Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The back of Cabaret Jūbankan faced Nishikiyamachi, and the Takase River flowed.

The Takase River was as narrow as a ditch. Yet there was indeed a river wind, carrying the sudden stealth of approaching autumn to the tips of weeping willow leaves, deepening the night around the halos of streetlamps.

Yet in the Hall of Cabaret Jūbankan, it was still a summer evening. The night of decadence—flared open like a trailing hem—swayed in hues as violently vivid as cockscomb flowers. Bare white skin, bared by evening dresses slit down the back, twisted like serpents; sweat glistened in those hollows, and in the summer night’s dance where men’s musk wrung out women’s musk, even the stiff-limbed young dancers’ steps began to cling stubbornly……. Into such a Hall, a single cricket—drawn by some longing—had strayed. The moment it sprang up, it was kicked by the tip of a quick-turning dance shoe. With a pitiful chirping cry, it breathed its last, but its voice was swallowed by the band’s clamor, and no one noticed.

Kizaki Saburō also did not notice. Kizaki Saburō was a photographer of pathologically sharp vision—so acute that one might think his naked eye had transformed into a camera lens. Given that he had visited Cabaret Jūbankan for three consecutive nights to photograph dance hall scenes commissioned by a graphic magazine, he should have been acutely attuned to compositions like a cricket on the hall’s floor. Yet he still missed it. Was it because he happened to be in the second-floor tearoom at that moment? Or perhaps…….

From the tearoom, he could take in the entire hall from corner to corner at a glance, but his vision couldn’t reach as far as the cricket. Even so, even if that had been possible, it would not have entered Kizaki’s eyes at that time.

Because Kizaki’s gaze had been fixed solely on pursuing the dancer Tsuji Yōko’s figure and facial movements. To possessed eyes, nothing else was visible. Moreover, this fixation had persisted stubbornly for three nights now. On that first night—the moment he glimpsed Tsuji Yōko and inexplicably startled—Kizaki’s eyes had already...

Alright. This dancer. I'll photograph this woman.

In an instant, his eyes transformed into camera lenses—yet for all their mechanical coldness, they burned with feverish intensity, glowing like noctiluca.

Kizaki peered into the lens as though peering into the depths of his own heart. Beyond the lens lay Yōko’s various poses. Yet by today, the third day, he had not once pressed the shutter. His refusal to use film until he found a satisfying composition—a master’s fastidiousness that occasionally verged on madness—was typical behavior. Yet why did he now feel such visceral repulsion toward poses he would normally have captured with eager haste?

Kizaki’s face was irritably dark, a shadow of melancholy having settled heavily upon it. But then, as if struck by a thought, he abruptly stood up and planted himself halfway down the stairs.

And the moment he pressed the shutter of his Leica aimed at Yōko, a dancer collapsed soundlessly, falling to the floor as if crumbling.

II It was a coincidence that seemed almost deliberate. The moment Kizaki’s Leica clicked its shutter and the moment the dancer’s body crumpled to the floor were nearly simultaneous—or rather, one might say the shutter’s sound felled her like the muffled report of a silenced pistol. Kizaki was startled, but so were the customers, the dancers, and even the musicians.

The band’s rhythm suddenly collapsed. On the main stage at the front of the first-floor hall was a swing band; in the balcony-style performance room jutting out from the second-floor corridor, a tango band—these two bands took turns performing, and at that precise moment, it just so happened to be the tango band’s turn.

The song was *La Cumparsita*. Because it was a song everyone knew, the way it fell apart became all the more apparent. But the musicians hurriedly regained their rhythm. It was the newly hired band, brought in starting tonight to replace the one that had been poached by another hall just yesterday. It was, so to speak, their debut performance. So tonight, at least, they were almost comically earnest. But by the time they had raised the recovered tempo, there was no one left dancing.

The step smoothly drew close, then with that momentum forcefully pushed the woman’s body away—even among tangos with passionately strong accents, so to speak, *La Cumparsita* was a song everyone wanted to dance to; even dancers who had retreated to their chairs, curled up like fish cakes, would grab another such figure and dance together as women. Yet Matsuri’s collapsed face was far too pale. This was no ordinary occurrence.

“What a disgrace.” “Too early to be taking a spill.” “Night’s barely begun!” “Some stumble-footed dancer?” “Who’s the klutz?”

The snide patron who’d begun to sneer—"Did she trip over her own steps and fall?"—also,

“Ah, Matsuri…” When she realized Matsuri had collapsed, she hurriedly released her partner dancer and—

“—Who was Matsuri dancing with?” “A judo thug?” Matsuri was not the kind of dancer who would ever trip by some fluke—not so unskilled as that. “When it came to dance, Matsuri; when it came to looks, Yōko.”

And this had become the established reputation at Jūbankan. “What? Matsuri…?” Yōko’s complexion—no, her complexion had already changed abruptly when Kizaki pressed the shutter, though why remained unclear. “Ah, I’m being photographed!” Her face—as if startled—suddenly turned away and rapidly paled.

“Excuse me.” Yōko moved away from the customer and tried to head toward Kizaki—but at that very moment, Matsuri collapsed. The photo weighed on her mind too, but more than that—Matsuri… She hesitated briefly, but in the end, Yōko slipped through the crowd and rushed toward Matsuri. Matsuri’s face held no trace of blood—even compared to Yōko’s pallor. Even the rouge on her cheeks had turned a bluish hue.

And there she lay—foaming at the mouth, writhing leech-like across the floor with faint twitches—while beside her, a young man stood dumbfounded.

III

“Ah, Kyō-chan!”

When Yōko saw the face of the young man standing rigidly there, dumbfounded beside where Matsuri had collapsed, she called out to him rather than to Matsuri.

At Jūbankan, he was a twenty-three-year-old youth who went by "Kyō-chan"—Kyōkichi. Kyōkichi could dance at any hall without tickets. He was a genius at dance. When dance teachers watched Kyōkichi’s steps, they felt utterly wretched by comparison. The dancers who partnered with Kyōkichi would forget all desire, gain, business sense, and even their sorrows—so much so that they lost themselves—enraptured in a sweet, tingling trance.

“When the band’s good, dancing to a favorite song with someone who leads so brilliantly—unless he’s just physically repulsive—there are moments when I suddenly think, I’d like to have this guy try to seduce me.” So went the confession of that flighty dancer—but even the most virtuous among them, when expertly guided into dance’s meditative state, might find themselves trembling under the illusion of surrendering to their partner.

Was this one of dance’s intense charms—burning almost to the point of physiological rhythm? Kyōkichi was among the rare few who possessed such allure. And he was beautiful. Though twenty-three, his face appeared almost boyishly innocent—a teenager’s guileless features. The pallor of his slender profile, delicate as a consumptive girl’s, stirred in women a sudden pang of helpless tenderness. Yet the nihilistic shadow over his fine brows, the decadent darkness encircling his long-lashed eyes, and the ironic creases flickering at the corners of his taut lips cast a chill bitterness across his face—a fleeting impression of a man a decade older.

The word “handsome” didn’t quite fit. It was, so to speak, a beauty that at once enchanted women and sent a chilling shiver down their spines. So, everyone wanted to dance with Kyōkichi. “I’ll give you back double the tickets, so dance with me. Hey, Kyō-chan, come tomorrow and dance with me, okay?” There were also women who would plead. With Kyōkichi, they must have felt that merely receiving tickets wouldn’t suffice. Matsuri had been dancing with that Kyōkichi tonight.

—Yōko recalled,

“What’s wrong? What on earth…?” she pressed urgently. “Huh…?” Kyōkichi glanced briefly at Yōko’s face.

“You—with Matsuri…”

"You were dancing with her, weren’t you?—" her eyes pressed next, but Kyōkichi didn’t answer. He pressed his lips into a sullen line and stared down at Matsuri with dumbfounded eyes.

The light from connected paper lanterns—pink, blue, lemon yellow—was tingeing the hall. But even as Matsuri’s face was dyed by those colors—no, because of them—it became visibly eerier, transforming into a waxen pallor of uncanny quality.

She looked to be in agony….

IV

Between the bubbles foaming from her mouth, the tip of her limp, dangling tongue was visible—and Matsuri let out a faint groan. The band played La Cumparsita in a clumsy rhythm to the empty hall, its sound all too easily drowning out Matsuri’s groans—yet even so, like a gust of wind slipping through cracks, Yōko’s ears caught the agony lacing those faint moans. “Oh no!” Matsuri’s groans might be wringing out the last of life’s agony—struck by this unpleasant premonition, Yōko jolted,

“Call a boy quickly—a doctor—”

"Call a boy quickly—" she thought in a panic, but the moment she turned around, Kizaki came into view.

Kizaki remained standing rigidly in the middle of the staircase. Jūbankan had originally been built as a cabaret exclusively for the Occupation Forces, so instead of chandeliers, they had hung Gion-style linked paper lanterns, and the staircase was painted vermilion in palace fashion. Especially the front staircase—its width was exceedingly vast, jutting boldly into the hall with its vermilion color—exactly like a kabuki stage. Standing in the center of such a staircase like an actor should have been mortifying enough, yet Kizaki showed no trace of embarrassment as he peered through his camera.

“Oh, not again…”

Thinking she might be photographed, Yōko involuntarily turned her face away—but the lens was focused on Matsuri’s collapsed body.

Even a dancer collapsing in the hall’s center held no particular distinction compared to the raw incidents churned out daily by the social climate. But driven by professional conviction—that this rare composition could anchor his *Hall Scene* feature for the graphic magazine—Kizaki desperately clung to his camera. Part of it was that photographing such scenes gave him an unconscious, somehow self-lacerating—and defiant—pleasure. Yet even Kizaki himself couldn’t fully grasp why.

The manager of Jūbankan—who usually stayed in his office—had come into the hall that night to observe the newly hired band’s performance. The moment he spotted Kizaki on the stairs, he immediately realized what Kizaki was trying to photograph. “Oh, this won’t do! Not here…” He tried to stop him—“If he took photos—” but Kizaki, in a frenzy, clicked the shutter, then restlessly made his way down the stairs and strode across the hall with large, possessed steps before vanishing.

It was over in an instant. Neither Yōko nor the manager had time to stop Kizaki. No, to say it was over in an instant—everything had happened in a single moment. As proof, when Matsuri’s body was eventually carried by the boys to the sofa in the office, *La Cumparsita* had not yet finished its piece.

V When *La Cumparsita* ended, people were finally reminded to dance, and the hall’s commotion cooled and subsided.

The manager promptly replaced the tango band with a swing band. He had been fully satisfied with the tango band’s impassioned performance, but it was to change the hall’s atmosphere.

And then, the manager drove the dancers—who had followed to the office out of concern for Matsuri’s condition—back to the hall.

“To the hall! To the hall!” “The customers are waiting—what are you dawdling around for?” “Dance! Dance!” and drove them back to the hall.

“But at least until the doctor…”

Until the doctor came, Yōko wanted to stay by Matsuri’s side. She had been closest to Matsuri. But,

“She’ll be fine. There’s no need to worry. Matsuri’s being watched by the office staff.” When told this, Yōko could no longer oppose the manager’s words. “Kyō-chan, why don’t you go dance too?” “Me? You’re kidding me.”

Kyōkichi said to the manager while looking at Matsuri’s waxen face. “You can’t dance with a patient!” “But then again，having you dance with others would be unfair to Matsuri.” “Because tonight，I’ve been completely reserved by Matsuri.” Yōko heard those words from behind and— “…? Matsuri… you…?”

“……? “Matsuri… reserved you…?”

With that, she turned around and tried to move closer to Kyōkichi—but in the office, she couldn’t get a detailed account. Moreover, the manager’s eyes were urging her on. Yōko invited him with a meaningful glance and led Kyōkichi out of the office,

“What exactly does it mean that Matsuri reserved you…?”

and peered into Kyōkichi’s profile with its long eyelashes. “Yesterday afternoon, I ran into Matsuri in Kyōgoku. “Because Matsuri was pouting like a baby—you’re so sloppy, the rubber ball’ll start bawling.” When I said this, she suddenly grabbed my hand—I got embarrassed. “In the middle of Kyōgoku, right…?” “Hmm… “And then…?” “Kyō-chan, dance with me tomorrow—just tomorrow, don’t dance with anyone else, spend the whole night dancing only with me—she said.” “Alright, I’ll dance for her.” “In exchange, I said, ‘Will you let me stay at Matsuri’s place tomorrow?’ — ‘Sure, I’ll put you up,’ she said — so I got her all to myself.”

“Do you… like Matsuri…?” “I don’t like or dislike her. “There’s only one woman I like—but even if my mouth rots—I can’t say it.”

Kyōkichi suddenly turned red. Yōko’s ears also turned red,

“Then why are you staying at Matsuri’s place…?” “Because today—that is, today being the day after yesterday’s tomorrow—is Saturday. I don’t have a place to stay on Saturday nights.”

“Oh! Why…?” “Saturday night…”

In the midst of trying to ask about Matsuri, Yōko found her own curiosity—now turned toward probing into Kyōkichi—unseemly even to herself.

VI “On Saturday nights, Mama’s husband comes over. So…” Kyōkichi answered in a tone as if it were someone else’s affair. “Mama… you mean… your… mother…?”

Yōko asked.

Kyōkichi suddenly burst out laughing.

The entrance bellboy turned around.

Feeling that gaze, Yōko realized for the first time how long they had been standing there talking,

“Let’s hurry.”

She urged in a whisper and gathered the hem of her dress. “I don’t got any mom.”

With that, Kyōkichi also cut across the lobby, “—It’s about the woman in the house where I’m staying.” “Everyone calls her ‘Mama,’ so…” “I also call her that”—but she could only catch half of those words.

The band’s noise suddenly came down upon the ears of the two as they approached the hall entrance. “Are you the second Mrs. Mama…?”

“Yeah. “The husband only comes on Saturdays.” “I must seem like a freeloader, right?” “That’s why I shouldn’t get caught by the husband.” Kyōkichi had leaned in close enough to hear, but when they entered the hall, Yōko—for some reason—suddenly pulled away from him,

“So you're Mama's kept man…? How gross.”

How filthy—she thought, turning her face away—and in that instant, the vermilion-lacquered staircase at the back of the hall struck her eyes in a more garish hue than usual.

Suddenly, the thought of Kizaki—holding his camera—flitted through her mind. Yōko’s eyebrows suddenly darkened.

“Huh…?”

Because they were just passing by the performance platform at that moment, it seemed Kyōkichi hadn’t heard. “It’s just as well you didn’t hear.”

Without looking at his face, Yōko said in a shrill voice. “Are you saying you’re Mama’s toy boy…? “No way.” “Mama’s a Fire Horse.” “She’s well past her prime.”

With that, Kyōkichi spoke with a maturity unbecoming of a twenty-three-year-old.

“What’s the problem? If she’s older anyway, might as well…” “Even if it’s twenty years…?” “Ha ha…. It’s just like a horror movie. Not my thing.”

“Who knows…”

“Why do you fixate on it so much?” Kyōkichi peered into Yoko’s face.

Radiant with austere elegance, her coldly mask-like face—unbecoming of a dancer—bathed in the pink glow of paper lanterns suddenly exuded a sophisticated sensuality. “Because it’s revolting.” “A swallow? How preposterous.” “If you were one, I’d sever ties immediately.” “Then if I’m not… would you take me in?”

Kyōkichi said abruptly.

“Huh…?” Given her line of work, Yōko had grown accustomed to being propositioned; while getting hit on could still anger her, she should have long since ceased being surprised by it—yet despite herself, she froze.

—What on earth had just happened?

At that moment, a man seated on a chair nodded to Yōko from afar.

7 The one who had nodded was Harutaka—the second son of Marquis Notake—a man in his early thirties. “Hey… will you let me stay?” While Kyōkichi repeated his plea—his twenty-three-year-old face wearing a teenage innocent expression—Yōko returned a nod to Harutaka as she listened. Notake Harutaka bore the nickname “Hopelessly Smitten Marquis”—a pun on his family name Notake—and was a regular patron of Cabaret Jūbankan. At Cabaret Jūbankan—alongside the third son of Duke Tōno who had swallowed cyanide the night before his scheduled detention as a war crimes suspect (whether to vent frustration or indulge inherent hedonism)—several so-called young masters of the aristocracy occasionally appeared to dance, only to have their exploits laid bare in a tabloid exposé.

Harutaka too had been one of those singled out, but whether due to innate obtuseness or simple indifference, he remained unfazed—of course, he didn’t rush around buying up copies of the magazine—and instead, thinking that if he had money like that to spare, he diligently bought tickets to frequent Cabaret Jūbankan. For one thing, to go into seclusion over something so trivial would require this “Hopelessly Smitten Marquis”... The Marquis was far too hopelessly smitten with Yōko. He never went to any hall other than Cabaret Jūbankan, and at Cabaret Jūbankan, he never danced with any dancer besides Yōko. When Yōko was dancing with other men, he would quietly sit on a single chair, remaining in the same position all the while, waiting persistently for Yōko herself.

When he came again tonight after the turmoil following Matsuri’s collapse and found Yōko nowhere in sight, he seemed to be shifting his gaze restlessly about. And when he finally spotted her and gave an eager nod, Yōko was talking with Kyōkichi—so, in a gesture befitting his sense of etiquette, he resigned himself to smoking another cigar before rising from his chair. Yet Kyōkichi lacked even a speck of such propriety—not enough to fill an ear pick.

“Hey.” “Let me stay.”

“……”

“Tonight….” “Can’t I…?”

“You’re unbelievable!”

Not merely in words but in genuine exasperation, Yōko— “—Why on earth do I have to let you stay…?” “Because Saturday nights—most women have prior engagements. Like Mama… Only Matsuri and Yōko are the ones who stay pure even on Saturdays…” “Like Mama…” “Only Matsuri and Yōko.” “The ones who stay clean even on Saturdays…” “But you’re monopolized by Matsuri, aren’t you?” “That’s why I’m talking about if something happens to Matsuri.” “If she dies or something, I’d have nowhere to stay tonight…” “I have this feeling Matsuri’s going to die…”

“She’ll die…? “You feel that way too…?”

Yōko suddenly grew worried,

“Oh, right. Enough of this talk—you go check the office. Check if the doctor has arrived. Hurry up and go check!” And seeing off Kyōkichi’s retreating figure as he left the hall—when she turned around—Harutaka stood before her eyes.

8

Yōko transferred the handkerchief from her right hand to her left,

“…………” Yōko grasped the hand Harutaka had extended. That was Yōko’s customary greeting to Harutaka—no, to all the patrons who came to her. Like a frivolous dancer,

“Oh my. You’re here.” To suddenly cling to someone or prattle away—her self-respect would not permit such things. Especially when she first stepped into the hall upon arriving in Kyoto—having fled her Tokyo home—she had been stiff as lead. She was as aloof as a noblewoman. Her beauty and refinement had even attracted patrons who found such qualities alluring, but others dismissed her as “just a dancer getting above herself”—these days, compared to prewar times, the hall’s caliber had declined. The dancers’ pride had deteriorated first and foremost. It had gotten to the point where the manager and senior dancers would warn them not to anger the customers.

“Fine, I’ll stop.” When warned, her young lady disposition would rear its head, but she finally restrained herself, thinking that to stop now would mean surrendering to life’s hardships. Moreover, as she reconsidered—that for a woman alone in this line of work bringing in new yen, there seemed no path but to either degrade herself further or soil her integrity—she gradually acclimated to the hall’s atmosphere, until she could at least manage a handshake.

Even if its caliber had declined, when it came to the hall, the patrons still tended to put on airs more than they would elsewhere. Therefore, even the pretentiousness of their handshakes felt surprisingly natural in the hall.

However, it was only this dancer whose handshake carried an innocent allure. Slipping past the dancer taking her tea break, Harutaka led Yoko to the hall’s center while thinking—

It wasn’t merely her appearance that gave that impression. To have one’s hand shaken by someone who had stayed over the previous night rather exuded decadence, but Yoko alone seemed as stiff as her dancing.

The song was *Along the Navajo Trail*. The song—its bassline’s repetitive toll reminiscent of horse bells—evoked the nostalgia of America’s fading western frontier, where Navajo descendants wandered like phantoms beneath endless prairie nights. It stirred Japanese sentimentalism, yet Yoko remained too rigid to surrender to the dance. During turns, she avoided techniques like clamping her partner’s knee between both thighs to spin—a restraint that preserved her virginal aura.

No—just as Kyōkichi had intuitively sensed that even Saturdays remained unsullied for her—Harutaka, this second son of the Notake Marquis, now reaffirmed through the sensation of his hand on her back his intuition: this woman had yet to wet her body even once.

“Tonight—without fail—I’ll take this woman somewhere…” The thought made his heart soar. If she came along, he felt certain of what would follow—but would she actually come? No—if he played his trump card line now, she wouldn’t be able to refuse his invitation! Harutaka suddenly uttered that line. “You attended Gakushūin’s women’s college.” “Am I right…?” “Wh-what…?” “Uh… no…”

Flustered, the moment she turned, the figure of Kyōkichi standing at the hall’s entrance came into Yōko’s view. Yōko’s heart jolted.

9

Just then, Rumi—a dancer who’d returned from Shanghai—and the plump back of Hamada, the black-market broker she’d been dancing with, collided with Yōko.

“Dumbass! You’re just shakin’ your ass doin’ that shimmy dance, so ’course we’re gonna collide, ain’t we? Pro!” Rumi tore into Hamada—who styled himself as “Pro-boy”—with her jaded tongue, but Yōko didn’t register a word of it.

She had no mind for such things. Harutaka’s unexpected words! And Kyōkichi’s expression! Yōko’s attention was involuntarily drawn toward Kyōkichi standing at the hall’s entrance, but when Harutaka suddenly turned again, he vanished from her view.

When Harutaka saw that Yōko was indeed flustered,

"This woman is as good as mine now."

—swiftly cutting his conviction into the hem of Yōko’s skirt like a blade through fabric—he executed a brilliant turn, “You’re the daughter of the Nakaseko family, aren’t you…?” “That’s not true.” “No use hiding it. In my sister’s graduation album, I saw your photograph.”

“…………” “I hear you were in the same class as my sister at Gakushūin.” “Probably… someone else’s…” “...To claim it’s just a resemblance—what a witless line, utterly lacking your usual spirit.” “Why do you…”

And then, swiftly turning again, “You’re hiding it so stubbornly. Though if I were a journalist, you might have reason to hide. Your father is, after all, the leading figure in political circles. That Nakaseko Kōzō’s daughter being a dancer at Cabaret Jūbankan…” “Don’t tell anyone! Please. I beg you.”

“So it’s true after all…” Harutaka’s dull, turbid eyes suddenly glittered as if confirming everything. Then, seized by some thought, “—I’m going to Tokyo tomorrow.” He let fall this abrupt, contextless phrase and stared at Yōko’s ear.

What a well-shaped ear! Harutaka was a man who felt no attraction to women with poorly shaped ears.

“To Tokyo…?” With eyes that seemed to ask—*Are you going to do something? Are you going to tell someone about this?*—Yōko looked at him, but Harutaka deliberately offered no reply,

“We won’t be able to meet for some time.” “I’d hoped to discuss this properly—even become your confidant—but…” “It seems tonight will be our only chance.”

At that moment, "Along the Navajo Trail" ended.

Harutaka pressed on in a rapid-fire tone,

“—However, tonight I’m going to Tamura. “Kiyamachi, below Shijō.” “Tamura—the restaurant with red lanterns hanging outside.” “When the hall closes, please come.” No sooner had he said, “I’ll be waiting for sure,” than—without waiting for a reply—he vanished from the hall in an instant.

Yōko threaded through the crowd to Kyōkichi’s side. “Matsuri...? Has the doctor come...?” “Has the doctor come…?” “He’s come. He’s come, but…”

Kyōkichi suddenly adopted an exaggerated Kyoto dialect. “He came, but it’s too late now.” “So… Matsuri was… after all…?”

“Cyanide!” “That fool Matsuri!”

10

Yōko rushed to the office while streaming tears.

Through tear-blurred eyes, the white cloth appeared hazy yet starkly vivid. Beneath that cloth lay Matsuri’s waxen face. Drawing nearer, flecks of lipstick clung to the center of her thin upper lip, dried to a somber crimson. Around her lips grew thick peach fuzz.

That seemed to inadvertently speak of Matsuri’s recent troubles—her not even having the will to shave her face—and it brought fresh tears. Yōko stood there in a daze for what felt like an eternity, but when she suddenly regained her senses, she could hear Kyōkichi’s voice from the next room, where he was apparently being questioned by the police. “…We were dancing *La Cumparsita*.” “Then Matsuri said that if she could die dancing *La Cumparsita* under Kyō-chan’s lead, she’d have no regrets—so I asked why, but she stayed silent.” “As we were dancing, Matsuri’s complexion suddenly changed, and then she turned deathly pale and collapsed right there.”

“Did you see her put anything in her mouth?”

“I didn’t see her put anything in her mouth, but she seemed to be chewing something. Matsuri was the type of dancer who couldn’t stand having nothing in her mouth—always chewing gum or sucking on breath mints—so I didn’t think it was strange at the time, but now that I think about it…” Had she put a cyanide-laced capsule in her mouth before dancing and bitten into it? Eventually, the police questioned Kyōkichi about his relationship with Matsuri, but when they determined it was nothing significant, they proceeded to interrogate two or three office staff members and then Yōko as well.

“Matsuri confided everything in me, but I never heard of any circumstances that would lead to her death.” “Did Matsuri have troubles so severe they could lead to her death?” Yōko asked a question in return.

Since her earnings were substantial, she wasn’t struggling financially. Nor did there seem to be any rumors circulating about intimate relationships with men. As the police withdrew without gaining any leads, the strains of the final *Goodnight* song soon began to drift through the air.

Kyōkichi took Yōko to a corner of the office.

“I’ve finally lost my place to stay,” he said. “Let me stay tonight.” “No,” Yōko replied. “You’re booked by Matsuri tonight, right? You’ve got to hold a wake for her… If you hold a wake, you can stay at Matsuri’s apartment.” “That makes sense,” he conceded. “Alright, let’s do that.” His tone shifted again, wheedling now: “In return, you’ll let me stay this Saturday, right? Hey—I’ve got nowhere to stay. Right?” He looked like a child throwing a tantrum. Yōko smiled ambiguously and nodded.

He looked like a child throwing a tantrum. Yōko smiled and nodded ambiguously.

“I’d feel uneasy holding the wake alone.” “You’re going to the wake too... right?”

“Yes. But I might be a little late.” “Are you going somewhere?” “Tamura.” “Tamura…? You’re not talking about Tamura in Kiyamachi…?”

“Kiyamachi.” “Don’t go. Stay away from Tamura.” “Don’t go!”

Kyōkichi suddenly shouted.

Eleven When told not to go, Yōko became all the more contrary. Without asking for reasons—only Kyōkichi’s imperious tone striking her pride— “You don’t have the right to order me around—not even enough to fill an ear pick.” Her hesitation was decided by this single retort, and now neither her voice nor her diction belonged to a dancer. “Then do whatever you want!”

Kyōkichi also bit his lip but deliberately muttered as if to himself, “But has Yōko started frequenting Tamura too?”

“Is going to a restaurant not allowed…?”

“Don’t talk to me like some principal scolding a female teacher…,” she sneered, but Kyōkichi was just as sharp-tongued, “Naive schoolmarms are cute because they think Tamura’s just a restaurant.—Though they do serve food there, you know.” “They serve everything.” “They’ll serve up scams and debts.” “They serve two pillows.” “They serve two sets of nightwear.” “A caged bird that can’t escape even if it tries.” “It’s not just some ordinary rendezvous spot.”

“Oh reeeally…? You sure know a lot about it.”

At the very moment he might have gasped, she said it with deliberate cynicism. “That, I know. But I…”

He was staying at Tamura. He tried to say, “Because I’m Tamura’s Mama’s lodger—” but ultimately couldn’t bring himself to voice it, “Instead of that—you’d better not come to the wake after returning from Tamura. “It’d defile the deceased.” “What do you mean by that…?”

Even if she tried to parse his meaning, it didn’t immediately cohere—Yōko was a girl who knew nothing of such matters, but— “Oh—so you think I’ll be seduced there.” “How rude.” “Don’t be absurd…”

With that—half-persuading herself—she went upstairs to the second-floor changing room. And as she lowered her evening gown to her waist and swiftly slipped into her chemise—perhaps because the final song had ended—the dancers came clamoring over.

On Saturdays, even the dancers’ feet burned like fire. They grew so exhausted, yet this was the only room where they could speak at full volume—especially tonight, with Matsuri’s incident hanging over them. Some dancers kept chattering away with their chemises still draped over their heads. But Yōko stayed silent as always. Ever since being accused of “putting on airs,” she’d withdrawn further from the group. Wordlessly buttoning her plain cobalt dress—using a round cord tied in a bow instead of collar fasteners—she barely noticed Shanghai-returned Rumi approaching belatedly.

“Damn, that’s brutal…” said Rumi as she came up late, chattering away to herself.

“Tonight I gotta deal with the patron, and tomorrow I was plannin’ to sleep till two—but now it’s some damn manager’s errand.” “There was a man who took photos of where Matsuri collapsed, I tell ya.” “Get those photos by morning—if they get published, we’re screwed. Go do it with my poor nerves.” “They don’t give a damn about using us dancers.” “The manager’s got way more nerve.”

What had Yōko been thinking? She approached Rumi, "I could go instead tomorrow for you."

Rumi peered at Kizaki’s business card, which she had retrieved from the manager’s desk.

Luminous clock

1

The former Kyoto Takarazuka Theater in Sanjo Kawaramachi showed films exclusive to the Occupation forces, and on Saturday nights, Jeeps and trucks lined up. When Kizaki left Jūbankan and arrived at Kawaramachi Street, it was precisely when the theater’s neon sign—flashing in the night sky—

“KYOTO THEATRE”

The tempo of the orange blinking lights encircling the pink electric letters suddenly grew lively; the feet of American soldiers spilling from the theater were swift, but Kizaki’s feet moved with restless urgency. He was agitated. Why…? Kizaki’s photographs—where lenses had transmuted into flesh—bore such fierce individuality that nihilism seemed to seep from the photographic paper itself. Their compositions perpetually evoked night with a tinge of decadence, and tonight’s photos of Yōko and Matsuri too had aligned flawlessly with his cherished theme of “nocturnal poses.”

However, was it merely preference that drove him to deliberately photograph the beautiful Yōko in her most unsightly poses and to find grotesque poses in Matsuri’s collapsed figure? He likely wouldn’t have gone that far in other places. In other words, it was because of his aversion to halls. This was because his deceased wife had been a dancer.

His deceased wife’s name was Yaeko.

When Kizaki Saburō met Yaeko during his student days, however, she was no longer a dancer and was working at the reception desk of a hotel in the Hanshin area. After a long four-year courtship and marriage, Kizaki could not dance, and though she collected dance records, she did not desire to dance. Two years later, Yaeko contracted mild pneumonia and went to recuperate at Shirahama Onsen in Nanki. One day, when he went to visit her, Yaeko was dancing with a stranger in the inn’s hall. It was *La Cumparsita*. While coughing, she nevertheless danced rapturously.

The instant he saw his wife dancing—and for the first time witnessed her held in another man’s arms—Kizaki found himself numbly calculating how many men his wife from her dancer days had been embraced by each night. The confession that even before their marriage she had already had affairs with a few hall patrons was suddenly recalled, and raw jealousy—as though fresh—vividly resurfaced. Kizaki was no longer the husband magnanimous toward his wife’s past; scorched by jealousy, he plunged into decadence.

