Pathway to Japanese Literature

I Something was making noise... There was a sound... Clinging to it with all the strength of half-awakened consciousness, Hiroko gradually and painfully emerged from the exhausted depths of deep sleep.

She opened her eyes in pitch darkness, but with the back of her head feeling numb, she suddenly felt as though her entire body—still lying face up on the pillow—had spun around in one swift rotation. Even though this was her own long-familiar room, Hiroko couldn't immediately discern which direction her head was facing.

Keeping her eyes open and straining her ears, she realized the sound hadn’t been a dream. Sometimes cats walking on the tin eaves would make loud noises, but this was different—a low, forceful sound was coming from downstairs near the kitchen.

Hiroko pushed aside the futon without making a sound and stood up while slipping her hand into the haori draped near the hem. Near where the sleeves of the dyed-pattern nightgown overlapped, her colleague and fellow nursery worker Tamino lay sleeping. Trying to feel her way out of the room, Hiroko unintentionally staggered.

“Huh?... Should I turn on the light?” Tamino’s voice came out slurred with the half-awake drowsiness of youth. “Wait…” Though she didn’t think it was a burglar, Hiroko’s nerves remained taut. Ever since the streetcar dispute had begun in September, this nursery had joined the support efforts, and after veteran worker Sawazaki Kin had been taken away, plainclothes officers had started coming at unexpected times. If someone were to brazenly come upstairs saying something like “What’s this? No answer—thought it was an empty house,” that would be unbearable. Hiroko had another anxiety as well. A dispute had arisen with the landlord over rent arrears. Ontakesan Ohyakusō. Fujii, who had recently hung a new signboard reading “Chūseikai Second Branch” next to that existing sign, owned several small rental properties in the area and was notorious for hiring thugs to raid tenants whenever he deemed there was no prospect of collecting overdue rent. It wasn’t an empty threat—he had actually stripped the tatami mats and driven out tenants.

Four or five days earlier, that Fujii had come here as well. Fujii had a close-cropped bare head, threw one sleeve of his Inverness coat—with its imitation sea otter collar—over his shoulder, and set his feet clad in silk tabi socks, their stitching visible, slightly apart. “You women—if you keep getting uppity like this, we’ll be left high and dry. If you say you can’t pay up, we’ll make sure you’re cleared out.” “Women who wear Western clothes—there’s not a decent one among ’em.” While speaking in a rough tone, his eyes gleamed with lechery. Hiroko, wearing an apron over her skirt and soft jacket as she knelt there, and Tamino’s careless figure facing away while occupied with something—Fujii leered at them repeatedly before finally leaving. Was he starting to harass them again? Damn it! Partly driven by this feeling, Hiroko abruptly threw open the small window of the six-mat room and looked down outside.

The tin roof, wet with night dew, was illuminated by the moon; the flatly sunken spread of that light caught Hiroko’s eye. The unseen moon, already risen high in the sky, cast its unblemished light through the night-misted air—making the distant field beyond sparkle with a watery, granular shimmer while settling that hazy, weightless vista right before her eyes—as the streetlamp tilting at the edge of a broken bamboo fence dimly illuminated the thick clay pipe lying beneath it. Moonlight dissolved in the night mist and the reddish-yellow murky electric light intertwined there to cast a gloomy tangle of shadows.

The night of the poor, low-roofed neighborhood lay still in sleep. Hiroko was about to close the storm shutters when a man hurriedly emerged from under this side’s eaves. As if to say "face before feet," he angled himself diagonally and, while looking up at the second-floor window, waved his hand. The midnight moon cast a cold light on the narrow half of his face and the shoulder of his kimono, and Hiroko stared wide-eyed from deep within the window frame, but— “It’s you!” she exclaimed. As if she had been waiting for that signal, Tamino—who had risen from her futon—reached out and turned on the light. In the sudden brightness, Tamino’s sleepy round face crumpled further.

“Mr. Ōtani? —What are you doing coming here at this hour?”

Parting the front of her nightclothes and exposing plump, glossy kneecaps, she muttered irritably. "If there's something to do, I'll wake you again, so go back to sleep now—you'll catch a cold."

From the three-tatami area in the corner—where an old table cluttered with gathered items stood—a steep, exposed ladder-like staircase led down to the six-tatami room below. Hiroko groped through the darkness to light the ten-candlepower lamp there, passed through the four-and-a-half-mat room where the partition’s karakami paper had been removed, and descended to the space before the sink. To save electricity, they hadn’t turned on the kitchen light. As she clattered at the rotten storm shutter fitting by the water outlet, someone outside grew audibly impatient—

“Let me see.” He tried to pull the door open.

“No, no. You have to lift this side first.” As the door opened, Ōtani stepped into the earthen floor in one stride. “I see—this really is a pain. On the contrary, it’s good for keeping us cautious, isn’t it?”

Then, blinking rapidly in his characteristic guileless manner, he chuckled—a soft “Hm, hm, hm.” “What’s wrong, coming at this hour?” “I’ve suddenly got a request to make.” “I thought I heard a sound and was looking, but you didn’t show yourself right away.” “My bad, my bad.”

Ōtani hunched his shoulders as if shrinking his neck and laughed, "I was taking a leak." He said in a low voice and stuck out his tongue. Ōtani’s request was for someone from here to attend tomorrow morning’s Yanagishima group meeting. Just as discontent over the compulsory mediation was mounting, the announcement of layoffs had each garage beginning to stir once more. "At eight o’clock, there’s this Yamagishi—the branch chief—and it’s been arranged that you just need to go visit that man at the office. I know this is sudden, but—please, I’m counting on you!"

Hiroko had braided her hair and was squatting by the raised floorboards in a hand-me-down meisen haori that felt overly flashy for her usual self— “—This is tricky…” She looked up at Ōtani lighting his bat cigarette. “—Isn’t there anyone from Kameido? On our side, Mr. Iida is heading to Hiroo.” “We had Mr. Usui handle that side.” “There’s Kinshibori, I hear.” “That person… I wonder if he went to ask…”

Hiroko smirked oddly as she stared at Ōtani, who met her gaze directly while deeply inhaling his cigarette—apparently weighing the circumstances— “He’s likely gone... Has gone.” he stated with conviction. What they knew about Usui Tokio came solely from his own claims of past involvement with the movement in Kyushu; nobody possessed verified details about his identity or history. Before anyone noticed, he had started visiting the clinic regularly, and when union operations became understaffed, this somehow evolved into assisting the secretariat. He was a slight man of twenty-four or twenty-five whose hunched shoulders left a distinct impression when viewed from behind.

Hiroko wasn’t one to dislike people easily, but whenever Usui came around with news—lingering without speaking to anyone or playing with the children, just loitering about observing their comings and goings—she felt an itch between her shoulder blades, an unease that made her skin crawl. There was something about him that she could never instinctively grow accustomed to, something that filled Hiroko with a kind of oppressive feeling. What Usui said often didn’t add up.

At one meeting, when Hiroko voiced her negative impressions of Usui, Ōtani—as was his habit—blinked rapidly, pursed his lips, and listened attentively while shredding an empty Bat box in front of his cross-legged knees, but he offered no definitive opinion. Finally, he raised his head, “There’s a need to investigate, don’t you think?”

he said. Since the streetcar incident 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, who spoke of Usui, there existed this layered tension that had accumulated between their feelings. Ōtani, while stamping out a cigarette butt behind his worn-down geta on the earthen floor,

“All right—I’m counting on you. Eight o’clock, Yamagishi.” “……”

Hiroko wrapped one arm high over her head, her left hand pulling at the fingertips of that hand in a gesture of perplexity. “There’s the matter of the children’s styes—I’m really at my wits’ end here.” “Hmm—” “It’ll be over by noon.” “Then you can do it afterward, wouldn’t that work?” “If need be, evening works too—the clinic’s open till ten anyway.” Hiroko wanted to resolve 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’ sentiments. In the evening, the moment she saw the faces of the mothers stopping by to pick up their children,

“Mom! “Rokubō, we went to the teacher’s today and washed our eyes!” “Didn’t hurt one bit!” Hearing it from the children’s lips while wincing—though it was the same information—how different must have been the warmth the mothers felt.

