Places 9780824890254

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Places

Places SE TOUC H I J A K UC HŌ Translated by Liza Dalby

U N I V E R S I T Y O F H AWA I ‘ I P R E S S HONOLULU

© 2022 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22   6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Setouchi, Jakuchō, author. | Dalby, Liza Crihfield,  translator. Title: Places / Jakuchō Setouchi, Liza Dalby. Other titles: Basho. English Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015340 | ISBN 9780824883409 (hardback) | ISBN   9780824888831 (paperback) | ISBN 9780824890254 (adobe pdf ) | ISBN   9780824890261 (epub) | ISBN 9780824890278 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Setouchi, Jakuchō, 1922–  —Fiction. Classification: LCC PL861.E8 B3713 2021 | DDC 895.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015340 Basho Copyright © 2001 Jakuchō Setouchi First published in Japan in 2001 by SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with Jakuchō Setouchi through Japan Foreign-Rights Centre. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: Detail from Koizumi Kishio’s (1893–1945) Togoshi Ginza Station (#27r), July 1940; from the series One Hundred Pictures of Great Tokyo during Showa (Shōwa dai Tokyo hyakuzue). Design by Mardee Melton

Everyone eventually passes away; time passes as well. But it seems to me that the place where you set your foot, the memory held by a physical piece of land, is what endures. —Setouchi Jakuchō, Places

Contents



Foreword by Rebecca L. Copeland Translator’s Preface

xv



1  Mt. Nanzan

1

2  Tatara River

18

3  Nakazu Harbor

35

4  Mt. Bizan

52

5  Nagoya Station

67

6  Aburanokōji Sanjō

80

7  Mitaka Shimorenjaku

96

8  Tōnosawa

114

9  Nishi Ogikubo

131

10  Nogata

148

11  Nerima Takamatsu-chō

164

12  Mejiro Sekiguchidai-machi

181

13  Nakano Honchō Dōri

197

14  Hongō Ikizaka

211

Translator’s Notes

221



ix

Foreword REBECCA L. COPELAND

Few authors have had as storied a life as Setouchi Jakuchō. Writer, translator, feminist, peace activist, Buddhist nun . . . even this descriptive list cannot contain the impressive sweep of Jakuchō’s career. Along the way she has also been daughter, wife, mother, mistress, lover, role model, and femme fatale. Through each twist and turn, she has reacted with both feisty verve and self-­reproving reflection. Basho (Places), superbly translated here by Liza Dalby, enjoins readers to accompany the author as she travels again over the familiar terrain of her life story, journeying through the places she once lived, loved, suffered, and learned. How should we categorize a work like Places that seems to hew so closely to the author’s lived experience? Is it autobiography or memoir? Novel or essay? “Lies are truth! Truth is lies!” Jakuchō and her unnamed lover chant in the latter pages of Places. We could modify their claim slightly to: All autobiographies are fiction; all fiction is autobiographical. The paradox is contained in the way the work is classified in Japanese: jiden shōsetsu, fictional autobiography, a novel about one’s life. We would assume an author would know her own life most intimately of all. But in this fictional autobiography we find Jakuchō questioning herself, uncertain why she behaved the way she did. ix

x  Foreword

Like a detective in pursuit of a subject, she returns to those places that promise to contain the clues to the person she became. Drawing on the rich literary tradition of Japanese women’s life-writing and the poetic wanderings of men such as Matsuo Bashō and Saigyō, Jakuchō creates with this work a map of self-discovery, a search for her place in the great unfolding of literary talent and national history. When Jakuchō emerged as a writer in the early years following the Pacific War, closeness to an author’s lived experience was almost always assumed, even desired, particularly for women writers who were expected to disclose the delicate sorrows tucked most deeply in their hearts. Categorized as joryū sakka or “women writers,” Jakuchō and her peers were meant to entertain with the sad foibles of a female life. But their truths, their intimate moments, were never meant to discomfort the reader. Jakuchō was soon to discover, however, that writing female feelings was a fraught enterprise. Her early work “Kashin” (A Flower Ovary, 1957), an erotically charged work concerning a woman’s attempt to understand her own sexuality, was met with derision. Whereas women writers had been known to offer frank portrayals of sexual longing, Jakuchō, critics believed, had gone too far. Most offensive to them was her repeated use of the word shikyū or uterus. At the story’s conclusion, for example, the female protagonist imagines that upon her death, when her body is cremated, her uterus alone would remain, unconsumed by the flames, desiring still. Critics, unused to such anatomical detail, charged Jakuchō with pandering to her audience for the sake of sensationalism, leading reputable journals to refuse to carry her writings. Jakuchō slipped into a period of despair. Looking back on the incident from the safety of hindsight, she was able to make light of the critics’ squeamishness. If a liver is a liver, and a stomach a stomach, she wondered, why wouldn’t a uterus be a uterus? But she was well aware of the answer: unlike other organs, the

Foreword  xi

uterus was tied to a woman’s identity as a reproductive commodity. Jakuchō had erred when she conflated this most sacred social function with sexual desire. Jakuchō’s ability to poke fun at herself has since earned her the admiration of readers. Her fans feel they can relate to her despite the incredibly unorthodox path her life has taken. But Jakuchō’s modesty and “folksiness” belie an extraordinary erudition. A voracious reader even in childhood and a graduate of the prestigious Tokyo Women’s College (later renamed the Tokyo Woman’s Christian University), Jakuchō had a higher education than most women of her generation. In her period of despair following the “uterus scandal,” she turned to the past, particularly to early twentieth-century women writers, and explored their literary and sexual journeys, spinning from their lives highly regarded biographies. In almost all cases, the writers she selected were women who, like herself, had been involved in extramarital relationships, had endured stinging social stigma, and had fought courageously against a system that would silence them. She followed her exploration of twentieth-century women by dipping even further into the past and discovering women who similarly flouted conventions in their quest for self-realization. In 1973, for example, she wrote Chūsei enjō (Medieval Scandal), a modern adaptation of the fourteenth-century memoir Towazugatari (The Unasked-for Story, also known as the Diary of Lady Nijō). Lady Nijō, like her more modern sisters, is another character whose life experiences roughly mirror Jakuchō’s own. Caught between lovers and social propriety, Nijō slips into scandal and ends up being deprived of her position at court, but not of her voice as she leaves behind the compelling story “no one asked for.” The years Jakuchō spent immersed in these biographies served her as an apprenticeship. As she learned from the literary voices of the past, she honed her own. The process also helped Jakuchō establish her own literary lineage. She had a sisterhood of writers from whom she drew inspiration and courage.

xii  Foreword

Critically successful, her work as a biographer re-established Jakuchō as a serious writer and gained her return to the literary fold. She answered in 1962 with a work of self-reflexive fiction, “Natsu no owari” (The End of Summer). Initially a single short story and later a collection of six published under the title Natsu no owari, each story is loosely based on her tumultuous eightyear relationship with married writer Oda Jinjirō, who figures prominently in Places. The End of Summer offered critics the kind of authentic, intimate voice they expected of a woman writer. She was rewarded with the Women’s Literature Prize in 1963. The public was stunned when on November 14, 1973, Jakuchō took the Buddhist orders and became a nun in the Tendai sect. The Japanese word for taking the tonsure is shukke, literally “to leave the house,” meaning to separate oneself from family and familial entanglements. For many, the tonsure is a metaphorical death, a removal from the dust of this world. For Jakuchō, taking the orders was perhaps the only way to stay in this world. In some respects, Jakuchō was following in the tradition of court women of old, such as Lady Nijō, whose taking of the tonsure removed them from the dizzying whirlpool of romantic passions and allowed them the freedom to focus on their own interests. Taking the vows similarly liberated Jakuchō from her romantic imbroglios. She has remained an extraordinarily productive writer. And, she has not shied away from writing about sex and sensuality. She has continued her research in the Japanese classics, producing a ten-volume translation of the Tale of Genji into a modern idiom, choosing a register that even a Japanese high school student could understand. And she has made her name as an outspoken humanitarian and activist, attending rallies and staging hunger strikes opposed to war and nuclear power. Still, Jakuchō is annoyed by the inevitable questions about her decision to take the tonsure. In a way, Places is the answer to that question. The work unfolds almost like a

Foreword  xiii

pilgrimage, a return to those places in the past where the narrator experienced moments of pain, joy, and humiliation, moments that helped define her and the course of her life. For many of us, certain places resonate with the ghosts of the past. Battlefields know the tragedy of war; and sites of lovers’ trysts, the faded promise of romance. Almost all of us will have had the experience of returning to a familiar place, only to be overwhelmed by memories. People long since forgotten return to us. Emotions carefully suppressed resurface. Like probing a sore tooth, we are drawn to these touchstones from our past, as if being in their proximity will return to us what we have lost. More often than not, we leave these nostalgic journeys empty-handed, or disappointed. Rooms we remembered as spacious and light turn out to be grey and shabby. Streets that stretched on forever are blocked; and magical forests have given way to parking lots. But occasionally, from these shards of memory we can piece together, as Jakuchō does here, not so much a portrait of our past, but a collage of who we are in the present. Unlike past poet travelers, such as Saigyō and Bashō, who traveled to places with a rich poetic lineage, Jakuchō does not celebrate sites with a poetic pedigree. Rather, she concentrates on the more or less mundane places in her own history, the rooms where she loved, and wrote, and fought. The houses. It is important to note that the house is always more than just a structure, and particularly so in Japan where the word ie also connotes family. The house is the frame that holds the family in place, establishes order and hierarchy. In Japan, it is the family system that allows the perpetuation of male supremacy and female subjugation; and it is against these structures that pre-tonsure Jakuchō struggled. Shukke for Jakuchō, therefore, provided an exit from the claustrophobia of the family system and the burden it placed on her as a woman. When Jakuchō returns to the places she once lived, her memories are often of her departures. In order to take her place

xiv  Foreword

among the long line of women writers; in order to find her place, she had to leave her houses, again and again, and extricate herself from familial relationships. Perhaps it is with some irony, then, that in 2007 the head of Japan’s national family—the emperor himself—awarded her the Order of Culture for her contributions to the nation and its culture. The prodigal daughter has returned, not as a submissive subject, but as a woman who has found her place.

Translator’s Preface

I first became aware of Setouchi Jakuchō when I was in Japan in 1998, doing research for my historical novel The Tale of Murasaki (2000), which I planned to write in the form of a fictional memoir in the voice of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of Japan’s classic novel The Tale of Genji. At that time, everyone was talking about a new translation of Murasaki’s eleventh-century tale into easy-to-read modern Japanese. The first volumes of what would become a ten-volume translation of this work had just come out. Not a specialist in arcane classical Japanese myself, I too rushed to read this version. The translator was a seventy-­five-year-old Buddhist nun. Who was this woman who, like me, was clearly obsessed by the Tale of Genji? Learning about her scandalous past and outspoken ways, I became even more curious. I tried to meet her, but she was so busy with writing, interviews, and everything that goes with being famous that I never managed to do so. I think I had hoped that my own somewhat notorious past of joining a Kyoto geisha community for an anthropological study of these women entertainers (Geisha, 1983) might pique her interest. But it didn’t happen. Still, I started to follow her life and began to read her works. When I wrote my Buddhist-themed novel Hidden Buddhas (2009), she was much in my mind, our lives seeming to encompass many parallel interests. xv

xvi  Translator’s Preface

Setouchi Harumi, born in 1922, began to write this memoir, Basho, literally “place” (or “places”—Japanese does not make a distinction) when she was seventy-seven years old. In it she traces her steps back to the physical and geographical locations that anchor the deepest layers of memory and identity, treating her readers to reminiscences of her childhood, and of the scandalous early part of her life, as seen through the eyes of the Buddhist nun she later became. Although the narrative proceeds roughly chronologically, it leaps about—the way thoughts and memories often do—connecting things across time and space. Yet in the present aspect of the places that Jakuchō revisits, there is always a sturdily remembered map of the past that reclaims attention. It would be hard to overstate how famous Setouchi is in her own country. Jakuchō, as she is known everywhere in Japan, is her Buddhist name, a designation she received when she took religious orders in 1974. Any Japanese reader of this memoir would be aware of her notorious past as a woman who abandoned husband and child to become an erotic novelist, a translator of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, and, incongruously, a Buddhist nun. She first achieved fame as a modern writer describing the unabashedly polyamorous life she had led. Now, as an anti-war political activist, she is known for her fierce opposition to the death penalty, and for the hunger strike she conducted at age ninety to protest the reopening of Japan’s nuclear reactors after the Fukushima meltdown. Translating this book gave me the opportunity to fathom the depths of this woman who had fascinated me for so long. I would call Places a memoir, but in Japan it is usually called a jiden shōsetsu, an “autobiographical novel.” In fact, it reads straight­ forwardly as autobiography with little hint of fictionalization— even though Jakuchō has long been entangled in the question of truth and lies, as she spells out dramatically in her description of a drunken argument with a lover in the last chapter.

Translator’s Preface  xvii

Jakuchō has been a public figure for a long time, but even Japanese readers might be surprised by the unflinching rendition of her thoughts and actions in this book. She is brutally honest as she revisits aspects of her past that she had previously avoided and probes the reality behind the outward-facing layers of her barely disguised autobiographical novels. Although she is still alive in 2020, and continuing to write more than twenty years after publishing Basho, one senses throughout this work that she really expected to die soon after its publication. Perhaps this accounts for her cutting frankness. In her younger years, the effort to escape from her provincial family to pursue an unconventional life as a woman writer required the expenditure of a great deal of psychological energy. An overwhelming desire to write drives her life still. While translating her memoir, I tried to meet her when I was in Japan in 2017 but was told that she was rushing to meet a manuscript deadline and felt obliged to turn down all meetings and interviews. I confess to feeling miffed at the time, but after finishing Places, I now understand that she has always been driven by her writing deadlines. That is the one thing about this mercurial, restless woman that has not changed. I am grateful to Okada Yoshie, Nishina Yoko, and Harue Wiedlin for answering my questions of meaning and nuance. I am also deeply indebted to the anonymous readers at the University of Hawai‘i Press for their suggestions and corrections, and to Stuart Kiang for his graceful copyediting.

1

Mt. Nanzan

HERE I AM, SEVENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, and all this time I simply thought my father’s hometown was some tiny village deep in the mountains. I only knew that he was born in a place called Kureha in the township of Hiketa in Kagawa prefecture, near the border of Tokushima. Hiketa is a quiet, unassuming little town on the Inland Sea. The Setouchi family graves are there in the cemetery of an old temple called Shakuzenbō. The corner of the grounds where the graves are now located was created after the Second World War by my older sister and her husband, who carry on the family line. When I was taken to visit the graves as a child, the gravesite was near the entrance to Hiketa town, halfway up a small hill. The stone memorial was unremarkable, squatting modestly next to its neighbor beside the mountain path. The main difference between this grave and the others is a biblical text carved into the side of the stone. Tracing the worn letters with his long index finger, my father quietly explained

1

2  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

that the Setouchi clan had been Christian since the late nineteenth century and had really wanted the gravestone to be a cross. If you squinted, yes, under the carving of a cross you could just make out words from the Revelations of St. John the Divine, chapter fourteen, verse 13—“Blessed are the dead, who shall lie with the Lord henceforth.” My father told me that it was his great-aunt, Setouchi Ito, who ordered this gravestone. My father Toyokichi was not originally a Setouchi. He had been born into a family named Mitani. He and his wife Koharu had two daughters—my sister Tsuya, and five years later, myself. Tsuya and I were very close. Like a shadow, I followed her everywhere—so it is strange I have no memory of her being present at the graveyard that day. I clearly recall the scene with its warm early summer sunlight illuminating the leaves of the trees on the mountain, as well as the sight of my father’s back as he washed the gravestone. Around the time I was in fifth grade, my father was entreated by his great-aunt Ito to become her adopted son and take over the Setouchi line. This is how our family got the name. So when I started high school, it was as a Setouchi. I didn’t hear the story that my mother had opposed this adoption until after her death, when her sister told me. The reason was that when my mother became engaged to my father, Great-aunt Ito had wanted him to marry a distant cousin instead. When I was around five or six, Aunty Ito would visit us in Tokushima from her home in Kobe. She was neat and well mannered, compact in form, with a sweet round face. She would be carrying a large calico bag and a tan vine-woven basket, out of which, like magic, she would pull forth all manner of regional treats—to my sister’s and my delight. There might be a kind of pound cake full of fruit that we had never tasted before and felt to be the height of elegant deliciousness. Aunty Ito called this gingercake. She also packed homemade cookies lavishly sweetened with honey. Out of her calico bag would appear matching

Mt. Nanzan  3

sets of children’s clothing, calico pants and dresses that she had sewn herself. She sent my mother an old blue faded Singer sewing machine, and my mother became quite skillful at making our clothes, too. Aunty would read the Bible to my sister and me, and enthusiastically teach us hymns. Only when she stayed with us were we children expected to tent our hands in prayer and intone amen before meals. At those times, my mother did not sit at the table, escaping to the kitchen instead. My father claimed to be busy with work and usually did not show his face until the meal was almost over. When she wasn’t around, my sister and I used to call this aunty from Kobe “Amen Aunty.” Yet the exotic aura of the modern that wafted from her fascinated me whenever she came to our house. Great-aunt Ito was already a widow by then. Her only son had died at age seventeen, and her husband, who had been a judge, was also deceased, leaving her on her own. Her one prayer was that the Setouchi line would not die out—which was why she pinned her hopes on my father. The reason she chose him, out of all the blood relatives, was that she was impressed by the way he took care of his mother—even though, as the third son, he was not obliged to do so. The first son had a strong-willed wife with whom my grandmother did not get along. When my older sister was born, my father’s mother, Mitani Taki, moved from Kureha to Tokushima to live with us. My sister was taken care of by this grandmother, who walked her to kindergarten every day. Oddly, I have no recollection at all of Grandma Taki. For a long time, Aunty Ito lived by herself in Suma near Kobe. As one of the elders of the Kobe church she was looked after by the other parishioners and so found it difficult to leave that place. From my grade school days, I have only one memory of ever visiting her in Kobe. Her house was set high over a rapid river, and the sound of running water reverberated throughout the building day and night. With her quietly modest demeanor, in her black housecoat, Aunty Ito would sometimes play her

4  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

little Nagoya harp for us. She would play the hymn God Be with You till We Meet Again. My father was a cabinetmaker. He worked with up to ten apprentices, young men just below the age of military conscription, who lived with us. My mother expended heroic effort to feed these teenagers, every day cooking a huge vat of rice big enough to feed a construction camp. These boys called my father oyakata, or “Honorable Parent,” and my mother anesan, “Big Sis.” Aunty Ito’s place was a world apart from the energetic confusion that reigned in our house. Aunty died at our home in Tokushima, where she had been brought in a state of advanced illness. I did not witness her death as I had married and moved to Beijing by that time. Nor did I attend her funeral. Years later I heard from my sister how the pastor of her church in Kobe, along with his wife and several parishioners, had gotten the deathbed notice and all had come dashing to Tokushima. Yet Aunty Ito did not expire for almost a week. Hosting this group at our house was quite an ordeal. Around that time, my father was finally able to purchase his own establishment, where he hung out a sign advertising Buddhist and Shinto religious articles for sale, and now he had the room to have customers and guests stay. “When people die, they are summoned to the abode of the gods. These Christians sure have a strange way of greeting them . . .” is what my mother’s relatives said. Another aunt once said to Aunty Ito, “You’re a Christian, so how come you picked a Shinto-Buddhist shop owner to be your heir?” Unfazed, she replied, “Christians and Buddhists both pray to unseen things, so it’s quite all right.” Up until then, I never gave a thought to the family line. Mitani or Setouchi—it was all the same to me. The characters to write Mitani Harumi were nice, but Setouchi Harumi wasn’t bad either. My father had named my older sister Tsuya, a rather old-fashioned name, but for me he chose Harumi—which in the

Mt. Nanzan  5

1920s sounded modern. I never asked him why. Whatever the reason, I seldom if ever had a heart-to-heart conversation with my father. I always thought my father loved my older sister Tsuya best—and my sister felt that our mother favored me over her. This became abundantly clear at the time of her marriage. For quite some time my mother felt that there was no need to train Tsuya in the family business. Her thinking was that this way she could marry a man she liked, in any line of work whatsoever, and it would be fine. We had a saying, “Father built the business in one generation, and we are ending it after one generation.” But it turned out my father had a different idea. In fact, he would have liked to pass the business he had created on to Tsuya, and this was a source of friction between my parents. Finally, when she had to choose a husband, my sister followed my father’s recommendation and ended up marrying one of his apprentices. Earlier, my mother had wanted to send Tsuya to a progressive upper-class high school, and she was disappointed when, instead, Tsuya chose to follow a woman’s traditional training in sewing, calligraphy, and using the abacus. My sister was keenly aware that my mother felt doubly betrayed. After this, my father had nothing to say about my own education and marriage prospects. He left it entirely in my mother’s hands. Each time something like this happened I was confirmed in my belief that Father didn’t care as much for me as he did Tsuya, and it pushed me even closer to my mother. Since reaching my seventies, I have noticed that during my life I somehow fixated much more on my father, who never talked to me, than I did on the mother who doted on me. Recently I have come around to thinking that my father’s deep attachment to passing his life’s work on to Tsuya came, not as my mother thought, from an attachment to his business per se, but rather from his feeling of responsibility to preserve the Setouchi line. As a result, a scene I had completely forgotten about suddenly came floating up from the depths of memory.

6  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

It took place in Hiketa. As if it were happening before my eyes, I could see my father and me crossing the becalmed Inland Sea and setting ourselves down on a sandy beach. I can’t remember why we were there. Father was wearing Western clothing—unusual for him. I only remember that I was a college student and that I already had a fiancé. As soon as we were married I was to accompany my new husband to Beijing. In his workplace, my father always wore a rough sweater my mother had knitted for him. In summer, he wore a cotton yukata, one sleeve hiked up to his shoulder. In the evenings, he drank sake at home. My mother washed his six-foot-long loincloth every day, and hung it to dry on the laundry pole where it fluttered whitely in the breeze. I recall my father as most manly in the figure he cut when, face painfully blueish from a fresh shave, he wore stiff striped silk hakama pants tied over a black formal kimono. But I also fondly remember him dressing to go out in a double-layer Ōshima silk kimono with an otter-fur-collared Inverness cape. Fashionable and fastidious, he often ordered Western clothes—a suit or tailcoat, or matching overcoat. Perhaps they did not suit him quite so well as Japanese clothing, but he still carried them off with style. He was a hit with the ladies, and I was vaguely aware from time to time that my mother was jealous. We sat side by side on the gray overcoat my father had spread on the sand, and I stared vacantly at the sea. I turned my head at the sudden smell of tobacco and saw that he had extracted a small pipe from his treasured deerskin tobacco pouch. Savoring the taste, he drew a puff of Shikishima tobacco. I suddenly asked, “Papa—do you wear your loincloth even under Western clothes?” He blew a strong puff of smoke. Without answering, he chuckled and gave a small cough. Just then I recalled a time when he had hoisted me up high on his shoulders to see the mikoshi palanquin at the Tenjin Festival. And then, a time when he lifted me up on his legs and spun me around in the air, calling out, “You’re an airplane . . .”

Mt. Nanzan  7

When I think about it, there were times when I lay awake crying, my whole body itching from allergies, when, to distract me from the pain, he brought a lantern filled with fireflies he had gathered and let them loose inside the mosquito net. One such time, he raised his hand and pointed to the mountain ridge which could be seen off to the right. “See that Osaka Peak over there? The spring your papa graduated from fourth grade, he crossed it by himself and went to apprentice at the carpentry shop at Jōsanjima in Tokushima,” he said. The mountain ridge straddled the border between Sanuki and Awa. “Imagine how hard that was for a kid,” he continued. “I plopped down in the middle of the road from exhaustion. The sea stretched before my eyes, but everything was misty through my tears, and finally I just howled. I carried five rice balls my mother had made, rolled up in a cloth slung over my shoulder. I unwrapped them and gobbled them up even though I wasn’t hungry. They were bitterly salted by my tears.” “Fourth grade means you were twelve?” “I was born in May just like you, but started school late. I was eight, so, right, I would have graduated when I was twelve.” “Were you a good student, Papa?” “Yep. Always number one.” His face softened in a smile. “Is Kureha, where you were born, far from here?” “Not so far,” he said, without offering to go there. After we had sat on the beach resting for a while, Papa led me to an old mansion about a twenty-minute walk away. At the edge of the fence next to the gate lay an artless scattering of gravestones. “This place was once the mansion of Kume Michikata.” “Who is that?” “He’s the great man who started the salt flats in Sakaide. He’s historical. He made guns, and ships, and all sorts of inventions. This rock here is his monument.”

8  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

A stone slab about the width of one tatami mat stood blocking the side of the decrepit gate. One side of the stone was covered in carvings of characters that of course I couldn’t read. The memorial was for Michikata and his family. “Shall we look around?” My father walked briskly through the crumbling gate. A spacious garden lay before us, although it seemed no one had taken care of it for decades. The trees had simply grown as they pleased, and a thicket of leaves and branches blocked the sky. Patches under the trees were dark and damp. It was difficult to make our way through the rampant weeds. The dense overgrowth called to mind a scene from The Tale of Genji—the desolate garden where Lady Yugao died, called the Wormwood Patch. A partially decayed mansion stood at the far end of the garden. Presuming the house to be uninhabited, my father walked straight in without bothering to call out. A sense of shadow even darker than those outside permeated the house. Spider webs festooned the place, clinging to our hands and getting onto our faces. Even though my father went first, waving his arm to clear the webs, I couldn’t escape the creepy sense of being attacked by those filaments. Room after immense room stretched before us, sliding doors mostly missing. The ta­ tami mats had rotted out. Still, the size of the pillars and height of the ceiling spoke to the glory that once was. Still in our shoes, we walked along the wooden corridors that ran next to the rooms. Something was making a faint noise. My father halted and cocked his ear. “Sounds like a spinning wheel. Can someone possibly be here?” Cringing behind his back, I peeked through one of the few remaining sliding doors into the next room. I let out a scream. A gaunt old woman with sparse white hair was bent over a spinning wheel that she was turning. There was no thread. She turned toward us and grinned through her wild hair. Scared to death, I clung to my father’s back.

Mt. Nanzan  9

“I’m very sorry—I thought no one lived here,” he said calmly. “That’s why I didn’t announce myself.” Still grinning, the ghostly old woman said nothing. “Seems like she’s deaf,” my father whispered. I thought she probably must be blind as well, but my voice wouldn’t come out. From that point, I have no memory of how we got out. But after we did, I noticed that I was holding my father’s hand tightly. Finally I quavered, “I thought she was a ghost.” “She may well have been a ghost,” he whispered, teasing me. From there, we made our way to the Hiketa station and rode the Asan line back to Tokushima. Inside the train carriage, Papa told me that the grandson of that same Kume Michitaka had been adopted into the Setouchi family when he married Aunty Ito. He was probably trying to say that the Setouchi family was of high enough status that the grandson of Kume Michitaka was not too proud to take the name. Aunty Ito’s mother was a Mitani woman from the same line as my father’s birth family, and Ito became the tenth generation of the Setouchi lineage. That day was the first time I heard my father say that his own family in Kureha had been in the business of making refined sugar. His mother, Taki, was a Suzuki from Aizono village in Awa, a most prosperous place at the time of her marriage. Taki’s husband, that is, my father’s father, Mitani Minehachi, succeeded to the professional name of Jinroku the Sixth. The sugar business was a booming success, prospering to an amazing degree. But young Minehachi had been sweet-talked by the head clerk, pampered and spoiled, and inducted into a life of dissipation. Leaving the details of the business entirely in the hands of the head clerk, he applied himself to enjoying the pleasure quarters of Takamatsu and Tokushima. Then he ran off when my father was two and was not heard from again. Rumor had it that he had fallen in love with an actress from a traveling troupe that stopped in Hiketa, and when the troupe moved on, he went with them.

10  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

Minehachi and Taki had three sons and one daughter. My father was the last child. Taki had been reared as a genteel young lady. She was devastated when her husband absconded, leaving her to care for four young children. Suddenly the business was being run by the head clerk, and before her eyes the comfortable household descended into poverty. Among the children, the one who got the worst lot was my father. His oldest brother inherited the ruined business, and the second oldest was adopted into a farming family in Aizono in Tokushima, becoming its heir. At that time on Shikoku, it was customary, after the oldest son, for the younger brothers to leave their village and try to marry into a wealthy family. That uncle had a swelling the size of a tennis ball on his left cheek. He visited us often, bringing fresh-picked vegetables from the field, and sometimes watermelon. Uncle Lumpface, as my sister and I called him, lugged boxes of fresh produce to us, including green herb mochi in the spring, and red bean mochi in the fall, for the festival of the wild boar. My father’s older sister had a daughter who came just between my sister and me in age—we were very close. We couldn’t wait for summer vacation each year, when we could go to stay at this cousin’s house. From the time she was little, my aunt took pity on her younger siblings, watching over my father with the solicitousness of a parent. Of all the many relatives, she was the one who took it upon herself to take care of her mother as well, and she was lauded as a wise and kind person all over Kureha. The part of the family from which our house was estranged was that of my oldest uncle in Kureha. From childhood, I had simply supposed that unlike my other aunts and uncles, his family must live deep in the mountains and be inconvenient to get to. Even on that one memorable day when my father and I were alone together, he didn’t seem to want to talk about Kureha or try to visit. On July 3rd in the last year of the war, my mother burned to death in an air raid shelter, and five years later my

Mt. Nanzan  11

father died too. After that, I decided to make my living as a novelist. My mother was fifty-one when she died, my father fifty-­ eight. After leaving home to go to Tokyo Women’s College, I never went back to live in Tokushima. I had no connection to my father’s oldest brother’s family, and didn’t attend family weddings or funerals. As a novelist living on my own, depending on no one, I thought that my appearance among those straight-laced relatives would probably have embarrassed them. Better to live my life without any such connections. But when I reached my mid-fifties, I decided to start attending Mitani family weddings and funerals, and then I met those cousins—my father’s oldest brother’s children. On my father’s side, we were now Setouchi, and the head of the Mitani household was my nephew. That house was now led by the grandchildren of my father’s oldest brother, and hearing their modern-sounding names—Masahiro, Shigenori, Takuya—made me feel the change of generations. Takuya had become head of the Mitani clan, inheriting the professional name Jinroku from the sugar factory. Takuya would have been the ninth-generation Jinroku, although nobody seemed to care. Even the head priest’s position at Shakuzenbō Temple in Hiketa had passed to a new generation. When I wrote a book about the poet-monk Saigyō, I learned that on his travels around Shikoku, he had stayed at Shakuzenbō for several months. Going back for a second look, I saw there was a stele set next to the well that was engraved with one of Saigyō’s poems. No one seemed to be sure of its meaning. Ara taka no hitamo Hiketa no ura nareba okibi ni kakaru shiratori no matsu An untamed hawk at Hiketa Bay where the pines are adorned with white herons

I began going to Shakuzenbō frequently for various rites and events, but I couldn’t seem to find anything in common to

12  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

talk about with this new generation of Mitani relatives. We never had any sort of deliberate conversation. However, the year I went for the fiftieth anniversary of my father’s death, an unexpected person appeared at the ceremony. The rite at Shakuzenbō had just concluded, and we were making our way to the upstairs room of a local restaurant. In the lobby below the stairs, with her back to a wall, sat a petite, well-composed old lady. Takuya’s cousin Masahiro, from a branch family of the main house, led me to the old woman and made the introduction. “This is my mother Mitsue,” he said. “Even though she is unable to walk, she wanted to see you before she dies, so we brought her. She can’t climb upstairs so she apologizes for sitting here.” “Haa-chan?” The old woman looked up with tears in her voice. “Mitchae-tan? Can it be Mitchae-tan?” I dropped down and hugged the old lady’s knees. Looking up, I found traces of the elegant past that everyone seemed to have turned away from in the narrow eyes and elegant nose of her barely wrinkled, beautifully traditional oval face. Celebrated as the village beauty, Mitsue had lived in Osaka during her youth, a fact that only enhanced her loveliness in our eyes. I couldn’t remember why she had come to live with us for half a year when I was five or six. She liked to wear a gauzy white veil wrapped around her neck, and we considered her the height of stylishness. With my lisp, I kept calling her “Mitchaetan,” and pretty soon everybody called her that. Unbothered by the children hanging around her all day long, she coddled us. At one point, the local photography studio decided on a whim to hang an enlargement of a photo of the beautiful Mitsue in their display window. White veil around her neck, Mitsue held an artificial rose, smiling with softly parted lips. The childish me would drag her to see that picture several times a day. At some point, I heard that she had fallen ill in Osaka and had moved to a sanatorium. After that, she still visited

Mt. Nanzan  13

occasionally, but the earlier interactions that had graced our childhood days were gone. Mitsue was now ninety-two. She had married late—her son Masahiro was in his fifties. She made ready to go, saying, “Now I can happily make the trip to Hades.” But I couldn’t let her go, so I climbed into the back seat of Masahiro’s car with Mitsue. “Is Kureha far from here?” I asked as he started the car. “We can get there in about fifteen minutes,” he answered. “Really?? I thought it was so far from Hiketa, deep in the mountains . . .” At this, Mitsue laughed quietly. “From the perspective of Tokyo or Kyoto, this may count as back country, but it’s not so far into the mountains,” she said. As we left the town of Hiketa behind, I thought I saw something familiar from the car window. “Could you stop a moment, please? Isn’t that the mansion of Kume Michikata?” I asked. “Yes, it is. How do you know about that?” Masahiro replied. He stopped the car. Excusing myself to Mitsue, I stepped out onto the road. The cluster of gravestones, the commemorative stele for Michikata—they were just as they had been fifty years earlier when I had gone there with my father. But the gate was new, and it was closed. A sign had been erected with information about Michikata by the Kume Michikata Preservation Society. It appeared the society was in charge of the place now. “Do you want to go in?” Masahiro asked. I shook my head and returned to the car. About ten minutes later, we arrived at Masahiro’s house, surrounded by peach trees in full bloom. Farm fields spread out around it, although here and there a few houses built in the modern style had sprung up. Mitsue was tired and went to lie down, but I asked Masahiro to take me on a quick tour outside.

14  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

“Well, this is Kureha,” he said. “This? Is Kureha?” I couldn’t keep a note of surprise from my voice. A flat farming village surrounded by mountains on three sides, where from a second-floor window you could get a faint glimpse of the Inland Sea. There were peach trees and apricot trees blooming everywhere. It was impossibly bright. “Most of these houses are Mitani. All cleaved off from the main house over the generations. It used to be they all made sugar, but now they’re either salarymen like me, or else farmers.” “How come I never came to Kureha until now?” I said out loud. I had always thought it was a long way away from Hiketa. I turned to Masahiro. “I’m not so far from having to say goodbye to this world myself, and though I wouldn’t say I’m searching for my roots exactly, somehow I feel I want to walk on the ground where my father was born—to see where he lived as a boy, until he was twelve. To stand in the actual place on my own feet—it feels like the land’s memory creeps into your body from the soles of your feet. It’s like a spell.” “Yes, that’s true,” said Masahiro. “Once, a long time ago, I read something—I think it was Kawabata Yasunari, although I’m not sure. It said writers generally are people from venerable houses that have fallen into ruin. When I read that, I said to my wife that it’s not surprising a novelist should have come out of our family. My wife loves books.” “I read that somewhere too,” I said. “The Mitani house may be ruined, but it was hardly a great old house.” “That’s not true,” Masahiro responded. “The entire Mitani clan of Kureha—don’t you know? The estate of Kume Michikata is now settled in the Shikoku Mura Village Museum in Yashima.” I told him I remembered seeing something about that several years ago. The Katō Kaiun shipping company had funded the establishment of the museum, and I had been invited by the

Mt. Nanzan  15

company president, Katō Tatsuo, to attend the completion ceremony. The museum exhibited old building styles and various kinds of implements from all over Shikoku, with inventions by Michikata among them, along with his books and papers. There was a display of the shed used in the refining of sugar from millet, and an ox-drawn contraption used for grinding. How amazing that a person of inventive brilliance on the order of the renowned Hiraga Gennai should have come from this humble village. I fondly remember the expression on President Katō’s face when I revealed the connection between Michikata and the Setouchi family. Masahiro led me to the Mitani main house nearby. Takuya had not yet returned from officiating at the memorial. The imposing house had been built not quite two years earlier. The foyer opened onto a grand room where a tiered display of Girls Day dolls reached almost to the ceiling. The gorgeously attired dolls of the imperial court lined the shelves in crowded ranks. On the wall opposite the dolls stood a wide Buddha altar. Masahiro showed me the dining table that had been made from the main pillar from Takuya’s wife’s old home when it was demolished. The table easily accommodated eight people. Masahiro ran his hand over the cut end of the table top as he turned to me and said, “See, here is the old pillar.” It occurred to me that my father must have touched that pillar when he was a boy, and I suddenly felt hot. “I wonder if it was here that he was born—my father . . .” I whispered. “No, the previous generation moved to this place,” Masahiro said. “The original Mitani house now belongs to someone else. Do you want to go see it?” He stood up. A ten-minute walk through the fields brought us to a fence of natural rock surrounding a castle-like mansion. A variety of fruiting trees stretched above the top of the stone fence— persimmon, chestnut, pomegranate, and wax myrtle, interspersed with pines. We pushed on the gate and it opened easily. Inside

16  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

the gate, large rocks formed stepping-stones leading to the interior. Around them the weeds grew lush. That said, it was nothing like the depressing state of the old Kume mansion my father and I had stumbled into long ago. The owner, also a Mitani, now lived in Moji and only visited here once every couple of years. At the far end of the garden we could see a warped building completely closed up with rain shutters. The grounds were so generous that even if a factory had been there as well, you’d still think it was a large place. I wandered slowly among the buildings. As if trying to stimulate the memories in the land, I stepped particularly slowly across the earth, thinking about the footprints of my father when he was a boy. Masahiro was following, and I spoke with him as we walked. “Masahiro, did your mother ever tell you anything about my grandfather? The one who left home to run off with the troupe of traveling actors?” “Oh yes, she spoke about that often. One spring, after more than twenty years had passed with absolutely no contact, a telegram arrived announcing he was on death’s door.” Apparently, no one recognized the woman’s name on the telegram. Still, my father’s two older brothers hurried down to Hakata in Kyushu. But Grandpa Minehachi hadn’t waited for them and had already breathed his last. The woman he had been living with was not the actress from the traveling troupe but rather a former geisha from that area. Living off her earnings as a nagauta singing teacher, Minehachi had earned some small change by telling fortunes. The woman was gentle, and, as she had been instructed to do when his time camed, she sent the telegram to Kureha. Chūjirō and Sei-ichi, two of the sons he had abandoned, took charge of the cremation and brought Minehachi’s ashes back to his native village. He had been just sixty-one. “According to what my mother said, his house was crammed with books—Chinese classics. The woman he lived with seemed very proud of the fact that he taught waka and

Mt. Nanzan  17

haiku, and composed dodoitsu ditties for her to perform. Apparently, my younger uncle exploded at that, saying that for someone who had abandoned his wife and children it was a fine thing to be composing funny songs. He caused quite a commotion, making the poor woman cry, is what they say.” Sometimes I think Minehachi’s blood, in tossing wife and children aside to live the completely self-centered, irresponsible life of a wanderer, probably runs strongest in myself. In the distance, the mountains loomed above the fields spread out below. A couple of farmers, perhaps husband and wife, climbed up out of a rice paddy. Catching sight of me, the woman untied the cotton towel from her neck and waved as she called, “Well, well, welcome home.” Returning their bow, and pointing to the mountain behind them, I asked, “What is the name of that mountain?” No doubt it was the same mountain my father had looked at, morning and evening, when he was a child. “That mountain? It’s called Nanzan.”

