Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

On a February night, there was no warmth of fire in the room.

Otome wore a dyed kasuri-patterned padded kimono whose shoulder pad was soiled, sat down on the folded hela-dai she had laid over the round, brown Seto brazier clumped with ash, and stared intently at the table with her face lowered.

The severe cold seeped in from the starry black suburban sky - freezing soil on roads and fields, penetrating tin roofs, reaching all the way to the roots of one's hair alongside the night.

The faint warmth of the electric lamp hanging low before the table was slightly felt on the face.
The electric lamp illuminated Otome's lusterless hair right nearby and cast light on the numerous temporarily bound books inside beer crates stacked a short distance away against the wall.
The table’s varnish shone smoothly.
The luster looked chilling, giving no desire to reach out—

After some time, Otome kept her hands tucked into her sleeves and lifted only her face from above the padded kimono’s sleeves,

“Hasn’t the hot water bottle cooled yet?”

In a slow, deliberate tone that seemed to put force into each word, she asked her husband Tsutomu.

At the spot directly across the same table, sitting on the household’s sole rattan chair, Tsutomu had likewise thrown a padded kimono over his shirt as a makeshift coat and was resting his cheek on his hand.
Tsutomu, his fair-skinned face—characteristic of someone born in the north—moving his notably large mouth, began hesitantly,

"No... Should I do it?"

he said.

"No, it's fine."

The small-statured couple, both wrapped in padded kimonos, were about to fall silent again when Otome spoke up,

"Grandfather... Is he really going to send Mitsuko back as a parcel?"

With an expression as though arching her long eyebrows, she said, and anxiously licked her own chapped lips.

“Hmm…”

“Grandfather… What’s he going to do… I just don’t know.”

……

On the table lay a letter from Sadanosuke, roughly scrawled in ash ink on toilet paper-like paper.
Without any opening phrases an elder might use, it abruptly began: “I’ve sent letters repeatedly—when do you plan to send money?” followed by “I don’t know what grand movement you’re conducting in Tokyo, but here a family of five is on the verge of starving to death.”
“And what about you, the eldest son?”
“If you don’t send money, I’ll send back that hindrance Mitsuko even if I have to package her up.”
“Keep that in mind!”
The letters—faded in places, smudged in others—hurled abuse through uneven characters that recalled Sadanosuke’s stubbornly bristling eyebrows.
On the lower part of the envelope addressed to Mr. Tsutomu Koshuku, there was a terrible stain of seed oil that had soaked through to the contents.

In his hometown of A City，Sadanosuke had been peddling natto door-to-door every morning for the past few years.
At night，Maki would encourage her husband and personally pull their Imagawa-yaki stall out to the riverside street—a place with especially harsh winds but bustling pedestrian traffic—where she worked until around 1 AM，while their younger son Isamu，an elementary school graduate，commuted to his job as a bank errand boy.
Thus，the family—including their daughter Aya—made ends meet.

There was a reason Tsutomu and his wife had entrusted three-year-old Mitsuko to such living conditions.

The previous spring, Tsutomu had been targeted due to his involvement with a proletarian cultural organization he worked for, and after being struck across the face, he developed malignant otitis media.
When Tsutomu developed meningitis of such severity, he was admitted by police to Saiseikai Hospital for charitable treatment.
There, a military doctor trainee operated on Tsutomu’s ear while being instructed step by step—“Cut here,” “Pack that there.”
The subsequent treatment proved so crude that even a specialist who examined it expressed shock, and when summer arrived, he developed an extremely malignant case of mastoiditis.
He was admitted to another hospital through friends’ connections, but his critical condition persisted for over a month.
Whether Tsutomu—lying with blood seeping through the bandage wrapped around his head like a Cossack hat—would ever recover remained something even the skilled surgeon, the otolaryngology chief who had performed the operation, could not definitively state.
In her efforts to keep Tsutomu alive, Otome made such desperate efforts as pawning a borrowed friend’s kimono, finally boarding the night train to leave Mitsuko—in effect—thrust upon her grandparents.

They had only been able to send two or three yen at a time during the first two or three months.
When autumn deepened, Otome sent Mitsuko a hand-knitted woolen mantle.
The initial promise with the elders to send child support could no longer be fulfilled.
Tsutomu’s life was saved.
However, since that spring, the activities of the publishing department where he worked devotedly for that organization fell into great difficulties.
There was no manpower, and there was no money.
In the morning, when Tsutomu—cradling the old *Marxism* compendium he had painstakingly collected—turned up his coat collar to shield his wounded ear and left through the front door, Otome would lock up behind him, follow him out through the back entrance, and receive several ten-sen coins from him at the familiar secondhand bookstore’s storefront before turning back.
Such things happened more than once.

