Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The May mountains, just beginning to grow gently warm, were eerie and required caution.
Snakes would bask in the sun while lizards and geckos would dart out unexpectedly.

I dislike reptiles most among all animals.

There are those who say humans' aversion to snakes stems from the subconscious memory of our ancestors—from a time before they became human—being terribly tormented by reptiles. Whether my ancestors were birds or horses, I do not know. But those eerie, clammy, cold, and seemingly vindictive cold-blooded creatures—I detest them.

But if one were to set aside these snakes, there would be no place as youthful, pleasant, and fragrant as the mountains in May. Decaying old brush leaves, sprouting new chestnuts and oaks, and candle-like pine buds gave off a vinegary, bitter, pungent aroma. The morning was like polished silver. And it was crystal clear.

There, even the pheasants, copper pheasants, and bush warblers could not help but grow excited. Pheasants had a special way of calling, different from autumn or summer. The bush warblers began their valley-crossing songs. That was the sound of each male crying out for a female. Even humans there found their blood leaping through every vein in their bodies under the mountain's stimulus.

Kōkichi—my brother—was there chasing after a woman. I was about seven or eight years old at the time. There my brother would step through bamboo grass stumps with Toshie—who would later become his wife—scrape their shins, roughhouse, have playful quarrels, and compete to gather bracken.

Toshie was a woman whose skin—not just her face but any hidden part—would feel smooth and fine-grained should anything chance to brush against her body. Her hair and eyebrows were jet black and thick. Her lips were as red as if rouged. Her ears were white and well-shaped. Her eyes were round as bells, with a firmness to them. The sole flaw was her nose running down the center of her face, its tip upturned toward the heavens as though sliced off at an angle—yet through a partial eye, even this could be taken for charm.

Her family owned a wide, tree-covered mountain where bracken, itadori, and in autumn, matsutake mushrooms pushed up their heads from the soil in endless abundance.

“The mountainless ones are comin’ up the mountain, huh…”

When four or five—sometimes seven or eight—village children would head to the mountains each carrying a basket to gather such things, Toshie would put on a scornful look and try to prevent them from entering her family’s mountain.

As a child, I felt ashamed that my family didn't own a single mountain or even one tanbo of dry field.
I still remember that.
At that time, my family owned only one rice field—a field Father had bought three years earlier from a bankrupt man in the neighboring village for 280 yen.
All other fields were borrowed from others and cultivated.
Even this purchased field carried 200 yen in credit association debt.
Naobei was poor while Saburō was wealthy.
Tokuemon possessed how many chōbu of rice fields.
This matter would instantly become village gossip whenever anything happened.
People envied those who owned more land.

Of course, this could not help but wound the boy's heart - gelatinous in its tenderness and softness.

I grew gloomy and resentful.

"If only our house had a mountain where bracken, itadori, and wild strawberries grew aplenty."

Suddenly, from the bottom of my heart, I found myself wishing for that.

When autumn arrived, Toshie’s household would mark off areas in the mountains where matsutake mushrooms grew by setting up ropes with bells attached.
They made sure others couldn’t harvest the matsutake.

There, we slipped in stealthily.
And then, we ravaged that mountain from every nook and cranny.

When we touched the rope while slipping through, a bell rang on the far side.

Then the guard gripping an oak club roared with a booming voice and came charging out from the watch hut.

But by the time the guard reached the spot, we'd already ripped five or six matsutake mushrooms into our baskets and were crouching hidden in shadowy thickets of overgrown dwarf bamboo or under the bulk of black pines, breath held tight.

“You damn brats! Shit!”
“Where’d you vanish to?!”
“I’ll smash every bone in your body!”
The guard struck a moss-covered stone with his oak club.

The hoarse, cursing shouts echoed off the opposite mountain wall.
Then the same voice returned again from afar.

“You damn pauper brats especially! Shit!”
“This is hopeless!”
“Shit!”

The guard had been hired by Toshie’s old man for a daily wage of eighteen sen, only during the matsutake season. He was an old man named Utarō. He himself owned only two tanbo of rice fields in the direction of S Town. All his other fields were worked as tenant land for Toshie’s household. He was undoubtedly poor. That guy always used the word "pauper" when cursing people.