Not only because Sawazaki had been arrested, but particularly now, such attentiveness mattered crucially even regarding how the mothers' sentiments were tilting toward the nursery. This necessity lay clear to Hiroko. It stood to reason that Ōtani, embroiled in his urgent activities, hadn't noticed that far; what's more, the daily troubles emerging at the nursery alongside this relief effort weren't the kind to be settled through passing hallway exchanges. "Well, I'll handle it somehow."

Hiroko pressed both hands against her knees and slowly stood up as she spoke. “Wandering around this late—are you sure you’re all right?”

“Well, it’s fine—it’s the third Sunday.” “Right then, I’ll take my leave.” “Apologies for rousing you after you’d finally fallen asleep.” Ōtani stepped briskly outside— “Hah!”

Stepping over the threshold, he turned his head toward Hiroko and— “It’s already this bad.” He exhaled a white breath into the night air. The moonlight dissolved in the night mist now seemed even more still and dense, the cold adding weight to its presence. A streak of lamplight from their side swiftly cut through it. Hiroko, with her hand on the storm shutter, shuddered.

“Has there been any word from Shigekichi?” “It’s been about two weeks since I last got one—I wonder what’s happened.” “Conditions inside have worsened again since the war. When you see him, please give him my regards.” “Yes. Thank you.”

Hiroko nodded firmly in understanding. Then, after listening intently to the clattering sound of Ōtani’s geta—Ōtani, who was both her husband Fukagawa Shigekichi’s old friend and now her mentor—crossing the drainage board, she closed the door and returned upstairs.

II

When she turned the corner of the alley, she noticed bicycles lined up neatly against the wooden siding. Each had a small package tied behind it and was placed diagonally with its front wheel aligned, but on one bicycle, an azalea plant in a small pot had been meticulously fastened with old Sanada cord. As Hiroko approached the morning street strewn with scallion leaves in that direction, she recalled a certain phrase. The living conditions of workers in a country could be gauged by how many bicycles they owned relative to its working population—it was probably some phrase like that. Before her now were lined up over twenty bicycles belonging to the streetcar workers, but not a single one was new enough to have spokes that gleamed.

At the entrance where four glass doors stood, employees were arriving in small groups, mostly silent. Some stopped right before the entrance, took one last drag of their cigarette butts with a motion so frantic it seemed they’d burn their lips, then slammed the stubs against the ground in desperation before entering. Someone thudded down onto the doorstep, spreading the hem of their coat as they sat, lifting each leg high in turn and unhurriedly undoing their shoelaces. Hiroko rose on tiptoe, avoiding the shoes at her feet while—

“Excuse me, would Mr. Yamagishi be here?”

She called out to the group clustered around the long four-mat table at the top of the stairs. The one who had been facing away, elbows propped to show the back of his black coat, turned around and saw Hiroko standing in the earthen-floored entryway. "Hey, is the branch chief here?"

He projected his voice toward the stairwell.

“Oh!” “It’s the person with business.”

With weight on his heels came a heavy clomping—thud! thud! thud!—as someone descended. Just then, having squeezed past three or four people slowly ascending by uncomfortably shifting aside on the middle landing, a slightly portly figure in a high-collared uniform without an overcoat—hair neatly parted with pomade—appeared thudding down the remaining three or four steps. “Ah.”

With an ingratiating manner, he called out and approached Hiroko. Hiroko said she had asked Ōtani. “Ah, thank you for your trouble. Please come up.”

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

“Mr. Ōtani—won’t he be coming today?” he said. “It’s just me alone, but...” “No—in fact, having you here, Madam, is even more effective.” “Ha ha ha!”

As she approached the stairwell entrance, Yamagishi casually— “Well…”

He stroked his chin with one hand, stepped away from the passage, and stopped. "In what order shall we proceed, I wonder?" Hiroko felt a strange sensation—as if preparing to give a public lecture. "At your convenience—I don't particularly mind—" "Well—let me have you proceed with one thing first." Saying this briskly, Yamagishi himself took the lead and went upstairs.

Three large and small rooms had been torn through. From the front horizontal beam hung jet-black posters. “Absolutely oppose the dismissal of 130 workers!” “Oppose the issuance of bus transfer tickets! Demand For Relief Conductors” hung alongside those from after the compulsory mediation and “Absolutely Oppose The 1,213,270 Yen Personnel Cost Reductions!” Morning sunlight streamed through the fully opened waist-high window on the left. Bathed in clear early light that held little warmth, several people stood lined up at the window frame—one explaining something while incessantly wiggling his thumb inside his sock. From where Hiroko sat, their figures appeared dark against the backlighting; behind them spread a vast cloudless sky, while on the adjacent slate roof ventilator heads—arranged in two rows of four each—spun round and round in unison.

In the corner, straddling two chairs that for some reason alone occupied the space—facing this way—one leaned both arms against the crude bentwood backrest with their chin propped up, while the other jiggled a single knee in incessant poor-man’s fidgeting. On the tatami mats, someone had raised both knees to their chest and now lay collapsed over them. A person sitting cross-legged thrust their hands between both thighs and shook their body. —— Hiroko detected a complicated undercurrent in the atmosphere around her. Beneath the room’s air—which seemed to proclaim itself accustomed to meetings and unfazed by routine matters—there flowed a current of directionless unrest and inarticulate anticipation that could be felt. This could also be discerned in the restless vigilance directed at comings and goings by a thirty-something employee straddling a chair with poor-man’s fidgeting.

Before long, a tall employee with a compress wrapped around his throat came to the small desk at the front. The man, still standing, checked his wristwatch, wound the knob, and spoke to the middle-aged employee who had been leaning his cheek on his hand and sitting cross-legged in a daze at the desk since earlier. “Alright, let’s begin.” One of the men who had been straddling a chair stepped down to sit cross-legged on the tatami, while the other remained as they were.

“Hey, close that, will ya? It’s freezin’.” The one by the window turned up their coat collar.

“We will now convene the Fifth Group meeting.” The group leader—his throat wrapped in a compress and his voice raspy—chaired 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 protest against the unjust dismissal of 127 workers, the matter was summarily rejected—as we have already promptly posted.” “Today, I would like to report on subsequent developments and determine our stance as the Fifth Group. However, before that, since Labor Relief has sent someone here now, I would like to have them proceed first.”

Then, right next to where Hiroko sat, a forty-something employee—who looked like a family man and was sitting cross-legged—boomed in an exaggeratedly loud voice, “No objections!” he shouted, shaking his head while looking down. “Well then… please proceed.”

Hiroko adjusted her posture on the spot and was about to begin speaking when— “Please come over here.” The chair indicated his own side. As Hiroko stood up and went there with a faintly flushed face, then— “No objections!” From the back, someone shrieked hysterically. Laughter broke out. Without engaging with that disturbance—thereby tightening the overall atmosphere—Hiroko spoke in an unadorned, clear tone about how much concern this current dispute had aroused even among the general workers’ wives, citing as examples the words of Hideko’s mother who was out on Shōki Tabi. And then, she explained that this morning in Hiroo, they had already opened a mobile nursery in support of the family association.

“I think it’s truly tragic what happened to Mr. Ōe, who threw himself in front of a train behind Keidai yesterday.” “The newspaper wrote that he was usually a drunkard, but the story I heard directly from people in Hiroo is different.” “Since Mr. Ōe’s wife was in poor health, he had no choice but to take frequent absences, and they used that as an excuse to dismiss him, which led to what happened.” “I think if we had been stronger and had even a hospital, Mr. Ōe wouldn’t have had to be dismissed because of his ailing wife.” “When I think he wouldn’t have had to commit suicide, it’s truly regrettable.”