2

Tatara River

JULY 3, 1945. MY MOTHER KOHARU burned to death in an American air raid. On that evening, the American bombers virtually obliterated the area around the prefectural offices, plus the cities of Kōchi, Tokushima, and Matsuyama. The city of Tokushima suffered the highest casualties. Most of the people fled to nearby Mt. Bizan. My mother and grandfather, Tominaga Wasaburō, entered an air raid shelter instead of fleeing. Both died. I was living in Beijing at the time. For at least six months there had been no contact between us, and I had no idea of what had befallen my hometown. Since my husband had received his on-site military call-up in China, I was left alone with our baby daughter, who had not yet reached her first birthday. It was a period of tremendous confusion. I didn’t even glimpse my mother’s death in my dreams. To this day, I cannot understand or accept how it was that my mother, who doted on me so completely, didn’t float into my dreams when she died. The first I heard of her death 18

Tatara River  19

was at the Tokushima station in July, upon our repatriation from Beijing a year after the war ended. The three of us, parents and baby, in our faintly soiled traveling clothes, alighted from the train and stood gaping at the charred fields that had once been a town. I heard a voice from somewhere calling my childhood name. It was a classmate from grade school whom I had not seen since graduating ten years earlier. For a second I did not recognize her. Breathlessly she related how my mother and grandfather had been killed in an air raid. She said my family’s house had burned down, but a temporary dwelling was erected nearby—and as she talked, I remembered her face as a child, and her name. Right after she left, a woman wearing a large straw hat came bicycling by the station plaza. My sister Tsuya. Averting her eyes, and without a word, she stretched her hand out to my daughter lying in her father’s arms. We had sent a telegram from the quarantine station in Sasebo where we had first re-entered Japan. My sister placed the baby on the parcel rack of her bicycle. A woman of few words, now she whispered sporadically. My husband’s family home had also been incinerated; his elderly parents had gone to live with his brother, who was working in Aichi prefecture. When I told her I had heard about our mother’s death at the station, my sister stopped short, and for the first time looked intently into my face and nodded. What at first glance had looked like a barren burned field in front of the station turned out on closer inspection to be home to a cluster of barracks-like huts around the edges of the plaza. Later I found out those huts were the black market. Daiku-­ machi, Carpenters Row, with furniture stores and shops for Buddhist articles, was the street closest to Mt. Bizan, but it was destroyed as well, with barely a house surviving. On a lot just kitty-­corner to where our old house had been, there now stood a single two-story house my father had built by himself. Somehow or other he had reached beyond cabinetry and acquired the skills

20  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

to build shrines and farmhouses. He drew the plans, made the blueprints, and did the work of a master carpenter. Having seen the things he had built for relatives, I wasn’t too surprised that my father had built this house by himself. Tsuya proudly reported that she had plastered the walls and papered the sliding doors. She had two small boys. Her husband had been taken prisoner in Manchuria and sent to Siberia. He had not yet returned. Since my husband’s family home was gone, there was nothing for us to do but move into this house my father had built and freeload. In the unvarnished wooden Buddha cabinet he had made stood a single tablet for my mother. Apparently, my grandfather Wasaburō’s tablet had been entrusted to my aunt. Though I joined my hands in prayer, I had no actual sense of my mother’s death, nor did the tears come. The following day Tsuya took me to the site of our old house. Neither she nor my father had said anything about how she died, and I had been hesitant to ask. “This was where we dug the air raid shelter, and this is where it happened.” My sister pointed to a place just behind the thick-walled kura used for storage. Originally a pawnshop storehouse, the sturdy structure’s exterior had survived the fire, although soon afterwards it crumbled away. Only the indestructible foundation stone remained. About three months prior to building the shelter, my sister and her two children had evacuated to Kanyake, her brother-in-law’s village near the border of Sanuki. From there, on the night of July 3rd, they could see the sky lit red from the firebombs falling on Tokushima. The next day, July 4th, my sister started walking before dawn. She reached Carpenters Row by mid-morning. A crowd had gathered in front of the bomb shelter. My father stood there stock still, looking as if his soul had been sucked out of him. This is what I was able to discern from my sister’s intermittent whispers. That recounting was so painful I couldn’t bear to ask her more. Later, from my mother’s talkative

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younger sister Kikue, I learned the condition of my mother and grandfather’s corpses. Grandfather’s summer cold had been aggravated by a high fever. This made evacuating him difficult, so my mother stayed behind and took him to the shelter. No matter how much my father tried to coax them to leave, she refused. My mother’s back was charred like a piece of burned wood, but when my aunt related how my grandfather’s front side was paler under the cape he had worn, my father began to shake and the tears overflowed. Wasaburō’s body had been protected by my mother, who had thrown herself over him, and was hardly burned. People were surprised that the bankbook and other documents wrapped in layers of mosquito netting were also saved. According to my aunt, the neighbors wondered why my father hadn’t forced them to evacuate, carrying the sick man on his back if need be. That may even have been my aunt’s opinion. She said to me, “Tsuyachan looked at those two bodies and didn’t shed a tear. ‘Aunty, I’m so hungry—don’t you have anything to eat?’ she said to me. So, I pulled out the two rationed rice balls I had cooked, and without a word she unwrapped them.” I detected a tone of reproach in her voice even beyond what she felt about my father’s failure to evacuate my mother and grandfather. Yet when I heard this story, my heart became unaccountably lighter. Thinking of Tsuya’s empty belly—she had walked alone for hours, without even a drop of water, only to find charred earth once she got to Tokushima—I thought why was it so bad to eat two rice balls? The green vitality in my sister’s young body was, at that point, the best salvation there could be. Finally, my aunt lowered her voice and said, “That night your mother was wearing a black crepe dress she had sewn herself. No peasant mompe pants. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to come out . . .” I found it strangely comforting to think that my mother, mindful of her role as leader of the Patriotic Women’s Association

22  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

in her village, preferred to die rather than escape wearing such an unpatriotically stylish outfit. She had been one of the first women in the village to have her hair done up in a permanent, and she rationalized it by saying how much time it would save in fixing her hair. But the truth is she was style conscious. The white apron and sleeve holders of the women’s association, worn with baggy peasant trousers, was a look that I imagine, in her heart of hearts, she must have despised. I have no idea where she learned about it, but she knew of Margaret Sanger’s birth control method and occasionally talked about it to my sister and me. She even tried it herself. “It’s a parent’s responsibility to space out the children so they can get a proper education,” she had declared. My father told me about their last conversation several years after my mother’s death. Soon after that he was dead as well. Around the time the war situation worsened, my mother went around saying that their town would not have air raids. Her reasoning went that if air raids were to come to a backwater place like Tokushima, that really would be the end of Japan, and there would be no reason to go on. As head of the village association, my father was preoccupied that day with getting people to evacuate. That was when he finally noticed that he hadn’t seen my mother. When he peeked into the shelter he found her there with Wasaburō. “Get out now!” He grabbed her hand. But my mother pulled away with determination. “I’m okay. Leave me here—you escape! Quick!” Probably they argued back and forth. That was all my father said about it, and I did not ask further. I will never forget the trembling in his face when he finally told me this. I couldn’t figure out why my grandfather was there in the first place. I have no memory of a grandfather other than this man, Tominaga Wasaburō, my mother’s father. When we were children we called him our Yokote Grandpa because he had a rice and fruit

Tatara River  23

store at the southern edge of Ryōgoku Bridge, in an area called Yokote. The front part of the store carried dried food and fruit, with rice sold in the back. To my childish eyes, the colorful fruit under the bright electric lanterns hanging in front were mesmerizing. I had no idea it was just a rice store. Hearing my mother was from that place gave me a sense of pride and joy. To my young mind, the Yokote house seemed much wealthier than my own. Wasaburō was much better looking than your average man. He had pronounced eyes and nose, with a clear expression of authority and refinement. Women and children alike were drawn to his large soft eyes. At that time, my mother’s younger brother Tominaga Takao and his wife operated the store with Wasaburō. Takao took after his father, although he was not quite as good looking. Uncle Takao was generous, and whenever I went to the store he would hand me fruit with a big smile. “Here, have this one, and this one too . . .” I would go away with my sleeves and the front of my kimono heavy with fruit, and both hands full. Their child was my cousin Masakatsu, one year younger than me. Just as I knew nothing about my father’s birth family in Kureha until much later, neither did I know much about my mother’s birthplace. Wasaburō was not originally the owner of a rice shop. My mother’s family, the Tominagas, lived in the town of Kotani Jōroku-machi in Tokushima. She took me there once, perhaps when I was in fourth or fifth grade. As I remember, my stay-at-home mother looked forward to going once every year or two to Jōroku Temple to visit graves. This temple is located between the mountainside of Jōroku town and a road running alongside the pure waters of the Katsuura River. To get there, we walked beside a long white causeway along the river. She may have taken me a few times, but I think my mother also enjoyed going by herself. This famous temple, the oldest in the prefecture, is known as the Hōryūji of Awa. According to temple legend, it had

24  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

been founded in the year 650 by the nun Tenshin Shōgaku, as a nunnery. It was called Jōrakuji, or Pure Ease Temple, but with the placement of a sixteen-foot- high statue of Kannon by the famous sculptor monk Gyōki in 686, it became known as Jōrokuji, the Sixteen-foot Temple. The main building stands in a leafy grove of huge old trees, with nine enclosures below it. It is a high-status temple, but it is also a favorite place for the people of Tokushima to come on excursions, and grade-schoolers for picnics. The temple is also famous for its blood ceiling. And sure enough, as children, when we were told to look up, we thought we could see sinister dark bloodstains on the ceilings of the walkways. In 1582, the lord of Mugi Castle, Shingai Tōtomi, also known as Priest Dōzen, was invited to Jōroku Temple by the treacherous Chōsokabe Motochika of Tosa, who was scheming to dominate the island of Shikoku. Dōzen was presented with a feast of delicacies, and while at the banquet hall, was told by Motochika’s representative Hisatake Chikanao that the stipend for the Katsuura area would be increased by one yen. This made Dōzen very happy—and totally relaxed, he proceeded to get drunk. He was unarmed when he stumbled out to the verandah of the drawing room, where he was attacked by Tosa soldiers with spears and stabbed to death. At that moment, they say, the blood gushing from Dōzen’s body spurted up to the ceiling. The children of Tokushima all know this tale of the blood ceiling of Jōroku Temple. Whenever my mother prayed to the Kannon statue there, I would observe my own ritual of looking up at the blood ceiling before setting out for home. On one particular day, I’m not sure what was on my mother’s mind, but instead of our usual route along the causeway, we started walking toward the mountain to the left of the rice paddies. After a bit, we came to a small stream. She pointed across the far bank. We could see a group of houses clustered at the foot of the mountain, and we gazed at the large house nearest us, surrounded by a stone wall like a castle.

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“That house with the stone wall—that’s where I was born,” she said, holding up her white parasol and not looking at my face. She continued, saying she had lived there until she was thirteen. “Let’s go see!” I said, excited with curiosity. “Other people are living there now. It would be a bother for them if we suddenly just stopped in.” Quickly my mother started walking down the path leading past the bridge. As she walked, as if speaking to herself, she murmured, “When I was a child, the area from the mountain behind the house all the way to Jōroku Temple belonged to us. We could walk from home to the temple and not leave our land. We would play there almost every day.” To me, it was like hearing a story from a book. When she was twelve, my mother lost her mother. As the oldest girl among five children, she had to be mother to her siblings—the youngest of whom was a two-year-old girl—from that day on. That was the first time I heard this from my mother’s mouth, although I must have been told by her or my aunt that the Tomi­ naga family had been village headmen for generations, respected by all the villagers. Although it was near the end of the year, the day was warm like autumn. Not a cloud marred the crystalline clarity of the sky. The three of us—me, my cousin Tominaga Isamu, who was driving, and his older brother Masakatsu turned toward my mother’s birthplace. The current head of the Tominaga family, my cousin Masakatsu, a year younger than me, operated a prosperous rice shop in Tokushima. Isamu and his wife were enjoying a carefree old age. When he was a boy, Isamu lived at our house for several years, and so we had a relationship like that of older sister and younger brother. Even now, we feel like brother and sister, and those two are the only ones who call me their big sister. My mother was fond of the two nephews from her side of the family

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and treated them just like her own children. I even feel that they may have been closer to my parents than I was—the daughter who left her hometown so early. From the time I left for Tokyo at age eighteen, they knew much more about her than I did. Both of them were stiffly proper, and I figured neither had ever touched a woman except for their wives—but I felt no need to confirm this considering they were seventy-six and seventy-two years old. In my family, everybody except my mother bore emotional scars. I wouldn’t say we were lascivious exactly— we just have personalities that make it hard to suppress our passion. I wondered how different my life would have been if my mother hadn’t died during the war. Probably I would not have divorced. If by some chance I’d done so, my mother would have certainly taken my daughter, cut off all ties with me, and brought her up herself. Fastidious, honest, chaste, and faithful, my mother sighed throughout body and soul even at the light flirting my father occasionally allowed himself. I noticed this about her when I was twelve or thirteen. At some point my sister and I started calling her “the saint” behind her back, and though we respected her, we couldn’t stand her prudery. “This is the first time the three of us have gone on a relaxed drive like this,” I said. “Well, Big Sister, it’s because you are always so busy . . .” Chatting easily like this, my cousins and I cocooned ourselves in the cheerful feeling of being on an excursion. Ever since we were children, Masakatsu had been smarter than me, and even now he was just stuffed with facts. I listened quietly, as if to a lecture, as he held forth about the highway. What I was more interested in was talk about the house we were about to visit—my mother’s natal home, now occupied by an unrelated family named Kume. He began to relate something that had happened twenty or so years ago. The mistress of the Kume household had come to Masakatsu’s house, asserting that whenever her family members

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passed through certain places in the old house, they would be seized by severe pains in their shoulders or hips. There were two or three places like this in the building. When they arranged for a prognostication, the shaman claimed to have discovered a curse by the spirits of twenty-eight samurai warriors killed by the warrior Yoshitsune, and she recommended an exorcism. Then she said that the responsibility for this exorcism rested not with the current householders but with the Tominaga family, as previous owners. This is the true story of what happened. In 1185, Minamoto Yoshitsune sneaked up on and attacked the Heike army sequestered on Yashima Island. At two in the morning on the 16th day of the 2nd month, Yoshitsune set out from Watanabe in Settsu province with fewer than a hundred fifty horsemen in five boats to cross the Kitan Straits. Just then a violent storm arose. Cutting across the rough waves with the wind at his back, he landed just before dawn at Amago-ura in Awa—that is, present-­ day Matsushima. Without stopping, Yoshitsune went right on to attack the main body of the Heike troops. The road his warriors took came to be known as the Yoshitsune Highway, a story that lives on today in numerous legends. Along the way, they fought a battle at the castle complex on the west bank of the Katsuura River, also known as Kumayama Castle. It was located about one kilometer north of Jōroku Temple and was guarded by the Heike general Taguchi Shigeyoshi’s older brother Sakurama Yoshitō. The castle walls were about thirty meters high. On the north side was a moat; the other three sides were swamp. To the northwest of the castle ran the Tatara River. Tragically, the castle fell in this battle, and twenty-eight defeated commanders were captured. They were beheaded and buried in the garden of a wealthy household in a small valley in the northern reaches of the Tatara River. “That house belonged to our ancestors, they say. And so, persecuted by that old Kume lady, my aunt and I went back

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and forth doing purification rituals with the shaman,” said Masakatsu. Laughing, I asked him, “So, what happened with the curse?” “After that, the curse lifted, and it’s been long life and happiness for them.” At that, I laughed even more. When we got to Kotani, the rice paddies were filled with the early stages of a public works construction, with several cranes poking up into the sky. On the south side of the river a park was taking shape. Names from the past that commemorated old battles, like Winners’ Bridge and Losers’ Bridge were encased in a dreary concrete structure. Yet the limpid water of the small Tatara River maintained an atmosphere of tranquility. Here and there pale plumes of pampas grass trembled in the breeze. Thinking this must be near the spot where I had stood with my mother so long ago, I asked Isamu to stop the car. Anything resembling a castle’s stone walls was long gone. I could see a brand-new Western-style building and an old farmhouse roof, but nothing like the houses with stone walls I had hoped to see on the peaks of the mountain ridges in the distance. Broad fields stretched in front of the Kume house, along with a bevy of construction vehicles. Half of the mountain directly in front had already been stripped away, exposing a raw slice. At the Kume house, eighty-five-year-old Toyo and his wife, surprised, came out to greet us. In good health and affable, Toyo loved playing croquet and talking. He was the one who had encouraged Masakatsu to go along with the exorcism. “And since then, with the curse lifted, it’s been nothing but good stuff.” He grinned broadly. The main buildings of the old houses from my mother’s time had all been renovated, and by the grandchildren’s generation the families were putting up Western-style buildings, requiring the dismantling of the old stone walls. Long ago, when the

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Tominagas lived here, there was a paper factory—my cousins pointed to a barn where it once stood. I’d never heard about my grandfather letting out some fields to tenants who made paper before. About five acres of land surrounded the house. This was why that generation had expressed satisfaction when they saw their home territory stretching from the mountain in back to the fields in front, and to the banks of the Tatara River—all of it Tominaga land. My mother’s story about how they could walk from their house to Jōroku Temple without having to set foot on anybody else’s land seems to have been true after all. “Such an unexpected visit—we have nothing to give you . . .” So saying, Toyo’s wife lugged a heavy bag of rice grown at the Kume farm and plopped it in the trunk. Before we left, I turned to walk toward the mountains. Tangerine and persimmon trees were growing where the mansions with their imposing stone walls had stood. Clusters of tangerines on every branch glistened in the sunlight. From the road one could simply stretch out a hand to pluck them. I picked three or four with a quick bow of acknowledgement to the houses that showed no signs of human presence. Eating as I walked, I was surprised at how sweet and delicious they were. Come to think of it, I remembered that my mother had been exceptionally fond of tangerines, as well as bananas and red bayberries. Strangely, I remembered something my aunt had said, and it filled me with nostalgia. Wasaburō’s wife, my grandmother Katsu, was well known in these parts for her intelligence. She had reared her children without difficulty, right up until the day she died at age thirty-six. Among those children, my mother was the one who benefited the most, in my aunt’s opinion. Rare for a girl, she graduated from a respected grade school, and once excused from housework, she spent the days reading books from the local rental library. When my aunt said this, she probably meant to imply that it had made more work for the others.

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Indeed, my mother was not good at housework or cooking. She seemed like a person who headed a household instead. Unruffled and steady, she was always generous and calm, especially in times of crisis when she was decisive and quick. My father really seemed to depend on her good judgment. She loved new things and would order a novel knitting machine or gadget for embroidering just from the magazine advertisements. I told Masakatsu that if she had ever seen online shopping, she would have been ordering things every day. “I guess you’ve inherited that,” said Isamu, who knew about my interest in online shopping. Somewhere I had heard that Katsu was not particularly beautiful. Before she died, Katsu had borne five children, and on top of that she had helped with the paper-making business her farm-hating husband had started. She also looked after the tenant farmers, which doubtless involved a lot of hard work. Her husband Wasaburō’s obvious handsomeness must have stood out during their time here, but even so, it seems there were no rumors of unfaithfulness on his part. From what I can remember, Wasaburō was a reserved, calm, and generous person. But right after Katsu died, he sold everything—the house and all the fields—and moved the family to Tokushima. Wasaburō had two older sisters. The older sister had married a rice merchant, and relying on her, Wasaburō entered that business. It remains a mystery why the two sisters did not object to his selling the family home and farm. Perhaps it was because the paper business had failed, and it was a way to settle accounts. Wasaburō hardly ever spoke in the local dialect. He spoke standard Japanese with a slight Awa accent—a speaking style that was oddly becoming. He never remarried during all the time that elapsed between his wife’s death and his own perishing in the conflagration. I can remember the tenor of his soft-spoken speech, but I can’t recall him smiling or laughing. I can only recall his dignified expression and demeanor, albeit stern like an old-fashioned

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samurai. The facade he maintained as an entrepreneur in the paper-making business and his life as a rice and fruit vendor now seem like rather ill-fitting masks. For a while he lived outside the city, raising several hundred chickens and selling their eggs. When I was a child I stayed one night at his little house, which itself was like a coop stinking of chickens. Strangely, I do remember the earnest expression on my grandfather’s face, living by himself there. Yet even the poultry business failed disastrously when, one cold night, he forgot to turn on the heater and the chickens all froze to death. Grandfather’s life was always shadowed by financial woes, eventually reducing him to a solitary existence. It is unlikely that any of those close to him would have encouraged him to remarry. After I had grown up I never had a chance to have a deeper conversation with him, or spend any time enjoying his company. Even so, from age three or four I had my own time with him, when he would carry me on his back, on the fifth day of the fifth month every year, just before daylight. I had been plagued with seeping skin sores since my earliest days. In local parlance, we called it “failed measles,” a kind of congenital eczema. My skin was so delicate that the least little thing would cause a rupture that would fester. At night, my entire body itched so badly that I couldn’t sleep. Nowadays it would probably be diagnosed as atopic dermatitis. No medicine helped. The doctors gave up. When a Chinese herbalist recommended rhinoceros horn, my mother prepared a tincture every day and made me drink it. Then she heard that praying at Ishikiri Shrine in Osaka was effective for healing skin maladies, so she took me all the way to Osaka to make an offering there. One day, Grandfather Wasaburō heard that if one rubbed one’s body with the dew that gathered on calamus leaves just before the sky brightened on the fifth day of the fifth month, it would change the body’s constitution. And so, undeterred by what anyone said, he resolved to see if it would work. On the designated morning, while it was still dark, he would heft my still

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sleeping body on his back and take me to a place where calamus grew, and swab me with the early morning dew. I usually woke up on his broad back. Most times, the stars were still twinkling. I don’t remember exactly where the calamus plants were—sometimes in a shrine garden in the mountains, sometimes on the bank of a wide river. Once they were in the far reaches of a public park. I had to stand stark naked in the grassy plot, wordless, as if performing a ritual, while Grandfather scooped the morning dew off the long leaves and rubbed them over my body. I didn’t mind, because it was a refreshingly cool and tingly sensation. I closed my eyes, and enraptured, entrusted myself completely to my grandfather. His broad, thick palms were soft and gentle. “That feels nice,” I whispered. “Oh good, oh good . . .” he replied, scooping up more dew. Our secret sacrament continued for several years. When I started school, they stopped. Whether it was because it gradually became unseemly, or because his living situation changed, I don’t remember, but it ended. And at some point, my skin became normal. My mother never once asked me where we went or what we did on those excursions. Considering it to be a secret between me and my grandfather, I never told anyone else about it. On that day, my cousins and I got back in the car and drove to Grandmother Katsu’s home village of Sanago-uchi. I remembered that just once, about the time I was a first grader, my mother had taken me to Sanago-uchi for a visit. We met a tall dark woman with round eyes who must have been my mother’s cousin. She led us into a packed-earth-floor kitchen with a scorched metal rice pot. Then I sat, bored, next to my mother at the edge of the sitting room while they talked and talked. The woman made a confection of parched rice and black beans in a molasses syrup right there in front of us, and when my attitude softened, took me outside to the mountain in back. A huge bayberry tree was dropping red fruit. Holding a basket to my chest,

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I lost myself gathering the ripe berries. The image of my youthful form, nimbly climbing the tree like a monkey and shaking it to loosen the fruit, remains fixed in my mind’s eye. Sanago-uchi, tucked deep, deep in the mountains, is the only village of Myōtō county that has remained unincorporated and independent from the city of Tokushima. It is a prosperous village of five thousand people, who no doubt prefer their own village governance. Out there, paved roads run along valleys deep into the mountains, continuing to who knows where. With some fall color still remaining, the warmth of the scenery was nostalgic and inviting. No matter where you entered the mountains, it was bright, quiet, and still everywhere you looked, with no trace of human activity. I gazed out the car window, wondering where the dark mountain I remembered had gone. Katsu, as a young bride, likely riding a horse, had left this mountain village to begin married life in a hamlet on the bank of the Tatara River. Isamu now stopped the car in front of a newly built house with the mountain at its back. A dog barked noisily. I gazed up at a white house that was modern and brand new. It was an impressive structure, like something lifted from the pages of an architectural magazine, rising imposingly into the sky. Suddenly I was reminded of the Mitani house in my father’s village in Kureha, which I had recently visited. There was something strikingly similar about the atmosphere. Ogawa Hiroshi and Harumi, the current owners of the house, came out to greet us. Hiroshi gave a clear laugh as he told us how he had lost the election for village headman the previous year. His wife Harumi, the same name as mine, had married into the village from Tokushima. Their daughter had just graduated from a women’s college in Tokyo. Now living at home, she commuted to her job at a bank in Tokushima. The interior of the house and furniture were modern and curated with expensive taste. They brought out an old photo album, and my eye fell on an extraordinarily beautiful

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middle-­aged woman. “I remember this person,” I said. “She often came to our house.” “That’s Kinue, my mother,” said Hiroshi. Then, as he continued talking, I heard something totally unexpected. Just prior to the end of the war, my grandfather Wasaburō had been evacuated to their house. “On that day, he was trying to fetch your bridal trousseau, which had been stored at your home on Carpenters Row, to bring it here for safekeeping. He took a car to Daiku-machi and was planning to be back the next day. But he caught an awful cold, and prolonged his stay for one night—that’s how he was killed in the bombing. Such a pity my mother could not convince him to come back.” I was at a loss for words. Suddenly I remembered hearing someone’s voice, my sister’s or my aunt’s, saying, “When he got older, Grandfather really liked Kinue from Sanago-uchi. He said he wished he could die there.” In the garden was a splendid persimmon tree and a huge yuzu tree whose branches were loaded with golden yellow fruit. The rice grown here is said to be the most delicious in Tokushima. Hiroshi said that the feudal lord Hachisuka Masakatsu relished this rice. The name of the stream flowing below the house is the Saga River, and the land just beyond it is called Saga. After mentioning that there was probably a connection to Saga in Kyoto, Hiroshi laughed, showing his white teeth. “Long ago, my father climbed up that bayberry tree and shook all the fruit down.” He said that even the old house belonging to the branch family, the one with the dark rice pot, had now been rebuilt and looked totally new. As if whispering to myself, I murmured, “You must be able to see the stars twinkling at night here. Do you have fireflies?” I tried to remember the touch of my grandfather’s gentle warm hands.

3

Nakazu Harbor

I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF MY surroundings when we lived

near Shinmachi River, on the north side of Tomida Bridge. To my childish eyes, our street was a broad thoroughfare. Our house was on the east side. Its entrance was narrow, although the building itself extended back, long and deep as an eel’s bed. Our shop was located at the entrance, on a packed earth floor. Behind it lay the wood-floored workshop where my father’s ten apprentices, sitting with their backs to the walls, worked at their tasks, their carpenter’s tools hanging in tidy rows behind them. As soon as you entered the shop, you were enveloped in the scent of freshly sawed wood. The family’s rooms lay beyond the workshop and one larger wooden-floored room. To reach that farthest space, you had to pass through the workshop along a plank down the center, all the time wading through soft mounds of wood shavings from the workers’ planes. Every so often someone’s plane, or chisel, or saw, might be hiding, buried in the shavings. Should I happen to carelessly step over a tool, suddenly Papa’s straight edge would come flying at my legs. 35

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“Women don’t step over tools!” came the stern voice after the rule had hit my thigh. “I can’t even see it under the shavings!” In a voice tearful from the pain, I reproached him. “Tell your guys not to leave their tools in the way!” The apprentices would snigger. From the time I could lisp, I would face any adult with a logical argument and defy any opinion I didn’t agree with. They used to call me “Haa-chan the quibbler.” Some of the apprentices had only just left grade school while others were about ready to be assessed for military conscription. The year they turned twenty-one, they received from my father an adult’s crested, formal black kimono and haori coat together with striped hakama pants. And then they entered the army. They called my father Honorable Parent, and my mother Big Sis. She made miso soup for the crowd and pickled her own radishes, cooking their meals in a pan big enough for a barracks. The store in front sold all the things made in the workshop. For example, every household in that era needed a special wooden shelf for the offerings to the gods, another shelf for the imperial symbols, and a shrine for the kitchen god, along with a second shrine, if needed, for the Inari rice spirit. At New Year’s, all manner of pot lids, steamer baskets, two-tiered stands, and three-cornered stands were lined up for sale, as well as pestles for rice pounding. We sold wooden objects from feather dusters to latticed room transoms. The transoms were mostly constructed by my father, but the openwork ones were cut by my mother, who sat in a corner of the shop following his designs on a jig. The apprentices slept above the store, and the four of us family members slept in the big room in back. Once, I discovered a large ceramic wide-mouth jar full of an evil-smelling dark liquid under a floorboard in the bathroom. “That’s the pot of Grandma’s tooth blackener,” said my older sister Tsuya.

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At that time, you occasionally saw women who still blackened their teeth, so I just nodded. My mother had a small copper basin that she kept in that same bathroom compartment. From time to time she would take it out on the porch, fill it with benzine, and clean the kimono that had become soiled by the oil from her traditional hairdo. After soaking for a bit, the dirt would fall away and the pale blue and peach colors of the fabric would regain their original luster. Then she spread them out on newspaper to dry. Embroidered detachable collars were cleaned the same way. In her thirties, my mother had thick black hair, becomingly done up in a married woman’s marumage chignon. I was past five before I stopped going to sleep sucking on my mother’s breast at night. I’m sure there was no milk at that point, but I loved playing with her nipple with my tongue, pinching and squeezing it as I fell asleep. Just touching Mother’s voluptuously plump body, her white fine-textured skin, was pleasurable. For the longest time I presumed that she permitted me to continue this indulgence without weaning because she regretted being too busy during the day to spend time with her children. However, it appears there was another reason. I think I may have figured this out when I was a liveaway student. I had come back home for vacation and was leafing through the family photo album when I found a rare picture of my mother by herself. She was gazing straight out as she stood in front of a painted forest backdrop at the photographer’s studio. She wore an Ōshima silk kimono, and her hair was done up like a Gibson girl’s. Her right hand rested on something like a flower stand, and she was clutching a handkerchief. Her face had a strained expression. She seemed thinner than I remembered, and her piercing gaze was strangely dark. I should have seen many pictures of her by then, but this was the first time I noticed the unsettling gloominess in her eyes. We weren’t living in the house where I was born when I happened to see this photograph. We were in the former

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pawnshop my father had bought on Carpenters Row. My mother was sitting with me, knitting while she looked after the Buddhist and Shinto implements on sale in the shop. When she noticed the picture I was looking at, she quickly returned her gaze to her knitting needles. And when I asked about the picture, she said lightly, “I had that taken when I thought I was going to die— something for you to remember me by.” “What? You were going to die?” “You were too little to remember, but I had tuberculosis and the doctors gave me less than three years to live.” Around the time that picture was taken, it seems my father heard that blood from a snapping turtle could cure tuberculosis, and he made great efforts to procure some. He also fed her eel livers for strength. For a year after I was born, my mother hardly dared hold me for fear I’d catch the disease. I was mostly taken care of by my grandmother, and raised on borrowed milk. This was why when she recovered, my mother held me every night until I was five or six years old. Mother’s breasts were ample and full of milk—this is what was told to my sister and me. My recollection of the tactile sensation of my mother’s breast, velvety soft in its smoothness, is always accompanied by a sound—the echo of the steamship whistle as the boats departed the wharf at Nakazu Harbor, not far from our house. That heartrending sound, ripping the night, came rushing up from the wharf straight to our bedside. Since it occurred every night, nobody was startled or lost any sleep. On the contrary, I absorbed it even in my dreams, feeling safe and comforted as if it were a lullaby. The Nakazu wharf was located by the fish market, between the mouth of the river and Tomida Bridge. Early in the morning the regular Asetsu Line ferry arrived from Osaka, and it would return late in the evening. This harbor was a playground for me as a child. All the adults in the house had work to do, and there was no place for me to play—a fact nobody seemed to mind. If my big sister was around, I would stick close to her like

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apron strings, but five years older than me, she mostly was at school during the day. Also, I suffered from a skin condition from age two or three, and my body was usually covered in pustules. If I got a cut, it would inevitably suppurate, and since I was always itching the neighborhood children did not want to get close to me. When my sister wasn’t there, they excluded me with blunt cruelty. So I learned how to amuse myself, having no other choice, and discovered my own places to play. Just to the south of our house was a laundry, and across from that a Western-style shoemaker, a wooden sandal shop, and a bakery. A long broad garden next door had a well that we used in common with the laundry. Clothing could always be seen drying on elevated lines in the sunlight streaming into the treeless garden. Cotton-stuffed futon quilts were airing out as well. It happened that the boards used for starching and drying fabric retained enough starch to make them slippery—a perfect slide for a child. At the back of the garden was a large shed where sawn timber was stored. There was no better place for hiding than the gaps in this forest of standing lumber. All alone I would creep into this corner, or that shadow, and patiently wait for something imaginary like a goblin to come find me. A red-berried oleaster tree towered over the shed. Below it stood a hedge of Nanking cherry, which also had tasty little red berries. Back then, I had to rely on someone older to climb the oleaster to pick the fruit, but I could pick all the Nanking cherries I could reach. Even if I was tired of eating them, they were still fun to roll on the ground like marbles. Then I would wander over to the shoemaker’s shop, where I never tired of watching him make shoes. He was an ugly old guy, but he didn’t chase me away. “You think this is interesting, huh?” “Yep.” “Probably because you’re the child of a craftsman yourself, Haa-chan.”

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I had heard the term “craftsman” often enough for me to vaguely understand what it meant. The storefront of the wooden sandal shop was even more interesting. The elderly geta maker wore glasses that had usually slipped halfway down his nose. He liked children and he liked to talk. All day long he sat behind the shopfront lattice attaching thongs to sandals, and he would engage me in conversation as I leaned over the lattice to watch him. Compared to most children, I was extremely late to talk—so much so, in fact, that my parents worried I might be a mute. And even when I did begin to talk, my speech was very slow. “The sun will set before you finish talking, Haa-chan,” said the geta maker, although he never told me to go home. “You go over to see the shoemaker a lot, don’t you, Haa-chan?” “Yep.” “Which do you like better? Shoe store or geta store?” “Ge—ta—store.” “Really? Why is that?” “More—pret—ty—straps.” The geta maker’s shoulders quivered with suppressed laughter, glasses slipping down his nose, as he listened to my slow, labored answer. Well, naturally a girl would find the cloth thongs on the sandals pretty. The bakery was the most stylish of the shops, and it had the largest entryway. Expensive-looking Western-style pastries and bread were lined up inside glass cases. The only people we knew who ate bread at meals were the Christian pastor and his family, so the bakery mostly sold sweets. The bakery was on the corner. In the lane alongside it, a greengrocer, general store, and tinker’s shop jostled for space. About midway down the lane was a calligraphy supply shop—just like in Higuchi Ichiyō’s novel Child’s Play—that stocked cheap odds and ends and candies. In the front of the shop, the cinnamon water in delicate glass bottles was endlessly fascinating, and we could buy little baubles for

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pennies. I played there when it was not full of noisy children. A young girl just like Ichiyō minded the shop. She knew the kinds of things I liked—colored paper, cardboard kaleidoscopes, marbles—and always pulled them out for me. But if a gabbling crowd of children descended on the shop, I would make my escape across the street to the Emmanuel Church. We went to Sunday school at the church without fail, but even on weekdays its garden was an ideal playground for children. There were swings and a sand box, and a rustic wooden bench under a large willow tree. Young mothers with babies sleeping in prams sat on the bench knitting lacy things. I swung on the swings, never bothering anyone. I was good at it and swinging high into the sky made me feel like a bird, or an angel. The inside of the church was gloomy, except on Sunday when a faint light burned on the altar. The pastor’s wife played the old chestnut-colored organ and taught us hymns. On summer evenings, my sister and I would go over to watch a magic-lantern slide show in the yard. We much preferred the pictures of life and customs in foreign lands to the stories of the life of Jesus. This was how I first became dimly aware of the fact that outside our little village was an unimaginable number of unfamiliar towns and countries in the world. For playing alone to be fun, the bigger your wings of imagination are, the better. Of all the places to play, the most attractive was Nakazu Harbor. If I went down to the harbor very early, the open-sided building where the fish auction had just concluded would still be wet with puddles of water from the hosing down it had received. You could stand right in the middle of that big fishy-smelling space without anyone to scold you. Whirling around, the brilliant sunlight sparkling on the wharf created another world surrounding the dim dank fish market. In the morning, an early-arriving ship glided up to the jetty like a small mountain. Everyone disembarked, leaving behind a silent white ship with rows of round windows and a

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smokestack like a fat cannon jutting out of the upper deck. I would sit down on the jetty and look up at the sun-drenched ship in the noon light, imagining how the electric lights strung in the netting on the masts, thick as berries, would look when they were illuminated. When night fell, there was satisfaction as people came spilling onto the upper and lower decks, and every round window glowed with a warm yellow light. A gangplank was set up between the wharf and the lower deck, and it was crammed with busy people coming and going. Wedged between my mother and sister so as not to get lost, I gripped their kimono sleeves in each hand. Once or twice a year my father would go to Osaka or Kyoto on business. My father in travel mode looked like a different person. Wearing his Inverness cape and fedora, and carrying a basket in his hand, he briefly disappeared inside the boat before reappearing on the lower deck without hat and cape. “Papa!” my older sister shrieked. Turning toward us, my father raised one hand from the deck. Not to be outdone by my sister, I also yelled at the top of my lungs. My mother silently waved her hand. A young sailor in a white uniform ran across the deck striking a small gong, and the boat disgorged the remaining well-wishers seeing people off before slipping out of the mooring. “Watch out, it’s about to go off,” my mother said, and my sister and I closed our eyes, scrunched up our shoulders, and covered our ears with both hands. “Buwannn, buwann, bouh, buwann. . . .” The horn blared from the smokestack on the upper deck. We were frightened by that sound—like the howl of a ferocious beast—but even though we stopped up our ears, my sister and I liked to pull our hands down and experience the full roar of the horn’s blast for just a moment. At night, there was also an unutterably plaintive echo within the sound of the steamship’s horn as it left the harbor. Perhaps I couldn’t bear the thought

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swirling in my head that Papa might never come back, and I would burst into tears, clutching my mother’s legs. “Papa is going away!” I wanted to cry—but my throat was so choked with tears the words never came out. If he left and never came back, what would we do? My mother and sister never seemed to consider that. Was I the only one who felt the pang of this danger so keenly? Wanting to say something without knowing what it was, I squirmed between them, stamping my getashod feet in frustration. “Strange child . . .” mumbled my sister, grabbing my hand to make me wave at our departing father. This was probably my first inchoate realization that in this world we always have to say farewell to those we love. So we stood stock still on the wharf as the fully decked out boat quietly began to move, its form outlined in lights as it left the estuary before being swallowed up in darkness. I couldn’t shake the memory of the illuminated ship’s nighttime departure, even as I sat on the jetty dangling my feet during the day. The seawater flowed in and out of the broad estuary, and the very idea that unknown cities lay beyond it was enough to make my heart beat faster. Glancing at the sky to my right, I could see the familiar gently sloping ridgeline of Mt. Bizan. I already knew that villages and temples lay beyond the mountain, for I had seen them—but now they seemed like a landscape in a dream, evanescent and unreal. Unknown places were much more fascinating to me than things I had already seen. I did not yet know the word yearning. I shook myself out of my daydream and went back over the causeway. Rafts were always tied up at the riverbank, bobbing in the wavelets. Stone steps led down the bank, and it was possible to gingerly make your way down to the water’s edge. You could leap onto a raft, relishing the dangerous wobble as you landed. I loved playing by myself, jumping from one raft to another. Raft leaping was far more stimulating than plucking crayfish from under the wharf.

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One day, however, I fell in between two rafts that had not been properly secured and almost drowned. I only escaped death by the quick action of a workman on the wharf who had seen me fall, yet I cannot forget the writhing sensation of hopelessness and fear that overcame me in the dark water underneath the raft. I was carried back to the house by neighbors, worn out from belching water, and close to a corpse. My mother, who had never shown any apprehension about letting me go to the wharf by myself before, now admonished me never to go alone. But that didn’t stop me from heading off to the harbor to play. Next to me now is a facsimile copy of a hand-drawn map. It was printed May 31, 1906, and cost ten sen. It is titled “Detailed map of the areas of Tokushima City,” and it came with an inserted slip noting that it was published by Koyama Jogakkan and drawn by Koyama Tōyō (the pen name of Koyama Yahei, founder of the company). The Koyama Imprint was the oldest, most prestigious bookseller in Tokushima when I was a child. The shop was shown on the map, located at Nishi-shinmachi, 1-chome, 7-banchō—just where I remembered it. I can’t recall ever buying a book that I didn’t purchase there. Even now it continues as a bookstore called Koyama Shoten. I had wanted a map of Tokushima from the 1930s, before it was leveled by the wartime firebombing, but unable to find one, I settled for this 1906 monotone map—which turned out to be surprisingly easy to follow. To my amazement, the names of all the places where I had lived from the time I was born until I was eighteen were recorded on this map. Present-day Tokushima, with its widened streets, dense public transportation network, and many changed place names, is hard to navigate for someone like me who left the place at a relatively early age. Modern Tokushima will always be overlain in my mind’s eye with an indelible map of the old city. Tokushima was the town that grew up around the castle of the Hachisuka clan. The castle had been built on a hill called

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Inoyama, or simply Castle Hill, its common name. The building itself was a flat-roofed structure rather than one with a typical castle tower. Since my childhood, the site of the castle has become a public park. Near a fountain, there was once a bronze statue of an armor-clad Hachisuka Koroku, but apparently it was melted down and donated to the war effort. The old castle had been protected on three sides by tributaries of the Yoshino River, forming natural moats. Only to the east was it necessary to build a moat with stone retaining walls. Even now the road that runs alongside that moat is still used. On the old map, the southeast gate of the city is clearly labeled Eagle Gate. It burned down in the war, and a plaque was erected on the site forty years later. The small stones forming the old city wall there have an elegance about them. Compared to the massive stone walls of other Japanese castles I have seen, this wall exudes a sense of stoic calm. It seems the samurai mansions were in the area to the east of the moat. On the map, that is the location of the Tokushima Girls High School and Teachers College. The Girls High School was enclosed by a ditch made of red brick. I was a student there for five years, and since I was often late to class, I would run, breathing hard, on the road next to the ditch. Now, you can barely cross that street for the crush of traffic coming and going. On the north side of the school was a block called Umayachō, or “stable town.” This area was south of the castle, facing Mt. Bizan, and it was where commoners lived. The names of the streets echo the vocations of the people who lived there—Grocers Street, Weavers Street, Bucket Street, Fresh Fish Street, Bathhouse Street, Falconers Street, Banner Street, Arrow Street, Carpenters Street, Antiques Street, Basket Street, to name just a few. You can practically hear the sounds and voices of the workshops rising from the names. The streets were narrow and unpaved, hemmed in by the low roofs of the buildings on either side. The rickshaws and carts passing through would throw up

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clouds of dust in dry weather, and mud when it rained, leaving pedestrians with dirt caked on the skirts of their kimono. At some point, the hairdresser stopped coming on her appointed days, and my mother started doing her own hair in a front pouf and bun. She also tried the newly fashionable Western-­ style ear-hugging waves, and pulled-back buns and chignons that made it easier to do physical labor. After a while, I never saw her step out of the kitchen or into the shop in everyday dress without her black collar, waist-tied apron, and white cotton overall apron. About the time I was in third grade, and permanent waves became popular, she still wore her hair in a bun unless it was a special occasion. Only then, when dressing up, did she plunge a pair of curling irons into a charcoal fire and use them to put a crimp in her hair. Even so, at that time, more than half of the coeds and grade school teachers still wore kimono with a blue hakama skirt tied over it. Whenever I returned to this city, my eyes were stunned at the broad new streets that had appeared in post-destruction Tokushima. The sheer number of edifices had swelled, and houses like mine, which looked like something out of a woodblock print, had been replaced by five-story modern buildings. Most of the old houses in Carpenters Row had been replaced in this way. It used to be that, sitting in our shop, we could call out to the druggist who lived across the way and have a conversation—a leisurely pastime unthinkable now that the streets have swelled to at least twice their former size. Besides, the three houses across the way had been torn down to make room for a gas station. Coming home was always fraught for me, since I usually had no time for simply strolling down the streets. But this time, holding the old map in one hand, a new one in the other, I decided to do it. Walking from east to west, or north to south, used to take an hour from one edge to the other, but with reclaimed land Tokushima felt much larger now. At the same

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time, the houses on streets I remembered, streets that were dwarfed by the new roadways, seemed much smaller. Tomida-­ machi and Sakae-machi had been pleasure districts, lined with geisha houses and restaurants, where I remembered hearing, from noon on, the music from shamisen lessons. The grade school I attended—along with the now famous actress Takehara Han and graphic artist Nakahara Jun’ichi—lay right at the foot of Mt. Bizan. Since it was next to the shopping district and red-light quarter, there were always two or three children of local geisha in every class. Three in my class alone stood out as especially refined and lovely, even as children. One of them had the best voice in the whole school, and usually had a starring role in the school pageants. All three have now left this world ahead of me. My best friend among them, the daughter of a renowned geisha, went through three unhappy marriages in succession. I heard through the grapevine that she passed away three years ago. There had been a time when I always went to her house after school let out, and so I decided to see if I could find that house. But with city planning, the entire red-light district had been demolished, vanishing without a trace beneath rows of unfamiliar restaurants and boutique shops. The little theaters we used to go to were gone as well, and people I asked on the street simply shook their head. Well, it’s no surprise that my old friends and classmates have mostly left the world at this point. In this Rip Van Winkle state of mind, my feet just kept walking until I found myself at Tomidahama. I used to love this quiet bright street facing the river, but now it was lined with hotels and shops clearly catering to the tastes of today’s young generation. The roofed excursion boats and moored restaurants were nowhere to be seen. How many old people are left who remember the colorful boats arrayed with lanterns and lights jostling each other on the night of the Tenjin Festival? The noise of the gongs and drums, and the crowds of people? On that night,

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the three main bridges were so crammed with spectators that the bridges bent to the breaking point. Fireworks exploded into the sky from the estuary, each one eliciting cries of appreciation from the crowds. I continued walking along the beachside road, feeling all the while like a tourist in a foreign country. From the Tomida Bridge, Nakazu Harbor was now taken up by the Okinosu Ferry Terminal—meaning, of course, that the white ship decorated with lights of the steamship line was long gone. The spot where the cluster of rickety rafts used to be was now occupied by a forest of sailboat masts and yachts. The exotic brown Emmanuel Church that I remembered as lying just over the Tomida Bridge had been refurbished into something I hardly recognized. The church and the garden had swapped places. The willow and the old swing were just fleeting phantoms in a bleak treeless garden. I entered the church and sat on a pew in an attitude of prayer. There was no dim light flickering in the gloom, or any whisper of music from a chestnut-colored organ. Unaccountably wretched, I made my way out, resolved it was time to leave this place. I was standing on the edge of the road when I saw someone across the way waving to me from a broad storefront with an old wooden sign hanging from the eaves. The sign read “Chikuwa.” I suddenly remembered something and jaywalked quickly across the street. “Welcome back!” exclaimed a smiling, fortyish-looking plump lady with a white kerchief tied around her head. She asked me what I was searching for, so I told her I wanted to find what had become of my old house. Just as I was saying that, I suddenly remembered that yes, right in this spot, there had been a shop that made the tubular fish sausages called chikuwa. When my mother was worn out cooking for my father’s crowd of apprentices, she would call on the mistress of the chikuwa shop to ask her strong young daughter to come give her a hand.

