Pathway to Japanese Literature

The elderly conductor—balding, dressed in a grubby frock coat—abruptly stood up and waved his baton, whereupon what must have been the umpteenth vulgar rendition of a fox-trot began from the orchestra pit. A young Russian who looked like the son of a fallen aristocrat; a British man with irritating eye movements resembling a company clerk; an American non-commissioned officer with hair styled in an oddly elaborate curl; a middle-aged Frenchman who appeared every inch the shrewd merchant—over a dozen men of disreputable bearing with peculiar quirks, all said to be regulars—along with Russian prostitutes who adorned the scene. Those resting around tables along the wall gradually rose up, linking arms one after another as they formed a dancing circle into the hall—its gloomy light filtered through pungent liquor fumes and tobacco smoke—keeping time with the music.

The women who hadn't yet secured customers formed pairs among themselves, their faces garish and caked with thick rouge, fixed in artificial smiles as they joined the dancing circle—exaggeratedly swaying their hips with every step.

A whirlpool of music that strangely lifted the spirits, the scraping sound of shoe heels against the floor, whispers exchanged by dancing couples, and between these—the lewd laughter of women occasionally spilling through.

When I looked at the hexagonal clock hanging on the wall to the right of the front liquor shelf, it was exactly 1:05.
I suddenly remembered and downed the half-finished glass of whiskey in one gulp.

“Oh, when did she slip in?” muttered Mizushima, who had been gazing down at the dancing circle, puffing out a cloud of cigar smoke he’d just inhaled.

“What?” I asked, widening my bleary eyes as I followed Mizushima’s gaze.

“Look—the woman dancing with that portly Russian man. She just turned this way and smiled. The one in the green jacket…”

“Ah yes, there she is... Quite the beauty, isn’t she?”
Nodding in response, I found myself involuntarily staring at the woman as though spellbound.

Until then, I too had not noticed the woman. While being held around the waist as if leaning against the tall man’s sturdy arm, she danced with light steps in her high-heeled red leather boots. A petite yet well-proportioned woman with fluffy flaxen hair curled like sheep’s wool. Her nose, with its strong sculpted lines, and the piercing gleam in her eyes carried an undeniably intellectual air. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three years old. As she continued dancing with practiced ease in an elegant form, on her face that occasionally turned serious there constantly lingered a smile—more refined than those of the other women yet simultaneously possessing an eye-catching charm.

“That woman…” Mizushima said, taking a sip from his glass.

“Hmm…”

“She’s said to be the most skilled in this bar.”

"That must be it... She’s a beauty, and there’s something striking about her..." I murmured in agreement, turning back to Mizushima.

Mizushima smirked slyly for some reason.

"By the way—what do you suppose that woman used to be? There’s something different about her..."

"Well—now that you mention it—she does seem rather refined."
"As I thought—an aristocrat or something..."

"That’s right."
"That’s precisely it—if I told you she was a certain imperial-era count’s daughter—you’d be surprised—wouldn’t you?"

“That’s surprising… Hmm, a count’s daughter…” I murmured in an offhand manner, turning to look at the woman again.

And just at that moment, a section of the fox-trot ended.
The men and women, their faces flushed with post-dance fatigue and excitement, disbanded their pairs and began returning to their respective seats, but the woman—her nape still held by the man’s shoulder—settled onto the fifth chair from the liquor shelf by the window.
Then, after downing in one gulp the amber liquor from the glass on the table, she suddenly wrapped her white hands around the man’s neck and pressed a brief, eager kiss to his lips.
When the woman parted her lips, the man immediately pursued them with a lewd gleam in his eyes.
Then, yanking the woman’s hunched body against his own chest, he pressed a second kiss upon her—no sooner had their lips met than they shook with convulsive laughter, bursting into shrill laughter all at once.

“What a shock…” I muttered, forcing a smile as I involuntarily turned my face away.
Yet the sight of their reckless merriment could not help but darken my mood.

“Heh…”
Mizushima wore a wry smile that clashed with his angry expression.

For some reason, we fell silent in that moment.

"Hey—should we get going?" Mizushima said abruptly after a moment.

