Pathway to Japanese Literature

Into the kotatsu covered with an indigo-patterned cotton quilt—its hem tucked about a third of the way inside—lay Shōhei, paralyzed by stroke, asleep on the futon spread across the floor.
Old Man Sakaguchi entered from the shop area into the middle room and, without addressing anyone, circled around the back of the kotatsu to reach the patient’s bedside.
Two shoji screens framed the bedside, with an old-fashioned lacquered chest standing in the corner.
The lower drawers held Osaya’s underkimono and small belongings, while the upper ones stored items like Morinaga biscuit tins brought by town relatives as gifts for the patient.
Across his pallid face fixed with utter indifference toward others—people preoccupied solely with their own ends—Old Man Sakaguchi reached toward the chest and twisted the radio atop it.

Directly above the patient’s head, the radio roared to life with deafening volume.
Ignoring Shōhei—who had dazedly cracked open his bleary eyes at the noise and was peering up—Old Man Sakaguchi entered the next room and sat directly on the tatami’s unedged surface without seeking a cushion.
He pulled out a folded hand towel from his kimono, extracted a printed sheet from within it, and spread it across the tatami.
Over the paper, Old Man Sakaguchi hunched forward in a crouch.
The right hand—its fingertips flattened and enlarged from decades of farmwork—clutched a short pencil.

The radio immediately began announcing in a crisp yet hurried tone, "We now present the economic market report."

“Shintō: 153 yen exactly, down twenty sen.”
“Oyogane: 285 yen exactly.”
“High price: five yen and sen.”
“Shinshō: 270 yen 80 sen, down twenty sen.”

The back of Old Man Sakaguchi’s unevenly striped cotton haori hunched forward over the tatami in tandem with his rapid-fire speech that seemed about to burst forth.
Unconsciously pressing the pencil to the corner of his mouth and licking it repeatedly while poised in wait, he would—the instant the voice called out “Oyofune: 88 yen twenty sen”—inscribe Roman numerals beneath its finely printed name on the paper.
Given that he was fitting unfamiliar Western numerals between small ruled lines using a thick-tipped pencil softened by saliva, keeping pace with the ceaselessly flowing stock fluctuations—delivered in that sprightly tone—at Sakaguchi’s speed proved exceedingly difficult.
With terrifying focus and tension, his neck muscles straining, he had just managed to write “Nippon Mining 127”—not yet entering the “yen twenty sen”—when the radio already moved on to shout “Nisseki: 103 yen 40 sen, down thirty sen.”

Once, twice—as such moments accumulated, Old Man Sakaguchi flattened himself even more against the paper, remaining motionless with the elbow holding his pencil planted firmly on the tatami. His figure seemed to say that money was rushing over him—now flattened like this—like a torrent; yet he had resigned himself to this raging current being too violent to reach into, that not even a drop would trickle down to where he lay. When that overwhelming surge subsided, Old Man Sakaguchi’s hands began moving haltingly again, adding three or four notes; yet it was hardly uncommon for these entries to be written under different names with different numbers.

The houses in this region faced the village’s narrow thoroughfare, each pierced through from the dirt-floored shop area at the front to the back door, forming a long narrow earthen-floored passage.
On the low wooden platform to the right of Shōhei’s shop lay fertilizer sacks, rice bales, bran bales, stovepipes, cement bags, plastering materials, and the large clattering scale used for trading; during deserted midday hours, mouse tails would occasionally flicker between the bales.
Around this time each spring, the astringent scent of fertilizer and burnt-fat odor mingled with straw’s aroma to hang thickly throughout the house.
The dirt-floored area widened at its rear where the kitchen stood.
A veranda-like structure less than three feet wide extended from the six-tatami room toward the earthen floor, bearing a crude wooden table along its length.
Each morning and noon found the entire household taking hurried meals there.

Onui sat at the edge of the shoji screens marking the boundary between that extension and the six-tatami room, unraveling her aunt Osaya’s old summer kimono.
Shōhei’s bony frame was imposing and heavy; however, they had to sew a small futon to place beneath his paralyzed lower back.

Old Man Sakaguchi was crouched on the tatami diagonally across from where Onui sat.
The sight of the old man—so intensely focused he absentmindedly licked and turned his pencil, yet still unable to write numbers properly—always made Onui feel both pity and a touch of youthful sarcasm.
In Onui’s eyes, there was no lack of reason why the old small landowner of this remote village appeared so pitiable.
Onui’s father—Shōhei’s younger brother—had for several years now transferred his crude business to his older brother and was living in a village house a little over a *ri* away, wearing satin *tabi* socks and a pale brown silk scarf around his neck, loudly discussing politics and economics.
Junpei’s household maintained a rhythm of life where large sums of money were constantly being discussed.
No matter how large the sums discussed might be, they were almost without exception merely spoken of; Junpei’s family’s actual livelihood was sustained on the residual credit ingrained among the local people since their ancestors’ time and the debts that came with it.
The monthly allowance Onui received for helping her aunt was not entirely insignificant to the family’s circumstances, yet Junpei’s disposition compelled him to tell even her: “Get out there and see—these days, girls can snap up twenty or thirty yen in no time!”
The way he spoke was so vigorous and lively that to Onui—accustomed to such an atmosphere—Old Man Sakaguchi’s every arrangement appeared thoroughly stingy in the manner of a petty mountain farmer.