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Momo-chan would help prepare lunch and dinner and then go home. This good-tempered red-cheeked, red-haired girl was well liked by the boys in my father’s shop. She coddled me as well. When I told this story to the woman who maintained the chikuwa shop with her son, she nodded. Yes, she had heard about this from her now-deceased mother. Guided by this lady, I walked with her just half a block to a tall, narrow four-story building. “This is it,” she said. “Make sure to stop by on your way back, and I’ll wrap up some chikuwa for you.” Just as she turned to go, a refined lady who appeared to be in her sixties emerged from the glass-doored storefront on the ground floor. She smiled bashfully. “I thought you might come someday. This is the site of the house where you were born,” she said without hesitation. Although she had come to this house as a bride, she explained, she had seen the land registration and its record of this spot as my birthplace. Only now there was no alley with an oleaster tree in back—in its place was a broad street running east to west. The glass-fronted shop sold things made of glass. Venetian glass objects, Czech glass accessories, and fashionable lighting were displayed in the front window as ideas for interior design. On the shelves inside was a colorful array of beautiful glass sake cups and containers you just wanted to reach out and touch. A veritable zoo of clear glass animals clustered in the window. “What a nice shop!” I exclaimed. I bought some sake cups and wine glasses and had her wrap them up. “What happened to the neighborhood’s Ohsumi rice store?” I asked. “I sent my husband to tell him you were here, and look—he’s coming now . . .” I turned toward the window and sure enough—I could tell without looking twice that the former owner of the Ohsumi rice store was walking toward us. Mr. Ohsumi had married my grandfather Wasaburō’s older sister Ine, and it was thanks to her

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that Wasaburō eventually was able to open a rice shop in Tokushima. Ine was also the one who had come up with the plan for my mother to be father’s bride. The Ohsumi house was the largest in the neighborhood, and behind it were a number of row houses they rented out. On the alley next to them was a set of rooms that was rented by none other than my father—newly independent from the boss of Jōsanjima, where he had apprenticed. Ine had been impressed by my father’s diligence and prevailed upon my reticent mother to accept the engagement. Later my mother would laugh as she related how poor they were as newlyweds. Four chopsticks, two bowls, is how she put it, as if talking about someone else. One night in monsoon season, this great-aunt Ine, helpful to the point of obnoxiousness, was found drowned in Nakazu Harbor. I was around six years old, and I remember being awakened in the still-dark morning hours by a pounding on the wooden shutters, and my parents rushing out into the rain. Tucked in our futon, my sister and I listened sleepily to the adults talking—what in the world was she doing out alone at the harbor in this rain? Ine was plain, resembling her mother, but her two daughters were quite beautiful. The older one’s husband married into the family, and the younger one went to a women’s college in Tokyo. A year before I was to get married, I finally talked to my mother about Ine. “Whatever you say about her, Ohsumi aunty surely had a discriminating eye,” I ventured, adding, “but is it true that she loaded her kimono sleeves with stones?” “Wherever did you hear that?” Mother’s face colored slightly. “Well, it was a rich family after all, and people just like to pass along rumors . . .” I decided not to tell her how Tsuya and I, from under the quilts, had listened to the grown-ups’ whispers.

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Here now standing in front of me with smiling eyes was long-dead Aunty Ine’s daughter’s adopted husband Hiroshi, inheritor of the Ohsumi name. I had not seen him for decades. “Long time no see . . .” With that offhand greeting, and guessing the kinds of things I wanted to ask, he related it all in a brisk tone. After everything burned down in the war, the Ohsumi’s half acre was reduced by eighty percent under the urban renewal plan. The land where the house had sat was claimed for a highway, and the family moved to one of the rental houses that had stood behind it. Hiroshi and I are cousins with seventy years more or less behind us. With his broad contented face and largeboned sturdy frame, Hiroshi seemed to take after his father’s side of the family. And so I learned that the house where I was born had become a glass boutique as I stood in that very place. “Well, this is an occasion that doesn’t come around very often. Why don’t you come over to my place for a cup of tea?” he offered. So, shoulder to shoulder, we slowly set off toward the third-generation Ohsumi rice shop.

4

Mt. Bizan

MT. BIZAN CAN BE SEEN FROM practically any spot in Tokushima. The slope of the ridge, gentle as its name “Eyebrow Mountain” suggests, is soothing to look at from close up or afar. If I was playing by myself on the Nakazu wharf, or in the open field where once a year a circus came and set up tents, I could turn around and there was Mt. Bizan. I would look up to it in mild wonder. With no sharp edges to mar its restful shape, it melted into my field of vision like the sky, or the clouds, or the setting sun. Before I entered grade school, our family moved to Carpenters Row, nestled at the foot of the mountain. From the window in our second-floor room, my sister and I could see Mt. Bizan looming behind the laundry-drying platform across the way. We could clearly make out the leaves on the slope fluttering in the breeze. That spring I started first grade at the Shinmachi Primary School, tucked deep in the hills where Mt. Bizan formed a backdrop to the wide playground. I remember the brilliant 52

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scene of the grade school entrance ceremony from seventy years ago as if it were yesterday. A row of cherry trees had been planted along the school’s long fence, and on the day of the ceremony they were in full magnificent bloom. We new students stood in four queues in the yard between the row of cherry trees and the low sepia-colored old-fashioned schoolrooms. I have no memory at all of the formalities and speeches that must have come before. My memory of this day begins with the two lines of boys and two lines of girls standing next to the cherry trees. I was in the middle of the fourth line, closest to the trees. Each line consisted of the students in one classroom, with its teacher standing at the head, facing them. The teacher for my class was a petite woman with pale complexion and a sweet face. She wore a kimono with a purple hakama skirt tied high on her chest. Since we had just recently moved to this area, I did not know any of my soon-to-be classmates. My kindergarten friends from before had all moved on to the grade school in Nakazu. I didn’t see a familiar face anywhere. Determined not to give in to a feeling of abandonment, I set my teeth and pursed my lips, keeping my eyes fixed on the roof— because if I lowered my gaze I was afraid the tears would spill out. There, soaring above the low roof of the classrooms, stood Mt. Bizan. A swath of cherry trees encircling the mountain halfway up, like an obi, looked like a gorgeous cloud of pink smoke. Just then I heard the teacher’s voice calling my name, and I replied loudly, “Here!” The smile on the teacher’s pale face widened. “Good response! Let’s everyone answer in a nice loud voice just like Mitani-san.” Half proud, half embarrassed, I averted my gaze toward Mt. Bizan. It was just a five-minute walk to school, even for the short stride I had as a first grader. Every morning, when I heard the janitor ringing the bell, I knew I could join the crowd at the

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entrance gate in just two minutes if I ran. So I was never late for morning assembly, where the entire student body of twelve hundred pupils formed lines in the schoolyard facing Mt. Bizan. Once a month there was a school-wide event where we climbed to the top of the mountain. At only 278 meters high, this was not so hard for the upper grades, but we younger students were pressed. Those who couldn’t make it to the top waited along the path with one of the teachers. These days, the mountain has been dignified with a paved road, a ropeway, and tourist facilities, but seventy years ago there was only a rough path leading to the peak. The townspeople called the peak “Bizan’s Tengo.” It consisted of a broad empty space with a single marker indicating a sacred spot, from which, on a clear day, we could see the Wakayama mountain range across the Kitan Straits. There, all the students lined up, and at the teacher’s command, faced east and made our deepest bow. Why? Because that was the direction in which, beyond the clouds, lay Tokyo and the Imperial Palace. In my entire six years, I didn’t miss this ceremony once. And by the end of first grade, I was alone no more—indeed I had become the leader of the pack. At some point, tired of being cooped up in the schoolyard at recess, I started sneaking off to Mt. Bizan. I had discovered a grove of oak trees just up a wild animal trail alongside a small stream trickling down the mountain and into a corner of the playground. The tall oaks blocked out the sun, creating a shady quiet nook. It was fun to step through the thick carpet created by years of fallen foliage. Shiny acorns tumbled about on top of the leaves. At first, I just liked going there to gather acorns, but there was also a special private satisfaction in having a secret mountain room that nobody knew about. I had read my sister’s copy of Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and at that age I simply adored the idea of something secret. Yet, it seemed rather a waste to keep this place all to myself, so I shared my secret place with two of my best friends,

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and the three of us would go to the oak woods and gather acorns. One day, however, we were so engrossed in acorn collecting that we didn’t notice that recess had ended. We tumbled into the classroom five minutes late, and all three of us were made to stand in the hallway. Twenty years later, I harbored a true secret in my heart. I was twenty-five, a repatriated woman with a three-year-old daughter. The man was twenty-one. He was my husband’s former student at the vocational school where he had taught for a year before returning to Beijing with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At that juncture, my husband had gone to Tokyo looking for work, leaving me and our daughter in Tokushima. Everything happened during the time we were left alone, and I was the one who made it happen. What was it but the result of an outrageous passion for which there was neither reason nor excuse? I was too afraid to call that irresistible wild ardor “love.” Later, it was only after examining my past deeds with cool objectivity that I was able to recognize the frighteningly destructive power of the passion lurking in my heart. For me, this had to wait until after I had renounced the world. I have to admit that the number of my love affairs is nothing like what has been rumored and whispered, but it isn’t limited either to what I have written about in my novels. After becoming a nun in the autumn of my fifty-first year, I put all my worldly affairs in order. Yet, in fairness, I couldn’t say that I was never pulled back by thoughts and emotions. With that, I have always abided by the Buddhist injunction against lust. Most of the men I was involved with have already departed from this world. But even if one of them were still alive, and we were to run into one another, it’s hard to imagine there could be any stirring of passion. Now, as I approach the end of my life, there is only one whose memory makes my chest tighten with emotion—the man who appears in my novels as Ryōta. As for the others, loving them or leaving them, I feel no

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regrets whatsoever. If I happen to think of them, my heart feels steeped in a nostalgic warmth as if my thoughts had turned to someone in the family. It is a feeling completely unrelated to the stinging, heart-rending pain I get when thoughts of Ryōta enter my mind. Aside from him, all those things like love, marriage, affairs—they all happened to me. His case was the only one where the flame was lit by me and kindled in him. Until then, he had never experienced real love. He was a bookish young man who had worked at Dōbun Publishers in Shanghai for three years. He received his military draft orders before graduating, but the war ended before he was called up. He had never touched a woman before we met. My husband was nine years older than me, but still a virgin when we married. I too approached our nuptial bed as a virgin. In those days I thought it normal that both my husband and young Ryōta had had no carnal experience. But the even stranger thing is, when I confessed my unquenchable passion to this man younger than myself, there was no sexual desire involved. Recently, I was encouraged to read the novels of Annie Ernaux by a woman novelist I know. I began with her book Simple Passion, and sure enough I was enthralled. I read the translations of all her books, but remained most moved by the first, Simple Passion, in which she relates the story of a forty-eightyear-old intellectual (Ernaux herself ) who has an affair with a foreign man ten years her junior, who is married with a child. She records the affair in concise straightforward prose without a hint of lyricism or romance. She herself calls it a “textbook case.” To compare it to a Japanese genre, we might call it an “I novel,” but without all the damp melancholy such works usually entail. It is strikingly confessional, but at the same time gallant and brave. When I finished reading it, I could clearly point to both the similarities and the differences between her passion and my own. The way we understood how love can go to the extreme limit of passion, leaving no room for calculation, was similar.

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Probing the extremity of desire meant disrupting the calm of ordinary life. When you unconsciously decide to throw away your life, yielding entirely to this one passion alone, your love leads you to destruction. What was different, in my experience, was the ineffectuality of physical passion. I have experienced the height of pleasure in sexual love, but in the end it never fulfilled a spiritual need. To me, the pleasure found in sex was always matched by the sense of eternal hopelessness that would set in after the act. I feared that my condition had to be close to the nature of male carnal desire. Sill, after reading Ernaux, thoughts of Ryōta would well up. In time, I began to suspect that the reason thinking of Ryōta still made my heart ache was that I had not finished writing about him. Here in Tokushima, I extended my stay another day after completing the job that had brought me back to my hometown after being away for so long. Standing in the schoolyard of the Shinmachi Elementary School, I saw how the original building had been eradicated in the same firebombing that killed my mother and grandfather. Not even a fragment of the old gray single-story classroom building remained. In its place stood a drab white three-story building, crammed into a spot by the entrance gate. The schoolyard was in the same place as before, but it was just an empty, uninteresting wide lot. Looking around to figure out what exactly had changed, I noticed a long narrow office-like building on the slope of Mt. Bizan. It completely obscured the view. Going around to the back of this building, I found, to my surprise, a cemetery with a cluster of brand-new gravestones. The low building was evidently there to hide the incursion of this graveyard into the corner of the schoolyard. Now I admitted to myself the real reason I had come. I wanted to follow the old trail next to the stream and climb up to the secret stand of oak trees. I presumed that since the mountain had not burned, the

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oak trees of seventy years ago would still be there. But the stream had dried up, and I could find no trace of it along the edge of the schoolyard, now full of dead leaves. Determined to continue looking, I pushed through high weeds and shrubs trying to keep to the old path, narrowed to half its former width—but finally it was impossible. Just ahead there should have been a small waterfall, its pure water bubbling over into the ravine. The stand of oaks would have stretched out to the left of that. I had told Ryōta about this place where we could meet to hide from prying eyes. Before it was light, with my daughter, father, and sister still asleep, I would creep quietly out of the house, holding my breath, and run as fast as I could to Mt. Bizan. Usually Ryōta got there before me and would be waiting in the pre-dawn dark. Wordlessly we stepped onto the path that led to the oak woods. Our rendezvous only lasted five or ten minutes at most, before the sun came up. During that time together we spoke not a word. We didn’t even hug. We sat down in the fallen leaves and looked closely into one another’s eyes. There was nothing to say. It was a hopeless situation that we had neither the courage nor the ability to break through. It was enough to sit together, breathing the same air, feeling we were alive. I was always the one to stand up first. Occasionally I cried. Wordlessly, he would hand me a freshly ironed handkerchief. I thought of his mother’s hand, ironing it for him. Almost as if they had a will of their own, the rank overgrown weeds stopped me in my tracks, where I stood petrified, thinking of a particular meeting with Ryōta one morning long ago. Indeed, that was the reason I was so determined to make my way back to this spot. Gripping the edge of a protruding rock with one hand, I craned my neck trying to see what lay ahead on the path. Surely there was a big pine tree there, I recalled. And there was a huge tree, what kind I don’t know, but as big as you like, standing tall, spreading its unpruned branches freely in all directions.

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On that morning long ago, we emerged from the stand of oaks and started down the trail. We had to walk single file on the narrow path, Ryōta in front. Picking my way carefully so as not to trip, I was startled and almost lost my footing when Ryōta suddenly turned and grabbed me in an overpowering embrace. “Close your eyes. Don’t open them!” he whispered urgently. I closed my eyes automatically at the insistence in his voice. I could imagine his lips suddenly descending onto mine, yet that didn’t happen. Still clenching me tightly, he turned my back closer to the mountain stream, saying, “Don’t look up! Just look down at your feet, and run straight down.” Ryōta’s arms grasped my shoulders securely. “Don’t look back! Just go!” Spurred by his commanding tone, I quickened my pace. When we landed back in the schoolyard, Ryōta grabbed my hand and we ran on as fast as we could. The quiet houses beyond the school showed no sign of activity. “What is it? What’s going on?” I managed to gulp. “Someone hanged himself.” “Hanged???” “A man. I didn’t want you to see.” “You saw it for sure?” “At first I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.” Now Ryōta’s voice became strained, and he continued with a nervous laugh, “But then I saw it clearly.” About twenty years or so later, I hadn’t heard from Ryōta for a long time when I was told that he had hanged himself in his office after a business failure. At this news, I couldn’t help but recall his voice and behavior on that long-ago morning. “Hanging is an easy way to die, and it’s effective,” Ryōta had said, half joking. “But if you’re going to kill yourself, better not do it that way. It’s not very attractive . . .”

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At the time he took his life, Ryōta was a father with a grown daughter and a son in high school. It was a cold day at the end of January. I was shocked at my own lack of surprise at the news when the telephone call came. I had lived with Ryōta for four years, and undoubtedly I had wounded him. My passion had been plumbed to its limit, but as Annie Ernaux pointed out, that limit had little to do with the act of living together. It may have appeared that Ryōta betrayed me, but in fact I was the one who induced him to do so. We two were the only ones who knew, and we played this little drama out with tacit mutual consent. Even after we broke up, I believed that Ryōta was my most avid reader—also my most critical. Just as we once sat wordlessly among the oaks, we clearly saw into the depths of each other’s heart, and I’m convinced that in my whole life Ryōta was the one who understood me best. Ryōta kept a second household with another woman. I would say he never experienced the life of a properly married man. His friends were of the opinion that even if he had never met me, his life would still have ended tragically. But I think that I was the one who cut short his innocence and drove him mad. My unreasonable passion for Ryōta is what destroyed his chance of gaining a peaceful family life. And that was my choice, not his. I fully grasp the fact that there is simply no way to atone for that. I rode the aerial tram to the top of Mt. Bizan, where, inside the gondola, I remembered a phrase from the classic collection Ten Thousand Leaves— Your lovely eyebrows, curving like the waves, still linger in my eyes. My heart is as unsteady as a rocking boat.

Somewhere I heard that the mountain’s name, “Eyebrow,” came from this poem, but I don’t remember who wrote it.

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My guess is that someone composed the poem while sailing the Kitan Straits, gazing toward this mountain faintly visible in the distance. I reached the peak, which I remembered as totally bare and bald without a building in sight. Now, cutting through the back side of the mountain, the highway ran straight to the top. There was a museum dedicated to the memory of the Portuguese writer and consul general Wenceslau de Moraes, who had fallen in love with a Tokushima woman named Oyone and moved here in the early 1900s. There was a stupa to the memory of those lost to the war in Burma. There were shops and tall electric pylons for a broadcasting station. The entire appearance of the place was new. And yet, if you cast your eyes below, the terrain of Tokushima remained just as it always had been—the buildings in the same places, the rivers, the bridges, Castle Hill like a little island poking out from the sea of the city—all unchanged. Following the townscape around the hill with my eye, I suddenly felt a warmth welling up. It was if a stone had been tossed into the waters of my heart, so long unruffled, leaving a pattern of ripples. For Ryōta to get to our pre-dawn assignation, he had to leave his government housing in the dark and ride for thirty minutes. If that wasn’t possible, he would stay overnight with a friend in Tokushima and come to the oaks from there. I would worry not only about making my own way to the oaks, but about how Ryōta would come. Ryōta’s father had moved the family to Shanghai after his own business failed. There he found a job operating a military canteen during the war. This went smoothly until Japan lost the war—after which they came back penniless. Ryōta lived with his weak, aging father and his mother, grandmother, and two older sisters—all of them depending on him. I’m certain this situation was oppressive, but just as I never spoke about my life with my husband to Ryōta, he never talked about his living conditions to me. The two of us floated as if in a

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dream, smoldering like smoke in the amorphous state that was our passion. I did not even register the burned-out rubble of the mountain, or the hubbub of the black market by the station— they seemed like something from another world. We were not calculating, but at the same time we had no constructive plan. Our single purpose in life was for our eyes to meet, day by day, one day at a time. We lived like sleepwalkers. Once he didn’t come to the mountain for two days in a row. On the third day, the friend he always stayed with was waiting outside my house when I came out. He pressed a hastily scribbled note in my hand. “He’s sick . . . can’t come . . .” he mumbled. “Caught flu and fever, can’t leave the house,” I read in Ryōta’s scrawled handwriting. That young man had also been my husband’s student. “Sensei’s wife might be concerned . . .” he said carefully. He probably guessed the nature of our relationship even though Ryōta was always careful to call me “Mrs.” and I always called him by his surname. Wrapped in an anxiety I couldn’t reveal to anyone, I too suffered a feverish attack. The next day I went alone to the stand of oaks, and hunkering down, I wept, hugging my knees. That evening, I hurriedly tidied up the dinner things, took my daughter to my sister’s, and announced I was going out. I didn’t say where. Then I jumped on my sister’s bicycle. She knew something was up by the piercing look in my eye, and I could tell she was struggling not to say anything. I had become incapable of thinking of the consequences. The government housing where Ryōta and his family lived was in the neighborhood where the old provincial offices had been. Three major temples famous for issuing amulets were nearby—Jōrakuji, which was number fourteen on the eightyeight-temple pilgrimage route; number fifteen, a Kokubunji temple; and number sixteen, devoted to the bodhisattva

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Kannon. I remembered vaguely that Ryōta’s family lived somewhere in this neighborhood. Mid-summer humidity hung in the night air like an oppressive curtain. Unable to grasp what I was doing, I just pedaled furiously, spurred on by anxiety and impatience. All I knew was that it took Ryōta thirty minutes to traverse the distance by bicycle, and there was but a single road running north along the foot of Mt. Bizan. Before I knew it, I was blinded by sweat and tears and could barely see in front of me. Repeatedly wiping my eyes with one hand, I kept pedaling. My feet, unused to bicycling such a distance, began to feel like heavy iron rods. And when I would lose my balance momentarily, the bicycle came close to tipping over. I passed Sakohachō district and raced on toward Kuramoto. On my left the burned-out ruins of the army base loomed even more darkly than the night itself. On the potholed road, guided only by starlight and a sliver of moon, and never quite falling, I got to a point just past the incinerated army base when the bike flipped over. I hadn’t seen the mountainous pile of rubble strewn across the road. Picking myself up from the roadside where I landed, I righted the bicycle and pushed it ahead, mutely walking on. Aching everywhere, I didn’t feel like getting on it again. A voice inside urged me to turn back, persistently asking what I thought I was doing. I felt I was losing my mind, and a shudder ran down my spine. But the thought of seeing Ryōta one last time outstripped the fear that I was truly going crazy. Gathering my nerve, I climbed on the bicycle again and soon was passing the neighborhood of Akui, then crossing Akui Bridge. The government housing lay just across the bridge in an area that had escaped the bombing, its streets lined by traditional old houses with heavy low roofs. I hadn’t seen a pre-war neighborhood so intact since coming back from China. Suddenly I was transported back in time. On a nearby porch, an old man sat fanning himself to keep

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mosquitoes away. I stopped and asked him where the Kannon temple was. He stopped fanning, and fingering the collar of his loose jacket, kindly gave me directions. Could it be that I might actually find Ryōta’s house with only the knowledge that it was somewhere near the Kannon temple? Overcome with fatigue and anxiety, I couldn’t bear to get back on the bicycle. So just leaning on it for support, I slowly threaded my way between the old houses. I approached a street with lights strung along the storefronts. Across the way stood a four- or five-family residence with a dim light seeping through the cracks in a wooden lattice. Pushed on by intuition alone, I drew closer, trying to see the names inscribed on the plaques under the eaves. All of a sudden, a door opened, and there stood Ryōta, dressed in a cotton yukata. I was about to fall over in astonishment, right there with the bicycle, when he reached out and grabbed me. I flinched as a pale arm extended from the yukata, sleeve hiked to the shoulder. A brisk voice issued from inside. “Who’s there? Tell them to come in.” “That’s my grandmother,” said Ryōta quietly. Turning his head, he announced, “I’m going out. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He took hold of the bicycle and walked out, pushing it in front of him. I followed closely on his heels with quick steps. This was the first time I had ever seen Ryōta in a yukata, and my heart fluttered. We came to the Kannon temple. Thick darkness pooled inside the gate while the far-off moon glimmered faintly. To the right of the main building was a stone pedestal. Ryōta stood the bicycle up against it, and with his hand on my shoulder made me sit. Without removing his hand, he choked out the words, “How . . . could you . . . do something like . . . this?” Hearing his slow heavy voice, I thought he must be very angry—until I looked at him and saw that his light brown eyes

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were trying not to smile. “I thought maybe you were dying and I couldn’t stand it,” I ventured. “If I were to die, I would appear to you as a spirit . . .” Before he even finished speaking, Ryōta knelt in front of me and embraced my legs with both hands. His face sank into my lap, where I soon felt warm tears seeping into the old mompe pants I had borrowed from my sister. I laced my fingers into Ryōta’s soft curly hair as he knelt there, and soon my even hotter tears spilled down on his hair. From the viewing platform one could see the glistening water of the Akui River flowing below. As if this had been my plan all along, I hailed a taxi from the parking lot at the end of the drive. “To the Kannon temple, please,” I said to the driver. “It’s a great day for a pilgrimage,” he said in response. The trip to that neighborhood was just fifteen minutes by car. Just as the driver had said, the number of pilgrims had swelled this spring, and the temple grounds were overflowing with people in white garments. I told the driver to wait for me in the lot and entered the main hall to make a perfunctory obeisance. Then I ducked out the main gate into the road. I was thinking of walking over to a vaguely remembered street just opposite from the way we had come when my feet became rooted to the spot. It couldn’t be! But there it was—that same two-story, four-family dwelling. Clearly nobody lived in any of the decayed apartments. Through the glass sliding doors on the upper floor, I could see mounds of old cardboard boxes in some of the upstairs rooms. It was weird that dwellings that had escaped the firebombing back then were still standing fifty years later. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to open them again. It had to be the house that a yukata-clad Ryōta had emerged from on that summer night. Now the structure looked so wretched that it wouldn’t be surprising if it were torn down tomorrow. Turning my gaze away, I retraced my steps to the

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main gate of the Kannon temple. The moment I had come through the gate I had noticed that the stone pedestal where Ryōta had gripped my shoulder to make me sit down was still there. Suddenly I recalled Ryōta’s hot tears on my thighs. The retreating figures of all the men who had passed through my life rose up like a wave, and at the sound of a pilgrim’s bell, slowly faded away.

5

Nagoya Station

EVERY TRAIN STATION IN EVERY TOWN, city, and country in the world has the same atmosphere. Whether a roofless platform stuck out in a field, or a modern urban station covered by a soaring roof, pathos and weariness tincture the lower air. Wandering people in eddies eventually arrive home in these places. They are also the starting point for pushing off on journeys that may be uncharted. More than anything else, stations are places where people pass through like the water in a river, like the wind, like time itself. People sometimes pass through just once, never to return. A train station also holds the sediment of countless farewells. The damp residue of grief that all train stations share might well come from the burden of tears they have all absorbed. In my eighty-odd years, I wonder how many times I have stood in train stations waiting to go somewhere. Some stations I traversed with great regularity. Some I was in once and never again. 67

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There is a small station on the Mugi line called Nikenya, two stops from Tokushima City. At present it serves the campus areas of Jōnan High School and Tokushima Bunri University. It is totally new and modern now, but fifty years ago all you could see from the Nikenya station to the edge of Tokushima was rice paddies. One day, after the worst summer heat had passed, I took my small daughter and headed to the Nikenya station to meet my husband, who had been working in Tokyo for six months. It seemed his job agreed with him, and he happily chatted in good humor. He kept saying how unbelievably difficult it was to find a house to rent in war-ravaged Tokyo. But then, right there on a narrow path between the rice paddies, I burst out abruptly in a groan. “I can’t go to Tokyo. Forgive me—I’ve fallen in love with someone else,” I blurted. My husband stared at me uncomprehending, a bemused smile on his face. Then, as if a dam had burst, my obsession with Ryōta, which had infused my whole being for half a year, came flooding out. I lost my footing while drowning in this torrent and sank to my knees, unable to stand. My husband must have thought I looked like some kind of wounded animal as I crawled beneath him. Our daughter, frightened, clung to her father’s legs. “Who is it? Tell me his name!” he demanded. So there on the ground, in that posture, I announced it was Ryōta. I couldn’t look up at my husband’s face. I expected his shoe to come flying at my shoulder, but he simply walked away. Holding our daughter in his arms, he left me there on the path surrounded by the green rice paddies. I still wonder why I didn’t run away at that juncture. The stress of leaving Beijing after losing the war was nothing compared to the awfulness of the next couple of weeks. The reason we had met at the Nikenya station rather than Tokushima was because my daughter and I had moved out of my father’s

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house and were using money my husband had sent to rent the upper floor of an unoccupied house close to Nikenya. Ryōta and his friend—my husband’s other student—had helped us move. If I had met my husband at the Tokushima station instead, I can’t imagine I would have acted out such a childish drama, not on such a busy street. Ryōta and I may have been childish, but among the three of us, my husband, the oldest, was the least worldly by far. Practically every night he insisted on summoning Ryōta, who then had to listen to him talk until late. It was as if the three of us had been cast into a deep well, where we writhed at the bottom without any idea how to escape. He had said he believed me when I told him it wasn’t a sexual relationship, but when he heard the whispers, “Who ever heard of a love affair where lips never touch?” he began to waver. “Sex or no sex, the betrayal is the same,” I pointed out. He slapped me in response, as if to say, “Who can believe that?” I felt I had asked for it—the punches, the kicks, the violent words and actions that escalated day by day. Rather than give in to despair, I wanted to die in that state, drunk on love. It never occurred to me to ask Ryōta for help. Food stuck in my throat, I barely slept, and as the days dragged on, my ability to think withered away. Since my husband’s return, Ryōta and I hadn’t had a single chance to meet alone. My memories of that half month, which were once as vivid and clearly detailed as any experiences in my life, turn into a maddening vagueness when I look back on them now, like something in an unreal dream. The only two people who could confirm what transpired, and what was said at the time, have long since departed from this world. A novel I wrote contains the only clues, but I think many more important things are concealed in the spaces between the lines. Now, the invisible text I have to think I consciously omitted throbs in my heart like a thin soft fishbone catching in my throat.

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I haven’t forgotten the moments of joy that irradiated those days, which otherwise were smothering torture for the most part. Once, in the midst of the impasse that we were incapable of solving, my frustration at not being able to speak to Ryōta alone made me scribble a note that I hid in the shoes he would put back on when he left our house. I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye at the entryway, so I hid behind my husband holding my breath while he planted himself at the entrance like a wrathful temple guardian. Who knows what would have happened if Ryōta had felt something odd in his shoe and decided to pull it out? What in the world was I trying to do with this dangerously inexcusable act? In any event, when Ryōta slipped his foot into his right shoe, he surely must have felt something. But all he did was nonchalantly put on his left shoe. Raising his head to bid farewell, he caught sight of me standing behind my husband. For just an instant I glimpsed in his eyes the same expression I had seen in his tearful face when he had clasped my legs that dark evening at the Kannon temple. Then he quickly turned on his heel and left. My body shivered in an upwelling of ecstasy. At that moment, the sin of deceiving my husband right before his very eyes was the farthest thing from my mind. I was beside myself with joy at having successfully passed a letter to Ryōta. But oddly, I have no recollection at all of what I wrote in that note. During that time, seeing how Ryōta never flinched at the incessant questioning and cross-examination from my husband became a source of deep joy to me. The word “adultery” wasn’t used much back then—the word that should have been stamped on my forehead was “unfaithful.” In my fitful sleep, I could see myself walking through crowds, my head held high, with the word “Unfaithful” darkly branded on my face. “Are you aware that everyone is talking about this scandal?” My husband threw this accusation in my face. “Might as well publish it in the newspaper!”

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I was sure it couldn’t be true and refused to believe him. But on the other hand I couldn’t be totally sure that no one had seen us in the moonlight— Ryōta in the shorts and shirt he had changed into, and me clinging to his back while he pedaled me home on my sister’s bike over that debris-strewn road the night I went to see him at home. When my husband found his housing, there was a sudden change in our plans. He decided we would move to Tokyo right away. Everyone assumed that he simply wanted to move his wife and daughter out of the disagreeable, uncomfortable countryside. I suppose he had belatedly recognized that it was no use trying to reason with someone young who had nothing to lose. Thus, I left Tokushima with nothing solved or settled, a captive of my husband. Perhaps he thought the Nikenya station was unlucky—in any case, we left from Tokushima. My older sister Tsuya was the only one who came to see us off. Ironically, both she and my father liked Ryōta better than my husband. “He’ll be at the railroad crossing,” she whispered. And turning to my husband, she said, “Our father scolded her thoroughly yesterday—please forgive her,” and bowed deeply. When the train passed the crossing at Castle Hill, Ryōta was standing there alone. Pressing my tearful face against the train window, I tried to drink Ryōta’s gaze into my whole being. The fear that this might be our final farewell sank to the bottom of my heart. It turned out we had no housing in Tokyo, but because of my husband’s connection to Kōro Mitsu, a woman recently elected to the House of Representatives, we ended up living as lodgers in her mansion. Probably this was because, during the election that summer in Tokyo, my husband directed me and all his former students, especially Ryōta, to work as volunteers for Mitsu’s campaign. Shouldn’t he have known that this would be an opportunity for Ryōta and me to find time together? Our room was a study off the entrance foyer, and living there

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was practically a form of house arrest. I have no idea what my husband said to the Kōro family, but we had three meals included, all prepared by a steady longtime servant. My husband never let his guard down, and did not give me any spending money. Every evening I endured my husband’s scolding without saying a word. With the tiny bit of rationality I still commanded, I deemed my husband’s actions to be justified. If you could have seen the shell of me from which my soul had fled, the idea that my husband could forgive me would have been even harder to believe. I truly felt that not resisting his violence was a form of atonement. Even so, in my husband’s eyes, the fact that I didn’t resist only reflected a headstrong stubbornness. Our child was deeply affected by the turbulence in her parents’ relationship and began to suffer bouts of night crying. Putting her on my back and walking out to the quiet street was the only freedom I was given, and when the child’s cries finally turned into rhythmic breathing, my own chest began to heave with sobs. Thus it was, on one of those days, that I was hunkered in a back seat of a Tōkaidō Line train bound for Hiroshima. I had pulled together the train fare at the black market outside the station by trading an Omega watch from my father and a few other articles I had stuffed into a small duffel bag. I was aware I was being cheated out of their real value, but I didn’t care—all I needed was my immediate train fare. That morning I had received a letter from Ryōta. It was as brief as a telegram, and tucked into an envelope that had been addressed in a feminine hand. It said he was going to a friend’s house in the mountains of Okayama. This friend was also a former student of my husband’s, and his family owned forested land and ran a lumber business there. I had heard about this house in the mountains before. My father the cabinetmaker was well informed about the wood he used in his work, and he knew this house was only occupied when the trees were being evaluated for lumber.

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Sitting in the train car, I lost the ability to think and, closing my eyes, nodded off. Having sold everything, including the duffel bag, I was arriving unencumbered just as Ryōta’s letter had instructed. I carried only a purse. In it were my ticket and some small change, even less than what people carried when they subsisted with ration coupons. In the hazy fog enveloping my head, I felt I was on a journey to my death. Yet, since my life in Tokyo had itself been like dying, I wasn’t afraid of death. The thought that a man whose wife had committed suicide would find it more humiliating than a man who had been cuckolded flitted through my mind, but if my heart didn’t change, living with my husband would remain hell for both of us. Then I thought, if I left, he would be happier knowing I was dead than if he thought I was alive somewhere living out my life. In the state of extreme irrationality that gripped me, I simply couldn’t deal with the fact that I was the cause of the wounded pride and humiliation he felt, even though the tiny bit of reason I had left told me that I ought to understand it. Blind to my own immaturity and childishness, my heart was wrapped in an obtuse resentment of my husband for not sinking to the marginal level of my own craziness. My husband wasn’t the bad one, neither was Ryōta. The one who really bore responsibility was none other than myself—I couldn’t shake this feeling. And I didn’t flinch from the vision of my own corpse, ravaged by wild animals in the deep forest of Okayama where I had never been before. It was the thought of Ryōta’s poor corpse laid out beside me that I couldn’t stand. I only wanted me to die, and that would be enough. Assailed with thoughts like this, my act of absconding was hardly a cheerful start to a new life. It was more like heading down a dark road leading to the abyss. I realized that I hadn’t left any sort of note, but then, I told myself, this was not the sort of thing one could ever explain in writing. Just then, from the back of the train car, I heard a child crying. It was a little girl’s voice, not a baby. It must be a

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nightmare, I thought, as the cry grew louder like a towering blaze, but it was just the mother taking the crying child out to the vestibule. Soon enough the cries ceased, although they continued to echo in my ears. Until then I had labored to avoid thinking about the daughter I was leaving behind, thinking only of the others. To me, the voice of this crying child became my child, crying for her mother. I was besieged by memories of everything about her, from her birth in Beijing to her little mannerisms and expressions as the days went by. I thought about the awkwardness I felt when I first saw this baby I had given birth to, and the way she unconsciously knew the perfect way to suck milk from my nipple—how she followed with her eyes the leaves of a pagoda tree rustling above her head as she lay in her wicker cradle, the fleeting expression that I was the only one to catch. There was no way to prevent the hot tears welling up behind my eyelids. Turning my face toward the window, stifling my voice, I cried endless tears. From the train window, the houses and lights we passed made me think of the peaceful, tranquil families that lived in them. Seen through wet eyes, the lighted windows of those houses glowed with a warm amber light. How could it be that in all these hours today, I hadn’t thought of my daughter? I began to think I really must be going mad. I had sold the watch, so I didn’t know the time. Just before the train left I had sent a telegram to Ryōta saying I would arrive before noon the following day. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. When I closed my eyes, my ears would fill with the sound of my daughter’s cries. But then the cries mixed with the sound of the train wheels, at some point even turning into a lively tune. Eventually, I must have nodded off. Suddenly I was awoken by the conductor’s voice announcing the train’s next stop, Nagoya. And at that moment my ears were once again filled with the reverberations of my child’s cries. Her voice may well have penetrated right into my dreams. But now it wasn’t a lively tune—only a

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breath-stoppingly painful lament. Those sobs I had become accustomed to while carrying her on my back in the middle of the night . . . was she now howling while being carried on my husband’s back, I wondered. A number of people stood up, preparing to get off the train. The train slowed down and slid up to the platform. The announcement rang out, “Na-go-yaaa . . . Na-go-yaa . . .” And people rushed to the doors. I looked up at the pale white face of the clock suspended from the ceiling. My heart skipped a beat. The clock read twelve. Again, my ears filled with my child’s crying voice. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I stood up and raced to the door. I had barely made it onto the platform with the riders who had gotten off when the door closed behind me, and the train slowly moved off. I had fallen to my knees on the platform, where I remained frozen in that position. From there, awaiting the arrival of a Tokyo-bound train, my memory goes blank. It was the end of autumn in my twenty-fifth year. That was fifty-three years ago. But even now, when I’m on a train that passes through Nagoya, my heart is pierced when the announcement comes over the speaker— “. . . next stop Nagoya.” To anyone sitting with me, my expression might not change, but the name of that station throbs in my memory like a rotten tooth that has not been pulled. Sometimes I feel sheer hatred and disgust for the stubborn persistent strength of this painful memory. On the other hand, if I were to imagine the unlikely possibility of a time when the word Na-go-ya ceased to bring back these memories, I would feel an unendurable anxiety. Could it be that I am secretly striving not to forget this faint pain until I die? The next day, resigned to disgrace, I returned to the Korō family’s house, and no one reproved me. No one even asked me where I had gone. On the contrary, I was treated with

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kid gloves and an almost embarrassing degree of tolerance. Ryōta, too, never blamed me, and later said that he had fully expected that change of heart—when I hadn’t shown up for three days, he went back home. Days passed as if nothing had happened. Yet, four months later, I did resolve to leave. If I had run away the first time because nobody saw that I was mentally ill, the second occurrence must have come around because I had gotten worse. At the time, nobody around me noticed my illness, least of all me. I thought my psychological condition was normal. The next time the train stopped at Nagoya, I covered my ears with both hands and pressed myself against the window. Now it was February, the middle of winter, and I had only the clothes on my back. I arrived at Kyoto station before dawn had broken, and never returned to my husband and daughter again. This time, Ryōta did not come to Kyoto. Just as he hadn’t reproached me for failing to come to Okayama, I never could criticize him for not showing up in Kyoto. My husband did what he could, waiting patiently for me to run out of options and come crawling back. This continued for three years. Finally, giving up in the face of my stubborn refusal to return, he remarried. The real victims of this strange love affair were my husband and daughter. I spent the next fifty years averting my eyes from the seriousness of this matter. And during that fifty years, I continually met men, then left them, entangling myself in numerous love affairs. Still, no matter how long any of those relationships lasted, I have finally come to recognize that I burned with a pure passionate love only once in my life, and it was for Ryōta. Only years later did I realize that my love for Ryōta had actually burned out that day in Nagoya station. At that time, I never even imagined what would have happened if I had not gone back to Tokyo. Perhaps it was like the empty way one’s

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heart is seized when one counts the years since the death of a child, showing a lingering attachment to a love that has been extinguished. But I also could picture, with a bitter laugh, the scenario of an old couple walking into a cheap bar in some outskirt of the city, realizing with a start that it was myself and Ryōta. That, too, would not have been so bad. In any case, my subsequent life was full of a lot more ups and downs than my half-baked novel indicated. Ryōta, from whom I should have been cleanly separated, reappeared like a ghost back in my life when I had been living a settled, cared-for existence with the novelist Oda Jinjirō. That renewed relationship with Ryōta, something unimaginable a decade earlier, started when I was thirty-seven and lasted till I was forty-four. His reappearance in my life is what gave birth to my novel The End of Summer, which later won literary prizes and officially made me a novelist. If the relationship with Ryōta hadn’t destroyed what I had established with Oda Jinjirō, I would never have written that book and probably never have become a writer. Even stranger, the three of us were happy when the critics wrote, “The book depicts a strange quadrangular love relationship, yet there is nothing obscene about it.” The reason the critics said “quadrangle” instead of “love triangle” was because Jinjirō was married. If you were to ask me now whether my relationship with Jinjirō would have continued indefinitely had Ryōta never appeared, I can say with certainty it would not. It’s simply natural that after eight years or so a relationship between a man and a woman is eaten away by boredom and flaccidity. So the way Ryōta happened on the scene when he did simply opened my eyes to this state. At the same time, it was not that my love for Jinjirō had gone cold. Boredom may be a betrayal of love, but it is not the same thing as its destruction. As a literature-loving young man, Ryōta had read Jin­ jirō’s few novels, and he respected him. In fact, it might even have been that he was more interested in Jinjirō than me when

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he first visited our house, looking like a dissipated ghost. Now, as I write this, I am dumbfounded at my own stupidity at not seeing it then. Ryōta, who had been shocked at my initial confession of love when we were younger, was now, at our second meeting, probably even more surprised when I said to him tearfully, “I’m the reason you’ve turned out so spineless . . .” But for the second time, and only for Ryōta, I lit the flame again. From feeling responsible, as well as regretful, that I had already caused this innocent young person to jeopardize his future prospects, here I was, a second time, leading him astray. His story was that ten years earlier, after breaking off from joining me in Kyoto, he had gone back to Tokushima where he found a wealthy supporter, and at the same time became the lover of a beautiful woman who worked in a bar there. After that, he drifted to Kyushu, where he fell in with a bar madam with a child, who got him to turn over a new leaf. There, for several years, he led a typical family life. But then one day, the woman left him, taking her child and going back to the man she had originally abandoned for Ryōta. “Why?” I asked. “Being kind is just human nature, it is not the love between a man and a woman—that’s what she said to me. And I fully agreed with that—so I had to let her go. However you dress it up, though, the fact is she got tired of me and tossed me out.” Ryōta’s voice came from deep inside, and he gave a little laugh. Having been taught by these women, Ryōta had become unbelievably skilled at sex. But whether it was from having exhausted his strength, or merely his time of life, his need to have a woman had diminished. During those ten years, I too had experienced a lot of sex. For both of us, to remember a love that was satisfied just by looking into one another’s eyes, without touching lips, was like a dream, and the fact that we could never return to those days was incredibly painful. We were too

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embarrassed to talk of it, yet in our imagination those shared memories were somehow restored. And then I couldn’t help blurting out a confession to Oda Jinjirō about my renewed affair with Ryōta. When I told Ryōta what I had done, he couldn’t hide his confusion. “What a complete mess,” he said, pursing his lips. “I couldn’t hide it any longer!” I cried, dismayed at his reaction. And at that moment my body began to quiver with love for Jinjirō, whom I had now wounded. Standing before me, Ryōta suddenly appeared petty. Why wasn’t I able to guess, at the time, that even though the two of us had come to this, deep in his heart Ryōta couldn’t stand the thought of being hated by Jinjirō, whom he respected. All these men are now gone from the world. As is my sister. And my father. The only one who remains alive, alone, is me.