“No objections!” “That’s right!” A strong round of applause broke out. Hiroko, utterly unaware of her own intensely focused and beautiful expression, her face burning,

“Please, everyone—keep fighting.”

she said. “We are preparing as much assistance as we can.” “So that it doesn’t come to nothing, please stay strong!” A sincere applause, devoid of the earlier jocular mood, resounded for a long time. “—We will now proceed to the report.”

Urged by everyone, Branch Chief Yamagishi, with one hand in his trouser pocket, began in a speech-like tone: "As this humble one now shares with you comrades the responsibility of branch chief, I hereby declare my resolve to fall on the front lines of the struggle without retreat. Therefore, I would like to immediately proceed to a frank public discussion regarding concrete methods for our struggle."

From around the time those words were spoken, the room visibly grew tense. “If there are any questions or opinions regarding the branch chief’s proposal, please present them.”

…………

“Mr. Chairman!”

At this moment, diagonally across from where Hiroko sat against the wall, a young employee raised his hand as if thrusting out his elbow. "I would like to announce the Third Group’s resolution." "Please proceed." "We, the Third Group, held an additional group meeting this morning and—operating under the expectation that our demands will naturally be rejected—have resolved to immediately commence a strike and elected our struggle committee members."

………… A subtle stir began to spread through the room. They absolutely would not compromise on opposing the dismissal of 127 workers. The directive that they should commence strike preparations if their demands went unheeded had already been issued by headquarters several days prior. Yamagishi forcibly ignored the atmosphere that had begun to ripple like a powerful wave, deliberately furrowing his brows as if smoldering while lighting a cigarette from a match struck with his round hands. “Excuse me… uh, I’ve got a question—”

Dragged along by indecision, a voice sluggishly broke the silence.

“What exactly is this Third Group’s resolution—how’s it supposed to work? I don’t quite get it—are you saying we should go ahead just here without the whole line?” “The Third Group is determined.” The young employee answered curtly and fell silent.

“In that case—” The man who had been speaking sluggishly suddenly straightened up defiantly and raised his voice in a provocative tone, “I absolutely oppose that plan!”

Hiroko discerned that this voice—the same one that had mockingly shouted “No objections!” from behind her when she stood up earlier—was now vehemently opposing the plan. “No objections!”

Another voice followed.

“I’m against it too! Go ahead and try it just here! This is ridiculous. If we get wiped out completely, that’s when we’ll really be screwed.” Hiroko’s entire being was jolted into alertness. Among those voicing objections, there was a strangely harmonious air. “Mr. Chairman!”

“Mr. Chairman!”

Two voices arose in simultaneous competition, the higher-pitched one forcibly pushing through the other, “I don’t think that’s right!” protested strongly. “If you think about February’s Hiroo strike, you’ll understand.” “A partial strike is possible—and the conditions for it sparking a full-line walkout have already ripened.” “Anyone who actually knows the situation on the ground would get that.” “Otherwise, why would headquarters have issued that directive?”

“Mr. Chairman!” An older man with fountain pens and Eversharps sticking out from his chest pocket spoke in a composed voice.

“I’m from Group One… but this is my personal opinion—I absolutely support going on strike!”

Having said each word with deliberate weight, “However,”

In a sudden shift, he skillfully drew everyone's attention to himself.

“However, if the entire line doesn’t walk out simultaneously, I am absolutely opposed to carrying out a strike!” Hiroko felt something hot surging up in her chest and bit her lip. How cunningly these executives were exploiting psychological pressure points to undermine solidarity. Hiroko felt pained by the fact that she was merely a guest without speaking rights at this meeting. Even when coal ignites into flame, doesn’t it start from one point and spread to the whole? And yet—

Stirred by cunning wordplay laced with double meanings, someone clapped—clap, clap. "Launching strikes without weighing power dynamics? That's infantile thinking." "Managing this just here now? Impossible!"

“Mr. Chairman!” A high-pitched voice insisted again. “Even if you talk about the balance of power, it’s all relative! Do you think there’s any such thing in capitalist society as a favorable balance just sitting back and not pushing from our side? In fact, even up to the compulsory mediation, if we had just held our ground and persevered, we could’ve managed it. They left it to the amakudari committee—that revolving-door bureaucracy—and essentially had it dismissed, didn’t they?” “That’s right!”

“No objections!” “There’s even talk that headquarters secretly drew up a list of dismissal candidates and ‘graciously presented’ it, isn’t there?” “Tch!” Before and after the convention, over sixty “ideologically suspect” employees were hauled off to the police from each garage, and several labor relief members were mixed among them. The management’s scheme of having preemptively pulled out those solid elements now became glaringly apparent in such a critical moment. Hiroko felt increasingly vexed.

The majority of Tōkō executives had vigorously instilled in employees’ hearts from the dispute’s very outset—through their interpretation of directives and policies—a defeatist mindset: either a full-line strike or no strike at all, that even if they struck, it would prove meaningless. When situations grew complex, such either-or thinking tended to arise everywhere. When Kameido Nursery overextended itself supporting the streetcar workers and parents began growing fearful, there too had emerged conflicting opinions—one arguing to completely halt strike support and another claiming they might as well shut down the nursery—and Ōtani had pointed out at that meeting how both views were mistaken.

Due to repeated suppressions, among Tōkō’s workplace masses there remained no organizers who could cut through the murky depths of these shady dealings and pull their energy onto the proper path of struggle, nor any leaders who should have stood at the forefront.

That even Hiroko, watching from the sidelines, understood.

The hall grew increasingly chaotic amidst the thickening tobacco smoke as all sorts of outlandish opinions and questions continued to arise. The strike absolutely had to be carried out. But this time, they wanted it done with a guarantee of 100% victory.

Just as one thought there might be such a thing, someone went out of their way to question its meaning, "I want to ask the branch chief," then asked what National Socialism was. When Hiroko heard this, she initially thought the questioner was trying to draw out an easily digestible explanation about how National Socialism—which ultimately used state power to protect capitalist interests—stood diametrically opposed to workers' well-being. Yet it turned out otherwise, and Yamagishi's vague response—omitting any explanation of class antagonism—concluded without even facing rebuttal. And then,

“Mr. Chairman!”

Next, as if it were an entirely separate matter, such a proposal was made. “Tōkō’s raised ‘Overthrow Fascism’ as its slogan, but I’m against that!” “The regulations say Tōkō protects all workers’ economic interests—no politics or parties involved.” “But this ‘Overthrow Fascism’ slogan? Flouts the damn regulations!” “So then—”

“As long as that point ain’t cleared up, I ain’t plannin’ to pay no union fees.”

“You’re being too damn sneaky!” “What the hell is Shimoda?!”

That was Tōkō’s infamous lazy executive whose pro-establishment stance had even been exposed in the newspapers. “Fascist bastards, get out!”

“Mr. Chairman! Order in the hall!”

“Everyone, please be quiet.” “Please speak one at a time!” The chairperson had only offered this formal remark, while Branch Chief Yamagishi kept one hand thrust in his pocket the entire time—propped his cheek against the edge of the small desk, whether awake or dozing—his heavy-lidded eyes closed as he let the hall descend into chaos. After all the noisy confusion had thoroughly exhausted itself and the crucial focus of debate had been sidestepped, leaving the entire mood listless and unfocused, the chairperson raised his sallow face as if sensing the tide had turned,

“Well, it’s already time.” and called for a resolution. Yanagishima Garage had made the strange decision that they would immediately enter into a walkout if anywhere initiated a strike.