Onui, while spreading out the faded tide-dyed garment, moved her face—all the more expressive due to the small mole at the corner of her eye—and occasionally glanced toward Old Man Sakaguchi.

Old Man Sakaguchi, acting as though Onui were beneath his notice, waited until the market report ended. With a sullen expression, he picked up the ruled paper from the tatami, rose to his feet, tucked it into his kimono, went into the adjacent room, and turned off the radio.
Shōhei looked up again from his pillow with a conspicuous white of his eyes in an upward glance, but Old Man Sakaguchi left without a word to his twenty-year cooperative comrade, heading straight for the shop area.
Even just the small-framed old man’s body being moved caused the tatami where Shōhei lay to creak terribly with each step.
The entire area was reclaimed rice paddies with already soft ground, and with the railway tracks nearby, the foundation would shake every time a train passed.
This house, too, had been lived in roughly for fifteen years in a state where it might be auctioned off at any time until very recently.

Old Man Sakaguchi went out to the shop, though he showed no sign of returning immediately.
Crouching facing the charcoal brazier, he puffed awkwardly at his tobacco.

Blaring its horn, the bus passed by, kicking up white dust.
The thick dust gradually settled as it struck the shop’s glass door, swirling in the bright afternoon sunlight before drifting into the dirt-floored area.
This thoroughfare was a national highway, but its width was only four or five ken.
Ever since regular buses began passing through, dust and mud splatters clung mercilessly to every house’s glass door.
The households lived without giving any thought to wiping it away.

Backlit by the sun, accentuating the fine dust clinging to the shoulders of her navy serge overgarment and the ends of her back hair, Osaya entered the shop’s dirt-floored area.
Without even greeting Old Man Sakaguchi, who sat on the shop’s tatami, she adopted a brisk tone,
“Onui! Onui!”

She called toward the back.

“Why don’t we make this into a salad for tonight? Hang it up for me.”

Osaya handed the basket she brought to Onui.
And then,

“How’s it going? Are you making a good profit somewhere?”

she said as she came to sit beside Old Man Sakaguchi, who remained crouching.
Her voice carried a sincere tone of warning—you’re probably not making any profit—though left unspoken.
With shrewd eyes honed through years of single-handedly managing the shop and battling life’s hardships, Osaya looked at Old Man Sakaguchi.

Sakaguchi ran his dry palm over his salt-and-pepper beard.
And then, slowly,

“—This time, the soy sauce shop owner made a solid profit,” he said.

“He must’ve grabbed quite the haul.”

In Osaya’s shrewd, flushed face, an unwittingly lured curiosity stirred.

“Which soy sauce shop owner?”

“That—the soy sauce shop owner, but…”

Drawn in by how Old Man Sakaguchi had lowered his voice to say this, Osaya too asked back in a low tone:

“Mr. Iida?”

With a nod of understanding,

“This time, he’s certainly made just under ten thousand in profit.”

Osaya slipped one hand into the opening of her overgarment and assumed a pensive expression. Without another word, she announced, “Let’s get to work,” stepped up onto the shop’s tatami, and sat before the battered desk pushed against the sliding door. Shōhei watched this scene from within his bedding through lowered eyes,

“Hey—”

he called in a voice drained of strength from his throat.

“Hey… come here”

“What is it? Want to sit up?”
“This spot isn’t right.”
“Where isn’t right?”
“Here, here.”
“You’ve been lying down long enough—let’s get you up a bit, eh? It’s no easy thing just lying around all day, Father.”
Onui stood and joined her; together the two women lifted Shōhei’s large torso to prop a floor chair against his back.
“Should I put this futon away?”
“That way’ll be more comfortable for sure.”

Rolling up the mended oilcloth large-crested coverlet, they wedged it between the floor chair and Shōhei’s back.
As Osaya tried to leave after setting it down, Shōhei stopped her by tapping his own knee.

“Stay here—”

“I need to finish up the ledger, so just wait a bit.”

In the shop, Old Man Sakaguchi remained crouched in the same spot as before, holding an unlit pipe between his fingers while reading a printed flyer.
This spring, the young head priest of Nishihonganji Temple was to marry the daughter of Duke Tokudaiji.
The cost was seven hundred thousand yen.
Nishihonganji Temple had set a quota of seventy sen per donation from parishioners of even such regional branch temples to solicit contributions regarding this matter, and in return distributed fans printed with a design of layered red and green paper containing a waka by the young princess who would work behind the scenes and characters written by the head priest.

“Not cheap, eh? How much d’you reckon the real cost actually was?”

When Sakaguchi, who had been scrutinizing it intently, closed the fan and placed it atop the printed flyer,

“Well, have you started frequenting this place too?”

With a robust, broad voice accompanying him, the one who entered the earthen-floored area was Jūzō, wearing as ever his old velvet round hat whose age defied estimation.

Osaya moved her head in greeting from what might be called the shop’s accounting counter at the front.
Jūzō lightly bent his tall, sturdy waist while simultaneously removing the round hat from his head—performing a bow that was polite yet somehow not, a peculiar gesture all his own.

“How’s the boss doing?”

He peered into the inner room where Shōhei had sat up.
Raising his voice,

“Well now—you’ve gotten nice and warm, must be comfortable now, eh?”

