Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

On the morning of March 29th, I woke up in an old-fashioned inn before Shiojiri Station.
Snow was falling.
In this area, inns never close their storm shutters at night, and when you open the shoji of a kotatsu-equipped room, there suddenly appears an inner garden where snow falls heavily.
While watching snow accumulate on pine branches as I finished breakfast, I grabbed my single small bag with one hand, turned up my coat collar high against the cold, and ran through the snow to the station.
The inn stood so close to the station.
The innkeeper came running after me holding an unopened umbrella too, and just as the train started moving,

“Well, I’ll be off then. Please come again,” he said, waving the umbrella he held bunched up in his right hand in farewell. This person ran an inn but was involved with Zen-Noh in Shiojiri Town and read literary newspapers published by the Writer’s Union. The previous day, there had been a lecture in Shiojiri Town, and I had also come there.

From the window of the third-class train bound for Shimosuwa, the mountains shrouded in falling snow appeared close by.
The Shinshu mountains, their slopes blanketed in white snow with trees standing out blackly, reminded me of the scenery along the railway near Khabarovsk.

When returning from Moscow, in a compartment of the Trans-Siberian Railway passing through the mountains of the Maritime Province where snow fell ceaselessly in much the same way and black trees resembled the bristles on a boar’s back, I was typing on my typewriter.
I felt an intense desire to travel for days again with Miyamoto through Khabarovsk’s snow-filled mountains aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In Shimosuwa, there was a literary circle centered around female silk mill workers.
In early March, a lecture group from the Writers' Union—including Eguchi Kan and three or four others—went there and held an extremely lively lecture meeting.
There was also the notable fact that female silk mill workers from the literary circle had been mobilized to read with skillful earnestness the short story titled *Seripuren* from the literary newspaper, earning enthusiastic applause.
At that time, since I couldn't go with everyone else, I decided to meet the circle members while visiting Shiojiri before returning.

At the station, the circle’s caretaker came to meet me, and when we went to Mr. ○○’s beef shop—which was near Shimosuwa Police Station—he said, “This isn’t the place. Didn’t I tell you to turn right from the main street and go around that way?” This time, holding an oil-paper umbrella, I followed my guide through the snow to a large restaurant near Suwa Shrine. After turning several times down the corridor, there was a small room with a door. In Western style, the wall had a window opened only on one side, and a large heated kotatsu was set up. Once we settled into that room, Mr. ○○ immediately came over and said with a laugh, “This place here belongs to a sympathizer of mine—very handy.”

The female factory workers in the literary circle numbered seven or eight, but due to workplace circumstances, they could only gather around seven in the evening, it was said. Those in the dormitory had a curfew until nine o'clock, and it was said they regretted being able to stay only briefly. Generally speaking, there were few large silk mills in Shimosuwa, many of the female factory workers came from within the prefecture, and commuting was fairly common—so literary circles could be formed. However, expanding literary circles into company interiors—into factory dormitories—proved considerably difficult. By necessity, female workers with progressive leanings centered around literary newspapers and *Working Women* tended to gather outside factories and hold their circles beyond company grounds. Yet the female workers belonging to Shimosuwa's literary circle centered around the ○○ Silk Mill were vigorous—after the recent Writers' Union lecture meeting, trouble arose between the organizing youth group and town office. A talk by someone from the Writers' Union had touched on opposition to imperialist wars of aggression and been forcibly halted, with speakers temporarily detained. Using this as pretext, reactionary elements in the town council protested to the autonomous youth group, demanding an end to such insolent lectures, officers' resignations on grounds of responsibility, or else abolition of their annual 200-yen subsidy. The male youth group capitulated—resigning and letting reactionaries seize hegemony. However, according to Mr. ○○'s account, the co-organizing female youth group passed a resolution refusing to acknowledge it as a bad lecture meeting, declined to approve resignations, and still held firm. What proved interesting was that eighty percent of female youth group officers were factory workers themselves—the group being composed almost entirely of circle members.

Mr. ○○ had experience working as an overseer in a silk mill from the Factory Council era, before emerging as a class warrior.
He diagrammed and explained the silk mill’s organizational structure to me.
In Nagano Prefecture alone, there were approximately ninety thousand female workers.
Of course, textiles were the main industry, but upon seeing the silk mill’s organization, I keenly felt how shamelessly it had been structured solely to exploit female workers.
Whatever might occur within management’s internal affairs, the female workers were organized to remain entirely excluded from participation.
When spring came, young poor peasant girls were brought from deep in the mountains by recruiters in bundles of twenty or thirty.
They were immediately confined to the dormitories, exploited through ten-hour labor, and once they were no longer needed, driven back in groups to their hometowns by the recruiters.
Next year, they would be made to renew their contracts all over again.
Due to the nature of chronic seasonal labor and utterly deplorable, industrially enslaved conditions, the standard of female silk mill workers had been kept at the lowest level.

“They’ve devised quite a clever system, you see—they’d never actually hand over the full wages in cash to the female workers every month.”
“They give each worker a ledger and just write numbers on paper.”
“They set it up so pocket money gets doled out as fifty sen withdrawals, one yen at a time.”
“The wages earned over several months get handed to their parents along with the ledger when recruiters take them back to their villages.”
“That way, they can easily withhold real wages without any fuss.”
“The workers won’t know until it’s too late, and even if they get angry about being cheated, they’ve already left the factory and scattered—no chance for a strike.”
“So they end up renewing contracts, thinking they’ll get paid next year.—This year’s worse though. Trainees aren’t even earning fifteen sen.”

Japanese proletarian literature addressed the issues of female workers in the textile industry.
There were several works by Kubokawa Ineko.
However, the even more deplorable working conditions and arduous struggles of female workers in raw silk production had yet to be sufficiently addressed in proletarian literature through grand compositional frameworks matching their reality.
There was only Yasuse Rihachirō’s short story.

“It might be said we’re somewhat lagging behind here as well.”

And I laughed.
Mr. ○○ sat facing me across the kotatsu, picking up fragrant tea snacks.

“Why don’t you write a piece called ‘Raw Silk’?”
“I’ll give you my full support!”
he said.

“Can’t they write in an organized manner through the circle yet?”

“They haven’t gotten that far yet—but to be honest, I’ve finally come to understand the value of the proletarian cultural movement lately. Literary circles are such a good thing.”
“They can be used for anything—when I actually tried it, I was truly amazed.”
“Even in the Writers’ Union, while we’ve had all sorts of experiences trying to popularize our work, it’s through these circle activities that we’ve truly come into our own.”