First, I want you to send money.
Next, in Isamu’s handwriting, came a tedious elaboration of how Mitsuko was hindering Maki’s work and causing their “Imagawa-yaki” business to decline.
Tsutomu and his wife deeply regretted their inability to send money.
But Tsutomu felt a distasteful emotion toward his father’s narrow-mindedness—dismissively concluding that the gradual decline in Imagawa-yaki sales was solely due to Mitsuko being a burden and persistently complaining about it.
Tsutomu had not overlooked, even through his own childhood experiences of observing the household, the feelings of Isamu—the second son who had turned seventeen—as he wrote and sent that tedious letter exactly as his father dictated, without adding a single line of his own words.
A City was caught up in the Tohoku famine region.
Since the war began, the hardships faced by farmers throughout this entire region had become severe.
At the end of the year, there was an incident where mothers from families who had sent their young men off to the army banded together and stormed [the authorities], demanding their return from the battlefield.
It was only natural that fewer young people would return from their nighttime outings munching away on freshly baked “Imagawa-yaki”—their pockets stuffed with the warm pastries—now that they claimed the river wind was biting cold.
Those who could spare such small change quit selling “Imagawa-yaki” and joined the wonton stalls.

Tsutomu sincerely laid out the state of society and attributed the cause of their financial hardships in terms Sadanosuke could accept, adding in the margin that this letter must absolutely be read to Isamu too.

The letter from Sadanosuke that eventually arrived made clear how utterly futile all Tsutomu’s efforts had been.
With lumbering cunning, Sadanosuke seized this chance to shift full responsibility for their destitution onto his eldest son’s shoulders—and began exploiting his granddaughter Mitsuko as leverage.
At that moment, Tsutomu’s disproportionately large mouth puffed in rhythm with his body as he fixed Otome with a razor-edged stare,

“I never went to a barber until I was eighteen, nor did I ever buy work gloves!” he said.

In order to earn money to buy books he liked, Tsutomu began commuting to the rope factory at night after the post office closed.
His mother Maki also began commuting to the same rope factory.
And with that money，they bought clippers to cut Tsutomu’s hair and cloth to sew work gloves，and paid for the medicine for their frail youngest daughter，Aya.

Tsutomu burned that letter from his father.
If the house were ransacked and such a letter came to light, being told to quit the movement using that as an excuse would be infuriating.
He thought.

Otome sympathized with Tsutomu’s indignation but gazed at her husband’s face—his hair oddly thinned since the otitis media—with her large double-lidded eyes wide open,

“Grandfather… you’re not mistreating Mitsuko, are you?”

she said quietly.
A twofold anxiety resonated in Otome’s voice.
She couldn’t even raise Mitsuko alone, yet was burdening Tsutomu—already weighed down by hardships—with domestic worries too.
She felt ashamed of this.

Around the time this year’s twentieth-day New Year observance ended in the countryside, Aya sent a letter in clumsy but clearly formed characters: “Grandma keeps saying she wants to die these days. I’m worried she might actually do it.”
The image arose vividly in Tsutomu’s mind—his small mother with salt-and-pepper hair, worn out from hardships yet meek and wise-looking, squeezed between carrying the heavy grandchild on her back and dealing with Grandfather’s stubbornness.
Out of concern for his mother, Tsutomu agonized over securing the necessary funds whether he retrieved Mitsuko or left her there.
The poem that had spurred him to join the proletarian movement brought in no money.

Then came another letter stained with rapeseed oil.
The moment Tsutomu returned home and wordlessly sat at his desk, Otome—her feet clad in his old navy tabi socks now baggy and loose—scurried into the unlit kitchen to prepare a hot water bottle. Even the funds for charcoal had been diverted to his transportation expenses.
——

After a long silence, Tsutomu tore his father’s letter vertically with a hand stained red on the middle finger,

“I should just tell him to pack everything up and come here.”

He said in a tone hardly different from usual.
Otome, unsure how to process this in the moment, stared at Tsutomu as though numbed.
Gradually, her double-lidded eyes beneath unconsciously raised eyebrows grew larger and larger, and together with the tip of her nose reddened by the cold, her expression became like that of a startled hare.

Packing up household belongings and coming here as five people—how would they manage to eat?
Something akin to fear pressed down on her with a broad weight.
Tsutomu, who thought such things, might have some resemblance to his father.
She thought.