6

Aburanokōji Sanjō

ABURANOKŌJI STREET, ABOVE SANJŌ BOULEVARD IN

the heart of Kyoto, is a place fixed in my heart. When I revisit a locale that has a connection to my past, and compare the past state with the present, the old image held in my memory overtakes me with a raw freshness. I wonder when it was that I became aware of this peculiarly strong phenomenon. Kyoto was the city to which I escaped after leaving my husband’s house in Tokyo. After three years there, I went back to Tokyo to try to establish myself as a novelist, but then I came back to Kyoto. I’ve been here ever since, for probably thirty-four years now—a tax-paying citizen of Kyoto. Strangely, during that entire time, I made no effort to visit the places where I had previously lived or worked. It wasn’t as if I was intentionally trying to avoid them, as they were in areas I might often pass by without stopping. Yet when I would pass nearby, an irrational sense of dread took precedence over a feeling of nostalgia. It wasn’t that I had done something wrong 80

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there, nor did I have a memory of anyone having come to grief at that spot. It’s just that my earlier time in Kyoto was, objectively speaking, the most unsettled, most impoverished, most miserable period of my life. Although my living situation finally settled down, the word “vagabond” or “vagrant” describes me perfectly, psychologically, at that time. I arrived in Kyoto in February 1948, the dead of winter, with nothing but the clothes on my back. That night, I tumbled into a friend’s lodgings in Kitashirakawa Hirai-chō. This friend, Marumoto Kyōko, had been born and raised in Taipei. We knew one another from our university days. We had entered college on the same date, each coming from four years of secondary school, but since she had been born just before the school entrance date, she was two years younger than me even though we were in the same class. My major was Japanese literature; hers was English. We were in different divisions, but because we lived in the same dormitory, we became close friends. After graduation, we split apart, me to Beijing, she to Taiwan. At that time corresponding was not possible, but when we were repatriated and discovered we were both still alive, she was the kind of friend who made the effort to come, by herself, all the way to Tokushima to visit me. In the early dawn on the train platform of Kyoto station, there stood Kyōko, and leaning on her shoulder, Minami Masako, another college classmate. With my one telegram to Kyōko, the two of them had come running, with clouds of frozen breath, to the fiercely cold train platform. And I, supported by one on each side, suddenly felt the tightly strung tension I had been maintaining for so long, finally loosen. “What in the world happened to your face?” Kyōko let out a little shriek. I had a bandage over my left eye. When I told them my husband had hit me, which was why I looked like the ghost of O-Iwa with her ruined face, they gasped in wordless sympathy. Neither of them were married, and both worked for the Allied

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Occupation in Kyoto. I had met Masako on the day we started college, and from our accidental meeting at the front gate, we became close friends. And then, coincidentally, I bumped into her in the Wangfujing shopping area of Beijing, and our connection deepened. Masako had gone to China early on with her father, who was in the import/export business. They lived comfortably there. However, she was repatriated a year before I was, and had lived in Kyoto since then. That much I knew, but this was the first chance for us to meet since Beijing. From the station, Masako took us directly to her house on Takoyakushi Street. She lived with her mother and younger sister on the second story of one of those solid old Kyoto buildings. The city had been spared from firebombing during the war. Her father had stayed in Beijing to close up the business, and his whereabouts had remained unknown until just recently, when they were informed of his death. Kyōko’s father, having lost everything in Taipei, had returned with the family to Japan. From their point of view, all the unforeseen suffering entailed in trying to make one’s way after Japan’s loss in the war was now reflected in my pitiful figure—coatless, gloveless, bandaged eye. Without asking for details, they set about warming up my mind and body. Masako’s mother set a pot of vegetables and fried tofu on the table, along with a dish of grated radish and dipping sauce. “I’ve never had such a delicious hot pot!” I exclaimed, slurping down mouthful after mouthful. Masako and her mother added more vegetables as quickly as I ate them. Some fresh black-market rice had just arrived from Tanba, and I forgot about my uncertain future as I gobbled every last one of the plump shiny grains from my bowl. That was a time when people lacking a booklet of rationing coupons couldn’t eat. I didn’t even have that. When I fled Tokyo, my overcoat, my purse, my ration book—everything had been confiscated by my husband. At the time, I believed his reasoning to be correct, and felt courageous to be willing to abandon everything. But now, all of a sudden,

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the realization that I was utterly without the means to live, destitute, caused my chopsticks to pause in mid-air. My two friends didn’t try to question me when they saw me waver. During dinner, the two of them fiercely criticized my husband’s abusive behavior, and facing them I never once tried to defend him. By that point, it was as if my soul had been extracted from my body, and captivated by another man, my heart, as if detached from the pain, acknowledged the angry outbursts of a husband who couldn’t stop himself from being violent. My friends agreed that, had it been them, the cord binding their bag of patience would long since have snapped. I did not feel that I could even begin to explain to these two friends who hadn’t married how they could comprehend the reality of the confused position I had fallen into—the course that my platonic love with Ryōta had taken, and my husband’s justified anger. Indeed, I knew that I had previously upset my sympathetic and indignant friends in Tokyo when I had stupidly defended my husband. So, lapping up their sympathy, I took the cowardly path of not saying anything as they vilified him as an evil barbarian. Then, as if gently probing a sore, Kyōko inquired about my daughter. To her, the child now abandoned by her mother, whom she had once met as a baby when she visited me in Tokushima, was the truly pitiful victim. “He says he’ll never give her back. But I’m sure I can get her at some point,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “That’s right. Of course. He’ll certainly let her go,” they agreed. In our imaginations, it was already as if my daughter had been returned, and we were bringing her up together. Once again, I turned my face away at the shameful memory. Could I really have thought I would take my daughter and run away with Ryōta? Did I ever actually fight against my husband’s will when he insisted he would never give the child to me? The truth is, she

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never figured in the love I imagined having with Ryōta. Somewhere I know that I always kept a lid on the deepest part of my heart that was too frightful to even glimpse. It was only because I was shocked by the cold, inhuman intention to leave my daughter behind that I turned back at Nagoya station. The very next day, I moved into Kyōko’s boarding house, called Takita. From her ample salary working for the Occupation, Kyōko was saving enough to send her younger brother to Kyoto University. Their lodgings were close to the university in Kitashirakawa Hirai-chō, a quiet neighborhood in the middle of a quarter of old mansions. The ground floor had been a liquor store and bar. Entirely surrounded by a tall hedge, the second story was a purely Japanese-style suite of rooms. Originally a single family had lived there, but the many rooms had been turned into a boarding house by the widow who owned it now. It was constructed with fine materials. The main pillar in the decorative alcove was a thick trunk of northern cedar, polished to a soft amber glow. Kyōko shared an eight-mat room on a corner of the first floor with her brother. All the other rooms were rented to Kyoto University students. Welcomed into their space, I entered into a communal life consisting of three people sharing one eight-mat room. Kyōko’s brother Toshio was due to graduate in March, and he had a job already lined up in Tokyo, but I could see immediately that it would be difficult for three people to live in that room until then. The landlady was a relative of Kyōko’s and we got her to agree that when a lodger moved out, I would move into the vacated room. Even so, I was penniless, and depended on Kyōko for all of my necessities. Besides feeding me every day, she had to lend me clothing, from inner layers to outer, since I had arrived with nothing but the clothes I wore on the train. My father did not seem surprised at my decision to run away, but he had to think about his position and what people would say, so he disinherited me. He gave me no financial support, and I was

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banned from visiting. Keeping it secret, my sister was putting together some funds to tide me over, but it took a while for her to send it. After one week, Ryōta appeared. He brought a stylish beige leather bag left over from his Shanghai days—it was stuffed with rice and vegetables. His grandmother, the one I had heard calling from inside the house, had packed the bag full, he said with a laugh. “Grandma was even more excited than I was.” I had to laugh. And suddenly my eyes filled with tears. Ryōta gazed at me in alarm. “It’s just that it’s been so long since I heard you laugh . . .” I barely got this out before I started to hiccup and couldn’t stop. Ryōta took in my living situation at once, and had an idea. He had a friend from the documents office where he worked who lived in Shioya alongside the Hanshin line. That young man, who was away recuperating from tuberculosis, shared an old house with his widowed mother, just the two of them. I don’t know what Ryōta told them, but his friend Naganuma, along with his refined mother, agreed to let me stay in their detached building for as long as I wished. As we sat on a nearby beach, Ryōta started to talk about what I should do. “From now on you must stand on your own two feet and become independent,” he stated. I did not feel disappointed or betrayed by this kind of talk from Ryōta. In truth, his reaction to my impetuous exit from my husband’s home was to think of the five people in his own family who were already depending on him. I felt he was rather naïve to think that I might want to rely on him, since I knew for myself that unless I became independent I could never show my face to my father, my daughter, or my husband again. The next time Ryōta came to Shioya, we had sex for the first time. It was in a shabby hotel room, some distance from the house. I could hear the echo of the ocean from my pillow. After

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the act, each of us tried extremely hard to hide our disappointment from the other. Ryōta was a virgin. On my wedding night, both my husband and I had been virgins. Yet now I was a sexually experienced woman who had already given birth to a child. Trying hard to ignore a sudden dizziness, I took in the uneasy expression in Ryōta’s eyes and pulled him to my chest in a hug. “It’s okay . . .” I murmured. I’m not sure how Ryōta took that, but he smiled liked a shy schoolboy. Soon after this, a special delivery letter arrived from Kyōko saying she had found a possible work situation for me and I should come back to Kyoto immediately. When I got back to her boarding house in Hirai-chō, it turned out that her brother Toshio’s friend from Taipei worked in a publishing house, and they had agreed to give me an interview for an editorial position. At the appointed hour, I made my way to the Daisui Publishing House. Everything I was wearing, from my underwear to my dress, and down to my shoes—was borrowed from Kyōko. The publisher’s office was located at Number 16, Aburanokōji Street, above Sanjō. This venerable street has existed under this name for a thousand years. It is the street that joins Sanjō and Marutamachi, an old spacious street lined with traditional town houses. Cars were few, and even foot traffic was sparse. Turning onto the street from Sanjō, I quickly located Number 16 on the north side of the street. It was an old-fashioned two-story building with a facade of yellow tiles. There were three large windows on the ground floor, four on the second story. The entrance was on the right, and as soon as you entered, there was a stairway up to the second floor. At the side of the entrance were two signs. One read Daisui Publishers, the other Ohtori Paper Company. At that time, new publishers had sprung up all over Japan, like bamboo after a rain. Daisui was one of these. The company president’s father had been one of the top paper

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wholesalers in Kyoto, and this second-generation business depended on its parent company for paper. Daisui was a book publisher, but it would also turn any leftover paper into envelopes and stationery. As it happened, selling those paper items, which carried depictions drawn from popular romance, turned out to be quite successful. But the original purpose of the company, according to its erudite young president, Sekine Atsushi, was to publish books. Even so, he was still riding on the strength of the paper business at that time, hoping to eventually turn it into publishing. I was going to meet Toshio’s classmate Masuda Daisuke, who had been with Daisui from the beginning as editor-in-chief. I climbed the wide wooden stairway with trepidation. The second floor consisted of one large space, two-thirds of which was dedicated to the Ohtori Paper Company, and the remaining third to Daisui Publishing. It was the end of February and still bone chillingly cold, but there were no kerosene stoves for heating. Instead, two large ceramic hibachi were set along the dividing line between the two companies. These were filled with lighted charcoal, with large kettles set on top. When I announced the purpose of my visit, a bespectacled, intelligent-looking man sitting in the rear corner facing the entrance nimbly stood up from his chair. “I heard about you from Marumoto. Your résumé arrived yesterday. Well, have a seat.” Responding to his brisk tone, I moved nervously toward the offered chair, this being the first time in my life I had ever interviewed for a job. But in so doing, I stumbled and knocked over a kettle on the hibachi. Luckily the water wasn’t hot, but it spilled all over the charcoal, sending up a cloud of ash. The ashes sifted down onto Mr. Masuda’s black hair and navy suit. I was also plastered with ash. Three young women from the Ohtori Paper Company rushed over with rags, a bucket, and a broom, and set to work cleaning up the mess. I took up a rag too and got

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down on my hands and knees, throwing myself into the effort to mop the floor. Finally, when I reached a stopping point, feeling totally hopeless, I looked up and met the amused eye of Mr. Masuda. “You’re a pretty hasty person, aren’t you?” he teased. Suddenly I relaxed, and said quickly, “I guess this means I’ve flunked the interview . . .” “That’s what I mean about being hasty. I haven’t even asked any questions yet.” Masuda’s tone felt like that of someone I had known for a long time. His expression indicated that he had gained a general impression of me from Toshio. “The president intends to publish some French literature that is less well known. Is this something you’d be interested in?” “What sort of authors is he thinking of?” I asked. “Gérard de Nerval, for example.” “Oh, yes please! I adore Nerval!” I exclaimed with enthusiasm. Masuda paused. “But before that, there is something that needs to be done right away. Thomas Aquinas’ Treatise on Human Nature.” That was gobbledygook to me, but feeling unnaturally confident, I nodded. As I made my way down the staircase of the Daisui Publishing House, I took some small comfort in the fact that at least I had been honest about my lack of editorial experience. Masuda had conducted the interview in front of the other employees, who had all pricked up their ears. They were undoubtedly rolling their eyes, knowing I was absolutely clueless about Thomas Aquinas, much less The Treatise on Human Nature. Surely a rejection would be on its way in no time. My shoulders slumped in dejection as I wandered aimlessly along Aburanokōji Street. Suddenly I heard the high sweet voice of a child coming from behind one of the latticed house fronts, and wanting to cover both ears, I ran. The cries of my

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daughter still echoed in my dreams, jarring me awake in the middle of the night. Feeling it was impossible to go back, I bit my lip. The echo of the waves lapping my pillow in that shabby hotel seeped across my mind. As the reality of what our “love” consisted of set in, my bright and fierce concept of it faded. This was something I would never say to Ryōta, even if it killed me. However, an employment contract soon arrived from Daisui, and so, wrapped in Kyōko’s clothing, I began my brisk commute to their office. When Toshio graduated and went to Tokyo, I lived with Kyōko in the student boarding house, commuting from there to my job. The managing director’s desk sat in front of a corner window, facing away from the street. The desks of five employees were arranged in front of him, three of them already occupied by two men and a woman. Joining her in that group were myself and another woman who had just been hired. She was a charming and beautiful girl who had come from Takarazuka, having danced in the review there. Upon leaving the troupe, she had married, divorced, and begun to write children’s books and romances for young girls. Using her real name, Nakashima Mitsuko, rather than a pen name, she had already published one children’s book with Daisui. Technically, she had been hired before me, but because of an injury, she had delayed her start until several days later. She was the same age as me, petite and beautiful. When she took her seat, the surroundings lit up as if a light had been kindled. The other woman was a not-yet-twenty Kyoto girl, bursting with energy. A man named Tsutsui, a former middle-­ school instructor with dreams of being a novelist, sat directly opposite Mr. Masuda in the rear corner. Mr. Monma, the managing director, had a gentlemanly look like that of a bank manager. His mild expression never cracked, perhaps because he actually had some background in managing a company. You could tell at a glance that Sekine Atsushi, the idealistic literary youth who was president of the company, was a

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cheerful young entrepreneur from a good background. The president’s friend Yoshida Masanosuke, who single-handedly ran the paper business, loudly proclaimed that he doubled as an employee of Daisui. A handsome devil, wearing tall boots and a long white scarf, he sauntered down Kawaramachi Street leaving a trail of women’s glances behind him. It was said he was a survivor of the war’s flying squadrons, and he still behaved with the swagger of a pilot. His plans all tended to succeed—except that the earnings of the paper company, which technically was completely separate from Daisui, were all eaten by the failures of the publishing house. After I had been working there a year and a half, Daisui went out of business. Nakashima Mitsuko went on to win the Edogawa Ranpō prize for literature, writing under the pen name Shinsho Fumiko. Yoshida Masanosuke became a sculptor known professionally as Nagare Masayuki, attaining worldwide acclaim along with Isamu Noguchi. If it’s not too much of an exaggeration to include myself along with them, it would seem that we three artists spent an obscure time in our youth together on the second floor of that building. Ryōta’s directive that I should become independent was, thankfully, brought about by dint of the Daisui Publishing House. I still was not entitled to any ration coupons, but I was able to get coupons for meals with the help of one of the students at the boarding house, who went to the black market. Usually I ate breakfast and dinner at the Yagura Cafeteria in the neighborhood. Kyōko and I often went to the public bathhouse nearby, and afterwards would stretch our legs in a little stroll along the canal. At Daisui, the work was interesting, my interactions with the other employees were amusing, and I came to think that this was a life that suited me. Day by day I regained my strength. This is not to say that I excelled in my work, however. When I first applied myself to the manuscripts for the Thomas

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Aquinas project, I did not comprehend how malnourished I was, and I would do things like drop my pen while taking dictation, or even fall asleep in front of the scholars, arousing their ire. If, however, the beautiful and polite Nakashima Mitsuko went to pick up the work instead of me, then these elderly gentlemen would immediately regain their good humor. Furthermore, since I seem to have a congenital disinclination to cope with details, the things I proofread ended up full of errors, and I ruined perfectly good translations. Many years later, I discovered in the National Library the thick volume from Daisui containing the Treatise, its vermilion title stamped on grey binding, and my whole body broke out in a cold sweat. The Nerval translation had not sold; neither had the Introduction to Spanish. The only thing that sold well was Nakashima Mitsuko’s children’s book, Little Chipmunk and the Red Gloves. I’m sure that one reason the Daisui Publishing House failed was its tendency to coddle incompetent employees like me. Even after the company went under, the president arranged a position for me in the pediatric research division of a hospital affiliated with Kyoto University. Fifty-two years later, one day in May, I made up my mind to go back to Aburanokōji Street. I feared it would be like opening Pandora’s box, but I knew it couldn’t be put off any longer given that I probably didn’t have that many years left. I got out of the car at Aburanokōji, and as I made my way up the street, alone in the May sunshine, I felt the time that had flown past was flapping its wings and rushing up to me. Aburanokōji had hardly changed at all. Lying between quiet rows of houses on either side, the street was wrapped in a sleepy tranquility. There was practically no one walking about, and again, no cars. Traditional heavy black wooden buildings in the Kyoto style were still in evidence, together with some new Western buildings that were noticeable on both sides. Calling up old memories, I walked

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through the area of Aburanokōji Street above Sanjō Boulevard several times. And as I stood there craning my neck to look up at the buildings, I was accosted by a voice. “Are you looking for something?” “A long time ago, I used to work in this neighborhood. I was just wondering if the building is still here or not,” I replied. A friendly, outgoing middle-aged man introduced himself as a neighborhood official. “Why don’t we ask the old sensei who lives here?” he said, taking me to a building on the other side of the street from where I had been standing. “He’s lived here a long time and pretty much knows everything about the place.” He pushed the button on the intercom. A gentleman said to be a famous engraver came to the foyer dressed in work clothes. When I told him I was looking for the site of the Daisui Publishing Company, he said, “Ah. That is the building across from this one. The owner is the same, but there have been many different tenants. A company called Daisui—feels like that was really a long time ago.” I turned my eyes back toward the building that had first pulled at my heart. A sign for a dye works company hung in front, but gradually the outline of a two-story house clad in faded yellow tiles came into focus. The four wooden window frames on the second story had been painted white, as had the three below. The entrance, a tall doorway, stood at the right edge of the building. Now it was closed. “Back inside that doorway there used to be a wide wooden staircase up to the second floor,” I ventured. “Yes, yes. I often saw it when the door was open. It’s still there, that wooden stairway.” That was all the proof I needed. “If you like, shall we contact the owner? His wife lives nearby in Sōrinchō,” the engraver offered. I protested against taking up his time, uncomfortable at the thought of bothering an artisan at work.

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“Well, I remember the wife of the owner telling me that Jakuchō-san had once worked in that building.” Listening to us, the man who had guided me here said with a note of regret, “If only my mother were still alive, she would have known a lot more about that place.” Finally, left on my own again, I stood there a moment unable to pull myself away. I clearly recalled the positions of our chairs, and Mr. Monma, sitting comfortably, his back to that second-floor window on the left. The president’s cheerful voice, and Daisuke’s low serious tones, echoed in my ear from fifty-two years ago. At the third window sat a young Masanosuke, loudly ordering everyone around. Overcome by nostalgia, I stood there steadfastly looking up at the hoary faded yellow-tiled building. That was the building where I had first worked, and first attained my independence. Behind that middle window was where I had sent up a cloud of ashes. That was also where I first heard about the double suicide of the writer Dazai Osamu. Now that I think of it, Yoshida Masanosuke and I were walking down this street one day when he invited me into a café. “So . . . how long are you planning to work here?” he asked. Then he let me have it directly. “I hear you abandoned your child. Go back! This is a terrible thing to do to a child. I know because I am my father’s mistress’s child, but because I was a boy I got adopted back into his main family. And I have memories of really suffering. I resented my birth mother—how could she have let me go? Go back! What are you doing here messing around with your half-baked proofreading?” He was relentless. When I finally had a chance to say something, I raised my eyes to look at Masanosuke’s face. But when I saw the tears glistening in his eyes, I quickly lowered them again. Even after he became a famous sculptor under the name Nagare Masayuki, we continued to have a close relationship. Long ago he told me he would become a painter, but the stone sculptures he ended up creating instead sing the same

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poetry that is in his heart. During the many times we have met over the years, never once has that exchange in the coffee shop come up. Where was that coffee shop, I wondered, as I walked down the street. I couldn’t find it. As if there were something pushing me in the back, I summoned my car and headed toward Kitashirakawa Hirai-chō. This was an area I had driven past I don’t know how many dozens of times in the past fifty-two years, yet never once had I stopped. I thought Hirai-chō would be easy to find, but there were so many streets that looked similar, I couldn’t locate it. I remembered the boarding house I had shared with Kyōko as a house on the corner of a quiet residential street lined with old mansions. I had only the concrete memory of the name Takita to go on. Most of the houses had been rebuilt, although there were a few of the original homes as well. Possibly this one, I would think as I approached one of them, but the name on the doorplate would be different. Just as I was about to give up, my eye was drawn to a house on the corner of a street I had wandered past. The building had been completely redone with a fancy Western-style entrance, but there was the nameplate in big letters—takita. On the other side of the frosted glass entrance door, I could see a red tricycle and a child’s rubber ball. Surely the woman who had been my landlady had long since passed away. Even the young girl vexed by acne who had been the adopted daughter back then would now be in her sixties. Maybe these toys belonged to that woman’s grandchildren? One of the boarders back then was the son of the popular singer Shōji Tarō, and I remember the wide-eyed look of awakening love on that girl’s face. Pulling myself away and turning down a nearby street, I suddenly found myself choking up. I couldn’t believe it. There was the tiny old-fashioned storefront with a sign hanging out in front exactly like the one from long ago—Yagura Cafeteria. Now it was a stylish little restaurant, but back then it

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had been the student hangout, a place to use your government-­ issued meal ticket. The young woman who took a liking to me and served me a double helping of rice—if she were still alive— would be on the downward slope of sixty by now. Looking around to the side, I saw something else that remained—the public bathhouse where Kyōko and I used to go every evening. During the many times Ryōta visited, he would always want to eat at this cafeteria. Each time the young waitress would place a bowl with a mountain of rice in front of him, Ryōta’s tears would spill out onto the peak. “This is what I’ve led you to—this place, this cafeteria . . .” The hopeless tone of his voice reverberates in my ear still. Everyone eventually passes away; time passes as well. But it seems to me that the place where you set your foot, the memory held by a physical piece of land, is what endures.

7

Mitaka Shimorenjaku

IN MAY OF 1951 I WOUND up my Kyoto life and went back to Tokyo. My father had died in April the previous year. Back when I had abandoned my husband and child he had written me the following rather unfatherly advice:

With this act, you have left the path of humanity. Since you are now inhuman, I think you must be entering the world of demons. And if you are now a demon, don’t let yourself become dulled by pity or sympathy—become the best demon you can be.

And it may well be that it was he rather than my adoring mother who believed I might become a novelist. Soon after I fled my husband, my father, already suffering from tuberculosis, had a stroke and was bedridden. Recuperating alone in an out of the way place, he must have worried about my incomprehensible life in Kyoto. I can’t help but think 96

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that even though he had to conform to social expectations by disinheriting me, it’s possible he may have taken seriously what I wrote to him half in jest—that one of these days I would return to Tokyo and become a big-time novelist, with many students sending cash and vying for a place in my coterie. In any case, as his health declined, he set off on a half-cocked trip to various healers, ending up in Konpira for moxibustion therapy. At the cheap inn where he went for treatment, he dropped dead when the moxa was applied to the crown of his head. I was not there at his moment of death, but even before my weeping sister could blame me, I felt keenly that I had killed him. They said that at his final moment, he mouthed the name of his stupid demon daughter with his last breath. When I made my way to the body that lay stretched out on its side on the second floor of that ratty inn, and viewed my father’s beautiful peaceful face, I didn’t feel sadness so much as the awakening of an intrepid spirit. At least there was one thing that had set his mind at peace. Finally, in February of that year, my husband had agreed to a divorce. I brought that announcement to my father, and we drank to it. That was the last time I saw him. “It’s been a long time,” he said. Enduring my father’s opposition had been the most painful thing for me after leaving my marriage. With that simple phrase, it all melted away. Right around that time, I took a shot in the dark and submitted five stories to magazines publishing for young adults and children. They were all accepted and about to be printed, an event my father did not live to see. After Daisui Publishing had gone under, I worked at a pediatric research center in a Kyoto University–affiliated hospital. That allowed me to eke out a living. My job was cleaning the test tubes and petri dishes and taking care of the laboratory rats. Before long though, I was put in charge of watching the library, and it was there that I found the breathing space to write my stories.

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When the first anniversary of my father’s death came around, I decided to leave Kyoto. I had passed four spring seasons there. And just as I had depended on my classmate Marumoto Kyōko when I first arrived in Kyoto, now I stayed with my college friend Ohmatsu Fumiko when I came back to Tokyo. Fumiko had married young, while we were still in school. Her husband had been drafted into the army early in their marriage and had come home unscathed. Living a peaceful life in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, she had been charitable enough to search everywhere she thought I might have gone after I deserted my husband. She had always wanted a child, but unable to have one, she had reproached me, unable to understand how I could have abandoned my own child. Even so, she had written to me in Kyoto— Whatever you have done, I still believe in you. Even if I don’t agree, it’s better to believe in you than to lose you. If there is anything I can do, you just have to ask.

Living as I did then in less than wonderful circumstances, I rewarded her deep friendship by not even bothering to respond. Yet when I wrote a selfish letter out of the blue telling her I was coming back to Tokyo and asking to stay with her until I found a room, she responded by sending a detailed map to her house, saying that she awaited my visit. Now that I think about it, that day when I got on the Chūō line, heading west from Shinjuku, it had been eight years since I had followed that same route on my way to Beijing after my marriage. Out of the train window on the right side, I caught a glimpse of the chapel’s steeple and grove of greenery as we passed Tokyo Women’s College. I almost floated up out of my seat. The train stations in Mitaka and Ogikubo had been spared from the wartime firebombing and were just as I

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remembered. Two years earlier, a runaway train had crashed into the Mitaka station causing great destruction, but now the repaired plaza at the southern entrance was hushed and deserted. The shopping arcade that stretched out in front of the station had the familiar feel of a countryside Ginza, with just a few people here and there. Following Fumiko’s detailed map, I headed south until, veering left onto a side street, I came to a housing development surrounded by a hedge, where her house was. During the years we had been apart, Fumiko had turned into an obedient housewife, but as we talked the literary coed and basketball star of her student days gradually reemerged. She dismissed the awful Mitaka station crash with a word—Terrible!—but was much more voluble on the subject of Dazai Osamu’s double suicide, which had occurred the previous year. Fumiko had been a client of the hairdresser Yamazaki Tomie, who had drowned along with the writer. “Well, since she died in that way, people talked about her, you know. But she was a really good person. She was very kind. She was such a skillful hairdresser too. All her clients were so fond of her. She lavished all her earnings on Dazai and ended up totally penniless, they say.” Later, Fumiko gave me a tour of Yamazaki’s beauty parlor, and of the drinking establishment called Sengusa where she and Dazai had stayed. She even showed me where Dazai’s family home was located. “The day of the wake was a real zoo. All the dignitaries of the literary world were lined up along the street, coming on condolence calls. I was standing right there when the author Hayashi Fumiko came up with a huge bouquet of flowers. She asked me where Dazai’s house was. She was so cute and small and round, I could hardly believe she was the famous author herself!” In our student days, the two of us had been great fans of Hayashi, and we bought every book she had published. Even after three years, the memory of being spoken to by Hayashi was

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still bright and clear in my friend’s mind. When she saw my illustrated novels aimed at the young ladies audience, she said apprehensively, “You’re not planning to continue writing stuff like this, are you?” Even more than I did myself, Fumiko had always had confidence in my ability to write. She dreamt of my writing things like Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog or D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I knew I couldn’t impose on this quiet couple for too long, so trusting I could find work at one of the employment agencies near the station, I looked for lodgings as well. Fumiko accompanied me in my search. If you walked about thirteen minutes down the shopping street from the southern entrance to Mitaka station, you would come upon an old highway. Three or four houses down from that intersection was an old-fashioned shop with a red banner with the word tobacco on it hanging from the eaves. Really, it was so old-fashioned it would not have been odd if there were a traditional straw roof over it. In what originally had been a packed-earth-floor kitchen was displayed a jumble of household items, toys, and cheap candy for sale, along with toilet paper, toothbrushes, soap, bedpans, and straw sandals. To the right and back of the main shop was a separate room, consisting of eight unedged tatami mats, that appeared somewhat larger because of the unbroken space. It even had a tokonoma alcove. One entered by a glass door on the verandah. A bare, grassless patch lay between the building and the street, providing an unobstructed view from the road. The landlady was a widow of about sixty named Shimoda Shun. She ran the shop with the help of her daughter—a young woman who I first thought must be her granddaughter. Small and chubby, wrapped in a white mama’s apron, Shun asked me what I did for a living. Before I could answer, Fumiko’s voice piped up, “She’s a novelist—but she writes sweet children’s stories and tales for beautiful young ladies.”

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“A novelist, are you? Well, Dazai Osamu’s grave is in the Zenrinji temple right nearby, you know. And on the Emperor’s Birthday, there at his grave, one of his followers killed himself as well. That guy bought a pack of cigarettes right here at this store. And he killed himself after he smoked them at his grave—that’s what the policeman told me.” Shun appeared to think that novelists were a deranged bunch, but nevertheless she agreed to rent me the room. She requested that I not bring a lot of stuff. And I could move in tomorrow. So the next day I piled my rolled-up futon and a single suitcase onto a trailer, and sitting atop it myself, moved to Shun’s place. She hardly raised an eyebrow at the paucity of my belongings. I found it rather endearing that she still referred to the holiday as the Emperor’s Birthday notwithstanding the fact that it had been renamed Culture Day three years earlier. The next day I bought a tall desk at a used furniture store in front of Inokashira Park. I negotiated the price down from 750 yen to 680 yen, and in addition got him to cut the legs down to make it into a desk for sitting on the floor. The fact that I can even now remember the price of this desk and the rent at 1,800 yen shows how precious each yen, every sen was to me at that time. All the publishers offered the same amount—just 300 yen per manuscript page for a teenage girl novel. Only much later did I discover that famous authors received 2,000 or 3,000 yen per page. I got some empty wooden apple crates from Shun’s store, covered them with paper, and piled them up to make a bookcase. Thus was born my first writer’s studio. Lining up paper, pen, and ink on the desk, I could happily sit there all day, elbows on desk, cheeks resting on hands, carried away imagining myself already a novelist. The road in front was unpaved, and right in front of the entrance to my room a huge Zelkova tree spread its branches. A network of Zelkova branches lined the edge of the road. Occasionally a bus roared by, raising a cloud of

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dust, or a horse-drawn cart clopped along, but other than that, the quiet of the road was rarely disturbed. I cooked my food on a charcoal brazier in the corner of the verandah. Living in Kyoto, I had gotten quite used to poverty, so this didn’t bother me. Sometimes in the middle of the night, as I was sitting at my desk, the sliding door would quietly open and Shun’s hand would stretch through, depositing something in the room. Shun’s husband had once worked as a live-in chauffeur at the Dutch embassy, and occasionally she would spend time there providing kitchen or housecleaning help. And from that connection would come things like a vegetable salad with mayonnaise, or a plate of pancakes dripping with syrup. Sixteen years earlier, Shun’s husband had been driving through a heavy May downpour while drunk, and he drowned when his car skidded into the river. “Around these parts, people say that river is a man eater. That happened while I was pregnant with Sachiko,” she told me. Every so often she came into my room with anecdotes or questions. “Manuscripts selling well?” “Okay, I guess,” I would mumble. Every few days I’d walk fifteen minutes to Mitaka station, ride the train to Suidōbashi, and walk to the Fukoku Publishing Co. in Fujimimachi. This small publisher brought out just one series called Young Lady World. After leaving a manuscript there, I would walk over to the Shōgakukan Publishing Co. in Kanda. That was the radius of my activity. Just over the tracks to the north entrance of Mitaka station was a road running alongside the pipes built for bringing fresh water to the city. Alongside it stood the mansion of the author Niwa Fumio. One day I called on the Niwa house and managed to get accepted into the group of writers he published in his privately curated magazine The Litterateur. If you were a member of his coterie he didn’t charge you to publish or require a subvention. There wasn’t even a need to solicit reviews of your

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manuscript. Indeed, of all the literary heavyweights, no one was more unselfishly helpful to young colleagues than Niwa Fumio. We gathered there on Wednesdays, and you never knew who might show up. A group of writers people referred to as Niwa’s “stable of officers” would usually be there, asking each other if they had read Camus. I would happily sequester myself in a corner of the room and listen, conjuring a pipe dream in which I would be included one day in this intimate circle of published authors. On the fifteenth of every month, another meeting was held at the Mon Ami restaurant in Higashi Nakano. This was a get-together to critique one another’s work. The regular supporters came, of course, and you would see the faces of Niwa’s officers all in a row. It was a magnificent affair. Even though I hadn’t yet written a novel, I enthusiastically commuted to Mon Ami. To have a novel published in The Litterateur was my most fervent desire. In time, I began to receive a fair number of visitors to my rented room. Doctors from the hospital at Kyoto University might drop by when they were in Tokyo for meetings. One guy from Kyoto even begged me not to give up on the idea of marriage. Some women friends whom I had met through The Litterateur regularly came by as well. None of us had made it in the world as yet, but all were secretly hoping. With all the visitors I had, Shun was pleased to think my economic condition must be improving. Her daughter Sachiko would bring trays of cheap sweets to the room. When Oda Jinjirō began to show up, however, things started to change. One day, he dropped in for a quick visit, coming in as usual via the verandah. He stood for a while just looking around the tawdry room, staring at the books in the apple crate bookshelves from one end to the other. “Okay if I borrow this?” “Of course. Go ahead.”

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He had picked out a couple of volumes on the woodblock print artist Sharaku that I had found at a used book store. Sharaku was originally from Tokushima, and at one point I had thought I’d like to write something about him. Extracting those volumes from the shelf, he looked around the room again. “Shouldn’t you get rid of that?” He pointed his chin at a doll in a small glass case that someone had given me, now sitting haphazardly in a corner of the tokonoma. I ended up stuffing it away deep in the closet. I had had drinks with Oda Jinjirō two or three times in Shinjuku, and even gotten a couple of cryptic love notes. So when he suddenly appeared on my doorstep I didn’t feel it was weird at all. But when it became clear that our relationship had gone beyond simply being friends, Shun’s attitude changed. Even with all the men who had come and gone previously, she still seemed to think I was a chaste woman. So now when I saw a sign for a room to rent above the entrance to a ramen restaurant on the shopping street, I decided it was time to move. I had been living at Shimoda Shun’s house at Number 269, Shimorenjaku for two and a half years. I had to climb up a set of creaky stairs to my six-mat room above the ramen place. The floor tilted so much that when I went to sleep I felt I was in danger of sliding off to one side. Just outside my room was a laundry-drying platform which the landlady could only reach by going through my room. All day long the smell of ramen seeped up from below. This place was definitely a step down from my detached quarters at the Shimoda house, but if it allowed Oda Jinjirō to visit freely, I was satisfied. The woman who owned the Igarashi Ramen House was slender and stylish. One eye had a slight squint, but she projected a mysterious sexiness despite it. She lived there with a good-looking son who was junior high school age. In the evening, she also served sake at the ramen counter. The ramen broth would cook on the stove for days on end, and she would just top

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it up with water—frankly, it was not the sort of thing one would want to pay money to eat. The fact that there were loyal customers must have been due to her sexy looks, I guess. She did her laundry during the relatively quiet hours during the day and sometimes lingered in my room to chat. She was rather eccentric, and the conversation might veer to topics like Einstein’s theory of relativity or Ishiwara Jun’s theories on quantum physics. Hoping to make her attractive son into a movie star, she begged me to introduce him to the influential Niwa Fumio, but I always gave her some noncommittal reply. Eventually she developed a grudge or something—in any case, she told me to move out. “My son is growing into a handsome young man, you see. It is not a good influence on him to see a woman who lets a man come to her room. It could overstimulate him.” She could not look me straight in the eye as she said this. Avoiding the stupefied expression on my face, she continued, “I’ll say this to you now because you’re leaving. You really should break up with Oda-san. His writing is never going to sell. Also, he looks like he has tuberculosis. You’d better be careful—people with tuberculosis have a weak sex drive.” I had moved to the ramen place late in December. It was now May of the following year. I left Mitaka for good and moved to Nishi Ogikubo. And that was the end of four years of my life in Mitaka. For the next twelve or thirteen years I made my living as an anonymous author writing for newspapers and women’s magazines. During that time I appeared once on a television variety show where the guests would suddenly be confronted by someone to whom they had some sort of past connection. That time, the guests turned out to be Shimoda Sachiko and her older brother from Mitaka. Forgetting we were on television, I rushed over and grabbed Sachiko’s hand. Sweet little round-faced Sachiko had grown up practically unchanged. Her somewhat

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weak-minded older brother had a wife who did not get along with Shun, and there had been difficulties there, but nevertheless the two of them had always been nice to me. This girl, whom we used to call helter-skelter Satchan, had gotten married and was now the mother of two. As we talked in the green room, I learned that Shun had passed away. “Our mother was always happy to see newspaper ads or television programs that mentioned you, Setouchi-san,” said Sachiko. As she spoke in her familiar voice and style, I was reminded of Shun, and the way she would always tuck a white handkerchief behind the collar of her kimono. In my mind, Shun’s calm smiling face overlaid that of her daughter as Sachiko talked. Thirteen or fourteen years after I took Buddhist orders, I had an errand that took me past the Shimoda house in Mitaka where I had once boarded. I got out of the car and stood in front of the shopping street, simply flabbergasted at the change that had taken place. The road was now completely clad in asphalt, and the evocative row of large Zelkova trees had mostly disappeared. The houses on both sides of the street had been replaced, and I saw no trace of the seal-carving shop or the dried fish store, or the rice store I remembered. Of course, there was no trace either of Shun’s little detached room that once could be seen from the road. In its place stood a bakery with a stylish Western interior. When I peeked inside, though, who should appear but roundfaced Sachiko herself. She immediately pulled me inside where we stood chatting away. It had been ten years since they rebuilt the house. When we had last met on the tv program, the old house was still standing. “Oh, it’s a shame you couldn’t have come before we tore it down,” she said regretfully. “So many people came around asking whatever became of Setouchi-san . . .” “That must have been a bother,” I said.

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“Not at all! If mother had been alive, how she would have enjoyed it.” Both of Sachiko’s daughters had married, and she and her husband now lived there by themselves. Since I had an appointment to keep, I said goodbye, then turned my steps toward the Zenrinji temple. When I reached the gate, I turned and there she was, still standing in front of her shop, waving. And now it’s been ten plus years since that visit. As if mourning the days since the death of a child, I counted the vanished time while heading there in the taxi. The young driver did not understand when I told him to let me off at the south entrance to Mitaka station, so I asked him to just drop me off anywhere in the vicinity. He ended up stopping at the plaza at the north entrance. I stepped out of the taxi, feeling like I had landed in some unknown foreign country. The vaguely countrified territory in my memory was nowhere to be found, and tall buildings filled the area. Where once you felt you could see the sky and sniff the wind off the Musashino Plain—now it had all vanished like a dream. Even if it had been possible to follow the old road alongside the water pipes to Niwa Fumio’s mansion, I had heard that it had been rebuilt quite a while before, and I flinched at the idea of heading there. Disoriented, I stopped a person walking hurriedly along. “The crossing to get to the south entrance is just ahead over there, is it not?” The woman chuckled. From the look of the shoulder bag she carried, I presumed she was a businesswoman. “The crossing? They did away with that a long time ago,” she said. Then she went out of her way to lead me to an escalator that led to the ticket gate. Trains were running on that level, so to get to the south entrance you had to take another escalator down. Before stepping onto it, I stood there looking down at

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the view of Mitaka. Long ago, you could look out from the old wooden ticket office over the low roofs of the shopping street all the way to the T-intersection where the road turned toward the Shimoda house. Now, new high rises were crammed along both sides of the street as far as the eye could see. Not a fragment of the old neighborhood remained. No longer did a ramshackle row of real estate shops with their glass doors papered in ads stand facing the square in front of the station. In their place stood more imposing new buildings. On the opposite side of the street there had been a tailor shop where I once had something sewn, but I could find no store window that looked even vaguely like that now. The seamstress there had been wonderfully skillful, and I suddenly recalled the light green wool dress she had designed and made for me. I was wearing that brand-new dress the first time Oda Jinjirō and I went to visit the author Satomi Ton. Now the sun was beating down—a distinct change from the drizzly damp of the rainy season. As soon as I started walking, I began to sweat profusely. I had walked along this road forty-nine years before, with Fumiko’s detailed hand-drawn map in one hand, checking each address I passed. I could hardly believe this was the same road on which I had commuted so often from the Shimoda lodging to the publishers, peddling manuscripts of teen fiction, receiving commissions, and coming back. Now, I couldn’t even find the location of the ill-starred Yamazaki Tomie’s beauty parlor. Finally, I found myself in front of an old drugstore, and my feet slowed. The shop exterior had completely changed, but the name on the sign set off a ripple in my memory. A woman who looked to be the owner came out, and standing in front of her I asked, “This will sound strange, but was this shop here fifty years ago?” Eyeing my nun’s robes, the woman smiled and nodded. “It was. I came here as a bride, but yes—the shop has been here since before the war.”

