Pathway to Japanese Literature

Guidepost: Part One

Chapter One 1

Beneath her body, the train stopped with a heavy thud and lurching sway. The jolt woke her. Nobuko opened her eyes with that sensation. But directly before Nobuko's eyes stood a square table covered by a green-and-white checkered tablecloth. Upon that table lay a jumble of Nobuko's handbag and Motoko's document case; shifting her gaze revealed several trunks of varying sizes, two bundles, and a large willow provision basket prepared in Harbin piled beside the white-painted entrance door—all clearly just brought this far. These were visible in the dim light. From Nobuko's position, Motoko slept on a bed arranged in a T-shape against the far wall. That too was visible in the dimness.

This was Moscow. Nobuko awoke with sudden clarity. They had arrived in Moscow. —Moscow—.

They had arrived at Kita Station yesterday after five o'clock. The northern city in winter was entirely an evening tableau; through the taxi window on the ride from station to hotel, she saw the fully darkened town, streetlights streaming their colors along the avenues, and vigorous snow falling through their luminous shadows. The city streets—now beginning to be wrapped in a vast night carrying rural simplicity—passed before Nobuko, her face pressed tight against the taxi window as she looked out, showing lamplight in low places, occasionally casting sudden fan-shaped illumination from semi-underground shops onto snow-falling pavements. Pedestrians became black silhouettes swiftly crossing through the tangled interplay of light and snow. In those scenes lay an approachability unexpected for a major European capital.

Today was their first day in Moscow. —That first glimpse. —Nobuko could no longer suppress the emotions welling up inside her. Carefully sitting up halfway so as not to wake Motoko with the creak of the bed, she lifted the edge of the curtain slightly. She craned her head into the gap to look outside.

Outside the double-paned window, snow was falling. When Nobuko and the others had arrived last night, the snow that had been falling lightly appeared to have continued all through the night. From unseen heights in the sky, snow fell swiftly and heavily, accumulating on the scaffolding of a large construction site across the narrow street and piling thickly atop the mushroom-shaped roof of a small hut stationed at the site’s entrance as a sentry’s shelter. In the side street where snow was falling thick and fast, there were no passersby. No sounds could be heard. In front of that quiet, snow-covered construction site, a single sentry paced slowly back and forth, his rifle slung over his shoulder with a leather strap. Wearing a felt winter cap with a pointed tip and a red star sewn onto it, and dragging the long hem of his fur-lined leather coat just above the snow’s surface, the sentry paced back and forth. A smile appeared at the corner of Nobuko’s mouth as she gazed down at the scene from the third-floor window curtain, unnoticed by him. The sentry, walking slowly through the falling snow, tilted his youthful face slightly upward toward the snowflakes cascading down one after another, strolling in a manner that seemed to deliberately let the snow strike his cheeks. The young sentry had liked the snow. He loved his country’s rich winter season, and the snow falling on his warm face was likely a delight. To Nobuko, who loved snow, it seemed she could understand the young sentry’s emotion as he turned his face to meet the falling flakes.

“Bukko-chan?”

From behind came Motoko's voice, newly awakened. Nobuko withdrew her head from where she had been lifting the curtain.

“Did you wake up?”

“Ahh… I slept well. What time do you think it is?”

Speaking of which, Nobuko hadn’t yet looked at her watch either.

“It’s eight-thirty.”

Motoko remained silent for a moment but, still lying on the bed, said, "Why don't you open the curtains?"

Motoko said. Nobuko vigorously pulled the heavy maroon cotton twill curtains. External light streamed into the narrow room. The full view of the snow-falling window appeared, and the walls of their room, painted in pale green, brightened. However, this brightness was only enough to make the whiteness of the snow falling beyond the large windowpane stand out all the more. “This won’t do, Bukko-chan. Let’s turn on the light.”

After pressing the switch and turning on the light, Nobuko opened the door and peered into the hotel hallway, sticking only her head out. The dim December morning atmosphere and falling snow had silenced all sounds from the outside world, and this scene struck Nobuko as strangely novel. At the end of the hallway, only the figure of a cleaning woman carrying a bucket was visible. The door to the room diagonally across the hallway remained closed, and a nickel samovar had been placed at the end of the corridor. The samovar was a remnant from the previous evening when Uiichi Akiyama had ordered it to his room and hosted Nobuko and the others together with Masao Segawa.

When she closed the door and returned, Nobuko had an unconvinced air,

“I wonder if everyone’s still asleep—”

she whispered. “It’s completely still.” “Hmm.”

Motoko, who had been taking her time,

“Well then,”

When she stood up, she began quickly preparing herself, taking one by one the items that had been draped over the back of the nearby chair. Even when the two of them stepped out into the hallway, it remained still and deserted. Nobuko and the others knocked on a door marked with the number 57 written on a small oval Seto ware plate above it.

“Yes.” A meticulous Russian reply came from right behind the door. As Motoko placed her hand on the handle, the door was opened from the inside.

“Ah, good morning. Please, come in…” Uiichi Akiyama, who had come to Moscow about two months earlier as a cultural state guest for the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, had been constantly accompanied by a young man named Atsushi Utsumi—a graduate of the Russian department at a foreign language school whom he had brought from Japan. It was Utsumi who had opened the door. “How was it—your first night’s sleep…” Uiichi Akiyama, seated on a long chair facing the table placed by the window, nodded his head in a somewhat stylish manner as he greeted them and asked Nobuko and the others.

“We slept like a log... It’s really coming down out there, isn’t it?” As Motoko said this and approached to look outside, both windows of this room faced the main street, and through the swirling snow, roof after roof of the avenue stretched into view. “I hear the snow was late overall this year—the first snow fell on the fourth, I think—” Utsumi pronounced the words with a slight Akita accent, articulating them as meticulously as he did when speaking Russian.

“This must be settled snow now. Once January comes and this snowfall stops, every day will be clear skies, and Russia’s true severe winter will begin.” Akiyama, too, seemed moved by his first sight of Moscow’s wintry scenery, but “Then shall we inform Segawa?” he said, glancing back at Utsumi. “Was that before breakfast?” “Yes. “I thought we’d do it together once you all were up.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” With an embarrassed look, Nobuko apologized. “We overslept…” “No need to apologize. It’s perfectly fine. “We ourselves only just woke up… But we can’t possibly match the Soviet people—they’re truly vigorous, you see. “They’d stay up until dawn engaged in heated debates, laughing and dancing one moment, then report punctually to work at nine—because…”

At that moment, Masao Segawa entered in a neat black suit and striped trousers. As a leading Japanese expert in the Russian language, Masao Segawa was also a state guest. Mitsuru Sanai, a theater specialist, had apparently departed from Moscow for Berlin about ten days prior.

“Good morning—how are you? Did you sleep well?” “Did you rest well?”

Uiichi Akiyama, true to his role as a proletarian artist, swept back his salt-and-pepper hair—rather long and streaked with white—in a style reminiscent of a chonmage topknot. Masao Segawa, in a manner befitting a professor, wore his hair neatly parted and cultivated a beard. These were precisely the distinctive traits each man possessed. As for what defined him, Atsushi Utsumi had soft hair combed flat against his broad forehead and wore black-rimmed Lloyd glasses—yet it was that hair, those glasses, and his thin-lipped expression that made Nobuko recall late nineteenth-century Russian university students. Utsumi himself did not seem entirely displeased with this impression.

Before long, the five Japanese delegates gathered around the table, called for tea utensils, bread, butter, and such, and began their breakfast with last night’s leftovers—pickled cucumbers, cheese, beautiful red ikura—that had been stored on the shelf of Akiyama’s nearly empty wardrobe.

“It’s curious—Russian people have long been depicted in novels as frequent tea drinkers, but now that I’ve come here, I find myself actually wanting to drink it too.”

Masao Segawa said this. "In Japan, people in places like Shinshu drink tea frequently too—generally speaking, that's how it goes in cold regions, wouldn't you agree?" Akiyama replied in his characteristic didactic tone.

While eating thin slices of delicious pickled cucumbers served on buttered bread, Nobuko's eyes kept drifting toward the snow falling outside the window. Moscow's snow... It stirred such vivid emotions that her heart refused to settle. To speak purely of the snow itself—Nobuko and the others had spent days in mid-December watching endless Siberian snow through train windows from morning till night, ever since leaving Harbin on the Trans-Siberian Railway past Lake Baikal into Great Russia. This was wilderness snow. At stations wrapped in snow and icicles, bells announcing train arrivals clanged—clang, clang, clang—their echoes piercing the frozen Siberian air's crystalline clarity. The white desolation held beauty.

When the train arrived at Novosibirsk, Nobuko—stepping down onto the snow as usual to breathe the outside air—was startled to find the frozen solid and glittering bright air so unyielding that it refused to enter the nostrils. Laughing in surprise, she kept coughing. It was minus thirty-five degrees there.

It was not that the snow itself was novel, but rather that this life in Moscow—amid such relentless snowfall—stirred Nobuko’s premonitions.

As the meal was nearing its end, Masao Segawa,

“Now then, how does your schedule for today look?”

he asked Nobuko and the others.

“Well, we haven’t exactly settled on anything specific yet.” Motoko, whose khaki suit complemented her black hair well, answered. “I was thinking of just dropping by the embassy for a bit—since we’ve arranged to have our letters sent there.” Uiichi Akiyama listened in silence with his small frame and shook his crossed legs.

“Alright, let’s settle it this way.”

While starting to rise from his seat, Segawa said.

“In about thirty minutes, I’ll have to go out to VOKS myself anyway, so I’ll take you there. Since VOKS is a place we’ll need to visit eventually regardless.”

“That’s a good idea. Visiting VOKS is important, you know.” Under thick, long eyebrows, blinking his disproportionately small eyes and nodding as if to himself, Uiichi Akiyama said. “All foreign cultural figures are being taken care of there, you see.” “Then that’s settled.” Segawa concluded the discussion in his practical manner.

“From VOKS, the embassy is also nearby.”

VOKS was the abbreviation for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries located in Moscow. This All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries had branches in every city of the Soviet Union while also dispatching personnel to countries around the world. Nobuko and the others had met Dr. Parvin—who resided within the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo—regarding passport endorsements. That giant-like man with ashen-yellow eyes too had been a VOKS Tokyo dispatcher. This time, Sanai, Akiyama and the others coming as state guests had all been arranged through VOKS’s mediation.

Following Segawa’s departure, as Nobuko and the others began returning to their rooms to prepare for going out, Uiichi Akiyama—from the table still set with tea utensils—

“At VOKS, you’ll find an extraordinary beauty.” “They say she speaks every language except Italian and Japanese.” “The very model of an Armenian beauty—well, you must see for yourself.” He said this with a laugh.

Following Masao Segawa—who wore an astrakhan hat crafted from black lamb’s fleece and a coat with a collar of the same fur—Motoko and Nobuko stepped out into the snow-filled street. At the entrance to the large construction site in front of the hotel, a heavy freight wagon was just beginning to enter. With his winter coat—lined with fur like those worn by sentries—left open at the chest and the earflaps of his winter cap flapping against both sides of his unshaven cheeks, the driver,

“Davai! Davai!” “Davai!”

In a booming voice, he urged the horse on, placed his hands on the shafts, and with all his strength guided it across the inclined plank. The word *davai*, she had learned, meant "give." The driver shouted *davai*, *davai* in an energetic tone—but what did it mean? To Nobuko, who was a step behind,

“Bukko-chan!”

Motoko called out in a loud voice. At the street corner just outside the hotel, three sleighs were waiting for passengers. Motoko was in the process of boarding one of them. Masao Segawa, carrying a large box-like object wrapped in a Japanese furoshiki under his arm, boarded alongside Motoko.

“Bukko-chan, stand at the front!”

“Where to?” “Here—there’s enough space to stand.” Masao Segawa said as he retracted his feet clad in winter boots.

“It’s only about six or seven minutes away, so there’s no problem.” “On the contrary, isn’t it rather fun?” “...Look, like this.” Entrusting the box to Motoko, Segawa had her half-sit on his knee. Having loaded the three passengers, the sleigh slowly turned the horse’s head—which had been facing Tverskaya Boulevard—in the opposite direction, then began to proceed at a brisk pace down the street lined with house windows. Snow fell on the driver’s round hat—a vivid green woolen cloth trimmed with fur—and also on the collars and chests of the coats worn by Nobuko and the others. It was windless snow. The sleigh soon emerged onto a street running parallel to Tverskaya Boulevard that cut vertically through Moscow. That was a shopping district where streetcars did not run. Bakery. Bookstore. Grocery store. Several vacant stores whose merchandise was unclear. A flower shop with its show window entirely frozen white, obscuring the colors of the flowers within. On the narrow sidewalk in front of the shops, men wearing quilted half-coats for warmth, felt boots, and swollen briefcases tucked under their arms walked briskly, their shoulders and chests whitened by snow. Women wearing brown woolen shawls draped from head to shoulders, with baskets looped over their arms, were walking slowly. Chewing sunflower seeds and spitting their shells onto the snow, a boy walked as if strolling. The town was old-fashioned, with three-story shops lining the snow-covered streets, and the scent of snow mingled with the faint odor of horse manure. The sleigh carrying Nobuko and the others passed by the iron fence of the National Music School, and soon came to a stop in front of a building with wide steps on the right side.

As the three of them were climbing the low stone steps, Motoko—by some misstep—slipped on the snow, lurched forward, and caught herself on the steps with her gloved hands. Motoko quickly righted herself. Just like that, they entered the main entrance.

That was the VOKS building. Even while checking her winter boots at the cloakroom, Nobuko surveyed the building—constructed in the early twentieth century’s new style (Nouveau)—with keen interest. It must have originally been built as a private residence for some wealthy Muscovite. The transom of the grand door separating the entrance hall was stained glass, where flowers resembling California poppies with soft petals had their vines rendered in sweeping arabesque patterns. The door frame itself—fitted with exquisite glass that echoed these stained-glass curves—had been crafted with swelling contours that grew more pronounced toward the base, evoking leaves cradling resplendent glass blossoms. Directly ahead stood the front staircase. Its marble handrail followed Nouveau-style undulating curves, shaped like elongated flower stamens. It had likely been modeled after French designs. Yet nowhere in its ornamentation could one find the taut lines of pure French style. The weight and thickness of every contour were unmistakably Russian in character, and the mansion’s opulence seemed to articulate a French aesthetic thoroughly Russified.

When selecting this building as an office for international cultural relations, the members of Moscow’s relevant committee must have all thought it beautiful and chosen it believing it held value for visitors from abroad to behold. But did those people anticipate how profoundly interesting—almost humorous—it was that this building’s splendor, while imitating French style, so richly exuded Russian character?

Nobuko, her interest further stirred, was guided to a room on the left-hand side of the hall. That space served as a reception room where several other guests were already seated on armchairs scattered freely across a somewhat faded pinkish-red carpet. Originally, this space had likely been used as a winter guest room after all—the ceiling with curvilinear molding was relatively low to ensure comfort and warmth, and a deep bay window faced the street. There was a potted cactus there. At the far end upon entering, there was also a bay window, and before it stood a large office desk. The only other office desk stood in the left-hand corner of the not-too-spacious room. Over there, a plainly dressed woman in a white blouse was handling affairs.

The beautiful woman that Uiichi Akiyama had specially noted was an Armenian woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight with such striking features that they were immediately apparent without being named. Wearing a black skirt and light pink blouse adorned with beautiful earrings, she possessed porcelain-pale skin, Middle Eastern-style long eyebrows, magnificent eyes, and round, vividly red lips as she managed the desk at the room's far end upon entry.

“Ah, Professor Segawa!” With brisk efficiency and businesslike charm, that person rose from her chair. Then, shaking out her neatly clustered black curls around her neck, she extended a hand for a handshake from across the desk. At the same time, she turned a smile toward Nobuko and Motoko—who stood there as new guests—then emerged from behind the desk and shook hands.

“This is Ms. Gorushkina, the administrative head here.” Then he introduced Nobuko and Motoko’s professional specialties one by one and explained that their Soviet visit had been undertaken in a personal capacity. “Welcome.” The beautiful woman, with work-trained efficiency, suddenly addressed Nobuko and the others in English. “We would like to accommodate your convenience as much as possible—how long will you be staying?”

Motoko hesitated briefly. Nobuko: “Professor Segawa, I’m sorry to trouble you, but please give this reply.” “We intend to stay as long as our travel funds last—and as long as the Soviets don’t expel us—”

“That’s delightful.”

Gorushkina burst into laughter and took Nobuko’s hand. “So you don’t plan to hurry through sightseeing in Moscow either?” “Of course we’ll need your help in many situations, but we’ll take things gradually—” “I want to learn how to buy tangerines in Russian soon.” “Oh, have you grown fond of tangerines?” This time Nobuko laughed. Gorushkina laughed with her, her large black eyes—their striking lashes drawing attention—glinting with wit. Then she said.

“After touring the Soviet Union for six months, one guest even said that what they liked best in the end was the salted pickles.”

Masao Segawa told Gorushkina that he wanted to meet Madame Kamenewa.

“Just a moment, please.” Gorushkina was writing in a notebook and handing it to the woman at the other desk,

“Will everyone be meeting her?”

she asked.

“How about it? Since it’s a perfect opportunity, you should meet her.”

Having said that to Nobuko and the others, Segawa, “Please.”

Gorushkina politely dictated in a scribe-friendly manner, “Yoshimi Motoko – specialist in Russian literature and translator – Sasa Nobuko – writer.” With this concluding the matters involving Nobuko’s group, Gorushkina began distributing the prepared documents to three Americans who had been waiting earlier and explaining their contents. Just then, a man around forty entered with silent, long strides – gauntly tall and thin, his face ruddy.

“Good day, Professor Segawa.” Hearing that voice, Nobuko involuntarily looked again at the man. For the first time, she encountered someone who spoke in such a low register. It appeared to be his natural voice: Novamirsky—the man Segawa introduced to Nobuko and the others—greeted them in that same subterranean tone, as though his Adam’s apple had slipped down into his chest. In his hand lay the pale blue paper slip Gorushkina had earlier passed to the woman at the other desk.

“Please wait a moment.” Novamirsky, who had left the room, returned before long. And,

“Madame Kamenewa is apparently pleased to meet you.”

While saying this in his usual subterranean voice, he bowed slightly toward Nobuko and the others as if addressing society ladies. Passing several offices with doors left open, the three were guided to a secluded corner of the building. Novamirsky—taller than Segawa from the neck up alone—stood before a door and, focusing his attention inward, knocked carefully. They heard the low voice of a middle-aged woman respond. Novamirsky opened the door,

“Professor Segawa.” After announcing, “Right this way.”

He remained outside and closed the door.

It was a spacious room unified in light gray and pale blue tones. In the left rear of that square hall, devoid of unnecessary decorations or extra furniture, stood an imposing desk. Before it sat a bob-haired woman in a white blouse and gray mouse-colored suit, reviewing documents. The broad-shouldered woman, who appeared to be between forty and fifty years old, did not lift her gaze from the documents in her hand until Segawa and Nobuko's group had soundlessly walked across the thick carpet and come within five or six steps of the desk.

“Good day. We apologize for intruding on your busy schedule for a short while.”

At Segawa’s polite words, the woman raised her eyes from the documents.

“Good day.” Then, rising from her chair, she turned toward Nobuko and the others and managed to muster something like a smile. To Nobuko, her first impression of the woman felt profoundly unsettling. Madame Kamenewa—who bore a heavy, square jaw uncannily resembling those of Trotsky’s brothers—stared fixedly at her visitors with eyes whose whites encircled her irises, her back teeth clenched as she forced a semblance of a smile onto her face. Nobuko, young woman that she was, sensed a dim dread radiating from that expression.

Masao Segawa appeared already accustomed to such expressions from Madame Kamenewa and shook her hand with an air of unruffled courtesy before introducing Nobuko and Motoko. Madame: “It is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

was all she said.

Segawa delivered his gratitude in a characteristically professorial, lengthy address regarding their recent sightseeing tour, then stood to untie the furoshiki-wrapped bundle placed on a chair by the wall and brought over a box—carefully transported here—measuring just under two shaku (approximately 60 centimeters). The paulownia wood box was a doll case. When the glass lid was slid aside, there emerged the Fujimusume doll—adorned in an exquisitely dyed furisode kimono with wisteria branches draped over her shoulders and wearing a lacquered sedge hat fastened by crimson cords beneath her chin. Segawa positioned the meticulously crafted doll—measuring one shaku five or six sun (approximately eighteen inches)—upright on Madame Kamenewa’s desk.

“As a memento commemorating our acquaintance.” “And to further strengthen amity between Soviet and Japanese cultures.” A look of faint yet unadulterated curiosity appeared on Madame Kamenewa’s dark-complexioned face.

“It’s very beautiful!” With only the intonation of those words conveying her admiration, Madame Kamenewa raised herself from the swivel chair she had been leaning back in and took the Fujimusume doll into both hands. “—It is a very finely crafted work of art.” Madame Kamenewa did not utter a single interjection—such as “Oh” or “Ah”—of the sort European women often use in such situations.

“The renowned production area for Japanese dolls is Kyoto—what Kiev is to the Soviet Union. This Fujimusume was crafted by a particularly esteemed shop in Kyoto. The doll’s attire, being formal wear, is an exact miniature replica of what humans use.” Segawa meticulously explained those details.

“Of course, as you are well aware, not all Japanese women wear such aesthetic attire every day—their daily lives are quite harsh, you see…” Listening silently to Segawa’s explanation and nodding in response, Madame Kamenewa continued observing the doll in her hands with her characteristic eyes whose whites showed all around.

From their chairs, Nobuko and the others were once again intently watching the Madame’s demeanor. To Nobuko, it felt as though she could almost hear what impressions were passing not through the heart of the Madame who was looking at the doll, but through that bob-haired head of hers. Delicate in color and intricate in pattern yet utterly devoid of vitality—that large doll, made of clay that smelled faintly of glue—stood worlds apart from Madame Kamenewa’s entire being. Madame, in fact, while her curiosity was genuinely stirred, was attempting to display on her face a sense of novelty toward what she perceived as an undeveloped culture.

Madame Kamenewa let out a sigh-like breath and, still silent, gently placed the doll on the desk. Once again, it fell to Segawa—ever polite—to dredge up some new topic. Nobuko’s astonishment swelled steadily; it took effort not to exchange glances with Motoko at her side. Could such interaction even exist? That Madame Kamenewa hadn’t offered a single casual word to them—young women—even after Segawa’s presentation of the Japanese doll struck her as extraordinary. Judging by Madame’s demeanor, she didn’t seem to harbor any particular animosity toward Nobuko and the others. It was simply that she held no interest.

When I considered it this way, there was something unsettled about Madame Kamenewa’s demeanor in her role as chairperson of this cultural liaison association—a position blending cultural and social elements—that had not fully settled into its proper place. In this spacious room with quiet lighting unified in gray and subdued indigo blue, it felt as though Madame’s inner consciousness frequently concentrated itself somewhere entirely separate from these encounters with language-barriered foreigners and discussions of international culture. The Madame seemed perpetually dissatisfied for reasons known only to herself.

Segawa seemed to be searching for a new topic, but “Ah, you had something you brought, didn’t you?” Segawa glanced back at Nobuko and the others. “Why don’t we present them now?” The atmosphere was thoroughly incongruous for heartfelt gifts to be presented. However, Motoko—flushed slightly with irritation, her face made beautiful by it—stood up, retrieved the tie-dyed silk fukusa and hand-painted fan depicting birds and flowers that the two had brought as gifts, and placed them on Madame Kamenewa’s desk. And though she could speak Russian, without uttering a single word, she conveyed the meaning of presenting it with a small gesture, and in that instant, an indescribable smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. It was a sour, bitter, sharp smile that could not compare to Madame Kamenewa’s—her back teeth clenched as she strained to maintain that astringent, leaden semblance of a smile on her face. Nobuko caught the momentary, impossibly intricate creases at the corners of Motoko’s mouth. Nobuko showed a genuine smile for the first time since being ushered into this room.

Even toward Nobuko and the others' gifts, Madame offered only a few brief words each time, praising their beauty. The words "thank you" seemed to be a custom she did not observe as Madame. Once this gift-presenting ceremony concluded, Madame fell silent once more.

Though Masao Segawa’s words were unrestricted, there existed nowhere in the bright, cold-toned hall a natural opening to utilize them. The three of them stepped outside as if the meeting had concluded.

As if she couldn’t wait for the door to close, Motoko—

“It’s suffocatingly formal, isn’t it? So this is what they call cultural liaison?” she said with palpable irritation. “I don’t care how grand she thinks herself—a simple ‘thank you’ wouldn’t tarnish her precious dignity.” Segawa twitched his black mustache beneath his nose in apparent surprise. “I did say it! Didn’t I say it?” He turned to look at Nobuko walking beside him. “Well... I didn’t hear it.” “Is she always like that?”

“Is that so?” “That’s strange… Didn’t she say it?” “I was certain she’d said it, though…”

“It’s like being granted an imperial edict—utterly terrifying.”

Segawa listened to Motoko’s words with only half an ear, his mind seemingly preoccupied with repeatedly reconsidering whether it was indeed true that Madame Kamenewa had not said thank you.

At that moment, Novamirsky appeared from around the corner of the corridor. Then, from beneath his pale carrot-colored, tousled eyebrows, he shifted his nimble grey gaze, attempting to discern the expressions of the three who had just concluded their meeting with Madame. He started to say something—but Novamirsky wisely swallowed it. They returned in silence to the reception room by the main entrance, where a lively commotion bustled around the beautiful Gorushkina.

Proceeding a few blocks down Maraya Nikitskaya Street where the VOKS building stood, this street met the first of two grand tree-lined boulevards encircling Moscow in a ring. A tram slowly passed along the outer side of the promenade. There, the road coming from Maraya Nikitskaya branched into five radial directions. In the past, there appears to have been a single gate leading into Moscow there, now called Nikitsky Gate. While Masao Segawa provided explanations, the tree-lined avenue glimpsed from their sleigh appeared beautiful through equally swift-falling snow—large linden trees with branches piled heavy with snow stretching endlessly into the distance. Along the tree-lined promenade stood snow-laden benches, while deep folds in the greatcoat of a bronze statue—standing tall at the avenue’s edge with its back to the street—gathered snowdrifts only on its windward side.

Nobuko and the others’ sleigh proceeded diagonally along one of the vertical roads at the five-pronged intersection there. That place was not a shopping district. They passed through areas where imposing iron gates fronted soot-stained, dilapidated five-story buildings visible beyond them, and where narrow sidewalks ran alongside weather-beaten wooden cottages—painted a rustic maroon—that leaned precariously with age. Modern European-style buildings and old Russian wooden cottages stood side by side along a single sidewalk, and the sight of snow falling heavily left a deep impression on Nobuko.

The Japanese Embassy, somehow irregular in a way that lent it charm, stood on the right side of a quiet, picturesque street with a solid gate, an inner courtyard, and a carriage turnaround. Nobuko and the others emerged from an entrance before the main entrance with its carriage porch, suddenly finding themselves in the second-floor corridor outside the office. Through Segawa’s introduction, Nobuko and the others wrote down their names and addresses and requested the safekeeping of their mail. The counselor was out, and Nobuko departed for home without presenting the letter of introduction she had received from the president of Bunmeisha—a friend of the counselor’s.

The three of them, having returned to the hotel, immediately noisily entered Uiichi Akiyama’s room. “Ah, welcome back.” “So, how was it? Did you meet the Bearded One?” Akiyama, looking amused, immediately asked, his small eyes shining. “The Bearded One?”

“Ah, that Armenian beauty has a mustache by the side of her upper lip.” Now that he mentioned it, there had been a shadow of downy hair above her red, rounded upper lip. Regarding the VOKS beauty, it was amusing how Uiichi Akiyama had discerned even the minutest details about her. “We met... She’s quite lively, isn’t she?” “She’s quite something, isn’t she?” Atsushi Utsumi, his earnest expression taking on a certain nuance, “Mr. Akiyama has taken quite a liking to the Caucasian beauty and was very pleased, saying she closely resembles Japanese women.”

he said. From the pocket of the coat she had hung at the room’s entrance, Motoko took out a large box of Russian cigarettes and, having come to the table, said to Professor Segawa, “Thank you for all your assistance.” She bowed dutifully. “But you know, that beauty is certainly a beauty, but that woman Kamenewa is quite something too.” …………

Akiyama silently blinked his eyes. Segawa also remained silent. For Segawa’s part, he seemed reluctant to acknowledge that Motoko was angry about Madame Kamenewa’s failure to properly thank them for such a grand gift. Silently, he exhaled cigarette smoke.

“Is that person always like that?”

To Motoko, who was pressing further, Akiyama responded evasively,

“If I had to say, she gives a rather stiff impression—you might put it that way.”

Segawa, who had been asked for agreement,

“She’s not much of a talker by nature, you know.”

he said. And then, continuing, “However, I find it interesting that Madame Kamenewa serves as chairperson of that VOKS organization.” “In a sense, one could say it eloquently demonstrates the political boldness of the Soviets.” “It’s quite interesting that they’ve calmly placed her siblings in such positions even amidst all this criticism against Trotskyists.”

Uiichi Akiyama, small hands befitting his diminutive frame rubbing together as if in deliberation while making the podium gestures he often used, “Since Kamenev has been exiled, along with Zinoviev—” Motoko remained silent but eventually smiled in an extremely sarcastic manner, “I see.”

“I see,” she said. “So all foreigners who come to VOKS are duly impressed in that regard—not a bad method, is it?” No matter what happened, Motoko showed a kind of stubbornness to say she didn’t want to—

“Being under VOKS’s care with that woman around feels thoroughly unappealing,” she said. Hearing this, Akiyama grew slightly agitated. His small eyes took on an intense expression.

“That is a personal sentiment,” Akiyama said. “To understand Soviet complexity, one must always maintain an open mind.” “Yoshimi-san, you’ve been remarkably sharp since day one,” Segawa remarked. He laughed with a wry smile. “But Yoshimi-san,” Utsumi interjected, “don’t you agree such cultural institutions have their value?”

It was Utsumi who had asked. “I have no objection regarding that matter.”

“Isn’t the issue ultimately about the facilities and the actual value of the work being done there?”

“…………” “Places like that also operate on a committee system like anywhere else, so it’s not something that can be swayed by one person’s inclinations alone.”

As if supplementing Utsumi’s words, Akiyama added.

“VOKS is a department removed from the political center, you see.” “It must be a good place to position people in such complicated roles.”

Nobuko listened intently, determined not to miss a single word anyone said. Even though all of this was being discussed in Japanese, these were debates Nobuko had never heard in Tokyo. And even during the week that Motoko and Nobuko had spent in the severely shaking compartment of the Trans-Siberian Railway up until yesterday.

“What’s wrong, Sasa-san?”

Segawa turned his face toward Nobuko, who had been sitting there without uttering a word since earlier, and said. “Are you tired?” “No.”

“Then what’s the matter, Sasa-san?”

“It’s not that anything’s wrong—I just want to understand Russian quickly. Even just seeing one VOKS building makes everything so fascinating. Here, even unpleasant things become interesting… what a mysterious place this is.” “Even unpleasant things become interesting… Ha ha ha!” “You might be absolutely right!” Segawa laughed in agreement, his cheerfulness restored.

“Since we’ll often be missing each other going forward, let’s have a proper dinner together today.” Segawa proposed this.

The hotel's dining hall had walls finished in green, just like all the rooms upstairs. What had likely been converted from ordinary rooms into a dining hall felt cramped; across the lined-up tables, coarse white paper lay spread out in place of tablecloths, with simple knives, forks, and spoons of various sizes prepared.

Although it was three in the afternoon, it felt like evening. Through two windows that looked down low onto the roofs of other buildings lay the view of snow falling all day from the darkened sky with unrelenting speed. On the central long table where Nobuko and the others sat, flowers had been arranged. It was a pot blooming with large pale purple Western chrysanthemums, around which coiled a wide ribbon of light pink-dyed wood shavings like pillars at a garden party, forming a large bow where green crepe paper wrapped around the pot’s base. White coarse-paper tablecloths, simple knives and forks, and this flower pot. Nobuko felt with endless fascination how Russia—that vast nation—bordered Mongolia at one extremity.

A waiter wearing a large white apron that wrapped all the way around to the back, with a not very clean napkin draped over his arm, served rich, oily borscht that looked delicious before everyone. The menu was monotonous; the waiter—dressed in a prawn-colored shirt and tie, his chestnut hair and beard meticulously curled with a curling iron—wore a ring on his pinky finger as he served. While eating her veal cutlet, Nobuko suddenly remembered—

“Something funny happened at dinner, didn’t it—may I talk about it?”

Nobuko glanced at Motoko.

“What?” “When we arrived in Harbin—thinking we should get used to Russian living right away—we stayed at the ‘Golden Horn’. Neither Japanese nor English worked there, you see. When noon came and we tried to eat lunch, they said the dining hall wasn’t open yet, so we ordered an expensive special meal to our room. Around seven o’clock when we asked for dinner—the same thing happened again. So for two days like that, we ate some rather strange meals.”

“Ah, it must only be in Russia that you’d find customs like serving dinner from three to five—”

As Akiyama said this, Segawa— “That was a slip-up even unbecoming of Yoshimi-san, wasn’t it?” Segawa laughed. “Dinner times appear quite often even in novels, don’t they?” “That’s precisely the tragedy of the red blanket, you see. Haven’t you secretly done similar things yourself?”

“I was perfectly fine.” Segawa insisted with an oddly meaningful tone that made everyone burst into laughter. “Why did you stay so long in Harbin?”

“We had to buy monkey fur, you see.”

“Monkey fur?” “It goes on the lining of the coat.”

Regarding that monkey fur, Nobuko felt somewhat dejected. Since they would be lining it with fur in Harbin anyway where proper adjustments could be made later, her thick black serge coat had been carelessly sewn regarding length and such. When purchasing the inexpensive yet durable and relatively lightweight monkey fur at Churin in Harbin, it had been arranged by Motoko's journalist friend. Caught up in the situation, Nobuko ended up having the fur attached without taking precise measurements of her coat's length. Imagining her small round figure dragging the heavy black coat—too long and ill-fitting in width—she felt a faint awkwardness toward the humor others might find in it.

As they were eating the candied dried apricots, plums, jujubes, and other fruits served for dessert, Segawa glanced at his wristwatch.

“Mr. Akiyama, will you be going to the Moscow Art Theatre tonight?”

Segawa asked.

“Well…” “Tickets—you received yours the other day too, didn’t you?” “Did you get them—Utsumi?” “…………”

Utsumi tilted his head and remained silent, as if trying to recall.

“Tonight is *Armored Train*—how about it, you two—won’t you go see it?” When Segawa said this, Motoko—ever the theater enthusiast—flushed slightly.

“Fine, you win...”

She made that familiar gesture of stroking her chin upward.

“I’d love to see it—but isn’t it impossible to get tickets this late?” Ivanov’s *Armored Train* had been translated into Japanese, and Nobuko had read it. “The tickets are with me.” “Well—could I have those?” “Since there are exactly three, I can put them to good use.”

Nobuko, “How wonderful!”

Her eyes lit up with genuine delight. "Being able to see our long-cherished Moscow Art Theatre tonight feels like a blessing." "Oh right Yoshimi-san," Segawa added with an air of sudden recollection, "you had been translating Chekhov's letters before we departed Japan?" He remarked in this way to show he fully understood Motoko's enthusiasm for visiting MXAT. Once arrangements were confirmed,Akiyama launched into effusive praise of *Armored Train*'s artistic merits.

“That’s something you ought to see.” “It’s truly splendid.” Watching Akiyama emphasize his point by clasping his small hands together, Nobuko wondered what kind of person Uiichi Akiyama really was. That morning too, when they had gone to VOKS, it had been Masao Segawa who actually proposed it and invited them. Segawa was the one who suggested it, and once they decided to go, Akiyama had been the one to emphasize the importance of visiting VOKS. Now, when the topic of the Moscow Art Theatre came up at this table as well, Akiyama repeated the same approach. Segawa began speaking, Segawa provided the tickets, and once it was settled they would go together, Uiichi Akiyama emphatically praised the excellence of the Moscow Art Theatre.

The Moscow Art Theatre was, as Segawa had said, truly close to the hotel. Along Tverskaya Avenue—ascending slightly leftward away from Red Square and turning right at a broad intersection—they had not walked far before seeing a glass awning projecting over the narrow sidewalk, catching reflected light that filled that single spot on the dark snowy street with cheerful brightness amid the winter night. People came up from behind, overtaking Nobuko and her group while chatting and laughing even more animatedly as they quickened their pace. People approached from the opposite side trying to enter the theater. The brightness concentrated before the theater made the ceaselessly falling snowflakes gleam white, through which black figures moved incessantly. At the very moment those black silhouette-like people pushed open the front doors to enter the theater, their upper bodies were suddenly bathed in intense light. It brought out the brownish luster of leather coats and made vivid the red and black rose patterns on cream-colored shawls worn by women.

Mingling with the crowd, Nobuko and the others checked their winter boots. Then they went to a separate coat check area and checked their hats and coats. Around Nobuko—in front, behind, to her left and right—women who had arrived wearing shawls of flashy floral patterns, fine calico, or else utterly commonplace brown and gray woolen ones were each removing those shawls. When the shawls were removed, all kinds of Russian women’s faces appeared from within them—faces with deep wrinkles, lively skin, and the eyes of middle-aged housewives marked by household weariness. Next, the thickly padded winter coats of ambiguous hues were shed in a manner that seemed almost natural. When women’s bodies emerged from within them, there was a fresh sensation—a suddenly supple and warm woman laid bare there.

Segawa's tickets were for box seats located midway on the right side facing the stage.

“What a terribly grand spot.”

Motoko, wearing the same yellowish-brown suit as during the day, sat down in the front-row seat next to Nobuko and said to Segawa behind her: “The tickets VOKS provides seem to mostly be box seats no matter which theater.”

“Well, you all are state guests after all.” “Hey!” Interrupting her, Nobuko—wearing a silk dress with beaded shoulder clasps—pressed her hand down atop Motoko’s and demanded attention. “Chaika (seagull) is here!” “Where?” Nobuko indicated the stage with a gesture. On the wide stage before curtain-rise hung a solidly heavy grayish curtain. At the central meeting point of its left and right sides lay a braided embroidery in muted tones—a seagull with wings spread, soaring between sky and water.

“It was on the entrance door too—didn’t you notice?” The seagull, serving as the sole decoration at the center of the plain curtain—framed within an elongated square with rounded corners—was also printed on the left edge of the light-blue ticket inside Nobuko’s handbag, its corner torn off, and adorned the cover of the program resting on the velvet-lined handrail of the box seats. The Moscow Art Theatre had marked a significant departure in modern drama’s history through Chekhov’s *The Seagull*. During rehearsals for its premiere, when this theater still stood uncompleted, the actors had practiced in a frigid storage-like building by candlelight. Yet all of them burned with the hope and pride that they alone were creating truly new theater, undaunted by the cold. This account came from Olga Knipper—Chekhov’s wife. *The Seagull* remained an emblem inseparable from MXAT’s artistic life.

Nobuko was astonished by the fact that a play whose lines she couldn’t understand could be this enthralling.

Not only was *Armored Train* easy to understand because Nobuko had read it beforehand, but the Moscow Art Theatre actors—each one a proper actor through rigorous training and unified approach—depicted with truly theatrical effect, scene by scene, the heroic actions of peasant partisans who fought in the civil war during the revolutionary period. Elsinen, the protagonist portrayed by Kachārov, was initially entirely blended into the crowd of peasants in the first act—so unrecognizable that one could not even pinpoint his presence. Yet as the act progressed and as revolutionary conflict among local peasants intensified, he gradually grew into a leader of the partisan group through accumulated small actions and modest initiative. *Armored Train* was a play that had no protagonist assigned a fixed role from the outset. It narrated and depicted how protagonists of specific events naturally emerge from real-life struggles.

Segawa, while eagerly watching the stage, whispered to Nobuko and the others in the front row of the box seats. “Look—Kachalov’s Elsinen has begun to stand out slightly in this scene for the first time, hasn’t he?” The audience was convinced the play was truly being performed for their sake as they watched. From the box where Nobuko and the others sat—down to the lower orchestra seats and up to the back of the second-floor balcony—spectators were packed tightly. No children were visible, but men and women of all ages—in every manner of dress and countenance—sat motionless in seats bathed in dim light, thousands of eyes fixed intently upon the stage. Though the theater’s atmosphere seemed governed by reserved modesty, when they reached a certain point, thunderous applause welled up and shook the auditorium. By any measure, that ovation was not meant solely for Kachalov’s skillful performance. At that moment, the audience sympathized with the partisans’ judgment and actions.

Nobuko was moved by this new scene that connected MXAT’s venerable realism-based stage with its audience through such passion. One tangibly felt how plays and novels had become entirely different from before since Russia became Soviet. How many men among the packed audience had actually experienced some part of this Elsinen the Partisan’s story between 1917 and 1920? Though the course of all they fought for in the revolution nearly mirrored what unfolded on stage, there must also be men who differed only in having lived to see this night—sitting in this theater watching it. Even if their roles differed—and thus their experiences varied slightly—every man who weathered that storm of courage, terror, tears, and exultation in that year of 1917, that October month, and every woman too, each must have at least one story carved into their life. Was *Armored Train* not speaking precisely to these “stories of theirs” etched deep into people’s lives? The MXAT actors weren’t just performing *Armored Train* splendidly to satisfy the audience—were they not also making most spectators recall their days of struggle, feel pride they hadn’t lived in vain for this new history, and awaken to the potential still expected of them? *Armored Train* brought down its heroic tragic curtain amid a strange reverberation that shook both stage and audience alike.

On Tverskaya Street past eleven o'clock, crystalline-fine powdery snow continued to fall, finer than the evening’s earlier flurries. A single sleigh that had come hoping to catch the theater’s closing crowd but missed its chance lumbered slowly along, following in the direction from which Nobuko and the others were walking.

Nobuko clung to Motoko’s arm—not so much from unsteadiness in her footing, but from a desire for steadfast support to anchor her violently shaken heart—as Motoko, wearing her brown coat, walked beside her. “Are you that cold?”

Noticing the slight trembling in Nobuko’s body as they walked pressed close together, Motoko asked anxiously. “That’s not it—I’m fine!” Feeling the powdery snow pleasantly against her flushed cheeks—this post-theater mood, a trembling that refused to subside—Nobuko recalled the evening when she was sixteen or seventeen and first saw Strindberg’s *Countess Julie* at a small theater owned by a wealthy man in Kamimeguro. That was the first modern theater Nobuko had seen. Countess Julie’s love was how morbid and bizarre! What a shuddering sound the whip made! Yet, stirred by the indescribable atmosphere of the entire play, Nobuko trembled in the carriage all the way home. That small theater, built to resemble a log cabin amidst the grove. In the smoking room hung a foreign-style lantern with stained glass panes. There were university students and people involved in literature and theater standing or sitting there, smoking in clusters, chatting and laughing. Not only did the play itself move Nobuko, who was on the verge of becoming a young woman, but the atmosphere of that small theater’s audience also filled her with a joy and curiosity that made her body tremble uncontrollably. Twenty-nine-year-old Nobuko trembled with an impression akin to that time as she walked through the powdery snow of a December night in Moscow toward the hotel. That emotion was fresh, so raw it stung her skin, and at once profoundly human. With an enraptured, absorbed expression on her small, round face that had become like a luminous body, Nobuko ended up clinging to Motoko’s arm all the way into their hotel room without realizing it.

Tonight, it was decided they would have tea in Nobuko and the others’ room. Tea utensils were ordered, and Akiyama and Utsumi gathered. “How was it?” While surveying the moved faces of Nobuko and Motoko, Akiyama—looking satisfied—rubbed his small hands together, their middle fingers stained with ink. “You must have thought MXAT truly lives up to its reputation.”

Segawa asked Motoko, who sat on a hard springless sofa—not particularly comfortable—next to Nobuko, ceaselessly puffing her cigarette. "Ms. Yoshimi, what are your thoughts?" "Hmm."

Motoko, her face beautifully flushed, said abruptly as if angry at herself. “I’ve decided not to be impressed by anything here right from the start.” “I see—then what about tonight’s MXAT? Will you maintain your resolution not to be impressed?” “That’s precisely what’s infuriating!”

Motoko said in a similarly indignant tone.

“It’s frustrating, but I can’t lie about it.”

“Well then, you were impressed after all, weren’t you?”

Segawa and Akiyama laughed heartily. Utsumi, seemingly disapproving of Motoko’s emotional display, silently shook his head like a nineteenth-century Russian student. “It might not be just the play that’s interesting.” “The audience and the stage resonate so intensely—how unique… How utterly unique!”

“Ms. Sasa, did you think so too?” Akiyama’s eyes sparkled.

“I feel the same way,” Nobuko replied. “There’s no audience as earnest and wholehearted as Moscow’s spectators. Like children, they live through and experience the stage together.” She paused, her tone shifting slightly. “Yet Mr. Sanai said he was disappointed when he came to Moscow this time—that MXAT’s audience had completely changed, their clothing mismatched and their manners rough—” Motoko cut in sharply, “So was Mr. Sanai wearing a tuxedo himself?”

“That wasn’t the case, though.” “Spectators aren’t about their clothing.” Segawa—who specialized in Russian while also being a master flutist in his family’s traditional art—spoke from his stage experience. “Audiences who unconsciously breathe life into the stage are what make for true spectators.”

“Whether it’s the passage of time or the passage of age—when you think about it, there’s a certain poignancy.” “Mr. Sanai and Sadanji launched the Jiyu Gekijo in 1909.” “He was only twenty-five or twenty-six then—barely older than I am now—but at their debut performance, he gave a speech from the stage that seemed to privilege the third-floor audience.” “Though what we called ‘third-floor audience’ back then was really just petit bourgeois—mostly students, if we’re being honest.” “Then the naturalist writers tore into him mercilessly—called the whole thing pretentious.”

Segawa began, “Now that you mention it,” said Motoko, her tone retaining its critical edge despite reluctant admiration, “when I met Stanislavsky at the Art Theater office last week—Mr．Sanai’s remarks felt rather evasive.” “He focused exclusively on praising their technical execution,” observed Segawa with diplomatic precision．

Motoko had been listening attentively to the conversation, but now she lit another long-stemmed Russian cigarette and asked.

“What kind of person is Stanislavsky?”

“He’s quite impressive. Though he’s already gone completely white-haired.”

“In any case, MXAT’s inclusion of *Armored Train* in their repertoire this time has groundbreaking significance—after all, they’ve stubbornly clung to *The Cherry Orchard* and *The Lower Depths* until now.” Segawa said, evaluating the composed progressiveness embodied by the white-haired Stanislavsky. “Exactly. I too feel respect for him in that regard.” “Whether it’s *The Cherry Orchard* or *The Lower Depths*, their staging methods have gradually evolved—they’re no longer confined to Chekhov-era realism.” “To have produced *Armored Train* with such realism, after such exhaustive research, and to have clearly finished it using dialectical staging methods—that’s truly splendid.” “Isn’t this likely the defining work of the season?”

While listening to the conversation, Nobuko blinked her eyes. What exactly did "dialectical staging methods" mean? In the single volume on historical materialism that Nobuko had read, the term had been used in relation to philosophy, but—

Motoko said plainly, "How does it differ from realism?"

Motoko asked Akiyama. Akiyama rubbed his hands together sheepishly. “In short—isn’t this proletarian realism advanced one step further?”

Akiyama explained.

“Even when standing on the same class position, isn’t it about not merely depicting phenomena one after another through superficial realism, but rather portraying them through the form and direction of movement—actively and dynamically progressing toward class necessity while generating friction with it?”

After remaining silent for a while, Motoko, who had been deep in thought, “I suppose that’s how it works.” She muttered skeptically. “Take tonight’s *Armored Train*, for instance.” “That sort of thing feels natural—and realistic, doesn’t it?” “The way partisan leaders emerge from the farmers themselves—without any commander descending from above—if realism were pursued to its absolute limit, shouldn’t it naturally arrive there?” “Trivialism and the like—they aren’t realism at all.”

Uiichi Akiyama, with the honed technique of one long accustomed to fielding questions, “In today’s Soviet Union, I take it we can understand that ‘dialectical methods’ are being promoted as one of the driving slogans?”

He said, deftly avoiding any further discussion, "In the grand scheme, of course, it's nothing but an attempt to concretely develop realism further—wouldn't you say?"

Drinking the strong tea poured into a thick octagonal glass cup with evident relish, Segawa looked surprised,

“Yoshimi-san, you’re quite the debater,” he said, twitching his beard.

“Until now, I had thought Sasa-san was the one who liked debates.” Motoko and Nobuko unintentionally exchanged glances. Appearing as though she had no choice but to affirm Segawa’s insight, Motoko looked at herself in dismay.

“It’s true,” she muttered, then blushed faintly.

“What’s wrong, Bukko-chan?” “Me?” Nobuko smiled awkwardly, wondering how she could explain this feeling to make them understand. “In other words… it’s like this.”

Hearing that reply, everyone laughed cheerfully. Regarding what Motoko was discussing and the adeptness of Akiyama’s responses, Nobuko was by no means indifferent. Rather, she had been listening with sharp attention. However, for Nobuko’s temperament, it was impossible to extricate herself from the profound sensory impressions she had absorbed at the theater as Motoko had. In Nobuko’s senses, so to speak, everything she had seen and felt since that morning had become overwhelming—even the scenery of Moscow’s snow-flurry streets, from the morning snow to the night’s post-theater snowscape, was perceived just as it was, vividly. Nobuko, rather than scrutinizing the Moscow Art Theatre’s staging methods, found herself more deeply enveloped as a solitary spectator in the human emotions evoked by their successful effects.

The group’s conversation naturally died out.

At that moment, from somewhere far away, something faintly resembling music could be heard.

“What is that?” Like a young animal twitching alert, Nobuko pricked up her ears. “Isn’t that the Marseillaise?”

Through the night of powdery snow, a melody slowly, faintly resounded from somewhere. “Hey, what could that be?”

Akiyama, briefly straining his ears,

“Ah, that’s the Kremlin clock tower’s Internationale.” Akiyama said. “It’s twelve o’clock.”

As they listened, the sound of the clock striking the hours from one to twelve in a heavy, clear tone soon reached their ears. The metallic purity of that resonance, unselfconscious in its clarity, held within its very innocence a power to move those who heard it.

“Well, it’s finally tomorrow. Shall we call it a night?” After everyone had left, Nobuko lifted the curtain and looked outside again just as she had that morning. An arc lamp from somewhere blazed down on the construction site across the way, illuminating the late-night street where powdered snow fell. A sentry with a rifle slung over his shoulder by a leather strap walked forward, turned back, and retraced his path along a short stretch. Moskva does not sleep. Feeling this truth, Nobuko watched for a long time the late-night street illuminated by arc lamps where powdered snow kept falling.

Two

In the autumn of 1927, approximately twenty-odd people had been invited to Moskva from countries around the world as cultural state guests for the Soviet Union’s tenth-anniversary commemoration of the revolution. Among them could be seen names such as France’s Henri Barbusse, who after the First European War had written a protest novel titled *Fire* (*砲火*, *Hōka*) against the cruelty of war and stood at the vanguard of movements toward a new society and literature. Those who had attended from Japan, including Sanoi Mitsuru of the New Theater and others, left Moskva at the end of November once the celebratory events had concluded, with Sanoi Mitsuru departing for Berlin. By the time Nobuko and her group arrived in Moskva after December 10th, the festival guests had largely completed their travels. Nobuko’s group did not know which foreigners had remained in Moskva after the event’s conclusion, but in any case, Uiichi Akiyama and Atsushi Utsumi planned to stay for several more months, while Masao Segawa remained until his year-end departure for Japan. These individuals had moved from the Bolsahaya Moskovskaya Hotel to the Passage Hotel. Having sent a telegram to Uiichi Akiyama and been met by him, Nobuko and her group naturally ended up settling into a room at the Hotel Passage where Akiyama’s group was staying.

Nobuko’s heart was drawn from her very first day of life in Moscow—to both the daytime routines there and the way nights were spent—by a blend of fondness and tension. Nobuko’s sensitivity was opened up, and she could not help being stimulated by everything she saw. Nobuko first approached the life of Moscow—a city brimming with unconventional vitality—by beginning to discern the contours of her own small neighborhood.

Several main avenues radiated out in eight directions from the Kremlin. All of them were old streets that held stories spanning centuries if one traced their histories, but one of them—a road that had once been the highway to Tver—was now called Tverskaya, a main thoroughfare. This grand avenue extended straight from the wide square outside the Kremlin’s walls far into the distance; along its course, it passed through the 1812 Napoleon’s Moscow Retreat Memorial Gate and ran alongside Eagle Forest—Moscow’s most magnificent primeval woodland park encircling the city.

On the left side of Tverskaya Street, just five or six blocks from where it began, there stood a large display window facing the sidewalk—bleakly lit and dim. Inside that dust-filmed show window lay not a single item resembling merchandise; instead stood models of human and feline internal organs. These were common medical specimens made of tinted wax. Above the display hung a sign reading "Central Publishing House." Yet whenever Nobuko passed by, it remained equally gloomy, dust-choked, shuttered, and lifeless. On the same building's far corner rose the massive construction site of the Central Post Office. The first narrow doorway encountered after turning left into the alley between them marked Hotel Passage—where Nobuko and her companions lodged.

On its entrance door resembling that of an office building, a daily menu was posted as proof that it was a hotel. Moscow suffered from such severe paper shortages that Nobuko and her group had discovered upon arrival how paper of various colors was being repurposed unexpectedly—though this menu was printed on large yellow sheets using pale purple ink with a konnyaku gelatin duplicator. When Nobuko circled around from Tverskaya Street to observe, she realized both the Central Publishing House—with its gloomy medical-equipment-store-like show window—and the Passage Hotel belonged to opposite sides of the same large four-story square building occupying that block.

On their third day in Moskva, Nobuko and her group changed rooms at the hotel. They moved to front-facing rooms on the fourth floor. From the window of that spacious room, neither the arc lamp that had illuminated the snow-covered construction site at midnight—a scene Nobuko would never forget—nor the figure of the young sentry in his greatcoat remained visible; instead, part of a collapsed massive roof now came into view. Gazing out at the December sky thick with falling snow and the distant roofs beyond the street, she saw a desolate rusty steel-framed old roof lying nearby—an unexpectedly exposed vestige of destruction. As Nobuko stood by the window gazing endlessly at the falling snow, white flakes fluttered down one after another, swiftly sucked into dark voids between steel frames. The snow seemed endlessly devoured, and staring fixedly at this motion made her eyes begin to swim. The same relentless snow fell upon the neighboring large construction site. There, building work continued around the clock. At midnight, arc lamps blazed down to illuminate it. In such starkly contrasting scenery, Nobuko vividly sensed Moscow life’s dynamic hues.

The large roof left to ruin had originally been a glass ceiling and served as Tverskaya Street’s bazaar. That was why this small hotel bore the rustic name Passage (Bazaar) Hotel. This small hotel—more shabby than simple—lacked any trace of hotel-like qualities throughout its entire building, just as its entrance bore no resemblance to a hotel except for the menu posted on the door. Inside the front door was an entrance area with nothing but a single potted palm and a bare round table, from which the staircase began. When she emerged on the second floor via those marble stairs worn down by footsteps, a narrow corridor flanked on both sides by identical white-painted doors stretched out. The door to one room was left open day and night, and that was the hotel’s office. Carpets had been laid in the corridors from the second to the fourth floor— a carpet patterned with flowers and leaves in red and green against a black background, the kind of design seen on table covers draped over guest desks in Japanese village offices.—

Nobuko noticed this carpet, found its rustic charm amusing, and came to love it. There was no trace of an intimidating air anywhere in this small hotel. People lived their lives. Life had its work. Each room of the hotel was equipped based on that unpretentious understanding of life. In every room stood one corner table for drinking tea and a large desk for work. The desk held a lamp with a white-tinted green shade and a two-color inkstand. On the wooden floor—polished in the Russian style with tonoko powder—two beds lay spaced apart, covered with mouse-gray blankets.

Within this small hotel, there was one place that was particularly absurd to Nobuko and her group. It was the bath. On the first day they were to bathe, at the appointed time, Motoko went down to the second floor ahead of the others. Then, before long, Motoko returned, clattering the wooden heels of her Caucasus shoes—which she used as slippers—as she walked.

“What happened?” “Wasn’t it ready?” The bath had to be reserved at the office the day before, and one was to enter at the appointed time.

“It’s absurd, but—come take a look.” “What happened?” “Just come and see.” Nobuko—wearing a purple Japanese haori over her white Fuji silk blouse—followed Motoko, who was clad in a man-tailored gown of thick striped woolen fabric, and opened a door beside the kitchen labeled “bathroom,” its porcelain sign glazed in Seto ware. “Oh…”

Nobuko involuntarily burst out laughing at the bathroom’s absurdly vast size. The floor—tightly covered in aged white tiles that had faded and discolored—sprawled out ridiculously wide, with slight depressions here and there where water had pooled. On the left wall covered in white tiles sat a cracked mirror stained with fly specks, and beneath it stood a washbasin. The Seto-ware bathtub was installed on the opposite side of that wall—could it be that not so long ago, all Russians had been such giants? In both length and depth, that bathtub—weathered and devoid of luster—stood imposingly large, like a prop tub planted on a comedy stage. A massive black cylinder combining firebox and tank loomed at its head, with two or three thick birch logs for two people’s bath placed beside the firebox. Nobuko found genuine humor in imagining Motoko—with her sloping shoulders, bobbed hair, and smooth skin—pacing this faintly grimy expanse while muttering “Damn it!” as if her own ample feminine chest were irritating her on its own accord. But practically speaking—what could be done? Since Nobuko stood even shorter than Motoko, she would always enter ordinary-sized tubs upside down—resting, or rather hooking—her head against the faucet side.

“—I’ll drown.” They eventually decided to bathe together simultaneously. By positioning themselves crosswise, even their small naked bodies could avoid slipping under. The cold climate meant Muscovites—with their habits of theater-going and late nights—appeared to follow an afternoon bathing custom. In December Moscow, daylight lasted barely eight hours. On heavy snowfall days, they left electric lights burning through the dimness.

Nobuko and the others had finished morning tea by around ten o'clock that morning as well. After waiting for the cleaning woman to finish tidying the room, Motoko settled at the desk facing the window with *Pravda* and *Izvestia*. Nobuko took out her coat, placed it on the bed, and—unusually for her—faced the mirror attached to the wardrobe to study how to wear the small brown felt hat. Regarding this small hat, there was a second hat story for Nobuko. The black hat Nobuko had brought from Japan was far more elegant than this one, adorned with a beautifully colored narrow ribbon. After being in Moscow for several days, Nobuko came to dislike that hat because it was too ornate. In snowy Moscow, women walked briskly wearing woolen shawls over their hair or hunting caps on their heads. Even those wearing ordinary women’s hats—all of them were extremely simple, small felt-made ones. The local people wore headwear suited to their climate. When snow settled on Nobuko’s decorative hat adorned with a beautifully colored ribbon and moisture caused it to lose its shape, its feebleness appeared so pitiful that it stirred feelings of frustration within her. Moscow in snow was a season as harsh as Chekhov had loved it wholeheartedly, yet splendid.

——

When she walked along Moscow Art Theatre Street, there were several shops selling women’s hats there. At one of these shops, Nobuko’s eye was caught by a small brown hat adorned with simple golden ornaments. Nobuko and Motoko entered that shop. Then they were shown the hat displayed in the shop window. Nobuko liked it, but when she tried it on, it didn’t fit. The hair got in the way. Nobuko realized for the first time that the reason all Moscow women wore such neatly styled small hats was because they had bobbed hair.

Nobuko, who had been holding the brown hat in hand and thinking for a while, said in an utterly natural tone:

“I’ll cut my hair.”

she said.

“Cut it? — You sure?”

Such was Motoko, who had gotten her hair bobbed in Harbin.

“I’ll really cut it—is that okay?” “Well, it’s neither good nor bad.” “Then say that for me. “...I suppose I’ll have to get it properly trimmed again anyway…” Through these circumstances, her bobbed head came to wear the brown hat. Nobuko left Motoko—who had begun immersing herself in newspaper reading—at the desk and departed from the hotel.

Under Nobuko’s arm were tucked a pamphlet titled *Golden Water* on its cover and a Moscow-made notebook with red-dyed edges.

Nobuko walked straight up Tverskaya Boulevard to Strashnaya Square, cut through the square, and entered the side street beside the pharmacy opposite the Moscow Evening Newspaper building. She ascended to the third floor of the building whose stuccoed pediment above the main entrance bore a painting of a mermaid frolicking in waves. This building seemed to have had an elevator once, but now only the outer mesh enclosure remained. The door Nobuko rang opened immediately, revealing a woman in her mid-thirties wearing a black skirt and a slightly faded light blue sweater. In this house with this person, Nobuko began learning the basics of Russian.

It was VOKS that had first introduced Maria Gregorievna—her lustreless chestnut hair parted down the center in the Russian style and arranged into thin locks at her temples. It was there that Novamirsky, responding to Nobuko’s inquiry, had recommended with his astonishingly deep voice. On the first day of the promised lessons, Nobuko had come to find this building using the written directions and map she had received. On Maria Gregorievna’s small-wrinkled round face were evident both kindness and eagerness, putting Nobuko at ease. Promptly, “Golden Water” began. When the brief lesson ended and the two were chatting in halting English, the bell rang at the entrance.

“Oh, welcome back!” “Already?” A surprised-sounding voice came from Maria Gregorievna, who had stepped out. The other person seemed to be a man, but his voice couldn’t be heard. As Nobuko was about to leave when Maria Gregorievna would reappear,

“Good afternoon, Ms. Sasa.” Novamirsky entered while speaking in an unmistakably deep voice that left no room for mishearing. Then Maria Gregorievna appeared there, “This is my wife.” Novamirsky introduced her again formally. “How are your lessons going?” She had not expected that this was Novamirsky’s home. Nobuko suddenly found herself at a loss for words, “Thank you.”

she answered.

“You certainly introduced me to an excellent teacher, but I’m afraid I may not be much of a student.”

“That’s not true at all,” “I can tell from my experience.” Novamirsky was no different, but his wife Maria Gregorievna spoke earnestly, her face slightly red at the tip of her nose. “Ms. Sasa, you have such a quick ear.” Even so, it still came as a surprise to Nobuko that this was Novamirsky’s home. When they had spoken at VOKS, Novamirsky had seemed entirely like a third party. He had spoken about his own wife, that wife’s work, and even his own expression in such a detached manner. Novamirsky kept the spoon in the teacup Maria Gregorievna had brought, sipping with evident relish as he gripped it between his index and middle fingers—

“Have you seen the Revolution Museum?”

he asked. “Yes. I have seen it.” “That has a unique significance.” “For the time being, I believe it’s a type of museum that can only exist in Moscow.”

After a slight pause to choose his words, Novamirsky “I was imprisoned for seven years.” “I was an anarchist.”

he said. “In October, I met Lenin and talked with him for two hours. “At that time, I changed my previous ideology—developed it—development—you understand, don’t you?” This revelation was no more surprising to Nobuko than Novamirsky’s appearance there. Was the name Novamirsky—a play on the characters for “New World”—his real name, or was it something like how Ulyanov became Lenin? There had been a time when this became a topic of conversation among Nobuko and her companions. Maria Gregorievna, supporting the elbow of her left hand—which was pressed against her cheek—with her other hand, listened to what Novamirsky was saying,

“Our revolution has received considerable criticism,” Maria Gregorievna said. “But if only those critics could grasp even slightly how we had lived before!” “The revolution did claim no small number of sacrifices,” she continued. “Yet it gave life to thousands upon thousands more. That remains the more undeniable fact.”

Before the revolution, Maria Gregorievna had been the wife of an officer.

“What a life that was!” “Back then, I could think of nothing but dying.” “But who would raise a small boy and a girl?” “Then October came.” “And then, the lives of me and the children truly began anew.”

At the children’s request, the boy came to live with Maria Gregorievna there, and the girl parted with her father. Motoko also began visiting this Maria Gregorievna. Motoko began reading Pushkin’s *Eugene Onegin*. From Maria Gregorievna’s lessons, Nobuko Sasa almost never returned directly to the hotel. From Strashnaya Square, there were times when she would walk along the snow-covered tree-lined path toward Nikitsky Gate. At that time, the tree-lined avenue was filled with babies and children brought outdoors, unless it was snowing heavily. The baby, completely wrapped in a quilt, with only its small red face showing inside the baby carriage, was pushed along the promenade. In ear-covering winter hats, mittens dangling from strings, and bundled up in thick coats like bear cubs, the children were pulling wooden sleds. Lying prone on top of them, the children slid down the short slope between rows of snow-laden elm trees to the path below.

A Chinese woman with bound feet, wearing black cotton-padded trousers and a winter hat, carried a basket on her arm and sold pom-poms by unraveling them with a rubber string threaded through her fingers. Those pom-poms were embroidered in the Chinese style with red, yellow, and green threads. At the entrance to the tree-lined avenue stood a stall selling sunflower seeds, apples, and tobacco at five kopeks per glassful, while another stall offered sausages and kvass. The owner of that stall was a Tatar man with a swarthy face who glared at Nobuko with fierce, pale-rimmed eyes as she passed by, eating bright yellow millet kasha from an earthen pot. Against the snow's whiteness, the Tatar's face appeared starkly black, while the millet shone with eye-searing yellow. These chromatic contrasts entered Nobuko's consciousness like visual music.

The tree-lined avenue to the left of Strashnaya was rich in scenic charm, while the one stretching to the right remained perpetually desolate, with children seldom playing there. Through the snow-covered tree-lined avenue where the spire of an old church could be seen in the distance, people in leather coats and hunting caps walked hurriedly, carrying their briefcases. Their manner of walking was less like strolling along the road and more like rushing from one errand to another. The way their leather coats were tightly cinched at the waist, and the look in their eyes—all nerves focused on a single point, leaving no room for anything else to enter their vision—While feeling those glances pass over her unresponsively, she walked along the tree-lined avenue observing each of those faces one by one. For Nobuko, that too was deeply interesting.

Descending Tverskaya Street all the way to Okhotny Ryad brought one out at the food market. Cooperative stores selling dairy products, tea, sugar, vegetables, and other goods under a rationing system were lined up. On the opposite side of that sidewalk, lined up in rows, were food stalls of every conceivable kind. There were whole pig halves. Spreading their legs wide to hold a bucket between them, vendors sold pickled cucumbers with brine crunchily frozen solid. There was a large pale yellow lump of dairy products. There was skate. There were apples and mandarins as well. The ones selling eggs carried in baskets while walking through the crowd were mostly elderly women. There was an old man selling crushed chicken. Mingling with the ceaselessly flowing crowd, an old person walked right in front of Nobuko. A meat seller had set up a stepladder and placed a board on top of it. In front of it, the old person stopped.

“Tossan, this’s fantastic meat! Perfect for borscht!” “Perfect for borscht!” Could that really be called good meat? To Nobuko’s eyes, the lump was black, and she couldn’t discern what kind of meat it was. Silent all the while, the old man extended his soiled finger and gave the meat a tentative poke.

“Huh?” “What do you think?”

After placing the birch bag containing meat at his feet, the seller urged him on while shifting his knee-high winter boots in the snow. The old man did not speak. Nobuko's eyes were drawn to the infinite suspiciousness etched on the old man's face, framed by a white-streaked unkempt beard. Even if told "Your name is such-and-such," he would likely have kept that suspicious look. Everything sold at these stalls was thirty to forty percent above official prices. Though goods were plentiful, both sellers and buyers engaged in tactical maneuvering. Nobuko noticed that among Okhotny Ryad's bustling crowds, few appeared working-class. Nor those with children. Beyond the snow-blanketed rectangular square stood an old church jutting from the roadside, its neighboring building draped with a red banner where "Eradicate Illiteracy" glared white. The crowd moved across this square, staining its snow.

The store where Nobuko went to buy chopped cabbage and ikura for their supper at the end of her long walks through the city was located just a short distance from the hotel. From the entrance steps of that semi-basement store down to the tiled floor, sawdust lay scattered. The smell of wet sawdust blended with the odor of pickling tubs and the aroma rising from shelves heaped with smoked goods. All these mingled together, filling the store with an astringent yet nostalgic scent—and Nobuko would return to the hotel with winter's fragrance clinging to her coat, her cheeks flushed and eyes gleaming with vitality.

Motoko was usually at her desk, just as Nobuko had seen when leaving. Seeing Nobuko enter, Motoko turned around on her chair,

“How was it?” Motoko asked. This was meant as a general inquiry about how things were outside. In Motoko’s voice there was a tone welcoming this change after three full hours alone. Nobuko began to speak. Motoko lit a fresh cigarette. “But these trivial little amusements—they’re life’s rainbows. By the time you put them into words, half has already vanished.” Nobuko said regretfully.

“I really wish we could go out together…” While shifting her gaze from the book spread open on the desk to the wristwatch placed beside it, Motoko added resignedly, “After all, as long as reading the daily newspaper remains a task in itself, there’s nothing to be done.” The newspaper—in Nobuko’s eyes that had been moist and shining with all manner of fresh impressions she’d absorbed—now revealed a faint hardness.

Every morning when she awoke and found newspapers sliding under the door, Nobuko would take the large pages of Pravda—crammed with characters she couldn’t read—and turn them this way and that as she gazed. And to Motoko, “When you’re reading, could you tell me bits and pieces here and there?” she requested. At that moment, Motoko, who had been reading the front page of Izvestia, did not reply immediately.

“Hey, what do you think?” “Why don’t you just read the Daily Moscow, Bukko-chan?” “Why?”

Nobuko said, rather in surprise. “But the *Daily Moscow* is just the *Daily Moscow*, isn’t it? The Moscow evening edition is different from Pravda, isn’t it? Isn’t it different in that way?” She could not believe that the English-language newspaper edited primarily for foreigners contained the same content as Pravda.

Around early autumn of that year, there had been an incident in which an international counter-revolutionary organization—operating across nearly the entire Donbass coal mining region, the Soviet Union's largest coal-producing area—had been uncovered. Engineers from the imperial era, Communist Party members who were Trotskyists, German engineers, and several hundred others had, for several years, engaged in acts such as sabotage, reducing production efficiency, and deliberately leaving aged mine supports in place to induce disasters—all with the aim of disrupting Soviet production. It was discovered.

That article was one Nobuko had read in newspapers while still in Japan. Japanese articles had been written in tones suggesting this incident marked a critical failure for the Soviet new society and signaled open rebellion against Stalin. The public trial of this Donbass Incident had commenced around the time Nobuko's group arrived in Moscow. They would devote full pages—sometimes two—to detailed accounts of the incident's progression alongside sketches of counter-revolutionary groups. As these articles appeared in newspapers across the civilized world, all Moscow publications carried them too. Yet Nobuko sought to grasp not just this globally watched event's developments, but the fundamental meaning at its core. Such relentless class hatred. A conspiracy planned and executed with deadly seriousness by those involved. The trial revealed how gravely these people had regarded their mission—all defendants confessing their plots with more theoretical rigor than reason. Here lay destructive passions rivaling those building the Soviet state—passions whose wellsprings of hatred Nobuko wanted to trace back to their roots of self-interest. French nobles and royalists had invited foreign armies to ravage their homeland during their Revolution, all to preserve aristocratic privilege. By what passion did Trotskyists become vanguards for foreign capitalists? Mere obstructionism? Could lust for power truly ignite such mad fervor?

Nobuko, at that moment, once again, “Then even just the key points of the editorial—is that no good?” Nobuko asked.

Motoko— “Bukko-chan, you don’t need to fuss so much.” she said.

“People like Bukko-chan are just fine as they are now,” Motoko said. “Just walk around, look, and listen—you’ll be able to read eventually anyway.” Unable to read them properly, Nobuko nevertheless bought both the Daily Moscow and the Komsomolskaya Pravda—with its articles written in simpler language—each time she went out, poring over their pages.

The period when Motoko and Nobuko spent their days together from morning till night lasted only about five days or a week after arriving in Moscow. Motoko created a strict daily study schedule that excluded only the evenings when the two went out to see plays. In addition to reading Pushkin at Maria Gregorievna’s place, Motoko began studying pronunciation and grammar alone with a female tutor she had hired. This linguistics-trained tutor would come to teach at their hotel from across the Moskva River on theater-free Mondays after dinner.

That evening when the teacher came, Nobuko—as she had done before—dragged a corner table to the farthest wall from Motoko’s study desk and worked there on the transcription of *Golden Water*. Bathed in the light of a green-shaded desk lamp illuminating an oval face, Motoko asked about idioms and etymologies incomprehensible to Nobuko. When that ended, pronunciation practice began. This registered clearly only in Nobuko’s ears and occasionally intrigued her. When taught numbers from one to ten thousand using Berlitz’s pale green book—where five was written as “pyachi”—Motoko pronounced it exactly as spelled. Thus Nobuko too believed one should elongate it as “pyachi”. Yet when combined with ten to form fifty, the stress shifted backward, making “five” resonate almost like “pechi”.

The female teacher and Motoko were cheerfully practicing various combinations of pronunciations while occasionally laughing, when suddenly the teacher’s voice took on a tone as if she had detected something. “Please—once more.”

the female teacher requested. What Motoko was carefully repeating was the character “atta.” Nobuko was transcribing into a notebook of cheap paper with smudging purple ink at the edge of the room’s wall on this side. “Boris the peasant was greatly tormented.” “Because the golden water—oil—that was supposed to bring him wealth and happiness had dragged him into an endless fraud.” Nobuko, who had been looking up the character for “dragged into” in the dictionary after not understanding it, was at the desk,

“Why is that?” At the sound of Motoko’s voice—retorting with a hint of anger—she raised her head.

“I pronounced it the same way all three times.”

The "atta" was still at issue. Nobuko thought, Oh dear. Nobuko, who couldn’t distinguish between the soft *eri* and the tightly rolled *eru*, had been mercilessly laughed at by Motoko during their Russian lessons back in Komazawa. Motoko, now that she was here in the home country, was unexpectedly burdened with *eri* after all. The female teacher had Motoko pronounce that utterly commonplace character once more. She once again silently expressed disapproval and shook her head. Her gaze at that exact moment met Nobuko’s eyes, which had just lifted from the notebook. The female teacher, as if struck by a sudden thought in that moment, from a distant spot beside Motoko where she had remained seated,

“You, please give it a try.” “Bira.”

and said to Nobuko, who was at the edge of the room. Nobuko, confident in her lack of skill, pronounced the word without making any particular effort. “Once more.”

Nobuko obediently repeated it once more. “See? Your friend can pronounce it. Please give it a try.”

This was unexpected for Nobuko. As Nobuko gazed over apologetically, Motoko shot her a sidelong glance and forced a wry smile. And then,

“Let’s practice until next time.” Bira was deferred, and the female teacher left.

As soon as the door closed behind the female teacher, Nobuko came out from between the bench and table pressed against the wall.

“That’s strange—what was that about?” “I can’t make sense of any of it.” “Was my ‘Bira’ really that good?” “It must have been.” Motoko struck the match once or twice unsuccessfully before lighting her cigarette. And there she sat—resting her fingers on the long-stemmed Russian cigarette as one would a pipe, exhaling smoke while settled into a chair she had shifted toward the center of the room—lost in thought when—

“Bukko-chan.” She said in the same displeased tone.

“What is it?” “While I’m doing something, stay out of this room.” “I could do that, but…” Where am I supposed to be during that time? Nobuko was perplexed. Nobuko was not yet accustomed enough to Moscow to wander the snowy night streets. When she thought about it, nearly two months had passed since leaving Japan, and the two of them had done nothing but live in a single room. “Hey, I have a good idea—let’s rent two small rooms here.”

The current fourth-floor front-facing spacious room cost six roubles and fifty kopeks, with an additional 10% tax.

“We can’t afford such luxury. “Here, even the smallest room costs five roubles—isn’t it? “If we do that, we won’t be able to cover book expenses.” “…………” The one who had to systematically buy books was Motoko. It was also Motoko who handled the accounting for their travel expenses.

“Hey, Bukko, please.” Motoko, aware that her demands were willful yet unable to contain herself, said this while tearing up.

“Since it’s only temporary—go wait in Mr. Akiyama’s room or wherever.” “—Fine.” “Just stop worrying about it.”

However, that night after getting into bed, Nobuko lay awake for a long time. The hallway light filtered through the glass above the door, casting its glow on a high corner of their darkened room's wall. Only the clattering within the steam pipes could be heard, while Motoko's bed sat quietly against the far wall. Motoko had grown so distraught over matters of pronunciation. To what extent was this her own responsibility? Nobuko couldn't quite grasp this point and found sleep elusive. If Nobuko bore any fault, it wasn't in trying to push Motoko aside within this new Moscow life, but rather in her tendency—born from too intense an interest in their surroundings—to rely on Motoko who understood the language. In truth, Moscow's daily rhythm from dawn till dusk had thrust Nobuko's spirit—once as narrow and suffocating as a tightly stoppered bottle—out into a vast, vigorous world. Since marrying Tsuchida, failing at it, and divorcing. In the years since she'd begun living with Motoko after turning twenty, Nobuko's existence had resembled a single bottle. Through its narrow mouth, funneled by her sensitized yearning to live well, thick impressions of life had accumulated drop by viscous drop. Yet this liquid of life lacked the fermenting power to clear her chest or cool her eyes; though at times it flowed hot, at others cold, sometimes so painfully it threatened to split the bottle apart, Nobuko could never abandon herself mindlessly to its currents. Viewed as a middle-class environment, her surroundings had never been peaceful. But the turbulence itself persistently made Nobuko acutely aware of her own existence—one forever out of step with its rhythms. It was at what felt like the outermost edge of this anguish that Nobuko had come to Moscow.

When that suffocating bottle-like existence dissolved in the intense vitality of Moscow’s life—when she discovered this self laid bare, this self overjoyed at seeing things, delighted at feeling things, even growing childlike through the fascination of learning—Nobuko embraced both herself and Moscow. All impressions in Moscow did not merely funnel narrowly into Nobuko’s inner world as they had during her life in Japan. Though filtered through Nobuko’s subjectivity, whether events or observations, their scale was grand, their complexity intricate, each possessing its own genuine necessity and significance. The historical three-dimensionality of Moscow life—where old and new blended in uncanny ways—stimulated all Nobuko’s knowledge and senses, drawing forth an ever-deepening zest for living. In such fervor, Nobuko naturally drew closer to Motoko, yet Motoko seemed intent on keeping herself at a fixed distance.

It was not only with newspapers.

A few days after arriving in Moscow, one of Motoko’s collar buttons came off and got lost. Motoko said, “Bukko-chan, buy it for me while you’re out sightseeing.”

“Oh, that’s impossible.” Nobuko coaxed playfully and shook her head. “The word ‘button’ wasn’t in the Berlitz book.”

“That’s what we brought the dictionary for. Look it up.” When told this without uttering a word of protest, Nobuko looked through the Japanese-Russian dictionary and found the character. “It was there, wasn’t it?”

“I found it.”

“Then that’s fine, isn’t it? Now go on and get going.”

With a scrap of paper on which she had written the characters for “button” and “brown” in katakana, Nobuko headed out onto Tverskaya Street. She found a clothing store and managed to buy a large brown button. Even minor grocery shopping—somehow, in Moscow, it had become Nobuko’s responsibility.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it? Since Bukko-chan is interested in everything…”

That was indeed something that could be said, and Motoko's educational methods had instilled confidence in Nobuko in every small matter. If not for Motoko's discipline, Nobuko would never have managed to speak—even if just ten words—at the ironworkers' club a mere two weeks after arriving in Moscow. When they went to the club gathering arranged through VOKS's introduction, neither Motoko nor Nobuko had imagined they would be made to stand on a podium. Yet the chairperson introduced Nobuko and the others to the roughly three hundred people gathered that night. Catching only the phrase "Japanese woman writer," Nobuko—

“Oh, aren’t they talking about us?” she whispered in a small voice to Motoko. ………… Motoko, who had silently nodded and listened to the chairperson’s words until the end,

“They’re saying to give a greeting—Bukko, you do it,” she said. “Why?!”

The chairperson approached the perplexed Nobuko and the others. And then,

“Please go ahead. Everyone is delighted.”

Without addressing either of them, [the chairperson] gave a slight bow. Motoko sank so heavily into her chair that it was obvious even at a glance. "Bukko-chan, say something!" "How troublesome—what should one say? How troublesome—what should one say? Hmm?" As they kept exchanging words, vigorous applause rose from the crowd—urging them on. "Come on! Come on!" Such voices too could be heard.

The day after arriving in Moscow, when she heard the cheerful calls of a horse driver encouraging his horse, Nobuko climbed onto the podium draped with red cloth, unsure of what to say. As if to hide her small frame, she moved past the tall speaker’s table and walked out to the very edge of the podium. Immediately below her eyes, a dense crowd of union members—men and women with varied faces—lined up and gazed curiously at Nobuko on the platform. That atmosphere emboldened her. Nobuko began speaking, pausing between each word,

“Everyone,” “Everyone,” she said. “I have only just arrived from Japan two weeks ago.” “I cannot speak Russian.”

Immediately from behind came a resonant elderly man’s voice: “You’re doing just fine!” There was such a remark. Everyone laughed. Nobuko on the platform couldn’t help but smile. And, not knowing what to say next, she paused to think for a moment. “Japan’s progressive workers want to know about your lives.” she tried to say. However, it was beyond Nobuko’s grammatical ability, and what she had tried to convey did not reach the listeners. Nobuko felt it,

“Do you understand?” she asked, turning to face everyone. Directly below Nobuko, a middle-aged woman in the front row immediately shook her head. Nobuko hesitated, then spoke bluntly,

“I support you all,” she said. The elderly man’s voice from earlier answered again in a resonant tone.

“This time I got it!” And then, vigorous applause arose.

This was an unexpected experience for Nobuko. At the same time, it was an event that bound her more concretely to Moscow's emotional landscape. Motoko, sensitive by nature, found her academic knowledge of Russian paradoxically restricting her fluency. Moreover, she was determined to reap what she considered a linguist's due harvest—to justify her two-year stay through tangible gains. Beside Motoko's strained nerves stood Nobuko—bearing none of these externally imposed responsibilities, expanding freely and flowing naturally as she absorbed everything around her—a contrast that may well have irritated Motoko at times. Nobuko thought this too.

If asked how to live differently from how she was living now, Nobuko wouldn’t have known. However, Nobuko’s way of living had not begun as something conceived and decided upon in parallel with Motoko’s life plans—as if to say, “Nobuko’s side should be like this.” Within Moscow’s twenty-four hours, Motoko drew a single, firm line as herself. In the spaces that did not clash with that line—the outer edges, the leftover areas—the details of Nobuko’s Moscow life had begun taking shape, stitching themselves together of their own accord. Nobuko lived in such a way. Was that matter truly so entirely absent from Motoko’s awareness?

When Motoko decided to begin studying Pushkin with Maria Gregorievna, Nobuko, without any particular thought, "What about newer works?"

she said. Classics can be read even after bringing them home. Because even the very words used in post-revolution literature had become different. That was what she had thought. Then Motoko flashed a sparkling laugh and,

“And can I be of use to you, Nobuko-san?”

she said. For an instant, Nobuko couldn’t grasp what she meant. Nobuko looked up with an almost innocent face, “To me?” she asked again while looking at Motoko. Seeing Nobuko’s eyes, Motoko suddenly changed her tone to a serious one: “I’ll stick to the classics for a year.” As she spoke, Motoko’s face faintly reddened. “There are more than enough novelty-seekers everywhere. However, in Russian literature, there are plenty of splendid old works. If current literature has any meaning, it’s because its historical sources are firmly established—Shchedrin and Saltykov, for instance. Because it’s a hassle and there’s no profit in it, nobody bothers. That’s why I’ll do it properly from the ground up.”

It was much later that Nobuko understood why Motoko had secretly blushed at her own words. If honesty was by nature incompatible with baseness, then Motoko was not base. For Motoko was never anything but honest with Nobuko in any circumstance. Yet to Nobuko, Motoko’s unstable moods—so honestly directed at her—felt painfully poignant. In the middle of the night at the hotel, where snow fell into the gaping hole of a ruined grand roof outside the window, Nobuko lay thinking as she listened to the clattering steam pipes. Fundamentally, what was this thing called mood? And she felt a vague fear. For it was the first time Nobuko had felt herself scorn such moods. And because, over the several years they had lived together, Nobuko had never once experienced ignoring Motoko’s moods. Even as Nobuko brooded over things in this way throughout that night, in Moscow life—which advanced ceaselessly, its wings never at rest—what single positive act could be wrought by such moods? What single failure could be salvaged by such moods? Nobuko, having come this far, felt the meagerness of the two women themselves entangled in such emotions.

III

The following night, when the female teacher came to Motoko’s room, Nobuko made sure to be the one who opened the door. Exchanging places with her visitor, she closed it behind herself and stepped out into the corridor.

As usual, in the quiet, narrow hotel corridor near the stairs, a lamp with a shade resembling a Japanese ice vendor's cup, its edges frayed, was lit. Beneath it, in the bright spot, Shura, the hotel maid, had brought out a chair and was working on drawn-thread embroidery with white cloth. After leaving the room, Nobuko went over and leaned against the railing. Shura, continuing to move her hands, asked, "Can I help you?" "No. It's nothing," she replied.

Tonight, too, Nobuko had thrown her Japanese purple haori over her white blouse. "Isn't it cold here?" “It isn’t warm—” Shura, wearing an old maroon jacket with worn-out fur and stretched-out knit stitches, her light-colored hair tightly wound into a bun at the nape of her neck, was thin. The back of Shura’s ears—she wore small golden hoop earrings—revealed the prominence of bone and emaciation. Nobuko, struggling to speak with the few words at her disposal,

“Shura, are you well?” she asked. Shura, without raising her eyes from her thread-pulled embroidery, “I have bad lungs,” she said.

“Do you understand? Lungs—here—” “Here—” As she said this, she pointed to the chest of her jacket—from which a button had come off—and looked up at Nobuko. Nobuko was surprised to find a youthful quality in Shura’s face that hadn’t been noticeable from a distance.

“I understand—there’s plenty of tuberculosis in Japan too.” “—Because I have no skills, I can’t do other work.” “But I’m not scared—my turn to enter the sanatorium will come soon.”

At that moment, someone came up the stairs. Shura stopped talking and picked up her embroidery. A man no longer young, wearing a tanned leather hat and cotton-padded half-coat, came up and entered a door while subtly observing Nobuko. Soon after, the bell rang in the maid's room beside the washroom. The man from earlier must have ordered tea. Shura left for the maid's room at the corridor's end, carrying her embroidery and chair. The corridor really wasn't suitable after all.

Nobuko went down to the third floor, counting each step one by one to kill time. There were twenty-six steps. She knocked on the door of Uiichi Akiyama’s room on the right side of the corridor laid with a crude floral-patterned carpet.

“Please come in.”

A lively young woman’s voice answered. When she opened the door, on a hard springless sofa pushed against the wall sat Uiichi Akiyama and Dolya Tsin pressed closely together, while Atsushi Utsumi leaned against a desk by the window.

“Good evening—am I not intruding?” “Come in, come in!”

Dolya Tsin said in rapid Japanese. “Our lesson just ended, right, Mr. Akiyama—isn’t that so?” “Yes—please come in.” The way Dolya and Akiyama sat pressed together resembled a plump crimson sparrow with a smaller brown one—gray-headed and wearing a black necktie—clinging tightly beside it on a perch. The young Atsushi Utsumi’s modest distance from Dolya struck an amusing contrast. Akiyama had recently been learning Russian from this Oriental Language School graduate who bore the unusual name Dolya Tsin.

“Ms. Dolya and Mr. Akiyama sitting side by side like that look just like two red sparrows.” Nobuko said with a laugh.

“Red sparrow?—What’s that? I don’t understand.” “What do you call it? ‘Red sparrow.’”

Utsumi, having been asked by Nobuko,

“Well...” he tilted his head. Nobuko hurried so as not to upset Dolya, who was looking suspicious, “Little bird.” she said in Russian. “Two little birds… two robins!”

“Oh, robin! I know!” Dolya cried out in a mix of English and Japanese, clapping her hands with delight. “Robin! I’ve read about them in English poems. They’re beautiful birds. Don’t you think so, Ms. Sassa?” “That’s right,” Nobuko replied. “Ms. Dolya is a crimson red sparrow, and Mr. Akiyama is a sparrow with a beard!” “Oh, how wonderful!”

Dolya, thoroughly amused and laughing heartily, sprang out from the sofa behind the table. “Sassa-san, you’re adorable!”

With that, she embraced Nobuko. Dolya hugged Nobuko tightly, then pulled away and went to the wardrobe, where she stood before a mirror reflecting dazzling light to examine her entire figure. While studying her profile, she smoothed wrinkles from her skirt. Dolya Tsin surveyed herself—blond hair framing a rosy, half-Asian half-European face, slender legs contrasting with her ample bust—and seeming satisfied, began practicing the Charleston alone while softly humming a dance tune. Lifting both elbows to peer down at her feet, she rapidly shuffled her enamel shoe heels and toes inward and outward in small, hurried motions.

“Sassa-san, can you dance the Charleston? I learned this yesterday. It’s difficult.” “The Russian heart and the Charleston rhythm don’t quite match, do they?” Nobuko, too, trying to make Dolya understand, spoke in broken Japanese. Dolya continued moving her feet hurriedly and clumsily for a while longer, but— “That’s true.”

In Russian, with a serious expression, she stopped the flurry of foot movements, clasped both hands behind her back, and began walking around Akiyama’s room as if looking for something interesting. Before long, while fiddling with the haori draped next to Nobuko, Dolya began talking about when she had been taken by her parents as a child to visit Japan.

“What was it called? That beautiful mountain park with the hot springs—” “Where was it... Hakone?” Akiyama said. “Oh, Hakone! There, I had someone buy me a box. It was a box made by gathering tiny pieces of wood and crafting them beautifully—and it even had a secret pocket.” “Ah, a wooden mosaic box—a savings box,” Utsumi concluded with cautious precision.

“Where is that box now?” When Nobuko asked that, Dolya Tsin visibly deflated. She shrugged both shoulders, “I don’t know.”

She said sadly. “We lost a great many things.” “My parents were very wealthy.” “They were big wealthy merchants.” Dolya said this in Russian, slowly and gravely. Akiyama suggestively added, turning to Nobuko. “It seems Ms. Dolya’s parents are living somewhere in Siberia—isn’t that right?”

“Yes, yes.” Dolya nodded repeatedly at the word “Siberia,” her heavily rouged lips drawn downward at both corners with an expression of hopeless bewilderment, her lower lip thrust out as if in defiance. Even Nobuko vaguely sensed it. Dolya’s parents had become entangled in some economic sabotage incident.

“Ms. Dolya, where did you learn to speak Japanese so well?”

Before long, having completely changed the topic, Nobuko asked. Dolya, who had been unexpectedly drawn into reverie by the Hakone woodwork, could not catch Nobuko’s Japanese. Utsumi interpreted in a teacher-like, methodical tone.

“Oh, Sassa-san, do you really think my Japanese is good?”

Dolya herself, as if clinging to that opening, tried to regain her former cheerfulness. “I think so.”

“I’m truly happy.”

That voice was imbued with sincerity. Dolya Tsin had placed the foundation of her life in Moscow on her linguistic abilities: a bit of English, a bit of Chinese, Japanese, and other languages. “When I speak Japanese, I don’t think. I just speak as quickly as I can—quickly, quickly—without stopping.” and inserted just a single word in Russian to ensure her last words didn’t trail off, “I just keep talking. The person listening will assume I know it well, don’t you think? I speak so smoothly. They must surely think I know it well. Isn’t this smart?”

Dolya’s youthful, girlish candor made everyone laugh heartily. Uiichi Akiyama nodded repeatedly in understanding as he rubbed his hands together. “We Japanese are far too lacking in this regard. We lack boldness,” he said. “Because we’re always so afraid of making mistakes.” Though silent, Nobuko found herself astonished by the contrast between Dolya and Shura—the maid she had spoken with earlier in the hallway. What a difference there was between Dolya, who never truly relaxed her gaze even when excitedly mimicking the Charleston, and Shura—thin yet composed in what could only be called clean rags of a jacket! Dolya in her enamel shoes seemed to be struggling terribly.

Dolya Tsin was going out to a friend’s birthday celebration starting at seven o’clock tonight. A few friends were supposed to come invite them after meeting up in Akiyama’s room. Dolya herself said nothing. Akiyama spoke about that. And then,

“I wonder what time it is now.” He made to check his watch. Nobuko knew it was time to leave. Akiyama did not like Nobuko and the others to be present when someone came to visit him. He always naturally created an atmosphere where Nobuko and the others would politely excuse themselves.

“Well, see you.”

When Nobuko started to rise from her chair, Dolya—with an expression of surprise—glanced between Nobuko and Akiyama while herself half-rising from her seat, “Why?”

Dolya said in a foreign-accented voice with a rising inflection.

“Please. “Please.” “Sassa-san.” “There’s plenty of time.” “I’m happy to hear Sassa-san’s Japanese.” “It’s truly beautiful.”

Akiyama, however, made no particular effort to stop her and addressed Nobuko who remained standing,

“Ah, when I visited Madame Nikitina’s home the day before yesterday,” he said, “she wondered why you hadn’t come.” “Oh...” “You really ought to go. Various writers attend—it’s quite interesting.” “Yes... Thank you.” Nobuko listened to this message from two days prior—delivered in Uiichi Akiyama’s typical manner—with a wry smile. Madame Nikitina was a linguist and professor at a technical college in Moscow. She was the wife of Nikitin, who had served as Education Minister in the Kerensky cabinet, and had established a literary group called the Saturday Society. Three days before Masao Segawa’s departure for Japan, a Japanese Literature Evening had been held featuring Segawa and Nobuko. Polinyak—who had once visited Japan—served as moderator, while Nobuko gave a brief lecture on the history of Japanese women writers since the Meiji era. That night, Nobuko had abandoned the Western dress that constantly made her conscious of how her back appeared, instead attending in Japanese clothing with an embroidered hem.

When the lecture ended, several people shook hands with Nobuko. Madame Nikitina was also one of them. Nobuko felt pleasantly impressed by Madame Nikitina’s striking Russian-style features and the substantial richness of the elderly woman’s scholarly cultivation. Madame Nikitina gazed at Nobuko—still unaccustomed to the setting—with a gaze that was both affectionately detached and fitting for her features, her nose tip slightly upturned. “You spoke very well indeed.”

“You spoke very well indeed,” she encouraged. “We were provided with knowledge we hadn’t known.” “But I suppose you probably haven’t had much experience with such occasions.” Nobuko answered truthfully.

“I’ve never given a lecture in Japan. Even in Moscow, this was my first time.” “Isn’t that right? You kept tugging at the hem of your kimono very often.” Madame Nikitina pointed to the front overlap of Nobuko’s kimono. “You were pulling at it, you know.”

“Oh—was I…?” “Forgive me for fixating on such a trivial thing.” Laughing, Madame Nikitina moved her arm—clad in russet velvet—around Nobuko’s shoulder. “The embroidery there was so beautiful that my eyes kept drifting to it.” “Then I noticed your small hand tugging at that spot.” Madame Nikitina urged Nobuko and the others to join the Saturday Society, and days later they took photographs together. But what kind of group was this Saturday Society? Nobuko’s group had somehow kept missing their chance to attend. Given that Uiichi Akiyama had gone again just the day before yesterday, he must be one of their regulars.

“The other day, some rare people came—Alexeef, the poet born in Siberia.” “He said to me something like, ‘You’re someone who should be with a proletarian writers’ group rather than sitting in a place like this, aren’t you?’” In this way, Uiichi Akiyama would always passionately recount to Nobuko the various things he had experienced. However, without fail, it was always about matters he alone had already witnessed and places he alone had already visited. And then, inevitably, Uiichi Akiyama would add,

“You should definitely go.”

He would say things like that, but he never invited her beforehand regardless of the situation, nor did he ever say, "Let's go together next time." Moreover, in this manner, he never told her anything concrete like "You should go see that too." Nobuko, who had greeted Dolya and was about to leave the room, "Ah, Mr. Akiyama and the others—what will you do for New Year's?"

She stopped with her hand on the door handle. "When I went to pick up letters at the embassy today, there was a notice posted," she said. "They're holding the New Year's Ceremony at eleven on New Year's Day—all Japanese residents must attend—" "Oh... Is that so..."

Utsumi remained silent, his mouth forming a sour expression.

“It feels so strange—a New Year’s Ceremony—do you suppose we’ll actually have to bow after all…” With a troubled look, Akiyama blinked his small eyes beneath his large brows, “I suppose we’ve no choice but to attend.”

He spoke as if there were no other choice. "When speaking of civilians in Moscow, there's scarcely anyone but us... After all, we're being observed far more meticulously than one might imagine." Akiyama said this hesitantly in Dolya's presence. Then, while gazing regretfully at Utsumi, "I'd been careless. This means we'll have to conclude our Leningrad affairs by the 31st."

Akiyama was said to have been invited by VOKS in Leningrad as a continuation of his sightseeing as a state guest. As she slowly climbed the stairs back to her fourth-floor room, Nobuko found herself pondering how each of the four Japanese individuals who had coincidentally come together at this small Moscow hotel called Passage lived according to their own hearts and plans. Motoko was also straining herself considerably. Uiichi Akiyama too—how meticulously he must have been attending to preparing a souvenir bag stuffed with gifts meant solely for himself. Uiichi Akiyama was a Japanese proletarian artist. In his attempt to vividly imprint his distinctive qualities in Moscow, he seemed to distinguish himself from Nobuko and the others in every action. At the same time, it made Nobuko and the others not forget that she and Akiyama were of entirely different standings, and thus even when observing the same Moscow, they had completely different ways of viewing it. Despite his awareness of this position, Uiichi Akiyama fretted over the embassy’s New Year’s Ceremony and tried to cut short his stay in Leningrad as well. To Nobuko, who had not lived in Moscow long enough to intuitively grasp what Akiyama meant by being closely observed, his demeanor came across as the restlessness of someone desperate not to incur disfavor from either side. Nobuko had been told endlessly since her time in Japan about the dread of the GPU in Russian life, but she had never heard a single word about Japan’s own meticulous ways of observation or their methods of meaning.

Taking advantage of the deserted staircase, Nobuko climbed the stairs two at a time, swinging her hands—which grasped each piece of her purple haori’s hem—left and right in wide arcs. The hotel’s only two waiters, when carrying items to the third or fourth floor, would hoist large trays piled high with objects onto their shoulders using a reverse grip like soba delivery workers, brandish a lightly soiled napkin in one hand, and climb the stairs two at a time with vexed eyes—exactly as Nobuko was now imitating.

IV

In the early days of that New Year, Shumpei Todo came to Moscow. This was an unexpected event even for Nobuko and the others. Three months prior, when Nobuko visited her father Taizo and Shumpei Todo regarding the passport endorsement, there had been no sign of such a development. Shumpei Todo’s current trip was also, on the surface, in a personal capacity and aimed at Japan-Soviet friendship. The Soviet side prepared a large-scale welcome evening. When the report appeared in the newspaper, Uiichi Akiyama,

“So he’s finally come, has he?” He wore a deeply contemplative expression. “This politician’s political theories are rather peculiar—if you listen closely, they’re as self-serving as any bourgeois politician and hardly modern—but among Japan’s established politicians, he at least possesses a certain breadth in trying to comprehend new things. The Soviet Union is a young country and possesses the vitality to create a new culture. Therefore, Japan must collaborate—that’s the gist of it.”

And then, he fell silent for a moment in thought, but— “Behind the current government sending this person over, there must also be the Manchurian-Mongolian issue at play, I suppose,” he said. Having been helped with passport matters when coming here, Nobuko went to pay her respects at the Savoy Hotel where Shumpei Todo was staying.

In a splendid, spacious room with a sofa upholstered in brocade silk framed in gold, Shumpei Todo stood surrounded by a crowd of people, puffing on a cigar. The people surrounding him in morning coats were all Japanese. Guided by a man in a suit who seemed to be a secretary from the anteroom, when Shumpei Todo saw Nobuko approaching his side, he turned his face—adorned with pince-nez and a wedge-shaped beard—toward her.

“Oh… We meet again, don’t we?”

He said in a bright tone resounding with a Tohoku accent. “How is Moskva? Have you taken a liking to it? Do you write home now and then?” While half-listening to Nobuko’s brief reply, Shumpei Todo moved his pince-nez-adorned face to glance around the area, then beckoned to a fiftyish man with close-cropped hair wearing grayish woven clothes from the group of four or five people clustered by the far wall.

“Nobuko-san. This person is a doctor of traditional medicine, you see. I place great trust in this person’s remedies. Let me introduce you to him. Should you fall ill, be sure to obtain medicine from this person.”

While greeting the traditional medicine doctor, Nobuko involuntarily laughed and said, “It would be convenient if you could even diagnose the illnesses I’ll develop before my return.”

Shumpei Todo’s stay in the Soviet was scheduled to be less than half a month. “No, no.” The person in gray clothes watched Nobuko’s complexion for a moment with a doctor-like gaze, but—

“You look perfectly healthy,” he said. “My duty is to leave all of you in a state where I’m no longer needed.”

Shumpei Todo, who had been talking to someone, turned toward Nobuko at that moment.

“Your Russian has improved quite quickly, hasn’t it?” he said. Nobuko mentioned that she had been reading nothing but publications from the Literacy Eradication Association.

“Ha ha ha.” “I see.” “In that regard, this place is quite efficiently set up.” “When I meet your father, I’ll give him a full account of your situation.” “It should set his mind at ease.”

Even in the anteroom connected by a keyed door from that spacious room, a considerable number of people were present. All were Japanese—since arriving in Moscow, this was the first time Nobuko had seen so many Japanese gathered in one place. There seemed to be more Japanese at the Savoy now than the entire staff of Moscow’s small Embassy. After leaving Shumpei Todo’s side and moving to the anteroom, Nobuko—who had been sitting on a chair gazing around briefly before her departure—was approached by a man of average height wearing a black suit.

“Excuse me—are you Ms. Nobuko Sasa?”

“Yes.”

“How are you finding Moscow—?” As he said this, he sat down in the empty chair next to Nobuko and produced a business card. The card bore the name Reiji Hida with the title of Berlin correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. Reiji Hida—Nobuko studied the thin, plainly dressed reporter with a look in her eyes that seemed to grasp at some half-remembered thought. She recalled having once read an article about the petty bourgeoisie written by someone named Reiji Hida. A vague impression lingered that she had found it compelling. Nobuko said as she examined the business card again.

“Mr. Hida… I believe I’ve read something you wrote—” “………” Hida wore a smile resembling a bitter laugh and, in a tone that came from more than just his lips, said plainly—

“That kind of thing isn’t anything great anyway—” he said.

“I’d like to hear your perspective on Moskva.”

“If you were to write something about it, that would be a problem—I really don’t understand anything at all.” “That’s not what I meant. But since we’ve gone to the trouble of meeting, I’d like to hear your impressions of Moskva.” “Moskva is such a mysterious place. A place that captivates people—but I can’t even read a single newspaper yet…” Reiji Hida, the journalist, laughed with ivory-colored teeth characteristic of a heavy smoker at Nobuko, who had started speaking energetically but soon became meekly dejected.

“Not being able to read newspapers isn’t something unique to you alone, so there’s no need to worry.—Now then, what aspects of Moskva have appealed to you? The newness—or the oldness?”

“For me, right now, all of it is fascinating. It’s certainly chaotic, but in that very chaos, isn’t it steadily moving forward? I think it’s a tremendous force. Somehow, I feel like the future is bottomless—or am I wrong…” “……” “The most spatially condensed place is New York. The most temporally condensed is Moskva…”

Hida took out a cigarette case from his pocket and slowly put a cigarette between his lips. “I see.”

he said. And after falling silent for a moment, he soon—

“By the way—are you aware of what’s called Russia’s scissors?”

he asked. Nobuko had never even heard such words. “In other words, it’s what forms the foundation of Russia’s potential that you speak of.” “Russia has been called Europe’s granary since ancient times.” “While exporting wheat on its own initiative and importing machinery from abroad in exchange, this reciprocal relationship—the opening of these scissors—has shaped Russia’s destiny through every era.” “In Imperial times, those scissor-handles were entirely gripped by aristocratic landowners.” “Those nobles lived in European-style opulence synonymous with vast wealth—yet left agricultural methods languishing in backwardness.” “Even resources like oil and coal saw over half their operations under foreign control through sold-off concessions.—Thus Russia’s people endured endless poverty atop boundless natural wealth.—Like jewel-laden Indian maharajas towering over skeletal subjects.”

Under the rose-silk-covered walls of the Savoy Hotel, where she had visited Shumpei Todo out of formal courtesy, encountering Reiji Hida had been unexpected—and that the conversation had unfolded into such a discussion was something Nobuko could never have anticipated. “In Moscow these days, even if you don’t want to, you can’t help but see issues like ‘industrialization’ and ‘electrification’ wherever you go.” “If I wanted to criticize, I could criticize endlessly.” “Certainly, in advanced countries, they’ve long since taken care of that—but in Russia, the meaning is different.” “This is the condition that determines the possibilities of the new Russia.” “In any case, first Russia must catch up to the global standard of modern industry and then surpass it—otherwise, socialism simply can’t take root.” “Even the phrase ‘Catch up and overtake’—though some mock it as mere wordplay—isn’t just a pun.”

As she looked into Reiji Hida’s eyes, which shone with an intellectual curiosity tinged with humanity, Nobuko thought how different he was from everyone else in Moscow. It felt pleasant. Whether they were Japanese journalists or officials in Moscow, there was an air about the people Nobuko met that they avoided discussing Russia beyond a certain point. That limit was extremely delicate and difficult to breach.

Nobuko’s face took on a look ablaze with intellectual curiosity, “I’m so glad I could hear your story.”

she said.

“And then...?” “No—it’s not that I have any particular profound insights here.”

Reiji Hida said in a tone that concealed himself—one of his characteristic traits.

“—If you think the revolution itself completed socialism, you’d be gravely mistaken—even in Russia, they’ve only just acquired the conditions for its possibility.” “Moreover, these conditions are hardly some well-behaved lapdog that, once acquired, would just sit docilely in the hands of that class.” That was something even Nobuko dimly understood. Even taking just the Donbass Incident as an example, the significance of Reiji Hida’s words was substantiated.

“That you’ve shared all this with me in Japanese is truly remarkable,” Nobuko said, expressing both friendship and gratitude toward Hida. “Since coming here, I’ve felt so many things—and felt them so strongly—” *I want to hear more of these stories—so many more.* She held back the words rising to her lips, fearing they might convey an awkward familiarity. In Reiji Hida’s bearing lingered an introspective quality uncommon among journalists, tinged with a certain melancholy.

“Whether you like it or not, the fact remains that the experiment has already begun across one-sixth of the Earth’s territory.” He continued in fits and starts. “Humans are such tenacious creatures—they don’t so much as blink even when logic stares them in the face.”

He flashed a complex smile in his eyes—one that seemed to endure humanity’s folly even as he observed it with irony. “Depending on how you look at it, they’re exactly like wolves. When a strong one gets surrounded and bitten from all sides, they won’t leave without testing that strength.”

At that moment, parting through the crowd, a burly-shouldered man in plain clothes approached the two by the wall.

“―Quite the lively conversation you’re having here, isn’t it?” The man cast a long, deliberate glance at Nobuko—her bobbed hair and navy silk dress marking her femininity—then pointedly ignored her as he addressed Hida in a domineering tone.

Hida remained silent, relit his cigarette, and while squinting his eyes against the smoke, twisted his face slightly to the side.

“Well, have a seat.”

He said without moving from the chair he was sitting on. The three remained silent. Then Hida addressed the man, "—Have you met Iiyama?" he asked.

“No.”

“I was looking for you.”

“Hmm.” As if something had occurred to him, the man clamped the pipe he had received from Hida between his teeth and strode off toward the hall.

"I wonder what his business is… that man…"

While watching his retreating figure, Nobuko murmured as if to herself. "He’s a military man." Still watching the retreating figure of the burly-shouldered man, Nobuko’s gaze narrowed sharply. Uiichi Akiyama had said they were being closely watched—were those watchful eyes now lurking even within this group? Nobuko soon began preparing to leave while,

“Is Berlin better than here?”

she asked Reiji Hida. “Well, I don’t know if I can say it’s better than here, but Berlin is quite a place these days.” “The movements of the Nazis are delicate, you see.” “—It’s all sorts of interesting, you know.” “When might you come to Berlin?” “It’s completely up in the air.”

“Please do come. It’s just one night from here—I’ll show you around. Even if I’m busy, there’s someone at home who can help…” “Together?” “I got married in Germany.”

Reiji Hida escorted her to the door of the room, and Nobuko shook hands with him before parting.

Walking along the crimson carpet from the secluded section of the Savoy Hotel—occupied by Shumpei Todo’s group—toward the front, Nobuko recalled the life of her newspaper’s correspondent stationed in Moscow. That couple, due to Moscow’s housing shortage, were living in the greenhouse of a mansion—using it as their home—where under its glass-paneled ceiling they had hung every conceivable object in place of curtains, all while letting a faint soy sauce scent linger.

From the hotel lobby adorned with palm planters, as she was about to head out to the entrance,

“Oh, Ms. Sassa! What a pleasure to meet you.”

Nobuko encountered Claude approaching her while removing a mouse-gray soft hat—a rarity in Moscow—from his large balding head. Twelve years prior, when the Konrads—Japanese language professors from Leningrad—had visited Tokyo, Claude had attended their welcome party as one of the diplomats fluent in Japanese. His black suit carried an indefinable tuxedo-like flair; his chin sagging in three folds quivered like a turkey’s wattle as he spoke fluent Japanese. His entire demeanor—from its polished affectation to his mannerisms—gave the impression of a foreigner thoroughly versed in the demimonde. Having formed that impression at the gathering, Nobuko—limited in her social connections—had never learned when Claude had returned to Russia.

However, not long after Nobuko had arrived here, one evening, a man called out to her in the corridor of the Art Theater. That was Claude. The way his chin—folded into three heavy layers—quivered as he spoke remained unchanged, but the uncomfortably smooth sheen he had when they met in Tokyo was now gone from Claude. The suit he wore looked perfectly ordinary. Claude had also attended the Japanese Literature Evening. And now they met once again in this corridor of the Savoy Hotel. Claude said in a charming tone,

“How are you finding Moscow’s winter?”

he said. “Is the heating in your hotel adequate?”

“Yes, thank you,” Nobuko replied. “I like winter, and the steam heating is generally adequate. Since you’re familiar with Japanese winters…” She smiled faintly, imbuing her words with an unspoken implication. “Do you remember the pleasure of snow-viewing there?” “Ah, yes—Yukimi—” For an instant, Claude’s gaze grew distant, as if wedged between a memory’s tableau and the present’s motion. But he swiftly disentangled himself from that paralysis—

“Ms. Sassa, there’s someone I must introduce you to.” “When would be convenient for you?”

he said. Nobuko had no prior commitments besides her language lessons and plans to attend the theater. “I see. Well then, Thursday at fifteen o’clock—that’s three in the afternoon—please do come to my place.” Claude tore out a sheet of paper from his small notebook, wrote down his address and drew a map for Nobuko, then handed it over. Alongside Bolshaya Moskovskaya Street stood the large, aged Hotel Metropol building, facing the outer wall of the Kremlin. On the promised Thursday, Nobuko entered from beneath the blackened iron arabesque carriage porch of the main entrance. What was once a flashy hotel for foreigners, akin to the neighboring Bolshaya Moskovskaya, now appeared to have become residences after the Revolution—housing certain people affiliated with a Soviet institution unknown to Nobuko. When she gave the room number Claude had written down to the reception, it turned out that to reach there, one had to go around the side of the building and enter via the back staircase. Nobuko, finally comprehending the explanation, followed along the outer walls of the large building.

A dark staircase yawned toward an inner courtyard where oil drums lay scattered in the piled snow, their shapes faintly visible through the gloom. The area felt forsaken, the stairs steeped in dreariness. Though Moscow’s streets would normally glow with lights by three o’clock on a winter afternoon, not a single illumination graced the hotel’s back stairwell or courtyard. Nobuko climbed cautiously up the shadowed steps to the third floor. Pushing open a heavy insulated door that faced the landing, she entered a corridor where ordinary brightness and traces of human habitation finally greeted her. Yet every door stood firmly closed, the space devoid of life. Nobuko walked to the farthest end and pressed the bell beside her destination’s door. Footsteps approached from within, followed by the metallic clatter of a chain lock disengaging. Claude stood revealed when the door opened.

“Good afternoon—” “Oh, Ms. Sassa! Please come in, Ms. Sassa.”

Despite Claude’s courteous choice of words, he had removed his jacket and draped a smoking jacket over his shirt with its collar undone. Claude knew Japanese customs. The very fact that he was a foreigner who thoroughly understood how women were treated in Japanese customs made Nobuko feel uncomfortable,

“Did I come too early?”

Standing at the door, she said spitefully. “You do seem rather busy…” “Ah, I must apologize,” he said. “I was in the middle of writing…”

Claude looked at his wristwatch.

“It’s the appointed time—please come in.” After guiding Nobuko to a chair by the window, he went to the back where two beds stood side by side, properly adjusted his collar, put on his jacket, and returned. “Thank you for coming.” “The other guest should arrive any moment now.” The room where Claude lived was a peculiar room. It was large and dimly lit, with a sense of division between the area with two beds and Nobuko’s seat by the window—as if Japanese thresholds or lintels demarcated the space. Below the window lay a snow-covered street at dusk, pale arc lamps glowing upon it. The view from the window intensified both the room’s dimness and its cluttered atmosphere. To Nobuko, sitting silently while gazing outside, Claude—

“I live here with Mr. Bukharin’s father.”

he said.

“You know Mr. Bukharin, don’t you? His father is in this room.” Nobuko’s curiosity was clearly stimulated. Because the sole book on historical materialism that Nobuko had read was written by Bukharin.

“Bukharin’s books have been translated into Japanese.” Nobuko gave a slight laugh and said. “Does Mr. Bukharin’s father also have a round head and round eyes?” Claude took Nobuko’s simple question—whatever he thought of it—extremely seriously,

“Mr. Bukharin’s father is a remarkable person,” he said, as if correcting something. “We work together quite enjoyably.” However, Nobuko had no idea what kind of work Claude, with his triple chin, was currently engaged in here in Moscow.

Claude repeatedly raised his wrist to check his watch. “Ms. Sassa, another guest will be arriving shortly. I have some business to attend to and will be going out. Please take your time and talk with each other. ...Will that be acceptable?” If that was acceptable to Claude, Nobuko had no particular reason to insist on him staying. “The guest who’s about to arrive is a person from China. A woman doctor of law.”

What could be that person’s motive for wanting to meet Nobuko? “But we—that person and I—what language could we speak? My Russian isn’t very good…”

“There’s no need to worry about that. She speaks English proficiently.” Claude looked at his watch again and stood up from the chair. “Excuse me. As there’s no time left, I must excuse myself to prepare.” After gathering what appeared to be documents in the dimly lit back area, Claude returned to the low dresser. Facing the mirror there, he began brushing the remaining brown hair on his balding head.

By the distant window, Nobuko sat with her back turned obliquely toward Claude. In the corner of her eye came an unexpected glimpse of a new bottle of Pinaud’s eau de quinine. A sensation akin to shock came over her. To discover this brand-new bottle in Moscow—in this cluttered, dimly lit bachelor’s room—a scent she had associated since childhood solely with her father’s presence, that thick sweet aroma mingled with bodily warmth—was startling. This toiletry was not something ordinarily obtainable in Moscow either. The eau de quinine bottle, glowing a garnet-like deep crimson before the mirror, not only evoked memories of her father but deepened Nobuko’s suspicions about Claude’s lifestyle. Imported eau de quinine. And Mr. Bukharin’s father. What connection could all these things possibly have with Claude? Within Nobuko grew an intensifying sense of having wandered into unfathomable territory. Just then, the entrance bell clanged loudly.

“Ah, that must be the guest.”

Claude, who had gone out, soon returned guiding a woman wearing a large brown overcoat. After removing the wolf-fur-trimmed coat from her collar and taking off the soft black woolen shawl that had been wrapped around her head, there appeared a woman nearing forty dressed in a high-collared outfit. In this Moscow where many men and women had ruddy cheeks and angular builds, the Chinese woman’s subdued cream-colored skin and sleekly smoothed black hair brought a sense of calm to Nobuko’s eyes.

Claude, mindful of the time, hurriedly introduced the Chinese woman and Nobuko.

“This is Dr. Lin. This lady’s esteemed husband is also a Doctor of Law and has now returned to his home country.” Claude introduced the woman named Lin in Russian.

“This is Ms. Sasa Nobuko, whom I mentioned.” “She is a progressive woman writer from Japan.” And while Dr. Lin and Nobuko were shaking hands,

“Well then, please take your time.” With that, Claude put on his coat and left the room. Now that today’s purpose for coming here had finally clarified itself, Nobuko felt at ease even within the same dimly lit, cluttered room. Nobuko—her mood gradually loosening and relaxing—naturally smiled as she looked at Dr. Lin.

“…………” Perceiving Nobuko’s friendly demeanor through her calm, wise eyes, Dr. Lin—like an older woman—looked at her with a gaze containing a smile. “Well… where should we begin our conversation?” she said. Her voice was clear yet reassuring. Nobuko sensed this woman was accustomed to guiding young people. Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University had been flooded with female students from China. Nobuko often saw them around town—their jet-black hair unevenly bobbed to their short shoulders beneath hunting caps. Since China was exacting cruel, bloody vengeance against revolutionaries, even the sun-tanned faces of these high-cheekboned girls studying in Moscow bore a unique tension beneath their youthful earnestness. Their strong-featured faces differed utterly from those of foot-bound women selling embroidered balls on tree-lined avenues, or from Chinese laundresses running basement shops—these were new faces of China. Dr. Lin appeared with a composure, depth, and quiet loneliness unlike any of those Chinese countenances.