And this fire of jealousy had not been extinguished even after Yaeko’s death two years prior; when he first came to Jūbankan and saw Yōko—that very instant—it blazed anew.

Yōko resembled the dead Yaeko. Thus, having resolved to photograph Yōko and pursued her beauty, Kizaki’s jealous eyes—which in the inn’s hall could only perceive Yaeko’s form as ugly—rebelled against Yōko’s beauty, making every pose appear as the pitiful ugliness of a woman’s instinct being dragged along by men, and after three futile days of this,

“Alright! Now that it’s come to this, I’ll capture that woman in her most vile pose!” Consumed by this masochistic gratification, he pressed the shutter—and Matsuri... The grotesque framing he imposed on her collapsed form became his sneer at the hall itself. Pale from distorted exhilaration, Kizaki began walking down Shijō Street toward Maruyama Park.

And then, as he climbed the stone steps of Gion, a young girl suddenly came darting out of the darkness.

2 “Hey mister, can I bum a light?” Thudding along, Kizaki found the girl standing defiantly before him, legs spread like a bus conductress. Her voice was youthful, but when Kizaki lit his lighter, the face of the girl—not yet fully grown into adulthood—flashed into view, white and pale; she must have been seventeen or eighteen. However, the girl skillfully lit the flame like a thirty-year-old geisha, “Hey mister, how far you goin’…?”

Without waiting for his reply—that he was returning to his apartment—she followed along, exhaling smoke. “Still got business with me…?” “Since the night’s dangerous, ya went outta your way to walk me this far—ain’t no problem, right?” “That ‘far’... How far is that…?” “And what about you…?” “Toward Seikanji.”

“I’m headin’ that way too.”

“Bullshit!” He tried to say it, but Kizaki walked silently alongside the girl through Maruyama Park and turned toward Kōdaiji Temple. The women lingering around Sanjō Bridge, Shijō Bridge, and Maruyama Park were nearly all of dubious character—he had heard the rumors and seen it himself enough times to immediately assume as much—yet something about this girl kept him from definitively categorizing her as such.

It wasn’t because she was too young…… Seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds were a dime a dozen. And while girls of that age—those of dubious character—showed an uncleanliness in their slathered white powder and lipstick, thick with the vulgarity of youth, this girl’s makeup-free, clean skin carried a distant nostalgia. A white yukata patterned with purple ox-drawn carriages and a purple *heko* sash—even as she smoked like a delinquent girl, something about her evoked the sound of a middle-school harmonica.

But even so, he felt no interest. He merely refrained from telling her to leave—no, without uttering a single word, he let her follow—until eventually turning from the Kōdaiji Temple road onto the Kiyomizu pilgrimage path. Winding and twisting upward, Mount Otowa loomed near, and there stood the Seikansō apartment, solitary amidst the woods.

Around the dull glow of the gate lamp, a profound stillness swirled like a halo, abruptly making it feel as though the night had deepened.

Kizaki pointed from afar, “There it is—my apartment…” he spoke for the first time.

“...Where’s your home?” “Surely it’s not somewhere in that mountain.” “Go home!” “That’s cruel.” “From a place like this…” “Too scared to go home?” “The problem’s you following me.” “There’s no ghosts here—run home!” “Mister… you alone in your apartment…?” When he gave a firm, sullen nod, the girl suddenly— “Well then, lemme stay too.” “Oh…?”

She peered into Kizaki’s face. The sweat-smelling hair, along with its odor, brushed against his nose.

3

“No!” “Quit sayin’ that and let me stay!” …………

“I don’t got nowhere to go back to.” “Why is that…?” “I’ve run away from home.”

“Hmm… Why’d you do something so stupid?” “…………” “Even if you’ve got nowhere to return to, there must be somewhere you can stay. Just stay at an inn.” “I don’t got the money to stay.”

The place was in a thicket, swarming with mosquitoes, and as they stood talking, Kizaki’s nerves began to fray, so he abruptly pulled out three ten-yen bills and— “Then take this and go stay at an inn!”

He handed it to the girl, feeling both disappointed—*So she was just a common night flower after all*—and oddly unburdened, then walked into Seikansō’s entrance without looking back.

After climbing the stairs to the second floor, the six-tatami room at the end was Kizaki’s. Within the six-tatami space, he had partitioned off about two mats with black curtains to create a darkroom for developing film. After placing his camera inside and lighting mosquito-repellent incense, there came a knock at the door. When he opened it, the girl stood there slumped in dejection, though her face alone maintained a strained grin. “Aren’t you going home?” “Yeah.”

When he saw her stick out her tongue with a playful flick—Kizaki nearly burst out laughing and found himself unable to send her away. The girl stepped briskly inside, “Mr. Kizaki, you’ve got a nice camera there.”

She seemed to have already seen the nameplate with Kizaki’s name hanging outside the room. He did not answer that, “You’re from Osaka, aren’t you?” Being an Osaka native himself, Kizaki found the girl’s dialect oddly nostalgic. “Yeah. It’s burned down.” The girl cast a quick glance toward the darkroom’s curtain.

“And your father…?” “Prison… Pre-trial detention….” She said with a composed face that he was in detention, but suddenly her voice took on a lively tone— “When someone’s in pre-trial detention, it costs money, you know. You gotta send care packages, gotta grease the guards’ palms,… and lawyers won’t lift a finger unless you stuff theirs with cash.”

Startled that this girl harbored such concerns, he asked if she had a mother, when suddenly— “I hate Mom.” And yet, the vehemence of her words took him by surprise; as he watched her thin eyebrows twitch restlessly, “I hate that woman with her mistress mentality.” “Nothing but men…” She seemed to be putting on a front. But Kizaki had no interest in asking further, “Go to bed!”

With that, he pulled out a futon from the closet.

The girl’s expression suddenly hardened as she stared at Kizaki’s movements.

4

As Kizaki, sensing a sudden femininity in her hardened expression, began laying out the bedding, the girl startledly jumped up and stood facing away in the corner of the room.

Of the six-tatami room, two tatami were used for the darkroom, so it was cramped. It would be natural to assume she had simply stood up and moved to the corner to avoid being in the way of laying out the bedding—but was Kizaki overinterpreting things by sensing she had startledly jumped up?

“How long has it been since you ran away from home?”

Kizaki suddenly asked.

“Ten days!”

Kizaki cast a glance at the rounded curve of the girl’s hips—she who had answered with her back turned—and hurriedly averted his eyes. Though her yukata and heko obi had evoked a faint nostalgia in him, perhaps because she had tightly cinched her waist, Kizaki found himself contemplating the girl’s ten days of life while gazing at the rounded curve of her hips. The flame of a borrowed cigarette in the dark. Yet this was not Kizaki’s lustful gaze. Rather, he felt a painful unease and revulsion.

He had associated it with the figure of a woman on a surgical table. Bed, surgical operation, young woman’s naked body. The sensation of raw pain! There were no women who willingly underwent surgery. But to endure this was the sad fate of patients—no, of women. The resignation of a woman lying on a surgical table! Forced self-abandonment! A state of unconsciousness! The instinct to cling to the surgeon, the anxiety! And hatred and resentment… Masochistic pleasure! The joyously celebrated ritual of the wedding night was a surgical spectacle. It was no mere spectacle. The surgical scalpel! The fateful pathos of women’s physiology had always been acutely painful to Kizaki. Perhaps this was because his jealousy toward his late wife Yae had warped Kizaki’s perception of female physiology.

Before marrying Kizaki, Yae had been involved with two or three men. However, he couldn’t bring himself to believe Yae had actively sought those relationships; instead, he wanted to frame it as timid Yae having been ensnared by the traps surrounding a dancer’s profession—left with no escape. Yae had reportedly been eighteen or nineteen at the time. The men were good-for-nothing delinquents from the streets. An innocent girl of eighteen or nineteen and those delinquent boys—what cruelty!

Kizaki’s association with surgical operations likely stemmed, in part, from his inexplicable hatred toward those men. Moreover, when he considered that Yae had been dragged along by the allure of those men’s bodies despite her desire to escape, Kizaki’s pity for the fragility of women’s physiology swelled into something nearing indignation. Pity and revulsion—there was no middle ground between those extremes. In other words, Kizaki could only conceive of women’s bodies in exaggerated terms. However, jealousy is a passion perpetually warped by exaggeration.

What Kizaki felt toward that young girl was indeed the same thing. Here was a woman’s body! As Kizaki alternated between looking at the girl’s touchingly thin shoulders and her rounded hips, he grew increasingly irritated and suddenly called out.

“Hey!”

5 “What…?”

She turned around, but Kizaki found himself momentarily speechless.

He had no idea why he had called out to her himself, and finally,

“What’s your name…?” When he asked, Kizaki’s voice was oddly dry. “I’m Chimako.” “Hehe…” “Pretty weird name, ain’t it…?” She giggled innocently, but when she suddenly noticed the laid-out bedding, “...There’s only one futon…?”

“There’s only one pillow too.” “I lost everything in the Osaka disaster. This is all I have left.” “I’m gettin’ sleepy.” “You don’t mind if I lie down here…?” Still wearing her sash, she lay prone and pinched the handbag tossed near the bedding’s edge between her bare toes. With a flick of her foot, she tossed it over her shoulder to the bedside and pulled out a cigarette. “Gimme a light…” “Oh, I’ll light it with this.”

Using the mosquito-repellent incense’s flame, she began to smoke eagerly, but suddenly lay flat on her back and stared fixedly at the ceiling.

Her eyes glinted brightly. And then she didn’t move for a while, as if fossilized. Yet her whole body seemed acutely aware of Kizaki. Even blindfolded and made to inhale anesthetic—like a patient faintly hearing the clink of a scalpel against its tray.

“What are you thinking about? The ash—” “It’ll fall,” Kizaki said as he edged closer while becoming aware for the first time of the violent man’s blood pulsing through his veins.

Was it an inexplicable impulse to cruelly torment the very object of his pity instead—or a self-destructive compulsion to be drawn instead to what he repelled and detested?

Even one who loves with sublime feelings may sometimes confront their beloved with an insect-like instinct. Moreover, Chimako was displaying the pathos and ugliness of dubious women writhing in the nighttime streets of recent days.

Pity is the fateful passivity of lying upon a surgical table!

Ugliness is the fragility of sensuality unaware of its own ugliness, and curiosity! Yet this very pity and ugliness formed the core themes of the nocturnal poses Kizaki captured. And beneath such decadence seethed his jealousy toward his deceased wife. He felt no carnal desire.

So, when asked what she was thinking about, Chimako—

“...About my father who was in prison...” When Kizaki saw her murmur this and then suddenly exhale the deeply inhaled smoke in a ring, gazing vacantly as it faded away, he jerked his hand back and could no longer embrace Chimako.

At that moment, footsteps sounded in the hallway, “Mr. Kizaki, I’m back!” came the voice.

6

By the voice alone, he immediately realized it was Sakano, the musician from the neighboring room. He must have returned after the hall closed. His voice, more hoarse and unhealthy than usual, listlessly echoed through the late hour and the weight of the accordion slung over his shoulder. “Oh, you’re back…”

Kizaki let out a shrill voice, but even that voice trembled shamefully and unhealthily. Realizing he was grotesquely agitated and growing despondent, soon— “Mr. Kizaki! Mr. Kizaki!”

Sakano’s voice called out again—“Come here”—and even that shrill tone trembled wretchedly. For an invitation to mahjong, it sounded unusually hurried and flustered. Kizaki stood up from Chimako’s bedside, sensing a sharp, glinting gaze piercing his back. “Is something the matter?”

he entered Sakano’s room.

“My wife has run away.”

The handwriting showed unexpected skill yet sloped downward to the right—a farewell note lay there. "...I can't go on living with a Philopon addict..." ...and so it went.

Philopon, contrary to sedative-hypnotics, was an injectable drug that temporarily stimulated the central nervous system to induce wakefulness and excitement. Sakano had apparently acquired a taste for it back when he performed on stage with “comic storytelling and accordion” as his selling points, injecting this potent drug as frequently as smoking cigarettes. Even Kizaki had been taken aback by the sheer quantity and frequency. If even Kizaki was appalled, Sakano’s wife— “It’s twenty-three yen for a box of ten vials, right? There are days when he injects two whole boxes of it, so it’s unbearable. My salary just goes to Philopon...”

She’d grumbled about how “it all just flies away,” but in the end, it seemed she’d fled for good—they’d bought Philopon before rice, leaving no money left for it.

“Damn it! What a damn amateur! ‘Please put up your Sakano Clinic sign and live happily giving yourself injections every day.’ She’s mocking me! No, forget the letter—Mr. Kizaki, just look at this.” Sakano showed the fragments of the stockpiled injectable ampoules his wife had smashed on her way out, his ashen face growing even more ashen as he stood listless—but then he let out a hollow laugh. “Like an inrō, y’know.”

and pulled out a box of Philopon from his pocket. “I never let this leave my side.” “Heh…” “Without this, I can’t play the accordion.” “In any case…”

First, one vial... and two cc—he injected it into his arm riddled with needle marks, then patted the spot repeatedly. “Please inject me too.” Believing this was the best way to comfort Sakano, Kizaki offered his arm—partly because he had intended to inject Philopon and develop the photos of Yōko and Matsuri through the night. “To keep from touching Chimako…”

"To develop the film—" he muttered, and when Kizaki returned to his room, Chimako had vanished without a trace.

And when he entered the darkroom, the Leica that should have been there was nowhere to be found, and in the darkness, only the luminous clock’s blue hands silently pointed to 11:20.

Aristocrat

I

“It’s 11:20.” “Oh, come on...” When asked the time, Takako deliberately extended her plump white arm—ample with excess flesh—before Harutaka.

—It was a room on the second floor of Tamura. Takako changed her outfit five times a day, but on Saturday nights, she often opted for a casual ensemble of white shorts and a white shirt. The clothing was as charmless as a boy’s, but the proprietress of Tamura calculated that this very quality would instead become the allure of a woman in her forties. The limits of allure one could earn through the scarlet hue of an underrobe were trivial at best—such was this woman’s conviction, honed over years navigating the water trade catering to men, from her days as the top hostess at a certain Ginza salon fifteen years ago to the present.

“Rather than eroticism, it’s exoticism.” This was the precept Takako had imparted to her hostesses when she ran a bar in Osaka. But the hostesses did not grasp its meaning. Those who assumed Ginza-style sophistication would appeal in Osaka were at least on the right track; most simply copied foreign film makeup, thinking exoticism meant slathering on heavy eyeshadow and thick false eyelashes—leaving behind only grotesque effects, a complete failure.

What Takako had meant was the allure of white shorts and a white shirt. Yet for such attire to succeed, beauty was a prerequisite. Fortunately, Takako was beautiful. But beauty alone did not guarantee success. For beauty to succeed, what she called exoticism was necessary. A man could tie down a geisha brimming with allure for a fixed sum of money. To draw men to herself and extract limitless funds from them, there remained nothing but exoticism—or so Takako had reasoned, wielding the razor’s edge of cunning within the constrained imagination of a woman in the water trade.

And she had succeeded. However, it goes without saying that the success she spoke of was as a mistress—that is, as someone living in the shadows. Yet in that outfit, she had made one miscalculation. She had failed to notice that her attire sometimes appeared ridiculous. This was a critical oversight. At the very least, seeing Takako’s getup had made Harutaka want to burst into laughter. Still, if the man called Harutaka possessed any redeeming quality at all, it would be his faint grasp of polite etiquette.

Instead of bursting out laughing, Harutaka decided to compliment her watch. Harutaka was too much a marquis to praise her diamond ring, and besides, the diamond clashed garishly with her carefully chosen shorts and shirt—a fleeting glimpse into the pitiable vanity of a woman with patrons.—The watch’s design was unconventional. “Let me see!” When he tried to peer at the watch that displayed not just hours, minutes, and seconds but also dates and days of the week,

“It’s hard to see, isn’t it?”

Takako scooted closer and drew her body in sharply.

“It’s certainly hard to see.”

While nodding along, Harutaka imbued the words "hard to see" with the meaning of "ugly."

II

Suddenly subjected to Takako’s coquetry, even Harutaka found himself exasperated. In such situations, Harutaka was too young to clumsily succumb to her advances. Though formidable when it came to women, the lewdness and cruelty of a man in his forties had yet to seep into his being, and as he still appeared somewhat innocent, he did his best to maintain that veneer. In other words, beneath the guileless sweetness that had earned him nicknames like the Hopelessly Smitten Marquis, he concealed a womanizer’s relentless persistence. He wasn’t particularly clever—but this was proof he wasn’t a fool.

However, it would be too harsh to flatly declare that this outward appearance of innocent sweetness was nothing but a mask. He had made calculations, but it wasn’t entirely calculation through and through. He still blushed with a naive naturalness—blushed like a teenager. What set him apart from a teenager, however, was the cunning of a man in his twenties—one who understood both the risks and rewards of feigned embarrassment. And Harutaka had reached the final year of his twenties. Twenty-nine—a troublesome age.

Just as Harutaka was too young, Takako was too advanced in years. If Takako had been younger, Harutaka would not have blushed so much. The allure of the term "old-blooming cherry tree" lasted only until thirty-three at best. Beyond that age, the term became something that—even for the pride of those in their twenties—was physically intolerable.

Harutaka estimated Takako’s age to be thirty-five or thirty-six, though she herself claimed to be thirty-two. However, in reality, Takako was born in a fire-horse year (hinoeuma), so she was forty-one this year.

Harutaka’s exasperation was not without reason, though to claim he felt thoroughly exasperated would be an overstatement. While maintaining an exasperated expression, Harutaka nevertheless kept his grip on Takako’s plump arm throughout his inspection of the watch. Having calmly noted Takako’s pounding heartbeat, it must have been the vestige of self-mockery remaining in Harutaka that imbued the words "It’s a hard-to-read watch" with the meaning of "ugly."

To speak of implications—he didn’t go so far as to let Takako’s body lean against his chest, but he certainly allowed a suggestive nuance to linger. In shogi terms, it was a move that didn’t deliver check but left attacking potential in reserve! The opponent he could corner with a check would arrive before long.

It was Yōko.

Weighing the difference in allure between Yōko and Takako,

“That’s a nice watch.” Harutaka deliberately fidgeted and pulled back. Takako’s face showed no expression at all. The fiery gaze abruptly cooled off completely. “This woman is coming on to me.”

The chill in the air was so mocking that it nearly made Harutaka’s conceit feel like a fleeting delusion. In a way, both parties maintained impeccable attitudes. For Harutaka, who was waiting for Yōko, and for Takako, who had a patron waiting downstairs… “Well then, please take your time…”

And with that, Takako soon left.

But then, for some reason, she suddenly turned back again.

III

Harutaka was slightly flustered. Takako’s shorts, pressed by the weight of her hips, had creased into hollows; when she stood up, the rounded curve of her waist split into two, mirroring a naked silhouette—a sudden comical yet raw sensuality swayed in her retreating figure. The exposed knees-down were plump and springy; the smooth, polished whiteness of a woman who had moistened her body since youth and been refined by men’s touch stretched out straight.

For Harutaka, who was eagerly awaiting Yōko, [Takako] held no particular allure to stir his heart, yet his gaze was nonetheless drawn to her retreating figure. As he stared after her, Takako’s sudden return left him flustered. Suddenly—though in reality—Takako lumbered in, her voice quiet. “Next time you come, please come alone.” Though born in Hokkaido, she said this in unexpectedly accentless words and quietly left again.

While Takako remained unfazed by maintaining multiple men simultaneously, she could not tolerate men keeping multiple women in return—as if compensating through this balance. Could the notion that men with multiple women were unclean be what barely sustained this woman-with-multiple-men’s own sense of purity? Yet whether fortune or misfortune for her, no man who might satisfy this purity had ever materialized.

At least, the men who came to Tamura rarely came alone. On the surface, it was a restaurant, but in reality, it functioned as a lodging house specializing in trysts—so naturally, there were no men who came without a woman. After the bar she had been running in Osaka burned down, Takako temporarily engaged in clandestine black-market meals at a rented house in Ashiya’s Yamate district. But with the war’s end, she set her sights on Kyoto—a city spared from firebombing—and purchased the shuttered restaurant in Kiyamachi for the bargain price of 150,000 yen.

After investing two million yen in renovations and furnishings, she established Tamura with a layout where every room had a locked annex, exquisitely crafted decorations, black-market cuisine prepared by a top-tier chef, morning baths, and a service that laundered and pressed shirts worn at night by morning. This shrewd business strategy—keenly attuned to postwar Kyoto’s atmosphere as a city of women and pleasure—quickly hit its mark. Witnessing how Kiyamachi’s inns and teahouses were utterly overwhelmed by this Osaka-based capital only deepened Takako’s confidence in her nightlife trade, even recalling the formidable fortune of her fire-horse birth year. Yet unlike her bar days, customers who came to Tamura now arrived accompanied by women—banquets being the sole exception. A man who had set his sights on this place—though he occasionally came alone—was waiting for a dancer.

As she thought this—the shop thriving yet still lonely, having taken many lovers and made money but never once having plunged into passionate love before crossing forty—she descended the stairs to her parlor, deliberately slowing her steps to suppress her restlessness, only to find a man in a yukata sprawled out,

“Hey, that girl ain’t here today.” “What’s goin’ on with her?”

IV

The one who had suddenly spoken was the only man who came to Tamura without a woman—in other words, Kimongi Shōzō, from whom Takako had borrowed the two million yen for Tamura’s renovations. Kimongi Shōzō had an unusual surname, but he was an even more eccentric man than that. He was, throughout the year, “I’m the son of a toothpick whittler.” he would declare proudly.

Though born into lowly origins, he made no attempt to hide them and displayed not a trace of servility. He was handsome but never tried to woo women himself. He had been a regular at Takako’s bar since his days as a clerk at a Kitahama stockbroker’s. One time, a barmaid “I’m going to visit Kuni’s mother because she’s ill…” and then asked him for travel expenses. He gave her twice the amount she had requested. However, when it turned out that the barmaid had gone home for an arranged marriage meeting, Shōzō—

“Visiting a sick person and a marriage meeting are just one character apart, but when you think about it, they’re worlds apart.” He laughed. And when that barmaid’s marriage arrangement had been settled and she returned to the bar to give her notice,

“Here’s yer funeral expenses.” He gave her a wedding gift.

However, within half a year, the barmaid separated from her husband and returned to her original bar. And then, she tried to make Shōzō her patron. He gave her money but made no move to touch her. The woman invited him to a hotel. He reserved a separate room. The woman became the laughingstock of the bar.

That was the year he turned thirty. Five years had passed, and Shōzō, now thirty-five, had established an office for Kimongi Trading Company in postwar Kitahama. When Takako went to consult him about Tamura’s renovation costs—wondering whether he had made four or five hundred thousand yen in stocks—he simply said: “When you go to Kyoto, let me stay.” And gave her two million yen.

Takako inferred this likely meant becoming his mistress and put on an air of complete understanding—yet even after that, Shōzō came every Saturday night without ever making an attempt to court her. Unable to endure it any longer, Takako finally forced herself to woo this beautiful patron—but at that moment, Shōzō said:

“I’m the son of a toothpick whittler. I’ll give money to women, but I won’t use money to court them. If a woman falls for me and comes my way first—then I’ll do the courting properly.” Takako stiffened at his fierce pride, yet there remained something about this thirty-five-year-old man that eluded her comprehension.

“What?! The son of a toothpick whittler…”

She thought, but the razor-sharp light pressing in was chillingly too keen. The mask-like beauty of his expressionless face also unnerved her. So, “That girl ain’t here today. What’s up with her?” When suddenly told this, her heart lurched.

“That girl…?”

Wondering if he had noticed about Kyōkichi—that she only lodged him elsewhere on Saturdays instead of keeping him at Tamura—she muttered to herself,

“Hmm.” It was about Chimako. Chimako…?

V

“Chimako…?”

Deliberately echoing his question, Takako began taking off her white shirt.

Shōzō nodded silently, instantly reading the unanswerable expression in Takako’s furrowed brows before looking at her now-bare upper body. Under the white shirt lay no chemise—breasts that had once borne a child yet bounced as lushly as a twenty-year-old girl’s, thick and obscene. The child she had given birth to was Chimako.

Sixteen years ago, when Takako was working at a certain salon in Ginza. At that time, Takako had many literati and painters among her hangers-on,

“Come as Stendhal tomorrow.” When told to do so, she would appear in a two-tone evening dress of red and black from *The Red and the Black*, “Today’s *The Tale of Genji*.” So immersed was she in literary pretensions that she would even arrive in a plain purple kimono—but the patron she had chosen, Himegami Ginzō, was an Osaka ironworks owner who naturally had no connection to literature whatsoever. Instead, he had money. Takako bore Ginzō’s child. Chimako. Born poor and becoming a nightlife hostess early on, Takako had come to believe that wielding a woman’s two weapons—beauty and flesh—to their utmost was the sole way to survive harsh times. Through nearly the same self-preservation instinct that led feudalistic parents to weigh lineage, wealth, and education in choosing their daughters’ spouses, Takako became a woman who measured men by their worth as patrons. And while using men, she had come to see them as enemies.

So even when she gave birth to Chimako, she considered it something she had been made to do. However, because Ginzō doted on Chimako, when his legal wife died, he was able to take her in as his successor—but Ginzō had already gone bankrupt. He had invested in a sunken ship salvage project, and it had failed.

Abandoned by Takako, Ginzō fled to Manchuria and subsequently vanished; just as he had cleanly cut ties, the war ended, and he unexpectedly returned to mainland Japan. When Chimako saw her father—emaciated beyond recognition and come to rely on Tamura—she took enough joy for both herself and the displeased Takako, letting him stay in a vacant room. But one night, Ginzō confronted Takako. When Takako coldly rejected him and tried to expel him from Tamura, Ginzō stormed out on his own—but a month later, for some crime he had committed, he had been sent from Osaka’s Minami Police Station to the detention center under the prosecutor’s office. Chimako went to deliver supplies. Takako severely scolded her, and the eyes with which she looked at Ginzō were colder and paler than those of a stranger. Chimako ran away from home.

In a yukata and heko obi sash—wearing nothing but what clung to her body—she had fled without taking a single possession. Perhaps owing to her environment, the girl had developed something of a delinquent streak and a hint of wanderlust; thus Takako hadn’t made the uproar one might expect over a sheltered daughter’s disappearance—though she had discreetly investigated potential leads. And ten futile days had slipped by…

Had she laid out those circumstances so bluntly to Shōzō? Takako swiftly threw on her yukata and,

“Chimako’s in Tokyo with friends.” “There’s some art festival or something going on, right?” “She’s such a whimsical child…”

"This is so frustrating," she rattled off in a Tokyo accent, whereupon Shōzō—

“Hmm.” “If it’s Tokyo, I should’ve gone too.” “Nah, ain’t got no business there.” “It’s just that going with that girl is fun.” “So, how ’bout it? Won’t ya hand that girl over to me?”

VI

Takako gasped.

“You want me to hand over Chimako—you, to that girl…?” "You’re in love with her—" she began, then hastily turned the latter half into a joke. “Shut your damn mouth! —But that girl’s an interesting one.” “Whenever she sees my face, she always glares at me with those pale, contemptuous eyes.” “When I see eyes like that, no matter how much—even if I gotta throw my whole damn fortune at it—I just gotta make her mine.” “Ha ha…”

Shōzō laughed with a boisterousness unbefitting a thirty-five-year-old man, but there was a sudden hollow ring to it—and what’s more, his eyes alone weren’t laughing. That gave off an unsettling sense of danger. “If you just shell out enough cash, any woman’ll come around…” “So that’s what you think,” she thought as Takako tied her yukata sash. “As long as there’s women like you around, men’ll all think that way. You’re the type who weighs men and money on the same damn scale—that’s what you are.” “You’re being awfully persistent.” “Nah, I’m praising you. Women are all sharp cookies, but there ain’t none as thorough as you. Makin’ men cough up cash while resentin’ ’em for it—now that’s one hell of a trick you’ve got.”

“Women are like that. Even if he’s their husband, no matter how much they love him, they’ll suddenly come to hate any man who claims freedom over their bodies.” “So what you’re saying is, you can’t stand me—hate my guts, ain’t that right?”

“Oh my. You’re different.” “What d’ya mean, ‘different’?”

“Let’s close the curtains, shall we? It’s early autumn—the river wind’s turned cold.”

Outside the window lay the Kamo riverbed, and beyond it, the lights of Miyagawachō’s pleasure quarter still burned.

“This room’s completely visible from Miyagawachō.” “Oh, no—” she said in a deliberately girlish voice, leaving only the blue desk lamp glowing as she turned off the other lights, but Shōzō pressed on with uncharacteristic persistence.

“But I’m happier being hated.” “If I wanted to be liked, I wouldn’t have lent you two million yen in the first place.” “Women are a dime a dozen.” “In Tokyo, there’s talk of women who’ll go for the price of a cup of tea—their status may’ve risen, but their going rate’s dropped.” “In that regard, you’re one hell of a woman—making me cough up two million yen without collateral, a written agreement, interest, or a deadline.” “But the reason I gave you that money was actually because I wanted to get a written statement of your heartlessness and cruelty from you.”

And then, he sneered as he looked at Takako. Takako absorbed those pride-filled eyes—eyes like solidified lumps of self-importance—through her entire being.

Shōzō continued.

“You think men are show-offs—that if you poke at their vanity, they’ll hate being seen as stingy and reluctantly cough up the cash. But me? I wasn’t reluctant.” “I handed it over gladly.” “For a woman like you, doing that’s the best way to… you…”

He was about to say that doing so would be an insult to her when a young woman’s voice called out from the entrance.

“Is Mr. Notake here, by any chance?”

It was Yōko.

VII

When Shōzō heard Yōko’s voice at the entrance—Yōko, who had come to visit Harutaka—he was startled for some reason.

However, the reason why he had been startled would become clear later—at that moment, he didn’t understand it. No—whether he had even noticed that he himself had been startled was uncertain.

"That voice sounded familiar."

That piercing nostalgia, too, didn’t seem to have clearly risen to the surface of his consciousness. “When you say Notake… you mean that Notake?”

“Isn’t that the Marquis Notake?” Shōzō asked. “That’s right,” Takako promptly said, but—

“Marquis.” “The Marquis’s young master.” “He’s a nasty one.” And his insistent tone abruptly turned awkward.

“Is he here?” “He’s a nasty one.” “What d’ya mean, ‘nasty one’? What kinda nasty one’re we talkin’ here…?” “Bringing in some strange woman… The one who just arrived is that type. A man’s no good unless he’s over thirty.” Driven by a woman’s instinct she herself didn’t recognize, Takako had been disparaging Harutaka in front of Shōzō—though her words weren’t entirely insincere. Within the lie lingered a faint pang of genuine jealousy. Not that Takako particularly liked Harutaka to begin with. To fall deeply for a man, she was too quick to fancy others. It was merely a passing whim—she felt no real attraction to Harutaka. Just that he was an aristocrat—that might have been all there was to it. Aristocrats’ stock had fallen too. Yet precisely because their value had dropped, women like Takako drew near them. Women with patrons now craved affairs with men weaker than themselves. Whether Harutaka’s standing had plummeted so low in Takako’s eyes due to postwar sentiment or his actual poor payments— Still, Takako didn’t despise aristocrats.

Takako had always recalled with a certain pride that her name contained the character for "noble"—貴.

Shōzō was not insensitive; he noticed that Takako was speaking too ill of Harutaka.

Takako was a woman who rarely spoke ill of her customers. That all patrons visiting her establishment were exclusively high-class clientele had been Takako’s pride—she had even exaggerated this point particularly to her patron Shōzō. “What’s this? Does this one have feelings for the Marquis?”

Shōzō bit his displeased lips and fell silent like lead.