III

Exiting through the office’s back door and walking along the tenement alley paved with coke slag, Hiroko felt an oppressive, unpleasant feeling growing stronger within her. That was a complex feeling. Tōkō was serving only to suppress the workers' morale. Despite that, I had been deftly maneuvered by the executives into serving as a mere opener—utterly ineffective for genuine encouragement—and made to speak about support efforts. I now clearly felt that failure. If I had possessed the foresight to properly assess the situation and hold back my speech, perhaps it might have served as some stimulating tension when the collective mood had grown so listless. Yamagishi had acted from the very beginning with that foresight. When Ōtani said he wouldn’t come, Yamagishi laughed and said something flattering. That too made my face flush with humiliation. The fact that Yamagishi hadn’t allowed me to speak later was due to his worn-out political technique.

In front of the wide improved road stood a newly built concrete bridge. One side was closed to traffic, with construction materials—cement barrels, metal rods, and a corner lamp embedded with red glass indicating the closure—piled up tightly. On the sunlit sidewalk where people could pass, a boy of about seven wearing a brown jacket and rubber boots, and another boy of similar age in checkered rolled-up pants—also wearing rubber boots—with a spiky haircut, were spinning tops as they played. Around the two small iron tops that glittered fiercely as they spun in the sunlight, the two boys holding ropes spat "Shh! Shh!" while swinging them with all their might to lend momentum to their own tops, paying no heed to anything passing by. When she saw this, Hiroko grew even angrier at both the meeting she’d just left and at herself.

Slowing her pace to check her wristwatch, Hiroko walked even more slowly as she opened her handbag and examined its inner compartments. The visitation permit she had obtained by having someone go to the court about a week prior was inside, its edges frayed from being folded into four. After closing the mouth of her coin purse containing a mix of ten-sen and five-sen coins, Hiroko made a gesture as if tilting her head once more, but upon checking her watch again, this time she set off toward the streetcar stop with brisk steps in her plain black shoes.

Shigekichi had been transferred to Ichigaya Detention about half a year prior. He had been held by the police for over ten months. For the first six months or so, even Hiroko had been detained by the police, making meetings impossible from the start. Even after Hiroko was released, visits to Shigekichi were not permitted. When Hiroko learned through that evening’s paper that Shigekichi had been transferred to pretrial detention and went to court for the first time to obtain permission, the preliminary judge told her this:

“Since the police do not even acknowledge his own name, the person known as Fukagawa Shigekichi is, so to speak, someone whose very existence is unclear.” “However, given the various pieces of evidence, we are aware of the matter, so we will grant permission.” Shigekichi had been processed without acknowledgment. The streetcar there, which turned back from the terminus, was nearly empty. Aside from the Moji-ri old man—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, and was picking his ear with the long nail of his extended little finger—the passengers were sparse. Leaning against the front door in a relaxed posture, a middle-aged conductor took out a notebook and pondered something while occasionally licking the shortened lead of his pencil. Among the old-timers of the city streetcar, there were not a few who dabbled in stocks. Even with a bag slung over his shoulder, as she watched the elderly conductor’s self-absorbed expression—closed off in his own solitary world—a passage from the first letter Shigekichi had sent her welled up in Hiroko’s heart, imbued now with infinite meaning. Shigekichi had informed her of the health regimen he was carefully following inside, and then speculated whether there had been any changes outside as well. The gears of history do not transmit their subtle sounds here, but regarding this point, there is no concern whatsoever. He had written with those words. There was no concern whatsoever. But Hiroko could not muster even a shred of pride—she had narrowly confined the meaning of those constrained words solely to her own circumstances. Even if she had interpreted it solely in terms of her own circumstances, how could there be “no concern whatsoever”? It could only be myself. I couldn’t even manage to deliver a single supportive greeting at the right moment. Such inexperience was everywhere—here and there.

When she noticed they had passed Ueno some time ago and looked around the car, Hiroko was struck anew—without her realizing it, the passengers’ appearances had become entirely different from those who had boarded at Yanagishima, from their clothing and complexion down to their bone structure. As Hiroko was jostled along the east-west axis of Greater Tokyo, the same streetcar—now approaching Yamanote—carried figures of men and women boarding and alighting enveloped in a pliable neatness and smoothness unlike the residents of Jōtō, where even blue trees refused to grow under smog’s poison.

Hiroko got off the train at Shinjuku 1-chōme. And she emerged onto a cramped street lined with prison supply shops, their vertical signs cluttering the view. Ahead, directly in front of her, stood the prison’s main gate, against which the sky appeared unnaturally vast. Outside the gate, accentuating the concrete wall’s height and serpentine length, was a bench of the sort you might find at a rural train station. The sheltering roof above the bench was arched high as if a sudden gust had blown it upward from below. It did not serve to block either rain or wind.

Each time Hiroko came down this road and looked up at the long concrete wall—straight as a forest and monotonous—and the blue sky that seemed more intensely azure than anywhere else in the city, she felt an unnatural silence tightening her chest. The gravel crunched underfoot as Hiroko entered. The layout was likely designed to make footsteps echo loudly. Gravel covered every surface, scattered here and there. The waiting room—a separate building facing the inner courtyard—had segregated sections for men and women. When she opened the glass door, the foul stench of coal briquettes hit her face. The space was relatively empty. A woman who might have been a former barmaid sat with knees drawn up—wearing a knitted jacket, her disheveled bun secured by a celluloid side comb—mouth agape as she stared with eyes showing white beneath the irises, hands tucked into sleeves. Four or five others waited. Visitation hours were suspended between noon and one o'clock. It was now about fifteen minutes until one.

Hiroko bought ten-sen sweets and nori tsukudani at the kiosk, handed over the care package, and stood in the sunlight outside the waiting area. In the inner courtyard, pine trees and other plants had been planted. The visitation room was located deep on the left-hand side, but when Hiroko first came here—unfamiliar with the layout—she had mistaken it for a restroom and started heading that way. It had an appearance that made such mistakes seem unsurprising. When tires scattered gravel beyond the gate, the guard unlocked it with a special key, and a single automobile drove into the inner courtyard. Three or four men got out of the car and entered the separate building while receiving salutes. Watching from a distance, Hiroko recalled what others had told her—how when Shigekichi arrived here, his legs swollen from torture had lost their mobility, forcing him to climb the entrance’s stone steps on all fours.

She checked her watch anxiously, but not even five minutes had passed. The wait felt interminable, yet when the moment came to speak face-to-face—when she felt they’d barely exchanged a few words—the window would be shut with a curt “That’s enough.” These visits drained her—the endless anticipation clashing with the taut composure required during those fleeting encounters. She could never forget Shigekichi’s gestures—how he’d lean forward through the visitation window the instant it opened, smiling broadly while rolling his large shoulders as if kneading dough—nor the cadence of his “Take care now,” always severed mid-phrase by the falling shutter. Even after a month would pass until their next meeting, the delicate expressions lingering in Shigekichi’s eyes and lips during their last encounter—their warmth undimmed—remained etched in Hiroko’s heart.

Hiroko opened her handbag and peered into the small cracked mirror. She wiped the dust off the mirror with her handkerchief, took out another section of the handkerchief, rolled it tightly, and rubbed it firmly across her cheeks. Her somewhat rough-skinned cheeks gained a faint reddish tint. The loudspeaker attached to the waiting room wall finally clicked on with a hum. When Hiroko opened the glass door to look inside, she saw the cluster of women straining to catch the static-muffled announcements—their chins now buried deeper in scarves and sleeves pulled more tightly together than before.

“Attention, we apologize for the wait.” “...Attention, Number 28. Number 28 to Booth 6.” “Booth 6.” “Attention, next Number 30.” At the sound of the announcement, a woman around forty—apparently involved in ideological matters and with a housewife-like demeanor—rose from the campstool where she’d spread a thin mat, placed a hand on her shawl, and looked up uncertainly at the black loudspeaker from below. “Attention, Number 30—the person you were trying to visit has been transferred to another prison.” Blocked by the buzzing static, the words “another prison” reached Hiroko’s ears as if they had said “that prison.” The meek, housewife-like woman involuntarily took a step forward,

“What?” She tilted her head in a characteristically feminine way toward the black loudspeaker and asked again. But the switch cut off with a pop at that point, and the woman—with an indescribably perplexed gesture—looked toward Hiroko using precisely that movement where one foot draws back in hem-adjusting steps, just like a kabuki onnagata at a loss. Hiroko felt overwhelmed with sympathy.