“Pauper brats of all people! Damn it! With your filthy hands—tch!”

Utarō spat.
He picked up a stone and hurled it without taking aim toward the nearby bamboo thicket.
The stone clacked against the pine trunk and ricocheted off elsewhere.
The very act of stealing—that was what truly seemed to infuriate him.

Once the guard had gone off toward the guard hut, we emerged one by one from somewhere.
Shikatarō, Ushimatsu, and Torakichi came together.
They exchanged glances and burst into stifled laughter.

“Should we go make that Utarō angry again?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s just quietly cut this rope and be done with it.”
“That would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, let’s do it! Let’s do it!”

II

After seven years, Toshie became Kōkichi's wife.
Kōkichi was twenty-three.
I, the younger brother, was sixteen.
It was spring.

The marriage between the landlord's daughter and the son of a tenant-owner farmer was a mismatch between their families.
Even as she became Kōkichi's wife, Toshie herself had never wanted to become my family's bride.
But she had been compelled by her disordered physiological condition to accept everything.

"What reckless nonsense have you done, Kōkichi, you fool!"

In front of her son, Mother never voiced a single complaint yet privately criticized his misconduct.
I,

“We gotta hurry up and find him a bride somewhere else.”

Mother spoke on the veranda where she had gathered with her sister—the aunt.

“You’re just a child, yet you talk like some impudent little know-it-all.”
The aunt, who still often gave out those “gun bullet” candies, laughed.
“Taking a bride at twenty-three is still too early.
“Kōkichi’s only just started being able to carry four-to straw bales since last year or so.”

I couldn’t stand being called an impudent little know-it-all.

The aunt’s husband was a man of strength who would walk wearing geta with one four-to straw bale gripped in each hand, or cross narrow, swaying plank bridges over rivers with three rice bales stacked on his shoulders at once.
That uncle often said that once a man takes a wife, his strength stops increasing from then on.
Even sumo wrestlers—once they take a wife, their strength in the ring starts to decline.
He often said such things.

From the perspective of sixteen-year-old me, my twenty-three-year-old brother had completely become an adult.

My brother had only graduated from higher elementary school and studied nothing beyond that. Yet among those his age, he knew more than anyone else—even more than those who had graduated from agricultural schools. This alone was enough to make me respect him. Kōkichi had grown healthy and straight like a black pine rising tall among oak trees. He had become a full-fledged man.

In the village, daughters kept getting sucked away to S Town and K City until only two or three women of marriageable age remained. There might have been one or two among those town-bound girls that Kōkichi would have seriously considered for a wife. But any girl who went to town came back within two years at most—coughing like sallow, shriveled pears. Then within half a year, she'd be coughing up blood and dead.

After that, yet another girl returned home coughing.
And then, after lingering for half a year or a year, she died.
A girl whose legs had swollen up puffy—when you pressed a finger against her shin, it would sink in with a squish—also returned home, unable to walk.
The girls who did not fall ill rarely returned from the town.

And year after year, their younger sisters and cousins who came of age after them likewise set out for the town.
They couldn’t afford to fear losing their youthful freshness like withered pears or having their legs swell up.

Young men, too, trickled away.
To earn money.
To live glamorous lives.

The village had lost all its allure and vitality.

And so in the village, it had become settled that the only ones parading about in floral-patterned merino dresses were either Isaburō's Toshie or Tokuemon's Ishie—daughters from landowning families who could stay without venturing to town.

The village had fallen into such a state.

Recruitment agents from knitwear factories were persistently going around to houses with young men and daughters.

III

Toshie suffered from morning sickness starting the day after she came to the house.
Frogs clamored noisily in the rice fields all night long.
Summer was approaching.

Toshie had plucked summer mandarins—left to ripen on the tree until their golden skins took on a bluish tinge—from her parents’ home and brought them.
Her teeth ached and tingled as the sour juice seeped into their nerves, but she devoured them one after another, again and again.
The mandarin orange peels discarded by the window had piled up high.
On top of that, a gloomy rain poured down in a sodden deluge.

