Pathway to Japanese Literature

I Sasamura had finally registered his wife in the family registry around the same time he submitted the birth notification for their infant. Even Sasamura—who had only ever considered homeownership a habitual formality—found himself confronted all the more clearly with the dilapidated state of his long-reluctant boarding house existence when he returned from that half-year westward journey. What burned itself into his bloodshot eyes during those months of hauling luggage between ports were men boarding ships with their young wives in tow. At a Kyushu hot spring inn, after suffering through another bout of boredom until he soaked himself feverish in the baths, his sole company became an Osaka geisha who occasionally visited his bedside.

“What kinda woman would suit ya?” “I’ll find one to your likin’... But don’t they say Tokyo women are flighty and no good at keepin’ house?” When Sasamura—pale from overdoing the baths—first retreated to his Osaka brother’s home, his sister-in-law said this while urging him to settle down properly. She’d neatly repaired his small-sleeved kimonos with their grimy collars and underrobes with fraying cuffs during his absence.

Sasamura had already grown tired of Dōtonbori as well. The cramped streets of Osaka had grown tiresome, and he soon began preparing to return, yet the thought of setting foot on Tokyo soil again after so long held a certain appeal—though not without its undercurrent of unease. On his return journey, when he stopped by Kyoto, he was even shown the cheerful domestic life of an old friend who had married the woman he loved.

“Among our group, you’re the only one who’s been left behind.” The friend packed tobacco into his long kiseru pipe while sitting atop a large, thick quilt that looked warm in the quiet, beautiful second-floor study, then pulled over his own tobacco tray adorned with maki-e lacquerwork. From there, the rounded silhouette of Higashiyama—tinged a purplish hue—could be seen.

“You should at least see Kyoto’s maiko once.” After that, as his friend gazed at the last few lingering cherry blossoms scattering one by two beneath the fresh foliage and began to speak, there was no room in Sasamura’s preoccupied mind to even catch the scent of what Kyoto meant. And so when they returned home together, he entered the sleeping quarters his wife had prepared and laid his lonely, sobered head upon the pillow.

Until acquiring a house in Tokyo, Sasamura remained at the old boarding house he had lived in for three or four years. In the boarding house, the old desk and bookshelf were once again taken out from the storage room, and a lamp with a rusted rim was placed before his eyes every night. At the window of the second floor where he had settled, the green maple leaves battled the early summer wind. Through circumstance rather than intent, Sasamura finally began to seriously consider the work he had been involved with. On the desk lay new foreign writings, with recently published magazines scattered about. He stood before a large stationery shop he frequented, bought manuscript paper he had long neglected, and breathed anew its crisp scent.

However, Sasamura—unable to settle in the coarse boarding house room—would leave in restless irritation when maids carrying evening meal trays began clattering down the corridors in their sandals. Sasamura generally headed toward his old haunts, but wherever he went, he found none of his former interest. At the house he had constantly visited, the woman he used to meet had left two months prior to set up a household in Negishi. Sasamura felt a weary reluctance to step onto that building’s hollow staircase. Entering the room now occupied by another woman and sitting by the long brazier, he felt disappointed not to experience even a hint of nostalgia. Even hearing the familiar village songs or women’s sandals echoing down hallways failed to stir anything within him.

When a friend urged him, saying, “I’d really like you to move into one of the houses Yamada-kun has recently built,” Sasamura gladly agreed.

II The house was one of the rental properties built by K―, Sasamura’s childhood school friend who—not being very bright—had remained enrolled in university even into those years. Having secured a modest sum of money from his hometown, he had constructed them in Tokyo as part of what he intended to be a long-term venture. On the cleared land stood two modest buildings containing four units each, their walls barely dried, while out back, wood shavings clung to the damp ground strewn with coal cinders that had been soaked by rain. Sasamura had just returned from his travels and had made no preparations for owning a house. Sasamura recalled that an older friend who had assisted him when he first moved to Tokyo—a man for whom he had scraped together the examination fees when taking the higher civil service exam, and who in return had left behind a small collection of junk upon being transferred to a distant province—had stored these items at a relative’s house, and decided to use them as a temporary solution. The cheap chest of drawers that emitted an unpleasant squeak when opened—into this he crammed the accumulated old tabi socks and grime-stiffened garments, then shoved it—separating upper and lower sections—into the six-tatami closet that still reeked of earth. There were also a worn-down pestle, a winnowing basket with splintered edges, and a bowl caked with bright red paint.

Sasamura, who had long suffered from a weak stomach, would exchange the clothes he had brought back from his travels for money somewhere, purchase a single electric medical device at a medical equipment store, and with the remainder occasionally bring back various sundry items.

The desk had been placed in a gloomy four-and-a-half tatami room facing the thoroughfare beside the entrance. Across the way stood small shops that had recently opened in this newly developed district—a sake dealer, a salt cracker seller, and such. Diagonally opposite there had long been a machine forge. From the forge came the ceaseless sound of machinery operating all day, yet Sasamura never found it noisy.

The tottering old man who had come from Shitaya soon quit, as sending him on errands seemed too pitiful. "Those students—they spend all day lazing around while constantly sending this frail old man on errands. It’s intolerable!"

The old man, wearing torn 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 so grubby it’s just unbearable.” Later, the fishmonger’s young workers came to the kitchen entrance and talked about that matter.

Sasamura remained silent with a bitter smile.

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 tatami room. Outside already thrummed with summer’s full force—through the blue reed screen hung over the window lattice could be seen ruddy, vigorous heads of men returning from the neighborhood bathhouse with towels slung over their shoulders, clattering past in geta sandals.

When introduced to the old woman, Sasamura said “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” with a polite bow.

The rough-mannered old woman showed little sign of being accustomed to Tokyo, yet immediately set to work in the disheveled kitchen and tidied it up properly. And together with the friend’s aunt, she prepared rice bran miso and other provisions. For dinner, simmered green beans and such were served in bowls placed on the dining table, and the light from the fastidiously cleaned lamp also seemed brighter than usual. With the friend who had been staying there, Sasamura began conversing haltingly as he picked up his chopsticks. He, who had been perpetually worrying about his stomach, ate with a clouded expression while remaining anxious about his digestion afterward.

Immediately, he began worrying about things like night garments for the old woman. The friend pulled out the futon he had been using from the closet,

“Put this on and go to sleep,” he said, leaning into the two-tatami room. The old woman sat restlessly by the grimy long brazier stained with iron plate drippings, sipping tea endlessly.

“No need for me—one layer’s plenty already… It’s quite warm enough as it is…”

III

When Sasamura’s nephew came alone from the countryside, making the house cramped, Miyama—the friend who had been living with them—moved to a different house in the same tenement. For Miyama, who had never been able to leave under any circumstances, new friendships had formed during Sasamura’s travels. He had also started visiting a certain senior who helped manage his daily affairs. Even after returning to Tokyo and continuing to live together with Miyama, Sasamura sensed that some deeper layer had taken root in the other’s heart. Though Miyama’s circumstances had appeared dire when Sasamura departed on his year-end trip—despite his substantial income—Sasamura’s thoughts had already raced ahead to Osaka’s streets where he’d once wandered rootlessly and to the brother he would meet there after so long, leaving him no capacity to consider Miyama’s situation. Sasamura had simply assumed Miyama would naturally help with packing. Even upon returning this time, he remained oblivious. But bit by bit, he began understanding that Miyama wasn’t just keeping pace with him alone.

“I’ve made considerable efforts for Sasamura myself.” “Even this current house—I’m only staying there because that man gets lonely.” Such matters also reached Sasamura’s ears through a certain man who would drop by here from time to time to eat meals and indulge in all-night conversations. To Sasamura, his nephew’s arrival seemed like the perfect opportunity for the two of them to go their separate ways. To Sasamura, it felt as though he had struck—against something powerful lying within Miyama’s breast, this Miyama who rarely let his thoughts show on his face. It was hardly unusual for Sasamura to flare up in irritation and lash out at Miyama from time to time.

Miyama took Sasamura’s old lacquered paper desk and moved into another house. Around that time, Mr.T—Sasamura’s friend who had arranged the house—brought his belongings from a Komagome boardinghouse and began living there communally. The two came to Sasamura’s place three times daily for meals.

On the evening the nephew arrived, landlord Mr.K, Mr.T, and Miyama also came together; the gathered crowd pooled their contributions and prepared something like a makeshift stew.

In the kitchen, along with helping Granny who was inept at everything, her daughter—a young woman named Ogin—also came to do the shopping and check the soup’s seasoning. “I can’t handle sweet…” The nephew’s cute face flushed red as he furrowed his brow. “Mr.Sasamura, how many years has it been now?” said Mr.T—a prodigious eater—hunching his tuberculosis-curved spine further as he endlessly swapped bowls with a bitter smile. He had already been on leave from university for several years due to his lungs. At that time, he had just returned from Ogasawara Island where he’d spent a year or two conducting inspections, his bag stuffed with survey documents.

“Working on a piece?” Sasamura gave an awkward smile. He brought the post-meal stomach medicine—a long-ingrained habit—from the desk drawer in the four-and-a-half tatami room and swallowed it down with water from his teacup. Once it had settled somewhat, he leaned against the rear window with a clouded expression and chain-smoked Pirate cigarettes until his tongue burned. The group took their satiated, listless bodies to the window and let themselves be exposed to the cool evening breeze.

Before long, Ogin came to collect the scattered items around them.

Ogin had first come here only quite recently.

One afternoon, on his way back from somewhere, Sasamura bought glassware like a confectionery dish and cups, tucked them into his sleeve, and returned home to find a young woman—who looked neither fully amateur nor professional—and a narrow-faced, lean man who retained a boyish air and showed little merchant-like demeanor sitting side by side at the long brazier in the tearoom. The woman’s face—somewhat elongated by her pulled-up hair—appeared angular. Her hair was styled in a ginkgo-leaf twist secured with a white comb, and she wore a black satin sash; upon seeing Sasamura standing there abruptly, she leaned forward slightly with a smile and politely pressed both hands together.

“...My mother has been in your care.”

IV Around the time when the neighborhood sprinkled water on the street, the two exchanged greetings and left.

“She’s quite a looker, isn’t she?”

When Sasamura, in the four-and-a-half tatami room, spoke to Miyama—who was still with him at the time—Miyama muttered "Hmm" under his breath.

“That man.” “That’s her paramour.” Miyama said with a deadpan expression.

“I see.” At mealtime, Sasamura said to Granny with a laugh, “Granny, you have quite the daughter,” to which Granny replied, “Yes,” and beamed with delight. After that, the daughter came over two or three more times alone. “She was properly married off, you see, but due to some circumstances had to flee that situation. Now that she’s idle… she just ends up coming…” When her daughter left, Granny would say such things. The daughter sometimes carried a bucket to draw water for her mother. There were times she would tidy up the kitchen neatly before leaving. The simmered sardines the daughter had prepared were delicious to everyone’s liking.

“This is delicious—far more efficient than Granny.” Sasamura turned toward the kitchen and began to speak. “This was grilled and then simmered, right?” “I’m somehow always so clumsy… but my daughter has a somewhat better touch.”

The mother came there and gave a sociable smile, but the daughter didn’t show her face much. The figure of the daughter—who had bought a great quantity of cheap fresh vegetables from the street in place of her mother who couldn’t run errands—entering through the gate with an umbrella caught Sasamura’s eye as he sat in the four-and-a-half-mat room. As he grew accustomed to looking at her, details like her narrow protruding forehead came into focus. It soon became clear this woman was friends with Miyama’s young aunt by marriage. It also emerged that this same aunt—the wife of that uncle—had snatched away from under her nose the student she was meant to marry; he being heir to a provincial fertilizer merchant.

“When it comes to that woman, I’ve heard about her too,” said Miyama, who did not speak particularly well of her.

“When it comes to Mr. Miyama, I’ve also heard about him from Ms. Osuzu.” When the woman heard this story from Sasamura too, she began speaking as if something had clicked. “Oh, so Mr. Miyama is that person? When it comes to that person’s family circumstances, I’ve already been told about them many times by Ms. Osuzu.”

The mother also sat by the threshold and began to recount those days bit by bit. "So this Osuzu woman—is she with your man?" Sasamura leaned against the wall, hugging his raised shins with both hands.

“No, they parted ways soon after that. She’s not the sort to stay devoted to one man. As for Mr. Miyama’s uncle, I’m well acquainted with him too. This person likely had another woman waiting in the wings already, I suppose.”

The daughter would occasionally cover her low nasal bridge with her hand and spoke in a manner surprisingly mature for twenty-two.

“This is quite an interesting story.” Sasamura had little interest in such talk. The other party didn’t seem inclined to discuss the matter in depth either. “It’s truly strange, isn’t it.” The daughter slightly relaxed her knees and was looking down.

Five

When the nephew who had come to take entrance exams for the military preparatory school showed signs of beriberi and needed to temporarily return to his hometown, Granny had to go back to the countryside to witness her brother’s final moments before his passing. Granny told Sasamura before departing that her brother, after a series of failures, had contracted a pitiable case of tuberculosis and retreated to the countryside about a year prior. “Though it ain’t proper to leave my daughter here till I return, what can you expect with young folks? If you’d just understand that much, my daughter’ll be idling at relatives’ houses for now…,” Granny began in a heavy tone before departing.

Around that time, when evening came, Ogin would put on flashy yukata and apply makeup thickly, which Sasamura pretended not to notice. “It’s troublesome when she carries on like that,” he said. “You should be the one to speak to her properly. The neighbors will start getting suspicious.” Sasamura spoke to Miyama about the matter in private. Even so, this woman’s occasional help wasn’t such an unpleasant thing for him. Since Ogin had started coming, he no longer needed to go personally to the kitchen each time to select the fish, and the ingredients for their three meals a day had grown more plentiful. New pickles unlike any he had tasted before and rather complex-flavored stewed dishes constantly filled the dining table. For Sasamura—who had long endured a life parched of warmth—this became each day’s distinctive hue.

“Well then, I’ll be leavin’ my daughter in your care...” Granny’s tone suggested she could entrust her daughter to someone as quiet and gloomy as Sasamura with peace of mind. The household soon became a life shared by three—the nephew, Ogin, and himself. When Ogin finished her tasks, she would occasionally go visit relatives in Yushima in the evening. And there were times when she would return late at night. When Sasamura would be reading books in his study, there were times when they—his nephew and she—would peel summer citrus in the tearoom.

“Truly, Shin-chan is a fine man, isn’t he.” Ogin spoke to Sasamura when the nephew was out. The nephew was the child of Sasamura’s half-sister through a different mother.

“Even though you’re uncle and nephew, you never talk at all.” “Watching it feels rather anticlimactic, doesn’t it.” “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.” Sasamura wore a wry smile. When beriberi developed in the nephew, Sasamura instructed Ogin to boil adzuki beans and administer the doctor’s medicine, but his legs only continued to swell.

“The doctor says a change of climate would be best.” “He seems to be suffering quite a bit.” “So he says to me, ‘Could you ask Uncle for travel expenses?’” “Why don’t you have him sent back to the countryside?”

Before long, Sasamura had his nephew embark on the journey home. He accompanied him to the main street, bought straw hats instead of conical ones for him to wear, and had him put on hemp-soled sandals over his tabi socks. “I must say, he was being quite particular.”

When Sasamura returned, he spoke to Ogin, who was tidying the kitchen. “Even when I tried to make do with cheap things, he wouldn’t have it.”

When he looked around the house now absent of his nephew, it had been wiped so thoroughly clean that the place itself seemed to breathe easier. On the backyard clothesline, every last one of the summer undergarments, handkerchiefs, and sleepwear that Sasamura had bundled away in the closet had been washed and laid out under the windless, quiet morning sun. "I must say, it's troublesome having absolutely everything dragged out like this."

Sasamura said while rinsing his parched mouth at the water spout. “Is that so.”

The woman brushed back the disheveled hair at her temples and looked over her shoulder. "But I'm high-strung, you see."

Six When Sasamura grew weary of sitting at his desk, he would tuck tobacco into his sleeve and often go speak with Miyama.

T― had spread out a travel mat in the front four-and-a-half-mat room and was lying there. T― had been pointlessly paying tuition to his university for a long time and now contemplated finally resigning from it to publicly pursue research on his beloved paintings—a thought he pondered daily. He kept wondering if there wasn’t some way to earn enough money for studying abroad without relying on his parents’ assets. After going to the island, he had taken an interest in things like the Bible and had come to dislike politics and war. His ideological leanings had also changed considerably from before.

"I'm currently in the middle of writing a novel," said T―, his high-nosed, angular face breaking into a grin as he propped himself up sideways and chuckled.

On the desk lay something half-written on Japanese paper. In T―’s head swirled countless ideas he wanted to shape into a novel—fishermen he’d seen on the Bonin Islands, Spanish castaways adrift at sea, and the many mixed-race individuals living there. Beside him lay an old copy of The Laborers of the Sea that had been retrieved from Sasamura's clutter.

The two of them indulged in various conversations while snapping off bananas that had recently arrived at T―’s place still attached to the branch. Peering through from the dim six-tatami room to the two-tatami space beside the kitchen, one could see Miyama there amidst tobacco smoke, bent over manuscript paper. Beside him lay scattered pineapple cans and newspapers drenched with spilled tea. And unsettlingly, ants had crawled up all over the place. “That woman wearing her hair in that elaborate Shimada style is such an eyesore.” Until now, Sasamura had often complained to Miyama about her. That she would leave their home unattended overnight only to come prying open its gate at dawn also grated on him. Ogin would sometimes stay up late at her relatives’ house in Yushima, passing the time playing cards.

“It looks bad to the neighbors, so you mustn’t go prying open the gate in the morning and coming in like that.”

Sasamura had once directly admonished her himself, but Ogin—being stubbornly competitive—hadn't given much of a proper response. "The fishmongers must take her for my wife," he said. "What kind of woman behaves like this?"

“After all, young women are nothing but trouble.” Miyama did not speak much about women. T― was snickering nearby.

When Sasamura returned from the back, Ogin lay sleeping in the two-tatami tea room, her disheveled form splayed across the tatami mats as if glued to them. Three o'clock sunlight pierced through the shoji screens, making her face appear flushed. At the sound of footsteps, her eyes opened—not a trace of a smile—as she pushed herself up to sit with legs still carelessly folded. To Sasamura's fleeting glance, she seemed a woman rotting in society's discard pile. Without a word, he walked past her.

When the rain that had been falling for two or three days finally stopped, mosquitoes swarmed in all at once. Even without that, Ogin had many nights when it was so hot she couldn’t sleep. And since there was only one mosquito net, late into the night she kept burning mosquitoes off the walls and sliding doors with a candle flame. There were nights she spent doing just that. “If I’d brought them from Yotsuya, I’d have two nets.”

Ogin stayed sitting up on the futon in her sleepwear, slapping at mosquitoes clinging to her fleshy legs with the flat of her hand. The next day, Sasamura bought a small single-person mosquito net from a street vendor, wrapped it in newspaper, and carried it home. He then handed it to Ogin.

“Is this the small mosquito net you got?” Ogin spread it out and burst out laughing. Then avoiding the kitchen where rats were scurrying, she deliberately hung it near the entrance. When she left the shoji screens open from the earthen floor entryway, that area turned out to be somewhat cooler than the tea room. “It’s so cramped here, I can’t get any proper sleep at all...” Ogin, wearing a large-patterned yukata, sat up inside the mosquito net propped on her limbs and muttered with a groan.

Sasamura was sleeping in the six-tatami room with the window wide open. From the window flowed a gentle night breeze, and the light cotton mosquito net fluttered in the dim glow streaming in from the neighboring eaved room. In the darkness, Ogin's pale face and hands moved restlessly as she flapped her fan, unable to fall asleep no matter how long she lay there.

Seven “……It’s such an awful thing. “In the end I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.”

One evening, while hanging a mosquito net in the six-tatami room, Ogin said this with complete seriousness.

The two of them drew closer as they talked about those days they had spent avoiding each other’s gaze, retracing their steps through that shared avoidance.

Ogin came over by the desk and began to talk haltingly about the man who had been taken from Osuzu.

“What kind of man was he?” Sasamura also wanted to hear about it. Ogin thrust out her chin as though constrained and spoke disjointedly of what had happened before and after.

“When evening came, he would sneak out of the private residence and stand in front of the house where Osuzu had rented a room.” “Then since there were two voices inside, he’d just keep listening there endlessly.” “I was such a fool, wasn’t I?” “By making a scene myself, I ended up driving him away.”

Ogin then went on to talk about how she and a young male relative had forced their way in there. “Men are such fools too. After that, he started sending letters now and then to where I was staying and coming to visit. Since it was a small restaurant, he would come in acting like a customer. He’d come dressed in Western clothes with my uncle’s gold chain dangling… When I’d be at the register and suddenly catch sight of his face, my chest would just tighten up…” Ogin laughed, the area around her eyes flushing red.

“So I did something truly terrible.” “Because of that, I ended up failing my school exams... Not that it matters now, but I suppose the bill for all that eating and drinking wasn’t covered either.” “Isotani—that’s such a strange man.” “It’s exactly like a play.”

Ogin began slapping at the mosquitoes clinging to the black wall. "How can you not be bothered by these mosquitoes?" "I've spent summers without mosquito nets before."

Sasamura, having taken the iron supplements he drank during times when his mind felt dull, now had a greasy face flushed with color. By the lamplight, his head was so agitated that his eyes flickered.

Ogin brought up the dirtiness of Sasamura's futon and laughed.

“When I first laid out the futon, I was shocked. Even though food and other things weren’t much of an issue, I wondered what on earth was happening... After laying it out, I somehow felt bad about it and ended up stuffing it back into the closet and all.”

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

“That house? That was an awfully complicated household. The one we called Mother was actually my stepmother—they say she’d once been a geisha in Shinagawa—but she didn’t get along with her son Sakae. By the time I came there, she’d already moved out. Then Grandfather kept arguing about whether to let her back in or not, so there was constant squabbling.” “Since the son was unhappy too, he’d go wasting money and such.” “Sakae was a man of some standing, but I’d hated him from the very start—never wanted to stay around him at all.”

Even after fleeing, she added stories about how that man had continued to pursue her.

“And he’s such a shameless guy.” Ogin, her face flushed, proceeded to talk about that settled evening.

“Miyama was saying you’d probably end up back with Isotani.” “No, that won’t happen.” Ogin said with a laugh.

“That man is completely finished.”

VIII

After T—, who had sometimes holed up at places like Daitoku-ji Temple, casually went off to Kyoto, the longstanding friction between Miyama and Sasamura—already complicated by matters involving Ogin—grew increasingly strange, 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 had made his work public a step ahead of Sasamura, and Sasamura could clearly see Miyama—a man of high self-regard—beginning to work in earnest. The sight of various people gathering there also grated on Sasamura’s nerves.

Being women, Miyama’s sister and Ogin secretly visited each other behind the scenes. Miyama’s sister would come to the tea room and seemed to talk about matters like Ogin and Isotani; there were also times she borrowed hairpieces and Western umbrellas from Ogin. There were even occasions when they produced newly pickled vegetables through their closeness.

“Shut up.” Sasamura seethed.

“Why on earth are you going to Miyama’s place again?” he demanded harshly. Ogin laughed and remained silent.

Even under normal circumstances, Sasamura—whose moods shifted violently—blurted out something without considering Ogin’s feelings and flew into a rage over his own words.

“Go away. I have no use for you.” The woman stared fixedly up at his face from beneath lowered brows while slumping her body beneath the low casement window and remaining perfectly still. Sasamura, sitting there, prodded her with his knee. “You kicked me.” Ogin’s eyes took on a harsh gleam. That bold manner of speaking from the woman only served to further aggravate Sasamura’s frayed nerves. She wiped the sweat from her face and went into the kitchen. Since her uncle’s downfall, Ogin—who had supported her foolish mother and frail younger brother up to the present day—had naturally come to recognize such things. There were many times when she couldn’t have survived otherwise.

In the quiet air of midsummer noon, the sound of machinery operating at a blacksmith’s shop reverberated heavily in Sasamura’s head as he awoke from a troubled sleep. When he looked around the house, there was no one there. In the kitchen, bundles of green edamame, scorched by the sunlight streaming through the window, lay abandoned beside the hearth. The wind swept through the vast sasa field behind the house with a dry rustle.

With a gaze as if searching for something, Sasamura entered Miyama’s house. Miyama sat by the six-mat room’s window as usual, his large frame properly positioned at the desk with bowed head. Ogin sat about a tatami mat away at the entrance threshold, her legs loosely folded. Sasamura’s eyes flickered down to the woman’s face as though trying to read her meaning. “You can’t just leave the house open like this.”

Sasamura muttered as if to himself and left immediately. Ogin too soon rose from that spot and followed.

“I didn’t say anything.” “We were talking about Ms. Osuzu.”

Ogin disliked that Miyama might think poorly of her due to the incident involving Ms. Osuzu, whom he sympathized with. At any rate, Sasamura felt he couldn't very well show disapproval toward Miyama—who must have known about his past through Ms. Osuzu. Regarding Sasamura's hard-to-please disposition as well, he considered there to be some truth in Miyama's remarks.

“You really do terrible things, you know.”

When Ogin went out for an evening walk to the main street, she spoke to Tomoe’s sister. "My hand is purple..." Ogin said this with exaggeration. On their way back, in front of the house, Sasamura heard from his dark window the sister calling out, “Come visit sometime—if your man wasn’t around,” as she took her leave. It seemed the shrewd Miyama had somehow become Ogin's confidant.

IX

After the distance between him and Sasamura gradually widened, Miyama moved far away. Around that time, Miyama’s living conditions—which had temporarily improved—grew bleak again, so he left behind even what he was supposed to give landlord Mr.K. Later, one or two merchants came to negotiate with Sasamura too. "I’d heard about him from Ms.Osuzu, but he really is an odd one," Ogin had remarked. Yet Sasamura, rather than defending Miyama as he might have initially done, chose to interpret everything in the worst possible light. It felt as though voices from those connected to Miyama—criticizing him endlessly about the woman—constantly buzzed in his ears, while a dark shadow coiled itself around his mind.

“It’s because your approach is so clumsy—you didn’t have to quarrel with Mr. Miyama at all…,” the woman remained dissatisfied despite Sasamura’s momentary compliance.

“Might as well get married properly.” Ogin began talking about this and that regarding the preparations. Sasamura wrote down each item in his notebook and even calculated the costs.

“It would’ve been better if my uncle had stayed healthy and remained in Tokyo.” “He was fond of novels and read them often... Though he was quite rough in his younger days, after falling ill, he became tender-hearted—hearing his favorite Kiyo’s Goten would bring tears to his eyes.”

“Once you achieve some success in Tokyo, it’s a path everyone inevitably treads.” “Even so, he himself still intends to make a comeback.” “He might be dead by now.” “After all, he even had to be carried into an inn along the way.” Ogin regretted the loss of her own clothes more than her uncle’s death. “If I go to my aunt in Yokohama, she’ll at least give me some advice.” Ogin, with a restless air, was thinking about various things regarding the wedding arrangements and such.

Sasamura took out from his desk drawer and gave to Ogin a pouch containing coral beads—which he had received from his sister-in-law’s aunt in Kyushu during his travels, where he had new haori made intended as gifts for his Osaka sister-in-law who had sent him to the hot spring resort—that he had kept hidden at the bottom of his bag. “Why do you have something like this?” Ogin twirled a bead between her fingers and laughed with puzzled amusement. “My aunt just said, ‘Since it’s cheap, why not buy it?’ so I did...”

“But there has to be someone you meant these for… It’s odd.” “How much did you pay for this?… I’ll take it to a hairpin shop to check its worth.”

When it came to marriage, Sasamura found himself considering various matters. "What ever became of those people who said they'd take care of me?" Sasamura said with a laugh.

“She’s a good woman, though.”

Ogin was gazing out the window with a faint smirk.

When darkness fell, the two left the house separately. Avoiding streets lined with bright shops, they wound through back alleys. It was a rain-threatening evening with dark clouds sagging low. As they walked through the lopsided town's desolate square, Ogin—her walk clumsy—nearly tripped and grabbed Sasamura's hand with an affected cry. Within Sasamura's small cold hand, the woman's large palm lay tepid.

On the second floor of the vaudeville theater, under the electric lights, the woman’s face was caked with gaudily thick white powder. On her lips, the rouge also shone with a bluish luster. A dark shadow flashed in Sasamura’s eyes. “That’s not….” The woman looked down, her face reddening. Through Ogin’s story of how she used to come here often with Isotani, even Sasamura saw it rise like a sweet recollection.

“He had just that sort of... neck, you know.” The woman spotted a well-shaped close-cropped head in the crowd below and made her eyes moisten. Sasamura, his body tingling as if tickled, leaned forward and peered down.

X Even after her mother returned from the countryside bringing things like canned fruit, Ogin continued to constantly intrude into Sasamura’s room. Sasamura neither believed that the woman loved him nor that he himself felt any affection for her, but when it came to the daily tasks she handled for him, her efforts attended to his every need. She could even keenly detect the man’s occasional moods. Her disposition was brisk and efficient, and when in good spirits, she would often crack puns to make people laugh. Her plump body lacked firmness; her features, devoid of clean lines and dignity, held a certain allure even in their disarray. In Sasamura’s mind, women like the one whose photo he had recently seen with marriage in mind and the woman he had known in Osaka long ago would occasionally resurface; yet he did not consider living in such a decaying state of mind with this kind of woman—who had suddenly fluttered in from somewhere—to be something he should particularly regret.

“If Miyama weren’t here, I would’ve cast you aside.” Sasamura would sometimes say such things. The past relationship between Isotani and the woman was also one of the illusions that haunted Sasamura’s mind. And whenever the story of that time came up, various new facts were added.

“...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 was, we were only together now and then. And besides, I didn’t know anything back then.” Sasamura rummaged through the box of photos Ogin had brought from her relatives’ house in Yotsuya around that time, trying to find a picture of the man among them, but there didn’t seem to be a single one. Among them were photos like one of Ogin at sixteen or seventeen, taken with her aunt. Her face—with its sharp jawline and a hint of peculiarity—and body were both awkwardly plump. Sasamura held it up high and burst out laughing.