“It seems he’s been transferred to another prison somewhere.” “Why don’t you try going to the office and asking? He was processed through there.”

She pointed at the two-story entrance painted in oil. After waiting over an hour, Hiroko was finally able to talk with Shigekichi for two or three minutes. Hiroko pressed her chest against the railing’s crossbar until it hurt, inquired about Shigekichi’s physical condition, and reported on the state of his father—bedridden from a stroke—then said as always, “I’m truly sorry the books you requested haven’t come through.” In the strained, self-managed life at the nursery, there were times when Hiroko didn’t even have the transportation costs to go borrow books. When she had a little money, there was no time to spare; when both aligned, she would seize those moments to send care packages that met even a fraction of Shigekichi’s minimal needs. People who willingly lent books generally didn’t have the kinds of books Hiroko wanted. People who seemed likely to have them generally disliked lending books to others. It was in such circumstances that there existed inconveniences beyond what Shigekichi could perceive.

Shigekichi, having been suddenly brought out for visitation and left standing awkwardly mid-stride, now had to recall various things all at once; he listed the book titles while uncomfortably moving his eyebrows and shifting his feet, "But given your circumstances, Hiroko, you needn't push yourself too hard. Even if there come times when we can't read books, we're still pondering various beneficial things," he said.

With the feeling that this was something she particularly needed to convey, Hiroko slowly said, "I had to go around Yanagishima this morning, which is why it's gotten so late... The nursery's work has been expanding, even extending to adult matters now—so my not keeping in touch wasn't because I've been lazy, you know. If even the streetcar workers lose, there'd be no way forward, right? That's why." Having said that, she laughed with her eyes.

“Hmm.” Shigekichi glanced at the guard—already positioned to close the window shutter with hand on the pull cord—shifted his gaze directly to Hiroko’s face, and spoke with a forceful motion like yanking down his heko obi.

“If Hiroko were to get ‘sick,’ try to set aside a little money so you aren’t suddenly left in a bind.” Hiroko instantly understood the full depth of Shigekichi’s words—all the implications their life together had taught them to recognize. Shigekichi hadn’t really been talking about money. In the streetcar struggle that Hiroko’s nursery was also caught up in, a time might come when they could no longer meet. Shigekichi understood this, and by that understanding, he encouraged and steadied Hiroko.

Exiting the visitation room that resembled a cold communal restroom 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. Happy to have met him—something that could not be contained by such words remained within Hiroko's body.

As soon as she passed through the gate, there in the wide gravel area just beyond appeared a small monkey dressed in a short coat. Two or three men in suits along with guards who had pistols hanging at their sides stood around the small monkey, squatting and laughing. Different from those clinging to street performers’ backs, this particular monkey had black ears sticking up from both sides of its head covered in fluffy brown fur, squatted while dragging its bluish-tinged tail across the sunlit gravel, moved its wrinkled face up and down, shifted its eyes restlessly, and frantically nibbled on something.

“When you see this one like that, it’s actually quite cute, Ha ha ha!” It was a shabby, pitiful-looking monkey. The person who carried a pistol directed at humans chatted amiably to the monkey and laughed. There was a rule there that prohibited any show of affection toward humans. But with a monkey, laughing wasn’t a violation—

IV

Several days had passed. It was one afternoon. Two babies were napping upstairs. In the meantime, as Hiroko was folding diapers at the top of the stairs, Tamino—her geta caught in her skirt—returned from outside, her footsteps audibly recognizable from afar. When she reached the side of the clay pipe shop and communal pump,

“Hey, what’s going on? That sign—it’s flipped over!” she exclaimed loudly. Jirō, who had been playing in the garden, “Ms. Iida, what’s going on?” “Hey, what’s the matter? Which sign got flipped over?”

The five-year-old Sodeko, Hideko, and even toddling Gen had crowded around Tamino. “There was a white triangular thing standing by the bridge, right?” “That fell into the ditch.”

They all stood at the top of the stairs.

Hiroko looked dubiously, “But—that wasn’t placed at such an edge to begin with.” While saying this, she too descended to the dirt-floored entrance. The sign for Snake Hollow Proletarian Daycare—white with black paint—was supposed to have been erected facing the road to catch passersby’s attention, positioned on the side where clay pipes were stacked, more than six feet back from the ditch.

“Look! See?” “Who would do such a nasty thing?” Indeed, in the muddy ditch where withered grass grew, the sign had been thrown in headfirst. “It was fine this morning, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I didn’t notice it when I left.” The children lined up on the plank bridge, their faces showing surprise with wide eyes as they looked on, but Sodeko—whose hand Tamino held—suddenly tossed up her bangs and shouted. “Hey, that’s the one my dad made, right?” “That’s right. What a jerk, huh?” From beside the clay pipe, Hiroko carefully lowered one leg, using the withered grass stump as a foothold, crouched as low as possible, and stretched out her hand. Even then, about two feet still separated her from the ornamental fish-shaped sign.

“Hey! I don’t want you falling in too!”

“I’m fine.”

At that moment, a young laundryman from across the road came and stopped his bicycle, gazing curiously at the commotion of women and children. “—Well, without a rope, it’s impossible.”

Brushing the mud from her hands, Hiroko too 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, furious with her red cheeks squared, strode along pulling Sodeko by the hand while declaring, “It’s definitely Fujii’s thugs’ doing—they’re in cahoots, so there’s no telling what they’ll do.” It was clear this wasn’t some drunkard’s capricious act.

“As for the pump too, it’s obviously that spy bastard who’s been stirring things up.” Two mornings earlier, Tokiko Kogura from Women’s University—temporarily assisting at the nursery—had been washing diapers at the wellside. No sooner did the sound of running water stop than the glass door at the clay pipe shop’s kitchen entrance slid open. Then Masasuke, the owner, thrust out his face—

“It’s trouble when you use it so recklessly. This well ain’t just for your place alone—if you keep hoggin’ it all for yourselves over there, we can’t even take proper time to rinse our rice!”

“It’s troubling if it’s used so recklessly,” his voice said. “The well isn’t just for your household alone; if you keep hogging it all for yourself over there, we here can’t even take our time washing rice!” “I’m sorry.” When Tokiko, carrying the freshly washed diapers, headed to the clothesline, she exchanged glances through the window with Hiroko in the four-and-a-half-mat room and smiled with a pleading expression—though unaccustomed to such harsh treatment. Hiroko understood Tokiko’s state of mind well and yet said nothing.

Hiroko ascended to the house ahead with a preoccupied expression.

“Well then.” “Thank you for your hard work. How did it go?” Tamino took out a small kraft paper bag from her skirt pocket as she sat cross-legged, shook each one, and poured out three white copper coins and eleven or twelve copper coins onto the tatami. “Mrs. Yoda was reluctant, saying it wasn’t her second time.” “Is this all we’ve got?!”

A collection bag had been passed around at the nursery to gather funds for the streetcar strike.

“Since it ain’t their direct fight, say what you will, it’s different.” “Even if we don’t know whether we’ll actually win, there’s those who think it’s just foolish to get crushed for nothing.”

Among the streetcar employees, several units of the Labor-Farmer Relief Association had formed. When Snake Hollow needed to purchase infant beds, the Yanagishima units took charge of collecting the funds. With that money, they installed three rattan beds still in use today. The parents working at Fujita Kōgyō, Inoue Seijū, Shōki Tabi, Kōjō Insatsu and other such places became connected with the streetcar workers through these efforts. A sense of neighborhood obligation helped raise nearly three yen during one fundraising drive. However, most mothers made little progress gathering strike funds at their own workplaces—Ms. Hanako from Tsunaya barely collected twenty sen from Ms. Kami in their tenement, whom she’d invited to the co-op’s sale.

