Pathway to Japanese Literature

I It was only around the same time as registering their child’s birth that Sasamura completed his marital registration with his wife. Even Sasamura—who had only ever thought of owning a house as a societal formality—found himself confronted upon returning from his westward journey of less than half a year with the stark dilapidation of the boardinghouse life he’d grudgingly endured for so long. During his travels hauling trunks from place to place, what burned most vividly into Sasamura’s bloodshot eyes were men boarding ships with young wives in tow. At a Kyushu hot spring inn, after suffering boredom to the point of contracting fever from excessive bathing, his sole conversation partner became an Osaka geisha who occasionally visited his sickbed.

“What kind of woman would suit you? “I’ll pick out someone who seems like they’d suit you… They say Tokyo women are all frills and no good at keeping house, don’t they?” When Sasamura—his face pale from soaking in the baths—first retreated to his brother’s place in Osaka, the sister-in-law who had neatly repaired his soiled-collared kosode robes and frayed-sleeved undergarments during his absence spoke these words, urging him to establish a household soon.

Sasamura had already grown tired of Dotonbori as well. The cramped, bustling streets of Osaka had grown wearisome, and he soon began preparing to return home, yet the thought of treading Tokyo soil after so long away brought both pleasure and an inexplicable unease. In Kyoto, which he stopped by on his return journey, he was shown the happy family life that his old friend had built by marrying the woman he loved. “In our circle, you’re the only one still left behind, aren’t you?”

While packing tobacco into his long pipe, the friend sat on a large, thick futon that looked warm in the quiet, lovely second-floor study, then pulled over his own gold-sprinkled lacquer tobacco tray. From there could be seen the rounded slope of Higashiyama, appearing purplish in hue. “You should at least see the Kyoto maiko once.” The friend then, gazing at the scattering cherry blossoms—a few lingering petals here and there beneath the fresh foliage—started to say something more, but Sasamura’s harried mind had no room left to even breathe in the essence of Kyoto. And so when the two returned home together, he entered the sleeping quarters his wife had laid out and rested his lonely, sobered head upon the pillow.

Until owning a house in Tokyo, Sasamura lived in an old boardinghouse he’d occupied for three or four years. At the boardinghouse, old desks and bookcases were again brought out from the storage room, and a lamp with a rusted-looking collar was placed before him every night. At the window of the second floor where he had settled, the verdant maple leaves battled the early summer wind. Through circumstance, Sasamura finally began to seriously consider the work he had been involved in until then. On the desk lay new foreign works and scattered newly published magazines. He stood before a large paper store he frequented, bought manuscript paper he had long neglected, and inhaled its fresh scent anew.

Yet Sasamura, unable to settle in the gritty boardinghouse room, would slip out when the clatter of the maid’s sandals echoed through the hallway as she carried dinner trays, his irritation mounting with each footfall. Sasamura would typically head toward his usual haunts, but wherever he went, he found none of his former interest. At the house where he had caroused endlessly, the woman he’d been involved with had left two full months prior to establish a household in Negishi. Sasamura found himself reluctant to climb the hollow building’s staircase. He entered the room now occupied by another woman and sat beside the long brazier, disappointed to feel no trace of nostalgia. Even hearing familiar village songs and women’s sandals clattering down hallways failed to stir anything within him.

“When a friend said, ‘I’d very much like you to move into one of the houses Mr. Yamada has recently built,’ Sasamura gladly agreed.”

II

The house was one of the rental properties built by K—Sasamura’s childhood classmate who, due to his lack of academic prowess, had remained enrolled in university even into those years—after securing a modest sum of money from his hometown to establish a lasting livelihood in Tokyo. On the cleared ground stood two buildings containing four small houses, their walls having only just begun to dry, while behind them, wood shavings clung to the damp earth—wet from rain and strewn with coal cinders. Sasamura had just returned from his journey and had made no preparations whatsoever for owning a house. Sasamura recalled that an older friend who had helped him when he first left for the capital had left behind some odds and ends with the man’s relatives—items he’d received in exchange for providing exam fees when this friend took the Higher Civil Service Examination before being assigned to a distant province—and decided to use them as a stopgap measure. The cheap chest of drawers that creaked unpleasantly when opened—along with heaps of old tabi socks and soiled clothes—were crammed into the six-tatami closet that still reeked of earth, packed separately into its upper and lower sections. There were also pestles worn down from use, bamboo sieves with splintered rims, and bowls stained bright red with paint.

Having long suffered from a weak stomach, Sasamura exchanged the clothing he had brought back from his travels for cash somewhere, purchased a single electrical apparatus from a medical equipment store, and with the remaining money would occasionally bring home various small items. The desk was placed in a gloomy four-and-a-half-mat room facing the street next to the entrance. Across the street were small sake shops and salt cracker shops that had recently opened in this newly developed district. Diagonally across the street was a long-established machine forge. From the forge came the incessant sound of machines operating all day long, but Sasamura did not find it bothersome.

The frail old man who had come from Shitaya soon quit, as sending him on errands seemed too pitiful. “Those students lounge around all day doing nothing, yet they keep using this poor old man with a bad leg for endless errands—it’s hopeless!” The old man, wearing tattered leggings, tottered out on his errands and stopped by the fishmonger’s shop to begin airing his grievances.

“That old man’s hopeless.” “And he’s disgustingly dirty beyond help.” The fishmonger clerks later came to the kitchen entrance and spoke of this matter.

Sasamura remained silent, a bitter smile on his face. From a friend's acquaintance's house, an old woman soon came alone to help out.

When the friend’s aunt brought that woman over, Sasamura was sitting blankly in the four-and-a-half-mat room. Outside already pulsed with summer’s vigor—through the blue reed screen hung over the window lattice could be seen ruddy, dashing heads passing by in clattering geta sandals, towels slung over shoulders as they returned from the neighborhood bathhouse. When introduced to the old woman, Sasamura bowed politely and said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” The rough-mannered old maid showed little familiarity with Tokyo ways but immediately went out to the disordered kitchen and tidied up properly. Together with the friend’s aunt, she prepared nukamizo pickling bran and other provisions.

For dinner, simmered green peas and other dishes were served in bowls and placed on the dining table, while the light from the fastidiously cleaned lamp seemed brighter than usual. There, Sasamura began talking with the friend who had been staying over as he picked up his chopsticks. He—constantly preoccupied with his stomach—wore a clouded expression as he ate, only to grow anxious afterward about how his digestion would fare. Soon he grew concerned about nightwear for the old maid. The friend pulled out the futon he had been using from the closet,

“Put this on and sleep,” he said, leaning into the two-tatami room. The old maid sat restlessly beside the grimy long brazier with its detached iron plate, endlessly drinking tea. “No, one layer’s more than enough for me. It’s already so hot...”

III

When Sasamura’s nephew came from the countryside and made the house cramped, his friend Miyama—who had been living with him—moved into a separate house in the same row. To Miyama, who had never been able to leave under any circumstances, new friends had emerged during Sasamura’s travels. He had also been associating with a senior who looked after his practical needs. After returning to the capital, even while living together with Miyama, Sasamura felt something deeper had taken root within his friend’s heart. Though Miyama had considerable income, when Sasamura departed on his year-end journey, his friend’s living conditions appeared dire; yet Sasamura’s mind had already flown off to the Osaka streets where he’d once wandered rootlessly and to the brother he would meet there after so long, leaving him no room to consider such matters. Sasamura had grown accustomed to assuming Miyama would help with packing and such. Even upon returning this time, he still failed to notice it. But he gradually came to realize Miyama was no longer tailoring his rhythm solely to him.

“I’ve done my best for Sasamura, you know. Even this house—I’m only staying there because that man gets lonely.” Such matters also reached Sasamura’s ears through a certain man who would come by from time to time to eat meals and indulge in all-night talks. To Sasamura, his nephew’s arrival seemed like just the right opportunity for the two to part ways. To Sasamura, it felt as though he had collided with something powerful lying within Miyama’s heart—Miyama, who rarely let his thoughts show on his face. It wasn’t unusual for Sasamura to occasionally fume and lash out at Miyama.

Miyama took an old lacquered paper-covered desk that had belonged to Sasamura and moved into a separate house. There, Mr.T—a friend of Sasamura’s who had arranged this house—also brought his belongings from his lodgings in Komagome and began living communally. And so, the two came to Sasamura’s place three times a day for meals. On the evening the nephew arrived, landlord K, Mr.T, and Miyama also came together. The crowd pooled the various items they had brought and prepared something resembling a makeshift stew.

In the kitchen, along with assisting the utterly inept old maid in every task, her daughter—a young woman named Ogin—also came, handling the shopping and overseeing the soup’s preparation. “But I’m too soft…” The nephew trailed off, his cute face flushing as he knitted his brows. “Mr. Sasamura, how many years has it been now?” said Mr.T—once a hearty eater—as he hunched his already tuberculosis-curved spine further, endlessly swapping bowls while offering a bitter smile. He had already been away from university for several years due to his lungs. At that time, he had just returned from Ogasawara Island, where he had been conducting educational inspections for a year or two, with his briefcase packed full of various survey documents.

“Not writing anymore?”

Sasamura laughed awkwardly. He retrieved his customary post-meal stomach medicine from the desk drawer in the four-and-a-half-mat room and washed it down with water from a teacup. When the medicine had settled somewhat, he leaned against the rear window with a clouded expression and chain-smoked Pirates until his tongue burned.

The group carried their lethargic post-feast bodies toward the window and let the cool evening breeze wash over them.

Before long, Ogin took away the scattered things around them.

It had only been recently that Ogin first came there. One afternoon, returning from somewhere with glass confectionery containers and cup-like objects tucked into his sleeve, Sasamura arrived home to find an unplaceable young woman—neither quite amateur nor teahouse girl—sitting by the long brazier in the tearoom alongside a narrow-faced, lean man who still bore traces of a shopboy’s youthfulness beneath his merchant-like demeanor. The woman’s face framed by a slightly elongated chignon was all sharp angles. Her hair arranged in a ginkgo-leaf updo with a white comb, black satin obi cinched tight, she leaned forward with a smile upon seeing Sasamura’s abrupt entrance and pressed her palms together in polite greeting.

"...My mother has been under your care." IV

Around the time when the neighborhood was sprinkling water in front of their houses, the two exchanged greetings and left.

“She’s quite a looker, isn’t she?” When Sasamura, in the four-and-a-half-mat room, spoke to Miyama—who was still with him at the time—Miyama uttered a “Hmm” under his breath. “That man.” “That’s her lover.” Miyama said with feigned innocence. “Is that so?” At mealtime, Sasamura said to the old maid with a laugh, “Granny, you’ve raised a fine child,” to which she replied, “Yes,” smiling happily. After that, the daughter came by two or three more times.

“She was married off once, but due to some circumstances had to flee that situation. With time on her hands, she just… well…” Whenever the daughter left, the old maid would say that. The daughter would sometimes carry a bucket and draw water for the mother. She would sometimes tidy up the kitchen properly before leaving. The simmered small horse mackerel that the daughter prepared was delicious to everyone’s taste.

“This is delicious—you’re much more efficient than the old maid.” Sasamura began calling toward the kitchen.

“This was grilled first and then simmered, right?”

“I’m rather hopeless at everything… but my daughter here has some skill.”

The mother came there and offered a polite smile, but the daughter didn’t show her face much.

The daughter—who had bought a great deal of fresh, inexpensive vegetables from the street in place of her mother, unable to run errands—entered through the gate holding an umbrella, her figure catching the eye of Sasamura as he sat in the four-and-a-half-mat room. As he grew accustomed to looking at her, details like the prominence of this woman’s narrow forehead began to catch his eye.

It soon became clear that this woman was friends with Miyama's young uncle's wife. It also became clear that the older woman—who had been that uncle's wife—had snatched away from the sidelines the student who was supposed to marry this woman, the son of a rural fertilizer merchant family. "As for that woman, I've heard about her too," said Miyama, who didn't speak well of her either. "If it's Mr. Miyama you're asking about, I've heard of him from Ms. Osuzu too." When Sasamura raised the topic, the woman began speaking as if something had just dawned on her.

“Oh, so Mr. Miyama is that person?” “If it’s about that person’s household matters, I’ve already been told all about them many times by Ms. Osuzu.”

The mother also sat by the threshold and began to recount those days bit by bit. “So is that woman Osuzu still with that man of yours?”

Sasamura leaned against the wall, both hands clutching his raised shins. “No, they parted ways soon after that.” “She’s not the sort of woman who’d stay devoted to one man.” “I’m well acquainted with Mr. Miyama’s uncle too.” “He must have found himself another woman soon enough.”

The daughter would occasionally cover her low nose bridge with her hand and speak in a manner surprisingly mature for twenty-two. “It’s quite an interesting story.”

Sasamura did not have much interest in such stories. The other party didn’t seem inclined to delve deeply into the matter either. “It’s truly strange, isn’t it.” The daughter shifted her knees slightly and looked down.

V

Before the nephew—who had come to take entrance exams for the military preparatory school and was showing signs of beriberi—could temporarily return to his hometown, the old maid had to go back to the countryside to witness her brother’s final moments. The old maid told Sasamura before leaving that her brother, after a series of failures, had contracted a terrible case of tuberculosis and retreated to the countryside about a year prior. “While I must leave my daughter here until I return—her being young as she is—I wonder how this will fare.” “If you would just acknowledge that much, my daughter could idle about at a relative’s house for the time being...” The old maid brought up this matter in a leaden tone before rising to leave.

Around that time, when evening came, Ogin would wear flashy summer kimonos and apply thick makeup, which Sasamura pretended not to notice. “This is a problem—if she’s going to act like that…” “You should be the one to tell her properly.” “The neighbors will start wondering what’s going on.” Sasamura spoke to Miyama about the matter in secret. Even so, he didn’t find it particularly unpleasant that this woman occasionally came to help. Since Ogin began coming, it was no longer necessary for him to go to the kitchen each time to select the fish, and the ingredients for the three daily meals became more plentiful. New pickles unlike any he had tasted before and simmered dishes with fairly complex flavors never ceased to cover the dining table. For Sasamura, who had continued a life parched of human warmth for so long, it also became the vividness of each passing day.

“Then I’ll leave my daughter in your care…” The old maid spoke in a tone suggesting that Sasamura—taciturn and gloomy as he was—was someone she could trust to leave her daughter with. The house soon became a household of three—the nephew, Ogin, and himself. Ogin would finish her tasks and then occasionally go visit relatives in Yushima from the evening onwards. And there were times when she returned late into the night. When Sasamura would be reading books in his study, there were times she and the nephew would peel summer citrus together in the tearoom.

“Truly, Shin-chan is quite the catch, isn’t he.” Ogin spoke to Sasamura when the nephew was away. The nephew was the child of Sasamura’s half-sister from a different mother. “Even though you’re uncle and nephew, you don’t talk at all.” “It seems so anticlimactic when you watch them.” “Yet Shin-chan tells me all sorts of things.” “When he was coming here, a pretty female student on the train bought him sweets and summer citrus…” “Is that so, huh?” Sasamura smiled wryly.

When beriberi developed in his nephew, Sasamura had Ogin boil adzuki beans and administer the doctor’s medicine, but the legs only continued to swell.

“The doctor says it would be better for him to move to a different climate.” “He seems to be suffering quite a bit.” “So he’s asking me to get travel expenses from you, Uncle.” “Why don’t you have him sent back to the countryside?”

Before long, Sasamura had his nephew embark on the journey back to his hometown. He accompanied him all the way to the main street, bought straw hats to replace his wide-brimmed ones and put them on him, and had him wear hemp-soled sandals over his tabi socks. “He was being so picky—it was a real hassle.”

When Sasamura returned, he spoke to Ogin, who was tidying the kitchen. "Even when I tried pushing cheap stuff on him, he wouldn't accept it."

When Sasamura looked around the house now that his nephew was gone, every corner had been wiped so clean it felt refreshing. On the back clothesline, summer underclothes, handkerchiefs, and nightwear he had bundled away in the closet were being washed one after another and laid out in the windless morning sunlight. "It's such a nuisance having everything dragged out like this."

Sasamura said while rinsing a parched mouth at the water spout.

“Is that so?”

The woman brushed back the disheveled hair at her temples and glanced over her shoulder.

“But I’m high-strung, you see.”

VI

When Sasamura grew tired of sitting at his desk, he would tuck his tobacco pouch into his sleeve and often go converse with Miyama. T— lay sprawled in the front four-and-a-half-mat room atop his travel mat. Day after day he pondered quitting the university where he’d pointlessly paid tuition for years, considering instead dedicating himself openly to art research. He kept searching for ways to fund overseas study without touching family money. Since visiting the island, he’d developed an affinity for biblical texts and growing aversion to politics and warfare. The very texture of his thinking had shifted markedly from before.

“I’m in the middle of writing a novel right now,” he said, his high-nosed, angular face breaking into a grin as he propped himself up sideways and chuckled.

On the desk lay a sheet of hanshi paper with something half-written on it. In T—'s mind swarmed countless elements he wanted to shape into a novel: fishermen observed on the Ogasawara Islands, shipwrecked Spaniards adrift at sea, and throngs of mixed-blood individuals. Beside him lay aged volumes like *The Workers of the Sea* that he'd excavated from Sasamura's jumble of discarded items.

The two had lately been breaking off bananas still on the branch that had arrived at T—’s place and indulging in various conversations.

Peering through from the dim six-tatami room to the two-tatami space next to the kitchen, there was Miyama amidst tobacco smoke, also facing manuscript paper. Beside him lay scattered pineapple cans and newspapers soaked with spilled tea. And disconcertingly, ants crawled all over the area.

“That woman doing up her hair in that Shimada style is such an eyesore.” Sasamura often complained to Miyama about the woman up to that point. The woman leaving the house open at night and prying open the gate to come in early in the morning also grated on Sasamura. Ogin would sometimes stay up late at her relatives’ house in Yushima while playing cards.

“It looks bad to the neighbors, so you mustn’t go prying open the gate to come in every morning.” Sasamura once directly admonished the woman, but Ogin, being stubborn, didn’t offer much of a proper response. "The fishmonger and others resentfully think she’s come as my wife." “Would a woman act like that?”

“After all, having a young woman around is no good.” Miyama did not speak much regarding the woman.

T— was beside them, chuckling quietly to himself. When Sasamura returned from the back, Ogin lay sleeping in disheveled form in the two-tatami tearoom, stuck fast to the tatami mats. Bright afternoon sunlight around three o’clock streamed through the shoji screens, making her face appear flushed. Awakened by the sound of footsteps, she sat up without a smile, her legs still uncrossed. To Sasamura’s eyes—which had glimpsed this—she seemed like a woman left by the world to rot. He passed silently by her side.

When the rain that had been falling for two or three days finally let up, mosquitoes swarmed forth all at once. Even without that, Ogin had many nights where it was too hot to sleep. And since there was only one mosquito net, she burned mosquitoes on the walls and sliding doors with a candle flame late into the night. There were nights she spent awake doing such things.

“If I’d brought two nets from Yotsuya, there’d be two.”

Ogin, in her sleepwear, remained sitting up on the futon for a long time, slapping the sticky mosquitoes clinging to her fleshy legs with the flat of her hand.

The next day, Sasamura bought a small single-person mosquito net on the street, wrapped it in newspaper, and carried it home. And then he handed it to Ogin.

“Is this supposed to be a mosquito net?” Ogin unfolded it and burst into laughter. Then, avoiding the kitchen where rats scurried, she deliberately hung it in the entryway. Leaving the shoji screens open from the dirt-floored entryway made that area somewhat cooler than the tearoom.

“It’s so cramped in here, I can’t sleep at all...” Ogin, wearing an oversized yukata, sat up inside the mosquito net supported by her limbs and muttered with a groan.

Sasamura slept in the six-tatami room with the windows thrown wide open. From the window flowed a gentle night breeze, making the light cotton mosquito net flutter against the faint twilight filtering in from the adjacent eaves room. In the darkness, Ogin's pale face and hands kept moving restlessly as she flapped her fan, still unable to fall asleep.

Seven

“It’s such a dreadful thing. Eventually we won’t be able to part ways.” One evening, while hanging the mosquito net in the six-tatami room, Ogin said this with utter seriousness.

The two of them now drew closer, as if to look back and discuss the days they had spent avoiding each other's gaze.

Ogin came to the desk and began haltingly to talk about the man who had been taken from Osuzu. “What kind of man is he?” Sasamura also wanted to hear that. Ogin thrust out her chin as if bound and spoke disjointedly of past and present matters.

“When evening came, I’d slip out of my family’s house and stand in front of the place where Osuzu rented her room. “Because I could hear their voices, I’d end up standing there listening intently for who knows how long. “I was such a fool, I guess. “I made a fuss myself and ended up making it impossible to go back, I guess.”

Ogin then went on to talk about how she and a young man from her relatives had forced their way into that place. "The man was a fool too, you know. Then he started sending letters from time to time to where I was staying, and even came to visit. Since it was a little restaurant, he'd come up pretending to be a customer. He'd put on Western clothes with Uncle's gold chain dangling... When I was at the counter and suddenly saw his face, my chest would tighten up..." Ogin burst out laughing, the corners of her eyes flushing red.

“And then I did something truly terrible.” “Because of that, he even failed his school exams this time… Not that that’s the main issue, but then the bills for food and drinks came up short, you see?” “Isotani was such a strange man.” “It was just like a play.” Ogin began slapping at the mosquitoes clinging to the black wall. “I can’t believe you aren’t bothered by all these mosquitoes.” “I’ve spent a summer without a mosquito net before.” Sasamura’s face, which seemed to ooze grease, was tinged with the color of blood after he had taken the iron supplement he drank when his head felt withered. In the lamplight, his head was so agitated that his eyes dazzled.

Ogin laughed as she brought up the dirtiness of Sasamura’s futon. “When I first laid out the futon, I was shocked.” “Even though food and other things weren’t like that, I wondered what on earth was going on… After laying it out, I felt somehow guilty and ended up stuffing it back into the closet or something.”

“What kind of house was that?” Sasamura asked again.

“That house? “It was a terribly tangled house.” “The one we called Stepmother—they said she’d been a geisha in Shinagawa—never got along with Ei, her son. By the time I came there, she’d already moved out. But Grandfather kept arguing about whether to take her back or not—there was constant uproar.” “Since the son wasn’t happy either, he took to spending money and such.” “Ei was a proper enough man, but right from the start I found him utterly loathsome—I never felt like staying.”

Even after fleeing here, she added that the man had continued to pester her.

“And he’s such a shameless guy.”

Ogin, her face flushed, talked about that evening when everything had been settled.

“Miyama said you’d end up with Isotani again.”

“No, that won’t happen.” Ogin said with a laugh. “That person is completely done for.”

VIII

After T—, who had occasionally secluded himself at places like Daitoku-ji, casually departed for Kyoto, the longstanding friction between Miyama and Sasamura grew even more peculiar over matters involving Ogin, prompting Miyama to purchase household goods with his divorced sister who had been living elsewhere and begin taking meals separately. There was also the fact that Miyama—with his high self-regard—had published his work a step ahead of Sasamura, and now the sight of him beginning to work in earnest stood vividly apparent before Sasamura’s eyes. The sight of various people gathering there too grated on Sasamura’s nerves.

Miyama’s sister and Ogin would secretly visit each other behind the scenes. Miyama’s sister would come to the tearoom and apparently talk about things like Ogin and Isotani; she would also borrow things such as a hairpiece or a Western-style umbrella from Ogin. Due to their closeness, she would sometimes bring out new pickles. “Shut up.” Sasamura seethed.

“Why do you keep going to Miyama’s place?” he snapped. Ogin laughed and remained silent.

To begin with, Sasamura—whose moods were prone to violent shifts—found himself provoked to anger by something Ogin had said offhandedly without considering his feelings.

“Get out.” “I have no use for you.”

The woman stared up through lowered brows at someone’s face while slumping beneath the low-set window and sitting motionless. Sasamura, seated there, jabbed her with his knee. "You kicked me away, didn’t you?" Ogin’s eyes glared fiercely. Her coarse way of speaking only inflamed Sasamura’s heart further. The woman wiped sweat from her face and moved to the kitchen. After her uncle’s downfall, Ogin—who had supported her foolish mother and frail brother until now—had naturally learned such things through experience. There had been many times when survival demanded nothing less.

In the still air of a midsummer noon, the sound of whirring machinery from the forge resounded heavily in Sasamura’s head as he awoke from restless sleep. When he looked around the house, no one was there. In the kitchen lay a bundle of green edamame—sun-roasted where daylight streamed in—left beside the hearth. The wind swept through the vast bamboo grass field behind the house with a dry rustle. Sasamura entered Miyama’s house with eyes that probed like searchlights.

Miyama sat by the window of the six-tatami room as usual, his large frame properly positioned at the desk with bowed head. Ogin sat about a tatami mat away near the entrance threshold, legs loosely folded. Sasamura’s eyes—searching for meaning—flickered down to the woman’s face. “You shouldn’t leave the house open like this.” Sasamura muttered as if to himself and immediately left. Ogin soon rose from her spot and followed.

“I didn’t say anything, you know.” “We were talking about Osuzu-san, you know.”

Ogin disliked the idea of Miyama thinking ill of her over the matter involving Osuzu-san, with whom he sympathized. Sasamura, for his part, felt he couldn’t bring himself to act coldly toward Miyama—who should have known about his past through Osuzu-san. He also thought there was some truth to Miyama’s remarks about Sasamura’s difficult-to-please nature. “You really do such terrible things.”

In the evening, when Ogin went out for a walk to the street, she spoke to Ban’s sister. “My hands are all purple…” Ogin said this with exaggeration.

On her way back, in front of the house, Sasamura heard the sister call out, “You should come visit sometime. If your brother isn’t around,” before parting ways—all from his dark window. It seemed that the astute Miyama had somehow become Ogin’s confidant.

IX

After the distance between Miyama and Sasamura had gradually widened, Miyama moved far away. Around that time, Miyama’s living conditions—which had temporarily improved—had become destitute again, so the items meant for landlord K were left behind as they were upon his departure. Afterward, one or two merchants also came to negotiate with Sasamura. “I had heard about him from Osuzu-san, but he really is quite an unusual person,” Ogin had said. But Sasamura, rather than endorsing her as he had at first, wanted to interpret everything in the worst possible light. It felt as though the voices of those around him who were in contact with Miyama—all variously criticizing him over the woman—constantly clung to his ears, while a dark shadow entangled itself in his mind.

“It’s because your approach was so clumsy—you didn’t have to quarrel with Mr. Miyama like that…,” the woman said, unsatisfied with Sasamura’s obstinacy.

“Might as well get it over with cleanly.” Ogin began going on about the preparations. Sasamura wrote down every item in his notebook and even calculated the costs. “If only Uncle had stayed healthy in Tokyo.” “He loved novels, read them constantly… When he was young and free, he was wild, but after falling ill, he grew timid—just hearing his favorite *Koyose’s Palace* would make him weep.”

“Anyone who achieves some success in Tokyo is bound to take that path.” “Even so, I still intend to make a comeback.” “He might have died by now.” “He was even carried into an inn along the way.” Ogin regretted losing her own kimono more than her uncle’s death. “If I go to my aunt in Yokohama, she’ll at least hear me out a little.” Ogin, in a restless tone, was thinking about various things related to the wedding preparations.

Sasamura had newly tailored a haori during his travels and, intending to give it as a souvenir to his Osaka sister-in-law who had sent him to the hot-spring resort, took out from his desk drawer a pouch containing coral beads—which he had received from that sister-in-law’s aunt in Kyushu and stashed at the bottom of his suitcase—and gave it to Ogin. “Why do you have something like this?” Ogin twirled the beads in her hand and laughed with puzzled amusement.

"My aunt suggested I buy them since they were cheap, so..." "But without any particular reason... That's odd." "How much did you pay for this... I'll have a jeweler take a look." When marriage came into view, Sasamura began considering all manner of things.

“What happened to the person who said they would take care of me?” Sasamura said with a laugh. “She’s a good woman, though.” Ogin gazed out the window with a faint smile.

When it grew dark, the two left the house separately. And avoiding the brightly lit shopping streets, they made their way through the back alleys.

It was an evening of dark, low-hanging clouds threatening rain. As they walked through the desolate square of Katagawamachi, Ogin—unsteady on her feet—kept nearly stumbling and grabbed Sasamura’s hand with an exaggerated cry. In Sasamura’s small, cold hand, the woman’s large hand was lukewarm.

On the second floor of the vaudeville theater, under the electric lights, the woman’s face was thickly powdered to garish effect. On her lips, a bluish crimson rouge glistened. A dark shadow flickered through Sasamura’s eyes. “That’s not it…” The woman lowered her gaze, her face flushing red. Through Ogin’s account of having often visited this place with Isotani, the image rose before Sasamura’s eyes like some saccharine reminiscence. “He had just that sort of… you know, nape of the neck.” From the crowd below, the woman picked out a neatly cropped head and let her eyes grow damp. Sasamura leaned his prickling body forward to peer down.

X

Even after her mother returned from the countryside with things like canned fruit, Ogin continued to constantly intrude into Sasamura’s room. Sasamura did not believe the woman loved him, nor did he think he felt any affection for her; yet when it came to the everyday matters she handled for him, her efforts seemed to scratch precisely where he itched. She could even keenly detect the man’s occasional moods. Her demeanor was brisk, and when in good spirits, she often cracked jokes that made people laugh. Her plump body lacked firmness; her contours were devoid of grace and refinement. Yet even in her somewhat disheveled face, there was something that drew one’s gaze. In Sasamura’s mind, women he had recently seen only in photographs—those he had intended to marry—and women he had known long ago in Osaka would occasionally surface in memory. Yet he did not consider it particularly regrettable to live in a state of languid entanglement with this kind of woman, who had drifted into his life so abruptly from nowhere.

"If Miyama weren't here, I would've cast you aside too." Sasamura would sometimes say such things. The past relationship between Isotani and the woman was another illusion that gnawed at Sasamura's mind. And each time that story came up, various new facts would be tacked on.

“...So how old were you then?”

“I was eighteen, and he was twenty-four…”

“How many years has it been since then?”

“No matter how many years you say it’s been, we were only together now and then.” “Moreover, I didn’t know anything back then.” Sasamura turned the box of photographs Ogin had brought from her relatives’ house in Yotsuya upside down, trying to find any pictures of the man from that time, but there didn’t seem to be a single one. Inside were photographs of Ogin at sixteen or seventeen, taken with her aunt. Her jawline was sharp, her face had a certain edge, and her body was unshapely and plump. Sasamura held it up high and burst out laughing.