Dr. Lin might be a professor at Sun Yat-sen University. That almost certainly seemed correct. But even though she herself had not clearly stated her own political stance, she felt it would be rude to keep questioning the other person about such matters. Nobuko said, “How has Mr. Claude been introducing me to you?” She gave a concise account of herself. It had only been a short time since she came to Moscow. She had come to Moscow to observe and learn, among other things.

——

“Your plan isn’t a bad one.” “After all, everyone receives their strongest influence directly from the facts themselves.”

Dr. Lin had graduated from the political science department of a university in New York and held a degree from there, it was said. Vividly in Nobuko’s memory came flooding back various scenes from the approximately one year she had spent around that university. The sight of hundreds of green-shaded reading lamps attached to large semicircular desks in the grand library at night. Squirrels playing on lawns dappled with elm tree shadows. The small café across from the dormitory on old Amsterdam Street—female students would often dash across its rough cobblestone slope out front. Everywhere seemed lively, casual, and full of enjoyment. Then into this scene gloomily appeared Tsukuda’s figure—ever wearing a top hat and neatly fastened gloves. Next emerged Nobuko’s own form clinging to that arm—her youthful round face flushed with excitement amid swirling confused thoughts—wearing a cherry-adorned hat and draped in a mantle. As if severing memories threatening infinite expansion, Nobuko recounted to Dr. Lin how that university had held a ceremony conferring honorary doctorates upon Belgium’s imperial couple—who heroically resisted German invasion after the Great War—and described that day’s scene.

“Ah—that was just a little before we returned to our country.” The use of the plural "we" caught Nobuko’s ear. Had Dr. Lin and her husband been in America as a married couple? “We haven’t been in Moscow for long yet either—we came last year.” Borodin had withdrawn from Wuchang just last year as well.—Nobuko was gradually losing grasp of why she was sitting here facing Dr. Lin, with her evidently illustrious background. What had Claude intended when he introduced Dr. Lin to Nobuko? Dr. Lin’s manner of speaking carried an air of affection, but it was clear that she had come there to meet Nobuko because Claude had told her to. While considering several possible scenarios that could exist between Dr. Lin and herself, Nobuko hit upon one particular matter and grew increasingly perplexed. Could it be that Dr. Lin had misunderstood, thinking that Nobuko had some serious problem she needed to confide and consult about? For example, that she had come legally with a passport but wished to engage in some form of political activity. And could it be that she was waiting for that to be broached, speaking like this while leaning against the table in a relaxed, spread-out posture around her skirt? Otherwise, it was unthinkable that Dr. Lin—who, judging by her demeanor, seemed to have her entire day’s work schedule meticulously planned and active—would go out of her way to come to this dimly lit room in the Metropolitan without even tea to engage in aimless conversation with Nobuko. What was she to do? Nobuko had no problems at present that she needed to confide in and consult Dr. Lin about. On Nobuko’s broad-foreheaded, fair-skinned face—brightly open between the brows—there was an abundance of understanding and sensitivity, but no clearly directed willpower could be discerned. Nobuko’s inner state was just as soft as her expression—unsettled. What Nobuko was consciously aware of and willed was simply the desire to live well. Nobuko, at a loss, had no choice but to return to explaining about herself. Nobuko began to speak somewhat abruptly.

“I have no political knowledge or training—though I strongly feel the contradictions in society.” Dr. Lin gazed for a moment with calm eyes at Nobuko’s face, which had abruptly brought up such a thing without any preface, but— “The literary figures of our country were also like that until very recently.” she said calmly. And though she appeared to be thinking, Dr. Lin adjusted her slender, well-shaped arms slightly deeper on the table and asked Nobuko.

“What do you think of Moscow… Do you think life here will change you?” In such a seething cauldron, could anything remain unchanged? “Moscow is seething—no one can live here without being boiled.”

Nobuko, who was speaking slowly while verifying herself with each word,

“But, Dr. Lin,”

She said in an unreserved manner born of trust, “But doesn’t everyone necessarily boil differently—at different times?” “...” “I want to boil as myself. To take all the time required—pass through the necessary process—” After a silence spent digesting Nobuko’s words, Dr. Lin extended her right hand and took Nobuko’s plump yet tapered hands where they lay clasped on the table.

“Please follow your own path.” “You will discover it.” The two of them fell silent after that. Outside the window, the evening darkness deepened, and under the pale light of arc lamps, figures passing hurriedly moved darkly over the snow. While keeping her eyes on that scenery, Dr. Lin murmured almost as if to herself with a somber tone.

“Between the people of our country and those of yours—I wonder which are living a harder life.”

Dr. Lin’s words were quiet, soft, and carried a resonance that sank deep into the heart. Nobuko realized that throughout her conversation with Dr. Lin, from beginning to end, she had done nothing but say “I, I”—and suddenly became acutely conscious of the narrowness of her own existence. And Nobuko felt ashamed. Yet Dr. Lin seemed not to have noticed how intensely Nobuko’s heart had been stirred and continued gazing at the snowy evening scene outside the window.

“Within the Chinese populace lies hidden a great—enormous, even—potential—both men and women, of course.” “But the Chinese people not only have yet to realize that potential—they don’t even understand the need to realize it.” Suddenly directing a smile filled with affection toward Nobuko, Dr. Lin “Have you seen the female students at Sun Yat-sen University?” Dr. Lin asked.

“Those girls—they’re all truly young, even immature, yet brimming with passion.” “Lovely girls—don’t you think so?”

There was in that "Don’t you think so?" (そう思いませんか) way of asking an irrepressible warmth and consideration. Truly—how long could those black-haired girls survive, returning to their homeland to fight for Chinese people’s freedom? Nobuko solemnly contemplated their lives. Dr. Lin’s voice carried a resonance that infinitely valued those brief, fervent young existences.

From the grimy, dark back staircase of Hotel Metropolitan, Nobuko emerged onto the snow-covered street illuminated by arc lamps. Though her meeting with Dr. Lin had seemed to end without reaching any clear conclusion, it etched into Nobuko’s heart the image of a person she had never before known. Within Dr. Lin’s slender chest—were one to open it—hundreds upon thousands of Chinese people lived enveloped in profound love, including those female students with black bobbed hair cascading over their shoulders. In comparison—if she were to tear open her own white blouse and peer inside—what could possibly emerge from there? First, me. Then the Tsukuda and Dōzaka family members.—And how could they possibly connect to the fates of hundreds of thousands? Nobuko walked on in her small black coat, merging with the stream of passersby who hurried past along the path where snow creaked and crunched beneath winter boots.

5

With the arrival of January, Moscow was blessed with continued clear skies. Beneath a winter sky stretched high and clear, the windless midwinter sunlight made the snow-covered roofs, snowdrifts, and frozen trees of the tree-lined avenues glitter dazzlingly—at times tinged pink, at others faintly blue. The Moskva River’s freeze had also solidified. From the bank deep with snow, looking across, one could see a thin black path running diagonally from this shore—where several bare poplar trees stood blackly visible—to the far shore where a small hut-like structure stood alone. On the white snow of the frozen riverbank, beyond the crossing path that appeared as a black line, figures ice-skating moved. The figures looked small and black against the snow.

With the arrival of this season, Red Square had acquired an added charm to its scenery. Tverskaya Street met one of the gates in the Kremlin's outer wall. Around the arch of that deep-set plaster gate weathered with age, street stalls appeared daily upon the snow. As everywhere else, first came sunflower seeds and apple sellers. Shoe shiners. Postcard vendors. Roughly made bags and Caucasus silk kerchiefs in vibrant primitive colors were laid out for sale. The gate area teemed with Red Army soldiers in ankle-length greatcoats, busy-looking men and women in leather coats, and babushkas with baskets on their arms who looked inclined to amble from stall to stall for hours. Amid this flow mingled even foreigners like Nobuko in their well-made but clumsily tailored black coats—yet Nobuko always found fascination in the stark contrast between the scenes unfolding inside and outside the gate's arch. The moment one passed through the arch to behold the full vista of the snow-clad square, that lively crowd outside abruptly thinned, leaving behind only sparse shadows of passersby in a square now solemnly white—an imposing midwinter tableau.

The Kremlin walls, adorned with Tatar-style curved spear-shaped ornaments, rose high along the right side of the square, and at the edge of those walls stood a gate. There towered a clock tower. Every night, the melody of *The Internationale* resounded from that clock tower, reaching even the window of Nobuko’s hotel overlooking the broken roof. From the Kremlin walls, among the roofs of its many buildings, golden crosses glittered in a forest-like array of varying heights. At the far end of the square—as if defying the flat expanse of snow’s whiteness—stood a Byzantine church painted in red and white with its bulbous spire and cross. Beside it lined an old church built up in muted yellow and green like chrysanthemum stone. These churches had been constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the left side of the square stretched solid government-style buildings whose hundreds of windows overlooked Red Square.

In the snow of the square stretched two narrow paths trailing into the distance. One traced the route where passersby from Tverskaya Street moved past the red-brick History Museum building, crossed before Lenin’s Mausoleum, traversed the square diagonally, then descended from beneath the clock tower toward the Moskva River embankment. The other curved in a hyperbola from an arch beneath the large structure on the left to another gate facing the Kremlin—the one called China Gate. Upon the white snow, these two paths appeared like slender threads. The sparse passersby formed single-file lines as they hastened along these trails.

Nobuko liked the entire view of this snow-covered square.

In the white snow of Red Square stood something like a circular stone well, gray and protruding. Since no one approached it, the snow around this stone well-like structure glittered with pristine thickness and whiteness. Though invisible from afar, inside this shallow stone structure sat a low stone platform. It stood precisely at the height where a large man's neck would rest if he knelt and stretched it out—thick chains lay coiled and fallen beneath that platform. This was the famous execution block frequently used when Moscow had been Russia's capital. At this execution block, Stenka Razin and Pugachev too had their curly-haired, thick-bearded peasant necks severed and made to bleed. They took as their own the groans of Russia's people from that era—people who couldn't even write their own names—and ascending Mother Volga's currents, confronted Moscow's tyrannical tsars. The song of Stenka Razin has spread to foreign lands with a melody steeped in heroism and melancholy.

When she gazed across the unobstructed expanse of snow at both this execution block and the golden crosses towering from the Kremlin walls, Nobuko was always struck by an intense, epic impression. Generation after generation, when nameless Stenka Razins and Pugachevs had been forced to kneel at this execution block, how densely must crowds have poured into the square through all four gates! They pitied those condemned to beheading, feeling in their own large, honest bodies that terror and pain—crossing themselves endlessly as they held their breath and stared at the ghastly spectacle. In response to those crowds' pleas and toward the bloodstained execution block, what the Kremlin-dwelling Tsar's family brandished was a forest of crosses. The road to the Moskva River too was blocked by two large churches ornate as spun-sugar confections. Nowhere in this square could be found anything resembling a human response to those seething emotions.

In the capital of any country, its square is connected to the story of the people’s history. Precisely because of that, the square is fascinating, poignant, and alive. As she gazed at Red Square blanketed in snow, Nobuko sensed here a richness of gradation and beauty that resonated with humanity’s persistent, indomitable passion for uprising—a passion long suppressed.

That day, Motoko had unusually joined her for a walk. Motoko and Nobuko stopped at a confectionery shop just before reaching the Kremlin gate where Tverskaya Street ended and bought half a pound of sugar confections. For Motoko, such shopping was a rare occurrence.

“Just one thing.” Nobuko picked up a piece of chocolate wrapped in strawberry-patterned paper from the paper bag and put it in her mouth, then walked together with Motoko—who had similarly puffed out her cheeks—to the entrance of the square. They had intended to make their usual circuit around that area today. It was a brilliantly clear and bitterly cold day, and street vendors were out in greater numbers than usual; on the two black trodden paths across Red Square, pedestrians formed an unbroken line, coming and going without pause. Motoko, who had rarely ever strolled around this area,

“The scenery here really does have character after all.”

They stood at the edge of the square and gazed around in all directions. Then, along the Kremlin wall, their eyes caught sight of Lenin’s Mausoleum, where something resembling scaffolding was visible.

“The construction hasn’t made any progress at all, has it?” Lenin’s Mausoleum—which had preserved and publicly displayed Lenin’s remains in their original state—had been closed for renovations since around the time Nobuko and the others arrived in Moscow. “Will you go see it once it’s fixed?” “What?” “The Lenin Mausoleum, you know—it’s one of the world’s famous sights.”

Motoko looked at Nobuko with her usual sarcastic smile.

“I won’t see it.” Without even attempting to laugh, Nobuko answered while staring into the distance. “It’s unsettling—and strange.” “...Since Lenin’s dead, he might not make a fuss, but…” “They’re doing all this work yet keep up such childish nonsense—they should quit it. No wonder people badmouth them.” The two walked along the trodden path toward China Gate. As if staged in *Satoko*’s opera—which depicted caravans converging on Moscow from various nations—had there once been a gathering spot here for tenacious Chinese merchants who crossed Mongolia? Various stalls stood beside China Gate too. This side had mostly food items. They even sold tvorog—curd cheese made from cream residue—in buckets. Motoko and Nobuko browsed these goods, with Motoko typically inquiring about impractical purchases like a whole chicken price for hotel living. Then they came upon an apple seller. The elderly man sat lethargically on a small wooden platform, his apples stacked in pyramidal piles. Their shoulders slightly raised, with thick cream-colored skins blushed red like a child’s flushed cheeks. These were premium apples—thin-skinned and fragrant. They cost more than the common red, flat-round variety. Motoko—

“These apples look delicious.” She had stopped to look at them, “Pachomu?* (*How much?)” she asked the price in a casual manner. The apple seller, peering shrewdly from between eyelids that he barely seemed to open, appeared to acknowledge that the one asking the price was not a Russian woman, “Eighty-five kopeks.” he answered with feigned bluntness. “That’s expensive.” Motoko, crouching down, picked up the fruit and examined it as she began to haggle.

“Set it at seventy-five kopeks.” “If it’s seventy-five kopeks, I’ll take six.” It could be said that Motoko had a habit of haggling when shopping. Even in Japan, she haggled so persistently that Nobuko, who was with her, felt awkward. When the price was lowered as if in consolation, she would then cheerfully pay. Unfortunately, in Moscow, both the sleighs waiting at crossroads and the street vendors often stimulated Motoko’s habit. When such things began, Nobuko would stand to the side and quietly listen to the haggling.

“Come on, seventy-five kopeks… agreed?” The apple seller remained obstinate, “Eighty-five kopeks!” he insisted loudly. At that moment, next to him—a young female vendor who had placed a cloth-covered basket of unknown contents on the snow, thrust her hands alternately into the sleeves of her reddish-yellow goatskin coat to warm her fingertips, and stomped her long felt winter boots while watching their exchange—parted her sturdy white front teeth in an inimitable mocking tone and—

“Kitayanki!” (Chinese woman) she uttered, giving the initial and final “ki” sounds a peculiarly sharp resonance—just like when a girl draws out an “Ee” sound— Instantly, Motoko took offense. Abandoning the apple seller,

“What did you say?” Motoko advanced toward the female vendor wearing a floral-patterned headscarf. The young woman with flushed, plump cheeks—reproached by Motoko—looked momentarily taken aback, but then, even more challengingly than before, she consciously parted her red lips wide, revealing her white teeth. “Kitayanki!” she uttered. She said this directly to Motoko’s face as she approached and laughed—“Ha ha ha!” The moment she laughed, Motoko’s leather-gloved hand struck the woman’s cheek.

“You idiot!” Motoko, her face flushed with agitation, cursed in rapid-fire Japanese and glared at the woman. “Don’t you dare mock people!” Again in Japanese, Motoko spat out the words in one breath. Due to the sheer unexpectedness of it all, in that instant, Nobuko couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Similarly taken aback, the female vendor regained her composure and, while pressing the cheek Motoko had slapped with her left hand, began waving her right hand wildly—

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” While flailing at the front of her goatskin coat, she wailed in a tearful voice.

“Hey! Hey! This woman hit me! Hey! What did I do wrong?! Hey! Hey!”

The young female vendor’s shrieks quickly drew a crowd of four or five people. The passersby who had gathered pressed closer to the shouting woman, trying to get a better look, pushing Motoko back as they formed a circle.

“What’s going on?” Some muttered to themselves in low voices as they stopped. Motoko, pushed by the gathering crowd and nearly forced out of the circle, stood glaring at the woman, every nerve in her body stiffened from the sudden surge of agitation. The female vendor, now satisfied that a crowd had gathered, pressed her hand to her cheek and drew a breath—pretending to sob as if preparing to launch into a proper denunciation of the woman who had struck her, intent on using the mob’s power to exact revenge. At that moment, from the roadway behind the woman, a middle-aged man in a half-coat and peaked cap swiftly approached. The moment Nobuko noticed the gaunt, sharp demeanor and watchful expression of the man, she thought, *This is bad*. Things were getting complicated. She had sensed it instinctively. Nobuko suddenly entwined Motoko’s arm with her own and pulled her out of the circle while whispering.

“Hurry, we’ve got to get out of here!” Motoko, her movements having become oddly sluggish from nervous agitation, failed to notice the man approaching and even resisted as Nobuko tried with all her might to pull her away.

“No! They’re coming!” Fortunately, the people surrounding the female vendor had not yet turned their attention to the connection between the woman feigning sobs and Nobuko and her companion. After putting two or three ken between themselves and the scene, Motoko finally seemed to grasp the implications of the commotion she had stirred up and stopped resisting Nobuko’s pull on her arm. The two walked as briskly as they could for several ken, then gradually broke into a jog of their own accord, finally breaking into a full run for the last few ken until they emerged onto the street before Bolshaya Moskovskaya. Before they knew it, a shabbily dressed boy had attached himself to Nobuko and her companion’s side as they ran, dashing alongside them,

“Eey, Hōja! (Chankoro) Hōja! (Chankoro)” “(Chink) Jap!” “(Chink)”

With that, he jeered and danced around them. Yet here, no passersby paid it any heed.

Nobuko and Motoko finally regained their normal walking pace. They began walking along the wide sidewalk bordering a small park-like garden where a blue-painted fence peeked out from beneath the snow, heading toward the hotel. Only now did Nobuko feel the fatigue hit her - her knees trembled uncontrollably. Her right arm that had pulled Motoko with all her strength shook unpleasantly in rapid little tremors. Nobuko felt like crying. If we'd been caught... Utterly drained, Nobuko returned to their room with Motoko under the pretense that she'd fallen ill during their walk.

Nobuko flung her hat onto the bed, left her coat unbuttoned, and sat on the bed for a long time without saying a word. Motoko also sat down beside her, smoked a cigarette, and remained silent, seemingly at a loss for words. Nobuko’s cheeks still bore a somewhat flushed color as she licked her dry lips, looking pained. “Let’s have some tea.” Motoko stood up and went to order tea, poured it, and placed it in Nobuko’s hands. When she had drunk the tea down to about half the cup,

“Ah, that’s right.”

Motoko retrieved the sugar candy she had bought on their way from her coat pocket hanging by the entrance and brought it over. When she had begun drinking her second cup of tea, Nobuko finally spoke—in an oddly hoarse low voice tinged with sorrow— "I absolutely refuse to let such things happen again," she said.

…… “Laying hands on someone—you mustn’t do that! No matter the reason… especially over mere insults—”

Motoko remained silent for a while, tapping cigarette ash onto the saucer's edge. "But they were making fools of us!" "What was that?!" "The way she spat out 'Chink'!" She repeated the slur with the same snarling emphasis on both syllables that the vendor had used. "You should've just told them off verbally." "Since when do words solve anything?!" This exemplified Motoko's characteristically blunt humor. Nobuko instinctively produced a pained smile.

"But hitting... why would you do that?" The insult "Chinese woman" had enraged Motoko so intensely—Nobuko couldn’t comprehend the ferocity of that temper. “Well, Bukko-chan, you’re such a refined person.” “Such a lady.” “I’m different—I’m Japanese…” “So there’s still no reason for you to get angry, right?” “People like that can’t tell the difference anyway.” “After all, there have always been more Chinese people here.”

On the streets, those whom Nobuko and her companions encountered were also Chinese men and women; as for Japanese people—and especially Japanese women—there were not even ten of them in all of Moscow. The embassy-affiliated Japanese women were dressed far more splendidly than Nobuko and her companions—let alone ordinary people—and through their appearance clearly sought to present themselves as noblewomen. Even Nobuko and her companions couldn’t tell Japanese and Chinese people apart. At Far Eastern University in Moscow, a considerable number of Japanese people should have been coming from Japan over the past several years to receive training as revolutionaries. When Nobuko and Motoko were walking along the tree-lined avenue near that university, they suddenly noticed that two men approaching from the opposite direction had an air about them that seemed somehow Japanese.

“Ah, I wonder if they’re Japanese.” Motoko also subtly took notice; gradually approaching from both directions, they passed each other at extremely close proximity while moving opposite ways. Nobuko and Motoko had only confirmed that those two people were not Great Russians. They couldn’t even clearly distinguish whether they were Chinese people, Koreans, or Mongolian young men. Had they been Japanese, those men would have noticed Nobuko and Motoko—unmistakably Japanese women—from their side, stopped talking, and passed by as vague “Oriental faces.”

Once again on Tverskaya Street, something similar had occurred. That time too, those walking ahead had been a pair. As they approached chatting cheerfully, their mouth movements seen from afar distinctly gave the impression that Japanese was being spoken. But when passing so close their shoulders nearly touched in the crowd before a grocery store, Nobuko found no definitive features to conclusively identify them as Japanese. Nobuko recalled these things.

“Given that, you could say it’s only natural that a woman like that would make a mistake.” “Well, if they simply can’t tell the difference, there’s nothing to be done.” “Even Japanese people can hardly distinguish Westerners’ nationalities… It’s because they mock us that it gets on my nerves.” “It’s always the same pattern—Hōja this, Kitayanki that.” “Is there even one bastard who’s treated us as Japanese?” “…………”

Kitayanka—(Chinese woman)—As Nobuko quietly mulled over the word, she recalled Dr. Lin, whom she had met days before in that dim, strangely empty room at the Hotel Metropol. That woman was a true Kitayanka—an authentic Chinese woman. Yet could someone with Dr. Lin’s composed bearing and beautiful eyes—standing beside a vendor haggling over prices—ever have been ridiculed as a “Kitayanka” in the same way Motoko had? From Nobuko’s perspective, it seemed fair to say Motoko possessed some quality that unwittingly provoked others to mock her.

Motoko approached the desk with the ashtray only to flick off cigarette ash, otherwise restlessly pacing the room with visible irritation. In Nobuko’s gradually settling mind, the figures of those two cowardly women—who had struck suddenly and fled—began to appear both bitter and absurdly comical. “—You’re such a mystery.” At Nobuko’s softened tone, Motoko’s gaze relaxed. “Why?” “But—you’re usually so straightforward—" “In a way, you’re far more open than I am… It’s strange how you flare up over just being called *Kitayanka*…”

“…………”

As Motoko looked back at Nobuko, tension resurfaced in her eyes.

When Nobuko was five or six, she had often been frightened by stories of Chinese kidnappers. Yet the Chinese people young Nobuko actually knew were the stout merchants with long queues who came to sell bolts of fabric at their home in Dōzaka. That stout man always arrived by rickshaw. Unlike Japanese people who used lap blankets, he would spread his legs clad in black cloth shoes and clasp a large fabric bundle between them. On his queued head sat a black hat adorned with round red berry-like ornaments, and whenever boarding or alighting from the rickshaw, his long queue would be swiftly tucked into the chest of his blue satin overcoat. This Chinese fabric merchant,

“Jo-chan, hello.”

With that, he always greeted Nobuko with a smile. He stepped up onto the tatami mats in the entryway and spread out various fabrics. Her young mother, whose husband was abroad and finances were tight, would pick up the beautiful Chinese textiles and gaze at them, only to resign herself and put them back down, patiently waiting for—

“Madam, this is cheap, you know. “Top-quality fabric.” Occasionally, her mother had bought things like damask for haori linings. From this Chinese man’s body, the fabric bundle, and the small Chinese peanut confection he placed in Nobuko’s palm came a distinctly Chinese odor. The reason young Nobuko could clearly discern this Chineseness was because one side of her childhood life had been permeated by the unmistakable scent of the West. Occasionally, thick cardboard boxes and wooden crates would arrive from her father in England. Receiving such parcels and opening them would throw not just Mother Takedai and the three small children but the entire household into commotion. Nobuko had discovered that these opened parcels were filled with an intoxicatingly pleasant Western fragrance. Even when sniffed through the wrapping paper, that faint scent grew clearer as the package was unwrapped and the inner box emerged; then when the lid was lifted and packing material burst forth, the Western aroma struck Nobuko’s nose most intensely. This Western scent exactly resembled that of Western confections. It carried a light, sweet yet piercing fragrance—identical to those rare Western sweets kept in Fūgetsu’s wooden boxes, beautifully decorated with silver particles.

Nobuko’s complex feelings toward China—a mix of fear and nostalgia—had since then incorporated various new dimensions. As the abundant splendor and excellence of ancient Chinese poetry, tales of the Silk Road, paintings, ceramics, and more gradually entered Nobuko’s life, she found herself drawn into an enduring fascination with both the China of old and modern China. There, it seemed to her, lay exposed an Eastern grandeur and desolation on a scale unimaginable in Japan—the artificially constructed opulence and stark destitution of human life laid bare.

When they were in Japan, it had been Motoko who went out of her way to visit a store in Kudanshita that handled Chinese goods and purchased a Chinese-style hexagonal brazier and a blue-green felt rug. Motoko, who had such tastes, would lose her composure, fly into a rage, and seethe with frustration when called a Kitayanka (Chinese woman). In the hearts of the Japanese people, since the First Sino-Japanese War, there had been a sentiment of living in close proximity to the Chinese while belittling them—toward international students coming to Japan and toward merchants as well. From that belittling attitude came numerous terms for Chinese people in Japan. The moment Motoko was called Kitayanka, the moment she was referred to as Hōja (Chink), it transformed with lightning speed into a term of contempt for Chinese people—might it not have splattered against Motoko’s face?

“Don’t you think so?—Don’t you find it psychological?” Motoko glared at Nobuko with piercing eyes but then turned away abruptly.

“You might be a cosmopolitan, you know.” “Because I’m Japanese.” “I can only perceive things as a Japanese person would.” On the lid of her cigarette case, she had taken out a cigarette and was bouncing it lightly, “Hmph.” With just a snort, Motoko jerked her jujube-shaped jaw toward Nobuko. “What’s so great about being a cosmopolitan?! If I’m a cosmopolitan, does that make me some kind of big shot?!”

Nobuko averted her eyes from Motoko, who stood rooted in the center of the room with an unlit cigarette clutched between her fingers, glaring at her. Nobuko lived simply, perceiving everything as it was with an unadorned heart—so much so that she had no need to consciously remind herself she was Japanese. Though Nobuko, born a Japanese woman, could have no heart other than a Japanese one, she did not possess as vulnerable a Japanese consciousness as Motoko did. Or rather, she simply lacked the habit of emotionally linking everything she found appealing to things existing in Japan.

The day after arriving in Moscow, when they visited the Moscow Art Theatre, Masao Segawa must have praised Kachalov and Moskvin numerous times, saying they were the spitting image of kabuki actors. For Nobuko, that was utterly incomprehensible. If Kachalov and Uzaemon were similar in some way, what value would there be in coming all the way to Moscow to see the Art Theatre?

When Uiichi Akiyama praised Caucasian beauties as being exact copies of Japanese ones, Nobuko felt a dark, suffocating weight from his words. That even someone lecturing in Esperanto would reduce women to their facial features when speaking of them—this fact painfully made Tsukuda resurface in her mind. It also recalled Takemura’s emotions that had nearly become deeply entangled during their time at the house deep in Komazawa. Both Takemura and Tsukuda had declared—as if voicing universal male wisdom—that living with women who did things like knitting was pleasant. To Nobuko, who yearned to live more vibrantly than knitting allowed and consequently found no peace for body or soul— Even Motoko—had Japan’s customs been different, she might have expressed her femininity as Motoko more naturally—

“Even though you can’t fully conform to Japanese customs yourself, to call it ‘Japanese disease’—absurd.” Nobuko said. “You’re contradicting yourself.” “In any case, I was wrong to raise my hand first.” “I do admit that.” Motoko said with unexpected honesty.

“The truth is, I’m furious on so many levels.” “At what?”

“First, at myself…”

Having said that, Motoko’s face flushed faintly. “And then, at Bukko—”

“…………” “I kept thinking about how much contempt you must feel—hiding scorn in your gut while putting on this model student act!” “I thought.” “I don’t despise you… but that kind of thing…” Looking up at Motoko, who had come and stood before her, Nobuko smiled faintly with tears in her eyes. “We aren’t trying to live in such a way that we’d have to flee from the people here, you know—”

VI

On the pale green wall without wallpaper, a large world map was affixed. Nobuko lay sideways on the crude couch beneath it, stretching out her legs as she mended her socks. The pleats of her schoolgirl-like navy skirt spread beyond the couch, and at the breast of her pale blue blouse hung a silk cord woven in a rainbow-like combination of colors in place of a necktie.

The table had been pulled within immediate reach. Japanese-style crimson silk needle cases and scissors lay scattered about, and beside them sat a single book neatly placed. Against a white background with red, the cover featured an image of a crowd surging forward with flags thrust high. *Ten Days That Shook the World* by John Reed. The title and author’s name were printed in black in Russian. The book was still pristine and had only just begun to be used as Nobuko’s language textbook that afternoon.

The light from the white ceiling fell straight and bright upon Nobuko’s neck and shoulders—neatly trimmed with an almost lonesome simplicity—and upon her back as she leaned against the pale-yellow varnished armrest of the couch, moving her needle. Nobuko twisted her neck and cast her eyes repeatedly toward the table. In the room where thick smoke from birch firewood swirled blackly upward into the clear winter sky from the snow-laden rooftop chimney of the building across the way, Maria Gregorievna’s face came to mind—that expression mingling earnestness and unease as she opened the first page of a new book and explained the relationships between political parties like the Cadets and SRs around Kerensky’s revolutionary government. When it came to such tangled problems, Nobuko’s language skills could grasp less than half of Maria Gregorievna’s explanations themselves. While threading a needle, Nobuko called out to Motoko, who was studying at the desk illuminated by the green-shaded lamp under the window.

“You’ll likely need to visit the International Publishing House soon, won’t you?” “Hmm… I’m not sure.” “When you go, take me with you.”

“Ah…” Cadets and SRs and other such political reference books had become necessary. Nobuko, realizing this, hit upon the idea that the best course would be to ask Tamotsu or Kouno Umeko to send her such a Japanese dictionary. In Japan, such books were being published one after another. Gogenkai had been brought to Moscow as well, but Nobuko had not anticipated that a social science dictionary would be so necessary in daily life. Even Motoko and Fukiko, who had been so thoroughly prepared, had not thought to bring that with them.—

Even if Tokyo and Moscow seemed far apart, letters still arrived in just about two weeks like this... Nobuko shifted her weight slightly, stretched out her hand, and took two letters from the table. Beside the letters lay a small pile of Japanese newspapers and magazines sent from Japan tightly rolled; even after being opened, they still retained their tightly curled shape. On her way back from attending her lesson at Maria Gregorievna’s place, Nobuko had stopped by the embassy for a walk as usual and picked up the mail addressed to herself and Motoko.

Nobuko, leaving the mending item with its needle stuck in it on her blouse-covered lap, pulled out the already once-read letter from its envelope again. In handwriting that had a kind of charm within its crisp, snapping sounds—like stepping on dry twigs—Kouno Umeko had informed Nobuko that the proofreading of the novel she had been asked to do was complete and that it would be published soon. And it stated that she was thinking of going to Kyoto or Nara when spring came and living there for a while. It stated that Suda Yūkichi had been living in Nara for several years, and that a room for Umeko might be found not far from his house. This letter was jointly addressed to Ms. Motoko and Ms. Nobuko. Nobuko did not know the area around the town of Takahatake mentioned in Umeko’s letter, but the Nara Park on a rainy day and the thicket of pieris there, its white flower clusters hanging down in bloom, remained vividly in her memory. When walking behind Kasuga Shrine, there was also the color of wisteria that had entwined high in the old cedar grove’s treetops, blooming with vivid, large purple flowers. On the day she saw those wisteria flowers, Nobuko had strolled leisurely along that moss-covered stone path with her brother Waichiro.

After returning Umeko’s letter to its envelope, Nobuko picked up another one. On a sturdy Kent paper square envelope, Nobuko’s name was written in Gothic decorative script. Using a G-pen whose tip had earlier snapped off—moving it horizontally and vertically to create this patterned lettering—had been one of Waichiro’s specialties. The envelope contained a joint letter from the Sasa family: Taizo, Takeyo, Waichiro, Tamotsu, and Tsuyako. Inside lay a bookmark Tsuyako had made by pasting a charming scrap of Yuzen chirimen fabric. "Today’s Sunday finds us all unusually at home." "With everyone gathered, we decided to start with a collective message." Taizo’s fountain-penned words—overflowing with a vitality that belied his age—had indeed been dashed off in his characteristic haste across a few brief lines. “Mother plans to visit Maesawa again shortly”――.

The next sheet was more than half filled with Takeyo’s writing. Nobuko gazed absently down at the page, recalling how her paternal grandmother—back when she lived in the countryside—would sigh while looking over Takeyo’s letters. “Mother’s handwriting is too—too skilled for the likes of me to read, I tell you.” That grandmother would take out a horizontally bound notebook from her hanging inkstone set’s drawer, chew the hardened tip of her brush, and record entries like “shoyu—1 sho” and “tofu—2 blocks” in her household expense ledger.

When receiving her mother’s letters written like this—each line spanning from top to bottom of the stationery in a single breath of connected cursive script—Nobuko felt perplexity rise to the fore. To put it simply, Nobuko could not read her mother’s letters. Yet because they were her mother’s words, she found herself unable to dismiss them with mere acknowledgment of their illegibility; driven by a sense of obligation—that some vital message might linger in those unread lines—she labored over them.

When she had read it through once earlier, she now picked up again the parts she had been unable to decipher, tracing Takeyo’s characters—their black, fleshy lines that might be called fluidly adept, slithering into coils only to stretch out again, stretching out only to coil once more. Nobuko began to feel a sense of listlessness, a disjointedness, as she read in detail. In that joint letter, it seemed to reflect exactly the lively atmosphere of the people of Dōzaka chattering noisily and talking all at once around the large dining table. As for Waichiro, he made no mention of the postcard Nobuko had written last month about the opera she had heard in Moscow’s Theatre Square, instead stating that since he only needed to submit his graduation piece this year to complete art school, he was currently cultivating a magnanimous spirit. Taizo, likely preoccupied with his busyness, had completely forgotten about the three consecutive postcards from the Tretyakov Gallery that Nobuko had specifically sent to her father.

Only at the beginning of Takeyo’s letter was there a thank you for keeping in mind the interesting postcard from the other day. It stated that everyone had viewed it with great delight. However, it did not specify which postcard Nobuko had written when, nor how it had been interesting. Nobuko, who now had this letter spread out on her lap, wondered—if she could ask, which postcard was that? If she could have asked, Takeyo would surely have fluttered those glossy eyelashes of hers, putting on a slightly awkward expression as she evaded with, "Oh, that one—you know, the one you sent the other day!"

The tone of everyone’s letters made Nobuko vividly recall the scene of the dining room in the Dōzaka house. And Nobuko suddenly laughed out. In every corner of the dining room of the Dōzaka house, there were always all sorts of boxes and cans of every shape piled up. Eggshell-colored vertical cans labeled "karintō from Nakamura-ya," square biscuit tins with dark green and vermilion stripes, slightly rusted old tin cans—such things were piled brazenly beneath the sturdy British-style crimson wallpaper with embossed arabesque patterns. It was a kind of spectacle. Beneath where Takeyo always sat at the central large table were two or three Fūgetsudō castella boxes, inside of which had been placed scraps of paper and whatnot—whatever Takeyo at the time thought she couldn’t do without. Therefore, when something like not being able to find a necessary note occurred in the Dōzaka house, Takeyo would take the lead, tucking her thick bangs behind her ears and peering under the large table. This habit had been ingrained in Nobuko and the other Dōzaka children since their earliest memories, so whenever a guest close enough to be invited into the dining room was present, Nobuko’s so-called “duck dive” would be performed under the table as needed. At times, no sooner had Takeyo—while searching for something—remarked, “I just can’t seem to find it,” than Nobuko would take the lead, and the four sons and daughters seated at the table would simultaneously stick their heads under it, deliberately lift their hips high, and imitate ducks.

On the mantelpiece of that dining room was displayed Taizo’s treasured Greek vase. In preparation for departing for Moscow, during the days when Nobuko closed up the Komazawa house and stayed in Dōzaka, a large kiln had been placed beside the Greek vase on the mantelpiece. Despite being cleaned every morning, the kiln—which had by some chance been moved to an out-of-place spot—remained beside the Greek vase on the mantelpiece for many days. And by now, it had probably disappeared. In the manner of tidying up where it had vanished unnoticed, the kiln disappeared from the mantelpiece, and no one remained who knew of its whereabouts.

These out-of-place aspects came from the temperament of Takeyo, who was a housewife. If Takeyo had meticulously attended to every corner, unifying them with her luxurious tastes, or if it had been unified by Taizo’s preference for antique art, what a stifling place the Dōzaka house would have become—a home with no room for human freedom to grow. Nobuko was glad that, in the Dōzaka house, there was at least such disorder. When she recalled her girlhood, it was precisely because there existed gaps in the Dōzaka house—gaps unimaginable to outsiders—that Nobuko could remember her own girlhood as a wild sprout that had once spilled forth and grown within those spaces.

When Nobuko turned fourteen or fifteen and wanted her own room, she cleaned up by herself the five-tatami tea room-style space next to the entrance that had become like a storage area. She positioned the old desk that had been shoved there to face the small garden where butterbur sprouts grew at the base of a young pine tree. From the mountain of old books piled up in the storage cupboard, she arbitrarily found and brought back volumes like *Suimasōshū* with their bindings coming apart, partial sets of *Kōyō Zenshū*, and *Kokumin Bunko*, creating her own bookshelf. Among them, if one were to speak of books that had truly been bought for Nobuko as her own, there were only two volumes: a pocket-sized collection of Poe’s stories.

Gaps and disorder still remained as one of the Dōzaka household’s traditions. As years passed and their economic circumstances grew more stable, this disorder and these gaps—now stripped of their former innocence—manifested through each family member’s scattered emotions and the wasteful consumption of material goods. From a long chair in Moscow—thousands of kilometers away, on a snow-laden winter night—Nobuko could assert this with conviction. The letters she wrote at this hotel table using the purple ink all Muscovites employed—on postcards or sometimes stationery—would first be unsealed by Takeyo, read through by whoever happened to be present, then stored beneath that familiar table in a box—“lest they go missing,” as they said. The letters tucked away in castella boxes might not vanish entirely, but after only a short while, the people of Dōzaka would have utterly forgotten even what they contained. For the people of Dōzaka were sufficiently self-sufficient without Nobuko——

On the third page of the Dōzaka joint letter that Nobuko was perusing with mixed emotions, Tomo had penned several lines. The slender characters—meticulously aligned like evenly spaced notebook entries, their pen pressure carefully moderated—bore a rounded softness reminiscent of Tomo’s plump, swollen upper eyelids. Was this truly a letter from a twenty-year-old youth about to enter his final year of high school? Next year he would be starting university— In the joint letter, Tomo had written in such uniformly thin strokes with relaxed pressure that it seemed he alone had used different ink and pen. “When I entered Tokyo High School, they decided to buy me something I wanted as a congratulatory gift.” “At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted.” “This time, as an entrance celebration gift, I have been provided with a proper greenhouse equipped with a boiler.” “This is indeed exactly what I wanted.” Tomo had included a simple diagram explaining the greenhouse’s dimensions and steam pipe layout.

The Dōzaka household tradition was full of gaps, but when their parents did something for the children or showed them something, there was a custom of making them formally and properly say, "Thank you very much," as a matter of courtesy. Having been raised to maintain decorum in speech toward his elders, Tomo—now twenty years old—using the phrase "was provided" could be said to unconsciously reflect that manner of upbringing. However, even from his elementary school days, when Tomo received a small amount of money from his mother to buy flower seeds, he had a habit of meticulously recording the income and expenses and returning the remainder. "The three yen I received from Mother, the seeds I purchased—such-and-such varieties—and their prices, all itemized in detail."

From the perspective of the lives of twenty-year-old Soviet youths that Nobuko had observed and felt in her daily life in Moscow, Tomo’s lifestyle sentiment—writing that he had been provided with a greenhouse for something as trivial as entering high school—felt utterly incongruous. What significance could entering high school and university possibly hold for Tomo himself, who did not understand how one must live in this vast world while navigating its storms?

For Takeyo, this undoubtedly seemed an event bearing on the Sasa family’s very future. The eldest son Ichirō had been badgered by Takeyo into taking the First Higher School exam, but upon failing, he swiftly enrolled in an art school instead. Takeyo—imbued with Meiji-era sensibilities where a university degree had defined her own marital prospects—invested supreme significance in her son entering a high school that would lead to Imperial University. That Takeyo’s urge to celebrate this milestone had transmuted into Tomo’s own posture of grateful receipt—this pained Nobuko. Even without harshness—shouldn’t Tomo, as a youth his age, examine his position within the family and the nature of their affections? That Tomo—who surely harbored his own struggles—wedged between Ichirō and his sister Tsuyako while confining his letters to topics of familial harmony—this restraint frustrated Nobuko. Why couldn’t Tomo correspond more freely and candidly? Reflecting thus, she realized that since her arrival in Moscow, Tomo had written twice—yet both times only in joint letters from everyone.

Suddenly, Nobuko found herself speculating about something that seemed impossible. “Could it be that Takeyo is suppressing Tomo from writing letters to me?” “If you write to your sister, show me first.” If the counterpart were Tomo, there was every chance Takeyo’s command would be obeyed. Even when Nobuko visited the Dōzaka house and managed to speak privately with Tomo, Takeyo had pressed him so relentlessly to disclose their conversations—so fiercely determined to separate Nobuko from what she called her “child of passion”—that he could not refuse. When the relationship between Takeyo and Ochi, Tomo’s tutor, grew improper—when Nobuko’s presence became an irritant in that ambiguous, feverish atmosphere—Takeyo’s attitude had grown glaringly pronounced. The affair with Ochi had faded like sunset clouds vanishing from the sky, but Takeyo’s determination to sever Tomo from Nobuko’s influence remained unshaken. Whenever Nobuko ventured criticism about Tomo or Ichirō, Takeyo would snap: “I have the right to raise my children as I see fit.” “Keep quiet.” She confronted Nobuko as if she were no child of hers. Takeyo believed keeping Tomo distant from Nobuko was a mother’s prerogative. At this thought, flames of fierce resistance burned in Nobuko’s eyes. If Takeyo had a mother’s right—then she, as a sister, had a human right. And a responsibility. Tomo must be brought out into air fit for human breath—.

Nobuko removed the sewing materials from her lap and properly reseated herself on the sofa. And she placed the half-sized manuscript paper she had brought from Japan on the table.

“Thank you for everyone’s joint letter. This time, I’m writing this letter especially for you alone, Tomo-san. We’re always talking with everyone else and never have proper conversations just between us. Why do you think that is? Don’t you have any stories you want to share with me? I can’t believe that’s truly the case. I think it’s perfectly natural—and good—for a sister and brother living in different countries to tell each other how earnestly they’re living their lives. If there’s something on your side preventing that... what would it be?”

Nobuko had anticipated that each line she wrote would be read through Takeyo’s eyes. “I wonder if my negligence in writing is the cause.” Nobuko could not help but sympathize with Tomo’s joy over the greenhouse’s completion. When he had declared he’d exhausted all possibilities with the frame, from spring to summer of the year Nobuko left for Moscow, Tomo had done nothing but cultivate cyclamens through hydroponics on his study desk. His delight at obtaining a greenhouse was something she shared wholeheartedly. Yet Tomo’s apparent acceptance of it solely as a high school entrance gift—without connecting it to his own youthful struggles—filled Nobuko with anxiety and frustration. From her perspective, Tomo ought to have shown more candid stubbornness. She wrote exactly as she felt about this matter.

“For anyone with your health, abilities, and family circumstances, entering high school should be nothing remarkable.” “Parents everywhere rejoice in this and exaggerate their joy through all manner of parental motives.” “But in their delight at their sons’ high school admission, do those parents ever contemplate how many children across Japan cannot even enter middle school solely due to genuine lack of money?”

"Is your Tokyo High School really such a place—so packed with rich boys that there isn't even one poor student among them? If that's truly the case, it's both terrifying and contemptible. Are the students being raised there so self-satisfied that they don't even know how to use their imaginations about all the misfortune teeming in this world?"

Unaware that she had knocked the crimson silk pincushion to the floor with her elbow as she wrote, Nobuko continued.

"I don’t know how much the greenhouse built for you cost, but it must have required expenses far exceeding a year’s tuition for a poor high school student. Tomo-san, have you considered that? And, to be fair, have you considered that there may be a young man out there—one with more talent than you and of greater service to humanity—toiling away covered in mud, all because he lacks the funds you have? Have you considered all these various things? A person without imagination can have neither compassion nor sympathy—let alone love for others."

As she wrote to Tomo, the entire life of the Dōzaka household—where everyone voraciously indulged their appetites while aimlessly squandering time and vitality—began to feel deeply, viscerally repugnant to Nobuko. “Tomo-san, it is you who must carry the pride of youth. While fully savoring whatever joy you possess, you must also clearly understand what meaning it holds in this society. To accept what you receive unconditionally—that is servility. What you must have, you must claim even if you have to assert it; and what you should not have—even if you grovel or it’s given—you should not take.”

The scene of Moscow First University rose vividly across Nobuko's consciousness. When she walked along the snow-glittered street toward the university on a winter day, the yellow outer walls of the circular auditorium crowned with snow towered before her. Band-like characters encircling the upper part of those walls were neither Latin nor biblical passages. "Learning for all working people"—those very characters were inscribed on the yellow circular auditorium's outer wall at Moscow First University.

“Tomo-san, how immense is the meaning contained in these simple words. These four words demonstrate how in this country, humanity’s relationship with learning has been properly redefined for the first time. They speak of how we’ve progressed to handling knowledge for everyone’s happiness. I had just gone to see it again yesterday. And when I imagined those characters being carved onto Moscow University’s ancient walls long ago, waves of beauty and joy washed over me. Listen, Tomo-san— The Soviet youth didn’t receive these words as some gift. They claimed them for themselves.”

As if trying to cast a resilient rope all the way to Tomo across the distant sea, Nobuko wrote the letter with her whole heart. “I believe that as human beings living our lives, we must cherish hearts moved by beauty. Moved by beauty, so we may become courageous. Don’t you think so, Tomo-san? The beauty of cultivating flowers lies not in that self-absorbed desire to make them bloom in our greenhouse for show, but in drawing forth all the beauty of life contained within a single plain-looking seed—that’s where true beauty resides.”

With a resolve that did not shy away from the fact that the rope meant for Tomo would clatter down before Takeyo’s eyes, Nobuko finished writing the letter. The thick letter’s folded creases had swollen too much, and the envelope tore. Deciding to seal it after weighting it down, Nobuko piled books and dictionaries atop the letter folded into quarters.

Just then, Motoko, having finished a segment of her studies, moved her chair. “Ahhh!” As if stretching the back of her housecoat, she spread both arms wide to either side and pressed the bony hollow at the nape of her cropped hair against the chair’s back. “Bukko-chan, what’s up? You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“...Because I was writing a letter...” “Now that you mention it, I should write to Dad soon too.”

Among the mail from Japan that had been retrieved from the embassy today, there were also two or three letters addressed to Motoko. While puffing on her cigarette with apparent relish, Motoko said, "At least your side still has recipients who'll understand what you write—there's purpose in that. But whatever I write to mine might as well be casting coins before a cat."

Motoko said. “It ended up being rushed and superficial… I just—”

Motoko’s father, who was born in Kyoto and spent his life as a merchant there, along with the rest of the family, treated her as the unexpected oddity of the clan. Moreover, the current housewife—who was the sister of the woman who had openly become his wife after Motoko’s birth mother died—was never acknowledged as something natural within Motoko’s emotions. Conscious of her own precarious position, after making sure to fulfill her obligations in treating Motoko as the dutiful eldest daughter, she adopted an air of complete detachment. Even after coming to Moscow, Motoko wrote letters only addressed to her father.

Nobuko, who had just finished writing her letter to Tomo and still retained her heightened excitement, “Just once, I’d like to receive a letter from Mother that truly feels like she’s speaking to me word by word.”

Nobuko said. “When it comes to Mother’s letters, she doesn’t care whether the recipient can read them or not, you know...”

“——”

Motoko, upon seeing Nobuko’s face like that, fleetingly flashed her usual wise and sardonic half-smile. Now that she mentioned it, Nobuko wondered if Father Taizo had been able to read all of Mother’s smooth, flowing script. In the past, during the nearly five years that Taizo had been away in London, Takeyo—who was still around thirty years old at the time—would fold ganpi paper sideways, densely fill it with thin, delicate characters from top to bottom, and write hundreds of letters. In her youth, during such times, Takeyo would light the special gleaming nickel round-bowl lamp—the prettier, brighter one—and sit facing Taizo’s empty desk to write her ganpi paper letters. Nobuko, then a girl of about five, stood beside her, resting her soft, rounded chin on the table as she watched. That was always remembered as a summer night’s scene. Now that she thought about it, those ganpi paper letters had also contained appeals—from the household’s strained finances to the harsh oppression that Takeyo could only interpret as her mother-in-law attempting to drive her out during her husband’s absence and replace her with his cousin. Filled with heartfelt appeals and lingering attachment, what emotions must the endless, thread-like cursive letters that the young Takeyo penned have stirred in Taizo, living his life as a forty-year-old student in lodgings in Cambridge and London?

As Nobuko now found herself separated from Japan by great distance, reading letters from her homeland amidst the very fabric of Moscow's daily life, she came to understand that Taizo was not alone—all those living abroad must feel these missives from home, received within the atmosphere of foreign existence, with a peculiar blend of reassurance and oppressive weight in equal measure. “When Mother’s letters arrived, Father would immediately tuck them into his pocket and then surely go off to some deserted spot—” “People who spoke of it always described it as Father’s devotion to his wife—but now that I’ve come here myself, somehow it doesn’t seem so simple to me anymore, does it?”

“Then what is it?” “—We go retrieve the letters ourselves here and bring them back, don’t we? But if someone suddenly said, ‘Here’s mail from Japan!’ and handed it to us here, I think there’d still be some kind of shock for me.” Moreover, during the final years of the Meiji era when Taizo had been living in London, there had been far too great a disparity between the meager life of the wife and children left behind in Japan and Taizo’s life in London—frugal yet enveloped in the city’s vibrant hues.

“In letters from Moscow, no matter how much I write about food, at least I can be sure it’ll never be resented.”

Nobuko said with a laugh as she recalled one pitiful thing. It was indeed from the time when Taizo had been in London. One time, Takeyo sat in the middle of the parlor crying and said, “Father, what a cruel man you are!” She spoke to the young Nobuko—her hair in a bob cut with a false topknot, her cotton damask obi tied in a shell-shaped knot. “Look at this! What on earth do you think is written here? Allow me to introduce tonight’s dinner.” Takeyo read out steamed young chicken, something, and fruit compote. Then she continued: “What do you think Father says? ‘Over there, you must all be gnawing on pickled radish by now—how pitiful!’ he says! How dare he say such a thing!” The words had been written on a single postcard. To young Nobuko, the details of that menu were incomprehensible, yet the disparity—that on her father’s side there existed some lavish feast while they themselves gnawed on pickled radish—was etched with strange vividness into her child’s mind. Nobuko could still recall Takeyo’s fury—her voice trembling with tears as she read out “steamed young chicken” before her young daughter. Whenever that memory surfaced, she would recall the sweet-smelling sweet potato porridge that Mother and the three small children often ate during those days. The thickly simmered porridge—beloved by the children and shared with the kitchen staff—would be ladled from the pot into a large pale blue square bowl and brought to the chabudai. The square bowl bore a pattern of a sparrow perched on a broken roof tile.

Even long after Nobuko had grown up, she remembered her father and mother quarreling over the wording of that postcard. Taizo explained that he had truly written it out of pity for everyone. Nobuko of that time came to comprehend that her mother’s anger back then was by no means directed solely at a single plate of steamed young chicken.

Such feasts. The intoxication of wine. Men’s carefree conversation and laughter. Takeyo—who read novels and pored over foreign magazines—must have heard within such scenes the coquettish voices of blonde women, their wasp-cinched waists and skirts billowing like extravagant foam, making men forget the homes awaiting them in their homelands. “Even Soseki—if you read his works—suffered greatly on both sides in a different sense during his time abroad.” “Even his wife.”

Nobuko’s gaze turned measuring as she recalled the letter she had just written to Kei and contemplated the depth of the rift between the life of the Udōzaka household—which seemed to peer out from its lines—and her own life here.

As someone living in Moscow, Nobuko’s heart now perceived the general life of Japan—or more precisely, Udōzaka’s daily rhythms—reflected from a fresh angle, and she found herself able to grasp her own assertions with relative clarity. However, as for Nobuko’s assertions from Moscow, how would the members of the Sasa household and her friends back home—remaining in their respective unchanged environments—receive them? As for that matter, Nobuko had hardly given it any consideration.

Nobuko loved every moment of Moscow, greedily accepting each impression of its ceaselessly dynamic life—neither boiling nor stagnating—as her own harvest. Even the style of postcards Nobuko wrote to friends like Umeko had gradually changed since coming to Moscow. To Nobuko, this transformation had become so natural that she hadn’t noticed.—The window of my room at Hotel Passage—without wallpaper—faces Tverskaya Street. If she wrote that, she could not help but convey the impression of ruins with massive roofs where snow fell through skeletal steel beams below her window and vanished—nor could she remain silent about how the Central Post Office’s colossal construction site, separated by just one alley, continued its ceaseless activity day and night under arc lamps. The city’s intense contrast between destruction and construction ceaselessly stirred Nobuko’s emotions. She could not remain indifferent to the will of today’s Russia—a will that spoke for itself through this stark contrast illuminated under Moscow’s harsh winter moonlight. Nor could she stay silent about how, above it all, every midnight brought the melody of *The Internationale* flowing from the Kremlin’s clock tower, its notes crossing rooftops to reach even her hotel’s double-paned windows. When morning sun glinted on Moscow’s snow-laden eaves, plump winter sparrows—suited to this horse-filled city—aligned themselves there, chirping as they awaited steaming dung to fall onto snow-piled roads. Such scenes too captivated Nobuko’s eyes and heart.

The descriptions of life appearing in Nobuko’s correspondence had thus gradually grown more concrete, gained momentum, and were beginning to resemble compressed symbols of Moscow’s social fabric. As noted in that day’s letter, Umeko had taken charge of the remaining proofreading—Nobuko had completed her lengthy novel, now nearing publication, in an unflinchingly realistic style. That her prose had become increasingly grounded and now moved at a tempo leaping from impression to impression reflected the shifting contours of Nobuko’s psyche since arriving in Moscow. Had this transformation sprung from her deepened understanding of urban Moscow life and its socialist advances? Or did it stem from her inability to grasp even the observable historical reality here beyond what freshly stimulated her senses? Nobuko remained unaware of all such aspects.

Nobuko’s daily fascinations merely darted back and forth, ever lively, between the myriad impressions that met her eyes and ears and the resonances they stirred within her heart.

After resting silently for a while, Motoko glanced absently at her wristwatch.

“Bukko-chan, you’ve forgotten again! That won’t do!” Motoko blurted out in a flustered, scolding tone. “What?” With a blank expression, Nobuko asked in return. “The room payment—” “Oh, right!” “You forgot all about it yesterday too, didn’t you? Go take care of it right now!” Nobuko pushed the table aside and searched for her own wallet—crafted from red Russian leather—amid the pile of newspapers from Japan. It had been decided that the hotel room fee must be paid every night by ten o’clock. Nobuko and Motoko often forgot to do so and let two days’ worth pile up. In truth, though there was supposed to be some penalty fee, whenever Motoko and Nobuko entered the second-floor office and—having forgotten—paid two days’ worth at once, the fine was never charged. When she stood up from the sofa, Nobuko inadvertently stepped on the red silk needle case with the tip of her shoe, unaware she had dropped it beside the table.

“Oh!” Quickly picking it up, Nobuko brushed off the faint marks left on the red silk needle case. “Poor thing—” Nobuko placed the needle case on the table, took the purple haori from the bed, and slipped her arms into its sleeves as she left the room.

VII

It was an afternoon three or four days later. As Nobuko, carrying a net bag filled with ikura, salt-pickled cucumbers, and apples, slowly ascended the hotel stairs, Atsushi Utsumi descended from above—hands thrust into his coat pockets, his body’s weight shifted to his heels, with an ambiguous air of seeming both leisurely and hurried. “Ah, you’ve returned? “Actually, I had just come to visit your room.” “Wasn’t Ms. Yoshimi here?”

“She was here, she was here!” Utsumi nodded with a face that still carried the air of a nineteenth-century Russian progressive university student. “I’ve already spoken to Ms. Yoshimi, but—actually, Mr. Polinyak says he absolutely wants the two of you to come tonight.” Boris Polinyak, who had begun publishing works after the revolution, belonged to the Russian Proletarian Writers’ Alliance and was an active writer.

“Tonight? —That’s rather sudden.” “Oh, it’s not so sudden.” At that moment, as someone else began ascending from below, Utsumi leaned his body toward the handrail to make way and slightly lowered his voice. “Well, it’s something he’d asked for some time ago, you know.” When Polinyak had come to Japan two or three years earlier, Uiichi Akiyama—who had been one of his hosts as a proletarian artist—appeared to have continued associating with him relatively frequently even after coming to Moscow. In the meantime, it seemed that Uiichi Akiyama had kept silent about the plan to invite Nobuko and the others—which had been in the works for some time—until the imminent day of today. Nobuko,

“What did Yoshimi-san say she would do?” she asked. As for Nobuko, she felt it didn’t matter whether she went or not. Polinyak had been to Japan, but that alone did not make him someone she particularly wanted to meet as a writer. “It seems Yoshimi-san intends to go. Since you were out, I couldn’t get a clear answer from her—in short, it depends on what you decide.”

“Excuse me, but would you come back with me for a moment?” “Certainly!”

Nobuko entered the room, placed her shopping net bag on the table, and while taking off her coat turned to Motoko: "So we're going to Polinyak's place?" she asked. "What about you, Bukko-chan?"

At times like these, Nobuko seldom was one to leap up with eager replies of "Let's go! Let's go!" "I'm not enthusiastic." Then Utsumi, as if knitting his sparsely set eyebrows,

“That would be a problem. Please do come tonight.”

he implored. “It’s really quite awkward—Aleksandrov has come downstairs and is waiting.” “About that?”

Surprised, Nobuko asked. “That’s right. Since Mr. Akiyama was being so inefficient, Professor Segawa finally ran out of patience and sent Aleksandrov, I suppose.” Aleksandrov was also a writer and had attended the Japanese literature evening the other day.

“Oh well, might as well go see Polinyak once.” To this Motoko, Utsumi said, “Then, I’ll leave it to you.”

He waved his hand vigorously about twice, as if to make sure.

“Please come downstairs at five.” “Well then.”

And then, this time, he truly hurried out. “It’s not like there’s any way to handle being told so suddenly—it’s only because today happened to be a day we were in that it’s fine, but…” Even so, when the time came, Motoko—contrary to expectations—changed without complaint into a yellowish-brown suit and white silk blouse that suited her well. “Bukko-chan, what are you wearing?” “The usual—is that not acceptable?” “That’s fine.” Nobuko stood before the mirror, raising the arms of her navy dress adorned with a white brooch and fastening the slender pearl necklace behind her neck. Motoko, watching her, donned the leather coat she had recently taken a liking to along with its matching hat, then stubbed out the cigarette she had still been smoking in the ashtray.

“Let’s go.” They went down to the second floor where Uiichi Akiyama was.

“If we leave now, we should arrive at just the right time.” While settling a small astrakhan hat on his head, Uiichi Akiyama promptly stood up, and the four boarded a bus from Hunter’s Square bound for the outskirts. Streetlights brought the snow-covered roads and large buildings into sharp relief, and as the crowded bus—packed with commuters returning from work—plowed through the bustling Theater Square before accelerating along an unfamiliar tree-lined avenue, Nobuko found herself losing all sense of direction.

“Is it still quite a ways?” “Yes, it’s quite a distance—are you all right?” Nobuko and Uiichi Akiyama stood in front, with Utsumi and Motoko behind them in two rows, holding onto the brass handrails attached to the corners of the seats. Moscow’s buses had passengers board from beside the driver’s seat, filling toward the back in order, with an exit door fitted with a folding panel at the very rear. Following the passengers disembarking one by one, Nobuko and the four of them also approached the rear door step by step.

“It’s a good thing you all came.” Uiichi Akiyama said, stroking his beard—streaked with white—with a gloved hand. “He’s been so insistent, you see—if I didn’t bring you all tonight, he said he’d doubt our friendship—well…” As Nobuko, who hadn’t been told the details leading up to tonight, she could only remain silent. Though, even during the Japanese literature evening, Polinyak had repeatedly urged Nobuko and the others to come visit. ——

At a certain bus stop where the bus stopped, Utsumi—

“Let’s get off at the next stop,” he cautioned Akiyama. “Wasn’t it one stop further ahead?” Akiyama looked as though he wanted to peer out the window. However, the bright windowpanes of the bus—about eighty-percent full—were all frosted white.

From the bus exit—where snow clinging to passengers' winter boot soles had been successively trampled into slippery ice steps—Nobuko carefully alighted onto the snow-deep bus stop.

After the bus drove off, showing its red tail lamps as it receded into the distance, the area around them—dimly visible under the arc lamps—resembled a wooded park in Moscow’s outskirts. Along a thicket of black trees with snow-laden branches, the sidewalk along which Nobuko and the others walked held snow much deeper than in the city center. Beyond the sidewalk stood houses surrounded by Russian-style fences. “This whole area used to be old villas,” Uiichi Akiyama said. “Polinyak’s house was permitted to be newly built just last year due to his literary achievements.”

Crossing the snow-deep walkway to the right side, Nobuko and the others entered through a low wooden gate. The entrance of a single-story house, built in the Russian style with stacked logs, emerged dimly in the darkness where no eaves lights shone.

Utsumi, with the air of someone accustomed to coming there, rang the bell attached somewhere out of sight. The sound of heavy, thudding footsteps could be heard, and soon the door—double-sealed against the cold—opened.

“Ah—Mr. Akiyama!”

The one who came out was Polinyak himself. Noticing Nobuko and Motoko standing right beside him,

“You’ve finally come! Saa, dozo—” Saying “Saa, dozo” in Japanese, he guided the four into the inner corridor. Aleksandrov—who had reportedly stopped by Hotel Passage earlier in the day—also emerged from deeper within and assisted the women in removing their coats and scarves. In the quite spacious inner room, a lively table had been prepared. Smiling amiably at Nobuko and the others as they entered, a slender, blue-eyed, remarkably youthful-looking Madame stood waiting at her seat by the table.

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” Even as Nobuko and the others exchanged greetings with the Madame, Polinyak bustled about cheerfully,

“That’s enough now, that’s enough. Please sit here.”

and had Akiyama sit to Madame’s right and Nobuko to his own right. And then, promptly, “When you come in frozen from outside, first and foremost—a glass of this!” “Clever or foolish comes after!” Having said that, he poured vodka from the table into everyone’s cups. “To our mutual health!” Motoko also drank about half of hers vigorously—touching the cup’s rim to her lips as if tossing it back. Nobuko raised her cup toward Madame,

“To your health!” Having said this, she merely touched her lips to the alcohol and set it down.

"Why?" "Miss Sassa." "No!" "No!" Polinyak noticed that Nobuko did not empty her cup.

“Mr. Utsumi, please tell her.” When visiting someone else’s home, not emptying even the first cup was considered unbelievably rude in Russian etiquette. “Do you understand? Miss Sassa, drink up!” Nobuko was troubled.

“Mr. Utsumi, please explain properly. “I’m truly someone who can’t drink alcohol by nature—but I can be perfectly cheerful, so please rest assured…”

When Utsumi conveyed this, Polinyak— “What a pity.” He shook his large head with truly regretful-looking reddish hair that grew in tousled disarray. The Madame, who had been watching the exchange with a smile, turned to Nobuko and the others and said: “I’m not good with alcohol either.” “But the one with lemon added is light,” he persisted. “It smells good, doesn’t it?” Upon hearing this, Nobuko noticed that among the several transparent glass vodka bottles on the table—all identical—two contained chopped yellow lemon peel, from which their drinks had been poured.

Motoko looked comfortably pleased, her complexion growing warm. "Vodka becomes quite smooth when you add lemon like this," she said. She finally finished the remaining half. "Bravo!" "Bravo!"

Polinyak praised her and refilled Motoko’s cup anew. “Look. Your friend is brave,” said Madame. “It can’t be helped,” said Polinyak. “I’m no good.” When it came to saying “I can’t,” Nobuko used the Russian she could muster: “Ya, nye magu.” Polinyak repeated Nobuko’s soft pronunciation with amusement. “Am I no good?” he said. It was not a sound written in angular katakana but in hiragana, resonating flexibly as if spelled out like yaa nyemaguu. Though Nobuko herself believed she had pronounced it firmly, to everyone’s ears, it seemed to sound entirely foreign and soft. Aleksandrov—who shared his host’s large build and had a serious demeanor, with tousled light hair tinged grayish-red—also looked at Nobuko, smiled, and nodded amiably.

Eventually, the conversation turned to comparing which country had better-tasting liquor—Japan or Russia. Next came a debate about drinking snacks. Freed from the ordeal of being constantly urged to drink since entering the room, Nobuko finally relaxed. The stove-warmed space smelled distinctly like a new Russian home—scented with tea. Bare wooden planks made up the floor, while unpapered walls displayed occasional modest ornaments and paintings. The room shared Polinyak’s own rough-hewn quality—his large frame and seemingly indifferent manner. It felt like the dwelling of someone living entirely by their own rules.

Polinyak seemed to conduct his marital relationship with the same rough, unrefined manner. His wife—an ingénue actress at the Moscow Little Theater—let her blonde curls frame her temples as she smiled quietly there, seemingly inhabiting her own private world. In her gentle aura accentuated by pale clothing, none of the flushed vigor typical of a housewife who had prepared that evening's table could be detected. Nor did there appear any trace of her attempting to enjoy herself alongside her writer husband in the lively manner befitting an artist. She seemed nothing more than a wife who happened to be a young actress—merely one selected through Polinyak's preferences as master of the house and installed there as its housewife.

The atmosphere of the Polinyak couple was entirely different from that of Maria Gregorievna, whose language lessons Nobuko attended. Maria Gregorievna's cheeks, much like those of the tall Novamirsky who spoke in an astonishingly deep voice, were reddened by the intense cold of midwinter, and the way the tips of their round noses glimmered was something the couple shared. The two of them each worked separately, pooled the money they both earned, and maintained their life in a house furnished with worn red velvet furniture.

Polinyak—brimming with untamed vitality and reveling in the literary talent overflowing from his very being—seemed not to give a thought, so long as his own comfort remained undisturbed, to what psychological state might lie behind his actress wife maintaining her ingénue poses even within the home.

The conversation of the gathering shifted from talk of alcohol to discussions about plays. Motoko, who liked Osaka’s puppet theater,

“When you went to Osaka, did you see the puppet theater?”

Motoko asked Polinyak. "I saw it. That puppet theater was fascinating." Polinyak explained it to his wife and Aleksandrov, who had neither seen nor heard of it before. "On the main stage there's another small stage that becomes the orchestra seats. The shamisen and singing are performed there while the puppets act out the play." "In foreign puppet theaters—whether marionettes or hand puppets—they perform by hiding the operators from the audience."

Motoko said this in Russian, “Exactly.” and pressed the point in Japanese with Uiichi Akiyama. “That’s right—just let them hear the vocal tones.” “Did you notice?” Motoko then switched back to Russian and said.

“In Japanese puppet theater, puppeteers called *tayū* appear on stage alongside the puppets. The puppets being manipulated and the *tayū* manipulating them merge entirely into a single rhythm, each becoming a vivid part of the other. That particular fascination is uniquely original.”

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly how it was! Ms. Yoshimi, you’re quite the performing arts aficionado.” Polinyak showed interest as he spoke, resting his folded arms on the table while glancing toward his wife—who listened attentively—with meaningful looks. “But Noh gave us an eerie feeling.” “What exactly is Noh?” Aleksandrov inquired curiously. “Behold! This is what it’s like!” Polinyak—now warmed by alcohol—sat upright in his chair facing the table, thrust out his chest, pulled his chin taut against his collar, glared straight ahead, and gradually raised his arms in a grand sweeping arc.

“Oooh, uuuuuuuu…”

...he emitted a deep groan that was not entirely unlike Noh chanting. Aleksandrov, who had been watching the spectacle without blinking, after a moment of thought and as if in despair, “I don’t get it,” he said. “Even I don’t get it.” Everyone burst into laughter. “Poor thing!” “Even among Japanese people, those who like Noh are a special group—you should tell him that!”

Nobuko said with a laugh.

“It’s a limited classical taste, you know.” “What do you mean?”

Polinyak peered at Nobuko. “Mr. Utsumi will tell you.” When they understood the explanation,

“That’s perfect!” He glanced back at Aleksandrov,

“With this, it’s been proven that we are not ‘barbaric Russian bears.’ Now, let’s toast to that celebration!” Everyone’s cups were filled anew to the brim. And then, “For the peaceful sleep of fortunate Noh!” they toasted. Nobuko, once again,

“I can’t.”

she ended up having to repeat herself. Polinyak, “Nyaa, nyeh, magoo.” With a sound like a bird clearing its throat, he mimicked Nobuko. And then, throwing two consecutive glasses of vodka into his mouth,

“It’s the same as how even things from our own country can be incomprehensible to us.” He exhaled cigarette smoke. “For example, MAT—the Moscow Art Theatre—has been performing *Days of the Turbins* for three seasons straight now. What’s so fascinating about it? I don’t get it.” “MAT’s audience has a tradition and especially likes that sort of thing.” Aleksandrov calmly explained.

“That’s what everyone says.” “But I don’t find it interesting at all.” “So you’re saying I lack the Soviet soul, then?” “...Mr. Akiyama?”

With the vodka bottle in hand, Polinyak turned to Akiyama and said. "Do you find *Days of the Turbins* interesting?" "That is a complex play." Having said only that much in Russian, he had Atsushi Utsumi convey the rest.

“It is a complex play, especially for foreigners.” “It deals with psychological themes, you see.” “If you don’t understand the dialogue, it’s hard to grasp.”

At the time of the 1917 Revolution, many tragedies occurred in households of former nobility and wealthy intelligentsia. Within a single household, the older generation could only think and act in counterrevolutionary ways, while the younger people could not help but become revolutionary. In some households, because the exact opposite occurred. Days of the Turbins was themed around those painful historical days when old wealthy-class families had to crumble moment by moment amidst the revolution. Though she could not understand the dialogue, Nobuko keenly observed on the richly atmospheric stage both the era's rapid transitions unfolding before her and those left behind by these shifts—people who clung awkwardly and stingily to their outdated social customs, desperately grasping at the now-impossible splendor of faded remnants.

“Sassa-san, how was it? Do you like that play?” “In today’s Soviet Union, there must be people who’ve experienced things like the characters in *Armored Train*, and others who lived through *Days of the Turbins*, don’t you think? I felt that very strongly. And that’s not something unique to Russia—Motoko-san, please explain this to them.”

“My, what an elaborate production.” With several glasses of vodka having pleasantly flushed her cheeks, Motoko’s tongue now flowed smoothly as she relayed nearly verbatim in Russian what Nobuko had said. “Sassa-san, you’ve answered most judiciously.”

Half-seriously, yet in a tone laced with sarcasm, Polinyak gave a light bow toward Nobuko.

“I propose a toast to your discernment and your absurd, vodka-loathing liver.” After the time came for her stage commitment and Mrs. Polinyak left her seat, the speed at which Polinyak emptied his cups became noticeably faster.

Uiichi Akiyama stroked his face—flushed all the way up to his forehead—with his small hand,

“Russians are strong when it comes to alcohol,” he said in a slightly nasal voice, nodding to himself. “People from cold countries are all like that.” “Because the air is dry—that’s why you can drink this much.” Atsushi Utsumi, who still couldn’t drink much, picked up the vodka glass left on the table and gazed at it through the electric light as if examining a test tube. Noticing this, Aleksandrov—

“Mr. Utsumi, the most appropriate method for experimenting with vodka isn’t looking at it—it’s doing it like this.” With the cup pressed to his lips, he threw his head back and downed his glass. “In Japan, you sip your liquor, don’t you? Like wine—” “Like wine—” “Whether sipping or gulping, I’m generally not good with alcohol.” Utsumi said, sounding somewhat weary of drinking occasions by now. “Among Japan’s gods, there’s likely no Bacchus.” “How pitiful!”

Nobuko wanted a handkerchief. It wasn't in her cuffs or her handbag. Speaking of which, she remembered having stuffed it into her coat pocket in her haste when leaving. Nobuko stood up from her seat and went through the inner corridor toward the entrance hall coat rack. Having found the handkerchief, tucked it into her cuff, and fastened the snap as she was about to return to the room, she encountered Polinyak approaching from the opposite direction. As Nobuko tried to avoid him by moving to the left side of the narrow corridor, Polinyak instead shifted toward that side and stood blocking her path.

Thinking it had been an accidental near-collision—Nobuko— “I’m sorry.”

As she said this, she tried to slip past Polinyak—who stood blocking her path—to the other side.

“It’s nothing.”

A low voice sounded. The next moment—who had moved how to seize the momentum?—Nobuko’s body was scooped up sideways into Polinyak’s arms in one swift motion. Still holding Nobuko—cradled sideways against his chest—Polinyak took slow, wide strides, kicked open the closed door of a room on the corridor’s left side with his foot, and tried to enter. In that room, a lamp was lit.

So sudden was it that when her whole body was scooped up from the floor, Nobuko's senses vanished. The moment the dim lamplight casting shadows on the wall entered her vision, Nobuko—her upper body cradled on his right arm and the backs of her knees on his left—mustered all her strength into the toes of her rigidly straight, pump-clad feet and tried to lower her legs. "Put me down!" Nobuko uttered in a low voice, as if involuntarily crying out in English.

“Put me down!” From atop Polinyak’s tall, powerful arms, no matter how much Nobuko strained her legs to slide down, it was futile. Nobuko, pushing against Polinyak’s chest with her left hand, “I’ll scream!” (Help—!) she said to herself. Nobuko truly thought to call Akiyama and Yoshimi. “Nichevo…” Polinyak repeated this and came to a stop, leaning his back against the large desk at the room’s center. There, he set Nobuko down on the floor. Yet still gripping her left arm tightly, he attempted with drunken abandon to bring his large, flushed face close to hers. Nobuko tried to pull away. Her left arm was seized even more fiercely. To fully prevent his face from touching hers, Nobuko—short in stature—had no choice but to press herself bodily against Polinyak rather than break free. Pressed together like this, her face became buried precisely at the level of Polinyak’s waistcoat buttons; no matter how he strained to bend his face downward, it could never reach hers.

Nobuko’s right hand was free. Pressing her face tightly against the rough woolen waistcoat, she moved her free right hand around from under Polinyak’s arm to his back and groped toward the desk. If her hand touched anything, she intended to slam it against the floor to make a noise.

At that moment, footsteps sounded in the corridor. Through the open door, anyone passing through that corridor could not avoid seeing this scene inside the room. With her face pressed against Polinyak's waistcoat, Nobuko glimpsed through the corner of her eye the figure of reddish-haired Aleksandrov standing at the threshold, watching them. With her outstretched hand toward the desk, Nobuko frantically repeated gestures signaling him to come. Aleksandrov took one or two hesitant steps, then abruptly strode forward with heavy footsteps and—

“Boris! “Stop this at once! “That’s not right!”

While placing a restraining hand on Polinyak's shoulder, he gave Nobuko the opportunity to leave that place.

Nobuko returned to the room where the table stood, her composure hollow and forced. On the table—abruptly vacated when three people had risen at once—remnants of zakuski, soiled plates, knives, and forks lay scattered in disarray. At Polinyak’s seat, a vodka glass lay overturned, its contents staining a large blotch into the tablecloth. Uiichi Akiyama and Atsushi Utsumi leaned back against their chairs in casual postures. In contrast, Motoko slumped her slightly slackened body against the table, planting her elbows deep as she exhaled cigarette smoke. When Nobuko reentered the room and took her seat, the lengthened ash at the tip of Motoko’s cigarette crumbled and fell onto the tablecloth.

“—What happened, Bukko-chan?” In a slightly concerned tone, Motoko called out from across the table. “Are you feeling unwell?” Nobuko, sensing that her own pallor had somewhat worsened, “I’m fine...” she said. And she brushed the disheveled bobbed hair—tousled when Polinyak had lifted her—behind her ear.

Before long, Polinyak and Aleksandrov returned to their seats one after the other. "Well then, shall we move on to the warm dishes?" Though drunk, Polinyak spoke in his unchanged host's tone and pulled his chair toward the table without looking at Nobuko. Nobuko, seated at Polinyak's right after rounding the table corner, had been naturally inching her chair away since returning to the room.

“To our appetites!” The final cup was raised. Aleksandrov raised his glass to Nobuko with a complicit expression only she could understand. Polinyak ceased his jovial banter and ate the newly served hot soup. Throughout the meal, Aleksandrov had done most of the talking. In this manner, the room’s atmosphere had undergone a subtle shift by the latter half of the evening. Yet even Uiichi Akiyama, Atsushi Utsumi, and Motoko—each gradually succumbing to pleasant intoxication—appeared oblivious to this atmospheric change.

It was past eleven when Nobuko and the four of them left Polinyak’s place and boarded the bus from the snow-covered stop. At the hour when theaters across the city had emptied out, all transportation heading toward the suburbs was crowded, but every bus traveling from the city’s outer districts toward the center remained empty. Nobuko and her three companions found scattered seats and settled in. Akiyama and Motoko seemed lulled by the bus’s warmth and the monotonous sway of its journey along frozen nighttime roads—their mild drunkenness giving way to drowsiness as they began nodding off comfortably. Beside Nobuko’s seat, someone had diligently breathed onto the white-frosted windowpane until a small round peephole formed where they had melted through the thick ice. Pressing her face to this opening, she glimpsed snow-laden tree branches glowing pale under arc lights and large illuminated buildings that flashed past her eyes. In the frost-white bus where nothing outside could be seen, Nobuko guarded this unexpected peephole and watched midnight Moscow flicker by in intermittent glimpses.

As the fragmentary scenery outside passed by, fragmentary thoughts welled up and vanished within Nobuko’s heart. The peculiar sensation—as though her stream of consciousness had been abruptly severed when Polinyak suddenly hoisted her entire body upward—still lingered in her senses. Why had Polinyak done such a thing? If he had simply come out to the corridor for some errand, seen little Nobuko approaching, and playfully scooped her up on impulse, then there should have been a cheerful prankster’s smile on his face as he did so—and Nobuko too should have felt like laughing after the initial surprise. Yet Polinyak’s large red face, crowned with disheveled hair, held none of that open-hearted cheerfulness or laughter. There had been a sensation of Nobuko instinctively stiffening her body in resistance. If this was meant as a man’s method of conveying some emotion to a woman, it was far too crude. Did such customs exist among the young men in the Russian village where Polinyak grew up? Or perhaps when they invited her actress wife’s backstage colleagues, the drunken actors—Polinyak included—would stir up such commotions.

Nobuko found it unpleasant that she had been hoisted up in such a manner at the place she had gone as a guest. She felt there must have been some flaw in her own demeanor. Nobuko recalled her "Ya nye magoo govoreety pa-rooski." It was only now that Nobuko could begin to consider and speculate about how the Japanese woman's Russian—softened and slickly polished—might have acted upon the senses of a drunken man. Nobuko, overcome with humiliation, instinctively turned her face away from the peephole in the frozen window.

When Nobuko had only been in Moscow for two weeks, she attended a meeting at the Ironworkers’ Union Labor Club. Suddenly made to stand at the podium, she said in embarrassment that she had only arrived from Japan two weeks prior and couldn't speak Russian. At that time, with what firm and splendid pronunciation had she said "Ya nye magoo govoreety pa-rooski" (I don’t speak Russian)? She must have said it in an even more feeble, faltering "Ya nye magoo govoreety pa-rooski" than now. Even so, the two or three hundred men and women gathered in that hall watched over Nobuko—small of stature and speaking clumsy Russian—with rapt attention, acknowledged her efforts, and some even called out words of encouragement. If those people were to see Nobuko being hoisted up by Polinyak like this, how utterly absurd they would feel it to be. They themselves, who applauded such a Nobuko, would simultaneously feel as if they too were being mocked. Nobuko considered that emotion justified. And there was in her heart a feeling that was half a desire to express this unpleasantness to those people and half a shame at even the thought of doing so. Nobuko did not feel like speaking of this unpleasant incident—whose meaning remained unclear—even to Motoko.

Upon returning to the hotel, Motoko and Akiyama, their mild intoxication beginning to wear off and growing cold, hurriedly drank several cups of hot tea, parted ways to their respective rooms, and promptly went to bed.

8

The next day, when Maria Gregorievna’s lesson time had been unexpectedly rescheduled and Nobuko returned to the hotel along Tverskaya Street, the lights were already on across Moscow’s streets. The black shadows of the crowd ceaselessly cut through the light spilling onto the sidewalk as they moved briskly. Walking hurriedly among them, Nobuko suddenly noticed that the familiar evening view of Tverskaya Street had begun to be enveloped in fog. Resembling the evening mist that settles over Japan’s late autumn, when she noticed the haze thinly veiling the streets, the fog was already growing denser by the moment—shop lights blurred hazily, and pedestrians on the sidewalk could scarcely see ahead. In the gaps between the tall buildings lining both sides of the avenue, smoke-like ash-white fog could be seen flowing past. Nobuko had not expected to walk through such fog in Moscow. As Nobuko hurried through the city where visibility had abruptly worsened, in her heart there was a feeling of loneliness, as though she were in a foreign capital.

In the roughly two months since coming to live in Moscow, Nobuko had not encountered any experiences that shook her general trust in Moscow’s people or her self-confidence. Yet last night’s summons to Polinyak’s home—where she, who should have been standing firmly on her own two feet, found herself bodily hoisted from the floor with such ease—had overturned the sense of stability she had maintained about herself. That Polinyak could lift her so effortlessly related fundamentally to physical disparity. Against Polinyak’s bulk and strength, Nobuko stood too slight. Between Japanese men and herself, no such chasm of physical power existed. By deploying irresistible force, Polinyak had abruptly lifted Nobuko—a woman grown—in that manner. In the word “rudeness” truest sense, Nobuko recognized this act as rudeness. Simultaneously wavered the mood of her Moscow life—until then so artlessly convinced she gave no cause or motive for such discourtesy. Nobuko now knew herself to carry within an element that might invite further humiliations. Along Tverskaya Street’s broad descending sidewalk, where February’s night fog drifted, Nobuko hurried—her heart’s loneliness knotted to feelings unvoiced even to Motoko.

That evening was supposed to be when the female teacher from across Moscow River would come to Motoko's place as usual. This meant Nobuko needed to be away somewhere for about two hours. But starting this week, the teacher had sent notice from her side and quit. Nobuko went to deliver unpaid tuition fees to this teacher—the one who had sent a postcard claiming illness—on Motoko's behalf. It was just past three o'clock when sunset began over a desolate suburban area: along a collapsing Russian-style wooden fence where birch branches rattled their bare tips against each other, countless Russian crows clustered noisily on treetops before roosting. In a dim room facing this vacant lot—a space heavy with soup-simmering smells—the teacher explained her poor condition following an abortion necessitating suspension of visiting lessons. The soot-stained snow coloring that district's ground; broken fences in empty lots; clamorous wingbeats of crows massed on naked branches—these scenes remained etched in Nobuko's memory.

For that reason, it was good that Nobuko was also in the room tonight. Motoko had decided to read Plekhanov’s theory of art as part of her own studies. Motoko read aloud by herself and translated by herself. No matter which theater in Moscow they went to or which theater reviews they read, phrases like “dialectical direction” and “dialectical techniques” were endlessly repeated, yet Nobuko and Motoko simply couldn’t grasp their concrete meaning. At Meyerhold’s theater they were performing “Trust D.E.,” with program notes describing it as a dialectical production of a script critiquing capitalism. Yet from what Nobuko and Motoko saw, the play felt like nothing but an extreme Expressionist technique. Motoko’s motivation for proposing they read Plekhanov also lay in such considerations.

As Nobuko diligently followed each character of Plekhanov’s essay that Motoko was reading, she discovered that this art theory was unexpectedly easier to understand than John Reed’s *Ten Days That Shook the World*. Compared to Reed’s articles—which depicted and recorded the tense, moment-by-moment shifts of revolutionary change with journalistic complexity and lively tempo—Plekhanov’s writings, unfolding through theoretical progression, were easier for Nobuko to follow precisely because they lacked emotionality.

“When you look at it this way, novels are really difficult, aren’t they?” “That’s difficult—the sentences are alive—” “For me, there’s simply no hope when it comes to novels.—It’s a struggle with every single word.” “You’re just not used to it yet.”

“That may be part of it, but…” Since coming to Moscow, the necessity of prioritizing listening and speaking over reading had taken precedence, and Nobuko’s halting Russian had grown even worse. Even though her spoken words were full of mistakes, they served their purpose when needed. Nobuko’s reading and writing abilities were extremely poor. Even regarding her own broken Russian, Nobuko had begun to feel an unpleasantness stemming from last night’s “nye maguu” incident.

“I wonder—among today’s writers—whose prose is truly accessible?”

Motoko was thinking, but said, “I don’t know.” “Prose that’s easy for foreigners to understand and prose that’s easy for Russians to understand seem to be slightly different things. Generally, Russians say new writers’ prose is easy, but for us it’s the opposite—there’s so much dialect, idioms, slang... Take Babel, for instance. The prose is solid and satisfying, but far from easy.” That was also surmised by Nobuko.

“Is Kemper’s prose really that accessible?”

At a bookstore, Nobuko had once bought Vera Kemper’s fairy-tale-like book titled *Animal Life*. Kemper’s seemingly gentle prose employed diction befitting a Futurist poetess—a clever touch if one could grasp it—but for Nobuko, it proved difficult.

“That’s certainly pretentious.” “But if we said her writing was difficult, she’d be terribly offended, wouldn’t she?” “Right—she was telling her husband something about it.”

That had occurred about half a month earlier. When Nobuko and Motoko were at Uiichi Akiyama’s place, Guttner entered wearing a Siberian-style reindeer fur coat and a long-flapped arctic winter hat. Guttner, still twenty-three or twenty-four years old, was one of Meyerhold’s assistant directors. When Guttner had visited Japan shortly before Akiyama’s group departed as state guests, he had been introduced as Meyerhold’s director. As the first theater practitioner from the Soviet Union, he was enthusiastically received by new theater circles in Japan, where they described the Expressionist stages—then emerging as the newest form of theater—as innovative works aligned with Meyerhold’s techniques. Uiichi Akiyama and Atsushi Utsumi had come to Moscow together with Guttner when he returned home. Naturally, they came to understand the actual scope of activities young Guttner was responsible for under Meyerhold within Moscow’s reality. Afterward, they appeared to have maintained ordinary interactions all along. Nobuko and the others had met Guttner two or three times previously in Akiyama’s room.

That evening, Guttner, who had encountered them by chance in Akiyama’s room, saw Nobuko and Motoko and invited the two to Vera Kemper’s house as though that had been his sole purpose in coming. While lighting a cigarette for the youthful Guttner—who still wore his showy yet beautiful fur coat patched together from yellow and pure white pelts—Motoko smiled faintly and said, “Even if we go suddenly, she might be out at the theater, don’t you think?”

“Even if we go suddenly, they might be at the theater, don’t you think?”

Motoko said. “Kemper is at home tonight. I know.”

His pale, smooth skin flushed refreshingly red from hurrying through the cold, Guttner gazed at Motoko with young deer-like eyes,

“Let’s go.” he said, then looked at Nobuko, “Hey, let’s go (Nu paidiyom—Well, let’s go).” he said with a slight shake of his body. Motoko, teasingly, “Isn’t it that your meeting us here tonight wasn’t a coincidence?” “It’s not.” Having said just that much in Japanese, Guttner explained that he had come to invite Nobuko and the others to visit the room. “If it’s a coincidence, then all the more reason we should enjoy it, don’t you think?”

In the end, the three of them decided to visit Vera Kemper’s residence. From the main street, they turned several corners that Nobuko couldn’t quite discern and entered a building so dark that the entrance was invisible. They climbed several flights of stairs and pressed the doorbell of a door that was still nearly pitch-black.

A slender woman in a pale sweater appeared. That was Kemper.

They entered a square, spacious room from the narrow entrance hallway. It was illuminated by a rather dim electric light. In one corner of the room was a large divan. Filling the opposite wall was a roughly number 100-sized figure painted in French-style pale tones. Beneath it sat an old man in a rocking chair, his legs wrapped in a lap blanket. Nobuko and her companions greeted the old man—who sat with hands resting awkwardly on his lap blanket—then passed through and were led via a door into Vera’s study.

“Please look,” Vera said. “This is what Moscow’s housing shortage looks like. We’re practically living in the cracks between walls.” The room truly was one of the narrowest, longest spaces Nobuko had seen since coming to Moscow. To the left stood a large window about nine feet wide, with Vera’s desk positioned to catch the light from that side. The divan where Nobuko and the others sat had been placed to the left of the entrance door, accompanied by a small tea table and low chairs that marked the reception area. The farthest third appeared reserved for a bedroom, where a tall wardrobe stood visible. Motoko began,

“We’re staying at a hotel now, but we’re thinking of looking for a room soon,” Motoko said. “Finding a room to rent in Moscow is a far more difficult undertaking than finding employment—Guttner, the time has come for your friendship to be tested.” Guttner, who seemed quite fond of his reindeer fur coat, entered Vera’s room still wearing it and stood leaning against the door, but soon left, saying it was soon time to head to the theater.

Mainly Motoko and Vera did the talking. Kemper, who had written Futurist poetry, joined a literary group of fellow travelers after the revolution and began writing prose poem-like works that took themes from animals and nature without directly addressing social issues. In French classics, there was Rostand’s *Chantecler*, and in modern times, the conversation touched upon how a woman writer named Colette was crafting witty works inspired by animals. Vera, small in stature, seemed to have consistently favored French art and fashion—whether she had ever been there or not. The conversation turned to Vera’s *Animal Life*.

“How was it? Was it interesting?” Vera asked with interest. Motoko replied bluntly, “I found it difficult.”

“More than each individual character, the overall expression…” “—And you? What did you think?” Vera turned toward Nobuko and asked eagerly.

“My Russian is still too rudimentary; I can’t yet read literary works.”

“—But…”

Vera Kemper had been gazing at the door with melancholy eyes when she finally said— “We modern Russian writers are all required to write in a way that even the masses who only learned their letters yesterday can understand.” Though she began with ironic inflection, Vera spoke as if finally revealing a daily burden heavier than irony itself.

“That matter would be different for foreign readers.” “Why?” “For foreigners, there are times when they cannot grasp the intuitive sense of language that comes from living within it—the reason we find your writing difficult must be because we’re foreigners…” “It’s all the same either way.” In Vera’s room there was a small terrier. When Nobuko and the others entered, the black-and-white spotted dog that had been curled up on the divan by the wall climbed directly onto Nobuko’s lap as she sat on that same divan, its clever black eyes shining. Out of respect for the mistress who seemed to dote on the dog, Nobuko kept it on her lap, occasionally stroking it while listening to Motoko.

At that moment, a voice called from beyond the door, and a young burly man wearing a skating jacket with stark black-and-white patterning in unabashedly American style entered. Vera remained seated beside the small table,

“This is my husband. Nikolai Krangel—director at Sovkino—our guests from Japan.”

she introduced Nobuko and the others. “This one—” and introduced Motoko as a translator of Chekhov,

“And this is the writer.”

She introduced Nobuko. “Pleased to meet you.” Krangel gave a nod of greeting without shaking hands and stood leaning against the entrance door, just as Guttner had done when he entered this room. He thrust one hand into the pocket of his dull mouse-gray trousers. — Through a brief exchange of words typical of a married couple—unintelligible to Nobuko and the others—Vera asked Nikolai a few questions about something.

“Yes, that was a good thing…”

Vera paused her words for a moment, but— “So, what do you think?” she said, looking up at Nikolai, who stood leaning against the door almost directly in front of her. “These people say that what I write is difficult.”

Staring intently at Nikolai’s face, Vera said. Nobuko found Vera’s attitude—pleading-and-dependent, as a wife—rather amusing. In Moscow, Nobuko had somehow held a preconception that did not expect such an expression from a woman writer.

Nikolai kept his gaze on Vera’s face without replying, shrugged his shoulders, and raised one eyebrow. If that gesture were put into words, it would have meant something like “What are you talking about?”—likely indicating he wasn’t considering Nobuko and the others’ opinions. He maintained his watch on Vera’s face as he slowly lit a cigarette. He made no effort to speak to Nobuko and the others. When Nikolai had taken a puff or two, Vera—

“I’m so bored.”

With that, she made a gesture as if quietly stretching her slender torso. Nobuko looked at Vera Kemper with a surprised expression. Vera’s words had been spoken in an ambiguous tone that blurred whether she found interacting with Nobuko and the others tedious or whether she meant that life in general was tedious. Nikolai, leaning against the door with his weight shifted onto one long, slender leg, smoked a cigarette while fixing his counterpart with the sidelong glance of a movie actor peering from beneath one raised eyebrow.

“You might as well go see some acrobatics or something,” he said.

“I’ve had enough of acrobatics too—really, we Muscovites see far too much of them.” Vera’s remark about seeing too many acrobatics also sounded symbolic to Nobuko. There was only one theater in Moscow that actually performed acrobatics.— Nobuko lifted the terrier puppy from her lap and placed it on the divan. And, in Japanese to Motoko,

“Shouldn’t we be heading back soon?” she said.

“Let’s do that.” And so, Nobuko and Motoko returned from Vera Kemper’s house.

On their way back, Nobuko said to Motoko, “That ‘I’m bored’—was she saying that to us?”

“Well… That’s just how she is.” Motoko, surprisingly unperturbed, seemed to take it as merely another of Vera Kemper’s literary affectations. Tonight, some time later—after finishing a book with Motoko and idly reminiscing about that scene—Nobuko found herself unable to recall with any warmth how Vera had cooed at Nikolai right before them both, staring into his eyes as she lamented her writing’s difficulty and declared her boredom. In that atmosphere lingered something profoundly unnatural to Nobuko and Motoko. What could they have done differently to prevent the Veras from conjuring such an air? This question tangled in Nobuko’s mind with what Polinyak had dredged up. Had she been different somehow—would Polinyak not have dredged her up at all? Nobuko began doodling across her open notebook with a pencil—interlocking hemp-leaf patterns and nonsensical circular chains.

The gentle yet stubborn angular face of Novikov Privoy—whom she had met at the recent Japanese Literature Evening, with his seal-like beard—came to mind. That evening, the Privoy couple had been sitting right next to Nobuko on her left. Novikov asked Nobuko if she knew a woman named Miss Ohana. During the Russo-Japanese War, Novikov had been taken prisoner by Japan and was in Kumamoto, Kyushu. At that time, the Japanese girl who had been kind to him was apparently named Miss Ohana. In the Novikov household, the name Miss Ohana seemed to have become a semi-fictional legend connected to his tumultuous half-life, and his wife in a white silk blouse interjected from the side,

“He’s apparently determined to go back to Japan once more to meet Miss Ohana.”

she said with a laugh. “I’m told I have a duty to properly thank Miss Ohana.” When the Kronstadt sailors staged their rebellion, the Privoy couple—implicated by association and living in exile in Britain until 1917—spoke English. Due to Moscow’s housing shortage, Privoy—who had no settled study room in his own home—was writing a long novel titled *Tsushima* at the “Creative House” that had been established on Moscow’s outskirts.

While thickly tracing doodles of circles stacked like stone walls, Nobuko wondered whether that Privoy would have dredged her up even if he were drunk. It was unimaginable. Privoy exuded a character that made such imaginings untenable. Yet both Polinyak and Privoy belonged to the same Russian Proletarian Writers' Union.—

“Hey, what exactly are proletarian writers, really?”

After translating for Nobuko and letting her listen, Motoko continued reading alone. “What do you mean, ‘what kind’…?” Without lifting her face from the book, she flicked off cigarette ash with her fingertip and asked back. “What should I call it—a regulation, perhaps—the very fact that it’s defined as such.”

“Isn’t that completely obvious?” Motoko answered in a slightly offended tone. “Isn’t a writer who stands on the position of the working class a proletarian writer?”

“Well, that’s true, but…” Among writers who began writing after the revolution, Nobuko thought there were some who belonged to the proletarian writer group for purely accidental reasons—even those called proletarian writers.

“Isn’t someone like Polinyak also like that? Even if someone happened to be born into a non-wealthy class during the revolution, carried a sack of potatoes around on evacuation trains during the civil war, and had their *The Naked Year* recognized... proletarian writers aren’t about literary talent, are they?” “That’s why Lunacharsky has reason to fret—‘have the eye of the avant-garde’—” Nobuko suddenly wondered—if she had been a working-class woman from Japan, someone laboring in a factory or some such place—how would Polinyak have acted under the same circumstances? And then, Vera Kemper too. Had Vera really been hinting that we were uninteresting guests by saying, “I’m bored”?

The Japanese government did not grant everyone equal freedom to travel to the Soviet Union, so those who could come openly were always either semi-official, semi-private Japanese with special purposes or otherwise half-baked cultural figures like Nobuko and her ilk. But even if a female worker were to come to Moscow by some means— It had become intuitively clear to Nobuko that neither Polinyak nor Kemper would ever act toward such a person as they had toward her. If it were a working woman—no matter how softly she might slur her words with a “nye” or “maguu,” no matter how petite her frame might be, like a Japanese woman easily lifted by a large drunken man—Polinyak would not have scooped her up as he had done to Nobuko. That female worker, even if she were someone from Japan, by virtue of being a worker, was connected to the entirety of Soviet workers. To scoop up that woman would have been akin to scooping up any one of the Soviet female workers, and the Soviet working people did not share Polinyak’s preference for such things. Polinyak knew the workers would not remain silent about their female comrades having been scooped up. Even Vera Kemper must have shared the same psychology as Polinyak, who operated under different circumstances.

Nobuko blackened the scribbles in her notebook with pitch-black intensity until the paper threatened to tear. People like that were servile in a certain sense. Nobuko thought of Polinyak and Kemper and came to that conclusion. They could not help but employ minds that groveled before the proletariat. Nobuko was, of course, not a female worker. But the fact that Nobuko was not a female worker did not mean she had to be servile toward Polinyak and Kemper, or toward the Soviet working people. Since coming to Moscow, the working-class people and their various organizations had ignored Nobuko. Unless Nobuko reached out herself, those people did not seek her out. That was entirely natural, Nobuko thought. Though Nobuko had absorbed a wealth of new sensations from Moscow life, there was nothing within her that offered anything new for the people here to learn. Even if there was novelty. Even if there was a vague sense of affection. Being ignored and placing oneself among the servile faction—were these not clearly separate matters?

—— With her hair swept back, crisply exposing her white nape under the electric light, Nobuko continued her doodling without end.

Nine

Around eleven o'clock the day after a deep fog had settled over Moscow, Nobuko—who had left the hotel to mail letters—was astonished to find every horse coming and going along Tverskaya Street sporting icicle beards. From the windless winter sky, the sun streamed glittering rays onto the snow-covered streets, making the horses’ icy beards and manes sparkle. It wasn’t only horses that walked adorned with icicles. The short beards of male pedestrians had stiffened stark white, while the locks of blond or chestnut hair that fell across the cheeks of women—their thick coat collars turned up against the cold as they trudged in winter boots—were sheathed in pure white by thin threads of ice.

Entering the tree-lined path, Nobuko felt as though she wandered deep into the depths of a forest of ice blossoms. Until yesterday, the linden trees along the avenue had only borne frozen snow on their bare black branches, but this morning they now bore delicate ice blossoms blooming even on the tips of their finest twigs. Each linden tree wrapped in ice blossoms appeared larger than usual, covered in endless shimmer, and as they blended with the sky’s glare, they bent toward each other from both sides of the wide avenue. The figures of pedestrians below appeared smaller, darker, and more distant than usual.

When mid-February passed, Moscow’s severe winter began thawing toward spring from nowhere in particular. When the winter season—once frozen solid and blanketed in white—began sensing spring, rising as evening mist one day and alighting on branches as ice blossoms the next morning, the natural harmonies that impassioned northerners seeped into Nobuko and Motoko’s emotions. Nobuko and Motoko began spending several days each week walking through Moscow—venturing from one district to another, down this alley and that. The two had begun searching for a room to rent. After nearly three months of hotel life, they began feeling its monotony. They wanted to reach deeper—to touch the very bottom of Moscow’s chaotic, roiling life. To do so, they had no choice but to find a room in a private home.

After asking Maria Gregorievna for assistance, the first house the three of them went to see was located far from the city center, requiring a bus ride deep into the suburbs. From the bus stop, after walking twenty minutes along a snow-covered path through sparse lonely woods, there stood a new Russian-style log-built house at one edge of a vacant lot. There, even the interior walls were built with exposed logs, and the floor remained unfinished. In the hollow echoing room stood a single unpainted wooden square table. The housewife who guided them was a stately large-built woman around forty, her hair wrapped in a white clean headscarf edged with delicate lace trim. Standing in the doorway with arms crossed over her heavy chest, her intense large eyes seemed to declare that behind her broad back lay concealed all survival schemes from the New Economic Policy of 1921 to this very day. Appraising the fabric of their coats and fur trimmings with piercing glances, she explained in a charmingly loud voice about the fresh air and former meadow views, then stated a monthly rent that was hardly cheap for the suburbs.

The room—newly built of logs and reeking sharply of varnish—contained not a single piece of proper furniture; through its window stretched a view of a hollow where a few scrawny poplars grew bent. Now, blanketed entirely in white with snow, it appeared like a field, but when the snow melted, it became clear that a vast garbage dump would emerge from beneath. Nobuko gazed at this view outside the window while, “Walking back from theaters at night here frightens me. There were no streetlights.”

“Walking back from theaters at night there frightens me,” she said. “There were no streetlights.” That was one reason this large-framed, sharp-eyed housewife—both mocking and jovial—had intuitively grasped the severity of the budget that daunted Nobuko and the others. Even the sharp-eyed housewife acknowledged that walking the long night roads back from theaters was frightening because they were all women. Maria Gregorievna—entrusted by Nobuko and Motoko with finding a room in Moscow, a task considered more difficult than any other—had relied solely on an address obtained through some connection and, knowing nothing about the place herself, brought Nobuko and Motoko to see it.

As they left that house and made their way back along the snow-covered road to the bus, Nobuko thought that their life in Moscow was gradually drawing closer to the viscera of Muscovite daily existence. The viscera of Moscow—unfathomable through Red Square and Tverskaya Street alone—were caught in the gears of history with their riot of hues, undulating patterns, and occasional stench and feverish heat.

The street around Vakhtangov Theater had alleys branching out like a mesh. One late afternoon, Nobuko and her two companions followed an address into one such side street—a dead-end alley flanked by an imposing brown stone wall. The room for rent lay in the basement of a two-story brick house blackened by soot within this cul-de-sac. Opening the door facing the stairwell corridor revealed a space that seemed to concentrate all the building’s gloom and dampness into one chamber. Both panes of its double-layered window glass had inexplicably been painted white. This gave the dark, clammy room an air resembling that of a disabled person. Through the unpainted sliver of glass visible between strokes, one could glimpse—at some distance—the trunk of a great elm tree and directly behind it, that same brown stone wall. In this lightless room stood a pallid woman wrapped in a brown woolen shawl, her arms folded within its folds as she fixed Nobuko’s group with eyes blazing like those of the starving.

"If you wish, I can provide meals," the pale landlady said eagerly. "I have some experience with cooking...and the market here is relatively inexpensive with plenty of variety..." In her fragmented words—her manner of speaking that seemed to tug at their coats—lay the genuine entreaty of someone truly needing rent money. As they stood in the room, they felt as though somewhere in this house lay a long-bedridden patient straining their nerves over this negotiation from some unseen place. Even if they endured this room, there was only one bed available for Nobuko and Motoko to rent, with no supplementary cot to be found.

When they walked around such places and returned to the hotel, the small Passage's cleanliness and the simple rationality of its facilities felt newly refreshing.

“When you look at it like this, finding a livable room isn’t easy at all.”

Motoko said, taking a deep drag of her cigarette.

“In Moscow these days, those who’d even consider renting rooms to foreigners are either ruthless types like that log house landlady or people who only have places like today’s—pitiable rooms that make you worry about one’s health.” Nobuko stared fixedly at Motoko, her expression as if something throbbed deep within her body. Having walked everywhere in her room search, Nobuko had now witnessed up close how Moscow still harbored poverty and cunning—those age-old misfortunes of humankind.

“Let’s keep looking a little longer. Okay?” Nobuko said eagerly. “I want to know whether in Moscow, those who rent rooms to foreigners are truly only shady characters or people left behind by the times.” “Of course we’ll look—we’re truly searching for one, after all—”

Motoko, who had experience searching for rented houses and rooms since her women's college days, thought for a while but said, "Maybe we should try placing an advertisement, Bukko-chan."

“In the Moscow evening paper or something—on the contrary, that might actually help us find a proper one.” “Let’s check the place we’re seeing the day after tomorrow first—if that doesn’t work out, then we’ll try advertising.”

On the day after next, the three went to a compact house on Bronnaya Street. The yellow paint on the exterior walls had aged and peeled, and in the shadow of that house's double window latticework, a potted cactus was visible from outside.

The one who answered the doorbell and opened the entrance was a round-faced woman over thirty, and when Nobuko saw her, she wondered if they had come to a stage door. The woman had styled her dark bobbed hair into a head full of frothy curls, just as the film actress Nazimova had done when she played Camille. She wore a jersey dress unfamiliar in Moscow and indoor shoes of red Caucasian leather. The landlady, dressed in such attire, upon seeing Nobuko and the others,

“Good day.” she said in French.

“Please come in.” She said this too in French to Maria Gregorievna, “Are these ladies trying to rent a room together?” she asked in Russian.

“Yes, that’s correct, of course.” Maria Gregorievna opened her honest brown eyes wide, as if bashful, “They can speak Russian well enough.” “Please speak directly to them.”

she said with a face where the tip of her round nose glistened even more brightly. "Oh my! That is wonderful! I have scarcely met foreign women who don't consider Russian barbaric." Nobuko and the others sat on chintz-upholstered armchairs. "This room now—you can see outside, truly a refreshing space. Though I'd kept it as my private room all this time—"

Tilting her head with its frothy curls slightly, the landlady mumbled her words as if leaving the rest to be inferred, and cast a coquettish glance. “If I could live with cultured people, I would be happy.” Two high-quality spring beds, along with a wardrobe, a study desk, and other items could be arranged immediately—so it was stated. “It’s convenient for me, you see… “Also, since I’ve arranged for a helper who comes by schedule, meals as well—if you wish, I can provide them. “With white meat or chicken—both my daughter and I have delicate constitutions and can only eat white meat…”

When the landlady said this, Maria Gregorievna blinked hard. The more buoyantly the landlady spoke, the further Motoko lowered her naturally deep voice. "So regarding the furniture to be placed in this room—is the expense your responsibility?" She asked while beginning to take out a cigarette, watching with amused eyes. "Oh my—that would require further discussion." Maintaining an innocent air, Motoko continued speaking all her Russian references to foreigners in the masculine form while—

“There must be hordes of foreigners looking for rooms in Moscow—with a nice room like this, surely some would come even if they had to bring their own furniture...” Motoko said. The landlady showed no sign of noticing Motoko had used masculine forms for “foreigners” in Russian, replying, “I have such trouble turning people away.”

“In proper households,” said the landlady, “choosing people to live with is difficult, you know. I have devoted my life to my daughter’s education.” Twisting her body toward the back door, she modulated her voice as if calling someone far away.

“Irina.” she called.

As if waiting for this moment, the door opened immediately. A girl of about eight, wearing a red dress with a too-short skirt and straight frizzy hair hanging down to her shoulders, came out.

“This is my daughter Irina.” “I have her practice ballet under a dance teacher from the Bolshoi Theatre—authentic, classical Italian-style ballet.” “Come now, my dear Irina—won’t you greet the guests?” Then Irina—the girl who had been called—smiling brightly as though she were a ballerina on stage responding to an encore, lifted the skirt of her red dress at both sides, pulled one leg deeply behind her, bent her knee, and curtsied. It was clearly a trained act for this girl; with her front foot turned outward like a ballerina’s, she slowly bent her knee and returned to her original posture—all while the landlady watched, holding her breath.

Maria Gregorievna said, "That was splendidly done." The landlady, remaining seated on a low chair, looked up at her standing daughter; the daughter, still standing, gazed at her mother's face—and at Maria Gregorievna's words of praise, they exchanged smiles of satisfaction. The daughter withdrew behind the door.

“Well, what should we do, Bukko-chan?”

Motoko consulted in Japanese. "The location is good... but it's a bit too complicated." "I simply can't bring myself to praise that child." "The location is convenient for us, and the room is nice, but after all, we are travelers."

Motoko explained while dividing her gaze equally between the landlady and Maria Gregorievna. “It’s impossible for us to bear the cost of furniture ourselves.”

Tilting her head slightly—swirling curls shifting—the landlady made an innocent yet unexpectedly surprised expression.

“Why do you say that? When we buy furniture, it always means it can be sold again.” “And in practice, we don’t call things ‘furniture’ unless they can be exchanged at a good price.”

Maria Gregorievna—

“In any case, an immediate answer would be impossible for both of us.”

Maria Gregorievna stepped in and proposed.

“How about allowing two days’ grace before giving your answer? —settle on this one.” Glancing back at the landlady wearing red house slippers, “In the meantime, you may very well find tenants you’re hoping for.” “That would be acceptable.” The curly-haired landlady stood up from her chair with a posture that slightly puffed out her chest—the practiced poise of someone accustomed to social negotiations.

“Well then, in two days—”

“Please—if we can come to live together, Irina will be delighted as well.”

The entrance door closed quietly but firmly behind the three people. The three people walked in silence for a while along the tree-lined avenue of the old-fashioned Bronnaya Street, devoid of passersby.

"What could the year 1917 mean for women like that?" Maria Gregorievna shrugged her shoulders in a maroon coat with black fur trim, the garment somewhat worn and showing its age.

“I’ve realized that type of woman appearing on Moscow’s stages isn’t exaggerated after all.” “—Don’t you think so too?” At the fork where they left Bronnaya Street, Motoko halted on the snow-paved walkway. “Since we’ve come this far, shall we stop by the embassy to check for letters?” The area near the back of the house they had inspected turned out to be roughly where the embassy stood. Maria Gregorievna proceeded straight to Nikitsky Gate to catch her train home.

Left alone, they circled around to the back of Futamata Street. Nobuko began to speak. “How unusual!”

Nobuko said that and took a deep breath. “French—how was it?”

“—That’s a mistress, isn’t it?”

Motoko declared bluntly. "The reason she doesn't keep a man around is because whoever's supporting her makes too much fuss." "There's no way I could endure living in such an irritating house!"

"If we were to live in that house, I can’t imagine how many times a day we’d have to praise the daughter." Motoko seemed more drawn to contemplating the lives of men who kept such women in Moscow.

“Given that woman’s situation, the man can’t possibly be a politician.” “He must be what they call a businessman.” “Businessmen—do they even exist here?” “Here?” “There are things like trusts and syndicates, aren’t there?” “...” The embassy with its gatekeeper’s hut at the entrance stood as usual that day—a gloomy brown building beneath a large snow-laden tree’s shadow. On New Year’s Day there had been a greeting ceremony for Japanese residents, followed by a modest reception. The grand reception hall where guests had gathered at that time was decorated with a luxury unimaginable from the building’s drab exterior. When first constructing this house, its owner—likely one of Moscow’s wealthy men—had probably sought to enjoy the sharp contrast between deep winter’s white snow during social season and sleigh bells’ chimes. The front entrance was entirely decorated in Egyptian style. Two thick ocher columns with swelling middles bore papyrus hieroglyphs painted in red, green and yellow like illustrations, while the surrounding walls—pale ocher to match—depicted two Egyptians through bas-relief effects. Separated by just one corridor, the reception room followed French style while the grand dining hall was built with high wooden wainscoting in English fashion.

The staircase leading up to the office to retrieve letters was inside a brown door separate from the main entrance. In the corridor outside the office stood a partitioned cabinet like post office boxes, with residents' names pasted on each compartment. Nobuko peered into the section bearing her surname. In that instant, she was struck by an indescribably peculiar sensation. That day, for some reason, the partitioned box wasn't crammed with its usual rolled-up newspapers and magazines—at the bare bottom of the shelf lay a single light-blue square envelope, perfectly aligned. Takedai's handwriting showed on its front. Within that partitioned space, the thick azure envelope felt unnervingly alive, as though consciously present with emotions. Feeling unsettled, Nobuko stared at it momentarily before snatching the letter from the box like seizing a living creature. Exposed to the bright outside light, it appeared merely thick, devoid of any peculiarity.

Returning to the hotel, the two finished dinner a little earlier than usual. That evening, they were scheduled to watch *Roar, China!* at the Meyerhold Theater.

“Let’s take a sleigh, shall we?” “Sleigh, sleigh… That’s extravagant.” “But the snow will melt soon, and then we won’t be able to ride sleighs again until next year—who knows if we’ll even be in Moscow next winter to ride them?” Nobuko, having finished her preparations to go out by putting on her coat, stood beside the table with a gaudy scarf dangling and opened the light-blue envelope she had retrieved from the embassy that afternoon. From the first line of the practical stationery with vertical rulings, Takedai’s difficult-to-read cursive script cascaded over Nobuko today not like tangled threads, but like a scalding waterfall.

“I have just received your letter—with what joy and anticipation did I look upon this long-awaited word from my dear daughter in a foreign land to her brother.” “However, my warm expectations were utterly betrayed.” “How far must your cruelty go?” When she had written to Tamotsu previously, Nobuko had felt a clear, confrontational emotion toward Takedai. Nevertheless, faced with Takedai’s characteristic way of putting things, Nobuko bit her lip. Takedai, in her excitement, had taken up a fountain pen in her diamond-sparkling hand, sat at her usual spot at the dining table, and begun writing immediately—the set of her shoulders, separated by thousands of kilometers, seemed to loom right there before Nobuko. Between Tamotsu and myself, there was a checkpoint just as I had imagined. Even though the letter was clearly addressed solely to Tamotsu, Takedai had opened it and read it first. And regarding Nobuko’s comments about the greenhouse that had been built for Tamotsu’s high school entrance celebration, she had confronted Nobuko without any regard for what Tamotsu might think.

With impassioned brushstrokes, Takedai vehemently emphasized how Tamotsu, unlike youths these days, was so pure-hearted and devoid of selfish pleasures. “By what right do you criticize the greenhouse that is his sole source of joy? As a human being and as a mother, I feel an uncontrollable indignation. You are a cruel person. The cruel blood that flows through the Sasa family lineage—the blood I have suffered from all these long years—flows within your heart as well. And you—in your life since coming to Russia—”

Having read that far, Nobuko felt an impulse to crumple the letter. What a way for Takedai to put things. Whenever Nobuko married Tsukuda—whenever she divorced him and began living with Motoko Yoshimi—she had been told she was nothing but cold-hearted. Whenever she went to Russia, Takedai would gather all her prejudices and preconceptions into a single point and declare that since going to Russia, Nobuko had become even more cruel. For Takedai, it seemed there had never been a time when Nobuko was a warm person. For Takedai, what was not cruel could only be a disposition like Tamotsu’s. Nobuko’s face turned pale as she held the unread letter in her hand for a while, but eventually, she quietly placed it on the table. With a stillness filled with more disgust than if she had thrown it down.

——

On the stage of Meyerhold Theater was a large warship’s deck. A European naval officer in a white uniform scolded, knocked down, and kicked the supple body of a boy attendant wearing a shabby white cotton garment with a queue hanging down his back. In this way did hatred accumulate. *Roar, China!* But why was Takedai so adept at provoking hatred like that? In the dim audience seats, as she watched the stage, this thought flashed through Nobuko’s mind. “The cruel blood flowing through the Sasa family lineage.” That blood flowed within Nobuko’s body as well—if that were so, then whose doing was it that caused that blood to course and be passed on to Nobuko? And through what actions? Which of the children had participated in such acts of Takedai’s? The stage was now dim. In one corner of the ship’s hold, a pale hazy light was intensely concentrated. There lay the corpse of the boy attendant who had been kicked and strangled to death. The boy had not been kicked only today. Not just yesterday or the day before—from the day his labor began, from the day he had needed a commander—the boy’s terror had begun. Through endless fear and despair for tomorrow had the boy attendant strangled himself to death. That same fear trembled through the existence of the people with queues gathered in this ship’s hold. It pierced and trembled through the vast crowd of gray overworked coolies laboring as dockhands at the wharf. That massive terror verged on transforming into hatred. Hatred—born of emotion—would soon take organized action. *Roar, China!*

Their hatred was great and stood within history. In the audience, Nobuko felt a faint shudder and wrapped her arms around her chest. "I wonder which of us—the people of your country or the people of mine—is leading a harder life." It was Dr. Lin, the Chinese woman, who said this in a slow, soft, subdued voice.