Hiroko spoke about their nursery’s experiences in those situations at faction meetings that had been taking place for several months. That day, the story about Kameido was also discussed. In Kameido, a special parents’ meeting had been held to organize support activities. Then a specially assigned young person came and earnestly explained about solidarity as workers—that even if their workplaces differed, they must unite to protect what was common to them as laborers. The parents listened attentively from start to finish, and a considerable amount of funds was collected on the spot.

However, before long, an unexpected result emerged. One by one, children began disappearing until finally five from the tenement stopped coming to the nursery.

“The problem was that we tried to explain everything all at once.” The long-eyelashed caretaker offered a general critique. “According to what we’ve finally managed to hear, it’s like this. Their reasoning was so sound that if they got dragged into the dispute, they wouldn’t be able to refuse. Since they’re worried about losing their jobs if that happens, it seems they’ve decided to pull their children out now while they still can.”

“I see.” Ōtani let out a thoughtful groan once and laughed. “Their reasoning was so sound they couldn’t refuse, huh. “Hmm.” “So does that mean they’re really not going to send their children anymore at all?”

“Yes. “They aren’t coming at the moment.”

At Snake Hollow too, after Kinosaki Kin was taken away by the police, there had been two or three parents who stopped sending their children. One had been working at Inoue Seijū. The wife’s reasoning was as follows. "Well, even living like this, you still got social obligations—can’t get out of visiting folks’ places now and then, you know." "When I drag my kid along to those times—what with people being around—that child up and yells, ‘Ma! This place is bourgeois! So it’s the enemy!’ just like that." "I’d turn red as beetroot, I tell ya!"

Such incidents had not occurred recently. Here, as one of the proletarian nurseries scattered about, this was a deviation that had emerged when they had just begun unified activities.

Hearing the baby fussing, Hiroko went upstairs to the second floor.

Ms. Hanako’s little one—its small face, poorly developed despite being nearly ten months old, grimaced as it let out a half-crying whimper and shook its head restlessly. Hiroko changed the diaper. The stool showed signs of indigestion. Having been told by the doctor to feed goat’s milk in addition to breast milk, Ms. Hanako would give it to the baby on days when she had work, leave the child at the nursery, and go out to “work hard.”

While changing Taa-bō’s diaper, she heard from below the window: “Listen up! This here’s our Kōba!”

A high-pitched, spirited voice—Sodeko’s—rang out. As Hiroko pulled the baby’s bed close to the second-floor railing to let it sunbathe while looking down, there in the corner of the vacant lot before the entrance stood a broken swing—Sodeko gripped the severed end of its rope and swung it with a motion like she was hauling something in. Jirō, wearing a jacket patched together with brown and blue yarn in a makeshift manner to extend its length and bracing himself in his rubber boots, watched from the side.

For a while, Jirō watched like that, and Sodeko—from beneath her black bob haircut that had grown out so long it nearly poked her eyes, making her look bold—continued swinging while occasionally glancing at Jirō with an overly earnest gaze, until eventually Jirō blurted out, “Hey! There’s no such thing as a nameless factory!” he said. Sodeko glared at Jirō. She pondered for a moment, but kept moving her hands without stopping, “—It’s the swing factory!”

He replied with a drawn-out whine. Hiroko, who had been looking down from above, opened her mouth wide in silent laughter. “This here’s the machine part!”

With the same earnest expression, Sodeko pressed the cracked wood grain of the swing’s post with the fingertips of her free left hand, showing it to Jirō.

This time, Jirō stood silently next to Sodeko. And he too grabbed the other severed end of the rope and swung it far more forcefully than Sodeko had, keeping a rhythm. Just when it seemed he was swinging steadily, Jirō—with agility befitting a boy—nimbly grabbed the swaying end of the rope and hung from it, curling up his legs. When the motion threatened to die out, he would kick the ground with his rubber boots and swing it back and forth once more. Jirō’s feet, wildly seeking purchase against the earth, would finally connect only to miss by a fraction of an inch the next moment, slicing through empty air—

Hiroko found herself drawn in before long and, as if she were pushing Jirō’s back herself, unconsciously began moving her own jaw in rhythm. Sodeko switched her grip on the rope but kept her eyes fixed, intently observing what Jirō was doing. When he grew bored with that, Jirō disappeared somewhere for a while, and when he reappeared, he was dragging along a detached wooden panel still caked in mud on one side. He dragged it beneath the broken swing’s rope and tied it there—trying to fashion something resembling a swing—but the rope was too thick, the board too thin and wide, and it all proved too much for his small, chapped hands. In an awkward posture, using even his knees to somehow manage it—no matter how many times the board slipped—Jirō strained in silence, exerting himself to the utmost. At home and at the nursery, there lay the efforts of Jirō, who possessed no toys worthy of the name. Hiroko found herself unable to simply watch those efforts any longer. What had become of Tamino? As she came downstairs with these thoughts running through her mind, Hiroko suddenly went Oh? Usui was already here. And there he was, facing Tamino and leaning against a pillar in that direction. At the sound of Hiroko’s footsteps, Tamino looked up. Usui, without turning around, unhurried yet with a demeanor that made clear he was fully aware of Hiroko’s presence, folded something that had been in front of him and tucked it into the inner pocket of his indigo workman’s coat.

Hiroko started to head toward the four-and-a-half-mat room where the two were but stopped herself. And she slipped on the wooden clogs at hand and went outside.

V

At night, after everyone had sent the children home and things grew quiet, Tamino and Hiroko would devise ways to make them as eye-catching as possible—minding font sizes, adding borders—as they cut stencils for leaflets, some large and others small square ones. The nursery's finances had deteriorated significantly since they began supporting the streetcar strike. Hiroko and the others decided that, rather than only taking in children who came regularly every day as they had done before, they would also accept children on any temporary basis for mothers who needed to go out urgently—charging only a snack fee—and that they would make the nursery’s work more community-oriented. At the same time, they had also previously maintained supporters for the nursery separate from Labor Relief among women from progressive households, and they decided to expand that aspect as well. Even if they cut 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 circularly rolled stencil from Tamino’s hands, examined it, and handed it back. “Over there—they’re probably using it now,” he remarked as though thoroughly familiar with every department’s operations. “Oh! This is so annoying! Didja just come by?”

Usui did not answer that, “If it’s just something like that, I think the place I know could handle it, but—” “Oh! If you knew a place like that existed, you should’ve said so sooner! Let’s go there, then. Okay?” “I think tonight should mostly be okay, but…” In Usui’s manner of speaking toward Tamino—honest and simple as she was—and in the intimidating attitude Hiroko had unwittingly witnessed when she came downstairs the other day, there flowed something undeniably artificial. After going out with Usui, Tamino had properly completed the mimeograph work as well, but four or five days later, she suddenly brought it up out of the blue.

“I always thought Port Lap was some kind of Western liquor—but it’s not, is it?”

It was a certain evening.

Tamino lowered the lamp and was mending a hole in her sock,

“I might end up leaving here before long.”

she said as if to herself.

It was a night of fierce winds, and Hiroko pulled out a desk under the same lamp to examine the account books. Without looking up as she continued jotting down numbers, Hiroko felt perfectly natural when— “Hmm.” She responded to Tamino’s words.

“Is there some promising opportunity somewhere?”

Tamino had been living a factory life until about three months ago, when she was dismissed from Yama Electric due to union involvement. "I was told to come to the union secretariat, but I preferred the workplace," she'd said. "I'll get back in there," she'd declared, and 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 is very happy that what he’d been waiting for has finally come through…”

Hiroko involuntarily raised her head and, while looking at Tamino who was facing downward, made a gesture as if slowly twisting her lower lip with the fingers of her other hand that wasn’t holding the pen. Tamino remained looking down at the things she’d used to fix up her appearance. “Making…”

Various commonplace speculations arose in Hiroko’s mind. At any rate, there was no mistaking that Usui had established contact with the party organization. “But that matter and you leaving here are separate issues, aren’t they?”