One night, as I was returning from the toilet beyond the lower shed and began climbing the stone steps, I suddenly heard my sister-in-law’s voice—her face thrust out the window—straining to vomit up what she’d eaten. Toshie was frantically trying to expel whatever kept rising in her throat. But no matter how she strained, what she tried to bring up wouldn’t come out properly, and she spat a mouthful of bitter saliva onto the mandarin peels with a wet splat.

She was no longer smooth-skinned, nor beautiful. For some reason, she looked unclean, smelly, and filthy.

Soon, rice planting season arrived.
Father, Mother, Brother, and I waded into the paddies where muddy water splattered against our foreheads and cheeks as we prepared for rice planting, using oxen to till the fields, plastered the ridges with hoes, and leveled them with smoothing boards.
When the rain stopped, the sweltering June sun fiercely scorched us from head to toe.

My sister-in-law did not work.
Father, Mother, and Kōkichi were all satisfied.
The reason Father was satisfied was that we had become related by marriage to Isaburō, a wealthy landowner who owned rice fields.
The reason Mother was satisfied was that Toshie brought a two-pole, three-tiered chest of drawers packed to every drawer with expensive garments—Kohama crepe, Nishiki brocade, Akashi gauze, and the like.
The reason Kōkichi was satisfied was that his instinctive live-fire exercise bore fruit most swiftly and directly.

From five in the morning until twelve o'clock, the four family members worked in the fields like unfeeling animals. They thought of nothing but working. At the rice mill's whistle, they finally felt they became human again. They returned to eat lunch. From noon, they would work again until about seven in the evening.

Toshie hung a mosquito net in the sitting room as a fly deterrent and slept inside it. A half-read new magazine lay discarded by her head. The meal hadn't been prepared.

“If she’d just have a child already, maybe she’d put some real effort into working.”

After eating and returning to the fields, Mother said.

Brother was still lazing around in his wife’s room.

“At the Isaburōs’ place, she likely never learned to work—just grew up playing around, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know a thing about that.”

“Kōkichi! Can’t you quit making such a racket!”

Mother’s scowl deepened at Kōkichi, who kept coddling his wife.

“Even if you say that, Mother, you were the one who was so delighted when she brought so much luggage that the house was getting cramped,” I said with a laugh.

“Enough! Luggage is luggage, and work is work. Those who don’t work—layabouts are the worst of all.”

Brother showed concern for his wife. He shielded Toshie from Father and Mother—parents who seemed born solely to toil and devour barley rice. Her hips widened. The smooth, soft flesh of her cheeks took on a slightly reddish tinge. And her lips began to chap. In her belly, the fetus swelled against the skin from within.

IV

Farmers valued land as more crucial than life itself.

Even the dead had to buy land; otherwise, there would be no place to lay their bodies.—They had held such a belief.
Therefore, they placed coins inside the coffin.
The dead would use that money to purchase their own resting plots in hell or paradise!

I remember when Mother buried a dead cat, she even strung a straw through the holes of two-mon coins and hung them around its neck, telling it to "buy your place with this."

Money can be taken away.
A house burns to ash.
When humans die, that's all there is.
But land alone remains forever.

Driven by such beliefs, Father used money from loans and mutual loan associations to painstakingly gather rice fields and dry fields, bit by bit.
When he could buy land from bankrupt individuals at prices lower than market value by thoroughly haggling them down, he rejoiced as though he had captured a demon’s head.

Over seven years, he had become something neither fully a tenant farmer nor entirely an owner-farmer—a hybrid of the two.
Even when buying a mere six or seven small plots of rice fields, Father and Mother were beaming with satisfaction.

“Starting this year, taxes are going to be a bit higher.”

In her joy of owning land, Mother spoke as if she even looked forward to paying taxes.
Brother and I listened nearby.

“What’s this? You buy that measly cat’s-forehead-sized field and go acting like you’ve become some grand landowner.”
Brother made a bitter face.

“Even so, that field and the two tan in Nohara are already fields where we don’t need to pay taxes anymore.”

