Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

In 1917, the world gained a single new legend.
"The Russian Revolution."
At that time, those living in Russia—from children who had become aware of the world to elders on the brink of senility—each gathered anecdotes that would last a lifetime.
The anecdotes were colored like Russian-style Easter eggs—some white, some green, some a vivid crimson.

Leonid Gregorevich Zheltersky was a young man who had just graduated from commercial school.
His father had been an industrialist in a small town who, during the revolution—whether due to some reason or perhaps one mistake among many—was killed and thrust beneath the river’s ice.
Zheltersky then gained as his own anecdotes the experience of packing his mother into a chicken crate for five days and the gloomy scene of a bullet piercing through the trunk of a February birch tree after he knocked away the gun barrel that had been pointed straight at his forehead.

In 1929, Zheltersky welcomed his second winter in Tokyo.
The weekly newspaper company where he worked stood facing Akasaka’s tram street.
It was a crude two-story makeshift building with siding painted sky blue and trimmed in white.
The ground floor housed the dispatch department, while the upper floor contained the editorial room.
When someone descended the stairs carelessly enough to make the whole room tremble, Zheltersky had exerted every effort to secure that desk and typewriter on the second floor.

On an overcast afternoon, each time a strong wind blew, a sandstorm like a smoke screen rose over the street.
The windowpanes rattled.
With both hands thrust into the pockets of his Western-style trousers, the president gazed out the window.

“Hmph!
What a lot of dust! Even if they sprinkled bittern on this mess, it probably wouldn’t do any good.”

——…………

No one responded.
One of the editors, tugging at his beard with one hand, was diligently translating from Russian to Japanese.
At the opposite desk, another person was excerpting and translating economic articles from a Japanese-language newspaper.
Zheltersky, wearing a black velvet Russian-style shirt, was reading a Russian-language newspaper at the desk closest to the window.
From the president’s muttering, he understood the words “What a lot of dust!”
He also grasped phrases like “it probably wouldn’t do any good.”
Timid Zheltersky wanted desperately to offer some friendly remark in that situation—if only a single word—given his position as the one nearest to him.
However, he could not find suitable Japanese.
—And so he too fell silent and began typing.

“Local libraries have recently achieved remarkable development. At present, their number stands at six thousand five hundred.”

A truck passed by outside with a terrible noise, making the entire makeshift building of the newspaper company rumble and shake. One of the men stood up as if suddenly remembering something and began gargling at the water faucet in the corner of the room. The president left for the next room.—

At the stairwell entrance, the serving girl’s face appeared.

“Mr. Zheltersky, you have visitors.”

“Who is it?”

“There are two ladies waiting downstairs.”

Zheltersky rose from the long chair, swept back his blond hair, and moved his water-blue eyes in a puzzled manner.
The wall clock showed 2:15.
Zheltersky carefully descended the shallow staircase steps that were at least a third longer than his booted foot.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes, he’ll be right down.”

Zheltersky bent down to peer toward the voice, a mix of surprise and vague bewilderment—

“Oh.”

His pale face flushed slightly.
Before he could sweep back his blond hair again, he was caught in Madame Boukin’s renowned volubility.

“Ah, Leonid Gregorevich! What happiness it was to meet you. Now, please come down quickly and be our adviser.”

Through their interactions, Zheltersky had already learned the knack of handling Madame Boukin. He wore a shy yet somewhat stubborn smile and, without a word, first took the offered hand of his counterpart.

“How do you do?”

Next, he greeted the plump Marina Ivanovna, who was standing nearby. Marina Ivanovna, who always thrust out her chest haughtily and treated Zheltersky like a child, for some reason today could barely manage to nod in response to his greeting. Madame Boukin gazed at this with a sigh, as if to say, “Quite right, quite right.”

“Now, Leonid Gregorevich—Marina Ivanovna has found herself in such a pitiable situation that I simply couldn’t abandon her as a friend after she sought my counsel. Marina Ivanovna, you must properly explain your circumstances to Leonid Gregorevich. A young man’s heart is generous—he will surely see to it that you’re satisfied.”

The dispatch clerk’s errand boys, office workers, and even the serving girl from earlier had now all stopped working at once, their eyes shining with deep curiosity as they watched this conversation that even Zheltersky himself did not yet comprehend.
He,

“Excuse me, but there are chairs over here.”

With that, he showed the two women to the reception room.
At the base of the bare white walls, returns of the Nichiro Jihō newspaper bound with rough straw ropes lay piled and covered in dust.
Four or five hard chairs without springs stood haphazardly around a bare round table.
No sooner had she pulled one beneath her hips than Madame Boukin launched into speech with renewed vigor.

“Leonid Gregorevich—please become poor Marina Ivanovna’s faithful knight! You won’t refuse me now, will you?”

Zheltersky crossed his legs clad in black Western-style trousers and watched her with wide blue eyes opened politely.

“Excuse me, Madame, but I still don’t have the slightest understanding of what this conversation is about.”

“Oh, really! I always get like this when I’m carried away—they call me a donkey at home, you know—Oh hohoho!”

No one knew why this lady alone was called Madame Boukin rather than Nadezhda Petrovna.

She had her business cards printed as Madame Boukin.
When Zheltersky was first introduced to her in Shanghai, she had said, as though announcing some special title,

“Yes, I am Madame Boukin—pleased to make your acquaintance.”

