Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

Something was making noise… Something was sounding… Clinging to that half-awake awareness with all her might, Hiroko rose painfully from the depths of exhausted, leaden sleep. She opened her eyes into pitch darkness, but the back of her head felt numb, and it suddenly seemed as though her entire body—pillow and all—had spun around in one swift rotation while she lay on her back. Even in her own familiar room, Hiroko couldn’t immediately orient herself.

While keeping her eyes open and listening intently, she realized the sound hadn’t been a dream. Sometimes cats would walk across the tin eaves and make loud noises—but this was different; a low, forceful thud was coming from the kitchen downstairs.

Hiroko pushed off the futon without a sound and stood up while slipping her arms into the haori draped near the hem. Where the sleeves of their dyed-patterned nightgowns overlapped lay Tamino, another colleague and fellow nursery worker, still asleep. Trying to feel her way out of the room in the dark, Hiroko inadvertently staggered. “What?… Should I light a lamp?”

Tamino’s voice came out slurred, thick with the half-awake, youthful haze of sleep. “...Wait...” It didn’t seem like a thief, but Hiroko’s guard remained unlowered. Since the tram workers’ dispute began in September, this nursery had joined in supporting the movement, and ever since veteran Sawazaki Kin was taken away, plainclothes officers had started coming at unexpected times. What—if they were to brazenly come upstairs saying something like, “Oh, I thought it was a burglar since no one answered,” that would be unbearable. Hiroko had another source of unease. Due to rent arrears, a dispute had arisen with the landlord. Ontakesan Ohyakusō. Fujii, who had recently hung a new sign reading “Second Branch of the Loyalty Association” beside that one, owned several small rental properties in the area and was notorious for hiring thugs to rough up tenants whenever he deemed there was no hope of collecting their overdue rent. It wasn’t an empty threat—he had actually stripped out the tatami mats and driven tenants from their homes.

Four or five days ago, that Fujii had come here as well. Fujii stood with a close-cropped head, wearing an Inverness cape with a fake sea otter collar—one sleeve flipped up over his shoulder—and one leg cocked in silk tabi socks whose stitching had come loose. “Can’t have you women getting uppity like this—dries up my livelihood, see? If you won’t clear out when told, I’ll clear you out myself.” “Ain’t a decent one among you Western-dressed bitches.” Though his words were gruff, his eyes gleamed lecherously. Wearing an apron over her skirt and soft jacket, with Hiroko kneeling there and Tamino’s careless figure absorbed in something facing away, he glared intently at them, lingering before finally leaving. Had they started harassing us again? Damn it! Partly driven by that thought, Hiroko suddenly threw open the small six-mat window roughly and looked down outside.

The tin roof, damp with night dew, lay bathed in moonlight; the flat, sunken expanse of that light caught Hiroko’s eye. The moon’s unblemished light—already risen high beyond sight—made the distant field beyond the night mist glisten with a watery, minute brilliance, settling that smoky, weightless vista directly before her eyes, while the streetlamp tilting at the edge of a broken bamboo fence dimly illuminated the thick pipe lying beneath it. The moonlight dissolved into the night mist and the murky reddish-yellow glow of the electric lamp mingled there, casting a jumble of somber shadows.

The night lay quiet over the poor, low-roofed neighborhood. Hiroko was about to close the storm shutters when a man hurriedly emerged from under the eaves on her side. He moved diagonally as if declaring "face first" over feet, waving his hand while looking up at the second-floor window. The late-night moon cast a cold light across half of his narrow face and the shoulder of his kimono-clad figure; Hiroko stared wide-eyed from deep within the window frame, but— “Oh! It’s you!” She let out a cry of recognition—it was him. As if that had been her cue, Tamino, who had already risen from bed, reached out and twisted on the electric light. In the sudden light, Tamino’s sleepy round face became even more crumpled.

“Mr. Ōtani? —What’re you doing coming here at this hour?” She had left the front of her nightgown open, exposing her plump, glossy kneecaps, and muttered irritably. “If there’s business, I’ll wake you again later, so go back to sleep now—you’ll catch a cold.” From the three-tatami space in the corner—where an old table cluttered with gathered odds and ends stood—exposed, ladder-like stairs led steeply down to the six-tatami room below. Hiroko groped her way through the darkness to turn on the ten-candlepower bulb there, passed through the four-and-a-half-tatami room—its sliding paper doors removed—and descended to the sink area. To save money, the kitchen light wasn’t on. As she rattled the rotten storm shutter at Mizuguchi’s place, from outside came a slightly impatient—

“Let me try...”

She tried to pull open the door.

“No good, no good. You need to lift this side first.”

As the door opened, Ōtani stepped into the earthen floor in one stride.

“Ah, I see—this thing’s a real hassle. On the contrary, it might actually be better for security this way.”

Then, blinking his eyes in his characteristically harmless manner, he chuckled softly—hu hu hu. “What’s going on, coming here at this hour?” “A request’s suddenly come up, you see.” “I thought I heard a noise and was looking, but you didn’t show yourself right away.” “My apologies, my apologies.” Ōtani laughed with a shrug-like gesture, “I was taking a leak.” He said in a low voice, sticking out his tongue. Ōtani’s errand was to request that someone from here attend the Yanagishima group meeting tomorrow morning. Just as dissatisfaction with the compulsory mediation lingered, the announcement of dismissals had each garage stirring once more.

“At eight o’clock—you just need to go meet Yamagishi, the Branch Manager, at his office. I know it’s sudden, but I’m counting on you, all right?” Hiroko had braided her hair and was squatting by the raised floor panel in a garish hand-me-down *meisen* haori that clashed with her usual modest style. “This is tricky...”

and she looked up at Ōtani lighting a fire in the vat.

“...Isn’t there someone from Kameido?” “On our end, Ms. Iida is going out to Hiroo.” “We had Usui handle that side.” “There’s Kinshibori, I hear.” ...Did he... go to ask about it... Hiroko stared at Ōtani with an odd grin; receiving her gaze head-on, Ōtani took a deep drag of his cigarette as if piecing together the circumstances, but— “No, he’s probably gone... He has gone.”

he said with a tone of conviction. Regarding Usui Tokio, all that was known came from his own claims of having once been involved in the movement around Kyushu; no one knew his true identity or background for certain. Before anyone knew it, he had begun frequenting the clinic, and when the union’s activities grew short-handed, this too had somehow turned into assisting the secretariat. He was a small man in his mid-twenties whose back gave the impression of slumped shoulders.

Hiroko was not one to dislike people easily, but whenever this Usui brought news and then—without talking or playing with the children—kept milling about nearby watching their every move, she felt an uncomfortable itchiness between her shoulder blades. There was something about him she could never instinctively grow accustomed to, and it filled Hiroko with a kind of oppressive mood. There were inconsistencies in what Usui said.

At a certain gathering, when Hiroko voiced her negative impressions of Usui, Ōtani—as was his habit—blinked his eyes vigorously, pursed his lips, and listened attentively while meticulously tearing apart an empty bat box in front of his cross-legged knees, but he offered no definitive opinion. Finally raising his head, “We should investigate,” he said. Since the streetcar incident had occurred, Ōtani had become responsible for support activities, and amid the busyness, the investigation had likely been left as it was. Between Hiroko and Ōtani, as they spoke of Usui, there lay all that had accumulated between their hearts.

Ōtani ground out the cigarette butt he’d dropped on the earthen floor with the heel of his worn-down geta,

“—Alright, I’m counting on you. Eight o’clock, Yamagishi, okay?” “……” Hiroko wrapped one arm high over her head and, with her left hand, tugged at the fingertips of that hand, her face a picture of bewilderment. “There’s the matter of the children’s styes—I’m at my wits’ end, truly.” “Hmm…” “It’ll be done before noon.” “We could do it after that, couldn’t we?” “If need be, we can do it at night—the clinic’s open until ten anyway.”

Hiroko wanted to address the styes that had spread due to the nursery’s staff shortage not through such methods, but in a way that would resonate more deeply with the parents’ feelings. In the evening, upon seeing the faces of the mothers stopping by to pick up their children, “Mom!” “Rokubō! I went to the teacher’s today and washed my eyes!” “It didn’t hurt one bit!” If told by their children’s eager voices, how different must be the warmth the mothers felt—even though it was the same thing.