Through the 1931 conference, the Japan Proletarian Writers' Union began organizing literary circles within enterprises and rural areas. The Musicians’ Union, Theater Union, Artists’ Union, and others also launched similar activities, as both the organic unity necessarily existing between political struggle, economic struggle, and cultural struggle within the liberation movement—along with discrimination—began to be firmly grasped from a Marxist standpoint and put into practice. This marked groundbreaking progress in Japan’s class struggle while visibly elevating the class character of proletarian writers. (The Japan Proletarian Writers’ Union had 4,500 circle members nationwide.) (In Tokyo, 145 out of 1,438 members were female circle members.)

The snow continued falling into the afternoon.
Mr. I said he would make another round by bicycle to mobilize the circle members and went out.
Mr. I was a young man of around twenty who had been fired during the Iwanami Shoten strike; after returning to Shimosuwa, he was actively engaged in literary circle work together with Mr. ○○.

Suddenly, Mr. ○○,

“Do you know Mr. Hirata Yoshie?” he asked me.

“I know… What happened?”

“He was caught.”

“Really? When?”

“Didn’t you know? It was in yesterday’s paper. Mr. Ogawa, someone named Mr. Nomura, and Kubokawa Tsurujirō were also arrested.”

“Do you have that newspaper? If so, please show it to me.”

I departed Tokyo at dawn on March 28th and came to Shiojiri.
I had overlooked that day’s newspaper.
When I looked at the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun brought by the maid, a three-column headline reported that comrades from the Proletarian Science Research Institute—Yamada Katsujirō, Hirata Yoshie, Nomura Jirō, Terashima Kazuo, Kōno Shigehiro, and others—had been detained. Simultaneously, it detailed how Kubokawa Tsurujirō, secretary of the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation, and Tsuboi Shigeji, head of publications, had been arrested at the home of federation secretary-general Ogawa Shin’ichi.
It was written in a sensationalized manner, linking the Cultural Federation to the Japanese Communist Party as if exposing its true nature and claiming they had acknowledged being formal party members.
Yamada Katsujirō’s older brother, the social fascist, expressed regret over having a younger brother engaged in such activities.
(!) The terror felt by the reactionary ruling class toward the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation had been markedly evident since its very founding in autumn 1931.
Even though the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation was formed as a comprehensive organizational body comprising thirteen legal mass cultural groups—including the Writers’ Union, Musicians’ Union, Theater Union, Artists’ Union, and others—the authorities refused to recognize its establishment.
They threatened to dissolve the Central Council.
Popular enlightenment magazines such as *The People’s Friend* and *Working Women* were continuously banned with every issue.
The sole reason these magazines were banned was that they were published by the Cultural Federation.
Feudal absolutist Japanese imperialism began the war to invade Manchuria and Mongolia and redivide China around the time of the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation’s formation.
This war of aggression was by no means one that would conclude with the self-serving establishment of Manchukuo; it was abundantly clear that it would serve as the prelude to an invasion of the Soviet Union and a second imperialist world war.
Moreover, the Second World War being planned by the bourgeois powers of the great powers carried various unfavorable conditions for them.
The establishment of the socialist state of the Soviet Union and the success of the Five-Year Plan.
And the colonial masses of India, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere would not allow themselves to be exploited and slaughtered as a vast reserve army for imperialist wars as obediently as they were during the First World War.
Revolutionary organizations of the masses exist internationally.
The working masses of European countries already had their respective revolutionary experiences.
These so-called “internal troubles” were intricately intertwined with the conflicting interests among various capitalist powers.
The Second Imperialist War was a world class war.
Feudal capitalist Japan, in this war, was serving as the watchdog of imperialism in the East.

The Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation had consistently and honorably used cultural activities to enlighten Japan's working masses about the profound class significance of their current political experiences, while clarifying where the proletariat might find a path forward from the oppressive weight of autocracy, economic crisis, and imperialist war.
Oppression is never directed toward powerless class-based organizations.

Spreading the newspaper across the kotatsu and staring at it, I couldn't gauge how far this violent oppression would expand or whether it might subside.
Mr. ○○ simply understood it as the usual spitefulness starting up again.

“They’re really going all out.”

Having said that, he peered at the same newspaper from across the kotatsu.
Yet the article left a heavier lingering weight in my heart.
I recalled Kubokawa Ineko—heavily pregnant—walking beside the pump well next to the Writers’ Union office in Kamiochiai, carrying a small cloth-wrapped bundle.

Until around seven o’clock, when a young female factory worker circle member wearing a kimono with medium-sized patterns arrived, I picked up the newspaper once or twice more and looked it over again.

Two—five—seven people.
Male and female circle members gradually arrived, and the Japanese-Western fusion room with the kotatsu soon filled to capacity.
Building on the momentum from the previous lecture, the female factory workers spoke more energetically than the men.
Their cheeks flushed, yet their hands kept politely tucked under the kotatsu quilt.

“That’s—a lie!”

“Who’d pay? — Who said that?”

“I heard Sakata came.”

“Hmm.”

Because the young women’s group managed by the female factory workers serving as executives was robust, the town council had approached them—using the editor-in-chief of an underground small newspaper in Shimosuwa Town—offering an annual subsidy of 150 yen or so if they restructured the organization.

“When we were elected as executives, the former young women’s group leader cried and quit.”
“Why did she cry?”

“Huh? She said she couldn’t stand being lumped in with people who go work in factories and such.”

The female factory workers all had shining eyes, sitting up straight with focused determination; whenever one of their comrades spoke, they listened attentively, and when words they themselves had wanted to say were voiced, they strongly expressed agreement, laughing cheerfully without reservation. The confident demeanor of everyone impressed me. When I was in the Soviet Union, I often mingled and conversed with female workers in factories. I sensed in the female factory workers of the Shimosuwa literary circle the same qualities of attentiveness, thirst for knowledge, and capacity to absorb class struggle into practice that the young female workers there had demonstrated. Their substantial brightness deserved attention.

*Working Women* was well-received in this circle too, and it became clear that practical notebooks were being put to actual use. For example, its use wasn’t limited to narrow applications like attaching ribbons to cuffs to prevent fraying; when one female factory worker was doing such handiwork, another would come by and ask something like, “What are you doing?” leading to *Working Women* being shown with the explanation, “It’s in this magazine.” It was utilized in such a manner. There, it was decided that news would be issued from the circle, and two women were appointed as correspondents to *Working Women*.