A postcard notifying of her return to the capital arrived from her mother. The postcard appeared to be in the father’s handwriting. Ogin had rarely spoken about her hometown until now, but she did not seem to harbor particularly good feelings toward her father. “They often tell us to come back to the countryside, but if we go there, we’ll just end up in some farmer’s household in the end.” “No matter how desperate things get, it’s the countryside I can’t stand.” “If it’s just that much, no matter where I go, I can manage to get by on my own, no matter what I have to do.”

Ogin recalled her uncle’s former mistress who had drifted into the countryside, and at times felt like being caged—yearning to break free from this house. Ever since her relationship with Isotani had broken down, Ogin’s state of mind teetered on the brink of collapse. Sasamura was not the sort of man to soothe Ogin’s troubled heart with gentle affection. Even in making Ogin his wife, he held little sentiment of wanting to guide the woman toward betterment or to consider his own lifetime.

“Even if I leave here, I won’t tell anyone about you.”

Before parting, one evening after dining out with Sasamura, the woman said as they walked along a narrow path through dark grassland. She held a toothpick between her lips and rolled up the hem of her kimono with both hands.

“Let’s not tell anyone in the countryside where I am for a while either.” Sasamura squatted in the thicket, gazing vacantly at the woman’s figure.

“Are you really that desperate?” “But it’s all just such a bother now…” The woman spoke with resigned abandon. Sasamura’s mind, which had been raging for two or three days, was already beginning to settle by then. He could now quietly contemplate what he was doing to the woman.

XI

Ogin, who had been trying to somehow settle matters with her body before confronting her mother, remained unable to resolve anything even after her mother returned. She would even go as far as preparing to leave, only for her resolve to falter and make her reconsider. At what was said to be the site of a temple at the entrance to Shinkaicho stood a pine tree that might have belonged on a country road, covered in dust.

Ogin, who had always been in bustling places, had developed a habit of quickening her pace whenever passing beneath it at night. Yet one evening, as if driven out by Sasamura, she found herself wandering there. However, she still could not help but return.

“I messed up, huh. I should’ve sent Mother a postcard to keep her from coming.”

On the morning her mother was due to return, Ogin sat slumped on the six-tatami sleeping area, halfway through taking down the mosquito net, lost in thought. In the corner of the room, the weary buzzing of a mosquito could be heard. Sasamura was lying down beside her. The returning mother came to Sasamura’s side without even changing her clothes, sat down stiffly, and greeted him. While making excuses for her delayed return—blaming it on having fallen ill from the countryside water—she spoke of how her one brother, who had been her sole support in the world, had passed away.

“There are plenty of relatives in the countryside, but with this, my own family line might as well have died out completely...” Sasamura responded with an awkward air. And he tried opening the canned fruit that her mother had brought as a souvenir.

For two or three days, Ogin had been trying not to get too close to Sasamura, but she couldn’t keep that up forever.

“I said…” Ogin once said to Sasamura with a laugh.

“Mother must’ve figured most of it out by now.” Sasamura had felt this outcome was inevitable, yet still wished she wouldn’t voice it now.

His work had seemingly been forgotten. Sasamura’s mind seemed to revive again around the time his nephew returned. The nephew had grown remarkably mature in a short span of time. He had removed the shoulder pads from his clothes, and his back had broadened. From the very day he arrived, he brought along two friends who came with him, having meals together and letting them stay over as they joked around boisterously in their thick country accents. For the time being, there were also quite a few companions who would drop by from outside now and then.

“What on earth are they saying? I can’t understand a word those people are talking about!” Ogin imitated them and rolled over laughing. “And they just shovel rice straight into their mouths.” “They look like people from a country without rice!” One day, the nephew was washing his athletic shirts at the wellside under the back eaves. By then, the group had found places to settle and scattered about. Ogin wrapped a hand towel around her head like a working woman and wiped down the kitchen shelves she’d neglected for ages.

"Why don't you at least do the laundry?" Sasamura, looking worn out from work, went out back and interrogated Ogin.

“Well, I did say I’d do it for you, didn’t I?” Ogin looked up at Sasamura with a face that seemed to dismiss the matter as trivial. Sasamura, who had constantly been worrying whether there might be some duplicity in the woman’s actions regarding food and such matters, at that time too made a veiled sarcastic remark.

“Is that so? I didn’t notice any of that at all.” The woman, as if taken aback, plopped down right there, put her hand to her forehead, and sank into thought.

“If I did such a thing, please try to think—what benefit would I get?” Ogin argued while breathing heavily. Her mother, who had been unstitching something, stopped her hands and interjected. At that moment, around the same time as the nephew, landlord K—who had been away from the capital—entered from the rear. Since the other three units weren’t renting out easily, K decided that upon returning from his hometown, he would take up residence in the end house himself. That day too, he had Ogin take out the winter clothes from the trunk and air them in the sun. And then the mother was supposed to take care of it.

K—partially deaf in one ear—stood tilting his head as he studied the two people’s faces.

Twelve

K was from a prominent family in his hometown, and Sasamura dimly remembered visiting that sprawling mansion to play after school during their younger days. Though they had remained estranged long afterward, one summer when K—now trudging back from Kumamoto Higher School to their hometown's higher school with an aristocratic bearing—was glimpsed in the school corridor, Sasamura soon withdrew from his studies. Even had they chanced to share meals from the same pot there, their conversations would never have flowed smoothly.

Sasamura considered that Mr.T in Kyoto—ever thoughtful toward friends—had perhaps told K to inquire into their subsequent movements, which led K to come there under the pretext of managing the rental house... But K himself never broached the subject. “How about it—keeping a man’s temper in check is quite a task, isn’t it?” K wedged himself between them, coming up to the brazier and sitting down.

With that interruption cutting short the conversation, Sasamura laughed too and retreated to the back rooms. At night, Sasamura faced the glaring lamp and tried to focus his mind on one of the works he'd begun writing around that time. The clanging from the machine forge had ceased, and the liquor store across the way had closed its doors too. From deep within this town came a drunkard who seemed to be a worker at the newly built soap factory, singing past with a slurred voice through his throat. There was also the sluggish creak of an empty cart being dragged home.

K continued drinking with Ogin and the others in the tearoom, sipping slowly all the while. At times, subdued voices could be heard before Ogin’s laughter spilled out. In the corner of the central six-tatami room, the nephew had already sunk into deep sleep. As night fell, Sasamura’s mind—growing sharper in darkness—throbbed with painful intensity. His nerves were too keen for writing; his eyes flickered painfully from strain. “Sake really does lift the spirits!” He recalled how Ogin—from her hospitality background—had earlier flattered K with this ingratiating remark to please the heavy drinker.

Ogin would occasionally pour leftover beer into a cup and drink after Sasamura’s guests had left. When alcohol flushed her face, she would let her loosely held knees slacken and gaze at people with eyes that seemed lewdly bloodshot. Her mouth—revealing decayed teeth—went slack as she spouted flippant puns and laughed to herself. It seemed Ogin’s body carried her father’s blood—the kind that grew lighthearted when drinking.

"A woman’s drinking just reeks of unpleasantness." Even Sasamura, who often grimaced, would sometimes deliberately begin drinking himself in order to get the woman—who took on a certain allure when intoxicated—drunk. When the outside quieted down, the voices from the back rooms became even more noticeable. The woman went out to the kitchen and seemed to be busily preparing snacks to go with the alcohol. When going to the lavatory, Sasamura passed through there with a bitter smile. The woman looked down while grilling sardines laid out on the tatami mat, though her pale face showed no trace of alcohol's influence.

“I’m just being subjected to Mr.K’s self-aggrandizing tales here.” “Why should it come cheap?” Ogin replied in a somber tone. Trying to soothe his aching head, Sasamura left his desk and abruptly went outside. After wandering through the vacant lot behind the house, he returned to the lit room. K kept nursing his drink in slow sips. Soon the woman opened the rear gate and stepped out through the gritty coal-cinder path, her wooden clogs clacking. She appeared to be heading to the liquor store across the way.

“Hey! Can’t you keep it down?!”

After a considerable time had passed, Sasamura shouted toward the back rooms as if unable to bear it any longer. The tearoom fell completely silent.

13

“Was it really that grating to your ears?” “But when Mr.K is kindly partaking like that, I can’t exactly make a sour face.” After K—seemingly at ease—had soon left without a word, Ogin remarked nonchalantly from across the room. It was something he realized later—that within K’s self-important talk as he sipped his drink slowly, there had also been an implication of trying to separate the woman from her friend. In this situation, it seemed that K himself had considered this to be the way to save Sasamura. K, who had been involved with the landlady—a widow of a military man from a house where he had previously boarded—also had one or two other women connected to him. That evening too, K had been talking about the woman with whom he had even had a child before parting ways, blending fact and fiction.

The woman, who still carried similar heartache somewhere within her, listened with a deeply felt yet faintly envious emotion that seemed to entangle her heart. Sasamura too felt it in his chest. He began speaking of Ogin’s past—things he had heard from Miyama. “That’s because that person doesn’t properly know about us,” Ogin said resentfully. “Though we may be floundering like this now, back home we were an unquestionably respected family—it’s not as if our pedigree was so poor.” Her mother came to her side and defended her.

“What does family status matter? That’s not what I’m talking about now!” Sasamura said resentfully. “From your perspective, that may well be so, but back in the countryside we have relatives too—if my daughter’s to be in such a state over such matters, it’s truly hard on me…” The wild, unpleasant mood persisted throughout the following day as well. By the time K wandered in that evening, Sasamura—who had returned home after roaming outside with his nephew—was leaning against the dimly lit room’s wall, staring blankly. In the tearoom, the mother and Ogin were murmuring about something in hushed tones, their voices lowered from time to time.

“Hey, hey—bring some sake, will you?”

While talking with K, Sasamura suddenly called out toward the back. “Since last night’s turned into tonight, ‘twere better ye gave up the drink now.”

After a considerable time had passed, the mother showed her face there.

“It’s fine.” “If I say I want to drink it,” Sasamura spat out. After a while, the reluctantly produced sake was brought there, and the sound of grating bonito flakes could be heard from the kitchen.

“Tell Ogin to come pour the drinks…” When Sasamura spoke and laughed, K exchanged glances with him and smirked meaninglessly. “Hey, pour the drinks.” Sasamura’s voice cut through again.

Ogin, having done her evening makeup and changed into a kimono, emerged there and sat down; with an apprehensive air, she picked up the sake decanter. Her face, marked by sleep deprivation, showed pronounced gauntness, her russet eyes listless and lips parched. K wore an innocent, uncomplicated expression and drank two or three cups one after another, as if it tasted good no matter when he drank. "If you have nowhere left to go, you should go stay at Mr. K’s place starting tonight." Sasamura said sharply.

“Right, that’s good.” “I’ll take her in for now.” “For the time being, that seems best for both of us.”

K opened his round, lifeless eyes wide and looked back and forth between their faces. Ogin, who had been sitting with her eyes downcast and head bowed in silence, stood up immediately when the sake decanter was emptied and went out toward the tearoom. And no matter how much they called after her, she never showed her face again. Drunk enough to forget everything, Sasamura lay sprawled on his futon. When he opened his eyes, the pale face of the woman who had come to sit beside him looked lonely in the dim lamplight.

“……I’m truly sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on, so please forgive me.”

Ogin’s murmuring voice could occasionally be heard near his ear.

Sasamura was cooling his throbbing heart with a cold, wet hand towel.

Fourteen The time when Ogin brought in items like the futon and mirror stand she had stored with relatives in Yotsuya, loading them onto a handcart, was already the season for wearing lined haori over clothes.

In the town, cheaply built rented houses lined the streets here and there, and hastily set-up soba and tempura shops had sprung up.

Ogin brought a large moss-green wrapped bundle into the six-tatami room at night and, saying she'd heard about it in Yotsuya, spoke of the subsequent disturbances at the house she'd previously been connected to, growing pale as she did so. It was a story about how the son of that household, who had been relentlessly pursuing Ogin even after she fled, had recently slashed his notoriously difficult stepmother with a sword. At that story, even Sasamura pricked up his ears in surprise.

“Because it would be bad if I got involved, Ms. Ocho practically drove me out here—telling me I mustn’t carelessly come back.”

“Huh,” Sasamura responded, gazing at the woman’s face with a look of exasperation.

“I’m too frightened now—I won’t go out anymore.” “That dark night in Kikuzaka when we passed each other—it was definitely Sakae.” Beside them, her mother was pulling out Ogin’s everyday clothes from the bundle to inspect them. Outside, rain came down in sheets, leaving the house damp and clammy inside.

“They say my complexion looks terrible—is that true?” Ogin asked anxiously. Since the start of this month, Ogin had occasionally pressed her abdomen and thought to herself. And, “I’m pregnant,” she said with a laugh, but after a while retracted it again: “Since I have poor circulation, there’s absolutely no chance I could conceive a child.” “You don’t need to worry.” Yet there were signs that could only point to pregnancy. Her eating habits changed and she often vomited after meals. When she questioned the mother about it, even the mother couldn’t decide either way and tilted her head in puzzlement.

“If we act now, there still seems to be a way to manage it.”

Sasamura, now burdened with yet another trouble, still could not bring himself to fully believe it. With his own weak body, the very notion that a child could be conceived seemed almost a wonder.

“There’s no way that’s true.” “Even if it were true, I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he said with a laugh. At times, his tone betrayed doubts about the woman’s virtue. “I may be flighty by nature, but I’m not cheating on you.” “If anything like that happened—even someone as brazen as me couldn’t stay in this house a single day longer.” Ogin delivered this with half-hearted sincerity. “Why not have that doctor relative you’re always calling ‘brother’ examine you?”

“How could I possibly do such a thing? When it comes to that old lady there, she’s really talkative, you know.” Ogin began discussing rumors about the old man who had raised three children to each become doctors. This kind of conversation repeated itself beside the brazier whenever the two of them faced each other. The brazier was filled with fresh straw ash, while small cups and lidded dishes sat at the edge of the desk. As night deepened, Sasamura developed a habit of occasionally wanting to drink—though only three or four cups.

“You don’t need to worry so much. If it really comes to pregnancy, I’ll manage to give birth quietly on my own.” “Since there are people I know, I could rent the second floor there…”

Ogin said. “Since it’s someone Uncle took care of, if I explain the circumstances, I don’t think they’ll refuse to take me in. If I could just receive a bit of your money, you know...”

“If such a place exists, you’d have gone there already.” Ogin told him various things about that person in Kyōbashi. The days when Uncle had been actively making his rounds resurfaced in connection to this.

“What were you doing and where back then?”

Ogin gazed at the lamp with dewy eyes as she reminisced about when she was sixteen or seventeen.

“It truly feels almost strange, doesn’t it?” Ogin muttered while rubbing Sasamura’s fingertips.

Fifteen During chilly mornings, K would often come to the brazier wearing a silk-padded kimono and eat his meal while Ogin busily packed lunchboxes in the kitchen—a scene that occasionally caught Sasamura’s eye when he happened to rise early. In Ogin’s accounts of bringing lunch to Isotani when he attended commercial school, carrying an umbrella when it rained and waiting near the school for him to emerge—the woman’s feelings from that time seemed reflected in the current demeanor of the two. When Sasamura went out shopping with her to the street, Ogin would select side dishes for the next morning’s lunchbox at stew shops they passed by.

After K had entrusted the management of the rental house to that young widow and moved back to his former lodging in Yanaka, various people came and went through the property though it remained vacant more often than not. The nephew had moved into one of those vacant houses and was living there. At times he would bring in crowds of friends, take various things from his uncle’s place, and they would eat and drink. Gradually Sasamura began to realize that the tuition and book money he provided was likely being squandered on food and drink by the delinquent friends his nephew had fallen in with around that time.

“Shin-chan has taken my tobacco case without me noticing.” Ogin told Sasamura with a laugh. The wife at the monthly-contract tobacco shop had even expressed surprise at how much tobacco the nephew was taking and warned them about it.

When he opened the desk drawer, he found not a single school notebook. Instead, the notebook listed names of Yoshiwara brothels and prostitutes. The words "mistress" and "waitress" scribbled here—he could only think they referred to Ogin.

“If you get dragged into those groups, it’s all over for you.” “Even if they summon you, never go out again.” Sasamura summoned his nephew and gave strict orders, but the nephew merely kept his nervous eyes downcast, not taking the words to heart. When a whistle sounded from outside, he soon slipped away. “That morning he came back with his face covered in bruises—remember? He said he’d been beaten up by a gang in Yoshiwara then… Told me not to tell you, so I didn’t.” Ogin informed Sasamura.

“At that time too, it seems he was dragged along by that crowd.” “There are even bearded men among them, you know.” “And Shin-chan—he’s violence incarnate when it comes to roughness.” “If we’re talking quick to fight, he’s truly something else.” “Back home, he says he once grabbed and tossed a teacher he disliked.”

Ogin elaborated on how the nephew had recently become notorious in the neighborhood.

"But after all, it's the friends who are bad." "You should stop being so harsh too." "Because you're so intimidating." Sasamura's small heart was also considerably troubled by the matter of this half-sister's beloved child. "I haven't exactly set a good example myself, you know." Sasamura smiled bitterly. "But at sixteen or so, there's no such thing as being charmingly considerate, you know."

One evening, Sasamura unexpectedly received a letter from one of his haiku friends with whom he had been out of touch for some time. It was a private letter stating that since there were matters he wished to discuss, he asked if Sasamura could come when convenient.

Ogin’s physical condition had worsened further. Her eyes remained clouded, and her limbs seemed listless. That evening too, she was supposed to go to the nearby gynecologist to be examined, but even that she found bothersome and ended up leaving late.

“My situation...”

Ogin immediately perceived it from Sasamura’s expression as he read the letter.

“It must be so.”

Sixteen

Sasamura went out by rickshaw to Yanaka through the cold, spitting rain. These days, Sasamura—who had naturally been avoiding social interactions—rarely left that dark, hole-like house in the sunken area. Until now, Sasamura had never been in a position where he needed to bow his head deferentially before others, but he couldn’t suppress his anxiety about how this friend—who seemed to serve as an outlet for pressures closing in from all directions—would broach the matter. A faint rebelliousness toward this haiku friend B—who appeared aligned with Miyama—also surged stiflingly in his chest as the rickshaw jostled him.

When led into a quiet second-floor room, B— soon brought up the matter of Miyama, a smile playing about his lips. For a while, B— listened attentively to Sasamura’s account.

Between the two of them sat a chili pot on the brazier, and B— occasionally interjected while pouring drinks for Sasamura.

“...Anyway, try not to speak too much about Miyama.” “Otherwise, you’ll only end up hurting yourself.” B— warned. Sasamura had resentment smoldering in his chest regarding his long association with Miyama, but the more he spoke of it, the more wretched he felt at how it seemed to diminish him. “...I think I might as well just marry her openly.” When the woman was mentioned, Sasamura began speaking with a tense feeling.

“I think that’s the honorable way.” “There’s no need to go that far yet.” Mr.B wore a smile in his eyes as he said, “I don’t think it’s as difficult a problem as you’re making it out to be.” “If you just dispose of the woman, the rest will be straightforward.” “After all, they say gossip only lasts seventy-five days.” “How about it? If I’m going to do it, now’s the time.” “Though I’m of little help, why don’t I try worrying about it?” Mr.B urged him.

Sasamura felt that the pain of the silence he had kept from everyone until now had somewhat eased. And he felt an unexpected relief. When the conversation turned to the abnormal condition of her body, being able to confess such things with uncharacteristic calmness felt both strange and like a wretched humiliation.

“Oh, is that so.”

B— opened his eyes wide but did not voice it. And he thought for a while. “In that case, you’ll have to wait until the matter resolves itself naturally.” “But don’t worry—there are plenty of ways.”

A hushed conversation continued for a while. The roars of wild beasts from the zoo could occasionally be heard, and outside, where the rain had briefly let up, the night deepened quietly. “I was actually worried you’d get angry again and say it wasn’t true. I’m glad you confided in me.”

On his way out, B— said this and ordered another flask from downstairs.

Sasamura’s rickshaw, its hood tilted, was struggling through the deep mud at the town’s entrance. Dark rain clouds hung low in the sky, and along the low-roofed town streets, figures of workers returning from the baths could be seen.

“Did you just get back?”

The one who called out as the rickshaw passed by was Ogin, wearing a bluish twin kimono. “How did it go?” “Did you go to the doctor?”

“Oh, I went.” “Then they said it was exactly that.” Above and below the rickshaw hood，such words were exchanged in breathless urgency. When Sasamura alighted from the rickshaw，Ogin followed behind shortly after，gathering with him around the brazier.

Seventeen “What did the doctor say?”

Sasamura asked the woman in a somewhat detached state of mind. Sasamura first wanted to confirm that.

“When the doctor suddenly examined me, he seemed to have already figured it out. ‘What kind of illness is this?’ he laughed. ‘It’s definitely a pregnancy.’ He also said there’s some sort of poison in my body. That he’d give me medicine for it…” “How many months…?” “Four months, he said.”

“Four months.” “I’m getting sick of this.”

Sasamura let out a deep sigh. And with a dreadful feeling, he counted the months two or three times in his mind.

That night, the three of them were engrossed in discussion until around one o'clock. Sasamura proceeded with the talk as calmly as possible, intending for the woman to withdraw. The proposal was readily accepted by the two women.

“If you say you can’t manage anymore, there’s nothing for it but to resign ourselves.” “Though seeing you fret like this—somehow it seems cruel…” The mother spoke while arranging her sewing before her.

“As for my daughter’s situation, once her body is unburdened, things will work themselves out somehow.” Once it was decided, Sasamura wanted to rid himself of this burden as quickly as possible. And terrifyingly rash discussions would sometimes be whispered among the three of them. Sasamura’s eyes, which seemed excited, began to gleam strangely.

“If it comes to that, I’ll handle it however I can. “I can manage that much.”

The mother’s eyes grew piercingly sharp. “But we can’t afford carelessness.”

Ogin was lost in thought, looking apprehensive. “Oh, it’s nothing. There’s hardly any need to fret.”

When he woke the next morning, Sasamura’s mood—which had been strained the night before—had become listless again. The head felt even more heavily oppressive and clouded. When he began considering what the mother had proposed in that distracted state from the previous night, it somehow seemed almost absurd. Sasamura couldn’t get anything done. And when it came down to it, he could only think there was no alternative but to proceed as they had discussed the previous night.

“I don’t think I could bear to look at the child’s face once it’s born.”

When Ogin—who had been talking in her usual clear voice with the landlord’s carpenter’s wife out back—entered, Sasamura immediately seized the opportunity to bring up the issue. “If you leave things as they are, each day will only make it take clearer shape, won’t it?” “Well, that’s true, but….”

Ogin simply kept laughing.

“This morning, I feel like something’s moving.” Ogin placed a hand on her stomach and looked at him with a mocking expression. “But you don’t have to get so worked up all at once.” “You’re like that, aren’t you?”

Ogin gazed at Sasamura’s face with a look of puzzlement.

When her mood turned gloomy, Ogin went to visit her relatives in Shitaya.

“Today I’ll go take care of a little errand,” she said, applying makeup before heading out. At her relatives’ house, two or three people to play hanafuda with would always gather. There were friends of “Brother’s” mother, a kept mistress from the neighborhood who had been a merchant’s concubine, and others. Ogin mingled with them and drew hanafuda cards in high spirits. There, she occasionally overheard rumors about Isotani.

“You too—instead of always idling around like this, you’d better go back to the countryside while you’re still free of another blunder like before and get yourself settled.” The old woman there had said she’d at least see her face, but Ogin had no desire to become a burden to any relatives, no matter where she ended up. No matter how desperate she became, she never considered going to a countryside without a home.

Eighteen Ogin, who had gone out to an acquaintance in Kyobashi to arrange a hiding place for childbirth around year-end, remained shut away in Sasamura’s house even after the new year arrived. Pressed by Sasamura, Ogin hesitated many times before finally going out with a box of sweets. She was made to buy pills and urged to take them in front of him, but she couldn’t bring herself to trust patent medicines. “I’ll take them later,” she said, stashing them away in the brazier. Sasamura, who was fond of medicine, always kept various remedies stocked in his desk drawer. Some had been forcibly prepared by an acquaintance who was a doctor, while others he purchased from drugstores after assessing his physical condition himself. Moreover, since hearing about the toxic elements in Ogin’s body, his own physical anxieties had grown more pronounced. Though pale, Ogin’s face had retained beautiful skin—yet lately, it seemed strange that spots similar to his own would occasionally appear there. The once-bright complexion from her forehead to around her eyes had grown uniformly dull. There were moments when her profile, as she gazed out the window lost in thought, appeared desolately lonely in a way that didn’t match her demeanor.

“They say all the toxins get expelled when you give birth.” Ogin, who made no effort to investigate her illness, seemed largely unconcerned, but no matter where things might lead, Sasamura couldn’t avoid feeling responsible for the child that would be born. “Then do you have any such recollection yourself?” Ogin retorted to Sasamura. Ever since a trivial incident had inflicted a small wound upon Sasamura during his twenties—when he had quit school and led an unarrested wandering life—he constantly felt as though the youthful blood that had surged through his entire body had abruptly been thwarted. His mind had deteriorated, and his sluggish body seemed to be gradually eroding away. Alcohol, women, tobacco, a dissipated lifestyle—he couldn’t attribute it solely to those causes. Even his fleeting interest in pursuing such things was nothing more than a heart seeking to drown itself in the shadows that would eventually drift from them. The sensation of sunlight and color—even the taste of food—seemed to be slipping away year by year from his roughened tongue.

When his mind grew sluggish, Sasamura found himself utterly helpless. In such times, he had no choice but to have his regular masseur apply pressure with all his might—enough to feel as though his skull might shatter. “That’s all in your head.” While worrying about the marks that had appeared on her face, Ogin didn’t even properly take the medicine the doctor had given her. “……If I meet and talk to them, then…” When Ogin returned from Kyobashi, she began speaking to Sasamura, who had been waiting impatiently.

“In that case—since there’s a vacant second floor—they said I could come anytime.” “But they said since it’s all women there, if we go through with this and end up looking like fools later, it’d be a problem—so we should think it over carefully first.” “They’re honest people, so of course they’d be worried.” “………….”

“That person’s son works at a newspaper company, they say.” Ogin added as if remembering.

“Huh.” “Is he a reporter or a laborer?”

“What do you mean? That’s what they said.” Sasamura did not feel at ease. “And that second floor is terribly narrow.” “The ceiling’s so low too—it’s such an unpleasant place.” “If you don’t come when it’s time for the birth, I’d feel utterly helpless in a place like that.” Sasamura kept silent. Ogin listlessly closed her mouth. For New Year’s clothing, Ogin had pulled out items from the trunk she brought again from Yotsuya and would sometimes sit with her mother in the tea room, needles in hand. By the time they had finished tidying up earlier, they had lost what little they’d managed to gather, and when they opened the trunk to find only mismatched remnants, their hearts grew desolate.

When she felt stifled, she would come to Sasamura’s side as he wrote with his brush in the haze-filled cigarette smoke, open the street-facing window, and gaze outside. At each gate, New Year’s bamboo decorations already stood, while across the way, the liquor store stacked barrels to enliven the festive atmosphere. Laborers wearing helmets could be seen going about their daily tasks. The mistress there—said to have wed into the household from Kumagaya with her demon-like face—would also come to the business counter with her swollen belly and settle herself down.

Nineteen

With the small amount of money he had obtained, Sasamura repaid the funds Ogin had borrowed from elsewhere during their desperate straits, had several pawned items sorted out, and then left the house with Ogin to buy futon covers with what remained. "Our futon's cotton has hardened—it's completely unusable. When money comes in next, even if you have to delay some payments, have a new futon made." Ogin often told Sasamura this.

“To think you’ve been bundled up in that futon for ten years—quite some endurance for someone so scrawny.” The matter of when they had first laid out Sasamura’s dirty bedding was brought up again. “I find overly fluffy futons rather unpleasant.” Sasamura laughed, but each time he heard those words, he found himself recalling the haphazard life he’d led—a life where, for years on end, he hadn’t even properly stretched his limbs, all without ever noticing it himself. And yet, he still felt a lingering nostalgia for that futon. The cheap desk, the old brazier—even these bore the indelible memories of time spent together. That grime-covered futon, too, was now being torn away by these people and thrown into a pile of rags.

When they reached the street, raindrops began pattering down sporadically. As they walked talking of nothing in particular, Sasamura’s mood abruptly darkened. “You go on ahead.”

Sasamura started walking briskly. “Then you don’t need to buy the futon cover?”

The woman stood bewildered. When Sasamura’s own feelings were thwarted by the woman’s casual remark, the intense hatred toward her—which had been suppressed for some time—swelled back to life all at once.

Ogin followed for a block or two, but eventually turned back with a dejected air.

That night, Sasamura did not return home.

When he entered the house in the morning, the woman was sitting before the brazier with a face flushed with excitement. The nephew also came nearby and was warming himself by the fire.

When he retreated into his study, the woman entered with a grim smile. “That’s really cruel. I got so unreasonably angry that I ended up telling Shin-chan everything. You can’t exactly criticize Shin-chan either.”

“Idiot.” “Watch your tongue when you’re speaking to someone weaker.”

“Shin-chan said it too—that Uncle wouldn’t be coming home tonight.” “After all, you had friends over last night too.” “The three of you pulling flowers—who knows how long you waited!” —“I should’ve followed right after you—then I could’ve seen what face you made while having fun…” “I wanted to see what face you made while having fun…”

“Shut up.” Sasamura’s entire face twisted into a scowl. He couldn’t even manage a laugh. As dusk approached, the sounds of the blacksmith’s machinery ceased, leaving even the act of sitting there feeling unsteady. When faced with perplexing matters, Ogin would often go to draw fortunes at the nearby Inari shrine. Despite the bustling street outside, here in the spacious shrine grounds all lay hushed, with only the dim glow of golden lanterns visible through distant trees. When she pulled the bell rope, a jangling sound echoed around them, and a young attendant emerged from the back.

“I brought yours too,” said Ogin, spreading out Sasamura’s [fortune slip] and placing it at the edge of the desk. Sasamura set down the dimmed lamp, curled up in the shadow of the brazier, and lay still. “It says I’m like someone dangling in midair right now,” she said. “Like I’ve got no home... yet where I am, I’m just fighting to stay afloat.” Sasamura kept silent, his eyes fixed on the text as if mesmerized.