That had been in the strange room of the Metropolitan. Compared to the hatred that now blazed like a bonfire across Meyerhold’s stage, illuminating the faces of the audience, the hatred Nobuko harbored was truly old and small. Entangled in family and blood. “The cruel blood flows within your heart as well.” “And you—in your life since coming to Russia—” What was there in Russia, and what would become of Nobuko? A great hatred beyond the judgment of Takedai’s prejudices had transformed into action and overflowed onto the stage, and in the aftermath of truth’s power and beauty, even Nobuko’s small hatred sparkled with vivid reality.

Two days passed.

The day arrived when they were to give their reply to the landlady of the rental room on Bronnaya Street.

“Bukko-chan, you go turn them down.”

When they finished their morning tea, Motoko said to Nobuko, who was clearing the table. “Because of the furniture condition?”

“—Isn’t that right? Didn’t you say yourself you can’t afford to buy furniture or anything?”

“I wonder if I can explain it properly… In terms of the wording…” “It’s fine, isn’t it? In the end, as long as they understand we’re refusing, that’s all that matters…”

In the meantime, Motoko went to the desk and wrote a room wanted advertisement for the Moscow evening paper. She wrote that the room seekers were two foreign women. “This should be about right, don’t you think?” If we wrote something like “two foreign women,” I feared landlords would again overestimate our financial means and send letters with conditions we couldn’t possibly meet. Nobuko—

“I wonder if this is all right…” she murmured hesitantly while looking down at the scrap of paper. “If we call ourselves ‘foreign women,’ doesn’t it make people imagine us wearing fur coats or something?” Motoko silently took two or three puffs of her cigarette as she examined her draft, then— “It’s fine,” she said dismissively, pressing the scrap of paper into Nobuko’s hand where she stood beside her. “We are foreign women regardless—our coats do have fur lining after all, though I hate to acknowledge it. The only difference is whether it’s inside or out.”

Nobuko left the hotel. In front of the construction site of the Central Post Office, which faced the hotel entrance across the snow-covered thoroughfare, a large truck had arrived and was unloading steel materials. A Red Army sentry in a winter coat, the hem of which brushed against the deep snow, watched the work of steel materials being carried in. Five no longer young laborers, wearing felt winter boots that reached their knees and short leather coats from whose linings matted wool hung messily down, were carrying in the materials.

After standing for a while on this side of the sidewalk, watching the laborers slowly lift and carry heavy beams while occasionally blowing their noses in between, Nobuko walked toward Bronnaya Street.

The house, its old walls still showing patches of yellow and low windows facing the sidewalk, today again displayed a potted cactus in its window. As expected, with a head full of swirling curls but today appearing without makeup, the landlady led Nobuko to the entrance hallway. Using the simplest words she could manage, Nobuko declined to rent the room, explaining that their financial situation did not allow them to purchase furniture.

“Very well. I understand.” “(Khorosho. Ponimayu.)” The landlady responded in a brisk, businesslike voice—utterly unlike the affected tone she had used when first showing the room to Maria Gregorievna and Motoko—with the curt bureaucratic reply typical of government offices. And after pausing for a moment, she gave a slight shake of her curly head, as if to rouse her own spirits,

“*Nichevo*.” she said.

“I thought you all were people connected to the diplomatic corps.”

Why had she thought that? As she stood there silently facing slightly upward while thinking this, the curly-haired landlady let her gaze—now clearly preoccupied with entirely different thoughts—fall upon Nobuko's face. But then, as if suddenly realizing, "Well then, goodbye."

The landlady extended her hand toward Nobuko. “Goodbye.” When she closed the door and stepped out into the snowy street, Nobuko felt that this woman had, after all, truly wanted to rent out the room deep down, and pitied her. She spent her days adorned with various expressions and costumes as if on a stage, yet deep down harbored anxieties about the truth. While recalling the landlady’s *Nichevo* tone—which seemed less directed at Nobuko than muttered to herself—Nobuko walked in the direction of the Moscow evening paper office.

When she reached Nikitsky Gate, a tram was just passing by the tree-lined avenue, its roof bearing a white circular route number. Because of this, the flow of traffic was blocked. Right beside Nobuko on the sidewalk, a Chinese woman was selling pom-poms embroidered with deep red and yellow threads, bouncing them as they dangled from elastic strings. While watching the pom-poms bounce, Nobuko suddenly thought of something. She turned around, retraced her path to the fork in the road, veered left, and passed through the embassy's somber maroon gate.

She ascended to the second floor where the office was and peered into the corridor’s mailbox. Nobuko’s intuition was correct. A bundle of newspapers and magazines tied with a thin string were in the compartment labeled "Sassa." Since the Siberian Railway only ran on specific days of the week, it was impossible for a single letter from Taketayo to arrive separately as it had the day before yesterday. Nobuko, with a somewhat buoyant feeling, gathered up all the mail that had been placed in the compartment. Step by step, she slowly descended the second floor while loosening the string between them to peek at what magazines had arrived. The Chuo Koron that had been sent to her ever since she arrived in Moscow. Fujin Koron. In between them, she found a large international postcard that seemed to have slipped in. It was Tasuku’s handwriting.

Nobuko hurried down the dimly lit stairwell with its high walls and emerged outside. Standing by the embassy garden fence where deep snow buried the linden tree's roots, she began reading the postcard. As she read, Nobuko unconsciously brushed the postcard's surface once or twice with her brown leather-gloved fingertips. Tasuku's handwriting remained as always—thin strokes with relaxed pressure forming pale penmanship, its evenly spaced characters bristling on the postcard worn from its distant journey. Though legible, they resisted Nobuko's desperate desire to read them thoroughly.

“Sis, thank you for writing me that letter.”

It began with those words. Nobuko thought it was good. Taketayo had opened and read the letter Nobuko wrote to Tasuku as though it were perfectly natural, then angrily sent it along. Still, she hadn't hidden Nobuko's letter from Tasuku. That approach was just like Taketayo. "I read your letter over and over again. Even now, before starting to write my reply, I read it twice more. And I believe what you say is right. To realize you still think of me this way—even after going abroad and living a completely different life—I was truly astonished."

In the simply expressed words, Tasuku's sentiment of reconsidering their relationship as sister and brother was clearly conveyed to Nobuko. "What you wrote about the greenhouse, Sis—of course it isn't merely to scold or reprimand me." "Nor are you blaming me for having gone and built it." "I understand that very well." "You were only trying to make me aware of broader social relations."

Nobuko teared up. The tone of Tasuku’s writing was grave and earnest; not only did it reveal a sincere effort to properly understand his sister Nobuko’s words, but it also conveyed Tasuku’s own resolute determination to have those around him affirm the validity of his interpretation. The tone of Tasuku’s writing evoked the scene of the heated debate that had erupted in the dining room of the Ugoshiro house over that single letter Nobuko had written.

“I had not thought a single one of the things you think about regarding the greenhouse.” “I find this deeply shameful.”

A line had been drawn next to the last sentence. In the same thin and delicate penmanship with which he wrote the characters, he had added, “I find this deeply shameful.”

Nobuko felt as though Tasuku's face—his puffy eyelids shaded by soft downy hair, his habit of sniffing through his nose when deep in thought—and the large knees protruding from his now-too-small school uniform trousers were right there before her in the snow where she stood reading. "I find this deeply shameful." —And Nobuko felt that same single line had been drawn through her own heart. "I find this shameful," he had written. When Nobuko had written that impassioned letter to Tasuku, could she have possibly imagined it would etch a single line across his heart—like a wheel track pressed sharply into soft, deep black soil?

The door of the guardhouse next to the gate opened. A guard in a greatcoat began approaching the garden where Nobuko stood. When the guard realized that the person there was Nobuko, whom he occasionally saw,

“Good afternoon.”

he said, touching the brim of his winter cap. Then, casting a glance at the postcard Nobuko was reading, he walked past. In the opposite direction of the guard, Nobuko started walking toward the embassy gate. While walking, she finished reading the postcard. Since you went to the trouble of building this greenhouse, I want to use it in a way that will make everyone happy. I want to cultivate melons this summer and have Father, Mother, and everyone else at home eat them. At the end of the postcard where he had written that, he finally found some blank space,

“I want to write more letters to you, Sis.” That line was written in characters even smaller than the main text. The postcard ended there.

In front of the benches along the tree-lined avenue, baby carriages stood lined up in abundance, their infants taking in the sun. On the promenade, small children played tag with complete abandon, their woolen scarves neatly tied behind overcoats as they dashed about nearly colliding with passersby. With a gentle, preoccupied expression, Nobuko walked toward the square housing the Moscow Evening News building, each time carefully guiding aside approaching children with hands placed on their bodies. I want to write more letters to you, Sis. What could Tasuku mean by that statement? Did it mean he had always wanted to write more? Or that he intended to write more frequently from now on?

After finishing her business of placing an advertisement at the Moscow Evening News office and emerging onto Tverskaya Boulevard to return to the hotel, Nobuko kept thinking about nothing but that matter. If it were simply that Tasuku wanted to write more letters to her from now on, she could have easily accepted it given the sisterly affection contained in his letters. But if this meant Tasuku's feelings of wanting to write more all along had been conveyed, Nobuko couldn't help suspecting Taketayo's influence even in the fact that today's message from Tasuku had come as a postcard. Since it was being sent to his sister in a foreign country where no one could read the characters anyway, perhaps Tasuku had written such a heartfelt message directly on a postcard. But if you're writing a reply to Sis, put it on a postcard. And show it before sending. It wasn't as though Taketayo hadn't said such things to Tasuku.

Nobuko returned to the hushed daytime hotel room where Motoko was also out. Through the double-paned window, sunlight filtered through the massive steel-framed roof across the way, reaching all the way to the edge of the corner table. As she set down the bundle of mail she had carried back and slowly removed her gloves, Nobuko—while taking off her coat—noticed a folded white paper lying amidst the piled books on the table. It was Taketayo's letter. This was the same letter Nobuko had placed there after reading only up to the line "And you, in your life since going to Russia—", unable to continue further due to body-trembling disgust. The letter extracted from its envelope lay splayed open, its thick creases swelling outward as multiple layers of stationery flared at their edges.

In the bright, quiet hotel room, as she undid the buttons of her coat, sadness spread through Nobuko’s chest. Tasuku’s heart was too tender. That tenderness made Nobuko feel the harshness of her own heart. When Nobuko, while believing in the correctness of her own way of thinking, had expressed it to Tasuku, she was made to reflect on the vigor and eloquence she had not noticed in herself at the time—causing her to feel a secret, intense shame. The eloquence of Taketayo, which even deprived Nobuko of the will to accept it, lay exposed on the desk there in the form of a letter. When she contemplated Tasuku’s heart—so tender it pained her—Nobuko felt herself visualizing a scene where Taketayo’s fiercely possessive and terrifying affection toward Tasuku stood confronting her own self: she who so resembled Taketayo in the intensity and ferocity of that affection.

Having removed her coat and now in a light blue blouse, Nobuko rose from where she had been sitting on the sofa and began pacing back and forth across the cleanly polished brown floor.

The tenderness of Tasuku’s heart made Nobuko feel the coarseness of her own heart’s texture, and even feel ashamed of it. It made her reflect that what she disliked in Taketayo existed within herself. However, just because that was so, being struck by the tenderness of Tasuku’s heart, Nobuko had never imagined yielding her own way of life to Tasuku’s path, nor could she conceive of compromising with Taketayo’s way of living because of him.

Stopping before the double-paned window, pressing her forehead against the inner glass where the faint warmth of Moscow’s winter sunlight lingered, and gazing at the black steel frame and the thin, soiled snow frozen in the shade, Nobuko felt a scene form in her heart. There was the expanse of the sea. The surface of the sea glittered under delicate sunlight, occasionally faintly clouding over when clouds passed, pure and full of life. In the distance, a cliff could be seen. The top of the cliff was lush with green grass, and upon that grass, as well as upon the cliff’s midsection, shone the same sunlight that lay upon the sea, while the cliff’s base was washed by the waves. Day and night, the base of the cliff was washed by the sea, and the sea raised waves against that cliff. But the cliff was not the sea, and the sea was not the cliff. Yet enveloped in the same natural light, they remained so.

Whether it was the sea or the cliff that was like that remained unclear, but Nobuko sensed both her own existence and Tasuku's within that scene. The term "mediator faction" was a label bestowed by those who would never themselves be mediated. Upon this mental seascape with its cliff, Nobuko came to understand with unnatural vividness—a realization that struck her like lightning. "Tasuku's classmates called Sasa an idiot." She had once heard in the parlor of their Dōzaka home how they'd derided him as "a born member of the mediator faction." Back then, Nobuko had understood this label only in terms of Tasuku's way of thinking. Now she knew his friends must have meant it to include what she'd only just grasped. It wasn't merely his reasoning—the heartbreaking tenderness of Tasuku's very nature threatened to bend youthful hearts away from their single-minded pursuits. To his friends, this peculiar softness in Tasuku was repellent. Yet what could he possibly do about such tenderness in his own heart...?

Nobuko stood for a long time before the double-paned hotel window overlooking Moscow's soiled, once-swollen snow now diminished as March approached.

Chapter Two

1

It was a truly cramped room. If Vera Kemper’s residence—where she and her husband lived in a dwelling as narrow and deep as an eel’s burrow—could aptly be called a crevice between Moscow’s walls, then the room Nobuko and Motoko found on the third floor of a building at an Astozhenka street corner was like a gap dwelling between Moscow’s walls and windows.

Though the three of them—Nobuko, Motoko, and Maria Gregorievna—had walked everywhere searching for rental rooms without finding any livable places, there came three unexpected responses to the room wanted advertisement they had placed in the Moscow Evening News. One was from a landlord on the opposite bank of the Moscow River. One was near Vorontsovsky Park, down the entire length of Tverskaya Boulevard. The last response came from Astozhenka 1-chome, from a man named Fyodor Lyubakov.

“Strange. It’s just ‘Astozhenka’ with no district or town specified—I wonder which part it refers to.”

The letter was written on a carelessly cut scrap of yellow paper with a chemical pencil whose color would rise like purple ink when rubbed or wetted, never fading. It was a message in masculine script stating simply that there was a room at our place that met your conditions, and that we could show it to you. Motoko, bent over the table as if cross-referencing the spread-out letter, was examining a map of Moscow.

“Huh.—So this kind of place has such a name.” “Bukko-chan!” “The location is absolutely perfect!” According to the map, from the Hotel Passage where Nobuko and the others were staying, exiting to Hunter’s Square, going straight to the right, past the outer walls of the Kremlin, there was a small district jutting out like a delta—that was Astozhenka. “If it’s called Number One District, that must be right at the start of it, I suppose.”

Judging by how it appeared on the map, the place seemed close to the Moscow River, with the tree-lined avenue just nearby. These very favorable conditions instead filled Nobuko and Motoko with disbelief. At an angle like a quarter slice of an apple, it was a distance that could be walked from Tverskaya. The two of them, together with Maria Gregorievna, had searched all over Moscow through several concentric circles encompassing that Astozhenka.

“Strange... Anyway, Bukko-chan, just go take a look and see what kind of place it is.” “Alone?” Hesitantly, Nobuko looked at Motoko. “Anyway, just go take a look as if you’re going for a walk, okay? It’s practically right there, isn’t it? Let’s start by checking the closest one first.”

A little under an hour later, Nobuko came back as if running up the hotel stairs. Without even knocking, she flung open the door to their room and— “Hey! It’s wonderful—come quickly!” With hands still gloved, she took Motoko’s coat down from the wall. “I told them I’d bring my friend right away, so they’re waiting for us.” “Is that true?” “Really! It absolutely won’t get away!”

The two hurried out to Hunter’s Square and boarded a streetcar from there.

“Is it quite far ahead?” “The fourth stop.” When they passed the Kremlin, a large church stood on a small snow-covered hill to their left, its massive gilded dome and cross glittering. At that streetcar stop, Nobuko and Motoko disembarked. “My, doesn’t this look just like the roots of a tree-lined avenue!” “Exactly!”

Excited Nobuko took the lead and turned in the direction opposite to the tree-lined avenue that began immediately to their right. Wearing a brown coat and a leather hat, Motoko walked alongside Nobuko on the outer side of the sidewalk. After walking one block along that sidewalk, on the right-hand side stood a plank fence with an open wooden gate. It was a plank fence and wooden gate of the sort commonly seen at still-unfinished construction sites. On the plank fence was posted a large notice that read, "No toilet inside this area," and Nobuko deliberately entered the gate without warning Motoko.

“What? We’re going in here?”

When Motoko followed and entered through the gate, there was a narrow vacant lot where barrels and old lumber peeked out from beneath the snow, and upon passing through it, they emerged into a rather spacious inner courtyard. On the snow, four darkly trodden paths had formed. A new, solid five-story concrete building stood in a U-shape, enclosing the inner courtyard. Nobuko, still silent, followed the first of the four trodden paths and began ascending the stairs from one of the entrances.

Exposed light bulbs were lit at the entrances and stairwells. In the corner of the concrete floor, cement bags apparently left over from construction remained piled up. The handrails, too, were made of concrete and jutted out crudely. Nobuko climbed the not-too-wide stairs step by step in silence, her face brimming with delight at having surprised Motoko. The interior of that large building, which appeared to have been constructed only a year or two prior, emitted a faint smell of concrete mingled with the moderate warmth of its heating system.

When she reached the third floor, Nobuko stopped in front of a door marked with a white-painted 35 on its black insulated surface. “This is it.” “I see. No wonder Bukko-chan got so worked up.” When Nobuko had come alone earlier, there had only been a large-built wife with a Marcel wave in her hair and a navy blue dress, and a boy of about five. This time, Lyubakov himself—a round-faced man with a reddish-brown mustache and bushy eyebrows—had returned. At the entrance hung a green-brimmed hat of the kind that all Soviet engineers wore.

According to Lyubakov’s account, the building had been constructed by the housing cooperative section of the railway workers’ union. “The railway union is one of the largest Soviet labor unions apart from the chemical sector, so this building is likely among the earliest union buildings erected in Moscow.” Once the ten-year installment payments were completed, the apartment with its four rooms, bathroom, and shared drying area would become Lyubakov’s property. Using the vacant room was convenient both for Nobuko and her companion and for Lyubakov’s finances. Therefore, he had no intention of demanding unreasonable rent.

Such discussions took place in the room that the Lyubakov couple, Nobuko, and Motoko—four people in total—were now seeking to rent and he to lease. Lyubakov, with his reddish-brown mustache, stood leaning against the wardrobe placed to the left of the room’s entrance as he spoke, his face not unkind but bearing a somewhat greedy look. The stout, plain-looking wife—her Marcel wave clashing with her attire—stood about a meter from the foot of the vertically placed bed near the doorway. Motoko sat on a large leather-covered divan doubling as a bed, positioned at a right angle to the wall blocking the head of the other bed, while Nobuko sat sideways on a chair facing the divan across the long table spanning the room’s width. The small room faced the outer side of Astozhenka’s corner building, so through the window behind Nobuko stretched a view of the snow-covered hill and large church. Motoko’s position on the inner divan resulted less from choice than from Nobuko and the Lyubakovs crowding in after her exploratory move, trapping her between divan and table. So small was that room.

While Nobuko and her companion were a section one had to search for on a Moscow city map, Astozhenka itself was a place well-known to Muscovites. The large cathedral on the small hill where Nobuko had alighted from the streetcar—using its golden dome glittering in the distance as a landmark—was called Christ the Savior Cathedral, built in 1812 after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow as a monument to Russia's victory. This cathedral became one of Moscow's famed landmarks due to marble gathered from across Russia for its construction, its massive dome sheathed in pure gold, and six bells whose tones resonated beautifully from its towering bell tower to Moscow's farthest reaches. Given its position facing Sparrow Hill—where Napoleon reportedly watched Moscow burn—early nineteenth-century Astozhenka was likely a desolate, suburban stretch along the Moscow riverbank beyond the Kremlin walls. Muscovites visiting Christ the Savior Cathedral on leisurely outings would surely arrive with sleigh bells jingling along snow-laden avenues, gazing from its Ural marble staircase blocked by snow at the pure white, solemn snowscape stretching in all directions.

The hill upon which Christ the Savior Cathedral stood was encircled by a stone battlement, with a single narrow walkway winding around its base beneath the parapet to connect with the road descending from the cathedral's front stone steps facing the river. Another path, passing before the plank fence at Astozhenka 1-chome where Nobuko and Motoko came and went, extended to what seemed like a dead end near the riverbank where stood a Persian embassy building adorned with vibrantly colored tiles. The riverbanks lay desolate everywhere. Moreover, snowbound and devoid of passersby, the area around Christ the Savior Cathedral's grand staircase was steeped in desolation—all the more profound for its expansive views stretching endlessly.

Astozhenka 1-chome occupied an intriguing position. While the riverbank stood desolate and wrapped in solitude, the tram-running street formed a third-class shopping district where lights flowed across snowy sidewalks even at night. One of two semicircular tree-lined avenues encircling Moscow began precisely at the small square before Christ the Savior Cathedral, where children and women with shopping baskets always lingered amid the jumbled hustle and bustle characteristic of an avenue's starting point. The terminus for trams arriving through Nikitsky Gate lay beyond this tree-lined avenue. Trams that had discharged all passengers at the stop beneath the avenue would return empty only to collect new riders at another stop slightly ahead. The tram-stop street was a residential quarter where snow-laden treetops of the avenue were visible from houses' front windows.

People lived in a certain town, and before long, they no longer lived there. There was something peculiar about that sensation. The fact that the view from their window had changed from the broken iron framework of the large roof behind Tverskaya Street to Christ the Savior Cathedral in Astozhenka—merely large and unadorned—and to the scene at the entrance of the tree-lined avenue had something peculiarly surreal about it.

Because there were no curtains on the double windows of the Astozhenka room, the snow-brightened morning light streamed abruptly into the depths of the narrow space. Waking on the divan that served as a bed, washed in that clean yet stark morning light, Nobuko gazed at the pale blue enamel kettle gleaming on the long table that jutted up beside her—the one they had used for tea the previous evening—and felt their lives had truly settled into the mundane arrangements of Moscow living. And for Nobuko herself, there was an inexpressible thrill and satisfaction in that very ordinariness.

At night, the shadow of the green lampshade from the desk lamp that Nobuko and her companion used indoors was reflected on the glass surface of the curtainless window in their Astozhenka room. On the other side of the partition created by lining up books along the center of the long table sat Motoko, while Nobuko occupied the side facing away from the door. After putting their young son to bed, the Lyubakov couple went out to the movies together, leaving only the maid Nyura in the kitchen. The entire apartment remained warm and hushed. At eight o'clock, Nyura—her Greek heritage evident in her olive complexion—knocked on the door,

“The tea is ready.” Carrying a tray with cups and a teapot, she entered holding a light-blue enamel kettle. Nobuko and the others had only their morning and evening tea prepared in the Lyubakovs’ kitchen, taking their main meals outside. Now using ration booklets like ordinary workers, they purchased not just ikura and salted cucumbers but basic necessities like bread, tea, and sugar themselves. At teatime, Nobuko brought two cups of oxidized milk (prostokvasha) she had first found at the Astozhenka food store from the window frame,

“I wonder how Mr. Akiyama and the others are doing,” she said. When Nobuko and her companion had decided to vacate the Passage Hotel and move to Astozhenka, Uiichi Akiyama gave them a volume of Ukrainian folk songs as a memento. It was a splendid large-format book with a light blue cover featuring distinctive Ukrainian embroidery designs. “This is something a Russian folk song researcher gave me,” Uiichi Akiyama said as he slowly signed his name in Esperanto and Japanese characters on the title page.

While slowly signing in Esperanto and Japanese characters on the title page, Uiichi Akiyama said. "I have no use for it myself, you see." It was a book introducing Ukrainian folk songs with musical scores. Uiichi Akiyama had said he would return after seeing May Day.

Nobuko continued setting up the dining space at roughly one-third of the long table's end. She spread out paper, produced a solidified mass of sugar, and cracked it with a nutcracker into cup-sized fragments.

When Nobuko said, "I wonder how Mr. Akiyama and the others are doing," this feeling arose because—viewed through the emotional lens of life newly begun in Astozhenka—their former existence at the Passage seemed to float on a different plane. A minor fact—for instance, that in the Astozhenka kitchen, a samovar had never once been used. Even this—the absence of samovars in Astozhenka—was, for Nobuko who had always associated Russia with samovars, a concrete reality of her new life. In modern Moscow, everyone boiled water daily with commonplace aluminum kettles on gas or oil stoves, no different from anywhere else. They would eat in their own dining area—undecorated with pink ribbons on tinted wooden panels—or else dine at one of the not especially tidy restaurants Nobuko and the others had been frequenting around town lately, where roasted duck was served with pickled red cabbage.

The movie theaters that Nobuko and her companions often frequented in the Tverskaya area were the First Sovkino and Kolos, which utilized the grand hall of a music school.

After moving to Astozhenka, the small movie theater that Nobuko went to alone was on the third floor of the kommunal where she bought prostokvasha and bread during the day. At the top of the worn-down, concave white stone stairs, there was a glass-paned box where tickets were purchased, and in the hall, five musicians past their youth were performing Mozart’s chamber music. The scene in the unremarkable hall—sparsely attended and with dim lighting—where five violinists, cellists, and flutists, none young anymore, dressed in worn suits earnestly played Mozart as if studying their craft through devotion to music, left a profound impression.

After several screenings had ended that day, the auditorium doors opened. Looking at the people spilling into the hall, every one of them appeared to be from the immediate neighborhood; though no face could truly be called cheerfully boisterous, each showed a quiet satisfaction. Here, they could enter wearing their winter boots. On people's feet were the crude, sturdy valenki worn by laborers. Mingling among the same sort of crowd, Nobuko watched the final screening of the day. That week's program consisted of an educational film about venereal diseases and a feature film depicting episodes from the Civil War era.

In their life in Astozhenka, neither triple-chinned Claude appeared nor did Polinyak draw near. Nobuko’s heart gradually sank into its center of gravity, and she began feeling the soles of her inner feet touch something substantial. This began awakening in Nobuko a desire to write.

Around that time, Moscow's snowmelt began. Within the plank fence surrounding Nobuko's building, on every street, and along the central tree-lined avenues, countless puddles of varying sizes formed from melting snow. By day, roof snow and street snow melted with a clattering rush through gutters, only to freeze again unchanged each night. Soft blue moonlight shone for several nights upon this snow that melted daily and froze smooth nightly, until eventually it stopped freezing even after dark. When this happened, true early spring came to all Moscow - a city spattered with mud. Horses and people alike moved through the streets mud-spattered, while life's sounds - absorbed all winter by accumulated snow - revived simultaneously from beneath the loosened drifts. Amid terrible road mire, irrepressible life stirrings, and paths grown treacherously slick enough to send one sprawling at any step, Nobuko flushed damply beneath her suddenly oppressive winter coat. Opening the grocery store door revealed an interior that felt deeper and darker than winter's version, its slackened air thick with nose-stinging wet sawdust scattered across floors and the smoky reek of cured fish. A single bright beam struck golden-brown scales of hanging smoked fish, making them gleam in darkness. Even these transformations were spring incarnate.

Nobuko’s urge to write her own work intensified further. With an aching glint in her eyes, when Nobuko returned from Maria Gregorievna’s lesson toward Astozhenka’s corner, an old peddler woman—her woolen shawl slipped back on her head—emerged from an opening in the foot traffic,

“Miss!”

The old woman vendor called out to Nobuko and held out a bouquet of flowers. "Snowdrops! The first flowers of spring—buy them for your happiness!" Nobuko gazed at the bouquet, took out a red Russian leather coin purse with a clasp from her pocket, handed thirty-five kopeks to the old woman, and accepted the flowers. The snowdrops—unlike the fuzzy-leaved snowdrops Nobuko knew in Japan—had smooth, fan-shaped leaves. About five of those leaves were arranged to form a border around several pure white flowers resembling white violets with thick petals. Truly befitting an early spring flower that had bloomed from beneath the snow, their stems were short. Holding the small bouquet with her gloved fingertips as if plucking it, Nobuko brought her face close while climbing the apartment stairs to smell its fragrance. The pure white snowdrop flowers had no discernible scent. Even so, these were undoubtedly Moscow's first flowers of spring. Nobuko filled a small glass cup with water and placed the bouquet inside. She decorated her own corner of the large desk with it. Spring light sparkled on the thin rim of the glass cup. Outside the window on Christ the Savior Cathedral's hill—now blanketed in melting snow—the large golden dome appeared even more brilliantly golden under irregularly reflected brightness.

—Nobuko began to write.

II

That day was Sunday. Around this time, Motoko had been attending lectures in Moscow University's humanities department nearly every day. During Motoko's absences, Nobuko would stay alone in their room, savoring the solitude. She had been writing her Moscow impressions to send to Bunmeisha, the publisher funding her travels. Since Sundays meant no university lectures for Motoko either—and with only one desk in the room making it impossible for Nobuko to pause her writing—the two rose leisurely each weekend morning: Motoko, being tall, would straighten the bed on her side, while Nobuko, being short, would tidy the divan on hers.

Just then, there was a knock at the door, and Nyura poked her head in—her dusky face with its Greek-style straight nose. And in a heavily accented voice, she announced: “There’s a guest here to see you.”

Nyura announced. Nobuko and Motoko exchanged looks of surprise. Who could it be? The two had just risen and weren't yet properly dressed.

“There’s nothing we can do!” Motoko showed Nyura a Russian-style gesture of spreading both hands helplessly as she spoke. “Look at us—we’re not even dressed yet… Nyura, please go ask the guest’s name.” While hurriedly finishing tidying her bedding, Nobuko— “Who could it be this early in the morning?” —said quizzically. If it had been Uiichi Akiyama, he would never have come at such an hour. Especially with the observant Atsushi Utsumi by his side, who knew full well they were late risers.

Nyura returned and stuck her head through the door again. "The guest says his name is Myano," she said. "He just arrived from Leningrad to Moscow." "Myano?" Motoko's face clouded with bewilderment. Then: "Is he Russian? Or Japanese?" She pressed the question anew. Nyura seemed unable to grasp the exact criteria for Japanese identity; she shuffled her feet awkwardly at the doorway, looking troubled.

“He’s not Russian.”

At that moment, Nobuko— “You know, it must be Miyano.” “That must have sounded like ‘Myano’ to Nyura… right?” “Oh, right—that makes sense.” “Even so, this Miyano person—do you know him?” “I don’t.”

“Who could it be?” In any case, after asking Nyura to have him wait in the hallway, Nobuko and Motoko went to the bathroom. When she tried to return to the room after washing her face, Motoko—who had gone slightly ahead— “Oh! You’re already here?”

A voice spoke. In response came a man's low voice answering something. Nobuko pricked up her ears at the sound. Had Nyura mistakenly let him through? For a man to enter a women-only room while they were absent— Nobuko became unable to leave the bathroom. Though she wore her usual purple haori as always, beneath it was only a slip.

Opening the bathroom door, Nobuko called Motoko. After putting on the blouse and skirt that had been brought for her and draping her haori over them, she returned to the room to find a man sitting on a chair by the foot of the bed near the door. Seeing Nobuko enter, the man rose from his chair. In a reserved manner, “I’ve intruded so abruptly,” “I’m Miyano.” he said. “He says he’s been researching ballet in Leningrad.”

“Since I came straight from the station upon arriving, I’ve been intruding since morning…” He sat there wearing a half-coat trimmed with fur only at the collar, as though he had business that would take mere minutes. Nobuko felt an odd contradiction between his formal politeness and the brazenness of having entered a women’s room uninvited. Even while aware her question was spiteful, Nobuko asked, “Are you acquainted with Mr. Uiichi Akiyama by any chance?”

she asked. “No—I know your name well, but I have never had the pleasure of meeting you. I heard you were still here.” “Then how did you come to know we’re staying in a place like this—” The unexpected visitor, who had no letter of introduction, was twenty-four or twenty-five years old and dressed in utterly ordinary clothing. At first glance, his face seemed to bear faint pockmarks, while his long eyelashes created an almost oppressive heaviness around his eyes.

The man named Miyano meekly accepted Nobuko’s blunt questioning, "I heard at the embassy," he replied. Nobuko found this suspicious. She couldn’t grasp the sequence of events—how someone who claimed to have come straight from Leningrad to Moscow could have heard about them at the embassy.

After remaining silent for a while, Nobuko—

“—What day is today?” She slowly turned toward Motoko and asked intently. “It’s Sunday!”

The moment she answered as if stating the obvious, Motoko seemed to clearly grasp Nobuko’s intent behind the question. The embassy remained closed to the public on Sundays. With a contemplative "Hmm," Motoko forcefully exhaled a large cloud of cigarette smoke. "Have you been staying in Leningrad this whole time?"

This time, Motoko began asking questions. Since Leningrad had cheaper prices than Moscow and fewer housing shortages, he had been staying there. For the same reasons, several commissioned students from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—Russian language trainees who would become future consuls and such—were also in Leningrad.

“When researching ballet—we’re naturally amateurs, but do you dance yourself?” “That’s not the case—what I do might be called dance history… After all, Russia has held a European and global position in ballet since the Tsarist era. Leningrad had the former Imperial Ballet School, and even now, with that tradition, I believe it clearly leads Moscow in ballet.”

“Excuse me, but we haven’t had our tea yet.” Nobuko interjected. “If you’ll pardon me, may I get started?”

“Please do… I’ve made quite an intrusion…” “Why don’t you take off that coat?” Clearly flustered, Nobuko pointed out. “We can’t very well have tea while letting you just watch…” She handed a cup to the man as well and began drinking tea with buttered bread and an apple. As she did so, Nobuko’s mood began to settle somewhat. Toward Miyano, who had appeared so abruptly, she realized she was failing to behave appropriately both in terms of etiquette and practicality. If there was something odd about his story, then all the more reason she needed to learn concrete details about this Miyano. Nobuko realized that.

“The First National Opera and Ballet Theater is currently performing ‘The Red Poppy.’”

Motoko, who had missed her chance to change into proper clothes, continued talking while drinking tea in her house attire.

“What do you think about that kind of thing? Wouldn’t you say it can’t be considered orthodox ballet?” “In Leningrad this season, they’re performing *Sleeping Beauty*, and I still think it’s splendid—of course, I also came here wanting to see things like *The Red Poppy*.” The man named Miyano was, “I’m primarily focusing on classical ballet as my subject. After all, that’s the foundation.”

he said.

At that time in the Soviet Union, doubts were being raised about Italian-style ballet techniques. There had been arguments that methods like pointe work—requiring extremely rigorous training impossible to master without such discipline—belonged to specialized professional dancers, and that popular dance ought to be more natural. The dances Nobuko had seen at workers' clubs were group dances, but they were not what one would call ballet. Nobuko wore an expression suggesting the topic was growing mildly intriguing,

“Was ballet your specialty in Japan as well?”

she asked.

“Not exactly—I thought since I’m here after all.” “I thought I’d try to compile something on ballet while I’m at it…” Nobuko stared again at Miyano’s face with its irritating eyelashes. What a strange thing for him to say. Since he was here after all, he might as well do some ballet research. If even a diplomat’s wife had said such a thing, it wouldn’t have been strange. If her husband had come as a diplomat and she herself was here anyway, wanting to learn Russian embroidery—that would have made sense. But this young man—then what was the real reason he had come to the Soviet Union? He had arrived without any initial intention to study ballet, and this reasoning of doing ballet “since he was here anyway” struck Nobuko as vaguely disquieting. Whether Nobuko or Motoko, not only had they set clear purposes for coming to the Soviet Union rather than France, but they had also come after handling all necessary arrangements—managing funds during their stay, passports and visas and more. And yet—Nobuko asked Miyano again.

“How long are you planning to stay here?” “Well—it hasn’t been clearly settled yet. —I suppose I’ll stay while they send me travel funds…” Motoko curled a strange wry smile at the corner of her lips.

“Somehow you seem both remarkably privileged and utterly unreliable.” “That’s true.” “That can’t be sustainable.—Forgive my bluntness, but are you affiliated with a magazine or something? This business about receiving funds…” “I have an elder brother in Nishikata-cho. He’s the one sending me money—though he isn’t exactly wealthy himself, so I wonder how long that will last…”

Even as he said this, Miyano showed not the slightest hint of anxiety, nor was there any indication he sought to make his brother keep sending him money. After tidying the tea set and going to the kitchen, Nobuko brimmed with amorphous suspicions. She couldn’t grasp why Miyano had come to their place or discern his purpose. If he merely wanted friendship, why hadn’t he arrived through an introduction—from the embassy, say. When she thought of even the embassy, Miyano’s circumstances grew still more opaque to Nobuko. Though he claimed to have inquired about her address there, the embassy should have been closed that morning. ——

Without knowing his clear purpose for visiting, as they dragged on with their mismatched conversation simply because they were fellow Japanese, Nobuko worried it might lead to sharing dinner together or lingering until nightfall—which would be troublesome. She grew anxious. Even Nobuko herself found this state of mind distasteful. But as their composure faltered and she and Motoko ended up doing all the talking, an inexplicable awkwardness seemed to deepen—she sensed there must be some underlying cause without exception. Nobuko stood in the kitchen for a while, at a loss. How could she naturally bring this bewildering interaction to a close?

After a short while, Nobuko adopted a look of resolve and returned to the room. And then, seeming distressed and in a strained tone, she began to say to Motoko: “Hey... Forgive me for saying so, but isn’t it about time for us?” Would Motoko solve this sudden mystery? After all, there had not been a single arrangement between them to go out that Sunday.

Motoko,

“Ah.”

After answering vaguely, she simply gazed out the window at the glittering golden dome of Christ the Savior Cathedral and continued smoking her cigarette. Even after Nobuko had said that, Miyano showed no sign of leaving.

Nobuko, growing restless again, left the room. Even if they were to go out, Nobuko was troubled about where to go. A place open on Sundays where a man would find it hard to follow—where could such a place be? Nobuko finally thought of the tailor's place. When she returned to the room, Motoko stood up from the other side of the table as if taking that as a cue.

“Well then, shall we go out?” She stated bluntly. “Would you care to accompany us part of the way?” With Motoko’s characteristic aloofness, she had Miyano leave the room so she could change. Nobuko whispered worriedly into Motoko’s ear as she was halfway through taking out a coat from the wardrobe.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Motoko smirked. While walking to the table and taking a wallet from the drawer, she spoke in a voice only Nobuko—who had approached her side—could hear, “Just follow along.”

she said.

When they stepped outside, the quintessential feel of a clear early spring Sunday overflowed both in the town and along the tree-lined avenue. The pedestrians walking more slowly than usual still wore their winter coats, though their valenki—knee-high felt boots—were mostly light rubber overshoes. Between the roadway and the sidewalk, grubby snowmelt puddles and streams of melted snow had formed, but today the center of the sidewalk was dry, revealing the stones beneath. For Nobuko and the others, it was their first day treading directly upon Moscow’s sidewalks now that spring had arrived.

“—It’s starting to dry up.” While rejoicing in the fine weather, Nobuko muttered in a voice pained by the circumstances that had brought them out.

Motoko had come to the corner of Astozhenka, positioning herself slightly ahead of the other two. There, she stopped. And, “Mr. Miyano, which way is it?” She asked, turning around. Just then, a tram bound for Theater Square was approaching from the direction of the gentle slope to their left at a leisurely Sunday pace.

Even though Nobuko and the others hadn't come far from the wooden fence of the building where they lived, Miyano appeared flustered when suddenly questioned like that by Motoko. Muttering "Well..." under his breath, he fluttered his troubled-looking eyelashes.

“—I’ll go buy tickets for *The Red Poppy*.”

“Well then,”

Motoko slightly lowered her leather-hatted head in acknowledgment. "We're going this way..." Miyano touched the brim of his hunting cap.

“Since you may visit Leningrad from time to time—we’ll surely meet again there at our leisure someday.” With that, Miyano stayed behind at the tram stop. Nobuko and the others naturally cut through the town corner where the stop stood and entered the tree-lined avenue. Though dirty snow still lay heaped abundantly along the avenue, a single strip of soft, moist black earth had now emerged down its center. With lingering snow remaining everywhere around them, this narrow band of black earth appearing between those white patches carried a freshness that made hearts quicken. The glossy branches of linden and maple trees lining the avenue—already hinting at budding—grew more supple, their delicate shadows mingling with residual snow at the roots to make that lush freshness feel all the more vivid.

Nobuko, whose mood had been weighed down by the enigmatic visitor, walked along the moist black earth path amidst the coming and going crowd as though letting out a deep sigh, "Oh, I want to take off these winter boots!"

she said. She wanted to strip away everything that clung to her body from winter—all of it. The tree-lined avenue on that early spring Sunday was a scene that made everyone feel that way. Still, the Muscovites—well acquainted with the north's weighty seasonal transitions—had yet to remove their galoshes, and none had unbuttoned their coats. Melting snow, warm moist earth, the faint scent of sap from trees preparing to bud. While savoring the soft, dense air born of those mingling elements, Nobuko and Motoko walked in silence along the tree-lined avenue for a time.

“I was so startled.”

Nobuko said as they walked, "So that's how he does it. I genuinely worried about where we were going and agonized over it." "That's just how it is," Motoko answered in the leisurely manner of someone strolling with a hand tucked into their pocket—as one might in Japanese clothing. "Just take the initiative first." "—That Miyano person... What do you think he's up to?" Still fixated, Nobuko persisted. "Bukko-chan, you've become quite neurotic, haven't you?" "That's certainly true. It's all so ambiguous—Nishikatamachi's brother or whatever—but anyone abroad takes money matters more seriously. It's as if he's exactly the type who'd go home immediately if told to. That way he talks..."

Recalling how Miyano moved through rooms—as if extracting only his body without disturbing the air—Nobuko found this too disagreeable. Even regarding someone like Atsushi Utsumi, Nobuko and the others had no inkling why he came to the Soviet Union with Uiichi Akiyama. Though his manner suggested he alone might stay if Akiyama returned to Japan, they still didn’t know what life he intended in Moscow. Yet despite their ignorance, Utsumi’s every gesture remained ordinary—so ordinarily awkward it gave them no cause for suspicion.

“Well, there are all sorts of people out there anyway—you just have to deal with them as they come. It’s not like we’ve done anything wrong…” “Well, of course that’s true. Of course that’s right. No one here is trying to do anything wrong—even the Soviet people themselves—so why…”

Nobuko faltered and cut off her words. Nobuko, too, hesitated to definitively label Miyano as a sinister professional. After walking in silence for a while, she eventually continued in a low, displeased voice.

“—It’s like he’s sniffing around!” “That’s their own business, isn’t it? It’s none of our damn concern.”

Nobuko and the others had reached the point where the tree-lined avenue gave way to Albert Square. Where Tverskaya Street crossed the avenue stood a statue of Pushkin. At the terminus of this tree-lined path rose a seated statue of Krylov, who had gifted Russian children countless fables. It formed a sculptural group: before the knees of elderly Krylov—dressed in loose housecoat-like attire, sitting comfortably in his chair while leaning forward as if telling a story—three or four children tilted their faces upward in rapt attention. The pedestal bore high-relief carvings of famous scenes from Krylov's fables. For some time they stood there, taking in Krylov's amiable seated figure backed by linden trees ready to bud, while Moscow children played around it, kicking up sprays of meltwater. The Sunday promenade teemed with children walking hand-in-hand with parents, but what struck Nobuko most were the Red Army soldiers in long coats and peaked caps bearing red stars—several pairs of them leading small children by the hand.

When Nobuko emerged from the tree-lined avenue onto Albert Square and passed by a stall, she— "What’s that?" and approached the storefront. The newly released graphic magazine Projektul, featuring a full-cover photograph of Gorky, had several copies hung by strings.

III

When she finished viewing the final partitioned section of the exhibition hall, Nobuko slowly turned back and retraced her steps to the very beginning.

At the exhibition commemorating thirty years of Gorky's literary career, various photographs and documents submitted by the Marx-Lenin Institute were on display. Yet Nobuko, who had absentmindedly looked through everything to the end, felt she hadn't seen a single photograph among them that captured Gorky's childhood years. Still, she wasn't entirely sure she hadn't missed one. Nobuko started over from the beginning, retracing her steps along the partitioned walls. There was a panoramic view of Nizhny Novgorod's old-city district where Maxim Gorky had been born and raised. Photographs showed Volga River docks and crowds of stevedores, with the outskirts of Nizhny captured too—the area around its vast rubbish dump. Simple captions pasted beneath explained: from this dump he had gathered rags and old nails to "earn small coins" for buying bread for himself and his grandmother. Yet not one photograph showed young Gorky scavenging through that rubbish heap.

Following chronological order, the array of photographs showed Nobuko vistas of the city of Kazan before her eyes, then unfolded scenes of the Azov coast and the bustling Near Eastern-style crowds moving through Tiflis. The captions told. What greeted the fifteen-year-old Gorky in Kazan was not Kazan University, which he had hoped to enter, but the slums and dockworkers. Eventually, it was fourteen hours of labor as a baker. Even here, Gorky himself did not appear in any photographs.

Nobuko stopped before a photograph labeled "Kaban’s Quay" and gazed at it intently. Gorky was twenty years old. The caption stated. At night, sitting on this riverbank, Gorky threw stones into the water’s surface while endlessly repeating three words. “What am I supposed to do?” Following the sequence of displayed photographs, Gorky soon returned to Nizhny and attempted pistol suicide on the banks of the Volga. A painful, lonely era of chaos. Even in this era, there were no photographs of Gorky.

It was not until 1900 that Gorky—wearing a black broad-brimmed hat slightly tilted back, a coat slung over his rubakha, and long hair more reminiscent of a Russian craftsman than an artist—began to appear in photographs in his rough-hewn form, familiar even to Japanese readers. From that time onward, he was suddenly photographed in great numbers alongside illustrious figures. Whichever commemorative photograph one looked at conveyed the profound emotion that the earnest people of Russia and Europe had felt toward Gorky’s emergence. The elderly great writer Tolstoy, stern and angular. Chekhov, overflowing with gentle strength and wisdom. Stanislavski and Dančenko, who began a new theatrical movement through the Moscow Art Theatre. Every one of them was photographed facing the lens alongside Gorky with that characteristically Russian earnestness. “Makar Chudra” “The Song of the Falcon” “Three,” followed by “The Petty Bourgeois” and “The Lower Depths,” along with other old editions, were beginning to be displayed on stands beneath numerous commemorative photographs. The commentary said with emotion that Gorky had gathered and depicted from among the people—who had wasted their lives in ignorance and barbarism under the Tsar’s tyranny—those “fragments we call extraordinary, good, indomitable, and beautiful.”

The exhibition had only just opened yesterday. In the bright, quiet hall—still not crowded enough to be bothersome—Nobuko retraced her steps once or twice, gazing at that section. Once he became famous and his works began to appear, Gorky had been photographed so extensively that his very existence became an object of universal interest. But what of Gorky before that—the child who had labored so desperately to survive? The youth who had suffered among obscene, ignorant apprentice bakers until he nearly sought death? That not a single photograph existed of Gorky from those most agonizing years—that only the towns forming the backdrop of his struggle had been captured—left Nobuko rooted to the spot with profound realization. In ordinary society, when someone’s path becomes fixed, people clear space for their existence and vie endlessly to photograph them without stinting praise. But when Gorky was still a child—when even whether that boy would survive his circumstances remained uncertain as he wandered rubbish dumps battling hunger and depravity—and when he had grown into a young man living in squalor while tormented by burgeoning desires for growth and vague premonitions of possibility, those around him had known nothing of his existence and remained indifferent. At the moment people praised works like *Three* and *Makar Chudra* as literary masterpieces, did they find solace merely by romanticizing lives they had never truly known?

Upon discovering that not a single photograph had been taken throughout Gorky’s childhood and youth, Nobuko felt as though a new and piercing facet of life had been laid bare before her. Tolstoy’s childhood photographs had been included even in his complete works. Lenin’s too. What about Chekhov?

Resting on the large leather-covered bench by the exhibition hall’s window, Nobuko tried to recall. The Chekhov photographs preserved in her memory were all images from his later period—the time when he appeared alongside Gorky in such pictures. Had anyone ever seen a photograph of Chekhov as a boy? As she sifted through scattered memories, one realization arrested her thoughts: Chekhov too must have been poor in his youth. His father had been a liberated serf who made his living as a street vendor in Taganrog, a town near the Sea of Azov—this much she remembered reading. If so, then Chekhov as well would have lacked the means for occasional childhood photographs.

When she became aware of these things, Nobuko found her underarms growing clammy of their own accord. When the snowmelt ended and spring light overflowed, Nobuko began to see droves of young Soviet people taking photos of each other on Moscow’s tree-lined avenues, within Moscow University’s grounds, and sometimes against the backdrop of buildings on bustling streets.

Just a few days ago, when Nobuko and Motoko were taking a walk in Briar. Under the linden tree there, a photographer had set up an old-fashioned backdrop and tripod, running his shop as one would in places like Nikko or Kamakura in Japan. A sign that read "Photos for 50 kopeks" was pasted on the trunk of the linden tree. As Nobuko and the others passed by, a young woman with a bobbed haircut was earnestly staring into the lens, about to have the shutter clicked. Nobuko sympathetically observed the rustic joy and nervousness on the plump girl’s ruddy face. She considered it a quintessentially Soviet scene—a simple tree-lined avenue. But at the same time, Nobuko remarked to Motoko.

“When you see places like this, Russia really is Europe’s countryside, isn’t it?” Then, following her train of thought: “In Europe, they say there’s a trick to spotting Japanese people.—Do you know?” “No.” “If someone’s yellow-skinned, wears glasses, and carries around a fancy camera—they say that’s definitely a Japanese person.”

“I see.”

On the bench in the exhibition hall, what Nobuko recalled was this conversation she had. The fact that Gorky had not possessed a single photograph from his childhood or youth. And the reality that not even one snapshot remained of the grandmother Gorky had so loved—the grandmother whose storytelling he had considered as vital as life itself—made Nobuko bitterly reflect on the superficiality of her own chattiness. The harshness of Russia’s impoverished people’s pitiful lives. An existence ignored. That Soviet youth now chased spring light so joyfully, photographing one another, was by no means mere rustic novelty.

Nobuko felt both apologetic and relieved that those around her hadn’t understood those petty Japanese words she had spoken. In all societies up to that time, photography had never been merely about whether one took pictures or refrained from taking them. Nobuko learned this fact for the first time. In that era when photography required significant expense, those who had their pictures taken were people with sufficient wealth to know methods of commemorating and preserving themselves—people who possessed the means to perpetuate their joys and loves by gazing at photographs over time. If photography in Russia during that period had not carried such inherent class connotations, snapshots of Gorky’s boyhood—when his romantic and untamed humanity lay exposed—would surely have been taken by someone. Even regarding Chekhov’s childhood, there might have existed one or two photographs taken by an uncle or someone.

The young Soviet people’s desire for cameras, their eagerness to have even a single photograph of themselves, was not the kind of rustic curiosity Nobuko had naively imagined. The poor people of old Russia—ignored by the wealthy and powerful, utterly passive and indifferent even toward their own existence—likely had neither reason nor interest, nor even the thought, to photograph their lives.

Photography and such things had existed solely as amusements for those with money. The fact that in Soviet life today, the people were so fond of photographs undoubtedly stemmed from their joy in existence, the diversity and dynamism of their daily activities, and their sense of purpose in life. Behind this fondness for photographs, it seemed to speak of countless existences living with an awareness of their own significance while society simultaneously acknowledged them.

When touching on such points, Nobuko couldn’t help but realize just how warped her feelings toward photographs had become. And she was struck by her own self-centeredness in having thought of both the sarcasm directed at Japanese tourists in Europe and the Soviet photography craze as manifestations of the same rusticity. Nobuko had had an enormous number of photographs taken of her since childhood—so many as to be called countless—even including those taken with Mrs. Nikitina when she came to Moscow. It began with her first photograph as a baby—Nobuko Sasa—commemorating her 100th day of life, inscribed on the back in her father’s handwriting. There was Yasuzo Sasa in his youth, holding the hand of his eldest daughter—still a small child sucking on a rubber pacifier—along with his grandmother wearing a hifu, his brothers, and his mother. When she married Tsukuda in New York, Nobuko recalled one of the commemorative photographs they had taken. In addition to the ordinary photos taken side by side, Nobuko, of her own preference, brought her face close to Tsukuda’s and had their profiles photographed from the side with the concept of a commemorative medal. It showed Tsukuda’s sharply defined profile in full, with the softly burning lines of twenty-one-year-old Nobuko’s face aligned along his轮廓. Six years later, after divorcing Tsukuda, Nobuko could not bear to look at that photograph. The photograph that so commemorated the union between Tsukuda and herself—its refusal to fade—was unbearable. Nobuko, who cherished her life so deeply that she had never torn up a single diary entry she had written, peeled that medal-style photograph from its backing and placed it into the stove fire. Nobuko had come to dislike photographs.

From around eighteen onward, Nobuko had grown to dislike photographs through her aversion to the very predicament of being forced to have her picture taken. This differed from the clear-minded girls who resisted out of humiliation at being made to take omiai photographs. From the opposite angle of how Gorky had been exposed to life’s hardships, Nobuko had been thrust into society’s spotlight early. The cause lay in her having begun writing novels in her girlhood years. Nobuko had her photograph taken by newspaper and magazine crews even when she didn’t want it. Those photographs were always put on public display alongside articles laced with curiosity, irony toward Takedayo’s concern for her daughter, and insinuations of distrust in Nobuko’s future prospects. For Nobuko, this was agony. Disgusted by such artificial circumstances, she had thrown herself into marriage with Tsukuda as if diving into an ordinary woman’s life—yet there too, photographs haunted her. That Nobuko had made such an abrupt, unexpected marriage. ...that she’d gotten pregnant and thus had no choice but to wed some American ruffian named Tsukuda to clean up the mess—along with such rumors.

All of these things tormented Nobuko, warping her sense of self. The reason she maintained such unimaginably intense resentment toward her mother Takedayo lay precisely in Takedayo's failure to comprehend this anguish. One might have called it societal expectation, but from Nobuko's perspective, Takedayo kept dragging her daughter along to fulfill what amounted to irresponsible demands. Nobuko had no choice but to resist.

While gazing at one of the partitions decorated with red cloth at the Gorky exhibition before her, Nobuko found herself deep within her endlessly expanding thoughts—but gradually, the color of that red decorative cloth blurred in her vision. No matter how much she believed she had resisted her circumstances, Nobuko could no longer deny that she still carried within herself an unpleasantly slick and glossy kind of superficiality. While despising the photographs that sought to capture her reluctant self, in the end Nobuko had been photographed. While being photographed against their will yet considering photographs costly treasures worth cherishing—Nobuko felt far removed from those plain, honest people who had to pay for a single photograph from money earned through their own labor. This was a sensibility honed by so-called culture atop middle-class shallowness, Nobuko thought. As she thought this, the red of the exhibition’s decorative cloth grew even more blurred. For Nobuko, acknowledging her own worldly-wise self was painful.

Nobuko descended the Renaissance-style front stone steps of the Central Art Museum one step at a time in her dejected manner and emerged onto the street. When the snowmelt finished and roads dried eighty percent, Moscow abruptly transformed into a clamorous place. The clangor of trams; on roadways paved with worn-rounded cobblestones, freight wagons and hackney carriages passed frequently, their rigid wheels clattering while scattering small sparks between horseshoes and paving stones. When Nobuko had first arrived, Moscow had been a white city where snow muffled all sounds. Then snowmelt streams flowed through the town, sunlight danced across rooftops, rain gutters choked with thawwater, and Moscow turned musical with exuberant leaps. Thus in drying spring air as roads desiccated, tram noises and human voices—everything—reverberated when striking building exteriors of gray hues, faded pinks, or peeling yellows.

Today, six months after coming to Moscow, the foundation of Nobuko’s heart lay exposed. As if walking upon that heart which pained her to tread, Nobuko took the road to Astozhenka. The Soviet people acknowledged Gorky as their writer. How deeply rooted that necessity must have been. Even as she walked, Nobuko found herself unable to stop contemplating this. That there were children’s homes in the Soviet Union, that there were children’s libraries. That universities stood open to working youths. The Soviet people took pride and joy in having begun building such a society through their own efforts and sacrifices. Gorky’s boyhood had been the life of besprizornye—homeless children, as Soviet parlance called them. Gorky, who had grown up learning to read from a cook on a Volga steamer, now watched over these newly emerging children’s libraries alongside his own scorching memories. That universities existed for all working youths. That universities unlike “My Universities” had arisen in the Soviet Union.

Gorky had to fight to survive and to remain human. Just as all the Russian people had to undergo that struggle. And every one of Gorky’s stories is a tale of those people’s sorrow, goodwill, and struggles. In the course of their patient and persistent struggle—as these people resolved to transform their lives and live as humans—Gorky was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and had to emigrate to Italy. Gorky’s life was, in its entirety, the history of all Russian people who had strived honestly and tirelessly for a better human life.

On her way back from the Gorky exhibition, Nobuko felt the question she had directed at herself during winter—when she had met the Chinese scholar Dr. Lin in a vacant room at the Metropolitan—even more deeply now, directed at herself once again. In her own view, she had always valued life and had not been indifferent to people’s fates. As a woman. As a human being. But with whom did she live, and for whom was she a writer? For what kind of people could Nobuko be said to be an indispensable writer?

As she crossed Astozhenka’s corner, Nobuko cringed inwardly at having made that impertinent remark about the photographs. Had someone else said such a thing, they would have detested Nobuko Sasa for those words. This mentality neither resonated with Soviet hearts grounded in reality nor connected with the guileless sincerity of Japan’s unassuming people. At that instant, Nobuko remembered another photograph. It showed her with Madame Nikitina. In it—while earnestly gazing at the lens with solemn expression—she had posed exactly as instructed: one hand lightly touching a small pearl necklace, the other arm draped over a sofa back visible behind Madame Nikitina’s shoulder, both hands meticulously framed. The thick-bearded photographer had praised her hands’ plump elegance, insisting he must capture them this way. When she saw the finished print—whether German or Soviet in style with its heavy chiaroscuro—Nobuko flushed with discomfort. Somewhat abashed, she remarked to Atsushi Utsumi who delivered it,

“Everyone ended up posing so much,” she said with a laugh. The fact remained that Uiichi Akiyama, Atsushi Utsumi, and Motoko—all captured there—were each striking affected poses exactly as the photographer had instructed. Yet in Nobuko’s case, the commonplace stylishness of her hand placement clashed conspicuously with the Eastern weightiness of her broad-featured face and the inner tension reflected within. When the photographer had praised her hands as beautiful, Nobuko hadn’t considered at all what this might imply about her life. Moreover, this beauty was being appraised not by the prominence of knuckles or strength that creates and sustains life—but merely by their plump smoothness. ——

To Nobuko, the memory of Polinyak scooping her up and all the thoughts she had associated with it were now recalled in a different light, triggered by the photographs. Until now, Nobuko had never regarded her birth into a middle-class background as something inherently shameful. She had always maintained there was no reason for such shame. And Polinyak and Kemper had recoiled at groveling before the proletariat. Even when the young anarchists of Ryaku came during her time living in Komazawa, Nobuko had not altered that steadfastness of heart.

Even if that itself hadn't been wrong, the glib superficiality she had unknowingly acquired didn't align with Nobuko's own sensibilities.

Nobuko entered the food store near the entrance of the tree-lined avenue while thinking such thoughts. She bought two cups of Prosto Kvasha and bread. At the checkout counter, she paid the money; as the calculator clanged and she received the proffered change, Nobuko realized—while hating all the petit-bourgeois tastes she perceived outside herself—that she had never before agonized over how these same tendencies existed within her, manifesting unbeknownst to her.

Nobuko kept tormenting herself with these thoughts as she climbed the concrete steps of her residence. Even when coming to the Soviet Union, she had pushed nothing but her own desire to live properly upon herself. What had it truly been like at the core? It seemed she could say that precisely because Nobuko wasn't indispensable to anyone, she had been able to come at all. She was nobody's wife. Nobody's mother. As a woman doing literary work, even by the standards of the social stratum she was born into, her presence might have been optional at best. And for the Soviet daily life that constantly drew her interest, or for the multitudes in her homeland living laborious lives different from hers—she hadn't been part of their struggles and strife, nor was she among those who'd persisted without being granted a place in society. She remained far from being their writer.

Until the appointed time arrived to meet Motoko for the meal, Nobuko lay on the divan in the Astozhenka room, lost in thought.

The Maxim Gorky Exhibition commemorating thirty years of his literary career gradually became a city-wide event as days passed. In mid-May, an announcement was made that Gorky would return to the Soviet Union after five years, and in Moscow, from factory club libraries to bookstore shops, "Maxim Gorky Corners" were set up. At the bare display window of the Central Publishing House on Tverskaya Street—where Nobuko and the others had once lived—a large portrait of Gorky was hung over a model of human internal organs.

IV

It was one such evening in early April.

Nobuko stood by the window of their Astozhenka room, looking down at the evening streets below. She listened to the city’s noises. Earlier that day, while she had been out, the winter window seals had been removed from their room. When she returned and opened the door unaware, the avalanche of sound that rushed at her as she entered made her startle. During snowy days, the surroundings had been almost too quiet—even desolate—but with the seals gone, their small Astozhenka room now felt like being inside a sound box. Perhaps because the polygonal mass of Christ the Savior Cathedral, built entirely of marble, stood on a small hill directly before their building, every sound amplified itself before tumbling into Nobuko’s room. Though there was no noisy intersection nearby, each tram passing along the building’s front transmitted clanging and screeching noises from somewhere into their space. Conversations became impossible during these intrusions. Yet Nobuko found she didn’t dislike their room’s new springtime clamor. The familiar nighttime square view now came accompanied by sound—a freshness marking the end of northern lands’ long winter seclusion.

At the table, Motoko, looking at the copy of *Red Virgin Soil* she had bought that day,

“Today, Professor Pereverzev gave a one-hour special lecture on Gorky,” Motoko began to say. “Oh, everyone must have been delighted, I suppose?” “Ah, there was quite a lot of applause—since it was without any prior notice…” Professor Pereverzev had been lecturing on the history of European literature at Moscow University. That semester, during the section on the Romantic era, Motoko had been auditing his classes. Nobuko had tagged along on Motoko’s first day of attendance. In the tiered humanities classroom, students packed so densely that they overflowed all the way to the edge of the podium where Pereverzev lectured, some even sitting there. Others stood listening. When the two-hour lecture—nearly incomprehensible to Nobuko—concluded and shifted to forty-five minutes of questions, an unusual scene unfolded. During the Q&A period, students seemed permitted to hold autonomous discussions among themselves. From several students standing beside the professor and leaning against the blackboard as they took notes, some directly answered questions or organized them by saying, “Your question was covered in last week’s lecture.” Nobuko, seated beside Motoko midway up the tiered classroom, found her attention drawn to one particularly vocal student among the group near the podium. He was a petite young man with strikingly bright blond hair. Tilting his freckled face upward to survey his peers filling the classroom, he responded to a question about Hugo. Since Russian pronounces H as G, the small blond student in a faded grape-colored rubashka called out “Gyuugo! Gyuugo!” for Hugo, gesturing animatedly as if at a union meeting. The scene brimmed with warm humor. Nobuko recalled that moment while—

“What did he say?”

and asked Motoko about the content of Professor Pereverzev’s talk.

“He talked about the romanticism present in Gorky’s works, but...”

Motoko’s voice carried a reluctant tone. “Compared to revolutionary romanticism, the romanticism permeating most of Gorky’s works is essentially petty-bourgeois in nature—or so he claims. Apparently, only *Mother* possesses class-based romanticism.”

Motoko’s cigarette smoke drifted through the green shade of the lamp. Nobuko,

“Hmm,” she said. Speaking of which, in *The Lower Depths* that Nobuko and the others had seen at the Moscow Art Theater, the role of Luka the pilgrim had been interpreted realistically. The Moscow Art Theater’s Luka was portrayed not as someone offering comfort or hope to the people of *The Lower Depths*, but rather as a talkative figure who—while himself mired in lower-depths existence with no intention of escaping it—repeatedly spun fabricated tales of aspiration, thereby rendering the discontented people even more powerless. This point in particular had been explained in the program. The fact that Luka had been interpreted in this manner in the production added a more realistic depth to the misery of *The Lower Depths*, compellingly conveying it to the audience. At least, that was Nobuko’s impression.

“Of course I understand that Gorky’s romanticism could be excessive at times,” “As Chekhov said.” “But really—can you just decide so easily that only *Mother* has commendable revolutionary romanticism while the rest are petty-bourgeois?” Motoko said with a gaze that seemed to rebel against something. “The theme of *Mother* is revolutionary and heroic.” “Therefore, what exists there is revolutionary romanticism—is that all there is to it?”

With Kyoto-style underbite lips and a stifled expression, Motoko looked angry,

“What exactly is a *mechtatel*—a dreamer?” “Huh?” “What exactly is a *mechtatel*—a dreamer—that wells up in the human heart?” Motoko spoke those words—words that expressed yearning and anticipation—in Russian, whose very resonance spoke to the heart, with force and urgency.

From the window where today’s removed paper strips now let through sound, occasional noises of early spring nights rose faintly as Christ the Savior Cathedral’s golden dome loomed hazily in moonless skies. After prolonged silence bearing pained resentment, “I detest this particular facet of their mentality here,” Motoko said.

“They just divide everything into this or that,” “split things apart and compare them—one side has value, the other has none.” “I can’t stand how they just settle things like that.” Motoko continued as if driven by suppressed emotions. “Even Gorky was just human, wasn’t he? How could a single human writer have just one work with revolutionary romanticism popping up while the rest lack it? They must connect somewhere.” Her voice sharpened. “Isn’t that connection precisely where humanity and literature intersect? And socialism—” she concluded bitterly, “—I suspect its vital point lies there too.”

Motoko concluded with sarcasm. It was rare for Motoko to speak with such concentrated emotion.

Nobuko understood what Motoko was trying to say. However, Nobuko—unlike Motoko, who was fluent in languages—had absorbed a great many points from the Gorky exhibition she had seen with her own eyes exactly as they were, points that compelled her to reflect on herself.

Such things often occurred between Nobuko and Motoko. When it came to evaluations of Gorky’s art in the Soviet context, Nobuko—true to herself—could not help having doubts arising from what she saw with her own eyes. Shortly after Nobuko and the others arrived in Moscow, a cartoon of Gorky had appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta (The Literary Gazette). An elderly Gorky, wearing a white calico cap with fluttering brim like those worn by wet nurses, was shaking Childhood placed in a cradle. Nobuko felt no goodwill toward that cartoon. In that sense, it left an impression. Even this year, there had been a cartoon of Gorky in some magazine where he was made to wear a woman’s skirt. It showed Gorky wearing a skirt, crouching by the stove as he slowly stirred a large pot labeled Forty Years. Nobuko stared at the cartoon with slight dread, thinking this might reflect how those in the Russian Proletarian Writers’ Union—abbreviated as RAPP—felt toward Gorky, that they could portray him this way.

Around this time, as Maxim Gorky’s contributions to Russia’s history of people’s liberation and its art came to be re-evaluated—commemorating his thirty years as a writer and beginning with Lunacharsky’s critiques—all publications, including *Literaturnaya Gazeta*, aligned their approaches toward Gorky.

The other Sunday evening, in the *Prozhektor* bought at Albert Square, there was a page titled "Maxim Gorky as Depicted in Cartoons." All of these had appeared in publications like the *Petersburg Gazette* during the era when Gorky, as the author of *The Petty Bourgeois* and *The Lower Depths*, first began attracting public attention. One cartoon depicted Gorky—wearing his signature black wide-brimmed hat and a rubakha—playing a balalaika and singing atop a monument’s pedestal, around which three Russian vagrants danced in a circle. On the pedestal’s stone was inscribed: “To Maxim Gorky...” “From the grateful vagrants” was written. Beneath a cartoon that abruptly attached a large bare foot to Gorky’s caricature was written: “A Head That Praises the Feet of Vagrants.” Around the large mushroom-like caricature labeled “Gorky,” the small, clustered faces of numerous writers sprouted forth. Gorky, clenching his fists in irritation as he watched the very petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia he had once portrayed with bitter disgust in *The Petty Bourgeois* now applauding him under the label of “reader masses after all.” All of these were cartoons from around 1900. In the newly drawn cartoon for *Prozhektor*’s Gorky special issue, an elderly Gorky—wearing a suit that revealed his large nostrils and drooping beard—was depicted standing like a giant amidst a woman flinging dirty water from a bucket at him, a man cradling a harp while setting a rope trap at his feet with one hand, and a crowd of men brandishing liquor bottles and pens in both hands while shouting, a half-smoked hand-rolled cigarette held between his fingers. The mischievous dwarfs causing trouble appeared to be caricatures of the Symbolist poets and writers who had emigrated to France after the revolution.

There were several lines explaining "Maxim Gorky, who had no connection whatsoever with White émigrés abroad." Ivan Bunin had even fabricated gossip, falsely claiming Gorky had tuberculosis. However, it stated that in reality, Gorky had never suffered from tuberculosis. When Gorky went to Sorrento in 1923 on Lenin’s advice, Nobuko too had thought the reason was for his convalescence. Prozhektor denied this.

Gorky must have seen the paintings of himself wearing that wet nurse’s cap in Sorrento, and he must have also gazed upon the depictions of himself as an old woman in a skirt stirring the pot labeled "Forty Years." And now, himself being depicted as a giant as well. Whether he had tuberculosis or not—this belated debate—how must it have appeared to Gorky’s heart? Nobuko was acutely concerned about such things. Gorky was trying to return to the Soviet Union. What images lay before Gorky’s heart as he sought to return to the Soviet Union? It was clear that these were not images of himself wearing a wet nurse’s cap or a skirt. Gorky’s heart must have been thinking of himself returning directly to the tens of millions of Soviet people. With that thought, Nobuko pictured Gorky growing old and saw his truthful eyes in the photograph.

That evening, when Nobuko stepped into the corridor after nine o'clock, she noticed Nyura standing in an oddly awkward posture in the hallway between their room and the kitchen. Nobuko wondered if Nyura had also wanted to go where she herself was heading,

“Are you going?” She pointed at the washroom door. Nyura—who wore a woolen shawl over her head as though she had just returned from somewhere—hurriedly, “No. No.” She shook her head and vanished into the kitchen. When Nobuko emerged, Nyura’s head peeked out again from the kitchen area. While wondering what was wrong, as Nobuko was about to enter her room just as she was, from behind—

“Miss!” Nyura’s desperate voice called out. Nobuko, slightly surprised, returned to the front of the kitchen. “What’s wrong? “What’s wrong, Nyura?” “Excuse me for disturbing you.”

“I don’t mind.” “But… is something wrong?” “Are you feeling unwell?” “No. No.” Nyura once again shook her head hurriedly from side to side, her dusky half-Greek face with its high-bridged nose staring at Nobuko through bewildered black eyes. “Please listen, Miss. I have to hang the laundry.” “I have to hang the laundry before the Mistress returns.” “She said that and left.”

Nobuko couldn’t understand why Nyura had to be so flustered about hanging the laundry.

“Nyura, you always hang them yourself, don’t you? Or is the Mistress hanging them?” “I’m the one who hangs them. But I’m scared.” While saying “I’m scared,” Nyura widened her eyes under her shawl as if she truly saw something frightening there.

Nyura, a seventeen-year-old born in a small town somewhere along the Black Sea coast, had received almost no education. She had not been awakened to the consciousness befitting a Soviet daughter. Even after Nobuko and the others had taught her their names—Yoshimi and Sassa—Nyura preferred to address them in the old-fashioned way as “Miss.” She called Lyubakov “Master” and his wife “Mistress.” In Moscow, only cab drivers or street vendors at most still called Nobuko and the others baryshnya. Though even bakery clerks now addressed them as “women citizens,” Nyura’s circumstances as a maid—apparently found and brought back by the Lyubakov couple when they went south for their summer vacation—remained antiquated and lonely.

From Nyura's fearful words, Nobuko recalled the recent rumor that a thief had broken into another wing of this building.

“Nyura, where do you hang that laundry?” “It’s the drying area.”

“Where is that?” “It’s upstairs.” “It’s the very top.” Finally, it began to make sense to Nobuko. The drying area was on the very top of the fifth floor. That was why Nyura was afraid to go there alone to hang the laundry even though it was already night. “I understand, Nyura. I’ll go with you.”

“Thank you, Miss. You are very kind.”

“I’ll put on my coat and come back, okay?”

“I’ll wait.” Nobuko returned to the room and, while taking out her coat, “I’m just going to accompany Nyura while she hangs the laundry.”

she told Motoko.

"She said she's scared to go all the way up to the top alone." "But are you sure you'll be all right going out now, Bukko?" "But it's inside the building." "Well, that's true, but..."

“It’s perfectly safe.” “Alright then.” Nobuko left the apartment with Nyura. Nyura properly closed the front door as she always did when going out. The bare concrete stairs had only small naked bulbs on each landing—their dim candle-like glow barely illuminating the steps. In the stairwell lined with tightly shut apartment doors and devoid of any other person, their footsteps echoed loudly. Nyura’s fear became understandable—a loneliness that made sense. They climbed quickly and silently up to the sixth floor. When they reached the top, the dead end became a glass-enclosed balcony, and to the right stood a single door with another bare bulb. They stopped before it,

“It’s here.”

Nyura took a key from her pocket and opened the door. Illuminated by the bare light bulb, the low-ceilinged hall came into view—ropes stretched across its width, various laundry items hung here and there. The floor was covered in sand. After entering the drying area together with Nobuko, Nyura locked the door again from the inside. Moving ahead of Nobuko, she briskly passed alongside multiple rows of hung laundry and set down the carried bucket beneath a rope stretched near the back wall. On the wall above the large nail anchoring the rope, the apartment number stood clearly written. Nyura began hurriedly hanging the large double-bed sheets and undergarments on the rope. With Nobuko standing waiting on the sandy floor, Nyura appeared restless—

“Soon—soon,” she repeated. “It’s all right, Nyura—take your time. I’m not in any hurry. If you lock it, there’s nothing to fear—don’t you think?” Nyura kept hanging the laundry sideways along the rope without immediately replying. “A little better,” she answered brusquely. Nobuko laughed.

The air in the low-ceilinged, dimly lit drying area was damp and carried the lingering scent of soap that never seemed to dissipate. "Why did you come to hang the laundry at night today?"

While looking around the area, Nobuko asked Nyura.

“Today wasn’t laundry day.” “So an exception?” “Yes—I washed them earlier. The mistress is in a hurry.” Nobuko felt pity for young Nyura’s shabby figure as she hung laundry with her awkwardly long arms. The Soviet household workers’ union had established that employers must pay extra per hour for labor outside contracted time. Nyura probably didn’t know about such things. It also became clear to Nobuko that the Lyubakovs found it not the least inconvenient that Nyura remained unaware.

“Nyura, do you have parents?” “They died, both of them.” “In 1921—from typhus. In 1921, heaps of people died.” Foreigners like John Reed had died from it too, and rare brave upper-class partisan leaders and political officers like Madame Larisa Reisner—whose collected works Motoko had recently bought—had also died around that time according to the prefaces. “Nyura, are you all alone?”

“Yes.” Having finished hanging the last undergarment, Nyura bent down to pick up the empty bucket she had pushed toward her feet. But she suddenly stopped and looked back at Nobuko, who stood diagonally behind her. Then, without preamble, “My real name isn’t Nyura.” she said. “It’s Evdokia—but the people here only ever call me Nyura.”

Nobuko involuntarily stared at Nyura's dark-complexioned young face marked by fine eruptions at the temples. Upon that face lay a plea concerning circumstances Nyura herself could not fully articulate. Compassion colored Nobuko's eyes. Nyura stared back into those eyes. In the damp air of the nighttime drying area—thick with soap's sharp odor—the two women stood facing each other between hanging laundry before silently moving toward the entrance door. Still wordless, Nyura unlocked the door, exited, and locked it behind them. Their echoing footsteps carried them down the deserted staircase once more.

When they had descended to the fourth floor, Nobuko asked.

“Nyura, how much is your monthly wage?” “Thirteen rubles.” ……

At the stairs leading to the third-floor landing, Nobuko asked, “Nyura, do you know about your union?” She had been walking along the street toward Nikitsky Gate the other day when she saw many women—mostly standing—holding some kind of meeting in an empty storefront facing the sidewalk. The shop’s open door allowed any passersby to enter. Nobuko went in and stood listening—it turned out to be a household workers’ union meeting. Remembering that gathering’s uniquely sluggish yet earnest tempo—heavy but fervent—she had asked Nyura.

“I know.” “Then join! You’ll make friends. They’ll write your real name Evdokia on those documents there.” “I already gave the documents to the master to fill out.”

“When?” “About three months ago.” If we speak of three months ago, it was when Nobuko and the others had not yet moved to Astozhenka. “Keep asking them often until they write it down for you, okay?”

Because they were already at their employers’ door, Nyura answered hesitantly, “Yes.” she said.

When they rang the bell, Motoko came out and opened the door. The Lyubakovs had not yet returned. “You really took your time! I was starting to think something had happened.”

“Was that so? I’m sorry. We didn’t hurry, right? Nyura?”

Nyura stood at the kitchen entrance, removing her shawl, and wordlessly smiled.

V

The next morning, Nyura brought the tea utensils as usual. Then, carefully bending at the waist, she placed the teapot and light-blue kettle one by one on the table, and with an utterly despairing air, let both her overextended arms drop onto her skirt. “Oh! I’ve ended up in such misfortune!”

With a groan, “Oh! Oh!” she cried while arching her back and flapping her arms against her patched brown skirt as though striking it. The motion mirrored exactly when Motoko had struck the street vendor woman’s face at Red Square’s edge—the vendor had wailed “Oh! Oh!” in exaggerated theatrical weeping. “What’s wrong, Nyura?”

Motoko asked, as if disliking Nyura’s exaggerated manner.

“They were stolen! Oh!”

“What was stolen?” “The laundry—all the laundry I dried last night is gone. They were stolen.” “You said you dried them last night…” Motoko turned a surprised face toward Nobuko. “Is this about the laundry you helped hang, Bukko-chan?” “Nyura, calm down. The things I dried with you last night—are they gone?” “All the laundry had disappeared by this morning—what fault is mine? Even without such things, I’m not happy at all… How cursed I am! What’s the point of me having large sheets?”

Tears streamed down Nyura's cheeks. "The mistress must think I stole them." "She already called." "They'll bring police dogs to sniff every inch of me." "Oh!" As if confronted by her ultimate terror made flesh through these police dogs, Nyura's tears flowed even more violently. "Nyura, you do remember locking the drying area when we left, don't you?" "What does it matter that I locked it?" "The key to get in there exists in every apartment in this building... When those dogs come, I'll make them sniff every single person here—Oh!"

Nyura left the room without wiping her tears, her cheeks still wet.

"What on earth had happened?" Recalling the late-night laundry area she had seen the previous evening and the deserted staircase, Nobuko made an uneasy face and glanced back at Motoko. Why had only the laundry Nyura hung been stolen? Water from the wet laundry had still been dripping onto the sand spread over the floor back then. As for Nyura’s belongings, they were one of the birch boxes placed beneath the folding bed attached to the kitchen wall.

“This is exactly why you shouldn’t meddle in pointless things.”

Motoko said displeasedly. Not only would we be inconvenienced—if things were like that, there might have been danger lurking somewhere even last night. For that reason, Motoko became displeased and reproached Nobuko’s thoughtlessness.

“Was there something special?” “No. “Two sheets, women’s underwear, towels… How strange—even though others had so much hung out to dry too…”

Nobuko couldn't believe the disaster concerned only the Lyubakov household. "Even if Nyura doesn't know about it, it must be happening elsewhere too—how dreadful," Motoko said in her characteristic manner while preparing to leave for university, "I don't know," she remarked with an intentional jut of her chin. "Well, they'll just have dogs sniff everything or whatever."

And she left. Nobuko, now alone, tidied the table and settled into her usual spot. The half-filled manuscript pages she had started writing had already accumulated to about thirty sheets and were clipped together with a nickel paper fastener. As she reread parts she had written the day before, she forgot about the commotion caused by the thief since early morning. On manuscript paper with blue grid lines, using poor-quality purple ink made in Moscow, Nobuko continued writing for a while. Nobuko was writing about that recent Easter night.

Religion is opium. A placard declaring "Religion is opium" stood displayed in the showcase window of the anti-religion publishing house across from the Hotel Grand Moscow. Yet in 1928 Soviet Russia, churches holding Easter services remained abundant. On Paskha's eve, street vendors—though few—sold dyed eggs and artificial altar flowers colored on wood shavings. At Fram-Frista-Spasitelya, chapel walls beneath golden domes blazed with hundreds of massive candles all at once, while singers from the Moscow First Opera and Ballet Theater came to perform the hymn chorus. Nobuko and Motoko joined the crowds surging toward Fram-Frista-Spasitelya. This throng seemed utterly oblivious to phrases like "Religion is opium." Women outnumbered and stood out more than men in the multitude. What caught Nobuko's interest was the distinctive quality of this commotion. The Easter rites conducted by a white-haired archbishop in golden vestments amid censer smoke might have been genuine acts of faith for elderly worshippers crossing themselves with Easter candles at each prayer interval, but for most young attendees, they appeared received merely as traditional spectacle. From such emotional disjunctions, arguments erupted sporadically through the crowd. This was an episode at history's seam—something Nobuko had wanted to write about.

As always, trains occasionally passed by with a terrible noise. Each time they did, the delicate yellow mimosa blossoms arranged in a cup on the desk trembled. Nobuko kept writing while feeling a tension within her heart like she was wrestling with something. Since she had begun writing her Moscow impressions, Nobuko became conscious of this nervous intensity she had never before experienced. The sensation persisted even as she wrote onward. When she started setting down her impressions of Soviet social phenomena, their complexity and sheer scale seemed poised to overwhelm her.

Nobuko wanted to convey her Moscow impressions through raw sensations exactly as she perceived them. She had always absorbed Moscow through her eyes—through happenings and vistas charged with color, motion, sound, and sentiment. That tempo, that urgency—each emotional spark and landscape rooted in profound causality. When she attempted to render these as witnessed and lived, her prose spontaneously gained dimensionality and vividness while developing rapid Tempo-like leaps. Yet it remained fragmentary.

Nobuko’s writing style, which shared something with Eisenstein’s films and Meyerhold’s stage productions, felt unfamiliar even to her. Yet life’s stimuli spontaneously imparted this style to Nobuko, compelling her to write in no other way.

If one were to trace the actual circumstances of Nobuko living in Moscow, Moscow was not merely the external phenomena she was writing about in her impressions. Nobuko received various things into herself through her eyes, and through them, she was excavating what it meant to be herself. As at the time of the Gorky exhibition. However, the ability to render Moscow in her impressions—as a force that acted deeply upon a woman’s inner self while sustaining her—was something Nobuko still lacked. Nobuko did not yet clearly grasp the self being shaped by these influences within herself. Nobuko was writing her impressions by naturally limiting the themes through her own choices.

It was when Nobuko had finished writing about the argument between the old woman and the young girl she had witnessed in the crowd on Easter night. There was a knock at the door.

“May I come in?” Nyura’s choked voice sounded through the door. Nobuko recalled that morning’s thief incident. She thought the police dogs had arrived. She did not want those professionals—people who couldn’t read Japanese script—to see the manuscript filled with its characters. Nobuko hurriedly rose from her chair, slipping the pages into the nickel fastener as she called out, “Come in.” She adopted a formal tone. The one who entered was Nyura alone. She came in with a tear-streaked face and swollen lips.

“What’s wrong, Nyura?”

Nobuko sat back down in her chair. Silently pressing her body close, Nyura stood beside her. A faint kitchen smell emanated from Nyura’s clothes. That Nyura had come to Nobuko’s room—unable to endure waiting alone in the kitchen wondering if the police dogs would arrive any moment—became clear from her demeanor: having entered, she remained standing there utterly at a loss.

“Nyura.” “Stop being scared.” “Dogs are honest, so they’ll clearly understand there’s no laundry or anything like that hidden with you, Nyura.”

Even after being encouraged so, Nyura—still wearing a half-convinced expression as she gazed out the window at Fram-Frista-Spasitelya’s golden dome— “The Mistress suspects me.”

Deeply wounded, she muttered in a tone that offered no path to healing. “Would the Mistress have kept me employed for nine months if I were dishonest?”

Nyura drew a deep, sob-like breath, “Ah. How sad,” and twisted her entire body.

“They’re always like that.”

Nyura began speaking in a high-pitched, hurried tone.

Before Nobuko and the others had moved there, there had been a lodger named Orlov—a man with a creepy goatee. Orlov with the goatee had everything specially made for him. His special nickel towel rack. His special wine glass. And he always scattered small coins in disarray on his desk. “Why did that man have to leave his coins out like that—he was waiting for me to take them.” “I knew he was testing me.” “How many times did that man summon me during the mornings and evenings?” “Dear Nyura, please do this for me.” “Kind Nyura, do that.”

Nyura said with hatred, “Dear Nyura, please do this for me,” mimicking the goateed man named Orlov when he would say, “Kind Nyura, do that.” “Even as he said those things with his mouth, his eyes were always glaring at me,” she continued. “Every time—even when he laughed—he only laughed with his lips.”

Nobuko looked at the clock and stood up. "Nyura, I have to leave for the formal dinner." Nyura suddenly seemed uneasy about having come to Nobuko's room without any real reason. "Miss..." She looked at Nobuko imploringly. "Even though I've told you all this, please don't say anything to the Mistress."

“You don’t need to worry, Nyura—but you’re lonely, too much alone, even though you have the union.”

As Nyura was about to leave the room, Nobuko said while putting on her coat,

“Even if the dogs come, you mustn’t get scared by wondering if you’re the honest Nyura.”

At four o'clock, Nobuko went to the second floor of the vegetarian cafeteria she had arranged with Motoko. Unlike regular cafeterias, it wasn’t too crowded; she took a seat at a small table by the wall and propped the chair opposite against the table as a sign someone would join her. Since Moscow’s climate had begun feeling springlike, Motoko started saying it was bad for Japanese bodies not to eat more vegetables. Thus they came to visit this vegetarian cafeteria once every three days.

While waiting for Motoko to arrive, Nobuko surveyed her surroundings with a prying gaze that refused to settle into familiarity. Even among Moscow’s cafeterias, diners skewed overwhelmingly male. Here too men dominated the space, but those frequenting this vegetarian establishment ate with deliberate slowness. Their conversations with companions stayed hushed—none exhibited that common sight elsewhere of men neglecting meals to passionately debate matters. Among regular patrons sat a man with shoulder-length hair who carried himself like a Tolstoyan adherent. To Nobuko’s eyes, everyone here seemed burdened by either physical ailments or private anxieties. If not that, they likely maintained personal dietary codes while nursing unspoken reservations about the Soviet regime’s relentless drive. The cafeteria’s atmosphere—permeated by these diners—hung chill and damp with the earthy scents of carrots and spinach. Nobuko kept glancing up at the round wall clock, her expression restless.

Motoko was twenty minutes late.

“Oh, I’m so late.” “Did you order anything ahead?” “I thought I’d wait until you arrived…” “Then let’s order right away.”

The two of them looked at the menu written in hard-to-read purple ink on pale pink paper and chose what to eat.

“What’s wrong? Did they come?”

Motoko asked about the theft investigation. “Nothing had come before I left.”

Motoko, surprisingly, did not dwell on it,

“Well, fine,” Motoko said. “Our room doesn’t even have a single lock—if they want to let the dogs sniff around, let them try.” Since moving to the room in Astozhenka, Nobuko and Motoko’s living conditions had in some ways become worse than before. The room was cramped and packed to the brim, with only one table that they used from opposite sides. However, just as Nobuko found stability in Moscow by accepting even such crampedness as a matter of course, Motoko too, since coming to Astozhenka, began attending university lectures and grew less high-strung. As for the theft incident, though Nobuko remained somewhat preoccupied with it, Motoko took the matter more nonchalantly than Nobuko had secretly feared.

After leaving the vegetarian cafeteria, Nobuko and Motoko took a stroll to the used bookstore on University Avenue. The spacious store interior—its three walls filled with bookshelves up to the grimy white plaster ceiling—was dusty, illuminated day and night by electric light. At the base of the table legs where books lay in piles constantly flipped over by the hands of customers coming and going, stood stacks of Kropotkin's complete works bound with rope. Nobuko happened to stop at a table where only books published between 1917 and around 1921 were haphazardly gathered. There lay intermingled Pushkin collections, Gorky's collected works, Lermontov poetry collections—published by the Soviets during that era of civil war and famine with terrible paper and crude printing—alongside Proletkult pamphlets that had since become classical reference materials.

As Nobuko was shifting aside the books on the table one by one to examine them, Motoko came over from another bookshelf holding two leather-bound volumes she had pulled out. “Did you find anything?” “The Kollontai book from the other day... I wonder if a place like this would have it.”

“Well… After all, they’re practically not being read anymore—it’s suspicious.” After Motoko left for the checkout counter, Nobuko continued looking at the books on the table for a while longer.

About a week ago, a women’s magazine arrived from Japan. In it, Junsaku Niki, a proletarian writer, had written an introductory article about Madame Kollontai’s *The Great Love*, which he had translated and published himself. In his characteristically flamboyant and unrestrained style as a writer, Junsaku Niki strung together arguments to the effect that Kollontai’s views on love and marriage represented the morality at the vanguard of the new century, and that those who rejected Japan’s old conventions ought to study her ideas—all while stimulating the curiosity and aspirations of young women.

In the room in Astozhenka, after reading that article, Nobuko felt a kind of shock. When Nobuko and her companions had first arrived in Moscow, Kollontai-ism had been seen and treated as a typical example of sexual confusion drawn out during society’s transitional shift from old to new. Rather, topics like discipline in sexual life, the social responsibilities of marriage, and establishing families with new social substance were what people repeatedly addressed. *The Great Love* was a novel Madame Kollontai had written during the civil war era. It presented the concept that a new form of sexual life—where neither party bore responsibility after mutual contact, nor recognized any need to develop permanent forms like marriage or family—constituted a materialist perspective. That error was being fundamentally criticized. The reality of materialism—that the foundation for happiness in love, marriage, and family life lay in improving labor conditions for working men and women, expanding social solidarity facilities, and vigorously resolving housing shortages, food scarcity, and childcare issues—had gradually become clear to Nobuko. In every context, this was understood precisely so.

The shock Nobuko felt upon reading Junsaku Niki’s article praising Kollontai-ism in the women’s magazine was not solely due to this belated introduction being handled so recklessly. When she read the article as a woman, she felt an instinctive disgust and heart-wrenching pain. Junsaku Niki—this self-proclaimed proletarian writer—did he feel no responsibility toward socialism? Nobuko found herself unable to fathom Niki’s state of mind.

Around the time Nobuko and the others left Japan, there were popular terms like “Marx Boys” and “Engels Girls.” Nobuko had rarely encountered them herself, but it was said that young men and women in work clothes roamed Ginza. At that time, the three words—erotic, grotesque, and nonsense—were being repeated throughout journalism. The tone of Junsaku Niki’s introduction of Kollontai-ism seemed to align with the first of those three popular terms. Nobuko’s feminine intuition sensed that Junsaku Niki’s interest in handling such matters lay not in theory, but rather in a man’s fascination with such reckless sexual relationships. To put it more bluntly, Nobuko detected in him a certain relish for the peril of young women teetering on collapse—lured by fantasies born from his embellishment of Japanese men’s age-old sexual licentiousness with a novel twist. If men and women and their children, who are far more socially guaranteed, do not need to establish a home as a foundation for living happily and safely while creating things of value for society—if marriage, family, and children can be carelessly cast aside as Kollontai says—then I have no need for socialism. Nobuko, stirred by passion, debated with Motoko.

“If they think socialism just means the proletariat seizing the means of production and political power—they’ll get what’s coming… People aren’t breaking their backs just for that, you know.” “It’s precisely because we want better lives—our hearts and bodies, individuals and society together—that we’re straining every muscle, and yet…” Nobuko, who felt profound disgust toward Junsaku Niki, found herself contemplating the inverse perspective. What did the thousands of Soviet daycare centers, children’s homes, and maternity hospitals truly represent? What story did those hundreds of cafeterias—inadequate as they were—tell about working women’s twenty-four-hour days? If marriage’s social responsibility went ignored, how could laws demanding alimony from irresponsible fathers even exist?

Beneath Nobuko’s indignation toward Junsaku Niki’s promotion of Kollontai-ism lay a subtle feminine sentiment that had gone unspoken at the time. She had married Tsukuda in that manner and divorced in that manner. For four years now, she had lived with Motoko as two women, never becoming any man’s lover. The issues of love and marriage did not seem to press upon her present self. Had anyone asked, she would have answered that she still did not consider marriage now. That reply held no falsehood. It was not that Tsukuda had been a bad husband that made cohabitation impossible. By conventional standards, Tsukuda had been a good husband. Yet to Nobuko, his very excellence as a spouse proved agonizing. His unquestionable goodness—this determination to protect their peaceful, unconstrained household within their own narrow world—had suffocated her. Thus, in her present disinterest toward marriage, it was less that she had failed to find another man beyond Tsukuda than that she resisted the very framework through which her experienced notions of marriage and family had been shaped.

Having been in Moscow for nearly half a year, Nobuko's emotions now held a vague new anticipation regarding the nature of marriage and family—yet alongside it, a disjointed doubt had begun to well up. In the Soviet life that Nobuko observed, social facilities were indeed being energetically created toward enabling happiness. However, within the narrow scope of her experience, she had never encountered a single couple whose union was so fresh and rich that it would make her heart as a woman burn with envy. Whether it be the Lyubakov couple, the Kemper couple, or the countless men and women streaming along the tree-lined avenue with their arms linked—

Yet as she considered how these utterly unremarkable men and women—living within Soviet conventions of mundane diligence, busyness, mundane conflicts, mundane caprices, and bureaucracy—were supported by social protections for each individual woman as worker, wife, mother, and grandmother—protections realized through social contracts that had never existed in the Japanese society Nobuko had lived in, regardless of how exceptional one’s qualities might be—Nobuko found herself moved nonetheless. Rallying herself through the fact that she too was a woman, Nobuko felt invigorated. The expectations and near-convictions about her future as a woman—which had begun sprouting within Nobuko’s still-turbulent heart—protested against Junsaku Niki’s Kollontai-ism with a ferocity comprehensible only to women.

Kollontai’s book was not at that used bookstore after all. When they returned and rang the Lyubakovs’ bell, Nyura’s face looked bright as she opened the door. Right away, Motoko

“What’s wrong, Nyura?” Motoko asked. “Did you get the dogs to sniff it out?” Nobuko teased.

Then Nyura looked back to confirm that the door to the Lyubakovs' room was closed. "I didn't need any police dogs," she declared in a low voice，triumphantly.

“They found that bedding from other houses had been stolen too—look!” “They always figure things out after the fact.” Nyura—who didn’t know how to express her overwhelming joy through any gesture other than haste—hurried ahead down the corridor and opened the door to the room meant for Nobuko and Motoko.

Six

For May Day, Nobuko and the others received tickets to Red Square from the Foreign Cultural Liaison Association.

That morning was slightly cloudy, and the temperature was low. In the streets of Moscow, both trams and buses had stopped. Along the desolate street devoid of even the shadow of horse-drawn carriages, people were sparsely hurrying toward Red Square. The hundreds of thousands of people participating in the procession had all marched out from their workplaces carrying flags and placards, so those walking separately toward Red Square were an extreme minority—and moreover, they appeared to be those who, for some reason, were not joining the march. Nobuko and Motoko joined those scattered pedestrians and walked along the avenue in front of the Central Art Museum, heading straight from Astozhenka toward Red Square.

Despite the chilly May 1st weather, pedestrians on the sidewalks were dressed in full summer attire that morning. The men’s shirts and rubashkas beneath their muted maroon overcoats—resembling raincoats—and hunting caps were white or cream-colored. From beneath the women’s half-coats fluttered out the hems of thin summer dresses, astonishingly light for the cold. Right in front of Nobuko and Motoko walked a trio of young girls, their voile summer dresses peeking out from beneath black half-coats. All three wore matching plaid scarves wrapped around their heads, their showy knots fluttering like three large butterflies. As if following their lead, Nobuko and Motoko quickened their pace in silence. Spectators were instructed to arrive at their designated spots within the square thirty minutes before the procession’s ten o’clock start.

When they reached Hunter's Square, Tverskaya Street was already packed full, and the procession stood waiting for its scheduled start time. The front ranks carrying large crimson placards had advanced to the very edge of the sidewalk where Tverskaya Street opened onto Hunter's Square. Looking up the gently sloping avenue as far as vision extended, Tverskaya Street became an unbroken surge of humanity and red banners. Placards spanned from window to window across the tall buildings flanking both sides. Looking past the square toward Bolshoi Theater Street revealed this side densely packed with vibrant red processions streaming from Moscow's commercial and government districts. Containing the immense energy that swelled through the streets like floodwaters held back by a dam, the specially scrubbed stone expanse of Hunter's Square lay nearly deserted that morning. Only Red Army soldiers and police officers stood stationed here and there for crowd control.

While crossing Hunter’s Square—swept clean and desolately empty—toward Red Square, Nobuko became acutely conscious of her own short legs moving in awkward alternation. She had never seen such a cheerful human multitude before, nor witnessed such an orderly mass waiting in formation. More significantly, she had never experienced crossing an impeccably groomed square—as though it were a privilege—under the watchful gaze of attendants. With solemn expression, Nobuko entered the spectator seats built along the Kremlin’s outer wall on Red Square’s right side.

Between the spectator seats for diplomatic delegations from various countries and those for civilian Japanese spectators where Nobuko and the others had entered stood a high podium draped in red cloth. This appeared to be where Soviet government leaders would stand. No one was yet visible there. In the spectator seats demarcated only by thick ropes cordoning off a corner of the square, Akiyama Uiichi, Utsumi Atsushi, and other newspaper personnel along with their wives had already taken their places.

“Ah, you’ve made it.”

Uiichi Akiyama, wearing a hunting cap, nodded toward Nobuko and the others as they entered. “It’s unfortunately cold today, isn’t it?” “Even so, it’s a great help that it didn’t rain.” Motoko answered while bowing politely to the newspaper correspondent and his wife standing diagonally behind her. The correspondent—a large-framed man who had buttoned his lightweight overcoat all the way up—edged somewhat closer,

“Have you seen recent Japanese newspapers?” the correspondent addressed Nobuko and the others. “Even if you say ‘recent,’ our papers take several days to come through Siberia—is there some news?” “Have you read about the Japanese Communist Party incident—?” “Ah, I read it—it was an extremely vague article. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.” “Now that you mention it, Yoshimi-san, wasn’t it more like you escaped here in advance?”

Listening to the correspondent’s words—spoken with a faint smile—Motoko wore a blank expression, but she suddenly turned to face him. “Even as a joke, that’s offensive,” she said decisively, her face serious. Then, glancing back at Uiichi Akiyama with a sarcastic tone, she added, “And what about you, Mr. Akiyama? Are you all right?” “I was just inquiring with Mr. Shiojiri about the situation,” Akiyama answered.

With his usual habit of shaking his head as if nodding to himself, Uiichi Akiyama answered while saying the correspondent's name.

“It seems a considerable number among my friends have been affected.”

As he spoke, Uiichi Akiyama hunched his shoulders in that characteristic way of his and—while rubbing his small hands together, another habitual gesture—leaned his upper body over the partition rope,

“Still no one in sight?” He peered toward the podium decorated with red cloth. Despite having come all the way to Moscow to witness May Day—and with Japan, where they would soon return, reporting the discovery of a secret society called the Communist Party and the arrest of over a thousand people nationwide—the displeased look on Uiichi Akiyama’s face, as someone relayed this news in a manner suggesting personal involvement, was vividly perceived.

While Uiichi Akiyama, seemingly avoiding the conversation, leaned out to gaze at the red podium they were both observing, Nobuko too recalled the matter with an unpleasant feeling that clashed with the May Day morning's mood. Nobuko and the others had read—in Japanese newspapers that had arrived just two days prior—an article publicizing the Communist Party arrests that had occurred nearly a month earlier at dawn on March 15th, phrased as "the authorities simultaneously commenced operations nationwide." Under massive front-page headlines spanning the entire sheet, it had been reported in an evasive tone—hinting at conspiratorial fragments through mentions of pseudonymed people holding secret meetings at Goshiki Onsen, university professors and students being heavily implicated in "internal consultations" and "document consultations"—while maintaining unrestrainedly sensational language. On the headline of that April 11th Asahi Shimbun article—sent from the Dōzaka house to Nobuko in Moscow—stretched a long red ink hook. Drawn with a bank pen dipped in thick crimson ink—a large, elongated line with modulated pressure—this hook was unmistakably her father Taizo's handwriting.

When Nobuko saw the red ink mark on the March 15th article, she felt an unpleasant irritation. The article itself was vague, and Nobuko—unfamiliar with such movements—could not grasp the reality of nationwide arrests. In Moscow, where the words "Communist Party" met her eyes everywhere, even Nobuko—politically uninformed—had come to think it natural that if capitalist parties represented nations worldwide, there should be a Communist Party for the working class. The red ink hook drawn with Taizo's pen nib gave Nobuko the sensation that it was leisurely catching some part of her body—herself remaining ignorant of Japan's reality yet free—with that crimson hook, attempting to drag her into confinement; Nobuko became conscious of her resistance.

On the hazy overcast morning of May Day, standing within the partition ropes of the spectator seats in Red Square and gazing at the still-empty red podium, Nobuko vividly recalled the shape of the red ink hook from the conversation exchanged between Motoko and the journalist. The feeling of resistance surged through her entire body. This resistance clashed sharply in an instant with Nobuko's tender heart—that had come to observe the May Day events with all her sensitivities laid bare. In the spectator seats, people around her glanced at wristwatches and chatted idly while periodically casting expectant looks toward Red Square's entrance. Amid them, Nobuko's small round face above her modest navy spring coat wore an expression that seemed both fragile and stubborn.

At that moment, without any warning, a thunderous Ura cheer suddenly came from the direction of Hunters' Square. The spectator seats suddenly tensed and buzzed with anticipation.

“Is it Stalin?”

“Well…” “Can you see?” “Nah.”

Led by an officer astride a white horse with a long flowing tail, a group of about a dozen men on black horses entered Red Square from Hunters' Square. Upon entering the square, the cavalry unit rode along its perimeter at a canter, passed before the diplomatic corps seats, advanced under the red podium, and came to stop just before reaching the spectator seats where Nobuko and the others stood. Nobuko had been intently watching the white-mounted cavalry approach the spectator stands when—

“Budenny!”

She let out a voice that was both startled and delighted.

“That mustache! That mustache belongs to Budenny!” On the face of the officer astride the white horse was a large black mustache—unlike anyone else’s—that extended beyond the width of his face to both sides.

“It really is!” Motoko affirmed with apparent amusement. When speaking of the First Cavalry Army, which had been active in Ukraine from 1917 to 1920 for the revolution, its heroic tales had even become subjects for plays. Budenny, as that First Cavalry Army’s organizer and leader—with his Cossack-style mustache—was regarded with affection even by foreigners like Nobuko.

The group of cavalry passed in front of the spectator seats where Nobuko and the others were watching intently and went all the way to the farthest end of the spectator seats. There, they turned their horses’ heads and, at a slightly faster canter along the distant side of the square, were heading back toward the entrance when— As if on cue, the Red Army’s procession streamed into the square from the gate near Hunters’ Square. Before their very eyes, the square began to fill up. Then, a large open-top car glided past the spectator seats where Nobuko and the others were and departed toward the gate near the Kremlin embankment.

“The car has gone,” said Uiichi Akiyama with conviction as he leaned over the partition rope beside Nobuko. “Stalin must have arrived.” At that moment, a passage from *The Internationale* resounded from the Spasskaya Gate clocktower of the Kremlin. As the clock finished striking ten—one chime after another—signal cannons roared nearby. Thus began the May Day ceremony and procession in Red Square’s chilly May air. From their sideways spectator seats, even craning their necks revealed nothing of the red podium’s upper platform. Forceful May Day greetings flowed from loudspeakers at each corner of the square—clear in enunciation yet devoid of theatrical cadence. Unable to see the podium’s top, Nobuko turned anxiously to Motoko beside her.

“Is that Stalin speaking now? Is that right?” she asked. “Probably. I can’t see him either.”

As if drawn by the voice, Nobuko stood on tiptoe toward the unseen podium. Nobuko forgot about the article on the Japanese Communist Party arrests and the red-ink hook mark her father had drawn on that article. When the speech thought to be Stalin's voice ended, an Ura cheer was shouted for the Soviet regime and May Day, shaking the square and rattling the walls of the surrounding buildings. Budenny remained astride his white horse throughout, standing beneath the podium facing the Red Army's massive gathering.

Before long, a march began to play from the loudspeakers, and the Red Army began to move. A large infantry unit passed by; a cavalry unit departed with Budenny—his large mustache now part of their ranks—at the lead; and mechanized troops advanced forward. Next came the workers' procession entering the square. When Nobuko saw the dense column approach—people clad in mismatched outfits wearing sneakers, holding placards aloft—tears suddenly welled in her eyes. How exposed these people were! How they clustered together using nothing but their bodies! The workers marching after the heavily armored mechanized troops felt so starkly vulnerable in their human softness—their warm hearts and blood making Nobuko feel her own body might be swept into that living wave. Old men and young alike wore hunting caps; daughters and matronly women workers wrapped their heads in colorful headscarves, unified in modest cleanliness—yet the inadequacy of Soviet textile production showed itself in the marchers' very bodies. What varied faces they had! Each face held its own life. Each its own heart. Yet united in their purpose this May Day, the ranks passing beyond Kremlin walls into the square—where red flags fluttered high—echoed heartfelt Ura cheers in response to slogans hailed from the podium. The winding procession turned hundreds of faces toward the platform as they passed beneath it, shouting "Ura!" in unison. March music resounded across the square. Some columns marched unconcerned with their own brass bands leading them. Even the roar of two planes circling low overhead for the festivities blended into the joyous noise as the grand procession—expected to number eight hundred thousand—flowed through Hunters' Square gate toward Moscow River Embankment.

As she gazed at the human wave filling that direction and the forest of placards swaying above it, Nobuko realized she could not see the Execution Site that she always regarded with particular emotion. In that area of Red Square where the Execution Site—a circular form resembling a large gray stone well narrating the history of people beheaded by the Tsar—would normally reveal itself, it had now been concealed beneath May Day's tide of humanity and placards. When they came near it, people were likely twisting their procession line to detour around it, but from Nobuko's vantage point, even that undulation remained indiscernible. The Execution Site had been swallowed by the wave of May Day's procession.

In Nobuko’s mind flashed the shape of the red ink hook drawn on the March 15th article. It now surfaced in her consciousness as a symbol—in a form vastly larger than reality. The red ink hook her father Yasuzo had marked on the newspaper sent to her now stretched its form, appearing like a phantom over the tens of thousands filling and moving through the Execution Site. Yet undoubtedly, Nobuko alone saw this ominous red hook. And undoubtedly, Nobuko alone resisted the sensation of being placed beneath it. With absolute clarity, she felt herself standing beneath the shadow of a different history.

The May Day procession, nearing its end, moved through the square's dusty ground—trampled flat and feverish under hundreds of thousands of shoes—its ranks growing sparse as it followed the march music that had been playing all day long.

The final procession passed. When Nobuko, having noticed, looked toward the podium, she found that it too had already emptied. Nobuko, Motoko, Uiichi Akiyama, and Atsushi Utsumi—the four of them formed a cluster and emerged from the utterly exhausted Red Square into Hunter’s Square.

This area was terribly crowded. Through gaps between the jostling crowd that had just disbanded from the procession, a farm tractor carrying a girl with a red headscarf came from the theater direction, scattering leaflets as it advanced. Nobuko and the others finally pushed through and crossed to Tverskaya Street's sidewalk. Here too, where red placards stretched overhead, swarmed with people, the air felt compressed and feverish.

“Bukko-chan，let’s stop by Passazh for some tea on our way back.” Motoko said this while turning toward Akiyama，

“Is Passazh open?” she asked. “Well… I wonder… It must be open.” “It’s open, it’s open.”

Atsushi Utsumi answered rapidly from beside them. Nobuko and the others returned to Astozhenka, their shoes covered in dust. In the morning, people heading toward Red Square along the street where trams had stopped were sparse, but on their return journey, that same avenue was crowded with crowds walking home from Red Square. Holding small red paper flags and whistling, everyone walked slowly in the weary May Day mood.

“I’m exhausted!”

When they entered the room, Nobuko immediately opened the window and threw herself onto the divan.

“Standing around really takes it out of you.” Motoko began smoking a cigarette with relish. Whenever she opened the window, the sounds—the creak of horse carts on cobblestones and clattering trams—would coalesce into a mass of noise that struck Fram-Frista-Spasiteliya’s large stone building before flooding into Nobuko and the others’ narrow, shallow room. Today, even when she opened it, not a single clamorous sound remained. The soft vastness of afternoon stillness enveloped both building and city. As Nobuko lay motionless on the divan, only faint murmurs from passersby reached their fourth-floor window. For Nobuko, the May Day procession had left a deep impression. Thus did all busy Moscow cease work on May Day—resting, celebrating. In that festive mood’s depth lay something that truly struck the heart. From May Day’s eve onward, no alcohol had been sold at all—so today’s cheerful atmosphere remained entirely sober. In such details lay an even greater joy—Nobuko finding points of shared understanding.

After resting awhile, Nobuko and Motoko washed their dust-covered faces and changed their clothes. Then their throats grew dry again. Motoko said to Nobuko, “Go boil some water.” “It’s fine—it’s May Day,” Nobuko replied. Under their usual arrangement with Lyubakov, they only boiled water mornings and evenings. When Nobuko went to check the kitchen, Nyura—who had opened the door earlier—was nowhere to be seen. Lyubakov’s wife and children appeared to have gone out too, leaving the entire apartment hushed. Nobuko found their light blue kettle on the shelf above the sink. Troubled by Nyura’s absence, Nobuko gazed at the kettle while muttering half to herself—disliking the thought of acting freely in a kitchen where none of their household were present—

“Nyura, where’ve you gone off to?”

She said in a drawn-out, lilting tone. Then Nyura emerged from the balcony outside the kitchen’s glass door. Whatever she had been doing, her complexion was slightly flushed. “Because we walked so much, my throat is dry, Nyura. Could I get some hot water?” “Yes, ma’am.” Nyura promptly took down the kettle, filled it with water, and placed it on the gas burner.

“Thank you. I’ll come get the hot water myself.” As Nobuko said this and tried to leave the kitchen, Nyura—who had been hesitating slightly—

“Come here and look.” She pointed to the door leading to the balcony. In the corner of the narrow balcony with an iron handrail, empty boxes and bags were piled up, and there was also a tin tub that Nyura used for laundry. The balcony faced the building’s inner courtyard, but because another wing of the building jutted out immediately to the left, the sunlight was poor. On the far side of the inner courtyard stood a concrete wall, around which two strands of barbed wire were coiled. Attached there at nearly the same height as the wall was the reddish-brown painted roof of a bread-baking factory. On that roof, three youths were out fooling around—whether they had returned from the May Day procession or hadn’t gone at all. When Nyura stepped onto the balcony, a challenging, sharp whistle erupted from among those youths.

Nobuko reflexively pulled herself into the shadow of the door.

“Hey! Devchonka! Little girl!” “Come over here!” From the roof came the voices of youths shouting while laughing. From the opposite side, one could see all the windows and balconies of this building that faced the inner courtyard. The youths had likely determined that all the windows were closed today with no women working on any balconies, and thus appeared to be taunting Nyura on the only open one.

A youth who had been lying along the gentle slope of the reddish-brown roof stood up while balancing his weight and took something from his pocket. Then, brandishing it toward Nyura’s balcony, he barked rapid words Nobuko couldn’t decipher. They erupted in synchronized laughter. One pressed a finger to his lips and whistled sharply—a shrill, piercing sound that reeked of vulgarity. Though it was May Day, Nyura remained on the balcony in her soiled work clothes, arms crossed over her flat chest, her rigid back turned defiantly toward the roof as she stared ahead without flinching or retreating.

Nobuko quietly left the kitchen and returned to their room. In their room on the building's front side, the open windowpanes brightly reflected the golden dome of Fram-Frista-Spasicheriya, while faint sounds from people passing through festive streets drifted in. This was the celebratory front. Yet precisely because one could sense Moscow's profound May Day joy, the balcony on the building's rear side held its quiet desolation. Nyura's figure standing on the kitchen balcony left a strong impression on Nobuko. Nobuko's heart had not forgotten the symbolically enlarged shape of the red ink hook.

Seven

When May Day passed, a sudden leap to early summer began in Moscow's streets. All the street trees' young buds unfurled into leaves with astonishing speed. A bright rain shower fell, wetting the marble breastwork of Fram-Frista-Spasicheriya. As Nobuko—trying to finish writing her Moscow impressions—looked up from her desk and gazed through the newly rain-washed window, seven or eight sparrows perched in a row on a single telephone wire glistening with raindrops.

Nobuko had recently stopped writing letters directly addressed to Takeyo. There had been a time, back when Moscow was covered in snow, when Nobuko had been unable to finish reading a letter from Takeyo regarding the letter she had written to Tamotsu after getting halfway through it. Since then, Nobuko would occasionally write updates on her current situation on postcards and send them addressed to "The Sasa Family." From the Dōzaka house came letters—written or jointly penned by Kazuichirou—less frequently than Nobuko sent postcards addressed to Tokyo. As usual, they rambled on aimlessly, reporting only about outings like where they had driven.

For some time around May Day, Nobuko would frequently recall and fixate on the newspaper article marked with her father’s red ink hook. She could envision it as vividly as if holding it before her eyes: Taizo’s expression as he sat alone at the breakfast table per his custom, reading that newspaper—clenching his denture-fitted molars, furrowing his thick short eyebrows that flared at the ends—then hastily seizing the pen from the inkstand on the table to mark the article with his red ink hook. In Taizo’s expression and in his act of having that provocatively marked newspaper sent to her, Nobuko recognized for the first time the emotional distance that had always existed—yet gone unnoticed until now—between her father and herself.

In the article reporting that Communist Party members had been arrested in Japan on March 15th, what had Taizo intended when he impulsively marked it with that red ink hook and had it sent to Nobuko? If she had been in Paris instead, would Taizo still have sent her that newspaper in the same way? The mere fact that his daughter was in Moscow had caused him to experience an extraordinary impulse from that newspaper article. Though Taizo himself likely hadn't known how to express it, the fact that the red ink hook conveyed the nature of his emotional shock made Nobuko sad.

Last autumn, when Nobuko and the others decided to come to the Soviet Union and went to the Dōzaka house about the passport matter, her mother Takeyo had said “Ro...shi...a?” drawing out each syllable while making a displeased face. During this period of nearly half a year, a letter from Takeyo—which Nobuko had read up to that point but could not finish—contained the words: “Your cold heart has been this way since you went to Russia.” When Nobuko went to ask her father Taizo for help with the passport, he had been pleased that she managed to secure a loan on her own and was now able to go abroad, refraining from expressing any opinions about her destination. In Taizo’s subsequent brief letters too, not a trace of preconceptions or prejudices toward Russia was expressed.

However, when a newspaper article appeared making clear that Japan—like other countries around the world—had somehow formed a Communist Party unnoticed, and that ministers and officials were panicking and scrambling about in confusion, Taizo's mental equilibrium was instantly shaken. Though differing in degree, this revealed the same nature as Takeyo's—an extraordinary psychological response both toward Russia itself and toward Nobuko being there.

Nobuko had always maintained the habit of unconditionally approving of her father. No matter how things stood with her mother Takeyo, she had kept the habit of viewing her father Taizo as fundamentally different. This habitual sense of security toward her father now trembled violently within Nobuko's heart. Her parents had been born with inherently different temperaments—differences that over long years had been reinforced by both sides until, to Nobuko who grew up between them, they seemed utterly divergent in their ways of thinking and feeling. Yet now Nobuko realized this perceived gulf between her parents' natures—exaggerated beyond reality—had been her own self-indulgence. Her father and mother were husband and wife. When pressed, they had always protected their shared interests as spouses first. How strange it was, she understood now, to have believed in some essential difference between their worldviews—a difference she'd magnified for her own convenience and coddled all this time.

At the end of April, when Nobuko went to see the Gorky exhibition held at Moscow’s Central Art Museum, she discovered there wasn’t a single photograph from his childhood. She compared herself—with her abundance of photos from infancy onwards—to him. This made her painfully aware of her own superficial attitude toward photographs. For the first time, even that part of her heart that had relentlessly opposed her mother while believing she could indulge her father uncritically now appeared equally unsightly to Nobuko. In the end, how different were the insight and common sense her father Taizo had often spoken of from her mother Takeyo’s practical judgment?

Taizo disliked government offices and officials. Solely because he wanted to quit the Maintenance Section of the Ministry of Education where he had started working right after graduating from university, he went to England in a position akin to that of an attendant to a young former feudal lord. The only buildings Taizo completed as a government architect were the modest few school buildings of Sapporo Agricultural College. When Nobuko was nineteen and went to Sapporo, she found those school buildings lined up under elm branches like an old oil painting, their brick structures standing in rows. After returning from abroad, Taizo continued working as a private architect.

Taizo often spoke of common sense—whether it existed or not—as if it were the very foundation of judgment. He would say “common sense” in English as if it were something that existed in England but not in Japan, and for Taizo, things like deficient common sense or its absence were contemptible. But what exactly was this common sense that Taizo so solemnly invoked—whether present or lacking? Even as she pondered deeply, when the word “Father” rose in her heart, Nobuko felt stirred by nostalgia. She recalled Taizo’s warm, large bald head that carried the scent of eau de quinine. In this father she missed so dearly, Nobuko sensed a shallowness of the same nature she had discovered within herself. Even Taizo, when scrutinized closely, did not truly possess common sense robust enough to merit the name—yet there was something about him that compelled him to intone “common sense” in English. If it were truly common sense—the kind imbued with true discernment—then the very fact that a law in a capitalist country banned the Communist Party should have been understood as proof that such social conditions for a reformist party’s emergence existed within that nation.