Not only because Sawazaki had been arrested, but especially now, such consideration was crucial even for the mothers’ sentiments toward the nursery. To Hiroko, that necessity was clear.

It was only natural that Ōtani, caught up in his hectic activities, hadn’t noticed such things; after all, the various daily difficulties arising from their current support activities as a nursery were not matters to be resolved through casual conversations. “Well, I’ll manage somehow.”

Hiroko pressed both hands against her knees and slowly stood up as she spoke. “...Wandering around at this hour—are you all right?” “Well, it should be fine—it’s the third Sunday.” “—Well, I’ll be going.” “My apologies for waking you when you’d just managed to fall asleep.” Ōtani energetically went out and, “Hmph.” Stepping over the threshold, he turned his head toward Hiroko, “It’s already this bad.” He demonstratively exhaled a white breath into the night air. The moonlight dissolved in night fog now appeared even more quietly dense, intensifying the cold with a heavier presence than before. Splitting through it, a single swift beam of lamplight from this side streaked. Hiroko, her hands on the storm shutter, shuddered.

“Has there been any letter from Shigeyoshi-san?” “It’s been nearly two weeks since the last one—I wonder what’s happened.” “Since the war, conditions inside have worsened again.—When you see him, please give him my regards.” “Yes. Thank you.”

Hiroko nodded emphatically. Then, after intently listening to the clattering sound of Ōtani’s geta—Ōtani being both her husband Fukagawa Shigeyoshi’s old friend and the man who now held a guiding role for her—crossing the drainage plank, she closed the door and returned upstairs.

II

When she turned the corner of the alley, she noticed bicycles lined up in a row against the siding. Each had a small package tied behind it and were left with their front wheels aligned diagonally; on one of them, a small azalea pot had been meticulously secured with old Sanada cord. Approaching the morning thoroughfare scattered with green onion leaves in that direction, Hiroko recalled a certain phrase. The living conditions of workers in a country could be understood by how many bicycles they owned relative to its labor population—that was probably the gist of it. Before her now were lined up more than twenty bicycles belonging to the tram workers, but not a single one was new enough to have sparkling spokes.

At the entrance with four glass-paned doors, employees arrived in small groups, keeping mostly silent. Some stopped right before the entrance to take one last drag with gestures that looked like they’d burn their lips, then desperately crushed the butt against the ground before entering. One man plopped heavily onto the entrance threshold, spreading his coat’s hem as he sat down, then lifted each leg high in turn and leisurely untied his shoelaces.

Hiroko moved aside the shoes at her feet and rose on tiptoe,

“Um, is Mr. Yamagishi here, by any chance?”

She called out to the group clustered around the long four-mat table at the entrance. The figure who had been showing his back in a black coat while leaning on an elbow facing away turned around and saw Hiroko standing in the dirt-floored entryway. “Hey! Is the Branch Manager here?” He projected his voice toward the staircase entrance. “Oh.” “It’s someone here on business.” With weight pressed into his heels, someone began descending with thudding footsteps. Just then, three or four people who had been slowly ascending awkwardly moved aside on the middle steps, and down the remaining three or four steps came thud, thud, thudding a slightly chubby man in a high-collared shirt without an overcoat, his hair parted with pomade.

“Oh,”

With a tactful demeanor, he called out and approached Hiroko. Hiroko said she had inquired with Ōtani. “Ah, thank you for your trouble. Please come up.”

While Hiroko was taking off her shoes, Yamagishi stood behind her with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets,

“Won’t Mr. Ōtani be coming today?” he asked.

“It’s just me alone, but…”

“No, on the contrary, having the Madam do it would actually be more effective.” “Ha ha ha.”

When she was about to head toward the staircase entrance, Yamagishi casually—

“Well then…” He stroked his chin with one hand and stepped away from the passageway, stopping. “In what order shall we proceed?” Hiroko felt a peculiar sensation, as though she were about to give a speech. “As for your convenience, I don’t particularly mind either way—”

“Well then—shall we have you proceed first?”

Having said this quickly, Yamagishi himself took the lead and climbed up to the second floor. Three large and small rooms had been torn through. From the front decorative beam hung jet-black flyers. “Absolutely oppose the dismissal of 130 workers!” “Oppose issuance of bus transfer tickets! Support Conductor Demand” hung alongside another declaring “Absolutely oppose the 1,213,270 yen personnel cost reduction!” following forced mediation.

The morning sun was streaming in from the fully opened waist-high window on the left. Backlit by the clear early morning light that held little warmth, several people were lined up at the window frame, and one among them kept wriggling his thumb inside a sock as he explained something. From where Hiroko sat, behind the figures of these people who appeared dark against the backlight spread a wide cloudless sky, while on the adjacent slate roof could be seen ventilation pipe heads—four each in two rows—spinning round and round, round and round in the same direction at the same speed.

In the corner, perched facing this way on two chairs that for some reason were there—one man rested his chin on arms leaning against a crude bentwood rest while another jiggled his leg incessantly from a half-kneeling position. On the tatami mats was one who had embraced both raised knees and prostrated himself over them. One sitting cross-legged with hands thrust between his thighs shook his body. ——

Hiroko sensed something complex within the atmosphere around her. Beneath the room’s air—which seemed to proclaim itself thoroughly accustomed to meetings, unshocked by routine matters—she could detect an undercurrent of directionless unrest and unspoken expectations that had yet to coalesce into definite form. That restlessness was also evident in the thirty-something employee straddling a chair and jiggling his leg—his vigilant gaze never settling as he monitored every entrance and exit.

Before long, a tall employee with a compress wrapped around his throat came to the small desk at the front. The man remained standing as he checked his wristwatch, wound the knob, then spoke with the middle-aged employee who had been sitting cross-legged at the desk all along, vacantly propping his cheek on his hand. “Well then, I’ll begin.”

One of the men who had been straddling a chair stepped down and sat cross-legged on the tatami mats, while the other remained as he was. “Hey, close that, will ya? It’s freezing.” The one by the window turned up his coat collar.

“Now, we will convene the Fifth Group meeting.” The man who had fussily applied a compress to his throat appeared to be the group leader and conducted the meeting. “On the afternoon of the 26th of the month before last, during Chairman Kawano’s meeting with Oishi and Sato—despite our side’s vehement protests against the unjust dismissals of 127 individuals—the matter was summarily rejected. The details were promptly posted as you’re all aware.” “Today, I will report on subsequent developments and determine our Fifth Group’s stance. But first, since Labor Relief has sent a representative here now, I believe we should hear from them.”

Then, a seemingly family man in his forties—sitting cross-legged right next to where Hiroko was seated—exclaimed in an exaggerated loud voice,

“No objections!” he shouted while shaking his head and keeping his gaze downward.

“Well then… please proceed.” Hiroko adjusted her posture where she sat and was about to speak when— “Please come over here.”

The group leader indicated his side. As Hiroko moved to stand there with a faintly flushed face— “Like hell we object!”

someone in the back shouted hysterically. Laughter erupted.

While tightening the room's atmosphere by refusing to engage with it, Hiroko spoke in unadorned, clear tones about how this labor dispute was stirring concern even among ordinary workers' wives. She cited as examples the words of Hideko's mother, who was participating in the Shōki Tabi demonstrations. And she explained that this morning in Hiroo, they had already opened a mobile nursery in support of the family association. “I think Mr. Oe, who jumped in front of a train behind Keio University yesterday, was truly pitiable. “The newspapers wrote that he was usually a drunkard, but the account I heard directly from someone in Hiroo is different.” “It seems Mr. Oe’s wife had a chronic illness, so he unavoidably took many days off work, and they used that as an excuse to fire him—that’s how it came to this.” “If we had been stronger and had our own hospital, I think Mr. Oe wouldn’t have been fired because of his sick wife.” “It’s heartbreaking to think he didn’t need to die that way.”

“No objections!” “That’s right!”