However, Tsutomu had been thinking about that matter throughout the day, between two or three different activities.
There was no prospect of being able to come up with the money to go pick up Mitsuko or to send any.
In A City, it was clear Sadanosuke would become increasingly cornered.
If they came to Tokyo—with Isamu working, Sadanosuke selling natto, and Grandma taking on home-based work with her diligent and dexterous nature—they could somehow manage to get by.
If they came to Tokyo and saw their living conditions for themselves—that was what they should do.
Tsutomu strongly thought so.
By doing so, Sadanosuke’s cunning nature—exploiting Mitsuko’s status as a burden to embolden Isamu’s second-son tendencies while scheming to leech off “you, the eldest son” once more—would be somewhat tempered, and they might even come to accept the nature of Tsutomu’s work.
Let them see the living conditions here with their own eyes and realize them together.

When it was explained to her, even Otome couldn’t find it unnatural.

“I guess there’s no helping it.”

Otome kept her eyes wide open, yet nodded in earnest agreement from the gut, and moved her tongue to slowly lick her lips—upper then lower.

“Then I’ll write the letter… You go to bed first.”

Tsutomu wrote a letter to Sadanosuke, then spent a long time writing something else on thin paper, placed each into separate envelopes, took one of them outside the room, and stored it somewhere.

Having gotten into bed and lain facing the shoji, Otome was not asleep.
When Tsutomu told her, “You go to bed first,” it had become common sense for Otome to either get into bed without question or retreat to the three-tatami space by the kitchen.

While writing something in small characters, Tsutomu occasionally slipped the fingertips of his left hand out from the padded sleeve and pressed on his ear wound. The bone had been scraped away, leaving the back of his ear hollowly sunken, with gauze packed into it. Due to the cold and fatigue, it still throbbed there now, and half his head felt heavy. Behind that ear, besides the surgical scar, there was another severe contraction scar. This contraction scar dated back to the winter of 1930, when Tsutomu—dissatisfied with *Bunsen*’s policies—had withdrawn from the group and joined *Senki*’s activities; it was inflicted when Ishifuji Kumio, known from *Bunsen*’s photographs for his hunting cap, pressed a heated iron against him.

II

Grandpa.
Grandma.
Aya-ko.
Isamu.
And Mitsuko.
All these people were soon transported in silence from Ueno Station beneath the Koshuku family’s two-room tin roof, alongside furoshiki bundles of varied colors and shapes, and began living amid stacks of sooty packages—each one, when opened, filled with ragged items piled even atop the alcove.

The lifestyle of Tsutomu and his wife changed.

At dawn—five o’clock, still dark—Sadanosuke sat up first on the bedding and switched on the electric light over the faces of the family sleeping cramped together. He began smoking tobacco. Tap, tap. He tapped his pipe. Grandma had properly prepared the tobacco tray.

At the noise, Tsutomu—who had gone to bed around two the previous night—tossed restlessly and pulled the futon over himself.

Before long, Mitsuko began stirring restlessly. Otome, who had initially been frantically patting her back, now fully awoke and tried to calm her with whispered words while worrying Tsutomu might wake up—the stiff-necked Mitsuko deliberately arched her body as if to reject this,

“Nooo! Graaandma!”
“Nooo!”

Due to a six-month-long habit, she would call out for Grandma and burst into tears.

Then, Grandma stood up from the futon while fastening her apron.

“There, there, Mitsuko, don’t cry now, okay? I’ll make your rice, so don’t cry, okay?”

Bringing the rice, she came to Otome’s bedding area and offered it to Mitsuko.

Isamu woke up next, Aya got up, and Tsutomu, unable to stay asleep, threw off his thin futon.

While Tsutomu washed his pale, dry face—sleeplessness etched into his features—Grandfather swept the area before the lattice with a straw broom, then went up to the tidied room and sat down.
Aya set out the low dining table.
Isamu was looking at a color advertisement that had fallen from the newspaper Grandfather had spread out, placing it on the tatami mat.

In the kitchen devoid of tools, Otome was preparing the meal,

“Grandma, try tasting it a little.”

These days, with an expression as if her eyebrows were permanently raised, she handed a small dish to Maki, who sat hunched over there.
Maki slurped the miso soup loudly.

“That’ll do…”

Otome and Grandma began making everyone drink the miso soup they had thinned out by adding plenty of salt to it.

Crowded around the small low dining table with their knees tucked in, even Mitsuko staying silent, the family ate their breakfast with unusual speed.

Even if there was time before going out, Tsutomu hardly spoke to anyone. He lay on his stomach near the edge of the veranda and read a book. He turned to Grandfather as if suddenly remembering,

“What happened to the oyaki iron griddle?”

he would ask things like.

“I sold it.”

Sadanosuke answered curtly.
The conversation between the two of them did not develop beyond that.

Tsutomu put on a threadbare navy coat and went out.
Even at such times, Sadanosuke never made any move to casually stand up and look.
He sat there with the shoulders of his handwoven cotton haori squared.