“Instead of land tax, there’s the credit association’s interest to pay.”

“No! If they aren’t your own fields, there’s no managing them.” Mother repeated.
“Without all that haggling over confiscations and tax payments—we’re better off this way."
"At least this way we can keep our peace of mind here.”

The village was gradually transforming.
The clear-sighted owner-farmer Mr. Take had sold off all his land and departed for the city.
The landowner Isaburō too sold part of his mountain and dry fields.
This was to fund sending his son to an agricultural college.
Those straining to rise from tenant farmers to owner-farmers extended beyond my father alone.

Utarō, that matsutake mushroom guard who had rice fields near S Town, sold one portion as a site for a pharmaceutical company and gained over 5,000 yen.

The man who handled these sales mediations was Kuma-san.
All thirty-two of his teeth were capped in gold without exception.
He never let even the smallest transaction pass without taking a five percent commission.
People cowered and tried their utmost to avoid involving Kuma-san.
They shunned Kuma-san.
But Kuma-san had a dog-like nose for transactions.
No one knew how he sniffed them out, but he would inevitably insert himself and have his say.

Electric lights arrived in the village.
It was Kuma-san who had come urging them to install electric lights.

The rickety old carriages and elderly coachmen with long-stemmed pipes clenched between their teeth were replaced by motor buses and their fashionable drivers.

Automobiles spewed foul-smelling gas across the roadways.
Leaving behind children clustered along the roadside gawking in wonder, they raced onward to the next villages—B and H.

V

November arrived.

One night，Toshie gave birth to a child．
Brother entered his wife’s delivery room．
But there was no cry from the baby．
Having finished giving birth，Toshie grew thin and lay on her back with a radiant smile．
The child，wrapped in rags and absorbent cotton，was soft，with thin black hair that had grown in，and had turned eerily cold．
It never cried or screamed．

“With this，I’ve completely escaped that noisy yoke．”

Contrary to expectations of grief, Toshie wore a cheerful expression.
This was Toshie’s face from before she became brother’s wife—from when she had freely frolicked through fields and freely loved.
She was unnaturally exuberant.
Modesty and complete reliance on brother had vanished from Toshie’s face.
The baby had died.

One month later, she was walking along the main road to S Town, led by a different man—a gaunt, pale-complexioned fellow swinging his cane—whispering something softly and lowly as they went.

Kōkichi also abandoned the house.

VI

And so it fell to me to take my brother's place—to help our parents and tend to household matters.

This wasn't worth it—such a gloomy duty.

VII

A single 16-candlepower electric light hung installed, its shade and bulb blackened with soot and fly droppings.

Before one knew it, the sixteen-candlepower light had dimmed to less than ten candlepower.
To maintain a ten percent dividend, the electric company was cutting corners on fuel.

When moving pictures came to the playhouse, the electric light drew breath.

Suddenly robbed of its powerful electric lighting by the playhouse, the household lights dimmed abruptly, as if about to go out.
When the projection stopped, this time the electric lights abruptly brightened.
When it started again, they abruptly darkened.
And so, the electric lights breathed countless times in a single night.

Automobiles came and went every single day. Whether it rained, blew wind, or was a holiday.

Loaded from town were tabi work boots that made straw sandals obsolete, fashionable parasols, Taishō-era kotos, and water pumps. From the village, they pushed into that rattling box every last one of the boys and girls who had just graduated from higher elementary school, as if licking the place clean.

Automobiles also brought wooden patented frames instead of rice-planting ropes with cloth markers tied at eight-sun intervals. The lever-drawn well bucket became a pump. When leafhoppers swarmed, incandescent lamps were used. They began sprinkling oil and lighting kerosene lamps instead of having children wade into putrid, water-moss-smelling fields up to their shins to search for eggs on leaf undersides.

They threshed the harvested rice with threshing sticks, sifted it through sieves, ground it in mortar mills, winnowed it with winnowing machines, and then it became brown rice.
Such troublesome, laborious tasks were no longer necessary.
When ears were fed into the whirring Oyadama-gō machine, husks flew off from their tips in a most satisfying manner.
And unhulled rice was thrown into an engine-powered automated hulling machine; their shells blown away by the wind while grains cascaded like a waterfall into waiting buckets.