She smiled with rouged cheeks. For her—a slender woman with black hair and sparkling black eyes—calling herself Madame Boukin was likely no different from applying rouge to her cheeks: a mere affectation. Zheltersky had once been her young lover in Kamata.—It had been captured on film.——

The knowledge Zheltersky gleaned from the abundant interjections and lamentations was this: that Marina Ivanovna had engaged in a fierce marital quarrel with her husband, Egor Maximovich; that its cause lay in three hundred yen Egor Maximovich had borrowed from Marina and failed to repay; and that she had resolved never to return home again, fleeing in this conviction.

“In the depths of despair, she came to me this morning—we ended up crying together.”
“Marina Ivanovna—I too am a woman—your anguish can’t possibly feel like someone else’s concern.”
“And so Leonid Gregorevich—the favor I wish to ask—couldn’t you shelter this unfortunate soul for a time?”

Zheltersky answered in a low voice, his Adam’s apple bobbing as though swallowing something down.

"If it is within my power, I will gladly be of assistance."

But no sooner had he finished speaking than the pale, lackluster edge of his brow where his whitish eyebrows grew flushed faintly red in spite of himself. The matter of their single-room dwelling and the lone ten-yen note in his wallet flashed through his mind.

When he flushed, Madame Boukin too colored slightly and heaved an exaggerated sigh.

"If it were possible, I would have come myself in earnest; I would have you keep her at your house for as many days as needed."
"How I should wish you to stay by her side and comfort her until she regains happiness—"
"But…"

Madame Boukin pulled the frayed string of the handbag on her lap with a girlish gesture.

"Oh, things aren't as they used to be for everyone—and then there are the little ones at my place—"

Zheltersky found himself at an impasse, wedged between two older women with whom he had always awkwardly positioned himself in their dealings.
He had been indebted to both of them in his own way.
Madame Boukin had introduced him—then on the verge of starvation—to her film company.
Marina Ivanovna and her husband were both seamstresses, and Zheltersky had been procuring piecework for his wife from Marina Ivanovna.
She was still there now.
At this very moment—as he clutched the chest of his Russian-style shirt with one hand and restlessly stroked his blonde hair with the other, still unable to decide—young Daryusha was likely turning the hand-cranked sewing machine while attaching a sleeve to a child's garment.

Marina Ivanovna had left without uttering almost a single word.
It seemed she kept her lips sealed, fearing that if she were to speak, the grief and despair filling her plump body would explode.
She merely kept her eyes fixed on Zheltersky’s face, watching him.
How fiercely she stared.
With her two bloodshot eyes and two sallow, rough cheeks, she was waiting for an answer.
Madame Boukin, too, had said all she had to say.
And she looked at his mouth.—The silence grew oppressive as Zheltersky, under the four-eyed gaze of these two formidable women, became strangely self-conscious about the beardless state of his own mouth being scrutinized.
He finally,

“In any case, let me accompany you to my house.”

he said.

“We really must check with Darya Pavlovna first—if it’s no inconvenience to her, of course we’d be delighted to have her stay.”

Madame Boukin cast a quick sidelong glance at Marina.
But Marina Ivanovna, disheartened, did not catch it; as if comprehending only that Zheltersky had said they should go home, she rose heavily from her chair.

II

Darya Pavlovna, her body soon to become a mother within a few months, was walking leisurely from corner to corner in the narrow room.
Leonid Gregorevich had found this rented room in the same ward as his workplace to save on train fare.
The landlord was a contractor, but this man was not at home.
A woman who appeared to be a wife was also nowhere to be seen.
Downstairs were a six-tatami room, a three-tatami room, and a kitchen—in a place where sunlight scarcely reached, an old woman over sixty and a girl of about six were living.

Outside the window facing the street, here too today, sandstorm gusts swirled too fiercely, clouding the glass panes.
Darya had made it her rule not to light the kerosene stove when alone.
Thus the room held no warmth.
Yet it could by no means be called an uncomfortable place.
White calico curtains printed with floral patterns hung at the window.
The glass door partitioning off the one-tatami kitchen area bore a red cotton cover embroidered in Russian style, while arching down on either side of the sliding door that served as the Zhelterskys' entrance from upstairs hung maroon merino cloth stitched with white Darya-flower motifs.
Artificial roses adorned the mirror on the pillar; atop the beam above the bed made from four beer crates sat a modest three-inch portrait of Christ.
These elements harmonized perfectly with Darya herself as she ambled from corner to corner—her somewhat countrified yet wholly unpretentious entirety.
Leonid Gregorevich stood exceptionally tall.
Darya measured merely two inches shorter.
And like him, her blonde hair held little luster.