Tamino did not directly respond to that and, half-engrossed in her own thoughts, muttered after some time. “There seem to be so few capable women around, and everyone’s really struggling with it, huh?” With those words, Hiroko felt as though the path of Tamino’s unspoken thoughts had been lit up with stark clarity. “Is this new position—not at a workplace?” “...” Hiroko felt her conflicted affection surge toward the young, honest Tamino. Tamino—likely influenced by something Usui had said—seemed ready to take on some role she considered more proactive than workplace activism. As for Hiroko herself, she had long questioned the way young female activists were so often funneled into roles like housekeepers or secretaries out of convenience. Still twisting her lower lip with her fingers, Hiroko slowly spoke.

“Over there, it seems they don’t approve of making female comrades live together under titles like housekeeper or secretary and even having sexual relations with them—I read about it somewhere.”

Among Hiroko and her comrades, "over there" always meant the Soviet Union.

“Hmm.”

This time Tamino raised her face. She looked at Hiroko with eyes that sharply lifted her brows, started to say something, but then continued moving the needle in silence. Before long, having finished mending the socks, Tamino began writing addresses on kraft envelopes while flipping through the membership ledger. The night deepened, and when the wind struck, the tin awning clattered noisily. When the wintry blast subsided, there was a stillness so profound one could almost hear the road freezing. Tamino wrote characters while holding the fountain pen with its nib oddly bent. The worn-down pen and slick paper surface ground against each other, squeak squeak squeaking as they moved.

As she continued her work 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 sliding doors painted with pines against distant mountains. At the low dining table on this side, Hiroko had been writing. Dawn was already approaching. As she grew weary, her thoughts refusing to coalesce no matter how she struggled, from beyond those sliding doors came pen sounds identical to what she now heard—a noise that conveyed both the unwavering speed of evenly written characters and the vigorous momentum of unimpeded thought flow even from this side of the doors. Hiroko stopped her hands and listened joyfully to that sound. Then through the sliding door—

“Hey,”

Hiroko called out to Shigekichi. “What is it?” “...Please don’t go demonstrating.” As she sat there alone with a faint smile, observing his reaction, Shigekichi seemed not to immediately grasp Hiroko’s meaning; beyond the sliding door came sounds of him making as if to straighten his posture—but soon— “What the—!”

He laughed. “I’m not the type for that sort of thing.” Soon, the squeaking sound began again.— To Hiroko, the life Tamino would lead henceforth as a woman bearing a class-defined position felt like something passionately intertwined with each joy and sorrow she herself had experienced. This was from when Shigekichi had been arrested and Hiroko detained at another police station. From the second-floor Tokkō room window, she spotted a mother sparrow building its nest in the branches of a hinoki cypress growing within the police compound.

Hiroko instinctively exclaimed, “Oh, you poor thing! Building a nest of all things in a place like this!” Then a thick-bearded man who happened to be there—

“What’s so pitiful about that! That bird knows it’s being safely protected.”

Having said that, he stared Hiroko up and down,

“You should just have a kid. I bet you’d dote on it—I can practically see it.” Hiroko fixed her gaze directly at the man. “Please return Fukagawa.” she said. The man fell silent.

At the end of the summer when Hiroko had just returned there and begun living at the nursery, a friend of Inaba's wife had suffered a serious injury at the worksite and been carried to the hospital. After leaving the baby at the nursery and having laid it down in the downstairs four-and-a-half-tatami room, Hiroko sat beside it reading a book while using a fan to shoo away mosquitoes. Before long, the baby woke up and started crying, refusing to be soothed no matter what. With sweat beading on the tip of its nose as it cried on and on, Hiroko had an idea—Ah!—and even as she delighted at her own thought,

“There, how’s this? Even you won’t cry now, will you, Chībo?” While saying this, Hiroko opened the front of her white blouse and pressed her breast against the mouth of the crying infant. Chībo had been a sallow child since that time—poor complexion and bloodless soles—but when he opened his mouth like a thin red ring and finally managed to suck Hiroko’s nipple after fumbling about, he immediately pushed it out with his tongue and began wailing even more violently than before. After repeating this three or four times, Hiroko finally gave up and addressed him as though speaking to a child old enough to understand.

“Oh dear—this is a problem. “But it’s not Auntie’s fault, you know, little one.” More than an hour later, Hokkaido-born Ms. Ohana returned. “I’m sorry about that.” “Phew, I can’t take it.” “What an awful heat!” Ms. Ohana undid her obi while standing, stripped off her large-patterned yukata, and draped a wrung-out hand towel over her shoulder, now clad only in an underskirt, “There you go, crybaby!”

She pressed her long, dangling black nipple against it. With a snort, Chībo latched on. Even Hiroko felt relieved when a look of ease appeared on the baby’s face.

Hiroko peered at the scene from the side while recounting what had happened earlier. Ms. Ohana indifferently wiped sweat from her hairline with the hand towel she’d draped over her shoulder while—

“Well ’course he won’t suck. If it ain’t the milk he’s been gettin’, cold stuff like that—he’ll hate it.”

For Hiroko, the events of that night remained unforgettable. The fact that these nipples were the cold nipples of a woman who had never borne a child. And there was Ms. Ohana—her body deceptively robust in appearance—struggling to get the malnourished infant, whose two small feet protruding from the diaper had soles as pale as if drained of blood, to latch onto breasts that retained warmth if nothing else. As if two images of women’s sorrow and anger in this society existed there, they were imprinted on Hiroko’s heart.

That night, after getting into bed and turning off the light, Hiroko said to Tamino in a casually calm tone. "Listen, make sure you don't waste your promising qualities and proactive nature on trivial matters through vague personal entanglements." "…………" "I know this sounds meddlesome, but we can only judge people by working with them in practice... don't you think? You and Mr. Usui haven't done any real work together yet—it makes me feel I can't read your true intentions..."

Tamino stirred in her bedding. Finally, Tamino said in a straightforward tone, "Well... I suppose you're right."

After saying this slowly, Hiroko heard her let out a sigh.

6

First thing in the morning, Special Higher Police officers from the local station came to the nursery. They wandered aimlessly around the area, “Toyono will probably come.” With that, they scrutinized the footwear in the dirt-floored entryway. Hiroko and the others didn’t know any name like Toyono. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t lie—we’ve got someone who saw you making contact.” That was clearly a false accusation, and they were about to leave as is, but—

“Hey, what the hell is that?!” When they saw the cane tip pointing at it, it was the nursery’s sign that had been thrown into the ditch some time ago and had since been rebuilt.

“What do you mean—isn’t it perfectly obvious?”

Tamino stepped forward and said.

“It’s been standing there for a whole year already.”

“Did someone say it was okay to put that up?” With evident irritation, Tamino—

“But it’s been standing there, after all. Because it’s right here like this—”

As she began to say, the man cut her off,

“I wouldn’t know about that.” he said with deliberate weight. “If we don’t see it here, then it doesn’t exist.” “Take your Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation—they may think they exist, but to us? They don’t.”

After the man left, Tamino spat on the ground and said, “Tch! How revolting!”

Around two in the afternoon the following day, as Hiroko was drafting news copy upstairs, she heard the heavy sound of someone climbing the stairs one creaking step at a time. The footsteps sounded unfamiliar. When she turned around, pen still in hand, there stood Inaba’s wife in split-toed work boots coming up the stairs with a cloth-wrapped bundle hanging from her arm. A daikon radish protruded from the bundle.

“Oh… Auntie… Why…?” “What do you need?”

“Mr. Ōtani—didn’t he come here?”