"Yeah—let's go."
"Ah... Completely plastered..." I sighed heavily while turning back toward him.
That flushed face held bloodshot eyes—glassy and melancholy—fixed in drunken stupor.

"I'm really drunk too."

"We did drink quite a lot."

"That's right. We drank a bit too much... But, but tonight was truly enjoyable..." said Mizushima in a voice feigning cheerfulness, as if trying to lift their suddenly gloomy mood.
Then, leaning back, he pressed the call button on the wall behind him.

“Oh, are you leaving already?” said the woman, who had glanced at Mizushima’s condition and now stood up hurriedly, leaning an elbow against the partition frame.
She was a woman of twenty-six or twenty-seven, fluent in English, who had been leaning alone against the table in the partitioned room next door since earlier—perhaps intending to ensnare one of the two men for the night—and had been incessantly casting coquettish glances their way.
“Where were you born?” I asked, to which she replied, “Kiev…”
She too must have been a woman who fled Soviet rule, burdened with misfortune.
Her rough skin lay concealed beneath white powder; an artificial beauty mark adorned her left cheek; tired-looking eyes outlined with eyebrow ink; pouting lips painted bright red—though hers was not a pretty face, she seemed reasonably educated and even amiably asked me various questions about Japan.

“We’re leaving…” Mizushima answered curtly.

“Won’t you stay just a bit longer?”

“No way.”

Mizushima said irritably as if brushing her off, then turned his head sharply to the side.
The woman—the one faring poorly with her timid demeanor—resignedly returned to her original chair.
There in her seeming loneliness, she stared at us with eyes containing a defiant gleam.

“Every last one of you—I wouldn’t bother with the likes of you…” Mizushima spat in loud Japanese as he abruptly turned back to me, forming a cold smile.

After adding a small tip to the bill brought by the Chinese boy and settling the payment, Mizushima and I bolted out of the partitioned room into the hallway. Then, after receiving our coats and hats from the Chinese doorman at the entrance, we rushed out of the Apollo Bar—leaving behind the resurgent buoyant dance music—with an air of escape.

“Why don’t we walk back…” said Mizushima while turning up his coat collar.

“Yes, let’s do that…” I immediately agreed.

Passing through a dark alley constricted by high brick walls and emerging onto K Street’s main thoroughfare, we encountered five or six Chinese rickshaw pullers who had been waiting under the dull glow of streetlights—now scattering toward us from all directions.

“No need...”

“No need…”

With a strangely nauseating mix of disgust and irritation repeating this refusal, Mizushima and I began walking down the dimly lit sidewalk of the deserted main avenue, keeping our faces lowered and refusing to acknowledge the persistently approaching rickshaw pullers.

Though they called it late October in Harbin, the area already wore the desolate visage of deep winter.

The bare poplar trees completely stripped of their leaves, the sidewalks frozen solid, the dark rows of brick and stone houses with their lights extinguished and double windows shut tight—wrapped in cold silence—all formed a town perpetually threatened by uneasy airs day and night. Beneath a gloomy night sky that had remained overcast since morning, this place lay in such sinister calm past midnight that even pedestrian traffic grew eerily sparse.
In the hazy gloom beneath scattered streetlights, shadowy figures of Chinese policemen stood with arms crossed, bleary eyes straining to keep watch; shifty-faced Chinese rickshaw pullers waited for customers under dark alleyway eaves; now and then a car would speed into view from nowhere in particular, its headlights glittering as though carrying some secret cargo. Hunching against the night's chill seeping through our thick coats, Mizushima and I hurried along in silence, our steps quick and small.

I had come to Harbin about a week prior due to a certain task for the Dalian-based M Company where I worked.

Mizushima was my middle school classmate, a graduate of the Foreign Language School’s Russian Department, and an employee at K Trading Company’s branch office. During the autumn of Taisho — year—when anti-radical forces waned as radical factions gradually advanced southward through Siberia, enveloping Harbin in an atmosphere of restless turmoil—we would invite each other during our free hours from work to wander through the town day and night.
We even visited parks with lurid exhibitions and their bars.
We wandered through several bars filled with revelry and decadence.
We ventured into Chinese opium dens.
We witnessed bandits being executed by firing squad.
Day after day we saw firsthand the tragic lives of Russia’s dispossessed imperial-era people.
Robberies, murders, fights, suicides—such sights and sounds threatened us time and again.
And on that evening before my scheduled departure for Dalian the next dusk, we spent over four hours at the Apollo Bar, drowning our mutual reluctance to part in drink.