Shōhei hunched his back, thrust his neck forward, and shifted his eyes peevishly from side to side within his large-featured face. He did not respond to Jūzō’s greeting.

Jūzō took a drag from his pipe, then turned to Sakaguchi and said:

“Word is you’ve been frequenting Moichi’s shop lately, eh?”

“……That’s not how it works.”

“So—made yourself a tidy profit then?”

On Jūzō’s long, deeply lined face—wrinkles concealing faint pockmarks—a smile surfaced. Compared to this Jūzō—even past seventy, with undiminished vigilance permeating his entire bearing—it became strikingly apparent how much Sakaguchi’s shoulders had slumped of late, though he was a full decade younger. Sakaguchi, appearing to have no room to perceive the mockery brimming in Jūzō’s smiling face, lowered his voice,

“—This time, the soy sauce shop profited.”

he repeated earnestly again.

“Soy sauce shop?—Which one…”

Then Osaya, for some reason, let out a voice tinged with irritation,

“It’s Iida!”

Osaya explained.

“Hmm.”
“Do they really have that much over there?”

“They do!”

For a while, everyone remained silent as they were.
Eventually, Jūzō dropped his cigarette butt and,

“Sakaguchi, you’re always tallying up others’ profits, but what’s the use if you yourself aren’t making any?”

He laughed, revealing the unnatural alignment of his Seto-ware dentures as if signaling to Osaya.
It was the laugh of a landlord who possessed unshakable confidence in his wealth and knew exactly what to seize from society’s harsh currents of wealth and poverty.
When Shōhei’s family first faced bankruptcy during the Taishō 7-8 panic, it had been Sakaguchi who enabled them to keep their shop running.
That money had naturally carried interest.
The nearly twenty years since then had lifted Jūzō—who back then had been somewhere in Hokkaido—to society’s forefront, while gradually driving Sakaguchi into this world’s chilly back alleys.

The sight of Sakaguchi—now at an age where anything lost could never be regained through the labor of his own hands and feet—suddenly becoming fixated on stock speculation stirred in Osaya’s heart an emotion akin to terror, yet alongside it flickered a morbid fascination, as though drawn to witness calamity.
Sakaguchi had a mute son over thirty with no bride—and shuddering at the thought of that mute son brandishing account books before eventually raising a hoe to chase after his stock-obsessed father, she nonetheless felt somewhere in her heart a strange compulsion to witness every last moment of that wretched downfall.

As she thought of these two association comrades—one rising, the other falling amid the unstable shifts of an era whose tremors reached even their village—and of how her own family had dripped sweat to steadily, inch by inch, begin rescuing their house from auction in that precarious flux, Osaya unconsciously straightened her posture and thrust her chapped hands deep into her collar.

Sandwiching the briquette brazier between them, Sakaguchi resisted Jūzō’s pressing.

“It’s all because you wouldn’t put up a thousand yen back then.”
“If I’d put in five hundred yen and you’d put in a thousand, I told you I’d make sure the interest got properly distributed—but you wouldn’t listen, so it’s all for nothing!”

“I can’t stand anything with ‘stock’ in its name—not even a radish root. If you’ve got money to throw at stocks, you’d be better off tossing it at women. At least with women, the cash you waste buys you some smiles.”

“Stocks are built to turn profits. You think the government would allow them otherwise?”

“Then how come you’re always losing money, Mr. Sakaguchi? When I was young in Yokohama, I got tangled up with GHQ schemes—taught me my lesson. Couldn’t even afford meals. Stocks rot! For every man here making two hundred yen profit, there’s another out there losing just as much. With fields, even when you’ve got nothing left, you can still manage to eat.”

The burly landlord—sturdy in both body and spirit—and the shrunken-shouldered landlord—diminished in both frame and resolve—refused to yield, their persistence only serving to underscore the senility pressing upon them both as they argued that stocks were better, that land was better.

In Osaya’s household—listening to this—there was neither land nor stocks.

After listening to the three o'clock market report on the radio, Sakaguchi finally left the shopfront.

Osaya,

“So how about lately—is your daughter-in-law still bringing eggs around?” she asked while laughing.
“She’s still comin’.”

Jūzō answered, shaping his lips as if pursing them over his white Seto-ware dentures.

“She brings ’em every single time.”
“And since the day before yesterday, her attitude’s changed something fierce.”
“When the bath’s hot, first thing she does comes sayin’, ‘Father, please get in,’ Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

There was a barbed edge to his laughter—so sharp that Onui in the neighboring room couldn’t help but prick up her ears.

Jūzō had no blood children, having adopted a married couple instead.
The elderly trio kept their finances strictly separate, but one day the daughter-in-law brought eggs from their own chickens to Jūzō.
Even for eggs produced in-house, they maintained a practice of counting each one and paying accordingly.
Jūzō handed over coins at the usual rate of two sen and five rin per egg.
The daughter-in-law stood on the veranda with her bamboo basket, accepting the payment while remarking that elsewhere these days, eggs went for two sen and eight rin apiece.
Those words needled Jūzō’s pride.
He declared they’d no longer need her eggs.
When the daughter-in-law broke down weeping at this impasse, the adopted son stepped in to mediate—apologizing profusely until they settled on resuming purchases at two sen and five rin per egg.