And about thirty minutes later, there was suddenly the clattering sound of footsteps descending the stairs, and a woman’s agitated voice could be heard demanding her shoes.

“Oh now, no need to get so worked up—why don’t you stay over?”

“Where are my shoes…?”

“There are no more trains.” “Stay over, why don’t you?”

“I’m going home.” “Won’t you give me my shoes?”

Shōzō started and went out into the hallway. The woman at the entrance turned around. Their eyes met. “Ah!”

The woman suddenly dashed out of the entrance, still barefoot.

It was Yōko.

Flower of the Night

I

When she crossed Shijō Avenue, the tree-lined streets of Kiyamachi revealed a sudden lushness—the willows along the Takase River and the plane trees lining the pavement now stood out with dense foliage.

Yōko, who had fled barefoot from Tamura’s entrance, walked down the pavement toward Sanjō and felt relief at the absence of any pursuers—yet the shock of seeing Shōzō lingered.

“I’m always running away from that man!”

Aware of how the pebbles made walking barefoot even more difficult—pitifully so—Yōko muttered.

The reason Yōko had fled her Tokyo home and come to Kyoto was, in fact, because of a man named Shōzō.

Yōko’s father, Nakaseko Kōzō, had ventured into politics through his talent for acerbic speeches, misuse of political funds, and sheer forcefulness—but he was inherently a stubbornly self-assured man with a habit of belittling others. He treated upstarts like Tojo Hideki as political underlings, sneered at them, and opposed them at every turn. Consequently, targeted by the Tojo faction, he retreated to a villa in Karuizawa and fell entirely from the political world.

However, one day just before the war’s end, a certain Yamatani—an admirer of Kōzō—visited the villa from Osaka and introduced Kimongi Shōzō, a young industrialist accompanying him.

When Yoko brought the tea, Shōzō paid her no mind and kept chattering away by himself.

“I made a profit.” “I’ll keep making profits from now on too.” “Recently, I acquired the patent rights for a simple brewing method at a low cost—one that uses a certain chemical to produce vinegar, soy sauce, sauce, even sake.” “Looks like Japan’s finally gonna settle things with the Potsdam Declaration, ain’t it.” “If that happens, I’m gonna make a killing with that business I just told you about.” “If Japan had settled things with the Potsdam Declaration back in your day too, I’d have come around.” “If it’s about political funds, let me handle that one concern.”

Kōzō had been taken aback, but when the war ended and he saw the opportunity to return to politics had ripened, he sent a telegram to Osaka.

Shōzō flew to Kōzō’s lodgings in Tokyo and abruptly said as he handed over a three-million-yen check. “Sir, don’t you have any leads? What I want is quick information—and your daughter.” When had he taken a liking to her? Shōzō’s demand to take Yoko as his wife had startled Kozo, yet his sharp-featured face and forceful demeanor against the backdrop of the check reminded Kozo of his own youth—a resemblance he found not entirely displeasing. Even the issue of family lineage, which could have been a hindrance, became conveniently addressed by the term “democracy.”

First, he persuaded his wife, then tried to coerce Yoko—but she too invoked democracy. And so mother and daughter clashed. “Dad… You claim to fight for democracy, yet you’re ordering me to marry a man I loathe…?”

Though she thought she had gone too far,Yōko had already resolved to leave home.Father was also in a bind,but Yōko too was at her wit’s end.

Yōko thought about the difficulty of supporting herself without relying on anyone, but seeing that difficulty as a thrill to test her own abilities, she had secretly left home and come to Kyoto… The lanterns of the shiruko shop by Beniyabashi Bridge, which had been lit until late, were already out, and it was dark.

When she reached Sanjō Kobashi Bridge, Yōko was suddenly grabbed from behind.

II

Yōko jolted. Any woman would startle if suddenly grabbed on a dark street late at night, but for Yōko, it wasn’t the shock of being seized that struck her—it was the premonition that the man gripping her shoulder might be Shōzō. She found it almost strange how intensely she feared him. That was why she had fled Tamura barefoot. Had she been escaping Notake’s advances, she would have calmly demanded her shoes and left with dignity. She possessed that much pride. Yet at the sight of Shōzō, shoes became irrelevant—she’d stumbled into the shame of bare feet, a spectacle her pride would never permit others to witness. What a wretched situation.

The panic of having been discovered by Shōzō—the last person she wanted knowing she had fled to Kyoto—was undeniable, but even this likely stemmed from a sense of powerlessness against this man alone. She felt engulfed by a scorching, tenacious force—something relentless and overwhelming. So she assumed the man who had grabbed her shoulder from behind was Shōzō… Yet when she turned around, it was a policeman.

“What are you doing…?” “Huh…?”

In that instant, she didn’t grasp the meaning.

“I’m asking what you’re doing out this late.” “I’m walking.” When she retorted irritably, the policeman too grew irritated, “I know you’re walking.” “I didn’t say you were sleeping.” “What’s the reason you’re walking…?” “I’m going home.” “Where’s your home…?”

“It’s the apartment behind Kyoto Hotel.”

Out of a subconscious urge to keep Shōzō from discovering her whereabouts, she gave Matsuri’s apartment address. “What were you doing out this late…?” “I was at my friend’s wake.” “What’s *your* line of work…?” “My friend’s a dancer.” “I’m asking about *your* job.” “I’m a dancer.”

“Why are you barefoot…?”

Yōko, who had adopted a teasing tone half out of irritation, gradually grew uneasy herself. There were stories of women who walked late at night only to be mistaken for streetwalkers and taken into custody.

“When I dance, my feet get burning hot and I can’t help it. If there were trains running, I’d put on shoes to go home, but walking barefoot feels better.” “Where are your shoes? You don’t have them, do you?”

“I left them at a friend’s apartment.”

“Where is that apartment?”

“Kyoto Hotel’s… no, Marutamachi.” “If you came from Marutamachi, you should be walking the opposite way.” “Come!” The policeman abruptly grabbed Yōko’s arm and hauled her toward Sanjō Bridge.

At the base of the bridge, a truck loaded with women was waiting, and every one of them appeared to be a woman of the night.

III

She realized at a glance that it was a truck transporting arrested black-market women to the police. “That’s not true. I’m…” Yōko began to say she wasn’t a prostitute, but the policeman ignored her and— “There’s one!” “Got her!” Responding to the voices from the truck, Yōko was piled up as effortlessly as luggage.

The streetlamp at the base of the bridge cast a coldly pale light like gas lamps of old, its glow pouring through willow leaves where tiny insects swarmed and darted. The moment Yōko glimpsed this from the truck bed, a loneliness so vast it stole her breath engulfed her. The Kamo River’s ceaseless murmur had pressed something like the shape of restless remorse into her chest—until the engine’s growl devoured both sound and sensation, and the truck lurched forward.

The truck curved sharply as it crossed the bridge. At that moment, Yōko remembered Matsuri. She had become a dancer through knowing Matsuri. But her direct motivation held no romance. In truth, one could say it was the dreary circumstances of February’s Financial Emergency Ordinance announcement—while she lived fugitive days at a Kyoto lodging house after running away—that drove Yōko to dance. To hide her whereabouts from her family and conceal her identity in Kyoto, she’d deliberately left behind her transfer papers and ration book. This meant she couldn’t exchange old yen for new currency or withdraw living expenses from her passbook. When old yen lost validity, panic gripped her—she couldn’t pay rent, much less ride trains.

The newspaper carried Kōzō’s opposition to the blockade. Yōko deeply agreed, but when she recalled that just a month prior, her father had likely been telling everyone he met there was no alternative to the blockade to curb inflation—she felt perplexed, wondering if even her once-principled father had begun swallowing not only right and wrong but even black and white to boost his election results. She couldn’t tell whether this was clever or not, but she sensed that her father, alongside Hatoyama Ichirō, had let some vital restraint slip away and no longer felt like tucking their tails in retreat.

“If Papa finds out my running away was ruined because of the blockade, he might revert right back to supporting it.”

She had muttered sarcasm, but when she happened to visit a beauty salon for a set, met Matsuri, and brought up her troubles, she was utterly at a loss.

Yōko had known dance since the age of fifteen and had liked it as well. However, what Yōko’s pride had permitted her to earn new yen as a dancer was because she had been spurred by Matsuri’s unyielding confidence—Matsuri, who loved dance enough to drown in it yet maintained her purity without being tainted by the hall’s environment. Therefore, Yōko had relied on Matsuri, and it was precisely because of this that Matsuri’s death had plunged Yōko into utter loneliness. Matsuri had also relied on Yōko.

“And yet, I can’t even go to her wake.”

As she wavered between two irreparable feelings, the truck soon reached the police station.

IV

When she got off the truck, Yōko was immediately placed in a detention cell together with the women of the night.

She had resigned herself to being suspected just for walking barefoot through the midnight streets, yet clung to optimism that she’d be quickly released once at the police station. That very hope made it all the more crushing when she squeezed through the detention cell’s narrow opening, left too numb to cry. The claustrophobic space where she couldn’t move, the filth, the nauseating stench—all were unbearable, but nothing compared to the wretchedness of missing Matsuri’s wake. This too stemmed from having gone to Tamura—she realized with belated regret—and as she did, Kyōkichi’s face surfaced in her mind.

“Stay away from Tamura! Don’t go!” Kyōkichi had tried to stop her; she was preoccupied with the wake; and Harutaka’s trap—using his discovery of her true identity as bait—was so trite and vulgar that its transparency bordered on absurdity.

Yet she had deliberately plunged into that trap—of course, to silence Harutaka. If the secret of her working as a dancer in Kyoto were to leak from Harutaka’s lips and reach her father’s ears, there was a risk she’d be dragged back home by force; moreover, within the resolve that endured the hardships of her runaway life lay a secret thrill—the knowledge that no one knew her true lineage. If it became fodder for the newspapers, that would be tiresome, and there was also the fear that it would tarnish her father’s political popularity.

In part, it was sheer contrariness toward Kyōkichi’s commanding attempt to stop her that drove Yōko’s feet toward Tamura. Yet that same contrariness now stirred within her—a sudden urge to prolong her arrival at Tamura and keep Harutaka waiting. “Please... don’t tell anyone…” She couldn’t bear to carry into Tamura the miserably flustered version of herself who had instinctively pleaded with him back in the hall. She wanted to push back against Harutaka’s smug certainty that she would come. A woman’s instinct—that keeping him waiting was to her advantage—had unconsciously taken hold.

Therefore, upon leaving Cabaret Jūbankan, Yōko first made a deliberate detour to a nearby sushi shop called Sushitsune. The owner of Sushitsune was an eccentric man who would go to the hall every night to dance until the last number, then return and gradually open his shop to prepare sushi; however, since the preparations took time, even when dancers returning from the hall deliberately arrived late, they ended up waiting quite a while. However, the reason there were so many regulars among the dancers was likely because they received free sushi coupons from the owner of this shop in lieu of tickets.

Finally leaving Sushitsune, Yōko headed to Tamura, but when she was shown into Harutaka’s room, it was thick with cigarette smoke that spoke to how long she had made him wait. Yōko had even recalled that—perhaps because the young girl sitting with her knees drawn up beside her in the detention cell had suddenly begun smoking a cigarette she’d somehow brought inside. “Sis, want a drag?”

The young girl in the loosely worn yukata spoke to Yōko. It was Chimako.

V

“Me…? I don’t want any.” When Yōko refused, Chimako thrust out her half-smoked cigarette and, “Ain’t gotta be polite. If ya don’t hurry up ’n’ take a drag, this Japa’ese cig’ll burn out quick…” She didn’t seem like a girl who’d been detained.

“It’s fine. I can’t smoke.” “Huh…?” “So serious, huh?”

At Chimako’s words, Yōko smiled.

In truth, when she had gone to Tamura, Harutaka had said similar words—it was that which she recalled…

“Would you like a cigarette?” “Please.” “I can’t smoke…”

“Really…?” “So serious, huh…”

Harutaka said this while holding a beer bottle, "—But... if it's this one..." "Oh my, I couldn't possibly."

“I see. “Well, I shouldn’t force you… But you truly can’t drink? “If it’s just a little… you’d drink it, wouldn’t you…? “Just half… I’ll only pour that much. “Would it be so bad if I made you drink a little? “I’m not really fond of it either.” While exercising meticulous care, he nevertheless showed persistence, his thin lips moving as he prattled on alone. “Are you going to Tokyo?”

“Yes, tomorrow.” “Even if you go… won’t you please not tell anyone about me…?” “About tonight’s matter…?”

Harutaka was already full of himself. “No, what you said in the hall…”

“Ah, that matter…”

“If someone finds out, I’ll have to disappear again. Then I won’t be able to dance at Jūbankan anymore, you know.”

Yōko was clever enough to wield such killer lines herself. “No, don’t worry,” he said with a hollow laugh. “Let’s keep this a secret between just the two of us. Well then—cheers!” “I can’t. Really…”

“I see. “Then，dinner…”

“I’ve already had dinner.” So that’s why she was late—or had she dined with someone? Harutaka’s interest cooled, but he then considered Yōko’s tardiness an unexpected boon. He called the maid. “Can you call a car…? If one doesn’t come, this lady can’t go home.” “Ain’t no cars runnin’ this hour.” The maid had shrewdly discerned Harutaka’s ulterior motive—precisely what he wished to hide—and this was deftly done. Yet in her overeagerness, she remained oblivious to his gradual attempts to detain Yōko through subtle tactics. In an instant, she flung open the sliding door to the adjoining room with a brisk “This way!”

An andon-style lamp; two pillows lay side by side. They mustn't see this now! The moment Harutaka frowned, Yōko abruptly bolted out of the room. For Yōko, who had nearly lost her chance to leave, the maid had provided the perfect excuse—but what came after... the corridor... Shōzō... bare feet... police officers... the detention center....

“What an awful Saturday!”

As she reflexively pressed her forehead,

“Sis, want a candy?”

Chimako addressed her again.

VI

Yōko stared at Chimako in disbelief. Her heko-obi sash must have been confiscated when she was detained. The hem of her loosely hanging yukata, even when wrapped around her raised knees, tended to slip into disarray at once. Yet this surprisingly did not appear slovenly—likely owing to the immaculate cleanliness of her unpowdered skin and the sharp, intelligent gleam in her clear, faintly bluish eyes. In the dimples that rose as she smirked, one could still glimpse a trace of the innocent girl she once was.

“A girl this cute…” Yōko was astonished by the audacity of secretly bringing cigarettes and candies into the detention center. “While I was ridin’ in the truck, I just snuck ’em into the seam of my yukata.” Chimako stuck out her tongue playfully and swiftly handed Yōko the candy. Yōko recalled Matsuri. “Sis, you’re pretty for a Black Girl.”

“Black Girl…?”

She didn’t immediately grasp the meaning, “Ah…” “That’s not it.” “I was mistaken for one.”

“I thought so.” Chimako looked around inside the detention center, “I thought you were way different from the riffraff around here. That woman over there—she’s a repeat offender who was supposed to be in the hospital, but every night she sneaks out to ply her trade. If she’s in the hospital, her parents can’t be supported. First, they gotta find her folks a job—otherwise, that woman’s sickness ain’t ever gonna heal. If I were the police, I’d give that woman fifty yen every day while she’s in the hospital. Then that woman’d feel like she could focus on gettin’ better without worryin’, right? But d’ya think even cops get fifty yen a day for their monthly salary?”

“That’s right—you’re quite clever, aren’t you? You’re smarter than politicians.” “If I were smart, everyone in Japan would be smart. They know if someone’d just come ’n’ do it, that’d be fine. Politicians ain’t just a buncha fools. But if they had to think about every single person here, they’d be too busy speechifyin’ to care ’bout anyone ’cept themselves. Me? I’m a fool—if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be pullin’ jobs like stealin’. But even when I do, I don’t slip up.”

“Did you… steal something?” “Yeah, messed it up good.” Her voice slipped into a hoodlum’s drawl, “Tryin’ to help my old man stuck in prison—daughter turnin’ thief for that? Dumber than shovin’ miso paste into a sake bottle.” “But no jar around, so hadda use the bottle.” “What’d you take…?” “Camera!”

“Hmm.” Yōko suddenly recalled Kizaki, momentarily forgetting she was in a detention center. “Since he had such a fancy camera, I figured he wouldn’t mind if I swiped it. Followed him all the way to his apartment and laughed it off.” “Then I got caught.” “Laugh…?” “If you’re gonna laugh about it, might as well steal!”

And Chimako let out a high-pitched cackle.

Seven

“Shut up! Cut it out already.” The lanky woman, who had been tossing restlessly in discomfort as if her elongated frame were too much to bear, frowned at Chimako’s laughter.

The detention center’s dim light cast a blue glow on the lump that had formed beside her left eyebrow. If that lump was a rubbery swelling, then the vile poison might have reached its final stage. In a voice hoarse as if she’d been made to drink mercury, “You think there’s anyone laughin’ their head off in the pigsty? —Pipe down. Can’t sleep with this ruckus.” “Give it a rest already, will ya?” Chimako answered in an exaggerated Kyoto accent before slipping back into her natural Osaka dialect,

“If it’s too loud for ya, why don’t you go get yourself a solitary cell? This ain’t your personal detention center. It’s a free hotel! How’s that for luxury?!” “What the hell? Say that one more time!” The woman lurched upright, “Who d’you think I am?!” She was Butsudan O-Haru—a woman who’d spent twenty years as an unlicensed prostitute. Now, no matter how much she lied about her age, she couldn’t pass for under forty. But in her youth, she’d been legendary enough to make men sell their family altars for her. “A tramp like you,” O-Haru spat, “one of those Shijō Bridge market-stall Girls—you’re not fit to lick my boots.” The words scorched Yōko’s ears, but Chimako shot back undaunted.

“If you’re Butsudan O-Haru, then I’m Heko Obi O-Chima.” “Heko Obi O-Chima may sell fights, but she don’t sell her body.” “Ask my age and I’ll laugh—seventeen! That cute girl’s Heko Obi O-Chima—she’ll sell a fight, but never her body! Don’tcha know Fly’s singin’ that over at Center?” From Sanjo-Kawaramachi to Shijo and Kyogoku—in Kyoto’s downtown Center—Chimako hummed a song that the delinquent students of Tenpura (Fly) sang, but suddenly her voice shifted into a self-deprecating “Ah-ah,”

“Honestly, parents who’ve got a daughter like me—such a disaster for ’em.”

Everyone laughed at her delivery. O-Haru laughed too as she turned her frayed back to them and lay down, but the instant she felt her bony frame against the detention cell’s unforgiving floor, she suddenly thought of her mother. Her mother was already seventy—she likely wouldn’t last three more years—but the time when her own body could no longer earn a living might come even sooner than that.

As long as a woman remained a woman—no matter how ugly, how filthy, even past fifty—she could earn a living from men. But even O-Haru’s confidence in this belief suddenly felt fragile when she considered her illness-ravaged body. “Everyone’ll end up like me.” “In the end, you’ll have nothing left to sell but your bones.” O-Haru also let out a strange sigh—“Ah-ah”—but by then, no one was laughing anymore; they all fell completely silent, heads hanging low.

However, Chimako’s eyes glinted sharply, and she suddenly brought her mouth close to Yōko’s ear.

“Sis, will you listen to my request…?”

Eight

“I could hear you out.”

Yōko smiled, feeling a nostalgic warmth in her ear from Chimako’s whisper.

To feel this oddly masculine sense of longing toward a delinquent girl calling herself “Heko Obi O-Chima”—was this the effect of detention making one crave human connection? No—it was precisely because Chimako didn’t act like a typical delinquent that Yōko found herself drawn in. And there was another reason: Chimako had stolen a camera—a detail that piqued Yōko’s secret curiosity. “So… you’ll really hear me out…?” “Yes… What is it…?” “I need you to go meet the person I stole the camera from.”

“Huh…?”

“Hey… will you go…?” She pressed her body closer like a child seeking affection. “But I can’t just run away from here.” “But Sis, you’re not a real Black Girl, see? So once tomorrow comes, they’ll let you out right away.” “I can’t ’cause I stole stuff, see? But you’re a dove, Sis.”

At the brightness in Chimako’s voice as she declared herself a dove because she’d fly out, Yōko too felt relieved, a light kindling in her heart, “So when we get out of here, you’re saying you want me to run this errand for you?” “Mochi-course…” Mochi as in mochiron mochi (“of course”), course as in “of course” course. Combined, it apparently meant something like Mochi Logic.

“Even if the detective asks me, I ain’t gonna confess I stole that camera. I’ll stick to sayin’ it was just somethin’ I was keepin’ for someone.” “I’m gonna keep insistin’ it’s an item I was holdin’ for someone.”

“That kind of lie will come apart quickly, don’t you think?” When Yōko stared in disbelief, Chimako fidgeted impatiently, “That’s why I’m askin’ you to go, ain’t I? Go to that person’s place and get ’em to say that camera was somethin’ I was keepin’ for ’em—if Sis here can talk ’em into it, ain’t that fine?”

“Hmm. But will that person agree to it?” “He’s a good guy after all—so he’ll help me out… right?” “He’s got a bit of a scary side, but he’s a kind person after all.” “I still regret stealin’ his camera, I do.”

“Where is this person…?” “Will you go…?” “Before that—where is this person? Tell me that first…”

When she urged her on and pressed more urgently, Chimako first named the location, “A man named Mr. Kizaki…”

“Kizaki…?” The Ming-style typeface of “Kizaki Saburō” on the business card she’d received from Rumi flashed through Yōko’s mind. “Hey… will you go…?” “I’ll go. And that camera…?” “It’s bunkin’ with Satsu! Would fetch fifteen thousand in new yen if sold—but it’s stuck with Satsu now.”

Chimako spat out the words.

Big Brother

One

The decadent night ended, and Sunday morning arrived.

It was already a decadent town. Especially on Saturdays, Kyoto’s nights—like the pallid glow of noctiluca shimmering ominously in swamp depths—unfolded into boulevards of flowers of evil, where countless unsavory events were dyed in the lurid hues of venomous pollen cast from decadence’s pistils—was this description an exaggeration? For instance, as far as we knew, last night—that Saturday night—... The moment Kizaki’s Leica—perched on Cabaret Jūbankan’s hall staircase to capture nocturnal poses for his “hallscape”—snapped its shutter, dancer Matsuri collapsed!

Cyanide! Kyōkichi!

At the Higashiyama apartment Seikan-sō, Sakamoto the Philopon-addicted accordionist’s wife fled, and Chimako—wearing a sash and posing as a black-market woman—stole Kizaki’s Leica and escaped. At Tamura, run by Chimako’s mother, the moment Yōko—a dancer who had visited the lecherous Marquis Notake Harutaka—spotted Takako’s patron Kimongi Shōzō in the hallway, she fled barefoot from Tamura. Mistaken for a black-market woman and detained, she found Chimako in the same detention center alongside Butsudan O-Haru and women afflicted with venereal diseases…

And then, as various women—in a manner befitting Kyoto, the city of women—spent the weekend night as fleeting wives or Saturday Madames, Sunday morning on Kawahara-cho Street saw last night’s men, pestered by their children, hurriedly buying toy jeeps. Their blissful faces!

So rather than seeing couples out on Saturday nights, the sight of parents and children together on Sunday mornings felt abruptly enviable. Especially for a man like Kyōkichi… Though it was called morning, it was already nearing noon. Having left Matsuri’s apartment, Kyōkichi walked through the bustle of Kawahara-cho with a desolate expression.

Kyōkichi had no memory of his parents. With no siblings or relatives, he had been raised by his grandmother—but in his third year of junior high school, even that sole remaining kin passed away. Now truly alone in the world, he took easily to a wandering life; wherever he worked, he could never settle down, and to this day he held no steady job. However, from age sixteen—when a widow ten years his senior had introduced him to the ways of women—until now, drifting between those drawn to his beauty, lonely circumstances, and unselfish nature, he had gained an unshakable confidence: no matter what happened, this face alone would ensure women kept him fed.

He was, in a sense, a man who appeared happy at first glance—but what was this desolation he felt? Was it because seeing families out on Sunday mornings had suddenly made him aware of his own loneliness, or was it…? He had drifted from woman to woman—or rather, been passed along among them—but he had never known love. He was liked by everyone, but he liked no one. Was it that desolation? Yet he couldn’t deny that beneath his desolation lay Yōko’s absence from last night’s wake.

Arriving at the Asahi Building in Sanjō Kawahara-cho with an absent expression, Kyōkichi suddenly—

“Big Brother.” A voice called out to him.

II

Called “Big Brother,” Kyōkichi was startled. The only one who should have called him that was Chimako—daughter of Tamura’s Mama—but she had run away ten days prior and remained missing. Considering her father was in Osaka Detention Center, Kyōkichi thought she might have gone there for visits or deliveries. Yet there was also a man who claimed to have spotted Chimako on Shijō Avenue yesterday. So then—wondering if she had indeed returned to Kyoto—Kyōkichi swiftly turned toward the voice. But it wasn’t Chimako.

In front of the Asahi Building, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl had laid out her shoeshine tools and was crouching there, looking up at Kyōkichi with a nostalgic gaze. "Oh, right—there was another girl here who called me Big Brother—" Kyōkichi remembered and approached her.

“Oh, it’s you.”

Kyōkichi, ever the dandy, had always made the girl polish his shoes, but because she hadn’t shown up at that spot for the past two weeks, he found it strange.

“Yeah.” “Me.” “Big Brother, I’ve ended up comin’ back again.” “You remembered me well, didn’t ya?”

The girl looked happy. Her accent was Tokyo dialect mixed with Osaka and Kyoto inflections—a jumbled mix that seemed to tell the tale of this rootless girl’s wanderings. “Where’ve you been…?” As he held out his shoes, she busied herself with the brush, “Got took in.” “Do somethin’ wrong?” “Nuh-uh. “Got caught in a vagrant sweep. “They stuck me in some temple over Neyagawa way.” “You run off?”

“Yeah.”

She stopped her cream-applying hand, looked up, and grinned.

“Still, shoeshining’s better after all.”

When she laughed, her beautifully aligned teeth were strikingly white. Her slightly narrow eyes were wide and clear, and though faintly smudged, the captivating charm that made one want to gaze at her remained unchanged from before. But in the two weeks since he’d last seen her, she had become utterly emaciated.

When he mentioned that,

“They let me use the bath, but with my stomach empty like that, I nearly fainted in there.” “Couldn’t stay in a place like that.” The temple-run detention center had nothing to hold a girl brimming with wanderlust—no charms at all—but as if making up for it, there’d apparently been no end of unbearable nastiness she couldn’t stomach.

“—I kinda missed the detention center, y’know.” “Even sleepin’ rough beats goin’ hungry.” “Yeah. “Besides, if I’d stayed locked up there... couldn’t’ve seen you.”

“Huh…?” “I wanted to see you, Big Brother… y’know.”

III

“To me…? Why……?” When he inadvertently asked if she had wanted to see him— “’Cause I like ya. I like ya, Big Brother.”

The shoeshine girl, without polishing, stared intently at Kyōkichi’s face with feverish eyes and said in a coquettish tone.

Kyōkichi made a bewildered expression. Kyōkichi’s face, which at times made him look like a thirty-year-old man with its bitter edge, would suddenly transform into a pure and innocent expression—like that of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy—no, rather like a girl—whenever he was bewildered. It was a habit of his when startled.

No, it wasn’t so much surprise as a feeling of being unbearably curious. It resembled the surprise of a baby seeing a moving toy. It was a hollow yet fresh surprise, like that of a dog led before a mirror.

“What on earth is the meaning of this? “Why does this happen?” And so, in a state of humble nakedness, he tilted his head, questioning not so much his own heart as nature itself. Within his shamelessly thick nerves, Kyōkichi possessed a naive childlike sensitivity—one unclothed by the conceptual garb of reducing everything to known facts through the aid of worn-out, clichéd words, tattered like a fifty-sen note.

For example, when his grandmother died, he had reacted the same way. When Matsuri collapsed last night, he had been bewildered. And even now... those unbecoming feverish eyes of the twelve-year-old girl were somehow utterly baffling to him. Moreover, there was an inscrutable, mysterious charm about it that defied understanding. “Big Brother, change to your right foot!” Kyōkichi, who had been staring blankly, hurriedly extended his right foot when told by the girl. She always started with his left foot because of his dance habit of leading with that side.

“Ah, that’s enough.” Seeing the sweat on the nose of the girl polishing his shoes more meticulously than usual, he felt sorry for her and tried to pay— “I don’t need the money.” “Big Brother’s is free.” Panting heavily, the girl said: “It’s not like this is a hall—no, even if it were, I’m sick of dancing for free.”

He said he’d pay and rummaged through his pockets, but there was no trace of his wallet.

“Damn—I’ve been pickpocketed.” He gave a wry smile but didn’t look particularly upset, “—I’ll pay you back in full tomorrow, so let me owe you for now.” “Sorry, sorry.” “Well, see ya…”

He started walking and tried to cross Sanjō Street, but when a jeep came, he stopped and waited,

“Big Brother!”

The girl caught up and clung to his arm.

“I’m coming with you too!” ……

As they watched the jeep that had rounded the corner of Sanjō Street rapidly shrink into the distance toward Rokujō-dōri in Kawaramachi,

“We can cross now. C’mon, let’s cross now, Big Brother.”

The girl pulled Kyōkichi by the hand as they crossed, “Big Brother… don’tcha hate walkin’ with me?”

IV

Repeating "Big Brother" with every other word—almost to the point of annoyance—seemed to be a delightful habit for the girl. Yet that it suddenly struck him as pitiable—was it because of this girl’s loneliness? It was like the refrain of a sad, lonely song she had learned during the year and more she’d spent drifting from place to place.

At least, to Kyōkichi’s ears, it rang with a melancholic echo. It was Kyōkichi who understood better than anyone the rhythm—like the creaking waterwheels of loneliness and endless wandering—that flowed through life’s stagnant waters. So, “Big Brother… don’tcha like walkin’ with me…?” As she spoke, peering up to gauge his expression, the twelve-year-old girl’s emotions felt more immediate and decipherable than the soft warmth of a thirty-year-old woman’s shoulder casually brushing against him—and in her words’ accent, rootless and unmoored from any hometown, he sensed a nostalgia so piercing it made his chest tighten.

But even so—what on earth could this girl’s feverish eyes mean?

“If you walk with me, you’ll get kidnapped!”

Kyōkichi said as they walked side by side. "Yeah, Big Brother, kidnap me!"

“Let’s take a train and go somewhere. We’d stay at farmhouses with cowsheds and watermills, camp under skies so thick with stars they seemed to rain down—watching shooting stars streak by—while listening to radios crackling from under someone’s eaves. We’d get off at whatever little station we happened upon and find even there was a tiny town, see a familiar accordion player’s name—the one they kicked out of the hall—on grimy movie theater flyers for cheap attractions, and cry from nostalgia. Then at some rundown hot spring inn, when we couldn’t pay the bill, Big Brother’d get hired as a tout, and you’d get hired as a switchboard operator…”

“Big Brother, kidnap me! Kidnap me! Kidnap me!” Kyōkichi’s eyes had suddenly welled up, and the girl’s eyes had grown damp too. Amid the clamor of Kawaramachi Street, Kyōkichi had become sentimental enough to speak wistfully of his nostalgia for travel. But had this sudden urge to wander off with this girl truly sprung from spite toward Yōko, who hadn’t come to Matsuri’s wake last night?

Yoko must have been seduced. She stayed at Tamura. That's why she couldn't come.