“Hey Kondo, what’s wrong?—Haven’t you gone awfully quiet…” Mizushima suddenly turned back to me and spoke after we’d walked about a block.

“Nah, it’s nothing really…”
I answered vaguely.
Yet in my head—swaying drunkenly—the various impressions received at the bar were repeating themselves one after another, dragging the tail of a melancholy mood.

“But tell me – what ultimately becomes of those women in the bar?”

“Who knows? These days I’ve stopped bothering to consider such things. Even if one among them attains some miraculously happy remainder of her life, most will meet tragic ends.”

“Is that so… Yet Harbin truly feels unbearable, doesn’t it? As if humans are being trampled into muck…”

“Hmm, them being trampled underfoot serves them right.”
“In reality—try seeing people as human in a place like this—try taking life seriously even for a day—and you’d have no choice but to go mad.”

“Ha ha ha…”

“Ha ha ha…”

Turning to face each other, Mizushima and I exchanged forced laughter.

"But when I think about it, everything is absurd."
"Attempting to build a better, happier life, the Soviet Government gets established."
"But behind that revolution, thousands upon tens of thousands of victims keep suffering in such a manner."
"At the very least, for them, life has never become better or happier."
"I really find revolution utterly repulsive…"

“But from the revolutionary’s standpoint…” I interjected.

“Wait—you’d say such sacrifices are only natural—” Mizushima sharply cut me off.

“That’s right…”

“That’s precisely why I detest revolution.—Can you truly endorse such revolutionaries’ mentality?”

“No—I’m not endorsing anything.”

“Of course, that’s right.—And…” Mizushima’s voice rose sharply.
“Fundamentally speaking, no matter how many times they repeat these revolutions, I think only a handful of revolutionaries achieve self-satisfaction—humanity as a whole will never become better or happier. To rephrase it: however much humans struggle, in the end Utopia will never come.”

“Yet even if one must ultimately concede that truth, I don’t want to despair of life to that degree.—If humans lose their dream of Utopia—to rephrase it, if we lose the passion to make our lives better and happier…”

“That would be lonely… Or perhaps there’s nothing left but to die…” Mizushima spat out. “But tell me—what exactly are these dreams and passions you speak of? Aren’t they just strings that manipulate humans into oblivion…?”

For some reason, I found myself unable to answer that.
Mizushima immediately pressed on.

"But those who can still be manipulated by such strings are fortunate.—Even after losing both dreams and passions, humans still can’t die easily."
"And they continue living while obscuring those contradictions and loneliness."
“Even those women at the bar—and the men taking pleasure in them—in short, I think they’re all just members of that same breed of humanity.”

Mizushima suddenly let out a deep sigh and fell silent.
I too, suddenly feeling an inexplicable desolation in my chest, likewise fell silent.
And so, we walked on in silence, exhaling white breaths and letting four sets of footsteps resound against the ground frozen like stone.
Before I knew it, the alcohol’s intoxication had begun to fade.
In the biting night cold pressing in around me, I became aware of a pain in my toes as though they were freezing.

At the intersection of K Street and P Street, when I parted with Mizushima after promising to meet again tomorrow, the hands of the tall clock tower on the street corner were pointing exactly at two o'clock.

From there to the M Hotel where I was staying remained a distance of seven or eight blocks, but firmly declining Mizushima’s offer to see me off, I began walking alone beneath the dimly lit trees with my head mostly lowered.

"But Mizushima has changed... What kind of change is this?" I suddenly muttered to myself.