After repeating her indoor stroll nearly twenty times, Darya returned to the table by the window. Around that area of the tatami, many small woolen fabric scraps were scattered. She had been cutting out a children’s coat until just moments ago. Following the obstetrician’s instructions, several times a day she would do such things—if sitting, stand and walk; if standing, sit; or lie down stretching her body out long. It was necessary for her to change her posture in various ways. As she cleared away the cloth from the table that served as both a writing desk and a dining table, Darya felt a slight fatigue. She rested her chin in her hand. Each time the wind blew too fiercely, she inadvertently frowned as she gazed at the scenery outside. The slate roofs of the barracks, and beyond them, the gigantic leafless trees jutting up like charred pilings. ……In the distance, a woman came out to the clothesline and hung what appeared to be pure white sheets to dry. The woman left. The wind blew. The white laundry fluttered wildly. In the overcast sky and its sandstorm, a pure white sheet of cloth moved as if sensing something. Darya Pavlovna was caught in a vague sort of reverie. It is not sorrow, nor is it even acute suffering. Blending into something vast, endless, and devoid of clear purpose—we who are living—that’s the sensation. Having lived among peoples with diverse customs and languages in various places, Darya was not surprised to find herself in Tokyo, struggling with an inconvenient language and having to live frugally. The fact that Leonid Gregorevich is her husband remains immutable. Oh, Lyonya!

Darya Pavlovna’s simple face burned with that name.
Her heart beat toward him and toward the infant growing ever heavier within her body—with an indescribable sweetness—as it developed.

“O God, protect us—”

But this life with beloved Lyonya and her precious child—its outcome—the outcome beyond that—
In Darya’s youthful breast—transitioning from wife to mother—whenever these thoughts arose, there always came a sensation like gazing at the vanishing end of a smoke trail, directionless and eternal.
To her mind, Leonid Gregorevich could never rise further in station; no change would come to their life.
They would never again see their homeland’s grasslands in their lifetime, nor know those nostalgic winter nights sitting warm in log cabins breathing walls steeped in memory.
Yet life persisted.
After we die—where would our descendants without nationality live? How?
Their lives would continue day by day where rooted like moss—as ours do now—so long as roots remain unsevered.
But for them to keep living where our graves lie—how could such a thing be dreamt!
Even Darya Pavlovna herself couldn’t begin to guess in which color-marked place on the globe her life would end.
The Earth’s vast surface—our lives scattered there in unspeakably rootless positions—
Darya Pavlovna recalled a sea lapping under a cloudy sky like today’s.

She gazed at the sea from the lowest deck of the Tsuruga-bound steamship.
The sea was the color of those dust-covered slate roofs.
Slap... slap... The seawater slapped sluggishly against the hull, turnips and wood fragments floating amid the waves alongside glistening oil.
In the distance, a ship whose hull had been sloppily painted vermilion for repairs resembled a leper.
Seagulls circled its mast.
The groan of a crane...

As if to abruptly sever Darya's endlessly continuing memories, the entrance downstairs opened as though blown by the wind.

“Oh my, this must be the young lady of the house—what sharp-eyed looks… And what might your name be?”

“They don’t understand our language at all.”

It was Leonid Gregorevich’s voice.
Darya hurriedly opened the sliding door at the staircase entrance and peered down.
Madame Boukin had already removed her shoes and stepped onto the stairs, gesturing animatedly toward her with both hands.

“Oh, oh! You truly are fortunate, dear Daryusha! Just try walking outside in this weather!”

Once she saw Marina Ivanovna next, and finally Zheltersky’s long legs—left, right, left, right—disappear up the stairs, the little girl below dashed into their room and held her breath,

“Granny, three foreigners!” she reported.

Three

Engrossed in conversation with her niece Shizu across the long brazier, Seki did not catch her granddaughter’s report.

“So you see—it’s all because Minoru-san’s resolve is half-baked.”
“Even if it’s mere obligation—precisely because she considers her a mother—Zen-chan won’t let her suffer the cold through his own earnings.”
“You could at least tend to your grandchild...”

“Granny!”

Ume leaned against her grandmother’s shoulder—the one with the handkerchief draped over the black silk crepe collar—and pushed.

“Three foreigners, I said!”

“Got it already.”

From the other side of the long brazier, Shizu said.

“What a fine little watchman you’ve got here at Granny’s place.”

Seki tapped her pipe against the edge of the long brazier and fixed her six-year-old granddaughter with a sharp look, the kind one might give a grown woman.

“What a peculiar child she is, making such a fuss about ‘foreigners, foreigners’.”
“If she were just a bit older, she’d be nothing but trouble.”

“Oh-ho-ho, no way!—How rare, Ume-bō.”

Ume sat beside her grandmother and, looking up at her aunt from under her brows, gave a bashful smile.
With her bobbed haircut and Genroku-period haori, Ume wasn’t an unattractive girl, but she remained one whom no one truly cherished.
A pale complexion and oddly precocious speech gave an impression like an adult who had withered before fully growing.
Raised by her elderly grandmother without playmates, Ume, at six, was already becoming like an old woman.
Shizu gazed at Ume, who sat sideways in a spoiled manner, with eyes that held a mix of affection and impatience,

“Ume-chan—what’s his name? The foreigner upstairs,” she asked.
“Jeri-san.”

“—Really? That’s a name like a sweet, isn’t it?”

“That’s wrong! I heard it’s somethin’ like ‘Jel-somethin’, but ain’t nobody can remember such a long name anyhow—no call to be usin’ names at all.”

“—If there are people upstairs, at least it’s not lonely.”
“How about tidying up the clogs soon?”

Seki let out a faint wry smile.

Once, when Shizu came to visit,

“My goodness, what on earth happened to those clogs at the entrance? How many family members do these people have?”

there had been a time when she had said.
Then Ume, in a very hushed voice, explained to her aunt.
“About those clogs—we’re not supposed to tell anyone, but we leave them there on purpose.”
“Our place ain’t safe with just Granny and me around.”