“They said the flagpoles they’d been using were too short and inconvenient, so Kenkichi went off to the bamboo thicket with some folks from the neighborhood. Then that person was astonished and said something like, ‘Well now, this is my first time coming to see it, but it’s truly magnificent—there’s nothing like this in all of Ichinomori. Just leaving this much standing would already be worth a fortune.’ So it seems their plans have shifted a bit.”

“Ha ha ha ha!” Jūzō laughed loudly again in that piercing manner that grated on Onui’s ears. Osaya spoke something in a calm, consoling tone.

However, eighteen-year-old Onui thought a demon resided in Jūzō's heart. This demon had taken root in Jūzō's core—one that converted every trivial daily interaction between the adopted couple and their elderly guardians into monetary equations: *that* kindness equated to so many sen, *this* politeness originated from such-and-such a source, flaunting each calculation before their eyes. This demon would never grant Jūzō peace. Nor would it permit him happiness. Though she didn't know how many thousands existed, for this reason alone, Jūzō directed his coldest hatred and scheming toward those who should have been nearest to him. Thinking this, even hearing the stubborn Jūzō's booming laughter reverberating through his Seto-ware dentures made Onui feel a suffocating tightness in her chest. For Onui at marriageable age, such family strife couldn't be heard as merely another's distant trouble. The shadow of something faintly sinister—lurking beneath the narrow rural routines of in-law relations that must someday begin in her own life—seemed to flicker unbidden at the edges of vision, imposing a tangible pressure both remote and immediate.

Onui soon slipped into wooden clogs and, carrying last night’s clam shells, made her way around to the back.
Under the old fig tree stood a handmade chicken coop.
Onui called out "To-to-to" as she first scattered corn kernels for them, then crushed seashells on the round stone beside the cat wheel piled with salt bags destined for somewhere and tossed them into the coop.

When viewed from the back, Shōhei’s shop and residence were wedged with visible strain onto a narrow strip of land between wheat fields and the front thoroughfare—a patch of ground unevenly sheared like a quarrying blade.
On one side lay railway tracks immediately behind the thoroughfare, houses barely lining its single edge; on the opposite side stood pine-covered hills that plunged straight into fields and paddies, giving the entire village a shallow, dust-choked demeanor.
Some years ago, when rumors spread of a station being built here, households had gathered seeking some new livelihood.

In this hushed and still moment, as the entire village lay bathed in the nearing evening’s western sun, a steam train’s whistle sounded once from the station. Its cry echoed through the piercing clarity of that sunlight, reverberating from one mountain to another.
It felt strangely lonely.
Then came the creak of freight cars—or something—grinding, followed by the clang of couplings colliding, and then a hush fell once more. In those moments, Onui felt her chest tighten with longing for her home.

Onui’s home was different from here—a semi-agricultural, semi-fishing village near the coast. If you climbed the temple hill, you could gaze out over the Seto Inland Sea stretching all around Kasa Island, known for its abundant catches of rockfish.
The village beach was a scenic spot renowned for its beauty. The traditional villages—encircled by pine groves along the coast—spread out among wheat fields and paddies, their backyards lush with summer mandarin trees whose branches sagged under the weight of yellow fruit.
Due to water shortages for rice cultivation, farmers everywhere dug wells for irrigation.

About one ri beyond this village lay a port town facing a large bay. Until the railway fell into disuse, all goods from Tohoku and Hokubei would first be gathered at this port before being shipped onward to Kyushu and San'in.
Shōhei and his brother’s mother was the daughter of a shipping agent who had built up that very trade into a large-scale operation.
Due to that connection, Kunihiro-ya—which had been an oil dealer for generations—began dealing in rice.

However, as soon as steam trains began running through this region, the port declined, and consequently, the village life that had been enlivened by the port’s vitality was left behind year after year into a deep slumber.
Kunihiro-ya’s decline was also due in part to this reason, but according to Shōhei, their downfall had been hastened by another cause altogether.

During the Meiji era, Japan experienced its first major wars and incidents at roughly ten-year intervals, and Shōhei served in three campaigns until he was over thirty.
While his older brother lived as a soldier, the younger brother Junpei naturally took on the family’s hereditary traits alone, learned to handle money, and when the railway opened, Junpei—wearing white tabi socks more often than transporting rice—found himself drawn to the bright nights of the small city just half an hour away.
There were also those debts.
Then came the Great Panic of Taishō 7–8, delivering the final collapse.
At that time, Shōhei had been running the business at the main family’s home in the village where Junpei now resided. But in his fierce attempt to rebuild Kunihiro-ya from its ruin, he replaced his brother and pushed into the station village.

It was from then on that Junpei became involved in election campaigns, mediated land deals, and began living a gentlemanly lifestyle in a village without steady employment.
According to Junpei, there was nothing to do in such a sleepy village.
Shōhei judged that this Junpei lacked a diligent heart for work.
And so, awkward clashes born of mismatched temperaments would flare up—naturally affecting both households in their entirety—but at such times, Junpei would gather his wife and children around him, a Shikishima cigarette held between his slender fingers, smoke curling from his relieved lips as he spoke.