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“I see. I used to live nearby a long time ago, and I often came here for cold medicine or eye drops. Brings back memories! Things have really changed around here, though . . .” The woman nodded. She stood next to me as we looked up at the tall buildings and the clear sky that had opened between the rains. The little grocery store where I shopped was gone. So was the fish store that had been next door to it. However, right in the place where I believed it should be, hung a sign for a sushi restaurant. The place I knew had a narrow entryway, and a long narrow counter where no more than ten people could squeeze in. The owner was a good-looking man with two young apprentices learning the trade. In the evening, shop owners from the neighborhood would crowd in at the counter to drink sake and eat sushi. They would entertain themselves by badmouthing their neighbors and colleagues, dropping rumors without a shred of truth into their sake and snacks. Those listening pretty much knew it was all lies, but the back-and-forth could get pretty raucous. They were regular customers naturally, and looking at those barstools now made me strangely nostalgic. The grocer, the fishmonger, the shoemaker—they were all heavy drinkers. And they all knew me as I had hurried down this street every day. Even though my spending was meager, I was their customer. They knew I was a writer of stories for children and did not seem to think it particularly odd. Because of the fame of Dazai, they knew all about novelists. The topic of Dazai often arose between the sushi master and his customers. “You know, the real object of Dazai’s intentions was that young lady Momo-chan from the bar back there.” “Yes, but he could never make it with a conceited girl like Momo-chan.” “Momo-chan rejected him, and that’s when Tomie got her claws into him.” “You mean, he got his claws into Tomie.”

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“She was crazy about him. She worked hard, saved her money. And finally, she put her business in hock to the bank. Thanks to him, she lost it all,” the sushi master had said. Back then, the sushi place had specialized in roast eel. On the night of the double suicide, Tomie had come in to the restaurant and ordered five servings of eel liver. “Not so cheap—buying that much courage!” she was teased. To which Tomie replied cheerfully, “Doesn’t matter! Tonight we need all the courage we can get.” She had made them laugh when she said the money for the eel livers was intended as a funeral offering. One evening, I noticed a young man who was not a regular nursing a cup filled to the brim with some kind of deep pink liquor, and I asked the bartender what he was drinking. “It’s called umewari. Want some?” I didn’t know that the clear red plum color of the drink masked the odor of the shōchu it contained, and fooled by its lack of taste, I quickly downed two cups of it. The next thing I knew, I was stretched out on the ground in front of the hedge of somebody’s house. The stars were twinkling in the sky above. I had no idea how I got there from the sushi place. I didn’t know that drinking shōchu could make you too drunk to stand up. That incident had taken place somewhere around here. I looked around for three compact little houses lined up behind a hedge, only to see that they had become Western-style office buildings. I turned around once more, looking for a trace of the Igarashi Ramen House, but there were so many new shops I really had no idea, and gave up. Ohmatsu Fumiko had long since moved away. We had somehow lost touch along the way. I think she may have resisted spending time with me, even though I finally did become the novelist she had predicted. And I was pressed by my life, and too busy, or just didn’t have the means to look into her whereabouts.

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I was told that she never showed up in the class notes, but somewhere or other I also heard that she was widowed and had been seen driving a car, looking very stylish in her Western clothes. The road that ran in front of the Shimoda house was still recognizable as the quiet side road it had been ten or so years earlier. Though I thought they were all gone, one Zelkova tree remained at the side of the road, its broad branches stretching to support the blue sky. I looked for Sachiko’s fancy little bakery, but couldn’t find that either. I asked at the nearby barbershop if anyone knew what happened to Shimoda Sachiko’s shop, and the barber, about the age of my own child, came out and said, “You’re looking for Satchan? She lives right over there.” He pointed. “I was just a child at the time, but I know you,” he laughed. “My mother used to talk about you.” I turned back toward the house he had indicated just as a man wearing long trunks emerged. He saw me and stopped. It was Sachiko’s older brother, the one who had accompanied her to that television program. He led me to her house, which I hadn’t recognized because four cigarette vending machines were now lined up in front of it. In a low voice, he explained that since a supermarket had come to the neighborhood, the bakery was no longer a viable business. Sachiko came running out, squealing in her familiar high-pitched voice, clutching a small child to her chest. I assumed this must be a grandchild, but when she rubbed its head, I saw it was a puppet. “I’m learning Nankindama sudare, the performance art. I’m already a pro with the bamboo sticks, but it’s a lot harder to do with the puppet.” She demonstrated her skill by manipulating the doll and speaking in the changed voice of a ventriloquist. Sachiko had lost her husband and was now living by herself in that too-large house. After reminiscing with her about Shun, I took my leave. The detached room where I had lived, as well as the building that had housed the rice store, was gone without a trace. Still wiping off my sweat, I now stood in front of

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the Zenrinji temple. During the days when I wrote novels with no hope of selling them, I used to come by myself to kill time at this temple. At the edge of the road leading up to the massive main gate, there used to be a stone carver, busy every day engraving gravestones. He was gone now, and the area in front of the temple was almost unrecognizable behind the new buildings and parking lots on both sides. The great wooden gate had been replaced with one of stone, and the main hall and temple offices within had been rebuilt with cement and rebar. Large funeral halls now occupied both sides of the wide expanse of grounds in front. That day two funerals were taking place simultaneously. A quiet graveyard used to lie just behind the temple buildings, where I could go to sit and forget the time. When I looked for the grave of Dazai Osamu, which I vaguely recalled, I found it overflowing with flowers, cherries, and sake bottles. Then I remembered that Cherry Remembrance Day, the official anniversary of his death, had come just three days earlier. Ranks of new wooden staves stamped with peoples’ names had been left in commemoration. There used to be just one gravestone for Dazai at this site, but now, off to the side, were stones for his wife Michiko and his son Masaki, who had died young. Yamazaki Tomie, his suicide partner, had written that she wanted to be buried with him, but apparently her wishes were not heeded. The three stones indicated that Dazai had died at age forty, his wife Michiko at eighty-five, and their son Masaki, when he was fifteen. It was hard to escape the conclusion, pitiful and yet bracing at the same time, that all the activity of our lives, from birth on, inevitably leads to the same place. Just to the right of Dazai’s grave was the imposing gravestone of the novelist Mori Ōgai. It used to be said that Dazai’s lifelong dream was to be buried in front of Ōgai. In my Kyoto days, I had sent fan letters to Mishima Yukio, and we struck up a correspondence. When I left the Shimoda house, I wrote him a letter about the graves of Ōgai and Dazai.

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“I can’t stand Dazai,” he wrote back, “so I turn my butt to him when I go to present flowers at the grave of Ōgai.” That was about the time Mishima was writing his novel Forbidden Colors. I stood between the two graves and recited a sutra. As I intoned it, the faces of Dazai’s orphaned daughters Tsushima Yūko and Ohta Haruko floated into my mind. Both had become writers, and both had been my close friends. Fifty years earlier, when I would come on walks to this graveyard nearly every day, how could I have ever dreamed that I would come to know Dazai’s literary orphans in the days to come? Before I knew it, the clouds had gathered again, and I was enveloped in a misty June rain.

8

Tōnosawa

SOMETHING HAPPENED WHILE I WAS LIVING in the detached room at the Shimoda house in Mitaka Shimorenjaku. Every so often Oda Jinjirō and I would get together for drinks at a cheap bar on the outskirts of the city. Those occasions were hardly as glamorous as secret dates—they were just times we shared together. The reason I didn’t refuse the invitations is that they made me feel peaceful and at ease. “I suppose I will just go on writing children’s stories and teenage fiction,” I sighed. “Is that because you have no talent?” he asked sharply. “It’s just that it’s so painful, writing a real novel . . .” I replied slowly. So earnest was my word “painful” that our eyes met, sake cups still in hand, and he fixed me with a sad gaze that did not seem at all drunk. “That’s too pitiful, really . . .” he said gravely.

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And from those scraps of conversation I began to think that I was loved. Though he would unexpectedly show up at my rented lodgings, there was no particular conversation I could point to— indeed, I came to feel serene and satisfied with countless wordless conversations during the time I spent with this most taciturn of men. And then one day, while helping himself to a drink, and staring at his sake cup, he said in a low voice, almost as if talking to himself, “Let’s go on a trip.” And right away I answered, “Yes, let’s!” I wondered why we hadn’t thought of it before. Right then and there we decided when we would go. He fixed a time to meet at Shinagawa station. That station was on his way to Tokyo from his home in Shōnan. His usual route when he came to see me was to ride the Yamanote line to Shinjuku, where he would change to the Chūō line for Mitaka. So, we would meet at Shinagawa station. We hadn’t decided where we would go from there. On the appointed day, just as I was about to leave, a policeman from the Mitaka substation dropped in. He used to come by occasionally to rehash the local gossip at Shimoda Shun’s store. For some unfathomable reason, he had decided to come to the verandah outside my room on this day, where, drinking the tea he had asked Shun to bring, he proceeded to ask how things were going for me. It should have been obvious that I was getting ready to go out, but he just sat there asking nosy questions about the publishers I was using and the sorts of things I was writing. Annoyed, I brought out three or four issues of the children’s magazines I had contributed to. “If this is some kind of survey you’re doing, would you mind if we did it some other time, please? I’m going to be late.” Maybe he took offense at my impatient tone. In any case, he dug in his heels and continued to ask about all kinds of unrelated things.

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“You’re really a strong drinker, I hear,” he said with a strange grin. “That’s not true,” I answered. “That’s your reputation at the bars in front of the station . . .” “Good heavens,” I replied. Right then Shun came in with a bowl of candy. Being nervous around the police herself, she was taken aback at the frankly annoyed expression on my face. She took it upon herself to try to mollify him. And so my margin of time dribbled away. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and grabbing my small duffel bag, I stood up to go. “Excuse me, but I really must leave or I’ll miss my train to Nagoya. I’m going there for research.” Saying goodbye only to Shun, I passed in front of the policeman and dashed out onto the road. I had lost half an hour in this stupid encounter and flew down to Mitaka station at a speed that caused heads to turn. There was no way I was going to make our rendezvous. To make matters worse, the train I grabbed stopped just before Higashi Nakano because of mechanical problems, causing me to lose all hope of getting to Shinagawa in time. My hair must have stood on end in frustration as my mind went completely blank. I was sure that no man, no matter how much free time he had, would ever wait over an hour for a woman who didn’t show up at the agreed-upon time for what would be their first tryst. I almost decided to turn around and go home, but then I determined that no matter what, I would get to our meeting place and see it through to the hopeless end. Finally I arrived at Shinagawa station, and to soothe my own desperate feelings as much as anything, I descended the stairs to where we were to meet. There I saw, in the milling crowd, standing next to the wall at the bottom of the stairs, the lean figure of a man in a black overcoat. More out of astonishment

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than joy, I ran up to him without apology or excuse and simply said, “You’re still here!” “You said you’d come, didn’t you?” The man unwound the white wool scarf from under the collar of his black overcoat. Perhaps he’d had a haircut? Whatever it was, he looked strangely gallant and refreshed compared to the man I was used to. We leaned against the wall and discussed what to do next. “Where shall we go?” “Where would be good?” I recalled a poster I had seen on the train in Higashi Nakano when I was feeling so hopeless.“How about Tōnosawa?” “Fine. Let’s go there.” Walking together side by side, looking like a long-­married couple, we climbed back up the stairs and took the Tōkaidō Line to Odawara, and from there got on the Hakone Tōzan line. It was toward the end of November. Riders were few, and the train car was frigid. Finally I told him about the police officer and the reason I was late. “I figured it was something like that,” he said. “You didn’t think I might not come?” “You said you’d come,” he repeated in a lilting voice, exactly what he’d said at Shinagawa. When we got off the train at Tōnosawa, a bone-chilling wind was blowing. The man took off his wool scarf and tried to wrap it around my neck. “Oh, please—I’m fine. Really, it looks so good on you— when I saw you underneath the stairs, it just about took my breath away it was so stylish.” I stood on tiptoe and returned the scarf to the man’s long neck. We followed a path down the hillside that turned into gently graded stone steps leading to the area where the inns were located. By making our way over to the sound of a stream running down the slope, we crossed a bridge and found several large old inns with hot springs along both sides of the road.

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Powerful lords had been among the people frequenting those inns long ago. Looking back wistfully, we recrossed the bridge and stopped in front of several cheap inns crowded together. I already knew that he never had any money on him. As an overforty novelist who continued to write even though his work didn’t sell, he was still praised, somewhat cynically, as being avant-garde. The crowd at The Litterateur all knew the story of how he had fallen in love and married a talented journalist whom he had met while working for a newspaper. She had ended up doing piecework at home to take care of their household expenses. We entered the inn closest to the bridge. In truth, it was closer to a roadside tavern than a hot springs inn. We called out in the foyer but there was no answer. Finally an aging woman with a sour expression came out and knelt to acknowledge us. He took off his shoes and stepped up first. I flinched when I saw his shoes. They were black and polished to a high sheen, but the leather was so creased and cracked they looked ready to fall apart if they were ever handled roughly. Up until then I had never looked down at his feet. Had I known, I could have bought him shoes, I thought, vexed. I slipped out of my brown high heels and lined them up next to his. I was mortified thinking how the proprietress would later rearrange our footwear. But as we climbed the stairs, a laugh suddenly bubbled up at the thought of the contrast of his elegant scarf with his cracked shoes. Our shabby room was six tatami mats in size, the mats brown with age. An alcove in name only contained a rather vulgar ceramic figure of Hōtei, god of happiness. The woman who had met us below brought up tea and the guest register, taking the opportunity to pull a couple of yukata and hanten jackets out of the closet. As soon as she left, he took off his overcoat and suit jacket and dropped them on the floor. I was about to pick them up and put them on a hanger when he spoke in a perfectly normal tone of voice.

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“Don’t look at the jacket lining.” But I had seen it just a second before he spoke. Both the overcoat and suit jacket were worse for wear but made of cashmere and a heavy wool. The silk lining of his almost black suit jacket was worn to shreds. Remembering the shoes I had just seen, I lowered my eyes at the sight of something I wasn’t supposed to see. Wordlessly, I hung the two items on wall hooks as he went on to explain. “The lining looks like strands of seaweed. These are hand-me-downs from my older brother. He was always style conscious—everything he wore had to be imported.” As I changed my clothes behind his back, my heart sank. I thought about what I’d heard about his wife—that she took in sewing, but didn’t have the time to mend the lining of her husband’s suit jacket. Trying to mask what I was thinking, I put on a cheerful voice. “Your older brother was handsome too?” “He certainly thought so. He became a doctor and took over our father’s hospital. In three years he was dead.” All of a sudden, he became uncharacteristically talkative. Up until now he had never spoken one word about his family or home life. I smiled. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “It’s just that here we are, the first time, and coming to a place like this. It’s not very romantic talk.” “I’m shy,” he answered. My heart quivered at the sweet expression on his face as he smiled, biting his lip. The inn’s hot-springs bathing area, the largest room and pride of the place, was reached by going down a long set of stone steps. The tub was filled to overflowing with hot water. His lean naked body looked undependable, and his long hands and feet stood out. Pretending not to look, I nevertheless took in

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his entire naked body at a glance. I was amazed by the unruly profusion of pubic hair on such a scrawny weak body. Immersed to my neck in the water, in a corner of the tub farthest from him, I turned around when he spoke quietly. “Hey, listen.” From the window of the bathing room came the gurgling of the Tanigawa River. It must have been the mountain stream we saw underneath the Tama no Obashi Bridge. Here was that same stream, running just outside the bathhouse of this inn. “I wonder if there are fireflies in the summer?” I mused. “Maybe peepers sing,” he ventured. “I heard them in Kyoto at Kiyotaki. There were lots of fireflies, too,” I said. “I wonder if there are still fireflies at Kibune?” He had recently had a novel published in The Litterateur. Oddly enough, it was not an avant-garde piece but was written in the form of a soliloquy by the eleventh-century court lady Izumi Shikibu. If his name had not accompanied it, one would never have guessed it was written by Oda Jinjirō. “I went specifically in the season to see fireflies, but only saw two or three light up.” As his words broke off, the sound of the river seemed to get louder and closer. This was the first time we were naked together. The wordless peaceful silence made me feel the warmth of the water penetrating my very core. I understood that behind his closed eyelids, the man was also thinking of the poem by Izumi Shikibu— Mono omoeba sawa no hotaru mo waga mi yori Akugare izuru tama ka to zo miru When I am troubled, a firefly glowing in the swamp could be my soul, which has wandered off, overcome by longing

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“So, tomorrow, how about we go someplace even farther?” I suggested. “I don’t have any money,” the man whispered in the same light tone he might have used to declare he had no handkerchief. “Money isn’t a problem. I’ve brought everything I have.” “Ha! Really? Quite extravagant, aren’t you.” “Oh yes—totally extravagant.” I had raised my voice and stood up splashing noisily. That evening, over a decidedly unappetizing tray of fish snacks, the man drank sake as usual. And as the orders continued and his mood rose, so did the politeness of the old lady who was serving us. “My goodness, you are really a strong drinker!” “Yeah, I drink like a fish.” “And so is your wife!” Although she clearly didn’t believe we were married when we checked in, now she went out of her way to use the word “wife.” As we hugged one another in the bedding, the man whispered in a hoarse voice, “Sorry—I drank too much. This is the first time I’ve done something like this.” “That’s okay,” I whispered back. “We’ve been having fun.” “No, it’s not okay.” “Ha ha—we should have done it in the bath,” I joked. “Don’t be ridiculous.” When I was washing his skinny back in the bath, he had suddenly turned around and tried to embrace me. But with the bright late afternoon light shining into the bathhouse, I had quickly jumped into the deep part of the tub. Now, holding his limp member in one hand, it seems I fell asleep. I awoke as if I had heard something in a dream—

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“Will you die with me?” Lying beside me, he was murmuring into his pillow. “I’m sick of it. Sick of everything.” When I heard it, the feeling came to me that I had come all this distance just to hear him say this. And I wondered if the despair I had felt when I was so late had come from the fear of losing forever the chance he would say this to me. “I understand,” was all I said. “I’ve wanted to die for a long time,” he continued. “Okay,” I laughed. And now he raised his head from the pillow. The light was off and the room pitch black. The sound of the mountain stream made its way into the room. “What’s so funny?” “Well, why don’t you ask your wife to join you?” “I feel sorry for her. She works so hard.” “And don’t you feel sorry for me?” I could tell even in the dark that he was laughing quietly. I turned my body toward him and laid my head on his outstretched arm. All the strength left my body. I had no idea that to fall asleep in the embrace of a man could bring such a complete feeling of being at peace. I felt as if I had suddenly reverted to being a small child. Everything began from that day in Tōnosawa. The next day we did not go to a further place, nor did we commit suicide. Together we went back to Mitaka, but this time on the Odakyū Line. “Either way is fine, but why the Odakyū Line?” I asked. “I don’t want to go past Fujisawa.” From that I saw the extent of his restraint concerning his wife, the way he clung to a guilty component in all his actions. All the way back on the train I labored in confusion over how I could prevent this man from dying. I never imagined that from that day forward the two of us would be intertwined for over ten years. Among all the men weakened by bad luck,

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humiliation, and despair, he might not have been the brightest of lights, but day by day I felt ever more strongly that I couldn’t let this man die. And at some point while spending time with me, he quietly began to smile again. This summer, it was especially hot. With the temperature hovering in the 90s throughout July, I traced that long-ago trip along the same route from Shinagawa station. Back then I was twenty-­ nine, Oda Jinjirō twelve years my senior. Forty-nine years have gone by, and Shinagawa station has changed beyond recognition. I couldn’t find the dark passageway beneath the stairs where he had slouched for over an hour waiting for me. The Tōkaidō Line now resembled the bullet train. Yet when I got off at Odawara, the old Tōzan line was running just as it always had. This time, though, almost all the seats were occupied. We had taken our trip at the very end of autumn when everything was cold and sere outside the train window. Now, in the heat of July, the clumps of hydrangea that came brushing against the window were faded and ugly, suffering in the cruel heat. Even so the lush green light came pouring in through the window, broken now and then by the pure white flash of a mountain lily nodding in the breeze. Young couples on the train embraced openly, without a hint of shyness, as if their expressions of love were occurring in a private room. A pair of little boys went dashing about screaming while their mother and grandmother did nothing to stop or scold them. Maybe it was just a feeling, but it seemed to me that the train ran faster than it used to. I tried to summon up the shadow of Oda Jinjirō, but it didn’t work. He had been dead for twenty-one years. And it had been forty-one years since we parted ways. Such a broad expanse of time was overwhelming to contemplate. I noticed that every time the dark mouth of a tunnel appeared, I felt a queer, heartrending sensation. Even though the tunnels weren’t that long, you couldn’t see the light at the other

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end when you entered, so the darkness seemed like being thrust inside the mouth of a huge beast. It reminded me of how a coffin is sucked into the mouth of a crematorium. And like a dream inside a dream came the memory of his arm reaching out when we were in the tunnel, quickly pinching my nipple. When the Tōzan line let me out at Tōnosawa, I looked down to the right at the Tanigawa River below and followed the now-paved mountain path that edged the peak, circling downward. Several groups of people were ambling down the same path. From behind me came a woman’s voice. “Well, in fact, it is a lot cooler here.” A little farther on, the path suddenly turned from pavement into stone steps. A row of souvenir stands lined the higher side of the path on the right. They were all closed, and I didn’t see anyone stirring. On the left, I began to catch sight of the highway, and the tiled roofs of the houses in the town. The traffic on the highway was thick, and it was difficult to cross. Finally I made it to the houses and walked slowly, house by house, to see if I could awaken any old memories. I carried a white parasol for protection from the sun but still had to wipe the sweat from my face and head. It was dusty and noisy, hardly the atmosphere of a hot springs town. The front gate of every establishment was dark, as they had all gone out of business. Poking around, I eventually picked up the gurgling sound of the river. But only when I came upon the Tama no Obashi Bridge did that late autumn day a half century ago resurface. I crossed the bridge and walked down the street where the large old inns from yesteryear still stood. I remembered how, feeling oppressed by the grandeur of those buildings, we had turned back across the bridge. Even then, the inn where we had stayed was third rate, so I couldn’t imagine that it would still be in business. It was hard to tell from in front, but from the middle of the bridge, as I looked at the places up ahead that were now

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closed, I thought I could see the heavy tile roofs from long ago. There were wooden walls in front of the first house that mostly hid it from view, but below the entrance foyer on the ground floor was a set of stairs leading down another level. Something shouted out from memory—there was the window of the bathhouse! The more I looked, the more I was convinced that this was the place. Had it still been in business as an inn, I would have liked more than anything to see the bath chamber in that faded house—would it have been large, with high ceilings? I would have even stayed a night just to listen to the soft murmur of the mountain stream, and to recall the past through the entire night. Looking at the house once again, I saw there was no doorplate to identify it. The one next door was in the same state, without any sign that someone lived there. The cheap ceramic god of happiness in the room where I had been invited to be part of a double suicide suddenly floated distinctly before my eyes. So did the man’s suit jacket with the shredded lining, hanging on the hook on the wall, and the cashmere British overcoat, reduced from its original glory. Oda Jinjirō lived on for another twenty-eight years. Then, with cancer of the tongue, he accomplished the gruesome death that he no doubt had chosen for himself. When I think of the way he died, I become depressed, ruminating on how happy the remaining years of his life could have been. I suppose that my youth and ability to find a seed of laughter in even the most seriously depressing talk or atmosphere created a safety net for him back then. But whether it turned out to be a blessing or a curse for him later in life, when he had determined to erase all traces of his existence, I don’t know. When he learned he had cancer, he told no one in his family. Then he threw away or burned every bit of writing that might remain as evidence of his life as a novelist. I will never forget the agitation and regret I felt when I found out.

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It was a fine morning in May when I was notified that he had died the previous day. His daughter called, and I heard the coldness echoing in her robotic telephone voice. “Anyway, we thought it best that you should know,” she said. Of course, it was not my place to ask anything about the details of his last moments. When she hung up, I fell to the ta­ tami mat and wailed. Before long I was leaning on the railing of the Tama no Obashi Bridge again. When I was sure that the window had to belong to the room we had shared a bath in, the building suddenly came to life. But the old woman who had sneered at his shoes as she rearranged them at the entryway, who had flattered us with her smiles as she lugged bottle after bottle of sake up to our room, could not possibly be still alive. The ones who were embarrassed by indiscretion, or secretly wishing to die, or hanging on as a witness to a rueful memory are all gone. If that woman were still alive, she’d be past ninety and would hardly remember a couple who had stayed at her place for just one night. When I want to castigate myself for being the only one still here after all this time, a sudden prickle of tears wells up from deep in my breast. The tears that had gathered under the shade of my white parasol now dried in the hot air. I had come on an early morning bullet train from Kyoto, so the sun was still high in the sky, beating down with increasing intensity. By the time I got on the train from Tōnosawa to go to a hot springs inn in Atami, I could have wrung the perspiration from my undergarments. After a bath, washed and refreshed with a change of clothes, I walked out from the inn. Whenever I stayed in Atami, I went to the same café for lunch. It was a tiny place, run by a quiet couple, that only seated about seven people. The menu consisted of items that had been chosen by the husband. From

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its beginning, the café served the kind of Western dishes that had been popular in the early part of the century. There would also be jazz records like Eric Dolphy playing in the background. When I entered, there was no special welcome greeting, no “ha­ven’t seen you in a while,” but instead, as if I had been there just yesterday, I was simply handed a hot towel. Then, before I could even order, I was given a large cup of cracked ice with water. The water in this area is so delicious it makes you want to return just to drink it. A middle-aged man came in and headed to a seat in the corner. It was likely his regular place, I guessed. He quickly downed two glasses of water and spread open a sports journal, which he read as he waited for his food. As I slowly sipped spoonfuls of cold squash soup, I stole glances at the man, who continued to read his paper while shoveling beef and rice into his mouth. There had been a time when, sitting across from Oda Jinjirō, I would get choked up wondering in what cheap café Ryōta might then be sitting all alone, eating who knows what. At such times, behind my eyelids, the wretched figure of Ryōta would appear, layered over the figure of the man who sat in front of me. I recently heard that over thirty thousand men had committed suicide since the previous year, on account of companies downsizing in the recession—most of them by hanging, and most in their fifties. Ryōta had been given a diagnosis of cancer, so it was that on top of his business failure that pushed him over the edge. But I hadn’t lent him a hand when he was despondent, and the news of his death had come without warning. A plate was put in front of me with all my favorite dishes. The wife of the proprietor said mildly, “You’re here on a project? In such hot weather!” “Just gathering some material in Tōnosawa,” I replied. “That area hasn’t changed much at all, has it?” she remarked.

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“Really? But all those inns used to be quite flourishing,” I said. “Well, that’s because places not set up to serve large groups have had a hard time.” Just then two women came in the door. This café is located near the entrance to the geisha district, so it has always had customers from that world. And since all of them praised the taste of the Western-style dishes, the restaurant enjoyed a certain popularity. One of the women was large and of dark complexion, with fat arms protruding from a sleeveless shift. She wore sandals and carried a baby in one arm. She was followed by a younger woman, a daughter maybe, not terribly refined. The first impression of the middle-aged woman was that she was ugly, but if you imagined a geisha’s white makeup over that shiny dark face, she would have made a striking figure of a woman. She had shaved her eyebrows, and her skin, without a trace of makeup, was coarse. Her fleshy lips were almost indecent, but with skillfully applied lipstick one could imagine that they would be extremely attractive sensually. The baby was wearing a cap pulled down over its face and several layers of clothing despite the heat. The woman repeatedly whispered to it as she cuddled it in her arms, letting me see, on her left wrist, a black scar that looked like a rubber band. It wouldn’t have been surprising if she also had the word “Destiny” tattooed on her inner thigh—her entire body reeked of that kind of intensity. “He is shy around people,” she said. “Usually he talks a lot, though.” It didn’t look to me like a child old enough to talk. Seeing my puzzled expression, the woman raised her penciled eyebrow and snickered. As she laughed, she rubbed the child’s forehead. “That feels goooood,” came a little boy’s voice. I almost dropped my spoon.

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Her face crinkled in delight as she exclaimed, “It’s a puppet!” I was speechless. Just the previous month, in Mitaka, I had seen Shimoda Sachiko’s ventriloquist’s dummy and mistaken it for a child. And just three days ago I had received a phone call from Sachiko. “How are you?” she burbled. “I’m just back from Okinawa. Sent you a present. Little Okinawa lion dog—so cute. It was really fun! There was a big party before the summit . . .” “Did your puppet go too?” I asked her. “Yes it did! I know you probably thought I was crazy to spend over 200,000 yen on that puppet. Yes, I could tell by the expression on your face! But you know, when I got married, it wasn’t a very happy time for me. He seemed like a nice regular guy, but his health was not so good, and he drank a lot. And when he was drunk he’d hit me, and the kids hated him, and so when he died young, it was too bad and all that, but I was glad. When I was on my own, I could do what I liked and be happy. A puppet won’t betray you. Okay, so it’s a little lonely. I take him on comfort visits to the old peoples’ homes—everybody is lonely! Human beings are lonely—that’s just the way it is . . .” Sachiko’s cheerful banter had gone on and on. At one point, the woman holding the puppet in front of me removed its cap and clothes and started to explain the structure and workings of the doll. What emerged was a stuffed toy that looked like a little monkey with a silly expression on its face. “He comes from a little star inside a person’s heart,” is how she explained it. Talking dolls and realistic toy dogs and cats are very popular now. Battery operated, they can record a repertoire of more than a hundred phrases, and can interact with people. The woman planted a big kiss on the puppet’s forehead, upon which the doll entreated, “I’m so embarrassed . . . Do it again!”

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“Is it lovable?” I asked. “I’ve had it about a year now, and I’ve grown quite attached to it,” the woman said. Using her right hand, she rubbed the scar on the wrist of the hand holding the doll. I imagined that sweating would make it itch. “A puppet won’t betray you . . .” Sachiko’s voice echoed inside my ear.

9

Nishi Ogikubo

I GOT OFF THE TRAIN AT Nishi Ogikubo station for the first time sixty years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1940. I was seventeen. It was the fifteenth year of the reign of the Showa emperor, also the 2,600th year since the Imperial Line was founded, and celebration was in the air. These were the war years, and I suppose the army and government were anxious to emphasize Japan’s origins and fan a spirit of nationalism. By chance, I had come to Tokyo just after the 20th of December to attend a cram school called Shōeijuku in Dōgenzaka, Shibuya. My high school math teacher had advised me that unless I went there to prepare it would be very hard to get into Tokyo Women’s College. Students from all over Japan attended this cram school. I shared one six-tatami-mat room with three other girls, from Aomori, Okayama, and Kamakura. Three days hadn’t gone by before I despaired at my lack of knowledge. I was lost during the teacher’s lectures about English and on math. I scored close to zero on the frequent tests. I felt oppressed by the confidence and 131

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scholarly ability of my roommates. Secretly, I thought about escaping and running home. I spent the end of the year foregoing most of the Christmas and New Year celebrations to study like crazy. But, together with my roommates, I did leave the dormitory on New Year’s Eve to pay a visit to the Meiji Shrine. The shrine was unbelievably crowded, so we held hands, trying our best not to get separated. In that tightly packed throng, we had barely finished bowing our heads and clapping when the human wave dashed us out again. After that, I went by myself to visit Tokyo Women’s College. Since I was planning to leave the cram school the next day in any case, I thought I would at least go take a look at the school. The reason I had chosen this college in the first place was a poster I had seen hanging in the hallway at my girls’ high school. It was a stylish black-and-white photograph of the college chapel, and the more I looked at it, the more romantic it seemed. I had first been drawn to the beauty of the picture, but when I realized it was actually an announcement for applications to the college, I decided then and there I would apply. Back in Tokushima, if one said “women’s college” you immediately thought of Japan Women’s University. So without knowing anything about the history, the founder, or the head of the school, I sent away for an application. Just before noon on New Year’s Day, I got off the train at Nishi Ogikubo station, comforted that it was as plain and old-fashioned as a train station in the countryside of Tokushima. Since coming to Tokyo I had become tense and conflicted, but here I could relax. From the station, I could have taken a bus to the college, but told it was only a fifteen-minute walk, I turned left at the road in front of the station plaza and started out. The shops and buildings on either side leaned inelegantly close to one another with the old-time look of the streets at home. The feeling I was strolling through a town like my hometown soothed my heart.

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The street wound around to a crossroads where, to the right, the fence around the college grounds came into view. The entrance gate was immediately to the left. There, the white chapel I had seen in the poster floated as if in a dream. Small windows—countless squares and diamonds filled with stained glass—reflected the weak winter sunlight. There was no sign of anyone at the guard booth, and the sturdy wrought-iron openwork gate seemed to invite me in. In the front garden an orderly array of knee-high pine trees clipped in geometrical fashion surrounded a small pond. Although it was a Western garden, it was a restful sight because nothing obstructed the view all the way to the main buildings. Walking by myself around the campus, with not a coed in sight, I determined to get into this college no matter what it took. Somehow I managed to pass my exams, and so, starting in April, I became a boarder at Tokyo Women’s College. Three and a half years later—the intended four-year matriculation had been cut short because of the war—I graduated in September. The president of the school, Miss Yasui Tetsu, followed educational principles based on the liberal tradition of the school’s Christian founder, Nitobe Inazō. Although in the world outside the college there were strict regulations that encroached on individual freedom, no one dictated people’s appearance on campus, and we wore colorful long-sleeved kimonos or wrapped ourselves in Western dresses as we pleased. This liberal education for women, established through donations from American Christians, must have been an irritant to the military government, which sought to apply all sorts of pressure on the school and the principal. But we students were blissfully unaware of any of it. I used to walk around the neighborhood of Zenpukuji freely, savoring the atmosphere of that part of town, old Musa­ shino. Crossing the tracks at the south side of the station, I would stop at the Kokeshi restaurant to treat myself to a cake,

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and then buy some sweets to take back at a branch of the Usagiya confectionary that was located on the bus route. In February of the year I was to graduate, having never once had a boyfriend, I went back home to an arranged marriage. After entering my name in my husband’s family registry, I did not attend my graduation ceremony and accompanied my new husband back to Beijing, from where he had come to fetch me. After that, eleven years flowed past. We suffered through our repatriation together, and then I left him. I wandered in Kyoto and then returned to Tokyo, where I ran into Oda Jinjirō. When I was ejected from a room on the second floor above a ramen restaurant near the Mitaka station, I found another place in Nishi Ogikubo, thanks to a broker there. During my time in Mitaka, when I supported myself by selling teenage stories and by commissions, I had commuted practically every day from Mitaka to the publishing houses in Suidōbashi without ever once getting off the train at Nishi Ogikubo. When Oda Jinjirō and I got off the train there, we stood in the wide plaza in front of the station. The neighborhood had not been firebombed during the war and seemed almost shockingly preserved. Following the map we had been given by the broker’s office, we went down a narrow alley directly facing the plaza. This lane was so narrow that two people walking side by side took up the entire space, and eventually it came in at a right angle to the street the bus followed toward Tokyo Women’s College. Tiny shops were squashed together on both sides of the street. There were bars, yakitori restaurants, fruit shops, bakeries, flower shops, hairdressers, optometrists, all jumbled together in no particular order. Even though there weren’t many customers in evidence, the street teemed with an unusual energy. The different odors emanating from the storefronts infused the breeze, enveloping my senses in a swirl of reminiscence.

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This street full of shops ended at a slightly wider road lined with private homes. On the left side we soon spotted a house with a blackened wood fence. It was the biggest house in the neighborhood. Hanging next to a rustic latticed gate was a nameplate that read Omata Kin. A neatly groomed lady greeted us at the door. I would have guessed her to be in her mid-sixties, with an oval face and straight nose, her eyes magnified behind her glasses, and a playful expression showing at the corner of her mouth. For an elderly person, she seemed quite lively. Enjoying a rather luxurious retirement, she lived by herself in this spacious house, renting out a detached room reached by a corridor. Her son lived in his own house in another part of the city, and her daughter had left home to marry. It was a lovely place to live, with a breeze wafting through the entire house. It had been cleaned and the wooden pillars polished. There was not a speck of dust on the sliding paper doors. Saying it was brighter on the verandah, Kin laid out two cushions for us there and brought out a tray of tea. From where we sat, we could see the detached room at the side of the house. We had been told that it was a six-mat room with a tokonoma alcove on one side, and it opened onto a garden on the other. The large garden had been diligently planted with flowers by Kin herself. It was the season for peonies, and two white ones had just opened in the invigorating May sunlight. Just beyond was a stand of taller red and yellow dahlias. “You love flowers, don’t you?” I remarked. “I do! Any kind of flower. They’re all beautiful,” she replied. Kin was watching Oda Jinjirō, who had been steadily gazing at the garden. Suddenly she turned to me and spoke without a hint of a smile. “I don’t like children. I don’t like taking care of grandchildren—that’s why I live here by myself. If you like, the two of you can move in. I prefer that to a regular husband and wife who would soon start having children.”

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So on the condition that we would not have children, we signed a contract that same day. Kin was fine with the idea that the contract would be in my name. When she heard that we were both writers, she said, “That room brings good luck, you know. The painter Kodama Kibō lived there when he was young. Also, the writer Kaneko Yōbun lived there during the early years of his marriage. The woman who lived there before you was somebody’s mistress, and then the man’s wife died, so she went and married him properly. Like I say, it’s a lucky room, so the two of you are sure to advance in the world.” She grinned happily. I couldn’t escape the feeling that she was more drawn to Oda Jinjirō than she was to me. I moved in right away. There was a small separate gate to the detached room, with its own mailbox just inside. As soon as I was settled, Oda Jinjirō began dividing his time between his family’s house near the ocean in Shōnan and my room here— half a month to each. On the days he didn’t come, a postcard crammed with tiny script would be delivered to the mailbox inside the garden gate. Neither of us had a telephone in those days. Behind the Omata mansion lay a quarter acre of empty land. There in that room overlooking that space, I continued to write my teen fiction. My expenses now were higher than when I was living alone, so I had to work even harder for money to live on. There were so many families named Omata in Nishi Ogikubo, they must have been a clan that settled here long ago. Walking in the street, you couldn’t avoid bumping into another Omata, noted Kin with a laugh. Our Omata house was located on a corner lot, across from a greengrocer. The couple who ran it, a beefy man and his sweet moon-faced wife, were so generous to me it was almost embarrassing. They gave me cheap prices to start with, then always stuffed extra things into my shopping bag. When I consulted with Kin as to how I might repay them, she said, “Don’t worry about it! They’re fans of yours. People were talking about you at the public bath the other day. They

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said the name Setouchi would be as famous as Yoshiya Nobuko one of these days—and the greengrocer’s wife nodded harder than anyone. Yoshiya’s novel A Husband’s Chastity was really great . . .” The bathhouse was directly across from the greengrocer. In those days it was rare to have a bath in a private home, so the public bathhouses flourished. Before long I started to address Oda Jinjirō simply as “Jin,” and he stopped adding “-san” to my name. Starting with his summer cotton yukata and obi, I would lay out his clothes. As the season changed, it would be a lined kimono and haori, and then padded jackets. In every case, Jin simply put on the clothes without comment. It was almost irritating how good he looked. Our landlady Kin became even more fond of him as the days went by, looking forward to his visits even more than I did. He was a man of few words, but he was a good listener and always attended to her in a kind manner, limiting himself to murmurs of agreement and a few interjections into the stream of her talk. “What a fashion plate that old lady is!” I said to him. “ ‘Do you think this lipstick is too red?’ Why does she ask me? She dyes her hair herself, you know, and she has fun going to the Kannon temple in Asakusa. So cheerful, so lighthearted—isn’t it wonderful? It seems she really likes you, Jin. How old do you think she is?” “She’s sixty-four.” At some point Jin had even gotten her to tell him her age. All in all, this shared cohabitation with a man who came and went was the most pleasant, comfortable living situation I had ever found. I even came to think of myself as deeply happy. As an indication of how calm and stable those days were, it was there that I wrote my first serious works, Painful Shoes and Pomegranate, which were published in The Litterateur magazine. For

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Painful Shoes I still used the pen name Mitani Harumi, but having finally published an adult novel, I started to feel that my future prospects might be looking up. Yet, as bad luck would have it, Niwa Fumio, the creator of The Litterateur, suddenly decided to cease publishing. He had borne all the costs to that point, without his writers having to contribute a dime, so Niwa had basically carried us all on his back, like dependent children. Now his announcement came as a huge shock. We didn’t know what to do. Of course none of us could complain to the founder about his decision, unilateral as it was. As this unsettling tsunami slowly receded, we formed various groups to start our own magazines. I did so with a group centered on Oda Jinjirō. We were joined by Yoshimura Akira and his wife Kitahara Setsuko from The Litterateur crowd, and by Suzuki Haruo, Yoshimura’s friend from Gakushūin University, with whom he had published the magazine Red Picture. Tagi Toshitomo, one of the editors at Shōgakkan whom I had befriended, also joined. A number of others expressed interest, but in the end those were the people who remained in the group. For our editorial meetings, we often gathered at my room at the Omata house. Seeing the crowd of people, landlady Kin wrongly presumed that it meant our fortunes were improving, and was happy for us. Soon after I had moved, I noticed a tall man standing at the entrance of Kanōya, the neighborhood pawnshop. His shoulder was draped in the mosquito netting he had evidently brought there to pawn. And who should it be but Yoshida Masanosuke, formerly the executive director of the Daisui Publishing House in Kyoto! When the company went broke, he too had come to Tokyo, to pursue his dream of becoming a sculptor. He’d changed his name to Ryūnosuke. Whatever place or circumstance he found himself in, he always looked sharp. Your eye couldn’t help but be drawn to him. He had found a room to rent in this neighborhood and was thrilled at our accidental meeting. He finished

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up his errand at the pawnshop and accompanied me back to my lodging. From that time on, Masanosuke often came around. He and Jin were kindred spirits and would often stay up talking till late at night. At first I’d had the impression that Oda Jinjirō was antisocial, since he didn’t seem to have many friends and disliked the company at The Litterateur, but I finally figured out that as long as he was interacting with people who weren’t writers, he got along fine with them. At length we decided on the format of our new magazine, and because we were starting from the ashes of another, we named it Z. For the cover, we used a photograph of one of Ryūnosuke’s sculptures, taken by Murai Osamu. Our first issue came out in March 1956. Oda wrote a piece on Sharaku; mine was a story called “The Saga of a Tibetan Queen.” We decided Z would come out quarterly, and so for the June issue I wrote a piece titled “Peony.” Around that time, Oda brought up the idea that our group ought to contend for the Shinchōsha Literary Prize. Entries for this prize were solicited from private magazines all over the country, and from the writings submitted, ten would be chosen in a preliminary round, and the winner chosen from them. Nobody in our group felt like volunteering. They all felt that Z, with only two published issues, was not a strong enough name—but somehow we finally decided to give it a try anyway. It was the height of summer. One night in late August, Jin came over as usual from his seaside home. Setting down his nightcap of sake, he abruptly broached the subject. “You should write this, you know.” The deadline was six days away. No one else in our group had done anything. Disregarding my claim that it was impossible, he hounded me like he had never done before. “Just write it . . . Go ahead, you can do it.” Utterly ignoring my hesitation, he cleaned up the eating utensils from the desk that served as our dining table, wiped the

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surface, and put down a pile of fresh manuscript paper in the middle. He arranged the pen and jar of ink, fluffed the zabuton cushion, and sat me down, pressing my shoulders down from behind. “Write about Beijing,” he said. Unaccustomed to the fierce tone in his voice, I grabbed my pen without thinking. For the next several days I was utterly absorbed in my task. Jin stayed at my place the whole time. Eating takeout food with one hand, I sent my pen flying down the page. We had no refrigerator, not even an electric fan. At some point Jin found a long narrow ice pack of the sort you would use for tonsillitis, and he stuffed it with crushed ice and wrapped it around my head. I would change my yukata frequently, but it still got sopping wet with sweat. When he noticed a breeze coming in from behind where I sat, Jin obtained a huge round lacquered fan and sat slowly fanning me from behind. At one in the morning on the day of the deadline, I finished the thirty-page manuscript. Jin had prepared a large preaddressed manila envelope, and he counted the manuscript pages piled up on the desk, made sure they were in order, and tapped them into a neat bundle, which he then tied tightly with a length of twisted string. I had fallen onto my back, and I looked up at him, breathing hard. Suddenly he grabbed both my arms and pulled me up. “That’s it,” he said, pushing me ahead of him. I staggered out into the night, almost as I if were drunk, and clutched his sleeve as we walked. There was a red postbox six or seven minutes away down the main street. The envelope was so thick the postbox had a hard time swallowing it. We pushed and shoved until we finally heard the metallic sound of something heavy landing at the bottom. At that, I sat down right there in the street. The only thing in my mind was the satisfaction of having written. I have mostly forgotten the grueling difficulty of those days, but in November, for the third issue of Z, I wrote about my

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repatriation from China in a piece called “The Tanggu Freight Warehouse.” Soon after this issue was published, I went out to the mailbox inside the garden gate and thrust my hand in to pick out the usual postcard from the house by the sea. Besides the postcard, I felt something else. It was a long white envelope with a pale green line along the bottom edge. From that, I immediately knew it was from Shinchōsha. Without even opening it, I sprang up. It had to be the notice that my story had been chosen as one of the final ten. Waving the white envelope, I ran out to the verandah where landlady Kin was dyeing her hair. “I’m in! I’m in!” I screamed. She wrinkled her nose and said in a self-satisfied way, “See—I told you this room was lucky. Now, if only something good would happen for Oda-san . . .” I hung my head in response, and had nothing to say. Among the winners listed in the table of contents were our acquaintances Tsuda Shin, Kashiyama Toshiyuki, and Natsu­bori Masamoto. They were all veterans, and it was such a thrill to be included among them. With this result I was completely satisfied, and didn’t dare hope for more. Even so, once again, an envelope with a pale green stripe arrived from Shinchōsha. It was the announcement that my entry, out of the ten, had been selected for the 1956 Independent Magazine Award. By now I could hardly deny that landlady Kin’s detached room was brimming with luck. The January 1957 issue of Shinchō magazine carried the winning submissions in the four categories of the third Shinchō Literary Competition. Besides my piece, “Qu Ailin, Coed,” were Kōda Aya’s “Flowing” in the literary essay category, “Far Wings” by Tominaga Hisato for the fiction prize, and A Dance for Two by Oyama Yūshi for the Kishida Drama prize. The judges for the Independent Magazine Award were the eminent writers Itō Sei, Ibuse Masuji, Ōoka Shōhei, Satō Haruo, Nagai Tatsuo, Nakayama Gishiyū, Takami Jun, and Mishima Yukio.

