Pathway to Japanese Literature

I After that, Yozo ended up frequenting dance halls on a whim and attended several Christmas masquerade balls. At one dance party, an organizer forcibly made him wear a Santa Claus mask to his bewilderment. While attempting to smoke by slightly protruding his chin from the mask, he struck a match—only for the flame to catch on the beard’s cotton batting, causing it to burst into flames. Even then, he—compelled to secretly recall that overly earnest clownish figure from those days through the dust-coated sweet dreams and bitter dregs in the creases of his heart that he now prepared to excavate—could not help but offer a bitter smile at this adorned, distorted self. Or perhaps this was his true form; he felt embarrassed by an identity he could no longer distinguish from its own artifice. That he himself had actually plunged into and witnessed these events, and his desire to speak of them—since they would neither become pleasant memories nor seem relevant to his current circumstances—made it best to quietly tuck them away in some corner of his mind; yet truthfully, he felt reluctant to do so. Long ago at a dance hall when Yozo had met her by chance and tried dancing a trot just once, she had said, “Isn’t this lovely?” But Yozo, feeling nothing at all, found himself envying her as she urged him on with those words. He felt as if touching the scar of an old wound that had never fully healed—a sensation both painful and itching—and found it wearisome to drag along her body, now fully transformed into a woman of the streets and grown unpleasantly bloated.

Now, Yozo literally recalled a certain pulse-quickening night.

At that time, Yozo—intending to take his work to a cottage-like hotel in the suburbs where sea breezes swept through—invited her, Yoko Kozue, from the nearby inn where she had been staying. She had occasionally visited to enliven the gatherings of Yozo’s unfortunate children, who had recently lost their mother and were mired in loneliness.

From the moment Yozo first saw her as Matsukawa’s Madam, he dimly sensed something overwhelming in her ethereal figure—yet he had never dreamed she would approach him so closely. Matsukawa at that time wore full ceremonial attire of fine silk and possessed a countenance beautiful enough for classical paintings, while the girl he brought along stood adorned in pure white Western clothing like a fairy-tale princess, carrying herself with regal dignity. Their presence felt utterly incongruous in his cramped, gloomy six-tatami study. They had come from afar specifically to visit him, bearing the lengthy manuscript of a novel. It was around March during that balmy spring two years prior—Yozo’s garden brimmed with magnolia blossoms at their peak, and sunlight reflecting from clusters of fragrant white flowers lent springlike brightness to his study’s shadowed veranda.

Yozo sat at the corner of the black desk in the center of the room, briskly flipping through the manuscript pages. The manuscript was scrawled in careless handwriting, yet he felt some raw passion bursting forth between the lines. "That’s tremendous passion."

He muttered his raw impressions and promised to read it later. “Some bourgeois they are.” He was still alive at that time and spoke to his wife, who had a welcoming demeanor toward guests. He assumed the work was merely a bourgeois Madam’s diversion—a notion aided by his inherent indolence—and given the crude prose and haphazard characters that failed to meet any standard, he only skimmed sections here and there without reading it through. Yet he could clearly discern the rebellious sentiment toward domestic life. As in many other instances, he unhesitatingly dismissed the work for the sake of this seemingly happy young couple. The life of a couple blessed with material wealth and love was on the brink of bankruptcy at that time—something they could never have even dreamed of.

The next day when Matsukawa came to hear the response, he gave him a warning that his wife embarking on a literary path might end up destroying their family depending on circumstances; however at that time Matsukawa—who had approached his wife worrying about the manuscript’s fate by the university pond with their children—seemed to cautiously explain how things stood now out of fear of wounding her pride.

“Yoko, you must never be disappointed.” “It’s just that the manuscript is a bit too unrestrained.” “The writing also still needs more refining.” Yoko, of course, was not disappointed. And then, the following day, she appeared alone again at Yozo’s study.

“I wrote that in a hurry,” she said. “The handwriting was transcribed by two or three students working together. I do intend to rewrite it eventually—if this isn’t published, I’ll lose face with everyone back home. They’d already splashed such lavish articles about me in the newspapers before I even left.” Madam rested one hand on the tatami, her face slightly flushed. Yozo and his wife remained unaware that she was eight months pregnant at the time. She had been told to return once to Otaru City and start afresh after becoming unburdened, leaving Yozo no choice but to keep the manuscript until then.

The extent to which that manuscript had played a pivotal role in their fates gradually became clear through Yoko Kozue’s account—how that autumn, having come to Tokyo with her bankrupt husband and children to set up a household in Tabata—but after passing through various hands and undergoing some degree of revision, it would not be until much later that it was finally released into the world. At times she visited film studios with Yozo and Mr. C—a popular writer Yozo had introduced her to—while at other times, having been introduced to what was then the sole avant-garde café in post-earthquake Yamanote that had become akin to an artists’ club, she appeared nightly among the gathering writers and painters as a guest-status trainee hostess. Yet she had long been stripped bare, persisting in wearing nothing but her younger sister’s flamboyant silk kimono as her sole outfit. The sloppily draped gaudy silk kimono occasionally appeared in his study. The tale of her marital decline—her once-lavish wedding as the beloved daughter of her recently deceased father; the unexpectedly shabby state of Matsukawa’s household when first settled with her cousin the Diet member (who had mediated their former romance), her mother, and Matsukawa himself, where opening the wardrobe revealed light from the neighboring house spilling in; how the furnishings ordered from Tokyo department stores were carted off to pawnshops with Yoko’s reluctant consent almost immediately; how just as one debt seemed resolved another would emerge—the marriage that had stirred the town for two full days being ill-fated from the start—all these details spilled from her lips with each visit. Why did Yoko Kozue—with both beauty and wit—have to go all the way to a backwater like Otaru and settle into such a household? Of course she may have been fascinated by Matsukawa—the Imperial University graduate and academic prodigy well-regarded in her hometown—during his speech when visiting their town. Yet the reason her father’s desired match never materialized was likely due to her schoolgirl romances coming back to haunt her—a truth even the oblivious Yozo eventually came to acknowledge much later.

“The cousin who brought us there stayed in Otaru for a whole week,” she said. “He’d grown so reckless—calling geishas every day and drowning himself in alcohol.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “These days I can’t help thinking I might as well become a geisha myself.” Though Tokyo still staggered under earthquake damage as wartime prosperity’s tide began ebbing, that air of unease hadn’t yet seeped so deeply into daily life at the time.

Surrounded by many children and confined to a plain family life, Yozo knew there was nothing he could do within his own domain. Feeling awkward about these frequent visits from a gaudy young woman—unable to sustain private conversations with her and conscious of his wife Kayoko just beyond the sliding screen in the tearoom—he had occasionally suggested to Yoko that she might visit some financially well-connected literary stars instead. Yoko too had welcomed this idea. And though she gradually forged her connections, it wasn’t as if she was gliding through social circles without reservations.

“And… all the men I find suitable are already married.” Thus she came to envy the women of the pleasure quarters for their advantageous position in selecting men, but ever since she began appearing at the Yamanote café he had introduced her to, her spirits had somewhat brightened. The long-pending novel—after having its text revised by Matsukawa’s former classmate, a financial reporter from a major newspaper—was circulated to several publishers before finally being made into a book by Isshiki, a young playwright and publisher who frequented Yozo’s place, right around that time. One evening, Isshiki and Yoko Kozue happened to meet face-to-face for the first time in his study. Isshiki was the sort of man who would come to Yozo—suddenly bereaved of his wife and at a loss—with a thick wad of bills for funeral expenses tucked in his pocket, casually saying “Please make use of this” as he discreetly slipped it behind the sliding screen. Given that Yozo had just lost assets worth tens of thousands of yen in an instant, when he hesitantly raised the matter of Yoko’s manuscript despite Isshiki himself having expressed reservations earlier, Isshiki immediately agreed without hesitation.

“After reviewing it, I’ll see what can be done.” “Please send me the manuscript right away.”

It was just when Yozo and his wife were gathered around the table with Isshiki and Yoko Kozue that soon after, Isshiki and Yoko took their leave together. “I wonder what those two will turn into.” “That may be so.” Later, Yozo had felt that way and spoken with Kayoko, but by that time Yoko had already parted from her husband and children, vacated the Tabata house, and was set to rent a room on the second floor of a commoner’s home in Ushigome. Her younger sister, who had come to learn beauty techniques, was also living in that household where their brother had been cared for during his student days. Even when Isshiki did not come by, Yoko still frequented the café from there. However, as this displeased Isshiki, her younger sister would sometimes go to fetch her. Yet to Yoko’s restless heart, the atmosphere of the artist companions who always gathered there—lively and boisterous—was something she found hard to abandon.

Yozo had only heard about it and had never once visited that café while she was there. Moreover, the rumors about Yoko circulating among that crowd were not particularly savory.

Yoko Kozue, having received news of Kayoko’s death, emerged from the coastal house where she had secluded herself for over half a year and came to Tokyo—this occurred not long after Kayoko’s funeral had concluded.

Kayoko had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on the second of January, but in the autumn of the previous year, a once healthy and plump Yoko Kozue had suddenly reappeared after a long absence. While maintaining her romantic relationship with Isshiki, she broke away from him and fled to the painter Yamaji Kusaba—who had been the object of admiration for many young women. After visiting the beautiful seaside home in Yoko's hometown together, they immediately entered married life at Kusaba's new residence in Tokyo's suburbs. Whether met with favor or disfavor, this marriage must have been something that even those who had until then been captivated by her appearance could smile and nod at approvingly.

Yoko Kozue had also been fond of Isshiki, a man with an Edo native's brash charm, but being the literary-minded girl type who felt a particular allure toward art and fame, when she requested him to design the binding for her debut work—finally slated for publication—and received a letter from Yamaji resonating with her work, she found herself instantly drawn in. This was precisely the person she had long been searching for—she felt. And once that happened, like a restless girl who had discovered a doll she coveted, she wouldn't rest until she had it in her grasp. The illusion of her own beauty—the conviction that a woman like herself could surely delight him completely—constantly fanned the flames of her fickle heart.

One night found Yoko Kozue with Yamaji in a quiet second-floor room of a distinctive house along the Okawa riverside, listening to late-night sculling sounds while immersed in discussions of art and romance. Behind her childhood home too had flowed a river emptying into the sea, its waters evoking an inexplicable nostalgia. She would recount how as a girl she'd seen her grandmother's corpse anchored by rope to a riverside post in that clear current—tethered against being swept away. That grandmother who'd maintained her elegance even in age had spoken through Yoko's own mystical phrasing of life-weariness and death-longing. As Yozo's children had once described her, she resembled a solitary white lily from Mount Chokai's ravines—by some mishap caught among timber and borne to the city—appearing doubly ethereal in her native wildness against urban backdrops, yet all the more displaced from metropolitan existence.

While she and Yamaji were together like that, there suddenly came a deafening roar of a car from the front entrance. After a moment came the sense of someone storming up to the house—then her younger sister’s voice called out to her from the corridor. —Yoko Kozue quietly left the room. Her younger sister had turned deathly pale. Isshiki had arrived and was raging about her with furious intensity.

Yoko Kozue was perplexed.

“Oh.” “Then I’ll go settle things.” “I can’t just go carelessly.” “Sis might get killed.”

Even in such ruin, Yoko Kozue had no intention of cutting ties completely with Isshiki. Even if she were to enter Yamaji’s household, she could not afford to lose a patron-type lover such as Isshiki.

When Yoko Kozue returned to the inn with her younger sister, Isshiki suddenly leapt out at the room’s entrance. —For a while, the two did not part. Before long, they found themselves facing each other. Isshiki’s complexion changed. He condemned Yamaji’s past and present of shifting from woman to woman and, with tears streaming down, earnestly tried to stop her. Yoko Kozue did not remain silent either. While soothing and comforting him with gentle words, she also voiced her dissatisfaction with Isshiki, who had a wife. Once she started talking, her country-accented eloquence burst forth from her thin lips in a rapid-fire torrent, unstoppable as oiled paper catching flame. In the end, she pleaded.

“Look, you’ll understand, won’t you? I love you. I’m always yours. But country people’s gossip is such a bothersome thing, you know. Whether for good or bad, my affairs immediately become a problem, you know. For the sake of taking care of Mother and Brother too, I need to marry Mr. Yamaji and stay married, you know. If you really love me, then forgive me for that much.”

Isshiki was overwhelmed.

Around that time, she appeared in Yozo’s study after a long absence. She wore a neat meisen silk lined kimono, her hair casually swept back in a Western-style updo. “Professor, I’ve decided to marry Yamaji.” “Is that not permitted?” Yoko studied his expression with uncharacteristic intensity. “With Mr. Yamaji, then.”

Yozo showed a hint of disapproval. That this was a manifestation of emotion resembling faint jealousy could not be denied. “I’m not too impressed with your partner…”

“Is that so? But I’ve already gotten married, you know.” “Then that’s fine, isn’t it?” “Yamaji says he would like to meet you, Professor.” “Did you come together?” “He’s at Manto’s coffee shop. If you’d like, Professor, would you care to come have some tea?” Yozo slipped on his fair-weather geta and left through the gate, but in a gesture of congratulations, he guided the two to a poultry restaurant near the theater. Yet their marriage collapsed in less than three months.

Yozo encountered the two of them at Tsukiji Little Theatre that summer. Her face—with bangs hanging over her forehead—was haggard, and since she wore a casually draped yukata, he didn’t recognize her at first. Yet her face attempting to smile at him in the corridor carried a perilously muted coquetry that made her seem hauntingly familiar. Before long they found themselves drinking tea together—though it required little imagination to grasp how Yoko’s recent days had been ravaged by both survival and romance.

One day, when Yozo visited a friend in Kamakura, he learned that Yoko had come to his home during his absence—an unusual occurrence. “What was it? She seemed to be in quite a predicament.” “She spoke as if things weren’t going well with Mr. Yamaji.” “She said she absolutely wants to meet and talk with you…” “She said she’d come again later, so when she does, make sure to listen properly to her, you hear?” Kayoko had told him this, but that was the end of it. Yozo had received a few sentimental letters from her in the countryside afterward, but around the time he had unconsciously let them slip from memory, she suddenly showed up.

Yoko Kozue’s complexion turned slightly ruddy from the sea breeze, and she grew quite plump. She informed him that she recently received marriage proposals from two men and, after explaining in detail about their lives and characters, asked him to decide whether she should choose one of those suitors to settle down in the countryside or return to Tokyo to resume her creative life.

“You’re exactly the sort who ought to settle in the countryside.” “Even if you wander out here, nothing good will come of it anyway.” “Get married in the countryside.” Instantly, Yoko Kozue shrugged her shoulders and declared flatly: “No, I don’t intend to marry anyone.” “I have always wanted to be alone.” In those words of Yoko’s was contained a certain vigorous country-bred resolve and passion. And as they spoke, he felt he had discovered something new about her true self, yet he could not help but sense certain unspoken desires that he himself could not bring himself to voice.

He had promised to visit her lodging nearby later that evening and parted ways, but Yoko Kozue, who had prepared dinner and waited, disappointed by his failure to come, soon returned to the countryside.

It went without saying that letters continued to be exchanged between Isshiki and her thereafter, and it was not unthinkable that there had been monthly remittances of spending money from Isshiki.

Upon receiving news of Kayoko’s death, Yoko Kozue abruptly returned to Tokyo; after settling into her previous lodging, she summoned Isshiki by telephone. Then the two went together to visit Yozo’s house. From that time onward, her figure began appearing frequently in his desolate study—yet Yozo himself, accompanied by some young men he was close to, visited her room for the first time one evening on their way back from a walk. In that roughly ten-tatami room lingered an atmosphere of melancholy coquetry, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to his austere quarters.

II

Yoko Kozue would often visit Yozo in his lonely study on desolate nights alongside Isshiki—who typically wore Lloyd glasses with his slicked-back, dashing pompadour hairstyle and maintained an impeccably sharp appearance—clad in a striped-patterned chirimen silk haori of secondhand distinction and an everyday meisen kimono in dull blue-green and dark purple scale motifs. By that time, however, the memorial tablet of his deceased wife, which had long been displayed before the alcove, had been enshrined in the family altar, and his body—once weakened—had somewhat regained its strength.

With his wife’s sudden death, he felt as though the pillar he had been leaning against had suddenly collapsed.

Kayoko had been preoccupied with preparing for life after Yozo’s death, assuming she would be the one to survive, while Yozo himself, lacking confidence in his own health, had largely resigned himself to the same expectation. Yet this haphazardly begun domestic life remained perpetually unmoored, their anxious hearts merely huddling together to scrape through each day as it came. Recently, having gained a little financial leeway, his wife—finally buying a cello for their music-loving child who had been pestering her—was met with his disapproving expression. Having noticed on some occasion that love letters had been mailed, and at a time when he was already agonizing over how his child—who now seemed to be entering Ginza cafés in a suit—had gradually begun displaying rebellious attitudes toward him, he became obstinate. However, Kayoko, fearing to expose the children to Yozo’s irritability, had always restrained him. Now, the buffer zone between father and children had been abolished. Yozo, who had lived like someone in the shadows, found his field of vision suddenly opening up. When entering the bath or sitting down to dine, hearing no trace of his wife’s voice and seeing no sign of her figure anywhere, he would suddenly feel a loneliness akin to having one hand torn away—yet at the same time, he could also unexpectedly regain a sensation of youthful freedom. He had firmly denied remarrying, so he felt nothing toward the goodwill of those who were anxiously trying to look after him—yet he had secretly been scouting out unfamiliar women from society. The decorum and emotional distance he had never relaxed in front of women seemed on the verge of being naturally abolished.

Yoko Kozue appeared in Yozo’s study two or three times paired with Isshiki, who came to visit her at her lodging, but one evening she finally came alone and approached him as he sat at his desk.

“Professor, how would you feel about me coming to your place to help with the household chores?”

Yoko Kozue casually broached the topic. Yozo did not truly take in those words. “Can you manage a household?” “I simply adore home life, you know.” “You may be skilled at embroidery and knitting, but when it comes to my household…” “Oh, how can you say that! I can handle not just the kitchen but cooking as well, you know. I can even keep your children company.” “Is that so.”

Yoko Kozue leaned forward slightly. “Professor, I want to work my hardest for you and your children, keeping the structure of your household exactly as it has always been—without altering a single thing.” “So while you are alive, Professor, I will serve by your side, and when you pass away, I will withdraw cleanly so as not to burden your children.” “And what about you?” “Me?” “I have some property that I will receive from my mother.” “If I were to stay at your household, my mother would send me kimonos and such.” “When I came this time, I told my mother about that plan.” “Of course my mother agrees as well.”

“Well.” “After all, my wife has only just passed away. I’d like to take some time to think it over.” “It’s not something that should be decided so rashly, after all.” At the point where both Yozo and she had stiffened, to keep Yoko from feeling embarrassed, he guided her to the children’s house in the back to listen to the phonograph. The old house, connected directly to the land, was divided into two sections: one where the family of Lawyer T—who had evacuated there during the earthquake and remained ever since—resided, and another with roughly three rooms where Yozo’s older children slept and lived. As the two of them crossed the garden and went up, amidst the haphazard piles of bookshelves, chairs, frames, and miscellaneous books and magazines, Yozo’s child Yotaro put on Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile from among the records stacked above and below the coffee table—a piece that seemed suited to her. Even his father, who did not understand music, could recognize that it was Elman’s strings—this much Yotaro had known. Yoko had uncrossed her legs and was leaning her slender hand on the tatami as she listened to the serene melody, but Yozo had a habit of always drawing Yotaro into such situations. Next came Farrar’s Jewel Song—then Schumann-Heink’s Wälküre—selected in this manner, but Yozo felt something akin to shame toward Yotaro; Yotaro, for his part, could not grasp the meaning behind his father arriving late at night with just Yoko; and Yoko herself, though wishing to speak familiarly as one young person to another, grew self-conscious under Yozo’s oddly rigid demeanor and deliberately restrained herself—leaving all three caught in a three-way standoff of mutual awkwardness. Before long, he withdrew to his study. Yozo was closing the one panel of the rain shutter he had left open while peering at the dark sky, but—

“It’s a quiet evening. You should go home and go to bed now.” “I’m sorry for intruding so late. Then you should go to bed too, Professor.”

Yoko left after saying that, but Yozo found himself feeling strangely unsettled afterward. Whether due to his own ugliness or simply his tendency to yearn for beauty regardless of gender, the figure of Yoko—first as the bourgeois lady who had arrived paired with Matsukawa, then as the haggard woman in a summer kimono he had seen at the small theater, particularly the seductive swirls of flesh around her cheeks—had left deep impressions on him. Yet when he considered her past and present, along with the gap in their ages, he could not bring himself to accept her that night.

Probably on his way back from meeting Yoko Kozue, Isshiki stopped by casually the next day. Yozo criticized last night’s Yoko with suppressed irritation. “She’s the sort of woman who tries to make the rounds from Yamaji Kusaba all the way to my place.” “If that doesn’t stop, then dabbling in literature or whatever will amount to nothing in the end.” “Now that’s a problem.” “Actually, that’s a bad habit of hers.” “No, I’ll make sure to tell her properly.” Isshiki hurriedly left, as though he himself had been scolded.

Rather than that，Yozo found himself wanting to draw closer to Fujiko Misu with her lonely beauty. After losing her husband—a young literary scholar who had frequented Yozo’s residence—Misu had long been having Yozo review her works in her desire to carry on the unrealized aspirations of her late lover. Whether the visitors were men or women，it was his wife Kayoko who somehow managed to bridge the gap between them and Yozo. At times，she had even been an eyesore，but had Kayoko not been there，Yozo—prone as he was to nervous exhaustion—might well have made his guests unbearably uncomfortable with his awkward demeanor. In Misu’s case as well，it was Kayoko who acted as a mediator. Fujiko always sat as though drawn to the entrance’s sliding door. Lately，Yozo had begun to show a bit more ease around her，but the phantom of her husband who had died young，Shunyo Misu，always flickered before his eyes. Moreover，since she had married a fellow tuberculosis sufferer，phlegm rattled in her chest. The child from her previous marriage had already grown up. She had maintained the same distance from Yozo both when Kayoko was alive and now.

Then there was another woman, Sayoko Sayama, who had been entirely unknown to him until then. Due to her numerous romantic entanglements and ever-changing lifestyle as a model, she had been introduced by a lawyer from the back and, after coming to offer incense at Kayoko’s altar—still placed before the bed at that time—and driving with the three of them to her Shiba residence where they were treated to dinner, Yozo had developed a lingering connection with her somewhere in his heart. He did not want to lose sight of her as she was. She had left the mansion of a certain German noble where she had cohabited for seven years and, having recently established a household in Shiba, was deliberating what to begin.

Yozo noticed her wiry arms covered in unruly hair; the magnificent diamond glittering on her finger; the gaudy rings crammed with large coral and pearls; the two long vault keys resembling fire tongs peeking from her sloppily tied flashy obi sash; the oversized masculine frog-mouth purse—yet as they dined and conversed, glimpses of a once-refined bearing gradually surfaced from her past, making him realize she was an utterly mysterious being. She inquired about Yozo’s age and family circumstances but divulged nothing of herself beyond casting her eyes ceilingward and murmuring, “Well…I’ve had my share of experiences, but it all began when Lion first opened and I became a waitress through their recruitment.”

Yozo, ever the country bumpkin, recalled the early days of Lion—that time when, on his way back from seeing someone off at Shinbashi Station, he had eaten white and pink sorbet there with his wife, children, relatives, and a teacher from Gyosei, only to be shocked at being charged several yen. “That one’s about thirty-five, right? I hear a 500-yen Petron deal is coming up now, but it’ll probably be rejected.”

On the way back, the lawyer was talking. Yozo was startled by this revelation but—given both his shortage of writing materials and his health having somewhat recovered—tried approaching the lawyer about accompanying him once more. However, there seemed to be some financial complication involved. “You’d do better going alone, Professor,” he declined—and that was that. A day later, Yoko appeared in the study. She held on her lap Sakiko—Yozo’s youngest daughter who had just turned nine and would cling to anyone offering a hand—the girl having been suddenly bereft of her mother. Sakiko had grown naturally attached to Yoko’s soothing touch. Tears pattered down as Yoko insisted she’d acted in good faith while airing grievances over Isshiki’s report of Yozo’s criticisms. He knew full well such tearful appeals were calculated ploys yet found it distasteful to view this barely-twenty-six-year-old woman—raised a proper lady—through that lens. Rather than avert his cold gaze from her tear-blotched face, he found himself reappraising her in that moment. Though she seemed to have returned after Isshiki’s harsh rebuffing, even those faintly provocative words barely registered with him.

“It’s sufficient if you occasionally come to look after the house. We’ll consider other matters gradually in time.” After playing with the children in the tearoom for a while, Yoko left.

Three

Before recalling that feverish night at the suburban hotel—Yozo had once been invited by her, a film enthusiast, on a day after the rain had cleared. As they set out for Asakusa wearing tall wooden clogs, he felt self-conscious walking beside her tall figure along the tram-lined road and refused, saying, “I won’t take a car,” yet even after boarding the tram, he grew exasperated by how Yoko clung to the hanging strap while habitually addressing him as “Professor, Professor” and chattering incessantly. There was also that time during a movie when he flustered at her hand brushing against his beneath his coat sleeve. Another day, visiting her room on impulse, he found her lying feverish in a futon spread across the center. Sitting at a distance, he waited for her to rise until realizing she couldn’t even get up—embarrassed and clad only in red undergarments—as she brought her face to his hand resting on the tatami and whispered near his ear, “All the way…” or something of that sort. But he had no desire to touch her half in jest that way. Then came the night she tearfully entreated him to judge whether she truly was society’s so-called “wicked woman”—recounting her marriage’s ruin from its wretched start, her abandonment even by family, and her recent failed union with Kusaba—before breaking into endless sobs. Afterward, with her signature rose-tinted sentimentality and fervor, she expounded at length about some British elder statesman’s romance with a young girl, as though guiding a provincial old man through a revue show. Yet one afternoon, packing manuscript paper, pens, and ink into his briefcase to finish pressing work at that suburban hotel, he ended up inviting Yoko—who had come visiting—to accompany him.

“Really?” “Is it really all right?”

Yoko Kozue pressed for confirmation.

And once that happened，he could no longer turn back. At the agreed-upon time with Yoko Kozue，who had returned to her lodgings to prepare，he went to the designated platform．But finding no sign of her，he waited for a while with a faint sense of disappointment． About ten minutes passed． He went outside and tried using a public telephone． The maid came out，but when he asked to have her come out，after three or four minutes had passed，she finally appeared． Considering what she had meant when she kept insisting she’d come whenever he was needed，he now wondered whether Isshiki had perhaps shown up or if she was flustered，fearing the medicine had taken too strong an effect．Yet even though Yozo had ample room for deliberation on that front，the costumed character could no longer retreat． Before long，Yoko Kozue came hurrying down to the platform in her newly tailored coat．

“I’m sorry. You must have waited quite a while.” She had excused herself by saying she had unfortunately been in the restroom when the call came, but just then an empty train pulled in, so she hurriedly jumped aboard. When they alighted from the train and arrived by car from the station at a cottage-style hotel on a hill in town, there was slight unease that Yozo—who was inquiring about room availability—did not emerge until giving a signal. But turning right down the Western building’s long corridor, proceeding a short way before descending stone steps, following the bellboy’s guidance across stepping stones in the dim garden to enter a Japanese-style room from the veranda, they finally settled into an eight-tatami room on the second floor. To him, who feared the cold, the bellboy turned the switch of the electric heater. After warming themselves in the bath and settling at the large rosewood table, by the time their lips touched glasses of wine poured just once, Yoko’s face had gradually begun to glow with what seemed like happiness. She spoke of her hometown’s mansion—its roof design reminiscent of when shipping agents thrived there before railways were laid—and of winters in Yozo’s homeland, where silent waves echoed late into snow-muffled nights. She described phantom-like gray seagulls soaring over northern seas that felt like the world’s end, and joyful kotatsu gatherings during long sunless winters beneath brooding skies. Even the room’s modest decor and garden’s arrangement took on a mysteriously shaded quality as she wove these tales.

The night deepened. By the time the shoji doors had whitened with the faint light of dawn, the two had fallen into a deep, deathlike slumber.

In a dimness reminiscent of a passing shower, Yozo sat before the desk in a daze, clutching the brazier as though his soul had been torn away. A little past noon, Yoko Kozue left her bed and took a bath. Then, sitting at the dressing table in the next room, she fixed her hair and makeup before announcing she would go check on Yozo’s children for a bit. Not forgetting a kiss, she departed through the back gate in a covered rickshaw. Yozo now felt for the first time a youth that his parched heart and withered body could scarcely contain. As he dazedly pondered the events of the previous night—like one who had lost consciousness—he sensed passions that had lain dormant within him being abruptly awakened. An unbearable loneliness now drove him into anguished torment. ——Her translucent-skinned supple hands; thin, upturned lips resembling red petals; beautiful eyes like black diamonds with long lashes; and the tormenting allure of the curve from her cheeks to her mouth—all these festered into his desiccated blood vessels even as her young soul sank entirely into his heart. Yozo even cursed his own long, unfortunate life.

As time passed, the room grew dim. When he thought to twist on the light switch, he suddenly looked up and found the bulb wrapped in a red handkerchief. In an instant, Yozo's heart jolted. Before long, he stood on the desk and removed it. He had no idea when she'd done such a thing. Yozo stepped down from the desk and sniffed the handkerchief furtively.

Last night Yoko had described this affair as his great leap into some impassioned romance—and having it framed that way left him no recourse. Yozo found himself increasingly restless for her return. Whether she would come back remained uncertain. He prayed she wouldn’t return, yet still he ached.

Then, at that moment, the Bellboy appeared at the entrance to the next room and— “There’s a call from Ms. Kozue.” “I see.”

Yozo nodded and stood up. “Professor?” “What are you doing?” “You?”

“After that, I went to your house and kept your children company by singing nursery rhymes with them.” “Everyone’s doing well.” “I was thinking of having dinner now. Won’t you come?” “If I won’t be disturbing your work, Professor, I’ll come right away.” Within thirty minutes or less, Yoko Kozue—wearing a haori patterned with sea pine motifs—passed through the garden directly beneath him where he sat smoking on the veranda’s rattan chair, then came upstairs. She appeared to have visited her regular beauty salon for full makeup—the pallor of her face glimmered alluringly in the twilight.

One day, Yozo was again in Yoko’s room. It was a room in a secluded spot, detached from the other rooms, where no clattering of slippers could be heard in the hallway and lodgers could avoid being seen by one another. The window, shaded by standing trees in the temple grounds, had a tastefully arranged curtain she had devised, and there she placed a desk and bookshelf. In that room, when listening to her various reminiscences and discussing literature, around five o’clock the temple drum would begin to sound, and the night would break into the pale light of dawn, startling them into retreating to bed. There was a person she was supposed to marry in two or three years, she had said on some occasion, adding that there was no need to think about it now—but Yozo had no way of knowing who that might be. When he asked if it was Isshiki, she replied that besides his wife, he also had some long-standing mistress from way back.

“Professor, you needn’t worry about such things. If you feel uncomfortable about it, we can settle matters anytime, you know.” “If perhaps he were to come here...” “He would never do such a thing.” Yoko Kozue sat before her desk wearing a black satin-collared tanzen robe of yuzen-printed merino with plush cotton padding, while in the single-flower vase she’d bought at the stationery store, early blossoms already stood arranged, and the clatter of trams and footsteps from the street carried an air of buoyancy. She would often enter the sunlit four-and-a-half-mat room at the end of Yozo’s house to play with his youngest daughter, who had grown completely attached to her, and would even bathe together with her, shaving her neck and trimming her nails. She would also apply cream and white powder for her. Sakiko, who had just turned nine, crawled under the long coffin where her mother lay and peered curiously at its bottom as if searching for her. However, since she could no longer meet her mother—and since there were many such children in the world—he told her she mustn’t speak of Mother anymore. Instead, after Yozo explained once that she had many brothers and sisters, she stopped mentioning her mother altogether. However, she would sometimes seem to act up and throw scissors, so Yoko would say with a laugh to Yozo that they must fix that behavior.

“Auntie’s feet are pretty.” In the bath, she would say while touching Yoko’s feet, and at night, when Yoko put her to bed, she would often finally fall asleep. She must have often secretly searched for her mother in the tearoom and storage room. However, whenever Yozo recalled his eldest daughter—who had died overnight due to his own carelessness—he had to endure. He, frozen with cowardice—unable to become romantic or carefree in love or work—could neither push his children away nor love them with his whole being. Yet setting aside lifelong matters like education that demanded consistent sincerity and deliberation, the hollow now formed in their daily household should have been considerably alleviated simply by the addition of Yoko, who bore not a trace of warpedness. He understood the vexation of unnaturally extending his twenty-five-year-long marriage—a union that had run along the same track—by grafting another woman onto it. Yet shortly after putting away Kayoko’s memorial tablet, he also felt as though he had opened a cage door.

“You’ll be in trouble right away, won’t you? “You’ve got a whole brood of children to look after and work to do—wait a moment now, it’s not like I don’t have some ideas myself.”

Washio, his contemporary who had been the funeral committee chairman, said. Yozo had envisioned—if only faintly—somewhat more colorful fantasies than what he seemed to be aiming for, but it was nothing more than that: mere envisioning. He was resolutely denying marriage. Marriage starting now was of course a heavy burden both economically and mentally. The children alone were enough.

By the glass window with its curtain drawn, as they warmed themselves at the Seto brazier and discussed the novel, the telephone rang, and Yoko went downstairs. “Isshiki?” From the look on Yoko’s face as she entered the room, Yozo realized. “He says he’ll send a car to pick me up and wants me to accompany him for a bit.” “If you don’t mind, Professor, I think I’ll go settle things though…”

“Well, I don’t mind though…” “Am I a bad woman?” Yozo was laughing. “Is it all right if I go? Should I refuse?” “Anyway, you must make yourself presentable.”

“I’ll definitely do that. Then please wait here for me, okay? I’ll definitely return by nine, so please go ahead and sleep, okay? I definitely will. I’ll get you!”

Yoko said that and, making a pinky swear, went out. Yozo slipped into the bed laid out by the maid along the wall, but soon a girl from Akita who attended to Yoko—sliding open the fusuma door with a “Pardon me”—interrupted him. He had just begun dozing off when, raising his eyes, he saw her bringing a box wrapped in blue paper and tied with string to his bedside, “Ms.Kozue said I should give this to you now, Professor.”

When Yozo peeked through a gap in the wrapping, he saw withered rape blossom tips poking out and realized they were early strawberries.—Leaving them by his bedside, he dozed off again. Once before, just prior to returning to her hometown, she had arrived by car and brought in a splendid Western-style flower arrangement; around the time it gradually withered away, he wrote her a letter—a rare occurrence.

“But Professor, that was unmistakably your love letter.” Yoko had later told him—though such a thing had indeed occurred.

The place where Yoko met Isshiki was nearly discernible from her manner when departing, but whether she would return tonight remained unclear. Yozo, soothed by the strawberries, lay quietly asleep like a child awaiting its mother, yet having once stumbled upon Isshiki’s letter amidst the careless clutter of Yoko’s magazines, books, and manuscripts—and knowing how incessantly she summoned him at all hours—he could readily imagine the marital pretense between those two.

However, Yoko returned exactly at the promised time.

“I’m sorry. You’ve been sleeping all this time since then.” “I must have dozed off a bit… You managed to come back after all.” Yozo looked at her face where the white powder was peeling off while asking, “So what happened?” “I brought up that matter,” she said. “Then Mr.Isshiki grew so agitated about this and that, I decided to cut it short and ended up…” “If there’s a bath, would you take one?” “Yes, I’ll come in.”

Yoko hurried downstairs as if being driven.

IV

One time, when Yozo went down to the garden and, shovel in hand, was planting into soil mixed with sand the Eizan moss that had begun taking on a bluish tint to propagate it, Yoko—wearing her usual striped haori over a dusky blue and purple scale-patterned meisen everyday kimono—stood on the veranda beneath the shadow of a large tree laden with white magnolia blossoms, which had suddenly brightened over the past two or three days. When Yoko had come with Matsukawa, bringing the children and a bulky manuscript, it had been during this very magnolia bloom; thus, whenever the season arrived, she seemed to recall it fondly—but just then, a visitor arrived for Yoko—said to be Akimoto, the Diet member from her hometown—so Yozo abandoned his shovel and came up to the veranda. Akimoto, a wealthy man from her hometown, was an admirer of Tolstoy and Gandhi who had some literary writings to his name, but was originally a poet—and it was he who had organized Yoko’s numerous poems for publication at any time. Yoko wore a slightly uneasy expression and said, “Could you meet with him for a moment?” So as he washed his hands and was about to come up, Akimoto had already entered the room. Akimoto possessed noble and imposing features, and as was typical of people from Yoko’s hometown, his frame was well-proportioned, his limbs as slender and straight as young cedars. The two sat facing each other around the rosewood table, but with eyes that seemed to probe one another, they exchanged only simple words. Yozo had been shown drafts of that poetry collection marked with circles and dots at Yoko’s inn and had read his writings praising soil, yet he confronted this man—Akimoto—with something akin to a sense of superiority, caught between feeling that Yoko’s marriage promise might or might not have been with him; before long, Akimoto was seen off by Yoko and departed. Much later, Akimoto proposed that after liquidating his provincial assets—leaving only a modest portion for his children—he would bring the entirety to Tokyo, purchase suburban land to manage as a farm while building a joyful love nest there with Yoko. This plan required her to completely sever ties with literary circles, a demand he had apparently made beforehand. Yet while Yoko needed such patrons precisely as means to break into those same literary circles, whether she could follow through to that extent remained unclear even to herself.

Before long, Yoko returned.

“He’s quite a handsome man, isn’t he?”

“Do you think so?”

Yoko smiled.

At that time she had not yet completely vacated the inn, so whether this was her first meeting with Akimoto remained unclear; he had known they had conversed at the entranceway, but seeing Yoko return to his side with a cheerful face—though tinged with some shadow—it appeared nothing more than a relationship where she received guidance on poetry.

At that time, Yozo’s surroundings were slightly unsettled. Rumors about the two had even appeared in the newspapers, and from time to time anonymous postcards would arrive or signed protests come in. Each time this happened, Yozo would grow despondent or become agitated, but Yoko Kozue would always soothe him repeatedly as if shielding him from the criticisms that were beginning to reach his ears and eyes. When the atmosphere at home grew tense, she would sometimes retreat dejectedly to the inn; other times, she herself would turn hostile and suddenly storm out. Yozo would sometimes feel a nervous flutter in his chest, but afterward, Yoko Kozue would have a girl deliver letters to summon him to the inn or walk endlessly through the late-night town with children who followed her out of curiosity.

One day, she seemed to have come into money from somewhere—she claimed it was her mother’s monthly allowance—and after making some extravagant purchases, she brought back a splendid pot of gladiolus from a florist on the street, which caused Yozo to grimace in displeasure. For the seasonal festival, she bought several dolls from the department store to adorn the children’s tiered display stand, and at times even dragged out all four children to see a movie, stopping to eat on the way home. Because of this, Yozo one day visited her room intending to give her pocket money.

“Professor, your money—I couldn’t possibly accept an artist’s money, you know.” “I didn’t come to visit you with that sort of intention.” “Please don’t worry about such things.” She kept pushing it back, but upon realizing Yozo’s persistence wouldn’t waver, “In that case, I’ll accept it.” “—Since this is unexpected money, I’d like to use it to redeem the items I have in pawn.”

“Of course.” “You know about that sort of thing too?” “Absolutely I do. Back when Matsukawa and I kept a household in Tabata—it was such a desperate struggle. He’d go out every day searching for work, while I couldn’t make my manuscripts amount to anything. I even thought of becoming a movie actress—went so far as to settle on the idea—but after hearing all sorts of stories about it, I grew disheartened… And above all, Matsukawa hated the thought…”

Yoko went out but soon returned—apparently having taken a taxi—and, breathing heavily, carried in a bundle of clothing together with a young girl. Gaudy formal kimonos, obi sashes, and under-kimonos were spread out there.

“I know this is terribly rude of me, but if you wouldn’t mind… I’d like your daughter to wear this one kimono.” “Well. She’s a student and doesn’t have anything yet, so I suppose it’s fine.”

The two soon left the inn, and Yoko herself returned to Yozo’s house carrying a single Kobama-patterned kosode wrapped in a furoshiki cloth. She had wanted to stay as far away from money matters as possible. She had wanted to avoid involving her relationship with Yozo in financial matters—knowing it would constrain her freedom in various ways and draw his feelings deeper—but his emotions came to loom over Yoko exactly as she had described.

V

At that time, Yoko would take Yozo’s daughters to a reputable yarn shop three blocks away, buy her preferred wool, and begin knitting a sweater for Sakiko. During such moments, she was truly a good friend to the children. But when she came to Yozo’s side or went out with him, the children grew lonely. Around that time, after Kayoko’s death, Yozo’s sister—who had stayed behind alone to manage the household—had already returned to the countryside, and Kayoko’s younger brother’s wife, who had helped around the funeral, had also come to drift away. Kayoko had as many as two brothers with yakuza connections. Apart from the youngest brother—who, despite his youth, had received a higher education and was settled at a prestigious large temple—the rest were the sort who relied on their sister for everything. Moreover, since it was Kayoko’s good-natured mother who was looking after the children, Yozo sometimes felt as if he himself had been brought in as an adopted child. Severing those entrenched bonds proved exceedingly difficult. As the number of children increased, she too gradually began to think ahead, having relied on the youngest brother, but once Yoko entered the household, all those people vanished at once. Yozo had unloaded long-held baggage and felt some relief from that alone, but what perplexed him was the confrontation between his sister—who had been striving for the children’s sake—and Yoko. Of course, it wasn’t certain that a person who had come after the family’s housewife passed away and settled into the tea room was doing so out of mere goodwill. If one were to lapse into a daze, it was all too easy to be enveloped by such thoughts.

“If you claim you can be a good housewife, you might as well try cooking properly.” Yoko Kozue—raised in Akita and quite interested in culinary matters—had gone to prepare sanpeijiru that day, a Hokkaido fisherman’s stew of salted salmon and root vegetables. When Yozo came to check on her progress, she flushed crimson. “No! Don’t come peeking!”

The sister, who had some knowledge of her hometown’s kaiseki cuisine, glared sharply with her naturally piercing eyes at the large pot of sanpeijiru Yoko had prepared. But it wasn’t only in such moments—even when sitting at the table with the children under the sister’s watchful gaze as she persisted by the long brazier, Yoko found it unbearable. The impact that the mood of three daily meals had on human life was something often experienced among mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, stepmothers and stepchildren in ordinary society. Even if Yoko hadn’t been there, Yozo would certainly have later regretted entrusting the household to his sister. At that moment, when he saw that a rather large piece of luggage had been prepared without his notice in the back house, his displeasure deepened further.

Yet Yoko’s daily routine consisted of entertaining the children by singing nursery rhymes, applying makeup on Sakiko, skillfully using knitting needles, occasionally making simple Western dishes when the mood struck, or immersing herself in romance novels while discussing new literature and musical films with the eldest son. The kitchen was handled by Osu alone—a maid whose compact build belied her age. Later, though more maids were added, Osu—who had been there since Kayoko’s time—understood the household customs in her own way and knew exactly where everything was stored. However, even Kayoko had noticed the inherent pilfering habits—which had grown increasingly brazen over time—and those too were eventually done away with.

One drizzly day, Yoko put on makeup, dressed in a black figured kinsha crested kimono, and unusually went out alone. “May I go take photographs?”

She came to Yozo’s desk and said. “Of course. Where….” “It’s called Sone in Ginza—a wonderful, artistic place for taking photos. I’ll be right back. You have to stay put at your house! You must. Well then, I’ll get you!”

In such cases, it was her considerate hand that would leave a kiss and a pinky promise as collateral. Yozo recalled how during his boarding house days, when visiting a woman who left her striped omeshi haori jacket behind upon moving to another room, it had brought him some semblance of reassurance. Yet even then—while harboring faint anxiety that this woman of dubious character might slip away—he had obediently waited as instructed. Looking back later, seeing that an affected pose photograph arrived soon after—even if not entirely false—it wasn’t truth. She had likely visited Isshiki or, assuming Akimoto remained in Tokyo then, stopped by his inn. As Yozo pictured her walking Ginza’s asphalt streets in light lacquered geta through intensifying rain, the taxi she’d hired might have been skidding along some unknown route. He had no way of knowing waiting for a woman brought greater happiness than meeting her. Yozo chased her phantom through Ginza—strolling spring rain beneath navy umbrella, hair styled ambiguously between Japanese and Western fashions. But doing so brought tightening chest pressure. Yozo didn’t agonize long. Soon returned Yoko came clinging sweetly to his lap.

“Don’t abandon me.” On a blustery April day, someone came to the entrance. Yoko, who had gone out to see them, soon returned holding a small tied letter. Upon reading it, her face immediately showed a look of surprise. “What could this mean? That man has come.” That man was Matsukawa, who had gone bankrupt in Hokkaido. “He’s at an inn in Yushima.” “He says since he’s leaving soon, could I please meet him just briefly…” “I won’t go.”

Yozo’s head grew heavy. After he, having become unable to manage and come to Tabata to hide away, returned to Hokkaido with his three children, nearly two years had already passed.

During that time, various changes had occurred in Yoko’s life. It was at the moment the New Year’s Eve bells began to ring that year that Yoko settled her marital life—which had reached a complete impasse at the Tabata house—and parted from her children. After bathing the children, she had them prepare for the journey. Yoko would often talk about that unforgettable night and weep. “But they’re children who’ve grown distant from me now. They’ll manage on their own somehow—there’s no point dwelling on what can’t be changed.”

In the local area, there seemed to be much sympathy for the man whose fate had been so thoroughly upended, but according to Yoko, there had also been flaws in his character. Precisely because this beautiful couple had been the envy of local society, he—being as ostentatious as he was—had found himself compelled to resort to dangerous ventures to satisfy a wife like Yoko; even when life’s collapse loomed before them, he could not bring himself to unsettle her dreams. He was a man whose tolerance and affection never fell short of soothing his wife with gentle words when she inexplicably grew furious at the cultural-style residence’s Japanese room—built half-whimsically by a young engineer—complaining how strange it was that the alcove pillar stood only on one side. Yet when the Tabata era came, their love met its true collapse. This occurred precisely when Yoko was attempting to gain permission to enter the studio.

“With your looks, you could no doubt become a star overnight—but you’d have to stake your chastity for it, wouldn’t you?” Instead of denying this, Yoko smirked slyly. Now, seeing the letter from Matsukawa—who had unexpectedly come to Tokyo—Yoko felt her heart surge with turmoil at once. Even if there was some fear, she never once doubted his love. “This feels ominous—I’ll try calling.”

Yoko said that and went to the boarding house behind where they usually borrowed the telephone.

When the other party came on, she casually addressed them. “Hello? It’s me, you know?” “Yeah, it’s me. On my way to a somewhat distant place due to circumstances, I stopped by because I wanted to meet you in absolute secrecy—it’s been a while, and there are various things to discuss. I’ve also been worried about you. So there’s something I really need to meet and give you in person—that’s why I want you to come here for a bit.” “Okay, then I’ll go right away.”

Yoko returned to Yozo’s side and told him exactly that.

“It might take a little longer than expected.” “But please trust me.” When Yoko saw Matsukawa, who was staying at an inn in Yushima, she offered her lips to him as he suddenly lunged toward her. Matsukawa had not taken off his suit, but compared to when they had parted in Tabata, he had kept himself neat. He had now embezzled thirty thousand yen from the company where he served as legal advisor, using it to provide for his absent family and henchmen while settling unavoidable debts, and was about to flee to Shanghai to make his fortune. He would lie low for the time being, and once he had established a foothold, he was to summon his second wife and children. Yoko Kozue teared up.

“This must stay absolutely secret.” “Since you’re likely struggling, I thought I’d give this to you... With just this much, you should manage your studies for some time.”

Matsukawa said that and, from the bundle of bills in his pocket, counted out only ten large ones and handed them over. Because the attendant he had sent was away from his seat, the two conversed like lovers accustomed to clandestine meetings. “That Professor probably likes you too.” “Is he always by your side?” “Well... Besides, the Professor is getting on in years.”

As evening approached, Yoko came back after parting ways, but even after stepping outside, her tears showed no sign of drying.

Yozo listened to the clamorous wind as he anxiously awaited Yoko’s return. The depths of his melancholic brain felt gritty, and his mouth was parched. He was physically worn out as well. Yoko’s eyes were moist when she returned. “You can forgive something like that.”

Yozo had no choice but to resign himself to such feelings, but Yoko denied it. “He’s already using such formal, distant language with me—he gave me a thousand yen. “I received it.” “Keep it a secret, okay?” “Deposit it in the bank.”

“I will do that.”

Whether she had done so or not, Yozo made no attempt to broach the matter of money. Yet when he later remembered to ask about it after some time had passed, not a single sen remained. Of course, she had done some shopping the very next day after receiving it, so he had already known that some of it had been spent. It was the next morning that Matsukawa was seen off at Tokyo Station, but when Yoko asked Yozo if he wouldn’t mind accompanying them to bid farewell, he went along—though feeling somewhat awkward—and Yoko, her mood having changed slightly, went up to the platform alone.

“I said, ‘Couldn’t you at least give me one child?’” “But it seems it’s no good.” “He’s taking them to Shanghai after all.” “If that’s their fate, then there’s nothing to be done.”

While eating strawberry cream at Senbikiya in the Marunouchi Building, Yoko was on the verge of tears. However, after a day or two passed, such sentiment eventually vanished, and Yoko urged Yozo to go buy at least a chest of drawers with that money.

“Hey Professor, don’t you think it’s unbearable how I have nothing and am so inconvenienced? Even if I stay at your house, I hate that people might think I’m just there to get handouts like some charity case. I want to buy just a chest of drawers and a mirror with Mr. Matsukawa’s money, so couldn’t you come along and take a look?”

The two of them descended from the street they had often walked together lately toward the cutting. And on Nakadori, she tried inviting him to the store where his wealthy friend regularly purchased goods. Hand warmers, tables, tea shelves—elaborate furnishings crafted from mulberry and paulownia stood densely packed there. Yoko selected a rather fine mulberry dressing table from among two or three options of mulberry and lacquerware items, then through a referral from that shop bought one chest of drawers at a store along the main thoroughfare. Over two hundred yen had been spent—even now it felt somewhat extravagant for Yoko. Bathing in April sunlight still holding pale shadows here and there, they circled the pond before ascending Toshogu Shrine’s stone steps. Yoko chattered ceaselessly until reaching a less frequented spot where talk somehow turned to Kayoko’s reputation; jostling about like children playing push-and-shove, she teased Yozo relentlessly—yet within her words glimmered a youthful sensibility that resonated with him who had until now been buried in domesticity.

“I’m sorry for criticizing your wife and all that.” “But your wife is well-regarded in the neighborhood.” “The Madam at the beauty salon was praising her.” Yozo felt as though he were under some bewitchment, but around that same time, abnormalities began appearing in his eyes—the road seemed to undulate unevenly, and hazy ripples floated within the light. He had felt a grievous terror toward this romance marked by such disparity in age and physique from the very beginning, but now the diabetes he’d long neglected suddenly began weighing on his mind.

"My eyes feel strange."

He had suddenly felt it yesterday when going to Tokyo Station.

“You need to get examined right away. Let’s head back now.”

However, as he grew accustomed to it, it wasn’t so inconvenient as to cause much trouble, but now, while walking along the pond’s edge, he noticed that it was right behind the O—— Eye Hospital. The examination hours were about to end, but the director readily examined him. Then they entered the darkroom, conducted blood tests, checked for tuberculosis, and after spending over an hour on rigorous examinations, it became clear that it was indeed caused by diabetes.