The spinning wheel that Mother had once spun thread with on rainy days, whirring it round and round through the downpours, now sat blackened with soot in the attic storeroom.
When mice occasionally clambered onto it, the wheel would emit a low rattling hum from above the ceiling.

“What’s that sound?”

It was evening.
Mother, whose hearing had grown poor, continued muttering to herself without catching my question.

“Takei came at noon today to collect the hulling fee. Do we have that money?”

“What’s that low humming sound?”

“If you get a machine to hull the rice, you don’t have to bother with turning the mortar mill—it’s easier that way—but get one, and it’ll cost you just for getting it.”

“What’s that strange noise in the attic I’m talking about!”

“What? What’re you— You saying there’s money in the attic?”

Mother was on the verge of going bankrupt.

If you threw away the straw sandals made by lamplight and bought rubber-soled tabi work boots, you needed money.
The pump, the incandescent lamp, the Oyadama-gō—they all required money.
Despite all that, the price of the rice we sold was nowhere near rising.
So Mother, who had once thought of nothing but land, land, land, now in her ruined state began muttering to herself about money, money, money—nothing but money.

VIII

O-Hae, the daughter of "Magoshichi," alighted from the automobile, exchanging affectionate smiles with an unfamiliar man.

You’d think they were lovers, but they were husband and wife.

O-Masa of "Tasuke" also returned home with a man of a different type—not one from the vicinity.

In the old days, people wouldn’t get together unless they were individuals from known backgrounds in the same locale.
If not someone from the same village, then with someone from a neighboring one.
If not someone from a neighboring village, then with someone from the next village over.
And it wasn’t oneself who decided marriages, but meddlesome, stubborn parents.

Now, the young women who had gone to town took up with men they happened to meet there of their own accord.

They would return briefly to the village, then go back out to town.

The next time they returned to the village, they would be with yet another man.
People had come to regard that as perfectly natural.
They saw but said nothing.

Even staying in the countryside, one could feel the times shifting.

Those who clung solely to the old-fashioned ways of the past were gradually approaching ruin.
A malicious, sharp-eyed, agile man pulled off a clever scheme.
Firewood dealers became coal dealers; chicken buyers turned into pig buyers.
Thus they pulled off a clever scheme.

Those who persisted solely as firewood dealers eventually had to abandon their trade once the mountain trees were gone. Firewood dealers were middlemen who exploited others for profit. Yet even from that, a certain implication could not help but be sensed.

Father was still buying up land bit by bit. Land prices had fallen. Owner-farmers went bankrupt; everyone moved to cities and put their fields up for sale with no one left to work them; Isaburō sold off portions of his dry fields for his son's school fees—just as autumn grew cooler with each rainfall, so too did land prices fall steadily with each new sale, their market value dropping with each transaction.

Father scoured around and bought up such land.
I disliked that.
Father put up the land he had bought as collateral, borrowed additional money from the credit association, and bought yet another dry field.
The five or six mutual loan associations had completely turned to dregs.

The mutual loan associations required each share to be repaid twice a year.
Therefore, every month, some mutual loan association would send over a notice calculating repayment amounts.
As a result, Father’s money pouch tightened.

And yet Father still did not stop buying land.
When Kuma-san slyly promoted a barren plot of land in the shadow of a pine grove at the mountain's base—a place no one would take even if you brought it anywhere—Father once again fell for the sweet talk and ended up buying even that kind of land.
In that respect, even in her ruin, Mother was still the wiser one.

"Buying up nothing but these worthless dry fields and rice paddies—you planning to become some kind of landlord?"

I was feeling too much absurdity and anger to take things seriously.

“Could we ever become landlords?
“I’m just thinkin’ of leavin’ even a bit of rice fields for us, that’s all.
“Money gets spent and that’s the end of it, but land’ll stay on clear to your grandchildren’s day.”

Father was unassuming and diligent.