When I thought of the Mizushima of old—that youthful dreamer of life, that passionate romanticist, that moralist one might even call timid—I could not help but consider the profound effect that nearly three years of life in Harbin had wrought upon his character. But when I considered the very town air that had so coarsened his heart, turned his life prosaic, and led his character into dark negativism, all the varied impressions and experiences from my week-long stay felt even more visceral. The gaunt face of a woman dancing naked before guffawing men, the bandit’s head that had thudded to the ground in a spray of blood, the eerie gleam in the eyes of an opium-addled Russian sprawled corpse-like across the floor…

"Foolishness, evil, ugliness.
'What an unbearable town this is!' I muttered, turning from P Street's main avenue into a shortcut through a dark alley, quickening my pace as if fleeing the heavy melancholy pressing down on my head."

A path two or three yards wide, hemmed in on both sides by tall, damp brick walls and lined with what appeared to be storehouse buildings of shops.
In the distant darkness, the familiar light of a Chinese restaurant glimmered faintly, a solitary point of illumination.
Turning right at that point of light and emerging onto the main avenue—which led to the M Hotel—I let my feet carry me thoughtlessly into that deserted path, where I found myself startled as if doused with cold water.

Thrusting both hands into my coat pockets and hunching my neck into my collar, I continued walking apprehensively at the unnervingly loud echo of my own footsteps.
But after a while, I suddenly heard low footsteps from behind.
I didn’t even feel like turning around.
I suddenly became highly agitated and could only quicken my pace.

“You… you…” I had walked perhaps seven or eight paces after becoming aware of the footsteps when I was suddenly called out to from behind.
Though the accent was different, it was clear Japanese.

“Huh?”
I startled and turned around.

Before me—who had stopped—from within the darkness, like a shadow suddenly coalescing, appeared a foreign woman with a shawl thrown over her head, her figure somehow shabby in bearing.
A face thickly coated with powder showed stark white even to night-adjusted eyes.
I, who had been feeling an anxiety as though some unknown danger approached, experienced momentary relief—but noticing two eyes fixed intently upon me, I couldn’t help but feel an eerie unease made keener precisely because it was a woman.

“Do you need something?”
After hesitating for a while, I posed the question in Japanese like this.

The woman fidgeted and remained silent.

"Have you mistaken me for someone else?"
I said again.

Even to that, the woman did not answer.
But after bowing her head and pondering for a moment, she abruptly raised her face,

"I... Japanese... not good. Please... you come... my house..." the woman said in halting phrases.

Startled by the sudden, unexpected invitation, I stared intently back at the woman’s face. And then, as if to evade my gaze for some reason, she immediately lowered her eyes. She was fidgeting impatiently with the edge of her grayish shawl using her right fingertips. While staring at her petite frame—unusually small for a foreigner—over her shoulder, when I suddenly noticed the garish calico pattern of the jacket she wore, I instantly realized she must be a Russian woman. And when I quickly considered why she had stopped me and what sort of woman she was, the thought "an amateur prostitute" flashed through my mind in an instant.

“Please… come to my house…”
The woman, still facing downward, repeated her plea once more in a supplicating manner.

The momentary thought made me hesitate in my response.
But upon noticing this and regaining some composure, within my heart—alongside an impulse urging me to turn away from the woman—another emotion, something akin to curiosity drawing me toward her, stirred distinctly.
And there, a lingering intimidation toward the eeriness remained at work, but it was also true that the faint vestiges of intoxication—though fading—had indeed begun to tempt me.
With my reply still lodged in my throat, I remained standing motionless for some time.

Then, the woman glanced up at me and, lowering her eyes again, suddenly muttered under her breath.

“One yen is acceptable.”

Here it comes—I thought with a cringing sensation.
There was no longer any room for doubt.
I had been told various stories by Mizushima about fallen Russian amateur prostitutes who would stop Japanese people while repeating “One yen...”
I lowered my eyes, then stared intently once more at the woman standing there as if cowering, looking over her head.
I felt a pang of heartache.
But in the next instant, for some reason, both my timid moral sense and hesitation had vanished from my heart.
And then, driven more by curiosity toward this mysterious world than by lust, I spoke with a peculiar, effortful determination to steel myself.