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According to the commentary, all the judges agreed that the submissions in this category were of low quality and nothing stood out. In the end, it had come down to Date Hiroshi’s “A Toast to the Young” and my “Qu Ailin, Coed.” Five of the judges—Itō Sei, Ibuse Masuji, Satō Haruo, Takami Jun, and Mishima Yukio—cast their votes for “Qu Ailin, Coed,” and that’s how I won. In the forty-four years following that event, I sat on many literary panels myself. Occasionally, all the judges find themselves in quick and complete agreement, but more often the choice is difficult, the votes are split, and then the complications set in. At times like this, a minor remark made by someone, or some little thing in the environment, can send the prize rolling in an unexpected direction. Even now, I can feel the atmosphere of those qualifying rounds and hear the comments people made. In effect, winning the prize is a matter of luck. But the vagaries of luck and the unexpected turns it takes can decide the course of a person’s life forever. In view of this, I see no reason not to believe that it was the auspicious nature of my rented room that brought me such incredible good fortune. The Independent Magazine Award went to the chairman of the magazine as well as to the author, so Oda Jinjirō accompanied me to the award ceremony. Now more than fifty years have gone by, and Nishi Ogikubo station has changed beyond belief. Perhaps not as changed as Mitaka or Kichijōji, but still there is hardly any trace of the way it was before. And even if I had wanted to feel the loneliness of a station where the express trains don’t stop, the crossing that once led to the Kokeshi restaurant was long gone. The buildings around the plaza in front of the station had doubtless changed hands numerous times, and I didn’t recognize any landmarks. I tried to find that narrow street of ours, but the fruit store of my memory and the beauty shop I went past every day were gone. The new shops blazed with garish colors unlike the

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subdued hues of old. I wandered for about twenty minutes, finally deciding it wasn’t any of the streets I had been on, and turned back midway, having run out of luck. As it happened, I ended up in front of the former home of the Islamic scholar Izutsu Toshihiko—an old friend of ours. His wife Toyoko had wanted to write novels, so Professor Izutsu placed her under Oda Jinjirō’s tutelage. She used the pen name Izutsu Maho, and he included two of her novels in Z. Izutsu was not by nature a sociable person, but he unconditionally welcomed Oda Jinjirō and myself into his home. From a literary point of view, Izutsu had praised Oda’s novel Tentacles as one of the premier examples of post-war literature. My own work “A Flower Ovary” was a good enough story, he thought, before dismissing it with a faint expression of disgust as being pornographic. To people like us, living on the fringes, his life seemed enviably rare. But now his fabulous mansion, converted into a multi-unit apartment building, was largely unrecognizable. Across the way had stood the mansion of the actress Kogure Michiyo, which still seemed intact, although it had certainly passed into other hands. That area of Nishi Ogikubo had always been home to upper-class mansions, and it remained peaceful and quiet. Walking down the street, trusting to my recollection of all the times I had walked to the Izutsu mansion, I finally found my way to the front of the Omata house. The blackened wood fence I remembered so fondly had been replaced by a new modern enclosure with a formidable gate, but the nameplate still read Omata. The corner greengrocer and public bath were gone. The building that had once stood out with the greatest prominence was the emergency clinic on the opposite corner. That too was gone. What used to be a real estate office standing in front of the garden gate on the Omata property was now a stylish little café. A pretty young woman stepped out, and asked me if I was looking for something. “Isn’t this where the Omata family used to live? I wonder—it’s changed so much!” I said.

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“Oh. Yes, it’s right over here. It’s just been rebuilt. But she’s probably there now. She just went out shopping a little while ago.” The young woman spoke with a kind expression, and rang the bell by the gate. A woman’s voice came on the intercom. I identified myself. “Oh my! Whoever would have thought . . . Wait just a second, please.” Right away a person appeared, out of breath, from the Western-style addition. A middle-aged woman with a fresh face, no makeup, opened the gate. “Whoever would have thought you’d visit us, Setouchi-­ san! I’m Masae. My mother is here, too.” In an instant, I remembered that Masae-chan was landlady Kin’s granddaughter. Kin’s oldest daughter Saiko had gotten married, and this was her daughter. The rising inflection of Saiko’s voice calling Masae echoed faintly in my ear. “This is the spot where the garden gate to the detached room was,” said Masae. I turned to look where she pointed. The profusion of flowers that landlady Kin had so diligently planted was but a phantom now. Only a row of trees stood next to the fence, separating this house from the one next door. When I entered the elegant Western-style foyer, the scent of fresh wood pricked my nose as soon as I stepped in. “Really, this was just finished. Today we started moving the furniture from the old place. So it’s kind of a mess at the moment. But if you don’t mind, please come in.” As a child, Masae was a wise-eyed, adorable little girl with bobbed hair. When she was in second or third grade, her father, Saiko’s husband Ishida, was diagnosed with liver cancer, and within two weeks of being hospitalized he was dead. I recalled that Masae had an older brother who was the spitting image of their father.

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The room was pervaded with the fragrance of fresh wood and new tatami mats. A handsome Buddha altar made of ebony had been placed next to a newly built tokonoma alcove. On the lintel above perched a smiling black-and-white photograph of landlady Kin. That was the Kin I remembered from my time there—fashionable, sunny, good-natured. “Ah—it’s like a dream,” I heard someone exclaim. Saikosan appeared on the verandah. Even in this fierce heat, she was wearing a proper summer hemp kimono, tied with a half-width obi in a neat clamshell knot. It did not seem like she had rushed to change her clothes. Not a drop of sweat could be seen on her cool face. She was barely transformed from the Saiko I once knew, and I simply had to ask her age. “I’m older than my mother was when she died.” “Unbelievable!” I almost exclaimed, gazing at how young she looked. Of large build, always standing straight, Saiko was the epitome of an old-fashioned, awe-inspiring madam. Yet I remembered clearly her tear-stained face and sobbing voice after her husband’s sudden death. “That picture of Grandma up there really is just like the person I remember,” I said. “She was in her mid-sixties when you lived here, Setouchi-san. And she was eighty-three when she died. But she looked just like this, unchanged, right up till the end.” Saiko straightened up on the cushion where she sat. “Even so, by the strangest of coincidences, today is actually the anniversary of her death.” “Is that so? Then it seems she must have invited me here.” I looked up at Kin’s photograph and felt a warm feeling in my chest. “Please allow me to pay my respects,” I added. I lit a stick of incense and placed it on the spotless altar next to a bouquet of freshly cut flowers and a votive light. The

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mother and daughter sat straight and silent as I intoned a sutra. Come to think of it, I had never come to pay a visit in my Buddhist robes after I first took orders, I realized with some regret. Kin had died in 1969 at the age of eighty-three. Her posthumous name is Seishoin Jakuchōshitsu Daishi. She had been hospitalized for just ten days, Saiko related, and her passing was as easy as a leaf falling from a tree. Before Masae was born, it had been agreed that she would be officially adopted by Kin. So although Saiko had taken her husband’s name of Ishida, Masae’s was Omata, and she inherited the property. I was practically speechless when I heard that Masae was now fifty-three. Perhaps because she had remained single, she looked at least a decade younger. “This room we are in now was built on top of what used to be the detached quarters,” said Saiko. “Is that so? Yes, there was a pomegranate tree and a fig tree just outside, I think.” “Oh, yes. They’re still there.” I looked toward the section of the garden in front of the wall where Saiko pointed. There stood the healthy old trees. “My mother talked about you and Oda-san all the time, right up until she died. She was thrilled at how successful you became, and took great pride in the fact that you lived here.” “It was an auspicious room, and I benefited greatly from the luck it brought me. I will never forget that,” I told her. Masae opened a drawer in the altar and took out two photographs and three or four postcards. The pictures, one of me and Oda Jinjirō, and one of me alone, had been taken just before I left to live in Nakano. I had totally forgotten about them. “She used to look at these pictures with great pleasure . . . Such a shame about Oda-san.” Saiko had read about Oda Jinjirō’s death in the newspaper. “He was a good person, wasn’t he? My mother was very fond of him.”

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“I know. She liked him better than she liked me.” Masae laughed softly. “Because he was so nice to her.” Saiko laughed as well. Even though she was quite healthy, she had a bad leg, so they had installed an elevator in the house. We rode it up to the second floor, where they showed me around. Next to a stylish living room was Saiko’s own room. There was a small altar dedicated to her husband. I asked to read a sutra there as well. An apartment building had risen on the broad site behind the house. I felt that the quiet mode of life that mother and daughter privately enjoyed was somehow still being directed by Kin’s spirit. “The time I lived here was probably the most peaceful and happiest time of my life,” I said. As soon as those words left my mouth, I realized it was true—I was happy then—and tears began to collect in my throat. Had I never left, how different my life might have been. The figure of a man, soundlessly opening the garden gate, stepping quietly as a cat through the flowers. Leaning over a white peony, a man’s gaze directed to the stamens in the center. The public bath may have closed for lack of customers, the greengrocer retired, and businesses ceased to exist, but here was someone who remembered me, and with whom I could recount events of the past. Listening to Saiko’s quiet voice, I held my breath, wondering if that red postbox, probably long gone, now existed in my memory alone.

10

Nogata

I WANDERED AROUND FOR ALMOST AN hour in the blazing heat. In my memory, there was a street running north to south that had very little human traffic in any season. Back then, Nogata station was a snug little stop on the Seibu line coming from Shinjuku. You relaxed as soon as you alighted from the train there. On the south side was a shopping street that ran east to west. If you turned left from the front of the station, you would be in front of the Nogata post office. From there a single road stretched to the south. Both sides of the street were lined with vacant houses and shops, and if you walked a little farther you would end up close to a small stream. There was a bridge, but it was so unremarkable you might pass it before even noticing it was a bridge. At the right-hand side of the approach to the bridge, a secondhand store spilled its wares to the edge of the road. I got along well with the elderly owner of that shop. He had little business sense, and when I passed by we’d banter about some trifle he had offered for sale. We became chatting buddies 148

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in this way. The first thing I bought from him was barely secondhand. It was an almost brand-new low table. The second thing I bought was a big Seto-ware ceramic hibachi. “It’s a fine piece—you’d do well to buy it. See, you can put a board on top and make it into a rather nice looking shelf.” He talked me into buying a number of things in this way, and soon my tiny room was crowded with stuff. And then I bought a paulownia wood chest, which I am still using forty years later. Like destiny, it has followed my wanderings. I tried to clean it once, and the metal fittings held up beautifully. The shopkeeper prided himself that his goods were of fine quality, and I guess in this case, he was right. The secondhand store was one of the landmarks I was searching for on this expedition. And now that I think of it, if you continued past the stream from that shop, you would come to a large plot of land that held the mansion of the president of the Taishō Seiyaku Pharmaceutical Company. I moved from the Omata house in Nishiogi to the Oyama house, a two-hundred-meter walk from the secondhand store, at the end of a lane that turned right. Don’t ask me why I moved from the comfortable Omata house in Nishiogi—I can’t even remember the reason. I moved in the spring of 1957. My new address was Number 389, Yamato-chō, Nakano-ku. The reason it is called Nogata on the map is that the area from the north side of the station to the east is Nogata, while the wide swath of land on the south side is called Yamato-chō. Even so, back in those days, the fringe of Yamato-chō was referred to as Nogata. This place I also found through a broker. Surrounded by a wooden fence, it was a quiet bungalow at the end of the lane, with a two-story addition, like a long wooden box. That was the section they were offering to rent. “They built it for one of their sons and his family to live in, but he was given an overseas assignment, and it seems he will be away for quite a while. That’s why they are renting it.” The broker was explaining various things as he led me around.

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“The eldest son is the pastor of a church. He lives here with his family.” As he chattered on, the broker clearly thought Oda Jinjirō and I were a married couple. When we later met, the members of the Oyama household were terribly Christian, all with peaceful expressions and a quiet demeanor. The pastor himself wasn’t there, but his affable young wife, with her round face and a remarkably large belly, was. As identification papers, I pulled out a copy of the Shinchō magazine announcing my literary prize. She barely looked at it, and with my signature we wrapped things up quickly. Oda Jinjirō, who had come along, served as guarantor. The two-story building was completely separate from the main house, with its own kitchen and toilet. There was a sixmat room on the first floor. Above that, another six-tatami-mat room, and a slightly smaller wood-floored room. Outside, on the roof, was a newly built laundry-drying platform. I immediately thought of the laundry area at the ramen house in Mitaka, but this one was for the exclusive use of the renters. If I tried to compare it to my old quarters above the ramen restaurant, where the owner had come traipsing through my room every day to use the clothesline, this place seemed fine indeed. Just as before, Oda Jinjirō commuted from his seaside home to this house and kept the same schedule—half a month there, and the other half with me. It didn’t take long before the true nature of our relationship was discovered by the family, yet they said nothing. We hardly crossed paths, and we always paid the rent on time, establishing ourselves as dependable renters. Here as well, the quiet refined manner of the man who came to visit seemed to induce the large family into trusting him. Furthermore, when my nephew was accepted into Tokyo University, and he came up from the countryside to live in the first-floor room below, that impressed the Oyamas even more. There was only a whiff of immorality in the unconventional living arrangement that resulted. But in any case, before the year was out, my

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nephew, having gotten accustomed to city life in Tokyo, moved to a dorm closer to the university. The Oyama house gave me more freedom and good luck than even the detached room at the Omata house. It was there that I composed my maiden collection of short stories, Memories of White Gloves, and where I rewrote the ill-received “A Flower Ovary” into a two-hundred-page novel that was published by Mikasa Shobō. Memories of White Gloves came out from a small publisher in Kanda called Hōbunsha. I didn’t receive a penny in royalties, and on top of that, saying they would pay it back right away, they talked me into lending them 50,000 yen. Seduced by their fine words and their willingness to publish an unknown author-to-be, I meekly accepted the situation. Still, the first printing of five thousand copies sold out, as did the second of three thousand copies. I resigned myself to the fact that in effect I had self-published for 50,000 yen, but more than that, I was overjoyed that my first book was in print. I sent a copy to everyone I could think of and was altogether pleased with myself. A Flower Ovary came out as a proper book in a hard case. One day, I walked up the stairs at Mikasa Shobō in Kanda only to be confronted by a large poster on the opposite wall screaming, “The Womb Writer’s Scandalous Book.” In dismay, I stopped right in my tracks and turned around to flee. But even so, I couldn’t help but be proud that the problematic novel A Flower Ovary was a boxed book, and again I sent a copy to everybody I could think of. As usual, the reputed publisher Shinchōsha did not offer me any commissions, but I did get an inquiry from the middlebrow monthly Shōsetsu Shinchō, and their offers gradually increased. I was glad to write as much as they requested. And then other requests for essays came, one after another, from women’s magazines and newspapers. I was overjoyed by the steady reward of seeing something I had written immediately

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turned into print. These commissions were a reliable source of income, and I bought raw silk kimonos and stenciled Okinawan kimonos, and to go along with them, styled my hair in a chignon at the top of my head. To be honest, I looked like a kokeshi doll with my round head sticking up, but that was my idea of what an author was supposed to look like. With my newfound income, I also bought all kinds of clothing for Jin. He had worn cheap wool kimonos, and I bought him raw silk ones. He wore rayon obi, and I got him obi made of heavy silk crepe. I got an air-­ conditioner and a television. It was a huge improvement over our lifestyle at the Omata house. One day, coming as usual from his seaside home, Oda crept quietly up the stairs. I was sitting facing my desk and didn’t hear him come up when a voice came from behind me. “I have a commission to do a serialized novel for a newspaper.” I was astounded. The pen slipped out of my hand as I turned to look at him. “What? You’re going to write a newspaper novel?” He stood there holding the overcoat he had removed, a glint of a smile in his eyes. “Why not? Isn’t that what you do, Harumi?” His college friend, who was now the president of the Tokyo Times, wanted a serialized novel that would run for a year. “A year—but that’s terrifying! You couldn’t do that!” “Of course I could. I told him I could write it, and there’s no reason to think I can’t.” In my heart, a feeling of sadness welled up instead of joy. Why didn’t this man promote his own work with conviction? He never published his writing in anything other than the so-called little magazines. Yet he had sat across from me at the desk every day, writing away. And no matter how many times he submitted manuscripts to established publishers, they were regularly sent back. His income was practically nothing. At his first

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home, his wife supported the family by taking in sewing, while I took care of all the bills at my place. At this point, private magazines were his only recourse, but our magazine Z had been dissolved. So we had started another nameless little magazine, along with Tagi Toshitomo and Suzuki Haruo. Figuring that nobody would actually read the contents anyway, we tried to make it visually stunning, using fine thick paper and large print. Rather recklessly, we just wrote anything we felt like, and because we had no name for it, we took to calling it the Nameless Magazine among ourselves. But as Oda Jinjirō had suspected, people were seduced by the cover and drawn into turning the pages before they even realized it. It was for a story that he published in this magazine that Tagi Toshitomo won the Shinchōsha Literary Prize for independent magazines. Just as he had done when I won, Oda Jinjirō accompanied him to the award ceremony as the magazine’s figurehead. Soon thereafter, Oda got a call from Saitō Jūichi, the editor-in-chief of Shinchō. He had put his own story “Hokusai’s Last Day” into the Nameless Magazine, privately hoping that a Shinchō editor would read it. “Finally, the sun has come out!” I exclaimed. I was overjoyed—probably more so than he was. How long had it been since Oda Jinjirō had a piece published in a literary magazine? That morning I felt like striking a flint over his shoulder for good luck as he left the house. He came back later than expected that evening, a strange expression on his face—an ironic smile, perhaps? Self-mockery? I had been waiting up for him. “Well, what do you suppose happened?” he asked. “They want you to write for Shinchō?” “Shinchō is Shinchō—no, they want me to write for Shinchō Weekly.”

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I was speechless. At that moment I didn’t recall that he had already declared his intention to write a pulp novel. “But . . . but . . .” I didn’t know what to say. What I couldn’t manage to tell him was that there was no reason he had to turn to pulp. “He did read the Sharaku story in Z, and he thought that maybe I could write for Shinchō Weekly . . . an erotic swordsman thriller, like Nemuri Kyōshirō.” “He said that?” Suddenly Oda let out a choked laugh. Turning around, he reached out to pick up a ruler that sat on the wallboard, and making as if it were a sword, he slowly twirled it in a circle, then aimed it at my chest, mimicking a swordfighting move. “Engetsu lethal move!” I flipped over onto the floor pretending to be killed, and hid my face in the mat. Suddenly hot tears forced their way into my throat, and without changing position, my body was wracked by sobs. He draped himself over my prostrate form and attempted to soothe me. “I won’t do it . . . don’t worry. There is no reason I should do such a thing.” The man’s voice mixed with my wordless tears and streamed through my ears. I was stung by the cold-heartedness of the publishing game, but I finally stopped crying. I had prepared a small celebratory feast of grilled sea bream and abalone sashimi, which sat on the low table. I snatched off the cloth covering them to show him now. “How very grand,” he said, feigning appreciation. As it turned out, I wasn’t wrong to worry that he would eventually end up writing such a novel, as if there were no other way to reward his long-suffering wife. It wasn’t lost on us that the girls who read and enjoyed my juvenile tales and fiction were in high school. Was it right to pursue his vision of art, convinced of the truth, even if his family should starve to death as a

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consequence? But on top of every other sacrifice was the question of his confidence in his art. Would his wife, who had been the first to recognize his talent at the outset, falling in love and marrying him, and who then had stuck with him for so long— would she be pleased by the idea that he was churning out potboilers just to earn money for the family? For the first time, I felt I wanted to know his wife, whom I had yet to meet. The next week, he left Nogata for his seaside home earlier than usual. When I lived at the Omata house in Nishi Ogikubo, he always sent a postcard on days he was away. Here in Nogata, he would telephone, usually from a public phone, and there was less to the conversation than what he tried to put into his written cards. I didn’t ask what his family’s reaction had been to the idea of writing a serialized novel, nor did he bring it up himself. Did you sleep well? How’s work going? What did you have for dinner last night? That was the tenor of our conversations. Even so, I felt I somehow knew how it had gone over, just by the way the tone of his voice transmitted what he couldn’t say beneath his actual words. When would his wife, having reached her limit, piece together the precise nature of the present situation? No matter how pliant and forgiving she might be, how could anyone stand letting her husband divide his time every month so he could be with another woman, in a problematic situation that had gone on for years? At one point he had let slip a remark she had made that she was troubled by the fact she was unable to hate me. When I heard him say that, I got goosebumps, fearing the underlying embers of hatred that would someday be fanned. But no one, it seemed, understood better the dejection she carried in her body and soul than her husband. “I’ll come tomorrow,” he said over the phone, and sure enough he came. When he sat down, the first thing he said was, “I’m going to write it.” And thus Oda Jinjirō turned himself into the popular writer Ryūkai Jūrō.

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People who knew him couldn’t believe their eyes when they opened their copy of Shinchō Weekly. I fielded questions from all of them. “Has he abandoned literature?” “Has he gone crazy?” “Where did his pride go as our standard bearer for pure literature?” Even authors and editors who had completely ignored him previously now blanched and criticized him. And they all looked to me as the one who had brought Oda Jinjirō to this new low. Even young people professing a love for literature dared to confront me to my face. Yet, despite the fact that we were shunned and abandoned by everyone, the serial he wrote turned out to be amazingly popular. Saitō Jūichi, Shinchō’s editor-in-chief, would avidly read each weekly installment when Oda delivered the manuscript to him. In fact, he would pull Oda aside to pursue a point, and they would talk for an hour or more. It was very strange how this standoffish, impatient, arrogant editor could find rapport with a taciturn antisocial author. Having been wounded by Saitō’s criticism myself during the scandal caused by my book A Flower Ovary, I was totally mystified by the closeness that developed between them. After all, Saitō was known to have suddenly cut off a series by someone they had hired merely by saying he was a wannabe writer. Everyone agreed that he was terrifying in person—“He makes it his hobby to knock down pure literature types.” Even writers like Shibata Rensaburō and Gomi Yasusuke were let go. Yet the astonishment over Oda Jinjirō’s new direction and the scuttlebutt aroused by the humiliations this man of letters had endured were all forgotten in light of the popular success his work now enjoyed. The payment for his serial was more than we could have dreamed. To a man who had been fed and supported by two women, the weekly cash that suddenly showered down on him

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was unbelievable. The newly minted popular author split these earnings precisely, giving half to his family by the seaside and half to me in Nogata. The result was that I panicked and tried to squander the cash as quickly as I could, as if it were the ill-gotten proceeds of something nefarious. Decking him out in male finery, I ordered him bespoke English suits and fine Yūki-tsumugi raw silk kimono. I picked out Bally shoes and sandals with deerskin straps like an actor might wear. I treated him like a doll I could dress up in the most stylish clothing, as if I were challenging the fact that he would never spend any of the money he had made on himself. And still he never made a fuss over anything. He continued to occupy the desk by the window, which, I had almost forgotten, was the same desk I had bought secondhand when I first moved into the detached room at the Shimoda house in Mitaka. I myself used as my desk the big Seto-ware hibachi with a board set on top—the thing I had been pressed to buy at the secondhand store by the bridge. The materials he needed for his work were spread out over the entire room. It had always been easy for me to churn out a pulpish serial, but it did not come easily to Oda. Watching from the side, it seemed closer to a wretched penance that he was forcing himself to undergo. Gone was the free time that he used to spend munching peanuts at a movie theater, watching films all day, or visiting the Hachiman Shrine, or, casually dressed in yukata, poking around the carnival freak shows. As the number of visitors to the house gradually increased, we found that we had to rent the room downstairs as well. Adjoining the garden, that room had been used by the owners as a guest room. My own work also continued to increase. With all this, it was easy for me to assume that our current life would continue indefinitely, wrapped as I was in a kind of oddly cheerful frenzy of activity, but underneath it all, there still lurked a feeling of unease that couldn’t be entirely dimissed—as if something bad could happen.

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And then one day, a man from my past I had almost completely forgotten about appeared—Ryōta. At first, I tried to maintain a facade of equanimity. But even though I realized I had been mistaken about his innocence, once this bedraggled, down-and-out person appeared on our doorstep, I couldn’t help but feel once again that I had some responsibility for him. It was probably no accident that he was renting a place just one station beyond where I lived. “It’s not a good idea to have anything to do with that man,” Oda advised. “But I’m partly responsible! When I look at him, it’s not so much pity I feel as annoyance.” “That’s why you shouldn’t have anything to do with him.” Despite having been strongly warned, I was unable to look past the sorry state of the person standing before my eyes. When the two of us had first been in love, we were very young. I was twenty-five, Ryōta twenty-one. But fourteen years had now flowed by between us. The new facade of little Nogata station did not quite compare to the much larger one at Mitaka. In my memory, the shopping district should have extended to the left and right of the ticket window, but instead it stretched straight south in one busy disorderly line, just like Mitaka. The old commercial area used to run alongside the main street to the rundown outskirts of town. That was where I once sat in cheap movie theaters all day with Oda Jinjirō, and ate at a Korean restaurant so shabby we felt we should hide ourselves from view. There was no trace now of any of those places. Thinking it had to be nearby, I asked passersby where the Nogata post office was. A middle-aged woman carrying a parasol kindly guided me there. The building had changed from the drab countrified government office I remembered to a

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modern, functional-looking building. As before, the main street ran south from the side of the post office, but the quiet peaceful nature of the area had totally changed. Numerous laborers worked busily out of a large colorful tent that had been erected on the right-hand side of the street as part of the riparian reconstruction. The secondhand store I used to go to would have been right there where they were working, but of course it was gone. The seventh Tokyo ring road had been built next to the old street, and since the entrance ramps had been laid over the old street of my memory, the map was now totally different. None of the landmarks I remembered were still standing, so I was lost. On a wild guess, I turned right, then left, then right again on a twisting narrow street, becoming more confused as I went. The houses around me were all newly built Western-style buildings. Nowhere did I see anything that looked like the wooden fence, old-fashioned even at the time, that had surrounded the Oyama house. Directly overhead, the sun beat down mercilessly, causing me to repeatedly wipe off the sweat from my front and sides. The small parasol I carried was little more than a formality, and the heat reflecting up from the street roasted me from below. No matter what street I turned onto, there was not a soul to be seen. Not a sound escaped from any of the houses. I had a sudden eerie feeling that I had stumbled upon a neighborhood that wasn’t part of this world. The house addresses from long ago had all been changed, and as I examined each nameplate, I just became more and more confused. Before I realized it, I had retraced my steps down the same street several times. It seemed certain that in the forty years that had gone by, the Oyama house would have been torn down and replaced. The gentle elderly couple would also have gone on to their heavenly reward. Could it be possible that the eldest son, who was a pastor, and his sweet round-faced wife—I think her name was Haruko—were still there? She had been pregnant when we first

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met, and the baby turned out to be an adorable little girl who often came to our rooms to play. I even had a picture of her sitting on my knee. Her name was Hitomi. When she was fifteen or sixteen she died of some illness. I had been in contact with her family up until then. I had lived here in Nogata from the spring of my thirty-fifth year until December of my thirty-ninth, for five straight years. Why was my memory of the place so weak? I can only believe it was because I was totally immersed in the gratifying melancholy of writing my serialized novel The End of Summer at the time. Seeking shade now, I leaned against the tall fence encircling a house I didn’t know to catch my breath and dab away at perspiration. The summer heat was relentless. Even though it was close to the beginning of autumn, the scorching days had just kept coming. As the sweat trickled down my legs, I vividly recalled how the “end of summer” so long ago had been just as hot. Once, when I was fully enmeshed in my intractable relationship with two men, Ryōta and Jin, I decided to go and see the wife of the man I had been involved with for eight years, whom I had never once met. Whether it was because of my own lingering affections, or the fact that both men were so kind, I couldn’t unravel the tangled knot. I figured she was the only person who could decisively take a scissors to it. So, at my own discretion, without consulting either man, I suddenly set out for Oda’s family’s home. I knew the station along the Tōkaidō Line, though I had passed it numerous times without stopping. Then I wandered about, looking for the address. My lightweight kimono and underskirt, damp with sweat, clung to my legs, making it hard to walk. I had a parasol that day too. With my poor sense of direction, I was soon lost. Just as I was about to keel over from heat and fatigue, I was approached by a young girl. Probably she could see that I was looking ill. When I asked her about the address she said carelessly, “Oh, yes—that’s the home of my

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classmate.” Then she walked in front to show me the way. As I followed her quick steps, my heart was pierced with the thought that Oda’s daughter would probably be a fresh carefree young thing like this. The single-story house surrounded by a low hedge was much more elegant than the Nogata house, which was like a narrow box stood on end. Most of the sliding doors were open, including the room with a verandah adjoining the garden. Oda was sitting facing a manuscript-strewn desk at the edge of a large room with a tokonoma. Bedraggled with heat and fatigue, unable to speak, my sudden appearance caused him to jump up as if twanged by a bow. When I got to the entrance, the bright sunlight outside made everything seem dark, and I could barely see the face of the man who came to meet me. “What’s wrong?” he asked urgently. “Here I am,” is all I could muster. We both were whispering, and tears sprang from my eyes. “Nobody’s home. Come in,” he said. It was Sunday. He said his wife and daughter had gone into Tokyo to shop. Suddenly the tension that had stretched me taut gave way to vertigo. He caught me as I started to fall and tried to comfort me. Nevertheless, the glimpse of his“other life” that I caught that day precipitated a sharp line of demarcation in our eightyear relationship. I think it was about one month later that I saw Oda, looking neither right nor left, striding up the little-used lane that came straight from the side of the post office. Occasionally when he came without notice, he would practically bump into me out in front just as I was about to go somewhere, but now he wore a stern expression that seemed to look right through me. He had undoubtedly gotten the express letter I had sent the day before, breaking off our relationship. Now, before my eyes, he bent over,

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dropping to his knees. I hurried over and tried to help him up, but he threw off my hand with unexpected force. His sunken eyes blazed with a hatred I had not seen before. “What was that? What’s with that letter?” he snarled. Now, leaning against the fence, I re-lived the terrible vision in my mind of the pair of us during that second when I was transfixed by the glare in his eye, out in the middle of a wide bright lane. As if it had been in cold storage all this time, that raw memory from forty years ago suddenly boiled over in my breast. I started walking again. It had been over fifty minutes since I started out from Nogata station. There were no old houses with fences, no landmark two-story buildings, anywhere in the twisting alleys I had wandered through, quite lost. Everything had disappeared. Only my memory had remained, frozen, inside my mind. Perhaps when I die and am cremated, all those frozen memories constituting my life will melt and coat my hot bones with a warm salve. I was walking blindly, looking for one of the entrances to the seventh ring road, when suddenly the entrance to a narrow alley opened up. Feeling that I must have passed by there several times already, I walked in. A black wooden fence came into view immediately. Across from it some trees stood tall, spreading a deep green shade. Through it I could see the roof of an elegant single-story house with a fresh, clean-looking wooden gate. I stood stock still, utterly drained. That this one place had been spared the drift of time gave me a moment of inexplicable peace. Then, as if afraid of what I would see next, I slowly directed my gaze toward the left of the house. There stood the two-story building, plain as day. The fondly remembered laundry platform was gone. These days everyone has washing machines and dryers, so there’s no reason to have a clothesline anymore. As if in a dream, I approached the dark wooden fence and warily took a look at the nameplate. The name Oyama was

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clearly inscribed. The street number had been updated, but the first name of the pastor was as I remembered it. There had been a narrow street in front of the house, which separated it from an open lot where a handsome Western-­ style building now stood. When I lived there, the empty lot had bloomed with asters at the beginning of autumn. They sprang up on their own, growing like weeds. When Jin and I used to take walks, we would stop in front of the asters, our eyes soothed by their purple color. I stood there looking up at the two-story building. That was the house where he and I had shared time— countless dramatic moments as well as regular everyday events, without limit. The thought pierced me like a hot iron rod. The entrance was now on the opposite side from where it had been. There was an old car seat in the foyer. It was high noon, yet all the windows and storm shutters were closed up tight. Of all my frozen memories from forty years ago, it seemed this one alone would stubbornly refuse to melt.

11

Nerima Takamatsu-chō

IN THOSE DAYS, THE A R E A C A LLED Takamatsu-chō in the Nerima ward consisted of daikon radish fields as far as the eye could see. On a clear day, you could stand in the middle of the fields and see the sharp outline of Mt. Fuji in the sky off to the west. Eventually, there was nothing for the two of us to do but calm down. Then I moved from the second story of the Oyama house in Nogata. Getting to that point was only possible because of the quotidian everyday life we had shared for eight years. It had been four months since I visited Oda Jinjirō’s seaside home in the glaring late summer heat. Afterwards, as was his habit, he came to my place as scheduled. Despite the incident when he had glared at me with hatred on a public lane just outside our house, he resumed his customary modest gait and continued to visit. The flashy serial he wrote for the weekly magazine came to an end, but he had received additional requests to do

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more of the same. Somehow he managed to meet this new demand. Before long we were back sharing the same bed, sleeping with our bodies pressed together, but without physical desire. Around that time, I ceased reading the things he wrote. We both avoided talking about why. He also never asked me about the course of events with Ryōta, and I never brought it up. This calm, non-sexual relationship was strangely like the tranquil feeling of warming one’s back in a sunny spot on a winter day. I would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and feel regret that it was not possible to continue forever in that comfortable posture, with the man’s arm wrapped around my waist, my head nestled snugly at the base of his shoulder. As if he could feel these hints in his dreams, he would barely open his eyes, and glancing at me would whisper, “Can’t you sleep?” “Yes . . . but . . . I was thinking, why can’t we just continue like this?” “Just like this is fine.” “But . . . you know . . . we really should do something,” I sighed. “You mean break up? I’m thinking about that all the time these days,” he said. I was surprised, and my voice choked, but I managed to say, “You . . . face that? Impossible! It would be too cruel. I couldn’t do that to you, Jin.” Now that he was announcing the decision to separate from me, I felt myself getting hot and I clung to his chest. And then there was the time I telephoned him in the middle of the night from a downtown hotel room. He was staying at the Nogata house. “Jin, please come help me,” I whimpered. “Ryōta is telling me to break up with you here, right now. It’s too painful.” “Where are you? I’m coming right away. Tell me the place,” he responded.

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At that, Ryōta grabbed the telephone from my hand, and in a calm voice that belied the fury in his look, said calmly, “Excuse me, but I will go to you. Yes, now—I’ll be there soon.” I was crying, but Ryōta did not turn around to look at me. He quickly got dressed, and left the hotel room by himself. I only heard much later from Oda that Ryōta had never showed up at the Nogata house. As incidents like these continued to happen, we gradually became comfortable talking about separating. Thinking over the length of time, I said one day, in mild surprise, “We’ve been together for eight years now, haven’t we?” And he said, “You always say ‘eight years’ but it’s been more like ten.” “What? How do you figure that?” “I start counting from the first time we met.” I had been twenty-nine when I first attended a gathering of The Litterateur group, and now I was thirty-nine. By the time I decided to move out of the Oyama house in Nogata, we were thoroughly sick of discussing these matters. The only thing that remained between us was the quiet of everyday life. Then Oda began to exhibit signs of uneasiness about the future prospects of his daughter, who was going to be married. Should he have sent her away to study? We decided I should be the one to look for new living quarters on my own. I went out on this mission on a clear day in late November. The Nerima broker to whom the previous Nogata broker introduced me seemed like an ill-natured old man, but when I stated I was looking for a small ready-built house, his attitude suddenly changed to smiles. He had just the thing to show me. There was a bus from the front of the Kami Shakujii station. A twenty-minute ride, he said, would take us to the bus stop at Takamatsu-chō, 2-chōme. The bus followed a wide road, passing the Self Defense Force building at Asaka. Few houses were visible along the road,

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but right in front of the bus stop was a general store even more cramped than the little shop at the Shimoda house in Mitaka. A middle-aged man tended the shop. The broker crossed the street in front of the bus stop and had me follow him down a narrow path through the fields. I stopped suddenly. “Oh! You can see Mt. Fuji!” I exclaimed. Without turning around, he said, “When the weather around here is clear, you can see Mt. Fuji every day.” Then, with an air of pride, he added, “When I was young, you could see it from pretty much anyplace in Tokyo. Say there was an apartment in the city—if there was a room that had a view of Mt. Fuji, you could charge an additional amount for it, the ‘Fuji view’ tax.” We could now see a small knot of houses from the path through the fields. “Is that it?” The broker turned to see where I was pointing. “That’s it. I sold most of them last week. There’s just one left. You know, the air is good here, and it’s quiet,” he explained quickly. “Also, the bus stop is close by.” He must have figured that once he had snagged the duck, he shouldn’t let go. There were about thirty houses in the middle of the fields. They all looked pretty much the same size, and the fences and gates of one house were much like every other. All were built out practically to the sides of the walls dividing the properties, leaving barely enough room for a garden “the width of a cat’s forehead,” as they used to say. “It’s a very nice group of people who have moved in here. Lots of intellectuals, I’d say.” The broker was trying hard to present everything in the best possible light. To wrap it up, he began talking about how a bargain like this would not last long, and I’d better decide quickly.

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Two six-mat rooms, one four-and-a-half mat room, foyer and kitchen, bath attached. This quintessential house plan was extremely appealing, and I was getting excited. It’s true that at first glance the house was cheaply constructed—the pillars were skinny, the fittings flimsy, the paper on the sliding doors crass. The main pillar was full of knotholes the size of bull’s-eyes. Nevertheless, it did have a proper gatepost, and a small openwork iron gate, and, most importantly, a full bath. It was large, almost seven square meters, with a bathtub big enough to accommodate a sumo wrestler, all surrounded by white tile. With my eyes fixed firmly on that bath, I ignored everything else and decided I would live in this house. Since coming to Tokyo I had only lived in rented quarters till now, none of which had full bathrooms. On the way back we stopped at the broker’s office, and I put down my deposit. Oda’s attitude did not change one bit even as he witnessed the preparations for our separation steadily proceeding. That night we slept in the same bed as usual, feeling a mutual sense of relief that new living arrangements were about to be made. “That huge bath! It’s the throne in that house, it seems. Big enough for two people!” Cheerfully, I told him about an essay by Okamoto Kanoko in which she wrote about loving everything big, and when she stepped into the tiny bathtub in her house, she always whispered, “Fill it more! All the way to the top!” “You’re right, that size would be perfect for Kanoko,” he said. “Ah, Jin—have you ever met her?” “When I was working at the Miyako News and gathering material for a piece on women writers, I went to talk to her.” “Was she really as fat as they say?” “She had no neck! Her chin spilled onto her shoulders. Yes, she was fat, but she was so little, and kind of cute.”

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“Cute?” “Kanoko was first class. She was the real thing. She always insisted that she was different from most women novelists.” “How was she different?” “I think she liked to say that she had a philosophy.” “Humph. So would you say I couldn’t write about her because I have no philosophy?” “Sure you can. She would be next on my list, right after Tamura Toshiko. Kanoko’s ideology wasn’t such a big deal.” After conversations like this, I began to suffer doubts about why the two of us thought we had to separate now. But we did. At the end of the year I moved by myself out of the rented rooms in Nogata that I shared with Oda Jinjirō, and into a freestanding house in Nerima. Without a map, it was extremely difficult to look for that address of forty years ago, 2–4722–10 Takamatsu-chō, Nerima-ku. When I lived there and sometimes came home late, I would treat myself to a taxi instead of taking the train from Shinjuku. When I could see the blue light flickering from two large gas storage tanks on the way, I would know we were almost there. I saw those tanks now, gleaming on the left-hand side of the road. I asked the driver in the taxi I had taken from the hotel if there wasn’t a wide street the bus followed that went right past the Self Defense Force quarters in Asaka. His answer did not inspire confidence. “Well, Nerima ward has changed an awful lot. They built a new road during the Olympics. It’s called Sasame Road.” He added with a laugh that you never see radish fields around here anymore. So I had him let me off at the current Takamatsu 3-chōme bus stop. He had said this was the original road, but it was much narrower than I remembered. I could see the gas holding tanks directly across the street from the bus stop. Suddenly I clearly remembered that the bus stop of my memory was located

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somewhat below the tanks, and you had to walk a little way to get to it. The neighborhood was residential, the houses jammed together with no space in between. I followed my nose from lane to lane, heading north, when suddenly, in the most unlikely place, I came upon a field with neat rows of stout cabbages. This was a comforting sight, and I looked around for signs of people, but didn’t see anyone. Trusting my feet and resuming my aimless wandering, I ended up at a small shrine. I remembered that indeed there had been a shrine about a fifteen-minute walk from the house. I used to go there to stretch my legs on a short walk. It wasn’t a very interesting shrine, but it was nestled in a small patch of woods, and it was quiet. I saw a sign that said it was called Ontake Shrine. It was smaller than I remembered, with no wider grounds surrounding it. I continued walking, finally coming back to the road where the taxi had let me out. Walking alongside this road, again heading north, a little stationery shop called Shōbundō caught my eye. Through the wide shop window facing the street, I caught a glimpse of a customer standing at the counter having his purchase wrapped. I waited for the man to come out, and then entered the shop. As I puttered about buying things I didn’t need—a red ballpoint pen, a brush-pen, a calendar—I decided to start a conversation with the shopkeeper. He looked intelligent, not like he belonged in such a place. “Do you happen to know, about forty years ago, if there was an area called Takamatsu 2-chōme somewhere around here?” As he put the items I had bought into a bag, he answered in a cheerful manner somewhat at odds with his stern appearance. “Well, this area is Takamatsu 3-chōme, but the place names have all been changed around since then. The roads have changed, lots of new construction . . . what address are you looking for?” “I lived in Takamatsu 2-chōme a long time ago, and I just wanted to see how things looked now,” I said.