Walking among clusters of Muscovites strolling under arc lamps along tree-lined avenues thick with young leaves’ fragrance on a May night, Nobuko felt a peculiar sensation when she realized she alone in this flowing crowd bore that red ink hook’s weight. Even Motoko, walking beside her and occasionally linking arms, did not grasp Nobuko’s strange feeling. Life in Moscow had thrust Nobuko into vast social phenomena whose very existence she hadn’t known while in Japan. She had grown freer and more unconstrained by that much—only to discover red ink hooks of varied meanings she’d never noticed before now weighed upon her alone, absent from the Muscovites moving about her.

In this state of mind while strolling along night tree-lined avenues, Nobuko harbored a certain feeling—one where she would nearly tell Motoko something yet always held back. This connected to what was written in Bukharin’s thick book that Motoko had bought and Nobuko had read during autumn of their Moscow-bound year, when they lived together in Komazawa’s secluded house. While gazing at Komazawa’s garden with its pomegranate tree on the lawn, Nobuko read that book and came to understand capital’s role in contemporary society, the working class’s historical significance, and the essential nature of their own petty bourgeois stratum—a fluid position capable of shifting either way. Around that time, Nobuko became newly awakened to the social relations inherent in her father Taizo’s work as an architect. Even if Taizo were a Royal Academy special member or American Institute of Architects honorary member, Nobuko knew that Sasa Taizo—working as an architect in present-day Japan—served those Japanese with sufficient funds to commission construction projects. Understanding this, she as his daughter came to sympathize with Taizo’s pent-up frustrations toward clients’ selfish demands that he occasionally mentioned.

However, the red ink hook once again overturned Nobuko’s understanding. Nobuko came to understand the reality that Taizo’s genuine dislike of officials did not translate into a dislike of people with money.

A certain wealthy man whom her father Taizo addressed as “Baron, Baron” was a lover of art and music. At the same time, he was one of those who, as part of Japan’s major zaibatsu, dominated political parties and held the reins of power in Japan. That wealthy man and her father Taizo had been acquainted since their time in England and were likely a kind of friend, but the family—including Nobuko and the others—had not been included in that association.

Nobuko was around ten or eleven years old. Taizo was able to go to Hakone for some business and took Nobuko along. It was summer, and Nobuko felt excited by the novelty of being taken to Hakone by her father for the first time while taking pride in the spotless white linen dress she had been made to wear. They went to Hakone, ate at a large inn, then Taizo mentioned the name of that wealthy man—a name even young Nobuko knew—and proposed stopping by his villa.

The villa of that wealthy man to which Nobuko had been taken by her father Taizo resembled a castle she knew from illustrations in girls' novels. The entrance door with large iron hinges opened to reveal a hall whose ceiling soared two stories high. High above, a handrail was visible from which hung a beautiful crimson carpet. Flanking a large door stood a suit of Japanese crimson-laced armor and one of foreign steel armor. The hall also contained vases and decorative plates. Bathed in light filtering through stained glass windows tinged green with hints of yellow, these ornaments all seemed to possess an imposingly vital presence.

The young Nobuko walked across the hall carpet in a spirited manner befitting a girl of her mettle, her eyes wide as she accompanied her father. Nobuko felt satisfied wearing a white linen dress that suited her well, a pink ribbon tied around her head, and stylish British-made sandals on her feet. Nobuko had thought she would surely meet the owner before they left. However, her father Taizo merely took Nobuko around two or three rooms accompanied by the steward. When they went back outside where the summer sun beat down on the soil, Nobuko felt her expectations dashed—a humiliating disappointment that left her deflated. Later, she realized he had taken her along because the owner was away.

Moreover, as part of a zaibatsu, Taizo was in opposition to that wealthy man while simultaneously maintaining similarly friend-like interactions with people who controlled rival political parties. Taizo’s temperament—utterly devoid of political interest or ambition yet enriched by broad hobbies and in some ways refreshingly uncomplicated—likely made him precisely the sort of architect friend whom those embroiled year-round in such contentious relationships found easy to engage with. Yet whenever Nobuko recalled the red ink hook, she found herself unable to avoid complex feelings toward her father’s very sociability.

In those people’s residences—comfortable homes Nobuko had never seen—when the host and Taizo were chatting amiably, if someone were to speak in affirmation of the Communist Party’s arrested members, or at least of the inevitability of their emergence, what expressions would both the host and Taizo make? Taizo would surely criticize the lack of common sense in whoever brought up such a topic without considering the place. But what exactly was this common sense in such a situation? Was this not Taizo’s judgment—one that sided with the sentiments of wealthy and powerful people who detested talk of the Communist Party, and another judgment that adhered to the common notion that what those people detested was inherently wrong?

Nobuko had secretly been proud of her father Taizo. As one of Japan’s leading architects. Neither a bureaucrat nor a businessman, neither a military man nor a politician—how Nobuko, having reached an age when she came to love literature, must have cherished in her heart as a point of pride the fact that her father was an architect, an independent private technician.

However, Taizo’s independence as an architect was truly limited in scope, and it was not long before Nobuko realized his activities were fundamentally controlled by those possessing economic power over large-scale private construction. Now she sadly acknowledged how Taizo’s social standing imposed limits even on his integrity and independence—how his gentlemanly demeanor carried unseen subservience. Her consciousness rejected demanding such obedience from itself. Yet Nobuko turned inward. When seated as Taizo’s daughter beside that Baron-like figure—how much freedom from paternal submission could she truly claim? She felt certain she too would perform gracious femininity for their approval. Or else stiffen under pressure and withdraw entirely.

When Nobuko was sixteen or seventeen, Japan established its first Philharmonic organization for Western music enthusiasts. The patron was that Baron who maintained a seemingly friendly relationship with Taizo. At the inaugural concert, Nobuko dressed up and went to listen with her parents. When introduced to the Baron couple, she simultaneously felt excitement and repulsion at their polished aura. While experiencing these dual emotions, Nobuko recalled having unwittingly presented herself as a clever-seeming, refined girl. Such aspects constituted the irritating elusiveness of Nobuko, who always hated acknowledging this about herself.

The circumstances of having nearly spoken to Motoko yet ultimately remaining silent were part of Nobuko’s new emotional process—one that concerned both her father Taizo and herself. The moral views that each person holds are also influenced by the interests of the class to which they belong. This was also true when it came to Taizo. The truth was also applied to Nobuko’s middle-class nature, which, like an Eve in the midst of being born, was halfway out but not yet fully free of it. Within those limitations, Taizo was a sincere person, and there was no denying that he was upright. But the limitations of Taizo that Nobuko had newly perceived, and her own limitations, were impossible for Nobuko to return to a time before she had understood them. For Nobuko, who had continued to unconditionally affirm her father and had affirmed herself for affirming him, these thoughts were an inner experience akin to noticing her emaciated self when a chapter had closed.

There was a newspaper article related to the March 15th Incident stating that the Ministry of Education had ordered certain professors from Kyoto University and Kyushu University—who had been leading social science study groups—to be dismissed, and that the university presidents had not immediately complied. However, in the end, after receiving resignation recommendations, Professor Takeshi Yamagami of Kyoto University and others ended up leaving the university. In the newspaper that carried a photograph of Professor Takeshi Yamagami in his imperially appointed official uniform along with the news, there was an advertisement for the long novel that Nobuko had finally seen published as a book after entrusting the proofreading to her friend Ume Kono and departing for Moscow.

Before long, Ume Kono sent over the finished book. In Moscow’s streets there were books aplenty—yet their paper quality remained poor and their bindings crude. Nobuko—who had seen only such books—gasped at her own volume’s magnificence when it arrived. “What an exquisite book,” said Motoko.

On the desk in their Astozhenka room, having unwrapped the package, Nobuko and Motoko gazed at the gilt-edged book with its woodblock-printed washi paper cover adorned by a beautiful persimmon illustration, pulling it between them as if vying to hold it. The novel had as its protagonist a young woman from Japan's middle class. Behind this work that depicted the fierce friction between seething youthful vitality striving to overflow and its environment lay Nobuko's own unwelcome marriage and the progression of its collapse. Opening the pages of that book—printed in vivid type with ruby annotations on high-quality paper—Nobuko, standing before the table, read passages here and there from the novel she had written.

“Let me see it too.”

Handing the book to Motoko as she reached out, and while tidying up the wrapping paper and string, Nobuko wondered whether the Soviet women could truly empathize with the various emotions of Japanese women contained within this novel.

“Here, there are actually more cases where if this novel’s male perspective were changed to a woman’s—then wouldn’t the people here understand it better?”

When Motoko spoke of "the man’s position," she was referring to the character who was the protagonist’s husband. The man could not understand his young wife’s struggle to endure their suffocating living environment, clung stubbornly to his subjective belief that he loved her as a husband, and became a character who led their complex relationship to ruin.

“But isn’t that fundamentally different?”

Nobuko said, fiddling with the book’s case adorned with a beautiful woodblock print of small flowers.

“Even in plays like Inga, a woman left behind by her husband retains the capacity to develop herself independently—and actually possesses the social conditions that make it possible...” Taking even one instance—the persistent parental interference in a daughter’s life as portrayed in Nobuko’s novel—this was already a fact eliminated from Soviet society’s customs and sentiments. Above the roar of Moscow’s May Day procession, it seemed only Nobuko—a Japanese woman and daughter—saw the red ink mark rendered symbolically large. Moreover, this red ink mark—drawn by the hand of her father who firmly believed he loved her. ——

Around the same time, a letter arrived from Tamotsu after a long interval. It was another postcard. The greenhouse was thriving with melons growing steadily, and I would soon have to decide on my department as I prepared for university entrance. What do you think, Sister? I’m generally considering either philosophy or ethics. It was written in that Tamotsu’s meticulous small characters with light pen strokes. From around that time, the evening hours in Moscow had visibly begun to lengthen. Even at nine o’clock in the evening, within the dim light, the golden dome of Fram-Frista-Spasitelya floated large in lusterless gold, while the monotonous pink and gray painted onto the old buildings of the towns appeared like a pastel painting in the twilight devoid of reflected light, together with the deep green leaves of the street trees. The sounds had also begun to echo strangely soft and distant.

In Nobuko and Motoko’s room with its two open, curtainless windows facing the vast sky where night was beginning to fade, it had become two or three o’clock before they knew it. The hour after the trams had ceased running, enveloped in a quiet, unchanging dim light, the view of Astozhenka’s street corner with its sparse foot traffic—offering a glimpse of the deep foliage along the tree-lined avenue where not a leaf stirred—was a charming exterior scene. Taking chairs out to the small balcony outside the window, Nobuko and Motoko did not sleep at all. Nobuko was concerned that Tamotsu was considering choosing philosophy or ethics for his university studies.

“Is ethics truly something one could specialize in as a discipline?... It’s so characteristic of him that I feel suffocated.”

In the pearly dim light of the overcast sky, Motoko struck a match—its small beautiful flame blazing—and lit her cigarette. Then, brushing tobacco flakes from her lips with fingertips, she spoke.

“Philosophy’s better, I guess.” “Even if you call it ‘philosophy’…” Considering Ochi’s ideas—undoubtedly involved in Tamotsu’s choice—and Takedayo’s pretentious scholarly tastes shaped by those influences, Nobuko kept her face fixed in skepticism. “If he goes into philosophy, he’ll just get more trapped. He’ll probably end up studying Kant anyway…” Remembering the Kant philosophy lecture she’d attended at Tokyo University’s summer course years ago, Nobuko felt a chill imagining how Tamotsu’s abstract tendencies might expand and rigidify under Kant’s influence. When she pictured Tamotsu becoming that kind of scholar, it seemed any emotional anchor linking his life to hers would vanish.

“What he needs is a field of study that resolutely thrusts him into society.” “He might as well study economics, for that matter—or if not, he could study philosophy using the methods they use here in this country.” “Then at least living would feel real.”

But Tamotsu, by his own inclinations, was trying to seek a pure truth absolutely unaffected by any reality. That fact was something Nobuko understood all too well. It differed from the direction of dialectical materialism, which delves into the very astonishing movements of relationships between humans and nature, affirms those movements, and seeks to discover their laws. Nobuko remembered how Tamotsu had even recoiled at the word "materialism" on some occasion - he had felt that "materialistic" carried a meaning akin to "selfishness" due to the characters that followed.

To the balcony where Nobuko and Motoko, having fallen silent for a time, looked down at the dimly lit street at two AM, the sound of a horse’s hooves came from afar. The hoofbeats echoed from Central Museum Street, which their balcony faced. Advancing toward Astozhenka so slowly that the rhythm of four hooves striking the stone-paved road could be distinctly heard. After some time, a single Moscow horse-drawn carriage appeared. It was a carriage where both people and horse moved through the white-night streets as if sleepwalking. On the high driver’s seat of the carriage pulled by a black horse with lowered neck sat a driver in a green round hat trimmed with fur, holding slackened reins while keeping both hands tucked into his coat sleeves, nodding rhythmically as he swayed. On the seat lay a half-collapsed drunkard. Under his thin overcoat he had bared the chest of his white rubashka and cradled a guitar. The carriage disappeared around Astozhenka’s corner with the same lethargy with which it had appeared before them. Long after its disappearance, the monotonous echo of hooves reverberated through dimly lit buildings lining the street until it reached Nobuko and Motoko.

The next day, Nobuko wrote a letter addressed to Tamotsu. To Nobuko, ethics could not be conceived of as an independent field of specialized study. Philosophy itself had been progressing in today's world. She wrote asking him to clarify what direction he intended to pursue within philosophy. About a week after Nobuko sent that letter to Tamotsu came another postcard from him. It described his summer plans with no relation to their previous correspondence. "This summer I plan to thoroughly enjoy myself," he wrote. For Tamotsu, this was an uncharacteristically decisive tone. The characters showed his usual handwriting as he detailed playing tennis extensively, bicycling around town, and taking drives. When Nobuko held this postcard and read it through, she found its abruptness unavoidable. Yet by the time she read Tamotsu's message Moscow had already turned summery. At the tree-lined avenue's entrance stood an ice cream stall garishly striped red and pink while book stalls lined the promenade. Sundays brought music from beneath linden trees drifting into their room. As Nobuko prepared for Leningrad she instinctively mapped Tamotsu's summer plans onto Moscow's summer scenery where she stood immersed.

Chapter Three

I

It was said that the white nights were most beautiful in early June. Nobuko and Motoko vacated their room in Astozhenka, where they had lived for a little over two months during that season, and headed for Leningrad. Moscow, which began to dry out and grow dusty with spring, once May Day had passed and the suddenly summer-like sunlight leaped out over everything, turned into a parched heat characteristic of a flatland city.

Nobuko and Motoko departed from Moscow’s North Station on a train past eleven at night. The train was not crowded, and when she awoke from a deep sleep, the scenery visible outside the train window startled Nobuko. The train was running along a vast, desolate field scattered here and there with decaying fences. The spreading water that soaked the field’s green grass shone under the dull gray dawn sky like diluted springwater. A grove of birch trees, fresh young leaves spread wide, stood clustered in that water. The watery, desolate landscape in white, green, and gray tones gave the impression they had entered a land close to the northern sea.

The impression of northern scenery glimpsed from the train window grew stronger upon entering the city of Leningrad. This city, facing the Baltic Sea and threaded with canals, had been built in the eighteenth century. Its bridges bustled with activity, and what was once Nevsky Prospekt—now renamed October Street—retained a European air, yet its main avenues, constructed in a German-inspired European style that was robust but charmless, instead emphasized the abundance of water from the Neva River, the Baltic Sea, and the canals encircling the city. Leningrad possessed a strangely melancholic beauty.

Nobuko and Motoko stayed at the Europe Hotel, which overlooked the canal of the Small Neva River, for about the first ten days of their time in Leningrad. There, something unexpected happened to them. One morning, they learned from a newspaper interview article that Gorky was staying at the same Europe Hotel as they were. “Oh… So he’d already come back from the south then.” “It seems he has.”

Maxim Gorky, who had returned to the Soviet Union from Sorrento in May after five years, soon went to southern Russia amid waves of welcome to inspect the Dnieper Dam construction project and other works. "...I see." As they looked at each other—Motoko having fallen silent after saying that and now deep in thought—Nobuko felt her heart stir. "Shall we try to meet him?" Nobuko suddenly blurted out simply. It wasn't from wanting to meet him to see what kind of person he was, but rather from a simple feeling of trust that Nobuko had come to want to meet Gorky. To put it another way, Nobuko had immersed herself so deeply in the world of Gorky's works that her desire to meet him had become genuine, and the Gorky exhibition had fostered in her a sympathy for Gorky both as a person and an artist, prompting her to reflect on herself.

“—What do you think?” “Let’s try inquiring about his schedule.” With a bright, wide-eyed expression on her wheat-colored face, Motoko joined in. “When would work best for us?”

“But… he’s a busy person after all.” “Shall we inquire about his availability first and then decide ours?” “I think that makes sense.” Motoko wrote a draft of the note on a small piece of paper. “Two Japanese women writers hope to meet you.” “Might you be able to spare a short amount of time?” “We look forward to your reply.” And they wrote their hotel room number and their two names. “By the way—how should we address him? Just ‘Maxim Gorky’ outright?”

Somehow, that didn’t feel settled either. “There’s no such thing as Grazhdanin [Citizen], is there?” Nobuko said, bursting out laughing at the incongruity—as if they were visiting a ward office.

“I wonder if ‘Comrade’ would be strange?” “That very sentiment—to think we’d even consider meeting him…” “Well then, let’s just write that.” “Yes, yes.”

The two of them took the note Motoko had written to the hotel front desk. And they had it placed into Gorky’s room mailbox. Gorky was in Room 8.

The next morning, Nobuko and Motoko found the reply in their mailbox. The next morning at ten-thirty, Gorky was to wait for Nobuko and the others in his room. Nobuko wore a summer dress of white with thin crimson stripes, Motoko fastened a beautiful hand-knitted silk tie at the breast of her white blouse, and exactly at the appointed morning hour, they knocked on Door Eight.

The large white-painted door was opened immediately. An astonishingly tall young man with light chestnut hair seemed, for his part, surprised at how small the two women standing right by the door he had opened were. “Good day. What business brings you here?” he inquired, stooping slightly. With cheeks slightly flushed, Motoko explained their reason for coming.

“Ah, I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Please come in.” They passed through a narrow anteroom into the guest chamber beyond. From its window too stretched a view of Shoneva. At the center of the room stood a marble table where, inexplicably, a lone plate held a single slice of toast. Another door opened—this one leading to an inner chamber—and Gorky emerged alongside the tall young man who had escorted them. Compared to his photographs, Gorky appeared far more aged, his large frame gaunter now. Yet there was an arid spryness to his elderly bearing, enhanced by his soft gray linen suit—a quality no camera could capture. Seeing them side by side, they understood at once that this was Gorky’s son. Both shared the same height and bone structure. But how starkly different were Gorky’s face—impossibly weighty and profound—from his son’s kind yet insubstantial features, as though the younger man had overgrown his own vitality! The very presence of father and son in such contrast stirred something in Nobuko. Gorky clasped each woman’s hand in turn within his large dry palms—clean and warm—to greet them.

“Please have a seat.” And seating himself in a spacious armchair, “This is my son.” Gorky introduced the young man standing beside him to Nobuko and Motoko. “He works as my secretary.” Nobuko recalled that there was a photograph of Gorky holding an infant—probably this person’s child, she thought. Gorky asked Nobuko and the others what they thought of the Soviet.

Nobuko thought for a moment,

“I find it extremely interesting.”

Nobuko answered. “Hmm.” Gorky seemed to examine every implication contained within the simple word “interesting,” but soon, “Yes. It can indeed be called interesting,” he nodded in agreement. “The Soviet is conducting a large-scale human experiment.” Then the conversation turned to rumors about a Soviet writer who had visited Japan. Regarding Gorky’s works translated in Japan and the performance of *The Lower Depths*, Motoko did most of the talking.

Motoko sent Gorky her translated collection of Chekhov’s letters, and Nobuko sent Gorky her novel. Gorky said it was a beautiful book as he flipped through Nobuko’s novel and asked Motoko whether Japanese law imposed any special restrictions on women’s publications.

Motoko replied, “Women can publish books of their own will—of course, within the limits permitted by censorship.” Gorky seemed surprised. “Is that so?” “In Italy,” he continued, “when a woman wishes to publish a book—if she is a young girl, she needs permission from her parents or guardians; if married, her husband’s approval.” He paused thoughtfully. “That is rather strange.” “In a country like Japan,” he added, “where women’s social status remains unrecognized—the fact that only books can be freely published—”

“I don’t think that alone means Japan is free for women.” Nobuko managed to string together just that much Russian and said.

“That’s probably because the old Japanese authorities never imagined the possibility of women writing books.” “That could very well be the case.” As someone who had often witnessed such contradictions in society, Gorky laughed. Nobuko and the others also laughed. Among the three of them, the topic of Japanese netsuke soon came up. At first, Gorky said he had a Japanese netsuke, a unique art object, that had been sent to him by someone. As they continued talking, it turned out to be about netsuke.

Gorky, sitting in a low-armed chair, received the clear June morning light from the side of his face, and deep horizontal wrinkles across his broad forehead were visible. The brightness entering widely through the window from across the Neva River's rippling surface fell upon both the shoulders and knees of Gorky's soft grayish clothes, illuminating the tips of Nobuko and the others' shoes on the carpet. Rather than attempting to speak herself, Nobuko gazed at Gorky’s sincere and entirely unadorned demeanor as if absorbing it. In Gorky, there was not a speck of the superficial gloss that famous people acquire from being rubbed smooth by their own fame. Gorky’s entire being was matte, and there was a genuine humanity—a pleasant masculinity in that sense—of a person who, with age, had come to focus only on what truly matters to human beings. While deeply perceiving many things, there was no exaggeration in Gorky’s spirit. As Nobuko’s precarious Russian reached him, Gorky—his large-boned upper body slightly hunched over the chair, elbow braced against his left knee as he listened—nodded and said, “That could very well be the case.” In moments like these, Gorky’s simplicity and sincerity filled Nobuko with boundless joy and encouragement.

When they were about to take their leave, Nobuko signed in Russian on the title page of the novel she had presented to Gorky at his request. The characters, difficult to write even under normal circumstances, came out even more clumsily in this formal setting. Nobuko felt self-conscious about it, but Gorky paid no mind to such matters—slowly, “Never mind.” he said, twisting his body toward the window as he blew on the still-wet ink of Nobuko’s signature. It was natural—a naturalness that seized her heart with its intensity. Whenever she met Gorky, Nobuko felt as though every world contained within the works she had read was being reaffirmed through human diversity and authenticity.

After leaving Gorky’s room and walking down the corridor toward their own, Nobuko’s feelings gradually shifted from joy to a somber pensiveness. When she felt this sense of rightness in Gorky’s deeply resonant matte humanity, she reflexively thought of the gloss that her father Yasuzo possessed. The secularity of the gloss Yasuzo carried stood out vividly to her. And there, the red ink mark came into view. Nobuko stopped blinking and found herself fixated on her father’s gloss and the red ink mark.

Nobuko felt, upon seeing Gorky, that as long as an artist could be characterized by expressions like "individualistic," their essence remained narrow and underdeveloped.

Five or six days later, Nobuko and Motoko moved from the Europe Hotel to the House of Scholars beside the Winter Palace. It was through an introduction by the Leningrad Cultural Liaison Association and the arrangements of Atsushi Utsumi, who had come to Leningrad after seeing off Uiichi Akiyama when he returned to Japan right after May Day.

It was on the bank of the Neva River; when standing by the window, there was a black swift current flowing right beneath their eyes. In the distance on the opposite shore stood visible the golden spire of Peter and Paul Fortress. The window where Nobuko and Motoko stood side by side gazing at the sunset over the Neva's flow was so tall and large that their figures appeared small. In the midst of white nights, each day's sunset came past midnight. Before Nobuko and Motoko—their finely textured Japanese faces illuminated head-on by the western sun—the sun itself swirled like a giant crimson fireball as it began sinking between three great smokestacks standing jet-black against the opposite shore. The Neva's current first darkened into steel-gray. Yet the setting sun still glaring harshly on their faces set ablaze the gold trim adorning ceiling and walls in what had been Grand Duke Vladimir's palace. Beside the window where they stood watching the sunset rose a large fireplace; upon its decorative mirror above were reflected parts of dazzling white stucco transoms and ceiling illuminated by western sunlight.

The sunsets and sunrises of this season in Leningrad were a single remarkable spectacle. The sun that had sunk between the first and second of the three pitch-black smokestacks standing erect on the opposite shore began to rise again after a mere twelve or thirteen minutes, starting from a point just slightly shifted from where it had set. Compared to when it sank, the sun rose as though laboring. Light swept over the heavy steel color of the Neva’s water, which had begun to swell with the incoming tide from the Baltic Sea. On the riverside avenue, there was no one passing by. The view at such times was filled with melancholy and was also beautiful. Nobuko was struck by how this city called Leningrad existed so near the northern edge of the world, and by nature itself—the Earth’s roundness so clearly manifested in its sunsets and sunrises.

Leningrad was not the capital of the Soviet Union. It was this fact that revealed to Nobuko and Motoko—who had spent half a year living solely in Moscow—the flavor of life in Leningrad, which they had not understood until coming there.

The Leningrad VOKS (Cultural Liaison Association) was located on the left side of the street leading toward Troitsky Bridge from Dom Uchyonykh (House of Scholars)—the former residence of Grand Duke Vladimir where Nobuko and the others were staying. The streets around there, paved with wooden bricks, were wide and perpetually quiet, with the lush June foliage of gardens enclosed by iron fences reminiscent of European aristocratic mansions extending their branches deeply over the sidewalk. In the area surrounding the Winter Palace, there were buildings that seemed utterly devoid of human presence. On the right side of the same wide street stood one large mansion surrounded by an iron fence. Through an iron fence with spear-shaped tips lined in gold could be seen a mansion with tightly closed windows, overgrown weeds encircling it, and large stone steps of a carriage porch buried within that vegetation. The large deserted stone house—its regular contours harshly illuminated by the summer daylight—stood on that quiet street, further muting what little sound there was. As Nobuko and Motoko walked along the sidewalk bordering its long iron fence, a lizard darted through the weeds at their roots and vanished.

The desolate street opened toward a park where flower beds planted with pansies could be seen in the distance. On the iron fence at the left corner hung a white-painted signboard for Leningrad VOKS (Cultural Liaison Association). Lush green leaves overhung from both sides of the stylish iron gate, and a single gravel path ran through the tall summer grass. Upon passing through that gate, Nobuko and Motoko were astonished. It was a derelict garden. In the weeds beneath elm branches lay two or three broken fragments of marble sculpture pedestals, while beyond the thicket stood an iron fence through which the riverside avenue could be seen. There, the flow of the Neva was visible. The Neva’s flow visible through the thick summer grass and beyond the lower elm branches across the iron fence seemed to Nobuko to run swifter and stronger than she had seen elsewhere. The midday gravel path—so hushed one might imagine hearing water sounds—led Nobuko and Motoko to a doorway where a door stood slightly ajar. The door at the edge of the large building extending far into the depths showed no trace of office-like features, and were it not for the freshly hung Leningrad VOKS sign on its outer wall, the surrounding desolation would have made them feel like intruders.

Nobuko and Motoko entered one of the second-floor halls, guided by the sound of a typewriter. There was an authentic aristocratic hall with walls covered in silk. An oval-shaped large table stood at the center, upon which VOKS publications were neatly arranged. In a small room they passed through, a typewriter was clattering.

When she called out and stood at the entrance of that wide-open room, Nobuko felt a strange sensation again. A young beautiful woman—alone—had placed a tea table with French legs at the center of that rose-colored room and was typing on a typewriter atop it. Why was this woman—with her extremely delicate frame, smooth temples, and wavy bluish-blonde hair—typing in the middle of such a room? It seemed her own preference had made her choose this position. As Nobuko and Motoko were having an inefficiently progressing conversation with this elegant person, the middle-aged man in charge of the room returned from outside. He wore a pale cinnamon-colored tie, his well-groomed russet hair and white forehead bearing an appearance as if shadows from fresh leaves he had just passed under still lingered on them.

Facing Moscow’s Bronnaya Street, the French-style decorative doors of Moscow VOKS opened and closed all day long in their bustle—what a difference there was between that liveliness and the quietude here! Moscow VOKS was a soup pot boiling vigorously, frothing and steaming. There, deep within the derelict garden, Leningrad VOKS was like an exquisitely crafted cut-glass hors d'oeuvre plate (appetizer dish). There was not a single unnecessary thing. What is needed is all there.

——

Every morning around nine o’clock, Nobuko and Motoko would pass through the back garden of the House of Scholars, paved with cobblestones, and set out here and there around Leningrad. Smolny, where the Leningrad Soviet was located, and the Maternity Protection Institute. “Working Women and Peasant Women” Editorial Bureau. The Pioneer summer camps in the suburbs, and so on. The places that Nobuko and Motoko wished to visit and for which they received introductions from VOKS were all located in towns far removed from what had once been called Nevsky Prospekt—Leningrad’s prominent thoroughfare. Around the Winter Palace, the main avenues were paved with wooden bricks to muffle the clatter of people and horses, but crossing a canal bridge where an old pot-seller spread her sarafan skirt like a Gypsy woman peddling pots of all sizes, one entered another district—towns paved with worn cobblestones, just as Moscow was. Between the worn cobblestones were straw scraps, paper scraps, and dried horse manure. The northern summer was not hot enough to make Nobuko and Motoko sweat as they walked, but the stifling, dusty heat of the streets turned their shoes white.

In their white linen blouses and student-style jumper skirts, Nobuko and Motoko made discoveries at every place they visited—discoveries they had not known in Moscow. Even in Moscow, Nobuko and Motoko had visited quite a variety of places. In particular, Nobuko had done work that involved walking and observing about twice as much as Motoko, but wherever they went in Moscow, what they found there was a single system—or mechanism—constantly active as part of the larger organism that was Soviet society. Even in the most modern kitchen factories, Nobuko saw how meals for thousands of people were prepared each day and what kinds of steam pots were used. And while being guided through the long corridors, they came to understand how the factory was divided into various departments and that there were literary circles, Communist Party cells, and union district committees there. Nobuko also saw thirty People's Nutrition Labor Union members wearing white smocks and caps engaged in vigorous activities; yet their work was so strictly organized and devoid of slack that what reached her was solely the systematized activity itself, not the human texture of those performing it. Even at the children’s library, it was the same. Just as individual spokes escape notice on a swiftly spinning bicycle wheel, in Moscow people continued working so intensely that each person disappeared into their activities.

Upon going to Smolny, Nobuko and Motoko understood Leningrad’s tempo for the first time. Smolny was originally a noble girls’ school where the All-Russian Soviet had been established during the October Revolution. On that historic October night, the colonnade of Smolny’s main entrance—guarded by the machine guns of the Cossack Revolutionary Army—and the front staircase where countless people had once rushed up and down with rifles in hand now greeted Nobuko and Motoko on a certain June morning in 1928 with refreshing summer light and a faint breeze carrying the scent of summer grass. Nobuko and Motoko had come to the Women’s Department there both because they wanted to see Smolny and because they had never visited the Moscow Soviet during their time in Moscow.

Nobuko and Motoko had intended to spend only that single day at Smolny. Depending on circumstances, just a few hours.

However, Nobuko and Motoko ended up visiting Smolny not just the next day but the day after that as well—four days in a row. At the Leningrad Soviet during that period, the Women’s Department was running training sessions to develop political leaders among rural women. About fifty women representatives selected from local Soviets near Leningrad had formed a single class undergoing two weeks of instruction. Nobuko and Motoko, who had unexpectedly appeared there, were invited to attend the discussion meeting scheduled for the following day. The next day, they received an invitation from the head of the Cultural Department—who had been observing the discussion meeting—to visit his department. On the fourth day, Nobuko and Motoko were shown a small room at Smolny—once a cleaning woman’s quarters—where the Lenins were said to have lived during the October Revolution period.

None of those things had been written in VOKS’s letters of introduction. In Moscow, wherever they went, only the specific departments addressed in their letters of introduction opened before Nobuko and Motoko. A single letter of introduction could not be reused and held no validity across two departments. At Smolny, the Women’s Department door that had opened for them led to other doors opening one after another—different people appearing successively—each explaining on their own initiative, questioning Nobuko and Motoko, and showing flashes of humor. As Pashkin from the Cultural Department had remarked. Pashkin—his large frame crowned with tousled corn-colored hair—turned toward Nobuko standing by the window and declared:

“Well, what do you think? Our achievements are magnificent—a letter like this has come here from a woman in a distant rural area...”

The phrase "our achievements" was one of the expressions used in all reports and speeches at that time. “She came to the Soviet Cultural Department with a question.” “Does Soviet power permit husbands to beat their wives?” “My husband used to beat me before the revolution.” “And he still beats me now—Vot!”

Pashkin placed the light-blue scrap of paper—bearing large characters written in thick pencil—on the table, turned his large palm upward, and,

“Vot!” he said, closing his left eye.

“Do you understand how vast a range of problems Soviet power is being held responsible for?” Before long, Pashkin’s eyes gleamed humorously as he focused his attention. “She didn’t take this complaint to the priest—she sent a letter to the Soviet Cultural Department.” “Here lies the clear articulation of our decade’s significance.”

“Will you send a reply?” Nobuko asked. “Of course we will.” “We will forward this letter from our department to the Women’s Department.” “Unfortunately, Russia still has no small number of husbands and parents who beat others.” “With children also participating, we created an organization to protect those accustomed to being beaten.” “Who told you about that?” Amidst such exchanges, time at Smolny passed with a slowness Nobuko had never encountered in Moscow. Within this unhurried temporal flow, Nobuko was granted leisure enough to observe even the profiles and retreating figures of Soviet people’s emotions as they underwent change.

It was when they first went to the Women’s Department at Smolny.

The door of the neighboring room—from which came the alternating sounds of two typewriters—opened, and a slender woman wearing a white blouse emerged. The woman, wearing a black skirt with a willowy figure, had pale skin and carried an air reminiscent both of the young woman they had met at VOKS and of Leningrad’s intellectual women. Before answering Nobuko and Motoko’s questions about the Women’s Department’s activities, the woman first asked what relationship they had with the Communist Party. For Nobuko and Motoko, this was the first time they had been asked such a question at any institution they had visited.

“We are non-Party members.”

Nobuko replied. “We are not political activists either. Because we are in literary work—but we want to learn about your work.” The black-and-white woman, in a bureaucratic manner, “Mozhno (It’s possible).” she said. After saying just that one thing, she mechanically tapped the palm of one hand with the pencil she held in the other and remained evasive. As if provoked by that attitude, Motoko formed a uniquely clever, ironic, sharp one-cheeked smile.

“Is the work of the Soviet Women’s Department supposed to be done solely for party member women?” Motoko asked. The black-and-white woman, as if suddenly roused, looked at Nobuko and Motoko and spoke in rapid justification. “That is not the case. In fact, non-Party women are elected as Soviet delegates in even greater numbers.” Yet it was clear this black-and-white woman had no firm grasp of “the Orient” and was seeing Japanese women for the first time. The young VOKS staff members too seemed to be encountering Japanese women in Nobuko and Motoko for the first time, their elegance expressing an awkwardness—a blend of shyness and sociability—born of unfamiliarity. The black-and-white woman at Smolny kept evading explanations about the Women’s Department’s activities that were being requested of her, instead persisting with questions as if hearing reports from some unfamiliar frontier—asking whether Japan had universities for women.

It was just when Motoko, growing increasingly impatient, seemed about to blurt out in Japanese, "There’s no point dealing with a woman like this!" The door to the corridor from which Nobuko and the others had entered swung open forcefully. And then, a large-framed woman with a healthy complexion entered—wearing a mouse-gray sarafan with fine calico patterns over a simple white cotton half-sleeve blouse, her head cheerfully wrapped in a cream-colored platok. Upon noticing the two people by the window,

“Are you guests here at our department?” With an unhesitating gait, she approached Nobuko and the others straight on.

“Hello.” While shaking hands with her thick, powerful hand, she looked alternately at the black-and-white woman and Nobuko and the others. “Where are you from?” The black-and-white woman was rising from her chair, “She is our director.” Having informed Nobuko and the others of this, she reported to the woman in the sarafan that Nobuko and the others were Japanese women writers. That they had been introduced from VOKS. That they had expressed their desire to learn about the work of the Women’s Department. The woman in the sarafan fluttered the end of her cream-colored platok’s knot against the sunburned, exposed nape of her neck,

“I’m very pleased.” The woman in the sarafan nodded to Nobuko and Motoko, whereupon the black-and-white woman lowered her voice slightly—though still audibly enough for them to hear—as if to emphasize, “They are not Party members,” she added. In that instant, Nobuko felt fiery contempt and rebellion course through her chest. What did it matter if they weren’t Party members? Any person must first be human before being a Party member. And one could only be either woman or man—

The woman in the cream-colored platok remained perfectly composed, kept her gaze fixed on Nobuko and the others, and did not alter the pitch of her voice.

“That isn’t a serious matter,” she said. “We work for everyone, after all…” After the black-and-white woman stood up and left, the woman in the sarafan took her place on the chair.

“Well then, where shall we begin?” “Since you’ve come from afar, you must use your time here effectively.” The woman in the sarafan spoke to another woman in the room and gave Nobuko and the others printed materials outlining the Soviet organizational structure. She explained that most women Soviet delegates were actively engaged primarily in education, public health, and food distribution sectors, both in urban and rural areas. “A vast majority of women—particularly in rural districts—have been overcoming illiteracy while simultaneously becoming active participants in village Soviet work.” “In our communities, while children are thriving remarkably, the women’s progress has been truly extraordinary.”

The woman in the sarafan took Nobuko and the others to the room where a political study session was being held for the women delegates. In the center of a fairly spacious, well-ventilated white-walled room, women of various ages—their heads wrapped in platoks of assorted colors, their foreheads and cheeks all bearing the hue of rural sunlight and wind exposure—were listening to a lecture on agriculture and electrification. On the vacant bench at the back, sitting side by side with Nobuko and the others, the woman in the cream-colored platok crossed her knees high and comfortably beneath her calico-patterned sarafan, rested her thick bare elbows on them, propped her chin, and waited for the twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old lecturer—her bobbed hair wrapped in a red platok—to finish speaking. When the lecture ended, she introduced Nobuko and the others to everyone present. Then, from among the trainees, a woman delegate—around forty years old, wearing gold hoop earrings and looking every bit the reliable motherly type—asked Nobuko and the others whether women in Japan also had suffrage.

Nobuko found herself more intrigued by the manner of this village Soviet delegate’s questioning than by its actual subject. The motherly-looking representative—her sturdy frame radiating practicality—made Nobuko feel keenly that these inquiries stemmed not from abstract curiosity, but from lived experience. This woman wanted to understand Japanese women’s circumstances through the lens of her own expanding world—a village life where daily discoveries stretched life’s horizons into new vastness. With Motoko’s assistance, Nobuko outlined Japan’s brief Freedom and People’s Rights era, its gender equality debates, and the enduring discrimination women faced thereafter. When the matronly delegate heard this explanation—

“See!” While shaking her shoulders as if angry, she poked the side of the woman of similar age sitting next to her. “Our place was just the same.” The woman in the sarafan, sitting on the bench in a relaxed manner, observed the atmosphere attentively,

“Everyone, what do you think?” she said.

“Given how things are progressing, it seems we may have more to ask each other and share, wouldn’t you agree? Let’s hold a discussion meeting tomorrow at two o’clock. How does that sound?” In their characteristically rural way, they responded slowly and deliberately.

“Khorosho.” “Radno.” Responses arose from here and there. In this way，Nobuko and the others unexpectedly ended up coming to Smolny again the next day. It was exactly time for dinner，and both the woman in the sarafan and trainee women delegates trooped down from lecture halls to large cafeterias downstairs. As Nobuko and others were about to part ways at corridor corners leading that direction，the woman in sarafan—

“Why?” She stopped and looked at Nobuko and the others. “Where are you rushing off to? Please eat with us.” One middle-aged woman delegate with burn scars on her hand, who had been walking alongside them, nodded in agreement as she addressed Nobuko, who was hesitating somewhat. “Absolutely!” she said. “During the revolution, everyone starved, but now there’s plenty of bread, so there’s no need to hold back.”

On the tram ride back from Smolny to just before Nevsky Prospekt, passing through the evening streets, Nobuko kept pondering the stark contrast between the woman in the sarafan and the black-and-white woman. Until the sarafan-clad woman returned, she had assumed the black-and-white one might be heading the Women’s Department. The black-and-white woman had deliberately cultivated that impression through her demeanor. That the true leader turned out to be the sarafan-clad woman—with her plain appearance, clear sense of purpose, and natural competence as assured as an expert laundress’s brisk efficiency—this revelation, to put it strongly, restored Nobuko’s faith in what Soviet meant.

“Did you notice?” In the train clattering and jolting along the worn rails, Nobuko said to Motoko sitting beside her on the rattan seats, “That tone when Ms. Black-and-White said ‘I am your supervisor’! “How delicate it was! “It was as if she regretted that person being involved at all, wasn’t it?” “With that attitude, Ms. Black-and-White must have university credentials or something.” “That’s precisely why she’s insufferable—”

The next day they went to Smolny, and the day after that as well; each time they went, Nobuko found herself strongly drawn to Anna Shimova—the woman in the sarafan. Anna Shimova appeared to be five or six years older than Nobuko. She had been a party member since 1917 and, during the revolution, had worked in the district soviet where her factory was located. In her unadorned appearance whenever seen, Anna Shimova was natural in both movement and spirit. What stood out most strikingly within her was this spiritual equilibrium; together with straightforward humor and a grasp of concrete points, Anna Shimova possessed a power that made people aspire to confidence, made them work, and made them take pleasure in it.

It was during their final visit to Smolny. After being shown Lenin's room as they prepared to leave, Nobuko and the others stopped by Anna Shimova's office once more. She was not there. When Nobuko's group had nearly departed and descended to the third-floor landing, they met Anna Shimova ascending from below. Nobuko and her companions expressed thanks for their four days at Smolny - days they had spent learning many things with genuine satisfaction.

“I’m glad you were satisfied.” And when Nobuko and the others mentioned they planned to stay in Leningrad until autumn, “Do enjoy yourselves as much as possible, and let’s meet again in autumn.” Having said this and begun to take her leave, Anna Shimova suddenly kept hold of Nobuko’s hand she had been shaking.

"When this training session ends, I will take a vacation," she said. Anna Shimova said happily, her cheeks glowing with a smile. "I have three daughters." She continued in a soft, low voice.

“My husband is away in the provinces organizing collective farms, but he too will take a vacation in a week.” Anna Shimova, “The three of us will live together.” “At least a month—”

When she said this, Nobuko involuntarily— “Congratulations!” So saying, she spread her arms as if to embrace Anna Shimova. Anna Shimova’s happiness was so fresh that it struck Nobuko and infected her. She had three daughters. Her husband would take a vacation from the provinces. She too would take a vacation once the training session ended. “And the three of us will live together.” There was a song-like rhythm of activity and vigorous joy of life there.

After she had stopped going to Smolny, Nobuko recalled Anna Shimova even more often - together with that whisper of joy that was like the repetition of a song. "We will live together as three, at least for a month." There lay substantiated in those words the resonance of an active life so vibrant that even spending a single month together felt rare and joyous. Every time she thought of this, longing awakened in Nobuko's heart. Anna Shimova's way of life, brimming with exultation. That crystalline happiness that made even others happy.

“Anna Shimova is so wonderful, isn’t she? She truly radiates such vibrant vitality—don’t you think?” Leaning against the window late at night when Leningrad’s white nights had begun fading into dimness, buffeted by the wind from the Neva while relaxed in her slippers, Nobuko spoke to Motoko as though unable to contain her captivated heart. “Living like that—aren’t you envious?”

Motoko seemed to catch her breath before Nobuko's exuberance as if struck by a fountain's spray head-on. "Well, she is the genuine article, isn't she?" "To have met someone like her was truly unexpected, wasn't it?" During the six months she had lived in Moscow, there had been people whose impressions became engraved in Nobuko's heart. The memory of Dr. Lin from China—whom she had met in a dusty room at the Hotel Metropol after being introduced by a triple-chinned Claude of unclear identity—made Nobuko solemn and earnest whenever she recalled that scene. "Which of our peoples—yours or mine—do you suppose lives a harder life?" Those words of Dr. Lin's, steeped in melancholy, remained embedded deep in Nobuko's ears. Through them, Nobuko had come to understand that her own fate formed an inseparable part of the destinies binding tens of millions of unknown people across Japan. Yet the respect and sincerity she felt toward Dr. Lin provided none of the stimulation that might make her wish to become something other than herself. Between Dr. Lin's richness and Nobuko's poverty lay an immense chasm. But within that solemn disparity, one felt Dr. Lin's essence and Nobuko's essence were fundamentally connected.

The feeling with which Nobuko was drawn to Anna Shimova was such that the emotion of attraction itself was already pushing her beyond herself. This differed from the mutual empathy that had flowed between Dr. Lin and her. How wonderful Anna Shimova was. Whenever this thought came, Nobuko—liberated from her own consciousness—found herself drawn into imagining the ideal way of life embodied in that singular woman, Anna Shimova.

On an evening as June was drawing to a close, around the window where Nobuko leaned—separated by the unpeopled embankment street—the rich scent of the Neva’s nighttime waters seemed to waft over.

“Don’t you find it wondrous?”

While bathing her relaxed entire body in the unshadowed light of the chandelier with gold-trimmed decorations from the ceiling, Nobuko continued.

“Did you notice how Anna Shimova and Gorky have something in common?” “Hmm, I wonder...” Leaning her left elbow on the edge of the table placed nearer to the bed, fiddling with an unlit pipe between her fingers, Motoko blinked as though unable to swallow something. “Now that you mention it, since they’ve both emerged from among working people, there might be a commonality in that sense.”

“It’s not just that—and not merely because they’re people who experienced the revolution. Gorky was so profoundly human, magnificent like life itself—a man who felt as pure as the scent of an aged cypress tree in full sunlight. With Anna Shimova, I sense something similar. Within her very humanity lies a woman distinctly set in place.” “…………”

Motoko stared silently and intently at Nobuko. And with an unconscious gesture, she put the empty pipe into her mouth. Nobuko began pacing slowly back and forth before the window. From the window, across the wide dark surface of the Neva, the streetlights on the opposite shore appeared sparse and lonesome. "How beautiful it is that within splendid, truly human people, each possesses their own complete sense of self." Nobuko—who had been walking with her back to Motoko—spoke in a tone rippling with yearning; she remained unaware that Motoko, listening, had flushed slightly.

"I want to bloom like that too," she said. "Like those people... How truly human they are." "To bloom together..." But Nobuko immediately thought on. What method could possibly exist in reality for me to make myself bloom? Not as anyone's imitation, not as a stopgap, but for this self to blossom fully. The paths Gorky and Anna Shimova had taken to live and bring themselves into full bloom—the more those paths contained heart-captivating substance, the more they became things uniquely theirs: neither what Nobuko could simply repeat, nor what left any opening for imitation. When she returned once more to the window, her gaze—not truly seeing what lay before her—resting on Motoko's brightly lit face, Nobuko kept thinking: Human goodwill is vast and earnest, yet for each person to nurture their honest will and hopes within it—how harsh must each individual's path be? The road ahead lay blank for Nobuko. This emptiness alone pressed itself upon her consciousness.

Nobuko was about to open her mouth the instant,

“Bukko!” Motoko’s low, pressing voice overtook hers.

“What are you thinking—”

Just as she was about to voice her complicated feelings, Nobuko was cut off and left speechless. “—Shall I try to guess?”

On Motoko’s smooth, wheat-toned cheek, an unnatural half-smile appeared. “You’re thinking about things Bukko never considered before—am I wrong?” Motoko’s voice and gaze—straining to contain some agitation—made Nobuko wary. “Do you think so…? But why?”

“You don’t have to dodge the question.” As she spoke, Motoko forcefully shifted her weight in the chair where she sat with her legs crossed.

“Why don’t you just say it plainly? Haven’t you always loved being upright and fair, Bukko?” Motoko stared at Nobuko’s flustered face with eyes that seemed to clamp down fiercely. Then, with a “hmph,” she turned her face away, only to turn it back again. “You don’t need to hold back with me.”

She said.

“If you want to bloom in full so badly, then why don’t you just go ahead and bloom already? Fortunately, here—unlike with Utsumi—there are other men around.” Before Nobuko’s rigidly wide-open eyes, Motoko stared at her provocatively while tracing the hand holding the pipe from her own chin to her cheek.

“At best, you’ll discover your whole sexuality!”

Like gas igniting with a bang, Nobuko’s emotions exploded.

“What do you mean by that?” While finally suppressing the impulse to press toward Motoko, Nobuko retorted in a strained voice from by the window. “What do you mean?” “You know that already, don’t you?”

“I don’t understand—what could you be misunderstanding…” Nobuko’s lips turned pale from loathing. “I—I’m expressing it in a complicated way.”

Motoko was clearly misunderstanding. Nobuko’s expressions about “whole sexuality” and “blooming in full”—Motoko had directly interpreted them solely as matters of men’s relationships with women and women’s relationships with men. Moreover, through her narrow, skewed subjective tendencies, she had confined the notion of such relationships to graphic depictions of direct and explicit sexual encounters, The more Nobuko looked at Motoko—from her darkly agitated eyes glaring back to the resentful, self-mocking downturn of her lips—the more she realized this was provoking aversion. Nobuko pressed her tear-threatened cheeks with her hand and turned toward the window.

Over the long bridge spanning the upper reaches of the Neva, a lit tram moved slowly and dimly onward. Day to day, the life shared by Nobuko and Motoko passed without particular awareness, but in moments like this—when Motoko thought Nobuko had fallen under some man’s shadow—Motoko’s emotional equilibrium would lurch from an entirely unexpected angle. And then she planted herself with stubborn force. When Nobuko saw Motoko’s soft female body brace itself with this abnormal passion, she—overcome by sadness and aversion—could not help confronting the non-ordinary elements hidden in their life as two women. In such situations, Nobuko always sensed something still less ordinary on Motoko’s side while—

Having married Tsukuda—a man far older than herself—just after leaving adolescence, and through the experience of a five-year marriage where her heart found no peace there, intermittently strained until it was finally destroyed, Nobuko as a woman had never truly bloomed in a sexual sense. Nobuko had come to live with Motoko without ever fully becoming a woman or a wife in the true sense. However, Nobuko had nothing to compare her own delicate state as a woman to, and thus had no way of knowing about it. Within Nobuko’s sensuality—intense in essence yet now half-asleep—and within the scope of her strong capacity for love, still not yet able to exert its full potential, Nobuko was drawn to Motoko and lived. For Nobuko, there were times when she felt the desire to press her own cheek against Motoko’s, and times when their lips would meet. She did not feel that such emotions and expressions were exactly the same as those between a man and a woman. That’s not it at all. Motoko is a woman, after all. Even if she left that life while still unawakened, Nobuko was in love with Tsukuda. They lived as husband and wife. For Nobuko, the distinction between men and women was as clear as nature delineates it. Motoko was not a substitute for a man but, above all, a woman—a friend, yet one with whom Nobuko felt bound by the kind of intimacy that made her want to press their cheeks together.

Since coming to live in Moscow, Nobuko and Motoko's life became far more relaxed and liberated than it had been during their time in Komazawa. In particular, the pain of being peered at by men as if there were something eccentric and grotesque lurking behind the superficial life of Nobuko and Motoko vanished. Nobuko's resistance to this—and even her twisted sense of humiliation at being forcibly pushed together with Motoko as a pair—also vanished. In Moscow, it wasn't merely because Nobuko and Motoko were foreign women who had come together from a distant country. In Soviet social life, contact between men and women was liberated both rationally and emotionally, with dealings between them following each individual's natural flow and being managed through social responsibility. In such an atmosphere, what might be called curiosity about sexuality—merely suppressed on the surface—differed from Japan's state of affairs, where beneath a veneer stripped of all ulterior motives, everything remained perpetually taut with concealed agitation. Nobuko's temperament—which directly received all things through her senses yet could not be described as sensual—harmonized with that Soviet atmosphere. And Nobuko, wounded by her difficult life with Tsukuda yet retaining naturalness toward the opposite sex while despairing of Japanese marital conventions, found even those emotions gradually redirected toward hope as something that could align with societal transformations.

In the human qualities of Gorky and Anna Shimova, complete sexuality was preserved and in full bloom. That Nobuko found this beautiful and enviable was a sympathy toward the abundant potential for human achievement and a profound acknowledgment of the possibilities that an advancing society’s essence granted to each man and woman.

The evening before last, Nobuko and the others were invited to the apartment of Oki, a Foreign Ministry exchange student located on a side street in Leningrad. There was a female doctor named Yoko—Oki’s temporary lover—with Mongolian eyebrows, Mongolian lips, and thick black Mongolian hair. There were about seven other Foreign Ministry exchange students as well. There was a woman introduced as Yoko’s older sister—her skin bearing a primal quality—with a heavy braid hanging down the back of her Mongolian robe, quietly moving between the kitchen areas. In the interminable meal and wine-tinged conversation, where could there have been any genuine enjoyment? What masculine allure could Nobuko have possibly felt toward these young men—who believed themselves no fools, who spoke disparagingly of Japan’s bureaucratism and tedious social life, yet remained oblivious to how listless and dull their own manner of speech was? At root, it had not been a conversation arising from such beginnings.

After a while, still facing the window, Nobuko said to Motoko, who was at the table.

“You’re too self-aware of how you feel about such things.” “…” “If you think being self-righteous and getting angry proves your truthfulness, Bukko, you’re mistaken.” “Even after coming to the Soviet Union—this sort of lovers’ quarrel between women… I truly can’t bear it—” “—Don’t act so high and mighty! What gives you the right to lecture me?” “You’re always like that, Bukko.” “Twisting logic to suit yourself—how despicable.”

“I don’t think so.” “But when you start acting like that, what am I supposed to do?—What would satisfy you?”

Gradually becoming calm enough to speak, Nobuko turned her body—which had been facing the window—toward Motoko. “Back in Komazawa, during times like that, I would get scared and cry or try to prove the truth. So even now—if I did that—would it put your mind at ease?” Nobuko slowly walked around the silent Motoko, aligned her slippers, and leaned against the tall mantel.

“—I don’t have to do that anymore. For each other’s sake—we’ve managed to live without anything pathological in our daily lives, yet at times like this, we suddenly become utterly strange—this itself strikes me as pathological.” “I feel tormented, and we’re ashamed…”

After pausing her words for a moment, Nobuko said rapidly, her shame manifesting in a slightly flushed face.

“We aren’t sexual deviants—we’re simply affirming the various nuances of human intimacy.” The dark menace and venomous luster gradually faded from Motoko’s eyes.

“I know that already.” “Isn’t it strange? Then why do you become so—so indescribably grandiose in your defiance? Do you understand it yourself? How—” Unable to bring herself to say the word “ugly,” Nobuko— “Isn’t that abnormal…” Nobuko said. “That’s not normal at all. I’ve never once called myself normal.” “...” As Nobuko gazed at Motoko’s Kyoto-style refined features—her wheat-toned face with its slight underbite, the two black jujube-shaped eyes watching her, the relaxed housewear draping over a bust far more mature than her own—she felt an inexplicable unease. There was nothing biologically un-female about Motoko. Yet why did she reject her own sexuality so vehemently? That Motoko—three years her senior—had been influenced since girls’ school by Bluestocking feminists like Raichō and Benkichi explained only part of it. Even if disordered relationships in Motoko’s family—between father, mother, and aunt—had turned her maternal love into contempt for men, something still eluded Nobuko’s understanding.

“You’re utterly baffling.” In a tone from which all traces of irritation and contempt had now vanished, Nobuko stared intently at Motoko. “In your life, there has never been a concrete instance of men entering it, has there?” “That’s not true.” “If we only speak in that sense, you could be called purer than I am—but you aren’t purer than I am.”

Motoko’s face flushed slightly, and she stood up to light a cigarette. “Like a middle school boy?” “Is that so?” “Because they haven’t been concretely experienced—when it comes to matters between men and women—perhaps they end up being exaggerated in fixed forms and laid bare unpleasantly in one’s mind…”

Motoko, puffing on her cigarette, walked back and forth around the nighttime room with two large windows open toward the Neva River. With an expression that suggested something had been revealed to her through Nobuko’s words—as she thought and paced about, Motoko eventually stopped and said, “That’s enough, Nobuko.”

Motoko said as she came to a stop by the chair. "If I'm analyzed like that, how am I supposed to handle it?"

Nobuko fell silent. Yet she felt she could now understand Motoko with clearer contours than at any previous moment. Within Motoko’s barricaded sexuality existed a desire with greater fermentative power than what Nobuko sensed within herself—moreover, male sexuality was being repelled with a ferocity matching that passion’s intensity. Would Motoko someday shatter that ring of contradiction herself? Nobuko found herself wanting to witness that moment. Unaware that within the undercurrent of her heart—which yearned to see that moment manifest in Motoko—there budded a premonition, at some imperceptible remove, that her own life too would unfurl differently when that time came.

——

II

About an hour’s ride by suburban train from Leningrad lay what had once been an imperial villa village. Catherine II—from her watery capital facing the Baltic Sea—had yearned for sweeping vistas of Russia’s cultivated fields and grown nostalgic for views of natural meadows and forests; this terrain perfectly suited those preferences. Flat land stretching endlessly to the horizon, dotted here and there with natural deep forests, had been further adorned with an immense artificial park where they erected a Baroque-style detached palace.

In October 1917, after Nicholas II abdicated, that very detached palace became where he lived until his departure for Siberia. The palace village formerly called Tsarskoye Selo (Emperor’s Village) was later renamed Detskoye Selo (Children’s Village). Though no particular facilities for children were created there, it had become an amusement park on Leningrad’s outskirts. Every Sunday, groups of youths—young men and women in canvas shoes and athletic shirts alongside boys and girls—would disembark at Detskoye Selo’s small white station and file into the great park. Both Catherine II’s detached palace and Nicholas II’s detached palace were now preserved as museums. The hundreds of young tour group members walked silently through places like the splendid “Chinese Room”—with its magnificent divan where Catherine II was said to have favored that small chamber and spent long hours daily—Nicholas II’s marble bathtub, and the dressing rooms of his wife and daughters, their expressions mingling curiosity with indifference. After completing their tour of the museum’s interior, they exited through the same French doors from which Nicholas II had departed for Siberia. Upon reaching the grand terrace overlooking the park’s forests and ponds, they grew suddenly cheerful as if liberated, beginning to chatter loudly and play about.

Beyond the forest visible to the left from the French-style grand terrace, at the edge of the park, stood a small old-fashioned stone building with a gloomy air. It was what remained of the aristocratic school where Pushkin had received his education as a boy. Across the street from that building, diagonally opposite, stood a two-story stone house with an inconspicuous entrance. As one walked along the aged stone-paved sidewalk running beside the building, white lace curtains hanging in four first-floor windows—and lovely pink geraniums adorning the full width of the windowsills—caught one’s eye in a fleeting glimpse. This building had originally been the residence of the aristocratic school’s principal. It now served as a pansion—a boarding house.

The reason Nobuko and Motoko came to have at least a general outline of knowledge about Detskoye Selo was that they had spent a certain day in July walking around the great park and palace village with the guide provided by VOKS. The boarding house that the guide had taken them to for their lodging was a gaudy, unsettled establishment which—aside from its long-term residents—also accepted unexpected guests on Sundays and such occasions. In the hall facing a garden that overlooked part of the park, large round tables covered with tablecloths were placed here and there, creating an NEP (New Economic Policy)-style social atmosphere.

When they stepped outside, they found such houses to be exceptions—the daily life of Detskoye Selo's entire village was unassuming. Moreover, strolls through its dense great park and excursions to the primitive meadows in the surrounding area could be enjoyed at will. Nobuko thought she would like to live in such a place for a time.

In the scholar’s house where Nobuko and Motoko had lived since arriving in Leningrad, staying through the entire summer would have posed no inconvenience. However, the rooms in this house—once said to be Grand Duke Vladimir’s residence—grew more opulently court-designed the finer they were, leaving Nobuko and her companion ill at ease. Though chairs with gilded French legs stood about, not one practical desk or lamp like those at Moscow’s Hotel Passage could be found. When their Leningrad sightseeing period ended, both women desired a boarding house with meals where they might study properly. Was there truly no lodging in Detskoye Selo less NEP-style than this?

It came to light that Dr. Konrad, a professor at the Oriental Language School, happened to know one of the boarding houses in Detskoye Selo well. Upon inquiring, they learned it was the former principal’s house in front of Pushkin’s school—the very one where Nobuko and the others had been struck by the neat, lovely beauty of pink geraniums. Through the professor’s introduction, Nobuko and Motoko moved from the scholar’s house to the second floor of Pension Somolov in Detskoye Selo.

In early July, Nobuko and the others spent the first few days in a single room before being able to have separate ones thereafter. Through no longer needing to go out for meals, having her own room for the first time in seven months, and nature's profound depths—as if submerged beneath a canopy of verdant foliage—Nobuko felt the various stimuli received since arriving in Leningrad gradually take root within her through life in Detskoye Selo. When she grew settled in mood, even the noisy cramped life led in that Astozhenka room in Moscow began to seem interesting in retrospect, and Nobuko started writing a novel soon after gaining her own room.

When breakfast ended, Nobuko returned to her own room and stayed in a relaxed state, secluding herself until three o'clock lunchtime. After lunch, until eight o'clock evening tea time, Nobuko and Motoko would walk around the great park or lie in the grass for long periods. Led by the writer Alexandrov, whom they had unexpectedly met on the street, they also visited Alexei Tolstoy’s place. Alexei Tolstoy was writing a historical novel about Peter the Great. In the parlor with the mahogany grand piano sat a youthfully dressed woman wearing a light pinkish-yellow dress and her thirteen- or fourteen-year-old son. In Tolstoy’s study hung death masks of Pushkin and Napoleon. A typewriter sat beside a Chinese ceramic round stool. Putting aside Pushkin’s death mask, Nobuko couldn’t grasp Napoleon’s appeal.

If one were to speak of what Nobuko did not understand, neither she nor her companions could grasp the significance of Dr. Konni—a scholar whom the residents of Pension Somolov often discussed with great interest. In the boarding house’s dining room, framed letters from Dr. Konni were displayed on the wall. Professor Lizinsky of Leningrad University’s history department. Professor Verdel of Law. Elderly Miss Elena, her slender frame perpetually clad in black and her posture impeccably straight. In the evening tea parlor and such places, it was mainly those people who often shared reminiscences of Dr. Konni. Among them all, when elderly Miss Elena praised the late Dr. Konni, her usually calm voice would quiver with emotion. For Miss Elena at least, speaking of Dr. Konni seemed to be the sole occasion when she would disclose her emotions. Before long, Nobuko came to realize that the residents of Pension Somolov shared an unspoken etiquette among themselves. It was that those who met at the dining table refrained from ever touching on each other’s pasts, avoided discussions of politics, and even when mentioning their current occupations, did not engage in probing conversations.

However, one evening, this rule was spontaneously broken through some trivial circumstance. By some chance, talk turned to the January Ninth Incident of 1905. It became a discussion about how foreign populations had perceived that massacre of civilians—carried out by the Tsar’s army under his orders at Winter Palace Square in Petrograd (Leningrad of that time). Liza Fyodorovna—wife of a senior engineer, her voice calm and deep in a manner befitting her age, with two or three strands of white hair beginning to show—

“I’ve heard something like this,” she said.

“In England, you know, when the January Ninth incident occurred, a certain grand duke was holding a dinner party. Among the ladies and gentlemen seated at the dining table, the topic of ‘the Russian incident’ arose quite unexpectedly—naturally prompting various opinions to be shared. Then finally, that evening’s host—the Grand Duke himself—opened his mouth: ‘In essence,’ he declared, ‘the Russian Tsar understands nothing of politics. And the people are mere beasts.’ At that very instant came the sound of shattering glass from behind the guests—the head waiter who had been standing there all along with his tray of cups chose precisely that moment to hurl it straight down at his own feet! Without uttering a word or even glancing back, he strode out of the room. As you’re aware—in English propriety children and servants exist to be seen rather than heard—so I suppose that head waiter expressed himself in what passed for an appropriate manner.”

Professor Lizinsky of history, wearing a gray suit with light-colored hair and beard, his face characterized by a slender nose whose tip held a faint redness, wore a contemplative smile tinged with irony. "That episode belongs to 1905," he said, "but might it not also stand as the sole remarkable incident in that head waiter's entire life? Therein lies the quiet tragedy of Dickens's England..." As if some vexing memory buried deep within her heart had been stirred,

“Generally speaking, how much credence should we give to such episodes?” Elena remarked, lightly tapping the tablecloth with the slender middle finger of her right hand resting on the table. “Has there ever been an episode untainted by exaggeration—verging on falsehood...” “With all due respect to your words—if I may interject.” With his flabby chin—resembling two stacked sacks—trembling, Pavel Pavlovich responded to Elena in stammering speech.

“I am able to recount an entirely unexaggerated episode.”

The mere fact that Pavel Pavlovich initiated such a coherent conversation was itself a rare occurrence in Pension Somolov’s dining room. The large-framed elderly woman who was Pension Somolov’s de facto proprietor and her equally large-framed son with a lackluster appearance always lived only in the back rooms, while the one who dined at the table with the pension’s guests was Pavel Pavlovich—a man in an old military uniform afflicted with paralysis. Though he occupied the host’s seat at the table, there was nothing host-like about him; if anything, he gave the impression of a housewife’s attendant stationed at that seat. Pavel Pavlovich meticulously wiped his large beard—resembling a bundle of dried corn tassels—with the napkin he had spread out and fastened from the second button of his chest.

“As you know, I served in the military—I was an artillery lieutenant colonel. In 1917, we were stationed at a small town near the western border. Where we were stationed, we had no inkling of what was happening in Petrograd. But one night—around two o’clock—a squad of armed soldiers suddenly came to our makeshift barracks. In those days, armed soldiers were everywhere you went. —Only their flags differed. They carried red banners. ‘The Tsar is gone,’ they declared. ‘It’s a revolution.’ But we knew nothing of this…”

Pavel Pavlovich set his sagging cheeks trembling with an expression that rekindled the confusion of that time.

“The orders we had been given pertained to border security.” “We had not received any orders regarding the revolutionary army.” The corners of everyone’s mouths involuntarily relaxed.

“So what happened, Pavel Pavlovich?” “Pavel Pavlovich?”

Liza Fyodorovna asked. “Excuse me, Madam. “What could I have done? I could not understand. The revolutionary army gathered all the officers in one place. And regarding each one of them, they inquired with the gathered soldiers. Whether they had done anything to torment them as their superior. The officers were taken away one by one. You understand, don’t you? My turn came. I knelt down, certain I was about to die. I was an officer too, after all. Because I believed I was an officer neither better nor worse than the others. The revolutionary army began questioning the soldiers. Had he ever beaten them? Had he ever imposed unreasonable punishments? Had he ever embezzled supplies? Their questions were extremely meticulous and rigorous. Sweat dripped from my forehead. Fortunately, I had done none of the items being questioned.”

"However, before long came an unexpected turn." "My subordinate soldiers began demanding of the revolutionary army: 'Do not punish me.' "'Since I was a kind superior officer,' they pleaded, 'do not kill me.' "'If you must kill him,' they started shouting, 'then kill us first!' "The revolutionary army debated among themselves at length." "'And so I remain alive like this.'" In Pavel Pavlovich’s aged eyes—clouded and round like an old seal’s—a faint film of tears welled up.

“I survived.” “—Yet I still cannot comprehend.” Pavel Pavlovich stared fixedly at Nobuko seated to his left, his tongue growing more tangled as he spoke. “That I didn’t strike them was solely because I—as a human being—could not strike.” “—If being beaten held such decisive meaning, why didn’t they halt it sooner?—I was a man incapable of hitting others.”

Pavel Pavlovich’s story, which laid bare his own fears and weaknesses without pretense, stirred a kind of emotion in everyone. Miss Elena did not claim there was any exaggeration in the story. At the same time, both Professor Lizinsky and Professor Verdel left the table without ever addressing why the soldiers hadn’t been able to stop the officers from beating them sooner.

Nobuko was deeply impressed by Pavel Pavlovich’s anecdote. With equal intensity, she felt the Pansion’s art of conversation. Among these people, there existed an elegant manner of speech indeed.

The next day in front of the avenue, Nobuko, who had come out of her room a little early, was resting on Pansion Somolov’s old-fashioned veranda alongside Motoko. Between the neighboring houses stood a large maple tree that spread its branches in a fan shape, and in a rocking chair placed where its leaf shadows cast upon white pages, Miss Elena was reading a French book. From the veranda could be seen the deserted summer avenue before three o'clock in the afternoon, the thickets of the large park, and beyond them, a low iron fence. The summer days in Detskoye Selo were endlessly quiet.

Then, from the direction of the hall toward the veranda came the tap-tap sound of a cane striking the floor as someone approached. Pelageya Stepanova, the wife of the former military doctor, appeared. Due to heart weakness, she needed a cane even to walk indoors. The wife, with her reddish-coppery hair styled in bangs, dull large eyes, and a swollen complexion that always displayed a threatening air of displeasure, was assisted by her husband—who wore a grayish old military uniform—as she finally settled her heavy frame into one of the vacant rocking chairs.

“Hmph! My heart!”

Gasping for breath, she clutched her chest and shook her head. Miss Elena, who was closest, had to speak.

“How are you feeling?” “Did you not sleep well again?”

“No matter where I go, there’s not enough of the air I need.”

“If you sleep with the window open, it should help quite a bit.”

Pelageya Stepanova widened her eyes, their whites showing and veins bulging as if she had been insulted.

“It has been ten years since my heart was ruined.—If possible, I would even tear down the walls to sleep.” After a while, an unexpected question was directed at Nobuko and the others at the edge of the veranda.

“Are there also plenty of people with heart problems in Japan?” Nobuko and Motoko were momentarily flustered.

“In Japan, there are probably more people with lung problems than heart disease.” Motoko answered. To Pelageya Stepanova, that reply seemed unsatisfactory.

“Since the revolution, heart disease has at least increased in Russia.”

A shadow of a laugh seemed to flit across Nobuko’s lips.

“Until 1918, I was truly healthy and active.” “Until that fire—Nikolai.” “My heart is entirely thanks to that fire.”

The former military doctor, wearing an expression as blank as his old uniform, responded to his wife’s inquiry with no particular surprise. “Hmm,” he said. “Of course it is—there could be no other cause.” She took the cane leaning against the chair and tapped it clack-clack against the veranda’s wooden floor. “In 1918 we were in Estonia. My husband was hospital director—I served as head nurse. The hospital occupied a village landlord’s manor—but what peasants they were! They set fire to it—not just the manor but even the surrounding forests and grasslands—”

Gasping for breath, Pelageya Stepanova continued her story.

“That night too, we had properly put up a Red Cross flag on the roof. Nikolai. Our Red Cross flag was over two meters in size, you know.” “Hmm.” “We frantically rescued the injured and sick from the fire. Not even a single person had their eyebrows singed. In return, we were left with truly nothing but the clothes on our backs.”

Pelageya Stepanova leaned her upper body forward on the rocking chair. And with her two large eyes—their whites showing and veins bulging—she looked around at Nobuko, Motoko, and Miss Elena. “Truly penniless!” Speaking in a low voice through bared teeth, she flicked the tip of her left index finger with her thumbnail. “The revolution only destroyed my heart.” Hatred, like a splatter, overflowed in Pelageya Stepanova’s manner of speaking toward Nobuko’s face—Nobuko, who knew nothing of the revolution’s time.

Nobuko said to Motoko in the corridor as she walked slowly toward the cafeteria. "That way of talking is really peculiar, isn't it? If they ended up penniless like that, how could they possibly be staying in a place like this?"

The engineer husband would come to Liza Fyodorovna’s place. Their nineteen-year-old daughter Olga—a senior at the Science University working as an intern at a radio broadcast station—would sometimes stay overnight. When this engineer appeared—his flushed face wearing pince-nez, head shorn in a blue buzz cut, large mouth amiably slack as he spoke sociably—the atmosphere in Pansion Somolov’s cafeteria shifted subtly. To dining tables that ordinarily lacked even constructive ambition, he brought a boisterousness reminiscent of Soviet-style vigor. When this engineer—seeming more frivolous and vulgar than his wife Liza Fyodorovna—joined them, Dr. Verdel and Professor Lizinsky at his fixed seats grew familiarly close in barely noticeable ways.

Regardless of these small scenes in the cafeteria, there was a person who always worked tirelessly in the same way at Pansion Somolov. That was the housemaid Dasha. Regardless of the lives and emotions of Pansion Somolov’s residents, every Sunday—as long as the weather was fine—there was a large crowd that would merrily play garmoshkas, sing, and revel until sunset, their white-and-blue horizontally striped athletic shirts and red headscarves flashing glimpses through the trees of the grand park. Sunflower seed sellers appeared among the crowd, and ice cream vendors lined up outside the iron fence. The large crowds and vendors were, on Sundays, the vibrant wave of Soviet life crashing into the dense park of Detskoye Selo. Nobuko, sensing herself at the edge of that wave, pressed one folded seam of the round table—foldable into two—against the wall, and in the narrow space where her back nearly touched the bed, she wrote her novel bit by bit each day.

III

It was a rainy day early in August. It had rained all day yesterday as well. On the damp, rain-soaked park path, raindrops pattered down from the grove of trees, and each time a rather strong wind blew across the wide pond’s rain-lashed surface, the fountain scattered as white mist, swaying as it dispersed.

In the deserted grand park on that rainy day, the wind that whitened and billowed the fountain’s spray shook the branches of the large maple tree beside Pansion Somolov’s veranda, blowing raindrops deep into the railings. On the old veranda where heavy rain fell like a prelude to the end of summer in this northern country, Miss Elena and Nobuko danced the mazurka, darting from one end to the other as if flying. Elena, dressed as usual entirely in black, had her slender yet powerful hand digging in tightly as it gripped Nobuko’s plump young hand. With that hand—which felt like a hook to Nobuko—Elena led her, flipping her black skirt, holding her head high, and danced while listening to the mazurka melody that Nobuko could not hear anywhere amidst the rain and wind. Nobuko’s body, clad in a slender red-striped dress and possessing gentle, rounded curves in an Eastern style, galloped as it intertwined with Elena’s large, black, bat-like movements. On Nobuko’s face, slightly flushed from the intense movement, there was terror. Elena truly stood up as if in a fit. “Let me show you. This is how one dances the mazurka,” she said, and seizing Nobuko’s hand unrelentingly, she began to dance. At that moment, Elena had been telling Nobuko stories from her youth. In Odessa, Elena’s father—a prominent industrialist—would occasionally hold magnificent banquets and balls for his only daughter, Elena. In the past—that is, before the revolution—Odessa was known as Russia’s little Paris, where Parisian fashions arrived even earlier than in Petersburg. Elena wore French-made evening shoes and danced the mazurka amid music and jubilation until dawn broke. As she spoke, a flame ignited in Elena’s eyes. “Do you know the mazurka?” “No.” “Ah… Now even those who can properly dance the mazurka have vanished.” Elena muttered as if to herself while gazing toward the park’s forest, then suddenly rose from the wicker chair and declared, “I’ll show you.” “As for what the mazurka is,” she grabbed Nobuko’s hand and made her stand up.

Elena’s slender body, always calm and solemn in its black attire, harbored such fierce passion within. Nobuko was surprised by this. For Elena, the mazurka melody—abruptly interrupted and utterly vanished after resounding at her half-life’s end—must have now revived as an impulse to seize Nobuko’s hand on this deserted veranda where summer’s end rain fell. Elena was remarkably light. She still had ample energy to dance the mazurka. Nobuko felt this as she galloped across the veranda floor under Elena’s lead. But when? And where? With whom would Elena dance the mazurka again? She did not even think now to speak of that mazurka she had once danced with joy. She too held hatred. Instead of Pelageya Stepanova’s heart ailment, Elena wore her stubborn black attire. Without explanation—more eloquently than any words—it signified what she had lost. Just then a gust swept through, swaying maple branches as Nobuko—dancing near railings—felt rain spray on her cheeks. Motoko appeared crossing the opposite hall. Motoko approached with earnest haste and waved yellow paper upon seeing Nobuko on the veranda. Elena too turned her attention there. The mazurka steps faded naturally until Motoko reached them where Elena and Nobuko stood still hand-clasped.

“Bukko-chan, a telegram.” She handed over the yellow paper folded into a long narrow rectangle. “A telegram? From where?” “It seems to be from home.” Nobuko stood at the boundary between hall and veranda—not even noticing how she had released Elena’s hand—and opened the telegram. She deciphered each hard-to-read Romanized character one by one. SHIKIUKICHIYOARITASHI. “Urgent return requested.” As she silently repeated these words two or three times in her mind, Nobuko became aware of resistance welling within her. Not only was the telegram itself too abrupt and brief to grasp its meaning—the very notion that her family believed such a sudden message could alter the course of her life being lived so far away filled her with anguish.

Nobuko greeted Elena and slowly walked with Motoko across the parquet floor of the hall toward the room.

“I wonder what it means.”

Motoko, having read the telegram repeatedly, handed it back to Nobuko and told her to consider various possibilities. “What could have happened?” “Well...” As the people back home in Dōzaka, there must have been something that would prompt them to send such a telegram to Nobuko. However, she could not bring herself to immediately accept that their motivation was significant enough to warrant changing her life. The two came to Nobuko’s room at the end of the corridor, and Nobuko sat on the bed and looked at the telegram once more. Sure enough, it was written as SHIKIUKICHIYOARITASHI and nothing else.

“How unchanged your family remains. “Even their telegrams are exactly like phone calls—‘Bukko-chan, I need to talk to you right away, come here immediately’—and now they’re telling someone here to return at once?...” Motoko lit a cigarette and, exhaling its smoke, gazed out the window while thinking intently. After leaving the Dōzaka house and living separately, whenever a call came from Takayo, Nobuko had developed a habit of knowing its purpose before even hearing it. “Oh, hello? Bukko-chan, come here. “There’s something I must discuss with you, so come here at once.” What Takayo said was always the same.

In the beginning, when summoned to the relayed calls, Nobuko would grow flustered and startled, wondering if some genuinely urgent matter had arisen.

Locked up the house, left a note for Tsukuda who would return to an empty home, and hurried on foot from the alleyway house where she had been living to the Dōzaka residence. While about to enter the dining room where Takayo sat waiting, Nobuko said in a breathless voice,

“Did something happen?”

When she said this, Takayo’s face showed not the slightest urgency, “Oh, do sit down.” Takayo replied. And the topics she would eventually broach were, when Nobuko was living with Tsukuda, either Takayo’s dissatisfactions with Tsukuda or Nobuko, or her speculations about them. After Nobuko began living with Motoko, it was the same emotion from Takayo that began with “What kind of person is Yoshimi...” One out of three times, the conversation did not involve serious matters, and on such occasions, Takayo truly seemed to want nothing more than to chat with her daughter, using the pretext of having business as her reason for summoning her.

In any case, Takayo’s *Come here at once* was something Nobuko found difficult to handle. For Motoko as well.—When called like that, Nobuko would reluctantly go out, unable to return to the far side of Komazawa that night, and come back the following day with an expression from her exchange with Takayo—one she could not bring herself to discuss openly with Motoko. SHIKIUKICHIYOARITASHI. The instant she read the telegram’s text, a weight pressed down on Nobuko reflexively, and she became aware of herself trying to root her feet to the spot.

“But Bukko-chan, you can’t just leave this alone.” Motoko said to Nobuko, who seemed oddly rooted in place. “At any rate, let’s try sending a telegram—with just this, we can’t grasp the circumstances.” “What should we write?”

After pondering for a while, Motoko said, “Shall we say ‘Inform us of circumstances’?”

Motoko said.

“That’s a good idea. I’ll go send it right away—before dinner.”

“I’ll go with you.” Nobuko and Motoko went out along the rain-soaked main street devoid of pedestrians to the Detskoye Selo post office and sent the inquiry telegram. Nobuko and Motoko, who did not have raincoats, returned with the fronts and backs of their thin summer clothes thoroughly darkened and soaked by the rain. “Bukko’s mother doesn’t even know I’m worrying myself like this over here, after all…”

Motoko said in a tone of harmless complaint.

“Bukko-chan, even if you try leaving this be... “It’s me who’ll bear the brunt of a false charge.” It would take at least two or three days for a reply telegram from Tokyo to arrive. Nobuko felt upset by SHIKIUKICHIYOARITASHI yet remained anxious about the reply, restless and devoid of her usual cheerfulness. When they talked in Motoko’s room at night, the conversation naturally turned that way. “Well, we’ll deal with it after the reply comes.” “Depending on how things develop, you might have to return even if unwilling...”

“Alone?”

“—So you’re saying I have to come along?”

It wasn’t that she disliked returning alone—more than that, for Nobuko, the very idea of leaving the Soviet Union now was unacceptable. “Before, you see, when I suddenly returned from New York, it was exactly like this too,” she said. “My mother told me she had to give birth but that the doctor had declared it very dangerous this time. I became unbearably worried and forced myself to return home alone, only to find the baby had long since been born and Mother was up and about as if nothing had happened.”

Nobuko vividly recalled that regretful feeling from back then—the heartrending sense of having been deceived. In New York, Nobuko’s parents—plagued by rumors that she had married an American laundryman or gotten pregnant and married out of necessity—had used Takayo’s childbirth as a pretext to compel Nobuko to return home against her will, leaving behind Tsukuda, whose university research remained unfinished. Now that eight or nine years had passed since then, Nobuko could finally understand her parents’ awkward position and their desperate measures. Even so, the thought did not fade—the thought that her father and mother had seized and manipulated the genuine concern Nobuko had felt as their twenty-one-year-old daughter. Nobuko was a daughter who resisted her parents to live as she wished, but unlike women raised among strangers, she proved unexpectedly vulnerable in family matters that had become habitual since childhood.

Since they were insisting she return home immediately, there must be something going on. But Nobuko was absolutely unwilling to be made to panic by her own childishness again.

“Surely something hasn’t happened to your father, has it?”

Motoko—who herself had an elderly father—said abruptly the next day on the bridge of the park where they were walking. After a moment of silence, Nobuko asserted with conviction: “It’s not Father—I’m certain of that. If it were something like that, there’d be different wording in the telegram. And... he’s definitely fine!” Nobuko thought that if anything had truly happened to Father, that telegram wouldn’t have stirred such clear opposition within her. Though her heart had recently begun forming new judgments about her father unlike before, she still trusted their bond as close father and daughter. What remained unchanged about Takayo was evident in how the telegram’s phrasing directly mirrored her habitual way of speaking to her daughter. Even after mentally reviewing each family member’s situation, Nobuko couldn’t pinpoint the cause. In the postcard she’d received when leaving Moscow, Tamotsu had written about his plans to enjoy riding his bicycle around all summer. She remembered those words clearly.

It was the evening of the third day since Nobuko had sent telegrams from the Detskoye Selo post office to Jijyoushirase and the house in Tokyo. The residents of Pension Somolov were gathered around the tea table. That afternoon, when waiting for Tokyo's reply had become unbearably agonizing for Nobuko, Motoko took her on a four-mile walk from which they had just returned. She was receiving her second cup of tea from Dasha and adding milk when the entrance bell rang.

The door between the dining room and hall stood wide open behind Pavel Pavlovich, as was usual on summer evenings. When Dasha, who had gone from the dining room to the entrance hall, returned, she went around Pavel Pavlovich’s left side and came toward Nobuko. In her hand she held a telegram. Nobuko involuntarily moved her chair slightly away from the table. “A telegram—for you.”

“Thank you.” Unfolding the folded yellow paper and meticulously tracing the Roman letters printed and pasted on the tape, Nobuko left the dining room, forgetting even to nod to her tablemates. A step behind, Motoko also rose from her seat and followed. In the middle of the hall, Nobuko thrust the telegram toward Motoko as she handed it over. AUGUST 1ST TAMOTSU SUDDEN DEATH AFTER INQUIRY. When she stepped onto the stairs leading to the second floor without saying a word, Nobuko’s entire body began trembling uncontrollably. While holding onto the handrail and climbing step by step, Nobuko began to cry violently. Crying as she kept climbing the stairs, climbing and crying, Nobuko clenched her left hand—the one not gripping the railing—into a fist and struck the air again and again, writhing in agony. What have you done? Tamotsu, you idiot. Tamotsu, you idiot. The irreparable sorrow. Bitterness.—Staggering, Nobuko hurried down the hallway to her room at an unusually fast pace. Just before reaching her room’s door, Nobuko suddenly felt the checkered black-and-white corridor floor lift her entire body up with a floating sensation, only to abruptly drop.

What Nobuko could clearly recall was up to that point. After that came only fragmented memories—how she had been led to bed; Motoko pressing her tear-streaked face close as she repeatedly draped something over her shoulders; and at some indistinct hour—whether night or day unclear—Motoko lifting Nobuko’s unsteady, faltering body onto the bed and letting her face rest against her chest,

“This won’t do!” “Bukko!” “What are you doing in this state!” “Here, drink this...”

She could only recall in fragments things like being forcibly made to swallow a spoonful of soup. And one more thing—I kept repeating it persistently, okay? I will not go back. Is that okay? She was able to recall how she had kept saying such things, and how each time Motoko would respond emphatically, "Oh, it’s fine, I understand, I understand," while shedding tears. Nobuko lay between dream and reality for two full days. In a mood as if awakening from a long nap—so long that she didn’t even feel inclined to consider how much time had passed—Nobuko truly opened her eyes around noon on the third day and looked at her surroundings.

When Nobuko opened her eyes, there was no one else in the narrow room but herself lying there. A bright, quiet light filled the small room’s white walls. In the cup on the table stood wild chrysanthemums like aster flowers and weeds resembling fox tails. The weeds in the cup were ones Nobuko herself had picked that day in a distant field. Everything came back to her clearly. AUGUST 1ST TAMOTSU SUDDEN DEATH AFTER INQUIRY.—Tamotsu had died. A wave-like tremor spread from Nobuko’s lower abdomen through her entire body as she lay wrapped in sheets. AUGUST 1ST. There was a sorrow sharp as a blade splitting her chest. SUDDEN SUFFOCATION.—

The sorrow was so sharp that she couldn't help pressing her hand to her chest where it hurt, yet strangely, no tears came from Nobuko's eyes. Instead, as if the very air around her had become grief itself, even when she slightly moved her body or turned her head, Nobuko felt an excruciating pain of sorrow that stole her breath.

The door at the foot of the bed was gently opened. Motoko entered. Seeing Nobuko lying there with eyes open,

“Are you awake?”

Motoko approached the bed in a tone that strained to maintain her usual composure. "You've slept a great deal, so you must be alright now.—Feeling any better?"

“Thank you.” “Anyway, I’ve sent the telegram…”

In an effort not to provoke Nobuko’s emotions, Motoko confined herself to discussing practical matters. “I conveyed that Bukko-chan won’t be returning and sent our condolences.”

“That’s fine. Thank you.”

The next day, supported by Motoko, Nobuko went down to the dining room only at mealtimes. After eating, each person who had been sitting at the table shook hands with Nobuko and offered condolences. Professor Verdel—who was short for a Russian man and balding—stared fixedly at Nobuko’s pallid face with his earnest, agreeable black eyes while,

“It is commendable that you have not lost your courage.” “You are still young.” “You will endure.”

Having said this with trust, he earnestly patted the back of Nobuko’s hand—which he still held—as if to encourage her.

“Thank you.” Managing to utter her thanks without crying was all Nobuko could manage. Professor Verdel’s manner resembled Father’s so closely. Yasuzo too—had he been able to take Nobuko’s hand—would surely have done so to encourage both Nobuko and himself.

Eventually, Nobuko began coming out to the dining room at every mealtime. However, her condition resembled that of someone just beginning to recover from a serious illness. Just as a convalescent patient—still profoundly delicate—is overly sensitive to faint drafts or shifts in temperature, so too would Nobuko, while mingling with others at the dining table, suddenly and clearly think "August 1st" for reasons even she herself could not grasp. Then instantly, the chill of sorrow would send her entire body shuddering. There were moments when, absentmindedly trying to swallow something, she would abruptly think—with no connection to what came before or after—that Tamotsu had died. The memory would press in—Tamotsu shaking his thick knees in an old polished uniform or navy-striped kimono; his young gentle mouth shaded with soft down; the heavy full shape of his eyelids; dear Tamotsu's likeness—until Nobuko could neither swallow nor breathe. Her sorrow permeated her entire body. When wind blew against that body, sorrow itself rang out.

Nobuko, who hadn't even thought to don mourning clothes, spent nearly the entire day outdoors clinging to Motoko's arm, still dressed in her white linen blouse and jumper skirt. In the end, she had been unable to enable even a single person—Tamotsu—to live. This self-reproach would not let Nobuko remain still. People live by living as they do, each in their own way. When she thought of how Tamotsu—even with his brother Waichiro, his sister Nobuko, and even their parents among those people—had felt utterly alone, Nobuko's lips trembled with a dry sob.

Nobuko had been so fixated on the small note titled "Meditation" posted on the lintel of Tamotsu’s study entrance. She had always been preoccupied with it. However, even so, she had not tried to give up on coming to the Soviet. Her own survival had come first. Leaning against the railing of a wooden bridge spanning a secluded pond in Detskoye Selo’s vast park, Nobuko sank into thought as she gazed at the white water lily flowers floating there.

Tamotsu had likely died because he could not reconcile himself—unable to discover in real life those fixed notions of absolute correctness and absolute good that he had so persistently pursued. Nobuko could not bring herself to believe that Tamotsu had died because of a romantic relationship. If even Nobuko had felt that way, how much more must Tamotsu Sasa’s classmates have thought of him as a son firmly attached to his family. Tamotsu, who had been so obedient to Mother’s every word to the point of frustration, had come to know the limits of her affection and died. That, too, tore at Nobuko’s heart. During those days when Ochi still frequently visited the house in Ugusudani and Mother would seclude herself in the guest room for long periods, Tamotsu once said to Nobuko: "Why does Mother put on white powder whenever Mr. Ochi comes?" Nobuko could not forget the startled feeling she had felt at that time. Mother had loved passionately speaking to Tamotsu about things like sincerity and purity, but perhaps Tamotsu had gradually begun to sense discrepancies between Mother’s words and the reality of her relationship with Mr. Ochi. Hadn’t Tamotsu, while obediently engaging with Mother’s talk, felt shame on her behalf within those eyes calmly set beneath his full eyelids?

Nobuko found it hard to believe that Tamotsu—who lacked the complex life experiences of someone like Aikawa Ryōnosuke and was not as quick-witted by nature—had been burdened by such vague anxieties as to make living unbearable. At twenty-one, Tamotsu—single-mindedly guided by his own convictions—had likely chosen death as the means to assert his way of life. In any case, Tamotsu was no longer alive. He was not alive—what a void. The feeling of emptiness permeated Nobuko’s entire body with each breath she drew. And to this void left by Tamotsu’s absence was added the severance of a connection through which Nobuko—his sister nine years his senior—had vaguely sought to link herself to younger men more vibrant than herself. Within the sister’s feminine heart—different from a brother’s—filled with a sense of impending thirty and its concern for the younger brother’s maturing body and mind, there existed a tenderness so ephemeral that any attempt to grasp and name it would leave only vanishing traces.

As if wandering through her despondency, Nobuko roamed the forests of Detskoye Selo. Motoko was always by Nobuko’s side. By the depth of Nobuko’s sorrow, Motoko—who usually tended to scatter her emotions—solemnly focused them, staying by her side with a faithfulness as if she and Nobuko had become one body. Nobuko would occasionally notice with a start. Even though Motoko was doing so much for her, she had not spoken a word for hours—she truly felt sorry.

“I’m sorry—for causing you worry.”

Nobuko said this from the heart and pressed Motoko’s arm against her own side.

“It’s fine. It’s fine.” “Bukko.” “You shouldn’t trouble yourself over such things.” “But… it’ll heal now.” “—I said it’s fine!”

However, after walking for a while, Nobuko once again forgot Motoko was there—and yet, clinging to Motoko’s arm, she managed to keep walking along the shadowed forest path.

On Sundays, starting early in the morning, groups of young men and women—disgorged as usual from Detskoye Selo Station—trailed past Pension Somolov’s veranda along the street in front. All day long, the drifting notes of garmoshkas could be heard, and laughter and voices calling out to companions echoed through the vast park. On such days, Nobuko did not go out to the park and stayed on Pension Somolov’s old veranda. And while it stood in complete opposition to the sorrow filling her very being, she listened to the cheerful commotion that somehow offered a strange solace.

From the veranda of Pension Somolov where Nobuko stayed, across the wide street, one could see a side entrance to the large park. At the low iron fence where maple branches hung in thick clusters stood an ice cream stall painted in alternating pink and red. It operated only on Sundays. Before it, two youths were engaged in some dispute. A young man in a cobalt sports shirt—the very image of a Komsomol member—argued with another wearing a yellow-and-black horizontally striped sports shirt, shorts, and sneakers. The street’s breadth prevented their voices from reaching Nobuko’s veranda. Only their gestures remained visible—bare arms swinging emphatically as they spoke. The youth in stripes appeared increasingly cornered; each time he faltered for a reply, he would push forward the white sports cap perched comically atop his head. There was humor in this motion. Soon six or seven comrades came running from within the park. They encircled the pair. Three girls wearing black exercise bloomers and red platoks joined them. The cobalt youth addressed the group in explanatory tones. His striped counterpart likewise pushed his cap forward while pleading his case. A girl tilted her face upward toward the cobalt-shirted youth, waving a sun-browned hand in dissent. She repeated the gesture toward the striped youth. Then one newly arrived comrade encircling them spoke. At once, all gathered burst into uproarious laughter as if overcome by hilarity. The girl in the red platok laughed with knees pressed together like a kite’s legs, hands braced on them as she bent forward. The cobalt youth—wearing a wry smile yet laughing himself—thumped the striped youth’s back once.

The one who had been hit pushed his cap forward from the back as usual, and soon they all entered the park together as a group. Crossing paths with them, two Pioneer girls came running out from under the trees, their red neckties fluttering, and went to the ice cream stall.

From the veranda, the scene there was in constant motion—unassuming and as simple as the very essence of healthiness gathered in the Sunday forest. The atmosphere held a charming innocence. Lured in by that atmosphere and having entrusted her heart to it, Nobuko gradually grew pale and pressed a hand to her chest on the chair as if there were an unbearable pain. Nobuko remembered. The way Tamotsu had laughed. When happy, Tamotsu would slap both knees with his hands and laugh heartily. Tamotsu, his pure white teeth—neatly aligned under the shadow of downy hair on his upper lip—shining as he laughed from the depths of his heart.—That Tamotsu was dead. He was gone.

The young people who entered and exited Nobuko’s field of vision as she watched from the veranda were mostly youths and girls from around seventeen or eighteen to about twenty years old. How assuredly these young people must have been affirming their own lives.

Unable to tear her eyes away from the encircling park scenery, Nobuko remained seated on the veranda chair. In the youthful vigor moving there, she could sense the very youthfulness of the society these young people inhabited swirling like an undercurrent, and on that Sunday in Detskoye Selo, even in the wind carrying the merry notes of garmoshkas from near and far, Tamotsu came to mind. The people of the Ugusudani house had likely never even attempted to consider how Nobuko and Tamotsu had lived with hearts connected like two sides of a single shield. Or perhaps only Takeyoshi had contemplated it.

Because there was a sister like Nobuko, Tamotsu had no choice but to become even more desperate. If someone had confronted Nobuko with those same words of reproach, she would not have considered offering a single word in her defense. That was indeed one facet of reality. But could that alone constitute its entirety? Rather than Nobuko having influenced Tamotsu, it was that Nobuko acted as herself would act, while Tamotsu—compelled by his own nature to respond as himself—found himself caught in the turbulent currents of their era. Consider how numerous university students had been arrested in what became known as the March 15th Incident. Though derisively called a natural-born mediator—a humiliation whose full meaning even he couldn't comprehend—who could claim that Tamotsu hadn't pondered these matters in his own distinctive way? Regarding even this single event, Tamotsu—being true to himself—would have uncovered myriad contradictions and recognized his inability to grasp any absolute truth. The people of Ugusudani lived their lives adrift on waves of economic stability—even Yasuzo, who upon reading about the March 15th Incident one morning had hastily marked the newspaper article with red ink before sending it to Nobuko—yet ultimately, days continued passing as they always had.

Reading the telegram that read "HACHIGATSU ICHI HITAMOTSU DOUCHIKA SHITSU NI TESHIUSU," on the verge of fainting, Nobuko repeated, "Is that right?" I will not go back. Is that right? She pressed for confirmation as if delirious. That was an outpouring of her truest self, deeper than Nobuko herself realized. Even if Tamotsu had lived and died all the more as Tamotsu because there was a sister like Nobuko, she felt that she and he remained inseparably bound in that life and death. Nobuko felt that her sense of life—burdened by Tamotsu’s death—was something no one in Ugusudani could comprehend, and this sense would not permit her to deviate from the position her existence now occupied.

On that Sunday as well, when the afternoon grew late, the tour groups that had been scattered throughout the forest of Detskoye Selo were once again gathered into their respective lines. Everyone was more sunburned than when they had arrived in the morning, their clothes disheveled; the bellows of the garmoshkas that had sounded tirelessly all day were folded and hung over shoulders as they headed down the street before Pension Somolov toward the station. As one procession passed through, Dasha—the maid of Pension Somolov—stood blocked on the opposite sidewalk with a basket hooked over her arm, visible from the veranda. It was rare to see Dasha outdoors—she who always worked with a large faded wine-colored apron wrapped about her skirt. Dasha too stood watching as if finding respite during those minutes when her path was obstructed by the crowd. This same Dasha—when Nobuko had received news of Tamotsu’s death and still took meals in her room—set down the breakfast tray on the table, wiped her hands once more with her apron, and reached them out toward Nobuko who had sat up in bed. And then,

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

she said. “I hear your brother has passed away—he was a student, I suppose?”

Dasha, who seemed to have passed several years beyond forty, let out a heavy sigh. "In the past, such things happened quite often here as well." "God rest his soul." Dasha recited a prayer and made the sign of the cross over her chest. Dasha’s words—"In the past, such things happened quite often here as well"—and her manner of stating "he was a student, wasn’t he?" with such certainty became etched into Nobuko’s impression. In the past, there had been those who committed suicide quite often, and it was during that time in Russia’s life when many of them were students. Dasha had lived through that life. And now, on the sidewalk of Detskoye Selo, she was watching a group of young men and women trudging along in a line, kicking up dust at their feet. It was nothing more than an ordinary Sunday street scene. But within that very ordinariness, a new everydayness—one that balanced Nobuko’s sorrow—was unfolding.



In early September, about ten days before Nobuko and Motoko were to leave Pension Somolov, Nobuko received her first letter from Tokyo since the telegram. The letter—placed in a sturdy horizontal envelope made of handmade Japanese paper and affixed with double postage—was thick, and the envelope bore her father’s handwriting.

Nobuko shut herself in the room with Motoko upon receiving the letter. She cut open the envelope with scissors. On crisp white paper was written August 15th, 1928. Tokyo. From Father. "Dear Nobuko," was written across two lines. "With our family's misfortune still so recent and your mother's tears yet to dry, writing this letter as your father brings me pain beyond measure. Yet imagining how you too must grieve beneath foreign skies alone, I have mustered courage to provide a detailed account of Tamotsu's final circumstances." Yasuzo wrote in the fountain pen script Nobuko knew so well. The pen's nib had become strangely twisted, yet Yasuzo still insisted it wrote better than others when flipped upside down. Her father's handwriting—refusing to let Nobuko forget even Ugusudani household's trivial habits and clutter—seized her with physical immediacy.

Again this year, in early July, Mother—fearing the worsening of her chronic diabetes-induced heat rash—went to Sakura Mountain for respite as usual, accompanied by Tsuyako; those remaining at the house in Ugusudani were Tamotsu, Waichiro, and I. Tamotsu had safely completed the twenty-day German language course. The heat had been particularly intense over those two or three days, and on the night of the thirty-first, Waichiro, Tamotsu, and I—the three of us—went to a hotel rooftop for dinner and a movie to celebrate Tamotsu’s completion of his course before returning home. That night too, Tamotsu laughed heartily at the movie comedy and appeared extremely cheerful.

The thirty-first passed that way, and according to Yasuzo's letter, on August 1st he had gone to his office as usual from morning while Waichiro went out to a friend's place. Both Father and Waichiro returned home for dinner, but unusually Tamotsu was not at home. When they asked the maid, they learned that around noon Tamotsu—wearing his usual short-sleeved white kasuri and black merino heko obi—had passed by the side of the maid's room and left saying he was going to a friend's place for a bit. When Tamotsu said he'd eat lunch over there and they asked about dinner, he replied while walking away: "I might as well get a meal out of it there too." With a laugh at his own cheekiness, he headed out through the gate.

Tamotsu, who had always been meticulous about stating his departure and return times in advance, never returned home that night. August 2nd arrived. Father went to his office. Waichiro stayed home waiting anxiously for Tamotsu’s return, but even by evening Tamotsu had not come back. When Father returned from work, he found Waichiro—now uneasy—in the midst of calling two or three friends Tamotsu often spent time with. Tamotsu had gone nowhere. There were no places he had visited the previous day. Moreover, none of his friends answered that he had stayed overnight at their homes. Our anxiety swelled to its limit; on the night of the second, we conferred with Waichiro until late hours and searched every corner of the house.

Nobuko, who had been handing each finished page to Motoko one by one as she read that far, had goosebumps. What must have been in Yasuzo’s heart—Yasuzo who was with Waichiro—as he searched through every corner of the house, corners usually forgotten in the busyness of their active lives, and through the garden thickets for Tamotsu? Nobuko thought of each character written on the white paper as a drop of her father’s anguish.

On the early morning of the third, Waichiro examined the storehouse once more as a precaution. There, he discovered for the first time that the storehouse's wire mesh had been cut. During Mother's absence, the storehouse key had been in my custody. They found that the padlock on the crawl-through entrance remained unlocked, the wire mesh at the section where one could open both the crawl-through and main storehouse door had been severed, and the damage had been meticulously concealed to avoid detection from outside. Father and Waichiro entered the storehouse. On the wooden floor just inside lay a warning note in Tamotsu's large handwriting: "Highly Venomous Ants." The trapdoor leading to the basement was tightly sealed. There too was a warning note: "Danger: Highly Venomous Ants‼"

Tamotsu had thus meticulously considered the safety of his family even after his own end. When I consider his heart, I cannot hold back my tears. A distantly related youth who frequented the house in Ugusudani was summoned. Father and Waichiro broke the storehouse basement’s glass from outside and began ventilating through the narrow gap using two electric fans. The storehouse basement had two windows—one east, one west—but both were only half above ground. Though we tried to ventilate quickly, the fans in our hands soon malfunctioned in the pouring rain, and the operation progressed sluggishly. —Tears overflowed until Nobuko could no longer see the words. Nobuko read that passage again and again. The rain’s spray, mingled with her father’s tears, seemed to wet her face.

While that heartrending task continued at the house in Ugusudani, the summoned young distant relative was sent to Takeyoshi at the house on Sakura Mountain in Fukushima Prefecture where she was staying to escape the summer heat. To avoid startling Takeyoshi, he first inquired whether Mr. Tamotsu had come there.

Continuing to read further ahead, Nobuko opened her eyes wide—now dry of tears yet strained. The hand holding the letter dropped onto her lap. Soon enough, she lifted it again and pressed it close to her eyes, reading intently. Tamotsu had once tried to die in late March, Yasuzo wrote, though fortunately they had discovered it beforehand. One evening that same March, with Tamotsu still on high school spring break, everyone stayed up late in lively spirits; leaving only him behind, his parents retired to their second-floor bedroom. After Yasuzo fell asleep and some time passed, he suddenly remembered leaving his bedside box—the one holding his glasses, dentures, wallet, and watch—downstairs in the dining room. When he went down toward the dining room, a powerful gas odor filled the pitch-dark hallway. Across from the dining room lay a Western-style parlor containing a gas stove. Recalling this, Yasuzo turned off the gas valve and switched on the parlor light. There lay Tamotsu on the sofa inside that locked room—the gas valve left fully open. He had forgotten that the hallway-facing window could be unlatched from outside. That night Mother wept with Tamotsu," Yasuzo wrote, "and I too found myself crying despite myself." Given this history, should a young man from Tokyo ask Takeyoshi whether Tamotsu had come there, it would sufficiently imply to Mother that something had befallen him. Such were the circumstances Yasuzo had explained in his letter to Nobuko.

What in the world had happened? Despite such an incident occurring, to leave Tamotsu alone in the empty house in Ugusudani throughout the long summer vacation—unattended, with only men and maids around—Nobuko could not believe such carelessness. In March, when Tamotsu—who had tried to die—was found, Mother and Tamotsu both cried, and I too ended up crying along involuntarily, Yasuzo wrote. That was all; there was no mention of how Yasuzo and Takeyoshi had comforted their son Tamotsu—who had attempted death but failed—saved him from shame, or encouraged him toward living. Could it be that Takeyoshi, having cried her fill with Tamotsu then and been moved by the sincerity of Tamotsu who had tried to die, had considered that sufficient for herself? Otherwise, how could they have brought themselves to leave Tamotsu alone in the vacant house in Ugusudani that summer and depart for the countryside themselves? Nobuko, unable to bear the suffocating frustration, struck her own thigh with her fist—struck and struck. The year Nobuko and the others came to Moscow—last summer—Aikawa Ryonosuke’s suicide had also been in August. Several years before that, Yukichi Takejima’s suicide in Karuizawa had also been in August. In both cases, it was recorded that the surrounding period had been marked by exceptionally severe heat. If Tamotsu had truly been Takeyoshi’s child of passion, Nobuko found it nearly impossible to accept that Takeyoshi hadn’t felt compelled by some anxiety to remain at his side. Father Yasuzo too, during that March incident, had made Tamotsu forget his suicide plan but hadn’t attempted a single resolute effort to keep him alive.—Things had nearly dragged on until this point. They hadn’t suspected a thing about how Tamotsu had been diligently researching the efficacy of melon fumigation gas either.—

Last summer, when Aikawa Ryonosuke died and his will was published, Tamotsu must have read it, of course. The notion written in that will—"the misery of living merely to exist"—even if not exactly the same in content, aligned with Tamotsu’s usual way of thinking. At that time, Nobuko felt anxious when she thought about it. When she stopped by Ugusudani on her way back from Aikawa Ryonosuke’s funeral, Tamotsu had made the storehouse basement his study, saying it was cool. That, too, pressed in on her with a sense of foreboding. Precisely because the sense of foreboding was so strong, Nobuko was too afraid to speak of it to either her mother or Motoko. Now that it had come to this day, she realized that the one most filled with foreboding had been herself. Nobuko acknowledged it as a fact thrust upon her. And yet, in the end, she had done nothing for Tamotsu. I had come to the Soviet Union—in order to live.

As though whipping her own sorrow and trying to tear off the skin of sentimentality, Nobuko read on harshly. In Father’s letter, there was not a single mention of Takeyoshi overcome by grief. When asked by the youth who had gone to Sakura Mountain whether Tamotsu had come there, Mother—having intuited something—received the subsequent telegrams, Tamotsu Critical and Tamotsu Deceased, with rather composed acceptance. Mother hurriedly returned to the capital from Sakura Mountain, accompanied by Tsuyako. That night, she secluded herself in her bedroom for the night, deeming herself unprepared in heart to face the pure and unblemished Tamotsu; early the next morning, she changed into her formal crested kimono and entered the room where Tamotsu’s coffin had been placed.

Nobuko felt a kind of terror as she read that passage. How different Takeyoshi's way of grieving was from Yasuzo's and her own raw shock and tears. Takeyoshi's composure—that of a mother treating the deceased Tamotsu as something sublime, as if she alone had understood his heart—terrified Nobuko. That Takeyoshi hadn't been overcome by grief planted in Nobuko an unspeakable suspicion. Had Takeyoshi secretly steeled herself for the day Tamotsu would cease to live? Did she mean to say she'd left him alone on that sweltering, desolate August day while maintaining that resolve? Through Father's letter, Takeyoshi's mediation—solemnly acting the part of a mother worthy of the pure, untainted Tamotsu—made Nobuko feel nauseated by her mother's self-satisfaction. There was no mother to embrace pitiable Tamotsu and weep over his heart that had struggled to live until death; instead, Mother's figure—inappropriately elevating Tamotsu and using that lofty bearing to stifle people's natural cries of shock—filled Nobuko with despair. Nobuko stared vacantly ahead with open eyes until Motoko finished reading that section.

At the end of the letter, Yasuzo had written his opinion regarding Nobuko’s telegram stating she would not return to Japan. "In our home, now even more desolate, the absence of your vibrant presence is unbearable; yet upon reflection, I believe there is some validity to your judgment. Even were you to return to Japan now, there would be no way to revive Tamotsu’s life, already lost. Tamotsu too would likely hope that his older sister continues her research energetically. We elderly couple have also come to share that hope together with Tamotsu. Above all else, make sure to live while taking care of your health." Yasuzo had, for the first time, written of themselves as "we elderly couple."

After handing the last sheet of white stationery to Motoko, Nobuko covered her face with both hands.

V

Nobuko sat at Pansion Somolov’s dining table with a mind ensnared by thoughts. Elena Nikolaevna—with an oddly long and conspicuous nose powdered white, wearing a white voile blouse adorned with artificial flowers at the chest—her small, black, gleaming eyes darting busily about, was vigorously arguing in a shrill voice about whether one could or could not understand Tolstoy’s state of mind when he made his final departure from home. The elderly Miss Elena, who had grabbed Nobuko’s hand on that rainy day’s veranda and danced a mazurka like the fluttering of a bat’s wings, had finished her vacation and returned to her work at the museum. The newly arrived Elena Nikolaevna had been working as a program seller at some movie theater in Leningrad. At thirty-three or thirty-four years of age, she had voluntarily disclosed that disreputable occupation of hers. She had added a contempt-filled annotation that in Soviet society, due to her good birth, she was only permitted such half-baked occupations.

The one engaging in a discussion about Tolstoy with Elena Nikolaevna—who wore perfume—was Liza Fyodorovna’s husband, the engineer. Skipping past Professor Lizinsky, who sat smirking silently in the adjacent seat, the engineer leaned across the table with his pince-nez glasses and blue-shaven face as he said to Elena Nikolaevna: “I understand Tolstoy’s state of mind toward his family. Given your depth of understanding, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t grasp his heart.”

“Oh my.”

Elena Nikolaevna smiled—a smile concealing an excitement she couldn't naturally accept—and said, "But that would mean your husband has forgotten his duties both as a spouse and father toward his family." "Don't you agree...Liza Fyodorovna?"

And suddenly, across the table, she addressed the engineer’s wife sitting next to Nobuko. “As for Tolstoy’s case, I believe I can be understood.” Liza Fyodorovna calmly moved her fork and answered in her usual composed voice without looking at Elena Nikolaevna. There was a certain palpable atmosphere there. Nobuko, while sensing that atmosphere, simultaneously sank into her own thoughts. After reading Yasuzo’s letter detailing the circumstances surrounding Tamotsu’s death, Nobuko found herself recalling one thing after another—this and that.

When closing up the house in Komazawa and moving their belongings to Ugusudani, Nobuko set aside one trunk containing books and asked Tamotsu to keep it. In that trunk, she had gathered only the books she thought she might eventually want to send to Moscow. When Nobuko made that request, Tamotsu, for some reason, did not immediately say "Ah, okay." He remained silent for a moment. When Nobuko, sensing something odd about this, pressed him again with "Please, I'm asking you, okay?" Tamotsu said, "I'll make sure it's arranged clearly."

“I’ll make sure everything’s clear even if I’m gone, so you can rest easy, Sister.” Tamotsu’s words, spoken in one breath, lingered in Nobuko’s memory without particular significance. Now, recalling them, she realized a plan must have already surfaced in Tamotsu’s heart—a plan that assumed he wouldn’t live forever. Nobuko had moved her luggage into the Ugusudani house at October’s start. Two months earlier, Ryōnosuke Aikawa’s will had appeared in the papers—Nobuko could no longer believe it hadn’t hinted at Tamotsu’s long-planned preparations for death. Aikawa’s suicide note stated he’d thought only of dying for three years, researching methods all that time. Tamotsu had made his first attempt in late March and failed. From October onward, nearly half a year had passed. Speaking of August 1st—from March to then spanned another half-year. During that interval, Tamotsu sent letters asking Nobuko which university department to choose; by June he wrote cheerfully of plans to ride his bicycle extensively that summer, declaring he “intended to enjoy himself.” Only now did Nobuko grasp how naively she’d read that postcard and taken comfort. To read carefully—to heed the phrase “intend to enjoy myself”—was to recognize it cast an immense shadow. Behind those words lay an effort to envision vaulting over an unenjoyable present. Moreover, Tamotsu had likely balanced persistent thoughts of death against life’s allure—intending enjoyment yet prepared should it fail. Nobuko had noticed none of this. Having noticed nothing, she stood accused of deficient affection toward her brother.

In January, when Nobuko wrote to Tamotsu about the greenhouse, Takedayo had become furious and sent a letter reviling her. From then on, all direct correspondence between Takedayo and Nobuko had ceased, but understanding that this stemmed from Tamotsu's March incident allowed Nobuko to naturally perceive another angle to it. According to Father's letter, the gas incident on that March night had been completely concealed from all other family members. It stated that only Tamotsu, Father, and Mother knew. Takedayo had undoubtedly been absolutely determined to keep this secret from Nobuko. She must have resolved never to let Nobuko—whom she considered destructive and materialistic—lay hands on Tamotsu's secret, which she held utterly sacred. This likely caused her to write even fewer letters.

Nobuko imagined even more intensely. Takedayo might have even thought that her son Tamotsu’s actions on that March night had been caused by her daughter Nobuko’s cold-hearted letter. Tamotsu had not taken it that way. Nobuko could vividly recall the postcard from Tamotsu that she had read under the linden tree in the snow-covered embassy’s outer garden. “Even though you were living in a distant foreign country, you thought of me so much—I was surprised.” There, Tamotsu’s tender feelings overflowed. Regarding what Nobuko had said to him—that the cost of one of the greenhouses built for Tamotsu’s high school entrance celebration might have covered a year’s tuition for a struggling student—Tamotsu candidly wrote back, “I never once thought of it that way.” “I find that to be an extremely shameful thing.” Beside that line, a special line had been drawn. When she read that postcard, how tightly Nobuko must have held Tamotsu’s heart close to her chest. Dear Tamotsu—Nobuko’s throat tightened with fresh sorrow as she picked up her teacup.

At that moment, from across the table, Elena Nikolaevna—continuing the earlier conversation with a strangely flushed expression—turned to Nobuko and said, “I hear you are a novelist. As a woman writer, what are your thoughts on this matter concerning Tolstoy?” Nobuko found nothing likable about either Elena Nikolaevna’s personality or her manner of speaking. Elena Nikolaevna was merely flirting with a dashing engineer—his cheeks to chin shadowed with thick stubble, his mouth unrestrained—using Tolstoy as a pretext while barely maintaining table manners. Nobuko, taking advantage of her limited Russian, barely managed to swallow the lump of sorrow rising in her throat.

“I believe Liza Fyodorovna has given an accurate answer.”

she replied briefly.

While Nobuko ground down her sorrow day and night, gradually distilling from the sodden depths of lamentation an astringent, enduring bitterness, the mornings and evenings at Pension Somolov continued in the strange cadence that had begun shifting since Elena Nikolaevna’s arrival.

It was one afternoon not long after the story of Tolstoy’s flight from home had become a topic of conversation at the dinner table, laced with disquieting turns of phrase. Professor Verdel, Nobuko, and Motoko went to see the murals in an old church standing in a field about two miles away. Separated from nearby villages and surrounded by shrub thickets in a small clearing stood a lonely abandoned temple renowned for its Byzantine-style mosaic murals. As they left and were strolling about, they unexpectedly encountered Elena Nikolaevna and the engineer walking arm in arm through the thicket ahead. When both parties—Professor Verdel’s group on one side, Elena and the engineer on the other—saw each other on this single unavoidable path, Elena and the engineer appeared to have just released their linked arms. Keeping the same distance between them, the pair walked several steps forward, and Elena Nikolaevna—wearing a gaudy light blue dress with a plunging neckline—spoke in an artificially vivacious tone,

“My, what an unexpected encounter!” Elena Nikolaevna approached, clearly focusing only on Professor Verdel. “I do apologize for the intrusion.” Professor Verdel lightly touched the brim of his black fedora, nodded to the engineer, and said in his usual calm and serious tone—though with a wry smile— “I’m afraid I can’t quite discern who intruded upon whom.” Nobuko and the other two simply set off on their way back. Throughout this, the engineer kept his face slightly flushed and did not utter a single word.

“It was the man who panicked.” “As for Elena, she’s all too happy to earn a little extra on his business trip.”

When they were alone, Motoko exclaimed indignantly.

“Isn’t he taking people for fools? Keeping such a nice, proper wife on the sidelines while carrying on right under her nose—that Engineer Amesuke bastard!” At evening tea, when all the residents of Pension Somolov had gathered around the table, Motoko said to Liza Fyodorovna beside her in a casually conversational tone anyone might use,

“Did you go for a walk today?” Motoko asked. “No.” With a slight raise of her eyebrows on her dark, Russian-featured face, Liza Fyodorovna answered in the rounded voice of a woman no longer young. “I was in my room—reading a book.”

“What a pity that must have been.” “We happened to see your husband and Elena Nikolaevna taking a stroll together at that old temple out in the field.” Listening in, Nobuko felt an awkward discomfort. Motoko must have started speaking that way out of goodwill toward Liza Fyodorovna, rebelling against the engineer and Elena. But it was meddlesome and left no one with a good impression. Nobuko gently poked Motoko. As if demonstrating her disregard for Nobuko’s signal, Motoko now turned to address Elena Nikolaevna across the table.