“For the time being, continue with the calcium injections.”

The director said.

Yozo bought Neelsen’s solution on his way back, took out the alcohol lamp and test tubes that had become covered in dust, and conducted a urine test on the veranda. At the time his illness was discovered, he had gone to the hospital every day while also weighing each portion of his food, and during that period, he had conducted urine tests on himself numerous times a day. That had long since ceased, but now, as the liquid in the test tube—boiling from the heat of the blue flame—rapidly turned tea-brown and then began darkening to soot-black before his eyes, he felt a pang of discouragement.

“Look, it’s pitch black.” He laughed.

“Those ironic eyes of yours.” Yoko was also laughing.

When Yozo visited her hometown home on the northern coast at Yoko’s urging, paulownia flowers scented the roads near and far. Yoko was dressed in a pale brownish silk crepe kimono with scattered patterns, carrying just a handbag and parasol with casual ease—a simplicity that made her slightly plump figure of late appear all the more voluptuous. Yoko had returned to her hometown once before, but on that occasion she had unexpectedly whisked away both of Yozo’s daughters who had come to see her off. That day was Saturday.

As the young child who was attached to Yoko boarded first, the eldest daughter was drawn along by it. “Auntie’s house isn’t like that at all!” Having grown up in a snow country where nature’s transformations were dramatic, the reality did not live up to the poetic descriptions Yoko had so proudly regaled them with, leaving the child disappointed. After transferring to the coastal line—likely bound for Sakata, which they’d heard was steeped in the atmosphere of the entertainment district—they found themselves sharing the carriage with a troupe of performers, which brought them some relief. In fact, Yoko had kept watch with vigilant eyes until settling into the sleeper the previous night. Being an unusual pair, they were recognized wherever they went. Through Yoko, Yozo was recognized; through Yozo, Yoko was detected—such was the pattern. Gossip and whispers of blame and ridicule constantly assailed their nerves.—He hadn’t meant to come this far.

Yozo’s surroundings were also noisy. The performers were cheerfully making noise, passing around and reading popular haiku that were in vogue in their world. The train was sluggish. Yoko had initially been telling him about the local customs around Sakata and old romances from the days when the shipping agents near her home—renowned as a snow country—were thriving, but as she went on, she grew bored, and drowsiness began to set in. —Her father’s six-year struggle with tuberculosis; the trumpet sound from the old-fashioned carriage she rode when first entering Akita Girls’ School; the academic atmosphere during that scandal involving homosexuality that rocked the educational world; the subsequent fates of beautiful young people—her stories always carried a touch of sentimentality and lingering resonance.

At the station were faces including Yoko’s mother and sister, along with Koyama—a literary youth from the area connected by marriage. The house wasn’t truly like that in reality, but with its splendid thick pillars of straight-grained cedar; ceilings of fine wood grain; and cedar doors, it had the appearance of a steadfast shipping agent’s establishment. Beyond a long earthen floor running through to the backyard lay children’s rooms, a dining room, maids’ quarters, a kitchen, and such.

After the greetings concluded, Yozo was guided upstairs, where there was a weathered chair on the spacious veranda. The hall there, which he had often heard about, seemed to retain traces of her wedding night with Matsukawa—who had been immersed in drink for two days and nights—but she, likely feeling as embarrassed as when she had brought Kusaba there, quietly drew near, pressed her lips to his, then swiftly pulled away. Footsteps echoed on the staircase. “Mother says it’s not amusing at all.”

He opened the high window, looked at the blue sea, and then went downstairs. His suitcase containing Yoko’s change of clothes had already been brought into the next room of the back annex—passing by the well and bath through the earthen floor. Yoko guided Yozo there. “It’s truly a humble room, but it’s where Father always stayed. “Father wouldn’t let anyone near him. “He was always reading books here. “On winter nights, we could even hear his coughing fits from our side, and it was truly pitiful.”

The shelves were packed with things like translated novels and poetry collections. An assortment of small antiques was also displayed. Yozo stepped out onto the six-tatami-mat veranda facing the flower garden and was looking at frames and such.

“Let’s go see the back.” Following her invitation, he slipped on the garden clogs and went out to the back. There were fruit trees, vegetable fields, and flower gardens there. Even modest trees and flowers seemed to fill Yoko with beautiful nostalgia as she stood beside the old plum tree and pomegranate trunk, recounting childhood memories. Descending several terraced steps brought them to what appeared to be an overgrown embankment where a river of considerable width swelled with waves. At its end stretched the Sea of Japan, bathed in sunset’s glow across a deep blue expanse. With shrill cries echoing, countless black-tailed gulls perched motionless upon the waves.

That evening, just as Yozo had finished bathing and eating his meal, two more reporters arrived. He reluctantly decided to let them in. “We received a dispatch from Fukushima regarding that matter.” The man who seemed to burn with literary passion relaxed after saying this. And then, glancing back at Yoko,

“I had no idea there was such an elegant room here.” As Yoko poured beer and such, gradually the mood relaxed, and they found themselves nodding along to the absence of that social page reporter-like demeanor. “Professor, there’s a rumor that you’ve come here this time to hold your wedding ceremony. Is that true?”

Yozo was flustered. Of course, Yoko had said that if Yozo truly had such intentions, her Yokoyama uncle would have come to discuss it—but Yozo couldn’t bring himself to feel that way. "I will not marry anyone."

He said this and earnestly explained his living circumstances and state of mind. The reporters blurted out youthful impressions characteristic of their generation without restraint and eventually left.

Six

Even within this coastal town steeped in snow country’s lonely desolation, the area called snow country village retained traces of its former prosperity as a port from before railways could be laid here—so much so that faint drumbeats from brothels now impossible to locate would sometimes catch one’s ear when returning from strolls toward the bright town center with its considerable walking distances, yet along the way, two or three cars parked outside the walls of a traditional inn with seemingly endless depth let drift a coquettish mood through the air.

“She’s the dance instructor here—Madame.” “Lately she’s been bringing in Ms. Yukie to teach new-style dancing too.” Yoko explained that Madame was an intellectual woman who understood artistic matters. On his very arrival day, Yozo found himself being guided to her brother’s house and even to the residence of a physician fond of literature with whom she was acquainted. Her dentist brother had installed equipment so rare that even Tokyo possessed no more than three such sets, earning him high regard in town. One evening at a traditional inn, while eating turban snails and such, he was shown a dance performance led by numerous beauties; another time he was invited to the newly built mansion of her aunt’s husband—the town mayor across the river—where he toured vast sake storehouses or drank liquor pleasing to his palate while watching carp drift in water winding beneath ornate railings. When visiting such homes, Yoko would grow as meek as a fostered cat, sitting motionless in the lowest seat wearing her black-ground haori with white embroidered crests—but since there existed a young man who’d read her works and even met her once in Tokyo long ago, Yozo never lacked diversion. This young man—something like Yoko’s second cousin—ran a bookstore in town while keeping a sporting goods shop on the side. His wife happened to be this mayor’s adopted daughter. The beauty of water rushing through those steeply sloped streets proved ideal for brewing sake. Descending those hills and crossing the old wooden bridge over that familiar river brought them to a shabby district like any provincial backwater—and Yoko’s house stood not far beyond.

In front of the annex where Yozo slept and rose, lovely zinnias were in full bloom, but beneath the summery sunlight there lingered a faint shadow somewhere, and whenever the equilibrium between the outside air and his body temperature was disrupted even slightly, he coughed. Yoko would fetch shirts from the neighboring house, while her mother—true to her role—pulled out old items stored in the warehouse: a yellow figured-weave lined kimono that wouldn’t look absurd on Yozo, and a coarse-textured, deep ocean-blue unlined garment.

One day turned suddenly hot again, and Yoko invited him aboard a crab-fishing boat departing from under the bridge. Gazing at rocks beyond deep reeds as if from a Chinese landscape painting, they rowed across the deep water. From behind Yoko’s house, the river gradually widened, and by the time they neared the flock of black-tailed gulls rippling on the waves, there the boundless blue sea merged with the crystal-clear azure sky. “I’ll bring crabs tomorrow morning. Definitely.” “You know where my house is, right?”

Yoko took out a pouch from her obi and gave some money to the boatman, but the boat had already set out to sea and was soon rowed close to the shore. Whistling as she went, Yoko tucked up the hem of her striped serge unlined kimono and strode boldly across the beach she had played on since childhood, as if it were her own domain. As Yozo followed her beckoning figure, his eyes caught Mount Chokai’s vivid nearness—its bluish-black slopes tinged with scorched hues and lingering snowdrifts—reflected clearly before him. In that moment, Yozo felt detached from the mortal world; her figure frolicking in the sea seemed like a mountain spirit. Yozo stood at the water’s edge where glittering silver sand shimmered through the waves. Not a single figure dotted the wide beach.

“It’s far more beautiful and bright than the sea back in my hometown.” “Yes.”

He struck a match within the spread-out sleeve of her kimono and lit his cigarette.

“Can you swim?” “When I went into the sea, Father would make such a fuss…” “I kind of want to go in.” Yozo stripped naked and, just as he had done long ago in his hometown sea, gradually waded into the waves that lapped at his ungainly shins—thighs. When he reached about eighteen meters out, he tried swimming but broke out in goosebumps all the same, so he soon climbed back onto the warm sand and basked in the sun. The fresh sunlight seemed to seep into the smooth white skin glistening with sliding droplets of seawater.

Yoko would let the waves toy with her straight, pale shins, then retreat again and again.

Not long after that, Yoko returned once more to the coastal house with her eldest daughter Rumiko in tow—having unexpectedly regained the child from her stepmother’s grasp. She came and went between her hometown—a journey that took sixteen hours—and Tokyo with the same nonchalance as going out to Ginza. The last time she tried to return to Tokyo, when she actually approached the ticket counter, she became slightly stubborn and caused Yozo some momentary trouble. The two of them left the ticket area and, with no other choice, walked for a while along the fence by the tracks through backstreets that reeked of ditches. The young poplar leaves fluttered in the wind, and rain clouds hung in the sky. Since Yozo had rejected formal marriage, her mother and relatives’ presence likely hindered her resolve to follow him back to some degree—but being someone who had always lived freely in spaces where her will could roam unconstrained, she could never have endured the oppressive air stagnating within Yozo’s cramped household. But Yozo had recklessly confronted it head-on. Though she had long been gossiped about by society—reduced to a flapper specimen of scandal—her movements in recent years, wavering here and there in search of respite for her unsteady soul, carried a certain intricacy of dreams and fervor befitting a country-born literary girl who had fled provincial life. This stirred Yozo’s emotions all at once—emotions long confined to his household, his life already nearing twilight. Above all else, her youth and beauty had buoyed up his soul, which had begun to harden unfulfilled. There were times when a child’s face confronting him tearfully would appear ugly, and other times when urgent words from an intimate youth who came bursting in would feel accursed. All the surrounding voices of criticism reaching his ears only fanned the flames of rebelliousness in Yozo. He was utterly uneducated in the techniques of love. He was now contending with a lack of mental resilience—something he hadn’t even faced in his younger days. His timid heart gradually grew shameless, mingling with what seemed like petty pretenses until it was reeled in to a point beyond retrieval.

It wasn’t only Yozo who couldn’t withdraw. Having lost any escape route from Yozo—who had wholly claimed her as his own—she too now found herself perplexed.

“You’re trying to send me back alone, aren’t you?” Yozo reproached Yoko as she walked right beside him. With a trace of shadow, her face appeared even more beautiful. “That isn’t it, but I did leave some conversations unfinished. Can’t I come later?” “I suppose so.” “Professor, you’re fine as you are. But as for your children…” Yoko desired separation, but she understood that he was not someone who could leave the children. And Yozo’s anguish also lay there. He knew that taking seriously Yoko’s past vow—“to maintain the Professor’s household traditions as they had always been…”—was impossible given their vast age difference, but sacrificing his children to follow her was even more agonizing. It was the dilemma of a solitary man—one he always faced—but at the same time, it was also an immediate economic issue. Above all, he lacked objectivity regarding Yoko’s difficult position.

In any case, after waiting for the next train to A City, Yoko also boarded cheerfully. And while waiting for the night train to Tokyo, they took a taxi and briefly toured the town. They also strolled through the park where a statue of a feudal lord with distinguished features stood. Even after boarding the train, Yozo found himself preoccupied with the atmosphere surrounding them during their stay—his own demeanor, Yoko’s demeanor which seemed to carry some lingering regret, and other such matters. Even having their commemorative photo taken at the town photographer’s studio didn’t sit quite right with him. The studio was located in a quiet residential district with beautiful rowan hedges, but Yoko wore a long-sleeved kimono she had once donned for her wedding ceremony, fastened with an obi embroidered in gold and silver threads with cranes and pine trees, while her sister—who was soon to marry a Bachelor of Science residing in Taiwan—also entered the studio in similar formal attire. The mother and sister-in-law sat on either side of the sisters, while the tall brother and the shorter Yozo stood behind them. Yozo felt that he would never come here again.

When the train carrying Yoko and Rumiko arrived, Yozo was standing on the platform with his eldest son. For Yoko, his eldest child remained her greatest obstacle through and through, yet when discussing literature, music, or films with her young comrade-in-arms, the two became excellent companions. Though he would direct sullen looks at his father, toward Yoko—with her smooth-textured touch—he could not help but offer words laced with sardonic humor.

Once, Yozo had gone with her to see Kikugoro’s play at the Honpoza Theater. “Do you hate the theater?” “I love it. Take me there.”

When they entered, the play being performed was Chushingura with its climactic vendetta scene unfolding, but being alone together amid so many watchful eyes felt overwhelming to Yozo. Moreover, he always found a third party’s presence desirable. Being face-to-face alone felt lonelier than solitude itself. The situation felt most at ease when the third party was an unfamiliar young man or someone of that sort. Watching Yoko chat animatedly with another—that he found particularly agreeable. When children served as the third party, it brought faint unease, yet proved more reassuring than keeping them at a distance.

"I should have brought the children." When Yozo said this, "Shall I call them over?"

With that, Yoko stood up and left—but though the play progressed steadily onward, for some reason she did not return easily. He grew irritated. He didn't understand why. He stepped out to the entrance midway along the corridor. And as he wandered through the passageway, he caught sight of Yoko entering. She quietly explained that she had gone to a café instead, thinking it better to have tea than watch the play. On another occasion, she tried to go to Yokohama to see an ocean liner with children seeing off a friend bound for Paris and three or four classmates, asking Yozo for permission.

“Is it all right if I go?”

Yozo hesitated.

“Well... if you want to go.” “That’s why I wanted to ask you.” “If you say I shouldn’t go, Professor, I’ll refuse.” “I can’t really say anything about it.” “Then I’ll refuse.” “There’s no need to refuse.” “If you want to go.”

When the day arrived, Yoko ultimately accompanied the children. Yozo had just gone out on an errand, but when he returned that night, she let slip a tone suggesting deep admiration for the cultured young men’s nocturnal behavior. At that time—though they likely did too—his child revered Baudelaire’s diabolism and Cocteau’s circle of surrealism. The fresh literary theories emerging from these circles also stimulated Yoko. “There she is! There she is!”

When Rumiko, who was leaning out the window, came into view, the child shouted with a blossoming smile, but Yozo felt an anxiety as though being hunted into some reckless venture. Her heart remained shackled, yet he thought this might let Yoko attain some semblance of calm.

After their father fled to Shanghai, Rumiko, her young sister, and brother closed up their house in Otaru and moved—along with their stepmother and her children—to the town where the stepmother’s family home was located, some distance from Yoko’s town. Their movements were also conveyed to Yoko’s mothers, and once it became clear they were living in misery, a seizure was plotted. When Matsukawa stopped by Tokyo in April to give Yoko money, she pleaded for the first time to at least have Rumiko returned to her, but was refused—so Yoko had wept to Yozo about it. Yet now that she had settled into Yozo’s home with the child, she swiftly discovered a different Yozo there.

To Sakiko—Yozo’s youngest daughter, clinging to Yoko’s motherly love lest she lose this mother figure—and to Rumiko, who had finally returned to her birth mother’s care after years apart, Yoko lavished equal affection and caresses upon both children, striving not to wound their fragile hearts. When going out, she would usually take Sakiko’s hand first, though Sakiko would then walk holding hands with Rumiko. At bedtime, Yoko would either tuck both children under her arms or cradle Sakiko until she fell asleep, singing lullabies or reciting fairy tales. —And so it appeared to Yozo’s eyes and resonated in his heart, but balancing the children’s delicate sensibilities proved too burdensome a task even for her.

One day, when Sakiko returned from school, she played with Rumiko—who had been waiting for her return—by arranging toys on the veranda. Small dolls, tea ceremony utensils, a kettle, a pot, a bucket, a washboard, along with colored paper, Nanjing balls, and red, yellow, and green straw-like stalks were heaped out. “Make sure to share with Rumiko too.”

When Yozo, who had been watching nearby, said, “What? This?” Sakiko shared some colored paper and wheat stalks with her, but Rumiko looked so forlorn that she soon threw both the paper and stalks into the garden. Yoko fretted anxiously nearby, standing up and sitting down, but Yozo—rather than making Sakiko, who had always kept her belongings neatly organized, share her things—had come to think it would be better to buy Rumiko separate items of the same kind.

The large doll—handed down from her deceased sister and more precious to Sakiko than anything—once again made Rumiko feel lonely and darkened her mother’s heart. “Though it’s terrible to say about your child, Professor, Sakiko-san is a bit spoiled. I think she needs to correct that.” “If you say so, I’ll listen.” Yozo had answered, but speaking from his own feelings, he didn’t want Rumiko—who he didn’t think was careful with belongings—to handle the doll that the deceased Kumiko had loved. So one day, when he took Yoko and Rumiko along on a shopping trip to the department store, he bought Rumiko a medium-sized doll. Since it was smaller than Sakiko’s, neither Yoko nor Rumiko was pleased, but Yozo seemed to think it was just fine.

Yozo—he would regret it much later, even now when he recalls—had taken Yoko and the children out one day for a stroll through Ueno, where fresh leaves cast deepening shadows, and showed them the zoo. At that time, his eldest daughter—who had been struggling to attend school due to her father’s romantic affairs—was also with them. When he noticed her turning her face away even from classmates encountered in the park, guilt pricked him, and he abruptly left Yoko’s side to sit alone on a bench. Yet precisely then, seeing Sakiko sniveling and sulking discontentedly, he had at first admonished her with benevolent eyes—but finally growing irritated, unwittingly struck the back of her head with his thick rattan cane.

Not long after that, one morning when Yozo woke up and went to the tearoom, the children had all gone out, and Yoko sat alone before the hearth. Tiny winged insects swarmed beneath the eaves as midmorning’s languid sunlight cast a listless glow. True to his usual habit, Yozo—his facial muscles still stiff from waking—sat down by the long brazier wearing a sullen expression. The children seemed to have gone to the back house serving as their quarters, and there was no sign of the maid. But Yoko appeared unsettled as she prepared breakfast atop the dining table. Yozo was wondering what had become of Rumiko when, after some time, a voice calling for her mother came from the four-and-a-half tatami room partitioned by waist-high screens. Yoko hurried over, dressed her in a kimono, and led her out to the tearoom.

“Say good morning to Uncle.”

Rumiko did as she was told. "Late riser." Having said that, Yozo fell silent and sulked. Yoko went out to the kitchen for a moment, but soon came back and sat beside him. No sooner had she sat down than she stood up again. While feeling he ought to say something kind, Yozo deliberately remained sullen. And as Rumiko picked up her chopsticks, he began to feel it was wrong to keep watching and eventually stood up. He came to the desk and lit a cigarette. No sooner had Yoko stumbled in than she covered her face with her sleeve and collapsed onto the tatami, bursting into tears. Her shoulders trembling, she cried out loud as she voiced the grievances she had been suppressing all along.

“What a cold person you are, Professor! Because you kept making that stern face—even while I was anxiously trying to make Rumiko bow properly—you maintained that frozen expression without showing even a single smile! Though that poor child kept stealing glances at your face, straining her nerves, you turned away like we were strangers by the roadside! My heart sank deeper each time, until I found myself repeatedly retreating to the kitchen to wipe away my tears. We mother and child have no wish to become charity cases subsisting on your leftover tea!”

Yoko spoke in broken fragments, her body trembling with violent emotion. Startled, Yozo approached her side and uttered soothing words, but they had no effect. No sooner had she risen than she stood before the chest of drawers in the next room, clattering about with something, then dragged Rumiko along and stormed out through the entrance like a whirlwind.

Flustered, Yozo went out to look, but she showered him with a shrill voice—“Don’t you ever set foot in my house again!”—and snapped the shoji shut. Before long, Sakiko—having returned from school and searched room after room—ended up coming to her father’s study and stood there forlornly. Yozo felt somewhat unburdened, yet loneliness gradually crept through his chest. He also regretted the heedlessness of his morning demeanor that had provoked her fury.

“Auntie?”

“Auntie left.”

“And Rumiko-chan too?” “Yes.” “They’re not coming back anymore?” “They won’t come back.”

Yozo said, but he couldn't help feeling as though he could see the figures of a parent and child walking somewhere around there.

After a while, he took Sakiko—who looked lonely—by the hand and aimlessly went outside.

Seven

The city was as silent as a cemetery everywhere. Everything that met his eyes—the shops lining the streets, the people bustling along the narrow sidewalks—appeared cluttered and chaotic. The faces of the women he passed were as expressionless as stone blocks. It was as if the bleakness he had felt just before losing his wife had deepened into another layer of desolation; even the summer sunlight seemed dull and heavy. He used to gaze joyfully at the ginkgo trees lining the streets—when they sprouted fresh buds, when their green deepened profoundly, when their leaves turned golden-yellow in early winter—each season evoking its own memories. But now, passing through their shade, even those pleasant sensations seemed only to remind him of life’s lost joys. For twenty or thirty years now—no, even longer—he had been afflicted with chronic neurasthenia; even when venturing outside, the city’s clamor reached him like a hellish din, and occasional visits to places like Ginza left his vision swimming. Yet since beginning cohabitation with Yoko, while tormented by desolation and anguish—wondering how he could endure such an existence for two or three more years—he felt his life turning irrevocably gray. Still, despite lacking faith in his own vitality, he couldn’t deny the smoldering passion within. The allure of the opposite sex—he had never once felt it so intensely before, nor had he ever been consumed by such attachment.

“Where did Auntie go?”

Sakiko asked.

“Who knows?”

He passed by the front of the inn where she had been staying and came to the intersection of the third block. As he passed by the inn, he fleetingly thought she and the child might be in that familiar second-floor room and glanced toward the back of the reception desk. But after walking about a block past it, just then, the familiar young maid came from the opposite direction and bowed. She was also born in the same hometown as Yoko and, with her hair tied in a peach-split style, briskly attended to Yoko’s errands; however, while clearing trays or such, she would often sit down there and want to talk about novels and movies. After he had drifted completely apart from Yoko as well, he had encountered her by chance at Salon Haru—which he had entered with four or five dance companions—but over the next two or three years, she had become quite a skilled waitress.

“Didn’t you go to Yoko’s place?” “Ms. Kozue? "No." “Isn’t she at your place?” He thought she might know something, but they parted without pursuing it. This was the area where he used to take evening strolls with his wife, accustomed to shopping for his bread, side dishes for the children’s lunches, as well as geta, tabi, and tableware—stores that would bow to her amiable demeanor were not few. But once he began walking with Yoko, even the geta shops and bean vendors stopped giving friendly looks. Yozo also found it difficult to do his shopping in that area. When they went out for a walk with Yoko, they would invariably turn left at the intersection to browse the row of bookstores, or go all the way down to enter the department store, or visit the bustling grocer on Hirokoji. When in the mood, they would occasionally try going into vaudeville theaters as well. She, who loved motion pictures, rarely missed a visit to Cinema Palace, so he would accompany her by train to see them as well. However, upon entering the smoking car, he would always find young men staring at their faces, and at times even catch whispers of her name, so he kept his mouth shut. Light in the Darkness and Resurrection were among the silent films they had watched there together. Moreover, she read a considerable number of translated works, and for Yozo—who often found reading bothersome—hearing summaries of those works, infused with her own flair through her thin, eloquent lips, became an intriguing part of daily life.

Yozo boarded the train from Sangenchō and went to see the Hirokōji Department Store. He had thought to buy something for Sakiko but clung to the absurd hope that Yoko might be there holding a child’s hand while buying a doll. Like a man possessed by a fox spirit, he found himself haunted by visions of Yoko. When he inevitably realized she couldn’t possibly be there, his wandering mind spurred him onward—he hurried out and made for Ueno Station. But upon learning the Tohoku Main Line limited express departed only once around seven-something in the evening, the futility of his actions suddenly enraged him, and he rushed away once more.

That night, he tried sending an inquiry telegram addressed to Yoko’s mother, but YOKO NOT YET ARRIVED

The reply telegram stating "YOKO NOT YET ARRIVED" came late into that night.

One evening, Yozo went out for a walk with his son Yotaro. He felt like someone who had lost a bird that had finally flown into his embrace—from that point onward, though he had no concrete plan, he found himself ceaselessly pursuing Yoko’s phantom. That Yozo had managed to reach this point without incident was never due to cultivated human refinement or rational self-reflection. It stemmed solely from the meagerness of his upbringing, a timidity rooted in his painful awareness of innate dullness and scant talent—a lonely existence that cast perpetual twilight over his days. His youthful passion smoldered as if its outlet had been blocked; his meager talent was pointlessly unearthed and turned over. Unwittingly, he had become a man who could only stare at his own feet. Though the mischievous goddess of love belatedly spurred this passion and breathed tormenting flames of confusion upon him, even he now began displaying worldly vanity and theatrical tendencies—a predicament from which he couldn’t easily retreat.

Yozo did not sleep well the previous night either, and the fatigue in his body these days had not subsided. Later Yoko would frequently run away, and Yozo would drive her out; after separating each time, they would invariably spread out bedding to sleep, though there were occasions when they had to call the neighborhood doctor. When awake, he tended to be driven by an impulse to take some action, so he decided to lie still and wait for his mood to settle—but at that time he remained unaccustomed to such practices. The occupational psychology that would later come to dominate his feelings had not yet become mixed in. It was nothing but a fundamental wavering of directionless life energy from its very roots.

The child clung to his father as they walked side by side. "I bet she’s here after all."

When they approached the usual inn, the child—apparently sharing the same thought—spoke up. "Let's ask." Yozo, now similarly resolved, stepped over the threshold to inquire. A middle-aged maid stood at the counter, "Ms. Kozue? She did come by yesterday—to collect her tailoring from the usual place..." "Where would she be now?" "Well now, I couldn't say."

The “usual tailor” referred to Madam Kami, a high-strung woman in the neighborhood whom his wife had commissioned for years to make their clothes. Whenever Yozo wore garments stitched by that Madam’s hands, nothing sewn by anyone else ever felt quite right against his skin. Yoko had also had a few pieces tailored there and knew the craftsmanship was excellent. As he listened to this account, Yozo suddenly felt as though his weak heart had stopped.

“She came all the way near the house…” This realization instantly plunged him into despair. Staggering out of there as his surroundings abruptly darkened, he collapsed onto the stone pavement of a liquor store’s alleyway, unable to steady himself even with his child’s support. These attacks of brain anemia had plagued him since youth, recurring in adulthood during dental treatments or writing struggles. There had been times he’d fallen in hospital corridors or lain by roadsides listening to street clamor. Yet now his collapse proved brief—on that summer evening, revived by what seemed a passerby’s voice at his ear, he abruptly stood and walked on.

After a considerable time had passed, one day a letter from Yoko arrived. Addressed to Sakiko, it bore neither her name nor her whereabouts. The moment he picked up that thick envelope, he felt a pang of gloom, but opened it nonetheless. Sakiko had been sick for exactly three or four days. It was an illness that struck sporadically, likely due to some congenital defect in her heart valves or similar issue, and seemed to cause chest pain. Though Yozo had long grown accustomed to children’s illnesses and deaths, when it came to Sakiko’s sickness—she who had been motherless since early childhood—his heart ached all the more.

“It will heal as she grows older, but for now, it’s a bit…” The doctor said. “Auntie! Auntie.” As Sakiko’s tearful voice seeped into his ears, Yozo’s soul throbbed with pain. Once told something, she would from that moment cease all mention of her birth mother, which only made Yoko’s affection all the more necessary. The soft touch of young Yoko’s hands—stroking her chest with lullabies and nursery tales, unfailingly buying chocolates or treats when they went out, taking her on walks to shave her neck, trim her nails, and attend to every small need—had made her utterly happy with just that. Yet for Yoko to leave her behind as Rumiko’s mother was nothing short of a cruel fate.

“Sakiko-chan has been putting Ms. Yoko’s photograph under her pillow, you know.”

The sister told Yozo. When he went to check by the pillow, it was indeed just as described. Yoko was Rumiko’s mother and could no longer love you as she once had—Yozo could not bring himself to make her understand this and had no choice but to endure passively. He also felt that dying together with this child might be one means of salvation.

At that moment came a letter from Yoko. Alongside several letters written on colored paper lay a heap of beautiful stationery intended as gifts for Sakiko. After delivering it to the sickbed, he and the child held up an envelope plastered with stamps to examine the postmark against the light. "The postmark is from Sarugakuchō Station," said Sakiko. "Hmm... So it's Kanda. But Kanda's a large area." "Do you think Mr. Isshiki might know?"

He thought it couldn’t be. Though he sensed Isshiki might know, considering how he was trampling on Isshiki—who had withdrawn in silence—without regard for seniority, he refused to entertain the thought. How Yoko had manipulated Isshiki—he didn’t want to touch on that either. He had resolved never to so much as glance at Isshiki, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that Isshiki was sneering at him from the shadows. It was a torment akin to that inflicted by a friend who, emboldened by holding your promissory note, deliberately plays ignorant while basking in your indebtedness.

“When it comes to men who have wives, I just can’t feel at ease.” “Moreover, Mr. Isshiki keeps a leisured madam of his own, you know.” Yoko had been uttering these placating words, but they seemed unlikely to bolster Yozo’s explanations. If anything, Yozo now found himself attempting to trace leads about Yoko through Isshiki himself. “Why don’t you go over to Isshiki’s place and check on things for me?” “Hmm… I could go, but… Why don’t I try calling first?” “I could go, but… Well, why don’t I try calling first?”

Yotaro went to make a call nearby but soon returned. "It seems he isn't coming after all." "He says he'll come now." "Because he said we shouldn't make them worry too much... Mr. Isshiki is a good person, isn't he?" Yozo was not ungrateful for Isshiki's kindness—bringing money when his wife died, installing a radio to distract his lonely children—but he also sensed some self-serving motive at play. The contradictions no longer felt like contradictions. He had even subtly factored into his vague calculations something like priority over Yoko.

Isshiki came rushing over in a taxi. “Ms. Yoko isn’t here, I hear.” Yozo deliberately spoke about the circumstances of Yoko’s departure in a manner that made it seem as though Isshiki was unaware—and about the postmark on the mail. “In that case, searching the theaters during their program changes would be the quickest way,” Isshiki said. “The changeover day is Thursday, you see. That person’s regular haunt is the Nanneiza Theater.” “The Nanneiza Theater...” Yozo murmured. He had once considered checking the Cinema Palace they’d frequented together many times, but realized an aimless search would only deepen his loneliness afterward. A fear lingered that she might be with some younger man.

“If even then we don’t find out, I have a man I’m acquainted with at the Kanda police—if we have them investigate, we’ll surely find her.” “No, there’s no need to go that far...” “She’ll likely turn up on her own eventually.” After saying this, Isshiki conversed at length, wrote an introduction for the police on his business card, and departed.

The following afternoon, Yozo headed out toward Kanda. Somehow, the child was also with him. Then, wandering around Sarugakuchō, he visited two or three inns; but since the child would have no interest in such things, he browsed through used bookstores here and there before heading out to the bustling entertainment district of Jimbōchō, where he had some tea and returned. In those days, movies still came with narrators delivering overly suggestive explanations, and the absence of voices for the figures moving on the screen rendered their expressions terribly unnatural. Thus, Yozo had no desire to make a special effort to visit silent movie theaters, nor did cafés particularly interest him. Yet with the child in tow, he would occasionally set foot in such places.

The next morning, Yozo wandered through the inn district of Surugadai, driven by a lingering impulsive mood. Long ago, he had been appalled by a friend’s deranged passion—how he had tracked down his estranged wife, scoured every inn around Nikko, examined guest registers with bloodshot eyes, finally uncovered the lover’s name, and even verified the room where they had stayed—but now he couldn’t even laugh at that. Depending on the opportunity, he too could very well end up playing such a role.

First, he inquired at two or three small boarding houses in the nearest backstreets. It was the time when maids, with their work sashes tied, were busy cleaning; at one house, he felt they took him for a plainclothes policeman. The nests of Chinese international students stood densely packed in that cluttered area. After haphazardly concluding his search, he eventually passed through that block and tried two inns along the broad avenue and one Western-style building resembling apartments—all fruitless. As he wandered aimlessly, he eventually emerged onto Ogawamachi’s wide tram-lined avenue and walked toward Jinbocho. Though usually passing through this area left no particular impression, now that he walked with this specific purpose in mind, he began catching whiffs of his carefree boarding house days—when he used to stroll these streets nightly—mingled with that era’s town atmosphere. When the room at his boarding house near the moat grew oppressive, he would invite a painter friend from nearby to a café—one of the earliest establishments of its kind, a place ambiguously called either a milk hall or fruit parlor—where they ate pineapple and drank cocoa. One night they visited a vaudeville theater and heard Enzo’s *Hasshojin* and *Ukiyodono*—performances delivered rapid-fire like oil paper catching flame. Amidst all this, he developed severe gastric atony.

"How many years had passed since then?"

He turned around. On Jinbocho’s bustling main street, he suddenly turned into an alley behind a large bookstore to find the side street astonishingly transformed—the entire area had been overrun by cheap cafés and bars. Peering through, Yozo spotted a red flag dyed white with “Shunkokan” at the periphery. Though certain it would prove futile, he went to investigate. As he climbed the stone steps of that ramshackle barrack-like boarding house doubling as an inn and stepped inside the entrance, there before his eyes—at the corridor’s junction just behind the staircase where a sliding door stood open—sat Yoko at the room’s threshold. She wore a silk crepe summer kimono, her hair tied in her signature style at the crown of her head, perched demurely. When he called out “Hey” with relief, she turned around—somewhat flustered, her face reddening. After leaning his rattan cane against the entryway step and attempting to clomp up, Yozo was met with a slight shake of her head from Yoko. But no sooner had she risen than she pointed upward at the staircase, signaling with her eyes for him to ascend to the second floor. Yozo steadily climbed up. She followed him.

“This is our room, you know.”

With that, Yoko guided him to the bright front room. It was a not-unpleasant six-tatami room where white-curtained glass windows had shelves piled high with girls' magazines and toys, and an unfinished green sweater lay atop a crimson zabuton cushion. A Korean-style mat was also spread out. Yoko had him sit down and went downstairs once, but after a short while, she came back up with Rumiko.

“Bow to Uncle.” As Rumiko placed her hands on the floor and bowed, Yozo patted her head and tried to pull her onto his lap. “What’s wrong? Is someone there in the downstairs room?” “It’s a craftsman, you see. Since that room has such a nice atmosphere, I had them put up new wallpaper just now.” “So what happened then?” “I had been thinking of paying you a visit soon, you know. I want to enroll Rumiko in Futsu Eiwa Kindergarten, but I thought it might be too much for her to manage from there... How is Sakiko doing?”

“She cried and was such trouble.” “And then she fell ill...” “How could you be so cruel?” “Even if I’m to blame, you vanished without a single word.”

Yozo wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. Yoko sat slightly sideways, her hands moving as she knitted. "But I do think it's been quite trying." "It's only just begun, hasn't it? Before long, the children will grow close. They'll quarrel too, inevitably." "Rumiko has been speaking of Miss Sakiko too." "But weren't our household children all doting on Rumiko like that?" "Though impoverished, I'd thought to make this place my haven for study. And I'd meant to bring my works to visit you occasionally, Professor—but that won't do."

“No, no. Because I meant to settle your past, I confronted it directly.” “The master and mistress here also tell me I mustn’t visit the Professor’s place.” “The master here knows you quite well.” “His late father was from Sanjo in Echigo and apparently used to visit your place often with silk fabrics.” “When he passed away, his son became the current master.” “Fair-skinned and gentle…”

“He’s a good man.” “And why would you…”

“This is Mr. Akimoto’s inn, you see.” “That person helped me organize my tanka poems and such here too, you see.” Yozo recalled that burly merchant from Echigo who would sometimes bring his son along and haul in heavy luggage, while simultaneously imagining the romance between that passionate poet of noble bearing and Yoko that had unfolded here. Yet against this imagined backdrop, reality felt somewhat meager, leaving an impression of something lacking. Eventually driven by his overwhelming—and rather cunning—passion, Yoko resolved to return after all.

“Well then, I’ll go in a little while.” “I’ll definitely go.” “I see.” Yoko’s face was flushed. As Yozo tried to leave, she pressed her body tightly against the wall and called out, “Lips! Lips!” He turned back sharply.

Yoko arrived by car as dusk’s hues crept into the garden’s corner. With Yotaro—whom she had sent ahead to check—leading the way, she had her belongings carried to the entrance and came up bringing Rumiko. "I was having tea with Yotaro and such…" "And then—though it’s nothing much—I thought… if you’d like to rest in this room…"

Yoko said this and tried spreading out the floor mat she had brought. “How do you like this tie!” On the veranda, the children were holding up the gaudy French-made tie Yoko had bought them to the light outside, examining it through the fabric.

When school went on break, the children all went to the sea. Rumiko was also included in the group. Reading and writing, watching movies, listening to records; in the evenings, going out to see the night stalls on the streets, sometimes even taking walks as far as Ueno—but with the anxiety of not knowing how long this life would last… and the anxiety of what would happen if it did continue… Yozo’s heart was prone to fear.

For every human drama, the difficulty lay in its climactic scene; like a judgment upon history, it was difficult to discern. Moreover, Yozo tended to entrust all phenomena to an endless extension.

At the end of August, Yoko called for Rumiko from the coast and departed together with her for the countryside. This was because, through her mother’s letter, she had come to understand that it seemed possible to retrieve both Rumiko’s younger sister and brother from their stepmother’s custody. After seeing the two off at Ueno Station, Yozo felt a momentary relief, but as if returning to the old vacuum, a sense of desolation assailed him. “I will have you come again, Professor.” “In return, wait until I let you know.” “I’ll send you a letter when the time is right.”

Even so, Yoko had not truly settled down by his side all summer. Though she had accomplished nothing particular, she had been tormented by worries she could not confess to Yozo—worries that would remain unresolved even if confessed. She burned with literary aspirations yet needed to sustain her livelihood. Her pride toward Rumiko mattered deeply. Compared to earlier times, there had also been significant changes in living conditions.

After about two days, Yoko’s letter arrived. He wrote back. From then on, he generally wrote every three days or so. His clinging anguish sought outlet in those letters, though some filled him with regret the moment they dropped into the postbox. Unable to discern whether Yoko would return or vanish forever, this turbulence in his heart—this pursuit of truth—was nothing less than his soul’s anguished groans. He often visited friends nearby and lost himself in talk.

One rainy day, he remembered a woman. It was that woman who had come to offer incense at his wife’s memorial tablet in those days. He had received the notice of her inn’s opening from that woman quite some time before. He had been treated to her hospitality all this time, and he wanted to hear about the various worlds she had seen. It was a terrible downpour, but for him, raised in a rainy region, this was rather welcome. In Takishii, it took him some time to locate it, but the location had a more pleasant atmosphere than he had imagined.

“Madam has gone to Ginza for dinner, but she’ll be back shortly. Please do come in.”

Yozo placed his umbrella there and entered. Crossing the bridge that spanned the narrow courtyard, he settled into one of the snug rooms. The faintly murky waters of the Ōkawa River lay directly before his eyes. Across the bank, warehouses and what appeared to be stone yards blurred in the rainy haze; at the base of the ominous large bridge visible to the right, listless gray smoke crept upward from one of several drab buildings. "What dreadful rain this is." A maid of about twenty-two or twenty-three—her skin peeling—opened the half-drawn wooden door and began wiping the bay window's handrail. As boats passed back and forth on the water, Yozo felt relieved he had come.

After bringing the tobacco tray and tea, the maid made a phone call. However, as this was a business establishment and guests had already arrived, she couldn’t very well continue like that. “Madam will be back shortly.”

The maid came to say.

“Isn’t there any middle-aged woman around here who’s good at conversation?” “There is.” “Shall I call one of them?”

Before long, a lanky woman who appeared to be a little over forty showed up. She didn’t give the impression of a geisha at all, but she was perfectly suited. Her conversation was engaging. The tale of the young geisha who, claiming her mother was ill, deceived her patron to get money and was caught by the shop clerk on Shijo Bridge in Kyoto while carousing with a Shinpa actor, leading to her patron’s ruin; the rumor of the woman who had an affair with an old actor in the park and had all her hair cut off from the roots—the newspapers’ fodder for tales of the demimonde’s scandals was inexhaustible.

Just then, Okami entered. More than Okami, one wanted to call her Madam… When he had seen her in spring, there had been a somewhat disreputable air about her, but now she wore an unlined kimono of striped silk crepe, her hair tied back like an educated woman’s, and she looked far more beautiful.

8

Sayoko, known as Okami, had beautiful eyes that flitted coquettishly—this alone gave her a slightly different impression from the common women who littered such places—but she moved away to the corner of the dining table where a sake flask, cup washer, and side dishes sat, wiping the area with a kitchen cloth while,

“It must be so difficult for you, Professor, dealing with Ms. Yoko’s situation…” Yozo’s face was already flushed from the two or three cups of sake he’d drunk, but—

“This is something I have no experience with myself, but I thought I’d ask you to listen.” “A bit of commotion isn’t so bad, is it?” She shot Yozo a piercing look, “Well, it should last about a year.” Sayoko delivered her prognosis. “Is she at your house now?” “She’s gone to the countryside for a while.” “Truthfully, I’m not sure what to do myself.” “What took her to the countryside?” “It seems she’s trying to reclaim her child from the stepmother.”

And after Yozo discussed various details of this incident, "Why did you start this kind of business?"

“I’ve thought about it a lot myself. Mr. Kurube said that if I’d been a bit more patient, he would’ve tried harder to help me out—but then his big venture collapsed, so things didn’t quite work out.” Kurube, a German nobleman who had apparently been prospering through arms dealing, tried selling military equipment to Chinese authorities. After pouring nearly his entire fortune into procuring goods and greasing palms—just when everything was finally arranged—a direct contract was signed between government officials and China itself. All his efforts to reach that point vanished like foam on water. When he received that telegram, he collapsed right there at the Fujiya Hotel.

However, Sayoko was not so imprudent as to confide such matters to him upon their first meeting. Regarding her seven-year lavish cohabitation with Kurube, she would occasionally bring it up in conversation afterward, and though she sometimes seemed to recall that it was, above all, that German nobleman who had loved and doted on her the most, she was now filled with the joy of having escaped that life akin to a prisoner of love.

“It seems quite a lot has happened in your past.”

“Me?”

“Haven’t you ever been in Shinbashi?” “I was.” “Back then, photos of demimonde figures often appeared in Bungei Club, didn’t they?” “Mine was published quite prominently as well.” “—But why do you ask, Professor?” “I somehow feel like I’ve seen you before. “Once, when I took the train from Shinbashi, there were three geisha sitting in Kushon, busily doing embroidery.” “You resemble one of them.” “Back when I was still young…”

“I did do embroidery as well, but… You see, the elder sister at the house where I worked was an extraordinary woman—she came into a foreigner’s inheritance and became utterly wealthy. When going to New Year’s engagements, she would wear kimonos with hem patterns of genuine koban coins and ichibu and nishu gold pieces, they said. So when she returned from her engagements, in summer she’d sit in a grand chair and have us wipe her down or fan her, and at bedtime it’d be one person massaging her while another read novels—that sort of arrangement…”

"Ah, so even someone like you..." Sayoko’s slender fingers were bedecked with rings—three-carat diamonds both large and small, a sizable coral surrounded by tiny pearls, and more. "What became of that person?" "The elder sister? That elder sister keeps Mr. Shibano—the one who committed a love suicide in Karuizawa with the famous Professor Takemura—as her paramour, you see." "I see." "With all that money, she built a grand house in Omori and puts on quite the act of being a leisured madam."

“Do you know someone called Shibano?” “Yes, sometimes we three go strolling in Ginza.” “I shouldn’t say this, but what an insufferable man!” “Though mind you—among all those Ginza dandies, you might not find another quite as handsome.” “So pretentious with that red necktie of his.” “Even though he’s got neckties coming out his ears whenever he spots nice ones in shop windows, he still whines about wanting more.” “Disgusting—that old crone keeping some young plaything.” “I find it thoroughly revolting.”

Yozo gave a wry smile, "That hits close to home." "No, men are quite all right. No matter how advanced in years a man may be, there’s certainly nothing ridiculous about him."

As he did so, he began to feel like eating something. Ever since losing his wife, his meals had been prepared by an elderly, diminutive maid who had merely observed his wife’s methods over many years, so picking up his chopsticks invariably filled him with gloom.

“Shall it be Ginsui or Naniwaya?”

“Well, I don’t know either of them, but…” “Naniwaya seems to have a good reputation considering how reasonable their prices are.” Yozo ordered a few dishes—*ayu no uota*, some bowls of rice, and sesame vinegar—ate his meal, and soon had a taxi arranged for him.

One morning, Yozo awoke in that room along the river. The busy traffic of motorboats, river steamers, and cargo boats had already grown frequent upon the water.

Last night, driven by the desolation of his study, he had ended up taking a taxi there, but with two groups of guests present, Sayoko was also slightly flushed with drink. Yozo hadn’t particularly intended to call for women. Though on rare occasions much later, when going out to eat with friends, he would call for geisha, he himself lacked both the mental composure and financial means to indulge in geisha entertainment. “Your coming to eat is more than enough.” “Even if you were to call geisha, it wouldn’t amount to much for me, you know.”

Sayoko’s purpose lay elsewhere. She had been thinking of gradually having his companions come over. Moreover, she introduced her sister who had come from the countryside to observe how her newly opened business was faring, and seemed intent on borrowing his assistance in various ways. Last night she had come into his bedroom again and talked until nearly dawn while listening to the sloshing sound of water creeping beneath the window in the deep night—though it was just talk in the literal sense, devoid of any particular meaning. Even lying so close that they were nearly touching, not a single finger was laid upon the other. In the faint glow of the electric lamp, the two of them lay on their backs. Most of the money used to purchase this house—which had flourished during its Masago-za Theater days—and renovate it had been borrowed from her sister’s husband now sleeping in the middle room: a rural tea manufacturer and major taxpayer who was her brother-in-law, with monthly interest payments being duly made. Strangely enough, it had gradually become clear afterward that she had well-connected relatives—Mitsubishi directors, Furukawa Copper Mine veterans, major Osaka factory owners—but Sayoko never flaunted this. It was not unimaginable that she had followed such a dark path because her father was different, but even so, having started her life at sixteen or seventeen as one of the Lion’s Seven—a group of beautiful café waitresses—she had steadfastly honed her skills on her own ever since, neither needing to rely on wealthy relatives nor liking to be bound by them. Raised in Shiba’s Shinmei district, she had been an unmanageable mischief-maker since her girlhood days splitting peaches, but back then, as leader of the local delinquent girl gang, she would swagger through festivals at Shinmei and Kotohira shrines, demonstrating her innate elegance.

Yozo rose from his futon and peered into the dimly lit central room from the hallway, where Sayoko—who had risen at some point unnoticed—now sat before the Buddhist altar where votive lights blazed brightly, her prayer beads draped over clasped hands as she devoutly recited sutras. To Yozo, this was an unexpected sight in such circumstances, yet whenever she—despite her profession—looked back on her own past filled with vulgar conduct toward numerous lovers, she could not suppress a shudder in her heart. It reached the point where her elderly mother—who had received meticulous nursing through Kurube’s deep affection during her long illness before dying years earlier—had fretted over her path, saying “How have you not been killed doing such things?” so perilous were the feats she had performed. This had already begun during her café waitress days when young aristocrats frequented her establishment.

In the central room with the Buddhist altar, three paulownia wardrobes and what might have been mahogany furniture stood lined up, with a shamisen case placed in the corner. The cluttered Buddhist altar, crowded with numerous small items, displayed a photograph of her mother bearing an uncanny resemblance to a certain veteran Shinpa actor, while an identical oil portrait hung on the wall. Sayoko kept praying with single-minded devotion, seemingly oblivious to Yozo's presence.

Yozo crossed the corridor as instructed and headed toward the bath area. The high-ceilinged bath area required descending two or three steps from the changing room equipped with toiletries. After Yozo had bathed and was shaving his face, Sayoko entered as well. For her—accustomed to managing men—this held no more significance than sharing a taxi ride. Before long, Sayoko stood by the hearth and combed her hair. Her gently sloping shoulders, well-proportioned limbs, and posture—one knee raised while tying up her hair—appeared precisely like the archetypal beauty depicted in Harunobu’s prints. Yet even then, Yozo had not forgotten his beautiful illusion of Yoko. This too might be considered a model of feminine beauty, but true naturalness resided with Yoko.

“Professor, would you like something to eat? Would you care for some toast?” “I suppose.” “I’ve already eaten. I’m about to visit the hill shrine—would you accompany me?” “The hill?” “It’s Matsuchiyama, you know.” “You frequent such peculiar places. Does it grant some special favor?” “Saint Kangi-ten is enshrined there, you know. A most venerable deity. Though it’s best reached by boat.”

Around noon, after riding together with Sayoko still in her everyday clothes, Yozo accompanied her to the foot of the hill. And he waited in the taxi for her to descend the stone steps of the hill, but even after that, he accompanied her on pilgrimages two or three more times—on one occasion climbing the steps himself to approach the hall where incense smoke rose in fragrant plumes.

One day too, Yozo arrived by taxi at this riverside house. Around the third day, he wrote a letter to Yoko in the countryside. There were some he wrote but did not send, but he mailed most of them. He tried to calculate how many letters were already in Yoko’s possession. He had intended to retrieve every last one of them someday—indeed, he had already managed to cleverly talk his way into taking back nearly every single letter on a certain occasion—but even while harboring such expectations, he still couldn’t bring himself to stop writing. Until now, he had never noticed—a strangely warped self had been discovered there. At times, he couldn’t help but passionately write things that might even frighten Yoko. Letters that could entertain a literature-obsessed woman like Yoko were, of course, something he was poor at writing, and they embarrassed him.

During such times, one day as he sat alone in his gloomy study, a female poet visited with a manuscript of poems. Though young and petite, this poet was not neatly dressed in appearance, yet her demeanor was not unpleasant. She was currently working as a café waitress in Kagurazaka, but prior to that, she had also worked doing household chores for a close friend of Yozo’s in the suburbs for some time. She now seemed to be at the very depths of despair, but in the intervals between serving customers, she would immerse herself in writing poetry. Her day-to-day existence was both a poem of stifled sobs and a relentless march of cruel fate.

Among the poetry manuscripts she had brought, many had already been published, but as Yozo read through one or two of them—though he did not understand poetry—he felt something akin to touching the anguish of her soul. His eyes grew hot before he knew it, and tears born of fragile resolve streamed down. "I wonder if there might be someplace that would publish this..." "Hmm... I'm not sure if I can help with that."

“I truly want to publish it myself, but I can’t seem to come up with the funds.” “Well, I do worry about it, but…” Yozo could only contemplate her circumstances with a somber heart.