Shizu picked at Tamaruya’s kaki mochi (persimmon rice cakes) while,

“How much are you renting it for?”

Shizu asked.

“Twenty-four yen.”

“It’s plenty for Granny’s own pocket money.”

After remaining silent for a while, Seki soon muttered,
"What a hopeless man Saku is."
Shizu thought she probably harbored resentment toward Sakuzō, who—while claiming it was for work—often foisted his young granddaughter on her and lived away from home.

Truly, why was it that a house with just an old woman felt so oddly damp and permeated by a smell like incense and herbal decoction?
Shizu, being under the care of a certain person, was leading a rather tedious daily life.
Having no other relatives to turn to, she came here to chat, but no matter how fine the weather outside, sitting before this long brazier seemed to make her forget that the sun was shining beyond the doors.

“Saku-san should just take a wife already—”

“Hmph—what a mess they’ve made. Honestly, if they hadn’t gone and turned this place into some half-baked Western-style mansion in the first place—kept it a proper Japanese room with some charm—even a makeshift building like this in a neighborhood like ours could’ve gotten a decent tenant, a single woman at least.”
“There’s no way around it—keeping the rent lowered for six months. First of all, it’s bad for appearances, isn’t it?”
“But foreigners are better than students, aren’t they? I hear they’re better off financially.”

Seki,

“Why?!”

With her entire face contorted in a frown, she shook her head.

“It’s impossible. Even if they see Ume’s face coming and going so often they grow sick of it, they don’t so much as bring a single caramel.”

After a pause, she added.

“First of all, you can’t get a read on their true nature.”

Shizu,

“Look, Granny’s ‘First of all’ is starting up again,” she laughed.

“It’s true! If you think I’m lying, just look—if we just see the look in their eyes, we can generally get a rough idea of what they’re scheming deep down. The other day, when I came to the kitchen to fetch water, thinking I’d try to figure out what those foreigners upstairs were feeling, I made some small talk with them. I stared right into their eyes while talking to them, but—goodness, those things were just unnaturally blue! Honestly—so blue it gave me the creeps, and I ended up backing off.”

“Hehehe, you’re such a funny granny—sneezing upstairs at this hour.”

Ume, who had been intently listening to their conversation, now spoke up in a thoroughly precocious tone—

“Hey! Someone’s coming!”

Ume warned.
Indeed, there came the sound of someone carefully descending the stairs step by step.
Shizu gave a slight shrug and stuck out her tongue in mimicry.

“Hehehe…”

Granny too, drawn into the moment, began packing fresh tobacco with a faint smile.
Ume was peering through a gap in the shoji screen at the plank flooring.
Seeing her figure from behind, Shizu soon,

“Ugh,”

she let out a small yawn,

“What time is it now?”

“The days are at their shortest now—it must be just past four.”

Ume thrust her face in front of the two of them,

“It’s a foreign lady—from elsewhere.”

Ume said.
But no one answered, and Shizu stood up to retie her waistband,

“How about it, Granny—let me treat you to sushi or something.”

Shizu said.

Seki, distractedly,

“I suppose so.”

While giving this absentminded reply, she looked up intently from below at Shizu’s hanten-patterned kimono and wisteria-purple half-collar.

“That kimono looks brand new.”

“For Granny here, even the tenth time feels brand new—how convenient. Well, really, what should we do? Since there’s no point in me going home now, why don’t we have some sushi if you don’t mind it being cold?”

“I suppose I should apologize for always splurging on you like this.”

“Don’t be so distant!”
“I’ll just go tell them real quick.”

At the cluttered entrance where even ownerless *geta* lay scattered, Shizu slid her feet into *zori* while curiously eyeing the women’s shoes stitched there.

“My, these narrow shoes—can’t believe someone with that build squeezes into ’em.”

“They’re fastened from the children’s section—ain’t no use relying on appearances alone.”

Seki whispered disdainfully.

“They don’t even know to wash their hands after coming out of the lavatory.”

“……The wind had settled just right……”
Shizu tightened her scarf and stepped out into the lamplit street.

Four

Bright winter sunlight streamed through the window and flowed into the room.
It was Saturday.
The voices of children playing in the street could already be heard up to their second floor.
Darya Pavlovna gathered the fabric onto her long, spacious lap and worked on the embroidered trim.
On the opposite side, Marina Ivanovna—her hair still disheveled—sat wrapped in a brown sweater, propping her cheek as she watched the movements of Darya’s fingertips.
In front of her lay a half-knitted infant cap in white and pink wool yarn, thrown down carelessly.
Five days had passed since she had come to this second floor.
Both Darya and Marina had spent those five days acutely aware of each passing day.
——

“Anya, why are you dawdling so much?”

Marina started muttering for the nth time that day.

“No matter how much you teach that girl, she just doesn’t grasp how to do things efficiently—she must be Egor’s niece.”

Darya answered in a calm tone.

“She’s just a child—no matter what you say—but she’s truly more helpful than adults.”

Marina had been waiting since morning for her adopted daughter Anya to come on an errand from her husband’s house in Azabu.

“Even though I’m going through with this conflict for completely justified reasons, I can’t afford to lose customers on top of it all, you understand?”