“Elena Nikolaevna, how was your walk? I hadn’t expected you to take such an interest in those old murals.” From the moment Motoko had addressed Liza Fyodorovna, Elena Nikolaevna had been engrossed in conversation with Professor Lizinsky, the history professor, speaking with excessive enthusiasm about the origins of that temple famous in Detskoye Selo. When addressed directly, she threw a brief, contemptuous glance at Motoko before saying to the engineer’s wife,

“It truly was a pleasure to have coincidentally taken a walk together today.” “Liza Fyodorovna, let us all go see that temple again soon—with Professor Lizinsky providing explanations as we do.”

After that incident, Motoko grew increasingly watchful of Elena and the engineer's conduct. The previous night, she had even witnessed them kissing in the hallway. Nobuko assumed a pained expression and said, "It's fine, isn't it? Just leave them be. If anyone should get angry, it ought to be the wife."

“Elena’s just having fun with it—she probably thinks that Japanese woman’s jealous.” “Tch! Who would?!” Motoko turned her face to the side and exhaled a puff of cigarette smoke. “Because he’s looking down on his wife too much—it’s getting on my nerves.”

She did not understand herself, having become neurotic from a sense of justice. Having said this, Motoko glared at Nobuko.

To the petty scandals—both audible and visible, typical of the summer Pension—Nobuko paid little more than half a mind. As the days passed since Tamotsu’s death, the house in Ugusudani grew ever more distant to Nobuko, imbued with the fact that she too had grown up within it. Tamotsu’s death thrust upon Nobuko the reality of how the house in Ugusudani had transformed and was now collapsing.

When alone and still, thoughts of the crumbling house in Ugusudani welled up persistently in Nobuko’s heart.

Nobuko rested both arms on the veranda railing of Pansion Somolov, placed her chin upon them, and gazed out. The vast park forest of Detskoye Selo where her eyes lingered had already grown nearly dark. Above the black forest, the lingering evening sky shone with a melancholy beauty, its luster like blue enamel. A strange conflict arose within Nobuko's heart. Once again in her mind, the house in Ugusudani—imbued with half of Nobuko Sasa's life—receded farther and farther away. The part of Nobuko that drifted from her body along with the house became the torn-off rear half of her being. The remaining half-face with defined features faced forward, clinging tenaciously to her present place and resolved never to leave. The more distant the house grew, the more intensely Nobuko clung to her current location with half her being—so fiercely that she failed to notice Motoko approaching until she stood beside her. Motoko said she'd seen the engineer sneaking out of Elena's room. What did that matter? Not because of what she'd become, nor for what she might become, but against the receding house of her past and her half-life struck down by Tamotsu's death—Nobuko clung with all her strength to this here and now where her face was turned. Now that Tamotsu had been fully absorbed into her existence, she held him deep in her heart while—

Guidepost: Part Two

Chapter One

1

Near the end of summer that year, Nobuko and Motoko traveled down the Volga River from Nizhny Novgorod to Stalingrad. After touring the Donbass coal mines and visiting places including the modest house where Chekhov was born and raised in Taganrog facing the Sea of Azov, they returned to Moscow in October.

In Moscow, autumn rain had begun to fall, and throughout the day, passing showers dampened the yellow leaves scattered across the avenues. A lonely, bright pearl-colored sky reflected in the rain-filled puddles, fragments of thick soot-black rain clouds visible scudding away within them. The blend of autumn trees brightened by rain-yellow hues and soft grays imbued every corner of the bustling Moscow streets with an unexpected lingering atmosphere.

After returning from their trip, Nobuko and the others had once again taken rooms at the Passage Hotel and were living there temporarily. The news that Danjuro Sado would bring Kabuki from Japan to Moscow and Leningrad was confirmed. The report that Japanese Kabuki would come to Russia at the start of the season and perform a program combining *Chushingura* and *shosa-goto* in two capitals was an event of great significance for all Japanese in Moscow. Since VOKS and the Japanese Embassy were directly managing this Kabuki invitation, Nobuko and Motoko inevitably encountered discussions about the upcoming Kabuki performances in Moscow whenever they visited either institution for errands. Compared to VOKS members' simple anticipation—who held an exotic fascination with Japanese *Kabuki* through *ukiyo-e* and similar works—the Japanese discussing Kabuki's Moscow visit did so with expectations tinged by unease. Though Kabuki was Japan's unique theater form, among those who had come to Moscow, only a handful of men and women truly possessed any deep knowledge of it. Even those who had rarely seen Kabuki while in Japan now gossiped with vague impressions—since Kabuki was coming to Moscow, it simply *had* to be splendid enough to impress Soviet citizens.

Being a theater enthusiast who also had relatively good knowledge of Kabuki, Motoko said, “Even just how Kabuki uses the hanamichi—that runway through the audience—the Soviet folks won’t watch it idly. When it comes to extending the stage into the spectator area, Meyerhold may have put considerable effort into it, but the bold simplicity of Kabuki’s hanamichi will surely astonish them.”

In the atmosphere of a socialist country, Motoko was enthusiastic, expecting new stimulus from seeing traditional Japanese Kabuki.

“The real problem lies in the explanations. Unless they’re exceptionally thorough, union members won’t grasp a thing.” Moscow’s main theaters allocated a fixed number of free admission tickets to various labor unions throughout the season. Living in hotels as if continuing their journey—since Kabuki would come anyway and they’d inevitably go to Leningrad—Nobuko listened with scant words to people’s conversations and studied the faces of those speaking.

At the beginning of August, after receiving news of Tamotsu’s death at Pansion Somolov in Detskoye Selo, Nobuko had changed somewhat. A natural brightness now tinged with a womanly frivolity. An unsuspecting nature. Nobuko—who had spent nine months in the Soviet Union living true to her temperament of loving good food and possessing an insatiable intellectual curiosity—had grown optimistic through the sensation of being alive while encountering new things. It was something profoundly different. Even when Soviet society’s earnest movements laid bare her own emptiness with a sharp sting, the pain—in how mercilessly it made her feel that very pain—was ultimately refreshing.

When Tamotsu died and she had somewhat recovered from the shock, the relationship between Nobuko and the Soviet society where she lived had become, in her perception, something different from before. Tamotsu had died. Nobuko felt she had been cast out from all her previous bonds. Cast out, Nobuko felt herself struck by an inexorable force into Soviet society—like a small, hard wedge propelled to pierce a wall—and there she remained lodged.

The change in Nobuko’s emotional life was nowhere outwardly visible, but it rendered her introverted toward the outside world. The feeling of herself being embedded in Soviet society was something profoundly different from the emotions of those who were abuzz with constant rumors about Kabuki coming to Moscow. Nobuko strongly felt that difference as hers alone. When the news of Tamotsu’s death came, Nobuko—on the verge of fainting—had persistently asked herself, Is that all right? I won’t go back—is that all right? she repeated to herself. The feeling of herself being embedded in Soviet society—this, is that all right? It was something that resonated in Nobuko’s heart at the very moment she had declared, I won’t go back. At the same time—leaning against the aged railing of Pansion Somolov’s veranda—it also resonated with that peculiar summer evening’s visceral reality: the sensation that all her past, along with her entire body, was receding further and further behind, while only the front of her face remained clinging to the cliff, feeling that no matter what happened, it would not detach from that place where it tenaciously clung.

Nobuko discovered the new emotional distance that had arisen between Motoko and herself. Seeing how profoundly Nobuko had been shaken by Tamotsu's death, it was Motoko who planned excursions like the Volga River cruise and visits to Donbass coal mines. This was all Motoko's thoughtful attempt to draw Nobuko back into life's interests. When she did return to daily life, Nobuko became conscious that within her heart, her relationship with Soviet society had transformed into something different from before. Motoko remained positioned exactly as she had been. Just as Nobuko herself had done until recently, Motoko entwined herself with Soviet society's moment-to-moment existence while keeping a measured distance—preserving a relationship that allowed both parties to separate without wounds when necessary.

This difference between herself and Motoko became acutely clear to Nobuko. And Nobuko accepted that change as an indisputable fact. It was not Motoko who had lost her younger brother Tamotsu, but Nobuko. The shock was so profound that it made her feel as though her entire life up to that point had been snapped off—and it was Nobuko, not Motoko, who felt this way. As a result, Nobuko found herself seized by an awkward immobility—a feeling of being embedded in Soviet society—and rather than resisting it, she discovered in this state a clue to her current state of mind. That Motoko—who was not Nobuko—continued living as she had for years, consciously accumulating knowledge and experiences through life in Moscow, was natural and inevitable. In this condition, Nobuko and Motoko plunged into the festive commotion surrounding Kabuki’s arrival in Moscow—an event that electrified the Japanese community abroad.

From their position, Nobuko and the others had no way of ascertaining how the Japanese diplomats stationed in Moscow conducted their lives. In any case, that their existence was neither what one might call glamorous nor marked by free and unrestrained movement was evident even from the atmosphere of the embassy wives. The arrival of Kabuki had invigorated all Japanese in Moscow, creating a palpable sense of joy that even the diplomats now possessed something worth showing to Soviet people and matters worthy of mutual discussion.

In connection with Kabuki, various people traveled between Moscow and Leningrad. Around the same time, several film and theater professionals who had been working in Germany also arrived. Nobuko had been commissioned to write an explanatory article about *Sagimusume* for a magazine titled *Film and Theater*. The plan was to publish her Japanese text in Russian translation. Since this was ultimately an amateur effort without academic rigor, she focused on conveying through the text alone the fantasy of *Sagimusume* as rendered in monochrome imagery. She also described how gently rustling snowfall and umbrellas—cherished as poetic devices—are adored within Japan's classical dance tradition.

“Of course, it’s all simple things within my understanding,” she said, “but as I wrote earnestly, I gradually began to feel strange and got stuck.”

Seated across the table from Nobuko as she spoke were Koichiro Nakadate, a film director from Germany; Yoshinosuke Nagahara, a young actor from the Kabuki troupe; Motoko; and two or three others. The place was a room at the Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel. Koichiro Nakadate was going to visit Eisenstein’s working methods at Sovkino’s First Studio tomorrow, and since Nobuko and the others were to join him, they gladly stopped by for a meeting in response to the invitation.

The Kabuki actors, centered around Danjuro Sado, were moving collectively through their short foreign stay schedule, and it seemed they could hardly find any personal free time. Yoshinosuke Nagahara, who had come to speak with Nakadate about some matter during a busy interval, was glancing at his wristwatch discreetly beneath his cuffs, "What you just described as a peculiar feeling, Ms. Sasa—it might be something entirely different—but I often experience something similar myself when performing here on this stage."

Yoshinosuke Nagahara said in a frank and passionate tone that was exceptional for a Kabuki actor. “What kind of feeling is that?” Nakadate—who gave an impression of soft tenacity that persistently dug deeper and strong nerves—asked Yoshinosuke with phrasing that carried a somewhat feminine quality, habitual to him.

“Performing on stage before an audience that doesn’t understand the language—that must indeed feel peculiar.” “In that regard, I’m surprisingly unfazed.” “Because they don’t understand the lines, there’s a part where it actually works to my advantage.” “After all, we’re fundamentally performing with the resolve to draw in an audience that doesn’t understand the lines through our art alone.”

“That’s evident when watching.”

Motoko agreed sympathetically, like someone who had watched theater for many years. “Even Danjuro is putting serious effort into his work.” “In that sense, there’s a kind of interest here that you wouldn’t quite see in Japan.” “It’s literally like water poured on dry ground—do you think the Soviet people find it interesting?” “Even though onnagata must appear quite grotesque to the local audience here, there’s no backlash.” “When it comes to film, there’s no such leniency.”

“Don’t you think so?” “I feel art’s true essence lies in its refusal to make concessions.” “That’s exactly where this strange sensation suddenly comes from.” “When we’re pouring everything into our performances on stage—in those very moments—I abruptly wonder how much value truly exists in the art we’re striving so hard to create.” Yoshinosuke, as if embarrassed by his own youthful fervor, flushed faintly. “There’s no doubt Kabuki is a uniquely Japanese form of theater—but even when performing *Chushingura* myself, I feel intensely that these emotions don’t belong to us today.”

“That’s right—when I tried to explain the mysterious elegance of *Sagimusume*, I felt that same odd sensation too.”

Nobuko agreed. "No matter how much effort we put into performing it, *Sagimusume* retains only the symbolism and fantasy of olden Japan... And what's more, that illusion of the dance could only ever truly live under the light of old-fashioned oil lamps."

“Knock on wood, knock on wood.” Koichiro Nakadate raised his thick eyebrows in jest while drawing his head back. “If what Yoshinosuke’s saying reached the master’s ears, you’d get quite the scolding.”

Motoko said to Yoshinosuke, who was silently laughing, “Is it true that you all received a formal lecture before coming to Moscow?”

she asked. “Danjuro gathered everyone and said, ‘Don’t forget we’re going to Russia to perform plays—blushing is strictly forbidden,’ or so he told us—” Yoshinosuke said plainly, “There are things that make us say such things.” he answered. “Even regarding this trip here—I hear the company really kicked up a fuss! They said if they were going to have that many people taken away from them, they should at least be sent enough replacements!”

Yoshinosuke Nagahara, who had remained silent for a while without answering Motoko’s words, said, “Kabuki has reached an era where it must change somehow.” “After all, it’s living people who are managing to put food on the table today.”

Eventually, time ran out, and Yoshinosuke Nagahara was the first to leave his seat. As Yoshinosuke’s large-framed, sturdy suit-clad figure disappeared outside the door, Motoko looked deeply moved, “Ah, so even those born and bred in Kabuki have come to feel that way.” she said.

“If you actually let them speak, isn’t that surprisingly where it lies?” Nakadate, who was well-versed in the affairs of Kabuki’s traditional world, spoke in a tone that resonated with the budding sentiments of the young actors. “After all, that world has become far too rigid. Even those who’ve resigned themselves to it would have their eyes opened if they came here and saw how things are done—we’re human after all. If you’re an actor yourself, wouldn’t you agree it’s a good thing that such experiences exist?”

In the dressing room of Leningrad’s drama theater, Nobuko recalled Danjuro’s wife sitting sullen-faced on the sofa behind him as he applied makeup before the mirror, her pallid complexion stark against the backstage lights. In the corridor outside, Nakadate—who had been guiding their group—encountered a young actor he knew from Japan. “Is your esteemed wife here too?” Nakadate asked. The actor—half-costumed as a young samurai—answered “Yes” with an ambiguous hand gesture. “Huh.” “Is that so?” Nakadate’s lips twitched wryly. “Trying to do things our old ways here would never work. Even stagehands here are full union members.” The young actor signaled Nakadate with a kohl-lined sidelong glance before hurrying down the cluttered corridor toward backstage.

Moving past such a scene and descending into the dressing room, Nobuko felt she could comprehend the ancient formalities and customs that had flowed unbroken through Kabuki's realm - traditions that had even come to shape the very emotions of senior officials' wives. The scent of white makeup mingled with costumes neatly laid out on thin linings. In the cramped dressing room that appeared carefree yet thrummed with a tension that made one's skin tingle, Nobuko stayed silent, uncertain of what to say.

In contrast to Nobuko, who was idle and awkward, Motoko—with the composure of silently smoking a cigarette—appeared accustomed to the dressing room.

In a tone of patronage, Motoko said to Nakadate,

“Yoshinosuke, how old are you?” she asked. “Isn’t he about eight?”

“He’s just getting started.” “Well, Yoshinosuke here does put thought into things. Just coming this far—for a Kabuki actor, it’s practically a once-in-a-thousand-chances opportunity. He must feel he can’t just slink back home empty-handed.” In the undertones of Koichiro Nakadate’s words about Yoshinosuke, Nobuko caught an unintended glimpse of Nakadate’s own disposition as a film director, and found herself drawn in as she listened from the side. Koichiro Nakadate was among the most promising of Japan’s film directors.

“It seems there are quite a few among the younger crowd who see this as their once-in-a-lifetime chance.” “Yoshinosuke probably wants to take this opportunity to see Berlin too, don’t you think?” “So that’s what it was about?” Motoko’s eyes widened with fresh interest.

“Given Yoshinosuke’s current position, it’s not impossible.—He should just go.”

spoke in a manner that displayed goodwill.

II

Even when discussing Yoshinosuke’s hopes for going to Berlin and the plans to realize them, Koichiro Nakadate seemed unable to contain his own eagerness to reap as much as he could from the natural opportunity presented by Kabuki’s stay in Moscow. He made arrangements with Motoko regarding tomorrow’s visit to Sovkino.

“Eisenstein is remarkable,” said Nakadate. “That’s certainly an impressive greatness, but in actual production, we’re made to endure such meager hardships—ones not even worth mentioning. I want to learn about Sovkino’s production plans and how their work is truly done.” When the three arrived, Eisenstein was preparing a scene in Sovkino’s large studio where numerous peasants would appear. The set depicted a peasant hut’s interior: an old woman weeping on a box beneath an old-fashioned small window; a young woman standing despairingly beside her; and before them, a middle-aged man in a rubashka and boots, red-bearded and avaricious-looking, raging and threatening with raised fists. Then the upstage door burst open as peasants flooded in, encircling the trio. Eisenstein repeatedly rehearsed this moment—the surging movement of the peasant collective surrounding them—to effectively capture through the camera his required tempo and intensity.

Eisenstein, sitting slightly apart from the stage, had the energetic face familiar to Nobuko from photographs in film magazines—round eyes and a fleshy, long jaw. To Nakadate and Nobuko, who were standing and watching the rehearsal, he explained that these approximately thirty men and women peasants were real farmers from the countryside of Vologda and were people who had seen a camera for the first time.

“As you can see, there’s no acting on their part. However, they have the faces of true farmers, the movements of farmers, and the souls of farmers. What more could you possibly need on top of that?”

Eisenstein employed large crowds of amateurs very effectively in Oktyabr (October). “The question of how to bring the collective and its will to life in art—this is the challenge Soviet society has given us. Cinema has many possibilities to answer that.”

Having said that and cutting himself off, Eisenstein looked up at the face of his fellow filmmaker Koichiro Nakadate—who stood watching the stage with a serious, closed expression—as if gauging his reaction. “If only we have sufficient patience and skill—” he added with a humorous wink. That undoubtedly reflected his current true feelings.

When Nobuko and the others entered the studio, it was already the umpteenth time—

“One!” “Two!” “Three!” As for the movements of the six-row horizontal line of peasants who had been practicing pouring in through the doorway—their footsteps and speed remained uneven, failing to generate the pressure that would unfold and bear down on the screen all at once. Nobuko could also see that the peasants’ senses failed to grasp the density of the movement. While Nakadate and Eisenstein were conversing through Motoko, the assistant director—who had repeated the same mistake about twice with the same cue—shook his head in disapproval, pondered alone for a while, then eventually had someone bring a long stick. The six people in the front row of the peasant crowd were made to hold onto that single stick. The person at the back, gripping the very end of the stick, remained motionless, while the remaining five, holding onto the stick, hurriedly fanned out into an arc. Therefore, the peasants on the side closer to the camera, near the edge of the stage, had to spread out almost at a run, taking large strides quickly.

With the introduction of the stick, the Vologda peasants seemed to have finally grasped the rhythm—the required speed and pacing each individual had to take on within the collective movement demanded of them. For the third time, without the stick,

“Now, burst in through the doorway!” The effect of the peasant collective encircling the three was that both the tempo and pressure approached what had been anticipated. Eisenstein, for the first time at that moment, “Good.” he began to rise from his seat. The camera was peered into, and formal filming commenced.

On his way back from the Sovkino studio, Koichiro Nakadate stopped by the Passazh Hotel where Nobuko and her companions were staying and tossed his stylish hunting jacket—befitting a film director—onto the table. “If there’s anything we should fear, it’s that tenacity,” he said as he sat down in the chair.

“And it’s not just Eisenstein who possesses that trait.” “Still, he certainly does have an excellent assistant.” After lighting Motoko’s cigarette and then his own, Nakadate smoked with evident pleasure while casting an envious look toward Eisenstein—the director who enjoyed such competent support. “The disparity is too extreme.” “When you drive them to complete exhaustion with night after night of all-nighters—do you think there’s any room left for patience or anything resembling it? That tenacity they’re all applying with such single-minded focus—that’s planned production in its living form.”

That day, Nobuko also toured various parts of Sovkino’s extensive interior for the first time. The 1928 fiscal year Sovkino film production plan was also explained. Within it were plans for a certain number of cultural films, educational films, theatrical films, and newsreels, each planned accordingly. “Since we operate under such plans, we prepare sets, costumes, casting, and other necessities for the next production as much as our materials allow when the appropriate time comes.” “However, regrettably, it has only been ten years since the Revolution.” “Sovkino does not have all the necessary equipment by any means, but we believe that in five more years, we will be able to have far better facilities.”

From the high-ceilinged set preparation room, reminiscent of a sports stadium, to the separate film processing building, Koichiro Nakadate walked along the pathway slightly muddy from yesterday’s rain while— “That’s unbelievable.” “That’s unbelievable,” he said paradoxically to Nobuko walking beside him. “If you were to say that they’re making films with an eight-hour workday from actors to stagehands, would anyone take that seriously?” Ever since coming to the Soviet Union, the names of directors like Pudovkin and Eisenstein in film had quickly and strongly reached Nobuko and her companions’ ears. Each of these names Nobuko had grown accustomed to hearing—much like how names such as Barbusse and Libedinsky were spoken of in the literary world—as splendid achievements unique to each individual. In the Soviet Union too, these directors were seen as heroes of the new cinema.

With his small stature and supple demeanor—infused with greater spirit beneath his apparent flexibility than his appearance suggested—Koichiro Nakadate left Nobuko with a fresh, invigorating impression as he suddenly directed keen observation and analysis toward the various conditions enabling Eisenstein’s abilities, rather than speaking at length about Eisenstein’s talent itself. In his characteristically low-key and gentle tone, Koichiro Nakadate acknowledged Eisenstein’s greatness. Yet within the nuance of his words when stating “That greatness was indeed impressive,” one sensed both courtesy toward the established reputation granted to fellow professionals and an artistic tenacity that defied such deference. This was a sentiment Nobuko couldn’t help but share. As a film director himself, Koichiro Nakadate did not necessarily consider Eisenstein categorically superior based solely on directorial talent. For him, the methodology of Soviet film production itself held far greater significance than Eisenstein as an individual.

When they returned from the Sovkino studio, Motoko said, “That stick was a good idea, wasn’t it?” In response to her comment, Nakadate—

“As for trying to use a stick—isn’t that something just about anyone would think of?” he said. “But it’s how you use the stick… that’s where it counts.”

Next, the conversation turned to German films as well. Nobuko talked about having seen the film *Salamander* by Ufa when she came to Moscow. "It’s about a Jewish scholar who’s persecuted and flees abroad, but he just buckles under. When the scholar plays the piano with a grave expression, these terribly romantic stormy waves appear above the grand piano." "Even an actor like Jannings—his distinctive flavor is quintessentially German, wouldn’t you say?"

Motoko cut in over Nakadate’s words, “But achieving a level like Jannings’ is truly remarkable.” he praised the intensity of Jannings’ acting. “That pairing of Lya de Putti and Jannings—now that’s something worth acknowledging.” “Mr. Nakadate, does Berlin prove to be quite useful to you?”

Nobuko asked bluntly. “Well... I’d say there are fewer places you could go from Japan that wouldn’t be useful.” “There’s something about German films I simply can’t grasp.” “When you speak of Zeiss lenses, they’re the world’s finest, aren’t they?” “That’s scientific rigor, yes?” “Yet in *Salamander*, they shamelessly thrust forth those sentimental waves—German culture being so scientific and systematic on one hand, yet so sensual and dark on the other—I don’t understand it at all.”

“It’s precisely where having Zeiss lenses alone doesn’t make a good film that our purpose lies, wouldn’t you agree?” As Kabuki arrived in Moscow, certain actors from the troupe and film directors like Koichiro Nakadate each kindled fresh artistic ambitions, shifting stance to branch out into new directions. This atmosphere carried a youthful intensity that Nobuko and her companions had never imagined when they first heard Kabuki would perform in Moscow.

Soviet spectators marveled innocently at Kabuki's splendid stage costumes, recognized its uniqueness through actors' expressions and cadences conveyed by minimal bodily movements, and overflowed with goodwill. In response, while passionately performing their week-long Moscow engagements, Yoshinosuke Nagahara and several young actors pursued Berlin-bound procedures with stage-matching fervor. The Kabuki troupe had been accompanied by a Shochiku executive of managing-director rank. The Berlin-seeking actors needed not only Danjuro Sado's approval but company consent too—requiring submissions guaranteeing New Year performance returns plus intricate procedures beyond Nobuko's group's imagination. And within these procedural maneuvers themselves lay Kabuki-world traditions—so entrenched that even straightforward Yoshinosuke often deflected when Nobuko's group pressed impatiently—

“So, how’s it looking? Is it going smoothly?” When they asked, “Ah, well...” he would often laugh evasively.

“Since Mr. Danjuro himself went to England when he was young and all, he naturally understands how these things work.”

Nevertheless, Yoshinosuke and the others’ plan to go to Berlin began to seem feasible around when Kabuki’s Moscow performances were concluding. “I’ll go see for myself.”

Yoshinosuke’s young face—a blend of actor-like poise and student-like earnestness—flushed. “And I’ll stop by here again on my way back—this is just between us...”

He laughed, showing his healthy white teeth. Unlike those who came to the Soviet Union merely to gather observations to take back home while leaving their true selves behind, the attitudes of Yoshinosuke and Koichiro Nakadate resonated with Nobuko. Yoshinosuke’s passion—unable to be contained as he breached some part of Kabuki’s old world. Koichiro Nakadate’s strategic vision as a film director, pushing every available condition to its limit. These were all hearts and plans fiercely driving toward tomorrow. The vital energy of these people—staking each new day as they advanced—struck directly at Nobuko’s emotions, emotions that since Tamotsu’s death had made her feel like a small wedge driven into Soviet society.

The Kabuki that came to Moscow left behind something unexpected and new—seeds they had unknowingly sown from the depths of their old traditions—and returned to Japan bearing their favorable reviews. Yoshinosuke and three or four other young actors promptly departed for Berlin, while Koichiro Nakadate separately boarded a Hamburg-bound steamship alone.

III

When Kabuki was performing in Moscow, Nobuko and Motoko were introduced to two young Russian women named Sakura and Mitsuko who spoke Japanese in Danjuro Sado’s greenroom. Both had graduated from the Oriental Language School, possessed Japanese names, and Sakura occasionally composed tanka. In contrast to Sakura—with her sallow, oblong face, beautiful black eyes and hair, and literary air—Mitsuko was a sturdy young woman who always seemed as bright as daytime, had a leg disability, and would visit Nobuko and the others’ hotel room with a cane. And with that cane, she was also employed at some government office every day.

Nobuko understood well the vague sense in which Sakura and Mitsuko were waiting for Yoshinosuke to return from Berlin. Yoshinosuke possessed a raw vitality in his personality that did not conform to the mold of a Kabuki actor, and this captivated Sakura and Mitsuko, who were foreigners. Nobuko felt a sense of goodwill toward Yoshinosuke for precisely the same reason. Motoko, who was always scathing with a superior attitude toward young men, “Yoshinosuke is quite something, isn’t he?”

Motoko had once said to Nobuko. It was at a restaurant in Leningrad where they dined while listening to Gypsy music—Motoko and Nobuko sat facing each other at a small table with a stand, and Motoko was drinking Georgian white wine. When Motoko said, "Yoshinosuke is quite something," Nobuko sensed an unusual radiance in her eyes and cheeks.

“Do you think so?” While fidgeting with her untouched wine glass, Nobuko asked in return. “—Bukko-chan, you think so too, don’t you?” Nobuko intuited with a woman’s sensitivity that Motoko was not merely speaking of Yoshinosuke as an actor. A slight shock flushed her cheeks. The fact that Motoko had feelings for a man was an unexpected revelation. And that this man was Yoshinosuke Nagahara—toward whom Nobuko herself felt goodwill—yet that very Yoshinosuke being the object of Motoko’s affection was something Nobuko could also understand. With a cautiousness akin to cupping her own hands beneath Motoko’s rare emotional stirrings to prevent their spilling, she silently watched the amber wine glow under the lamp’s light. But how would Motoko’s feelings toward Yoshinosuke develop? What did Motoko herself wish to nurture?

Nobuko, whose only romantic experiences had been single-mindedly innocent and childlike, looked up at Motoko from within the cream-colored light of the lampstand, her delicately shaped features tensed with urgency. "If you're serious, why not talk to him?"

“...” “Then… should I talk to him?” Motoko remained silent, drank her wine, and watched the cigarette smoke slowly dissipate around the lampshade. “Then… should I talk to him?” Without thinking, she blurted out—and Nobuko felt perplexed. There was no way to know how Yoshinosuke truly felt about Motoko—and even if there were mutual affection between them, how could the various minutiae of his life as a Kabuki actor possibly connect with Motoko, with her bobbed hair and Western attire? It was understandable that Motoko was drawn to Yoshinosuke, but Nobuko found herself bewildered, unable to discern any practical necessity that could bind their two lives together.

Motoko gazed at Nobuko’s expression—which seemed more urgently pressed toward resolution than her own—with a somewhat dazed look, then slowly murmured, “Well, never mind,” as if to herself. And then she called the waiter and had him begin settling the bill.

It was a morning a little over two weeks after the Kabuki troupe had withdrawn from Moscow and Yoshinosuke and the others had departed for Berlin. The door to Nobuko and the others’ room—where they had just finished their morning tea—was knocked. Motoko called out loudly,

“Please come in,” she said in Russian. The door opened, and there stood Yoshinosuke in a dark suit.

“I’m home!” When it was decided Yoshinosuke could go to Berlin, he had declared concisely and emphatically, “I’ll go and see”—and in that same tone, he now said, “I’m home.” “I returned last night, and this time I took a room here, so please look after me.”

While exchanging handshake greetings, Nobuko “That was terribly early, wasn’t it?” she said, and was surprised.

“Were you able to see so many plays in such a short time?”

“Yes. I made sure to attend both matinees and evening performances twice each.”

Motoko’s face flushed faintly when she unexpectedly saw Yoshinosuke appear, but in a composed tone,

“What time did you arrive?” she asked. “You managed to secure a room here without trouble?” “Yes. The kantora—the front desk person—remembered my face. When I said ‘Pazhalsta, komnata’—‘Please, a room’—they went ‘Khorosho, khorosho!’” “Where is it?” “It’s the small room on the left at the end of this hallway.”

“Ah, so it’s the room we stayed in at the very beginning. Right, Bukko-chan?”

It was the room where on snowy nights illuminated by arc lamps, one could see the construction site of the Central Post Office. As if going to Berlin had been less about the trip itself than an excuse to stay behind after the group’s departure for independent movement, Yoshinosuke returned alone from Berlin to Moscow. He lodged at the inexpensive Passage Hotel where foreigners seldom stayed. During the period when Uiichi Akiyama and Atsushi Utsumi had stayed at the same Passage Hotel, Nobuko and Motoko—still unaccustomed to life in Moscow—had casually visited their rooms. This time, though Yoshinosuke’s room came to be on the same corridor, neither Nobuko nor Motoko went to his room. The fact that Yoshinosuke was a young actor accustomed to being pampered made them hesitant to visit his room without reason. Moreover, knowing of Motoko’s feelings toward Yoshinosuke from their time at the Gypsy restaurant’s counter in Leningrad, they found themselves all the more reluctant to call on his room. It was not unusual for two or three days to pass without them meeting at all.

One evening, after several days had passed in that manner, Yoshinosuke came to visit Nobuko and the others’ room. “What have you been eating to survive? Are you all right?” Motoko said to Yoshinosuke, who couldn’t speak Russian. “With ‘pazhalsta’ and omelets. With ‘pazhalsta’ and cutlets, I’ve been managing, so I’m all right.” Yoshinosuke broke into a seemingly carefree smile, his face glowing. “It seems omelets and cutlets are just like in Japan.”

Yoshinosuke had come because he had business. The next morning, Meyerhold Theater actor Garin was coming to the hotel to meet Yoshinosuke. He apparently had something he wanted to ask directly about Kabuki acting techniques. The request was for either Motoko or Nobuko to interpret. “Then it has to be Ms. Yoshimi,” Nobuko said. “My Russian is only good enough to expand Mr. Nagahara’s omelet by two or three ingredients at best.”

“—I don’t want to.”

Motoko leaned against the back of the long chair she was sitting on and refused.

“How could I possibly talk about theater?” Motoko, who loved theater and meticulously appreciated each actor’s performance—Nobuko couldn’t completely fail to understand her aversion to interpreting. Garin was an actor who had recently gained considerable acclaim among Meyerhold’s younger members for roles such as Khlestakov in *The Government Inspector*, and then there was Yoshinosuke. Unaware of such emotional undercurrents, Yoshinosuke adopted a perplexed yet courteous tone,

“I apologize for the imposition, but might I ask if you two could meet together? If it wouldn’t be troublesome, we might make use of this room here.”

he said.

“That’s a good idea.” “Let’s all meet here.” “And I’ll take charge of interpreting.”

Nobuko readily agreed and said.

“In exchange, I can only explain things in plain terms. So Yoshinosuke-san, you’ll need to use your intuition, okay?” “That’s perfectly fine. Mr. Garin seems to want to know about the conventions of form.” “See?” Motoko glared teasingly at Nobuko’s impulsiveness and intimidated her. “How could Bukko-chan explain conventions—or even your reckless stunts?”

“That’s not quite the case.”

Yoshinosuke explained in an expert manner that went beyond mere mediation. "If you could just make me understand what situations they're referring to, that would be enough. After that, I'll demonstrate it physically anyway." "I see."

That evening, Yoshinosuke had no commitments either, making for an unusually leisurely night. The three of them sat around the table sharing salmon roe and cucumbers for a late-night meal, like students in Moscow. Yoshinosuke seemed to genuinely enjoy this simple camaraderie between friends, “When we live like this,” he said, “it becomes hard to believe our way of life back in Japan even exists.” “You truly understand when you go abroad, don’t you?”

“Is it homesickness?”

“It’s just that it feels like an entirely different world, isn’t it?” Yoshinosuke drank fragrant hot tea with lemon and remained silent for a time, his youthful face marked by a gaze that emphasized the whites of his eyes. “It’s not just the stage that’s traditional—every corner of a Kabuki actor’s private life is steeped in it…”

He sighed. “Can’t you change it?”

Nobuko involuntarily looked at Motoko’s face. Motoko, even though she knew Nobuko had seen, did not shift the gaze she had fixed on Yoshinosuke.

“It’s difficult.” Yoshinosuke spoke as if stating the conclusion of matters he had pondered many times before. “If it were just me escaping from that world, that would be one thing—but trying to change anything while remaining within it? That’s impossible.”

“If you were to leave that behind, what would happen?” In Motoko’s casually pressing questions, Nobuko thought she could sense the pulse of feelings toward Yoshinosuke that only she herself knew. While listening to their exchange from the side, Nobuko’s heartbeat quickened. “That’s exactly the issue.”

Leaning his elbows firmly on the table, Yoshinosuke said in a serious, rather pained voice.

“First, those around me won’t consent.” “Those around you—you mean your wife?” “My wife would certainly object, but it’s the relatives, you see. In the Kabuki world, family relations are truly significant—there’s also obligation.” Yoshinosuke had lost his father, who had been a Kabuki actor, during his boyhood, and due to his traditional family lineage, he had long been placed under the protection of senior relatives.

“There’s another issue I have to confront personally. I can’t abandon the stage. This alone I cannot change—no matter what. There’s also the matter of accumulated skills as an actor. Though if I were to just quit outright, that’d be simple enough. Where does one find a stage that lets you grow while advancing Japanese theater?” “It’s not like you could suddenly go to Tsukiji either…” “That’s precisely it.”

Yoshinosuke, who could no longer inhabit Kabuki’s stifling antiquity, found it equally impossible in reality to make the leap to performing *The Lower Depths* at Tsukiji Little Theatre with its sudden drum rolls. As she listened to Yoshinosuke’s unadorned talk, Nobuko came to feel deeply that after all, things that must change do so in this manner. Just like a trapdoor rising—even if half of one’s life remained in the darkness between the abyss beneath the stage and its surface—the other half that had risen above became intensely conscious of and tormented by what still lingered below. To Nobuko, this seemed natural. She recalled how Uiichi Akiyama’s suicide note had made no mention of the feudal elements surrounding him—because, he wrote, he believed Japanese society still retained some degree of feudal aspects, and one could not critique feudal elements while living within them. At the time, Nobuko had been unable to fully grasp those words. Yet now, whether observing Yoshinosuke or reflecting on herself, she saw the truth: while carrying old things within herself—though unable to affirm them as clearly as Yoshinosuke did—she still sought new ones. That this contradiction existed did not negate the authenticity of her desire to seek a new path. Nobuko thought of how people pushed forward with single-minded conviction amid such turmoil and felt sorrow. She remembered Tamotsu. For Tamotsu had been unable to comprehend life’s ceaseless development—how it sprouted and grew from contradictions and conflicts. And Uiichi Akiyama too. Uiichi Akiyama’s intellect—that of a man half-submerged in mud, his upper body straining to free itself while demanding reason even from himself—had lacked the wildness of human spirit.

Nobuko, with a heart filled with her own literary doubts regarding that question,

“I wonder if even someone like you can’t transition to modern theater?”

Nobuko asked. “In terms of sentiment, I feel that if I were to decisively make such a change, it would surely feel refreshingly unburdened. But I wonder...”

“Kabuki actors start as child performers, you see.”

“Kabuki actors start as child performers, you see,” Motoko said, as if gauging the depth of traditions ingrained through performance.

“You’re the same way, aren’t you?” “Since your debut was at six years old.” Yoshinosuke wore a deeply thoughtful expression. “Western actors may have various struggles with their craft, but they probably don’t suffer in circumstances like mine.” He spoke. “Even those skilled in classical theater—for example, Shakespearean actors—can take on modern works.” “I think the particular gap between Japanese Kabuki and contemporary theater doesn’t exist in other countries.”

“When you think about it, Japan is quite a remarkable country.”

Motoko said while extinguishing her cigarette on the edge of the bread plate, “It’s like suddenly grafting Ibsen onto the stump of a chonmage topknot.” “Given how fundamental the problem is, it’ll require considerable effort—but I intend to manage somehow.” After saying this, Yoshinosuke remained silent in thought for a while before resuming in his characteristically fervent tone, “I plan to begin making decisive changes starting from my private life.”

Nobuko could not immediately grasp what Yoshinosuke meant by his resolute declaration. She wavered in judgment—did he mean that as a Kabuki actor, he intended to reorganize matters like customary dealings with the entertainment districts and negotiations with patrons, or was it something else entirely? Motoko, who likewise seemed unable to quickly discern the conversation’s focus, “What do you mean by ‘private life’?” she pressed again. “A man about town?” As she asked this, Motoko’s eyes took on a slightly teasing glint.

“As for me, in that regard, I’m rather more straightforward than others.” “If I don’t create them, such problems are of a nature that wouldn’t arise.” “What I’m referring to is mainly my married life, you see.” The expanding topic once again swirled and contracted sharply, and Yoshinosuke drew near the periphery of Motoko’s unknown emotions. "Isn’t it going well?"

“—In my case, it’s going too well.” “That is the problem.”

Nobuko found herself deeply drawn into Yoshinosuke's account. At the same time, as a woman, she felt an acute pang at the thought of a wife's position being discussed among friends by her husband in such terms.

Motoko also fell silent. However, Yoshinosuke continued in the same earnest, analytical tone he had used when discussing Kabuki, “Fundamentally, our marriage was less about me gaining a wife and more like acquiring an assistant for my mother—the widow who raised me from childhood.”

Yoshinosuke said.

“The things she does well, she truly does an excellent job at. On that point I have no complaints… My wife doesn’t understand that actors are artists or that we strive to grow, nor does she consider such things necessary. Yet within the sphere of an actor’s life, she flawlessly handles all tedious social obligations and duties, leaving absolutely no room for concern. In an actor’s life up until now, such things have been of paramount importance—so it can’t be helped, but… My wife has done nothing wrong at all. However, I’ve come to feel that a manager and a wife should be separate entities.”

A somber expression floated across Yoshinosuke’s glossy, lively face.

“What do you all think? Am I being too selfish?” Both Nobuko and Motoko understood Yoshinosuke’s feelings so perfectly that they found it difficult to reply immediately. “—I’m seeking a wife. Someone who can discuss theater itself with me…”

Then, with a sharpness that startled Nobuko—who had been listening beside them—Motoko said: “Even if such a person were to become your wife, wouldn’t managerial necessities still arise?” “Can it really be separated—can you separate them?” “I don’t think it’s impossible to separate them. If we’re talking about someone who truly understands theater, they would naturally be someone who stands on stage themselves—and if someone does stand on stage, the aspects of study and managerial tasks would actually become clearly distinct, because...”

While rolling the red pipe in her mouth, Motoko, who had been intently listening to Yoshinosuke’s words, after a short while,

“Hmm, I see.”

She muttered as if having deeply grasped something within herself. "You are a realist." The nuance that flashed through that manner of speaking made Nobuko sense the shift in Motoko's feelings. With the same clarity that Nobuko had understood, Motoko too comprehended that the woman Yoshinosuke Nagahara sought was one he envisioned with concrete, realistic conditions—and that at the very least, his feelings in discussing this matter with Nobuko and Motoko contained no trace of insincerity.

Nobuko gradually became refreshed and happy. Their feelings toward Yoshinosuke had an ambiguously swaying quality. From Motoko's own perspective and Nobuko's perspective influenced by Motoko's, there existed a sensitivity on their side that Yoshinosuke had not even considered. Because Yoshinosuke's way of thinking was far ahead, Nobuko came to comprehend that while Motoko's particular feelings toward him and her own mood—which had been pulled along by those feelings—were drawn to Yoshinosuke's newfound humanity, they were simultaneously sentiments directed at an actor depicted within conventional common sense. Nobuko secretly felt somewhat awkward about the two of them as women. And once again, she felt convinced of Yoshinosuke as a friend.

“I’m truly glad that I—Yoshinosuke Nagahara—am not merely what you’d call an actor.” “That was a strange way to give a compliment.” Motoko laughed. Yoshinosuke also laughed. Nobuko felt, within Motoko’s laughter, that her mood had indeed been transformed. Motoko asked Yoshinosuke with a detachment that had completely severed her from herself.

“By the way, does someone like the person you hope for actually exist?” “I wonder.” He seemed to have no particular focus anywhere. “After all, in Kabuki there are only female impersonators…” His tone implied that this too contained the feudal irregularities of the Kabuki world.

IV

The following morning around ten o’clock, Garin arrived at Nobuko and the others’ room with Yoshinosuke as promised. He wore a relaxed low collar with a subdued tie, his appearance neat and unassuming. Garin’s face differed entirely from the celebrated actors of the Art Theater, but it was the shape of his forehead—closely resembling that of the marvelous American dancer Fred Astaire—that caught Nobuko’s attention. Anna Pavlova too had possessed that sort of compact, horizontally broad forehead. Garin’s round forehead, slightly splayed like a flowerpot and radiating intelligence and agility, made Nobuko think roles distinct from Khlestakov in *The Government Inspector* might better showcase his true talent. Since the previous season, Meyerhold had been staging a pale, boneless-looking Khlestakov through Constructivist-inspired avant-garde set designs.

Garin seemed to want to directly reference Kabuki conventions for his own stage work and asked Yoshinosuke several questions using examples from Chushingura he had seen. During the previous day’s discussion, when Nobuko rendered what Garin had said into plain Japanese, Motoko— “Ah, it’s about the convention of rushing onto the stage.” —supplemented by way of explanation. “Well then,”

With that, Yoshinosuke—still in Western clothes—knelt on one knee against the hotel’s bare floor and demonstrated the form. Even during this, Nobuko found her attention drawn to Garin’s distinctive forehead. That Garin showed such interest in Kabuki forms seemed to reveal his innate talent for dance. Meyerhold’s productions were intensely stylized, their character portrayals—in stark contrast to the Moscow Art Theater’s realistic acting—expressed through movements that conceptually captured personality essences. Khlestakov too had been rendered through this directorial approach. In such stagings, one could see why an actor with Garin’s forehead and sharp physicality might thrive. Yet Nobuko somehow struggled to lose herself in Meyerhold’s theater as dramatic experience.

Garin stayed for about an hour and then left. Once or twice, he imitated Yoshinosuke’s forms and immediately tried doing them himself, kneeling on the floor. “The people here are so straightforward—even someone as popular as that actor.” Yoshinosuke, seeming satisfied with his role as teacher, said: “In our world, even trying to teach one single thing becomes a huge commotion.” “You have to appoint people properly or make formal arrangements.” “That’s no different with Noh,” “It’s family tradition—a proper guild system.”

Nobuko talked about Garin’s forehead. “Didn’t you notice?” “Was that so?”

Keen motor skills and an actor’s ability to portray human characters were not the same thing, nor did she believe that these two qualities were always synthesized within the same individual. Nobuko could not foresee Garin’s life as an actor lying on a path of smooth development.

“That may be so, but Yoshinosuke-san, what do you think? I was just talking with Garin earlier and suddenly thought of something. When Kabuki came this time, wasn’t it Meyerhold who was most enthusiastic about observing and taking special courses? Next comes Vakhtangov who staged *Turandot*. As for the MXAT (Art Theatre), they weren’t as involved proportionally, don’t you think? I wondered what that meant.” “Isn’t it because MXAT has an established acting tradition?”

“Well, that’s true, Bukko-chan.” “I don’t think that’s all there is to it.”

Nobuko looked at Yoshinosuke with serious eyes. “MXAT is advancing through realism, wouldn’t you agree? Though they’ve moved from *The Cherry Orchard* to *Armored Train 14-69*, that progression itself shows how they’re propelling realism forward through development.” “Meyerhold tries to stylize things dynamically like that, but can such an approach truly evolve indefinitely on a fundamental level...?” “I think it’s at least a question worth your consideration, Yoshinosuke-san—how MXAT showed little interest in Kabuki’s *kumadori* makeup while Meyerhold pursued it so ardently.”

“Even in Kabuki’s domestic plays, there’s realism like Kikugorō’s.” As if rebutting, Motoko—who loved theater—said. “Here, we only performed period pieces, you see.” “That might also be part of the reason.”

The time was drawing near when Yoshinosuke had to return to Japan. Yet their interactions with Nobuko and the others in the same hotel continued as they had from the start—three or four days would pass without them meeting face-to-face. What now existed between Yoshinosuke and Nobuko’s group were only the steady feelings of friendship, free from instability. On the night when Yoshinosuke—unusually—lingered in their room and matters of family life arose, Motoko remained at the table even after he left. That evening, she seemed to be recalling emotions that had flowed beneath their conversation—feelings that cast no shadow on Yoshinosuke but had shifted solely within her own heart. With her back to the table and flipping back the bed’s blanket as she began preparing for sleep, Nobuko found Motoko—

“If Yoshinosuke could think as clearly as that, he might amount to something.”

Motoko said. In her tone resonated both compassion and composed expectation. That aching nuance from Leningrad's Gypsy restaurant—where under cream-colored lamplight even Nobuko's composure had wavered, where Motoko's body (that of a woman several years past thirty who'd once remarked "Yoshinosuke has real potential") had momentarily surfaced—now lay extinguished.

The evening had come when Yoshinosuke would finally depart Moscow the day after tomorrow. It was past the tenth of December, and the entire city lay under a cold moonlit night. A little past eight o'clock, Yoshinosuke unexpectedly visited Nobuko and the others' room, accompanied by two young women.

“I thought it might be rude to intrude, but since I don’t speak Russian…” Yoshinosuke said with a perplexed look and introduced to Nobuko and the others the sisters from Moscow—young women with rarely seen curls cascading around their pretty faces.

“This one is the older sister, Nobuko-san.” The girl wore a purplish silk dress and greeted Nobuko and the others with shyness. “This is the younger sister, called Sakura-san. The sisters have often visited the dressing room, but…” The younger sister too wore a slightly worn beige silk dress, her beautiful features contrasting with her lustreless youthful face dusted with white powder. An old silk dress cut low at the chest, a certain glossiness in long-lashed black eyes. To Nobuko and Motoko, the sisters’ occupation became clear. Though sharing the same Japanese name of Sakura, compared to these girls, Mitsuko and her friend Sakura were young women of an entirely different atmosphere.

The sisters, seated side by side on a single sofa, began exchanging sporadic, inconsequential remarks with Nobuko and the others. Both seemed truly shy, and when they answered that neither was employed anywhere, their tone made one feel sorry for having asked such a question. Motoko interjected in Japanese, “Have you ever been to these people’s home?” Motoko asked Yoshinosuke. “Yes, once or twice.” And then,

“They live in a terrible place—several people in one room divided by curtains. I felt so sorry for them I brought some gifts,” he said. The sisters’ residence appeared to be across the Moskva River. After about ten minutes, Yoshinosuke excused himself to finish urgent packing in his room. The girls kept asking when Yoshinosuke would depart—information even Nobuko and Motoko lacked. As they waited restlessly on the sofa despite knowing they should leave, an impatient knock struck the door.

“Please come in.”

“Good evening.” A woman no longer young—of medium build, wearing a suede half-coat and a small felt hat—entered.

“I am Ternovskaya—I was in Japan…”

Nobuko rose slowly from her chair with an expression that suggested unexpected events stacking upon one another. Ternovskaya—this woman—had been known to Nobuko and the others as a courageous female leader of Siberian partisans during the revolution, one who had associated with proletarian writers during her time in Japan. Even here in Moscow, where she occupied a political sphere entirely separate from their hotel-dwelling existence, both Nobuko and Motoko found themselves startled by Ternovskaya’s abrupt appearance that evening.

With the brisk movements of a woman accustomed to constant activity, Ternovskaya shook hands with Nobuko and the other girls in a businesslike manner. She sat facing the table, took out cigarettes, offered them to Motoko and the girls, then lit one herself. Ternovskaya's hair—a brassy yellow devoid of luster—framed her face as she lit the cigarette with furrowed brows. Among the five women, Nobuko alone did not smoke; oppressed by the atmosphere, she averted her eyes from Ternovskaya's gaze. Those eyes held yellowish-gray irises with pupils like pitch-black spears thrust at their centers. Their expression resembled a leopard's far too closely. What Nobuko sensed there wasn't spiritual fortitude but something verging on cruelty—a quality made more terrifying by its residence in a woman's face.

“Does Mr. Yoshinosuke live here?”

“Yes,” Motoko replied. “These young ladies are also guests visiting him, but he’s currently occupied with urgent packing in his room.” “May I see him?” Ternovskaya asked. “He should be here shortly.” While Ternovskaya conversed with Motoko, Nobuko recalled having encountered this woman before—sometime in early autumn, on a tree-lined path after rainfall. Though the rain had ceased, droplets still scattered from linden branches whenever the wind stirred. From the opposite direction, a woman carrying a briefcase had passed by Nobuko then. What drew her attention was how this solitary figure among the post-rain commuters wore a beautiful cobalt-blue translucent silk raincoat—the kind young Japanese women favored, yet unprecedented in Moscow. Alongside that vivid raincoat, the distinctive expression in those eyes had etched itself into Nobuko’s memory.

Nobuko, recalling this, told Ternovskaya about the incident.

“Is that so?” “I can’t recall.” With that, Ternovskaya neither confirmed nor denied possessing the cobalt-blue raincoat. The two daughters, finally resigning themselves to Ternovskaya’s arrival—which showed no intention of addressing them—rose from their seats. Then Ternovskaya—

“You all will be stopping by Mr. Yoshinosuke’s room on your way back, I presume.” She said in a penetrating, commanding tone.

“Please tell him to come here once he finishes packing.” Yoshinosuke entered Nobuko and the others’ room sooner than expected, his expression somehow unconvincing. When he saw Ternovskaya—though he seemed to recognize her face—

“Good evening.” He greeted her with the practiced hospitality skills he possessed. Ternovskaya silently shook hands and,

“Are you busy?”

For the first time, she asked Yoshinosuke in Japanese. “Yes, there was some packing to do… My apologies.” Including his earlier entrusting of the two daughters, Yoshinosuke gave a slight bow to Nobuko and the others as well. Topics arose—whether there had been word from Danjuro’s group who had returned ahead, or what role Yoshinosuke would play in the New Year’s performance. Just as Nobuko and the others couldn’t grasp why Ternovskaya had come to see Yoshinosuke, Yoshinosuke himself seemed equally unaware. Without any move toward his room, after forty minutes of idle talk she left their room with footsteps as devoid of lingering emotion as when she had arrived.

It had been nearly a year since Nobuko and the others had come to Moscow.

It felt strange that Ternovskaya—who had never once visited before—had suddenly come to Nobuko and the others’ room on the third floor of the Passage Hotel that night with such unerring accuracy, as though she hadn’t needed to search at all.

“I wonder if Yoshinosuke Nagahara’s fans go that far.” Yoshinosuke turned an inquiring gaze toward Motoko. “There’s no doubt she’s someone I saw backstage once, but…” Motoko chewed pensively on her pipe before finally saying: “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“No matter what kind of fans an actor has, in a sense it’s an act of God.”

On a clear winter morning a day later, Yoshinosuke boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway departing Moscow as scheduled.

V

Nobuko and Motoko began searching for a room to rent again. It was already December, marking a full year of Moscow life for Nobuko and the others. This time, they did not go through the tedious process they had when searching for a room to rent in spring, but instead went straight to the advertisement reception window of the Moscow evening paper and placed a room wanted ad.

It was an evening when snow seemed likely to start as early as the next day. As she walked back to the hotel along Tverskaya Street, where shops had kept their lights on since around three in the afternoon, Nobuko said, "I hope we can find a good room this time too." "But having too short a deadline like at Ruybakov's place would be inconvenient," Motoko replied. The house where they'd stayed temporarily before departing for Leningrad—its windows framing the golden dome of Fram Frista Spasicheriya—had been available only until the Ruybakov family took their summer vacation.

“At that time, we hadn’t left Moscow yet anyway, so it worked out. This time, we’ve gotta settle down a bit more properly.”

Nobuko and Motoko's summer vacation lasted longer than planned due to Tamotsu's sudden death intervening midway. The subsequent arrival of Kabuki from Japan created an unusual impact on many Japanese residents in Moscow. Among them all, Motoko—the theater enthusiast—grew particularly excited about watching Kabuki performances in Moscow. Yoshinosuke Nagahara's presence as an actor—like a young shoot unexpectedly sprouting from Kabuki's ancient roots—drew closer to their daily lives within Moscow's environment. Nobuko—bereft by Tamotsu and feeling severed from her birthplace and past lifestyle—received as fresh discovery the energy with which Yoshinosuke Nagahara and film director Eisenstein pursued new life and art. Even without a home remaining, this confirmation that movements connecting to Nobuko's spirit existed elsewhere strengthened her resolve. After Yoshinosuke Nagahara departed Moscow, Nobuko felt herself increasingly wedged into Moscow life. Motoko too resumed attending Moscow University starting the week after Yoshinosuke left Passage Hotel. Motoko's studying carried an air reminiscent of someone who—while idly smoking and watching smoke trails without focus—had suddenly remembered an obligation needing fulfillment before crushing their cigarette in an ashtray and rising.

Motoko’s daily life began circling on a plane scarcely different from that early summer before her Leningrad trip. Living in one room while observing this rotation, Nobuko felt herself immobilized on that plane—wedged into place yet uncertain how to move beyond it. Two days after their advertisement for a room appeared in the Moscow evening paper under “foreign women,” Nobuko and Motoko received a sealed letter. It was a brief typewritten note: A suitable room is available. At home daily by 2 PM. I await your visit. Though merely a business notification from the room’s owner, Nobuko and Motoko stared at the address—

“My!” With that, they separated their heads that had been bent over the letter and looked at each other’s faces. “It’s inside that building again! What strange fate connects us to this place!” The typewritten characters stated Astozhenka 1-chome. “So we’re back to Fram Frista’s golden dome again.” “Well...” Motoko, ever practical, considered this carefully. “That needn’t be true. “This one specifies Kvartira—Apartment—58.”

Once again, Nobuko was tasked with inspecting the place. When she came to Astozhenka after six months, the food store at the street corner still hung its sign with "Kommuna" written in large white characters on a black background, and the trees along the avenue beginning beside it wove black lace patterns into the winter sky with the fine branches of their leafless treetops. Beneath the stone wall of Fram Frista Spasicheriya, a kiosk that had stood empty since spring now housed people selling newspapers, tobacco, and sausages hung from strings.

On the wooden fence of 1-chome, a piece of paper stating "No toilet inside here" remained pasted. Nobuko entered the wooden gate of 1-chome with the particular composure of someone familiar with coming and going there. Though Ruybakov’s entrance had been immediately on the right when approaching, Kvartira 58’s entrance stood second from the left among four doorways lining the building’s inner courtyard. She climbed to the fourth floor through the still-deserted inner courtyard and rang Door 58’s bell. A stout elderly woman emerged wearing a large gray linen apron that draped to the back of her skirt. When Nobuko stated her business, the woman looked her up and down from head to toe—

“Please wait.” With that, she went into the back.

In her place emerged a large-framed, middle-aged woman of indeterminate age wearing earrings. This woman too said "Good day" while sweeping her gaze from Nobuko's head to toe in one appraising look. She was the housewife. The room being offered here was a long narrow space—as if someone had stood upright the shallow box-like room they had rented at Ruybakov. From its window, the golden dome of Fram Frista Spasicheriya remained invisible, and consequently fewer echoes of the city's noises reverberated there.

“This room has a separate entrance, you see.” With her dry, frizzy brown hair and skin tone that made her emerald earrings stand out, the housewife explained to Nobuko while facing the back door. “You may use that door if you wish, though for security reasons, I would prefer you enter and exit through the front.” The next day, Nobuko and Motoko moved to the front room of the house called Sokolsky. They were not only accustomed to the Astozhenka neighborhood but also found it convenient for commuting to theaters now that the season had begun. At Sokolsky’s, they secured a contract that included meals. In Moscow, where harsh winter would soon begin, not needing to go out for daily dinners was a desirable condition.

“Anyuta’s cooking is our pride.” As the wife with dangling earrings had said, the borscht (a thick soup) and cutlets prepared by the plump Anyuta tasted far better than the greasy fare from the Passage Hotel. What Nobuko and her companions found somewhat surprising was that dinner was shared with the Sokolsky couple themselves. This occurred at a table draped in white linen, meticulously set with even dessert spoons.

After the meal, the wife immediately withdrew to the children’s room.

“We have a daughter who is three years old. She’s a lovely child. She’s had a slight cold for a couple of days... though according to her mother, her health always requires serious attention.” Sokolsky, with his rather pale, shrewd face sporting a stylish black beard and appearing far younger than his large-framed, sluggish wife, remarked in an ironic tone that seemed to take nothing seriously. “In Japan as well—is motherhood in general something worthy of admiration?”

Motoko, savoring her post-dinner cigarette, responded with sharpness that pierced through Sokolsky’s mood as he spoke in that manner: “Nowhere in the world will you find a cat that can outmatch a hen with her chicks.”

said. “Indeed! That would be the truth, I suppose.” Leaning back deeply into the leather-upholstered divan, his legs clad in well-maintained leather boots crossed high, Sokolsky—

“Well,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch beneath the cuffs of his rubashka. “Excuse me—I still have two committee meetings tonight. Please tell Anyuta whatever you need.” The Ruybakov household had carried the atmosphere befitting a lower-ranking engineer’s life—a blend of honesty and shrewdness, yet unpretentious—and from Nyura’s body as she worked there had emanated a damp kitchen odor. The Sokolsky household’s atmosphere bore a smooth veneer characteristic of high-ranking officials, one Nobuko found difficult to grow accustomed to.

Returning to their room, Nobuko said to Motoko,

“I prefer Ruybakov.”

she said with a pouting face.

“The folks here seem determined to only ride Myakufukii (second-class cars), you know.”

Motoko,

“Ah, it’s fine.”

Without addressing Nobuko’s dissatisfaction, Motoko seemed to take interest in the house’s features, each with their own distinctive flair. “Here, Anyuta is the de facto housekeeper, isn’t she? With that plump old woman at the center, everything seems to run smoothly.” Instead of the wife, who seemed entirely preoccupied with her apparently late-born daughter, the axis of the Sokolsky household revolved thanks to Anyuta. That had become clear even from a single dinner. Anyuta’s manner of serving was filled with confidence and authority, as if urging, “Now, everyone, please begin.” How is everything? She had such an air about her. Anyuta seemed to take pride in her master’s status and to be satisfied with the authority granted to her there.

On the afternoon of the second day, Nobuko and Motoko went out to the International Publishing House in the downtown area and returned just in time for dinner. That day had brought the first snow since morning. Just as the two women were brushing the snow off their coats, there was a knock and the door opened. And then appeared the face of the wife wearing earrings. “May I come in?” Without waiting for permission, the wife stepped into Nobuko and Motoko’s narrow room and closed the door behind her. She made a gesture as if clasping her hands before her body. Twisting her clasped hands,

“Please listen.” With a face mottled by strange floating red patches, she said to Nobuko and the others.

“Just now, my husband called, and something extremely unexpected has occurred, so we absolutely need this room.” Due to both the incomprehensible abruptness and sheer arbitrariness of it all, Motoko and Nobuko wore wounded expressions. Silently pressing closer to Motoko—who had sat down in the chair before the desk—the wife took a step forward and,

“Slushayte (please listen),” she continued in a strained voice. “How should I explain this… That is… Something related to a highly significant individual has occurred.” “…………” “It’s related to my husband’s office—circumstances have arisen that simply cannot be avoided. I’m sorry, but we need you to exchange rooms with the children’s room. Anyuta will carry your luggage and one of your beds over there, so…”

Nobuko,

“What an utterly incomprehensible explanation!” Following this, Motoko said, “Don’t you find this rather odd?”

“We only moved into this room yesterday. Did you know two days ago that such a sudden need for this room would arise? Did you know about this and still enter into a contract with us?” “How could such a thing be possible! It truly became something entirely unexpected.” The wife’s confusion surpassed mere disarray—it signaled that some extraordinary event was about to occur. This was the sort of occurrence that filled this large-framed woman—adorned with mismatched earrings and wholly absorbed in her daughter—with profound terror. The room issue appeared not merely due to her husband’s orders but as a desperate wifely measure to protect them from crisis. Yet the matter’s nature—likely never to be explained—remained obscure, leaving Nobuko and Motoko able to respond only as those abruptly ordered to vacate a room they had just occupied since yesterday.

Motoko said, “I’m sorry, but we cannot accept your explanation.” “This is too exceptional a case—I’ll speak with your husband,” Nobuko continued. “And if we receive an understandable explanation, then we’ll move our belongings. From what time will this room be needed?”

“Probably at night, I think...” The wife kept twisting her hands helplessly, the blotches on her face growing darker still. She stood there motionless for a moment, then suddenly drew a shuddering breath that sounded like suppressed sobs, and fled the room leaving the door gaping open.

While standing and shutting the door, Nobuko opened her eyes wide, “What’s this about?”

Nobuko asked Motoko in a whisper, “What on earth does she mean by ‘something came up’?”

Motoko drew down the corner of her lips in displeasure and, while lighting a cigarette, stared fixedly at Nobuko—who had come to close the door—as if probing the meaning of an incident even she didn’t understand. “I don’t know what’s so unavoidable about it, but they’re making fools of us, demanding we vacate here out of the blue.” “If it’s that kind of situation, then they shouldn’t have rented it out in the first place.” “They can just use another room.” “Why do we have to go to the children’s room and vacate here? I don’t understand.”

With an expression that suggested she had thought of a good idea, Nobuko—

“I have an idea!” Nobuko said. “Let’s just say ‘pa ocherid’ (order of the queue) and settle it that way, okay?” Whether buying bread or purchasing theater or train tickets, Moscow’s queues maintained strict order. Even in lengthy lines, one could leave to handle other matters and return without losing their place—provided they had properly secured their position. This was one of Moscow’s civic moral principles. Before Nobuko and Motoko could finish deliberating, the entrance bell rang as Sokolsky returned. His wife seemed to rush out to greet him. She spoke in hushed, pleading tones. The door to the couple’s bedroom opened—then closed.

Then Anyuta knocked on Nobuko and Motoko’s door and, with the door still closed from the outside, intoned in a high-pitched voice, “Dinner!”

she called out.

Nobuko and Motoko exited through their door. The door across from them opened, and the Sokolskys emerged. With the comical awkwardness of a scene from a poorly acted play, the four of them took their seats at the table. Sokolsky, wearing his well-polished boots again today, pulled his chair toward the table while,

“Earlier, my wife spoke to you about the room matter, but I understand you did not fully grasp the situation.”

[Sokolsky] began.

“Yes. “It’s so sudden, and generally, there’s hardly any precedent for this sort of thing.”

Sokolsky rested his finger on his well-groomed black mustache and pondered for a moment. "Indeed, indeed." He nodded to himself as if confirming his understanding. "In our lives, unprecedented things do occur.—Let us finish dinner first." The wife did not utter a single word, her face—instead of losing its red blotches—having taken on a strangely darkened complexion as she listlessly cut the veal on her plate into small pieces.

The meal ended with almost no conversation. The wife immediately stood up and left toward the bedroom. Anyuta came in to clear the table. With the ease of a man whose servant knew every household occurrence without causing problems, Sokolsky promptly— “Now, let us settle our business.”

and moved to the divan. Sokolsky repeated what his wife had told Nobuko and the others—but more methodically and with greater emphasis. It was clear he was suppressing nervous agitation and irritation, hoping to handle matters as smoothly as possible. "You must understand." Motoko began speaking while making Sokolsky light her cigarette.

“I find your explanation lacks solid objective grounds,” “Consider a person called A who rented a room through proper contract.” “If after two days they’re told to vacate because the room is suddenly needed—generally speaking, ‘unavoidable circumstances’ doesn’t qualify as valid explanation.”

“—I see.” Sokolsky, who had been sitting shallowly on the divan with one elbow propped on his knee, pulled back his knee and re-seated himself. “As you say, my explanation lacks objectivity—but if I’m not permitted the freedom to make it more concrete, what would you do?” As she listened, Nobuko began to feel she could not afford to be tossed about by Sokolsky’s cleverness and bureaucrat-like adeptness at loopholes. While Motoko was taking a drag of her cigarette, Nobuko said in a manner entirely characteristic of her.

“That is truly your misfortune—I can only say.” Sokolsky looked at Nobuko with an expression of surprise and said.

"Misfortune is something that inherently warrants sympathy in such circumstances." "Is that so?"

Nobuko involuntarily let out a small laugh. “Unfortunately, you exude far too much authority.”

“So, how many days do you need the room?”

Motoko brought the conversation back to the main point.

“That remains unclear at present.” “So during this period, are we meant to live in the children’s room and wait?”

“I rather think it would be more convenient for you to find another room and relocate under the circumstances.”

With eyes and a voice thoroughly charged with anger, Motoko— “Well, nyevazmozhno (that’s impossible).” —declared in a tone that permitted no debate.

“If there were no housing shortage in Moscow, you wouldn’t have responded to our advertisement in the first place.” A vehement protest welled up in Nobuko’s heart. In all these circumstances generally, there was nothing resembling the good aspects of Soviet life that Nobuko had experienced over the past year. The reasons were ambiguous, the approach unusually high-handed, and given Nobuko’s disposition—here of all places in Moscow—she could find no justification for having to yield to such an absurdly coercive demand. While sulking in silence, Nobuko recalled a satirical cartoon that had appeared in Krokodil. It was something that sharply satirized the bureaucracy within Soviet society. “Encased in ice” It depicted how a single bumaga could instantly “melt” bureaucrats into amiable people. Nobuko said to Motoko in Japanese on a sudden impulse.

“I’m going to go to VOKS now.” Sokolsky caught the term VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries). “What did you say?” he asked Nobuko. “I said that I would go to VOKS, consult about what Muscovites normally do in such cases, and come back.” “Do you know anyone at VOKS?” “We’ve already been in Moscow for a year now.”

Sokolsky fell silent. However, it seemed he still had to make Nobuko and the others vacate their room, and moreover, the appointed time appeared to be drawing ever closer. While thinking, Sokolsky glanced at his wristwatch. And after pondering once more, before long, he seemed to resolve that there was no alternative but this course of action, "I will present a final cooperative proposal." he said.

“I will certainly find a room for you at the earliest opportunity within this building.” “A room no different from your current one.” “This I promise.” “I already have some prospects in mind.” “Under these conditions, please allow your belongings to be moved to the children’s room.” “Then we shall trust your word.” “Once the room is prepared, we will move there from the children’s room.”

Sokolsky stood up from the divan and, forgetting to greet Nobuko and the others, hurried off to the kitchen with hasty steps.

Nobuko and the others moved the books and decorations they had just arranged on the desk by themselves to the children’s room on the other side of the wall separating it from the dining room. Anyuta pushed the children’s beds out of the room and brought a folding bed from the other room. Sokolsky himself, wearing an overcoat for going out, carried the large trunks and baskets. The children had been taken to the couple’s bedroom beforehand, and on the white wall remained what might have been Easter decorations or birthday decorations—a large troika paper cutout made of red and green paper. The children’s room, illuminated by a lamp dimmer than candlelight compared to other rooms, held a faintly sweet, milky smell that had permeated its walls. The room itself was more than twice as large as the place Nobuko and the others had rented. However, there was only a table by the window cluttered with items typical of a children’s room—no desk, no lamp—and Nobuko and the others sat on the bed like refugees, gazing at the snow falling outside the dark window that faced the building’s inner courtyard.

That evening, when Nobuko went to wash her hands, she found the dining room door—still lit—left open, and saw the wife reverently carrying a tray bearing a wine bottle and glasses back to their original room.

VI

The next morning, Nobuko and Motoko awoke unpleasantly to face their first day in the milky-smelling room. Motoko, who had gone to wash her face, returned to the temporarily assigned room wearing a mannish striped gown and carrying a hand towel when

“Is there a man called Myakov who’s the People’s Commissar of Public Health?”

she asked. “—I don’t know.” Nobuko knew the names of several leading Soviet figures and had even made postcards from photographs of some of them. However, that was simply the natural result of having lived in Moscow for a year; she didn’t know about each and every government official.

“What about that person?” “The one using that room is People’s Commissar Myakov, I hear.” Motoko’s single statement laid bare Sokolsky’s fervor in displacing them. Simultaneously, Nobuko’s eyes took on a suspicious gleam as she fixed Motoko with an intense stare. “Why would someone like him need to secretly maintain a room in this sort of place?” The commissar had arrived at the apartment the previous night during the lull before theater crowds dispersed. He appeared to have entered through a separate exterior entrance by the main door—no bell rang to announce his coming. By chance, Nobuko had witnessed Sokolsky’s wife carrying wine bottles back to their former quarters, confirming the room’s intended occupant.

“There’s something going on, isn’t there?” “Well…”

Ever since the discovery of Don Bass’s anti-Soviet conspiracy last year, purges had continued throughout the entire Soviet apparatus and within the Party. Cases of bribery, illegal disposal of materials and products, and deliberate dereliction of leadership were exposed from within various production sectors and organizations such as cooperatives, with articles being published in Pravda not infrequently. That a People’s Commissar—despite his position—engaged in seemingly illegal housing arrangements filled Nobuko and the others, as foreigners, with dark imaginings. And this darkness carried a distinctive quality within Soviet life. A People’s Commissar elected by all feared public criticism and acted furtively. This fact created the impression of corruption being proven within the collective sentiment of Soviet life. The emotion might have been naive, but it was strong and clear—Nobuko felt even more intensely that there could be absolutely no justification for their place being taken away for such people’s sake. We are foreigners—neither Communist Party members nor revolutionaries. But at least we aren’t undermining the Soviet people’s earnest constructive work. Compared to a People’s Commissar who covertly maintains hideouts, Nobuko and the others stood closer to the Soviet people in both spirit and reality. Nobuko—

“Well, if that’s how it is, then that’s perfectly fine, isn’t it?” she said with a defiantly energetic expression.

“Sokolsky’s reason for evicting us has only grown increasingly flimsy.” While pouring the tea that was brought to their room morning and evening, Motoko said in a disenchanted, sarcastic tone, “The People’s Commissar has apparently taken a liking to Barsac—a Russian white wine. They say he only deigns to drink coffee in the mornings.” She sneered, twisting her lips into a smile.

“Anyuta’s so worked up about having someone like that come to our place that she just can’t keep quiet, you know.” “They made sure she heard it was absolutely confidential.” “Since she can’t help talking anyway, it’s safer to make me her confidant—Anyuta’s no fool.” Nobuko was drinking tea and thinking,

“If we can just find a room, let’s move.”

she said. “Even if it’s a bad room.” Nobuko found it unpleasant that they were in a house connected to a dubious incident. In the year since coming to Moscow, Nobuko and the others’ existence had been neither glorious nor remarkable, but it had been tranquil and free. If some dispute involving Myakov, the People’s Commissar of Public Health, were to overturn the lives of the Sokolsky family—who through some circumstance had become entangled in it—then their own lives would inevitably have to be examined from complicated angles as well. Such things were distasteful to Nobuko. For Nobuko, who since Tamotsu’s death had felt herself wholly plunged into Soviet life with nothing else to cling to, placing herself in situations that might entangle her in such affairs felt utterly contrary to her true self.

Motoko agreed with this, and while half-teasing Nobuko as she earnestly spoke her mind,

“You already know that.” “There’s no need to make such a fuss.”

she said. “But the Soviet really is something else.” “Anyuta went out of her way to say ‘prinimaet’ when that man was just sipping his coffee.” “She made a point of saying it with excessive politeness.” “So the Narkom doesn’t merely drink—he partakes, does he?” Nobuko had only known the verb prinimaet as a term used when taking medicine or such.

That day too was all snow. The fine snow fell without cease, just like the scenery from the previous year when Nobuko and the others had first arrived in Moscow, piling into permanent snowdrifts across every town until spring. At dinner, the wife—who until then had not shown herself anywhere—emerged from the bedroom with evident reluctance. She sat at the table, "Unpleasant weather, isn't it?" Avoiding their gaze by looking toward the kitchen, she rubbed her hands together. Motoko replied in a calm voice,

“It isn’t anything special, is it?” she said. The large apartment building at Astozhenka 1-chome had central heating that kept every unit warm down to the kitchens at a comfortable temperature. The wife drank only her soup, emerald earrings visible beneath slightly disheveled brown hair. With both elbows planted on the table and fingers occasionally massaging her temples, she touched neither the second meat dish nor the candied dried fruits. Sokolsky didn’t return for dinner, and like the person who had come to their room after they left, it remained unclear when he came back or went out.

The next day at dinner too, the wife remained shut in her bedroom. After finishing their meal served by Anyuta alone, Nobuko tried to look out the dining room window at Astozhenka Street's snow-blanketed scene. The bedroom door stood slightly ajar, and through the gap Nobuko glimpsed the wife in her chintz-patterned robe—listlessly handing a white enamel bedpan to a girl standing on a child's cot. In that fleeting view through the crack, the bedroom showed the same disarray as the children's room where Nobuko and the others stayed.

In the same building one floor below, a room was finally found after dinner on the third day.

The wife stubbornly refused to emerge from the bedroom, as if the family's turmoil were somehow Nobuko and the others' fault. Sokolsky, who had not returned for dinner, came hurrying back around five o'clock, knocked on Nobuko and the others' door, and stayed about fifteen minutes. After announcing that a room had finally become available on the third floor of the same building and that the gatekeeper would come in forty minutes to move their luggage, he briefly entered the bedroom and hurried out again, nearly catching his coat hem in the door in his haste. Nobuko and the others tipped Anyuta and followed the overweight, breathless gatekeeper down to the new third-floor room.

When Nobuko saw the housewife's face with those earnest eyes of an unyoung Russian woman, she first felt profound relief and trust. The Lukyanov family was incomparably more unadorned than the Sokolsky household, their furnishings containing not a single superfluous item—as if matching the residents' complete lack of pretense. The room prepared for Nobuko and the others was nevertheless dreadful. In this building where every floor seemed to have at least one such cramped little chamber, the Lukyanovs' apartment contained a narrow room built facing the structure's inner courtyard. With only one window looking out onto the dark courtyard where snow fell ceaselessly, and containing just a single bed, a desk, and a wardrobe standing beside the entrance door, the extremely confined space was already filled to capacity.

It was clear that Sokolsky, in desperation, had no choice but to secure even this room. For Nobuko and the others too, no matter how cramped it might be, Lukyanov’s tidy and uncluttered room was preferable to remaining in the atmosphere of a household gripped by Sokolsky’s anxiety over impending disaster. In the simple falcon-brown eyes of Lukyanov’s wife—who stood at the door watching Nobuko and Motoko painstakingly arrange their luggage—there appeared both sincere kindness and confusion.

“This room was the one my daughter was using, but since Sokolsky insisted, we made it available for the two of you—though it’s not a room where two people can live in.”

Looking even more perplexed, Lukyanov’s wife flushed at her neck within her hand-sewn, pale cream blouse with its Russian-style collar loosely rounded at the chest.

“At our place, it hasn’t even been decided yet whether we can host dinner for you.” Both Nobuko and Motoko, working in their own ways, found themselves troubled. Motoko,

“Didn’t Sokolsky make the request?” she asked. “He had to explain that matter to you.” “Sokolsky did explain,” Motoko replied. “But my husband is away on business now. He doesn’t even know we’ve lent out this room.” It grew increasingly clear that Sokolsky had pressured Lukyanov’s wife—someone ordinarily difficult to refuse—into arranging the room through some undisclosed connection. The earnest wife spoke slowly, her discomfort palpable not only in her inability to state things plainly as a household manager but also in her anxiety over her husband having unilaterally brought foreigners into their home.

“Why don’t we just go eat at the Passage?” Nobuko said in Japanese. “We’d feel more comfortable that way.” Motoko, rather to soothe the wife’s anxiety, said, “It’s all right.” “We’ll manage. There’s no need to worry.”

“Ochen’ zhalko (It’s very regrettable).” The wife said this in a heartfelt voice. After thinking for a while, the wife added an offer that was trivial to her but proved greatly helpful to Nobuko and the others. “Tea, we can prepare at our place.” “Morning and evening—”

Two days later, Lukyanov returned from his business trip—a small-framed man in his fifties with sloping shoulders, modest in both speech and attire. Though he had performed no particularly heroic deeds, he was precisely the sort who had lived honestly through the 1917 Revolution and now worked diligently as an official in the Ministry of Transport. Lukyanov’s eyes shared the same warm falcon-brown hue as his wife’s. The sole distinction lay in how his eyes cradled a certain melancholy when measured against her brighter gaze. There were two daughters. The elder—slender, petite, and faintly affected—had graduated from Moscow University the previous year and now worked at some unspecified place. The younger daughter was a plump girl resembling her mother, set to enter technical school next year, her falcon-brown eyes clearer than her mother’s and glossy hair of matching color cut in a bob. This younger daughter brought tea to Nobuko and Motoko’s room. Knocking twice slowly on the door,

“May I come in? “(Mozhno?)” In a voice that still retained something childlike, she called out slowly, and finally offered the tea tray with a beaming smile. Lukyanov’s modest household had an atmosphere similar to that found in the apartment of Maria Grigorievna—Nobuko and Motoko’s language teacher—and her husband, the Novamirskys, who worked at V.O.K.S. Everyone diligently attended to their respective tasks, and theirs was a lifestyle that, while not lacking, had no room for wasteful leisure. Just as Mr. Novamirsky and his wife Maria Grigorievna both had cheeks reddened by exposure to the open air and noses that were similarly slightly upturned at the tip, so too did the Lukyanov couple and their two daughters all share falcon-brown eyes and slow, Russian-style movements.

The Lukyanov family’s way of life held an honesty that stirred sympathy within Nobuko’s heart. At the Ruibakovs’ house, both husband and wife had made Nuira shoulder the bulk of daily life, and like his wife, the husband too lived amidst aimless leisure time. Sokolsky’s household had been an unexpected fissure in Soviet society that Nobuko found herself stumbling into. The natural, diligent simplicity of the Lukyanov family—people unacquainted with pretense—harmonized with the earnest outlook on life that had taken root in Nobuko’s heart and would not fade after Tamotsu’s death. After Tamotsu vanished—after returning from trips to the Volga River and Donbass—Nobuko had outwardly adopted a more adult-like demeanor. Even toward Motoko, she had become more subdued. Yet this was not because her heart had grown calm; rather, it stemmed from a new passion for life—imperceptible to others—that now concentrated itself within her. Nobuko’s increasingly fierce will to live drew secret strength from the anguished certainty that made her body tremble: Tamotsu was dead. That unmistakable pain lent Nobuko’s newfound passion to live a deep resonance like the bass tones of music. Guided by the echoes she heard within herself, Nobuko sought to plunge ever deeper into Soviet life.

It was on the same fourth day that Lukyanov’s wife decided to take on preparing Nobuko and the others’ dinners, and Motoko reserved a room at the Passage Hotel.

“What a waste—after I went through all that trouble—”

Motoko, who had just returned after securing a room at the Passage Hotel, heard about this from Nobuko—who had remained in the room—and expressed regret. "But with this setup, we can’t possibly manage… You feel the same way too, don’t you, Bukko-chan?" Nobuko was sitting on the bed covered with a dark, coarse blanket.

“It’s impossible. This room really is only enough for one person.” “I suppose I’ll just come here for dinner then.”

Though the Passage Hotel and Astozhenka were close, Motoko seemed reluctant to waste time commuting back and forth. “I end up feeling too sluggish in this weather,” she said. “If I eat dinner here, I’ll just wind up killing time here till night no matter what.”

“What if I go to the Passage instead? You wouldn’t need to kill time then?” “It’s fine—I’ll just drive it away.” Having said this without even a smile and considered the matter, Motoko ultimately decided to move to the Passage Hotel alone as originally planned. Under those circumstances, Nobuko lacked the courage to eat dinner facing a window that showed nothing but snow falling in solitude. It was settled that Nobuko would go to the Passage Hotel for her meals.

Seven

Onstage, the curtain had just fallen on the first act of the opera La Traviata, the resplendent chorus of toasts still lingering in the audience's ears. To Nobuko and Motoko, seated in the first row of the second-floor balcony, appeared a blond boy dressed as a Pioneer. The Pioneer boy approached Motoko's side. And, all over his freckled face animated with intensely cheerful curiosity,

“Is that a telescope?” He pointed at the binoculars resting on Motoko’s khaki skirt at her knee.

“Oh.—Why?”

“This is the first time I’ve seen something like this.” “Can you really see all the way into the distance with them?” “They can’t see that far—they’re opera glasses, meant for watching the stage.” The Pioneer with a bright red satin tie spread wide across his chest had a slightly uncomprehending expression at what Motoko was saying. “May I look through them?”

Motoko handed the opera glasses to the Pioneer. She taught him how to hold them and adjust the distance by turning the silver shaft between the two lenses. "Oh, how wonderful!" "That corner looks just like it's right nearby!" The Pioneer pressed the opera glasses to his eyes, surveying everything from the dome ceiling of the modest Experimental Theater to the seats below. In those days in Moscow, items like fountain pens and watches were considered rare luxuries. It truly seemed this was his first encounter with opera glasses. Yet his excitement felt disproportionate as he kept exclaiming—"I can see over there too! This side too!"—while peering through them. Nobuko,

“Can you really see that well?”

Nobuko asked the Pioneer. “These opera glasses are already old with a poorly made mechanism, so they’re inconvenient even for us to watch the stage with.” The opera glasses were something Nobuko’s mother had received as a souvenir from someone abroad and had used extensively over a long period. By means of a small screw, the lens folded down, and the entire opera glasses collapsed into a thin bundle. Because they were handy, Nobuko had taken them.

When Nobuko said this, Petya removed the lenses from his eyes and stared intently at her with a momentarily frozen smile. “Is that really true?” Nobuko said half-jokingly.

“Things like lenses and automobiles progress every year, and better ones are being made, you know.”

Petya muttered under his breath, “That’s true.” While saying this, he pressed the opera glasses to his eyes again and peered toward the back of the balcony, then turned to Motoko— “Can I borrow these opera glasses and take them downstairs?” “My seat’s down there.”

From the balcony railing, he indicated a place slightly to the right of the orchestra box below. "I want to see how it looks from down there." "Is that alright?" "I’ll bring them right back!"

Motoko glanced briefly at Nobuko. “――Sure, go ahead.”

In the resonance of those words, she could discern that trusting the boy would be acceptable. Nobuko remained silent, her expression unreadable around the mouth. The boy’s Pioneer uniform made her feel it was her own distrust that seemed abnormal. “Oh, fine—” Motoko said in Russian, “I’ll let you borrow them. Bring them right back.” The boy disappeared from the balcony. It felt slightly too long before his Pioneer figure reappeared in the seats below near the orchestra box. Stretching her neck alongside Motoko while looking down, Nobuko—

“Do you think that boy will come back to return them?” Nobuko said. She felt he wouldn’t come back.

“He’s a Pioneer.” “Well, that’s true, but…” Even as she said this and kept looking down, the bundle of bills surfaced in Nobuko’s mind. “You—where’s the money?” “I transferred it here.” Motoko tapped the briefcase wedged between Nobuko’s seat and her own. Before coming to the theater, Nobuko and Motoko had gone to the National Bank and obtained banknotes equivalent to three months’ living expenses. Motoko had for some reason kept them in her coat’s inner pocket. At the theater’s coat check, when removing her coat to deposit it, Motoko remembered this and moved the bundle of bills from her pocket to change its location. Nobuko thought Motoko’s handling of it was careless given the circumstances but stayed silent. At that moment, several guests checking coats stood around them. When Motoko moved the bills so briskly yet inappropriately like that, a stern-faced woman in her forties—who had been right beside them and seemed to have noticed Motoko’s actions—wearing a reddish silk blouse was also sitting alone on the same balcony, diagonally across from Motoko.

Nobuko, still facing Motoko and looking down, said in a small voice, “Do you think someone saw the money?”

“Does that woman notice? The woman in the red blouse—she was right behind you at the coat check.”

“Ah, that one’s a bit odd.”

The opera glasses themselves were neither particularly regrettable to lose nor an item that would cause inconvenience for Nobuko and Motoko. But was that child truly only curious about the opera glasses? Or was he planning to steal them? Nobuko and Motoko’s curiosity shifted its focus to that possibility. It felt like it took slightly too long, but eventually the Pioneer appeared in a seat near the orchestra box that Nobuko and Motoko were looking down at, his figure clad in a red necktie. Standing at his seat with the closed curtain behind him, he aimed the opera glasses toward the balcony where Nobuko and the others were and waved in greeting. During the intermission, two or three faces of the sparse audience members who had remained seated turned around and looked up at the balcony where Nobuko and the others were, toward which the Pioneer was waving. The man in a dark suit seated next to the boy borrowed the opera glasses from him, twisted his neck, and gazed not particularly at Nobuko and the others but at the entire balcony. Then, after using the returned opera glasses to look around here and there for a while longer, the boy signaled that he was now heading that way and disappeared from view.

The Pioneer came to return the opera glasses. Motoko whispered chidingly to Nobuko, “He did come back after all.” And between Motoko and the boy began a fragmentary conversation about Japan. “There aren’t many Japanese people in Moscow.” “I know Chinese people well—there were Chinese children at ‘Children’s Home.’” “This is my first time meeting Japanese people.”

The Pioneer who had introduced himself as Petya asked Motoko when the bell rang through the hall announcing the performance's start, "May I move to this seat?"

“Because during intermission, I want to hear more about Japan.” That evening, the Experimental Theater was eight-tenths full. In Moscow theaters, there was a custom that if it was confirmed a seat was vacant, one could change seats without issue. Admittedly, such vacancies were rare, though.

The Pioneer remained on the balcony and sat in the seat one row behind the woman in the red blouse. Motoko and Nobuko’s seats were exactly the first and second seats from the central aisle in the first row. Motoko’s right side was separated by a generously wide aisle; next to her was Nobuko, and beyond that, there were no empty seats in the row.

Compared to the National Grand Theater that performed only operas and ballets, the Experimental Theater’s repertoire consisted of works like La Bohème, Faust, and La Traviata—stages considered for young singers to appear on. Though everything was small-scale with simple stage sets, that evening’s La Traviata proved captivating. The soprano’s voice—softly pliant yet brimming with youthful richness—portrayed Traviata’s old-fashioned, delicate woman: her joys, sorrows, and despair with a rawness absent from grand prima donnas. Since the lyrics were sung in Russian, a certain Russian nuance shaded the flowing melodies, giving that night’s La Traviata an intimacy akin to hearing a story Pushkin himself might have penned. Nobuko left the theater with a warmth suffusing her heart, as though melodies from the beautifully performed opera still resonated within her body. They walked to the Passage Hotel where she drank tea with Motoko before Nobuko took the streetcar back to her Astozhenka residence.

They reached the entrance of the Passage Hotel facing the Central Post Office construction site along the nighttime path during a lull in the snowfall.

Nobuko and Motoko had not come there alone. The Pioneer had said he would see them off and had come along. At the entrance of the Passage Hotel, Motoko bid farewell to the Pioneer, whose red necktie peeked out from between the collar of his threadbare black woolen short coat.

“Well then, goodbye. Go home and go to sleep.” “It’s late already.”

Petya hesitated slightly, but “May I come up to your room?” he said in a somewhat pleading manner.

“Just for a little while—I’ll leave right away.” Both Nobuko and Motoko imagined the child wanted tea. “Is staying out this late even allowed for Pioneers?” While saying this, they ended up going up to Motoko’s room with all three of them. At that time, Motoko had taken the room—the one where she had stayed with Nobuko on their very first night in Moscow, and later where Yoshinosuke Nagahara had remained for over two weeks eating nothing but omelets—the small corner room on the third floor.

Entering Motoko’s room, taking off their coats and placing their belongings on the desk and chairs to rest briefly, Petya grew markedly animated. With a face like a flickering small flame, he whistled a melody from *La Traviata*, then abruptly switched to humming Budyonny’s song as he paced about the room, finally mimicking a Caucasus dance by alternately thrusting out his bent legs with stiff springs to either side.

“Why are you being so noisy?” Motoko scolded with an exasperated look. “What a peculiar boy!”

Petya promptly retorted with a laugh, “I’m always cheerful. I’m famous at Lager (encampment).” But keenly sensing his limits, he ceased his commotion altogether. And this time, he started a guessing game.

“What’s in this desk drawer—shall I try to guess?” “As if you could guess.” “No—I’ll show you I can guess! First—let’s see…”

Stroking the green baize-covered desk from above, he tilted his head with its glittering golden crew cut,

“First, there are paper items inside!” “You’re being sly,” Motoko retorted with a look of exasperation. “What desk drawer doesn’t have paper items in it?” “Then there are definitely pencils inside too.” Petya tilted his head, golden crew cut glinting. “A knife—is there one?” He looked at Motoko and Nobuko in turn with a sidelong glance, eyes brimming with challenge and mockery. “At the very least, there’s something metal in here!”

Declaring this, he swiftly opened Motoko’s desk drawer. When he saw that the drawer contained only large white notebook paper and Japanese manuscript paper, Petya made a disappointed expression.

“It’s nothing special! “(Nye vazhnyi!)” “Well, obviously—of course it’s nothing special. Paper’s just paper.” “Whether it’s white or blue—”

Petya quickly regained his cheerful energy and,

"But I guessed right, see? This is made of metal!" He held up two Moscow-made pen nibs between his fingers. "Now then... I wonder what's inside this." He reached toward Motoko's document case resting on the desk.

“Don’t touch!” In a sharp voice, Motoko wedged the document case firmly between the chairback and her own body. “Why can’t I touch that?” “Ask your leader.” Nobuko had grown weary of Petya’s guessing game. Thinking to serve him tea and hasten his departure, she took the light-blue enamel kettle—its belly round and swollen—and went down to the kitchen to fetch hot water.

Carrying the kettle filled with hot water and a tray bearing a cup and spoon for Petya, Nobuko returned to the room to find him circling round and round Motoko—who sat motionless on a chair near the center of the cramped space—while opening her small brown handbag and peering inside.

“Ah, you lose!” he exclaimed. “Seven rubles and thirty-five kopeks, a gold watch, and old theater tickets are inside.” Nobuko thought he was acting strangely. “What are you doing? Why do you need my sumochka?” “It was your Comrade’s turn to guess what was inside this. She only said there’d be about three rubles and didn’t know anything else. Since I won, I’ll confiscate this!”

Petya, still holding the small brown handbag, moved his hands behind his back. Nobuko stepped right up to the boy and extended her hand.

“Hand it over! “(Davai!)” “…………”

“Why?” “Hand it over!” “A game is just a game!”

Nobuko put away the returned handbag in the desk and shut the drawer with a clatter.

“Alright, that’s enough. Drink the tea and go home.”

While drinking tea, Nobuko began to grow concerned about the time she needed to return.

"What time could it be?"

Motoko looked at her wristwatch.

“Oh my, it’s already this late?”

It was nearly twelve o'clock. Nobuko left the Passage Hotel accompanied by the Pioneer-attired boy. They descended Tverskaya Street toward Ryojin Square.

“You can also get to Astozhenka from Strasnaya.”

“I know.” “Let’s go via Strasnaya—or would you rather not?” “There’s no need for me to take a detour.” While Strasnaya Square counted among Moscow’s bustling nightspots, it equally enjoyed notoriety as a place where anything might happen. Nobuko found herself unable to accept the Pioneer boy’s proposal to go through Strasnaya at face value. Hurrying toward the Ryojin Square tram stop, she slipped in her winter boots between snow-crusted cobblestones.

“Be careful!” The Pioneer shouted with grown-up urgency and steadied Nobuko’s arm— and the small brown handbag she had been clutching in that same steadied hand, nearly dropped when she slipped— “I’ll carry it for you.” He took it from her and clamped it firmly under his own arm.

The tram bound for Astozhenka arrived shortly. The bright interior was packed with men and women returning from theaters and meetings. Nobuko and Petya finally squeezed into the conductor’s platform. Several others besides them had boarded. Being pushed deeper inside little by little, Nobuko—

“Hand over that purse.” “I need to buy tickets,” she said.

“I’ll buy it for you—I have a pass.” As he said this, the Pioneer—standing one step ahead of Nobuko at the tram entrance, which was raised a level higher than the conductor’s platform—rose slightly onto his tiptoes and surveyed the crowded interior. The tram was approaching the next stop. When Nobuko, who had briefly glanced outside, turned her gaze back to the tram entrance, the Pioneer was no longer there. In Moscow trams, conductors always stayed in the rear where Nobuko and the others had boarded, never moving about the carriages as they did in Japan. If she looked, the female conductor was indeed standing in her designated corner, preserved despite the crowding. The Pioneer had no need to go further inside to buy tickets.

I've been had! Nobuko thought in that instant. At the same moment, still silent, she began charging through the packed tram with ferocious intensity toward the rear, shoving passengers aside. She didn't know the word *pickpocket*. The word "thief" didn't occur to her either. Unable to cry out immediately, Nobuko forced her way through the crowd toward the back, determined to seize that red necktie herself before they reached the stop. When she'd pushed three-quarters through the carriage, the tram halted. Then immediately started moving again. Not even a glimpse of red necktie remained visible inside. The Pioneer had escaped completely.

It was only then that Nobuko finally found her voice. The surrounding passengers discovered that the petite foreign woman in a black coat had her purse stolen by a Pioneer-attired boy. The passengers, thoroughly aware of such boys' swiftness and the futility of catching them, remained extremely calm while sympathizing with Nobuko's misfortune. When Nobuko said she was penniless and asked them to let her off the tram to return to her friend's place, two or three men called out to the driver. The tram was immediately stopped.

Walking unhurriedly along the late-night snowy street still busy with pedestrians toward the Passage Hotel, Nobuko felt herself growing exhilarated while simultaneously admiring the Pioneer boy’s methods. Ever since he had begun trailing Nobuko and the others at the Experimental Theater, the boy had worked relentlessly all night toward his objective. Taking the binoculars only to return them—this was his method to dissolve initial suspicions as a first step. A guessing game. Under the guise of such play, the boy had been inspecting and appraising Nobuko and Motoko’s possessions. He showed Motoko Nobuko’s Mouade gold-cased wristwatch,

“This is a fake, right?” he said, drawing a retort from Motoko,

“No way it’s a fake—it’s the real thing!” The cleverness of having made her say it. Neither Nobuko nor Motoko had ever fully lowered their guard around that overly cheerful, excessively curious Pioneer boy. They had harbored half a suspicion. Motoko had wedged her document briefcase between the chairback and her own back as if engaged in a battle of wills, refusing to budge from her seat. Even Nobuko had wondered if the boy might have accomplices nearby when she rejected his suggestion to go around Stratsnaya. Yet in the end, they’d let him walk off with the purse. While Nobuko’s blunder had set things in motion, that freckled blond Pioneer boy had—from the very start—maintained an unrelenting performance of tension, responding to the undulating interplay of their vigilance and carelessness until he finally seized his prey at the last opportunity. His tenacity was remarkable, even as a ruse. The psychological deception and meticulous planning of his hunt reminded Nobuko of Gogol’s villains. But what if he’d followed them all night and come away empty-handed? At that thought, Nobuko felt genuine fear for the first time. The boy’s mention of Stratsnaya suggested he had accomplices—perhaps even an adult boss waiting there. She felt relieved she’d given up the purse. At least he could present his boss with some cash, a gold-cased watch, and an old leather purse. That saved him from being driven to desperate extremes. That had bought Nobuko’s safety.

When Nobuko opened the door to the Passage and Nosov’s large beard appeared from behind the palm plant pot that had been there since she and the others arrived in Moscow last year, her entire body suddenly went limp. Half-consciously, half-unconsciously, she had been engaged in a psychological struggle with the Pioneer boy all night long. That it had already ended brought her relief.

Perched lightly on a chair while taking off her winter boots, Nobuko gave Nosov a concise account of that night’s events.

“That boy—well, well...” Nosov shook his head.

“I saw the boy come in with you all. But since you were all together, I thought he might be someone you knew. You should report it to the front desk (kantora).”

As she spoke with Nosov, a distorted smile—strangely luminous—appeared in Nobuko’s eyes and upon her lips. At the junction where Tverskaya Boulevard met Akhotny, Nobuko’s foot had slipped, and in that instant her purse had passed casually into the Pioneer boy’s hands. At that moment, the Pioneer boy firmly tucked Nobuko’s small worn purse under his arm and began walking while supporting her wrist; then seizing her gloved hand, he pressed it between his own bare hands—reddened from the cold—and made an exaggerated smacking sound in mockery of a kiss. Nobuko withdrew her hand as though dismissing something absurd.

As she spoke with Nosov, Nobuko recalled that scene. How relieved that Pioneer boy must have been at that moment. First he had pulled it off. In that surge of triumph, the Pioneer boy might have involuntarily mimicked a kiss against Nobuko’s hand. Yet—that mock kiss—it had been precisely a con artist’s handiwork. Up the stairs—now nearing one in the morning, their steps muffled by floral-patterned carpet—Nobuko climbed toward Motoko’s room, one deliberate step at a time.

VIII

Nobuko and Motoko had been targeted, and the Pioneer boy who stole Nobuko’s purse was known throughout Moscow as Damsky—a swindler who specialized in women and foreigners. The following day, after speaking for some forty minutes with a plainclothes officer from the civic police about the previous night’s events, Nobuko and Motoko learned these new facts. Yet neither Nobuko nor Motoko felt inclined to emphasize their victimhood. After all, the chain of events had originated in their own carelessness from the very beginning.

The plainclothes man, wearing a stand-up collar shirt with pleats on the chest—the kind Lyubakov was always seen wearing in photographs—meticulously recorded the items taken from Nobuko. When reporting the small amount of money and the watch, Nobuko felt awkward. The watch—even if it was a Mouade with a gold case—had stopped working long before, and it was something her father Taizo had bought her as a parting gift when she first set out on her journey. When asked her occupation and replying that she was a woman writer, Nobuko felt the foolishness made manifest in reality strike her as a particularly painful self-indictment.

“We rather think it was our own fault.” “But what’s done is done.”

Motoko said while offering a cigarette to the plainclothes officer. “We considered it necessary to report.” “Indeed it is,” he replied. “Moreover, we find it deeply regrettable that you foreigners placed even partial trust in that boy due to him being a Pioneer. And we deeply regret it.”

As for matters like that boy getting caught or the stolen items being recovered, it seemed the man held no expectations from his frequent experiences.

“What do you think?” Nobuko asked the questions she had been harboring since last night.

“Was that boy a real Pioneer, or was he just a bad kid wearing a Pioneer uniform?” After a moment’s thought, the young plainclothes officer with an earnest face said: “It’s impossible to say either way.” “As you know, the Pioneer organization is a massive public body—Moscow City alone has tens of thousands of boys and girls belonging to it. It’s a fact that the boy was a Pioneer, and it may equally be true that he was a professional Damsky.” “Regrettably, such things can happen in a society undergoing transition.”

When they first arrived in Moscow, they hadn’t encountered pickpockets at all, but being targeted by an elaborate con artist after a year had passed made Nobuko thoroughly reconsider their lifestyle. At the theater coat check, Motoko had taken out a wad of bills from her coat pocket. That had been the root of their mistake, but from what psychology had such carelessness arisen in Nobuko and Motoko? Nobuko and Motoko worked in Moscow, but they weren’t living off the money earned there. Moreover, with the ruble being cheaper than the yen, their Japanese funds stretched several times further in conversion. Nobuko came to realize that their carelessness stemmed not from simple absentmindedness of those unaccustomed to urban life, but from a vulnerability inherent to foreigners like themselves—who didn’t work or live properly in this land—being coddled by a somewhat favorable exchange rate.

Motoko’s frugality had remained unchanged since their arrival in Moscow, and even now, Nobuko and the others had never once gone to eat extravagant dishes at the Savoy Hotel’s dining room—the kind that would have strained their budget. They rarely even bought sweets that were expensive by Moscow standards. In such frugality, they were no different from many honest Muscovites. If that wad of bills had been Motoko’s monthly salary—how would things have been then? Or if it had been Nobuko’s manuscript fee—in any case, the two of them would surely have been more careful.

When she reconsidered the exchange rate between the ruble and the yen, Nobuko found herself caught in a paradox. The fact that the ruble had a lower exchange rate against the Japanese yen meant that, compared to Japan, the Soviet Union generally lacked social credibility. But against what conditions of Japan did the Soviet Union have less credibility? For the majority of Soviet people, it was never thought that Soviet life as a whole was only marginally more credible than other capitalist societies. After all, the achievements of socialism chosen by this country’s people were steadily progressing. The electrification of agriculture and industry had been increased by a significant percentage during the six months from May Day 1928 to Revolution Day. The low creditworthiness attributed to the Soviet Union stemmed from foreign powers who refused to trust its socialist methods, from those who found it preferable to sell machinery and other goods to the Soviets at higher prices, and from officials and consultant engineers stationed abroad who could earn far more rubles in monthly salaries than they would have in their home countries.

As she grew accustomed to Soviet life, Nobuko felt an increasing aversion to the prejudices held by other countries toward the Soviet Union and their tendency to propagandize them through scare tactics. To put it another way—what bitter irony that their rubles increased precisely through the exchange rate which manifested those very prejudices. Motoko’s frugality with money was not the frugality of working people. Rather, Nobuko thought, it was a petit bourgeois habit of always carefully and prudently using money that had some margin to spare. But then, could Nobuko herself have claimed to be free of petit bourgeois tendencies in aspects different from Motoko’s? Having visited a Pioneer campsite once or twice and held discussions with Pioneers at their club—based on just that—Nobuko, who had behaved toward that blond Pioneer boy as if she understood all there was to know about Pioneers, could not help reflecting on the naivety in her own attitude. As if the only red cloth in Moscow were Pioneer neckties! In a place like Moscow, there was nowhere you couldn’t easily get a scrap of red cloth! Malice was acrid and realistic—Nobuko couldn’t help but acknowledge this. The little villain Pioneer boy’s keen eyes had targeted the unconscious fault line between the two Japanese women and struck true.

Not long after this incident, Motoko returned from the Passage Hotel to Lukyanov's long, narrow room - as cramped as a pencil case. And so Nobuko moved into a room in the new building near Novodevichy Convent where Chekhov's grave lies.

When taking the train from Astozhenka toward Moscow’s outskirts, one found the terminus at the famous Novodevichy. Until recently, Novodevichy had been known solely for its monastery, but this December—as snow fell thick upon it—a compact new town had taken shape there. In this settlement that had only just begun to testify to Moscow’s expansion, shops essential to residents’ lives—groceries, bookstores, clothiers—had opened wooden storefronts facing linden-lined sidewalks, stocking their shelves for now with only the most immediately necessary items. Like pathways through a park, several trodden trails wound through the snow between large linden trees. Each of these paths led to the respective entrances of three five-story apartment buildings.

Peering at the inner roofline crowned with the spires of Novodevichy Convent beyond the snowy sky, the newly developed town—emerging as a cluster in the snow-covered wilderness—stood in stark contrast to the Russian-style desolation of its surroundings, manifesting the bustle and vitality of Soviet new life. The large apartment buildings, imposing in the snow with their black square outlines, had been built by the Chemical Aviation Workers' Union. For years, people had set aside fixed savings for these buildings, eagerly awaited their completion, and finally moved into this new district with triumphant spirits. Though the stores still lacked fully stocked shelves, and the hardware shop’s red-flag-decorated window displayed only two oil stoves lined up modestly, there was in this place both the story of the town’s origins and the pride of new life.

The room Nobuko moved into was on the fourth floor of the rightmost building among three large apartment complexes forming the heart of Novodevichy's new district. When she pushed open the entrance door, the entire structure's still-damp concrete—steam-warmed and gradually drying—held a sharp, nose-stinging odor like laundry hung out to dry. The rented room was roughly four times larger than Lukyanov's quarters. Yet when the union health worker's wife showed her the space, Nobuko finally understood why Motoko had awkwardly insisted she could never settle there.

Facing three pure white walls and two large, curtainless windows, on the broadly exposed floorboards stood a single weathered wardrobe, forlorn and solitary. A single glossy new desk had been placed facing the window. Near the window on the left side of the door, pressed close against it, a divan had been placed in lieu of a bed. Nobuko looked around the room and,

“It’s very clean.” As she said this, Nobuko felt profoundly strange. The room couldn’t become truly unclean even if it tried—there simply wasn’t enough in it—but why were all the furnishings so uniformly small? Whether the desk or divan— The desk looked unsettlingly diminutive against the room’s spaciousness, its newness glaringly fresh. As for the divan, its very presence accentuated the hollow feeling through awkward newness and inadequate scale. Only the wardrobe matched what Nobuko recognized as Moscow-sized furniture. There was no malice in it, yet the room felt like facing someone with a large face crowned with disproportionately small features—an encounter perpetually off-balance.

Nobuko had known nothing about Motoko having found such a room. Motoko, who had been staying at the Passage Hotel, found the room by herself through an advertisement, decided on it alone, and prepaid one month’s rent with dinner included. "I messed up, Bukko-chan." It was during lunch the day after Motoko had spent a night in the Novodevichy room—in an attempt to surprise Nobuko—that she finally spoke about it.

“I shouldn’t have prepaid.—I’m sorry, but Bukko-chan, you’ll have to live over there for a while. Switch places—or rather, how about it?”

Motoko had already canceled the room at the Passage Hotel by that evening. Seated across from Motoko at a paper-covered table in the Passage Hotel’s dining room, eating stewed dried apricots and plums with an aluminum spoon, Nobuko—instead of answering—made a face on the verge of tears. “But you said it’s lonely there—” “Bukko will be fine.”

“Why?” “You don’t have to shut yourself away there all day like I would.” “All you have to do is sleep there, Bukko—you’ll be fine.” “Weren’t you the one who said you wanted to study Morozovsky and Tretyakovsky properly?” In Leningrad, attached to the Winter Palace, there existed the Hermitage Museum created by Catherine II. When Nobuko saw that vast and eclectic collection, she had felt an attachment to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, which gathered only purely Russian paintings. She had also thought she wanted to revisit Morozovsky’s gallery—an outstanding collection of French modern paintings in Russia. It had been since the summer she lived at Pension Somolov that Nobuko had been saying such things. Morozovsky’s gallery housed works such as Picasso’s *The Piper*, several pieces from his youth, and those of French Impressionists like Gauguin, Carrière, Degas, Monet, Manet, and Cézanne.

The techniques of French modern painting and Russia’s unwaveringly realistic artistic tradition seemed to remain as two currents that would never blend, lingering before the new gate of Soviet painting. Around the time Kabuki had come from Japan, an exhibition was held in Moscow for three young painters who had been sent to study in France by the Proletarian Artists’ Association. The three years spent in Paris had torn apart the naive talents of these young artists from the Soviet. For Soviet viewers, whichever of the three artists’ works they examined, each seemed to prove how futile it was to imitate foreign paintings. The entire canvas was crushed beneath chaotic techniques born of uncertain motifs and imitation, letting one trace how the artists themselves gradually became entangled in confusion over what and how to paint. When they had first arrived in Paris, their works were primarily landscapes; all three viewed their subjects with a Russian’s unadorned eye, encouraged by the sudden abundance of colors and atmosphere surrounding them to display an amusingly affectionate tone. By the end of the first year—and worsening through the second and third—their disarray grew increasingly disordered until, in their final commemorative return works, all three laid bare their futile attempts to grasp something through desperate impatience, yet being unable to do so, were left utterly adrift.

This exhibition of failed Parisian studies made Nobuko think deeply. Soviet new art possessed an essence that couldn't be created through three-year study abroad programs in Paris. The fact that Lunacharsky and Soviet painters had come to understand this held profound significance. To be studied. To be imitated. That Soviet paintings and literature were neither—neither objects of study nor imitation—struck Nobuko with visceral poignancy. Within this realization hid a voice demanding of her: "Then where does yours belong?" Soviet art emerged from Soviet life itself. For Nobuko now, her only answer lay in an increasingly desperate urge to immerse herself completely in that Soviet life.

And so, that winter, even when Nobuko primarily went to see Tretyakovsky and Morozovsky— "Why can't we refuse that Novodevichy?" That was a natural question arising from Nobuko's very being.

“There’s no way we can back out now. But those people—” Motoko clearly remembered only the apartment number of the Kvartira and spoke of the couple—members of the chemical aviation union—whose names she had forgotten. “Because it was my first time renting a place. I even bought a desk and divan for it, and since we’ve already prepaid for it, canceling would be ridiculous.”

If they canceled, the one-month advance payment would be forfeited to the other party. As she rode the train from Astozhenka to Novodevichy, Nobuko found this quintessentially Motoko-like reasoning both absurd and distasteful. To a place she herself found bleak and uninviting, Motoko was dispatching Nobuko—who was even more susceptible to loneliness. Out of reluctance to waste the prepayment— Yet Nobuko had ultimately agreed to go not just from practical necessity—she did need somewhere to live—but also driven by her own morbid fascination with that very desolation.

The Gusev couple in Novodevichy had about four boys. In the morning, after eight o'clock, the couple left for work together. After a while, the country maid would take the boy to the nursery in Shinkaicho and return. After that, Nobuko would drink morning tea in the dining room, and at four in the afternoon, she would again eat dinner alone under the dining room light. At nine o'clock, she would again drink her evening tea in the same manner. Every night without fail after that, the couple would return together, sometimes talking loudly as they continued discussions from their meetings. At the Gusev household, the couple ate their main meal at their workplaces.

Mrs. Gusev, who was a nurse, did not share the inclinations of Mrs. Luibakov—such as styling her hair in Marcel waves or constantly assigning tasks to the maid Nyura. Because they had a small child who needed to be taken to and picked up from the nursery, the Gusev couple kept a maid—and it seemed they had hit upon the idea of taking in lodgers precisely because her time was entirely free during the day. The couple were exceedingly indifferent toward their lodgers. Therefore, they were indifferent to the maid’s cooking skills as well. They remained indifferent to how Nobuko ate burnt cutlets every day, or how at evening tea she ate cold pickled fish, cabbage, and carrots stirred with rancid oil.

After living there for two or three days, Nobuko came to understand that this indifference of the Gusev household was truly nothing more than indifference—indeed, it was rather their natural state of being. The small divan and the desk—oddly petite compared to the room’s size—seemed to be nothing more than furniture the Gusev couple had chosen simply keeping Motoko and Nobuko’s body sizes in mind. In fact, when Nobuko spread sheets and blankets over the divan that appeared extremely small and tried sleeping on it, it served adequately as a bed—though not a comfortable one.

The Gusev couple, as if measuring shoe sizes to fit their feet, had purchased two clean, new pieces of furniture to match the dimensions of their new lodgers—who were far more petite than themselves. The couple did not consider what effect the petite divan and petite desk might bring to the bare, spacious room. There lay a painful predicament for Nobuko.

Outside the two bare windows lay the endless night of Novodevichy, where late December snow raged down. Under a lamp casting a clean green spot of light in the empty room, Nobuko sat facing her desk. To find at least some solace in a lampshade she could tolerate, Nobuko had bought that shade today from a store on Moscow’s bustling Kuznetsky Bridge. Nobuko wore her usual light blue Fuji silk smock, a silk inner cord dangling before her chest. Since moving to this room, she had spent hours each day at her desk, willing herself to grow accustomed to the cement smell and desolate atmosphere.

Even now, seated at her desk facing the window where snow fell ceaselessly into the night, Nobuko noticed only the green lamplight reflected in the glass before her and the portion of her light blue smock illuminated by that glow. On the desk lay open books and a notebook. But she couldn't bring herself to touch them. It was a paralyzing loneliness. "Why was this place so lonely?" "Is it because it reeks too much of cement?" Nobuko wondered, enveloped in a loneliness so monotonous it felt numbing. Could the hollow emptiness of the room itself be causing such intense loneliness? Yet the Gusev couple were fundamentally decent people. Nobuko tried hard to steady herself, but like a toy doll bobbing unsteadily from the bottom of a water-filled cylinder, both her body and mind had floated up from desolation's depths before she knew it, fixating entirely on loneliness. The loneliness was fierce and inescapable, yet strangely devoid of sadness or tears. Just as the starkly empty room making Nobuko lonely stood parched, her loneliness dried out completely in every corner, permeated by concrete's curing odor. A parched loneliness that wouldn't even mist with tears. For Nobuko, this was loneliness unfathomable in its very nature. Nobuko's hair looked unusual that evening as her two black eyes—their gaze petrified by loneliness—remained fixed on the windowpane. While buying the lampshade earlier, Nobuko had stopped at her regular barbershop on Kuznetsky Bridge. The establishment employed only male barbers and stayed perpetually crowded due to its reputation. When her turn came, the elderly portly barber received her request for a simple trim,

“You always go for something this simple, don’t you? It’s far too simple.”

As he said this, he clicked his scissors behind Nobuko, who was wrapped in a white cloth.

“Madam’s hair isn’t like sheep’s wool—you can’t just trim it and be done, Baryshnya—young lady. Let me show you what proper styling can do.”

The portly barber, swaying his body rhythmically, kept switching combs and applying them to Nobuko’s hair. Even as she watched his white, round hands moving in the mirror, Nobuko couldn’t begin to guess how her hair was taking shape. “I’d rather not have anything too fussy.” “Good, good.” “No need to fret.” Before long, “There! All finished!” “How does it look?”

With a flamboyant gesture as if handling a bullfighter’s mantilla, the portly barber removed the white cloth that had enveloped Nobuko’s upper body, then slightly crouched down and peered into the mirror from the same height as her visible face. And, “Très bien!” He praised his own work in French. In the mirror, Nobuko was adorned with lustrous black curls that billowed like foam all over her head. It wasn’t that it didn’t suit her, but the way it did was utterly devoid of character. For a woman of her age and features, it was nothing more than an ordinary suitability—a commonplace match. Nobuko, remaining standing before the mirror, reached out her hand as if to press down the swelling waves of her curly hair.

“No, no. You mustn’t touch it. “It’s perfect just as it is.” Nobuko found such a hairstyle outlandish on herself. But since people say a woman’s mood changes with her hair, she thought it might serve some purpose in driving away this loneliness. Her hair was as festive as a festival procession, but Nobuko’s eyes, fixed on the snow-falling night windowpane, shone with the same loneliness as the previous evening, like two black buttons. That evening, Mrs. Gusev, who had returned home unusually early, knocked and entered Nobuko’s room.

“Sorry to bother you.” “Please let me take out my coat.” The only wardrobe was placed in the room Nobuko was renting. It had been agreed that the wardrobe would be shared with Nobuko, but she had set up her suitcase beside the divan and hung her coat on a nail. Nobuko had not yet realized that it was precisely such a transient way of living itself which still prevented her from acclimating to that place.

“Tomorrow, we’ve been invited as guests.” Mrs. Gusev, wearing a white cotton blouse and black skirt, said cheerfully as she opened the wardrobe. From inside, she took out a large fur coat that hung there as one of her belongings. Mrs. Gusev lifted the fur coat still on its hanger with one hand, held it slightly away from herself, and gazed at it, “Nye plokho (Not bad).”

she said. “Does it suit me?”

[She] pressed the fur coat under her chin and turned toward Nobuko. When Nobuko heard the knock, she found it painful to be discovered in that room—unable to focus on anything and lingering in loneliness—so she stood around the desk as if she had been in the middle of something. Nobuko said, "Try it on."

“It suits you well.” In her satisfaction, Mrs.Gusev—unlike what Nobuko had secretly worried—paid no attention to the change in Nobuko’s hair and extended her arm clad in the fur coat while stroking its thickly folded cuff. “At Mostorg there were far more luxurious fur coats available,” she said. “But those are terribly expensive.” “We decided to make do with this for now.”

“It’s fine.” “It’s a good coat.”

The Gusevs had come to live in union housing that winter. For the first time, they could wear a fur coat—not a padded one with twill-lined cotton—and attend social invitations as a couple. Mrs. Gusev’s joy mirrored the very essence of new life brimming through Novodevichy’s freshly developed streets. With an unadorned simplicity that Mrs. Lyubakov could never attain and an unreserved candor beyond the timid Mrs. Lukyanov’s reach, how effortlessly Nurse Gusev conveyed to Nobuko even these incremental betterments in their circumstances. In one sense, she thought this room’s unbearable emptiness too was born from the Soviet Union’s swift advancements in laborers’ living standards.