Today, because the remains of soldiers conscripted from Shimosuwa to Manchuria and killed in battle had arrived, the youth group members were forcibly mobilized for a welcoming ceremony at the station.

“Before coming here,” he said, his voice dripping with absurdity, “they claimed Shiojiri was his registered hometown, so they went and held another welcoming ceremony there too.”
“Split up the bones and brought them here for yet another farce.”
“Wouldn’t even let us use umbrellas in that blizzard.”
“Couldn’t be bothered with a proper ceremonial platform either.”

In a tone dripping with absurdity, farmer Mr. △ spoke.

“How about that? Did the women get dragged along too?”

“As if we wouldn’t go! We didn’t go there to chat.”

Then, everyone ate sugar beans while singing the “Workplace Song” created by the circle members. They also sang the song “Tram.” When they first sang one song loudly in unison, even though it was a snowy night outside, it became warm and they felt good, so they sang another, and then another. In the end, feeling hot, Xko stood up and opened the window.

On the late-night upbound train after eleven, I headed toward Tokyo. I disembarked at Shinjuku in the early morning chill, not long after the national railway’s first train had departed. Beyond the station platform’s cold-heavy eaves somewhere, dawn’s first light lingered. Riding through Tokyo’s newly broken night in a battered one-yen taxi, my thoughts gradually turned homeward. From turning the police box corner with fifty sen clutched tight, I stepped out when we stopped and hurried down the alley—only to find my front door locked when I tried it. The door opened to reveal a household member still in nightclothes; I asked immediately.

“Mr. Miyamoto?”

“He is here.”

Relieved by this, I was slowly washing my face when Miyamoto came downstairs.

“How was it?”

“It’s good you went…”

After remaining silent for a while, he eventually said,

“—You made it back safely.”

he said.

The Japan Proletarian Writers' Alliance was scheduled to hold its fifth conference over three days from March 15th to 17th.
As part of the report to be issued by the Standing Central Committee, the Women’s Committee’s report and proposals had to be written, and it had been decided that Kubokawa Ineko and I would be the authors.
The Women’s Committee not only served to elevate the worldview and technical skills of women writers within the Writers’ Alliance, aiding their growth as outstanding proletarian women writers, but also actively participated with unique initiative in the expanded circle activities—developed as a notable advancement in literary endeavors by the Writers’ Alliance since 1931—while inspiring and guiding the literary autonomy of working women in enterprises and rural areas, bearing the task of organizing them under the influence of proletarian literature.

Since the 1929 world economic crisis, working women in Japan’s rural and urban areas had been awakening to class consciousness at a rapid pace due to the deterioration of working conditions and the impoverishment of daily life.
The struggles these working women were passionately conducting in the minutiae of real life as integral members of a class fighting for liberation—their various manifestations—had to be exhaustively channeled into Japan Proletarian Literature.
At the same time, the reports and novels that these working women meticulously wrote—laboring over them for long periods with pencils in factory workspaces, corners of dormitories, or deep within farmhouse storage rooms in villages—had to be boldly incorporated as the future nursery of proletarian literature, even if they remained piecemeal and immature at present.
Clumsy though they might be, these writings represented groundbreaking first steps through which working women expressed their class-based assertions via their daily lives—and that very act constituted the budding of proletarian literature as a true weapon of class struggle.
Moreover, it could not be said that these writings were always clumsy.
The themes were treated from a class-based perspective by the workers themselves, and in some cases were even remarkably adept.
The class capable of producing truly creative women writers today was not the bourgeois intelligentsia heading toward collapse.
It was the proletariat and peasantry rising toward the building of a new society.

The activities of the female factory workers’ literary circle in Shimosuwa eloquently speak to this fact.

I returned to Tokyo from the Shimosuwa literary circle on March 30th, and whether it was the next day, I went to Shimojūjō.
Kubokawa Ineko had been living in Shimojūjō for several years.
Kubokawa Tsurujirō, who had been arrested around March 25th in connection with the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation, had still not returned, and it was said that Ineko, whose childbirth was imminent, was bedridden with a cold.

When I climbed up to the second floor，several women writers from the Writers’ Alliance were already there.
Ineko sat up halfway on the bedding spread near the alcove，wearing a padded robe over her shoulders，and upon seeing my face—
“Oh，you came after all…”

she said.

“How are you?”

“I’m mostly better now, but I ended up getting a terrible fever.”
“Because I walked through the rain the other day, soaked to the skin…”

“What about Mr. Kubokawa? Can he be released?”

“He might be released, I think.”
“I’ve prepared clean clothes thinking he’d come back crawling with lice… but when I went the other day, they made him eat oyakodon.”

Worn thin by pregnancy and further weakened by a cold, Kubokawa Ineko nonetheless retained her inherent composure and subtle humor as she made us some delicious tea.

“Mr. Todo hasn’t returned since last night.”
“What could have happened to him…”

Comrade Todo worked for the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation.
The authorities’ interference against “KOPP” had not begun only when the secretary-general and Comrade Kubokawa were arrested.
Since nearly the beginning of this year, the secretariat had been under constant attack—one or two short-term victims taken in succession each time they barely managed through these struggles—but Todo’s failure to return since last night left everyone faintly uneasy.
It was felt that what bourgeois newspapers reported on the 28th as violent oppression against “KOPP” had not stayed confined to counter-propaganda’s scope but was silently and insidiously spreading into every participating organization’s inner workings.

While eating anpan, we discussed the contents of the Women’s Committee’s report and proposals. We reported on the Women’s Committee’s general tasks, organizational activities, and creative activities, while the agenda items included issues such as women’s unique struggles against fascism and social fascism in culture and literature—intensified since Japan’s imperialist invasion war in Manchuria-Mongolia—and proactive outreach to colonized and oppressed ethnic women.

While I was jotting those down in my notebook, Kubokawa Ineko—who had been watching with her lips tightly pressed together—suddenly said,

"Hey, I just can't take it anymore."

"My father seems to have gone mad."

Her father lived in Ōmori and worked for something like an electric light company.
I immediately understood her feelings.
Her husband had been taken by the enemy, and she, with childbirth imminent, found herself in a position where she had to take responsibility for that as well.

“……Apoplexy?”

