamas die, and then end up dying too? Well, when I get better, Kimi-chan says, I’m gonna become a XXXXXXXXX and go out marching with a XX in my X.7 Translated by Samuel Perry

(23) Shawl tokunaga sunao Translated from Arts Gazette (December 25, 1931) Born the son of an impoverished tenant farmer in Kumamoto Prefecture, Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958) left school in the middle of the sixth grade to become an apprentice printer. Familiarity with the world of printers and their struggles bore fruit in one of the most famous works to emerge from the movement, Sunless Streets (1929). Appearing quickly in German and Russian translation, the novel was hailed for its large-scale depiction of the Kyo¯do¯ Press strike and especially welcomed for being the work of one of the few worker-writers in the movement. Despite Tokunaga’s commitment to writing, fund-raising, and teaching for the movement, 7. The Xs here appear in the original and represent self-censorship by either the editors or the author. The last line most likely refers to Kimi-chan’s desire to march in the streets holding up a flag or banner in her hand— as many children were portrayed doing in the proletarian media. (Translator) a rt a s a we a p on 235

however, he would, with much anguish, retreat and recant, going so far as to disavow Sunless Streets by 1937, a step he himself would criticize after the war when he resumed his commitment to leftist literary and social causes.8 “Shawl” was illustrated and published in the Arts Gazette, which, together with the Literary Gazette, was started up in 1931 as part of a vigorous effort to reach working-class readers and potential writers. Tokunaga’s presence in these publications (see [31], figs. 7 and 9) attests to his investment in this campaign. nf After pacing back and forth in front of the movie billboard, Mitsuko went back and stood in the darkness. She wore a restitched Meisen jacket over a Shin-meisen kimono, and with nothing but a threadbare red shawl wrapped around her shoulders in place of a winter coat, she seemed rather cold.9 Drowning my sorrows in a bottle of saké Should I cry or sigh over this star-crossed love? Mitsuko tapped her foot in time with the jazz flowing out of the movie house, but her heart wasn’t really into the music. . . . I’ll bet he comes out of that alley there, near the kimono shop— she said to herself. But then, just as soon as she pictured her boyfriend in her mind’s eye, she started worrying once again about her appearance. A coat would have been out of the question, but a new shawl she’d at least set her hopes on, a shawl she could wear for New Year’s, which was now right around the corner. She’d so wanted to show him how she looked in it. No bonus this year, is what she was told at the factory— and along with it went any hope of getting that three-yen-eighty-sen shawl still hanging there in the kimono shop on the alley. The elegant crimson one embroidered with red hearts. A restitched jacket and last year’s kimono—what an embarrassing getup!— she thought to herself. But then she knew exactly what he would say in reply—Oh, Mit-chan, stop being foolish. It’s not your fault you can’t buy your shawl, it’s the bourgeoisie that’s to blame. Don’t let something so trivial get to you. . . . Why have these lingering feelings 8. Murakami, “Tokunaga Sunao,” 559–60. 9. Meisen and Shin-meisen refer to types of clothing produced using new methods of weaving and dyeing thread, which not only accelerated the production process but also allowed for more detailed patterns and textures at a lower cost. (Translator) 236 chapter five

For a man I should have forgotten? The recording was still blaring out into the heavily trafficked New Year’s Eve streets. Self-conscious of her four-year-old shawl, Mitsuko walked out in front of the movie billboard only to return once again—No one at tonight’s meeting cares at all about what I’m wearing, damn it! “Why have these lingering feelings?” You can say that again. “. . .” She then noticed at the corner of the alley a man in workers’ clothes with a black scarf wrapped around his neck— he caught sight of her and made a slight gesture with his hand. “Well, how about that. He still hasn’t bought that overcoat.” Mitsuko all of a sudden found this humorous and permitted herself a smile as she waited there in the darkness. “Hey! Been waiting long?” The man looked as though he was almost freezing to death with his shoulders hunched up so high. “Ei-chan, you didn’t get a new coat either? Didn’t you get a bonus?” “Small as a rat’s ass, but I got one all right. Gave it away to the aah . . . you know, that XX strike fund.” “Well, well, Mr. Generosity . . .” Men! Don’t they ever think about the details?— thought Mitsuko, as she walked alongside Eikichi. “Well, get this, our factory gave us nothing this year. No bonus at all.” “No bonus . . . ?” “Yeah, that’s why I . . .” “Wait . . . so you didn’t do anything about it? What a bunch of sissies!” “Oh, come on. I can only do so much all by myself.” Mitsuko turned somewhat sullen. “And remember, I can’t even get that shawl I’ve been wanting. . . .” “Well, what d’you think you’ve got right there on your shoulders?” “This old thing? I bought it three years ago. And it’s meant for a child.” “You and your luxuries. Hell, I can’t even buy a second-hand overcoat!” Perhaps because he was cold, the man plodded along with long, hard strides. “Hey, Mit-chan, d’you read the Literary Gazette last night?” “Yeah, about half.” “Well, you keep in mind what they’re writing there. Tonight’s study group is sponsored by the Art Club, so you just say whatever comes to your mind. Got it?” Tall and lanky, Eikichi then stooped over slightly: a rt a s a we a p on 237

“I’d like to know why can’t I even buy a three-yen-eighty-sen shawl. And why does my boyfriend have to freeze to death ’cause he can’t afford an overcoat?— That’s all you have to say.” “Oh, don’t be silly, Ei-chan.” “What’s silly about that? I mean, why did they take away your bonus? Why is business so bad? We’ve got to put our heads together and think about these problems. The proletariat must fight a brave battle to protect our everyday lives.” “. . .” “Got it?” “Sure.” “Boy, is it cold. Gimme your arm. Walking like this’ll warm things up a bit.” “Hey, your legs are too long. Walk a bit slower, will ya?” “Oh, stop complaining—you walk faster.” Well, I’ll show you! thought Mitsuko. Why can’t I buy that shawl? Why can’t my dad find a job for three years running? I’ll tell ’em all right, she said to herself, with a burst of energy. And not to be outdone by the man’s long legs, she sprung forward with a new bounce in her step. Translated by Samuel Perry

(24) The Bulletin Board and the Wall Story yi tong- gyu Translated from Group (February 1932) As with many Korean figures of the Japanese colonial period and the early postliberation years, the basic facts of Yi Tong-gyu’s life are subject to speculation. He was born in Seoul, perhaps in 1911 or 1913.10 He was working as a reporter for the journal New Youth (Sinsonyo˘n) when he joined KAPF (Korea Artista Proletaria Federacio), of which he would remain a member until its dissolution in 1935. Caught in the mass arrests of 1934, Yi was imprisoned until 1936. After liberation, in 1946, he became chief editor of People’s Korea (Minju Choso˘n), the official newspaper of the North Korean People’s Committee, but he died sometime during the Korean War. In December of 1931— the same year when “wall stories” began to appear in Japan— Yi published “The Mute” (Po˘ngo˘ri), perhaps the 10. The first date is given in “Yi Tong-gyu”; the second, in Kwo˘n, Han’guk kyegu˘p munhak undongsa, 387. 238 chapter five

first piece to be labeled a “wall story” in Korea. 11 We are lucky to have “The Bulletin Board and the Wall Story,” for it appeared in the only issue of the journal Group (Chiptan) currently known to have survived censorship and other historical vicissitudes. This is the only piece in this anthology not originally written in Japanese. (As other selections [33, 39] show, some Koreans in the proletarian movement, whether in Japan or colonized Korea, also wrote in Japanese.) Although intensifying crackdowns had weakened the ties between the Japanese and Korean movements by the time this story was published, it presents an ideal origin narrative of the wall story, as plausible in Japan as in Korea. For more proletarian stories translated from Korean, see the anthology edited by Hughes, Kim, Lee, and Lee, Rat Fire. NF Like the setup in any old shack put up to serve red bean porridge, the factory cafeteria was laid out with rows of long pine boards, nailed to makeshift legs, except that today, hanging on one of the walls, there appeared a gleaming, newly lacquered bulletin board. What the heck is that for? wondered the puzzled factory workers. The next day, coming inside to eat their lunches, they found a white piece of paper posted on the bulletin board, a piece of paper covered with neatly penned letters. Their curiosity sufficiently piqued, they gathered round. “What is it, an advertisement?” shouted So˘ngdong, the short one standing behind the rest. “Advertisement? This ain’t no advertisement,” replied one of the men standing in front, all of whom now proceeded to read it out loud. “Lessons in Character Building. Part one: Diligence. It has long been said that the hardworking man is the successful man, therefore all men should be hardworking. In order to build his personhood and then to establish his household, it not only behooves a man to approach all his tasks with the utmost of sincerity but also . . .” The men sounded out each word deliberately, as though they were reading from a storybook out loud. No sooner had the lunchtime siren started ringing than Inso˘ng ran quickly toward the cafeteria, opened up his lunch box, and started chomping on a rice ball. And as he sat there now, lunch in hand, he too glanced over at the bulletin board: “What do we need that kind of lecture for?” “Hey, let me see too!” said So˘ndong, muscling his way to the front of the crowd.

11. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 189n100. a rt a s a we a p on 239

“What do you need to look at that for?” chimed in Yunsik, the prankster, blocking So˘ngdong’s view. Sprawled out on a bench as he ate his lunch, Taeso˘k offered his two cents as well: “What do ya think they’re up to, posting something like that up here?” “Something stupid, that’s what.” Good old highpockets, So˘ngbok, had finally chimed in. “‘Stop goofing off and work harder’ is all they want to say.” “Man, that ain’t the half of it. I bet when they announce more layoffs or lower wages, they’re just gonna post a notice up here, so they don’t have to tell us face-to-face.” From that day forward the office posted a new Lesson in Character Building every day, which basically said something along the lines of “work hard” or “be loyal.” About once a week a factory supervisor or one of the office employees would come to read out loud the writing as though they were delivering some sort of lecture. But not a single one of the workers attempted to read these notices any longer, or even give them a second glance. Three or four months beforehand there might have been one or two men who would have read them with sincerity. But since then a strike had broken out to demand better treatment from their bosses and to protest the reduction in wages that had so shocked the world. After this, things finally sank in and the workers were no longer the fools they once had been— not a soul among them now had time for this sort of garbage. After all, the only reason this cafeteria had been constructed in the first place was that they had demanded it in the last strike. Sometime afterward a theory of sorts circulated among the workers: “It is with great regret that this bulletin board, supposedly for our benefit, has offered us nothing whatsoever. So let us make this bulletin board something beneficial to ourselves!” This is why they all decided to take turns writing down something and posting it on the wall for everybody to read together. Each day something new was posted right on top of the piece of paper drawn up and posted by the office. They posted newspaper articles as well (especially articles about strikes) and even good pieces of writing they had torn out of magazines. Later on they posted wall stories they took from journals, which brought about the best results. Reading them while they ate lunch became a daily routine, one they found thoroughly enjoyable. Of course the office knew nothing about what was going on. Then one day during lunchtime their supervisor walked into the cafeteria, cool as a cucumber, with that big smile of his plastered on his face. He was there to read to them what was written on the bulletin board. On the bulletin board, however, had been posted a sheet of white paper with a wall story on 240 chapter five

it called “The Workers Committee” by Mr. XYZ. Mistaking it for something the office had actually posted, the supervisor began reading the story out loud. “Ahem! ‘They gathered together with great excitement. For an event of the utmost gravity was about to play out before their very eyes. . . .’” After he read a few lines, the color suddenly drained from the super’s face. “Wait a minute, just what is this . . . ?” The man was all eyeballs as he read the remainder of the story to himself. The workers watching him now could hardly help bursting out into wails of laughter, which they had only managed to hold back for a few seconds. “Aha, ha, ha!” “Whoopee!” Without speaking a single word— his face indeed spoke what was on his mind— the super lifted the heavy bulletin board off the wall, propped it onto his shoulder, and then headed straight toward the office. Behind him followed a stream of uproarious laughter that shook the entire cafeteria. By the following day the bulletin board had disappeared for good. But by then the workers had all understood the need for more wall stories, and having become quite accustomed to reading them, they were determined to start them up again. From now on they would use the doors of the cafeteria just as they had the bulletin board, and whenever they found wall stories in magazines, they would post them on the doors and read them with enthusiasm every day. Translated by Samuel Perry from the Korean

(25) A Farmer among Farmers hosono ko¯jiro¯ Translated from Proletarian Literature (February 1932) Hosono Ko¯jiro¯ (1901–1977) was born in Gifu Prefecture but moved to Hokkaido in his youth. There, as a farm worker, he gained intimate knowledge of the bleak conditions of tenant farming in northern lands as depicted in this selection. While holding a string of jobs including reporting— a feature shared with many proletarian writers— he became active in the movement, maintaining his commitment through its decline and resuming his activities after the war.12 The proletarian literature movement, like the larger political units

12. Maeda, “Hosono Ko¯jiro¯,” 228. a rt a s a we a p on 241

of the movement, regularly coupled “farmers” with “workers.” But the materials it drew on were much more likely to reflect urban industrial life despite the fact that the boundary between city and country was increasingly blurred with tenant farmers finding it difficult to support themselves with farm work alone. Besides “Tetsu’s Story” [19], “A Farmer among Farmers” is the only selection in this anthology with a rural setting. Farmers were ostensibly harder to organize because they didn’t have a shared workplace to foster solidarity; nor were they likely to have a bulletin board for posting this kind of story. The depiction of encroaching war in this story, however, brings it in dialogue with other pieces [26, 32, 34] revealing subtle and explicit resistance to Japan’s imperialist ventures. nf He stooped down beneath the eaves and tossed off the reed mat that was folded over his back. In his haste, however, the snow clinging to an old straw mat, hung over a crack in the wall, was knocked down onto the nape of his neck. “Oh, cripes, that’s cold,” said the old man, jerking his head to the side and shaking off the snow. A copy of the Farmers Union Newsletter he’d just been given fell flat on the ground in front of him. He picked it up off the floor and stood up again, noticing as he did so that visitors had arrived, and then hearing people talking softly inside. Now, who could that be? the old man wondered for an instant, his mouth watering as he opened the muddied neck of his straw sack. Inside the sack were bracken roots still freshly covered in soil, by now so bone-chillingly cold they were practically frozen to a crisp. The old man lifted his shivering hands up to his mouth and blew on them repeatedly. Each time he did so there came a grumbling sound from the depths of his stomach. It had been empty for a very long time. Twilight was setting in and the powdery snow that had begun to fall since noontime had already spread out a blanket of white in all four directions. Winter had arrived. In the paddies on either side of the road stood the rotting stubs of last year’s rice plants, with what looked like tiny withered beards of grain stuck here and there. The apple orchards and mulberry fields were engulfed in a gray haze that extended far into the distance— dusk was settling over this hamlet, which now looked like a desolate heath. Plagued by poor harvests and widespread famine, this cold and barren northern village hadn’t a hearth still burning, and would soon be abandoned into the depths of the snow. Soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone, the old man managed to stumble into his house on legs numbed of all sensation. The visitors were 242 chapter five

the village head and a man from the town hall. The village head shifted his gaze toward the black bracken roots stacked up on the earthen floor. “Still workin’ hard though it’s gettin’ to be winter, eh?” he said with a smile. “It’s gotta be tough now that you’re older. How about it, heard from your boy recently?” By “your boy” the visitor was referring to his son, who’d been taken off to the Mongolian-Manchurian front line. Had something happened? wondered the old man, his face twisting into an expression that betrayed his bewilderment. “They say a journalist’s coming by to visit. So— ” chimed in his wife from beside the hearth. “A what?” “Well, actually— ” began the village head, launching himself into the following explanation. A journalist from a newspaper in Tokyo was making his rounds in the area, visiting the families of soldiers drafted to the front from places hit hard by poor harvests, and it appeared that he might stop by this hamlet sometime tomorrow. If the journalist did come, they wanted to make sure the old man would not complain about how hard it was to feed himself, and instead focus on how his son was devoting himself to the good of the nation. “You know, it’ll be an honor for the whole village if we get taken up in the papers,” said the man from the town hall, conspicuously slipping something wrapped in paper toward the doorframe. As he did so, a malnourished child with sunken eyes, who sat beside the hearth, flashed his eyes greedily in its direction. “So that’s what this is all about— you gotta be kidding me.” The old man glanced to the side of him. “Me, I don’t do business that way!” “Well, it’s not meant to be— I mean, you’re a loyal citizen of Japan, aren’t you?” “Look here, mister, I don’t know how all you gents with storehouses full of rice do things, but poor folk like me? Who’ve got to feed themselves by digging up wild roots outta the snow— ? Well, I say to hell with you and all your smooth talking— and your goddamned country as well!” “Pa, how could you— ” shouted his wife, stern-faced, from beside him. “Oh, shut up, woman!” he replied. Shifting his glance toward the village head and his lackey, he added something more menacing: “We’re already at our wit’s end! All you gents with full storehouses best be careful, you hear?” Sour-faced, the visitors then took their leave. Through the crack in the a rt a s a we a p on 243

door the powdery snow blew its way into the dark, earthen-floored room with each gust of the wind. “I’m starving, goddamnit,” the old man said angrily, as he stepped up to the hearth and sat in front of his “dinner” tray. “‘A gesture of the government’s sympathy’— Hell, they’ll say any goddamn thing they want to get what they’re after. And all to pull the damn wool over our eyes! Crafty old bastards, the whole lot of ’em.” His lips already pursed, the man blew into his steaming bowl. The broth made a bubbling sound as it was forced into small ripples that ran to the opposite side. The barnyard millet, almost grayish in color, rose up to this side of the bowl as though it were sand in the surf. It was just then that the words from the newsletter he’d placed in his breast pocket surfaced in the old man’s mind: Don’t be fooled by the “sympathy” of the capitalist landlords! Let us join arms and rise up! Translated by Samuel Perry

(26) To Qiqihar kuroshima denji Translated from Literary Gazette (February 1932) As evident from his biography (see the introduction to [34]), Kuroshima Denji was a tireless proletarian critic of war. Following the Manchurian Incident of September 1931, in which the Japanese military staged a pretext for expansion into northeast China, stepped-up mobilization prompted communists to combine antimilitarist and labor issues in their factory organizing. With great courage, they attempted to do the same in the military. As this story shows, the correspondingly wary authorities did not hesitate to act swiftly on their suspicions.13 With a handful of details, Kuroshima manages to sketch the shift of control over terrain among the Japanese and Soviet armies, Chinese warlords, and resistance forces. Zooming in on the campaign to take Qiqihar, which would become an important base throughout the war in northeastern China, he fashions a narrative of Japanese resistance to the imperialist war. Given the eagerness of the authorities to stamp out antiwar activity in the military, it is curious to note the absence of defensive deletions

13. Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 93–94.

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in this story and the fact that the issue of the Literary Gazette in which it was carried was one of the few to escape banning. nf At the start of November, northern Manchurian ground begins to freeze. The occupied Chinese houses were turned into temporary barracks. A piercing cold assaulted the skin even through winter coats made of fur. Two weeks earlier, First Class Private Wada’s company had set out from Sipingjie. They arrived in Taonan by the Si-Tao line, and then advanced two hundred kilometers farther north. The soldiers began to be afflicted by stubbornly proliferating lice. “I wonder if it’s true that Russia is backing Ma Zhanshan.” They had not taken a bath for a full twenty days. Hoping they could soon withdraw to the rear, they discussed a rumor heard from above. “It’s a lie.” Second Class Private Ehara denied it on the spot. Ehara was a soldier with no chance of promotion because he had once belonged to a labor union. “But they’re supplying him with cannons and ammunition, aren’t they?” “That’s a totally made up story.” “I wonder.” In the wake of shelling, countless Chinese soldiers lay scattered along the hills and trenches around the Daqing Station, looking like lumps of meat ravaged by wild animals. Wada’s company had occupied the area. That the Chinese soldiers had not been blessed with money or food or clothing while alive was evident from their malnourished skins and from the torn and ragged Sun Zhongshan jackets in which they lay. Seeing that, Wada shivered in spite of himself. Following its retreat, Ma Zhanshan’s Heilongjiang army readied the ammunition and cannons and concentrated its forces to attempt a counterattack. Russia was supporting this. A communist army of “Chinese and Koreans” had marched out of Blagoveshchensk as reinforcements. Such were the rumors that had spread through all the units. “— The goddamned enemy’s not just the Chinese, so you’d all better not let your guard down even for a moment! Got that?” The pencil-mustached company commander repeated his warning. Officers who returned from reconnoitering at the front line spoke of seeing Russian cannons. “Can it be true?” Feeling numb as if anesthetized, many of Wada’s comrades were at a loss what to believe. “How can they say Russia supplied the weapons? Just look at the guns a rt a s a we a p on 245

the Heilongjiang army threw away when they ran off. Nothing but Type-38 Arisaka rifles, right?” “Yeah, that’s right!” But the rumor began to spread wildly out of control. One evening when they returned to the barracks from the occupied territory, letters were distributed to them along with the comfort packages. “This year, looks like there’s a famine not only here but all over Hokkaido too. After paying the land tax, we don’t even have any straw left. . . .” This is what Wada was reading when a corporal arrived to summon Ehara. “Something they want me to do?” Ehara asked uneasily. “Don’t ask. Just come!” “How do I know what it’s about if I don’t ask?” “Shut up! . . . Moriguchi and Hamada, you come too!” Not only Ehara but five or six others reluctantly rose and went before they had even had a chance to finish reading their letters. They lined up and marched out. Wada and those of his comrades who were left behind looked silently at one another’s faces. Ehara and the others never came back. The next day at dawn, the army received the order to proceed north. After twenty-six hours of fierce fighting and marching, they advanced as far as Qiqihar. Clusters of Chinese soldiers lay about everywhere, like ants doused with boiling water. Horses shot in the legs were shrieking among the abandoned cannons and rifles. But no Russians, Russian rifles, or Russian cannons could be discovered anywhere. Wada gradually began to feel deflated as if his expectations had somehow been betrayed. Translated by Željko Cipriš

(27) A Day at the Factory nagano kayo Translated from Literary Gazette (April 25, 1932) All we know about Nagano Kayo is her name, her membership in the Shimosuwa Circle (Nagano Prefecture), and what we learn from this piece itself. She is, in other words, one of the workers encouraged to write under the “Bolshevization” of the movement in the early 1930s, which meant taking the movement to the factories and the farms and hearing back from them. Absent the circle movement, it is hard to imagine Nagano thinking her experiences worth recording and sharing. In terms of format, her piece, illustrated by Kiire Iwao (1905– ?) and published in the Literary Gazette, looks much like the celebrated 246 chapter five

Tokunaga’s “Shawl” in the Arts Gazette. The pedagogical function of such writing is made clear in Yamada Seizaburo¯’s critique [28] in the same issue. That the work and its review appear in the same issue provides not only a rare opportunity to witness a concrete example of the pedagogical process, but also to see what was important for the leadership as compared to the young factory worker, for whom the prospect of organized protest did not yet have immediacy. This aspect— of the lack of exposure to organizing— makes for interesting comparison with “Another Battlefront” [32], a piece of fiction by the comparatively experienced writer Matsuda Tokiko. nf Whew! It’s cold. Another snowy morning. If you commute on a day like today, you realize it’d be a whole lot better just to live in the dorm. I’ve been working for twenty days straight without a day off. My body’s plumb worn out and I can’t even get up. My feet are chilblained and itchy so I rub ’em against against each other and just stare up at the ceiling. . . . Anyways, I force myself to stand up and put on my work clothes and get into my canvas work shoes and head out the door. I can see the road in the weird faint brightness of snow. These canvas shoes, they get soakin’ wet in the factory then frozen stiff so they creak with every step and cut into my feet that’re all swollen and purple. It’s still a little dark, and all you can see in the snow are the sharp tracks of the milkman’s wheels. I go in at the gate with a worn-out wooden sign saying XX Silk Filature, turn my name tag over, and head straight for the cafeteria. The narrow entrance to the cafeteria is abuzz with folks stuck there holding their chopsticks and rice bowls. It’s practically start time and the table only holds about twenty when there’s four hundred girls waiting for their breakfast, you can hardly eat in peace, it’s practically like you’re fighting with everybody. You get some crumbly black mixture of three parts rice and seven parts barley and just one plate of shriveled up greens for a side. The monk who gives lectures on self-improvement at the factory preaches, “When you receive food you must bow in gratitude.” So some simple-minded fools actually bow to their food. You have to wash your own rice bowl. And there’s only cold water. So blood starts to trickle out of the cracks in your chapped hands. It’s on us to soak fourteen reels. They’re metal, so they make your hands bleed. Can’t wait for ’em to get all callused up. . . . The minute you hang up your cleaning rag on your seat or in the hallway, a rt a s a we a p on 247

the shaft starts to turn. Even though start time’s supposed to be six thirty, work always begins five or even ten minutes early. And then you can’t hear nothing but the shaft roaring and the foreman yelling. The only ones who take the fifteen-minute break at nine o’clock are the foreman and the clerk and maybe the guys. We gotta use that fifteen minutes to make sure we’re caught up on the work, because even though we’re supposed to have a half an hour at lunch, if we’re just a little bit late, there’s no rice left in the cafeteria. Matter of fact, this happens all the time. That damn cafeteria supervisor, he walks around and around, and if he finds a grain of rice on the floor, he starts yelling. They don’t even let you fill up your belly with that stinking food. When I think about how it’s not just in the factory that we’re being wrung dry, I want to take my rice bowl and smash it on the foreman’s mug— “Hey, XX-chan. Shall we tell ’em they have to feed us right at least?” XX-chan was sitting next to me, eating but looking sad, not saying a word. Yesterday, XX-chan let the big reel drop and broke it. Then a supervisor guy rushes over and has the nerve to yell, “This here reel cost a helluva lot. Same’s these rings.” XX-chan was sobbing so I says to him, “It’s not like she did it on purpose.” Then the guy glares at me, but who gives a shit. XX-chan just doesn’t have any guts. . . . You can’t even sit down once during the eleven hours (in fact, more like eleven and a half hours if you add the time before start time and the extension of finish time), you’re just flying in front of the Minorikawa-style reeling machine, just hoppin’ around, so that by evening, everybody’s face is pale and their hairdo’s falling apart and all’s you can do is look at each other with sad faces. . . . The big reel gets inspected under a dim ten-watt light and then gets inspected under a hundred-watt light in the quality-control section. Sure enough, the light’s different so it doesn’t pass, and then for punishment you have to sit on the wooden floor for over an hour and get preached at. Finally, the shaft stops turning, and it’s like a big wind died down, it’s so quiet. We’re in a daze for a while, then from somewheres comes a sigh of relief. “I’d just as soon die as live another day like this,” says XX-chan next to me in a pitiful voice. “My chilblains are a-itching and a-hurting, maybe I’ll just take these shoes off.” “You take those shoes off and you’ll really get it, XX-chan.” You hear people talkin’ like that. Then you force your tired body to clean up your spot, then clean the hallway, and the person whose turn it is to clean 248 chapter five

the toilet has to do that, too. The company saves money by making us do these things instead of hiring somebody. It makes me so mad. . . . Translated by Norma Field

(28) Our Own Literature Course (1): A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage yamada seizaburo¯ Translated from Literary Gazette (April 25, 1932) Yamada Seizaburo¯ (1896–1987) was born in Kyoto in circumstances precarious enough for him to be put out to foster care. Though eventually reclaimed by his mother, he was still compelled to leave school in the sixth grade. In the course of a string of live-in apprenticeships, he came to know about socialists Ko¯toku Shu¯sui (1871–1911) and Sakai Toshihiko (1870–1933). Like many in the proletarian literature movement, he started out in the newspaper world, first as delivery boy and then reporter, submitting his own fiction to journals on the side. Being slightly older than most of the others included in this anthology, he was involved with The Sower, often said to mark the beginning of the movement, as well as Literary Front (see Aono [4, 9]). A fiction writer, editor, and publisher, he was a central member of NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio) and the Writers League. His 1938 recantation (announced in a published letter to “A Brother,” by whom he meant Hayashi Fusao [7]) led him to Manchuria, where he became active in literary organizations and authored fiction depicting the dream of harmony between the Japanese settlers and the Chinese. Returning to Japan after internment in Siberia, he threw himself enthusiastically into the democratic literature movement and rejoined the Communist Party. 14 He is the author of a two-volume account of proletarian literature, A History of Proletarian Literature (1954). Yamada’s “A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage” is one response to the call to “establish a communist literature” declared at the second congress (April 1930) of the Writers League. The league embarked on a program cultivating worker correspondents and promoted reportage as a means of expanding its reading and writing base. Everyone, leaders included, had to work at grasping the new genres. “On Literary Reportage” by Kawaguchi Hiroshi (see [37]) clarified the nature of

14. Sakamoto, “Yamada Seizaburo¯,” 740–41. a rt a s a we a p on 249

the genre and introduced examples of foreign reportage writers.15 At the head of his list came the German-writing Czech journalist and Communist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), considered a pioneer of the genre. Kawaguchi’s introduction of Kisch’s views on the importance of reportage for leftists was translated into Chinese and became hugely influential. Yamada’s presentation for the Literary Gazette readership follows the lines of Kawaguchi’s explication. His comments on Nagano Kayo’s account of a harsh winter day at the filature [27], together with his affirmation of anyone’s ability to write reportage, express the determination of an international band of writers to use the democratized weapon of writing in the struggle to overcome the injustices around them. nf Preface— This literature course is something we hope to continue in each issue. The first in the series offers instruction in writing reportage literature. For the second, we are planning to have Tokunaga Sunao tell us how to write wall stories. Only if you readers and instructors work together can this course benefit the creation of a proletarian literature for the masses. We hope you’ll send in questions and requests to make this course meaningful. (Editorial staff )

1. What Is Literary Reportage? Literary reportage will serve as one foundation for the development of proletarian literature. It is one of the most important genres for the development of proletarian literature for the masses. It is a genre that is flourishing among the factory workers and farm workers of the Soviet Union. How has productivity increased in your factory; what are the facilities like; what is your work like, and what kinds of thoughts do your fellow workers have; how is the race for constructing a socialist society coming along? The things you’re always seeing and hearing about, the things you’ve experienced— that’s what you should write about concretely and report on for the masses in newspapers and magazines. That’s how you communicate with one another and encourage one another. In Germany, too, this sort of reportage is being produced vigorously in factories and farms and showing growth and development. How is literary reportage different from what’s usually called “fiction”? 15. Translated into Chinese by Xia Yan. Our thanks to Anup Grewal for information about the roles of Kisch and Kawaguchi in China.

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Literary reportage above all aims to tell everybody the things that the author has seen or heard, the large and small things he’s experienced just as they’ve been seen, heard, and experienced. In contrast to writing that has as its principal aim the reporting of such aspects of reality, what’s usually called “fiction”— and I hope to take up what constitutes fiction in detail eventually— also selects incidents and facts from reality, but these have to be shaped into a plot by the author. It’s sufficient for now if you understand that the fictional story has to be constructed with a beginning and end. In other words, even if you don’t have the skills of a writer that are necessary for fiction, if you can write something about the length of a postcard, with just a little effort, anyone can write literary reportage. That’s why I said that literary reportage is a foundation for the construction of proletarian literature for the masses.

2. The Mission of Literary Reportage and How to Go About Writing It I think you can understand what literary reportage is from what I’ve written above, but just because reportage has as its principal aim the reporting of reality doesn’t mean that you should write about just any thing that happens. Of the many things that you see and hear and experience every day, you need to sort out those things that you want everybody to know, the things that if you share, will draw together the feelings of people working in factories and farms (or people who’ve been forced into unemployment), that will lead comrades to encourage one another— those things that will lead to the unity of workers and farmers and contribute even the littlest bit to the struggle and to victory. This need to “sort out” doesn’t mean that you should only write about strikes and demonstrations. Naturally, those are events that you will all want to write about and, of course, should write about. But in literary reportage, there are materials that are apt to be overlooked that in fact make for fine subject matter. Topics like how bad the sanitary conditions in the dorms are and the grief that causes everybody, or how the extension of work hours is causing mounting dissatisfaction, or how people got tied down to their jobs even on May Day and you’re pissed off but your coworkers don’t have much consciousness yet so you’re bothered about that, or how your coworkers have been taken away to war, and how they didn’t really want to go but were overwhelmed by all the shouts of “Banzai! Banzai!” and had no choice but to go, weeping in their hearts all along— these are all things that you shouldn’t hesitate to take up in literary reportage. a rt a s a we a p on 251

3. One Example of Literary Reportage On page six we have “A Day at the Filature [sic]” [27] by factory worker Miss XX of the XX Circle in Nagano Prefecture. This is a piece that depicts the wretched working conditions of the author and her fellow factory girls, how they’re exploited, and how the girls are trying to fight against these conditions in the form of an account of a single day. And to some degree, the author is able to communicate the things that she wants everybody to know, but there are some points that she has overlooked that make her piece deficient. She has failed to tell us the scale of the capitalist who owns the filature, whether he owns other filatures or banks. And there’s only a little bit about the lives of the factory girls. The author needs to pay more careful attention to these aspects. The author of literary reportage needs to develop sharp eyes to see through to the bottom of things. Otherwise, even if she’s gone to the trouble of producing this piece of literary reportage, it will be terribly weak. The need to develop a keen sense of observation of reality is exactly what we’re discussing in proletarian circles these days. It’s the first step toward dialectical materialism as the mode of literary creation. 4. A Proposal I think I’ve made clear what literary reportage is, its function, and the way it should be written. so now i want to make you a proposal. why don’t you take the occasion of the coming may day to produce a piece of reportage to submit to the literary gazette ? we’d like you to write freely and boldly about taking part in may day, or not being able to, or what your workplace was like on may day. There’s no need to fuss over your writing. It’s enough to try to convey reality as accurately as possible. Translated by Norma Field

(29) On Wall Stories and “Short” Short Stories: A New Approach to Proletarian Literature kobayashi takiji Translated from Studies in the Newly Rising Arts (June 1931) This and the following piece [30] show Kobayashi Takiji (see [1] for biographical information) as theorist as well as star writer in the movement. This discussion of wall stories appeared in volume 2 of a three-volume series, Studies in the Newly Rising Arts, which was, interestingly enough, a volume devoted to writings of the “aesthetic 252 chapter five

school,” which was generally critical of Marxism. Perhaps this indicates a special regard for Takiji as craftsman and/or tacit sympathy for his cause. Takiji himself doesn’t disguise his ideology or his purpose for one moment. His elaboration of the “risk of bias” is telling. “Bias” was the word routinely modified by “political” to indicate submission to the primacy of politics as the fatal flaw of proletarian literature. Takiji, however, uses “bias” to indicate “one-dimensional” and “formulaic” writing, which will necessarily thwart the political purpose of the genre: to attract readers without much education or spare time. Bad art, in other words, makes for bad politics. Was this primarily strategic? Surely so. But we shouldn’t overlook the respect for the intended readership implicit in this view. That readership is deemed to be of “low cultural level,” a phrasing that doubtless makes us wince, but we might also acknowledge the resonance of the “wall story” project with our contemporary pedagogical principle of “meeting the students where they’re at.” It’s also interesting to see Takiji’s openness, in contrast to some of his comrades, to such popular writers as Kikuchi Kan (1888– 1949) as valuable guides to writing that could hold the interest of nonintellectuals. nf As writers, many of us have fully appreciated [Anatoli] Lunacharsky’s [1875– 1933] observation that we need to create literary works “elementary and simple” in content that will gain currency among the millions of industrial and agricultural workers.16 We have not, however, succeeded in producing works that live up to this ideal. Early last year, some among our ranks misunderstood the ideological implications of “elementary and simple” content. Even after this misinterpretation had been rectified (“Resolution on the Problem of Popularization,” Battle Flag, July 1930), no concrete example of this concept— in other words, no “literary work”— appeared. This results not so much from our sloth but rather reveals the practical difficulties of the task that we have been assigned. From the latter half of last year, however, Battle Flag proposed that we experiment with wall stories. As for why Battle Flag embarked on this experiment, it was first and foremost our way of responding to the wishes of the people right away; it was also a matter of the writers themselves wanting to dedicate energy to this project. Though they are far from perfect in form,

16. Lunacharsky, “Theses,” sec. 9. a rt a s a we a p on 253

we have succeeded in finding in wall stories the early manifestations of a new type of proletarian literature, one grounded in “elementary and simple” content. I can offer several reasons why wall stories will find favor among people of the industrial and agricultural working classes. First, they are only a page or two in length, so they can be read quickly at any time, any place, and moreover, they let the reader grasp something solid and coherent. Second, wall stories will be posted in places where workers and farmers congregate, and address topics of immediate concern to the masses. Given such a role, wall stories hold great potential if we put effort into them. We must be wary, however, of the risk of developing a certain bias. What sort of bias do we risk? It is the risk of understanding the role of wall stories one-dimensionally and formulaically. If such an understanding were to take hold, wall stories would turn into crappy old sermons ordering people to “do this and do that!” And in actual practice, all the wall stories to date seem to have succumbed to that tendency, despite the authors’ good intentions and efforts. Nevertheless, to the extent that wall stories are wall stories as distinguished from “short” short stories— however much they may resemble them— I believe they have a limitation. The reason is the role with which they have been charged. In that respect, wall stories are bound to be a “onedimensional” art form. What I wish to emphasize here is that the genre of wall stories will have a completely new and significant influence on the field of proletarian literature. This is because wall stories can inform our interest in the “short short story” in proletarian literature, yielding rich contributions on the question of form in short short fiction. There is an important reason for why I refer to “short” short stories here, rather than “short stories.” What would that reason be? Allow me to quote from my monthly literary review for the May issue of Central Review:17 A factory worker once said to me, “Can we get you to write lots of really short pieces that we could read in five or ten minutes?” The kind of story he had in mind was very simple, with a very specific theme, something that he could get the gist of immediately. A story that makes you say the minute you finish reading it, yeah, that’s the way it is, or, is that right— the sort of work that hits you smack where it counts. 17. Kobayashi Takiji, “Bungei jihy¯o,” 250–51. 254 chapter five

In the case of proletarian literature, especially in Japan, which is prerevolutionary, and where the cultural level of workers is low, I believe this type of short story has a special significance. Many short stories familiar to us look like excerpts from novels with the beginnings and ends cut off. You finish reading them, and you don’t really “get” it. (However excellent they may be as examples of a certain kind of narrative, they fail to stand on their own as short stories. We have had many “excellent” short stories of this kind in Japan.) The minute you finish reading the last line of a short story, the story should become crystal clear to you. Just as in the case of a bad joke, if the last sentence of a short story is vague and unclear, the reader feels unsatisfied and is likely to prefer an interesting, plot-driven novel. For workers who have little time or money, however, this is not an option.— For this reason as well, we must produce many, many short, convincing works. Proletarian writers have much to learn from the “theme stories” of Kikuchi Kan [1888–1948] or the works of some of the excellent foreign short story writers who employ the conte form. It takes a special talent and technique to master the short story form. One reason that we have seen so few convincing short stories is that many writers regard them as something to be slapped together when taking a break from novel writing, rather than as a form requiring a specific skill. The important thing is that henceforth, when we “consciously” take up short stories in this sense, Lunacharsky’s dictum— that these stories must penetrate the stratum of workers of low cultural level by relying on “elementary” and “simple” content— will surely find concrete realization. . . . I have only been able to discuss these topics in a very general manner, but I believe that this is one new direction that our Japanese proletarian literature must seek in 1931. Translated by Ann Sherif

(30) A Guide to Fiction Writing: How to Write Stories (excerpt) kobayashi takiji Translated from General Course in Proletarian Arts (June 1931) This guide, published in volume 2 of the five-volume General Course in Proletarian Arts, follows up on another guide written by Kobayashi Takiji’s [1, 5, 11, 22, 29] comrade Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31] for the inaugural a rt a s a we a p on 255

volume. 18 More than Takiji does here, Tokunaga calls attention to the specific requirements of proletarian fiction writing, citing as a negative example a passage from a “so-called Newly Rising Arts” work that he deemed incomprehensible to workers and farmers. Nevertheless, much of both men’s comradely advice is commonsensical, reflecting their grasp of the bourgeois literary legacy even as they sought to overcome it. Takiji, understandably hesitant about producing a “guide” for fiction writing at age twenty-seven, lets his excitement come through when he dissects his own work. The unrestrained use of emphasis (represented sometimes with quotation marks, mostly through italics) in this piece as well as the previous one on wall stories [29] gives a distinctive rhythm to his prose, conveying irrepressible enthusiasm and urgency. nf

i. To tell the truth, there can be no such thing as a “how-to” for writing fiction. Some people may think that if they read a “guide to fiction writing,” they will be able to write a novel. This is not the case. Each of us approaches the task with our own assumptions about how to write, whether consciously or not. Therefore, this essay is nothing more than a report of my own personal approach to writing novels. It may serve as a reference for aspiring writers, but only in a very limited sense. Indeed, the views expressed here should not be understood as hard and fast rules. New writers must have their own original approach. [. . .] 1. Feeling Things and Writing about Them As living things, we all “feel” emotions in response to the myriad dimensions of reality in the world around us. Even on the most ordinary day, we experience a wide range of feelings. Put simply, it is these emotions that form the foundation of prose fiction. Commonsensical though it may seem, I should remind the reader that feeling those emotions is not the same as “writing” them. Rather, emotions function as the foundation of fiction. I emphasize this point here, because there are far too many works in which new writers appear to have done nothing more than toss in anything interesting that came into their heads, much in the same way a person might dump things into a trash can. Such an approach to writing no doubt results from conflating the experience of emotions with the literary expression of those feelings.