“We don’t need you buying us rice fields.”

“I don’t need it. If Kōkichi comes back, I’ll give it to him.”

“Do you think Brother’s coming back? …You’re out of your mind!
“He’s never coming back!
“No matter how many fields you buy, it’s all useless!”

The collection of interest from the credit association,the repayments for the mutual loan associations,the wife,and the son’s opposition gradually wore Father down.

The three of them devoted themselves to farming, but their harvests simply couldn’t keep up with the interest.
If things continued like this, it was a foregone conclusion that they would have to sell off the land they had bought at even lower prices and repay their debts.
He even tried asking someone to approach the Kangyō Bank where interest rates were lower.

But one day, it was spring.

“I’ve pulled it off now, I tell ya!”
Father returned home walking briskly and vigorously, as if rejuvenated.
He spoke in his usual unassuming, diligent tone.
“This time, they’re puttin’ in a train from K to S, so seems like a good chunk of our family’s land’ll sell for that railway site.
Even at five yen per tsubo, they’d sell easy enough at that price—but I went and bought up all I could for a pittance. Pulled off a real good one there.
After all, it was good I bought up all I could.
This time, I’m gonna make a killing, I tell ya!”

Nine

Green barley, wheat, and rye stretched lush and vigorous across the entire village.
The swallows that had returned darted low over the wheat, their bellies nearly brushing the green leaves.

A team of survey engineers moved back and forth through the wheat fields, carrying a measuring tape, surveying poles alternately painted red and white, and a surveying instrument.
They were pulling measuring tapes, peering through telescope-like surveying instruments mounted on tripods at painted poles, scribbling something on maps, and shouting.

English symbols and numbered square stakes were driven one after another into the wheat fields.

It was the tenant farmers who couldn't help muttering complaints when their wheat was trampled and broken.

Father was glad the wheat had been trampled and broken.

For both landlords and owner-farmers, trampled wheat meant money would come pouring in.

The negotiations for site acquisition began.

He had purchased a one-se dry field for twelve yen and sixty sen, then offered it at two yen and thirty sen per tsubo.
For one se, that would amount to sixty-nine yen.

Father claimed it was a dry field he wanted to cultivate himself and held back from selling.

The price per tsubo rose to two yen and ninety sen.

Father repeated that it was a dry field he wanted to cultivate himself, as the soil quality was good.
And then he sold on credit.
The unit price was bid up.

I was silently listening nearby and, despite his unassuming nature, found myself impressed by Father’s skill in negotiation.
At two yen and ninety sen per tsubo, anyone would kill for that price, yet Father showed not the slightest hint of such eagerness.

Finally, it reached three yen and fifty sen per tsubo.

Our family’s rice fields and dry fields were caught up in three locations of the railway site.
One rice field had its center turned into a railway site, cleanly split in two, with both left and right sides now bordering the railway line.

Not only the railway site, but land prices along the entire line soared.
There had never been such a windfall.

The owner-farmers who had written their rice fields and dry fields into mutual loan associations as collateral or were about to have them seized instead of debt were not limited to Father alone.
Shōbei, Sakuemon, Tōtarō—half the village’s owner-farmers had been gasping under such painful financial juggling.
They found relief as though they had come back to life.
The landlords were smugly satisfied.
Utarō had sold a rice field near town for five thousand yen some time ago and used eighty-five yen from that to buy a dry field.
That dry field had now also been caught up in the railway site.

"You damn paupers, look at you now! Everything we do turns out just right! You lot should boil the dirt from our fingernails and drink it."

He was spouting carefree talk and boasting arrogantly.

"What nonsense you spout! You Tenpō coin bastard!"

Having just had their wheat trampled and with no paddies or dry fields of their own that would become part of the railway site, the tenant farmers showed blatant resentment.

“Our rice field got left out by a hair’s breadth.”
“If that train line had swung just five ken further west, even we’d have had some measly coins rollin’ in!”

And there were those who nursed regrets too.