“It might be something called early-onset dementia… My cold is also because of that.
I took him to Teidai Hospital, but once we got off the train and started walking, he would just keep going straight ahead endlessly.—When he opened an umbrella, he couldn’t figure out how to close it… It was so exhausting.”

“How much leave can he take from the company?”

“He’s on leave now, but it’s no use anyway.”

“Could he really have indulged that much…?”

When World War I ended and Japan was in the midst of its frenzied economic boom, her father had just lost his wife.
He managed to partake in some portion of that boom’s benefits and engaged in petty bourgeois indulgences.
He had indulged quite severely, and his recklessness had ended with the 1929 panic—now this unfortunate outcome manifested.

“See? That’s why Marxism isn’t a lie! Even in something like this, you can clearly see the process of Japanese capitalism’s development and collapse manifesting itself!”

Because I had spoken with such earnest simplicity, Ineko burst into laughter—
“Exactly!”
—and retied the string around her swollen belly.

“They say bad things pile up on bad things, but there are solid objective or historical reasons for that, you know.”

“That’s right! Tsurujirō Kubokawa being taken away, you having to give birth alone, what happened to your father in Ōmori—they’re all links in one chain with a single root cause… Let’s keep fighting, okay?”

Among people involved in union work, due to the nature of their duties, it seemed married lives often could not be conducted in the conventional manner. In the realm of proletarian cultural activities as well, as the movement intensified, family life naturally began to change, and there was talk that cases where married couples could no longer always live under the same roof were likely to increase.

“While we can live together, we should live as vigorously and proactively as possible to leave no regrets whatsoever.”

“If that were to happen, the women writers of the Writers’ Alliance might end up unable to keep churning out nothing but masterpieces about *The Problem of Love*.”

At this, everyone burst out laughing, and Kubokawa Ineko herself—the one who had made the remark—sat on the floor wheezing with laughter. While laughing, this issue became strongly etched in everyone’s hearts.

2

The conference was approaching.
The deadline for *Working Women* had arrived.
The fact that I had to write the novel I had been serializing in *Fujin no Tomo*.
Because of all these things, I was busy every day.
Miyamoto was even busier, and while we were in the same house, when we happened to meet in the hallway,

“How’s it going?”

“What do you need to do?”

we exchanged words of that sort.

The two-story house beneath the zelkova tree was filled with an active atmosphere.

On the evening of April 3rd, Kobayashi Takiji came.
He told us Nakano Shigeharu had been taken to Totsuka Police Station,
having heard about it at the Writers’ Alliance office.

“Would Hara Izumi know?”

I asked.
Nakano’s wife worked as an actress at the Left-Wing Theater.

“Hmm, hard to say. She probably doesn’t know yet.”

Kobayashi said with his characteristic gaze and manner of speaking.

“I should give her a call.”

I used the automatic telephone in front of Komagome Hospital, illuminated by the lights of shops behind it, to call Tsukiji Little Theater.
Hara Izumi promptly came to the phone.
In a brisk tone,

“I know.”
“Mr. ××’s wife came to inform me.”

she said.

“Tonight, I can’t go home unless it’s after eleven.”

The purpose for which Nakano Shigeharu had been taken into custody, or how long it was expected to last, did not seem to be clear even to Hara Izumi.
I hung up the phone, bought some candy drops and a bat in a paper bag halfway up Dōzaka slope, and returned.
Kobayashi Takiji chatted energetically and, as he was leaving past ten o'clock, stood outside the entrance lattice facing us who were seeing him off from inside.

“How about this?”

he said, striking a pose with his elbows slightly spread.
He wore a fedora, was dressed in a modest kimono, and carried a furoshiki-wrapped bundle.
Miyamoto said,

“It’s quite good.
You look exactly like a village office clerk—it’s very fitting.”

“So that means it’s suited for Otaru, huh?… Well then, see you.”

They closed the lattice toward the laughter-filled night air, and Kobayashi departed, his geta clattering against the paving stones.

Murayama Tomoyoshi was summoned the next day.

It was a little past six in the evening on April 7th.

The streetlights had come on, but the evening street was not yet completely dark as I walked alone with my bag slung over my shoulder and came to stand outside the latticed door of my house. As usual, the lattice door was quietly closed. When I rang the bell, someone immediately came out and unlocked the lattice from inside, but at that moment, the shadow of a man’s head was briefly reflected on the frosted glass by the light shining from behind. Oh, who could be here? At that very thought, the lattice door swung open, and there stood Yamaguchi from the Metropolitan Police Department, his jet-black face turned toward me as he planted himself imposingly inside the house.

“Metropolitan Police.”

he declared intimidatingly.
Silently removed my shoes and entered the entranceway,

“How long have you been here?”

I asked.

“I’ve been waiting since seven this morning—it’s a stakeout.”

As I walked briskly down the corridor toward the tearoom with a deeply unpleasant feeling, from behind—
“Are you alone?”

“Are you alone?” Yamaguchi said.

“I’m alone.”
“Where did you go?”
“My parents’ house.”
“In the X District area?”

He asked back, looking surprised.

“No—there’s a house in the countryside…”

When I went to the four-and-a-half-tatami tearoom beside the kitchen, there in the spot just inside the entrance huddled the young girl Yasu and her older sister, their eyes wide with bated breath, looking up at me as I entered still carrying my bag. Seeing their intimidated expressions, anger toward the intruder welled up inside me, and I said in as normal a tone as possible,

“Make some tea.”

I tossed off my hat and sat down before the chabudai. While slowly drinking hot tea, I wondered whether there wasn’t some way to let Miyamoto know about the house being in this state.

We had gone to our parents’ house on the coast for work, and I had just returned alone.
I had parted ways with Miyamoto at the station.
As for where he went on his errand in the vastness of Tokyo after that, I did not know.
But even so—could there really be no way to let him know?
I thought I absolutely had to let him know.
This was my home, and now it had been occupied by the enemy.
Thinking of this as my home, he must not return—

As I took my time drinking tea in the next room, I noticed another spy climbing up onto the veranda in front of it—first his head appearing—then whispering furtively with Yamaguchi while keeping a shrewd eye on my movements through a single sliding door.
Assuming I would be taken away, I downed two raw eggs.
Before long, Yamaguchi went out to make a phone call or something.
I whispered instructions to the household members and had them go upstairs.
Thinking this might serve as some sort of signal, I had them arrange the windows and lamps differently than usual.
When Yamaguchi returned immediately, another spy slipped past him, stealthily ascending the stairs to the second floor.
It appeared he had restored both windows and lamps to their original state before descending from the second floor shortly after.
When that was done, Yamaguchi,

“Then we’ll have you come to Komagome Police Station under the pretense of voluntary compliance.”
“You’ll likely return tonight—probably—but…”

I slowly changed into the warmer set of clothes and switched my coat to the one with a longer hem.
While discussing with the household members what to do about the house during my absence,
“I must ask you not to speak so much,”
he said.
“They’re household members—of course we have things to discuss.”
“It’s because they’re household members that this won’t do.”
When I took two handkerchiefs,
“Rather than that, a hand towel would be more convenient,”
Yamaguchi cautioned.
“Well then, I’ll be going. Take care. There’s no need to worry—”

By then, night had fully fallen outside, and a fine rain began to fall.
Bundling a sweater against the cold in a furoshiki-wrapped package under her arm and holding an umbrella, she walked with another spy down a deserted rainy side street to Komagome Police Station.