“Let’s go…”

Then the woman looked up at me as if startled and said something, but I couldn’t discern its meaning.
Yet wearing a smile that seemed satisfied, she suddenly became animated and began hurrying back along the path we had taken.
From her left and slightly behind, I followed in silence with a feeling that might have invited a wry smile.
After retracing our steps some fifty meters, she turned left into a narrow alley—pitch-dark and unnoticed by me until now.
Without once looking back, she kept hastening along this malodorous path that reeked of dust and refuse, its course so narrow it nearly grazed the brick walls on either side.

“Do you understand English?” After a short while, the woman suddenly turned back to me.

“I understand…” I answered.

“Oh, you can speak English?” the woman suddenly became animated and retorted in fluent English.

“Hmm.”
“I can manage a little…” I responded, my mood having somehow lightened.

“Where do you reside?” The woman slackened her pace, drawing near until our shoulders almost touched as she promptly inquired.

“M Street…” I answered mendaciously.

"Yes—I know three or four Japanese gentlemen."
"Mr. Kimura, Mr. Takayanagi, Mr…," the woman said in a soft voice tinged with a smile.

"I don't know any of those people."

“I see.”

The woman’s English was incomparably more skillful than mine.
And that made me feel she was by no means an uneducated person.
She must undoubtedly become another unfortunate victim of the revolution—when this thought struck me, I could not help but feel a pang in my heart, driven as it was by mere fleeting curiosity.
But the intense interest in this aventure that had arisen by chance between us—a man and woman strangers in a foreign town—immediately enveloped that pain.

“What’s your name?” I asked bluntly.

“Katerina…” the woman answered lightly in a coquettish tone.

Soon we emerged into a side street with some light.
At that moment, the woman abruptly turned toward me—her white face now illuminated through her shawl for the first time—giving an instantaneously alluring impression.
But she remained silent as she crossed the side street diagonally and entered another dark alley on the far side.
After walking about eighteen meters, she suddenly stopped. Jerking her chin toward me, she quietly pulled open the entrance door to a house where dim light seeped from within.

“Please be quiet…” the woman whispered in a hushed voice into my ear as I followed behind.

From the sooty ceiling hung a frayed electric wire, from which a dust-covered light bulb without a shade cast a dim yellow glow around.
A dusty-smelling, hollow hall.
Toward the back right, three or four rooms with doors continued in succession.
However, the woman began ascending the stairs—their wooden edges rounded from wear—that ran along the left wall immediately beside her, lifting her short skirt with one hand behind her back as if fearful of making any sound.
I followed suit, but as the woman’s black lace-up boots—their once-high heels now bent sideways and worn down—moved tentatively before my eyes, a strange discomfort welled up in my chest.

"I shouldn't have come..." I muttered inwardly, turning my face away repeatedly as I dragged my heavy feet up the stairs.

First floor, second floor—it was a shoddily constructed Western-style building enveloped in a suffocating silence that made one wonder whether people were living there at all. Soiled white walls bore graffiti here and there; where a window’s shattered glass should have been, newspaper had been pasted over the gap. The stairs emitted an eerie creak even when stepped on quietly, their surfaces gritty with mud and gravel. The dim electric light—chilled as if frozen by midnight’s fierce cold—and that momentary discomfort had imperceptibly transformed into terror. Yet the woman kept ascending step by step without turning around, as though climbing an endless staircase in utter silence. Second floor, third floor—when we reached the fourth and final landing, she paused with a labored sigh. Then, while quietly removing the shawl she had been wearing, she said in a small voice:

“Here we are…”

Nodding under the dim light, I gazed directly at the woman’s face for the first time in that instant. Her reddish-brown hair hung lusterless and unkempt; high cheekbones framed a face grown so emaciated beneath the removed shawl it seemed barely recognizable. Beneath makeup that had appeared merely pallid in the dark, freckles now stood exposed in multitudes. She must have been twenty-six or twenty-seven. Eyes sunken deep in shadowed sockets stared at me through sagging lids—eyes that squinted as if against glare yet burned with shame laid bare by the lamplight, their depths clouded by exhaustion’s indelible stain. I turned my face away unbidden. There I remained motionless, battered by the bitter dissolution of illusion and my own wretched complicity in being led to this moment—a suspended figure amid vanishing phantoms.