When night came, Tsutomu returned.
The only difference was the electric light being on; Grandfather, despite a day having passed, was still often sitting in the same spot as in the morning, with the newspaper and tobacco tray before him.
During Tsutomu’s absences, Otome would use flour that Grandma had managed to procure to make sobagaki and feed everyone.

After entering the bedding area in the three-tatami space, Tsutomu said in a low voice,

“Grandpa—what does he do all day?” he asked Otome.
“He was sitting there.”
And, as if uttering something ominous, Otome lowered her voice even further.
“Grandpa—hasn’t he gone senile?—”

Tsutomu did not reply.
Stubbornly sitting like that, Grandfather was observing his own way of living.
Tsutomu sensed that.
Whether Sadanosuke truly needed to start working or not, his sullen silence—as if observing—appeared bitter to Tsutomu.

Every day around five o'clock, Isamu would head out to the radio shop on the street below Daradara Slope, where he'd listen to employment broadcasts or gaze long into the display window, his boyish red cheeks cast in the blue shade of the lights. After about a month, he was hired as an errand boy at a company near Kyobashi.
Tsutomu found and brought an old bicycle costing five yen and twenty sen in two-month installments.
Isamu happily pedaled to commute on it, and when he returned at night,

“This new company’s huge. There are five errand boys like me.” He pouted as if realizing how small the Bank of A City truly was. “But... everyone’s there.” Unconsciously slipping back into his regional dialect, he added, “They’re all cheapskates despite being runts—can’t stand ’em.”

At that company, a fad had taken hold among the errand boys where they took turns treating each other.
Isamu would get treated to meals but couldn’t return the favor, which was why they would say such things to him.

Grandma was reattaching the straps on Mitsuko’s clothes with a grasping needle while—“If that’s how it is, Isamu, you shouldn’t get involved—” she said worriedly.

Tsutomu had returned home unusually early and was working at his desk.

“There’s no need to worry about that kind of thing.”

He moved his large mouth gently and spoke in an encouraging tone.

“Isamu, since you’re saving up for the house and not wasting money, you have every right to stand proud.”

Isamu—who shared his elder brother’s fair complexion and stocky build though with a more refined mouth—neither protested nor agreed, instead beginning to flip through a month-old issue of *Children’s Science* that lay nearby.
In these moments, Otome wished Grandfather would offer some remark too.
Yet Grandfather kept silent, sitting there puffing on his tobacco.

However, even Grandfather finally came to have to mingle with others and walk around the unfamiliar streets of Tokyo.
Aya, who had often been bedridden since their time in City A, had developed a severe case of tuberculous peritonitis and needed to be hospitalized.

At that time, due to his work demands and personal circumstances, Tsutomu could not return home every night. Otome neatly arranged Grandfather’s geta and sent them to their uncle in Mikawashima. Though elderly, Kankichi—Sadanosuke’s uncle—had worked as a clerk at the town office for over a decade and was their sole relative in Tokyo. They borrowed money for the doctor’s immediate fees, promising repayment from Isamu’s seventeen-yen monthly wage, and tried to get Aya treated through the relief committee using the town office’s connections. They had finally contrived that resourceful scheme.

Kankichi’s third wife, Oishi, came after two or three days, bringing a loan document to have Sadanosuke put his seal.

Oishi entered through the torn shoji at the entrance and—

“Country folks are hopeless.”
“You don’t have the slightest clue how to keep a house tidy, do you?”

Exaggeratedly standing on the tips of her colored tabi socks, she pulled her sleeves together as though everything were filthy, sat on a single zabuton cushion, and looked around at Aya lying there and the surrounding area.
Then, facing Grandma as she respectfully removed her tasuki work sash and bowed her half-gray head,

“How convenient! You never come around otherwise—only when you need money do we become useful! But I suppose that’s what relatives are for.”
“Now then—put your seal here.”

Otome hitched up not just her eyebrows but her thin shoulders too in a tense posture, hoisted Mitsuko onto her back, clutched the money Oishi handed over, and went out to buy ten sen’s worth of shochu and five sen’s worth of fried snacks.
Tsutomu had gone years without interacting with his aunt and uncle—a former barmaid and her husband who were notorious throughout the neighborhood.

As Otome was about to leave, holding an empty bottle that could hold about one gō in the hand supporting Mitsuko on her back, Oishi—

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing with that?! With that little thing? You’re planning to go buy?”

Even if you were buying just one gō, unless you brought a container that could hold four, they’d only give you less than one. Oishi’s way of getting by was like this in every matter.

Mitsuko, with eyes as wide as saucers, stood frozen before the kitchen counter, stretching her hand close enough to touch the fried snacks and pointing—

“Gimme that!”
“Mommy, gimme that!”

she whined.
Oishi stuck out her lower lip like a girl making a sulky face,

“Here, eat this!”
“Huh?”