He had been with many women, but Kyōkichi had never once fallen in love. While having relations with women, he had clung to the dream that only in love would he be with a more splendid woman. And with Yōko, he felt he could fall in love. No—it might already be love. At least, he felt a nostalgia that resembled romantic feelings. So, even though he danced with the other dancers, he had never tried to dance with Yoko. To dance while holding her close, Yoko was too much of a virgin for Kyōkichi. Into the techniques of his dance—physically irresistible to any woman—he alone had never wanted to drag Yoko.

“Even if I wanted to kidnap you, I don’t have a cent.”

Of course, the girl didn’t have any either… he thought with a bitter smile. Then she— “I’ve got money. Today’s inflation, y’know?”

V

Kyōkichi burst out laughing. He didn’t know how much she had, but whatever she’d earned shining shoes couldn’t amount to much. The girl’s way of saying “Today’s inflation, y’know?” instantly blew away the gloom that had clung to Kyōkichi since last night, and as he burst out laughing, the idea of taking to the road now carried a strange exhilaration. Spite toward Yōko made him suddenly think of taking to the road—this impulsive recklessness: was it due to his age of twenty-three, despite his precociousness, or his lack of education, or perhaps some ingrained wild impulsivity? In any case, the whirling shifts of Kyōkichi’s heart—changing with time and circumstance—abruptly made the streets of Kyoto, which had seemed so enchanting until yesterday, feel repellent to him.

Just because they hadn't burned down, they strutted around like they were hot shit. What the hell was this Kyoto! Kyoto was nothing but a contraband stockpile—the whole damn city. Thanks to them stingily not consuming it and leaving it stored away, it was as if its value had gone up. Originally, it wasn't worth three pennies to begin with.

Though Kyōkichi grabbed the girl’s hand to flee, his feet naturally turned toward Café St. Louis—a cluttered alleyway east along Kawaramachi Street—and he wondered how it had come to this.

Café St. Louis was Kyōkichi’s haunt—a place he might linger in all day through. That he’d thought to stop there before bidding Kyoto farewell—was this too some lingering attachment to the city? Yet Café St. Louis stood in Kyoto without being of Kyoto. The café’s proprietors were Ashiya madams—those very same Ashiya madams who had once epitomized the bourgeois leisure class of the Hanshin region. Now forced into a harsh new-yen existence that stripped them of shame and decorum, they hung out signs offering Western dressmaking lessons or hatched schemes for café co-management.

Kyoto was said to have been the mistress of Osaka and Ashiya. Yet when her patrons Osaka and Ashiya burned to ashes, this mistress suddenly rejuvenated herself—replacing her faded shoji screens—to become Japan’s peerless beauty. Now the legal wives of Osaka and Ashiya found themselves forced to do business with their husbands’ former paramour. It was a compromise born of grim necessity, yet Café St. Louis—for all its slapdash management full of holes, utterly lacking in shrewd efficiency typical of women-run establishments—still scoffed at other Kyoto cafés with the dignity proper to legal wives, even as...

“I’ve come to hate Kyoto.” It was indeed a fitting establishment for Kyōkichi to make such a declaration. When he pushed open the door adorned with gold lettering, the San Francisco broadcast music captured by the ten-tube all-wave receiver flowed the splendid string ensemble into a single delicate curve—and abruptly, Kyōkichi’s feet began moving rhythmically. But,

“Kyō-chan, there’s a phone call for you right now.”

“Who from…?”

“Yoko-san!”

When he heard this, he stopped abruptly.

VI “Oh, her.”

He feigned disinterest upon realizing the call was from Yoko, but even so, there was a sweet stirring in his chest.

“Kyō-chan’s Liebe…? “*Madame*, or perhaps *Mädchen*…?” “My *darling*, you know?”

Inside the bar counter, Natsuko boomed out tongue-twisting foreign phrases in her gravelly voice and clumsily struck Kyōkichi’s shoulder. And without noticing the sharp glare shot by the girl Kyōkichi had brought along, she suddenly let out shrill laughter.

Her voice was loud, her gestures exaggerated—a laugh that didn’t quite suit her. She wore a subdued indigo linen robe but wrapped a gaudy crimson turban around her head—the dissonance mirrored that jarring mismatch.

However, ever since Natsuko began boldly wrapping this turban around her head, her mood had abruptly turned buoyant. She found herself utterly mystified by this transformation within her own demeanor.

Natsuko’s husband was a dentist who had rented a small room in a building near Ebisubashi in Osaka for his clinic, commuting daily from Ashiya. Natsuko had married the dentist while scorning his profession, yet his very shabbiness had ushered her into the circle of Ashiya’s petit bourgeois leisured madams. However, Natsuko had always been a reserved woman—even after her conscripted husband died in the war, she remained suited to the modest widow’s role of living with her six-year-old son, her old-fashioned mother-in-law, and a returned sister-in-law. Her hoarse, raspy voice and her disproportionately large, protruding nose—unexpectedly—did not betray her desolate chastity.

Even after the clinic—where she had employed a substitute doctor to manage operations—burned down in an air raid along with stockpiled expensive medicines, machines, and materials, and their savings were frozen, forcing her to open a café jointly with friends, Natsuko still spent many days gloomily shut away in her Ashiya home, thinking about her husband. However, Chiyowaka—the geisha from Pontochō who occasionally came to St. Louis to meet her patron—had been in Osaka’s Minami area until she was bombed out. As they chatted about the Ebisubashi neighborhood in Osaka, [Natsuko] realized: *Not only did I know that dentist—he had been my husband!*

When she pressed further in shock, she learned her husband had been involved not only with Chiyowaka but with numerous geishas and hostesses. Chiyowaka appeared to have been discarded with ease. "He was famous for his broom, you know," "To think he had such a fine wife like you..." As Natsuko realized she had been his legal wife all along, she turned pallid listening to Chiyowaka—who now vented even Natsuko’s portion of resentment—yet it was not long after that she began wrapping turbans around her head.

She had grown strangely close to Chiyowaka in an odd manner, her days returning to Ashiya grew fewer, and she suddenly became prone to laughter...

Kyōkichi disliked women with high-pitched laughter. Grimacing, he asked, “When did she call?” “You’re curious about her? Ohoho… Approximately five minutes ago!”

Natsuko imitated a news broadcast,

“—But she said in a desperate voice that she’d call again soon, so when Kyō-chan comes, have him wait for her.”

VII “Heeh…”

Kyōkichi had put on a derisive tone, but even so, his chest churned at the thought of what Yōko could possibly want.

Kyōkichi knew nothing about Yōko’s circumstances. He didn’t even know where she lived. Yōko hadn’t known either that Kyōkichi was staying at Tamura. Their interaction had been limited to exchanging brief words at Jūbankan. That Yōko even knew calling St. Louis would reach him struck Kyōkichi as strange. Of course, she had never called before.

All the more reason for this unexpected joy to warm his chest—but moping over it would be pathetic, so Kyōkichi sharply doused it with cold water. “It’s only been a day. That’s so off-putting.”

The dream had shattered. When he recalled—through the lens of a man in his thirties—Yoko’s habits during dances—how she always pulled her chin in firmly, pursing her lower lip slightly while keeping her mouth closed; the fragile curves stretching from her faintly cherry-tinted, thinly fleshed ears down to her nape, curves that spoke of virginal frustration—his raw jealousy reignited with fresh intensity.

“I’m outta here.” “Aren’t you going to take the call…?” “I ain’t no pimp.” “What’s this ‘pimp’ thing? So it’s like an out-of-focus photo or something…?”

Natsuko wasn’t playing coy. Giggling and frolicking around with Chiyowaka felt somehow buoyant and amusing, and Natsuko had suddenly taken on the airs of a delinquent madam—but in truth, she remained naive. Even if she felt a thrill, she was afraid of dirtying her body and knew nothing. She was a delinquent madam in appearance only. She gazed with astonished eyes at how the two other co-managers neatly compartmentalized their activities: participating in demonstrations for the repatriation promotion movement of detainees, entertaining customers who came to the shop, and going to stay overnight in Ōtsu.

“Out of focus…? Hah….” “Waiting for some morning-after dame’s call is about as classy as being outta focus or a pimp.” “Ain’t my style.”

“Oh my, oh my.” “Are you really leaving…?”

“If she calls, tell her I’m already out of Kyoto.” “Oh, that’s right. I was thinking of having you join the Liberal Club. You know it, right? The Liberal Club. You can’t join unless you have a companion. A couple—how lovely! Ohoho…”

It was an out-of-place, shrill laugh.

“Couple, huh.” “Hmph.” He snorted derisively, “Couples should stick to traveling.” “Journeys need companions—nights need pity?”

Kyōkichi said flippantly, “C’mon, let’s go,” and took the girl’s hand,

“—Behold, Tokai’s dawn return!”

Humming to himself, he left.

To Tokyo

I

He awoke to voices from the next room. When he looked at the clock by the pillow, it was already ten o'clock. However, for Shōzō, it was still ten o'clock.

Shōzō was a man who usually slept only about four hours, but on Sundays he made sure to sleep soundly until nearly evening. He built up a reserve of sleep. The place called Tamura was perfectly suited for this purpose. First and foremost, Takako’s body possessed a peculiar temperature and odor with an ether-like quality that put Shōzō to sleep. He would fall soundly asleep. For the busy Shōzō, she was both a woman he must never meet except on Saturdays and one indispensable for stockpiling sleep on Sundays.

So waking at ten o’clock was unusual for him. However, it was not the voices from the next room that disturbed his sleep. Then what could it have been? What woke him was his pride and passion. No—to him, pride and passion meant the same thing. It was his pride alone that produced his passion.

And now, this passion was entirely focused on Yoko. The reason he had asked Yoko’s father, Nakaseko Kozo, to hand her over was because of the haughty expression Yoko had shown Shozo when he first visited Kozo. Yoko had furrowed her eyebrows. Yoko, who had clear-cut likes and dislikes, could feel no goodwill toward a man of Shozo’s type. The self-esteem that filled Shozo’s entire being had likely repelled Yoko, who was inherently strong in self-esteem. The son of a toothpick artisan exaggeratedly believed he had been insulted. And it was in this thought’s immediate shift to a sudden proposal to Yoko that Shozo’s pride lay. In other words, for Shozo, a marriage proposal was the most effective means of insulting Yoko, and there was also some contempt toward Kozo. From the very beginning, Shozo had not respected a politician like Kozo in the slightest. It was precisely because he did not respect him that he had provided the money.

However, Yōko detested marrying Shōzō and ran away from home.

Shōzō’s pride was completely wounded. This son of a toothpick carver had stirred passion in Yoko for the first time—she who hadn’t felt even a sliver of passion before. “Alright, someday I’ll make that woman kneel at my feet!”

Shōzō was the kind of man who would stop at nothing for his pride. To make Yōko submit, he would have paid any price. Yet there was one sacrifice he could never make. To put it plainly, his pride alone was never to be surrendered. So even when he saw Yōko at Tamura's entrance last night, Shōzō didn't attempt to follow her. His pride forbade it.

"But now that we know that woman's in Kyoto, it's my move."

"I can't keep lying here half-asleep," Shōzō thought in bed, considering what he must achieve today while absently hearing the voices from the adjacent room.

II

“What a nice room this Western-style one is. It could be used as a bar just like this, don’t you think?” “We did use it. Just being a regular restaurant or inn wouldn’t be interesting, right? So, though it’s not quite a bar, we specially made this room Western-style so you could drink Western liquor and have the girls serve. It’s off-limits now, but back when we first opened, quite a few foreigners came here. We had gathered a fair number of good girls too.”

“I’d heard there are inns in Kyoto where you get a girl included for a nightly rate, heh…” “What’s with the ‘heh’? But really…? Has such a rumor spread all the way to Tokyo…?” “It’s not just a rumor, is it? You’re raking in the money, aren’t you…?”

“It’s not like the old yen days—the police are too nosy now, all the girls have vanished, and this room’s just a reception area these days...” “Still quite impressive though.” “Mama...” “What about... investing...?”

“Ah, that cabaret proposal from before…?” “It sounds intriguing, but…” “A million yen would cover it. “Mama, if you front half, it’d be perfect.” “We’ll make a splash opening it in Ginza.” “They’ll swarm us—mark my words.” “I flew all the way from Tokyo banking on you, Mama…” “Come on—get in on this. If we start now, we could recoup the million by Christmas.” “But how stable is Tokyo? “In Osaka they say one watermelon moves five grand at Akadama. “...If they re-freeze the new yen there, wouldn’t everything go belly-up...?”

“You’re underestimating me.” “Well, you should see Tokyo once.” “You can’t understand just by talking.” “When I go back tonight, won’t you come with me, Mama…?” “Oh, you’re leaving already tonight…?”

“Sightseeing in Kyoto...? Tamura’s enough. Sightseeing in some unburned city with zero potential for development would be utterly pointless.” “How polite of you.” “Heh heh… Besides, I’ve already bought three return tickets. If we dawdle around, we’ll get tangled up in the JNR general strike—it’ll be a disaster.” “So you’re planning to drag me off with a rope around my neck? You win. But what about the third ticket…?” “Since it’s Mama we’re talking about, you’ll probably end up wanting to take a bath along the way…? You’ll bring someone along, won’t you?”

“You fool.” “Every night!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” “That.” “Ev...” “Quit baring your teeth like that!” “Heh heh…” “We’re talking about Mama.” “Still the same even now…?”

“You idiot!”

The ones conversing in the reception room were likely Takako and a friend from Tokyo. Before long, their voices faded away. Takako seemed to go up to the second floor. "The Marquis’s place, huh."

Shōzō's eyes suddenly glittered. Yōko had gone to Harutaka’s place last night! After about ten minutes, Takako entered the room where Shōzō was sleeping.

Three

“Oh.” “You’re already awake…?” “Yeah.” Shōzō, still lying prone, stretched out his hand and took a cigarette.

“Lighter…?” While Takako was trying to light the Dunhill lighter, Shōzō had already struck a match. The Dunhill lighter lacked the sudden flare of a struck match. At the root of Shōzō’s dislike for it lay a comparison between Takako and Yōko. In terms of charm, Yōko was a woman lacking in charm. Even if she stood on her head, she couldn’t exude half the charm Takako did. No matter how Yōko might shine with virginal beauty, exude noble refinement, possess education, or demonstrate intellect—spend a day with her, and he’d grow bored. In this way Shōzō observed.

She had as much charm as a matchstick, so to speak. Yet Shōzō sensed in Yōko this sizzling combustion—he supposed it came from anticipating how striking the matchstick’s shaft with that cruel thrill would gratify his pride. The toothpick ends up scorching the matchstick to ashes. And since such ambition had abruptly morphed into something resembling romantic passion, men’s hearts defied any neat formulaic explanation.

Shifting his gaze abruptly from the burning matchstick, Shōzō looked at Takako. Takako was not wearing the shorts from last night. She was wearing a floral-patterned dress like a twenty-year-old girl would wear. From exoticism to eroticism—and Sunday morning became a girlish affectation like fresh fruit after pork! If Yōko hadn’t been lingering in Shōzō’s mind, this calculated maneuver of Takako’s might have had its intended effect.

“There’s talk of starting a cabaret in Tokyo...”

She was planning to make Shōzō foot the bill.

“……” “There’s apparently a good location in Ginza—I thought I’d go take a look tonight…” “With who…?” “Ah, my friend’s here.” “You can meet her later.” “She’s rather pretty.” “More importantly—that woman who came to Notake’s place last night. Where’s she from?” “Well…” “Here…?” “It’s her first time here, right?” “Probably just some pro from somewhere.” “Ain’t ya comin’ to fetch the shoes?”

“Not yet…?” “Notake…? Is he still here?” “The Marquis…? He left... just now…” “Huh.” “What will you do now…?” “I’m going back to Osaka.” “You have time to go to Tokyo…?” “Nah, not really.” While saying that, Shōzō looked at Takako with a glint in his eyes, thinking, *This one’s planning to take Notake along with her.* And spreading out the newspaper, “Estate for sale: a certain marquis’s residence, Tokyo suburbs…”

Such an advertisement caught his eye.

Four Shōzō assumed a bone-chillingly intense laugh,

“Now this is getting interesting!”

And he was looking at that newspaper advertisement. “It says ‘a certain marquis’s residence,’ but this has to be Marquis Notake’s place for sure.”

Shōzō believed in the concept of coincidence. He naturally believed in his own talents as an entrepreneur, the speed of his mental agility, and his fighting spirit, but he believed in coincidence even more. Being born into the family of a toothpick carver was a coincidence. And he believed that this coincidence had gone on to call forth a multitude of coincidences, ultimately creating the grand coincidence where a thirty-five-year-old unknown young entrepreneur came to occupy a higher position than the heads of old zaibatsu in the personal income rankings of the 21st fiscal year.

“A man who can’t seize coincidence is worthless.” This was his theory. Of course, depending on perspective, anyone’s life might be considered a chain of coincidences. Yet there existed both dullness and sharpness toward coincidence. Shōzō had perpetually sensed coincidence and caught it. What’s more, he’d grown so skilled at wielding coincidence that he could turn it into inevitability for himself. No—rather than wield it, he gambled on coincidence. And he’d always won those gambles. He might be called a fortunate man, but transforming the coincidence of being born to a toothpick carver’s family into a lucky one had required repeating that thrill—grabbing coincidence by the scruff and staking himself on it. He had confidence, but there was no thrill in a gamble certain to win.

Thus, for Shōzō, to believe in coincidence meant that he was a man constantly being tested by chance itself—and that when those moments came, the only thing he could ultimately rely on was not heaven, but himself alone.

For example—everyone read newspapers. A day without newspapers felt nearly as lonely as a day devoid of humor or coincidence. At a certain teahouse in Gion, they prohibited their resident maiko from reading newspapers. She hid the newspaper in her underwear and read it in the toilet, they said. In the past, one rarely saw young girls walking through town with newspapers, but in recent times, even young, flighty, stocky girls lingering on nighttime street corners clutched newspapers alongside their handbags. Everyone and their mother read them. However, even if two people opened the same newspaper at the same time, there was no guarantee the first article to catch their eye would be the same. For an estate sale advertisement of a certain marquis’s residence to leap out before anything else—now that would have been one hell of a coincidence.

Moreover, when he overlaid this coincidence with others—Yōko, Harutaka, Takako, Takako’s friend, the trip to Tokyo…—Shōzō could no longer believe the estate for sale was anything but Marquis Notake’s residence, and his actions for the day had already been inevitably decided. And while envisioning how those actions would unfold, he casually asked Takako.

“What time’s the train?” “Since it’s an express, probably around nine in the evening.”

“Call a car. I don’t need dinner.”

“Oh, you’re leaving already!” “I’m in a hurry. Give my regards to your friend. I’ll probably see them again anyway.”

Shōzō grinned slyly.

Personal Advice Column

One Everyone and their mother reads newspapers. They read the same articles. The interests of everyone and their mother prove more alike than we realize. Yet it’s equally true that everyone and their mother doesn’t necessarily care about the same issues to the extent we assume. People would glance at the same newspaper column first more often than we think—and yet, the columns people prioritize differ from one another more than we imagine.

For example, Sakamoto—a man—read the personal advice column first thing each day. After that, he might read other columns—or he might not—but he never once failed to read that column first. Of course, saying he never missed a single day was an exaggeration. Because there were days when it didn’t appear.

It was in this morning’s newspaper. Even if his wife had run away, the personal advice column remained faithfully by his side. The habit of reading that column had actually been influenced by his wife, but even after she was gone, this habit alone—like Philopon injections—did not flee.

So, Sakamoto first injected 2cc of Philopon. Then he read today’s personal advice column. And once again recalling that his wife had left him, he seethed with resentment.

“Question—During my deployment, my wife was deceived by a police officer’s words—‘Your husband won’t return from the front’—fell into an adulterous relationship, and even ended up bearing a child.”

On top of that, the man completely drained my workplace allowances and even our child’s savings, and when the war ended, fearing my demobilization, she vanished with an unregistered infant in tow. Even my wife now apologizes, saying she was abandoned, and is suffering, but I believe that having such a person in public office is unforgivable even for the nation’s sake. Is there any way to investigate the baby she took away? "The baby still hasn’t been registered in accordance with his wishes."

“Answer—War is itself a tragedy, but the lives of those citizens swept into its wake are the most wretched and profoundly anguished of all. I can fully imagine the torment in your heart. Yet I find it equally pitiable to categorically dismiss your wife as nothing but an adulteress. We know all too intimately the circumstances facing bereaved families of deployed soldiers. If your wife truly repents her past transgressions, you must forgive her and rebuild a peaceful home together.”

Especially when considering your children’s future, I earnestly hope for this. Even so, that police officer is an unscrupulous fellow. While holding a position where he should be providing even greater protection to bereaved families, indulging in both lust and greed is truly inexcusable.

“Please request that the police station where that man was employed locate him and take severe disciplinary action.”

When he finished reading, Sakamoto suddenly— “You bastard!” he shouted. Two

At that moment, “What’s this ‘bastard’...?” With a sly grin, Kizaki opened the door and entered. His eyes were bloodshot—likely because the Philopon Sakamoto had injected him with last night had been too potent, keeping him awake until morning.

“Did you hear that? —No, never mind, I wasn’t talking to you.” “Take a look at this.” “This is absolutely vile.”

Sakamoto showed him the newspaper’s personal advice column. Kizaki quickly skimmed through it, “Good grief, this is appalling!”

“Exactly.” “I was livid, huh?” “This is downright infuriatin’, I tell ya.” “There’s at least four solid reasons to get steamed up, I tell ya.” “This is one hell of a mess, I tell ya…”

Due to his past as a comic storyteller, even when speaking earnestly, Sakamoto’s manner of speech retained a flippant air.

“First off, of all times, for this personal advice column to appear right after yesterday’s events…” “It’s a sin, I tell ya.” “He’s a damnable bastard, absolutely….” “I tell ya, Mr. Kizaki—the moment I read this, it hit me: my wife must’ve run off after knockin’ up some guy.” “Nah, no doubt about it.” “You think you can run away on Philopon alone?” “Well, you see, how I got involved with the woman… It was back when I was still performin’ in the booth, heh, heh…” “My wife was also in that booth, twirling around… kickin’ up her legs and dancin’, you see.” “In other words, a dancer.” “I’m a musician myself, you see.” “Teach!” I tell ya. “Hey, Teach!” “She had the nerve to say that!” “On the night of an all-night practice, she had the nerve to come sayin’, ‘I’m sleepy.’”

There, Sakamoto shuddered his shoulders violently—by now, it was the gesture of a comic actor. "I’ve been waitin’ for this, haven’t I? But am I sleepy? Then let’s sleep together—I didn’t say that. When the night gets late, even thieves get sleepy. Endure, endure! We gotta finish it tonight, or tomorrow’s opening won’t happen—that’s the very essence of a performer, I tell ya. Then, that woman couldn’t stand being sleepy—‘Give me Philopon!’ Alright, here we go—her plump, soft white arm slid in… That’s how we got involved in the first place, a bond forged by Philopon, I tell ya."

“Then you knew about her Philopon use all along?” “That’s right. Now you’re goin’ on about Philopon this and that... What’re you even talkin’ about? She must’ve found some guy and run off. Don’t know where that bastard crawled from, but he’s rotten through. Just like this cop here, I tell ya.”

he said, pointing at the newspaper,

“Even if she gets abandoned, knocked up, comes crawlin’ back beggin’ for forgiveness with her swollen belly stickin’ out—I won’t have any of it, I tell ya.” “But don’t you think you’re reading too much into this?” “Nah. “Absolutely certain, I tell ya.” “I’d bet on it, I tell ya.”

“A hundred percent—that’s how it is, I tell ya,” Sakamoto was saying when the sound of footsteps climbing the apartment stairs,

“Behold, the dawn return from Tōkai…”

could be heard along with that hummed tune.

III

“Mr. Sakamoto.”

Kyōkichi came to the front of the room and called out in an overly familiar tone.

“Can I come in…?” “Oh, Kyō-chan?”

And so, it had been him who'd said, "Come in."

“I’ll come in.” “Careless—you can’t open this room if you’re not careful.”

Kyōkichi opened the door a crack and gingerly inserted only his head,

“Oh—you’re a guest…?” he said as he entered. Then he turned to Kizaki and gave a quick bow. Kizaki returned the greeting while thinking, That face looks familiar. “Don’t go spoutin’ things that’ll wreck your rep.—’Sides, even without peepin’, it’s too late now,” Sakamoto said. “She ran away,” he cackled, though the laughter rang hollow.

“Hmph.” “Kyō-chan, what do you think? I think my wife’s got herself a man. What do you think? And your observation…” “That’s for sure.” Kyōkichi said simply, like sweeping away a pawn with a lance.

“Women are so sloppy.” “When’d she run away?” “Last night…?” Hmm, I thought so. “Because it’s Saturday, you know.” Beneath Kyōkichi’s abrupt assertion that Saturday nights were when women descended into chaos lay a vexing loneliness, like tearing apart and discarding old cotton batting. “I see. “You think so too?”

Sakamoto abruptly shook hands with Kyōkichi. Kizaki turned his face away, exhaling tobacco smoke along with the contradiction of being the only one who felt compelled to defend women. But Sakamoto, "Hey, Mr. Kizaki, I absolutely won't forgive this." "Don't you think that telling someone to 'just forgive her' as advice column answers are themselves unforgivable?" The moment he said this, Kizaki reverted to his usual self. "No—the very ability to casually give such answers qualifies them as advice columnists." "If they actually probed the depths of every questioner's psyche, they'd be disqualified as advisors." "'Report it to the police to punish the adulterer and forgive your wife'—if people could settle for such cookie-cutter solutions, nobody'd write to advice columns." "These days you won't find anyone spouting platitudes like 'Report it to the police' even over lost wallets." "Even if you get the adulterer punished, your troubles remain." "'Forgive her because she regrets her mistakes'—that it?" "Hmph." "Educated people with social status don't understand a damn thing about human nature." "Right? You see what I mean."

Kizaki turned toward Kyōkichi.

“I don’t give a damn about that stuff.”

Kyōkichi spat out the tobacco residue clinging to the tip of his tongue with a "ptt,"

“Instead, Mr. Sakamoto—give me a shot of Philopon. That’s why I came here.”

and extended his arm.

IV “Philopon…? Alright, let’s do it.” “Business at Sakamoto Clinic’s been booming lately, eh?”

Sakamoto grinned at Kizaki while taking out a Philopon ampule from the case, then applied an ampule cutter and rotated it, splitting it cleanly in two as if shearing through glass. The crisp snap rang out with piercing sharpness—a hollow challenge hurled at his fleeing wife.

Philopon, a dangerous stimulant with harmful effects on the heart and nerves, was akin to shortening one’s lifespan with each injection. Yet this self-destructive compulsion of addicts—drawn ever deeper toward the unhealthy despite knowing its harm—should have rendered the snap of splitting ampules a muddy resonance of decadence. Instead, its hollow clarity rang through the vacuum like some perverse ethics of decay. So Sakamoto, entranced by the lingering thrill,

“So Kyō-chan’s finally joined my crew, eh? I’ll give you shots every day if you want.”

“No, just today’s enough.” “Will it hurt...?” “I ain’t into this for kicks.” “Gimme the kind that doesn’t hurt.” “Hey, do me this favor.” “Hey, it hurts, doesn’t it?” “But… I guess it’s fine even if it hurts.” “Because today’s special.” “If I can win at mahjong, I’ll endure it.” “But if it hurts too much, I ain’t gonna like it.”

“It’s fine. Everything hurts at first, y’know.” “You plannin’ to play mahjong?”

“Yeah. I didn’t sleep last night.” “If I slip up, I’ll lose.” “Losing’s fine—but if I do lose, I can’t go to Tokyo.” “Mr. Sakamoto…it really doesn’t hurt…?” “Ah—tssk…!”

Kyōkichi grimaced—whether from the needle going in or not. Sakamoto pressed the syringe’s plunger as he

“—Going to Tokyo…?” “Yeah. I’ve had enough of Kyoto. Mr. Sakamoto—you don’t have any money, do you? You won’t lend me any, will you…? That’s why I’m using mahjong to get my travel money.” He could have returned to Tamura and begged Mama for money—it wasn’t impossible—but the thought that Yōko might have stayed there last night extinguished any desire to go back. What’s more, his longstanding dislike for Mama had now fused with his revulsion toward Tamura itself, making even the sight of her face unbearable. That feeling must have slightly strengthened Kyōkichi’s resolve to drift away. He had more confidence in mahjong than in dance, and when he stepped out of St. Louis and hit upon the idea of using the money he’d make from it for travel expenses, it felt refreshingly clear.

So he had left the shoeshine girl waiting at the apartment entrance and come to seek out Sakamoto, a familiar face at the hall. The mahjong parlor Kyōkichi frequented was in Gion’s Hanamikoji Street, not far from the apartment. “How’s that? Didn’t hurt, did it?”

After pulling out the needle, Sakamoto patted Kyōkichi’s arm with a few firm pats.

“It hurts.” “There, see?!” “Blood’s comin’ out, damn it!” “If a little blood and pain bother you, how’d you handle a nosebleed? —How about you, Mr. Kizaki?” “You too…”

“Maybe I’ll have you do it… to shake off the drowsiness.”

When the needle entered Kizaki’s arm,

“Mr. Kizaki… There’s a call for ya…”

The maid’s voice was heard in the hallway.

V

The name was Seikan-sō, but this apartment was a rickety, cheaply built structure as grimy as a damp rag. Moreover, it seethed with noise from dawn till dusk, its air thick with squalor. The figure who best embodied Seikan-sō’s essence was its maid Oshin—a squat, stumpy woman so unsightly she’d earned nicknames like “Clattering Sewing Machine” and “Monster.” Her voice matched her appearance—a crushed-gravel roughness born not just from warbling pop songs all day, but from the relentless grind of her existence. She meant well at heart, but her manners were appalling; she mangled Kizaki’s name into “Kijaki,” and the way her eyes smoldered whenever she looked at him left the photographer thoroughly exasperated.

Oshin was fond of everyone in the apartment, but she seemed particularly fond of Kizaki. But even so, there was no one who would engage with her—or so it was supposed—yet Oshin always slept with the maid’s room door thrown wide open, her exposed sleeping figure on display. And even if some drunkard returned, approached Oshin, and tried to play a prank, she would merely stop snoring without opening her eyes, and by the next day, she’d act as if nothing had happened. She was nineteen.

“Oh, he’s not here.—Mr. Kizaki!”

Oshin seemed to have opened the door to Kizaki’s room. “Here!”

When Sakamoto shouted, Oshin clattered into the room,

“Oh, another injection.” “Mr. Kizaki… There’s a call for ya…” “I can’t get away right now.” Sakamoto answered in his stead while pressing the syringe’s plunger.

“But it’s from the police!” “Police…?”

Kizaki wondered in an instant what business they could have with him, but nothing came to mind. Last night, Chimako had stolen the Leica and fled—he hadn’t realized the matter was related to that.

“Tell them I can’t get away right now.”

Sakamoto was deliberately slowly pressing the plunger. "But it's the police!"

“Then tell ’em he’s out!” “Is it really okay to say that?”

“To hell with the police!” Sakamoto had been reading about a corrupt officer in the advice column—perhaps because he’d fallen under the delusion that his own wife had run off with some patrolman—and now he suddenly seemed to feel an inexplicable revulsion toward the police.

“If they’ve got business, they’ll come themselves, right? Mr. Kizaki.” “Long as you don’t do nothin’ wrong, cops ain’t got no business with ya ’cept bicycle licenses.” “Just tell ’em no!” “He’s out, I said! Mr. Kizaki Saburō ain’t home!”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” “Mr. Kizaki, hurry up and go!” “I’ll get scolded!”

However, since Sakamoto wouldn’t pull out the needle, Oshin— “I don’t care. Let them scold me!”

With those words, she clattered out, swaying her hips.