“Now, please come in…” the woman urged me in a small voice.
And then, approaching the door of the room immediately to the right, she placed a hand on the handle.
“So this is it… Your home is—” I asked, attempting to conceal my awkwardness.

“Yes…” the woman nodded quietly.

However, I had completely lost all resolve to enter.
And with sullen silence gripping my lips, I stared at the woman’s face.

“Oh dear, whatever has come over you?” she asked with affected solicitude.

I let out an involuntary sigh.
Keeping my gaze averted from the woman, I surveyed my surroundings.
To escape—to resolutely dash down those stairs—I felt there existed no salvation for me beyond that.
Yet I hesitated.
Hesitating, I studied the woman's demeanor once more as if probing.
Seized by apparent anxiety that I might flee, the woman abruptly sharpened her gaze.
Then—as though she'd stomped back to my side in an instant—she yanked at my coat sleeve.

"I'll just leave the money..." With that excruciating resolve of the moment spurring myself on, I reluctantly followed after the woman. I felt nauseated. But when I entered through the door and plopped down onto the chair by the wall that the woman had pointed out, I felt a slackening of tension with a sigh of relief. Without realizing it, my entire being had become utterly exhausted.

It was a long, narrow room. From the ceiling where paper hung torn in places, a shade-less bulb thick with dust cast its yellow, meager light here too. Around the crude round table were three or four chairs with unraveled webbing. Beyond the shabby curtain strung on a wire, a bed seemed to be installed. On the four walls where the faded arabesque-patterned wallpaper peeled in places hung nothing but a single tricolor print of a mundane landscape, leaving the hollow, chilled-air-filled room devoid of any discernible decorative items. The woman sat down facing me across the table with an unsettled air about her, but immediately stood up again.

“It must be cold… I’ll bring some fire,” the woman whispered softly.
And just as she began walking toward the door in the middle of the left wall, she threw a glance back at me and vanished into the adjoining room.

Having imagined her living alone in just this room, I gazed at the door with unexpected feelings while straining my ears, but the woman’s clattering footsteps that had been audible soon ceased, and the adjoining room fell completely silent.
I shifted my gaze to the window on the right, opposite that door.
The brown curtain with its modest floral pattern, drawn shut, swayed quietly.
Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds—I looked all around the room again.
A faint foreboding began to stir within me.
Trying to obscure this feeling, I took out a cigarette from my pocket and lit it, conscious of the match’s sound.
And exhaling a mouthful of purple smoke, I gazed up absently at the electric lamp where the smoke was coiling.
Then, at that very moment, a faint voice came from beyond the door.
Then came two or three feeble coughs.
While involuntarily holding my breath, I strained my ears.
But then, everything fell completely silent.

“Who could be there?” I murmured inwardly.
At that instant, the story of a Western “honey trap” that someone had once told me about suddenly flashed through my mind.
I jolted.

Before long, I quietly rose from the chair.
And I started toward the door through which the woman had entered.
But when I felt my shoes creak sharply against the floorboards, my feet froze in place.
My agitation mounted.
My nerves sharpened like needles.
While faltering in my movements, I stared fixedly at the entrance door.

But it wasn't long.
When I started at renewed sounds of staggering footsteps and turned around, the adjoining room's door opened quietly to reveal the woman holding a Seto brazier in its shadow.
In the brazier smoldered wood chips that had apparently just been lit.
The Seto brazier and Western woman formed a contrast both utterly bizarre and reeking of poverty.
My taut mood abruptly slackened.
And I cast a bewildered look at her figure.
Then, as if hesitant for some reason, she hurriedly closed the door, readjusted the brazier she'd set down, and approached me while turning her smoke-smudged face aside.

“It’s terribly cold…” Muttering in Japanese as if to hide her discomposure, the woman forced a stiff artificial smile onto her lustreless face.
Then after placing the brazier on the chair she had drawn before me, she sat down facing me across it.