Strong applause broke out. Hiroko, her face burning with a beautiful expression of concentration she herself was completely unaware of, “Please, everyone, do your best.”

she said. “Though our efforts may be meager, we are preparing as much assistance as possible.” “So don’t let it go to waste—please hold firm!” A sincere applause, devoid of the earlier frivolous mood, resounded for a long time.

“Now then, we will proceed to the report.”

Urged by everyone, Branch Manager Yamagishi, with one hand in his trouser pocket and in a speech-like tone, “This unworthy one hereby declares that, having taken up the responsibilities of Branch Manager alongside you all, I am resolved to perish on the front lines of this struggle without retreat.” “Therefore, I wish to immediately move to a frank public discussion regarding concrete methods for the struggle.” From around the time those words were spoken, the atmosphere in the hall grew visibly tense. “If there are any questions or opinions regarding the Branch Manager’s proposal, please present them now.”

…………

“Mr. Chairman!” At this moment, diagonally across from where Hiroko sat against the wall, a young employee raised his hand in a motion resembling someone stretching their elbow. “I would like to announce the Third Group’s resolution.”

“Please proceed.” “We, the Third Group, held a group meeting this morning and, standing on the anticipation that our demands will naturally be rejected, resolved to immediately go on strike and elected struggle committee members.” ……

A subtle stir began to spread through the hall. Absolutely no compromise on opposing the dismissal of 127 workers. The directive from headquarters—that they should enter strike preparations if the demands were not met—had already been issued several days prior. Yamagishi willfully ignored the atmosphere that had begun to stir like small but powerful waves, deliberately furrowing his brows in a show of vexation as he lit his cigarette with a match struck by his round hand. “Excuse me… uh, I’ve got a question—”

Dragged along by indecision, a single voice sluggishly broke the silence. “What’s this Third Group resolution about—" “I don’t get it—you saying we should move ahead just here without the whole line?” “That’s the Third Group’s position.”

The young employee answered briefly and fell silent.

“In that case,”

The man who had been speaking sluggishly suddenly straightened up as if switching to a confrontational stance and raised his voice provocatively, “I absolutely oppose that proposal!” Hiroko recognized that voice as the same mocking one that had jeered “No objections!” from behind when she had stood to leave earlier.

“No objections!”

Another voice followed.

“I’m against it too! Go ahead and try with just this half-measure! Absurd. We’ll be wiped out completely—then we’ll really have nothing left!” Hiroko’s entire attention was roused. Among those raising objections, there was a strangely unified atmosphere.

“Mr. Chairman!” “Mr. Chairman!” Two voices rose competing at the same time, the shriller one forcibly overpowering the other,

“I think that’s wrong,” he protested vehemently. “If you’d just consider February’s Hiroo strike, you’d understand. A partial strike is possible—in fact, conditions are ripe enough right now for it to spark a full-line walkout. Anyone who actually knows what’s happening on the ground should see that plain as day. Otherwise why would headquarters have given those orders in the first place?” “Mr. Chairman!”

A middle-aged man with fountain pens and Ever-Sharps protruding from his chest pocket said calmly, “I’m from Group One… but this is my personal opinion—I’m absolutely in favor of going on strike!” Having delivered each word with deliberate weight,

“However—”

In one swift motion, he skillfully drew everyone’s attention to himself. “However, if the entire line doesn’t rise up together, I’m absolutely against going on strike!” Hiroko felt something hot surge inside her chest and bit her lip. How cunningly these executives were manipulating psychological pressures to break their resolve. She painfully felt herself to be merely a guest with no right to speak at this meeting. Even when charcoal ignites into flame, doesn’t it start from one point before spreading through the whole? And yet——

Incited by the suggestive trickery of their wording, someone clapped twice—pat, pat—. “Without considering the balance of power and trying to strike over everything—that’s nothing but childishness.” “How the hell are we supposed to manage with just this section?!” “Mr. Chairman!”

A shrill voice insisted once more. “Even if we talk about balance of power, it’s all relative! Do you think there’s any balance under capitalism that’ll swing in our favor if we just sit back and do nothing? In fact, even up to compulsory mediation—if we’d just dug in our heels once and for all, we could’ve done it! Didn’t they just hand it over to the Amakudari Committee and get brushed off, so to speak?” “That’s right!”

“No objections!” “There’s even talk this time that headquarters secretly drew up a list of termination candidates and handed it over, isn’t there?” “Tch!”

Before and after the convention, over sixty "ideologically suspect" employees had been dragged off by police from each garage, and several labor relief committee members had been among them. It now became vividly clear that management’s scheme—having previously weeded out such stalwart elements—had been precisely this kind of premeditated strategy for when push came to shove. Hiroko found it increasingly galling. From the very outset of the dispute, in their interpretation of directives and policies, the majority of Tōkō executives had vigorously instilled in employees’ minds a defeatist mindset: either an all-line strike or no strike at all—one that would be meaningless even if launched. When situations grew complicated, such either/or thinking tended to arise everywhere. When Kameido Daycare overextended itself supporting municipal streetcar workers and parents began growing fearful, there too arose conflicting opinions—some arguing to completely cease strike assistance, others claiming it wouldn’t matter if they let one nursery collapse—and at that meeting, Ōtani pointed out how both positions were mistaken.

Under repeated crackdowns, among Tōkō’s workplace masses there remained no organizers who could pierce through this shady bargaining’s core and channel their energy into proper struggle—no vanguard leaders who should have stood at the forefront. This became clear even to Hiroko watching sidelined. The hall grew ever more chaotic through thickening cigarette smoke as absurd opinions and questions kept erupting. The strike absolutely had to happen. But this time—this time—they demanded it come with a hundred percent victory guarantee.

Just when she thought there might be something like that—what did it even mean, going out of her way to—

“I want to ask the Branch Manager—”

Then, someone asked what state socialism was. Hearing this, Hiroko initially thought the questioner was trying to draw out an easily digestible explanation about how state socialism—which ultimately used state power to safeguard capitalist profits—stood diametrically opposed to workers’ welfare. But instead, it concluded with nothing more than Yamagishi’s ambiguous response that omitted any explanation of class antagonisms, not even facing rebuttal. And,

“Mr. Chairman!” Next came a proposal that seemed to veer entirely off course. “Tōkō’s adopted ‘Down with fascism’ as our slogan, but I’m against it. The regulations state we’ll protect all employees’ economic interests regardless of politics or parties. Yet raising some slogan about overthrowing fascism flouts those very rules. So—”

“Until this gets sorted out, I ain’t paying another cent in union fees!” “Quit slickerin’ us around!” “The hell’s Shimoda good for?!” That was Tōkō’s infamous layabout exec—the one whose government boot-licking had even made the papers. “Pull out, you fascist YATAI hacks!”

“Mr. Chairman! Order in the hall!” “Everyone, please be quiet. Please speak one at a time!” The chairman had only offered this formal remark, while Branch Manager Yamagishi kept one hand thrust in his pocket the entire time—propped against the edge of the small desk with his cheek resting on it, heavy-lidded eyes closed—as if letting the hall remain in chaos whether he was awake or dozing. After the commotion had thoroughly exhausted itself with the crucial focus of debate being sidestepped and the collective mood growing listless and scattered, the chairman raised his sallow face as if sensing the tide had turned,

“Well then, since the time has now come...”

and called for a resolution. Yanagishima Garage had made the bizarre decision that they would immediately go on strike if anywhere initiated a strike action.

III

Exiting the office’s back door and walking through the tenement alley paved with coke slag, Hiroko felt an oppressive, unpleasant mood welling up within her. It was a complicated state of mind. Tōkō was doing nothing but suppressing the employees’ morale. Yet despite that, she had been maneuvered by the executives into serving as mere opening act—forced to speak about support efforts in a role that provided no real encouragement. That failure was now keenly felt. If Hiroko had possessed the resourcefulness to properly discern the situation and hold back her own speech, then perhaps—when the collective mood had grown so listless—it might have provided some stimulus to pull things together. Yamagishi had acted from the very start anticipating that outcome. When Ōtani said he wouldn’t come, Yamagishi laughed and said something flattering. That too made Hiroko’s face flush with humiliation. The reason Yamagishi hadn’t let Hiroko speak later was due to his worn-out political technique.