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A cheerful woman came out from the back of the shop. “Oh my goodness! It’s Jakuchō Sensei, is it not?” “Hello. Yes.” “How fabulous. A while ago I wrote to ask you to lecture to our PTA. Somebody had said that you once lived around here, and that you might come for old times’ sake because of that connection. But it seems you had gone abroad just then.” “That’s a shame. Had I been around I certainly would have come. This place brings back a lot of memories.” Listening as her husband gave me directions, the woman briskly interjected, “Papa, stop dithering. Just take her there in the car. Never mind the shop. I’ll stay here and take care of things.” The shopkeeper gave a wry smile of embarrassment and went next door to the garage to get the car. “Seems like you wear the pants at your house,” I remarked to the woman. The wife smiled brightly at my words, quivering with mirth. “Oh yes—everybody says that.” So with this unexpected turn of events, I spent almost two hours driving around with the owner of the Shōbundō stationery store looking for my old house. He first took me to the home of an old man, the native-born head of the neighborhood council, who directed us to someone even older who had lived there longer than he did. Shōbundō-san accompanied me there as well, but that old man was sleeping and apparently didn’t remember anything of the past in any case. The road was now three times as wide as it once had been, with a bewildering amount of traffic. There were modern buildings and apartments on both sides of the street, and even single-family homes had been rebuilt in a very modern urban style. I didn’t see a sliver of anything that looked like a field. Even the old houses were of new construction. I would have given up the search long before, but Shōbundō-san had gradually gotten into it and insisted on going around a bit more.

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What made think of that house in the first place was something that had happened two years earlier. I was doing a book tour for my modern translation of The Tale of Genji, and people had lined up to have their copies signed. One elegant woman in a suit said to me, “You lived in Nerima ward once, didn’t you? I lived there as well. I moved away a long time ago, but I hear that house of yours is still there.” I looked up at her face as I signed the book and handed it back. There had only been about thirty households back then, but I had practically no interaction with any of them. I was acquainted with the head of the neighborhood association, though, and it turned out his quiet little wife had come to this book signing. I found out that they had divorced. She had taken the children and moved to Shōnan, south of Yokohama. In the house right across from mine lived a young couple who appeared to be artists. I heard that the wife was an illustrator. It was difficult to connect the sophisticated beauty of the person standing in front of me with that cute young illustrator. How old could she have been forty years ago? We couldn’t talk about anything other than the character of Nerima, but I grasped her hand with sincere feeling before she melted back into the crowd. When I moved into that new place, my sister sent a sixteen-­year-old girl up from the countryside to be a live-in helper. Yuri-chan was a petite girl with white skin and a face like a Bunraku puppet. My sister had told me she was like a little grain of rice, which as it turned out was an appropriate description. She had been born in Saipan. When repatriated to Japan, she went to live in the mountains in the southern part of Tokushima. She was new to tasks such as lighting the gas stove and prone to small fits of sniffling sobs, but I found the extent of her unworldliness rather charming. In the beginning, Oda Jinjirō and Ryōta would both come to visit at the same time. There would be conflicts, but then we would put together a hotpot meal and drink sake. Once

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again I would start to wonder why, in this friendly state, we couldn’t simply go on like this, the three of us. When it got late, I thought it would be nice if both of them stayed over. Right about then they both would stand up, saying they mustn’t miss the last bus. I would offer to walk them to the bus stop, but they would refuse, and the two of them, shoulder to shoulder like best of friends, would head off. You’d think one of them might turn back along the way and return to me, but neither did. After I moved out of the Nogata house, Oda Jinjirō’s family left their house in Shōnan by the sea and I moved into it. That was originally my idea, and I was the one who made all the arrangements with the landlord. Oda’s daughter was starting college in the spring at the same school her father had graduated from. The commute from Shōnan was terribly inconvenient, and when I heard that she was going to look for a closer place to rent, I suggested the arrangement. The elderly landlord silently listened to my proposal with a stern expression on his face. After a time though, he straightened up on his cushion and replied, “That is an excellent plan. I’m happy to see that despite everything you have come to recognize proper relationships. This is wonderful. I have no objection.” I flew back upstairs to where Oda was waiting and recited the old landlord’s reply, imitating his manner. “ ‘I’m happy to see you recognizing proper relationships . . . ’ is what he said,” I giggled. When I told Ryōta about it, I used a different tone. “I wonder that people don’t see this as irrational,” Ryōta snorted. “We’ve been judged outside the bounds of rationality from the beginning. Why would anyone think anything is different now?” I replied. Ryōta was in a good humor about the new arrangement. Exactly when it started I don’t remember, but Ryōta smoothly

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began to insert himself into the house in Nerima. I planted flowers and trees in the narrow little garden space until it overflowed. Maybe because the soil was good, everything took hold. Yuri-chan clapped her hands in delight when the redbud tree sent out branches, taller than she was, full of deep pink flowers. I felt totally comfortable putting Ryōta’s socks out to dry under the eaves. Oda Jinjirō made no objection, but naturally our relaxed evenings of making and sharing a hotpot stew did not continue. Ryōta had started a cable broadcast company with a friend of his in Ichigaya. I hadn’t realized that he was operating a rental studio for television and radio—something that was rather rare at the time. In fact, I wasn’t really interested in what kind of job Ryōta had found. He got up and left early, coming home late. That suited me perfectly. As far as I was concerned, this house was even luckier than the one in Nogata. Of course I never mentioned this to either Oda Jinjirō or Ryōta, but when I moved, the elderly Christian landlord had conferred his blessing. “I’m certain the Lord will bless and protect you in your new life.” Naturally, every time something good happened I secretly recalled his words. Really, I must have been watched over by something given the amount of good luck that happened over and over in this house. It was where I began writing my serialized biography of Okamoto Kanoko, called A Profusion of Kanoko. That project was the idea of Yaguchi Jun, the famous editor who got Ariyoshi Sawako to write her novel The River Ki. Yaguchi was editor-in-chief of The Women’s Pictorial, his messy desk famously piled high with books and research notes. I had sat across from him when he said, “Why don’t you write about Okamoto Kanoko? Take however long it takes. Write it thoroughly.” I said yes. Mr. Yaguchi was a year older than me. He had always expressed enthusiasm for my novels. One morning, not a month

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after moving, I sat down at my desk by the window in the six-mat study of my very own house for the first time, and put my pen to a fresh sheet of manuscript paper to begin writing A Profusion of Kanoko. I had no idea that it would take me two years. While I was gathering material on Okamoto Kanoko, another editor came to visit me at the Nerima house. It was Tanabe Koji from Shinchōsha, who came to inform me that he was now the one who would oversee my work. Believe it or not, he wanted me to write a novel chronicling my affair and breakup with Oda Jinjirō. “Well, we haven’t broken up yet,” I said. “If you write this, you will. I’ve always been a fiend for confessional literature. I used to be quite a respectable editor, you know.” “What do you mean, ‘used to be’?” “Well, if I hear so-and-so has had a baby—off I go! Someone else has a mistress—I chase it down! Somebody’s talking about splitting up—I fly to it! ‘Undeterred by rain, undaunted by wind!’ I go and make them write about it. That’s the Miyazawa Kenji spirit, I guess.” As if not knowing what to do with his long stringy body, Mr. Tanabe hunched his back like a cat, alternately threatening and cajoling me that now was the time to write that story. Susceptible to flattery as I am, I began to write it that very night. I was still sitting at my desk when Ryōta came home. It was the middle of the night. He crept up behind me and peeked over my shoulder at the manuscript. With a sharp exhalation, he picked up the pages that had piled up on the tatami. There was as yet no title. He simply wrote his name at the top, and began reading from the first page. He found a pencil and began checking the misspellings and omitted characters that had resulted during the onward rush of my writing. I suddenly embraced a memory of Oda Jinjirō, at the Nogata house, reading over the

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manuscripts of my novels. And now, just as I had done in Nogata, as soon as I finished a page I thrust it with my left hand over to Ryōta to read. For the first time in my life, in June the year before, I had taken a month-long trip abroad. On the anniversary of the establishment of a regular sea route between Japan and the Soviet Union, I was invited to attend the first post-war delegation of the Japan-Soviet Women’s Commemorative Delegation. We left from Yokohama on the Russian ship Mozhaysky, returning to Yokohama one month later. Our group was led by the wife of the Russian literature specialist Komekawa Masao. Other members of the group included the wife of Kawabata Yasunari, the novelist Kataoka Teppei’s widow, and the poet Takami Jun’s wife. The journalist Ishigaki Ayako came too. In addition to the famous authors who came to see their wives off at the dock, Yukio Mishima and his flamboyant wife came to see off Mrs. Kawabata. They stood out as a glamorous couple. There were many editors as well who came to show their faces in deference to the authors. Oda Jinjirō stood quietly in back next to Saitō Minoru, the editor of Kōdan Club—at that time the magazine that bought most of his historical novels. I could just barely make out the figure of somebody standing alone on a cliff far back behind the crowd. No matter how far away he was, I decided without a doubt it had to be Ryōta. Even though he had said the night before, “I’m not going to see you off tomorrow,” I naturally assumed he had come. Here I was, a person who had stolen someone else’s husband, now feeling a closeness to him as if he were my own spouse, and yet I was carrying on behind his back with a younger man. I was getting tired of these complications. I wanted to take a month off, separated from both men, and give it some thought. Yet no matter where I went, I was frustrated by the irritation I felt at the fact that I was always panting to communicate my observations to them. To the extent I shared my experiences and feelings with

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them, they had become part of my flesh and blood, completely ingrained into my heart and body. My novel begins with the return of the Mozhaysky to Yokohama harbor. The two of them were standing side by side on the cliff, away from the rest of the crowd, waving to me as I stood on the deck of the ship. That was the scene I described to open the story. When I finished it, I gave it the title The End of Summer without hesitation. Ryōta had been much more involved in editing that manuscript than Oda Jinjirō. At the end his eyes teared up. “This is a good novel. Even Oda will gain credit with this.” With whom I wondered, and of course he didn’t say. Why was it that my men were totally blasé about being written about in such a blatantly open way? I didn’t ask them that either. Ryōta came out of the kitchen carrying a bottle of sake and cups in both hands. He filled mine to the brim. “Congratulations. This is going to make you a real novelist.” We clinked our cups of cold sake and gulped them down. At that moment my eyes filled with tears at the irrational thought that Oda Jinjirō wasn’t there with us. Pretending not to see the tears, Ryōta whispered, “If Oda were here, he’d be really happy, wouldn’t he?” Of course, none of us had any idea that The End of Summer would win that year’s Women’s Literature Prize. “Let’s look a little bit more. We can probably get some information at the government office.” The owner of the Shōbundō shop was not about to give up on helping me find some trace of the house where I used to live. All this had taken much more time than I planned for, and I had to get back downtown to give a lecture that afternoon, so I declared an end to our search. “It can’t be helped,” I told him. “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised—it was forty years ago, after all. Things have just changed so much.”

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He dropped me at the bus stop, and I wished the general store that used to be nearby were still there. I said farewell, apologizing for taking him away from his store for more than two hours. From there I hailed a taxi. Riding the bullet train back to Kyoto that evening, it was as if I had been possessed by the spirit of Nerima. I couldn’t stop thinking about my time there. At that house, Ryōta, in his usual Ryōta way, got fired up about his business and became his old energetic self. His business ideas were always one step ahead of the curve, but just about the time they were ready to take off, better capitalized companies would notice the opportunity and crush him. I myself was blessed with such good luck it was almost disconcerting. I barely had enough time to sleep at night. I gave all my earnings to Ryōta to manage—I didn’t even know where my official registered seal was kept. During that time, I felt I worked better in a hotel, so for more than half the month I would get a hotel room. And come to think of it, Ryōta made all the hotel reservations. Soon after The End of Summer was published by Shinchōsha, I began writing installments of the novel Wives for a three-newspaper conglomerate. As soon as I had started on it, I got a call from Saitō Jūichi, who had been telling me from the beginning that I should write a serial for Shinchō Weekly. I had mixed feelings about this, remembering how Oda Jinjirō had been forced to assume the pen name Ryūkai Jūrō when he wrote for them. Trying to suppress the excitement in my voice, I asked, “When would it start?” “Next week.” “That’s impossible. Give me another week,” I said, and took it on then and there. My whole being warmed at the thought of taking vengeance for Oda. “So, what will you write about?” asked Saitō.

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“The nun of Giōji temple. The one who cut off her little finger for a lover when she was a geisha.” “Oh yes—Teruha the geisha. That’s good.” That was the extent of our discussion. Mr. Saito did not call me in to his office the way he had summoned Oda Jinjirō. I called this serial A Woman’s Virtue. Doing the research for it took me more and more to Kyoto, so I was spending even less time at the Nerima house even though it was my official residence for a full two years, when I was forty and forty-one and writing for newspapers, weekly magazines, women’s magazines, and literary magazines. Every day, every month, my name would appear in some form of publication. People called me the luckiest of popular writers. Two days after returning to my home temple in Kyoto, the Jaku-an, I received a package in the mail from the owner of the Shōbundo stationery shop in Nerima. Inside were three maps, photographs, negatives, and a letter. He wrote that he had in fact gone to the government office to look for the information I was interested in. My old address, 2–4722–10 Takamatsu-chō, had been changed in 1975 and was now 1–16–5 Doshida, Nerima-ku. We had come very close in our search, and he apologized that he hadn’t discovered it then. At the original location there had indeed been about thirty houses, but the government office had no information on any particular one. He recalled that I had mentioned the general store by the bus stop, and sure enough he found that it had become a liquor store. He also could tell that my house had been rebuilt, and that the tree I told him I had planted was still there, now grown as high as the first-story roof. You could easily understand what had become of the place by looking at the map and the photographs, in which the addresses had all been neatly recorded. My old community was just a little north of where we had gone around and around, on the west side of the No. 443 highway, Sasame Road. The liquor

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store had moved south, but Shōbundō-san had circled its location in red pencil, and I could follow a line from it to my old house. He had taken color pictures of the house and the surroundings. Looking at them nearly brought me to my feet. Every house had added a second story, but the ground plan was unchanged. The site of my house, the height of the fence, the shape of the gatepost, the black openwork gate—were exactly as they had been. I had no memory of the flourishing azalea in the middle of the hedge, but there was a tree that I would say was a redbud reaching up taller than the roof. I imagined that the firstfloor plan hadn’t changed all that much. We had replaced the overly large (according to Ryōta) bathtub, but it was probably in the same area of the house. The place I thought had disappeared from the face of the earth was still in existence! In my excitement I immediately changed into my Buddhist robes and left my room, carrying just an overnight bag. If I go now, I thought, while it is still light, I ought to be able to make sure with my own eyes.

12

Mejiro Sekiguchidai-machi

THE AREA CALLED SEKIGUCHIDAI-MACHI, IN THE

Bunkyō ward of Tokyo, is as peaceful and quiet today as it was thirty-seven years ago. If you cross the Edogawa Bridge over the Kanda River heading north, you will find a street going west, gradually sloping upward. Traffic is light. Even at noon, the air is replete with stillness. Ahead on the left you will come upon the Chinzansō estate, former home of the Meiji statesman Yamagata Aritomo, and on the north side the street merges into the main artery of Mejiro Boulevard. The elegant construction of Chinzansō makes it easy to imagine this area as home to the mansions of the elite since the Edo period. In front of Chinzansō is a grade school, and separated from it by a narrow pathway is a building called the Mejirodai Apartments. Right at the time when lots of new apartment buildings were called “mansions” to make them seem classier, the Meijirodai project called itself an apartment complex even though its siting, quality of construction, and overall looks were 181

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indeed reminiscent of a true mansion. Apparently the owner of the construction company was opposed to using the term “mansion.” I heard this from the manager when I went to inspect the units there. He showed me around from the dining room in the basement to the roof, including the hallways on every floor, saying that there were only two units available at present—and one of them might be spoken for tomorrow. “Scholars and writers have lived here from the beginning,” he said modestly. “It’s nice and quiet—a great atmosphere for work.” He added slyly that the famous scholar and novelist Saitō Haruo lived just across the way. His manner was totally refined if not unctuous, and he could have passed as a high-class hotelier rather than an apartment manager. He showed me the two open apartments. The one that was more likely to be available was a corner unit on the top floor. Its expansive living / dining / kitchen space felt large enough to have easily held my entire Nerima house with room to spare. Sliding glass doors opened on to verandahs on the south and west sides. The manager led me to the western verandah. “Please take a look,” he said with evident pride. “Today you can see Mt. Fuji especially clearly. The view of Fuji from this room is fabulous.” I remembered what the broker who sold me the Nerima house had said, pointing to Mt. Fuji floating in the western sky. “City apartments with a view like this can charge a Mt. Fuji tax,” was how he put it. This building charged an all-inclusive rent. When I found out the cost, it was so unbelievably expensive that I almost burst into laughter. I had to cover my mouth with my hand. Yet, I considered that it might not be an impossible amount for me. Putting on an air of nonchalance, I asked about the deposit and a few other things. Before I left the room, I went out on the southern verandah and looked down at the city below. Right below my eyes, the

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New Edogawa Park, long and narrow, snaked alongside the river. The building I was in, perched on the slope of a cliff with two floors underground, six floors above, loomed precipitously over the park. On the other side of the river, in a row of small houses facing me, one stood out in particular—a small red-roofed twostory structure, right below my gaze. I had been standing in the middle of the upstairs six-mat room in that very building when I looked up at this grand palatial construction for the first time. It was a romantic view of a palace of light floating in the night sky with all its windows lit up, illuminating the darkness. Ryōta had rented the cheap red-roofed apartment, where he lived alone, after sharing the house in Nerima with me. Forty years had gone by since our first declarations of love. During that time, we had each lived our life without contact with the other. When we finally met again, just over two years went by until, after various twists and turns, we ended up living under the same roof. As the older of the two, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had robbed a young man of his promise, so it began with my acquiescence to Ryōta’s long-suffering expression, after which I gradually came around to allowing the two of us to live together. Yet, at the same time, I always found that sharing living space with a man was oppressive, and I would grow bitter that he was claiming my share of the air. The result of what had started out as my new life of independence was that Ryōta made me re-evaluate my almost ten years of living with Oda Jinjirō. The reason I was able to continue with Oda for so long was that for half of every month he would return to his wife and family. While he was away I could replenish the air he had encroached on. I understood this now that I was living with Ryōta. But in the depths of my heart I began to harbor a resentment toward him for ripping apart my warm quiet life with Oda Jinjirō, for whom my feelings of love had not cooled. I even started to feel resentful that, even earlier, Ryōta had destroyed my marriage and caused me to leave my

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baby daughter, who was more important to me than any man. If I am honest, however, I have to admit that both the former catastrophe and my current situation were precipitated by no one but me. Yet I couldn’t shake the sense that it was all Ryōta’s fault, and my grudge grew deeper. Although I acknowledged that our living together had come about because I needed to make amends for Ryōta’s blighted prospects, he never made a move to separate and set out on his own, and my irritation grew over the fact that I felt no joy or satisfaction in the act of making amends. In the midst of that new chapter, the sudden upsurge in demand for my work and the ensuing overwork frayed my nerves. I wanted to be alone, without sex, and thus spent half of each month working in a hotel room or making trips to Kyoto to gather material. I had entrusted all my income to Ryōta to manage, and when he poured it into his new business venture with a friend, I berated him harshly. However, poisoned by my own words, I wounded myself more deeply than I did him. I had never once thought of my long relationship with Oda Jinjirō as anything like marriage. But as the days went by, living with Ryōta began to feel like the accumulated weariness of a long-married couple. A shiver ran down my spine when I realized that if we went on like that, all we could look forward to would be a degeneration into the boredom of commonplace married life. Around that time, a friend whom I had gotten to know since coming to Tokyo won the Akutagawa Prize for literature. We held no secrets from one another regarding our private lives, so I knew about the artist she had been living with, and she knew all about my situation. She told me that she wanted, after winning the prize, to get married officially. She confided that they were planning, not to consult with, but to announce a fait accompli to the writer who supervised the magazine they both contributed to. She deeply respected this man and always added the honorific “sensei” after his name, even when speaking of him

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to others. Of course, there was absolutely nothing to object to in her secretly marrying, or changing her name, and as soon as she finished telling me about it, I surprised even myself with the words that emerged from my mouth. “Hmmm. You’ve got a point. It’s probably a good idea— yes. Maybe I should do that too.” My usually calm and unperturbable friend, who never showed surprise at the revelation of any secret, widened her eyes. “It might help us settle down, actually,” I added. Knowing me and the particulars of my life for such a long time, she said, in a normal tone of voice, “Yes, I think it will be fine.” She had seen that my living together with Ryōta was causing me anxiety. “Right. It’s a good idea, so I’ll do it. It will help Ryōta settle down.” “ . . . and what about you?” I noticed the smile she was suppressing while she said this, so in a cheerful tone I replied, “It’s time to pay the piper.” That night I brought up the subject of marriage. For an instant Ryōta’s face brightened, and his cheeks, normally much whiter than mine, colored with a rush of blood. He fixed me with a look just as my friend had. His expression showed that he wondered whether this was a joke. Ryōta’s oddly timid expression reinforced my sense that doing this would shake things up in our lives, rousing us from the pent-up general malaise in which we had been sunk. I vigorously nattered on to cover the fear that if I didn’t speak up strongly, the vague nature of my plan would reveal itself. So I relied on my own words to fan my feelings, and gradually my passion transferred to Ryōta. The waves of emotion rose higher. We talked about announcing it that same year, but I brought out a sheet of manuscript paper and placed it in front of Ryōta. “Write it now. The announcement.”

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With good grace, he dashed it off smoothly right there. When I read what he handed back, brief in the extreme, I felt the trembling of his heart under the words. “It’s perfect,” I told him. “To the point. I wouldn’t change a thing.” Then we decided how many cards we would need to send out. “Okay, great. Tomorrow we’ll have them printed,“ he said enthusiastically. “Perfect. I’m so relieved.” I expected there would be various complications and difficulties after we sent out the announcement, but at that moment what I felt more than anything was relief from the weight of responsibility for Ryōta that I had been carrying for so long. As I saw it, the ill feelings I harbored against him in the matter of finances would all disappear if we married. Everyone would think it perfectly proper for a wife to support her husband’s business with her earnings. That’s what I was thinking. I had previously said to him things like, “I don’t care if you use the money on women or gambling—but when you endlessly pour the money I made, staying up night after night writing, into your business venture, supporting the people in your company, that’s what I can’t stand.” I was relieved to think that I wouldn’t be compelled to say such hateful things anymore. We had the cards printed up the next day. Ryōta brought them back, a fat bundle casually wrapped in newsprint, his face smiling in the way I had loved and remembered from long ago. I think we both felt a vague uneasiness about how long we could maintain this unfamiliar feeling of exhilaration. Yet we both tried to act as if we were in high spirits. Four or five days later, my friend and I went to call on the esteemed writer. We made it a point not to visit on the group’s regular meeting day, and we were led into the large living

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room next to the foyer, where we usually met. The sensei entered, wearing a kimono, and though he must have harbored some suspicion at our unusually nervous manner, he listened to us in his usual generous and placid way. My friend went first. Though she certainly ought to have practiced many times what she would say to him, she stumbled a bit trying to carefully choose the words to explain that she wanted to marry the man she had been secretly living with. The sensei’s face, as he looked at his favorite pupil, had the expression of someone hearing something for the first time. Then he turned his gaze to me, as if to say “. . . and you?” I responded quickly, saying that I wanted to send out a similar announcement. After a brief silence, the sensei turned toward his pupil and said calmly, “Well, that’s all fine, but you know, you’ve won the Akutagawa Prize, so even if you get married, don’t make it public.” And then he turned to me. “And you—since you’ve just broken up with ‘that guy’ you talk about in your novel, getting married . . . not such a good idea.” When we left the writer’s big house, we practically ran down the empty street alongside the hedge. “This makes me so happy!” “Right? Do you understand?” my friend exclaimed, as if she could see straight into my heart. “I feel so much lighter!” Then I imitated the sensei’s voice—“since you’ve just broken up with that guy . . .” I felt like skipping. That night I told Ryōta. He turned pale for a second and then dropped to the floor as if he had been hit. “It was the sensei in Masago-chō, wasn’t it?” he choked out in a hollow voice. I could hardly tell him how I had felt like skipping when I left the sensei’s house. In fact, I felt utterly dejected at that

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moment, and seeing Ryōta’s despair brought tears to my eyes. All I could think of was how to comfort him. Less than a month later, Ryōta said his commute was too far, and so he was renting an apartment closer to the company. I felt relieved that he was moving to an apartment he had found on his own, and strongly encouraged it, pretending to take Ryōta at his word that it would save both commute time and energy. Of course I would go to work there and sometimes stay overnight, and Ryōta would come back and sleep at the Ne­ rima house two days a week, we decided. I calmed down a lot after Ryōta got his apartment, and my own work progressed nicely at the Nerima house. Then Ryōta started to talk about marrying one of the women who worked in his company in two or three years, and I flew into a rage. I couldn’t believe how crazed with fury this made me. “I never expected you would react this way,” Ryōta explained. “You’ve been so cold to me ever since we started living together—how could I take it any other way?” Told off by Ryōta in such an uncharacteristically cool tone, I was wounded by the ugliness of the truth behind his words, and overcome by the disgust I felt toward myself. How could I have forgotten how selfish and unreasonable I’d been with Ryōta? Clearly, ever since we had started living together, I had regarded myself as the victim. Thus I flayed myself, screaming and crying over my disgraceful behavior. “I wanted to marry you because I love you!” I wailed. “But we didn’t marry!” Ryōta’s cold words flogged me like a whip. I recalled the sense of freedom I had felt that day I jauntily skipped down the street outside the sensei’s mansion. Dejected, I realized I had gotten carried away. Amazingly enough, in the midst of that tangle of difficulty, I left the house in Nerima, and with little confidence in my

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ability to pay the high rent, moved into the corner apartment on the top floor of Mejirodai, the one that looked down on the pitiful rooms that Ryōta rented. When the evening glow faded over Mt. Fuji on the west verandah, the lights on the south side would come on in the houses stretching out as far as the eye could see. Even though I had to work like crazy to pay the rent, I was mesmerized by the jagged play of light on Mt. Fuji and the lights twinkling like stars as they came on in peoples’ homes. And I would think, behind even the most meager of those lighted windows, could there be a solitary soul as isolated as I was? The Mejirodai apartment building seems hardly changed from what it was thirty-seven years ago. The broad parking lot in front is the same. So is the layout of the entrance hall. I remembered the walls outside as being a very pale, close-to-white shade of green. Now they are beige. Entering the wide lobby, the management office is there on the right, as it always was. When I inquired, I learned that all the rental units had been converted into condominiums. The cafeteria and parlor had disappeared from the first floor of the basement, and the second floor had become a laundry room—something that did not exist before. I lived in my apartment in this building two separate times. The first was for about a year, a mostly spiteful reaction to the unexpected news of Ryōta’s love affair with a young woman. During that year I twice attempted to kill myself in those rooms. I took sleeping pills. When the first try failed, I explained it away by saying I must have mistaken the dose. The second time, I called the doctor in the middle of the night but have no memory of the huge fuss it caused. Later I heard that if the doctor had been even a little delayed, I would have been gone. But as I said, like a dream that simply evaporates, I have no recollection of what went on before or after. Clearly my nerves were shot. In the end I was diagnosed as suffering from an intense neurosis called obsessive compulsive disorder.

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The doctor who diagnosed me was Kozawa Heisaku, who had studied under Sigmund Freud. The doctor was over seventy, and his speech bore traces of the stroke he had suffered. A friend told me he had made a special exception to examine me, because I was the novelist who had written about Okamoto Kanoko. “Professor Kozawa loves literature, and he has been interested in Okamoto for a long time. He’s very learned about Buddhism, which is why he found her novels so fascinating.” When my friend had seen the state I was in—my physical grasp so weak that I couldn’t hold a teacup or a pen—she made up an excuse to have me seen by Dr. Kozawa. I turned out to be the last patient he ever treated, and I actually found myself looking forward to those sessions where I would lie on a couch in a darkened room for half an hour, and one after another describe the images that arose in my mind. My memories of this first sojourn at the Mejirodai Apartments are shrouded in an oppressive dark cloud of despondency. But I keep folded in my heart the times I went to Professor Kozawa’s quiet office in Setagaya—the only rays of sympathetic light that pierced the gloom. Just as I used to do, I walked down the stone steps on the path running between the apartment building and the grade school, heading toward New Edogawa Park. There was no one there. Suddenly I heard running water, a familiar sound. One didn’t hear it during the day, but at night, when I opened the sliding glass door onto the verandah, the voice of the river came floating up to the window. Looking down at the dark windows of Ryōta’s apartment, I spent many hours absorbed in the sound of the river. The memory of a literary couple who used to walk slowly in this park every morning drifted into mind. For half a year I lived

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under the same roof as the famous writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. He had taken over two apartments on the first floor of the basement, and he occupied them with his wife’s younger sister Shigeko, the model for one of the characters in his novel The Makioka Sisters. This was when his last residence in Yugawara was being built. He also employed several maids—beautiful young women who had become fans after reading his novel The Kitchen Chronicle of War and Peace. In addition, he had a small room on the same floor as mine that he used as a study. I had to go past it on the way from the elevator to my apartment. Every time I did, I held my breath and tiptoed as quietly as I could. If there was nobody in the hallway, I would sometimes touch his door with my forehead, or rub my palm on it, whispering, “May I share your good fortune.” On those occasions I momentarily forgot the feeling of mortification that constantly dogged me, and felt happy. As I was saying, every morning at the same time, a big black limousine would arrive from the Chūo Kōron Publishing House to take the couple over to the park next to Edogawa Bridge. They would get out at the entrance, and the car would wait while they took their time circumambulating the park before being driven back to the apartment. I treasured being able to watch them out of the corner of my eye. From the riverbank, our building looked quite large and grand. Since it was actually the basement second floor that looked out at ground level on the side facing the cliff, the view from the back made the building seem much taller than it appeared from the facade in front. After one year, I moved from Mejirodai to Nakano Honchō Street, and it was there that I finally ended my relationship with Ryōta. I also changed my official domicile back to Kyoto. But after that, because I still had work in Tokyo, once again I rented a room in the Mejirodai Apartments. I have often wondered why I came dancing back to this ill-omened place that

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had been so unsatisfactory before. This second time, I lived there a full four years, from the end of my forty-fourth year to the end of my forty-eighth, changing rooms three times. The author Hirabayashi Taiko lived in the building for a while during her later years. This was where she wrote about the social activist Miyamoto Yuriko. She had just had surgery for cancer and had chosen this place because it was located between her home and the hospital. I ran into her in the lobby on the day she moved in. Without a hint of humor, she said impatiently, “I ha­ ven’t long to live, you see, and before I die I must finish this book. If I stay at home, I will spend my time taking care of the tropical fish or standing around the kitchen. Do you understand?” She turned her back, and over her shoulder added, “We are both using this place for work, so I suggest that we don’t try to socialize.” She narrowed her eyes and walked briskly off. In effect, she was saying don’t bother me. Her frank tone and decisive attitude were refreshing. Just after that, I heard from the manager that Hirabayashi-san’s apartment was on the first floor of the basement, the same as mine. At the end of a right-angle hallway our rooms were on either side of a small garden. Hirabayashi-san had probably not known how close we were when she took the place. From that time on, we never met, but two months or so later she moved out. On that day, too, I ran into her in the lobby “There’s no air here! I’m being smothered!” she exclaimed melodramatically. “I just can’t live somewhere where there’s no soil!” Which puzzled me a bit, until she continued in a voice suddenly sweet, “Didn’t my mynah bird bother you?” “Did you have a mynah bird here?” “Yes, I did. He is very chatty. Since your room is right across the garden from mine, I wonder if you didn’t hear it. If it bothered you, I apologize.”

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“Not at all. I never heard it. What did it say, your mynah bird?” “Just like I taught it—it said, ‘I love you, I love you.’ ” Puckering her lips like a bird’s beak, Hirabayashi-san imitated the bird’s voice. Enchi Fumiko moved in after Hirabayashi left. Enchi chose that apartment for her study when she was immersing herself in her modern translation of The Tale of Genji. These two authors, both famous and of the same generation, were polar opposites in every way. Hirabayashi-san enjoyed dishes like roast beef that she would slap on the stove and fry up quickly. Enchisan, with her upper-class upbringing, had probably never stood in a kitchen in her life. Even during the war, she had a servant sent up from the family home in the countryside, they say. Once she was there, she telephoned me constantly, asking me to come to her room. “I chose this place because you were here, and I thought I could depend on you,” she admitted. She worked on the Genji translation with unflagging enthusiasm, and after completing a section, with a pleased expression on her face, she would tell me her thoughts and opinions about Prince Genji. It seemed she was organizing her ideas by talking to me. Naturally I brought tea and sweets. “This project is really important. I couldn’t stay at home, where I would just chat with my grandchild, so I decided to find a separate study. This is the first time in my life I’ve left my home and gone out to work!” She wore an expression like a schoolgirl, happy and excited by this new experience. On the weekends, she went back to her house in Ikenohata in Ueno, but from Monday through Friday, she was here working singlemindedly at her desk, except for the times she called me. I learned that the Russian scholar Hara Takuya was the first literary person to use an apartment in this building as his workplace, and the science fiction writer Arima Yorichika lived here for a time as well. When the apartments were first built, the

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screen stars Ai Jōji and Saga Michiko had their love nest here. I heard too that the prime minister’s daughter, Tanaka Makiko, began her married life here. I myself sometimes met the actor Kitaōji Kinya in the elevator. In the Taishō era, the Kikufuji Hotel in Hongō Kikusaka was known as the place for writers, artists, scholars, and actors to rub shoulders. Our apartment building may not have been quite on that scale, but it wouldn’t have been out of place to call it a mini Kikufuji. At the very least, the fact that the three modern translations of The Tale of Genji were all done by writers who lived here—Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Enchi Fumiko, and Setouchi Jakuchō—is, if not predestined, an interesting coincidence. There was one more interesting character. One day, I was hailed from across the hallway by a voice that stopped me in my tracks. The voice sounded familiar, but the visage was bizarre—a face without makeup, dark brown in color, eyebrows almost completely shaved. Dark lips without lipstick. Only the teeth gleamed whitely in a laugh. “You don’t recognize me without makeup, do you? It’s Gordon.” My mouth dropped open. The bar called Gordon in Ginza was popular with literary types. The madam of the salon was petite, but well proportioned, smartly dressed, and lively. She looked like she had been a bookish young lady, well read and quite able to engage the authors in literary banter. The bar was trendy and full of energy. Madame Gordon was a well-known character to those who frequented the Ginza. “I had heard you were living here, so I thought I’d drop by and say hello,” she said affably. Although I’d been invited to her establishment two or three times, you couldn’t say I was a regular customer. I ran into her again in the hallway, but this time she was in full makeup, and I could hardly believe it was the same person. From her I understood the skill that women in the entertainment world

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possess of creating a gorgeous facade with cosmetics—and likewise the contrast with the pitiful state of their bare faces. I heard from the manager that Madame Gordon had been the first person to rent a room in this building. “I suppose you could say she’s the mistress of the building,” he remarked. Her big Cadillac was parked in the lot in front. Rumor had it that on a trip to America she had somehow wangled a car out of the president. So when he came to Japan, the president, having taken a shine to her, gave her the car he had promised— at least that’s what was said. The story sounded suspicious to me, since plausible-sounding lies are the stock-in-trade of a novelist, but she was the sort of character to whom this rumor could easily apply. After closing hours, writers and critics would often leave the bar and come back to Gordon’s apartment, drinking and talking till dawn. I had been invited to join them three or four times, but since I always had an excuse not to go, the invitations stopped. Jovial and good with customers, Gordon loved looking after people and mostly depended on the women who worked in the bar to take care of the business. In the end, however, stock in the company had been amassed by the number-two hostess, and rumor had it that she used it to take over the establishment. In fact, though, from the beginning Gordon had been hired as the madam, and wasn’t the owner, so it was probably a case of downsizing when she left. After she quit that bar, she couldn’t work anywhere else, and she started taking care of a rather childish high school student, the son of an acquaintance. Pretty soon, that student moved into her apartment. Her goal seems to have been to help him get into college, but perhaps because of that living situation, the boy failed the entrance exams and ended up as her live-in lover, without doing much. I heard a rumor that she hadn’t paid her rent in three years, and right after that I heard about her death. She had wrapped herself in electric wire and turned on

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the current—a gruesome method of self-immolation that was briefly the talk of the Ginza. Once, when he was still working as an editor, Gotō Meisei came by to pick up a manuscript from me. We were sitting and talking in the basement parlor when news of the student radicals and hostage situation called the Asama Sansō Incident came on television. I remember that we both sat up in our chairs and watched intently. Saga Michiko was the model for my novel The Actress, and she used to come visit me. It also happened that Enchi Fumiko suffered her first occurrence of retinal detachment while having supper with me in my rooms. All of a sudden, she put down her chopsticks. “This is very strange,” she said. “A black curtain has come down over my eyes, and I can’t see.” I remember the quaver in my voice as I hurriedly called her home. After that, the same thing happened to Enchi’s other eye. She had surgery on both, but by the end of her life she was practically blind. Still, she never stopped working on her Genji translation. The finished version came out in 1973, a year I will never forget, since it was that autumn that I took Buddhist orders. What was the Mejirodai Apartments is now called Mejirodai House. In the park, I turned back to climb the stone steps up to the building, but I ended up walking back and forth for a while, finding it difficult to leave. Most of the people I once knew who lived in the building are gone. Of all the people mentioned here, the only ones still around are Hara Takuya and Tanaka Makiko.

13

Nakano Honchō Dōri

THE HOUSE HAD ONCE BEEN A pawnshop, but it piqued my interest because it had a large kura storehouse with thick earthen walls in back. When I casually inquired about the rental, the couple who had informed me about the place whispered, as if it were a problem, “It’s a little out of the ordinary, with that attached storehouse.” Since I was on good terms with this couple, and had nothing to hide from them, I let my guard down. I swallowed hard and told them my reason for wanting to move out of the Mejirodai Apartments. “I’m fine with a kura,” I said. “Back in my hometown, my father made a house out of a grand old storehouse that had been used as a pawnshop until it went out of business. I think pawnshops bring me luck.” “Well, this pawnshop didn’t go out of business—it moved to a larger space. So at least it won’t be bad luck, I guess.” The man who showed me the place was rather taciturn, relaying the essential information in a monotone. I took Ryōta 197

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along to see the house the next day. The subject of our splitting up, which he had initiated, inevitably became vague because of my unsettled state after my nervous breakdown. What would he say to the young woman who thought he wanted to set up a household with her, I wondered, now that Ryōta was saying something about our getting together again. Rooted in the realization that everything that had happened was my fault, it gave me a splendid feeling to think that this time, finally, I would be able to make it up to Ryōta for all the pain I had caused him. He did not disagree with my opinion that the shortest path to making a fresh start was to move. Nobody knew who we were in that area near Nabeya Yoko-chō where the house was located. You got off the Marunouchi subway at Shin Nakano station, and it was a short walk from there. Ryōta followed the roughly sketched map showing a turn toward Yoko-chō from Hon Dōri. From there, the house was at the end of a short lane. It was definitely a convenient place for a pawnshop, where one could exchange items for cash away from prying eyes. “Just like you said—it’s a great storehouse,” announced Ryōta, who had gotten there a few steps ahead of me. He planted his feet in the middle of the lane and looked up. The house was on the left at the dead end of the lane, and behind it loomed the tall whitewashed kura. The entrance had been changed since its days as a pawnshop. From what we could see from behind the gate, it was now just an ordinary sliding glass door. A low cinderblock wall extended around the house, accented by a pair of stone gate pillars. We rang the bell, and a middle-aged man came out. He was a friend of the people who first told me about the place, and some sort of relative of the person who ran the pawnshop. He had been informed that we were coming and was waiting with a key. The man showed us around the interior. It seemed he had lived there until quite recently, as all the rooms retained some

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warmth of habitation. Besides an eight-mat and a six-mat room, there was a four-and-half-mat tearoom. Across from the Japanese-­ style rooms were a dining room and kitchen in Western style, and a living room of about seven mats in size. The layout was more than enough. And then, in back, was the storehouse. Fiddling with the key, our guide took us there as well, although he himself did not come inside. Ryōta moved on ahead and climbed up a set of steep stairs. At the top he turned around and grabbing both my hands, pulled me up. A row of sturdy wooden beams marched across the ceiling. As you’d expect inside a kura, it was dusty. A small window latticed with metal let in some light. Peering out, we could see an unbelievable stretch of empty land. Nary a tree had been planted, but that garden too was part of the house’s territory. “With a bit of work, this could be an ideal place to write,” said Ryōta, in a voice that did not seem his own. At the end of the year we moved into the house with the kura. Before we did, Ryōta came and worked on it every spare moment as if possessed. In the narrow space between the wall and the verandah of the Japanese-style rooms, he got a gardener to bring in trees and stones, and before you knew it, a modest little garden had taken shape. In addition, he had a carpenter come to re-plaster the walls of the kura on the second floor, where he put in tatami mats and a bookshelf, creating a rather elegant writing studio. With a desk placed underneath the metal-­latticed window, the room was transformed into a relaxed and orderly place. I was so flabbergasted at the enthusiasm with which Ryōta made these arrangements that I secretly had two thick nameplates made—one with my name, one with his. On the day I went to see everything he had done on the garden and studio, I silently presented the plaques to Ryōta in the newly refurbished

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room in the kura. The blood rose to Ryōta’s pale cheeks, just as it had in the Nerima house when I had brought up the idea of marriage. He picked up the two wooden plaques as if they were clappers, and struck them together. We hung one on each of the two gate pillars, and thus our new life began. The difference in rent between the new house and the Mejirodai Apartments was negligible. In the morning, Ryōta left for his office in Ichigaya, and he came back in the evening. Even if I had been up all night, bleary-eyed and face unwashed, I did not fail to see Ryōta off every morning. He seldom returned while it was still daylight, and usually I wasn’t there to greet his arrival. I would be up in my second-floor study working on manuscripts at my desk till late at night. And then suddenly Ryōta would be standing behind me, saying something. So these uncannily peaceful days went. Yet inwardly I began to feel like a prisoner shut up in jail. Perhaps writing novels was the punishment imposed for all my offenses. Thoughts like these fluttered across my mind, yet I wasn’t truly unhappy. Fatigued, I would stretch out to nap looking up at the row of beams crossing the ceiling, thinking that I could hang myself from any one of them any time. Oddly enough, the thought was comforting, affording my workstrained nerves a bit of relief. I never asked Ryōta how his work was going, and I gave him all my income to manage, completely indifferent as to how he used it. I tried very hard to turn a blind eye to the intuition that something fishy was lurking behind his too-bright expression and cheerful tone of voice. I also tried to ignore my habitual tendency to feel that I bore partial responsibility for the mistakes in Ryōta’s life, although that thought would still bubble up occasionally from the core of our shared life. Ryōta began to invite business colleagues to the house, and soon enough editors and my own work-related companions

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would come and go as well. Single-mindedly, I chased after work assignments, dispatching them with vigor. After two years of work, I finally finished A Profusion of Kanoko in that room. Since making it my writing space, I had pasted enlargements of photos of Kanoko on the wall next to the metal-latticed window and looked up at them as if they were talismans. From that angle, you couldn’t tell where Kanoko’s eyes were looking—certainly not down at my pitiful excuse for writing. Rather, she looked as if she’d been released from somewhere far away in space and time. And although she had three men around her in the photos, it seemed to me that her unfocused pupils were filled with an infinite loneliness. Late one night, I suddenly noticed that Ryōta was standing behind me. He was holding a bottle of whisky and two glasses. Drunk already, his eyes gleamed wetly. “I’m back.” “I see. Maybe you should take a little rest? It’s two in the morning.” Ryōta swished hot water in the whisky glass and passed it to me. Though we were living together in the same house, we rarely had a real conversation anymore. “It must be hard for you, too . . . every night working late,” I said. I may not have shown real concern for him in this remark, but I wasn’t trying to be snide either. I truly believed that Ryōta was working hard on the rental studio business until late every night. Raising another glass of whisky to his lips, Ryōta fixed me with an unfamiliar stare. I was sitting in front of the latticed window, my sallow face without makeup, my hair a mess. Ryōta, on the other hand, looked youthful when he was drunk, and I found myself thinking that recently it seemed he had become younger. That impression had no emotion attached to it. I had been happy that Ryōta never uttered platitudes like “Aren’t you working too hard?” Or “You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

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Once, talking to an editor we had become friendly with, I even overheard him say, “As long as she’s busy writing, this one is happy.” And I had just grinned. He had made that remark when our companion said it must be hard living with a woman writer. Another time, he said, “Writers are only interested in what goes on in their own mind.” Pretending not to have heard him, I felt the thorn of sarcasm in his remark. Likewise, when he confided to a mutual friend, “I really think that her work is important, and I worry deeply about her. But she shows absolutely no interest in my work—she scorns it.” Again, stabbed to the quick, I pretended not to hear. The thought of continuing on like that was terrifying—­ precisely because Ryōta’s remarks were so cutting and on target. The reason my mind had descended into chaos before moving to this house was the dissatisfaction and irritation I felt over Ryōta’s loss of confidence. He had given up on committing himself to a true effort. So I shut myself away in the storehouse to avoid having to confront Ryōta’s feelings and endeavors as much as I could. “Leaving this house in the morning is easy,” said Ryōta with a strange smile twisting the corner of his mouth. “Returning is hard.” He took my empty cup and poured more whisky and a dash of hot water. “What’s hard about it?” “The air in this house feels like a sheet of glass. I have to break through it with all my strength before I can enter.” “You can’t be serious.” “It’s true. Your nervous frenzy has frozen the air in this house.” Ryōta’s face suddenly paled. “If I don’t get drunk every night, I can’t make myself come back here.”