While mimicking her voice and glaring at Mitsuko with eyes full of malice, she drank the shochu by herself and poked at the fried snacks.

It’s because they lack faith that they’re poor and keep getting sick.
That’s how you end up with a red son.
Using such talk as a drinking accompaniment, she finished her ten sen’s worth of shochu, let out a burp, then pulled another ten-sen coin from the coin purse tucked in her obi and made them buy more.
Until her husband returned from work, Oishi had them buy ten-sen shochu two or three times.

After Oishi had finally left, Sadanosuke once again took out the thirty-yen loan document from Tsutomu’s desk drawer. Looking it over repeatedly, he stood up once more to put it back.

“Poverty sticks to us...”

It was the first time since Grandfather had come to Tokyo that Otome heard such a piercingly cold tone.

“If we had money… we could manage like that…”

“So Brother’s always been right, hasn’t he?”

Otome said in a voice parched from both the vexation of dealing with women like Oishi and the budding hope that Grandfather’s attitude might be changing.

“If the world were different, even Aya could’ve rested properly and recovered.”

She went on to explain in detail about how each district in the Soviet Union had free hospitals that provided treatment, licking her lips repeatedly as she spoke. Publications like *Soviet no Tomo* had been sent by Tsutomu ever since their days in City A. Though no one knew what Sadanosuke had truly thought of them until then, that day he listened intently to every word Otome said.

At night, to Grandma,
“We shouldn’t have sold the Imagawa-yaki tools—even such things as those.”

Grandfather's voice saying this could be heard.

III

When she left the hushed asphalt main road, turned left at the gasoline shop and left again, and emerged into the sparsely built new development, the moon suddenly rose high and clear, casting Otome’s small shadow onto the ground.

In the distance and nearby, zelkova groves were enveloped in mist suffused with moonlight, and in the sky, pale white clouds floated.
As she walked while gazing at the unclouded moon encircled by a large halo, Otome felt that only the rustle of her hem and the clatter of her sandals disturbed the delicate sound of moonlight pouring down unimpeded.
Walking alone at such an hour was lonely and terrifying.
But it was only while walking these very roads that Otome—commuting to Shinjuku as an apprentice waitress—finally regained her sense of being human.

Aya was admitted to Jikei Hospital through a welfare officer’s assistance, but the accompanying costs fell on the family—transportation expenses mounted up, and they couldn’t bring themselves to put the sweet bread everyone ate at home into Grandfather’s lunchbox.

After Oishi started visiting regularly, she brought piecework and forced Grandma and Otome to earn money through it.
They received twenty-five sen per cotton garment, with the thread supplied themselves.
Yet this piecework became something dreadful for the two women who lacked sharp tongues.
On the appointed day, Oishi arrived punctually with twenty-five sen.

“Well, I’ll leave it here.”
“Sending messengers while working from home—how refined of you high-status folks.”

When Grandma bit off the final thread with her teeth and went to the edge to flap the finished garment clean, Oishi—who had been waiting while drinking shochu as usual—immediately demanded,
“Let me see that.”
She inspected it.
Testily folding it herself, she pressed down on the bundle for a while.
Then upon leaving, as she stood clutching the sewing parcel, she thrust a hand toward Grandma’s—and sometimes Otome’s—sickly-looking pigeon chests,

“I’ll buy some side dishes on my way back, so give me twenty sen.”

Oishi said this without batting an eyelash, staring fixedly at their faces.
At her audacity, they involuntarily gulped down their saliva.
Before they could utter a word of refusal under her pressure, Oishi snatched the twenty sen from the small change that lay there.

There were two reasons behind Otome’s decision to work at a café: to escape this demon as soon as possible, and another reason.

For Tsutomu to continue his activities safely, it was becoming imperative that he leave home and rent a room elsewhere.

Recently, when the magazine was sent to the binder, it became clear that it was beginning to be targeted, so Tsutomu seized the opportunity and swiftly transported hundreds of copies of the magazine.
Due to the suddenness, there was no place to send them.
He had a flat-rate taxi driven haphazardly to the outskirts and hauled that cargo into a mixed grove.
It was just past noon on a Saturday.
As Tsutomu staggered under the heavy load, pushing deeper into the grove through zelkova and oak trees bathed in mild sunlight, he abruptly emerged into a narrow clearing overgrown with grass.
On the grass, three young students lay sprawled out talking.
Both sides were startled.
The students all stopped talking at once; one sat up, donned a soft cap, and stared at Tsutomu—a small man with a load slung over his shoulders, his large mouth pressed into a tight line.