A postcard arrived from her mother announcing her return to the capital. The postcard appeared to be in her father’s handwriting. Ogin had not spoken much 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 went there, we’d just end up settling into some farmer’s household in the end.” “No matter how desperate I get, it’s the countryside I can’t stand.” “If it’s just that much, then no matter where I go, I can make a living on my own by doing something.”

Ogin recalled her uncle’s former mistress who had drifted off to the countryside, and at times felt as though she herself were caged, yearning to break free from this house. Since her relationship with Isotani had broken down, Ogin’s state of mind had begun teetering on the edge of collapse. Sasamura was not the kind of man to soothe Ogin’s troubled state of mind 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 life’s course.

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

Before parting, one evening on their way back from eating and drinking out with Sasamura, while walking along a narrow path through a dark grassland, she said. The woman held a toothpick in her mouth as she tucked up the hem of her kimono with both hands.

“Let’s not let anyone know where we are for a while—not even back home in the countryside.” Sasamura squatted in the thicket, gazing dazedly at the woman’s figure. “Are you truly that desperate?” “But it’s all… become too troublesome now.” The woman spoke with defeated resignation.

Sasamura’s mind, which had been raging for two or three days, was already beginning to calm by then. He was able to calmly consider what he himself had been doing toward the woman.

XI

Ogin, who had been trying to somehow resolve her physical condition before confronting her mother, remained unable to settle matters even after her mother's return. She had even gone so far as to prepare to leave, only to lose courage and reconsider. At what was said to be the site of a temple at Shinkaimachi's entrance stood a dust-covered pine tree that might have belonged to some rural roadside. Though Ogin had always frequented lively places and would quicken her pace whenever passing beneath it at night, one evening—as if driven out by Sasamura—she found herself wandering there. Yet she still could not help but return.

“I messed up, huh.” “I should’ve sent Mother a postcard telling her not to come.”

On the morning her mother was due to return, Ogin sat slumped on the six-tatami bed where she'd begun taking down the mosquito net, lost in thought. In the corner of the room came the weary buzz of a mosquito. Sasamura lay beside her.

The mother who had returned came to Sasamura’s side without even changing her clothes, sat down stiffly, and greeted him. While making excuses about her delayed return—having fallen ill from the countryside water—she spoke of how her brother, the sole remaining pillar of support in her world, had passed away.

“We may have many relatives in the countryside, but with this, my family home has pretty much been wiped out clean…” Sasamura responded with an awkward sensation in his heart and opened the fruit preserves her mother had brought as a souvenir to try them. For two or three days, Ogin had been keeping her distance from Sasamura, but she couldn’t maintain that distance indefinitely.

“I told her…” One time, Ogin spoke to Sasamura while laughing. “Mother must’ve mostly figured it out by now.”

Sasamura felt he had anticipated this development yet still wished she wouldn’t voice it now. Work had seemingly been forgotten. Sasamura’s mind seemed to revive around when his nephew had returned. The nephew had grown remarkably more adult within a short span. The shoulder tucks had been let out and his back had broadened. From arrival day he’d dragged along two friends who’d come with him—feeding them meals, letting them stay over, carousing in loud country accents. Visiting companions from outside now and then were also numerous during that period.

“I can’t make heads or tails of what those people are saying,” Ogin said, imitating them before doubling over in laughter. “And they just shovel rice down their throats! They’re like people from a country without food.”

One day under the eaves at the back wellside, the nephew was washing his athletic shirts. By that time, they had found places to settle down and scattered to their respective spots. Ogin had tied a hand towel around her head like a working woman and was wiping down the kitchen shelves she had neglected cleaning for some time. "Why don't you at least do the laundry?" Sasamura, who seemed tired from work, went out to the back and interrogated Ogin.

“Well, I did say I’d do it for you though.” Ogin looked up at Sasamura with a look that seemed to say such a thing was trivial. Regarding matters like food, Sasamura, who was constantly concerned that there might be some duplicity in the woman’s actions, made yet another veiled sarcastic remark at that time. “Is that so? “I didn’t notice that at all.”

The woman sat down heavily as if surprised, pressed a hand to her forehead, and sank into deep thought. "Please try to think—what could I possibly gain from doing such a thing?" Ogin argued breathlessly. Her mother paused from whatever she'd been untying and cut in.

At that moment, around the same time as the nephew, the landlord Mr.K—who had been away from Tokyo—entered from the rear entrance. Since the other three houses weren’t being easily rented, Mr.K—upon returning from his hometown—decided to take up residence in the end house himself. That day too, he had Ogin take out winter clothes from the luggage trunk and put them out to air in the sun. And her mother had been put in charge of overseeing that.

Mr.K, partially deaf in one ear, stood tilting his head as he compared their faces.

Twelve

Mr.K was the scion of a prominent family in his hometown, and Sasamura dimly remembered occasionally visiting that sprawling mansion on his way home from school during his youth. After that, they had long been estranged, but one summer when Mr.K returned from Kumamoto Higher School to his hometown higher school with his clumsy, princely figure, Sasamura left the school shortly after recognizing him in the school corridor. Even if they ended up sharing a pot of rice here by chance, they weren't exactly on the same wavelength.

Sasamura considered that it was because T— from Kyoto—a man who cared deeply for his friends—had told Mr.K to investigate their subsequent movements, which led Mr.K to come here while managing the rental properties... But Mr.K himself never brought up the matter.

“How about it—keeping up with men’s moods is quite the ordeal, eh?” Mr.K wedged himself between them by the brazier and dropped heavily into a seated position.

So that conversation was interrupted, and Sasamura too laughed before retreating to the back.

At night Sasamura faced the glaring lamp and tried to concentrate on one of his recent literary projects. The clanging from metal workshops had ceased completely now, and even the sake shop across the street had shuttered its doors. From deep within this district came a drunken factory worker—likely from that new soap plant—staggering down lanes while slurring some half-forgotten song. Occasionally one heard listless creaks from empty rickshaws being dragged homeward. Mr.K kept nursing his sake with methodical persistence in the tearoom, entertaining Ogin and her mother between sips. At intervals their murmurs would rise solemnly through paper screens, only to fracture suddenly against Ogin’s bright peals of laughter. Meanwhile, the nephew lay sprawled unconscious in a corner of their central six-mat room, drowned fathoms deep in sleep.

As night fell, Sasamura’s mind, which had grown clearer, was painfully agitated. His nerves were keenly alert to the point that his eyes stung when he tried to take up his brush. “Sake sure does lift the spirits, doesn’t it?” He recalled how Ogin, who had once been in a house of hospitality, had spoken flatteringly to Mr.K—a man fond of his drink—earlier. After Sasamura’s guests had left, such an Ogin would occasionally pour leftover beer into a glass and drink it. When the alcohol showed on her face, she would slightly shift her loosely positioned knees and stare at people with eyes that were bloodshot and almost lewd. Her mouth, revealing decayed teeth, slackened as she spouted frivolous puns in a playful tone, laughing uproariously by herself. In Ogin's body seemed to flow the blood of a father whose spirits would lift when he drank.

“Women’s drinking leaves such an unpleasant aftertaste.” Even Sasamura, who often frowned, would sometimes deliberately start drinking himself to get the woman—who became somewhat flirtatious when drunk—intoxicated.

When the outside quieted, the voices from the back became even more noticeable. The woman went out to the kitchen, and there was a sense she was preparing drinking snacks.

When heading to the toilet, Sasamura passed through there with a wry smile. The woman kept her head bowed as she grilled the tatami-preserving sardines, but her pale face showed no trace of having been drinking. “I’m just listening to Mr.K’s self-praise right now. Why can’t he be more modest?” Ogin said in a somber tone. Trying to cool his aching head, Sasamura left his desk and suddenly stepped outside. And after wandering around the vacant lot at the back, he returned to the bright room. Mr.K was still sipping slowly and persistently.

Before long, the woman opened the back gate and went out through the coal-cinder path entrance, her geta clattering. She seemed to be going to buy sake at the sake shop across the way. “Hey, can’t you keep it down a little?”

After a considerable time had passed, Sasamura shouted loudly toward the back as if he could no longer endure it.

The tearoom fell silent.

“Was it really so offensive to your ears? But Mr.K went to the trouble of drinking sake here—I couldn’t very well make a disagreeable face.”

After Mr.K—who seemed to carry a leisurely air—soon left without a word, Ogin remarked offhandedly from across the room. It was something noticed afterward—while Mr.K sipped his sake and held forth self-importantly, his words had carried implications of trying to separate the woman from her companions. In the present circumstances, it seemed Mr.K himself believed this was the way to save Sasamura. Mr.K, who had been involved with the landlady (a military officer's widow) of a house where he had previously boarded, also maintained one or two other casual ties with women. That evening too, Mr.K spoke of the woman with whom he had even had a child before parting ways, blending fact and fiction in his account. The woman, who still harbored similar heartache somewhere within her, listened with a mood tinged by poignant yet faint jealousy that seemed to cling about her. That too resonated in Sasamura's chest.

Sasamura brought up things about Ogin's past that he had heard from Miyama. "That's because he doesn't truly understand us," Ogin said bitterly. "However flustered we may appear now," her mother interjected, drawing near in protest, "back home our family stands firm—this lineage of ours isn't so wretched as all that."

“What does family lineage matter?” “That’s not what I’m talking about right now.” Sasamura spoke in a hateful tone. “To you, that may well be how it seems, but we have relatives back home, and if my daughter is to be thrown into confusion over such matters again, it would truly be unbearable for me…”

The rampaging unpleasant mood persisted through the entire next day as well.

By evening when Mr.K wandered in, Sasamura—who had returned from wandering outside with his nephew—was leaning against the dimly lit room’s wall in a daze. In the tearoom, Ogin and her mother were murmuring in hushed voices about something from time to time. “Hey, bring the sake.” While talking with Mr.K, Sasamura suddenly called out toward the back. “Since tonight comes after last night, ’twere best you refrained from the sake.”

After some time had passed, the mother appeared there.

“What’s wrong with it? If I say I want to drink,” Sasamura spat out. After some time, the sake that had been withheld was brought there, and the sound of grating bonito flakes could be heard from the kitchen.

“Tell Ogin to come pour drinks…” When Sasamura said this and laughed, Mr.K also exchanged glances and grinned meaninglessly. “Hey, pour the drinks.” Sasamura’s voice shot out again. Ogin, having applied evening makeup and changed into a kimono, emerged there and sat down; with a timid air, she picked up the sake bottle. On her sleep-deprived face, signs of emaciation were strikingly visible; her reddish eyes were sunken, and her lips were parched. Mr.K, with an innocent face free of reservations, kept drinking two or three cups in succession, looking as if it tasted good no matter when he drank.

“If you’ve got nowhere left to go, you should just head over to Mr. K’s place starting tonight.” Sasamura spoke in a prickly manner.

“Hmm, that’s fine. I’ll look after you for now. For the time being, that seems best for both of you.” Mr.K opened his round, dull eyes wide and studied their faces. Ogin—who had been sitting with downcast eyes, head bowed in silence—stood up immediately when the sake bottle ran dry and went out toward the tearoom. No matter how much they called after her, she didn’t return. Drunk enough to forget everything, Sasamura lay collapsed on his futon. When he opened his eyes, the ashen face of the woman sitting beside him looked desolate in the dim lamplight.

“...I’m truly sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on, so please forgive me.” Ogin’s murmuring voice occasionally reached his ear.

Sasamura was cooling his pounding heart with a cold wet towel.

14 It was already around the time when people began wearing lined haori over their clothes when Ogin brought in items like the futon and dressing table that had been stored with relatives in Yotsuya, loading them onto a handcart. Throughout the town, flimsy rental houses lined every corner, and newly established soba noodle shops and tempura restaurants sprang up here and there. After bringing a large pale green furoshiki bundle into the six-tatami room that evening, Ogin recounted what she had heard in Yotsuya—stories of the ongoing disturbances at the house she had previously been connected to—and grew pale as she spoke. It was said that even after Ogin had fled there, the son who had been constantly pursuing her had recently slashed with a sword his stepmother, with whom he never got along.

Even Sasamura pricked up his ears in surprise at this story. “To avoid getting implicated, you see, Ochou-san practically drove me out, telling me I shouldn’t carelessly come here anymore.”

“Huh,” Sasamura gazed at the woman’s face with an exasperated look. “I’m too frightened to go outside anymore. The one I brushed past that dark evening in Kikuzaka was definitely Sakae.”

Beside them, her mother was taking out Ogin’s everyday clothes from the bundle and examining them.

Outside, the rain poured in torrents, and the house interior hung heavy with damp.

“I was told my complexion looks terrible—is that true?” Ogin asked with concern.

Since the start of this month, Ogin had occasionally been pressing her abdomen and thinking to herself. And then,

“I’m pregnant,” she said with a laugh, but after a while denied it again, “With my cold constitution, there’s simply no way I could get pregnant.” “Please rest assured.”

However, there were unmistakable signs that could only mean pregnancy. Her eating habits had changed; moreover, she would often feel nauseous after meals. When he pressed her mother about it, she too seemed unable to determine either way and tilted her head uncertainly.

“If we act now, it seems something could still be done.”

Sasamura, with yet another burden added to his load, still couldn't bring himself to fully believe it. With her weak body, the idea that she could conceive a child seemed nearly inconceivable.

"That can’t be the case." "Even if that were true, I wouldn’t know anything about it," he said with a laugh. At times, his tone insinuated doubts about the woman’s virtue. "I may have this coarse nature, but I’m not being unfaithful." "If such a thing had happened—just imagine—no matter how shameless I might be, I couldn’t stay in this house another day." Ogin spoke with half-seriousness.

“Why don’t you have that relative you keep calling ‘brother’—the doctor—examine you?”

“Is that even possible? When it comes to that Granny over there, she’s downright meddlesome.” Ogin began recounting rumors about that old man who had managed to make all three of his children become doctors. Such talk would repeat itself by the hibachi whenever the two pressed their faces together. New straw ash had been placed in the brazier, while small cups and lidded containers sat arranged at the desk’s edge.

When night deepened, Sasamura had developed a habit of occasionally wanting to drink sake—even if just three or four cups.

“You don’t need to fret so much. If it really comes to pregnancy, I’ll manage to give birth discreetly.” “Since I know people there, we could rent the second floor...” Ogin proposed. “Since it’s someone Uncle looked after, if we explain the situation, I don’t think they’d refuse to take us in.” “If I could just get a bit of money from you...” “If such a place exists, you’d be there already, wouldn’t you?”

Ogin talked at length about that person in Kyobashi. The days when her uncle had been busily managing things were brought up again in connection with that.

“Back then, where were you and what were you doing?”

Ogin gazed at the lamp with watery eyes as she reminisced about when she was sixteen or seventeen. “It really does feel strange, doesn’t it.” Ogin muttered while massaging Sasamura’s fingertips.

Fifteen During chilly mornings when Mr.K would come eat by the hibachi bundled in silk-padded robes, Ogin would be busily packing lunchboxes in the kitchen—a scene that sometimes caught Sasamura’s eye on mornings when he happened to rise early. In Ogin’s stories of bringing lunches to Isotani at his commercial school or waiting with an umbrella by its gates in the rain, her youthful sentiments seemed to mirror their current situation. When shopping with Sasamura along the streets, Ogin would pick out side dishes for the next day’s lunchbox at stew shops they passed.

After Mr.K had entrusted the management of the rental house to that young widow and moved back to his former boarding house in Yanaka, various people came and went through the property, but 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 a crowd of friends, carry over various things from his uncle’s side, and they would eat and drink. The tuition and book money that Sasamura provided seemed to be getting squandered on food and drink by the gang of delinquent youths his nephew had fallen in with around that time—traces of this gradually became clear to Sasamura.

“Shin-chan has taken my tobacco case sometime without me noticing.”

Ogin informed Sasamura with a laugh. The landlady of the tobacco shop under monthly contract had been puzzled by the large amount of tobacco the nephew was taking and had even warned him about it.

When he opened the desk drawer, there wasn’t a single thing that resembled a school notebook. Instead, the notebook contained a list of Yoshiwara brothel names and courtesan names. Mistress — waitress — and other such terms casually scribbled down could only be about Ogin in this situation.

“If you get dragged into that kind of gang, that’ll be the end of you. Even if they summon you, you must absolutely never go out again.” Sasamura summoned his nephew and admonished him, but the nephew merely kept his nervous eyes downcast and hadn’t truly listened. And when a whistle call sounded at the front, he soon slipped away and was gone. “You remember that morning he came home with his face covered in bruises? He said he’d been beaten up in Yoshiwara back then… He told me not to mention it, so I didn’t.” Ogin informed Sasamura.

“At that time too, he must’ve been dragged along by that gang.” “There’s even men with full beards in there.” “And Shin-chan—he’s rough through and through.” “When it comes to picking fights, he’s downright fearsome.” “Back home, he says he once grabbed and threw a teacher he didn’t like.”

Ogin explained in detail about how her nephew had recently become notorious in the neighborhood. "But it's that his friends are bad influences, you know." "You should stop being so harsh with your words." "Because you're scaring him." Sasamura's small heart was considerably plagued by matters concerning this stepsister's beloved child.

“I haven’t exactly shown you any good things either.”

Sasamura gave a wry smile. "But at sixteen or so, there's no coquettish consideration involved."

One evening, Sasamura unexpectedly received a letter from a haiku friend with whom he’d long been out of touch. It was a private letter stating there were matters he wished to discuss and asking if Sasamura might visit when he had the chance.

Ogin's physical condition had worsened further. Her eyes remained clouded, and her limbs appeared listless. That evening too, she was supposed to go to the nearby gynecologist to be examined, but even that felt like too much trouble, and she ended up leaving late.

“About me….”

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

“It must be about that.”

Sixteen

Sasamura went out to Yanaka by rickshaw in the cold drizzle. Lately, Sasamura—who had naturally come to avoid social interactions—rarely left that house like a dark hole nestled in a hollow. Sasamura, who until now had never needed to bow his head and speak before others, couldn’t help feeling anxious about how this friend—who seemed like a bursting outlet for pressures closing in from all directions—would broach the matter. Even his faint rebellious sentiment toward this haiku friend B—who seemed aligned with Miyama—rippled faintly through his chest, already tight from being jostled in the rickshaw.

When shown into a quiet second-floor room, B—, with a smile playing at his lips, promptly brought up the matter of Miyama. For a while, B— listened to Sasamura’s story.

Between them sat a pot of chili simmering on the brazier as B— occasionally poured drinks for Sasamura while interjecting. "In any case, you should refrain from speaking too much about Miyama." "If you don’t, you’ll only end up hurting yourself." B— admonished in a cautionary tone. Sasamura harbored a smoldering resentment in his chest over 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’ll just openly get married.”

When the topic of the woman arose, Sasamura began speaking with a tightly strung feeling.

"I think that would be cleaner."

“There’s no need to do it by then.” B― floated a smile at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t think it’s as difficult a problem as you imagine. Once the woman’s disposed of, the rest will be straightforward. People’s gossip only lasts seventy-five days, as they say.” “How about it? If you’re going to do it, now’s the time.” “Though I’m hardly up to the task, let me at least try to take care of things.” B― urged.

Sasamura felt as though the pain of the silence he had maintained until now—with everyone—had loosened somewhat. And he felt an ease he'd never known before. When the conversation turned to the abnormalities of the woman's body, being able to disclose such matters with unexpected calm felt both strange and like a wretched humiliation.

“Oh. Is that so?” B— widened his eyes but did not voice it. And he thought for a while. “In that case, we’ll have to postpone discussing matters until things naturally settle down.” “But it’s fine—there are plenty of methods.”

A quiet conversation continued for some time. From the zoo, the roars of wild animals could occasionally be heard, and outside where the rain had let up slightly, the night deepened quietly.

“I thought you might get angry again, saying it wasn’t like that—I was actually worried.” “I’m glad you confided in me.” On his way out, B— said this and ordered another one-to flask of sake to be brought downstairs.

Sasamura’s rickshaw, its hood jolting, struggled through the entrance to the town mired in deep mud. Dark rain clouds hung low in the sky, and along the low-roofed town streets, figures of workers returning from the bathhouse could be seen.

“Did you just get back?” The one who called out while passing by the rickshaw was Ogin, wearing a bluish kimono with twin patterns.

“How did it go?” “Did you go to the doctor?”

“Oh，I went.” “Then he said it’s exactly that after all.” Above and below the rickshaw，such talk was exchanged in hurried flurries.

When Sasamura alighted from the rickshaw, Ogin soon entered from behind as well and gathered around the brazier.

17

“What did the doctor say?”

Sasamura asked the woman with a somewhat detached feeling. Sasamura first wanted to confirm that. "When the doctor suddenly examined me, he seemed to have already figured it out. 'Is this even an illness? He just laughed and said it's definitely a pregnancy.' Moreover, he said there's some poison in my body. He said he'd give me the medicine, so..." "How many months did he say...?" "He said four months."

“Four months. “I’m getting sick of this.” Sasamura let out a deep sigh. And with a dread-filled feeling, he mentally counted out the months two or three times.

That night, the three of them remained engrossed in discussion until around one o'clock. Sasamura proceeded as calmly as possible with talk of having the woman withdraw. The proposal was readily accepted by both. "If you say your situation is untenable, then there's nothing to do but resign ourselves to it." "Even watching you worry like this... I can't help feeling sorry for you." Her mother said while placing her sewing in front of her. "Anyway, once my daughter's body is lightened, things will sort themselves out somehow."

Once it was decided, Sasamura wanted to shed this burden at once. And dreadful, reckless-seeming consultations would sometimes be whispered among the three. Sasamura’s feverish-looking eyes began shining unnaturally. "If it comes to that, I’ll manage the aftermath somehow." “That much I can handle.”

As she spoke, her mother’s eyes grew keenly sharp. "But we can't be careless." Ogin looked anxious, deep in thought. “There’s no need to fret.” When Sasamura awoke the next morning, the tense resolve that had gripped him the night before had slackened again. His head felt heavier and more stagnant than ever. Thinking back on what her mother had proposed with last night’s fleeting determination now seemed almost absurd.

Sasamura couldn't focus on anything. And when it came down to it, he thought there seemed to be no other way than to proceed as they had discussed the previous night. “Because I don’t think I could calmly look at the child’s face once it’s born.” When Ogin, who had been talking in her usual clear voice out back with the landlord’s carpenter’s wife, came inside, Sasamura immediately seized upon her to bring up the matter. “If you leave things as they are, won’t the situation only grow more defined with each passing day?”

“Well, that’s true, but…”

Ogin was just laughing.

“This morning I feel like it’s moving somehow.” Ogin pressed her hand against her stomach and gave him a teasing look. “But you needn’t get so worked up about it right away. That’s just how you are.”

Ogin looked at Sasamura's face with a puzzled expression. When her mood grew listless, Ogin went to visit relatives in Shitaya. "I'll go make some money on the side today," she said, putting on makeup before heading out. At her relatives' house, two or three companions for flower card games would always gather. There were friends of "Brother's" mother, mistresses who were former merchants kept by neighbors, and others. Ogin joined their company and drew flower cards in a buoyant tone. There, she now and then caught snatches of rumors about Isotani as well.

“You too—what’s with you? Stop loafing around like always. Before you make another blunder like before, you’d better go off to the countryside or somewhere and build up your health.” The old woman there had said as much just to see her face, but Ogin thought she didn’t want to become a burden to her relatives no matter where she turned. No matter how desperate she became, she never once considered going to the countryside—that place with no home.

Eighteen

Ogin, who had gone to an acquaintance in Kyobashi to arrange a hiding place for giving birth around the end of the year, remained shut away in Sasamura’s house even after the new year came. Urged by Sasamura to go out with a box of sweets and such, Ogin hesitated many times before actually doing so. She had been made to purchase pills and was urged to take them in front of Sasamura, but Ogin had no faith in patent medicines. "I'll take them eventually," she said, stashing them away in the brazier. Sasamura, who was fond of medicine, always kept various medications stocked in his desk drawer. Some had been reluctantly prepared by a doctor acquaintance, while others he had bought from drugstores after assessing his own physical condition each time. Moreover, ever since hearing about the toxic elements in Ogin’s body, his own physical anxieties had intensified further. Though her complexion was pale, Ogin’s skin had remained clear, so it struck him as strange that lately, scattered blemishes similar to his own would occasionally appear on her face. The once-bright expanse from her forehead to around her eyes had clouded over entirely. And while lost in thought, her profile as she gazed out the window sometimes appeared so forlorn it seemed at odds with her actual mood.

“They say all the toxins leave your body when you give birth.” Ogin, who made no effort to understand her illness, seemed hardly concerned about it. But no matter where this path led, Sasamura couldn’t avoid feeling responsible for the child that would be born. “Then do you have any such experience yourself?” Ogin countered. Ever since Sasamura had quit school and received a minor wound during his early twenties of unrestrained vagrant life—a time free from police detention—he had constantly felt as though the youthful blood that once surged through his entire body had abruptly stalled. His mind was decaying, and his sluggish body seemed gradually eroded. Alcohol, women, tobacco, a dissolute lifestyle—he couldn’t blame it solely on those causes. Even his urge to pursue such things amounted only to a heart seeking to drown itself in the shadows drifting up from them. His sensitivity to sunlight and colors—even his perception of food’s taste—seemed to fade year by year through his coarsened tongue.

When his mind grew sluggish, Sasamura couldn’t lift a hand or foot. At such times, he had no choice but to have his regular masseur apply pressure with skull-crushing force. “That’s just your imagination.” Ogin, while concerned about the blemishes that had appeared on her face, hardly even took the medicine the doctor had given her.

“...If I meet and talk with them...” Ogin began when she returned from Kyobashi, finding Sasamura waiting impatiently. “In that case, they said since the second floor’s vacant, you could come anytime—but with it being just women involved, if we go through with this and end up looking like fools later, it’d cause trouble. They said we’d better think it through carefully first.” “Since they’re straightforward people, they must be worried.”

“…………”

"I heard that person’s son works at a newspaper company," Ogin added as if she had just remembered. "Hmm." "Is he a reporter or a factory worker?" "What do you mean? That’s what they said."

Sasamura didn't feel very good.

“And that second floor is extremely cramped.” “The ceiling’s low too—it’s such an unpleasant place.” “If you don’t come when it’s time for the birth, I’ll feel so anxious in a place like that.”

Sasamura remained silent. Ogin listlessly fell silent.

For New Year’s clothes, Ogin pulled out items from the trunk she had brought again from Yotsuya and would sometimes hold a needle with her mother in the tearoom. By the time they had finished tidying up earlier, even the few things they once had were all gone; opening the trunk revealed nothing but mismatched items that left them disheartened. When feeling stifled, she would come to Sasamura’s side where he worked with his brush amid tobacco smoke haze, open the street-facing window, and gaze outside. Bamboo decorations already stood at every gate, while across the way the sake shop stacked barrels to liven up the atmosphere. Workers adjusting their helmets could be seen bustling about. The ogre-faced landlady there—who had married into the household from Kumagaya—would come to the accounts desk with her swollen belly and plant herself down.

Nineteen

Sasamura used what little money he had obtained to repay funds Ogin had borrowed from elsewhere during their desperate straits, had several pawned items sorted out, and with what remained left the house with Ogin to buy futon covers. “The cotton in ours has hardened and become completely unusable. When money comes in next time—even if you have to delay some payments—you should get a new futon made,” Sasamura would often tell Ogin. “To think you’ve been wrapped in that futon for ten whole years—it’s impressive someone as scrawny as you managed to endure it.”

The matter of when she had first laid out Sasamura’s dirty bedding was brought up again.

"I find overly fluffy futons uncomfortable." Sasamura was laughing, but each time this was said to him, he found himself recalling the life he had led without ever paying attention—a sudden existence where for ages he had never properly stretched his legs and back. And yet, nostalgia for that futon still remained. The cheap desk, the old brazier—even these bore the unforgettable memories of those times. That sticky futon too was now torn away by these people’s hands and cast into the pile of rags.

When they reached the street, rain began falling in scattered drops. As they walked talking of something, Sasamura’s mood abruptly shifted. “You go on ahead home.”

Sasamura marched off brusquely. “Then you don’t need to buy the futon fabric?”

The woman stood bewildered. Sasamura found his own feelings thwarted by the woman’s offhand remark, and the intense hatred toward her that had lain dormant for some time now swelled back to life all at once. Ogin followed for a block or two but soon turned back dejectedly.

That night, Sasamura did not return home.

When he entered the house in the morning, the woman was sitting by the brazier with an excited look on her face. The nephew had also come nearby and was warming himself by the fire. When he had secluded himself in the study, the woman entered with a sharp smile.

“That’s really terrible of you. I got so unreasonably angry that I ended up telling Shin-chan everything. You can’t really criticize Shin-chan either.”

“Fool.” “Watch your tongue when it comes to small matters.” “Even Shin-chan said, ‘Uncle won’t come home tonight,’ you know.” “After all, friends came over last night too.” “The three of us drew lots and waited who knows how long.” “I should’ve chased after you right then and there.” “I wanted to see... what kind of face you were making out there having fun.”

“Shut up.” Sasamura contorted his whole face. He couldn’t muster a laugh.

As dusk approached, the blacksmith's machinery fell silent, making even sitting feel unsteady. When troubled by uncertainties, Ogin would visit the nearby Inari Shrine to draw oracle slips. Though the street outside bustled, within the shrine's spacious grounds reigned absolute stillness, golden lanterns glowing faintly through distant trees. When she pulled the bell rope, its metallic clatter reverberated through the air before a young shrine attendant emerged from the shadows.

"I brought yours too," said Ogin, spreading out Sasamura’s slip and placing it at the desk’s edge. Sasamura set down a dimmed lamp, curled up in the brazier’s shadow, and lay prone. "The oracle says I’m dangling in mid-air right now. Like I’ve got no real home... yet where I am staying brings nothing but struggle."

Sasamura remained silently engrossed in reading the oracle slip.

“Should I go to Kyobashi or not? What should I do?”