18. Tokunaga, “Sho¯setsu sakuho¯.” 256 chapter five

Art, on the contrary, provides a frame for expressing emotions. [. . .] [. . .] For example, painters choose a single scene from among the myriad fields, rivers, and mountains and fit that scene into a framework. In a like manner, writers select one of many experiences and place that into the frame of the novel. [. . .] Let me explain the relationship between the writer’s experiences and literary expression in another way. People experience the myriad sights, sounds, and feelings of daily life differently, depending on their particular outlook and subjectivity. For sensations and emotions to become part of a literary work, however, a writer must handle them in a manner that transcends individual subjectivity, evoking those experiences and emotions in a way that will resonate powerfully with readers. In other words, the individual and the subjective must be rendered in an “objective” manner. [. . .] 2. What to Write about and How? [. . .] One must first decide with absolute clarity on the “what” one wants to write about. Secondly, there must be only one focal point in the work. [. . .] Now, I will discuss “composition” or structure. The appropriate structure for a novel is that which most effectively brings to life the subject of the work. [. . .] In a novel, lack of a sound structure is a fatal flaw. Japanese prose fiction, both bourgeois and proletarian, tends to be particularly weak in this respect. We must, for that reason, read with careful attention novels that are well composed, such as those by Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, and other foreign writers. Composing a novel is quite literally the same work as constructing a house. In both cases, the final product will be of no use to anyone if, despite high-quality materials and noble intentions, the structure is unstable and wasteful. [. . .] Finally, I will touch on matters of technique and skill in writing. [. . .] [. . .] Shakespeare’s works demonstrate clearly how important technique and skill are. It is well known that the great playwright borrowed most of his stories from other people. Nonetheless, he was able, as if by magic, to impart new life to old stories. We could attribute this to the brilliant composition of his plays. The more important factor, however, in the eternal radiance of Shakespeare’s works is his consummate skill with language; it is his beautiful words that are still quoted today and that people love to repeat. [. . .] Often, people who are writing for the first time attempt to produce “beautiful language” by using complicated sentence structure or inserting an abundance of adjectives. That, however, is not what constitutes good writa rt a s a we a p on 257

ing. Accomplished writing consists of the simplest, clearest, and most accurate language. New writers must learn this fundamental truth. Once this principle is understood, all that can be done is to pursue the craft with discipline and patience over time. In addition, a writer should read many novels by other writers, and compare and critique them. For example, we can learn a great deal from contrasting a work by a proletarian novelist and one by a bourgeois writer, or from examining the differences between one proletarian novel and another. This is the only way to enrich and refine our skills as a writer. [. . .] 3. Content and Form: Groundwork for a Novel Normally, a guide to writing novels would discuss many aspects of a writer’s craft, including the relationship between dialogue and descriptive passages; the difference between actual conversation and dialogue; how to handle external description of characters and psychological description; how to describe faces, clothing, facial expressions, speech, behavior, idiosyncrasies, actions; or what to do about the character’s surroundings, psychological analysis, and so on. Other important topics include use of the first person versus the third person, and differences between short stories and full-length novels. I cannot possibly cover all these topics in detail here. Instead, I will discuss some specific examples from my own work “The Organizer.”19 [. . .]

ii. After my recent release from prison, I wrote “The Organizer” (Part 2 of “The Factory Cell”).20 Since this work is still fresh in my mind, and I am its author, I hope the following discussion of the story will be useful to you, my young readers. (1) In this work, I decided to describe the life of an organizer who goes underground to work on rebuilding and strengthening the labor movement at “Kanabishi” Cannery Factory after it had been all but destroyed by the authorities. [. . .] (2) I chose the May Day struggle as the main event in the work. By describing this struggle as it unfolded, I sought to make concrete my central theme. I should also mention a secondary reason for selecting May Day as a focus in this work. The story had already been scheduled to appear in the 19. Kobayashi Takiji, “Orugu. ” 20. Kobayashi Takiji, “Ko¯jo¯ saibo¯.” 258 chapter five

May issue of a journal, so I thought it was appropriate to focus on the May Day struggle. Such considerations are an important aspect of proletarian works. [. . .] (4) Only two characters appear in the story. I am particularly fond of Okimi’s personality. In fact, I’m crazy about her. Keep in mind that a novelist can’t create a vivid character if he doesn’t love her. Some writers take this to the extreme. Now, this may be too much of a digression, but one writer I know says that he feels a sudden XX and proceeds with as much excitement when he’s writing about his female characters as he does when he’s with a real woman. To write about characters effectively, a writer must know everything there is to know about them. Indeed, I know all about Okimi and Ichikawa: the rhythms and tones of their voices, the way their faces move when they speak, even what they do in the privacy of the bathroom. Whether or not I describe all those aspects of the character in the novel, I nonetheless must know them in intimate detail. Even though no one will ever hear the sounds and rhythms of the characters’ voices, a writer must never neglect them. (5) Finally, I should touch on another aspect of my approach to writing “The Organizer.” When I first came here from Hokkaido, I noticed that most working people in Tokyo read only when they were riding the commuter trains. No one, it seems, has time to sit at a table and read a book at their leisure, as do people in the countryside. Only after I understood this did I realize I shouldn’t write the kind of novel that people have to be sitting down to understand. I decided instead to write stories that hit people where it counts even if they’re reading on a crowded train. This doesn’t mean I’m being sloppy about my writing, or making the task easier. I put considerable effort into crafting “The Organizer” so that it could be read in such surroundings. In the end, I did work carefully on writing the story, but it still has numerous flaws. I should point out that the process of finding as many of those defects as you can is a means for you young writers to refine your writing skills. Not even being thirty years old, it’s a little embarrassing for me to offer any “guide for fiction writing” to my readers. I’m willing to put up with this embarrassment, however, if my attempts to explain how to write a novel somehow provide an opportunity for a fine writer to emerge from among those who work in factories and on farms. Come forth, new writers, from the factories, from the farms! Translated by Ann Sherif

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(31) The Achievements of the Creative Writing Movement: An Assessment of Works to Date (excerpt) tokunaga sunao Translated from Literary Gazette (September 25, 1932) Leading writers in the movement not only published their own short fiction, poetry, and essays in the pages of the Literary Gazette or the Arts Gazette, but they also contributed to the new phase of the popularization movement that these “gazettes” represented by reviewing work submitted “from the factories, from the farms.” This review by Tokunaga Sunao (see [23] for biographical information) shows their emphasis on having new writers be constantly alert to the specificity of a given situation (see Hirabayashi Taiko’s criticism in [14]) in order to produce effective proletarian literature. nf As of issue 21 of this publication, the submissions received from circle members, correspondents, and [Writers] League members are as follows. [. . .] It is evident that our literature is making progress, but how do things look if we assess our strengths on the basis of the results to date? One characteristic of the very short fiction, or wall stories, being produced these days is that they tend to follow a cookie-cutter pattern. For example, say there’s a strike, and everybody goes at it for all they’re worth. The cops haul them off, but they absolutely stand tough. That’s the pattern. But in fact, every real struggle has its own “specificity.” That we have so many formulaic stories is concrete evidence that circle staff, correspondents, and league staff are out of touch with the actual struggle. No matter what the factory, farm, barracks, government offices, or street corner, each has its own character, and every struggle is carried out within that “specificity.” That’s exactly where a piece of writing has the possibility of playing an auxiliary role. For example, you could say that every river is a body of flowing water, but any boatman will know the “specificity” of each river. Why does he know? Because without that knowledge, he can’t do a thing with his boat. We write fiction. We write it in order to advance “the victory of the proletariat.” The heart of the boatman steering his boat has to be our guide, too. The smallest struggle will have its own “specificity.” It’s within this specificity that the principle running through every hour, every minute of the struggle needs to be brought to life. Creation is itself a form of practice. We must gear up in order to continue our advance. Translated by Norma Field 260 chapter five

6 : Anti-imperialism and Internationalism introduction Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 3, 1941, captured the attention of the Euro-American world. To see the Japanese empire through the lens of WWII, however, is to see just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The “iceberg” of the Japanese empire is best understood with a look at the nineteenthcentury global competition for natural resources, cheap labor, and new markets that provoked Japan to develop a military-industrial complex by the turn of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the empire encompassed Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), and by 1931, the puppet regime in northeast China (Manchuria). Additional pockets of China, southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands would soon be added. Proletarian writers such as Kuroshima Denji, whose essay is excerpted in this chapter ([34]; see also [26]), criticized Japanese imperialism in solidarity with an internationalist movement that, following Lenin, saw late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism.”1 It is tempting to wonder how an internationalist, anti-imperialist movement might have continued to struggle against the Japanese empire from within if government repression had not been so thorough by the mid-1930s. (See chapter 7 for a discussion of repression.) Proletarian journals deployed slogans such as “Overthrow imperialism”— in which imperialists were also understood to be finance capitalists responsible for the growth of empire— and represented through informational articles, photo montage, and creative works the experience of exploitation shared by the impoverished in Japan itself, in the colonies, and throughout the world. The two stories presented in this chapter— one about female labor in a Japanese rubber factory and another about the suffering of Korean farmers under Japanese colonial control— together illustrate the commitment of proletarian journals to exposing the complicity between capitalism and imperialism while building international solidarity. Kuroshima Denji’s essay in this chapter argues the importance of an antiwar literature that reveals why the proletariat needed to forge international solidarity rather than allow itself to be duped into sacrificial roles in national wars. 1. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism”; and Kurahara, “Teikokushugi to geijutsu.” 261

Figure 8. “Overthrow imperialism” Full-page image from Literary Front (July 1929, p. 5). Some of the other captions: “Get your hands off China!” and “Troops from various countries stationed in Shanghai” (from left, Japan, United States, England, France, Italy).

Japan, like other “late developing” countries, found that by the end of the nineteenth century, most of Asia had already been parceled out to Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United States. According to Social Darwinist logic, then enjoying international credibility, the question was how to catch up with the strong and avoid the fate of the weak. In the mid-nineteenth century, both the Qing Dynasty (China, 1644–1912) and the Tokugawa Shogunate (Japan, 1603–1868) were ruled by Neo-Confucian principles decidedly antipathetic to mercantile capitalism. The day of reckoning arrived when the British fought the Opium Wars against China (1839–1842, 1856–1860), winning the dubious right to import opium into China to offset a trade imbalance caused by its own addiction to tea. Military strength, it was clear, could force advantageous trade conditions. Meanwhile, the Tokugawa Shogunate was crumbling under the economic contradictions of its nearly 250-year-old regime as famines (1833–1836) and mass uprisings (1830–1844) revealed that the realm was not harmonious. It was well known among European imperial powers that the Tokugawa Shogunate was capable of brutality toward unwelcome foreigners, but with the addition of California as the thirty-first state in 1850 following rapidly on the discovery of gold, the up-and-coming Americans sent Commodore Matthew Perry in command of three well-armed ships to Japan to negotiate trade with the regime in 1853. A year later, good timing and the confidence of the newly arrived resulted in “unequal treaties” like those already imposed on China, opening new ports for trade, granting extraterritoriality in select ports, and limiting the ability of the Tokugawa Shogunate to impose tariffs. Other imperial powers— Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia— negotiated their own treaties on the same basis in quick succession, followed by additional commercial treaties. Shamed by these threats to sovereignty and faced with the possibility of being colonized, forces within Japan fought over how to defend the land. It was self-evident that capitalism was both driving and being driven by imperialist expansion. To the surprise of many, Japan emerged as a Westernstyle imperialist power in just a couple of decades. By 1895, Japan defeated the Qing Dynasty in the First Sino-Japanese War, acquiring Taiwan as a territory and moving in on Choso˘n Dynasty Korea (1392–1897), beginning what would become the fifty-year period of expansion of the Japanese empire that would end in devastation in 1945. Japan defeated Russia in 1905 (to the cheers of African American internationalists and others around the world who saw a champion against white hegemony, a view that would be strategically deployed in the announcement of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940), annexed Korea in 1910, issued the Twenty-One Demands a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 263

to China in 1915, and sought international recognition for its accomplishments when the world’s great powers gathered to negotiate conditions for peace following WWI. Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), future prime minister from June 1937 to January 1939 and July 1940 to July 1941, attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 and left frustrated that the Euro-American powers seemed unwilling to follow through on US President Woodrow Wilson’s concept of “self-determination.” Under that principle Western powers should have relinquished their territories throughout the world, but they did not. The Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917) initiated an extraordinary experiment to rival capitalism. Thinking people in late-developing countries such as Japan, burdened with the understanding that the proletariat must necessarily suffer for capitalism to grow, studied Marxism and looked to the Soviet Union for a model: What if a proletarian revolution could transform the conditions of society as profoundly as the bourgeois revolution had? What if there were an alternative to capitalist-imperialist development? A vigorous debate on capitalism in Japan ensued at home and abroad, and the state of Japan’s burgeoning empire was key to the debate. In 1927 the Comintern issued its “Theses on Japan” (commonly referred to as the “1927 Theses”), which would sow enormous controversy. First and foremost of their concerns was the strength of Japan’s empire: The great increase in the relative strength of the Far East in world economics and politics after the war makes the problem of Japanese imperialism particularly important. The strengthening of Japanese imperialism during the last ten years, its growing aggressiveness, its penetration of China, India, the Near East, the Pacific Islands, U.S.S.R. territory, etc., have transformed Japan into a first-class imperialist power of the vast Asiatic continent.2 The assessment of Japan as a “first-class imperialist power” was held to be self-evident, not only by the Comintern but by Japanese leftists, too, even before the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931, so often regarded as a crucial point in the development of the empire. How to understand Japan’s emergence as an imperialist power was the question provoking controversy: Crucially, was it economically advanced enough to proceed directly to a proletarian revolution? To the disappointment of some in Japan, Comintern assessments seemed to mimic the racial condescension Konoe had faced at the Paris Peace Conference: “The Comintern’s 1927 Theses

2. “Theses on Japan,” 295. 264 chapter s ix

claimed that Japan lagged far enough behind Russia’s own ‘backwardness’ in February 1917 to require a two-stage (first bourgeois and then proletarian) revolution to achieve socialism.”3 Intellectuals who came to constitute the Worker-Farmer Faction argued that Japanese imperialism was evidence that Japan was not backward, but rather highly developed, while those who came to be known as the Lecture Faction followed the lead of the Comintern as they conducted thorough studies of Japan’s economic structure. 4 The proletarian critique of imperialism was complicated by the fact that the Comintern’s theorists could hardly be neutral given that the Soviet project was jeopardized not only by Japanese expansion into China and the dampening impact that might have on revolution there, but also because the Japanese occupation of northeast China directly threatened Russian security. But it is important to note that the expansion of the Japanese empire was being analyzed and criticized by the late 1920s, and that proletarian writers— whatever their disagreements— agreed that Japanese imperialism was conducted at the expense of the proletariat, both at home and abroad. Proletarian literature presents imperialism in its different forms, with the purpose of making the whole comprehensible. Two celebrated examples— Kobayashi Takiji’s [1, 5, 11, 22, 29, 30] “The Crab Cannery Ship” (1929, second half banned) and Kuroshima Denji’s [26, 34] Militarized Streets (1930, banned)— articulate clear and forceful critiques of the imperialist project being carried out at the expense of the domestic and international proletariat.5 In this anthology, readers might look at Hosono Ko¯jiro¯’s [25] portrait of a rural farmer who refuses the comfort of nationalism even in the face of hunger and the possible loss of a son, Kuroshima’s glimpse into the lives of soldiers at war in northern Manchuria, Kaji Wataru’s [16] parable of a Japanese boy and Korean girl trying to rescue her father from hell, Yi Tong-gyu’s [24] and Chang Hyo˘k-chu’s [33] representations of class struggle in Korea, and Kim Tu-yong’s rebuke to Japanese comrades for too hastily adopting socialist realism [39]. As Kuroshima argues, the proletariat needed to “oppose their mutual wounding and killing,” exploit the “quarrel among thieves” that is imperialism, and “bring the entire system of thievery to an end.”6 hbs

3. Hoston, The State, Identity, and the National Question, 221. 4. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis, 55–75. 5. See Bowen-Struyk, “Rival Imagined Communities,” for a reading of these antiimperialist works. See also “Comrades-in-Arms” in Perry, Recasting Red Culture, 124– 70; and Floyd, “Bridging the Colonial Divide.” 6. Kuroshima, “On Antiwar Literature,” 327. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 265

(32) Another Battlefront matsuda tokiko Translated from Proletarian Literature (April 1932) One consequence of Japan’s stepped-up expansionism following the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was the redirection of key industries to the production of war materiel. For the working class, militarization could mean employment opportunities, though these were often temporary. The conditions of work, however, exploitative to begin with, were exacerbated by constant speedups, which in turn intensified the impact of environmental hazards. Given these circumstances, the challenge for the proletarian movement was to secure workers’ rights and oppose imperialist war. Through Sadayo, its female protagonist, “Another Battlefront” highlights sexual harassment as an element in this struggle. Author Matsuda Tokiko (1905–2004) learned firsthand about hazardous, even life-threatening work conditions and abusive family relations as she grew up in the mineral-rich mining town of Arakawa in Akita Prefecture. Although normal school followed by a brief teaching career gave her a way out of the mines, she would dedicate her literary and activist energies throughout life to the dispossessed, especially to women on the bottom rungs of society. In Tokyo, she became active in both the Women’s Arts and proletarian circles, thus receiving exceptional training as a writer. In the early 1930s, Tokiko was also busy organizing the proletarian birth control movement and starting up a day care facility. Together with other stalwarts, she continued to write and publish in the spirit of the movement after its organizations had been disbanded. After the war, support for the defendants of the Matsukawa Incident (1949), widely regarded as victims of an antileft frame-up during the US occupation, and investigation into the murderous treatment of Chinese forced laborers in the Hanaoka Incident (1945) yielded important works of reportage. Her best-known work is The Tale of Orin (1966), a prizewinning fiction based on her mother’s life. nf

1 “. . . Hands!” The manager snarled at their backs. Sadayo and the others ducked instinctively as they speeded up their hands. The sieving, washing, and steam tray sections . . . everywhere, the chattering and singing came to an abrupt halt. The roar from three sets of 266 chapter s ix

bearings and the other machines stirred the suffocating stench of the gas that was beginning to turn into a pale-yellow haze . . . “Get off your butts already!” Like an owl prowling by daylight, the manager, brown-clad burly back rounded over, passed noiselessly behind the women, and then, still without a sound, walked into the shadow of the partition— the second section— between the steam tray and sieving areas. The leaden sky, stretched taut since morning, finally unleashed a torrent of rain to pound against the saw-toothed glass ceiling. Four glass windows, fitted at intervals of about a yard, creaked as they were pulled shut. Then, the hallway windows . . . With all escape routes blocked, the gas became more concentrated by the minute, filling the space from the dirty-white concrete floor, covered with rubber scraps, sulfuric acid, glue, and dust, all the way to the ceiling of the vulcanization division. “Uh-oh . . .” The stifled sound came from Mrs. Takai, who had been desperately reeling out No. 7, type B. She let go of the tubing and stared fixedly at Sadayo. “Having a tough time, aren’t you . . .” Sadayo’s hands continued to move as she turned around to take in her neighbor’s flushed face. Under the apron showing traces of black chemical burns, a belly eight months pregnant rippled faintly. “. . . Why don’t you ask to get off early today?” “. . . Wouldn’t want to do that too often, you know . . .” As if she’d had second thoughts, Mrs. Takai grasped the rubber tubing and began to move her hands more frantically than ever. Their other buddy Akino was also struggling to clear her throat. As for Sadayo, she was trying to ignore the pain in the back of her neck as she licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. In the one-foot-square ebonite tub they surrounded, carbon disulfide and sulfur chloride and benzene melted and bubbled like amber-colored candy. The women looked like they were fishing from the way they used both hands to reel off the half-dry rubber tubing continuously sent their way— type B (for medical use, black), T, and G— into the tub. After immersion in the chemical bath, the tubing would be passed over steam-heated tinplate and wound onto small pulleys. The source of the poisonous gas in the vulcanization division was this tub. “You know, Auntie . . . about us women . . .” “. . . Chitchat!” They hadn’t noticed that the manager had suddenly come up behind a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 267

Akino. He stood glaring at them. Sadayo’s lip started to stick out. She bit down hard with her huge canines. But the gas continued to rise mercilessly, roasting her face, piercing her nostrils and then her throat. The tears came hard and fast. Infuriating . . . She was dazed and confused, as if she couldn’t tell anymore whether she was human, or maybe a dog, or a cat . . . Watch out, a voice cried from deep, deep down in her consciousness. She tried to concentrate all her force toward the back of her head in order to look up. The manager still stood there, glaring. “It just might happen that we’re going to have a visitor from the Ministry of the Army!” The manager stared hard from under his protruding forehead then stepped out into the hallway. He’s hot and bothered about the flyers this morning. The thought came to Sadayo along with a sharp, unpleasant sensation that traveled from the back of her nose to her ears. . . . Now that we’re at war, orders come pouring into your factory. You’re told to work overtime, to be more efficient as you work with poison gas, but you’re not provided with any of the gas masks you yourselves produce . . . One by one, the words of the flyer came back to Sadayo’s mind. “Every time those saber rattlers come around, that old Owl starts acting like he’s crazy . . .” Akino, who’d been keeping quiet, murmured, “I dunno, but it just feels like one of those days where there’s gonna be a bang . . .” Akino had worked in the vulcanization division longer than most of the other girls, and she had already experienced two spontaneous explosions. Both had occurred on rainy days like today when the poison gas was trapped and compressed inside the factory until, finally, it exploded in yellow flames accompanied by the deafening roar of what sounded like dynamite. Even so, it would be another two hours . . . one hour . . . fifty minutes . . . before they could leave.

2 By closing time the rain had turned into a downpour, producing sprays like smoke swirls outside the window. Most of the machines were turned off except for the bearings and the mill for the night crew. From underneath the belt that slap-slap-slapped to a halt, Sadayo could hear the wood-soled sandals and voices of her fellow workers calling to one another. I didn’t bring my umbrella . . . thought Sadayo as she stuck her head un268 chapter s ix

der the steam plate, groping for her lunch box and navy blue smock. Suddenly, her shoulder was grabbed from behind with brute force. “Ouch! That hurts!” Sticking her butt up and backing out cautiously, she found Yoshioka the macerator standing and grinning. Nobody else was around. “. . . You still got some in there?” Sadayo shuddered. “What are you talking about?” She was being formal. “You know, the flyers.” “I wouldn’t know anything about that. Get out of the way, won’t you please, ’cuz I’m going home . . .” “He, he, he. Who distributed those flyers this morning?” Sadayo untied her apron strings behind her back. With exaggerated calm, she put on her smock. “. . . Was it Terada? Sugii? You? Hm. . . ?” “No way. I got handed one outside the gate, I was so surprised I just ran in. . . .” “Hey, wait!” Yoshioka grabbed Sadayo as she tried to pass in front of him. Macerator that he was, he pressed and squeezed her two or three times. “All excited, aren’t you, bitch? . . . You’ve gotten a whole lot smarter about this business, you guys have . . . Be careful you don’t get to be such smartasses you find yourselves transferred right out the factory gate next time.” Yoshioka pushed her away. Sadayo lost her balance and pitched forward at the feet of Auntie Takai, who was retying her obi with her back turned toward them. “What happened. . . ?” Sadayo didn’t reply. Mrs. Takai had no way of understanding why this bucktoothed girl who’d been transferred from the ball division this spring had to be treated like this by Yoshioka. But for Yoshioka, it was precisely at these moments that he found Sadayo a hateful nuisance. It’s all because she had the manager of the ball division fooling around with her for a while. And with those looks. Terada and Sugii helped her out then. So she feels like she owes them. If it’d been anybody but the manager, I’d sure as hell whip the skin off her bucktoothed mug. . . .7 7. Yoshioka’s thoughts here are not in the original version but appear in subsequent collected texts.

a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 269

Within a few minutes, a nonchalant Yoshioka came out of the factory bathroom. He straightened his jacket collar. Then, trying to move stealthily in his wood-soled sandals, he headed for his appointment. In the shabbiest of the reception rooms next to the office, the personnel manager, a man endowed with a physique at least twice the size of Yoshioka’s, was enjoying a leisurely smoke of Asahis, elbows resting as usual on the round table. “. . .” He turned a sharp gaze on Yoshioka as he entered. “How about it . . . got it figured out?” “Well . . .” Yoshioka glanced back at the grimy knob on the door he’d just closed. “Well, have a seat . . . You didn’t find out anything . . . is that what it comes down to?” “Well, you see . . . every time those flyers get handed out, those guys, like Terada and Sugii, they report for work extra early . . . so they must have others in their gang . . .” “So it’s not going to work.” “What isn’t going to work? We are determined to . . .” “No!” The personnel manager shook his fleshy cheeks. “I mean, you’re not going to be able to get it straight from their mouths. . . . In which case . . .” The manager smiled from under his thin moustache at Yoshioka, who was standing transfixed, his eyes on the round table. “We’re going to try another approach. . . . Today, there was another . . . from the army ministry . . . um . . .” As if to impress on Yoshioka that he was a man of caution, he left his sentence unfinished and struck a match. For Yoshioka it was a moment of such anxiety and terror that he was swept over by a wave of nausea. “Sit down, I told you . . . we’ve got any number of options. It’s just a question of nerve. We have to lay our plans so those guys don’t trip us up . . . right?” Right! Yoshioka felt that last word clutching his heart. Still  . . . having come this far, he had no choice . . . but to continue . . . that much he had thought about. “This is how it’s going to work.” The manager started to smile again. “Nowadays, they’re collecting money at all kinds of places to send to the front. That’s what we’re going to do right here. Not with the company forcing it down your throats, but with the initiative coming from you factory workers talking to each other. The deal is, those 270 chapter s ix

anti-imperialist war guys will end up trapped in the net. You get it, right . . . in the net . . .” “Yes, exactly so . . . after all . . . yes indeed . . .” Without so much as casting a glance on the much-relieved Yoshioka, the personnel manager quietly raised his rice-sack-like body from the chair. “You and Ito and Matsuki, I want you to come by my place at nine o’clock tomorrow morning . . . all right?”

3 Many times a day, the sound of the paperboy’s bell announcing an “extra” reverberated against the factory windows. Inside, all the talk was about collecting money for the Manchurian army. “For this week only” was the claim about overtime that had already been repeated ten times in the tire, molding, and hose sections. Solid tires for tanks. Drainage hoses for warships, suction hoses for trench digging. Insulation of various types, gloves for soldiers, poison-gas masks. And medical tourniquets for bullet wounds— all these were “delivered” from the various divisions to the army and the navy unbeknownst to all except the managers and foremen and their trusted henchmen in each section. Agitated from morning to night by the moan of the bearings and the flywheels, Sadayo kept a watchful eye on her surroundings through the stagnant yellow haze of the poison gas. Auntie Takai’s face grew more pale and bloated by the day. With her forehead and cheeks shining like the scar tissue from a burn and her thinning brows perpetually furrowed, she continued to reel. “I feel so bad for the baby,” she said, asking for a transfer to a “less smelly part of the vulcanization division,” but the manager wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s not like we have lots of options for placing somebody as clumsy as you. If you’re so worried about the baby, you should just hurry up and quit . . .” was the manager’s response. Her swollen eyes filled with tears as she told Sadayo about it. “If I could get by quitting the factory, why on earth would I be asking Owl for a favor . . .” So skinny that her sharp cheekbones were as high as a cat’s, Akino seemed to be taking aim with one of her crossed eyes at Mrs. Takai’s belly while letting the other fall on her own hands. When it came to questions about money, she would get hot under the collar. “There’s no such thing as a penny I don’t need,” she said. “Besides, no matter what, I gotta get back home for New Year’s.” Back where she was from, her father, who had worked for many years at a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 271

the local mine, had been laid off three months ago and was about to use up the money he’d been “given.” So they needed to consolidate into one household. “. . . They say Oshigé’s swelled up, too . . .” “Whose kid is it?” Sadayo’s train of thought had been abruptly cut short. Her question sounded casual. “It must be the manager of the ball division . . .” A sigh was mixed in with the murmur from Mrs. Takai, who was holding a corner of her apron to her nose. “. . . She’s a lucky one. She’ll get taken care of all right . . . But when it comes to the likes of me, there’s no way I can take time off . . .” “But you know, Auntie . . .” Sadayo’s anxious, traveling gaze locked in with Ito’s on the other side of the steam plate section. Flustered, he looked down. “. . . Do you think the manager of the ball division’s really going to take care of her all the way?” “. . . I suppose you’ve got a point there. If you think about how much you have to suffer, who needs a guy anyway? . . .” Sadayo was forced to recall once again her time with the manager of the ball division. To be sure, it was just once, but he was the one who had made a plaything of her body, then tossed her over for the prettier and younger Oshigé. He was the one who, whether it was because she’d been taken off to the police station from that gathering with Terada and the others, had assigned her to the vulcanization division, the foulest part of the factory, and within it, the drying section, which was most harmful to the body. That man was hateful to her. But now Sadayo also felt sorry for Oshigé, who was carrying his child. “You wait and see. It’s just for now. Once she’s close to her due date, she’s going to be sent away . . . and paid off with a pittance.” That’s what Sugii from the press section had said, and it seemed to be true. “Are they really gonna collect money for the soldiers in Manchuria?” Akino asked as if she’d just thought of it. “Who said?” “Tat-chan from the sieving section said so on the way home last night. She said Mr. Ito said so . . .” “Ooh . . .” Sadayo suddenly remembered the words of a thin guy with glasses who’d started coming to their meetings from about springtime. He wasn’t one of Terada’s group, and he didn’t work in the factory. 272 chapter s ix

“How much are they going to take?” Mrs. Takai sounded worried, too. “. . . I wonder if it’s really true.” As soon as the whistle sounded for lunch, Sadayo ran straight to the cafeteria. “Oh!” Sadayo skimmed the announcement plastered right above the cafeteria entrance. It was crammed with red marks for emphasis.

4 announcement As all of you are aware, our Japanese army is at present braving the brutal cold of Manchuria and Mongolia as it crushes the enemy for its barbaric deeds. As Japanese desirous of victory for the path of righteousness as quickly as possible, why don’t we all write to cheer our soldiers? . . . We have been thinking hard about how we could collect some money and send it along, too. However small the sum . . . it would be from our hearts. In this connection, it happens that we already have a Friendship Association intended for our mutual benefit. . . . What if, separate from our dues, we donated at the rate of five sen a share, with as many shares as possible according to individual wishes? Now, for the sake of convenience, we think that it would be best to have the sum deducted directly from our salaries. Therefore, please notify your section managers as soon as possible about the number of shares you wish to contribute. To all Members, from the Officers of the Friendship Association “They’ve gone and done it . . .” Blue overalls and aprons piled up noisily. Chignons high and low and a variety of bobs came before and after Sadayo and paused for two or three minutes to read the notice. Sugii muttered one word then sat down in the middle of the male workers. Terada from the ball division was on the late shift, so they didn’t run into each other much these days. The section managers came, too. As if they were elementary school teachers with their charges, they sat at the varnished tables at the head of the five rows of male and female workers and opened their lunches. Everybody chewed their boiled beans and stewed vegetables in silence. The clear winter sky peered in through the windows. The rattle of the ventilators in the tire and hose sections reverberated throughout . . . For her part, Sadayo was on full alert as she observed the managers’ gazes a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 273

fall like stray arrows around Terada and Sugii. Beside her, Mrs. Takai seemed to be chewing her stewed seaweed with reluctance . . . On the other side, Tatchan from sieving was picking at her dried sardines . . . Once the managers left, Akino peeked around from the other side of Tat-chan. “Told you so . . .” Everybody started talking. “How come they want to take our money?” “Well . . . it does say ‘according to individual wishes,’ so it should be okay not to wish it.” “Then I sure ain’t gonna wish it!” With that decisive response to Sadayo’s statement, Akino closed her lunch box. “So we have to give money to the soldiers after all?” asked Mrs. Takai as she put her head down on the lunch box she had wrapped up without finishing eating. “No, no, it’s all right, Auntie . . . It says people who wish to, so . . .” “Hey, you, Sada!” It was Michiko from tubing calling out to her from the far right of the row on the other side. Sadayo made a point of slowly slipping behind everybody’s backs. “. . . Come to my house tonight . . .” The message was whispered in her ear. Sadayo looked behind quickly only to find that sure enough, Ito was staring at her icily with his spy’s eyes. “Didya hear me? Want me to tell you once more!” Michiko’s shout was exaggerated. She had sensed Ito’s presence, too. “They say Sabu-chan in sieving’s gone funny in the head.” “What?” Sadayo felt a shiver run down her back. “Oh, no.” Auntie Shima, Yat-chan, and Tsuneko all lifted their heads at once. “Is that true?” “It’s true. Mr. Kumagaya of the tire section said he ran into him near the train station. He said he really does have dementia.” “The poor thing . . .” “And to think they’re asking for money for the troops . . .” It was Sugii’s quietly persistent voice. “Whaddya saying!” Ito pretended that he was only passing behind the women in order to get to the exit. “Oh, that Sabu-chan’s gone crazy, they say.” 274 chapter s ix

“Is that right. That kid, huh? . . . Well, he didn’t have too much upstairs to begin with.” “Aren’t you the clever one, Mr. Ito. Sabu-chan got sick in the head because the smell in that stinkin’ sieving section was so bad he couldn’t work anymore. That’s why his mom came and asked for a leave.” Sadayo was overcome by anger. The burning anger she felt for “untainted” Ito was more powerful than the stinging fumes of carbon disulfide. “You’d better watch out yourself! You seem kind of crazy these days carrying on about Chinks this and Chinks that! Weren’t you out for two or three days there? You might not be stuck in a stinkin’ section, but you must’ve caught a cold or something anyway.” “Sorry to disappoint you about that! You’re the one who’d better watch out not to catch cold through the gap between those teeth!” “Thanks for your concern! I’ll take good care.” “My goodness, aren’t you getting hot under the collar. That’s enough, cut it out . . .” Standing between Sadayo flushed beet red and Ito pale with the effort of confronting her, Auntie Shima was waving her hands at both of them. She chuckled as she started to sing. “. . . Vul-cani-za-tion, a darn good sec-tion, beats any flower garden— isn’t that what they say, hahaha.” “Mr. Yoshioka, when did this business about sending money get decided like this?” Sugii’s question was put calmly but his voice was high-pitched. Everybody turned in his direction.

5 From the next day on, Mrs. Takai stopped showing up. It was Sadayo who submitted her request for leave first thing in the morning. New flyers turned up from under the steam plate, from the gathering places in the ball division, the roller division, the molded rubber, rubber coating, tubing, hose, tire, and rubber sheet sections, where they were picked up by everybody. No to compulsory overtime!! No to military management of the factory!! No to imperialist war!! With these words burned into their retinas, Yoshioka and the other “clean” types turned their hostile gazes on Sugii and Sadayo and the others. Their wary eyes rebuffed such stares. Jeering eyes returned their rebuffs. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 275

“Just you wait till next payday!” As they watched the impact of the flyers, plans for the next step began to take shape in the hearts of Sugii and the others. Reminders to donate money came from each section manager. They were mostly put off with responses like “just one more day” or “next week.” It was on the third payday, at the point where the day and night shifts changed places. Sadayo and the others rushed to the accounting section of the office, each grasping her seal warm from being kept between the layers of their obi sashes since morning. From the little window surrounded on three sides with frosted glass, the young official’s smooth voice called out their names, attaching “Miss” and “Mr.” to each. Impatient hands, drooping necks, shoulders smelling of rubber pressed against one another in front of the tiny window. Michiko from tubing stabbed Kitayama from the ball division with her sharp elbow. Yoshi-chan from sieving, who was in front of Izumi of the press section, put her arms over her breasts and yelled, “Dirty old man” . . . “Here!” “Ouch . . . ou . . . ouch, would you hurry and take it and get outta here!” “Miss Murakami Akino.” “Here!” Cross-eyed Akino looked like she was staring at the frosted glass to the right as she thrust her seal in the center of the window. “Here!” When she turned over the brown paper envelope that had been slid out to her, she shouted out in surprise. “Hey! This is it?!” “What’s up?” It was a man’s voice coming from five or six people behind, a voice that signaled something out of the ordinary. “If you’re not gonna earn enough, I’m gonna divorce you, ha, ha, ha.” “Hey, don’t get us stuck here. Hurry up and get out!” It was lathe man Matsuki flapping his hands in the middle of two hundred tightly packed workers. “My, aren’t we getting pushy . . .” Giggles. All heads were bobbing in the crowd pressed against both sides of the hallway and stretching for yards. Sugii cast shining eyes over them all. Five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes . . . four people, five people, then six people came clutching their 276 chapter s ix

pay envelopes, frantic to get out. Sadayo was at one exit, Sugii at the other, blocking the way, waiting as if to shoot them down. “Hey, everybody, could you wait a second. I’ve got something to say to you!” “What? Whaddya talking about?” “Shh.” He lowered his voice and pointed to the back of his pay envelope. Those who had already been handed their pay now turned over their envelopes. Among the guys, there was only a handful getting over ten yen. And of course, there wasn’t a single one among the women. The company store was unsparing about taking out deductions every other week. Even Oshigé of the ball division, and Hidé, the current favorite of the manager of the vulcanization division, got just under seven yen. “Hey, everybody!” Even the little buzz cut up front wiped out the face he’d traced with his spit on the frosted glass and turned around . . . By now Sugii had been pushed smack into the middle of the workers. The muscles of his slightly reddened face were tense. He shouted out hoarsely. “Hey everybody, I’ve got some serious stuff I need to discuss with you . . . ,” he started, then took a breath. “This is how it is. Mrs. Takai, the one in drying who’s taking time off, kept pushing herself to the limit and ended up having a really tough delivery. Just think what it’s like to have to take to your bed when you’re so poor. And on top of it, she hardly has any money coming in. You can hardly stand to watch it. Then there’s Hasegawa Sabu-chan who quit the vulcanization division this past spring. Now he’s demented and just goes around babbling . . . Neither of them can be here today to pick up their pay. They’re so bad off . . . As a matter of fact, I feel so bad for them I can hardly stand it . . . so, how about this?” he said and paused as if to survey the room before continuing. “. . . It’s a pitiful amount, but I’m thinking of donating twenty-nine sen from my pay of nine yen eighty-nine sen. How about it, won’t you all join in? . . .” “Mr. Shindo¯ Michio!” The voice at the window hadn’t changed its tone. “Mr. Shindo¯ Michio!” “Hey!” The boy flinched when he heard Yoshioka’s voice. He was trying to get to the window, but his path was blocked. “Hey, you! Mr. Sugii!” Yoshioka called out to him once again. There was a stir, and the personnel manager along with the managers of the tire, ball, and vulcanization divisions lined up their faces on the other side of the window. “What is it?” a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 277

Sugii’s gaze took in the faces at the window as he turned to Yoshioka. Yoshioka spoke. “You’re too much . . . I asked you over and over for donations to send to Manchuria, and you kept coming up with this excuse and that and put me off. And now you’re trying to grab this money from everybody for that hag Takai and that kid who isn’t even connected to the company anymore!” “So?” “So?! You said you couldn’t afford the five sen a share for donations and now you’re talking about twenty-nine sen!” “You’re right. I did say that.— But so what? All I did was ask you to give us more time, that we’d think about it by next payday!— Hey, everybody! Do you see it any different?” “Nope, that’s how we see it!” Kumagaya from tires was the first to speak up. “That’s exactly right!” “Mr. Shindo Michio!” The voice from the window came again. But everyone in the hallway was so caught up in the exchange between Sugii and Yoshioka that they paid no attention to the fact that they were blocking the path. “Anyway, do you mean to say you don’t feel sorry for them?” Sugii asked back in turn. “Who said I didn’t feel sorry for them— but how about the troops in Manchuria? Don’t you feel sorry for them? You probably don’t, do you? You’re against imperialist wars, right? You don’t even bother to get permission from the company before carrying on as you please— ” “All right, then!” Sugii shouted. The wave was cresting. Sugii could feel it. “Go for it!” “If we’re gonna fight, let’s do it!” The minute these voices subsided, Sugii could see countless eyes, burning with expectation, turned on him. He turned toward Yoshioka and continued slowly. “So, Mr. Yoshioka, you do feel sorry for Mrs. Takai and Sabu-chan.— All right, let me say it, too. I do feel sorry, definitely, for the troops in Manchuria. They’re fighting night and day, now, without even having time to sleep. They’re getting hurt in explosions. They’re getting burns. Their hands and feet are rotting from frostbite. And just like Sabu-chan, they’re getting demented because of poison gas. They’re a lot like us.” Silence rose from the heaving shoulders and backs of his mates who were pressed together. Only the unstoppable steam from the boiler and the groan of the bearings faintly disturbed that silence. Creee-ak. The door to the general affairs section opened. 278 chapter s ix

“Mr. Shindo Michio!” It was the accounting clerk shouting. They could feel their minds being dug up from the deepest folds of their hearts. “But— everybody!” Sugii raised his voice a notch, then swallowed hard. For the third time, their gazes assaulted him. But . . . he began. “— I’m going to— apologize to Mr. Yoshioka.” They were stunned by the words. The blood rushed from Sadayo’s face. “What’s happening?” “Why?” “What’s happening, Sugii?” “What’s the matter, Mr. Sugii— ” Sadayo’s strained voice fell over everybody’s heads like a leaden weight. “Everybody!” Sugii opened his mouth again. “You ask why? Think about it . . . Mr. Yoshioka’s feeling just as sorry for Mrs. Takai and Sabu-chan as we are. His objection is that we didn’t talk to the company first. In that sense, I have to apologize for cutting corners. So everybody . . . this is what I want to ask you about. I want to negotiate with the company to get them to do something about the medical fees and living expenses for those two who’ve been saddled with such hardships . . .” “Aw-right! Let’s go for it!” It was Kumagaya from the tire section shouting. Like Sugii, he still had a ways to go before hitting thirty, but as a worker he was already the mainstay of his section. “That’s right!” “Go for it!” “Ne-go-ti-ate, ne-go-ti-ate.” The mass began to move. Its head had been pushed past the accounts window and was up against the wall by the general affairs section. Yoshioka’s pale face, the backs of the drooping heads of “clean” Ito and Matsuki were struggling in the swirl. Every one of the faces at the window had retreated. The footsteps of the early arrivals of the late shift made the floors creak outside the hallway. “I really can’t give no donation. I’ve gotta get home. I’m worried about my folks . . .” This was Akino. Beside her, buffeted from front and back but hanging on to Tat-chan’s tiny left hand, Sadayo murmured, “Things are hard for you a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 279

right now, aren’t they, Miss Akino . . . But be sure to come back, all right? And bring your dad. We’ll do our best together.” We’re just like the soldiers. We breathe in poison gas while they make us produce weapons for murder. But if we stick together like this and make our demands, we should be able to stick with our opposition to this war. . . . This was the hope Sadayo poured into the empty right hand with which she now firmly clasped Akino’s.8 Translated by Norma Field

(33) Hell of the Starving chang hyo˘ k- chu Translated from Reconstruction (April 1932) This story, a successful entry in a competition sponsored by the leftleaning mainstream Japanese journal Reconstruction, was published in April 1932, twenty-two years into the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. Born the year Korea became a Japanese protectorate, Chang Hyo˘k-chu (1905–1997, also known in Japan as Cho¯ or Noguchi Kakuchu¯), was an elementary school teacher living in Taegu, Korea, at the time of the competition. He was educated in the colonial system that prioritized Japanese language and history. Given that the proletarian cultural movement had for almost a decade helped foster the development of a modern literature written in the Korean vernacular, Chang could certainly have written his story in Korean. By publishing his story in Japanese, however, Chang used the language of the imperial center to articulate the cruelty that Japanese capital and its human representatives were inflicting on Korean colonial subjects under the self-serving logic of civilization. As with other selections in this anthology that bear the marks of precautionary self-censorship by the author and/or editors— most commonly, Xs in place of objectionable words— Chang’s story challenged readers to imagine the unprintable that was happening in colonial Korea. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the Japanese proletarian arts movement was committed to the struggle against imperialism, but this commitment surely meant something different for those whose lands had been colonized. An abiding concern for Korean activists was the restoration of national sovereignty, and to the degree that Korea

8. The last two paragraphs are also not in the first publication. 280 chapter s ix

was being proletarianized by Japanese capital, it made sense to many that an independence movement could coincide with a proletarian revolutionary movement. In Japan many Korean workers were committed to the Communist Party and communist labor unions, so much so that as much as a third of the illegal Japanese Communist Party (JCP) may have been Korean after the Comintern policy of “one nation, one party” was put into effect.9 Chang himself would eventually turn away from the proletarianism of “Hell of the Starving” toward “pure literature,” historical fiction and “pro-Japanese” fiction. He stayed on in Japan after the war, became a Japanese citizen, and adopted his wife’s name. He published prolifically under the name “Noguchi Kakuchu¯” in multiple genres, including reportage on the Vietnam War and fiction in English.10 The italicized Korean expressions and the embedded notes in this translation are in the original. In other words, “Koreanness” is repeatedly foregrounded. Does the flavor of exotic difference make international identification difficult; or worse, as some might argue, does it render Koreans as stereotypically underdeveloped (and therefore in need of the civilizing forces of imperialism)?11 Or is sympathy elicited so effectively as to facilitate the sensation of international solidarity? hbs