I kept my eyes lowered to the dust-flecked table surface, remaining motionless and silent.
But even as I wondered whether the woman’s seemingly deliberate mannerisms aimed to lull me into complacency, I found myself unable to relax my vigilance.
An awkward silence persisted between us, each clinging to our positions.
Then eventually, the woman began rhythmically tapping the brazier’s edge with her outstretched fingertips, but after some time suddenly looked up and,

“Please take off your coat…” she whispered in an unnaturally faltering voice.

Without responding to that, I stared back at the woman’s face as if probing it, but it had been freshly made up without my noticing.
And though thin, her face—likable and petite—bore two eyes opened wide with an amateur’s timidity as if to charm, yet in them lingered no shadow of evil.
Her hair covered in soot, lips clouded with faded rouge, the rough nape peeking from her jacket, the stained calico jacket, the woolen serge skirt worn threadbare—when I compared this figure that had lost any youthful feminine charm, looking painfully disheveled, with her awkward demeanor since entering the room which gave no clear indication of her intentions, my anxious imaginings about the woman until now began to seem somewhat foolish.
But even so, the sense of someone’s presence in the next room that I had felt and my lingering suspicions toward the woman, who seemed to be concealing some secret or other, would not dissipate.

“Do you live here alone?” I asked in a casual tone.

The woman who had been looking down suddenly glanced up at me, blinking uneasy eyes as she seemed to hesitate before answering.

“Is there no one else here?”

“Yes… I’m alone…” she replied in a hollow voice, bowing her head.

It’s a lie—I thought.
Yet seeing her fidgeting with such nervous restlessness, I felt hesitant to press harder.
But precisely because of that—there was something here, something—those suspicions grew deeper still.

“Really alone?” I said again, raising my voice.

“Yes…”
The woman nodded ambiguously.

“But weren’t you talking with someone in the next room earlier?”

The woman jerked her shoulders in a start.
But she remained bowing her head, lips tightly clenched for some reason.

“You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”

“No…” The woman looked up at me with upturned eyes.
The gaze appeared fearful.
And the blood had drained from her face.

While deepening my suspicions, I kept watching over her head at the figure of the woman who seemed to be gradually curling in on herself inexplicably. And we maintained a prolonged silence between us. Then the woman, who had been frozen in place, finally raised her face quietly. Her eyes were brimming with tears.

“I have never met someone like you before…” the woman suddenly said.

“Huh?”

“You are a kind person.”

I stared at the woman, unable to find any words to reply.

“No, other people all immediately demand my body. There is no one like you…” The woman turned her face away as if evading my gaze and spoke with a trembling voice.
And after a moment, she suddenly threw herself down onto the desk and began to sob quietly.

I painfully suppressed the wry smile that had begun to surface.

“What on earth is going on?” I finally asked, unable to bear it any longer, standing up and approaching the woman.

The woman weakly raised herself.

“The truth is… the truth is, a husband and two children…” The woman cast a teary-eyed glance toward the neighboring room.

“Huh?―Your…”

The woman nodded silently.

“Why?—And you…” I panted.

The woman bowed her head as if at a loss for an answer.

It was a feeling as though something had been slammed down squarely with a sharp crack. I turned toward the neighboring room and, while staring at the woman’s figure, found myself lost in anxiety, confusion, shame, and doubt.

“Why…” I began, but then hesitated to continue.

The woman looked up at me with an aching gaze.

“My husband… my husband has pleurisy. Since early this summer…” the woman said in a trembling voice, her tone despairing.

A secret thought had begun to stir toward that place.
That was the moment.
When I heard those words that seemed to lay bare everything up to then—rather than being struck with surprise—my agitated feelings suddenly calmed.
And in that settled state of mind, as though returning to myself for the first time, I stared fixedly at the figure of the woman before me.
Then, as if the taut cord of emotion that had sustained her through this confession had slackened, she began weeping quietly again while keeping her face lowered.

“This too must be one of revolution’s tragic victims…” I thought to myself.
And, drawn by that sobbing voice, I silently lowered my eyes to my lap.

A prolonged silence passed between us.

"But what is your husband's condition?" I eventually asked quietly.

"Yes, he likely won't last much longer."
"We can't take him to a doctor."
"And besides...first of all, the four of us haven't eaten anything since yesterday..." the woman answered in fragmented bursts, stifling her sobs.
After a moment's silence, she suddenly trembled and muttered:
"All of this is because of that Lenin. There's no man more hateful or terrifying than him."