“Isaburō’s got all that land, but somehow—like they’d colluded—it’s been left out.”
Mother spoke of others’ affairs with evident delight.
It felt as though she was getting her revenge here for Toshie having run away.
“Only one plot’s been caught up proper, and the rest just barely graze the corners in two measly spots.”
“Hee hee, that’s rich.”
I, too, felt a certain uncanny satisfaction.

“And over there, they’ve got debts from sending kids to school, and the tenant farmers aren’t paying their taxes properly—they’re seething over it, from what I hear.”

“That’s just their comeuppance.”
“As if I care!”

In the areas of the railway site where stakes had been driven, after harvesting the wheat, they neither plowed, tilled, nor planted anything.
In summer, lush green weeds grew unchecked there as they pleased.
When late autumn arrived, those weeds turned gray and withered.
Through golden-ripened ears of rice ran a straight line like a stretched bolt of withered cloth.
From autumn onward, some even left the entire area along the railway line to grow wild, abandoning unprofitable wheat cultivation.

The onset of winter arrived.

Another team of surveyors arrived, carrying measuring tapes and red-and-white painted boundary markers.
Then, peering through a surveying instrument resembling a telescope, they shouted something, carried it to a new location, and drove in square stakes.
The line connecting stake to stake now began to undulate somewhat like a snake.

“Are they building another train line now?”

Father returned after watching a survey team at work, his face clouded with concern.

“There’s no way they’d build two railways in this backwater.”

“Hmm.”
“That’s true.”

People grew alert to where the new stakes were being driven.
The railway site was to be changed from the first survey points to the second survey area.

In the initial survey, our owned land had been included in the railway site, but this time it was excluded.
There were also those kinds of landlords and owner-farmers.
At first, as many as four locations had been included, but this time, not even a single tsubo was touched.
There were also such cases.
The crash came.
They had thought they could make a killing, so they let their fields go to waste and lay in wait.
And yet, their calculations had gone awry.
They were left dumbfounded.

With the new survey, those whose lands were newly included in the site rejoiced.
Landlords, owner-farmers—those who owned land were caught between joy and sorrow.
The ones who could sit back and watch that spectacle unfold were the tenant farmers who owned nothing.

“This time too, all four plots got caught up proper,” Father sighed with relief.
“But last time they took nothing but our poor land—now this deal’s turned even meaner.”
“And if they keep flip-flopping like this, it’ll be hell trying to clear and replant all those fields we let go to waste.”

Why would they make the tracks snake around like that? It made no sense.
A straight line’s obviously best.
I’d barely thought it when someone—

“This time around, they’ve gone and made it wind all over like some blue serpent just to get Isaburō’s fields included.”

They began.
In reality, this time, every last one of Isaburō’s rice fields had been caught up in it.

“Aren’t they saying they’re relocating the station from Gongen’s area to these rice fields here?”

“They must’ve greased quite a few palms with the bigwigs.”
“They used that Kuma-san for it.—That Kuma bastard’s been brazenly making trips to K City since summer, hasn’t he?”

“So that’s what they were up to.”
“No wonder I thought Kuma-san and Isaburō had been scheming together lately.”
“Damn it!”

Those excluded from the railway site began raising a raucous uproar.
Whether their land made it into the railway site or not meant the difference between their homes collapsing or remaining standing.
It was only natural they became deadly serious, their eyes bloodshot.

“Well then, why don’t all of us go have a sit-down confrontation with the other executives?”
“If Isaburō’s gonna pull a stunt like that, we can’t just sit back and take it lying down.”

“Yeah, right, right.”
“We can’t just swallow our tears in silence!”

The group that had gone to K City made no headway.

“As expected, it’s the cunning humans—the ones with money to throw around—who pull off these clever schemes.”
As I watched this, that feeling within me deepened.
It’s those who work in the shadows who always manage to pull off every clever scheme.
The overly honest ones always end up the biggest fools in the end.

One night, Hisakue’s wife, who was raising a ruckus, set fire to Isaburō’s house.
However, it was suppressed before becoming a full-blown fire.
The tenant farmers also joined the side of those who had been excluded.
Isaburō’s rice fields, from June planting onward, had two-thirds of them left untilled and began to be left to ruin, overrun with weeds.