There was a newly built concrete bridge just before reaching the wide improved road. One lane was closed off, with construction materials still gathered there—cement barrels, rod stock, and closure lanterns embedded with red glass panes all tightly packed together.

On the sunny sidewalk where people could pass, two boys around seven years old were spinning tops—one in a brown jacket and rubber boots, the other in a straight-cut kasuri-patterned coat and also rubber boots, his close-cropped head bent over the game. Around the two small iron tops glinting in the sunlight as they spun furiously, the boys with ropes swung them with all their might—*swish, swish!*—spraying saliva as they whipped momentum into their own tops, ignoring everything around them.

Seeing this scene, Hiroko grew even angrier at both the meeting she had just left and at herself.

Slowing her pace and checking her wristwatch, Hiroko walked even more slowly as she opened her handbag and examined its inner compartment. The visitation permit she had someone obtain from the court about a week earlier was inside, folded into four with its edges frayed. Closing the clasp of her purse containing a mix of ten- and five-sen coins, Hiroko tilted her head once more in contemplation. But upon checking her watch again, she set off toward the streetcar stop at a brisk pace in her plain black shoes.

Shigeyoshi had been transferred to the Ichigaya detention center about half a year prior. He had been held by the police for over ten months. For the first six months or so, since Hiroko herself had been detained by the police, they naturally couldn’t meet; even after Hiroko returned, permission to visit Shigeyoshi was not granted. When Hiroko learned from that evening’s paper that Shigeyoshi had been transferred to detention and went to the court for the first time to obtain permission, she was told by the examining magistrate:

“Since the police don’t even acknowledge their own names, a man called Fukagawa Shigeyoshi might as well not exist for all we know.” “Well, given that we have ascertained the matter through various evidence, we will grant permission.” Shigeyoshi had been transferred with blank documentation.

The train there that turned back from the terminus was empty. Apart from an old man with a hunched back—who had chosen a seat on the sunny side, placed a large square white cotton furoshiki bundle beside him, sat down leaning his elbow on it while using the long nail of his extended little finger to dig out earwax—the passengers were sparse. By the front door, a middle-aged conductor leaned in a relaxed posture, taking out a notebook and occasionally licking the shortened pencil lead as he pondered something. Among the old-timers at the municipal tramway, quite a few dabbled in stocks. Even with a bag slung over his shoulder, as Hiroko watched that elderly conductor’s self-centered, hardened expression—withdrawn into his own solitary world like that—a passage from the first letter she had received from Shigeyoshi revived in her heart, imbued with infinite meaning. Shigeyoshi had informed her of the health regimen he was carefully following inside, and now there must have been changes outside as well. The gears of history do not transmit their faint sounds here, but regarding this point there is no concern whatsoever. He had written those words. There is no concern whatsoever. But I could not bring myself to feel any pride by narrowly applying those constrained words’ meaning solely to my own circumstances. Even if I were to interpret it solely in terms of my own situation—how could there be “no concern whatsoever”— It would be me. Even a single word of support—I can’t manage to speak it at the right moment. Such immaturity exists here and there.

When she noticed they had passed Ueno some time ago and looked around the car, Hiroko’s eyes widened anew at how the passengers’ attire—the luster of their complexions down to their very bone structure—had all changed from those who had boarded at Yanagishima initially. The tram jostled Hiroko east to west across Greater Tokyo, but as it approached Yamanote, the figures boarding and alighting—unlike Jōtō’s residents where even trees stood blighted by soot’s poison—were clothed in a suppleness of bearing, a scrubbed neatness, a polished smoothness.

Hiroko got off the train at Shinjuku 1-chome. And she emerged onto a cramped street lined with vertical signs of prison supply shops. Ahead, directly in front of her, loomed the prison’s main gate—its presence making the sky appear unnervingly vast. Outside the gate, emphasizing both the concrete wall’s height and its snaking length, there stood a bench like one might find at a small rural station. The canopy over this bench arched sharply upward as if a sudden gust had blown it up from beneath. It served no purpose in blocking either rain or wind.

As Hiroko came along this road, each time she looked up at the monotonously long straight line of the concrete wall—resembling a forest in its uniformity—and at the azure sky whose blueness felt more intense here than anywhere else in the city, she sensed an unnatural silence that constricted her chest like a vise. Crunching the gravel, Hiroko entered. It was probably to make people’s footsteps echo loudly. Gravel was spread everywhere, all around.

The waiting room, a separate building facing the inner courtyard, was divided into men’s and women’s sections. When she opened the glass door, the foul stench of coal briquettes struck her face nauseatingly. The room was relatively empty. A woman who appeared to be a former barmaid—wearing something like a crocheted wool haori over a disheveled topknot pinned with a celluloid side comb—sat with her knees drawn up, hands tucked into her sleeves, mouth slackly agape as she stared with eyes showing prominent whites. There were four or five others besides her.

Visitations were suspended from twelve to one o'clock. It was about fifteen minutes until the appointed hour of one o'clock. Hiroko bought ten-sen worth of sweets and nori tsukudani at the shop, then stood in the sunlit area outside the waiting room. In the inner courtyard, pine trees and other plants had been planted. The visitation room was located deep on the left side, but when Hiroko first came here, unfamiliar with the layout, she had almost headed there thinking it was the restroom. It had an appearance that made such mistakes unsurprising. When the sound of tires scattering gravel outside the gate rang out, the guard unlocked it with a special key, and from there, a single car entered the inner courtyard. Three or four men got out of the car and entered the separate building while receiving salutes. From a distance where she observed the scene, Hiroko recalled the story she had heard from others: when Shigeyoshi came here, his legs swollen from torture had lost their mobility, forcing him to climb the stone steps at the entrance on all fours.

She anxiously checked her watch, but not even five minutes had passed. The time spent waiting felt interminable, yet when the moment came to finally see his face and speak, they would lower the window with a curt "That’s enough" before she felt they’d exchanged more than a few words. The visits were exhausting due to both the prolonged anticipation and the intense tension that strained her nerves in such a brief time. The moment the visitation window opened, Hiroko could never forget Shigeyoshi’s gestures—how he would smile with a “Hey there,” leaning forward as if slowly rolling out his broad shoulders—nor the cadence of his voice saying “Take care now,” its ends always cut off by the descending shutter that threatened to fall at any moment. Even if a month had passed until their next meeting, the same warmth from the subtle expressions in Shigeyoshi’s eyes and around his lips that she had last seen remained etched in Hiroko’s heart.

Hiroko opened her handbag and peered into the small, cracked mirror. Then she wiped the dust off the mirror with her handkerchief, took out a different part of the handkerchief, rolled it tightly, and rubbed it firmly over her cheeks. Her somewhat rough cheeks took on a slight reddish tinge. Finally, the switch was flipped on the loudspeaker mounted to the waiting room wall, and it began to blare. When she opened the glass door and peered in, the women—straining to catch the shouts rendered indistinct by static, determined to hear them without fail—buried their chins deeper than ever into their scarves and pulled their sleeves tightly together.

“Ahem—we’ve kept you waiting.” “…Ahem, Number 28. Number 28, proceed to Cell Six.” “Cell Six.” “Ahem—next, Number 30.”

As the voice sounded, a fortyish, housewife-like woman—likely involved in an ideological case—rose from a campstool spread with a thin mat, rested one hand on her shawl, and looked up uncertainly at the black loudspeaker from below. “Ahem—Number 30. The person you wish to visit has been transferred to another prison.” Drowned out by buzzing static, the words “another prison” reached Hiroko’s ears just as they had said “that prison.” The meek, housewife-like woman involuntarily leaned forward, “Huh?”

“What?”

She tilted her head femininely toward the black loudspeaker and asked again. But the switch cut off with a pop, and the woman—making an indescribably perplexed gesture—looked toward Hiroko with that exact movement: one foot drawn back in a hem-adjusting sweep, precisely like a kabuki onnagata at her wit’s end.