“Should I go to Kyobashi or not? What should I do...” Ogin thought that with Sasamura—who had Mr.B’s support—she couldn’t even risk making an imprudent discussion. “According to B-kun’s mother’s view, she says it’s better if we stay together...” Sasamura, who had said this, had met with B— once or twice since then. In the evening, Sasamura went out to see the bustling evening town. And then, on a sudden impulse, he bought a shawl for the woman and returned.

Ogin spread it out with a delighted look and burst into laughter.

“The one I had before was much bigger and shinier.” “And there was even a coat... but after Uncle got sick—I lost it all.”

“Is that so.” “You shouldn’t go asking for luxuries.” “If you don’t fit in here, I’ll send you back to the countryside.”

Sasamura flushed with anger.

Twenty Since spring arrived, Sasamura would occasionally decide to go look at rental houses to move into. The unsuitable layout of this house was also one reason they needed to accommodate Ogin’s condition. Whenever a guest got up to use the toilet—which was accessible from the tearoom—Ogin frequently had to hide herself in the shadows. By then, Ogin had completely abandoned the idea of going to the house in Kyobashi. The danger of the second floor served as one pretext, but the anxiety about what would happen after leaving there increasingly dulled her initial resolve.

“...Moreover, even I would need to prepare at least some basic household items if we move elsewhere—I couldn’t bear not to.” “No matter how you look at it, giving birth in such a shabby state makes me feel terribly uneasy.” In Ogin’s heart these days, even having gone there to consult about her situation had come to feel like a reckless move. “In such a cramped second-floor dwelling, if the delivery goes smoothly, that would be fine—but since it’s my first childbirth after all, there’s no telling what might go wrong.”

“With something like this, there’s no end to whether it’s serious or trivial,” the mother interjected from beside them.

Sasamura leaned silently against the brazier, intently smoking his tobacco. His eyes caught sight of Ogin's noticeably swollen belly as she tied the strings of her red merino apron decorated with white hemp leaf patterns. Her face, which seemed to hold moisture within, appeared as translucent as white wax.

“If we were to act recklessly and something were to happen, I would have no way to explain myself to the father of this child in the countryside or to our relatives.”

For these reasons, Sasamura was compelled to start searching for a new house.

Sasamura ventured out to search the deeper recesses of the neighborhood. There he spotted several fairly spacious vacant houses here and there, but their grimy surroundings or unfavorable layouts left him dissatisfied with every option. As he walked, his haori over the lined kimono undergarment grew oppressively heavy in the unseasonable warmth. In the quiet district of many fences, willow buds shot up vigorously while plum blossoms dotted some corners. The sky stretched in an unbroken expanse of deep blue. Having surveyed these backstreets of Koishikawa, Sasamura found himself reluctant to abandon familiar surroundings—the uncertainties of moving from his friend’s house to a common rental home weighed heavier than expected.

Today was surely the day Dr.M was to be admitted to the hospital.

One afternoon, Sasamura went out house-hunting but suddenly turned back midway as if remembering something. That day was thinly overcast and oppressively heavy. At Aokido Pharmacy, he had two boxes of Rāheru medicine wrapped in paper. When he entered the vicinity of the University Hospital, pale sunlight flickered across the sidewalk lined with cherry trees whose buds remained tightly closed. Sasamura, preoccupied with his own affairs, had not crossed Dr.M’s threshold for some time. Between Dr.M and Sasamura, there were times when a distance would form.

Dr.M began to suffer from the same illness around the time Sasamura’s stomach was finally starting to recover.

“At your age, relying so much on medicine like this is disheartening.” “If you don’t even chew your food properly with those teeth of yours, you’ll never get better.” To Sasamura—who hadn’t touched a drop of tea and wore a perpetually clouded face—Dr.M spoke with forced cheer, mocking his own ailing body that had lost its will to live. Yet even Dr.M’s sole remaining pleasure, his appetite, began betraying him bit by bit from around that time. After entering the assigned hospital room and waiting for some time, Sasamura—who had opened the door and was peering down the long corridor—saw the tall figure of Dr.M appear from the entrance. Mr.O and Mr.I entered from behind, carrying tools at hand and what appeared to be bundles.

Dr. M’s eyes seemed to harbor deep anxiety, but finding Sasamura’s unexpected figure here appeared to bring him heartfelt joy.

Twenty-One Dr.M stepped down from the wheelchair in his snow boots and still wearing his shallow bowl-shaped hat. He leaned his weary frame against the wall, attempted to sit in a chair for a while, then propped his elbow on the central bed—all seemingly trying to distract himself from the cold, unwelcoming hospital room that fate had unexpectedly decreed he must now occupy.

“Since they’re admitting patients here—so to speak—you’d think they’d make the hospital room a bit more presentable.”

When Mr.O brought it up, "Hmm... This is unbearable," Dr.M replied, glancing around the room with a slight nod, though his brow remained clouded. Even so, he found great satisfaction in the fact that people had gathered on such a day. And though his tone was lower than usual, seeming weighed down by his mood, the conversation remained lively as ever, punctuated by feeble smiles and light jokes. "Try pressing here."

When the topic of illness came up, Dr.M exposed his emaciated lower abdomen and used his hand to indicate where the scar was. “Does it hurt?” “No, it’s fine.” “I see, it’s grown quite large indeed.” Dr.M had to stay there for two weeks to have the scar examined and determine its nature. He had begun worrying about this scar only after his long-standing stomach condition—present for some time—had worsened considerably. Dr.M began to appear reluctant to take up his brush from around that time.

"Still, it would be better to have a good doctor examine it." Sasamura too had harbored doubts about the scar and had recommended it once or twice. "How’s your stomach been lately?" Dr. M occasionally asked Sasamura. On his face, one could see the gradual erosion of his spirit, as if being trampled down bit by bit.

Sasamura noticed that the newly arrived company’s haiku contest submissions were piled mountainously on the desk. The selection of haiku, which had until now been a hobby, had recently become one of Dr.M’s important duties—this realization flashed before Sasamura’s eyes like a cruel irony. “I haven’t done anything wrong that would make me sick,” Dr.M said in an agitated tone. “It’s my surroundings that are destroying me.” In his voice now lingered a heartfelt sigh from Dr.M—he who for these past two or three years had maintained such defiant pride against busy work and troublesome social engagements, against society’s cold criticisms.

Around the time he went to a gastroenterology hospital for an examination, even the director there still couldn’t provide a clear diagnosis. As time passed, even pain began to develop in the scarred area.

That day, as evening approached, he left the hospital room with the group. When Sasamura visited for the second time one evening, the spacious room had been filled with various items. There were unfamiliar beautiful chairs and lovely potted plants arranged. Braziers, pots, bowls, shelves, beverages, fruits—even spoons and knives in several colors—had all been brought in haphazardly. Newly published books and design sketches for book covers lay scattered about in disarray. As if in the hold of a ship, cross-legged on a fully spread-out floor mat, Dr.M—now engrossed in discussing food flavors with a visitor—appeared even more spirited than before.

“When I wake up in the morning, having even something like this by the bedside feels somewhat nice.”

When the topic of the potted violet there came up, Dr.M muttered while gazing at the flower. Dr.M had never before had any interest in things like flowers. On the day the scar carcinoma in his stomach was confirmed, Mr.O and Mr.I came together to visit Sasamura that evening. Sasamura, having been persuaded by a doctor friend, lay his weary body on the freshly laid futon and drifted in and out of sleep after trying an injection for the first time.

Ogin, flustered, retreated to the back room.

Twenty-Two “So the fundamental question remains whether to make the incision or not,” said Mr.O. “Mr.J and others argue that if we can’t leave it untreated indefinitely, we should resolutely proceed with surgery.” “But would that truly produce results?” asked Mr.I. “They say they can’t be certain,” Mr.O replied. “Given how considerably his body has weakened, there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t accelerate his demise.”

“Moreover, regarding the incision… It seems Dr.M himself does not wish for it.”

Hushed whispers continued for some time. Eventually, the two men left after nearly confirming Sasamura’s stance. "Oh... That’s terrible."

Ogin entered the room where the guests had left and sat by the brazier.

“Thirty-seven seems to be a truly unlucky age, you see.” “My uncle was just the same way.” Sasamura lay on his back atop the futon, stroking the hair at his weary temples as he sank into thought. A dull ache pulsed intermittently through the muscle where he’d received the injection. “Why not have that fortune teller near Dentsū-in examine you?” “He’d divine it plain enough.” Ogin raised the matter of the diviner once more. At dawn the next day, Sasamura went to consult the fortune teller only to find his establishment closed. On his return path, he entered a small Daikokuten shrine adjoining Dentsū-in’s side grounds and resolved to seek counsel from a monk stationed there. The monk—a stately man nearing forty resplendent in brocade vestments—had been murmuring to a careworn countrywoman when his gaze began darting toward Sasamura’s disheveled hair and shadowed countenance. The arrival of a noblewoman glittering with rings and wristwatch, handbag swaying as she descended from her rickshaw, drew from him a smile that failed to brighten his despondent eyes. Without pause, she disappeared into the inner chambers.

“This is simply too…” The monk ran the crystal rosary beads through his fingertips, opened a book, and began speaking to Sasamura. “The illness has already taken firm root.” “Wouldn’t surgery have any effect?” “It’s simply too…” he said, leaning back with a look that dismissed any need for further examination. Sasamura tossed the money packet onto the sanbo tray and left.

When he visited Dr. M that day, the room that had seemed like a workspace was neatly tidied up. Dr. M had neatly parted his hair, and his face no longer showed the dark shadows that had been present before his hospitalization. Others had also come by his side. “This morning too, ×× came and said they’d do whatever they could if I could write something now, but I told them I’d make my request once I’ve recovered from this illness.” "I don't intend to write now that I've come to this," Dr.M scoffed with a bitter smile at his own miserly self. He could also discern the implication that if they truly had goodwill, there was no need to make this patient write anything…

“Moreover, I’ve become wealthy since falling ill. Mr.AA came again yesterday and left about a hundred yen. If you need anything, I could help out a bit,” he said with a laugh.

After agreeing to take on a major project for Dr.M, Sasamura moved alone to a lodging house in Ushigome. Before that, he had visited with his family the coastal area where Dr.M had been staying, spending two or three days there. The coast still had cold winds, waves remained rough daily, and not a single clear day emerged. Sasamura’s blood had again turned turbid following an injection, leaving his head persistently heavy and sluggish. He had also been forbidden from drinking alcohol.

The lodging house in Ushigome had several separate buildings and even a neat garden, but its only tenants were about two gentlemen and one Chinese man. Sasamura loaded only his desk, lamp, and table clock onto a handcart and moved there one afternoon. Then he set up his desk by the window facing the garden where tree shadows were plentiful.

Twenty-three

The lodging house was deathly quiet even during the daytime. Sasamura tried changing the placement of his desk multiple times and visited the bathhouse he used to frequent during his long stays at other lodgings in the area before acquiring a home—all in an attempt to calm his nerves—but he felt as though he were traveling and could focus on nothing. As he lay there restlessly shifting about, noon arrived, and a pale-faced maid of around thirty brought in a meal tray, silently tidying the scattered items around him. Even seated before the meal tray, his head remained foggy as if submerged in water, and even the untouched bamboo lacquered chopsticks felt unpleasant. Out of concern for his illness, Ogin had prepared a chopstick case with utensils and a rice bowl wrapped in paper inside the desk, but these remained untouched.

Moreover, since this was assistance for Dr.M—who stood on the brink of death—there was also doubt whether any payment would be received even if he did the work. By a strange twist of fate, Sasamura—now unable to afford even a single pair of geta—could no longer act with the carefree abandon he’d once known in his old lodgings. When he finished eating, he took a hefty dose of stomach medicine from his bag and went up to the spacious second floor. The second floor had several separate rooms with good views, but they were all vacant. The tall figure of a sickly-looking master—around fifty-three or fifty-four with prominent cheekbones, a high nose, and sunken eyes—could be seen amidst the garden shrubs. Sasamura had never once heard the voice of that master, who seemed to be something like a former government official. There were two women who appeared to be his wives, and an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl with a high chignon—who sometimes came dressed in heavy makeup and gaudy outfits to attend to guests—but it was unclear which of the wives she belonged to.

There was a young maid who seemed to have worked at a restaurant or similar establishment, along with two others. When they finished dusting, they would lean against the handrail, admiring each other’s hairstyles and chatting about combs and hair ornaments. “Strange to keep three women here when there aren’t even any guests,” Sasamura remarked with a laugh as he wandered about. “That may be so, but we do get lodgers staying a night or two now and then...” Sasamura went downstairs and resumed his seat at the desk. Two or three manuscript volumes lay atop it—the beginnings of works written on large Western paper. Summoning his weighted-down spirits, he began adding brushstrokes in fits and starts. Once begun, the work advanced for a time through sheer inertia. Occasionally he would consult the original text to verify passages. Suddenly setting down his brush, he leaned his exhausted frame backward—only for his mind to become ensnared once more in a thicket of thoughts that refused to abate for the longest time.

When his spirits became utterly dampened, Sasamura slipped quietly out of the lodging's gate. His feet naturally turned toward home. Ogin was boiling something in the kitchen that seemed intended for the desolate lodging's meal tray.

“I was just thinking of having the rickshaw man carry it now…” Ogin wiped the sweat from her brow as if feeling the heat and stepped away from the charcoal brazier. As he sat by the brazier, the roaring sound of the blacksmith’s machinery echoed in his ears as familiarly as ever. When he entered this soundless world, Sasamura felt his thoughts grow even more scattered.

Late at night, Sasamura returned to his lodging house carrying a lidded container. When he entered the room and lit the lamp, there in the ashtray on the desk lay a small business card of Dr.M, stamped with his literary pseudonym in red ink. Sasamura sat at his desk for a while, but soon turned down the lamp and went to bed.

Around that time, a poet acquaintance who had retreated to his hometown in Kazusa appeared carrying a travel bag as if on a whim. And once he began staying on the second floor here instead of his regular inn in Nihonbashi, even the three daily meals of unpalatable food gradually became somewhat tolerable to Sasamura’s palate. That poet, who had come to survey the state of central literary circles, was then grappling with pressing domestic circumstances of his own. Between these two men—each consumed by their private struggles—their exchanges often passed each other like ships in the night.

Twenty-four

When the poet returned home after about five days, the marriage proposal he had brought left only a faint trace in Sasamura’s heart, and the lodging house returned to its former loneliness. The marriage proposal concerned a daughter from a wealthy family in the poet’s hometown. While lying there listening to the story, Sasamura’s chest felt suffocating. In the middle of their conversation, a phone call—rare at that time—came in for Sasamura. The caller was a painter whom Sasamura had met once or twice elsewhere but never spoken with deeply; the matter involved reviving a marriage proposal that had been brought by a medical student—a relative of his brother whom Sasamura had befriended during a trip to Kyushu when he first acquired his house—and which had made some progress before the other party withdrew. Ogin’s sudden arrival came just as Sasamura’s mind—having returned photographs and despaired over it—had not yet fully recovered.

“Today’s a strange day.” Having properly ended the call and returned to his seat, Sasamura’s face showed agitation. While narrating the progression of his feelings from that failed marriage proposal to his turn toward Ogin, Sasamura added...

“Moreover, I’ve long doubted whether I’m even physiologically qualified for marriage, you know…” The poet was laughing as he listened to his unfortunate friend’s story. By early June, Dr.M had taken to bed, though not entirely confined to it. And while lying there, he would contemplate book designs or look through new foreign publications someone had brought him. Among them were works like Sturm by someone called Obrostrobsky and two or three pieces by Hauptmann.

“Since △△ insisted I read it, I did look through it, but this isn’t something worth such high praise.” The ambition of becoming Japan’s foremost authority seemed to have only grown more resolute in Dr.M’s mind since he had taken to his sickbed. A translated book titled “Jinsei no Gigi” (Doubts of Life) remained at Dr.M’s bedside for some time.

“Read this. The writing isn’t all that clumsy.” Dr. M, who had never before immersed himself in life’s problems, recommended the book to Sasamura, its pages marked here and there with red lines. Their fragmentary conversations now and then touched on philosophy as they progressed. Dr. M, who tended to those around him out of sheer resolve alone, would occasionally let words like “philanthropy” slip from his lips. His past life of strenuous struggle, marked by a strong sense of self, now seemed to come to mind in Dr. M’s weakened heart of late.

“I want to care for people as much as I desire once more.” Dr. M murmured with deep eyes. The herb called greater celandine—said to be good for illness—hung from the eaves where all the shoji screens had been opened wide. They ventured daily into distant suburbs through the sweltering heat to gather it. Countless bundles also arrived sent from unknown people in far-off provinces. Lying in bed, Dr.M gazed contentedly at the drying herbs fluttering in the breeze.

“I would like you to write one major work for me, Dr. M…” Sasamura, who had never placed much importance on such things until now, seized the moment to make his request.

Dr. M nodded lightly and said, “Well, perhaps once autumn comes and I can manage rice with tea again, I’ll write it.” Sasamura fell silent and looked down. When two or three people gathered around, Dr. M would become engrossed in conversation indefinitely.

“What have you been eating lately?” Dr. M asked as if he’d suddenly remembered. “Well now, sir. There’s nothing particularly special about it. I’ve just been licking salted fish guts.” Mr.O said mockingly. “Does Sasamura like vegetables?” “I think arrowhead would be quite tasty.” “Yes... arrowhead might be too delicious.” Dr.M murmured. Sasamura couldn’t find the right moment to bring up the money he’d brought and withdrew without mentioning it.

25 As the time of childbirth approached, Sasamura found himself growing uneasy and began returning home occasionally to check. Ogin, whose legs had retained fluid from early signs of beriberi for some time, sat listlessly on the kitchen threshold—now lifting her hem to catch the cool breeze from behind, now leaning her body against the low window frame—as she contemplated the terrifying day of her first childbirth drawing near. Her face appeared small with a feverish flush, and beneath her restless glistening eyes lay a peculiar light.

No matter how much Sasamura labored, seeing that the vast manuscript’s untouched portions showed no sign of diminishing in the slightest, the arm holding his brush stiffened involuntarily. Beneath the window of the lodging house, the bluish-black leaves of laurel trees lay piled under a layer of dust. From the ground that had never dried, the smell of earth wafted up. As his vision grew dim, Sasamura let out a low “Ah…” from his chest and stretched his bony back flat against the tatami.

Descending two or three steps down the hallway from there revealed two more detached rooms. Sasamura would sometimes enter them to lie down and gaze at the sky. Summery clouds the color of milk drifted lightly overhead. Though he tried to devise material for writing something of his own—anything to fill the immediate gaps in his life—he found himself utterly unable to summon the necessary frame of mind. When the time came for sprinkling water on the streets, Sasamura rode home in the summoned rickshaw, baked by the western sun. Upon entering the quiet town nestled in its hollow, the restless turmoil in his chest seemed always to dissipate.

The inside of the house, still without any lamps lit, was dim and filled with a clammy chill. Ogin was sitting in the corner of the tea room, pressing her abdomen. In the kitchen, the mother was tending a small flickering fire beneath the pot. "It seems like it'll be tonight."

Ogin twisted her brows and said as if squeezing out the words. "I don't think it'll come that easily from just that, but we still need to call the midwife..." The mother spoke in a calm tone that seemed to forcibly suppress her anxiety. "Then I'll send someone." Sasamura stood rigidly in place as he pushed out the words. "I suppose... How can we know? ...More importantly, your night blindness..." Ogin looked up at Sasamura's face.

“I was going to go prepare things, but I didn’t think it would happen this soon…” Sasamura paced restlessly about the room, his movements tinged with anxiety. He worried whether this one night would pass without incident. From a young age, his upbringing—imperfect in every aspect, having been constantly oppressed in positions of inferiority—rose vividly in his mind. The thought of an infant—even more degenerated—coming into this world filled him with loathing.

Ogin too would repeat those words whenever the child came up in conversation.

“What kind of child will be born, I wonder.” “I don’t want to give birth to a bad child.” “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But anyway, since we’re not going to raise it.” Sasamura said.

When the abdominal pain Ogin had bitterly resented for a time began to subside, she rose and lit the lamp, then set about preparing the meal.

“Somehow, I have a feeling this birth will be difficult…” Ogin, who had been eating her meal, soon set down her chopsticks again and bent over. Sasamura set down his chopsticks as well and gazed at Ogin’s face. In the depths of her eyes flashed a shadow of regret toward the unborn child.

When the hurried dinner was finished, Sasamura took something and left the house. The mother also went to call the midwife around the same time.

26

After stuffing a small amount of money into the bottom of his sleeve, Sasamura wandered aimlessly through the town. While concerned about the childbirth yet feeling reluctant to be present there, he stopped by the substitute doctor's place where he hadn't shown his face for some time. Sasamura had tried about five injections around March or April while feeling indefinitely toyed with before giving up, but he still felt uneasy about it.

“Have you been feeling any better lately?” The doctor said, fanning his beer-flushed face with a round fan. Sasamura brought up whether there might be a household that could take in the child due to be born that very night. To this man who had been his neighbor since childhood, Sasamura never hesitated to confide anything. “It’s not impossible—but you’ll regret it later,” the doctor replied, recounting his experience of sending away a child born from a relationship with a woman to be raised in the countryside.

“I can’t afford to think about the future right now.” Sasamura wanted detailed information about the prospective household he had in mind. When arrangements had been made to give away a seventh child—born to a stepmother—to a rural family, and the eager grandfather came to collect it, the sentimental father had wept over parting with the frail suckling infant—a story Sasamura had once heard from his mother that left him unsettled. He suddenly remembered this.

“Well, it’s better to handle it after the child is born.”

The doctor talked about the circumstances of the elderly couple—who lived quite comfortably—and then said. Sasamura received a few pills and left there.

When he returned home, the small house was hushed. The mother was in a dark corner inspecting the birthing linens, while beside her, Ogin arranged things like absorbent cotton and oiled paper. Wearing terrifyingly high tatami-soled geta, the midwife arrived shortly after. Sasamura retreated to the 4.5-tatami room and lay down. “Just rest assured as if you’re aboard a great ship.” “I’ve handled thousands of births, but you won’t find a single case where I’ve failed.” “Just rest assured.” The midwife chattered on, proudly boasting of her own skill.

They decided to have the childbirth at the Ake family’s place. The mother busied herself alone—carrying futons, preparing food for the midwife, going in and out through the back. Sasamura went over to check once or twice. The labor pains gradually intensified. Ogin—eyes bloodshot and brimming with tears—grimaced as she clutched Sasamura’s proffered hand. Each time her face flushed crimson with congestion, oily sweat beading on her forehead. When the contractions subsided, she gasped through her shoulders and twisted her hands helplessly. At intervals she lifted her head to spit thick mucus into the waiting metal basin. Undigested remnants of her evening meal came up too.

The anxious hours passed from nine to ten, but the laboring woman, encouraged by the midwife, kept straining uselessly. Her physical exhaustion became visibly clear. “Ah… It hurts….” Ogin clung to her mother’s calloused hand and stared vacantly into space. “What’s happening here?”

After midnight, the mother came over to the house and, tilting her head to the side, spoke to Sasamura.

“Is it a difficult birth?” Sasamura asked from his vigil by the brazier. “Well... It doesn’t seem to be progressing easily.” “Shouldn’t we call a doctor?” “The midwife assured us she’d handle it... I suppose there’s no need for doubt.” Eventually Sasamura succumbed to exhaustion and slept. He awoke at seven the next morning with the lingering unease of haunted dreams. When he entered the tea room, he found his mother clattering about in the kitchen.

Ogin was still struggling.

27

It was nearly ten o'clock when the midwife, cradling the red-backed plump newborn in both hands, carried it to the tub filled with water in the next room. When the newborn was first exposed to the air, it let out two or three cries, but by then had already gone limp. Sasamura watched timidly from a corner of the delivery room, his body shrinking back whenever the infant seemed about to cry out.

There, the faintly audible sound of machinery forging came only from the front, leaving the surroundings quiet. The mother, finally freed from her long ordeal, heard the midwife’s voice saying “What a big boy,” and with a feeling of revival smiled through tear-filled eyes—but soon sank into sleep. From her face wiped of sweat and tears, all color had drained away at once, leaving only a faint pulse that barely persisted.

The midwife finished washing the soft downy body of the newborn with practiced hands, then proceeded to dispose of the soiled items. A peculiar odor from such things hung in the room, while a cool breeze brushed against the exhausted mother’s face with comforting gentleness. For now, a faint sense of joy stirred in Sasamura’s chest.

“That was quite a struggle.”

The midwife finally sat down and smoked tobacco.

“When it takes this long, even a midwife’s body can’t endure.” “I did briefly consider it, but once the head was out, it was all ours from there.”

Sasamura looked at the midwife’s face as if to say, “Was that how it was?” When the head had emerged but the shoulders were stuck—urged on by the midwife’s “Just one more push…”—the laboring woman’s desperate, almost grotesque exertion now seemed absurd in retrospect. “Can’t it come out more naturally?” “There are such cases.” “But after all, it’s a baby this size coming out,” the midwife laughed. Sasamura felt as if he were being reproached and gave a bitter smile.

After the midwife examined the new mother’s body with a dirty stethoscope and discussed postnatal care before leaving, the room grew even quieter. The [Ogin’s] mother silently tidied up the area while Sasamura sat by the well-ventilated window gazing at the pale face of the new mother who had fallen into a sleep from which it was unclear when she would recover—but occasionally he would approach and peer at the infant’s face.

That day, Sasamura spent the day drinking sake in the next room with the doctor who had come concerned about the childbirth. When the postpartum woman awoke, she gazed at the infant laid beside her with a lonely smile; yet when supported by her mother to rise for the toilet, her figure appeared shockingly emaciated and aged. The infant occasionally let out a weak, muffled cry. Sasamura diluted milk with water, soaked it in rolled gauze, and had himself drink it.

The next morning, when the haiku friend from Yanaka came to visit, Sasamura was sitting at the postpartum woman’s bedside. “Yes, that’s wonderful.”

The haiku friend wearing an unlined summer haori entered the room adjacent to the delivery chamber and offered congratulations in his customary manner. The gloomy atmosphere within the house suddenly took on a semblance of cheerfulness. “So... how are things?” After listening to various accounts, the haiku friend showed concern about Sasamura’s strained finances. “I can manage if it’s just a small amount.” “True enough—I’d wish for that if possible...” Sasamura made that request as well.

Before the two of them lay a plate of strawberries the mother had favored eating before childbirth.

28 The mother couldn’t stay in bed for long. When some strength returned to her legs and waist, she wanted to rise and try doing something. Partly there was the joy of having successfully escaped a great ordeal, and partly because the boy she had borne wasn’t exceptionally ugly compared to others, she felt as though she had somehow become a proper woman. On the seventh night after birth, she herself went out to the water spout to select fish, squatted before the tub containing congratulatory carp provided by the fishmonger and doctor, and examined the vibrant yukata fabric brought by the haiku friend. The midwife had her take the final bath under supervision, placed the infant by the breezy window, cut the umbilical cord with a razor, wrapped it with rice grains in paper, and said to Sasamura: “Please write the baby’s name and birth details here.”

“You should come up with a good name.” The mother placed various items on a tray—prepared meal offerings and what looked like wrapped money—and set them before the midwife. “Since your first child is a boy, you must be proud,” said the usually brusque midwife, forcing a polite smile as she took a sip from her sake cup.

Sasamura wore a bitter smile but occasionally took the child in his arms and carried him to the brighter window. The infant would occasionally open his eyes slightly, like those of a mouse pup, and narrow his mouth—his face changed from day to day. At times it showed perfectly formed features; at others, those features collapsed entirely. “The area around his eyes resembles yours,” Ogin said while peering into that face. “But this child will grow up better than his father.”

After the seventh night had passed, Sasamura took the infant in his arms and quietly went out to the back. He walked about within the plank enclosure, entered the cramped space beneath the eaves where juniper trees grew, and showed the child shadows tinged with blue. The infant opened its eyes wide and moved its mouth. In its eyes, the tree shadows were reflected blue. As he looked at that face, Sasamura could not suppress a faint pity and melancholy. There he remained crouching.

“Let’s hurry up and do it.” “If we do it now, we won’t have to make him an illegitimate child.” Sasamura urged the mother to make a decision from time to time as if suddenly remembering while looking at the infant suckling at her breast. “I’ll raise him.” “I’ll raise him without being your burden.” “There’s more than enough breast milk anyway.”

Ogin finally spoke in a distant tone, but she still lacked both the confidence and resolve to raise him alone. Sasamura’s mind turned once more to the work he had neglected for some time. After discussing separation all day, he abruptly left home in the evening and went to check on his lodging. The flannel summer kimono with a modest pattern—the only one he had bought with Ogin when they went out to the street at the beginning of summer—now had sunburned shoulders, felt bulky on his body, and looked shabby. Sweat seeped from his hands and feet, and by the time he entered the lodging room, his sleep-deprived eyes grew dim. Sasamura took off his kimono and went to the well beside the mound, where he wrung out a hand towel in the cold water and wiped down his body. The stone-built well curb was damp with moss. Beside it, evening primroses grew tall and thick.

The room was already dim. The desk remained exactly as he had seen it two or three days earlier when he briefly visited, but the clock that should have been ticking there was nowhere to be seen. Sasamura felt vaguely dissatisfied. He searched around the closet and staggered shelves, but it remained unfound. When he opened the desk drawer, the paper case containing a few coins he had left there was gone.

29 When he asked the maid, the clock had been missing since dusk. It was concluded that a petty thief had probably crossed the side fence, entered, and made off with them. The fence ran along the north-side wooden panels, forming the boundary with the neighboring large property. Within the deserted grounds, on either side of a large old estate stood two or three dilapidated small houses, but trees were numerous and weeds grew thickly. Sasamura’s room at the boundary of the deep main house had a window that—when one crossed the fence—immediately faced the detached room where the desk was placed.