1 Kaboom! Kaboooom! When the rock face in the northernmost corner of the mountainside exploded, shards of stone shot up into the sky like a fountain, scattering themselves as they fell, into the fields and at the river’s edge, not far from where the farmers managed to flee. After three more blasts, with a boom that ripped through the sky and over the mountain, a boulder then crashed at the feet of some half dozen farmers seated along the riverbed. The stone was as big as a man might get his arms around, and its newly severed surface glistened brightly white. The men grabbed their lunch tins (papchobaek) and scampered back up the hill. Close to three hundred farmers were huddled in white on the hill just 9. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 188–89; see also Pak, Zainichi Cho¯senjin undo¯shi, 221, on the high rate of Korean membership in the JCP-affiliated AllJapan Council of Labor Unions. Our thanks to Samuel Perry for these references. 10. Takayanagi, “Cho¯ Kakuchu¯ / Chan Hyokuchu,” 409. See Noguchi, “Foreign Husband,” 66–91. 11. Perry, “Korean as Proletarian,” 280. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 281

south of the makeshift forge— each with wisps of loose hair on their necks fluttering in the wind beneath dirty braids. Some held chopsticks weakly in frostbitten hands, gobbling down what was mostly yellow millet, often mixed with radish tips and cabbage leaves. Swept by gusts of frigid air, they seemed to be savoring every morsel of their frozen food. Others without lunches could but squat to the side and smoke, the white wisps from their pipes dissolving into the wind. Wearing long, tattered coats (cho˘gori) fastened simply with a coarse rope around the waist, they held their arms tucked deeply into narrow sleeves and buried their necks beneath collars. “Think it’ll snow?” asked a middle-aged man, shivering in the cold and looking up at the sky. “I bet we see some flurries.” “Yup. Sure looks like it,” said the man beside him, looking up at the sky with an empty pipe still stuck between his teeth. The farmers busy eating their lunches (cho˘msim) also looked up above the mountain in front of them. Gray clouds were gathering over the pine forest that soared into the sky just beyond the valley. Five or six young men had gone down to the side of the stream and were kicking at the ice with their feet. The thin sheet of ice crackled into pieces. Most likely they craved a sip of hot water, but beneath the ice there flowed not even a cold trickle. Atop the hill the farmers had closed up their lunch tins (papchobaek) and begun chattering among themselves— some three hundred men gathered in such proximity made for quite a commotion. In a tree-lined enclosure next to the forge, a group of thirty-some young farmers sat in a circle apart from the larger group. They were protected from the wind here, and since the spot faced southeast, it felt warmer. These farmers from the two hamlets of Paegol-li were airing their grievances with little hesitation. “What the county magistrate says just doesn’t make sense,” said one young man. His oval-shaped face had a dark, almost ashen, complexion, but his shoulders were solid and he flexed them as he spoke. “You’re right. It just doesn’t add up,” added an older-looking man. “Digging this dam (mot) was supposed to help us out, wasn’t it? I mean, the magistrate said we were going to get one wo˘n per day. I tell ya, they sure pulled the wool over our eyes with all that sweet talk of theirs. Just how do you get from one wo˘n to a quarter?” “Hell, twenty-five cho˘n won’t even buy me a lunch (cho˘msim).” “Lunch (cho˘msim)? Humph! Let me eat my fill after working all day like this, and hell, I’d eat a whole bushel of rice in one sitting. ’Cause of this damn drought, even millet costs a fortune nowadays. Shit!” “Masan’s right. None of us have had a decent meal in the past three 282 chapter s ix

years— not even of millet,” spoke a small man, distorting his face in frustration. “You said it. I mean just look at us. We’ve got to slurp on grass soup just to survive. The little millet we eat hardly keeps us full for long. And for crying out loud, we only get that every other day or so.” The solidly built man they called Masan seemed to speak with his whole body. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” said the middle-aged man. “The women and children are content with a few grains of millet sprinkled in their grass soup.” “Humph!” broke in Masan scornfully. “Not that you would know, Hangol, since you don’t even eat lunch, but how much millet do you think is left over for the wife and kids when you take a lunch to work?” “Probably nothing.” “You’ve got it. Not a single grain,” chimed in someone nearby. “Shit. Might as well just stay at home, lie down on the ondol floor, and sip on that sorry excuse for soup the womenfolk make with those roots they dig up.” Masan rose to his feet as he spoke and looked out over to the crowd. The farmers were strapping their A-frames onto their shoulders and heading back to the work site. “All right, let’s head on back. The foremen are shouting down there in the village.” Dressed in knee-length khakis and black serges, the foremen were indeed waving their arms back and forth and shouting from the tavern (chumak) in Tohwa-li, off in the distance. The farmers headed in droves up to the work site. As they passed through the valley alongside the stream, a steep hill to the left gradually led halfway up the central mountain, while a low, flat-topped hill to the right eventually joined another mountain behind it at the far edge of the dam construction site. The two mountains came together far to the north, enclosing a fairly large area of flat land; a small river ran down through the deep valley between them. The dam was to be built by digging out the bottom of the enclosed plain and by piling the dirt onto the two hills in order to construct a retaining wall of some two hundred meters in length, which would stretch between the two mountains. The wall would have to be built ten meters high. To the lower left of the wall the farmers were building the floodgate, and to the right were the itinerant laborers (hansan inbu). They were suspended ten meters up the mountainside as they pounded their sledgehammers onto long metal spikes, which were used to make holes for the explosives. After chiseling six or seven a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 283

holes a meter deep into the mountain face, these men would then pack in dynamite and set off explosions twice a day. This passageway through the mountainside was to be used as an emergency sluice once the embankment was constructed. They were carving out the waterway so that when the dam was full, water could be released a little at a time. Since a good portion of the mountain was made of solid rock, the job was a hard one. A square-faced man named Han, who had eight men working under him, was in charge of this part of the construction project. He also employed another twenty or so farmers charged with the task of collecting debris after each explosion. The dam itself was being constructed out of concrete. The total budget for the project was 150,000 wo˘n, half financed by the local government with the remainder of the costs being born by the local landlords who would benefit from the new irrigation. Director XX was contracted to oversee the project. With four foremen working under the director, the project employed seven hundred farmers altogether. The construction of the dam had been conceived as a means of providing relief to the victims of the drought in Ch’ibo Township (myo˘n). Ch’ibo was the hardest hit area of North Kyo˘ngsang Province and had lost the most people to starvation during the three-year drought. When the construction began, however, seven hundred farmers from throughout the township showed up for work. If they had actually put each of the farmers to work at one wo˘n per day as the county magistrate had originally proposed, the director’s profit margin would have dropped considerably, so the decision was made to lower the daily wage to a quarter of a wo˘n and to have each farmer work not every day but every other. It was thought that the farmers would come flocking in like crows even if offered a paltry twenty cho˘n per day. And a mere glance at how diligently the farmers now worked under the direction of the foremen— without grumbling a single word of complaint— might lead anyone to a similar conclusion. The farmers were divided into two groups, those who dug up the soil with their hoes and those who carried the soil on their A-frames to the retaining wall. But each and every one of them worked at the beck and call of the foremen. When the pace of the hoeing showed even the slightest sign of abating, the foremen howled like wolves. When the amount of soil piled onto the A-frames showed even the slightest decrease, they cracked their whips and cursed foully. The farmers who had eaten lunch that day managed to keep apace. Their hoes felt a bit lighter now and their A-frames did what they were told; it didn’t matter if there was an extra scoop or two of earth loaded on their backs. The farmers who had met with the foremen’s whips before lunchtime 284 chapter s ix

also managed to find an extra spring in their step. The foremen for their part now hung their whips at their sides, as though with relief, as they wove their way through the ranks of toiling men. A few farmers who had taken no lunch, however, stood out from the rest in that they moved much more slowly. The foremen closed in on them and cracked their whips. “What the hell is this! Move it along. Want me to beat the crap out of you?!” The farmers lashed by the whips tried their best to pick up the pace, but they simply had no strength left in their limbs. “Faster! Pick up your speed, I said,” screamed one of the foremen, pushing an older man from behind. The old man then stumbled forward and fell under the weight of the soil loaded on his back. After finally getting to his feet once again, he was shoved from behind for several more paces as he struggled to plod along. But the old man was putting up no resistance and seemed likely to tumble over once again. The foreman let go of him, unleashed his whip, and took aim at the old man’s legs. When the whip uncoiled itself from the man’s ashen legs, they XXed bright red. The other farmers walked quickly by, pretending not to notice. The old man rejoined the single-file line of A-frames and walked off along with them. As night began to fall, the foremen busily cracked their whips. The farmers had exhausted their energy and barely moved at a snail’s pace even when flogged by the foremen. Snowflakes were falling ever so delicately over the pine trees on the surrounding hills. But the farmers worked on, dragging their numbed bodies along like sticks. “Shit! Why don’t they just set the damn things off,” muttered somebody, looking up at the mountain to the right, from which came the sound of hammering. The sky was overcast and no one could tell where the sun was in the sky. The exhausted farmers moved on in silence as though they’d been struck dumb. Director XX oversaw the construction work on the dam. He was standing atop a mountain of sand and gravel piled sky-high and was screaming at the top of his lungs. The workers in this area had come from the local town of Saribuk, so they weren’t accustomed to such work. The construction materials were brought to town by train, and then carried from there to the Ch’ibo Township Office by oxcart. The director glared down hatefully at the farmers moving about him. It irritated him to no end to see them walking as slowly as ants. He called out to one of the foremen who approached the holding wall. “Hey, Yi!” a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 285

Foreman Yi trotted over to the director. “What the hell is that?” The director glared at Foreman Yi. “No matter if they’re XX, they shouldn’t be that slow!” “Yes, well, it’s kind of late, you see. It doesn’t seem to matter how much I flog them. It has no effect whatsoever. Using the whip just tires me out actually.” “You idiot! You say it’s late? What time could it be? Maybe four?” “Well, actually it’s almost six o’clock, sir. It just looks a little brighter outside because of the snow.” “Six? Let me see that. Hell, it’s only quarter till.” The director glanced at the foreman’s watch. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Keep them working a little longer.” “Right, sir.” Yi then walked away. It was getting dark already. In early February, the gray of night had usually set in by five. After a while, the director raised his arms into the air and gave a signal. The foremen spread the word to all the farmers. “All right! That’s it for today! Now, get yourselves down to the tavern (chumak) lickety-split and wait for us there.” The farmers began stretching themselves out and heaving deep sighs of relief. Then, with chige still strapped to their backs, they filed out through the river valley. They passed by the forge and walked down toward the village. From the blacksmith shop came the clanking sound of metal banging against metal and the orange glow of iron rods being fired. Having passed through the village proper, the farmers then gathered in the outer courtyard of the tavern (chumak), where they were to wait for the foremen to arrive. A brilliant pillar of flames shot up over the work site and an explosion of dynamite ripped through the sky. The pattering thuds of rocks falling to the ground then followed. The farmers were divided up according to their home villages and the vouchers were distributed. Each having received his twenty-five cho˘n, they hurried off into the darkness toward their villages.

2 Paegol-li, on the way to Masan-li, was the farthest village from the worksite. As the farmers passed through each hamlet along the path, their numbers slowly dwindled and there were only twenty or so remaining now who were headed toward Paegol-li. Even after passing through Sohwa, the site of the township office and police station, these farmers still had two small mountains to cross over. It was the middle of the night and the twinkling lights off in 286 chapter s ix

the distance were all that told of the villages that lay ahead. The line of farmers carrying their chige snaked its way along the mountain path. The powdery snow had stopped falling, but the wind was blowing fiercely now. Pine trees throughout the mountains whistled with each gale. Even the weathered skin of these farmers was stung by the frigid air that swept up beneath their coats (cho˘gori). Their ashen faces, even their eyeballs, seemed almost frozen solid. But the farmers walked on in stony silence. When they crossed the final peak, they could see lights from a village. There were only five or six lanterns burning, however, because most of the villagers had simply learned to live in darkness. Descending from the mountain pass, several farmers disappeared into the village, leaving only four or five men behind— those who lived yet one more hill to the west in the two hamlets of Paegol-li. “I guess you’ll be heading home, Masan.” (o˘so˘ tora kage) “You take care now.” (chal kage) “Maedong. Hangol. Take care of yourselves.” (modu chal kage) “Catch you later.” Exchanging greetings with the farmers heading down into the village, Masan, Maedong, and Hangol (Note— These are not their real names, but their household names, derived from the villages where their wives had come from. Masan’s real name, for example, is Kim Myo˘ngcho˘l, but his wife came from Masan-li, or Masan village), the men from Paegol-li, managed to find a spring in their step at the thought of getting close to home. “I wonder what time it is,” said Masan, as they came in sight of their village. “It’s got to be past midnight,” replied Maedong. The small village of only seven or eight households was set into the eastern slope of a hill. Not a single house had a lamp burning. Masan split from the others and entered his front yard through an opening in a low dirt wall. Tenant farmer families normally built no gates in front of their homes. To the back of the yard was a low house built on a bit of land raised up a meter or so in height. The back and the two sides of the house had been built with square-shaped blocks of hardened mud, piled on top of one another, with the addition of wooden support beams on the front side and a small door through which to enter the ondol room. As soon as Masan opened the door and stuck his head inside, he felt the warm stuffiness of the room and saw his wife and children sleeping. When he flung his weary bones onto the straw (wanggol) matting (chari), a wave of frigid air stung his wife’s face, waking her. She pulled herself up listlessly and knelt beside her husband. “Get me something to eat, quick,” he said rather gruffly. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 287

His wife went straight into the kitchen and heated up a pot (sot) with some kindling. She put something into a metal bowl and brought it out to him. It was gruel, mixed with radish tips, dried cabbage leaves, and some sort of wild root they had no name for. Grains of millet floated among the roots like morning stars. The warm fluid stunk of the fields, but it still felt good when it reached his frozen gut. In the darkness his wife waited for him to finish, and when he did so, he collapsed onto the floor again faceup. His muscles felt as though they had melted off his very bones; it was impossible for him to sit up any longer. “Today we climbed Mt. Pibong to dig for arrowroot,” said his wife. “Mt. Pibong? Why’d you go so far?” “There was lots of arrowroot there, just like they said.” “Oh, yeah?” “Well, the radishes and cabbage from last fall are almost gone, and I can’t stand the taste of those wild roots all by themselves. Maedong Taek, Toli’s mom, and a bunch of others have been going out to Majo˘n River to collect wild lettuce recently, but today Toli’s mom asked me if I wanted to go up the mountain to get arrowroot so I ended up going with them.” For the past three years the women had been digging for wild roots to make ends meet. After the terrible drought hit southern Korea, millet had been planted in the fields and paddies instead of rice, but even that had not grown well. The millet and beans they’d managed to harvest ended up being taken by the landlords, so the farmers had no choice but to rely on dried radishes, cabbage, prickly ash, and soybean leaves as the main staple of their diet. Even that tended to be insufficient, however, so they resorted to scavenging the wild fields and mountain slopes, digging up whatever wild roots they could. Because of all the debts they had incurred through tenant farming over the years, they had already sold everything worth selling— there wasn’t a single thing left that might bring in any cash. If the wild roots in the fields had been claimed by the property owners as well, not a single farmer would be left alive today— they’d certainly have all starved to death. “That mountain is damn steep. You’d better be careful.” “Now that you mention it, I almost fell myself today. I started getting dizzy up there, I was so hungry.” “Well then don’t go up again!” “I heard that six people died in Tain-dong, on the other side of the mountain.” “That’s why I’m telling you not to go again.” “But you know how much better arrowroot tastes than that horrible grass soup.” 288 chapter s ix

“Humph!” Masan felt sorry for his wife, who so wanted to eat arrowroot. He had been twenty-five years old when he got married, but his wife Kamnyo˘n had been a pretty girl of only seventeen. The past seven years of hardship, however, and the famine caused by three years of drought had left her as withered and discolored as the grass in winter. Right there in the darkness, as he traced her faint outline, he was reminded of the pretty girl that Kamnyo˘n had once been. It was just before they had gotten married. He had come to visit Kamnyo˘n’s father on some sort of errand. It was nighttime in autumn. Kamnyo˘n and the other girls in the village had gathered in the ondol room and were winding cotton thread on a spinning wheel. The wheel went clickety-clack, clickety-clack as it spun around. The girls were chatting away merrily, when one of them broke out into song and the others joined in. It was a folk ballad of four-syllable quatrains, which they sang to the rhythm of the wheel. Masan had stopped in front of the room to listen. ...... He who found my lady’s taenggi, He who found it, give it back. Yes, I found it. Finders keepers. Without reward I won’t return it. When your father talks of marriage, Then I think I’ll give it back. When your ch’ima drapes upon my Turumagi I’ll give it back. ...... ...... (Note: A taenggi is a ribbon. A ch’ima is a woman’s skirt and a turumagi is a man’s jacket.) a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 289

The tune was a simple melody. While the girls sang, they nudged at one another and giggled. It was a love song. Masan had only been eavesdropping on them, but then he poked a hole in the paper door to peek inside, and he saw Kamnyo˘n sitting right in front of him, winding her string, with cheeks as pink as peaches, more beautiful than he could bear.— He imagined now that he was looking at those pink cheeks on his wife’s face again. But today, seven years later, the impoverishment of the village had already robbed the girls and young men of their laughter and beauty, and had left them with all the vital spirit of dried-out leaves. Today Masan had found the unjust conduct of the foremen so repellent that he’d decided never to go back to work again, but now as he looked down at his wife, and over at his sleeping children— with bellies protruding like bullfrogs— he knew he simply had to go on working, even if only for that twenty-five cho˘n per day. “You don’t have to go to those dangerous places anymore, my dear. We’ll figure out a way to get by somehow.” He was determined not to have his wife go up those perilous cliffs ever again. One of the children started to cry. Kamnyo˘n put the child to her breast, but it offered no milk. By the time the child’s whimpering had abated, the two were suddenly overcome by the exhaustion of the day’s work and started to doze off. “Oh, I heard the township office is giving out free millet tomorrow.” Kamnyo˘n murmured this drowsily, but her husband had already drifted off into a deep sleep.

3 The next morning he heard his wife saying something to him at his bedside and he opened his eyes. “What’s the matter?” “Maedong’s just come looking for you.” “What for?” “Well, he says Punso˘n’s family ran off last night.” “Ran off? Good heavens, who’s next!” Masan got out of bed and went straight outside. Punso˘n had lived at the western end of the village. Masan slowly walked over to take a look at his house and found the doors to both the kitchen and the ondol room wide open. Not that it had been much of a house when his family had lived there, but now that it was empty, it seemed exposed for what it really was— a shack dug into the ground about ready to collapse 290 chapter s ix

any minute now. Five or six of the villagers had already gathered in the front yard. “Masan. Did you (chane) know he was going to run off?” asked Maedong. “Didn’t have a clue.” “I wonder where they could’ve gone in the middle of winter.” “What does it matter? They’ll starve to death on the road somewhere.” The elderly couple had lived there with their teenage daughter, but Punso˘n was unable to go out to work at the dam site, and they had barely managed to eat even once every three days. They had accumulated a good deal of debt and must have finally decided to take to the road. Masan and the others felt a strange sense of loneliness welling up inside them. The couple had been the village elders of sorts, to whom they all had become attached over the course of more than a decade. Originally they had lived in town, but they were eventually swept away by the fate befallen many a farmer and gradually pressed ever deeper into the mountains. The villagers recalled what a prosperous farmer Punso˘n had seemed to them when he first moved to the village, leading two zebu cows into his stable. Only more recently had Punso˘n found himself in desperate straits because of his debts. It was the first time that anyone had fled from Paegol-li under the cover of darkness, though this means of escape was common in other villages. Two families in this village alone, however, had in fact sold all their household goods and moved to Manchuria— last autumn and the autumn before that. Most families left behind had already starved to death or else were sipping on grass soup at death’s doorstep. Someone had even died from an impacted bowel after steaming straw as a meal. “In this freezing-cold weather?” was all the farmers could think, as they searched around the empty house. Not a single thing worth taking home had been left behind. Only the heavy tools and farm equipment remained as they had been. “We might as well run off too. Finally we get a decent crop this year, and we still won’t be able to pay off our debts. . . .” “Aah. We’d be better off dead,” (chungnu˘n su ga cheil ise) muttered Masan and the others as they each went back home. The sunlight broke through the clouds, and as the frozen surface of the road began to melt, the women in the village hoisted their children onto their backs or took them by the hand as they walked to the township office. “We’re heading off now,” Kamnyo˘n said to her husband as she left. “You really think you’ll come back with something?” Her husband’s tone implied that she shouldn’t waste her time, but he didn’t stop her. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 291

From each village in the township women had traveled through the earthen-red hills and forests of pine to congregate in the courtyard of the township office. One might have counted five hundred people there, but what was most horrific was found not in their numbers, but in their complexions. The yellow ones, still swollen with fluid, had not yet reached the worst stage of starvation. Those with faces speckled black or dark red were actually starving— not quite dead, but just barely hanging on. Only a very few of them were yellow, and most had sores covering their bodies like lepers. The children, too, were the same shades as their mothers, but something sweet and childlike still lingered in their faces, and oddly for that very reason they seemed far more pitiful. The women squatted in a corner of the courtyard beneath the earthen wall, wherever there was direct exposure to the sun. The older women, their faces covered in wrinkles, looked even more dreadful. Behind the glass windows of the township office, a dozen or so clerks were busily going about their work. In the office to the right of them the corpulent Mayor Yun, head of the township, was talking with the chief of police and the warden. By the time the sun had fallen midway into the western sky, they had not doled out any of the millet. The wind blew fiercely, ruthlessly teasing the skirts of the starving women and freezing the ends of their frayed nerves. “I bet they don’t hand out anything,” said Kamnyo˘n to the other women from her village, all huddled beneath the right-hand corner of the earthen wall. “I think they will,” disagreed Maedong Taek. (Note: The women are customarily called by this combination of their household name and the form of address “Taek,” meaning woman of the house. Maedong’s wife is thus called Maedong Taek.) “I wish they’d hurry up and give it to us,” chimed in Toli’s mom. “I’m just dying to get a whiff of that sweet scent of millet.” “Sweet scent of millet? Hah, hah, hah . . .” “You’re too much!” “Why you laughin’? I just wanna smell the millet,” barked Toli’s mom. A widow over forty years old, she held her five-year-old son Toli in her lap. “I haven’t tasted millet once in the last three years, damn it.” The faces of the women who had just poked fun at Toli’s mom now turned as stiff as stone once they began to think about their own suffering. They had forgotten how hungry and thirsty they had been. The very farmers who harvested all the rice were scarcely able to eat a single grain themselves. In order to pay for their agricultural expenses and XX, they needed to sell what 292 chapter s ix

remained of their rice crop— amounting to less than a third— after delivering the land rent. Then they would buy Manchurian millet and thin it out with onions and sorghum as their staple diet. But when the drought hit, they had to resort to eating wild grass roots just as the cattle did. They hadn’t had a mouthful of that tasteless millet ever since. It had felt as though they’d never in their entire lives eaten a proper meal of steamed grain, and in the end the women had grown accustomed to the taste of weeds. But what Toli’s mom was now saying made them recall the flavor of real millet, and at the thought of receiving some tasty grain, not grass, to eat, they could hardly contain their wholehearted desire to consume some. They wanted their millet, and they wanted it now. Kamnyo˘n, Maedong Taek, and the other wives had been making porridge with the millet that their husbands were earning, but millet was not the sole ingredient, and it was really nothing but the occasional grain that could be found floating among the stewed weeds. The porridge scarcely had the flavor of real grain. When I get that millet, I’m going to serve it up proper as a meal in itself, even if it’s enough for only a single serving. This is what each of the women was thinking. Toli’s mom had survived by sipping on that slimy grass soup, but every day at mealtime her son had implored her, “Mommy. I wanna eat reeeeal food” (o˘mma pap mo˘kko sipda). That’s why she so wanted to give him a proper meal— if only just once. So when the village head (kujang) had gone around the previous week spreading the news of the township office’s distribution of relief millet, her heart had almost skipped a beat at the news, and she’d been waiting eagerly ever since. “Oh, Toli. You just wait a bit longer, sweetie. We’re going to get the millet on the twenty-first of the month and then I’m going to cook you up a proper meal.” But each morning when the child awoke, he would ask, “Mommy, is today the twenty-first?” “No, honey. We’ve got three more days to go.” (ani se pam to˘ chaya twae) The woman had been badgered by her child every morning up until just yesterday. As each gust of wind assailed them with fallen poplar leaves and dust, the starving people waited with bated breath. Just as night began to fall, the deliberations finally seemed to come to a conclusion; both the township mayor and the warden, his sword clanking at his side, climbed up a small elevation in the courtyard. A few clerks lined up beside them, the head clerk a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 293

holding a thick record book. It had taken some time to figure out how the small quantity of millet would be distributed, for there were only ten sacks of grain and all of five hundred starving people. Were they to dole it out to every person who had come to receive some, no one would get very much at all. The decision was thus made not to offer millet to the families who had family members working at the dam site in Tohwa-li. The dam construction project was a form of drought relief itself, just as was this millet distribution, and it would not have been fair to offer some people double benefits— such was the justification. The millet had been purchased with funds collected through a 1 percent donation of government workers’ salaries and was to be distributed to needy areas. Considering the indolent nature of farmers, it had been feared that offering direct aid to the needy in the form of such distributions of millet might possibly result in their becoming dependent on such support, thus making the farmers even more lazy. The original intention of the relief effort was to put the farmers to work, to make them live by their own earnings, thus remedying their indolence, as well as to help ensure a stable supply of water in years of drought. These had been the two reasons behind the dam construction project. And yet despite this indirect form of aid, the suffering of the starving was intensifying day by day, and in light of the horrifying number of people who it was feared would XX before the next harvest, the decision was made to make an immediate distribution of millet. The township mayor explained the situation at great length. But there wasn’t a soul listening. The women were all feasting their eyes on the sacks of millet being carried out by a workman and heaped up into a pile. Stacked at the feet of the mayor, the brown, plump-bellied sacks of grain seemed to stare hatefully back at them. After the mayor finished extolling the virtues of those to whom gratitude was due, he turned to the head clerk and had him read off the names. The starving people, now swarming around the sacks of millet, ran up one by one as their names were called, opened the small bags they had brought with them, and stared, spellbound, at the millet being measured out by the workman. The man would only fill each bag halfway to the top, however, and the women often implored him for just a bit more. “Nope,” (an twae) he’d say. Even when shoved aside, some still persisted and kept sticking their bags back out in front of the man. Whenever that happened, the office manager drove them off, shouting, “Hey! You keep that up, and we’ll take it all back!” XXXXX, XXXXXX and when his eye sparkled sinisterly, they would turn back home disappointed. 294 chapter s ix

One tottering old woman pressed her way through the crowd, snatched the scoop away from the workman and started shoveling the millet into her own bag. In silent astonishment the man just stared at her for a moment, but then asked, “Granny (halmassi), did they call your name (iru˘m)?” “I don’t know,” said the old woman, quietly making her retreat with millet in hand. “No, no! (an twae an twae) You can’t do that.” The workman grabbed the bag away from her. “You bastard! (manghal nom) You bastard! (manghal nom) Why won’t you give me any?” “You’ve got to wait till your name is called. That’s why.” Having admonished the old woman, the workman turned her bag upside down and dumped the contents into someone else’s sack. The clerks found this all quite amusing. The old woman kept muttering something and just stood at the side of the workman, thrusting her sack forward each time his scoop measured out millet for somebody else. One hundred people down, and only six sacks of millet left to go. Not one of the women from the two hamlets in Paegol-li had received any. Eight of them had made the trip. As the pile of millet grew smaller in size those still waiting gradually became despondent, while those who had received their grain vanished as quickly as smoke into the wind. By the time another hundred had gone, Toli’s mom’s name was finally called. Dragging her child beside her, she went up to the workman and had her sack filled with millet. “Masan Taek. Maedong Taek. I’m going on ahead. You all take your time,” she said, balancing the sack on her head and strapping her child onto her back before quickly disappearing. Those she left behind with heavy hearts watched her walk away. By the time the last sack of rice was opened, there were still three hundred starving people waiting who had retreated into the corner of the earthen wall in resignation. They were waiting, just in case. “They said no families with workers (ilggun) will get any.” “I wonder.” “That’s what the mayor said, I’m telling you.” The women spoke among themselves. When the millet was gone, the women returned home bitterly disappointed. But the old woman who had earlier demanded her grain remained seated against the wall wailing, “Aiguu! Aiguu!” When someone asked what was the matter, she tearfully explained that she had a large family and that a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 295

she wanted to bring her grandchildren something to eat. But now what in the world was she to do? The mayor disappeared into the office. The workman thought her a nuisance, lifted her up from the ground, and carried her out to the front gate. “Oh, you bastards! (ai manghal nom) Why can’t you just give me a single scoop?” she wailed. With heavy hearts, Kamnyo˘n and the others made their way back to their village. It was dusk by now. The sky above each smokeless village they passed was brilliantly clear. “We got nothing after all,” said Kamnyo˘n. “My husband said as much this morning.” “He was right. We sure got cheated.” “But did you see those tiny rations? Might as well not get anything at all. It would’ve disappeared right away. Then we’d just be back to sipping on grass gruel.” “I guess you’re right,” said the women trying to put it all out of their minds. “But you know, it would’ve been nice to get something,” regretted Kamnyo˘n. “Like Toli’s mom said, I can still smell the sweet scent of millet.” The sorrow-stricken women disappeared into the village. It was the evening of the following day. Masan, Maedong, and the others were just coming back from work, when they heard the sound of a woman crying. They hurried into the village. The crying was coming from Toli’s house. The anxious men crowded into the tiny yard in front the house, where they could clearly hear the sobs of Toli’s mother inside the dark ondol room. She was crying, “Toli! My Toli!” Knowing something was terribly wrong, Masan opened the door. “Masan! My Toli is dead. . . .” Toli’s mom spoke to him, holding something wrapped in white cloth in her arms, and then she melted into tears once again. Five or six women from the village were there with her. “Stop crying, dear.” “He’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about it now. Try to calm down.” They all tried to comfort her in different ways. But Toli’s mom was so distraught that she couldn’t help but burst into tears again. After a while, she spoke. “He kept begging me. ‘I wanna eat real grain, I wanna eat real grain,’ he kept saying, so I . . . so I . . .” She broke down again for another minute. “This morning I heaped up a steaming bowl of millet for him and he gobbled the 296 chapter s ix

whole thing down. You can’t image how relieved I felt watching him. But then . . . but then this afternoon he just collapsed on the floor to go to sleep, and he didn’t even get up for supper. That’s strange, I thought, and I went over to check on him just a few minutes ago, and when I touched him he was stone cold.” Toli’s mom had taken a long and deep breath, and told the women and men standing outside the door what had happened. It had only been a short time since the boy had died. “You can’t just all of a sudden start eating pure grain when all you’ve been eating is grass soup and gruel. The poor kid’s bowels got blocked up for sure,” said Masan under his breath. “Of course you can’t.” “Everyone knows if you go without food for a long time you’ll die if you eat plain grain.” The men whispered to one another in hushed voices. “You’ve got to be strong,” said Masan. “There’s nothing you can do about it now. . . .” “Masan’s right. It was his destiny (palja), so you’ll just have to accept it.” “If that’s what fate (palja) decided, there’s nothing you could’ve done to help him.” Maedong said this to comfort the woman, but he knew it didn’t have shit to do with fate. The men left the women behind and each went home to eat his own dinner. Just before dawn, while it was still dark outside, the men in the village gathered at Toli’s mom’s house, took the corpse from the wailing mother, and then carried it to the communal graveyard behind the village where they buried it. Children’s bodies were normally taken care of during the night hours. Last winter one of the adults in the village had died of starvation. With the scene of that tragedy once again vividly recalled to mind, the villagers felt even more disheartened by the hand that fate had now dealt them. After the men had turned back to go home, the tiny mound of newly turned red earth, lone among the old graves, seemed oh so sad to be left behind.

4 Things were becoming more and more menacing at the dam construction site. It was early March, two months since construction had begun, but the embankment had only reached half its required height, and neither the floodgate nor the rock demolition was going as the director had originally a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 297

planned. The director would have to finish up the work by the end of March, as he was supposed to begin another dam project in a different district with an acquaintance. What made things worse, however, was the waterway, which was to carry water from the dam to the fields stretching out in front of the villages— not a single part of the project was progressing according to schedule. The slow-footed farmers so infuriated the man that a fire seemed to rage inside him. He pressured the foremen but to little effect. Then he replaced two of them. The foremen, for their part, to avoid incurring the director’s displeasure, would lash their whips with impunity and hound the men with strained voices. As patient and persevering as oxen, as tolerant of pain as rock, the farmers cast their own bodies beneath the whip for a wage no larger than a cat’s teardrop. From when the stars began fading in the eastern sky until the owls hooted in the forests at night, they worked like wooden puppets, forcing frozen joints to bend against their will. The northern winds now blew down into the basin from the ridge of the mountains. The bottom of the reservoir had been dug out quite deeply and hoes and pickaxes had eaten their way into the base of the mountain. The frozen turf had been cut up mercilessly, its red earth heaped into baskets on A-frames. Bearing those overflowing baskets on their backs and supporting themselves with walking sticks (chaktaegi) to keep from slipping, the farmers climbed up a meter-wide path on the embankment on top of which they dumped their soil. Freed of the unbearably heavy loads, the farmers were then able stand up straight and stretch out. With the foremen below the embankment facing the opposite direction, it was here that they had a brief moment of reprieve when, slowly making their way back down, they could steal a glance far down into the valley and over to the site of the floodgate construction. To the right was Mr. Han’s work site, from where the incessant sound came of iron rods being hammered into rock. “Get down here!” (o˘so˘ naeryo˘ wa) the foreman would shout, after which the startled men quickly descended. There were two sloping paths built into the side of the embankment, one for going up and one for going down. And it was along these paths leading to and from the digging operation at the west of the reservoir that the line of farmers circulated endlessly, leaving no more than half a meter between each man. Even the slightest gap in the line invited the wrath of the whip. Once atop the embankment, where having dumped his heavy load of soil each farmer recovered a spring in his step and a boost to his spirit, it was the trip back down into what seemed like hell that was most unbearable. All the men wanted to do was to avoid the eye of a foreman and stand still for 298 chapter s ix

even one second. If they were caught, however, they’d get called over by the foreman at the base of the embankment and get the crap kicked out of them. At least twenty or thirty times a day somebody got the full treatment. It was below the embankment that one was more likely to be punished, since there were two foremen over at the digging site, one stationed at the base and one in between. Up on the embankment the farmers could take their time coming down the slope, and they walked from there in an oddly subversive way back to the digging site. This was hardly the case though when they were slaving away at the base of the embankment. Most of the men from Paegol-li were assigned to the digging site. Working a hoe or a pickax without any breaks whatsoever gave them stomach cramps. Often they just wanted to stand up straight and stretch out a bit, but nothing of the sort was permitted. The freshly spaded soil was to be shoveled with a scoop into the basket on each man’s A-frame. Before long, as the digging continued, they reached the base of the mountain, where the ground was solid. Maedong was digging at the boundary between the flatland and the base of the mountain. He had dug the edge of his hoe into the soil and was just pulling it out when he noticed a hibernating frog, its back flat up against the back of his hoe. It wasn’t uncommon to dig up frogs or to unwittingly crush them with the tip of one’s hoe, but here was a whole frog, completely uninjured, squatting behind Maedong’s hoe. It was quite a miraculous find, so Maedong lifted the creature gently out of the earth with his hoe, picked it up, and then buried it again in the soil a few steps in front of him. “What are you doing? Hurry up, before they catch you!” Standing a few men away, Masan tried to warn him. Maedong quickly resumed his digging. But the foremen at the edge of the work site came sauntering over. “He’s coming! He must have seen you,” said Hangol, at his side. The eyes of the foreman sparkled sinisterly. Maedong prepared himself for what was to come. At the same time it seemed ridiculous he’d be flogged for such a trifle. The foreman kicked Maedong in the seat of this pants. Maedong had been swinging his hoe down into the ground, so his pint-sized frame pitched right over. As he tried to get off the ground, the foreman’s whip cracked, striking him on the cheek. He got to his feet instantly and stared at the foreman square in the face. To whip someone on this account was simply idiotic. It was the first time anyone had dared stare right back at a foreman. “Hey (i nom), you smart-ass (ko˘nbangjinde)!” a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 299

The foreman grabbed the collar of Maedong’s jacket (cho˘ gori) and dragged him over to the foreman in the center of the reservoir. He and the other foreman took turns XXXXXXing him. Maedong was pissed off now. And he wasn’t afraid in the least. He lifted up one of the foreman at his waistline and flipped him right over. The man was knocked down flat on the ground like a child, but when he picked himself up, the foremen each aimed for one of Maedong’s legs in an effort to knock him down. Maedong toppled over and knocked his head on the ground. The foremen then dragged him away in this position. The farmers for their part were dumbstruck and stood there blankly watching this happen. How could anyone not abhor the foremen’s violence? After being dragged off in this manner, Maedong was then beaten mercilessly XXX and then XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Their hearts racing, Masan, Hangol, and the others could do nothing but swallow their rage. Maedong was left there on the ground unconscious until lunchtime. After the foremen went down to the village, Masan lifted Maedong onto his broad shoulders and carried him down to the hill below. He laid him down next to the bellows (p’ulmae) of the blacksmith shop, and after a while Maedong regained consciousness. Five or six of the villagers tried to console him. Maedong drooped his head without saying a word. Hammering on a piece of red-hot iron that sent sparks flying to the ground, the owner of the blacksmith shop also spoke to him. “You ain’t the only one, ya know. This sorta thing goes on all the time. Just yesterday a fella got it a lot worse than you did.” The man then told Maedong of the previous day’s events, a lynching that had been carried out by the foremen. The previous day farmers from the villages to the east, Sinp’ung-li, Hantae, and Tojang— in the opposite direction from Paegol-li and Masan-li— were at work at the dam site. By lunchtime the whips had only cracked a couple dozen times, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Then afternoon came. A pint-sized farmer, as wasted away as a tree in winter, was gasping for air as he went about his work. He’d had only a single bowl (sabal) of millet gruel for breakfast that morning and had eaten nothing for lunch, so he barely had the strength to stand on two feet. There wasn’t a trace of life on his wrinkled, ashen complexion. The soil in the basket (pasok’uri) on his A-frame (chige) bore down on him so heavily that his feet sank into the earth with each step he took, and his legs had several times almost given out on him. As he staggered along, the foreman’s whip cracked on his back incessantly. As the sun gradually fell in the western sky, he felt 300 chapter s ix

his insides might melt away like snow and ooze right out of him. Naturally, his pace tended to be slower than the others’. No matter how often he was thrashed by the foreman, there was nothing he could do. The sting of the whip was nothing compared to the pain inflicted by the weight of the load. And he’d have to work under these conditions until nightfall, for there was no option of quitting. His choice was to be beaten by the foreman or to lose a day’s wages; all he could do while gasping for air was move on. The foreman, for his part, was irritated the farmer showed no fear of his whip, which had no effect on him whatsoever. It happened when the farmer was trying to climb the embankment, and he seemed— like a crawling maggot— to slip downward every few steps he took forward. He had just reached the midpoint of the slope when finally a foreman yanked on his A-frame from behind. The man pitched straight over and fell off the edge of the path face forward. The dirt in his A-frame dumped all over his backside, and he looked like a clump of earth as he tumbled down the embankment. The other farmers just stared wide-eyed at the terrifying sight playing out before them. Twenty or thirty men atop the embankment looked down at what was happening, but among them one set of eyes in particular burned with anger. Though the other farmers headed back down the embankment, one young man with burning eyes remained standing to witness the foreman XXX the farmer, who had by now reached the base of the reservoir. The farmer was completely still, and possibly dead. As the foreman continued to XX him, however, the man started writhing like a worm and then somehow brought himself to his feet; he picked up his Aframe and stumbled off yet again. His steps were like those of a ghost drifting away. The young man atop the embankment glared at the foreman hatefully. The other farmers walked on, but he alone stayed put right where he was. The foreman noticed him and shouted, “Hey you! Get the hell down here!” The young man remained standing. Detecting the sign of resistance, the foreman swiftly mounted the embankment and confronted the young man face-to-face. The two glared at each other. “So smart-ass, wanna cause some trouble, do ya?” The foreman slapped the young man across the face. He then got a good hold on him and managed to deliver a few kicks and punches. But then the young man jumped on top of him, holding the pint-sized foreman down to the ground as he hit him smack in the kisser. Two other foremen seeing this raced over. They pounced on the young man like wild dogs as the young man was XXXXXXXXXXX. The young man, a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 301

who XXXXXXXX, now lay still atop the embankment, his heart alone pounding wildly. The pint-sized foreman approached the young man and XXed him. The young man gradually inched his way over to the southern edge of the embankment, off the side of which rubble from the exploded cliffs had been discarded. The foreman then XXed him with all his might, and he plunged over the edge, crashing against the protruding rocks as he tumbled. “We was carrying them iron rods over to Mr. Han when we saw what was happening. We could hardly believe our eyes, but XXXXXX,” said the old blacksmith. “So we go down to check on him, and wouldn’t ya know he was still XXXX? Anyway, we carry him on over here and patch him up a bit and, by golly, come sunset he got right up and walked back home with his neighbors. He was walking with a good limp though. . . .” The man tried to console Maedong. “You want to earn money, you got to put up with it. Nothing much you can do.” “They’re bastards!” countered Masan, his large body shaking with his words. “You can say that again,” replied the old man. “Mr. Han used those very same words. ‘Bastards,’ he says. And listen to this. Just between you and me? That director’s going home with most of the wages promised to the workers, from what I hear. I tell ya, there’s a hell of a lot of backroom dealing going on around here. Mr. Han and the director can’t stand each other, and they’re always arguing about something. Now, Mr. Han might seem tough, but he’s a good man. The farmers working for him down yonder have been getting forty cho˘n a day from the beginning— did ya know that? Anyway, Director XX is supposed to be overseeing Mr. Han’s work. Now, I don’t know exactly how much the director is making, but they’ve contracted the whole project out to him, so he thinks he can do whatever the hell he darn well pleases.” “Let me get this straight, old man (yo˘nggam). You’re saying Director XX is pocketing part of the wages they promised to us?” asked Masan. “Well, I don’t know much about the big picture, but if Mr. Han says so, there must be some truth to it.” Masan couldn’t make heads or tails out of what he was hearing. He didn’t understand why they’d allow this one man to act so irrationally. How could XX, XX, and the XX remain silent about everything? The previous year the villagers in Paegol-li had roughed up their landlords’ men in an effort to avoid paying their sharecrop debt, but following the incident Masan and four others, who’d been the leaders of the attack, were XXXXXXXXXX in town, and for five days they XXXXXXXX. Even now 302 chapter s ix

he could clearly recall XXXXXX at the time, so he just didn’t understand why the XXXXXs, who had at the time acted in the interest of justice, would now overlook the same XX of the director. The farmers were being brutalized. How in the world was this drought relief? he XXXX. There was no mistake about it, only the landlords and the director would profit from a reservoir built under these conditions. “Shit! We gotta to do something,” shouted Masan. “Yeah, right. And what do you actually think we’d accomplish? I say just keep quiet,” replied Hangol. “Hmm.” Masan lowered his head, as though convinced there was indeed nothing they could do. “Hey, I got it. We could go crazy and raise hell like we did last winter. That way they’d at least feed us some beans and rice (k’ongbap),” said Hangol with a chuckle. 12 The beans and rice were all and good, but it was the XX that terrified them. They all thought back to what had happened that past winter. It was late fall of the previous year. Having planted millet instead of rice, the farmers managed to take in a small harvest. For the previous two years the landlords had taken more than 60 percent of even this meager crop of millet. But having barely survived the agony of two years of drought, the farmers had thought that this year at least they should be exempted from making their sharecropping payment. “Just how are we supposed to survive!” The farmers had been in an uproar. When the landlords and their agents (sau˘m) came by for the collection, the village elders pleaded for mercy. “Dear sirs. As you can see, our womenfolk and children have broken out in sores like lepers (mundung’i). If we are fortunate enough to have a good harvest next year, we’ll pay you back what we owe you then. Please be so kind as to forgive us our debts this year.” They knelt at the feet of the landlords and begged them with hands clasped in supplication. But the landlords would have nothing of it. “Out of the question. Eight bushels of millet and three bushels of beans. Hand them over,” they declared, rubbing their drum-shaped bellies and scribbling in their accounting books. From house to house they went, handing down orders to each and every family before heading off over the mountain pass.