Hiroko felt overwhelmed with sympathy.

“It seems he was transferred to another prison somewhere.” “Please go ask at the office—he was transferred from there.”

She pointed to the painted entrance of the two-story building. After waiting over an hour, Hiroko was finally able to speak with Shigeyoshi for two or three minutes. Hiroko pressed her chest against the railing’s crossbar until it hurt, asked after Shigeyoshi’s physical condition, relayed news of his father—bedridden from a stroke—then added as always: “I’m truly sorry the books you requested haven’t come in.” In the strained self-management of nursery life, there were times Hiroko lacked even train fare to go book-hunting. When funds allowed, time didn’t; when both aligned, she seized those moments to send care packages meeting a fraction of Shigeyoshi’s basic needs. Willing lenders rarely had books she wanted; likely owners generally hated lending. Here lay inconveniences beyond Shigeyoshi’s imagining.

Shigeyoshi, suddenly brought out for visitation and left standing abruptly in mid-air, had to recall various things at once; he awkwardly moved his eyebrows and shifted his feet while listing book titles, "But given your circumstances, Hiroko—you don’t need to push yourself too hard. Even if there are times when we can’t read books, we’re thinking of all sorts of useful things."

he said. With the weight of having something particular to convey, Hiroko began slowly—

“I had to go around Yanagishima this morning... That’s why it’s gotten so late.” “The nursery work has expanded so much that it’s even extending to adult matters now—so my long absence wasn’t because I was slacking off, you know.” “If the tram workers lose, there’ll be nothing we can do about it, right?” “That’s why.”

Having said that, she smiled with her eyes.

“Hmm.” Shigeyoshi, already poised to close the shutter, glanced at the guard gripping the cord to pull it, shifted his gaze directly to Hiroko’s face, and spoke with a forceful motion as if yanking down his heko-obi sash.

“If you were to become ‘sick,’ try to set aside some money so you don’t suddenly find yourself in trouble.” Hiroko instantly understood the full implications of Shigeyoshi’s words as deeply as their life circumstances allowed. Shigeyoshi had not really been talking about money. In the tram strike that had also drawn in Hiroko’s nursery, a time might come when they could no longer meet. Shigeyoshi understood this, and by understanding it, he encouraged and supported Hiroko.

Exiting the meeting area that resembled a cold communal toilet and beginning to head back toward the sunlit gate, Hiroko thought she too was walking across the gravel with the same gait as the other women who had finished their visits. I’m glad we met—but something that couldn’t be contained by such simple words remained lodged within Hiroko’s body. As she exited the gate, right there on the wide gravel area, a small monkey dressed in a short coat had been brought in. Surrounding the small monkey were two or three men in suits and guards with pistols hanging at their waists, standing and squatting as they laughed. Unlike the monkeys that cling to street performers’ backs, this small creature—wherever it came from—had black ears jutting from both sides of its head covered in brown downy fur, a bluish tail dragging across the sunlit gravel as it crouched, its wrinkled face bobbing up and down while its eyes darted restlessly, fidgeting as it nibbled on something.

“When you look at it like this, it’s quite cute, isn’t it? Ha ha ha ha.” It was a shabby, vulgar-looking monkey. The people who carried pistols toward humans could easily offer kind words and laugh at a monkey. Here, there existed a rule that prohibited all displays of amiability toward humans. But when it came to a monkey, laughing wasn’t a violation—

4

It was an afternoon several days later. Two babies were napping on the second floor. Meanwhile, as Hiroko folded diapers at the top of the stairs, Tamino—her geta clogs catching on her skirt—returned from outside, her footsteps distinct even from a distance. When she reached the side of the tile pipe shop and communal pump, “Hey—what happened to that sign? It’s flipped over!”

she exclaimed loudly.

Jirō, who had been playing in the front yard, “Ms. Iida, what’s going on?” “Huh? What’s up? What sign got flipped over?”

Five-year-old Sodeko, Hideko, and even toddling Gen crowded around Tamino. “There was a white triangular thing standing by the bridge, right?” “That’s fallen into the ditch!” The children all stood before the top of the stairs. Hiroko looked suspiciously,

“But—that wasn’t placed all the way at the edge like that!” As she said this, she too descended to the dirt floor.

The sign for Snake Hollow Proletarian Daycare—painted in black on a white background—should have been erected facing the street on the side where clay pipes were stacked, positioned more than six feet back from the ditch to catch the attention of passersby. “Look!—See? Who would do such a thing?” Sure enough, the sign lay hurled into the muddy ditch overgrown with withered grass, lodged there headfirst. “This morning it was perfectly fine.”

“Yeah, I didn’t notice it when I left.” The children lined up on the plank bridge, their faces showing astonishment as they stared wide-eyed, when Sodeko—being led by the hand by Tamino—suddenly flung up her bobbed hair and shouted. “Hey, that’s the sign my dad made!”

“That’s right. What a mean thing to do, huh?”

Hiroko slowly lowered one leg from beside the clay pipes, using the clump of withered grass roots as a foothold, crouching as low as she could while stretching out her hand to reach it. Even then, there remained a distance of about two feet to the sign standing upright like a shachi-hoko ornament.

“Hey! If you fall in too, I’ll be really upset!”

“I’m fine.”

At that moment, a young laundry worker from across the road stopped his bicycle and watched curiously as the women and children made a commotion.

“Well—without a rope, that’s impossible.”

While brushing the mud from her hands, Hiroko also gave up, “When Sode-chan’s father comes, we’ll have him pick it up, okay?”

On the path back with everyone, Jirō persistently asked. “Hey, who did it? Why would they throw it away like that?” Tamino, still fuming, squared her red cheeks and strode forward while pulling Sodeko by the hand, “It must be Fujii’s thugs. They’re in cahoots—who knows what they’ll do next!”

It was clear this was no whimsical act by some drunkard. “Even the pump incident—it’s obvious that spy’s the one who stirred it up!” The morning two days prior, Kogura Tokiko—a university student temporarily helping at the nursery—had been washing diapers at the wellside. No sooner had the sound of running water begun than the glass door of the tile pipe shop's kitchen entrance opened. Then, the owner Masasuke appeared,

“If you keep using it so recklessly, we’ll be in trouble.” “This well ain’t just for your place alone! Keep hoggin’ it all for yourselves like this and we won’t even get time to rinse our rice proper!” Masasuke’s voice carried over. “I’m terribly sorry.” When Tokiko—carrying the freshly washed diapers—moved toward the clothesline, she met Hiroko’s gaze through the window of the four-and-a-half-mat room and smiled with an imploring look, unaccustomed though she was to such brusque treatment. Hiroko understood Tokiko’s state of mind perfectly yet chose to say nothing.

Hiroko went up to the house ahead with a preoccupied expression.

“Well then.” “You’ve worked hard. How did it go?” Tamino took a small kraft paper bag from the pocket of her skirt—sitting with her legs splayed like a kite’s—and shook it out one by one, emptying three nickel coins and eleven or twelve copper coins onto the tatami mats.

“Mrs. Yoda was being difficult—said she wouldn’t do a second round.” “That’s all?!” A collection bag had been passed around at the daycare to gather funds for the City Tram Dispute. “Since it’s not their direct concern, no matter how you explain it, they just don’t get it.” “Even though we don’t know if we’ll actually win, some think it’s pure foolishness to risk oppression for nothing.”

Within the City Tram employees, several Labor-Farmer Relief Association groups had formed. When Snake Hollow found itself compelled to purchase infant beds, the groups in Yanagishima took the lead in collecting funds. With that money, the three rattan beds now present were installed. The fathers and mothers here who worked at Fujita Kōgyō, Inoue Seijū, Shōki Tabi, Kōjō Insatsu, and similar places became connected with the City Tram workers through these circumstances. Partly owing to their sense of neighborly obligation, nearly three yen had been gathered during one fundraising drive. However, the mothers generally made scant progress in activities like collecting funds for the City Tram employees at their respective workplaces, and Ohana-san from Tsunaya had managed to gather less than twenty sen from Kami-san in the same tenement—whom she’d invited to the consumer cooperative’s flash sale—and that was all.