“After all, we can’t keep watch all the way over here,” the maid explained about footholds for descending from the crossed fence, but no such traces could be seen on the decaying Kenninji-style bamboo fence. Sasamura found the soundless room unsettling. Trying to calm his head—which had been plagued these past two weeks—he sat before the desk, but here at his lodging, various matters forgotten at home began resurfacing. There was the work from Dr.M that periodically pressed upon him, but he also felt uneasy about having written nothing for some time. The fact that he still hadn’t replied to letters from his elderly mother back home—not even once since moving to these lodgings—would sometimes darken Sasamura’s mood. When Sasamura had opened the drawer earlier, his eye had caught on an unopened letter received at home at the month’s start—tucked into his sleeve and brought here still sealed. For a long while now, Sasamura had failed to send even the barest necessities to his impoverished mother.

When he noticed the area growing dim, Sasamura struck a match and lit the lamp, but the room—its residual heat still lingering—was stiflingly hot. Suddenly concerned about Dr.M again, he left the lodging and found his feet naturally turning in that direction. Sasamura had often felt a certain loneliness and unease when keeping his back turned too long on Dr.M out of petty defiance.

Dr. M was lying down after having a massage. Since July began, his body had grown increasingly frail. He would loosen his hips and sometimes have visitors massage them. The greater celandine he'd relied on—prepared by a master pharmacist—had proven largely ineffective. Sasamura peered from the entryway into the tearoom and asked his wife about Dr.M's condition. "Earlier when changing clothes, he kept fretting—'I've wasted away completely,' and 'If I'm not improving despite all this, there must be no hope.' But then he said," she added with forced brightness, "'Well, if even you recovered somewhat back then, perhaps cooler weather might bring some relief.'"

While imagining Dr.M’s agitation, Sasamura left through the genkan. When he visited Mr.I’s residence nearby—not far from there—a guest happened to be visiting on the second floor. Sasamura entered the downstairs room he always frequented, where beneath the veranda eaves adorned with elegant blinds, Gifu lanterns glowed, while by the azure bamboo fence, pliant bush clover branches arched like Tomozome-dyed fabric. During his absence, the garden’s flower beds had been meticulously tended. The proofsheets heaped high on the desk suggested Mr.I’s works were being received with even greater public favor recently.

30 After the guest had left, the host came down wearing a stylish yukata with a pale gray heko obi wrapped loosely around him, his face looking distinctly refreshed. This man’s taste in attire and room decorations, reminiscent of authors from bygone eras, perfectly matched his state of mind—detached from the surrounding atmosphere. Every time Sasamura visited this place, he felt as though he were stepping into a realm entirely foreign to him.

In the back, coquettish women's voices could be heard. In the flower garden—like something out of a kusazōshi picture book—lamplight cast a pale glow, and the night breeze stirred with a hushed grace.

“I’ve been devoting entire days to this.” “Trying planting them over there, then moving them over here.” “Once I start tinkering, there’s no end to it.” “Come autumn, the insects will start chirping readily enough again,” said Mr.I, taking a pinch of cut tobacco and inhaling with vigorous breaths. Even in that strained tone, his creative mood seemed stretched to its limits—as they spoke, Sasamura found himself unable to escape the void within.

It was quite some time later that Sasamura appeared walking with Mr.O at Kagurazaka's festival grounds, where the crowd of laborers had finally thinned. Mr.O kept a house in a secluded spot with the wife he had married the previous year. After leaving Mr.I's residence, Sasamura found his feet turning again toward that direction. Mr.O had brought a rattan chair to the second-floor railing to rest his head weary from afternoon writing, but to Sasamura's eyes—accustomed to the room with its massive bookshelves stuffed with volumes and walls cluttered with antique ornaments—the space felt more nostalgic than his own sparse study. On the desk sat a lamp burning dimly, before it a manuscript dense with cross-outs and marginal notes.

The two walked around looking at plants meant for Mr.O's garden, but Sasamura, though maintaining an irritated state of mind, still followed Mr.O who was accompanied by a student attendant. At the base of the slope, they encountered Mr.I who had also come out seeking plants. The slope lined with planted trees showed sparse human figures. There, Mr.O found something resembling Taiwanese reeds, purchased about two clumps, and had the student attendant carry them back. Mr.I returned home bearing flower pots.

Mr.O used his remaining small change to enter the beer hall and quench his thirst, but Sasamura joined him. The two picked at ham in a secluded room, talked awhile, then went outside. The commotion along the street had largely quieted. After parting from Mr.O, Sasamura slipped through a shadowed alleyway back to his deserted lodging.

“Won’t you come take a look at my place?”

When parting, Sasamura tried inviting Mr.O. "Nah, I'll rest. Your lodging's rather dreary too."

At the lodging, the lodgers had settled into sleep. Making his way along the long corridor and entering his room, he found the tightly shut interior still holding the evening's residual heat. Sasamura cracked open the higher small window to let in some air, but soon laid his weary body down on the futon.

For two or three days, Sasamura began working from the cool of the morning. Into the two rooms of the front annex suddenly came a woman around forty who appeared to be the wife of a downtown merchant, as if she had come to catch her breath. The woman, who seemed to have some physical ailment, lay sprawled out with a pillow every day. From time to time, a woman around thirty would visit with her young daughter; they would eat fruits and spend half a day chatting leisurely before leaving. The koto borrowed from the lodging's daughter was strummed in time with the woman's languid singing voice.

“It’s unbearably noisy.”

Sasamura frowned at the serving maid but made no move to change rooms. 31

When their divided finances became untenable, Sasamura soon gave up the lodging—this after a friend in Yanaka had finally resolved Ogin’s physical situation. By then, the nephew too had been taken back to the countryside by his brother-in-law. The nephew was spiraling further into delinquency. Late at night he would drag rickshaw pullers home from Asakusa or bring crowds of companions to intimidate his uncle—acts he showed no hesitation in committing. The gang would gather at the vacant house to guzzle sake as they pleased or belt out popular songs with no regard for their surroundings.

“How ’bout some pickles?” A young man with rolled-up sleeves staggered in drunk from the back door and demanded of Ogin.

“Go call Shin,” Sasamura said, his face pale. “You just leave him be. It’s too dangerous to even go near him.” Ogin would peek in from the back door and report the situation to Sasamura.

The gang threatened nearby liquor shops and tempura restaurants. “He says if Uncle speaks up, he’ll kill him.” Sasamura heard such things from Ogin once or twice. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been saying you’ll kill me...” When Sasamura saw his nephew returning from outside at dusk, he suddenly confronted him. The nephew, reeking of alcohol, did not even sit down. Then, with a fierce look, he said, “I’ll kill you,” and went to the kitchen to get a blade.

“You! Run!” Before Ogin’s shrill cry had even faded, the nephew entered gripping a kitchen knife, supported from behind by Ogin herself. Hearing the crash of an overturned water jar in the kitchen, the college student renting next door came rushing through the back door to help.

By the time Sasamura, who had fled outside, returned home, the nephew was no longer there.

“Someone with such a gentle face doing such violent things—it’s rather shocking, isn’t it?” Ogin had been unsettled all night, but Sasamura wasn’t feeling particularly well either. When the nephew searched for the white-sheathed dagger that had been stored at the bottom of the trunk, it was nowhere to be found; instead, there emerged items like a Chinese fan bearing the handwritten inscription of someone Sasamura had carefully preserved. Even after the brother-in-law of the nephew—who was Sasamura’s cousin—had coaxed him away and taken him along, a persistent ache remained in Sasamura’s head. The eccentric Sasamura was not well-regarded by his cousins and the like.

“That person doesn’t think so badly of Shin-chan.” After seeing off those two，Ogin remained preoccupied with that matter. It was shortly after this disturbance that a friend came to confirm Sasamura’s stance regarding Ogin. Until then，the two had met repeatedly to discuss this very issue. While Sasamura continued hurrying through Dr.M’s work，the merits of separation versus continuation were debated at length between them.

"My mother disapproves of separation, but regardless—settle this before the child grows much larger. If you make a clean break, I'll of course consent." "Even at half your proposed terms, I think we can mostly reach an agreement."

The worldly-wise friend left the lodging with those words. “I might speak somewhat ill of you, so you should be aware of that.” As he was leaving, the friend reiterated his point to Sasamura. By the time the friend returned, considerable time had passed. Sasamura kept lying down and getting up, unable to settle his mind. And he himself couldn’t determine which way it would turn out to be more fortunate. He had no intention of forcing a judgment.

“I met and spoke with various people,” said the friend, returning to Sasamura’s room with an expression that defied his expectations, his voice low. “You know—it might be better if you stay together after all.” The friend took a breath before speaking in broken fragments. “Given your attitude toward her and hearing how she’s devoted herself to you all this time—there’s some merit to her side of things.” “And as I spoke with her more, I realized she’s endured real hardships—she seems to grasp the situation thoroughly.” “Her own thoughts differ somewhat from what we’d envisioned.” “Most of all—when she wept while gazing at the baby suckling her breast—even I found myself at a loss.”

The two discussed the conditions for staying together for some time. "She’s a woman with a certain charm that works on men," the friend muttered. "Once everything’s settled, I’ll follow after you," Sasamura said while seeing off his friend, who was heading out once more.

Thirty-Two

About two hours after the friend had left carrying the conditions for their cohabitation, Sasamura returned home with a sensation like a bamboo rod springing back to its former shape after being bent. When night came, the three of them played flower cards in the six-mat room at the rear. That Sasamura had been leaking complaints about the woman’s conduct to his friend—and that these grievances had now mostly dissolved from the friend’s mind through her daytime explanations—could be detected even in the friend’s manner of speaking. Her arguments had followed a sound logical progression.

“I’ve had a long association with Sasamura-kun myself, but I’ve never encountered troubles like this before,” the friend abruptly confronted them. The woman listened in silence. “...Anyway, please leave it to me.” “After we separate—if you say you want to start a business or something—though my help may be insufficient, I intend to do my best to look out for you. I’ll never do you wrong.”

The friend had advanced the conversation to that point. The woman sought criticism from the friend regarding her own attitude toward Sasamura. She recounted her struggles since coming to this house without even bedding—Sasamura’s dreadful mood swings, her pawnshop visits despite her frail health, and how she repeatedly rescued Sasamura from crises with money earned through her own efforts. “Sasamura keeps insisting I’m only staying here out of greed or some ulterior motive, but if that were true, I’d have far better places to go.” “I feel drawn to this child too, and having already failed once before—if something messy were to happen again now, I couldn’t possibly face my relatives.”

Her mother added in a grave tone from beside her. The progression of that conversation and Ogin’s demeanor at the time could be imagined through the friend’s brief account. Sasamura could not refute that cold logic. Though he had no particular objection to staying together, he could not believe the woman’s feelings would ever seep deeply into his own heart. When they grew candid with each other, there were aspects of her manner and speech that drew him in, but warm emotions rarely mingled between them. At the bottom of Sasamura’s mind lingered faint dissatisfactions and a shadowy melancholy, but he now lacked the leisure to examine them closely.

The flower card game proceeded with lively energy. Slow-witted Sasamura would sometimes lose track of the cards as he played. Then at an unexpected moment, he committed an unforeseen error. Ogin found it difficult to play her cards while trying to shield Sasamura.

When a blue combination was nearly formed in Ogin’s hand, the friend who had been teasing her smoothly placed a peony card on his palm and flashed it before her eyes with a playful gesture. “How unfortunate—you’re not the only one drawing flower cards here.” “How mean of you!” Ogin sharply slapped that hand. The flower cards were put away into the box quite late. Signs of fatigue were visible on everyone’s faces. Sasamura’s mind was foggy.

“Thank you so much for your unexpected concern. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a host… Please give my regards to your family…” After talking for a while, Ogin closed the door and came back inside while seeing off her departing friend. Her face, with her hair pulled back tightly, had recently begun to regain its fullness. Sasamura stared at the lamp while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette that irritated his tongue, but he began to feel a vague regret about having settled the matter that day. He also felt that the woman’s somewhat lax attitude during the card game was hard to comprehend.

“I’d like you to refrain from that sort of rash behavior.” Sasamura brought up the time when Ogin had hit the friend’s hand. “It’s fine because that was Mr.B, but if it had been anyone else, they would have thought it quite strange. Don’t you feel ashamed doing something like that?” “I... didn’t notice at all.” “I did something like that?” “Since we were playing cards, I couldn’t remain so formal the whole time—I might have gotten carried away, but...”

As she said this, Ogin let the child suckle at her breasts. Sasamura’s concern over such matters struck her as odd instead.

33

The work progressed little by little. As he progressed, he grew more attuned to the original text and naturally mastered the core principles of revision. He began taking interest in the work itself. With the long-standing problem at least temporarily resolved and his mind somewhat lightened, he found himself steadily moving his brush forward without pause. After two or three days of not setting down his brush, Sasamura suddenly remembered and went to check on the house. When he entered, he found the child still clad in birth garments lying atop a spacious lacquered-paper desk that had been pulled near the well-ventilated window to avoid fleas. It was past mid-August, yet the heat remained oppressive. Before the child’s eyes spun a windmill whirling round and round in the breeze. Looking at that face, Sasamura felt something akin to pity.

Ogin took down the yukata fabric that had been placed atop the chest of drawers and showed it to Sasamura.

“It’s almost time for Shoichi’s shrine visit. It seemed too pitiful to go in just the clothes on his back, so I bought two lengths of this fabric last night.” “This isn’t exactly cheap—it finally came to seventy-five sen with this….” Ogin said with a desolate smile. Sasamura sat by the window with his sleeves rolled up and legs stretched out. The mother was boiling water for washing in the kitchen.

“For this child’s first kimono to cost only seventy-five sen… I can’t help but feel so sorry for him…,” said Ogin, her eyes brimming with tears. “One piece should be more than enough. Besides, this isn’t much of a pattern,” Sasamura muttered. “You say that, but it’s not so bad. For children, this kind of thing is best. Besides, since there’s enough material here, I can’t even call it insufficient.” “When the doctor was talking, I should have just let him have his way.”

“Oh well, it’s fine. Even if we have next to nothing… when you think about him being raised by someone else’s hands….” Ogin had wanted to make the garments from at least meisen silk or merino wool, but waiting for that seemed unlikely to bring the time when she could make them. “And even if we don’t go for the shrine visit, we still have to give gifts to those who celebrated for us. At the tobacco shop nearby, they hear about it every day. This may not be a respectable area, but there aren’t so many poor people here. If at all possible, I’d like to take him to the guardian deity’s shrine.”

In the kitchen where the western sun streamed in, the meticulous mother made the child take a bath. Ogin also rolled up her sleeves and helped with it. Soon, the child’s reddish body, dried with a towel, was dusted unevenly with talcum powder. “He’s a beautiful child. Not a single blemish...” said Ogin as she stroked the chubby thighs and arranged the coarse swaddling cloth. In the blowing wind, the child was happily flapping their limbs about.

After finishing the evening meal, Sasamura went to visit Dr. M. Dr. M had spread a futon in the cool detached room downstairs and was lying there. Around that time, Dr. M’s tumor had begun causing considerable pain. Even his altered face showed traces of anguish, and as he spoke, his consciousness would occasionally grow hazy. He seemed to find even sitting up laborious.

Sasamura spoke of how his lodgings' inconveniences made work difficult, his wish to vacate the place, and indirectly requested money.

“Did you need something?” Dr.M offered a completely misplaced greeting. His speech lacked its usual clarity. Within Dr.M—whose condition had progressed with terrifying speed—there existed both a desperate struggle to survive and fleeting pangs of torment. Dr.M, whose capacity for resistance weakened daily, was in no state to listen to Sasamura’s desperate circumstances. “I haven’t received anything from them yet either…,” Dr.M said reluctantly, taking several bills from the bag beside him and handing them to Sasamura. The sight of him keeping such a bag close was unprecedented in Dr.M’s circumstances until now.

Sasamura felt a pang of guilt. Whether the manuscript would be completed or Dr.M would die first—even Sasamura didn’t know.

34 Having vacated his lodgings, Sasamura found himself setting up his desk once more in the old four-and-a-half tatami room. In the neighborhood during that single summer, the population had greatly increased. The figures of housewives holding children born around the same time as Shoichi, standing at their gates in the evening, occasionally caught Sasamura’s eye. The cute boy of about four whom Ogin often brought over—giving him sweets and feeding him meals to win over his affection—had grown considerably in the brief time since they’d last seen him. It was said the child had been born among real siblings in a certain prosperous carpenter’s household nearby.

“It’s strange how once you have a child of your own, you start noticing all the children around us.”

Ogin held onto the lattice and stared fixedly at the child climbing up and down the window. The figure seemed somehow insubstantial. "Right now he doesn't know anything and just plays around like this, but when he grows up, even he'll have all sorts of things to think about." Sasamura couldn't help dwelling on that gloomy house. The mother of the child who couldn't marry had recently entered into a strange relationship with the elderly neighborhood head.

The daughter from the rice cracker shop across the way brought her two-year-old boy over to Ogin’s place, talking about her own misfortunes while gazing at the child’s face and weeping. The child’s father had been the illegitimate son of a prominent landowner in Shiba. Now disowned by his parents, he was imprisoned. The child had been conceived when the woman was working at a teahouse. Ogin cried along with her and handed the child a bib.

“That child might not survive.” “The mother’s so worried her milk has dried up, you know.” “When it comes to health—well, there’s only our own child like this.” “If she were to die, that woman’s body would float up…” Though Sasamura still hadn’t fully embraced the mindset of raising a child, even he couldn’t remain detached when the boy fell ill.

In the evening, the child who had been held by Ogin and shown the outside suddenly vomited up milk violently, suffering unable to even cry.

“You! You! Shoichi is in trouble…!” Ogin shouted as she came running into the house.

The child seemed to have innately inherited his father’s constitution with weak stomach and intestines. Ogin hurriedly took him to the doctor, but that night she sat on the futon throughout till dawn warming her sickly child’s easily chilled abdomen with her own body. Sasamura was roused time and again by those clinging cries yet merciless thoughts flashed through his mind at intervals.

As Ogin and her child had not shown their faces for some time, an elderly relative from Shitaya came visiting unexpectedly one evening. Ogin, who had been putting the child to sleep, hurriedly carried them out back when that shrill voice reached her ears, but she found no chance to hide the small pillow.

“What’s this about… this pillow?” the elderly woman said, scrutinizing it intently.

Ogin laughed and laughed, then entered carrying the child. “So that’s your child…” The elderly woman let out a laugh. “No wonder something seemed off—my son had noticed it ages ago.”

35

Not long after Ogin’s father—who had come to Tokyo upon being notified by this old maid—returned to the countryside, the family registry was sent to Sasamura. Her father, who had bungled various ventures in Tokyo and then failed in the silk industry, grew impatient trying to recoup his losses and was badly burned in stocks—leaving him entangled in managing affairs for his nephew’s main family household. He had been accompanied by Kinuya—the old maid’s second son and a doctor—when visiting Sasamura’s house during that season when one begins wanting lined haori in mornings and evenings. Sasamura had met this Kinuya twice before. Kinuya, who was set to inherit an old family with distant branch relations, was addressed as “Brother, brother” by Ogin. That Kinuya loved Ogin beyond mere sisterly affection also became clear to Sasamura.

“Aunt probably intended to have Brother and me end up together or something…,” Ogin said, laughing sadly as she brought up old memories. “Please call Brother over just once,” Ogin kept begging Sasamura. When Sasamura happened to be selecting flowers with a friend in Yanaka, he sent a rickshaw puller with a handcart to fetch him. Kinuya arrived promptly with the affected manner of a self-important doctor, after which Sasamura himself went out with Ogin. They then went together to a vaudeville theater. Kinuya, who adored children, never once released Shoichi from his arms.

Ogin’s father, who appeared to be around fifty-five or fifty-six, was a quiet, well-mannered man. He bore no resemblance to the man we had heard about in rumors—the one said to have squandered his fortune on drink and women. “My father’s become so much weaker in just a short time. When he was in Tokyo before, he wasn’t like that,” Ogin said to Sasamura after her father—drunk that evening—had gone to bed. “It might be due to age, but with the main family on the verge of collapse, he must’ve completely lost his spirit. Father had always clung to the notion that no matter what reckless things he did, there was still the main family to fall back on.”

Ogin herself seemed rather disappointed by this. Sasamura had never even attempted to consider such matters. Ogin's upbringing, her past life, her family lineage, the people surrounding her—such things held not even the slightest value for Sasamura, who had never bothered to inquire about his own ancestors. He would occasionally hear about their ancestors from his brother. He had caught fragments of various legends passed down through his maternal family. Crude Buddhist statues plundered during the Korean campaigns, letters from generals of that era, autographed documents by Toyotomi Hideyoshi... Such childhood memories of being shown these artifacts had long faded from his mind. The only thing that occasionally made him glance backward was his maternal grandfather, whose constitution was said to mirror his own. This grandfather had reportedly stabbed a friend who embezzled government bonds before committing seppuku in rage. Born as the third son to a second wife in a declining family and raised amidst decadent airs, Sasamura naturally possessed only vague notions of concepts like home and family. Clutching at these fragile artistic endeavors—if only he could survive through them—Sasamura had been dragged through each passing day for six or seven years, never once contemplating any long-term future with Ogin.

“With your intellect, well—at least try to train that woman properly.” Even these words from the advising friend left Sasamura completely numb. The next day when Sasamura awoke, his father was drinking morning tea with his mother in the tearoom. On his mother’s face—as she partook in this rare shared tea—lay an irrepressible look of joy. Though he only learned of it much later, Sasamura had come to imagine those distant days when the two had been intimate.

36

The morphine injections that Dr. M had occasionally tried to forget his suffering had become a constant practice by autumn. While the injection was effective, Dr. M’s mind resembled wilted flowers moistened by night dew. “An indescribably delicate sensation,” Dr. M said, lingering regretfully as that limited time slipped away. Sasamura—now that Dr. M’s work was complete—set aside the brush he had taken up for his own writing in a flustered state and occasionally went to check on him. They took turns keeping vigil in the desolate sickroom through the nights. At Dr. M’s prompting, they would each bring food and sip alcohol all night while laying out their offerings. Ogin arranged chicken, matsutake mushrooms, and other items in a lidded dish for Sasamura.

“You’re enjoying quite the feast,” Dr.M jested. One day Sasamura wrote until about eight o’clock before suddenly remembering something and going out. It was a stormy evening with fierce wind and rain, leaving few pedestrians in the streets. Having grown weary of his bedsores’ pain, Dr.M’s appearance had changed completely after reclining in an armchair for some time. His once dusky complexion now bore a silkworm-like pallor; when he lay still with closed eyes, he looked as noble as a stone statue. His hair had been cropped short. When Dr.M began sinking into sleep, the group withdrew to the adjacent room. A painter who had joined them spread out some calligraphy paper that was there and began sketching absurd cartoons. Portraits of Dr.M and the others were drawn. Haiku and satirical verses were scribbled down haphazardly. As night deepened, their merriment intensified. Their laughter abruptly startled Dr.M from sleep.

“Aah...” A long sigh escaped from Dr. M’s restless body. In his eyes as he scanned their faces with piercing intensity lay unconcealable unease. “Let me see.” A faint shadow of a lonely smile drifted across Dr. M’s previously agitated features. He then took up a brush himself and lost himself in composing verses.

After dawn broke, the group withdrew from there.

In the Yamanote town, persimmon leaves lay scattered across the road as a lukewarm wind carried the grassy scent of vegetation.

“Do you think Dr. M is aware of it?” “To avoid disappointing his family, it even seems he’s deliberately maintaining that kind of act. But a patient’s mind turns out to be surprisingly unaware.”

After exiting the gate, Mr.O and Sasamura walked along while engaged in this conversation. The feeling of despair they had felt when first facing Dr.M after receiving the tragic diagnosis had gradually withered in the hearts of the two men.

“It seems the cancer isn’t just in the stomach anymore.” “It’s also reached the throat area.” By the time such whispers had reached everyone’s ears from no particular source, Sasamura too had few opportunities to speak with Dr. M. It was on a certain late night not long after that when, prompted by the doctors’ statement, messengers and telegrams were dispatched to the homes of close relatives. Around the high-piled sickbed, people gradually gathered.

A certain painter with a heart condition was the first to rush over. "Look at this state!" he exclaimed, entering with a pale face and gasping for breath. The patient, who had been in a coma, opened his eyes as if roused by the morning injection, and suddenly the faces of the many people surrounding him came into view. The room was filled with a somber air of anxiety. The quiet sound of footsteps ascending and descending the staircase could also be heard. And it gave the patient a terrifying premonition.

37 When the intense excitement in his head gradually subsided, Dr. M would occasionally converse with close relatives. There was little difference from his usual condition. Excitement—or rather fury—had thrown Dr. M's mind into distressingly chaotic disarray. Was this inability to endure the physical agony of approaching death, or rebellion against inescapable fate like a petulant child? Through choked voice emerged torrents of anguished cries.

When the pain subsided, Dr.M's condition returned to normalcy. At times he would even lapse into drowsy comatose states. Requests began emerging here and there—to take his wife, exhausted from prolonged nursing care, to a hot-spring cure; to donate his corpse to medical science for autopsy. "Once dead, there'll be no more pain." Dr.M offered this with a desolate smile. "Bring me all your wretched faces!" Dr.M shouted, his clouded eyes sweeping a piercing gaze across the countenances of those drawing near.

“...Eat unpalatable things and live as long as you possibly can,” Dr.M admonished. The restrained sobs of women clinging to their sides hung in the solemn air. The crowd filling the second floor held their breath in complete silence. Many stood packed in the back.

Dr. M drew his last breath late that afternoon.

By the time the funeral was held, Sasamura had already returned home twice. He even visited the home of a certain magazine’s editor to sell hastily completed manuscripts. The reporter, who had had no dealings with Dr. M during his lifetime, was enjoying gathering various ceramics around him. And he proceeded to explain about an old Chinese teapot for which he had been keeping water simmering on a low flame. Dirty ceramics were taken down from shelves or reverently extracted from boxes. And he provided an explanation for each one. The concept of the novel the reporter was working on was also discussed. It was based on the old Yoshiwara earthquake and incorporated concepts akin to the law of causality derived from Buddhism.

Sasamura listened without showing any sign of displeasure, but he was worried about his own preparations for the funeral. The talkative reporter polished Sabita’s pipe while guiding the conversation through various topics. When Sasamura returned to Ushigome, it was long after Dr. M’s corpse—which had been carried out from the veranda onto a pallet through the morning’s steady drizzle and taken to the autopsy room—had been neatly sutured back together and returned. At the entrance, figures coming to offer condolences remained sparse.

“It seems Dr. M was indeed found to have an abnormal brain.”

At the entrance, such talk had begun. "Why would he suggest something like an autopsy?" Sasamura couldn't help recalling Dr.M's proposal—one that seemed tinged with theatrical humanity even at death's threshold. "I want to see the funeral too." When Sasamura returned home to make preparations, Ogin said with affected sweetness, though their six-month connection to relatives in that Ushigome neighborhood weighed on their considerations.

Before the funeral procession began, there was a commotion as turbulent as boiling water. Inside and outside the house, people were packed tightly, moving about without any order. Sasamura’s face was utterly exhausted when he returned from the funeral.

“I rushed over by rickshaw, but it was after the funeral had just left...” Ogin asked about how the women were faring.

Sasamura did not want his own unremarkable appearance to be seen by anyone.

38

By the hands of the neighborhood head, bamboo grass was erected again at the gate. Sasamura was writing a lengthy manuscript to send to the countryside, driven by an urgent restlessness as he listened to the north wind rustling dryly. On Sasamura’s shoulders rested a burden even heavier than at the end of last year. His life had also grown somewhat more complicated. And it was around the time when the town had fully donned its spring attire that he visited the house of a certain intermediary in Kōjimachi early one morning, embracing that manuscript. To Sasamura’s eyes, long confined to a single room, the bustling twilight town felt somehow pleasant, but the prospects of the manuscript he carried were uncertain. Sasamura had experienced such situations countless times before. And he could not help surveying his own lonely surroundings shaped by meager talent.

“If this falls through, it’ll be terrible.” That day, having returned empty-handed due to their mismatched calculations, Ogin came to Sasamura’s side and spoke anxiously. Shōichi—now finally shedding that peculiar sour smell infants carry—was sometimes carried out to the desk by Sasamura and treated like a plaything. And ultimately made to cry. “Poor thing—you’re being too rough…” Ogin gathered up the child being pinched and bitten, pressing her breast to his mouth.

There were times when he would take him to the less crowded morning baths on a whim. Afterwards, Ogin came bringing a towel. “Father handles the baby quite well.” When Ogin returned home, she told her mother.

The baby, carried on the back of a poor girl living in the back alleys of this town, was taken to nearby temple grounds and sunlit storefronts of cheap candy shops, but out there—coaxed with sweets crammed into his mouth—he often developed stomach troubles. Ogin had considered it a virtuous deed to reduce by even one mouth to feed in that struggling babysitter’s household, but this arrangement too proved short-lived. “You can’t leave someone who’s sick out in this cold, dust-choked wind.”

Returning from an outing, Sasamura saw his child’s limp face tied to the bony-backed nursemaid and immediately scowled upon entering the house. “With two women here, you’re being careless,” he said. “Carrying him around like that isn’t good for his health at all.” Ogin hurried to summon the nursemaid. At her home, a widowed mother twisted palm-fiber ropes while raising her brood of children. Ogin knew well the wretched conditions of that household.

“In rural farming households, they carry them around all day long, you know. Even so, all the children are healthy…” The mother said as if making an excuse. Ogin also began to laugh as she recounted things like the rough babysitters her brothers had endured, or how their father would roll them up in futons or lock them out late at night in his brusque manner. The vague impressions of a country house lingering in her memory and the figure of her childhood self were recalled with nostalgia. “Even so, we all grew up like this… And now for me to become a mother…”

“Even so, they all grew up like this, you know.” “And yet here I am with children of my own….”

As the year drew to a close, with unexpected money beginning to flow in from unexpected sources and such, Ogin suddenly felt her spirits lift. And for spring preparations, she began going out shopping now and then. Sasamura also went out together and would sometimes return carrying Seto pottery and such. When the month's end arrived, the narrow room became cluttered with things like ceremonial rice cakes and decorative straw ornaments, and the sound of Ogin's geta clattered as she went in and out of the house late into the night. Her mother was also bustling about working in the kitchen. A new sacred rope was hung on the household altar, and the oil lamp burned a deep red.

Sasamura couldn’t help feeling as though he were being shown someone else’s commotion. And then, he couldn’t help but stir it all up. “What are you going to do with such a big mirror rice cake?” Whenever his mind clouded over, Sasamura would take perverse satisfaction in finding fault with every single thing the two women were doing.