The narrow special interrogation room on the second floor stood empty, its shade-less bare bulb illuminating the desk cluttered with boxes of official seals and the cover of a magazine titled *Jikei*.
The space looked dusty and grimy.
As she sat on a chair surveying the room,

“What’s the matter?”

Nakagawa entered with a gaunt, nervous face wearing a strained smile. This was Inspector Nakagawa Shigeo of the Metropolitan Police Department’s art movement division—an unforgettable enforcer of suppression for those involved in proletarian cultural activities. Twisting his lips and glaring,

“So you came back alone to assess the situation?”

he said.

“Is that how your side would phrase it?”

“Exactly.”

“Regarding the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation—this time you’ll clarify your stance.”
“The financial dealings of cultural organizations.”
“Connections to superiors.”

“And there’s also this.”

From his document briefcase, Nakagawa produced and showed me the supplement to *The People’s Friend*—the election special issue.

“There’s also the matter of *Working Women*…”

When I stayed silent, Nakagawa—

“It’s nothing serious either way. Just go away for two or three years—it’s a pity, but you’ll have to live an uncertain life from now on.”

Without taking his eyes off my face, he said that and blew cigarette smoke from his mouth repeatedly.

I understood that I had been detained due to my association with the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation, and that the authorities had commenced their despicable operation against me as well—just as they had done with comrades from other cultural organizations—to crush the legal Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation and obstruct the activities of legal class-based cultural activists.

Nakagawa asked about Miyamoto’s whereabouts.
What could I possibly know?
Nakagawa examined my belongings after,

“Come on, off to the detention cell.”

Leading the way, he exited the high-class room, descended a narrow rickety back staircase different from the one by the police station’s main entrance, arrived before the detective room, and knocked firmly on the frosted glass door with iron bars at the right-hand corridor’s end.
On the upper part of the door, there was a small round peephole made of clear glass in that section alone.
A pair of eyes peered through from there and immediately undid the latch.
Nakagawa was standing outside the opened door.

When I alone entered the inner corridor, the two iron-barred cells facing me were filled with men who had abruptly risen to their feet—their variously shaped faces and whispers crowding the space. A greasy, unclean stench mingled with the stuffy odor of bodies weighed heavily in the night air. This place was even dimmer than the high-class room upstairs. Through gaps in the sturdy iron bars peered countless eyes—bodies frozen in place yet radiating an indescribable fervent curiosity—while beyond these human cages stood a policeman wearing a regulation cap with a sword at his waist, fastening the door latch. This barbaric scene, so removed from normalcy, formed my first impression. The guard took something resembling a shoe tag hanging from the wooden wall and bound my furoshiki-wrapped bundle.

“Number Two is your number.”

he said.
After undergoing a body search, she took off her shoes and changed into straw sandals.
When I passed in front of the leftmost cell to go to the toilet and recognized one familiar face among those pressed together looking this way, my eyes widened.
Konno Dairiki, a loyal comrade from the Cultural Federation Publishing Office, was there.
Turning the corner in a low voice,

“Today?”

When I asked, Konno, from within the dark cell, nodded emphatically, stuck out his tongue with a laugh, and shrugged his shoulders.

The first cell where women were held had a three-tatami wooden floor with three grime-glazed straw mats laid out. A young woman who looked like a waitress sat slumped under the dull electric light, her bangs casting shadows as she pulled her sleeves together dejectedly. I was put in there too and sat facing her. The three walls were wood-paneled. When I looked up at the ceiling—painted a pale blue—only the areas where hundreds of people had rubbed their sweat and grime with their heads or leaned back against it were stained black all around. The woman who seemed to be a waitress kept stealing glances at me, but after a while,

“It’s freezing… I have stomach pain.”

she bent over on the hard, cold straw mat.

At eight o'clock, the detention cell's preparations for sleep began.
One thin mattress and one quilt, both reeking even more intensely of the detention cell’s distinctive stench.
There were no such things as pillows.
As I watched them carry bedding from the hallway cupboard into each cell, I noticed that while the women apparently received one set each, the men were given four mattresses and four quilts per cell.
And nearly ten people would sleep on those.

“Boss. Let us have one more futon each tonight. Please. When it’s cold, we can’t help needing to piss at night—it’s unbearable.”

A thug-like man with bulging eyes—wearing a striped silk padded kimono whose frayed hem hung in tatters—said this while slightly bending forward, briskly laying out futon without waiting for the guard’s reply. A servile efficiency permeated his every gesture.

I stood pressed against the cell door, watching the scene through fine wire mesh no more than two shaku from the corridor. As nine became ten then neared eleven, each clang of the detention cell’s opening made me rise from the stinking futon to see who entered. Miyamoto had said he might return home around nine if coming back tonight. Every door creak jerked her head up—What if—?

She fell soundly asleep in one go.
When she woke around five a.m., detainees in neighboring cells and beyond were already preparing to rise.
Dawn had not yet fully broken; it was still dark.
She put away the futon in the rotating cupboard and began washing her face.

Outside the cell, along a four-ken wooden corridor of one-ken width, a corrugated iron sink with a single faucet stood at the right end.
Short hand towels cut in half were lined up on the wooden wall beside it.
Soap was forbidden.
Toothbrushes were forbidden.
She tried splashing water on her face, but the two corrugated basins were shared for washing floor rags.
That floor bore detainees shuffling to the toilet in straw sandals and guards tramping in muddy boots.
The rag used there was washed in the same basin meant for faces.
Hearing stories of scabies outbreaks and seeing these filthy practices, more than anything I felt terrified gonorrhea might infect my eyes.