Ogin thought she couldn't even casually consult with Sasamura now that he had Mr.B's backing. "According to B-kun's mother's theory, it would be better if we became proper partners..." said Sasamura, who went on to meet with Mr.B once or twice more after that.

In the evening, Sasamura ventured out into the bustling twilight streets. Then, on a sudden impulse, he bought a shawl for the woman and returned. Ogin looked delighted as she spread it out to examine it, then burst into laughter. “The one I had before was much larger and had more sheen.” “And I even had a coat... but after Uncle fell ill, I lost everything.”

“Is that so.” “You shouldn’t talk about luxury.” “If it’s not good enough, I’ll send you back to the countryside.”

Sasamura's expression darkened.

Chapter 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 for needing to accommodate Ogin’s body. Whenever a guest got up to use the toilet accessible from the living room, Ogin would frequently have to hide herself in the shadows. By then, Ogin had completely abandoned the idea of going to the Kyobashi house. The excuse about the second floor being unsafe was one reason, but the anxiety about what would become of them if they left this place increasingly dulled her initial resolve.

“...And even I would need to prepare at least some basic household items if we were to move elsewhere,” “No matter how you look at it, giving birth in such shabby conditions makes me terribly anxious.” In Ogin’s heart these days, even having gone there to consult about her circumstances had come to seem like a rash act. “In such a cramped second-floor residence, if the birth went smoothly that’d be one thing—but with this being my first time, there’s no telling what complications might arise.”

“Whether it’s grave or trivial, there’s no end to where this might lead,” her mother interjected from beside them. Sasamura stayed silent, leaning against the brazier while staring fixedly through tobacco smoke. He noticed how Ogin’s belly had grown conspicuously larger as she fastened the strings of her red merino apron—its hemp-leaf pattern dusted white—around her swollen form. Her moist-looking face appeared almost translucent, like bleached wax. “If we act carelessly and something goes wrong, I’ll have no way to answer to this one’s father back home or our relatives.”

For these reasons, Sasamura was compelled to search for a new house. Sasamura went out looking in more secluded areas. There he began noticing several reasonably spacious vacant houses here and there, but their dirty surroundings or unsatisfactory layouts left him unimpressed with any. As he walked, his haori over two-layered underkimono grew oppressively heavy in the steadily warming weather. In the quiet district dense with hedgerows, willow buds shot up vigorously while plum blossoms bloomed sporadically. The sky arched in a depthless blue expanse. Though Sasamura had surveyed these backstreets of Koishikawa, contemplating the daily anxieties of leaving his friend's house for an ordinary rental made him reluctant to abandon his familiar haunt.

Today was certainly Dr.M's admission day.

One afternoon, Sasamura went out to search for a house but turned back midway as if suddenly remembering something. That day hung heavy under a milky overcast sky. After having Rahel medication wrapped in two boxes at Aokidou pharmacy and heading toward the university hospital, he found faint sunlight flickering across the sidewalk flanked by cherry trees with tightly closed buds. Preoccupied with his own concerns, Sasamura had not crossed Dr.M's threshold for some time. Between Dr.M and Sasamura, rifts would periodically emerge.

Dr. M had come to suffer from the same illness around the time Sasamura’s stomach was finally beginning to recover. “For someone your age, relying so much on medicine like this is disheartening.” “If you can’t even chew your food properly, that’s no good at all.” To Sasamura—who hadn’t touched a drop of tea and maintained a perpetually clouded expression—Dr.M declared with apparent vigor, mocking his own ailing body devoid of purpose, but even his sole remaining pleasure of appetite began betraying him bit by bit from around that time.

After entering the assigned hospital room and waiting for some time, Sasamura eventually opened the door and peered down the long corridor—through his eyes appeared the tall figure of Dr.M approaching from the entrance. Mr.O and Mr.I entered from behind, carrying tools and what looked like bundles. Though Dr.M’s eyes seemed to harbor deep anxiety, finding Sasamura’s unexpected figure here appeared to genuinely please him.

Twenty-One Dr.M, who had ascended from his wheelchair wearing snow boots and still donning his shallow sieve-shaped hat, appeared to be distracting himself from the unpleasantness of this cold hospital room—unexpectedly assigned by fate—by leaning his weary body against the wall, trying to sit briefly in a chair, or resting his elbows on the central bed. “Since they’re supposed to be accommodating patients, you’d think they could make the hospital room a bit more presentable,” Mr.O remarked. When Mr.O spoke up, Dr.M looked around the room and nodded slightly, though his brow remained clouded.

When Mr.O began speaking,

“Hmm… unbearable,” Dr.M responded, glancing around the room with a slight nod, though his brow remained clouded. Even so, the fact that people had gathered on such a day brought him great satisfaction. Though his tone was lower than usual and his mood seemed subdued, their conversation remained lively, accompanied by faint smiles and light-hearted jokes. “Push here.”

When the topic of illness came up, Dr.M exposed his emaciated lower abdomen and indicated the scar’s location with his hand. “That must hurt.” “No need to worry about that.” “It has grown quite large indeed.” Dr.M had to remain there for two weeks to have the scar examined. He had begun worrying about this scar only after the long-present stomach illness had grown considerably worse. Since around that time, Dr.M had appeared reluctant to take up his writing brush.

“However, it would be better for you to have a good doctor examine that.”

Sasamura too had harbored suspicions about the scar and had recommended it once or twice. “How’s your stomach been lately?” Dr.M would ask Sasamura from time to time. His face showed a gradual erosion of spirit, as if being worn down bit by bit. Sasamura noticed that haiku contest submissions from the newly joined company were stacked mountain-high on the desk. That the selection of haiku—until now a mere hobby—had recently become one of Dr.M’s important duties flashed before Sasamura’s eyes as a cruel irony.

"I haven't done anything wrong to deserve this illness," Dr.M said in an agitated tone. "It's my surroundings that are destroying me." In his voice now sounded a heartfelt sigh from the man who had maintained steadfast defiance against these past two or three years of busy work, troublesome social engagements, and cold public criticism. When he had gone to a gastrointestinal clinic for examination, even its director had still been unable to provide a clear diagnosis. As this continued, pain began developing in the scarred area.

That day, they left the hospital room together with the group at dusk.

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 bonsai trees adorning the space. Braziers, pots, bowls, shelves, drinks, fruits—even spoons and knives of various kinds—had been brought in and cluttered the space. Newly published books and design sketches for book covers lay scattered haphazardly about. As if in the bottom of a ship’s hold, Dr.M sat cross-legged on a spread-out mat, engrossed in conversation about food with a visitor—his demeanor showed even greater vigor than before.

“When you wake up in the morning, having something like this by your bedside—it’s kinda nice.”

When the topic of the potted violet there came up, Dr.M murmured while gazing at the flower. Dr.M had never had any interest in things like flowers before.

On the day it was confirmed that the scar was stomach cancer, Mr.O and Mr.I came together late at night to visit Sasamura. Sasamura, having been advised by a doctor friend, lay his weary body on the freshly made futon after trying an injection for the first time and drifted in and out of drowsiness. Ogin, flustered, retreated to the back.

Twenty-Two "So the question now is whether to operate or not," "Mr.J says if it can't be left as is anyway, you should go through with surgery." "Would that actually work?" "They say they don't really know." "And considering how much his body's weakened, there's no guarantee it wouldn't hasten his death." "Besides...I can't accept surgery... Dr.M doesn't seem to want it either."

Their whispered conversation continued for some time. Eventually, the two men left after nearly confirming Sasamura’s stance. “Oh… That’s terrible.”

Ogin entered the room the guests had left and sat down beside the brazier. “The age of thirty-seven seems especially unlucky. “My uncle was just the same.”

While stroking his limp hair, Sasamura lay on his back atop the futon, lost in thought. He occasionally felt a dull ache in the muscle where the injection had been administered. “...Why don’t you have the fortune teller in front of Dentsū-in take a look?” “They can tell things quite clearly.” Ogin brought up the fortune teller again.

Sasamura visited the fortune teller early the next day, but unfortunately it was closed. On his way back, he entered the small Daikokuten shrine beside Dentsū-in Temple and decided to consult a monk stationed there. The monk was a splendid man nearing forty, dressed resplendently. He was murmuring something in a low voice to a careworn old woman who seemed provincial, while occasionally staring at Sasamura’s gloomy face with its disheveled hair. When a noblewoman glittering with rings and a watch descended from a carriage holding a handbag, the monk forced a downcast smile. The woman went straight into the inner room.

“This is beyond…”

The monk ran the crystal rosary beads through his fingertips, opened a book, and began speaking to Sasamura. “The illness has already taken deep root.” “Would surgery not be effective?” “Impossible…” he said, leaning back with a look that dismissed any need for closer examination. Sasamura tossed the money packet onto the sanbo 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 no trace of the dark shadows that had clouded his face before hospitalization remained. By his side, other people had also come.

“This morning, ×× came again and said they’d do whatever they could if I could write something now, but I told them I’d ask after recovering from this illness.” “I don’t intend to write even now that I’ve come to this,” Dr.M said with a bitter smile that mocked his own miserliness. He could also discern the implication: if they truly had goodwill, there was no need to make this sick man write... “Moreover, I’ve become quite wealthy since falling ill.” “Yesterday △△ came again and left about a hundred for me, so if you’d like, I could be of some service now,” he said with a laugh.

After agreeing to take on a major project for Dr.M, Sasamura moved alone to a boarding house in Ushigome. Prior to that, he had visited the seaside area where Dr.M went with his family and spent two or three days there. The coastal wind remained cold, the waves stayed rough day after day, and not a single clear day emerged. Sasamura's blood clouded again after an injection, leaving his head persistently heavy and sluggish. Alcohol had also been forbidden.

The boarding house in Ushigome had several separate buildings and even a lovely garden, but its lodgers consisted of just two gentlemen and a single Chinese man. Sasamura loaded only his desk, lamp, and clock onto a handcart and moved there one afternoon. And he placed the desk by the window facing the garden, where the shadows of standing trees were abundant.

23 The boarding house remained silent even during daylight hours. Sasamura repeatedly rearranged his desk placement, visited the bathhouse he used to frequent during his years at nearby boarding houses before acquiring a home, and attempted to compose himself—yet feeling like a transient wanderer, nothing took hold. As he alternated between lying down and rising restlessly, noon arrived with a pale-faced maid around thirty bringing a meal tray, who wordlessly tidied the scattered items about. Even when facing the meal tray, his head felt fogged as if submerged in water, the bamboo lacquered chopsticks he couldn’t properly grip turning disagreeable. Though Ogin—fearing illness—had prepared chopsticks in a case and a rice bowl wrapped in paper within the desk, he left them undisturbed.

Moreover, since this was assistance for Dr. M—who stood at death’s door—it remained doubtful whether any payment would be received even if he worked. Due to a strange twist of fate that left him unable to afford even a single pair of geta, Sasamura could no longer act as freely as he had when living in the boarding house. After finishing his meal, he drank the stomach medicine he had stored in a bag and went up to the spacious second floor to look around. On the second floor were several independent rooms with good views, but all stood vacant. In the garden’s shrubbery appeared the tall figure of a master who seemed to be in poor health—prominent cheekbones and nose, sunken eyes—aged about fifty-three or four. Sasamura had never once heard the voice of that master, who appeared to be a former government official. There were two women who seemed to be wives, and an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl with an elaborate high shimada hairstyle who occasionally came by in heavy makeup and flashy attire to inquire after guests’ needs—though it was unclear which wife she belonged to.

There was a young maid who seemed to have worked at a restaurant or similar establishment, along with two others besides. When they finished cleaning, they would lean against the handrail, praising each other's hairstyles and chatting about combs and hair ornaments.

“Even though there are no guests, having three women here is strange, isn’t it?” Sasamura laughed as he wandered about the area. “That may be so, but we do get guests staying a night or two now and then…” Sasamura went downstairs and sat again at his desk. The opening sections of a manuscript written on large Western paper—two or three volumes—lay on the desk. Summoning his leaden spirits, Sasamura began sporadically adding brushstrokes. Once started, the work progressed for a while through sheer inertia. At times he would flip through the original text to cross-check. Suddenly setting down his brush, he leaned his weary body backward until his mind became entangled in various thoughts that refused to be severed no matter how long he waited.

When his spirits became utterly dispirited, Sasamura quietly slipped out of the boarding house gate as if fleeing. His feet naturally turned toward home.

Ogin was boiling something in the kitchen that seemed meant for the desolate boarding house's meal tray. "I was just thinking of having the rickshaw driver deliver it now..." Wiping sweat from her forehead as if feeling the heat, Ogin stepped away from the charcoal stove.

When he sat by the brazier, the roaring sound of the blacksmith's machinery echoed familiarly in his ears. When he entered this soundless world, Sasamura felt his mind grow even more scattered.

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

Around that time, a poet acquaintance who had withdrawn to his hometown in Kazusa came ambling out carrying a travel bag. After he began staying on the second floor here instead of his regular inn in Nihonbashi, even the thrice-daily unappetizing meals gradually grew somewhat tolerable to Sasamura’s palate.

The poet, who had come to investigate the state of central literary circles, was then under pressing family circumstances. Between these two people—each tormented by their own problems—their words sometimes crossed at cross purposes.

24

When the poet left after about five days, the marriage story he had brought left only a faint trace in Sasamura’s heart, and the boarding house returned to its former desolation. The marriage proposal concerned the daughter of a fairly wealthy family from the poet’s hometown. As he lay listening to the story, a suffocating tightness filled Sasamura’s chest. Mid-conversation, an unusual phone call came through to Sasamura. The caller was a painter whom Sasamura had encountered once or twice elsewhere but never deeply conversed with. The matter concerned reviving a marriage proposal that a medical student—a relative of Sasamura’s brother, with whom he had grown close during his travels in Kyushu when first establishing a household—had brought forward and partially advanced before being betrayed by the other party. Ogin had entered his life just as Sasamura’s mind—having returned the photographs and despaired over them—had not yet fully regained its equilibrium.

“It’s been a strange day today, hasn’t it?” Sasamura, having finally hung up the phone and returned to his seat, had a look of agitation on his face. While recounting how his feelings had transitioned from that failed marriage proposal to Ogin, Sasamura added this.

“Moreover, I’ve long doubted whether I’m even physically qualified for marriage…”

The poet was laughing as he listened to his unfortunate friend’s story. By early June, Dr. M had taken to his bed, though not yet completely bedridden. While lying there, he would contemplate book designs and peruse foreign publications someone had brought him. Among these were works like “Sturm” by someone called Obstrobusukii and two or three pieces by Hauptmann. “△△ insisted I read it,” he said, “so I did glance through—but really, it’s nowhere near as impressive as they claim.”

The aspiration to become Japan’s foremost authority appeared to have taken firmer root in Dr. M’s mind since he had taken to his sickbed. A translated volume titled *The Doubts of Life* had lain by his pillow for some time. “Read this. The prose isn’t half bad either.” Though never one to dwell on life’s quandaries before, Dr. M now recommended this book to Sasamura, its pages marked here and there with red underlines. Their fragmented discussions occasionally brushed against philosophy. The doctor, who tended to those around him through sheer force of will, sometimes let words like “philanthropy” slip into conversation. His past struggles—marked by a fierce sense of self—now seemed to occupy the weakened chambers of his late-life heart.

“I want to care for people to my heart’s content once more.” Dr. M muttered with a profound gaze in his eyes. Celandine herbs—said to be good for illness—hung under the eaves where all the shoji screens had been opened wide. They braved the heat daily to gather them from distant suburbs. Many more arrived from unknown people in far-off provinces. As he lay in bed, Dr. M watched contentedly as the drying herbs fluttered in the breeze. “I want you to write something monumental for me, Dr. M…”

Sasamura, who had never placed much importance on such things until now, tried making his request after judging the tide.

Dr. M nodded lightly and said, “Well… once autumn comes and I can eat things like chazuke again, I’ll write it.”

Sasamura fell silent and looked down. Whenever 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 suddenly remembering. “That’s correct.” “There’s nothing particularly noteworthy, you see.” “I’ve just been licking salted fish guts.” Mr. O said mockingly. “Do you like vegetables, Sasamura?” “Arrowhead’s quite tasty, I’d say.” “Well… arrowhead is a bit too sweet,” Dr. M muttered. Sasamura couldn’t find the right moment to bring up the matter of the money he had brought and withdrew as he was.

25

As the time of childbirth approached, Sasamura became vaguely concerned and began returning home occasionally. Ogin, who had recently shown signs of beriberi with swollen legs, sat listlessly on the kitchen threshold—sometimes lifting her hem to catch the cool breeze from behind, sometimes leaning against the low window ledge—as she contemplated the terrifying approach of her first childbirth. Her excited-looking face appeared small, and in the depths of her restless, dewy eyes lay a faint light.

No matter how hard Sasamura worked, seeing how the manuscript’s vast untouched portions showed no sign of shrinking made his brush-holding arm stiffen involuntarily. Just below the boarding house window, dark Aoki leaves layered under dust overlapped one another. From ground never dry came soil’s smell rising to his nose. When his vision started blurring, Sasamura heaved an “Ah—” from his chest and stretched his bony back flat across tatami. Two or three steps down that corridor lay two more detached rooms. Sasamura sometimes went there to lie down watching sky. Milky summer clouds drifted lightly overhead. To patch life’s immediate lacks through original writing—he tried brainstorming material but couldn’t find the spirit.

When water was being sprinkled on the streets, Sasamura rode home in the summoned rickshaw beneath the scorching western sun. Upon entering the quiet sunken town, his tangled chest anxieties seemed perpetually siphoned away. The still-unlit house held air both chilly and dim. Ogin sat in the tearoom’s corner cradling her belly. In the kitchen, her mother nursed a flickering fire beneath the pot.

“It seems like tonight.” Ogin twisted her brows and spoke as if squeezing out the words.

“I don’t think it’ll come out so easily, but we still need to call the midwife...”

Her mother spoke in a calm tone, as if forcibly suppressing her anxiety. “Then shall I send for someone?”

Sasamura stood rigidly in place as he spoke in a strained voice. “That’s right. Will we know?” “...But your night blindness...” Ogin looked up at Sasamura’s face. “I was thinking of going to prepare, but I didn’t think it would happen this soon...”

Sasamura paced restlessly around the room. Anxiety hung over whether this single night would pass without incident. From childhood—oppressed in perpetual defeat, flawed in every aspect—the vivid memory of his own upbringing rose to his mind. The thought of a child being born into this world in a state even more degraded than his own filled him with revulsion.

Ogin, too, would often say it whenever the topic of the child came up.

“What kind of child will be born, I wonder. I don’t want to give birth to a bad child.” “A melon vine won’t bear eggplants. But it’s not like we’re going to raise it anyway,” Sasamura had said. When the stomach pain that had been plaguing Ogin began to fade, she got up to light the lamp and prepare the meal. “Somehow… I can’t help feeling this birth will be difficult…”

Ogin, who had been eating, set down her chopsticks again after a while and hunched over. Sasamura left his chopsticks set down as he gazed at Ogin’s face. In the depths of those eyes flashed a shadow of regret regarding the fetus. When the hurried dinner ended, Sasamura took something and left the house. Her mother went to call the midwife around the same time.

26

After stuffing a small amount of money into the depths of his sleeve pocket, Sasamura wandered aimlessly through the town. While anxious about the impending birth yet reluctant to be present, he stopped by the substitute doctor’s office where he hadn’t shown his face for some time. Sasamura, feeling he was being toyed with to no end, had stopped after trying about five injections around March or April, yet still felt uneasy about it. “Have you been feeling somewhat better lately?”

The doctor said, fanning his beer-flushed face with a round fan.

Sasamura broached the subject of whether there might be a household willing to take in immediately the child that would be born tonight. To this man with whom he had been neighbors since their childhood days, Sasamura did not hesitate to confide everything. “It’s not impossible. But you’ll regret it later,” said the doctor, recounting how he had sent away a child he fathered with a woman to the countryside.

“I can’t be thinking about the future right now.” Sasamura wanted detailed information about that prospective household’s circumstances. When arrangements had been made to give away a seventh child born from a second wife’s womb to a rural family, and when the grandfather came eagerly to collect it, the tearful father—unable to part with the frail-looking nursing infant—had wept; having once heard this story from his mother, Sasamura found no comfort in it now. Abruptly, he remembered that incident.

“Well, it’s better to decide after it’s born.”

The doctor spoke about the circumstances of the elderly couple from the prospective family—who lived quite comfortably—and then said: Sasamura received some pills and left there. When he returned home, the small house was hushed. In a dark corner, her mother was examining the birthing rags she had laid out, while nearby, Ogin arranged items like sterile cotton and oiled paper. Wearing terrifyingly high tatami-soled geta, the midwife arrived shortly after. Sasamura withdrew to the four-and-a-half-mat room and lay down.

“Just relax as if you’re on a sturdy ship,” said the midwife. “I’ve attended thousands of births, but you won’t find a single failure among them. Rest easy now.” She proudly boasted of her expertise.

They decided to have the birth at the Ake family’s place. Her mother busied herself alone, carrying futons, preparing what little food there was for the midwife, shuttling in and out from the back. Sasamura also went over to check on them once or twice. The labor pains gradually set in. Ogin, her eyes bloodshot and filled with tears, her face contorted, clung to Sasamura’s hand as she bore down. Each time, her face flushed bright red, and greasy sweat beaded across her forehead. When the bearing down ceased, she panted heavily, her shoulders heaving as she fidgeted helplessly with her hands. From time to time she lifted her head and vomited viscous matter into the waiting metal basin. What she had eaten in the evening came out undigested.

The anxious hours from nine to ten o'clock passed, but the laboring woman, encouraged by the midwife, merely strained in vain. Her physical exhaustion became visibly apparent. “Ah… It’s so painful…” Ogin clung to her mother’s firm hand and stared into space. “What do you make of this?” After midnight, her mother came to the house and, tilting her head, spoke to Sasamura. “Is it a difficult birth?”

Sasamura asked while keeping watch by the brazier. “Well… It doesn’t seem like an easy case.” “Should we call a doctor?” “Well… Since the midwife made those assurances when she took charge… I suppose there won’t be any mistakes.”

Eventually, Sasamura grew tired and went to sleep.

With a feeling of having been haunted by nightmares, it was around seven o'clock the next morning when he awoke.

When he went out to the tearoom, the mother was clattering away in the kitchen. Ogin was still in labor.

Twenty-Seven It was nearly ten o'clock when the midwife, cradling the plump newborn with its reddish back in both hands, carried it to the tub of water prepared in the next room. When the newborn first met the air, it let out two or three cries before going utterly limp. Sasamura watched warily from a corner of the delivery room, his body flinching whenever the infant seemed about to wail. Here, only the distant clang of metalworking reached them from the front of the house, leaving the surroundings hushed. Ogin—finally free from her long ordeal—managed a faint smile through tear-filled eyes when she heard the midwife declare, “What a big boy he is,” her expression reviving momentarily before she sank back into unconsciousness. All color had drained from her face where sweat and tears had been wiped away, leaving only the faintest pulse to betray lingering life.

With practiced hands, the midwife washed the soft, downy body of the newborn, then proceeded to dispose of the soiled materials. In the room, a peculiar odor from such things drifted, and a cool breeze brushed the exhausted mother’s face with a pleasant touch. In Sasamura’s chest too, for the moment, a faint flicker of joy stirred. “That took some doing,” the midwife finally sat down and lit tobacco. “When it drags on this long, even a midwife’s body gives out. I did waver for a moment there, but once the head was through, we had it in hand.”

Sasamura looked at the midwife’s face as if to say, “So that’s how it was?” When only the head had emerged and the shoulders were stuck—as the midwife urged, “Now, one more…”—the laboring woman’s grotesque straining, which had been a life-or-death effort, now seemed almost comical to recall. “Can’t it just come out more naturally?” “Some women do have it that way. But after all, a baby this size has to come out,” laughed the midwife. Sasamura felt as if he were being mocked and forced a bitter smile.

After examining the mother’s body with a dirty stethoscope and discussing postpartum care, the midwife left, and the room grew even quieter. Her mother silently tidied up the area while Sasamura sat by the well-ventilated window gazing at the pale face of the mother who had fallen into a sleep from which there was no telling when she would recover—and from time to time he would approach to peer at the infant’s face. That day, Sasamura spent time drinking sake with the doctor who had come to check on the childbirth in the next room. When the mother awoke, she gazed at the face of the baby laid beside her and showed a lonely smile; but as her mother supported her to rise for the toilet, her figure appeared both startlingly emaciated and utterly drained. The infant occasionally cried in a damp-sounding voice. Sasamura thinned some milk, rolled it into gauze, soaked it, and made 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 good to hear.” The haiku friend wearing an unlined summer haori entered the room next to the delivery room and offered his usual congratulations. The heavy air within the house suddenly seemed cheerful. “So, how about it then…” After listening to various accounts, the haiku friend expressed concern over Sasamura’s current financial difficulties. “If it’s just a little, I’ll manage somehow.”

“Yes, if it were possible, I’d wish for that too...” Sasamura made that request too.

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

Twenty-Eight

The mother could not stay in bed for long. When some strength returned to her legs and hips, she wanted to get up and try doing something. There was joy at having successfully escaped a great ordeal, and because the boy she had borne wasn't exceptionally ugly by ordinary standards, she felt somehow as though she had become a proper woman. For the seventh-night celebration, she herself went out to Minakuchi to select fish, squatted before the tub containing carp provided by congratulatory fishmongers and doctors, and inspected the gaudy yukata fabric brought by the haiku friend. The midwife had prepared her final duty bath, placed the newborn by the breezy window, cut the umbilical cord with a razor, wrapped it with rice grains in paper, then told Sasamura: "Please write down the baby's name and birth details here."

“You should come up with a good name for him.” The mother placed the prepared meal items and various monetary gifts on a tray and set them before the midwife. “Since it’s your first child and a boy at that, you must be proud,” said the usually brusque midwife, offering a perfunctory smile as she brought the sake cup to her lips. Sasamura forced a bitter smile but would occasionally scoop up the child and carry him toward the brighter window. The baby would occasionally open his eyes slightly, like a mouse’s, and purse his mouth, but his face changed from day to day. At times he would show a perfectly formed contour; at others, that contour would collapse entirely.

“The area around his eyes resembles yours.” “But this child will turn out better than you.”

Ogin said, peering at his face.

After the seventh-night celebration passed, Sasamura carried the infant and quietly stepped out to the back to look around. He walked here and there within the wooden fence, entered the narrow space beneath the eaves where junipers grew, and showed him the blue shadows. The baby opened its eyes wide and moved its mouth. The shadows of trees were reflected blue in his eyes. As he gazed at that face, Sasamura could not suppress a faint sense of pity and melancholy. And there he remained, squatting endlessly.

“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 up her mind from time to time as he looked at the infant suckling at her breast—as if suddenly reminded. “I’ll raise him. I’ll raise him without being a burden to you. There’s so much breast milk anyway.” Ogin had finally spoken in a distant tone, but she still lacked both the confidence and resolve to raise the child entirely on her own.

Sasamura’s thoughts turned once more toward the work he had long neglected. After a day spent discussing their separation, he abruptly left the house at dusk and went to inspect the boarding house. The sole flannel summer kimono with its modest pattern—bought alongside Ogin during early summer outings—now hung sun-faded at the shoulders, feeling thick against his body in its shabbiness. Sweat oozed from his hands and feet, and when he entered the boarding house room, his sleep-deprived eyes swam dizzily. Sasamura removed his kimono and went to the well beside the artificial hill, wringing a hand towel in cold water to wipe himself down. Moss clung damply to the stone-built well curb. Evening primroses grew tall and dense nearby.

The room was already dim. The desk remained exactly as he had found it two or three days prior during his brief visit, but the clock that should have been ticking there was nowhere to be seen. Sasamura felt an odd sense of incompleteness. He searched around the closet and staggered shelves but still couldn't find it. When he opened the desk drawer, the paper pouch containing a few coins he had left there was missing.

Twenty-Nine When he asked the maid about it, she said the clock had been missing since duskfall. The conclusion was that a petty thief had likely climbed over the side fence, broken in, and made off with it. This fence ran along the northern clapboard siding, marking the boundary with the neighboring expansive estate. Within the deserted compound—where a large old manor stood flanked by two or three ramshackle cottages—trees rose densely and weeds grew rampant. Sasamura’s room at the edge of the deep main house had its window—the one with the desk positioned before it—facing directly across to an outbuilding just beyond the scaled fence.

"After all, my eyes don't reach this far," explained the maid regarding footholds for descending from the scaled fence to this side, but no such traces could be found on the decaying bamboo Keninji-gaki fence.

Sasamura found no comfort in the soundless room. Trying to calm his mind that had been troubled these past two weeks, he sat before his desk only to find himself recalling various matters forgotten at home. There was the work Dr.M periodically imposed on him, but Sasamura also grew uneasy about his own prolonged writing drought. That he hadn't once replied to letters from his aging mother back home since moving into this boarding house occasionally darkened his thoughts too. Earlier when opening the drawer, his eye had caught on a letter received at home at month's start—slipped into his sleeve, brought here, and stored unopened. For so long now, Sasamura had failed to send even what little he owed his mother living in poverty.

Noticing the growing dimness around him, Sasamura struck a match and lit the lamp, but the room—still retaining its residual heat—was stiflingly hot. Suddenly concerned about Dr.M again, he left the boarding house, his feet naturally turning in that direction. Sasamura had often felt a certain loneliness and anxiety whenever he had defied the doctor for long periods out of petty defiance. Dr.M had just received a massage and was lying down. Since July began, his body had grown increasingly frail. He would slouch his hips and occasionally have those who came near massage him. The greater celandine he had relied on as his last hope had been prepared into medicine by a prominent pharmacist and taken, but it had become clear that it provided little efficacy.

Sasamura stuck his head through the entrance into the tea room and inquired of the doctor's wife about his condition.

“Just now when changing his clothes, he kept fretting—‘Oh, I’ve wasted away completely. If I’m still unwell despite all this, there must be no hope left.’ But then he said, ‘Well, since even Sasamura recovered, perhaps if cooler weather arrives, things might improve a little.’” While envisioning the doctor’s restless state, Sasamura left through the entrance.