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This sudden confession was hard to absorb. I had to agree it was honest, but very sad. After that I don’t remember what we talked about. Nor can I forget the chill that came over my heart knowing that sooner or later our life together would have to end. The ground floor of the storehouse was now an excellent library, allowing me to spend day after day in my study. I could have gone on like that, without any regrets, unaware that I was sprouting horns and turning into a demon. Unsurprisingly, but in keeping with some vague plan, in another two years my life with Ryōta came conclusively to an end. Now, thirty-five years later, I was going back to see this place, fully expecting it to have utterly changed. During the time that had elapsed, I had driven past on the Aome Highway but had never stopped expressly to visit. I remembered the city bus went to Nabeya Yoko-chō, or you could take the Marunouchi subway to the Shin Nakano station. In those days I mostly took the subway. Today, the subway at noon was fairly empty, with riders doing as they pleased, sleeping, reading, or just looking out the window. The only one perusing the forest of garish advertising posters was me. I recalled that back then, when I lived shut away on the second floor of the storehouse, I hardly ever went out or rode the subway. When Ryōta used to come home late, he probably had to get a taxi from Shinjuku. Alighting at Shin Nakano station, I walked west on the Aome Highway and soon came to an intersection. Standing there, looking around, I felt a rustic atmosphere emanating from the buildings and signs. When I crossed the intersection, I came upon a playground I remembered. It was practically unchanged. The scene was just as before, with sandbox and climbing bars where children played, young mothers with sleeping babies in prams sitting on the swinging log, knitting. The park was narrow, with only enough space for three or four trees. A stone

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monument stood near the end of the fence between the park and the highway. It was dedicated to somebody named Sugiyama who had donated the land for the park in the Meiji era. I had forgotten the origins of Sugiyama Park, but it suddenly came to me that I had once come to the park to take pictures for a magazine article. I clearly recalled the pattern of the kimono and obi I had worn at the time. My income then was surging, and to let off the built-up stress from sitting so much, I had indulged in a spree of impulsive kimono buying. Ryōta was managing the money then, and I didn’t quite comprehend how much those kimonos cost. He never said a word to me about it, which made it easy for me to close my eyes to his siphoning off many times that amount for his company every month. I walked once around the park, then turned west on the Aome Highway. Furniture store, tatami store, sheet metal, Buddhist implements, flower shop—the old-fashioned signs could have been from ages ago. After walking for a while, I came to a much narrower road leading off from the highway. I was certain it was the street into Yoko-chō when I saw a sign hanging on a building that said Kobayashi Dentist. The dental office I knew had been enlarged to a hospital about twice the size I remembered. “I’ve just done a temporary fix to end the pain, and you really must come back a couple more times,” admonished the kind dentist over and over, seeing through me entirely, as I tried to jump out of the chair as quickly as possible. He directed this criticism of the person who usually skipped appointments to Ryōta, who would take himself off to the dentist at the slightest twinge in a tooth. Ryōta imitated his voice and manner. “If she would just pay half as much attention to her teeth as you do,” he griped. “She’s always so rash and impatient.” Remembering this, I had to laugh. And I wondered what that doctor had thought of our relationship when looking

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at our charts—different surnames, together with the fact that I was several years older than Ryōta. I imagined how surprised he would have been to hear that Ryōta had hanged himself. As I passed by the Kobayashi Dental Clinic, that sensible, scrupulous dentist’s warmhearted expression floated back into my mind. This neighborhood was looking very much the same as it had before, but about two meters on, I stood flabbergasted at the sight of a small lane on the left. Though thirty-five years had flown by, the tiny lane had not changed at all. It had never been paved, and square paving stones were inelegantly laid down the middle. I remembered that children used to gather in it to play— kicking stones, catching flies, no-hands wrestling—because there was rarely any traffic on it. Even though I hardly left the house, when I did go out, that would be the scene I saw. Now, there wasn’t even a shadow of a child in the lane. Like an optical illusion, thirty-five years passed before me in the blink of an eye. Even so, the houses on either side had all been rebuilt, and the old wooden fences with overhanging pine trees were all gone. As if bewitched, I proceeded down the narrow lane—and there it was, the former pawnshop turned into a house where I had lived for two years. Lifting my eyes, I saw the storehouse looming up behind the dwelling. The once-whitewashed earthen walls were dark and smothered in dead vines. White cracks formed arabesques on the blackened exterior. It seemed vaguely menacing and haunted. I wondered if the studio Ryōta had designed and made for me was still there. Was the metal latticed window just the same? I could almost see the sallow face and disheveled hair that were mine back then as I worked like a demon at my desk. The ancient storehouse looked as if it would collapse at a single poke. I had a fleeting vision of a ceiling beam still aloft amid fallen walls, and from it, hanging by the neck, a corpse swaying in the breeze. Twenty-five years after we separated, Ryōta left his wife and children and died, strangled by his own business.

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When I had recovered from that short dizzy spell, I started walking again. The cinderblock wall and the gate pillars were still there, but never having been repainted, they were filthy. I recalled the blood rushing to Ryōta’s cheeks when he saw the two nameplates I had made—the sound when he happily clapped them together. The front garden that Ryōta had designed and brought in a gardener to install had been ruthlessly taken over by weeds. The space between the house and the cinderblock wall was occupied by a carport that hadn’t been there when we were. The pillar where Ryōta’s nameplate had once hung was now affixed with a plaque with the name of the original owner of the pawnshop. Besides myself, not a soul had entered that lane. Nor was there a sound from any of the surrounding houses. I suddenly felt a cold shiver, as if I had stumbled into a world on a different planet. A photograph had been taken of the two of us standing in front of the gate pillars. Wearing a newly made jacket and skirt and a hat, I stood next to Ryōta, who was wearing a suit and smiling, uncharacteristically showing his teeth. My expression seemed undecided, my gaze oddly unsettled. We had been at the house a little over a year. The photo was taken on the morning I would be leaving by myself on a trip to Europe. Someone who had come to see me off must have snapped the picture. The morning sun was in Ryōta’s eyes; my face was shadowed by the brim of my hat. I had been invited to accompany a man and wife associated with one of my publishers on a one-month trip to Europe. I had initially been reluctant, but Ryōta spurred me to accept. “If you go on as you have been, you could break down again,” he said. “It’s a good idea to get away, to escape from the atmosphere of this house.” “Well, there was a reason I had that breakdown,” I said, resisting his pressure. It hadn’t been two years since he had brought up the idea of marrying a young woman at his company, cornering me. We had used that crossroads to begin our

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lives afresh in a new house. But behind the mask of amicability we wore, aware of the danger that was gradually building, we had each felt a strong sense of discord. “I’m sick and tired of work-related travel.” There was poison in my voice. Just after we had first broached the subject of separating, I had been making preparations for a trip to Europe on my own when suddenly Ryōta announced that he would come with me. The bitter memories of that trip still lurked in my mind. I had been engaged to produce a series of articles, and throughout the entire trip I spent all my time holed up in a hotel room, writing. Ryōta, on the other hand, was free to spend his days exploring a succession of foreign cities, map in hand. He would return to the hotel invigorated and lively, barely able to contain himself. To an observer, it might have looked like an extravagant trip to restore a relationship, but the only one who enjoyed it was Ryōta, while I became increasingly gloomy, feeling more lonely than if I had gone alone. Before long, however, I gave in to Ryōta’s prodding. “But this time,” I declared, “I’m making it an absolute condition that I won’t be working.” I began staying up late every night preparing to be away for a month. That was how I ended up in the position of having to say farewell. Yet, if I hadn’t taken that trip, perhaps I would not have broken up with Ryōta. As it turned out, I wasn’t prepared for the questions that arose on the trip—something I hadn’t expected. What I discovered during that month, after being hounded into leaving, was the dark heavy solitude in the depths of my heart. Wherever we went, there would be letters from Japan waiting for us when we arrived at the hotel—letters for the publishing company’s president and his wife, and for their private secretary. When the secretary saw that there was never anything for me in the pile, not even a postcard, she took to passing the letters to the couple out of my sight.

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Consequently, at every hotel, I would think of Ryōta, free of my presence, spreading his wings and enjoying his freedom. And each time I had this fantasy, it hardened my resolve to break with this man whom I couldn’t seem to escape. When I got back to Japan, I discovered that the deluded ideas I had suffered on my trip weren’t a momentary madness at all. One month after my return, I said we should split up. And when he made no move to leave the house, I began living in a hotel. Then, late one night, there was a knock on my hotel door. I was curled up at my desk and thought it might be the bellboy with a telegram from my editor, so I stood up. Outside the door, I heard Ryōta’s hushed voice. I opened the door a crack and Ryōta slipped past me like a dervish. Smelling of sake, he came right into the room. Bed and desk were covered with scattered sheets of paper. Ryōta fell onto the bedspread. I brought a glass of water and said in a harsh tone, “Don’t you dare lie down! Get up . . . get up this instant!” I had to suppress the urge to pour the water directly on his face. “Stop messing with me! I’m fighting a deadline,” I practically screamed. “If I don’t finish this by morning, I’m ruined!” Ryōta drained the glass in one gulp and stared at me with moist eyes. “It’s not just because of the money that I didn’t want to leave you. I want you to understand that. It’s horrible if you think that living with you was just for the money.” I couldn’t forget that I had said those terrible things. Yet I kept silent. I knew if I spoke again, it would prolong the situation, and I really did have a deadline breathing down my neck. I remained stubbornly silent. Ryōta held up the empty water glass, and I avoided looking at the tears gathering in his eyes as I went to fill it. If I tried to say anything, I would be engulfed in tears as well. From

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the edges of my mind, the long time we had spent together came crashing down in fragments. Ryōta slowly finished the second glass of water and stood up. As if evicted, he turned his back to me to leave, but suddenly turned around and grabbed me in a tight hug. He brought his mouth close to mine. It had been a long time since he had done anything like this. Ryōta’s lips lightly brushed my closed lips, and he released me. It struck me that this was a final ceremonial act. I put my hand on the door. “I’m leaving,” he whispered. For a brief second I was pierced by an impulse to stop him, but I let it pass. Staggering feebly, Ryōta made his way down the hall. Without stepping outside the room, I waved my hand. As I listened for the sound of his footsteps to die away, I furtively stuck my head outside the door. His tottering step down that long hotel hallway in the middle of the night was the most pitiful lonely sight imaginable. I was unable to restrain my tears. My heart longed to run and embrace his retreating figure. Yet I did not move. Finally, after I was sure that he had disappeared in the elevator, I turned back to my desk. It was over. As that realization sank in, I was overcome with emotion, rippling out from a bottomless sense of emptiness. I had lived in that house with the kura for a full two years. After vacating it, I moved to Kyoto. I think it took about two months to wrap up the details of that house’s disposition. I have no recollection of taking down the nameplates when I moved out. Perhaps Ryōta did so when he left. Or maybe somebody who was helping me move took them down. I don’t know. Not long after I moved to Kyoto, I heard that Ryōta had married the young woman from his company. I also heard a rumor that they had thrown a lavish reception. That wounded

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my self-esteem to be sure, but after a week had passed I got over the feeling of humiliation. In Kyoto it didn’t take long to discover the inconvenience of being so far removed from my source of work, so I made my way back to the Mejirodai Apartments, making it my Tokyo workplace. I continued this ruinously uneconomical back-andforth between my Kyoto house and apartment in Tokyo, and after a while I got used to not thinking about Ryōta. Still, there was no getting away from the weird conviction that Ryōta was reading everything I pumped out and published.

14

Hongō Ikizaka

ON THIS SECOND GO -AROUND, I HAD been living in the Mejirodai Apartments for about three years when I heard from the manager that the owner was putting up a new apartment building. “The scale is much larger than this place. It’s twelve stories. And so convenient. It’s located in Hongō Ikizaka.” The manager’s tone of voice hinted that he thought I might be interested in moving out of the Mejirodai Apartments. The new place was called Hongō House and it would be finished by the end of the year. He had me wait at the elevator while he dashed into the office to get a brochure. Before I even reached my room, I began to think this new apartment building was an attractive idea. I dashed over to Ikizaka to take a look at the construction. Nearby was a model of the rooms, but the building itself was just a steel framework. The floors were laid out, but the walls were not built yet.

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To investigate this half-built construction, I climbed up the scaffolding in lieu of stairs, floor by floor, up to the twelfth floor at the very top. Buffeted by a strong breeze, I held on tight to one of the steel girders and gazed down at the city of Tokyo spread below with Mt. Fuji looming in the west. Mejirodai Apartments was the setting where I wrote my novel The Peaceful Room. And that pretty much sums up my view of the place. I had a feeling, though, that if I were to continue to live there I wouldn’t make any further progress. So I quickly signed a lease for one of the new apartments, not mentioning it to Enchi Fumiko, who at that time I was seeing practically every day. Nor did I discuss it with the new guy I was having an affair with. The apartment was ready as promised, and I moved there in December. Hongō House is a high-rise built on high ground, so it felt much taller than the Mejirodai Apartments. I chose the eleventh floor, and my apartment had the most floor space of any of my Tokyo accommodations. From the window in the eight-mat room I used for my studio, I could look down at the vicinity of Ueno and Yanaka. From the even bigger window in the living room, I could see the Kōrakuen baseball field and amusement park directly below. Mt. Fuji loomed in front, and I totally saw what Hokusai’s Red Fuji and Black Fuji were about—those woodblock prints are not abstract artistic interpretations at all, but realistic renditions. The man I was seeing at the time was almost arrogant— much tougher than the men I had been involved with before. He doted on his wife and child but had already had numerous affairs. From the beginning when he barged into a chink in my heart, I forced myself to recognize that this was just an affair. It seemed that once I became involved with a man, my attitude would either threaten his self-confidence or else gradually entwine him in a deeper sympathy. This man continuously and brazenly betrayed me, while at the same time, without telling

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him any of the details, I recall betraying him as well. Even so, the strings that pulled our hearts together were not severed. He couldn’t remain indifferent to the shadow of emptiness I held open in my heart. Likewise, I couldn’t ignore the shadow of loneliness residing in him when nesting with this energetic man. From my window on the eleventh floor, I would watch him leave the apartment building. As he walked down the slope, my heart never felt closer to a man’s isolation. On gusty nights, the cry of the wind swirling through the chasm of the building rushed up to my window. Its unbearably pitiful voice seemed to pierce the glass and surround me. Sitting there alone, listening to the wind’s cry, I gradually started to feel that the wide walls enclosing this huge empty room were becoming a burden. Frequently, writing deep into the night, my pen would halt and I would notice the howl of the wind. It seemed to be inviting me to see a white road opening up before my eyes. When it was exactly I can’t say, but the desire to renounce the world and take Buddhist orders started to take hold at that time. My personality contains a stubbornly self-reliant spirit composed of equal parts of a higher-than-average sense of righteousness and dumb-assed diligence. Should I stand at the brink of an emergency, my self-reliance will shove every other instinct out of the way. The tiny amount of reason or calculation I can muster can do nothing in the face of this unstoppable force. If I become accustomed to my house, accustomed to convenience, accustomed to love, once I notice my life playing along tepidly and harmoniously, I start to fidget and get cranky and my mind starts to wobble, and the incorrigible urge to destroy things wells up again. With what in my life can only be called a reckless urge to repeatedly move, at what age did I suddenly become conscious of entering my twilight years? Perhaps it was when I took to heart a phrase that Okamoto Kanoko often used—“When

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people turn forty, they return to their roots.” From the time I entered my early forties, this prickling sense of my life winding down started to settle into the deep reaches of my mind. I believe this thought was directly connected to a yearning toward death. Coincidence or not, brief life spans and accidental deaths were not uncommon in my family’s lineage. Perhaps my leaning toward death was also influenced by the Meiji-born women I wrote about—women whose tempestuous lives were cut short, but who died beautiful deaths. The following passage is from an essay called “On Wandering” I wrote when I was forty-seven. I constantly dwell on my deepest wish, the temptation to wander, to shed this worldly life and take the tonsure. At present I have a house but no family, no blood relatives who might tug on my sleeve to stop me. I can’t say that I’m free of the sexual bonds that are hard to leave behind or break, and I find my attachment to those bonds seems so strong at times that it might well keep me from accomplishing my desire. But as long as that is the case, my desire to wander gets stronger by the day. It isn’t that it’s easy to forsake the bonds of sex and family, even for people whose emotions in love run shallow, but it’s doubly difficult for someone like me, who, more than most, is deeply emotional in love, with strong attachments. When pierced in the heart by these painful interchanges, someone like me is likely to take drastic measures, and then notice that they are already halfway on the road to throwing everything away and wandering the world.

I think it was when I was writing this in that room in the Mejirodai Apartments that my soul felt a strong desire to

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disentangle from my physical body. Looking back now, I can say it was the following year, when I went to see the construction site of Hongō House, that my spirit began to disengage from my real life and take the first step into wandering. Three years prior to that, in the storehouse study at Nakano Honchō Street, I had already met with a Catholic priest several times, and we had read the Bible together. It had begun when I telephoned my Catholic writing colleague Endō Shūsaku. “I want to be baptized,” I told him. “Ah. I see. I can ask my priest if he would do it,” he replied, as if this were the most ordinary request in the world. “Perhaps you should read the Bible.” Really, introducing me to a priest was as simple as distributing bars of rationed soap, or so it seemed. I’m pretty sure that even at that moment the desire to leave the profane world behind had already established itself in my heart. But I didn’t go through with it then because I was dealing with a surfeit of reality. All sorts of physical, exceedingly human obstructions got in the way, and then suddenly the time for it was past. Also, when I was reading the Bible with the priest, I came to feel that, after all, I had been born and brought up in a Buddhist environment. Intellectually and culturally, it was hard to extricate myself from that. In the hectic pursuit of the everyday tasks involved in moving to Kyoto and then getting a Tokyo studio, I forgot my craving for wandering, and the hope of leaving the profane world was put aside—but it did not disappear. Even though I had no particular connection to the land in Hongō, once I started living there I felt an uncanny sense of familiarity with the area, as if I had lived there in a previous life. I walked its many hilly streets just letting my feet go wherever they would go, and would see them turn abruptly into narrow maze-like lanes, past buildings with old-fashioned signs like “Honorable

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High School Lodgings” straight out of the turn of the century. The streets led me into the past, and I became a late Meiji or early Taishō denizen. The feeling was not uncomfortable. I walked down lanes where the people had put flower boxes and pots filled with modest blossoms in the narrow spaces under the eaves, since their houses had no gardens. The scene was totally familiar, like the neighborhoods of my childhood. Among the sawtooth-roofed buildings, there was a store that only sold brooms. Almost without thinking, I stepped into that shop. This was the neighborhood where Higuchi Ichiyō lived the better part of the twenty-four years of her existence; the neighborhood where Hiratsuka Raichō started the feminist magazine Blue Stocking; the area where Izumi Kyōka wrote Women’s Pedigree, whose story takes place close to where the sensei in Masago-chō lived. It is also the neighborhood frequented by the anarchists Park Yeol and Kaneko Fumiko, as well as the neighborhood of the Kikufuji Hotel, where the scene of my novel The Devil’s Dwelling is set. I had never been much for taking long walks before, but after I moved to Hongō House, I thoroughly explored the surrounding neighborhoods on foot. I found the pawnshop Ichiyō had frequented. It was still there. So, on one hand, there were numerous lanes and old backstreets that had miraculously survived earthquakes and fire, and on the other hand, alongside them, broad avenues with brand-new buildings, like Hongō House in Ikizaka. Apparently, the area now called Ikizaka refers to the street that was reconstructed after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. A century earlier, during the Edo period, the right-hand side of this slope was the location of the samurai family Ogasa­ wara Iki-no-kami’s villa—which is how it got its name. Right next to my apartment was a neighborhood called Yumi-machi, or Bow Street, which dated back to those days. I took the man I was seeing to the interesting places I had discovered on my rambles, trying to give him a taste of the things

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that moved me to joy. We were already well past the love affair. But though we spent a fair amount of time together, we didn’t have a lot to talk about, and I felt that I usually ended up telling him random things from my past. Finally, after pretending to be interested in the details I had dredged up, he said, “Oh really? Is that it? Don’t you have anything more interesting to talk about?” This man was always drunk when he came to my room. He seemed to be on his last legs, so exhausted that he couldn’t last a minute without a drink. Every so often I had to meet with another writer about the project we were working on, both of us late in meeting a deadline for a monthly. When this happened, I would be so exhausted my nerves would be shot. So while the man I was seeing would try to drown his fatigue by getting drunk as fast as he could, I would be too tired to come close to getting drunk. Also, when he drank, he spat out irrational, violent nonsense, piling on the meanness to make himself feel better. I took offense since I was sober, and would react violently myself. “You think this is something to chat about, like snacks with sake?” I hissed. “Bah. Why do you writers think that you’re writing the truth? You’re just writing realistic-seeming lies. It’s a real minus for a novelist to be so naïve.” “If a reader thinks I’m writing the truth, isn’t that the goal?” I countered. “You make me laugh. Me? I’m a natural-born liar. From the time I was old enough to understand, I’ve been living a lie. If I didn’t do that, I couldn’t have survived. Don’t kid yourself. I’m not a weakfish like you. You know there’s a qualification for being a novelist. A really genius liar can spot someone else’s lie and immediately rip it apart. Falseness lurks in your stories. The world is simply varnished over with lies. Lies are truth! Truth is lies! Truth is lies and lies are truth.” He began to tap a fork on the side of his cup, taunting me with this chant. I was trying to be angry with him, but

218  SETOUCHI JAKUCHŌ

I started tapping chin chin on my cup with chopsticks myself, as if infected by his drunkenness. “Lies are truth! Truth is lies!” we sang together. When I told the man I was planning to take Buddhist orders he did not seem surprised; neither did he attempt to dissuade me. He was silent for a moment. Then he said softly, “Well, there is that . . .” To which I responded brightly, “Exactly. I’m relieved. Just as planned.” The man laughed. “You bet,” he said. We clinked cups. All at once the inebriation left the man’s eyes, and I don’t know why, but it gave me a pang, and I hurriedly lowered my eyes. I walked slowly away from Suidōbashi station. This area had hardly changed. Twenty-eight years had gone by since I put down the pen I used while writing till all hours in my Hongō House studio. That was the day I left to go to the Chūsonji temple to take Buddhist orders. On November 14, 1973, I performed the ceremony of becoming a nun at Chūsonji in Hiraizumi, Ōshū. It had been ten years between the time I first thought about doing it and the day I accomplished it. The night before, having not slept a wink since the previous day, I finally put down the pen with which I had been writing non-stop, jumped up, and flew from the room. The reason for this ordeal was that I figured I would not be able to write for a long time after taking the tonsure, so I needed to finish all the assignments I had taken on. I couldn’t postpone my leaving any later than the last train that would get me to Chūsonji that night. Only a few relatives and very close friends were going to attend, and they had left for the temple and were already there, waiting for me to arrive.

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Slowly climbing the broad slope of Ikizaka, I lifted my eyes to the Hongō House apartment building, which had come into view. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been back since that evening when I rushed out. I thought of all the times the man had walked alone down this hill when he left the apartment. I would have been standing, pressed to the window glass on the eleventh floor, watching him go. That window was now glittering in the late afternoon’s winter sunlight. Everything about the building looked the same as it had before. It was hard to believe that twenty-­eight years had gone by. I was fifty-one when I left. Now I was seventy-eight, about to be seventy-nine in another month. The man who had not tried to talk me out of becoming a nun, though younger than me, had died of an illness eight years earlier. This man, more attached to and greedy for life than most, did not capitulate to death, fiercely fighting off his demon of disease until the very end. I went to see him while he was still conscious. “I’m dying,” he finally permitted himself to say, spitting out the words. “If I were seventy-six, I’d have no complaints. But I’m only sixty-six.” I sat there without a word. His face turned serious. “A lot has happened, but it was all in vain, wasn’t it?” “You are not dying,” I said, intending to mean that his writing would live on. The man laughed weakly. “That’s the first lie you’ve told, is it?” “Lies are truth,” I responded. And the man quietly smiled. Of all the men who had handled my female body, it may have been this man who understood me even better than I did myself. “If I hadn’t become a nun, I probably would have committed suicide,” I told him. To which he said, almost with jealousy, “I envy you.”

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When I said, “Becoming a nun is like being alive in death,” he looked me straight in the eye and nodded deeply. The flower shop in the lane at the back entrance to Hongō House was still there, overflowing with a colorful floral array. I crossed the wide parking lot and entered the building, using the back entrance I had been accustomed to using. As I drew close to the mailboxes lining one wall of the lobby, I reached out to touch the box that used to be mine, just as I had done so many times. The name of the person who had moved in after me was written on the mailbox. I got on the elevator I used to ride. I met no one in the lobby, in the hall, or in the elevator. I went past the eleventh floor and got off at the roof. From there I could see all of Tokyo. I had a vision of myself climbing the scaffolding without stopping, right to the top of the unfinished construction. Of the very few people who had attended my Buddhist ordination ceremony, almost all had passed away, starting with my older sister. There on the rooftop, buffeted by winds from every direction, I recalled the shriek of the midnight wind battering the glass of my eleventh-floor window. I had the uncanny sense that my current state with shaved head and black garments was something that had existed from long before. Leaning against the wall, I turned my face to look at Mt. Fuji, snow covered and hovering before my eyes. Below, the roller coaster in the Kōrakuen amusement park, full of people, rolled along its track in slow motion, as if in a dream. Suddenly a gust of wind caught the sleeve of my black robe, flipping over the narrow red nun’s stole as if it had a mind to blow it away. I grabbed my clothing with both hands, holding it down, while I asked the wind when I would be continuing on the path to join them.

Translator’s Notes

Jakuchō titled each chapter with the name of a place important in her past. As these locations in Japan may be unfamiliar to Western readers, I have glossed the titles with a simple description of the theme of the chapter in the following notes.

1.  Mt. Nanzan—Paternal Heritage The opening chapter is set in Tokushima prefecture on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. Jakuchō returns to her birthplace, having reconnected with relatives on her father’s side after becoming a nun. She calls up memories of her father from her childhood and teenage years. One invisible thread in this chapter is the rift between her father and his eldest brother, who became family head. In her opening paragraph, she lightly mentions that she didn’t know much about her father’s hometown of Kureha. The scene with her father sitting on the beach is another hint that there was something odd about this. At that point she was about seventeen and clearly had never been to Kureha. When she describes the deserted Michitaka mansion with references to the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, Japanese readers would smile at the allusion to a major piece of Jakuchō’s own literary opus, a translation into modern Japanese of this classic work. In college, she majored in Japanese literature. Her 1992 novelized biography of the famous poet-monk Saigyō, Ask the Flowers (Hana ni Toe), is another outgrowth of her delving into Japan’s rich literary tradition. In this chapter, she mentions Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), Japan’s preeminent postwar author and Nobel prize–winning novelist. Jakuchō was personally

221

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acquainted with most of the Japanese writers who achieved fame during the course of her literary career, as she makes clear by dropping references to them throughout the book.

2.  Tatara River—Maternal Heritage This chapter opens with the horrifying description of her mother’s death in an American air raid. Jakuchō herself did not know of her mother’s fate until she was repatriated from China, where she had spent the war years with her husband and child. Firebombing raids on Japanese cities began in 1944 and continued until the end of the war in August 1945. At first, the raids were directed against major cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Yokohama, but by June and July of 1945 smaller cities were being attacked. Jakuchō’s hometown on Shikoku was devastated. Her mother, as she learns, had died together with her maternal grandfather in a bomb shelter. Memories of these two figures, her mother and grandfather, drive the narrative of this chapter, culminating in the tale of her grandfather’s custom of using dew from the calamus plant to heal her skin. This remedy may well have had therapeutic benefit. Calamus, or acorus calamus, also known as sweet flag, is a reedy wetland plant with a distinct fragrance that has been used in Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese herbal medicine for centuries. In Japan, adding calamus leaves to a hot bath for the Tango no Sekku festival on the fifth day of the fifth month was traditionally thought to be soothing to the skin. Yet it is her emotional connection to her grandfather rather than the effectiveness of a home remedy that is the point of the tale. Jakuchō’s mother’s family had been prosperous, owning land that stretched from the mountain in back of their home to the nearby Jōrokuji temple. Jakuchō compares that temple to the seventh-century Hōryūji temple in Nara, one of the most famous sites in Japan, boasting a pagoda thought to be the oldest extant wooden building in the world. The Jōrokuji’s history goes back almost as far, although it is not as well known. She relates the history and legends of this temple in detail, including the origin of the blood ceiling well known to all the schoolchildren in the area, as well as the saga of the twelfth-century military commander Minamoto no Yoshitsune, one of the most famous warriors in Japanese history, who figured in a legendary battle that took place in the area surrounding her hometown. Since many places in Japan hold tightly to legends of Yoshi­ tsune’s exploits, some of the details here may well be embroidered.

Translator’s Notes  223

3.  Nakazu Harbor—Childhood In this lyrical chapter, Jakuchō returns to Tokushima, the city where she was born. She relates memories of growing up in a carpenter’s shop as a child who frequently played alone, her imagination her sole companion. Ancient customs such as tooth blackening could still be glimpsed back then, lending an antique aura to her memories. The ritual of applying an acidic, oxidizing solution to the teeth as a sign of a woman’s married status had lasted through the nineteenth century until the Meiji empress declared it unfashionable. But even then, a few women in the countryside, Jakuchō’s grandmother among them, still held to the old ways into the twentieth century. On another cosmetic note, many Japanese women nowadays dye red highlights into their hair. But when Jakuchō describes a country girl as “red-haired,” the term is meant to indicate that the highlights in her hair were brown rather than the blue-black that would have been considered more classically beautiful. Jakuchō’s memories are often linked to Japan’s literary heritage. She describes the local dime store as being like the one in a novel by Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), one of the first women writers of modern Japan. Higuchi’s most famous novel, Takekurabe, translated as Child’s Play, depicts a young girl growing up on the fringes of the licensed quarters, and Ichiyō was clearly an idol and role model for Jakuchō. Throughout the book, Jakuchō continues to name people whom she had known before they became famous. In this chapter, her grade school classmate Takehara Han (1903–1998), a classical dancer, and Nakahara Jun’ichi (1913–1983), a well-known artist and illustrator, are singled out for mention. To the Japanese public, Jakuchō was already a highly recognizable figure by the time of her visit to Tokushima. With her round face, shaved head, and Buddhist robes, anyone would have known at a glance who she was.

4.  Mt. Bizan—True Love The anchor of this chapter, Mt. Bizan, is not only a poetic image and the scenic background of Jakuchō’s childhood home, but the secret place for her first trysts. Her early years in Tokushima come to a startling conclusion in this chapter. Saving her move to Tokyo for college for a subsequent chapter, she recounts her schoolgirl memories of Mt. Bizan and then jumps ahead to when she is twenty-three, having returned to Tokushima from

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Beijing with her husband and child after the war. Here begins her encounter with the man she calls Ryōta, a relationship she struggles to come to grips with throughout the book. Jakuchō compares the intensity of her feelings in this liaison to those of the French author Annie Ernaux (1940–), who wrote in a form similar to the Japanese literary genre called the “I-novel.” Inspired by Western precursors, I-novels are based closely on the author’s own experiences, often amounting to thinly disguised autobiography. Jakuchō’s own I-novel Natsu no Owari, translated as The End of Summer by Janine Beichman, describes the love triangle she entered into in later life with the writer Oda Jinjirō and Ryōta. Yet that book never mentions the passionate albeit platonic bond with Ryōta that arose during their youth, which Jakuchō describes here for the first time.

5.  Nagoya Station—The Battered Wife When Jakuchō tells her husband she has been unfaithful, he forcibly removes her and their young daughter from Tokushima to Tokyo, displaying the rage that would have been typical of a Japanese man in such circumstances. Describing his physical violence and her reaction to it, Jakuchō unsparingly presents the classic profile of a battered wife. The one thread that holds her in the marriage is her little girl, but that thread too is finally snapped. Once they separate, her husband maintains custody of their daughter, since joint custody is not an option in Japan, effectively removing the child from her life completely. (Jakuchō did reconcile with her daughter, then an adult, after she became a nun, but the daughter’s name has never been publicized.) As she continues to mull over her relationship with Ryōta, Jakuchō discovers a safe harbor in her rapport with the man who would shape her literary career, Oda Jinjirō (1910–1979). Oda was a member of Japan’s avant garde, a writer known for his devotion to pure literature. Thinly disguised as the character Shingo in the novel The End of Summer, Oda appears under his real name in this memoir. The name Ryōta, however, in both the novel and this memoir, may be pseudonymous. His family name is never mentioned.

6.  Aburanokōji Sanjō—Down and Out in Kyoto In 1948, with the support of college friends, Jakuchō settles in post-war Kyoto, where she finds work in a small publishing house and makes the acquaintance of other artists and writers while beginning to secure her own independence. This is where she first hears of the double suicide of

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the writer Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), accomplished by drowning himself with the young woman who was his lover. A renowned and popular novelist, Dazai was famous as much for his scandalous living as for his lightly fictionalized stories. She will return to the example of Dazai, a great literary influence on her own work, in subsequent chapters of the memoir.

7.  Mitaka Shimorenjaku—The Vagabond Life In 1951, Jakuchō returns to Tokyo and lives in rented quarters in the vicinity of Mitaka, a Tokyo suburb. She struggles to make a living as a for-hire writer of pieces published in children’s and teenage magazines. At the same time her ambition to undertake serious writing deepens as she begins to fraternize with Japan’s literary elite, joining a group of writers that coalesced around Niwa Fumio, publisher of a small literary magazine reminiscent of the European “little magazines” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In describing her various moves during these years, Jakuchō observes the Japanese convention of rating the size of her living quarters by the number of tatami mats that each room can accommodate. One mat is roughly three feet by just under six feet, so a typical six-mat room is just under one hundred square feet. Most tatami mats have edges bound in black fabric, an effective way to visually break up the space. If the mats lack these edges, the room seems larger—something she remarks on in the room rented from Shimoda Shun. As Jakuchō methodically revisits the places where she once lived, a pattern begins to emerge. At first everything seems new and changed, and she is disoriented, but then she finds something concrete that remains, fossils from her past, or a person to whom she had a personal connection. In this chapter, that connection is provided by Shimoda Sachiko, daughter of her former landlady, who has continued to live in the same physical location despite subsequent house remodeling, business failure, and widowhood.

8. Tōnosawa—Beginning a Love Affair Jakuchō was twenty-nine when she began an affair with the forty-oneyear-old married writer Oda Jinjirō. Here, in describing the trip that launched the beginning of their relationship, she returns to Tōnosawa to try to summon memories from the physical traces of that former time. But in the hot springs resort, she ends up connecting to the experiences of other lonely women who have turned to emotional surrogates.

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9.  Nishi Ogikubo—A Lucky Room This chapter opens in 1940, at the beginning of Jakuchō’s student days at Tokyo Women’s College in Nishi Ogikubo, a prosperous Tokyo suburb. The college had been founded in 1918 with the aid of American church groups, and it expanded after the end of the Second World War, styling itself, in English, as the Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, the singular possessive noun underscoring the importance of the individual in its educational mission. In this respect, Jakuchō has rightly been lauded as one of TWCU’s most esteemed alumnae. In 1955, Jakuchō returned to Nishi Ogikubo with Oda Jinjirō to look for a place to set up house together. There, with Oda’s encouragement, she began to pursue her literary ambitions. When a short story she has written is awarded a literary prize, she credits the stroke of luck to the happiness she experienced living in the Nishiogi house. Later, returning there to plumb her connections to that place, she has an uncanny encounter with the daughter and granddaughter of her original landlady, Omata Kin, whose posthumous Buddhist name signifies the protection bestowed on a deceased person in the afterworld.

10. Nogata—A Serious Writer In 1957, Jakuchō and Oda Jinjirō moved to rented quarters in Nogata, another suburb of Tokyo. There she continues to churn out short stories and articles, making a living from her writing for the first time. Oda, by contrast, has little luck getting his own work published. Instead of getting into the coveted literary magazine Shinchō, he is offered a chance to write a serialized potboiler, with a swashbuckling masterless samurai as its hero, for the mass-market Shinchō Weekly. Both Oda and Jakuchō consider accepting such an offer to be a betrayal of his ideals even though she herself has been thriving on such commissions for some time. At this juncture, Ryōta reappears to confound Jakuchō’s life. She tries, unsuccessfully, to break up with Oda, but this odd threesome continues for another four years.

11.  Nerima Takamatsu-chō—The Love Triangle In 1962, Jakuchō buys a freestanding house in Nerima-ku, on the outskirts of Tokyo, leaving Oda behind in Nogata, where his wife and daughter soon join him. Despite this peculiar arrangement, Oda continues to visit her in Nerima, as does Ryōta—sometimes together. Jakuchō’s writing career has blossomed, and she takes on the project of writing a

Translator’s Notes  227

biography of Okamoto Kanoko (1889–1939), a poet, novelist, and Buddhist scholar. While occupied with this biography, she is approached by another editor with an offer to publish her first-person account of her own tangled love affairs. Written quickly, the resulting novel, The End of Summer, shoots her to literary fame, winning the Women’s Literary Prize in 1962.

12.  Mejiro Sekiguchidai-machi—Depression Feeling claustrophobic and oppressed by her life with Ryōta in Nerima, Jakuchō reacts in wildly contradictory ways. She first declares that she and Ryōta should marry, under the impression that it will somehow resolve their unhappiness. Then she pulls back, moving by herself to an extravagant high-rise apartment in Mejiro, a fashionable area of Tokyo. During her year in the Mejirodai, she suffers a long bout of depression that involves two suicide attempts. The Mejirodai was a favored residence for successful artists, and she mentions the names of several famous literary figures who lived there when she did. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), a godlike literary figure for Jakuchō, chronicled the changes in society and culture in his many novels and essays—of which the best known in the West are The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki) and In Praise of Shadows (In-ei Raisan). Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–1972) achieved fame as an anarchist and writer of proletarian literature. Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986) was a prize-winning author and playwright known for her novels and dramas exploring female sexuality. Several of her works have been translated into English: Onna Zaka, as The Waiting Years, by John Bester; Onna Men, as Masks, by Juliet Carpenter; and Nama Miko Monogatari, as A Tale of False Fortunes, by Roger Thomas. Enchi is also known for her translation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, a classic work that Jakuchō herself went on to translate into an even more accessible modern idiom.

13.  Nakano Honchō Dōri—The Final Break Stung by Ryōta’s plan to marry a young woman who worked at his office, Jakuchō decides to embark on a fresh start with him, somehow. Together they find an old house with a kura storeroom in back, which Ryōta converts into a study for her. She ends up working in it non-stop for two years, but comes to feel like a prisoner in her own home. After experiencing an epiphany on a foreign trip, she moves out upon her return to Japan and definitively breaks with Ryōta. They had been together for seven

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years. At the end of the chapter, while commuting back and forth from Kyoto to Tokyo, she decides to take a studio in the same building in Mejiro where she had lived before and stays for another four years.

14.  Hongō Ikizaka—Leaving the World By the end of the memoir, Jakuchō is a famous author who keeps busy writing all the time, yet a spiritual darkness begins to gnaw at her. Ever restless, she is told about a new apartment building going up in an old part of Tokyo, and she rushes to see it, immediately putting down a deposit. After moving to Hongō House, she enters into a new affair and continues to write, deepening her intellectual kinship with some of the early twentieth-century women authors she has written about. Here she reflects on her walks in the exact area where Higuchi Ichiyō once lived, the same neighborhood where Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), an early feminist writer and political activist, also lived. In her quest to become a nun, the subject of this chapter, Jakuchō was turned down by several Buddhist temples, presumably because of her notoriety. Finally, with the help of Kon Tōkō, a writer who was also a priest of the Chūsonji temple of Tendai Buddhism, she was accepted at Chūsonji as a novice nun. She describes her inability to write after taking orders. Yet after a period of isolation, she goes on to lecture and write prolifically, including her famous ten-volume translation of The Tale of Genji, published in 1998. Her memoir—this book, Basho— won the Noma Prize for literature in 2001.

About the Author Setouchi Jakuchō (1922–), born Setouchi Harumi, was a prolific essayist and novelist before taking Buddhist vows and becoming a nun of the Tendai sect at the age of fifty-one. Since then she has continued to publish and is celebrated in Japan for her sermons and social activism and for her acclaimed modern Japanese translation of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), published in 1998. Jakuchō received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2006.

About the Translator Liza Dalby is an anthropologist and writer specializing in Japanese culture. She is the author of numerous books, including Geisha (1983, 2008), Kimono: Fashioning Culture (1993), and The Tale of Murasaki (2000), a historical novel about Murasaki Shikibu.