When Mrs. Gusev left clutching her fur coat, Nobuko found herself enveloped once more in a loneliness as still as the unchanging green lamplight. To Mrs. Gusev, it remained utterly inconceivable why her lodger—occupying a room so filled with air—should feel such loneliness, let alone why she must endure it in silence. And even Nobuko herself, suffering through this warm, dry loneliness, didn’t understand why she persisted in living each day merely trying to endure it. Nobuko remained under a spell cast by Motoko’s having paid a month’s rent in advance. Until that deadline arrived, she had unconsciously become immobilized—all while remaining oblivious to her own paralyzed state.

Nine

On the evening of December 31st of that year, Nobuko and Motoko were invited to the embassy’s New Year’s Eve celebration. People involved in fisheries and other civilians had also been invited, and Nobuko played mahjong for the first time among the guests that night. Under the guidance of a financial officer who brought a chair to her side and taught her the rules and strategies, Nobuko won the game. “This is exactly why amateurs are so dangerous!” The embassy staff who apparently always played mahjong with their regular group laughed, teasing Nobuko as she stared in surprise at her own victory.

The embassy staff, who always played mahjong with the same fixed group, laughed and teased Nobuko as she stared in surprise at her own victory. "Ms. Sasa, please don't commit the sin of feigning innocence like that." "But I truly am playing for the first time tonight—really!" When Nobuko turned her flushed face to insist further, Motoko deliberately deflected— "I wouldn't know anything about that"— and exhaled cigarette smoke. That night, Nobuko and the others ate rare Japanese-style hand-formed sushi.

On New Year’s Day of 1929, after the morning ceremony had ended and they had stayed at the embassy for a while longer, it was around five in the afternoon when Nobuko returned to Lukyanov’s room with Motoko. After taking a short rest, while Nobuko was trying to return to her own room in Novodevichy, a stabbing pain began to grip her stomach. Could this be punishment for eating such rare sushi and winning at mahjong... Remarking jokingly, Nobuko climbed onto Motoko’s bed, leaned against the wall, and pressed her fingertips hard into the painful area of her stomach.

"You must have gotten chilled." Motoko prepared a hot water bottle and brought it over. "If you've let your feet get cold, it won't get better. You should lie down for a while." Still dressed, she slipped under the blanket and tried to warm her body by moving the hot water bottle alternately between her feet and behind her stomach. "But I'm not cold anywhere..."

The pain intensified, and by night, it spread so much that she couldn't tell whether it was her stomach or her entire body that hurt, and became excruciating. Nobuko, unable to endure the pain, shook her head while letting out intermittent tearful whimpers,

"I can’t stay lying down."

and sat up on the bed. Her insides twisted with pain, and her entire back stiffened like a board. Even when sitting up was painful, she couldn’t lie down either. Nobuko groaned, clutching Motoko’s hand and pressing it to her side and her pain-twisted face as she hunched forward on the bed, then arched backward.

Ten

The overly bright electric light shone directly down on her face. In a barely audible voice, "It's too bright," Nobuko muttered. Something like a folded handkerchief was placed over her eyelids. Only Nobuko was granted darkness. Right near her ear, as if submerged in that darkness, voices ceaselessly spoke. The speakers were a woman and a man. They spoke in a language that wasn't Russian. Gott and Zen and mit. Could it be German? The woman wore dentures. That clicking sound only came from people with dentures. How much longer would they keep talking? They'd been talking endlessly since earlier. They seemed determined to continue. While finding the voices irritating, Nobuko simultaneously thought the hot compress enveloping her torso felt undeniably pleasant. Her mouth grew desperately dry. Each time she voiced this complaint, someone peeled a mandarin orange fashioned into a lion shape and pressed it to her lips. It was Motoko who let her suck the mandarin juice.

Even without looking, I knew that. Mikan—mandarin. Mandarin-chik. Why had Pushkin listed so many fruit names like that? Pineapples and mandarins. Motoko picked up the rhyme and began marking lines in her notebook like the meticulous stitches of a rag. How odd. To write poetry using nothing but rhyme—how absurd. Eventually, in the darkness granted only to Nobuko, Motoko said, “I’ll leave the mandarins here,” and left. “I’ll come again tomorrow afternoon to check on you,” she said. And Motoko was gone. The conversation between the man’s and woman’s voices—their pronunciation clattering through cobblestones—still continued.

Opening her eyes, Nobuko saw the early morning scene of the hospital room she found herself in. At the same time, she felt an intense pain in her flank. She rang the bell on the small table beside the bed and received a bedpan. As the orderly left the hospital room carrying the used bedpan, the middle-aged woman who had sat up on the neighboring bed— “When asking for things in a place like this, it’s better to say ‘Buchche doburui’ (excuse me).”

the middle-aged woman instructed. “They’re all so busy, you know.” “Thank you.” When she said “Buchche doburui,” the woman’s voice had the hollow clatter of dentures. Nobuko recalled, with a dreamlike sensation, the tangled mess of last night’s brightness and clamor that had knotted her emotions.

Motoko came in the afternoon.

The place Nobuko was taken to was the affiliated hospital of Moscow University. Visiting hours were from 2 PM to 4 PM. It was said that Nobuko’s gallbladder and liver had developed acute inflammation. “What’s the Russian word for ‘gallbladder’?” “It’s zholchnyi puzyr.”

“Hmm. ‘Zholchnyi puzyr’?” “Before coming here, Bukko, you had something like stomach spasms—it seems there was already something slightly off since then.” “Why did it get inflamed?” “We still don’t know.” Nobuko, her entire body stiff and immobile, kept her bobbed head resting on two stacked white pillows as she stared at Professor Fromgold with the dull, cold eyes typical of pained patients. Professor Fromgold’s hands looked unnaturally pale red, as if he’d scrubbed them raw. He placed those hands squarely on the knees of his white lab coat, wore pince-nez glasses, and sported a high single collar with a black necktie—thoroughly German in every detail. With his pince-nez perched on a prominent nose, Professor Fromgold tilted his egg-shaped, receding forehead slightly,

“Are you still in pain?” He took Nobuko’s hand and checked her pulse. The voice held an authoritative nasal tone.

“It hurts terribly.”

“Did you drink alcohol during New Year’s?” “No, not a single drop.” “Does anyone in your family suffer from cancer?”

“No, no one.” “Good.” Professor Fromgold stood up from his chair and said to Nobuko, “You’ll be improving soon.” He then gave instructions to his assistant Boris in a mix of Russian and German—“Davai something-or-other.” Nobuko lay on her back in bed, her plasters changed twice daily with two hot water bottles applied. The woman in the neighboring bed was a diabetic patient. When a small lump of meat arrived with her meal, the woman half-rose in bed and began poking at the meat on her plate with a fork,

“Such a pathetic scrap of meat!—Where am I supposed to get any nourishment from this?” she said resentfully. That voice, after all, had the hollow clatter of dentures. Atkuda uzhyachi shiry? (Where am I supposed to get any strength from?) The word uzhyachi meant “to take away.” Where is the strength taken from—to live.—There is hatred there. Nobuko was restrained by Boris and two nurses and made to swallow a rubber tube. At the tip of the rubber tube was attached a gold ball about the size of a soybean, with a hole. The tip of the thin rubber tube that hung from Nobuko’s mouth extended downward into a glass measuring cup—resembling a beer mug—placed on the floor beside her bed. That rubber tube was called a *zonde*. For three hours, even as she let the rubber tube hang from her mouth, not a single drop of bile dripped into the jug placed on the floor.

The powdered medicine Nobuko took was white and called Bella Donna. It was written on the paper bag in purple ink. Bella Donna. That meant "beautiful woman." Over four or five days, the pain throughout Nobuko's body began to subside. First, her back eased. Then the dull pain narrowed its range to just her right flank. While lying on her back, she became able to move slightly. At least her arms and neck could now move without discomfort. And as Nobuko's normal voice returned, the daily rhythm of life began to revive.

The internal medicine ward of Moscow University Hospital stood in the snowy suburbs at midwinter's depth, and windless winter snowlight filled the sickrooms, the corridors, and eventually even the bathroom where Nobuko had begun slowly soaking in hot water for treatment. The whiteness of walls, the whiteness of sheets, the whiteness of hospital gowns—all within transparent snowlight—gave them a material weight, and in that heaviness lay life's tangible reality. No longer needing to plan or judge or act—watching people move about, letting others do things for her, seeing life from an angle entirely new—how utterly strange it all felt.

As the intense pain subsided, Nobuko came to occasionally feel a joy within her body while lying down—transparent as the snowlight itself. All except for the dull, heavy ache in her right flank. The diagnosis was inflammation of the gallbladder and liver; though Nobuko had been felled by that single blow, the delicate rhythm of her life seemed to require such an illness less because of the disease itself than as a modulation in the very key of her existence. Since arriving in Moscow—and especially since Tamotsu’s suicide last summer—Nobuko’s sense of being alive had remained tightly wound. In that lonely Novodevichy room reeking of drying concrete, she spent a week confronting solitude as though turned to stone. In her unusual state of defenselessness—a condition that might already have contained the seeds of illness—it was possible the gases released by the warming concrete in those walls had poisoned her liver. Yet Nobuko felt no urge to obsess over causes or reasons for her sickness. She accepted with quiet grace this collapse brought on by inflammation surging through her organs.

When she had to swallow the zonde, Nobuko’s tears spilled from both eyes as she gagged like a kitten. When made to drink magnesium and given a harsh laxative, she would collapse after the frenzied commotion and urgency. There were times when Nobuko’s torso—with its white, smooth skin—was laid bare on the black leather-covered table. A tin plate would be placed over the flannel cloth on her right flank, an electric cord connected to it. Whenever the physiotherapy doctor in his white coat moved behind the switchboard, Nobuko—still lying on her back—would plead through fearful sidelong glances toward the panel.

“Pozhaluysta, chut’-chut’. Khorosho? (Please, little by little. Is that okay?)” “Khorosho?” (Please, little by little. Is that okay?) At other times, Nobuko spent her days in a mood as clear and bright as the transparent snowlight. There was something black, soft, and heavy inside her right flank that kept her from moving from her bed, and because of that, her mind seemed to find stability and drift expansively alongside the snowlight. Nobuko was moving very slowly toward recovery. The cause of her illness remained unknown. And amid the repetition of orderly, monotonous mornings and nights, the tension that had gripped Nobuko’s heart since Tamotsu’s death began, at some point, to ease—all throughout that entire process while she remained unaware. When Tamotsu died, by the window of Pension Somolov where August geraniums bloomed in deep pink, the kind Dr. Verdel had taken Nobuko’s pale hand and said, “You are still young—you can survive” (*Mozhno perezhit’*). Now, through this abnormal hiatus of sudden illness, Nobuko was surviving at last.

At Moscow University Hospital, there were no distinctions such as first, second, or third class. The internal medicine ward where Nobuko stayed was a women-only section, with two large wards at the end of the corridor each containing about thirty beds, and in front of them, about four smaller rooms lined up. In the small rooms, there were two beds each, where patients with severe illnesses were placed. However, if a small room was available and one wished to be alone—as Nobuko did—one could have a private room simply by paying double the fee. When the diabetic woman was discharged, her bed was removed from beside Nobuko’s, and a large couch was brought in.

Motoko was sitting on the couch with her legs bent. During visiting hours, from beyond the open door at the foot of Nobuko’s bed, an elderly woman with a woolen shawl draped over her head could be seen walking down the corridor toward the large ward, carrying a basket and leading a child by the hand. In Moscow, whether in hospitals or maternity wards, bringing food from outside to patients was prohibited as a general rule. “Just think about it—what effect do fried buns stuffed with meat and jam have on a stomach ulcer? And among the many, there are patients who firmly believe that if they just eat that, their illness will be cured.”

Boris, the assistant, laughed as he said that. Motoko obtained permission to have chicken soup, a minced chicken dish, and kisel (a thin fruit-flavored jelly) brought from Lukyanov’s place for Nobuko’s main meal. It was placed in stacked aluminum pots, wrapped in napkins, and delivered promptly at four-thirty every day. “Thanks to you getting sick, Bukko-chan, I can now have proper meals at Lukyanov’s too.”

While peeling a mikan she had brought for Nobuko and intending to eat some herself, Motoko deliberately spoke spitefully. "Thanks to that, I'm being made to eat nothing but chicken cutlets made from soup scraps." Nobuko laughed beneath the white woolen lace shawl spread over her pillow and covering her head. "It's okay. I still can't have thick soup, so I haven't turned into scraps yet, you know."

The winter of that year was bitterly harsh, with temperatures in Moscow plunging to minus twenty-five degrees on some days. The trains stopped. The snowlight in Nobuko’s hospital room cast a bluish-tinged shadow across its brightness. At the corner of the inner pane in the double window above her head was a spot where a small crack let in such intense cold that it threatened to give her a headache. That day, Nobuko spent hours with a large bath towel draped over her head. The white wool lace shawl she had worn while lying down since Motoko brought it the next day had been a specialty of Vyatka village along the Volga coast. When Nobuko and Motoko had taken a sightseeing boat down the Volga River to Stalingrad the previous autumn, three or four old women had been selling shawls in a grassy area just beyond the Vyatka landing. Ochre soil—the kind that would turn into a quagmire if rain fell—lay clumped in uneven patches under the clear autumn sky, while a boardwalk climbed along the Volga’s high stone cliffs from the landing to the village. Passengers who had come ashore from the boat crowded around the shawl-selling women. Both this clustered crowd and their chaotic chorus of voices were absorbed into the Volga’s vast waters and the towering September sky until the people seemed small and their clamor faded into the riverine silence. The Vyatka shawl Nobuko bought was of poor quality, so even when worn over her pillow, its fibers prickled against her cheek.

The room in Novodevichy had been canceled. Because Nobuko’s condition had become predictable, Motoko spoke of matters such as writing a general report to the Sasa family in Tokyo. “Thank you very much.” “I’ll write one myself soon.”

“There’s no need to rush.” “I told them Bukko-chan herself would write eventually.” “Back in Novodevichy, they were shocked when I said Bukko was hospitalized.” “They told me, ‘Take care of yourself.’”

“So that dog box-like divan—was it still there by that wall?”

“It was there.”

Motoko assumed an expression that seemed to recall the somewhat desolate indoor scene. "That place was rather strange, wasn’t it?"

Motoko said quickly, with a look that showed some guilt over having sent Nobuko there alone. And then, “I’ll leave a bit early today,” she said, glancing at her wristwatch. “I have plans to go skating with Mrs. Kawai.” “That sounds nice. You should definitely go—can Mrs. Kawai skate?” “Since she says it’s her fourth year, she must be able to skate a little.” They had just bought their skates when Nobuko ended up hospitalized.

“You must take off your glasses when practicing first, I’m sure of it. If you keep fearing falls, you’ll never improve. Where will you be skating?” “They say there’s a private rink somewhere near the embassy…” “I wish you’d skate somewhere that isn’t such a place...” Nobuko’s voice brimmed with discontent. To speak of private rinks—they’d surely have wooden fences around them, places ordinary Muscovites couldn’t enter.

“Why not just do it on the Moscow River instead?” That diplomatic life maintained exclusive enclosures even for such a vibrant winter sport struck Nobuko as particularly incongruous in a place like Moscow. Nobuko felt grateful that the hospital where she lay was an ordinary university hospital where various women were being treated. Yet Motoko didn’t share Nobuko’s sentiments about private skating rinks,

“It’s fine—I’ll be specializing in falling at first anyway.” “It’s better when it’s just us Japanese—we don’t have to hold back,” she said in that manner. From her pillow draped with a white wool lace shawl, Nobuko stared fixedly at Motoko sitting on the couch with folded legs, her gaze like a wild animal’s glare. Nobuko felt her bedridden self and the healthy Motoko had passed each other by in that instant. Even after Motoko left, Nobuko kept thinking about it while gazing at the forgotten mandarin peel on the couch’s armrest. I could barely move—several times a day I’d ring the gauze-wrapped bell at my unsteady bedside to call the maid, then say *Buche dobrei* as taught by the Jewish diabetic woman to get things done. But this was a hospital for Russians. In those twenty-four hours, Soviet methods and innate Russian sensibilities blended thickly, and Nobuko—lying ill—felt herself sinking deeper into life among Russians. Motoko, healthy and attending university, had taken up skating that led her to the embassy’s private rink. She’d brush against diplomats who always kept Soviet life at arm’s length, making emotional detachment their professional creed. Nobuko felt something unresolved simmer about this. She herself had stayed nights at the embassy before, and when she collapsed half-conscious this time, it was the embassy’s Kawais who called Professor Fromgold and arranged her hospitalization. Whenever such personal ties threatened to deepen, Nobuko’s mind conjured Japanese diplomats in Moscow—their untrustworthy essence she couldn’t fully believe in. And she grew tense. Yet Motoko seemed able to engage that embassy atmosphere—its core attitude of emotional suppression—as it was. Motoko could touch two disparate worlds at once. Back in Komazawa days, she’d read Marxist histories long before Nobuko while maintaining Gion’s traditional geisha connections whenever she returned to Kyoto. Nobuko lacked such emotional flexibility.

Why did Motoko dislike having Russians see her comical figure - wearing skates for the first time, attempting to step forward only to land on her backside? Surely someone at that rink, whether man or woman, would come laughing to Motoko as she sat fallen and teach her how to glide properly. Yet Motoko's aversion to being witnessed tumbling by Russian eyes reminded Nobuko of that time Motoko had wordlessly slapped the cheek of a vendor woman who mocked her as "Kitayanki!" - that outburst when she'd struck without warning.

When she thought about it, even Motoko—after a year of Moscow life that had added various details to her daily existence—likely retained the same essential patterns of emotional response. Even toward the great surge of Soviet life, whenever she thought of Motoko confronting it at every turn with her own sense of self, Nobuko felt pained.

Nobuko stirred slightly. Then she pulled the pillow beneath her cheek and pressed her face tightly into its soft feathers. Nobuko desired to lose herself within Moscow's life.

Eleven

The clear February afternoon’s snow-bright light streamed into every corner of the pristine white, narrow bathroom. On the tiled floor stood a wheelchair bearing Nobuko’s discarded hospital gown and folded blankets. The bathtub brimmed with scalding water where Nobuko’s submerged body glowed a healthy cherry-blossom pink, belying her status as a patient. Despite inflammation in both gallbladder and liver, she showed no trace of jaundice. Nobuko stretched her limbs leisurely in the bath until the slightly overgrown hair at her nape grew damp from immersion. The luminous snowlight glinted along the tub’s white rim, shimmered over ripples stirred by steaming water against her faintly flushed skin, and spilled across the starched knees of Natasha’s white apron.

Natasha wrapped her curly, lustrous chestnut hair in a spotless white kerchief, fastened a freshly laundered white apron over her nurse's uniform at the collar, and bared both arms up to her elbows. Seated on a small round stool, she gazed contentedly at the snowscape beyond the window. While doing so, she occasionally turned her eyes toward Nobuko's warm flesh-toned body lying bathed in snowlit water, then looked outside again. The color of Natasha's cheeks resembled peaches ripening day by day. Within the clear snowlight free of impurities and amid her white kerchief and nurse's uniform, Natasha's peach-hued young cheeks overflowed with astonishing vitality. In her profile—peach-colored cheeks facing distant snowscapes—and in the swell of her large white apron around her abdomen, her sturdy young frame carried not only robustness but also a certain earnest solemnity. Natasha was approaching her seventh month of pregnancy.

Nobuko, her forehead now beaded with sweat, remained submerged until the droplets began to stream down, then grasped Natasha’s arm and rose from the bathtub. While Nobuko, shifting her weight to her left leg and holding onto Natasha’s arm, stood favoring her right side where she couldn’t put weight down, Natasha wrapped Nobuko’s wet, steaming body in a towel and rubbed it firmly. As she moved one hand to wipe herself, Nobuko asked.

“Natasha, how’s your math assignment coming along? Did you finish?”

That day, throughout her morning break, Natasha had been tackling her differential homework. Since she hadn’t seen even a glimpse of Natasha’s heavy-footed gait, Nobuko asked one of the elderly maids,

“Natasha, did you take the day off today?” I asked. “She’s here—she’s working hard on her math studies.” And, placing a palm against her wrinkled cheek, she shook her head sympathetically.

“The assignments aren’t easy for her.” Natasha was a student in the medical department’s rabfak (Workers’ Faculty) at the Second Moscow University. While putting the new hospital gown over Nobuko’s head, Natasha answered, “Well, somehow or other.”

“There’s one problem I can’t solve, but it doesn’t matter.”

“You always go to school after bathing, but don’t you catch cold?” “No. “The bath does me good.” After daily baths began being prepared each afternoon for Nobuko’s treatment, Natasha—now seven months pregnant—had obtained permission from the medical office to bathe after her. Following dinner, she would then attend university from six until eleven to study. To prevent Nobuko from catching drafts after her bath, Natasha swaddled her completely in shawls and blankets before wheeling the chair back to their room. During their absence, the ward’s resident cat had slipped through the door gap. The animal now sat on the bedside table, quietly yet intently pulling apart and eating the clustered blue leaves of an asparagus-like potted plant. Nobuko paid it no mind as she deftly transferred from wheelchair to bed and lay down.

“Ah, this feels good.” “Natasha, it’s your turn next.” “Khorosho.” Now that over a month had passed since her hospitalization, a feeling closer to friendship than the usual nurse-patient exchanges had arisen between Nobuko and Natasha. On Natasha’s side, this feeling remained thoroughly matter-of-fact; rather, it was Nobuko’s state of mind that found itself captivated by every movement of the heavily pregnant Natasha. Nobuko’s feelings had grown from a trigger that was entirely contrary from the start.

About five days after her hospitalization，Professor Fromgold ordered Nobuko to take daily baths as part of her treatment. That afternoon，she rolled the wheelchair，

“Let’s go to the bath.”

Looking back, it had been Natasha who entered the room. Worn out by pain and gazing dazedly, Nobuko’s eyes caught sight of the young nurse’s noticeably large belly beneath her reddened cheeks. With the nurse’s assistance, Nobuko somehow managed to lower both legs from the bed. But her body, rigidly stiffened by pain in every limb, simply couldn’t execute the one or two movements required to transfer from bed to wheelchair. The pregnant young nurse—her already ruddy cheeks flushing deeper—tried hauling Nobuko’s immobile body into the wheelchair with both arms. Yet being of similar height, and each burdened with their own physical vulnerabilities, they only entangled themselves and staggered clumsily. Each time their bodies collided awkwardly and swayed, the wheelchair faithfully rolled backward on its wheels. After two or three attempts, Nobuko lost her temper from the unbearable pain.

“Let’s stop.” She let out a sob. “Neither of us has enough strength.” The next morning when Boris came on his rounds and asked about her bath, Nobuko said: “The nurse did come to help me, but she’s pregnant herself. How could I—unable to move—manage it when she needs assistance too?” She clearly voiced her dissatisfaction that heavy work had been assigned to a nurse in such condition. Beside Boris, who sat facing Nobuko’s bed, stood the very nurse holding her medical chart. To prevent such inconvenience from recurring—for both herself and the nurse—Nobuko had spoken up despite knowing the nurse was present.

Boris, who was tall with pale hair and eyes, listened silently to Nobuko’s complaint but did not respond to it directly; upon finishing the examination, he said in a calm tone, “It might have been too early to move.” “Well, let’s take it slowly.”

Having said that, he left the hospital room in a completely natural manner. Just as they had not listened to Nobuko's complaint containing her reproach, The nurse holding the medical chart was no different. She left with an air of utter nonchalance, as though there were absolutely nothing about her own condition to be dissatisfied with. Their overly natural matter-of-factness surprised Nobuko and then prompted her to reflect. In Moscow, the presence of pregnant nurses was a matter of course in certain cases. That pregnant nurses were assigned to positions within hospitals that were not overly strenuous for their condition and continued working until maternity leave was, upon reflection, only natural. In the Soviet Union, it was absolutely prohibited for any working woman to be dismissed once she had reached five months of pregnancy because. because they must not be deprived of the four months of paid leave, maternity hospital coverage, or nursing subsidies that she and her baby were entitled to receive due to dismissal.

Nobuko should have known about such working conditions for women in the Soviet Union from pamphlets she had read. She had toured maternity hospitals and nurseries too. Yet she was shocked at herself for being unable to accept that these conditions naturally applied even to nurses within hospitals—her own pregnant nurse, wrung from her painful side! This sense of having encountered something profoundly misplaced was rooted in the old society that Boris and that nurse didn’t know—the society where Nobuko had lived and suffered. She realized this was the egoism of a world where paying patients customarily made demands on hospitals and nurses—hospitals she had known until now as places charging exorbitant fees, where patients struggled to cure themselves while nursing vague distrust of medical care. In Moscow’s hospitals, patients received treatment backed by unions and health insurance, while healthy young nurses worked leisurely—their round bellies carried openly beneath white aprons, walking heel-first with their weight shifted back.

This discovery, while making Nobuko realize how devoid of compassion the society she had lived in was, struck her womanly instincts with astonishing freshness through "the Soviet way of life—so different from elsewhere." Nobuko began focusing her full attention on the pregnant Natasha. In the women-only ward where Nobuko was hospitalized, six nurses worked twenty-four hours a day in three eight-hour shifts. That the nurses were called by the word Nyanya—a term that also meant wet nurse—embodied a distinctly Russian warmth. Moreover, this traditional appellation suited them perfectly in reality. The reason was that among the six nurses, only Natasha—who was pregnant—possessed any systematic medical knowledge; the remaining five were all elderly women who had nothing but kindness, patience, and nursing experience—what other countries would call nursing aides.

During the morning cleaning time, when Nobuko saw Natasha enter from the hallway with a cleaning tool—a damp cloth attached to the end of a push pole—she perked up. Natasha, short and sturdily built, had lustrous chestnut-curly hair and large, somewhat animalistic yet spirited eyes that suited her curls. Natasha slowly and carefully wiped with a damp cloth from under the long chair all the way to behind the bed. No matter what kind of work she was doing, Natasha never hurried. Her round, heavy stomach moved steadily with a slowness that maintained the stability required by her entire body.

Nobuko followed Natasha’s movements with her eyes from atop her pillow. From how her pregnant motions were regulated with solitary care, Nobuko sensed Natasha’s youthful vigor as one about to become a mother for the first time—her tenderness toward the baby and earnest regard for their shared existence with her husband. Nobuko asked Natasha, who was working slowly, in the tone of a bedridden patient speaking from their bed.

“Natasha, where does your husband work?” “He is a student.” “At the National Music School’s vocal department. He’s a baritone.” The husband of the young pregnant nurse attending the Workers’ Faculty (Rabfak) of the Medical University was a student at the music school and a baritone singer. Natasha answered this with a complete lack of wonder—the kind that could not be encountered in any country but the Soviet Union.

“So you like music too, then?” “I’ve never wasted tickets to operas or music school concerts.”

Another day. Natasha finished cleaning and poured water from a glass sipping cup into an asparagus-like potted plant beside Nobuko’s pillow. While turning aside with her hand’s back—the face of a black-and-white spotted cat perched on [the] table—Nobuko spoke.

“Why does that cat like blue things so much?” “Well…” “Probably because she doesn’t have any apples.”

During winters without fresh vegetables, Muscovites really did eat a lot of apples and mandarins. Nobuko, too, never went a day without eating mandarins. Nobuko abruptly changed the subject and,

“Natasha, how many more years do you have left at Rabfak (Workers’ Faculty)?”

she asked.

“This is my second year. “So just one more year left.” “About how many female students are there?” “There aren’t many—only nine.”

Natasha said with a look more like a university student than a nurse.

“In our case, generally speaking, women are still lagging behind.” “Even among working women engaged in production, few possess high technical standards.” “Moreover, Rabfak comes after working during the day.” “The coursework itself is quite demanding, and there are cases where women can’t see it through.” “When they have households to manage or babies to care for—” “What about you?” “Are you confident?” “Working during the day and studying at night with that body—it must be tough, right?”

“Nichevo.” As if it were truly nothing, Natasha rubbed her chin with her bare arm. “At Rabfak, only those who really want to study keep at it.” “But sometimes—oh, the sleepiness!” “There are moments when your eyes just won’t stay open.” “The whole lot of us lined up nodding off one after another!” “Oi!” Natasha burst out laughing helplessly.

“But they’re all good young men,” she said. “At the Workers’ Faculty, about fifty thousand youths across the country are studying. As Lunacharsky said—‘What the Soviet needs most now are those studying at Rabfak while conquering hardships.’” Natasha would sometimes enter at perfectly ordinary moments. “May I sit?”

“Please do.”

Sitting on the bench, Natasha took an apple from her apron pocket, bit into it with a satisfying crunch, rested for about five minutes, and left.

While intently observing Natasha’s work habits, Nobuko felt she had come to truly understand—in her very core—the essence of what it meant to have a public marriage and public pregnancy. In every society Nobuko had known as a woman, what was spoken of as a public marriage had always been defined by either the flawless execution of marriage ceremonies or else the completion of legal formalities—the matter of whether one was registered or not. Nobuko, by nature averse to anything underhanded, had in that sense married Tsukuda publicly, and with that same publicness divorced him.

But.—Nobuko couldn't help comparing the thoroughly social openness with which Natasha approached her profession, marriage, pregnancy, and her child's birth to the mere façade of publicness she herself had experienced. In the society where Nobuko had lived as a woman, even when a young woman resolved to build a life with a partner of her own choosing, that same society would not rest until it had scrutinized even the contents of her womb—and yet when it truly mattered, what semblance of protection had it ever offered for the very publicness of marriage she herself had demanded?

While deepening her shock at the falsehoods so casually practiced in that society, Nobuko recalled her own confusion and tumultuous emotions from when she had decided to divorce Tsukuda. She had not known until that moment the fact that under Japanese civil law, a woman upon marriage lost her legal personality and had to become an incapacitated person. After five years of life painful for both of them, when Nobuko resolved she had no choice but to divorce and opened the Six Codes to investigate the legal procedures, she discovered that statute in the marriage section. By then she had long since left Tsukuda’s house and was at her parents’ home in Ugusudani. Standing before her father’s desk with that page of the Six Codes open, she truly felt her body and mind beginning to go numb all at once. Did Tsukuda know about this law? She thought this under a flash of terror. As someone in the position of wife, could I not even get a divorce? With anguish as though oil were being squeezed from her pores, she read phrases like “the husband holds the right to demand cohabitation from his wife” and various acts a wife could not perform without her husband’s permission—and when she finally understood that mutual divorce could also be requested by the wife. The moment she thought she had been saved by this, Nobuko was seized by an even crueler terror. What if Tsukuda refused to accept the mutual divorce? If he were to say in his usual manner—“This might be what you desire, but I could never conceive of such a thing myself. My love will never change”—and refuse to provide the essential signatures and seals... That would be revenge Tsukuda had every right to exact as a husband.

In the backstreet where November’s north wind whipped up sand and dust, there sat her coat-clad self on an earthen-floored chair at a scribe’s shopfront, staring with rapt intensity as the mutual divorce document took shape through the shabby penmanship of the scribe. The fresh anxiety when she realized the divorce procedures would have to be filed at Tsukuda’s registered domicile.—Lying in the quiet hospital room bathed in snowlight, her head wrapped in a Vyatka lace shawl, Nobuko thought: In a society where only women must live through such terror, to speak of the publicness of marriage was nothing but hypocrisy.

Natasha was beautiful. She was filled with a solemn, pure beauty like that carried by a young, robust animal in its prime. This beauty of hers shone forth precisely because Natasha existed publicly under all her present conditions—on cheeks growing daily more apricot-hued, on the swelling white apron of her nurse’s uniform. Coming into the ward, her red cheeks and apron flickering with clear snowlight as she absently went about her tasks, Nobuko watched Natasha and nearly—

"I truly understand what Soviet power must mean for you all." There were times she wanted to say it. At such moments, Nobuko would lie silent between her white shawl and white pillow, blinking her Oriental single-lidded black eyes as she thought bitterly. During those five years as a wife, just how much had Japanese authority actually given Nobuko in return for her public marriage? Beyond having her legal personhood stripped away through marriage, the only social recognition she received consisted of a family allowance—twenty-five yen added monthly to Tsukuda’s salary—and an annual allocation of four or five charcoal bales from the school, more than what unmarried staff were given.

Twelve As if gazing at a cluster of grapes, Nobuko lay on her pillow and held up a pair of earrings over her face with both hands. The amethyst sat snugly on its golden mount just beyond the tip of her little finger, small diamonds arranged to evoke a dewdrop fallen from the purple. The large amethyst was of exceptional purity; when held against the snowlight streaming from the head of her bed, it flashed a deep crimson glow, weighty as beautiful grape clusters.

The earrings, with a taste unmistakably like those worn by wealthy Moscow merchants' wives, were something Motoko had purchased and brought to celebrate Nobuko's birthday. Since Nobuko couldn't wear them as they were, Motoko's plan was to link the two earrings together and refashion them into a brooch. Before that—"Let me see them once"—Motoko had said yesterday, the day before today's birthday, when she left them behind.

The amethyst’s weighty presentation was distinctly Russian, and Nobuko thought that even if it were made into a brooch, she herself lacked the ample bosom worthy of its heft. Because February’s birthstone was amethyst, Motoko had sought out and brought those earrings for her. And Nobuko was pleased. However, it was more accurate to say that her joy had been shown in response to Motoko’s thoughtfulness. When the white paper wrapping was opened and the pair of earrings appeared from within, Nobuko’s eyes widened at the beauty of the gemstones, and at the same time, she felt a kind of shock deep within her heart. The earrings, which were nowhere near new, were precisely because of that finely crafted with no expense spared on materials or labor—yet this fact pierced Nobuko with such sharpness that it made her think of the revolutionary period. From the hands of the wealthy woman who first had them made and kept them, how many times had these earrings passed from one owner to another before now ending up—unexpectedly—purchased by Motoko? What kind of fingers had grasped these earrings that symbolized wealth, only to let them go, she wondered.

Nobuko's true preference was that jewels—those things whose pure beauty one could enjoy—must be new and unclouded by human desire, resentment, or tears. If she couldn't acquire new and beautiful jewels, Nobuko would have felt no inclination whatsoever to purchase them. But Motoko bought them. She had bought them to comfort Nobuko, who lay suffering from serious illness.

—— As she adjusted by degrees the angle of light striking the large amethyst and gazed at its magnificent deep purple hue, Nobuko discovered that the diamonds arranged like dewdrops lacked any brilliance. The droplets seemed to have dripped from the amethyst only to settle on delicate gold mountings, emitting nothing but a white mineral gleam. They failed to radiate that noble, intense cold flame-like sparkle of the diamonds in the ring perpetually gracing Takedayo's finger. Nobuko remembered there existed a type called Ural Diamonds. They were said to be inferior in quality to African diamonds. She had heard such talk when Japanese Kabuki visited Moskva - a rumor about some woman from Japan accompanying the troupe who kept busily purchasing Ural Diamonds, declaring Russian stones were cheap.

Nobuko momentarily recalled Takedayo’s slender fingers with their smooth, pale skin, adorned with a splendid diamond ring. From the expression of those no longer young hands came the memory of Takedayo’s vibrant lips painted with dull-colored rouge. Voluminous bangs, black eyes shining with excitement, and the dense fluttering of thick eyelashes. Nobuko shifted slightly beneath the white coverlet of the bed where she lay. In the letter from Takedayo that she had received two or three days prior, there was a part that somehow nagged at her. Upon learning of Nobuko’s illness and hospitalization, Takedayo had written in her usual flamboyant cursive across the stationery that—as she worked herself into a state of self-induced emotion—she had resolved as a mother to employ every possible means to restore Nobuko’s health. For his sake—that is to say, for the sake of the deceased Tamotsu— Since Tamotsu’s suicide last August, Takedayo had never referred to him by his proper name. She now referred to him only as “he.” The mother who had done so little for him believed it was her duty to him to do her utmost for the children left behind. And she had sent one thousand yen via telegraphic transfer. The money had reached Moskva before the letter did. The thank-you postcard would likely miss its intended recipient. Yet now, as she lay on her back reading Takedayo’s letter—much as she now gazed at the amethyst earrings—those very words, now recalled, still filled Nobuko with a vague, prickling impatience. Amidst the complexly intertwined emotions of attachment and aversion she felt toward her kin with their ill-fitting affections, Nobuko shook the pair of amethyst earrings she held aloft like a luxurious pendulum. Nobuko thought how elegant it would have been if the diamond dewdrops had been crafted with more ingenuity to sway precisely there. And if that dewdrop had been a fine diamond emitting a strong sparkle— But if that were the case, these earrings would already belong to aristocrats—Motoko would never have bought them in the first place, and Nobuko herself would only grow more conflicted about accepting them, perhaps even feeling compelled to return them.

Thinking someone had come to the door of her hospital room, Nobuko hurriedly clenched the amethyst earrings in her palm. She did not want Natasha to see such things. The image of Natasha looking at her with those large, slightly animalistic eyes full of spirit and shrugging her shoulders appeared vividly in Nobuko's mind. To Natasha, these were objects worthy of contempt—things her class history had torn away with hatred. If she saw foreigners picking them up, blowing off the dust, and treasuring them as rare finds, Nobuko thought that even were she in Natasha's place, she would say, "Well then, if those suit your needs, take as many as you like." Nobuko took paper from the bedside table and wrapped the earrings. Then she stored them in the bowl-shaped medicine box containing Belladonna powder.

After a while, Natasha really did enter the hospital room. With her curly hair, deep apricot cheeks, and heavy footsteps that landed heavily on her heels. Wearing a freshly laundered pure white nurse's uniform and apron, Natasha's rounded figure looked all the fresher. Nobuko had not only grown completely accustomed to the size of Natasha's belly but had even come to love her in that condition.

“Natasha, how is your little one today?” “Oh! The little one’s doing somersaults!”

That day was Nobuko's free day. She didn't have to take magnesium or laxatives, and there was no stomach tube that day.

Dazzling snowlight shone upon the white walls of the hospital room. Nobuko gazed absently at that brightness and recalled a black leather-covered armchair and a small bag sewn from white flannel. Long ago, when Nobuko had contracted the Spanish flu in New York and been hospitalized, it had been in a small room at St. Luke’s Hospital where a large black leather-covered armchair stood between the window and wardrobe. That chair had been meant for nurses. A nurse sat there wearing over her pale blue cotton uniform an apron so tightly starched that its chest portion puffed outward on its own, a small white nurse’s cap equally stiff with starch perched upon her head. And she read aloud Maupassant’s *The Necklace* for Nobuko’s sake.

Nobuko lay in bed listening to it. Through a Japanese translation, Nobuko had known that outstanding short story. But she was listening to it being read in English. Miss Jones—the tall, good-natured nurse whose age Nobuko found hard to place—had at first been reading aloud meticulously and slowly. But as she gradually became absorbed in the story, perhaps thinking Nobuko had fallen asleep, she grew silent and continued reading page after page, utterly captivated. And when she had finished reading after some time, Miss Jones unconsciously straightened her hunched back and leaned into the armchair,

“Poor thing!”

Muttering this sincerely to herself, she placed the book—its pages dog-eared and corners worn from being passed around among numerous nurses—on her apron-covered lap. The heartfelt "Poor thing!" from Miss Jones permeated Nobuko’s chest as she lay motionless on her back. It was the story of a poor, frugal wife who had lost a pearl necklace borrowed from a well-to-do friend for a single evening banquet she needed to attend for her husband’s sake—a woman who had toiled and wasted away for years to repay in installments the cost of its replacement. When the installment payments they had exchanged for their marital happiness finally concluded, they learned that the original necklace had been an imitation. Miss Jones, as someone whose own position might truly expose her to such circumstances, could not help but feel sympathy and pity for these honest poor souls subjected to such cruel mockery.

In December 1918, beyond the tall windows of St. Luke’s Hospital that overlooked New York’s cloudy winter sky, similar high-rise buildings of the great city stood visible across the distance. Miss Jones had neatly parted and tied her brown hair in front, placed a white nurse’s cap atop it, turned her prominent nose to the side, propped her cheek on her hand, and gazed out at the scenery. Her slightly weathered profile bore both a faint pensiveness and the habitual tension of a dutiful nurse prepared to rise instantly during her shift to attend to even the most trivial patient requests. Miss Jones’s hands—propping her cheek—were pale reddish and clean from frequent washing, grown strong through years of handling patients’ bodies—the hands of a working woman with sturdy knuckles. In New York City, that metropolis of boundless extravagance and opulence, the sight of Miss Jones—inherently kind, diligent, and tall—sitting with a dog-eared copy of Maupassant’s *The Necklace* on her lap as she gazed out the window, left Nobuko with a pensive mood.

Before she knew it, she had dozed off, and Nobuko opened her eyes on her pillow as if startled by her own near-descent into sleep. Miss Jones was sitting in the same chair by the window as before. Her strange movements, conducted without a sound, drew Nobuko’s gaze. Miss Jones took out a small gray bag from beside the front of her stark white apron stiff with starch, opened it, pinched something out from inside, and slipped it onto a finger of her left hand. It was a ring with a large diamond. Miss Jones, with a serious, scrutinizing expression like that of a woman trying on her favorite ring alone in her room, lifted her left hand bearing the ring on its fourth finger to eye level, moving it about as she observed how the diamond sparkled in the winter indoor light. After a while, she clasped her hand and placed it on her lap, gazing down at it intently.

Miss Jones looked up, and their eyes met. For Miss Jones, who had flushed red, Nobuko hurriedly adopted an equally earnest demeanor,

“That’s a very splendid ring.”

“You must take good care of it,” she said. Miss Jones accepted Nobuko’s feelings with the same warmth they were conveyed. “Yes, dear.”

“Yes. Dear,” she answered. Still dangling the small ash-gray bag suspended by a long string from beside her apron’s chest—which billowed like a pure white sail— “This is my engagement ring.”

“This is my engagement ring,” she said. Then, moving her face away to show it to Nobuko on the bed as well, she raised her left hand and gazed for a while at its intricate sparkle. “During our shifts, we have to wash our hands frequently—sometimes with strong chemicals. We can’t wear any rings at all. So I always put it on when my shift ends.” The engagement ring that Nobuko was earnestly examining along with Miss Jones had neither frivolity nor ostentation despite its splendid large diamond. It gave the impression that Miss Jones and her soon-to-be husband—a man of modest bearing—had carefully made it their own through mutual consultation. Even as an engagement ring, one could sense in it the modest life plan of Miss Jones—a nurse—and a man working somewhere with a fixed salary. Nobuko could sympathize with Miss Jones, who—prompted by having just read “The Necklace”—had somehow felt compelled to take out their engagement ring to look at it.

That night, when seven o'clock came, Miss Jones combed Nobuko's hair into two braids as usual, wiped her entire body with warm water, applied alcohol, dusted her with talcum powder, and finished her day's work. Finally, after adjusting the steam and preparing to leave the hospital room, Miss Jones was addressed by Nobuko: "Miss Jones, do you still have to wash your hands now?"

she asked. “No, I’ve already finished everything.” “Then put on that ring. I want to see you leave wearing it.” Miss Jones, as if having received an unexpected request, looked at Nobuko for a moment and fell silent in thought—then, as if something had occurred to her, “I’ll be right back.”

She closed the door and left. Sure enough, moments later, quick feminine footsteps echoed in the hallway, and the door opened simultaneously with the knock. It was Miss Jones, now changed into a kimono. She wore a purple coat with black fur trim on the collar and an inconspicuous black hat. “Does this meet your approval?” Hurrying to Nobuko’s bedside, “Goodbye, good night.”

While adjusting Nobuko’s covers with her right hand, she grasped and shook Nobuko’s hand with the one wearing the engagement ring. “Nurses are prohibited from entering hospital rooms in personal attire—goodbye.” Miss Jones immediately disappeared outside the door. In a Moscow hospital room flooded with February snowlight years later, as Nobuko recalled Miss Jones’s diamond engagement ring and her earnestly bashful expression when she had slipped in wearing that purple coat, her heart resisted the memories that naturally arose thereafter. Every night at seven o’clock, after Miss Jones finished preparing Nobuko for bed and left, around eight o’clock, the door to Nobuko’s hospital room would be knocked heavily after a pause. Tsukuda would enter. Tsukuda’s jawbone structure—large and ample—and his pale, supple-muscled face rose vividly in Nobuko’s memory.

Yes. In those days, Tsukuda would visit Nobuko’s hospital room every night. I would place two braids tied with ribbons on the pillow and wait there. I would listen intently to the footsteps gradually receding down the hospital staircase step by step late at night after the elevator had stopped. Recalling that was painful for Nobuko now. To escape from those footsteps and that face, I had to struggle so desperately. Even recalling that brought pain and fear.

When Nobuko had been at St. Luke’s Hospital, her heart had been full of love—one might say that was why she had felt such tender sympathy even toward Miss Jones’s engagement ring. Even so, Nobuko pushed through her oppressive memories to think: How Miss Jones must have cherished that engagement ring, treating it as the very keystone of their happiness. After Nobuko discovered where she kept her precious ring, Miss Jones would often take out that small bag hanging from her chest and gaze at the solitary diamond. Each time, Nobuko found herself gripped by an odd sensation. That magnificent diamond engagement ring, imbued with traces of hardship, seemed all the more unexpected to Nobuko when emerging from beneath Miss Jones’s apron—somehow making her feel that the time when that engagement ring would be worn alongside a golden wedding band seemed unlikely to ever come for Miss Jones.

When Nobuko left the hospital and came to live in the university dormitory located in the city's uptown district, Miss Jones once invited her to a play. In the dormitory hall where young female students buzzed with activity, Miss Jones—waiting for Nobuko to descend from her seventh-floor room—appeared utterly modest and nurse-like through and through. Upon spotting Nobuko approaching, she rose from a hall chair and hurried over with hands outstretched as if to assist her walking, her demeanor brimming with the meticulous kindness only an exemplary nurse possesses. The name of the theater they attended that evening, and the title of the play, Nobuko had since forgotten. In the third-floor seats sat another nurse who was Miss Jones's close friend. As the performance progressed, Miss Jones clutched her handkerchief and kept dabbing at her eyes. With a white handkerchief, she impatiently wiped her tears—on her hand glinted a ring. Miss Jones's profile—suddenly aged-looking and earnest as she leaned forward from the inexpensive third-floor seats, intently watching the stage while wiping her tears—was dimly illuminated in the faint light.

Comparing Natasha working leisurely with her large belly held like a banner of diligent life to the existence of that earnest Miss Jones who always seemed anxious about something, Nobuko found such difference between them that she could hardly believe they represented the same woman's life path. Miss Jones's body, wrapped in her fine uniform, stood tall and thin like a stick. What was demanded of her was disciplined and meticulous service. That was her profession after all. Matters concerning her womanhood—marriage or pregnancy—existed separately from her duties, unknown to patients, as issues belonging solely to herself: private affairs. Just as Miss Jones's cherished engagement ring was kept in a small gray bag hidden beneath her apron. In civilized nations, the notion of a pregnant nurse continuing her duties was nothing short of an absurd joke.

Natasha did not fully understand the value of the social conditions she lived under. That’s what Nobuko thought. There was no shadow of a transitional period anywhere in Natasha. Natasha had been raised as a true daughter of the Soviet Union and lived as one. From her pillow, Nobuko watched Natasha pass by outside the door, wearing what looked like heel-less athletic shoes and carrying a tray stacked with several medicine bags.

Late that afternoon, as visiting hours were about to end, Nobuko was visited by an unexpected person. That day, Nobuko had finished bathing while Motoko was still present. After Motoko had left as well, in the hospital room at that hour when the snowlight was shifting into a reddish sunset, Nobuko—in a half-asleep state—

“Good afternoon—may I come in?”

Startled by the man's voice, she opened her eyes. At the door stood a stocky Japanese man of unremarkable height wearing a black suit. Nobuko raised her head from the pillow to look at him. It was a swarthy, square-jawed face she had never seen before. Without granting or denying permission to enter, “Who might you be?” she inquired. “I’m Gonda Shosuke. When I visited the embassy and heard you’d been hospitalized here for illness, I thought I should pay my respects.”

The name Gonda Shosuke had reached Nobuko’s ears several times. He was a salvage operator who had become famous by successfully raising a passenger ship that sank during World War I in some sea under international scrutiny. Gonda Shosuke entered the hospital room while introducing himself. And, “Hello—it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

He gave a slight nod and promptly sat down on the vacant sofa. “To be honest, I’d been looking down on what Russian hospitals must be like, but they’re unexpectedly decent—quite good, actually.”

Gonda Shosuke looked directly at Nobuko's face resting against the pillow and asked, "So how's this illness of yours?" "I don't know where you're ailing, but you don't look wasted at all," he continued. "If anything, you're positively radiant. You've got good color in your face." Nobuko found it unexpected that a businessman like Gonda Shosuke would visit her with what seemed such misplaced concern. Moreover, his blunt way of speaking made him difficult to engage with.

“When did you arrive here?”

Nobuko diverted the topic away from herself and shifted it to Gonda’s side.

“Do you have business here too?” Gonda Shosuke—his hair cropped short but left longer in front and parted to the side—swiftly brushed the back of his head before letting his hand fall to his knee. “Ah, it’s been nothing but trouble,” he said. “You’ve heard of the Black Prince ship, right? It’s famous.” “Well... I don’t believe so.” “There’s this big Russian ship called the Black Prince that’s supposed to be lying sunk at a spot in the Black Sea. I came thinking I’d try raising it this time, but they keep making excuses and we’re getting nowhere.”

“Are you obtaining rights or something?”

“That’s right. It requires a rather detailed contract, you see. First, if we succeed in raising it, there’s the matter of taking a certain percentage of that for ourselves.”

The Black Prince was said to be a sunken ship that had long been a topic of conversation among salvage operators around the world. It was said to have sunk while carrying gold bullion worth millions of rubles. “Could it really still be there untouched all this time?” At Haruo Oshikawa’s fantastical tales, Nobuko’s lips curled into a faint smile. The Soviet Union needed funds for all these new development and construction projects. And yet, Nobuko couldn’t believe they would abandon millions of rubles’ worth of gold bullion sunk within their own territorial waters.

“I wonder if they haven’t already disposed of it by now.” “No, such a thing is absolutely out of the question.”

Gonda Shosuke shook his head firmly and denied it.

“First off, nobody’s heard any reports about the Black Prince being successfully salvaged yet.” “But they don’t have to report every little thing to the world, do they?” “Is that really how these things go?”

Despite being over forty years of age, Gonda Shosuke stubbornly insisted. “You probably wouldn’t understand, but when carrying out such work in the middle of the sea, there’s absolutely no way passing ships wouldn’t take notice. When I was doing it myself, it was truly remarkable—they actually changed course. What’s more, the current Soviet Union doesn’t have divers skilled enough to raise that ship. When it comes to diving, Japan reigns supreme in the world.”

Even if one left the cumbersome, barnacle-encrusted ship itself untouched, was it truly impossible to locate just the necessary gold bullion and extract it from the seabed? If Gonda Shosuke were to raise it and find no gold bullion, what would he do then?

“Well, you start by thoroughly investigating it first.” “If the opposing country doesn’t provide a guarantee, well, that’s just wasted effort—but if you hit it right, it’s quite something, you know.” Gonda Shosuke recalled the exhilaration and satisfaction of when he had hit the mark and smiled what is called a Hokusō smile. And,

"How about it? With this, my line of work is quite manly and impressive, don't you think?" he said.

Nobuko suddenly felt a strange sensation. Gonda Shosuke had spoken in a tone as if he were feeling quite pleased with himself before a woman serving as his drinking companion. Both fell silent for a while.

“By the way, when are you going to be discharged?”

Gonda, appearing about to leave, asked. "Well, I still can’t tell—since my liver is swollen." The inflammation in Nobuko’s gallbladder and liver, of unknown cause, showed no signs of subsiding, and just four or five days prior, she had gone as far as the X-ray sanatorium to have it examined. As a result, there were no new findings. Bile that had cleared through the probe had begun to come out, but her liver remained swollen, protruding a full three fingers' worth below her ribs.

"So your liver’s acting up like a drinker’s disease—you don’t have a hint of jaundice, do you?"

“Yes.” “Do you drink?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ll be fine either way. I’ll guarantee it. With that healthy complexion, you’ll be discharged in no time.”

Gonda Shosuke, who had been watching Nobuko as she lay on the couch looking like she was about to leave yet hadn’t, said in the same tone he had used when speaking about the Black Prince— “You know about French letters, don’t you?” he said. “French letters.” Nobuko had read that term somewhere before. And she recalled that it had been written as something not typically mentioned in ordinary conversation. But was it truly that kind of thing? If that were the case, Nobuko couldn’t comprehend why Gonda Shosuke would bring up such a thing here, and she—

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Hmm, don’t you know?”

He tilted his head quizzically,

“It’s something men use,” he explained to Nobuko. “I have some of very high quality—completely natural ones at my place. Why not try one?”

Nobuko rested her bobbed head on the white pillow and stared blankly at Gonda Shosuke with vacant eyes. The words Gonda was saying were understandable, but the sensibility of the conversation utterly failed to align with her own perspective. Silently staring at him with surprised eyes— “Anyway, take care of yourself.—If I have time, I’ll try to drop by again.” With that, Gonda Shosuke left the hospital room.

Thirteen

No matter how much she thought about it, Nobuko couldn’t fathom what state of mind had led Gonda Shosuke to visit her and say such things. The short, dark-skinned man—a Japanese diving industrialist recognized as such both domestically and internationally—never appeared before Nobuko again, and she gradually began sitting up in bed a little more each day. With this change, the people coming in and out of Nobuko’s hospital room were no longer limited to Motoko, Natasha, and the doctors. A middle-aged nurse from the medical office began visiting to sell pressed flowers mounted on paper. The arrangements made by this shy, finely-wrinkled nurse differed from ordinary plant specimens—three or four varieties of Russian grasses and wildflowers were artfully arranged on blue or cream-colored paper in combinations that complemented each sheet’s hue. However they were dried, the blossoms retained much of their original vivid coloring, with soft green moss sometimes playfully paired with autumn-tinted yellow maple leaves. These floral displays reminded Nobuko of the previous summer she had spent near Leningrad at Detskoye Selo. They evoked grasses and flowers that had swayed in those fields’ summer breezes, making her recall the wild blooms that had adorned her table at Pension Somolov when she received the telegram announcing Tamotsu’s death. The pressed flowers resurrected that unforgettable August in Nobuko’s heart, leaving her unable to return any piece without keeping it. Whenever she found arrangements with different floral combinations, Nobuko would write brief notes in their margins to send to her Tokyo home and friends. Natasha showed no interest in these purchases of hers.

“They’re lovely—so well-crafted.”

That was all she said. That was a natural attitude for Natasha. Dried and pressed flowers were ultimately nothing more than mementos. What need would Natasha—with life's vigorous processes unfolding within her body—have for such tokens of remembrance?

A woman came to Nobuko’s room to show her beautifully embroidered women’s undergarments, saying she was staying two or three rooms down. Though her current hospital life left her grooming neglected, she had the hairstyle of someone who regularly visited a barbershop for curling iron treatments, her slim and willowy frame clad in a slightly loose navy blue dress. Over it, she wore a blue-tinged sweater of unusual weave.

The woman, who appeared to be between thirty and forty, showed Nobuko linen undergarments embroidered with delicate floral patterns. A chemise had forget-me-nots embroidered in a combination of water blue, navy, white, and pink. Panties had Ukrainian-style patterns stitched in understated gradations of yellow, cream, and lemon around the hem. All featured excellent color combinations and skillful craftsmanship. Nobuko, sitting propped against her pillow on the bed, spread them out and gazed at them.

“So these things exist in Moskva too.” “I hadn’t seen them anywhere.” Within what Nobuko had observed in Moskva, clothing was shoddy—she had never even glimpsed a linen blouse. “They’re not commercial goods.” “There are people who do this sort of work privately.” “Not bad craftsmanship, wouldn’t you say?”

As Nobuko gazed at the embroidery, the woman said.

“Do you like them?” “They’re very beautiful.” “If you wish, I can have such undergarments made for you.” “Oh? Thank you.”

Nobuko responded absently. Both Motoko and Nobuko wore only the simple white garments they had brought from Japan, and it had never crossed their minds to buy undergarments specially embroidered in Moscow.

“She can have them ready soon—a week would suffice. Will you still be hospitalized by then?” By her manner of speaking, Nobuko realized that this woman herself might be the skilled embroiderer she had mentioned. There, Nobuko folded the undergarments and, while handing them back with a thank-you, said: “We live simply here.”

she said in a way that made it clear she had no intention of ordering undergarments. “Splendid undergarments—and what does one wear over them?” The woman laughed along with Nobuko,

"You're right about that," the woman agreed.

“All people want to live simply. It’s just that not everyone can live that way.” With feminine gestures, the woman casually refolded the undergarments she had received from Nobuko on her lap when suddenly—

“Do you have any children?”

she asked Nobuko. “Not yet.”

After giving that answer, Nobuko realized her response had jumped ahead—she didn’t even have a husband yet—and added, “I don’t have a husband yet.” The woman said nothing about that, but somewhere, that memory seemed connected to her present life of coming to a foreign woman’s hospital room to show embroidery. “I once had a child, you know,” she began.

“It was during the 1919 famine,” she said. “There was this elderly, earnest doctor—a good man—who asked me, ‘Do you really think you can bear this child now and raise it?’ We’ve lived through those kinds of times.”

Nobuko recalled the teeth of the engineer’s daughter she had met last year at Pansion Somolov in Detskoye Selo. That Soviet girl, who worked as an engineering intern from Leningrad University at a broadcasting station, possessed a lovely, well-developed nineteen-year-old body—yet when she smiled, all her upper teeth jutted crookedly. Those teeth were casualties of famine. At the age when children transition from milk teeth to permanent ones, she had grown up hungry.

Just as the conversation between the two had lapsed, Natasha entered the hospital room with her usual heel-dragging gait. The woman watched Natasha searching for something by the windowsill, then said with deep feeling,

“This is our era—isn’t that right, Natasha? How much do you get for childbirth preparation?” “Half my salary—the maternity hospital is free of charge. Plus nine months’ milk money.”

“It’s certainly not bad at all.” The woman remained silent for a while longer, lost in thought as she sat on the sofa. However, when Natasha left, immediately after—

“Well, take care of yourself. Goodbye. I will probably be discharged around the day after tomorrow.” Her elegant yet obscure-background slender figure disappeared down the hallway.

As yet another of those visitors who would appear in Nobuko's hospital room just once, leave behind some fragment of their lives, and never cross paths with her again—sure enough, on a certain afternoon, a terribly agitated woman entered Nobuko's hospital room.

A woman no longer young, wearing her own tawny coat over the white flannel hospital gown meant for patients, her yellowish hair flowing down over both shoulders, stood in the doorway and stared piercingly at Nobuko, who had just risen to her feet. "So it's you—the Japanese woman they're talking about?"

The abruptness left Nobuko at a loss for a reply. But there, when they spoke of a Japanese woman, it could be none other than herself. Nobuko,

"Is there something you need?" she asked. "Mind if I come in?"

“Please.”

Nobuko gestured toward the sofa,

“Please have a seat,” she said. “Aren’t you cold? —The window here has broken glass, you see.” “Don’t worry about it.” The woman, appearing extremely agitated, said this hurriedly and dismissively as if it were a bother. “I came here thinking I wanted to meet you and talk, you know.” Her tone carried a note of protest. Nobuko wondered what this could be. Nobuko still couldn’t move enough to risk offending anyone. Without having any idea, Nobuko,

“Sukache (Move aside).” Having said this, she placed both hands on the half-risen coverlet.

“I came to this hospital because my kidneys were bad and my whole body was swollen—to get cured as quickly as possible and leave right away. That was over two weeks ago. But this past week, the swelling’s gone down completely—I’m fully healed! Yet the doctors keep saying I’m not cured.—What? Who the hell knows?! I tell them I’m cured, they insist I’m not. Whether they discharge me or keep me here—it’s all the same!”

The woman spoke in a loud, angry voice. The large ward remained quiet. Through the corridor, she seemed to be trying to let her companions in the large ward—where her own bed stood—hear what she was saying in Nobuko’s room. Nobuko stared at the woman’s flushed face with its open pores—a face that appeared weathered by harsh living. Not only were her eyes agitated, but they also held a feverish moistness. Nobuko, once again,

“Aren’t you cold?”

Nobuko was concerned.

“Nichevo.” Dismissing Nobuko’s concern as if refusing to be sidetracked by such trivialities, the woman continued even more loudly. "When I say to let me go home early, the doctors and nurses here always bring you up as an example." “Look at that Japanese woman over there, they say!” "Young, having come from afar, lying here all alone with only friends visiting, yet for nearly two months now, she hasn’t complained once." "You’re so patient about both the food and the treatment." "They tell me I should learn from you!" “—How ridiculous!!”

The woman, seemingly unable to contain her indignation, waved one hand with a violent gesture.

“You and I are completely different, aren’t we? Looking at you, you’re still young—” She stretched her neck and scrutinized Nobuko’s face. “Why, you’re nothing but a little girl!”

Nobuko involuntarily laughed.

“But what about me? I’m forty-four already. At home I’ve got five kids counting last year’s baby. I feed them, clothe them, bathe them—and still work my job too. I’m a cleaning woman! And my husband—who’d look after my husband if I didn’t? How’s he supposed to work proper then?—I’m nothing like you. Get it? How could I stay patient like you?—No household to run, no husband, no suckling babe at your breast. You’ve got no real troubles at all, have you?”

In the crude woman's words there was truth. Nobuko had no real worries. In her dark, anxious, distrustful emotions—those of a lower-class Russian woman rather than a Soviet working woman—she found the doctors' words suspect and seemed unable to endure being held up as an example to follow like this seemingly carefree Japanese woman. To the woman—darkly intense, her hair disheveled as she confronted Nobuko—Nobuko responded with an unexpected calmness she hadn't anticipated,

“It was good that you came to me.” Nobuko said.

“You told the truth,” Nobuko said. “It’s true that your circumstances and mine are completely different—because I’m alone.” Her body involuntarily tensed as she pressed her hand against her heavy right side and explained, “However, I’m not responsible for what the doctor told you. I knew absolutely nothing about that matter—I’m only hearing it from you now for the first time. And in return, no one has told me a single thing about you either.”

The woman’s boiling irritation and vague sense of humiliation seemed to be gradually calmed by Nobuko’s manner of speaking. The woman who had been standing rigidly at the foot of Nobuko’s bed relaxed her posture slightly and, while holding the front of the coat draped over her shoulders, leaned against the wardrobe. Nobuko,

“Please sit down. Standing isn’t good for your condition,” she said. “It’s because you had to work far too much that you became ill…” The woman sat down on the sofa with sluggish movements. She wore short boots over bare feet, appearing as though she had rushed out of the hospital room in unbearable frustration. Though her face had seemed frightening at first glance, the obstinate honesty of an upright soul and the clumsiness crushed by life that showed there touched Nobuko’s heart. Suddenly, Nobuko thought this woman’s husband might have another young mistress.

“Does your husband come to visit you?” “How would that man have time? Meetings! Meetings! And! He never comes home before midnight!” “Is he a Party member?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

The woman answered irritably and bluntly. "I'm not a Party member—I'm a union delegate."

“That’s fine. As a delegate (デレガートカ), you should maintain reasonable thinking about your own illness.” “That may be—but look at this!” The woman opened her coat and pulled aside her hospital gown to show Nobuko her unwashed chest. “Where’s this swelling they talk about? If anything I’ve wasted away—all because I’m not eating properly.”

“It’s a salt-free diet, isn’t it?”

With a look of surprise, the woman scrutinized Nobuko’s face. “—You’re studying medicine too, aren’t you?”

"All over the world, kidney patients aren't allowed to eat salt." "Even so, how could you possibly get it? Why are they being so pigheaded about keeping in someone who's been told they should've recovered just from seeing the doctor daily?" An elusive mix of accusation and torment surfaced in the woman's eyes. Her agitation seemed to be hardening into something like paranoid obsession. The constant gnawing worry over her family and husband—now completely out of contact—had grown too much to bear.

Nobuko was troubled because she did not know the Russian word for protein. Not only that, but what illness could this woman have inside her body? How could Nobuko possibly know? Nobuko eventually thought of a good idea. She asked the woman whether she had received X-ray irradiation.

“Ah. They did it to me once right after I came in, and again recently.—They say that’s expensive, you know.”

“There’s no need to worry—you’re a union member after all.—The doctor must be saying you’re not yet healed after looking at those X-ray images. Even if you didn’t see them yourself, he’s been examining them thoroughly—that’s his job after all…” Now the woman didn’t speak in a voice that could be heard outside Nobuko’s hospital room. Just as a Japanese woman might tuck a hand into her collar while deep in thought, she hung her head with her hand slipped into her coat collar. The hair cascading over her shoulders lay tangled and looked grimy in the snowlight.

Nobuko, while pulling up the rubber hot-water bottle to her increasingly oppressive flank,

“If you want to go home quickly, getting yourself agitated is inadvisable,” she said in a voice resonating with weariness.

“If you build a fire under the pot, your illness will come to a boil along with it.” Then she proposed an idea to the woman - that someone being discharged from the same hospital room should convey her home address and ask them to tell her child to come. Nobuko, feeling utterly weary, lay down on her pillow. The woman raised her bowed head and gazed aimlessly at the snowscape outside the double-paned window. That scenery remained invisible to Nobuko. Because the double-paned window was positioned directly above the bed.

The desertedness of Nobuko's hospital room and the silence seemed to give the woman a final sense of calm. After a while, she spoke as if telling herself, "Well then, I suppose I'll have to endure it for the time being."

Placing her hands on her knees, she rose from the sofa as if lifting her body. The excessive agitation had passed, and even she seemed to be beginning to feel fatigue. “I explained it to you in a way you could understand.” Having said that, the woman flashed a wrinkle that resembled a smile at the corner of her mouth and looked at Nobuko. Then, dragging her feet, she left Nobuko’s hospital room.

"You explained it in a way I could understand."—What a union meeting phrase that was! Within that woman—she of the tangled mass of dark bristly hair—lay a life so steeped in such terminology that she departed without saying thanks or apologies, having uttered this workplace expression as her form of gratitude: "You explained it in a way I could understand." Nobuko perceived in this exchange nothing less than the decade of Soviet life that had shaped the woman's existence.

Amidst such days at Moscow University Hospital, Nobuko’s illness followed not so much a course of recovery as a passive course of gradual stabilization. By the end of February, still plagued by a heavy, dull pain lingering in her right flank that kept her upper body bent, Nobuko had finally managed to walk from her bed to the sofa.

14

On one such day, despite it being what should have been Nobuko's most refreshing moment after bathing, she sat with tense eyes fixed on her hospital room's white wall, deep in thought. An unusual air of preoccupation hung over her face, mirroring the painful confusion that had taken root in her chest. Nobuko had received her mother's concern about her illness from their homeland in an unexpected manner that day. Regarding the covert duties inherent to military attachés stationed at embassies abroad, Takedayo appeared astonishingly naive, viewing them merely as ceremonial roles. Otherwise, she would never have asked Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara—a man she'd met only once or twice—to thoroughly investigate her daughter Nobuko's condition in Moscow and report details back to Japan. Recent accounts indicated this Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara's sister-in-law had married a young medical graduate. This graduate happened to be the eldest son from a family Nobuko unexpectedly had ties to—she even remembered being carried on his father's back—with both Yasuzo Sasa and Takedayo attending the wedding ceremony. During that occasion, casual mention was made of Fujiwara potentially being stationed in Moscow as brother-in-law to the groom. When departure dates approached, Takedayo reportedly sent an envoy two days prior and—realizing time was short—urgently requested someone visit Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara's suburban residence that very night to ask him to check on Nobuko's condition. Unfortunately unable to drive directly to the house, he had disembarked some distance away and arrived apologetic after searching his way on foot. "He seemed genuinely distressed," they said of Fujiwara. Repeatedly he'd emphasized: "Please convey your exact condition as witnessed through my own eyes." Faced with these explained circumstances, what could Nobuko do but express gratitude?

Nobuko recounted the entire course of her illness. "Well, before meeting you, I had imagined how terribly haggard you must have been—but seeing you like this, I can see there’s no need for concern." "Please do write thoroughly to reassure them." Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara, who appeared to have passed forty by some years, had a crown of thinning hair—visible even beneath his close-cropped hairstyle—resulting from years of wearing a military cap since his youth. His sparse balding and pallid complexion instead conveyed an impression of meticulous intellectual diligence and calm disposition. Ever since Nobuko and the others had arrived in Moscow, there had been an attaché named Lieutenant Colonel Kibe. The unrestrained, open-hearted demeanor of that man—who seemed perpetually intoxicated—and the character of Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara, who had appeared before Nobuko today, were diametrically opposed at first glance. Contrary to standard practice, there had been no replacement of the original attaché with the new one; instead, these two men—whose personalities seemed perfectly complementary—would now both be stationed in Moscow. Due to issues surrounding the Eastern Chinese Railway and fishing rights, interest in the Japan-Soviet border had recently intensified. As these matters came to prominence, Nobuko came to perceive the significance of Fujiwara’s new assignment. The lieutenant colonel—whose mission’s nature was discernible even to Nobuko—appeared before her through a strange twist of fate, requested by Takedayo as though he were an insider to the Sasa family. Having grown up in a household without a single military member, and because of an incident during the Great Kantō Earthquake when Gendarmerie Captain Amakasu strangled Ōsugi Sakae, his wife Itō Noe, and their six-year-old nephew—labeling them an anarchist family—before dumping their bodies into an old gendarmerie well, Nobuko had once witnessed the boy’s mother weeping silently in a corner. Nobuko’s aversion to military men had become bone-deep.

The kind of rough intimidation Nobuko feared was absent from Takeo Fujiwara; this lieutenant colonel carried an indistinct coloration about him, exuding a quietly arid demeanor. After exchanging casual remarks about Moscow life, when asked "What are your thoughts on Japan's Emperor?" Nobuko laughed from her bed at the question's sheer unexpectedness. "Oh really—you military men might be different, but do ordinary people like us even think about the Emperor that much?" To Nobuko, that was the only conceivable perspective. Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara then smiled faintly himself and murmured near her ear with undiminished calm persistence, "That may well hold true." "As you see, Russia abolished the Tsar for this Soviet world, and even during the French Revolution they guillotined Louis XVI—so fundamentally, socialist ideology contains sovereignty issues within itself." "You appear deeply sympathetic to Soviet methods, so I wished to inquire about this point." Nobuko felt an odd sensation in her solar plexus. Was this still casual conversation? She vaguely sensed danger shadowing these questions. A visceral revulsion toward military men surged up instinctively. Yet through natural wariness, Nobuko crushed this rising aversion and responded in her initial tone: "Well, I find Soviet life interesting and admirable—but that concerns the Soviets, no?" "Japan remains Japan." "I don't know your thoughts, but I haven't turned revolutionary yet." "I don't understand theories." This was Nobuko's unvarnished answer. "Then your personal feelings?" Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara pressed with unaltered tranquil tenacity. "Do you believe Japan should retain its Emperor or abolish him?" Nobuko grew angry at herself for attempting to answer these passive, incomprehensible questions.

Nobuko’s face flushed. “And really—no matter who considers it—if something should exist because it’s better to have, then let it exist, and if it’s bad, then obviously it shouldn’t!” she said rapidly. “Is it because you think having an Emperor in Japan is a bad thing that you’re asking so persistently?” “That’s strange,” Nobuko muttered irritably. Why does the Emperor become such an issue here in Moscow?

Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara listened without altering the expression on his bluish-black, sunken-eyed face to Nobuko’s answer—which manifested both an irritable outburst and a failure to grasp the issue—then eventually declared in a lecturing tone: “For Japan’s future, this Emperor problem remains the most difficult and dangerous point in all circumstances.” “In Japan, communists are advocating the overthrow of the emperor system.” “Therefore, even in the recently amended Peace Preservation Law, Article 1 places emphasis on the point of transforming this national polity.” “It carries an extremely severe penalty.” “You are free to think whatever you like about society, but the issue of the Emperor alone should be treated with caution.” Takeo Fujiwara, appearing to be a nonsmoker, leaned back on the sofa and spoke in this manner with his arms crossed. When Nobuko silently listened to what he was saying, Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara—with a soundless laugh that creased the corners of his mouth—remarked, “Your mother, unusually for a woman of her standing, seems to have given considerable thought to the matter. She was concerned about your ideological leanings.” Nobuko felt a physical pain as though a wedge had been driven into her chest. When Nobuko thought about what Takedayo might have told Takeo Fujiwara—acting on her half-baked thoughts driven by that characteristically self-righteous enthusiasm she had always directed at Nobuko—she felt utterly at a loss with herself. That this was Takedayo’s maternal love for her daughter Nobuko—what kind of love was this? Nobuko said with a stiff, bitter smile. “I’ve always had a bad reputation with Mother.” “I bet she called me an egoist.” Then, Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara—who seemed to have observed Takedayo with the same calm expression he now directed at Nobuko—said, “That wasn’t quite the case.” He added that he was deeply impressed. “There was not a single pessimistic tone in the letters you sent after being hospitalized.” “However, last summer—I believe it was—your brother passed away.” “And then she was concerned that you had completely stopped writing about ideological matters in your letters.” “Well, I’ll make sure to explain that point properly as well.”

What could Takeo Fujiwara possibly mean to Takedayo! Nobuko felt her body tremble. Despite believing she understood her children better than anyone else, in reality Takedayo was always going around listening to unexpected criticisms from others about her own child and being swayed by their words. Even in the case of Ochi, Tamotsu’s tutor, it had been the same. Because his subjective and personal criticisms were parroted verbatim in Takedayo’s emotional expressions toward Nobuko, she could not endure it as a daughter. If mother and daughter were to confront each other, even if their clashes were fierce and they shed tears together, there would be no lingering deep-seated aversion toward Takedayo—and yet. During the turmoil of when she married Tsukuda, Takedayo often made Nobuko cry and, in ways only a mother knows how to torment her daughter, drove her to despair. But back then, she was a mother. Nobuko could cry and speak her mind to a mother. At that time, there still was nothing that stood between the two of them. Before long, Ochi appeared, and such people began appearing even in Moscow. The schemes Mother carries out, believing them to be manifestations of parental affection, only make Nobuko’s heart grow wary of Takedayo. Does Takedayo not realize this fatal flaw? When Nobuko imagined the scene—Takedayo rushing by car to a military man she had met only once, relying solely on the tenuous connection that he had arranged a marriage for an old acquaintance’s sister-in-law, and probably trusting him unquestioningly because he was a soldier, then pleading, “Please keep an eye on Nobuko’s ideological leanings”—she felt a poignant humiliation that left her palms clammy. After Tamotsu died like that, what could Nobuko possibly have confided in Takedayo? Nobuko had irreconcilable feelings that held Takedayo responsible for Tamotsu’s death. That had been acting upon Nobuko’s consciousness of living since Tamotsu’s death. Nobuko was trying not to be Tamotsu. Toward life. Toward mothers.

How could such things—all these matters—ever be written down in something like a letter? It wasn’t something that could be debated. For Nobuko, it was her very existence...

To Nobuko, who had fallen silent while lost in thought, Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara—who seemed to have been tracing the thread of his own reflections during that interval—eventually said, "However..." "Your mother, true to being Professor Imura's daughter, maintains a purity of sentiment toward the Imperial Family that's quite rare these days." "I found myself deeply respectful when hearing her speak of it." Nobuko listened vacantly to these soldierly words of praise from Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara, devoid of any real connection. That Mother harbored pure feelings toward the Imperial Family—this seemed to Nobuko a matter utterly divorced from daily life and absent from her own emotional landscape. In the sense that there existed no focal point within her own emotions to align with them, Nobuko felt herself distinctly separate from both her mother and this military man, Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara.

Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara smiled as he prepared to leave and said: "To be frank, your mother specifically requested that I visit you periodically when in Moscow. But given my current workload, I must regrettably inform you that I won't be able to fulfill this obligation despite my initial agreement." Two days prior, a cleaning woman from the nephrology ward—where Nobuko herself was hospitalized—had remarked, *"You don't have a single care in the world, do you?"* The words had struck Nobuko with unexpected force. Nobuko, who had been immersing herself in the Soviet Russian rhythms unfolding daily within her hospital ward—its mornings and nights filled with carefree openness and subtle social textures—found herself violently uprooted from this comfortable existence by the sudden intrusion of a military officer. Lying in her hospital bed after Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara departed with crisp martial strides, Nobuko felt encircled by unyielding metal rake teeth—cold and inflexible. The truth was, Nobuko couldn't properly comprehend anything Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara had discussed. He'd focused on matters she'd never contemplated before Moscow nor felt compelled to consider there—the Emperor being chief among them—topics that felt simultaneously irrelevant yet left behind a disquieting residue.

To Nobuko, who had not known the atmosphere in her homeland following the March 15th Incident, everything—the emergence of Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara, the discussions about the Emperor, even Takedayo rushing to his side—seemed abnormal. And this abnormality carried far more substance and intentionality than the vague sensation she had felt before last year's May Day—when those vivid red-ink hooks her father Yasuzo had marked on the March 15th Incident newspaper article and sent to her had seemed to impose an implicit restraint on her movements. Though Fujiwara's visit and words were ostensibly personal, the residue they left in Nobuko's heart—she couldn't grasp their purpose—nonetheless carried a pervasive sense of authority. And sensing this authority around her only made Nobuko more uncomfortable.

That late afternoon, when Motoko came to the hospital room, Nobuko—as if she had been waiting—

“Did you meet that Lieutenant Colonel Takeo Fujiwara?”

She asked. “He was just here.”

“Did your mom put you up to this?” Motoko glanced sarcastically at Nobuko’s sullen face as she started pulling a cigarette from her bag. “It was an excruciatingly formal thank-you note.” She laughed—a dry “Ha ha ha.” “Your mom’s so calculating, it’s almost admirable.” When Takedayo imagined Nobuko—sick in Moscow—being tended by Motoko, she’d probably sent those words of gratitude with genuine feeling. But for Motoko, this couldn’t erase years of Takedayo’s suspicion and habitual condescension. Motoko took out the customary mandarins from her bag, arranging them one by one on the bedside table as she spoke in a low voice, her lips twisting slightly.

“I don’t know what your mother is thinking, but here, connections like that don’t do any good.”

Motoko said. “I thought so too... It’s really troubling…” “He’s the opposite type of Lieutenant Colonel Kibe, don’t you think?” “I think so.” “Even Lieutenant Colonel Kibe—that open-heartedness of his is just an outward gesture, you know.” Nobuko understood every word Motoko said, and it made her feel all the more poignant. As if grasping for a fragile lifeline there, Nobuko— “Have you heard that Dr. Yoshizawa from Tokyo University might come to Moscow?”

she asked Motoko. “Who from?… From Fujiwara?” “You should’ve told me something like that—Mother said if he comes, she’ll have him examine me.” “Huh—I don’t know. That Dr. Yoshizawa—the one they say’s from the same hometown as Sassa’s father?” “Have you heard?—It’d be good if even Dr. Yoshizawa came.” Nobuko wished not so much about being examined for her illness, but rather that ordinary people—not the likes of Takeo Fujiwara—who wouldn’t talk about the Emperor or her ideological leanings would visit her hospital room.

That night, from a small ward about two rooms ahead, the groans of a patient could be heard all through the night, reaching even this corridor. It was the first such occurrence in the ward since Nobuko had been hospitalized, where peace had reigned until then. Those groans sounded less like the pain of a newly begun illness and more like the death moan of someone on the verge of dying. Despite being a women’s ward, the groans rose and fell hoarsely like a man’s, and outside the door in the corridor came the sound of nurses and doctors on duty coming and going.

When the surroundings grew still and Nobuko began to doze off, she was soon awakened again by groans reaching her ears. The moment she awoke, her heart sank as she realized daytime impressions clung stubbornly to her mind. The hospital room with its lights extinguished was dimly lit by corridor light filtering through the glass above the door. In that murky half-light where Nobuko lay with eyes wide open, the darkness felt oppressive—and as the dreadful moans that involuntarily seized her hearing grew louder, her body seemed to float upward while still lying on its back, terror lifting her physically.

This was exactly the kind of night she wanted to see Natasha - Natasha who walked slowly with her nurse's large apron draped over her swollen belly, cheeks flushed like apricots. But there was no way to call her. She didn't work night shifts anymore. Not in her condition. As the groans grew louder and fear tightened its grip, Nobuko held her breath beneath the covers and clenched her hands together until they hurt. Her whole body tensed with an ache that held more than just the terror of those sounds - the bitter aftertaste of daytime lingered sharp beneath it all. With thin tears glistening in her eyes, she buried her face deep into the pillow and finally fell into exhausted sleep as dawn approached.

Nobuko had no way of knowing what discussions had arisen at the Sasa household back in Japan, centered around Takedayo, from early February through March—or that they were now being put into action.

Fifteen

It was one late morning, just after March had begun.

Natasha and Motoko entered Nobuko’s hospital room together. Nobuko, who was trimming her nails in bed, saw this,

“Oh… Why?”

She stopped trimming her nails and shifted her gaze from Motoko, who wore a leather coat, to Natasha and back again. Since Nobuko’s hospitalization, Motoko had visited the hospital room without fail once daily, though always strictly within the designated visiting hours of two to four in the afternoon. A faint look of concern appeared on Nobuko’s face. Motoko, who had entered, wore a tense expression somewhere between unease and something else—her lips pursed in a manner that wasn’t quite displeasure. Nobuko wondered if it was about her own surgery. Two days prior, during Professor Fromgold’s rounds, it had been stated that Nobuko’s unexplained liver swelling had persisted too long and required surgical examination. Nobuko did not desire the surgery. She did not want her body to become one with a pipe inserted into her side.

Motoko seemed to sense Nobuko’s sudden anxiety. “I got special permission because there was something I wanted to show you a little sooner,” she explained.

“What is it?” “You don’t need to worry.”

When Natasha left, Nobuko pressed, “Come on, what is it?” “A telegram like this arrived this morning.” After reading the Romanized Japanese telegram she had been handed, Nobuko gasped, “Oh...”

Nearly dumbfounded and in disbelief, she looked up at Motoko. And then, as if to confirm it once more, she read each character one by one. “MADATAIINSENUKA WAICHIRO KEKKON SAN KATSU JUSHI HI.” “Depart Kobe May 23rd, arrive Marseille July 1st.” Haven’t you been discharged yet? That was smoothly comprehended by Nobuko. She also comprehended, though abruptly, that Kazuichiro’s wedding was set for March 14th. She could comprehend the departure from Kobe on May 23rd and arrival in Marseille on July 1st—but the whole family…—

“What does this mean?” For Nobuko, who knew her family’s daily life all too well, imagining the Sasa household members—her father and mother, her brother and his probable bride Koeda, her sister Tsuya-ko—as a group arriving in Marseille on July first was utterly unexpected. Nobuko fell silent for a while, staring at the telegram. Then, as if groaning,

"What could they possibly be thinking?" she muttered.

Since Tamotsu’s death, the letters had constantly described Takedayo’s poor health—her frequent nervous diarrhea and the vision impairment caused by her diabetes. Nobuko recalled the commotion that accompanied Takedayo’s outings. Even just going to the seaside house for a few days—how much luggage and help had that required? Takedayo, who could not do without her own pillow and washbasin even within her own home, was coming to Europe. From between the Romanized letters of the telegram, Nobuko felt the Sasa family’s unique commotion and excitement as vividly as a barometer’s needle cannot help but indicate changes in atmospheric pressure with its entire being. Financially speaking, within Nobuko’s understanding, this constituted nothing short of a major incident for the Sasa household. Even if they owned a private car, and even if Takedayo always used it for her outings, that car had been a fuel-efficient British model purchased during a tax-free import period. The Sasa household’s finances, while appearing extravagant in daily trivialities, lacked the substantial strength to withstand any significant expenditure. Her father would probably part with his pottery collection. Nobuko thought. Sasataizō had a hobby of collecting pottery, with pieces in his collection featured in famous ceramic catalogs. Even so, for the whole family to come—even bringing Tsuya-ko...

“You, what on earth do you think this means?” Nobuko looked up at Motoko with eyes like those of someone whose comfortably settled bed had suddenly caught fire beneath them. "The whole family coming...?" “I don’t know.” Chewing on a red-translucent pipe stem, Motoko suggested in her characteristically calm, objective tone, “They might be planning to come here.”

She said in a calm, objective tone, as though stating a conclusion she had reached after much deliberation on the way to the hospital. “Since Tamotsu-kun ended up like that, and with your illness on top of it, Mother might have reached her limit.” Nobuko took on a frightened look as she recalled the contents of the letter from her mother she had received earlier. “Mother has resolved to take every possible means.” As the first manifestation of this, it was military man Fujiwara Takeo who had been asked by Takedayo to come visit. That visit had been nothing but painful for Nobuko. This time, the whole family was coming... Regarding the fact that her entire family was coming like this—what was considered the natural course of action for Nobuko to take? "Oh," Nobuko seemed to want to cover her face with both hands.

“Couldn’t it be that they’re planning to change their return route via Siberia, and if you haven’t recovered by then, take you back with them?”

“Really? “No way!” “That’s absolutely out of the question!!” Nobuko’s face contorted into a tearful grimace, as though clinging to the bed. “Of course, since they’re arriving in Marseille in July, there’s still quite some time left.” “Since it’s only just March now, once five months pass, even Bukko-chan would have gotten better by then, I’m sure.”

Gazing at Nobuko who was so flustered it bordered on panic, "You too have hardships no one knows about."

Motoko said in a considerate tone, though she herself shared half of Nobuko’s intense confusion. “After all, your family is unconventional. Because they actually go through with such outlandish ideas, it’s downright overwhelming. In comparison, my father is just a complete meshchanin—a townsman—you know. In fact, he’s almost easier to deal with. He never even thinks beyond going to Beppu twice a year at most.” Nobuko gradually regained her composure from the initial shock. Before her family could finalize detailed plans at home, before corresponding arrangements could be made everywhere, Nobuko and Motoko came to consider it imperative to clearly inform them of their own independent initiative. To prevent everything from becoming a passive, cornered state for both of them—especially for Nobuko.

——

Nobuko earnestly considered all possible conditions that might arise, consulted Motoko about them, and finally reached a decision. That was the plan for Nobuko and Motoko to leave Moscow and meet up with their family in France.

“Certainly, that might be one method.” Motoko was not opposed to the plan either.

“I think that’s the best approach.” “After all, we’ll want to see France and Germany eventually anyway—let’s settle on this plan, yes?” “Please—just agree to this.”

Nobuko had no intention of undergoing liver surgery. As they continued discussing, she recalled words Professor Fromgold had once said - that carbonated springs were effective for the liver. Professor Fromgold, his pale red, cleanly washed hands resting on the knees of his immaculate white examination gown in the German manner of holding his elbows, remarked in his habitual nasal voice, his pince-nez glinting, that he had heard Japan had abundant hot springs. At that time, he had said carbonated spring baths made an excellent treatment for the liver.

"I've thought of a good idea. Splendid! Splendid!" Remembering this, Nobuko seized both of Motoko’s hands.

“Hey, you know—there’s that famous spa called Baden-Baden somewhere in Germany, isn’t there? The one that often appears in novels.” “—And then there’s also a place called Karlsbad.” “I’ve decided to go to one of them.” Nobuko—who knew nothing about European spa town customs or whether she and Motoko could blend into such atmospheres with their Moscow living habits and lack of proper attire—clung to her idea precisely through the simplicity born of this ignorance. To avoid surgery. And to obtain international travel permission. For these two purposes, going to Karlsbad or Baden-Baden for treatment shouldn’t have seemed groundless by European standards of common sense. After morning consultations, Nobuko asked Motoko to immediately send this telegram to the Sasa household: “DISCHARGE BY END OF MONTH.” “MEET MARSEILLE.”

Sixteen Worn out by unexpected agitation since morning, Nobuko took a long afternoon nap. When she awoke, she took out the telegram from beneath the blue medicine box on the table and read it again. The shock and anxiety that had felt like an impending avalanche subsided, and as Nobuko quietly read the telegram with the composure of having settled on their initial course of action, thoughts of various matters she had been too overwhelmed to properly consider that morning began to surface in her mind.

In a Japanese middle-class family, for five household members to go abroad to meet one family member stationed overseas—regardless of circumstances—was an uncommon occurrence. Though it was the Sasa family's unorthodox way of doing things, Nobuko began feeling remorse for having received this news with nothing but guarded apprehension, as if they were coming solely to drag her back. Even if her illness had become a major catalyst, since everyone had gone through the trouble of making such a resolute decision to travel abroad, her father Taizo would surely be looking forward to seeing London again after twenty years, while Takeyo too had long harbored a desire to visit the West at least once. Considering Takeyo's failing eyesight, it seemed only natural she would want to go abroad now. After Tamotsu's death, Takeyo appeared to have deified "him" into an entity entirely distinct from her husband and other children. This could not help but feel oppressive for the entire family. Rushing through unfamiliar destinations with limited time and itineraries—experiencing various sights and sounds—might well transform the household atmosphere. With Takeyo having lost Tamotsu—that perpetual source of anxiety—and potentially finding new conversational fodder, how relieved everyone might feel. Regarding Koichiro and Koeda's marriage—seemingly expedited for this trip—and their sudden decision to hold the ceremony on March 14th, a mere two weeks away, Nobuko concluded she ought to celebrate this from her family's perspective after all.

From Taizo and Takeyo’s position as parents in society, this wedding of their eldest son Koichiro was truly the first occasion where they could say they were marrying off a child. As the eldest daughter, Nobuko had caused such a commotion that her parents had no time to either approve or disapprove, and she had recklessly gone through with the marriage. In Nobuko’s case, there had been no wedding ceremony, nor anything resembling a proper reception. Given all that—how her social dignity as a parent had been wounded and her self-respect bruised by those matters—Nobuko imagined that Takeyo must surely be planning an extravagant ceremony for Koichiro’s wedding, declaring it a momentous occasion for the Sasa family. The wedding of Koeda’s sister held several years ago had also been extravagant. Koeda’s father, being a businessman, was a man who possessed both the personality and the means to go all out with extravagance when the occasion called for it. It must surely be a lively affair. Thinking of how even just her departure abroad had made the hallway resound with people’s comings and goings, Nobuko smiled on her pillow. For the Sasa household too, now that Tamotsu was gone and Koichiro had become their only son to bring in a bride, they might as well haul in as many chests of drawers covered in pale green damask and long chests as they liked. With half-humorous sentiment, Nobuko affirmed her parents’ fondness for ostentation.

That Koichiro and Koeda were getting married was something Nobuko felt had finally come to pass. Koichiro had liked his cousin Koeda for many years, and on the evening before Nobuko’s departure for the Soviet Union, he had deliberately pulled her into a dark parlor and asked her to convey his feelings to Takeyo. Koeda was a splendid girl, good at climbing trees and filled with a vitality and raw impulsiveness unfamiliar to Nobuko herself. Though Takeyo had trusted Koichiro and tacitly allowed his extended stays at their cousin Koeda’s place, when Nobuko conveyed his resolve to her—"She may not be a bad girl, but to think of her becoming Koichiro’s wife! That woman isn’t the type to support a husband in his development. She’s too hedonistic"—Takeyo had looked at Nobuko with clear denial in her eyes. Nobuko, preoccupied with her impending departure the next day, could neither engage in detailed conversation nor properly listen. She pressed her mother’s hand as if trying to persuade her in those brief moments, saying, “But Mother—Koichiro won’t change his mind. I told him that clearly. That’s why he asked me to speak with you.” Even now, Nobuko hadn’t forgotten how she’d grown irritated by Takeyo’s habitual coddling of her son while looking at her mother’s pale, sweet-scented face—how she’d retorted, “You let Koichiro linger at the Iikura house for days on end, then claim Koeda can’t support his career? How presumptuous! If Koeda doesn’t actively dislike him, she’ll naturally come to love him.” When confronted so bluntly, Takeyo had withdrawn her hand from Nobuko’s with her usual “There you go again!”—“You may act as you please as an older sister, but don’t you dare incite Koichiro too.”

As Takeyo spoke, a light rejecting Nobuko’s words flashed in her eyes. “Well then, do as you please,” Nobuko said. With that, she began to leave. “But you should at least remember he asked me to say these things.”

That series of events—how had Takeyo handled her dissatisfaction with Koeda? Nobuko spread and folded the telegram between her hands atop the bedclothes as she pondered. It seemed that both Koichiro and Koeda had persisted. In the photograph taken with the whole family before Nobuko departed for the Soviet Union, there was Tamotsu’s figure—wearing his uniform neatly, his plump face utterly devoid of expression—and in an earlier instance, there was also little Tsuyako with her bobbed hair, thick legs, and a mouth that seemed half shyness, half stubbornness. Even Tsuyako would be coming along all the way here. ——

To make these burgeoning thoughts into something as richly fruitful and enjoyable as possible, Nobuko felt herself stepping forward. She began thinking of intertwining her own proactiveness with that plan. For Koichiro and Koeda—and all the more so for Tsuyako—it seemed unlikely such an opportunity to travel would ever come again. With a nuance inherently different from her consideration for the younger ones, imagining her father and mother enjoying this journey in a manner befitting their position and circumstances still stirred tender feelings within Nobuko. She would satisfy everyone as much as possible, and after that, they could return however suited them best—whether through Siberia or across America. And if she returned to Moscow again, that would be fine. The more her resolve solidified not to return home with everyone no matter what, the more Nobuko found herself hoping with a clear mind that the family trip would begin joyfully.

The next day, when Motoko came, Nobuko, the moment she saw her face,

“Hey, I’ve started to feel a bit hopeful about everyone coming.”

She said cheerfully, with apparent joy. "I've decided—once I get better quickly, go all the way to France, and diligently look after everyone—to make sure no one tells me to go back home." Gazing intently at Nobuko's face showing earnest emotion as she spoke, Motoko wore an intensely serious, complex expression and slowly lifted the corner of her large lips. There was not a trace of sarcasm in that expression—a look that seemed to pity Nobuko while also appearing to doubt her way of thinking. Nobuko, sensing Motoko's wordless critique in that expression,

“Why?” she asked in return. “Do you think there’s something wrong?”

“It’s probably too good, if anything.”

“Relatives, when all’s said and done, aren’t much,” Motoko said in a subdued voice. From the tone of that voice, Nobuko imagined a scene—fixed somewhere in Paris, centered on Takeyo, whom Motoko knew all too well—and Motoko must have suddenly felt herself as a separate entity, one who could never seamlessly belong to that family circle. Nobuko touched upon the issue indirectly but directly presented it as her own hope,

“Let’s live separately from our family.”

she proposed. "After all, our lifestyles are different, and we can't sustain ourselves through social obligations alone." If Nobuko and the others had gone to Paris slightly earlier and begun living in their own way, there would have been no need to become thoroughly entangled with the Sasa family members. No matter how much she resolved to satisfy her family, Nobuko knew she could not endure being confined to the social engagements and sightseeing that Takeyo favored. And what proved even more perplexing yet intriguing for Nobuko herself was that now, after having lived in Moscow for over a year, it had become increasingly difficult to grasp what in France or Paris could truly capture her interest. Having a broad interest in all manner of things came naturally to Nobuko from birth. When first setting out for the Soviet Union, she had only anticipated those quintessentially French elements—music, paintings, cafés, chestnut trees, the Parisian atmosphere as commonly described. But present-day Nobuko—just as she found herself captivated by Moscow's more realistic fabric of daily life beyond landmarks like the Kremlin and tree-lined boulevards—felt her heart stir toward seeking the tangible details of Paris's unfathomably complex urban existence whenever the city was mentioned. She contemplated the meager possibilities available to them both, who knew no French.

Motoko’s skating practice had long since been discontinued. Motoko had apparently gone to the embassy’s exclusive skating rink three or four times regardless, but after muttering without a laugh that it was no use just falling all the time, she stopped going altogether. From her bed, Nobuko urged her regretfully, “You’re still in Moscow—you should keep at it.” “You’ll surely be able to walk soon. If you quit now, you’ll never do it again in your life, you know.” However, Motoko refused Nobuko’s encouragement, saying, “I can’t do it.” “I can’t do it.” “You end up tensing your whole body.” Nobuko stopped urging her any further. Nobuko had come to understand that such things—unavoidable to Motoko herself—were a manifestation of Motoko’s character.

After receiving Takeyo’s telegram announcing their arrival in Marseille on July 1st, the substance of Motoko’s daily visits to Nobuko’s hospital room naturally changed. Nobuko’s mood as a patient had shifted too, leaving no time for them to relax eating mandarins as before. Nobuko and Motoko sat side by side on the long chair, spreading a map of Europe across their laps as they compared routes from Moscow to Paris against the calendar in their notebook. They planned how many days to spend in cities like Vienna and Berlin. Motoko had discreetly consulted Mrs. Kawai, concluding that Vienna—neither deficient nor excessive—would be ideal for arranging their minimal wardrobe. From Vienna to Prague. Then Karlsbad, Berlin, and Paris. Still—when would Nobuko be discharged? She had wired home about leaving by month’s end, but this was merely their expectation—Professor Fromgold had given no definite word. From his tone, Nobuko understood all internal treatments had been attempted; that he was training her to move despite persistent liver swelling. But since this wasn’t full recovery, they decided she should see surgery. And she herself had resolved: Even if healing imperfectly, she’d refuse any operation forcing her to live with a rubber tube draining bile year-round from her white, smooth flank. Nobuko loathed becoming deformed. Imagining a woman with tubing beneath her blouse, she felt severed from that image—a future constrained. Nobuko wanted the future wholly intact.

With March's thaw beginning, the walls of Nobuko's hospital room—which had been filled all winter with quiet snowlight—now began to dance with glittering reflections from puddles formed by melting snow somewhere outside. On such a day, Nobuko put on a shawl, was wrapped in a blanket, placed on a transport cart, and taken to the surgical department located away from her hospital room within the complex. Natasha, wearing valenki (long winter boots), had put on a coat over her nurse's uniform and donned a headscarf as she followed along.

In the spacious operating room warmed to a suitable temperature, Nobuko was stripped of all her clothes. She was laid out on the operating table. Three doctors - fully attired as surgeons save for their lack of masks and gloves - surrounded Nobuko as she lay naked on the table, her glossy body exposed, their lips pressed together in expressions blending awkwardness and solemnity. They began examining her in silence. As physicians in internal medicine would do, they pressed on her liver, and when Nobuko winced in pain and furrowed her brow,

“It hurts (boli no),” they muttered among themselves as they continued examining her. After repeating the same procedure multiple times, the eldest of the three doctors—the one with distinct beard shadow—said, “Well…”

The senior doctor stepped back from the operating table and signaled to the operating room nurse to have Nobuko get dressed. “Do you wish to undergo surgery?” Nobuko sat up on the operating table, raising her bobbed head to look up at the doctor as she put her arms through the hospital gown the nurse held out, and spoke each word as if to drive them into his understanding.

“Ya sovsem ne khochu (I don’t want it at all).” A momentary smile appeared on everyone’s faces.

The chief physician, after a moment of consideration, “You do not require surgery.”

he concluded. One of the doctors, having finished listening to that much, began to move away toward the operating room door.

“Professor Fromgold treated you thoroughly,” said one of them. “Don’t eat too much greasy food.” Another continued sternly: “You must not drink a single drop of vodka.” The third concluded with finality: “Alright?” Again placed on the transport cart and moving along the snowmelt path between the linden trees back toward the internal medicine ward—Nobuko—

“Natasha, you have no idea how happy I am!”

she said. "I was afraid of the surgery." "You can say that again." Natasha, looking like a Russian nesting doll in her large valenki and plump figure, agreed in a manner befitting an internal medicine nurse while avoiding a puddle that had appeared ahead of them.

“I don’t like surgery either.” Around eleven on a clear morning, the air held a cold sharpness, yet March sunlight pierced brightly through the brisk atmosphere. Along the trodden path where Nobuko was being wheeled on the transport cart, within the stillness lingered a faint rustle—melted snow dripping from tree branches onto thick layers still blanketing the ground. It had been two full months since Nobuko had felt the outside air. With surgery now decisively unnecessary, relief welled up from the very core of her being, joy overflowing into every part of her body and soul. Like an animal emerging from winter hibernation—gazing at its own nest from outside as though it were some rare treasure during its first spring excursion—Nobuko looked out at the single-story wooden internal medicine ward beyond the linden trees.

That afternoon, the moment Nobuko saw Motoko appear in the hospital room,

“Hooray!” she announced, lowering her clasped hands onto the bedspread with a soft thud. “Demons, be gone! It’s been decided I don’t need surgery!” In her cheerful chatter, Nobuko talked about how she had been taken to the surgical department on a transport cart that morning for her examination, how refreshing and pleasant the outside air had felt after so long, and how she had discovered so many of the devil’s black holes along the snowmelt-covered path.

On her way back from surgery to her hospital room along the linden tree avenue, Nobuko discovered numerous small black holes—their edges soiled by mud splashes—dotting the pristine white snow where no one had trodden. The melting snow dripping from tree branches had created these holes pocking the ground’s snowy surface. As signs of spring’s arrival in Moscow—the season’s footprints—they had caught Nobuko’s eye each time she strolled along the tree-lined avenue last early spring too. Finally freed from needing surgery and brimming with mischievous joy, Nobuko—being grudgingly pushed along on the transport cart through the crisp air—gazed at the grimy little black holes beneath the linden trees and thought they resembled the mouths of Japanese children smeared with sweet bean paste. As she passed by, gazing with a desire to laugh alone, her associations expanded. Cheerfully cursing the past surgery in her heart with a “Chort povery!” (Devil take you!), she relaxed her lips in a solitary smile. If—as Russians say—one devil vanished from each small black hole, what a horde must have disappeared from these snow-pocked hollows here! The Russian adults and children who cursed using “chort,” those countless devils of all sizes they’d expelled from homes where they’d holed up all winter—now slipping out through spring-opened doorways to burrow into these holes with sighs of relief—Nobuko found it all terribly comical.

“With my Russian, I could never express such absurdity properly. That was pure chort through and through – utterly ridiculous…” Nobuko melted her relief into laughter and playfully teased Motoko.

Seventeen With it decided that she wouldn’t need surgery, Nobuko began spending as much of the long daytime hours as possible out of bed, practicing staying awake. A concrete basis formed for her discharge by March’s end. The plan to reunite with her family in France now took practical shape. Among the congratulatory telegrams sent by March 14th for Kazuichiro and Koeda’s wedding, Nobuko included one stating: FOR MOTHERS HEALTH TAKE AMERICA ROUTE. Takeyo—whose diabetic eczema grew so severe each summer she couldn’t remain in Tokyo—why would she contemplate enduring the Indian Ocean’s sweltering heat via midsummer European routes? As Nobuko methodically expanded her considerations, they struck her as reckless. For her family to travel safely and comfortably, Takeyo’s health demanded priority: even at greater expense, the cooler northern Pacific route seemed safer—crossing America via northern railways before reaching France from the Atlantic.

On the night when Kazuichiro and Koeda's wedding had been held in Japan that day, Nobuko found herself unable to sleep for some reason and had not turned off the light in her hospital room even past nine o'clock.

It was nearly ten o'clock. The door to Nobuko’s hospital room opened, and a female assistant doctor she had seen once quite some time before entered. She held a position midway between a nurse and Boris, Professor Fromgold’s assistant, and was the female assistant doctor who had accompanied rounds shortly after Nobuko was admitted. “Good evening. How are you feeling?” The female assistant doctor, whose name Nobuko did not know, came right up beside Nobuko’s bed.

“It’s been quite some time since we last met.” “You’ve nearly recovered completely now, haven’t you?” With the same square, dry-featured face she’d had when Nobuko last saw her, she chatted amiably, looking at Nobuko and letting her eyes dart over to the table by the bed’s pillow.

“I’m on duty tonight,” said the female assistant doctor. “I remembered you and thought, ‘Alright, I should go visit that pleasant Japanese Madam.’” Nobuko felt that both the timing of her visit and what she was saying seemed forced as she replied, “Thank you.” “I’ve finally started walking again—though I was bedridden for quite a long time.” “Congratulations.”

The female assistant doctor, with an air of restlessness, looked around the room and asked, "Do you mind if I sit for a moment?" "Please do."

Nobuko assumed that the female assistant doctor, like anyone else who came to the hospital room, would sit on the bench placed against the far wall. However, with a familiarity Nobuko had not anticipated, she suddenly sat down diagonally beside the bed where Nobuko lay. Nobuko involuntarily shifted her body slightly sideways under the covers. The female assistant doctor, paying no heed to Nobuko’s undisguised look of annoyance, acted as though the patient’s room at ten o’clock at night were a park bench on a day off,

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” she began. “Yes.”

Nobuko answered briefly. “What sort of things do you write?—Novels?” “Or rasskazy (short stories)?” “Oh, I do love literature.” “I read such an enormous amount!”

To the silent Nobuko, she repeated her question. "Come now, what do you write?" "Novels (*povesti*)." "How wonderful! It's truly a shame they aren't written in Russian. Have they been published?" "I have already published several books." But why on earth did she have to engage in such absurd conversation? Nobuko became utterly bewildered. To make this woman clearly aware she was being a nuisance, Nobuko—

“However many books I may have, it makes no difference to you—since unfortunately you can’t read them,” she said.

“Well, it’s about time for me to sleep.” And as Nobuko began to turn over in bed, the female assistant doctor—for some reason—

“Just a moment longer! “Darling!” “Minutochku! Milaya!” With that, her body—which had been sitting diagonally at the edge of the bed—half-covered Nobuko as she placed her right hand on the far side of Nobuko’s body.

“Please listen, I got married last night.” At that moment, Nobuko wondered if the assistant doctor was drunk. _Vyshla zamuzh._ She got married—but why on earth did this woman need to inform Nobuko of that? Nobuko pulled her head and chin back against the pillow as far as she could, trying to distance her face from the rough-textured, square, and rather ugly visage of the female assistant doctor. “Do you have a husband?”

Sulkily—Nobuko—

“If I have a husband, go find him.” With that, using one hand, “Tight (Tugo).”

Nobuko tried to push away the white-sleeved arm of the assistant doctor leaning over her. Between the doctor's body—not particularly large but heavy—and her hand thrust across Nobuko's form, the bedcovers grew taut over Nobuko's chest, stifling her breath. "Let me breathe!" Using slightly more force than needed, Nobuko twisted her body. The assistant doctor wore a vacant expression. "I'm sorry." She withdrew her hand from across Nobuko's body while righting her own position, yet continued with dogged determination,

“Where are you receiving money from?”

she asked.

With this question, everything crystallized for Nobuko. She must have been placed in a position requiring her to urgently submit an official report regarding Nobuko Sasa—the Japanese woman currently hospitalized at Moscow University Hospital. Moreover, this sudden necessity meant she was hurrying through her task. Even so, what an inept performer she was. The female assistant doctor’s floundering efforts—utterly unsuited to such work, simple-minded and lacking not just malice but even basic cunning—instead evoked pity in Nobuko. Having lived in Moscow for over a year, Nobuko had come to understand these unavoidable Soviet necessities regarding foreigners to some degree. And her understanding carried sympathy. There was no need to maintain innocence toward those who lacked it themselves—this she believed in her heart of hearts. Therefore, in this place where the exceptional had become commonplace, there came a time when even she could not avoid becoming entangled in it all. From Nobuko’s subjective perspective, the most intelligent and precise approach for this assistant doctor would have been to state directly: “Please answer these specific matters.” Yet she could not do so—for her role as medical assistant and her other duty were considered entirely separate obligations, and by the nature of that duty, none but herself could be permitted knowledge of it.

Nobuko explained with utmost candor, both for the woman’s sake and her own. "A writer who’s achieved some recognition for their literary work having a publisher fund their travels in exchange for producing a book—this happens in every country. Do you understand what I’m saying?"

“Why? Of course I understand.” “Bunmeisha, one of Japan’s leading publishers, sends me money for the book I’ll be publishing. Through the Chosen Bank. Understood?” Having managed to glide past the daunting peak of questions she had been floundering over how to surmount, the female assistant doctor finally resumed a more natural expression and demeanor. As though she had forgotten how she had so abruptly blurted out last night that she’d gotten married—as if drunk on something—she smiled brightly,

“Surely you’ll be able to write an interesting book about the Soviet Union,” she said, adding in the same unaffected tone she’d used when first declaring her love of literature, “I hope it gets translated into Russian.”

After sitting in silence at the edge of the bed for a while longer, the female assistant doctor eventually stood up quietly and,

“Good night,” she said.

“I’m sorry for intruding.”

When the female assistant doctor closed the door and was about to leave the hospital room, Nobuko called out loudly from her bed, “Please turn off the light. Please do.”

she requested. The next day, when Motoko came at the usual visiting hours and was told by Nobuko about the entire events of the previous night, “Huh.” “But now, of all times—isn’t that absurd?”

She said with eyes darting as she tried to quickly assess the situation. "It's not like she just arrived here yesterday or today." "You think so, don't you? I didn't understand it either. But when I really thought about it, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise."

“Blessing? … What kind?” “Army Major Fujiwara Takeo’s...”

“I see… That makes sense.”

Motoko acknowledged with a groan.

“But I can’t think of it any other way. This is the first time since we came to Moscow that something like this has happened.” Nobuko believed her own conjecture as the circumstances closest to reality. The more she thought about it, the more her expression grew despondent, and she became dejected,

"Honestly, Mother!"

With a dejected expression that suggested even getting angry would be futile, she turned her face to the window and fell silent. At that time, in the Soviet Union, they did not permit foreign travel without a clear purpose or reason, and there were restrictions on the amount of rubles that could be taken abroad for travel. Nobuko and Motoko needed to make arrangements so that at some convenient location they would depart to from Moscow, Nobuko could receive funds from Bunmeisha, and Motoko could receive funds she had entrusted to her cousin in Tokyo. Now that Nobuko had finally begun to walk slowly and unsteadily down the hospital corridor, Motoko took over her role and walked around whenever she found time to look into the matter. Nobuko and Motoko carefully kept these matters as a private affair between themselves. At least until Professor Fromgold approved Nobuko’s trip to Karlsbad and wrote some sort of certificate for her. Both Nobuko and Motoko greatly feared having unwanted people—people like Fujiwara Takeo—meddle in their plan.

Eighteen After all—though referred to as matters of the Sasa household—they had been decided by Takeyo’s will alone. But when on earth had she managed to formulate this plan to come to Europe, make the decision, and even reserve a cabin?

When Nobuko had read about half of Takeyo’s second thick letter—which finally arrived around March 30th after being preempted by the exchange of telegrams between Moscow and Tokyo—she found herself gripped by that question. When she looked at the last page of the letter, there was a date written by Takeyo: February 21st in the evening. When had the first letter been sent—the one that said she had learned of Nobuko’s illness through Motoko’s notification and had been deeply moved? Nobuko took a paper holder from the bedside table and tried to take out the stored letter. It was dated February 5th. Comparing the two dates, Nobuko thought the speed was tremendous. In just under two weeks, Takeyo—who could stir up a commotion even over a trip to the country house—had managed to decide all this. It was so characteristic of Takeyo—this single-minded decisiveness. Passionate forcefulness. It seemed one could sense a sudden whirlwind state that had been stirred up within the Dōzaka household. In the midst of it all, even Kazuichiro and Koeda’s wedding ceremony was wedged in.

However, regarding Kazuichiro and Koeda's marriage, the emotions expressed in Takeyo's newly arrived letter—an unexpected calmness that differed from expectations, even a tone that could be perceived as cold—took Nobuko by surprise. This time, as our trip abroad was finally approaching, because the legal formalities for Kazuichiro and Koeda had become necessary, we decided to hold the wedding ceremony on the fourteenth of next month as an auspicious date. It was written that preparations were underway with the mother's heart seeking to bless the future of this young couple through boundless love. This tone was bureaucratic. Somehow, with the necessity regarding our trip abroad being the main focus, it gave the feeling that Kazuichiro and Koeda's wedding ceremony was being conducted.

"Ah, but how many would understand what lies in this mother's heart as she casually smiles at the well-wishers coming and going?" "My child who has become a god may know my heart—weeping while smiling, smiling while weeping."

As she read, Nobuko felt gloom and apprehension. There, a more tangible cloud welled up to obscure the expression of blessings bestowed upon the young couple. The sense that Mother did not genuinely welcome Kazuichiro and Koeda’s marriage lay exposed. Takeyo harbored some unexpressed thought she had not committed to paper. And this was considered something only he could understand.

Nobuko continued reading with an expression as if her lips were slightly pursed from bitterness. The wedding would be held privately with only relatives in attendance, and it was written that the reception at Hoshigaoka Tea House would include the same group. Looking at the list of expected guests, Nobuko thought that even the relatives who were to be invited would likely find it somewhat unconventional. Takeyo—who, as the Sasa family heir in daily life, could not even stop the family driver from calling Kazuichiro "young master." Takeyo, who as Taizo’s professional successor voiced dissatisfaction that Taizo’s efforts to promote him were insufficient. If Takeyo were to hold Kazuichiro’s wedding extravagantly, foolish as that might be, it would make sense—after all, that was precisely the kind of mother she was. As justification for keeping it so private, Takeyo wrote that bringing the young couple along on this European trip would incur enormous expenses.

The act of taking the young couple along was clearly presented in Takeyo’s writing as a parental benevolence toward them. Just as Takeyo had determined that deciding to visit Nobuko—even at the cost of her own health—was an expression of boundless parental love, Nobuko found herself unable to accept such simplicity. For Takeyo’s phrasing—“In light of our upcoming trip abroad”—though barely twenty words long, how decisively it positioned them all: Takeyo, Taizo, and herself as the central figures! There had been no protective phrasing about “coming to where you are” while envisioning Nobuko ahead, nor any mention of “wanting to show the young people too.” Under the banner of their foreign trip, every thought in Takeyo’s mind had to be subordinated to this purpose. Each action was summarily dismissed as mere outpourings of parental affection. What pained Nobuko most was how Takeyo appeared to proclaim to everyone she met—even newspaper and magazine reporters—that this grand family expedition had been conceived solely through an irrepressible parental love directed at her.

Nobuko felt her underarms grow damp. She sensed on her cheeks the imagined scorn of those who would think, "Hmph." Why couldn't Mother ever just state things plainly—in a way that would let anyone accept them without question? My daughter is ill abroad. It worries me, and since I want to see foreign lands at least once, I've decided to take everyone on a small trip. Who could possibly find fault with that?

Using the white paper of Takeyo’s letter as a screen, black and gray and madder—revealing glimpses of mystically garish aqua—kept drifting past one after another. To Nobuko, it felt exactly that way. This chaotic swirl of indeterminate colors reflected and flowed across her being, yet Nobuko could neither grasp them to unify into a single hue nor find the strength to calm their ceaseless, restless motion.

After putting away the letter, Nobuko lay on her back atop the pillow for a long time. Tears that would not form flowed within Nobuko’s chest. Takeyo’s unfathomable intensity. Nobuko found it unbearable—the psychological incongruity of a love she perceived as hypocrisy. That, for Mother, was an utterly sincere and genuine sentiment, and she believed that all her actions could only arise from that sentiment—what was Nobuko to do? For Takeyo, the world likely consisted of nothing but good things and bad things. And “Mother” was considered to belong fundamentally to the realm of good. Nobuko thought with grief. But in life, beyond good and evil, there exists a kind of unbearable feeling that Mother does not know. That unbearable feeling was something Nobuko had to experience all too often between herself and Takeyo. When that was called Nobuko’s lack of kindness and coldness, her unbearable feelings burned and turned into resentment many times over.

Unrelated to all these undulations within Nobuko’s heart, Natasha now saw Nobuko as a patient who had begun walking the corridors, treated her as a lone patient nearing discharge—no longer needing a wheelchair—and herself had grown increasingly grand in the roundness of her belly. The soft apricot hue of her cheeks grew deeper against her energetic features framed by curly hair.

“Natasha, when does your vacation start?”

“In sixteen more days.” “Then I’ll probably be left here, I suppose.”

Nobuko’s discharge was now a matter of time. But whether it could be done within March or spill over into next month, Nobuko did not know. During Professor Fromgold’s rounds, Nobuko had just broached the topic of going to a foreign hot spring. The family in Japan would come to France. She wanted to go to a hot spring somewhere, rest for a while, and then meet her family in France. When Nobuko said that, Professor Fromgold made his pince-nez glitter and, in a somewhat nasal high-pitched voice—

“That’s splendid!”

he said, leaning his white-coated upper body forward from where he sat on the examination chair. However, the matter had still not progressed beyond that point. The sight of Natasha looking forward to her approaching vacation day by day was moving. She continued to work diligently as ever, fulfilling all necessary duties, and seemed determined to make the two-month paid leave that was approaching—earned through such work—entirely fitting for herself. Every morning when she woke up, Natasha seemed to count down the remaining days with her young husband—flipping calendar pages as if declaring “Just this many left!”—and the joy of their plans, which needed no explanation even to Nobuko, one of her assigned patients, would sometimes spill over onto her apricot-toned cheeks during her shifts.

“Natasha, simply watching you makes me feel like something good might happen.”

Nobuko truly did feel that way. The simplicity of her clear-sighted way of living. The uncloudedness of joy. When she imagined this Natasha holding a baby with her young baritone husband beside them, what appeared was not merely a portrait of youth, but rather a family portrait of entirely new substance. What a difference there was compared to Dōzaka family life—governed by fervor without clear purpose and days piling up under a dizzying tangle of aimless emotions. When Nobuko thought of Natasha’s “family,” fresh as a ripe tomato, she found solace from the complex, intractable jumble of thoughts imposed by Dōzaka family life. When Tamotsu had died that way—taking as his environment what ultimately stifled his life and suffocated even herself—Nobuko felt a distance between life in Dōzaka and her own way of living that could never be bridged. And feeling herself entrenched in Soviet society, she had lived clinging to that sensation. Even as the emotional distance fissuring her heart and her rejection of Dōzaka life remained unchanged, the inescapable logic of daughterhood and kinship’s unavoidable concerns came chasing after her—stirring Nobuko from her recent untroubled ease. She spoke as if wanting to shield Natasha’s joy with unclouded sincerity.