“—He hasn’t come.”

She had made plans to meet Ōtani that night. Inaba’s wife, her gaze anything but ordinary,

“So it really was like that after all…?”

Hiroko stood up from the chair with a speed she herself didn't realize she had.

“What’s wrong?”

“I… I saw it happen.” There was something in the tone of her voice that sent a chill through Hiroko. Because it was Inaba’s Wife’s turn to manage the mutual aid group’s duties at her house, she had taken the day off to go shopping. When she turned onto the main street from the station square, a man who looked like Ōtani came into view up ahead, walking alongside another young man. Inaba’s Wife thought she’d get a bit closer to see if it was Ōtani and call out to him if so, so she followed from behind—then, at the radio shop’s corner, the younger man parted ways. When she had passed about two alleyways, a man in Western clothes emerged from beside a candy store—and then, in an instant, two more men appeared from somewhere and flanked Ōtani precisely from front and back.

“Hey!” As someone shouted, as Ōtani tried to slip away, and as those three men swiftly surrounded him—sparking a brief scuffle—to Inaba’s Wife’s eyes, it all flashed like silent lightning: swift and sharp. Since they weren’t proceeding forward but turning back toward the station square, she had hidden under the eaves, half-covering her face with her sleeve. What her eyes captured was a man flanked left, right, and behind—now in handcuffs. Yet even so, the one who came calmly adjusting his kimono’s front with shackled hands was unmistakably Ōtani.

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 over her mouth, but then asked in a voice parched on her tongue. “Mr. Ōtani—didn’t he have anything with him?” “Well, I thought something was off—he was carrying a small bundle-like thing, I’m sure of it.” “The man who parted ways earlier—what was he wearing? Western clothes?” “Western clothes?”

“Western clothes? Don’t be daft! You know the kind—they’re everywhere around here. A student’s kasuri cotton, most likely.” Hiroko’s pupils narrowed to piercing slits. Kasuri... Kasuri. Usui always wore kasuri. But—

“You didn’t see that person’s face, did you?” “But y’see, he’d already turned the corner ahead…” Taking the stairs two at a time, Tamino came up from below. “Did you hear?”

Above red cheeks, Tamino’s eyes blazed.

“Aren’t they coming here?”

Inaba’s Wife, as if intuiting something drawing near, shifted her uneasy eyes from Hiroko’s face to Tamino and back to Hiroko. Hiroko noticed this,

“It’s okay!” She signaled with her eyes to Tamino. “This is a nursery, after all—you know, if they try anything strange here, the mothers wouldn’t just stay quiet, would they?” Even though she wasn’t sweating, Inaba’s Wife kept wiping around her nostrils with her striped apron twisted around her fingers. “Do they think the proletariat’ll just sit there and take it?!” As Inaba’s Wife descended downstairs, Tamino—as if she’d been waiting impatiently—moved her strong arms and dragged out the luggage from the cupboard. And then, while carefully disposing of unnecessary scraps of paper, Tamino—

“A complete ransacking like this? No thank you!”

Tamino muttered.

It was unclear. Once the Soviet Friendship Society had spread to workplaces across every district and Soviet tour groups began being selected at those workplaces, their activities became restricted instead. They hadn’t entirely failed to anticipate repercussions reaching even the nursery due to the streetcar support activities and Ōtani’s department’s connections. She made a call to a certain place and sent Tamino out to have them notify the necessary locations from there. When Shigekichi had been taken down, Hiroko had believed herself perfectly composed—yet while descending the familiar stairs of Ōtani’s house, she twice banged her forehead hard against a crossbeam midway down the wall. Ōtani’s gaze had silently watched those faint scars. And then,

“Well, eat before you go.”

With that came Ōtani's practiced considerateness and composure—the sort that naturally seated Hiroko at the chabudai. When she recalled the various situations where he had helped her grow through their work, Hiroko felt her stomach quiver with bitter frustration at his arrest. There had been a time when Hiroko heard someone tell how Ōtani had narrowly escaped danger by climbing a tree. Amused, she had chattered about this rumor to Shigekichi,

“Did that really happen?” she asked. Shigekichi looked at Hiroko’s face for a moment but did not directly confirm or deny that it had happened; he simply, “He’s quite resourceful.” He answered that and laughed amiably. Hiroko would recall the hesitation in Shigekichi’s reply from that moment for years to come, feeling it etched into her heart. The depth of Shigekichi and Ōtani’s relationship was more than just personally swapping stories about each other—such friendship served as an important invisible spring driving history forward, a value Hiroko had recently begun to grasp, little by little.

But was it truly necessary that Ōtani had to be arrested? When Hiroko considered this, she felt there was something frustrating about Ōtani’s approach. For example, when hearing “the man in kasuri-patterned clothes,” the person who came to Hiroko’s mind was Usui. If that had been the same kasuri-patterned clothes Inaba’s Wife saw... When Hiroko voiced her suspicion—brief in words yet deep and vague in meaning—Ōtani dismissed her anxiety with relative ease. But did Ōtani truly possess any objective basis for his absolute conviction that such a thing was impossible?

In the circumstances surrounding this incident, there was something frustrating for Hiroko.

Just one day later, Tamino was arrested at the nursery. When Hiroko returned from going to the clinic to get the children's deworming medicine, 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 she saw the children’s condition, Hiroko—for some reason—fire! she had the momentary illusion of a fire. Without thinking, she too broke into a trot from her side. The moment they met, Jirō grabbed Hiroko’s skirt and—

“Hey! Hey!” Gasping for breath, “Ms. Iida was taken away!”

Jirō announced.

“When?!” “Just now!”

“What about Mr. Kogura?” “He’s here.”

That morning’s newspaper announced the termination of the streetcar dispute. Tamino was standing there reading the newspaper but put it down once only to pick it up again, “To think we had to find out about this in the morning paper... How utterly humiliating.”

Tamino said. That blunt expression could have been Hiroko’s own state of mind. Inaba’s Wife, upon hearing that story, “Oh dear, I’m in a real fix—bein’ a bother to the neighbors and all.” “They said it was for the strike, so even if it’s just one sen, I put it into a bag and collected… right?” Tamino had until just moments ago been preparing to print flyers explaining to the parents who had contributed to the fund that the dispute hadn’t been lost because the employees failed to demonstrate their full strength.

When Kogura saw Hiroko entering, “Ah, thank goodness!” He stood up as if being reeled in. Two Tokkō agents came as if nothing were amiss and, without properly saying a word, suddenly climbed up to the second floor. Right after, when Tamino was seen following them upstairs and coming back down, one of the Tokkō agents held a document printed in red ink titled Akahata. He then struck Tamino’s face.

“Don’t play dumb—you’re a party member, aren’t you? Ōtani told them everything—and they beat him so terribly!” As he said this, Kogura’s eyes welled with tears. Hiroko found herself speaking in a harsh tone without realizing it: “That’s a lie.” Such documents—of which there wasn’t even a single sheet here at the nursery—were prepared from somewhere and used as an excuse. Hiroko had heard that this same method had been used during the crackdown on the Proletarian Cultural League.

While encouraging Kogura, Hiroko wrote on a large white sheet of paper about Zawasaki Kin—who had been held in police custody for nearly three months without any reason—and Tamino, who had just been dragged away. She then hung it on the lintel at the top of the stairs where it would immediately catch the eye of anyone entering.

As for how long this momentary reprieve she had obtained would last—whether until nightfall or tomorrow—Hiroko couldn’t tell. Hiroko went up to the second floor alone to look. The area around the three-tatami table was in disarray. Beneath the table, onto the tatami, the pen shaft had rolled down violently from above and remained lodged there. Quietly pulling it out, Hiroko fiddled with it as she formulated a plan to hold a meeting right then with the parents who would come to pick up their children that evening. Then she went downstairs and entrusted a package to Kogura. The contents were a single jacket for Shigekichi in prison.