She had Anya deliver every single order that came her way—no matter how trivial—up to Darya’s second floor without exception. There appeared to be some peculiar understanding between the couple that defied others’ comprehension, for even as they kept up these endless quarrels, Egor Maximovich himself seemed not to voice the slightest objection regarding his wife’s earnings. To Darya’s common sense, such behavior struck her as utterly bizarre. She began questioning whether their fights were truly earnest. For Marina too, her husband’s attitude bred profound discontent. If I can just scrape by on my own, does Egor Maximovich truly not care where I live? Doesn’t he mean to return those three hundred yen at all? A grotesque unease churned within her heavy, somewhat indolent chest. Darya saw through the insecure depths of her heart—at times pitying her, at times feeling a young woman’s sardonic amusement. Yet she pretended not to notice anything. Marina likewise maintained silence on the matter. In contrast to the tempestuous Marina Ivanovna, Darya secretly took pride in her own tranquil disposition.

By the time Darya had advanced two-thirds of the way through the trim, finally, from below,

“Aunt!”

Anya’s thin, jittery voice called out.

“Finally you’re here!”

Thud, thud—Marina descended,

“Did you get lost or something? You idiot… Hmm, fine.—Well?”

Fragmented speech echoed through the room.
Suddenly she burst into raucous laughter.

“Ha ha ha! How absurd! Daryusha!”
“Come see this spectacle!”

At that shout, thirteen-year-old Anya—all skinny limbs and freckles—flushed crimson to her hairline. She tossed her chestnut hair over her shoulder with an indignant flick and glared at her aunt. From the scrap box meant for fabric remnants, she’d fished out a narrow strip of purple silk satin—a pitiful substitute for the ribbon she’d never gotten. This she’d tied into a butterfly bow at the ends of her unhatted hair, bouncing the makeshift adornment on her palm all the way here like some poor girl’s treasure.

“What a fine young lady we have here! Ha ha ha ha! Did your kind uncle say it suits you?”

As usual, Ume—who had thrust her face out the moment the entrance opened—observed this scene from behind the stairs with abnormal intensity.
Anya’s small, sallow face flushed red as if about to cry.
It paled again to its original hue.
Until Anya bowed with one leg lightly drawn back and left through the earthen-floored entryway, Ume kept watching with animal-like curiosity and vague hostility.

“How did it go?”

Instead of answering, Marina spread her arms wide.
The order she had been counting on had fallen through.
She sank back into her chair.
But—

“Ahhh,” she let out a deep sigh.

“You’re truly fortunate, aren’t you, Daryusha? To live properly by depending on Lyonya like this.”
“What a miserable creature I am—just look at me! If I lose my job, how could I possibly keep living?”

“But... aren’t you well-off?”

Darya’s innocently spoken words provoked an unexpected reaction.
Marina—

“Please, Daryusha—I implore you.”

As if her heart were being wrung out, she seized Darya’s wrist and pressed it to her own chest.

“Please don’t look down on me as some miser who nags about money—will you?”
“It’s agony to imagine you all must think me a wretched woman in your hearts even while staying silent! You see?”
“Daryusha, dear Daryusha—you alone understand me, don’t you?”

Darya felt both the awkwardness of this sudden sincerity being forced upon her and no small stirring in her heart.

“Marina, I can well imagine that you have your own cross to bear.”

Marina looked at Darya happily and nodded in agreement.

“That’s exactly it, the cross!—You see, Daryusha, you can’t possibly imagine how terrifying it feels for a woman of my age to look at the future.”
“No country to protect me, no youth left, no husband.—Egor is the kind of man who’d wear a burial shirt with gold coins sewn into it, fretting over the afterlife even in death!—Ah, just imagine that moment!”
“What power?”
“At that moment, the only thing that will protect me from death is money—and even that money isn’t newly saved coins, but ones disappearing one by one, coins I can never retrieve again.”
“For me, the terror of having to part with each coin is already so vivid—so palpable I can see it before my eyes now.”
“So you see, Daryusha—those three hundred yen aren’t just money to me—they’re a part of my very life. And now, Daryusha—how could I stay silent while that Egor, with all his skill and strength, swindles away the coins I’ve saved with such anguish? Tell me, Daryusha!”

Darya involuntarily stroked Marina’s short-fingered hand with its prominent veins.

“Surely Egor Maximovich will return it soon—it’s simply that he couldn’t keep to the promised day.”

“—Why must Egor Maximovich be so insatiably greedy? To think he’s terrified I might kill him—Daryusha, that man won’t touch his coffee unless Anya drinks it first!”

That was a well-known fact among those familiar with Egor Maximovich’s household.

**Five**

“Egor Maximovich wasn’t like that from the start, you know.”

Marina said, as though unable to endure reminiscing.

“We too were once a young, carefree couple like you two, Daryusha. Egor would cut at the large cutting board. I would sew. Egor would finish these and deliver them to customers. Little by little, we saved money. We finally managed to buy one dressing doll for the display window—those happy times back then… And Egor was already skilled at the mandolin since those days, you know? He was quite famous around town. He would play, and often make me dance…… And just when we’d finally managed to scrape together enough to get by—what do you think happened? A machine gun came flying into the house along with soldiers. ‘You lot, get out! We’re the masters here from today!’”

Tears welled up in Marina’s eyes with their swollen lower eyelids.