“From the time I was eighteen, how have Mother and Brother treated me?”
“They sent me off to Miyanomori as an adopted son, then brought me back—and just when I’d gone all the way to Osaka trying to make something of myself, they made a fuss and dragged me home again.”
“There! Go wherever they send you off to, then come back here!”
“When they’re in trouble, they call me over and use me as much as they please—but have they ever once thought about my situation?”
“It’s only natural that things would get tiresome after all this time.”

Onui could not forget her father’s reminiscences through her daughterly emotions. With those unforgettable emotions still fresh, the uncle and niece were caught up in a complex web of circumstances—Onui observing various actions arising from Shōhei’s diametrically opposed interpretations.

The warm spring sunlight of the seaside village bathed the three large, dilapidated poultry houses nestled among wildly overgrown weeds throughout the long day.
In the earthen-floored area behind the kitchen lay a large incubator thrown in and covered in dust.
When they settled in this village residence, Junpei—inspired by the spacious grounds of the estate—conceived an unprecedented large-scale poultry farming operation in the vicinity.
He sent his eldest son to Nagoya for training sessions, invited experts from Nagoya, and temporarily immersed himself in state-of-the-art poultry farming—but in this sleepy village it proved unprofitable, until matters reached the point where hired hands would sneak chickens out to fund their drinking sprees, leading him to abandon it.

Junpei’s calculations always ended up being positioned three or four years ahead of the prevailing trends that eventually reached the village. Whether it was managing the bus company—which had led to massive losses and a bitter feud with his brother Shōhei—or the poultry farming he had ultimately abandoned after sustaining heavy financial blows and tarnishing his credibility, Saeki, who initiated identical ventures just four or five years later, had now amassed a fortune through those very enterprises.

The estate fell into ruin, and the workshop where generations once pressed oil now stood in its original place, reduced to hollow walls and a roof.
In the annex’s second floor, a loom for weaving hemp sacks used in oil manufacturing stood assembled, draped with cobwebs.
How many years had it been since that partially woven cloth had been left neglected in the loom, still caught in place?
Since childhood, Onui had memories of playing house beside it on rainy days while gazing at it.

Despite the irreparable collapse that seemed to seep into the warehouse’s crumbling outer walls and even the surrounding green grass, Junpei sat in the newly built tatami room—the only sturdy part remaining—wearing satin tabi socks bought from town, pouring tea in a slow stream from a small pot into a small bowl before drinking it.
The courtyard visible from there alone was meticulously maintained, its moss glowing a beautiful green under the sunlight.
In the pond, goldfish swam.
The toilet had a tokonoma alcove where a printed Shōen beauty painting and an incense burner were placed.
The newly built tatami room’s engawa featured city-style glass doors, but the walls of the tokonoma and ranma transom remained in their middle coat of plaster, untouched for years.
Though they could no longer manage such things, Junpei cheerfully expounded his expertise on wall plaster instead, insisting it needed thorough drying before applying the final coat.

Though it was one of Kunihiro-ya’s characteristic traits, Junpei never attempted to adjust his always overly forward and hasty schemes to suit the local character, declaring that even losses incurred by ideas too far ahead of their time were not the mark of a man’s downfall. And from Junpei’s every gesture exuded an air of perpetual get-rich-quick schemes—or moments when such ideas might materialize—so that the entire household was drawn along, half-doubting yet ever caught between his whims. Amidst the weeds that grew ever thicker across the estate during these intervals, Onui too grew up without being driven to feel acute heartache.

From beneath the fig tree’s small shed emerged seven or eight white chickens that flapped their wings halfway in apparent delight as they scurried out and began pecking at grass along the ditch’s edge. Keeping watch over the chickens with a short stick in hand to prevent them from ruining the neighboring wheat field tended by the old man who had returned from Hawaii, Onui pondered how starkly different her uncle’s household felt compared to her own family’s life. Whenever Junpei spoke of future profits, he habitually turned to his sons and daughters with cheerful tales of buying them all something. Though only a sliver of these promises ever materialized, their lives rippled with an anxious expectation woven from reality and fantasy.

Shōhei drove his two young sons with urgings like “We’ve got to earn” and “You lot need to bring profits,” living a life that scorned appearances.
If one claimed he never lost a penny through shrewdness, the truth remained that Shōhei too belonged to Kunihiro-ya’s lineage—men he employed had repeatedly embezzled funds.
In business too, Shōhei carried himself like a corporal declaring “There’s a strategy,” using his old military catchphrase.
When money got embezzled, the shop would erupt into such commotion that crowds gathered out front.
Yet when the man timed his approach just right and offered what Shōhei deemed a proper apology, he’d brighten instantly—serving rice and even pouring out sake.

Since falling ill and becoming bedridden five years ago, Shōhei gradually grew silent.
Before anyone realized, Osaya took over managing the shop as her primary responsibility.
Shōhei’s bed was placed in what seemed like the center of the house; from there, he could see through the left sliding doors into the shop and through the right ones into the back areas.
Shōhei spent his days dully yet obstinately tracking the figure of Osaya in her dark blue work coat—shuttling dozens of times between the shopfront and back without rest, like a loom’s relentless bobbin.