“You have it tough too, Professor.” “You have so many children...” “What happened to Ms. Kozue?” “Yoko is in the countryside now, but…” “If someone like me would suffice, I’d like to help look after your children.” “You see…” “That’s very kind of you, but…” “Depending on how things go, I may end up taking you up on that offer.” “Yes, anytime…”

She gathered up the poetry manuscripts spread out on the desk and left.

He wrote a letter to Yoko that very day. While praising the poems, he also wrote about considering asking her to look after the children and so forth. Then on the third day came a reply from Yoko—a lengthy letter filled with somewhat indignant words expressing her opposition. Even setting that aside, others had voiced concerns about how a former café waitress would manage Yozo’s household affairs, so he resolved to abandon the idea.

After washing off sweat in the bath, Yozo was in his usual breezy small room talking with Sayoko about that matter.

This ambitiously constructed riverside house initially felt remarkably pleasant precisely because of its waterside location, but upon frequent visits, its various furnishings—such as one of the two largest German-made safes ever brought to Japan, said to have been installed by twenty-five laborers—began speaking of her former life. While these elements created an atmosphere reminiscent of some leisured madam from the neighborhood, the interior decorations ultimately remained rather unappealing by any measure.

“You’ll gradually replace them all in time.”

Yozo was lying by the window. Sayoko brought her face nearly perpendicular to his head and remained there at length. As they spoke like this, something uncannily intense flashed in her eyes. "When I was in Shiba—right around the time I first met you, Professor—this sort of thing happened."

Sayoko began to speak. “There was this person, you see—I had just left the Kōjimachi mansion and was at a time when I hadn’t yet settled on a course of action.” “Then that person said—‘You’ve already passed thirty and have done all sorts of things.’” “Since I’m like the leftover scraps from a sea bream’s carcass—something already picked clean—he said I should just cut my losses and sell myself cheap. Then he left me five hundred yen.” “So that’s your patron.”

“There’s no patron or anything like that.” “Just how old are you anyway?” “Me?” “Well...” Her answer was ambiguous. He had no right to ask the woman’s age.

“What about that man?” “That was the end of it.” “The money?” “I used up the money.” That had been the compensation for her chastity over one night. She still seemed to be valuing that at around 1,000 yen. “That man—a stockbroker?” “He’s not a stockbroker. If it’s stockbrokers you mean, I did have connections with a rather prominent one back when I was active in this area, but that man was completely ruined in the earthquake.”

And she began speaking about that stockbroker’s circumstances. “Back when that man was still a shop clerk—around twenty-four, I suppose—there was a time I was summoned to a banquet room and found him somewhat appealing.” “As we kept meeting frequently, our relationship deepened. When he managed to secure me a share of the store, he started talking about us living together. But then I found another patron, so that plan came to nothing. Since I soon went straight myself, I ended up completely forgetting about him.” “Then, after ten years had passed and I’d returned to the business, stockbroker associates invited me to a banquet. Among them was that man’s friend. Meddlesome as they were, four or five of them took me to a play and arranged for me to meet him in the same box seats.” “That man had now lost his master and, being seen as reliable, was settled into the position as an adopted son-in-law managing things. Since it didn’t seem like a bad arrangement, I became interested again—our connection was rekindled.” “When that happens, I grow resentful of Okami-san’s presence and hate having to send her back.” “Okami-san was three years older than me—staying up all night waiting in jealous fits. When it came to that man’s hands, they were constantly covered in purple bruises. That’s how things ended up.” “In the end, we ran away from that shop and set up house together, but after that, things didn’t go well at all.” “I too had finally given up and was under Mr. Kurube’s care when—during all that earthquake commotion—that man sent someone from the shop to ask me for money.” “He actually came himself.” “It was only a small amount, but when I returned to my room and thought about it, I felt like an utter fool. Worried Mr. Kurube might notice, I gave him five yen and sent him packing.” “But really—that person looked utterly shabby in his straw sandals or whatever they were.” “I couldn’t bear to even look at his face.”

As the timing was convenient and at Sayoko’s suggestion, he decided to watch Kabuki for the first time in ages. Compared to the wordless films Yoko preferred, his long-cultivated habit of Kabuki appreciation still clung to his body. He could never grow accustomed to those dark, gloomy movie theaters.

Sayoko went out to the front desk and called to inquire about seat availability. “For second-floor box seats, there’s the fifth one available.” “That’s acceptable.” “I’ll get ready now, so Professor, you should go home to fetch your kimono.” “Right.” After doing exactly that and waiting in the room, a maid came over. “Okami-san says she’d like you to come see what she should wear.” “Right.” When Yozo went to look, he found several drawers and cabinet doors left wide open. Under-kimonos, unlined robes, and obis lay scattered across the indigo mat spread beneath them and spilling beyond its edges like fallen flower petals.

“It shouldn’t be too flashy, should it?” “Right.” “It’s better not to be too conspicuous.”

In the end, they settled on a rain-patterned kimono paired with a black figured haori coat. Her face, less heavily made up than usual, now bore a crisp, well-defined loveliness. Provided she ignored fleeting trends, she owned enough garments to clothe her for a lifetime. Her maru obi alone—each measuring one ken in length and four shaku in width—filled an entire safe. When she later pulled out splendid Chinese dresses and old-fashioned Western clothes for inspection on occasion, all proved to be post-earthquake creations—gaudy pieces unmistakably tailored to Kurube’s tastes.

When the car arrived, Yozo stepped out through the kitchen entrance. Sayoko emerged from the room while slipping a compact into her obi.

“Is it all right if we make a slight detour?” “It won’t be any trouble.”

Having said that, Sayoko instructed the driver to head to Nagatacho. Soon they arrived at the quiet streets of Nagatacho. Sayoko got out of the car at the end of the long ivy-covered fence and entered the side street. Her cool figure swayed lightly as she walked ahead of him, but he couldn’t quite discern which house she entered. It was only much later that he realized it had been Kurube’s mansion.

The Kabukiza Theater during summer's peak heat wasn't particularly crowded. The actors' roster looked sparse, and the program offerings were unremarkable. At the entrance, Yozo encountered a theater-world acquaintance he knew by sight, then spotted the company president standing in the corridor. When Sayoko asked him to make introductions, he briefly did so before ascending to the second floor—yet even in that vast auditorium, her appearance stood out conspicuously: seated frontmost and brandishing her fan. But precisely because no complicating relationship existed between them, compared to his outings with Yoko, he felt an ease whose full measure he couldn't quite grasp.

The two of them waited cheerfully for the play to begin, looking down at the audience gradually filling the hall.

Finally, one day, a telegram arrived from Yoko. The moon was pale, the water misted—a message urging, “Come.” Yozo had already been waiting impatiently for two whole weeks. He had grown utterly despondent. He had even considered suddenly barging into her hometown, taking lodgings in town to secretly investigate her movements—and together with a friend living nearby—having an elderly monk fortune-teller perform divination. He had frequently visited a young I Ching researcher located further back in time; having found interest in that man’s more objective approach, he had even contemplated undertaking I Ching studies himself—yet the old monk’s perspective in this matter was not off the mark either. That friend who was fond of divination had long maintained a habit of consulting fortune-tellers versed in Eastern and Western physiognomy whenever embarking on new endeavors or seeking insight into his general fate. A rare edition of *Three Lifetimes Physiognomy* from China—along with Chinese classics—was at his side.

“I don’t mind driving Kozue out.” “I’ll take responsibility.” While he was one to encourage Yozo’s children with such words, on the other hand he also played the role of a compassionate listener for Yozo. The old monk would occasionally direct his glaring white eyes toward Yozo and the others while uttering words that seemed like pointed remarks toward nonbelievers when explaining others’ circumstances; but when Yozo’s turn came and he approached, the monk’s demeanor shifted to one of pitying the unfortunate as he meticulously rolled crystal beads and counted his rosary.

“This person will surely return to you. She will come back as though clinging to the hand of a compassionate father. Even if you were to go yourself, now is too soon. You would do well to wait until month’s end. By then, word shall come.”

The diviner said.

In any case, Yozo decided to visit Yoko’s house again and sent a reply. And on the evening of the following day, he packed some souvenirs into a trunk and departed from Ueno. The truth was that Yoko had come out as far as a hot spring near Fukushima, where she and Yozo had arranged to meet, so now that he found himself riding the train this way, he dreaded encountering her family and the townspeople yet again. However, when he arrived at the station the next afternoon, Yoko’s sisters and brothers were also there to meet him, showing no particular change from the first time. He settled once again into that same detached room. In addition to Rumiko, there were two children she had just retrieved from her stepmother’s care. Restless about something, Yoko said “Professor…”, inviting him out before crossing the earthen-floored area and heading upstairs. Without much thought, he followed her up.

Yoko offered him a chair on the engawa and explained the circumstances of how she had retrieved the children. The stepmother, who had returned to her family home in Yamate town not far from here, already had two children of her own and would often treat Yoko’s children harshly. “She was a maid I took under my wing and employed during my time in Hokkaido.” “Back then, she was kind to the children as well—though she was an ugly woman, she was a loyal maid, you know.” “Matsukawa apparently left a considerable amount in her care.” “They’re apparently supposed to send for them once they’ve settled in Shanghai, but those children weren’t even being properly fed.”

“Did you bring them here?” “I marched in and had it out with her.” “I can’t hold my head up in front of her, you know.” “And so from now on—” “I won’t cause you any trouble, Professor.”

“……”

“Professor, don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I met him.” Yozo stiffened. This concerned Akimoto—someone Yozo himself had once met. “Who?” he demanded. “I need money to raise the children.” With terrifying suddenness, Yozo seized Yoko’s shoulders and shook her violently, driving her toward the wall. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cried. “Don’t rage like this! Am I truly so wretched?”

Eventually, Yozo stepped back and sat down in the chair. As they remained like that, Rumiko came climbing up the stairway calling, “Mama! Mama!” “Rumiko-chan went downstairs,” Yoko said gently. “Mama, I need to talk to Uncle right now.”

Before long, Yoko changed the subject as though she’d completely forgotten about it. Things like how her younger sister was soon to be sent off to Taiwan by her mother to marry her fiancé, and how it was fine for her to stay on leisurely until her mother returned… While Yozo sensed a gray path ahead, just being in Yoko’s presence as she spoke cheerfully momentarily eased his heart. It was like a refreshing sea breeze.

IX

Yozo’s current visit lasted far longer than his previous one, and while mutual familiarity had grown between them, it was equally true that both parties felt weariness in turn—so much so that by the end, even the surrounding atmosphere had become something oppressive to endure, with dark clouds looming so palpably they could not be overlooked. The reason for his delayed return was Yoko’s anal fistula—a condition she had only recently come to fully recognize—which had abruptly worsened, assailing her with searing, nerve-piercing pain alongside a fever exceeding forty degrees; he could not bring himself to abandon her to this state and thus spent day after listless day steeped in gloom.

When they first arrived, they would often go down to the beach, ride a small boat along the river’s current, or take the train to a beautiful coastline an hour or two away for picnics with a large group. There were also days when he spent his time reluctantly writing characters on colored paper and silk cloth that various people brought in. Among those people were clerks from the shipping agency days and old men who cultivated the fields of Yoko’s family. Running around the sprawling parlor were Rumiko’s young sisters and brothers—who closely resembled Yoko’s ex-husband—and with Yoko’s youngest sister joining in, children’s song dances would sometimes begin. Yoko clapped her hands in time as she sang with an air of utter happiness. There were times when they took the children by the hand to see night stalls in bustling districts; often they walked dim backstreets alone or sipped tea at cafés along thoroughfares. Yoko’s family had once run salt and metalware shops along the town’s main street—her handsome father being an adopted son-in-law—yet he proved an honest and diligent man of business acumen who expanded their fields and holdings; even after railways supplanted shipping routes and trade declined, he persisted in conducting deals across regions while burdened by illness. Shortly after Rumiko was born—though ambiguity lingers whether “her” refers maternally or paternally—her grandfather died; yet his particular fondness for Yoko could still be heard in her tone when recounting daily life. Given this girls’ school had roiled education circles with student homosexual affairs later sparking teacher-pupil scandals—and considering how he lavished funds on her flamboyant wedding preparations and three-day feast despite her likely non-virginal state—one could imagine how her father’s love stoked her aspirations.

According to Yoko’s account, the day after the wedding, she had offered strong brewed tea to Matsukawa—still hungover from the previous night’s drinking—in a room on the second floor. Both body and soul, she felt she had wholly given herself to him. She placed one hand on the tatami and poured Kyuuko’s tea into the teacup. She entered his bedroom after one in the morning. Until that moment, he had been receiving cups passed around from all sides in the banquet hall, so he ended up in a deep slumber until the window grew pale with dawn, completely unaware. As Yoko, having finished her morning makeup, sat facing Matsukawa, there came the sudden sound of footsteps on the staircase, and the man who had originally arranged their marriage—a cousin of Yoko’s—appeared halfway up.

“Well now, aren’t you putting on quite the devoted wife act.” “This one’s been thoroughly taken in.” The cousin—a scion from a wealthy family serving as prefectural assemblyman—declared this, his eyes widening at the newlyweds whose faces had flushed crimson. According to Yoko’s own intricately woven accounts, her past romantic history with this cousin and the triangular emotional entanglements that arose when she accompanied the newlyweds—along with her mother—to Otaru formed a bewitching romance akin to something from a Maupassant novel. On one desolate rainy evening at a wayside inn, Yoko’s coquettish manner toward her cousin abruptly stoked Matsukawa’s jealousy into an uncontrollable blaze. Claiming they needed to talk, he suddenly dragged Yoko into a dimly lit adjoining room.

“I am your husband!” He said this and passionately caressed Yoko until she trembled violently.

Even after arriving, the cousin remained in the town for some time. And night after night, he indulged in alcohol and women. One day, as Yoko and Yozo were engrossed in discussing literature in the detached cottage, her mother appeared at the entrance of the adjoining room from the earthen floor area and exclaimed hurriedly that Rumiko’s stepmother and two students had just arrived by car in this old snow-covered town—they must have come to retaliate and take back the children.

“Right!” At that time, Yoko had a slight fever and looked haggard, but when it came to the children—like a mother cat protecting her kitten—she hurriedly slipped into her geta and dashed toward the main house. Yozo pricked up his ears and stayed still, wondering what would happen. But Yoko’s voice—now as voluble as oil paper set ablaze—was carried by the wind. Though he couldn’t make out coherent phrases, fragments gradually reached him. Since the stepmother had originally been a maid Yoko herself had trusted, she seemed to treat her like a fool from the outset—her manner less that of negotiating with Matsukawa’s second wife than of a mistress scolding a servant. Yet with not a shred of venomous hatred to fuel conflict, the stepmother could only bow her head in resignation, while the students carried on just as they always had! With an air of *such things*, they listened while laughing it off. When that happened, even her once-polished city dialect—so reminiscent of romantic novel banter—completely shed its veneer, laying bare a coarse country accent as vulgar words burst from her thin lips without end. Suddenly came a rustling sound—over the boundary plank fence where pomegranate branches grew thick, neighbors’ faces began appearing one after another. From there, the room where Yozo sat was fully exposed. Feeling self-conscious, Yozo abruptly went out to the parlor. Yoko sat by the hearth with one knee raised like a gang boss,

“If you think someone like you is loved by Mr. Matsukawa, that’s a colossal mistake.” “Even now, if I wanted to take him back, I could do it anytime.” The words clung to his ears like burrs. As the squall quieted, the students mollified the boys darting about; the stepmother—her skin sun-darkened and eyes faintly protuberant—bowed brusquely and withdrew; while Yoko, her expression loosening at the children’s playacting, maintained cordiality toward the students. Soon enough, they too departed after downing two or three beers with squid sashimi and crabs heaped whole on platters.

That evening, as Yozo wrote a short piece for a Tokyo newspaper under a lamp that noisily attracted swarms of insects, Yoko began running a fever and took to bed in the room facing the street next to the shop—accessible from the parlor where the Buddhist altar stood. When touched, her forehead and hands were as hot as fire. Her face was flushed red, her eyes bloodshot.

“Does it hurt?” “Terribly.” “I have a fever of forty degrees!” “Plus, my bottom burns like it’s being stabbed with a blade—I can hardly breathe.” “It’s an anal fistula after all.” Since Yozo too had undergone surgery for an anal fistula, he could fully sympathize with her pain. She panted with flame-like intensity, but when the pain became unbearable, she suddenly sat bolt upright as if springing up. When that became unbearable, she would leave the mosquito net and stand on the veranda or kneel in seiza.

Of course, this was not the first night of suffering. For several days now, she had been aware of the pain around her anus and had been running a slight fever, but to the eye, the small isolated swelling—with its slightly inflamed base—was not yet pronounced enough to be immediately identified as an anal fistula. “It might be hemorrhoids.” He had said. Even afterward, they remained intermittently concerned, but even with her slight fever, their spiritual anguish ate so deeply into their inner selves that their affection stagnated like thick muddy sediment—and his harshness toward her grew severe, to an extent that even Yoko’s heart couldn’t bear it. Occasionally she would be called by her sister and leave the detached room, crossing the earthen floor to go to the main house—not returning for some time—but when she did come back, there was nothing particularly unusual about her demeanor.

“That you can’t trust me... What an utterly wretched man you are, Professor.” Yoko would say such things, but given the nature of their surroundings, their conflicts remained internalized, never erupting into loud arguments.

Before long, the hemorrhoid suddenly swelled up and began to discharge pus.

Yozo, feeling awkward about lying sprawled beside her, was about to leave the mosquito net when she, delirious with fever as if in a dream, “Stay a little longer…” she stopped him. By morning, she had calmed somewhat, dozing off and on as the cool breeze from the narrow roji garden brushed against her hands and feet—but this respite lasted only briefly. The time when she went to see Dr. K, a familiar gynecologist, was still early enough to go by rickshaw, when the pain wasn’t yet severe enough to make her leap up, and her fever wasn’t too high. It was through this examination that they definitively identified it as an anal fistula, and the immediate treatment was to apply a cooling agent to reduce the swelling while they still could, but the abscess only festered and spread further. Therefore, today Yoko had also decided to call upon the director—a literary-inclined internal medicine scholar with whom she was ordinarily acquainted and who had once taken Yozo to visit his residence adjoining the hospital.

After completing his hospital rounds, the doctor came by rickshaw. At that time, Yoko’s bed had been moved to a bright six-tatami room facing the inner courtyard—located in the back of the tea room that usually served as her mother’s living space—and Yozo was keeping watch by her side. He had been anxiously wondering whether he should leave after hearing the diagnosis results, but the director—pressing his finger against the painful swelling below and doing something— “It’s already suppurated.” “This will hurt.”

he said with a smile,

“Have you ever had surgery before?” “In Hokkaido, I had my breast removed, you see.” “Another surgery now, Professor.” “This is what we call perianal inflammation.” “Given how things are now, there’s no choice but to operate.”

“Should we go to a surgical hospital to have it cut?” “That would be ideal, but well—it doesn’t seem too large yet. Since Dr. K has already examined you, the two of us can handle it.” “Will it be local anesthesia or something?” “I’m not sure.” “If you can endure five or ten minutes, it probably won’t even come to that.” “Considering the throbbing pain you’ve been enduring, this will be nothing at all.”

After such exchanges continued for a while, it was ultimately decided to have it cut out completely in one go. “The only solution for an anal fistula is cutting it out,” said the director. “I still consider my own surgery to have been the right decision. If excision doesn’t work, leaving it untreated would be worse still. You’d just be relentlessly cornered by the pain.” As they spoke these uneventful words, Yozo suddenly recalled a time twelve or thirteen years prior—when his ravaged stomach and intestines had forced him to lie supine in bed for three weeks following surgery, his body emaciated beyond recognition. His thirteen-year-old eldest son and eleven-year-old eldest daughter would occasionally visit him then, though his wasting was so severe that some had already half abandoned hope. That eldest daughter—the one who had prayed so earnestly—died less than a year later. Even now, her young face remained etched in his soul: that worried expression tinged with bashfulness. Had she lived, how would she have judged this incident involving her father that occurred right after her mother’s death? The ache of connecting with dead children’s souls cut deeper than that of living ones.

By comparison, one could say that over twenty-five years of married life, his wife’s love had been relatively requited. The next day, around three o'clock, the two doctors arrived together. They laid out the disinfecting equipment, scalpels, and tweezers they had brought packed in a folding bag atop the waterproof cloth spread on the veranda, their manner utterly casual. Summer had already begun fading into late summer's end, and here in particular, the sunlight always carried a shadow. Within that light, the brutal procedure was performed.

Following the doctor’s instructions, Yozo pinned down Yoko’s flank firmly with his knee while using both hands to clamp her thighs with all his strength—but when the scalpel began cutting into the abscess, Yoko let out a piercing scream and tried to leap up. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!” Instantaneously, greasy sweat seeped out across her forehead and nose. The gynecologist holding the scalpel was startled and momentarily withdrew his hand.—This time, the internal medicine director plunged the scalpel into the rosy-hued flesh. Yoko was moaning as though her breath might give out at any moment, but by the time Yozo—who had turned his face away—withdrew, the wound had already been disinfected. Soon, the smell of iodoform filled the air, and gauze was applied.

By the time the doctor had packed up his instruments and left, even a faint smile had appeared on Yoko’s face. And from that moment, her fever suddenly dropped. With the kind services of his mother and brother, Yozo spent one day racing around in a taxi to explore scenic spots in the Yamate area at a suitable distance from town—eating river fish at a traditional restaurant by a lotus pond, venturing into nearby mountains to float a boat on a lake in the light rain, and walking along the water’s edge at the mountain’s base, which held the serene charm of an antiquated Western painting from the Middle Ages—returning at dusk. Thus another two or three days passed.

At such moments, a shadow crossed Yozo’s mind—the suspicion that someone had always been by Yoko’s side until now—but Yoko, in contrast, knelt on one knee outside the mosquito net and whispered heartfelt words to him. “If this were an ordinary romance, no one would say a word about it.” “The mere chance that two people of different ages met—what else could that be but a miracle?” However, Yozo could not help but also consider the true meaning hidden within those words. If he endured three years, five years—at most ten—Yozo too would eventually exit this stage. And all accounts would be settled. By then, she would have skillfully ridden the tide of journalism, and another happy married life would be waiting for her.

Yozo was now in his study, diligently running his pen across the paper.

As he wrote, a surge of sentiment welled up within him, hot tears seeping out until the characters became invisible. He wiped away tears with his fingertips and the backs of his hands as he continued writing. His heart swelled with thoughts of the young children sleeping peacefully in the next room at dawn's pleasant hour. The telegram from Yoko that he had received that evening lay at the desk's edge. ARRIVE TOMORROW SEVEN OCLOCK That was what it said. Two weeks had already passed since returning from shaking hands with her at her sickbed, but during that time his heart—thoroughly tormented—was gradually regaining normalcy. Here, he had resolved to rebuild himself completely. As his heart leaned in that direction, he suddenly felt his burden lighten, as though a path were opening before him.

He had been working in just a short-sleeved yukata with the wooden door left wide open, but even after finishing his writing as the sparrows’ chirping grew noticeable, the unfading emotion still tightened his chest.

When he took the telegram in hand, he felt that what he had been waiting for had finally arrived—but he was also flustered. “…I’ve made enough preparations to study near you for a year or two…” It had already been three or four days since Yozo had received that letter from her containing those words, but having had to complete two works in quick succession, even he—who had been writing to her so frequently—had yet to send a reply. The truth was, he was utterly exhausted by this affair. More suffering than pleasure—and since that suffering itself was pleasure, meaning pleasure became suffering—and without suffering one might succumb to ennui; even so, he found himself here parched with longing to breathe in the blue sky.

As an intermission to this incident, he would occasionally go to Sayoko’s waterside house to distract himself from the desolation. At that time, his sister—who had always been in the middle rooms or tea rooms—had returned to the countryside, and he was no longer being taken exclusively to the guest rooms.

At the appointed time, Sayoko would enter the bath, then sit before the mirror. She thickly applied makeup to her face, lightly brushed ink on her eyebrows, and though she used little eyeshadow, dyed her lips pomegranate-red with a rouge stick. Her eyes and brows were set wide apart, and though the bridge of her upturned nose rose somewhat unnaturally from its base, it was not striking enough to cause concern. Yet her eyes—shining like planets—nonetheless imparted an air of instability, while her overall countenance retained a relaxed quality, perhaps owing to her Nara birth. Her pride in her beauty remained unbroken, and it seemed to her that countless splendid prospects lay ahead. She felt desperate to try something—anything. Writing novels being one such aspiration, Yozo had even been shown a handbox filled with her scattered manuscripts.

"I believe there’s nothing I can’t do if I put my mind to it, but novels do seem rather difficult, don’t they?" "It doesn’t work out like manipulating men." "Oh, I wouldn’t do such a thing."

Once her makeup was done, she would change into a kimono and appear in the guest rooms herself, in a manner reminiscent of an actress making her backstage entrance. After attending to one or two guest rooms, she would invariably be drunk. At times—eyes bleary from gulped whisky, steps slightly unsteady, speech tending to slur—she would draw near to Yozo in a languid state.

“That’s quite something.” Yozo, unable to remain indifferent, “You drink quite a lot, don’t you? Is it alright to drink like that?”

“I’m fine—that little bit of whisky. When I drink too much, it gets bad.” “O-Kami-san!” A voice called from the hallway. “They’re all leaving now.” Yet on such nights, he could never tell where she slept. Feeling he might be hindering her work, he would ask them to call a taxi—though it was not unusual for them to talk late into the night with an electric lamp by their pillows, listening to the creak of oars on water in the deepening dark.

One day, Yozo left through her gate together with Sayoko. “Professor, if you’re free today, would you accompany me to Kanda? I want to have my fortune told there.” “Of course. Depending on circumstances, I might do the same. What are you having your fortune told about?” “There’s nothing immediate, really—but I feel peculiar. It’s been such a long-standing relationship—we even kept house together in the past. There’s nothing particular about it now. Yet when they flee, I pursue; when I retreat, they give chase—just when you think it’s severed, time passes and it reconnects... How strange it all is.”

Sayoko was more subdued than usual. “What kind of person is he?” “He hasn’t been well at all lately.” Yozo wanted to probe what kind of man Sayoko favored, but she merely said that much and did not offer even a hint of who that partner might be. Yet much later, one evening when Yozo sat beside an oversized rosewood brazier in the tearoom, the place was unusually crowded with guests. The kitchen bustled nonstop—calls to restaurants rang out incessantly—and even Sayoko, still in her everyday clothes, busied herself heating sake and ferrying items about. Then abruptly, a man slid open the entranceway fusuma and stepped in, clad in a padded robe with a toothpick dangling from his lips.

"Ah, so this is him." In an instant, Yozo's sixth sense stirred—but no sooner did he notice than Sayoko, grinning slyly, abruptly led the man away. Three or four more years passed, and he often crossed paths with that man in Sayoko's second-floor room and began visiting Yozo's house; by that time, he too had grown quite shabby in appearance, aged beyond recognition. And by that time, Yozo had come to learn many things. He realized that pulling her out from Hon Kurube's house had also been his revenge for having been scalded in the past.

Now, Sayoko had broken away from Kurube—who had intended to start a new life with her, even considering marriage and taking her back to his homeland—in order to begin one with him; yet upon being lured into this arrangement, she found her expectations utterly betrayed. To begin a new life with her current partner, Sayoko’s lifestyle was a bit too extravagant, and her tastes leaned too garishly Western. Thus, Sayoko began this hospitality business exactly as she had intended.

After emerging onto Kinzabashi-dori—still not yet properly laid out—Sayoko hailed a one-yen taxi and decided to go as far as Kanda Station’s viaduct underpass. However, since the fortune-teller called each person up to the second floor individually, Yozo waited downstairs while Sayoko had her reading done. Before long, Sayoko came down. Her expression showed no change from before she had her fortune told. Eventually, Yozo too decided to have his fortune told. “The compatibility is most favorable. However, this person lacks stability. Unless you supervise her quite strictly, problems are prone to arise.”

The fortune-teller continued. It concerned Yoko. When they left that place, neither showed interest in discussing the fortune-telling results; after wandering through the streets for a while, they returned together to Yozo's study. Sayoko sat before the rosewood desk and was browsing through magazines when—

“Professor, I was hoping you could write something for me.” “I’ll write something, but my work won’t end up in your room." “I’ll bring you something before long.” “That would be rather harsh otherwise.” “We’ll replace them gradually, you know.” Then their conversation shifted to the construction of her house, touching on the purchase price when she took it over and the costs involved—some parts requiring renovation while others needed entirely new construction.

Yozo looked around the smoke-darkened old room as if seeing it anew.

“I really need to do something about this house.”

“Well, if you do decide to build, you should have that carpenter do the work.” “He’s the master carpenter who works for Toriyaso on Hirokoji, you know.”

That grand bourgeois poultry restaurant came to have some connection with her man, and this too gradually became clear afterward.

It was at that time that he went to have dinner, taking his youngest daughter along to see the elaborate architecture and garden of that Toriyaso poultry restaurant. With a splendid grove of Chinese fan palms as the distant backdrop, water filled the entire garden, cascading over rock formations like a crystal curtain. As dusk settled, the lantern light filtering through the lush green thickets of winter bamboo lent a refreshing coolness to the scene. Innumerable black and red carp were swimming effortlessly beneath the handrail where the water lapped in. Cherry blossom tofu, wasabi-marinated chicken, and bowl-shaped dishes were arranged on the dining table. The figure of Sayoko, refined in her black crepe haori, seemed somewhat chilly, but she had barely touched her chopsticks.

Sakiko seemed unaccustomed to both the people and the place, and though she didn’t look particularly happy, she kept smiling the entire time. “Once, when Mr. Kurube and I suddenly decided to go to Nikko on some impulse, we made it to Ueno Station just fine, but I ended up forgetting my purse.” “There was no time, so I came to this house and explained the situation, and they silently covered three hundred yen for me once, you know.”

With such topics coming up, on their way back, the three of them walked along Hirokoji where night stalls lined the street. Sayoko was holding the child's hand, but even as they walked like that, she seemed to shrink from public view.

Abruptly, the conversation turned to Yoko. “I’ve grown thoroughly sick of it. I think I’ll put an end to it.” “Put an end to it.” “Then will you take over?” In a voice that lacked confidence, “I will take over.” At that moment, Yozo wasn’t particularly counting on that—but he did feel that now, with such a playmate having entered the picture, was the opportune time to part ways with Yoko. So he neglected to go meet her, instead slipping into the mosquito net and lying down his weary body. He kept his eyes tightly shut.

The gentle slope of a deep pine forest where he had often walked with Yoko came to mind—a quiet, sunlit mountain covered in pines, perfectly suited for townsfolk's spring and autumn picnics. Towering pine trees stood sparse yet majestic, their canopies shielding against summer's heat. For Yoko, who never wearied of recounting childhood joys, this place brimmed with nostalgia. At the cliff's upper edge amidst mixed growths, Japanese pepper trees bore fruit while bush clover and pampas grass grew thickly nearby. The tide's murmur lingered close at hand. Through gaps in pine boughs stretched skies of crystalline purity unseen in Tokyo—Yozo, country-raised, found more kinship with this hushed nature than any grand vista ever stirred him. Clad in straw sandals, they'd roamed wild through those woods like feral children.

Crossing the river behind Yoko's house revealed an area reminiscent of snow country's rural landscape—a place with a rough-edged atmosphere where groves stood thickly, paths lay buried under grass, and houses blurring the line between farmsteads and townhomes could be seen among them. Yoko entered the dirt-floored entryway of one such poor dwelling and peered inside, saying, "Excuse me." There sat an old woman who divined fortunes by observing candle flame movements, hunched in a damp dim room where she promptly began reading Yoko's fate. She wore disheveled hair, offered a prayer before the altar, then stared at the flame's wavering with eyes like those possessed by a deity.

“Look to someone from the east,” “That person will help you.” The old woman had offered this suggestive hint in her country dialect. East from here could only mean Akimoto—the wealthy poet of established means. Yozo wasn’t entirely unaware that Yoko’s vigorous return to Tokyo now had such a patron waiting in the wings, yet his mood remained shadowed by gloom. Accompanied by Shima no Tasogare—a young literary figure from town who happened to be Yoko’s cousin—Yozo boarded the homebound train feeling as though he’d wandered onto some dark path leading nowhere.

Now that his distress had eased somewhat, he still wavered between going to meet her or abandoning the idea altogether. Yet when he considered the vigor in those letters she had sent—written with bold strokes on scroll paper while lying on her sickbed, detailing her postoperative recovery—he became too restless to even lie still, let alone sleep.

After changing into a kimono and grabbing his walking stick, he exited the gate and turned the corner of the side street. Before he had walked even ten ken, he encountered her figure approaching with a smile. Her petite form, clad in an old-fashioned small-patterned ro-shibori summer kimono, seeped into his vision with nostalgic familiarity. Yoko gazed at Yozo for a while with dejected eyes that clung to him like a child seeking a benevolent father. “Professor, you look young.”

It seemed she hadn’t fully recovered yet—her face as pale as a silkworm with a faint, sickly flush spreading across it, her eyes glistening. Yozo couldn’t quite maintain an indifferent demeanor, but Yoko turned to look back toward Yotsuji Square.

“I’ve only brought the two girls with me.” “And Mother also provided a maid.” “I must find a house right away.” As she said this and turned back toward the automobile, at that moment the young children who had emerged from the car and the maid carrying a trunk approached Yoko, who stood waiting there. “Now, bow to Uncle.” The children bobbed their heads in bows, beaming all the while, but the mother’s struggle to gather these children and begin a new life was no easy task. That too was merely an artistic blueprint for living that Yoko—with her abundance of dreams and tendency not to dwell on inconveniences—had sketched out.

In the next alley parallel to the narrow backstreet where Yozo had lived for thirty years, a house was quickly found. After hiring his regular cart driver to transport her belongings—the chest of drawers and mirror stand they had bought together by the pond, the bookcase with pink fabric ruffled on its glass doors, the trunk, and the futon wrapped in a large hollyhock-patterned cloth that had been stored at the back of his house—Yoko gathered the children and vacated the neighboring boardinghouse.

Having grown up in a rural household governed by the extended-family system, for Yoko, creating a new world of her own there with the children for the first time must have been nothing short of delightful. Even the rural home could no longer be governed entirely by her mother’s will. The heir—her brother’s family—had left that remote house and established themselves in a quiet residential district at the heart of the town. However much they loved this sister of theirs, they could not possibly approve of her actions, which so often became the subject of public gossip. They had wanted to give her enough capital to start a business and have her stay quietly in the countryside, or perhaps remarry into some respectable household and settle down—but they understood all too well that Yoko was not one to smolder idly in rural obscurity. Yoko had often caused her brother and mother worry, and even when she came out this time, she had only paid some expenses herself. The fact that she, bedridden, often took money from her old wallet also sometimes came to Yozo’s notice. Yozo, whose stay had dragged on, was not entirely unaware that he needed to do something—but even when he once paid a modest bill at a restaurant, it had caused such complications for her brother that he found himself at a loss for what to do.

The place where Yoko and the others settled was a narrow single-story house, but with a small courtyard garden to the south that gave it an airy layout. There was a bay window perfect for displaying flowers, its white curtains perpetually fluttering in the wind. Moreover, Yoko possessed a knack for enlivening rooms—with literary-girl sensibilities, she would arrange rattan chairs on the engawa veranda or position an elegant shaded lamp by the desk, transforming the space as skillfully as one might compose a color woodblock print.

However, her complexion was still pale, and she couldn't endure sitting for long periods. The wound had not yet fully healed, so medicine, tweezers, and gauze were necessary. "Professor, I'm sorry, but it's really hard to do with just the mirror. Could you change the gauze for me?" "Ah, sure." Having said that, Yozo placed a zabuton cushion in the bright area of the engawa veranda and peered at her surgical wound as she lay on her back. While appearing mostly adhered in a pale purple hue, when he probed, there was a hole that seemed to go deep, from which lymph-like fluid had seeped in. Yozo did as instructed, gently wiping the area with alcohol-disinfected tweezers, applying gauze, and securing it with a slenderly cut pick to keep it from falling off.

Whenever the tweezers' tip even slightly touched it, she would cry out, "Ouch!"

“Thank you so much.”

Yoko would try to sit up, but day after day only brought the same repetitions without progress. At times Yozo would arrange pillows beside the children under a single cramped mosquito net in the back room. But this being her household—with children and a maid besides—he found no mental respite. Moreover, Yoko would occasionally regard him with intruder's eyes, rendering harmony unattainable. He would emerge brusquely in mild irritation, yet even his old study offered no calm. There were instances when he turned back to slap her pale cheek within the mosquito net. Yoko simply stared blankly at him, face frozen in stunned silence.

Moreover, Yoko was not always at home; when Yozo went there, he might find only a maid keeping house or the door shut. Around that time, Yozo would often take her out to Ginza or Kanda, having her sit on his lap as he drove around doing errands. Things like buying a grandfather clock, having a ring remade, or purchasing cosmetics. Moreover, the habit of dining out had taken hold, and they often hailed taxis to first-class restaurants. The reason was this: Yozo’s kitchen, left entirely to two maids, had fallen into utter disarray. Heaps of excess vegetables rotted beneath the sink; perfectly usable utensils lay discarded about; cheap dishes and bowls were bought indiscriminately. Simmered fish from distant seas turned cloyingly sweet like sugared preserves, while pickled vegetables reeked like stagnant ditches. Moreover, items frequently went missing, and the purposes for which petty cash was handed out tended to be unclear; but given the extreme shortage of maids at that time, there was nothing to do but turn a blind eye.

However, it wasn't always settled that Yozo would pay at restaurants. Rather, in most cases, Yoko would produce a cloth purse from her obi and declare, "Let me pay," handling the bill with practiced generosity. She gave the impression of possessing some inexhaustible treasury. Before long, a cool breeze began blowing. Yoko had moved from her second boardinghouse relocation into a two-story house directly facing Yozo's residence. By then, through his connections, she had begun serializing a work in a women's literary magazine—though her wound, which had seemed temporarily healed, remained unclosed, with forgotten pains now resurfacing. Ultimately, the scalpels of internists and gynecologists had proven too timid. A radical surgical redo became necessary. While Yozo privately considered introducing her to an eminent surgeon, Yoko's traumatic experiences with crude provincial treatments had left her thoroughly wary.

“Rather than that, I think I’ll go to a hot spring. How about Yugawara?”

Yoko brought it up one day. “I guess so.” “Do you have the money?” “I won’t trouble you, Professor. If we have four hundred yen for two people, couldn’t we stay for about two weeks?”

Yozo also made some preparations and boarded the train from Tokyo Station the following afternoon. Yoko had packed items like the rubber ring appliance she had recently started using into the suitcase, wearing a black haori over the uniquely woven lined kimono they had found together at the department store. Yozo, dressed in formal attire—which his late wife had considerately made for him without permission and which he rarely wore—settled into the crowded second-class train car.

Ten

In Yugawara, they settled into an ordinary room at N Inn, but all traces had vanished from when Yozo had stayed there for less than a month with a friend and disciples during the season when golden oranges ripened on the hills. The location had been expanded deeper into the mountainside, now fully transformed into a first-class establishment. The heir who used to guide them around various places had long since died, and the girl who used to cause commotions with friends had been married off elsewhere, becoming a mother to several children. Yozo—who couldn't drink and had no disciples—soon sank into complete loneliness. Exhausted from fending off drunken friends who accosted him, his nerves frayed raw—though looking back now, even that had been his pitiable former self. In retrospect, the role he now played might have been even uglier than that.

Yoko, as if grateful to have been brought here upon arriving, fidgeted restlessly before taking a bath and, after changing her usual gauze dressing, crossed the bridge to stroll through this hot spring town. When he reached the town center, he looked around the area with faint nostalgia. Then stopping before a compact inn,

“There used to be a billiard hall here. The master had marvelous skill—I learned how to hold a cue from him, but even after days of practice, I never got the hang of it. Can you play?” “I did play in Hokkaido. Back then we wives had all sorts of social gatherings—we even danced sometimes. Taught by Mr.S——’s younger brother’s wife, the agricultural scientist’s wife.”

Yoko never lacked material for romantic tales, no matter the circumstances. Stories like the romantic episodes between that grotesque wife and her younger brother at the local merchant marine school; or how this brother had an older lover who now supported herself through flower arrangement and tea ceremony while raising the child she’d had with him; or how Yoko, when hospitalized to have a breast abscess incised, developed feelings for the surgeon who performed the procedure—only to later stagger to his hospital unsteadily and be rejected. At other times, she would suddenly disappear with her manuscript paper, causing a commotion and leading to incidents that became gossip fodder for newspapers—such things were not uncommon.

At the hour when dim electric lights lit up the town, they returned to the inn and sat down to a cheerful meal. Whether imagined or not, Yozo felt something oppressive in the sharp-eyed clerks' gazes whenever passing through the entrance, while Yoko ordered fruit desserts from maids with the ease of one accustomed to their service, all while listening for any commotion in adjoining rooms that might signal reporters. Yet the strongly stimulating hot spring proved counterproductive for her. After three days of soaking and changing gauze, the pain only intensified until she had to lie down even by day, spreading out bedding. Until yesterday she'd endured sporadic discomfort to explore Okura Park—climbing steps through tinted trees, descending to rock-framed streams, walking paths through fields of scattered cockscombs and bush clovers, hiking to Fudo Falls where water slicked cliff bases beneath autumn skies hazed with bonfire smoke over shallow hills. Now she frowned as if brought to some absurd place, her mood turning foul. When this happened, Yozo too felt like some wrongdoer, his weak heart aching secretly. Being near her—teary-eyed and silent, or dozing toward the wall only to startle awake—gradually filled him with melancholy.

Another evening, after using the tweezers, Yozo took a bath and sat down at the dining table under a desolate electric light. Yoko was lying beside him with feverish eyes. Her cheeks had flushed bright red. At this point, she put on airs of bourgeois refinement inherited from her mother while seemingly forgetting they had come to this hot spring using money coerced from rural patron Akimoto—Yozo reflexively felt she might even come to resent his calmly indifferent face. But then he also sensed there was no need for such paranoid speculation, and instead gazed at the dishes the maid was laying out before them.

“I’m not eating anything.” She seemed to answer with a faint look that she wouldn’t eat, but as Yozo picked at his meal with apparent distaste, Yoko appeared to feel a stinging pain, letting out a thin moan and contorting her face. He kept a rigid expression while pondering other matters and did not turn toward her.

"How can you sit there eating so calmly while someone's suffering like this? Some esteemed veteran you are!" Yozo flinched. Then he snapped. He left the table with his meal half-eaten, folded his change of clothes along with scattered books and manuscript papers into his bag, then removed his padded robe and prepared to leave. "I didn't come here to nurse you." "What a nuisance!" "You can handle it alone."

Yozo fumed, asked about the train times over the phone, and struck a match to light his cigarette. The clerk came over, “Are you departing, sir?” “I’ve got some business to take care of.” The clerk tilted his head slightly, suggesting that if he hurried, he could make the last train, but Yozo couldn’t stay still. When the automobile roared to life, he threw on his Inverness coat and hurriedly left the room. But once the car began moving, he felt an odd tug at his conscience—fully aware of this awkward situation yet half-hoping he might miss the train. He considered driving to Atami instead, yet somehow felt it would be more pleasant to return home and lie down in his study.

The car rattled as it sped along the stone-strewn road. Yozo nearly rolled over several times, and with the wind blowing, the jolting nearly made him hit his head against the window frame—in that instant, his hat flew out through the half-lowered window. As if it had been thrown on purpose. "You, my hat just flew off." The driver stopped the car and searched through the windy thicket, but it took no more than two minutes.

The station lights came into close view. And just as they were about to enter the station square, the sound of a train moving could be heard. Yozo returned to the room with the air of someone who had pulled off some mischief.

“Professor, say ‘orange’ like that!” Before long, Yoko too rose from her sickbed. Preparations for Yoko’s hospitalization required considerable time. As she happened to be serializing a novel in a women’s magazine, she needed to stockpile two months’ worth of installments; wanting to secure some brilliant future for Rumiko, her immediate aspiration became having the girl live as an apprentice under Yukie—the dancer who kept forging new artistic paths while maintaining favorable social standing—thus once arrangements were complete, this request too had to be made. Most crucially, she needed her mother to come.

Yoko had been lying down even on the return trip from Yugawara due to the train's jolting. When they alighted at Odawara Station, her face turned deathly pale—her heart seemed to have stopped, leaving her unable to speak or see. Supported by Yozo's hand, she was led into a rest house beside the station where she lay limp as if dead. Finally carried by men into a quiet back room, she slept briefly until the cold greasy sweat soaking her forehead subsided and her rapid pulse somewhat calmed. She tried every means to avoid the painful surgery, only to come instead to feel its necessity acutely.

One day, Yoko visited Yukie wearing a dark gray kosode with interlocking arrowhead patterns and an obi of green ground adorned with red and ocher arabesques, carrying Yozo’s letter in her breast and bringing Rumiko along. Yukie had gladly agreed to take her in as a live-in apprentice, but since she composed poetry with elegant penmanship and held fervor for literature, Yoko too found their conversation flowing like that of old confidants. Yozo, led by Yoko, went to observe the rehearsal one evening not long after that.

“I too wanted to write novels so desperately, you know.” In her cozy room cluttered with ornate decorations, Yozo listened to her artistic ambiance and passionate words reminiscent of northerners while being treated to an elegant dinner—yet the resolve and vitality required to succeed in the arts were nothing ordinary. When the conversation turned to her past love affairs, her clear eyes suddenly overflowed with passion.

However, she was not alone. There was Kiyokawa, a young literary figure whose name Yozo had long known by reputation. When Yukie first introduced him - a man who carried himself like the young master of a downtown household - Yozo realized this must be her youthful lover even as he momentarily found their pairing oddly disquieting, sensing some faint unease. "This suits Yoko perfectly."

Yozo thought this. The padded robe Yoko had made to wear in the hospital room—with its coarse stripes of dull crimson and navy—had begun showing slight stains from being worn constantly; yet even as November passed its midpoint, she still lay confined to the back room on the second floor, alternating between sleep and wakefulness. By then, the gauze replacements could no longer keep pace; at times she would frantically shake her bobbed head, stamp her feet, and pace wildly about the room to distract from the pain. She used a makeshift ointment to somewhat ease the pain. Yozo often slept beside her, but one night he heard from her lips that Akimoto would be coming to Tokyo under the pretext of visiting her.

“That person comes to Tokyo sometimes, you know.”

Yoko said casually.

“Even if he comes, it’ll only be for two or three days.” “But since I’m receiving money from him, let me go just this once, okay?” It was thought to be a sick visit, or perhaps to check on Yoko’s movements, but there had been no change in her demeanor.

From the second floor overlooking Yozo’s garden, smoke from a bonfire rose daily. Winter had deepened somewhat, and the roof-raising for the addition had been completed. He had reached a point where he absolutely had to do something about the house.

Eleven One afternoon, with Yozo’s consent, Yoko Kozue set out to visit Akimoto’s lodgings wearing a newly tailored omeshi crepe—a slightly dark silver-gray fabric interwoven with navy arrowhead patterns. Perhaps owing to her hemorrhoids—which bore a suspected tubercular aspect—her face possessed a morbid beauty, eyes glistening with a moist inner light. Though she compelled Akimoto—distant as he was—to send substantial living expenses while attending to Yozo nearby—even if this served her irrepressible ambition of novel-writing apprenticeship, and even if Akimoto’s ample wealth diminishing slightly for this purpose hardly mattered—there were moments when she couldn’t restrain self-reproach over deceiving him. This, combined with her hemorrhoidal pain, left her nerves severely frayed. Simultaneously, Yozo—who seemed to monopolize her very being—struck her as an insufferably obtuse and cunning man, stoking her resentment. To outside observers, her actions might have appeared thoroughly impure; yet from her own perspective—though their manifestations were warped—this stemmed from an environment and fate riddled with complexity and contradictions. She couldn’t help feeling that truth couldn’t be entrusted to mere sentiment amid life’s harsh realities—her fragile martyrdom itself cruelly trampled underfoot. Her martyrdom and literary passion were akin to the delicate wings of a beautiful butterfly—ensnared in reality’s spiderweb and writhing in anguish.

“Is it really alright for you to take so much money?” Whenever her purse grew light—whether by two or three hundred—she would hastily request money via telegraphic transfers and such, a practice that by then had become increasingly blatant, causing Yozo, who watched this, no small distress. “It’s fine. Where there’s money to be had, there’s money to be had.”

“No, they say there’s hardly anything left anymore.” “Even if it seems gone, country fortunes always find something somehow.” Yoko remained optimistic, but since she seemed reluctant to write receipts or thank-you notes for the money being sent, Yozo had brought that up too. “That’s precisely why I’m struggling! When I must send a letter, I have to write something rather flirtatious to satisfy that person. Yet whenever I try to write, your gaze keeps piercing through me, doesn’t it?”

After saying that, Yoko would give a bitter smile, but she would sometimes deliberately write in elegant script before Yozo. Since he could mostly imagine those phrases' contents, he deliberately pretended not to notice them. Now on that very day, Yozo was supposed to take Yoko's mother—who had cared for him in the countryside—to see a performance at the Kabukiza Theatre. Since Yoko was naturally expected to accompany them, he had bought three tickets. "You take Mother and go ahead first, Professor." "I'll visit Mr.Akimoto's hotel and wrap things up in thirty minutes—an hour at most—then come straight there." "I promise." "That should be fine."

After hurriedly preparing, Yoko said that and left the house a step ahead.

Yozo and her mother had settled into the second box on the second floor of the Kabukiza Theatre after some time. It was a performance by Ganjiro’s troupe—beginning with some new period drama and featuring his signature Daisanji in the middle act. Precisely because Yozo still retained some attachment to Kabuki theater at that time, he felt vaguely lonesome with Yoko—so crucial to him—not being by his side. Her mother was quite talkative, but nine out of ten words from her rural dialect remained incomprehensible.

As the number of acts advanced, Yozo gradually lost his composure. Though he had wanted to see the play, he couldn’t help worrying about the atmosphere of the hotel room where she had gone to meet him. Waiting for a companion in such a pleasure spot would make anyone nervous regardless of their company, but in this case Yozo found his theater-going mood even more cruelly disrupted. He repeatedly left his seat, going as far as the stairway entrance before eventually making his way to the main entrance, where he lingered while scrutinizing people occasionally emerging from cars. Before he knew it, two whole hours of this fretful waiting had slipped by. At last fatigue settled in his nerves, and half through resigned acceptance, he deliberately returned to his seat. The crucial middle act of Daisanji was already nearing its opening. The wooden clappers’ rhythm from backstage drew closer.

Just then, Yoko staggered in. "I'm terribly sorry." "You waited for me, didn't you?"

Having said that, Yoko sat down beside Yozo. "But it's fine." "Now the middle act is about to start." "I see."

Yoko nodded, but both her face and voice were weary.

The moment Yozo saw her haggard face, all the scenes came vividly before his eyes. Yoko’s usually black eyes had lost their luster, drying to a dull brown, and her lips too were devoid of vitality. It was precisely at such times that she seemed to feel drawn to another body, and amidst all eyes around them fixed on the stage, her hand would reach out to gently touch Yozo. Ganjirō’s Daisanji was one of Yozo’s favorite things. Beneath the tragic fate of Haruto Bō in his role, it was fascinating to watch his grand individuality—much like his large head—joyfully lift its neck smoothly upward.

“Hmm!” Yoko smiled faintly as she gazed, entranced. When viewed directly from above during the second act, Chūbee—played by the same actor—revealed a sinewy white neck where wrinkles stood out starkly, and even in his retreating figure from shoulder to back, there was an undeniable loneliness. Having watched the actor’s splendid stage presence since first seeing him in Osaka during his thirties, Yozo found himself reflexively struck by how bitterly time’s passage showed on this popular performer—its traces etched with cruel clarity.