12. Beans and rice were normally served in prison. (Translator) a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 303

When the landlords left the house of Toli’s mom, who’d been newly widowed, she fell to her knees in her front yard (madang) and burst into tears, letting go of all the grief that was pent up inside her. The adults looked back at their aging parents and embraced their beansprout-pale kids, petrified by thoughts of the winter to come. The young ones, in the arms of their mothers, were frightened by the grief they sensed in their parents and cried, “Mommy. . . .” Masan called Maedong, Hangol, and the others together for a meeting. “I’ve decided to XXXX my sharecrop debt. What about you guys?” “I’m not XX,” growled Hangol. “Me neither. What the hell’s gonna to happen to us if we have to eat grass soup all winter,” added Maedong. “Okay, but listen, it’s not going to work if there’s even one XXX among us,” said Masan as a way of confirming everyone’s determination. This is how the villagers in Paegol-li, and in other villages as well, had decided to XXXX their sharecrop debts. But the landlords pressed their agents (sau˘m) to carry out an enforced collection. The agents arrived in Paegol-li followed by three farmhands (mo˘su˘m) with straw matting and empty sacks tossed over their shoulders. They began with Toli’s mom. “Look, lady. You’d better just give us the crops. It’s not going to be pretty if you don’t hand them over. Just go ahead and keep this up, and you’ll lose your paddies next year XXXXXXXXXX. It’ll be pretty bad.” The agents (sau˘m) tried their best to win her over. But Toli’s mom shook her head and refused to give in. “No way! No way!” (an twae an twae) The agents (sau˘m) got angry and started giving orders to the farmhands (mo˘su˘m). “Ignore her. Just take away the principal. Five bushels of millet . . . and one and a half bushels of beans.” The farmhands went around back behind the small three-room shack, took out the sacks of grain, and emptied them out onto the straw matting they’d carried with them. The mother dropped her son to the ground, closed in on the farmhand’s scoop, and clutched it in her arms. Like a scrawny toad, Toli tottered over to his mother’s side bawling. The burly farmhands shoved the woman aside. “Get out of the way! You crazy bitch!” (pik’yo˘ra manghal nyo˘n) “You thieves. Thieves!” (toduk nom toduk nom) hollered the woman as she was pushed aside. By now Toli was wailing. The villagers overheard the commotion, and while the women peeked 304 chapter s ix

apprehensively through the cracks in the pine-branch fence, the men gathered at the entrance of the shack in order to block the way. The agents (sau˘m) kept their composure, but tried to crush the nerves of the villagers by cursing at the woman. “Calm down, you bitch!” (kaman hi isso˘ manghal nyo˘n) They grabbed her by her hair and pulled her to the ground. With her son still in her arms, the woman managed to fall on her back. “Aigu!” “Waaa!” Mother and child both cried out in distress. Just then Masan, Maedong, Hangol, and a few others stampeded into the yard. “Hey you! (i nom) Where do you get off treating a mother and child like that?” shouted Hangol. “Humph!” scoffed the agents, throwing back their shoulders. “This is none of your business, you idiots! Now, go back home and get your own payments ready.” “What, are you crazy? You can XXX over our dead bodies,” said the young men. They ran over to the farmhands, snatched away the scoop, and XXXXXX. The farmhands and the young men XXXXXXXXXXXXX. The villagers shouted, “XXX” and XXXXXXXXX, and XXX the agents. The four men wrestled their way through the crowd and ran off. “You just try coming back! We’ll XXXXX out of you.” “Stinking thieves! (toduk kae) Get the hell out of here!” The farmers shouted abuse at them as they watched the agents scamper away. For three days nothing happened. But the landlords were not about to remain silent over the matter and this worried the farmers. They couldn’t predict what shape the landlords’ XXX might take, which made them even more anxious. On the fourth day they finally met with the landlords’ XXX. XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, and summoned Hangol, Masan, and some others. After the farmers XXXXXXXXXX, one of the XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. For five days they XXXXXXXXX. But more than anything they were at a loss when they were asked the question, “Who made you do it?” It seemed like the XX were under the impression that the farmers had been XXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Masan and the others were questioned as to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, but they hadn’t been told to do anything. In the end, they were stripped of their trousers (paji) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 305

and their hands were XXXXXXXXXX, but each time XXXXX they screamed out and XXXXXXXXXX. Even now they could still remember how much pain they had been in at the time and how XXXXXXXXX without overlooking so much as the dirt under their fingernails. Afterward the landlords removed every single kernel of grain that was left in each of the villages. “Damn it! I’m at my wit’s end!” Masan’s strained voice competed with the piercing sounds of the old blacksmith’s anvil. “I can believe it. But XXXXXX is there anything you can really do about it? Best just give up,” said the man, as he pounded away with his small hammer. “Hmm.” Masan and the others fell silent, as though more confused than ever.

5 The construction work was by now progressing favorably. The farmers were tapping into all the energy left within them in order to carry out their work. And the foremen’s whips became effective in moving them along. With just a few X they XXXed those in whom the threat of the whip showed no reaction. The farmers were so terrified of the XX that they worked diligently. The number of farmers on the job decreased only slightly. No matter how brutally they were treated, the farmers still showed up for work so long as they could stand upright— because for those who didn’t show up starvation lay in wait on the horizon. The foremen, for their part, were more intrepid in their bearing than tigers. “Now, that’s more like it!” The director praised his foremen. At night he bought them rice wine (yakju) and hard liquor (soju) and even had some chickens butchered. Just about then two engineers came from the provincial office to inspect the site. The director got his hands on the most delicious chicken and beef he could find in the village and treated the engineers to a feast. The engineers, for their part, suggested a few minor improvements to be made before returning home. The basic inspection of the construction site concluded without difficulty. The embankment had now reached more than half its planned height. One day the county magistrate and the township mayor came to observe the work site. They had actually come to see the farmers’ labor. Huge numbers of farmers were working away diligently. There didn’t appear to be any complaints among them either. The director guided the magistrate and his 306 chapter s ix

delegation over to the digging operation at the site of the future reservoir. Walking among the farmers at work, the director called out to one of the foremen, pointing at the chige of one of the farmers. “Hey, Kim! Isn’t that too much for him to carry? Lighten up his load a bit.” Foreman Kim took a scoop to the mountain of dirt piled high onto the farmer’s back and removed some dirt off the top. The county magistrate walked around the floodgate construction site with a look of satisfaction. He then observed the concrete pouring operation for a while. Though he knew nothing much about it, he could tell it was an extremely sturdy floodgate being constructed. The county magistrate was enormously satisfied at the thought that it was through his own efforts that the dam construction was being completed, and that he was able to provide relief to several thousand starving people with only a small fraction of district funds. When he returned to the county office, he would no doubt file a report to senior officials about the fruits of his benevolent governance. The farmers, however, had heard that the county magistrate would be visiting, and two or three days before his arrival they met to discuss how they might reveal to him their unfortunate situation. “We just have to tell the county magistrate what’s really going on.” All the farmers spoke with excitement. “Well, that’s the plan. Masan and Hangol from Paegol-li have already discussed it,” shouted an old man originally from Paegol-li. “If the magistrate comes on a day when we’re on the job, we’ve gotta say somethin’ to him.” “It sounds good, but will it work?” “One of us has to walk right up to the magistrate during his visit and tell him that we’re being mistreated and that they aren’t giving us our wages.” “But who will it be?” The farmers looked around at one another and then fell silent. After a while the old man said, “I’ll do it.” Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned on the old man. In each of them was the look of desperation. The day the county magistrate visited, the farmers from Sinp’ung-li and other villages to the east were on the job. He arrived at the construction site in the afternoon. Having waited for just the right moment, the old man stepped away from the work site and walked toward the magistrate as he was coming down from Mr. Han’s construction site. But Foreman Yi immediately noticed him and with quick steps intercepted him. “Hey, old man! (yo˘nggam) What are you wandering around here for?” “Well, I just have something I want to say.” “To who?” a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 307

“To the magistrate.” “You idiot! What makes you think that someone like you can just on go up and talk to the magistrate? Hah, hah! Stop right there.” “What makes you think you can be so rude? I might not look respectable, but I’ll have you know I wasn’t born a commoner (sangnom).” “There ain’t no such thing as yangban and commoners (sangnom) no more. Now quit talking like an idiot and get on over here!” “I will not.” (an twae) “What did you say?” The foreman grabbed the old man by the collar and dragged him against his will toward the floodgate. Later that evening, once the magistrate had gone, the old man was brutally threatened by the director and the foremen, and he returned home utterly dejected. The farmers’ plans in the end had failed, but little did they know that even if had they had succeeded in talking to the magistrate, little of the profit would have been returned to them anyway since XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

6 The young man who had fallen over the embankment was back at work. Thanks to a good word from the old man at the blacksmith shop, he was able to find a job at Mr. Han’s work site. He now walked with a slight limp in his right leg. “Well, you got it pretty bad, but you XXXX, didn’t ya,” said Mr. Han in a spare moment during the workday. “I thought for sure you were a XX.” “I know. Luck (chaesu) was on my side. . . .” “Guess it was.” The young man’s name was Yun and he came from Sinp’ung-li. Mr. Han was oddly sympathetic toward the young man. Occasionally he even criticized the director. “Yeah, he’s about as friendly as a famished wild dog (nu˘kdae).” Mr. Han cleared his throat and spat to the ground. “And he sure as hell knows how to make things work in his interest. I mean, just look what he gets away with out there, and he’s raking in thousands from this job.” “You don’t say! He’s making that much?” “Sure he is. And I’m not talking a couple thousand either. I bet he’s raking in more than ten grand out of this one. I know all about these dam projects, and I tell ya, there’s more than a little backroom dealing going on here.” “Oh, yeah?” Mr. Han went on and on about all sorts of things. 308 chapter s ix

“Listen, I don’t get along with him either. My job is to chisel holes in the rock, but he only lets me blast twice a day. I’m all ready to light fuses by four thirty or five, but that bastard makes us wait till after six o’clock. He wants to make the farmers work as long as possible. And in the meantime I’ve got to twiddle my thumbs over here till all the men are off-site. I tell ya, I gotta put up with all sorts of crap from this guy. And get this! The bastard even tried to negotiate the fee they contracted me to work at. Well, not that you’d know much about these things anyway. . . .” This was how Yun came to learn from Mr. Han about the director’s injustices. Yun had also heard rumors from some young men in his village who had organized the Sinp’ung-li branch of the XXXX. For example, he learned how laborers in the cities had established unions and struggled XXXXXXX and how tenant farmers would have to organize farmers’ unions in order to negotiate with their landlords for a greater percentage of their crops. Many of the young men in his village had graduated from the elementary school in town, and there were a fair number of intellectual types who had graduated from schools in the big city. This area originally had many educated young men and progressive thinkers, but last spring XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX, so now educated young men were far and few between. The XXXX were broken up and the farmers’ unions they’d helped establish eventually lost their momentum. If only those young men were still around today, thought Yun, they’d organize the farmers at the dam for sure and help us put up a good fight. In order to keep his eyes out for someone from the western villages who might have the wisdom and wherewithal to XXX, Yun had received special permission from Mr. Han to be on-site every day. So far he hadn’t found the kind of person he was looking for. The whips of the foremen intimidated everyone. At least once a day a man was beaten with the same sort of cruelty that he himself had experienced. Yun witnessed this much to his vexation. Then one morning it happened. Masan, Hangol, Maedong, and two others from Paegol-li had arrived at the construction site somewhat later than usual and found that work had been going on for some time. As they came down the slope in the northern corner of the work site, Foreman Kim walked up to them on his spindly legs. “You’re too late. Now, go back home.” Masan and the others stopped in their tracks. This happened quite often, so they weren’t very worried about it. But the foreman confronted them and tried to block their way. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 309

“It’s not so late. Can’t you just let us in today?” Masan pleaded with him. “Forget it. Now, get out of here!” said the foreman, socking Masan in the gut. Seeing their chance, Hangol, Maedong, and the others dashed ahead of the man and quickly disappeared into the huge crowd of farmers, dropping their A-frames (chige) and shoveling up dirt into the baskets with their scoops. They basically looked like everyone else now and the foreman could do nothing about it. Hangol, Maedong, and the others had done it. After the others had escaped into the crowd, Masan then made a dash forward, but the foreman managed to grab on to a corner of his A-frame (chige) and held him back. “Don’t even think about it!” “I’ll come extra early next time. Please just let me in today. . . .” “Forget it! Now, get out of here!” The foreman was unforgiving. Masan figured he had given his best shot trying to talk to the man, so he decided just to run for it as soon as he found the opportunity. The foreman chased him close on his heels, but once Masan had reached the crowd of farmers the foreman gave in. With spiteful eyes he watched Masan quickly put himself to work amid the crowd and abandoned the attempt to pursue him further. But the foreman didn’t let Masan out of his sight for the entire day. He followed Masan wherever he went. Nothing happened that morning. But then nightfall started to set in. As Masan found himself climbing the embankment, he lost his footing and fell forward, all his soil spilling out of his basket. The foreman dashed up to Masan and kicked him in the seat of his pants— as though he’d been waiting all day long for the chance to do so. “Pay attention to the path!” Masan stood up abruptly. The foreman tried to strike him again, but Masan managed to dodge the blow. The foreman’s whip missed him and cracked the air. The foreman then exploded in anger and leaped toward him. At first Masan did nothing to resist, but he kept dodging the man’s blows. Then suddenly Masan lunged forward at the man, grabbed him by the throat, and shook him to and fro. The foreman started choking and began to squirm. Foreman Yi then scurried over to help Foreman Kim, but Masan simply lifted the pint-sized man into the air with his powerful arms. The farmers watched in utter disbelief. They were worried about what might come next. The two foremen Masan had lifted up into the air were kicking their legs back and forth in vain. Then the director and another foreman arrived. All five of them wrestled it out together. Masan didn’t put up much resistance. He basically let them attack him. But then the foremen’s blows started to get 310 chapter s ix

harder, and amid a flurry of blows he simply walked off stoically back into the crowd of farmers. The foremen, for their part, didn’t attempt to pursue this powerful man any further. Masan’s resistance had been superhuman. And Yun, who had seen it all, was simply delighted. In his mind it was clear who had won this particular battle, and he was overjoyed by what he had witnessed. When the farmers went to collect their wage vouchers, Yun tried looking for Masan, but it was too dark to find him.

7 It was a gloomy, overcast day. Thick layers of black clouds weighed heavily over the summit of the mountain. A biting gale swept down the slope beneath them. The greens of the pine trees and the reds of the balding peaks seemed overshadowed. The movements of the farmers at work seemed listless. It was almost nightfall. Masan, Hangol, and the others had just deposited their loads of soil at the top of the embankment and were taking a brief moment to stretch their bodies. The holding wall had reached two-thirds of its planned height, so it was now twice the burden for the farmers who had to carry up the soil. It was but three meters short of Mr. Han’s work site up on the left. Hangol and the others happened to look down over to Tohwa-li and saw a middle-aged woman scaling the bluff below the embankment. “Auntie. What’s the matter?” Hangol crawled down the slope and grabbed the woman’s hand to pull her up. The woman took a moment to catch her breath and then, with tears rolling down her ashen cheeks, she spoke. “It’s . . . it’s so terrible.” “Well, what? Tell me what happened.” Hangol was assailed by a strange sense of unease. In no time at all Foreman Yi was standing behind them. “What’s the matter? Just tell me,” pressed Hangol. “Oh, it’s just so terrible. She fell . . . she fell from the mountain and . . . and now she’s dead.” “Huh? Who? Who!” “Your . . . your wife.” “What?” For a while Hangol just stood there speechless and paralyzed, but then he took his aunt by the hand and ran off with her, leaving his A-frame (chige) and everything else thrown to the side. His aunt followed him, but she was a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 311

now completely out of breath and she looked as though she were being dragged behind. Watching Hangol run off into the distance, Masan recalled what his wife had told him that morning as he was leaving. “We’re going to Mt. Pibong today,” she had said. “No, you’re not! It’s too dangerous!” he said to stop her, but now he couldn’t help thinking that she might have fallen from the mountain and died along with Hangol’s wife. “Maedong. I’m going to check out what happened. Take care of Hangol’s A-frame (chige). And pick up our wage vouchers for us,” said Masan as he took off, his empty A-frame (chige) slung over his shoulders. He passed through Tohwa-li and Ch’ibo-li and crossed the Majo˘n River. That was half a mile in itself. He could see Mt. Pibong right in front of him now, its massive, dark-brown silhouette soaring like Mt. Fuji into the middle of the sky. After crossing the Majo˘n River and several smaller hills, he made out the foot of the mountainside as well as countless numbers of women gathering arrowroot. They were like so many white dots scattered over its slopes. Masan went around to the western base of the mountain, heading in the direction of the valley where the villagers from Paegol-li would most likely have headed. Though from afar it looked like a single peak, up close the mountain had numerous deep valleys, and it was impossible for Masan to know exactly where he was located. Yet in every ravine and on every slope, there were women climbing. In the foothills there were groups of women collecting wild roots as well. Masan had been following Hangol, who was off in the distance, but after crossing the Majo˘n River he’d lost sight of his friend. All the women he met seemed unaware that an ill-fated woman, not unlike themselves, had just fallen to her death. Passing by the fourth ravine he came to, he noticed that there wasn’t a single woman on the mountainside, and he thought that this for sure must be it. He walked up alongside the stream. The slopes on either side of the valley gradually grew steeper and the streambed became less and less distinct. He climbed up a path on the slope for a while and found half a dozen straw huts built close to the base of a bluff. There was a crowd of people gathered to the right of the hut. “That must be them,” he thought to himself and headed in their direction. The narrow valley worked itself halfway up the mountain carving out deep grooves in the mountainside. The valley came to an abrupt end with a sheer cliff, which reached to the very summit of the mountain. As Masan approached, he overheard a chorus of excited women’s voices. 312 chapter s ix

“It was like this white thing just came falling down from up there. I thought it was a rock at first, you know.” “Well, I saw her when she was still hanging there. It was so scary, I mean, I just had to close my eyes.” These weren’t the women from Paegol-li. They were just other women collecting wild roots. Masan passed through the small village and continued, out of breath, deep into the ravine. He saw the women beneath the cliffs. Among them he also saw someone who looked like Hangol. As he drew closer, Kamnyo˘n came running up to him. Her complexion was ashen, almost black. In the pupils of her eyes flickered the terror of a startled hare. She tried to say something as she looked at her husband, but the words would not come out. Masan saw that his wife was safe and heaved a sigh of relief. Practically shoving her aside, he went straight over to Hangol. His aunt was clinging to the dead body. Hangol, at her side, stared at the ground. He stood stiff as a rock. Masan tried his best not to look directly at the corpse. But he couldn’t keep from staring at it. The dead body had been gruesomely crushed. There was no evidence of a face and her arms and legs were broken. Her ribcage had been shattered as well, so her whole front side was stained with fresh blood. The lesions from the final thud were a vivid sign of how far she had fallen. All the women’s eyes were swollen. Still in shock, their faces looked odd. Masan was so upset that not knowing what else to do, he walked up to his wife and, as though it were entirely her fault that the woman had fallen, shouted “Why weren’t you paying attention? You idiot!” Kamnyo˘n broke down into tears. Masan then started to cry with her. He wept in spite of his manhood. He walked over to Hangol and took his hands into his own. “Hangol. Hangol. Oh, why! Why!” He couldn’t bring himself to say anything further. After a while, seeing Hangol staring vacantly into space, he said, “You’ve got to be strong, you hear?” Hangol’s eyes seemed frozen in place as if he didn’t know where he was or what was going on. “Hangol. You’ve . . . you’ve got to be strong!” “I know. . . . I’m fine. I just don’t know what to do,” said Hangol quietly. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 313

“There’s nothing you can do, Hangol. Nothing at all. . . .” Masan felt as though he’d never in his entire life gone through anything so sad and so terrifying as this. He stood there silently for a while, but then eventually recovered his presence of mind. He realized that they couldn’t just stand there forever, and he ran back to the village to get a straw mat and some rope. He wrapped up the mangled corpse, tied it onto his A-frame (chige) and then hoisted it onto his back. The leaden sky was beginning to darken. Ten people or so followed behind Masan. Hangol’s aunt also staggered along, wailing the entire way home. That night the villagers participated in the wake in turns. From what Kamnyo˘n and the others told them, the men learned of how Hangol Taek had fallen to her death. That morning the women in the village had climbed up Mt. Pibong after the men had left for work. With bamboo baskets dangling from their waists and beat-up kitchen knives (k’al) and sickles in tow, they had clawed their way up the mountainside with some difficulty. The spots in the shade were still frozen and quite slippery. From the end of the ravine onward it was all rocky cliff and as they made their way upward, fragments of rock crumbled and fell off the edge. The arrowroot grew in the soft soil in the cracks along the cliffs. The women would cut away the leaves with their sickles, then jab their knives into the earth, pull out the arrowroot, then toss it into their baskets. Whenever a gust of wind rose, it felt as if they might themselves be blown away into the air like fallen leaves. Straight below them was the deep ravine opening its jaws. In the distance they could see the tiny hamlets of Ch’ibo-li on the other side of the Majo˘n River and the foothills undulating like waves over the plain. Their minds were swimming and these distant points seemed to waver on the horizon. Kamnyo˘n had been overcome by dizziness several times but had crouched down each time to wait for the wind to subside. As night fell, and perhaps because their stomachs were so empty, they felt especially dizzy. Hangol Taek and Kamnyo˘n had found themselves out on the nose of a ledge, for the arrowroot vines had stretched themselves around it. Below the ledge was a cliff dropping several dozen meters. Hangol Taek had just ripped out an arrowroot vine. And it was just then. Her foot slipped on some gravel on the surface of the ledge and then she was just dangling there in the air. The next second she tumbled down into the ravine. 314 chapter s ix

“I was so scared right then, I just, I . . .” Kamnyo˘n’s heart pounded ever more intensely. The men listened in horror, their faces ghastly pale.

8 By the time the rock blasting at Mr. Han’s work site was completed, night had already fallen and a few stars twinkled icily among oppressive clouds. The square in front of the tavern (chumak) was crowded with farmers; it was as bustling as on any market day (changnal). The foremen had gone inside for a drink of rice wine (yakju) and hadn’t yet come out. It was brightly lit and festive within the tavern’s inner courtyard. The sweet smell of grilled meat seemed to mock the very senses of the farmers. The high-pitched, gay voice of the hostess (anjuin) seemed to ridicule the hundreds of starving men standing outside. Each time the farmers passed by the tavern (chumak) they themselves coveted a sip of rice wine (makko˘lli), so long had it been since any of them had had a drink. They fancied a good swig of the stuff might just cure the effects of three years of hunger. In a dark corner of the courtyard the farmers were waiting in anticipation for the foremen to come out and distribute the payment vouchers. Hangol and Masan still hadn’t received their vouchers from the day Hangol Taek had fallen to her death. Maedong had tried to collect them, but the foreman had refused saying, “No way! It’s their fault for leaving early.” The other farmers cursed Foreman Yi as inhuman. They called him a devil, a man with less humanity than filth beneath his fingernails. The tragedy of the recent circumstances worked the farmers up all the more. They told Masan and Hangol they should by all means demand their vouchers that day. Masan was waiting to act on his determination to raise the issue. The four foremen began distributing the vouchers. The farmers were divided up into groups according to their villages. Foreman Yi was in charge of Paegol-li. When Masan was called, he said, “Mr. Director. Please give us the vouchers for the other day as well.” “What?” “For the other day when . . .” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The foreman tried to walk away. “Well, you can’t just refuse to give us vouchers for the time we worked,” said Masan grabbing on to the sleeve of the foreman’s Western-style shirt. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 315

“I said no. Now, get out of my face! Accounts are calculated on a day-today basis. You have to get your wages on the same day you work.” “That ain’t how it works.” “How dare you!” The foreman’s palm slapped across Masan’s cheek. Masan did not keep quiet. “What did you hit me for?” (wae ttaryo˘) “Well, you little bastard . . .” (i chasik) The foreman grabbed ahold of Masan and tried to bring him into the inner courtyard. Just then the farmers standing around Masan blocked the foreman’s way and wouldn’t let him through. “Masan, take it from him.” (pado˘ra) “That’s just plain wrong!” “The damn bastard!” (manghal nom) The farmers all shouted out in turn. “You beast!” (kaejimsu˘ng) “Just XXX him.” The circle of farmers closed in around them, and Masan and the foreman found themselves pressed close up together. The farmers were as excited as bulls in a ring. The sound of heavy breathing came from all four directions. Yi was terrified. “Okay. I’ll give ’em to you. Just remember that from now on you pick up your vouchers on the day you work.” The foreman handed over the vouchers and escaped into the inner courtyard. The farmers watched him scornfully from behind as he walked away, but at the same time they felt enormously relieved. That the farmers, who up until then had been terrorized XXX, were actually able to XXXX a foreman was simply exhilarating. Acting in the name of justice, thought the farmers, makes us strong. Masan and the others had taken five or six steps in the direction of their village when someone tapped on Masan’s shoulder. When Masan turned around, there was a young man behind him. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” the young man said. “My name is Yun So˘ngsam. I’m from Sinp’ung-li.” “Okay,” Masan said. Yun had been walking along with Masan and the others, but Masan stopped in his tracks when he heard that Yun was from Sinp’ung-li. “I’ve got to stop by Majo˘n-li, so let’s walk together,” he said setting off again. The other farmers then followed. 316 chapter s ix

On the road Yun spoke about the lynching he’d received. He also told Masan what he had heard from Mr. Han about the violence of the foremen and the injustices of the director. As soon as Yun mentioned his lynching, Maedong said, “Oh, was that you? I got beat up pretty bad too.” “You were XXX, too? Well, it’s not just the two of us. I hear most people get it eventually,” replied Yun. “But more importantly, we can’t just let this go on forever without doing anything about it. I think we should XXXXX the whole lot of them, just like you did tonight. . . .” “Yeah,” offered Masan with concern, “but we’re bound to lose.” “Won’t know for sure unless we try. I think we can pull it off as long as we stick together.” Yun told them about the XX of the workers in the city, whom he’d heard about from the young men in his village. “Anyway, if we could get all the farmers to stand up for one another just like I saw you guys do tonight, I’d be willing to negotiate with the director myself.” “Great idea. Count me in,” said Hangol, who until then had remained silent. “You’re right, damn it. We farmers are human too. It’s an outrage that all we get is twenty-five cho˘n after slaving away like oxen all day long. And to top it off, the director pockets all the rest? Shit!” The path led up over the mountain pass, so the discussion broke up for a while. On the other side of the pass, they could see Majo˘n-li. It was a big village. Since it had a marketplace, there were lights flickering here and there. “Let’s talk again soon,” said Masan. “XXXXX together!” shouted Hangol. They passed through the marketplace and Yun parted from the others. “Let’s do it!” he said. Masan and Hangol felt their hearts beating faster and faster as a new, intense emotion overcame them. It was lunchtime the next day on the job. The farmers were all gathered on the same hill. They were talking up a storm as usual. Masan stood up all of a sudden and shouted, “Can I get everybody’s attention please?” The farmers all looked over and stared at Masan, and as they gradually became interested in what he might say, things quieted down. “I’m sure you all know what I want to talk about. Here we are slaving away a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 317

day after day with the foremen XXXXXX. Well, I’ve been thinking about just who really benefits from all this. And there’s no way in hell that any of us are going to make a penny in profit once this dam is completed. We come all the way out here because we want to earn a day’s wage (sakjo˘n). But think about it. While we’re working harder than horses (mal), the director and the XX are pocketing our wages. Never mind that they’re XXXXX us day after day. Now, I say this is an outrage! My fellow farmers! Are you with me?” “He’s right! It’s just like Masan says.” “How can anybody be so unreasonable. Shit!” The farmers started shouting. “Now, please quiet down for just a minute. (choyonghae chuso) As long as we speak what is just, even the most inhuman people will listen to what we have to say,” continued Masan after a while. “Now, in terms of what we can do about this, how about we listen to what Mr. Yun from Sinp’ung-li has to say?” “Let him speak,” replied Maedong, Hangol, and others. Yun, who had been sitting beside Masan, stood up and began speaking softly. “As Masan said, the director’s unreasonable behavior is an absolute outrage. And you all know what we mean. You’ve all had to suffer from his XX day after day.” Yun told them how the director was XXing the greater part of the wages that the workers were supposed to get, that the work hours were too long, and that XXXX. He went on to explain how it was only because the farmers were as passive— passive as earthworms— that he managed to get away with it all. Bringing up the example of the previous night, he tried to convince them that as long as the farmers were united they’d for sure be able to get better wages and that everything could be resolved without anyone being XXed. “How about it? Should we fight it out with the director and the rest of them? Are you with me?” Yun looked around into the crowd. “Let’s give this bargaining thing a try. I say we confront the director.” “Let’s go now!” The young farmers shouted in excited tones. “Okay, so I’ve gone ahead and written something down. Listen up and tell me what you all think.” Yun read out loud the five lines of text he had written in large letters on a piece of Korean paper. 318 chapter s ix

Our demands: 1. Increase wages threefold. 2. Set working hours from 8:00 to 5:00. 3. No more XXing. The farmers, united.

“Sounds good to me. It’s good just the way it is.” “Let’s do it now!” The young men shouted. The older farmers remained silent. “Well, let’s go then!” The farmers lifted their A-frames (chige) onto their backs, and with Yun, Masan, Hangol, and some others in the lead, they descended in droves down to the tavern (chumak). At the tavern (chumak) the director and the foremen were drinking wine in the ondol room. With great commotion the farmers filed into the inner courtyard. Foreman Yi opened the sliding door (milch’ang) and Yun and Masan jumped right in. Yun immediately thrust the piece of paper in front of the director and shouted, “From today on please follow these guidelines. Or else not a single one of us will come to work again.” The director looked at him suspiciously. Foreman Yi XXXXXXXXXXXX, the director’s face, round as a stone, flushed red in alarm. He took the piece of paper Yun had handed him and read it. “Heh, heh. Some nerve you’ve got, you little smart-ass. Now, tell me where a country bumpkin like yourself learned to be so clever. Shit, now get the hell out of here. All of you!” shouted the director, tearing the piece of paper into pieces. The foremen went out into the courtyard and tried to chase them out with their clubs. But the farmers wouldn’t budge. The same cowards who had slaved under the threat of the foremen’s whips until just yesterday were now completely reborn and newly emboldened. Masan and the others snatched away the foremen’s clubs and drove them back. The farmers gradually pressed forward as far as the veranda. “Let’s XX the foremen!” they shouted. a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 319

The foremen panicked. The sight of hundreds of ferocious eyes staring at them was terrifying. When the director saw the foremen panic, he felt terrified as well. Who knew what might happen here in the middle of the mountains? He had no choice but to go out to the veranda and address the farmers. “Okay. We’ve got your demands, now give us until tomorrow. We’ll go over them carefully tonight and then give you our reply.” The foremen XX and Yun then asked, “So you’ll come through for us tomorrow?” “I’ll do my best,” said the director grudgingly. “All right, everyone. Let’s wait till tomorrow then,” said Yun. The farmers went away exhilarated by their success. But the next day during lunch break, just as Yun was trying to convince the farmers from the eastern villages to submit a list of demands like the other farmers had the previous day, the director and the XX came up from the village and told Yun to go back with them. Yun refused to go at first, but the XX grabbed Yun by the arm and dragged him away, saying, “Just come. We’ve got something we need to talk about.” The young farmer went off with a worried look on his face. The XX dragged him over the mountain pass all the way to the XXX, where he was XXed for the time being. The farmers soon heard what had happened to Yun and they Xed the director’s cruel behavior even more so. The next day it happened. As the farmers from the western villages arrived for work, forty or fifty farmers from the eastern villages were waiting for them to explain what had happened the previous day. “We should confront the director together and get him to release Yun,” said Masan to the crowd. “Well, come on! Let’s go!” (cha modu kaja) Furious that Yun had been XXed, the farmers headed down to the tavern (chumak)— not a single dissenter among them. The farmers were like charging bulls, terrifying and wild. The foremen, however, weren’t about to be found. The entrance to the tavern (chumak) had been closed, and knowing that the farmers would overcome them, they had locked the main gate. The farmers pounded on the doors. “Open up!” “Let us meet with the director!” The doors were locked securely, and they wouldn’t budge. “All right, boys. We’ll just have to do it the hard way!” 320 chapter s ix

Masan scaled the wall and jumped over the side. Once Hangol had followed him, so did several dozen of the other young men. In the inner courtyard the foremen tried to chase the farmers back, threatening them with their clubs. But the farmers managed to pull the director out from the ondol room where he had been hiding. They opened the gate, dragged him out into the courtyard, and shouted, “Give us Yun back!” “You bastard! (i nom) Why did you XX Yun?” “Let him out!” Surrounded on all sides by the crowd, the director trembled as he spoke. “I don’t know anything.” (moru˘gesso˘) “What do you mean you don’t know? Let Yun out!” “XXXXXXXXXXXX, we don’t know anything about it.” (uri molla) “Then go to the XXX and get him out for us!” Masan grabbed the director by the arm and pushed him forward. The crowd spat insults at him as they followed behind. The ranks of men surrounding the director climbed up the mountain and down the pass, XXXXXXXXXXX. (Completed October 1931) Translated by Samuel Perry

(34) On Antiwar Literature (excerpt) kuroshima denji Translated from Proletarian Arts Textbook (June 1929) A dedicated antimilitarist writer, Kuroshima Denji (1898–1943) was born into a poor farming-fishing family on Shodo Island in the Inland Sea. After a stint in a soy sauce brewery, he went to Tokyo to pursue his literary dreams. The program he enrolled in at Waseda University didn’t qualify him for exemption, however, so he was conscripted into the army in 1919 and made to join the Siberian Expedition, a doomed military intervention to crush the Bolshevik Revolution by Japan and its erstwhile World War I allies, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France. Falling ill, he ended up spending a year in Siberia. Back in Japan, Kuroshima first joined the Literary Front group and then, like most of the writers in this anthology, the Writers League. 13 When his health began to

¯ wada, “Kuroshima Denji,” 472–73. 13. O

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fail again in the early 1930s, Kuroshima returned to his native island and lived out the remainder of his short life in the company of his wife and three children. Kuroshima is best known for his Siberian stories of the late 1920s— vivid descriptions of agonies suffered by Japanese soldiers and Russian civilians during Japan’s invasion. Since most of those soldiers were poor farmers, these works link up with the farm stories that Kuroshima contributed to the proletarian genre, which overwhelmingly focused on urban workers. His novel Militarized Streets (1930, banned immediately, and then banned again by the postwar US occupation) is a masterful description of economic and military aggression against China, demonstrating how the expeditionary forces— coming mostly from the peasant and working class— are sent to protect the financial interests of the bourgeoisie. An excellent selection of Kuroshima’s literature, including Militarized Streets, is available in “A Flock of Swirling Crows” and Other Proletarian Writings. Included in the present anthology is an antiwar “wall story” set in China, “To Qiqihar” [26]. hbs and nf

1. The Class Nature of Antiwar Literature 1. There are various kinds of war. There are wars of aggression and conquest. There are defensive wars. There are also people’s liberation wars, and revolutions. [. . .] Though antiwar literature has existed since rather early times, it differs in principle from the antiwar literature of the bourgeoisie and the antiwar literature of the contemporary proletariat. [. . .] The proletariat does not generalize in opposing war: we do not oppose war in general. In certain cases, despite its tragedy and cruelty, we affirm it for the sake of humankind’s progress. What the proletariat opposes thoroughly and resolutely is imperialist war. That is to say, we oppose wars of aggression, wars of plunder. 2. Much of the bourgeois antiwar literature starts out from an individualistic or humanistic basis. It depicts individual suffering, countless sacrifices, and war’s wretchedness, as well as the feelings and humanitarian spirit of the individuals who oppose war. Let me cite a few familiar examples. Tayama Katai’s “One Soldier” [1908] takes place in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. A soldier hospitalized for beriberi who can no longer stand the hospital’s filth, lack of hygiene, and poor food leaves the hospital only partially recovered and sets out to rejoin his unit. Dragging his heavy 322 chapter s ix

legs, he walks all day carrying his rifle and knapsack, and finally dies from beriberi-related heart failure on the second floor— if I remember correctly— of a supply unit canteen. That is the story. It emphasizes hatred of war, the terror, the shackling of the individual by military life, and war’s terrible cruelty. Peaceful daily life is what is desirable. War, in “One Soldier,” is a vast prison. Once a person enters it, he cannot escape that vast prison no matter how much he squirms and struggles. Naturalism’s passive worldview briefly shows its face here. [. . .] 3. Although the bourgeoisie opposes war because of its glaring misery and terror, it by no means considers how war might be thoroughly eradicated. Even if it does consider it, it does so in a tepid and halfway manner that ultimately only plays a reactionary role. It is the pacifism of idealism or of support for the status quo. Consequently, the bourgeoisie clearly reveals its class nature even in antiwar literature. [. . .] 4. Henri Barbusse’s Clarté [1919] is an antimilitarist literary work that also emerged from the European Great War. The first part of this novel is sluggish and difficult to read. Barbusse does not merely curse the war’s miseries, but also hurls his hatred at those responsible for the war, and celebrates the spirit of the International. [. . .] [. . .] Even if such sordid, horrendous wars should cease for a time, so long as the capitalist system exists, they will continue to occur. “As long as wars can be decided on by people other than those who do the fighting, they will recur again and again. As long as they can be decided on by people other than the foolish masses who forge the bayonets and wield them, wars will recur any number of times.” And so long as the capitalist system continues to exist, “There will be nothing on this earth except preparation for war. Everyone’s energies will be absorbed into it, all the discoveries, all science, and all imagination will be captured by it.”— Such is the warning cry in Clarté. And today, ten years after Clarté was published, the world’s imperialist countries are indeed doing nothing except preparing for war. [. . .] War preparations will not cease so long as the capitalist system continues to exist. Wars, too, will not cease. We are absolutely opposed to imperialist wars. But war will be eradicated only when the proletariat, the most heavily oppressed and the ultimate class, emancipates itself and, in so doing, also emancipates all humanity from the class system. To reach that point, we must pass through revolutionary wars. The proletariat opposes imperialist wars, but it affirms revolutionary wars. [. . .] American socialist writer Upton Sinclair, in Jimmie Higgins [1919], writes about a great deal of discord within the consciousness of the proletarian class regarding imperialist war. It is said that in a certain sense, the novel is a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 323

an account of how Sinclair himself, after much agonizing, came to a pro-war stance at the time of the Great War. As the danger of imperialist war among European countries grew increasingly intense, the socialists and militant workers of the countries involved launched movements opposing the terror of this war. Soon the American socialists too were roused to action, and the Leesville chapter of the Socialist Party to which Jimmie belonged organized speech meetings opposing the war. But the plutocratic monarchs and military men of Europe ultimately drove the slaves of their countries to the battlefields. Thereupon orders for armaments poured into America from those countries, and almost all its factories swiftly transformed into weapons factories. Old man Granitch’s Empire Machine Shops, where Jimmie worked, was also converted into a weapons factory. Jimmie, realizing that the objects being made by his own hands were shells that would kill his German comrades, is assailed by grave doubts. Is it commendable conduct for an internationalist and socialist like Jimmie to be making such ammunition? Is it right for him to accept the wage increase of four cents an hour given by old man Granitch as a share of the wretched loot? This problem torments him so much that he recognizes that even the wheat grown by American farmers is bought up by England to fill the stomachs of English soldiers who kill the German comrades. The orders for armaments grow larger and larger, and wages rise. In the end, this delights even an honest socialist like Jimmie. But as the wages rise, so do the prices. At that, voices of discontent and denunciation arise in the factory. “Strike! Strike!” Fired from the factory, Jimmie is hired as a helper to a suburban farmer. Shortly thereafter a revolution takes place in Russia, and the proletariat wins peace through its own power. But German troops march into Russia. Some American socialists start to take part in the Great War, aiming solely to defeat the German troops trampling Russia, the world’s only proletarian country. Jimmie continues to be tormented by two utterly incompatible points of view: Should he trounce the detestable German army, or should he oppose militarism? In the end, a trap skillfully laid by the US army drags Jimmie off to the battlefield. Yet at the very outset he has an interesting encounter. A German submarine plunges him into the Atlantic Ocean. He is evacuated to an English hospital, and there addressed by the English king, George the Fifth: “Well, Higgins, how are you feeling?” “Sure, I’m all right.” 324 chapter s ix

“Are you an American soldier?” “Naw, I’m only a machinist.” At the end, Jimmie accepts leaflets from a Jewish Bolshevik and distributes them all within two days. He is arrested for it and subjected to every imaginable kind of terrible torture, but he does not give away his accomplice. That is the basic story of Jimmie Higgins. Concerned lest I go on too long, I have only been able to describe it very roughly. Within its pages resonates the spirit of the International, and opposition to imperialist war. [. . .]

2. The Proletariat and War 1. The proletariat understands that wars cannot possibly end without the abolition of class society through a socialist victory. The proletariat’s attitude toward war differs in principle from that of the bourgeois pacifists, anarchists, and antiwar writers who set out from similar ideas. We believe the struggle that the subjected classes wage against the ruling class is necessary, and has progressive value. The struggle of slaves against slave owners, serfs against lords, and workers against capitalists, is necessary. Wars are accompanied by cruelty, bestial acts, privation and distress, and yet there have been wars in history that have served to abolish harmful, reactionary, evil systems. They should be considered to have contributed to humanity’s advance, and approved of. Concerning present-day wars too, it is necessary for the proletariat to analyze their specific historical nature to see whether they lead us toward liberation, or oppress us even more. The French Revolution opened up a new epoch in the history of humanity. The Paris Commune too was a bourgeois, progressive, people’s liberation war. In other words, those wars primarily removed a feudal despotism and the shackles of foreign rule. They were progressive wars. Likewise, if the people were to start a war against England, that would be a just, necessary war. We cannot help agreeing with a war of an oppressed class against the oppressors and exploiters. And we cannot help hoping for its victory. 2. What is the nature of the war closing in on us at present? Might we liken it to two thieves fighting over unequal share of the loot? No matter how much the one with fewer stolen goods adorns his conduct, asserting the justice of his cause, he still remains nothing but a thief. Or how would it be if three thieves made an issue out of fair division of the size of their turfs, and began to quarrel? No matter how hard they tried to justify their conduct by broadcasting their justice and humanity, it would still be an instance of thieves deceiving the people for the benefit of the thieves’ own interests. And yet, it is this kind of a quarrel over the size of the a nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 325

turf that is approaching at present. This is the imperialist war that is about to take place. Modern capitalism has followed a trend from free competition to monopoly. Monopoly in every section of industry increases profits. Small capitalists are absorbed by the large. Then banks combine with industries, finance capital is generated, and a financial oligarchy comes into existence. Capitalist monopolies at first partition the domestic market. But under capitalism, the domestic market is closely connected with foreign markets, and together they come to form a uniform world market. If large capitalist corporations establish monopolies over areas producing raw materials, and over overseas markets, that strengthens them immensely and magnifies their profits. And so, “international capitalist corporations frantically do their utmost to wrench away from their adversaries all ability to compete, endeavoring to buy up the iron ore, the oil fields, and the like. And the only thing that guarantees the success of the monopolist corporations in the face of any mishap in the struggle with its adversaries is the exclusive possession of colonies” (Lenin).14 Therefore, the capitalists “crave the conquest of colonies.” And “ultimately, the finance capital and the foreign policies aligned with it bring about a struggle among the powerful countries for an economic and political partition of the world.” This, in other words, is what imperialist war amounts to. And having appropriated extensive colonies and markets, the capitalists live a parasitic life through exploitation, doing no work whatsoever themselves. “Capitalism pushes a very small number of particularly rich and powerful states to the top, and those few states, despite having around one-tenth or at the very most one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, are plundering the entire world simply by ‘clipping coupons.’” Accordingly, imperialist wars are wars among plunderers, quarrels among thieves. “The inhabitants of the colonies” subordinated to those thieves “are treated like cows or horses. They are exploited through all sorts of methods. These include capital export, lease of territory, deception in the sale of commodities, being made to slave away under the sway of dominant nations, and various other ways” (Lenin). In addition to profits wrung out of the workers in the home country, the capitalists thus accumulate vast profits from the colonies. With this superabundance of money they try to win over the labor aristocracy and labor

14. This and the following quotes are from Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism,” sec. 6. 326 chapter s ix

leaders. It is an undeniable fact that the capitalists fiddle with every possible means, indirect and direct, to bring traitors over to their side. The workers who have been bought out by them are no longer on our side. They are tools of the bourgeoisie. Their way of thinking is no longer that of the proletariat. It only becomes a hindrance to the proletarian movement, and no help at all. Once an imperialist war breaks out, far from opposing it, such types will rush to patriotism. 3. Imperialist wars possess no progressive significance whatsoever. To the contrary, along with repressing a great many of the world’s nations, they also repress the proletariat of the home countries, and are conducted for the sake of consolidating and expanding the wage-labor system. Nevertheless, the crafty bourgeoisie holds aloft the justice of its cause in all its splendor and beauty. During the European Great War, the French and English bourgeoisies deceived the people by insisting they were waging war to liberate Belgium and other nations. In fact, they were fighting a war to retain the colonies they had plundered. The German imperialists, on the other hand, were fighting to redistribute fairly the too many colonies of England and France. In the coming war too, this sort of thing is likely to happen again. And the unpropertied class will no doubt be promptly herded to the slaughter-fields of battle. Those driven before our very eyes into the arenas of a thievish quarrel over carving up the turf are human beings united by their poverty— even if their skin color be different— and the proletariat must unconditionally oppose their mutual wounding and killing. And we ought to think about utilizing the quarrel among thieves to bring the entire system of thievery to an end. That is why the proletariat must make it clear for what purpose that war is being waged. [. . .]