It was a figure of aching defiance.
Involuntarily turning my face away, I let out a sigh.
"But how could you all end up like this…" I said hesitantly.

“Please listen—I’ll tell you everything…” The woman wiped her tears.

The story the woman began to tell was as follows.
That her husband had been a first lieutenant in Petrograd’s Imperial Guards Cavalry Regiment; that the revolution had broken out shortly after their marriage and the birth of their eldest daughter; that stripped of position and property, the three of them had fled Petrograd with their lives barely intact; that they had wandered through Siberia for two years enduring every hardship; that during this time their eldest son was born; that it had been about a year and a half since coming to Harbin; that her husband had contracted pleurisy from the strain of forced labor to obtain food; that as her husband’s death approached, their children could no longer receive adequate meals; that about two months prior they had lost everything left to sell; and that through it all, the woman burned with all the defiance she could muster, ceaselessly cursing the Soviet government and reviling the revolution.

“Lenin is a devil—a beast!” she repeated again and again, worked into a frenzy by her own tears.
At times she ground her teeth.
At times she pounded the desk with a clenched fist.

While occasionally nodding along with gestures to her increasingly excited and rapid speech that grew inaudible in places, I silently listened to the woman’s words. But was it because the woman’s circumstances were too tragic, or was there some subconscious reason at work? As her story progressed, my heart lost its initial stirrings of emotion and gradually grew cold for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Not only that, but as the woman’s sentimentality intensified, I began noticing exaggerated, theatrical gestures—the sort often seen in Western ladies—interspersed through her speech. When it became glaringly apparent that she was trying to force me to acknowledge both the tragic nature of her circumstances and particularly the inescapability of her way of life, I found myself powerless against the faint sense of disgust that kept pressing against my chest.

“Please pity me, please pity me…” the woman entreated me several times with a directness characteristic of Western ladies.
Each time she did, I found myself compelled to repeat, “How pitiful, truly pitiful…” But when I noticed my own voice growing increasingly hollow, I couldn’t escape feeling a hidden ache in my heart.

Having finished her story, the woman fell silent as though exhausted.
I likewise kept silent, my head bowed low.
It must have been past three o’clock.
The barren room—offering no warmth from the scant wood chips smoldering in the small brazier—grew utterly cold alongside the freezing night air outside, the chill pressing in relentlessly.
Unable to endure it any longer, I swept my gaze around the room.
I stared at the woman.
But she—her earlier agitation now entirely drained away—maintained a somber expression and made no move.
One minute passed, then two, in desolate silence.
There I remained before this tragic heroine of sorrows, sinking ever deeper into a wasteland of bleak emotion.

"I should leave…" I thought to myself.
Then I jerked upright from the chair.
At this sudden movement, the woman's face snapped upward as if pulled by a spring.

"Oh, what are you doing?" she asked, eyes widening as she fixed her gaze on me.

"I'm leaving…"
As I spoke, I took two or three steps toward the exit.

"Wait… please wait…" she murmured, half-rising from her seat.

I stopped and looked back toward the woman.
Then, with unnervingly bright eyes, she approached my side and seized the sleeve of my coat.
I shook it off.
Pulling two or three banknotes from my suit's inner pocket, I thrust them toward her in a rough handful.
But she made no move to take them.
Leaving them lying on the floor, I began striding toward the entrance door.

"No, you mustn't...!" she cried out in a flustered manner as she clung to me.
Then suddenly grabbing me from behind by the shoulders, she tried to pull me back while exhaling lukewarm breath against my cheek.
I twisted around and looked back.
And in that instant, what appeared vividly before my eyes were two perfectly round eyes burning with desire upon her faintly pale face.

“Goodbye…”

After roughly shaking off the woman’s arm and shouting that, I rushed out the door without looking back.
Then, taking two, three steps at a time as I hurled myself down the staircase with great strides—filled with bitter anguish and a desire to trample myself into the dirt—I kept roaring in my heart.

“Fool! Fool! Fool!…”