Then, after an interval of two days, one evening when the two of them were in Yoko’s second-floor room, the maid O-hae came in and said, “The driver has brought this and is here to pick you up,” then quietly handed Yoko something like a folded note. Since meeting at the Azabu hotel, Yoko had not spoken much about Akimoto. She had grown sick of his thick, rock-like hands; the coat hanging on his wall that reeked of provincial gentility; his endless prattling about Tolstoy and Gandhi that betrayed a literary youth still clinging to rustic naivety. Then, on the very next evening, when she found herself commissioned to give a lecture for a newspaper event and was already writing a serial novel for a women’s magazine, it felt as though her dazzling literary debut was all but secured—her status as a new-era woman writer and her glorious future practically guaranteed. Against this backdrop, Akimoto, whom she’d met again after so long, struck her as hopelessly outdated and steeped in provincial mustiness.

Yozo had listened dismissively as if reassuring himself, yet found some parts almost believable. “Let me go meet him again next time? Though he came all this way from afar that day, I was too rushed for proper conversation—so we agreed to find some quiet place and spend a night together.”

Yozo nodded. "That man seems like quite the passionate type." “That’s right. When I entered the room, he suddenly pounced and lifted me all the way to the ceiling… But there’s something odd about him.” Yoko’s face turned red as she looked down. “Where are you meeting this time?”

"He also mentioned wanting somewhere near water..." When Yoko had fallen into her affair with the painter Kusaba, she would often speak of a chic house near Yanagibashi—a place imbued with deep memories where they'd spent a delightful night listening to creaking oars on late-night waters. Now it seemed this new rendezvous would likely be in that same area.

“Let me see that for a moment.”

Yozo took the note as he said this, but the location was on the opposite riverbank, with the house’s name clearly written there. Moreover, the phrasing felt antiquated and pretentious—even the line “Your humble servant shall attend” left an unpleasant aftertaste. Contrary to his expectations, Yozo found himself cringing with visceral distaste. “Perhaps I’ll quietly slip into that house for a look.” He attempted to deliver this as a jest. “Yes, there’s no issue with you coming,” Yoko replied nonchalantly before rising to her feet.

“What time will you be back?” “Ten—I’ll be back by eleven at the latest.”

She made a pinky promise and went downstairs. Without even needing to consider where to direct his empty heart, Yozo took a taxi to the same familiar house along the Ōkawa riverside—Sayoko’s place—as was his habit. Then, just as they had pulled up near the intersection, his eldest son and young Hirata—who were strolling in the area—spotted them and suddenly rushed over to the car. “Where are you going?” “Uh, just gonna grab a bite…”

Yozo, somewhat flustered, ended up saying, “Won’t you ride along?” Triumphantly, as if they had been waiting for this very moment, the two climbed in.

Among his many children, Yozo had given the most extra care to his eldest son since the boy’s infancy and had taken him to various places. He had taken him to see rare circus troupes, world-renowned aerialists, acrobatics and operas—even kabuki plays that were perhaps too mature for a child his age at the time. One year when Mukojima flooded, Yozo dragged his seven- or eight-year-old son—dressed in stifling Western clothes and a student cap—through suffocatingly sweltering heat, intent on showing him the plight of the poor and the relief efforts. He made the boy walk all the way to Senju, only for the child to develop a fever of thirty-nine degrees that very night and begin vomiting a black soot-like substance.

“That was a bit reckless, wasn’t it?”

Yozo was laughed at by the pediatrician and had even been cautioned that taking his child to too many places might be unwise. Yet later, when he found himself learning from this very child about strolling through Ginza, visiting cafés, and attending concert halls, he realized his educational approach had been nothing but blind affection, often growing irritated by the boy's daily routines. Moreover, it became routine for the son to collapse once or twice yearly from gastrointestinal ailments or tonsillitis. When attempting middle school entrance exams, he developed sudden high fevers on test days for two consecutive years—returning home by automobile—which delayed his admissions until even his devout student-like earnestness inevitably gave way to indolence. Here too lay exam hell's curse warping young fates—a torment that endlessly plagued Yozo.

But looking back now, he even felt it might be good to let him know of his own footsteps to some extent. Even if this were a special case like love—though he hadn't articulated it clearly—he at least harbored an indulgent notion that his son wouldn't lack the modern sensibilities and emotional depth befitting a contemporary person, capable of passing judgments more fittingly than his aging self ever could. When it came to loose-mindedness, few possessed brains as loose as Yozo's.

The mere fact that this place faced water meant that the moment anyone entered the room, they felt distanced from the dusty streets outside. Yet for Yozo and his companions, the establishment wasn't so grand as to feel beyond their station. Exchanging idle chatter with Sayoko—who possessed a certain literary charm—while sharing a simple meal helped somewhat distract from the tribulations surrounding the Yoko situation.

"I did ask before, but novels truly are such difficult things." Sayoko, having apparently been writing lately as well, brought out a manuscript binder and was flipping through her scattered novel drafts, but Yozo had always thought this woman was not one to write, but rather one to be written about, "You really need five or ten years of apprenticeship first." "Above all else, you must begin with the sentences themselves." She had said this with a laugh, but now that they had grown this close, he found he couldn't broach a single coherent story about her eventful past.

As the children and Hirata watched the bustling water traffic below, Sayoko entered with her evening makeup artfully arranged. Sitting cross-legged, she observed the round-faced child smiling brightly. "This young master here—you met him at your home once before."

Yozo was also laughing, but then he reintroduced young Hirata and asked him to select the meal before taking a bath. Yozo imagined that somewhere upstream along this same riverbank, Yoko Kozue was likely drinking with Akimoto and lifting their spirits by now. Since this had been confessed to him beforehand, he didn't feel particularly displeased about it—yet when considering his own peculiar position in this arrangement, there remained an uncomfortably ticklish sensation. Then from a small room separated by one hallway—also overlooking the waterway—Yozo thought he heard Sayoko laughing with her charming smile. But when she returned to their group after some time, her eyes were faintly reddened at the rims as if she'd been drinking beer. Yozo had been reflecting on how many of his acquaintances now treated this place as their carefree haunt, so he wondered whether the neighboring guest might belong to that circle. Upon asking Sayoko however, he learned it was a neighborhood doctor who'd recently taken to visiting alone and discreetly. This doctor too numbered among the eccentric madam's admirers—Yozo himself had once received a brief examination from him, after which they'd occasionally crossed paths here. Strangely enough, this man turned out to be one of those relatives with whom Yoko had temporarily stayed upon graduating girls' school. This connection explained why Yoko knew Ningyocho's layout so intimately—even making special trips to purchase datemaki there wasn't without cause. As Yozo considered this, he noticed traces of the Kozue lineage in certain features of the Doctor's face—that molded appearance with its waxed mustache upturned at the tips. His stocky frame carried an inherent comicality too, matched by surprising skill at dancing. When Yozo had visited Ningyocho Hall with Sayoko to observe dancers earlier, he'd spotted this doctor among the crowd—stepping through earnest textbook-perfect moves with such vigor that Yozo couldn't help smiling.

“How about it?” “Why not try some exercise?” “You’ll find it quite interesting once you try.” The Doctor moved closer and pressed him. That same Doctor had come again tonight. Sayoko’s tone betrayed particular annoyance about this, though Yozo himself remained unaware of what might have been whispered behind his back. Yozo imagined Yoko seeking refuge at this Doctor’s house—that around her girls’ school graduation, some unsavory rumors had surfaced, leading her to shelter there temporarily. But this was pure malicious conjecture; the truth appeared simpler—she had likely come to take music school entrance exams instead. Throughout his dealings with Yoko—even after their complete estrangement—only disparaging gossip ever reached him. Once, when he’d rashly tried defending her publicly, it had doubly ensnared him in mockery’s whirlpool, leaving him utterly paralyzed.

At the appointed ten o'clock, Yozo left Sayoko's house. After hailing an en-taxi on the street and getting off near his home, he quietly looked up at Yoko's second-floor window across the way. The wooden shutters on the second floor were tightly closed, with no lamplight shining through, but from the six-mat room below—just inside the plank fence—leaked the sound of her voice conversing with her mother. Yozo opened the lattice door with a sigh of relief. "An hour—no, even earlier! I came back long before you."

She came up to the second floor with a nonchalant face. “What’s wrong?” “I’ll explain properly later—but I got into a fight.” Yozo wasn’t perturbed in the least.

“At the promised house…” “Hmm, I didn’t like the house, so I dashed out of there and wandered along the embankment.” “Then I went to another house.” “That was fine at first, but once he started drinking, his attitude turned so affected that I got angry and rushed out into the hallway.” “When that happens, I’m a woman who doesn’t look back!” “He even chased me all the way to the entrance, though…” “Then it’s practically as if you went there to pick a fight, isn’t it?”

“It’s okay. I’ll send it to Ueno tomorrow anyway.”

Yoko said this while concealing her loneliness. The next day, Yoko timed her departure and left the house. After ordering a fruit basket in Ginza, she raced by automobile to Ueno Station. But by then it was already too late. By the time she had a redcap porter carry the heavy fruit basket and rushed out to the platform, the train had already begun moving.

Yoko dejectedly loaded the fruit basket into the automobile and returned. Without even a chance to change clothes, she and her mother began packing the basket to send to his rural home. The basket was packed with clusters of large, emerald-green grapes and golden oranges visible through their wrapping paper. “Even if they get a little damaged, things like this are rare in the countryside.” Even Yoko had lost her composure. Yet how profoundly her capricious demeanor that night would reverberate through their future fate only became clear to Yozo much later—and it was not until that moment, after returning from their rare rendezvous, that he could finally accept how Yoko’s twice-repeated, dubious reports from the previous evening had indeed been truthful.

12

After finally sending Yoko to the hospital, Yozo felt abruptly liberated from his romantic tribulations, allowing him temporary respite. The long-pending house expansion project significantly aided this shift in mood. Though the construction outcome naturally betrayed Yozo's expectations, once he had yielded to the contractor's demands—handing over a considerable sum and allowing freight-delivered materials to pile in his garden—he recognized even these lumber stacks violated their agreement. Yet by then, nothing could be done. With limited funds and it being no grand architectural endeavor, Yozo deliberately restrained himself from making detailed design requests, confining his instructions to broad outlines.

“No unnecessary ornamentation.” “Anyway, I want you to build something sturdy.” “Understood.” “Since I happened to find some lumber at a good price.” The contractor said this and took the money away. This contractor had a rather impressive office near the antique dealer with whom Yozo was acquainted, and the two would occasionally meet at that antique dealer’s shop. Even when considering the refined taste of his wife—who would come to the same shopfront and handle sencha utensils—one might have thought it acceptable to fully entrust the construction to her husband, an engineer. However, it soon became clear that the work had been subcontracted to a different carpenter. The slapdash work—done as if sneering at people—soon began and proceeded in hectic disarray. While the sturdiness—in the sense of crude craftsmanship—could not be entirely dismissed, as the structure took shape, he began to feel a growing disgust. However, he could no longer keep up. The fact that the expenses had nearly doubled was something he couldn’t help. Even if only his residence had become larger, he had no choice but to be satisfied. There, only his old six-tatami study remained, its floor joists and ceiling repaired and walls repainted. For thirty years, he had strained his thin intellect and meager talent in that very room, laboring over each fleeting creation; yet it was also that same room where various people would visit, looking around the shabby space with astonished faces. It had also served as the couple’s bedroom and as a sickroom for their frail children. It was also in that very room that his wife, with a hollow heart, had lovingly combed the abundant hair of their daughter—hair that had been spread out across the tatami where she had died of summer dysentery at age twelve, within the span of half a day and half a night. Outside, voices chanted *“Welcome, welcome,”* as the refreshing morning breeze of July 17th caressed the pale, translucent forehead of the girl whose form had transformed overnight. And his wife too—who had nearly gone mad and utterly lost her joy in life at that time—over a decade later, on the very afternoon of January second this past New Year, lay in the same spot as a cold, empty shell, leaving behind the voices of the children calling for their mother. Even amid such epochal sorrows experienced in this room—sorrows that remained sorrows—he could not help but feel nostalgic for how traces of his own small life had seeped into every corner: the ceiling and pillars of that modest room, stained with tobacco resin; the torn shoji screens here and there; the soot-darkened edges and eaves of weathered wood. Beyond this nostalgia, there was a simplicity so refined—so stripped of excess that it seemed impossible to make it any plainer—which now struck him with clarity as he sat in the gaudy new study. It made the extension feel utterly distasteful by comparison. Yet when he set up his desk in the new six-tatami room—built protruding in what had previously been a corner of the garden overlooked by the neighboring third-floor windows, its floor slightly elevated—the scent of Taiwan hinoki cypress filled the air. It felt like shedding some grime-ridden old garment and donning something new, however flawed. Here, he resolved, would be his pristine workspace from now on; he would not let Yoko set foot inside.

At times, Yoko would come to inspect the nearly completed construction. When in good spirits, she would offer opinions drawn from her own experience and tastes regarding elements like the second-floor children’s study window, joining forces with the children in her signature charmingly spoiled-child-like way to have them retrofit the Japanese-style glass sliding doors by integrating Western-style window frames into casement windows. Yet this expansion of Yozo’s house—meant for the children—brought her scant pleasure.

“It’s really nice, Professor—your place has become so splendid.” Yoko would occasionally let slip an envious tone as if joking, but while making Akimoto shoulder hefty living expenses, Yozo’s incomprehensibly selfish attitude—trying to monopolize love alone—would at times feel unbearably infuriating. Even if it wasn’t Yozo’s calculated scheme but rather a trick devised from her own shrewd mind, the fact remained that Yoko herself had fallen into such a painful predicament. She was a woman who could casually accomplish even the most unreasonable feats—innocent if one called it innocence, sweet if one called it sweetness—a possessor of self-intoxicating romantic sensibilities. With a flawlessly keen sensitivity that perpetually and skillfully reinvented her life from one phase to the next, her nerves operated so tirelessly that she sometimes appeared like a scheming, unguarded villainess endlessly plotting some conspiracy. Yet despite harboring passions that flared up moment by moment, her deficiency in womanly domestic stewardship often gave her the air of a promiscuous woman of the courtesan type. Just as a child enamored with novelties grows swiftly bored of even the most wondrous plaything that first ignites their curiosity—reaching instead for newer diversions one after another—she too would fixate on a man who caught her fleeting fancy, leaping toward him without discernment or restraint. Yet when life failed to match her soaring desires, or when a seemingly more appealing prospect appeared nearby, the flames of insatiable yearning would drive her onward to another. Yet in each reality she grasped, nothing in this narrow world could satisfy her hypersensitive heart; everywhere her rainbow-like hopes were betrayed, until capricious lamentations and sorrows shattered her beautiful dreams into dust. However, what flowed through her voluptuous body—which had imbibed the beautiful spirit of nature from the rough gloom of the northern sea—was always the blood of new passion and an unceasing longing for life. Even in her love pilgrimage, which seemed so ill-suited to compromise with life, there had been too neurotic a calculation. In the north where she was born—though to be precise, this was by no means limited to the north alone—nothing was so readily converted into material terms as a woman’s chastity. Yozo, having visited her hometown home twice and juxtaposed its lingering atmosphere—still redolent of a red-light district that remained as a vestige of its past prosperity as a bustling port—with her acute grasp of both modern womanhood’s self-awareness and new romantic tricks gleaned from literature, perceived this paradox: while she remained prone to impulsive actions, there also dwelled within her a murky, almost ignorant calculativeness that cheapened chastity below material worth—a decadence so profound it might have belonged to women of bygone eras. Of course, if it were neurotic calculation, nearly all modern people possessed that. Yozo, too, was one of those suffering from it.

Since attending Yoko’s anal fistula surgery, Yozo had come to recognize within himself a certain indolence that increasingly kept him at a remove from her.

Of course, this aversion toward their impure, convoluted romance had long hung over his mind like a dark cloud—an aversion compounded by fierce condemnations and the children’s discontent, which had fermented into a strangely twisted defiance and obstinacy. Combined with lonely old age’s timid yet tenacious carnal desires—unprecedented not in their intensity but in their persistence—his self-judgment and introspection grew dulled, leaving him unable to clearly recognize their true nature. Yet even as his heart’s throbbing festered moment by moment with cruel intensity, what now allowed him to faintly brush against something resembling genuine feeling was her recent hysterical state of mind—a hostility toward him that increasingly merged with her physical suffering into something profoundly toxic. At times, Yoko would tuck money from the countryside into her obi and, placing her aching body on Yozo’s lap, ride an automobile all the way to Ginza to buy a light hospital-style blanket. From the white fox fur around her neck came a supple warmth that brushed against his cheek. If she wears this fur around her neck, she’ll never catch a cold. While thinking this, he had to endure the pain in his gaunt thighs. On another occasion, when a year-end dance recital—featuring Rumiko, Yoko’s beloved daughter entrusted to a live-in apprentice—was to be held at Yukie’s house, Yoko invited Yozo to attend. Though reluctant, he deliberated before arriving late at the master’s Aoyama residence—only to spot her among the crowd as anticipated, appearing strangely disheartened by his presence. Yozo sat slightly behind center stage watching adorable girls dance to nursery rhymes, though in a back corner he also glimpsed the face of Yukie’s young lover—a man deeply versed in dance. Yoko sat modestly behind him throughout in a crested black haori, eyes downcast pensively—yet amid this bright gathering, how starkly her face and figure had recently grown haggard stood out. She had once told him of coincidentally meeting this young man at Shinjuku Station’s bridge on their return journey—speaking favorably of their interaction—yet from her subsequent tone one could infer their relationship had grown somewhat closer than that. At times a dark shadow would cross Yozo’s mind, but he forced reassurance by considering Yoko’s position relative to her master. That this youth was her ideal match had been evident since their first visit to Yukie together—with him feeling even fickle Yoko might build a lasting love nest with such a man. Nor could he dismiss how natural it seemed for something to arise between nimble Yoko and this rising modernist—yet one hope remained.

"He really would make a good match for Yoko." Yozo voiced the thought aloud. The young man’s work—*The Distance of the Flesh*, then celebrated in literary circles—proved perfectly suited to stoke such emotions in her. Yoko’s ceaselessly searching heart had no doubt already begun secretly plotting rebellion against her daughter’s guardian-master, but to Yozo’s clouded mind, such insight remained beyond reach. Even were it true, he could only flee from that knowledge like a patient fearing a favorable diagnosis. That a man like him—elderly and mired in wretched living conditions—had no reason to believe he could forever hold the heart of a young woman like Yoko, spinning restlessly as a windmill, became his fated torment. Yet each time he pondered how long this tragic affair might endure, he shuddered with anguish. Visibly, his brief life was being carved away.

After the recital concluded, Yozo and Yoko—alongside that young man and two or three ladies—were treated to a light supper. They sat around a table draped in white linen, spending time in casual conversation centered on the master, a witty man with a charming demeanor. Yet throughout this, Yoko remained silent, her pale face often bowed low as if weighed by profound contemplation. Even if that was due to her illness, such behavior had been rare before or after.

And another thing was that an unexpected scene in the operating room had vividly revealed to him Yoko’s—no, the essential nature of all women. Yozo followed Yoko as she was carried from the hospital room on a stretcher and entered the room adjacent to the operating theater. Through gossip and society’s whispers, Yoko already seemed to have piqued the doctors’ intrigued interest; within her first day of hospitalization, she had developed a rapport with Dr. K——, the surgeon—intimate enough to permit coquettishness. But after exchanging a few words with Yozo, preparations concluded, and she was soon laid upon the operating table. Yozo loathed the sight of blood and hesitated to approach, deliberately lingering in the adjoining room. Yet when Dr. K——, fully prepped and wearing a smile one might direct at a petulant child, stepped toward the table, Yoko—as if sensing the scalpel’s cold glint—abruptly adopted a mischievous tone and cried out.

“Dr. K——, don’t make it hurt.” Dr. K——’s hair was wildly disheveled, but with a “There, there” or some such words, he suddenly took up the scalpel.

“Come here and take a look.” Dr. K—— turned to face Yozo and spoke bluntly. Though reluctant to look, Yozo walked around to the foot of the operating table. What met his eyes was a deep wound on her flesh—pale as bleached wax—excavated to the size of a rice bowl like a crimson dahlia in full bloom, its edges sealed so tightly that no fresh blood could seep through. It was a body of peerless beauty. At that instant, Yoko furrowed her brows and cried out.

“Don’t look!” Of course, Yozo had left after just a single glance, but even after the postoperative cleanup was completed and Yoko had been moved to her hospital room, he did not remain by her side for long. Eventually, he left the hospital with an unpleasant feeling. And since then, he hadn’t felt inclined to visit the hospital for two or three days.

Yozo’s feet would often turn toward that riverside house. Around the time when a certain bookstore had just planned a large-scale publication—and since he too was to be assigned one volume for distribution—funds remained accessible even when he wasn’t earning through manuscripts, so his pockets were not particularly empty. Even so, his way with money—accustomed as he was to meager yields—was neurotically miserly, and his poor arithmetic only made him all the more stingy. Even so, having a substantial sum of money in his pocket and going out was something he had never experienced in his entire life. Being driven day after day to do nothing but abrupt jobs might have been unavoidable for his frail body, whose stamina couldn’t endure—but he was also a natural-born idler.

“If only you could get even a single page written tonight.” For days on end, his wife would fret like this, needling Yozo’s gloomy mood as he sat scowling over unwritten pages, but when driven to the brink, he would finally take up his pen with resigned inevitability. Once begun, the work would somehow take shape—though each effort left him breathless. His meager income meant he rarely had money to call his own. Yet through some innate temperament, his wife managed to keep their home pleasant; though lacking financial acumen, she orchestrated everything with her peculiar sense of style. Uneducated yet intuitively attuned to his work and moods, she governed even his study’s arrangement—every letter’s placement predetermined under her care. Through her hands, daily pickles gained vivid hues, fish and vegetables were chosen with unerring judgment. When Yozo reminisced about childhood country dishes, she’d skillfully recreate them for their table. Thus he never dined out nor kept servants, yet years of boardinghouse habits lingered—he’d never become one of those respectable family men. His upbringing played its part, but some indolent streak ran deeper: this domestic life suffocated him despite himself. His modest familial happiness inevitably eroded literary ambitions. Yozo remained ever a man of the hearth—whether writing or receiving guests, she was always present. Nor could he bear wounding the wife who tended their brood. Now, embracing loneliness’s bleak freedom, he carried money in his pocket and reclaimed time as his own. Released from cramped domestic joy into desolate expanse, he shouldered sentimentality’s weight while returning at last to himself.

That day too, Yozo—now accustomed to going out—left the house unsteadily and hailed a car on the street; but having no desire to visit Yoko’s gloomy hospital room, his feet naturally turned toward the riverside house. Though the house had been expanded after all, his mood shouldn’t have been bad, but upon seeing the finished result, everywhere he looked revealed slapdash workmanship that made him grow troubled by the crude craftsmanship of country carpenters who might have been rounded up from who knows where. Moreover, during construction they couldn’t properly organize household goods and books—since they had been piled into the back house—and quite a few things ended up missing. The evidence that neighborhood ruffians had broken through the old wooden fence and ransacked the garden lay in scattered books strewn from fence gaps to veranda; yet even sturdy old fixtures, worn tatami mats, and leftover construction materials from earlier days had vanished without trace. Realizing that things which should have been there were missing—even those unfindable despite searching—brought a lonely feeling. The absence of a good maid and kitchen chaos further irritated Yozo’s nerves. He was troubled by Osuzu—a stocky longtime maid with naive features—frequently taking things out, yet also exasperated by new maid Omitzuru who loved buying unnecessary items. Osuzu stubbornly refused confession even when plainly at fault, while willful Omitzuru would puff up demanding dismissal at every provocation.

13

By that time, the riverside house had grown quite lively. Madam Sayoko’s unconventional approach to her trade attracted an exclusive clientele of intellectuals—writers, painters, journalists. The patronage had transformed entirely since its opening days. Yet even now, remnants from her pre-Kurube era as a geisha occasionally surfaced—men who might have been stockbrokers or wholesalers from her Yoshicho days. Come evening, she would sometimes drift into Yozo’s room reeking of liquor, the hem of her magnificent spring kimono—its ombre-dyed lining peeking through—trailing languidly behind her. Yozo could only assume these were lingering ties from her geisha-house management years, but Sayoko herself remained tight-lipped about such connections. During her seven-year cohabitation with the German nobleman, she had shed the affected geisha mannerisms that never truly suited her, growing increasingly alienated from the mercantile class. The affected women nowadays—hair rigidly parted seven-to-three, reclining indolently while guffawing at crude jests—struck her as utterly insufferable. Now she relished sitting knee-to-knee with literary figures she’d once admired from magazine pages—passing sake cups, selecting geishas by drawn lots—finding their unpretentious camaraderie refreshing. It pleased her too when women of standing graced her establishment.

Yozo had once brought Yoko here around November. Since her marital collapse, Yoko would often mention the waterside house where she had spent a night at the dawn of her romance with that now-distant painter—so under pretext of showing Sayoko’s house further downstream, Yozo had meant to introduce them. This occurred one evening after dining at a relocated traditional restaurant in Yamanote post-earthquake; Yozo had broached the idea out of curiosity. Contemplating his burdensome elderly self sustaining such a relationship with young Yoko indefinitely made his vision darken—yet equally disheartening was imagining eventually losing her. Now—or perhaps from the start—he’d never truly believed Sayoko could become his own; though aware a woman of her merchant-class pedigree—always commanding premium rates—exceeded his capacity to sustain, some part of him still harbored this notion as emotional refuge for when Yoko inevitably vanished—yet bringing Yoko there had been mere whim. Earlier, while engrossed in conversation with Sayoko and her old friend downstairs, Yozo—having just arrived—felt disinclined to answer Yoko’s call. During this period Yoko’s house stood somewhat apart; she often ventured out wearing her new jersey one-piece dress with eldest daughter Rumiko. For Rumiko’s sake, Yozo frequently became an obstruction. Once before Mr.F—editor of a women’s literary magazine—their atmosphere turned inadvertently hostile; as Mr.F departed, Yozo harshly berated her at the entranceway threshold—yet even after parting, he still endured solitude’s torment.

At that time too, Yozo's feelings had grown slightly distant from Yoko. He was looking at photos of one of Sayoko's friends—a woman who was apparently willing to work as a housekeeper. Though called a housekeeper position, it seemed to imply that if both parties found each other suitable, things could progress beyond that. "She's prettier than in the photo." "She comes from a good family in my sister's rural area." "She had married into a proper household, you know, but her husband's business failed and the family scattered."

Sayoko had been saying this, but that woman was not Yozo’s type. Just then, a call came from Yoko, but Yozo didn’t feel like hurrying back. “The problem is you’re too soft on Ms.Yoko, Professor.” “Just leave her be.” When another friend of Sayoko’s who was nearby said, “You should go back to her.”

“You should go back to her,” Sayoko said.

Yozo eventually rode with Sayoko’s female friend, dropped her off near Shiraki, and returned to Yoko’s place. The friend wrote her address and name with a pencil on the edge of a note in the car and handed it to him, saying, “Please come visit.” “Why don’t you come take a look? It’s on the way.” After finishing their meal, they peeled pears. “I could go... Let’s go—to see the water.” Yoko said without faltering, but in truth, she was not inclined.

“I don’t know... I just don’t like that sort of person.”

After getting into the car, she grew edgy. “We’re just going to look at the house.” “If that’s all, then fine.” In the lower guest room they were shown into, Yoko stood by the window gazing at the water, but her reluctance to come here had not stemmed solely from how disheartening it was to meet the madam—who seemed to have maintained a life of certain comforts until now. As previously described, across from Sayoko’s gate stood a rather imposing concrete hospital whose proprietor would slip in nightly to linger—undeterred by her annoyance—but what must have truly given Yoko pause was that this very place had once sheltered her when she was fresh out of school and aspiring to enter music conservatory.

At Sayoko’s house, unlike usual, the service wasn’t particularly good. And just as they were about to leave, Sayoko—whom they had glimpsed in the dim corridor—took considerable time to appear before them in full formal attire. Both were embarrassed, but Yoko forced herself to start a conversation to fill the room’s emptiness. Then Sayoko entered with practiced grace, her face painted pure white and wearing an embroidered haori. She sat down at the entrance.

“You must be Ms. Kozue.” Having said this, Sayoko exchanged greetings, closed the glass-paned windows while mentioning the evening chill, and sat back down precisely at the entranceway—her expression remained stiff. Yoko stood up and approached, attempting to show friendliness through acts like comparing heights with Sayoko, but none of these efforts succeeded in easing the tension. “I suppose that’s just how it is,” Yozo thought.

Yozo regretted his actions. In the midst of this regret, he went to summon Sayoko. It seemed guests were about to arrive. “May I write here tonight?” Yoko seemed to feel some superiority in having writing work to do. When Yozo nodded his assent, she immediately went to the entranceway telephone and—through a nearby boarding house—ordered the maid to bring her newly tailored embroidered haori, manuscript paper, and other items by automobile. However, when a brocade tie-dyed furoshiki bundle soon arrived and Yoko—as planned—put on the haori, she grew restless alone and called the maid to insist on staying overnight. After some time had passed, that maid came and...

“I’m afraid tonight is inconvenient.” “We’re rather busy at present.” Yozo exchanged glances with Yoko at the maid’s bluntness. Soon after, they summoned an automobile and departed. “Sayoko-san won’t be satisfied unless it’s Koichi.” Yoko said in the car. One night, Sayoko was profoundly drunk. Though her drunken words were hard to follow, piecing together fragments suggested Kurube—who should have severed ties long ago—had taken up with a Shinbashi geisha or was amusing himself with her. It also seemed the money he was meant to send had been withheld due to Sayoko’s haggling or Kurube’s misunderstanding; regardless, his attitude so grated on her that the thought of confronting him only to be rebuffed became unbearable.

Kurube still clung tenaciously to his attachment toward Sayoko. He had repeatedly urged her—with tiresome persistence—to remain at his Kōjimachi mansion until he could somehow revive his fortunes, but Sayoko had grown sick of the seven years of unnatural living. No one had ever loved her as Kurube did, yet neither had anyone indulged her caprices as extensively as he had. Whenever she returned late at night after consorting with young Kabuki actors, he would invariably emerge onto the balcony and wait there in perfect stillness.

“You’ve been unfaithful. You mustn’t do that.” The handsome, towering Kurube was red-faced with anger as expected. Another time, when she used illness as a pretext to meet a lover at a hot spring inn—a man whose relationship had waxed and waned since her Yoshicho days—Kurube suddenly appeared. The man scrambled to gather his Western-style clothes and tumbled from the veranda into the garden, leaving his watch behind in his haste. Yet Kurube bore no hatred toward Sayoko. So long as she avoided outright scandal, he had resolved to overlook these minor indiscretions done behind his back. All hope of returning to his homeland had vanished after his only son died from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident. Since their failed attempt to sell weapons to China, even Japan’s military circles had gradually developed an aversion to German goods.

However, Sayoko’s departure from his mansion had also been due to the instigation of a man with whom she had shared a long-standing relationship—one that could neither be severed nor sustained. When she finally managed to break away from Kurube, she came to realize that unless she slipped into back alleys, she couldn’t go with that man either. Even after she started the house by the water, Kurube would quietly come by, saying that she could keep this business going but they should meet occasionally; however, Sayoko flatly refused, explaining that the neighbors were too nosy and it was a business that relied on reputation—having him linger would cause problems. Sayoko had spoken in this manner, but it didn’t seem their ties had been completely severed.

Sayoko had never been as drunk as she was that night, but Yozo too was somewhat intoxicated, so through some momentary impulse he brought her home together in an automobile. Though Sayoko entering Yozo's new room wasn't limited to that night alone, when they passed through the gate—easily visible from the second floor of Yoko's vacant house—even Yozo began doubting his own capricious act. Even if Yozo and his former wife had merely been keeping each other in check, the power of unspoken things couldn't be entirely dismissed.

When Yozo showed Sayoko to the back room, Yotaro, his eldest son, came out together with one of the young writers who had been visiting, and they watched the drunken Sayoko with interest. Sayoko pounded the rosewood table with her clenched fist while spewing heated words through a clumsy tongue. "I'm thirty-three."

And that was all Yozo could clearly make out; no matter how he strained to listen, there was nothing else.

Before long, she staggered to her feet. “Can you walk her home?” Yozo instructed the children, but when he escorted her out to the reception room, Sayoko suddenly stopped and—without any awareness of whose lips they were—impulsively pressed hers to his. Soon after, she went down to the entrance. About forty minutes later, Yotaro returned.

“What a riot, that woman.” “What happened?” “She said she was going to the German’s mansion in Bancho, so I went along for the ride. When we got there, the door was shut tight.” “No matter how much we rang the bell or pounded, nobody came out—so she went and smashed through the glass door.” “Out comes this imposing bald German fellow—he thrust aside anyone trying to force their way in.” “Then he looks at me and says, ‘You seem decent—take this drunkard home.’” “Said it’d look bad having someone banging on doors so late. I managed to calm her down and get her home, but in the car she started kissing me wildly…” “Blood was streaming from her hand—I bandaged it with my handkerchief.” “Must’ve been something eating at her... Still, that German was one distinguished-looking old gent.”

Yozo listened in silence.

One day, Yamamura, an old friend, suddenly appeared in Yozo’s room. Yamamura, who had once been a writer with a penchant for collecting Seto ware, now ran an antique shop quite a distance from Yozo’s house. He had gathered Buddhist statues with nearly broken-off hands, damaged ceramics, exotic water jars and vases, swords and sword guards, and rare chintz fabrics. After parting from his wife—a female writer with whom he had shared three years of married life through an artist-to-artist romance—and having cohabited with his current wife for some time, he would occasionally come across her works unexpectedly in newspapers. News of this female writer, who had followed her new lover to America, had already grown scarce.

He had always been a romanticist, but one day when Yozo happened to run into him while taking a walk around Ueno with Yoko and his young daughters Sakiko and Rumiko after some time apart, he was now candidly recounting his impression of Yoko from that time in his own way. After Yamamura confessed to a past love with an innocent young girl he had kept hidden in a boarding house in town for some time—to which Yozo listened attentively—they ended up visiting the hospital room together.

“At that time on Hirokoji Avenue, I suddenly caught sight of that person’s figure. Her attire was plain, utterly unadorned, yet there was an aura that faintly wafted about her. Just as I stopped in my tracks, wondering what it was, I soon noticed you standing there beside me.”

Yamamura spoke. Until now, all criticisms of Yoko that had reached Yozo's ears or appeared before his eyes portrayed her as a disgraceful woman—yet in truth, they couldn't be taken entirely at face value. Among them were criticisms that only applied to her in situations involving Yozo. Of course, physical beauty and moral virtue were separate matters, but until Yozo later encountered the various incidents Yoko had caused, his very soul had been utterly intoxicated by the glow of her youthful beauty.

The hospital was hushed. Facing the wall where a blackboard hung—on which Yotaro had jokingly claimed was written "suffering from a literary disease"—Yoko lay with her bobbed black hair lushly spilling over the pillow. Still wearing her red-and-black striped silk nightgown and clutching a book, she had been asleep, but now turned toward them. “Mr. Yamamura.”

When Yozo said this, Yoko brushed back the hair from her forehead and... “Forgive me for being in this state.” As Yozo gazed at her large eyes glistening beneath black locks, he imagined Dr.K—who likely came every few days to change her gauze—trading half-teasing retorts with Yoko as she spoke to him in that coquettish way of hers, as if they’d known each other since childhood. “Professor—are you busy now?” “Not particularly.”

“You’re such a heartless man, Professor.” Yoko’s face turned harsh. “Why?” “Fine. Professor’s life is Professor’s life, after all.” Yozo was also irritated, but he remained silent. “When a woman is in the hospital, men ought to at least bring money once in a while.”

“So you’re saying you need money.” “Obviously!” Yoko’s prickly tone stung Yozo’s nerves—he already felt cornered in their exchange. Around that time, she had received a lengthy letter from Akimoto, who had left disillusioned by her behavior. The monthly living allowance she’d been freely spending now risked discontinuation. Her spirits sank. Then Yozo—oblivious to all this—appeared for the first time with a companion. The dam of resentment burst.

Resolved never to visit her again, Yozo left the hospital room, leaving the gauze behind. He had grown thoroughly disgusted with her attitude at the time of the surgery. He had come to hate her.

“That woman is always scheming something.” Yozo spoke to Yamamura about it repeatedly.

“Hmm, that’s right. There’s this sword.” After two or three days, Yozo nevertheless visited the hospital room again with a bundle of bills from his royalty advance tucked in his pocket. He feared above all else that if they separated, he would be criticized by Yoko’s associates over money matters. And if there were ever a time to write... he had considered that far. Even though on the surface Yoko was being showered with arrows of criticism from all directions, Yozo understood that among those who criticized her, there were quite a few who still held an interest in her.

A thick bundle passed from his pocket into Yoko's hands. She flipped through it briskly, took twenty bills, then handed all the remainder back to Yozo. "I'm sorry." "Don't mention it." Yozo feared becoming hospital gossip and sensed something brewing, so he soon left the room. Yoko was discharged forty full days after her surgery. It was already early February—during that time her second daughter had caught a cold nearly developing pneumonia, and just as that barely healed, now Sakiko at Yozo's house had taken to her sickbed.

Yozo visited the hospital room about twice more after that, going at night each time, but on neither occasion did he come away with a favorable impression. Once she had called an outside clerk from the department store to make spring clothes for Rumiko—who was staying with her instructor—and spread out gaudy Yuzen fabrics across the entire room; another time she took up hand clapping from her bed and made Rumiko dance while singing her usual nursery rhyme. She had gathered nurses and the young doctors on night duty who were making merry in high spirits, but Yoko lay with her long sleeves draped down to the bed as she sang in a melting voice.

Yozo could not help feeling bitter toward her—she who seemed unable to calm down unless she carried on like that wherever she went—but if the day came when he had to speak of it, he would have no choice but to hear her eloquent excuses.

However, since being discharged from the hospital, that restless energy had completely vanished from Yoko. Moreover, the wound had not yet fully healed.

“I have to keep going there for now, you know.” She had stealthily come to his room, redolent with the scent of tatami and wood, and was saying such things. “Could it be tuberculosis?” “There’s some of that too, it seems.” “I was even made to buy iodine solution.”

And after that, Yoko took out the letter from Akimoto that she had received at the hospital from her obi, “Even though he went out of his way to come, he’s furious that I didn’t leap at him, contrary to his expectations.” “He’s even tallied up all the money he’d been sending every month until now.” “He writes something like, ‘I’ve grown utterly sick of life, so I’ll now set out on a wandering journey.’”

With that, she unfolded and showed him a letter measuring four or five feet in length. Yozo took it in hand and glanced at it. The characters brimming with ardor pierced his eyes so painfully that he couldn't bring himself to read them properly. For the first time, Yozo confirmed that everything Yoko had said about Akimoto was true. He felt guilty for having regarded her with suspicion. He came to accept he was just as culpable as Akimoto.

“Now that there’s no one left to give me money, I’m in a real bind.” Yoko muttered, hugging her drawn-up knees to her chest. “I wonder if I should come back to your place again, Professor. I’ll leave the children with my mother and send them back to the countryside…” “You can come.”

Yozo answered. Something was bound to happen again—he couldn't help thinking that too—but for now there was nothing else to do. His unassuming manner didn't feel disagreeable. Yet Yoko had grown more guarded than before. Even when entering Yozo's room, remaining glued to his side from dawn till dusk proved inconvenient in multiple ways. Whether negotiating directly with Akimoto—who hadn't yet fully abandoned hope—or handling matters indirectly through her mother back in the countryside, there were inevitably things she couldn't bring herself to confess to Yozo. She needed somewhere to steal breaths regardless. As precaution against such eventualities, Yoko rented a room in the adjacent boardinghouse while transferring all her belongings to the rear house. The familiar chest of drawers and vanity were carried into Yozo's room, their cosmetics' fragrance faintly permeating the space from that day onward.

14 Even by that time, Yoko still continued writing serialized pieces for women’s magazines, though their popularity never surged as her initial fervor had promised. The magazines had originally aimed to capitalize on the journalistic appeal of her scandal-tinged aura—whether admirable or notorious—that florid atmosphere she cast about herself through past and present controversies. Yet after commissioning her for a couple of installments and finding her work unexpectedly competent, they pressed her harder. But with Yozo’s love affair then deeply offending public morals, even her impassioned writings failed to win over the general audience. Of course, though her dreamlike works brimmed with that peculiar passion and sentiment unique to her, they were never meant for mass consumption. Her pieces happened to run alongside those of an established female social critic, but when Yoko compared them with her own, she found them pretentious and old-fashioned—even feeling a petty urge to disparage them.

Given Yozo’s indolent nature, even when she occasionally brought up the subject of her work, he would only read it once, ask about parts he didn’t understand with a “What does this mean here?,” and smile at her explanations—but given their differing literary qualities and positions, he made no particular effort to offer guidance. When it came to short stories, she would sit reverently before him, never breaking the decorum of master and disciple, and implore him to read her work. And after he finished reading, when Yozo uttered a few critical words, she would say “Thank you so much” and bow with apparent delight. Yozo had thought that if someone were to imitate his style, that person would surely suffer a great loss, and he could not imagine there being anything he could teach them. But she wasn’t without talent. He had considered that if she were to build a stronger structure, her work would flourish, and it might not be a bad idea to draw her somewhat into the field of his own realism. While love mattered, from Yoko’s stated position her longstanding wish had always been literary training and being propelled into society; thus, were his reputation in the literary world to collapse overnight, it was only natural that love’s flame would vanish in that instant. Yet despite her works lately receiving lackluster responses, Akimoto’s whereabouts had also been lost—even when she went to search for him, she couldn’t discern where he might be hiding—and so with all this, Yoko had grown thoroughly disheartened.

However, Yoko was not one to linger over the Akimoto matter as if clinging to past attachments. She pitied having driven him to such despair and regretted losing a reliable source of income; thus, while still retaining some confidence and hope, she felt a lonely emptiness as if she had lost something precious.

As time passed, spring arrived. In Yozo’s narrow garden where large stones lay piled and potted plants remained pushed aside, the nimble forms of bush warblers could be seen hunting food as they darted between branches, while a biting late-winter wind stung the skin. When rapeseed flowers—which Yozo favored—began appearing in the single-stem vase on his desk, some vitality returned to Yoko’s pallid face, and a firmness emerged in her eyes that had been moist beneath their lashes. There lingered an indescribable subtle charm where the fullness had returned from her cheeks to her jawline. Yozo, who had cautiously weathered the winter, typically fell ill each year around this time with bronchial-tube-clinging colds that confined him to bed, but that year—despite enduring societal censure and literary anxieties—he inexplicably remained healthy, passing his days idly in her company.

Yoko would go out roughly every other day, saying she was going to the hospital, but sometimes visited the editorial office of the related women's magazine instead. Sometimes she went to Ginza to have tea with young reporters, or found herself treated to dinner.

“Today I was treated to dinner by Mr. So-and-so and heard about Izumi Shikibu.” Yoko would recount what she had heard to Yozo, but the young journalist who had been dropping by occasionally about manuscripts since she started writing still visited from time to time. When deadlines approached, Yoko would vanish even from her boarding house room and shut herself away in a quiet inn nearby, though there were times when she couldn’t be found no matter where they searched. Yozo constantly harbored the anxiety that this untrustworthy woman might flee at any moment to somewhere unknown, no matter how affectionately she now seemed to cling to him.

“Tokyo is such a vast place—the more you settle in, the vaster it seems. “Even if you were to vanish abruptly like that, I doubt anyone could ever find you.” Yoko had once voiced such things, which of course stemmed from her own considerations of fleeing. However, having already failed once, she must have long been cautious not to act carelessly with this old man. Yet when Yozo found her absent from both the boarding house and inn—contrasting with her prohibition against visiting while she wrote at the inn—her attitude rankled him. He couldn’t determine when she’d left the inn either. Was she holed up studying in her room all this time? Or did she sometimes seek creative stimulation by visiting Cinema Palace or Musashino-kan Theater? Perhaps trying to stir inspiration by listening to a phonograph over tea at cafés? Even that much would have been tolerable—but he couldn’t shake the suspicion she might be bringing some young man into her room.

At such times, he too would seek an outlet for his heart, and it had become his habit to go visit the riverside house. Sayoko, having learned from past failures, had completely stopped bringing the sake cup to her lips. On the contrary, she had long since abstained from even beef and chicken. She had also resolved not to drink tea. Whether this was merely a trifling superstitious affectation fashionable among women of the pleasure quarters, or something more deeply rooted in penitential motives—even for Sayoko, who stood newer than those demimonde denizens yet older than the general run of modern girls—her complete abstinence from alcohol could only be seen as evidence that a firm lock had been fastened deep within her heart.

Sayoko’s house remained as prosperous as ever. Neatly made-up, she sat at the counter phoning geisha houses and warming sake, though when customers made special requests she would order whiskey instead. Society had not yet reached such an impasse. The economic aftermath of the World War still lingered in places, and people everywhere had risen up for the city’s reconstruction following the earthquake. Ginza-dori and Hamacho Park had already taken shape, while the grand Kiyosu Bridge stood completed. Nevertheless, this entire area’s geographical advantages had deteriorated; the Shitamachi charm from Masago-za Theater’s heyday had faded into obscurity, and despite increased water traffic, all newly widened arterial roads remained dimly lit. Yet despite the desolate surroundings, Sayoko’s house stayed lively. To her madam-like demeanor—now distanced from pleasure quarter customs—came people acquainted with manuscripts and palettes, connecting with one another as they gathered noisily in droves.

When the tatami room was one she wasn't very familiar with, Sayoko would provide a bit of service and then, to catch her breath, occasionally hail a taxi to the Ginza area. Yozo occasionally took her to houses in the Ginza area where he seemed to recognize some faces, among which was a bar run by a corpulent, bob-haired madam. It was a compact little bar in the backstreets of Ginza, where indirect lighting cast a pale bluish glow. Sitting on cushions, they would have someone make them a glass of low-alcohol cocktail to sip slowly, and naturally find their frayed nerves subsiding into calmness. She had once mentioned that long ago, she had been introduced to Yozo by someone on a train, but even when he tried to uncover her past history and status, he couldn’t lay a finger on such matters. Of course, Yozo had also been diligently working his nerves to sniff out Sayoko’s past, of which he knew only the barest outline, but far from her past, even the hidden aspects of her present life remained entirely unknown to him. Yozo had a bad habit of being overly interested in people.

Around that time in Ginza, large-scale cafés of questionable taste began aggressively emerging, painting the entire area in lurid hues. For someone like Yozo with delicate nerves, the overwhelming stimulation nearly blinded him, while phonograph-amplified jazz clamor deafened ears everywhere. Rumors of first-rate hostesses enlivened entertainment magazines and newspapers, as lavish modern flair set adrift those warm souls still clinging to familiar comforts. Even among those flooding into Sayoko's place were fragments of this crowd; though Yozo too—when plans with companions collapsed—would occasionally dip into these new pleasure worlds, he struggled just to drink a single cocktail. His inherent solitude and temporal dislocation left him perpetually bewildered. In all such realms of revelry, he found only Pierrot's lonely visage within himself. The plump madam's house alone—where he'd encounter a few quietly drinking intellectuals—suited him well enough for Ginza strolls. Yet he detested Yoko noticing his frequent riverside visits and probing his innocent motives; moreover, wandering thus brought him no peace of mind anywhere.

When he was back in his study, there came the sound of the gate opening followed by the glass-paned entrance door sliding open. Yozo had been discussing rumors about Yoko with the child when she barged in, suddenly enlivening the room. Yoko explained she had gone to the hospital again today, then dined in Kanda with several young doctors she'd grown close to during her hospitalization, and after parting ways had watched *Light in Darkness* at Cinema Palace. Though one might interpret the flush spreading across her face as traces of dubious excitement and fatigue, given her tendency to be easily moved by art, it could very well have been genuine.

“Was Dr.K with you?” Yozo asked about that gentleman who had shown such precision with the scalpel during Yoko’s surgery. “No, Dr.K didn’t come.”

Yoko shook her head. “All those people are so guiltless and fascinating. They’re in a completely different spirit compared to you writers.”

A literary discussion began between the child and Yoko, and rumors emerged of associates who never surfaced in journalism's public sphere. Yoko, trying to sniff out the literature of tomorrow, kept prodding for details; among the young students he mentioned were some already veering into leftist ideologies, and he seemed to hold respect for their fervent theories assailing the established literary world. “And besides, he’s such a dashingly handsome man!”

Yoko was such a romantic fantasist that merely hearing such rumors made her ears burn with excitement. Yet as these Marxist youths—still lacking significant influence at the time—struck her as remarkably fresh, Yozo himself envisioned something akin to a gallant trailblazer through them, while also sensing an inescapable premonition that Yoko might someday encounter this young man. Though Yozo couldn't help feeling secretly flustered, he simultaneously recognized this as a match befitting her character. In that instant, he even fleetingly imagined what stance he ought to take should some incident arise.

“Want to go get something to eat?” Yozo said. “I want mitsumame. Let’s eat.”

Soon the three of them went out together.

Then, on a warm evening, Yoko once again disappeared from the boarding house.

As she left, her eldest son Yotaro, who was at Furutsu Paara on the corner of the tram street, caught a glimpse of her departing figure. “It really does seem that way.” “She was wearing a black haori and holding a rain umbrella; she seemed to have a package or something in her hand.” “She might have gone to work on her manuscript.”

He spoke. Just a little before that, Yotaro had casually reported seeing Kozue alight from a car with their usual women's magazine reporter and enter that inn while passing by. Yozo, who had deliberately kept his distance for some time, went to investigate, only to find the young reporter had already left by then, with Kozue eating an orange while reading the evening paper. When she saw Yozo enter, her expression turned sullen.

In response to Yozo's questioning, Yoko Kozue maintained she had simply invited the reporter and treated him to dinner at their regular Chinese restaurant. Since the reporter was one of Yoko's admirers, Yozo couldn't help feeling suspicious. "But with people like that," she said, "someone like me needs to do such things occasionally." "I'm even taking advances on my manuscript payments." Yozo found this explanation plausible enough to drop the matter. That evening, intending to take a short stroll around the neighborhood, they left the inn together and deliberately avoided main roads, walking through newly developed areas like Shinhanamachi whose appearance had completely transformed after urban rezoning. From the foot of Tenjin's back slope, they visited a sweet red bean soup shop operated by a familiar confectioner near Hirokoji. This was a somewhat unconventional establishment run by the elder brother of a young English literature scholar who often visited Yozo's study.

And as they walked on like that, he lost sight of the right moment to part ways and ended up spending the night in Yoko’s room.

Around the time when Yoko had just established a household nearby, young man K—— who—along with Yotaro and another youth H—— (the latter recently taken with English literature)—had abruptly visited her proposing something like launching a campaign for publishing Yozo’s complete works, had since become practically part of the inner circle and now assisted Yozo—who often found himself in need—with household matters. This same young man K—— happened to be in Yozo’s room that day, and though he went searching for Yoko at both the boarding house and inn with a changed complexion, she was nowhere to be found.

Before long, young man K—— brought Ohae, Yoko’s maid who had been left behind at the boarding house, to Yozo’s room. Ohae, who had come up to Tokyo from Yoko’s hometown the previous summer to look after the children, was a simple eighteen-year-old girl with well-proportioned features and a plump but balanced figure—the subject of occasional gossip among the young people who visited Yozo. Now brought before him, she seemed terribly flustered yet oddly composed, her face reddening as she sat rigidly in place.

“Where did Ms. Kozue go? You know, don’t you, Ohae-chan?”