“Nothing in this world happens without reason, so I’ve resigned myself to losing the shop—after all, there are even people struck dead by lightning for sins they never knew.”
“But the one thing I cannot resign myself to is how they made Egor into such a terrifying man, Daryusha.”
“…But knowing how he used to be, I still can’t leave him… We’ve lived together for twenty-two years, Darya Pavlovna…”

While listening to Marina’s somber story, Darya came to know of a deep sorrow within Marina’s heart that she had not been aware of until now.

Unaware of this, she drank tea with her other friends,

“Go ahead and drink, Anya.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

They secretly felt ashamed of themselves for having imitated Egor Maximovich and his pitiable niece and burst into laughter.
Darya, moved from the heart, took the other’s hand.

“Marina Ivanovna, surely no one knows what a deeply sorrowful person you are.—If I have ever done anything inconsiderate toward you, please forgive me.”

Marina nodded emphatically and affectionately stroked Darya’s smooth, rosy cheeks.

“Sweet Daryusha, you’re such a kind girl—may you give birth to a splendid child.”

Darya—made more sensitive by her pregnancy—felt so moved she wanted to embrace Marina. She stood and began pacing the room. Marina sighed, shook her head, and picked up the knitting.

The children who had been playing in the street had gone off somewhere, and the area was quiet for a while.
The shops across the street were bathed in the afternoon's slanting light from the front.
Whenever Darya approached the window, she could see the red enamel sign of a tobacco shop hanging beneath the awning.
Tobacco.
Bakota.
BATAKO.
——That could be read in various ways.——

After three o'clock, Leonid Gregorevich returned home from work.
First removing his hat and greeting Marina Ivanovna, he took off the cover of Darya's hand-cranked sewing machine, stood it on the tatami mat, and straddled it as a seat.
In their household, there were only two chairs.
Darya stood up to prepare tea.

"How is everything?
Has anything interesting happened?"

While brushing back his blonde hair, Zheltersky said in a throaty voice—

“Nothing at all.”
“Every day the same faces—the same job.”

he replied.
If it had been only his wife, he would have added afterward—
“Still nothing decent.”

he had wanted to add but restrained himself.

Today, while he was eating lunch and smoking, Matsuzaki suddenly came up.

“Hey, how’s it going? Keeping busy?”

While distributing charm to various editors, he pulled a chair up beside Zheltersky's desk.

“It’s quite warm today, isn’t it? How is your wife keeping? I just happened to be passing by and thought I’d see how you’re getting on.”

Matsuzaki kept sneaking glances at the draft Zheltersky was typing on the typewriter and pulling out the newly arrived Russian-language newspapers stacked nearby to skim through them, but—“Ah, I hear that recently Mr. Luikov’s wife has been coming to your place, hasn’t she?” he said. He continued, his healthy-looking face—small in stature and perched atop a round torso—overflowing with an innocent-seeming smile.

“What on earth happened? Isn’t Mr. Luikov even coming to pick her up?”

“...He probably doesn’t consider it as serious as Marina Ivanovna thinks. Most likely.”

“Huh—why did they clash so much? Mr. Luikov—has he started fooling around or something? Ha ha ha ha!”

Zheltersky, certain that the listener was already fully informed yet compelled by courtesy to answer this question posed anew with perfect naturalness, endured the unpleasantness and gave a general account.
Matsuzaki—sitting on a chair in his American-style coat belted so high it gave him a hunchbacked appearance—burst into cheerful laughter.

“Oh, come on! Ha ha—squabbling over such trivial matters at their age! Though I must say, your place must be quite a hassle in such tight quarters.”

“It’s difficult—the bedding is low, so we need a lot of kerosene.”

Having said this in Japanese, Zheltersky blushed and laughed shyly.
Since Marina had come, he had been giving up the bed to the two women and sleeping on the tatami mats.
Even if he covered himself with every cloth he could find, the biting cold of winter would wake him up.
The kerosene, uncertain as to who could pay for it, was thus burned in the stove during the night.

“How long are you going to keep her?”

“Well… She should be going back soon.”

“You see, this is precisely the great difference between Japanese women and foreign women. If a Japanese woman’s husband didn’t repay money she’d advanced for him, she wouldn’t come tumbling into a friend’s house—and there’d be no one fool enough to take her in! If it were me, I’d send her packing with a good scolding.”
“Ha ha ha ha! Do you mean to say you’re overflowing with chivalry or something? Ha ha ha ha!”

“I’m the sort who can’t say no when asked—weak—timid.”

——What a nuisance it was to have a friend who was a senior clerk in the Foreign Affairs Section!
During his time in his homeland, Zheltersky had been constantly pestered by friends bearing various acronym-laden titles.
When one came to a foreign country—depending on the place, whether lengthy or brief—one could not help but acquire some titled acquaintances.

As Darya placed a plate of biscuits and sugar on the table, Zheltersky watched.

“Today, Mr. Matsuzaki came,” he said.

“Oh—”

“What a nuisance!”

Marina Ivanovna exaggeratedly furrowed her face and spread both hands.

“He’s already caught wind of me being here.”

VI

The three began to drink tea.

“Lyonya, do you have the day off tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been two weeks, hasn’t it?”

Marina silently stirred the sugar, placed the spoon on the edge of the saucer, and slowly drank her cup in one go.
She prided herself on never leaving the spoon in the cup while drinking like so many others did.
Zheltersky took out a Russian-language newspaper from the black briefcase he had placed on the window frame and gave it to Marina.