“Natasha, do enjoy your vacation thoroughly.” At this, Natasha smiled warmly at Nobuko and said, “I can take walks.” She spoke simply. “Being able to take walks—this is the very foundation of a vacation’s enjoyment,” she said in such a manner. Come to think of it, this made perfect sense. For Natasha—who worked full days as a nurse and spent nights attending the Workers’ Faculty at Moscow University Medical School, living within strictly regimented hours—the ability to take walks, to have time for unhurried daytime strolls, meant free time into which all manner of other possible pleasures could be packed: the surest proof of liberation and rest.

Tree after tree across Moscow, gutter after gutter on buildings, were cheerfully wet and glistening with March’s meltwater—and the dazzling thaw, with its rainbows cast upon snowdrifts and puddles shrinking lower each day, came flooding into Nobuko’s hospital room. The murmur of spring harmonized with the cheerful appearance of the heavily pregnant Natasha and blended with the bright anticipation of Nobuko’s imminent discharge. The family commotion and Takeyo’s agitating passion. Thinking of the disjointed arguments was painful, but it would be a lie to say that seeing France after a full year in Moscow and meeting her family was nothing but a burden for Nobuko. One day, Nobuko decided to write three letters to her family in Japan. Addressed to her parents, addressed to Kazuichiro and his wife, and addressed to her younger sister Tsuyako—who by now must have become a fifteen-year-old girl during the nearly three years since she last saw her. Keep luggage to a minimum. Mother should travel in the kimonos she is accustomed to wearing, since Takeyo would not be taking buses or trains anyway. Bring slightly more tabi socks and about three pairs of zori. Prepare for scattered showers—a coat or something. Above all, it was toward Kazuichiro and Koeda that Nobuko held the most concrete expectations for what the trip would yield. The main point of the letter was that, as a young architect, Kazuichiro should not come in a carefree sightseeing mood but instead prepare to observe and explore with a specific theme from his professional standpoint. To Tsuyako, Nobuko wrote like a homeroom teacher for junior students at a girls’ school. You must learn to handle your own personal affairs and be able to pack without relying on Mother or Koeda, she wrote. You’ve always had someone help you with whatever you needed to do until now, you see,

Around the time it was decided that Nobuko would be discharged in about a week, Dr. Yoshizawa—a friend of Taizo’s who had been rumored about—arrived via Siberia and stopped in Moscow for several hours en route to attending a League of Nations conference in Geneva. In that brief period, Motoko met with Dr. Yoshizawa, discussed Nobuko’s progress, and reported on the treatment that had been administered to Nobuko.

“Well, that’s probably already settled there.” That was Dr. Yoshizawa’s opinion. “As for treatment methods, he said there’s nowhere that offers anything better.” “He said if you return to Japan and spend a month at hot springs, you’ll be completely cured.”

That was what Motoko conveyed.

Nobuko,

“Going back to Japan... to a hot spring?...” Suddenly she looked anxious.

“Aren’t we trying to go in the opposite direction?” “It’s about what happens once we return to Japan. Mother has apparently asked Dr.Yoshizawa to send a telegram. Depending on how you’re doing, they’ll decide whether to come over.” Nobuko looked at Motoko with questioning eyes. How strange—if only Takeyo would just say plainly, “I want to see the West too,” then everyone’s feelings could be settled cleanly! She felt anew the contradictions she had sensed in Takeyo’s letters. That those who claimed they’d risk death to visit their ailing daughter would base their decision on circumstances—that they’d only come if Nobuko’s travels went well—struck her as fundamentally inconsistent.

In any case, a telegram arrived from Dr. Yoshizawa: “TATE. YOSHIZAWA.” On the first Saturday of April, Nobuko was discharged from Moscow University Hospital after nearly four months and returned to Motoko’s narrow, narrow room in Astozhenka—carrying the small slip from Professor Fromgold certifying her trip to Karlsbad.

Chapter Two

1

Nobuko Sasa and Motoko Yoshimi departed Moscow and arrived in Warsaw on the afternoon of April 30, 1929. Rain had been falling since morning, soaking the Polish fields and farmlands that stretched beyond the train window. The rain still had not let up when they reached Warsaw. The dim concrete of Warsaw Station—stained with soot, soaked by rain and mud—stood gloomily illuminated as crowds speaking a language that resembled Russian yet remained incomprehensible to Nobuko and Motoko bustled about. This commotion felt choppier and more nervous than the heavy, sluggish crowds they had grown accustomed to at Moscow's stations. The two hired a horse-drawn carriage in front of the station. It resembled Moscow's carriages with its low, wide seats. Dripping from its black hood, the emaciated horse pulled this carriage bearing Nobuko and Motoko—who peered curiously from beneath their shelter at Warsaw's early spring evening veiled in rainy haze—to a hotel facing a small square that resembled a park, thick with shrubbery.

The passports that Nobuko and Motoko carried in their travel handbags contained endorsements issued by the Japanese Embassy in Moscow for travel to Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, and bore a visa from the Polish Legation stationed in Moscow. The itinerary for Nobuko and Motoko was to go from Warsaw to Vienna, then via Prague and Karlsbad, staying a while in Berlin. Nobuko’s family was scheduled to arrive in Marseille on July 1st. By then, Nobuko and Motoko were supposed to have arrived in Paris. Having lived there for a year and a half, life in Moscow—a foreign land for Nobuko and Motoko—had gradually become second nature to them, but upon crossing the Polish border, both Nobuko and Motoko now felt themselves embarking anew on a foreign journey.

With the carefree spirit of being newly embarked on a long journey and an unaccustomed nonchalance, Nobuko and Motoko had not made any particular selection of a hotel in Warsaw, where they were staying for just one night. Following the carriage’s guidance, they took a room at a hotel near the station that seemed to cater exclusively to border-crossing clientele.

The impression they had received at Warsaw Station. Then, in the lobby and dining room of that third-rate hotel, as they encountered an atmosphere that felt both greasy and ostentatious, Nobuko and Motoko became acutely aware that here they were foreigners—treated as nothing more than transient outsiders. This intensity of foreignness among the country's people was something they had never experienced in Moscow. Moreover, there seemed to be a particular nuance in how Warsaw regarded foreigners arriving from Moscow.

When a second-floor front room overlooking the square at the hotel was secured, Motoko promptly went down to the lobby and bought cigarettes at a corner kiosk. For Motoko, who loved tobacco, the pleasure of this journey lay in being able to sample and compare cigarettes from at least several different countries. Motoko began a tobacco-related conversation in Russian. Then, on the lips of the young female clerk, there appeared an expression—so faint that Nobuko could not help but perceive it as one of contempt. The saleswoman obligingly dealt with Motoko, handed over the change without looking at her face, and said "Merci" in French.

A similar thing happened in the hotel dining room. The elderly waiter in charge of Nobuko and Motoko’s table, while fully understanding the Russian that Motoko spoke, never once replied in the same language, responding instead with a French “Oui, madame” to every word. Extremely politely, and obstinately.

—

Amid the clatter of dishes and ceaseless comings-and-goings that stirred the dining room’s air, a string quartet played a minuet. Nobuko began eating with an attentive expression, as if listening to the music, but soon— “Oh! White bread!” she murmured in a hushed, startled voice, then looked across at Motoko’s face.

She muttered in a startled whisper. And she looked at Motoko’s face across from her.

“Right?”

“It’s true,” she said. “Pure white.”

Motoko tore off a piece of her own bread and examined it, "The fact that we’re surprised by white bread just shows how much we’ve turned into country bumpkins," she said with a wry smile. In Moscow, there had only been black bread and loaf-shaped breads baked with a brownish powder. Having grown accustomed to this, Nobuko now found herself startled first by the soft whiteness of the French bread she had absentmindedly broken on her plate. Yet to Nobuko, the whiter the snow-white bread was, the more it seemed incongruous with the faintly grimy atmosphere around them—a mismatch as stark as the stubborn manner of the emaciated old waiter who would only say “Oui, madame” or “Oui, mademoiselle.”

After finishing their meal, as they came out into the lobby, Motoko said to Nobuko in a half-teasing tone: “Bukko-chan has her moments.” “Your first words upon arriving in Europe were, ‘Oh, white bread!’” “That’s artless in the best way.” “But isn’t that really how it is?” “That’s exactly why it’s artless.” And yet, how deep-rooted was the silent resentment Warsaw’s people held toward Russia. If people who had even been forbidden from receiving education in Polish during the imperial era held resentment toward old Russia, Nobuko could comprehend that. But she had not expected that even now, such intense resentment toward the Russian language would still be harbored.

"I wonder if the people of Poland don’t realize how much Russia has changed now—it’s become something completely different, and yet…" Nobuko said regretfully. Poland not only became independent after Soviet Russia but also came to include a wide region of Ukraine in 1920. "They were oppressed so harshly that they can’t shake off their suspicions." "They probably think, ‘Who would trust what the Soviets say?’"

In Poland, where the military man Piłsudski ruled as dictator, appeals to the League of Nations from an anti-Soviet nationalist stance led to actions like partitioning Ukraine. In that region of Ukraine which had once been Soviet territory, Jewish massacres occurred from time to time, and Nobuko and Motoko had read the gruesome reports in Moscow newspapers on more than one occasion. Nobuko and Motoko headed toward the front desk in the hotel lobby with unhurried steps. Where in Warsaw would tomorrow's May Day be held? They were at the hotel counter to inquire about this—perhaps also to ask where the theater was located.

At the old-fashioned counter—disproportionately cramped relative to the lobby’s spaciousness—two groups of newly arrived travelers were examining floor plans to select their rooms. Waiting for them to finish their business, Nobuko and Motoko stood aside. The travelers conversed in German. The manager—dressed in an unmistakably professional frock coat—responded with hurried “Ja, ja” replies to what appeared to be detailed requests from one couple’s wife. The sight of this large-breasted, reddish-haired wife assertively negotiating their hotel arrangements while pushing aside her timid, long-nosed husband—who looked unwell—proved so amusing that Nobuko failed to notice she had dropped her handkerchief.

Just then, a young Polish officer in resplendent sky-blue military uniform—appearing as if attending some banquet within the hotel—happened to pass by. He bent down with practiced grace and retrieved from the crimson carpet the handkerchief Nobuko had dropped unaware,

“Voilà—Mademoiselle.” He stood upright, clicked both heels of his riding boots sharply together to make his spurs clink clearly, and with a restrained smile offered the white linen handkerchief to Nobuko. The way he said “Voilà—Mademoiselle” carried a luster polished through social refinement. The clear ringing sound of the clinking spurs. With a gesture that lightly hooked and lifted the handkerchief as if by his fingertips, he presented it to the petite Nobuko. That entire sequence of movements was as light and rhythmic as a passage from a dance itself.

Nobuko stood there, not even considering that others might be watching. In the final moments before departing Moscow, in haste, she had hurriedly sewn soft gray Angora fur onto its collar and cuffs and was wearing the navy-blue tailored coat. When she saw what was being offered to her—the unexpected realization that it was her own handkerchief she’d dropped at some unknown moment, combined with the young officer’s overly flamboyant, salon-like manner of retrieving it—Nobuko found her ears turning red without conscious will. And then, with a gesture as if she had been invited into a dance partner’s greeting,

“Merci,” she said. The young officer gazed at Nobuko’s face—flushed with embarrassment at using foreign words—his eyes brimming with contained laughter. He stood upright once more, clicked his riding boots together with a sharp clack that rang his spurs clear, and departed. The moment he left, Nobuko was suddenly overwhelmed by awkwardness. I put on airs without meaning to—saying “Merci” like that. When I don’t even know French. She felt relieved Motoko hadn’t witnessed this.

Motoko was saying to the manager in a slightly raised voice in Russian, a tone verging on negotiation.

“Why? “Of course you should know—you must know, given your duties…” Nobuko moved aside.

“What’s wrong?”

Glancing briefly at Nobuko, Motoko said in Japanese with a meaningful bitter smile, “He claims he doesn’t know anything about May Day.”

In Warsaw, how May Day was perceived became apparent to Nobuko and Motoko. Nobuko took over and said to the manager in English.

“As written in the guest register, we are writers and need to observe the scene on May 1st—where is the procession?” The manager, raising the arm of his black frock coat and stroking his mustache, listened to what Nobuko was saying, then answered in heavily German-accented English that seemed begrudging: “According to this morning’s newspaper, the procession will gather at Theater Square.” He continued,

“However, it’s dangerous,” he warned while shaking his head—parted down the middle and slicked with pomade. “Who knows where they’ll do what?—It’s no place for ladies like you to approach.”

The only thing Nobuko and Motoko could learn from the manager about tomorrow’s May Day was that the May Day procession would gather at Theater Square.

When they left Moscow, they had looked forward with keen interest, thinking this year’s May Day would be in Warsaw. Last year’s May Day, from the viewing stands of Red Square, they had watched hundreds of thousands of people ebbing and flowing to the music in procession. How the towns must have been filled with red flags, crowds, and songs! The resounding roar... What a vivid reality it must have had. That joy and satisfaction which filled the holiday atmosphere had permeated even the somewhat weary quiet of Moscow’s city streets on the afternoon after the procession ended. Nobuko could not forget that impression. What kind of May Day would there be in Poland? They would observe Warsaw’s May Day. After all, if they were to be in Warsaw on May 1st, it was only natural for both Nobuko and Motoko to direct their interest accordingly.

Without knowing the exact time or place, around nine o'clock the next morning, Nobuko and Motoko left the hotel together.

By the time they awoke, the rain that had still been falling finally ceased, leaving the sidewalk cold and thinly damp. From the stiff branches of street trees still bearing spring buds, large raindrops fell with audible plops onto Nobuko's shoulders as she walked. After several inquiries to passersby, the street they were approaching appeared to run along one outer edge of the city park. A low iron fence stood there, beyond which lay a thicket of shrubs. The sidewalk, squeezed between rigidly spaced street trees and the iron fence, felt not just chilly and desolate but saw only rare pedestrians. Those occasional passersby too hurried past with raincoat collars upturned, hands thrust in pockets, shoulders hunched as if shrinking into themselves.

Nobuko and Motoko walked on half-doubtfully, saying to each other, "I wonder if this is really okay..." Even if there could be no May Day morning atmosphere like Moscow's here, it didn’t seem possible that this cold, wet, deserted street would bring them to encounter Warsaw’s May Day procession anywhere. “With things like this,” Motoko said, “there might not even be a procession.”

“I wonder… Could that really be? There should be workers here though…” As they walked on with their gazes fixed ahead, the low iron fence of the park that had run continuously along the right side of the sidewalk abruptly came to an end. Ahead appeared a tall brownish building. Where the stone exterior—taller than Nobuko and her companion were tall—ended, it formed an arcade resembling a castle gate. The imposing depths of that arcade created a plaza-like space. Several trucks packed with people were parked there. Nobuko and Motoko looked suspiciously in that direction.

“This feels off.—There’s no way this dump qualifies as Theater Square.”

Hesitating yet, the two of them walked into the gloomy plaza-like space surrounded by buildings. Compared to Moscow’s Red Square, this stone-paved area—perhaps a tenth its size—had dozens of trucks parked with their bodies pressed close to the bases of tall stone structures that enclosed it on three sides. On every truck stood men and women uniformly dressed in khaki overcoats resembling raincoats, wearing similar-colored rain hats and leaning on long sticks. Each vehicle appeared to carry a fixed number of people. Among the ranks of stick-bearing figures on the trucks, there was none of the casual banter typical to such scenes—even those smoking cigarettes were scarce. Though everyone wore identical clothing, only the older members who seemed to be leaders had climbed down from the trucks, clustering here and there on the stone pavement to exchange fragmented words and check their wristwatches. An atmosphere of tension hung over everything, as if they were waiting for something.

Nobuko and Motoko, who had stepped into the place without suspicion, found their caution awakened by the unusual atmosphere. While sensing that something was amiss, out of traveler’s curiosity, they did not attempt to leave the square. The people on the trucks were all wearing armbands over their raincoats. On a white background, in black typeface-like characters, it could be read as "Stadtgard." If Gard meant security, then Stadt—like in Kronshtadt—would that mean city? From the trucks, indifferent mechanical gazes were directed toward Nobuko and Motoko. At the far end of the square opposite the arcade from which Nobuko and Motoko had entered stood a single café and a short row of shops. Those shops had closed their fireproof shutters, leaving only the café open. A single passageway leading out of the sack-shaped square remained unobstructed in that section.

Nobuko and Motoko stopped in the middle of a square surrounded by tall buildings and looked around at the ominous scene. One wore a soft gray angora fur-trimmed coat, the other a camel-colored coat—they stood there exposed to the encircling surveillance from trucks that had stopped around the square. The only ordinary-looking people present at that time and place were these two: Nobuko and Motoko. From any perspective, they appeared as foreign women who couldn’t speak Polish—their natural, unguarded demeanor betraying complete unfamiliarity with the situation. As Nobuko and Motoko gradually sensed the abnormality in the square’s atmosphere, they began walking again without mutual consultation,

“Shall we go a little further that way?” They approached the edge of the square where a single café had opened its doors. Looking back from there, thin sunlight beginning to filter through the rain-washed sky was blocked by tall buildings, spilling only halfway across the square. The rear half of the stone pavement lay cast in a chill shadow, the stark interplay of light and dark rendering the square undeniably gloomy. It was when Nobuko and Motoko had roughly grasped their surroundings. From the lead truck among three parked in single file facing the rightward street as seen from the café came a shout—unintelligible to them. It was some kind of signal. Instantly, khaki raincoat-clad figures from that truck leapt down from both sides with sticks in hand, merging with others from the following two trucks to form a unit that swiftly massed at the narrow town entrance on the right. Something had begun. Only then did Nobuko and Motoko realize they were surrounded by a crowd before they knew it. Where had all these people come from? When? Until moments ago, only khaki-clad figures and themselves had occupied this eerily desolate square. Now the exit to the side street where they stood on tiptoe peering ahead swarmed with people. Over their heads, red flags advanced from a considerable distance—fewer than ten visible from Nobuko’s vantage. The moment she saw them, an uncanny shock struck her. The flags pressed forward silently. Not a single May Day song carried from that direction. Their pace toward her quickened.

With no songs, fewer than ten red flags—sorrowful yet resolute like those who were firmly determined—tilted their tops slightly forward and advanced persistently straight ahead. Standing on tiptoe, Nobuko involuntarily clenched her gloved hand into a fist. Though it was May Day, they sang no May Day songs—what thoughts filled those few souls gathered beneath red flags as they pressed toward the square? Suddenly, as the leading flags swayed high, the march seemed to break into a run, and with it rose a rapid-tempo Internationale. When the red flags drew near over the fierce strains of The Internationale, the human barricade blocking Nobuko and Motoko's path—khaki-clad figures at its forefront—collapsed and surged forward. The Internationale ceased. Jumbled shouts forced through mingled voices erupted from beyond Nobuko's view. A struggle began. The fewer than ten red flags swayed chaotically over angry cries until—as if someone tried seizing them—a murderous human surge pushed back toward where Nobuko stood. The march had broken through the khaki-clad group's stick-built barricade yet still pressed onward. The human whirlpool spread through the square; Nobuko and Motoko clasped hands to avoid separation, their small Japanese frames battered until they were forced from clashing streets back to a distant café. At that moment—bang. Bang—then after a pause, two more pistol-like reports rang clear.

“Let’s get inside now!”

Nobuko and Motoko pushed open the café’s front door and entered, their posture more like a stagger. And then, they took seats at the table in front of the café’s large display window—the only spot with vacant seats. The chaos of the square was right there beyond the display window. Far from it—the shoulders and backs of the crowd pressed against it so forcefully that one might think the wide display window glass would shatter at any moment.

The calm inside the café, separated from such outdoor scenes by just a single pane of glass, felt utterly contrasting to Nobuko. It wasn't only Nobuko and Motoko there looking outside. Three or four hatless men of sturdy build in suits sat, each with a coffee cup placed on the table before them. Some had spread newspapers on their laps as if they'd stopped reading due to the growing commotion outside, and were gazing outdoors. One man shifted on his chair, clamping the café's small table between his spread legs in ill-mannered fashion, and peered up through the display window at the churning crowd outside, hands thrust in trouser pockets all the while.

To Nobuko, frightened yet remaining there, the men’s strangely unperturbed demeanor around her felt somehow unnatural. If gunfire were to break out, even within the café’s interior, their position—exposed to the square with only a single display window separating them—would not be safe. Even so, within the cramped café interior, there were no other secluded seats to move to. Directly behind where Nobuko and Motoko sat stood the counter, where a portly old man in a white shirt and waistcoat had planted himself behind it, arms crossed as he watched the square through the front door.

The pistol-like sounds that Nobuko had heard and fled into the café to escape did not repeat beyond those two shots. The May Day procession, blocked at the entrance by the khaki-coated men, ultimately could not enter the square. Not a single red flag appeared within Nobuko’s field of vision as she stood fixed in place at the square. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the commotion of the crowd began to die down. It was then that Nobuko noticed—the crowd packing the square consisted almost entirely of men, with no women in sight. And she could not discern which strata of Warsaw citizens these hundreds of men gathered in the gloomy square belonged to. Were they people who had come hoping to guide the May Day procession and its red flags into the square? Or did most of them linger here hoping for chaos should those flags enter? ――

As the crowd thinned, Nobuko noticed a man’s suit outside the café’s display window—worn-out like that of an unemployed person—as he struck matches to light cigarettes. There were even men mixed in who looked like tramps, wearing raincoats that were dirty and stained with grease.

Nobuko and Motoko left the café after the square had become quite deserted. Neither of them spoke unless necessary. Both bore the clouded, weary look in their eyes that followed subsided agitation.

The air of the square where the two of them stood looking again remained turbulent, the crowd's scuffle having just dispersed. The shadows of the several trucks that had been parked flush against the outer walls of the tall buildings surrounding the square were gone, and the khaki-coated men had completely scattered. Along with them, the May Day procession and red flags had vanished just as quickly.

Nobuko and Motoko left the front of the café with some urgency and went out to where they could see down the street where the procession had earlier tried to enter the square. Now along that street there were only scattered figures of people—two or five at a time—receding into the distance. Nobuko felt a sharp sadness rising from the bright emptiness of the road surface stretching clearly before her. Where had all those procession people gone? And what of those swaying red flags?—The Internationale, sung for just a few bars before abruptly cutting off. Though to Nobuko it seemed the silenced singing and the shadows of red flags that had rippled over the crowd’s sea of heads should still linger beneath that sky, all that stretched along the street was a hollowness reaching endlessly ahead. Nobuko involuntarily drew a deep breath and felt her nostrils quiver. This was Warsaw’s May Day. Warsaw’s May Day—glimpsed for an instant before being scattered. How many hundreds had been in that procession? Nobuko couldn’t begin to guess, but it felt unnatural how those who’d marched clustered under red flags had vanished from around the square as completely and swiftly as the khaki-coated men. To Nobuko, it resembled the desperate agility of people subjected to cruelty. They must have hidden their red flags and run at full speed. She found herself comparing it to Moscow’s May Day streets where red flags and placards had stood like forests above surging music. Tears seeped into Nobuko’s eyes. For those who had marched with red flags on Warsaw’s May Day, she felt an incommunicable sympathy—and pity.

Having lost any desire to retrace their path, Nobuko and Motoko walked with a pace that seemed driven by their own violently agitated emotions through streets permeated with emptiness until they circled around to the main avenue of the city park.

In stark contrast to the desolate sidewalk they had passed earlier—littered with scraps of paper along an iron fence—this side was a neat boulevard that seemed meticulously constructed around a modern city park. Meticulously maintained, a lawn with gentle undulations and picturesque charm spread widely to the edge of the clean, broad sidewalk. Along the smooth roadway, splendid automobiles glided, and far ahead, a marble obelisk-like memorial tower stood towering. The sun, nearing noon, shone directly down from overhead onto that affluent-seeming boulevard. A faint smell of gasoline drifted in the air, and in the distance, the marble of the memorial tower gleamed white.

After walking for a while and observing, Nobuko understood that this park boulevard had been meticulously maintained from end to end—not for those who walked its sidewalks, but to provide a satisfying scenic view from the windows of private automobiles speeding past. Along the sidewalk, not a single bench had been placed. It was a magnificent park boulevard that had been designed solely for walking. Pedestrians who wished to gaze at the park’s fine scenery while basking in the sun and resting on a bench—like Nobuko and Motoko, travelers staying in Warsaw for just a single day who now walked as they did—would never ride in something like automobiles. Even people who did not know how to hail a taxi were among them. Enduring her desire to rest her feet somewhere as she walked, the ostentatious grandeur of this park boulevard gradually began to grate on Nobuko’s nerves. As if sensing Nobuko’s mood, Motoko came to a stop on the sidewalk.

“At this rate, no matter how far we go, it’ll all end up the same.” Motoko looked around as if searching for somewhere to rest. “They could’ve at least put a bench here—it’s so heartlessly designed.” Resignedly, the two continued walking at the same sluggish pace. “This doesn’t make sense. However you look at it, there’s no way May Day could’ve been just that.” Without any clear purpose, both Motoko and Nobuko had hurried here driven by some faint hope in their hearts of finding a proper May Day procession.

“Was it a dispersed demonstration from the start?” “You think so?” Nowhere along the opulently glittering park boulevard before them was there any hint that today was May Day. The scene Nobuko and Motoko had witnessed in the gloomy square behind the park could almost be mistaken for a nightmare.

Nobuko and Motoko returned to the hotel for a late lunch, exhausted and disheartened. Walking back that way made them realize the carriage that had brought them from Warsaw Station had taken a long detour through the rain to reach the city. Cutting straight through the small park where shrub thickets were visible from the station brought them right to the hotel square.

“This is exactly why I can’t stand it! That old man went and took us all around the damn city.”

“It’s fine.” “We’re just sightseeing anyway.” If she got angry at every little thing, it would be unbearable when traveling through countries where she didn’t understand the language, Nobuko thought.

“Thinking about trying to plan some flawless trip and straining myself—I hate that. There’s no way we can outsmart the locals anyway.” “Bukko’s so carefree—thanks to that, I’m the only one who has to pinch pennies and fret.”

After their lunch break, Nobuko and Motoko left the hotel once again. This time for a proper tour of Warsaw. The two of them once again hired a carriage in front of the station. The train that Nobuko and Motoko were to board for Vienna was scheduled to depart Warsaw shortly past seven o'clock that evening. The sightseeing carriages of Warsaw seemed to follow roughly fixed routes, and Nobuko and Motoko's carriage, drawn by a chestnut horse with a coarse mane, passed through several towns and gradually entered narrow, filthy streets. Before long, their carriage approached a lane-like area paved with uneven cobblestones. From the carriage, the windows of houses on both sides pressed so close that one could almost reach out and touch them, all kinds of laundry hung out to dry there. Those laundry items were called such precisely because they were hung wet on clotheslines, but every single one was nothing but rags. A woman who appeared bare-chested could be seen doing something by the window. A shabby hardware store. There was a shop cluttered with locks and old clocks, and on a sidewalk just wide enough for people to pass each other, children clustered together playing. The exposed body of a girl squatting facing them came into Nobuko and Motoko's view as their carriage passed by. The children's bodies and clothes were equally soiled without discrimination. From a nearby window somewhere arose the voices of a man and woman arguing rapidly in Yiddish—a language resembling German. It soon stopped.

The entire narrow, filthy street seemed weighed down by poverty, overpopulation, and a vague yet ceaseless anxiety, while Nobuko and Motoko’s carriage—clattering over uneven cobblestones to the rhythm of the horse’s gait—became enveloped in a stench like that beside a vast garbage dump. This place was called Warsaw’s old town, a quarter where Jewish people had lived for generations. In Moscow there existed a Jewish theater, and at the corner where Tverskaya Street curved toward the Art Theater stood a large, immaculate Jewish restaurant. Nobuko and Motoko would occasionally dine there on distinctive fried fish dishes and other specialties. At that establishment, a woman in neat attire always waited on them.

In Warsaw there, it was certain that within every gap between the densely clustered buildings along those filthy old streets—gaps where unfortunate people of all ages were packed tightly living—an even greater number of bedbugs infested. From the open carriage, a pained sorrow deepened on Nobuko’s face as she gazed at the misery lining both sides of the street. That such deep-rooted, blood-soaked prejudice against Jewish people still persisted even in modern times struck Nobuko as nothing but the inherent darkness of European civilization. Born and raised in Tokyo, she had never personally known the prejudice against Japan’s own outcast communities in rural areas. Though Poland itself had been repeatedly partitioned, though it bore its own history of tragedy and humiliation, the fact that within this nation there still existed those who despised, who shunned, who continued treating Jewish people as targets for massacre—when Nobuko thought of this, anguish and terror gripped her. She had seen photographs from the Great Kanto Earthquake showing corpses of Koreans massacred in Tokyo and elsewhere. The very word “massacre” now made her recall those images from her carriage seat.

In that old town as well, there was not the slightest hint that today was Warsaw’s May Day. Likely the same poverty as yesterday’s. Filth. The filth that would likely cling to the children huddled in the gutters tomorrow, and the strange docility of oppressed people’s children. The carriage carrying Nobuko and Motoko passed through the old town with a horse’s gait reminiscent of a funeral. As they passed through a gate-like structure, the coachman, seeming relieved himself, straightened up on his seat and said in Russian.

“Well, let’s go to the new city area now.” “It’s beautiful over there. There’s a splendid park too.” His tone suggested he himself was sightseeing along the way.

Sure enough, after a while, Nobuko and Motoko’s carriage entered a stately residential area where its all-too-conspicuous station-front passenger-waiting appearance stood out from the surroundings. In the modern park residential area, each mansion stood enveloped by groves of beautiful evergreen trees and flower gardens, each designed with distinctive charm. They also saw gardens where a small child, guarded by a nurse in a spotless white apron, played with a large dog around a grassy fountain. In this neighborhood, being wealthy seemed to be the human norm, and not a single house attempted to conceal this fact as anything but natural. In stark contrast to the people of the old town, who had flooded the cramped streets with their poverty yet found it impossible to conceal.

Through the residential area stretched a smooth roadway and a tree-lined avenue hazy with spring buds, gently visible far into the distance. Feeling they would never become guests of these modern mansions, Nobuko rode past one serenely quiet luxurious residence after another in the carriage. Nobuko suddenly wondered if there wasn't a single Jewish person among the owners of these mansions. There had to be some. Suppose one of these mansions here belonged to the Rothschild clan—what would the neighborhood servants gossip about then? Our neighbor is related to the Rothschilds, you know. Wouldn't they say that? Such servants themselves were Polish, and it was entirely possible they took pride in never having set foot in the old town. Nobuko detested such a possible reality.

The carriage was slowly pulled along at the horse’s pace. Beyond a beautiful hedge of Italian cypresses lay a garden where yellow English daffodils bloomed profusely. Both the beautiful hedge of Italian cypresses and the early-blooming English daffodils were visible from the street through an iron gate adorned with delicate arabesque patterns. It was as if they illustrated life itself here, Nobuko thought. That life differed from the multitudes of lives packed into the foul buildings of the old town, and it differed too from the lives of those who had marched with red flags to that gloomy square whose name Nobuko did not know. And the life with cypresses and yellow daffodils was satisfied with how it differed from countless other lives.—

Nobuko looked at Motoko beside her. Motoko held a lit cigarette in one hand and, with the fingertips of her other hand from which she had removed a glove, picked off tobacco flakes from the tip of her tongue while letting her wandering gaze settle on the passing scenery from the carriage. Judging by her blurred expression and sullen silence, Motoko clearly wasn't in particularly high spirits either. The whiteness of Warsaw's bread that had made her Moscow-accustomed eyes widen in the hotel dining room last night. This came to Nobuko's mind symbolically. The bread had been so white. There was something in Warsaw's life and their glimpse of its cityscape that recalled that bread's whiteness to Nobuko through its opposing darkness. Even May Day seemed to have been sucked into some bottomless void, with the unspoken rule that only those who knew were allowed to know about it. The city of Warsaw itself felt like it was holding some secret.

Just then, the carriage carrying Nobuko and the others approached a certain crossroads—a compact plaza-like space. In that park-like residential area, they had newly created a small decorative circular garden, and from their carriage Nobuko could see the flank of a large marble block placed at its center. From the marble block emerged a memorial statue being carved. The statue had been erected facing the main avenue that sloped gently down toward the lower town.

“It’s Chopin’s memorial statue. “It’s a statue of Chopin—the famous Polish musician.”

The coachman, twisting his body on the driver’s seat to explain this to Nobuko and Motoko in the rear seats while slowly handling the reins, began turning the carriage toward the front of the memorial statue. “What should we do?” With a slightly flustered expression, Motoko looked at Nobuko. “Want to see?” “No, no.”

Nobuko also hurriedly declined. Even if they were shown this capital's famous Chopin statue, Nobuko couldn't imagine how the impression she had received from Warsaw's streets would change in any way. "Let's just go straight."

Motoko waved one hand in a dismissive gesture toward the coachman while, “Fine. “Fine.” “Nye nada (There, there, I don’t need it).”

“Nye nada,” she said. “Pryamo payezhche (Go straight ahead).”

The dusty carriage carrying Nobuko and Motoko continued onward toward a large slope overlooking the lower town. Enveloped in faint evening mist beginning to gather and sunset glow beyond thin clouds, Warsaw's streets all lit up at once.

II

After the Great European War, the opulent authority of the Habsburg dynasty that had dominated Austrian tradition crumbled, and Austria became a republic. Surrounding the capital Vienna, a land so narrow that its agricultural yields could not meet the population's needs was left for the republic. Foreign capital had penetrated every sector. Even so, Vienna strove not to abandon the distinctive features of a city that until recently had been called Europe's Little Paris-Vienna, and the shops lining its grand avenues made efforts through their window displays to create an ambiance unseen in other nations' cities.

Nobuko and Motoko walked along the avenue bathed in sparkling May sunlight, where shops glistened beautifully under its rays. In a women’s shoe store window, elegant shoes—fashionable in Vienna with neutral-toned leather accented in chocolate brown—were lightly arranged on chic glass platforms, their comfort beckoning invitingly. Vienna was, after all, renowned throughout Europe as a city of leathercraft. Along main thoroughfares, shops with carefully lowered sunshades displayed richly colored handbags and cigarette cases made of Vienna’s signature gold-tooled leather in their dim interiors. Motoko, drawn to such items, would invariably stop before each leather goods store to scrutinize its display window. In Vienna, Nobuko and Motoko needed to outfit themselves for the remainder of their travels. While attending to these preparations, Motoko aimed to purchase both a stylish case for personal effects and a ladies’ cigarette holder. Even when finding desirable items, Motoko never bought from the first shop that caught her eye. After leaving their hotel and strolling through Vienna’s streets, she meticulously compared every notable leatherwork shop’s displays one after another. This exhaustive process led them today to a specific store they had marked in a side street—one turn from the main avenue housing their dressmaker’s atelier—where they intended to make their purchases.

Nobuko walked alongside Motoko down the bustling main thoroughfare. At every shop in that area, English sufficed. This testified to how American visitors had been increasing in Vienna of late. Nobuko moved through Vienna’s streets at eleven in the morning with a sunken expression. What was it selling? A white goat with gilded horns passed by, pulling a cream-painted cart while finely jingling the red bells fastened about its neck. A truck went past, then immediately after came a wagon drawn by two large-hooved horses. The frequent and varied traffic of vehicles and beasts subtly enlivened the city’s clamor, layering it with complexity. Thus did Vienna’s streets appear prosperous, thronged with pedestrians. Yet as she walked surveying these countless shops overflowing with goods—more than could ever be used—each display immaculately arranged, Nobuko found herself unable to escape sensing how desperately Vienna strained for commerce’s own sake.

Vienna possessed an urban flavor distinct from Paris, London, or New York—while maintaining the casualness befitting a small republic’s capital, it was crafted with tasteful aristocratic elegance and splendor to delight travelers. Even in Vienna, where the opera and theater season had ended, the very name of the city seemed to carry the lingering reverberation of Strauss’s waltzes. Perched on a chair in the leather goods shop, Motoko picked up one of the men’s wallets displayed before them and sniffed its scent with exaggerated seriousness. The clerk had said, "This is an excellent product. Take a sniff. Can you smell how good it is? You’ll understand right away." Nobuko watched Motoko—who was enjoying this shopping ritual—with detached disinterest, unable to recover her own wounded feelings.

“This is an excellent product,” said the clerk. “Take a sniff. Doesn’t it smell wonderful? You’ll see right away.” Nobuko watched Motoko sniffing the leather wallet with a reluctant expression. She couldn’t recover from her wounded feelings toward Motoko, who was enjoying shopping this way, and remained emotionally detached. Why had Motoko needed to anger her so much this morning at the hotel? Just because her change of blouse hadn’t been in the suitcase? Motoko, who had started changing beside the bed while still half-dressed in her slip, had asked Nobuko—already fully dressed—to take out a blouse from the suitcase. Nobuko had looked through every part of it. But Motoko’s white crêpe de Chine blouse was nowhere to be found. “I wonder what happened… It’s not here,” Nobuko had said carelessly.

"I wonder what's wrong... It's not here," she said.

“There’s no way it’s not here. It’s the only decent blouse I have—there’s no chance we didn’t pack it! Look.” “It really isn’t here… What could have happened?” There was only one suitable suitcase for Nobuko, and into that single case they had packed both Motoko’s and Nobuko’s personal effects.

“Wasn’t it you who packed it, Bukko?”

In the bedroom, still with the curtains undrawn and illuminated by electric light, Motoko stood wearing only a skirt over her slip, with a terrifying gaze and voice,

“Hand it over!” she commanded Nobuko. “There’s absolutely no way I didn’t pack it. How could I have forgotten something like that when I have nothing else to wear? It’s your fault—you’re the one who packed it! Just get it out wherever it is—”

Even if she told her to take it out from somewhere, Nobuko and Motoko only had that single suitcase between them. ——

“It’s impossible—such nonsense.”

Nobuko said while repacking the contents of the overturned suitcase back into place on her own bed, "It was wrong to put both our things in one."

“Hand it over!” Motoko’s jaw twisted into a contorted expression of anger as she approached the bed and grabbed Nobuko’s arm through her clothes—Nobuko still busy repacking—with a tight grip. “What am I supposed to wear without that blouse?” “…” Nobuko could only think she had indeed packed every item Motoko had laid out to be packed together into the suitcase. She was at a loss.

“Maybe you left it hanging in the wardrobe—thinking you’d wear it here?” “That’s not true!” Motoko grabbed Nobuko’s arm painfully and shook her. “What did you forget to bring for yourself? Huh? I haven’t forgotten a single thing! Why should I be the only one stuck wearing these filthy rags?” Her face flushed crimson as she glared fiercely, tears welling in her eyes.

“It’s proof you don’t care about me at all.” “Fine!” “I’ll stay right here forever like this!” Had Ryuzo Kurokawa—the young man who came saying he’d heard from the Vienna legation—not visited them that day, Motoko might truly have never left the hotel bedroom for the entire day.

When the telephone on the table between the two beds rang, Motoko kept gripping Nobuko's arm without even glancing toward it. Naturally, Nobuko couldn't move from her spot either, and the unanswered telephone bell shrilled three or four times through the bedroom where heavy curtains blocked the morning light. Eventually the ringing ceased. After some time came a knock at the door. There stood Ryuzo Kurokawa—a young man with black hair wearing a black suit, yet carrying himself with worldly assurance.

“As I thought, you were here—downstairs they said no one answered the phone, but since the key hadn’t been returned.” “—Forgive my sudden intrusion.” Kurokawa’s arrival became Motoko’s opportunity to break the deadlock too. Wearing yesterday’s white blouse out of necessity, Motoko and Nobuko maintained silence toward each other yet responded normally to Kurokawa as they finished breakfast in the room adjoining their bedroom. Soon all three left the hotel—Nobuko and Motoko heading to their appointed dress shop while Kurokawa set their next meeting date before parting ways. He recommended finding a boarding house for their nearly two-week stay in Vienna and took charge of the task himself. Walking along the bright streets after leaving the hotel, Nobuko glanced sideways at Motoko’s blouse as they walked side by side. Though washed multiple times, Motoko’s white silk blouse had softened from stark purity to muted ivory—yet showed no trace of grime around the delicate pintucks at the chest or along the crisply ironed collar. Strolling through Vienna’s avenues—their first proper European city since Moscow—Nobuko felt reassured the blouse didn’t look shabbily worn. Simultaneously, she found it painful that even after reaching Vienna, Motoko’s feelings toward her remained as tangled as during their Komazawa days or Moscow cohabitation.

In the days ahead of their travels, they would have no choice but to manage with Nobuko’s broken English. Motoko’s frustration at her own words’ ineffectiveness and Nobuko’s carelessness had frayed her nerves, and Nobuko—wondering if even the slightest trigger might reignite another scene like that morning—grew despondent about their travels as she selected a clever little handbag from the leatherwork for herself.

The Viennese-style coffee had fluffy foam of cold cream floating atop its hot, fragrant surface. The distinctive quality lay in sipping it without much stirring—preserving both the aromatic warmth and the cream’s light, melting texture on the tongue.

Nobuko and Motoko, unaware of how to drink it properly, sat in a café with bowls of coffee before them where they had stirred the cream completely into the liquid. On empty chairs lay two ladies' handbags they had bought—one dark green and the other cocoa brown. The dark green one with rigidly squared corners belonged to Motoko. The rich cocoa-brown bag with rounded edges on all four sides was Nobuko's. Like all cafés on Vienna's main streets, this one had unfurled a red-and-white striped awning behind a low-trimmed evergreen hedge facing the roadway. When early summer came, Viennese people would likely rest in the shade of these low green hedges that seemed fit for an opera stage. It was still early May though, and all patrons—including parties of English-speaking women—had taken seats inside the café. The room's walls, framed by crisp silver moldings, displayed wallpaper with pale pink backgrounds where startling vermilion floral and avian patterns—boldly executed with Oriental influences—were depicted. The wallpaper's daring yet refined colors and designs harmonized perfectly with the embossed glass lamp shades attached nearby—their translucent surfaces etched with delicate variations resembling half-opened fans.

Since 1918, when the terrible war ended and Vienna’s era of hunger had passed, Russia had become Soviet, but on this side of Europe, people’s sentiments—reflecting a desire to settle into petit-bourgeois stability and comfort merely by discarding the old aristocracy—and catering to that mood, Vienna’s latest trends in interior decoration became Neo-Rococo, as seen in this café.

In a corner of the café, Nobuko spread out an English-language newspaper she had bought along the way. The two had departed Moscow on April 29th. Until that day on May 5th—a span of seven days—Nobuko and Motoko had been cut off from newspapers. Nobuko’s eyes, which had absentmindedly opened the newspaper, were drawn to the front page with a startled blink. “Berlin City Emerges from Crisis. Disturbances Slightly Subside,” ran the large headline. “The mob has been suppressed in the Wedding-Neukölln district,” read the sub-headline. It was a Reuters dispatch dated May 4th. Compared to how sensationally the headline was treated, the main text was simple. Following the violent May Day march on May 1st, the agitation and unrest that erupted throughout Berlin had been gradually subsiding over these past two days. At present, a portion of the mob continued their resistance in the Neukölln district. However, Unter den Linden and other central streets were safe for foreigners to pass through. That meaning was being reported. The mention of Unter den Linden being safe for foreigners was quintessentially characteristic of Vienna’s English-language newspapers. Germany was in a period when—to absorb travelers from around the world—it had simplified entry procedures and eliminated visa requirements.

“What on earth does this mean? Such things are being published here, but...”

Nobuko handed the newspaper to Motoko. The German Communist Party had maintained a large organization as a legal political party. The three letters K.P.D. had gradually become familiar to Nobuko and the others through their life in Moscow. What exactly had transpired during that violent May Day in Berlin? From the tone conveyed in the newspaper article, one could discern that a fierce armed clash had occurred. Nobuko and Motoko had witnessed in Warsaw what might be called fragmentary glimpses of such heartrending May Day scenes.

“I wonder if Reiji Hida and Koichiro Nakadate are all right.” Nobuko said uneasily. If the entire city of Berlin had been plunged into extraordinary circumstances, then even Reiji Hida—a Japanese journalist—and Koichiro Nakadate—a film director—might find themselves in the midst of the turmoil, Nobuko thought. Both were people whom Nobuko had met when these individuals came from Berlin to Moscow. The fact that these two were the sort who had come from Berlin to Moscow to observe made Nobuko think that when the May Day incident occurred, they would not simply draw the curtains and shut themselves in their Berlin rooms.

“It seems something happened, but you can’t tell from just this.”

Motoko quietly returned the newspaper to Nobuko, who, startled by the news, had forgotten the emotional tension that had existed between them since that morning.

"In any case, those people will be fine. They're foreigners after all." "I don't know. Neither of them seems like the type to stay put." Nobuko recalled their own figures as two women who had taken refuge in that Warsaw square's café. Through the rain-washed sky echoed two gunshot-like sounds—bang, bang. What did it mean that such chaos had erupted in Berlin? Precisely because she couldn't grasp the reason, Nobuko anxiously imagined countless possibilities.

“We must find yesterday’s newspaper, don’t you think?”

When they left the café, Nobuko doubled back to the kiosk they had visited earlier. The store had only the previous day's newspapers. Under linden trees budding blue along the avenue, Nobuko read the foreign news dispatch dated May 3rd. The headline "Berlin Disturbances: Second Day" filled several columns. Striving to grasp the incident's contours quickly, Nobuko skimmed through the article as far as her language skills allowed. She learned May Day marches had been banned in Berlin. Despite this, marches of roughly 100,000 workers—including many women and children—took place across Berlin, clashing with police and escalating into street battles in working-class districts like Wedding, Moabit, and Neukölln. It reported police had even used latest-model automatic pistols not deployed during the Great War. Barricades were erected in Wedding and Neukölln. On the night of the 2nd, nearby streetlights were destroyed, leaving pitch darkness where workers and police faced off across barricades. At 2:15 AM, armored cars arrived until finally at dawn workers abandoned their positions—all described in a harrowing report by a journalist who patrolled all night. Over two days, more than twenty workers died. Several hundred were injured. Over a thousand workers—men, women, youths—were being arrested. The government's reason for banning Berlin's May Day march made no sense to Nobuko. But Germany was a republic! But the government was Social Democratic! If this was possible, had Warsaw's May Day march been prohibited too? But why? Why on earth? Could there be any reason workers shouldn't demonstrate on May Day?

With a mix of bewilderment and anxiety tinged with irritation, Nobuko tightened her brow and mouth as she finished reading the article, then recounted its essence to Motoko.

“This is precisely why it’s inconvenient not having Moscow newspapers here.” “I can’t make sense of anything at all.” Motoko said with visible frustration. As she spoke, passing once more before the leather goods shop where they’d earlier purchased bags and other items, she abruptly veered toward its display window and peered inside again.

III

The turmoil in Berlin that occurred on May Day continued until around May 5th. The government had banned it, but when armed police forces were dispatched to kill and injure the massive crowd of Berlin workers attempting to march on May Day as their right, this act appeared to enrage people throughout Germany. In Hamburg, a general strike seemed to be brewing. A "May Day Incident Public Investigation Committee" was apparently being organized, not only by German labor groups but also by intellectuals from various fields.

For Nobuko and Motoko, who were only reading English-language newspapers published in Vienna, all those matters could only be grasped as seeming to be the case. The English-language newspaper was the sort that, when reporting on Berlin’s situation as of May 3rd, would write above all else that foreigners could pass through Unter den Linden in complete safety. The English-language newspaper had scattered reports about the general strike brewing in Hamburg and the organization of an investigation committee across the same page, as if they bore no direct relation to Berlin’s May Day incident—as though each were entirely separate news items.

Nobuko and Motoko slowly went through such newspapers at the table placed by the sunny third-floor window of the lodging that Kurokawa Ryuzo had arranged for them. The lodging, located on a quiet side street not far from the bustling Kärntner Strasse, gave Nobuko and her female travel companions a modest calmness distinct from hotel life. When the well-mannered maid—dressed in a black uniform with a neatly tied white apron over her chest and wearing a lace headdress—brought trays of breakfast with bread, coffee, and Wiener sausages, Nobuko would sit at the bright table, enveloped in an atmosphere that made her prone to forget their Vienna stay would end in less than two weeks.

Without a single Baedeker (the famous travel guide) or any money to their names, Nobuko and Motoko wandered at will throughout Vienna in May, after the opera and theater seasons had passed, and visited several museums. Even just seeing Rubens’s "Woman Wrapped in Fur" at the Liechtenstein Museum left Nobuko with an unforgettable impression. There was also a magnificently aged princess statue in Velázquez’s palette of white, pink, gray, and black.

About ten days had passed since departing Moscow, and by now Nobuko no longer stared wide-eyed at the whiteness of bread served at meals in their Vienna boarding house. The winter clothes from Moscow had been completely shed, and blending into the bustle of bright main streets, Nobuko's figure—caught unexpectedly in shopfront mirrors and show window glass at odd angles—now wore matching Viennese-style clothes of subdued femininity: thin woolen plaid coordinated with a spring coat. Motoko's suit too held spring-like softness in its lilac-tinged hue. Accustomed to Moscow's lifestyle where evening attire seemed unnecessary, Nobuko and Motoko found contentment in one or two newly tailored outfits. Unconcerned about wearing the same clothes day after day, they visited suburban Schönbrunn with Kurokawa Ryuzo or rode in the ambassador couple's car to view musicians' graves at the Central Cemetery outside town—a veritable map of European music history.

The quiet ambassador couple seemed satisfied to be stationed in a city like Vienna—one of those European metropolises relatively unburdened by international political complications. The embassy stood adjacent to the botanical garden. May’s fresh greenery surrounding the embassy grounds seeped through the weathered stone wall, growing more intricate as it deepened and blended with the neighboring botanical garden’s verdure. This was when Germany’s Graf Zeppelin prepared to embark on its around-the-world flight. No longer young, the ambassador’s wife—dressed in Western attire like a proper Japanese lady—sat upon the parlor sofa while,

“From this very window, I had such a clear view—it was truly beautiful—that enormous aircraft gleaming silver all over, just like a swan of the sky,” the ambassador’s wife told Nobuko.

The Ambassador’s Wife centered her social life as a diplomat’s spouse around Vienna’s status as the world’s musical capital, and rumors arose about Zimbalist, who had gone on a concert tour to Japan. The story of a young soprano singer who had recently studied in Italy for some time before coming to Vienna also came up. After the Great War, Austria too became a republic, and with the decline of traditional aristocratic and upper-class social circles, Vienna’s renowned musicians began embarking on long-term concert tours to America as soon as the season ended.

“For that reason, these days even in Vienna, what’s good is only during the season.” “By this time of year, there are no concerts worthy of your attention to offer our distinguished guests.” “But when you consider that thanks to this, even those in Japan could hear Zimbalist, I suppose it’s for the best.” It was after the First World War that European musicians began coming to Japan, as the Ambassador’s Wife had said. Zimbalist had come to Japan in the early autumn of the year Nobuko departed for Moscow. This was Zimbalist’s second visit, and he had stopped by Japan on his way to and from America. During Zimbalist’s second visit to Tokyo, on a certain day, there was the premiere performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Ueno Music School. On the old-fashioned, unadorned stage of Ueno Music School—which resembled a school auditorium built in the early Meiji period—Japan’s foremost musicians had gathered that day. The first violin’s leader was a music school professor and a renowned female performer who was a senior figure among Japanese violinists. That day, Nobuko listened from a poor spot too close to the stage—where the sound passed over everyone’s heads—accompanied by her lively group: her mother Takeyo, her brother and sister, and two cousins. Both the performers and the audience members, packed to capacity in the narrow auditorium, were filled with tension as the Ninth Symphony was performed for the first time in Japan. The first movement passed over Nobuko and the others like a forest of jumbled, powerful sounds; after a short interlude, it was just before the second movement began. Ms. Ito Ka, the first violin’s leader, who had been gazing at the audience in a relaxed posture with her violin tucked under her left arm and her bow-holding right hand resting on her knee, suddenly broke into a delighted smile—for what she had spotted?—and nodded her bobbed head emphatically several times while lightly raising her bow-holding right hand. Hundreds of audience members searched for the direction where Ms. Ito was bowing her head. From her valley-like position, Nobuko could see nothing. But soon, whispers of "It’s Zimbalist! Zimbalist is here!" spread throughout the hall. Then, even as they couldn’t tell where Zimbalist was, the audience erupted into enthusiastic applause, and Nobuko too wondered, Where? “I can’t see him,” she said, clapping no less enthusiastically than anyone else. Zimbalist himself, seemingly hesitant to acknowledge the unexpected welcome that had arisen during the performance, made no response. Instead, shushing sounds seeking quiet were heard from somewhere.

It was an incident that lasted no more than a minute or two. The second movement of the Ninth Symphony began. The conductor that day was Professor Cello from Germany. The baton lightly tapped the music stand to signal attention. And then the performance began. A breath too soon, the first violin’s leader began to play. Nobuko started. Then she was caught by an emotion both innocent and endearing. Zimbalist was here. In that joy, she felt how everyone’s shared exhilaration had been candidly expressed through this female violinist—no longer young yet undeniably a master. After that concert, Nobuko and Takeyo and all their companions returned home utterly drained from overstimulation. Takeyo sat in her outdoor clothes at the dining table as if needing respite first, drinking tea while addressing Nobuko and the others who also sat around another table with tea and sweets before them,

“That’s Beethoven for you,” she said. “I was truly moved. By the end, tears were spilling out—I couldn’t help it!” In that instant, Nobuko realized Kazuichiro and Koeda had tried to exchange glances but restrained themselves. She thought their seats today had been terrible regardless. Unable to be enveloped in the symphonic cloud of harmonized music, it felt as if they had crouched at the base of tangled roots formed by massive sounds throughout the performance. To Nobuko’s untrained ears, it was an overwhelming congregation of noise; before she could feel moved by the music, her nerves were left reeling from the sheer volume of violent sound with no escape. Though this was Japan’s first performance of the Ninth Symphony, she regretted having failed to secure better tickets. Naturally feeling this way, Nobuko said to Takeyo,

“The seats were terrible, weren’t they?”

she said.

“That kind of thing would make even you cry.”

And then, absentmindedly, “When people listen to such awful sounds for too long, it makes them cry,” she said. When she said this, there was not a hint of sarcasm in Nobuko. Then Takeyo looked at Nobuko with displeasure, her beautiful eyes still blackly glittering from excitement, “There you go with your sarcasm again,” she said.

“Since I’m the one who’s moved, shouldn’t you just let me be moved as I please?”

Nobuko fell silent. But why did Takeyo insist one must be moved simply because it was Beethoven? The forced sentiment oppressed her. Since arriving in Moscow, Nobuko had heard numerous operas and attended many concerts. In Japan, people still welcomed opera troupes coming from places like Harbin. Whether opera or performances by Fershin Fansu—a small conductorless orchestra formed after the Soviet era—they all possessed incomparable skill compared to what Nobuko had heard in Japan, radiating music's essential nature. At Moscow's music school, listening to Fershin Fansu perform Mozart with musicians arranged in a circle onstage and the first violinist doubling as conductor, Nobuko felt she had touched for the first time the very spirit of Mozart's music. Fershin Fansu's Mozart was not merely an effortless outpouring of eighteenth-century brilliance. Here was conscious struggle against ugliness while pursuing beauty—will and reason striving to create, through which life itself could be sensed. Nobuko found resonance with Mozart within her innermost self.

The concert took place on a snow-covered Sunday afternoon in 1928. As she returned to the hotel along the creaking snow-covered road, Nobuko recalled the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony she had last heard in Ueno and came to understand just how clumsy and amateurish it had been. At the same time, she remembered Ms. Ito Ka’s distinctive flat face—her bobbed head nodding cheerfully as she sat in the first violin’s seat wearing a hem-patterned kimono—and recalled, for the span of a single breath, the sound of her violin that had begun too soon. Upon coming to Moscow, Nobuko realized how utterly preposterous all those things had been. Yet she also understood that for Zimbalist—accustomed to Europe’s brilliantly skilled, socially polished musical world—the expressions of those sincere, rustic Japanese musicians and their enthusiasts must have been profoundly moving in their artlessness. Several famous pianists and cellists had come to Japan on concert tours around that time, but they would simply perform, praise the audience’s quality, and depart. Zimbalist alone had shown genuine interest in European music’s development within Japan itself. Regarding this, so-called connoisseurs would remark—with undertones of condescension—that Zimbalist wasn’t a world-class performer like Elman or Heifetz, but rather someone resembling an educator. In Moscow, whether in music or theater, specialized education was held in high regard and diligently pursued.

As the Japanese ambassador’s wife in Vienna—who frequently presided over musical exchanges from East and West—the woman seemed to relax with Nobuko, her conversational counterpart who had no ties to high society and was not a musician. “While stationed here,” she said, “it gladdens me to hear of the favorable reputation held by those Japanese who come to Vienna for musical study. But nothing compares to the joy I feel when an eminent figure like Zimbalist visits Japan and returns praising its audiences for their quiet earnestness. At such moments, I truly feel my standing elevated.”

It seemed Viennese musicians returning from American concert tours carried the impression that American audiences, having purchased tickets, demanded entertainment proportionate to their expenditure. How vividly joyful it would be if those who held goodwill even toward Japan’s single-mindedly earnest audiences were to perform before Russia’s inherently music-loving crowds, enveloped in their moment-to-moment empathy. The thought struck Nobuko as peculiar. Not one European musician had embarked on a concert tour to the Soviet Union. Russia—this music box bursting with potential that would play the instant its lid was opened—was being shunned. “Could it be,” she wondered aloud, “that foreign governments disapprove of musicians visiting Moscow?”

The ambassador’s wife, having received such a question from Nobuko, maintained an expression as though she had put something difficult to swallow into her mouth.

“Well—” “Well—I wonder what it could be.” Having given a smooth, evasive reply, she dismissed the question—in Vienna, and in this parlor, it was customary not to pursue such topics, a truth Nobuko discerned through this very manner of deflection.

That Nobuko and her companions came to Vienna after the social and music season had ended proved rather advantageous for them. During the winter season, even in the embassy parlor—bathed that afternoon in fresh green light and enveloped in a silence broken only by birdsong—splendid guests seemed to have been gathered on multiple occasions, both officially and unofficially. Being out-of-season travelers from Moscow who were unaccustomed to socializing, Nobuko sensed the ambassador’s wife was handling them with practiced ease in her role.

Years earlier, the heartrending circumstances of mind that had driven the Japanese pianist Kawabe Misako to suicide in Vienna now came to be understood by Nobuko, who had arrived in Vienna at a time when even her name had been utterly forgotten.

IV

Kawabe Misako was the pianist from whom Nobuko had taken piano lessons for about five years starting when she was around ten. On an early spring evening, when Nobuko—wearing a Yuzen-patterned haori with prominent shoulder padding—was taken by her father Taizo to visit Kawabe Misako’s house for the first time, a dog barked at the gate, and as they arrived, the lights flicked on in the Western-style room where one black-lacquered piano and one brown piano stood side by side. Kawabe Misako was a young pianist who had just graduated at the top of her class from Ueno Music School that spring. Her slender, clear-eyed face was beautifully aglow, as if illuminated from within by some perpetual light. The fact that Kawabe Misako—whose special beauty could be clearly perceived even by a girl’s heart—had a severe limp filled Nobuko with solemnity. Her younger brother Kazuichiro had developed an impairment in the tendon of his left ankle from polio. From the time he was an infant, the concern of the entire household had focused there, and when Kazuichiro—at four years old—first walked unaided through the garden where maiden camellias bloomed, two-year-old Nobuko, his elder sister, burst into tears of joy before their mother Takeyo did. Having grown into a girl who continued to protect her brother, Nobuko was deeply struck by the fact that her piano teacher had a severe limp. To the extent that she did not mention a single word about it upon returning home, Nobuko felt such sympathy and respect for Kawabe Misako. Her parents, noticing that Nobuko’s sensibilities were awakening early, had begun having her take piano lessons, but all Nobuko had at home was a baby organ. With that baby organ, Nobuko began to study the method book.

Before long, a second-hand German-made piano said to have come from Tsingtao was purchased. Lighting the silver candleholders attached to both sides of the old-fashioned black-lacquered piano with ornate decorations, Nobuko played etudes late into the night, her girlish heart wholly devoted, and improvised melodies too. Those times flowed like living within light itself. Nobuko eventually progressed from sonatinas to sonatas.

At that time, Kawabe Misako was a renowned genius pianist and professor at a music school. Kawabe Misako’s recitals specializing in Beethoven were typically held at Ueno Music School, as was customary for concerts of that era. When the door at the rear of the unadorned stage opened and Kawabe Misako emerged wearing a kimono with hem patterns and a formal maru obi, the audience erupted in fervent applause. There was a beautifully tragic quality to her figure as she approached the piano—her youthful face radiant with tension turned toward the audience, her delicate left shoulder heaving violently, her left hand braced against the patterned kimono’s left knee. Through this atmosphere drifted a romanticism akin to flowers blooming out of season. Her performances were distinguished by their passionate intensity. As she swept the sleeves of her formal attire—a pale purple crepe kimono adorned with shoulder patterns—to perform Beethoven’s concerto, a comb flew from her loosely arranged chignon and clattered onto the stage during her impassioned playing. During that period, concertos were customarily performed without orchestral accompaniment, relying solely on the piano regardless of the performer.

Nobuko had two fellow students. Both were upperclassmen at the girls' school Nobuko attended, and those students had advanced much further than she had. When Nobuko played facing the piano, Kawabe Misako standing beside her would often suddenly press down on her wrist—forcing several keys to sound at once under her abruptly flattened palm. Kawabe Misako's playing method required keeping both wrists lowered while raising all ten fingers perpendicular to the keys. This posture felt unnaturally strained. When playing absentmindedly, Nobuko's wrists would naturally return to their normal height from her moving arms—only to be forcefully pressed down again by Kawabe Misako's two fingertips, always her index and middle fingers.

The reason Nobuko had quit the piano lessons she attended twice a week was a matter of chance. In the winter before Nobuko turned sixteen, Kawabe Misako injured her finger with a felon. It was said she had developed a felon from her intense practice. The lessons were suspended for four months. When the four months had passed and Kawabe Misako returned from the hospital with her left index finger whittled down to a sharp point, Nobuko had come to spend two-thirds of the time she had previously passed before the piano at her desk instead. Nobuko, who had entrusted the expression of her various girlish emotions solely to music and song, rapidly became drawn to novels during the time Kawabe Misako injured her finger with a felon. She became captivated by the fascination of imitating them and writing. Works such as Merezhkovsky’s novel depicting the life of Leonardo da Vinci, Wilde’s *Salome*, and D’Annunzio’s *The Triumph of Death* captivated Nobuko. There was romance there. There was passion expressed through physical movement, and thought expressed through voice and action. At sixteen, Nobuko was drawn to novels that captured life in its raw form—loving, hating, thinking, and fiercely clashing—seen with her eyes, heard with her ears, and expressed through tangible bodily experiences.

Thus, Nobuko parted from Kawabe Misako. Though they had parted—if parting meant merely quitting piano lessons—Nobuko continued to attend her performances without fail. In early spring, just after Nobuko had graduated from girls’ school, an unexpected disaster befell Kawabe Misako. One evening, as Kawabe Misako was leaving a friend’s place, she was struck by a car near Akasaka Mitsuke and suffered severe injuries. Due to the late-night nature of the accident and her remaining unconscious, she was transported to Tsukiji Hayashi Hospital without her identity or origins being ascertained. When it became known that the woman was the pianist Kawabe Misako, the public was shocked. Kawabe Misako’s injury was to the head. Her skull base had been damaged, and her condition was critical. In the dim, medicine-scented antechamber of Hayashi Hospital’s ward, Nobuko shuddered at the whispered report of Kawabe Misako’s condition.

When autumn had deepened that year, Kawabe Misako returned home from the hospital. Nobuko went to visit her. In the Western-style room where the piano stood—the same room where Nobuko had first played from her method book—a simple bed had been placed. When Nobuko entered, Kawabe Misako lay in the dim light, having drawn the curtains behind her.

“Oh, Miss Nobuko!”

Kawabe Misako—oh! Mixing a foreign-style exclamation with Kyoto dialect, she sat up on the bed.

“You’ve come!” She took Nobuko’s hand and gripped it tightly. “I’ll do it now—I’ve been reborn, I tell you! Right? Isn’t that so?” Without letting Nobuko interject, Kawabe Misako kept talking. As Nobuko listened, a painful ache welled up inside her, sweat seeping from her body. She couldn’t help thinking some part of Kawabe Misako’s brain had been damaged by the injury. Kawabe Misako’s words—spilled rapidly as if she couldn’t stay silent—lacked coherence. When she repeated that she would now unleash her true genius, tears as thick as congealed blood welled in Nobuko’s eyes. It terrified her to hear this. And repelled her. Genius! That Nobuko shuddered at this word had deep roots. Around this time, when eighteen-year-old Nobuko first published a novel through happenstance, she sensed something viciously cruel beneath “genius”—a term that tantalized yet reeked of cliché. This was when she began feeling an irreconcilable gap between her mother Takeyo’s attitude toward life—which showed no inclination to perceive such things—and what had become decisive for her own existence. Listening to Kawabe Misako—gripping her hand on the dim bed beside the sealed piano she could no longer play, babbling endlessly about future musical triumphs and genius with a near-incoherent tongue—tormented Nobuko.

Nobuko truly fled from Kawabe Misako’s place and returned home. Then, retreating into her small room, she remained unseen for a long time. Kawabe Misako had changed because of the injury. Unable to find any signs in her impressions from their time together that would contradict this, Nobuko seemed frozen in the face of life’s terror. Within Nobuko’s boundless pity and sorrow for Kawabe Misako lay an instinctive resistance—her own determination not to let her fate become such a thing someday.

There was a time when Kawabe Misako was still convalescing. A messenger came to fetch Nobuko from her nearby residence. Kawabe Misako had asked Nobuko, who had begun literary work, to teach her works related to music. Nobuko wondered whether there could exist any truly great literary work that had no connection to music. When both are intertwined with life— Nobuko gave *Jean-Christophe* and *Kreutzer Sonata*. Then she added *Beethoven* by Romain Rolland, the author of *Jean-Christophe*. That day, Kawabe Misako spoke repeatedly to Nobuko about the poverty of thought among Japanese musicians—though what had motivated her remained unclear.

When more time had passed and Kawabe Misako once again stood before the piano to supervise her students’ practice, Nobuko began hearing rumors of what she had secretly feared. People said Kawabe Misako had developed something like grandiose delusions since that injury. There were those who suggested that since Nobuko had known her since childhood, she ought to caution her. But what could Nobuko have said? As Nobuko, she could barely manage the battles encircling herself.

Some time later, Kawabe Misako’s departure for Vienna was announced. Anna Pavlova had come to Japan, and Elman had come. In an interview, Kawabe Misako declared that through her artistry as a Japanese pianist—or at least through her performances of Beethoven—she would shake the world’s music scene. Nobuko read that interview in the newspaper and found her palms growing clammy. With a sense of uneasy anticipation, Nobuko attended Kawabe Misako’s farewell concert before her departure for Vienna. It was a program consisting entirely of Beethoven’s works held at Ueno Hall. After each piece, the entire hall applauded. And through her impassioned performance, her comb was shaken loose once more. Nobuko shrank in pain and sorrow in her seat. How fervently Nobuko had wished that Kawabe Misako’s comb would not be shaken loose—if only on that day, her final concert in Japan. The rumor that Kawabe Misako’s piano playing was so passionate it would shake loose her comb had spread at some point. Nobuko, sitting among the audience, could vividly sense how those watching the stage with half-hearted anticipation of witnessing that spectacle had noticed the comb gradually slipping from Kawabe Misako’s loosely tied hair and become more engrossed in wondering when it would fall than in the music itself. When Kawabe Misako—her silk-cherry-blossom-patterned shoulders colliding with the grand piano as she struck several rapid successive chords—sent her comb flying from behind her hair, it bounced off the stage floor and rolled away. A momentary satisfaction rippled through the audience.

The performance continued, but Nobuko doubted Kawabe Misako's own taste—if the comb was bound to fall off anyway, why hadn't she removed it before taking the stage? Someone had once written—comparing Nobuko's status as an extremely young female writer to the popularity surrounding musume gidayū performers—that the essence of musume gidayū lay in the instant when a comb fell from the bangs of a performer who clung to her lectern and wailed "waaah!" while prostrating herself, and that if Nobuko Sasa could incorporate this flavor into her work... She had read such commentary before. Nobuko could not forget that and had firmly resolved to consciously refuse any similar demands that might be made of her. Nobuko's resolve—her refusal to compromise on matters akin to how Kawabe Misako's concerts had come to make audiences anticipate the comb falling onstage—remained unshakable. Nobuko, who had continued to question her belief in genius, felt through the matter of the comb that the gap between herself and Kawabe Misako as artists was unbridgeable. Though still immature, Nobuko had begun to assert her own stance as an artist in relation to Kawabe Misako.

It was around half a year after Kawabe Misako had left for Vienna. Kawabe Misako had set out with great fanfare to conquer the world through music, but unexpectedly—so the story went—a certain conservatory professor had told her she might become proficient enough to properly play something like the Moonlight Sonata after three or four years of rigorous practice. Such rumors reached Nobuko’s ears. Word also came that Kawabe Misako’s fingering technique was fundamentally flawed. Each phrase, each report, seeped into the deepest recesses of Nobuko’s being. Without uttering a word, Nobuko spread her ten fingers—still retaining their youthful suppleness—before her eyes and gazed at them intently. “Lower your wrists and raise your fingers!” she recalled Kawabe Misako’s voice that had commanded.

Kawabe Misako threw herself from her boarding house window onto the paved street below and committed suicide in Vienna. The news appeared in the newspapers shortly afterward. Nobuko stared at the newspaper with cheeks drawn taut, said nothing, and drew in a breath. The breath she had drawn lodged in her chest with nowhere to escape. Nobuko continued keeping her mouth stubbornly shut toward everyone.

Several months later, Kawabe Misako’s remains were delivered to her homeland. It was early summer.

Without a proper chief mourner present, wind swept through the temple's main hall where sparse attendees sat, carrying the voices of sutra chanting. The remains were contained in what resembled a tin-plated soup tureen. A small foreign-language label typed on paper clung to the canister's surface. When dividing the bones—some to remain in Tokyo while others would be interred in Kyoto—tears rolled repeatedly down the aristocratic features of Koeda Doi, the sole disciple who had devotedly managed the day's arrangements with heartfelt care.—"How pitiful." Koeda Doi gathered the bones while whispering these words with genuine feeling. Nobuko, moved by Koeda Doi's sincerity, sat respectfully at her side. As for Kawabe Misako herself, neither Nobuko's artistic doubts about her nor this sense of fundamental difference could be erased—even by death. At that time, Nobuko found herself embroiled in domestic strife with Tsukuda, her mood turning sharply dark toward both herself and others.

In the world of music—seemingly vast yet narrow—Nobuko came to keenly feel, now that she had come to Vienna, that the distance between Vienna and Japan was far closer than an outsider might imagine. At that time, Kawabe Misako’s reputation and the expectations and curiosity surrounding it had likely preceded her own appearance in Vienna, preparing the backdrop for her debut. Now, the embassy’s parlor had taken on a bluish tint from the deep fresh greenery of May. When Kawabe Misako first appeared there in Japanese attire, her spirit—still unbroken and undefeated—was expressed with such heightened excitement at having finally reached Vienna. That scene seemed to take shape in Nobuko’s mind as well.

"If one practiced rigorously for three or four years, they might become able to properly play something like the Moonlight Sonata"—had that professor in Vienna said it exactly like that? Kawabe Misako studied abroad while retaining her title as professor at Japan’s sole state-run music school. And, believing she could shake the world with her Beethoven performances, she arrived in Vienna. When Kawabe Misako received such an evaluation, and when she saw those rumors—spreading like wildfire through the Japanese community around her as people exchanged looks of astonishment—it may have been a matter of fingering technique for a fourteen-year-old girl immersed in musical training, but for Kawabe Misako, it was the moment her life darkened irrevocably. By the time she was thirty, Nobuko had come to understand this with clarity. To Nobuko, who was traveling abroad as a woman with money she had managed through her own work, Kawabe Misako’s financial struggles also appeared gravely significant. Kawabe Misako’s brother seemed to have been supported rather by her financial means after their parents’ death. Kawabe Misako probably had only a fixed amount of travel funds. After that, she must have planned to earn income through concert tours in Vienna and other places while continuing her higher studies. The life of sustaining herself in Vienna through concert tours while having to start her finger exercises anew as a Japanese woman over thirty, and her mornings and evenings there—when Nobuko imagined the moment Kawabe Misako, standing by the window of her lonely Vienna boarding house with disheveled strands of her loosely bound hair falling over her slender kimono-clad shoulders, became acutely aware of her physical disability as a musician at that catastrophic juncture, she was overcome with unbearable pity. It was only when enveloped in the light of music that Kawabe Misako’s severe limp appeared with heroic grace. In Japan at that time, it had been possible precisely because one could take a rickshaw wherever they went. In Vienna, where the wave of that light had receded, leaving behind mornings and evenings of struggle merely to survive—where the hem of her Japanese kimono, soon to grow weary and shabby, became disheveled as she walked the streets, no longer able to rely solely on carriages—Kawabe Misako’s figure must have appeared before her as a wretchedness incomprehensible without having come to Europe. When even getting through each day required meticulous calculation, how could one possibly continue paying tribute to a Viennese piano professor whose customary tuition fees from foreign disciples were astonishingly high? When Kawabe Misako departed Japan, her boat had been burned and discarded. When Kawabe Misako returned to her homeland again, she had to be a triumphant victor. Kawabe Misako had set out for Vienna not as one who would study piano there, but declaring that she would come to conquer the world with her own Beethoven—because of that. The jealous Japanese music world would never forget those words they had heard with their own ears—that she would conquer the world with her own Beethoven. From the gaps in that verbal fence with which Kawabe Misako had imprisoned herself, her every move was being watched. In Vienna, Kawabe Misako had no public to support her. Even if they did not fully understand the music itself, there were no simple people who loved her courage and efforts and applauded her clumsy performances.

In Vienna were only her competitors—people younger and wealthier than herself, perhaps even those she had taught—and the audience of that world capital of music, Vienna, who would acknowledge her existence solely through her musical technique itself. The figure of Kawabe Misako—truly at her wit’s end, with no means to appeal and nothing to cling to in her anguish—seemed to appear before Nobuko at the window of her Vienna boarding house.

How much dark despair must Kawabe Misako’s black, clear eyes have held as they gazed around the room of her boarding house? A wall that was silent yet seemed to be watching something. The aloof coldness of a mirror mindlessly reflecting objects—on a spring afternoon in 1929, her recently healed liver weary and heavy, Nobuko gazed at the three walls of her Vienna pension room where she had secluded herself, unwittingly seized by reminiscence. They were covered in a gentle, modest wallpaper patterned with small branches. The oval mirror on the wall had a golden narrow frame that glinted, and a small red rug lay before the two beds.

What kind of house was the boarding house where Kawabe Misako had lived in Vienna? And what kind of Vienna street was it where Kawabe Misako’s body lay after falling from the window? With a raw and terrifying sensation, Nobuko peered out from the wide third-floor window open right beside her. The fine weather shone upon the building across the way, and below Nobuko’s window was the pavement of a side street with few passersby. On a gray, sun-dried curbstone sat a boy in shorts, perched primly as he turned some small object this way and that between his hands, fiddling with it intently as if deep in study. As she watched the boy’s absorbed movements below, Nobuko found herself gradually freed from the dark and ghastly recollections of Kawabe Misako’s final moments. At the same time, with a feeling as though those words had been clearly spoken somewhere in that deserted room, a question arose. Why did Kawabe Misako ever come to say she would conquer the world with her own music? Even after Kawabe Misako’s life ended in tragedy, Nobuko continued to think of it solely as the misfortune of Kawabe’s own genius complex. During her time in Moscow, the music she heard there never once connected with her recollections of Kawabe Misako. What part of Beethoven’s music could be called conquest-like? Wouldn’t it rather be the overcoming of the inevitable anguish and turmoil inherent in human existence? The process by which the very passion of suffering humans seeks sublimation becomes a storm-like, melting adagio and is carried toward a new will to live. And yet, why did Kawabe Misako think that such was the essence of Beethoven—to conquer the world?

Blinking her eyes as she looked down at the boy’s movements on the pavement, Nobuko was startled by the new question that had welled up within her. Yet it had been Wagner who wanted to conquer—Nobuko thought. After all, he had written that sort of letter to Wilhelm I. “The most effective means to make people gentle and easier to govern lies in religion and music,” he had written. Nietzsche had broken with the late Wagner over precisely this—furious at how he marketed music to emperors as such a tool. To Nobuko, Nietzsche’s indignation seemed utterly justified.

And that the Wagner operas heard today—early works like *Tannhäuser* from when Wagner was young, poor, and seeking his own path, before he ever wrote such letters to the emperor—held profound significance, she thought.

That Kawabe Misako had mistaken the human essence of Beethoven’s music—an essence so profound it pierced through even literature—for a personal radiance of genius, bearing it as her own halo, was a foolish simplicity and hubris through which her true tragedy as a woman became forgotten amid mockery.

But—Nobuko kept thinking. Was this fundamental misconception regarding geniuses like Kawabe Misako—this absurd conflation of art's gradual permeation into people's hearts with Napoleonic conquest through brute force—truly something that had existed solely within Kawabe Misako's mind? To Nobuko, this seemed impossible to believe.

The mindset of her mother Takeyo—with whom Nobuko had continuously clashed throughout her life before coming to Moscow—and her mother’s approach to literary fame and honor constituted something essential that Nobuko could not avoid confronting if she wished to live authentically. If Nobuko’s fierce repulsion toward Takeyo’s thirst for fame had directly opposed Kawabe Misako’s genius complex, then Takeyo as a mother and Kawabe Misako as a pianist shared a common worldly heroism in their attitudes. And ultimately, this was not merely some coincidental personality trait shared by two strong-willed women, but rather a concept that had naturally solidified within the old societal customs—customs that enforced a brutal, blind, and bloody struggle for survival where individuals ceaselessly jostled to topple each other, with one rising to prominence as another fell into ruin. People applied facades of modesty and humility precisely to protect themselves from the danger of inadvertently heralding victory and provoking hostility by exposing the ferocity of that struggle. Nobuko could not help dwelling on how Japanese customs enforced a modesty verging on hypocrisy. What a uniquely imposed burden this must be for women. Kawabe Misako had lacked the cunning foresight to apply such discreet facades at each critical juncture of her life. She had been astonishingly single-minded and honest. Yet Nobuko also thought this way. In Kawabe Misako’s life was reflected, in its entirety, the form of the society in which she had lived.

In that room of Nobuko’s boarding house stood a large fireplace. The winter season had passed, and considerable time had elapsed since fires could no longer be kindled within it. Upon the shelf above the cold, dim spring hearth lay a bouquet of pansies Nobuko had bought in town. Walking slowly beneath it while reflecting that Kawabe Misako—who had ended her life in Vienna—had been nearly her own present age when viewed in retrospect, Nobuko found herself enveloped in fresh pity. Seven or eight years had passed since that incident. Since arriving in Moscow, Nobuko had witnessed how the new society transformed writers’ and musicians’ living conditions across various relational aspects. With this understanding now coloring her emotions, when she earnestly reconsidered matters, she realized that even her strenuous efforts to consciously distinguish herself from Kawabe Misako in her own mind—to forcibly position Kawabe at the opposite extreme from herself—meant nothing more than maintaining that very resolve; it did not signify existing in a world fundamentally different from Kawabe’s. Nobuko had felt revulsion toward the terms “literati” and “female literati” then in circulation, along with the lifestyles they evoked, and had rebelled against them. Yet rebellion alone constituted her stance—she possessed nothing to replace what she rejected. For Nobuko, who refused to count herself among either the literati or female literati, there remained only isolation. Within that isolation, she had continued struggling all this time.

In the quiet afternoon of the boarding house room in the side street, where the faint scent of a bouquet of pansies lingered beneath the mantelpiece, Nobuko stood tracing the winding paths of her thoughts from one memory to another, and half-unconsciously picked up the decorative Mozart bas-relief medallion placed upright on the small table there. On the golden surface of Vienna's famous bas-relief medallion appeared Mozart's profile in low relief—slightly stooped, or rather with a pigeon-chested stance, wearing a rounded wig.

Nobuko vividly recalled the expression on Kawabe Misako’s face when she had appeared on stage in a bright-patterned kimono, her figure limping. In response to the applause, her lips—painted with rouge and slightly parted as though wanting to speak— Her delicately featured, narrow face—lightly dusted with white powder—blended the fervor of her focus with a kind of hazy radiance born from that intensity; this young, burning face was tilted slightly upward toward the audience. However violently her left shoulder jerked from the imbalance of her gait, however unevenly she had to move—one step high, one step low—Kawabe Misako never lowered that small Kansai-style white chin of hers, with its slightly parted, striking lips.

5

It was the day when they had just two days left in Vienna. Nobuko and Motoko, urged by Kurokawa Ryuzo, went to visit a place called the Karl Marx Hof on the outskirts of Vienna. Although Austria’s national government was held by the Christian Social Party, Vienna City’s municipal administration and Vienna State’s policies were entirely controlled by the Social Democratic Party. And Vienna, with its population of 1.8 million, had recently been attracting international attention as an industrial city operated under socialism.

“For ladies such as yourselves to go to the trouble of coming to Vienna and leave without seeing it would be a laughingstock.” “After all, I’d hate to be resented later for having shown you Schönbrunn but not taken you there.” On the streetcar heading to the workers’ district called Lindenhoff on the outskirts of Vienna, Kurokawa Ryuzo explained to Nobuko and Motoko what kinds of initiatives the Vienna Social Democratic Party had undertaken for workers’ welfare, particularly focusing on the successes of their housing policies and social protection programs. In Vienna, in order to respect tenants’ rights and impose a progressive tax on those monopolizing large houses, it was made difficult to profit from their sale. Vienna City was able to acquire just under 27 percent of Vienna’s land as municipal property in 1927. They apparently had plans to steadily build more of the same workers’ housing they were about to see on those lands.

As the streetcar moved beyond Vienna's city limits, the colorful and ornate atmosphere gradually vanished from the townscapes on either side. Nobuko and her companions disembarked at a quiet station marked by wooden cottages with low roofs and prominent red gasoline station tanks. A short walk uphill from there stood one of the city's notable landmarks—the Karl Marx Hof. At the center of the broad gravel entrance path stood a small fountain adorned with a plump nude child statue, surrounded by low shrubbery and benches arranged to evoke a miniature park. The modern-style apartment buildings—each floor equipped with terraces—were constructed in two vertically aligned blocks, their numerous windows and terraces creating an impression of vibrant abundance through their uninterrupted sightlines. On one side stood the low weathered brick outer wall of some preexisting structure; on the other, a not particularly spacious area nestled between gentle slopes was being comfortably utilized under ample sunlight.

“What do you think—this is workers’ housing.”

As he said this, Kurokawa Ryuzo led Nobuko and Motoko to the basement corridor of the first building. The basement was a corridor with a black-and-white checkerboard mosaic that allowed passage to the other side of the building. Decorative lamps hung from the coffered ceiling, and several doors facing the corridor remained firmly closed. Both the passageways and the corners of the corridors—where dust might typically collect—were impeccably cleaned, yet the air in this utterly deserted area felt somehow unfamiliar to Nobuko. Nobuko thought it must be because it was a weekday afternoon, when people were out working.

Kurokawa Ryuzo, appearing as if he were a regular visitor there, knocked on a closed door at the end of the corridor with practiced ease. Above the door, the number 17 was written in white with a stylized simplicity that matched the Western style of the entire building.

“An old man named Schmidt lives here.” “He’s an old lathe worker—let me have a look inside.”

Kurokawa Ryuzo’s friendly knocking went unanswered; even after knocking two or three times with pauses in between, there was no sign of anyone beyond the door. “It seems no one’s home.” “The old man must have wandered off somewhere—the weather is so nice today.” For some reason, Kurokawa Ryuzo’s tone carried the quality of someone who couldn’t find a guard who should have been stationed there.

“Why don’t we step outside and wait?” As instructed, Nobuko and Motoko exited the corridor to the back of the building and sat down on the low wall of the sunlit stone steps that overlooked the slope, where the sunlight felt pleasant. The stone surface, baked by the clear May sunlight, seeped heat through Nobuko’s clothes into her body, almost hot enough to be uncomfortable. Motoko promptly took out a cigarette. Kurokawa Ryuzo struck a match and lit it for her. The flame appeared transparent. It was such a brightly sunlit spot there. There was no wind.

Nobuko gazed with narrowed eyes at the suburban rooftops of Vienna—bathed in sunlight and stretching out below the shrub-covered slope—but soon murmured, “It’s so quiet here…”

With that, she once again looked back at the building and corridor behind her.

“It’s almost like no one lives here at all. I wonder if it’s always like this.”

“That’s not the case at all,” Kurokawa Ryuzo replied. “It’s simply that everyone’s out working at this hour.” He infused his straightforward explanation with a defensive undertone as he continued, “The wives and others here don’t need to stay home minding the house, so they all go out to earn however they can.—They’re managing comparatively well. Vienna City provides workers unemployment benefits as standard, along with pension insurance after all…”

A short distance from where Nobuko and Motoko were basking in the sun, near the building, an old woman wearing a black shawl sat knitting.

“Most likely, those people are also part of the pensioner group,” he said. “Schmidt is now doing quite well living on his pension—after thirty-five years of service, that’s only natural.” Thinking Schmidt might have returned already, Kurokawa Ryuzo went alone to check the building’s corridor. When he had moved some distance away, Nobuko turned to Motoko. “What do you think this place is?” she asked in a slightly lowered voice.

“Does workers’ housing this devoid of children even exist? No matter where you look, there’s not a single window with laundry hung out—” Nobuko compared this scene to Moscow’s Novodevichye Shinkaimachi, where workers’ housing thrived vibrantly amidst the snow. There, children had been everywhere you looked. All sorts of sounds and voices had filled the air. The seething energy of daily life had permeated everything. “This place seems pretty much designed for tours,” Motoko remarked, stroking her chin with the hand holding her cigarette in a sarcastic gesture.

Motoko said this and, with a sarcastic air, stroked her chin with the hand holding her cigarette. At that moment, "He still hasn’t come back—what a shame you came all this way for nothing." With that, Kurokawa Ryuzo returned to Nobuko and the others, swinging the black soft hat he’d taken off in one hand.

“He’s usually here, but what bad timing.” “That’s perfectly fine.”

Motoko said.

“The interior must be just as immaculate as the exterior, I imagine.” “I want you to see it for yourselves.” “How wonderfully efficient.” Nobuko added her agreement. “One can usually tell.”

“However, one must remember there’s truth to ‘seeing once being worth a hundred hearings.’” Kurokawa Ryuzo—a religious philosophy student at Vienna University who carried himself with a worldliness unlike any Japanese student Nobuko had ever known—habitually inserted such proverbs into conversation, just as he’d demonstrated moments earlier.

Apparently having given up on finding Schmidt, Kurokawa Ryuzo lit another cigarette, and just as he was about to say something, a boy emerged from the depths of the corridor and began walking toward Nobuko’s group. The boy of about eleven—his shins and knees, boyishly lean beneath his shorts, exposed below the old shirt and jacket he wore—stood meekly before Nobuko and the others, tilting his blond head in a manner typical of Viennese children.

“Hello,” he said. Nobuko and the others also returned, “Hello.”

Nobuko and the others greeted him. Then, with a casual gesture that belied any particular intention, the boy extended his right hand—until then hidden from their view— “Here.” and showed them postcards. Motoko, “What’s this?” instinctively asked in Russian as she peered down at the postcard in the boy’s hand. It was a photographic postcard of this Lindenhof workers’ housing complex, Karl Marx Hof—an image taken from the fountain area resembling a small park at the entrance, showing the brightly aligned terraces and rows of windows in clear perspective. As Nobuko and Motoko hesitated momentarily, Kurokawa Ryuzo fished some coins from his trouser pocket and gave them to the boy, then inquired about his mother with feigned familiarity. The boy answered shyly and, turning to Nobuko’s group,

“Thank you very much.”

With that, while showing his hollow cheeks that suggested ill health, he headed back down the corridor from which he had emerged. Kurokawa Ryuzo said, “Here’s one as a memento,” and distributed the postcards one by one to Nobuko and Motoko. The situation of this workers’ housing complex—which Kurokawa claimed drew a constant stream of visitors from around the world to observe “the socialization of urban administration”—struck Nobuko as precisely that when she saw the expression on the face of this postcard-selling boy. Old man Schmidt’s room—he was a lathe worker who was likely out today—was probably designated as a residence where they would open the door to show the interior whenever guests came. And every time he showed foreigners around his home, Nobuko thought, Grandpa Schmidt probably received some gratuity from those who guided them. Vienna was a place where all sorts of little gratuities were commonplace. And if such gratuities were also considered part of the benefits of living in Karl Marx Hof—what a contradiction and deceit this would be for the lives of workers. Nobuko could not help feeling that way. The postcard-selling boy’s demeanor—well-mannered, docile, and what one might call a kind of polite panhandling—seemed to leave an impression on Motoko as well. She curtly—

“Does anyone have the right to live here if they’re a worker?” she asked Kurokawa. “At present, the roughly 270 worker households living here are, for the most part, families of workers who have long been members of the Social Democratic Party.” “—So you’re saying they’re the party’s labor aristocracy?” Then Kurokawa,

“But isn’t that actually the case in Russia too?” he said with a teasing smile, looking at Nobuko.

“Only Communist workers get housing—is that it? Only those who can get housing are—”

“Is that how it’s handled here?” “Do people really say Russia does everything through Communists alone?” “I don’t recall exactly, but Soviet Communists make up about one percent of the population.” “In any case, the Social Democratic Party’s policy here is to keep increasing these housing units and work toward improving workers’ lives.”

Kurokawa Ryuzo said, “Dr. Sasashima—you’re familiar with him?” He mentioned the economist who writes about socialism in magazines like Kaizo and Chuo Koron. “The doctor seems quite impressed with Vienna’s socialism. He says it’s evolving from urban socialism all the way to Marxism. After all, current rents for Vienna’s worker housing are one-twelfth of prewar levels.”

Nobuko did not know what urban socialism was. Nobuko and Motoko both remained silent.

Kurokawa Ryuzo,

“How about it, Ms. Sasa!”

With a peculiar, practiced manner of speaking that made his age hard to pin down, Kurokawa directed the focus of the conversation toward Nobuko. “When you look at it this way, the world really is an interesting place, isn’t it? It isn’t just Russia that’s working to improve workers’ lives, you know. Even if they aren’t Bolsheviks, the Vienna Social Democratic Party is actually improving workers’ lives, you know.”

“Is that so?”

Nobuko's feelings—having rejected Kurokawa's words within her heart—naturally took shape in her voice. "I don't believe that's true." "Why do you say so?"

An expression as if he had stumbled over something trivial passed over Kurokawa’s face with its neatly parted black hair. “For my own edification, I’d like to ask one thing.” It was this evasive manner and tone of Kurokawa’s that rendered him incomprehensible to Nobuko.

“But isn’t that right? If the children of workers living there come to sell postcards whenever they see foreigners, then I don’t think you can say their lives have improved there.” “That’s not something of any great significance, Ms. Sasa. Foreigners who come here all want some kind of souvenir—they’re just selling them to those who want them.” “But in fact, he’s earning pocket money that way, isn’t he? It’s certain the income from postcards isn’t contributing to this workers’ housing as revenue.”

“That may be so.”

Kurokawa acknowledged that reality. However, he immediately followed up,

“Then don’t they sell them in Russia?” he countered. “They seem relentless enough when it comes to propaganda—but haven’t they managed to get around to postcards yet?”

What a strangely roundabout way of putting things. Nobuko retorted, “They don’t sell such things!”

She retorted with a huff, like the indignant young woman she was. With a wounded heart, she recalled their recent visit to Schönbrunn Palace—the three of them together. It had been shortly after the Berlin incident. As they gazed out at the Vienna Woods from a beautiful hilltop colonnade, Motoko Yoshimi had casually asked Kurokawa Ryuzo whether Vienna’s newspapers had carried any follow-up reports about the Berlin May Day events. At the time, Kurokawa had replied indifferently—“Well…”—before adding, “It must be settled by now.” Then he continued: “In Berlin, it’s always the Communist Party carrying the banner for everything,” he said, turning to face Nobuko and the others. “They have to do everything according to Comintern directives, don’t they?” There had been a sting in Kurokawa’s questioning tone. Back then, Nobuko had remained silent. Motoko too had pretended not to hear.

Even now, as Nobuko continued to gaze silently at the sloping landscape with a wounded expression, Kurokawa said, “If you insist that workers in Russia aren’t selling postcards or such things, that’s simply because Russia hasn’t even advanced enough to produce postcards yet.”

Kurokawa said. “Cut it out, Mr. Kurokawa!”

Nobuko looked at Kurokawa with an exasperated expression. “Have you ever seen postcards with paintings by Repin or Konchalovsky?” “Looks like Mr. Kurokawa’s lost this one.” Amused, Motoko interjected from beside them. “In Russia, Mr. Kurokawa, workers’ housing is built for workers to live in—not to show off to foreigners or turn into postcards.” “Oh, just you wait and see.”

Kurokawa refuted as though imbued with deep conviction. “Just wait until Russian workers can freely make postcards or anything else like they do here—you’ll see. They’ll certainly start selling them. Human feelings don’t differ so drastically from country to country, I tell you.”

“It’s strange, Mr. Kurokawa’s argument. Everything’s backward—” “Everything’s backward—you see—” With a look that said this would be her final word, Nobuko spoke while gazing at Motoko. “It is precisely when Russian workers become able to freely create anything that they will come to lead lives where they no longer need to sell things like postcards—”

With their departure from Vienna approaching, all tasks requiring completion beforehand had been finished, leaving Nobuko and her companions with only one obligation that day—to visit this Karl Marx Hof. Having hurried through their tour of the complex, they found themselves without plans for how to spend the remaining hours of the radiant afternoon. Wearied by her contentious exchange with Kurokawa Ryuzo, Nobuko wandered alone down the stone steps until she reached the slope’s midpoint. From this halfway vantage point, the townscape unfolded low and vast to both sides, distant buildings’ windows catching the slightly westering sun at full angle—their panes of glass blazing in unison with dazzling intensity.

While viewing the scenery with a sense of interest, Nobuko found herself unable to shake off a lingering impression regarding this Karl Marx Hof. She thought she had felt a similar emotion in Countess Coudenhove’s parlor as well. A beautiful Japanese woman named Mitsuko, born in Tokyo, became Countess Coudenhove of Vienna after marrying a Viennese count who had come to Tokyo as a diplomat in the early Meiji years, and spent her entire life in Vienna. After Austria became a republic, the widowed Countess Coudenhove lived modestly in a suburban villa with her slender, broad-browed youngest daughter. For years, the paralyzed elderly woman had leaned against the chaise longue, wrapped in an elegant housecoat knitted from fine lemon-colored yarn. At that villa, both the gravel-strewn narrow entrance path and its small garden were filled with blooming purple lilacs; their flower clusters had been cut and arranged so abundantly on the table beside the elderly woman wrapped in soft lemon-colored clothing that they seemed to overflow. It was vividly chromatic. The second son of this elderly woman was Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, who in their conversations was referred to by the nickname Pan Europa. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europeanism posited that European nations should form a union exclusively for themselves to address political and economic issues while also preserving their culture. Though her physical freedom had been taken away, the European sociability ingrained in this woman—now stripped of its transient splendor—and the Tokyo-like simplicity characteristic of a woman from that city were harmonized into a kind of refined atmosphere, she—

“Oh, Pan Europa—you know—he is currently in Brussels.” As she spoke this way, her somewhat antiquated Japanese usage instead resonated with elegant refinement. Through the name and work of this absent Pan Europa, even the elderly woman’s secluded residence in Vienna’s suburbs occasionally seemed enlivened. It was the military attaché from the embassy who had brought Nobuko and Motoko to this elderly woman’s parlor. Dressed in an elegant striped suit that avoided ostentation, with a springtime-gray soft hat and deerskin gloves, his appearance bore no resemblance to an army major. He suggested to Widow Coudenhove that Nobuko too should endorse Pan Europa and provide her signature.

“That is indeed the case. “You.” “so that we may receive as many signatures as possible from everyone.” Nobuko remained silent, smiling.

The Soviet Union had not been invited to the Pan-European Union. as if Russia were not one of the European nations. And as if the League of Nations had come to refuse to recognize that the Soviet Union too was one of the nations. When Romain Rolland had been invited to join the Pan-European Union, he refused on the grounds that now was the time to strive for the unity of all peoples across the world—this was something Nobuko had read about in a Moscow literary newspaper. The article appended excerpts from Lunacharsky’s commentary to an essay by Romain Rolland, in which he warned that even European intellectuals were being organized—through various forms and expressions—into an anti-Soviet crusade, and argued that destroying Soviet endeavors would mean losing all social and personal freedoms from the world. It had been last year that Nobuko managed to read it. Drawn to an unmistakable photograph of Romain Rolland, Nobuko—who had just arrived in Moscow—carefully stored that old literary newspaper in her folder and kept it with her ever since.

When they left Moscow for Warsaw, Nobuko sensed Poland’s anti-Soviet sentiment permeating the very air. The anti-Soviet feeling that had hung over her face like a clinging odor during their single night in Warsaw now connected seamlessly in Vienna—to how the ambassador’s wife discussed music, how the military attaché championed Pan Europa, how Kurokawa Ryuzo delivered his world-weary Soviet critiques—all converging toward a single orientation. Her inability to speak the local language made Nobuko reflect earnestly on the unnaturalness of passing time among compatriots so fundamentally unlike herself. Though she held no firm political stance herself, as someone acquainted with Soviet realities Nobuko often found her sentiments naturally opposed to theirs in Vienna—leaving her frequently silent. From knowing her connection to this place and its people was transient, this attitude of hers had gradually taken form. For Nobuko—even if tomorrow rendered this hillside view something she would never see again—the fact remained that somewhere distant now, windows would blaze when struck by afternoon sunlight at a certain angle. That was the essence of truth permeating all things.

Conscious of the feminine bow swaying on the back of her Viennese-style spring coat, Nobuko lowered her eyes to the tips of her shoes as they climbed step by step and returned to where Motoko and Kurokawa Ryuzo were smoking their cigarettes. When she returned, she found Motoko still in the midst of debate—holding a woman’s long tobacco pipe in her right hand clasped before her chest, sitting beside Kurokawa on the low wall, staring fixedly at him.

“Hmm, that’s an odd theory,” said Motoko while staring at Kurokawa. “So in your socialism, you mean the intelligentsia constitutes its own distinct class?” “Well, yes—at minimum,” replied Kurokawa, drawing out his words. “We must preserve the intelligentsia’s unique qualities—what we call Bildung—and let them develop as their own entity.” “And what exactly is this ‘Bildung’?” It was characteristic of Motoko—this blunt interrogation.

“In Japanese, you might translate it as something like ‘culture.’ Though in truth, it’s something geistig with far more complex implications.” “What’s ‘geistig’?” Pressing further, Motoko asked again. “It could be called spiritual or mental—or perhaps intellectual.”

With an ironic expression, it was Motoko who kept pressing the questions relentlessly. Listening from the side, Nobuko suddenly found herself in a humorous mood. She recalled how this Motoko had once fiercely debated Atsushi Uchiumi in Moscow over the reading of a single Russian character, with neither yielding in the end. ——

“Buko-chan, I’ve been listening in on Mr. Kurokawa’s socialist theory for a while now, but…”

Motoko said, looking back at Nobuko with a suggestive gaze.

“Socialist theories originally have thirty-some varieties, they say.” “Ah, that’s right, Mr. Kurokawa.” “Mr. Kurokawa’s socialism supposedly means that the intellectual class should develop in their own uniqueness as the intellectual class, and the capitalist class should develop in their own uniqueness as the capitalist class.”

“Of course, this is all premised on the working class as the foundation.” Kurokawa added, turning to Nobuko. “There’s nothing more absurd and illogical than Japan’s intelligentsia blindly Russifying everything and mindlessly clamoring about workers and peasants for every little thing.” “Socialism fundamentally isn’t about turning everyone into ignorant peasants or destitute laborers, you know.” “Isn’t that right?” “Its purpose is for all people to live better lives.”

“So, in other words, like this?”

Nobuko turned the question back to Kurokawa Ryuzo. “So in your view, workers should remain workers, the intelligentsia as the intelligentsia, and capitalists as capitalists—maintaining these distinctions as they are now—and each should develop better accordingly?” When she said “in this way,” Nobuko made a gesture of stacking upward one after another—workers, intelligentsia, capitalists—in that order.

“No—in socialism, knowledge should come above wealth.” “The intelligentsia should use their cultural power to govern capital.”

“But—then that’s Owen’s theory, isn’t it?” Nobuko stared at Kurokawa with surprised eyes.

“I had actually thought from the very beginning that you would say that. With all due respect, you are only familiar with Bolshevik theories, so...” Kurokawa Ryuzo struck a match with a sharp snap and relit Motoko’s cigarette for her,

“In accordance with Bolshevik theory, when the revolution comes, perhaps we’ll get to see Ms. Nobuko Sasa switch over to the proletarian side.”

That manner of speaking kindled hatred toward him within Nobuko’s heart. Kurokawa laughed loudly. “So, does that mean Ms. Nobuko Sasa will become a proletarian, quit writing novels, and become a hotel cleaning woman somewhere?” Nobuko, trying to calm her surging emotions, remained silent—a silence Kurokawa seemed to interpret as her beginning to be persuaded by his argument.

“I cannot permit such things on humanitarian grounds.” “Even for you yourself, Ms. Sasa, when that reality materializes, there’s no doubt you’ll be unable to endure it.” “Look at what the Bolsheviks did.” “Once the proletarian dictatorship began, how did they treat the intelligentsia they’d pretended to ally with and exploited until then?” Each of Kurokawa’s words roused a hundred protests in Nobuko’s listening heart. To marshal them into orderly arguments that wouldn’t become direct insults required every ounce of her strength. Nobuko took a single quiet deep breath,

“At best, Mr. Kurokawa.” She began in a voice about two tones lower than her usual speaking tone. "You are very skilled at—to put it bluntly—speaking in a way that ensnares people." “But that’s a mistake.” Nobuko stopped Kurokawa as he tried to say something,

“Firstly, the intelligentsia is not a class in the same sense as the working class or capitalist class. Moreover, socialism cannot be solely a matter of culture. The foundation lies in societal production and its economic relations. Then comes politics. The intelligentsia transitioning to the proletarian side doesn’t mean I must become a cleaning woman. As a writer in my own right, unless we stand in history’s progressive direction and improve society from the proletarian standpoint, it’s evident that neither art nor culture can develop authentically. Lunacharsky was intelligentsia. Lenin too. Marx was intelligentsia too.”

Even speaking on the premise of "if a revolution were to occur" was something Nobuko could not accept. Nobuko did not think that she herself was a revolutionary in the present, nor did she think she would become one in the future. However, in terms of the advancement of human history—even though Nobuko did not know through what process or how it would manifest—she was not merely passive in her feelings about revolution. But that was a small, burning ember hidden deep within Nobuko’s heart. It was not the kind of thing to be discussed in debates.

Kurokawa Ryuzo remained silent for a while, his eyes following the cigarette smoke as it vanished into the open air, but then he seemed to shift the emphasis in his mind from one point to another. “You’re quite tenacious, aren’t you?” “I was surprised, I must say.” This time, he laughed without making a sound. “Well, you see—when ladies once get something fixed in their heads—their minds being simple, after all—it seems quite difficult for them to rationally change direction.”

Motoko quickly reached out as if to grab Kurokawa’s tie,

“So you finally resorted to that,” said Motoko. Her jujube-shaped face flushed.

And her jujube-shaped face with its fine complexion flushed. "That’s your loss, Kurokawa-kun." "If a man argues with a woman and resorts to that, it’s waving the white flag—won’t you admit it?" On the surface her words might have seemed playful, but in Motoko’s eyes as she pressed Kurokawa there flashed a seriousness that was no jest. "Well, it’s two against one after all." Making his attitude ambiguous, Kurokawa conceded. "In foreign countries, it’s customary to defer to ladies in all situations."

“—That’s not the point!” The three of them fell completely silent, each lost in their own thoughts. They remained there resting as they were for a while longer.

“Shall we get going?”

It was Kurokawa who started to say that. The three of them walked side by side through the corridors of the Karl Marx Hof and passed by the door where Old Man Schmidt was said to live. However, Kurokawa did not try knocking there again. With their footsteps mingling into a single sound, they all stepped on the gravel and exited the front gate. Even in Vienna, these workers’ districts had unfinished sidewalks, with concrete poured just wide enough for walking.

VI

Having left Vienna as planned and arrived in Prague, Nobuko and Motoko unexpectedly encountered circumstances that forced them to alter their itinerary. When Nobuko and Motoko arrived at a hotel not far from Wilson Station, they found male and female travelers crowding around the wide American-style front desk in the modern lobby. In Prague, this hotel touted as the latest in style was already full—it wasn’t just them; rejected travelers with trunks left atop the bold black-and-white checkered floor consulted companions everywhere. These travelers who had flocked to Prague all came for the First Czechoslovak Industrial Exposition opening the next day. Nearly all these travelers surging into Prague—Eastern Europe’s transportation hub—were bound for Karlsbad, the very destination Nobuko and Motoko had aimed to reach. The exposition would be held in Karlsbad, with leisure at Europe’s famous hot spring resort serving as one enticement to draw international guests to the Industrial Exposition.

The old Bohemian capital, a full 1,200 kilometers from Vienna.

Prague—the capital along the beautiful Vltava River known since the thirteenth century as the “City of a Hundred Spires”—preserves abundant medieval monuments along its banks and throughout its streets, while also serving as the vibrant heart of a young postwar republic that has thrice elected Masaryk, its leader of national liberation, as president.

Despite their limited knowledge, Nobuko and Motoko had stepped off at Wilson Station with a curiosity inherently different from what they had felt in Vienna. But with the station's congestion followed by an unexpected hotel shortage, Nobuko found her traveler's spirit crushed first. The men leaning their upper bodies forcefully against the hotel counter as they haggled for rooms carried themselves in a manner that ostentatiously declared themselves guests attending the Industrial Exposition. Whether traveling in male groups or married couples, in any case, pairs of women travelers like Nobuko and her companion—unaware of the exposition's existence, lacking room reservations, having stumbled into this commotion—were nowhere to be seen among those jostling around the counter.

As time passed, it grew increasingly clear that other hotels would fill up too. Nobuko and her companion rode in a carriage and finally secured a room at a hotel located slightly outside Prague’s city center. And that too was the only remaining suite at that hotel, which was supposedly fully booked. If the first hotel they had arrived at—located near the emerging business center of Prague and aspiring to modern facilities—aimed for contemporary efficiency, then the atmosphere of the hotel where Nobuko and her companion had managed to secure a room seemed intent on impressing its guests with Prague’s elegance.

The suite where Crown Prince Yi had once stayed was decorated in a style reminiscent of nestling among morning glory flowers and leaves. Both the carpet laid on the floor and the hues of the silk-covered walls harmonized in pale green nuances, while from the ceiling hung an exquisite Bohemian glass chandelier—its form like morning glory petals glistening with dew—encasing the lamplight from below. In the bedroom, Bohemian-style beds draped with lace covers were lined up. Though it usually seemed like a quiet hotel, that day saw a constant stream of people coming and going in its not-so-spacious lobby, yet when dinner time arrived, only scattered figures could be seen in the dining room. The atmosphere was disjointed and hectic. The male and female travelers who had gathered in Prague for the exposition—in the hotel’s well-mannered, formal dining room where even smoking was prohibited—must have been why they couldn’t fully embrace merriment.

After dinner, Nobuko and her companion went to the counter and heard that in Karlsbad, there were likely no vacant rooms left even in the smallest hotels. They returned to their own suite—too extravagant to feel settled even for a single night’s stay. In one corner of the room, bathed in a hue reminiscent of mayfly wings, stood a stylish glass display case with gold trim. Inside it were displayed splendidly cut goblets of Bohemian glass—world-renowned as artistic crafts—and cameo-like translucent fired small boxes among other items. Nobuko sat on a slightly worn-looking silk velvet settee,

“What should we do?” She looked up at Motoko standing by the table as she lit her cigarette.

“Given this situation, there’s nothing to be done.” The Czechoslovak Industrial Exposition was scheduled to run for the next two months. “I’m giving up on Karlsbad.” “Why… even though we’ve come all the way here?” “But… You understand, don’t you?”

When she thought about enduring today’s commotion multiplied manifold in Karlsbad’s bustle, Nobuko’s body seemed to grow heavy. “Look, I really do want to abandon Karlsbad.” “It actually makes my side ache.” “If you yourself refuse to go, then that settles it.” “I don’t think Professor Fromgold would mind at all.” “We never imagined overlapping with Prague’s exposition anyway.”

Nobuko silenced Motoko.

Once it was decided they wouldn’t go to Karlsbad, they settled on sightseeing in Prague the next day and then taking the night train straight to Berlin in one go.

The next day dawned with a fine drizzle. As their carriage moved slowly along the fresh green road veiled in misty rain, taking in the Central European-style bridges and castles spanning the Vltava River, Nobuko felt lingering regret at leaving this town of delicate charm—steeped in the unwavering spirit of reformer Jan Hus—after scarcely a day’s stay. To compound matters, the Berlin-bound train they had chosen would pass through Dresden at midnight. This meant missing the art museum of Dresden, often called the Florence of Central Europe.

“Since we’ve given up on Karlsbad, why not stay another night and take a train that arrives in Dresden during the day?” “Even just four or five hours.”

On the carriage heading toward the city hall to see the famous Prague astronomical clock, Nobuko said to Motoko. "I just can't bring myself to give up. It's not like a place like Dresden is somewhere we can easily come back to..."

After remaining silent for a while, Motoko, as if she had reached a decision, “Let’s go straight to Berlin.”

Motoko said clearly. "If you start getting sidetracked everywhere by your little hobbies again," she declared with finality pressing through her cigarette smoke, "There'll truly be no end to this." Her hand cut through Prague's humid air. "We're going straight to Berlin."

Thus, Nobuko and her companions arrived in Berlin near noon the next day. And they took a room at the pension called Ludwig on Moltke Straße, which Koichiro Nakadate had previously told them about.

VII

In Berlin, Koichiro Nakadate—who had toured Sovkino studios with Nobuko and her group in Moscow—was still staying. There was also Isamu Kawase, who had become widely known for shifting his focus from architecture to avant-garde stage art research. In Prague, where no hotel offered proper lodging, one couldn't deny that beneath Motoko's insistence on "just getting to Berlin" lay the imagined faces of these people with whom they shared a common language. Nobuko had been anticipating the chance to meet Reiji Hida—the newspaper correspondent she'd encountered in Moscow. The day after arriving in Berlin, when they met Koichiro Nakadate at a café near Prager Platz adjacent to their pension and inquired about Hida,

“Isn’t he traveling right now?”

Koichiro Nakadate answered in a tone that was too casual, as if to imply something to Nobuko. "Isn't he in Geneva or somewhere like that?" "That's the sort of story I heard."

When Nobuko asked Kawase Isamu too, she received a similar reply. "Ah, he's traveling. Switzerland." That manner of speaking carried a tone that wouldn't let Nobuko press further about Hida's destination. Vaguely, she came to understand. In short, whether it was Geneva or some city further east, Reiji Hida had gone where he needed to go. And there was no need to ask about it—no, one shouldn't ask about it. Through such instances, Nobuko came to recognize the way of life of those Japanese people in Berlin who sought to live broadly in the world.

Since his time in the architecture department of the art school when he was called a prodigy, Isamu Kawase had been living in a certain part of Berlin for nearly three years now, continuing his research on stage design and direction. In addition, he seemed to be involved in the radical youth theater movement in Berlin. Isamu Kawase was also in the midst of translating a lengthy novel by a proletarian writer who had become famous in Japan around that time, which dealt with a major printers’ strike. During their discussions about the translation, it became apparent to Nobuko and the others that Isamu Kawase seemed to have a highly capable German woman as his mistress.

Led by Kawase, Nobuko and Motoko went to the Neukölln district on a certain day not long after arriving in Berlin. During Berlin’s May Day, dozens of workers had their blood spilled in worker districts such as Neukölln and Wedding. Nobuko and the others had read that article in an English-language newspaper they had happened to buy when they were in Vienna.

“It feels somehow embarrassing to say I just want to go see it.” While asking Kawase Isamu to take her to Neukölln, Nobuko made an awkward face toward the people living and fighting in that district.

“But you understand, don’t you? If you came to Moscow, you’d still have to go see Red Square, wouldn’t you?” “Damn right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

That day was already over twenty days since May Day. But in the square before the Karl Liebknecht House lay evidence that the workers of Neukölln—deemed Berlin’s revolutionary district—and their families had not forgotten the barricades they had built and defended, or the blood of their comrades spilled there from the night of May 1st to the night of the 3rd. That was the large white circles painted here and there on the square’s stone pavement. There were large white circular marks in three separate places on the square. Within those circles, the blood of Neukölln workers killed by the police force had been shed. On the black stone base of the building to the left of the Karl Liebknecht House, there were also several places where white paint had been smeared. It was a mark indicating where police bullets had struck and chipped the stone.

“Fundamentally, prohibiting May Day marches itself is blatant provocation.” “There’s 1.9 million unemployed—" “Even if they lie low, whether they can just stay put—anyone could figure that out.” “They’re waiting for any pretext to crack down.” “Watching like hawks—Mussolini’s a real bastard.” Germany’s conservative forces had envied Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, and when he banned May Day marches across Italy in 1925, Hindenburg promptly imitated him by attempting to prohibit May Day in Germany too. The German working class was said to have fought courageously and reclaimed their May Day rights.

Under the hazy Berlin daylight that fell upon the shoulders of her lilac-colored travel coat, Nobuko stared with a gaze as though her pupils had hardened at the three vividly white circular marks on the square. Isamu Kawase, tall in his Burberry coat and beret, said: "We should see them now while we can." "Even though Zörgiebel himself gave the orders for it to be done," Motoko added, "now he can't stand that these white circles remain here forever. Given the location, it's as if Zörgiebel's name itself is challenging the world's workers."

In the Karl Liebknecht House that faced the square was located the headquarters of the German Communist Party KPD.

Motoko looked at Kawase with an earnest yet teasing gaze,

“That Zörgiebel fellow is surprisingly honest, isn’t he?” “The man who orders killings—who’d have thought he’d be stumped by white paint circles?” “Naturally—after trying so many times.” “He finally had to face the fact that Neukölln’s workers never run out of white paint.” Nobuko and the others laughed curtly in unison. “The German working class won’t escape this mire until they truly grasp the Social Democrats’ true nature.” “They keep creating unemployment through industrial rationalization.” “Locking out hundreds of thousands.” “Banning the Red Front and anti-fascist groups.” “Workers resist each of these blows.” “That’s why not a soul stayed home this May Day—yet still they can’t quite believe the Social Democrats have become fascist lapdogs.” “Some still think ‘social fascist crimes’ are just Communist Party rhetoric.” “And they cling to some vague hope they can’t even name.” “So the deception continues.”

After spending some time in the square, Nobuko, Motoko, and Kawase Isamu entered the basement bookstore of the Karl Liebknecht House. The entrance to the Communist Party headquarters appeared to be located elsewhere, and the basement facing the square had simply been opened up and converted into a bookstore. The store had no particularly eye-catching display window—just display stands lined with books and shelves simply arranged around the walls. Handling administrative duties there was a quiet woman in her fifties, wearing a white blouse and black skirt.

Instructed by Kawase, Nobuko selected from the displayed books one volume of Grosz’s satirical art collection, two volumes of Käthe Kollwitz’s art collections, and two pictorial stories by the French satirical printmaker Masereel. There was an English translation of Clara Zetkin’s biography of Lenin, and she took that as well. All the while, Nobuko’s heart thrilled at the thought that she was buying books at none other than the KPD’s bookstore. For Nobuko, this Karl Liebknecht House in Berlin was the first Communist Party headquarters she had ever witnessed. While in Moscow, Nobuko had often heard the name K.P.D. (German Communist Party) and seen its letters. В・К・П（Б）—the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—and its three meticulously bracketed characters had seeped even more intricately into Nobuko and her companions’ daily lives. In newspapers, on the radio, and above all on the pages of the various pamphlets for working women through which Nobuko was being enlightened. The resonance of В・К・П（Б）—not to mention the K.P.D.—had gradually dissolved into Nobuko’s life over the year and a half she had spent in Moscow. Yet before Nobuko and the others, the building of В・К・П（Б） had never once appeared. The headquarters of the All-Union Communist Party was inside the Kremlin walls. To gain access there, the Japanese Foreign Ministry passports that Nobuko and the others possessed were of no use. As Nobuko came to understand more about the Soviet social and political dynamic, she not only ceased to hold any confusion of truth and falsehood toward В・К・П（Б） but also felt that by always making clear she was, politically, a person outside the organization, she was expressing a class-based conscience. Even after coming to Berlin, Nobuko’s attitude remained consistent. Nobuko’s state of mind was, from one perspective, also a matter of being stirred by sincere respect for the avant-garde organizations and their activists that existed in various countries. Therefore, Nobuko found it difficult to remain indifferent even to the composed expression of the female clerk—gentle yet devoid of any merchant’s ingratiating charm—who was observing from behind the bookstore counter as Nobuko and the others now selected several art books and other volumes.

Taking their time to buy the books, the three of them crossed the square and emerged onto Neukölln’s streets. Isamu Kawase, who had been heading toward the subway station, seemed to think of something as he walked,

“While we’re at it, I’ll show you another place.” “A café, though.” “Inside, it’s better not to talk too much.”