When he visited Mr.I, who lived not far from there, there happened to be a guest on the second floor. When Sasamura entered the downstairs room he always used, there were Gifu lanterns lit under the eaves with elegant bamboo blinds hanging from them, and by the green bamboo fence, soft branches of bush clover drooped like tie-dyed patterns. In the time since he had last visited, the garden’s flower beds had been meticulously maintained. The thick stack of proof sheets on the desk also suggested that Mr.I’s works had been received even more favorably by the public of late.

Thirty After the guest left, the host came down wearing an elegant yukata with a pale gray heko obi sash coiled loosely around him, his face bearing a strikingly bright expression. This man's sartorial preferences and room decorations—evocative of bygone authors—matched his mental state that stood apart from the surrounding atmosphere. Every time Sasamura visited here, he felt he was intruding upon a world fundamentally mismatched to him. From deeper within came the sound of a woman's ingratiating voice.

In a garden that seemed like something out of an Edo-period illustrated book, the lamplight cast a pale glow, and the night breeze stirred softly.

“I’ve been spending the whole day on this—trying planting over there and moving them over here, you know. Once you start fiddling, there’s no end to it. The insects will chirp more readily once autumn comes,” said Mr.I as he took a pinch of shredded tobacco and inhaled deeply with a healthy sound.

Even in that tense tone of his, there seemed to be a creative fervor at its peak, and as they conversed, Sasamura couldn’t help but feel his own emptiness.

It was some time later that Sasamura’s figure—having left that place and now walking with Mr.O—appeared in the festival-lined Kagurazaka, where the crowd of laborers had finally begun to thin. Mr.O had a house in a somewhat secluded location with the wife he had welcomed in the previous year. Having left Mr.I's house, Sasamura found his feet naturally turning in that direction once again. Mr.O had brought out a rattan chair to the second-floor railing to rest his head, weary from his creative work since afternoon, but to Sasamura’s eyes—accustomed as he was to the room with its massive bookshelves crammed full of books and gaudily arranged old decorations—it felt even more nostalgic than his own desolate study. A lamp with a narrowed flame was placed on the desk, and before it lay a manuscript crowded with erasures and marginal notes.

The two walked around looking at plants that might grow in Mr.O’s garden, but Sasamura, though he felt irritated throughout, still followed behind Mr.O who had brought his student along. At the foot of the slope, they encountered Mr.I, who had also come out hunting for plants. The base of the tree-lined slope was sparsely populated. There, upon finding what looked like Taiwanese reed-like plants, Mr.O bought about two clumps and had his student carry them back. Mr.I went home carrying potted flowering plants.

Mr.O used his remaining coins to enter Biya Hall and quench his thirst; Sasamura went in with him. The two found a secluded room where they picked at ham while talking before going back out. The street's commotion had largely subsided. After parting from Mr.O, Sasamura slipped through dark alleys and returned to the unpeopled boarding house. "Why don't you come see my place?"

When parting, Sasamura tried inviting Mr.O.

“No, I’ll rest.” “Your boarding house isn’t interesting either.”

At the boarding house, the lodgers had all fallen asleep. When he made his way down the long corridor and entered his room, the residual heat of evening still lingered in the tightly closed space. Sasamura let in some breeze through the higher small window for a while, but as he did so, he laid his tired body down on the futon. For two or three days, Sasamura set to work from the cool of the morning.

Into the two rooms of the detached quarters ahead, a woman around forty who appeared to be a merchant’s wife from the downtown area suddenly entered, as if catching her breath. The woman, who seemed to have some physical ailment, would lay out a pillow and lie down every day. From time to time, a woman around thirty would visit, bringing her young daughter; they would eat fruits and sweets and spend half a day chatting leisurely before leaving. The koto borrowed from the boarding house’s daughter was strummed in time with the protagonist’s languid singing.

“It’s unbearably noisy.”

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

Thirty-One

When their divided finances became untenable, Sasamura soon vacated the boarding house—this happened once Ogin's physical situation had finally been settled through the efforts of a Yanaka-based friend.

By that time, the nephew had also been taken back to the countryside by his brother-in-law.

The nephew was increasingly descending into worse behavior. Late at night he would drag rickshaw drivers back from Asakusa or bring crowds of friends to intimidate his uncle—things he did not hesitate to do. The whole group would gather at the vacant house to drink sake as they pleased and sing popular songs loudly without regard for their surroundings.

“Please, just a bit of pickles,” accosted an older youth with rolled-up sleeves, who came drunk through the back door to pester Ogin.

“Call Shin here,” Sasamura said, his face paling. “Just leave him be. It’s too dangerous to go near him.” Ogin would peek in from the back and tell Sasamura about what was happening. The whole group threatened nearby liquor stores and tempura shops. “If you say anything, he says he’ll kill you.”

Sasamura heard such things from Ogin once or twice.

“Hey, I hear you’ve been saying you’ll kill me...” When Sasamura saw his nephew returning home at dusk, he immediately confronted him. The nephew, reeking of alcohol, did not even sit down. Then, declaring “I’ll kill you,” with a fierce glare, he went to the kitchen to fetch a blade.

“You! You there! Run away!”

Almost before Ogin’s shrill scream had faded, the nephew wielding a deba knife entered, supported by Ogin. Hearing the clattering crash of the water jar overturning in the kitchen, the university student renting next door rushed out to the back entrance.

By the time Sasamura, who had fled outside, came back into the house, his nephew was nowhere to be seen. “He has such a gentle face yet does such violent things—it’s really something, isn’t it?”

Ogin had been unsettled all night, but Sasamura wasn’t in a very good mood either. And then the nephew searched through the bottom of the trunk for the white-sheathed dagger but couldn’t find it; instead there emerged items like a Chinese-style fan bearing someone’s handwritten inscription that Sasamura had carefully preserved. Even after the nephew’s brother-in-law—who was Sasamura’s cousin—coaxed him away, a persistent ache remained in Sasamura’s head. Sasamura, the eccentric, was not well regarded by his cousins and the like.

“That person doesn’t think so badly of Shin-chan.” After seeing the two off, Ogin remained preoccupied with the matter. It was soon after that commotion that a friend came to confirm Sasamura’s stance regarding Ogin. Until then, the two men had met repeatedly to discuss the issue. While Sasamura continued rushing through Dr. M’s manuscript, the advantages and disadvantages of separation versus staying together were deliberated between them for some time.

“My mother disapproves of separation, but in any case, settle things before the child grows too big. As long as you make a clean break, I’ll consent, of course. With just half of what you propose, I think things will mostly be settled.”

The worldly-wise friend left the boarding house with those words.

“I might speak somewhat ill of you too, so bear that in mind.” As he left, the friend drove the point home to Sasamura. By the time the friend returned, a considerable amount of time had passed. Sasamura alternated between lying down and sitting up, his mind unsettled. And he couldn’t determine for himself which direction would lead to a better outcome. He hadn’t even intended to force a decision.

“I met with various people and talked things through, but...” The friend returned to Sasamura’s room wearing an expression that defied expectations and spoke in a low voice. “You know, it might actually be better if you two stayed together.” The friend took a breath and then began to speak haltingly. “Given your attitude toward her and what I’ve heard about how she’s dedicated herself to you all this time, there’s some logic to her side of things.” “And the more I spoke with her, it became clear she’s endured hardships and understands the situation quite well.” “Her own ideas also differ somewhat from what we had in mind.” “First of all, when she looks at the nursing baby’s face and cries, even I was at a loss.”

The two of them discussed the conditions for staying together for a while. "She’s a woman with a bit of a knack for charming men." The friend muttered.

“Once matters are settled, I’ll follow afterward.” Sasamura said as he saw off the friend departing once more.

Thirty-two

About two hours after the friend had left carrying the conditions for their cohabitation, Sasamura returned home with a feeling akin to a bamboo that had been bent springing back to its former shape. After night fell, the three of them played games like Flower Cards in the six-mat room at the back. The fact that Sasamura had been constantly spilling his grievances to his friend about the woman’s attitude and behavior—and that her explanations that day had largely dispelled the friend’s concerns—could be discerned even from the friend’s tone. In what the woman said, there was a coherent logic.

“I’ve had a long association with Mr. Sasamura myself, but I’ve never encountered trouble like this before,” the friend confronted her abruptly. When he did so, the woman remained silent, listening. “...In any case, please entrust this matter to me. If you intend to start some business after we separate—though my means may be limited—I will do my best to look after you. I’ll never treat you poorly.”

The friend had carried the conversation that far. The woman sought the friend’s critique regarding her own attitude toward Sasamura. Her efforts since coming to this house without even a single futon were laid bare—Sasamura’s terrible mood swings, her pawnshop visits made despite her ailing body, how time and again she’d rescued his emergencies with money earned through her own hands.

“Sasamura keeps saying I’m staying in this house out of some selfish motive, but if that’s all it were, I’d have other places to go.” “I’m drawn to this child too, and having already failed once before, if I were to make another mess of things now, I truly couldn’t face my relatives.”

Her mother added her own words in a slow, deliberate manner from the side. The sequence of that conversation and Ogin’s demeanor at the time could be pieced together through the friend’s concise account. Sasamura could not refute its cold logic. He had no objections to staying together either, yet he found no true resonance of the woman’s feelings within his own heart. Her demeanor and manner of speech when they grew close held a certain appeal, but moments where their warmth truly blended remained scarce. In Sasamura’s mind lingered both a faint discontent and shadowy melancholy, but he now lacked the capacity to dwell on them deeply.

The game grew lively. Sasamura—never quick-witted—would sometimes lose track of the cards as he played. Then at an unforeseen moment came an unforeseen misplay. Ogin’s attempts to cover for him only made the game harder to proceed. Just as Ogin’s hand neared completing a blue combination, the teasing friend laid a peony card flat on his palm and flicked it before her eyes with a roguish flourish.

“Poor you—you’re not drawing flowers all by yourself here.” “You’re such a pest!” Ogin sharply slapped his hand. The flower cards were finally put back into their box quite late. Signs of fatigue were visible on everyone’s faces. Sasamura's head was in a fog.

“Thank you ever so much for your unwarranted concern. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to look after you properly… Please give my regards to your family as well.” After talking awhile and seeing off the departing friend, Ogin closed the door and came back inside. Her face—hair pulled taut—had recently begun regaining some fullness. Sasamura gazed at the lamp while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette that stung his tongue, gradually feeling regret over having settled matters that day. Something about the woman’s careless manner during their card game refused to sit right with him.

“I’d like you to refrain from such thoughtless behavior.” Sasamura brought up when Ogin had slapped the friend’s hand. “It’s only because it was Mr.B that it’s passable—if it had been anyone else, they’d have found it terribly strange. Don’t you feel any shame at all doing something like that?”

“...I didn’t notice at all.” “I didn’t do any such thing.” “Since we were playing flower cards, I couldn’t stay so stiff all the time—maybe I got carried away and did something like that, but…”

Ogin said this while letting the child suckle at her breast. Sasamura’s remarks about such matters struck her as strangely puzzling.

Thirty-three The work had progressed little by little. As he advanced through it, he grew more familiar with the original text while naturally grasping how to approach revisions. He even found himself developing an interest in the work itself. With that long-standing problem finally settled and his mind somewhat unburdened now, he found he could drive his brush forward without pause. After setting down the writing brush he'd kept in hand for two or three days straight, Sasamura went to check on the house as though suddenly remembering it existed. Entering the room, he found their child still dressed in its birth robe lying atop a wide lacquered paper desk that had been moved beside a breezy window to avoid fleas. Mid-August had passed yet summer's heat remained fierce. Before the infant's eyes spun a small windmill whirling in drafts of air. Looking at that face filled Sasamura with something like pity.

Ogin brought down the yukata fabric that had been placed atop the chest of drawers and showed it to Sasamura. “It’s time for Seiichi’s shrine visit already, and it’s too pitiful to have him go in just his birth clothes—I bought enough of this fabric for two outfits last night.” “It’s not exactly cheap—this still cost seventy-five sen…” With that, Ogin gave a forlorn smile.

Sasamura sat by the window rolling up his sleeves, legs stretched out. The mother was boiling bathwater in the kitchen.

“To think this child’s first kimono would cost seventy-five sen… I can’t help but feel so sorry for him…,” Ogin said, her eyes brimming with tears. “One piece should be more than enough. And this pattern won’t do,” Sasamura muttered.

“You say that, but isn’t this somewhat decent?” “This is perfectly suitable for a child.” “And with enough fabric here, you can’t really call it insufficient.” “I should have given it to him when the doctor was speaking.” “But oh well, it’s fine.” “Even if we don’t have much… when you consider him being raised by others…” Ogin had wanted to make them at least from meisen silk or merino wool, but waiting for that, she didn’t think the time to make them would ever come.

“Besides, even if we don’t go for his first shrine visit, we still need to give presents to everyone who came to congratulate us.” “At our old tobacco shop, they hear about these customs every day.” “This may not be the nicest area, but there aren’t any truly poor people here. If we can manage it, I’d like to take him to the tutelary shrine.” In the kitchen bathed in evening sunlight, the diligent mother gave the child his bath. Ogin rolled up her sleeves and helped. When dried with a towel, the baby’s pinkish skin showed splotches of talcum powder.

“He’s such a beautiful child. Not a single boil...” said Ogin as she stroked the soft flesh of his thigh and adjusted the coarse swaddling cloth. The child splashed his arms and legs about, seeming to enjoy the breeze blowing in.

After finishing the evening meal, Sasamura went to visit Dr.M. Dr.M lay on bedding he had spread in the cool downstairs room. By then, his tumor had begun causing considerable pain. His altered face showed traces of anguish, and as he spoke, his consciousness would occasionally blur. Even sitting upright seemed an effort for him.

Sasamura spoke about the inconveniences of the boarding house, how unsuitable it was for his work, and his desire to vacate the place, and indirectly requested money.

“Did you have some business?”

Dr.M offered a greeting that completely missed the mark. His manner of speaking lacked its usual clarity. Within Dr.M—whose condition had advanced alarmingly—there existed both a painful struggle to survive and futile anguish. Losing his capacity for resistance day by day, Dr.M was in no position to lend ear to Sasamura’s dire circumstances. “Since I haven’t received payment from them yet either…” Reluctantly, Dr.M took several bills from the briefcase at his side and handed them to Sasamura. The presence of such a briefcase beside him presented an unprecedented sight in Dr.M’s case.

Sasamura felt a pang of guilt. Whether the manuscript would be completed or Dr. M would die first—even Sasamura couldn't tell.

Thirty-Four

In any case, Sasamura, having vacated the boarding house, ended up setting up his desk once more in his old four-and-a-half-mat room. In the neighborhood, over the course of that single summer, the number of people had grown considerably. The figures of housewives holding children who seemed to have been born around the same time as Seiichi, standing at their gates in the evening, also sporadically caught Sasamura’s eye. The cute little boy of about four whom Ogin had often brought over—giving him sweets and feeding him meals to make him comfortable—had also grown considerably in the short time since they had last seen him. It was said that the child had been born among the real siblings of a prosperous master carpenter’s family in the neighborhood.

“It’s strange how having my own child makes me notice all the other children around.”

Ogin gripped 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 plays like this, but once he grows up, even he will have all sorts of things to think about." Sasamura too could not help but think about that gloomy house. The mother of the child, who remained unable to marry, had recently entered into an odd relationship with the elderly neighborhood head.

The daughter from the rice cracker shop across the way brought her two-year-old boy to Ogin's place, talked about her own unfortunate circumstances, and cried while gazing at the child's face. The child’s father had been the legitimate son of a prominent landowner in the Shiba area. By then he had been disowned by his parents and was in prison. The child had been conceived when the woman was working as a servant at a teahouse. Ogin too, crying along with them, did things like handing the child a bib.

“That child might not survive,” said Ogin. “The mother’s so worried her milk’s dried up, see? His legs are just skin and bones like our own boy’s.” If she dies, that woman’s body would float up... Though Sasamura still hadn’t fully embraced fatherhood, even he found himself drawn in when the child fell ill. In the evening, the infant Ogin had been holding outside suddenly vomited milk in a gush, suffering silently, unable to cry.

“You—you! Something’s wrong with Seiichi…!” Ogin came running into the house, shouting.

The child seemed to have congenitally inherited his father's predisposition toward weak digestion. Ogin hurriedly took him to the doctor, but that night throughout until dawn, the mother sat on the bedding warming the sick child's easily chilled abdomen with her own body. Sasamura was awakened time and again by that piercing cry, yet merciless thoughts would occasionally flash through his mind.

Because Ogin and her child had not shown their faces for some time, an elderly relative from Shitaya came to visit unexpectedly one evening. Ogin, who had been putting the child to sleep, hurriedly carried them to the back room upon hearing that shrill voice but found no chance to hide the small pillow.

“What’s with this pillow…?” Granny stared intently at it. Ogin entered, laughing repeatedly as she held the child. “Is this your child? That’s…” Granny also began to laugh. “No wonder things seemed off. “My son had noticed it ages ago.”

Thirty-Five

Not long after Ogin’s father, who had come up to Tokyo through the old woman’s report, returned to the countryside, the family registry was sent to Sasamura. The father—who had blundered through various ventures in Tokyo before failing in the silk industry and growing frantic trying to recover—ended up suffering another crushing loss in stocks and becoming embroiled in settling matters for the main household headed by his own nephew. This father came to Sasamura’s house accompanied by Granny’s second son Kinya, a doctor, during that season when one starts wanting lined haori jackets in the mornings and evenings. Sasamura had already met this Kinya twice before. Kinya—destined to inherit an old family with distant branch relations—was addressed by Ogin as “Brother” repeatedly. That Kinya loved Ogin beyond mere sisterly affection gradually became apparent to Sasamura.

“Auntie probably intended to have me and Brother end up together or something…” Ogin brought up old matters from long ago and laughed bleakly. “Brother, please call him over just once,” Ogin begged and begged Sasamura. Once, taking advantage of an occasion when he and his Yanaka friend were out flower-viewing, Sasamura had a rickshaw puller bring a rickshaw to fetch him. Kinya soon arrived putting on doctorly airs, but Sasamura subsequently went out together with Ogin. And they went in together to hear a vaudeville performance. Child-loving Kinya never let Seiichi out of his arms.

Ogin’s father, who appeared to be around fifty-five or fifty-six, was a quiet and well-mannered man. He bore so little resemblance to the man rumored to have squandered his fortune on alcohol and women that one could hardly recognize him as such.

“Father has weakened considerably in just a short time. When he was in Tokyo before, he wasn’t like that, you know,” said Ogin to Sasamura after her father, who had gotten drunk that evening, entered the bedroom. “It might partly be his age,” he said, “but watching his ancestral home collapse around him must have drained what strength remained. Father had always clung to the notion that no matter what messes he made, there was always the main family to fall back on, you see.”

Ogin herself also seemed to be considerably disappointed by that.

Sasamura had not even thought to consider such things. Ogin’s upbringing, past life, family status, the people around her—such matters held not even a moment’s worth of consideration for Sasamura, who had never even attempted to inquire about his own ancestors. It wasn’t that Sasamura never had his older brother lecture him about their ancestors from time to time. He had also caught snippets of various legends passed down in his own mother’s family. Memories from early childhood—being shown various items like rough Buddhist statues seized during the Korean campaigns, letters from generals of that era, Taikō’s autographs…—had long been forgotten. The only thing he occasionally felt inclined to look back on was his maternal grandfather, who was said to have shared a similar constitution with him. It was said that his grandfather, enraged after having his government bonds embezzled by a friend, stabbed the man and then committed seppuku. Born as the third son to the second wife of a family in decline and having grown up amidst a decadent atmosphere, notions of family or household had naturally grown faint in Sasamura’s mind. If he could somehow survive through his fleeting artistic efforts... Clinging to this hope, Sasamura had been dragged along day by day these past six or seven years, never once considering any long-term future with Ogin.

“With your intellect, well... just mold that woman properly.”

Even to these words from his friend, Sasamura remained completely unfeeling.

The next day when Sasamura woke up, his father was drinking morning tea with his mother in the tearoom. On his mother’s face—unaccustomed in recent times to such acts as drinking tea together like this—there was an uncontainable look of joy. Though it was something he came to know only much later, Sasamura found himself able to imagine the time when the two had been intimate.

Thirty-Six The morphine injections that Dr. M had occasionally tried to forget his suffering had become constant by autumn. Dr. M’s mind during the morphine’s efficacy was like wilted plants moistened by night dew.

“It’s an indescribably delicate state of mind,” said Dr. M, reluctantly lamenting the passing of that limited time. Sasamura—for whom Dr. M’s work had already been commissioned—put down the brush he had taken up for his own creative writing in a flustered state of mind and went periodically to check on the doctor’s condition. They took turns keeping nighttime vigil in the desolate sickroom. At Dr. M’s prompting, they would sometimes bring food from home, spread it out, and sip alcohol through the night. Ogin arranged chicken, matsutake mushrooms, and other items in a lidded dish for Sasamura.

“You’re eating something delicious there,” Dr. M teased playfully.

One day, Sasamura had been writing until around eight o'clock, then remembered and went out. It was a rather stormy evening, with few people out on the town’s streets.

Having grown weary of the bedsores that pained him in his sickbed, Dr. M’s face—as he rested in an armchair for some time—had completely changed. His once dusky complexion now bore a pallor like silkworm larvae, and when he closed his eyes in stillness, he resembled a noble stone statue. His hair had been cropped short. When Dr. M began sinking into sleep, the group withdrew to the next room. A painter who had joined them spread out xuan paper that was at hand and wielded his brush to create clumsy caricatures. Likenesses of Dr. M and everyone else were drawn. Haiku and comic verses too were scribbled down as each pleased. As night deepened, their merriment grew. That laughter suddenly startled Dr. M awake.

“Aah…” A long sigh escaped from Dr. M’s listless body. In his piercing gaze as he looked around at everyone’s faces, there was an anxiety he couldn’t conceal.

“Let me see.” A shadow of a lonely smile came over Dr. M’s seemingly irritated face. Then he took up a brush himself and immersed in composing verses.

After daybreak, the group withdrew from there.

In the Yamate district, persimmon leaves lay scattered across the road, and a lukewarm wind carried the scent of green vegetation.

“Is Dr.M aware of it himself?” “It also seems he might be deliberately putting on such an act to avoid disappointing his family.” "But the patient’s mind is surprisingly dim, you know." After exiting the gate, Mr.O and Sasamura walked while having this conversation. The feeling of despair they had when first facing Dr.M after receiving his tragic diagnosis had gradually withered in both their chests.

“The cancer isn’t just in the stomach anymore, they say.” “They say it’s reached the throat area too.” By the time such whispers had reached everyone’s ears from no particular source, Sasamura too had few opportunities left to speak with Dr. M. Due to the doctor’s statement, messengers and telegrams were dispatched to the homes of close relatives late one night not long after that.

Around the sickbed piled high, people began gathering one by one. "Look at this!" cried the painter with a weak heart who had arrived first, entering hurriedly with a pale face and ragged breath. The patient, who had been in a coma, opened his eyes as if revived by the morning injection, and suddenly the faces of the many people surrounding him came into view. The room was permeated with a quiet air of anxiety. The sound of footsteps quietly ascending and descending the staircase was also heard. This gave the patient a terrifying premonition.

Thirty-Seven As his mind, which had been in a state of violent agitation, gradually calmed, Dr. M would occasionally exchange words with close relatives. There was no significant difference from his usual manner.

During moments of agitation—or rather, rage—Dr. M’s mind became distressingly disordered. Whether he could no longer endure the physical agony of death’s approach or raged like a tantrum-throwing child against the icy hand of inescapable fate, all manner of things were cried out in a sobbing voice. When the pain subsided, Dr. M’s condition returned to normal. He would even lapse into a dozing coma at times. Requests began to be mentioned here and there—that someone take his exhausted wife, worn out from long nursing duties, to a hot-spring cure, and that his corpse be donated to the medical community for autopsy.

“Once I’m dead, it won’t hurt anymore.” Dr. M said this and smiled forlornly. “All of you—bring me your unpleasant faces!” shouted Dr. M, his clouded eyes sweeping a piercing gaze over the approaching group. “...Eat unpleasant things and live as long as you possibly can.” Dr. M instructed them. The stifled sobs of the women clinging to them could be heard softly. The people filling the second floor held their breath and fell completely silent. In the back, many people were standing.

Dr. M drew his last breath late that afternoon.

Until the funeral was held, Sasamura returned home twice. He even visited the home of a certain magazine editor to sell the hastily completed manuscript. The reporter—who had had no dealings with Dr.M during his lifetime—had been amusing himself by gathering various ceramics around him. He proceeded to give a detailed explanation about an old Chinese earthenware teapot kept simmering on low heat. Grimy ceramics were taken down from shelves or reverently extracted from boxes. Each piece received its own explanation. The reporter also discussed the conceptual framework of the novel he was writing. It took an old earthquake in Yoshiwara as its subject matter while incorporating notions resembling Buddhist principles of causality.

Sasamura listened without showing any displeasure, but he was concerned about his own preparations for the funeral. The talkative reporter polished Sabita's pipe while steering the conversation in various directions.

When Sasamura returned to Ushigome, Dr. M's corpse—which had been placed on a stretcher at the veranda that morning and transported to the dissection room through the drizzling rain—had already been neatly sutured back together as before and returned some considerable time earlier. At the entrance, figures coming to mourn were still scarce.

“It’s said Dr.M did indeed have an abnormal brain after all.”

At the entrance, such talk had begun. "Why on earth would he suggest something like an autopsy?" Sasamura could not help but recall Dr. M’s final request—one that seemed tinged with a lingering human vanity even at death’s door.

“I want to see the funeral too.” When Sasamura returned home to make preparations, Ogin had spoken in a coaxing tone, though this consideration also stemmed from that neighborhood in Ushigome where relatives of the household they had been tied to for nearly half a year resided.

The period before the funeral was a seething commotion. Inside and outside the house, people were packed tightly, moving about in complete disorder.

Sasamura's face was utterly exhausted when he returned from the funeral.

“I rushed over by rickshaw, but they said the funeral had just left…” Ogin pressed for details about the women’s demeanor.

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

Thirty-Eight By the neighborhood head's hand, bamboo branches were again erected at the gate. Sasamura wrote a long manuscript bound for the countryside, hurried by the dry rustle of north wind in his ears. A burden heavier than last year's end now weighed on Sasamura's shoulders. Life had grown more complex. He visited an intermediary's house in Kōjimachi at dawn one morning—manuscript clutched to chest—when spring had fully dressed the town. To eyes long accustomed to one room's confines, the bustling dusk streets felt oddly comforting, yet his manuscript's fate left him unsettled. Sasamura had weathered such crossroads countless times before. He could not avoid surveying his talent-starved, desolate surroundings.

“If this gets rejected, we’ll be in trouble.”

That day, due to their differing intentions, Sasamura had returned without achieving his purpose. Ogin came to his side and began speaking worriedly. Sasamura would occasionally bring Seiichi—who had finally begun losing the unpleasant newborn smell—to his desk and make a plaything of him. In the end, he made him cry. "Poor thing, you're being too persistent..." Ogin took the child—who had been pinched and bitten—into her arms and pressed her breast to his mouth.

There were times when he would decide to take the child to the sparsely attended morning baths. Then from behind, Ogin came with a towel to retrieve him. “Father is quite good at handling the baby.” When Ogin returned home, she spoke to her mother. The baby was carried on the back of a poor girl from the slums behind this town to places like the temple grounds nearby or the sunlit storefront of a cheap candy shop, but they would stuff his mouth with sweets out there as a distraction, and he would often end up with an upset stomach. Ogin had considered reducing the number of mouths to feed in that struggling babysitter’s household by even one as a meritorious act, but that too did not last long.

“You mustn’t leave a sick child out in this cold, dusty air.” Upon returning home, Sasamura saw the child’s limp face tied to the bony-backed babysitter and abruptly made a stern expression as he entered the house. “With two women around, aren’t you being too careless? Moreover, keeping him strapped to someone’s back like that—it’s simply not good for the child’s health.” Ogin hurried off to call the babysitter. At the babysitter’s house, the mother—who had lost her husband—was raising her many children while twisting palm-fiber ropes. Ogin knew well the miserable state of that household.

“In rural farming households, they carried them on their backs all day long. Still, all the children were healthy….”

Ogin's mother spoke as if making an excuse. Ogin laughed as she recounted how rough the babysitters for her younger brothers had been - how their hot-tempered father would roll them up in bedding or lock them out late at night. Vague impressions of country house scenes lingering in her memory and images of her childhood self rose with nostalgia. "Still, we all grew up this way." "And now here I am with a child..."

As the year drew to a close, unexpected money began arriving from unforeseen sources, and Ogin’s spirits suddenly lifted. And for spring preparations, she frequently went out shopping. Sasamura would also go out with her and sometimes return carrying Seto ware and other items. When New Year's Eve arrived, the narrow room became cluttered with mirror rice cakes and decorative straw ornaments, while the clatter of Ogin’s geta echoed in and out of the house late into the night. Her mother was busily working in the kitchen. At the household altar, a new shimenawa sacred rope was hung, and the lamp glowed crimson.

Sasamura couldn’t help feeling he was being shown someone else’s commotion. And he couldn’t refrain from disrupting it.

“What are you going to do with such a big mirror rice cake?” When his mind clouded over, Sasamura would assume a self-satisfied air and compulsively find fault with every action the two women took.

Thirty-Nine

The New Year passed bleakly. In Sasamura’s fastidious room, where they had reluctantly placed the smaller mirror rice cake, the withered petals of a shabby potted plum lay beside it, leaving the area around the desk as desolate as ever. Sasamura would sometimes find himself recalling how he had idly wandered around Osaka around this time two years ago. There, bundled in a stiff new Inverness coat that restricted his movements, he walked alone through the Dotonbori area every day. And drawn by some longing, he would drift into the stifling crowds of theaters, vaudeville halls, and cheap eateries.

At times, his figure could be found wandering aimlessly through dimly lit, cramped backstreets; other times, having failed to enter anywhere, he would end up in some unexpected outskirts, taking a lonely supper under the pale electric light in the second-floor room of a sparsely frequented poultry restaurant. And when his pockets grew thin, he would retreat to the house of his brother’s acquaintance in the quiet suburbs, resting his stimulus-weary mind and immersing himself in work.