Young Man K—— casually inquired. And even when pressed two or three times, she merely smiled uncomfortably and gave no answer. Judging by her demeanor, she seemed to know far too much about various incidents in the boarding house room—things one couldn’t sense in Yozo’s room—so much so that she likely found it utterly absurd that Yozo and the others were even asking such questions. The calls coming to Yoko, the calls Yoko made out—what Yoko was actually doing was beyond Ohae’s youthful understanding, but she did grasp that there was some male friend involved. It was possible that Yoko Kozue had even confided the secret of her affair with that man to Ohae, who was always by her side.

Yozo held a furoshiki bundle containing manuscript paper, a compact, and other items. Vividly picturing Yoko Kozue’s resolute figure—her bobbed hair pinned with an oroku comb, black-lacquered tall geta clacking through spring rain-drenched streets as Ohae saw her off to where the entaku taxis flowed—he burned with resentment and frustration at being unable to discern her whereabouts. Yet tormenting this girl further would be futile. For Yoko to mold this maid into an utterly reliable confidant required no particular effort at all.

After the child and Young Man K—— went out into the late-night streets to get something to eat, Yozo lay down on his sickbed like a semi-invalid. Burying his body alone in the soft kapok futon, his weary mind would calm and his frayed nerves find relief—yet he had a more pressing anxiety that transcended this sordid world of passion. In such a case, had his creative drive been vigorous and journalism favorable, his heart would not have had to become so despondent.

How long had Yozo kept Confessions of a Fool balanced over his upturned eyes? As he lay there, his eyelids grew heavy until the electric lamp faded into dimness and he slept. Then when the room turned ashen with dawnlight, he felt knees press weightily against his bed's edge and jolted awake—only to find Yoko's gaunt face peering down at him from above.

“I’m sorry—I wrote this much last night.” Yoko said this, taking out ten-odd manuscript sheets from her folder and flipping through them with a rustle. Seemingly stirred by a sentimental pang in her exhausted body, she shook Yozo’s still-sleeping form. Then one night, he lost sight of her again. Yozo found himself driven by curiosity to identify the shadowy figure he vaguely sensed. The doctor who had operated on her affected area first piqued his interest, though suspicion also fell on others—the dance instructor’s lover and that magazine reporter. Yet above all, her occasional remarks made clear she seemed to detect some fresh stimulus in the doctor’s life—that man of exceptional skill and character working in realms beyond ordinary understanding. For her, accustomed to dealing only with temperamental artists, winning the affection of such an eminent doctor must have been an undiluted joy. Should he take on the role of new patron, all the better.

“Yoko’s gone missing again.” Yozo reported to Sayoko. Sayoko was undoubtedly someone who had experienced all sorts of situations involving secret rendezvous and the like.

She had just gotten out of the bath, finished applying her makeup, and was sitting at the front desk. “Why does she do such things?” “Even though there’s someone like Professor here.”

Sayoko said while gazing at her reflection in the mirror propped up at the counter. “She must like you, Professor.” “Well… once in a while.” “Since when? She didn’t leave any word at all?” “Seems like it was since last night.” When he mentioned the doctor, Sayoko suddenly perked up with interest.

“Why don’t you try hiring a private detective?”

Sayoko also had a somewhat mischievous streak. “I suppose so.” Yozo became gloomy, but once he began digging into such matters, it was his nature to burrow endlessly downward without cease, leaving him no way to gain footing. And he gradually became accustomed to deriving pleasure from that stimulation and suffering. “Professor, why don’t you try going to the I Detective Agency in Nihonbashi now?” “Will you come too?”

“Eh.” “But let’s try calling first.” Sayoko picked up the desk phone receiver. After making arrangements with the detective agency, she called the garage too.

Soon, Sayoko threw on her patterned haori jacket, draped a black fox fur scarf over her French velvet coat-clad shoulders, and settled into the hired car's seat—but Yozo felt an inexplicable reluctance to proceed. That said, there was no particular intent behind Sayoko's action either. It was nothing more than a childish notion of hers, who at times played the harmless leader of delinquent girls. After returning the car, they entered the detective agency's dimly lit waiting room together, but as they were kept waiting for some time, Sayoko abruptly—

“I somehow feel like it might be around the XX Pavilion in Gotanda.”

“XX Pavilion?” “What’s that?” “It’s a large restaurant built after the earthquake—the sort for secret rendezvous... If they hole up there, they’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you.” Yozo knew nothing of such places, though truth be told, Yoko herself wasn’t particularly worldly either. Yet when Sayoko declared this with such certainty, he found himself envisioning Yoko and the doctor making their way there. Sayoko grew fidgety and proposed calling XX Pavilion to test her theory. She bustled out into the hallway and lifted the receiver. Yozo stood beside her.

“Hello, a woman named Ms. Kozue should be at your place...”

A maid's voice came from the other end.

Sayoko briefly covered one side of the receiver with her hand, "I think I hit the mark."

She playfully widened her eyes mischievously, but according to the maid’s response that came back on the line, Yoko still didn’t seem to be there. “At first they answered as if she were present, you know.” “A name like Ms.Kozue isn’t exactly common.” “Since this seems pointless, why don’t we go for a drive?” “I suppose so.”

The streets had become a world of electric lights. The two of them, with a restlessness that refused to settle, promised extra fare in their drunken exhilaration and raced off in the taxi. Sayoko was more animated than usual, but Yozo too wanted to seize this chance to see such a house. “Since we’re going to have dinner anyway…”

“That’s right,” Sayoko said after a slight pause,

“But I can’t go there.”

“Oh, I see.” “When I lived at the Kōjimachi mansion, I stayed there for over a month due to illness.” “Then while a certain person had come and was lying there, someone suddenly arrived.” “When the maid came clattering in to report this, he panicked terribly—jumped into the garden still clutching his clothes—but then left his most important hat behind in the alcove!”

“Who is this ‘certain person’?” After Sayoko came to live together with her elderly mother in the mansion of a German noble, she had already lost even the slightest interest in telling Yozo the name and status of that man with whom she had once kept house for several years.

Before they knew it, they arrived in Gotanda. And at a spot slightly before the main gate of XX Pavilion—encircled by a long hedge and deep in the shade of a grove—Sayoko had the car stopped and sent the driver to inquire, but he returned saying that such a person had yet to arrive. At the same moment, headlights flashed on as an automobile emerged from the gate and curved toward them. Under the glow of the room light, there appeared the ruddy face of a plump forty-two- or forty-three-year-old woman—her dowdy chignon bundled in a black serge coat and draped with a velvet shawl—while a slender-faced gentleman in Western attire, his features sharp and composed, bent forward to strike a match for his cigarette. Yozo felt a sickening sensation and could roughly grasp this house’s atmosphere. Until now, Yozo had been fantasizing about Yoko’s face and demeanor in one of those rooms—how she would deliberately write manuscripts or read them aloud with pride beside that distinguished Dr.K, innocently displaying her pride as a woman writer—but even that vision now vanished without a trace.

“At times like this, one must do such things to settle the Professor’s mind.” It seemed to Yozo that Sayoko had voiced this thought. Eventually they set off homeward, feeling as if some possessing fox-spirit had abandoned them. “How ridiculous—I’ve squandered twelve yen,” Sayoko laughed as they alighted from the car before the riverside house’s gate. Late that night, Yozo walked along dust-settled streets with Mr.K—— and the child beneath stars that shimmered with spring’s coquetry. Seizing the moment, he pushed open the heavy door of that familiar inn and inquired of the maid behind white drapery—only to learn Ms.Kozue was indeed present.

“She has already retired for the night, but…”

Disregarding this, the three of them clomped their way up.

Sure enough, Yoko was lying in bed. Her hair was set in beautiful waves; her face, seemingly made up before bed, had been coolly applied with slightly thick white powder; and there was a radiant beauty to her, unclouded by even a trace of shadow, as though she were about to embark on some dream. She was wearing a crimson patterned silk crepe long under-kimono.

Yozo cursed violently and suddenly struck her head and face three or four times. Yoko’s black eyes snapped open. "My head matters! I need it to make a living!"

“What’s one or two heads like that?”

And then he tried to leave with the young people standing nearby in exasperation. "Wait." Yoko's voice came from where she lay. Yozo was instantly pulled backward. When he looked over, her expression suddenly softened, a meltingly coquettish smile appearing. "Stay here, Professor."

A white hand was extended. Given the circumstances, he too had no way to resist her allure tonight.

Fifteen

However, Yoko’s health after being discharged from the hospital still could not be called fully recovered at that time. Even after such incidents occurred, she would occasionally feel feverish; though it was a surgical department, the powdered medicine Dr.K gave her seemed perfectly suited to her constitution—she always kept it prepared in her handbag—so she thought of going somewhere slightly warmer. Since Yozo happened to be writing for the newspaper, it proved convenient for them to go together. Yoko showed no particular inclination to go alone either. Moreover, it hardly qualified as a proper journey. It was simply a matter of spending several harsh days enduring the lingering winter cold at that modest suburban hotel where their thoughtless actions had first bound their fates.

Yet when they arrived at the hotel, Yoko did not seem to have settled into her room in a cheerful mood. However, in the salon—which had sunroom-like wide verandas extending east and west—the fireplace always burned crimson with coal, steam heating ran through the rooms, and she could read and write without noticing the cold outside where frost pillars glittered in the morning garden. Except on Sundays, there were few people during the day, but at night young foreign men and women returning from work would fill the salon, maintaining cheerful conversations without becoming too boisterous. Yoko would often don a black haori and enter during less crowded hours. At a spot slightly removed from the radiator's warmth, she would peruse American fashion magazines and such, though she did not particularly dislike the foreigners' ambiance.

“Professor…”

She would say this and occasionally invite him to the unoccupied radiator area, but typically when their private room grew stifling, she would fidget her way out into the corridor. Though Yozo vaguely sensed something between Yoko and Dr.K—the latter being a man of established reputation who moved in esteemed circles and bore boundless honor—he speculated that if anyone had succumbed to Yoko’s seductive charms, it might be one of the other young men at the hospital or perhaps that women’s magazine reporter; or he imagined the truth might actually lie with Dr.K himself, who had performed her surgery. Yet Yozo also felt somewhat responsible for her loss of financial patronage and keenly aware of his own failure to provide substantial material support; sensing that she—never oblivious in such matters—was likely already securing new connections and advancing those schemes, he—prone to losing rationality to anxiety and jealousy—even amidst such gloomy torment, found himself wanting to somehow preserve her place in literary circles against the barrage of criticism from all quarters. Love remained love—but if this crumbling affair were to attain any semblance of order, if his thoroughly ruined dignity were to be salvaged even slightly, there was no path but to nurture her talent.

In the quiet town warmed by winter sunlight, the two would occasionally go for walks. But Yoko, walking beside Yozo, often fell into nervous sentimentality and would sometimes utter cryptic words that seemed to hint at something to his insensitive self. When they grew tired of the hotel’s somewhat distinctive meals, they would invite the young people who had come to visit and enter a lively alleyway restaurant beyond Gaardo, often dining on fresh crab and shellfish dishes characteristic of a seaside town. It was just when the seeds of proletarian literature were beginning to sprout, and such shadows had started coloring even the literary discussions of young people. Yoko, who loved conversation, kept her nerves keenly attuned to glean something from these youths. There had been a time last autumn at its height when he had taken her—before she had resolved to undergo surgery—on a drive all the way to Hakone. The night had grown quite late, and Yoko—troubled by hemorrhoids—lay listlessly with her upper body sprawled across the cushion; but when they had the car stop before a certain inn in Miyanoshita around nine o'clock, a boisterous crowd of drunken students was spilling out of the entrance making a racket. Startled, Yozo first made to abruptly step down from the running board, then tried to retreat back into the car. And just as he attempted to direct the driver, four or five students had already surrounded the vehicle.

“Dr. XX is here too. He’s been wanting to meet you.”

While they were arguing back and forth, one young man said this and persuaded Yozo. He thought stubbornly refusing would lack dignity, so he decided to yield to their goodwill. They didn’t jeer at the two who had suddenly appeared before them. “On the contrary—attacking such a romance is feudalistic thinking,” they declared. “Go right ahead!” they urged, surrounding Yoko as she stepped into the entranceway and hoisting her up while shouting “Banzai!” Flustered, Yozo seized the chance to slip smoothly away. Guided by the clerk, he settled into a second-floor room—but when Yoko entered shortly after, even her weary face bore a faint flush of excitement.

“This is awkward.” “We’ve come to a bad place.” “Those people all seem pleasant. They’re from Imperial University.” Since this was Yoko—never one for shame—they exploited it fully.

The two of them took a bath together and then began their meal. About ten students then arrived with a more earnest demeanor than before to engage in literary debate, but Yoko Kozue took full charge of it. Brushing aside Yozo, who stood there grinning, she animated even her delicate hands with expression and rattled on incessantly from her thin lips. This was not unique to that occasion—whenever young men visited, it was always Yoko who responded to their lively discussions, while Yozo, though not unhearing, scarcely uttered a word. Occasionally, beautiful poems beyond Yozo’s imagination would flash from her unrestrained lips, but to him, they carried the scent of a woman’s world—a mystery akin to flowers or the moon.

One evening, the two of them were having a meal in a private room at their usual small restaurant. Wherever Yozo went, he had developed a habit of eyeing the alcove’s hanging scrolls and vases, generally judging whether the food was carelessly prepared by how the flowers were arranged. But now, there hung an old Nanga-style scroll signed "Buson." Though its fake status was evident from both the painting’s style and the restaurant’s modest setting, a curiosity that it might be some overlooked treasure compelled him to repeatedly study this artwork that didn’t seem entirely worthless. He felt faint vexation and irritation toward Yoko’s restless mood—as if she perpetually sought escape routes—yet lacked either the courage to confront it directly or the finesse to disentangle himself. Feigning belief where none existed, he remained mired in anguish’s quagmire. This stemmed from her coquetry being more neurotic and provocative than usual during such moments, with jealousy-blended loathing and attachment driving him into morbid lust—so that they wallowed together in a carnal mire.

That night too, Yozo had become somewhat sullen, but at some moment, “Professor… if you think I’m too much of a burden…” Yoko suddenly said this, a lonely expression on her face. Yozo was thinking about something else, so he couldn’t clearly hear her words, and without even the awareness to ask their meaning, he remained silent—but the shadow of what lay behind her was faintly blurred.

When the salon was empty, Yoko would sometimes close the book she was reading and leave Yozo’s side. Yozo sat in a swivel chair before a desk that was nearly too high for him, pen in hand, yet strained his ears as if trying to perceive every movement of her unseen form. Once—when she had first moved into Yozo’s house—she had gone alone to the Imperial Theater to see some actress-led play or other. At that time—likely due to some peculiar expression she wore—a young American gentleman seated beside her addressed her in broken Japanese. Their words never quite achieved mutual understanding, though he managed to grasp whether she had any companions. Though Yoko had long harbored curiosity about white foreigners, knowing many were disreputable types, she disliked being pestered with conversation amid such crowds. She left her seat and stepped into the corridor. Passing by concession stands, she emerged onto a balcony overlooking the moat’s nighttime scenery. It might have been May—the street trees already thick with indigo-black leaves as a light rain fell. Whether she meant to escape the foreigner or lure him out remained unclear from her account alone—yet one could hardly doubt some measure of curiosity drove her. Even considering later rumors of her entanglement with a German student youth—as with all modern young women—she might well have nursed yearnings toward such foreigners.—In any case, standing on that balcony, Yoko must have listened to approaching footsteps in the corridor with a chest-quivering akin to inexplicable dread. Sure enough, the young man approached. In faltering Japanese he proposed going downstairs to summon a car for them to drive together. Naturally unaware of his character—and feeling insulted by his misunderstanding—Yoko refused through gestures, but he remained insistent. As their tussle drew gathering spectators and usherettes, Yoko enlisted help from Ms.O—a women’s activist acquaintance of Kusaba’s whom she’d chatted with earlier in the corridor—finally managing to establish her identity. Ms.O deliberately proclaimed her status as a renowned woman writer.

Afterward, when Yoko was standing before a display window on her way back from a photo shoot at Sone Studio in Ginza, she noticed that same young foreigner standing beside her again, grinning. This time, they merely exchanged smiles with their eyes, and though she felt she had been subtly followed for two or three blocks, nothing came of it. In Yoko at that time, there still remained the girlish charm of maidenhood and the dignified pride befitting a literary young woman. Yozo was now at the foreigners' hotel with Yoko, and he couldn't help but recall such things. The young foreigners here mostly seemed to be engineers employed by government ministries or companies, but among them were also newlywed couples who had just arrived and brought in several trunks, using the place as temporary lodging while searching for a rental house. Yozo did not neglect to pay attention to Yoko's movements as she went out into the hallway multiple times a day, her footsteps seemingly stolen away—partly for that reason too.

At times, he would faintly sense her presence as she slipped out to the telephone near the front desk’s office, as though stealthily making a call somewhere—yet at night, she would often listen to the radio until late. During times when there were visitors, or when he visited a young writer who had built a different love nest with a renowned female writer some distance away, Yozo could finally face his manuscript paper once the hotel staff had settled down for the night. He often joined the foreigners in the salon and had tea and cake with her, but he himself was someone who, had he possessed a bit more courage, would have liked to exchange words with those people who seemed as though they wanted to say something.

Then one night, Yoko lay in bed with her usual nervous fever, reading a book, but no sooner had she begun dozing off than she called out to him hysterically and stretched out her pale hand. During the day, Yoko had visited a town clinic in a covered vehicle at Yozo’s urging and brought back medicine, but the doctor—a humorous man versed in literature—had grown thoroughly familiar after briefly examining her body. Yet in this instance, the prescription proved ineffective for Yoko.

Yozo had grown inexplicably weary of this existence. Even when composing a single newspaper piece, his mood refused to settle. Yoko's illnesses plunged him into deeper gloom. He would move to her side to soothe her, but she invariably wore an expression of suppressed weeping, eyes glistening.

“Professor, you’re such a pitiful soul.”

Yoko said this and took his hand, but suffering under the oppressive weight of this burdensome attachment, it was nothing but her moaning voice. "You're so slow to catch on…"

She murmured inwardly.

The fever persisted into the next day. And when evening drew near, at Yoko Kozue’s insistence—she could no longer endure it—they decided to request Dr.K for a house call. Dr.K arrived shortly thereafter, wearing a crested haori and stiff hakama. Yoko’s complexion suddenly brightened from the moment she learned Dr.K would come.

Just as Yozo had come to buy cigarettes near the front office, Dr.K—his large eyes glinting—entered hesitantly and addressed him with formal courtesy. “I’ve come to pay my respects…” “How kind of you to visit amidst your busy schedule.” “Please.” Seated in an armchair wearing traditional Japanese clothes, Dr.K appeared every inch the robust yet unpretentious middle-aged gentleman. Like damp autumn mist giving way to sunlight, Yoko raised her upper body on the pillow and called out “Professor!” in an ingratiatingly cheerful voice while motioning Yozo aside. Yet Dr.K—as if conscious of Yozo’s presence—responded with measured composure, his gaze flickering toward her animated chatter in subtle admonishment. Their conversation largely revolved around Dr.K’s experiences during his studies abroad.

After sipping his tea, he began the examination. What passed between them—more than the exchange between doctor and patient, a searing yet conscientiously restrained gaze of affection—was not something Yozo’s eyes could clearly discern in the dim electric light. But when the blanket’s edge was lifted to reveal the slow-healing wound, he hurriedly left the room. And there was no way to know what words were whispered.

Yozo was walking down the corridor with a feeling of being crushed when, just then, women’s literary magazine Reporter R—— arrived. By the time Yozo had ushered Reporter R—— into the room, the long-overdue wound dressing had been completed, and Dr.K had returned to his former chair. Yozo recommended the canned Three Castles while recounting how he had undergone anal fistula surgery performed by the director at that same hospital long ago. At that time, Dr.K had just returned from Germany. As this went on, it began to seem imaginable that while harboring affection for him, the doctor would also administer suitable treatment to Yoko Kozue’s wanton fever. Above all, Dr.K possessed high honor and status. He was of a station that sometimes warranted even the carriages dispatched from noble quarters.

Yet even Yozo, his eyes clouded by unreflecting attachment, could not turn a blind eye to Yoko’s brazen mischief. He was slightly agitated. And when the reporter—while requesting a manuscript from him—began suggesting that Yoko write something short as well, he suddenly hurled insults. “What could anyone possibly write in this trash?”

“No, but if the Professor would just glance over it…” “I refuse.” In this situation, Yozo felt he had somewhat vented the frustration of being made to look like a ridiculous clown before Dr.K, but after the reporter departed and the doctor took his leave, his anger only intensified further. He paced back and forth beside the bed and grilled Yoko. Regarding that matter, Yoko did not offer a single word resembling an excuse. Before long, Yozo began haphazardly cramming manuscript paper, magazines, and spare shirts into a trunk. After fastening the lock, he summoned the bellboy and demanded the bill.

“Dr.K is an honorable man, so please at least consider that.”

Yoko pleaded with tears in her eyes. "And Professor, you're overthinking things a bit." "I'll explain later."

After settling the bill, Yozo picked up his heavy suitcase and abruptly tried to leave the room, but he needed to call a car to get to the station. In front of the manager and bellboys he had grown somewhat familiar with, leaving the sick Yoko behind also looked improper. He was concerned about how far things had progressed with Dr.K. Above all else, even if he couldn't hope for a sincere reconciliation at an opportune time, he wanted at least superficially to return together as they had come. Were he to return alone, he would undoubtedly suffer through a night with no recourse in that lonely study, unable to sleep peacefully.

Yozo soon had the meal brought to the room and took up his fork, but Yoko sipped a few spoonfuls of consommé and was eating an orange.

“Forgive me.” Having said that, Yoko lay back on the bed again. Yozo went out to the salon where coal was glowing red.

After a day's interval, one afternoon, Yoko went out with two young men who had happened to come visiting—she said she wanted to check on Rumiko, whom she had placed as a live-in apprentice with her dance instructor some time ago—something she hadn't done in quite a while. As the young men departed via the national railway line—their exit seeming almost like a sudden impulse—Yozo made no effort to see them off in his usual manner, and Yoko too left behind some parting shot as she went out. Yozo sent words implying she should never return to the hotel again, but she, for her part, subtly hinted at her immediate request—as if to say that if he were kind enough to build her a house, then perhaps...

When he found himself alone, the room suddenly appeared spacious, and the gloomy and turbid air seemed to brighten. Before he knew it, spring had already arrived even within the closed glass windows, casting a hazy light. The cineraria he had bought at a town florist’s on a walk some time ago now sat forlornly wilted in the corner of the table scattered with magazines, letters, and manuscript paper. Night soon fell.

Yozo, having no interest in going out, took a bath and then entered the dimly lit dining room. Western music records were playing, with four or five foreigners scattered about at various tables. The story about a certain French professor who had been staying at this hotel for over ten years—from its founding by the American-returned master up to the present—was something Yozo had once heard from an elderly bellboy with managerial airs when he first stayed in the Japanese-style room with Yoko Kozue. Yet Yozo had never seen what manner of man this was—not once had he glimpsed any elderly gentleman resembling such a figure in either the corridors or salon. When selecting his room, he had semi-permanently replaced the flooring to his taste, changed the wallpaper and window drapes, and remodeled the fixtures—without touching the building’s fundamental structure—to make it more comfortable.

His lifestyle was exceedingly strict; he almost never went out at night, and one seldom heard of him dining out. When school went into recess, he made it his practice to go every year, and spending an entire summer at a temple in Nagasaki had been his long-standing custom. He appeared to be roughly the same age as Yozo. Yozo had a glass of wine poured and, with a lonely air, sipped at it slowly as he contemplated the life of that foreigner—of which he understood only fragments—comparing it to his own existence weighed down by endless troubles. Yet to mold himself into religious norms and forms without faith felt hollow, and immersing himself in some academic research was not in his nature. He had grown utterly weary of his long-standing family life and had become completely worn out by this wretched romance. He had always thought of seeking respite for his mind and body in some mountain forest, but such a life was already quite a luxury in modern times.

A glass of wine lured his crushed spirit into a drowsy stupor and kindled a faint flame in his muddled head. After finishing his meal, he took a chair by the salon stove and smoked a cigarette. Perhaps due to the fatigue of several days, a pleasant drowsiness began to wash over him. Eventually, he returned to his room and got into bed still wearing his kimono. Here, stretching his limbs freely across the wide bed and letting his body rest became his greatest solace.

Yozo felt Yoko might return yet also sensed she might not—at first he even felt it would be a relief if she didn't. After drowsily falling asleep once, he had likely slept about an hour and a half when he suddenly awoke to the commotion of a neighboring guest returning. By then voices had already vanished from the salon adjacent beyond the hearth, and the hotel lay utterly still. The ticking of the office clock's second hand and sounds of distant doors began registering distinctly in his ears. When a knock at the entrance door reached him, his nerves sharpened as though it were Yoko.

What time was it? His nerves, languid as a patient's, suddenly jolted at the telephone bell. It rang shrilly and incessantly, but with the bellboys seemingly fast asleep, no one came to answer. The guests were all salaried workers with early morning commutes—there should have been no reason for a call this late. Yozo thought it was likely Yoko and nearly rose from bed, but his hazy consciousness made even that effort feel burdensome. Amidst this indecision, he drifted back into a fitful sleep.

The next day, Yozo withdrew from there and returned to his study for the first time in a while. It felt as though he had awoken cleanly from a nightmare, yet the residue clinging to the recesses of his mind refused to loosen its grip. And as he sat at his desk, he realized just how exhausted his body had grown from relentless nights without sleep. He had Dr. Watase, who lived nearby, come examine his body. The doctor knew all about his recent lifestyle but—having been cohabiting with the second woman this whole time—took up his stethoscope with graver solemnity than usual.

“It’s neurasthenia, I suppose.” “I’ll adjust your medication to help you sleep better.” “I’m terrified of living like this—it’s no good, is it?” “That said, this room must be quite lonely when you’re alone.”

After the doctor left, he slept until evening.

By the end of April, Yoko was to move to the coast of Zushi. By that time, her relationship with Dr.K had already become something of an open secret, and during moments when both were in good spirits, she would laughingly let slip intriguing hints about it. “The lives of people like that are truly simple and innocent,” she said. “They must think our life is so vibrant and fascinating. That man knew a geisha in Shitaya through his professional connections—she’d been hospitalized for the same hemorrhoid treatment as me. After being discharged, he’d occasionally call her over, you know. They say her features resembled mine quite closely.”

“Hmm.” “When did your relationship with him begin?”

Yozo asked. “Hmm, I’ll explain everything in detail later…” “If I just shift that person’s position a bit, I could even write it down.” “I’ll teach you all sorts of fascinating things.” “But you’d get angry, Professor.”

Yozo gave a bitter smile. "At first... where did you go?" "When I took him for a drive at night to some far-off place, he was so startled." "After you were discharged from the hospital?" "Yes. When I stayed late once, I had him kiss me in his office." Such scenes came easily to his imagination. "I've got some amusing letters too. He's properly earnest like the upstanding man he is, yet simple as a child." "Show me." "That comes later too."

But in good conscience, Yozo had no desire to probe into those secrets of the doctor's. The more he learned, the more it merely dredged up his own vulgarity. "I wonder if there's money involved." He gingerly broached that subject too.

Yoko began roughly calculating that income, but there was no way to determine the extent of his assets. Naturally, since Yoko appeared to be covering most of their outing expenses, there seemed to be no calculating motive on her part. Even had there been some such intention, it would hardly have mattered before the guileless Dr.K. By all appearances, the doctor had proven slightly more adept. As his patient, Yoko had apparently visited Dr.K's residence too, using that experience to estimate his standard of living.

"But Dr. K said that." “He told me, ‘Since the Professor is a good man, you must take proper care of him.’” “My moving to Zushi will help settle this affair too.” Yozo listened silently, sensing that physical distance might actually give her more freedom to arrange meetings with the doctor. Though he understood Dr. K was trying to withdraw, he doubted whether her fiery passion could be quenched like flames doused with water.

“I want to give Dr.K something in thanks, but what would be good?” He felt that despite having progressed to such a relationship, even this gesture might prove insufficient—yet he also thought this might finally settle matters. “About how much should it be?” “We shouldn’t be too miserly about it.” “What about cigarettes?”

“Very well.” “Can you get something decent for about thirty yen?” “I wouldn’t know...” Yoko went to Zushi to look for a house two or three days after that, but by then she had already purchased a box of cigarettes wrapped in two sheets of formal Japanese paper and tied with a ceremonial cord, and she came to Yozo’s room to show it to him. At exactly the same time, a round birdcage hung by the window of her rented room, and on quiet mornings the lovely chirping of the canary would reach his room as well; but her claim that it was a farewell gift from her younger brother to celebrate her move was a lie—the obtuse Yozo only realized much later that it was actually a present from Dr. K, and with that, he finally grasped that this romance had reached its climax.

Yozo had gone to Zushi for the first time with Yoko four or five days after their relocation. Though he'd actually felt reluctant about going, her apparent eagerness for him to see the house eventually moved him to agree. That coastal area would soon enter its peak season when young crowds would gather at the hotel. He had known about the young popular writer who'd been renting a house there beforehand, and was aware too of the mansion belonging to a brilliant Marxist—the sole bourgeois heir who happened to be his eldest son's classmate. It wasn't unthinkable that Yoko's house might become an easygoing salon for those youths. The embarrassment of parading his tattered romance in such surroundings now weighed on him, as did the unease of being so far removed from the children.

Yoko was happily explaining the layout of the rented house, the entranceway, and the composition of the front garden.

“That’s fifty yen. “Isn’t that cheap?” Renting such a house—what would they do? The timid Yozo grew worried. While writing serialized works was manageable for now, that couldn’t last forever. Of course, she wasn’t always extravagant; there were moments when she seemed like a genuinely sharp-minded housewife. Yet as a household, everything somehow conspired to be costly. Even the cosmetics she bought from places like May Ushiyama were of considerable quality. However sporadically Yozo supplemented them, ruin was certain to come eventually.

However, Yoko intended to settle her past life and apply herself seriously to studying there. Even if she left Rumiko in someone else's care, she would still feel anxious about it, so she wanted to keep her close at hand. Regarding the move, she had received a certain amount of money from her mother. Her mother had not yet abandoned Yoko. Yozo, carrying his leather briefcase, sauntered out of the house. He arrived at Tokyo Station by taxi, but by the time he reached the coastal station, the lingering late spring day was already fading.

The coastal town they passed through by taxi was quiet and desolate, and the twilight wind carried a damp, lonely chill. Yozo had some sort of bad premonition, but as he was also daunted by frequent gossip, he found himself in a generally unsettled mood. Yoko, unusually, upon returning home immediately changed into her scale-patterned meisen everyday-kimono and, with her hair still disheveled, took along the maid Ohae to go shopping at the fishmonger’s next to the hotel and the greengrocer’s a little further away, working to prepare dinner. With her kimono hem tucked up, she even drew water for the bath.

“Look at these fresh shrimp! I even ordered squid sashimi!”

Yoko brought the shrimp that had been delivered from the fishmonger and showed them to Yozo. “Are you really serious about this?” Yozo felt similarly, but there was no trace of that possessed mood from when she had abandoned him at the suburban hotel. Though he sensed the stimulus of momentarily embracing a new life—a passionate flame like a sparkler that might reignite at any provocation—he knew full well this excitement would soon wane into boredom. Yet these were truths one couldn’t grasp until they materialized. Moreover, while evading life’s responsibilities—a evasion justified by her inherent inability to face reality—Yozo unknowingly harbored within himself a selfish desire to pilfer her affection. Worse still, even as his own life grew increasingly tangled, he yearned to know every detail. Of course, this too was mere rationalization; he couldn’t deny his feelings were steering him blindly onward. Through Yoko, he now saw clearly those women from his past with whom he’d shared only fleeting connections.

In the eight-tatami room at the rear, surrounded by gardens on two sides, after an aimless dinner had concluded, while eating fruit and sipping tea, the bathwater was heated—and there Yozo soaked in the tub, letting Ohae scrub his back. When Rumiko finally fell asleep, the surroundings grew quiet, and the sound of waves could be heard. “Would you like to go down to the shore?” Because Yoko had invited him, he took his walking stick and left through the gate. The hotel entrance was right there.

“If you would like to listen to the radio, you can do so at the hotel.” Yoko said this and made her way down to the beach through the alley behind the hotel, though she already possessed detailed knowledge about the hotel’s operations and the lifestyle and character of the proprietor and his wife. The sea was dark. The towering offshore area barely reflected the faint glow of the sky. Moreover, the sea breeze carried a thin chill. Yoko walked along the sandy beach whistling, her footsteps heavy and dragging through the sand, when she suddenly turned back and drew close to Yozo—struggling to strike a match—blocking the wind with her sleeve.

"Aren't you enjoying this?" "I suppose so." Yoko wandered along the shore as if sleepwalking through a dream, her steps weightless as she drifted endlessly across the sand. Yet with this companion who seemed to dwell in a world wholly separate from her own—a world steeped in melancholy like the night sea's sorrow—she appeared vaguely unfulfilled. Still, through him, Yoko now sought to plant her feet more firmly upon the ground.

Sixteen

There was still time before summer visitors would come to this ordinary inland sea. The figures of children and women—playing in the sand, splashing water, or hunting for seaweed, small crabs, and sea urchins—had been increasing daily along the shore that was finally beginning to take on a summer-like aspect, while even the eager kappa-like swimmers could be seen in waves sparkling under the early summer sun. Yoko took Rumiko and the maid along, following the receded tide across the rocks as she chased small fish darting through shallows and collected chestnut burr-like shells. She knew how to extract fresh sea urchins from those spiny casings. Yozo too, leaning on his cane, wandered listlessly along the rocks until he had ventured beyond sight of Yoko and the others. Crouched on a rocky outcrop with cool breezes brushing his neck, he found himself gripped by an inexplicable daytime melancholy resembling his inherent hypochondria. Even then, he couldn't summon a moment's enjoyment of life. Though driven by urgency to return to his own existence, he remained paralyzed about how to turn away from this reality that felt like being cornered on a perilous cliff. He felt ashamed at having somehow stumbled onto this absurd stage, yet seemed incapable of making a graceful exit. Nami-ko Fudo stood nearby in that area. Yozo detested turning toward any place bearing the label of historic site, though he had occasionally climbed there with Yoko. When accompanied by Mr.K—the popular writer lodging at the hotel to work—they would visit film studios together, and since their enviable newlywed life then seemed assured of future happiness from which fresh acclaim arose, Yoko too began frequently voicing sentiments she wished to confide in Mr.K as all three walked together.

“Isn’t the current situation perfectly adequate as it is?” Mr. K had said this, yet his words stirred unease in Yoko’s heart as well. Since the Doctor incident—after relocating here—she seemed to profoundly regret her own lack of restraint. At least for the time being, she appeared to be suppressing her restlessness by resigning herself to returning to her original path with Yozo; yet depending on perspective, there might still linger unresolved matters that defied full reckoning. To sustain her relationship with Dr.K over time, she reasoned that maintaining distance would prove more advantageous for the doctor—whose reputation remained vulnerable—and one couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she was intentionally using Yozo as a facade. At that time, still unaware the canary itself was Dr.K’s gift either, Yozo would often sit in a rattan chair beside the cage of the curly-plumed bird—a creature he disliked—observing its movements; yet harboring latent suspicions, he found himself inclined to delicately probe Yoko’s sentiments toward this avian captive. He had kept birds as a boy, but never favored caged specimens as much as those perched freely on branches. The thought that even this fragile canary would soon perish under Yoko’s untrained care left him unsettled.

Perhaps the rainy season had finally set in, for the coastal air grew heavy with gloom each day. One afternoon, Yoko went alone to Tokyo to visit a women’s magazine company on business. Yozo too had not been staying there continuously. Living with Yoko was anything but easy. For a woman to become his daily companion—someone to share mornings and evenings—she first needed to grow accustomed to his household; yet under living conditions where she couldn’t blend into his life, it instead became a burden. After that incident, he now felt ready to shed it all right there. Keeping pace with her youthful existence—straining both body and mind—proved utterly agonizing. Nor could he ignore life’s mounting pressures.

When he returned to Tokyo, he would go to the Okawabata house, take a bath, have meals, and finally feel as though he had been liberated.

Alternately led by the eldest son, the children would go to Zushi; by that time, his suspicions regarding the doctor had already faded into something like a faint shadow. After going two or three times, even in the town of Zushi and along Hayama's coast—places that had once felt somehow repellent—a faint nostalgia had imperceptibly taken root within him, and he began to feel that spending this one summer there with the children might not be so bad; he even went house-hunting with Yoko on occasion.

That day, as Yoko was leaving the house, she had told him she would surely return by evening to have dinner together, so Yozo had waited with that expectation; but even as the sun was about to set, she still had not come back. Along with the housemaid, a woman named Kitayama—who had been assisting Yoko with her manuscripts since their Hokkaido days and would occasionally check on Rumiko, now an apprentice to a dance instructor in Tokyo—had also come by, so Yozo wasn’t exactly bored; yet with Yoko absent from the house, it still felt like a withered flower, and even the lamplight seemed lonely. Moreover, as time passed, it grew increasingly dispirited.

Before long, eight o'clock passed and it became nine.

In the narrow town, where automobile horns delivering hotel guests had resounded several times, and when night had grown quite late—just as the sound of an engine echoed before the gate—Yoko returned with a kind of formulaic beauty: her Mei Ushiyama-styled black hair gleaming with immaculate waves, her eyebrows, eyes, and lips sharply defined by thickly applied white face powder and eyeshadow. Because she wore a black haori jacket with a woven pattern where silver chidori plovers had been stitched here and there, the impression of her face grew even harder, like a plaster sculpture.

“I kept thinking you’d be back any moment, you’d be back any moment, and here I’ve been waiting all this time without even eating.” Yozo was angry. Yoko sat with her back to the kitchen; whether due to her makeup, her eyes lacked both their usual melting softness and any dark shadows. “But those people were treating me to dinner since it had been so long, and when a woman meets with editors, she can’t just stick to business matters like that.”

While sympathizing with that atmosphere, Yozo thought there might be some truth to it, but this time he began disparaging her hair and face. Yoko wore a half-dazed expression, but as Kitayama and Ohae gazed with envious eyes at her impeccably made-up face—utterly devoid of any shadow—the worm of irritation squirmed ever more fiercely in Yozo's gut. Finally he stood up as if kicking his seat away. After putting on his haori, he took his foldable briefcase and cane and went out. He thought he wanted to eat a somewhat elaborate dinner somewhere.

Yoko followed after him with Kitayama in tow. “I’ll carry that for you.” Kitayama said this and tried to take the folding briefcase from his hand, but Yozo walked briskly down the dark road, swinging his cane. Warm raindrops began pattering against their faces. When they reached the shaded teahouse, he too was breathing heavily. Around the time they settled into the second-floor room, voices of Yoko and the maid could be heard at the entrance; but by the time he went down to the bathhouse below, there was no trace of them.

Listening to the sound of the increasingly heavy rain, Yozo—his mind unsettled—would drift into a doze only to wake again, spending a lonely night there.

17

The next morning, Yozo, who had left his bed, found his eyes still gritty and his head foggy, as he had only managed to sleep deeply for a short time. The vivid garden trees, their fresh greenery moistened by the night’s rain, glittered without casting a shadow even against the deep blue of the sky; but Yozo, with his weak heart and habitual disposition in such situations, found himself sinking into a profoundly turbid mood.

Around the time of Yoko's hospitalization—when she had been staying in the neighboring boardinghouse room or visiting Yozo's study—it had become customary for her to storm out of the room whenever they quarreled. But now that Yozo found himself cast as the one who had driven himself out, he felt an awkward sense of incompletion. While he felt like making a clean break from this place, his resolve remained poor, and there was something tugging at the nape of his neck. Once caught in a snare, he found it terribly difficult to extricate himself. He somewhat regretted his own childishly envious soul, yet he also felt that this was precisely the time—when she had not yet begun any new romance—to cast off this life so full of anguish and troubles in one decisive blow. However, precisely such times were precisely when it became all the more difficult to sever things cleanly. Jealousy was not limited to when a third party appeared. Around a woman like Yoko, born with an innate coquettishness, one could imagine countless intangible phantoms of love—but more than that, within her very being sprawled countless ovaries of love.

Unintentionally, his wallet had grown alarmingly light at just that moment. Going to Yoko's would have resolved it effortlessly; informing the innkeeper and leaving would have sufficed too. Yet even his relationship with Yoko—already drawing society's censure and ridicule—made him feel conspicuously self-conscious, making him loath to create fresh awkwardness over trifles. These petty fixations compounded until his breakfast stuck in his throat like dry gravel. When he tallied the bill, however, even after settling it and leaving a tip, enough remained for rail fare without hardship. Having lost any pretext to visit Yoko's while nursing this deflated resignation, he finally summoned a motorcar.

The roar of an engine could be heard outside. Yozo felt it might be wrong to leave without telling Yoko, yet as he looked left at the narrow street where her house stood, he found himself wondering what the three of them and the child might be doing at that very moment, then proceeded along the path following the stream.

When he boarded the train, his feelings finally began to calm. While he felt somewhat dissatisfied as usual by Yoko’s absence at his side, there was also a sense of ease in having distanced himself from the gloomy prison of his mind. When he returned home and entered his study—feeling his body’s fatigue and decline like that of a semi-invalid—he immediately had a futon laid out and lay down; at the same time, he ordered the maid to have Dr.Watase, his usual physician, come as always.

Before long, Dr. Watase arrived in his starch-stiffened examination gown, kneeled beside the bed, and began using his stethoscope. "I too suffer from women troubles, you see..." When Yozo muttered awkwardly, the doctor smiled wryly. "Oh, it's perfectly fine." "You have a slight fever." Yozo had long been told by the doctor to live by the coast for five or six years due to his weak trachea, and now Dr. Watase was thoroughly examining his chest.

“It’s neurasthenia after all. I’ll give you some medicine, so make sure to get plenty of sleep now.”

After drinking tea and talking for a while, once Dr. Watase had left, Yozo found himself drifting into a doze. His daily existence—as if tormented by nightmares—simmered with revulsion, yet he realized he had again dreamed of her. When morning came, he could no longer remain abed despite having slept his fill. Seeking mental calm, he rummaged through books piled haphazardly in the alcove, pulled out a Strindberg novel, and opened it. Though feeling a literary thirst, aware of his own creative impoverishment, the solitude of his study overwhelmed him with loneliness too acute to bear alone. Outside, modern art blared garish marches while Marxist studies gained vogue and proletarian literature surged everywhere—a churning whirlpool of frenetic currents.

For a while, Yozo was able to spend several days and nights with Sayoko and her close friends and the like.

Among Sayoko’s circle were various women. The woman who had once suggested hiring a housekeeper—the same one Sayoko had shown him a photograph of—was also among them. When walking beside Sayoko, this woman even appeared rather distinguished; yet upon drawing near and exchanging words with her, dismaying qualities emerged. He found himself distracted by how her buckteeth exposed receding gums when she laughed; though her manners weren’t poor, something crude lingered in her speech and temperament. There was an angular coarseness about her—as Sayoko had mentioned, she’d apparently been wife to a prominent provincial landowner. Her bearing held vestiges of dignity, yet her conversation persistently veered toward vulgarity. Yozo would occasionally spot her sitting primly at Sayoko’s accounts counter, her soberly tailored clothes impeccable, but those clunky gold teeth disastrously spoiled the impression of her face.

During his married years, Yozo had not only refrained from paying attention to any beautiful women but had rejected romance outright—for even when opportunities arose over long periods to feel fleeting interest toward women in the trade whose presence faintly stirred something in him, he believed himself unworthy of loving any woman. Yet now that his relationship with Yoko lay in ruins, he found himself increasingly casting a gaze tainted with spiteful persistence toward women around him.

He was led by Sayoko and once went to visit the house of this woman named Okei-san. Okei-san had rented a house with a gate in a quiet area of Mita. A sixteen- or seventeen-year-old niece had come from the countryside, and on the second floor, two Mita students were boarding. In the old-fashioned central courtyard was a spring-fed pond, with azaleas sprawling across the ground and the young leaves of maple trees casting dense shadows. In the four-and-a-half-tatami alcove, a lush flower arrangement in a white flat bowl was displayed, and the scroll and cloud panel were not of particularly poor quality. Okei-san also seemed to have some knowledge of tea. The tidy, compact place also gave the impression of a mistress’s residence.

After being treated to tea and yōkan, they left the place. "I'm hardly fit to be a conversation partner, but please do come visit from time to time..." Okei-san said this and accompanied them to the exit leading to the street.

“There’s something going on there.” “True,” Sayoko replied. “Nothing concrete at present, I’d say. Though lately there’s been something... off about them. They’ve been indulging in rather vulgar conversations.” This closeness between Sayoko and Okei-san in Tokyo stemmed from their families’ connection—Sayoko’s sister ran a major tea wholesaler in Shizuoka that maintained friendly ties with Okei-san’s ancestral home.

“Shall we stop by Heinzelmann’s Otama-san’s place?”

After exiting onto the street, Sayoko said. “Heinzelmann, you say…” “Professor, you didn’t know about him yet, did you? A nun cohabiting with a German named Heinzelmann.” “And the German?” “A young engineer.” Due to her seven-year cohabitation with the German von Kurube, Sayoko appeared acquainted with various Germans; once while walking in Ginza, she encountered a rather uncouth fifty-year-old German man at the corner of Owaricho. Despite her attempts to avoid him, he followed her relentlessly with a mocking expression.

“What was that about?” Even when he asked, Sayoko just kept laughing and said, “No, he’s a nasty one.”

Heinzelmann lived in a house with a modest gate. A mother with her hair in a traditional chignon sat neatly dressed and bowing in the entranceway, while Otama-san emerged from the inner rooms upon hearing Sayoko's voice. She wore a plain Western dress, her perfectly round face with its dull complexion smiling in a lonely manner. Her hair was of course bobbed. Every room resembled stage sets for translated plays—on the second-floor eight-tatami room lay a cheap blue carpet, with a simple low table and chairs arranged beside a sturdy large dressing table where several bottles of Western liquor stood.

At first glance, Otama-san appeared the very picture of simplicity and obedience, but she couldn’t be called cheerful—as though harboring an inner sense of inferiority. “Would you care for a cocktail?” While peering into several liquor bottles kept with apparent care, she glanced back at the two drinking tea at the low table.

Yozo waved his hand. Between Sayoko and Otama-san, news of their German acquaintances, romantic relationships, and other such worldly gossip was exchanged, and before long, the three of them decided to go out to Ginza. In Ginza, Otama-san entered her regular cosmetics shop, had them bring out things like rouge and cream for her to scrutinize this and that, but in the end left without buying anything; then she also popped into a hat shop for a bit. By all appearances, she led a modest lifestyle, never wasting a single material thing. She did not linger long in Ginza, and when it was time for her husband to return, she promptly took the train home.

Observing such women always made Yozo think of Yoko instead, but one day as he sat alone in his study, Sayoko brought along yet another different woman. The woman named Yoshiko, who indeed had a striking presence, was slightly younger than Sayoko, with a face of middle-aged beauty. She wore a black haori adorned with family crests and had her hair styled in a glossy marumage. “This lady is your neighbor, and we’re from the same hometown too.”

Sayoko introduced her with those words. “Ha ha.”

Yozo had been laughing, but gradually came to understand her romantic past and straightforward temperament that cut through like splitting bamboo. He learned of her melodramatic history—reminiscent of an old-fashioned novel—from her time being employed by the same household in Shinbashi; falling in love with the young master while working as a maid at a renowned economics professor's estate; leaving to become a geisha after the youth was sent to a provincial high school; and how the young man eventually tracked her down, drawn anew by her charms, maintaining their clandestine affair even after his graduation and marriage. Moreover, he occasionally encountered her strolling through the neighborhood in yukata, her sleek washed hair styled in a bun, cradling a Setter dog in one arm—a vision that cemented her reputation as a celebrated beauty in these parts. He discovered her hobbies of flower arrangement and mahjong, where she displayed strategic brilliance yet always lost with such elegant grace that he found himself admiring her paradoxical methods. Unlike Sayoko, she was no homemaker.

“Care for a round?” Sayoko brought her index finger to the tip of her nose, mischief dancing in her eyes. “Well now. You’re likely angling to fleece me again—though back when my wife was alive, I only ever made blunders that earned me scoldings. Seems my disposition’s shifted somewhat of late.” “You were worse than hopeless before, weren’t you?”

Sayoko laughed. That evening, Yozo stayed late playing mahjong at Sayoko's house with visiting journalists and manga artists. One night when Yozo and Yoko went to see a Deneshon dance performance, they encountered Yotaro there with his schoolmates. At that time, Yozo had been away from home for some time. Unable to leave things at that, through some turn of events he found himself dining with Yoko Kozue at Ginza's sparsely frequented Monami restaurant, stealthily visiting the newly completed Musashino Cinema, and ultimately returning to Zushi once more.

Around that time, owing to postwar exhaustion from the Great War, first-rate Western artists visited Japan—where economic conditions remained relatively favorable—and found unexpected enthusiastic reception among youths just as recorded music was gaining popularity. Yozo had long attended military bands' open-air orchestral performances and Italian operas, but even his growing taste for records reflected this transition—the murky tones of Japanese music were beginning to yield to Western melodies' beauty. Through listening to Elman, he came to appreciate violin tones that had previously struck him with cloying unpleasantness, even discerning differences between Zimbalist's and Heifetz's playing styles. Though this amounted to nothing more than an antiquated Eastern mode of appreciation, from the perspective of love's study—which he'd finally begun grappling with in sweat-soaked earnestness at his age—it could still be considered grounded. Within the household, those once-frequent clashes between Yozo and his wife and children over old versus new hobbies had disappeared altogether. There had been an instance when Yozo and his wife waited near Ueno Zoo while running errands in Hirokoji for Yotaro—who'd gone to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the music school—and just as the performance ended, their son appeared in uniform with hunched shoulders and fearsomely solemn expression, striding briskly past them without a glance. But even that now belonged to the distant past.

Before this Deneshon performance—it had been last year—the same American dance troupe had come, and at that time too, Yozo had made Yotaro purchase advance tickets, arranging three seats side by side for them to watch. Yoko Kozue, wearing a newly tailored charmeuse haori among other things, occupied the innermost seat, with Yotaro next to her and then Yozo in order, having taken their positions near the orchestra box. It was still early before curtain time, with seats on both lower and upper floors only sparsely filled here and there. In the twilight-like dimness, the three looked through their programs for a while, but Yoko seemed to resist having Yotaro as a barrier between them.

“Let’s step out.” When Yozo stepped out into the corridor to smoke, the two followed after him. This Western-style theater, which had barely been saved from flames during the earthquake disaster, had only recently completed its renovations at that time, its former classical decorations now transformed into something much more elegant. The three entered the ladies’ lounge and looked around at the red-striped wallpaper when suddenly Yotaro addressed his father.

“Have you seen the second-floor hall?”

“Hmm, how was it?” “It’s quite lovely. The aesthetic there is truly the finest in this building.” “Oh yes, I must see that.” Yoko said with coquettish affectation. “Shall we go look?” As Yoko began to move toward the stairs, “Professor? You’re not coming?” “No, you two should go ahead.”

Yozo felt slightly irritable, yet being constitutionally incapable of staying still, he began wandering the corridor after the two figures disappeared upstairs. When he stepped into the entrance hall, he saw several groups of foreigners in resplendent dresses engaged in standing conversations here and there, though the space remained relatively uncrowded. Walking alone with Yoko through the ostentatious theater corridor—she who seemed poised to declare, "You should take full pride in possessing me"—filled him with excruciating self-consciousness. His usual method involved using a child as social camouflage, but leaving everything to the child now stirred vague apprehensions. Though deliberately courting social peril, his heart found no peace.