Some time ago, Junpei’s second son had encountered complications from a minor misstep in land mediation, and Junpei came to arrange the settlement funds.
At first, Onui was sitting beside her father as usual, wearing felt zori and a tea-colored silk haori, but as the conversation gradually turned in that direction, she discreetly withdrew to the back door as she was now.
At Shōhei’s bedside, Osaya and Junpei were talking rapidly and loudly to each other, their voices carrying all the way to the back.
After Osaya’s firm, rapid speech had grown heated, risen to a peak, and abruptly cut off—following a brief silence—Shōhei unexpectedly spoke up with a strangely shrill, rising-pitched voice, his weakened vocal cords straining with desperate effort.

“N-No good!”
“This side comes first!”

Each word he spoke shook his entire body, reaching Onui’s ears clearly as she plucked insects from lettuce leaves. A nameless sorrow tightened its grip, and tears rolled down Onui’s cheek.

Whenever she remembered, it felt as though those tears were still flowing through her chest.
Onui, as if trying to shift her mood, summoned sudden vigor and hauled water into the bath.
When she had warmed the water considerably by burning pine branches with a large fire rake, Osaya came out carrying Shōhei’s soaked belongings.

She poured hot water into the large tub with a splash, submerged the bulky laundry inside, and pressed it down with creaking force. After letting it sit briefly, Osaya immediately raised a round stick and—disregarding the splashes hitting her face—beat the laundry with all her might: wham, wham! She flipped it over to pound the other side, declared it done, and had Onui wring it out. Osaya, her face flushed red, kept beating impatiently—wham, wham—while

“Large stuff—this works best.”
“There are things you can learn even from Koreans.”

Onui found it funny and, while spreading a dripping-wet old cloth over the laundry pole, accidentally laughed out loud.
Osaya wore a dead-serious face, whacking the laundry with such conviction—as if bound by some pact that a single solid thwack would make the stains cough themselves out—then set down the stick, satisfied with her no-nonsense solution.
That was exactly the short-fused charm so typical of Osaya, bursting with rough vitality.

Giggling softly while trying to reposition the laundry pole, Onui’s eye was caught by a single small green pinecone clinging to a pine branch—itself bound with coarse rope to the forked post supporting the clothesline—its charm striking her as delightfully tender. Then, she also noticed a golden star glistening directly above in the bright evening sky. As she gazed at those two small, beautiful things—one celestial and one earthly—Onui felt something gently touch her own heart within her parched existence. As if to cherish and savor such a moment of her own in her heart, Onui slowly and carefully spread the heavy, dark laundry across the pole.

About two years ago, Osaya decided to take out life insurance, thinking she should at least leave something behind for her sons besides debt.
In the neighborhood was a house that ran a tobacco shop while handling such matters part-time.
Since signing up meant they would handle everything, she immediately took the train to three stations to complete the procedures, and a doctor came.
Though her body had no particular issues, after they wrapped a strange device around her upper arm that tightened, her blood pressure was found to be too high, and Osaya's insurance was denied.

She had been told hot water was bad for her in such condition, and though Osaya knew her own body mattered until she saw Shōhei through, she couldn’t break a fifty-year habit.
No sooner had the bathwater’s sound faded than she emerged, slicking back her wet-glinting temples without a mirror glance as she went to the shopfront shrine.
She struck a match and lit the sacred lamps left and right.
Then standing before them, she gave two brisk claps—just as at a shrine—her hands moving with urgent force.
It was a crisp sound less like prayer than something meant to snap the gods’ eyes wide awake.

“Aah—”

After bowing her head so precisely that a modulated voice escaped her unbidden, she briskly passed through the middle room where Shōhei lay, came to the six-tatami room before the kitchen, and forcefully slid open the cupboard’s karakami doors.
Sometimes, due to the momentum of her hand, she would open the left karakami door as well, and when she did, from inside the cupboard would emerge things like an old sutra-wood seawater hat and a pillow whose seams had split, its stuffing spilling out as it lay tossed inside.
Without a word, Osaya firmly shut that one and reopened the right karakami door.
There was a Buddhist altar there.
Inside the Buddhist altar was a hanging oil lamp, but due to fire precautions, they normally did not use it, instead having a small bulb wired from the electric light.
Twisting it on, she sat down before it regardless and with the same brisk urgency rang the bell twice.
She placed the rosary beads on the tip of her left hand, chanting “Namu, namu,” and here too,

“Aah—”

she bowed her head with modulated emphasis.

Osaya turned toward the kitchen’s earthen floor and called out to Onui, who was doing the washing up there.

“They haven’t come back yet, have they?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah.—Was it different? Shō and the others can tell right away which truck it is by the sound, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“Well… it might be different…”

When Onui, drawn by a car horn heard at a distant corner, went out to the front of the shop to look, a passenger car sped past along the village road, kicking up sand and dust already too dark to see.

“Well, alright. Today it must be around eight, I suppose.”
“Today it’s probably around eight.”

The dinner preparations were completely finished, and the earthen floor was illuminated by a dull light from the six-tatami room.
They did not have dinner until the two sons who drove trucks for work returned.
There was no reason for Onui to take her bath before the two of them.

The truck they had been waiting for stopped in front of the house a little past eight o'clock.

“They’re back!”

Osaya, half-rising to one knee, raised her voice and informed Shōhei.

“Father, the truck has returned.”