3. The Everlasting Need for Antiwar Literature 1. Is literature that addresses the multitude of workers and farmers and constructs antiwar ideas and emotions necessary only when a war is being waged? Isn’t antiwar literature necessary in peaceful times, when no war is taking place? Yes, it is necessary. So long as the capitalist system continues to exist, wars will never be eradicated. Even if a fleeting season of peace arrives after the world is partitioned through an imperialist war, the next imperialist war will follow without fail. The European Great War ended and peace came. But before even ten years had passed, capital’s scramble for dependent territories, this time centered on XX, gradually intensified once again. This has the marks of leading toa nt i - i m pe ri a l i s m a n d in t e rn at ion a lism 327

ward a new partition of the world, and that will not stop without triggering a war. Bourgeois governments dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to preparations for war. Capitalist peace, viewed in its essence, is nothing but preparation for the next war. Scientific inventions, chemical industry, railroad construction, telegraphic communication, opening of roads— under capitalism, everything is focused on the target of preparing for war. That has grave consequences, direct and indirect, for the lives of the proletarians. Here abides the constancy of antiwar literature. So long as the capitalist system exists, proletarian antiwar literature must also exist, and fight against it. 2. Needless to say, antiwar literature does not merely deal with barracks, and other aspects of military life. Capitalism utilizes every means of preparing for the next war. It drags young workers and farmers into barracks, and dresses them all without distinction into identical uniforms. It attempts to squeeze people into a single, manipulable mold. And the crowd of workers and farmers shoulders the rifles, and starts to line up like a procession of masqueraders. This is one of the deeds the imperialist bourgeoisie carries out in its preparation to exploit the proletariat through war. In addition, schools, training institutes, reservists’ associations all become their instruments for war. Steelworks, chemical factories, fertilizer companies— and the workers laboring in them— are also used for war. From the chemical factories comes the poison gas, from the fertilizer plants— fertilizer companies force farmers to buy overpriced fertilizer, but whenever needed they produce explosives. Radiotelegraphy, railroads, steamships, even movies and plays: the imperialist bourgeoisie is using them all for war, or for drumming up belligerent ideas. Everything is focused on aggrandizing military power. Yet that is not the goal for the bourgeoisie, but a means. Through such militarism, they are striving to maintain securely the present system of exploitation for as long as they can. And they are doing their best to extend forever the oppression of the dispossessed class. That is their goal. Accordingly, militarism is kept ready not only for war with foreign countries, but also for the uprisings of the dispossessed class at home. The dispatch of troops to farmers’ uprisings and to the great strikes is one of the proofs substantiating this. Hence, it is the duty of proletarian literature to expose the essence of imperialism and militarism, to appeal to the multitude of workers and farmers, and to rouse the multitude to rise up. Needless to say, we must always continue to do this, even in times of peace when no war is taking place. At such times, we lay stress mainly on exposing the militarist essence, that is to say, on creating antimilitarist literature. [. . .] Translated by Željko Cipriš 328 chapter s ix

7 : Repression, Recantation, and Socialist Realism introduction What was left of proletarian literature in the final years as the state persecuted individuals and crushed the last remaining organizations? This chapter offers a glimpse into that period as writers struggled to maintain some form of commitment through dismal circumstances. “Dismal” turned to dire when Kobayashi Takiji was brutally murdered while under interrogation on February 20, 1933, in effect sounding the death knell for organized struggle (fig. 2). The movement is often said to have ended when the last remaining proletarian arts organization, the Writers League, disbanded in February 1934. Stalwarts soldiered on, however, even starting up journals such as Literary Review. The works in this chapter date from 1934 to 1935— after the dissolution of the league— but readers will notice that even the bleakest works still harbor hope that a movement might be rebuilt in the future. And, as always, there was much debate. To be sure, repression was hardly new to the movement: whether it was writing or organizing, participants lived with the dread that their actions might be severely punished any minute, even as they tried to be prepared for that outcome. Kobayashi Takiji’s account [11] of the mass arrests on March 15, 1928, in which some 1,500 people were arrested, gave memorable literary expression to the terror of nighttime police visitations and brutal interrogation. As we look back on it, it is all the more meaningful that this work, which announced Takiji’s literary talents to a widening audience, also articulated the caprice and severity of repression for activists on the left. The novella, moreover, had real-world consequences for the author and his comrades. Arrested in 1930 for having allegedly contributed money to the outlawed Japanese Communist Party (JCP), Takiji was taunted by the Special Higher Police: “So you’re Kobayashi Takiji, huh? Writing that ‘March 15’ story with all those exaggerated half-truths, you sure did make us all look bad, didn’t you? Well now that we’ve got you, we’re going to give you a taste of what you wrote about.”1 Left-related arrests only increased thereafter, reaching over 10,000 in 1. Eguchi, Tatakai no sakka do¯mei ki, 2:286, cited in Ogino, Takiji no jidai, 107.

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Figure 9. Proletarian writers meet to discuss works for the October 1934 issue of Literary Review This journal started up around the time the Writers League was dissolved in February 1934. Seated at left, Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40]; right, Kawaguchi Hiroshi [37]. Back row, from left: Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31], Moriyama Kei [38], Kubokawa Tsurujiro¯ (NAPF member, husband of Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21]), Matsuda Tokiko [32]. (Matsuda Tokiko no Kai, ed., Matsuda Tokiko: Shashin de miru ai to tatakai no 99nen [Shinnihon Shuppansha, 2014], 46.)

1931, nearly 14,000 in 1932, and over 14,000 in 1933.2 Censorship likewise intensified as 20 percent of books related to politics and society were banned between December 1928 and May 1929, not even counting left-wing journals, which suffered even more frequent banning.3 The state’s system of surveillance was bolstered beginning in 1928, when the police were granted over 2 million yen, nearly half of which went to enhance telephone lines for police communication,4 the realpolitik behind Kataoka Teppei’s unnerving depiction of telephone lines as networks of oppression in “The Linesmen” [12]. The mass arrests of spring 1932 dealt a crucial blow by apprehending many leaders and writers in this anthology including Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 2. Mitchell, Thought Control, 142. 3. Tipton, Japanese Police State, 25. 4. Ibid., 25. 330 chapter s even

40], Nakano Shigeharu [19], Kataoka Teppei, and Kurahara Korehito [13]. Miyamoto Kenji (newly wed husband of Yuriko), Kobayashi Takiji, and Kaji Wataru [16] managed to escape and go underground, although all three were eventually caught by another mechanism of surveillance: spies. The 38,000-plus number of arrests from 1931 to 1933 includes duplicates inasmuch as some of the same people were repeatedly arrested and detained without charges, a strategy of harassment employed by the Special Higher Police to put pressure on those whom it could not formally charge with crimes.5 Take the case of Miyamoto Yuriko, a frequent target, treated “as if [the authorities] hardly noticed they were handling a human being.”6 It was common practice for the authorities to release prisoners on this side of death and thus evade responsibility for their demise. Nearly every author in this anthology experienced arrest, and those who were on the outside were often involved in the time- and money-consuming tasks of providing the necessary supplemental food and warm clothing, but also letters and books to those in prison. We see a glimpse of this in Wakasugi’s “The Mother” [3] as well as Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “Midnight Sun”[35] and Yuriko’s “The Breast” [36] in this chapter. The latter story reveals the sometimes irksome, other times sinister harassment endured by activists operating a proletarian day care and working with labor aid organizations. It is remarkable that a story depicting the duplicity of a police spy could be published at all, let alone in 1935. If the mass arrests of 1932 dealt the movement one serious blow, another came from within the movement itself when two leaders of the JCP recanted, or committed tenko¯ , in 1933. Sano Manabu (1892–1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–1979), who were active with a number of the authors in this anthology from the very beginning, were serving a life sentence when they issued a joint letter renouncing their allegiance to the Communist International (Comintern) and criticizing it for failing to grasp the distinctive conditions of Japan. Sano and Nabeyama’s statement was circulated among those in prison and led to over five hundred recantations. The flood of apostasy came on top of thorough infiltration by police spies. By 1935, the JCP was broken. Why did so many recant? Explanations include the psychological and physical misery of prison, resurgent nationalism in Japan following the Manchurian Incident (and the lure of improved possibilities for the Japanese masses), doubts about Soviet leadership, and, not least, the need to earn an income for those with families to maintain. There was also the elusive phe5. Ibid., 31. 6. Kurahara, “‘Koiwai no ikka,’” 175. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 331

nomenon of the “counterfeit recantation,” which was undertaken with the goal of release and resumption of activities. Despite the many compelling reasons for apostasy, it was nonetheless scarring for individuals and for the movement, at the time and long afterward. In short time, “tenko¯”— once used positively by Marxist Fukumoto Kazuo (1894–1983) in the 1920s to urge a change toward theoretical purity7— became synonymous with public repudiation of proletarian politics. As Miyamoto Yuriko explained in December 1934, “The special term for political recantation— ‘tenko¯’— began to be used in its current sense at the beginning of the summer last year, but it came to have specific meaning in the proletarian literature movement only this year, when the capitulation of writers and playwrights and others became apparent.”8 In “Buds That Survive Winter,” the concluding essay of this volume, Yuriko insisted that apostasy was both an individual and a social problem. The swift emergence of recantation literature was just as swiftly challenged by bourgeois critics. In response, Miyamoto Yuriko insisted that “the only ones who can criticize how some have come to recant are those who continue to resist; and if this problem is to be tackled in its literary aspect, it should not be in the field of bourgeois literature, but rather as a problem whose essence lies within proletarian literature.”9 Yuriko’s frustration is directed at the opportunistic targeting of defeated proletarian writers to further discredit the movement, but her concern is also to better understand the recantations— and recantation literature— of her long-time comrades Murayama Tomoyoshi and Nakano Shigeharu. Like many of their recanting comrades, both men continued to resist as they could, risking and indeed experiencing arrest, incarceration, publication bans, and long-term surveillance. When Murayama’s pioneering “Midnight Sun,” included in this chapter, was published, both it and Murayama’s character were scrutinized for clues to the movement’s failure to withstand repression. Nakano, who would go on to have a distinguished, politically active postwar literary career, wrote influential, agonized reflections and fictional pieces on recantation, of which “A House in the Village” (1935) is especially famous.10 As novelist and critic Noma Hiroshi (1915–1991) cautions, the literature of apostasy 7. Fujita Sho¯zo¯, “Sho¯wa hachinen,” 35, cited in Long, “Songs That Cannot Be Sung,” 72. 8. Miyamoto, “Fuyu,” 129. 9. Ibid. 10. Nakano, Three Works.

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is not a literature in which one declares the decision to recant, then recants and proceeds to seek a new ideology to replace the old. It is a literature that pursues the process wherein the recanter, who steadfastly believes in the correctness of the communist movement and Marxist thought and wishes to advance them, reflects on his weakness, tries to get to the bottom of the defeated self, identify its limits, and arrive at the resolve to go on living by safeguarding his conscience within those limits.11 In truth, when the Writers League disbanded in February 1934, the movement had lost an indispensable element: organization. As with recantation literature, some members of the movement took dissolution of the central organization to be a step forward, even an energizing liberation for proletarian literature. Complicating the volatile situation was the introduction of socialist realism into Japan at this time. Socialist realism is often thought, unflatteringly, to cover the whole of explicitly leftist artistic practice. While it draws on key concepts such as “typicality” going back to Marx and Engels, it became prominent as a theory in specific historical circumstances, at the crux of the two five-year plans of the Soviet Union. In 1932 the dissolution of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) marked the end of a period in which multiple groups argued their various tendencies, and a single Union of Soviet Writers was established under the banner of “socialist realism.” Socialist realism would go on to have a long and controversial career as the official artistic doctrine for many Communist regimes including the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. It may come as a surprise to many readers to learn that in its early phase, at least, even when it was promulgated as official doctrine, socialist realism not only prompted sustained and lively discussion in the Soviet Union itself,12 but its introduction occasioned the last vigorous debate among those committed to the proletarian arts movement in Japan. It isn’t easy to grasp the content of this doctrine from the pronouncements that accompanied its launching at the first Soviet Writers Congress (1934). Perhaps this was intentional, given that the goal was to unify writers in “remold[ing] the mentality of people in the spirit of socialism,” in the words of Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948), in conclusion to his address to the congress. Zhdanov, whose party-centered postwar cultural doctrine gave us the term “Zhdanovism,” urged writers to use their “weapons (genres, styles, 11. Noma, “Kaisetsu,” in NPBT, 7:520. 12. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment, 100–104.

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Figure 10. Kobayashi Takiji memorial gathering February 21, 1935, at Taigaro¯, Tokyo. This is a rarely seen “smiling” version of a somber gathering. Its existence along with the solemn version in the home of Ito Jun, son of Kishi Yamaji (see caption to fig. 2), Kishi’s relationship to the group assembled, and his absence from the photo had long suggested that Kishi was the photographer. Ito’s discovery of the original glass plates among his father’s belongings in fall 2014 provided confirming evidence. Front row, left to right: Ko¯no Sakura, Yamada Kiyo, Miyamoto Yuriko [36, 40], Kobayashi Yuki, Seki, and Sango (Takiji’s younger sister, mother, and brother), Kurahara Korehiro and Fuyuko (parents of Kurahara Korehito [13], then in prison). Center row: Hara Sen (Proletarian Theater League member, wife of Nakano Shigeharu [19]), Kataoka Teppei [12], Murayama Tomoyoshi [35] (see also figs. 1 and 6), Tsuboi Shigeji, Kubokawa Tsurujiro¯ (NAPF member, husband of Sata Ineko), Tateno Nobuyuki, Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21], Kawaguchi Hiroshi [37], Nakano Suzuko (Working Women, sister of Nakano Shigeharu), Tsuboi Sakae, Murayama Kazuko [17, 18], Yoneya (first name unknown), Ueno Takeo, Yanase Masamu (fig. 1). Back row: Namae Kenji, Eguchi Kan,Watanabe Junzo¯, Nakano Shigeharu, Fujimori Seikichi. (Courtesy Ito Jun.)

forms and methods of literary creation) in their diversity and fullness, selecting all the best that has been created in this sphere by all previous epochs.”13 In other words, the program of socialist realism, when it entered Japan, did not seem prescriptive with regard to either content or form. In her brief introduction to the Soviet development, Miyamoto Yuriko cautioned, “Whether the slogan of socialist realism is immediately applicable to Japan is a question to be subjected to vigorous popular debate.”14 13. Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature.” 14. Miyamoto, “Shakaishugi riarizumu,” 64. 334 chapter s even

And debated it was. Socialist realism, the new overarching artistic policy in a country that had undergone a proletarian revolution, became a rallying cry for many still committed to resistance, including recanters. Despite its fluidity when it emerged from the first Writers Congress, the authority of the Soviet Union gave “socialist realism” a sense of solidity for Japanese writers, especially given their own bleak prospects. But what did the slogan mean? Did it mean that the “dialectical materialist method for literary creation” promoted by RAPP was no longer valid? Would it finally make possible the unification of literary method, movement organization, and worldview? And where in Japan was there a reality that could provide material for a “socialist” realism, anyway? This last question, whether the debaters intended it or not, turned out to be intimately related to the core of Sano and Nabeyama’s recantation statement, namely, the claim that the Comintern had failed to grasp the “distinctive conditions” of Japan and its colonies. For defenders of socialist realism like Nakano Shigeharu and Moriyama Kei [38], the critics who asserted its inappropriateness for Japanese conditions fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the struggle and the role of literature in that struggle. Whatever “Japanese reality” might be, it didn’t exist in isolation from world conditions,15 nor was art a simple reflection of social reality. 16 Regardless of their different positions on socialist realism, the theoretical arguments from Kawaguchi, Moriyama, and Kim [37, 38, 39] excerpted here reflect these writers’ continued, serious commitment to pursuing a “realism” adequate to their desperate times. hbs & nf

(35) Midnight Sun (excerpt) murayama tomoyoshi Translated from Central Review (April 1934) It is surely unfair to Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977) that despite his many contributions to the proletarian arts movement, his writing is here represented by a mockingly autobiographical story written after his recantation. But “Midnight Sun” was one of the most discussed works of the emerging genre of recantation literature, eliciting disgust at his indulgent self-revelations, scorn for his failure to address his recantation squarely, and sympathy for the demoralization brought on by more than two years in prison. 15. Moriyama, “Proletarian Realism and ‘Socialist Realism,’” this volume, 399. 16. Nakano, “Mittsu no mondai,” 156. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 335

Murayama Tomoyoshi was a leader in both the modernist art world and proletarian theater where he was a playwright, actor, director, and costume and set designer, as well as a theorist, performance artist, architect, and illustrator. After a brief stint at Tokyo Imperial University, Murayama went to Weimar Germany where he became engrossed in Expressionism and Constructivism. He is credited with introducing Constructivism to Japan in the form of his Mavo movement when he returned in 1923.17 Murayama was active in the proletarian movement from the establishment of the early League of Japanese Proletarian Arts in 1925 through his recantation in 1934. He contributed artwork to proletarian journals, including Boys Battle Flag, which was edited for a time by his wife, Murayama Kazuko [17, 18], and signed his illustrations “Tom” (see figs. 1 and 6). One of his most famous plays, Tale of a Crime Syndicate (1929), for which he was arrested, dramatized the efforts of Chinese railway workers to unionize under Japanese military repression. Arrested again in 1932, he recanted in 1934. Though expressly banned from writing, he formed a theater group to implement the new slogan of “socialist realism.” He was arrested a final time in 1940 for staging a play by Maksim Gorky (1868–1936), spending another two years in prison before being released on bail. After the war, he resumed his activities, staging proletarian dramas and taking a theater company on tour in the People’s Republic of China. Along with enjoying the skill with which Murayama produces a wry self-portrait, readers will likely find it satisfying to recognize his thinly fictionalized companions: his wife, Murayama Kazuko, as Kano Noriko, Kurahara Korehito [13] as Kimura So¯kichi, and Nakano Shigeharu [19] as Matsui Nobuzo¯.18 In her essay [40] published eight months later, Miyamoto Yuriko addresses this story when she expresses concern that unflattering recantation literature might further discredit proletarian literature for the fainthearted. This is the only fictional work in this anthology not translated in its entirety. Balancing space constraints with overall priorities led to the omission of one section (so marked), amounting to one-fourth of the whole. hbs An editorial meeting for the May edition of a small magazine for the children of laborers was held one evening at the home of Susukida Ippei in the Kichijo¯ji area. The April edition had been the first to be produced after Kano 17. Inoue, “Murayama Tomoyoshi,” 557; Weisenfeld, Mavo, 22–48. 18. Kunioka, “Murayama Tomoyoshi,” 72–81. 336 chapter s even

Noriko was chosen as editor in chief. People had nitpicked about this and that, pointing out various flaws throughout the issue. Those bastards, she kept thinking to herself, she’d show ’em what she’s made of! Asleep or awake, a stubborn mood had taken hold of her, making her fumble after dishes only to have them fall and shatter, or miss the stitches in her knitting and have to undo them who knew how many times. After a week of this, she had come up with a thoroughgoing plan that should have been impervious to all objection and brought it to the meeting. She ran this plan of hers by the six men of the editorial staff, starting with the master of the house, Susukida Ippei, bald and old enough to be her father, and completely led them all by the nose. Things were settled mostly according to her original plan, and rather full of herself, she unintentionally began smirking triumphantly. “Well, I have some things to attend to, so I’ll be leaving ahead of you guys,” she said as she stood up, doing her best to hide the smirk as she fitted her dark-green beret onto her bobbed hair. It was more or less standard procedure after such conferences for the men to sit around and, as if to compensate for their expenditure of brainpower, gab endlessly long into the night until they had to make a mad dash for the last train home. As she stepped down into the entry hall with its sagging floorboards, two men were standing there in the dim light, speaking with each other in lowered voices. One was bald old Susukida, who had left his seat just moments ago as the meeting was winding down; the other man, wearing dark celluloid-green eyeglasses, arms crossed, was, of all people, Kimura So¯kichi. Since it seemed to be a secret discussion related to their work, Noriko greeted them with only a quick glance as she skirted past. As she stooped to put on her shoes in the darkness, Kimura’s ever calm and clear voice was audible speaking in subdued tones. If she could just have a word with Kimura, she was thinking, when Susukida’s voice sounded from above: “Miss Noriko, it’s dark, isn’t it? The way home, I mean.” “You can say that again! Why on earth do you live in such a gloomy old place, Mr. Susukida?!” Complaining loudly, she opened the front door with a clatter and peered out into the darkness lit neither by moonlight, starlight, nor electric light. As she was about to step out, Kimura’s voice reached her: “Well then, why don’t I come along with you?” Until it intersected the somewhat busy avenue near the national railways train station, the road ahead stretched on and on for about a quarter of a mile with not a single house to be seen, nothing but wide-open vegetable patches on either side. “So, I hear the editorial meeting for the children’s magazine was today, hm?” re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 337

“Yes, it was. What a big hassle, being editor in chief!” “Come now. You’re perfect for the job, I’d say.” “But still it really is a hassle. Nobody ever agrees with my ideas.” “In what way don’t they agree?” “I mean, why can’t they see how a child thinks? I certainly can, clear as day.” “But of course you can. You’re something of a kid yourself, after all.” Kimura said grinning. “Well now! You might have a point there! But really, since they don’t understand how a real child thinks, they just stick to the theory and that’s it. If you try to foist that kind of stuff on kids, they won’t go for it. I think you’ve got to appeal to a real child’s sensibilities or it won’t work at all. Do you think I’m wrong on this?” “No, by no means. It’s no good to just take the theories and sensibilities of an adult and water them down for the kids.” “You said it!” Noriko’s voice, forlorn a moment ago, instantly came to life. “You’ve got copies of that German children’s magazine Trommel at home, don’t you? If so, may I please borrow them?” “Sure, I’ll lend them to you. I’ll look around for them first thing.” “In that case, I’ll stop by your place to pick them up soon.” After a bit, Noriko spoke again, “I’m just no good at language study.” “At Russian, you mean? I’m sure that’s not so!” “No, I’m no good at all really, but you know, I’ve been thinking about giving it my best shot anyway, maybe getting together some fellow comrades who also want to study and taking lessons from a Russian teacher at night school.” “Sure, that’s the spirit. If you keep at it every day you should be able to pick it up well enough.” “Still, I have a lot on my mind. Sometimes I’m lonely or sad, and there are things I want to do but just can’t.” “— ” Noriko suddenly began to sniff intently. “Why, it’s daphne flowers! Can you smell them?” “Well.” Kimura seemed to be twitching his nose in the darkness, but replied, “I sure can’t.” “You can’t smell this, even? What a dumb nose! It’s really a wonderful scent, I’ll have you know. Gosh. When it comes right down to it, my nose is as sensitive as an animal’s, I guess. Almost superhuman. You mean you really can’t smell them?” Noriko, searching out the scent, flew on ahead with hurried steps. Be338 chapter s even

hind her, Kimura could be heard saying, “Thing is, I don’t know what daphne flowers smell like to begin with.” Noriko stomped into the puddles left over from the downpour the day before with surprising vigor. Along the way she had been stepping into them a bit once or twice, but now, full speed ahead, she sent water scattering in great splashes. “What’s with you, splashing around like that?” Kimura said, as if displeased, yet suppressing a bemused wonder. Every so often the tepid wind carried the sounds of trains passing in the distance, but besides that the only thing audible was Noriko’s feet splishsplashing. Ahead of them part of the sky flashed bright for a moment, and the light reflected faintly in the water at Noriko’s feet. Suddenly Kimura swept up alongside her and took her arm in his as a foreigner would, saying to her as if reproving a child, “Tsk tsk, settle down now.” “It’s dark,” Noriko began blabbering away, “It’s dark, it’s scary, oh no, it’s really scary, what’ll we do, whatever shall we do?!” Halfway in tears, staggering unsteadily, she felt as if she were being pulled along when they came to where the first streetlamp spread its dim light. The bustle of the train station was right in front of them. Noriko brushed off Kimura’s arm from hers, saying, “You go ahead.” “All right, then,” Kimura said, walking on, the neat creases of his Kurume cotton kimono now clearly visible. The stores were all closed, but in a few cafés the voices of women singing and laughing echoed noisily. From the station came a man wearing a flimsy felt hat, Matsui Nobuzo¯, a man of letters who lived in Susukida’s neighborhood and worked in the same organization. He looked at them suspiciously and in a glum tone of voice asked, “Hey, where’ve you two been?” Realizing that she and Kimura made an awkward combination, Noriko, prone to embarrassment anyway, blushed deeper and launched into a rapid-fire explanation, finishing up with “I was scared, it being dark and all. Really scared.” But Matsui only snickered suggestively; so, flustered, she opened her eyes wide and repeated emphatically, “IT— WAS— SCARY!” “As long as you’re with Mr. Kimura, there’s nothing to be afraid of, eh?” Noriko turned away somewhat and pretended to ignore his comment. Kimura, grinning broadly, suddenly turned serious and said to Matsui, “Oh, now that I think of it, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk with you about.” Assuming that it was probably a secret discussion about their work, Noriko, saying good-bye, reverted to her usual self and with high-pitched laughter waved good-bye to them as she strode alone into the station. She looked back toward the street as she bought her ticket, but Kimura and Matsui seemed to have completely forgotten her, lost in discussion as they turned back. The train picked up Noriko, lost in thoughts of Kimura, and forged ahead. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 339

For a long time she had been sure that Kimura had feelings for her as well, but had she been mistaken? His unenthusiastic attitude today would suggest so. Was he utterly without feelings for her? Was she just another woman as far as he was concerned? For a while now there had been many a sign to the contrary.— As she troubled herself over these questions, her shoes oozed water onto the train floor. Kimura had gone abroad right after graduating from higher school and studied philosophy and literature in Germany and Russia for four or five years. He had returned to Japan three or four years ago and, through Susukida’s introduction, joined the arts group to which Noriko and the others belonged. At first he was not made much of, writing art treatises and critical essays in clunky prose, but eventually everyone came to realize that this style of his, lacking flair and making everything seem self-evident, came from his grappling with issues head-on, from their very foundation, and in an orderly fashion drawing them to conclusions that followed quite naturally but were nonetheless invariably breathtaking. They swiftly came to value his opinion. The treatises and essays of other writers before him, such as those by Noriko’s husband, Kano Eiji, or Matsui Nobuzo¯, had appeared spectacular, with vivid turns of phrase and sharp rebuttals, and had seemed to smash the enemy’s aesthetic theories to pieces, but Kimura’s essays calmly and realistically demonstrated their own persuasiveness and made the enemy’s theories collapse of themselves. This, as well as his small eyes deep in thought, his height of five feet eight inches along with his habit of stooping as if out of consideration for short people, his square chin befitting an intellectual, his fuzzy earlobes, all of this had drawn Noriko to him for quite some time now. On the second floor of their house in the middle of Zo¯shigaya the lights were still on, and the shadow cast by her husband Kano’s head of shaggy hair kept moving in and out of view in the brightly lit glass windows as he went about doing something. As soon as she had gotten in the door, Kano shouted from the second floor, “I’m hungry. Get two orders of take-out noodles.” So she sent the maid out to get the noodles, took off her dripping stockings and wiped her feet clean. When she brought the noodles up, Kano, who had been standing around idle, plopped down into a chair and began eating away. “You’re so quiet tonight. What’s wrong, are the noodles no good?” Noriko looked at Kano’s face as he ate. He had a brainy-looking face, with double eyelids sunken in above his eyes, thick forceful lips, and two deep wrinkles distinctly spanning his forehead. Whenever he was turning something over in his mind, like now, he would roll his eyes around left and right restlessly and look out of sorts. “Come on now, what’s on your mind? What?” 340 chapter s even

He remained silent for a while, the edges of his lips twitching, but finally he said, “Actually, there’s, er, something I need to talk with you about.” It is quite probable that Kano had never once spoken to Noriko in so serious a tone in all the seven years of their married life. Noriko was born the youngest daughter of many children in a prosperous merchant household in Kyushu. She graduated from a girl’s school in Tokyo and, with a love for literature, became a writer for a certain magazine. That’s when she became enchanted with the talents and looks of Kano, who was making quite a stir at the time as a new progressive writer, and decided right away that she wanted to marry him. Her parents felt no small unease, concerned that Kano’s household was a poor one with nothing to its name but debts and, as for Kano himself, there seemed to be something rather decadent about his talents. However, considering the fact that she’d possessed a totally childish personality since the day she was born and couldn’t even cook or sew, they resigned themselves to the fact that it would be absolutely impossible to marry her off to a normal household. They opted not to oppose her wishes, and even provided for Kano’s suit for the wedding ceremony. Noriko was certainly an odd character, and when they began their married life Kano felt as if he had lost his way in some unexplored wilderness. At first it was all very interesting, and he kept his balance by taking a detached attitude toward her habits as much as he could, but in the end he reached his limit and just couldn’t stand her anymore. One of the chief attractions of a young woman was a soft voice, but Noriko’s was anything but, he began to think; since she was from Kyushu, her face looked Korean, lacking the well-sculpted delineations of Scandinavians that he found so attractive. Gradually he came to think that he had lost the glitter of his debut, that his art had reached a dead end all because of her, all because he was stuck with this outlandish woman. Whenever he was writing, Noriko would take up her knitting in a corner of the study, and when he would say, “Go off to the next room! I don’t care who the writer is, he can’t write a damn thing if you don’t leave him alone!” she would plead, “I’ll be dead still” or “I won’t even breathe,” and when he insisted, she would slam the sliding door open and storm out with a tearful face, but before even ten minutes had passed she would sneak back in despite herself, her lonely heart unresponsive to her own injunctions. Whenever she started thinking about something, she had to think it all the way through to the very end, and had no room to think about anything else. No matter how many times you called out to her she wouldn’t hear, and she would often drop things onto the floor in a daze. It utterly mystified him how every now and then Noriko could just sit there for hours on end just staring blankly, probably entranced by some silly fancy. She wrote good poetry and re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 341

children’s stories, but she left her manuscripts scattered about and made no attempt to keep track of her publications. For Kano, who liked to keep everything filed systematically and logged down in notebooks and scrapbooks, this messiness was intolerable. On the whole, wasn’t this just a bunch of nonsense, he thought to himself. Taking a disdainful attitude toward her and ignoring her, he had stopped speaking seriously with her for quite a while now. “What is it?” Noriko, without taking her eyes from him, felt around for her chair and, grasping it, pulled it to the table and sat down. “I, well, I love you very much.” “Oh, come on now. What are you trying to pull?” Somewhat relieved, she grinned broadly at him, but he just sat there looking at her without saying anything, so she went on without really meaning what she said: “I’ve known you don’t love me for a long time now. I haven’t believed in your love for ages.” For a few moments he just looked at her fleetingly, but finally he said, “I love you. But, to tell the truth, I’ve found someone I love more.” She took it to be a joke. “Oh, sure. I know all about it.” Confused, seeing that what he was saying wasn’t getting through to her, he grasped her hand with its gracefully long, slim fingers of which she was so proud. “Listen, there is a woman I’ve promised to marry.” Feeling her hand gripped so tightly, seeing the emotional intensity in his face and his embarrassed grin, she was at last startled. Ineluctable fate had circled around and suddenly struck. Kano went on, trying to blurt it all out as quickly as possible. “It’s a real mess, I know, but there’s no way around it. I mean, what can I do? This household is just no good. And things aren’t going to get any better. Surely you see it too. We’re just too different in character. That’s not your fault, of course. I’m an incurable egotist. But for me to grow as a person, for my art to develop, I just absolutely need someone who will completely envelop me, fostering my growth while taking care of me— ” “Who is she?” It was as if Noriko had turned beggar-like before this person, whoever she was, looking up at her, finger in mouth, drooling; she was jealous of her, but at the same time envious, and before she knew it, her heart was growing faint and she felt as if she were in a daze. 342 chapter s even

“Um, yes, well, as for that— it’s kind of a complicated relationship, you see— she’s someone’s wife.” Noriko tried guessing who it was a couple of times, deliberately choosing only women completely unlike herself, like Mrs. Hasegawa or Mrs. Mishima. “No, not her.” “Well, who then? Who?” She asked this as if asking simply out of curiosity, though her eyes were suddenly welling up with tears. Stroking her tousled hair, he answered, “Saeki Mizuho.” [Omitted here is the passage that describes Kano’s delusional affair with actress Saeki Mizuho and his abandonment by her.] Around the time that Noriko had finished editing twelve issues of the children’s magazine, Kimura disappeared. His tall stooping frame was nowhere to be found. Another year and a half passed, and Kano was more absorbed in his work than ever, though once or twice a month he still got himself dead drunk, when early one morning he was unexpectedly taken away from his house. The next day he learned that Kimura had been found in hiding and taken away at the same time. Within a couple of days the full scale of these arrests became evident: close to twenty members of their group had met the same fate as the two of them. From now on the group’s work would get harder than ever. While he was with the police, Kano found out that Kimura, unlike him, had not revealed a thing the whole time. He beat his head against the wall in self-reproach but couldn’t help realizing that such fortitude was absolutely beyond him. While sitting in a dark corner and imagining Kimura’s ordeal again and again, he tried inflicting physical pain on himself after making sure that no one was watching, but when all was said and done, he finally had to acknowledge that under like conditions he would crumble under pressure. Then he found out that Matsui Nobuzo¯ had taken the same attitude as Kimura— Matsui Nobuzo¯, whom he had always looked down on for being obtuse and careless about his work. The self-esteem he’d built up over the years came tumbling down with a great clatter, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, no matter how frantically he looked for excuses. During these long dark days he analyzed in detail every aspect of Kimura and Matsui— upbringing, education, face, appearance, habits, casual remarks— and compared them to his own one by one. Matsui was a little guy just over five feet tall. He had a pale, thin, sickly face with rheumy eyes. His fingertips were tobacco stained and he had long, dirty nails. He had been a classmate of Kano’s since middle school, but with his gloomy, twisted personality he re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 343

had only two or three friends then, and Kano hadn’t been one of them. His home was in the countryside of Akita or somewhere, but he had long been lodging at his uncle’s house and for some reason seemed to be estranged from his parents. Despite his long acquaintance with Matsui, Kano had no idea what his father or mother looked like or what kind of people they were. While Kano had gotten sidetracked with decadent art, hankering after fame and intent on self-promotion, Matsui had gone on smoking his cigarettes with a depressed air and hanging around with his small circle of friends. Finally he wrote one excellent piece of fiction and became famous. After that, he couldn’t seem to write a well-constructed piece to save his life, but here and there in his inconsistent, half-assed works lurked a mysteriously forceful intensity, allowing him to maintain his status as a novelist. His most striking characteristic, however, appeared during discussions that occurred at their various meetings. He always chose a corner where he would sit crosslegged, hanging his head with its slightly disheveled hair, but at some point, he would suddenly add his low voice to the discussion, maintaining his hangdog posture all the while. Whenever he had taken a stand and quibbled interminably over some point to no avail, he would immediately take up another point and start in from that angle. If that didn’t work, he would try to trip you up on your own words and go from there. When the chairman tried to wrap things up, he would say, “Chairman, wait please. I’m systematically advancing an argument here.” Even if it was pretty much clear and obvious that he’d been refuted, he would, as usual, continue to argue his opinion slowly and calmly. Not only did this dogged persistency utterly sour everyone’s mood, the impatient among them even twiddled their thumbs in boredom. Still, those who knew that Matsui, just like a mother who refuses to give up hope in her dying child to the very end, had himself carefully thought out his own opinions beforehand, and hence for this very reason was so insistent on them, sympathized with him even as they fretted about the lavish expenditure of their valuable time. But after finally conceding, he would then start talking as if he’d been asserting the other person’s opinion all along, and even his erstwhile sympathizers had to give up on this incorrigible fellow. Thus, when he held a correct opinion and refuted the errors of his rival, those few people who also held the correct view felt as if they had hundreds of thousands of reinforcements, but when his thinking was muddled, due perhaps to his weak physique, and he began insisting on one error after another, he ended up the very picture of wretchedness. Then again, if perchance there were people listening to Matsui’s debating who couldn’t really care less how the argument came to be resolved, they were nonetheless end344 chapter s even

lessly fascinated at how he could advance along the twists and turns of a narrow, intricate path and come up on his rival unexpectedly from behind, then enter into a blind alley he himself had made and dig up a way out, every now and then using some odd turn of phrase redolent of a rare poem. Kimura, born into a family who had served as shrine priests generation upon generation since ancient times, likewise insisted on his own opinions but differed from Matsui in striding straight down a wide-open road with artless simplicity. When yanked onto some unexpected, entangled byway by Matsui, he would look up at the ceiling with a melancholy air but finally he would untangle the knots and get back on track. Kano would look on without taking part in the debate whenever he had the slightest suspicion that there might be flaws in his viewpoint, but once he was sure he could make a go of it, he would mercilessly push ahead and stab at his target relentlessly. However, if he realized he was wrong, he would acknowledge so immediately, though with a grimace. This characteristic of Kano’s persisted even when Kimura went underground and for all intents and purposes was no longer present as a colleague. Thus, when Kano received directives from Kimura, he carried them out with flying colors, but Matsui had a hard time getting going and frequently acted when it was too late, increasing Kano’s self-confidence as a result. As soon as Kano had gotten used to prison, he began to read book after book with boundless voracity. Apart from his fifteen minutes a day of exercise, he never took his eyes away from the printed word, even while eating or excreting, and every week Noriko had to come up with six books or more to present to him, borrowing them or hunting them down at used bookstores. During the day he spent his time absorbed in reading, but during the long, long night he was consigned to his many worries. From random statements he heard during visits, from the vague wording in letters that passed the prison chaplain’s censorship, from careless remarks he picked up from his jailers, and from reading between the lines in the weekly newspaper put out by the prison association, from all of these he could tell that the state of society seemed to be shifting drastically. He could picture to himself what life would be like here for at least four or five years onward down to the most trifling details, but he couldn’t begin to imagine any further. Then again, his very existence itself could just get cut off in this place. Noriko would send him postcards or letters written in her miniscule handwriting every three days, bring him food and books obtained with the manuscript fees she earned from her poems and children’s stories on Mondays every week, and visit him face-to-face once every twenty days. Her face perspiring, she made a point of choosing a corner in the visire pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 345

tation room, where she leaned against the wall, quickly took out notebook and pencil, and started writing down the errands he dictated to her, nodding “Okay, and then? Okay, then what?” Suddenly the sly grin of a mischievous child spread across her face as she told him, “Since just a week ago, I’ve been going swimming once a day. I get up at six in the morning and head to Jingu¯ Pool. At ten sen an hour it’s a bit pricey, but oh well. When we go, folks from the theater are there in the crowd, and they do all kinds of funny impersonations and things and are really popular with everyone at the pool. Yesterday chubby ol’ Nagahara, who can’t swim at all, was up on the diving board being goofy and really putting on a show when he finally slipped and fell in and nearly drowned.” With another sly grin she added, “I guess fools jump in where angels fear to tread water, eh?” After returning to his cell, Kano thought of this lame joke of hers and chuckled to himself. Just what was she thinking, really? Was this a ploy to keep his spirits up? Or was she truly such a child? Or did she think acting like a child was somehow charming? Noriko’s letters were also one of a kind. A complicated discussion of dialectical materialism that she was studying intently during his absence would lead right into a detailed account of the plot of some Marx Brothers movie full of nonsense that she’d gone to see at the Ho¯gakuza Theater with someone the day before. He too sent letters to Noriko filled to the brim with tiny characters six times a week, the maximum he was allowed. But these letters were filled with nothing but critical commentary and impressions concerning the books he had read, mostly fragmentary notes of no use to anyone. Noriko wrote to him, “Letters from Mr. Kimura and Mr. Matsui are easy to understand and interesting, and everyone reads them and gets a lot out of them. Won’t you please write letters that are easier to understand, like theirs? Even if you happen to be writing the same thing about the same subject as them, we can’t really figure out what you’re getting at because of your convoluted wording.” Reading this, Kano realized that here too his egotism could be seen, that he wrote for himself while Kimura and Matsui wrote for everyone. He blushed for shame, but even if he tried and tried, he just couldn’t seem to change the way he wrote. Kano spent close to two years like this, but after getting through the second stifling summer, something unfathomable and irresistible began to eat away at him. The flesh and blood— and something else somehow indefinable— of his long-forgotten forbears from the immeasurably distant past seemed to be utterly consuming him, the trifling product their line had borne. No matter how much he cried and screamed or how much he pushed 346 chapter s even

and struck back at them, his efforts were ineffectual. In his night-and-day struggle with this thing, he would groan out loud without realizing it, beat his head with his own hands, and scratch at the walls. As for Noriko’s letters and visits, if she was late getting him the books he had asked for or got the wrong one, or if fewer letters came from her than before, he reacted to these and various and sundry other mishaps arising from her disorganized nature rather erratically, sometimes heaping abuse on her, sometimes imploring her in a servile manner. And even though deep down in his heart he had no doubts, he even cast roundabout aspersions on her morality as a means of getting a response out of her. Suddenly, just when he was expecting her to feel sorry for him and apologize, the following letter came. Utterly caught off guard, he had to read it over and over dozens of times. “How much have you hurt me all these years? You could never even imagine. In a word, you’re an egotist by nature, and have no idea whatsoever how much pain you cause others. I have dealings with many men, but not a one of them is as self-centered as you. All are extremely kind, and my association with them is pleasurable, and best of all, I can rest easy with them. While you do seem to feel sorry for having caused me pain, your feelings smack of oldfashioned humanistic sentimentalism. I detest all of that. Such sentiments are nothing more than petty bourgeois exaggeration, and are essentially devoid of reality. You seem to be making an effort to resolve the contradictions in our married life with such sentiments, but that is wasted effort as far as I can see. I am not of your sort, and when it comes to morality at least, I intend to keep after the essence, the truth of matters. So do me a favor and don’t worry about my lifestyle when it comes to morality. I will commit no mistakes in that regard, whether I am being supervised or not. Because I have my self-respect as a human being. And should that, by any chance, be contrary to your own benefit, you will have to excuse me. You should have known long since that my personality is such that if there were something that I found to be correct, something I found to be ideal, and something I felt to be moral, I would have a very difficult time casting it away. I love truth, depth, and calm more than anything. I most dislike all that is opposed to these values.” No matter what kind of person he was, was there really a need to launch such a frontal assault on him, here of all places? He tried to convince himself that this wasn’t how she really felt, that she wrote all of this from some passing outburst, but no. Not another letter came from her after that. She did show up as usual for the once-every-twenty-day visit, but there was none of her nonsense talk and smiles. She either looked fleetingly at him re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 347