On his way back from Kyushu, when Sasamura visited Osaka for the second time, his jaded mind—having grown weary—had cooled to the point where he could no longer endure the noxious air that had permeated there through February. And seeking a residence where he could immerse himself in quiet contemplation and creation, he hurried back to Tokyo.

Sasamura felt he had finally come to understand the depths to which he had sunk.

“Should we go somewhere?” Sasamura, who had put the remaining money into his desk drawer, was recalling the loneliness of his solitary travels aboard ships and trains, and at hot spring inns. “And we need to buy some supplies.” “It’s a bit unusual to have a household as empty as ours.” Ogin leaned against the brazier and surveyed the room.

“If we go somewhere, please take us to Narita Temple first so the little one can make his visit. Please don’t turn a blind eye to this.” “Since there’s no need to worry about meeting people there, that should work. Though it’s a mineral spring, there’s a bath that’s just right for staying one night…” “When are we going?” “Is it too late to go today?”

“If we go there now, it’ll get dark by the time we arrive.”

When Sasamura awoke the next morning, Ogin had already tied her hair in a bun and fastened the collar of her underrobe.

It was the end of February. The bone-chilling cold from the previous night persisted, and snow began fluttering down, yet sunlight still occasionally filtered through the shoji screens. Inside the train, the child pressed their hands against the windowpane where droplets trickled down, bracing their feet against Ogin’s knees as they cried out noisily. From behind, some women peered in to comfort them or reached out to beckon them over. Ogin’s figure walking along the platform, her hair tied in a bun, looked odd even to Sasamura’s eyes.

“You look like a duck.” Sasamura muttered from behind.

“Do I really look that plump?” Ogin looked herself over again and again. Having the rickshaw driver carry the child, the two of them went up and down various stone steps, but the bright mountain air gave no sense of being a Buddhist temple. The stone monuments and plaques engraved with donation amounts also seemed characteristic of Narita-san. Sasamura hurried Ogin, who was 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 completely vacant. Ogin spent the next day too—leading the child by hand—walking along wide corridors and climbing up to Fudo Hall perched high on a steep cliff during breaks in the light rain. In the plum garden, bush warblers occasionally sang, and the day remained damp and muggy from morning till night. “After all, there’s no place like home.”

When evening came and the storm shutters were being closed, Ogin—sitting in the spacious room—spoke up.

Forty

Around the time the child began pulling himself up to stand, Sasamura was forced to vacate the house that had been transferred from Mr.K to a back-alley carpenter. The carpenter had immediately drawn up renovation plans upon purchasing it, but even before that, newly built rental houses had already appeared on the subdivided rear plot he had leased from Mr.K. Mr.K’s rental venture had ended in failure, but the carpenter had erected four houses—all remaining vacant. “If they’re putting up houses back there now, we can’t stay here either—and on top of that, it’s two stories!”

“Once it’s finished, we could move over there.” While Sasamura and Ogin had these conversations and occasionally went out back to inspect them, every house stood cramped and unpleasantly built. Even before the walls dried completely, people were already hauling in luxurious bedding and lamps—nouveau riche gentlemen who seemed to spend all their nights elsewhere as bachelors. “What sort of people live there? “They likely failed at some venture and came here after closing down their house in the downtown area.”

Ogin tried to discern the residents’ character from the patterns of the zabuton cushions drying on the handrail.

One cold morning around ten o'clock, as Sasamura came out to the kitchen using a toothpick, his ears caught the voices of a man and woman speaking in a country dialect he couldn't place. They were the young couple who had moved into the middle house facing their back door. Ogin quickly became close with the tall, slender wife whose features were well-defined. As they grew more familiar with each other’s temperaments, the wife began coming up to the tea room and candidly talking about her circumstances in her full country dialect. The couple had run a boarding house in Waseda until just before moving here, but the wife, unaccustomed to Tokyo, had been unfamiliar with the ways of the city. Her husband, who had been commuting to Hongo University from there, was seven or eight years her junior—they had been acquainted since her days as a geisha in their hometown. Ogin often went to their house carrying her child to chat, and soon the men too became close without reserve. The man named Okada rarely went out wearing a square cap. And he remained constantly glued to the long brazier.

The child was taken into the wife’s lap and was kissed on the cheeks and hugged tightly. In May, the interior decorations that Sasamura had bought from the street were displayed in the bright second-floor of that house.

The wife, who had hysterical tendencies, would often end up sitting alone by the long brazier, whimpering whenever Okada was away. Occasionally, voices from their arguments would drift over from behind the house. When securing a house that could accommodate Ogin and her child along with a young relative of Sasamura’s—a student attending a private university where he was boarding at the time—the child remained carried on Okada’s wife’s back for half a day even as they moved their belongings in. The house stood in a back alley along the way to Hongo, but after settling the three there, Sasamura had to go out again to search for his own boarding house.

"In this house, we ended up seeing two New Years come and go." On moving day, Ogin sat rooted before the emptied closet and spoke with weighted reflection. "Even a dump like this—when you actually have to leave, it somehow gets under your skin." Sasamura found himself remembering too—the time since Ogin had first arrived here. Over those two years, even the kitchen's white plank flooring had developed a slick, dark patina.

It was that season when damp winds clung to the skin, making one occasionally long for a lined haori jacket. Perched on the wicker trunk he had brought in, Sasamura surveyed their still-unsettled house while Okada's wife wandered the veranda, rocking a crying child against her back. Ogin kept scrubbing the floorboards with a rag, though every now and then she would turn toward the child as if remembering—"There now"—and squat down to expose her swollen breasts. Through the veranda where they had removed the shoji screens, the incoming wind still carried enough chill to raise gooseflesh.

Forty-One

The boarding house that Sasamura had moved out of stood on a hilltop, up one slope from where Ogin and the others lived. There was a balcony with a good view, and the third-floor rooms had been designated as the domain of maids wearing soft clothing. Until summer vacation arrived, Sasamura had shut himself away in the unsettled second-floor four-and-a-half-mat room, though it felt more comfortable than the lodging in Ushigome where he'd stayed the previous summer. When his spirits grew heavy, Sasamura would wander over to the house. Ivy bought from the nearby Konnyaku Enma festival hung from its eaves, and a goldfish bowl that delighted the child sat there. Ogin kept watch over the child toddling along the shoji screens while planning what to make for Sasamura's evening meal, but Sasamura leaned against a pillar smoking as if visiting someone else's home. He couldn't help feeling keenly how greatly the distance had grown between himself and those at the boarding house. Among the lodgers were two or three elderly gentlemen who would drink late into the night with friends and play go after being dismissed from their offices, yet their state of mind seemed little different from that of the surrounding students. To Sasamura, this appeared enviable.

At night, Ogin would carry out the child and accompany him as far as the top of the slope, but when Sasamura waved “Bye-bye” to the child and entered the boarding house, something that refused to blend with the atmosphere there clung stubbornly to his chest. The students who had already finished their exams filled every room with cheerful laughter. There were those bustling about with handcarts and others packing up their belongings. Sasamura left his sweltering room above the kitchen and stepped onto the balcony, where he sat down on a rain-soaked chair and smoked in the dark. Then two or three students came out. Maids smelling of white face powder emerged too.

Sasamura's decayed tooth began to ache, and he was unable to sleep until late that night. Sasamura, trying to cool his overheated head, had the men open the door and went outside. Outside, the rain was spitting down, and the sky was pitch black. The wind was also blowing. Amidst this, Sasamura descended toward Kasumigaicho.

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—I entrusted…”

Assailed by the sound of military songs, Sasamura finally woke around ten o'clock the next morning, but his sleep-deprived head felt even heavier. The military songs were being sung by the children from the house behind the plank fence.

By the time Sasamura moved into the lower room facing the garden, he had grown quite accustomed to the boarding house. Whenever Ogin revealed her disagreeable disposition, his nerves would instantly bristle. Then he called in the law student boarding with them to discuss separation. At such times, Sasamura became immediately convinced that the woman warranted nothing but hatred.

“Even I find staying like this tedious...” The woman tried not to reveal her sense of indebtedness before her mother and the law student. That way of speaking gave Sasamura even more damning hints about the woman’s background. And all the things that had ordinarily been sealed away in the depths of his chest now took on their own meanings at once, fraying Sasamura’s nerves. "You all behave like you’ve got some kept-woman mentality, squatting in another’s house." “Well, people like us who don’t understand anything clearly don’t belong in a proper household like yours.”

Ogin insisted vehemently, her face pale. “If that’s how it is, you could at least call my father to settle things properly. But no—for all your legal knowledge, you consult with someone like Mr.Wakayama and do nothing but try to drive us out…” The irritated feelings of the two could not keep racing away from each other endlessly.

Forty-Two When a certain time had passed, the feelings of hatred and regret would be wiped from his chest as though they had never existed, and the woman would appear anew in Sasamura's eyes. At such times, Ogin sufficed to evoke the impression of the woman he had first met. For a day or two, Sasamura became part of the household again. And even when he returned to the boarding house, his mind remained steeped in sweet reminiscence. He didn't even attempt to consider how soon that too would be betrayed.

“I really thought I’d be driven out.” “Why would you act like that?”

Ogin could not help but find Sasamura’s sudden, violent fluctuations in emotion perplexing.

“I’m suffering too.” Sasamura gave a bitter smile.

“When I think I have nowhere to go and say things like that, I end up acting even more forcefully,” Ogin said with a laugh. “Your way of speaking is quite harsh too,” Sasamura retorted. “When you come at me so aggressively, there’s no room left for logical arguments.” “When you flare up at me like that,” she continued, her voice faltering slightly, “I get all flustered and don’t know what to do… It must be because I’ve had no proper education.” Her words grew quieter yet sharper: “Because of that shameful lack—this feeling like I shrink before you every moment—I resent my parents.” The final declaration came out brittle and dry.

Sasamura felt he could perceive the mistaken nature of his own attitude toward the woman. While forcing Ogin to be a docile wife, he couldn’t deny that he still harbored a coarse attitude akin to handling a mistress or something of the sort. And he began to think that perhaps he was finding in that very situation the stimulation and interest to fill each passing day. “You still went to school, didn’t you?”

Sasamura said with an expression that seemed to be probing for details about Ogin’s upbringing. “Oh, I did go a little… to Yushima School..." “Swinging my lunchbox around, I’d walk through those parts—me, who never listened to a word the teachers said….” Ogin laughed evasively. “Why didn’t you go to school, Uncle?” “Uncle?” “Why do you think?” “When times were good, you were too busy playing around, weren’t you?” “Besides, by then I was already getting older—book learning wasn’t meant for someone like me.”

"But you can at least write letters, can't you?" "No." "Why don't you give it a try? I'll teach you."

“Oh, please do teach me.” “In truth…” he said, but Sasamura had never actually seen Ogin write characters.

When he returned to the boarding house, Sasamura set to work on a war novel he had been commissioned to write for a certain magazine. That magazine also had connections to Miyama. From the reporter who had come to him conveying Miyama's sentiments, Sasamura occasionally overheard things about Miyama. As he wielded his brush, Sasamura sometimes despaired of his future. After Dr. M’s death, the fact that his position was being unexpectedly yet naturally advanced filled Sasamura—who lacked confidence in his own talents—with unease rather than reassurance.

“I hear you’re going to board a warship as a war correspondent. Is that true?”

One day, when the haiku friend from Yanaka saw Sasamura’s face, he inquired. “But that was back when you didn’t have children. Even if they say there’s no danger, it’s still actual combat after all.”

The friend said this and tried to sway Sasamura’s resolve. Even Sasamura understood well the inappropriateness of such work.

43

By midsummer when they found a suitable house in a quiet town near Ogin’s neighborhood, their hearts had already turned toward establishing a new household together. When vacating their previous residence had become urgent, Sasamura hadn’t been able to prepare proper housing for them to move into jointly. While living separately temporarily, he had even contemplated finding an opportune moment to publicly announce their marriage. “This is ridiculous. If you keep carrying on like this, nothing will ever improve.” “However much time passes, you still can’t even afford to buy one proper tool.”

Ogin muttered from time to time while looking over the boarding house ledger. When Sasamura heard from Ogin about the house she had found while passing by, he hurried to go see it.

The house stood on sloping ground between cliffs where few people passed. Around the rotting gate, the thick branches and leaves of two or three paulownia trees cast deep shadows, but beyond the gate, paving stones were laid out, and the main house stood far back from the road. In the three surrounding derelict gardens, summer weeds had overgrown, and the house’s kitchen area had old wooden doors that were broken and floorboards that were sunken. Yet the room facing the front garden with its many trees was built as if set apart in its own section, exuding a sense of calm.

Sasamura promptly settled the agreement and returned, but moving in so hastily without any preparation did not sit well with Ogin. When it finally came to moving in, even that dilapidated house had its shortcomings. “Isn’t there a better house available?” “If the well’s at the bottom of the slope, there’s nothing we can do about it.” When Ogin heard the details about the house from Sasamura, she made a face that seemed reluctant. In Ogin’s mind, images of tidy lattice-doored houses like those she had once lived in—in Tsukiji and Kinsukechō—were constantly present. Ogin, who loved cleaning, wanted to live neatly in such a house, polishing the charcoal brazier and sitting at her dressing table. Moreover, she thought that even if they were to move out from here, it would be better to allow some leeway by getting their belongings in order first, as that would present a better appearance to the neighbors.

“You’re only concerned with having a gate…” Ogin also said that.

“But there’s no such thing as a perfect house.” “At least there, even if guests come, they won’t notice the child for a while—you’ll have to put up with the well being far. Otherwise we’re stuck.” Before long, Sasamura—who had gone out with the student after having him carry buckets and brooms—drew water from the back and wiped down the musty closets and tatami mats. When he grew tired, he would go out to the veranda and smoke tobacco. The spacious abandoned houses built on the surrounding hill made it feel as if they were in a mountain temple, with cool breezes and crisp, clear air.

Before long, Ogin came carrying the child on her back and left him beside Sasamura.

“Please,” she entreated. “It’s too cramped and dangerous here—there’s nothing we can do about it.” The child, clad in a white Chinese-style dress, toddled unsteadily through the spacious room, trailing after Sasamura’s footsteps. After a few steps, he plopped down onto the tatami mats. He had begun speaking in fragments now. Even after settling in, the women continued grumbling about the distant well and the damp tatami mats that made the gloomy living room feel oppressive. Yet Sasamura found solace in finally inhabiting a house with an expansive garden. When venturing out, he would place flowers received from neighbors into the rickshaw’s footrest before returning home. Various plants now grew within the inner garden’s hedges—some purchased together by Ogin and himself at Yakushi’s festival stalls.

The child, wearing shoes, shouted gleefully as he ran around the garden. Sasamura chased him up and up the small hill in the front garden, delighting in the game. Ogin had gradually grown accustomed to the house, but even so, after sunset she rarely ventured out alone. There were many nights when she lay awake. When the cherry leaves yellowed and fell, signs of pregnancy began to show on Ogin’s body once more.

44

When Ogin told him this news, Sasamura felt as though he’d been bitten once more. His urge to evade responsibility burned fiercer now than when it had first happened. As his curiosity toward her steadily dulled, Sasamura would sometimes awaken from his fixation on the woman as if a spell had broken. In those moments, his heart grew desolate—like watching a phantom dissolve before his eyes—and this stalled emotional state proved impossible to revive. Days thick with revulsion stretched endlessly onward.

Such things seemed to occur for Ogin as well in the same way, but her menstrual cycles always ran more smoothly than the man’s. “You were just toying with people.” “The way you spoke back then made it clear.” “Men are shameless things—that’s what I thought.” When old topics resurfaced, Ogin would sometimes say such things and laugh forlornly. “Somehow it seems strange, doesn’t it?”

Sasamura said while gazing at Ogin’s face, which showed concern for her belly. “With two or three months in between... and yet a child is conceived.” In Sasamura’s mind, the image of a man named Isogai suddenly flashed through his mind. Sasamura had seen and knew that Ogin, after recently encountering by chance a middle-aged woman who had once served at Isogai’s uncle’s household, had begun occasionally commissioning sewing from this skilled woman. The woman had now married a skilled carpenter living nearby. The woman who had brought the sewing appeared at the entrance to Sasamura’s room and bowed.

“She’s such a strange woman, isn’t she?” Ogin later laughed about that woman who had taken a young husband. “Even someone like me has such skilled hands… My uncle always had me do all his sewing.” The sewing work she presented with those words appeared, even to Sasamura’s eyes, to be very skillfully done. Through this woman, Ogin and Isogai might have been exchanging information—Sasamura sometimes found himself suspecting such things. Even when Ogin was late returning from her evening errands, dark shadows could not help but cross Sasamura’s mind. At such times, Sasamura would pick up the crying Seiichi and take him toward the bright, lamp-lit streets. And so he waited for Ogin to return.

Ogin, who loved shopping, took the opportunity while out to gather an assortment of odds and ends and returned home via a different street with a bright, clear expression. “Please try this—they’re famous salt crackers.” “When I was in Kansukemachi, I often used to go buy these.”

Ogin bared her white chest and let the child suckle at her taut breast, wiped the tears from his face, then smiled brightly.

“I ran into Mrs. Okada on the way, you know. Since they hadn’t come around for a while, I wondered what had happened—turns out they couldn’t keep up their household anymore and ended up moving into a boarding house together as a couple two or three days ago…”

Ogin began talking about such matters while crushing salt crackers. Though Sasamura's suspicions would fade in those moments, he couldn't shake the feeling that something shadowy still clung to Ogin's body whenever she went out.

“To be saddled with this kind of responsibility for the third time—I’m the one who drew the short straw here.” Sasamura said half-mockingly. “Even if it’s the third time, how pitiful… The last one only lasted about four months before I got so fed up I ran away. And though I was with Isogai for three years, he was still a student, and I was on my uncle’s side—so all we had was this promise about adoption. It’s not like we met all that often.”

45 Being questioned by Sasamura about Isogai in such detail didn’t feel unpleasant to Ogin, but even so, the topic gradually lost its initial intensity for both of them. The more Sasamura came to understand Ogin and Isogai’s relationship and Isogai’s character, the more his curiosity toward her waned—yet in Ogin’s heart too, those fleeting dreams she harbored now and then gradually faded. Still, in Ogin’s manner—which at times seemed to cast itself upon Sasamura—one could discern a lingering nostalgia for her failed love. When he imagined it thus, the woman in those moments appeared beautiful through Sasamura’s eyes.

“But from that woman, you must have heard at least how Isogai is doing now.” Sasamura asked while smoking tobacco through the silver pipe that the man had supposedly owned, but to Ogin, it didn’t seem worth discussing with him.

“I hear he’s still idling about as usual.”

In Ogin’s eyes, neither the sparkle she once showed when speaking of the man nor any shadow of passion could be seen. “Has that fire in your chest already gone out?” Sasamura felt as though he wanted to stir those embers once more. “How long will you keep thinking such things?” “If I were merely thinking them—I wouldn’t act this way.” “And had I met him even once, I couldn’t possibly hide something like that.”

The fact of her pregnancy became increasingly certain with each passing day. “You really are fertile, aren’t you? After all, didn’t Mr. Miyama’s sister say that when she looked at your body?” Ogin laughed, gazing at Sasamura’s face.

“But it’s fine.” “Since it’s sad for a child to be alone, having up to three would be all right.”

Around that time, Sasamura gradually began finding financial flexibility. A couple of new publishers came requesting manuscripts, and the old newspapers they’d stored away had quietly been cleared out. Their life grew less financially strained than at the start. Whenever Sasamura returned from downtown, he would stop by his regular toy shop and find unusual toys for Seiichi. The child had come to play alone with his toys.

Ogin would take out the round pills that were still stored in the drawer of the long brazier and occasionally show them to Sasamura. "When I think about that time, I feel so wretched." Ogin gazed at the face of the child playing beside her, her eyes clouding over. "The boy was saved by Mommy. When he grows up, Mommy will tell him all about it properly."

Ogin said in a tone meant to annoy Sasamura.

“To remember that time, let’s keep these pills stored away like this forever.” “Idiot.” Sasamura gave a wry smile. Ogin, trying to withhold her milk for the fetus’s sake, gradually became aware of her child’s growing fretfulness—his sullenness intensifying daily. When she tried having him cling to the old man’s hands, the child recoiled from their stiffness compared to his mother’s supple touch. At night, as Ogin attempted to sleep in Sasamura’s room, the child would cling to her breast and wail whenever taken to the old man’s side. The cries of this child—handled by aged hands that lacked any delicate understanding of children—needled into Sasamura’s brain as he watched nearby.

“Why don’t you look after him yourself?”

Sasamura grimaced at Ogin, but she, having long left matters like diaper changes entirely to her mother, remained oblivious to such things. Before and after Ogin’s body had settled, the father’s and mother’s feelings toward their child were entirely reversed.

46

There was a young painter in the Kanda area said to be a distant relative of Ogin. The man called Yamauchi and Sasamura had met once or twice somewhere and were acquainted. While formalizing matters concerning Ogin, Sasamura found himself suddenly reminded of Yamauchi through Yoshimura—Yamauchi’s cousin who frequented his place. Ogin’s father, who had been close to Yoshimura’s family, had also been acquainted with Yamauchi’s father.

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

One evening, Yamauchi, who had come to return New Year’s greetings, was thoroughly drunk. Yamauchi, who had once been vigorously promoted, was at that time incurring resentment from some quarters due to his irreverent behavior. Though these rumors had reached Sasamura’s ears—leaving the name Yamauchi with a rather poor impression in his mind—the family background and father’s circumstances he heard about from Yoshimura and Ogin’s mother gradually formed an image of Yamauchi in Sasamura’s thoughts that differed from the man’s outward appearance.

Yamauchi sat with glazed eyes, spilling the sake Ogin poured onto his black silk crested kimono and stiff hakama trousers as he barely maintained his seated position. The hand gripping his cup trembled ceaselessly.

“Painters certainly do wear amusing costumes, don’t they?” Ogin remarked after Yamauchi had staggered home. “I hear Kanzaki—that man’s cousin who handled our cousin Ofusa’s affairs—is also a heavy drinker,” added her mother.

“That man’s father was a dreadful drunk too,” Ogin said, looking at Sasamura. Her mother entered the parlor strewn with cups and dishes and began speaking. “After all, he was the sort who drank away his entire fortune. They say in his prime, when returning from hot spring revelries to town, he’d scatter money all along the road.” When the Sasamura couple visited, the father sat beside his son, drinking restlessly. His speech brimmed with such absurdities that the women clutched their bellies laughing. Then he offered Sasamura a sake cup—

“Mr. Sasamura, this is the kind of man I am,” he said, laughing cheerfully. Yamauchi was smirking. “Ugh, how awful—that father and son drinking so much… It makes me think of my own father.”

Ogin said she was going out while holding Seiichi’s hand. "But they’re all such good people," she said. "With no relatives in Tokyo, they seem so eager for human connection…" Ogin, who always quickly noticed how others managed their households, spoke as if she had seen through Yamauchi’s way of living even after returning home. When cherry blossoms began to fall, Ogin grew busy preparing for Sasamura’s trip home. Four or five years earlier when he had last visited his family, Sasamura had still been unemployed. His clothes had been shabby then too. The displeased look on his mother’s face when welcoming her own grandchild’s first homecoming remained deeply etched in Sasamura’s mind.

“For your mother’s sake, you should at least dress up properly when you go…” Sasamura had told Ogin about such matters as well.

Even as Ogin painstakingly gathered trivial souvenirs, anxiety about Sasamura’s hometown constantly clung to her mind. “Since Shin-chan went back in that state, Mother and Sister must think poorly of someone like me too,” Ogin would often say, but she did not forget to show as much goodwill as possible on this occasion. On top of the several newly tailored and remade kimonos in various colors, Ogin also gathered items like the soft sash she had borrowed from Kinya in Shitaya.

“The stiff sash is good, but bring this one along too.”

Around that time, Kin’ichi crossed to the battlefield as a military doctor, around the same time as his brother.

47

Sasamura, who had returned to his hometown, could not stay there long. Having grown up in one of the large, dilapidated samurai districts of an old castle town, he had kept his eyes fixed ahead for so long—with no chance to recall the scent of his native soil—yet now found himself occasionally turning back to the wretched figure of his childhood self and the gloomy atmosphere that had enveloped him. The bustling town he first walked through hand-in-hand with his sister; the scent of weeds in a desolate vacant lot beneath stone walls where he caught crickets with neighborhood girls; the damp narrow alleys shaded by trees where his boyhood friends persevered—which he timidly slipped through on his mother’s errands, softening his sandal-clad footsteps; the tranquil grassy shade of park woods where he lay sprawled with lazy companions during detested school hours—each time he watched Seiichi growing day by day, Sasamura felt an urge to breathe deeply of that nostalgic air into his mind wearied by a decade of struggle. Before his father’s untended grave, he longed to taste once more that reverent tenderness from those days.

Sasamura, who had been envisioning such things in his heart, descended to the dark night station built in the suburbs and immediately felt a desire to turn his face away from the unpleasant memories of his youth—memories enveloped by that rough, dilapidated town. The clatter of clogs descending from the crude wooden staircase to the bumpy earthen floor, the peculiar odor wafting through the darkness from the rice paddies, the makeshift-looking dim inns visible through the willow trees in the station square, the eateries on both sides displaying Osaka-style red lanterns—jolted along the stone-paved road through these scenes in a sluggish rickshaw, Sasamura felt as though he were seeing a newly-developed town for the first time.

As the rickshaw twisted and wound through the town lined with low-eaved houses, a familiar main street eventually came into view. Passing through several such streets, the rickshaw entered a lonely residential quarter lined with stone walls and earthen fences. From a sky heavy with sagging clouds, rain began to fall reluctantly. From gaps in the dark tree groves and hedges, glimmers of light still seeped through, and the quiet town had not yet fully surrendered to sleep.

That evening, Sasamura stayed awake in a spacious second-floor room, growing tipsy on two or three cups of sake while eating and engrossed in conversation with his mother and sisters until the rooster crowed. The mother and sisters—who had welcomed him at the old-fashioned broad entrance hall—gradually shed their initial shabbiness as they talked, yet their faces remained altered. The marks of their long, careworn lives—of battling and struggling through hardship—were etched painfully onto these women’s aged features.

The next morning, Sasamura visited a nearby doctor to have a coal cinder removed from his left eye that had flown in while on the train. When he was attending middle school, whenever he came down with a mild fever or felt pain in his brain or spinal cord, he would rush here—but the house remained exactly as it had been back then. The doctor, whose hair had been thinning, seemed almost strange for not having gone any balder than before. Sasamura spent two or three days visiting his sisters’ houses and his brother’s adoptive home, but wherever he searched in the town, there was not a single person who resembled an old friend.

By the time the taste of long-forgotten food began to linger on his tongue, thoughts of Tokyo had already resurfaced in Sasamura’s mind. And as if fleeing from his elderly mother’s sunken, cold eyes—which sought an opportunity to draw near her long-unseen child and have him listen to her feeble, lonely heart burdened by tangled circumstances and a life she could confide in no one—Sasamura found himself restlessly wandering outside day after day.

48 Surrounded by his few nephews and nieces and one brother-in-law as he prepared to leave the land, Sasamura felt as though he were hearing for the first time his mother’s faint heartbeat—she who shared his blood—and her muffled sobs. As the train glided smoothly from the station precincts into a vast field dappled with early summer shadows, Sasamura’s clouded face pressed against the window met the crisp morning breeze, tears welling in his eyes.

Sasamura could not shake the feeling that his mother’s fidgety demeanor this morning—after half a day spent facing each other yet never sharing a heartfelt conversation—and her careworn expression throughout this visit now seemed to pull at the train as it raced across the open fields, as though trying to drag it backward. The loneliness and poverty enveloping his solitary mother, and her grandmotherly affection for the unfortunate orphan left behind by her younger sister—all of this sank deep into Sasamura’s heart.

…A most reluctant farewell—who knows when we might meet again… She had seen him off beyond the gate and returned inside, yet could not bring herself to sit down. Clutching the garments he had left behind, her nose bled profusely until she nearly lost consciousness… Upon arriving in Tokyo and immediately receiving such a letter, Sasamura’s eyes seemed to vividly conjure up his mother’s flustered figure entering the room where her child had sat until that day.

"This is exactly the problem," he thought. "If it had to end like this, why couldn't we have opened up to each other more like mother and child while we were together?" Sasamura tossed the letter aside with a bleak laugh. He couldn't help pitying his mother, who now believed, "He's no longer my own child." During his stay, he had suggested once or twice that she move to Tokyo, but his mother showed no inclination. The idea of tiptoeing around an unfamiliar daughter-in-law in the city displeased her, nor did she wish to bring her granddaughter into crowded urban life—but more than that, circumstances there were too entangled for her to extricate herself as easily as Sasamura imagined. The kind of closeness needed to discuss such matters had never blossomed between them.

“There was a fine painting at home. I suppose you sold that one too.” Sasamura recalled an old picture book he had once discovered at the bottom of a drawer in a moldering long chest within a dark storage room during his boyhood, and mentioned it to his mother without truly meaning to inquire. That the painting was unmistakably by Utamaro could be deduced from the supple lines and restrained hues of other works by the same artist he later encountered.

When Sasamura rummaged through the scrolls and sword-like objects inside the old long chest stored on the second floor of his sister’s house, he searched for the picture book but found it nowhere, which suddenly made him want to confirm with his mother. Mother gazed at her child’s face with a puzzled look, not smiling in the slightest. “I heard your wife isn’t an amateur—is that true?”

Mother suddenly asked. “Don’t talk nonsense. Shin was the one who spread that rumor, wasn’t he?” Sasamura vigorously denied that.

From Mother’s side as well as Sasamura’s, neither touched upon the crucial issues between them again. Sasamura even sometimes stayed out overnight. When a letter arrived from Ogin urging him to return, his mother hesitated to even voice her objections.

“……What a trivial affair this is.” On the morning of departure, as Sasamura busily packed his belongings beside her, his mother suddenly spoke up. When she tried to help with something, Sasamura rebuked her with a single harsh shout, making her withdraw her hands completely.