Shōhei had been restlessly directing his unsettled gaze toward the entrance from under the low-hung lamp, but when Osaya said this, he nodded deeply and formed a soundless smile that seemed genuinely pleased.
He opened his mouth wide, tilting his face upward as he laughed, but the sparkle of laughter was only in his eyes, and his mouth looked as though it might weep.

“I’m back.”

Shōichi, in overalls, entered the earthen floor while removing his work gloves.

“Now, go take your bath right away.”

When Shōichi emerged into the middle room—his youthful chest barely covered by a plain lined kimono thrown on carelessly post-bath, one foot kicking a black merino heko obi to wrap it haphazardly around his waist—his younger brother Naoki entered, having stayed behind alone to finish cleaning the truck and securing the garage door.

“I’m back.”

“What’ll you do? Will you take your bath right away?”

“—I’m starving.”

Even though Osaya was sprawled right there, in a lively, loud voice—

“Shō-chan! Shō-chan!”

she called out loudly.
“Hurry up and serve dinner! Naoki’s putting his bath off for later.”

At the pump, Naoki—having only washed his hands—removed the hand towel from around his neck and began wiping himself down,

“I’m good here.”
“Too much hassle.”

He pulled a stool from the earthen floor and brought it over, then took up position facing the veranda where the charcoal brazier was placed.

Shōichi sat cross-legged in a grand manner and, like the eldest son, faced the meal table on the tatami.

Osaya served the steaming rockfish soup while,

“How was it? Did you make it to Nagase too?” she asked.

“Yeah.”
“Made two round trips.”

“Fourteen yen, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow’s the day for Ueda—they called on the phone.”

“Hmm.”

Naoki, who had just turned nineteen, was eating without pause in his mud-covered overalls—holding a rice bowl in one hand while gripping the soup bowl backward with the same hand that clutched his chopsticks.

Eventually Onui went down to the earthen floor to clean up, and the brothers went to the middle room and settled down on either side of their father.
Shōichi pulled his father’s futon over his own stomach as well and moved to the right side.
When Naoki also emerged from the bath—his physique suddenly grown burly from manual labor clashing awkwardly with the boyish kasuri-patterned robe that now seemed too coarse for his frame—he settled on the left side.
The young brothers stretched their bodies contentedly from both their day’s fatigue and full stomachs, hovering at the boundary between dream and reality.

For Shōhei, it was precisely these moments that had allowed him to somehow endure his monotonous days.
Pressed from both sides by his vigorous wage-earning sons—lying still on his back as if soaking in a hot spring—Shōhei eventually raised a withered finger with—

“That...”

he said weakly, pointing to the space above his head.

“Why?”

Shōichi, still lying down, raised his head and looked in that direction but found nothing particularly new catching his eye. Then Naoki on the other side got up on one knee and pressed his face close to his father’s as he asked: “Why, Father? That thing—why?”

“That...”

“The radio? Is it the radio?”

Like a newborn calf scrambling to its feet, Naoki clattered up with limbs flailing and turned the radio right above his brother’s head.
As Western music played on, a trembling soprano solo began to drift through the air.
When he heard those two voices, Shōichi

“Ugh, that screeching!”

he said grumpily.

“Try a different one.”

Naoki turned the tuning knob haphazardly as his brother instructed.
Suddenly, a lively shamisen leapt in, and a song resembling Yagibushi began.
No one said a word about it.
Naoki went to the futon’s original spot as if stepping over his father and rolled there again.

The jangly shamisen strumming echoed from the earthen floor where Onui washed dishes, spreading through the dark village night.
Shōichi, who sometimes sang theme songs himself, would turn off the radio whenever Western music played—what did that mean?
Naoki, only a year younger and simple-minded, seemed childish to Onui, yet Shōichi—three years her senior—had aspects of his feelings she couldn’t grasp, perhaps because he was a man.
Even without understanding the meaning, listening to violins and flutes weaving beautiful melodies sometimes made her drowsy, but mostly left Onui with a pleasant feeling.
Those Western music sounds stirred in her a longing for Tokyo life she’d never known, for foreign city youths she saw yearly in films, at least for some glamorous sweetness different from their daily grind.
Onui had never imagined Tokyo living being part of her life.
Let alone foreign lands.
All the more, that longing felt like nothing but pleasant comfort to her.

Tonight, as she washed bowls while listening to the raucous shamisen, Onui suddenly realized something she had never considered before and secretly felt apologetic toward Shōichi. For she had long assumed Shōichi disliked Western music alongside his parents merely out of stubbornness, and had even entertained an uncharitable suspicion that he might be feigning dislike deliberately. If it were discovered that Shōichi—who had served in the military and spent those two years steeped in city life—had returned with a taste for jazz, she thought, even their reasons for sending him spending money during that time might come under scrutiny, prompting him to maintain this pretense to avoid complications. But what if Shōichi’s aversion to Western music arose from something else entirely? If Shōichi—who felt similarly stirred by such music and knew fragments of a life absent from this backwater village—now found it repulsive to be half-drawn toward something nonexistent here, thus rejecting jazz altogether...—

While Osaya set the habu tea she drank instead of regular tea on the shichirin stove, Onui distinctly recalled a particular smiling face.
It was from when Shōichi had been discharged and returned home, when the union held a celebratory drinking party.
Jūzō spearheaded crude jokes that grated on Onui’s ears until the conversation turned to finding Shōichi a bride.
Shōichi smiled with a faint blush—neither joyful nor merely bashful.
Then at last, as if bracing against something unseen, he sullenly—

“Enough, enough! I won’t take a wife till I’m twenty-six!”