with a gloomy expression or else stared fixedly at the wall behind his head. Through the undersized window of the visitation room, he could see outside a small flowerbed with yellow chrysanthemums in full bloom. “How much have you hurt me all these years?” Noriko had written. His wedding ring had been loose and wouldn’t stay on his finger, all because he refused to go to the jeweler’s. At the wedding ceremony he had to squeeze his fingers together into a fist so it wouldn’t fall off. Eventually he took it to a pawnshop and sold it. No sooner had Noriko’s classmate begun playing the wedding march than he made a dash for the altar up front, and the bride, left behind, had to follow with hurried steps, with the congregation on both sides quite taken aback. When the ceremony was over and they were to go home, he stubbornly refused to ride together with her in the car, instead singing stupid songs with some of his decadent friends and tottering home quite as if he were utterly contemptuous of this marriage. Once he had kicked her down in the snow; another time he had thrown her out of the house with only a small bundle in hand. Such being the case, was it that he didn’t love Noriko? No, he loved her. He loved her, but there was something wrong with that love. How about Saeki Mizuho four years ago? Was it really the case that Mizuho’s love had been of a base nature while his hadn’t? In his chagrin at being dumped, that’s what he had forced himself to conclude, but was it really so? No doubt during their four months together they shared a “pure” love. A love in which an older woman looked on him with empathy, a love in which he was fully relied on. When it came to self-interested calculations of an ulterior nature, he had had far more than she. He was contriving to replace his wife in order to establish a household more conducive to his work. This was what brought on his abrupt declaration to Noriko, his letter to Narita [Mizuho’s husband], and then complete failure. His love for Noriko likewise had something instrumental about it. In normal times, he expected her to take care of household business for him and comfort his tired body and mind, and now to get things to him on a regular basis and comfort his lonely mind. And yet was it really so bad, this love that takes without giving? He’d realized for a long time now that this was what his love was like, but he actually prided himself on being blessed with such an attitude. He had before him a great task that needed to be accomplished. For that reason all other considerations had to take second place. Women, beings obviously inferior to him, were indeed doing a job of some value in assisting the accomplisher of great things, that is, himself. Furthermore, they could thereby improve themselves in the process. This proposition, sometimes obviously, sometimes not, was the guiding force in his attitude toward women. Even in casual relationships he refused to be constricted by the usual formalities and 348 chapter s even

thought, “Forgive me, but it’s all for the sake of a greater cause. And of course if you take a long view of things, this is of benefit to you as well, that is, if you aren’t too incompetent to take advantage of that benefit. And if you are, then what was this relationship to you anyway?” As for those who worried their heads over women’s issues— whatever those were— he felt pity for such bothersome “feminists.” That this way of thinking was all too convenient did trouble him some, but if this wasn’t the way things were, what was? For the life of him he couldn’t think of any other way and couldn’t abide another way of thinking. Yet now Noriko seemed to be denouncing this way of thinking. He tried looking in the letter for just a glimpse of some word expressing gentleness for him, obvious, hidden, or even subconscious, but he couldn’t find a one. When it came right down to it, this was an explicit denunciation of him. And this denunciation was suffused with a power against which he was defenseless. What’s more, the letter even declared that he had absolutely no power to recover from this denunciation. Also, the word “morality” was used continually in the letter, but how was it being used? If it was being used in the ordinary humdrum way of meaning a wife’s chastity, that at any rate suited him fine. He was sure from long experience of Noriko’s extreme perfectionism in this regard and so wasn’t really worried, but it was good to have her confirm that this unexplained break-off in communications was not brought on due to another man. Anyway, since he had been stuck in these unnatural circumstances for two years and running with no end in sight, this definite declaration on her part would come in handy in driving away any doubts that might assail him in his darker moments. That’s because he was certain that her personality was such that it was impossible for her to tell a lie. After two months had passed, Kano stopped thinking about this problem for the time being. A larger problem was pressing on his mind. Then another month passed, and one morning when the sun came up glittering after a night of snowfall, Noriko came and sat down in the corner of the visitation room. Without further ado, Kano, watching her face as he did so, announced, “I’ve finally decided to, you know, recant.” Contrary to his expectations, she showed no strong reaction but looked into his eyes for a moment, and then asked, “Is there no other way?” “Yeah, there’s no other way. Please tell everyone else the same.” Then, feeling as if he had just set down a heavy burden, he turned away a face full of tears that wouldn’t stop. And then, not long thereafter, as the year was coming to a close, he was released on bail. His friends received him back in many different ways. Some glared at him with hatred; some couldn’t hide the contempt for him they held in their re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 349

hearts; some felt sorry for him; some were earnestly drunk with joy; some tried hard to restrain their joy. And he heard all kinds of surprising news. From one moment to the next he was laughing boisterously, shedding tears, fuming angrily, feeling ashamed. The extent of Noriko’s joy at having him back was rather unexpected. She wanted to get him caught up on all that had occurred during his absence so that he would quickly come to understand how things shaped up at present. Kano tried to get a grip on the facts coming at him all at once as fast as he could and formulate his own views concerning them, but he didn’t have the strength to think yet. He had wanted so much to read newspapers when he was in prison, but when he spread one out now, the exaggerated rustling sounds and the gigantic sheets of paper all wore on his nerves, and no matter where he started reading, none of the articles seemed of any interest. When he tried reading something published during his absence, be it fiction or nonfiction, he would lose track of what he was reading after two or three lines. In the chaotic swirl of his anxiety at falling into the unknown and his happiness at being set free, he could only lie exposed to the sensations and feelings that sported before him. He couldn’t figure out what he thought of Noriko either. Even though he’d lived with her for a long time, he lacked confidence to say that deep love had given him a thorough knowledge of her, and now their two-and-a-half-year separation had turned her into something he didn’t know what to make of. And besides, there was that unexplained break-off in communication for half a year, too. Anyway, he was reassured by the way she had seemed to welcome him back from the bottom of her heart and assiduously explain to him all that had happened during his absence, but now and then he would stop and stare at her face, surprised by her new vocabulary and turns of phrase, enriched and transformed by the influence of the friends— men and women— she had naturally associated with during his absence. But even then he was constantly trying half consciously to ferret out from behind her words her true feelings for him and her activities while he was away, but he wasn’t able to recover the intimacy to ask her openly. Two or three days of this passed, but then the barrier was breached and a devastating, utterly unanticipated urge for raw speech assaulted him. That he had spent a long time among people who entirely lacked love meant that even the slightest thing she did for him sent him to seventh heaven, but it also made his need for love inexhaustible. Her love had to be perfect and flawless. In recompense for having been starved for love for such a long time, he had a right to demand it from his own wife. No matter what kind of husband he had been in the past, and no matter if he had now strayed from the movement. 350 chapter s even

Around this time, a letter came addressed to Noriko from Matsui Nobuzo¯, who was still behind bars. It was the first letter he had sent to her since learning that Kano was out on bail. In it the following was written: You are often in my thoughts, and I have never ceased to sincerely hope that all is well with you. Human beings are terribly insignificant and yet full of possibilities. They say that long ago, that famous Edo lumber merchant Kawamura Zuiken raised the fallen roof tiles of Zo¯jo¯ji Temple with only a kite string. In truth, taking a heavy tile fallen flat on the ground and using a thin kite string to place it back on the roof is something that occurs frequently in human life. Thus it is that preserving this thin kite string properly is rather important. Each of us invariably relies on his helpmate, his wife. This is so regardless of her actual ability or lack thereof (the same probably applies to husbands from the wife’s point of view). In any case it is a fact that we rely on them to an extremely great degree. And so I wish all the best for both of you. We men always entrust the proper care of our thin kite strings to our wives. It’s an old story, I suppose, but once a construction crew was building a large smokestack. They had just finished it and everyone had come down, and they had broken down the high scaffolding when they discovered that one of the crew had been left behind up on top. They were all at their wit’s end, unable to formulate a method to get him down, but then the stranded man’s wife came and had him unravel the yarns of his socks and at last got him down safely. In a way, the wife here might very well have topped even Kawamura Zuiken at Zo¯jo¯ji. Even Zuiken probably couldn’t have thought his way out of this one. And that’s precisely because she was the man’s wife. She knew her husband even down to his socks. With one sharp suggestion from her to undo his socks, he was able to save himself. I’m getting pedantic here, but please always stay in fine health, in good spirits, and full of hope. And show us your face full of these fine qualities now and then. With that sight we too shall be encouraged. At first Kano didn’t understand what Matsui was getting at with this old story. He told Noriko that that goddamn Matsui had gone and come up with a bunch of weird stuff that made no sense to anybody else, but Noriko looked at him with tears in her eyes and said, “Don’t you understand? The roof tile of Zo¯jo¯ji and the man left behind up on the smokestack, they’re you!” Saying this, she broke down in tears. He reread the letter and in shock burrowed into his futon and cried for a long time as he thought of Matsui and reflected on his own attitudes. But after some time had passed, he actually began nagging Noriko— “Are you going to hang on to that thin kite string? re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 351

Do you know me down to my socks?”— quite as if he were in fact demanding that she have that much love for him. In between these demands for love, he sometimes perceived something amiss in Noriko’s feelings. Whereupon doubts would abruptly emerge to pester him, doubts he didn’t even really give credence to himself. Cutting right through to the most implausible scenario, he tried accusing her of having had physical relations with some man during his absence. Of course Noriko denied it, but as he accused her time and time again and got the same response over and over, he seemed to sense something suspicious in Noriko’s look. Now, not only was he getting more annoyed than before, but he was coming to be afflicted by a dark fear. Because he knew all too clearly that if by any chance she really had had such relations with another man, then, regardless of everything else, he would be utterly unable to go on living with her any longer. “Why do you keep making such an issue over this?” Noriko asked him with an enigmatically dark look. “Why, it’s the biggest issue of all.” “Is that so? The biggest issue, is it? I wonder why you’re so fixated on the physical.” Now once again here he was, confronted directly with the meager quality of his love. He could look all around and discuss the matter with himself all he wanted, but there was no getting around it. She continued, “Supposing I say that I did, what then?” “No good! No good at all!” “By ‘no good’ you mean . . .” “Divorce! Immediate divorce!” She was taken aback by the force of his words at first, yet gradually her eyes filled with a confrontational look. “Never mind that you’ve fooled around quite a bit yourself!” “That’s different!” “Oh no, you can’t have it both ways. If it’s okay for a man, it’s okay for a woman. If women shouldn’t do it, then men ought to quit, too.” “It doesn’t work that way! Anyway, I absolutely couldn’t stand it, so all of that’s beside the point.” “If you can’t stand it, the same goes for me.” “Fine, whatever! It doesn’t even make sense to me! But anyway, it’d be no good! If someone so much as touched you even once, it’s the end of everything! This isn’t about reason! It just won’t do, and that’s that!” At that, after something of a short silence, Noriko, in a hushed voice, said quietly, “Well then, please, divorce me.” 352 chapter s even

For a moment he just sat, stunned, but, reflecting on the hushed, quiet tone of these words, he all at once found himself tumbling down into the depths of an unfathomable bitterness and despair. After some time had passed, though, he began casting about for a way to crawl back up from that despair. Maybe these are just womanly wiles to get his attention, or, maybe she’s just aggravated because while he was away someone informed her of one of his little flings that he had kept from her. With these hopes he began tirelessly questioning her, but Noriko’s replies only grew more and more vague. When their mutual irritation had grown unbearable, Noriko abruptly asked in counterattack, “All you do is go on with these silly questions— how come you don’t try to find out who the other man actually is?” Now that he thought about it, he was surprised to realize that only the fact of physical relations itself was at issue as far as he was concerned. The identity of the other man was nothing more than a mere matter of curiosity, but he gave the issue his attention so as to break out of the current impasse. He had no clue as to who it could possibly be, so he tried guessing a couple of names, purposefully picking men he knew she looked down on, in the midst of which she volunteered, “It’s Mr. Kimura.” In that case the problem hadn’t developed during his absence at all but went way back. But what a mistake it had been not to make an issue of the other man’s identity. Now that he had found out it was Kimura So¯kichi, the depth of Kimura and Noriko’s relationship no longer mattered to him. When he put the two of them together in his mind, he immediately understood how inevitable their relationship was and crumbled before this fact. He had before recognized the gulf between himself and Kimura when it came to personal character, but now that gulf had become almost unbridgeable. As a last resort he tried getting annoyed on a number of accounts, but from the beginning he knew such efforts were futile. When Noriko said Kimura’s name, everything that had seemed vague vanished. At that point she began quietly to tell him all about her and Kimura in an orderly fashion as follows: It all began four or five years ago. Around when I first became editor of the children’s magazine. Differences of opinion would flare up among the members of the editorial staff all the time and cause trouble, and every time it happened I would go to Mr. Kimura for advice or just to complain. Mr. Kimura always pointed out the fundamental issues at stake in a gentle tone and then without fail would ask with a broad grin, “How about it? Does that make sense?” Whenever I made an issue of something trivial, re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 353

he kindly redirected me to more important, significant issues. In this way he could pick out in my jumbled speech what was negative and what was positive and sort them out. Maybe he could do this without realizing it, but I can’t thank him enough for the eye-opening experience it afforded me. While this was going on, it gradually became clear to me just how much you had let me down in the past, and that in future I couldn’t really develop if I were with you. If at that point Mr. Kimura had shown up as the janitor to clean up the irresolvable pain I was stuck with (after abruptly blurting this out, Noriko grew childishly gleeful), how really delightful! No, not a janitor— a vacuum cleaner! But what an awful thing for me to say, really. Mr. Kimura never tells people to do this or do that. He listens silently and lets them say whatever they have to say to the very end. Then he responds with something like, “True, that’s so, but, you know . . .” After he has explained his position, if they answer back, “No, that’s not how it is, most definitely not!” he just replies, “Is that so? Well, okay,” and looks at them quietly with a sort of sad look on his face. What a face! Also, when I’m running off at the mouth like a kid, he just keeps listening happily the whole time. But then when I’d get home, the situation would be so completely switched that it nearly made me dizzy. All you did was put me to work, on one thing after the other. And if I didn’t do even one thing you said, you’d call me a damn lazy ass at a snap. Every day I had to whip myself body and soul to keep up with the pace of your lifestyle, till I was completely worn out. Whenever you were at home, you’d shut yourself up in your room from dawn to dusk, and when I thought you were writing away busily at something, I’d plop down and start to read a book, and you’d say, “Don’t you have anything to do?” Or maybe I’d come in to chat, but you’d screw up your face in a frown and say, “What a loudmouth! Go work on your scrapbooks, don’t just laze around!” One time I told Mr. Kimura, “Really, I’m not a loudmouth. And no matter when, no matter what, he always sees things the opposite of the way I do,” and it seemed hard for him even to comprehend. Anyway, I didn’t believe in your love. Because you were unfaithful, I was always alone crying or in a rage, but after I came to have my very own job with the arts group I paid less and less attention to such incidents, and whenever I was told of one of your little scandals, I felt more contempt than jealousy for your frivolity. But that business with Saeki Mizuho fundamentally overturned this outlook of mine. Why? Because it made clear to me that you could really and truly love a woman after all. When I realized that, I was at first infuriated, then anguished, and then finally the feeling welled up in me that my marriage with you was wasted effort and trouble for nothing. And that’s when Mr. 354 chapter s even

Kimura showed up. One time I went to his home to have a long talk. It had gotten late so he saw me to the train station, and on the way I asked him, “Why on earth haven’t you gotten married?” “Because there’s been no one I wished to marry.” “But you’re such a serious person, I’d think there’d be all kinds of women wanting to marry you.” “I’m not saying there aren’t, but if they aren’t my type, what can I do?” “If only I had married someone serious like you, I could’ve avoided all this stupid trouble.” At this he laughed suddenly. “That’s quite an honor.” I changed the subject with a laugh, but after that conversation I could feel that the two of us had drawn much closer to each other. When I started to sense that he was in love with me, I was somewhat shocked. Why would a serious person like him feel love for me, a married woman? However— and I’ll get to this later, but— for him there was nothing strange about it, and in no way did it contradict his fundamental stance. But for me it was anguish to keep this secret from you. Anyway, that’s how matters stood when one time he looked at me and said, “You are the one and only person I’ve loved in ages, for half my life probably. If you truly love me, then, depending on your decision, I would like to marry you. I’ve thought a lot about you and I’m perfectly convinced that together we could have a good marriage. If you agree, I’ll tell Kano so. Only, I can’t be specific about this, but in the near future my circumstances might undergo a dramatic change, so please bear that in mind.” “From the experience of my marriage with Kano,” I answered, “I’ve come to understand that marriage is really a complicated thing, that even without faults you can point to there will be times when a husband and wife hurt each other. Unavoidably, whether they want to or not. On the other hand, judging from Kano’s attitude toward Mizuho, it would seem that, depending on who it is, even he can really love someone and so have a happy life without contradictions, so I rather feel it’s my duty to give him his freedom. Not only does my personality not bother you, you actually love me for it, and I also know it’s likely that living with you would enrich my personality. So I would marry you. But at present I’m someone’s wife, and our family situation is also complicated, so please let me think about it.” “What more is there to think about, really?” “The most important thing we’ve got to think about is this, that since you and Kano are involved in the same work, what if this issue had a negative impact on your working relationship?” re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 355

“There’s no need to worry about that. I’m certain that even Kano would never try to settle things in that manner.” But even though part of me hated you really, I also had a strongly protective and sympathetic flesh-and-blood love for you, the kind that comes from living together for a long time. And so I spent the passing days unable to make a definite decision one way or the other. Still, even if the situation wouldn’t resolve itself right then and there, I thought I could eventually develop into a person able to resolve it. Even though I felt I was being unfair to both Mr. Kimura and you, Mr. Kimura characteristically left things up to my wishes, so I was able to carry on with a relatively calm and relaxed attitude. But one day suddenly he said to me, “I want to tell you, due to certain circumstances, I absolutely must leave home and go into hiding for the time being, so how will you resolve our issue?” Vaguely aware of the circumstances to which he referred, I asked, “What should I do?” “If you could,” he answered, “I would like for you to work together with me side by side.” “I’m fairly well known in society, you know. If I work together with you, won’t that turn out to your disadvantage? Then again, there’s some doubt that I’d be able to bear such a lifestyle.” At first he dismissed these worries, but after thinking about it for a while, he shook his head. “No, your concerns are well founded, after all. Well then, for a while now I won’t be able to meet with you. But if you should wish to get together, I could arrange it.” “Since I’m too visible, it wouldn’t be good for you to meet with me unless it were absolutely necessary for our work. It’s impossible for me to resolve this issue right away now, so let me just say that I’ll always be thinking of you, my feelings won’t change, and leave it at that.” “Well, if that’s your decision, I’ll respect it.” And with that the two of us parted, and he disappeared soon after. Now that I had parted with him, I couldn’t get his deep love for me off my mind, and I cried miserably, regretting the position I had taken with him. Still, when I remembered that he was always thinking of me, parted though we were, I firmly believed that our love hadn’t come to an end with this. Afterward I would often worry about how he was doing and my love for him would grow unbearably intense, when before I knew it close to a year had passed. One day I had to go pick up my manuscript fee from a magazine company— for some crazy reason it had been mailed to Manseibashi of all places, and I went grumbling all the way. I had to 356 chapter s even

wait forever, and when I finally got ahold of it and left, it was already evening. I was hurrying my way to the station in the twilight when suddenly someone called my name from behind. I had been walking along absentmindedly, so this nearly made me jump out of my skin as I turned around. I could just barely make out standing there in the shadows a gentleman in fine Western clothes. Since I didn’t know who it was, I started to keep walking when I heard him say, “Noriko, it’s me.” It was the very man I’d been worrying about for nearly a year, Mr. Kimura. I was overjoyed but also embarrassed, and in spite of myself I started to run off, but after five or six steps I turned around and there he was, standing in the same spot. I regained my composure and went up to him, and he said, “I mustn’t stand here long. Let’s walk.” We made our way through dimly lit byways until we came to a certain small coffee house and went in. When I got a good look at his face, he hadn’t changed a bit, I saw, but he was surprisingly well dressed. He was just looking at my face without saying anything, so, not saying anything myself, I slowly but surely began looking down. “What’s the matter?” he asked, and his voice sounded so full of worry that I tried giving him a smile. When I did, he returned a wry smile. After that we were silent again for quite a while, until he broke the silence with “How have you been?” No sooner had I begun telling him of this and that which I had been studying in the past year while he was away than I started blabbing away by myself just like old times. He listened to me, looking pleased. After a while the place got rowdy with a crowd of people, so he stood up and suggested we leave. Outside it was night, completely dark. We walked for a short time and then he looked at his watch and said, “There’s something I need to do here in a bit. I’ve only got ten minutes to get there, so we’d best part company here. But I’d really like to meet with you again to sit down and have a good talk. If you don’t mind, shall we get together again at a later date?” I felt the same way, that our meeting had been spur of the moment and we’d hardly had time to talk about anything, so I answered, “Let’s meet, definitely.” We arranged a time. Then with quick steps he vanished into the darkness. I felt like I’d been dreaming, and the streetlamps in Sudacho¯ seemed enveloped in a dense fog. When I got home, there was some kind of meeting going on. I spotted Matsui and Susukida in the fog of cigarette smoke, with everyone gabbing on and on in debate. You were sitting there, rolling and unrolling the silver wrapper of your cigarette, leading the discussion. Even though you all probably maintained some kind of contact with Mr. Kimura, not a one of you had any idea I’d just now seen him, which seemed funny. Next time, Mr. Kimura and I met re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 357

along the rows of cherry trees at the British embassy in Hanzo¯mon. And so he and I started keeping in touch, though opportunities were few and far between. I very much wanted to know just where he was living, what on earth his day-to-day life was like, but I thought I mustn’t ask, and so didn’t. His hope was that our meeting now and then like this would give us the opportunity to resolve our situation once and for all. “Granted, you’re the wife of a comrade,” he said once, “but even so, if we two have grown together through true love then, according to the principles we adhere to, such a union is the most moral of all. Do you not understand that?” “I understand.” He hardly ever mentioned the fact that my putting an end to my current family life would cause you pain in many ways— he appeared not to consider that important. Anyone will tell you that he’s kind and gentle, extremely sensitive to others. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Even you’d agree, I bet. Nevertheless, he really didn’t bother himself about the pain you and the family would have to bear. I respected him in many ways, but one of the things I respected about him the most was that, whatever he was, he was not a humanitarian. The matter was relatively simple since you didn’t love me deeply and so any pain or sadness you felt from losing me would be temporary. But supposing that you loved me deeply and your mother would suffer miserably from the blow of our separation, even then, even so, if your love for me were negative and our relationship only served to hold us back in our development, he wouldn’t concern himself with your pain but would uncompromisingly adopt a stance based on fundamental principles. I sensed this and admired him for it. But I said to him, “If we say that people should drop their current marriage partner whenever a better match comes along, then you may very well someday want a life other than one with me. Marriage is not only an issue for one person alone, it’s one person understanding and loving another person, working together with them and building up one single life. All of which requires a fair amount of effort and quite a bit of time. If I’m having second thoughts about leaving Kano once and for all, it’s because I have to think very carefully before throwing all that hard work to the winds and starting over again from step one. Moreover, there shouldn’t be a shred of decadence in our lives. Also, if to some degree I’m sticking to an established lifestyle, that could be seen as having a positive significance, namely preventing disorder in one’s life. Have you considered these points?” “I have. But to truly love someone is no simple matter. It’s extremely rare. If the parties involved are the type of people who think things 358 chapter s even

through fully instead of acting on blind impulse, then this sort of thing shouldn’t happen over and over again.” If I’d heard this from anyone else, I probably wouldn’t have believed him. But since I see him as someone who would never dream of telling lies or employing sophistry in such a situation, I felt he was being honest, and still do. Before too long, danger finally caught up with even our arts organization, and, calm as he was, his attitude gradually shifted and he started pressing me for an answer. Once he even said, “I know this sort of thing can’t be resolved right away. But I may be arrested any day now, even tomorrow.” Actually, there was one more reason why I couldn’t take a decisive attitude. Exactly around that time you were becoming more and more of a zealous worker, and you seemed to me to be on the verge of achieving a real honest-to-goodness serious character. In my heart a feeling of respect for you was growing slowly but surely. But while this was going on, Mr. Kimura seemed to have begun doubting my love for him and was trying to give up on me. True, my situation was pretty unusual. I was beginning to fall into a certain self-loathing, wondering if I was dillydallying like this because I was weak or because I was totally incapable of making a qualitative leap. Anyway, to go on keeping the situation secret wasn’t good from anyone’s standpoint, so I resolved to tell you everything. I was going to discuss this with Mr. Kimura at our next rendezvous. He’s punctual to a fault, but that day, he never showed up. I thought maybe I’d gotten the time wrong and waited right there for a whole hour, but he never showed up. So much for my hard-earned resolve! Disappointed, I came home, only to find that you’d been taken away too while I was gone. So you see why when it comes to those “physical relations” you’re so worried about— and in this case it wouldn’t have been wrong of us if there had been— there was nothing whatsoever. On that score I adhered to my own peculiarly fastidious nature to the very end. I didn’t realize at the time how much this was putting him through, but now when I think about it, I feel really sorry for him, and I’m truly moved by his endurance. Just around two months later I got a report from him from a police station somewhere that he was quite all right, that he’d staked his life on this so please try not to worry about him. All along I’d known this might happen someday, but now that he’d really been arrested, the intensity of my emotional reaction caught me completely off guard. When I imagined the suffering he must be going through, it practically made an invalid of me, and I got so that I couldn’t get out of bed. During the time before he was sent on to prison, I wished night and day that his suffering might be as light as possible, and I came to know with a vengeance what real heartache is, like it or not. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 359

No matter how strong my love for him was, this reaction seemed all too intense, and my doubts about this stayed with me for a long time. Only later did it hit me what it was, that part of the intensity was from the shock of your getting arrested too. Since my heartache for you was so strong, I realized that in some strange and indefinable way I was deeply drawn to you, linked with you. My relationship with Mr. Kimura after that was limited to the occasional exchange of letters, letters that were short and simple, but I could sense that they were truly written for my sake. However, your letters weren’t like that at all. I don’t necessarily mean to be comparing the two of you, but I could tell even from what you wrote in your letters that you were always thinking only of yourself, only writing for your own sake. I couldn’t have been further from your mind. After being separated from you, for some reason not a single one of my memories of you was a good one. Only memories of sadness and suffering welled up in my heart. I realized that you felt like a stranger to me, and this frightened me. When I really thought about it, it began to seem as if you didn’t harbor such terrible feelings toward me, so maybe, I thought, it was because I was an extremely unloving person, and it broke my heart all over again to think of your misfortune. That was my emotional state when letter after letter started coming from you rebuking me and forcing your self-serving idea of morality on me. That’s when I wrote you that last letter. Let me tell you what I was trying to say in that letter. Because of censorship and other reasons, I couldn’t write the facts out clearly, which caused you to misinterpret my point. What I meant was this, that my married life with you up to the present had been anything but moral in the true sense of the word, but that for my part I wished for our marriage to be quite a bit more moral, which might very possibly not work out according to your fancy. My thought was to show you as much as I could of how I felt at the time and thereby avoid stunning you suddenly when you knew nothing of what had been going on. I wanted to lessen your pain. But when I got your next letter, it was obvious that you were interpreting the word “morality” in its old-fashioned, self-interested sense, and to clear up such a big misunderstanding would require me to write concretely what was what, which wasn’t possible in a letter under such circumstances, and besides, your visitation restrictions had been lifted and I could meet with you face-toface often enough, so I left off writing you. After that, whenever I went to see you, your face was paler and paler, and the way you looked at me was just the way a drowning man eyes his last straw, so I could tell that your future would be anything but bright. That’s why when you told me about your intention to recant, I took it as a matter of course and wasn’t all that 360 chapter s even

surprised. But ever since that issue came up, lots of people have blamed me as if it were all my fault. One comrade’s wife said to me, “Why didn’t Mr. Kano discuss such an important matter with you beforehand? I’ll tell you why. He must have decided all by himself because your marriage is a mess. My husband would never have done that.” What could I say to such criticism? Be that as it may, the issue of your recantation disturbed me so much I tossed and turned and couldn’t get to sleep at night. But I knew that for you it was something unavoidable. Because of this, I thought you might just very well be released on parole sooner than expected, and I decided in my mind that I would take this opportunity to bring things to their correct resolution as swiftly as possible. You would be a free man, while Mr. Kimura wouldn’t be released for a long time yet. For my part I felt I should do my all for Mr. Kimura, and I decided firmly to make a clean break with you after you were let out. I wondered what Mr. Kimura’s thoughts would be about this. I told the gist of the matter to someone who was going to see him face-to-face and had them ask his opinion concerning this issue. When they did, he quietly answered, “There is nothing for me to say. Miss Noriko should do what she thinks is right. But no one else has any say in the matter.” It was an ever so brief meeting, three or four minutes at best, and that’s what he said. Anyone else faced with such a crucial moment would’ve jumped at the chance and done whatever it took to make me his, and Mr. Kimura probably could’ve done so and succeeded if he’d wanted to. Here he was, on the spot, and that’s all he chose to say. When I was told his answer, at first I thought, what an undependable person, but before too long I realized that this very attitude of his came from his deep respect for me, and I was impressed all the more by his character. About a month later, I went to the prison for a visit and to bring you some things. After handing over a dozen pastry rolls and a can of sardines each for some friends locked up in there, I sat waiting in the anteroom for our visitation time, doing my knitting. I could hear a raucous engine outside. Whenever we hear a car engine, we figure it must be a prisoner under police escort and we wonder if it’s someone we know, so we stick our heads out the window to see who it is. We do this all the time. When I looked out, I saw books and bedding piled up next to the car, which meant someone was being transported to another prison somewhere. Before too long, a man in handcuffs with a straw hat tipped back came out the door. I had no idea who he was, but I gave him a polite nod of the head and he did likewise. Everyone in the visitation room had their eyes focused intently on him. When he was in the car, another man came out the door. For a split second I thought my eyes were deceiving me! He re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 361

was of course restrained with handcuffs and wore straw sandals. His kimono barely covered him. Suddenly he looked my way with a sickly pale face forgotten by the sun. It was Mr. Kimura! He stopped in his tracks and stared intently at me. The serious expression he’d always had was now a gloomy one. I was shocked. And I quaked with an intense dread wondering where he was being taken away so abruptly. In a situation like this, what shows in a person’s face? Probably one of the most complicated expressions possible. It was just a couple of steps to the car, but on the way he never took his eyes off me. He nodded lightly to me, and when he did, his hair— fine as if freshly washed— flopped down over his forehead, and since his hands were restrained he shook his head to flip it out of the way. Because of my usual shyness I dropped my eyes for an instant, but this was wrong of me, I thought, so I plucked up my courage and looked up, but he’d already disappeared into the car. This was our first reunion in two years, and possibly our very last encounter. It terrified me how a power we couldn’t so much as budge was able to take him away as it willed. What were his feelings now, being led off like this? I was more intent on his feelings than my own, and I couldn’t stop the tears as I watched the car disappear into the distance. From here on out for who knows how long, he must undergo a great deal of suffering. If I could bear half that suffering for him I surely would, but that wasn’t possible. All I could do was to take some small comfort in believing that he was a strong person, capable of enduring that suffering. This encounter further strengthened my resolve to do all that I could for him. With this final resolve in my heart, I went to where you would be for our visitation. All along the way I was lost in my thoughts, almost unconscious even of the fact that I was walking, but it turned out that you were in court and I couldn’t meet with you after all. Once again I was let down, all that thinking for nothing. Then at our next visitation, when I saw the look on your face of someone knocked down for the count, I couldn’t find it in my heart to bring it up. I’d have to be a real monster to do something like that. So, that’s pretty much it. By saying all this I’m by no means making a confession. I’m simply telling the truth. However you take it, I have no objections. With these words, a look of relief crossed Noriko’s face. And yet the very next moment this was followed by the sudden appearance of extraordinary confusion. She had been examining and sorting out aspects of this unsolvable problem over and over again in her head so as to put them before Kano, and as she did so she kept digging up more and more problems, exhausting herself, it seemed, in the process. 362 chapter s even

Listening to Noriko, Kano felt a deep hopelessness at first. Noriko’s heart was now bound with the heart of another, a man far, far better than himself. Much more importantly, it was completely clear to him that absolutely nothing whatsoever could alter this bond. Come what may, it would persist. While she spoke she sometimes smiled like a child, sometimes blushed in embarrassment, sometimes wrinkled her brow trying to decide how to proceed, and sometimes cried without bothering to wipe her tears away. This was Noriko, the same Noriko as before. He hadn’t been able to see her true value, had only hurt her and made her suffer. And here Kimura had seen right through to her true worth immediately and had developed a deep love for her. Kano felt unbearably depressed and shamed. This was a feeling quite unrelated to jealousy. He could see before his very eyes down to every last detail what a beautiful thing it would be if Noriko and Kimura were to be married. For the two of them to have such a complete, happy, and beautiful marriage as he imagined was something he too hoped for their sakes. But when he looked into his own heart, much to his surprise he also found himself very reluctant to give Noriko up. Maybe it was because the more he turned it over in his mind, the fact that Kimura had chosen her alone of all women made her essential value clear to him as well. Maybe it was because he was deeply moved by the way Noriko had navigated between Kimura and himself for these past three years or more. But at the bottom of it all was perhaps what could be called marital affection, slowly developed over time even despite all their conflicts. After all, Noriko too had begun to sense something along those lines. No matter what, Kano wanted to hold on to her. But . . . “How are you going to live your life? Do you intend to go on cheating on me, still?” When asked this by Noriko, the furrows on Kano’s forehead deepened as he searched the depths of his heart. Whereupon he couldn’t but respond, “It’s not that I intend to. But the time may come when I can’t stop myself, all the same.” She sneered and looked at him with a complicated expression, as if she were at once disappointed and yet didn’t give a damn what he did. “How do you feel about Mr. Kimura?” she asked. “No matter how I look at it, I can’t feel the slightest bit of hatred for him. I’m surprised, myself. But far from hating him, this whole thing has only made me respect him more.” Noriko smiled happily that he seemed to see things her way. She always smiled like that, almost like a baby, whenever she understood something right away or whenever someone else’s words corresponded with what she thought. On the other hand, whenever she started thinking something re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 363

through, she looked just like an old person deep in thought, worn down with cares. Kano had seen these two contrasting expressions playing across her face for a while now even as she appeared exceptionally clear and decisive. He felt sure that in fact she was wandering, just like him, lost in the interminable twilight of a midnight sun. Translated by Christopher W. Oakes

(36) The Breast miyamoto yuriko Translated from Central Review (April 1935) By April 1935, Miyamoto [Chu¯jo¯] Yuriko’s (1899–1951) husband, Miyamoto Kenji, and many of the leaders of the proletarian movement were either imprisoned or released after political recantation. Moreover, the Communist Party— and by extension, whatever was left of the proletarian movement— was thoroughly discredited in the media by the scandalous accusation that they were exploiting women by asking them to serve as cover wives (or “housekeepers”) for activist men who had gone underground. Such was the moment Yuriko, who would return to prison in May 1935, seized to publish “The Breast” in the highbrow Central Review. From the time of her debut publication, A Flock of Poor People (1916), at the age of seventeen, Yuriko showed an ambitious literary sensibility as well as a sensitivity to class inequality. Extended stays in the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter with companion Yuasa Yoshiko (1896–1990), a scholar and translator of Russian literature, fostered her feminist-socialist consciousness.19 When she returned to Japan in 1930, she threw herself into proletarian organizations, joining the Writers League; editing the journal Working Women with Sata Ineko [8, 15, 21] and Wakasugi Toriko [2]; organizing writing circles for workers, including the Shimosuwa Circle represented by Nagano Kayo [27]; and writing autobiographical works and essays about life in the Soviet Union. (See “Buds That Survive Winter” [40] for more.) The repressive conditions plus Yuriko’s propensity to rewrite make “The Breast” a challengingly layered text.20 In 1935, Yuriko was still able to use ellipses to avoid objectionable words while inviting readers to 19. Aoyama, “Yoshiko & Yuriko.” 20. For a close reading of Yuriko’s revisions of another proletarian story, see Bowen-Struyk, “Revolutionizing the Japanese Family,” 479–507. 364 chapter s even

fill in the blanks. In 1937, once again out of prison, she not only filled in the blanks as the new publication laws dictated, but she also tweaked the text. She made further revisions in the postwar period before her untimely death in 1951. An editor with access to prepublication manuscripts continued this work after the US occupation ended in 1952. Yuriko’s writings are in the public domain, and the postwar, restored versions are available at Aozora Bunko online, making it possible for readers to note changes. With some tweaking of our own, we have, where possible, restored words and passages that were elided in the first publication, which, as with all entries in this anthology, serves as the base text; unrestored ellipses represent passages that were either deleted or rewritten later. This story offers a richly detailed portrayal of the opportunities but also the dangers facing women— sexism, thugs, spies, and the constant threat of arrest. Here, we see them persevere in an aid movement for supporting strikes and imprisoned comrades, all the while trying to connect with regular working people by providing a crèche. Readers might like to know that there was a streetcar struggle that began in September 1934, the character Hiroko is based on Yuriko, Ju¯kichi is based on her husband, Miyamoto Kenji, and Sata Ineko has identified herself as the mother who nurses her baby. 21 hbs

1 A noise  . . . something was making a noise. . . . Concentrating all the strength she could muster in her semiconscious state on that thought, Hiroko began to awaken with difficulty from the depths of a deep, dark sleep. Her eyes opened in the pitch of night, head heavy with sleep, and her prone body suddenly felt like it was spinning. Even in her familiar bedroom, Hiroko had trouble figuring out which way was which. As she opened her eyes and strained her ears, she could tell it was definitely not coming from a dream. Sometimes a cat would walk on the eaves of the tin roof and make a racket, but this was different. A low muffled sound was coming from somewhere down by the kitchen on the first floor. Hiroko leapt up silently and reached over for her jacket hanging at the foot of her futon. Sleeping close enough for the sleeves of their splash-patterned, indigo nightgowns to overlap was Tamino, her coworker at the day care. Hiroko felt her way with her feet and accidentally stumbled.

21. Sata, “‘Chibusa,’” 132. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 365

“Wha? . . . Wanna light?” Tamino slurred her words in her youthful drowsiness. “Just a minute. . . . I’ll go take a look.” Hiroko didn’t think it could be a thief, but she was on her guard. The streetcar struggle had begun in September, and this day care participated in support activities, so ever since the veteran Sawazaki Kin was hauled off, plainclothesmen from the precinct were coming by at unexpected times. She’d be no match if they barged in with some sort of pretext like Tried knocking but nobody answered so we thought maybe there was a burglar in here. There was another reason to be so anxious. There was a dispute with the landlord over back rent. The same Fujii who had recently hung up a sign for Loyalty Association #2, next to the sign for the Hyakuso¯ Digestive Remedies from Ontakesan, had a lot of small properties here, and when it looked like the back rent wouldn’t be paid, he was known to hire thugs to work over the renters. It wasn’t a mere threat, either. His goons would tear up the tatami mats and beat the renters until they were driven out. Fujii had come by four or five days ago. Hair close-cropped and an Inverness cape with a fake otterfur collar thrown over one shoulder, he sat down and crossed his legs displaying fine satin tabi socks. “Just ’cuz you’re women don’t mean you can get away with whatever you want, or you’ll be my ruination.— If you’re having a tough time calling it quits, lemme know and I’ll do the quittin’ for ya. Nothing good gonna come from women in Western getup if you ask me.” His words were menacing but his eyes gleamed lustily at Hiroko’s body, knees tucked under an apron worn over a skirt and loose jacket, even as they also followed the movements of the nonchalant Tamino on the other side of the room. So he’s begun harassing us, thought Hiroko. That bastard! And she threw open the small window of the six-mat room and gazed outside. Hiroko’s eyes were struck by the moonlight on the dew-moistened tin roofs, spreading low and wide. From high in the sky, the light of the moon, itself invisible, reached all the way to the night-mist-covered field on the other side, making everything glisten delicately. The flimsy scene in the hazy background suddenly faltered before her eyes, as the light of the crooked streetlamp next to the broken bamboo fence dimly illuminated the thick earthen pipe lying nearby. The moonlight melted into the night fog and mingled with the orangey, muddy light of the streetlamp to produce a cheerless effect. In the night air, Hiroko felt the deep sleep of her neighbors under their low, shabby roofs. Just as she was about to close the shutter, the figure of a 366 chapter s even

man suddenly appeared from under the eave on her side. As if led by his face rather than his feet, the man’s body seemed to angle upward, and turning to the second floor, he gave a wave. From above, Hiroko strained her eyes down at the slender profile and casual clothing that looked chilly in the moonlight. “Ohh . . .” she cried out, in a voice that said, So it was you. As if that were the signal she was waiting for, Tamino got up and turned on the light. The sudden light on her sleepy round face caused her to scrunch it up even more. ¯ tani? . . . What’s he doing here at this time of night?” A healthy knee “Mr. O stuck out of her open kimono as she muttered angrily. “Go back to sleep before you catch a cold. I’ll wake you if there’s something.” From a small three-mat room cluttered with an assortment of old desks in the corner, steep stairs descended into a six-mat room. Feeling her way in the dark, Hiroko lit the ten-watt bulb, passed through the four-and-a-halfmat room with its partition removed, and stepped down in front of the sink. There was no light in the kitchen, to save money. Part of the kitchen shutter ¯ tani was making a rattle trying to open it. was rotting, and O “How d’you . . . ?” “No, no. If you don’t lift this first, it won’t work.” ¯ tani stepped onto the earth floor, looking like he When the door opened, O couldn’t wait to get inside. “Oh, I see, no wonder it’s so much trouble. It’s actually a good precaution, isn’t it?” He blinked his eyes in his innocuous way as he laughed, “Hee, hee, hee.” “What is it? At this time of night . . .” “Something’s come up all of a sudden that I need your help for.” “I thought something was strange, but why didn’t you show yourself sooner?” ¯ tani ducked his head and laughed. “I was taking a “Sorry about that.” O leak,” he said in a low voice and stuck his tongue out. ¯ tani’s errand was a request to send someone from here to the union meetO ing in Yanagishima the next morning. They were already unhappy with the forced arbitration, and on top of that, dismissals had been announced. All the depots were once again getting agitated. “If someone can go meet Yamagishi, that’s the name of the branch chief, at eight o’clock tomorrow, we’ll be all set. I’m sorry it’s so sudden, but— please?” Her hair in braids, Hiroko crouched on the trapdoor covering the storage area, wearing a jacket given to her that was a bit showy for her age. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 367

“— What a pain.” ¯ tani lighting a Bat cigarette. She looked up at O “— Isn’t there anyone from Kameido who could go? Our Iida is going to Hiroo.” “I had Usui go ask over there. Apparently, they’ve got the Kinshi Canal area.” Hiroko remained silent for a while. “— I wonder if he really went. . . .” ¯ tani met Hiroko’s gaze squarely as With an uncanny smirk on his face, O he took a long drag on his cigarette, apparently thinking things over. “Nah, I’m sure he went. . . . He went.” He said it with conviction. All that was known of Usui Tokio was what he himself had told them, that he used to work with the movement in Kyushu, but nobody knew his background. At some point, he began hanging out at the clinic, and when the union became shorthanded, he started filling in doing secretarial work. He was twenty-four or twenty-five, with a slight build and slumped shoulders. Hiroko wasn’t the type to take a dislike to people, but she had a bad feeling about him. He would linger after delivering some news, not bothering to chat or play with the children. The way he watched them as they went about their business sent shivers up Hiroko’s back. Instinctively, there was something about him that she couldn’t warm up to, and it distressed her. And there were times when the things he’d say didn’t add up. One time, when Hiroko brought up her negative impressions of Usui with ¯ tani, he sat cross-legged, his down-turned eyes blinking rapidly as usual, O his mouth seemingly pouting, listening attentively as he tore an empty cigarette wrapper into small pieces, but he never said anything decisive. Finally, he raised his head to say, “— This should be investigated.” ¯ tani had assumed responSince the outbreak of the streetcar struggle, O sibility for the support programs, and his energies were thus diverted, no doubt leaving the matter of the investigation just as it was. When Hiroko raised the question of Usui now, there was a history to it. ¯ tani ground out the cigarette butt that fell on the dirt floor. “Well then, O I’m counting on you. Eight o’clock, Yamagishi.” “. . .” Hiroko made a bewildered gesture, swinging one arm high up overhead and then pulling it with her left hand. “— Did you know we have a boy with a sty? There are things I need to take care of!” “Uh, huh— it’ll be over by noon. How about you take care of it after that? Or if it suits you better, go in the evening. The med clinic is open till ten.” That’s not how Hiroko wanted to do things. She wanted to take care of the 368 chapter s even

child’s sty, which had worsened in the understaffed day care. Then in the evening, as soon as he saw his mother’s face when she came to pick him up, he would say, “Mommy! Rokubo¯ went to the doctor today and the doctor, he washed my eyes out! And it didn’t hurt one bit!” What a difference it made in the warmth a mother felt if she could hear such words straight from her child’s mouth. Ever since the arrest of Sawazaki and everything else that had been going on, Hiroko thought it was especially important to pay attention to how the ¯ tani was with mothers felt about the day care, but given how preoccupied O all the movement activities, it was understandable that he hadn’t thought that far. And in any case, the variety of day-to-day problems that arose from current support activities couldn’t be resolved through a casual personal conversation. “Well, I’ll take care of it somehow.” Finally, Hiroko placed her hands firmly on her knees and, standing up slowly, said, “— You’ve been unsteady lately. Are you alright?” “Sure, I’ll be fine. It’s the third Sunday already.— Well, if you’ll excuse me. Sorry to wake you.” He stepped out energetically then said, “Whoa.” Straddling the threshold, he turned to Hiroko and said, “Look at this already.” He showed her his frosty breath in the night air. In the short time since he had arrived, the night mist and the moonlight mingled and silently thickened the cold, making it feel heavy. A ray of light escaped from the house and pierced the cold fog, as Hiroko shivered with one hand on the shutter. “— Get a letter from Ju¯kichi?” “No.” “The war is making things worse for us.— Please give him my best when you see him.” “Yes, thank you.” ¯ tani’s clogs. Hiroko agreed heartily. She listened to the fading sound of O He was her husband Fukagawa Ju¯kichi’s dear old friend and now a mentor to her. She locked the door and went back up to the second floor.