In any case, after washing my face and returning to sit in the cell, the cold began to seep into my body.

When it became past seven o'clock, the custodian brought rice and miso soup.
In a bento box whose paint had peeled off completely were rice and four slices of takuan.
The miso soup was poured into bowls and passed over, but these too were chipped bowls, and the chopsticks were a collection of discolored, used disposable ones.
They passed this kind of food through a hole cut under the cell door—four sun (approximately 12 cm) in height and seven to eight sun (21–24 cm) in length.

The meals at Komagome Station were all brought from the commissary of the police dormitory, but under what seemed to be a contract system, the regulation of eight sen per meal was not actually upheld.
For eighty days, the miso soup was always made by throwing in all the leftovers from yesterday’s lunch or dinner and reboiling them.
That’s why tough ends of green onions would emerge from a single bowl of soup.
Tofu boiled to disintegration would appear.
Cut cabbage stems would appear.
It was filthy food.

Lunch came after eleven o'clock.
Dinner was after four o'clock.
The side dish was inferior hijiki.
Simmered chopped kelp.
A jumble stew of daikon radish and foul-smelling fish scraps.
With simmered potatoes, chopped burdock root, and the like, the same side dishes were served for both lunch and dinner.
And this pattern would generally repeat every two days.
Ganmodoki once every eighty days; inferior fish mince once.
Once, dried fish with bite marks; rarely, a simmered burdock root stew mixed with small pieces of pork was a feast.
The inferior quality of the food was a common complaint in the detention cells.
When the meals were distributed,

“Tch!”
“What the hell do they think they’re doing?”
“Once I’m out, I’ll storm this bento shop!”

Voices saying such things could be heard.
However, at that time, there were few leftist comrades at Komagome Station, so the general grievances were never organized into struggles like a May Day protest within the cells.
There had been a reason why the meals at Komagome Station fell below mandated standards.
The meal costs for those detained under arrest were borne by the police during the detention period.
Yet even when detention periods ended, bureaucratic police procedures often kept individuals from being released that morning, holding them for an additional day or two.
Since the station’s accounting section paid the commissary strictly according to the ledger, the commissary—due to police formalism—found itself forced to absorb the loss of hundreds of meals annually.
The police commissary itself operated on meager profits; after deducting both their margin and compensation for losses from the eight-sen-per-meal allocation, detainees received substandard meals worth less than five sen.

On my first day in the detention cell, I had first warmed my body slightly with that miso soup in the morning, finished lunch, and gradually begun to feel calmer.
I didn’t know how many days I’d be detained, but this arrest was my first experience.
I walked slowly around the three-mat cell and thought.
Regarding issues related to the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation, there was only one attitude we could take.
The Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation was a legal cultural organization conducting activities in accordance with humanity’s historical development.
As a proletarian woman writer, I believed it an honorable duty to work alongside outstanding comrades for this purpose.
As a woman writer from Japan’s intelligentsia, I never doubted that I stood on the most natural path of inevitable historical development.
What we must do was solely to clarify the proletarian cultural movement’s necessity as part of the liberation struggle—to assert, defend, and expand its rightful legitimacy and activities.
The cunning, despicable snares that the ruling class hurled at revolutionary masses and their cultural organizations to protect their own collapse had to be meticulously severed.
I had seen with my own eyes the Soviet Union’s cultural achievements.

In the socialist society occupying one-sixth of the Earth, I have witnessed how rational a life is being conducted even for women of the masses, and have lived through that social reality—.

Singing in a barely audible voice, I looked at the graffiti carved into the filthy wooden walls of the detention cell. The number of markings was small, and many had been scraped away or defaced. High up on the wall was written "Ms. Harada Masako." Next to the food slot, "Party" stood deeply carved alongside the date August 10, Showa 3. Faintly visible was the word "Banzai." On the left wall, "Japanese Communist Party" had been boldly inscribed, its characters later marred by countless scratches.

As for myself alone，I felt no worry whatsoever and was filled with a deep，objective kind of confidence，but I grew concerned about the comrades’ whereabouts since last night.
As evening approached，an anxious expectation arose within me.
On the evening of April 8th，the women of the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation Women’s Council had been scheduled to gather at the house in Dōzaka.
That house had now become the most dangerous place.

As expected, after six o’clock, Sawamura Sadako of the Theater Alliance and Yamamoto Kotoko of the Proletarian Birth Control League were brought to the detention cell.
As Sawamura Sadako was walking toward the house in Dōzaka, Yamamoto Kotoko came along from the opposite direction with a strange man.
Realizing this was dangerous, she was about to slip past when Yamamoto Kotoko—

“Oh!”

She called out and started to stop.
Thus, the spy noticed Sawamura Sadako,

“Oh, you’re one of them too?”
“Well then, come along.”

Apparently, they were brought in.

Sawamura Sadako was transferred to Yotsuya Station that very evening, and only Yamamoto Kotoko was detained together with me at Komagome Station.

In the detention cell, I was left alone.

Though April had come, it rained every day.
Sitting directly on the floor chilled me through.
I wore the kimono and warm underwear Yasu had smuggled in, sitting atop my folded flannel nightclothes now worn to rags.
The day after being placed in detention remained rainy and cold, so someone from the protective custody room crowded with men—saying I should sit on this—lent me that old nightwear.

In the intervals between the sound of rain flowing through the corrugated iron gutter,

“Hey, sir, please do this for me. I’m begging you.”

Someone in the protective custody cell was saying.

“During the shift change earlier, you told me to wait until the next time, so I’ve been waiting quietly like you said… Right, sir?”

They were asking to be allowed to go to the restroom.
I listened with both anger and clinical detachment.

From my position, I couldn’t see, but the guard appeared to be loitering directly in front of the protective custody cell.

“...So go on. Open the door,”

he said in a thick, low voice.
The four-and-a-half-mat protective custody cell had wooden flooring, its door fitted only with vertical bars reminiscent of Tokugawa-era prison cells—thin enough that a slender arm could slip between them to manipulate the heavy latch’s metal fixture.
Even now, I could hear the clinking of someone attempting exactly that.

“—It’s no use!”
The latch was locked.
The guard said this knowing full well.
The entire detention center listened.
Due to the continuous rain, days of sitting directly on wooden floors, and their poor diet, their bodies grew cold—on even slightly chilly days, everyone’s need to urinate became urgent.
Each time, they had to ask the guard to open their cell and let them relieve themselves.