“Enough, enough! I won’t take a wife till I’m twenty-six!” he said.
The entire village knew about Shōhei’s household debts.
They also knew the land beneath this house wasn’t theirs.
They also knew Shōichi had only attended middle school halfway.
Even if the villagers remembered this when they saw Shōichi driving the truck, they would say “Admirable.”
But if told to hand over your daughter, those matters would be recalled under entirely different conditions.

Onui’s older sister Otami had gone to Kobe through distant relatives to work as an apprentice.
There, too, lay the heart of a girl seeking her own happiness.

Under the five-candlepower electric light as she took her evening bath, these thoughts did not fade from Onui’s mind.

When Onui, carrying the faint scent of Rate cream, came into the middle room, Osaya had also joined them, and it was the time when their drowsiness had cleared.
Shōichi, at the shopfront, assumed a posture as if straddling the charcoal brazier and was haggling with a man in a striped garment.

“Now now, don’t say that—let me take care of it.”
“After all, there are folks who can lend a hand...”

“Tomorrow’s a fixed buyout day, though…”
“I can manage to arrange a day or two though.”

“Well... I’m tellin’ ya, it’s impossible...”

After the back-and-forth, the man picked up the bicycle lamp he had left there and went out.

Shōichi,

“No matter how meager it gets, a single household still ends up with four cups to fill.”

He returned under the electric light.

“Why?”

“With the old man at Yanagishita Post Office dead, they’re moving that house to Hosaka... They’re saying we should take it on for twenty-four yen.”

“That won’t do.”

Osaya shook her head as if sitting up straight.

“It’s impossible.
“I’ve seen the Yanagishita house, but there’s no issue.”

Naoki, who had been silent, suddenly said in a loud voice at that moment.

“Oh, right.”

Osaya recalled,

"Earlier, someone from the union came by saying they'd provide rice."
"They'd been saying they'd never agree to three sen per bale, but—"

she said.

"With gasoline prices rising like this, we've gotta raise the freight rates, but since railway fares are staying put, it's tough."

Osaya said in a tone tinged with acerbity,

"Ueda must be raking it in and raking it in till they don't know what to do with themselves."

She laughed.
Ueda was Nisseki's sole authorized dealer in the region, and heavy oil couldn't reach the Naval Arsenal unless it came through Ueda's shop.

"Mother, I'm going to the post office tomorrow—"

"Well then, I'll take a look."

Opening the dresser drawer, Osaya took out a white cotton bundle and Shōhei’s pension certificate.
While at it,

“What in the world is this?” Osaya showed a single stock certificate to Shōichi and the others. “What is this?”

“It’s Mr. Sakaguchi’s—the one the police had seized. He finally got it back and left it here for us to figure out what kind of thing this is.”

“What’s this—this Ken Tetsu Company—”

“I don’t know.”

Naoki, puckering his mouth and peering from beside his brother,

“It says fifty yen,” he said.

“Doesn’t Mr. Sakaguchi know about this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Isn’t this just scrap paper?”

Shōichi picked up the stock certificate—which was at least properly printed—with a disgusted finger gesture, causing everyone to burst out laughing.
Osaya took it in her hands again and gazed at it.

“If it really had value, no matter how much the police were involved, they wouldn’t have kept it seized for half a year.”
“Did the stock dealer get caught?”
“He hasn’t been caught.”
“He’s with the military police now.”

When Naoki declared this with his trademark loud voice and deadpan seriousness, they laughed again. The stockbroker who had first hooked Old Man Sakaguchi—letting him profit about two hundred yen before making him cough up nearly a thousand—had sent over Ken Tetsu shares matching cash value instead of real money, using the pretext that “since you absolutely insist on today” mid-negotiations, then disappeared from his shop the very next day. Because there was some criminal aspect involved, the stock certificate given to Sakaguchi had been confiscated by police as evidence for six full months.

Shōichi,
“If he’s not careful, Mr. Sakaguchi’ll end up hanging himself,”
he said.
“In the evening, he was shambling around Shimotonden.”
“He must’ve gone to Moichi’s shop.”

The stock certificate of uncertain authenticity was put away into the dresser again as it was.

“I’ve gotta return that box.”

Muttering to herself, Osaya took out the crushed-cornered “Asahi” cardboard box from the drawer, opened the lid, checked inside briefly, and blew off the dust.

“What’s this?”

“These are Father’s medals.”

Onui,

“Oh! I’ve never seen these even once,” she said. “Is the military handbook in here too?”
“It’s inside.”
“Let me look.”

Having only heard the name "Golden Kite Medal," Onui had imagined something entirely different in appearance from what lay in the cardboard box before her. There must be many varieties of such things, she thought. Inside the box, a photograph from Shōhei's healthier days had accidentally gotten mixed in. He wore a black formal kimono, two additional medals hanging alongside the others on his chest. The one captured in the photograph somehow looked more genuine than the actual medals.

Everyone gazed at the medals in silence for a while.
Eventually, Osaya, still silent, closed the lid of the cardboard box as before and put it away in the same place as the stock certificates.