Just then, he spotted some familiar faces there as well. Sitting down on the circular cushions alongside them, he made small talk for a while. "You're truly enviable—having such a young, beautiful lover."

When that perpetually jocular friend said this to him, Yozo hung his head despondently. Then after encountering one or two more acquaintances and exchanging greetings, when he suddenly looked up, he noticed Yotaro and Yoko descending the stairs there. They came down slowly in lockstep—shoulders pressed tight, toes aligned—wearing expressions of uncharacteristic solemnity as they conversed in hushed tones. Yozo averted his eyes as if witnessing something illicit, but the pair passed directly before him at a measured pace, likely unaware, never glancing his way.

When he returned to his seat after a considerable time had passed, the two of them were already there, "Where have you been?" Yoko asked.

“We were looking for you, Professor.” “When we came back here and found you weren’t around, we searched everywhere.”

“Oh, never mind.” “This isn’t good at all. Your sulking has ruined any desire I had to watch the dance. That’s why I invited you—if only you’d come along properly.” Yoko’s eyes had moistened then, but looking back from that period—even beyond the incident that occurred after her discharge—both their nerves had grown considerably frayed. This time they had taken seats on the upper floor where the leg movements were clearly visible, but during intermission, Yozo suddenly received a distressing report from his child in the lower corridor.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about, Dad… Though it’s nothing really serious.” When Yotaro said this and led him to the circular cushions, Yozo—who had already been constantly worried about leaving home even without this—felt his nerves twinge with anxiety.

“I thought it might be better not to say anything, but I figured I should at least let you know…”

Yozo couldn't quite grasp what was coming. Whether it concerned his eldest daughter—who had been growing despondent from receiving strange looks at school—or whether something had happened to his young second daughter, in that instant his vision seemed to darken. "The truth is, Shoji withdrew some money and did something reckless." Shoji was Yozo's second son. "How much?" "He withdrew five hundred yen and spent three hundred of it in a single night."

“Where did he spend it?”

“Yoshiwara.” “Actually, we went to pick him up yesterday with Ms. Sayoko after getting a notice from the Nihonzutsumi police box, but it seems they found his spending suspicious because it was so reckless.” So it had finally come to this, Yozo thought, feeling utterly overwhelmed. He couldn’t bring himself to blame Yotaro, who had been entrusted with the passbook. When the bell rang, father and son parted ways—one going upstairs, the other down. That evening after leaving Yoko at the usual nearby inn, Yozo returned home only to find the remaining two hundred yen that Yotaro had stored in the utility chest drawer was already gone. Inside the empty envelope lay a scrap of paper with something scrawled in red ink.

"Damn, I’ve been had again." Yotaro, laughing, brought the scrap of paper and showed it to Yozo as well. I will temporarily borrow this money—so it was written in red letters. Just recently, Shoji—who was supposed to take the entrance exam for higher schooling—had come before Yozo while Yoko was also present, appealing that further education was useless in this era and that he had no interest in school. No matter how many times Yozo tried to reason with him, he had refused to bend his stance. Now, that pale face from that moment abruptly floated up before Yozo’s eyes.

18

One evening, Sayoko had come to visit. After taking Yozo's youngest daughter to see Tenkatsu's magic show in Asakusa and stopping by his home following dinner in Ueno—though it was meant to be just a brief visit—Yozo found himself caught in crossfire: assailed externally by attacks from journalists and internally by the first flames of rebellion rising from his second son, who harbored resentment toward both his eldest brother's attitude regarding Yoko's scandal and the family's internal strife. Even as he had mostly seen through the limits of his social credibility, he still couldn't bring himself to break away from Yoko, who herself struggled to find a new direction.

Around that time, he had an opportunity to glimpse Marx Boi—a classmate of his eldest son who was said to reside along that coast—at Yoko's salon. It was evening.

However, when Yoko was introduced by Yotaro—Yozo’s eldest son who had come with him—to the young man playing in the hotel’s billiard room, they immediately became friends on the spot. After leaving the hotel, she dragged him back to the house. The young man—high-nosed, fair-skinned, with a prominent upper back—sat slightly hunched in the shadow of a French-made lamp’s melancholic-hued shade, its two bulbs shaped like women’s breasts. Hearing Yoko had brought him there, Yozo emerged from the inner room to greet his son’s classmate—a fatherly courtesy. Yotaro happened to be bathing. Already sensing an emotional connection with the young man that seemed to transcend even her introducer Yotaro, Yoko now directed coquettish charm toward Yotaro as well through the bathroom door.

“How is the bath?”

she called out toward the bathroom, among other things. When he saw the bashfully stiffened young Sonoda, Yozo felt a faint shadow of premonition creep into his intuition—struck by the youth’s distinguished features and vigor reminiscent of a sapling’s growth—yet it remained more an objectively beautiful illusion; even if some base emotion akin to jealousy lingered, it was something he could sufficiently suppress through rational will. That Yoko would defile such a pure young man beneath her station seemed unthinkable, and there appeared no cause for concern—yet when coming to this coast, the youth’s presence must have already taken root in her mind, and imagining even their first encounter in the billiard room, it seemed fate’s design had long prepared some sudden upheaval.

However, putting that aside, as if he had now completely forgotten about it, he had distanced himself for a while from the gloomy and tense house in Zushi.

“Come to my house. Let’s arrange some flowers or something.” Sayoko had been saying this when the gate creaked open and Yotaro—who had gone back to Zushi just yesterday—suddenly reappeared. He wore a slightly sullen expression, as though the matter concerned him personally.

“What’s wrong?” Yozo asked anxiously. “Something happened that I need to tell you about…” “In Zushi?” “Yes.” According to Yotaro’s account, today the three of them—Sonoda, Yoko, and he—had spent time together again, but Yoko’s mischievous antics toward Sonoda were enough to show their interactions had already descended into dangerous territory. Yoko walked hand in hand with the young man while whistling as usual, hooking her cane’s handle onto his collar and pulling from behind.

"I was seen off by both of them and boarded the train." "Hmm, just as I thought."

Yozo thought what was fated to arrive had arrived. "Well... What time is it now?" "The train's still running, right?"

"There is." "I'll settle this matter tonight." "I'll go now."

Yozo blurted out impatiently. This Yokosuka-bound train that had recently become part of his regular commute was never pleasant for Yozo—whether traveling with Yoko or alone. Yet tonight too, beneath what felt like a somewhat refreshed mood, he found himself unable to fully contain a strand of loneliness as he sat in silence on the cushions between Yotaro, whom he'd brought along, and a young man. There were few passengers.

Late at night, the town of Zushi lay quiet and desolate. He was fully aware that this behavior of his—while appearing as if he maintained some composure—was in truth something unsparingly wretched; yet seeing the town more deserted than expected made this realization grow clearer still, until he found himself regretting having come. He had even considered staying at a hotel overnight to deal with matters tomorrow, but once set in motion, his turbulent emotions proved difficult to restrain.

“You go get a room at the hotel and wait there.” Yozo alighted from the automobile a short distance away and, upon reaching the gate, said this to Yotaro and young Gondo. When he tried the gate, its door was already locked. Yozo knocked two or three times as if mindful of nearby residents, but receiving no reply began growing irritated. Suddenly gripping the gate’s crossbeam, he vaulted over with gymnast-trained agility—straddling it in one fluid motion before cautiously lowering himself inside. Until this very instant, he’d never imagined himself capable of such swift maneuvering, nor ever contemplated attempting it.

“Hey, hey.” Yozo circled from beneath the dark tea room window to the garden partitioned by a low bamboo fence, pressed himself against the wooden sliding door on the veranda, and called out softly. Soon Yoko’s voice responded, and one panel of the door slid open. He stepped up into the sitting room through the gap. “My apologies for arriving so late.”

Yozo plopped down and looked around the room, but there was nothing particularly different. There was no trace that Sonoda had been anywhere around until now. Even if there were a corridor leading to the bath area, storage room, and kitchen entrance, there was no need to consider that far.

Yoko looked somewhat haggard as she sat apart near the pillow of the bedding—which had been laid out along the wall opposite the veranda, where the back opened into a corridor—in a manner that seemed wary of Yozo.

“What’s wrong?” “There was something I’d actually meant to discuss with you when the time came.” “And…?” “Professor—I wonder if I ever told you about Mei Harumi.” “No, you haven’t.” “That’s right. “Then this must stay strictly between us.” “You mustn’t write about it or anything.” “It concerns their reputations.”

“Go ahead and tell me. It’s all right.” “Ms. Harumi had set up a temporary beauty salon branch in Karuizawa two summers ago while escaping the heat.” “There was this Keio University boy who kept calling her ‘Auntie’ and clinging to her, you see.” “Now even she—though her business flourished that way, and of course her master’s leadership was skillful—found herself facing such internal struggles precisely because of that success. She ended up feeling compelled to sacrifice herself for that young man, deciding to marry him. So she confessed everything to her master, settled their marital life up to that point, and tried to start anew with him.”

When it came to such stories, her own unique expressive charm offered a sweet respite to Yozo's tense mood that night—though it couldn't match the intrigue of foreign romance novels he'd once heard through her lips. Yet since it seemed tangentially connected to real-world issues, listening didn't bore him. According to Yoko's account, Harumi's master had tentatively consented to her marriage with the young man—but as this marked a crucial turning point in Harumi's life, it demanded careful consideration. Even if deemed definitive, the master insisted they must first secure approval from Harumi's rural uncle given his social standing. Thus accompanied by the young man, the trio soon visited Harumi's hometown where her uncle and brother-in-law were summoned to discuss dissolving her marriage to the master and formalizing the new union—yet not a single attendee endorsed this fresh love marriage. At that moment, the Master adopted a solemn demeanor and pressed the youth: "If your mutual passion proves genuine, I could still yield Harumi even now. But do you truly possess confidence to responsibly care for her? Provide us here with a response convincing enough." When confronted thus, the young man faltered abruptly. Mumbling "I'm sorry," he hung his head low. And in that instant, Harumi's trust in her masculine Master grew firmer.

“So that’s all this was about?”

Yozo felt a ticklish sensation.

“When morning comes I’ll call that person here, so I’d like you to hear it from Professor… but…” “I can’t play along with such theatrics.” Yozo replied. He couldn’t tell whether this was a desperate pretext from Yoko or her genuine wish—given the other party’s ambiguous attitude—to have him mediate now that he’d come tonight. In any case, considering the young man’s family lineage and his father’s social standing, a marriage with sincerity-deficient Yoko seemed unlikely to proceed smoothly; even if it did, its longevity remained doubtful. Yoko too must have thoroughly accounted for her own vulnerabilities.

“Is that not permitted?”

"I detest such tasteless sarcasm." Regardless of age, he thought such meddling would prove futile against Sonoda's character. As they spoke, the clock struck two. Yozo's mind grew weary. Yoko Kozue, her eyes perpetually glistening, had likewise grown weary. "You should rest now that it's late..."

Yozo lay down using his arm as a pillow, and Yoko Kozue too stretched out atop the bedding. “His physique is so large. Despite that, he seems weak. He appears to have a chest illness too. He was using ice to cool it down or something.”

Yoko Kozue said sorrowfully.

As they murmured to each other, the shoji screens gradually whitened.

“In about an hour, I’ll send a messenger to his place. Won’t you please meet with him once? I beg you.” “Are you trying to make that man talk?” Yozo had indeed thought so, but after Yoko left for the taxi stand intending to send someone to Sonoda’s place, he found himself—putting aside all reasons—unwilling to face his child’s friend who had become Yoko’s romantic partner, and so quietly slipped away back to the hotel. Then, urging Yotaro and the others, he departed without even taking breakfast there.

Yozo abruptly felt a loneliness as if a flame had been extinguished. Even when alone in his study, or even when amusing himself at Sayoko's house, he couldn't escape a certain hollowness in his heart. When he went out to Ginza with Sayoko or paused at bars and cafés for respite, the more he moved about, the more his inner calm slipped away. He had gradually learned that for an earthbound man like himself, the most accessible way to suppress mental turbulence was first to restrain his unsteady body. Though not to the severity of strict religious precepts, he felt inclined to mold his daily life into some such formal structure if possible. Yet precisely because he now had modest non-labor income—as if trying to claim recompense for twenty-five years of impoverished married confinement—his heart remained grudging even as his calculations grew loose. The unbearable dinners prepared by an inexperienced maid were one cause, but the desolation of being abandoned by contemporary journalism did nothing to settle him in his study. Yet even amidst these anxious days, stirred by the recent Zushi incident—as if a scalpel had been applied to his festering flesh, smoldering embers of life seeping from beneath oppressive anguish—he found fresh interest in foreign works he'd previously skimmed like another's affairs. A desire to start anew—if indeed a decade of life remained—had begun to lift its head.

Moreover, Yozo had recently torn down the single-story building in the back and, in its place, created flower and vegetable fields, added water lilies and koi to the garden pond, and erected a wisteria trellis. In the shade of the phoenix tree, he had also set up an assembled swing for his youngest daughter. However, as he went about these tasks—having the maid assist him in watering with a hose, taking out hoes and shovels to replant bush clovers and hibiscus, tending to roses and dahlias—the image of his aged, solitary self became increasingly poignant in his mind, and even when he rested on the veranda, the lack of anyone to bring him even a cup of tea left him feeling unfulfilled.

The incident involving Yoko in Zushi had left the few young men around Yozo half-jealous and half-angry, or lonesome, but in journalism and the wider world, it seemed to have brought a sense of relief.

From a certain young newspaper reporter who had long been interested in Yoko’s actions came a telephone call one day. At that time too, Yozo was at Sayoko’s house. At Sayoko’s house as well, near the windows of the riverside rooms, several young willow trees were planted, and above the entrance garden an electric lantern of unusual design was hung, giving the sitting room a perpetually lively air.

When Yozo picked up the desk phone at the reception counter, the caller expressed a desire to hear his thoughts on the recent incident. “Well,” he said, “I have no particular thoughts beyond hoping their marriage goes smoothly. Even if there were some, I wouldn’t wish to say anything at the moment.” The caller didn’t press further, but Yozo found his curiosity somewhat piqued by this opportunity to learn about subsequent developments in the Zushi affair. He had no intention of drawing Yoko closer now, yet couldn’t deny harboring an interest tinged with jealousy.

The next day, having been urged by Sayoko—who was eager to wear Western clothes—Yozo went with her to Hitsujiya to look at fabrics. Sayoko not only possessed luxurious Chinese-style garments worn by women of status, but as part of Kurube’s belongings from when she had danced at hotel soirées, she also owned dresses and everyday Western clothes—though their styles had now grown outdated. “Well… wouldn’t it be better to give up on Western clothes? “Chinese-style garments would be fine, though.”

“In a different sense, he said the same thing,” Sayoko told Yozo. “That Japanese women have no need to abandon the kimono they’ve grown into and wear Western clothes. But I still want to try them.” After coming to know many literary figures, painters, and journalists, Sayoko began finding vulgar the stockbrokers and wholesale merchants she had previously associated with, growing dissatisfied with these enthusiasts of the pleasure quarters. Even if dealing with regular geisha was unavoidable, she remained incompatible with the stereotypical proprietresses and maids of ordinary teahouses. To their eyes, Sayoko was a heretic of an altogether different hue.

After buying floral-patterned jacquard at Hitsujiya, they visited the residence of a certain Madam in Yotsuya who ran a Western tailoring school. Yozo had first met this Madam at a handicraft exhibition held by a women’s magazine company, visited her home once, and even gone together to have a meal at Sayoko’s house afterward. Madam resided in a spacious Western-style house with an air of composure, where Western liquors were also kept at hand. Several years prior, she had ended her marriage and gone to France to acquire skills in Western tailoring.

In the guest room furnished with sturdy, smoke-darkened furniture, they were treated to melon and tea and spent some time together before heading out to Ginza in the evening as a trio; yet their moods were so at odds that they couldn’t even begin to gauge the substance of each other’s lives.

The next day, Yozo was discussing the Zushi rumors with Yotaro and Gondo, the young man.

“Well, what should we do?”

“Shall we go and see?”

Gondo, the young man, proposed. "I think they're already strapped for cash." "The other party may be the only son of a bourgeois family, but he's still just a student after all." "What's the situation there? Should I go take a look?" "Well... If money's needed, I could part with a little..."

Yozo now felt a desire to trace the trail a little further.

Gondo, who had gone to Zushi, returned around eight o'clock that night. Yozo was lying down engrossed in reading a Strindberg play.

“Ms. Kozue had brought a chair and tea table out to the garden—wearing something like a beret—and was writing her manuscript,” Gondo reported. “When I arrived, she seemed guarded, but clearly wants money. She mentioned needing to come to Tokyo tomorrow or thereabouts, and said she’d like to meet you then, Professor.” He also shared the specific time and location he’d arranged. When the day came, Yozo gathered a modest sum and visited his usual bird cuisine restaurant in Ueno. The second floor held a spacious banquet hall, while below, an expanse of water was framed by small windows of varied designs. A waterfall cascaded from moss-covered crags upstream, and between stands of moso bamboo, summer lantern light—dappled by spray—would sink into trembling sasa bamboo and bush clover swaying in cool breezes.

Yozo was sitting by the bay window in a small detached room on the second floor—directly opposite the banquet hall—gazing at the bluish-yellow leaves of moso bamboo below while waiting for Yoko to arrive. Before long Yoko came, having apparently left Sonoda waiting at Monami in Ginza or some such place. Since this spot offered no visibility to others, Yozo had only eaten a little food. Yoko fidgeted restlessly.

“Mr. Gondo is such a horrible person! It was such an arrogant attitude - as if he’d come to spy on our lives or something.”

Yozo was just smiling slyly.

“Please don’t tell the newspapers about us for now.” “That’s my intention too…” “There’s someone I call ‘brother’—though he’s really my cousin—named Kurosu.” “He used to work at the Foreign Ministry and now seems connected to political parties.” “He apparently has many underlings too.” “But he’s a proper gentleman.” “Since he handles all matters for the Sonoda family, he’s taken charge of this situation as well.” “He says he’ll get Father’s consent when the time comes, but for now once we sell the Ushigome house, he’ll quietly arrange ten or twenty thousand from the proceeds so we can set up a household.” “He lives quite comfortably in Kugenuma with his wife.” “She’s a cultured woman.”

To Yozo's ears, it hadn't sounded particularly pleasant, but he didn't feel displeased that Yoko had obtained such a settled position. "How splendid."

"But right now, it's a problem." "That person does throw his wallet down for me, but I don't want to lay hands on it." "It feels so grasping—doesn't it seem sordid?" "All the more because those people have never known money troubles." Then, talking in her characteristic observational way about how her parents lived off stocks and such—the outer framework of their existence—she barely touched her chopsticks to the simmering chicken. And when she received the money, she carelessly shoved it into her handbag,

“We’ll speak properly next time.” “I’ll take my leave now, if I may.”

Yozo nodded.

Yoko, beginning to rise, leaned in toward him. As if attempting a parting kiss. Yozo panickedly blocked her with both hands while pulling away.

Had Yozo not been a man who wrote—or rather, had he been an ordinary person who valued conventional living without the habitual urge to probe human nature or take more than passing interest in worldly affairs—he would not have persisted so tenaciously in tracking Yoko’s affairs even after she found younger lovers. Yet knowing this incident had reached its expected climax here and now was the perfect moment to return to his own life, he found his emotional reckoning eighty percent complete. Still, a faint lingering attachment remained, as if traces of Yoko’s scent clung to his body, driving him with curiosity to pursue her as she flitted from one new romance to another.

Had Yozo not been a man who wrote—or rather, had he been an ordinary person content with conventional living, unburdened by the habitual urge to probe human nature or take more than passing interest in worldly affairs—he would never have persisted so tenaciously in tracking Yoko's affairs even after she found younger lovers. Yet knowing this incident had reached its expected climax here and now—the perfect moment to return to his own life—he found his emotional reckoning eighty percent complete. Still, a faint lingering attachment remained, as if traces of Yoko's scent clung stubbornly to his body, driving him with perverse curiosity to pursue her through each new romantic entanglement. At times he would firmly lock away his heart and, with the transient ease of one liberated from that oppressive daily existence, venture into the garden to tend flower beds, prune encroaching weeds, or resume half-read books. Yet even in these moments, he remained vulnerable to assaults of that peculiar timidity haunting unmarried men—suddenly ambushed by memories of his beloved late daughter whose blurred features lingered deeper in his mind than even the still-vivid recollections of his deceased wife, events surrounding her death unexpectedly dragging him into maudlin tears. When midnight awakenings brought thoughts of that daughter surging forth, his chest would constrict as if weighted by stones, morbid tears seeping endlessly until they soaked into his pillow. Then would come the weakness—that lifelong frailty compelling him to apologize to the mother he had perpetually neglected. As for his wife—Yozo, convinced he had loved her sufficiently, harbored no regrets.

Yozo often spent his days lying on an unfolded futon, drifting in and out of drowsiness. Yet partly due to the urging of young Gondo—who indignantly claimed Yoko had betrayed him—he did create another opportunity to meet her. However, after handing over money at the Ueno bird cuisine restaurant and parting ways, she abruptly became someone distant in his perception, leaving him to find himself in an emptiness as if a possessing spirit had departed. He would find himself praying for Yoko’s marriage to proceed smoothly, yet it was equally true that—knowing her inability to settle into an ordinary, earnest household—he secretly hoped her inherent fickle passions would lead even this earnest pursuit to soon collapse. Should they meet again, he thought, he could no longer face her with his former feelings; a reactive disgust would send chills coursing through his entire being. Yet at the same time, he could not suppress the sprouting of a demonic ambition to cruelly toy with her as retribution.

Then Yoko, who had put away the money in her handbag and returned home so joyfully, called from the nearby An’ei Inn less than three days later. It was still early evening, and he was in the dreary parlor listening to a record while drinking tea with the child, but when he tried being such a family man, he became vividly aware of something fragile in this motherless child’s daily life, and found himself unable to feel happy.

Hearing that the call was for him, Yozo left through the gate and entered the telephone room at the boarding house that always relayed his calls. Assuming it was probably Sayoko wanting to order flowers or something, he picked up the receiver only to be startled when it turned out to be Yoko’s voice.

“Oh, Professor.” “It’s me.” “What’s wrong? Where are you?” “It’s An’ei Inn.” “There’s something I need to discuss with you, Professor—I’ve just come out now.” “I thought we could talk over dinner.” “What could it be?” “Come here.” “Right now.”

Undeterred, Yozo went to meet Yoko again.

Yoko was in the front second-floor room. Suitcases and a handbag sat in the tokonoma, giving her the appearance of someone who had just returned from a journey, her hair and makeup both disheveled. "I'm terribly sorry for making you come all this way..."

She gestured toward the floor cushion by the gold-leaf folding screen.

“What’s with the suitcases? Traveling?” “That was the plan.” “The one who’s supposed to be looking out for us is Mr. Kurosu, Sonoda’s cousin.” “He makes me uneasy.” “How’s he making you uneasy?” “That man has designs on me—that’s the trouble.” I see! Yozo thought. “What’s more, he’s intimidating.” “They say he used to be in the foreign ministry, but now he’s part of some extra-parliamentary group—apparently he has lots of underlings.” “He doesn’t seem like a bad or violent sort, but there’s something about him that keeps me on edge.” “He’s quite handsome and still young too.” “His wife is an intellectual and perfectly nice, but he acts strangely toward me.” “Just the other day, when I was removing Sonoda’s dead skin on the veranda, that man came over and started making sarcastic remarks—half teasing.”

“There’s no need to worry about such things.” “That may be so, but…”

Yoko’s face flushed slightly, "But he says such things, you know." "The gossip is becoming troublesome, and selling the Ushigome house can’t be done immediately either, so he says I should hide somewhere out of sight for the time being." “There’s a place that’s just right for that.” “He says there’s an old inn they’re acquainted with and villas up on the high ground at the edge of towns like Numazu, so I should go stay there.”

“Just the two of you?” “Hmm, just me alone.” “Do you plan to separate?” “That doesn’t seem to be the case, but since Mr. Kurosu will come later, he told me to go ahead anyway.” “Apparently it’s quite rural there.” “At the time I went along with it, but after being seen off by Mr. Kurosu and Mr. Sonoda at the station, I began having doubts.” “I was torn between going through with it or backing out.” “But since Mr. Kurosu had bought the ticket for me, I couldn’t very well refuse to board.” “I did get on, but my heart wasn’t in it.” “Then I suddenly changed my mind and got off at the next station.” “Just then an inbound train arrived there, so I took it and ended up coming here.”

Though Yoko was amiable and quick to warm up to anyone, Yozo had long understood that this very trait made her all the more guarded around men. He found himself envisioning the man's bearing and personality, even mentally composing a scene straight out of a pulp novel—some suggestive incident that might unfold between them. "So after getting here," she said, "I called Mr. Kurosu on the telephone." "And told him that to settle our situation properly, I needed you to meet him once—forgive me, please don't refuse—even if I have to drag you there myself." "But there was no other way." "I implore you—you must see Mr. Kurosu."

When it came to such matters, Yozo was utterly uncertain; however, since it wasn’t something as significant as finalizing his daughter’s marriage arrangement, he thought it might be acceptable to at least hear what the other party had to say. “I suppose meeting him wouldn’t hurt. Am I to go there, or if a meeting place has been decided somewhere…” “He’s supposed to come here, you know. And we set that for tomorrow around noon. He also seems worried about whether I have truly cut ties with you. That’s precisely why it’s all the more necessary for you to meet him, Professor.”

“So you mean that man has taken an interest in you—is that it?” “I’m not certain about that either…” “In any case, if you simply remain steadfast it should suffice—but isn’t this approach rather pitiable for Mr. Sonoda?” “But since the conditions are likely centered on Sonoda’s interests, my position may not be particularly advantageous.” “That man’s own emotional inclinations are another matter entirely.” “Moreover, while I don’t believe him so lacking in gentlemanly conduct as to deliberately place me at a disadvantage for exploitation—setting aside such ulterior motives—the terms being offered to me still seem unfavorable overall.”

Judging from Yoko’s tone, it was not something that had escaped Yozo’s notice either—that Kurosu’s hope was less about advancing marriage talks than about first confirming her preparedness for married life once she entered into it. Whether she could truly become a chaste housewife or not, whether she could live frugally within the confines of allotted funds—Yozo considered that Kurosu might pose such questions with himself as an observer. Yet even Yozo recognized that when it came to her entering married life with a promising young man like Sonoda, there were demands he absolutely had to make of Yoko—matters resolvable depending on her resolve. But in truth, regarding Yoko’s mental preparation for this new life, Yozo held no key. The key should have lain within Yoko herself. Even were Yozo made a guarantor, he could assume no responsibility, and attempting to forcibly redirect her life’s course at an unreasonable angle would prove meaningless. This would equate to erasing Yoko’s very existence, and thus the current passionate affair should never have emerged.

However, on the other hand, Yozo harbored another naive notion. Depending on the partner, he thought she might become a cheerful housewife attentive to every domestic detail. Knitting and embroidery—she enjoyed such things. Just glancing through a magazine would let her grasp even complex knitting patterns, and she had her own flair for room decoration and cooking. She liked reading too. Her literary talent wasn’t as inferior as society dismissed it to be. Because she stayed by Yozo’s side, even those talents and virtues were looked down upon as if they were mud—though one couldn’t deny there was spitefulness in crowd psychology at play. Even now, assessing Yoko this way, Yozo felt that if her life truly stabilized through marriage to Sonoda, she might smoothly step into society. And he hoped for this. He believed this alone could compensate for society’s scorn. He also thought that had she not fallen into love, he might have sustained her through his own efforts somehow. Moreover, Yoko’s desperate writhing—clinging to literature as her lifeline through all circumstances—struck him as pitiable.

When the maid brought Kurosu’s calling card the next day, the two of them had barely woken up. After taking a walk around Hirokoji the previous night, Yozo had returned to the inn with her again. And even after taking a bath, as he spent time with Yoko—who had applied her evening makeup—eating fruits and such, the night had grown late. “Please show him in.” Having said that, Yoko hurriedly got up and, “Is there another vacant room available?”

“I’m afraid we’re fully booked at the moment…”

The young maid answered. Yoko was perplexed. “Then please have them wait a moment…” She helped the maid hurriedly put away the bedding, went to the dressing table to fix her makeup, then went out to the corridor to greet the visitor.

It was around nine in the morning. Yozo, still not entirely awake from sleep, felt the puffiness of his face and the stiffness in his facial nerves as he straightened his posture and smoked a cigarette.

A tall gentleman in a suit entered. His dashing figure gave an impression somewhat reminiscent of a veteran children’s story author Yozo had long known, but he remained composed in his own brazen manner. Tea trays and bowls of fruit lay scattered about. Moreover, with a single maid apparently slowly and laboriously carrying out the bedding into the corridor, there was an awkwardness in the air. “This is Mr. Kurosu.” As Yoko made the introductions, they exchanged brief greetings, but Kurosu, with restless eyes, surveyed the room that seemed to drift with some sinister aura, though he was also quite agitated.

“No, actually, Ms. Kozue, since you requested to meet Mr. Inamura, I’ve made a special trip here.”

Muttering fragmented phrases that seemed to ask "What sort of situation is this?", he glared down at Yozo with severe eyes. "With that understanding, we asked Professor to come and have been waiting here for you." Having said this, Yoko was preparing tea, but having sensed Kurosu's stormy mood, she couldn't help feeling intimidated.

“What kind of talk is this? If I may be permitted to inquire…” Yozo spoke up, but Kurosu—as if unable to contain his displeasure—assumed a domineering air, extracting a double-cut cigarette from a metal case and lighting it. “Naturally I assume this concerns the marriage arrangements, but regarding that matter…” “That is indeed part of it,” Kurosu replied, “but first—if you’ll forgive my bluntness—the crucial question lies in whether Ms. Kozue here possesses adequate sincerity. Until this determination is made, I must thoroughly observe her sentiments and conduct in my capacity as Sonoda’s legal guardian.”

“As for that matter, Yoko herself will prove it in due course, but I believe now is the perfect opportunity for her to settle her past.” As if demanding to know what exactly this situation amounted to, Kurosu puffed on his cigarette while scrutinizing the two of them; Yozo—this elderly man of letters—could not help but seem like some cunning degenerate manipulating Yoko behind the scenes.

“In any case, I shall take my leave today. Perhaps another time, if the opportunity arises…”

Kurosu gave Yoko a suggestive look, then hastily rose from his seat and left the room. After seeing Kurosu out, Yoko immediately returned to the room, her face disenchanted and fuming.

"I'm sorry." Yozo muttered. "But you wouldn't say anything, Professor!" There was a stinging sharpness in Yoko's voice. "But he wasn't saying anything either! There's nothing for me to say." "You're always like this! When it came to important matters, you never considered a single one of them! With your social standing in decline like this, dragging me down with you now would be impossible."

Yoko kept up her hysterical chatter as she snatched Yozo’s lone tabi sock from where it lay scattered in the corner and tore it apart with a sharp rip in her fit of anger. Yozo grew increasingly irritated, yet he understood he had no means to counter her when she launched into these tirades. An embrace remained an embrace; their respective positions stayed fixed as positions. He lacked the deftness to properly separate one from the other.

Before long, Yoko finished preparing herself and left the room, but given the inn's circumstances, he too departed after a short while. While imagining Yoko desperately pursuing Kurosu to stitch together this collapse.

One day, Yozo was meeting with a social affairs reporter from a major newspaper in one of the water-facing rooms at Sayoko’s house. Regarding Yoko’s recent incident, Reporter Hamura had previously requested an interview as well; but fearing that careless remarks might hinder her marriage—or so it was perceived—he had kept his distance, and thus Yozo had intentionally refused. Mr. Hamura’s attitude toward Yozo and Yoko was always sincere and natural. It was not the sort that pried inquisitively or mocked derisively. That day as well, he had first made a phone call to confirm Yozo’s intentions before coming.

"If the Professor has no objections." "Well... I think I can talk about it now, but..."

When he saw Mr. Hamura at the entrance, Yozo—who had been talking with Sayoko at the front desk—stood up and personally escorted him in. Mr. Hamura’s modern questions were delicate, but Yozo, with his old-fashioned sensibilities, came across as merely childishly pretentious. “How do you think this recent incident will go?” “What is your insight, Professor?”

“Well… I don’t know either, but I’m hoping things will work out. This time it might be genuine.”

“Is that so?” “When Ms. Kozue cut her hair short like that, I did feel something—the stirrings of her heart, or perhaps nuances—something along those lines.”

Such talk continued for a while.

“If you intend to write about this, please frame the story to progress favorably.” “Yoko isn’t the wicked woman society claims her to be.” “Of course there’s calculation involved, and she has her ambitions, but fundamentally her first marriage began on faulty ground—that’s what warped her fate into its current shape.” “As for literary talent—if properly nurtured, it should flourish—but whether you call them dreams or desires, she invariably succumbs to them.”

"But how do you feel about this, Professor? You’ve been watching her so intently all this time…" "No, I wasn’t exactly staring at her. But there’s something that ceaselessly seeks…"

Yozo said this and began to sporadically utter words of genuine hatred. And finally,

“This stays strictly between us, so please keep it that way. Since this is solely my own criticism, you mustn’t write a word of it.”

Mr. Hamura soon left.

The next morning around ten o'clock, when he went out to the front desk, Yotaro was already up there reading the morning edition of the newspaper from the company where Mr.Hamura worked.

Sayoko sat motionless beneath the Buddhist altar in the dim inner room where an oil lamp glowed brightly, rubbing her prayer beads as she chanted sutras with unwavering focus. Both she and Yoko harbored many dreams in life, but having been professionally tempered over long years—unlike Yoko, who still clung to her genteel airs—Sayoko’s heart held an unyielding core of steel. Her faith served both as atonement for a past imprinted by her mother and as daily discipline to sustain hope. Much like rinsing one’s mouth or brushing teeth each morning, without this ritual her thoughts would scatter aimlessly through the day.

Yozo stayed up late playing mahjong again last night and went to bed exhausted when the glass shoji began to grow pale with dawn light. Yotaro was also part of the group. “Has something been published?”

Yozo, having only just heard about it, couldn’t bring himself to glance at the newspaper. Whether for better or worse, that article must have drawn an insurmountable line between him and Yoko—one that could not be crossed from either side. “Ah, this is somewhat unfavorable.” Because Yotaro said this, he also became somewhat concerned and glanced through the article. Indeed, trusting in Mr. Hamura’s understanding, the faint words of personal hatred Yozo had inadvertently let slip had been embellished and exaggerated; rather, it was as though Mr. Hamura’s own surmised version of Yozo’s hatred was being hurled at her in his stead.

Yozo felt grateful for the young reporter's consideration, though it left him vaguely unsettled. Abruptly, Yozo sank into melancholy.

“It seems Mr. Hamura grasped things a bit too well,” Yozo thought. “That’s too harsh on Ms. Kozue,” said Yotaro. “And this ‘poisonous flower’ they mention—it’s clearly referencing Baudelaire’s work, but the meaning here is completely different.” At that time, Yotaro was also influenced by that poet’s diabolism. This influence was evident in his behavior as well.

However, Yozo had come to feel that matters could not be resolved with superficial niceties, so he had no choice but to close his eyes to them.

Even when Sayoko eventually left the Buddhist altar and came over, seemingly uninterested, she did not attempt to broach the subject. It was something he had only realized much later—Sayoko had already become friends with his children by that time.

After two or three days, Yozo was again at Sayoko's house one evening. He had gone out onto the balcony with one of the journalists he encountered there, gazing at the night view from Ryogoku to Kiyosubashi as the river wind swept over them, when he was abruptly summoned back to the hallway.

“Professor, you have a phone call. It’s Ms. Kozue.” It was Sayoko’s niece—who had recently come here to help—that said this in a low voice. “Did you tell her I was here?” “Oh, the young master was…”

Yotaro was at the front desk. "This is a problem," he muttered to himself. Bewildered, Yozo went downstairs. The receiver lay off the hook. "If only you'd told her I wasn't here."

Yozo said to Yotaro.

“But…”

Yotaro’s attitude at that moment appeared weak yet strong. But this realization would come much later—at the time, such psychological nuances remained beyond the grasp of Yozo’s dulled perceptions. When he lifted the receiver, the connection carried faint static at first before Yoko’s fevered voice sharpened into clarity. He had braced for furious accusations, yet instead encountered desperate entreaties. Yozo offered excuses about the late hour and proposed meeting tomorrow instead—even ventured that if this concerned the newspaper article, he too found its contents troubling—but Yoko’s response came choked with barely restrained emotion, quivering on the edge of tears,

“No, it’s not about that. There’s something I absolutely must meet you about tonight.” “You’ll come right now, won’t you?” “You must.” “The usual place.” “I’ll be waiting.” After hanging up the receiver, Yozo let out a sigh, but even he felt things were spiraling beyond his control. “What’s wrong?” “She says to come.” “You should go.”

Yotaro urged him.

“Then have a car called.” Sayoko called Naniwa Taxi. When he got out of the car at the side entrance of An'ei Ryokan, he now realized belatedly how deep the night had grown. Lately he had lost all sense of time, so the nights seemed especially short.

Yoko appeared from the roadside entrance and approached him unsteadily, like a phantom.

“I’m at the Mayflower right now, you see.”

“Why?” “It’s inconvenient at the inn, you see.” “You’re in danger too, Professor.” “Why would that be?” “Mr. Kurosu has misunderstood us.” “He’s convinced you’re colluding in this scheme.” “Huh.” “But do come inside.” “Madam’s perfectly decent.” Yozo let himself be led into the beauty salon. During his earlier stays here—when Yoko had occasionally visited this house—he’d grown familiar with the dog-loving Madam. She’d told him how the master, manager of Restoran, sometimes came up from Yokohama. There was even that time he’d brought home a three-month-old fox terrier for Sakiko, who adored animals.

Madam was already asleep in the residence, but the apprentices brought tea and such. Yoko’s nerves were overstimulated, and she couldn’t stay still.

“Let’s go somewhere.” “I actually went by your place earlier, you know.” “Then about an hour ago, Mr.Gondo came to the inn and said your Shoji’s drunk right now and threatening to come after you.” “Let’s just go.” “This place is trouble too.”

The two ventured back out. Along the street, all the shops were closed. The only light came leaking from the electric lamps of cafés and bars in the side streets. A speeding car passed by like a meteor toward Komagome. Eventually, an empty taxi finally came from the direction of Komagome, so they hurriedly got into it.

The place they entered was a red-light district in the northwest part of town, but as it was past the hour, everywhere stood as silent as a forest. Yoko got out of the car in front of a house that stood exposed along the wide street, went around to the back entrance, called out "Auntie! Auntie!" and knocked on the gate—and after some time, a reply came from within.

“I’ve been here before.” “You understand, don’t you?” “But don’t scorn me, okay?”

When she said this, Yozo was suddenly reminded of that youth Isshiki.

“I used to come to this house with that person from the theater world and others, you know.”

Eventually, the door at the entrance opened, so they entered through there and settled into a quiet second-floor room at the back. "I want to eat something. Professor, how about you?" "I suppose it's all right to eat." Yoko took out a pen and a scrap of notebook paper from her handbag, wrote down three or four dishes to order, and handed it to the maid.

“And sake?” When the maid asked,

“I’d like a drink.” “One bottle will do.” “My apologies for the late hour.” There remained some time before the four Western dishes would arrive. Yozo kept his guard up, deliberately maintaining composure to avoid having his sore spot touched, while Yoko consciously restrained her restless impatience as she began circling toward the subject of the article. “Everyone said it—that the article went too far.” “They called it conduct unbefitting of the Professor we know.”

“That was Mr. Hamura’s misunderstanding.” “That’s why I’ve been telling you all along, haven’t I? You must promise not to meet anyone from the newspaper at all.” “It depends on the situation and the person. I believed Mr. Hamura would write something advantageous. I did reiterate that point, though later I made some minor remarks about you. Still, I don’t think it’s any worse than what’s already been written in the papers.”

“Let the world say whatever they want.” “The fact that it came from your mouth, Professor, is what’s significant.” “But if that was unfair slander, wouldn’t I be the one to get blamed?”

“You’re a renowned master, Professor. You can’t possibly equate yourself with someone like me, can you? At a time like this—when you should be shielding me—you’ve done something akin to pushing me over a cliff instead. A single word from you could derail my entire fate.” “I don’t believe there was such ill intent in what I said.”

Just then, Western food and sake were brought in.

“Excuse me for interrupting.” “Let’s have this talk now.” The maid spread a kitchen cloth over the table scattered with cigarette ashes and arranged serving dishes, sake cups, and chopsticks there. It had been clear from the beginning, but once Yoko launched into her tirade, there was no fending it off. Yet tonight she was too grievously wounded to sustain her harangue. What now mattered most for Yoko was damage control. And to achieve that, making Yozo atone for his own mistakes seemed more imperative than anything else.

Even as this was happening, Yoko kept pricking up her ears at the occasional car sirens and engine roars that reached them. Her nerves couldn't help but interpret it as Kurosu’s pursuit. The whole world—even Yozo—was now persecuting her.

Twenty

A nerve-wracking night of blatant conflict and feigned reconciliation came to an end. Yoko had to somehow whitewash the newspaper article as favorably as possible through Yozo, but now that he had been ensnared by her in this way, he had no means of escape. When she awoke around ten o'clock, Yoko took out her makeup tools from the toilet case and began fixing her face. Then, retrieving a hair iron from the brazier, she made Yozo assist her in deliberately hard-to-reach places under the guise of camouflage. Yozo had once before been made to apply the hair iron at some hotel, but since Yoko—not being dexterous enough to trim his luxuriantly overgrown hair that hung down to her ears in her own style—accidentally let the hot edge of the iron touch her neck, she had leapt up and shrieked. Yoko was always intoxicated by her own phantom and would often gaze fondly at her deep black eyes reflected in the mirror. "Look at this," she would say. "I look beautiful today," she would murmur innocently. Yozo had convinced himself of this as well, but of course she herself could not see the beauty of her expression in each and every such moment—like when she had screamed upon being touched by the hair iron. Yozo had often imagined moments when she would show other men the same expression or perhaps an even more sorrowful and tragically beautiful countenance, but he found himself drawn to the allure of last night’s harsh mood.

From the moment he had been brought there the previous night, Yozo had sensed something dubious about the house. It would later be revealed through the caretaker's accounts that during that period, Yoko had brought that surgeon—Dr. K—to this very place, arriving by taxi with other young men. Though Yozo had understood immediately upon being led there that this house served as Yoko's lovers' rendezvous before his time, he hadn't imagined her capable of such brazenness. Yet disliking exposure to the maid and caretaker's gazes, he deliberately seated Yoko before the alcove while keeping his own back to the entrance. The sliding door's frame contained an interior lock mechanism, but the room itself stood sturdy yet vulgar in construction, utterly devoid of refinement.

The lingering summer heat still showed no sign of abating. The electric fan was pushed aside, and autumn flowers were arranged in the floor vase, but Yozo was exhausted both mentally and physically. Having left the mirror, Yoko Kozue applied pale crimson rouge to her pallid cheeks - her face now utterly transformed from the tear-streaked visage of the previous night - yet her forehead remained clouded with anguish. Before long, they ate a light meal of about two dishes at Toast.

“You should go to the newspaper now.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Though I suspect going there would only layer more shame atop what’s already been done. And even if we issue a retraction, it would merely be a procedural formality.” “Then what should I do?” she pressed. “I fully grasp your position, Professor, but can one truly speak of being outmaneuvered by journalists? Those people wouldn’t dare fabricate statements you never uttered. If this persists, my fate will be reduced to absolute ruin. To think that a single careless word from you could see me cast out from society—isn’t that wretched?”

"But marriage…" "That’s not even the point." "I can’t bring myself to face those people." "And when you actually enter those bourgeois circles, they’re truly insufferable." "Even he just talks about which stocks are rising or falling." Noon soon arrived. The previous night, Yoko had grown hysterical and snapped Yozo’s fountain pen in two. He had laid out manuscript paper intending to write something, but it came to nothing. Yoko slammed down the broken pen and shattered the ink bottle too. Ink oozed across the tatami mats. That morning, Yozo had bought a new fountain pen from the stationery shop on the tram line, getting Yoko a transparent-barreled women’s model while he was at it. Yet even after rising today, he couldn’t muster the will to spread out his paper again. With that matter set aside, his only recourse was to try contacting the newspaper by telephone.

The telephone was on the outer wall of a slightly recessed, dimly lit futon room at the bottom of the staircase. Yoko also came down and kept watch nearby. Mr. Hamura was not there, but when a man who appeared to be the social affairs section chief eventually emerged, Yozo protested that the article did not reflect his true intentions. “Mr. Hamura overinterpreted my goodwill.” “As it stands, this will utterly destroy Yoko—I’ve woken feeling absolutely wretched about it.” “I must request you retract that piece…”

“Is that so?” “But what about issuing a retraction?” “At our company, unless there’s an egregious error, we maintain a policy against retracting published material once it’s gone to press.” “Isn’t that perfectly adequate as it stands?”

“No, this is unacceptable.” “Because it’s my standing that’ll be destroyed before Yoko’s.”

The conversation grew increasingly chaotic for a time, but with Yoko listening irritably nearby, Yozo too began growing somewhat flushed with agitation. To make matters worse, the telephone connection grew faint and static began intruding, making it difficult to pin down the crucial points. At length, Yozo set down the receiver. Then, noticing someone standing eavesdropping at the corridor's end, he hurriedly went upstairs.

“It’s no use.”

Yozo said dismissively. Not long after that—through Kurosu, whom Yoko Kozue had mobilized, and by virtue of his connections with the newspaper's upper management—a special article was published both to issue corrections and to benefit Yoko.

Before one knew it, an autumn wind was blowing along the coast of Zushi.

By that time, Yozo once again ended up eating and sleeping at Yoko Kozue’s house.

“I’ll have to be away for some time again, so you need to take good care of things while I’m gone.” When leaving the house, Yozo said this and entrusted domestic affairs to his eldest son. Even if a correction had been published, it would have been nothing but a desperate superficial fix, leaving Yoko Kozue appearing utterly broken in society’s eyes. The correction article was drafted in the newspaper’s conference room. Kurosu attended wearing stately haori and hakama with black tabi socks—an outfit lending him the dignified bearing of an extra-parliamentary faction boss. For Yozo however, overwriting the previous article proved no simple task. Moreover, having journalists extract statements while Kurosu—standing firmly on Yoko’s side—remained present made for an unseemly spectacle. Of course, Yoko had broached the matter beforehand. She took meticulous care not to let Yozo feel humiliated.

At the appointed time, when Yozo arrived, Yoko had not yet come; but as he was talking with Section Chief Kimoto for a while, she arrived. Kurosu also entered with a smile, exchanged harmless greetings with Yozo, and soon disappeared. “Now, Ms.Kozue, you should come over here.” The plump, round-faced Section Chief Kimoto had Yoko sit in a large armchair. He appeared captivated by the beauty of Yoko he was seeing for the first time,

“No matter what the world may say, you are fortunate.”

He whispered softly to Yozo. Much later, when Yoko appeared at a bar in Ginza, Yozo heard rumors that this man had also become one of the regulars there and something of a supportive advisor to her, but he found it somewhat endearing and felt no displeasure. Yoko Kozue answered Section Chief Kimoto’s questions in her signature atmospheric manner, explaining that while romantic love was significant, her previous life had reached an impasse due to struggles with daily living and maternal love anxieties; seeking a path forward, she emphasized that literature remained her lifeline above all else, and regardless of how her new marriage issues might unfold, she ultimately had no choice but to rely on Yozo. In her black haori, the contours of her face stood out all the more vividly, and beneath the black hair cascading to her cheeks, her smooth obsidian-like eyes shone moistly, large and luminous beneath long eyelashes.

“And what about your present frame of mind…?” When confronted with such enigmatic questioning himself,Yo zo found himself at a loss.

“When things come to this, it’s only natural for anyone to have lingering attachments.” “Isn’t saying you want the marriage to proceed smoothly a lie?” “Wouldn’t it be better for you to take Ms. Kozue with you after all?”

The section chief pressed further. "No, my true intention is for this marriage to proceed smoothly." "It’s precisely because I intended to settle things that I also criticized her." Yozo knew this love was nothing but fleeting vanity, yet even that might have been a miserable lingering attachment in disguise.

When the phone rang, Yozo was in his room, having felt all day that something might come up. When he went to check the boarding house's telephone room, it was indeed Yoko's voice. "Professor, it's me." "I'm at Shinbashi right now—couldn't you come to Monami!"

That voice remained pleasant to his ears. "All right, I'll go." "Come immediately then." "You must." Yoko Kozue delivered her customary phrase and disconnected. Yozo returned to his room to prepare, yet felt an inexplicable heaviness. The moth-to-flame agitation that once consumed him had long since dissipated; though the phone call provided momentary stimulus, his heart refused proper ignition. How much longer must this continue? he wondered.

Since it was exactly dinnertime, Monami—which had only just opened—was packed with people. As he climbed the stairs to their usual second-floor spot, he glanced down and saw a familiar woman smiling up at him with a teasing look. Yozo couldn't muster a return smile and continued upward, but found the dining room empty and Yoko still absent. He settled at the window-side table and had just lit a cigarette when she finally appeared.

“I’m sorry—I stopped by Harumi on the way.”

Yoko gave no indication of recalling that incident but seemed somewhat guarded. Yozo too felt no enthusiasm. "How has the marriage turned out?" "We don't know when the house will be sold, you know. In the meantime, I suppose we'll be staying at Mr. Kurosu's place." Yoko wore a bitter smile just as a celadon-colored soup arrived. With the tall waiter—napkin draped over his arm—standing at a distance, their conversation ended there.

“The sea at Zushi has grown completely desolate, you know.” “Since that person won’t be coming anymore, Professor, do bring your work and visit again.” “Don’t you think that’s still necessary for now—for restoring my reputation too?” “After dinner, you’ll come watch a moving picture with me and go along, won’t you?”

“I could go, but…”

While adding sauce to the chicken sauté, Yozo gave a noncommittal response. When he thought of Yoko’s coastal house after that incident, it made him all the more depressed. Just as Yoko had used her powder puff and the two were about to leave the table, a group of customers came upstairs, so Yozo hurriedly descended the staircase. Since that incident, he had felt an even greater sense of constriction. Yoko Kozue had no idea how much longer her relationship with Yozo would last, but in any case—even if a new romance were to blossom between her and a third party—she expected that while continuing to revere him as her mentor, Yozo would also, despite his struggles, not begrudge offering affection and protection from his position as a teacher-father figure; yet given how things had turned out, she had no choice but to use Yozo as a tool for pretense for the time being. She treated Yozo as one might handle a festering sore, yet could do nothing to quell the smoldering hatred that simmered within her. Yozo, too, had resolved to end things honorably—steeling himself with the same self-negating notions he’d long clung to, that he was born unworthy of women’s affection, compounded now by age and life’s circumstances—but when even a quietly critical word or two he’d uttered after their conversation became so exaggerated under Mr.Hamura’s pen, he could do nothing but wear a bitter expression whenever facing Yoko, as if she could see through his vile entrails.

One day, that Kurosu from Kugenuma unexpectedly came to visit. Just then, Yoko was chasing the sole surviving male canary that had escaped from its cage, searching the neighboring vacant lot in her slippers. The cage door stood slightly ajar. Yozo too stepped down to the veranda edge and gazed up at the coral tree hedges and neighboring pines and zelkova-like treetops. It flashed through her mind—these were the canaries given when she parted from the doctor to come here. This pitiful male, left alone after its mate died a month prior, had now flown toward open nature though its wings might barely function. Yoko had been contemplating the commemorative bird, recalling that brief period of simple romance—amusing in retrospect given her many affairs—as a bright interlude amid her trying life with Yozo. But its escape jolted her into panic. Though she imagined it frozen somewhere among branches, the only sound was wind through leaves and grass—still she couldn't abandon her search.

