Pathway to Japanese Literature
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| Original Title | 或る嬰児殺しの動機 |
|---|---|
| Author | 佐左木 俊郎 |
| Genre | Modern Short Fiction |
| Author Type | Male Author |
| Summary | In a Tokyo choked by relentless expansion, an aging laborer named Uhei battles daily through flood-like crowds to deliver vegetables, his fragile livelihood tethered to a cartload of produce. The city’s sprawl devours farmland, displacing workers like him into poverty. When a celebrity spectacle gridlocks traffic, Uhei’s desperate rush to meet market deadlines ends in police detention—a delay that rots his goods and unravels his already precarious existence. Bedridden and destitute, he succumbs to illness, leaving behind his daughter Tsuru, pregnant and alone in their crumbling hut. \nTsuru, once sent to Tokyo as a maid only to return disgraced and abandoned, now faces an unthinkable choice after childbirth. Her infant’s cries echo in the shadow of her father’s corpse, both victims of a society that grinds the vulnerable to dust. Authorities discover the tragedy—a skeletal infant amid funeral ashes—and a young prosecutor, confronting Tsuru’s anguished confession, grapples with a haunting truth: her crime stems not from malice, but a world that offers no mercy to the poor. As secrets intertwine with systemic decay, the line between guilt and survival blurs, exposing rot deeper than any disease. |
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