Six “Oh, wait a second, Oshin-chan!” Even Kizaki, who had been amused by Sakamoto’s jesting tone, finally grew somewhat concerned and tried to call Oshin back—but by then, she was already clattering down the stairs. Kyōkichi was smirking at the commotion when suddenly—

“I’m outta here. This Philopon’s hitting hard. Can’t fuckin’ take it anymore!”

As he stood up, driven by the vision of his favored blue Chin'itsu hand—mahjong tiles already forming in his mind—

“—Dammit all! Sorry ’bout that!” He said in a maiko-like tone and left.

And as he passed by the management office,

“……Mr. Kizaki’s out, I tell you!”

Oshin’s shrill voice rang out. With a wry smile, Kyōkichi left the entrance, but when he suddenly stopped in his tracks, his ears perked up. “—A theft…?” “Oh, is it about the camera?” “Oh, if that’s the case, last night certainly…”

Just as Oshin started to say that, Kyōkichi suddenly barged into the management office, demanded "Let me handle it," and snatched the receiver from her hand. "Oh, hello? "What was it again?" "You...?" The voice on the phone practically bristled with authority. "Me? "Umm..."

He grinned slyly,

“I’m from the office. The maid who just came out has a screw loose, so I took over.” While being berated from behind by Oshin, Kyōkichi let out a muffled snicker deep in his gut. “Mr. Kizaki is…”

“He seems to be out.” “Last night—there was a theft at your place…?” “Hmm.” “Mr. Kizaki’s camera was stolen—wasn’t it?”

“Weeell... “That can’t be the case, though.” “I haven’t heard a thing about it, though.”

He hadn’t intended to mock them. It was likely that a delinquent youth’s instinctive urge to unconsciously shield wrongdoing had driven Kyōkichi to take the call.

“Do you know a girl named Chimako?” “What relationship does she have with Mr. Kizaki?” “Chimako…?”

he asked in return, surprised, but nonchalantly,

“Well… haven’t heard a thing.” “By the way—did somethin’ happen?” “This Chimako… girl you mentioned…”

“No, nothing really…” “My apologies for the trouble.” “Oh, hello…?”

However, the call had already ended. Kyōkichi hung up the receiver and asked Oshin.

“Did something happen last night…?”

“It seems Mr. Kizaki’s Leica has gone missing.” “Who…?” “Did someone steal it? Mr. Kizaki isn’t saying a thing.” “He isn’t reporting it to the police, you know.” “Weeell... Did Chimako steal it?” “Did Chimako steal it?” “Who on earth is this Chimako person...?” “Do you know her…?”

“No, not really…” “How the hell should I know?”

Kyōkichi was visibly flustered.

Seven

At that very moment, the shoeshine girl who had grown tired of waiting outside,

“Big Brother, still…? C’mon, let’s go!” The shoeshine girl’s intrusion into the management room came as an unexpected salvation for Kyōkichi.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

About to leave, he suddenly turned around, and Kyōkichi’s right palm— “Oshin… you’re talking about this, right…?”

and traced a semicircle over her abdomen.

“Kyō-chan… you know…?” Oshin’s eyes—wide with surprise—darted around frantically. Though no one else had noticed, Kyōkichi’s gaze—so unnervingly attuned to a woman’s body despite his youth—felt both eerie and reassuring. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you…?” “Hakari-sama… The father’s properly…” She wanted to say “There is one”—but not knowing who it was, Oshin had only secretly confided in Sakamoto’s wife. Sakamoto’s wife had apparently been in the same predicament. There was a doctor in Gion who performed quick procedures, she’d said, offering to make an introduction. She too had resolved to end it. But after her escape last night, Oshin had given up all hope.

“If it’s early enough, even one injection’ll do the trick. You should have Mr. Sakamoto give you the injection. Hey, Oshin. Just do it.”

Saying that Mr. Sakamoto had every kind of injection drug— “Do drop by sometimes，Kyō-chan.”

With Oshin’s guffawing laughter at his back, he left Seikan-sō.

He was somewhat concerned about Chimako, but what kept him from returning to Sakamoto’s room to hear the details from Kizaki was,

“Not my damn problem. “I don’t care.”

It was a capricious indifference. While his nerves operated with meticulous precision, a careless recklessness clung stubbornly to Kyōkichi.

And yet, the shoeshine girl— “Big Brother, I was so worried—I thought you weren’t coming out!”

Yet he remained acutely sensitive to the sensation of the small hand that had eagerly clung to him as she spoke. Though she was only twelve, her hand felt rougher and more calloused than any woman’s Kyōkichi had ever touched. This warmth seeped into what little innocence still lingered in the young man’s heart.

“You were born in Tokyo, right…?” “Yeah. I was born in Kobiki-cho. My home was a tobacco shop. My school was the same as Rokudaime’s. I could walk right to Ginza.” “Better Tokyo than the countryside. Let’s go there after all.”

“Yeah. I hate walking around Ginza in these dirty clothes, but if I’m with you, Big Brother, it’s okay.” When Kyōkichi passed through the path of Kōdaiji Temple, came alongside Maruyama Music Hall, and reached near the police box, he spotted the figure of a young woman ascending from the base of the stone steps and stopped short in surprise.

VIII

They were likely family members of the Occupation forces. Two women, their heads wrapped in bright red neckerchiefs to shield against the sun, had stopped their jeep in front of the woman and were addressing her. They seemed to be asking her to let them take photographs. The woman, looking troubled and on the verge of tears, waved her hands in refusal.

Her refined appearance—a cobalt-blue solid-color dress that complemented her modest elegance—was beautiful enough to make Occupation forces’ family members want to take photographs, but her feet were clad in tattered sandals. They were the kind of loaner sandals provided by libraries and hospitals. Was she refusing to be photographed because of those sandals?

However, Kyōkichi had no time to wonder why the woman was wearing such sandals.

No, he hadn't even noticed them. "Ah, Yōko!" He had been tripped up by an unexpected coincidence—but then again, had Yōko not been distracted by having her photograph taken at that moment, she might have noticed Kyōkichi. However, coincidence had diverted Yōko's gaze away from him. And then, speaking of further coincidences—for once they start piling up, they become endless—the moment Kyōkichi tried to approach Yōko,

“Hey, you!”

they were stopped by the police officer at the police box. "What’s this about…?" "Step over here! You too, come here!" The police officer led Kyōkichi and the shoeshine girl into the police box. Kyōkichi didn’t understand why he had been stopped, and irritation welled up within him,

“Is there something you need?”

“Your name…?” “Yagisawa Kyōkichi!”

“How old are you…?” “Twenty-three.”

“Your occupation…?” “Vagrant.”

“What do you do to make a living…?” “Freeloader.”

“What’s that girl to you…?” “…………” “Why aren’t you answering?” “If you’re going to call me ‘you,’ I can’t answer!” “Hmm. What’s that girl to you…?” “She’s my sister.” “Her occupation…?”

“Can’t you tell by looking…? Shoeshiner.”

Kyōkichi looked toward Yōko as he said this. Yōko had apparently been photographed. After exchanging a few words with the Occupation forces’ family members, she got into their jeep. “Oh, crap!” Thinking he had to catch her now, he instinctively tried to dash out— “Where do you think you’re going—?”

The police officer’s hand suddenly grabbed Kyōkichi’s arm. Before long, the jeep carrying Yōko drove past the police box with a light, crisp sound.

Dove.

I

In detention centers, those released and sent out are called "doves." Just as Chimako had predicted, Yōko was detained for only a single night and became a "dove." Since she had been arrested on suspicion of being a "Black Girl," she underwent an interrogation so humiliating she couldn’t speak of it to anyone—but once they confirmed she was a virgin, there was no longer any room for doubt. Because of the humiliating experience, Yōko felt a numbness that wouldn’t let her cry. To make matters worse, her shoes were missing. Since she had been spotted by Kimongi Shōzō, there was naturally no way she could go to Tamura to retrieve them. She had briefly considered calling the apartment to have them bring her shoes to the police station, but she disliked having to explain the situation. If she explained the situation bluntly, it would only invite unwarranted suspicion, so she couldn’t even ask her colleagues at Jūbankan for help.

In times like these, Matsuri—the one she could rely on—was already dead. In the end, the only one she could ask was Kyōkichi. If it was Kyōkichi, he would know she had gone to Tamura, would likely take it on without hesitation, and moreover, asking him about the shoes would conversely serve as proof of her innocence the previous night—so she borrowed the police station’s phone and called St. Louis.

He wasn't there. Because she would call again, she left a message asking them to have Kyōkichi wait if he arrived, and after about ten minutes, when she tried calling once more— "Oh, Kyō-chan just returned now, dear. "A message...? "I did pass it along. "But when the phone rang, he told me to say he'd already left Kyoto—then went out with some girl. "Ohoho..." The shrill laughter was Madame Natsuko of Café St. Louis's trademark mannerism, but Yōko—unaware of this—felt as though she were being ridiculed.

Even though he knew the call would come, he’d deliberately gone out with some “girl”—she felt utterly mocked.

“Fine.” She’d never speak to Kyō-chan again—who cared about shoes? She’d walk barefoot—and with her face deathly pale, Yōko nearly bolted out of the police station. But of course, she couldn’t actually walk barefoot. The police janitor lent her a pair of sandals, so she put them on and left—then decided to visit Kizaki immediately.

The reason she didn’t even stop by Matsuri’s apartment was that she felt she had to fulfill the task Chimako had asked of her as quickly as possible. However, Yōko herself also had business she needed to discuss with Kizaki. However, when she reached Maruyama Park, she was asked by an Occupation forces’ family to let them take her photograph.

“I’ve been getting my picture taken nonstop since last night.”

While muttering about the cruel coincidence, she flushed anew at the wretchedness of her sandal-clad feet,

“No-no. “I’m sorry.” “Excuse me.” She attempted to refuse using broken English but ended up being photographed. However, as a gesture of thanks, they offered to give her a ride in their jeep. Yōko got into the jeep with the feeling of finally being saved from the misery of walking in sandals. And thanks to that small commotion, she ultimately didn’t notice Kyōkichi inside the police box. However, even if she had noticed him, whether she would have called out remained uncertain. ――The jeep eventually arrived in front of Seikan-sō.

II

As she was about to get out of the car, Yōko— “Can you dance…?”

When asked, she nodded, and— “So… won’t you come to our party this Sunday…?” The Madams in the car seemed to have taken a liking to Yōko. The fact that she could speak broken English must have also struck them as something rare. “Thank you… If I can make it…” Yōko had said it intending to decline, but they seemed to take it as agreement and held out a notebook, telling her to write her address down here.

“No thank you!” To refuse so clearly, Yōko was far too Japanese. Anyway, when she wrote down the apartment’s address and handed it over, “This Sunday at 5:00 in the evening, we’ll come by car to pick you up at this address.” “Is that all right…?”

“Thank you.” As she got out of the car, Yōko said, “Thank you for going out of your way to bring me here—” Her words, which could also be taken as gratitude for being invited to the party, made it as good as a promise.

Along the pine-grove path where a gentle breeze blew, the automobile sped away like the wind. The heads wrapped in red neckerchiefs turned back, and Yōko kept waving until the ruddy hands fluttering in the autumn sunlight disappeared from view—but her waves remained timid, nothing more than hesitant gestures she could manage. The spot where Yōko stood was shaded, the sunlight blocked by the Seikan-sō building, but her heart too had suddenly clouded over.

When Yōko entered Cabaret Jūbankan, she had concealed her surname but kept using her real given name—such was her love for the name Yōko above all else she possessed. She believed it symbolized humanity’s innate longing to live brightly and joyfully beneath the sun’s light. But now, seeing the untroubled radiance of the American women in the car, she felt terms like “bright” or “joyful” or “beneath the sun’s light” could no longer be tossed about so carelessly—and with the sudden thought that she too might belong in this gloomy Seikan-sō building, her heart sank.

To exaggerate, even if the sky was clear a block away, Seikan-sō was the kind of place where only there was overcast, and the autumn wind blowing over it suddenly appeared darkened. The building itself was gloomy, but when Yōko was eventually led by Oshin into Kizaki’s room, she was startled by the gloom etched into his expression.

Kizaki had just opened the door and was about to leave. From a Tokyo magazine publisher,

“Photos urgent…”

An urgent telegram had come demanding immediate submission—if not sent promptly, it would be too late—so he was about to head to the post office to wire a refusal. “Oh… Are you going out…?” “If I hadn’t been given a ride, I would’ve missed you,” Yōko said with relief, but— "………"

Kizaki silently returned to the room while glancing at Yōko’s feet. That expression was chillingly gloomy.

III

As for Kizaki’s gloomy expression— (It was his raw jealousy that had revived.)

If a single line of explanation were given, it would already be clear—but expressions are the creases of life formed on the trousers of the psyche. A single line of explanation might serve as an iron to smooth out these creases, but even relying on words' pressing heat, imperceptibly fine wrinkles would remain. Yet even a thousand lines of explanation would prove insufficient to account for these minute folds. And what of the psyche's creases—no, the flow of consciousness—that swell and fade, fade and swell, never settling like fixed trouser wrinkles?

Thus, one could neither call a single line insufficient nor deem a thousand lines excessive—but where, then, does the method exist to describe a human’s momentary expression without excess or deficiency?

Is the conviction that one has managed to describe something without excess or deficiency even when using commonplace words and style born from overconfidence in the correctness of the order one imposes on their powers of human observation, or from blind faith in the conventions of literary technique?

Now then—such a preface as this deviates from proper form, so having received a shoe tag from the guardians of novelistic technique, removed my skeptical footwear, and humbly entered the traditional tea room of the novel to sit properly upon the cushion of description—if one proceeds according to form—

The moment Kizaki saw Yōko’s face as she entered, he was struck by a paralyzing nostalgia—and at the same time, something—

“Damn it!” He was thrown into disarray by this regret—an inexplicable regret.

He couldn’t fathom why Yōko had come to see him, but now that the Yōko he had only ever viewed through a camera lens stood before him in the flesh as a physical being, she was no longer a stranger. When he first saw Yōko in the hall of Cabaret Jūbankan,

"She looks like her!" It was true he'd been startled by her resemblance to his late wife Yae, but upon closer inspection, it didn't even amount to a stranger's coincidental likeness—merely a faint similarity in aura. Yet Kizaki lacked the leisure for careful observation, and as he tracked Yōko's retreating figure dancing through the hall's atmosphere with his camera's eye, her form had warped into an image of his deceased wife framed through jealousy's lens.

Thus, for Kizaki, Yōko’s appearance before his eyes was tantamount to Yae’s image escaping from the lens—it was no longer a mere matter of resemblance. He naturally felt a paralyzing nostalgia, but was that what they called romantic love? If this was romantic love, then it had already guaranteed the bitterness of suffering in equal measure—one had to steel oneself for the loss of all freedom of heart. So he felt regret at having thought, "Damn it!"

“So she’s finally come.” “She really came after all.” “What brought this woman before me?”

This was the regret. That was what had made Kizaki’s expression so gloomy. In his premonition that something was bound to happen between him and this woman, there was no brisk delight—only a certain bitterness.

But why had she come? Kizaki waited for Yōko to speak.

IV

“I’ve come up because I have a request to make.” At Cabaret Jūbankan she had used atashi, but the formal watakushi suited Yōko better when speaking properly. To Kizaki’s ears, it sounded unaffected—a refinement from good upbringing unbefitting a dancer… This suddenly made Kizaki feel sad. Yet this was no lament for societal decay, for well-bred women falling from grace. It stemmed instead from the prejudice he held about dance—a refusal to associate refined women with such things. The reason was personal.

For Kizaki, dance was always a nocturnal pose moving to lewd rhythms—an overt indulgence where the ugliness of women’s biology, veiled in social decorum, was laid bare. So he didn’t want to associate the two, yet here was Yōko, inextricably linked. Just as Yae had been connected… Why she would engage in something like dance—that was what made him sad. He was forcing himself to grieve. And he sank deeper and deeper into gloom.

“—I have two requests. “Both are unreasonable requests. “Would you hear them out?” “Let’s hear them out.”

Kizaki stared fixedly at Yōko's eyes. Yōko also looked at Kizaki's eyes. Their eyes met, but Yōko's eyes uttered not a word. Compared to the feverish intensity of Kizaki's gaze, Yōko's remained glacial—offering no foothold for connection. Though their eyes touched, their hearts remained estranged—in icy detachment that rebelled against the vulgar notion that young women instinctively feel romantic thrills when alone with men, Yōko stood honed to perfection.

Therefore, her words were businesslike.

“Actually, I would like you to give me the film you took at Cabaret Jūbankan last night.” “Why…?” “I do not wish to disclose my reasons.” “I cannot say.” “Then unless I state my reasons… you won’t give me the film?”

“No—whether I listen or not makes no difference.” “I cannot hand it over—no matter what reasons there may be.”

“Why…?”

“I can’t state the reason.”

The fact that he had given the same reply as Yōko was not sarcasm. Yōko remained silent for a while, but eventually—

“Why did you take photographs of me…?”

“I can’t state that reason either—not now.” “……” “Rather than that—why are you doing something like dance?”

Kizaki's voice had grown irritated.

“For my livelihood.” Yōko had grown sullen too. “Can’t you survive unless you work as a dancer?”

As if to cut her off, Kizaki said, glaring at Yōko.

V Glared at by Kizaki, Yōko’s eyebrow twitched sharply. Her self-respect seemed to shoot through her veins. “Then may I ask—is it that I must not become a dancer?”

“You mustn’t!”

Kizaki involuntarily shouted. “Why mustn’t I?” “………”

In that instant, Kizaki couldn't answer. It was his own conviction, but it never formed into words. The reason why she mustn't was this—the photographs he had taken last night of the hall's scene—the curve of Yōko's retreating figure that had inadvertently captured the ugliness of the female form—there was no other way but to show her. "You look down on the profession of dancing, don't you...?" "Contempt...?" As if surprised, Kizaki asked back.

“Even a dancer’s work is an honest profession.” Yōko’s tone abruptly took on the directness of a dance teacher explaining herself to a newspaper reporter.

“Dancers are no different from laborers.” “We are laborers who walk backward for three minutes and receive eighty sen in wages.” “We walk several miles in a single night.” “We are physical laborers, no different from rickshaw pullers.” “Even in midwinter, we’re drenched in sweat.”

Ah, that sweat... Kizaki recalled. The sweat trickling down the hollow of her back—Kizaki saw it as if it were the pitiful sigh of a woman’s menstruation.

That same sweat had been shed by his late wife Yaeiko the day before she died.

Kizaki married Yaeiko in the summer. In the one-room apartment he had rented—where they spent their first night—Kizaki and Yaeiko hung the mosquito net together. They turned off the lights and released fireflies into it. The faint blue glow of the insects alighted swiftly on the exposed white swell of Yaeiko’s sweat-damp chest and flickered there.

However, after being afflicted with chest disease, Yaeiko would always wear proper nightclothes and sleep alone inside the mosquito net, no matter how sweltering the night. She had grown so frail she no longer even had the strength to sweat. And on the night before her death, Yaeiko called Kizaki into the mosquito net in a faint voice, “Our bond was so brief, wasn’t it?” A tear spilled down as she stroked Kizaki’s hair—then suddenly she burned with fierce intensity. “Idiot, you’ll die!” “I’d rather die! I’d rather die!”

Even through her nightclothes, Yaeiko’s body burned like fire as she screamed; sweat seeped into his palm—a sad sensation, as though he were wringing out the last of her life. Never before had Kizaki felt the pitifulness of the woman within his wife so acutely.

“But that sweat—isn’t it sweat wrung out by a man? Isn’t it sweat shed while holding hands with a man?”

Kizaki said in an irritated voice. Without a word, Yōko suddenly grabbed her handbag and stood up.

VI

“Huh?!”

Wondering if she was angry—Kizaki looked up—Yōko flung her words at his face as if hurling them. “Lowlife!” No sooner had she directed a cold, white-eyed glare at him than she turned her back. She tried to leave the room swiftly, but when she slipped them on, her sandals looked wretched. Yōko was half in tears, but the sound of the door resounded with all the force of her pride. Kizaki sat there dazedly.

“What’s so lowlife about that?!” The reason he hadn’t even tried to chase after her was that he felt an almost perverse joy at being called a “lowlife.”

Of course, Kizaki did not think of himself as a lowlife. However, he was so thoroughly decadent—so mired in viewing women solely through a lens of sensuality that he could no longer even muster the will to assert his own decadence—yet this was not some masochistic pleasure in resigning himself to being called a lowlife. What he wanted was to clutch at even this straw—Yōko calling him a "lowlife" and storming out in indignation—as something for himself, drowning in a swamp of decadence, to grasp onto. It was a contradiction, but perhaps that was the very nature of romantic longing. Kizaki couldn’t understand why Yōko had come wearing such shabby sandals, but her retreating figure in those sandals lingered on his eyelids, leaving a lingering aftertaste reminiscent of the bittersweetness of a mild heartbreak.

“This is just fine.”

It was a resigned relief. The moment he saw Yōko—"Damn it!" The regret that I wouldn't get away unscathed with this woman—it was a relief fading into resignation.

Kizaki lit a cigarette. And now, recalling the phrase he had discovered in the Lotus Sutra during those days when he had been tormented by jealousy toward Yaeiko—

“Do not meet those you love.” As he abruptly recalled that phrase, the cigarette reeked of loneliness. But the rationed 'Hikari' went out almost immediately. Kizaki flopped heavily onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

On the ceiling, a spider had built its web.

"Maybe I'll become a womanizer."

He couldn’t tell what association had brought it on. But at this sudden, fleeting thought, Kizaki jolted.

At that moment, the door suddenly opened. Kizaki jolted upright. The one who had opened the door was Yōko. Yōko stood rigidly, her face deathly pale. Her shoulders trembled. And just as the trembling seemed to spread throughout her entire body, Yōko abruptly plopped down in front of Kizaki.

VII “Mr. Kizaki!” Yōko uttered Kizaki’s name for the first time, “Why… why would you humiliate me…” "—must you…?” The rest of her words trembled and failed to emerge. The fact that she was in such an agitated state made Yōko feel pathetic even to herself. "Lowlife!"

Once she had stormed out, her pride wouldn’t allow her to return so shamelessly, and yet—had she come back solely because she had a message for Chimako?

Could it have been some unfathomable force that drew Yōko back? But what that was, Yōko could not comprehend. "I don't recall insulting you at all." Kizaki muttered. "—You're misunderstanding."

“Then why would you say such a thing?” “…………” “Why… why do you despise the profession of being a dancer…?” “I don’t despise it. However, if it sounded like I do… that’s…” Just as I was about to say, “Because I’m fond of you—” a spider came sliding down from the ceiling toward Yōko’s head.

Kizaki abruptly reached out his hand to brush away the spider. Yōko flinched and jerked back.

“It’s a spider.” Kizaki laughed stiffly and abandoned the notion that he loved Yōko. The idea of becoming a womanizer—a hollow impulse he never truly meant—stood as the simplest way to scorn women, yet even within such musings, he found himself unwilling to reduce Yōko to that contempt. Perhaps this sentiment had instantly reached Yōko, for her voice now carried a calm reassurance as she spoke.

“Mr. Kizaki… would you be willing to hear my request…?” “I’ll hear it.”

Kizaki's voice was now sincere. Whatever that wish might be, granting it for Yōko was Kizaki's meager way of expressing affection. It was a love that did not seek to touch. "Well..." And then Yōko conveyed Chimako's message,

“Could you… tell the police that and help out…?”

Kizaki silently nodded. Eventually Yōko stood up. "Oh, already..." A lonely shadow instantly crossed Kizaki's face as if to say, "Are you leaving already?"

“Another time, perhaps…”

As Yōko descended the stairs, she was abruptly shaken by a feeling that she might somehow end up coming back to this apartment again. Giggle Gang

I “There really are some idiotic cop types out there. “They have the nerve to think I’m Higuchi. “Maruyama Park gives me the creeps. “If you carelessly walk around with a girl, you’ll end up in a hell of a situation.” At the Gion Hanamikoji mahjong club “Gion Manor,” even Kyōkichi, who had been talking while arranging tiles, eventually fell as silent as lead. Their opponents were Good Morning Gin-chan, Blowing-a-Kiss Yasusuke, and Atom Bomb Gorokichi—these three formed a mahjong club-specializing delinquent group called the Giggle Gang. They always lurked around city mahjong clubs in trios, and whenever a good mark showed up, the three would collude to swindle gambling money out of them.

Kyōkichi knew the Giggle Gang’s tricks. Moreover, could his decision to take on the Giggle Gang for a match have stemmed from overconfidence in his mahjong skills? Or was it the thrill of a desperate gamble—challenging their cheating head-on?

Kyōkichi quickly found himself at a disadvantage, and by the time the first round ended, he had already lost four thousand yen. “Kyō-chan, you’re awfully quiet. Why don’t you make some noise? Groan or grunt or something.” Good Morning Gin-chan said with a sly grin. “If you don’t keep your mouth shut about gambling and love affairs, there’s no point in ’em.” Kyōkichi retorted like this, but his complexion had turned pale.

Kyōkichi had been retorting like that, but his complexion had turned pale. “Gambling gets more interesting the more you lose.” Half muttering to himself, Kyōkichi clung to his tiles, but the moment he declared a ready hand, they would always block his winning tile. When the North-North wind came around, Kyōkichi had two North tiles. Red Dragon tiles—two of them. If things went well, he could win with a hand nearing Mangan using Four fans.

“Gotcha!” Shouting, Kyōkichi called pon on the North tile that Blowing-a-Kiss Yasusuke had discarded, then turned to face Yasusuke. “Mwah!” He blew a mocking kiss. At that moment, the leather wallet of the young man settling the bill at the club’s counter caught Kyōkichi’s eye. He recognized that wallet! “Ah!” “That’s my wallet!” Just as Kyōkichi started to rise, Good Morning Gin-chan discarded a Red Dragon tile.

“Pon!”

Kyōkichi energetically called out, “As if I’d let this one pass!”

While picking up tiles—no longer in a position to worry about the wallet—he suddenly called out to the shoeshine girl sitting on the sofa in the corner and whispered something to her.

II “Okay.”

The girl nodded in a brisk voice and hurried out of Gion Manor behind the man.

“Oh, Kuniko-san’s disappeared.”

Good Morning Gin-chan said. "No, it's nothing—just... going out to buy cigarettes... H-heh, heh..."

“You’re in high spirits, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely!” After calling pon on North-North (Pei-Pei) and Red Dragon (Hongzhong) to declare tenpai with four han, Kyōkichi had no room left in his mind to worry about pickpockets.

He didn’t need to have ordered the girl to tail him—a single shout of “Pickpocket!” would’ve been enough. But he didn’t want to spoil his thrill at teetering on the edge of a mangan. This was the samadhi of mahjong—a trance so deep you’d miss your own parent’s dying breath. The winning tile had to be Five Man or Eight Man. Yet the Giggle Gang trio guarded those Man tiles fiercely, even dismantling their own hands to block them. That left Kyōkichi no choice but to draw his way to victory.

“Alright, I’ll draw it!”

Kyōkichi’s eyes blazed with intensity. No matter if made to dance, shoot billiards, play mahjong, or do anything else, he displayed genius-level skill—but when it came to mahjong, his true talent lay in the fighting spirit and formidable gambling luck that let him draw even the most improbable tiles when it counted most. And it was only in those moments that he found purpose. At twenty-three years old, despite his youth, Kyōkichi found himself unable to feel passionate about anything, drifting through weary days. For him, daily actions were mere whims—wandering with the shoeshine girl, sudden notions of going to Tokyo, plans to fund travel through mahjong, even choosing the Giggle Gang as opponents—all meaningless caprices. Yet once immersed in the tiles’ thrill, that alone became his youth, letting him forget everything and lose himself completely.

Whether he could earn the fare to Tokyo was no longer a concern. How many points he might lose, whether he could recover them in the next round, what he would do if he lost and couldn’t pay the gambling debt with his empty pockets—none of these concerns even crossed his mind. “I’ll draw five or eight Man!”

He had thought of nothing else. “Let’s just wash this round. With a giggle, yeah?” “With a giggle, yeah?” said Blowing-a-Kiss Yasusuke. “No, I’ll draw it myself. Draw, purple! Take red! This giggle’s dyed in color!” Kyōkichi kept up the banter, but his expression remained unyieldingly stern as he took a tile and rubbed its face with a goddamn intensity.

III

Kyōkichi rarely put his all into drawing tiles. But for that one crucial tile, he would voice a "Damn it!" And in those moments, he would become possessed by a wizard-like inspiration that could transform any tile into the one he desired, and his aim rarely missed. If he lacked confidence, he wouldn’t have put his all into it. It was the whip-like intensity of a champion jockey—reserved only for when he was cornered yet confident he could break through, unleashed in the final stretch toward victory.

“Damn it! Five Man!” However, it was neither Five Man nor Eight Man. “What the—Red Dragon?!” If it was a Red Dragon, that meant a quad—and a chance for rinshan kaihou (a rule where drawing a fourth identical tile allows one extra draw to complete the hand).

Everyone gasped and held their breath. Good Morning Gin-chan put the lit end of his cigarette into his mouth and extinguished it. Good Morning Gin-chan—a former silent film narrator—had lips twice as thick as a normal person’s.

Kyōkichi fell silent, wiped the sweat from his hand, then smoothly reached out, grabbed the rinshan tile, and rubbed its face as if scraping it intensely. He didn’t need to look—the texture alone told him. It was Five Man. Kyōkichi knocked over the tile with a look of disappointment. “I don’t know. It’s a mangan. Five-Eight Wu-Pa Toi-Toi. Wu-Fan. That’s a mangan. It’s meaningless. That’s the Giggle Gang for you. Don’t get angry. I’m suffering here. Must leave a bad taste, huh? It’s not my fault. Don’t get angry.”

As he rambled on about nothing in particular to himself, a sudden pang of loneliness struck him. “What a godawful giggle fest.” “I’ve seen plenty of giggle fests in my time, but never one like yours.” “If it’s come to this, I’m going all out.” “Goro-chan, let’s go with the giggle fest too!” As Good Morning Gin-chan clattered the tiles while mixing them and spoke, the woman from Gion Manor— “What exactly is this ‘giggle fest’…?” “Here, the mangan prize!”

She approached the table, placed the prize cigarettes down, and casually rested her hand on Kyōkichi’s shoulder. “Give me a rub. I’ve gotten old.” Kyōkichi suddenly peered into the woman’s face. Hmm, not bad— Suddenly,

“How about we sleep together tonight? A giggle fest’s just code for sleeping together.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The woman turned red and fled.

“Not interested? Good thing you said no. Obligations’ll shave three years off your life, I tell ya.”

As he arranged the tiles, already making flippant remarks—what was this aimlessness all about? Was it that once he had tasted the thrill of a mangan, his tension vanished like an insect after mating, only to be replaced by a grimy, powder-strewn yellow weariness akin to the crash of Philopon?

“But I tell ya, it’s always those types who end up gettin’ knocked up.” “I had a hell of a time.” “No, no—I did court her!” “No way…?” “Yes.” “No, no—I did court her!” “She got pregnant.” “It’s a giggle fest, I tell ya.” “She’s a married woman.” “Since she’s the type who’d shack up with an accordion player for a husband, her belly swells up like an accordion right away.”

The moment Gin-chan said that, Kyōkichi released his hand from the tile with a start.

Four “But Gin-chan… is that really your child…?” “Saka…”

“Isn’t it Sakamoto’s child…?” Kyōkichi inadvertently began to say Sakamoto’s name but, flustered, corrected himself: “Nah, might be the husband’s kid.”