After about ten minutes of silence, this time in a different voice,

“Sir—permission to use the restroom.”

he said with a bit of vigor.

“…………”

That was ignored.

“—Hey, sir”

It was the voice of the same middle-aged man again.

“Please open it, sir. I’ll have an accident.”

“Just go ahead and do it there!”

“How could I do something so filthy? Hey sir, please—I’m sick.”

“—Liar!”

“It’s true. Want me to show you? I’ve got gonorrhea!”

After a while, the guard took a key ring from behind the small table near the detention cell entrance and slowly—deliberately ignoring the protective custody room they’d been begging him about—opened Cell Two’s door first.

The detention cell guards were in pairs.
They worked twenty-four-hour shifts from 8 a.m. to 8 a.m. the following day, with rotations occurring daily.
After guarding inside the detention cells for one hour, they would go outside to rest for the next hour.
During shift changes, the two police officers exchanged salutes,

“Twenty-nine inmates. Two are out.”

They would exchange reports in this manner.

It was the same guards’ day.
Sō, a young man in Cell Two, requested that the guard buy him some medicine.

“Excuse me, but please let me buy Orizanin.”
“I’ve been taking it continuously, and now that it’s run out, I’m in a real bind.”

The guard stood in front of the cell, glanced back at the peephole on the detention cell entrance door, then turned this way with a sneering grin.

“Hmm, fine.
“I’ll get it for you.”

he said.

“I’m truly begging you.”
“I’ll likely be held in confinement for another twenty-nine days or so, and since I have to go to pre-trial detention, getting beriberi would really cause problems.”

“So I told you I’ll buy it for you, didn’t I?”

The young guard answered in a low voice tinged with a Tohoku accent and stood in one spot, grinning sneeringly.
If they truly meant to purchase it, the guard would have to retrieve the funds held under the detainee’s number and instruct the errand boy.

“—Please.”

“Hmm.”

“……The last time I asked for Sarumata too, you only gave responses and didn’t buy it for me in the end, did you? —I’m begging you.”

Tiptoeing with exaggerated steps to peer through the entrance’s peephole at the outside, and once he determined no one was likely coming, the guard regained his composure and said something to the effect that if you adopted the attitude you ought to take, he’d hear you out.

“You’ve been here sixty days and still won’t disclose your registered address?”

“We Communist Party members have ironclad rules.”
“They must be obeyed.”
“...But that’s none of your direct concern, is it?”
“Please buy it.”

He had been engaged in central activities for the youth league in Hiroshima and was arrested shortly after coming to Tokyo.
He was a twenty-one-year-old revolutionary young man of worker origin.
The heated exchange between Sō and the guard grew increasingly intense, and Sō—whose hair had grown out completely over sixty days—appeared irritated,

“What! Do you think your duty ends there?!”

he said.

The high-cheekboned guard’s face turned red.

“Hey!”

As he growled, the guard’s expression changed.

“Come out here.”

“I don’t have to come out!”

“I said get out!”

With a clang, he opened the cell door.
Instantly, they grappled with each other, and a violent commotion of tussling erupted inside the cell.

“Boss!
Hey, Boss!
He’s young! Please have mercy on him!
Hey, Boss!”

A terrible sound rang out, and then one of them came tumbling out of the cell onto his back, collided with the detention cell entrance door, and rebounded off it.
The detainees made no sound but were all on their feet.
*Tap, tap.*

Knocking on the entrance door, the off-duty guard entered. He had come upon hearing the unusual commotion. However, the guard who entered didn't ask a single question, and the one who had grappled offered no explanation while panting heavily. Without a word, he unfastened the sword hanging at his waist along with its belt and charged back into the cell still wearing his muddy boots. Once again a fierce struggle broke out—this time Sō seemed completely pinned down, his head slammed against the cell's wooden panels with all their might again and again. Each time he was slammed, thick dust billowed through the wooden panels of Cell One where I sat holding my breath. He was battered so violently that soon a strange guttural sound emerged, as if his neck were being squeezed. Agitated, the guard came out of the cell.

The guard who had arrived later silently entered Cell One where he was stationed, inspected the wooden panels, and ran his hand over them.
Then the two guards continued working in silence, collaborating to repair the entrance door that had come loose from its iron bar. When they finished completely, the one who had attacked like a beast departed.

I immediately went to the toilet then, glancing into neighboring Cell Two as I passed by.
It seemed as though nothing had happened at all.
Including Sō, seven men sat neatly with their backs against the wooden panels of the three-tatami cell facing each other in a row, several of them hanging their heads.
When passing before the protective cell, a large-eyed ruffian called out,

"—How about it, Professor?!"

he proclaimed in a loud voice, his tone laden with passive protest.
Silently, I went to the toilet and returned.
I came to understand what it truly meant that occurrences within the detention cell were confined to this side of a single entrance door, cut off from society, and deemed a special zone even within the police force itself.
I also came to understand how the rule of making prisoners sit seiza within the detention cells carried a hypocritical effect born of bourgeois formalism.

(Various police officers from within the station frequently came to the detention cells.)
A small desk stood in the hallway with a special form on top printed with time slots and other details.
They would briefly appear to stamp it with their official seals.
Some turned toward the cells and walked the entire length of the corridor to inspect them.
Yet none attempted to discern how brutally the guards had treated Sō from how the prisoners sat formally without any outward change.
Formal patrols came even at night.
The guard saluted as he would by day and reported, “Twenty-nine individuals, including one woman. No abnormalities.”)

It was around April 11th.
Around nine in the morning, as I was heading to the toilet and about to turn the corner near the protective cell, I heard the lock of Cell One click open. Imono Daiki, who seemed to have been waiting impatiently, swiftly rose by the wire mesh.

“Kurahara’s been arrested,” he whispered and sat down.

“When?”

“It seems like two or three days ago.”

The impression this news made was staggering.
On the way back,

“Was he arrested alone?” I asked.

“It seems so. But I don’t know.”