Unable to turn back, Tsutomu pressed forward and once again pushed his way into the thicket of trees extending behind the clearing. When he had gone far enough, he steeled himself, took out the prepared string and paper, and began wrapping. After he had been at it for a while, a high-pitched whistle sounded from the direction of the clearing where the students were. It was a jazz melody that Tsutomu and the others didn’t know. However, Tsutomu instantly intuited that the restless whistle was being blown toward him and that it signified a warning. He covered the magazines with grass, tossed his frayed-collared and hem-torn coat over them, and strained his ears to listen in a stance resembling someone urinating standing up.

Small branches snapped underfoot as footsteps of two or three people and women’s laughter gradually drew nearer. Upon reaching the clearing, they seemed momentarily disoriented but turned leftward, until both the footsteps and boisterous female voices faded beyond Tsutomu’s hearing.

It took about two hours to finish the work.
In the meantime, the students once again used a whistle to inform Tsutomu that someone was entering the grove.

Tsutomu told Otome emotionally that evening about the support these young students had shown.
He also spoke at that time about needing to secure a separate room.

Otome, her hair styled in waves giving her a changed appearance, would invariably stand by Tsutomu’s table when returning late at night and, licking her dry lips from mental fatigue, recount in a low voice the day’s events at Reijinza.

“Democrats who sing things like the ‘Red Flag Song’ come here too. They show the waitresses scars on their wrists and brag that they’re from torture.”

“Hmm.”

“It made me furious—I thought you’d think everyone’s like that.”

Ever since Grandfather and Grandmother had come to live with them, Tsutomu—now thoroughly sleep-deprived—would frequently press the wound behind his ear while listening in sullen silence to whatever Otome said, never once asking about the café on his own.

When Otome kept talking at length, he would become sullen,

“That’s enough. Go to sleep.”

he said.
Tsutomu could not reconcile the image of a café waitress with Otome.

As for whether Otome was even remotely suited to such work—far from it; she made for an odd waitress, less resembling one than either Tsutomu or even Otome herself had imagined.

The customer assigned to Otome arrived.
[He] plopped down heavily into the booth,

“Well then, I’ll have a cocktail.”

Then, Otome—who had been standing by with raised eyebrows, not moving her eyes as she waited for the order—

“One cocktail, right?”

She would meticulously repeat it each time, nodding to herself in confirmation while raising her eyebrows, then leave and bring the ordered items.

When the customer reached out his hand and attempted to touch her body, Otome could neither deftly evade it nor banter back with any liveliness; her hand remained gripped as she silently shrunk her body and raised both eyebrows high. Otome’s face—which still held traces of beauty—suddenly took on the desperate expression of a startled wild rabbit. Confronted with this unexpected transformation, the customer—feeling something between foolishness and embarrassment—unconsciously reverted to a serious expression and released his hand, then...

“!”

He clicked his tongue.

After working for about twenty days, including her probation period, Otome was fired from Reijinza.
It was because she never learned how to provide service.

Tsutomu brought a book even into his bedding as he asked,
“What exactly is this ‘service’ everyone’s supposed to do?”
for the first time then.

“—I don’t know!”
Shaking her waved head, Otome grew sullen.

“I don’t know!” The forceful way she said it reminded Tsutomu of Otome and himself from four years ago.

There was a butcher shop at the edge of A City that had posted a sign reading “Pork Available Here” on its glass-paned shoji, and Otome was the daughter of that shop.
When Tsutomu’s cousin was hospitalized with a severe eye disease at an ophthalmology hospital in A City, Otome worked there as a helper.
The two gradually began to talk, and Tsutomu, who worked at the post office, lent her copies of *Senki* and other materials.
Otome had just graduated from elementary school but read them with careful interest.
She borrowed various books to read, and at one point—whether due to some misunderstanding—asked him to lend her Marx’s *Capital*.
After about five days, Otome—still wearing her hair down—came to return the book to the patient’s room with beads of sweat on the sides of her nose.

“—Did you understand?”

Tsutomu relaxed his characteristic mouth into a smile and asked.
At that moment, Otome raised her eyebrows—so long they seemed to leap from her forehead—and looked up at Tsutomu’s face, which, though both were small in stature, stood three or four inches above her own.

“—I don’t know!”

With a forceful shake of her head, she spoke exactly as she had just now.

Tsutomu had forgotten, but when they were finally to marry, he had insisted that since they weren’t receiving cows or horses, there was no need for his parents to give noshi paper (ceremonial gift wrappings), while Otome’s mother had wept, arguing that precisely because they weren’t receiving cows or horses, she wanted at least a single sheet of noshi paper from his parents.
Otome had declared that if they said it wasn’t allowed, she would run away from home, and so she had come to Tsutomu, who was already in Tokyo.