“None o’ your damn business.” “The woman says it’s my kid.” “Can’t just dismiss the chance it’s the husband’s.” “I’m Good Morning Gin-chan.”

Though he’d invoked his Good Morning Gin-chan persona in such an unexpected place，Gin-chan had originally been known by his real name Motohashi as a notorious hoodlum in Kyōgoku’s entertainment district．However，Gin-chan now abandoned the name Motohashi and went by his alias．He despised leveraging his identity as a hoodlum in the disorderly postwar society，instead deliberately adopting the tacky nickname “Good Morning Gin-chan” as an act of self-mockery．

According to Gin-chan, hoodlums were ultimately gamblers, womanizers—a down-and-out lot without a penny to their name—or so he maintained. However, many of Gin-chan’s former comrades had become bosses in the black market, forged exclusive ties with cabarets, amassed fortunes overnight, and now had no choice but to buy villas costing four hundred thousand or even a million yen if they wanted to burn through their money by dawn. There were those who had actually bought such villas.

At the time of Japan’s defeat, they wore threadbare national uniforms with wooden clogs. However, after about half a month, they wore shoes. After five days passed, they donned jumpers. After three days passed, they sported smart suits and carried leather briefcases. Soon they grew beards and danced in halls with stunning beauties. And finally, they bought villas.

However, Gin-chan— “Hoodlums turning into entrepreneurs and buying villas—what a giggle-fest of a world we live in!” “No sooner do they crawl out of one villa than they go and buy another.” While declaring this, he grew more destitute with each passing day, his followers now reduced to just two—Tasuke, who blew kisses, and Goro-chan the “Atomic Bomb”—forming an inexplicable giggle-fest clique. “Hoodlums ought to make their living through gambling.” He had been haunting mahjong clubs, but he couldn’t find any decent marks, and the money to last the night was running dangerously low. But he was satisfied with that. It was a modest protest against his comrades who had become bosses. That’s why, even when he drank, he only had cheap Alps Whiskey. However, that Alps Whiskey turned out to be a mistake.

“Thanks to Alps, I ended up screwing up and messing around with someone else’s wife.”

And Gin-chan briefly recalled the woman who had come to his apartment since last night. She had run away from her husband’s place. “Women… they…”

After arranging his tiles, Gin-chan first discarded the pai pan (white dragon tile) and, “They put on a nonchalant face reading their magazines, but once they latch on like germs, they won’t let go.” “Just toss ’em like the pai pan!” “Well, I’ll take it.” “Pai pan’s my specialty.”

“While you’re at it, pick up a woman for me too.”

At that moment, the telephone rang.

Five

“This is Gion Manor—” said the woman from earlier as she answered the phone.

“Hello.” “Who’s callin’, please?” “Huh? Saint…?” “Ah—Saint Louis? Saint Louis—what’s this ’bout?” “Bit my tongue ’n’ fucked it up.”

Good Morning Gin-chan began to laugh, though it carried the strained quality of something forced. And,

“If it’s Saint Louis, that’s me.”

With that, he flipped over the tiles and started to rise from his seat, but suddenly began fidgeting restlessly,

“No—tell them I’m out.”

And what could account for this uncharacteristic restlessness in Gin-chan—so unlike his usual self? But, “Kyō-chan, you…”

The call had come through. Gin-chan let out a sigh of relief and settled back into his seat.

“Me…?” Kyōkichi raised his long eyelashes with an audible snap,

“Damn, today’s turned out to be a day full of phone calls for me.”

He flipped over the tiles and, deliberately putting one hand in his trouser pocket, stood up and walked away. “Kyō-chan…?” “Do you recognize me…?” “Ohoho…”

From the laughter, he realized it was Natsuko of Café St. Louis.

“What in the world…?” “You keep callin’ and callin’—I can’t take bein’ stuck listenin’ to that phone all day like some stockbroker’s clerk!”

“Oh.”

“You’ve got the wrong person.” “I’m the new release here.” “You’re mistaking me for someone else.” “Ohoho…” “You’re not seeing the full picture.” Her every word seemed jarringly out of place, but far worse was how the telephone receiver amplified that rasping voice—rendering it even more raw, parched, and tinged with a pitiful sensuality that clawed at his nerves.

“Who’s this ‘someone’? Who?” “With so many people around, you can’t tell, can you? “Hmm… Could it be that person? “Ah yes—Yoko! “He’s been calling again since that time. “When I told him she’d left Kyoto, he sounded utterly crushed.” “Ohoho…”

…… “You’re still in Kyoto, I see.”

“Yes—to my shame—I’m stuck here scraping by with empty pockets.”

“Paipan…? What’s that supposed to mean?” “If you’re in Kyoto, let’s go to the Liberal Club together.” “The inaugural meeting’s tonight at five.” “Be my guest.”

“Oh. “I can’t go alone.” “Members must come in pairs—couples only.” “Isn’t that just wonderful?” “Just ditch that restrictive Liberal Club already!”

As he was about to hang up,

“Wait—wait! I haven’t told you why I called yet!”

“What…?” “Ohoho…” “Ha! Ha!” “Don’t rush me. I’ll hand it over now. I’m just relaying messages.” As the “Ohoho…” laughter faded, it seemed someone else had taken their place at the other end of the line, their breathing audible.

Six

Who could it be—he wondered, waiting for the voice to speak.

“Big Brother…?” The voice that came through the receiver—nostalgic yet hesitant—was unexpectedly that of the shoeshine girl. “Do you... recognize me?”

“Yeah.” “Big Brother…? Do you recognize me…?” “Yeah.” “Big Brother, do you know why I’m calling from a place like this…?”

Her voice came through bubbly with eagerness. "Huh...?" He tried to think it through, but in that moment couldn't figure it out. "How the hell should I know? Why'd you go to St. Louis anyway?" "Don'tcha get it...? Ya really don't get it at all, do ya, Big Brother?" She sounded exasperated.

“How the hell should I know?” “Why?” “Tell me!” “…………” However, there was no reply.

“Did he shake you off?”

Kyōkichi casually lowered his voice. To the girl, he’d said only that—to tail that man, the pickpocket. He’d had no time to tell her what to do after following him—how to proceed from there. So he hadn’t expected the wallet to be returned. Still, it was irritating to have gone to the trouble of spotting the pickpocket only to leave him be—he’d told her to tail the man on nothing more than a whim. Even if the girl had lost him, he didn’t particularly despair. However,

“Nuh-uh.” A voice came through—declaring she hadn’t been shaken off—in a tone as triumphant as if announcing the capture of a demon’s head. “Well now... That’s some impressive yapping you’ve got there.”

Kyōkichi involuntarily smiled, “How far did you tail him…?” “I can’t say here, Big Brother.” “Big Brother.” It was a crisp Tokyo dialect. “Ah,” Kyōkichi pressed his tongue against the back of his upper lip and, “So that guy’s at St. Louis?” “Hmm...? —Yeah!”

She must have glanced around inside St. Louis before nodding—and imagining that gesture, Kyōkichi had never felt more fond of the girl than in this moment.

“So, Big Brother, come quickly!” “Got it!” “Hurry! Hurry!” “O.K., already! Ahaha…” Still buoyed by laughter, “—What’s your name again…?” “Me…?” Her startled response—as if her childish heart had been jolted by the unexpected joy of being asked her name— “Big Brother—I’m Karako!” The voice that answered, soft and composed, was already a woman’s. That’s how she breathed. When Kyōkichi returned to his seat, Gin-chan of Good Morning sat strangely heavy and subdued.

“Sorry to keep you waiting!”

That round also ended with Kyōkichi winning. “But I took two thousand.” “I’ll pay up at St. Louis.” “Gin-chan, come with me.”

As he started to stand up, Gin-chan hurriedly— “Hey, let’s play another round!” he tried to stop him.

“But I’m in a hurry.”

“What’s the problem?! Drop St. Louis!” Gin-chan’s voice suddenly turned sharp and menacing, but his eyes lacked strength.

7 Gin-chan’s forceful stance in stopping Kyōkichi, however, stemmed from a vulnerability—he had left a woman waiting at St. Louis.

The woman was Sakamoto’s wife. Gin-chan and Sakamoto had known each other since Sakamoto’s days at the Kyōgoku shack, and when Sakamoto married his wife—even if just for formality’s sake—the ceremony they held took place at Gin-chan’s apartment, with Gin-chan acting as sake pourer. In other words, he had acted as their matchmaker; thus Sakamoto relied on Gin-chan, and whenever marital quarrels arose, his wife would come crying to Gin-chan’s apartment. One night, a fight broke out over Philopon, and his wife ran out to come crying to Gin-chan’s apartment. “It’s late, so stay the night. Tomorrow I’ll go to Sakamoto’s place and make him come apologize. Don’t dwell on it—here, drink this,” he said, pouring whiskey into a glass.

That was Alps Whiskey. If you went to a bar on Shijō, they'd sell you a bottle for eighty yen if they knew your face. The official price was three yen fifty sen, but even at eighty yen a bottle, this whiskey counted as cheap. Since nobody had heard rumors of deaths from it, they'd decided it couldn't be methyl alcohol even if it made your eyes gummy a bit—and that night too, the two of them ended up draining two whole bottles. Because it was cheap and went down easy, they'd guzzled it—that was their mistake. With other whiskeys this never would've happened—but then again, this was Alps. Gin-chan got so plastered he lost all sense of time, his consciousness turning murky as he fell into some strange relationship with Sakamoto's wife. Sakamoto's wife had been tough for a woman, but even she'd finally hit her limit.

Of course, Sakamoto did not suspect a thing. "Last night, my wife was causing trouble again—" he said with an oddly earnest apology. Gin-chan had no words to reply. The wife was troubled, but this woman was a strange one. One moment she was tormented, declaring briskly that it’d be better to leave that Philopon maniac; the next, she wept about being pregnant with an illegitimate child, then cooed sweetly about how happy she was to bear *your* child—only to collapse into “Ah, I want to get rid of it.”

Her behavior had been erratic, but last night she suddenly declared, “Let me stay here,” and ran away to his place. “That’s a problem. If Sakamoto finds out…” Gin-chan wanted to avoid being with the woman even a little. If it became clear that his wife had fled, Sakamoto would surely come to report it. When dawn broke, Gin-chan, as if praying,

“Go somewhere else and stay there.” “Where am I supposed to go? There’s nowhere.” “Why don’t you go watch a movie or something? Let’s meet at St. Louis at three.” “We’ll discuss it after that.”

In any case, deeming it unwise for her to stay there, he forcibly drove the woman out. But what conversation could they possibly have at three o'clock? He knew perfectly well no good plan would surface, making the prospect of meeting agonizing.

When the game ended, Gin-chan looked up at the pillar clock and saw its hand pointing to five. In that moment, he felt a slight regret mingled with a resigned sense of relief—but in truth, the clock had stopped due to a malfunction. It was still three-thirty. He could make it. He had to go. However, playing another round of Iichan and dragging things out was his way of deceiving himself in this moment.

As Gin-chan was forcibly detaining Kyōkichi, a man drifted in like a gust of wind. Ah!

It was Sakamoto.

8 Like a man who had drawn a good hand from the North (Pe) wind, Kyōkichi was already itching to play another round of Iichan. But there was also Karako waiting at St. Louis.

Urged by Gin-chan, he hesitated briefly. At that very moment came Sakamoto’s entrance.

“Oh, Mr. Sakamoto—perfect timing!”

Kyōkichi exclaimed at this stroke of luck—and with that, his resolve hardened in his gut. “—I’m gettin’ out. Mr. Sakamoto—take my place, will ya?” You know, that’s better—he thought, glancing at Gin-chan’s face.

“…………” Gin-chan was groaning.

Gin-chan hadn’t known that Kyōkichi and Sakamoto were acquainted. So, “Since her husband’s an accordion player, she gets knocked up quick.”

He’d blurted out all that about the woman—come to think of it, what a careless thing to say. The words had slipped out with the clap of a discarded tile, but then again, I’d been loose-tongued ever since my benshi days.

Gin-chan wore a face like he’d bitten into a caterpillar, utterly dejected.

The moment he caught a glimpse of that face, Kyōkichi remembered—for the first time—the hot gossip about how Gin-chan had stolen Sakamoto’s wife right under his nose. “Ugh! This bastard’s turned into some giggling freak!” Kyōkichi ground down on the irony of leaving Sakamoto behind like gravel between his teeth, but he wasn’t twisted enough to sit there smirking at the tension. “Better to run than stay!” As he tried to stand up, Sakamoto—

“C’mon, Kyō-chan! You just shot up Philopon, didn’t ya? I’m just here to watch from the sidelines,” he said, stopping him.

No—it was precisely because he didn’t want to watch from the sidelines that he was trying to escape—Kyōkichi fidgeted restlessly. “I’ve got something I need to go get at St. Louis.”

“Then I’ll go get it for you. I’ll just be looking for my wife anyway…” He had just begun to self-deprecatingly hum the lyrics of a song—“From every town and every hill, searching here and there for Shanghai Lil…”—when— “Ah—!” Gin-chan raised his voice. But no one noticed. And as for Sakamoto’s wife waiting at St. Louis—they had no way of knowing that either.

“Heh heh…. You think you can talk your way out of this with smooth words? There’s no way I’m letting some random person handle this errand!”

After forming a circle with his thumb and index finger as if to say "this," he bolted out of Gion Manor in an instant. “Hey, Kyō-chan! Kyō-chan!”

Good Morning Gin-chan suddenly stood up for some reason and called out to stop Kyōkichi.

9

“What’s up, Gin-chan…” Flustered and panicking, Kyōkichi came back to the entrance. “Come closer…” Gin-chan pulled him nearer with a wild look in his eyes and placed a hand on Kyōkichi’s shoulder. “About what we talked about earlier…” He started to whisper—“Keep this from Sakamoto, you know…”—but abruptly changed his mind. Kyōkichi was the sort of man who seemed kind at first glance—but precisely because of that, he also seemed loose-lipped. So Gin-chan had stopped him with the intention of silencing him, fearing Kyōkichi might let slip about Sakamoto’s wife—but when he saw Kyōkichi’s face, he somehow felt ashamed toward him and couldn’t bring himself to say it. No—he was more ashamed of himself than of Kyōkichi. He thought his panicked attempt at silencing him was unmanly. Moreover, that would make Sakamoto far too pitiable. Admittedly, revealing the whole truth to Sakamoto would also be too cruel to him. But secretly trying to silence Kyōkichi in front of Sakamoto—who embodied “ignorance is bliss for the husband”—felt akin to insulting him. The fact that Kyōkichi had found out was like divine punishment—

“If you’re gonna talk, then talk!”

To let things take their course would be easier on him too—at least in this regard, Gin-chan wanted to strip himself bare with reckless abandon.

“About earlier…?”

Kyōkichi asked back. "Nah, when you gonna pay back that two thousand points from earlier?"

Gin-chan forcibly changed the subject there. Kyōkichi’s expression turned scornful as he realized—Oh, so that’s why you stopped me— “You’re quite the opportunist, aren’t you?” “I’ll pay it.” “If I go to St. Louis, I can get it.” “I’ll pay it today.” “Gin-chan, so that’s how it is?” “I’ll make good on it.” “That’s so sleazy.” “Just gotta pay and that’s it, right?” He left in a huff. Gin-chan returned to the mahjong table with a gloomy expression.

“Gin-chan, what’s wrong? Did some dame give you the boot? You ain’t exactly burstin’ with energy, are ya?”

Sakamoto was stroking the tiles with a sullen face.

“You’re not exactly full of energy either.”

“Me?”

Sakamoto gave a wry smile,

“My wife ran off.” “Huh,” “So it’s not like I’m moping around over that, see? When you get too damn angry, you start getting dizzy—can’t go on. Everything goes all woozy-like.” “Take care of yourself.”

“You mean my wife?” “No, your body. Aren’t you injecting too much Philopon?” “I’m fine, I tell ya. The comedian Wakana injects sixty shots a day and still stays alive and kicking, I tell ya. More importantly, Gin-chan, Alps aren’t good for you. They say that stuff’s aviation fuel, I tell ya. In the end, you’ll be gasping for air—dead certain, you know.” “Yeah. Dead certain, huh?”

Gin-chan quietly gauged Sakamoto’s expression but suddenly— “Hey, let’s settle this round! We’re all living on borrowed time anyway!” His voice took on a confrontational edge.

Dusk

I

The makeshift coffee shops of Tokyo and Osaka, for starters, had chairs so jagged and hard they hurt your backside, utterly unsuited for settling in to leisurely savor the atmosphere—but Kyoto’s cafés, true to their locale, remained unhurried.

For example, at St. Louis there were regulars who sat for half a day. The owner of the secondhand bookstore D-Dō in Sanjo-Kawaramachi, for instance, spent more time sitting in a corner of St. Louis than he did in his own shop. The purpose of this owner’s life lay in pleasure. However, pleasures that required large sums of money were nothing but unpleasant to him. To enjoy oneself as effectively as possible with as little money as possible was, for him, true pleasure. He adhered to this principle by lingering at St. Louis every day. For this café, owing to its location near Pontocho, had many geisha regulars, and watching them was a feast for his eyes; moreover, by teasing geishas he knew with snide remarks, he felt as though he were splurging at a teahouse. Of course, the geishas scowled. But since he knew that even if he spent money extravagantly, it wouldn’t win him any favors, it didn’t trouble him. The fifty-year-old man’s teasing—free of playboy pretensions, devoid of vanity, stingy through and through—was in fact a refreshingly straightforward pleasure. And what greater indulgence could there be than this, where even the steep price of a ten-yen cup of coffee felt like a bargain?

He was a Kyotoite.

St. Louis rarely became crowded. That said, it wasn't languishing. In Kyoto, there were scarcely any coffee shops that filled to capacity. Yet even on those rare occasions when St. Louis did become packed, he wouldn't relinquish his seat. He remained utterly composed. He put on airs like the old man from Chekhov's plays who never paid his boarding fees.

“Please use this establishment for business meetings and appointments.” Beneath a sign written in feminine script that read, “Please use this establishment for business meetings and appointments,” he wore an expression as though waiting for someone—though of course, he was waiting for no one at all. However, except for the owner of D-Dō, everyone at St. Louis at that moment was, as if by prior agreement, waiting for someone.

Even Madam Natsuko was waiting. She was waiting for Kyōkichi.

Chiyowaka of Pontocho was also waiting for her patron. The patron she was meeting at the café was, of course, not her main patron—but a so-called lover-patron, one who combined the roles of lover and patron, was certainly preferable to a mere patron or a simple lover. So even as the owner of D-Dō teased her, she kept waiting indefinitely. Even the pickpocket whom Karako had tailed from Gion Manor was growing impatient, perhaps waiting for someone.

Karako was, of course, longing for Kyōkichi. If he didn’t come soon, the pickpocket would get away. Karako stepped outside repeatedly, casting a distant gaze in the direction Kyōkichi would likely come from. But he didn’t come. “He’s late... “What’s goin’ on with him?”

When Karako returned to St. Louis once more and her anxious voice was heard, a young woman suddenly looked up. It was Sakamoto’s wife, Yoshiko.

He was late. Really late. What had happened to Gin-chan? As if reeled in, Yoshiko suddenly grew anxious.

II Gin-chan had said he’d come at three, but it was already past four. Because it was tucked away in a narrow alley, the interior of Café St. Louis had already been quietly, yet somehow hurriedly, invaded by the early autumn dusk that arrived sooner than most. The worry that Gin-chan might not come pressed in like the gathering dusk, and Yoshiko found herself recalling once more the look of annoyance on his face when she’d barged into his apartment the night before.

“Is my coming here a bother to you…?” “It’s not that you’re a bother, but this is awkward.” “You hate me… don’t you?” “It’s not that I hate you, but you shouldn’t be here.” “See? There you go.” “You hate me… don’t you?” “…………”

The fact that Gin-chan felt awkward because of Sakamoto—this was something Yoshiko couldn't grasp.

Women, in such situations, think only of two things—whether the other person likes them or hates them—and refuse to consider anything beyond that. At the very least, they wear such an expression. The fact that she had been driven out of the apartment under the pretext of meeting at St. Louis at three was because he hated her—she stubbornly convinced herself of this.

As proof—that he hadn’t come even past four for their three o’clock meeting—Yoshiko now wore the face of a woman who had been cast aside.

Of course, she hadn’t liked Gin-chan at all in the beginning. It wasn’t a relationship born of affection. The demon of Alps Whiskey had taken hold. Or rather, it was a bond akin to belching out drunkenness—a connection that felt almost like a half-hearted joke. Even the term “momentary impulse” would be an exaggeration. Yet from such a joke, a piece had been set in motion that would make Gin-chan impossible to forget—proof that the mysterious power of physical bonds defies all our imaginings.

Once the piece of infidelity was set in motion, it was always the woman who had to keep it moving. So Yoshiko had gone so far as to stage breaking an ampoule under the pretense of Philopon use to crawl into Gin-chan's embrace—though part of it had also been because of the child in her belly. Sakamoto had nearly caught on to it too.

Because of the child in her belly, even if she was hated, she had to see Gin-chan again. But where could Gin-chan be? She tried calling the apartment, but of course he wasn’t there. With a tear-streaked face, the moment she glanced toward the entrance, Yoshiko gasped. Kyōkichi had entered. As if her secret had been exposed, Yoshiko hurriedly averted her face. However, Kyōkichi had of course noticed Yoshiko.

“Heh.”

The memory came back of how flustered Gin-chan had been when the call came from St. Louis to Gion Manor. Kyōkichi deliberately turned his face toward Yoshiko, kept both hands thrust into his trouser pockets, and flicked the cigarette out of his mouth with the tip of his tongue.

“What awful giggling!”

When she heard that remark about her "giggling," Yoshiko—for reasons unknown—suddenly stood up and came to Kyōkichi’s side.

III

“Kyō-chan, you…”

Yoshiko hesitated slightly, "...You don't know where Mr. Motohashi is...?"

“Mr. Motohashi…? Such a man…” "The hell should I know? I’ve never even heard of him—" thought Kyōkichi, who didn’t know Gin-chan’s real name. He deliberately turned his back on Yoshiko as she approached, then flicked his gaze—which had just exchanged a nod with Karako—toward the pickpocket.

Under normal circumstances, Kyōkichi would banter more readily with Yoshiko—Sakamoto’s wife—than with his friend Sakamoto himself. Though his words were crude, they carried a rough charm, and whenever Kyōkichi came to visit the apartment, Yoshiko found her worries momentarily eased. But what had come over Kyōkichi today, this uncharacteristic coldness?

Yoshiko peered into some guilty feeling with a chill from the depths of her thoughts—thoughts with no place to land—and said, “It’s about Gin-chan… the Good Morning…”

Involuntarily, she flushed. “Hell if I know.” “You met up with Gin-chan, didn’t you……?”

"Hell if I know." From his sulky, blustering tone, Yoshiko realized Kyōkichi must have been meeting with Gin-chan until now. Of course, when Kyōkichi had just said—

“What awful giggling!”

The moment he said that, Yoshiko realized—the “giggling” was Gin-chan’s catchphrase, and those words coming from Kyōkichi now were proof they had been together until just moments ago. Where had they met? Yoshiko remembered she had called Gion Manor about half an hour earlier to summon Kyōkichi. Kyōkichi must have been playing mahjong at Gion Manor. And his partner might have been Gin-chan. No—it had to be exactly that. Was Gin-chan still at Gion Manor?

“Could I borrow the telephone for a moment…?” Yoshiko abruptly said this to Natsuko and called Gion Manor.

Because it was an automatic telephone system, at first she had no idea where she was calling, but

“Hello, Gion Manor…?” “Is he there…?”

From Yoshiko’s way of speaking, it became immediately clear—and in that instant, Kyōkichi, “Oh shit, this ain’t good!”

Startled, he cut off Yoshiko’s words as if— “No! No! You can’t call now! Gion Manor’s empty! I said there’s nobody there!” Using a transparent lie he couldn’t bring himself to mention Sakamoto’s presence to cover it up, “Kyō-chan, don’t interfere!”

Even Kyōkichi was trying to keep her from meeting Gin-chan—Yoshiko’s voice had turned piercingly shrill with suspicion. At that moment, the pickpocket suddenly stood up, paid his bill, and made to leave Café St. Louis. “Big Brother!”

Karako tugged impatiently at Kyōkichi’s sleeve.

IV

Urged by Karako, Kyōkichi thought to immediately follow the pickpocket out, but found his attention drawn to Sakamoto’s wife, Yoshiko.

If left alone, Yoshiko would call Gin-chan. But Sakamoto ought to be with Gin-chan right now. If Sakamoto were to discover right then that Yoshiko had called Gin-chan, there was no telling what chaos might erupt. Even if Sakamoto didn’t notice, Gin-chan would be cornered—and more than anything, Kyōkichi couldn’t stomach silently witnessing this scene of a woman phoning the place where both her husband and lover had been until just yesterday. It was a sickening feeling.

“I said no!”

"Cut it out!" Kyōkichi suddenly snatched the receiver from Yoshiko’s hand and slammed it down with a clatter. Yoshiko turned deathly pale.

“You lunatic!” “If I’m a lunatic, then you’re a shrill giggler!”

…………

Yoshiko’s shoulders were shaking as she glared at Kyōkichi. Her face was half in tears. …………

Kyōkichi’s face was also half in tears. Women are all fools. Matsuri dies; Yoko gets seduced; this woman has an affair and runs away from her husband... On top of that, she goes and calls without knowing a damn thing! Oh! She’s pregnant and kicks the bucket. That Oshin was pregnant too! “Big Brother, hurry…”

"If we don’t go now, we’ll lose him!" Karako exclaimed to Kyōkichi in an anxious voice that betrayed her impatience. "Oh right!" Kyōkichi dashed out of Café St. Louis. Karako rushed out after him, "That way!" As she pointed at the pickpocket walking toward Kawaramachi Street, Yoshiko came clattering out. And as she tried to hurry off toward Kiyamachi with a frantic expression—Kyōkichi,

“Where are you going…?” he stopped her with a—

“None of your business! Where I go…” “It’s my business—!” Her snapped retort betrayed the desperate intensity of a woman determined to meet Gin-chan at Gion Manor. “Hey, wait a second!” “Let go of me!” “No, I ain’t lettin’ go.” “It’ll tear!” “Hey, wait—” “You’re headin’ to Gion Manor…?” “Hey, I’m beggin’ ya.” “Don’t go—gimme a break here.” “Hey, Yoshiko!”

“Don’t ‘Yoshiko, Yoshiko’ me like we’re best pals!” Even as she said this, Kyōkichi—his voice gradually shifting to a wheedling, desperate plea—began, “Hey, I’m begging you…”

And while holding Yoshiko back, as he suddenly turned around, the pickpocket had already vanished into Kawaramachi Street. At the same time, Karako had also disappeared from view.

5

The last rays of the setting sun that had illuminated only the mouthpiece of the Three V’s sailor pipe—displayed as a consignment item in the shamisen shop’s show window on Shijō Kawaramachi—faded away as people waited for the city tram, and dusk slipped quietly down. In this neighborhood where a flood of disordered, quasi-colonial Ginza-style colors had lately overtaken even the desolate melancholy of the ancient capital, the moment a gray autumn wind swept through with its biting chill, dusk still settled into that muted twilight unique to old Kyoto. The town and its people, worn down by the wind, trembled like disheveled hair with urban melancholy.

The pickpocket standing before the shamisen shop’s display window, waiting for the streetcar, seemed somehow worn down. Do even pickpockets wear down like ordinary people? No—that man was no professional pickpocket. A real pickpocket would have blended into the crowd waiting for the train. A real pickpocket wouldn’t stand alone apart from the line, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette missing over a third of its tobacco.

That man—Kitayama Masao—had been a junior clerk at a bank in Osaka. After graduating from night classes at a commercial school, he was hired as a cashier but was soon conscripted. When he returned five years later following demobilization, those years had done nothing to alter this earnest young man’s earnestness. His soft, mumbling voice remained unchanged from before his conscription, and even his abacus-flicking hands bore no trace of those five years of extraordinary experiences. They were unblemished hands.

However, there was one thing he learned since returning: buying women from the black market.

One night at Nakanoshima Park in Osaka, Kitayama felt a passion akin to love for the girl he had picked up there. Yet after forcing himself to meet her two or three times, the girl with the bruise beneath her right eye abruptly ceased appearing at the park. She vanished from the crowds of black-market women haunting Osaka Station’s plaza. When his desperate searches through Namba and Shinsaibashi’s nighttime haunts proved futile, he wondered if she’d been arrested. As he fretted over whether she’d fallen ill, a letter arrived from her one day,

Things had gotten tough in Osaka, so I came to Kyoto to work. "This Sunday at 3:30, I'll be waiting at a place called Café St. Louis in the side street of Shijō Kawaramachi—come meet me," the letter said. This must be what it feels like when your heart takes flight—when Sunday came, Kitayama had already reached Kyoto by morning. At the station entrance, he had his shoes polished by a shoeshine boy for the first time in his life. But when he went to pay after the polishing, he realized the wallet he'd kept in his back trouser pocket had been stolen. Without money, he could no longer meet the girl. Walking along Kawaramachi Street like an empty shell, he noticed a wallet protruding from the back pocket of a young man getting his shoes shined in front of the Asahi Building. A devilish impulse struck him. The moment he gasped, Kitayama's hand was already reaching out...

“Oh god, oh god!”

As Kitayama Masao vividly recalled that moment—groaning an unearthly sound that was neither sigh nor scream while shaking his head vigorously—the train arrived. Kitayama boarded restlessly yet with part of himself left behind. Then from behind him, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl hurried onto the train. Needless to say, that girl was Karako.

6

There was a brief pause before the train started moving. In the meantime, both Kitayama and Karako peered restlessly through the windows at the pavement of Kawaramachi Street. Karako had been waiting for Kyōkichi to come. Despite having gone to the trouble of tailing him all the way from Gion Manor to St. Louis and calling Big Brother via telephone—only for Big Brother to have been too preoccupied with some other woman—Karako had ultimately relied on her quick wits to follow alone. Yet even so, gnawed by jealousy, she bit her lip.

However, that she felt no desire to resent Kyōkichi for this was not because her affection was immature. Being treated kindly by others was a sad custom this girl had somehow resigned herself to. Therefore, perhaps before Karako could wish to be treated kindly by others, she first tried to devote herself and ingratiate herself on her own initiative. Naturally, she liked being asked to do things by others. No, she even wanted to volunteer for things she wasn’t asked to do. However, she did not expect any reward; it was an uncompensated devotion born from the loneliness of an orphan’s emotions. For a twelve-year-old girl, the job of tailing a pickpocket—a burden far too heavy—was precisely what had Karako bustling with energy. And accomplishing it splendidly was the only expression of her love-struck feelings toward Kyōkichi.

The train began to move. Karako was suddenly shaken by a lonely premonition that she might part ways with Big Brother here and never see him again, but her eyes glittered brightly as she glared at Kitayama. Kitayama lingered reluctantly, his gaze still drifting toward Kawaramachi Street. He had been searching for that girl. It was because of that girl that he had pickpocketed Kyōkichi’s wallet. It was partly an act of spite for having been pickpocketed himself earlier, and partly a moment of devilish temptation—but had there been no purpose, no money to pay for that black-market girl, someone as earnest and timid as Kitayama could never have committed such an audacious act as pickpocketing someone. He stole it and immediately disappeared into the crowd. There was still time before the appointed three-thirty. As he wandered aimlessly, regret and fear came chasing after him, searing into his back like a scorching heat. As walking grew frightening, Kitayama rushed into Gion Manor. He had learned mahjong on the battlefield. He killed time playing mahjong and went to St. Louis. But the girl never came, no matter how long he waited. Of course, Kitayama had no idea that the girl had been arrested the previous night along with Butsudan O-Haru and the others.