“Better to escape than die.” Yozo muttered, but Yoko did not dwell on it. Just as she stepped up onto the veranda and was brushing off the burrs clinging to her hem, Kurosu arrived. By that time, the maid she had brought from her hometown was also gone. Her father—a craftsman-like man not yet forty, wearing a new happi coat—had come all the way to Zushi to take her back. At that moment, Yoko stood on a coastal sand dune. She understood this was the result of her hometown newspaper once again igniting sensational articles about her latest romantic scandal, and she could imagine how troubled her mother and brother must be. Had this been the usual Yoko, she would never have simply sent her father—who had traveled all this way—back home without a word. Yet when she saw him, she merely flushed slightly and turned her face away, refusing to meet his gaze. Yozo, who had been standing a little apart, also pretended not to see.

"There's a marriage proposal, I hear." Yoko had been saying this, but even her ever-loyal maid—who had been surrounded by admirers in Tokyo—was whisked away without a chance for farewells, constrained by train schedules. While Yoko met Kurosu in the entrance salon, Yozo smoked tobacco in the inner tatami room. Their voices carried over, punctuated by Yoko's light laughter, but their conversation's substance remained veiled.

“If you open a café, I can arrange the money somehow.” “You’re sure to prosper.” “He’s saying things like that.”

After seeing Kurosu off, Yoko came to Yozo's side and said: "But even I know better than to carelessly join forces with those people."

Yoko was laughing.

"Oh right—that man, right after that incident, three or four people came to my place while I was out and apparently terrified the children." "...saying things like 'They're probably taking advantage of my absence,' or 'Your father's reputation has already fallen into the mud'..." "That morning's meeting at the hotel gave a bad impression." "They've even started imagining that I was the one scheming behind your back in that love affair." "There's nothing to it now, but..." Yozo, too, at that time in the newspaper company's reception room, had merely exchanged polite smiles and nods.

As evening approached, the two grew somehow melancholy. There were indeed pleasant moments in their world of solitude, but it was Yozo’s habit to invariably feel an irksome gloom whenever they faced each other for too long. He was always filled with an inexplicable sense of dissatisfaction, and as thoughts of society’s curses and his children’s troubles weighed on him, his nerves cowered under an anxiety akin to being pursued by a blade. Even without that, what flowed beneath the surface of bewilderment was always a lonely emptiness, and to distract from it, he constantly desired different environments.

“Why don’t we go to the hotel for a bit?”

Yoko invited him. Yozo was hesitant to show his face in the hotel salon, but feeling hungry, he found himself wanting to enter the dining hall for the first time in some time. At the hotel, they could listen to the radio, and if they requested it, a bath would be prepared. Around the time of the love affair incident, Rumiko had returned to her teacher’s place.

They locked the gate from within and exited through the neighboring gate on contiguous ground. After crossing the sandy path and ascending the gradual slope, they arrived at the hotel entrance. The radio was playing Western music. Through Yotaro’s influence before the earthquake disaster, Yozo had at last begun memorizing the names and works of the world’s great musicians—around the time when the gidayū ballad recitation and tokiwazu narrative music he’d heard since childhood were being supplanted by Bizet and Mozart—yet no music drew such a clear line between old and new eras as this.

There was still some time before the dining room would open. Yozo took a seat in a corner of the salon while Yoko listened to the radio some distance away. She cocked her ear as if trying to extract her own daydreams from the beautiful melody of what resembled a trio's chamber music, yet the sound of instruments merely served to slightly soothe her mind.

Light shone through the frosted glass on the upper part of the billiard room’s entrance door, and the faint clack of balls drifted through. Yozo sensed what might have been the phantom of that young man lingering nearby, yet even the romance he had vaguely anticipated before Yoko’s departure for Zushi—when brought into harsh reality—had shattered without offering the slightest resistance. That he wished for the marriage to bear fruit was no falsehood, yet equally true was his desire that it should never come to pass.

The two were soon in the dining hall. “Did you intend to study Marx?” Yozo asked with a sarcastic look while holding a wine glass. “You’re saying I’m too much of a young lady, aren’t you? That person’s a spoiled brat too.” It was a time when the proletarian movement had not yet flourished to any noticeable degree either, and Yozo knew nothing of what Marx’s theories entailed, yet he found himself struck by a certain atmosphere of the era. From the fact that Kusaba had once taken a bolt of white figured satin from Yoko under the pretense of painting something for her, Yoko explained that those people already harbored such a rotten, thick emotion—calculated from life’s necessities—that taking from wherever there was something to take was only natural,

“Mr. Kusaba would say, ‘When will you give me the promised money?’ and I used to press him about it often.” “Even the money I received from my mother and brought with me—it’s all been used up.” However, this Marx Boy—being the only son of a bourgeois family—found it not as easy as Yoko had imagined to confront the substance. To do so, he still had to endure several years—like an ordinary young lady of society—of being obedient to her in-laws and living modestly. He could not even consider love in isolation.

One afternoon, Yozo and Yoko Kozue were strolling through Hyakkaen Garden—still too early for autumn grasses—and after writing haiku and poems on rakuyaki pottery together, they stopped by the nearby Torikane to eat. It was a well-known, long-established house, designed so that no one would encounter another regardless of where they were—a tranquil home with several old-fashioned rooms partitioned by corridors and small courtyards, reminiscent of traditional theater stage props. On another autumn evening when the moon shone brightly, urged by Yoko, who loved water, they had driven along a long embankment veiled in mist to Shirahige Bridge and stayed there. In a dim, low-ceilinged room smoky like those in ghost story plays, Yoko had deliberately disheveled her hair all over her face and leaned over him. Yet after two love affairs that had caused her suffering and made Yozo endure bitter hardships—even hurling words of hatred at each other—there was no possibility of their moods harmonizing anymore.

They drank two or three small cups of sake alongside local specialties like clam soup, simmered potatoes from the menu, and sashimi with grated yam, but beneath Yoko’s flattering words lingered pent-up resentment—the intoxication from alcohol she wasn’t used to drinking had faintly reddened the rims of her eyes. Whenever she needled him with complaints about that newspaper article from before, Yozo could no longer resort to nothing but abjectly apologizing. After taking a bath, the two had rested in that gloomy parlor from before, but before long Yoko—clutching a thin cord—suddenly pounced on him. With a look that could not be mistaken for playful mischief, she wrapped it around Yozo’s neck.

"I might kill you, Professor." "Killing you wouldn't even begin to satisfy me." Yoko tightened the cord viciously. Yozo kept laughing as he stared up at Yoko's face from below—her eyes and mouth contorted in an expression that hovered between laughter and tears.

“Oh, fine. Go ahead and kill me.” Yoko straddled him, alternately loosening and tightening the cord until Yozo’s breathing grew labored. He grimaced in pain and grabbed at the cord. The silent struggle—half in earnest and half in jest—persisted until they loosened the cord and sprang apart. When he rose, his slack throat throbbed with a faint, sore pain whenever he touched it or swallowed, like pressing against a swelling.

In Yoko’s eyes, there sat a cunning old man she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate, somewhat bashfully rubbing his throat.

21

In the midst of the scorching western sun filtering through gaps in the garden trees and reed screens to spread crawling across the tatami mats of his gloomy study—which faced only westward—Yozo had been living apart from Yoko Kozue for some time. From the ugly emotions sparked in them by the social page article, various peripheral unpleasant incidents had continued to occur afterward. There were even times when the two would rise to their feet and struggle against each other, pushing and being pushed across the entire room. He had always disliked physical force in any situation, and since Yoko Kozue did not possess those temperamental flaws common to women—stubbornness or obstinacy that might irritate others—he could not possibly initiate a struggle of his own volition unless she erupted like oilpaper set aflame or resorted to outright insulting behavior. Yet when confronted with her hysterical accusations—which demanded some form of violent release to vent her resentment—he had no choice but to pin her arms and slowly press her against the wall, or engage in a knee-wrestling match of sorts, grappling and disentangling as they crawled inch by inch across the tatami mats.

It was a time when he had been compelled to write a written oath in response to her earnest request. Yet this was no amorous love pledge—rather, it was an oath pledging that he would henceforth never write about her in any work whatsoever. Should he write even the slightest mention of her, he was to pay without objection a penalty of 1,000 yen—a document so naively contrived it might deceive a child. Yozo wrote it carelessly on manuscript paper as he was instructed.

“Is this okay?” “Thank you so much.” Yoko, appearing somewhat relieved by this, had folded the document and stowed it in her handbag, a shadow of a smile rising to her face that until now had been tinged with anguish—though her anxiety over not knowing what he might write at any moment had not been entirely dispelled. Since that article, what had been reflected in Yoko’s eyes was his character, now operating in double and triple layers. Even if one couldn’t think he was a villain, he wasn’t a good man one could feel at ease with. She found herself astonished that such blind passion could exist within this man—passion that now, in certain moments, felt more like a nuisance, even an unforeseen misfortune in her life. Yet beneath the depths of his infatuation—so intense it seemed to border on obsession—there lay something different from mere playfulness or cold critique: a writer’s temperament, she sensed, being concealed. In matters of love, Yozo was nothing more than an ordinary man utterly devoid of tricks or reason. Yet in his persistence—not once or twice attempting to draw her close—he had not failed to calculate even the byproducts of such experiences. In Yoko’s eyes, which always viewed reality through a beautiful, thin veil, her own phantom appeared reflexively—as if every pair of eyes belonging to the opposite sex gazed upon her with burning longing and admiration. That this old writer—who had until now been confined to a stifling household, knowing only a single woman of the old type with her marumage hairstyle, and who had dismissively overlooked even sensational love affairs in society—had, whether through fickle mischief, calculation, or some shred of sincerity, at least managed to peel away that single cold-seeming layer and ignite the fire of passion within him: this alone filled Yoko with a secret, ticklish pride. Yet that it had instead produced a reverse effect, turning into a result that harmed her own self, was nothing short of mortifying.

Yozo found it somewhat unpleasant that the document had been taken from him. Whether such a document existed or not—if he wanted to write something he could write anything; if he didn't want to write he wouldn't—these matters depended entirely on his own will. This awareness that the contract might as well be scrap paper gave him an unpleasant sensation akin to the melancholy inherent in a writer's psyche. Whether it was hypothetical or a momentary whim, her attempt to bind him through money struck him as anything but endearing.

However, with even the slightest trigger shattering that momentary peace, they would fight like monkeys and dogs once more. In the end, even Rumiko—who had been nearby—began crying and lunged at Yozo. Before long, Yozo gathered the scattered items on his desk into his briefcase, dashed outside, and walked through the falling rain in his sandals to the nearby rickshaw stand. In the train, Yozo recalled his obstinate demeanor from that time and their blatant struggle, yet there also rose before his eyes the image of her—having pulled Rumiko away from him and clutching the child to her chest—lamenting.

“The bug of passion is infesting this body!” After the fight, Yoko said that, tears streaming down her face. Amidst the surging influx of two distinct new artistic movements into the literary world—emerging arts and proletarian literature—Yozo, though scarred all over, felt a nagging restlessness stirring secretly within him. On one hand, there were foreign works that had been difficult for him to accept until now—works that, at this age, had begun to resonate with him in some way. On the other hand, he could not help but realize the folly of trying to create anything through his own meager strength alone. At times, it seemed as though the twilight of his life was already closing in, and he feared he might self-destruct as he was—yet there were also moments when he thought he must not collapse into utter despair, not yet, for there might still be some redemption to be had in time. He approached those works with an interest and understanding different from his younger days.

Then one afternoon, as he sat at his desk where the western sun crept in, Yoko Kozue’s elegant Western attire—unseen for so long—suddenly appeared before his eyes. The lovely outfit with its cool white lace at the collar made her figure appear somewhat smaller, yet her face also showed traces of emaciation.

“Professor.”

With a somewhat timid demeanor, she approached his desk, holding in her hand a small booklet that remained half-opened yet folded.

Yozo started. It felt as though something he shouldn’t have seen had appeared, but she—eyes glistening with tears—placed the book on the desk and, “Lately, I’ve been reading nothing but things like this.” “It’s *Confessions*, you see.” “I’ve read quite a lot of Tolstoy too.” “Thanks to that, I seem to be being reborn.” “I intend to settle all accounts of the past and step into a new life.” “Professor, please forgive me for everything up until now.” “I intend to become a serious Yoko from now on.” “I intend to do it seriously.”

Yoko pleaded earnestly with heartrending words.

He had not read much of Rousseau or Tolstoy either. There were some he had read and respected, but it was more accurate to say he disliked them without having read them. However, even if that was merely fickle, transient excitement, there had been no reason to ridicule Yoko’s sentimental passion. Moreover, he had once been made to hear from her own lips the plot of *Anna Karenina* as she narrated it in her idiosyncratic style. When it came to Tolstoy or Goethe, they had felt like towering peaks too high and vast to approach, but now he found himself wanting to read such works. On his desk, Balzac and Poe had formed a strange contrast.

Yozo, while recalling that such volumes had once been in his bookcase, skimmed through several chapters of *Confessions*; but Yoko, feeling acutely attuned to the household atmosphere, found herself unable to settle.

“Professor, I’m truly sorry to ask this, but would you mind stepping outside for a moment? There are various things I want to talk about, you know.”

“No, but…”

Yozo said this, but with an air of significance about her request, his heart had already begun to stir. “It should be fine if we just go a little way.” “Keeping it a secret from the children…”

“In that case…” Though Yozo would later gradually come to understand its meaning, at that moment he simply let himself be carried along by her restless mood and stepped outside. Yoko nearly dragged him as she hurried toward the tram thoroughfare. Spotting an empty rickshaw passing by on the opposite side of town, she frantically waved her hand, dashed toward it, and beckoned him over. The sun had dipped low in the west, and the roadside ginkgo trees were beginning to wilt with pale yellow tinges. Yoko shoved Yozo into the rickshaw as if forcing him inside, then climbed in herself and slammed the door shut with a clank. Yozo felt vaguely uneasy, but his curiosity being stirred, he remained silent and let matters take their course.

“Where on earth is she? Is it Zushi after all?” “No—we left there recently,” “and took up a modest house in Shibuya instead.” “It’s cramped enough,” “but there’s a proper tatami room done up nicely—quiet too.” “The garden runs into our neighbor’s nursery,” “with sasanquas and Chinese parasols and bush clover—quite charming really.” “He could write there undisturbed,” “so I thought we must have you visit—” “Let’s go now.”

“Who knows?” Yozo felt a ticklish unease, his mind crowded with anxiety that the cursed incident’s aftermath might begin anew and with wonder at why her attitude had grown so unnervingly courteous—leaving him no capacity to discern her true feelings. This was not unique to the moment; he inherently lacked the acuity to immediately grasp the meaning of any reality confronting him. Thus misled by societal rumors, Yoko Kozue had either convinced herself that a romantic entanglement already existed between Yozo and Sayoko—the Madam of that riverside house—or at least predicted such an affair would occur. Deeming this a gravely serious matter, she resolved to spirit Yozo away to her own home. Yet this sprang solely from a literary girl’s overactive imagination: Yozo and Sayoko’s relationship amounted to nothing beyond playmates whose intimacy slightly exceeded that of a rendezvous-house proprietress and her client. Of course, Yozo remained oblivious to such romantic stratagems and had never considered leveraging his friendship with Sayoko to keep Yoko in check—not that there was anything worth concealing to begin with.

In any case, he was invited to the house in Shibuya. The house stood on a thickly wooded elevation slightly removed from the street. Just as Yoko had described, it had a comfortably livable layout: upon entering through the genkan entrance, passing through a salon with chairs and tables arranged in good proportion, then proceeding down the corridor toward the rear, there lay a ten-mat tatami room detached from the living quarters—its fine wood grain and elevated floor creating an air of refinement. Decorations like curtains and table centers with their fairy-tale aesthetic reflected her characteristic taste, though only the innermost room had a somewhat forced quality with its disproportionately heavy flooring and built-in cupboards.

“Please.” Yoko brought out a zabuton cushion near the veranda edge and tried to make Yozo feel at home with even greater care than when she had invited him to her country house before. The female painter Kenjikaku—that same woman from Otaru—and Rumiko were also there. “Hello, Uncle.”

Rumiko came to his side, smiling cheerfully as if she had forgotten the incident from before. No mention was made here of Rousseau or Tolstoy, and as she busied herself preparing dinner in the same manner as when she had once taken him to the house in Zushi, some unresolved matter lingered between them. Yozo felt as though the home and study he had finally grown close to were receding once more, and he could not bring himself to relax. He could not even foresee what would happen next, but for now, he did not need to consider it.

Before long, dinner began. And when it ended, they amused themselves with Rumiko’s nursery rhyme dance, and for a while, lively conversation bloomed. Rumors about newspaper serials, literary gossip, enpon sales figures, and so on. “Why don’t we hold a Futsukai picnic one of these days?” “Ah, that’s right.” “How about around Tamagawa? Let’s charter a net boat and enjoy ourselves all day. I haven’t seen everyone in quite some time. Let’s definitely do it. I’ll send out a notice.”

As was his usual underhanded way，several days passed like this until one day Yoko suddenly seemed to remember and confronted Yozo. "There was a Matsuya yukata at your place once，wasn't there?" "What did you do with that?" "I want a bolt of it." The yukata fabric in question had been devised through someone’s idea at the time via a tie-up with a department store and served as designs for writers. Yozo too had received an order to use his own haiku as a design—something Yoko had come up with.

Yoko’s interrogating face suddenly took on a hostile expression. Just like the beautiful consort of a foolish daimyo of old—her willow-leaf eyebrows bristling as she petulantly insisted on her whims—there was a fierce beauty to her rage. Yozo found himself powerless to resist. He had given one bolt of the yukata fabric delivered from the department store to his daughter and another to Sayoko. Both his daughter and Sayoko had already had them tailored and were wearing them. Yozo explained matters exactly as they stood. Though it was only natural for his daughter to wear it, when he declared there was no reason to give any to that riverside woman, Yoko flew into a hysterical rage.

"But it couldn't be helped. We were already separated." "Even so, wouldn't it have been better if you'd considered how sickening I find this? What a waste on some woman like that." "Then just buy another bolt." "I don't want some bought thing. Get that one back for me."

“It doesn’t have to be now, does it?”

Yozo muttered but reluctantly wrote a few lines; Yoko Kozue skimmed through the text and finally appeared relieved. After waiting for the envelope’s address to be written, she dispatched painter Kitayama Kikuno to Sayoko’s place with money for a round-trip taxi. Outside blazed the midday sun, yet inside the room remained cool. Yozo rested his head against the black persimmon wood threshold of the floor for a while, but soon drifted into sleep while half-dreaming the voices of Yoko Kozue and Rumiko conversing in the adjacent room. When he awoke, Kitayama had already returned with the yukata.

“She was just about to go out when I arrived,” Yoko said. “Since I was going to Shiba Shikokucho, she told me to ride along to that area, so Ms. Kitayama came with me.” Having said that, Yoko spread out the yukata—wrapped in paper and sent over—there, but— “Ms. Kitayama says that her appearance is quite something to be wary of.” Yozo knew how Sayoko’s restless black eyes would sometimes emit a cold light, revealing in that instant a beauty reminiscent of a sorceress from times past—yet unlike someone like Yoko, this stemmed from a steely fortitude at her core, forged through long years in her profession, while traces of the delicate disposition from her days leading delinquent girls still lingered within her.

“Just now, Ms. Kikuno told me, ‘Ms. Kozue, you need to pull yourself together.’” Yoko’s words clearly contained hostility toward Sayoko—not romantic jealousy toward a rival in love, but rather unease toward the atmosphere of Sayoko’s home, always bustling with figures from literary and art circles. The yukata had a sea-blue base with white motifs of Yama-no-I’s wooden well frame and autumn grasses—a pattern that suited Yoko perfectly. She briefly draped it over her shoulders to inspect it, but upon recalling it had passed through Sayoko’s hands—as if her pride had been wounded—she suddenly crumpled it into a ball and stomped into the garden with a hysterical expression, trampling it under her geta. Yozo could only watch dumbfounded, but unsatisfied even then, she went back inside for matches and descended again to set it ablaze. White smoke billowed as the yukata burned fiercely; she prodded the smoldering remnants with a stick fragment.

Finally, Yoko seemed to begin feeling a certain emptiness; after quietly gathering the ashes, she dejectedly climbed up to the veranda.

“For me to take the Professor? You’re quite the fantasist.”

The flickering eyes of Sayoko, who was somewhere chattering those words, floated into Yozo’s mind.

However, after five or six days of this, even this life began to grow wearisome. He had grown weary of even grazing against the thorny nerves of Yoko Kozue, this lovely tyrant. And yet he remained ensnared by her black eyes, by cheeks bearing beguiling curves of beauty, by hands and legs imbued with a delicacy reminiscent of Japanese paintings. He couldn’t help but cling to this allure—something unattainable to Sayoko, who hailed from mercantile roots. He was torn between anguished feelings born from aversion clashing with clinging attachment. He understood time had long since slipped away, yet all the more found these lingering affections impossible to sever.

Yet Yozo often grew weary from satiated emotions and yearned for a savior—a third party—to appear. Whether they were his friends or Yoko's, he found it desirable to be seated among young conversationalists or women. In such situations, Yozo would always fall silent while Yoko became the guests' cheerful interlocutor; yet compared to their face-to-face encounters, this arrangement paradoxically granted his nerves greater ease and calmness. When their solitary room grew stiflingly tedious, he again found himself compelled to seek environmental changes. The act of sequestering himself in places with elegant bathrooms and powder rooms, or in Japanese-style rooms exuding tranquil refinement with gardens, or in secluded spots detached from society had utterly transformed the habits of this former family man. He tried to anchor his placeless spirit in these momentary dwellings, but this merely amounted to savoring transient shifts in mood—wherever he went, desolation lay waiting.

On one occasion, having escaped the suffocating confines of Yoko’s house in Shibuya, he found himself at one of those houses outside the city. It wasn’t too far from Shibuya, and having visited two or three times before, he had become acquainted with a maid who was quite fond of Yoko. One cool evening, just as he was beginning to feel melancholy at being confined in that room, Yoko’s unfulfilled mood once again grew harsh. From time to time, petty emotional skirmishes broke out. From Yozo’s perspective, even the bond between them—long since stripped of its adhesive force—now clung together only by literature, or rather by her writerly ambitions. Were she to sever even that thread, she could free herself at any moment from this agonizing pretense of romance. Yet from Yoko’s view, this clueless old writer was nothing but an overgrown spoiled child, shamelessly imposing his weight upon others. She despaired of him—this man who had no concrete plan to take a young lover, no clear direction for his real life, and who merely writhed aimlessly in the mire of their romance—yet if she were to reject him carelessly, it would only repeat the failure of the Zushi incident.

Yozo, thinking to wrap things up here, paid the bill and waited for the car to arrive, but a low-pressure system that seemed about to erupt into a storm had settled over both their moods.

While waiting for the car, he seized the moment when Yoko was chatting with the maid by the veranda edge and suddenly tried calling Sayoko’s house. It wasn’t particularly meant to spite Yoko, but there was no longer any room left to shield her emotions. “Is Madam in?”

Yozo inquired softly, “Ah, Professor?” “Madam left for Shizuoka last night.” In Shizuoka lived Sayoko’s half-sister—a substantial taxpayer—who had long been prone to illness.

“But she isn’t there? Where is she now?” “Let me see.” Suddenly, Yoko approached and snatched the receiver. “Where did you call?” “What does it matter where? You go back to Shibuya. I’ll go back alone.” When the car finally arrived, he shook off Yoko and hurried to the entranceway to board it—but by then, she had already grabbed the door handle. No sooner had a fierce argument erupted in the speeding car than Yoko abruptly ordered the driver to stop and scrambled out. After they had gone a block or two, a voice seemed to call from behind—then another taxi carrying Yoko came speeding up to chase them. The car with Yoko’s rain-damp face pressed against the window alternately drew perilously close then fell away. When she looked back, Yozo’s car had fallen a full block behind. Now it was Yozo—his heart frail—who found himself pursuing her vehicle.

Twenty-Two

It was also around that time that talk of marriage arose between them—an attempt to stabilize their positions through pretense, both socially and privately, which had spiraled beyond any hope of control. Such feelings had also existed within Yoko’s mother and the others back when Yozo was first invited to her hometown. And depending solely on Yozo’s approach, her maternal uncle was supposed to come to finalize the discussion. However, Yozo’s feelings had not yet advanced to that point. Now, that Yozo had come to feel this way was due both to the inertia of long-standing passion clouding his rational eye for discerning advantage and disadvantage, and to foolish vanity and stubbornness—an attempt to somehow socially recover the miserable decline of their romance.

“If you’d make sure I won’t struggle financially even after your death, Professor, my uncle would agree.” Yoko had said this, but Yozo thought setting aside what remained of the smallest royalty portion from three bookstores might suffice. During that period while the children were at the coast, Yoko turned Yozo’s old six-tatami room into a living space, losing herself in translations of Proust and Colette. Between readings, she cleaned rooms like they were her own home and sprinkled water over garden stones and lanterns, passing days in seemingly cheerful routine—until the children’s return from shore abruptly darkened her mood.

Yozo did not necessarily believe he could have confidence in this marriage, nor had he ever thought she would ultimately need to settle down with a younger spouse. For his aged, fragile heart, this was undoubtedly painful, but keeping her feminine sensibilities—which seemed to yearn for marriage for honor's sake—in a state of tension was, for the present, one viable approach. One time, the two visited Takashimaya. Yozo, responsible for two motherless daughters—one a graduating schoolgirl and the other in elementary—could never maintain composure in such circumstances. He knew his eldest daughter suffered silent persecution at school. Boys could take action whether passive or active by their very nature as males, but girls had to endure storms while protecting the household through quiet perseverance. This agony pierced Yozo's nerves too. Visiting a department store intensified his heartache, making him ashamed and fearful of his own self-indulgence. Yet seeing Yoko brimming with happiness like May blossoms brought unexpected buoyancy to his leaden heart. As they examined various formal dress patterns together, visions of her wearing them began surfacing in his mind. They immediately agreed on a design. At that time Yozo also commissioned a modest silk crested kimono for himself.

However, even as they did so, their feelings continued to waver incessantly. Yozo still harbored a desire to somehow avoid appearing on that showy stage of marriage, while Yoko too had moments when she seemed entirely preoccupied with other matters. "If we end up separating this time," he said, "let's have someone reliable mediate so we don't drag things out again." When Yozo spoke these words,

“Who would be good?” Yoko, too, was nonchalant, as if ready to part ways at any moment.

“Let’s leave it to Kasuga.” “He’s consistently shown us kindness all along, and even after we separate, he’ll keep watching over you.” “If Kasuga steps in to mediate—since I want a clean resolution—I could part with about a thousand yen.” “Very well.”

Yoko smiled. She seemed almost able to use that money right away. “But don’t tell anyone, okay?” “Of course,” he said. “I don’t like being too lenient either.” As they went about this, the formal dress they had ordered arrived completed, with embroideries added to two or three places as Yoko had requested. Yozo began to feel as though he was finally about to step into the spotlight, and so he forced a whip upon his crushed heart. Yozo had once taken a photograph with her in her hometown—she wore a reddish-brown, stiffly woven Obama-style long-sleeved kimono that she had donned on her wedding night to her late husband Matsukawa, fastened with an obi embroidered in gold and silver threads with a thousand cranes—joined by her brother and his wife, along with her sister. It had been a commemorative family photograph taken when they welcomed Yozo, but he now wondered if that might become their formal wedding portrait.

However, one day, Yozo decided to inform only his eldest son, Yotaro, of the matter and seek his opinion. “Well, Ms. Kozue doesn’t seem like someone who desires material things, so I don’t think there should be any conflict—but I wonder about entering her into the family register.” “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” “Well, perhaps.”

Yozo also nodded. When Yozo broached the matter to Yoko, her expression suddenly turned severe. "If Mr. Yotaro says such things as the heir," she said, "then I'll stop too." "But going through family register procedures would bind us both. Wouldn't that disadvantage you?" "That's your selfishness talking!" "I can't stay here anymore." Her agitated nerves always proved unbearable to him.

“Fine, do as you like.”

Yozo’s tone was also harsh.

Yoko stormed out like a whirlwind.

Kasuga had been a close lawyer since the time of Yozo’s late wife. Having his office in Sukiyabashi and having once worked at an English lawyer’s office known for its penchant for antiques, he himself had come to like mediocre antiques and exotic interior decorations—though Yozo began frequenting him after he handled a joint debt. Moreover, since Kasuga’s beautiful wife had unexpectedly been a friend of Yoko’s from her schoolgirl days, even after Yoko came to Yozo’s side, she was invited to alumni tea parties and taken to their regular cafés and plays. Though the truth remained unclear, on the surface they seemed well-disposed toward the pair, so Yozo thought that with Kasuga’s intervention, even this intractable problem might find resolution and Yoko’s situation be settled. He had also reasoned that even if his vulnerabilities were exposed, Kasuga being a gentleman—and this falling outside professional duties—wouldn’t make an issue of it.

Nevertheless, now that Yoko had left, Yozo found his heart unsettled. While he thought she would be safer there than with anyone else, the fact that she had rushed to the Kasugas’ place still worried him. This time things couldn’t be brushed aside—and realizing some inescapable condition would surely be imposed, he now felt a pang of loneliness. It wasn’t impossible to imagine Madam being behind it all, holding the key. He knew that binding each other in this way was indeed the best course of action under these circumstances—

A day later, on the evening of the third day, Kasuga sure enough arrived.

Just as Sayoko, who had been visiting, was leaving—around the time she exited the gate—Kasuga entered through the front entrance. The two of them did not proceed with their usual familiarity. They sat facing each other in a heavy atmosphere, but Kasuga broached the subject.

“Actually, about Ms. Kozue…” From Yozo’s lack of awareness, the great misapprehension between them—and the increasing difficulty of her own position—were things Yoko Kozue had laid bare while weeping all night, and through Kasuga’s demeanor, Yozo could largely imagine it all.

“How about it, Professor? Since you’re also in a bind, let’s settle things cleanly here and now. Moreover, Ms. Kozue doesn’t seem to love you at all.” Kasuga spoke frankly, but the matter of the promised money also came up.

“And you’re saying that came from your own mouth, Professor?” “Ms. Kozue says she absolutely wants to receive it—” “No, I too actually want to settle the aftermath cleanly.” “That’s right.” After promising to arrange the money within a day or two, they soon parted ways. Then, on the very next evening, when Yozo was in the usual small downstairs room at Sayoko’s house with the pattering sound of water, he was informed that the popular writer Kamiyama and Kasuga had unexpectedly arrived, so he went up to the second-floor parlor. Yozo brought up the issue of Yoko in the course of the conversation. And he added a slight stipulation.

“Regarding the money for Yoko—of course I’ll give it if I must—but if she’s found herself a new partner now, that would be rather troublesome.” “If you could guarantee that point for me now, it would be a great help.” At this juncture,Yo­zo felt unpleasant—as if he were pettily probing even Ka­su­ga’s hidden motives—and guilty too,sensing how despicable he must appear through the Pro­fes­sor’s eyes.Yet when pressed,the money still pained him to part with.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Kasuga replied, “but I doubt it’s true. Still, I’ll bring it up.” “In any case, I’ll deliver the money tomorrow,” Yozo said. That evening, Kamiyama escorted Yozo home—the same Kamiyama who had timed his invitation with the tides, now conducting the overture to his tempestuous affair with Sayoko. Days passed since Yozo handed over the money at Kasuga’s office, his mind circling like someone shifting vantage points to glimpse Yoko behind the Kasugas’ wall-like presence. When giving Kasuga the cash, tears had streaked Yozo’s face, yet through the clouds that had long shrouded him, he thought he glimpsed a sliver of blue sky.

Then, one afternoon after about a week had passed, Yozo found himself summoned yet again by a telephone call from Yoko. As was typical when this void opened in his heart, since breaking with Yoko he had taken to frequenting friends' houses in the neighborhood. Facing meals prepared by those country-bred maids depressed him, yet having grown accustomed to going out, sitting alone in his study made him feel there was no purpose in living as though besieged on all sides. Still nursing a hidden defiance, he hadn't yet succumbed to utter despair; he even sensed a shift emerging from his formerly gloomy temperament. When reading now, he discovered fresh interest in previously obscure matters—unlike his feverishly distracted youth, he felt hearts might truly connect through words. He lamented being too aged for complete renewal and remained uncertain where to begin preparations, yet sensed some small step forward might still be possible. He had come to recognize the squalor of clinging to life's remnants, yet refused to ape genius through cheap imitation.

At such times, when he was in the study of a well-off old friend, exactly because his state of mind and environment were so utterly different, his mood would settle somewhat.

“There’s always something else. “There are plenty of women who aren’t struggling financially but say they’re lonely being alone.” His friend had said this, but when he thought of such women or marriage—those who would fit neatly into domestic life—he still felt gloomy.

One time, Yozo was taken by that friend to visit a woman living in Azabu whose lifestyle operated on an entirely different scale from someone like him. Seeing the woman had been merely a pretext; their true purpose was to inspect the house she wanted to sell, though its architecture proved truly remarkable. This was of course a hidden residence belonging to a scion of a major zaibatsu family—not some grand edifice, but a tea-ceremony-inspired space meticulously crafted in every corner. Yet merely listening to the portly woman recount her three-year architectural tribulations felt arduous enough. The Western-style building at the rear, said to have cost three thousand yen per *tsubo*, likely told no lie—but the elderly man in full court regalia gazing from its wall, who had once managed every detail of the woman’s affairs with seamless efficiency, had since transferred his attentions to a new mistress. The garden too, its undergrowth choked solely with alpine plants, exuded desolation.

“Why don’t you write here?”

She made a hospitable remark, but it seemed she had no grasp of what a writer’s life—especially that of someone like Yozo, a friend of this wealthy man—entailed. “They say that place cost three hundred thousand yen, but with stock losses and all, it’s become a bit too much to handle now. We’d have to take a significant loss if we sold it—but our own residence is so excessively ornate, it’s rather absurd, don’t you think?”

In the car on the way back, the friend spoke. In this latest phone call from Yoko, she said that due to circumstances she had decided to return to the countryside, and since there were things she wanted to discuss before leaving, he should definitely come to the Yamatoya Inn in front of Ueno Station. By that time, composure had settled within Yozo. The town still retained some lingering heat. Wearing his usual dust coat and carrying a thick-gripped rattan cane, Yozo was ushered into a cramped room cluttered with two or three pieces of luggage where he planted himself between Yoko and her art student attendant Kitayama. He now felt everything was a dream. The notion of her returning to the countryside felt refreshingly straightforward. Her tearful, drawn-out explanation about her mindset and reasons for retreating to the countryside now—which seemed tinged with some sort of fraud—struck him as a contrived bit of shallow scheming, but he merely smirked and nodded along.

“Why are you laughing so much today?”

Yoko pressed nervously. “It’s nothing.” “I just feel somehow refreshed.” According to Yoko, her mother was also of an age where she didn’t want to cause her any further hardship. With the household income having decreased, the annex where Yozo used to write had been rented out, and she thought she wanted to give him a little money on this occasion. It was deeply felt that country living would also be good for Rumiko’s health, and so on. Seeming to think that Yozo was deliberately pretending, even after stepping outside, Yoko continued speaking in a manner that suggested she herself had at some point been swayed into sentimentality by her own words, all while pitying him as they parted here.

“Well then, this is goodbye. You’ve understood, haven’t you?” “You’ve understood, haven’t you?”

She extended her hand.

“Goodbye.”

Flipping up the hem of his dust coat, as he walked toward Hirokoji, a voice called out from behind him. However, not even two days had passed before Yozo once again heard her cheerful voice through the receiver of a telephone call summoning him. “Come right away.” “I had a fight with my mother and came back.”

No matter under what conditions they had parted, Yoko took it for granted that Yozo was someone she could summon whenever she wished. Moreover, precisely because there was the issue of money this time—take it she did—but a residue lingered in her heart afterward. She remained troubled too by his demeanor when they had parted ways at Ueno. Yozo had to consider Kasuga’s position to some extent and was weary of this endless chain of incidents, but the breeziness of Yoko’s current phone call—as though she’d forgotten every word from their farewell—stirred an impulse he couldn’t contain within himself, and he found wanting to trail her ceaselessly shifting maneuvers as far as he possibly could.

The morning was still early.

Autumnal light showered down upon the ginkgo street trees whose branches and leaves had begun to wilt slightly, and the faint dust stirred up by the passing entaku taxis was noticeable enough to catch the eye.

The inn stood in a narrow alley at the edge of Shinjuku's Café Street. Having stayed there once before, Yozo managed to take an entaku rickshaw directly to its entrance. As he alighted from the vehicle and approached on foot, Yoko's voice called down from above. He looked up to find her leaning against the handrail with both hands, gazing downward while laughing. The inn's newness gave it an unobjectionable atmosphere. Moreover, she possessed that quality of being well-received by innkeepers and maids wherever she went.

“Did I startle you?” “Not really.” When he looked, suitcases and arabesque-patterned furoshiki bundles of various sizes were piled in the corner, giving the impression they had just arrived. “What’s wrong?” “No, I had a fight with my mother right after arriving.” “I just stuck my feet into whatever dirty wooden clogs I could find and rushed out here.”

“What about Rumiko?” “She was crying and clinging on, so Rumiko’s here with me.” “She’s downstairs taking a bath with Ms. Kitayama.”

When he looked, a slender unfamiliar watch glinted on her wrist like an insect. “Did you buy something like that?”

Yozo said reproachfully. It was likely thought to be something she had bought just as she was leaving.

“I’m sorry. I received some money. But I haven’t used much of it yet. Let’s travel together.” Yoko said brightly. Even with that amount, she suggested they might as well spend it all together in some pleasant way since it wouldn’t be enough for anything substantial anyway. “But something more interesting happened. I met a friend from my girls’ school days on the train. She’s the daughter of a large kimono fabric merchant in the city, but she married into the Kogouchi family—they’re major taxpayers who own a bank and such—and they’re quite prominent there. Since Mr. Kogouchi was with her, I got introduced to him too—he apparently graduated from Keio University’s economics department and has a house around Kojimachi. He once invited me to visit, you know? From his suit to his necktie and shoes, everything was flawlessly chic—not a single detail amiss. His face was sharply defined, with what you might call a stern handsomeness—a modern type of attractive man. Men like that always smoke good cigars too. He took out his case and gave me one as well, but—”

In Yoko’s story, there emerged a protagonist straight out of a popular novel. “The wife’s face is rather plain—second-rate, you might say—but she wears gaudy visiting kimonos. She’s nothing more than a good-natured person.” “When we talk about novels or movies, she and I can’t even focus on the same things.” “She might make a rather dull wife for a man like him, but she leaves an excellent impression.” “That sounds ideal.” “Couldn’t something be done about it?”

“But he already has a wife—there’s nothing that can be done now.” “But I do think it might be worth trying to see him.”

At that moment, both Kitayama and the child came up from the bath. Yoko took black tea and fruit, and with money in her pocket, the world seemed to have changed completely. Since there were prying eyes around, they couldn’t go out for a walk even after nightfall, and the three of them stayed up late chatting—but somehow liquor that Kitayama favored was brought out, and even after the child and Yozo had gone to bed, the conversation between the women continued. During the time when Yoko had set up a house near Yozo, rumors also emerged of a young sculptor who frequently visited Kitayama and earnestly professed his pure love to Yoko as well. If only Kitayama could endure being slightly farther away, his father was supposed to build an atelier near their shop in Kanagawa—but she, disliking the idea of entering into the staid atmosphere of an old-established family, had continued a life of impoverished cohabitation in Ekoda for some time.

“You should set your sights on someone too.”

Yoko was slightly drunk. "Yes, but no one notices me." "If you're going to choose someone, aim for a heavyweight." "I'm hopeless. I could never imitate you." "I could never imitate you." She blew out cigarette smoke.

“Dreadful women.” Yozo covered himself with the futon as he thought. When autumn had finally reached its peak, the two traveled to Hakone for two or three days to seek out the autumn leaves, but by the time they returned, Yoko’s funds had grown considerably thinner.

The two settled into an inn at Kowakidani, buried in a blazing tapestry of autumn leaves. Though Yozo had steeled his resolve—accepting that a storm would inevitably come and vowing to live only for today—he found himself powerless against the occasional piercing of his heart, as if by a thistle’s thorn. At times, she would behave with boyish cheerfulness and speak with the delight of small birds whispering in a morning forest, but just when he thought she might drench him in a torrent of words too rapid to answer one by one, leaving him exasperated, she could also vex him with a gloom as sharp as the melancholy tide of northern lands or mountains furrowed by passing showers—and though she remained a literary girl naive to reality, she could shrewdly see through people like a seasoned courtesan.

At times, she would behave in ways that suggested her lover had come to one of the inn’s rooms, or let slip a tone implying they should at least spend their final moments together happily for the sake of future memories. Even as they walked through Gora Park—its paths strewn with jagged rocks—under a drizzling rain shared beneath a single umbrella, she would whisper as if longing to spend a summer there together, only to then act as though her next partner were already drawing near. She was, as it were, a natural-born sleepwalker in a state of elation.

“Ah, so many dreams…”

“If I don’t have dreams, I’d be so lonely.” Yoko was already tearing up. The season when one longed for the hearth had arrived.

By that time, Yoko had moved her belongings and child into a boarding house in Kanda. The mirror stand and chest where she had applied cream and rouge every morning and night still remained in Yozo’s room. This was because debts jointly incurred with her former husband Matsukawa during their marriage in Hokkaido had finally caught up to them—during Yozo’s absence, even his desk had been listed among the seized items. Though untangling this required some effort, they had entrusted the matter to a young lawyer at Kasuga’s office.

From Matsukawa, who had fled to Shanghai, there had been no word whatsoever since then. More than Yoko, it was Yozo who occasionally recalled this. He thought that if Matsukawa—who seemed ready to return home at any moment—could establish a foothold there, settling down might not be such a bad idea. Yet Yoko lacked the audacity to go as far as Shanghai.

One time on the second floor of Tokyo Kaikan, they ate Kansai-style beef hotpot. Among Yozo’s three children, Rumiko was also present. They had been dividing meat from the pot onto small plates behind the folding screen to feed the children when—at that exact moment—a group of four entered: a fiftyish man in a rural-style fur-trimmed Inverness coat, a slightly younger man, a sun-tanned thirty-five- or thirty-six-year-old gentleman in a chic dark brown suit who looked like a golf enthusiast, and a woman in gaudy attire who appeared to be his wife. This caught Yoko’s eye.

“Look, that’s Mr. and Mrs. Kogouchi.” Yoko whispered to Yozo, but just then, diagonally across from the screen behind her, they took their seats. He wasn’t particularly striking, but his lean face with its straight nose had an air of refinement, and his well-proportioned figure was smart. Yoko leaned out slightly from the edge of the screen and bowed, but their side—caught in a messy domestic scene—was a bit embarrassed. Then, around the time when about a week had passed, at a concert in the Imperial Theater, Yoko once again encountered the Kogouchi couple.

The performer was the Russian pianist Godowsky—a stout, slightly plump gentleman who looked every bit the Russian—and though one could not discern the technical mastery of his playing as readily as with the familiar violin, his hands with their long, protruding white cuffs seemed to tame the keyboard with ethereal precision, much like how in beloved gidayū shamisen performances, a skilled player’s nimble plectrum and strings tangle yet never part.

Yoko had noticed the Kogouchi couple's presence from the very beginning. Their seats were positioned exactly two rows ahead, diagonally visible from here—the napes of necks, an ear, a cheekbone, and a jawline. Yozo could barely discern from the slightly pointed occiput to the jaw that seemed to manifest strong willpower, yet he somehow sensed that Yoko's eyes—repeatedly drawn in that direction—shared his perception. When the intermission ended, he exchanged greetings with Mrs.Kogouchi and Yoko as they passed by him on their way back to their seats.

As the solemn concert concluded, Yozo followed the surging audience and hurried out into the corridor—but when he turned to look back, Yoko’s figure was nowhere to be seen. Thinking she might have slipped past the orchestra box to exit through the south corridor, he went to check that direction too—but by then, not a single shadow remained there either. Yet it was precisely at that moment that Yoko revealed herself at the corner and called out to him.

“I’ve been searching for Professor since earlier. While I was just greeting those people as I was about to leave, you hurried off and…”

The boarding house in Kanda where a leftist Diet member would later be assassinated held a strange significance for both Yoko and Yozo. This was because Akimoto’s regular lodgings—now that very barrack-style boarding house—had been where he stayed under their agreement: once Yoko began writing novels for a major newspaper, she would leave Yozo’s side, enter married life, and establish a love nest on a quiet suburban farmstead, all while Akimoto sent her monthly living expenses for a year. Yet it was also the house where Yoko, who had received guidance on her songs from him, met Akimoto. Moreover, Akimoto had recently been involved in another incident straight out of fiction. He had long been separated from his wife, with her sister living with him in a quasi-second-marriage arrangement while managing his household and caring for his children. However, this woman had recently embezzled a considerable sum of money and fled to an elderly man said to be a former Salvation Army officer—an incident that became sensationalized in the social pages of newspapers around that summer, particularly since this officer was renowned as a leader of the leftist faction.

“Mr. Akimoto was a most peculiar man. His mind seemed quite unhinged, you see.”

The boarding house owner said. Akimoto had come up to Tokyo to search for the woman when the incident occurred. And here he met with the woman and the man several times, but the woman’s resolve did not waver. According to Yoko, he had geishas he regularly entertained in his hometown and was quite a heavy drinker, but despite being a man of such means, there must have been something peculiar about him that made all his wives leave. “Now that you mention it, I can think of something too.”

However, Yozo knew the boarding house owner in another sense. His father—who had been born in Echigo Ojiya and died four or five years prior—had come to sell Echigo textiles throughout several years spanning from Yozo’s boarding house days into his era of family life. At that time, this still pale-faced young man had been the master of this house—now a father to two children. “We often talk about you and your wife.” Yoko had said this, but it was also this very house where he had coincidentally found her after she first fled Yozo’s home and vanished.

Yoko, who had brought her belongings from a Shinjuku inn, settled into the downstairs room she had once repapered herself. She hung childlike curtains on the window, and even the French-made lamp—carried over from her Hokkaido days with its two bulbs—now wore a silk shade thick with embroidery, evoking an atmosphere reminiscent of a foreign brothel. Yozo would sometimes sleep side by side with Rumiko in that gloomy room, but Yoko would also spend nights in his study.

Then, one early morning—unfortunately, just as Yoko had spent the night away from her boarding house room—a phone call came. Yoko hurriedly slipped on her haori and rushed out, but when she returned shortly after, she began preparing with a perplexed look. “The clerk from Mr. Akimoto’s place has come,” she said.

By now, Yozo too understood that Yoko was maneuvering in various ways to draw Akimoto back. He had even hoped for that outcome. However, at times Yoko would act as though she had taken up Yozo’s instigation, calling the Kogouchi residence and exchanging courtesies with Mrs. Kogouchi. “What do you know—the mister’s out.” Yoko, tilting her head mischievously, stepped away from the phone.

However, he still felt there was some hope with Akimoto’s side. Now that Akimoto had gone to the trouble of sending his clerk to investigate her movements, the situation spelled misfortune for Yoko. Eventually, in a separate room of the boarding house, Yoko met with the clerk, but she sensed he had already become aware of her whereabouts from the previous night. “I had no choice but to make up an excuse about working on a manuscript elsewhere—treated him to a nice meal and sent him packing.”

With the forgotten handbag in tow, she promptly returned to report to Yozo after seeing off the clerk. “He came at a bad time, I must say.” Yoko came to the side of Yozo—who had just woken up—and let out a hollow laugh, though her figure appeared pitiful as she despondently rested her cheek on the table.

Before long, that eventful year too drew near to Christmas. Yozo would occasionally find himself heading toward Yoko’s boarding house, but by that time, the light from the usual lamp was not always visible through her ochre curtains. Something else was about to begin. Yozo, working his sixth sense, headed back toward the bustling street.

Twenty-Three

The main street was bustling, but the side street leading to the boarding house located slightly off the main thoroughfare was lively in a different sense. The main street was a prominent shopping district lined with renowned large bookstores, stationery shops, and Chinese restaurants, but once you stepped into the side streets—as manifestations of modernism’s cheap popularization—flimsy, haphazardly constructed cafés and salons stood tightly packed in rows, with raucous jazz melodies streaming from every direction. Even when Yozo went to the trouble of visiting, if Yoko wasn’t there, it felt pointless—so he tried to avoid going whenever possible. Yet he still couldn’t help worrying about her whereabouts. Crowding into the narrow boarding house room with Rumiko made three of them sharing futons—it was undeniably gloomy. Lingering there dazedly while eating the boarding house’s meals during the day only irritated him further. Yet whenever something came up, his feet still carried him in that direction. They would go out together to eat Chinese food, and sometimes visit the variety show theaters in Jinbōchō that he had frequented long ago with Minegishi—a painter and haiku poet who lived there during Yozo’s Nishikichō boarding house days. In the past, there was Enzō—chattering away like oil paper catching fire—performing *Hasshōjin*, *Hanami no Adauchi*, and Sanba’s *Ukiyodoko*, which we used to listen to. But now, coming here again, there were no storytellers of that caliber left, and the atmosphere had utterly changed. How many years had passed since then? In Japan too, there had been a great war, and everything in society had changed rapidly; meanwhile, the world had also seen an unprecedented tragedy that brought great confusion to European culture. In both the intellectual and literary worlds, there had been remarkable surges and ceaseless transformations of various ideologies and isms; yet even as he drifted amid these tides, Yozo’s youth—his bachelor years—had drawn to an uneventful close, his twenty-five-year marriage had reached its climax, and the hues of twilight now pressed in prematurely upon his surroundings. He was seized by an urge to dance and began an awkward dance in the corner, though his steps were prone to falter from the start. Left alone to handle the dance—unable to manage even the simplest steps—as he made a thorough spectacle of himself, his heart gradually grew cold—yet the moment for transformation refused to arrive with any ease.

On another occasion, when the slightly plump boarding house landlady told him Yoko wasn't in her room, he came down the stone entrance steps. He sensed something like human activity nearby—perhaps she had gone for tea or to her regular spots like Nanmei-za Theater or Cinema Palace—and thought waiting for her return might be bearable. Yet the landlady's uncharacteristic silence about inviting him up with her usual "Why not wait inside...?" left him unsettled.

It was precisely when the Hamaguchi Cabinet, inheriting the Seiyūkai’s profligate policies, had emerged to implement fiscal austerity. Suddenly, the Prime Minister’s broadcast reached Yozo’s ears. The radio came from an electrical appliance store at the crossroads corner just beyond the boarding house. As this was something he had wanted to hear, he leaned half his weight on his cane and listened attentively while keeping watch on the boarding house entrance for any sign of Yoko. Her aimless boarding house life—barely sustained by his meager support—could not have lasted indefinitely. With no clear path to restore her standing now that journalists had abandoned her, it seemed inevitable she would take some action to forge a way forward. Though believing this outcome proper, something still remained unresolved in Yozo’s heart. Yet he also thought it wiser to leave matters vague this time rather than pry into her affairs, and had avoided visiting as much as possible—though coming here now left him unsettled nonetheless. That said, he had gradually grown aware of recklessness’s dangers. Once his heart began wavering, it would not easily settle—during such times, he knew it best to stay motionless in his room. And he knew it best to dwell on those gloomy days when they shut themselves in their boarding house room as if shunning daylight—to reflect on how unhealthily they repeated those moments of playacting at transcendent bliss, as though such indulgences were life’s ultimate rapture.