39

The New Year passed lonesomely. In Sasamura’s finicky room—where they’d reluctantly placed the smaller ceremonial rice cake—the withered petals of a scrawny potted plum clung dryly to its branches, while the space by his desk remained as desolate as ever. Sasamura often found himself recalling those days from around this time two years ago when he’d wandered aimlessly through Osaka. There, swaddled in a new Inverness coat that restricted his movement, he would walk alone each day through the Dōtonbori district. And he’d let himself be drawn into the stifling human heat of theater halls, variety shows, and cheap eateries.

At times, his figure would be found wandering aimlessly through dimly lit, cramped backstreets, or—having failed to enter anywhere—ending up in some unexpected outskirts under the pale electric light of a second-floor room in a quiet poultry restaurant, managing to get a lonely supper. When his pockets began to grow empty, he would retreat to his brother’s acquaintance’s house in a quiet suburb to rest his overstimulated head and immerse himself in work.

On his way back from Kyushu during his second visit to Osaka, Sasamura's jaded mind began to cool—the vile air that had permeated the city throughout February had become unbearable. Seeking a residence where he could immerse himself in quiet contemplation and creation, he hurried back to Tokyo. Sasamura felt he had finally begun to understand the place into which he had fallen. "Shall we go somewhere?" Sasamura, who had placed the remaining money in his desk drawer, recalled the loneliness of his solitary journeys aboard ships and trains, and at hot spring inns.

“And then we need to buy some supplies.” “A household with absolutely nothing—like ours—is pretty rare.” Ogin leaned against the brazier and looked around the room.

“If we’re going, I’d like to have the little one pay his respects once, so please take us to Narita-san. That way he won’t get night blindness.” “Since there’s no worry of running into people there, that would do. It’s a mineral spring—they’ve got baths perfect for staying a night or so…” “When are we going?” “Is it too late to go today?” “If we go there now, it’ll be dark by arrival.” The next morning when Sasamura awoke, Ogin had already bound her hair in a bun and fastened the half-collar of her underrobe. It was late February—the penetrating cold from the previous night had deepened, and snowflakes drifted down intermittently, yet pale sunlight still filtered through the paper-paned doors at times.

In the train car, the child pressed their hands against the windowpane where droplets streamed down, bracing their feet against Ogin’s knees as they shouted noisily. From behind, some women peered in to comfort or reached out to beckon them over. The sight of Ogin walking across the platform with her hair in a bun struck even Sasamura as odd. “You look like a duck.”

Sasamura muttered from behind. “Am I really that plump…” Ogin kept turning to look back at her own figure. Having the rickshaw puller carry the child, they climbed up and down stone steps in every direction, yet the bright mountain air bore no resemblance to a Buddhist temple’s atmosphere. The stone towers and plaques embedded with donation amounts still felt distinctly Naritasan-like. Sasamura pressed Ogin—who kept trying to buy amulets and talismans in her eagerness—and soon left the place.

At the hot spring inn surrounded by many old plum trees, every room stood empty. Ogin, carrying the child, spent the next day as well sometimes walking along the wide corridors, sometimes climbing during breaks in the light rain to the Fudo Hall that loomed atop a high cliff. In the plum orchard, bush warblers occasionally sang, and the day remained humid from morning till night. “After all, there’s no place like home.” When evening came and the storm shutters were closed, Ogin, sitting in the spacious room, spoke up.

Forty

Around the time the child began pulling themselves up to stand, Sasamura had to vacate the house that had been transferred from K—to the carpenter out back. The carpenter had drawn up renovation plans immediately upon purchasing it, but even before that, new rental houses had already been completed on the subdivided plot of land behind that K—had been leasing out. K—’s rental venture had ended in failure, but the carpenter built four houses—all fully occupied. “If they’re building houses out back, we can’t stay here either—and what’s more, it’s a two-story house.”

“Once they’re finished, we could move over there, right?” While having these conversations, Sasamura and Ogin would occasionally go out back to look, but all the houses were cramped and unpleasantly constructed. Before the walls had even dried, there were already people lugging in luxurious bedding and lamps—upstart gentlemen types who perpetually lodged elsewhere, single men all.

“I wonder what kind of people they are in that house.” “They apparently failed in their work and had to close down their home somewhere in the downtown area.” Ogin was trying to sniff out their character from the patterns of zabuton cushions drying on the handrail. One cold morning around ten o’clock, as Sasamura came out to the kitchen while using a toothpick, voices of a man and woman speaking in an unfamiliar regional dialect reached his ears—the young couple who had moved into the middle house facing their back door.

Ogin soon became close with the wife—a tall, slender woman with finely proportioned features. As they grew more familiar with each other’s temperaments, the wife began coming up to the tea room and speaking openly about her past in her thick regional dialect. The couple had been running a boarding house in Waseda until just recently coming here, but the wife, unaccustomed to Tokyo, hadn’t been able to grasp how things worked. Her husband had been commuting to Hongo University from there; they had known each other since her days as a geisha in their hometown, with her being seven or eight years his senior. Ogin, too, often went to talk at that house while holding the child, and soon the men also became close without reservation. The man named Okada seldom went out wearing a square cap. And he remained glued to the side of the long brazier.

The child was taken into the wife’s lap, where he was kissed on the cheeks and hugged tightly.

In May, the interior decorations Sasamura had bought from the street were displayed in the bright second floor of that house. The wife, who had a hysterical disposition, would often be found sobbing quietly alone by the long brazier when Okada was away. The voices of the two arguing also occasionally leaked through from behind. When they secured a house where Ogin and her child, along with a young man—a relative of Sasamura’s attending a private university who had been lodging with them at the time—could live, even during the move as belongings were carried in, the child spent half the day strapped to Okada’s wife’s back. The house was in an alley behind a street leading to Hongo from there, but after settling the three of them there, Sasamura had to go out again to search for his own lodging.

“We finally spent two New Years in this house.” On moving day, Ogin sat firmly in front of the emptied closet and began speaking with a thoughtful air. “Even a house like this—when it actually came time to leave, I couldn’t help feeling reluctant.” Sasamura too found himself recalling everything since Ogin had first come there. Over nearly two years, the white plank flooring of that kitchen had acquired a smooth, glossy sheen.

It was the season of damp, clinging winds—a time when one might occasionally want a lined haori. Sasamura sat on the trunk he had brought in, surveying the unsettled house, when Okada’s wife wandered along the veranda, rocking the crying child on her back. Ogin was busily wiping the floor with a rag when, every so often as if remembering, she would turn her face toward the child and say “There you go,” squatting down to show milk-filled breasts. The wind blowing in from the veranda with its shoji removed was still cold enough to chill the skin.

Forty-One

The lodging Sasamura had moved out of was located on a hill one slope up from where Ogin and the others lived. There was a balcony with a good view, and the rooms on the third floor were designated as the domain of maids wearing soft garments. Until summer vacation arrived, Sasamura had shut himself away in the unsettling second-floor four-and-a-half-mat room, though it felt more comfortable than last summer's lodging in Ushigome. When melancholy struck, Sasamura would wander over to check on the house. At the house hung a ninja figure bought from the nearby Konnyaku Yama festival market, alongside a goldfish bowl that delighted the child. Ogin kept watch over the child toddling along the shoji screens while considering what Sasamura might eat that evening, but he leaned against a pillar smoking tobacco like a visitor in someone else's home. Sasamura couldn't escape feeling acutely aware of how far he'd grown from those at the lodging house. Among the lodgers were two or three elderly gentlemen who returned from government offices to drink late with friends playing go—their spirits seeming little different from the surrounding students'. To Sasamura, this appeared enviable.

At nightfall, Ogin would carry the child out and accompany him as far as the top of the slope, but Sasamura—who would say “There you go” to the child before entering the lodging—felt something lingering in his chest that he simply couldn’t blend into the atmosphere of the place. The students who had already finished their exams were making cheerful laughter in every room. There were those darting about with handcarts and people bundling up their luggage. Sasamura exited his hot room above the kitchen and went out to the balcony, where he sat down on a rain-soaked chair and smoked in the darkness. There, two or three students came out. The powder-scented maids also emerged.

Sasamura’s decayed tooth began to ache, and he lay awake late into the night. Sasamura, trying to cool his agitated mind, had the men open the door and went outside. Outside, the rain spat down reluctantly, and the sky was pitch black. A wind had picked up. Through this, Sasamura descended toward Kasuga-cho. In a dark alleyway, he encountered two men in square-sleeved uniforms who came clattering after him to inspect his body, but his feet naturally turned toward home. “The enemy’s—life—entrusted to—…”

Assailed by the voices of military songs like this, Sasamura finally awoke around ten o’clock the next morning, but his sleep-deprived head felt even heavier. The military songs were being sung by a child from the house behind the plank fence.

By the time he had been moved to the lower room facing the garden, Sasamura too had grown quite accustomed to the lodging. Whenever Ogin displayed her disagreeable traits, Sasamura’s nerves would instantly bristle. And he summoned the law student who was boarding with them and consulted him about separating. At such times, Sasamura would find himself utterly convinced that the woman was detestable.

“Even I find this tedious...”

The woman tried not to reveal her vulnerability before her mother and the law student. That way of speaking further suggested unfavorable implications about her past to Sasamura. And all at once, even matters that had long been buried deep within his chest—each taking on its own significance—began grating on Sasamura's mind. "You people act like you've got some kept woman's mentality squatting in another's house." "Well, simpletons like us who don't understand anything clearly don't belong in a proper household like yours."

Ogin pressed on, her face pale. “If that’s how it is, then you should’ve called my father to settle things properly. But no—even with all your legal knowledge, you just consult Mr. Wakayama and do nothing but scheme to drive us out…” The frayed emotions of the two could not help but endlessly diverge and race apart.

Forty-Two

When a certain time had passed, the feelings of hatred and regret would vanish from his chest without trace, and the woman would appear new again in Sasamura's eyes. At such times, Ogin sufficiently evoked the impression of the woman he had first met. For a day or two, Sasamura had once again become part of the household. And even when returning to his lodging, his mind remained steeped in sweet reminiscences. He didn't even attempt to consider that the time would soon come when those very reminiscences would be betrayed.

“I truly thought I’d be driven out. Why must you behave like that?” Ogin couldn’t help being perplexed by Sasamura’s sudden emotional outbursts. “I’m suffering too.” Sasamura responded with a bitter smile.

“When I think I’ve nowhere else to go and say those things, I end up acting more forcefully than ever.” Ogin said with a laugh. “Your manner of speaking is quite harsh, you know. When you press me so aggressively, there’s no room left for logical arguments.” “When you flare up like that, I get all flustered and have no idea what to do… I suppose that’s due to having no proper education. Because of that, there’s no telling how self-conscious I feel in front of you. I resent my parents.” Ogin said in a withered voice.

Sasamura felt he could perceive how his own attitude toward the woman was mistaken. While forcing Ogin to be a docile wife, he couldn’t deny that he still harbored a rough mentality akin to handling a mistress or something of the sort. And he also began to think that perhaps he was filling that space day by day with nothing but transient stimulation and fleeting interest. “Still, you did go to school, didn’t you?” Sasamura said with an expression that seemed to be trying to ferret out something else about Ogin’s background.

“Well, I did go a little—to Yushima School…” “Swinging my lunchbox around, I’d walk through those parts—never listened to a word the teacher said…” Ogin laughed evasively. “Why didn’t your uncle go?”

“Uncle? Why do you think that was? When times were good, he was probably too busy amusing himself. And by then I’d already grown older—studies and such weren’t meant for someone like me.”

“But surely you can at least write a letter?”

“No.” “Go on, give it a try.” “I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, please teach me. Truly...” she said, though Sasamura had never actually seen Ogin write characters. When he returned to the lodging, Sasamura took up his brush to work on a war novel commissioned by a certain magazine. That publication had connections to Miyama too. Through what seemed like Miyama’s lingering influence, Sasamura occasionally caught news of him from the reporter who now sought him out instead. Wielding his brush, Sasamura sometimes despaired at his future prospects. After Dr.M’s death, finding his position advancing unexpectedly through sheer inertia rather than merit filled him—a man perpetually doubtful of his own talent—with unease rather than reassurance.

“So this talk about you boarding a warship as a war correspondent—is that true?”

One day, a friend from Yanaka saw Sasamura’s face and inquired. “But that was when there were no children. Even if they say there’s no danger, it’s still actual combat after all.” Having said that, the friend tried to sway Sasamura’s resolve. The utter unsuitability of such work was something Sasamura himself fully understood.

Forty-Three

By mid-summer, when a suitable house had been found in a quiet town near where Ogin stayed, both their hearts turned once more toward establishing a new household. When vacating their previous home had become urgent, Sasamura hadn’t been able to secure a residence they could move into together immediately. During this provisional separation, he had contemplated finding an opportune moment to formally announce their marriage.

“This is ridiculous – we can’t go on like this.” “No matter how much time passes, we still can’t even buy a single piece of furniture.” Ogin was muttering from time to time while looking over the lodging’s accounts.

When Ogin told him about the house she had found while passing by, Sasamura hurried to go see it.

The house stood on ground resembling a slope midway between two cliffs where few people passed. Around the rotting gate, the branches and leaves of two or three overgrown paulownia trees cast deep shadows, but within the gate, paving stones were laid out, and the building stood quite far back from the road. In the derelict garden on three sides, summer grass grew thick, and on the kitchen side of the house, old wooden doors were broken and floor joists were warped. However, the room facing the front garden with many trees—built in a somewhat detached section—had a sense of calm.

Sasamura quickly made the arrangements and returned, but moving so hastily without any preparation was not at all agreeable to Ogin. When it actually came time to live there, even that dilapidated house had its deficiencies.

“Isn’t there a more... suitable house?” “The well being at the bottom of the slope can’t be helped.” When Ogin heard the details of the house from Sasamura, her face showed reluctance. In her mind’s eye, she constantly pictured tidy lattice-door houses like those she’d once lived in—in Tsukiji and Kinsukechō. Ogin, who loved cleaning, wanted to live neatly in such a home—polishing the long brazier or sitting at her mirror stand. Moreover, she thought that even when moving out here, it would look better to the neighbors if they allowed themselves some leeway to prepare and arrange their belongings properly first.

“You think as long as there’s a gate, it’s fine…” Ogin said that too. “But you can’t expect to find such a good house. At that place, even if guests come, they won’t realize there’s a child for a while, and you’ll just have to put up with the well being a bit far.” Before long, Sasamura had someone carry a bucket and broom and went out with the student. He fetched water from the back and wiped down the musty closets and tatami mats. When he grew tired, he would step out onto the veranda and smoke tobacco. The spacious abandoned houses built on the surrounding high ground made it feel as though they were in a mountain temple while staying there—the wind cool and the air crisp.

Soon, Ogin came carrying the child on her back and left him by Sasamura’s side.

“Please,” she entreated. “It’s dangerous in such cramped quarters.” The child, clad in a white Chinese-style dress, toddled through the spacious room trailing after Sasamura. After taking a few steps, he plopped down onto the tatami. He could manage simple words now. Even after settling in, the women still complained about the distant well and the gloomy dampness of the tatami-floored family room, but Sasamura found contentment in having moved to a house with its first proper garden. When he went out, he would place plants people occasionally gave him into the rickshaw’s footrest to bring home. Various shrubs grew within the inner garden’s hedges—some purchased by Ogin and him together at Yakushi’s temple fair.

The child put on his shoes and, gleefully shouting, ran around the garden. Sasamura delighted in chasing the child up the small hill in the front garden again and again.

Ogin had gradually grown accustomed to the house, but even so, she rarely went out alone after sunset. Even at night, she often could not sleep peacefully. When the cherry leaves turned yellow and fell, signs of pregnancy began to appear in Ogin’s body once again.

Forty-Four When Ogin told him of this development, Sasamura— He felt as though he’d been bitten on the hand again. And his desire to escape responsibility grew even more intense than it had been the first time. As his curiosity gradually waned, Sasamura would sometimes find himself emotionally detaching from the woman, as though a spell had been lifted. At such times, his heart felt lonely, as though an illusion had vanished before his eyes. Once that mood had stalled, it was not easily regained. Days that felt loathsome continued for many days.

Such things seemed to occur for Ogin as well, but her fevers and chills always progressed more smoothly than the man’s.

“You were just toying with people from the start. That’s exactly how you sounded back then. Men are shameless creatures—that’s what I thought.” When old topics resurfaced, Ogin would sometimes say such things and laugh with a hollow smile.

“It seems rather strange, doesn’t it?” Sasamura said while gazing at Ogin’s face, which showed concern about her belly.

“To have been apart for two or three months and then end up with a child...”

In Sasamura’s mind, the figure of a man called Isotani suddenly flashed through his thoughts. The fact that Ogin had recently encountered by chance an older woman who had once served at the household of Isotani’s uncle and had since been occasionally commissioning sewing work from this skilled seamstress was something Sasamura had observed and was aware of. That woman had by now married a deft-handed carpenter living nearby. The seamstress who brought the finished garments even appeared at the entrance to Sasamura’s room to bow politely.

“She’s quite a character, isn’t she.” Ogin later laughed about that woman who kept a young husband. “Even someone like her has such deft hands… My uncle used to have her do all his sewing.” The tailored clothes she displayed with these words appeared remarkably well-made even to Sasamura’s eyes. At times, Sasamura would wonder whether Ogin and Isotani were exchanging messages through this woman. Even when Ogin returned late from evening errands, dark suspicions would inevitably cross Sasamura’s mind. At such times, he would scoop up the crying Shōichi and carry him toward the lamplit streets. And there he would wait for Ogin’s return.

Ogin, who loved shopping, went out and returned home via a different street, her arms full of an assortment of small items and her face bright. “Please try eating this—they’re famous salt crackers,” she said. “When I was in Kinusuke Town, I used to often go buy this.” Ogin exposed her white breast and let the child suckle at her taut breast. She wiped the tears from his face and gave a gentle smile.

“I met Mrs. Okada on the way here. Since they hadn’t been around for a while, I wondered what had happened—apparently they couldn’t maintain their household anymore and ended up moving to a lodging as a couple two or three days ago…”

Ogin began to talk while crumbling salt crackers. Sasamura’s conjectures would vanish at that moment, but he couldn’t help but feel that something dark still clung to Ogin’s body whenever she went out. “To be saddled with this responsibility for the third time—I’m the one who drew the short straw,” Sasamura said half-mockingly. “Even if it’s the third time, how pitiful… The first two were over in about four months each, and I ended up running away because I couldn’t bear them—and though I had a three-year relationship with Isotani, he was still a student and I was on my uncle’s side, so we only had this promise about adoption—it’s not like we met all that often.”

Forty-Five

Ogin didn’t particularly mind being questioned by Sasamura about Isotani in various ways, but even that topic gradually lost its initial interest for both of them. As the relationship between Ogin and Isotani and Isotani’s true character became clearer, Sasamura’s curiosity toward the woman waned, while in Ogin’s heart too, those faint transient dreams gradually lost their color. Still, in Ogin’s attitude of occasionally throwing herself at Sasamura, there undeniably lingered traces of nostalgia for a love that had been broken. When he imagined her in that light, the woman appeared beautiful in Sasamura’s eyes.

"But you must have heard from that woman how Isotani's been getting on lately." Sasamura inquired through a haze of smoke from the silver pipe that man had supposedly owned, though to Ogin the matter hardly seemed worth bringing up before him. "He's still idling about from what I hear." Neither the gleam that once lit Ogin's eyes when speaking of the man nor any shadow of ardor remained visible now.

“Has that fire in your chest already gone out?” Sasamura felt like he wanted to stir up those lingering embers once more.

“How long will you keep thinking such things?” “If you were only thinking about it, you wouldn’t behave this way.” “Besides, if I’d met him even once, I couldn’t possibly hide something like that.” The fact of the pregnancy became increasingly certain as the days passed. “You really do have potent seed, don’t you.” “But didn’t Mr. Miyama’s sister say that after examining you?” Ogin laughed while looking at Sasamura’s face.

“But it’s fine. Since it’s sad for a child to be alone, having up to three is okay.” From around that time, Sasamura gradually began to find his financial situation more manageable. A couple of new publishers started coming to request manuscripts, and the old newspapers he’d stored away gradually disappeared. Because of that, their livelihood was no longer as desperate as it had been at first. Whenever Sasamura returned from downtown, he would invariably stop by his regular toy store and find an unusual toy for Shōichi. The child began playing alone with the toys.

Ogin would still take out the pills stored in the drawer of the long brazier from that time and occasionally show them to Sasamura.

“When I think about that time, I feel so pathetic.”

Ogin gazed at the face of the child playing beside her, her eyes clouded. “Shō-chan, Mama saved you.” “When you grow up, Mama will tell you all about it again.” Ogin said in a tone meant to irritate Sasamura. “Let’s keep these pills stored like this forever so we don’t forget that time.” “Idiot.” Sasamura smiled bitterly. Ogin, having her milk taken for the fetus, gradually became aware of the child’s clinginess—his spirit wilting day by day. She tried making him cling to the old man’s hands, but the child disliked their stiffness compared to her supple ones. At night, when the child clung to her bosom as she tried sleeping in Sasamura’s room, he would sometimes be taken to the old man’s side, but it never worked. The child’s cries under those rough hands—hands devoid of any delicate understanding—pierced Sasamura’s mind like needles as he watched.

“Why don’t you take care of it?” Sasamura grimaced at Ogin, but she—having long left all matters of diaper changes and such to her mother—was oblivious to such things. Before and after Ogin’s physical recovery, the father’s and mother’s feelings toward their child had completely reversed.

Forty-Six

There was a young painter in the Kanda area said to be distantly related to Ogin. The man named Yamauchi and Sasamura had met once or twice before and knew each other. When dealing publicly with matters concerning Ogin, Sasamura found himself reminded of Yamauchi through Yoshimura—Yamauchi's cousin who frequented his place. Ogin's father, who had been close with Yoshimura's household, had also been acquainted with Yamauchi's father.

In spring, before Sasamura returned home for the first time in several years, the Sasamura couple and Yamauchi had grown close enough to visit each other.

One evening, Yamauchi, who had come to pay a New Year's visit, was thoroughly drunk. Yamauchi, who had once been vigorously promoted, was at that time incurring resentment from certain quarters due to his irreverent behavior. Though the rumors Sasamura had heard left the name "Yamauchi" with no favorable impression in his mind, from what Yoshimura and Ogin's mother told him about Yamauchi's family background and father, a different Yamauchi—distinct from his outward persona—began to take form in Sasamura's thoughts.

Yamauchi sat with glazed eyes, spilling the sake Ogin poured into his black crepe-silk crested haori and coarse-stiffened hakama, barely maintaining his posture. The hand holding the cup trembled incessantly.

“Painters certainly wear amusing costumes, don’t they,” Ogin remarked after Yamauchi had staggered off home. “They say Kanzaki – that cousin of Ofusa’s husband – is another heavy drinker too.”

"That man’s father was also a terrible drinker." The mother entered the sitting room littered with cups and dishes and began to speak. "After all, he was the kind of man who drank away an entire large fortune." "He was an extravagant man—I’ve heard stories that during his wild youth, he’d walk between the hot spring resort and town scattering money as he went." When the Sasamura couple visited, the father sat drinking next to his son in a perpetually restless manner. His way of speaking overflowed with absurd remarks that made the women double over laughing. He held out a sake cup to Sasamura,

“Mr. Sasamura, I’m this sort of person,” he said with a cheerful laugh. Yamauchi sat there smirking.

“Ugh, I hate this! A father and son drinking like that... It reminds me of my own father.”

Ogin announced she was going out while taking Shōichi by the hand.

“But they’re good people, aren’t they. “Because they have no relatives in Tokyo, they seem so attached to others…” Ogin, who quickly took note of how other households were run, spoke about Yamauchi’s way of life as if she had seen through it even after returning home. During the season of falling petals, Ogin was busy preparing Sasamura’s things for his homecoming. Four or five years ago, when he had returned home, Sasamura still hadn’t done anything. His attire also looked shabby. The displeased face of the mother at that time—when welcoming the first homecoming of the child born from her own womb—was still deeply etched in Sasamura’s mind.

“I should at least dress up a bit for your mother’s sake…” Sasamura told Ogin about such matters too. Even as Ogin painstakingly gathered trifling souvenirs and such，anxiety about Sasamura’s hometown clung persistently to her mind. “Since Shin-chan went back in that state，your mother and sister must already think poorly of someone like me anyway，” Ogin would often say．Yet she did not forget to show as much goodwill as possible during this opportunity．

On top of the several newly made and remade kimonos in various colors, Ogin also gathered Kin’ichi’s heko obi borrowed from Shitaya and other items. “The stiff obi is fine, but you should take this as well.” Around that time, Kin'ichi, along with his younger brother, had gone to the warfront as military surgeons.

Forty-Seven

Sasamura, who had returned to his hometown, could not remain there long. Sasamura—who had grown up in one of the dilapidated samurai districts of a large former castle town—had kept his eyes fixed unwaveringly ahead for so long that he scarcely had room to recall the scent of the land where he was raised. Yet around this time, he would sometimes cast glances back at the wretched figure of his younger self and the gloomy atmosphere that had surrounded him in those days. The first lively town he had walked through, led by his sister’s hand; the scent of the thickets in the desolate, wide vacant lot beneath stone walls where he had gathered crickets with neighborhood girls; the damp, narrow alley abundant with shade where boys he knew persevered—a place he had timidly hurried through in straw sandals while running errands for his mother; the quiet lawn under park trees where he had lain sprawled with lazy friends during detested school hours—each time he watched Shōichi growing day by day, Sasamura felt within his mind, wearied by a decade of struggle, an ache to deeply inhale that nostalgic air once more.

At the overgrown grave of his father, he thought he wanted to once more savor the devout and tender feelings of that time. Sasamura, who had been envisioning such things in his heart, descended to the dark night station built on the outskirts and was immediately overcome with a desire to turn his face away from the unpleasant memories of his youth enveloped by that coarse, desolate town.

The clattering of geta from the crowd silently descending the crude wooden staircase to the uneven earthen floor; the peculiar stench flowing through darkness from rice fields; dim inns resembling shacks visible through willow shadows in the station square; Osaka-style red lanterns hung at eateries lining both sides—Sasamura, jolted along the uneven stone-laden road in a sluggish rickshaw through this milieu, felt as though he were seeing a newly opened town for the first time.

As they twisted and turned through the town lined with houses bearing low eaves, a familiar main street eventually came into view. After passing several such streets, the rickshaw entered a desolate residential quarter lined with stone walls and earthen fences. From skies where heavy clouds hung low, rain began falling reluctantly. Through gaps in dark groves and hedges, glimmers of light still leaked out—the quiet town had not yet fully settled into sleep.

That evening, Sasamura stayed awake in a spacious second-floor room until roosters crowed, growing tipsy on two or three cups of sake while eating and immersing himself in conversation with his mother and sisters. The mother and sisters who had greeted him at the old-fashioned broad entrance gradually shed their initial shabbiness through conversation, yet their faces remained altered all the same. The marks of their long struggles against hardship-filled lives—of battling and striving—stood painfully evident on these women's aged faces.

The next morning, Sasamura visited a nearby doctor to have the coal dust that had gotten into his left eye on the train removed. Back when he had attended middle school, whenever he came down with a mild fever or felt pain in his brain or spinal cord, he would rush there—yet the house remained exactly as it had been in those days. The doctor, whose hair had been thinning, still showed no further signs of balding—a fact that struck Sasamura as almost peculiar.

Sasamura spent two or three days visiting his sisters' houses and his brother's adoptive home, but no matter where he searched through town, there was not a single person who resembled an old friend. By the time forgotten food flavors began clinging to his tongue, Tokyo had already resurged in Sasamura's mind. And as if fleeing those sunken cold eyes of his elderly mother—eyes seeking to grasp any chance to hear an aged parent's vulnerable feelings about circumstances too tangled for letters to convey, about living conditions with no one else to confide in—Sasamura, upon meeting his own child after years apart, kept restlessly walking outdoors rather than drawing near.

Forty-Eight

As Sasamura was about to leave the land, seen off by a small number of nephews and nieces and one brother-in-law, he felt as though he were hearing for the first time the faint heartbeat and muffled sobs of the mother who shared his blood. As the train glided smoothly out of the station premises into the wide field bathed in early summer's shade, Sasamura—his clouded face pressed against the window—was struck by the cool morning breeze, its freshness drawing tears that seeped from his eyes.

Having spent half a day face-to-face with his mother—with whom he had never shared a heartfelt conversation—Sasamura could not shake the feeling that her fidgeting demeanor that morning and careworn complexion from recent days seemed to pull at the train racing across the open fields, trying to drag it backward. The loneliness and poverty enveloping his solitary mother, the grandmother’s affection for the unfortunate orphan her daughter had left behind—all of this struck Sasamura’s heart with profound force.

...A most reluctant parting—who knows when we shall meet again... Though I saw you off beyond the gate and returned inside, I could not bring myself to sit down. Clutching the clothing you left behind, my nose bled freely until my senses grew distant—so I write... Upon arriving in Tokyo and immediately receiving such a letter, Sasamura's eyes vividly conjured his mother's flustered figure when she had entered the room where his child had been sitting until that day.

“This is exactly the problem. If things have reached this point, why couldn’t we have opened up to each other more like mother and child while we were together?” Sasamura threw down the letter and laughed bleakly. He could not help pitying the mother who believed “he’s no longer my own child.” During his stay, Sasamura had suggested once or twice that she move to Tokyo, but his mother showed no inclination to do so. She would dislike having to mind an unfamiliar daughter-in-law in Tokyo, and taking her granddaughter into crowded places was undesirable—but more than anything, circumstances were too entangled there for her to extricate herself as easily as Sasamura imagined. The familiarity needed to voice such matters had yet to develop between them.

“There was a good painting at home, but they must have sold that off too.” Sasamura recalled an old art book he had once found at the bottom of a musty drawer in a long chest within the dark storage room during his boyhood, and brought it up to his mother without truly meaning to inquire. That the painting was undoubtedly by Utamaro’s hand could be inferred from the supple lines and calm colors of other works by the same artist that he later saw.

When Sasamura rummaged through the scrolls and sword-like items inside the old long chest stored on the second floor of his sister’s house and searched for the art book, he could not find it anywhere, so he suddenly felt compelled to confirm with his mother. The mother gazed at her own child’s face with a puzzled look, not smiling. “They say your wife isn’t some amateur—is that true?” The mother suddenly asked. “Don’t talk nonsense. Shin’s the one who spread that around, isn’t he?”