Hiroko spoke about their nursery's experiences in such matters at a faction meeting that had been taking place for several months. That day, matters concerning Kameido were also discussed. In Kameido, a special parents' meeting had been organized to support the activities. Then a specially selected young person came and earnestly explained the necessity of worker solidarity - that even though their workplaces differed, they must unite as laborers who shared common protections through their status as workers. The parents listened attentively from beginning to end, and a considerable amount of funds were collected on the spot.

However, before long, an unexpected result had emerged. Children began disappearing one by one until finally five from the tenement stopped coming to the nursery altogether. “It was a mistake to explain everything all at once like that.”

The long-eyelashed nursery worker there offered her critique as a sweeping indictment.

“From what they’ve finally managed to hear, it’s like this.” “Their reasoning was too sound—if they were dragged into the labor dispute, there’d be no way to refuse.” “So apparently, they’ve decided that if it comes to that, they’ll pull their children out now out of fear for their own necks.”

“I see.” Ōtani let out a thoughtful groan once, then laughed. “Their reasoning was so sound there’d be no refusing them, huh? “Hmm. “So, what—are they really not going to send their children anymore after this?” “Yes. “Right now, they aren’t coming.”

In Snake Hollow too, after Sawazaki Kin was taken away by the police, there had been parents—two or three of them—who stopped sending their children. One was working at Inoue Seijū.

The wife’s reasoning had been as follows. “Well, even living like this, you’ve got social obligations to keep up with. Every now and then you’ve gotta go visit some decent household or another, right? So when I gotta take Gyōbō along, you know how you’ve got appearances to keep up in public? But that kid just hollers, ‘Mama, this house is bourgeois! So they’re the enemy, right?’—right out loud like that. I just get so embarrassed, I tell ya!”

Such incidents had not occurred all that recently.

This was the deviation that had emerged when this place—one of the proletarian daycare centers scattered here and there—had only just begun its unified activities.

Hearing the baby’s fussing sounds, Hiroko went upstairs to the second floor. Ohana-san’s little one—nearly ten months old but showing no signs of healthy growth—grimaced her small face, shaking her head as she strained out a half-whimpering cry in her restless sleep. Hiroko changed the diaper. There was stool showing signs of indigestion. Having been told by the doctor to feed goat’s milk in addition to breast milk, Ohana-san would give it to the child on days when her earnings continued, leave the baby here at the daycare, and go out to work nonstop.

While changing Taabo’s diaper, below the window, “Listen here—this is our corp!” A high-pitched, spirited voice—Sodeko’s—rang out. As Hiroko pulled out the infant’s bed close to the second-floor railing to let them sunbathe while looking down below, at the corner of the vacant lot before the entrance stood a broken swing—gripping the severed end of its rope, Sodeko swung it with a motion as if hauling something in. Jirō, wearing a jumper extended with makeshift patches of brown and blue yarn to add length, planted himself in rubber boots and watched from the side.

For a while, Jirō watched like that, and Sodeko—from beneath her black bob cut, its bangs grown so long they nearly poked her eyes, giving her a fierce look—continued her motions while occasionally casting an overly earnest glance his way, until finally Jirō blurted out gruffly, “Hey, there’s no such thing as a nameless factory!” he said. Sodeko looked at Jirō as if glaring. And though she was pondering this, she soon continued moving her hands without stopping,

“It’s a swing factory!” He responded with a creaking noise. Hiroko, who had been looking down, laughed silently with her mouth wide open. “Here—it’s a machine!” With her characteristically earnest expression, Sodeko pressed her free left fingertips against the swing post’s cracked wood grain and showed it to Jirō. This time Jirō stood wordlessly beside Sodeko. Then he too grabbed another severed rope end and swung it with a rougher rhythm than hers. Just when it seemed he’d keep swinging, Jirō—with boyish agility—nimbly seized the swaying rope’s tip and drew his legs up. When about to stop, he’d kick the ground with his rubber boots and swing it back—swing, swing. Jirō’s feet flailed wildly—sometimes barely scraping earth, other times missing by a hair’s breadth to cut through empty air.

Hiroko found herself drawn in and, as if she were pushing Jirō’s back herself, unconsciously began moving her chin in rhythm.

Sodeko switched her grip on the rope but kept her eyes fixed, observing what Jirō was doing. Growing bored with that, Jirō disappeared somewhere for a while; when he reappeared, he was dragging a warped plank still caked with mud on one side. He dragged it under the broken swing’s rope and tied it to the rope—attempting to fashion something swing-like—but the rope proved too thick, the plank too thin and wide for his small hands chapped from winter cold. In an awkward posture that brought his knees into full use as he tried repeatedly to secure it—the plank slipping from his grasp again and again—Jirō strained in silence, laboring mightily. Here lay Jirō’s efforts: at home and at the nursery alike, not a single proper toy to his name. Hiroko began to feel she couldn’t just watch from above any longer. I wonder what happened to Tamino.

Thinking this as she came downstairs，Hiroko was startled—Oh? Usui had already arrived unnoticed．Facing away，he leaned against a pillar opposite Tamino．At the sound of Hiroko’s footsteps，Tamino looked up．Without turning around yet fully conscious of her presence，Usui unhurriedly folded something before him and slipped it into his indigo jacket’s inner pocket． Hiroko began moving toward their four-and-a-half-mat room but halted．Then she stepped into whatever geta lay handy and went outside．

V

At night after sending all the children home and things grew quiet, Tamino and Hiroko devised ways to make them as eye-catching as possible—minding font sizes and adding borders—as they cut mimeograph stencils into large and small square flyer shapes. The nursery’s finances had deteriorated significantly since they began supporting the city tram strike. Hiroko and the others decided that rather than only regularly taking in children who came every day as before, they would now accept any child on short notice—even if only for a snack fee—to accommodate mothers with urgent errands, and that they would make the nursery’s work more accessible to the masses. At the same time, they had previously maintained sustaining members for the nursery separately from labor relief among progressive household women in the general public; they would now expand that aspect as well. Even after cutting the stencils, there was no mimeograph machine on hand. They had to go all the way to the clinic to print them.

The next day, as Tamino was about to head out in her usual skirt and geta, Usui arrived and,

“Let me see?” He took the rolled-up stencil from Tamino’s hand, examined it, and handed it back,

“Over there—they’re probably using it right now,” he remarked with the air of someone intimately familiar with every department’s operations. “Oh! How exasperating,” Tamino shot back. “Did you come all this way just for that?”

Usui did not answer that, “If it’s just something like that, I think we could handle it at a place I know—” “Oh! If there was such a place, you should’ve said so sooner!” “Let’s go there, okay? That’s fine, right?”

“I think tonight should mostly work out...” In Usui’s manner of speaking to the honest and guileless Tamino, and in that intimidating attitude Hiroko had unwittingly witnessed when she came downstairs from the second floor some days prior, there flowed something calculated.

After going out with Usui and properly completing the mimeographing work, Tamino had brought it back, but four or five days later, she suddenly brought something up in passing.

“Port Lap—I’d always thought it was Western liquor, but... that’s not right, is it?”

It was one evening. Tamino lowered the lamp and sat mending a hole in her sock,

“I might end up leaving here before long.” She muttered as if to herself. It was a night of fierce wind, and Hiroko too had her desk out under the same lamp and was examining the account books. While continuing to write numbers without looking up, Hiroko felt perfectly natural— “Hmm.” She acknowledged Tamino’s words. “Is there some better opportunity waiting for you?” Tamino had worked in factories until about three months prior, when she had been dismissed from Yama Electric due to her union involvement. “I was told to come to the union secretariat, but I prefer the workplace.” She had said she’d get back in, and that was why she was helping out here temporarily.

Looking down, Tamino pulled at the tangled thread with a clumsy, youthful roughness,

“It’s still not clear yet, though.”

After a pause,

“Mr. Usui—what he’d been waiting for finally came through, and he’s so pleased…” Hiroko involuntarily raised her head and, while looking at Tamino—who kept her gaze lowered—made a gesture with her free hand as if slowly twisting her own lower lip. Tamino remained looking down at the mending in her lap.