Imono’s large-mouthed face wore an indescribable expression as he said this.
I have never personally met Kurahara Korehito.
However, the fact that the history of the proletarian literary movement’s development in Japan and his achievements are inseparably linked remains known to every single person who speaks even a word about proletarian literature.
From the Proletarian Literary Movement’s very inception in Japan, his efforts—tirelessly and actively addressing the objective conditions of that era from his position as a Marxist art theorist while advancing class-based cultural movements—were extraordinary.
Even tracing Kurahara Korehito’s own evolution as an art theorist makes clear that he embodied Marxism through his very way of life.
He had not merely translated and introduced Soviet proletarian art theory to Japan through detached academic study divorced from practice.
While practicing proletarian cultural and artistic movements as integral components of liberation struggles—always situating them within revolutionary movements’ totality—he swiftly identified budding developments in art theory emerging from accurate political assessments of objective reality. He voraciously absorbed international experiences to expand these developments, critiqued them, and implemented them in concrete cultural struggles.
Thus as an art theorist, Kurahara Korehito developed as a vanguard advancing alongside the proletarian liberation movement’s inevitable growth across Japan.
Precisely because he had clearly grasped capitalism’s intensifying class antagonisms in Japan, foreseen their revolutionary potential, and firmly understood their political trajectory from an international perspective did Comrade Kurahara become an indispensable practical-theoretical leader in proletarian cultural struggles.
Through analyzing papers like “Organizational Issues of the Proletarian Art Movement”—published under the pseudonym Furukawa Sōichirō in *NAPP*’s June 1931 issue—and “Revisiting Organizational Issues of the Art Movement” from August’s edition, the Writers’ Alliance achieved a landmark shift: literature’s foundation became rooted in factories’ and rural areas’ “truly proletarian bases,” while circle activities embedded themselves deeply into working-class lives.

Kurahara Korehito was a familiar presence to all revolutionary working masses.

After taking off my straw sandals and aligning them facing away, the guard clanged the lock shut right in front of my face as I backed into the cell.
But I did not sit down; clasping my hands behind me, I leaned against the filthy, cold wooden panels and stood there, my heart filled with emotion.

In this way, we are being forged.
That feeling ran deeper than anything.
The enemy snatches away Nakano Shigeharu, captures Kubokawa, arrests Tsuboi Shigeji, even drags in Kurahara to obstruct their activities.
But do they truly believe such tactics can uproot Japan's surging proletarian revolution and its cultural demands?
Take even my own case—this violent oppression only instills fresh resolve as a proletarian woman writer.
Everyone feels this.
Those bearing a proletarian worldview inevitably transform enemy assaults into developmental gains once endured.
Through struggle, Nakano Shigeharu will grow into an ever more steadfast revolutionary poet.
Murayama Tomoyoshi too shall sharpen his edge.
Comrades newly assigned to replace those arrested cannot help but develop rapidly—politically and literarily—through complex struggles.
That the enemy mounts such concentrated attacks itself testifies to the proletarian cultural movement's breadth and depth; soon enough, relentlessly excellent revolutionary artists will emerge from factory and rural literary correspondents.
Can the enemy halt this force?
Could their capitalist production last even one day without the proletariat?
So long as they cling to semi-feudal capitalist-landowner power, the proletariat remains proletarian.
They will not cease struggling.
Here too capitalism's contradictions manifest—snatching away a few vanguards has conversely spawned activists tenfold their number.

Boundless conviction filled my chest, and before I knew it, I stretched while standing and laughed up at the sky.
Without making a sound, I spread my lips into a broad smile and let out a quiet laugh.

Around two in the afternoon, the Tokkō officers came to the detention cell, took me out, and led me into a room on the second floor.
On the other side of the table cluttered with ink bottles and ledgers sat a Metropolitan Police Department’s Tokkō officer in a black suit, his facial features all scrunched toward the center as if pressed into his face.

“You know Higashi, the Teidai student.”
“That student said he got your manuscript for the Youth League’s publication.”

“I don’t know any such student.”
“And I’ve never heard of any such manuscript either.”

“That can’t be right.”
“In fact, they’ve gone to your house and arrested him there.”

He fixed his gaze with those piercing eyes and repeated persistently, his habitually sneering mouth twisting.
After the back-and-forth, the Tokkō officer opened his briefcase and took out several photographs.
From among photographs the size of playing cards—including one of a gaudy young woman with her hair styled using a curling iron—he pulled out a single one,
“You know this, right?”

He turned it toward me and showed it.
It was a three-quarter-length portrait of a man around thirty, dressed in a paired kimono typical of Oshima, standing with his arms crossed in front of a garden tree.
He was fair-skinned, with a modest mustache beneath his nose.—
“—Who is this?”
“You know him, don’t you?” he smirked.

“I don’t know.”

“That can’t be right.”

“But there’s nothing I can do if I don’t know.”

“So you don’t know, huh? It’s Kurahara.”

I unconsciously brought my face closer, then took the photograph in my hands and examined it.
I had some recollection of having seen an old photograph of him in Western clothes before, but this was the first time I’d seen one like this, and I couldn’t even tell if it was genuine.
When I turned over the back of the photograph, on the white part was written “Kurahara Korehito, age thirty-two this year.”

“Was he arrested?”

“Didn’t they blare it all over the newspapers like that?”

“I can’t know since you don’t show me the newspapers.—Please show it to me.”

“I could show you, but—”

That was as far as it went.
The Tokkō officer didn’t even try to rise from his chair and said something like how you must have met him in Moscow.
Even so, where in the world could this photograph of Kurahara have been taken, and under what circumstances?
I looked over the photograph once again while,

“Where was this photograph taken?” I asked.

“They took it right after he was caught.”

“At my house?”

The Tokkō officer made a vague gesture of acknowledgment.
I had heard that when they went to arrest comrades at that house, they brought every weapon imaginable, but I’d never once heard of them taking a photography team along.

Photos were taken at the police station.
If that was the case, I thought the background of this Kurahara photograph was strange.
The appearance of the seemingly tranquil garden didn’t make sense.
Why would there be a photograph taken in what looked like a garden?
As I kept looking, my doubts grew deeper and deeper, until I felt an unpleasant sensation—like a bitter, astringent taste in my mouth.
Who took this photograph, and when?
I wondered if Kurahara even knew this photograph was in a place like this.
As I was being taken back to the detention cell, the Tokkō officer followed behind me, descending the staircase,

“You wore a kimono; that’s better.
“It’ll take longer otherwise.”

he said.
It was apparently for the sake of that student named Higashi—someone I couldn’t place.
A young man from the lunchbox shop, wearing a marked happi coat and rubber boots, was standing and waiting halfway up the narrow staircase.
There hung a notice: “Stairway use must be kept quiet.
A notice reading ‘Judicial Office’ was pasted where the corners had peeled off, covered in dust.