Without listening to the Prime Minister’s broadcast until the end, Yozo soon emerged onto the bright main street. And at such times, walking alone was also enjoyable.

It was in the spring of the following year that a romantic incident—unprecedented in Yoko’s life and unlikely to ever recur—occurred. Yet given their circumstances, ages, and compatibility, this outcome felt utterly natural for them both; a foreboding like demon’s wings had long cast its faint shadow. Precisely because Yozo did not wish for it, he deliberately offered frequent feigned hints. “That man is certain to succeed.”

However, he wasn’t entirely opposed to it either. If she was going to leave anyway, there was also the thought that it would be better for her to settle with someone promising rather than end up with some mediocre person. Selfish though it was, he also felt unwilling to let those under his influence be tarnished. It wasn’t so extreme as to conflict. They could only be called emotions all too common among humans.

The time that gave Yozo an unpleasant premonition was during the year-end recital meeting held at the home of Kiyokawa’s older lover Yukie. Yozo felt some new incident was about to befall Yoko and had grown reluctant to even step over the threshold of her boarding house; when invited to the meeting, his response lacked enthusiasm. This was also because, prior to that incident, when attending a dance performance by the Takada couple in a Marunouchi auditorium, he had been dodged upon leaving—leaving him unsettled—and despite their earnest invitation, he felt as though he’d been hoodwinked, souring his impression altogether. But since he couldn’t trust Yoko’s affections, he saw no point in getting angry.

“That’s true.” “I wonder if it’s appropriate for me to show up every single time.” “But Professor, it would be strange if you didn’t go.” “The master also wants you to see it.” Yozo had been watching this person’s dancing for a long time. Twelve or thirteen years earlier, when he had first seen her at the Nihonbashi Club, she had been young and her dancing vibrant. Gradually she began handling new themes and forging her own artistic path. Though Yozo seemed to understand dance yet didn’t truly grasp it, he enjoyed watching it—so after taking on Kiyokawa, a young lover deeply versed in dance, he never missed a performance of her new works.

However, precisely because tonight’s event was private, he felt less able to blend into the social atmosphere of the gathered crowd than into the dancing itself; moreover, he somehow sensed the growing closeness between Yoko and Kiyokawa since that time—so ultimately, he found himself disinclined to attend. Even in Yoko’s recent remarks, the affection between them with Rumiko wedged in between was palpable, making him wonder whether tonight might force some scene upon him—or worse, whether this itself was their preparatory maneuver. Yozo, slow-witted as he was, hadn’t articulated this thought clearly, but extrapolated, it held true.

Near Yukie’s house in Shinanomachi—recently relocated—Yoko Kozue stepped out of a taxi. Wearing a black satin Western dress with white lace collar trimmings, her face and figure lacked the radiance they held in traditional Japanese attire, leaving her with a desolate air as her mood sank into gloom. The cramped room was packed. Leaning against the wall near the entrance, he glimpsed Kiyokawa and a young acquaintance, while onstage, the children’s dances had advanced deep into their program. Soon Rumiko’s group finished their charming new dance. Parents withdrew their children—some clad in showy costumes, others unnaturally precocious for their age—and several more substantial acts followed in succession. Yoko lingered at the back, her movements obscured, but tonight she lay wilted like a flower blighted to its core. Under the master’s cheerful gaze—she who had taken Rumiko under her wing—and Yozo’s wary eyes—he who had been force-fed so many bitter draughts—Yoko hid her soul’s aimless throbbing, already shattered utterly before this romance.

Before long, Yozo was told by the master and went upstairs to investigate. There, tea preparations had been completed, and sandwiches, sushi, and sweets were laid out for hospitality. “Those people are geisha from your home region’s Nishishinchi district, Professor.” When the master spoke, he turned to look and saw two middle-aged women with vacant expressions in the adjoining room where the partition had been removed.

“Those people are quite accomplished entertainers,” “Their banquet rooms are wonderfully lively.” After the Master had gone downstairs, Yozo chatted awhile with Kiyokawa and the others while nibbling sandwiches until Yoko came to fetch him. Descending, he found the Master’s unadorned dance already in progress. When it concluded, tables were arranged for a hushed celebratory feast. The love-obsessed widow—rumored swept away by Yuigahama’s tsunami during the earthquake—alongside her sister (a theater director’s wife) and Yukie with her licensed disciples settled into crescent formations on one side. Opposite them sat Yozo,Yoko Kozue,and Kiyokawa in mirrored curves.Yukie’s group labored to sustain their sparkling banter without lapse while this contingent sat listless as half-paralyzed limbs.

Yozo felt suffocated and soon hurried outside. Yoko urged Rumiko—who had been playing with Kiyokawa—to follow and trailed after them; but when she stepped out beneath the brilliantly glittering starry sky, she finally felt relieved.

That was the night of New Year’s Eve. At times Yozo found himself tormented by doubts about Yoko and Kiyokawa’s conduct that evening; at others he brushed them aside. After all, Yukie—though aged—should have been seasoned in such matters; surely even Yoko’s passion wouldn’t override her master-disciple bond with Rumiko to pursue romance, nor would that young Marxist Kiyokawa readily accept such an arrangement. The reasoning was flimsy, of course. He knew full well it offered no real defense—yet Yozo deliberately turned his face from the matter.

Around that time, Yoko Kozue had been picking out styles from American fashion magazines brought by beautician Mei Harumi, looking for one that might suit her. Having found a design she liked, she had pestered Yozo into buying fabric and buttons, then set about cutting the material. Though she had never studied Western dressmaking properly, she cut it anyway. The orange satin fabric formed a skirt made entirely of fine pleats—a distinctive feature, one might say. Yoko Kozue sewed eagerly, anticipating showing it to Kiyokawa, while Yozo—unaware of this—silently watched, tilting his head at both the design and the fabric’s color but finding no opening to voice his criticism.

At that time, Yoko Kozue brought Rumiko with her, intending to spend the New Year at Yozo’s house. Yozo’s eldest daughter was busy with spring preparations alongside the maid, but Rumiko was in the ten-tatami children’s room playing battledore with Eiko. Among the older children, some had gone out to Ginza.

Yozo tried not to recall the New Year’s Eve two years prior when he had gone out to a hotel for work. He did not want to remember how he had gone out to the churning crowds of Ginza with a friend and eaten at Fūgetsu, or how on New Year’s Day he had seen *"The Gate of Seclusion"* at the kabuki theater—only to be awakened early on the morning of the second by a piercing bell and learn that his wife had suddenly collapsed; rushing home, he found that by that afternoon, she had already left behind the voices of her clinging, weeping children and died. Yet whenever he saw Yoko diligently working her needle in his room, he felt a prickle of irritation.

Yoko was quietly moving her white hands but began to speak in a somber voice.

“Now that I look back, I can’t help thinking how we’ve managed to come this far.” “I wasn’t supposed to end up like this.” “I can see my own feelings clearly now.”

Yozo was startled in that moment. Something unknowable within her—the shadow behind had come to be faintly sensed.

“You’re saying I’m the one who dragged us this far, aren’t you?” “That’s not it.” “I’m talking about the result.” “Right, I get it.” “Well then, let’s break up.” Yet after the night spent in that unresolved state had deepened, and the 108 bells of earthly desires ringing near and far had subsided—after Yoko Kozue had shown off the completed Western dress by wearing it and gone to bed—Yozo would begin to doze off only for his eyes to snap awake again, his nerves that had begun to settle under Yoko’s demeanor now flaring back with twofold or threefold force. He sprang up from bed and came to sit in front of the desk. Yoko also opened her eyes, noticed him sitting there, and reached out her white hand.

“What on earth are you angry about?” “Go to sleep.” “You’re being mean.” “Go back to your boarding house and sleep.” Yoko also sat bolt upright and rose from the bed. Then, muttering to herself as she put on her Western clothes, she went to pull Rumiko from the children’s room. “To kick someone out into the street on New Year’s Eve—what kind of landlord does that make you?”

While speaking through tears, she dressed Rumiko in the Western clothes and left without ceremony. After the sound of the glass-paned entrance door closing came the gate’s clang, reverberating through his study as dawn drew near.

24 After New Year's arrived, wanting to leave their separation somewhat dignified, he decided—this time entirely of his own initiative—to send Yoko Kozue a substantial sum of money through the dance master. This stemmed from his perception that regarding Yoko and Rumiko's circumstances, an atmosphere was developing where both the Master and her young lover Kiyokawa seemed positioned to assist them in various ways—and because Yoko herself lacked the capacity to stand independently, whether in life or literature. Should Yoko and her child thus make a splendid resurgence within their group's new-era social sphere, how shabby Yozo—left behind alone—would appear was not beyond his imagination. Of course, this instance was no exception—Yozo's jealousy always carried such psychological undercurrents. His reckless decision to lay everything bare from the outset to sustain Yoko in literary circles had been both social posturing and fragile self-respect. This interplay of appearances and calculations perpetually weighed in Yozo's mind, each side rising and falling against the other.

Moreover, toward the end of the year, Yozo had received a visit from Master and Kiyokawa—and had even been given some unexpected year-end gifts. It happened to be a time when Yoko was also present, and while the gifts could have been taken as a blessing for the two of them, upon delving a bit deeper into his feelings—perhaps out of consideration for Yoko’s recent emotional state, having already distanced herself from Yozo—it might also have been interpreted as one of the Master’s mediating efforts to achieve an amicable resolution without provoking Yozo’s anger, perhaps even a step further in that direction. Of course, Yozo at that time could not have foreseen things to such an extent; neither did the Master’s cheerful conversation or demeanor cast even a hint of such shadow. Yet it could not be said that Kiyokawa’s attitude lacked something suggestive. His youth and honesty would not allow him to offer empty formalities before this old writer.

“I do think things could be managed a bit more smoothly.”

Kiyokawa said with visible frustration. It was as though he himself were declaring that were it him, he could surely make her happier and guide her more skillfully. Had Yozo possessed keener sensitivity or a more analytical mind, he would undoubtedly have responded without hesitation to Kiyokawa’s words, which carried a somewhat challenging tone. Then Kiyokawa might have proactively argued for the irrationality of this unnatural, crumbling love affair—insisting that liberating her would benefit both Yozo himself and Yoko Kozue—and it’s possible that even Master, having already reached an understanding, might have supported this stance, though there might not yet have been a program fully in place for Yoko Kozue to confess her romance with Kiyokawa through her own words. In that case, it went without saying that Master would have had to take the first step by personally approving their romance.

However, Yozo did not have the mental bandwidth to probe deeply into their true intentions that evening. He merely felt the fluttering of leaves before a storm and, within the oppressive atmosphere of that moment, could do nothing but fruitlessly search for Kiyokawa and Yoko’s true feelings. Eventually, the four of them went out together, but Yoko walked just as she had in the room—perpetually lost in thought, her head bowed—while only Kiyokawa’s footsteps resounded steadily through the quiet town near the month’s end, already adorned in spring.

Soon came that late-night incident on New Year’s Eve. This likely accelerated their actions further still, while the destination of the money Yozo had sent gradually took clearer form in his mind—a mind ever inclined toward conjecture.

One day, Yozo suddenly visited the boarding house in Kanda. Several days had passed since he had entrusted the money placed in a horizontal envelope to Master. When he went to deliver the money to Master, Kiyokawa happened to be by her side as well, but Master hesitated slightly, as if uncertain whether it was proper to accept it. "My, that much?" "But I don't want to feel guilty about this later." "Very well, I'll take custody of it then." "Given that it's her, I do think giving it all at once might be unwise."

“I’ll leave that to you as well.” “No, that still shouldn’t be something for you to keep.”

When Kiyokawa said this, Master gave a light nod. “I suppose so.” After this brief exchange, an earthquake occurred. Yozo and Master went up to the dance floor and stepped out toward the window to look, but soon took their leave. Around that time, there was a young poet staying at Yozo’s house. This poet, Shiro Koike, was an enigmatic figure in both physique and disposition. He had come to rely on Yozo through a hometown connection with Yoko, though even Yozo could not deny his poetic genius. His appearance—a black serge suit worn day and night, paired with a russet tie and beret—was accentuated by his small frame. With pallid skin and muscles unpleasantly flabby, most people understandably mistook him for a woman in men’s clothing. He praised Yoko and submitted to her like a rabbit cowering before a leopard. At times he displayed maidenly shyness; at others, a streetwise sharpness—yet ultimately, he seemed nothing but a pitiable human wreck. Prone to angina attacks like an injured dove, he never forgot to carry a small bottle of digitalis in his pocket. Once, he accompanied Yoko to Mei Harumi in Ginza. As its lower floor housed a barber shop, he decided to get his hair cut there while she received a wave perm upstairs. But when Yoko’s styling finished and she failed to appear after endless waiting, he went downstairs to find Shiro sprawled in the chair, preening himself with a manicure.

Even after Yoko's whereabouts were lost, he still seemed to visit her at times, but he never spoke a word about anything crucial. As time passed, even his presence and visits grew increasingly sporadic. No matter what actions Yoko took, they were now as beyond reach as a balloon that had slipped from his hand and disappeared into the clouds. While he felt this was for the best, something didn't sit right with him. When he kept his composure, it was like a windless lake—no ripples stirred. But once his heart began to sway, waves surged without end, and like a compass needle pointing north, his feet naturally turned toward the boarding house. She had probably already moved out of the boarding house, but if he spoke to the landlord, he might come across facts he hadn't known until now.

The one who came out to the entrance was Okami, but— "Oh, Professor?" "Oh, please come this way." Okami hurriedly led Yozo up to the second floor and, "Ms. Kozue is moving out today." "The cart has just arrived, and they're about to load the luggage, so please come over here and take a look." It had been a close call. Yozo had noticed the cart in front of the boarding house but hadn't realized it was for Yoko's move; he had slipped past it and climbed the stone steps. Prompted by her words, he stepped out into the corridor and peered down through the glass door. There, young movers in workmen's jackets and slightly soiled brown felt hats were just then carrying out Shioji's bookcase.

“Haha, I see.” Yozo forced a bitter smile, but when the young poet Shiro Koike unexpectedly appeared beside the cart, he gasped and instinctively kneeled back into a formal seated position. “Has someone been coming around lately?” “Yes, he’s come two or three times.” “What a man.”

“Well, he didn’t mention his name, but he’s a young man.” “He has a high nose and big eyes—like an actor, you know.”

“Hmm, I see.” The presence that had always loomed in Yozo’s forebodings was indeed Kiyokawa, but from the moment he visited Master with money, those forebodings had temporarily vanished. Yozo suddenly felt a surge of excitement and leaned further against the glass door’s handrail, watching as the luggage was loaded one after another. Once he saw that everything had been fully loaded and secured with ropes under Koike’s direction, he took out a cigarette and began smoking while waiting for the cart to depart. At this juncture, he grew reluctant to part with the money—yet he still wanted to see their faces. Yozo peered intently in the direction the cart was moving, then after a brief pause went downstairs—only to find upon stepping outside that the cart had already crossed the main road stretching from Suidobashi to Hitotsubashi Bridge.

That area was where Yozo and Yoko would often abandon taxis or hail them, and it was also there that they went out late at night during that time to buy newly available brotchen and bread.

Keeping a distance of one or two blocks, Yozo followed intermittently, sometimes falling behind the cart and sometimes moving ahead. Those accompanying it weren’t just the young poet carrying Yoko’s toilet case—there was also Rumiko with her heron-like slender legs, and the nursemaid Kitayama, who held a cloth bundle in one hand and gripped Rumiko with the other, zigzagging here and there as they walked along playfully. The town was nearing dusk, and a cold wind blew against the wings of Yozo’s overcoat.

When they reached Kudanzaka slope, the figure of the young poet could be seen pushing at the rear of the cart, lagging slightly behind the group of women as he labored his way up the incline—but upon arriving there, Yozo found himself inexplicably empty and came to an abrupt halt. There’s no need to pursue this any further.—Yozo thought as much, but soon began walking again. The cart had stopped on a bustling street in Fujimicho—after climbing the slope and making two turns, left and right—but upon arriving, it was a flower shop where pale pink begonias bloomed riotously within the thick glass of the display window, like flowers encased in ice.

*A fitting love nest*—Yozo felt a wry smile form on his face as he entered the alley where the luggage was being carried in. The flower shop’s back entrance stood there. Yozo climbed the ladder-like stairs in the kitchen corridor, crossed the three-tatami entryway cluttered with luggage, and suddenly bounded into the room—only to find, contrary to expectations, just Rumiko and Kitayama present, with no trace of Kiyokawa or Yoko. “Huh—not here?”

Yozo plopped down cross-legged on one of the brand-new fluffy merino cushions arranged in a pair and laughed as though he found something absurdly amusing. “Where’s Mom?”

Yozo asked Rumiko, who was approaching him. Rumiko wasn’t acting awkward at all. “Well, Mama went strolling in Ginza with me today.” “But Mama ended up having to go somewhere else.” “So she called Mr. Kitayama and had him come pick me up.” He couldn’t make sense of what she meant. Asking Kitayama or Shiro would’ve been pointless anyway. Yozo lay down for a while with his eyes closed, puffing on his cigarette, but feeling too brazen, he soon left.

The young poet Shiro Koike, who had been introduced to Yozo by Yoko, was naturally at a disadvantage in this situation—though not enough to leave him agonizing over his course of action. At that time, he had been taken under the wing of a cultural affairs journalist from a major newspaper who moved in Yozo’s circles, working under him for two or three months. Though brief, this stint as a journalist had briefly lifted his spirits. Just when he thought he’d finally secured some pocket money for coffee and cigarettes, the printing workers began shunning him. The supervisor grew so exasperated he forced him out—but in exchange, he gained some recognition among senior literary figures and even managed to approach the renowned Ōmori poet. Yet once unemployed, finding even menial odd jobs proved far from easy. Before long, he began taking French lessons from Yozo’s eldest daughter. For Yozo—who always seemed so desolate—he would also relay updates about Yoko’s recent activities. He too found his heart parched if too much time passed without seeing Yoko. According to his account, during last winter while Yoko was still at the boarding house, she would occasionally visit Kiyokawa’s home in Banchō with Kitayama and Rumiko in tow. They would play records, make Rumiko dance, and their lively banter always blossomed into something vibrant. Hearing this, Yozo finally understood why she had maintained such stiffness toward him during that period.

One day, Shiro went to see Yoko. He occasionally carried in his pocket the spending money he received from Yoko, but in Yozo’s imagination, Kiyokawa’s lifestyle seemed rather affluent, and he was certain that this recent romantic affair had required a considerable sum taken from his family’s funds. From Yozo’s perspective, the phantom figures of the two appeared so extravagantly opulent. As a pair, they left nothing to be desired. Of course, that was only under the assumption that Kiyokawa had fully rebelled against his family.

When Shiro entered Yozo’s study, his eyes were slightly agitated. “When I went there today, it seems Mr. Kiyokawa is selling his books—the whole room was in complete disarray.” “Why?” “Since that place is a rented house behind Mr. Yamagami’s residence, it must be cramped for various reasons. Because he’s apparently found a house in Tabata this time and plans to move there, he probably needs the money.” Yozo couldn’t make sense of it. Had it not even been a month since Yozo provided the money, and yet had it already run out? Even if Kiyokawa refused to lay a hand on that money, was he really in such dire straits that he couldn’t move without selling his books?

“That can’t be right.” “No, that’s exactly it.” “They’re mostly books on dance and art—he said it’s a real shame to sell them.” Was he really that serious about it? Yozo felt a pang of sorrow. Then some time later, when they’d just moved to Tabata, Shiro made a special trip to see the place. It was an old two-story wooden Western-style house with a front garden fit for growing cosmos.

However, at that time, Shiro was struck on the head by Kiyokawa and driven away while wiping his tear-streaked face.

“What did you say?”

When Yozo asked, Shiro clutched his head as if in pain,

“That guy must be getting worked up about something. “And since I kept peeking in on him so often. “But I don’t think that’s going to work. “Though Ms. Kozue did apologize to me.” Shiro too seemed indignant, lamenting that Kiyokawa was unworthy of Yoko, but after that, all news of Yoko ceased entirely.

Twenty-Five

After March arrived, once again, one day Sayoko appeared in Yozo’s study.

Even now, Yozo would occasionally take a taxi to the house along the river to have dinner. He would sometimes take people along, but being alone was easier. By that time, Yotaro rarely showed himself in his father’s study unless accompanied by Sayoko, but this too ended up being convenient for Yozo. Yozo was initially intensely wary of this, but it proved futile. As long as he didn’t lose sight of the children, he tended to leave most matters to their own judgment. Setting aside whether that was kind or unkind to them, he had a habit of viewing each child as a distinct individual. Moreover, in his mind, the younger generation should always surpass the previous one. If anything, he had a tendency to draw his children too deeply into his own sphere of life. Even regarding his intermittent affairs with Yoko, he had openly discussed them with Yotaro and even involved him directly. At times he felt a thrill in doing so, but he resolved to trust his children. In Sayoko’s case too, one could say Yozo himself had sown the seeds. The children were all uniformly starved for maternal love. For Yotaro, Sayoko had gradually assumed a semi-maternal role. When they spent time together, it was not uncommon for all three of them—Yozo, Sayoko, and Yotaro—to gather. Yet even when alone with Sayoko, Yozo found himself missing Yotaro’s presence, feeling an odd incompleteness.

“I came because there was something I wanted to consult you about, Professor.”

Sayoko broached the subject, but it was merely trivial matters of friendship between women. This was because the dance instructor—with whom Yozo had recently become acquainted through Yoko—had suddenly appeared at the riverside house last night with a friend. Though from different eras, both the instructor and Sayoko had once worked as geishas in Shinbashi long ago, so their conversation flowed naturally and they shared an enjoyable late night together. Then upon leaving, they ignored Sayoko’s protests and forcibly left behind a monetary gift.

“However, when I checked later, it turned out to be a bit too much. There’s no reason for them to give me that much, so I was thinking of returning the favor with some sort of gift, but what do you think would be good?”

As a woman in the nightlife trade, Sayoko was always meticulous. “Something like a handbag or cosmetics.” “That’s true.” “But that person was wearing Chinese-style clothing, wasn’t she?” It had been just recently that the three of them—Sayoko, Yotaro, and Yozo—had encountered the dance instructor in Chinese-style clothing while taking a nighttime stroll in Ginza. When Yozo realized that Yoko’s partner was Kiyokawa, he immediately reported this to the dance instructor via a nearby public telephone. Yet her response on the call struck him—whether imagined or not—as terribly flustered. Three or four days later, when he went to check, it was not as worrisome as he had feared—she had gathered her disciples and was conducting a lesson. Yozo was the one who ended up feeling embarrassed, while she calmly taught the dance fundamentals. The twang of the biwa resounded sharply through the cold room.

When he waited in the next room, the dance instructor soon came after putting down her plectrum. However, whether it was Yozo's paranoia or not, her expression seemed slightly stiff—as if she were on guard against him—and he couldn't help feeling somewhat slighted. Yet upon later reflection, it occurred to him that while Kiyokawa and the dance instructor's relationship had seemed severed, in truth it might not have truly ended. To cut those ties, hadn't Yozo's money played a part? Even as minimal compensation to Rumiko's mentor, the fact that Yoko and Kiyokawa had likely furnished such material support wasn't entirely baseless speculation when trying to reconcile those events as they'd appeared through Yozo's perception. But that too turned out to be merely a scenario Yozo had fabricated from curiosity long afterward; in the incident's immediate wake, there'd been no trace of such a thing.

“You’re impressive—already starting lessons again.” When Yozo said this, she beamed, “Oh, I just began today.” “Since I’ve sorted out my feelings now.” “And it’s not just sour grapes—truthfully, this feels more refreshing.” After speaking for about thirty minutes, Yozo left the dance instructor’s house. Yet when he unexpectedly spotted her in a Chinese-style dress at a Ginza grocery storefront, she looked as cheerful as a schoolgirl. Yozo introduced Sayoko and Yotaro to her, and after the four walked together chatting briefly before parting ways, this encounter became the catalyst for visiting the riverside house.

The Chinese-style dress, being perfectly suited to an Eastern beauty, made the dance instructor look younger and more charming. Therefore, following Sayoko’s suggestion, they decided to give shoes as a gift. But since they wanted to give something nice if they were going to the trouble, she proposed combining it with a seaside outing to look for them together. “So, since we have her foot measurements, I’d like that person to come along too,” Sayoko said. “We’ll make it seem like a casual group outing. I’ll treat everyone to Chinese food at least.”

“Very well.”

26

It was on the afternoon of the following day that they promptly coordinated via telephone, met with the dance instructor Yukie at Shinbashi, and took a drive to Yokohama with Sayoko and Yozo along with his son—a group of four intending to spend half a day out. They dismissed their taxi before reaching Isezakicho and wandered through bustling streets where Yukie—youthful in spirit despite her years—darted about cheerfully in her Chinese-style dress like an excited child. Eventually they strolled through their intended destination of Motomachi Street, browsing Western furniture displays and hat shop windows before visiting a shoe store, though having the very person they were buying for present made things awkward. The outing hovered between purposeful errand and capricious stroll until Yukie grew disenchanted midway through its unclear intent. But upon reaching the town's outskirts, Sayoko purchased an embroidered wall hanging for her second-floor room while Yozo—having lost many possessions since his wife's death including his Javanese batik tablecloth—bought a cheap machine-embroidered piece before they visited the pier area. On their return they had a quick meal at Hakuga and stopped by Fujiya, but when they finally retraced their steps to the station front, the clock already showed six.

After arriving at Shinbashi, Yukie insisted they visit an establishment run by an elderly woman from their hometown whom they had long known, so they entered the old-fashioned house. The alcohol-loving Yukie ordered dishes from her favored ryotei restaurant, and as her drunkenness progressed, her conversation grew animated—she summoned familiar geisha and became cheerfully lively all by herself. Meanwhile, Yozo—beset on all sides now among fellow elders after losing his young lover and anticipating malicious rumors—maintained formally polite vigilance at all times. That evening too, he couldn't bring himself to touch his sake cup, and soon the three of them withdrew from the place.

“How about we head out to Ginza now and buy some earrings or something to give as a gift?” “That’s true too.”

Sayoko also decided to go along with it. Sure enough, the next day’s newspaper carried gossip about Yukie and Yozo. When they promptly submitted a formal retraction request, this time it even included their photographs, and they were maliciously mocked. Yozo felt nauseous and utterly rotten.

27 When February arrived, another call came from Yoko. Through Yozo's hazy conjecture, Yukie and Kiyokawa's relationship seemed severed yet persisted unresolved—plagued by this, Yoko's insistence on relocating to distant Tabata had carried the day. Now that they'd moved there, how blissful their new life must be. Given who they were involved with, this time was bound to succeed—he tentatively believed this, yet resisted believing it. The worm of infidelity too had taken root within her, but even this proved inadequate to fill her boundless loneliness.

When he answered the phone, it was indeed Yoko’s voice. “I’m at Sanchome right now.” “I need to meet and talk with you, so come right now.” He wandered out to Sanchome and was glancing around when Yoko abruptly materialized before his eyes. She was wrapped in that familiar coat—navy with pale, coarse stripes in a Yankee style, purchased from Yokohama through Mei Harumi—but her hair hung disheveled and her face had grown markedly haggard. They quickly hailed a taxi and sped to their usual place, but even after settling into the room—where it felt like they remained in makeshift attire—Yozo found himself overwhelmed.

Since it was mealtime, Yozo listened to Yoko’s instructions and ordered the meal. “You’ve gotten thinner.” “Well, I work every day,” “Look at my hands like this,” “My joints have swollen up...”

Even so, Yoko was still beautiful. "That person draws water for me and washes the dishes for me, but..."

“No maid?” “Yes. Because he’s been getting worse lately, he says he detests things like beautiful hands, you know. He says I have to make them as rough as a laborer’s, or else it’s no good.”

“I see.” “It’s a bit too much for you.” “But life is good, isn’t it?” “But it’s not going so well either.” According to her account, Kiyokawa’s father—having been spoiled by an elderly master and accustomed to luxury—disapproved of taking in such a woman, while only his mother—born into higher status than his father and well-educated—understood her, sending a fixed monthly sum through their senior, Yamagami. And though he did have some income of his own, since he also had to pay rent, things weren’t so comfortable.

“But we have to manage with that much. Isn’t that enough?” “But I’m lonely. After all, it’s the countryside—it wasn’t exactly luxurious, but I could eat as much as I wanted of whatever I liked.” The conversation was gradually becoming vulgar. Despite her appearance, she too was still a woman at heart. Yoko had paid delicate attention to Kiyokawa’s parents and siblings, their household’s financial state and atmosphere—yet the very aspects of reality she found challenging ultimately underpinned their romance.

Yozo could not help considering that she—with her thin-lipped mouth—must have clung to Kiyokawa at the start of this new romance even more tenaciously than she had to himself, and that just as she had done with him, she must have tearfully appealed to Kiyokawa about her dissatisfactions with Yozo.

“It’s like that everywhere. Because there’s nothing in this world that meets your exact specifications, you’ve planted yourself right there, haven’t you?” Yozo had evaluated their romance as splendidly radiant—unlike his own gloomy love—and secretly yearned for it, but when he came to understand the pragmatic reliability of Kiyokawa’s methods, Yoko’s allure seemed to have faded somewhat.

“Professor, aren’t you involved with Ms. Reie?” “That’s no joking matter—there’s nothing between us.” “Is that so?” Yoko had nodded in agreement, but Yozo hadn’t realized her move to Tabata aimed to fully wrest Kiyokawa from Yukie—with whom he still hadn’t truly severed ties—nor could he have known her question stemmed from anxiety that he might be aware of this. “That person’s pitiful too.” “When I lived in Bancho, I once ran away.” “I thought of coming to your place, Professor—I boarded the streetcar along the moat, but he came chasing after me, so I got off at Suidobashi and trudged toward Masagocho.” “He kept following me from behind, hiding and reappearing—we played cat-and-mouse through those backstreets until he finally gave up and went home.” “I nearly called you from the phone at Akamon Gate, but then your household’s atmosphere flashed through my mind, so I rushed back to Bancho.” “He wasn’t there when I returned, but later he came home still wearing those russet shoes and suddenly clung to me crying.” “Seems he’d stopped by his mother’s place and came back weeping.”

“So the old routine has started again.” Yozo had been somewhat entranced by the wine he was sipping little by little, but imagining that scene, he grew slightly irritable.

Time passed swiftly; Yozo gave her a little spending money and sent her back around ten o’clock.

However, such things were not just once or twice. There were times when they would go to the house around the same hour, and other times when he had to wait as long as thirty minutes. As he sat alone in solitary waiting, a light early summer rain began to fall, and the bonsai plants arranged on the terrace paved with lapis lazuli tiles became beautifully drenched before his eyes. Here, the sound of trains could be heard nearby, and late at night the rumble of freight cars would shake the house; but if one could endure that much, it wasn’t an uncomfortable place to stay. At times, a colleague of popular writers—who had been carrying on an affair with Sayoko for about a year around that time—would take up position in the hall and merrily make a racket all night long. On such occasions, both Yoko and Yozo would grow somewhat wary, but ordinarily, it was a place where they could let their guard down. Yoko, caught in the rain that had started on the way, had her hair wet, but—

“There wasn’t a good chance to get away, so I pretended to go to the greengrocer’s and slipped out on the way.” “He really resents me receiving money from you, Professor.” “Did you tell him?” “Not exactly.” While Yozo felt this was just a way to earn pocket money during hard times, he remained interested in her account of daily life. “Have you been writing anything lately?” “When we write, it’s on the second floor and downstairs.” “I write downstairs.” “Kiyokawa can’t write and is struggling.” “Because my pen races ahead so quickly, he seems even more irritated.”

“You’re the one not letting him work, aren’t you?” “Nuh-uh… When he writes after all—it’s better for him to be alone.”

“He wouldn’t approve of what you write.” “Wouldn’t he end up getting flattened?” “Nuh-uh… We do argue a lot, but—” Every time he saw her, Yoko seemed more soiled by life. When she went to bathe, the stains on the chemise she discarded in the dressing room were noticeable, and the heels of her stockings were worn thin. As ever, her mean-spirited complaints persisted, and even the oranges she occasionally bought and loved rarely made it to her mouth; the meat and fish, too, were said to be heartlessly whisked away. Like a stepchild, Yoko seemed saddest of all by that.

“The other day when I was short on money, I thought I’d have Mother buy about ten collars I was planning to sell—and when I mentioned it to her, she bought them for ten yen.” “Some of those are worth ten yen per set, you know.” Of course, Yoko was not truly such a young lady either. “Won’t he marry you?”

When Yozo asked, “At that time too—since I’d make him a suitable wife—they said they’d properly formalize things.” “But his father is a bit stubborn.” “After all, in that household, the husband and wife just don’t get along.” “His father has that rigid merchant disposition typical of downtown, while Mother has a fondness for reading and old Edoite-style education and tastes—so it’s only natural they sympathize with the Kiyokawa brothers pursuing literature.” “His younger sister is an oil painter.” “They all take after Mother’s side.” “Even so, the atmosphere from those people bearing down on me can’t be called good.” “The other day, Mother treated us to tempura, but even on such occasions, I was seated below his sister.” “Even when getting into a taxi, it’s still me in the back.”

As she spoke, Yoko’s eyes quickly welled up with tears. “But marriage is a woman’s graveyard.”

Yozo lay on his stomach puffing tobacco smoke, but the mismatch between her haphazard calculations and Kiyokawa’s obliviousness felt glaringly obvious. “Rumiko.” “Since he finds her such a nuisance, I’ve been keeping her with someone else lately—but even though he adored her before we started living together, now he says she’s not the least bit cute.”

“That’s clear enough.” “It’s the truth.” “Young people these days are all so resolute.” “To a degree someone like you couldn’t even imagine, Professor.” “Because you showed up there sniffling.” “And he hasn’t been doing the dishes lately either.” “When I’m cooking meals, I can’t even read books—my mind turns all parched.” “Maybe we should just break up—what do you say? Would that be so wrong?”

“I suppose so.” “If you were my daughter, I’d make you endure, but…”

“Yes—” Yoko also smiled wryly.

Twenty-Eight

That summer too passed in a hectic rush, and as the coolness began to set in, the long-pending matter of Yoko’s separation suddenly started taking concrete form. Yozo had neither schemed nor actively tried to restrain her, but with the young poet shuttling between both parties, talk of her moving out to a boarding house had somehow settled before anyone realized. There was something indecisive in her mannerisms—coupled with her ever-cautious habit of hedging bets—that kept him from mustering the resolve to charge ahead; but since everything was crumbling anyway, he thought it might be fitting to assume his role in the final act.

That evening, Yozo had pressing work to attend to, but due to an unexpected phone call, he packed his manuscript paper and pens into his briefcase and headed out.

“I’m busy tonight.” “I can’t talk.” With restless agitation, he took out last month’s issue of the women’s magazine from his briefcase the moment he saw Yoko’s face. He had been writing a serialized work for that magazine. Yoko wore a kimono—an unusual sight—but they sat facing each other sipping tea without exchanging words. Though her demeanor lacked composure too, Yozo grew increasingly irritable over his still-unformed plans for tonight’s writing session—and over something unresolved lingering in her words.

“Then I’ll call it off.” “That’s not it. It’s just that I feel sorry for that man.” He thought she might be refusing indirectly, but that wasn’t the case. In any case, fearing it would disrupt his focus, he decided not to press the matter tonight. Once his emotions began to sway, they had a tendency not to stop easily; thus, he had no choice but to settle on that decision. Since time was precious, Yozo thought to have his meal quickly and decided to take a bath beforehand, so he hurried off toward the bathhouse. The bathhouse was luxurious for a ryotei, and the tasteful design of the separate dressing room partitioned by doors also felt refined.

The rain began to fall heavily. Yozo stayed in the bathhouse for a while, listening to the sound of rain in the desolate garden, but he began to feel uneasy when Yoko did not come. Just moments ago, when she was in the room, a sudden phone call had come in, and she had gone downstairs via the maid’s relay. But no sooner had she returned to the room and sat down than she stepped out into the hallway again. When she failed to come back for some time, Yozo grew suspicious and went to investigate—only to find Yoko loitering furtively by the staircase landing. However, Yozo hadn’t paid it much mind at the time—thinking he would ask her about it later—and had instead gone ahead to take a bath while waiting for her to return to her room. But now that the memory suddenly surfaced, he hurriedly put on his clothes and went up to the second floor to investigate.

The room’s entrance opened onto an inner hallway, and the tatami room had a small adjoining chamber—but Yoko was nowhere to be found. In the inner hallway, his hat and overcoat hung on the wall with a foolish expression—that was all.

Just then, the maid arrived. “She said she was just stepping out for a moment and had only just gone outside.” “She slipped into our household’s garden geta and took the oil-paper umbrella.” “I’ve been had.”

Yozo hurriedly put on his coat. “I don’t think that’s what happened.” The maid saw him out with a laugh. The next afternoon, when Yozo visited the house again with Shiro in tow, the Madam emerged and informed him that Yoko had come that morning to return the umbrella and garden geta—with Kiyokawa accompanying her. Afterward, Yoko had painted the events of that night in grotesque colors: summoned out into the cold rain, she claimed she had been forcibly dragged into a car by an overwrought Kiyokawa and driven off into the darkness. Of course, her frequent trips to the hallway had undoubtedly been part of a calculated revenge plot against Yozo—with Kiyokawa, who was pulling her strings from a separate room.

Twenty-Nine

When autumn arrived, Yoko moved into a fourth-floor apartment in 3-chome. The love nest they had painstakingly maintained in Tabata had already collapsed, and since then she had been living on the second floor of a private home near Kaneiji Bridge in Sakuragicho. During this period, it was that young poet who maintained contact between them and acted as messenger—he would summon Yozo when needed, and when Yozo went out for leisure, it was he who would alight from a taxi at some backstreet corner to draw Yoko out. Though Yoko’s departure from the Tabata house made her separation from her lover appear at least partially genuine, the truth seemed to be that they had not yet fully severed ties. Yozo had never been shown that house by her before, and though part of him wanted to storm in unannounced at least once, he ultimately preferred to avoid confronting her secrets. Around that time, whenever they met, Yoko would tell Yozo about Komura—an up-and-coming writer living in Negishi. She spoke of his married life, his affairs, his literary devotion evident in how he bought foreign novels from Maruzen and devoured them—referring to him by nickname and describing, with a humorously tinged voice, the cozy modern atmosphere of the household she frequented so casually. This very nonchalance made clear their relationship held no particular depth. Once, on Yoko’s whim, Yozo dined with her and the Komura couple at a ryotei in Sanno—all four together—and on their return was invited by Komura, whose family had long been acquainted with Hirokoji’s vaudeville theater from his father’s days near Ueno, to visit the establishment. If Yoko’s social circle had truly been limited to the Komura couple during this period, she would have inevitably brought Yozo to her room occasionally. That she did not revealed her habitual caution—keeping Yozo connected as an emergency prop while desperately clinging to her crumbling affair with Kiyokawa. And so their dealings with Yozo appeared to be gradually fading into nothingness.

Then, after a period of silence from Yoko, yet another phone call came from her. In any situation, Yozo could only think of himself as waiting for her with open arms. “Professor, it’s me.” “I’m at Enrakuken now.” “Come here.” “Right away.”

She spoke commandingly yet with an urgent edge to her voice. Unable to refuse, Yozo left his room all the same. When he stepped into Enrakuken’s broad earthen-floored hall, there stood Yoko in Western clothes beneath the right-hand window. Noticing his approach, she lifted a face brimming with sorrow of an intensity he’d never witnessed before. As he took the frontmost chair, she—wearing a hysterical expression— “We can’t speak here. Let’s go outside.”

She murmured, hurriedly paid the coffee bill, and stood up. The town was in the throes of rush hour, but the desolate autumn light rendered this crossroads all the more disordered. As if hesitant to walk together, Yoko hurriedly crossed to the other side, hailed a rickshaw there, and after waiting for him to arrive, shut the door. When they had started moving a little, she let go of the crumpled handkerchief from her wet eyes and tried to say something, but covered her face again.

“What’s wrong?” “I’ve finally been abandoned by Mr. Kiyokawa.”

“Hmm.” Yozo’s voice caught in his throat, and for an instant he felt a disagreeable sensation. Though he had privately anticipated this outcome—and could even sympathize with Kiyokawa, who after great struggle had finally cast her aside—he found himself unable to reproach or mock Yoko now that she herself had been discarded. “I’d assumed everything was going smoothly since then.”

“Yes, that’s right.” “Because of that situation, even my brother came all the way from the countryside recently.” “After all, he’s a top student from Mita—this was finally our chance to settle past matters and restore my honor—so he even tried persuading Mr. Kiyokawa to marry me.” “He said he needed two or three days to consider it, so I’ve been waiting until today for his response.” “And this must be that reply.”

With those words, Yoko took out a crumpled half-torn paper scrap from her handbag and showed it. Yozo took it in hand and looked, but from the letter's phrasing alone, he couldn't properly grasp the context of the situation. To put it concisely, it meant that while appreciating the kind offer, after various considerations, Kiyokawa was regretfully unable to comply with her hopes and hoped she wouldn't take it ill—a tactful refusal. “With just this, I can’t really understand it properly though.”

Yoko folded the paper scrap and placed it into her handbag, but after crying, her face had somewhat cleared up. “Am I really a bad woman?” “Well…” “You have to decide that for yourself.” “I see.”

The car exited Hirokoji toward Sakamoto, entered the bustling narrow streets, and came to a stop at the foot of the overpass. Yet whenever Yozo visited that house, he always felt at ease. Moreover, no matter what kind of household it was, it remained an unsuitable place to keep Yoko. What she tried to escape was precisely what she had always sought. Her hopes were neither grand nor lofty, yet the moment she grasped them, the foul stench of reality clung to her nostrils. She lacked the skeletal structure to sustain herself.

“Did Mr. Kiyokawa love me?” “Or did he never love me at all?” Those words seemed to prove Kiyokawa’s rationality—so unlike Yozo’s—in refusing to indulge her reckless abandon steeped in love; yet they also measured Yoko’s romantic affection for Kiyokawa as a man. “He even told my brother—‘I can’t study if I’m with Yoko.’” Yoko smiled bitterly without pretense or facade, her expression tinged with nervous discomfort—and in that moment, she too became like a bouquet callously trampled on the roadside by Kiyokawa’s hand.

Thirty

The apartment building in Sanchome was the first apartment building built in that area after the earthquake.

This city was still on the path to reconstruction, but the newly built townscape had largely taken on a renewed appearance. The reinforced concrete apartment building in Ganjo's district had a drugstore on its first floor. Though the land plot was narrow, a rooftop terrace with a fine view sat atop the fourth floor. On the second and third floors were four or five tatami-floored rooms each, their tokonoma alcoves and built-in cabinets recessed into the walls, all adorned with beautiful decorations. It had been built by the son of an educator and a pharmacy owner who had pooled their resources to invest 100,000 yen, but the fourth-floor room Yoko had contracted was only about six tatami mats in size, equipped with gas but lacking running water. When the heavy wire-meshed window was opened, the neon lights of Hirokoji Department Store—striped in blue and red like a ribbon across its brow—could be seen glowing lonesomely in mid-air, while below, the lamplight of cafés that had already infested the backstreets and the sound of records drifted up. Yet no noise from the main street reached them. With only occasional voices from the rooms across the staggered entranceway and none of the apartments having guests, it was as quiet as being sequestered in a castle tower.

“I have something I’m in the middle of writing, you know.” “Once it’s finished, I intend to have you look at it, so I’m putting all my strength into it, you know.”

Yoko had hinted at it some time before as well, but her attempt to seclude herself in the apartment had also been to complete it. The reason was to submit it to the Kokumin Shimbun’s prize novel contest; through this single work, she aimed to carve out a new start and plot her rehabilitation into the literary world, pouring her heart and soul into it. When confronted with her heartfelt plea, Yozo found himself unable to dismiss her outright; seeing her writhing to rise again even as she was beaten down, he too felt compelled to somehow bring clarity to her situation. He paid March’s security deposit for her, became her guarantor, and visited the room nearly every day.

In that room, Yozo often drank coffee and ate toasted bread instead of proper meals, but at night he would go out to dine at oden stalls or cheap restaurants that Yoko had somehow become a regular at. One of the two young men jointly running an oden stall—a literary youth from Noto who attended the humanities department of a private university by day—had already developed a relationship with Yoko akin to that between a backstreet queen and her knight. By then, the young poet who had been cherished by a certain poet and his Madam in Omori had also fallen ill with beriberi, developed a pathological heart condition, and—utterly exhausted in his perpetually worn black suit, whether sleeping or waking—returned to his mother in his hometown, who had remarried. Kitayama had established a household in Egota and was devoting himself to painting, while Rumiko had been left in the care of her cousin’s home in the suburbs, where the road to the main thoroughfare had recently opened. The reason was that even Kiyokawa—who had so thoroughly won over Rumiko—abruptly changed his attitude once their cohabitation began, and this too became one of the factors that fostered disillusionment in their romantic life.

Yoko had brought a coffee percolator from the department store and kept busily brewing coffee. That percolator was something the senior overseeing Kiyokawa had brought back in bulk from Germany long ago and stored under the floorboards—nowadays, such items were even sold in department stores. Inside her bookcase were separate provisions like ham, corned beef, apples, and oranges. As the weather grew colder, she would rise in the morning without washing her face and take light meals while lighting the gas stove—but when her writing hit a snag, Yozo’s presence became a hindrance. Moreover, the pharmacy owner managing the apartment would sometimes tout Yoko’s fourth-floor residence as a selling point to prospective tenants, forcing Yozo to use the back entrance. Climbing the stiff, creaking stairs was arduous enough, but reaching her room only to find it locked added to his fatigue. Her destinations were usually Cinema Palace or Nantei-za—when her pen stalled, she sought salvation in films—though leaving her room couldn’t be attributed solely to that purpose.

Yozo did not hold nearly as much interest in Yoko’s literary pursuits as she imagined. He couldn’t muster as much interest in her literature as he did in her beauty, but he couldn’t deny the pure sentimentality and delicate charm of her work—like a wildflower too fragile for the wind. While discussing the plot and themes, she showed him the manuscript. Yozo drank his coffee while reading through each page one by one. At one moment there was a fresh depiction of cohabitation between an astonishingly old playwright and his young actress lover—who was also his disciple—and at another came fervent love scenes between a youth who had returned destitute from wandering to seek refuge with that senior playwright and the very actress he’d once romanced. These elements coalesced into an intriguing play that evoked a certain rainy night’s events from times past. It was adorned with her signature flourishes of thought, making it impossible to clearly identify any real-life models.

“How is it?”

Yoko peered into Yozo’s face as she asked. “I suppose so.” “Is it no good?” “But it’s not like that.”

Soon, the transcription began, and an assistant appeared in the room. The assistant was the wife of an up-and-coming proletarian writer—a name Yozo had heard before—but upon being introduced, he came to recognize her as a woman of pure character. When he learned that such work provided some supplement to her livelihood, he found himself unable to withhold respect for her conscientious efforts. At times, while the two women slept under a single futon chatting intimately nearby, Yozo lay on the cramped closet bed where his head touched the wall.

Before long, ten or twenty submitted works were brought into his study. At first, Yoko had intended to keep her plan entirely secret from Yozo. This was because one of the two judges happened to be Yozo himself—and yet he held half the authority in selection. Depending on circumstances, it was not impossible for him to determine her work’s fate through a single adjustment in scoring. Thus she had also wanted to secure his critique beforehand.

“Since causing you suffering as a judge would weigh on my conscience, I wanted to keep it secret from you, Professor.” “But Professor, you do come nearly every day.” “I’m utterly at my wits’ end.” “Of course Mrs. Kurihara insists mine is truly exceptional and will certainly win—and I’m in full creative flow myself.” “The secret simply couldn’t be kept any longer—but with a pseudonym, wouldn’t that actually preserve your position as Professor?” “I don’t mean to ask for any special favors in scoring.” “Within the bounds of maintaining your impartiality as a judge—if there were two works tied in points—surely choosing mine wouldn’t be impossible? That’s what I thought.” “No—it won’t do.”

Of course, Yozo undoubtedly wanted to maintain an objective stance, but he also understood that if a work was selected, it was because it deserved to be. Yozo began earnestly reading each submitted work one by one. As far as their themes and settings were concerned, some ventured beyond what established literary figures had ever attempted—and even he found his interest piqued. Works depicting miners’ wretched lives; the escape of a life-term prisoner in Hokkaido; the decline of an opera troupe that once flourished at Kinryukan and the fates of its actors and surrounding delinquents—among these, one piece stood out: a work that thickly painted Asakusa’s decadent atmosphere through disbanded opera singers, its raw breath and pounding pulse leaving Yozo utterly overwhelmed.

“There are some rather good ones.” Yozo appeared in Yoko’s room with two or three works tucked into his bosom. “Right—let me read them too.” Yoko said that and began reading the roughly scrawled work.

“The work itself is good, but as a newspaper serialization, the subject matter leans toward the unsavory and contains too many backstage references—it may not suit general readers.” “And the latter half drags.”

“Right—” However, after Yozo had painstakingly scored the entries—to a degree free from favoritism—and her work titled *Rainbow on Earth* had managed to reach the fate of being selected for approximately second place, it was revealed that she had used Mrs. Kurihara’s name. As a result, it too was ultimately buried in obscurity.

On another occasion, Yozo went to visit the apartment. The town was now fully in the grip of midwinter, with not a trace of golden leaves remaining on the ginkgo street trees. With Yoko’s plans ending in crushing defeat and her efforts to rebuild through fiction thwarted, even Yozo could no longer sustain her fate in his hands. “Is she gone already?” When he inquired at the pharmacy, Yoko was absent that day as well. A week had passed since the room’s atmosphere had turned hostile, driving them both to irritation and leading them to part after hurling harsh words at each other. Yozo had recently been occasionally eating meals and drinking tea with Fujiko, and he had brought her along this time too.

“She’s already gone.”

The owner answered, but he was smiling more than usual, "No, Ms. Kozue really won’t do." "If someone like you, Professor, doesn’t keep a firm watch over that woman, there’s no telling what she might do." "Is she up to something?" "I can’t say for certain, but that woman really isn’t quite right."

“Did she take the deposit?”

“No, she said she’d come back for it later.” “Then I’ll take it for now.”

It wasn’t a significant sum, but now that things had come to this, he began to begrudge it. The deposit receipt was just inside the wallet. Two months’ worth of the security deposit remained. Fujiko waited in the light rain under a black-and-white patterned umbrella, standing rigidly. She was an attractive widow who had been visiting Yozo for some time and was always one of the good listeners to his stories about Yoko. Before long, intending for the two of them to eat dinner at Sayoko’s house, they hailed a car.

In the end, it could be said his illusions had been utterly shattered by the romance with Kiyokawa. A considerable time later, when she opened a bookstore in Shibuya—turning its back room into a salon for young people and somehow securing a livelihood—Yoko wanted Yozo to see it too. She went so far as to specially dispatch Kitayama as her envoy to request a meeting. At that time, Yozo—having arranged to meet Yoko—was led by her to inspect the store. After two or three visits, he discovered that the youth working there as shopkeeper and book deliverer was a literary aspirant from the third-block oden shop. Through this man’s accounts, news of Yoko’s recent activities occasionally reached Yozo’s ears. It began to seem her lifestyle—a seeming inversion of her idol Madame Colette’s—was evolving into something resembling a back-alley existence.

Around that time, by a chance opportunity, Yozo began frequenting dance halls. There, he cast off the pretentiousness of his fastidious haori and hakama attire, embraced the freedom of a Western suit, and found healing from the weariness of romantic entanglements. And from that period onward, her dust-laden phantom gradually faded away.