“He made…” Various commonplace conjectures rose in Hiroko’s mind. In any case, there was no doubt Usui had established contact with the party organization.

“But that matter and you leaving here are separate issues, aren’t they?” Tamino did not respond directly to that. Half-absorbed in her own thoughts, she muttered after a while. “There seem to be so few women who are useful, and everyone’s having trouble with it, aren’t they?” With those words, it seemed to Hiroko that the course of Tamino’s thoughts—which did not tell the whole story—had been vividly illuminated. “This time—isn’t it the workplace?”

“...”

Hiroko felt her own complicated affection surge forth toward the young, honest Tamino. Wasn’t it possible that Tamino, having likely been told something by Usui, was now considering taking on a certain role she believed held more proactive value than her workplace activities?

As for Hiroko, she had long held various doubts about the roles—housekeeper or secretary—into which young female activists were so often expediently drawn. Hiroko continued to think with a gesture as though twisting her lower lip, then slowly said. “Over there, they apparently consider it improper when they make female comrades cohabitate under titles like ‘housekeeper’ or ‘secretary’ and even engage in sexual relations with them—or so I read somewhere.”

Among Hiroko and her comrades, when they said “over there,” it always meant the Soviet Union.

“Hmm.”

This time Tamino raised her face. She looked at Hiroko with eyes that sharply lifted her brow ridges as if about to speak, but stayed silent and kept working her needle.

Eventually, having finished mending the socks, Tamino began writing addresses on kraft envelopes while flipping through the membership ledger. Night deepened, and when the wind struck, the tin awning clattered. When that winter wind subsided, a silence fell over everything so profound one could sense the road freezing. Tamino was gripping the fountain pen with its nib oddly bent as she wrote. The worn-down pen and the slippery surface of the paper ground against each other, squeak, squeak, making noise.

As she continued working while listening to that squeak-squeak sound, Hiroko’s mind was drawn to a particular scene. In houses with six-tatami and four-and-a-half-tatami rooms stood karakami sliding doors painted with pines against distant mountains. At this kitchen counter here, Hiroko had been writing something. Dawn was already approaching. When Hiroko—exhausted and unable to organize her thoughts—grew utterly frustrated, from beyond those karakami doors came the squeak-squeak of a pen exactly like what she heard now. Even from this side of the doors, it was a sound that inevitably made one sense both the uniform speed of characters being written and the vigorous momentum of thoughts flowing unimpeded. Hiroko stopped her hands and listened joyfully to the sound. Then, through the karakami door—

“Hey.”

Hiroko called out to Shigeyoshi. “What is it?” “...Please don’t go demonstrating.” As Hiroko stood alone with a faint smile playing at her lips, observing the situation, Shigeyoshi—apparently failing to grasp her words in that instant—seemed about to straighten his posture behind the karakami door. But soon, “Oh, come on!” He laughed. “That’s not really my style.” Soon, the squeak-squeak sound began again— To Hiroko, Tamino’s future life—as a woman who would come to occupy a class-based position—felt passionately intertwined with each joy and sorrow she herself had experienced.

This was from the time when Shigeyoshi had been arrested and Hiroko was detained by a different police station. From the window of the second-floor Tokkō room, Hiroko spotted a mother sparrow building a nest in the tips of hinoki cypress trees growing within the police compound. Hiroko involuntarily,

“Oh, poor thing! Building a nest in a place like this...”

she said.

Then a man with a thick beard who was there retorted, “What’s so pitiable about it?! It knows it’s being safely protected.”

Having said that, he leered at Hiroko up and down, “You should just pop out a kid. Bet you’d dote on it—I can practically see it now.” Hiroko fixed her gaze directly at the man’s face.

“Return Fukagawa.” she said. The man fell silent. At the end of the summer when Hiroko had just returned and begun living at the nursery, a friend of Ohana-san’s suffered a major injury at the worksite and was carried off to the hospital.

After leaving the little one at the nursery and laying them down in the four-and-a-half-tatami room below, Hiroko read a book beside them while fanning away mosquitoes with an uchiwa fan. Eventually, the little one woke up and started crying inconsolably. The baby was crying so hard that sweat beaded on its nose tip—Hiroko had an idea! Ah!—and even as she delighted in this sudden inspiration, “There now—how’s this? You won’t cry anymore now—will you?”

As she said this, Hiroko opened the front of her white blouse and pressed her breast against the mouth of the wailing baby. The little one had been frail since birth—a child with sallow skin and bloodless soles—but now opened their mouth into a thin red ring, fumbling until finally catching Hiroko’s nipple between their lips only to immediately push it back out with their tongue and wail even more violently than before. Three or four times Hiroko repeated this, until finally giving up and—at her own wits’ end—addressed the child as one would to someone old enough to understand.

“Oh dear, this is a problem. But it’s not Auntie’s fault, little one.”

A little over an hour later, Hokkaido-born Ohana-san returned. “I’m sorry about that.” “Phew, I can’t take this.” “What in the world is this heat?” Ohana-san, standing as she was, undid her obi, stripped off her large-patterned yukata, and draped a wrung-out hand towel over her shoulders now clad only in an underskirt, “There now, you little crybaby!”

She pressed her long-drooping black nipple against him. With a snort, the little one latched onto it. Even Hiroko felt relieved—a look of relief appeared on the baby’s face.

While peering at the scene from the side, Hiroko recounted the earlier incident. Ohana-san wiped the sweat at her hairline with a hand towel she’d carelessly draped over her shoulder, “Of course he wouldn’t suck. After all, if it’s not milk straight from the breast, it’s cold—he’d hate that.”

Hiroko could not forget the events of that night. The fact that her own nipples—those of a woman who had never given birth—were cold. And there was Ohana-san—visibly robust in physique—struggling to make the malnourished baby, whose two small feet emerging from the diaper had soles as pale as death, suckle at breasts that offered nothing but warmth. As if two portraits of women’s sorrow and indignation within this society were present there, they became imprinted upon Hiroko’s heart.

That night, after getting into bed and turning off the light, Hiroko said to Tamino in a casual, calm tone.

“You mustn’t let vague personal entanglements squander your promising qualities and drive on trivial things.” “…………” “I know this sounds meddlesome, but we can only truly judge people through shared work… don’t you agree?” “Don’t you think?” “You and Mr. Usui haven’t undertaken any proper work together yet—I can’t fathom his true nature…”

There was a rustle as Tamino shifted in her futon. After a long moment, Tamino said in an honest tone, “Well… I guess you’re right.” Hiroko heard her let out a slow sigh.

Six

Early in the morning, the jurisdictional Special Higher Police came to the nursery. They wandered aimlessly around the area,

“Toyono will be coming, right?”

they scrutinized the footwear in the dirt-floored entryway. Hiroko and the others had never heard of anyone named Toyono.

“What do you mean you don’t know? “Don’t lie! We’ve got someone who saw you answering their communications!” It was clearly a baseless accusation, and they were about to leave just like that when—

“Hey, what’s that?!”

When they saw the walking stick’s tip pointing at it, there stood the nursery’s signboard—the one that had been knocked into the ditch earlier and now stood re-erected. “What do you mean—isn’t it perfectly obvious?”

Tamino came out and said.

“It’s been standing there for a whole year now.” “Who said you could put this up?” Tamino said with evident annoyance, “But it’s standing right there! “Here it is, right here—”

Just as she was about to say this, the man cut her off, “How should I know?” he said with an unnervingly meaningful tone. “If we decide it’s not here, then it isn’t here at all. As for the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation—they may think they exist, but as far as we’re concerned, they don’t.” Tamino spat on the ground once the man had left and said, “Tch! How revolting!”

Around two o'clock the following afternoon, as Hiroko drafted a news bulletin on the second floor, she heard the heavy, deliberate footsteps of someone climbing the stairs step by step. The footfalls were unfamiliar. When she turned around, pen still in hand, there stood Inaba's landlady in her Shōki-patterned tabi, climbing up with a furoshiki bundle dangling from her arm. A daikon radish protruded from the bundle.