As he waited impatiently, suddenly— "Should I really be dawdling around here like this?"

The anxiety reared its head like a snake and coiled around Kitayama's right wrist. Pickpocketing! Crime! Handcuffs! He was a timid man. Kitayama fidgeted his way out of Café St. Louis and boarded the train bound for Kyoto Station.

And as he felt his lingering attachment to the woman and his desire to flee Kyoto as soon as possible like two parallel train tracks, the train arrived at the station entrance.

Kitayama's feet moved swiftly as he crossed the station square. Karako followed, panting heavily as she scurried after him.

7

When they passed through the ticket gate and climbed the stairs, inside a narrow passage partitioned by rope sat a crowd of travelers wearing gloomy expressions as they crouched listlessly. Not a single person stood.

Could they be repatriates? Or perhaps—were they just ordinary travelers being forced to wait for hours in that grimy passage under the dim electric lights until the train arrived? Each was a human being with an independent personality, but clustered together like this, what emanated from them now seemed a single animalistic sensation stripped of will. As people walked past them—their sudden sense of superiority outpacing any sympathy—they tossed fleeting scornful glances, yet Kitayama’s eyes bore an envious stare toward those very travelers.

He wanted to abandon everything, blend in with the travelers, and vanish to some unknown land. His gaze suddenly met that of one of the crouching travelers. Somehow, the face looked familiar. “…………” Kitayama wore a feeble smile on his half-crying face and began to speak—but just then, a station employee approached from ahead. Startled, he averted his face and walked stiffly through the passageway, descending the stairs toward the national railway platform. The station employee’s uniform had looked like that of a police officer.

The fire of remorse—*I’ve become a thief*—which Kitayama had extinguished beneath his expectation of meeting the woman now relentlessly hounded his retreating back as he returned empty-handed. Ahead, in his frantic flight to shake it off, fear loomed monstrously, flicking out the law’s crimson tongue.

The Osaka-bound national railway train arrived promptly. When a seat opened up in Takatsuki, he slumped exhaustedly into it, and the moment he spotted Karako sitting primly across from him, "Oh!"

For the first time, Kitayama realized that Karako had likely been following him all the way from Gion Manor. After they passed Suita and Higashi-Yodogawa Station, the neon sign of Kitano Theater soon appeared through the south-side train window, and Osaka was already cloaked in night. It was the hour when the daughters of the night emerged like blossoms unfurling on moonvine tendrils—hushed figures materializing in Osaka Station Square.

Kitayama's eyes took on a futile searching look as he scanned for any girl with a bruise beneath her eye among them—in that moment, he had completely forgotten about Karako, who seemed to be tailing him from behind.

"She wasn't there." However, the straw-thin, fleeting hope that she might be in Nakanoshima Park led Kitayama’s feet to Nakanoshima Park.

Kitayama walked round and round inside the park. No matter how thickly applied the powder was, the bruise that couldn’t be concealed was nowhere to be found beneath any of the girls’ eyes.

As he walked in circles, Kitayama listened to the lonely echo of his own footsteps. Overwhelmed by a loneliness so vast it seemed to swallow his consciousness, he abruptly halted. He turned around. Karako stood there. “Why are you following me…?” With a roughness that surprised even himself, Kitayama suddenly seized Karako’s shoulder. At that moment—bang, bang—gunshots rang out.

8 “Fireworks,” he thought distantly. Kitayama heard those gunshots as if from a great distance.

Nakanoshima Park had the Yodo River flowing through its center, evoking thoughts of fireworks. Indeed, about two months prior, the Mizuto Festival had been held in this park, where festival enthusiasts had sent up fireworks in a raucous celebration. So he didn’t register them as gunfire. “Y-Y-You… you followed me all the way from Kyoto, d-didn’t you?” “Why are you following me—?” Kitayama stammered in agitation, his hand gripping Karako’s shoulder with violent force.

………… Karako couldn’t respond in that instant. Since the air raids, she had encountered her fair share of terrifying experiences and met frightening people, but never before in her life had she seen anything as terrifying as Kitayama’s expression. Unable to make a sound, Karako was trembling uncontrollably. “Say it!”

Kitayama glared at Karako with bloodshot eyes while shaking her shoulders. Shaken, Karako suddenly looked up at the sky. Under a starry sky so dense it seemed to rain stars, a star streaked across, drawing a delicate tail before vanishing in an instant—and in that moment, Karako remembered Kyōkichi. “Big Brother… I’m staring into such terrifying eyes right now.” Even if she hadn’t followed him all the way to Nakanoshima Park—when she had passed by a police box along the way, if she had just rushed in and said, “That guy’s a pickpocket,” Kyōkichi’s wallet would have been returned. But when it came to police boxes, there was still that resistance characteristic of a vagrant orphan. Earlier today, she had already been made to feel uncomfortable at the Maruyama Park police box.

And partly, there had been a childish vanity in wanting to hand the pickpocket over to Kyōkichi without relying on the police’s help. The joy of confirming where the pickpocket would settle and informing Kyōkichi about it must have driven Karako to keep tailing him indefinitely.

“Say it!” “You won’t talk?!” “You!” “Why did you follow me…?” For Kitayama Masao—ordinarily so meek he could scarcely raise his voice—this violent expression, unlike anything he had ever shown before, appeared to surge from rage. Yet it stemmed not from anger, but rather from Kitayama’s own terror.

“This brat knows I’m the pickpocket!”

This premonition must have sent Kitayama into a frenzy. It’s the cowards who are prone to act violently when push comes to shove. “You know everything, don’t you? Damn you!” Kitayama’s hand moved from Karako’s shoulder to her neck, and just as he began to tighten his grip—bang, bang… gunshots rang out again, and the crowd came rushing in like an avalanche. “It’s a breakout! “It’s a breakout!” “Hey—get over here and run!”

It was a group that had broken out of the nearby Osaka Detention Center and fled. The gunshots had probably been warning shots fired by the guards. Someone jumped into the river. Kitayama snapped back to his senses and dashed off, blending into the group. Kitayama's violent frenzy receded all at once, his coarse face twisting into nothing but a mask of panic.

Nine The cries of “Run! Run!” were the clamor of mob mentality hurled by escaped detainees—a group of unconvicted prisoners who had broken out of the detention center—at anxious ears still inclined to heed the whispers of conscience. But to Kitayama’s ears, “You too—run!”

And he heard it. So even as he blended into the mob and began to run, Kitayama found himself turning pale with the illusion that he too had become one of the escaped prisoners. That night, as the list reported to the police was later revised four times over, no one knew the exact number of escaped prisoners at the time, but there must have been roughly a hundred. It appeared they had split into three groups; the roughly thirty who fled to Nakanoshima Park were mostly prisoners still in their blue official uniforms, having no civilian clothes from care packages like kimonos or Western attire—so at a glance, it was clear they were escapees from the detention center.

The blue of the government-issued uniforms, illuminated by moonlight, took on a lurid and eerie intensity that pierced Kitayama’s heart like a blade of remorse. “I’m not just a pickpocket—I nearly became a murderer!” He had almost killed that girl—and now Nakanoshima Park, where he’d once found that shadow-dwelling girl so nostalgically, meant nothing to Kitayama anymore.

“Run! Run!” “We’ve got to escape from Nakanoshima—” Before he knew it, Kitayama found himself running while shouting the same cry as the prisoners. Oh, right—having this thing on me is bad news. Kitayama threw away the wallet he had pickpocketed from Kyōkichi.

Gunshots rang out again. The guards must have fired another warning shot. The sound was distant and hollow, but a man in his mid-fifties, who had been running slightly apart from the group, suddenly crouched down.

It was Ginzō. It was Ginzō—the father of Chimako, who had told Kizaki, “Dad’s in prison…,” and the former patron of Takako, the madam of Tamura. The reason Ginzō had been lagging behind alone was, in truth, that he had no intention of escaping. Complaints about cells so cramped with several times their capacity that lying down was impossible, resentment toward guards who refused to allow care packages without bribes, grievances over meals... had been mounting when, on that day, dinner was delayed indefinitely and they were clamoring in uproar—just then, a sudden quarrel between prisoners flared toward the guards attempting to suppress it. As hostility between prisoners and guards intensified until the swelling frenzy finally shattered the detention center’s bars and surged out like an avalanche, Ginzō was swept into their midst—yet he had resigned himself, certain that even if he fled, he would only be recaptured and face harsher punishment.

So, though his steps had been reluctant to flee, when he ducked at the gunfire, Kitayama's discarded wallet came into view. Ginzō swiftly picked it up and,

"That's it—with this, I can escape!" Running toward Yodoyabashi like a maniac, his daughter Chimako's face flashed through his mind. Haa... haa... he dragged in labored breaths thick with the thought—*Kyoto... I'll go to Kyoto... I'll see Chimako*.

Characters

Part One

After passing through Nakanoshima Park and arriving at the north end of Yodoyabashi Bridge, Ginzō had lost sight of the group he had escaped with. Ginzō ran toward Umeda Shindō along the broad streetcar-lined avenue, but to his fleeing back, that straight path stretched interminably. When he came to Ōe Bridge, Ginzō suddenly turned left. Then, hiding among the rows of willows along the riverbank, he ran toward Watanabe Bridge. Now that he was alone, the reality of being pursued finally began to gnaw at him.

However, he hadn’t felt anxious until he picked up the wallet. The will to escape was as scant as a grain of dust on an earpick—rather than the gnawing dread of pursuit, he found solace in the thought that surrender might bring relief. Resignation had taken root long before any flicker of hope to flee could kindle. However, the chance event of picking up the wallet had cut through Ginzō’s indecision as clearly as numbers, and the distance to Kyoto where Chimako was now amounted to no more than ten blocks to Osaka Station, from where the national railway to Kyoto would depart.

"With this money, I can get to Kyoto!" Clutching tightly to thoughts of Chimako, the anxiety of being pursued now rattled his body uncontrollably. He collided with willow trees again and again, and just as he staggered—he passed a police officer. However, the police officer merely glared sharply at him and passed by. The commotion at the detention center had occurred just ten minutes prior, and it likely hadn’t yet reached that police officer’s ears. The Osaka Detention Center, which had produced a large number of escapees, did not report the incident to the police until an hour had passed.

Of course, had he been wearing the blue prisoner uniform, he likely wouldn’t have passed through unscathed—but at that moment, Ginzō was dressed in the Western clothes Chimako had smuggled in for him. When Chimako came to visit and found it painful to see her father Ginzō in blue prison clothes, she managed to procure Western clothes from the black market and asked the guard to deliver them. “Chimako’s the one who saved me!” With a sigh of relief, as he turned toward Watanabe Bridge, the road suddenly brightened—the lights of the barrack-built shopping district illuminating Ginzō’s feet. He was still in his straw sandals.

Chimako had tried to send shoes too, but since wearing footwear wasn’t permitted in the detention center, the shoes she’d brought ended up becoming a bribe for the guards. “These straw sandals are no good!” Ginzō muttered as he walked, clutching at his constricted chest once he realized no one was chasing him anymore. Western clothes paired with straw sandals were common enough postwar attire these days—nothing unusual at first glance—but a keen observer might have noticed these were prison-issue sandals.

When Ginzō arrived at Sakura Bridge, he turned toward Sonezaki, blended into the black market, and bought a pair of canvas shoes. Nearly 100 yen still remained in the wallet. When he reached Osaka Station, bought a ticket to Kyoto, and took his place on the platform feigning innocence, he finally felt relieved. But anxiety lingered still, and as he kept glancing restlessly over his shoulder, his eyes caught the sharp-featured face of a man in his thirties boarding the second-class car of the Tokyo-bound express train—freshly prepared in Osaka—at Platform 10. Ginzō was jolted by a sudden shock.

Two It looked familiar—the moment he thought that, "Ah—that man!"

The moment he realized—it happened almost simultaneously with his recollection. He didn’t know the man’s name—Kimongi Shōzō—but he had seen that face at Tamura before. "It was definitely Saturday night!" After Ginzō—who had returned from Manchuria—relied on Tamura, where Takako, his former mistress, and Chimako, whom Takako had borne him, were staying, and pleaded to be given any work—even as a kitchen hand (cook’s assistant) or bath attendant—bringing along a fifty-year-old man who had once been an iron magnate, it was on the fourth day, a Saturday night, that he saw Shōzō at Takako’s place. Though he had caught only a fleeting glimpse of that face—a face he would see neither before nor after that single moment—his instincts instantly told him this man was Takako’s current patron. From that moment on, it became a visage Ginzō would never forget for the rest of his life. Or rather, one he had wanted to forget. He had already sensed that Takako likely had a patron, but seeing the man’s face now, jealousy flared in him—shamefully unbefitting his age. As proof, even in the detention center’s predawn hours, this man’s visage had haunted his dreams.

That face was trying to board the train from the opposite platform. Ginzō jolted and, his face pale with pain, averted his gaze—

"...The train on Platform 10 is the 9 PM express bound for Tokyo..." he heard the loudspeaker announce. Ginzō looked up at the platform's electric clock.

“8:10 PM. There were still fifty minutes until departure.” Ginzō muttered this, but in his gut, he was thinking of something else entirely. That man was heading to Tokyo… So he wouldn’t be going to Kyoto tonight… Such were the thoughts running through his mind.

Kyoto—Tamura—Takako!

“—Tonight, Takako is alone!” The allure of Takako’s voluptuous body, her warmth, her scent surged back within him—for Ginzō now, the joy of going to Kyoto lay not in reuniting with his daughter Chimako, but in seeing Takako’s face.

Ginzō looked back once more. Shōzō’s face was in the window of the second-class car. That haughty visage lingered behind Ginzō’s eyelids long after he boarded the Kyoto-bound national railway train—he recalled a time when he too had worn such an expression, riding the sleeper car from Osaka to meet Takako, whom he’d once kept in Tokyo. Everything had become a dream from the past. Even the dreams spun within that sleeper car were now mere phantoms. Japan had changed, and Ginzō had changed completely. Since returning from Manchuria, he’d become a man utterly devoid of backbone.

Crashing into Tamura to beg for a room when he had nowhere else to go was one thing—but sneaking into Takako’s bedroom late the night after seeing Shōzō, only to be harshly rejected and driven out of Tamura, was beyond spineless. However, when the train arrived in Kyoto, Ginzō hailed a rickshaw at the stationfront and had it rush toward Kiyamachi, where Tamura was located. Numb with longing for Takako, he had become so utterly spineless that he could nearly forget the disgrace he had shown back then.

Three

The rickshaw driver carrying Ginzō had a refined-looking face, but perhaps because fares alone weren’t enough to live on, he seemed to dabble in dubious matchmaking. He kept pressing—asking whether the master was heading to Kiyamachi to procure yatona (who might seem cheaper than geishas but ultimately cost more)—and instead offered to introduce him to a far cheaper and more amusing spot. “Comes with a bottle of sake, and if you take your time, you’ll still get change from a hundred yen—ain’t that a bargain? “Moreover, the women are all amateurs who’ve come back from Manchuria…” The driver’s words about the location being behind M Police Station—making it safest right under the law’s nose—pierced Ginzō with bitter ache.

Ginzō listened with a bitter ache to the rickshaw driver’s words—that the place was behind M Police Station, making it safest right under the law’s nose.

Words like "repatriation" and "police" were all too familiar to Ginzō. After being rejected by Takako when he made advances and fleeing Tamura, his life had sunk to the depths of destitution—but perhaps a vestige of Osaka merchant pride remained, for *I was once a man of standing in the iron trade*. Just you wait—I’ll make that woman regret it, he thought, selling cigarettes, rice balls, sugar, and liquor in a corner of Osaka’s black market—liquor that turned out to be methyl alcohol.

He had sold it without knowing it was methyl alcohol, but even so, if people died, it would still count as involuntary manslaughter—he had faced imprisonment for that ordeal, and now that crime was compounded by the added offense of escape, on top of which he was using money from a wallet he'd found without permission.

As they passed Gojō, suddenly it was rain. As if Ginzō's body had suddenly grown heavy, the rickshaw's pace slowed. A sudden gust swept in, driving sideways rain through gaps in the canopy. Raindrops trailed down the celluloid window fixed to the canopy, Shijō-dōri's lights flickering past as the vehicle turned from Shijō Kobashi into Kiyamachi—the moment it did, Ginzō was seized by violent desire. The desolation of a repatriate, a fugitive's restlessness, his resentment toward Takako, his shame and reputation—all forgotten. As he swayed in anguish for Takako's white flesh, soon the rickshaw reached Tamura's entrance.

Indeed, the threshold felt daunting. He couldn't bear to face the maid. But steeling himself, he entered through the back entrance, and when he asked the maid,

“Madam isn’t in.” “She left for Tokyo just now.” “And Chimako…?” “She hasn’t been here since the other day at all.” As the chatty maid prattled on about Chimako having apparently run away, Ginzō slumped down lifelessly in the kitchen—but rather than disappointment at Takako’s absence, it was his worry over Chimako’s disappearance that left him blank, aging him ten years at once. However, at that moment, the telephone rang,

"M Police Station…?" The moment he heard the maid’s voice echoing back through the telephone receiver, Ginzō’s eyes flashed sharply, tension shooting across his pale face.

At that very moment, at Kyoto Station, the Tokyo-bound express train that had departed Osaka at 21:00 pulled into the platform, and Takako—who had rendezvoused with Marquis Notake as arranged that afternoon—was about to board the second-class car with her Tokyo friend.

Four

Shōzō, who had boarded the train from Osaka, grinned and flashed a sinister smile when he saw Takako and her companion enter the second-class car. “Just as I thought.” Earlier that day, Takako had said she would depart around nine in the evening. Knowing the only Tokyo-bound express leaving at that hour was the 9 PM train from Osaka, Shōzō—on his way back from Tamura to Osaka—immediately arranged tickets and boarded that very train. Of course, had Takako boarded alone with just a female friend, Shōzō’s plan would have been rendered meaningless—but as expected, she instead took a seat beside a refined-looking young man in an empty row. The moment he saw the young man’s face, Shōzō—

That’s him… Marquis Notake… The realization clicked into place without a shred of doubt, and he felt satisfied that his intuition was right. However, to call that satisfaction truly pleasant—would be an overstatement. For the scene now before Shōzō’s eyes—his own mistress attempting to travel with another man—was, for a prideful man like him, a fact that would make any man lower himself. Moreover, that man—Notake Harutaka—had indeed brought Yōko to Tamura last night.

He smirked, but it was only natural that Shōzō's face—already stiff with a pallid hue—was now ashen.

“Just you wait!”

Shōzō recalled the real estate advertisement he had seen in that morning's newspaper at Tamura. When he saw the ad reading "Estate for sale: Tokyo suburbs, a certain marquis's residence," he returned to Osaka and immediately phoned Tokyo to confirm it was indeed Marquis Notake's property. He felt a thrill at this coincidence. Yōko—Harutaka—Tamura—Takako—estate sale—Tokyo-bound... Coincidence bred coincidence, encircling Shōzō. What new chances would rain down next?—his bloodshot eyes stared like a man watching life's dice roll.

In other words, Shōzō wound the thread of coincidence around the top of his own life. And once released, the top would spin away. That was Shōzō’s reason for living—his life needed to spin like a top without cease.

Just you wait—having now leaped far beyond his initial purpose of confronting Harutaka merely to ascertain Yōko’s whereabouts, “The fact that I’ve boarded this train won’t end without consequences.” I won’t let Harutaka get off unscathed—and I myself won’t come out clean either. I had already thrown the dice—a challenge to chance.

Speaking of coincidences, neither Takako nor Harutaka noticed Shōzō sitting in the corner of the train carriage. From Shōzō’s position, he could see them clearly, but Takako and Harutaka were seated in positions that made them difficult to see from their side. And as Takako and Harutaka—without sensing any of that coincidence—remained pressed tightly together, aware only of each other’s bodies, the train entered the Yamashina Tunnel.

Five

“Shall I open the window a bit?” When the train emerged from the tunnel, Harutaka half-rose from his seat and reached for the window latch. The hem of Harutaka’s jacket brushed against Takako’s face by the window.

“But isn’t it raining…?” Takako removed the handkerchief she had been holding to her mouth and said slowly in a prudish tone. Her face, body, and voice were all youthful, yet in such a way of speaking, her forty-one years would fleetingly reveal themselves. “Oh. I suppose you’re right.” With his usual polite manner, Harutaka sat back down—but something about Takako’s way of speaking struck him as disagreeable. Harutaka, too, had grown oddly prone to resentment these days—so much so that he became convinced his foolish oversight of forgetting the rain might pour in was being mocked—a man increasingly sensitive to his aristocracy’s decline.

Part of it was the discomfort of soot getting in his eyes. Even if soot in the eyes was an unavoidable force, Harutaka was the kind of man who considered it as shameful as a sneeze. He must have believed that soot was something only lowborn people’s eyes ever admitted.

Instead of rubbing his eyes in irritation—Harutaka instead thought to use that hand to take Takako’s.

Enduring the gritty pain in his eyes while simultaneously savoring the tactile sensation of the woman's hand—when he thought about it, even he himself wanted to laugh aloud at the absurdity. But since this was an unwanted trip to begin with, Harutaka decided allowing himself that much indulgence was permissible.

Having been invited by an unsavory friend in Kyoto to visit, Harutaka had left Tokyo over a month earlier when a letter from his mother arrived three days prior demanding his immediate return home. Harutaka’s father had died mysteriously five years before while sleeping at his mistress’s house in Tsukiji; his older brother had chased a movie actress to Manchuria and was rumored to be eking out a living selling soap in Changchun or some such place—the sole scrap of news about him—leaving Harutaka in a household of three with his mother and younger sister Nobuko. According to his mother’s letter, she worried about Nobuko’s behavior and entreated him as her brother to advise her—a request Harutaka couldn’t simply disregard. Yet he still felt lingering attachments to Kyoto.

Returning to Tokyo without having succeeded in seducing Yōko would leave an unbearably unpleasant aftertaste. If he had to return to Tokyo anyway, then Takako’s invitation had provided an unexpectedly convenient travel companion—so he boarded that train, saving himself the hassle of arranging tickets.

“Even if we get off at Atami along the way, the lodging costs will be the other party’s expense.” Though surprisingly crass—yet given this was his inherent, calculating approach—even Harutaka felt “Since that one didn’t work out… this one…”

This pragmatism of switching his focus from Yōko to Takako carried a faint regret. Yet precisely because of that, hands could be grasped more easily than suppressing a sneeze. When he abruptly seized the hand resting on his knee, Takako returned the grasp without altering her expression.

Four eyes were watching it.

Six

Takako’s friend Tsuyuko and Shōzō—the two of them—were watching it.

“Hah.” “Already at it?”

From her diagonally opposite seat, Tsuyuko gazed at Takako and Harutaka’s clasped hands as though they were cheap carvings. There seemed to be no blood flowing through them. Lovers didn’t clasp hands like this. They didn’t grasp each other this way—devoid of any thrill or feeling.

Therefore, even as she watched, Tsuyuko felt no particular emotion. She felt neither beauty nor ugliness. Tsuyuko was simply calculating—from how they clasped hands—the amount of capital Takako would provide for the cabaret she intended to open in Ginza.

Apparently, Takako didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the cabaret proposal. But given that she had succeeded in the swift maneuver of bringing them all the way to Kyoto and getting them onto a Tokyo-bound train that very day, Tsuyuko was fired up—she wasn’t about to let the cabaret proposal go unaddressed now. For that purpose, it was preferable that Takako thoroughly enjoy herself on this trip.

“Haven’t you shown off enough? Instead of treating us, why don’t you invest some capital? Right? It doesn’t balance out if you keep playing the considerate one.” While preparing this line, Tsuyuko had deliberately seated Takako and Harutaka side by side before tactfully withdrawing to a separate seat herself. Even when she had been introduced to Harutaka at Kyoto Station,

“Turning a marquis into your plaything is such bad taste these days.” She wanted to retort sarcastically but bit her tongue— “—Rather handsome, isn’t he?” With those words, she tickled Takako’s ears—a maneuver born of the same psychology that made businessmen assign geishas to meetings with investors.

However, as she observed Takako's utterly passionless expression, Tsuyuko felt a tinge of disappointment—perhaps getting her to cough up even five hundred thousand yen would be impossible.

However, the one who was disappointed was Takako. If Takako—so thoroughly steeped in converting her youth into money and judging men by whether they qualified as patrons—had any remaining dream, it was a yearning for aristocracy. Every calculating woman has one blind spot. In Takako’s case, it was her shallow pride in the name *Takako*—a name she had clung to even through the life of poverty she was born into and the ways she had wetted her body from a young age.

"With this man," she thought, "it seems I could fall in love." Such a premonition had flitted through her mind like a strand of straw, but when Harutaka took her hand so easily, the dream shattered with absurd simplicity—and Takako became once more a woman of realism. As they passed Maibara, Takako—

“Won’t you look this way for a moment…?” Flipping Harutaka’s eyelid over like an eye doctor would, she abruptly brought her face close and licked it once with the tip of her tongue. The grit was gone.

“Well… how is it?”

Takako’s face, grinning with a smirk, seemed to drip with the artful coquetry of a woman who knew nothing of love.

Shōzō, who had been watching from afar, abruptly stood up.

Seven He couldn't take it anymore—Shōzō attempted to head toward Takako's seat. He tried to strike Takako across the face. Not only was his woman holding hands with another man—she was using the tip of her tongue to lick away grit from the man's eye. Seen from a distance, that pose created an illusion of something else entirely. Even someone other than Shōzō would naturally want to strike them. But had the man not been Harutaka, Shōzō likely wouldn't have flown into such a rage. Harutaka was precisely the type of person Shōzō detested most.

Takako’s longing for aristocracy ultimately stemmed from her baseborn origins, and for that very same reason—having been born into a family of toothpick whittlers—Shōzō harbored hostility toward the aristocracy. And furthermore, the fact that he was the son of a toothpick whittler had made Shōzō’s self-esteem all the more vulnerable to injury, so he would fly into a rage more readily than most, nearly losing all sense of restraint. "If having my pride wounded meant enduring it, I’d rather die."

This was Shōzō’s creed: he would endure any hardship for ambition, but he could not tolerate having his pride wounded, and he was prepared to discard even his ambition—indeed, his entire self—if necessary. In other words, Shōzō’s passion was driven more by the swings of his self-esteem than by ambition.

Therefore, without any regard for consequences, he tried to strike Takako right there in the train car—but Shōzō's self-esteem wasn't the petty kind that would allow such recklessness—so after taking two or three steps forward, he suddenly halted. "If I hit that woman here now," he thought, "my self-esteem will be twice as wounded."

Shōzō, still unable to contain the festering pus of his wounded self-esteem that throbbed without outlet, turned on his heel, opened the door to the third-class car, and stepped out onto the deck. And then, opening the deck door and being struck by the driving rain and wind, he tried to cool his head—

“Idiot!” The man who had been crouching on the deck shouted. “Huh…? …”

“The rain’s getting in, damn it! You idiot!” “……” Shōzō’s face twisted in rage. “Close it!” “……” “I said close it! Deaf or something…?” The man stood up and tried to close the door. But Shōzō had grabbed the door handle and would not let go.

“You bastard!” The man jabbed at Shōzō’s chest. The pus of self-esteem that had accumulated in his chest overflowed, seeking an outlet. Shōzō, without a word, mustered all his strength and slammed into the man’s chest with a thud. The man was flung out onto the deck in an instant.

“Agh!” Shōzō instinctively closed the door. The moment he did, a young woman’s face appeared in the rain-streaked window. Shōzō whirled around in shock.

Eight

Shōzō had not pushed the man off the deck intending to kill him. It was the man who first thrust at Shōzō's chest. Shōzō had merely thrust back in return—nothing more. Had their positions been reversed, it might have been Shōzō who fell from the deck.

He had no intent to kill. However, he knew the door was open. He had unconsciously sensed that pushing would make the man fall. The image of the man falling like a clay doll into the torrential rain had flashed through Shōzō’s mind an instant before he thrust back at the man’s chest. Therefore, even if he had known for certain that the man would die, Shōzō would still have thrust him—that much was certain. He was a man who would not hesitate to commit murder for the sake of his self-esteem.

Even if he hadn’t intended to kill, wasn’t that thrust delivered as though he were perfectly willing to accept such an outcome? However, the moment he saw the man fall with a cry, even Shōzō was startled and— “I’ve gone and killed someone!”

As if to smother that thought, he closed the deck door almost instinctively.

"The fact that I boarded this train won’t end without consequence."

Was this what he had sensed coming all along? Shōzō cast dice against the overlapping layers of countless coincidences surrounding him. Was this the answer he received?

So to speak, to transform the great coincidence of murder into his own fated inevitability, one might say Shōzō seized that first minor coincidence by the scruff of its neck and dragged it toward himself. However, another coincidence struck him - that there had been one person who witnessed the killing at that very moment. Had there been no witness, the man who fell from the deck would have been deemed to have tumbled through his own negligence, and Shōzō's crime would have been consigned to eternal darkness. Thus, nothing shocked him more than seeing that young woman's face reflected in the rain-streaked window of the door he'd slammed shut in panic.

When he turned around, she stood slenderly in the corner of the deck, quietly watching Shōzō’s face. It was an ethereal smile. Her brown-tinged pupils, crisply clear within eyes that glowed blue from their depths, emanated a sensation of something moist—suddenly giving her the appearance of a mixed-race child. And those eyes, “You just committed murder, didn’t you…?” —peered into the very depths of Shōzō’s heart.

If beauty were indeed an innate quality, one would wonder what kind of fate had bestowed such beauty upon this woman—she was that beautiful. And furthermore, if beauty were a talent, it was to such an extent that one would wonder what kind of talent made this woman appear so beautiful. "For the first time in my life, I’m facing off against a woman!"

While staring intently at the woman’s face, Shōzō thought this.

Nine

The reader had likely surmised by now why the first subheading of this story was titled "Characters."

The woman who had witnessed the scene of Shōzō pushing an unknown man off the train deck from the deck—this was the new character. For Shōzō’s life, and for this story…

Now, taking the opportunity presented by this new character's appearance, I would like to bring the author themselves onto the stage and insert a few annotations here.

Who is the protagonist of this story? Could it be dancer Yōko? Photographer Kizaki? Or perhaps Madam Takako of Tamura? Her patron Shōzō? Or former patron Ginzō? His daughter Chimako? It could also be said that Kyōkichi, the live-in at Tamura, is the protagonist, nor can we definitively say that Karako—who calls Kyōkichi "Big Brother"—lacks the qualifications to be one. Notake Harutaku is of course no exception.

Speaking of which—Sakamoto the accordion player; his wife Yoshiko; her lover "Good Morning" Gin-chan; Madam Natsuko of St. Louis; Takako’s friend Tsuyuko; amateur pickpocket Kitayama; Oshin the maid at Seikan-sō; Rumi who returned from Shanghai; geisha Chiyowaka; Butsudan O-Haru—all these eccentric figures spawned by the times inherently possessed the right to demand protagonist status.

This story had now reached eighty-five installments yet temporally recounted only a single day and night’s events. Even as the train carrying new incidents and new characters was advancing toward Tokyo, what affairs might have been unfolding in Kyoto—and through whom—remained beyond all prediction. Ultimately, this stemmed from the author’s attempt to illuminate societal currents by pursuing the possibilities of coincidence—yet it could also be said that the very act of these various figures caught in coincidence’s net demanding recognition—each as individuals spawned by those same societal currents, no, as Japanese people, asserting that we too can become protagonists—forcibly anchored the author’s feet around them, hindering their efforts to leap forward through time at a sprint.