Sasamura forcefully denied it.

Neither from the mother’s side nor from Sasamura’s did they touch upon those crucial issues again. Sasamura even sometimes stayed out overnight. When a letter arrived from Ogin urging him to return, his mother could not even bring herself to voice her desire for him to stay. “……How pointless this all is.” On the morning of his departure, as Sasamura bustled about packing, his mother suddenly spoke up. And when she tried to help with something, Sasamura harshly snapped at her, causing her to immediately withdraw her hands.

Forty-Nine

Sasamura was recalling the time when he had first left his devoted mother’s care and come to Tokyo. At that time, Sasamura would occasionally write long letters, and whenever he claimed to have found employment somewhere, he had formal clothes sent from strained circumstances. Once he began earning a modest income, he never failed to set aside a portion of it to send.

"I’ll have to send money a bit more properly from now on…"

Sasamura nodded, but by the time the train crossed the prefectural border, the complicated Tokyo life he was entangled in had already begun flooding his mind like an incoming tide. Thoughts of his wife and child started surfacing.

When Sasamura arrived at Shimbashi the next morning, the town remained quiet. The ground still glistened with undried night dew, while from a flower cart draped with reed screens, blossoms' deep hues struck the eye with vivid intensity. The taut faces of urbanites and sporadic women's voices that reached him seemed to pierce straight through his chest.

Sasamura, having alighted from the rickshaw, encountered Shōichi—still in his nightclothes—bobbing out to the entranceway while munching on a sweet bean bun. The child blushed a face that seemed both shy and happy as he looked up at his father. After that, Ogin and her mother also came out. The figure of Ogin’s tall father also appeared. The brother was also milling about in the tea room. Sasamura had been aware of this brother’s arrival even before departing for his hometown. This brother, who had been raised in Tokyo, returned to the countryside due to beriberi not long after Ogin came to Sasamura’s place. And there he had lived until today. This brother, who had been trying to become a pharmacist in Tokyo, disliked such things and had considerable skill in Western tailoring.

Whenever they passed by a tailor shop outside, Ogin would sometimes bring up her brother in the countryside, saying, “My brother needs to hurry up and open a shop like this in Tokyo soon…” By the time he turned twenty-four or twenty-five, there had also been an expectation that relatives in the countryside would provide the necessary capital. “If he stays in the countryside, his skills will probably get rusty.” Sasamura, too, occasionally let slip a tone that seemed to lament this. “What on earth is he doing in the countryside?”

“I hear his health has improved lately and he’s working in town now.” “There’s also a rumor that he’s gotten involved with a woman… I heard about that last year when Brother Kin’ichi returned to his adoptive family.” That day ended with talk of events during their absence and their child. Ogin found a packet of pickled plums among the various souvenirs scattered there and happily opened the lid to look inside. In those pickled plums was a unique flavor that could not be experienced in Tokyo or Ogin’s hometown. Rice crackers were also Ogin’s favorite.

“Oh, your mother sent so many.” “I wonder if the plums from your hometown are different somehow.” The child was delighted，fiddling here and there with the large warships and tumbler dolls—gifts from the aunt—but did not approach his father’s side. And whenever their gazes met，he would oddly avert his eyes. “He seems rather haggard，doesn’t he?” Sasamura noticed his sickly slender neck.

“No, that can’t be right. “He’s been quite energetic lately. “When asked about his father, he says things like ‘I went to buy anpan on the choo-choo train’—it’s so amusing.” “It’s possible my nephew might come alone, you know. “They’ve finally foisted him on us again.”

Sasamura brought it up when he entered the study with Ogin for the first time in a while. That matter was not something Ogin had been entirely unprepared for. In a buoyant tone, Ogin lit an unaccustomed cigarette and held it up to Sasamura’s mouth.

Fifty

The health he had cultivated during his travels soon began to crumble. In the countryside house where his mother lived, medicinal baths using hot spring minerals from Joshu were prepared nearly every day for an elderly rheumatism patient. Sasamura would soak in these baths each time. Beyond the earthen embankment encircling the house lay fields stretching out beneath mountains whose wooded slopes rose just across the river. In the study with its deep eaves and broad veranda, whenever he occasionally settled to write, green frogs would erupt in chorus as rain pattered against young persimmon and crabapple leaves by the window. The scent of soil and foliage permeated the windless stillness, his nerves frayed by overstimulating city life feeling as though smoothed by a soft brush. Had his mother and sister not intruded there, Sasamura could have lingered endlessly in undisturbed reverie.

Occasionally, holding an umbrella, he would cross the bridge and set foot in the red-light district at the mountain's base. In the quiet new quarter reminiscent of Kyoto's Pontocho, rain misted through green willows as wire-framed lanterns glowed beneath eaves, and from dim houses hung with blue noren at their entrances came muted shamisen plucks that stirred travelers' melancholy. Sasamura, at four or five years old, had been taken by his father to one such house, where he remembered watching Bon dances from a second-floor railing, or hand performances on stages spanning between buildings during festivals.

In a secluded second-floor tatami room, under the flickering shadows of a candlestick, Sasamura listened occasionally to the women’s conversation interspersed with Kansai dialect, his face flushing from the effects of two or three cups of sake. Among the women was one who had been born in Kyōbashi-Hatchōbori and long worked in Tokyo’s pleasure quarters.

“This place is no good.” “In a real pinch, people here don’t even bother to bare a shoulder.”

The woman seemed ill-suited to the lukewarm temperament of the land. "But at least the entertainment rooms are easygoing," she added. After returning to Tokyo, Sasamura remained unable to shed his indolent habits for some time. During daylight hours, he would plant flower seeds in the garden or take the child—now steadier on his feet—on outings to places like Asakusa.

Ogin, whose belly was gradually growing larger, became even sterner toward the child who clung to her side. “There’s no milk, none at all,” she said, tightly fastening her collar. “When you nurse from Mama, it makes my whole body get goosebumps... Would it be all right if Papa puts on some spicy-spicy stuff instead?” Ogin would say that and then rub chili pepper little by little onto her nipples. After being subjected to it two or three times, the child soon learned to bring a rag from the kitchen and wipe it off.

“You have no idea how delicious my milk is,” the old mother said, breaking into a grin as she peered into the child’s face. The child, having grown accustomed to the old mother’s embrace out of necessity, would fall asleep at night suckling at empty breasts, but come morning would be tied to her back and watch the fire she tended flicker and burn. “Off to Smoky Mountain you go, coins and gold come here!”

The child, having been taught that rhyme by the old mother at some point, would occasionally make people laugh.

The father understood this toddler’s faltering words—cast aside by his mother—better than anyone, as though they were his own native tongue. The child’s frayed nerves sometimes turned spiteful enough to vex the adults. He would wail in a shrill voice, complaining that the teacup used to pour hot water was different, or sulk, saying the nightclothes put on him were bad.

“Let’s go to the barber and get your hair cut. Then you might feel a bit refreshed.” Ogin, as if struck by an idea, put on her geta and took Shōichi out with her.

Fifty-One

Never before had Sasamura been laid in as soft and comfortably pleasant a bed as when he returned from his travels. In the relatively calm four-and-a-half-tatami room protruding between the front and middle gardens, all of the bedding laid out by Ogin each evening was composed of nothing but fluffy new items.

Even Ogin's red pillow was new. The dim bedroom with its wooden shutters closed was at times stiflingly humid, and Sasamura would occasionally slip his feverish body out from under the thick cotton futon onto the cool tatami mats. "The thick mattress is a problem." "Is that so? I can't sleep without a thick futon in any situation. I'd like to have at least one set of silk bedding prepared here at home too." Ogin stretched out her arm showing soft downy hair and lit some throat-soothing tobacco.

Ogin's timidity had intensified further. This was after an incident that had occurred while Sasamura was away: the wife of a shop owner on a street just two blocks from there had likely been killed by her husband and collapsed dead in front of Ogin’s gate, vomiting blood. The dusky black stains of blood had seeped into the soil until just two or three days before Sasamura returned home.

The woman appeared to have thrashed about the neighborhood, for scattered under a large zelkova tree in a square two or three blocks away were geta sandals and what looked like combs. There was also talk that she had taken poison herself.

In the bedding, Ogin told of how that woman had been abused by her husband and trembled with fear as if it were her own fate. The man who had briefly been involved with Ogin had slashed his stepmother—with whom he had always been at odds—not long after she ran away from him, and this fact now began to feel like a vivid reality in Ogin's mind. How frantically had that man searched for his wife who had cleverly escaped the matchmaker's grasp? How deranged the mind of that man—who did nothing but drink alcohol daily while wandering the neighborhood—had become was something even Sasamura understood as he listened.

“When I was walking with you, didn’t we once meet in the back alley of Kikuzaka? That was him.” “Huh.” Sasamura could still recall that time when Ogin had suddenly encountered a man in the darkness, but he considered her panicked gasp and the way she had grabbed his hand to be nothing more than this woman’s habitual affectation. At that time, Ogin had not yet grown familiar enough with Sasamura to clearly identify that man as such. That evening, a drizzly rain had been falling, but the man, wearing low geta and holding a Western-style umbrella, was drenched.

“That’s him. He called out ‘Ogin’—my name.”

“Huh.” “If you hadn’t been there then, I might have had something done to me.” “He’s a violent brute.” “Though if he doesn’t drink, he’s actually quite timid when he’s sober...”

Regarding that house, a new fact was once again spoken from Ogin’s mouth.

“……From the moment I went there, I loathed it—I simply couldn’t bear to stay together. When evening came, I would go out back and just space out. Out back was a lonely paddy field, with frogs croaking, you know. That dreadful feeling… I was crying. And then—well—I took the train and ran away here.”

“I’ll go pay a visit to that house once.” Sasamura said half-mockingly. “And I’ll let them know you’re here.”

Fifty-Two

However, the newness of such a bed did not last long. The time soon came when the scent of the woman’s hair staining the pillowcase would choke his chest. When Sasamura began spreading out the book he had craved by his pillow, the liberated woman no longer felt lonely sleeping sprawled out in the adjacent four-tatami room, stretching her limbs freely. “Ah, I just want to become light and free quickly, no matter what.” Ogin made her clouded eyes gleam as she heaved up her languid body.

Sasamura too found himself unable to shake the sensation that the sickly sweet yet blood-tinged odor of childbirth he had once experienced would occasionally assail his nostrils. Moreover, behind Ogin stood her father and brother who had come from the countryside with some money in their pockets, intending to reunite their wives and children to live together in Tokyo. When Ogin stepped away from her four-and-a-half tatami world inhabited solely by them as a couple, she would inevitably be drawn into that vortex. The sorrow of her scattered family was deeply ingrained in Ogin’s mind.

"There’s a house in the side street just past the cart shop up ahead." One day, Ogin broached the subject with Sasamura. She had already witnessed his clouded expression many times by then. "I think we should rent it anyway—what do you think?" "Father says he’ll get work somewhere from there." "Yoshio complains his current place is stiflingly hot and wants to commute here too. If we both work, it shouldn’t be too hard."

“So your father’s going to settle here permanently too, huh?” “Whether it can be done or not—well, I suppose that’s the plan.”

“Well, might as well try it and see.” “If we do that, I’ll have a place to give birth—that’d be much more convenient. And since they’ll be nearby, they can help look after the baby.”

When the three moved there, Sasamura took Shōichi along for a stroll to see the place. And entering from the engawa overlooking a small garden, they would occasionally wet their mouths with bancha tea drawn by the mother before returning home. Eventually, a basket containing playthings was brought in, and Shōichi too generally came to stay there overnight. “Just how much Shōichi loves Grandma’s lap.” When Ogin, who had gone out to talk, returned to Sasamura’s room at night, she reported what the child had said and done.

“Grandma dislikes that too, but there’s nothing to be done about it.” Sasamura dismissed her remark. As Ogin lay moaning in pain within the bluish room shaded by loquat leaves, Shōichi went to her side and clutched his mother’s hand. That day, Ogin had gradually entered labor since morning. By noon, the intermittent pains grew steadily more frequent.

“Well, I’m going now.” After preparing the side dishes for lunch and putting on sandals, Ogin headed toward the delivery room, but Sasamura paid little heed. For several days around that time, the two of them had been keeping their unpleasant faces turned away from each other. “You should come too.” Ogin said to Sasamura as she was leaving. “There are plenty of people there already.” Sasamura muttered, but still he couldn’t not go see.

Outside, the midsummer sun blazed with a dizzying glare, but inside the house shaded by abundant trees, a cool wind blew through. “Huwt?” The child frowned at his mother’s face, drawing close to her side each time she strained, and lent his small hand as adults do. And with his handkerchief, he wiped the sweat oozing like beads from her nose and forehead. “Oh, what a clever little one you are!” “I too had a time when I caused Mama suffering like this, you know.” The midwife let out a tearful voice.

53 Quite some time passed before the newborn girl’s skin gradually faded and turned white. The wrinkled contours of her eyes and nose did not easily take shape. Sasamura did not so much as glance over, but in Ogin’s manner as she nursed the child at her breast, a more motherly tenderness than before had begun to emerge. The midwife came daily and had her bathe in the hot water. Sasamura also went to see how the newborn was changing, but the child’s face remained just as scrunched.

“What’s this….” At the seventh-night ceremony, Sasamura looked at the baby—its face powdered white and rouged by the midwife, squinting its dazzled eyes open—and burst out laughing.

Ogin too sat up on her futon and smiled as she watched the squirming newborn.

“It’s fine. A child like this will actually get better, you know.”

Ogin said with apparent confidence. With wrinkles like an old man’s gathered around its eyes, the baby scratched its tear-streaked face. Apart from the skeletal frame—its long torso and scrawny build—and narrow forehead being the spitting image of the father, the fact that this child had inherited its mother’s paternal facial features came as something of a relief to Sasamura. Even Shōichi, who had been walking along the engawa pulling a toy train, scrunched his face into a pained expression along with the baby when he approached. And urged his mother, “Give her the breast….”

“Thank you very much.” When Ogin, who had regained some strength, entered from the back with hair in curls, Sasamura’s expression remained stern. Sasamura was in the kitchen at that time, having lit the charcoal brazier and cooking the midday dishes while the nephew worked nearby. After the nephew attending school from midday onward went out, Sasamura spent each day alone in the quiet house lying down or getting up. Sometimes the mother would come to bring meals or check on the kitchen, but Sasamura never showed a pleased expression when she did. Amidst this cycle of being cared for and caring for others, Ogin’s apparent determination to assert influence over her parents and younger brother struck him as both pitiable and bitterly frustrating. Sasamura found it painful that his capabilities were being overestimated. He had to think about the aging mother in the countryside with dwindling years; his own business; and matters concerning the child as well.

“You should know that I can’t possibly manage everyone with money right now—it’s impossible.” Sasamura would sometimes say to Ogin in front of others. “Oh, it’s not like that at all!” Ogin said as well, but Sasamura still could not shake his unease. The invisible force of erosion seemed impossible to fend off.

"There’s no choice but to take one child and part ways." "And then I must call my mother and sister here and immerse my head in the calm, untroubled air of family life..."

Sasamura would sometimes find his mind turning in that direction. He also felt he could no longer endure the blindly active life he had led until then, driven by rampant material desires. He came to think his own frail constitution and passive temperament had naturally led him to this state.

For about ten days of an all-male household, the house had grown disorderly. When Ogin came up, she surveyed her home with apparent curiosity, though unease colored her gaze. "I don't intend to have you come back." Sasamura spoke in a tone meant to repel an intruder. "But even I worry about my own household..." The uncle and nephew appeared to be scheming something—a scene that met Ogin's eyes upon returning after days away. Ogin's suspicions, no less than Sasamura's, would not cease until they had plunged into the darkest depths.

54 The delivery had been easier than the previous one, but Ogin’s health did not recover by winter. The complexion that once began to take on a dewy sheen clouded over again along with her body defeated by the lingering heat. Her limbs steadily withered, and a large hollow formed above the prominent collarbones on her chest. A certain doctor acquaintance put away his stethoscope into his bag, showed deep unease in his eyes, and remained silent while twisting his beard.

“Could it be her lungs?” After Ogin stood up and went to the tearoom, Sasamura asked.

Sasamura had rarely entertained thoughts of illness regarding his wife’s relatively sturdy skeletal frame until now. At times he had felt as though facing an unconquerable mass of flesh akin to her stubborn temperament, but even that now seemed on the verge of crumbling away. Sasamura felt terrified as he realized he might have been trying all this time to wash away the tainted blood flowing through his own body. “I want Mr. Hamada or Mr. Hashizume to examine me.”

Ogin would occasionally say such things and wonder at her own body’s failure to convalesce as she hoped, but matters still tended to drag on. “Why don’t you just have anyone give you a preliminary exam then?” Sasamura sometimes found Ogin’s patience irritating, but he also felt compelled to see just how far her decline would progress. Who would ultimately prevail… he sometimes thirsted for such brutal sentiments. The young doctor did not readily disclose the symptoms.

“Well, you should go to the university hospital or Juntendo and have them examine you.” “I think there might be some slight abnormality in the lungs.” “Something seems a bit off.”

After the doctor had left, Sasamura spoke to Ogin. "What do you mean?" Ogin said in a tone that suggested she didn’t trust him from the outset. Until it became clear that Ogin’s illness—which she had gone to the hospital with that doctor the next day to have examined—was a mild kidney disease common after childbirth, she couldn’t focus on anything. "Is that so? So have I finally ended up with that kind of illness?" The sight of Ogin holding the infant as usual and working in the kitchen appeared pitiful even in Sasamura’s eyes.

“Well, let me have a quick look,” Sasamura said with apparent concern and had her expose her chest for examination. Her angular, bony chest looked frail. “What a horrid body I have. Just these thick bones….” Ogin forlornly touched her own neck and chest. And while tending to her skin, “I wouldn’t mind dying. If only there weren’t the child….”

“You’ll be fine. “I’ll definitely heal you.” Sasamura laughed with feigned reassurance.

“So it seems you’re the healthier one after all.” “But women have childbirth to deal with…” Ogin had continued drinking milk and taking medicine for about a month, but once her kidneys improved, she quickly grew tired of it. By the time cool breezes began to blow, even the once-thin child had grown plump with ample milk, yet Ogin still occasionally visited her regular doctor. “Dr. Takahashi said he’d like you to come over for a moment.”

One day, after returning from the doctor, Ogin said to Sasamura. "What is it? He says he wants to meet you and discuss something important."

55

The doctor, gentle like a woman, was skilled at examining children. He would explain her condition in detail using easy-to-grasp terms, so Ogin naturally felt at ease. She was well aware of circumstances like the former geisha-like woman—whom she knew—not getting along with her mother, and that a bride had recently arrived from the countryside as a replacement.

“That young doctor has such a pleasant demeanor, you know,” Ogin said, even taking a liking to the pharmacy itself. Being summoned by that doctor concerning Ogin’s affairs didn’t sit well with Sasamura. “How trivial. Going out of his way to summon me and all that…” When Sasamura returned, he vented his anger to Ogin. The doctor’s attitude—which seemed ready to interrogate Sasamura—was enough to make him imagine Ogin’s somewhat coquettish manner toward the young physician.

“This time, you must have her properly examined by a competent doctor.” In the doctor’s tone as he said this, there was an undeniable undercurrent that seemed to censure the husband for his callousness toward his wife.

“Did Dr.Takahashi say something rude to you?” Ogin looked puzzled. “But even if I go to the hospital alone, I’d be completely lost.” “If we go, since Dr.Takahashi knows the gynecology department staff, he could come along and explain things properly.” “Anyway, he just said he wanted to tell you… Isn’t that all?” It wasn’t that Sasamura couldn’t understand Ogin’s reluctance—after all, she’d once been led around a vast, confusing hospital by an acquaintance and hated fumbling from place to place—but her logical explanations only irritated him more.

They continued for many days to sit with their backs turned to each other, wearing unpleasant expressions. Sasamura occasionally laughed at his wife’s indolence in making no move to go to the hospital, but Ogin did not seem particularly bothered. It was quite some time later that she went one day to have herself examined at the university’s gynecology department, accompanied by the same doctor acquaintance who had gone with her before. “They said there’s nothing particularly wrong anywhere right now…”

When she returned, Ogin, still in her formal attire, came to Sasamura’s side and began to speak. “It’s just that during childbirth, my uterus became slightly bent, but they said it can be corrected during a future delivery. Right now, they’re saying even just a week of washing would be worth trying if I want to.” “Huh, is that so.” Sasamura found the diagnosis anticlimactic. Ogin’s complexion, lacking both luster and vitality, would gradually improve with the coming of winter, but the softness of her flesh and the bloom in her cheeks—eroded with each childbirth—showed no signs of returning.

56

From around that time, Ogin would occasionally appear before Sasamura’s old friends and pour drinks for them. Ogin’s somewhat aged face, with the thinning roots at her temples showing through her growing-out hair, had grown somewhat calmer than before while also revealing a certain coquettishness. And even when dealing with guests who sat without reserve, her manner was not as rough as Sasamura had worried.

During Sasamura’s absence—when he had abruptly gone off to the seaside for about a week with a bit of money in his pocket to distract himself from the unpleasantness of their increasingly chaotic household—someone came by the house to check on them, a child’s hat tucked in their coat. The man sat down on the entrance step and conversed for some time.

“Please do come visit.” “If Sasamura-kun says anything, I’ll smooth things over…” Ogin later recounted to Sasamura how the visitor had casually offered such pleasantries before leaving. “I bet that gentleman’s house is quite splendid. “...I’d like to see what other people’s homes are like—for future reference.” After hearing Sasamura’s explanation, Ogin began to fret over the bare rooms in her own house. When Sasamura went to the seaside, his mind festered with irritation. The damp autumn rain lingered on and on, leaving the tea room by the cliff edge and the four-and-a-half-mat room beside the entrance with its sticky tatami mats feeling utterly dreary. After the mother—who had carried her baby on her back while braving the rain to fetch water from the communal well at the cliff base through the back gate—tripped and fell on the slope, loosening two front teeth, mother and child began voicing complaints about the house’s inconveniences anew.

Every time they ate, Ogin would watch the mother’s face—anxious about those teeth—with a pained expression. To Sasamura, it seemed she was trying to make him believe she had made some grand sacrifice. “That’s why it’s too much for elderly people.” “We could have Shō-chan fetch the water, but that wouldn’t really work either…” Ogin said to Sasamura in a needling tone. After closing their house, her father—then living at a noble family’s estate in Shibuya—would occasionally visit while still wearing his formal haori and hakama, taking out rare sweets from his sleeves to give to Shōichi.

“The retired gentleman gave me this…” he would sometimes say as he presented a beautiful drawstring pouch, still wrapped in paper, before his daughter. “How are you feeling?” Sasamura occasionally spoke in an amiable tone. The fact that this resourceful old man was gradually becoming involved in domestic affairs was something Sasamura could acknowledge, but one could also imagine from his occasional remarks that he was finally growing weary of the stifling family customs there.

“After all, I’m getting older too…” For the past five or six years, this father had idled away his days in the countryside; he now seemed to be contemplating whether there might be some other, less burdensome work available. Sasamura occasionally confided such family matters only to Miyama, with whom his old friendship had been restored around that time, but he still often found himself agonizing alone. When his mind became entangled in this way, his tormented head felt on the verge of madness.

57 These surrounding circumstances—each time they manifested through Ogin’s somewhat brusque manner of speaking or her carefree attitude of playfully teasing skittish animals for amusement—made Sasamura regard his wife as a brazen woman. Crushed by an unpleasant mood, he would do nothing but go out to eat meals and then shut himself away in silence within his narrow, cage-like study. Sasamura’s timid, cold eyes sought out only the flaws in every woman he had ever been involved with.

When sitting across from each other at breakfast, there had been nothing unusual about moments when their contending unpleasant expressions would suddenly slacken as if tickled—causing them both to burst into laughter—but Sasamura’s recent aversion now sufficed to negate his wife’s coquetry. Before Sasamura’s eyes appeared a woman uglier than any he had ever seen. He could no longer endure the agony of staring at her, yet even in Ogin’s mind, the crisis encroaching upon their marriage had grown palpable. At times now, she found herself unable to avoid contemplating her own future.

In the tea room, when eating meals served by her mother at the tray that a frightened Ogin had quietly prepared in the shadows became unbearable, Sasamura had it moved to his study. He then took a lonely, simple dinner alone. In the chilly bed at night, when his eyes that had finally begun to droop suddenly snapped open, his painfully exhausted head grew agitated. Sasamura trimmed the lamp’s wick and occasionally sat up on the futon. He spread out books and such, frantically trying to soothe his throbbing head, but his sensitive eyes could no longer endure the stabbing lamplight—tears welled up uncontrollably. His breathing was labored.

Sasamura remembered those times when he would slip away late at night from his lonely boarding room, wandering through towns sunk in deep slumber, drawn to the glow from Miyama's study window that only revived in the quiet of night. In the pallid light of dawn breaking, he pictured two figures walking along forest paths and pond edges, their conversation having exhausted itself into silence.

Sasamura wiped the greasy sweat from his forehead that clung to his fingertips, left the room to search for alcohol or food in the kitchen—or else waited for Ogin to cautiously push open the locked door and slip outside—as these became his only options. The next morning too, Sasamura woke early. The irritating remnants of last night’s liquor coated his tongue while his facial skin remained thickly feverish, and the morning sun streaming through the veranda stung his eyes. In Ogin’s pale face—which entered Sasamura’s view as he wandered the garden—signs of fatigue showed clearly. Ogin sat dazedly on the edge of the tea room’s veranda, holding the child.

After finishing breakfast that day, Ogin carried the child on her back and went out—an unusual occurrence. "It’s so gloomy here—let’s go somewhere to play, shall we?" In Ogin’s demeanor as she said this and left, there was an unusual calmness and gentleness. Around three in the afternoon, when Ogin returned with a friend she often visited, Sasamura had closed the sliding doors tightly and was sleeping in his room.

58

“……Since I might be driven out at any moment, I’ve been thinking maybe I should just leave that place.” Ogin visited that friend who had a house in Shiba and began talking about such matters. This friend, who had been a merchant before, was a woman Ogin had been close neighbors with back when she lived in Kanesuke-cho; however, the husband she had recently taken up with was living quite extravagantly. Every time the woman came, she was dressed in a manner that kept up with the latest trends.

“Mr.Suda must be doing quite well lately.” Sasamura had heard such things from Ogin’s lips before as well, but even as she spoke them, Ogin herself was not without her own sense of pride. “I might be driven out at any moment too.” Mrs.Suda also laughed and said similar things in agreement, but such anxieties still arose from time to time.

Ogin told her friend about her recent hardships. Mrs. Suda also thought she couldn't simply describe Sasamura as quiet. "But men are all like that." Mrs. Suda comforted Ogin, who from her perspective still didn't seem to be seriously considering the idea of a proper home. "And you have a child—no matter how difficult things get, thinking of leaving is a mistake." Mrs. Suda admonished her with those words.

The two of them strolled around places like Hibiya Park and then came over to Ogin’s house. Whenever this wife with a certain lonely air about her came, Sasamura would join in and they would always play by plucking flowers and such together; however, that day he did not show his face. And the sound of the two women talking and laughing in the tea room further irritated Sasamura’s mind as he lay half-awake.

After some time had passed, Sasamura wandered through the town with Miyama—who had just come to visit—without any particular destination in mind. A hazy, dim sunlight filtered through the streets; in the utterly still air, the listless sound of Raoya’s steam whistle hung faintly audible, and every face looked sallow. “Where should we go?” “Why don’t we go to Misakicho and catch a one-act play or something?” Muttering such things between them, they came out into an open field beside Tomisaka. Dragonflies flitted through the sky while insect voices rose from bushes at their feet. They climbed a small hill and gazed for a while at smoke spreading from the Arsenal’s chimney into the quiet sky.

In Sasamura’s throbbing head，memories flashed unbidden of those times when he had wandered about freely with another，free from all constraints．Sasamura would often enter lively places like theaters and restaurants together with this companion，trying to forget his loneliness．The current anguish differed not at all from that earlier desolation．

Squatting down and puffing on his tobacco, Sasamura began talking about the contradictions between his own personality and his wife’s. Miyama casually brushed it off.

“One must accept that some degree of sacrifice is unavoidable... There’s no other way but for you to cultivate your wife through your own mindset. There are plenty of examples in society of husbands gradually shaping their wives to their ways.” That Sasamura was incapable of such deft maneuvers was something that even Miyama, who spoke those words, understood. “Even back then, F— and others were saying such things,” Miyama added. “You would never be able to control that woman, you know….”

F― was a young man aspiring to literature who used to come and go between the two of them at that time. Sasamura felt he could imagine some of the bystanders’ gossip from that time based on that.

After standing through a one-act play and returning home, Sasamura’s mind was in an even more agitated state than before. “Hey.” Sasamura entered the dimly lit room and abruptly called out toward the back. From within emerged the child tentatively peeking out, but upon sensing his father’s stern expression, he soon flushed crimson and retreated. Sasamura summoned Ogin and repeated the same variety of separation talk once more.

59 Ogin couldn't tell whether to approach or not at such times. During the half-day he had been out, she felt anxious about where he had gone and what he might have discussed with Miyama. She couldn't bear how he had immediately summoned her in that murderous tone upon returning—as if Miyama had dredged up some new ammunition to torment her through his words. Back then, Ogin had understood exactly how she was perceived in Miyama's heart—they who had fallen out through some strange twist of circumstances. She couldn't help repeatedly thinking that even the accidental bond between herself and Sasamura had originally been forged through Miyama's uncle by marriage.

When Miyama and Sasamura first resumed their interactions that summer after two years apart, Ogin's displeased expression—as if an old wound had been touched—planted fresh seeds of suspicion in Sasamura about the circumstances of that time. "But Miyama and I have had a ten-year relationship," Sasamura said. He spoke of his feelings to Ogin then. "I hate that people think I cut ties with Miyama back then over some woman. And seeing how his household remains unchanged... I can't help feeling sorry for him."

Since the matters involving Ogin and the child, Sasamura—having been strained by various hardships—did not voice this, but he felt as though he genuinely understood his friend. At that time, Miyama was living in a rented house within the grounds of someone’s deeply secluded villa, after moving from place to place. Sasamura would sometimes sit by the window of that house amidst the dense grove, eating persimmons that Miyama peeled and offered, while losing himself in conversations that recalled the past. In the garden, sasanquas bloomed, and in the clear autumn sky, the cry of a shrike could be heard. Miyama continued to live a life there that seemed detached from humanity, yet his mind remained constantly oriented toward the world.