“Oh, it’s you, Auntie… Why? Do you need something?” “Didn’t Mr. Ōtani come here?” “He hasn’t come.” She had arranged to meet Ōtani that night. Inaba’s landlady peered about with uncharacteristically sharp eyes,

“So it really happened after all?” Hiroko stood up from her chair at a speed she herself didn’t recognize.

“What’s wrong?” “I saw it happen.” There was something in the tone of her voice that chilled Hiroko. Because her household had drawn duty in the kō association rotation, she had taken the day off for shopping. When she turned onto the main street from the station toward this direction, she spotted ahead a man who looked like Ōtani walking with another young man. Inaba’s Landlady followed from behind, thinking to call out if it was indeed him. At the radio shop’s corner, the younger man broke away. After passing two alleyways, a man in Western clothes emerged beside the candy store—then two more appeared from nowhere, flanking Ōtani front and back.

“Hey!” In that moment—as someone shouted, as Ōtani tried to slip away, and as those three men swiftly surrounded him and a brief scuffle broke out—all of it flashed before Inaba’s Landlady’s eyes like swift, sharp, soundless lightning. Because they weren’t heading further ahead but turning back toward the station area, Inaba’s Landlady hid herself under the eaves, covering half her face with her sleeve. What filled her vision was the figure of a man surrounded from left, right, and behind, his wrists locked in handcuffs. Yet despite all that, she said it was indeed Ōtani who came calmly adjusting the front of his kimono with his clumsy hands.

When Hiroko finished listening, her throat tightened, and she felt strangely unable to speak. For a while, she kept her right hand—still clutching the pen—pressed against her mouth, but then asked in a parched voice: “Did Mr. Ōtani have anything with him?” “Well, I did think something was off—he was carrying something like a small bundle, I believe.” “The man who left earlier—what was he wearing? Western clothes?” “What do you mean, Western clothes? Why, it was that common student’s kasuri cotton—probably.”

Hiroko’s pupils narrowed to piercing slits. Kasuri... kasuri. Usui wears nothing but kasuri. But—

"You didn't see that person's face, did you?" "But you see, he'd already turned the corner ahead…"

Stepping over every other step, Tamino came climbing up from below.

“Did you hear?” Above her red cheeks, Tamino’s eyes glittered fiercely.

“Aren’t they coming this way?”

Inaba’s Landlady, as though intuitively sensing something drawing near, shifted her anxious gaze from Hiroko’s face to Tamino and back to Hiroko. Hiroko noticed that, “It’s all right!”

She shot Tamino a meaningful look.

“This is a nursery, you see. If they try anything funny here, well, the mothers won’t just sit quietly by.”

Even though she wasn’t sweating, Inaba’s Landlady kept wiping around her nostrils with her striped apron twisted around her fingers. “Do they think the proletariat are pushovers? Comin’ at us like this?!”

As Inaba’s Landlady went downstairs, Tamino—as though she’d been waiting—swung her strong arms and dragged the storage chest out from the cupboard. And, carefully disposing of unnecessary scraps of paper, Tamino—

“I’ll be damned if they think they can ransack everything down to here.”

she muttered.

She couldn't discern. When the Soviet Friends' Association expanded to workplaces across each district and workplace-based selections for Soviet observation groups began, their activities became more restricted. She hadn't entirely failed to anticipate that repercussions from both the city tram support activities and Ōtani's department's involvement would reach the nursery. She called a certain location and sent Tamino out to have them relay information to necessary places. When Shigeyoshi had been arrested, Hiroko had believed herself perfectly composed—yet while descending the familiar stairs at Ōtani's house, she struck her forehead hard against a wall beam halfway down, twice. The gaze of Ōtani who had silently watched those faint scars. And then,

“Well, eat something before you go.” With practiced thoughtfulness and composure—the kind honed through years of mentorship—Ōtani guided Hiroko to sit at the low dining table. When she recalled the countless ways he had helped her grow through their work, a bitter frustration at his arrest quivered through her stomach. Once, Hiroko had heard someone recount how Ōtani had narrowly escaped capture by climbing a tree during a close call. Amused, she later chattered about this rumor to Shigeyoshi,

“Did that really happen?” she asked. Shigeyoshi briefly looked at Hiroko’s face but did not directly confirm or deny whether it had happened, merely—

“He pulled off quite the swift maneuver.”

He answered and laughed cheerfully. Hiroko would recall for years to come the reluctance in Shigeyoshi’s reply at that moment, feeling something engraved upon her heart. The depth of Shigeyoshi and Ōtani’s bond went far beyond merely exchanging personal rumors about each other; Hiroko had recently come to grasp how such friendships served as crucial, invisible springs propelling history forward—their true value becoming clearer to her by degrees.

But was it truly inevitable that Ōtani had to be arrested? When Hiroko considered this, she felt there was something frustrating about Ōtani’s approach too. For instance, whenever she heard mention of "the splashed-pattern man," the figure that rose in her mind was Usui. If that had been the same splashed-pattern garment Inaba’s Landlady saw— When Hiroko voiced her suspicion—terse in wording yet thick with implication—Ōtani had dismissed her concerns with relative nonchalance. But did he possess any objective basis for his absolute certainty that such a thing was impossible?

In the sequence of events surrounding this incident, there was something frustrating for Hiroko.

A mere day later, Tamino was taken from the nursery.

When Hiroko returned from the clinic where she had gone to get deworming medicine for the children, Jirō and Sodeko were standing at the ditch bridge looking this way. When they spotted Hiroko in the distance, the two children joined hands and ran toward her with all the strength they could muster. The instant Hiroko saw the children’s condition—why?—fire! —she mistook it for a fire. From her side too, she found herself breaking into a trot. Grabbing onto Hiroko’s skirt the moment they met, Jirō—

“Hey! Listen!” Jirō gasped, out of breath. “Ms. Iida’s been taken away!”

“When?” “Just now!” “What about Mr. Ogura?” “He’s here.” That morning’s newspaper had announced the termination of the city tram labor dispute.

Tamino stood reading the newspaper she had spread out, but after setting it down once, she picked it up again, “That we had to learn about this through Buru Shin only this morning—how infuriating.” Tamino said. That straightforward expression might as well have been Hiroko’s own feelings. Ohana-san, hearing that story, “Oh dear, I’ve gone and troubled the neighbors something awful. Because of the strike, even if it was just a single sen, we collected it all in a bag… you know?”

Tamino had been preparing until just moments ago to print flyers explaining to the parents who had contributed to the fund that the labor dispute had not been lost because the employees failed to demonstrate their full strength.

Ogura, upon seeing Hiroko enter, “Ah, thank goodness!” He moved forward as if reeled in.

Two Special Higher Police officers came as if nothing were amiss and, without properly saying a word, suddenly stormed up to the second floor. Immediately after, when Tamino followed them up and came back down, one of the Special Higher Police officers was holding something printed with the title "Red Flag" in red ink. Then he struck Tamino across the face.

“Quit playing dumb—you’re a party member! They said Ōtani spilled everything… then they beat him senseless!”

While saying this, Ogura’s eyes filled with tears.

Hiroko found herself speaking in a harsh tone, “That’s a lie.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. Documents that had no business being in this nursery were being fabricated elsewhere and used as pretexts. Hiroko had heard this same tactic had been employed during the crackdown on the Proletarian Cultural League too. While encouraging Ogura, Hiroko wrote on a large sheet of white paper about Sawazaki Kin—now held without cause for nearly three months in a police detention cell—and Tamino, who had just been dragged away. She hung it from the lintel at the stairway’s top where it would catch every entering eye.

Whether this brief respite she had found would last until nightfall or persist into tomorrow—Hiroko couldn't begin to guess. She went up alone to inspect the second floor. The three-tatami space around the table lay in disarray. Beneath it on the matting, a pen shaft had rolled down violently from above and remained stabbed into the floorboards. Quietly extracting it, Hiroko turned the object over in her hands as she devised a plan: that evening, when parents came to collect their children, they would hold an impromptu meeting right there. Then she descended and entrusted Ogura with a package—inside lay a single undershirt for Shigeyoshi in his prison cell.