In other words, they were all protagonists. Even Matsuri, who had committed suicide in Jūbankan's hall, was a protagonist. Yet at the same time, it couldn't be said that this person alone was particularly the protagonist.

If one were forced to name a protagonist, it might be said that this new character now standing on the deck between the second- and third-class cars, facing Shōzō, held the greatest claim to that qualification. Because she was the woman who had undergone the most vivid transformation among the many Japanese people altered by social currents, and a figure scarcely seen in Japan of the past. She and Shōzō glared at each other for an instant. Their gazes met and sparks flew—then her brown-tinged, dewy eyes smiled bewitchingly. And,

“If you want to meet me, come to Ginza’s Arsène.”

With those words, she slipped gracefully into the third-class car and vanished from sight.

Shōzō entered the washroom and looked at his face in the mirror. A faint smile appeared on his pale face.

A Zoetrope

I

The rain pounded into the depths of late night along Shijō Avenue. The same rain that fell upon the clay-doll-hardened corpse of an unnamed man—pushed from the train deck near Maibara Station to die in obscurity—now poured onto the loneliness-drenched hearts of pitiful souls wandering Kyoto's midnight streets. Until just four or five days prior it had felt like summer, but this rain now falling—suddenly illuminating the scent of fragrant olive blossoms in temple shadows across town—was already winter-approaching autumn's cold rain, each downpour drawing closer to the frozen season.

With a violent shudder, Karako turned from the intersection of Shijō Avenue onto Kawaharamachi Street. Drenched by the rain down to the hollow of her back and underarms, she continued wandering solely out of her desperate desire to find Kyōkichi. That evening, she had followed Kitayama—who had stolen Kyōkichi’s wallet—all the way to Nakanoshima Park in Osaka, where he nearly strangled her, but in the chaos of the prison break she narrowly escaped. Though relieved, Karako now felt crushed by disappointment—having lost sight of Kitayama, she believed she no longer had the face to meet Kyōkichi.

Though she had hurried all the way to Osaka burning with anticipation of the joy she’d feel when catching the pickpocket single-handedly and handing him over to Kyōkichi, that joy now lay empty. Her feet, which had trudged back to Kyoto where Kyōkichi waited, felt as heavy as her rain-soaked heart.

However, when she came straight to Café St. Louis upon arriving in Kyoto, Kyōkichi was of course not there. Madam Natsuko wasn’t at the shop either—perhaps she had gone to the Liberal Club’s event with someone as a couple.

“Any message from Big Brother…?” “No.”

The shop girl’s crimson-painted lips remained coldly pursed—even though she had a man waiting to meet her in Kitano on Sunday night, Madam Natsuko still hadn’t returned, leaving her unable to go out and likely fueling her irritation. When Karako left St. Louis dejectedly, she was overwhelmed with the desire to see Kyōkichi. “Big Brother, please forgive me!” If she were to apologize for letting the pickpocket get away—with just a single word while meeting his gaze, “Idiot!” Even if he slapped me across the face declaring “I’m through with you!”, even if he stormed off promptly with Sakamoto’s wife Yoshiko, I wouldn’t care anymore. Anyway, I wanted to see him.

I also went to check out a mahjong parlor called Gion Manor. But he wasn’t there. At a corner table, a couple who seemed to be the owners faced each other with weary late-night faces that seemed to ask whether having too many mahjong parlors popping up everywhere might end up ruining them all; they were just reading the newspaper, and apart from them, there were no other customers.

Walking back and forth through the rain, each time passing another light going out along Shijō Avenue, when she turned onto Kawaharamachi Street, Karako's feet naturally turned toward St. Louis.

The door to St. Louis was shut, and inside was dark. Standing beneath the eaves, Karako gently knocked on that door.

II

“Auntie!”

She called out, but there was no response. After a while, she knocked on the door again. Then, having left St. Louis behind, Karako started walking toward the rain-shrouded lights of Kiyamachi, but suddenly turned on her heel and trudged back down the alley to return beneath St. Louis’ eaves.

“Auntie!” This time she called out louder while hiking up her slipping skirt string—not bothering to knock—rattling the door and trying to force it open when a boozy breath suddenly wafted down from above. “Who…?” Since it was a woman’s voice, she didn’t flinch too badly. Karako looked up silently to find [Natsuko] staggering over and leaning against her. “Oh… So you’re Kyōkichi’s lover…?” “Ohoho…”

The shrill laughter was quintessentially Natsuko’s, but tonight the Madam of St. Louis was drunker than ever before. Perhaps returning from the Liberal Club—her typically frivolous gestures now soaked through with regret—she hadn’t even brought an umbrella. "You… What brings you here at this hour…?" "Forgotten something?" "Or have you forgotten Kyōkichi…?" Natsuko clung to Karako’s shoulder, her hand floundering through the handbag in search of the spare key.

“Auntie, do you know where Kyō-chan went...?”

"Hey, tell me," Karako pressed, her voice now shrill.

“Kyō-chan…? “Kyō-chan’s gone off to Tokyo… Ohoho.” It had been a careless remark, but perhaps Natsuko’s feelings—her wish that Kyō-chan would just go off to Tokyo—were what had made her say it. “If he’d gone with me to the Liberal Club… things wouldn’t have turned out like this.” “No, I—Ohoho… If it’d been Kyō-chan, I wouldn’t have felt this wretched.” “Ohoho….” “Cheap brandy? A cheap hotel? A creaky bed? Ohoho…” “He’d gone and grown a beard.” “I hate bearded men!” “I hate stimulating men!” “He had terrible body odor.” “Look, it’s still reeking on my hand!”

She spat twice on her right hand and let out a belch. “Auntie, did you drink…?” “I did drink. “I’m done for! “I’m tainted. “Ohoho…. “But it’s fine. “I’m free—the Liberal Club. “Ohoho…. “Kyō-chan’s gone off to Tokyo.” “Really…?” “I’m going to Tokyo too—” With those parting words, Karako walked off down Kawaramachi Street toward Kyoto Station with the same step that had taken her out of the alley....

The rain still showed no sign of letting up. In that rain, Kyōkichi and Yoshiko were at that very moment walking from Sanjō to Nijō under a single umbrella—something Karako, of course, knew nothing about.

3

In silence, Kyōkichi and Yoshiko—Sakamoto’s wife—walked. For what purpose were they walking side by side like lovers? Kyōkichi couldn’t grasp the reason. That evening before Café St. Louis, it had been Kyōkichi—with an unwarranted concern unbefitting his twenty-three years—who stopped Yoshiko as if praying when she tried to visit Gion Manor to meet “Good Morning Gin-chan.” His logic was that Sakamoto, Yoshiko’s husband, stayed at Gion Manor, and who knew what might happen if she went there? But once he finally persuaded her, Yoshiko—

“Then what am I supposed to do…?” she said, and like a child throwing a tantrum, didn’t budge. If she’d just stayed put, that would’ve been one thing—but there she stood planted in the middle of the road, “Fine. I’ll cry for you then…” As if to prove she meant it, her face twisted like she might actually burst into tears. “Women’re built from the get-go to trouble men. That’s why I can’t stand ’em.” Kyōkichi was worried about Karako tailing that pickpocket and wanted nothing more than to ditch Yoshiko right there—but at his core, he was soft on any woman who wasn’t his own, a bleeding heart through and through, which only deepened the pathetic loneliness clinging to him.

“Yosh-chan, don’t go on like that.” “If you cry, Yosh-chan, I’ll be in a bind.” “Then what am I supposed to do…?” “How the hell should I know?” He couldn’t tell her to go back to Sakamoto’s apartment, nor could he tell her to go to Good Morning Gin-chan’s place. But Yoshiko had become such a hysterical woman that she flared up in anger at Kyōkichi’s dismissive retort.

“Oh, Yosh-chan, where are you going?”

Saying "Wait for me," Kyōkichi started walking shoulder to shoulder with her, but as they walked, Yoshiko— “Where are we going…?” she asked.

“How the hell should I know?” There was nowhere to go. Night fell, the rain came down, and at an acquaintance’s shop in Kyōgoku—where they’d promised to return a borrowed umbrella in half an hour—they ended up huddled together under its shelter for four hours. “Really, what am I supposed to do…?” “How the hell should I know?” “Is there somewhere we can stay…?” “How the hell should I know?” Eventually they abandoned such talk and trudged aimlessly through the rain, chatting about dance and movies until even those topics dried up. Then they walked in silence, staring at the white streaks of falling rain, moving forward through sheer momentum.

Yoshiko had jumped to the conclusion that Kyōkichi had stopped her from going to Gion Manor because Good Morning Gin-chan had asked him to, and like a tick she clung to him without letting go, thinking that making him suffer through her petulance would at least serve as some form of revenge. But as the night deepened, she found herself growing lonely at the thought of parting from him. The rain was cold. Kyōkichi too was at a loss with Yoshiko, though he was by nature a lonely man. But staying at an inn with Yoshiko posed problems. As he walked deliberating whether to trudge through the rain all night or find somewhere to stay, Yōko suddenly crossed his mind.

4

That's right—he'd have Yōko put them up at her apartment. Kyōkichi's face suddenly brightened. Yoshiko did not want to return to Sakamoto’s place, and if he couldn’t take her to Good Morning Gin-chan’s apartment either, then his only options were to take her to Tamura or find an inn somewhere—but as someone lodging at Takako’s place, he couldn’t very well bring her there, even if Yoshiko was a woman with no connection to him. That said, if they were to stay at an inn, who knew what might happen—he couldn’t definitively say there’d be no repeat of Good Morning Gin-chan’s blunder. Kyōkichi tonight was far too starved for human connection. Having fallen once, Yoshiko could no longer maintain her integrity as a woman of principle, and with her inherently flirtatious nature as a former revue girl, she seemed likely to yield to Kyōkichi with ease comparable to having her pinky barely touched. There was probably also some resentment toward Gin-chan at play. In any case, the two of them tonight seemed precarious. The night had deepened, and the rain continued to fall. However, that way he’d have no face to show to either Sakamoto or Gin-chan, and even supposing such a mistake didn’t occur, if the two of them were to stay at an inn together, there’d be no way to justify it.

Yet the thought of sending Yoshiko to an inn and returning alone through the rain to Tamura was a loneliness so profound it made his head spin. Therefore, this abrupt idea that had floated up—of having Yōko let the two of them stay at her apartment—was like a lamp being lit in Kyōkichi’s heart. And this idea was indeed something groped for by the tactile sensation of a twenty-three-year-old lonely youth’s empty head. If it were Yōko’s place, the mistake with Yoshiko wouldn’t occur, and even if Sakamoto or Gin-chan found out, it would hold up as a valid excuse; moreover, spending the night at Yōko’s place carried a certain self-destructive pleasure.

Yōko had been seduced the previous night—or so Kyōkichi had convinced himself. Going to stay at Yōko's place with a woman in tow—this was a kind of contempt Kyōkichi was hurling at her, something like remorse. "What kind of face she'll make—I want to see it." As Kyōkichi suddenly furrowed his brows and muttered this, the thought that if he went with a woman Yōko would likely let them stay—and that he could lodge there openly—already using Yoshiko as pretext quickened his pace.

“Where are we going…?” “A woman I know’s place.” “A woman’s…?” As she spoke, the driving rain struck Yoshiko’s neck with a sudden chill. “There’s nowhere else to stay.” “Hey, Yosh-chan—c’mon, it’s fine. Let’s have her put us up as a couple.”

At the phrase “as a couple”—Yoshiko smiled, “Staying… then… what about tomorrow…?” Suddenly hearing Yoshiko’s saccharine voice, Kyōkichi—

“How the hell should I know? Tomorrow’s wind blows tomorrow.”

With that curt dismissal, he began walking to find Yōko’s apartment. Finally finding it, he knocked on Yōko’s door.

“Yōko, it’s me. “I’ve got nowhere to stay.” “Let me stay.” Inside the room, there was a sense that Yōko had abruptly sat up on her bedding.

5 Yōko lay utterly exhausted in sleep. The previous night—after dancing through the evening at Jūbankan Hall—she had dragged her spent legs to Tamura in Kiyamachi to meet Marquis Notake, only to flee barefoot from his advances, be mistaken for a streetwalker, detained overnight without sleep. Then upon release came more burdens: borrowing police sandals to visit Seikan-sō, stopping by Matsuri’s apartment to console relatives from rural Chiba and discuss funeral arrangements, until finally staggering home—where she flung her body onto the bedding like shredded cotton batting, too drained even to cook, plunging instantly into dreams.

In her dream, she was dancing with Kyōkichi. She thought she had been dancing while drenched in sweat—but when she suddenly opened her eyes, it was night sweats. Had nearly six months of dancing at the hall ruined her body so completely that she was sweating this profusely at night? But before that thought could fully form, she found herself startled by the lingering aftertaste—a suffocating sweetness accompanied by some unexpected rhythm of tactile sensations she hadn’t known she possessed—wondering why she had dreamed of dancing with Kyō-chan.

Do I want to dance with Kyō-chan? I never had anyone I wanted to dance with. I'd never even entertained such vulgar thoughts before. No—I'd never even dreamed of it. When I danced with men, I simply turned to stone. A stone feels nothing. How could my own senses betray me? How could such vulgarity exist within me? Oh—what was that smell? The fragrant olive flowers in the apartment courtyard released their rain-drenched scent. The moment she caught that faint sweetness, Yōko had already slipped back into sleep.

Within that shallow sleep, Yōko was dancing again. She had been dancing with Kyōkichi when she heard her name called by her ear—it was Kizaki. Now she danced with Kizaki.

When she awoke with a start, there was a voice outside the room. The moment she thought it was Kyōkichi’s voice, a warm nostalgia welled up in her chest—but— “Hey, let us stay. C’mon.”

At that familiar voice, she instinctively clutched her chest. “No. That’s not what we agreed.” “C’mon, don’t say that.” And the voice outside the room said.

“But you said Saturday, didn’t you?”

"I'll let you stay on Saturday"—though she hadn't clearly promised it, she had said that.

“But I’ve got nowhere to stay. It’s not just me—there’s two of us. A woman’s with me. Let us stay.”

“I’m leaving.”

Yoshiko, for some reason, suddenly started down the stairs.

“Ah, Yosh-chan, wait! Hey, Yosh-chan!”

Around that time, through the rain along Shijō Kawaramachi, two men were staggering with their arms around each other, dead drunk. They were Sakamoto and Good Morning Gin-chan.

6 “Gin-chan, I can’t handle another drop,” Sakamoto muttered, his face drenched to the tips of his eyebrows as he leaned against Good Morning Gin-chan’s shoulder and bobbed unsteadily along. “Let’s call it quits on bar-hopping—” “Cut the crap,” Gin-chan slurred. “Tonight we’re drinking straight through till morning.” Though Gin-chan’s steps were equally pitiful, he bellowed in dodoitsu rhythm: “We’ll drink till dawn breaks, exchange Good Morning greetings, clink cups and say Goodbye… that’s how far we’re going tonight!”

While bellowing in dodoitsu rhythm, he stubbornly refused to let go of Sakamoto.

After playing a couple of rounds of mahjong at Gion Manor where Sakamoto lost about 3,000 points—with each 1,000 points worth 200 yen—he tried to pay the 600 yen debt, but Gin-chan refused to accept it, so they decided to use that money for drinking instead. They hopped from bar to bar until late into the night, yet even then insisted on scraping together their meager funds to keep dragging out their bar crawl—not so much because they hadn’t drunk enough, but rather because they dreaded returning to the apartment. If they returned to the apartment, Yoshiko might be there. Though she had stood someone up at Café St. Louis during the day, Yoshiko—having now fled her husband’s place—had nowhere left to go but her own apartment. If she were stood up again, she would only retreat further into her apartment and stubbornly await her own return.

Thinking this, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for the woman he’d gotten involved with—Yoshiko’s impending circumstances, the disposal of her pregnancy, her complaints, tears, stifled sobs… If he pulled her close while telling her not to cry and showed her some affection, women would let themselves be deceived by their bodies… Even so, whenever that happened, Yoshiko’s body would emit an unpleasant odor that not even perfume could mask… *It’s pitiful, but I can’t bear the thought of that.*

And besides—with these very feet that had just parted from her husband Sakamoto after bar-hopping together—how could I possibly return to that apartment where Yoshiko waited? I couldn’t declare “I took your wife,” nor confess “Things ended up like this with your woman”—yet neither could I play dumb. With nothing proper left to say yet unable to let go completely, I kept dragging Sakamoto along through one bar after another.

“I’m goin’ home now. I’m so sleepy I can’t stand it.” “Cut the crap. What’s the point of going back to the apartment your wife ran away from?”

Gin-chan spoke in a self-deprecating tone, “If you’re sleepy, shoot up some Philopon.” “That’s true enough.—Then let’s get a shot in right now!”

Sakamoto leaned against the eaves, took the injection case from his pocket, and skillfully administered a Philopon shot while standing. Then, massaging his arm, he said, “C’mon, let’s go—but I’ll pass on the Alp, no offense meant,” and hugged Gin-chan’s back. Gin-chan stopped a passing rickshaw.

“Take us somewhere to drink. “But if you take us to some lousy dive, we’ll be squealing our heads off.” Forcing two men into a single rickshaw—they’d be squealing their heads off over this guy-on-guy ride—Gin-chan cradled Sakamoto’s body on his lap and quipped, “Damn, you’ve got a nice ass there,” when suddenly, peering out through the canopy window, he spotted a woman trudging alone through the rain and thought, Oh! It was Yoshiko.

7

Was tonight’s rain in Kyoto falling to drive our protagonists into sudden madness? It was a rain that churned through the depths of Sunday nights—nights which disordered their hearts far more than any decadent Saturday—leaving everything mired in mud. Natsuko of Café St. Louis was also covered in mud, and Karako’s longing for Kyōkichi had reached a fever pitch. Sakamoto and Gin-chan descended into drunken disorder, Kyōkichi’s nighttime wanderings strayed beyond all norms, and tonight’s Yōko too was not her usual self—restlessly unsettled with an eerie disquiet.

And Yoshiko, Sakamoto’s wife, too seemed tinged with madness—as evidence of which, after having followed Kyōkichi all the way to Yōko’s apartment, she suddenly bolted out, leaving Kyōkichi’s calls to stop her behind in the rainy darkness at her back as she dashed around the street corner, only to eventually trudge away with a heavy, despondent gait.

Though she had clung to Kyōkichi out of feminine pride, it was also because—for a woman—being left utterly alone was the hardest thing to bear. Precisely for this reason, nothing had made Yoshiko more wretched than detecting through womanly instinct the intimacy between Kyōkichi and Yōko—yet when she suddenly fled, could it have been jealousy she herself hadn’t foreseen? But the heart of a woman who deliberately tortured herself by wandering solitary through night streets steeped in loneliness had already crossed beyond reason—teetering into madness.

And then—having forgotten all concern for the child in her womb, without even an umbrella, her soaked body still subjected to the rain’s lash—as Yoshiko trudged dejectedly through the downpour, Good Morning Gin-chan saw her figure from the rickshaw and felt his chest constrict sharply. Had Sakamoto not been sharing the same rickshaw with him, he would have been paralyzed by such aching nostalgia that he might have called out to stop her; by now, Yoshiko’s wretchedness had erased from Gin-chan’s heart every trace of the womanly unpleasantness she carried.

But Sakamoto didn’t seem to have noticed Yoshiko, and Gin-chan couldn’t possibly call out to stop her. As she rapidly disappeared into the distance, he suddenly— "Could it be… that I’ll never see that woman again?" He was struck by this premonition—lonely as a traveler’s melancholy, pricking his chest like a needle found in bedding—and while he wavered under its weight, the rickshaw driver lowered the carriage pole in front of a ramshackle house behind the police station. The gate lamp glowed red like a clinic’s.

“Oh, it’s a red lantern.”

In hot spring towns and similar places, houses with questionable women had red gate lamps as markers, and the term "red lantern" had become a byword for businesses that sold springtime pleasures.

“Well now, step right up.” “Just one serving with drinks included…” It wasn’t quite as the rickshaw driver had boasted—that they were all repatriated women with shockingly good-looking ones lined up—but at least there were no women who seemed like kept mistresses. However, Gin-chan, “Sake, sake! If there’s no sake, Alps’ll do!”

Without so much as glancing at the women, he took a sip of the cold sake that was brought and grimaced. “—This is some godawful gut-rot swill!” “Gin-chan, maybe this is methyl alcohol, huh?” “Maybe so—dunno if it’s methyl or not. But this sure ain’t regular booze!” “Hell, ain’t this some rotgut swill!” “Hell, maybe I should just croak already!” Cracking jokes all the while, Gin-chan kept drinking nonchalantly.

8

Around that very time—which is to say, around the time Sakamoto and Gin-chan had started drinking questionable liquor at a suspicious-looking house behind the police station—Kyōkichi was once again climbing the stairs to Yōko’s apartment, “Yoshiko, you’re such an idiot!” “Ignoring my attempt to stop her and just taking off alone like that... Does she even have a place to stay tonight?” he muttered. However, he hadn’t truly intended to bring her back seriously. He had stopped her as a formality and even chased after her to search, but once he immediately lost sight of her, that very fact became his excuse to return alone to Yōko’s apartment.

Though it was typical for his inherent wanderlust to shift Kyōkichi’s emotions like a revolving lantern, spinning wildly with time and circumstance, his abrupt decision to abandon Yoshiko—whom he had cherished and cared for until moments ago out of loneliness and kindness—sprang from a starkly self-serving impulse: hearing Yōko’s voice through the door. However, Kyōkichi had so thoroughly internalized the emotions of an orphan that he remained oblivious to this egotism.

At first, he had even considered using Yoshiko as an excuse to get Yōko to let him stay in her room—a scheme requiring such meticulous scheming—yet now here he was, having abruptly shifted to presumptuous familiarity and returned alone with shameless audacity. This too stemmed from those same orphan’s emotions: once convinced someone would take him in, he reverted to the wanderer’s pitiful instinct, like a migratory bird compulsively returning to its haunt.

“Yōko, it’s me.” “Open up.” “Don’t be mean.” “C’mon, let me stay.”

When Yōko heard Kyōkichi’s words—Ah, he really did come back—the moment her shapely ears, their thin flesh translucent, flushed faintly, Oh, have I done something wrong? I’ve been sitting here on the bedding without even lying down this whole time. What on earth had I been thinking? The loneliness that had suddenly struck her upon waking from shallow sleep was an emptiness akin to the aftermath of a random attacker’s passing—the desolation of being left alone now that Matsuri was dead. Yet even more than that, it was the melancholic realization upon waking: the lamp still lit in the room, rain falling outside the window, the scent of osmanthus lingering, and the uncertainty of whether her dancing had been but a dream—these thoughts plunged her loneliness into ever deeper depths. It was something like the faint nostalgia every human possesses. So, like a child chasing after the dining car’s light along the tracks to run alongside the train, Yōko had been pursuing the footsteps of Kyōkichi—who had appeared unexpectedly only to vanish in an instant—in rhythm with a woman’s instinctive urge to cling to something.

"How filthy—bringing a woman here to stay with him. I’m cutting all ties. But… who was that woman anyway?" While despising Kyōkichi, she found herself vaguely thinking about him. "On a night like this, I want to dance with Kyō-chan." "But I was the one who spoke as if to drive him away." Precisely because she harbored such regret-filled feelings, when Yōko heard Kyōkichi's words upon returning again, she involuntarily rose to her feet—her usually spirited, contrary hands now shedding a layer to become those of an old, weak woman,

“What’s wrong, Kyō-chan? You’re such a strange one.”

She opened the door—the door she had never opened to any man before.

Nine "Oh, Kyō-chan... alone?" "Weren’t you with a woman?"—Yōko deliberately left the door unclosed after Kyōkichi entered and asked. "She went back." Though this was his first time at Yōko’s place—perhaps accustomed to staying in other women’s apartments—Kyōkichi didn’t glance around the room or search for a place to sit but instead immediately settled before the vanity, removing his rain-soaked socks as he muttered—

“Come to think of it, that woman…” “Kyō-chan… she’s your lover, isn’t she?”

Yōko closed the door and came to Kyōkichi’s side. Upon realizing Kyōkichi was alone—her unresolved feelings had vanished in that same moment, and with them disappeared her self-justification for keeping the door open under the pretext of him needing shelter with a woman—this very act of leaving it ajar as if she were wary of him now suddenly wounded Yōko’s pride.

“Lover…? “Don’t talk nonsense. “She’s someone’s wife and someone’s mistress. “Come to think of it, that woman’s got one hell of a giggle-giggle going on. “Nah—you don’t need to think about it. She’s pure giggle-giggle through and through.” “What’s this ‘giggle-giggle’ business…?”

She tried to sit down, but Kyōkichi’s bare feet—freed from his socks—suddenly made her acutely aware of his raw masculinity. Yōko hastily averted her face and remained standing. “Gin-chan from Good Morning said ‘giggling’ comes from Arabic. “Yōko, you don’t know Gin-chan, do you? “He’s a good-for-nothing but graduated middle school. “Giggling—even sleeping alone in the cold—Gin-chan’s educated about that stuff.” “What trivial nonsense you’re spouting. “Yōko utterly despises this.”

In Kyōkichi’s presence, Yōko deliberately adopted vulgar cabaret slang. That aspect of him that made her act this way was Kyōkichi’s virtue. At times he seemed remarkably mature, yet in the next moment would lapse into childish, grammatically fragmented speech—this duality must have been what put women at ease around him. The sense of shame she felt in front of self-conscious, pretentious men could be recklessly cast aside when facing a man like Kyōkichi. He was dazzlingly handsome, yet at the same time a man like darkness.

Thus Yōko had been exposing her unseemly state—a nightgown haphazardly tied with a thin sash—to Kyōkichi’s gaze when suddenly from the darkness his two eyes glinted sharply and stared intently at her body.

“What are you looking at…?” “Yōko... did you go to Jūbankan tonight...?” “I took the night off. I’m thinking of maybe quitting the hall altogether.” “Huuuh…” “I think I’ll move out of this apartment too. Kyō-chan, if you hear of any apartments available somewhere, let me know.” “Huuuh… Moving…? I suppose so.” Last night she had been certain it was Harutaka, the Hopelessly Smitten Marquis—and believing this had altered her state of mind, Kyōkichi’s eyes were sharp with unspoken words.

“What’s with you, looking at me like that…?”

“…………”

“Kyō-chan, if you’re going to look at me like that, go home.”

Yōko suddenly felt a creeping unease. She felt the man’s eyes relentlessly boring into her.

Ten As Kyōkichi’s gaze raked over Yōko’s body—these lips… these ears… this nape… these shoulders… these hands… this torso… these hips… these legs—wondering whether the Hopelessly Smitten Marquis had dampened them with that bluish tinge of freshly shaved stubble and serpentine rhythm, his eyes gradually grew unnervingly fixed, transforming into those of a man relentlessly closing in. To Yōko herself, such eyes were unexpected; to Kyōkichi himself, they were unforeseen.

For Kyōkichi, who had known women’s bodies since he was sixteen yet had never once been in love, this secret nostalgia he harbored for Yōko alone could now be called nothing less than love itself. Precisely because of this, he had kept his hands off Yōko’s body, wanting to preserve her untouched. He knew his dancing technique could disrupt a woman’s physiological responses—so much that he’d avoided dancing with Yōko despite his feelings—yet now he found himself craving the sensation of her skin. What in God’s name was this mundane passion?

“Look, go home.” “…………” “Then go home! Kyō-chan!” Pretending not to hear her unspoken “That look in your eyes terrifies me—”, Kyōkichi listened to the sound of rain outside the window. It was a sound like restless impatience.

Yōko too listened to that sound. And if Kyō-chan were to press her forcefully—she herself would likely lack the strength to refuse him—the rain poured into Yōko’s ears a sound of such dizzying loneliness that it left her nearly despondent.

But when Kyōkichi suddenly tried to pull Yōko close, "Oh, Kyō-chan, wait!" "I’m not that kind of woman!" If self-esteem was what mattered most to Yōko, then that self-esteem came from her pride in having preserved one thing unsullied until her twenty-fourth birthday. It was something she would eventually have to discard—but to do so so carelessly... The humiliation, shame, and fear desperately held Kyōkichi at bay,

“Ah! Kyō-chan—are you trying to kill me? Do you think I’m that kind of woman…?” “But Yōko, you were all giggly last night, weren’t ya?” “So your ‘giggly’ act meant you slept alone last night, yet still let that Hopelessly Smitten Marquis stay over—is that it?” he pressed further, “That’s not it. It was giggly.” “Last night was giggly.” “You have to believe me.” “It was nothing at all.” Yōko was desperately repeating “giggly.”

“Really?” Kyōkichi peered into Yōko’s eyes and saw his own ugly expression reflected in her pupils like the light of noctiluca. “It’s true! I ran away! Barefoot! I ran away barefoot! I...” The moment he heard her say “I’m not that kind of woman” for the third time, Kyōkichi abruptly released Yōko and fled the apartment without a word.

Eleven

The rain that suddenly poured down on the stone steps of the apartment entrance had completely cooled Kyōkichi’s excitement, but—

“I’ll never be able to face Yōko again!” This feeling sent a cold shiver down his spine. Kyōkichi’s confrontation with Yōko had been both the sole escape route he carved out—a man convinced she was already lost—to flee his relentless jealousy, and a paradoxical manifestation of his nostalgia for what was gone; yet it also stemmed from a pragmatic calculation: if she had permitted Harutaka, she might as well permit him too.

It was precisely because of this mercenary mindset that when Kyōkichi learned of Yōko's purity, he found himself overwhelmed with shame at the ugliness of his intended actions. That was why he had fled outside as if escaping, but when he realized he could never face her again, Kyōkichi sheepishly turned back into the apartment and climbed up to Yōko's room. The door to the room remained open. Without even attempting to close it, Yōko lay crying in the room. Yet there was no sound of crying.

Kyōkichi didn't understand why she was crying, but even Yōko herself didn't know. Was it sorrow over nearly facing humiliation? Anger that Kyōkichi too had tried to insult her? Sobbing after the fervor of resistance had subsided? The unexpected loneliness after Kyōkichi had left in shock? Pity for herself—and then pity for Kyōkichi? A melancholy nostalgia that all people share? Or hysteria?—Whatever the case, a woman’s tears were beyond comprehension—not just for men, but even for women themselves.

Yōko became aware of Kyōkichi’s presence, raised her head, and wiped her tears. She looked completely unruffled. But her voice was shrill and—

“Do you have some business...?” “Uhhh? Yeah.” Stammering but resolute now—Kyōkichi reached out— “—Lend me cash. “Got no coin for flophouses. “Wallet got lifted.”

By this late hour, he was now afraid to return to Tamura. Yōko threw down her handbag, “Take however much you need.” “Well ain’t this a treat…” Kyōkichi’s tone had already turned frivolous as he started to pull out a hundred-yen note from the handbag, but after a moment’s thought— “—Then I’ll borrow just this much.”

As he grasped the 300 yen in hand, he left wearing an innocent expression—so guileless it drew a faint smile from Yōko.

And when he emerged onto Kawaramachi Street, an empty rickshaw passed by. He had asked to be taken to an inn, but the rickshaw driver—claiming it was too late now, that inns wouldn’t do, and that he knew a place serving cheap drinks where one could stay—started off in a direction of his own choosing.

Along the way, he passed a woman walking drenched through the pouring rain. He thought it might be Yoshiko, but it was someone else.

When he came near the police station, Kyōkichi saw a fifty-year-old man standing by the roadside and thought, "Huh?" It was Ginzō, whom he had seen at Tamura. When Ginzō saw the rickshaw driver's face, his expression suddenly relaxed in relief as he smiled at him.