49

Sasamura recalled when he had first left this devoted mother’s care and come to Tokyo. In those days, he would occasionally write long letters, and whenever he announced finding employment somewhere, she would even send formal clothes from their strained circumstances. Once he began obtaining modest income, he never neglected to set aside portions from it to send. “From now on I’ll have to send money more regularly…”

Sasamura nodded, but by the time the train had crossed the prefectural border, the complexities of his Tokyo life were already flooding his mind like a tide. Thoughts of his wife and child also began to surface.

The next morning when he arrived at Shinbashi, the town was still quiet. The ground remained damp with night dew not yet dried, and from the reed-screened flower cart, blossoms' deep hues struck the eye vividly. The taut faces of city dwellers and women's voices that occasionally reached his ears seemed to pierce straight through his chest. Having alighted from the rickshaw, Sasamura encountered Seiichi—still clad in sleepwear—toddling out to the entrance while nibbling sweet bread. The child flushed shyly, his face glowing with delight as he gazed up at his father. Following behind emerged Ogin and her mother. The tall figure of Ogin's father materialized next. Her younger brother too was shuffling about restlessly in the tea room.

Sasamura had been aware of this younger brother’s arrival even before leaving for his hometown. This younger brother, who had been raised in Tokyo, returned to the countryside due to beriberi shortly after Ogin came to Sasamura’s place. And he had lived there ever since. This younger brother, who had disliked his plans to become a pharmacist in Tokyo, possessed considerable skill in Western-style tailoring.

“My younger brother needs to hurry up and open a shop like this in Tokyo soon…” Whenever they passed by a tailor’s shop outside, Ogin would often start talking about her brother back in the countryside. “When he turns twenty-four or twenty-five, there’s also the prospect that our rural relatives would provide that much capital.” “If he stays in the countryside, his skills will probably get rusty, though.” Sasamura, too, occasionally let slip a tone of lamenting this. “What on earth is he doing in the countryside?”

“Lately, his health had improved—they say he’s working in town now.” “There’s also talk he’s taken up with a woman… I heard that when Brother Kinya went back to his adoptive family last year.”

That day drew to a close with talk of what had happened while he was away and talk about their child.

Ogin found a small box of pickled plums among the various scattered souvenirs there and happily opened the lid to look inside. Those pickled plums had a distinctive flavor that could not be experienced in Tokyo or Ogin’s hometown. Kakimochi rice crackers were also Ogin’s favorite.

“Oh, your mother sent so many. Is there something different about the plums from your hometown?” The child was delighted as he fiddled with the large battleship and roly-poly doll-like gifts from his aunt but did not approach his father’s side. Whenever their eyes met, he would oddly avert his gaze. “He looks rather gaunt.”

Sasamura noticed the sickly thinness of his neck.

“No, I don’t think that’s the case.” “He’s been quite lively lately.” “When I ask him where Daddy is, he says something like, ‘I went to buy train-choo-choo anpan!’ He comes up with such amusing things.” “It’s possible my nephew might come alone.” “Once again, we’ve been stuck with him.” Sasamura brought it up when he entered the study with Ogin for the first time in a while. That was not something Ogin had been entirely unprepared for either. Ogin, in a buoyant tone, lit a cigarette she wasn’t used to smoking and pressed it to Sasamura’s lips.

50

The health he had nurtured during his travels soon began to decline.

At the house in the countryside where his mother lived, medicinal baths using hot spring minerals brought from the Jōshū region were prepared nearly every day for an elderly man suffering from rheumatism. Sasamura soaked in these baths each time too. The place lay just across a river from dense mountain woods, with fields stretching beyond the earthen walls surrounding the house. In the study—its deep eaves sheltering a spacious veranda—whenever he occasionally wrote, green frogs would start croaking as rain pattered down on young persimmon, crabapple, and apple leaves outside the window. The scent of soil and foliage permeated the windless stillness, soothing his frayed nerves—worn ragged by city life’s relentless stimuli—like a soft-bristled brush smoothing them over. Had his mother and sister not intruded there, Sasamura could have lingered undisturbed in sweet reverie indefinitely.

Occasionally, he would open an umbrella, cross the bridge, and venture toward the red-light district at the foot of the mountain. In the quiet new district that recalled Kyoto’s Pontocho, rain misted over green willows, wire-framed paper lanterns glowed under eaves, and from dimly lit houses hung with blue noren curtains came the soft plucking of shamisen strings that stirred the travelers’ melancholy. Sasamura recalled scenes of Bon dances he had viewed from the second-floor railing of one of those houses when he was four or five years old—taken there by his father—as well as hand dances held on festival days on stages spanning from one house’s second floor to another’s.

In the secluded second-floor room, under the flickering light of a candlestick, his face flushed from two or three cups of sake, Sasamura occasionally listened to the women’s stories interwoven with Kansai dialect. Among the women, there was one who had been born in Kyōbashi’s Hatchōbori and had long worked as a geisha in Tokyo.

“This place is no good. You won’t find anyone baring a shoulder even when the moment calls for it.”

That woman seemed ill-suited to the climate of the lukewarm region. “But in exchange, the banquet rooms are carefree.”

After returning to Tokyo, Sasamura remained stuck in his indolent ways for some time. During the day, he would go out into the garden to sow flower seeds or take the child—who was now quite steady on his feet—out to Asakusa. As her belly gradually grew larger, Ogin became even harsher toward the child who clung to her side. And saying, “No milk! No milk!” she tightly pulled her collar closed. “When you nurse, it makes Mommy’s body shudder… Is it all right if we put some of Daddy’s spicy stuff on too?”

Ogin would say this and then rub chili pepper little by little onto her nipple. After being subjected to this two or three times, the child soon learned to bring a rag from the kitchen and wipe it off. “Oh, how delicious mother’s milk is!” Granny broke into a grin and peered into the child’s face. The child, having grown accustomed to Granny’s embrace out of necessity, would fall asleep at night suckling at her empty breast, but come morning, he would be tied to her back and watch the flickering flames of the fire she kindled.

“Off to Enen Mountain you go, coins and gold come here to me!” The child had learned that song from Granny some time before and would occasionally make people laugh.

This child, pushed away by his mother, expressed himself through faltering speech—yet his father understood him better than anyone, as if it were his own native tongue. The child’s frayed nerves made him spiteful enough to vex the adults at times. He would wail in a shrill voice that they’d used the wrong bowl for his hot water, or sulk that his nightclothes weren’t fastened properly. “I’ll take him to the barber for a haircut,” Ogin said. “That might help him feel a bit refreshed.”

Ogin, as if struck by an idea, slipped into her geta and took Seiichi out with her.

Fifty-One

Never before had Sasamura been laid down in such a soft, comforting bed as when he returned from his travels. In the relatively tranquil four-and-a-half-mat room protruding between the front and inner gardens, the bedding laid out each evening by Ogin’s hands was all plush and new. Even Ogin’s red pillow was new. The dimly lit bedroom with its wooden doors closed was stifling enough to feel almost sweltering at times, and Sasamura would occasionally slip his feverish body out from the thick cotton futon onto the cool tatami mats.

“This thick bedding is unbearable.” “Is that so? I simply can’t sleep without thick futons, no matter the circumstances. I’d want at least one set of silk futons prepared even for home use.”

Ogin stretched out her arm where soft downy hair was visible and lit something like a medicinal cigarette. Ogin’s timidity had grown even more pronounced. It was after an incident that had occurred during Sasamura’s absence—a shopkeeper’s wife from a store two blocks over had likely been killed by her husband, collapsing before Ogin’s gate while vomiting blood. The dull black stains of blood had seeped into the earth until just two or three days before Sasamura returned.

The woman had apparently thrashed about the neighborhood, for scattered under a large enoki tree in a square two or three blocks away were geta sandals and combs. There was also talk that she had taken poison herself. Ogin, lying in bed, talked about how that woman had been abused by her husband and was frightened as if it were happening to herself. The fact that the man who had briefly been with Ogin—and from whom she had fled—had soon afterward slashed his stepmother, with whom he had always been at odds, now struck Ogin’s mind with visceral clarity. How frantically the man had searched everywhere for his wife, who had cleverly escaped the matchmaker’s grasp! Even Sasamura, hearing this, understood how deranged the mind of the man who drank nothing but alcohol every day and roamed the neighborhood had become.

“When I was walking with you, didn’t we meet in that back alley of Kikuzaka once?” “That was him.”

“Hmm.” Sasamura could still recall how Ogin had suddenly brushed past a man in the darkness that time, but he considered her panicked grasp of his hand and startled cry in that moment to be nothing more than this woman’s habitual exaggerated affectation. Ogin, at that time, had not yet grown familiar enough with Sasamura to clearly point out that man as such. That evening, a drizzling rain fell as the man—wearing low geta and holding a Western-style umbrella—stood thoroughly soaked.

“That’s the one.” “He called my name—Ogin.”

“Hmm.” “If you hadn’t been there then, who knows what might’ve happened to me.” “He’s a violent guy.” “Though if he doesn’t drink, he’s actually quite timid when he’s sober.”

Another new fact about that house emerged from Ogin’s lips. “…From the moment I arrived there, I hated it—I just couldn’t make myself stay. When evening came, I’d go out back and stare into space. The back opened onto lonely rice paddies with frogs croaking, you know. That awful feeling… I’d end up crying. Whenever things got bad, I’d take the train and run here.” “I’ll go visit that house myself.”

Sasamura said half-mockingly.

“And I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Fifty-Two

But that newness of the bed did not last long. The time soon came when the smell of the woman’s hair ingrained in the pillowcase would choke his chest. When Sasamura began spreading out the book he had been craving by his bedside, the liberated woman no longer felt lonely stretching out her limbs to sleep in the long four-mat room.

“Ah, I just want to become unburdened as quickly as possible, no matter what.” Ogin’s dulled eyes glimmered faintly as she strained to lift her leaden body. Sasamura too found himself unable to shake the memory of that childbirth stench—cloyingly sweet yet metallic—that would suddenly assail his nostrils. Behind Ogin loomed her father and younger brother, who had come from the countryside with modest funds, intent on reuniting their scattered family in Tokyo. Whenever she stepped beyond her four-and-a-half-mat world containing only husband and wife, Ogin would inevitably be sucked into that vortex. The grief of her family’s dissolution had seeped deep into Ogin’s mind.

“There’s a house right up ahead in the cartwright’s alley, you know.”

Ogin broached the matter with Sasamura one day.

Ogin had by then been shown Sasamura’s intermittently clouded expression many times over. “I think we should go ahead and rent it—what do you think?” “Father will be working somewhere from there.” “Yoshio says where he’s staying now is unbearably stuffy and wants to start commuting here too. If those two work, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.”

“So your father’s settling here permanently too?” “Whether they can manage it or not—well, that’s the plan, I suppose.” “We might as well try it then.” “If we do this, I’ll finally have a proper place to give birth—it’d be extremely convenient.” “With them nearby, we could have help looking after the baby too.” When the three moved in there, Sasamura took Seiichi along to inspect the place. He would enter through the veranda overlooking a modest garden, sometimes wetting his lips with the coarse tea Ogin’s mother drew for him before heading home.

Baskets containing toys and such were eventually brought over, and Seiichi too came to stay there most of the time.

“Seiichi just adores Granny’s lap.”

When Ogin returned to Sasamura’s room at night after going out to talk，she reported what their child had said and done. “Granny dislikes that too，but there’s nothing to be done about it.” Sasamura dismissed her remark. As Ogin lay moaning in pain in the bluish room beneath the loquat leaves，Seiichi went to her side and clutched his mother’s hand. That day，Ogin had gradually begun going into labor since morning. By noon，the pains arriving at intervals grew steadily closer together.

“Alright, I’m going into labor now.” After preparing the side dishes for lunch, Ogin slipped on her zori sandals and headed toward the delivery room, though Sasamura barely registered her departure. For days now, they had been turning their backs to each other in sullen silence. “Please come stay with me.” Ogin made this request to Sasamura as she stood in the doorway. “They’re all there already—isn’t that enough?” Sasamura muttered his refusal, yet found himself compelled to follow regardless.

Outside, the blazing midsummer sun beat down, but inside the house—shaded by many trees—a cool breeze drifted through. “Does it hurt?”

The child frowned at his mother’s face, drawing closer each time she strained, and lent her his small hand as adults do. And he wiped the beads of sweat oozing from her nose and forehead with a handkerchief. “Oh, what a clever little dear! I too had times when I made my own mother suffer like this, you know.”

The midwife let out a cry-like voice.

Fifty-Three

A considerable amount of time passed before the newborn girl’s skin gradually peeled away to white. The crumpled mess of her facial features refused to settle into proper form. Sasamura didn’t so much as glance over，but in Ogin’s breastfeeding there now emerged a more motherly tenderness than had been present before.

The midwife came daily and made her use the hot water. Sasamura went to see how the newborn was changing, but the child’s face remained as scrunched as ever. “What’s this…?” At the seventh-night celebration, Sasamura looked at the baby—its eyes squinting as if dazzled after being adorned with white powder and rouge by the midwife—and burst into laughter.

Ogin sat up on her bedding and smiled at the squirming newborn.

“It’s fine. A baby like this might even turn out better in the end.”

Ogin said with confidence.

Gathering wrinkles like an old man’s around its eyes, the baby scratched its tear-streaked face. The child’s lanky, long-torsoed frame and narrow forehead bore a striking resemblance to his father’s, and beyond that, the fact that this child had inherited the facial features of his mother’s paternal line was, for Sasamura, rather a kind of relief. Seiichi, who had been walking along the veranda pulling a toy train, approached them and, together with the baby, frowned as if in pain. “Give him some milk…,” he urged his mother.

“Thank you very much.”

When Ogin, who had partially regained her strength, entered from the back with her hair in curls, Sasamura's expression remained harsh. At that time, Sasamura went out to the kitchen, lit the charcoal brazier, and was cooking the lunch dishes while his nephew worked nearby. After the nephew—who attended school from midday onward—had left, Sasamura spent each day alone in the quiet house, alternating between lying down and getting up. Though her mother would occasionally come to bring meals or check on the kitchen, Sasamura never showed a welcoming expression whenever she did. Amidst this cycle of caring and being cared for, Ogin’s state of mind—seemingly trying to assert her authority over her parents and brother—struck him as both pitiful and bitter. That others overestimated his abilities pained Sasamura. He had to consider everything: her aging mother from the countryside with few years left, his own work, their child.

“You’ve got to realize I can’t handle people with money right now—if you don’t, we’re in trouble.” Sasamura would sometimes tell Ogin this in front of everyone.

“Yes, I know it’s not only that.”

Ogin also said this, but Sasamura still couldn't quell his unease. He felt it was impossible to fully fend off this invisible force of erosion. There was no choice but to take one child and part ways. Then I'd have to call Mother and Sister here and immerse my head in the quiet, unburdened air of family life—

Sasamura found his thoughts drifting in that direction from time to time. He also felt he could no longer endure his previous reckless lifestyle driven by rampant material desires. He came to think that his frail constitution and passive disposition had naturally led him to this point.

For about ten days as an all-male household, the interior of the house had grown vaguely unkempt. When Ogin came upstairs and looked around her home as if seeing it anew, there was a tinge of unease in her eyes.

“I didn’t intend to have you come back.” Sasamura said in a tone repelling an intruder. “But I’m concerned about my own home too…” The uncle and nephew seemed to be scheming something—the scene meeting Ogin’s gaze as she returned after days away. Ogin’s suspicions, no less than Sasamura’s, always had to probe the darkest recesses before they would abate.

Fifty-Four

The childbirth had been easier than before, yet Ogin’s health showed no signs of recovery until winter came. The complexion that had once glowed with dewy freshness grew dull again alongside her body, worn down by the lingering summer heat. Her limbs gradually withered away until a deep hollow formed above the sharp ridges of her collarbones. An acquaintance—a doctor—put his stethoscope back into his bag, his eyes betraying profound unease as he twisted his beard in silence. "Is it her lungs?" Only after Ogin had left for the tea room did Sasamura ask.

Sasamura had rarely ever anticipated illness in his wife’s relatively sturdy-boned physique before. At times, he felt as though he were confronting an unconquerable mass of flesh, much like her strong-willed temperament—but even that was beginning to crumble. He felt as though he had been shedding the bad blood flowing through his body for a long time, and it was terrifying. “I want to have Mr. Hamada or Mr. Hashizume examine me once.”

Ogin would sometimes say this and wonder at her own body not recovering as she hoped, but still it tended to drag on. "Why not just have anyone give you a preliminary examination?" There were times when Sasamura found Ogin’s drawn-out manner frustrating, but he also felt compelled to see just how far her decline would progress. In the end, who would claim victory... There were times he thirsted for such brutal thoughts. That young doctor did not readily disclose the symptoms.

“Well, it would be best to go to University or Juntendo and have them examine you. I also think there might be a slight abnormality in your lungs.” “Something feels a bit off, you know.”

After the doctor left, Sasamura spoke to Ogin. “What exactly does he mean?” Ogin said in a tone that showed she didn’t trust the young doctor from the outset. Until it became clear that the illness Ogin had gone to the hospital with the doctor to have examined the next day was a mild kidney disease common after childbirth, Ogin couldn’t focus on anything. “Is that so? “So I’ve ended up with that kind of illness after all, have I?”

Ogin’s figure, holding the baby as usual and working in the kitchen, appeared pitiful even to Sasamura’s eyes.

“Here, let me take a look,” Sasamura said with apparent concern, making her expose her chest. Her ribbed chest looked painfully frail at a glance. “What a wretched body I have. Nothing but these bulky bones…”

Ogin forlornly touched her own neck and chest. And while adjusting her collar,

“I wouldn’t mind dying… If only there were no child…” “It’s nothing serious. I’ll definitely heal you.” Sasamura laughed with an air of reassurance. “So it turns out you’re the healthy one after all, aren’t you?” “But women have childbirth to deal with…” Ogin had continued taking milk and medicine for about a month, but once her kidneys improved, she quickly grew tired of it. By the time the cool air set in, the once-skinny child had grown plump with flesh and her milk had become abundant, but from time to time, Ogin still visited her regular doctor.

“Dr. Takahashi said he’d like you to come see him for a moment.” One day, upon returning from the doctor, Ogin said to Sasamura. “What is it? He says there’s something he wants to meet you about and discuss properly.”

55

The doctor, who was as gentle as a woman, was skilled at examining children. Because he explained her condition in an easy-to-understand manner and went into detail about such matters, Ogin naturally began to feel at ease. She knew all about how his relationship with the woman who seemed to be a former geisha had soured, and how a bride from the countryside had recently arrived as her replacement.

"That student has such an inexplicably pleasant air about him," Ogin had even grown fond of the pharmacy itself. Having to be summoned by the doctor over Ogin's affairs left Sasamura feeling distinctly uneasy.

“What nonsense—going out of his way to summon me or whatever he’s up to…”

When Sasamura returned home, he vented his anger to Ogin. The doctor’s attitude—which seemed poised to interrogate Sasamura—was enough to conjure images of Ogin’s coquettish demeanor toward that young physician. “This time, you really must have her examined by a proper doctor.”

The doctor’s tone couldn’t be said to lack a reproachful air toward the husband for his coldness toward his wife. “Did Dr. Takahashi say something rude to you?” Ogin looked perplexed. “But if I go to the hospital alone, I’d be completely lost.” “If we do go, Dr. Takahashi knows the gynecology department—he could come along and explain things properly to you.” “I was just telling you about it beforehand… that’s all.”

Ogin, who had once been taken to the hospital by a doctor she knew, had grown increasingly reluctant to go out due to her aversion to fumbling this way and that in the vast, unfamiliar hospital—something Sasamura couldn’t entirely dismiss. Yet her logical explanations only grated on his nerves all the more.

They spent days on end turning their displeased faces away from each other. Sasamura occasionally laughed at his wife's indolence in still not making any move to go to the hospital, but Ogin didn't seem particularly bothered. It was a good while later when she finally went one day to the university's gynecology department to be examined, accompanied by the same acquaintance doctor who had accompanied her before.

“At the moment, they say there’s no specific issues anywhere…” When she returned, Ogin approached Sasamura still wearing her formal clothes and began speaking. “They said my uterus became slightly bent during childbirth, but that can be corrected during the next delivery.” “For now, they say I could try a week-long course of washing if I want.” “Huh,” Sasamura found the diagnosis disappointingly mundane.

Ogin’s pallid complexion, lacking both luster and vitality, had gradually regained some color through winter’s passing, but the suppleness of her flesh and the bloom in her cheeks—eroded with each childbirth—showed no sign of returning.

56 From around that time, Ogin began occasionally appearing before Sasamura’s old friends to pour drinks. Her somewhat aged face—with thinning hairline at the temples where sparse strands revealed patches of scalp—had grown calmer than before, yet now showed a certain coquettishness. Moreover, her manner toward guests who sat informally lacked the brusqueness Sasamura had anticipated. When Sasamura abruptly left for the seaside for about a week, clutching a small sum of money to escape their conflict-ridden household’s unpleasantness, there came visitors during his absence—people who brought items like a child’s hat tucked under their arms. One man sat down on the raised threshold and began talking at length.

“Please do come visit. If Mr. Sasamura says anything, I’ll smooth it over…” Ogin later told Sasamura how the man had casually offered such pleasantries as he left. “I’m sure his residence must be quite splendid.” “I’d like to see what other homes are like—for my own education.” Ogin listened to Sasamura’s explanation and began fretting over the emptiness of their own home’s rooms. As Sasamura headed out to the seaside, his mind festered with irritation. The clammy autumn rain lingered endlessly, making the cliffside tea room and the sticky tatami of the four-mat entryway feel unbearably oppressive. After the mother—who had ventured out through the back gate in such rain with a baby strapped to her back to fetch water from the communal well below the cliff—tripped on the slope and loosened two front teeth, complaints about how unlivable this house was began pouring anew from both mother and child.

Every time they ate, Ogin would gaze pityingly at her mother’s face, which remained preoccupied with her teeth. To Sasamura, it even seemed she might be trying to make him think she had sacrificed something grand.

“That’s why it’s too much for an old person. We could have Shin-chan fetch it, but that’s not really an option either…” Ogin said to Sasamura in a barbed tone. After closing their house, her father—who was then living at a noble family’s residence in Shibuya—would occasionally visit still dressed in formal *haori* and *hakama*, producing unusual sweets from his sleeves to give Seiichi. “The retired gentleman gave me this…” he would say, laying before his daughter a beautiful drawstring pouch still wrapped in paper.

“How are you holding up?” Sasamura occasionally asked in a sociable tone. That this resourceful old man was gradually becoming involved in domestic matters was something even Sasamura had to acknowledge, but from his occasional remarks, one could imagine he was finally growing weary of the stifling household customs there.

“After all, I’ve gotten old…” The father, who had spent the past five or six years in idle languor in the countryside, now seemed to be weighing whether there might be some less taxing work for him elsewhere. Sasamura occasionally confided these domestic matters only to Miyama, with whom his former friendship had by then been rekindled, but he still often found himself mired alone in his brooding. With his thoughts knotted like this, his aching head teetered on the verge of madness.

57 Such circumstances—each time Ogin showed her slightly restless way of speaking or her carefree manner, as if delighting in teasing some easily flustered creature—made Sasamura regard his wife as an audacious woman. Crushed by this oppressive mood, he left his room only to eat, otherwise remaining shut away in his cramped, cage-like study. Sasamura’s timid, cold eyes now sought out only the flaws in every woman he had ever encountered.

There had been no shortage of mornings at the breakfast table where the muscles of their clashing, displeased faces would suddenly slacken as if tickled, leaving them both on the verge of bursting into laughter—but lately, Sasamura’s disgust was potent enough to overpower even such affectionate antics from his wife.

In Sasamura’s eyes appeared a woman uglier than ever before. He could no longer endure the torment of gazing at her, yet even Ogin’s mind now sensed the crisis encroaching upon their marriage. And at times, they found themselves unable to avoid contemplating their separate futures. When eating meals in the tearoom—served by her mother at the tray that a timorous Ogin had furtively prepared from the shadows—became unbearable, Sasamura ordered the food brought to his study. There he took a solitary supper of bleak simplicity.

In the chill of his bedding at night, when eyes that had finally begun to droop suddenly snapped open, his painfully exhausted head grew agitated. Sasamura trimmed the lamp wick and periodically sat upright on the futon. He would spread open a book and desperately try to soothe his throbbing head, but his weak eyes welled with tears that couldn't endure the stabbing light. His breathing grew labored.

Sasamura recalled those times when he would often escape late at night from his lonely boarding house room, wandering through towns sunk in deep slumber, seeking out the lamplit window of Miyama’s study—a space revived only in the quiet nights. And in the pale light of dawnbreak, he thought of the two of them—weary from talking—walking along the edges of woods and ponds.

Wiping away the greasy sweat clinging to his fingertips from his forehead, Sasamura had no choice but to either leave his room and go searching for alcohol or food in the kitchen or wait for Ogin to push open the door she had cautiously locked and slip quietly outside.

The next morning, Sasamura woke up early. The lingering irritation of last night’s sake prickled his tongue, his facial skin still thick and swollen with heat, while the morning sun streaming through the veranda stung his eyes.

Ogin’s pale face, which had come into Sasamura’s view as he wandered the garden, also showed signs of fatigue. Ogin sat vacantly on the veranda of the tearoom, holding the child.

That day, after finishing breakfast, Ogin went out carrying the child on her back—a rare occurrence. “It’s so stifling here—let’s go somewhere to play, okay?”

There was an uncharacteristic calmness and meekness in Ogin’s demeanor as she said this and left. Around three in the afternoon, when Ogin returned home with a friend she often visited, Sasamura was lying in his room with the sliding doors tightly shut.

58

“…Since I might be driven out any day now, I’ve even begun to think perhaps I should just leave there after all.”

Ogin visited that friend of hers who had a house in Shiba and began to talk about such things. This friend, who had once been a merchant, was a woman Ogin had been on friendly terms with as neighbors back when she lived in Kanesuke-cho; but lately, her husband had taken up quite an extravagant lifestyle. Every time she came, the woman was dressed in attire that kept up with the latest trends. “Mrs. Suda must be doing quite well lately.”

Sasamura had often heard such things from Ogin before, but even as she spoke them, Ogin herself was not entirely lacking in pride. "I might get kicked out any day now." Mrs.Suda had laughed along and made similar comments, yet such anxieties still surfaced from time to time.

Ogin told her friend about her recent hardships. Mrs.Suda, too, could not simply describe Sasamura as gentle.

“But men are all like that.” Mrs. Suda comforted Ogin, who from her perspective still did not seem to be seriously considering the idea of a home. “And you have a child to think of. No matter how hard things get, it’s a mistake to even consider leaving.” Mrs. Suda also said as much, admonishing her.

The two of them strolled around places like Hibiya Park before making their way to Ogin’s house. When Mrs.Suda—this woman with an air of loneliness about her—came over, Sasamura would usually join in their games of plucking flowers and such, but that day he kept himself hidden. And the voices of the two women chatting and laughing in the tearoom only sharpened the irritation in Sasamura’s sleep-fogged head.

After some time had passed, Sasamura wandered the town with Miyama, who had just come to visit, without any particular destination. A hazy, pale sun hung over the town, the air utterly still. The whistles from Raoya sounded languid, and every face appeared uniformly sallow. “Where should we go?” “Let’s go to Misakicho and catch a play or something.” While muttering such things, they came out into the vacant lot beside Tomisaka. Dragonflies flitted through the sky as insect sounds rose from the thicket at their feet. They climbed a small hill and gazed at smoke spreading from the artillery arsenal’s chimneys into the quiet sky.

In Sasamura’s aching head, memories of times when the two of them had walked all around like this together, unconstrained, flashed intermittently. Sasamura would often take the two of them into lively places like theaters and eateries, trying to forget his loneliness. The current anguish was no different from the loneliness of those days. Squatting down and puffing on tobacco, Sasamura began to talk about the contradictions between his own personality and his wife’s. Miyama brushed it off lightly.

“You’ll just have to accept that some sacrifices are unavoidable… There’s no other way but to cultivate your wife through your own mindset.” “There are plenty of examples in society of husbands gradually molding their wives to their ways, you know.” That Sasamura couldn’t perform such deft imitations was something even Miyama understood. “Even back then, Mr.F and others were saying things like that, you know.” Miyama continued. “That you’d never be able to control that woman…”

F― was a literary-minded young man who used to move between the two of them at that time. Sasamura felt he could imagine some of the bystanders’ rumors from that time through this.

After standing through a single act of a play and returning home, Sasamura’s mind was in an even more agitated state than before.

“Hey.”

When Sasamura entered the dimly lit room, he suddenly called out toward the back. From the back room, the child peeked out timidly, but upon sensing his father’s grim expression, he immediately flushed and scurried away.

Sasamura summoned Ogin and repeated the same kind of parting talk.

Fifty-nine At such times, Ogin couldn't tell whether approaching him would be wise or not. Throughout the half-day he'd been out, she grew uneasy wondering where he had gone and what he might have discussed with Miyama. She detested how Sasamura would summon her in that murderous tone the moment he returned home, as if Miyama had dredged up fresh ammunition to torment her with. Ogin had long understood how she was perceived in Miyama's heart - Miyama who had fallen out with Sasamura in that peculiar way years ago. Nor could she stop herself from constantly dwelling on how even her accidental bond with Sasamura had originally been forged through Miyama's uncle-in-law.

When Miyama and Sasamura resumed their interactions that summer for the first time in two years, Ogin’s displeased reaction—as if touching an old wound—planted fresh seeds of suspicion in Sasamura about the circumstances of that period. "But Miyama and I have had a ten-year relationship, you know."

At that moment, Sasamura told Ogin how he felt. "I dislike that people might think I broke off with Miyama back then just over some woman, and seeing Miyama's house still in the same state... I can't help feeling sorry." Though Sasamura—worn down by hardships since Ogin and the child entered his life—didn't voice it aloud, he felt he'd come to truly understand his friend.