Otome herself disliked it and, sensing Tsutomu’s feelings—he too disliked it but stayed silent out of necessity—took the money she had scraped together with such anxiety. But when they rented Tsutomu’s room, all it did was add another ten yen to their debt with Oishi.

Having managed to relocate Tsutomu, before Otome could even breathe a sigh of relief, their debt to Oishi doubled.

Aya died.
There was no money for the funeral.
For the Koshuku family, no one else would extend them any help.

Grandfather and Grandmother returned from the crematorium after collecting Aya’s bones—Grandmother carrying Mitsuko tied to her back with a rope.

Grandmother rearranged the furoshiki bundles to the back of the cupboard, opened only the front section, spread out a light blue Fuji silk furoshiki there, and placed Aya’s bone urn atop it.

When Otome returned early from the shabby suburban café she had recently begun commuting to, Grandmother sat before the urn with Mitsuko’s legs dangling limply from her back,

“—We don’t need the red cloth anymore…”

she said quietly, never taking her eyes from the bone urn,

“Haa…”
She let out a sigh.
Isamu returned and stood rigidly, looking at Aya’s bone urn with an unfamiliar, awkward gaze.
Then, he briskly bowed his head in respect.

No one cried.
Mitsuko turned the bobbed haircut that looked pressed between her shoulders toward Otome again and again,

“Oh!”
“Oh!”

She pointed at the bone urn with a dirty finger as if regretting it wasn't food.

Wherever they might bury Aya’s bones or entrust them to a temple, Grandfather and Grandmother no longer had a hometown.—

The entrenched attitude Sadanosuke had maintained since their arrival in the capital was gradually beginning to fade.
Otome somehow sensed this even in the way Grandfather sat.

After their debt had newly increased, Oishi began coming around without missing three days. Upon hearing Oishi’s prying questions—about how Tsutomu hadn’t been coming home lately and where exactly the café Otome worked at was located—Otome,

“Grandmother, be careful now.”

Straining her eyelids, she said earnestly.

“There’s no telling what she might do.”

She’d do anything for money.
If she just barged into the café where I work, that’d still be manageable.
Thinking this, Otome felt terror toward Oishi.
At that moment, Grandmother, in a manner that seemed both to understand and not understand,

“I suppose so...”

She had answered this, but seemingly having pondered it after lying down, the next morning—as Otome washed Tsutomu’s shirt in a kitchen bucket—she came to her side and, while restraining Mitsuko who tried to stir the laundry,

“Aunt Oishi said yesterday when she came—‘Otome’s helping with the Red work too, isn’t she?’” she reported.

“Look here!”
“What did you say, Grandmother?”

“I told her you’re working at a café—said you’re working at a café, but…”

Otome, worried about the house being left unattended in her absence,

“Make sure to tell Grandpa properly too, alright?”

she cautioned.

Around this time, whenever the weather was good, Sadanosuke would push an old baby carriage and walk around selling cheap candies to children.

In the evening, when he returned near the house around the time Isamu usually came home, Grandfather cautiously entered through the back alley empty-handed and, after confirming Oishi wasn’t there, pushed the baby carriage around to the front.
Once, when they crossed paths, Sadanosuke had ten sen taken from his meager earnings by Oishi.
He had learned his lesson by now.

The lattice door clattered open, followed by the sound of the baby carriage’s front wheel being lifted over the threshold. Hearing this from somewhere, Mitsuko scrambled out without delay.

“Oh!
“Oh!
“Grandpa!”

She raised her stubborn-looking little forehead with a mischievously cheerful expression,

“Gimme!”

Sitting with her small feet splayed out like a black kite’s legs, she planted both grimy hands on the square cloth bundle.

“After Grandpa comes up, gimme this!”

“No-o-o!
“This is mine—ours—!”

Grandfather silently sat down on the threshold and placed a couple of sugar-coated biscuits into Mitsuko’s hand. Mitsuko, with upturned eyes, glanced alternately from Grandfather to Grandmother and stuffed them into her mouth all at once as quickly as she could.

——

After the kitchen discussion, five or six days had passed.
Around ten o'clock—after delivering lacework she had knitted while sitting at "Suzuran," a café where shifts came only about once every three days during the worst times—Otome received some sixty sen and was strolling halfway up the slope when a policeman approached from the opposite direction.
One side was a field of cedar saplings; the road was single-laned.
As Otome watched while slowly ascending, the policeman scrutinized each house's nameplate one by one before stopping at the lattice door displaying the Koshukus' paper slip.
He opened it, entered, and called out loudly—

“Hello?—Is anyone here?”