Sasamura would occasionally take the child out. While being encouraged by Miyama’s sisters, the child, wearing a crepe sleeveless garment and such, was frolicking around the spacious garden with a cheerful air.

Miyama, too, seemed to have a deep interest in the child playing like that.

“Hey, bring him over here… It’s dangerous,” he called out from inside the house to his sisters. That this child resembled Sasamura seemed to present Miyama with a miracle-like revelation... From Miyama’s expression when he first saw the child coming to the entrance during Sasamura’s initial visit, Sasamura felt that one couldn’t help but read such a meaning into it.

"Miyama must have thought Shōichi was Isotani's child." Sasamura had told Ogin this before too, but the meaning never seemed to properly reach her. It was much later that Ogin appeared outside Sasamura's room, her face pale, sitting forlornly while nervously adjusting her collar. "...I don't mean you absolutely must keep me here if we find a way—it would be wretched for you too." "But even so, I can't just get up and leave this very moment..."

Ogin would occasionally respond in a tone completely unlike her usual mocking expression, but both parties in this situation well understood there was no way to resolve it. “Anyway, I intend to set you free.” “It should have been this way from the beginning.”

“Therefore, you should consult properly with Mr. Miyama.” Ogin also said that.

60

It was unclear how far Sasamura’s agitated nerves would descend into madness. There was another self deep within his mind that calmly watched the self whose blood grew so agitated it could not be controlled—a self that merely observed in trembling fear. From his mouth poured a relentless stream of venomous words, yet even the slightest cold remark from the woman trying not to show weakness sent tremors through his entire body—he himself found it both terrifying and despicable. It was almost strange that such savage blood flowed within him as well.

“I’m no match for you.” The woman who uttered this with a forlorn laugh trembled before Sasamura, her face as pale as a wounded beast’s. Her hair, struck by the bony man’s hand, had collapsed at the roots. Tears streamed from eyes resembling festering wounds. Still, she made no move to flee. “It’s truly strange weather,” she said. “Even if I don’t mention it, everyone’s saying so.” Clutching her unsteady hair with one hand, she shook her head as if in pain.

There had been times before when Sasamura would suddenly raise his hand toward the woman’s head. There had also been instances where he quietly pulled out the comb from her hair as she slept and snapped it in two. She found having her possessions destroyed more unbearable than being struck. When she perceived Sasamura’s expression growing dangerous, she became vigilant of the chest of drawers and dressing table, persistently using her body to shield them.

Sasamura, his weak heart pounding, finally managed to sit down with support from his mother’s hand. With his geta and hat hidden away, Sasamura could not even dash outside.

The two had no choice but to wait through time's passage for Sasamura's frayed nerves to wither. After wandering outside for two or three days, the version of Ogin he had previously known began to resurface in his vision. "I truly thought this time I'd be driven out for good." Ogin had become docile like a lamb. Whenever she read Sasamura's expression, she began exhibiting an overly familiar mannerism, as if preparing to throw herself into his embrace.

“But you’ve been pretty awful yourself.” Sasamura smirked wryly. “But you kept making unreasonable demands, so I had to snap back at you.” Ogin said this while preparing half-boiled eggs late at night, resting her cheek on the edge of the brazier as she smirked. “What you’re saying—it’s not that I don’t understand. But at that moment, my head just flared up—I couldn’t help it, you know. It must be because of a lack of education.”

The two brightened the lamp and talked on and on, absorbed in their conversation. Memories of when Ogin first came to Sasamura's place rose again in both their minds. When the matter of aborting Shōichi or giving him away—things that had tormented their hearts daily—was brought up, tears welled in Ogin's eyes as she gazed at the innocent face of the child sleeping beside her. “I wonder if it’s because I’m seeing him through that lens, but this child does look rather pitiful.” Sasamura also gazed forlornly at that face. The bond that bound these four family members was both strange and sorrowful.

“This child may die young. I just have that feeling.” “That may be,” Sasamura muttered. “If only you hadn’t come rushing into my life back then, none of this would have happened.” “...What a miserable thing this is.” “But it’s not too late even now. For us to keep going on like this is unbearably painful.” The two of them could no longer keep staring fixedly at each other.

61

Sasamura's figure appeared once more beside the old long brazier. After Sasamura finished his breakfast, Ogin prepared newspapers and tobacco for him, then took a broom to the study that had accumulated dust over a long period. Then she tidied up the carelessly scattered items and sorted through the letters. The morning sun that seemed to seep into the faded reddish-brown tatami streamed through the window, and the winter air was so clear that one could see dust clinging to the hair at their temples.

Sasamura couldn’t even bring himself to calmly read the newspaper. The abandoned work weighed on him, and the thought that if he let his guard down he’d soon become someone others turned to for advice tangled in his mind. Before starting work, he felt like spending a carefree day out somewhere. “I think I’ll go out somewhere today.” Sasamura muttered this while gazing from the entrance at Ogin’s back as she tidied the alcove, an unusually patterned hand towel wrapped around his head like an older sister’s headscarf. Ogin kept dozens of such towels in her chest of drawers—ones she’d received from various places during her late uncle’s days of dilettantism.

“Go on then.” Ogin said as she busily dusted the books.

“I’d like to go too, but... where are you going?” “I want to eat something delicious.” “Tempura or something.” “Say, shall we take just Shō-chan along?”

Ogin looked up with a bright smile. “I really haven’t been going out lately. With two children already, I can hardly get out, you know.” “You can go out if you want.”

Sasamura stepped out onto the engawa and gazed at the crystal-clear sky.

“If we three ate at Nakasei, how much do you think it would cost? I haven’t eaten there in a while either...” she thought, but soon felt pangs of guilt.

“What a waste! But more importantly, Shō-chan’s celebration is coming up soon, you know. The Seven-Five-Three... We must do what we can for the children, or else it would be wrong.” Ogin said wearily. The fact that she had been making such calculations was something Sasamura had known for quite some time.

"If we don't make it in time there'll be trouble, so shouldn't I prepare the bird's-eye fabric today and at least place the order?" Sasamura felt as though all their estrangement-period conflicts had come crashing over him at once, yet he couldn't bring himself to decisively stop this.

Ogin, who went shopping downtown with Sasamura, found a casual restaurant along the way and ate dinner there.

“It’s nice to get out sometimes, isn’t it?” said Ogin with a relieved expression, bringing the sake cup to her lips. “I wonder how many years it’s been since I last walked through a place like this. When I come here occasionally, things like their hairstyles—the women’s appearances are completely different from Yamate, aren’t they?” Ogin seemed to contemplate herself—this self that had long been shaped by unfamiliar currents. Without ever dressing up properly or putting on feminine airs, through all her laughter and tears, she had become the mother of two children. Four years had flowed by like a dream. How strange it felt to be drinking here now with Sasamura.

"Compared to when we last came here, this house has grown quite dirty." Ogin's eyes darted restlessly.

“With Isotani, right?” When Sasamura smiled at her, Ogin too— “No,” she said with a laugh. After leaving there, the two wandered around the Suda-machi area. Ogin, whose body had never fully recovered since childbirth, would feel nauseous whenever she rode the train. The train emerged from the darkness, passing through bright areas. Whenever blue sparks scattered across the sky, Ogin felt so dizzy her head spun. “Why have I become so spineless?”

Ogin, laughing as if amused, finally crossed the rails while clutching Sasamura’s hand.

62 “You... you...” called Ogin as she chased after Sasamura, who was heading into his study upon returning from outside. Sasamura, who had developed a habit of going out, found himself each day not knowing where to settle his restless state of mind. It was that season when the cherry branches at the edge of the cliff in the backyard—visible from where the long brazier stood—grew whiter each morning. Whenever Sasamura left his restless study, his capricious feet would wander off in various directions without any particular destination. Even so, he remained concerned about the area around his desk—no sooner would he leave than he would return, time and again.

“It’s possible we might have to vacate this house.” Ogin, without even sitting down, began explaining that today she had brought a retired man who appeared to be a prospective buyer of the house along with the landlord’s clerk. “Hmm, is that so?” said Sasamura, puffing on his tobacco. In his mind arose the sheer hassle of moving this increasingly complicated household—though nothing resembling a proper home had yet been put in order. To move required preparing a lump sum of money.

“But even if we do have to vacate, it’s not like it has to be today or tomorrow.” Ogin said to Sasamura in a tone meant to reassure him.

Gathering their shabby belongings, they moved to a rather spacious house they found in Koishikawa not long after that. Before that, Ogin had also once gone with Sasamura to see the house. And they met the old man keeping watch over the vacant shop and settled various matters.

“You’re still young—I can’t believe you already have two children!”

The landlord removed his woolen scarf and served tea to the couple.

What Sasamura liked most of all was the separation between the tea room area and the study and guest room areas. The tea room area even had a small chamber designed like a proper tea ceremony room. In the garden stood plum trees with fine branches and palms among others. Small lanterns were also placed. Settling there and lying down in the spacious tatami room, Sasamura felt as though he were on a journey. While Sasamura was burying the bush clover roots he had brought from their previous house into the soil, Ogin went out to look at long braziers and such. The old one ended up in the junk dealer’s hands when they moved.

“No matter how you look at it, I couldn’t possibly take something like this out—it’s too embarrassing.” Ogin gazed at the old brazier with its fallen lid while voicing her dissatisfaction to Sasamura, who remained indifferent. Even so, parting with it left her with an unpleasant feeling. At the bottom of the drawer—no longer worth wiping clean—still lay old fortune slips that had repeatedly been used to divine the uncertain fate of mother and child. No sooner would Sasamura sit in the tatami room than he’d rise restlessly again, making his way to the kitchen area before wandering into the slightly elevated four-and-a-half-mat chamber to sprawl beneath the round window or step down into the garden cluttered with stepping stones. On certain days, smoke from the Artillery Arsenal would fill the garden while coal cinders blown by cold winds danced across the wooden veranda. During such times, the sky inevitably turned overcast as palm and bamboo leaves rustled noisily. Sasamura’s head felt heavy.

“This is hopeless.” Ogin sometimes muttered while opening the shoji and peering out. “And the position of the toilet in this house—I just can’t stand it.” The story that a certain murderer’s mistress had once been there immediately reached Ogin’s ears from the mouths of neighbors.

“That’s right, I was hiding it from you, but...”

Sasamura burst out laughing upon hearing that.

63 The murderer, who had strangled up to two people and buried their corpses beneath the floorboards, soon vacated that house to conceal his crime's traces. That was when he moved into this house. Even before Sasamura moved in, a translator living there at the time had police officers and judges come in—they even dug up the soil beneath the floorboards. These facts suddenly made Ogin find this house oppressive. The story of her former husband slashing his stepmother—a woman he'd never gotten along with—became entangled with it all, clinging to Ogin's mind like a vengeful ghost. The savage face of the criminal from newspaper reports refused to leave her thoughts.

Ogin, her face pale, would often sit up in bed late at night. She trimmed the lamp’s wick and waited impatiently for dawn to come. “Please—let’s move soon,” she said. “It feels like my life’s being cut short here.” When morning came, Ogin would plead with Sasamura with a dark expression. He could not refuse her. Sasamura recalled the house he had once stopped by in passing—the one connected to Ogin’s past. It was not as fine as he had imagined from her descriptions. The elderly master who kept a young mistress in Tokyo and wielded influence over the neighborhood; his wife, said to have been a geisha; Ogin herself, deceived by a matchmaker’s lies and embroiled in conflicts during her four months there; the commotion of her wedding night, when she was paraded through a crowd of local dignitaries bearing lanterns at the station; even the theatrical episode where she wept upon seeing Isotani shuffle up to meet her one day—all these things strangely stirred Sasamura’s curiosity. During her time in that house of hospitality trade, Ogin had filled Sasamura’s eyes with visions both repulsive and beautiful.

After getting off the train and strolling through the suburban area, Sasamura’s feet naturally made their way toward the vicinity of that house. And he went around peering into houses like that one here and there—this one or that one.

Keen-eyed Sasamura wandered from one place to the next, searching for houses where Ogin had once lived while trying to catch even a faint whiff of her younger self from days past. Before him stood countless establishments: teahouses for pilgrims hung with banners in onion-green, russet, navy, and white; restaurants whose gates revealed meticulously swept gardens nestled against hillsides. When he moved away from such streets, more of the fairly neat little thoroughfares typical of Tokyo's outskirts stretched endlessly onward. Packhorses and carts passed through the town where white dust swirled up. He occasionally spotted rickshaws too. There were glittering barbershops that spoke of the town's level of civilization and dimly lit fabric stores. Bathing in the thin winter sunlight, a white storehouse would come into view, then a school building with russet clapboard siding would appear.

Sasamura’s tired legs, though he kept thinking of turning back, had unwittingly carried him all the way to the edge of that area. From there spread out gray rice fields visible here and there among mixed groves and forest shadows still trembling in the cold. On that bleak-looking street, he occasionally encountered men in Inverness coats who seemed like Tokyo types and women in light-colored coats wearing white socks. Sasamura kept following that road as far as it went.

64 Along roadsides where white sand occasionally swirled up, beggars began appearing—prostrating themselves at the sight of passersby—while worshippers started gathering sporadically from other paths as well. That gradually guided Sasamura to the entrance of a quiet town. This town too had teahouses for travelers and restaurants similar to those in the towns he had passed through earlier, but the area felt narrower and more desolate. The temple there, which drew a fair number of worshippers even on ordinary days, seemed precisely the sort of place suited for elderly people and women from Tokyo’s downtown districts to visit during casual strolls. Women in their forties and fifties, wearing weather-beaten geta with bags dangling from their hands, passed through the temple gate in an unbroken stream. Among them stood out men who resembled stock traders and women dressed in dashing outfits.

Feeling as though he had wandered into a place where he didn’t belong, by the time Sasamura made his way out from the temple grounds, the wind had turned colder and his stomach had hollowed.

Before long, Sasamura settled his weary body into one of the innermost rooms of a certain restaurant. Sasamura gazed at the Masamune and cider advertisements on the walls of what appeared to be a recently added room, the hanging scroll in the alcove, and the Higan cherry blossoms arranged in a vase, when what he had ordered was brought by the maid’s hand. The small amount of alcohol he drank quickly spread through Sasamura’s body, frozen from the cold. He poked at the sashimi and the contents of the bowls, but nothing went down his throat. After finishing his meal with the unappetizing rolled omelet, Sasamura soon left the place and came out onto the cold path through the rice fields. And with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, he returned to the bustling town he had passed through earlier. In the town, the sound of the tofu vendor’s horn could already be heard.

Sasamura found it anticlimactic to leave the place just like that. He thought that if he could find even a house that somewhat matched the stories he had heard from Ogin, he would rush into it. After wandering around for some time, the house Sasamura finally entered differed little from the ordinary restaurants in the area. Still, its relatively composed architecture and garden imbued with tranquil solitude through its ample trees and stones made it feel somewhat more comfortable than the previous house he had visited. The Tokyo-style maid’s demeanor wasn’t overly slovenly either.

“What can be made here?” Sasamura asked the neatly dressed twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old maid as he picked up a board placed on the serving table. The maid, who seemed to have dissolved her household, was a woman with an air of someone who had known hardship.

"Given that it's a place like this, we can't make anything delicious... Well now, what would be good?" she said, sizing up her customer as if preparing to take matters into her own hands. "No matter what you suggest, you simply don't have anything to work with here." "Wouldn't chicken be better instead?" "It's quite cold..."

Sasamura didn’t want to eat anything. He simply wanted to pry information about this house from the woman’s mouth. “Go ahead with that.” From head to toe utterly unpretentious, the woman—her thin, forlorn face chattering about this and that—spread fat in the pot and deftly rinsed cups in the wash basin. “What does the young master here want to do? Is he still in jail?” Sasamura asked in a light tone while drinking beer that wouldn’t go down.

“Huh? Still…”

The woman showed no surprise. She likely assumed he was a regular visitor to the house from that time. "What happened to the bride who came here around that time?" Sasamura brought up Ogin.

65

However, Sasamura couldn't get any detailed information out of the woman. He began feeling uncomfortable with his own attitude of relentlessly excavating Ogin's darker facets, and the woman too knew little about past matters. Sasamura would occasionally try to probe deeper, only to deflect with other topics.

“Hmm, well, that’s about the size of it, I suppose,” the woman responded in kind.

“The one closing the door over there is the second bride who came here.” The maid looked up at a young woman sliding open the wooden door of the second-floor tatami room visible diagonally from there and informed Sasamura. Sasamura stretched up over the serving table to look at her, but she did not appear to be a particularly remarkable woman. “That girl was brought here from the family’s relatives, but I don’t know if she’ll last.” The maid also said that.

Sasamura handed the woman a cup. He poked at the meat while making joking remarks like “You’ve had a husband once or twice before, haven’t you?” and “What kind of husband do you like?” Before he knew it, a light was lit in the room. A group of customers who appeared to be locals came up. “Well now, a kind person is best of course—though I can’t stand someone too eager either. If it’s someone I love, I wouldn’t mind getting hit or slapped a little. Even if he acts that way in front of others, I like a man who’s kind when we’re alone.”

“Huh, then that’s just like me.” Sasamura laughed. The woman laughed hysterically.

Sasamura felt as though he wanted to linger in this room indefinitely. It occurred to him that this might have been the very room where Ogin first slept in this house on her wedding night. The image of men carousing all night with food and drink outside the bedroom, coupled with the memory of Ogin's first husband being hopelessly drunk that evening, made his head spin strangely. Yet he found himself drinking the beer with unexpected ease.

“Do you know the son of this house?”

Sasamura inquired again. “No, I’ve only come here just recently. They say he has a terribly bad drinking habit. They say his behavior as a man isn’t good either.” When the maid had once said of Ogin, “He was a flat-faced handsome man, you see, but somehow such an unpleasant fellow,” Sasamura now came to think there had been some coquettish affectation in her words.

When he left that place, Sasamura realized he was quite drunk. As he exited, what flickered into view through his bleary eyes was a shabby old man who appeared to have once been Ogin's father-in-law. With his elbow propped on the train window gazing into the dark outside, regret over having visited such a house began stirring in Sasamura's mind. He wanted to laugh at himself too—at how earnestly serious he'd always been with Ogin.

The train roared with a terrifying clamor. "I went to see your old nest." When Sasamura returned home and saw Ogin's face, he felt compelled to say those words, yet could only feign normalcy as if nothing had occurred. The looming certainty of eventual confrontation filled him with dread. At that moment, Ogin sat in the family room beside her needleworking mother, absently breastfeeding their child while awaiting her husband's return.

Sasamura immediately retreated toward his study.

66 For Sasamura, understanding his wife Ogin—layer by layer, like peeling skin—was both a cruel fascination and a source of anguish. The Ogin who had first come to his home with her brother—the brother Miyama had mistaken for her lover—still lingered in his mind with those clear, piercing eyes of hers; yet it tormented him that he could no longer find satisfaction in only those aspects of her that had touched him over the years. On one hand stood a woman devoid of anything he had hoped for; on the other, a character that could never shed its pretense and concealments no matter the circumstance—a duality he found himself confronting with increasing frequency, much to his chagrin. Still, there remained many moments when he could not simply watch her in silence.

In the next house they moved to, that summer their child fell seriously ill.

It was around the time when the season shifted from the blossom season, with its winds and dust, to the calm early summer that Ogin happened upon a house near their previous residence and moved their belongings there using borrowed hands. Among those who came to help was Ogin's youngest brother - a middle school student who had arrived from the countryside for the first time just last year. This brother, who had been left with relatives since the family's dispersal years earlier, was now being sent to Tokyo to pursue his studies.

In a corner of the garden enclosed by a still-vibrant green Keninji bamboo fence, variegated double camellias lay scattered among pines and junipers, their fallen petals resting on earth resembling mountain soil where bluish moss crept across the ground. The building showed fine wood grain in its compact yet well-proportioned construction. Sasamura stepped onto the polished hemlock veranda and stood surveying the garden with an air of contentment. He assisted Ogin and her brother as they hung picture frames and arranged books, though his mind lingered on the study's troubling proximity to the kitchen.

“Like this, the voices from over there stick in my ears—I can’t study or get anything done.” Sasamura said as he sat before the desk.

“This house would be perfect for a working couple or something like that. The problem is I’m planning to live here alone.” “Hmm... This way...” The youngest brother also tilted his head. “So you didn’t notice either? But it was such a pleasant house, you see.” Ogin had also begun to feel concerned, but she still found it comfortable to live there. The magnolia and pomegranate leaves soon grew thick, their cool blue shadows casting across the walls of the overly bright room. Since moving here, Ogin—suddenly revitalized—would sometimes spend half a day cleaning with a refreshed face as if forgetting everything else. Sasamura too went out to the garden and passed his days tending to plants.

At last, the mind-numbing summer arrived.

A new bathtub was brought into the bathroom, and a pretty-faced young maid was hired.

"This isn't right."

From around that time, Sasamura would gaze at Shōichi’s pallid face and grow uneasy at intervals. As their younger daughter gradually became more endearing, the older child ceased to be looked after by her mother. The temperamental child occasionally caused trouble for the maids and elderly. "He’s turned into such a peculiar child." "If we don’t correct this now, it’ll be problematic when he’s older." Ogin watched with a baffled expression as Shōichi began whimpering in a fretful voice.

“You people don’t understand this child’s temperament.” Sasamura said this and grew agitated where he stood.

67 One morning, as Ogin paced the veranda with a fussy Shōichi on her back, Sasamura sat at his desk wearing a bitter expression while chain-smoking tobacco. He had been keeping himself aloof from household matters for days now. The sight of his wife anxiously circling before him—waiting as if willing her husband to finally intervene in their child’s illness—scraped at Sasamura’s nerves like fingernails against an exposed nerve. The previous night in Azabu, a single father who had recently settled down with his mother and three children had visited alongside Ogin’s cousin from the countryside. Shōichi, taken along that morning, had returned exhausted from the unaccustomed train ride and now slept cradled in his uncle’s arms. The child’s already troubled stomach had been ravaged by grapes served with beer to their guests. Before dawn could break the sweltering night’s grip, the boy crawled out from under the mosquito net he shared with his mother and called for her in a thin, whimpering voice.

“You’ve had enough, haven’t you?”

By morning, Ogin too had finally realized that something was wrong with the child’s body. “There’s nothing to be done—he’ll just waste away.” With a sigh, Ogin paced in the cool shade of the garden and went into the room to offer him toys, but the child remained unhappy.

“You have a terrible fever.” “Let’s go see the doctor, okay?” While talking to the child, Ogin entrusted the infant to the maid and went out. The child, whose fever had soared to forty-two degrees at one point, lay wrapped in a thin cloth as if on fire on the laps of the gathered people, remaining in a comatose state throughout the day. And continuously, bluish-black stools were collected in the bedpan. Each time the child whimpered and cried, it resounded in Sasamura’s ears.

“He said, ‘This time we’ve made rather a blunder,’ you see.” “If you want to save him, they say there’s no choice but hospitalization.” “They insist home care simply won’t be adequate under any circumstances.”

When Ogin returned from the doctor, she spoke to Sasamura. “In any case, they say we must first bring the fever down a bit.” “Dr. Takahashi will come later and take another look, they say.” “But… they also said that when the time comes, the hospital will arrange a referral for us.” As the afternoon arrived and the sweltering heat intensified, the child grew even weaker. And while breathing heavily, he occasionally opened his eyes and pleaded for water. His eyes no longer had the strength to recognize people’s faces.

In Sasamura’s irritated mind, hospitalization felt like a monumental task he had to confront, but for Ogin, having to make immediate preparations from their household—parched since summer—was yet another ordeal. By the time the doctor came to check on him, the fever had subsided considerably. The child kept calling out in a shrill yet feeble voice, “Ice… ice….” “But we must at least make new merino bedding for the child… It’s not like we can just act on impulse as you do now.”

When it was finally decided that Ogin would be hospitalized, she spoke to the impatient Sasamura. Ogin, who had long nursed her aunt, knew the exacting ways of hospitals. “Everything’s such a mismatched jumble—when you try to do something properly, you just end up floundering.” Sasamura could not stay there long. And upon exiting the chaotic ward, he abruptly took off his hat and went outside.

68 By around nine o'clock that evening—by the time they carried the child into the hospital—Sasamura had already returned home once to negotiate with the hospital and handle related matters. “They say it’s acceptable until just past nine. Let’s get him admitted tonight no matter what.”

At that time，Ogin was taking out things like the child’s change of clothes from the closet with her mother and gathering daily necessities for their stay．In the tea room’s Shinto altar and Buddhist altar，the oil lamps the mother had lit cast a crimson glow，and various people had gathered there． “Let’s just hope they don’t turn him away．” “He’ll probably be okay．It’s not like it’s too late yet，” Sasamura said while stepping out ahead of the others．

“Get better quickly and come home, okay?” When the old woman said this, the child—wrapped in a blanket in the car— “Granny, you wait at your house…” he said as he left.

The slowly drawn car came into view of Sasamura, who had come out to the hospital entrance and was watching impatiently.

“Sweetie, do you understand? Look, Daddy…” Ogin spoke to the child as she arrived in the car. The town had grown late, the air damp with moisture. The examination room—separate from both wards and main entrance—lay deep within the grounds, past the large black gate’s side entrance and through gravel-covered courtyards. Only Sasamura and Ogin entered inside. While the room was being assigned, the group stood encircling the child in the dim corridor. The child suddenly cried out urgently about needing to defecate again. Those unaccustomed to the place fumbled helplessly about.

The hospital room was a fairly spacious tatami-matted space facing the thoroughfare. Under the dim electric light, a white bed lay arranged with desolate emptiness. "No! Don't wanna!" The child grew anxious about being made to lie on that bed. "Let's go home." "You'll sleep here until you get better, okay? Be a good boy now." "The doctor will scold you."

“No... I wanna go home...” The child stubbornly insisted. And he let out a voice brimming with pent-up frustration as he cried and screamed. In the end, his feeble body sprang from the bed and thrashed about the area. Sasamura slapped his cheek sharply, but the child grew even more terrified and thrashed about. The maid, carrying the girl on her back, paced restlessly nearby. “It’s just not working at all.” Ogin rolled onto the tatami mat, gazed at the child’s face—exhausted from thrashing and now sleeping with labored breaths—and spoke despondently.

“In this state, even what might have been saved may not survive after all. If it comes to this, we’d do better nursing him at home instead. It’s too pitiful.” “You’re right.” Sasamura sighed. They would later understand that this hospital, though designed to feel warm and homelike, came across as exactly the opposite that night through the doctors’ and female clerks’ unadorned attitudes. Somehow even this disgusted the two of them.

“At any rate, let’s wait until the director examines him.” That day coincided with the director’s scheduled business trip to the Chiba branch hospital. It took many days thereafter for the child to grow accustomed to the hospital room—days spent lying still for bowel movements and enduring painful mercury enemas that demanded careful judgment to withstand. “The illness will climb still higher. If we can properly crest that peak, there should be little left to worry about afterward.” When the elderly director conducted his first examination the day after admission, his manner showed such seasoned expertise it verged on nobility.

Sixty-nine For over thirty days in that hospital room corner by the thin-rimmed brazier, the two ate meals—trays from the hospital kitchen, daily lunchboxes brought from home, and occasional items Ogin procured from the neighborhood fishmonger—all hidden from their small patient's sight. The child's appetite had returned with such ferocity—working his sunken cheeks like a caged monkey seeing others eat, contorting his face near tears—around when permissions began coming every day or two from the director: first rice gruel tolerating two or three grains, then wafers, soft-boiled egg yolks, and mizuame syrup. Yet even before these concessions, regarding food or anything else, the patient had been frightfully obstinate.

“Sweetie’s sick of this.” After crossing what the director called the perilous peak, when his fever had somewhat subsided and he grew tired of the playthings arranged around his bed or hung from strings, the patient would sometimes sit on the bed with an air of utter weariness—chewing at the dry skin of his lips, face scrunched up—and mutter with a listless air. “There, there,” Ogin comforted from beside him. “Just a little more patience now. “If you keep enduring, soon you’ll walk again, eat your favorite Western dishes, and we’ll all go together to Asakusa or wherever you like.”

Just when the stool would show slight improvement, troubling mucus would appear or the fever that had finally subsided would spike again, so things did not proceed as smoothly as those by his side had hoped. When Sasamura returned from outside, he would invariably take up the temperature chart to examine it or insert the thermometer into the patient’s armpit, swinging between disappointment and resignation. Yet even when he didn’t go out, he couldn’t leave everything entirely to Ogin. If the lukewarm water enema reverted back to a mercury enema, the hearts of the couple that had begun to hold hope would suddenly cloud over again. Sasamura performed enemas and occasionally asked the nurses—who came to take the child’s temperature and pulse—various difficult questions.

“You should stop asking so much.” “They’ll get annoyed.” Ogin later said to Sasamura.

“You’ve already managed to come this far after all.” “It’s better if you don’t get so agitated.” During the two or three days surrounding that night when the director, declaring “Tonight will be the critical peak,” made special late rounds to administer what seemed to be a cardiac emergency dose, Sasamura remained fixed at the bedside of his comatose child, forgetting all else—yet at times he noticed Ogin’s weary, listless demeanor, her resolve seeming to waver abruptly away from the child who appeared beyond hope. Even without that, Sasamura would sometimes grow irritable and suddenly raise his hand toward Ogin’s head, but with their sick child before them, the hearts of the two had softened toward each other, as if they were journeying together on a cramped boat. The gentle effort to preserve that small life—with almost nothing else in their lives beyond it—was what brought them face to face each day.

“Once the boy recovers, shall we go to a hot spring or something?”

Sasamura started to speak upon finding his wife slumped over in exhaustion by the child's side at dawn.

“You must be exhausted too.”

“No.” Ogin opened her weary eyes and, as if she had been scolded, flusteredly raised her face and beamed.

Outside the window grew pale with approaching dawn, and a gentle breeze seeped through the mosquito net. Sasamura felt he had become far removed from his daily life of spiteful affections that so readily turned volatile.