At that time, after moving here and there, Miyama had come to live in a rented house deep within the grounds of someone’s villa. Sasamura would sometimes sit by the window of that house within the grove, eating persimmons Miyama peeled and offered while indulging in reminiscences of the past. In the garden, sasanquas bloomed, and in the clear autumn sky, the cry of a shrike could be heard. Miyama continued living an almost otherworldly existence there, yet his heart remained constantly attuned to the world.

Sasamura occasionally took the child out with him. Urged on by Miyama's sisters, the child—dressed in a sleeveless chirimen garment—hopped about the spacious garden with apparent delight. Miyama too seemed deeply interested in how the child played. “Hey—bring him over here... It’s dangerous,” he called from inside the house to his sisters. That this child resembled Sasamura struck Miyama as something miraculous... When Sasamura first visited and saw Miyama’s expression upon noticing Seiichi at the entranceway, he felt this implication lay just beneath discernment if one cared to look.

“Miyama must have thought Seiichi was Isogai’s child.” Sasamura tried explaining this to Ogin again then too, but she didn’t seem to grasp its proper meaning. It was only after considerable time had passed that Ogin came outside Sasamura’s room with a pale face and sat down despondently, nervously smoothing her collar. “……Since it’s pitiable for you too, if only arrangements could be made, it’s not that I must absolutely insist on being kept by you.” “But even so… it’s not as if we can leave right this moment.”

Ogin would occasionally respond in a tone completely unlike her usual mocking demeanor, but both of them understood all too well that in this situation, there was simply no way to resolve things. “Anyway, I intend to set you free. It should have been done long before now.”

“Therefore, you should have a proper discussion with Mr. Miyama.”

Ogin also said that.

Sixty

It was unclear how far Sasamura’s agitated nerves would descend into madness. Deep within his mind there existed another "self" that calmly observed his own blood raging beyond control, but this self could only watch in trembling fear. From his mouth venomous words spilled forth relentlessly, and even the woman’s slight cold remarks—trying not to show weakness—made his entire body tremble so violently that his flesh seemed to leap; he found this both terrifying and wretched in himself. It was almost strange that such violent blood flowed within him as well.

“I could never match you.” The woman who laughed with hollow mirth wore a face as pale as a wounded beast’s as she trembled before Sasamura. Her hair, struck by the bony man’s hand, had collapsed at its roots. Tears streamed from eyes that seemed on the verge of festering. Still, she did not attempt to flee.

“It’s truly strange weather. Even if I don’t say it, everyone’s already saying so.”

The woman winced as she shook her unsteady hair, holding it down with her hand.

There were times before when Sasamura would suddenly raise his hand to the woman’s head. There had been instances when he would gently pull out the comb from the sleeping woman’s hair and snap it in two. The woman found having her belongings destroyed more regrettable than being struck. When she saw Sasamura’s expression growing fiercer, she kept watch over the dresser and mirror stand, using her body to block them at all times.

Sasamura, with his weak heart pounding, finally managed to sit down below, supported by the mother’s hand. Sasamura, whose geta and hat had been hidden, could not even rush outside. The two had no choice but to wait through the force of time for Sasamura’s nerves to wither away.

After two or three days of wandering outside, the other Ogin he had been confronted with until now began to reappear before his eyes.

“I truly thought this time I’d be driven out for sure.”

Ogin had grown as docile as a lamb. When she saw Sasamura’s expression, she began to show an overly familiar demeanor, as if about to leap into his bosom. “But you’re pretty terrible too.” Sasamura smirked.

“Because you kept making unreasonable demands, I had to say something rotten back.”

Ogin said this and, late at night while preparing half-boiled eggs and such, leaned her cheek on the edge of the brazier and smirked wryly.

“What you say—it’s not that I don’t understand it.” “But at that moment, for some reason my head just flared up, and I couldn’t help it.” “It must be because I’m uneducated, I suppose.”

The two brightened the lamp and lost themselves in talk for hours. The time when Ogin first came to Sasamura's place rose to both their minds. When mention was made of how they'd agonized daily over aborting Seiichi or giving him away, tears pooled in Ogin's eyes as she gazed at the guileless face of the child sleeping beside her.

“Is it because we’re seeing things that way? This child somehow seems so pitiful.”

Sasamura also gazed desolately at that face. The bond connecting the four of them as parent and child felt both mystifying and sorrowful.

“This child may die young.” “I somehow feel that way.” “Maybe so.”

Sasamura muttered. "If you hadn't come bursting into my place that time, none of this would've happened."

“……What a dreadful thing this is.”

“But it’s not too late even now. It’s unbearably painful for us to keep living like this.”

The two of them could no longer keep sitting still facing each other.

61

Sasamura’s figure appeared once more beside the old long brazier. After Sasamura finished breakfast, Ogin set out the newspaper and tobacco for him, then took the broom to the study where dust had long accumulated. She tidied up the messily scattered things and sorted through letters. The morning sun streamed through the window as if seeping into the faded ochre tatami mats, and the winter air was so clear that even the dust settling on their temples was visible.

Sasamura couldn’t even calmly look at the newspaper. The work he had cast aside began to weigh on him, and whenever he relaxed, thoughts of a life where he’d soon be sought out for advice tangled in his mind. Before starting work, he felt the urge to spend a day carefree playing somewhere.

“Maybe I should go somewhere today.”

Sasamura, wearing a hand towel with a distinctive pattern tied in a sisterly style around his head, muttered while watching Ogin’s back as she tidied the tokonoma from the entrance. Ogin had kept dozens of hand towels in her chest of drawers—ones she had received from various places during her deceased uncle’s days of indulging in hobbies. “Go on, then.”

Ogin said while bustling about dusting the books with a duster. “I want to go too... but where are you going? “I want to eat something delicious.” “Tempura or something.” “Well—shall we take just the little one with us?”

Ogin looked up with a smile. “I really haven’t been out in a while. With two children around, I can’t easily get out.” “If you like, we could go out.”

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

“If we eat at Nakashō with the three of us, how much do you think it would cost?” she had been thinking—“I haven’t eaten out in a while either…”—but soon a pang of guilt struck her. “What a waste—but then again, the little one’s Shichi-Go-San celebration is coming up soon. The children’s rite... We must do what’s proper for them—it’d be sinful otherwise.” Ogin said with a troubled expression. That she had been making such calculations was something Sasamura had long known.

“If we don’t make it in time, it’ll be a problem—so I should get the money ready today and just place the order. Would that be all right?” Sasamura felt as if all the conflicts from their estranged period were suddenly bearing down on him at once, but he couldn’t bring himself to clearly put an end to it. Ogin went shopping with Sasamura to downtown Shitamachi and found a casual eatery along the way where they ate dinner. “It’s nice to go out once in a while, isn’t it,” Ogin said with a relieved look, taking a sip from her sake cup.

“I wonder how many years it’s been since I last walked around 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 her own self that had long been shaped by unfamiliar tides. Without ever dressing up properly as a woman should, she had become the mother of two children through cycles of laughter and tears. Four years had passed like a dream. That she found herself drinking here with Sasamura now felt strangely unreal.

“Compared to when we came here before, this house has become quite dirty, hasn’t it?” Ogin’s eyes darted about restlessly. “With Isogai, was it?” When Sasamura laughed at her, Ogin too— “No,” she said with a laugh.

After leaving that place, the two wandered around the Suda-cho area. Ogin, whose body had not been right since childbirth, would quickly feel nauseous whenever she rode the train. The train emerged from the darkness and passed in and out of bright areas. Whenever blue sparks scattered in the sky, Ogin felt so dizzy that her head spun. “Why have I become so spineless?”

Ogin, laughing amusedly, finally crossed the rails while clutching Sasamura’s hand.

62

“You, you…,” Ogin called out, chasing after Sasamura as he returned from outside and headed into his study. Sasamura, who had developed a habit of going out, found himself each day with a restless state of mind, uncertain where he could settle it. It was around the time when the tips of the cherry branches at the edge of the cliff in the back garden—visible from the long brazier—began to whiten each morning. Upon leaving his restless study, Sasamura’s capricious feet would wander off in various directions without any particular destination. Even so, the area around his desk still weighed on his mind, and more often than not, no sooner would he step out than he would return shortly.

“We might have to vacate this house.”

Ogin had barely sat down when she began explaining how the landlord’s clerk had come that day with a retiree who appeared to be the prospective buyer of the house.

“Hmm, is that so?” said Sasamura as he smoked his tobacco. Though they still lacked anything resembling proper household goods, the sheer tedium of moving their increasingly complicated lives to another house weighed on his mind. To move, they had to prepare a lump sum of money. “But even if we do have to move out, it’s not like it has to be today or tomorrow.” Ogin said this to Sasamura in a tone meant to reassure him.

Gathering their shabby belongings, they moved to a rather spacious house they had found in Koishikawa—this happened not long after that. Before that, Ogin had also gone once with Sasamura to look at the house. And they met the old man keeping watch over the vacant shop and settled various matters. “You’re still young,” he said. “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 was the separation between the living area and the study and guest rooms. The living area even included a small room designed like a tea ceremony space. Plum and palm trees with spreading branches stood in the garden. Small lanterns had also been placed.

Having settled there, Sasamura—lying in the spacious tatami room—felt as if he were on a journey. While Sasamura buried the bush clover roots he had brought from their previous house into the soil, Ogin went out to look at items such as a long brazier. The old one had passed into the hands of a scrap dealer when they moved.

“No matter what, I can’t bring myself to take something like this out—it’s too embarrassing.” Ogin gazed at the old brazier with its fallen lid and voiced her dissatisfaction to Sasamura, who remained unconcerned. Even so, she didn’t feel entirely comfortable letting it go. At the bottom of that drawer—which no one had any motivation to wipe—still lay old fortunes that had been used time and again to divine the uncertain fate of the mother and child. No sooner would Sasamura sit down in the tatami room than he’d rise again, restlessly making his way to the kitchen area. Then he’d head to the slightly elevated four-and-a-half-mat room, stretch out beneath the round window, or step down into the garden cluttered with stepping stones to look around. Depending on the day, smoke from the Artillery Arsenal would swell into the garden, and coal cinders blown by the cold wind would dance across the wooden veranda. On such days, the sky would surely be overcast, and the palm and bamboo leaves would rustle restlessly. Sasamura’s head was also heavy.

“This is hopeless.”

Ogin would occasionally slide open the shoji screens, peer outside, and mutter to herself.

“And the location of the toilet in this house—I just don’t like it.” The story that a murderer’s mistress had once lived there soon reached Ogin through neighborhood gossip. “That’s right—I was hiding it from you, but…”

Sasamura laughed upon hearing that.

63 The criminal—who had strangled up to two people and buried their corpses under the floorboards—soon vacated the house to conceal the traces of his crime. At that time, it was this house they moved into. A certain translator who had been there before Sasamura moved in also had police and judges enter the house at that time, with even the soil under the floorboards being dug up. That fact suddenly made Ogin find this house eerie. The memory of her former husband—who had reportedly slashed his ill-fated stepmother—now linked to this history, clung persistently to Ogin’s mind like a haunting specter. The ferocious countenance of the criminal that had appeared in the newspaper also did not leave her sight.

Ogin, her face pale, would often sit up on the futon late at night. She would trim the lamp’s wick and long for dawn to come.

“Hey—let’s move out quickly. It feels like my life’s getting shorter.”

When morning came, Ogin implored Sasamura with a grim face. Sasamura could not refuse it either. Sasamura, too, found himself recalling the house he had once stopped by in passing—the one Ogin had been connected to before. The house was not as clean as Sasamura had imagined based on what he had heard from Ogin. The elderly master there who kept a young mistress in Tokyo and wielded influence over the neighborhood; his elderly wife who claimed to have once been a geisha in Tokyo; Ogin, deceived by the matchmaker’s words, and the various conflicts during her four months there; the commotion of the wedding night when Ogin was swarmed by a crowd of the town’s influential figures who had come out with lanterns to meet her at the station; the dramatic episode where Ogin wept upon seeing Isogai, who had come shuffling to see her there one day—such things strangely piqued Sasamura’s curiosity. During her time in that house of entertainment trade, Ogin had constantly made Sasamura’s eyes behold visions—some repulsive, some beautiful—of various kinds.

After disembarking from the train and strolling through the outskirts of that area, Sasamura’s feet naturally headed toward the vicinity of that house. Peering at houses here and there—this one or that one—he moved along.

Sasamura, trying to catch even a whiff of young Ogin’s lingering scent from her past, walked with sharpened eyes, searching from place to place for the houses where she had once lived. Before Sasamura stood numerous rest houses hung with flags in pale green, russet, navy, and white from various pilgrim groups, and restaurants whose gates revealed well-swept gardens built into hillsides.

When he left such streets behind, a rather tidy thoroughfare—the kind found on Tokyo’s outskirts—stretched endlessly onward. Packhorses and carts passed through the town where white dust rose. He also occasionally spotted rickshaws. There were barber shops that sparkled inexplicably, hinting at the town’s degree of modernity, and dark fabric stores. Bathed in the thin winter sunlight, white storehouses came into view, and school buildings with red-lacquered clapboards appeared.

Sasamura’s weary legs, though he kept thinking of turning back, somehow carried him all the way to the outskirts. From there, rice fields visible here and there among the mixed groves and forest shadows still trembling from the cold spread out grayly.

On that desolate avenue, he occasionally encountered Tokyoites in Inverness capes and women wearing pale coats with white tabi socks.

Sasamura followed that road as far as it would take him.

64 Along the roadside where white sand occasionally swirled up, beggars began to appear, prostrating themselves at the sight of passersby, and scattered worshippers started approaching from other paths. This gradually guided Sasamura to the entrance of a quiet town. This town too had teahouses and restaurants similar to those in the previous towns he had passed through, but the area felt cramped and lifeless. The temple there, which drew sizable crowds of worshippers even on ordinary days, seemed precisely the sort of place suited for elderly folk and women from Tokyo’s working-class districts to visit during casual strolls. Women in their forties and fifties—wearing weather-beaten geta and clutching cloth bags—streamed through the temple gate in an unbroken line. Among them stood out men who resembled commodity speculators and women dressed with calculated elegance.

Feeling as though he had wandered into an unfamiliar place by mistake, by the time Sasamura slipped out of the temple grounds, the wind had grown colder and his stomach was empty.

After a while, Sasamura settled his weary body into one of the back rooms of a certain restaurant. Sasamura gazed at the Masamune and Cider advertisements on the walls of the room—apparently a recent addition—along with the alcove’s hanging scroll and equinox cherry blossoms arranged in a vase. Before long, what he had ordered was brought in by the maid. In Sasamura’s body, frozen from the cold, the small amount of alcohol he had drunk quickly took effect. And he poked at the sashimi and the contents of the bowl, but none of it would go down his throat. Sasamura finished his meal with the unpalatable rolled omelet, soon left the place, and found himself back on the cold path through the rice fields. And with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling, he returned to the bustling town he had left behind. In the town, the sound of the tofu vendor’s horn could already be heard.

Sasamura found it anticlimactic to simply leave the place like that. And if he found a house that matched even slightly the stories he had heard from Ogin, he resolved to head straight in. After wandering about for some time, the house Sasamura finally entered was no different from the ordinary restaurants in the area. Even so, the building’s relatively calm atmosphere and the garden—with its abundance of trees and stones exuding solitude—made it somewhat more comfortable than the previous house he had entered. The Tokyo-style maid’s demeanor wasn’t all that slovenly either.

“What can you make here?” Sasamura asked the neatly dressed twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old maid as he picked up the board placed on the dining table. The maid—who seemed to have left domestic life behind—was a woman bearing the marks of someone accustomed to hardship. “Well, given it’s a place like this, we can’t prepare anything delicious… but what would you like?” she said, assessing his demeanor while making a show of handling things herself.

“No matter what one suggests, there’s nothing to use here, you see.” “Wouldn’t chicken be better instead?” “It’s cold...”

Sasamura did not want to eat anything. He merely wanted to probe this woman for information about the house.

“Come on, do that.” The woman—unassuming from head to toe with her thin, forlorn face—kept up a stream of trivial chatter as she spread fat in the pot and deftly rinsed cups in the washbasin. “What does the young master here intend to do? Is he still in jail?” Sasamura asked in a light tone while drinking beer he had no business drinking.

“Huh? Still…”

The woman showed no surprise. She seemed to consider him a regular patron of the house from that period.

"What happened to the bride who came around that time?" Sasamura brought up Ogin.

65

However, Sasamura could not elicit any detailed accounts from the woman. He had grown self-conscious of his own attitude, which seemed intent on dredging up every last dark corner of Ogin’s past, and the woman didn’t know much about earlier times either. Sasamura would sometimes try to probe deeper, only to divert it with other topics. “Well, that’s the sort of story it is, I suppose,” the woman responded in such a way.

“The one shutting the door over there is the second bride to come here.” The maid looked up at a young woman sliding the wooden door of the second-floor tatami room visible diagonally from there and informed Sasamura. Sasamura craned his neck over the dining table to look, but she didn’t seem particularly remarkable.

“That girl was brought here from family relatives, but I can’t say whether she’ll endure or not.” The maid added this too. Sasamura passed the woman a cup. While prodding at the meat, he made joking remarks like “You’ve had a husband once or twice before, haven’t you?” and “What sort of husband suits you?”

In the room, a lamp had been lit at some point. A group of customers who seemed to be locals came upstairs. “Well, I suppose a kind person is preferable, but then again, I can’t stand someone too nosy. If it’s someone I love, I wouldn’t mind being hit or scolded a little. Even if he acts that way in public, I like a man who’s kind when we’re alone.” “Oh, then I’m the same way.” Sasamura laughed.

The maid laughed hysterically.

Sasamura felt as if he wanted to remain immersed in this room forever. He also felt that perhaps this was the room where Ogin had first slept in this house on her wedding night. The fact that men who came and went all night had been eating, drinking, and making a racket outside the bedroom, and that the new husband Ogin had seen for the first time had been slumped in drunkenness that evening—these things strangely made Sasamura’s head swim. And the beer turned out to be unexpectedly drinkable.

“Do you know the son of this house?”

Sasamura inquired again. “No, I’ve only come here quite recently myself.” “They say he’s got a terrible drinking habit.” “They say his manliness isn’t much to speak of either.”

There was a time when Ogin had said of someone, "He's a flat-faced but handsome man, yet somehow I can't stand him." Those words now seemed to carry a flirtatious undertone. When he left there, Sasamura realized he was quite drunk. As he departed, what caught Sasamura's glazed eyes was a shabby old man who appeared to have once been Ogin's father-in-law. Leaning against the train window and gazing into the darkness, Sasamura felt regret stirring within him for having visited such a house. Facing Ogin, he wanted to laugh at himself for always having been so earnest.

The train ran with an awful din.

“I went to see your old haunt.” When Sasamura returned home and saw Ogin’s face, he felt like saying those very words to her, yet ultimately could only maintain the pretense that nothing had happened. The knowledge that this tension would inevitably erupt someday hung over him like a weight. At that moment, Ogin sat in the tearoom with her mother—who was occupied with needlework—casually nursing their child as she waited for her husband.

Sasamura immediately retreated toward the study.

66

For Sasamura, understanding his wife Ogin layer by layer—as if peeling her—was both a cruel fascination and a torment. The Ogin of that time—when she first came to Sasamura's house with her brother, whom Miyama had mistaken for her lover—still lingered in his mind with those keenly alert eyes; yet what left him desolate was how, with each passing year, he could no longer find satisfaction in only those aspects of Ogin that touched him directly. On one side was a woman who possessed none of what he had hoped for; on the other, a character that could never shed its pretense and concealments regardless of circumstance. Though he had grown weary of increasingly confronting this duality, there still came frequent moments when he found himself unable to merely observe her in silence.

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

It was around the time when the season shifted from the blossoming days when winds stirred up dust to the tranquil early summer that Ogin happened upon a house near their previous residence and, enlisting the help of many hands, moved their belongings into it. Among those who came to help was Ogin’s youngest brother, a middle school student who had come from the countryside for the first time the previous year. That younger brother, who had been entrusted to relatives since the family’s dispersal, was now to be sent to Tokyo to study.

In a corner of the garden enclosed by a still-verdant Ken’inji-style bamboo fence, amidst pines and junipers, variegated double camellias lay scattered across the earthy ground covered in blue-green moss. The building, with its fine-grained woodwork, was compact and well-built. Sasamura stepped out onto the smooth-edged hemlock veranda flooring and stood gazing at the garden with a contented air. He helped Ogin and her brother hang frames and arrange books, but grew concerned about the study’s proximity to the kitchen.

“With all that chatter from over there getting in my ears, I can’t study or get anything done,” Sasamura said as he sat before the desk. “For a working couple or something, this house would be perfect. It’s a problem because I’ve gotten it into my head to live here alone.”

“I suppose so… Well, this is…” Her brother tilted his head. “So you didn’t notice after all? But it was just too comfortable a house.”

Ogin too had begun to feel uneasy, yet the dwelling remained comfortable to inhabit. The magnolia and pomegranate leaves soon grew thick, their cool blue shadows now reaching the walls of rooms that had been too brightly lit. Since moving here, Ogin—as if suddenly revived—would sometimes forget everything and spend half a day wiping surfaces with an unburdened expression. Sasamura too passed his days going out to the garden and puttering about with plants. Before long arrived a summer that made heads grow sluggish. A new bathtub was brought into the washroom, and a young maid with comely features entered their employ.

“This isn’t right.”

From around that time, Sasamura would gaze at Seiichi’s pallid face and occasionally grow concerned. As the younger girl gradually grew more endearing, the older child ceased to be looked after by their mother. The difficult child occasionally gave the maids and elderly folks a hard time. “He’s become such a strange child. If you don’t fix this now, it’ll cause trouble when he’s older.” Ogin stared at Seiichi with an exasperated look as he began to cry in a fretful voice.

“You people don’t understand this child’s temperament.” Having said that, Sasamura grew impatient on the spot.

67 One morning, as Ogin paced the veranda with a fussing Seiichi on her back, Sasamura sat at his desk wearing a bitter expression, smoking nothing but tobacco. Sasamura had spent days distanced from domestic affairs. Anxious about their child's illness, his wife kept pacing before his eyes as if waiting for him to yield first—her figure and voice grated on Sasamura's nerves like a finger brushing against an inflamed hair follicle.

Last night, the father who had recently established a household with his mother and two children in Azabu came along with Ogin’s cousin who had arrived from the countryside. At that time, Seiichi, who had been taken along in the morning, also returned with them; exhausted from the unfamiliar train ride, he slept cradled in his uncle’s arms. Seiichi's stomach and intestines, which had already been worsening before, were severely harmed by the grapes that had been served to the guests alongside beer. Unable to wait for the sweltering night to end, the child who had been sleeping under the same mosquito net as his mother crawled out and called for her in a whimpering voice.

“You’re tired of this, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

By morning, Ogin too had finally come to realize that something was wrong with the child's body. "There's no one to help... He's getting weaker."

Ogin sighed as she walked in the cool shade of the garden and went up to the room to offer toys, but the child was not pleased. “You have a terrible fever, sweetheart. Let’s go see the doctor, okay?”

Ogin, while talking to the child, 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 fiery body like a hastily bundled package, lapsing into a day-long coma on the laps of those who had gathered. And continuously, black and blue stool was collected in the bedpan. Each time, the whimpering cries reached Sasamura’s ears. "He said that this time—this very time—it’s been a bit of a failure." "He said if you want to save him, there’s no choice but to hospitalize him." "He said that the care at home just can’t be sufficient."

When Ogin returned from the doctor, she spoke to Sasamura. "He said we can't do anything until we've brought the fever down a bit, whichever way we go." "Dr. Takahashi said he'll come by later to examine him again." "But... he also mentioned that when the time comes, the hospital will arrange everything for us."

As the afternoon came on and the sweltering heat intensified, the child grew weaker still. And while breathing heavily, he occasionally opened his eyes and pleaded for water. His eyes lacked the strength to recognize anyone's face. In Sasamura’s irritated mind, hospitalization loomed like a monumental task, but for Ogin, the immediate preparations required from their household—parched since summer—proved another ordeal.

By the time the doctor came to check on him, the fever had subsided considerably. The child kept calling in a high-pitched, feeble voice, "Ice... ice..."

"But we have to make at least a new muslin blanket for the child... It’s not like I can just act on a moment’s notice like you can." When hospitalization was finally decided, Ogin said this to Sasamura as he pressed her impatiently. Having long nursed her aunt, she knew the hospital’s demanding standards. “Everything’s just a mismatched jumble, and when you need something right away, I get all flustered.”

Sasamura could not remain there for long. And upon exiting the chaotic sickroom, he abruptly grabbed his hat and went outside.

68

By around nine o'clock that evening—before the child was carried into the hospital—Sasamura had gone home once and gone to negotiate with the hospital among other things. "They said it's acceptable if it's slightly past nine, so let's have him admitted tonight no matter what." At that time, Ogin and her mother were pulling out things like changes of clothes from the closet and assembling daily necessities for their surroundings.

In the tea room, the Shinto altar and Buddhist altar were illuminated by the crimson glow of the lamp her mother had lit, and there, various people had gathered. “Let’s just hope they don’t send us away.”

“It should probably be alright. It’s not like we’re that far past the point of no return yet,” Sasamura said as he stepped out ahead of her.

“Get better quickly and come home.” When told this by the old woman—still wrapped in his blanket atop the carriage— “Granny… you wait at home…” he said before departing.

The carriage drawn slowly came into view before Sasamura’s eyes—he had come out to the hospital entrance and stood waiting impatiently. “Do you understand, sweetheart? Look, there’s Daddy…,” Ogin called to the child from the carriage as she arrived. The town was already deep into the night, the wind damp with moisture. The examination room—distinct from the patient wards and main entrance—was situated deep within the gravel-paved compound, beyond the small gate of a large black main gate. Only Sasamura and Ogin entered inside.

While the room was being decided, the group stood in the dark hallway surrounding the child. The child suddenly complained of a bowel movement again. The people, unfamiliar with what to do, fumbled helplessly around the area.

The hospital room was a fairly spacious tatami-matted room facing the thoroughfare. Under the dim electric light, a white bed was laid out forlornly. “No! I don’t want to!” The child felt uneasy about being made to lie down on that bed. “Let’s go home.” “When you get better, okay? Be a good boy and lie down here now. The doctor will scold you, you know.”

“No… Let’s go home…” The child stubbornly insisted. And he cried out in a voice frayed with fretfulness. In the end, he flung his unsteady body off the bed and thrashed about the area. Sasamura sharply slapped his cheek, but the child only grew more frightened and thrashed about. The maid, while carrying a girl, paced restlessly nearby.

“It really does seem hopeless, doesn’t it?”

Ogin rolled out onto the tatami, gazed at the face of the child sleeping with exhausted thrashing and rapid breaths, and spoke despondently. “In this state, even what could be saved might not be saved, you know.” “If it’s come to this, we’d be better off nursing him at home.” “It’s just too pitiful.”

“Yeah.” Sasamura also let out a sigh. As they would later come to understand, what was meant to be the hospital’s warm, homelike atmosphere—undermined by the doctors’ and female clerks’ unadorned attitudes that night—instead struck them as quite the opposite. That too felt somehow tiresome to them. “Let’s just wait until the director examines him.”

That day, the director was away on business at the Chiba branch hospital. It took many days from then—days of making him defecate while lying down or enduring painful mercury enemas by determining their necessity—before the child grew accustomed to the hospital room. “The illness’s progression will climb higher still. If we can successfully pass this critical peak, there should be little to worry about afterward.” When the elderly director came for his first examination the day after admission, his manner was so practiced it verged on dignified.

Sixty-Nine In the corner of the hospital room by the brazier spread with a thin mat, days stretched on for over thirty where the two ate meals—using trays from the hospital kitchen, daily stacked lunchboxes brought from home, and occasional items Ogin procured from a nearby fishmonger—careful not to meet the small patient’s eyes. The patient’s appetite had recovered enough that seeing others eat would make him twitch his hollow cheeks like a caged monkey and contort into tearful frustration—this coincided with when permission finally began coming every day or two from the director: first for rice gruel with two or three grains being harmless, then Weha crackers, half-softened egg yolks, and mizuame syrup. Yet even before these allowances, he’d been frightfully obstinate about anything related to food or drink.

“Boy’s tired of this.” After the patient had passed what the director called the arduous critical phase and his fever had somewhat subsided, he would grow weary even of the playthings arranged around his bed or hung from strings. At times he sat on the bed as if thoroughly bored, biting at the skin of his parched lips, his face contorted in a listless mutter.

“Oh yes, that’s right, that’s right,” Ogin consoled from beside him.

“You’ve got to endure just a little longer. If you keep enduring,” she said, “you’ll soon walk again, eat your favorite Western food, and we’ll all go together somewhere like Asakusa.” Just when his stool showed slight improvement, worrying mucus would appear or the fever that had finally subsided would spike again, making progress nowhere near as smooth as those by his side had hoped. Whenever Sasamura returned from outside, he would promptly take up the temperature chart to examine it or insert the thermometer into the patient’s armpit, alternating between disappointment and resignation. Yet even on days he didn’t go out, he couldn’t leave everything to Ogin alone.

If the lukewarm water enema reverted back to a mercury enema again, the hearts of the couple that had begun to hold hope would suddenly cloud over once more. Sasamura administered enemas and occasionally asked difficult questions of the nurses who came to check temperatures and pulses. “You really should stop asking so many questions. They’ll get annoyed.”

Ogin later said to Sasamura. “You’ve already made it this far. It would be better if you didn’t get so restless.” When the director declared that night would bring the crisis’s peak, Sasamura stayed constantly at their comatose child’s bedside throughout the two or three days surrounding the late-night rounds for emergency cardiac medication, forgetting all else—yet at times he noticed Ogin’s weary, listless demeanor, her attention slipping away from the child who seemed beyond hope. Even ordinarily, Sasamura would grow irritable enough to suddenly raise his hand at Ogin’s head, but with their sick child between them, their hearts softened toward each other like travelers sharing a cramped boat. The tender struggle to preserve this small life—with nothing else binding them—was how they faced one another each day.

“Shall we go to a hot spring once the Boy recovers?”