"Ah, thank you very much."
"Lately newspapers are like telegrams—filled with abbreviations from end to end."

Marina spread it out.
Darya, in a loose housecoat with soft crimson stripes, rested both elbows comfortably on the table as she sipped her second cup of tea.
Each time she lifted the cup, the loose crimson sleeve slipped back, revealing the pale white of her arm.
Her housecoat had become disheveled.
This disarray instead made her appear all the more endearing, as though accentuating the youthful luster of her figure beneath.
Leonid Gregorevich blew a quick, affectionate kiss toward his wife.
Darya flushed at the delicate nape of her neck.
She glared at her husband.
But a girlish, mischievous smile spread across her thin, earnest lips.
Marina still held the newspaper open before her face.

By the time everyone had finished drinking, Stepan Stepanovich the fabric seller—his enormous, bearded face shaking the entire second floor—made his appearance.

Upon seeing that, Marina Ivanovna suddenly lunged as if to pounce,

"How fares your fifty-third lover?"

she said and burst out laughing.

“Well, really—Madame.”
“—You always have such a sharp tongue.”

Stepan Stepanovich first took Darya’s hand and respectfully kissed its back, then offered the same greeting to Marina.

He was a single man who became everyone’s laughingstock, as it was said he constantly chased after cheap affairs.
Using the pretext of selling woolen cloth, he was also notorious for slipping into other men’s wives’ homes.
Marina Ivanovna clearly did not hate him, even as she mocked his tendency to fall for any woman.
While silently smiling at her frivolous barbs, Darya poured tea for the new guest and withdrew onto the bed.
She felt awkward about being seen in her housecoat by the man who had knelt before her and kissed her hand.

“Hey, Stepan Stepanovich, have you met any of our acquaintances’ wives lately?”

“The day before yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting Madame Boukin—she’s always so beautiful—a truly youthful lady.”

Marina poked Darya’s side with her elbow.

“That person became acutely aware of her own beauty only after appearing in motion pictures.”

Stepan Stepanovich chewed a sugar cube and downed three cups of tea.

“Ah, that was quite sufficient.”

He bowed to Zheltersky and said something in a low voice. Then Zheltersky swept back his hair with that familiar gesture, forced an awkward ambiguous smile, and glanced toward his wife. Marina instantly caught it.

“Huh? What was that? Stepan Stepanovich, are you saying the tea tasted bad because there was old cabbage here?”

“It’s the complete opposite—I said, ‘May blessings be upon the beautiful ladies and their happy household.’ But since God isn’t in fashion these days, I had to say it in a small voice.”

Stepan Stepanovich hesitated for a while but soon pulled Zheltersky into the kitchen.

"What could it be, huh? What could it be?"

Darya stopped Marina—who had half-risen to peek—with a look of displeasure.

"Lyonya will tell us later."

On the wooden floor beyond the shoji screen, Stepan, while bumping his foot against a kerosene can and apologizing profusely, carefully pulled out a letter from the inner pocket of his coat.
He pressed his mouth to Zheltersky’s ear and whispered.

“I am truly embarrassed—it’s truly an impertinent request—but I received this letter this morning and cannot read it.”
“Might I implore you to read it for me?”

Zheltersky reached out his hand, letting slip a wry smile as he became entangled in an unexpected secret.
The envelope was pink with a four-leaf clover pattern embossed in green.
Zheltersky pointed at the pattern.
Stepan nodded with his bearded face.
...inside—judging by Stepan’s conversational skills—in katakana:

“Dear Mr. Petrov,

Is there truly no substitute? Last evening, though I waited, you did not come—why? Even my own heart I do not understand.
You, if you truly think I’m cute, attach this letter and come to the usual place by seven tonight. Definitely, definitely. Well, goodbye.

Beloved, beloved,

To Mr. Petrov, in Shibuya

From your Toyoko”

It was unmistakably the handwriting of a woman unaccustomed to writing letters. What’s more, it seemed to have been painstakingly written with a wretched fountain pen over considerable time—the pink stationery bearing another four-leaf clover pattern lay wrinkled in spots. As Zheltersky read aloud, Stepan—who had waited with anxiety plain on his face—grew increasingly moved to a pitiable degree with each explained word. When Zheltersky indicated everything up to the final “ゟ” character (though he admitted this particular glyph lay beyond his Japanese reading ability, suggesting it must be Toyoko’s personal mark), Stepan pressed his lips repeatedly to the letter before returning it to his inner coat pocket. Then, still whispering, he spoke into Zheltersky’s ear.

“Leonid Gregorevich, please don’t tell anyone about this—it’s such a foolish thing. For a man like me to become infatuated with a young girl at my age—it’s an utterly foolish thing! But Leonid Gregorevich, we banish Christ while enshrining Lenin’s portrait. I too have a Madonna—a Madonna… You understand my heart, don’t you?”

Zheltersky nodded while avoiding Stepan's eyes—those eyes that clung to him with fervent intensity—and opened the partition shoji.
He couldn't decide how to handle Stepan, always adopting an attitude that made the other man feel he was someone entirely removed from himself.

Before bed, while Marina went down to the toilet, Darya embraced Leonid and said.

“Lyonya, if you can go to Egor Maximovich’s place on Monday, do go, okay?”