2 Rounding the corner of a narrow street, she saw bicycles lined up in a row against the wooden walls on either side. Some of the bicycles had little bundles tied up neatly on the back, while one lone bicycle had an azalea in a small pot carefully fastened with an antique Sanada cord. As she headed up that street littered with leek greens and other debris, she remembered somere pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 369

thing she had heard about how the well-being of a country’s workers could be determined by their bicycles. Today, she saw before her about twenty bicycles belonging to streetcar workers but not a single one of them had shiny new spokes. Workers in groups of twos and threes were coming and going from the four glass doors at the entrance. One stood near the door nearly burning himself on his Bat as he took a last drag before finally giving up, stomping out the butt, and going inside. Another draped the hem of his overcoat across the door frame, then in no hurry, lifted one leg at a time to untie his shoes. Avoiding the shoes at her feet, Hiroko stood on tiptoes and called out, “Excuse me . . . Is Mr. Yamagishi here?” She directed her voice toward the group gathered around the long table near the end of the entryway. The one wearing a black overcoat with his back to her and his elbows extended turned around to face the brown-overcoatclad Hiroko standing in the entrance. “— Hey, is the chief here?” He called out toward the entrance to the stairs. “Yep.” “Somebody here to see him.” Someone came down with the thud, thud, thud of heavy heels. Midway, he had to make room in the confined space for three or four people slowly ascending, then after a couple more heavy steps, a plump man appeared, coatless with a stand-up collar and hair parted with pomade. “Helloo.” His manner was smooth. Hiroko told him she had been sent by ¯ tani. O “Well, hello. Thank you for your trouble. Please do come in.” While Hiroko removed her shoes, Yamagishi stuck his hands in his pockets. ¯ tani today?” he asked. “Will we get to see O “It’s just me. . . .” “No problem. The ladies are better at getting results— ha, ha, ha.” Yamagishi walked nonchalantly to the foot of the stairs. “So . . .” He paused in the walkway and rubbed his chin. “What order should we go in?” Hiroko had a funny feeling like they were deciding who would go first at a lecture. “As you please, I’m fine either way— ” “Well then, may I go ahead?” He spoke quickly and led the way to the second floor. Up the steep stairs, three rooms of various sizes had been opened up to form a large space. Pausing by the wall, Hiroko saw, straight ahead, posters 370 chapter s even

printed with dark black ink hanging from the beam. “Absolutely oppose the firing of 130 people!” “Oppose bus transfer tickets! Demand support for conductors!” Lined up next to the one on forced arbitration was “1,213,270 yen— absolutely oppose cutting personnel expenses!!” There was an assortment of such posters. In the two rooms to the left, the morning sun shone through a waist-high window opened wide. The beautiful though not-yet warm morning sun shone on the backs of several people huddled in the window frame, one of whom kept wiggling his big toe in his sock as he explained something. From where she stood, the people were backlit and the cloudless sky spread out behind them with two rows of four vent shafts on a slate roof spinning in unison. In a corner holding the only two chairs in the space, one person straddled the seat facing this way, leaning on the shabby bentwood back with his chin in his hands, while another sat letting one knee jiggle nervously. One man sat on the tatami mat, head down as he hugged his knees. Another sat cross-legged, rocking his whole body with his arms between his legs.— Hiroko felt complicated undercurrents circulating in the room. Beneath the air of well-worn familiarity and the pervasive feeling that nothing could surprise them, she could sense an agitation whose direction was as yet undecided, an anticipation that could not yet find its way to the lips. Hiroko could see it, for example, in the alert look on the face of the thirty-something straddling the seat and jiggling his knee. Finally a tall employee with a compress wrapped around his throat went up to the small desk at the front. He looked at his watch and wound it, then he sat at the desk and said something to the vacant-looking middle-aged man seated cross-legged on the floor with his head in his hands. “Well, we’re ready to start.” One of the men straddling a chair lowered himself to the tatami mat and crossed his legs and the other stayed as he was. “Close it, will ya? It’s cold.” The man next to the window put up the collar on his overcoat. “I now open the meeting of unit 5 of the union.” The one wearing the old-mannish compress on his neck was evidently the chair, and he conducted the meeting. “In the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, at a meeting between Chairman ¯ ishi and Sato¯, our strong objections to the unjust termination Kawano and O of 127 employees were raised but summarily rejected, and the facts of the re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 371

case were immediately broadcast. Today, we’re here to report on developments since then and decide on the stance to be adopted by our unit 5, but first, labor aid has sent somebody here today, so I think I’d like to start there.” At which point, an employee with the air of a family man seated crosslegged next to Hiroko raised his voice but not his head and yelled out “No objections!” in an exaggerated manner. “— Well, then . . . Please go ahead.” Hiroko sat up straight and was about to speak, when she was told, “Please come up here.” Hiroko walked to the front as a slight rush of blood went to her face. “No objections!” someone yelled at the back. There was laughter. Not at all perturbed, Hiroko took in the atmosphere of the room and began speaking in clear, unadorned language about how much the current struggle was attracting the interest of even the wives of ordinary workers, giving real examples, like what Hideko’s mother, who worked at Sho¯ki Hosiery, had to say. Then, she explained how just that morning, they established a family aid organization in Hiroo and opened a mobile day care. ¯ e committed suicide by jumping in front of the train near “Yesterday, Mr. O Keio University Station, and this is truly a shame. According to the newspaper, he was a drunk, but the people of Hiroo tell a different story. They say that his wife had been ill so he missed a lot of work, which served as a pretext to fire him and led him down this road. If we were stronger, if we had our ¯ e wouldn’t have had to lose his job because of his own hospitals, then Mr. O ailing wife. When I think of how he didn’t need to commit suicide, it seems like such a shame.” “No objections!” “That’s right!” There was strong applause. Unknown to her, Hiroko’s face burned with a beautiful expression of concentration. “Please, everyone, give it your all,” she said. “We are making preparations. Please stay strong so that it won’t come to nothing.” There was no hint of the earlier heckling; instead sincere applause continued for some time. “— Well then, we’ll have some reports next.” Responding to popular demand, branch chief Yamagishi put one hand in his pants pocket and launched out in an oratorical tone. “Unworthy though I am, as branch chief I bear responsibility to you all, and I declare that I am resolved to struggle till the end on the front lines. 372 chapter s even

Next, I want to move to an open group discussion of specific methods in the immediate struggle.” From the moment he said this, the room became visibly tense. “Anyone with questions or opinions on the chief’s proposal, please speak.” “. . .” “Mr. Chair!” At this time, a young employee across from where Hiroko was seated against the wall raised his hand, elbow out to the side. “I want to share the decision of the number 3 squad.” “Please go ahead.” “We at the number 3 squad held a meeting this morning, and anticipating that our demands would be summarily refused, we moved to strike and elected a strike committee.” “. . .” A slight commotion arose in the room. A couple days earlier, they had received orders from headquarters to not compromise and prepare to strike if the 127 employees were fired. Yamagishi lit a cigarette and made a show of frowning at the smoke in his eyes.— “Hold on a minute  . . . I have a question— ” The silence of the group, thrust into indecision, was broken by a single slow-sounding voice. “That decision made by the number 3 squad— What does it mean?— Does it mean that even if all the lines don’t join, you’ll go it alone?” “That’s how the people in the number 3 squad feel,” the young employee answered quickly and closed his mouth. “If that’s the way it is . . .” The one who had slowly broken the silence before now suddenly sat up straight and raised his voice provocatively, “I’m against it. I’m against the proposal.” He hiked up his shoulders under his overcoat like none of this was worth his time. “No objections!” Another voice followed. “Me, too. I’m against it. Look at what’s going on here. If this gets yanked up by the roots, then we’re all goners.” Hiroko was paying attention with every fiber of her body. As if in response to each other, came cries: “Mr. Chair!” “Mr. Cha-air!” Two voices broke out in competition, and the high-pitched voice forcibly overcame the other. “No, I don’t think that’s right,” it protested strongly. “I think you can understand if you just look at what happened with the strike in Hiroo in February. A partial strike can take place, and in fact, conditions are re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 373

ripe for this to lead to a strike on all the lines. If that wasn’t the case, why do you think headquarters would be issuing these commands?” “Mr. Chair!” An elderly man with many fountain pens and mechanical pencils in his breast pocket spoke in a calm voice. “I’m in squad number 1. This is just my personal opinion . . . but as far as a strike goes, I absolutely agree!” “However . . .” He cleverly drew everyone’s attention to himself. “However, if all the lines aren’t going to rise up together, then I’m absolutely opposed.” Hiroko felt something hot rising up in her chest and she bit her lip. How skillfully they were causing it all to fall apart. But she was just a visitor with no right to speak, and that pained her. Stirred up by the slick use of words, someone started to clap. “It would be infantile to strike or whatnot without thinking through the different power relations. You think we can do that right here right now?!” “Mr. Chair!” Again, the high-pitched voice asserted itself. “Power relations are relative, so if we’d tried to make a push before the forced arbitration currently going on, no reason we couldn’t have. But we were told to leave things up to the no-good reps who used to be on the other side, and they just dodged our demands.” “Exactly right!” “No objections.” “Isn’t there talk that this time around, headquarters has presented a list with names of people to be fired?” “That’s no laughing matter! Tsk!” From around the time of the general assembly, more than sixty employees said to have tendencies had been removed from the different depots including those on the labor aid committee. Looking at it now, it was clear what their plan had been. Hiroko was bitter. A strike by all the lines or none. Anything less than a united strike by all the lines would be meaningless— this was, in effect, the defeatist idea propagated by the Tokyo Transit Labor Union that had, from the beginning of this dispute, infiltrated the hearts of the workers through superficial . . . . . . interpretations of orders and policies. As the situation became complicated, such ideas were likely to appear everywhere. As far as support for the streetcar dispute was concerned, when the Kameido day care made a mistake by overdoing it and scaring the parents, some people thought that all struggle support should be canceled, while others thought the cause was worth crushing 374 chapter s even

¯ tani who explained why both of a day care if that was what it cost. It was O these ideas were wrong. Among the rank and file at the workplace, there wasn’t the strength left among those who should organize and stand at the head to get to the bottom of this dickering and lead them on the path to proper struggle. Even Hiroko could see as much. As the room became smokier, confusion ensued with preposterous opinions and questions following one after another. There should absolutely be a strike. However, it should only be done if the leadership could guarantee its success 100 percent. Or, someone would say with great purpose, “I have a question for the branch chief.” What, he wanted to know, was national socialism? At first, Hiroko thought the question was an invitation for the chief to put forth a proper explanation of the pros and cons of national socialism for workers, but no, Yamagishi ended the discussion with a vague, un-class-conscious response. Then, “Mr. Chair!” A brand-new idea was introduced. Tokyo Transit was proposing the slogan “Down with fascism,” but one man said he was opposed to that slogan. Tokyo Transit was supposed to look out for the economic interest of workers, not get involved in political parties and politics. Therefore, “Until all that gets clarified, I don’t aim to pay no union fees.” “What a lot of nerve!” “Who d’ya think you are, Shimoda!” “Get outta here, ya fascist peddler!” “Mr. Chair! Order in the room!” “Silence, please. Everybody, please speak in turn.” All the while, branch chief Yamagishi sat with one hand in his pocket, the other supporting his chin on the small desk, heavy eyelids closed, making it hard to tell if he was sleeping or not, in any case, surrendering to the chaos. The pandemonium continued, and when it had sucked all the energy out of the room, the chair raised his pale face. “Well, that’s all the time we have.” He called for a resolution. Yanagishima depot would walk off immediately if someplace decided to go on strike. That was the curious resolution passed.

3 Hiroko left the office through the back door, feeling worse and worse as she walked alone on the cinder-covered path alongside a tenement. It was a complicated feeling. Tokyo Transit was not doing anything except re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 375

standing in the way of the workers. Despite this fact, she herself had ended up simply talking about support before the debate began. She sensed her mistake now. If she had only spoken later, when the atmosphere in the room became so disjointed and confused, she might have provided a bracing stimulus. Yamagishi saw it all coming and acted accordingly. Yamagishi had used his skills as the union petty bureaucrat that he was and managed to avert this, which was perfectly predictable. As she emerged onto a wide, reconstructed boulevard, there was a newly built concrete bridge. It was closed to traffic in one direction, with piles of cement barrels, rods, and square lanterns inset with red glass. On top of a sunny pedestrian walkway, a seven-year-old boy in a brown jacket and rubber boots was playing tops with another crew-cut boy his age in a splashpatterned kimono and rubber boots. The two boys stared intently at two small iron tops gleaming in the sun. Phst! Phst! Spittle was flying as each gave his top his best, energetically spinning the ropes with all his might, never taking his eyes off for a second. Their utter devotion caught Hiroko’s attention. Relaxing her pace, Hiroko looked at her watch and then, slowing down even more, she opened her handbag and looked into a compartment. Inside was the visitation permit she had secured from the court about a week earlier. It was folded in quarters with the edges already beginning to fray. Hiroko shut her change purse with assorted five-sen and ten-sen coins, cocked her head to the side, and looked at her watch once again, but this time, her plain black shoes made a beeline for the bus stop. Ju¯kichi was transferred to Ichigaya Prison almost six months ago. The police had had him for ten months. Even Hiroko had been detained for about six months, so she hadn’t been able to see him then, nor was she able to see him when she was released. When she first learned that he had been moved to presentencing detention, she went to the court, and they told her: “He won’t even confirm his own name with the police, so you could say we don’t know whether we’ve got a ‘Fukagawa Ju¯kichi’ or not. Still, given the evidence, we do know we’ve got him, so we’ll grant permission.” Ju¯kichi had been sent with blank forms. The train turning back from the end of the line was empty. There were few passengers except for an old man sitting on the sunny side, elbow resting on a large square package wrapped in white cotton, digging out earwax with the long nail of his pinky finger. The elderly conductor leaned casually on the side of the door near the front, got out his notebook, and periodically licked the lead of his stubby pencil while pondering something. It wasn’t unusual for those who had been with the train for a long time to play the market. 376 chapter s even

Watching the face of the old man immersed in his own world despite the conductor’s pouch he carried, Hiroko recalled a passage in a letter she received from Ju¯kichi with countless implications. Ju¯kichi had written that it was certain that a precondition for health was the stability that comes from being mentally steadfast, and he described the health measures he was taking on the inside. Outside, too, there must be many unusual goings-on. The gears of history didn’t transmit all their subtle noises to where he was, but on that point, there was no cause for concern. That was what he had written. No cause for concern.— As Hiroko thought about the constrained expression and all it implied, she in no way flattered herself that this was just for her sake. She overshot Ueno Station, but didn’t realize her mistake for some time. When she finally looked up, she was surprised to notice that while she wasn’t paying attention the passengers had completely changed in appearance, skin luster, even in their skeletal structure. Hiroko was jostled as she traveled in a wide arc from the east to the west of greater Tokyo, but as the train neared the Yamanote area, the appearance of the men and women getting on and off contrasted more and more with the residents east of the castle, where the toxic smoke stymied the growth of green trees.— Hiroko got off the train at Shinjuku 1-cho¯me. She came out onto a street lined with tall signs advertising prison-visit supply shops. She strolled along for some time when, suddenly, right before her was the gate of the prison against the expansive sky. Outside the gate, there was a bench that looked like it belonged in some small country train station somewhere, and it made the height and width of the concrete wall behind it seem all the more conspicuous. As if they had been tossed up by a gust of wind, two planks serving as a roof for the bench were tilted high, leaving the seat of the bench to get soaked on a rainy day. As Hiroko looked at the brilliance of the sky whose blue could be felt more palpably here than in other parts of the city up above the hushed monotony of the thick concrete walls, her chest felt constricted and she realized that here there were two horizon lines. And she felt the unnaturalness of it. Hiroko entered, stepping on the gravel, selected, no doubt, for the way its crunch echoed. Gravel was spread everywhere. Men and women were separated in the barracks-like waiting room. As she opened the glass door, her nose was assailed by the acrid stench of charcoal briquettes. It was mostly empty. One woman, apparently a former barmaid clad in a wool-knit cloak-like jacket with a fallen chignon bun and plastic combs, sat cross-legged with hands in pockets, walleyed and mouth ajar. There were another four or five people besides her. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 377

From noon to one o’clock was break time. It was just fifteen minutes until Hiroko’s appointment at one o’clock. She submitted the penny candy and soy-boiled seaweed she bought at the store as a care package and went out to stand in the sun for a while. There were plantings of pines and some other trees. On the far left was the interview room, but the first time Hiroko visited, she had mistakenly gone there thinking it was a toilet. That was what it looked like. Outside the gate, tires sounded on the gravel and then the door opened and a car came through. Three or four men were saluted as they got out and went into another building. Watching that scene from where she stood, Hiroko remembered something she’d heard about how Ju¯kichi had to crawl up the stone stairs of the entryway when he first arrived.22 She got worried and looked at her watch. Not even five minutes had gone by. Waiting was long like that, but when the time came and she saw his face and started to say something, it would seem like they had hardly exchanged any words at all before the window announcing time’s up would close. These visits were quite draining, what with the anticipation built up over the long wait entangled with the acute tension of the cramped, short visit itself. The instant the window opened, Ju¯kichi would smile hello, gesturing slowly as if rubbing his shoulders. When the window shut abruptly, it would cut off the end of his “Well, then, take care.” But the inflection of his voice would stay with her until she could visit again the next month, and she recalled with fresh emotion the subtle expression in Jukichi’s eyes and around his mouth. A small, cracked mirror was stuck inside her handbag. Hiroko took out a handkerchief and wiped away the dust that had accumulated on her face since the morning, then took a new section of the handkerchief, rounded it and rubbed above her cheeks. A little color appeared. The loud speaker in the wall of the waiting room seemed to have been switched on and began to buzz. When she opened the glass and peeked inside, the women, straining to catch the static-filled announcements, buried their chins even further into their collars and adjusted their sleeves. “Um . . . Sorry to keep you waiting. Um . . . number twenty-eight, number twenty-eight go to number six. Number six. Um . . . Next is number thirty.” At the sound of the voice, a woman near forty who looked to be the wife of a thought criminal rose from a folding stool covered with a straw mat, draped her shawl over one arm, and forlornly looked up at the black horn.

22. Added to the postwar version: “because his legs were swollen from torture.” 378 chapter s even

“Um . . . number thirty, the person you were here to meet has been sent to another prison.” Hindered by the grating buzz, even Hiroko’s ears heard “a mother prison” instead of “another prison.” The gentle-seeming woman who appeared to be the prisoner’s wife involuntarily took a step forward with a “What?” And turning to the speaker, she tilted her head in a feminine way to listen again. With an abrupt click, though, the switch was turned off, and the woman was left standing speechless in a pose of surprised confusion, and just like a male kabuki actor performing a woman at a complete loss, she turned toward Hiroko, dragging her feet and letting her kimono hem split open. Hiroko was overwhelmed with sympathy. “It sounds like he has been moved to another prison. Try inquiring at the office— the door is right over there.” She pointed to the painted main door of a two-story building. After waiting for more than an hour, Hiroko was finally able to talk with Ju¯kichi for a couple of minutes. Without realizing it, Hiroko pushed her chest up against the bars to the point where it hurt. She asked Ju¯kichi about his health, told him about his mother who lay paralyzed, then apologized sincerely that, as always, the books he requested had not come in. Eking out an independent life amid the financially strapped day care left her without even the resources to walk to borrow books. And those occasions when she might have a bit of money, she lacked the time. Taking advantage of the times when she had both, she managed to get just a fraction of the minimum he needed. As a rule, the people who didn’t mind lending books never had the kind that Hiroko wanted. Those who were likely to have them didn’t, in general, like to lend them. Even in such matters, things were more frustrating than a person might think. Having been brought out suddenly, Ju¯kichi stood suspended in space, forced to recall everything at once. Furrowing his brows and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, looking unwell, he managed to give the titles of some books. “But, Hiroko, you have to think of your situation, too, so don’t go to too much trouble for me. Even when there is nothing for us to read, we are still thinking about things in a way that is productive.” Hiroko wasn’t especially eager to broadcast her feelings, but she spoke slowly: “This morning I went to Yanagishima, and look how late it’s gotten. . . . You must feel neglected, but please know that it’s not because I’m not doing anything,” she said. She closed her lips but smiled with her eyes. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 379

Ju¯kichi muttered, “Hmm . . .” He glanced at the guard who stood, cord in hand, ready to close the door, then transferred his gaze directly to Hiroko’s face, and drawing himself up like a man who has just tightened his belt, he said forcefully, “Set aside a little money if you can, just in case you ever get sick or something, so you don’t suddenly find yourself in trouble.” Thinking of the way they lived, Hiroko tried to grasp the content of Ju¯kichi’s words in all their fullness. He was not just talking about money. Leaving the cold place that resembled a communal toilet, she headed for the gate across the sunny courtyard and found herself thinking that she was walking across the gravel just like all the other women who had come out for visitation. She was so glad she got to see him, but “glad” didn’t begin to describe the feelings she carried in her heart. When she exited the gate, she saw in the clearing immediately before her a baby monkey wearing a padded kimono vest. Standing and squatting, a group had formed a circle around it, including two or three men in suits and a security guard with a pistol. This strange little monkey was different from the ones trained by showmen. With black ears standing straight up on both sides of its head and a blue-tinged tail dragging on the sun-warmed gravel, it moved its wrinkly face up and down, eyes darting restlessly as it ate something. “When you see them like this, they’re quite cute. Ha, ha, ha . . .” It was a shabby little monkey. These were men who paid no attention to the people coming and going but could lavish affection on a monkey. Feeling the coarseness that came with their occupation, Hiroko walked away.

4 One afternoon several days later, Hiroko was folding diapers in the entryway while the two babies napped upstairs. From a distance, Hiroko heard the sound of Tamino in skirt and clogs approaching. When Tamino came up next to the pump shared with the sewerage pipe shop, she said, “Wait, what happened to that sign? It’s flipped over.” She spoke loudly. Jiro¯, who was playing in the garden, said, “Miss Iida, whatcha mean? What sign got flipped over?” Five-year-old Sodeko and Hideko, even toddling Gen, gathered around Tamino. “Next to the bridge, there used to be a white triangular thing, right? It’s lying in the bottom of the ditch now.” They stood in a bunch near the entrance. Hiroko, sounding suspicious, said, “But— it wasn’t even near the edge.” As she spoke, she stepped down 380 chapter s even

onto the dirt floor. The sign with Hebikubo Proletarian Day Care painted in black on a white background had been erected on the side with all the sewer pipes, about six feet away from the ditch, where it would catch the attention of pedestrians. “Look!— Who could’ve done this? It’s so mean.” The sign had been dumped headfirst into the muddy, withered grass in the ditch. “It was fine this morning, wasn’t it?” “Yeah, I didn’t notice anything when I left.” The children lined up along the wooden bridge, eyes open wide with surprise. Sodeko, who had been taken by the hand by Tamino, suddenly shook her short bob and yelled, “Hey— it’s my daddy who made that!” “Yes, that’s right. Son of a gun.” Standing next to the pipes, Hiroko gingerly lowered one leg, then using the roots of the withered grasses as a foothold, keeping her center of gravity as low as possible, reached out her hands. Even so, the upended sign was still two feet away. “Be careful! It’d be awful if you fell in, too.” “I’m okay.” The young man from the cleaner’s across the street stopped his bicycle and watched with interest the ruckus being raised by the women and children. “— Um, that isn’t going to work unless you got some rope.” Clapping the mud off of her hands, Hiroko gave up. “When Sodeko’s father arrives, we’ll ask him to get it out for us.” As they retraced their steps, Jiro¯ kept asking, “Who did this, huh? Why’d they dump it in the ditch anyway?” Jaw set and flushed with anger, Tamino took large strides, Sodeko’s hand in hers. “It’s gotta be the handiwork of Fujii’s thugs.— They’re just looking for trouble, the whole lousy bunch of ’em.” It was clear this was not just the antics of a drunkard. “And you can be sure it’s a no-good spy that put ’em up to messing with the pump, too.” Two days earlier, Ogura Tokiko, a graduate of a women’s college who was temporarily helping them, had been washing diapers at the well. At the sound of the water running, the glass door to the kitchen of the sewerage pipe shop opened, and it wasn’t the wife but the owner, Seisuke, who popped out his head to say: “Hey, you keep usin’ water like that and we’ll all be in trouble. It ain’t just one household usin’ this, ya know. Won’t even be able to rinse our rice, we won’t.” “I’m very sorry.” As she walked over to the clothesline, Tokiko’s glance had met Hiroko’s re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 381

through the window of the four-and-a-half-mat room. A look passed over Tokiko’s face, the defensive look of a person unaccustomed to being treated harshly, and then she laughed. Hiroko understood exactly how she felt and, for that reason, had said nothing. Lips pressed tightly together and deep in thought, Hiroko led the way into the house. “Well, thank you for your work today. How did it go?” Seated on the floor with legs folded back alongside, Tamino reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulled out a small brown paper envelope, and one at a time laid out three nickel coins and ten or eleven copper coins. “Auntie Yoda was holding out, saying she already gave, you know.— And this is all she gave!” An envelope was passed around in the name of the day care to collect funds for the streetcar dispute. “They don’t feel directly connected, so that makes a big difference. And they seem to think it’s foolish to risk a crackdown when there’s no way to know who’s gonna win.” Among the streetcar workers, there were a number of worker-farmer aid groups. When Hebikubo Day Care approached them with a request to buy cribs, a group in Yanagishima took charge and raised the funds. That was the money that provided the three wicker cribs in the nursery. That was how the mothers and fathers using the day care who worked at Fujita Industries, Inoue Tanning, Sho¯ki Hosiery, or Ko¯jo¯ Printing had come to be connected with the streetcar workers. There was something of a sense of fellow-worker loyalty, and one time during a collection, they raised close to three yen. But the moms didn’t make any headway with such activities in their own workplaces. Ohana from Tsunaya could only collect twenty sen from the neighbors in her tenement she had invited to a sale by the consumer union. These were the kinds of experiences that Hiroko talked about with a group that had been meeting at her place for the past couple of months. When they ¯ tani proposed, “I got into a debate over a piece they had read for that day, O feel like I keep repeating myself, but especially with these kinds of problems, I think we have to base our studies on our concrete experiences.” So they also talked about what was going on at Hebikubo. At Kameido, a special mother-father committee was formed to start up aid activities. A young person from . . . . came and earnestly explained what worker solidarity was about. He spoke fervently about how, just at the moment when the crisis of . . . . was approaching, what an important connection they all had to the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of the streetcar dispute. The 382 chapter s even

parents were moved as they listened attentively, and they contributed substantially on the spot. However, an odd thing happened as a consequence. One child, then another, stopped coming to the day care until, finally, five children from one tenement no longer came. “It was bad to lay it all out from beginning to end in one session.” A day care worker with long eyelashes offered this in self-criticism. “It seems that it was because what was laid out in the talk was so persuasive that they felt that once they got involved in the dispute, they wouldn’t be able to refuse. Then they’d have to worry about their own necks.” ¯ tani “That so, huh. Because the talk was so persuasive. You don’t say.” O grumbled “huh” one more time, then asked, “So, just like that, they really stopped sending their children?” “That’s right. They’re not coming.” At Hebikubo, too, there were two or three parents who had stopped sending their children after the arrest of Sawazaki Kin. One of them worked at Inoue Tanning, with Mrs. Yoda, who said she’d heard it like this: “Well, ya know even though we live like this, we still have some social connections, and from time to time we’re obliged to call on people who live in kind of a fancy house. Well, one time I brought my little Ikubo¯, and would you believe it, right in front of everybody he goes and says in a loud voice, ‘Ma! These people are bourgeois, ain’t they? So they’re the enemy.’ I turned bright red, I tell you.” Hiroko smiled wryly. But that story didn’t represent the current reality. It was a bias that appeared in the early days, just after they had unified around . . . . activity. Hiroko heard the sound of a baby fretting and went up to the second floor. Ohana’s Chiibo¯ scrunched up a face so small that it was hard to tell if he had grown at all in his ten months, and he whimpered as he shook his head as if he was having a hard time sleeping. Hiroko changed his diaper. His bowels were loose. A doctor had told them to offer the baby some goat’s milk in addition to breast milk, so Ohana gave him some and then dropped him off at the day care when she was out working many hours. As Hiroko changed Taabo¯’s diaper, she heard from beneath the window, “Alright?! This is our fact’ry!” It was Sodeko’s high-pitched, determined voice. As Hiroko dragged Chiibo¯’s crib over to where he could get some sun, she looked down at the clearing in front and saw that Sodeko was in the corner grasping the cutoff rope from a broken swing and waving it as though she were reeling somere pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 383

thing in. Jiro¯, in a jacket that had been lengthened piecemeal with blue and brown yarn, stood watching from the side with his feet planted firmly in rubber boots. Jiro¯ gazed on the scene for some time as Sodeko continued the same action while casting serious glances at Jiro¯ from underneath her overgrown black pageboy that gave her a ferocious air. Eventually, Jiro¯ said curtly, “Hey, there’s no such thing as a factory without a name, ya know.” Sodeko glared at him as she thought it over, then responded without pausing her hand, “— It’s called Swing Fact’ry!” Who cares?!, her tone seemed to say. Looking down from where she was, Hiroko involuntarily opened her mouth wide in a soundless laugh. “Look, this is a machine!” said Sodeko to Jiro¯, still serious as she pressed her free left hand against the cracked wood grain of the swing’s pole. This time Jiro¯ moved without a word to stand next to Sodeko. Then he took up the other piece of broken rope and began to wave it around even more wildly than Sodeko as he got into the swing of things. After whipping it around and around, Jiro¯, with the characteristic agility of a boy, lifted his legs up and swung from the end of the swaying rope. When it seemed about to stop, he kicked the ground with his rubber boots and off he went, swinging this way and that. It looked as if his feet were blindly kicking at the earth: sometimes they would just touch, but at other times they would miss and whip the air.— At some point Hiroko became entranced, and unawares, her chin began to bob in rhythm as if to give him a push. Sodeko changed hands, but she stood transfixed watching Jiro¯. Once he tired of this, Jiro¯ disappeared for a little while, and when he reappeared, he was dragging a loose board with mud on one side. He lugged it to where the rope swing was hanging, and then tried with all his might to fasten it on so it would resemble a real swing, but the rope was thick and the board was thin and wide, and Jiro¯’s small chilblained hands were no match for the task. Though positioned awkwardly, he kept trying, using even his knees to somehow make it work, but no matter how many times the board fell, he continued to give it his best without so much as a peep.— From the second floor, Hiroko began to find it hard to watch the efforts of Jiro¯, who had nothing you could call a real toy either at home or at the day care. Wondering what was going on with Tamino, Hiroko went down to the 384 chapter s even

six-mat room and was taken aback. Usui, his back to Hiroko, was leaning against the pillar face-to-face with Tamino. At the sound of Hiroko’s footsteps, Tamino looked up, but Usui took something in front of him, folded it up deliberately, and placed it in the front fold of his kimono, clearly aware of Hiroko’s presence but not moving his head in her direction. Hiroko decided not to go to the four-and-a-half-mat room but instead slipped on the wooden sandals at the door and stepped outside.

5 In the evening after the children went home and things quieted down, Tamino and Hiroko turned their attention to crafting eye-catching leaflets, deliberating over such things as the size of the letters and the borders, while they cut a variety of large and small, square stencils for mimeographing leaflets. The finances of the day care had taken a real hit since they began to do support work. Hiroko was no longer just taking care of the children who came every day. She decided that as a convenience to mothers who needed to run out for something, she would also take in children at the spur-ofthe moment for a trifle and thereby make the day care more accessible to everyone. But quite apart from its labor aid aspect, the day care had been sustained by women from progressive families, and she was determined to expand in this direction as well. Even if they could cut the stencils, they didn’t have a mimeograph. They had to go to the clinic for that. Tamino was about to go out in her usual skirt and clogs when Usui arrived. “What’ve you got there?” He took the rolled-up paper from Tamino’s hands, looked it over, and handed it back. “They’re probably using it over there right now.” He often spoke like he was thoroughly acquainted with the activities of every post. “Really?! What a pain. Did you just go by there?” Without answering, Usui said, “If that’s all you’re trying to do, I know a place that should be able to take care of it— ” “You shoulda said something sooner! Let’s go! All right?” “I think it’ll be all right tonight. . . .” Hearing these words directed at the honest Tamino, Hiroko recalled witnessing Usui’s cavalier attitude when she happened on them as she came downstairs the other day. They went out, and Tamino took care of the work, but a day later, she re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 385

suddenly brought up, “I always thought port was just Western saké, but it isn’t.” Then one night Tamino had pulled the light down low and was repairing a hole in her stockings when she said, “Might be goin’ someplace else one of these days.” She said it as if she were talking to herself. It was a very windy night, and Hiroko sat at the desk beneath the dim light to go over the books. Without raising her face, she kept on writing numbers and quite naturally absorbed Tamino’s words with a murmur. “Hmm . . . Something promising?” Just three months ago, Tamino had lost her job at the Yama Electric Company because of union activity. Until then she had always lived the life of a factory worker. She was invited to the union office, but she liked the workplace, she said, and she was sure she’d get back in there. In the meantime, she had been helping Hiroko. Looking down, Tamino ineptly pulled at the tangled thread with youthful roughness and said, “Nothing’s settled yet.” Then after a bit, she added, “Mr. Usui’s really happy that the thing he’s been waiting for has come through. . . .” Without realizing it Hiroko raised her head and, looking at Tamino’s down-turned face, used the fingers not holding the pen to slowly twist her lower lip. Tamino was still looking down at her mending. “What do you mean ‘come through’? . . .” Some likely conjectures popped into Hiroko’s head.23 “That doesn’t have anything to do with you, though, does it?” Tamino didn’t respond directly. After a little while she murmured, half engrossed in her own thoughts. “It sounds like everybody’s having a hard time because really useful women are few and far between.” As if her eyes had just been opened, Hiroko realized the significance of what Tamino was thinking but couldn’t say. “It’s not a job?” “. . .” Hiroko felt a rush of complicated affection for young, honest Tamino. Most likely Usui had said something to her, and that must have inclined her to take on a role that might be considered to have more positive meaning than being active in the factory. But Hiroko had long harbored doubts about 23. Added to the postwar version: “In any case, there had no doubt been some contact between Usui and the Party organization.” 386 chapter s even

the way young female activists were sucked into the roles of secretary or housekeeper as a matter of expedience. Hiroko thought it over as she continued to twist her lower lip, but then she spoke slowly, “Over there, it seems they’ve made a point of saying it’s no good to have female comrades live with men under the pretext of calling them secretaries or housekeepers, even making them have sexual relations with them. I read about it somewhere.”24 “Yeah?” Tamino lifted her head. She looked at Hiroko with her brows raised sharply and started to say something, but then stopped and resumed her needlework. Putting her socks away at last, Tamino went through the roll of supporters and began to write their names on brown envelopes. As the evening advanced, the wind rattled the tin eaves. Whenever the cold, wintry wind died down, though, there was a stillness all around, suggesting the roads had iced over. Tamino was writing with a fountain pen she held at a strange angle near the tip. The worn-out pen rubbed on the slippery surface of the paper with a squeak, squeak. Listening to the squeak, squeak, Hiroko’s mind recalled another scene. In a house consisting of two rooms separated by cheap sliding doors decorated with a landscape of pine trees on a mountain, Hiroko was writing something at the kitchen table. It was already nearing dawn. Tired, Hiroko was struggling with her ideas, which were not coming together, but from the other side of the sliding door, sounded the same squeak, squeak of a pen. Even from this side of the door, the sound couldn’t help but make her feel the lively vitality of the ideas being written with such an even-paced speed and without any hesitation. Hiroko stopped her own hand and lent an ear to that sound with pleasure. Then, through the sliding door she said, “Excuse me . . .” “— What is it?” “. . . Please don’t go protesting, okay?” Hiroko’s lips were forming a smile as she listened for signs from the other side. Ju¯kichi, apparently not grasping the meaning of Hiroko’s words right away, seemed to be straightening his posture. In a minute, he burst out laughing. “— Is that what you’re talking about!” “That’s hardly my style now, is it?” And the squeak, squeak promptly resumed.— 24. Added to the postwar version: “In Hiroko’s circle, ‘over there’ always referred to the Soviet Union.” re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 387

Hiroko felt an emotional bond with Tamino, who was setting out on the path of a class-conscious woman whose joys and trials would not be unlike the ones she herself had experienced and would continue to experience. When Hiroko had been detained by the police, she looked out the window and discovered that a mother sparrow had built a nest at the top of a Japanese cypress. She said, “Ah, poor thing! Building a nest in a place like this.” As soon as she said that, a man with a heavy beard who was standing there said, “What do you mean, ‘poor thing’? She knows she’ll be safely protected.” He looked Hiroko up and down. “Somebody like you’d be fine if you had a baby. You’d dote on it, too, I can tell.” Hiroko stared straight at the man and said, “Please let Fukagawa come home.” The man lapsed into silence. Hiroko had been released and gone to live at the day care at the summer’s end, when Ohana’s friend was hurt badly and had to be hospitalized. Chiibo¯ was entrusted to her at the day care. Putting him to sleep in the four-and-a-half-mat room on the first floor, Hiroko sat by his side, shooing flies away with a fan while she read a book. When he opened his eyes, he started crying and simply wouldn’t hush up. He cried so much he began to sweat. Hiroko had a sudden thought, and pleased with the idea, said to him, “Okay, how’s this? Little Chiibo¯, you’re not going to cry on me now, are you?” And as she said this, she opened her white blouse and offered her own breast to the crying baby. Chiibo¯ looked shriveled, and the color of his face and the soles of his feet was poor. He opened his mouth like a thin red ring and rooted around, but just when she thought he had taken the nipple into his mouth, he thrust it back out with his tongue and began to cry again, this time with even greater ferocity. After trying this three or four times, she gave up and, at a loss herself, spoke to him as if he were a child who could be reasoned with. “Hey little guy, you’re out of luck if you don’t like this.— Come on, Auntie’s not so bad.” A little over an hour later, Hokkaido-born Ohana came back. “Sorry about that. It’s awful hot out there.” Ohana undid her sash, removed her large-patterned summer kimono to her waist and placed a hand towel on her shoulder. “Lookee here, little crybaby.” She offered him a dangling black nipple. Breathing hard, Chiibo¯ dove in. Hiroko explained what had happened. With complete nonchalance, 388 chapter s even

Ohana said, “Of course he’s not gonna suckle. If it’s not a breast that’s been nursing, it’ll feel cold, and he’s not gonna like that.” She took the towel from her bare shoulder and wiped the sweat off her face. Hiroko couldn’t forget that evening. That her nipples were cold nipples.25 And the sight of Ohana, though splendidly endowed, just managing to stick her malnourished baby, pale legs sticking out from his diaper, to the breast that was at least warm. It struck Hiroko that the sorrow and outrage of women in this society could be found in these two images. That night, after she got into bed and turned out the light, Hiroko spoke to Tamino using a casual and calm tone. “Be careful you don’t use up your enthusiasm for something twisted or self-serving, okay?” “. . .” “I’m sorry, I know it seems like this is none of my business, but in the work we do, we can only judge a person by the work they’ve done. Don’t you agree? And I feel like you haven’t done any real work yet with Mr. Usui. I feel like we hardly know him. . . .” Hiroko felt Tamino stir in the bed next to her. After a while, Tamino said earnestly, “— I guess so, now that you say it.” She spoke slowly. After a while, Hiroko heard her sigh.