At dawn, Sasamura started to speak upon finding his wife’s haggard figure slumped over beside their child. “You must be tired too.” “Not at all.” Ogin opened her weary eyes and, as if chastised, raised her face in a fluster and smiled. Outside the window, dawn began to pale faintly, and a soothing breeze filtered into the mosquito net. Sasamura felt he had grown quite distant from his daily life—that spiteful snarl of love and hatred so prone to madness.

Seventy

The hospital room that had been full at the time of admission had begun to show scattered vacancies by the time of discharge. Though it was only mid-September, after a single heavy rain, the weather had suddenly turned cool, and at night the white beds felt cold to the touch. Ogin had sent for bedding and other items from home, but realizing it was already that time made her feel strangely uneasy. The sky remained cloudy day after day, leaving the hospital interior damp and oppressive. In the old building that would sometimes grow as quiet as a forest, a distant door would slam shut one moment, then a child's cry or woman's laughter would seep from somewhere the next. Among the hospitalized patients were young downtown-style couples who dressed up and spent entire days out enjoying themselves while leaving their child with the maid and nurse, and women speaking in Osaka dialect who had come to Numazu for summer retreats only to bring along children who had fallen ill there. Young wives carrying out dead children dressed in white; people parading recovered children in fine clothes while departing triumphantly with lines of rickshaws—all these scenes were visible through Sasamura's hospital room window, and each time they appeared, the couple grew pessimistic about their own child's condition or fretted over the endless days.

There were also one or two people like Kami-san with whom Ogin exchanged toys and sweets.

“Their house is apparently behind the Asakusa Ward Office—they said we should definitely visit once we’re discharged. Seems they run a pretty large knitted goods factory.” “They’re not one for flattery, but there’s something about them that makes you like them somehow.” “Whenever they see my face, they start talking about all sorts of things, and they say the same about me there.” Ogin brought spider and octopus playthings—crafted from fresh wire with cleverly shortened legs—from that hospital room and connected them to the string stretched across the floor.

Seiichi, growing bored, didn’t let Ogin leave his side for a short while. Ogin, after listening for the child’s breathing to ensure he was asleep, finally went out to use the washbasin or visit the toilet.

“Let’s go up to the second floor for a bit, shall we?” “Then you might feel a bit refreshed.” “From up there, you can see all the trains you love so much, Boy.”

Ogin said this and hoisted Seiichi onto her back to carry him out. Then, together with the maid who was carrying their next child, a girl, she went out to the second-floor corridor and let them look out the window. After looking for a short while, the child soon grew bored.

Having grown weary of the hospital room, Sasamura would sometimes come home and lay his exhausted body down in the middle of the parlor that seemed emptied out. In the garden, pine and pomegranate leaves grew thick and lush while a bright drizzle pattered softly. Having been confined in the hospital room so long, he now found himself reflecting on how he had kept watch over the woman’s often careless tasks and driven his own body day and night. Sasamura seemed perpetually tormented by harrowing dreams.

Among the two or three letters that had arrived on the neatly tidied desk was one from his elderly mother, who—having been informed by his nephew of her unseen grandson’s illness—had sent a lengthy letter filled with nursing advice and such. At the back of the letter, purified rice from her devotions to Hiyoshi-sama and similar rites had been rolled into a single bag. The elderly mother had gone there every single day in the pale light of dawn to pray for her grandson’s recovery. As Sasamura read this, scenes from his own difficult childhood—when his mother had struggled so much with her sickly child—unfolded and surfaced at length in his mind’s eye. The life of the child who would walk the same path also came to mind with concern. And yet parents and children and grandchildren must inevitably part ways in death, missing each other’s passing—he could not help but contemplate the powerful force of blood ties binding them.

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 his 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 while his nose—sensing a robust hunger—sniffed at the savory steam. The persistent stubbornness he had shown during the worst of his illness, when he pushed away nurses administering enemas, was no longer seen as he entered convalescence.

The couple, having forgotten all else, watched from beside as the child ate the soft porridge that looked so delicious. "It’s truly wonderful—you being able to eat like this now."

Ogin wiped around his mouth and said with genuine delight. "If you give him that much, isn't it too much?" Having been chastened by a previous failure with kuzuyu midway through, Sasamura couldn't simply follow the doctor's instructions to the letter. "It's fine, this much. Being overly cautious all the time has its downsides too, you know." Ogin scooped up another soft portion with the lotus spoon and fed it to him.

“Here, try standing up.” Sasamura set down his chopsticks and spoke to the child sitting silently with an air of satisfaction. The child placed his hands on the windowsill and finally managed to stand up, but couldn’t hold himself up for long. “Still not there yet.” Sasamura laughed with a lonely air. By that window, their younger daughter was just beginning to pull herself upright. Throughout their prolonged hospital stay—never properly nursed at their mother’s breast—they had been carried solely on the backs of a woman who came to help from elsewhere and the maid. After Ogin’s milk diminished from nursing fatigue, they supplemented with cow’s milk, yet the child remained quite plump. The maid would carry him while strolling through corridors or playing in the garden near the director’s quarters. From the director’s wife she occasionally received sweets to bring back. The nearby Nikolai Hall too became part of the maid’s playground. Sasamura had heard its Sunday morning bell toll four times already. Ogin once carried Seiichi there herself to look.

“What a beautiful temple this is,” Ogin said. “When you go inside there, your mind naturally quiets down. But the little one doesn’t like it at all.” “I also hated temples when I was a child.” Sasamura still remembered how, at seven or eight years old, he had been led by his mother before dawn to mingle among the crowd gathered outside the great gate of Honganji’s branch temple, battling the cold under a starry sky that remained etched in his mind. While listening to his mother’s words—which meant something like “Those who hear the abbot’s sermon will have their sins erased; even those bound for hell can reach paradise”—the child sitting in the dark, vast hall dreaded the place as if it were a hell where sins would be laid bare. Nothing had ever imprinted itself so clearly in his mind as his state of mind at that time.

The small patient with a swollen belly breathed with unprecedented vigor and soon fell asleep. “Well, I’d like to go to the bathhouse while Boy is asleep.” Since arriving here, Ogin had occasionally had Otoh—who came by at opportune moments—style her hair alone, but she had never found time to bathe. After tidying up, Sasamura sat leaning pensively against the wall in the hospital room after Ogin left, keeping watch over the child’s sleeping face. As his weary mind began to clear, various tasks requiring attention after discharge surfaced in his thoughts. “We can’t leave looking too disheveled when being discharged,” Ogin had said—a concern Sasamura now contemplated.

Ogin returned soon, stroking her glossy, reddish face.

Seventy-Two

The house after discharge appeared unfamiliar not only to the child but also newly strange to Ogin and Sasamura, whose eyes had grown accustomed to dimness. Dressed in a padded soft kimono and placed at the center of the family room, the child gazed out weakly toward the garden with eyes that seemed pained by the outside world’s intense stimuli. His expression remained clouded. To Sasamura, who had asked if they could be discharged now, the director replied, “Yes. A little longer,” while stroking and examining the child’s stomach condition,

“It took a bit longer than planned, but he should be fine now—it was quite an ordeal,” he said with a laugh before leaving.

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

From that morning onward, the weather—which had been raining continuously for two or three days—began to clear, alternating between fine drizzles and moments when yellow sunlight streamed through the dust-laden windowpanes.

“Let’s leave the hospital today.”

Sasamura brought it up shortly after eating lunch. In the hospital room where visitors had grown scarce, the child sat on the bed, the distributed wafer still clutched in his hand, his face bearing an utterly exhausted expression. The potted plants they had brought from home and placed on the window frame facing the garden had been left unattended for some time, parched for water and withered.

“In that case, I’ll have to go home for a bit…” Ogin seemed surprised by the suddenness of it.

“If we take Boy home, he might recover all the faster.—Well then, I’ll be going now.” With that, Ogin smoothed her hair and stepped into the geta that Sasamura had picked up in Awajicho while running errands around the time the illness entered its convalescent phase—before hurrying off.

During that time, Sasamura, carrying the child, wandered the corridors. Seriously ill patients were constantly being carried in, corpses carried out. Compared to its earlier bustle, the hospital now felt listless and sluggish. Even into Sasamura’s heart—stretched taut by the brink of death—drifted a faint melancholy of ease and resignation. At the corridor’s end was an old woman nursing an emaciated girl of eleven or twelve, a fixture since before Sasamura’s arrival. She had become their closest acquaintance. The girl was a child sent away to the countryside—a satogare—cast out from her home. Even when her biological father visited occasionally, Panama hat in hand, she felt no connection.

“Poor thing.” Ogin would occasionally come to see that room and, her eyes clouding over, speak to Sasamura. “If we’d given our boy away to someone as you said, he’d still end up like that.” Ogin had also said that.

“Mom…,” Seiichi said, his face clouding with impatience at intervals as Sasamura carried him outside still wearing his house sandals. A dim cloud shadow hung over the town. Sasamura went from there to the tram thoroughfare and walked about showing him the plaza at the bridge approach. While he did this, Ogin came hurrying over by rickshaw clutching a furoshiki-wrapped bundle and other items. At home, an altar lamp had been lit among other preparations. Among the various devotional offerings decorating the altar were items Otoh the hairdresser had specially gone all the way to Narita to procure.

The stool the child soon produced still contained traces of mucus. "Was it wrong to bring him here after all?" Ogin murmured to Sasamura as he peered into the chamber pot. Beside Ogin—who had abruptly succumbed to deep sleep as her exhaustion overwhelmed her—Sasamura kept watch over their child intermittently kicking off the bedding. Beyond the mosquito net, mosquitoes still hummed.

Seventy-Three

Urged by Ogin’s declaration of “Above all else, I want to settle our social obligations quickly…,” they distributed gifts commemorating the tatami replacement while treating Otoh to a theater performance in gratitude and inviting concerned well-wishers to their home. By then, the child had remained in his post-discharge condition, but when autumn arrived, his recovery accelerated markedly. That winter after New Year’s, he suddenly contracted diphtheria while visiting Ogin’s brother’s home during an outing, but aside from being saved by a timely injection at the critical moment, nothing else transpired.

“This child will be difficult to raise. They say it’s best to keep him as a disciple of Marishiten-sama until he turns eleven.” Ogin had heard such things from an old man at a consultation office acquainted with Otoh. However, while their second daughter had seemed to grow up even when left to her own devices, they gradually came to realize she wasn’t always just cheerfully playing alone. This child, who was usually nothing more than a plaything for adults, would sometimes become stubborn—clinging to the sliding doors and crying wholeheartedly in a willful voice for over an hour.

“What an unpleasant child. With that pig-like snout of his... this brat’s going to grow up mean.”

Sasamura felt as though he were touching the sprouting selfhood of a small child. “Since it’s the Year of the Snake, he might have inherited my stubbornness.”

As she said this and hugged the child, Ogin found herself strangely seeing his face anew—a change that drew her heart to him even more intensely. "You seem to think only the boy matters." "I don't favor either one over the other."

The mother’s affection, which she occasionally voiced in such terms, was gradually cooling toward the older child—a shift Sasamura understood all too well. "That’s right—from his constitution to his temperament, I understand Seiichi best."

And the sharpness of that mutual understanding was one of Sasamura’s inescapable torments.

That winter, the cold that had suddenly struck Sasamura lingered in his bronchial tubes for a long time. Even after the fever subsided, the phlegm that clung stubbornly to his throat still wouldn’t clear. He also experienced occasional chills. Sasamura had shut himself away in the 4.5-mat room for a long time, lying in bed. Even the wind seeping through the gaps in the shoji screens struck sharply against his thin skin. “I’ve gone and made it worse.” Sasamura gazed at his emaciated hands and muttered resentfully. “This came in.”

One evening, Ogin took out a postcard from the mirror stand's drawer and showed it to Sasamura. The postcard was from Isogai, addressed to the seamstress woman who had become a carpenter's wife some time ago, but within the letter he had inquired about Ogin's current whereabouts. In that sense, he seemed unaware that Ogin had finally settled down with Sasamura. Sasamura felt a blood-tinged nostalgic itch at the clumsy handwriting and signed postcard.

“Huh.” “So he wants to see you again, huh?”

“That could be it. That man has this habit—after breaking up with a woman, he’ll remember her again a year or two later and come back. I don’t know if there’s anything going on now, but when he’s involved with one particular woman, he still seems to get concerned about others. Then just when she’s forgotten about him, he’ll suddenly go meet her and apologize or something. He’s a strange one.”

“How amusing.”

“He must be fickle after all.” “Where is he now?”

“Where could he be? He must have failed out of school too, of course.” “He must have met you somewhere at least once.” “If he meets me, he’ll say he did.”

74

Sasamura had even tried searching for any fragment—no matter how small—of old letters that Isogai had sent to Ogin in the past. The thought of discovering something within them that would make his heart race when read seemed more intriguing than anything else. When alone, Sasamura often liked to search through the mirror stand, chest of drawers, sewing box, and bottoms of bags that carried scents of perfume and face powder. It felt exactly like when he had rummaged through his mother’s musty chests and boxes in the dark closet of their rural home as a child. But as for writings, there were only bundles of promissory notes that Ogin’s uncle had lent to friends during his prosperous days, account books from that time, several ledgers, 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.

“Shall I try asking around?”

Sasamura heard Ogin occasionally making such remarks. 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."

“There should at least still be letters from Isogai around. Show them to me.” Having said this, Sasamura pressed her. “When we were at the Koishikawa house, I burned them all.” “Huh. What a waste,” Sasamura said regretfully. On another occasion, through the wife of a school-educated friend, Sasamura heard a story: A female student’s lover had been noticed by her mother through some trivial incident, and for their only daughter’s sake, the father had arranged to adopt the man as his son-in-law. Yet after this arrangement, the man’s affections soon shifted to another woman—a tale Sasamura then recounted to Ogin.

“Does such a thing even happen—keeping letters in a shoulder bag?” “Well, I suppose so. I did the same.”

Ogin murmured, her eyes taking on the look of someone recalling maidenly feelings from that time. When she had burned those letters, she had still worn red garments on her body. "Why didn't you show that to me?" Sasamura regretted it even then. The absence of such keepsakes on Sasamura's part left Ogin feeling lonely at heart, yet even so, letters from a woman at the hot spring resort during that time and those from the woman Sasamura had fallen into a faintly platonic love with during his youth in Osaka became rare material for Ogin, who tended to exaggerate such matters.

When the two were at a vaudeville theater, Ogin promptly spotted Isogai’s face on the second floor across, where he was with friends. While shrinking back into the shadow of the person sitting in front, she occasionally glanced over her shoulder in that direction.

“That person over there was Isogai’s friend.” Ogin said this and informed Sasamura, but he only learned about Isogai 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 of here.”

Sasamura regretted not having memorized every face in their surroundings. "How could he have noticed?" "He probably didn't even realize I was there." "Besides, I've changed so much since back then." "If he'd actually spoken to me, that'd be different—but just passing by briefly like that? There's no way he could've recognized me." "But just as your eyes kept searching for him, you think his eyes would miss seeing you?"

“That’s not true at all.”

75

Yet it was not such a distant future before the time came when the name Isogai uttered by Sasamura held no meaning or resonance beyond contempt and derision toward his wife. Just as Ogin felt no pain even when saying such things, Sasamura too felt a lonely ache as it gradually became clear that the man was not truly her match in any real sense, and that she herself was unworthy of him.

“At the tram street, Mom was talking with someone else.” One day, when Seiichi had been taken along to Ogin’s dental treatment, he suddenly came to Sasamura’s side and made that report. Whenever Ogin gave birth, her teeth were damaged. Her eyes would sometimes cloud over. After her second childbirth, her teeth had deteriorated even further. “These teeth are in terrible shape. It’s impressive you’ve endured this until now,” the doctor told her, leaving Ogin feeling almost embarrassed.

When her teeth hurt, Ogin would have someone treat them each time, but she couldn’t keep up with regular visits. “What does it mean for someone so young to have such bad teeth?” The old man—who had never suffered dental problems except losing two front teeth when he fell on a slope while carrying a child during rainy well-water fetching at their previous house—laughed and said this.

“We’re not like country folk.” When it came time to eat, the child too was troubled by cavities in the same way. There too, Sasamura saw the bad blood that seemed to be corroding his body year after year.

“This time, may I at least attend more regularly?” Ogin said this and, while holding Seiichi’s hand, went to see the doctor. In the unpleasant April weather, Ogin would at times experience unbearable headaches along with her teeth. And she would undo the hair she had painstakingly styled and cool herself with ice.

“What’s happening? Is it possible my brain is already rotting? It’s an indescribably unpleasant kind of pain. And my body feels like it’s being weighed down even more…” Ogin, who had stubbornly persevered through their difficult household while clinging to the belief that better days might still lie ahead, would sometimes realize—as her body weakened—that she was already approaching thirty.

“How long can I keep working anyway? I’ll be buried soon enough.” Whenever she saw Sasamura’s face as he occasionally laughed desolately while saying such things, she often felt an inexplicable sense of pity. “Rather than you struggling in a household like mine with its known future, it’d be better for you to do something about it now. If you’d just teamed up with some resourceful merchant or contractor—let them call you ‘Miss’ or whatever—and lived cheerfully, who knows how much more sensible that’d have been. Even as a box peddler, you could easily support some dashing man in style. In exchange, I’ll raise the child to be of use to you in your later years. And I’ll hand him over to you anytime you need him. Whether the child will listen to you or not—that I don’t know.”

Every time Sasamura said such things, Ogin pretended not to hear.

Sasamura couldn't quite figure out who this man was that the child said he'd met on the tram street. "What kind of person..." he said, trying to list names of people he knew, but still couldn't figure it out. "That person was talking about you, Dad."

The child said with bowed head. The fact that the man was Isogai soon became known through Ogin’s account. “It was exactly like the Hongō-za theater. I was truly at fault—he said something like ‘From now on I’ll think of you as my sister and help whenever I can…’” Ogin recounted the scene with a laugh.

76

In early summer, when Sasamura fled the house with its numerous constraints and complications and shut himself away in a room at a quiet country inn, his state of mind was entirely different from when he had come there before with work requested by a friend.

The town was situated close enough to Nikko and reachable to Shiobara in just under five hours, yet it held nothing within itself to detain travelers. At the moment he fled the house, Sasamura was in such utter disarray that he had no time to even consider the tedium of that place. Moreover, he had made no preparations whatsoever to go to any proper place. Sasamura wanted to escape from the house and people for some reason, settle in a land not so accustomed to travelers from Tokyo, and quietly try to think something through to its conclusion.

Even before that, Sasamura would often be on the verge of rushing out of the house, only to end up being restrained by Ogin and the old man. From spring through summer, Sasamura’s emotions grew more abrasive than ever before. It pained him to see Ogin’s face—seemingly doing nothing but sighing every day over his own health and household struggles, his brother who had to close down the house they once owned, and worries about his mother who had gone there—but he detested even more how these emotional tremors incessantly reverberated through his mind. Ogin’s manner of trying to conceal everything made the two of them even more incapable of opening up to each other.

For no particular reason, Ogin found herself irritated by Sasamura’s occasional visits to a certain woman. Despite the considerable age gap between them—she was staying at a boarding house in Surugadai due to poor health—and the presence of two or three young men who gathered around her, it was her decadent aura, born from a mole-like existence in the shadows, that only sporadically captured his interest. When the house grew stifling, Sasamura would jingle the tobacco money in his sleeve and let his aimless footsteps carry him in her direction. Sprawling by the wall of her room, he listened as she told him various stories.

On the woman’s desk lay medicine bottles among other things. With eyes like wilted flowers, she wore a gaudy yukata patterned with peony crests and draped over it a threadbare student’s haori woven in arrow-feather motifs. In her disheveled state, she recounted both the path that had brought her to this place and memories of her first love. When his head grew heavy, Sasamura would curl up on the zabuton, pull a blanket over himself, and drift into a pleasantly drowsy half-sleep. Just as he seemed to slip into proper sleep, voices reached him—the boarding house landlady had come for tea and gossip with the woman.

To the woman’s place came one or two other friends of that sort. Among them were those who appeared to be receiving allowances from men while attending school.

The boarding house had few guests. And with the shoji tightly closed, lying down and getting up there while watching the woman go about her tasks, his mind and body were invaded by a kind of lethargic ease to the point where even rising in that dark room felt burdensome—yet he was still tormented by something irritating.

“How old are you, young man?”

The woman asked, as if suddenly remembering. “Five.” Sasamura answered as if laughing at himself. He took some unappetizing Western-style food there and ate it. “Is this line of work really such a bad business?” The woman asked that. When Sasamura could no longer bear staying there, he hid his face under his hunting cap and soon went outside.

77 The woman, whose job was sending letters here and there, would occasionally write formulaic letters to Sasamura under a male name. This too came to Ogin’s attention. Even without that, discerning where he had been from Sasamura’s face when he returned home was no difficult task for Ogin. At such times, Ogin’s demeanor jabbed sharply at Sasamura’s heart, already filled with shame.

“Don’t you realize that by getting involved with such things, you’re becoming the perfect laughingstock of society? Even Mr. Miyama and everyone else are saying so.” Ogin became heated and hurled vile insults at the woman. Her eyes also changed color.

Having wandered outside for about two days before returning home, Sasamura found it almost comical that there was nothing left to excite Ogin’s nerves—yet he couldn’t simply laugh off her brusque manner of speaking and gestures, born of her utter lack of understanding toward his state of mind. Discarding everything and putting only a pen and paper into his pocket, when one afternoon Sasamura abruptly left home, Ogin remained completely unaware. Until then, the two of them had engaged in vulgar arguments time and again. After moving homes, the matter of the woman whom Sasamura had stopped visiting no longer troubled Ogin’s mind, but Sasamura’s mind—which had been temporarily distracted by such things—had grown even more unsettled than before. And as life grew increasingly burdensome year by year, he felt as though he could no longer sustain his fracturing state of mind.

The rain fell damply that day, but through the train window, the shadows of fresh leaves across the plain appeared refreshing to Sasamura's eyes—unaccustomed to leaving home for so long. The train gradually left Tokyo's outskirts and ran through Kanto's vast, monotonous fields. In Sasamura's mind, images of his home—which until now had felt like being caught in a whirlpool—and his family's togetherness gradually began fading. Now the quietness and freedom of his destination town grew clearer in his sedimented mind. Wherever he'd traveled before, his eyes had always chased shadows of people and women—that mindset from seven or eight years ago now seemed alien compared to his present state. This had been especially true during his long wandering journey west years earlier. Whenever he'd seen travelers with their families on ships or trains during that time, the feeling intensified. Back then, to Sasamura's heart, nature anywhere had been nothing but these irritatingly tedious rows of country pine trees.

The refreshing early summer rain lightly sprinkled against the train window. Outside the window stretched rain-soaked black soil fields where green vegetables extended tender leaves and stems, while darkened thatched houses nestled against vividly colored groves. Inside the train were visible the sunburned red faces of Westerners who seemed bound for Nikko. The train gradually veered toward the mountains. A deep mixed forest, ceaselessly battered by gusts, swayed its supple branches as young bamboo shoots from a thicket intertwined their rain-drenched boughs. Cedars stood in dense clusters here and there like those seen in old oil paintings, imparting a sense of the mountains' profound aura.

The town, which had grown suddenly desolate since the railway was laid, was so quiet it made one's ears ring. Even on the wide street lined with quite large houses, human shadows were sparse.

Led from the inn’s spacious earthen entrance to a second-floor tatami room at the back, Sasamura restlessly stepped out to the veranda edge to gaze at the garden or fix his eyes on scrolls and hanging decorations, but the faint chirping of small birds kept downstairs reached his ears with a desolate air.

Even as evening fell, the rain continued to fall softly.

78

The room’s spaciousness resisted easy habituation; considerable time passed before he grew accustomed to its desolation. When Sasamura woke around nine in the morning, he would typically remain seated by his desk until three or four in the afternoon when the bath was heated. No sound reached the tatami room set apart from the others. Occasionally on the wide desolate street, the rat-a-tat drumming of a candy seller gathering children would pierce the settled stillness of the surroundings—apart from this, only the usual chirping of small birds reached his ears. Sasamura’s mind, stripped of all sensation, would at times grow as hollow as a vacuum.

When his tongue grew irritated from the tobacco he kept smoking, Sasamura would occasionally turn back to his desk and stare at the paper trying to write something, but his head remained weary. On clear days, the forms of Mount Nantai and other peaks could be distinctly seen from the window. The sacred grove and cedar-lined avenue stretching toward Nikko loomed darkly before his eyes. Though the Ōtani River's dry bed was visible from the high rear window, wherever Sasamura looked he seemed to face a wall of silence.

Thoughts of home sometimes surfaced before his eyes. When they had been face to face, he had been unable to perceive Ogin’s true feelings or fate, but now that he was far away, they seemed to come into clear focus. In Ogin’s breast—where, along with her flesh, her youthful heart was being worn away—dreams of love still sometimes turned back to visit. Unfulfillable material desires also constantly unsettled her heart. The violent hands of her husband, trying to trample them down, had grown increasingly difficult to resist with each passing year.

"If I could just keep the child from hardship and manage to dress in presentable clothes when needed, I would have no other desires."

Ogin’s words were tinged with the lonely shadow of a life losing its color.

Sasamura could not help recalling the pitiful sight of Ogin fainting in the theater crowd one day.

That day, the couple went to Shinbashi to see someone off. And on their way back, at the bridge approach, they ate tempura—Ogin’s favorite. “Ah, this is delicious.” Ogin said this and, while looking at Sasamura’s face, laughed as if amused by herself. “You sure eat a lot.” Sasamura was smiling bitterly.

The two of them strolled along Ginza-dori to walk off their meal. “It’s been years since I last walked around a place like this. When I was in Tsukiji, I used to come here almost every night, you know.”

Ogin said this while gazing around curiously at her surroundings.

“Shall we catch a glimpse of one act of kabuki?” When Sasamura reached the corner of Owari-chō, he abruptly suggested.

The one-act viewing section was quite crowded. When she stretched up to peer at the dimly lit stage, the curtain had just risen on Earthquake Kato. Standing on tiptoes over people's shoulders, Ogin barely caught sight of Yaozō's Kato emerging from the *hanamichi*. Through her bleary eyes, the elegant figures of women arrayed in box seats gradually came into sharp focus. She hadn't entered such a place since seeing what they called Danjūrō's once-in-a-lifetime performance of Kumagai with her uncle some ten years earlier.

Eventually, the pale yellow curtain that had been lowered fell, and around the time Sōjūrō’s Konishi appeared there, Ogin retreated to the back with a pallid face. While pressing her head, she was breathing laboriously.

"My head is spinning... Everything's gone dark around me..." Clutching Sasamura's hand as they moved into the corridor, Ogin cried out in a tearful voice, "You... I can't go on anymore," and collapsed right there. For a while, Ogin went out to the athletic field and let the wind buffet her. Sitting plastered to the zinc-plated flooring, she gradually regained her composure. Sasamura soon led her outside.

Without brushing off the dust clinging to her coat, Ogin searched for a pharmacy with a pale face. Tears welled in her eyes, and her limbs were completely cold. "Why have I become so weak?" Muttering to herself as she walked along the riverside, Ogin’s figure was something Sasamura occasionally glanced back at.

79 “Please go ahead and take your bath.” Every day at the appointed hour, the well-mannered young girl from Kuriyama would come to the room’s entrance and call out with a smile—by that time, Sasamura’s mind had grown listless and weary, without a single coherent thought. There were moments when the agony of silence nearly drove him mad, but he still loathed moving about the room.

Having stayed over ten days, he had come to understand the living conditions of the townspeople, and through occasional conversations with masseurs and others, the circumstances of the inn people had also become nearly clear. The town's inns—what one might call its lodgings—had mostly become daruma-style inns ever since travelers bound for Mount Nikko ceased passing through here. The forest that once thrived behind the town had been felled year after year, and the barren soil yielded no rice. The horses that had carried goods to their sole client in Ashio were now scarcely seen. Amidst all this, that inn alone maintained its dignity. Behind it stood a newly built structure where high-ranking officials came to stay. A foreman who collected payments from the fish market gathered local geisha and drum-and-flute instructors in the hall there every day, making a racket.

In the changing area of the bathhouse, water from the dug-out well flowed ceaselessly. While gazing at the pale summer-snow flowers brought from the mountains and soaking in that water, Sasamura immersed his body—muscles gone utterly limp—in the hot bath. On the steam-fogged glass window, shadows of the garden's standing trees were reflected in a pale azure light.

As evening approached, Sasamura ventured out into town. From the dim second floors of inns here and there, figures of cocoon buyers who had come from various regions were visible. When he entered the backstreets, there appeared houses with gates where yellow persimmon flowers had scattered, and rows of cluttered eateries and geisha houses displaying sacred lanterns stood lined up. Sasamura would occasionally make his way to the edge of the terrifying Ōtani River, still scarred by last autumn's flood. Upstream from the white riverbed strewn with rocks, the menacing forms of rugged mountains loomed overlapping against the twilight sky. Along the edge of the embankment crushed by ferocious water currents, people had built huts one after another and settled there. Sasamura would follow the stones upstream across the wide riverbed as far as he could go, or sit on a rock and listen intently to the throbbing of his heart that seemed about to be swallowed into the depths of a terrifying silence.

Before long, in the shade of the forest on the high opposite bank and among the pine groves thriving on the downstream sandbars, firelights began to flicker. Lightning occasionally streaked across the white water. Sasamura could not remain there for long. After making another round of the town and returning to the inn, Sasamura suddenly pictured himself sitting there for about ten days without really looking at anything. On the desk, papers and books remained scattered as they had been when he arrived, and in the stagnant electric light, summer insects buzzed.

That evening, Sasamura came to the hearth downstairs and had some sake poured for him. By the hearth was also sitting the owner of the town’s large rice mill, whom he sometimes conversed with.

The next morning around nine o'clock, when Sasamura went downstairs to wash his face, he suddenly caught sight of a woman peering out from the kitchen. Her face, with its thin sideburns pulled taut, looked more haggard and pallid than when he had seen it the night before. The plaster on her temple appeared unsettling.

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

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