Seven

From the Zhelterskys’ second floor, the sound of a guitar and mandolin duet could be heard.

Marina, on the bed with her elbow propped on her knee and her head supported by that hand, watched Egor Maximovich gloomily plucking his mandolin.
The table had been pulled out to the center of the room, with plates heaped with bread, sausage, and ikura placed atop it.
A large soy sauce bottle containing a splash of wine at the bottom sat directly on the tatami mat beside them.
This was something Ruikoff had brought down along with his mandolin.
Ruikoff and Marina had just had a heated argument.
Egor, his chestnut hair thinning and voice squeaky, had come to retrieve his wife at Zheltersky’s urging.

“Since I feel bad for Leonid Gregorevich too, I’ll go back for now—look here, I’m not trying to deceive you. I’ll at least return half of it for the time being.”

Egor laid out fifteen ten-yen bills from one end of the table to the other in front of the Zheltersky couple.

“No, it’s your doing! Who’d be fooled by this? With just this, you’re saying you’ll make the other half vanish!”

“I’ll return it—I’ll definitely return it by next month.”

“Well then, we’ll wait until then.”
“Truly, it’s all because I took your words at face value from the very beginning that things have come to this.—The money does exist!”
“Of course it exists.”
“You’ve hidden that away and are siphoning off mine, haven’t you?”

“Then do whatever you want!”

Egor angrily grabbed the mandolin and strummed its high-pitched strings, as shrill as his voice.

“There!”
“Leonid Gregorevich, how about it after all this time?”

Zheltersky took out a guitar from the cupboard and, greedily savoring each resonance, began tuning it.
In the meantime, Egor muttered to his wife.

“The responsibility afterward isn’t my concern, I tell you.”

Before Marina could even gasp in understanding of her husband’s meaning—

“Come on, let’s play one—‘Snowy Field All White...’”

The snowy field lay endlessly white... white.

Beneath the gray distant sky.

――Beneath the gray distant sky……

Strum, strum―from within the guitar’s notes rose a shiveringly mournful mandolin melody that flowed through the narrow room, warmed by the scent of cheap wine and kerosene stove.

I saw from the window yesterday
A traveler's figure growing dark into the distance,
Footprints left deep in the snow...

In the six-tatami room downstairs, Seki listened to that music while warming herself by the foot warmer.
Ume was already asleep.
Curtains had been hung around two sides of the room to prevent those going to the toilet from peeking in.
The large noshi—only half remaining on the patchwork curtain—and characters dyed with "Sanae" were illuminated by the 10-candlepower electric lamp.
A smell resembling sunbaked herbs—like boiled gennoshoko—drifted through the air.

Though she couldn’t understand the drawn-out, moaning words of the song, the mandolin’s quivering notes—like someone shuddering in pain—and the guitar’s melancholic yet tender low tones intertwining with them seemed to stir something in Seki’s withered chest.
Seki, who had been listening awhile with a Shitamachi dweller’s typical fondness for music, soon furrowed her brow and desperately scratched the roots of her half-white knotted hair with a tarnished nickel hairpin.

“This is absolutely unbearable.”

The only response to her anguished soliloquy in the dead of night was a torn fragment of the stage curtain her deceased daughter-in-law had received from a Kiyomoto recital.

“Utterly unbearable.”

When she went to the bathhouse today, Yaotomo’s wife was there.
After some small talk,

“Auntie, when is the foreigner at your place due to give birth?”
“Even so, it must be quite a burden for you to rent out the second floor like this.”

When she was told that, Seki couldn’t believe her own ears.

“What?”
“Given how she looks, she’ll be due for congratulations soon—but the Westerner’s baby is said to look like Kewpie and be adorable, so Auntie might actually find it a comfort.”

Seki, aghast at her own carelessness, finished bathing in haste and returned.
How could she—always so vigilant toward her tenants—have failed to notice that?
If only she had worn Japanese clothes—no matter how much she hid it—I could have seen through it!
When Seki thought of that foreign woman’s large white body, her foreign stench, and how she never washed her hands, the prospect of childbirth—unlikely to be a proper human delivery—filled her with disgust.
Moreover, right above her own head—Hmph!
Hmph!
That’s a real seven-league nuisance!
A seven-league nuisance.

But this was precisely where Seki’s dilemma lay. How could she tactfully drive them out? Seki keenly felt the inconvenience of not sharing a common language for the first time. If it were in Japanese, there was a way to say anything without causing offense. When Seki thought of the foreign man’s blue eyes—how that baby would surely have those same blue eyes and twitch its tiny nose—she felt an uncanny terror.

Just as she was about to close things up and lie down, an unexpected brilliant idea occurred to her. Whether they tried to climb up from the water spout with the laundry tub from her own house’s clothes-drying area or tried to come out from the second floor, there was no reason anyone could rightfully complain—wasn’t that right? If they got annoyed and left, that was their own problem.—Feeling satisfied with her resolution, Seki let out an enormous, unreserved yawn and slowly crawled into bed.

The ensemble drifting down from the second floor had at some point changed its tune.
Zheltersky and Egor, the wine having made their cheeks flush slightly, were captivated by the sounds spilling from their instruments and played a mazurka with abandon.
Darya and Marina’s cheeks burned.
The two women sat side by side on the bed, stamping their feet in rhythm as they swayed their shoulders passionately and clapped their hands.