Seventy

The hospital room that had been full at admission began showing scattered vacancies by discharge time. Though only mid-September, after one heavy rainfall the weather turned abruptly cool, until at night the white bedsheets felt cold to the touch. Ogin sent for flannel bedding from home, yet realizing autumn had truly come left her strangely unsettled. Day after day of overcast skies left the hospital interiors clammy. In that old building where silence could deepen like forest stillness, distant door slams would give way to children's wails or women's laughter seeping through walls. Among patients were young working-class couples who dressed up for daytime excursions while leaving children with maids and nurses, and an Osaka-dialect woman who'd brought her child fallen ill during a Numazu summer retreat. Through Sasamura's window passed processions - young widows carrying white-shrouded infants, triumphant families parading cured children in carriages - each sight making the couple despair anew over their own child's lingering illness and resent the interminable hospitalization.

There were also one or two people such as Mr.Kami who exchanged toys and shared sweets with Ogin.

“Their house is behind Asakusa Ward Office, I hear. After we’re discharged, they insist we should visit—apparently they run quite a large knitted fabric factory.” “They’re not one for flattery, but there’s something about them that makes you like them somehow.” “The moment they see my face, they start talking about all sorts of things—and they say the same about me over there too.”

Ogin brought from that hospital room toys—spiders and octopuses made of freshly crafted wire with ingeniously designed legs—and fastened them to threads strung across the floor. Bored Shōichi wouldn’t let Ogin leave his side even for a moment. Ogin waited until she heard the child’s steady breathing before finally slipping out to use the washbasin or visit the toilet. “Let’s go up to the second floor for a bit.” “You might feel more refreshed that way.” “From up there, you can see your favorite trains.”

Ogin said this and hoisted Shōichi onto her back. Then, together with the maid who was carrying the next girl, she went out to the second-floor corridor and had them look outside from the window. The child would grow bored almost immediately after watching for just a short while.

Sasamura, who had grown weary of the hospital room, would sometimes come home and lay his tired body down in the middle of the seemingly emptied parlor. In the garden, pine and pomegranate leaves grew thick and luxuriant, while a bright drizzle pattered down softly. Having been shut away in the hospital room for so long—attending to the woman’s tasks that tended to grow lax—he now looked back on how he had driven his own body day and night. Sasamura seemed to be constantly tormented by painful dreams.

Among the two or three letters lying atop the neatly tidied desk was one from his elderly mother—who, having been informed by their nephew about her unseen grandchild’s illness—had written at length offering advice on nursing care. At the back of the letter was a single bag of ritually purified rice from Hiyoshi-sama—the deity his mother worshipped—rolled up inside. The elderly mother went there every day at the pale light before dawn to pray for her grandchild’s recovery. As Sasamura read this, memories of his own childhood—when his mother had endured many hardships raising a frail child—unfolded and rose vividly before his eyes. He couldn’t help but worry about the life of his child who would walk the same path. And he couldn’t help but contemplate the powerful bonds of blood relation—parents, children, grandchildren—who must someday part ways in death through some twist of fate.

Seventy-One By the time they began feeding him things like sashimi and clear tofu soup, the child who had been utterly weakened was gradually regaining strength. As Ogin placed the yukihira pot containing rice she had rinsed in the kitchen onto the brazier and began preparing gruel, the child sat cross-legged on a soft zabuton cushion, waiting with his nose—keenly sensing healthy hunger—sniffing the appetizing steam. The obstinacy and willfulness seen during the worst phase—when he would push away the nurses' hands administering enemas—were no longer observed as he entered convalescence.

The couple watched from beside, forgetting everything else, as their child ate the soft porridge. "It's truly wonderful he can eat like this now." Ogin wiped around his mouth as she spoke with genuine joy. "Isn't that too much to give him?" Having been chastened by his earlier failure with the arrowroot starch drink, Sasamura couldn't simply follow the doctor's instructions to the letter. "This much is fine." "Being too cautious all the time has its downsides too."

Ogin scooped up another soft portion with the lotus-shaped spoon and gave it to him. "Try standing up." Sasamura set down his chopsticks and began speaking to the child, who sat quietly as if satisfied. The child managed to stand by gripping the windowsill but couldn't sustain himself long. "Still not ready yet." Sasamura laughed bleakly. At that same windowsill, the next girl had just begun pulling herself upright. Throughout the long hospital stay—never properly nursed at his mother's breast—he'd been confined to the backs of an outside helper and the maid. After Ogin's milk dwindled from nursing fatigue, they supplemented with cow's milk, yet the child remained plump. The maid carried him about, wandering corridors or visiting the garden near the director's quarters. She sometimes received sweets from the director's wife. The nearby Nikolai Cathedral too became one of the maid's playgrounds. Sasamura had heard its Sunday morning bell toll four times now. Ogin once carried Shōichi there herself to look.

“What a beautiful temple this is,” Ogin said. “When you go inside, your mind naturally grows calm—or so it feels. But our little one hated it.” “I disliked temples too when I was a child,” Sasamura replied. At seven or eight years old, Sasamura had been taken by his mother before dawn to join the crowd gathered outside the great gate of Honganji’s branch temple, shivering under cold starlight—a memory that remained etched in his mind even now. The child sitting in that vast dark hall, hearing his mother explain how “those who listen to Monzeki-sama’s sermons will have their sins erased—even hell-bound souls can reach paradise,” had feared the place as a hell where sins were laid bare. No other childhood memory clung to him with such visceral clarity.

The small patient with a distended belly fell asleep breathing more robustly than ever before. "Well now, I'd like to slip out to the baths while the little one's sleeping." Since arriving here, Ogin had occasionally had Ms. Otoh—who came by at well-timed moments—do her hair, but she'd never managed to find an opportunity to bathe.

After tidying up around there, in the hospital room after Ogin had left, Sasamura leaned pensively against the wall and kept watch over the child’s sleeping face. And as his weary head began to settle, thoughts of the various post-discharge tasks he would have to deal with rose to mind. “We can’t exactly leave the hospital looking too shabby either,” Ogin had said, and Sasamura also considered the things she had been concerned about. Ogin returned soon, stroking her glossy, reddish face.

Seventy-Two

The post-discharge home appeared new not only to the child but also to Ogin and Sasamura, whose eyes had grown accustomed to dark places. Dressed in a soft, padded kimono and placed in the center of the family room, the child gazed out at the garden with eyes too weak to bear the outside world's intense stimuli. His face remained clouded. When Sasamura asked if they could finally be discharged, the director replied "Yes—a little longer," while stroking and examining the child's abdomen,

“It took a bit longer than planned, but he’ll be alright now—he had quite a rough time,” the director said with a laugh as he left.

Two or three days had passed since then. They decided they would continue outpatient visits for the time being, and in any case, the couple resolved to leave the hospital.

That day, from morning onward, after two or three days of continuous rain, the weather began to clear—alternating between a fine drizzle and pale yellow sunlight streaming through the dust-covered windowpanes. “Let’s get discharged today.”

Sasamura brought it up shortly after finishing his lunch. In the hospital room where few visitors now came, the child sat on the bed with the distributed wafer still in hand, wearing a look of utter weariness.

The plants that had been brought from home and placed on the window frame facing the garden had also been forgotten for some time, parched from lack of water, and had withered. “Then I’ll just have to go home for a bit…”

Ogin seemed surprised by the suddenness of it.

"If we take him home, he might actually start getting better quickly.—Well then, I'll be going now." Having said that, Ogin smoothed her hair and hurried out after taking down the geta—wooden sandals Sasamura had acquired in Awajichō while shopping when the illness was entering convalescence. During that time, Sasamura carried the child out and wandered the corridors. Critically ill patients kept being brought in while corpses were carried out. Compared to its former bustle, the hospital now felt oddly lethargic. Even in Sasamura's heart—which had been stretched taut to the breaking point—there now drifted a faint melancholy born of slackening tension and uneasy calm. At the corridor's far end, only the old woman nursing an emaciated eleven- or twelve-year-old girl since before Sasamura's arrival remained as the couple's longest-standing acquaintance. This patient was a child sent away from home. Even when her biological father occasionally visited wearing a Panama hat, the girl showed no recognition.

“How pitiful.” Ogin would sometimes come to see that room and speak to Sasamura with clouded eyes. “If we’d given our boy away like you said, he’d have turned out just like that too.” She had added this as well. “Mama...” Shōichi would say, his face clouding with impatience at times, whereupon Sasamura would carry him outside still wearing his outdoor sandals. Pale cloud shadows stretched across the town. Sasamura walked from there to the streetcar avenue, showing the child the plaza at the bridge’s approach. As they lingered there, Ogin came hurrying over by car, clutching bundles wrapped in furoshiki cloths.

At home, a lamp was lit at the household shrine among other rituals. Among the various offerings decorating the shrine were some that Ms. Otoh the hairdresser had purposely gone all the way to Narita to obtain. The child’s stool that soon followed still contained mucus. “I wonder if it was wrong to bring him here after all.” Ogin murmured to Sasamura as he peered into the chamber pot. Beside Ogin, who had succumbed to exhaustion and fallen into a deep sleep, Sasamura kept watch over the child who occasionally kicked off the bedding. Outside the mosquito net, mosquitoes still buzzed.

Seventy-Three

Prompted by Ogin’s remark—“Above all else, I want to quickly settle our social obligations…”—they distributed gifts from the bed-clearing along with treating Ms. Otoh to a theater performance in return and inviting concerned well-wishers to their home. By that time, the child still remained in his post-discharge condition, but when autumn arrived, his convalescence progressed rapidly. That winter brought nothing noteworthy except when the child suddenly contracted diphtheria one day at her brother’s house after the New Year had begun, barely saved by an injection during the critical moment.

“Raising this child is hard work,” she said. “They say it’s best to keep him as Lord Marishiten’s disciple until he turns eleven.” Ogin had heard such things from an inquiry office elder acquainted with Otoh.

However, they gradually came to realize that their younger daughter—who had seemed like she would grow up fine even if neglected—wasn't always just contentedly playing alone by herself. This child normally served as little more than an amusement for the adults, but when his stubbornness took hold, he would cling to the sliding doors and cry with all his heart for over an hour in willful defiance.

“What an unpleasant child.” “With that nose like a pig’s snout… this brat’s going to grow up mean.” Sasamura felt as though he were touching the sprouting of a small self. “Since it’s the year of the snake, he might’ve taken after me and become tenacious.” As she said this and hugged the child, Ogin found herself increasingly drawn to how she could now strangely see his face in a new light. “You seem to only care for the little one.” “I don’t favor one over the other.”

Sasamura clearly understood that the mother’s affection, which she occasionally voiced in such terms, was gradually cooling toward the older child.

“That’s right. From his constitution to his temperament—I understand Shōichi best.”

And the sharpness of that mutual understanding was one of the inescapable pains for Sasamura.

That winter, the cold Sasamura had suddenly contracted lingered long in his bronchial tubes. Even after the fever subsided, the phlegm that clung to his throat still wouldn't clear. He sometimes had chills. Sasamura shut himself away in a four-and-a-half-mat room and slept for days. Even the wind slipping through the shoji gaps cut sharply against his thin skin.

"I've finally aggravated it." While gazing at his emaciated hand, Sasamura muttered in frustration.

“This came.”

One evening, Ogin took out a postcard from the drawer of the mirror stand and showed it to Sasamura. The postcard was from Isotani, addressed to the seamstress woman who had become the wife of a certain carpenter, but its text included an inquiry about Ogin’s current whereabouts. In that sense, he seemed unaware that Ogin had finally settled down with Sasamura. Sasamura felt a blood-tingling nostalgia toward the clumsy handwriting and the signed postcard.

“Huh.” “So he’s thinking of seeing you again or something, huh?”

“That might be the case.” “That man has a habit of remembering women he’s parted with again after a year or two.” “I don’t know if there’s anything specific now, but when he’s involved with one particular woman, it seems he still ends up concerned about others.” “And then when they’ve forgotten about him, he abruptly goes to meet them to apologize or something.” “He’s such a peculiar man.” “Interesting.” “He must be fickle after all, don’t you think?”

“Where is he now?” “Where could he be? Of course—he failed out of school too.” “He must have met someone somewhere at least once.” “If he meets someone, that’s what he’ll say.”

Seventy-Four Sasamura had even tried searching for any fragment—any old letters Isotani might have sent to Ogin—just to see if they existed. The prospect of discovering something within them that would make his heart race when read seemed more intriguing than anything else. When alone, Sasamura often enjoyed searching through the mirror stand, chests of drawers, sewing boxes, and bottoms of bags that carried scents of perfume and face powder. It was exactly like the feeling he'd had as a child searching through his mother's musty personal chests and document boxes in the dark closet of their old country home. But as for writings, there were only bundles of promissory notes that Ogin's uncle had lent friends during his prosperous days, household expense ledgers from that period, several account books, and other items all bearing Sasamura's name. Among the bundles of promissory notes were some recording considerable sums. There seemed to be one or two people among them whom Ogin remembered.

“I wonder if I should try asking around.”

Ogin would sometimes say such things, and Sasamura heard them too. And each time, he would laugh and say, “If there are those who lend and can’t collect, there are also those who borrow and never repay.” “Rather than those, there should still be letters from Isotani around, right? Show me those.” Sasamura asked after saying this. “When I was at the Koishikawa house, I burned them all.” “Huh. What a waste that was.” Sasamura lamented.

Another time, through the wife of a friend from school, he heard a story about a female student whose beloved man had incidentally come to her mother's attention. For their only daughter's sake, the father had arranged to adopt the man as his son-in-law. However, after this development, the man's affections soon shifted to another woman—having heard this tale, Sasamura recounted it to Ogin too. "Putting letters in an obi pouch—does that sort of thing actually happen?"

“Oh, I suppose so. “I was like that too.” Ogin murmured, her eyes taking on a look that seemed to reminisce about the maiden-like feelings she had at that time. When she had burned those letters, Ogin still wore red items on her body. “Why didn’t you show that to me?” Sasamura regretted that even then. For Ogin, it was lonely that there was nothing of that sort on Sasamura’s side; yet even so, letters from a woman who had been at a hot spring around that time and letters from the woman with whom Sasamura had fallen into a faint Platonic love during his younger days in Osaka were invaluable material for her, who tended to exaggerate such matters.

When the two were at a vaudeville theater, Ogin quickly spotted Isotani's face on the second floor across where he had come with friends. While shrinking into the shadow of the person sitting in front, she occasionally stole glances over her shoulder in that direction. "That person over there was a friend of Isotani's." Ogin said this to inform Sasamura, but he only learned about Isotani having been nearby after returning home. You're making a fool of me. He must have noticed me. I'm the one who's been made a fool.

Sasamura regretted not having committed to memory each of the faces around him.

“As if he’d notice.” “He wouldn’t have even known I was there.” “Besides, I’ve changed so much since back then.” “Unless we actually talk, even if we passed each other once or twice, there’s no way he’d recognize me.” “But just as your eyes keep searching for him, how could his eyes possibly overlook you?” “That’s absolutely not true.”

Seventy-Five

However, it was not long before the time came when the name Isotani uttered by Sasamura carried no meaning or resonance beyond contempt and mockery toward his wife. Just as he felt no pain even when Ogin brought it up, Sasamura found it lonely how it was gradually becoming clear to him that the man was not truly a match for him in the real sense and that the woman was unworthy of him.

“At the tram line, Mama was talking to a stranger.” One day, when Shōichi had been taken along by Ogin to her dental treatment, he suddenly came up to Sasamura and reported this. Ogin’s teeth were weakened each time she gave birth. Her vision would sometimes blur. After her second childbirth, her teeth had deteriorated further. “These are terrible teeth. You’ve endured this remarkably well until now,” the doctor told her, leaving her nearly breaking composure from the awkwardness.

When Ogin felt pain, she would have someone treat her teeth temporarily, but couldn't maintain regular visits. "What does it mean for someone your age to have such rotten teeth?" At her previous residence, she had gone to draw water from the well in the rain, fallen on a slope while carrying a child on her back, and lost two front teeth to injury—that being her only dental issue until now. An old man who had never suffered toothaches laughed at her while making this remark. "I'm not some country bumpkin."

When it came time to eat, the child was also troubled by cavities in the same way. Sasamura saw there, too, the bad blood that seemed to be invading his own body year after year.

“This time, may I finally attend more consistently?” Ogin said this and, holding Shōichi’s hand, began going to the doctor regularly. In the oppressive April weather, Ogin would sometimes feel unbearable headaches alongside her dental pain. She would undo the hair she had carefully arranged and press ice against her scalp.

“What’s happening? Is my brain rotting away? It’s an indescribably unpleasant pain. And my whole body feels like a ring tightening around it…” Ogin, who had stubbornly persevered through their strained household while clinging to the belief that better days might still lie ahead, would sometimes realize she was nearing thirty as her body weakened. “How much longer can I keep working? Soon enough I’ll be buried.”

Whenever she saw Sasamura’s face laughing desolately like that, she often felt it was somehow pitiful. “Rather than you suffering in a house like mine with its foreseeable end, you’d do better to make some arrangement now.” “If you teamed up with some shrewd merchant or labor contractor—letting them call you ‘sis’ or whatever while living cheerfully—who knows how much more clever that’d seem.” “Even running a box shop, you could properly keep some dandy in style.” “In return, I’ll raise the child to be useful to you later.” “And I’ll hand him over whenever you need.” “Whether the brat’ll listen to you—that I can’t say.”

Whenever Sasamura said that, Ogin pretended not to hear.

As for the man that the child had met on the tram line, Sasamura couldn't quite figure it out.

“What kind of person...” he said, listing names of people he knew, but still couldn’t figure it out. “That person was talking about you.”

The child said while looking down.

It soon became clear from Ogin’s account that the man was Isotani. “It was just like the Hongō Theater.” “I was really terrible.” “From now on, think of me as your sister—I’ll be there to help when needed,” he said…,” Ogin recounted with a laugh.

Seventy-Six

At the start of summer, when Sasamura escaped the house with all its nagging obligations and shut himself away in a room at a quiet country inn, his state of mind differed completely from when he had previously come there with work commissioned by a friend.

The town was situated close to Nikko and within less than five hours' reach of Shiobara, but there was nothing in the town itself to detain travelers' footsteps. When Sasamura fled the house, he was in such utter confusion that he had no leisure to consider the tedium of that place. Moreover, he had made no preparations whatsoever to go to any suitable location. Sasamura wanted to escape his house and its people, settle in a place not yet accustomed to travelers from Tokyo, and quietly think something through to its conclusion.

Even before that，Sasamura had often been on the verge of rushing out of the house，only to be restrained by Ogin and the old man. From spring to summer，Sasamura’s emotions became more frayed than ever before. It pained him to see Ogin’s face，which seemed to do nothing but sigh every day due to worries about her own health and household struggles，her brother who had to close down a house he once owned，and her mother who had gone there—but he also found it unbearable how these waves of anxiety constantly reverberated in his own head. Ogin’s demeanor of trying to hide everything made the two of them even more unable to open up to each other.

For no particular reason, the fact that Sasamura had been visiting a woman from time to time would sometimes irritate Ogin’s mind. The woman, who had been staying at a boarding house in Surugadai due to poor health, differed vastly in age from him; though two or three young men would gather around her, it was only her decadent mood—born of a mole-like existence in perpetual gloom—that occasionally piqued his interest.

When the house grew oppressive, Sasamura would jingle tobacco money in the depths of his kimono sleeve and direct his aimless feet toward that direction from time to time. And lying by the wall of that room, he listened to various stories from the woman. On the woman’s desk sat medicine bottles and such. The woman—her eyes dejected—wore a showy yukata patterned with peonies and draped a student-style haori with arrow-patterned weave over it. In her disheveled state, she spoke of how she had fallen into that life and of her first love. When his head grew tired, Sasamura would curl up on the zabuton cushion, cover himself with a blanket, and begin drifting into pleasant drowsiness. Just when he thought he had fallen asleep, voices of the boarding house landlady and the woman—who had come for tea and chatter—reached his ears.

One or two other friends of that sort also came to visit the woman. Among them were also those who received support from a man and attended school.

The boarding house had few guests.

And with the shoji tightly closed, lying down there, getting up, and watching the woman go about her tasks, his mind and body would be invaded by a kind of languid complacency to the point where rising from the dark room felt burdensome—yet he was still tormented by some restless irritant.

“How old is your little boy?”

The woman asked, as if suddenly remembering. “Five.” Sasamura answered as if laughing at himself. He took some unappetizing Western food there and ate it. “Is this line of work really such a bad one?” The woman asked.

Sasamura could no longer bear staying there, hid his face under a hunting cap, and soon went outside.

Seventy-Seven

The woman whose occupation involved sending letters everywhere would occasionally write formulaic letters to Sasamura under a male pseudonym. These too came within Ogin's notice. Even without that, determining where Sasamura had been from his expression when returning home posed little difficulty for Ogin. Her manner during such moments stabbed sharply at Sasamura's self-reproachful heart. "Don't you realize you're becoming society's perfect laughingstock by involving yourself with such things? Even Mr. Miyama says so—everyone does."

Ogin became vehement and cursed the woman with vile language. Her eyes had changed color. Sasamura, who had returned home after wandering around outside for about two days, found it strange that there was nothing that should have agitated Ogin’s nerves to such an extent. Yet there were aspects of Ogin’s rough manner of speaking and gestures—devoid of any understanding of his feelings—that he couldn’t simply laugh off.

Abandoning everything and putting only a pen and paper into his pocket, when Sasamura abruptly left home one afternoon, Ogin remained completely unaware. Until then, the two had repeatedly engaged in ugly quarrels. After moving to a new home, the matter of the woman Sasamura had distanced himself from no longer occupied any space in Ogin's mind. Yet Sasamura's thoughts—which had been temporarily distracted by such matters—had lost even more of their former composure. And as life grew more troublesome year after year, he felt increasingly unable to hold together his fragmenting state of mind.

The rain fell in a damp drizzle that day, but to Sasamura—who hadn’t left home in some time—the view from the train of green-leaved plains stretching beyond appeared refreshingly vivid. The train gradually moved beyond Tokyo’s outskirts into the broad, monotonous fields of the Kanto region. In Sasamura’s mind, the shadows of his home and family gatherings—which until then had felt like being caught in a whirlpool—began gradually thinning. The quiet freedom of the town he approached now grew clearer by degrees within his sediment-clouded mind. Wherever he journeyed now, he found himself comparing his present state to that mindset from seven or eight years prior—when his eyes had constantly chased after glimpses of people and women. This feeling had been especially pronounced during his long westward wanderings. The sight of travelers moving with their families aboard ships or trains had intensified that sensation further. Back then, to Sasamura’s eyes, nature wherever he went had been nothing but tedious country lanes lined with pines that grated on his nerves.

The refreshing early summer rain sprinkled lightly on the train window. Outside, fields of black soil thoroughly soaked by rain showed blue vegetables stretching tender leaves and stems, while darkened thatched houses nestled against vividly colored groves came into view at times. Inside the train, sunburned red faces of Westerners who appeared to be heading to Nikko could also be seen.

The train gradually proceeded toward the mountains. The deep mixed forest, constantly buffeted by gusts, swayed its supple branches while slender young bamboo from the thicket intertwined their rain-soaked stems. The cedar groves clustered here and there like those in old oil paintings evoked the mountains' profound essence.

The town, which had grown suddenly desolate after the railway was laid, was so quiet it made one's ears ring. Even on the wide street lined with fairly large houses, the figures of people were sparse.

Guided from the inn’s wide earthen entrance to a back second-floor room, Sasamura restlessly stepped out to the veranda edge to gaze at the garden or fixate on scrolls and hanging decorations, but the faint cries of small birds kept downstairs could be heard forlornly through the air. Even as evening fell, the rain continued to fall softly.

Seventy-Eight It took considerable time for him to grow accustomed to the loneliness of that spacious room—a space that resisted letting one settle into any habitual posture. When Sasamura woke around nine in the morning, he would typically remain rooted by his desk until three or four in the afternoon when the bathwater heated. To this sitting room—detached from other chambers—no sounds ever penetrated. At times, the rhythmic drumming of a candy peddler gathering children on the wide desolate street would fracture the sediment-thick silence enveloping everything; otherwise only the customary chirping of small birds pricked at his ears. Sasamura's mind—as though severed from all sensation—would occasionally bleach white like a vacuum.

When his tongue grew irritated from the tobacco he kept smoking, Sasamura would suddenly turn back to his desk and try to write something, staring at the paper, but his mind remained weary. On clear days, Mount Nantai and other peaks could be distinctly seen from the window. The shrine forest and cedar avenue stretching toward Nikko appeared darkened before his eyes. Though the Otanigawa riverbed was visible from the high rear window, wherever Sasamura looked he seemed to face a wall of silence.

Thoughts of home would occasionally surface before his eyes. Even aspects of Ogin's feelings and fate that had been imperceptible when they faced each other now seemed clearly understandable with this physical distance. In Ogin's heart—where her youthful spirit was wearing down along with her body—dreams of love still occasionally returned. Insatiable material desires constantly unsettled her heart. The husband's violent hands, trying to trample them down, had become increasingly difficult to resist year after year.

“If I can keep the children from going without and dress them in decent clothes when needed, I have no other wishes.” Ogin’s words cast the lonely shadow of a life gradually losing its color. Sasamura couldn’t help recalling how Ogin had collapsed pitifully in the theater crowd one day.

That day, the couple went to Shinbashi to see someone off. And on their way back, at the foot of the bridge, they ate tempura that Ogin liked.

“Ah, delicious.”

Ogin said this and laughed self-consciously while looking at Sasamura’s face, as if amused by her own behavior.

“You really eat a lot.” Sasamura forced a wry smile. The two strolled along Ginza Street to walk off their meal.

“I wonder how many years it’s been since I last walked somewhere like this. When I lived in Tsukiji, I used to come here almost every night.” Ogin said this while looking around the area with fresh interest. “Shall we peek at one act of Kabuki?” Sasamura suddenly proposed when they reached the corner of Owari-chō.

The one-act viewing section was quite crowded. Craning their necks toward the dimly lit stage, they saw that the curtain for Jishin Kato had just risen. Ogin stood on tiptoes and peered over people’s shoulders until she finally caught a glimpse of Yaozō Kato’s head emerging from the hanamichi. In her bleary eyes, the beautiful figures of women lining the box seats gradually came into vivid focus. Ogin had not set foot in such a place since seeing what was called Danjūrō’s once-in-a-lifetime performance of Kumagai with her uncle nearly ten years earlier.

Eventually, as the pale yellow curtain that had descended fell, and around the time Sōjūrō’s Konishi appeared there, Ogin retreated to the back with a deathly pale face. And while holding her head, she breathed laboriously. "My eyes are spinning... I feel like everything’s gone pitch black around me..."

Clutching Sasamura’s hand and stepping out into the corridor, Ogin cried out in a tearful voice, “You… I can’t go on anymore,” and immediately collapsed there.

For a while, Ogin went out to the playground and stood in the wind. Ogin sat plastered to the zinc-plated floor, gradually growing accustomed to it. Sasamura soon led her outside. Without brushing the dust from her coat and with a pallid face, Ogin searched for a pharmacy. Tears welled in her eyes as her hands and feet turned completely cold. "Why have I become so weak?" Muttering to herself while walking along the riverside, Ogin's figure occasionally drew Sasamura's glancing looks back.

Seventy-Nine

“Please come take your bath,” said the well-mannered young maid—who was said to come from Kuriyama—as she arrived at the room’s entrance with a smile every single day at the appointed hour. By this time, Sasamura’s mind had grown listless and exhausted without thinking of anything in particular. There were times when the pain of silence nearly drove him mad, but he still found it loathsome to move about the room. Having stayed over ten days, he had come to understand the townspeople’s living conditions, and through snippets overheard from masseurs and others, he had mostly pieced together matters concerning the inn’s residents. The inns of the town had mostly turned into Daruma-like lodgings since travelers heading up Mount Nikkō stopped coming through here. The forest that once thrived at the back of the town had been completely cut down year after year, and even in the barren soil, rice would no longer ripen. The horses that had carried goods to Ashio, their sole remaining client, were now scarcely seen. Amidst all this, that inn alone had maintained its dignity. In the back, there was also a newly built annex where high-ranking officials would come to stay. A foreman who came to collect payments from the fish market gathered local geisha and drum and flute instructors in that hall every day and made a racket.

At the entrance to the bathhouse, well water flowed ceaselessly. While gazing at the pale summer snowgrass brought from the mountains and soaking in that water, Sasamura soaked his body—which felt as if his muscles had gone completely flaccid—in the hot water. On the steam-fogged glass window, the shadows of garden trees were reflected in a pale bluish hue.

When evening approached, Sasamura went out to look around the town. From the dimly lit second floors of inns here and there, figures of cocoon buyers who had come from various places could be seen. When entering the backstreets, there were sights like houses with gates where yellow persimmon flowers were scattering, rows of cluttered eateries, and geisha houses displaying sacred lanterns. Sasamura would occasionally go to the edge of the terrifying Ōtani River, still bearing the scars of last autumn's flood. Upstream from the rock-strewn white riverbed, the rough, menacing forms of mountains overlapped in the twilight sky. Along the embankment crushed by ferocious water currents, people had built huts one after another and were living there. Sasamura would follow the stones upstream across the wide riverbed as far as he could, or perch on rocks listening intently to his throbbing heart that seemed about to be swallowed into depths of terrifying silence.

Before long, flickers of firelight began to twinkle in the forest shade along the lofty opposite bank and among the dense pine groves on the downstream sandbar. Lightning occasionally streaked across the white water. Sasamura could not stay there for long. After making another round of the town and returning to the inn, Sasamura suddenly visualized his own figure, who had been sitting there for about ten days gazing at nothing in particular. On the desk, papers and books remained scattered just as they had been upon arrival, and in the stagnant electric light, summer insects were fluttering their wings.

That evening, Sasamura came to the hearthside downstairs and had sake poured for him. By the hearth, the owner of the town’s large rice mill, who sometimes served as a conversation partner, had also come and was sitting.

The next morning around nine o'clock, when Sasamura went downstairs to wash his face, he suddenly caught sight of a woman peeking out from the kitchen. Her face, with its thin sideburns pulled back tightly, looked haggard and paler than when he had seen it the previous night. The medicinal plaster stuck to her temples was also unsettling.

“Sir, please do take me to Nikko.” A gold tooth glinted in the woman’s mouth. Her voice sounded hoarse. She had come there in response to last night’s greeting.

In the afternoon, Sasamura put on the Western-style clothes that had long hung on the wall and abruptly headed off alone to the station. And he just made it in time for the train bound for Nishi-Nasu.