He called out.
Otome’s breath grew frantic not just from climbing the slope; instinctively opening her mouth as she looked around the area, she nonchalantly turned off the path about two houses before theirs and circled around to the back.

Just then, Grandmother had put out a bucket and was hanging the laundry to dry.
Wringing it out, hanging it on the pole and spreading it while listening intently to the interrogation in the earthen-floored area without making a sound.

“So, the family currently has five members?”

“That is correct.”

“That child… Ah, Mitsuko?”

The policeman, seemingly scrutinizing the ledger, remained silent for a while, but soon clattered his sword and shifted his footing.

“So... your son Tsutomu’s gone missing, right?”

Otome clutched Mitsuko’s small pink drawers, a metallic clang reverberating in her ears.
Grandmother, in her usual slow, low, courteous voice,

“Hm,”
she replied.

“Why on earth did he run away from home when he’s got a child—”

“...”

“A life of dissipation, then?”

“Well… I suppose you could say it’s something like that.”

Otome, her shoulders tense and face still lowered, inadvertently began to smile—*Grandma, well done!*
She truly had thought so.

For thirty years—persisting through poverty while being unable to feed even himself—Grandfather had somehow pushed Isamu through elementary school and kept them alive until today.
Once, Tsutomu had said Grandfather was sustained by Grandmother.
In moments like these, Otome keenly felt Grandmother’s desperate resourcefulness.

For several days, even under Suzuran’s green and red dusty-colored lights, Otome would suddenly recall, “A life of dissipation, I suppose?” [...] vividly recalled the two voices saying, “Well… I suppose you could say it’s something like that.” But each and every time she recalled it, the emotions that entwined themselves around Otome grew more complex.

The fact that Tsutomu was a man of such opposite character to one who would indulge in dissipation made the conversation with the policeman seem utterly absurd and even rather amusing to Otome as his wife; yet when she earnestly reflected on Tsutomu’s steadfast nature, she felt a depth in her connection with him that she had never experienced before.

Due to the sudden exigencies of the situation, Tsutomu had moved elsewhere without giving Otome time to think things through. Tsutomu was not a man who would abandon himself to dissipation. Until now, that had been as far as her considerations went. But if I couldn't keep up with the movement, Tsutomu wouldn't keep me as his wife—this fact had now become immovably clear to Otome. Were such a time to come, she felt she could never cling to him and make a shameful spectacle of herself. The value of the proletarian movement and Tsutomu's worth had seeped too deeply into her very being. Otome lay face up on the pillow holding Mitsuko, considering all these things for the first time since Tsutomu left home, unable to sleep for a long while.

It was already cell season.

A bright, fine rain fell frequently.
When it rained, a faint scent of young cedar resin would drift over from the damp cedar sapling field out front and linger by the edge of their two-room house where Aya’s bone urn sat stored in the cupboard.

On her late shift day, Otome sat reading at Tsutomu’s table.
Grandfather—unable to peddle his wares in this weather—had spent a long time with the newspaper when suddenly,

“Oi.”

He released the unlit pipe from his mouth and called Otome.

“Even if they’re caught like this, can they just let it be?”

Otome wondered what it was about,

“Let me see?”

She stood up and peered at the newspaper.
In the corner of the third page were a few lines reporting that two Zenkyo laborers had been arrested at the Koto Employment Office.

Grandfather’s way of reading the newspaper had changed.
Otome felt this strongly in recent days.
Lately, Grandfather began asking things Isamu wouldn’t even think to ask.
Grandfather had been silently listening to Otome’s halting explanation, but after a while, he cleared his throat and thrust out his stick as if—

“Can’t the candy sellers form a union?” Grandfather said.
Otome found herself flustered and raised her eyebrows.
“I don’t know.”
After another long silence, Grandfather clenched his pipe between his teeth, then removed it, tapped out the ash with force, and spoke.
“We need Tsutomu’s world to come soon, or we’re done for!”
Though it had been phrased as “I’m in trouble,” Otome felt that this from Grandfather marked a major step forward.

“That’s why I’m saying, Grandfather, you shouldn’t go on saying things like you did before, right?”

About a month ago, when they had dried the winter coat Tsutomu had been wearing, Sadanosuke turned the tattered garment inside out to inspect it,

“A man nearing thirty, living in Tokyo, having to walk around in such rags—what a pitiful excuse for a man.”

he said, and Otome flared up and argued back.
They were referring to that incident.

Grandfather slowly exhaled tobacco smoke toward the drizzling rain outside and silently shook his knees.

Otome stood up to change clothes while having Grandmother pacify Mitsuko, who had soon begun clinging to her.
Even as she tied her obi, Otome felt as though she could see Tsutomu’s figure—holding a large Western-style umbrella over his small-suited body, lips pressed tight, walking steadily away.