But it was not long after that.

“Oh no, this is terrible!”
“Everything’s ruined!”

Father was so startled that he collapsed in front of the chicken coop, which was covered in chicken droppings.

“What’s wrong?
“What’s wrong with you?”

“This’s a disaster!
“Everything’s gone to ruin! Get over here!
“What’ll we do?
“What’ll we do?”

Father’s hips gave out, and his legs wouldn’t hold him.
When he was about to feed the chickens, villagers came to tell him that an executive of KS Electric Railway had been indicted and detained on bribery charges, and that the train project had collapsed.
“What’s this? Losing your nerve over something like that?!”

As I watched Father, unable to stand, I felt an inexplicable sense of relief.

The village—those at the peak of joy, those seething with anger, those gnashing their teeth in frustration—all without exception had been cast down from a high cliff into the depths of a deep valley.
Rejoicing had been easy.
How excruciating it is to plummet from a great height into the depths of an abyss!

The ravaged land still saw weeds flourishing thickly; by autumn, the grasses withered, and there rotted into gray decay.

10

Eventually, Father died.

Father, born in the village during the Keiō era, ate barley rice his entire life; he cared nothing for malnutrition, premature aging, or senility—thinking only of acquiring land, building wealth, and passing it on to his children.

By his final years, Father had grown decrepit.
The body he'd ruthlessly overworked in fields during youth increasingly defied him.

He began handling manure buckets and oxen with labored lethargy.
Shouldering rice sacks became impossible.
Nights brought sleeplessness.
Limbs hung leaden while his lower back throbbed with sharp pain.
There was a time when his body moved so freely he scarcely noticed its existence.
Now every fiber felt mysteriously burdensome—even rising required cumbersome effort.

When dawn broke, he shouldered a hoe and went out to cultivate the desolate, ravaged land, reluctant to let it go to waste.
The work made little progress.

The land had now abandoned him.

Both rice fields and dry fields had all been mortgaged off.
And once the electric railway project was officially canceled, land prices plummeted.
Father must have felt it was already beyond his power to turn back the tide.
He still struggled to hold onto the land.
He took out more loans and paid the interest.
But Kuma-san—who had sold him the land years prior—now came rushing like an arrow to collect debts.
He brusquely insisted they liquidate the land to settle things.

Just as he had once taken pleasure in haggling down a bankrupt man's land price to nothing and buying it, this time another young man gleefully slashed the value of his land as if tormenting him through merciless bargaining.
It went for a pittance.

Father must have felt his entire life as a patriarch had been a failure—a meaningless chronicle of simple earnestness, sluggishness, and folly.
His life's final reckoning was done.
And what remained was zero.

He died.
The tree, having fulfilled its lifelong duty, gradually began to wither from some unseen cause, and died in such a way that no measure could revive what had already withered.
I was glad that both the land and the debts had vanished simultaneously.
I felt unburdened.

Kōkichi returned from K City.

Then Mother died.
Mother was worried that the police officer kept coming around under the guise of conducting a census check to ask about Kōkichi, who was in town.
The police officer grilled her relentlessly about nothing but Kōkichi.
Did he have a wife? What was she doing? And would she be returning soon?—Would she be returning soon? This last question—he never failed to ask it whenever he came.
Mother had even been made to fear that her son might be involved in something like theft.

We felt unburdened.
The rice fields, the dry fields, the money, the dependents—all were gone.
We could fly off to wherever we pleased.
We could do whatever we wanted.

The land owned by Toshie’s father Isaburō was overgrown with mugwort, fodder grass, and thatch grass, and no one gave it a second glance.

Kōkichi and I took Mother’s remains to where Father lay sleeping and buried them.

It was autumn.
The sun gleamed razor-sharp over the tomato fields.
Over the village assembly hall, and in S Town beyond—where the white pharmaceutical company and power plant stood sharply visible under the clear sky—there was a sense of something crumbling even as something else stirred into motion.
I knew what my brother was up to.

Kōkichi left the village in a flurry the day after we buried Mother.

(May 1930)