6 Early in the morning, someone from the local police station showed up. He wandered around as if he had no particular purpose. “Toyono’s coming around today, I suppose.” He cast a suspicious glance at the footwear in the entrance. Hiroko and the others had never heard of a Toyono. “What, you don’t know him? Liars. I’ve got someone who saw you heading out to meet him.” This was just a wild accusation. He was about to turn and leave when he stopped. “Wait! What’s that?” When they looked at what he was pointing to with the end of his walking stick, it turned out to be the day care sign that had been tossed into the muddy ditch the other day. “Whaddya mean, ‘what’?— Dontcha know?” said Tamino, coming out. “It’s been up for a year already.” 25. In the postwar version, the line reads: “That her nipples were the cold nipples of a woman who’d never given birth.” re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 389

“Who said it was okay for you to put it up?” With an air of annoyance, Tamino started to say, “So long as we’re here— ” but he interrupted, “Don’t be so sure of that.” He made it sound as if there were some special meaning behind his words. “If we say something doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t exist, you see. Take KOPF. The participants think it exists, but we’re not letting it exist.” When KOPF, the Japan Proletarian Culture Federation,26 was started up in 1931, that meant the creation of the first cultural organization unified under . . . .  . . . Acknowledgment of this notification had been refused by . . . . , and this spring, this was compounded by . . . . . . . . . . . . . After the man left, Tamino spat on the ground. “Damn! Hate that lousy bastard.” The next day, around two o’clock in the afternoon, Hiroko was working on drafting the newsletter on the second floor when she heard someone coming up the ladder, one heavy step at a time. The footsteps were unfamiliar. She turned around with pen in hand, and there was Mrs. Inaba from Sho¯ki Hosiery, who had come up carrying a furoshiki-wrapped package. A large white radish was sticking out from the package. “Oh, it’s you, Auntie . . . What’s wrong? Something I can do for you?” ¯ tani come by?” “Did Mr. O “No, he hasn’t.” Hiroko had an appointment to see him that very night. Mrs. Inaba’s eyes darted about, conveying something out of the ordinary. “Then that must’ve been him after all.” Hiroko stood from the chair so fast it surprised even her. “What happened . . . ? “— I, I saw it all.” Something in those words made Hiroko shudder. It was Mrs. Inaba’s turn to host the mutual aid association meeting, so she had taken the day off to do the shopping. As she turned this way across the ¯ tani big avenue in front of the train station, she saw a man who looked like O walking along with a younger man. Mrs. Inaba wanted to make sure it was him before calling out, so she followed them a bit when the younger man parted with him at the corner by the radio shop. After crossing two alleys, a man in Western clothes appeared from beside the penny candy shop, and in a second two more men came out from nowhere, and they closed in on ¯ tani. O

26. Gloss supplied by translator. 390 chapter s even

“Hey!” ¯ tani tried to slip through, when the three men They said something, and O quickly surrounded him and some scuffling began. It all flashed before Mrs. Inaba’s eyes like a sharp, soundless lightning strike. Instead of continuing on, they started heading back toward the station, so half covering her face with her sleeve, she ducked under the storefront eaves. What she saw was the form of a man trying to slip through but surrounded on three sides and handcuffed. Despite the fact that his hands were nearly immobilized, the man was calmly straightening the front of his kimono— she was sure it was ¯ tani. O When Hiroko finished listening, she felt her throat clench and her voice fail. For a while, she pressed her mouth with her right hand still holding the ¯ tani carrying anything?” pen, then croaked out in a dry voice, “Was O “Hmm . . . I wondered that, too.— He was carrying what looked like a teeny tiny package, I think.” “The man who parted with him— What was he wearing? Western clothes?” “You think he’d be in Western clothes? Naw, he was wearing the kind of thing you see all the time on students, a splash-patterned kimono, I guess.” Hiroko’s eyes narrowed as if to pierce with her gaze. Splash pattern . . . splash pattern. Hmm . . .27 “You didn’t see his face, huh?” “How could I, he turned the corner first.” Taking two rungs at a time, Tamino came into the room. “Did you hear?” Her eyes glared over her flushed cheeks. “Won’t they be coming here?” Mrs. Inaba looked from Hiroko to Tamino, then moved her gaze back to Hiroko. Hiroko noticed this and said, “It’ll be okay!” She turned to Tamino and signaled with her eyes. “This is a day care, right? If something weird happened, the mothers would never stand for it, right?” Even though she wasn’t sweating, Mrs. Inaba kept dabbing around her nose with her striped apron wrapped around her finger. “The way they treat the pruletariat— you’d think we wasn’t human!” When Mrs. Inaba had gone downstairs, Tamino impatiently pulled down a trunk from the bookcase with her two strong arms. While she carefully got rid of the scraps of paper they didn’t need, she murmured, “Couldn’t stand them cleaning out this place.”

27. The postwar version adds, “Usui always wore a splash-patterned kimono.” re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 391

There was no telling about that. When the Friends of the Soviet Union Association spread to workplaces in each district and representatives from each workplace were selected to join a study tour, then those activities became more restricted. It wasn’t as if Hiroko had never imagined there could be repercussions ¯ tani’s position. from the links between the streetcar support activities and O She sent Tamino out to call a certain place to have them inform the necessary people. When Ju¯kichi was arrested, Hiroko had thought she was utterly calm, but twice she hit her forehead hard on a crossbeam suspended across the per¯ tani’s house. Hiroko recalled O ¯ tani silently gazing fectly familiar ladder in O at the traces of the injury, then saying, “Well, have something to eat.” The composure with which he had sat Hiroko down at the table. As she conjured up various scenes of their work together, her stomach churned with bitter regret. ¯ tani’s climbSome time ago, Hiroko heard a story from somebody about O ing a tree to escape danger in the nick of time. She found the story amusing and told it to Ju¯kichi. “Did that really happen?” she asked. Ju¯kichi studied Hiroko’s face and said, “He’s capable of amazing feats.” He laughed as he answered. Much later, when Hiroko thought about the way Ju¯kichi had responded, she found there was something about it that ¯ tani’s friendship went beyond telling tales deeply impressed her. Ju¯kichi and O about each other. That such a friendship served as a spring for propelling history forward was a value Hiroko was recently beginning to comprehend. ¯ tani would be arrested? As Hiroko But was it really inevitable that O thought about it, she thought he, too, must have regrets. For example, the man in the splash-patterned kimono . . . What if the splash pattern was that ¯ tani had any basis for his conviction that something splash pattern? Had O like this wouldn’t happen? Hiroko was plagued with feelings of remorse. Barely a day later, Tamino was arrested at the day care. On her way back from getting deworming medicine for the children, Hiroko found Jiro¯ and Sodeko standing watch near the bridge over the ditch. As soon as they saw Hiroko, they clasped hands and galloped toward her with all their might. The instant she saw the children, Hiroko for some reason immediately thought, Fire! She, too, started to trot toward them. Jiro¯ grabbed at her skirt and said, “You know what? Listen!” Then breathlessly, “They took Miss Iida away!” he reported. 392 chapter s even

“When?” “Just now!” “What about Miss Ogura?” “She’s here.” That morning, the newspaper had announced the end of the streetcar dispute. Tamino spread open the paper as she stood. After putting it down once, she picked it up again. “It’s disgusting that we have to learn about this from the bourgeois morning newspaper!” Her frank words struck a chord in Hiroko. Hearing this, Ohana said, “Well, now I’m really in a pickle with the folks in the neighborhood. I went around collecting funds, asking them to give even if it was only a sen.” Tamino had been preparing to print flyers to inform the parents who had donated funds that the employees had lost because they hadn’t exerted their true strength. That was when she was caught. When Hiroko entered, Ogura said, “Oh, thank goodness!” Two men had come in as if nothing was the matter and gone up to the second floor without so much as a by-your-leave. Tamino followed them right up, but when they came down, one of them was carrying something with the title printed in red ink. He used it to slap Tamino on the face. “‘Don’t act like you’re innocent! You’re a party member, aren’t you? ¯ tani’s spilling it all,’ they told her. Oh, she was badly beaten.” O As she recounted what had happened, Ogura’s eyes welled with tears. With unconscious sharpness, Hiroko said, “That’s a bunch of lies.” They’d use some document that couldn’t possibly have been there as a pretext. Hiroko had heard about things like that happening with KOPF, too. As she tried to cheer Ogura up, Hiroko took a large white sheet of paper on which she wrote about Sawazaki Kin who was being held in police custody for no reason at all for nearly three months and then about Tamino, and hung the paper from the lintel above the entrance where everyone coming in would see it. She had evaded arrest this time, but she had no way of knowing if it would last until that night or the next day. She climbed to the second floor by herself. Only the area near the table was in disarray in the three-mat room. Tamino’s green pen had apparently rolled off the table and the nib had pierced the tatami mat underneath. Hiroko pulled it out quietly and, as she fiddled with it, decided to hold a meeting with the parents when they came to pick up their children that night. Then she went downstairs and entrusted a package to Ogura. It was a jacket for Ju¯kichi in prison. Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 393

(37) Negative Realism: One Direction for Proletarian Literature (excerpt) kawaguchi hiroshi Translated from Literary Review (April 1934) Kawaguchi Hiroshi (1905–1984) was a Yokohama-born and Tokyo Imperial University– educated scholar of German who contributed to the proletarian arts movement as an organizer, critic, editor, translator, and participant in theater groups. As a student at the Urawa Higher School, he was a classmate of Sano Manabu, who would be instrumental in building the Communist Party in Japan, although he is best known for his decisive political recantation (see the introduction to this chapter). In 1924, Kawaguchi joined the Tsukiji Little Theater group and made the acquaintance of Murayama Tomoyoshi [35]. After entering Tokyo Imperial University, Kawaguchi became a founding member of the Society for the Study of Marxist Arts along with Hayashi Fusao [7] and Kaji Wataru [16] as well as Senda Koreya (1904–1994) and Sasaki Takamaru (1898–1986), who would be active in the proletarian theater movement. Joining NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio), the Writers League, and the Institute of Proletarian Science, Kawaguchi was a vigorous participant in the movement’s theoretical debates who made important contributions through his translations of leftist theories of art, beginning with the works of Marx and Engels and extending to writings by Lu Märten (1879–1970) and Franz Mehring (1846–1919). With his wife, Matsui Keiko (?– ?), he introduced the writings of Rosa Luxemburg (1871– 1919). Some of Kawaguchi’s writings were also translated into Chinese, with his “On Literary Reportage” becoming especially influential.28 In 1930, he coauthored a dictionary, Proletarian Literary Arts, with Yamada Seizaburo¯ [28]. Arrested at a meeting of the Writers League in May 1932 along with Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31] and Eguchi Kan (1887–1975), he retreated from the movement and devoted himself to translation and teaching German, a move he would later describe, ruefully, as that of a “deserter.”29 His retreat notwithstanding, Kawaguchi engages the debate on socialist realism with an apparent intent to rebuild the movement one day. “Negative Realism” is a carefully reasoned essay asking readers 28. Translated into Chinese by Xia Yan. Thanks to Anup Grewal. 29. Fujita Fujio, “Kawaguchi Hiroshi,” 169. 394 chapter s even

to think about the relationship between historical consciousness, ideological aspirations, and the representation of reality: In the absence of a socialist reality, Kawaguchi asks, can there be a socialist realism? hbs

[. . .] 2 There may be those who think it unnecessary to once again raise the question of the appropriate course of action for rebuilding the proletarian literature movement because the answer must be socialist realism. Of course, I have no objections. I support socialist realism. In that sense, one could say that the path for rebuilding the proletarian literature movement is straightforward and clearly marked. When we take into consideration the current state of proletarian literature, however, I must say that I have my doubts about whether this is truly the path best suited to our situation. If we were to set forth with socialist realism, I think it would have to be quite different from what it is in the Soviet Union, or, let us at least say, we would need to bend it here and stretch it there. [. . .] As a first step, I would like to take up the issue of so-called negative realism. To put my conclusion before my argument— and this may sound heretical— I want to say that negative realism offers a meaningful course of action that should be recognized as such for the rebirth of proletarian literature. I will make my argument by contrasting it with socialist realism. First of all, though this might seem like a bit of a digression, I must preface my argument with my understanding of the theoretical hypothesis that socialist realism has presented us.

3 [. . .] What does it mean to write according to the method of socialist realism? According to [Ivan] Gronskii [1894–1985], it means to write the truth. Or, according to [Valerii] Kirpotin [1898–2007], the most basic meaning of the slogan of socialist realism is contained in the demand for truth from artists, or the correct depiction of life within art [. . .]. Isn’t it the case that all great literature since ancient times has existed for that banal, commonsensical activity called “depicting the truth”? Even as we speak of truth, however, we must acknowledge its plurality. It is certainly not homogeneous. It is certainly not indeterminate. If there is bourgeois truth, there is also socialist truth. There’s the truth of everyday life in the most general sense and human truth and so forth. And there are those who think that there is no such thing as artistic truth, their own works excepted. The heterogeneous character of realism springs from these differre pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 395

ent senses of truth. A specific kind of realism corresponds to a specific kind of truth. While “truth” is always the goal, this truth continues to undergo renewal, and this lends itself to the historical development of not just realism but literature in general. Moreover, we must not forget that a certain kind of truth corresponds to a certain kind of reality. The historical limits to cognition are also the historical limits of reality. Of course, there are plenty of instances when the historical limits of cognition do not reach the historical limits of reality. This is most egregious with mediocre writers. Even with the most talented writer, however, the extent of literary cognition will not exceed the limits of the historical development of reality. In the early nineteenth century, writers like [Marie-Henry Beyle] Stendhal [1783–1842] and [Honoré de] Balzac [1799– 1850] were able to tell the truth of bourgeois reality, but surely they could not tell the truth of a socialist reality. Even socialist realists cannot be free from such limits. Of course, in the Soviet Union, where class conditions have been a central preoccupation, the class limits to cognition may cease to exist, but there will never come a time when historical limits cease to exist, nor will there come a time when the historical development of reality will halt. It would be the height of conceit to discuss the limits of past realisms while thinking that socialist realism has no limitations.

4 [. . .] Well then, what is this “socialist truth” that we are talking about? It would be very difficult to extract a clear explanation. Most often, it is discussed in relation to the problem of how to represent truth. [. . .] The following words by [Anatoly] Lunacharsky [1875–1933] describe the situation. “Imagine a house being built. When it is finished, it will be a magnificent palace. But it is not yet complete. You writers present it just as it is, and say this is the socialism of which you speak. But it lacks a roof! You must, of course, all be realists. And you speak the truth. But in fact, we can immediately see that this truth is fallacious. Only the writer who understands what kind of house is being built, the process by which it is being built, and who knows that it will be equipped with a roof, is capable of depicting socialist truth. The person who does not understand progress surely cannot see the truth. That is because the truth does not resemble the reality of today. Truth does not stand still. It leaps. It is progress, and it is struggle. [. . .] Those who cannot see it thus are bourgeois realists, and accordingly, they are pessimists [. . .].” There are more than enough reasons why Soviet writers and critics understand the essential moment of truth in this way and call it “socialist 396 chapter s even

truth.” [. . .] In a single leap, they are transforming what was an undeveloped country in a quasi-medieval state into one of the world’s most advanced countries. Politics, economics, culture— just about all aspects of society— are following an infinite upward curve. [. . .] In short, in the Soviet Union, reality itself is exceedingly positive. It is clear to everyone that it is positive. [. . .] When reality itself is socialist, then writers can convey socialist truth. When reality is positive, writers can convey positive truth. Thus, socialist realism is a positive, affirmative, active realism.

5 But how are things for us? Even comparing ourselves to the Soviet Union seems foolish. Of course, it’s unnecessary to state that there is no socialist construction going on here; in fact, there is all too little that is positive and an overwhelming amount of the negative. What is dominant is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , the degenerate, the unsound, the hideous, the duplicitous, and the reactionary face of death. [. . .] I have no intention here of offering political theories or an analysis of social conditions. Those are not my ambitions. It is just that in the Japanese reality, the negative vastly outweighs the positive, and therefore we cannot underestimate the negative. And it should be obvious that my intent is not to ignore that which is positive in the Japanese reality. If we take it that reality is negative, then we must acknowledge that it poses a tremendous challenge for writers to try to represent positive truth. [. . .] When reality is unbearably negative, I think that it is certainly no worse to peel away that festering skin than it is to tell a positive truth. Therefore, along with positive realism (whether that should be called socialist realism in our country or something else, I do not know), I want to propose negative realism as one course for regenerating proletarian literature. [. . .] Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

(38) Proletarian Realism and “Socialist Realism”: A Study of Literary Method (1) (excerpt) moriyama kei Translated from Literary Review (April 1934) Moriyama Kei (pseudonym for Morimatsu Keiji, 1904–1991) was born in Niigata Prefecture as the son of a schoolteacher. He entered the Fourth Higher School and proceeded from there to the Philosophy Department of Tokyo Imperial University. Becoming friends with Nakano Shigeharu re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 397

[19], an earlier alumnus of the Fourth Higher School, he was introduced to the New Man Society and thereafter became active in the proletarian literature movement. His first poetry collection was advertised but banned before publication. In 1932 one of his poems was translated and published in the US leftist journal the New Masses (1926–1948).30 When comrades such as Nakano and Kubokawa Tsurujiro¯ (husband of Sata Ineko [8, 15,21]) were arrested and detained, he charged himself with helping them and their families, making sure, for instance, that the former had proper reading materials. When Moriyama himself was detained in 1940, Nakano and Tokunaga Sunao [23, 31], among others, provided for his family. 31 He turned to prose fiction from the late 1930s on, and in the postwar years, he wrote and lived in Ishikawa Prefecture until his death in 1991. When asked why his father had turned down invitations to return to Tokyo, Morimatsu Wafu¯, also a writer, speculates that Moriyama had become attached to the place and its people, but that fundamentally, the fact of his compromise (recantation) during detainment had grown into a lifelong scar.32 nf [. . .] Why, then, has the argument for “socialist realism” failed to take root in the field of Japanese literature? In the first instance, we could point to the fact that in the face of the current state of our society, we writers have begun to waver. Some might say, the argument for “socialist realism” is fine and it’s probably even correct. It’s just that I don’t have the capacity to actually produce literature along those lines. Such relatively honest confessions, together with various forms of self-serving whitewashing, are being bandied about. [. . .] Still, it happens to everyone to succumb to doubt, and surely there isn’t a single writer insensitive enough never to have experienced it. It’s only when we begin to rationalize our doubts and to assert the correctness of mistaken directions that we degenerate as writers and even begin to cause harm. Can it be that at present, we writers have let ourselves degenerate to that degree? No, we have not. [. . .] Secondly, then, is it as Kubo Sakae [1900–1958] and others say, that “socialist realism” cannot actually exist in Japan so long as socialism as a set of relations of production does not exist?

¯ ba, “Moriyama Kei,” 615. 30. O 31. Mori, “Nempu,” 422. 32. Ishikawa Kenritsu Komatsu Sho¯gyo¯ Ko¯to¯gakko¯, “Morimatsu Wafu¯-shi.” 398 chapter s even

It’s true that many sincere people have been deeply vexed by this theoretical aspect of the issue. [. . .] [. . .] But think about it. We aren’t madmen. We can’t possibly assert that our proletarian literature and Soviet literature stand on the same ground and have the same content. In fact, there isn’t a single writer or critic in Japan who has called on writers to “depict the new reality of the construction of socialism.” Rather, what we writers have attempted to take up, however inadequately, is the need to learn from reality, that is, the reality of a Japan not cut off from the rest of the world, along with such issues as the organization of the experience of creative writing, the critical reception of the literary heritage, class needs, and the worldview and daily lives of writers. We have never thought it possible for a “socialist realism” based on a socialist economic system to exist in present-day Japan. [. . .] I think I’ve got it. The socialist nature of proletarian literature in a capitalist country is a product of the reflection in literary ideology of the real contradictions of capitalist society. Not only do Kubo and the others not recognize this fact, but as we’ve seen from Nakano [Shigeharu]’s criticism, it’s as if they cut off this thing called “Japanese reality” from the reality of the rest of the world and won’t look at the way that “socialism as a system of the relations of production,” which actually exists on the face of the earth, also affects the reality of our country and acts on its social, political, and cultural life. Next, Kubo and the others hardly appreciate the fact that literary methodology is not only something that cannot be separated from social reality or writers’ class practices and worldview, but that it is directly connected to the achievements of the literary history of all humanity, absorbed according to practical need. Why did a writer like Voltaire have recourse to conservative forms like the alexandrine or observe the “three unities” [of action, time, and place]? Or why, in the past, did a modern worker poet like Negishi Sho¯kichi [1892–1922] have no choice but to write in musty old forms? It’s because “there is no linear or direct link” between various ideologies, beginning with literature and the arts, and the economic base, and the more direct link is with the literary heritage. “It is the accumulation of knowledge, principles, concepts, skills, and various artistic forms from past ages that is the direct base of the philosophies and arts of a given age.” ([Mark Moiseevich] Rozental [1906–1975]). [. . .] For all these reasons, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to attach the name “socialist” to the new direction in which Japanese proletarian literature could advance. It’s only when this term is spun around in criticism like a toy windmill, just as the expression “in the mode of dialectical materialism” once was, that it turns into empty verbiage. We are not in love with this term. re pre s s i o n, re c a ntat i o n , a n d soc ia list re a lism 399

If a more appropriate one exists, we can adopt it, and if we come to a pass where we can no longer use even a term like this, then we will have to devise something else. [. . .] [. . .] Not only is it obvious that there is no need to gloss whatever is being called “Japanese reality” with terms lacking substance such as “dark” or “negative,” but there is no point in manipulating generalizations to describe the task facing the proletariat in a country that has not even undergone a bourgeois democratic. . . . . . .33 [. . .] More than anything, we should be considering the degree of seriousness with which a work has depicted social reality through the utmost exertion of artistic subjectivity by examining the concreteness with which the world of the work is related to the reality of our society. [. . .] Translated by Norma Field

(39) Socialist Realism or XXX Realism? (excerpt)34 kim tu-yong Translated from Literary Review (June 1935) Some basic facts about Kim Tu-yong (1903?– ?) are missing or cannot be confirmed, an apt reflection of both the conditions of colonial Korea and the turbulence of the postliberation peninsula. Probably born in 190335 in Hamhu˘ng, in present-day North Korea, Kim Tuyong was in Japan for his secondary schooling, proceeding from the prestigious Third Higher School in Kyoto to the Aesthetics Department of Tokyo Imperial University. He didn’t graduate but did join the New Man Society, where he met a number of soon-to-be comrades, including Nakano Shigeharu [19]. Even though he stayed in touch with developments in Korea, Kim invested most of his considerable energies into the movement in Japan as an editor, publisher, and prolific writer for Japanese- and Korean-language proletarian arts publications and as a theorist and organizer for the labor movement.36 Growing awareness 33. “Revolution” is plausibly the suppressed word here. 34. The suppressed word has never been restored, but it is almost certainly “revolutionary.” See Fujiishi, “Kin Toyo¯,” 213. Other instances of suppression are not so easily restored, and the lacunae have been left as such in the translation. 35. See discussion in Cho˘ng, “Kin Toyo¯ / Kim Tu-yong” 18n2. 36. See Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble, especially chapter 5, for the context of Kim’s activities.

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of the low literacy rate of Korean workers in Japan also led him to become active as a dramatist. Kim is controversially remembered for dissolving the resident Korean labor organization (Zainihon Cho¯sen Ro¯do¯ So¯do¯mei, or Ro¯so¯) into the Communist-led All-Japan Council of Labor Unions (Zenkyo¯) and consolidating Korean cultural activities within KOPF, the Japanese umbrella organization, rather than incorporating them into the Tokyo branch of KAPF, the Korean Proletarian Arts Federation. Did the man who had once cried “Write about Korea!” in the Imperial University Newspaper care more about class or about ethnicity?37 Both, he might have answered, to judge from the span of his work as well as the essay excerpted below. It’s illuminating to observe the confidence with which Kim pronounces on the requirements of art to his Japanese comrades. Kim had his share of arrests and prison terms during the 1930s. Some say that he recanted (counterfeit or otherwise) around 1935. In 1947, he “returned home” to what would soon become the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. His death date is unknown. nf

1 The problem of socialist realism calls for debate not only in Japan but in Korea as well. No sooner was this issue introduced into Korea from Japan, to be followed up by proper discussion in literary circles, than the relevant documents from the Soviet Union, such as Sotomura Shiro¯’s [1890–1951] translation of Socialist Realism38 or Kawaguchi Hiroshi’s [37] of the same title, were promptly banned for sale in Korean bookstores. (Needless to say, the same was not the case in bookstores for Japanese people.) Given the current political situation in Korea, moreover, this issue could not be satisfactorily debated, and everything was simply accepted as correct, just on the basis of the opinions of Japanese writers and critics. To this day Korean writers and critics have been unable to arrive at a correct understanding of the matter. It is for this reason that the current debate on the issue will have an important influence not only on the Japanese literary movement but on the Korean as well. I would first of all like to draw your attention to this matter. [. . .] 37. Cho˘ng, “Kin Toyo¯,” 12–15; Fujiishi, “Kin Toyo¯,” 209–12; Perry, “Korean as Proletarian,” 284–89. 38. Sotomura, Shakaishugiteki rearizumu. A translation of eight separate articles by Valerii Iakovlevich Kirpotin (1897–2007) and seven others.

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3 [. . .] Even in the Soviet Union, where the proletariat  . . . . . . . . . . . . ,39 there is emphasis not only on the importance of basing literature on realism, but on connecting this effort with the immediate task of “psychological reconstruction and education.” In the current circumstances of Japan, where the power of the proletariat has been diminished, writers must strive all the more to develop realism in their literature, thereby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . at the same time. This is the most forceful lesson of socialist realism in the Soviet Union.

4 But in fact, what have Japanese writers and critics tried to learn from Soviet socialist realism? The need to establish realism on a firm footing, certainly, but they have hardly touched on the political task. In literature, the act of writing is everything. The writer must, above all, write, and the question of methodology is certainly significant. At the same time, if the aspect of political responsibility were to drop out of the thoroughly partisan endeavor of socialist realism, leaving it simply a methodological issue pertaining to creative writing, that would be tantamount to the sundering of literature and politics. [. . .]

6 Moreover, [Japanese critics] suggest that Japan’s and the Soviet Union’s being on the same historical trajectory means a direct connection (Mr. Nakano),40 or link Japanese realism with Soviet realism by tacking on the same adjective of “socialist” on the grounds that the actualities of the Soviet Union set the parameters for Japan (Mr. Moriyama).41 Or they suggest that because the theoretical level in the Soviet Union represents the highest attainment of the . . . . . . . . . proletariat, we need to learn from it (Mr. Nakano). Or they claim that Soviet theory serves to nourish Japanese literary criticism and creation (Mr. Moriyama). With such arguments, and by using the word “socialist,” they try to link Japanese realism with Soviet realism. [. . .] However much influence the Soviet Union may have over the Japanese 39. These words were never supplied. 40. In this and subsequent references to Nakano, Kim seems to draw mostly on the latter’s “Mittsu no mondai.” 41. In this and subsequent references to Moriyama’s reasoning, Kim seems to draw mostly on the latter’s “Proletarian Realism and ‘Socialist Realism’” [38].

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masses, is it possible to say that it directly sets the parameters for conditions in Japan? What determines the living conditions of the Japanese proletariat are the political, economic, and social circumstances of Japan, and not those of the Soviet Union. [. . .]

7 Messrs. Nakano and Moriyama have taken socialist realism as a fixed principle of literary creation and have turned it into a rigid mold. At least, the sort of example quoted suggests as much to us: “To make a long story short, if the likes of [Maksim] Gorky [1868–1936] or [Alexander] Serafimovich [1863– 1949] were to come to Japan, wouldn’t they be able to depict the conditions in Japan according to the method of socialist realism?”42 [. . .] But is it really the case that if you’re a Gorky or a Serafimovich, you can go anywhere and instantly grasp the historical nature of the actual conditions and turn it into great literature? Turn it, moreover, into a work that “ties in with the tasks facing the proletariat of that country”? It seems that even for the mighty Gorky, this would not be such an easy thing to accomplish. And besides, even if we say, “Describe reality correctly!” that’s not enough to give birth to art. In fact, how you sort out your subject matter, how you compose your narrative, how you write it— don’t these all depend on your artistic abilities? How can there be such a thing as a fixed method? But if we listen to Mr. Nakano, it sounds like as long as you grasp the method, you can write anything. Can it be that socialist realism is a creative methodology that, once grasped, allows you to go to any country and write about it? [. . .]

8 [. . .] True, we no longer have organized activities.  [. . .] But does that mean that nothing is going on whatsoever? Of course, given current circumstances, our activities (through Literary Review [fig. 9] and other sites) are of an unsatisfactory and paltry nature; nevertheless, to assert that because there is no organization, there is no literary movement is to ignore reality. [. . .] Translated by Norma Field

42. Nakano, “Mittsu no mondai,” 156.

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(40) Buds That Survive Winter (excerpt) miyamoto yuriko Translated from Literary Arts (December 1934) Miyamoto [Chu¯jo¯] Yuriko’s frustration with recantation literature comes across clearly through her characteristically steadfast writing. At this point, in late 1934, she is responding to a “tenko¯ writer boycott”— a boycott of proletarian writers who have renounced proletarian ideology— issued by stalwart critics of proletarian literature Nakamura Murao (1886–1949) and Okada Saburo¯ (1890–1954). Why, she asks, are they critical of those who have renounced proletarian literature given that they have been hostile to it all along? After suggesting that they should mind their own business, she presents the real task: to take recantation as both an individual and a historical problem and investigate further the historical conditions that had brought about this phenomenon. No one is exempt from her critical eye, and she famously writes that “even the great author known as Tanizaki [Jun’ichiro¯, 1886–1965]” despite his erstwhile youthful ambitions, has led her to reflect on “the tenacity of the feudalistic character of Japan as seen through its literary techniques and tendencies.”43 Incarcerated repeatedly in the 1930s, Yuriko’s health suffered tremendously, and at one point, she was thought to be on her deathbed and released. This must have had something to do with the authorities’ standard practice, designed to avoid responsibility, but no doubt Kurahara Korehito has a point in crediting her release to the committment of arrested comrades who refused to betray that she was a Communist Party member even though they themselves might have recanted.44 (See [36] for more biographical details.) Arrested in 1933, and refusing to renounce his convictions, her husband, Miyamoto Kenji, would spend twelve years in prison. She herself was incarcerated from January through June: released only for her mother’s death, her health was so severely weakened that she didn’t resume her sentence until May of 1935. In the meantime, she managed to write and organize, and when she was finally able to visit Kenji in prison in December 1934 for the first time, she soon after registered their marriage in his family 43. Miyamoto, “Fuyu,” 132. 44. Kurahara, “‘Koiwai no ikka,’” 175.

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registry. 45 After the war, Kenji was granted political amnesty, Yuriko was allowed to write again, and the two stepped forward, she as a leader in the postwar New Democratic Literature Movement, and he as chairman of the postwar JCP. She died before her fifty-second birthday. hbs [. . .] If we exclude those reviewers who have their own particular motivations, we can see that the various reviews of writers who have recanted have been broached with generosity and common sense. Among them, two common points have been emphasized: so far, those works that supposedly deal with recantation have neither addressed the process undergone by recanters, which is supposed to be the heart of the matter, nor have they helped to clarify the ideological tendencies that follow. [. . .] [. . .] I think it’s clear that the issue of the writers who have recanted is both an individual and a general problem within the development of proletarian literature. Certainly, if we look at the facts, we find that each retreat was based on individual circumstances and was carried out in personal ways. I cannot, however, be satisfied with saying in the manner of Mr. Sugiyama [Heisuke, 1895–1946], that “Murayama Tomoyoshi’s renunciation was inevitable because he doesn’t exactly have an impressive character.”46 “Midnight Sun” [35] received some degree of recognition for the way that the author endeavored to reveal his personal sense of dejection along with the bleakness of objective conditions. The effect, whether Murayama was aware of it or not, comes across mostly as an emphasis on self-exposé, both here and in his recent essay, “Starting Over as a Writer.” But what could such exposés possibly contribute to proletarian literature, no matter how much personal muckraking takes place, so long as it remains within the limits of individual anatomy? Even if we go on to conclude that all individual weakness is a product of the petty bourgeois character of the intelligentsia and denounce it, I think that still does not leave us with the sense that we have grasped the essence of our reality. What we really want to know is this: What kinds of historical necessities brought the intelligentsia, sorely prone to fluctuation between enthusiasm and dejection, to making a class shift in their youth without, moreover, shedding the various contradictions they embodied? Further, what were the historical particularities of their activism over the past ten years that caused 45. Odagiri Susumu, “Miyamoto Yuriko nempu,” 468. 46. Paraphrase from Sugiyama, “Tenko¯ sakkaron,” 278–79.

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those internal contradictions to intensify and necessitate their defeat when confronted with these trying times? I want to know all the details. I think that the issue of recantation is intimately connected to the situation in which young Japanese Marxist activists who, lagging more than twenty years behind Europe, ideologically aligned themselves with the masses, only to be immediately subjected to multifarious forms of violence. The intelligentsia who shifted their class position during the period of the movement’s legal rise, in part because of the special circumstance in which they could make their names as literati, failed to fully remake themselves as class subjects, and when circumstances got the best of them, they objectively became types from a bygone era, and it is this collapse that is now appearing in the form of recantation. Therefore, this is not merely a problem for the conscience of those proletarian authors who have “recanted.” This is a problem for all of us, a problem for the masses. Why? Because we have no recourse but to inherit the history of these wounds in one form or another, and moreover, we have to extract, to the greatest degree possible, sound revolutionary lessons from them. If I may share my thoughts honestly, there is something in Murayama’s and Nakano Shigeharu’s [19] writing that doesn’t sit well with me. They are said to have good heads on their shoulders, but they both insist that they themselves don’t really understand the feelings that led to their recantation— no doubt each has his reasons, but why in the world? I myself can’t think about it cynically as Mr. Sugiyama does. I don’t know the details or the logic, but in any case, how can the unkind interpretation that they were at least quick to grasp the advantage of . . . . . . . . . . be applicable? It fills me with regret. [. . .] For the most part, I think that the issue of writers who have recanted is being used cunningly to foster feelings of suspicion and contempt toward the toiling masses and the intelligentsia, toward radical elements. The progressive feelings of the masses are being crushed in no small way and bit by bit replaced with animosity. It is up to us to realize who is responsible for this. [. . .] The history of Russian literature is interesting no matter which period one looks at, but I recently read something that made a strong impression on me. At the beginning of the 1890s when Marxism had just entered Russia, there was a great famine in twenty provinces. Young radicals, who had become apathetic in response to the suppression of the disturbances that followed upon the false abolition of serfdom, seized the moment of the terrible reality of this famine and once again took up the problem of the people’s misery. This was right around the time that a twenty-one-year-old [Maksim] Gorky 406 chapter s even

[1869–1936] attempted suicide in Nijny Novgorod. Radical intellectuals, including early Marxists, went out to the famine-stricken regions and assisted mightily with the struggle and emergency relief. As the famine ended, cholera broke out and riots erupted here and there, but who do you think became the target of the angry masses? The radical intellectuals and doctors who had battled sickness and starvation alongside them. The one who commanded the baton in this travesty was none other than the Tsar’s infamous police chief, Captain [Konstantin Petrovich] Pobedonostsev [1827–1907]. Naturally, it was not Pobedonostsev but rather the Russian Marxists who had the rug pulled out from under them but still got back up on their feet and ultimately brought this dirty trick to light. It is with utmost interest that I envision a day when various present-day phenomena are brought to light from a similar perspective in the annals of Japanese proletarian literature. Translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

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Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge copyright holders for permission to translate and publish the following titles: Chang Hyo˘k-chu’s “Hell of the Starving”; Hosono Ko¯jiro¯’s “A Farmer among Farmers”; Kawaguchi Hiroshi’s “Negative Realism: One Direction for Proletarian Literature”; Kurahara Korehito’s “The Path to Proletarian Realism”; Nakamoto Takako’s “Red” and “Going on a Field Trip?”; and Yamada Seizaburo¯’s “Our Own Literature Course (1): A Guide to Writing Literary Reportage.” We thank the Japan Writers’ Association for securing us the permission to translate and publish the following titles: Hayashi Fusao’s “Apples”; Hirabayashi Taiko’s “On the Tendency of Proletarian Works to Become Formulaic”; Kaji Wataru’s “Hell”; Matsuda Tokiko’s “Another Battlefront”; Moriyama Kei’s “Proletarian Realism and ‘Socialist Realism’: A Study of Literary Method (1)”; Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “Midnight Sun”; Nakano Shigeharu’s “Tetsu’s Story; Or, a Rope around Whose Neck?”; and Sata Ineko’s “ Covering Over the Essence,” “Prayer,” and “Leafleting.” We thank Critical Asian Studies (www.criticalasianstudies.org) for permission to reprint Lawrence Rogers’s translation of Hayama Yoshiki’s “The Prostitute,” and the University of Hawai’i Press for permission to reprint Samuel Perry’s translations of Kobayashi Takiji’s “Letter” and Tokunaga Sunao’s “Shawl.” A project like this, spanning over a decade, comes to fruition only with the cooperation and kindness of many, many people. We regret that we cannot show this book to the late Mr. Eizaburo Okuizumi, head of the Japanese section at the University of Chicago library. When he saw the final table of contents after years of supporting us, he cheered us on with heartfelt enthusiasm despite his advanced illness. Aiko Kojima has been essential from beginning to end at all levels, ferreting out obscure texts and biographical details, keeping order for all of us, and helping us negotiate the challenging waters of permissions. Sato¯ Saburo¯ has generously shared details from his exceptional knowledge of this period. We wish to thank all our translators who have stayed with us through multiple revisions over the years with good humor: we were learning together. We are fortunate that the University of Chicago Press gave us the opportunity to see this deeply collaborative endeavor through. We thank Alan Thomas for seeing the potential of this project years ago and sticking with us; Randy Petilos for steering us with unfailing good humor; and Kelly Finefrock-Creed for her sharp eyes and good sense. The readers for the press buoyed us with enthusiasm and advice. We are also grateful for the support of the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Everyone in Japan and other parts of the world who expressed excitement about this project over the years has helped sustain our belief in its meaning. We would like to pay special tribute to one of them, Miriam Silverberg (1951–2008), one of our early supporters and an inspiring pioneer. 409

HBS thanks a wonderful husband, friends, and colleagues for sustaining support; graduate students at the University of Chicago during a 2001–2004 postdoc who became friends, interlocutors, and contributors; students at Notre Dame and the University of Michigan who were early readers; and Norma Field whose awe-inspiring flight has been the wind in my wings. I look forward to many more years flying together. NF thanks Ishizuka Jun’ichi and Chieko for friendship and expert advice; Kyeong-hee Choi for all-encompassing friendship; Adrienne Hurley for her courage and kindness; the community of Otaru found in the tracks of Kobayashi Takiji; and Rodger not just for unwavering support but for showing, in unannounced ways, what it means to be true to the values cherished by the people in this book. And thank you, Heather, for letting me join you in this pursuit. It has changed my life.

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Abbreviations BDSM Kindai Nihon Shakai Undo¯shi Jimbutsu Daijiten Henshu¯ Iinkai, ed. Kindai Nihon shakai undo¯shi jimbutsu daijiten/Biographical Dictionary of the Social Movements in Modern Japan. 5 vols. Nichigai Associates, 1997. GNBR Hirano Ken, Odagiri Hideo, Yamamoto Kenkichi, eds. Gendai Nihon bungaku ronso¯shi [History of contemporary literary debates]. 3 vols. Miraisha, 1965–1966. Originally published 1956–1957. HTZ Hirabayashi Taiko zenshu¯ [Collected works of Hirabayashi Taiko]. 12 vols. Ushio Shuppansha, 1976–1979. KKH Kurahara Korehito hyo¯ronshu¯ [Collected critical essays of Kurahara Korehito]. 10 vols. Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1966–1979. KTZ Kobayashi Takiji zenshu¯ [Collected works of Kobayashi Takiji]. Shinso¯ban. 7 vols. Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1992. MTJ Matsuda Tokiko jisenshu¯ [Matsuda Tokiko collected works (author’s edition)]. 10 vols. Sawada Shuppan, 2004–2009. MYZ Miyamoto Yuriko zenshu¯ [Collected works of Miyamoto Yuriko]. Shohan. 33 vols. Shinnihon Shuppansha, 2000–2004. NPB Nihon puroretaria bungakushu¯ [A collection of Japanese proletarian literature]. 40 vols. and supplement. Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1985–1987. NPBH Nihon puroretaria bungaku hyo¯ronshu¯ [A collection of critical essays on Japanese proletarian literature]. 7 vols. Shinnihon Shuppansha, 1990. NPBT Hirano Ken, Kurahara Korehito, Odagiri Hideo, Noma Hiroshi, Takeuchi Yoshimi, eds. Nihon Puroretaria bungaku taikei [An anthology of Japanese proletarian literature]. 9 vols. San’ichi Shobo¯, 1955. NSZ Nakano Shigeharu zenshu¯ [Collected works of Nakano Shigeharu]. Teihomban). 29 vols. Chikuma Shobo¯, 1996–1998. SIZ Sata Ineko zenshu¯ [Collected works of Sata Ineko]. 18 vols. Kodansha, 1977–1979. SPGK Akita Ujaku and Eguchi Kan, eds. So¯go¯ puroretaria geijutsu ko¯za [General course in proletarian arts]. 5 vols. Naigaisha, 1931. Aono Suekichi. “Janguru o chu¯shin ni shite: ‘Shirabeta geijutsu’ sairon” [Further thoughts on “Investigated Art”: Focused on The Jungle]. Bungei sensen, January 1926, 68–70. In Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Aono Suekichishu¯ , vol. 3 of NPBH, 228–30. *———.“Masamune Hakucho¯-shi no hihan ni kotaete shokan o nobu” [A statement of my views in response to Mr. Masamune’s criticism]. Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, November 1926, 149–62. In Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Aono Suekichishu¯ , vol. 3 of NPBH, 246–59. ———. “‘Shirabeta’ geijutsu” [“Investigated” art]. Bungei sensen, July 1925, 3–4. In Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Aono Suekichishu¯ , vol. 3 of NPBH, 226–27.

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Translators Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer and researcher at McGill University. He is the editor and principal translator of We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino, and his translations and articles have appeared in Mechademia, positions, Japan Forum, and Granta. Heather Bowen-Struyk is the guest editor of Proletarian Arts in East Asia (a special edition of positions) and a coeditor of Red Love Across the Pacific. She is completing her manuscript on love and proletarian literature while teaching at the University of Notre Dame. Željko Cipriš is professor of Asian studies and Japanese at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. His translations include “A Flock of Swirling Crows” and Other Proletarian Writings by Kuroshima Denji and “The Crab Cannery Ship” and Other Novels of Struggle by Kobayashi Takiji. Brett de Bary, professor of Asian studies and comparative literature at Cornell ¯e University, has translated writings of Miyamoto Yuriko, Nakano Shigeharu, O Kenzaburo¯, and Karatani Ko¯jin. She is the editor of Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalization and coeditor, with Naoki Sakai and Iyotani Toshio, of Deconstructing Nationality. Mika Endo researches pedagogical writing experiments with working-class children in prewar Japan. She teaches at Bard College. Norma Field’s most recent book is Kobayashi Takiji: 21-seiki ni do¯ yomu ka. Committed to learning about Fukushima, she maintains with colleagues the Atomic Age website at http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/. Gregory Golley is a writer living in Chicago. He is the author of When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism, a portion of which was recently translated and published as Miyazawa Kenji to dı¯pu ekorojı¯: Mienai mono no rearizumu, an award-winning volume in the Heibonsha 100th anniversary series. Justin Jesty is assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, and researches the relationship between art and social movements. Jeff E. Long is an associate professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he is researching the role of apostasy in the writings of Hayashi Fusao and Shimaki Kensaku. Christopher W. Oakes is an independent scholar and translator residing in Chicago. His research interests, when focused, tend to gravitate toward Buddhist traditions and their interaction and involvement with literary and artistic pursuits. 429

Samuel Perry is professor of East Asian studies at Brown University. His publications include Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde and From Wo˘nso Pond, a translation of Kang Kyo˘ng-ae’s Korean novel In’gan munje (1934). Lawrence Rogers is emeritus professor of Japanese at the Hilo campus of the University of Hawai’i. He has translated many literary works, both modern and premodern, and is a recipient of the translation prize from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Ann Sherif teaches in the East Asian Studies Program at Oberlin College, Ohio. Her current research explores publishing history, the arts, and political activism in twentieth-century Japan. Mamiko Suzuki is assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. Her research interests include Meiji women’s writings, education, and modern women’s literature.

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