After cautioning Nobuko and Motoko, who were unaccustomed to the area, Kawase Isamu pushed open the door of a small café and ushered the two women in ahead of him. True to its location in a workers’ district, small tables and iron chairs were crammed into the narrow interior, two nickel-plated water boilers on the counter forming its sole decoration. Behind the counter stood a balding proprietor with the sleeves of his striped shirt rolled up. A movie poster from Daiei Studios featuring the sickly pallor of a semi-nude woman’s face was pasted on the side wall.

Kawase immediately ordered three cocoas. Diagonally behind Kawase, who had chosen a seat by the window, at a table facing Nobuko and Motoko, sat a solitary man in his forties. He sat with his legs spread wide on the chair, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket. An empty coffee cup rested on the table before him. The moment they entered the café from the street, Nobuko understood what sort of café scene Kawase had meant to show them in Neukölln. What Nobuko recalled was the atmosphere of the men in that Warsaw café where she and Motoko had taken refuge on May Day morning. The demeanor of this man—who had given Nobuko’s group a glance both sluggish and sharp as they noisily opened the door and entered the small shop—made her grasp in an instant many things she had failed to comprehend that morning in Warsaw. While stirring the cocoa brought to their table, Kawase flicked one eyebrow almost imperceptibly and signaled to Nobuko and the others.

When they finished their cocoa, Kawase and Motoko smoked a cigarette, and the three left the place.

“Did you understand?” “Around here, filthy eyes and ears and such are scattered everywhere.” “But lately, those guys ain’t having it easy either.”

Kawase opened his pursed lips in an amused laugh. “Since then, those bastards can’t casually prowl under workers’ housing windows anymore—they’d get drenched with more than just water now. After what they did to the kids last time, the women won’t show any mercy.”

From the day after arriving in Berlin, Nobuko and Motoko met once daily with a group consisting of Isamu Kawase, Koichiro Nakadate, and two or three other young men at various locations throughout the city. Kawase and Nakadate knew both Nobuko and Motoko’s address and the general extent of their social interactions. However, neither Nakadate’s address nor Kawase’s residence had been disclosed to Nobuko and Motoko. As for these people’s daily lives as well, Nobuko and Motoko knew only of them when meeting together—only of them during shared activities. Yet in Berlin, even such a manner of association among Japanese people was accepted by Nobuko and Motoko as not unnatural.

VIII

It was strange that relatives who had never met nor even heard rumors of each other in their homeland would coincidentally encounter one another in a foreign capital and begin associating. The custom of burdensome familial obligations passed down through old Japan had been gradually eroding in the Sasa household over time. Yet when they happened to find themselves in the same foreign city, the narrowness of being fellow Japanese compelled them to view each other as close relations. True to form, her mother Takedayo had contacted her maternal second cousin in Berlin, Dr. Tsuyama Shinjiro, regarding Nobuko.

Berlin’s subway changed to an elevated line around Westend. In a certain street of that area where Tsuyama Shinjiro had been lodging at places like a university professor’s widow’s home, his first meeting with Nobuko had been primarily formal in nature. However, Nobuko received an unexpected request from him. Among Berlin’s medical professionals, an organization called the Thursday Club had been formed. There, he asked Nobuko to give a brief talk about her Soviet observations.

Nobuko, perplexed, postponed her reply. Then she consulted with Kawase and Nakadate. "Tsuyama... isn't he a military doctor?" Kawase—his large eyes rolling goggle-like as he twisted his tall frame that could be mistaken for a Chinese youth's—asked a young man beside him called Muraii. "Well... I don't know." Nobuko too had only known him as Dr. Tsuyama Shinjiro. "He's doing poison gas research or something—I think I've heard that name before—and someone said he's working damn hard..."

“――Maybe I should just decline...” Nobuko said with a face like a schoolgirl plotting to sneak out of the classroom. “I’m not good at speaking, so I agree that we should decline, but...”

Koichiro Nakadate, who had been silent until then, “You should speak.”

Looking at Nobuko from behind the thick, round black frames that appeared even bulkier beneath his heavy eyebrows, he spoke encouragingly. “Talking about those matters to people who want to hear them is a virtuous act.” As if propelled by everyone’s words, Nobuko consented to attend the gathering. Nobuko steeled herself and went to the Japanese Club with Motoko that day, determined to arrive precisely at seven o’clock sharp.

In that district, following Berlin’s regulation-driven approach, every house along the streets had identical steps and platforms arranged before their entrances. Having stepped out of the taxi, Nobuko—clutching the navy felt hat she had removed in the car alongside her handbag in a youthful, student-like demeanor—ascended one of these entryways. There was no sign of anyone resembling an attendant, only people conversing while standing in the vacant hall. After inquiring with them about the meeting room’s location, Nobuko and Motoko made their way toward the large double doors left conspicuously open at the rear of the left wing.

When she reached the threshold of the room, a troubled expression appeared on Nobuko’s face, her neatly cropped hair reflected clearly. The room, illuminated by the strong light of an old-fashioned chandelier, had all its windows with curtains fully drawn, heavy with the weight of night. Tobacco smoke lingered thinly. Around the long, large table were gathered a great many elderly-looking medical scholars who, at first glance, would likely regard a young woman like Nobuko as little more than a child. From the fact that she, as a woman, was being made to speak tonight, Nobuko had somehow imagined there would also be groups accompanied by their wives. However, the scene before her eyes was an atmosphere devoid of any feminine presence, filled with tobacco and the scent of dry woolen fabrics. The elderly people positioned near the open door of the room—unable to avoid seeing Motoko and Nobuko—likely deemed it unwise, given their considerable authority as Japanese medical scholars, to direct their attention directly to these simple Japanese women who appeared no older than schoolgirls. A person resting their cheek on the table was talking almost directly across from Nobuko and Motoko. Beside them, a person lazily stretched one arm across the table to stub out a finished cigarette in a distant ashtray. Their gazes briefly swept over Nobuko and Motoko and that was all.

The fact that she had been invited somewhere to speak meant that night's gathering at the Japanese Club was Nobuko's first such experience. There were truly no people who genuinely wanted to hear her speak. With unbearable discomfort, Nobuko absorbed the atmosphere of that space. Perhaps it had been solely Tsuyama Shinjiro's idea as the Thursday Club's organizer. She shouldn't have come. Just as she felt like leaving immediately, Nobuko exchanged glances with Motoko as if seeking rescue. A man who had been facing the table with his back to them suddenly twisted his neck as if sensing their presence and turned around. It was Tsuyama Shinjiro.

“Oh—” He pushed his chair back and stood up in a somewhat flustered manner.

“Please, come in.” “Please come this way.” “My apologies.” “Did I not guide you? — I was giving a report before the regular meeting, so my apologies.”

Nobuko and Motoko were given seats lined up at one end of the large table. Once settled, Motoko took out a cigarette as usual. Without saying a word, she bowed slightly to the person next to her to get a light, then smoked it with evident relish—indifferent to what the men might think—all while surveying the room decorated in old-fashioned Berlin taste with its ornate severity and the people gathered there. When Nobuko cast her gaze among the people, the unwelcoming atmosphere of the gathering pressed down on her with even greater concreteness. Though these were all people supposedly engaged in scholarly pursuits, the air in the room remained unyieldingly stiff, strangely coarse, and utterly impermeable. Nobuko lowered the handbag she had placed on the table onto her lap and took out a small handkerchief. She used the handkerchief to gently press and rub each palm one by one.

Eventually, Tsuyama Shinjiro stood up and clapped his hands to call for an end to the idle chatter. He then formally introduced Nobuko as the speaker. Though Nobuko was a maternal cousin Tsuyama Shinjiro had first met in Berlin, he made no mention of this personal connection, presenting her instead as Sasa Nobuko—a novelist and the first Japanese civilian woman to have experienced life in the Soviet Union. “As you are visiting Berlin during your inspection tour of various nations, we have asked you to speak this evening on medical matters within the Soviet Union.” “We appreciate your attention.”

Upon hearing that, Nobuko inadvertently muttered to herself. "Such medical issues—I'm at a loss." When Tsuyama Shinjiro had invited Nobuko to the Thursday Club's regular meeting, he hadn't specified such an imposing professional categorization. The request had been framed broadly as being about life in the Soviet Union. If that were truly the case, Nobuko hadn't considered it entirely beyond her capabilities. She now understood why the room's atmosphere felt so inhospitable. If these Berlin experts were being told that Nobuko Sasa—a mere novelist whose sole credential was having visited the Soviet Union—would lecture them on medical issues, some mild resistance would naturally arise. Yet paradoxically sensing this resistance as her entry point, Nobuko found herself surprisingly able to speak naturally. "First and foremost," she began, "I must clarify that I possess no expertise in medical matters." "Therefore," she continued, "as someone who has personally witnessed Soviet life—particularly the realities of daily existence in Moscow—I intend to truthfully share my observations in hopes they might prove useful." She described Soviet factories and their medical facilities, the relationship between labor unions and health protection programs, mother-child consultation centers and Leningrad's Maternal Protection Research Institute, workplace initiatives like one-minute exercises and rest rooms for female workers' health, and seaside sanatoriums built near hot springs. Though phrased with youthful simplicity, every detail of Nobuko's conversational account stemmed from firsthand experiences that had moved her—vivid reports anyone could understand, freshly hewn from Soviet realities.

As her talk progressed and vivid impressions revived through description, Nobuko regained her mental freedom. There were even moments when she could perceive her listeners’ focused interest converging upon her as she spoke. Finally, Nobuko described her life at Moscow University Hospital where she had been hospitalized for three months until April due to hepatitis. What truly exemplified a Soviet hospital was Natasha herself—how comically they had hugged around the wheelchair while mumbling incoherently, this plump nurse with cheeks like ripe apricots. What fit had Nobuko thrown as the patient over that incident? She then spoke freshly of how watching the robust Natasha work with healthy beauty and conversing with her became one of the joys of her convalescence—adding that Natasha was a Komsomol member and second-year student in the Workers’ Faculty of Moscow University’s medical school.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you must be well acquainted with numerous splendid hospitals in various places, and perhaps you yourselves may even have such hospitals.” “I don’t believe you are particularly lacking in well-trained nurses either.” “But regarding Natasha’s life as a nurse—since I am a woman, I was deeply moved.” “Though Germans are said to love music, I don’t believe you often find combinations like these Natashas—young wives of baritone students at the National Music School working as nurses at a university hospital.”

For over forty minutes, Nobuko had continued speaking with variation, but there she faltered. As she came to speak even of Natasha, various emotions welled up in Nobuko’s heart. Regarding the conventional path of medicine where each person aims to become great, I have come to feel like presenting a word that overturns its essence. Nobuko, whose bobbed hair and gently curving neck-to-shoulder contours appeared even more petite under the strong overhead light casting taut shadows, tilted her head slightly as she cast a shadow on the carpet and remained silent in thought for a moment. Nobuko, unable to find the right expression, spoke candidly from her genuine feelings,

“What I felt most strongly is that in the Soviet Union, medicine is truly being made to serve the purpose of protecting everyone’s lives.” “Of course, there are still various shortcomings—for instance, there have even been cartoons about dentists being unskilled and causing pain—but even so, medicine is steadily becoming more integrated into daily life.” “In every country, so that medicine can fulfill its true role and so that doctors can truly become beacons for those who are suffering, I believe it is right that such a society should be demanded to be built—even from the perspective of medicine itself.”

Having concluded with that, she fell silent for a second or two. But abruptly—

“This concludes my talk.” With a single bow, Nobuko returned to her seat. From among the approximately thirty to forty listeners came a round of unceremonious applause. Clearly, Nobuko’s talk—through its naturalness and vivid facts—gave the listeners a profoundly human impression.

“Well, thank you for your hard work.”

Tsuyama Shinjiro—his thick, dark neck encircled by a soft collar showing faint stains—stood up and gave a greeting.

"I found it concrete and informative, but as per our custom, please feel free to ask any questions you may have, gentlemen." Because Nobuko was such an amateur, the expert listeners likely had nothing they wished to ask. For a short while, cigarette smoke merely rose from here and there.

Breaking the silence, the man in his sixties sitting to Nobuko’s right fiddled with the platinum watch chain on his waistcoat and said, “Hmm… what to make of this—from your talk, I suppose I’ve grasped the social aspects, but—”

Then, interjecting in German—a language Nobuko couldn’t understand—

“Isn’t that aspect rather underdeveloped?” He spoke slowly in the slightly nasal voice typical of eminent clinicians, not quite directing his words at Nobuko. The man with the square, half-white forehead had kept his eyes closed throughout Nobuko’s entire speech, arms crossed and face tilted back against the chair’s backrest.

“How about it, Ms. Sasa?”

Tsuyama, the organizer, took up the indirect question from that person—which Nobuko perceived as arrogant.

“As for their medicine itself—how would you assess its level? Do you still consider it to be at a considerable level now?” “…?” Nobuko set down her half-drunk cup of bancha tea on the table and, with a look of surprise spreading across her face, shifted her gaze from Tsuyama to the entire assembly. “That you would ask me such a thing—isn’t Soviet research and discoveries always reported to the global academic community?—or do German medical journals have a policy against publishing Soviet work?—”

Nobuko uttered these words completely unaware of their ironic effect.

In Vienna, the city of music, Soviet music had been shut out. In German academic societies, she thought, similar exclusions might not be impossible. Yet no one responded to Nobuko's straightforward counter-question. Everyone remained silent. There was something unnatural about this silence. Having finished speaking and regained some composure, Nobuko turned a questioning look toward those clustered at the room's rear. On that wall protruded a square Kamin—a type of furnace—decorated with bluish-purple tiles in the German style. Young people had drawn chairs into the alcoves flanking it, gathering in the corner as if by prearrangement. At the very edge sat a man of thirty-three or four, arms crossed in relaxed posture, his shoulder and head lightly resting against the Kamin. He swung his loosely crossed legs while maintaining a closed-lip smile. Nobuko's gaze fixed on that smile— A smile both wise and critically appraising. That expression suggested something unspoken. Nobuko redirected her gaze to re-examine those around the table—the pretentiously indirect questioners and their ilk. The people firmly entrenched around the table were uniformly elderly. The juniors clustered by the Kamin seemed to have naturally conceded this space to their seniors.

The nature of the Berlin Thursday Club felt as if it had laid bare its inner workings to Nobuko. This too must be a sort of academic circle. There were likely all manner of troublesome student-like emotions in those senior-junior relationships and among the members themselves. To this Thursday Club's customs, the simple directness of Nobuko's way of speaking must have possessed an element that naturally invited laughter. Nobuko sensed that the person questioning her—regardless of formal seniority—seemed to be someone whom the young specialists regarded with academic criticism.

The man with a ruddy, angular face and a salt-and-pepper beard—his features bearing some resemblance to Kanasugi Eigoro—appeared unwilling to let the favorable impression of the Soviet Union that had permeated the room through Nobuko’s talk settle unchallenged in people’s hearts. “Academic fields—not just medicine—all inherently contain significant problems within their own domains,” he said. “Explaining this to you would likely prove futile, but your presentation amounts to little more than an overview of Soviet social conditions rather than a discussion of medicine proper.”

It seemed he was trying to make Nobuko understand that, for the scholars here, that alone was insufficient to be considered valuable, while simultaneously attempting to provoke the self-esteem of the other listeners.

"Now, how about... preventive medicine and such areas—" "Preventive medicine—does that refer to things like tuberculosis prevention and controlling epidemics?" Nobuko asked Tsuyama Shinjiro. "That’s the general idea."

“Quite a few tuberculosis sanatoriums have been built—but what do you think?” Nobuko answered uncertainly.

“As you know, given how many died of famine typhus up through 1922 and 1923, I don’t believe the Soviet could possibly be indifferent.” “But I wonder to what extent they’re administering things like preventive injections normally…”

During the nearly year and a half they were in Moscow, Nobuko and the others had not encountered such situations.

“The dissemination of knowledge about preventing venereal diseases is being thoroughly carried out even in places like workers’ clubs.”

“Well, naturally they would.” The man with the half-white beard nodded in satisfaction. “The situation there seems rather disorderly.” “As a government, they can’t simply let that continue.” It was the expression of a man who—without fully refuting fabricated tales about shared women or rampant promiscuity in the Soviet Union—seemed to entertain such notions in his half-gray head. “In any case, America currently leads in preventive medicine advancements. Next comes pre-war Germany.” “Next comes pre-war Germany.”

“But you see—”

Driven by an inability to stay silent in the face of his nitpicking objections, Nobuko said, "The other day, when Dr. Junnosuke Miyai presented his report at the League of Nations in Geneva—" and invoked the name of a renowned authority in infectious diseases and preventive medicine that every Thursday Club member would surely recognize.

“Dr. Miyai was investigating something in Moscow.” “Perhaps he actually found something unexpected.” “Preventive medicine as an academic discipline in itself—” Motoko, who had been listening, smirked and turned slightly away in a manner that thrust her chin out a bit. The moment she saw Motoko, Nobuko realized it was true. How absurd this all was! She shook herself free from the hook of that specialized term—preventive medicine—that had ensnared her. This doctor had been asking questions solely to make Nobuko flustered. Had someone truly listened to Nobuko’s talk, they would have understood through numerous examples the reality that in the Soviet Union, the framework of what was called preventive medicine had expanded beyond narrow realms like inoculations and vaccine production, shifting toward a broader, deeper effort to make the very fabric of working life itself healthier. Even though Nobuko’s entire talk had been, so to speak, the very reality of this new preventive medicine. —Realizing this, Nobuko’s expression grew solemn. She half-turned toward the man with the half-white beard and half-turned toward all those present at the gathering.

“Allow me to add one brief remark.”

Remaining seated in her chair, she placed her clasped hands on the table and added. "I imagine it must have been quite difficult for you all to listen to my talk—one that uses ordinary language drawn from daily life—when you’re accustomed to reports filled with specialized terminology." "Otherwise—and I mean no disrespect—there wouldn’t have been such a question just now, you see." Nobuko said to the elderly, father-like man with the half-white beard who had been trying to dismantle the impression her talk had made.

“I don’t believe such questions would have arisen.” “When I receive such esteemed questions, I somehow feel as though I can’t tell where you were listening to what I had to say…” A restrained but irrepressible laugh welled up from the people clustered around Kamin. It spread all around the table.

“In any case, it’s best for you all to see the Soviet situation firsthand for yourselves.”

Nobuko sincerely recommended it to everyone without ulterior motives. “It’s only natural you find my account lacking or remain skeptical.” “It’s utterly different from anywhere else.” “Truly, if any of you would just go see for yourselves—you have the experience and confidence... It’s merely one night from here to Moscow.”

Having said that, Nobuko looked toward the seats beside Kamin where young people clustered, as if seeking resonance. The man who had been watching Nobuko with a shrewd, sardonic smile still leaned his folded arms lightly against Kamin and swung his crossed legs, but kept his gaze lowered somewhere near his feet. The half-gray-bearded man facing the table, wearing a dark brown coat, began whispering with his mustached neighbor in a manner Nobuko perceived as deliberately ignoring her. Nobuko's practical suggestion that everyone should visit Moscow themselves—more than any words she had spoken that evening—remained unabsorbed, lingering precisely where her voice had resonated.

When Nobuko and Motoko left the room a step ahead of the others, who were to continue with some sort of meeting, they were invited by the Thursday Club as guests to observe two inspections scheduled for the following week—St. Clara Hospital and the infirmary at the Berlin Remand Prison. It was Tsuyama Shinjiro who made the proposal. The proposal passed without objection.

Tsuyama Shinjiro, Nobuko’s second cousin, was not only the sole medical doctor present but also clearly perceived as someone who held speaking authority within the Thursday Club from some distinct perspective. With an unpleasant aftertaste lingering in their hearts, Nobuko and Motoko left the stifling room. And when they stepped into the anteroom, Nobuko saw something unexpected there. In one corner of the anteroom—from which Nobuko in the inner room had been just visible—a crowd had formed. As Nobuko and the others emerged from the back, that cluster dispersed into retreating figures heading toward the entrance hall and others ascending the corridor stairs. People still lingered there lighting cigarettes as they watched Nobuko and Motoko pass by. There had been people standing here listening to the talk. It was said there were over a thousand Japanese in Berlin, but among those scattered about here and there, Nobuko recognized no familiar faces. Yet those people—having listened to Nobuko’s talk—approached her naturally as she emerged. Feeling it would be rude to coldly push through them, Nobuko slightly slowed her pace. However, with nothing particular occurring, she exited through the Japanese Club’s entrance while conveying through her entire bearing a sense of farewell.

Inside the room with its heavy curtains drawn tight, even past nine in the evening had felt like the dead of night, yet stepping outside revealed a faintly glowing early summer dusk. From the uniformly pale yellow front entrance—each one identical—Nobuko and Motoko descended to the sidewalk. “Well done.” From the cluster of Japanese people beneath the linden trees lining the avenue, Koichiro Nakadate’s voice called out. “Oh—you all came?”

Motoko immediately went over. “Were you listening?”

To Nobuko, who spoke awkwardly, “Even though it was your debut, I figured I had to listen.” “And I felt obliged since I was the one who suggested it.” “I moved heaven and earth to be here.”

The one who answered was Kawase Isamu, a tall man wearing a beret. In his characteristically gentle tone, “Ms. Sasa, you’re quite something, aren’t you?” Koichiro Nakadate always delivered serious matters in an offhand tone. “The sight of you treating those dignitaries with such impartiality was quite something.” Nobuko, pressing the back of her hand to her flushed cheeks,

“But that half-white-haired man—how mean-spirited!” she complained childishly.

she appealed in a childlike manner.

“That’s just a man who’s here temporarily.” “For inspections, you know—since it’s in vogue.” Motoko, as if a curtain had just fallen on a play, interjected from the side, “Anyway, I’m parched.” Motoko said. “Why don’t we go somewhere?” “I wonder if beer would be okay?”

“Sure.” “Wouldn’t you be troubled, Sasa-kun?” Kawase Isamu, with youthful consideration, glanced back at Nobuko standing off to the side.

“Tonight is Sasa-kun’s night as the guest of honor.”

“Sure, as long as it’s somewhere we can get something to eat. I’m starving.”

They all laughed as if to say, "That figures."

The group of about six people, including Nobuko and the others, began to stroll leisurely through Berlin’s dimly lit streets under what could be called a white night—a faintly luminous evening that never fully darkened.

Even though they were all Japanese in Berlin, what a stark difference there was between these people and those who had been in the inner room of the Japanese Club from which Nobuko and the others had just emerged. Not only did their ages and occupations differ, but their faces, clothing, moods—even the worlds they inhabited—were utterly distinct. The six Japanese eventually settled at a restaurant near the bustling Kurfürstenstraße, famous throughout Berlin for its excellent beer. Compared to a café, it had a much broader facade, but in compensation, the shallow rear area reflected the lively interior scene through mirrors glittering on three walls.

Before Nobuko’s group, who had found a table in a corner and settled there, glass beer mugs filled to the brim with a beautiful amber-colored liquid were distributed. “Let us celebrate the success of Sasa-kun’s debut!” Kawase Isamu declared with deliberate theatricality. Everyone laughed and clinked the rims of their beer mugs together, and the men downed about a third of theirs in one gulp.

“Tonight’s beer is especially good… It really must be summer already.” “This is great! —Nobuko-chan.” Kawase had only raised his beer mug for the toast when Motoko said to Nobuko, who was waiting for the salad he had ordered for them.

“This should be fine—there’s hardly any alcohol in it. It’s delicious!” Nobuko took a sip and let the beer’s light fragrance and sweet-edged bitterness suffuse pleasantly through her mouth.

“This is a problem—it’s harder not to drink it.”

“Hahahaha! Truly, that’s the honest truth!”

Koichiro Nakadate agreed. "But I wonder what kind of face Professor Fromgold would make if he saw this."

“Who? That what’s-his-name Gorido guy.”

“The doctor at the Moscow hospital. I was supposed to be drinking mineral water in Karlsbad around this time.” “What are you talking about? Nobuko-chan, you were the one who decided to give up on Karlsbad yourself.”

Motoko, her eyelids faintly flushed, spoke in a harsh tone.

“Cut it out with that strange way of talking.” The abruptness came as a surprise even to Nobuko. They all fell silent for a moment. Around the time the second beer mugs were lined up before each of them, their reservations faded away, and both Kawase Isamu and Koichiro Nakadate grew lively and eloquent. “Since you all went to the trouble of coming to listen, you shouldn’t have stayed in that corner—you should’ve come in boldly—” Motoko said. “Terrifying, terrifying!”

Koichiro Nakadate drew his head back with sardonic exaggeration. "We maintain a strict policy of not getting too familiar with those illustrious personages." "When Sasa-kun told everyone to go inspect the Soviet Union themselves—you should've seen their faces. Not one of them so much as squeaked, did they?"

“But really, why doesn’t everyone go, when they’ve come all the way to Berlin? Even though they’re so greedily competing for the latest knowledge.” As the weariness in her nerves gradually dissipated and her complexion regained its luster, Nobuko posed an earnest question.

“They’re all busy with Victoria Street.”

Motoko said. In Berlin, there was a café by that name where only Japanese women gathered. “But—seriously.” “In other words, we’re all just keeping each other terribly in check.”

Kawase Isamu, his large eyes somewhat bloodshot, answered. “There must be one or two men among that crowd who actually think for themselves. Those people probably want to go see the Soviet Union too, but if they act carelessly and get noticed—only to ruin their future—it just wouldn’t be worth it. After all, the Japanese in Berlin are a nosy bunch.” “That goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

Nakadate interjected plainly, yet with that touch of humor. "From their perspective, we're apparently the disgrace of the Japanese people."

“Huh, I don’t like that. So does that mean we’ve somehow ended up joining the ranks of the disgrace?”

“—You needn’t worry about that. After all, you’ve been invited by the Thursday Club—the highest authority among Japanese residents in Berlin.” From within the laughter emerged Murai—a young man who had remained silent until now. “Mr. Nakadate—how do you suppose that will proceed?” He stretched his neck toward the table as if fighting against the beer hall’s clamor to be heard, and asked.

“—It’ll work out somehow.”

“What’s this about?”

While having Murai light her cigarette, Motoko pressed for details.

“The film Mr. Nakadate produced before leaving Japan will be released here soon.” “What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s all well and good, but…”

Koichiro Nakadate had been frequenting UFA Studios in Berlin and, when the Kabuki troupe came to Moscow, had also visited Sovkino’s film studios there. It was understandable that he felt some reluctance deep down. “So it’s an older work, then?” True to her love of theater and film, Motoko pressed further. “That’s part of it, but—” Then Murai, as if taking over the explanation from Nakadate, “Mr. Nakadate holds an ambition in the production of what are called chonmage period films.” “—I suppose that’s the right way to put it?”

He sought Nakadate’s acknowledgment. “The assertion is that chonmage period films have no reason to exist unless they’re produced as critiques of Japan’s feudal society.” “And he argues that such chonmage period films in Japanese cinema, as works of art, remain completely untapped.” The work scheduled for release in Berlin this time was said to realistically depict the life of ronin in the late Tokugawa period and portray the collapse of samurai power.

“That sounds perfectly acceptable.” “After all, it’s been two years. If even I couldn’t bear to watch it myself, I’d be in real trouble.”

“I suspect it might turn out surprisingly well.”

Motoko spoke about a Japanese film that had been released in Moscow. It was a tragedy adapted from a work by a Japanese proletarian writer, in which an orphaned girl, unable to endure the cruel life of the orphanage, ultimately set fire to it and descended into madness. "The way they kept catching her no matter how many times she tried to run away—how they dragged her back each time and treated her worse than before—that felt real enough," she said. "But I didn't think it worked as art. Still, Moscow loved it."

“Ah, that makes sense.” “They come to understand it through the theme.” Koichiro Nakadate and Kawase Isamu’s words collided simultaneously. “Themes like that are international, you see.—The significance lay in how it pulled the emptiness that Japanese cinema had until now into such international themes.” Now that he mentioned it, even when Nobuko recalled it, the method of that tragedy—"What drove her to that?"—followed the heaviness and darkness of German films.

“Mr. Nakadate, what’s the title of that one?” “According to this company’s proposal, it seems we’ll end up going with ‘Schatten des Yoshiwara.’” “Schatten?”

Nobuko asked back. “It means ‘shadow,’ I suppose.” “So... ‘Shadow of Yoshiwara’?” Into the silence that had fallen over the group, Kawase Isamu blew out a forceful puff of cigarette smoke. The way he expelled the smoke reflected everyone’s unspoken dissatisfaction with this retitling.

“Well, I guess that’s just how it is.”

Motoko muttered regretfully.

“Considering that, it’s surprising they actually released *A Town Without Sun* with its original title.” “That’s different—the publishers themselves are on our side here. In that sense, if it’s *What Drove Her*, we might as well just go with it as is.” “That may be so, but…”

Nakadate told Nobuko the name of the Berlin production company that she couldn't quite make out.

“They rejected that one over there.”

The same company was now intending to acquire Nakadate’s work.

“Hmm.” “That’s the thing—it’s always like this...” “Right?” The face of Kawase Isamu—with his glaring eyes and dynamic features—and the face of Koichiro Nakadate—whose thick eyebrows, emphatic beneath his heavy black-framed glasses—momentarily stared intently into each other’s eyes.

Nakadate's frame of mind had become far more preoccupied with practical matters than when he had been in Moscow.

Nobuko had noticed it soon after arriving in Berlin. When they met in Moscow, it had been Yoshinosuke Nagahara—who could no longer endure the old Kabuki world and sought escape from it—who appeared more tormented. What those seven or eight months back in Berlin had made Koichiro Nakadate experience remained beyond Nobuko’s comprehension. Yet through Kawase Isamu’s manner of speaking with him—like friends perpetually debating some enduring issue—she sensed something fundamental passing unspoken between them, a shared understanding embedded within their omissions.

“In reality, films and theater—that sort of stuff refuses to become modern enterprises down to the last thread.” Rubbing his large-eyed face with his palm, Kawase Isamu used a rolling R in annoyance.

“Even German films have hit rock bottom,” Kawase Isamu said to the group at the table. “Whether it’s eroticism or abnormal psychology, it’s all formulaic. Even Pabst has nothing to be proud of anymore. And on top of that, Rambert Wolff has already reached its limits.” Due to film production requiring substantial capital, even in Berlin where leftist artistic movements appeared to be thriving, the making of proletarian films was said to be economically unsustainable.

“If they keep going like this and turn into talkies, German cinema’s done for.” “Yeah, it’s plain as day. It’ll get gobbled up by American capital.” At that beer hall, while quite a few people would come in, immediately stand at the bar, drink just enough to quench their thirst, and briskly leave, there was also a considerable number who, once they had settled into a corner, would not budge easily. The figures of those men and women were reflected in the shop’s glittering mirrors, and from the corner where Nobuko sat, a section of the boulevard—now fully enveloped in night—could be seen. The neon lights Berlin prided itself on ran vertically along the heights of buildings across the street, blazing like blue ribbons of light that vanished into the early summer sky. Orange threads of flame spelled out “GLORIA-PALAST” in soft lettering along the eaves of the adjacent movie theater. Neon signs of every color crisscrossed Berlin’s nightscape with motionless lines, evoking a three-dimensional pulse of metropolitan nightlife unlike anything she had experienced in Moscow or Vienna. There was something unnerving about Berlin’s darkness—as if the night itself were alive. Nobuko listened to Koichiro Nakadate and Kawase Isamu continue debating the commercial nature of film and theater while immersed in these nocturnal sensations.

Nine

Shortly after Nobuko and Motoko arrived in Berlin, Koichiro Nakadate and Kawase Isamu accompanied them to a ticket agency resembling a play guide’s office, located in a side street off the lower end of Unter den Linden Street. From the dimly lit shop’s walls to the back of its counter, German-style posters with bold colors and designs were densely plastered without gaps. There, over two weeks, the two men researched performance programs that Nobuko and Motoko could attend during Berlin’s off-season theater schedule. They had advance tickets purchased for them at several venues—for Strindberg’s *Ghosts* at the Deutsches Theater; for *Threepenny Opera*, which had maintained sold-out shows through two consecutive seasons; and for a rare out-of-season performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester, renowned for its splendid renditions. Though tickets were nearly gone for both this symphony and the touring Scala Opera’s production of *Carmen*, Nobuko’s group managed to secure two leftover box seats for the Ninth—uncharacteristically luxurious for them—and two tickets in a third-floor corner for the evening *Carmen* performance.

“Well, that’s settled.” With his tall frame pushing open the shop’s glass door and ushering Nobuko and the others out into the street ahead of him, Kawase Isamu said. “With this lineup of programs we’ve managed to get now, it’s not a bad selection—so that’s settled? You’re going to the museum today, right?” Emerging onto Unter den Linden—a grand yet aridly bureaucratic boulevard—Nobuko and the others headed toward the former palace-turned-museum at the avenue’s terminus, while Kawase’s group split off toward the subway.

That day, Nobuko and the others ran into them at a Japanese restaurant where Kawase, Nakadate, and their companions often ate lunch. Japanese restaurants abroad were steeped in a damp, heavy odor unlike anywhere else—a smell that seeped from walls and tables saturated with precisely those foods Japanese people yearned for: miso, soy sauce, pickles. In a deserted corner of Tokiwa’s dining room—its romaji sign hanging outside, that distinctive odor lingering—the four of them finished their late lunch around a soy sauce-stained table: Nobuko, Motoko, Nakadate, and Kawase.

"The good thing about this place is that if you adjust your timing just slightly, it becomes nice and empty like this.—The food’s as you can see—countrified stuff, mind you…" Kawase Isamu, with his long years in Berlin, would come to dine at this Tokiwa—where familiar faces meant he could avoid drinking the beer he didn’t particularly want—on a few days each month, depending on his finances and mood. In Berlin’s eateries, beer or wine came standard, and Nobuko and the others, who didn’t order them, were made to pay something like a tax in lieu of alcohol with every meal.

When Kawase Isamu heard that Nobuko and the others planned to go to the museum that day, he—

“Perfect timing! Hey, let’s just go today—what do you say?”

He rolled his large eyes and looked back at Koichiro Nakadate. "Ah, that's fine." "What's this about?" It was Nobuko whose curiosity was immediately piqued by their exchange.

“Do you also have business at the museum?” “Not exactly, but you’re all heading to Unter den Linden anyway, right?” “Is there any other way?”

Motoko asked. “That really is the route after all.”

Kawase, who had been collecting his thoughts while watching Nakadate explain softly, "Do you all have any money on you right now?" he said, mainly addressing Motoko.

“I don’t have much on me… What’s this about?” “I’m thinking of having you buy theater tickets.—You do intend to see them after all, don’t you?” Kawase then talked about the play-guide shop beside Unter den Linden Street and suggested it would be more convenient for Nobuko and the others to systematically purchase advance tickets for performances they wanted to see or hear during their Berlin stay.

“Hmm, that might not be a bad idea either.” In a serious tone that seized upon Motoko’s response—which didn’t seem entirely unreasonable—Kawase—

“Despite appearances, we’re quite busy, you know.”

he said. “I want you to see as much as possible, but we simply can’t stick around and accompany you everywhere. I think it’s best if we find a way that doesn’t burden each other.”

“We never once intended to be any burden on you all from the very beginning.”

“I’m well aware of that, which is why—isn’t this a clever plan?” Kawase pursed his lips slightly and stared at Motoko with his large eyes bulging out even more. In that moment, a shadow of a smile flickered across the overly serious Kawase’s lower eyelids. Nobuko noticed that and, thinking "Oh?", looked at Koichiro Nakadate, who was always Kawase’s partner in all matters. As usual, Nakadate—whose thick eyebrows were further accentuated by the large, round black frames of his glasses—casually turned his slender face, which appeared weighed down by the glasses, toward the window and tapped the table with his fingertips. Even in Nakadate’s expression—or rather, the way his expression remained unchanged—there was something that somehow stimulated a mischievous feeling in Nobuko. Nobuko,

“Oh… What could it be?” She stopped blinking and stared at Nakadate as if playing a guessing game. “What’s going on?” “A consultation, perhaps?”

Nakadate answered with lip movements reminiscent of delivering theatrical lines. After settling their portion of the bill, Motoko began counting money under the table to purchase tickets later. Through the low street-facing window drifted Berlin's early summer breeze, agitating the faint Japanese scent lingering in the room. "Mr. Kawase!" Nobuko soon called out to Kawase with laughter brimming with playful accusation.

“What?” “I see—this was more of a clever plan for Kawase Isamu than it was for us, wasn’t it?” “Hmm.” “I suppose that’s one way to put it.” Though faintly blushing around his eyebrows, Kawase maintained his usual somewhat affected youthful demeanor. Nakadate, again as if delivering a theatrical line,

“Petty tricks, you see, tend to get found out.” When he said this, they all burst into laughter. Kawase, for some reason, had not introduced to Nobuko and Motoko the lover who was openly acknowledged within their circle. For their part, Nobuko and Motoko did not broach the subject either as they continued associating with him, but Kawase must have devised this expedient of having them purchase advance tickets both to preserve his evenings with that person and to avoid inconveniencing the women.

While checking the money, Motoko, unaware of the skit among the three,

“Shall we get going?” She prepared to stand up, fastening the metal clasp of her document case with a click. And so the four of them boarded the subway from the nearest station to Unter den Linden Street.

10

As several days passed, Nobuko discovered the unexpected convenience of having bought tickets in advance that allowed her and Motoko to move about independently. On one side, through the presence of Nobuko's second cousin—the medical doctor and Thursday Club secretary Tsuyama Shinjiro—the axis of their activities in Berlin became twofold.

After Nobuko gave a brief lecture at the Thursday Club, both the tours of St. Clara Hospital and Berlin’s remand prison—to which Nobuko and Motoko were invited—proved to be entirely bureaucratic inspections. St. Clara Hospital specialized in gynecology and was reputed for its comprehensive X-ray facilities and their high medical efficacy. The Japanese inspection party—a group of about twenty men with only two women among them—was received by a nun around sixty years old whose speech was clear and spirited. The stiffly starched pure white wimple enveloped the elderly woman’s ruddy, healthy-looking face as she swung the large golden cross hanging over her black habit with vigor; her gestures while guiding and explaining to the group exuded pragmatic worldly wisdom and decisiveness. True to its identity as a nunnery hospital, even the transom of the X-ray room—preserving its white ceiling—was framed by decorative mosaics in white, pale blue, and purple. Nobuko and Motoko, with amateur curiosity, found themselves drawn to these German-style aesthetic elements in the hospital’s appearance and instinctively compared them to Moscow’s hospitals during their tour. Yet whether due to differing specialties or because St. Clara’s X-ray facilities fell short of their rumored reputation, none of the Thursday Club doctors asked any properly formulated questions.

The Berlin Remand Prison stood on Alt-Moabit Street, encircled by towering walls of fearsome reddish-rust hue. Guided up a dark spiral staircase, the group glimpsed a courtyard through a skylight window below. The instant the courtyard entered her view, Nobuko felt her heart violently struck and nudged Motoko. Around the modestly sized courtyard ran a narrow concrete path. At its center grew three linden trees spreading their branches. Between each tree wound additional concrete paths—mere single-person widths—arranged in zigzag patterns. Upon these walked fewer than ten women in brown skirts and broad aprons, moving in single file. Though Nobuko continued climbing past the window amidst the men, the scene burned itself into her mind.

Nobuko whispered in a low voice, “It’s the same as Rosa’s photo.” She murmured this to Motoko. When Rosa Luxemburg had been imprisoned, Nobuko had seen a photograph in Moscow showing her taking a walk under a female guard’s supervision. Rosa had been forced to wear an apron. The exercise yard—exactly like the one now glimpsed through the window—had featured a narrow path winding around an inner courtyard with trees. Though called a hospital ward tour, the inspection group had merely shuffled through corridors lined with cells. It was lunch distribution time—as Nobuko’s group passed through, a prison laborer was portioning out watery food from a small drum-shaped container into aluminum bowls with a metal ladle. The laborer in gray prison uniform and cap roughly sloshed the liquid meal about. The sound reminded Nobuko of night soil collection in Japan. Through one open door flashed the sunken-eyed face of a man in hospital clothes sitting up on his bed.

Everything that met Nobuko’s eyes caused her pain. She endured it with a gradually rising emotion resembling indignation and was guided along with the group to the X-ray examination room. It was daytime, but the room was illuminated by electric lights. Along the surrounding walls were what looked like specimen shelves, and inside their glass panels lay a large soup spoon bent into a strange shape. A medium-sized spoon. Forks, dentures, wood fragments, broken combs, buttons of various sizes, clasps, and so on were displayed. According to Tsuyama Shinjiro’s explanation, all those strange objects had been extracted from the stomachs of prisoners. Prisoners sent to the remand prison would often attempt to commit suicide or try to prolong their trials by claiming illness, swallowing foreign objects. This X-ray room would immediately detect their plans, and they would receive appropriate treatment—so it was explained.

The Japanese medical scholars—whether intrigued by the bizarre objects that had been extracted from the stomachs of remand prisoners—scattered about the room, pressing their faces close to peer into the glass cases and examine the displayed specimens of X-ray photographs affixed there. Among the specimen photographs was one depicting a twenty-two-year-old man swallowing shoe heel leather. There was also a photograph of a man who had pulled out and eaten his own hair, resulting in a hairball lodged in his stomach. After looking at them for some time, Nobuko began feeling nauseous and stealthily retreated toward the door alone. No matter what cunning plans they might have had, she thought, the psychology of people bending such hard, large spoons to swallow them whole or gulping down shoe leather could not be normal. Such was the terror that oppressed them—that drove them to these maddened acts. In this very pride of equipping the prison with a fully functional X-ray room, Nobuko sensed a relentless cruelty. Even if they were to precisely remove these madness-tinged objects from the stomachs of men and women driven insane by the law, human misery would remain unrelieved—the society that kept producing criminals would remain unchanged. Regardless, the X-ray room would keep operating today and tomorrow, satisfied with its scientific precision. The cruelty of heartless machinery! Were it otherwise, Berlin’s Police Chief Zörgiebel would never have beaten workers to death on May Day.

For Nobuko, yet another scene that was even more unbearable followed during that day’s tour. When they exited the X-ray room, the Thursday Club group was escorted to the dining hall. Since it was lunchtime, they were told they should observe the prison’s meal distribution system. Nobuko thought there must be a display shelf there too, with sample portions arranged according to the day’s menu. She recalled the sound of a prison trustee ladling something like stew with a metal scoop in the corridor earlier. That kind of clatter didn’t come from the stew on display. Moreover, what pained those confined here wasn’t the stew itself, but rather the sound of being forced to eat it. —

Nobuko walked into the bright cafeteria from behind the others with a gloomy, intense gaze. And there, she came to a stop. What had been prepared in the cafeteria was a simple yet proper banquet. “Well, this is rather overwhelming.”

A voice uttered in Japanese with a somewhat troubled tone could be heard. The guiding official, particularly addressing Nobuko and the other women,

“Please, please take your seats.” He indicated the seat directly opposite where he stood. Five or six prison laborers stood stationed in the cafeteria to serve. Clad in gray uniforms and gray prisoner caps, they maintained military-style attention postures at fixed distances from the tables. Every face held a potent curiosity toward these outsiders. As Nobuko moved to sit in the designated seat, a young prison laborer behind her took one swift long stride forward and pushed in her chair.

Once everyone had taken their seats, brief formal greetings were exchanged between both parties, and deep dishes of potato and cabbage vegetable stew were brought before the inspection group.

“This is apparently today’s lunch for the prisoners,” “It’s exactly the same as what was being distributed when you passed through the corridor earlier.”

The organizer Tsuyama Shinjiro, who had been seated next to the official, explained to the group. The same thing... she murmured inwardly. The same thing—yes—but how utterly different it was. Nobuko recalled that retching-like splashing sound. "There are no other delicacies, but please do help yourselves to seconds from this plate." "Moreover, everything now being served here consists solely of what the prisoners eat."

On the table covered with a stark white starched cloth, in addition to thick slices of bread and butter placed before each person, lay a large yellow lump of cheese on a plate. A large plate displayed sliced sausages—square ones, thick round ones, and two-toned varieties—arranged in rows. Honey sat in a glass jar. Pastry-like baked goods and dried fruits were arrayed. This was all food the prisoners ate—but when were they given which items, and in what quantity? In the eyes of the prison laborers who never once looked away as they watched the guests receive explanations and eat, Nobuko could not help but detect a glimmer revealing they never consumed such things regularly themselves. The prison laborers stared fixedly, observing the guests eat. The tension in their entire bodies betrayed how their mouths had grown slick with saliva unbeknownst to them. To be served and monitored by people told everything on the table was theirs yet forbidden from touching even a morsel—what heartless, inhuman behavior it was to dine as guests here. The expressions in the eyes of the prison laborers standing at rigid attention showed habitual hunger. No irony or mockery flickered there. This absence pierced Nobuko’s heart all the more sharply. The bright scene of the remand prison’s guest cafeteria remained hushed and orderly, its satirical barbarity carefully veiled.

After returning from the Altmoabit remand prison, Nobuko did not go straight back to her lodgings but instead walked for a long time with Motoko through Tiergarten’s natural woods, bathed in western sunlight filtering through the trees. At times like these, it was a relief that Nobuko and Motoko could move about freely as a pair, unbound by prior arrangements with Kawase and the others. Nobuko and Motoko also joined the same Thursday Club group to tour Berlin’s municipal sewage system—a facility the city boasted was world-class. From a large manhole beside the main thoroughfare—where passersby cast puzzled glances at Japanese people entering one by one—they descended an iron ladder several meters underground into a concrete tunnel resembling a riverbank. Damp walls glowed with electric light. Illumined by this glow, a black river seven or eight meters wide flowed with powerful currents. This was Berlin’s grand sewage river. From this black great river of sewage—thoroughly sterilized as proudly claimed—no defining stench arose. Only the air hung oppressively damp, its coldness and weight clinging to the skin. From the flow of black water in that colossal sewer, Nobuko sensed something like the outermost limit of cleanliness achievable by a metropolis’s excrement.

In this way, Nobuko and Motoko toured aspects of Berlin that were entirely different from what Kawase and Nakadate showed them; however, for Tsuyama Shinjiro, who served as their guide, these tours were—so to speak—official affairs stemming from his general position as the Thursday Club's organizer. For Tsuyama Shinjiro himself, there existed a more distinct, more concentrated subject. That was his interest in the rearmament of "New Germany."

Eleven

During her stay in Vienna, Nobuko observed how the small number of Japanese residents there clustered around the legation. Their way of thinking—encompassing notions like Pan-Europeanism and a coordinated coldness toward the Soviets—seemed to coalesce into a diplomatic atmosphere attuned to the Austrian Social Democratic government’s current disposition. When she came to Berlin, Nobuko felt herself thrust into the midst of a vast, complex mechanism that never ceased moving for an instant. For Berlin’s Japanese community, the embassy did not occupy the central role in daily life that Vienna’s legation did. Since the postwar inflationary period, multitudes of Japanese had continued arriving in Berlin—each pursuing their own interests and objectives, competing and jostling while directly engaging with significant facets of Berlin itself. Thus, Tsuyama Shinjiro—rumored to be a medical doctor in Berlin devoted to poison gas research—harboring strong interest in German rearmament, while another group of Japanese like Kawase Isamu and Koichiro Nakadate’s circle lived immersed in film, theater, social sciences, and the international proletarian cultural movement, constituted nothing less than an exact reflection of Berlin’s societal landscape.

One afternoon, Nobuko went to Deutsche Bank with Motoko as usual. The money Nobuko was to receive from Bunmeisha had arrived. Unfamiliar with the place and hindered by language barriers, they found themselves shuttling between the first and third floors twice due to mishandled procedures. At the bustling first-floor entrance—as busy as a department store—the ceaselessly moving elevators embodied Berlin’s efficiency-driven ethos. There were no doors, nor did they stop at each floor as usual. Riders would hurriedly step into these doorless, perpetually moving boxes the moment they drifted up or down before them. Unable to adjust to this unnerving restlessness, Nobuko let one elevator pass while standing frozen. Just then, a young clerk—papers fluttering in hand—leaped from a descending car still ten centimeters above the floor, disappearing at a half-run into the counter-lined hall. With exaggerated movements born of excessive tension, Nobuko and Motoko finally completed their third-floor errand. When they returned relieved to the first-floor hall with its marble pillars, Nobuko glimpsed a Japanese face amid the jostling foreign crowd beneath the colonnade. Nobuko—

“Oh!”

She let out a small cry and touched Motoko’s hand.

“Isn’t that Sasabe’s son over there?”

Even in that moment, Nobuko’s gaze pierced through the crowd, pursuing that distinctive Japanese face darting in and out of sight beneath a marble column. Nobuko was seized by an uncanny, illusory sensation. The fact that within this bustle filled with unfamiliar, indifferent foreign faces there had by chance appeared the face of literary master Junnosuke Sasabe—a face she had known only through photographs since her girlhood—sent ripples of bewildered excitement through her emotions. After Junnosuke Sasabe passed away, she had heard his eldest son had come to Berlin to study music. The distinctive fullness of his jawline and shape of his eyes gave Junnosuke Sasabe’s late-life photographs a subdued richness—a kind of luster and substance that radiated the essence of a deeply human character. Nobuko could not bring herself to look at those photographs—not out of sympathy for the man’s literary world, but because of the life circumstances that had surrounded him—without anything stirring in her heart.

After Junnosuke Sasabe himself passed away, his wife’s memoirs were published. In them had seeped his wife’s worldly and resolute character. As a wife, she had spoken only of Junnosuke Sasabe—her husband and a Meiji-Taishō era literary figure who had lived feeling contradictions between European ideals and Eastern, particularly Japanese customs within himself and without—as a difficult man whose motivations she scarcely grasped, rather than addressing the delicate undulations of his inner life.

If one were to look closely into the literary world of Junnosuke Sasabe, they would find the unresolved conflicts between the egos of men and women churning ceaselessly.

Nobuko was a woman who lived in protest of the fragile, beautiful intelligence that Aikawa Ryōnosuke had ultimately been unable to sustain. At the same time, she was a woman who refused to submit to the life attitude of passively observing the unresolved whirlpool of Junnosuke Sasabe’s literature from a previous era—a woman who yearned to confirm through her own life that it was possible to carve out a different path in history today. Driven by Berlin’s mechanical tempo yet resisting it in her floundering way, Nobuko appeared in Deutsche Bank’s hall with a displeased expression, her heart filled with an aversion to haste. The moment she unexpectedly recognized Junnosuke Sasabe’s unmistakable features there, the equilibrium of her emotions shattered—as though an unresolved issue she had been grappling with in life and history had abruptly materialized before her in living flesh. When she exclaimed “Oh!” and touched Motoko’s hand with her own gloved one, the shock that ran to her very fingertips pervaded every part of Nobuko’s body and her entire existence.

The face of Sasabe's son—who appeared to be waiting for someone beneath the marble pillars—seemed to sense a scorching gaze directed at him from afar; through the flow of people, he turned his eyes quizzically toward the direction where Nobuko stood. Then, as if that face had indirectly acknowledged that Nobuko was indeed Nobuko, a shadow of a faint smile appeared in his gaze. With that expression, his face grew even closer in resemblance to that of his father, Junnosuke Sasabe, in the photographs.

Nobuko was enveloped in an uncanny feeling, as though swept by the wind. In this Berlin crowd, the face of Junnosuke Sasabe—which had struck Nobuko so profoundly—was ultimately mere facial resemblance; that the son's living process could never again become the father's stood as a reality filled with such harsh implications. That face—now timorously jostled in the human tide where Nobuko watched, visible one moment and hidden the next, flickering in and out of sight—inevitably made her feel something of life itself.

Nobuko felt compassion for Sasabe Junnosuke’s son, who had been born with a face so strikingly like his father’s. He could not escape that face. That face—whether in Berlin or London—so long as there were Japanese people who knew the name Junnosuke Sasabe and remembered his photographs, would inevitably find itself surrounded by an environment shaped by associations with his father’s literature—a world calibrated around the dignified features inherited by this young man. With what power would he extricate himself from that circumstance?

The next day, when Nobuko encountered Kawase and the others at a café on the corner of Plagel Square, she told them about Sasabe Junnosuke's son whom she had spotted in the crowd at Deutsche Bank.

“Does that sort of person not associate with you all at all?”

“Well… a different world altogether.”

Kawase Isamu replied, moving his large eyes.

“Wherever those people go, they’ve always got their entourage in tow—it’s what you’d call a preordained life.”

“Why don’t you just kick all that away? It’s absurd,” Motoko said with a sullen twist of her lips. “The real point is that the old man considered beef hotpot a feast yet produced all that work,” Kawase replied, his large eyes shifting. “You need only consider that.” “Those raised surrounded by entourages since childhood must feel lost without them,” Motoko countered. “And their hangers-on are worse—each has sunk into vulgarity these days. When people see that face, they grow maudlin, reminiscing about their youth spent reading Junnosuke Sasabe’s works.” Her voice sharpened. “That’s precisely why it’s poisonous—they occupy positions of supposed standing.”

In Berlin, apart from those like Nobuko and Motoko who sought to touch upon everything during their brief stay, there were also elite offspring like this Sasabe—encountered by chance in the crowds of Deutsche Bank and unlikely to be met again. There existed one place in Berlin where its proprietor knew nearly every face among the mutually unacquainted Japanese residents. It was a souvenir shop called "Kanda" run by a Japanese person.

Twelve

In Shinjiro Tsuyama's days with Nobuko, whom he encountered in Berlin, there were also such circumstances, and at the same time, there were various sentiments from her life there—a year and four months in Moscow—that she had brought here. There was an aspect of this fact that remained indifferent. When meeting Nobuko and Motoko, Shinjiro Tsuyama—whose perpetually worn soft collar attested to his meticulous handling of money—would serve them modest fare from Berlin’s small eateries, dishes like watery stew of salted pork and cabbage, even when accompanied by women. Shinjiro Tsuyama was not driven by what society calls stinginess; rather, his approach contained something akin to an indifferent horsepower—the kind found in a person who intensely fixates on a single matter, devoting themselves to pursuing it without distraction, utterly unconcerned with all else.

Shinjiro Tsuyama—his large, sturdy frame clad in a grayish matching suit, thick neck constricted by a soft collar—shook his slightly twisted, dull-colored necktie and said to Nobuko and the others.

“In any case, the Japanese need to study Germany’s methods much more seriously. That post-war Germany—don’t you see?—is now on the verge of overtaking Britain and France. Krupp, Siemens, I.G.—this is one of the world’s leading dye factories, you know. They’ve made astonishing progress. When it comes to Leuna’s nitrogen factory, it’s the largest in the world—just look at this one. What they’re currently producing is fertilizer. It’s said that Leuna propelled German agriculture forward, but in an emergency, this factory has facilities to be entirely converted into a powerful military plant. In Japan, there’s been quite some talk lately about production rationalization—but nonsense! Nonsense! Compared to what Germany’s doing, it’s adults versus children.—Well, even so, better than not saying anything at all.”

And Shinjiro Tsuyama proceeded to give Nobuko and the others a more advanced explanation.

“Ladies like yourselves may find this irrelevant, but this is precisely because Germany adopted advanced trust laws after the war, which is why it has finally succeeded.” “Trust laws are—” “It’s a unique method that applies the famous tactic of General Moltke—‘march divided, fight united’—to industry.” The occasion when this discussion arose was after the Thursday Club members had toured Berlin’s sewer works and disbanded, when Shinjiro Tsuyama, Nobuko, and Motoko were eating lunch at a small shop in the area. As Shinjiro Tsuyama’s talk progressed, Nobuko’s eyes gradually widened. In the end, with a gaze so piercing it seemed to bore into him, she stared at his coarse-textured face—dust-covered yet brimming with energy. Nobuko was astonished from the depths of her being. As a form in which capital was becoming increasingly monopolized, trusts had developed in post-World War I Germany. And yet they were being noted as a danger to world peace. It was precisely because a small number of German entrepreneurs—military-industrialists—were strengthening their dictatorial power through oligarchy that what was called the fixed impoverishment of the German masses had arisen. What stirred Nobuko’s surprise and curiosity was that Shinjiro Tsuyama seemed to understand trusts—exactly as he had explained them—solely from the perspective of General Moltke’s tactics. In all matters, Shinjiro Tsuyama—who focused his attention on the aspect of German rearmament—went on to explain trusts as a manifestation of this: that Germany was preparing with a vengeful resolve to win the next war at all costs. Listening to his talk gave one the illusion that trusts and conglomerates had been invented by German militarism and existed solely within Germany. Like coal liquefaction and the artificial silk industry. But no matter where Nobuko searched through the knowledge and examples she had read or heard, trusts were a process of capital concentration emerging from the very mechanisms of the capitalist economic system. If that were not the case, then why is it said that what drives Europe’s economy today is a mere three or four hundred industrialists? They don’t say it’s three or four hundred military personnel.

—— Industrial rationalization was progressing not only within Germany but had even expanded into international cartels in steelmaking and other industries—this was what Shinjiro Tsuyama spoke of as the "conquest" of "New Germany." Tsuyama’s manner of speaking—astonishingly simple yet brimming with unshakable conviction in his own words—deepened Nobuko’s astonishment all the more, despite her limited knowledge of the global economy. “So, Mr. Tsuyama, do you also think it would be better for such a war to break out again?”

“It’s not that I’m saying it’s good, but no matter how you look at it, Germany can’t let things stay as they are now.” “Who would they be fighting?” “Well, Germany has its traditional enemies.”

That, of course, meant France. “They don’t think this current state will last forever. Aren’t they undertaking such massive fortress-building along the border?”

Not only toward France, but among some in Germany there existed people casting hateful gazes in all directions across their borders. That, too, Nobuko understood. But――

“Are they so certain Germany will win if they wage war again?”

“That’s just how fortune moves with time.”

As if amused by Nobuko's characteristically feminine timidity and aversion to war, Shinjiro Tsuyama laughed heartily without restraint. “As for Germany—they’ll stop at nothing to win.” “That’s only natural—I must say there’s ample possibility.”

“That’s strange.” Nobuko stared at Tsuyama with a gaze as if her entire young, soft body had settled into it.

“Even if they do such things, won’t their methods only grow more and more cruel?—Unless you try to fix the foundation itself…” On November 7, 1918, when news of Germany’s unconditional surrender arrived, the sight of New York City—intoxicated as if drunk—flashed through Nobuko’s memory. Hundreds of sirens across New York had all at once blown a forest of sound toward the sky. The Kaiser’s straw effigy, carried through Wall Street to a side alley of the Stock Exchange, was set ablaze, and in the thoroughfare where its smoke drifted, New York citizens staggered amid a flood of people—laughing, shouting, hurling scraps of paper at one another while strangers embraced and danced. The crowd that had stayed awake all night flooding New York’s downtown—every face twisted with an eerie excitement—struck Nobuko as grotesque and terrifying. It was then she first saw the visage of a crowd turned savage with the satisfaction and delight of conquest. Thereafter, through eyes colored by newly awakened doubts, Nobuko witnessed it all: humanitarian slogans fading from rainbow hues into cold practicality; ferocious street robberies proliferating in *New York Times* reports; countless photographs of war brides and war babies dispatched to Ellis Island with each arriving ship from Europe. What Nobuko realized with visceral clarity was this: those harboring the most solemn reflections on the World War were rarely the ones busily chattering on peace’s reconstructed stage. The families who had lost husbands, lovers, fathers—losses beyond retrieval—lived through the postwar era in a different register altogether from the brazen vitality of “eternal prosperity,” that gilded lie swelling its coffers throughout the war. She could not escape this truth. Her revulsion toward those basking in self-satisfied hypocrisy became entwined with her rebellion against the stifling atmosphere of her upbringing. And though Nobuko herself scarcely recognized it, her feelings as she drifted toward marriage with Tsukuda remained inseparable from that unstable air—quivering like heat haze since autumn 1918.

“I think war is something truly cruel.” Keeping her pained gaze locked into Tsuyama’s eyes, Nobuko continued. “And wrong.” “The worst part is that those who profit from war are precisely the ones who’ve never had to fight it themselves—that’s what it means.” “Don’t you agree, Mr. Tsuyama?” “And they never honestly admit that war itself is fundamentally wrong.” “It’s capitalism’s naked sickness—yet!” “Patriotism, justice—how they distort language!”

Nobuko's tone grew piercing. “If you still haven’t had your fill of war, then this time, let’s have only those profiting from your ‘Moltke tactics’ fight it out among themselves.” “In the end, if it’s work done for their own profit, then let them keep it among themselves, I say.” When she said this, Nobuko had her toes stepped on painfully under the table. Nobuko realized— that Motoko had given her a signal. to be careful with her words—that was the warning being given.

Shinjiro Tsuyama had been silently listening to Nobuko’s words, but eventually, with a calmness entirely unaffected by the substance of her remarks,

“Your way of thinking may indeed be correct.” “But it’s idealism.”

he said in an unexpectedly calm tone. “Perhaps modern humanity has not yet progressed that far.”

“I don’t think you can say that.” “But there’s the Soviet Union!” “Socialism, at any rate, has already been started!” “And yet, isn’t the whole world desperately trying not to acknowledge it? Why is that?”

Despite his heavy, large build—with its low forehead and thick hairline forming a straight line that pressed toward his eyebrows—Tsuyama Shinjiro’s face showed no change of expression in response to Nobuko’s words. He calmly,

“That’s because socialism hasn’t yet become a universal law,” he said.

“There are always exceptions.” “However, exceptions are not the general law.” “Isn’t that right?” “Even if Russia has ended up like that, other places remain as they are—still believing in different methods and possessing the conditions to sustain themselves.” “Therefore, in the struggle for existence that unfolds under more universal laws, they must win through those very methods.” “Because Germany is a ‘have-not’ nation within Europe.”

And Nobuko was told by Shinjiro Tsuyama about the specifics of Germany’s military preparations. The League of Nations monitored German militarism and had set the National Defense Force at 100,000. However, within that 100,000-strong army, they retained as many officers from the former German military as possible, and provided both this 100,000-strong force and the 150,000-strong police force—also composed of former soldiers—with armaments that circumvented the League’s regulations to the greatest extent possible. In addition, under various names such as self-defense corps, emergency technical corps, and officers’ alliance, they maintained old military organizations under different guises.

“Even the navy isn’t allowed to build warships over 10,000 tons, but lately they’ve started using a newly discovered lightweight metal called duralumin—lighter and stronger than aluminum.” “In Germany, even merchant ships have proper standards, and aviation routes haven’t been expanded meaninglessly just for today.”

When Berlin workers were killed on this year's May Day, all newspapers reported it as the work of the police force. In countries where May Day worker crowds and police forces have become thought of as inseparable companions—dreadful as it is—people are left with the impression that what the police did still retains some permissible justification. But if we are to believe what Shinjiro Tsuyama told us, then it was in fact the German military that shot and killed the workers on May Day. It was the German military that, with tanks and machine guns, strafed Berlin's workers. Domestically, they had already begun killing. When the League of Nations permitted an armed police force of 150,000 under the pretext of maintaining domestic order in Germany, they had prepared themselves to turn a blind eye to what would occur on this year's May Day. Nobuko listened to Shinjiro Tsuyama—who remained utterly indifferent to these horrifying events now unfolding within Germany, praising only the thoroughness of its rearmament—with an emotion more guarded than outright verbal rebuttal. A person who held such views about Germany would have no reason to return to their own country of Japan and adopt a different way of thinking. In that sense, there was something in common between Tsuyama Shinjiro—now sitting in a Berlin bistro—and those who had instigated assassins against Labor-Farmer Party representatives. And Tsuyama Shinjiro would become a disseminator of the latest German-style knowledge among like-minded people in Japan, even without consciously intending to do so. Adding his scientific authority as a medical doctor. Within this line of thought lay something that soured Nobuko's mood. Nobuko remained unpersuaded by Tsuyama Shinjiro, and Tsuyama Shinjiro equally unaffected by Nobuko's ideas; before long, the three of them left the small shop in the alley off Charlottenburg Street.

Nobuko and Motoko took the subway from there to Nürnberg Platz. Berlin’s subway did not leisurely encircle the city’s periphery with a single loop like Tokyo’s Yamanote Line. It was divided into several relatively short loop lines, each segment connecting to a mainline railway station. After hearing Tsuyama’s words, Nobuko sensed military intent even in this segmented structure of the Berlin subway she rode. A meticulously ordered city concealing ulterior motives— Berlin harbored such designs.

From the clean, spacious subway platform, Nobuko and Motoko emerged onto the street. The sun’s heat—June just two or three days away—was faintly dissolving the scent of asphalt into the air. At the four corners of Nürnberg Platz stood Berlin’s characteristic automatic traffic signals. With the jerky, imposing formality of machines directing human currents, as vertical streets cycled through red, orange, and blue—the three mechanical eyes lined in a row—the intersecting cross-street signals issued their commands in blue, orange, red.

As Nobuko and Motoko approached the corner, the signal changed, and red appeared in the direction of Prager Street they were heading toward. Nobuko, feeling her nerves frayed, did not hurry forward and instead raised her head to gaze at the signal's colors. Within black eaves that deftly blocked the daylight's glare, a deep orange abruptly shifted to an artificially vivid blue signal. At that instant, as clearly as if reading a movie title, the phrase "Japanese fascists, hatching in Berlin" surfaced in Nobuko's mind. That chain of words arranged itself with pathological swiftness while entwining around Shinjiro Tsuyama's low-browed face and thick neck constrained by his ill-fitting soft collar, then rotated grandly within Nobuko's consciousness like a scene from an Expressionist film.

Thirteen On a rainy night, as Nobuko stood by the window looking down at the street below, a man and woman in raincoats hurried past on the opposite sidewalk—and neon light streamed crimson over wet umbrellas tilted against the rain.

In the room at the Ludwig Boarding House, where walls and chairs were decorated in a cream and green color scheme, Nobuko sat alone, two old issues of *Battle Flag* spread open on the table. Nobuko saw the magazine for the first time. One cover featured what appeared to be a Soviet oil factory, while the other showed a man who looked like a foreign miner—a safety lamp dangling from one hand—approaching with a smile. As the official journal of the All-Japan Proletarian Artists’ League, which had begun publication around the middle of last year, that magazine overflowed with a freshness Nobuko had never before encountered in Japanese magazines, international tentacles, and a will to struggle. When Kawase Isamu told Nobuko to contribute something to *Battle Flag*, she learned its name for the first time.

“Oh, you haven’t seen it before?” “I thought they were sending it to Moscow.” “—This is like our Linkskurve (left-wing curve), you see.” The *Battle Flag* that Kawase had explained contained not only essays by critics like Shinohara Kuroudo and poets such as Oribara Ryousuke and Mori Hisao but also an article under the byline “Suzumura Shinji in Berlin”—a memorandum on German workers’ theater—alongside an introduction to Piscator’s theatrical theories and the staging of the famous postwar antiwar satire *The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk*. One volume—the Soviet Revolution commemorative issue—contained a novel titled *March 15, 1928* by Kobayashi Takiji. In the column titled *Sensōsen*—a coterie term—Shinohara Kuroudo wrote about that novel: “Indeed, there are a great many artistic flaws present there.” “Yet within the author’s effort to depict not as mere episodes but on a grand historical scale the issues closest and most vivid to us, there lies an important implication for the future development of proletarian literature.”

From the day she borrowed *Battle Flag*, Nobuko would alternately open the two volumes whenever occasion arose and read them. Every novel published there was a work that took up anti-war themes or exposed power’s tyranny. Nobuko fully understood why proletarian writers chose such subjects and why their tones carried such vehemence. After all, since the March 15th Incident, within Japan’s limited confines, revolutionary masses had been forced to live under twenty-four-hour suppression. The repercussions—though their form had changed—reached even into Nobuko’s life in Moscow.

But—even so—Nobuko's mind harbored doubts about these novels. In them, all the novels were like screams. How many exclamation marks there were in these novels! And the world of these novels felt like the very bodies of their authors—bodies tensed with exertion from class-based fervor—insisting on their themes, growing rigid, becoming closed off. Nobuko felt suffocated—as if these novels lacked any gateway through which readers, following their momentary inclinations, might spontaneously enter their worlds and eventually dissolve into the realities expressed there.

Proletarian faction novels began to appear when Nobuko was still in Japan. "The Letter in the Cement Barrel," "In the Charity Ward" “Third-Class Passengers”

There were such novels. Those works had a powerful impact that impressed even Nobuko, who lived far removed from the lives and literature of such people. There lay the explosive force of raw passion from people without money, wretched individuals, those driven to ruin. However, the essence of what it meant to be proletariat had not been grasped. Then, around the time when Nobuko and the others were settling in Moscow, within the group collectively referred to as proletarian literature, the issue of class nature was taken up, leading to a conflict between anarchism and Marxism and ultimately a split. During the year and a half that Nobuko and Motoko lived in Moscow, a group of people seeking literature grounded in Marxism split from *Bungei Sensen* (Literary Front), and eventually publications like *Senki* (Battle Flag), which Nobuko was now reading, came to be issued. The various articles in the two issues of *Battle Flag* that Nobuko had borrowed from Kawase and brought to Ludwig’s room scathingly criticized that *Literary Front* was nothing but a gathering of social democrats and opportunists supporting the New Labor-Farmer Party.

Last summer when she was in Leningrad, her brother Tamotsu committed suicide. Afterwards, Nobuko wrote not a single novel. Nor any travelogues. For Nobuko—more than being unable to write from the shock of Tamotsu’s suicide—it was that upon recovering from that profound blow, she had somehow ceased being her former self. As this Nobuko who could no longer settle into her fictional world as before yet found herself at a loss for how else to express herself—this Nobuko had come to Berlin.

In Ludwig’s Berlin-style room—clean but devoid of charm—Nobuko wandered around the table, gazing out the window at the rainy night streets below. The novel titled *March 15, 1928* by Kobayashi Takiji was part of a serialized work. In that novel, one could sense a grandness of structure absent from other works, and there also seeped through a warm, heavy flexibility in the movements of the human heart and body. The description of Oe—wife of the fighter Ryukichi—disliking spies and detesting cruel arrogance resonated with Nobuko. Yoshi was also understood by Nobuko, and the simple, heartfelt portrayal of the company employee Sata and his mother connected Nobuko to the people living in a port town in the northern country that formed the backdrop of this novel. But why was this novel so littered with expressions like trembling and mumbling, nitpicking and fidgeting, aimless wandering? Compared to the other parts of the novel—sparing no effort and depicted with palpable realism—Nobuko found it utterly incomprehensible. She could not believe that the author had written them without noticing. Could such repetition be attributed to mere carelessness?

Nobuko moved away from the window where neon burned red in the rain-soaked night sky of the city, returned to the table, and once again opened sections of the novel to re-examine them. The same issue contained an essay by Oribara Ryōsuke titled Resolved Issues and New Tasks, while the previous month's issue had carried Shinohara Kurōdo's Left-Wing Liquidationism in the Art Movement and Mori Hisao's The Problem of Proletarian Mass Literature. These essays brimming with quotations from Lenin and Lunacharsky all debated how proletarian literature and other class-based art movements must connect with mass life. Their conclusion vehemently stressed the necessity for novels comprehensible to anyone. Could Kobayashi Takiji have intentionally incorporated this excessive use of descriptors like "trembling" and "fidgeting" in his attempt to write accessible fiction? Nobuko felt these repetitive mannerisms had cheapened what should have been the novel's richly textured world, leaching away its substance. Yet shifting perspective, she wondered—was this very reaction of hers precisely what Lunacharsky denounced as needing exclusion, what Mori Hisao cited in his essay as "all artistic conditionality and refinement"? Though Nobuko herself felt she had persistently resisted literature decaying within such 'refinement'—

In the articles of the two volumes of *Battle Flag*, there were parts Nobuko understood and parts she did not. The All-Japan Proletarian Artists Federation went by the abbreviation NAPF (Nappu). Under the Standing Committee’s name, a document titled “Opinion on Methods of Dispute” had appeared in *Battle Flag*. The text secretly astonished her. The intended meaning seemed reasonable enough—that becoming trapped in arguments for argument’s sake was wrong. Yet in conveying this straightforward point, the opinion document’s phrasing contradicted its own purpose—awkward as words spoken through stiffened lips, dragging around elaborate logic-heavy language. Even so—was it correct for these Marxists to write this way? Was labeling it bad prose itself a mistake? The same bewilderment came from essays by Shinohara Kuroudo and others. Only after setting aside all phrasing that struck her as superfluous could Nobuko finally grasp these papers’ intent. Yet despite everything, those convoluted texts had been written to argue that proletarian literature must be comprehensible to all.

All of this remained beyond Nobuko’s comprehension. The peculiar terminology that had become customary among Japanese Marxists. The convoluted phrasing that felt alien to those using ordinary language. This strange contradiction—Nobuko earnestly grappled with it, weighed down by its painful presence. Just as when strangers had visited the Komazawa house, Shinohara Kuroudo’s writings were impenetrable—mere strings of citations—but today’s Nobuko no longer possessed the composure to smile at them as she once might have. Whatever image those people held of her, Nobuko herself could no longer remain unbound from tomorrow, could no longer sustain the illusion of detachment from such turns of phrase. ——

At first glance, within what appeared robustly constructed by theory, there lay a strange contradiction unnoticed by anyone. Nobuko suddenly wondered if similar contradictions might exist within the daily atmosphere of Kawase Isamu and his group in Berlin. This realization contained something that startled her sensorially as a woman. As Nobuko stood again before the window gazing down at the rain-lashed pavement through the heavy downpour, the door behind her opened.

“Oh Nobuko, haven’t you gotten ready yet?” That was Motoko, fresh from the bath. “Go on now.” “With how the old man here operates, he’s sure to have booked someone else right after us.” “Then I’ll go draw the water.” Nobuko had meant to fill the bathtub herself. Then— “I’ve already prepared it so you can get in.” Motoko stressed “already prepared” with that particular inflection she always used in such moments—a tone tinged with vexation at her own considerateness.

“Thank you. Well then, I’ll go in.”

About thirty minutes later, Nobuko returned, her face and body now thoroughly rosy, vigorously rubbing her washed bob with a towel. Motoko had taken out her travel sewing kit on the table and was mending the torn silk lining of her jacket. The new socks to be worn starting tomorrow were placed next to the sewing bag, still in their cellophane packaging. They were thin artificial silk socks in a crisp ocher—unlike the real silk ones Nobuko and the others had been wearing up until now, which were a pale, listless flesh color. In the women’s hosiery section of Berlin’s large department store, Wertheim, there was an astonishing array of socks—so many varieties that Nobuko, who had come from Moscow, was taken aback. For the women buying them, the shop clerk would slip the socks onto a glass leg form illuminated from within by an electric light and meticulously check for any snags or loose threads.

The rain soaking the streets and the scene of women leisurely relaxing in the room—it was an unusual night in Berlin.

Nobuko moved away from Motoko, leaned back deeply against the table, and while supporting her radiant post-bath face with a hand propped against her cheek, watched the minute movements of Motoko’s needle— “Have you thought about trying on a one-piece dress?” she said slowly, in a tone that seemed to emerge from within her own thoughts. The item Motoko was now mending was the jacket of a pale lilac suit she had bought in Vienna. “I could wear that, but there isn’t one that suits me.”

Looking down while moving her hands, Motoko replied. “Are suits really that comfortable to wear?” To Nobuko, they did not feel that way. “I think they are.” “There’s a reason suits form the foundation of women’s attire.” “They keep you looking sharp.” In Vienna too, Motoko had made two suits. One was the jacket she was now mending and its matching set. The other was an extremely chic yet subdued suit—a coat and skirt in navy fabric with thin, intriguing stripes, paired with a white crepe de chine blouse featuring tone-on-tone drawnwork. At the same shop, Nobuko had chosen a composed fine-checkered one-piece dress with a matching spring coat. The thinly woven one-piece dress had a camellia flower ornament at the collar made of flesh-toned and navy-tanned leather. Since arriving in Berlin, Nobuko had purchased one early summer outfit. This too was a one-piece dress with a smooth texture against the skin, in a moonlight-like hue.

Nobuko was silent for a while,

“Now that you mention it, I don’t wear suits.”

“I wonder why...” she said. “I don’t feel like wearing one even for traveling.” “Well of course,” Motoko retorted. “How could a crawling baby doll like Bukko-chan wear a suit? It’d be too tight—” The observation held truth. Compared to Motoko’s slender frame, Nobuko’s figure was round and compact, her limbs proportionally shorter. Until now, Nobuko had never particularly considered how Motoko favored suits while she herself preferred one-piece dresses. She’d simply accepted their differing sartorial choices as naturally as their contrasting complexions and builds—as inevitable as skin tones varying between individuals. To scrutinize this casual acceptance felt almost like overthinking something that had organically developed through daily coexistence. Yet two days prior, they’d witnessed phenomena that challenged such unexamined assumptions.

14

The place Kawase’s group took Nobuko and Motoko was a quiet town about two streets removed from Berlin’s bustling downtown. They opened a door glowing faintly blue beneath the linden trees’ dense foliage and entered. Inside lay a snug café. A record spun while several couples danced. Small tables lit by lamps lined the walls where others sat watching the dancers. Nobuko’s group of four had settled around one table when they noticed Kawase and Nakadate’s party comprised all the men in that cramped space. Every soul in the café—dancers and spectators alike—was female. Though uniformly bobbed-haired, women in suits with loose neckties partnered others in silk dresses—half clad in tailored suits, half in flowing one-pieces.

In the dimly lit café, a foxtrot played languidly, as if the record’s rotation speed had been lowered. Even among the dancing couples, there was no atmosphere of cheerful excitement in either their movements or their complexions.

“I see, this place is different.”

Motoko said after looking around the interior for a while. “Are they all businesspeople?” “I wonder.”

“If they’re doing all this, does that mean they go off somewhere when the mood strikes them?” “That must be the case—these types are usually cocaine addicts—it’s terrible—postwar Germany is full of this sort of thing.” While listening to the conversation, Nobuko looked at the surrounding group of women with a mingled feeling of curiosity and disgust. The women in suits—this café’s distinctive feature being women partnering with other women—were all thin and, as if by agreement, had poor complexions. And their thin jawlines stood out. As Nobuko watched the couples dancing past their table, she noticed that many had unhealthy backs where their shoulder blades protruded visibly through their suits, and around the backs of their ears—where their pomaded bobbed hair was slicked back—there was a morbid grubbiness that unnerved her.

To Nobuko and the others’ table came the standard Berlin beer. Seeing Nobuko’s expression, “Don’t make that face.” “No one forced you to come here.” Motoko chided her as if performing courtesy toward Kawase’s group and observing propriety toward the women present. You were brought to this peculiar café precisely because you’d only seen Berlin’s main streets while accompanied by women. After the Great War, German shows became obsessed with nudity. The trend crossed to America, spawning large-scale spectacles like the Ziegfeld Follies.

The other peculiar café Nobuko’s group had visited the previous night with the same companions was less a café than a theatrical spectacle, its main attraction being a man whose physique resembled that of a young woman. A large-bodied nude figure with soft blonde waves styled in a bob cut appeared in the circle of light to the music’s rhythm. Manipulating an oversized ostrich-feather fan—of the kind Josephine Baker had popularized in Paris—she danced atop snug golden pumps, contorting her rose-tinted body through every angle. The performer, whose taut torso and chest area appeared indistinguishable from a woman’s, seemed to make some gesture invisible to Nobuko’s group as he exited the spotlight—prompting the audience, until then silently mesmerized by this feminine man’s dance, to erupt simultaneously in coarse, masculine laughter. The atmosphere felt both ludicrous and unnerving. Nobuko and the others departed immediately after the star performer’s act concluded. According to Kawase’s group, they had been speculating about how many among the sizable number of female patrons were actually women.

“Berlin has even more deranged cafés. “It’s called the Prisoner Café—there, all the waitstaff wear horizontal-striped prisoner uniforms, and the bartender’s dressed as a guard. “And how very thoughtful—the seats are benches identical to those in a courtroom’s defendant dock.” “War—this is all war’s doing! Every last one here is its wretched souvenir.” Koichiro Nakadate, for whom such aspects of Berlin life had long ceased to be novel, said with a somber expression.

“When you examine human abnormalities closely, every single one proves utterly pitiful.” “If we’re talking about things existing here that Moscow likely lacks—first it’s places like this, then there’s that white circle in the square.” This referred to the memorial for the bloody May Day incident before the Karl Liebknecht House.

Even this morbid women’s café must not have existed before the war. During the roughly thirty minutes Nobuko spent in that gloomy, oppressive café, she noticed that when women dancing past brushed by their table—particularly those in suits—they would look at Motoko with meaningful glances before letting their gaze drift over to her. For a while Nobuko had vaguely sensed that viscous gaze when, as if suddenly awakening, she discovered she wore a one-piece dress while what Motoko had on was a suit. And she realized their attire was no accident in this peculiar café—for the transgressive women gathered there, it served as a marker through which they recognized one another’s deviance.

When Nobuko realized this, she resented even the possibility that Kawase and the others might notice her awareness. Kawase and his group—though bearing no malice—might not have been entirely free from a sense of observing at a remove whether this transgressive café’s atmosphere held some connection for Nobuko and Motoko as a pair of women.

Nobuko left the women's café having lost the innocence she had carried when entering. The preoccupation forgotten amid Moscow's vigorous bustle had reawakened within her. Through being shown these Berlin women's cafés, Nobuko felt she had glimpsed—separate from how they subjectively structured their lives—the decadent depths of relationships between women. The disgust this evoked was physical, precisely because Nobuko understood ordinary sexual propriety. This shared something with the sensation that had stiffened her body when she first stared at that white-painted circle in the square before the Karl Liebknecht House.

But regarding such feelings, Nobuko did not discuss anything with Motoko. By poking and prodding at such topics, the delicate balance that had been maintained between their emotions and expressions might be thrown into disarray—this was what Nobuko feared. As evidence that Motoko, too, had not merely observed the grim scene of that women’s café that night out of morbid curiosity, she—uncharacteristically for her—neither uttered anything sarcastic nor made any jokes about it. Both of them had come to realize that their lives were being conducted atop a manhole cover laid over sewage—and moreover, that this cover was not particularly sturdy.

That evening as well, Nobuko kept the conversation to whether the suit was comfortable or uncomfortable to wear and watched as Motoko mended a loose thread on the back of the jacket. Eventually—

“What do you think of Berlin?”

Nobuko asked Motoko. "Do you find it interesting?" "Well, I wouldn't say it's interesting." "I still find Germany unsettling." She said "still" because during their recent visits to the Berlin National Art Museum to view German paintings, Nobuko had repeatedly remarked how even the Venuses depicted in old works appeared as pale, hunched-shouldered women with distended bellies—stunted figures as cold and fish-like as they were unsettling.

“Life in Berlin seems to have no point where its contradictions harmonize.”

On one hand, there was the militarism that Tsuyama Shinjirō claimed Japan ought to emulate. All buildings in Berlin stood five stories tall. The townscape had to maintain uniform styling for each city block. Thus in Berlin, the neater parts of town increasingly resembled military parades. Streets governed by strict regulations converged from all directions according to their width, meeting at a central square. Though a crossroads, this rigidly square space—formed by roads of identical width intersecting with meticulous precision—lacked dynamic expansiveness, making heavily trafficked areas feel oppressively cramped. There, like a sullen mute refusing speech, red, orange and blue traffic signals blinked incessantly. In Berlin restaurants, those who declined to drink beer or wine with their meal were compelled to pay a fixed tax-like fee instead. This too was regulation.

Nobuko often saw middle school students in Berlin’s streetcars who remained standing even when seats were available. That, too, was a regulation. When she saw middle school students wearing regulation caps with gaudy bands—their long shins exposed below short pants like those worn in Spring Awakening, their pale acne-marked faces turned toward the streetcar windows as they rode—she wanted to know what lay within those boys’ hearts. In Berlin, the hierarchy of age and seniority was strictly enforced. Yet the plays and films causing sensations in Berlin were those dealing with crimes committed by boys and girls. Even The Threepenny Opera exposed the gang world through Expressionist staging that unfolded darkly and rapidly. Meyerhold’s theater—the most Expressionist-leaning among Moscow’s stages—had produced works like The Government Inspector, though here Expressionism seemed employed as a vehicle for satire. In Berlin, Expressionism assailed the senses through impressions of chaotic angles and chiaroscuro—both physical and spiritual—captured in that instant when destruction strikes and everything teeters on collapse.

“Even with Gross’s cartoons—I find that kind of grotesque entangled with physicality questionable.” “Don’t you agree?” “In depicting modernity’s repulsiveness, Gross himself has gotten too caught up in it.” On Sunday evenings, large crowds would return to central Berlin from suburban picnics, their bicycles strung with wildflowers. Among them was a young couple pedaling a tandem bicycle, their baby nestled in a basket between them. Watching these people stream back along the military road—sunburnt faces as if exhausted from singing, laughing and chatting while clutching meadow flowers, bicycles aligned for tomorrow’s labor—Nobuko couldn’t believe that *The Threepenny Opera* or Gross’s cartoons truly originated from the depths of these people’s lived emotions. Of course, these same people likely attended such plays and viewed such paintings. They might even find them thrilling or amusing. But that was merely one fragment of their sentiments—where did the greater part of their daily lives flow?

“Red Districts” Wedding and Neukölln had risen to prominence since May Day, yet the newly forged path of life had not permeated into the scenes Nobuko and Motoko encountered during their trivial, ordinary days in Berlin. It existed merely where it existed. Berlin’s proletariat was being squeezed by the “emerging Germany”—advancing separately yet in tandem through economics and law via what Tsuyama Shinjirō called “Moltke’s tactics”—and even as they were trampled underfoot, more fuel was being fed into militarism’s boiler. Red Front! Red Front! Ready?! It was a cry of rebellion, a roar of resistance, a fist thrust defiantly against imperialism. Yet. Nobuko could discern only the unyielding opposition of both sides there.

The reason German imperialism—now resurging with greater malevolence than before—and the opposing popular forces were locked in such sharp opposition that even Nobuko and her companions could sense it was, according to Kawase Isamu’s theory, due to Germany’s Social Democrats who had attached themselves to monopoly capital. Scheidemann and Noske succeeded in killing Karl and Rosa and substituting the 1919 German revolution with a sham that did not even reach the level of a bourgeois democratic revolution. And so, Kawase, Nakadate, and their circle would return to issues within their own expertise of film and theater, declaring that the seriousness of Germany’s emerging art had gradually become nothing more than a rotting ditch. It was said that German art was being absorbed by American burlesque shows with large production capital and devoured by talkies. Nobuko and the others would discuss all these matters under the umbrella term of “global circumstances.”

Moscow’s way of life—encompassing every concrete aspect of the people’s lives, whether they understood socialism or not—pulled the actuality of social life as a whole in socialism’s direction.

The new intertwined and mingled with the old, at times becoming mottled yet advancing unceasingly.

As she flipped through the issue of *Battle Flag* left out on the table, Nobuko thought that Japan resembled Berlin more than it did Soviet society. To Nobuko, the word “revolution” had come to be perceived as one containing a promise for the future—yet how astonishingly different, in each place, were the intricate and complex processes through which revolution was truly lived out and carried forward. Within Nobuko’s perception that Japan resembled Germany lay associations drawn from the March 15 Incident, the assassination of Yamamoto Senji, and the fierce atmosphere of conflict permeating two issues of *Battle Flag*. Nobuko, who had not yet acquired the habit of organizing her innate sense of justice and assertions of human rights into theoretical frameworks to guide her actions, could only relentlessly perceive what repulsed her as repulsive—her clear eyes’ black pupils hardening into an even deeper blackness.

Nobuko spoke in a tone of bitter conviction, “Japanese men must be saving Germany, huh?” she sighed.

“The formalistic aspects, the places where men put on airs and act self-important—it’s just like Japan. When you look behind the scenes, it’s Gross-like. Women are confined to the three Ks—children, kitchen, church… Just ask the Japanese who claim to admire Germany—they’ll talk about diligence and orderliness, but essentially two-thirds of them are actually in tune with Germany’s antiquated ways and militarism.”

“Of course there are few Japanese abroad who are truly progressive at heart.”

Motoko said with a practical expression. “Those who manage to secure travel funds can’t very well afford to forget about advancing their careers.”

Around eight o’clock on an early June evening, a group of Japanese people stood on the platform of ZOO (Zoological Garden) Station, where the Paris-bound train stopped. With their backs to Berlin’s nightscape tinged with neon lights of various colors, the group stood in a circle, talking in excited voices.

“How could such an unreasonable person even exist?!”

“I don’t intend to back down just because of such intimidation either.”

“Of course.” “How stingy those people are!”

The one who had said this was Nobuko, who was about to depart for Paris.

A late-afternoon preview screening was held for Koichiro Nakadate’s *Shadow of Yoshiwara (Shadō obu Yoshiwara)*, set to premiere in Berlin at last. Nobuko and Motoko, their departure time approaching, had been unable to attend, but according to Kawase Isamu and the others who came to see them off at the station, voices among Berlin’s Japanese residents who had viewed it were already rising—calls to “beat up Koichiro Nakadate!” The film sought to portray the decline of the samurai class through the material hardships and existential anguish of masterless warriors in the late Tokugawa period, but reports claimed Japanese residents were indignantly decrying it as a national disgrace—the poverty and suffering depicted through characters in patched rags within ramshackle dwellings, they argued, looked shabbily impoverished and tarnished Japan’s dignity in Berlin.

“Of course there might be such people among the crowd, but you can’t seriously think every last one’s like that?”

Motoko, who had placed a small olive-colored bag at her feet, said, "But you see, their sentiments all seem much the same." "It’s simply a matter of whether they voice it or not." "In what I’ve heard lately, since dirty German films are in vogue these days, this level might pass—that was actually the most progressive opinion." "That’s absurd!" Everyone forced bitter smiles. "You see, those people..."

Kawase Isamu said. “By giving embroidered handkerchiefs and such at best to the landlady, her daughter, and other familiar women, they were greatly promoting national prestige.” “Things like Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms, you know.” “Then when *Shadow of Yoshiwara* gets shown, they end up losing face—it’s a major blow, you see.” “You can’t exactly tell them not to watch, can you?” “The ladies must be chattering noisily with their polite social niceties…”

Stretching his head out from the platform, Murai peered ahead at the elevated tracks where the rails had begun to hum.

“It seems it’s coming.” Nobuko and Motoko shook hands with each person one by one. “Thank you for everything.”

“What on earth will they get up to on the way back?” The train that had entered with a ground-shaking rumble was losing its momentum and about to come to a stop. Along the windows of the train carriages, Nobuko and the others hurried toward the middle of the long train. “Here it is—number nine, right?”

“That’s right.” “Thank you very much.”

Nobuko stepped up onto the footboard and, gripping the handrail, looked over Motoko’s shoulder—

“Well then, goodbye!”

Nobuko waved toward Kawase and the others standing on the platform. “Listen everyone—I beg of you—please don’t let anyone beat up Mr. Nakadate.”

The figure of Kawase Isamu—walking toward the departing train while swinging his raised arm once, twice in broad arcs—grew distant beneath the platform’s Ausgang (exit) sign written in white letters, where only sparse human shadows remained.

Milestone: Part Three

Chapter One

I

Every night at seven o'clock, the Marseille-bound train departs from Lyon Station. When departing Paris on that train, one arrives in Marseille at seven o’clock the following morning.

The Katōri Maru of Nippon Yusen Kaisha, which had departed Kobe around May 20th carrying the Sasa family, was scheduled to arrive in Marseille around 9:00 AM on July 1st. From Marseille Station, she would stop by Hotel Noailles, confirm the room reserved by Mr. Masunaga of the Paris Japanese Embassy, and then proceed to the port to meet them. Such were the instructions that Shuzo Masunaga had given Nobuko along with the Marseille-bound tickets.

On the evening of June 30th at seven o'clock, Nobuko departed alone from Gare de Lyon. Avoiding the first-class car where she would be confined facing strangers of unpredictable origins in compartments, Nobuko boarded a second-class car styled like Japanese trains.

The train car was about eighty percent full, and Nobuko was seated alone on a two-seater bench. Nobuko carefully placed the small cream-colored handbag she had bought in Vienna between her body and the window, then with the alert composure of a young woman traveling alone in a foreign country where language posed a barrier, she immediately began gazing at the scenery outside once her seat was settled.

Along the railway line heading to southern France, farmland spread out peacefully enveloped in summer twilight. The farmland was cultivated with care—richly and meticulously in every corner. In the regions through which Nobuko’s train passed, poplars stood prominent. Along a stream that flowed while thinly reflecting the twilight’s muted light, several poplar trees stood aligned. From their gnarled trunks thickened with age sprouted vigorous young branches bearing abundant leaves of pale green tinged with gray. As the train advanced, poplar rows continued along country paths that receded into the distance, gently curving away. The farmhouses scattered here and there had gray outer walls with thick thatched roofs, their courtyards—holding livestock sheds and carts—squarely enclosed by low earthen walls of matching gray. Those farmhouses—with their rounded thatched roofs, earthen walls, and poplar shade—seemed to cradle the traditional life of French peasants. Yet it was said France’s agricultural population had steadily declined in recent years. To maintain favorable financial conditions, the government had begun procuring domestically scarce crops cheaply from colonies—a policy resulting in colonial land dispossession that the French Communist Party condemned. Nobuko had recently read such reports in Paris-available Daily Mail articles.

The landscape of faded aqua blending with grayish fresh green reminded Nobuko, gazing from the train window, of Chavannes's color palette. The quiet harmony Chavannes favored revealed itself through this journey as the very hue in which French nature resided. This elegant, almost pristine natural color of France had also been used in fabrics—the same tonal family graced uniforms at a French-run middle school in Tokyo. When Tamotsu became a first-year at that school, Nobuko looked at the boy's uniform with its chic French coloring and found it admirable.

This color, which formed nature's dominant tone in France, was also that of the French Army. Thus this elegant hue was likely called a terrain color—a variety of what is termed camouflage. Outside the train window gradually darkened, until the brightly lit interior began reflecting on the glass of the night train racing straight toward Marseille.

The truth was, Nobuko had never imagined she alone would end up traveling by night train to Marseille to meet her family like this. In the five years since she had begun living with Motoko, there had been such deep-seated incompatibility between Motoko and Takeyo that even with the Sasa family coming to France, Nobuko found herself unable to ask Motoko to accompany her to meet them. Still, she thought Motoko might harbor some interest in Marseille itself as a port town. Perhaps—true to Motoko’s character—she might even have agreed to sightsee in Marseille for a day before departing Paris together, even if she refused to go to the docks. That was how Nobuko had reasoned. But when meeting with Masunaga to coordinate welcoming the Sasa group arriving July 1st, Motoko—standing beside her—showed not the slightest curiosity about Marseille.

“With the hotel arrangements made like this, Bukko-chan, there’s no need to worry.”

That was all she said.

“Don’t you want to see Marseille?” “Well, it’s more prudent when it’s just family without outsiders.”

Motoko, who had come to see her off at Lyon Station, said to Nobuko through the train window. “Do your best to be careful.” There had also been a misunderstanding on Nobuko’s part regarding Masunaga’s intentions. From the close friendship between Masunaga Tsutomu and Sasa Taizo, Nobuko had thought that Shuzo, the son, might go as far as Marseille for Taizo’s sake—one of his father’s closest friends. However, when Shuzo Masunaga was arranging and delivering the Marseille-bound tickets for Nobuko,

“Truly, I really should be the one to go meet them, but there are matters I cannot leave unattended, and since you’re a lady, it would be inappropriate for me to intrude…”

he added, laughing with what society considered a handsome face. While casually offering her thanks in greeting, Nobuko found herself wounded by his slight laugh. If he had simply said, "Excuse me," it would have felt better to Nobuko.

In France, using Japan’s feudal customs as an excuse to claim that bringing a male companion would be troublesome because she was a woman—to young Nobuko, who struggled with the language—felt both illogical and contemptuously dismissive of her femininity. If there had been any genuine consideration to spare Nobuko discomfort, it wouldn’t have been impossible for him to travel to Marseille in a separate seat without involving her at all. For Shuzo Masunaga—who comported himself like a socialite and clearly prized his polished image—the prospect of Taizo Sasa disembarking in Marseille might have been acceptable, but merely envisioning Takeyo, Waichiro, Koeda, and Tsuyako trailing off the ship as one ungainly family unit likely made him pity himself for having to endure their company.

In the fact that the Sasa group was coming to Paris with their entire household, there was indeed something excessive that anyone could see. For what purpose had the Sasa family—not even considered wealthy—brought their entire household, down to the youngest daughter, to a foreign country? From the moment she had received that notification in Moscow—even her daughter Nobuko—she had continued to sense something somehow unnatural in this sudden decision. Anticipating their shared life in Paris, Nobuko had come a full month earlier to prepare—determined to establish roots for her and Motoko’s life there beforehand and maintain their shared sense of living unshaken by disruptions. When it finally became clear everyone would arrive in Marseille on July 1st, Nobuko felt as though she had drawn a deep breath into her chest unnoticed and quietly let it escape.

Nobuko’s unconcealed demeanor of finding it burdensome might have helped make not only Motoko but even Shuzo Masunaga feel troubled by Taizo and Takeyo, who were soon to arrive in Paris.

In a corner of the night train where she could no longer distract herself by gazing at the scenery outside, Nobuko felt freshly saddened that she was about to greet her family—who had come all the way from Japan—in such a state of mind. She too bore some responsibility for this. Nobuko had thought this as well. Whatever the circumstances might be, her father and mother and all the others had made this forty-day voyage relying on Nobuko who was in Paris. As the one who would meet them alone tomorrow, she resolved to welcome everyone as cheerfully as possible. Nobuko made this resolution.

The next morning, even though it was just before nine o'clock, Nobuko—who had stepped from a taxi at Marseille's already sweltering pier—clutched a large bouquet in her arms. Alongside it hung a blue-velvet stuffed dog with a comical face, suspended by a green ribbon. Similarly tethered by a rose-colored ribbon stood a French doll whose skirt billowed like layered rose petals. These childish accoutrements clustered about the schoolgirlish Nobuko. Alongside the pier lay moored a single unsightly ship, its hull streaked with red rust. Dockworkers with pipes clamped between teeth loitered in numbers, awaiting work's commencement. The only figures resembling greeters were two or three hotel guides sporting round caps embroidered with gold-threaded hotel names along their brims. Nobuko had been certain this was the wrong pier—the vessel docked there was unmistakably a cargo ship. She had specifically summoned the hotel porter to convey precise instructions to the taxi driver about reaching Katori Maru's designated pier, precisely to avoid this situation——

When Nobuko alighted from the taxi and saw the small dirtied ship at the pier, she immediately turned to the fat dockworker in overalls beside her.

"Is this the Katori?" she asked. “Oui, oui.”

With flowers and dolls dangling from her arms, Nobuko went straight to directly beneath the ship’s hull and peered up anxiously again.

“This is the N.Y.K. Line. The Katori?” she asked. The burly dockworker with a pipe clamped between his teeth looked down at Nobuko’s flustered state and broke into a smile that mingled amusement with pity. “Voilà la mademoiselle. Katori!”

While waving one hand palm-up grandly toward the docked ship, he looked up at its upper deck. Following his gesture, when she looked up, many indistinguishable faces were lined up between the decks, peering down at the pier—unfamiliar to her untrained eyes. Nobuko thought she had spotted the upper half of a woman in Japanese clothing among the figures. That was neither Takeyo nor Koeda, but another Japanese woman. However, energized by this, Nobuko strained her neck intently and, moving sideways, began scrutinizing each face visible from the edge of the upper deck. When she reached a certain point, Nobuko suddenly stood on tiptoe with her whole body and began waving the bouquet grandly from left to right and right to left. Her father Taizo had been spotted. Next, she spotted Tsuyako. Koeda was there too. Her mother came into view. And there was Waichiro too.

On the ship as well, they seemed to have spotted Nobuko standing alone among the sparse dockworkers and waving her bouquet. A commotion arose there, and Taizo began vigorously signaling with his hat. With quick, fluttering waves—a childlike gesture as if about to take flight—Tsuyako sent her greetings. Takeyo flipped the sleeve of her kimono and raised her hand high.

In response, Nobuko began waving not just the flowers but now also the blue puppy doll and French doll, swinging them loosely in wide arcs as if tracing circles through the air. She realized the faces lining the ship were looking down and laughing at this display. Nobuko too laughed as she waved, "I can see all your faces!" she shouted, growing even more animated with the puppy and doll, yet tears had begun welling in her eyes beneath that boisterous laughter. What a transformation had come over Takeyo. When Nobuko had left Tokyo, Takeyo's bangs—always luxuriantly styled in her characteristic flamboyance—had been drawn back tightly into a severe coiffure with nearly no fringe remaining. Though her face still bore white powder, her eyes hid behind dark light-blocking lenses of gloomy tint, and her shoulders—waving intermittently toward Nobuko standing within that uncertain gaze—had grown gaunt; her summer kimono, properly aligned along formal lines, revealed bony contours beneath.

Takeyo had changed. That Takeyo had come all the way to France via the Indian Ocean. This fact made Nobuko forget all emotions except sympathy.

Nobuko, on the verge of tears with her throat quivering, strove not to let the smile fade from her face directed at the people watching from the ship and continued waving the bouquet and puppy doll even more vigorously. Just when she thought Taizo, who had been visible on the upper deck, had disappeared, his figure reappeared at the railing of the now-deserted middle deck. Even to nearsighted Nobuko, her father’s face, now brought so close, could be discerned as clearly as if held in her hand. Taizo waved his hat, looked at Nobuko, smiled, and then was crying. When she saw her father’s face crying and smiling, Nobuko felt a surge of emotion that left her unsteady on her feet as she kept waving the bouquet and doll toward the upper deck. Taizo’s expression made Nobuko realize what life in the Utsuki district had been like for everyone since Tamotsu’s death.

Unable to wait any longer for the gangway to be attached, Nobuko went aboard the ship.

II

The Rue de Dienne, located between Trocadéro Square and the Seine embankment named Tōkyō, had a government-office-like quietness. On the left side of the sidewalk shaded by plane trees protruded the old-fashioned, illuminated porte-cochère of the Hotel International. This hotel must have been opened under the name “International” around the time of the 1900 Paris Exposition—when the Eiffel Tower was erected at Trocadéro—to accommodate guests of all kinds who had gathered from various countries. When had it come to pass that this place became a temporary lodging for Japanese visiting Paris, and the hotel’s few servants had grown so unperturbed by the sight of men in yukata? Given that the Seine embankment near the hotel was named Tōkyō, it seemed to have been after the European War. The Rue de Dienne was situated between the Eiffel Tower and the Tōkyō Embankment—a location unlikely to cause one to get lost, not far from the embassy, and close to the Grands Boulevards that included the Champs-Élysées. Despite occupying such a spot, it was an unpretentious third-class hotel, and this combination of factors must have gradually made it the temporary lodging of choice for Japanese visitors to Paris.

Nobuko and Motoko ascended the front staircase to the third floor of the hotel building—its facade intimidatingly wide for show but shallow in depth. Then they knocked on the large white-painted double doors with golden handles.

The one who opened the door was Koeda. If she put on a hat, she would be ready to go out at any moment—the muted rose-patterned georgette dress suited her lithe, youthful figure perfectly. Koeda exclaimed, “Oh! Good morning!” and touched Nobuko’s hand with evident delight. “You managed to come so early!”

Koeda, from right there, turned toward the inner bedroom,

“Mother. Ms. Motoko and Big Sister have arrived.”

Koeda announced. Tsuyako came running. She was wearing a white blouse and grass-green skirt. For the overweight thirteen-year-old Tsuyako, the grass-green outfit looked unsophisticated and rural. Tsuyako silently clung to Nobuko.

“What’s wrong? Are you going out somewhere?” “I don’t know.” With Tsuyako still clinging to her, Nobuko and the others passed through the spacious antechamber, where atop its worn red carpet lay two large riveted steamer trunks, Taizo’s Innovation trunk, and a mountain of other luggage—large trunks, small trunks, and assorted baggage. In the inner bedroom, besides the two beds for the couple, there was even Tsuyako’s bed added as another, and all the beds remained unmade. The spacious room was cluttered and as unsettled as in the midst of moving. On the chair lay Takeyo’s personal suitcase, its lid left open. Takeyo, wearing a hand-dyed night kimono with a tazuna pattern and an obi-like sash, leaned back against the dressing table, her bare feet resting on another chair. Taizo sat perched on one of the beds, and Waichiro leaned against the window partition with a sullen expression.

The demeanor of those three—Koeda’s way of rejoicing. Having joined her family in Marseille four days prior, Nobuko had come to perceive the general circumstances. Nobuko,

“Good morning.” She gave her father this brief greeting and moved to Takeyo’s side.

“How are you feeling? Were you able to sleep? And the fatigue—if you rest properly, it must still be quite exhausting, no?”

“Oh, good morning.” “You managed to come after all.” Takeyo turned to Motoko and,

“Please excuse me; my legs have swollen up and are rather painful,” she excused herself, stretching her legs out on the chair. “Please, make yourselves at home.” Takeyo had just finished arranging her hair, but both Taizo and Waichiro were properly dressed. Breakfast had been finished, and the coffee set had been pushed aside onto the table by the wall.

“Well, now that Nobuko has come, I should be on my way.” Taizo stood up from the bed, having said that. Takeyo, with her legs still stretched out on the chair, entwined her gaze with Taizo’s movements,

“So about what time will you be returning?” Takeyo asked. “I need you to come back early—I haven’t been informed when Mr. Toyohara and the others will arrive to collect us.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be back by evening.”

As Taizo finished preparing in the antechamber and went out, Takeyo said, “Well then, all of you might as well go out.”

she said to Waichiro, who was standing sullenly by the window. When Nobuko was in Japan, Waichiro had been a senior at art school. He had graduated that spring and begun working at his father’s office. Waichiro carried himself with the maturity befitting a young man. Waichiro, over his pure white collar, clenched his nervous lips and did not respond.

“Since no one’s stopping you, you might as well go out.” “Look at Miss Koeda.” “She’s been ready for quite some time now and is waiting eagerly.” In Takeyo’s manner of speaking, there was an undertone that distressed Nobuko on Koeda’s behalf. Koeda’s gentle face—pretending not to hear—flushed faintly, just as expected. Koeda made an uneasy movement, as if she didn’t quite belong there, but—

“Mother, shall I prepare your outfits?” She said, deliberately trying to change the subject. “Which one shall I prepare?” “Well, since I won’t be going out anywhere until evening anyway, anything will do—but where did I put that leaf-back-colored hem-patterned one?” “Well… It’s the new one you didn’t wear on the ship, right?” Koeda looked troubled,

“I think it was in the large trunk—let’s check.” The “large trunk” referred to the riveted container that had been placed in the antechamber. Nobuko followed Koeda and went out to the antechamber. Then, stopping Koeda who was trying to open the trunk’s lock herself, she called out loudly, “Waichiro-san, come here for a moment.” she called out.

“The key won’t turn properly.” Waichiro came, and the trunk’s lock opened immediately—needless to say. Nobuko whispered to Waichiro in a voice too quiet for Takeyo to hear.

“If you stay in a bad mood too, Koeda-chan won’t know what to do—go on out. I’ll take care of it. All right?”

Waichiro “Yeah.” he said.

“Please come back for a bit in the evening, okay? And then after we see the mothers off, let’s all go out for dinner.” “Okay.”

“Come on, you should go.” Waichiro left the antechamber as he was and went to their room to get his hat.

However, Koeda did not try to go along with that; instead, she remained alone, bending over the large trunk and carefully moving aside the packed clothes one by one as she tried to find the kimono she had been asked for.

“Digging through all this inside would be too much. It’s alright, Koeda-chan—I’ll go through it properly later.” Koeda’s excessive consideration made Nobuko unable to keep watching. At the same time, frustration welled up toward Waichiro and Koeda themselves, who had formed such habits with Takeyo.

Nobuko, from this room,

“Is that acceptable?”

and called out to Takeyo in the bedroom.

“While we’re at it, I’ll have you stage a kimono exhibition.” “It’s remarkable you brought this many.”

At that moment, Waichiro entered carrying his hat. “There now, Koeda-san.”

This time, Takeyo, attempting to placate Waichiro, urged on Koeda, who was by the trunk.

“You should hurry up and put on your hat.” “Waichiro-san—are you ready to leave now?” “Yeah.”

“That’s enough.—Koeda-san.”

Finally, the young couple went out.

Takeyo leaned back into her chair. “Well, well—the same old commotion as always.” “Koeda-san really does act like a princess no matter what she’s asked to do.” It seemed she meant Koeda was inept and dragging her feet. To Nobuko, the schoolgirl Koeda—once praised for her beauty and skill at climbing trees—now appeared only as someone who had lost all confidence in her role as a bride, timidly hesitating in every gesture.

After taking a short rest, Takeyo turned back to the dressing table and slowly began her makeup. With a fine brush whose bristles had been trimmed short with a snip, she applied light ink made from burnt paulownia wood, alternately lifting each eyebrow while peering into the mirror with a pursed-lip expression as she shaped her brows. Bringing the hand mirror close to her face, she examined the results with a serious expression. In front of her real daughter Nobuko, Takeyo concentrated leisurely on her makeup as if she were alone. Nobuko too, watching her mother apply makeup from the side for the first time in years, found herself struck by the domestic scene, regarding it with a rare, almost curious interest.

Motoko had been avoiding the bedroom with its stifling awkwardness and gone out to the antechamber’s terrace. From there, Diena Street stretched below. Tsuyako had followed Motoko and now stood there too. Up close, Takeyo’s hair showed stark white roots. She dyed it black from above with Kuro-chic, styling it into a tight bun with gathered front locks, but the dye seemed to muddy her once-elegant hairline. Nobuko ventured,

“Mother, perhaps you should try stopping that Kuro-chic,” she said. “Wouldn’t your natural color be more splendid? Since you have such a healthy complexion, I think it would actually accentuate it even more though…” “Well…”

Takeyo, who had been looking into the hand mirror with an air of disagreement toward what Nobuko had said, took up the eyebrow pencil she had once placed on the dressing table again. Then, she gradually darkened and strengthened the starting points of both eyebrows. When she did so, an accent akin to the initial stroke of a brush was added to her eyebrows, and this very artificiality served to accentuate the distinctive beauty that had characterized Takeyo since her youth. While being distracted by Takeyo’s hands applying makeup amidst the clutter of the bedroom laid with a faded red carpet, Nobuko’s innermost heart was filled with an unease—a premonition that something must be done.

III

On a clear July morning at Marseille’s port, when Nobuko saw her family still aboard the ship—particularly her father Taizo’s face and Takeyo’s gaunt appearance—her heart constricted, and she resolved that she must truly become someone reliable and useful for everyone’s sake. Everyone’s needs—no matter how Nobuko herself might judge them—must be met not with criticism but with the practical power to resolve them. That too would mean lightening Taizo’s burden throughout this long journey. Having so resolved, Nobuko spent that night at Marseille’s Hotel Noailles beside Takeyo’s bed, who had retired early.

In that single night, Nobuko had come to fully grasp the difficulties of this journey for the entire Sasa family. What startled her was how everyone's feelings seemed so sharply at odds, their differences tangled in complex knots. After finally disembarking in Marseille following their interminable voyage, she had expected the family would relax together and speak somberly of all that had transpired during their year-and-a-half separation. If they were to speak of Tamotsu, how profoundly might Takeyo grieve anew? Or perhaps she would blame Nobuko. This fear gripped her. She even imagined hearing the words: "If I see Nobu-chan's face, I won't be able to go on." The Takeyo she had seen aboard ship had indeed been that haggard.

After arriving at Hotel Noailles and resting for a while, when Waichiro and Koeda withdrew to their own room, Takeyo, as if she had been waiting for that moment—

“Father, excuse me, but please take that out,” she said to Taizo. What was this “that” which had to be taken out so urgently? Nobuko thought this as she watched Taizo turn his suited back toward her and open the black leather Boston bag. Taizo stood there holding between his hands a small urn-shaped object wrapped in silvery brocade cloth. “Where should I put it?”

Taizo asked Takeyo, who sat on a cream-colored velvet settee. "Well..."

Takeyo was looking around the ornately decorated interior, characteristic of a port town hotel,

“Excuse me, but please place it there.” She pointed to the high mantelpiece with a mirror. That was behind the sofa on which Takeyo was half-lying. Taizo, following Takeyo’s request, reverently placed the silver brocade-wrapped item there with both hands. Nobuko felt as though the color of her lips was changing. She realized it was Tamotsu. The small box wrapped in silver brocade was a part of Tamotsu. Due to the unexpected shock, Nobuko’s entire body stiffened on the chair she sat on. And in her eyes, a bitter fluid welled up. In Nobuko’s heart, Tamotsu lived—as the beloved Tamotsu who had died, he lived even more sorrowfully than a living Tamotsu would have.

August 1st remained a date that Nobuko still found difficult to calmly face or even hear mentioned. It was precisely because she believed Tamotsu dwelled within the hearts of all those who had come from Japan that Nobuko became acutely aware of her own self striving to connect with theirs, and resolved to remain sincere toward that bond. How could one who loved so deeply endure carrying the bones of their beloved? To Nobuko—who felt Tamotsu’s presence with almost visceral vividness at even the slightest reminder, chilling her to the core—the confrontation with the bone box atop the hotel mantelpiece proved unbearable. She stared fixedly at the brocade-wrapped case with a gaze dark and piercing, holding her breath, neck rigid, uttering no sound. Nobuko had never imagined that in a Marseille hotel, she would be ambushed by Tamotsu’s remains without a single word of warning.

Takeyo did not speak. Taizo too remained silent. Unable to speak or move her body, Nobuko did not even notice for some time that her parents were silent as they gazed at their daughter. When she regained her senses and became aware of the strange atmosphere—intuitively grasping how Takeyo was perceiving it—Nobuko wanted to cover her face with both hands. Takeyo had tested her. Nobuko had felt this with crystalline clarity. When realizing the brocade-wrapped object contained Tamotsu—would she have clung to it weeping? Or risen from her chair to bow? Had she done so, it would have demonstrated kindness toward Takeyo. But Nobuko shed no tears—only turned pale, her expression growing frightened. And just as her parents said nothing about this, she too remained silent. Takeyo had utterly failed to comprehend the shock Nobuko experienced. The pain inflicted by the brocade-wrapped contents. Not only did Takeyo misunderstand this—she had concluded that Nobuko’s failure to display expected grief proved her a cold-hearted daughter. This realization pressed upon Nobuko with crushing weight. Tamotsu needed no bows from such a heartless sister. Nobuko read in Takeyo’s eyes a luminous condemnation phrased as words. What tormented her most was seeing Takeyo’s conclusion crystallize amid that moment’s sparking backlash. Takeyo’s reasoning stood immutable. Russia—the Bolsheviks—Nobuko’s ideology— Takeyo possessed no coherent basis for rebuttal that might let her impulsively voice arguments about it.

The direct shock from the brocade-wrapped bundle itself, combined with the anguish over Takeyo's attitude triggered by it, hardened Nobuko's heart. If Nobuko were to gently place her hand on the brocade-wrapped bundle out of affection for Tamotsu, it was something done only when no one was around or watching—only at such times.

Tsuyako, who had been tagging along with Waichiro and Koeda, returned to the room. As she entered through the door, Tsuyako swiftly turned her gaze toward the mantelpiece. And when she saw what was placed there, an expression as though she were deliberately avoiding looking at it floated onto the girl’s face.

Nobuko felt. Given this situation, Tsuyako too—and likely Waichiro and Koeda as well—must indeed feel this brocade-wrapped item as a burden in their hearts. Even Taizo might have been accepting of carrying Tamotsu around in this form solely for Takeyo’s satisfaction. The members of the Sasa family, excluding Takeyo, were all living in the present—individuals who affirmed life sometimes naturally, sometimes thoughtlessly.

The impressions Nobuko received during the less-than-twenty-four hours from the next morning until their departure for Paris were extremely complex. At the root of this complexity lay Takeyo’s weakening health. There was another contributing factor. It was the fact that Takeyo—having included Nobuko, who had come to meet them, among the visible group of six—had embarked on this journey while firmly holding within her emotions the invisible presence of another person: Tamotsu.

When she went to Waichiro and Koeda’s room before bedtime, Nobuko,

“Mother, did you keep that brocade-wrapped item displayed like that all the time even on the ship?” she asked.

Koeda looked toward her young husband Waichiro. "Yes..." she replied with visible unease. "Brother really hates it though..." Koeda—who had married her cousin Waichiro just two months before their journey—likely didn't know the full details, but it had been Waichiro who searched through bamboo thickets and old wells with his father Taizo last August, during the deserted summer vacation at their Uchisaka home, when Tamotsu disappeared. It was Waichiro who found Tamotsu in the storehouse basement. It was Waichiro who carried him out. Every sight of that brocade bundle reignited those memories—a pain Nobuko could well imagine for someone newly wed.

“If Mother were traveling alone, she could do as she likes.” “But we can’t stand it.” “Tsuyako’s been acting strange ever since then too.” In Waichiro’s tone resonated the irrepressible smolder of emotions that had accumulated during their forty days aboard the ship.

“Once we get to Paris, there’ll be an escape for you all.”

Avoiding deep conversation, Nobuko spoke as if joking. Scenes observed in Noailles that afternoon—for instance, Taizo and Waichiro going out to tour Marseille. The confusion over whether to take Koeda along or not, and then how Takeyo had demanded meticulous service from her during dinner at the hotel’s dining room. The discovery that Koeda was so disliked by Takeyo perplexed Nobuko. Takeyo seemed to be scrutinizing with a piercing gaze the state of Koeda—who, having just turned twenty-one and knowing neither hardship nor experience in serving others—now found herself positioned as both aunt and mother-in-law to Takeyo, her timidity taking precedence as she remained unable to grasp how to express affection or seize the initiative herself.

After dinner, Nobuko went out to the hotel lobby with her father, Taizo. As befitted a hotel in a port city at weathered the end of long ocean voyages, the lobby overflowed with gaudy hues of decadence. Women stood about in great numbers or strolled idly, their bare shoulders draped with then-fashionable Spanish shawls, their attire and makeup leaving no doubt as to their nature. Taizo and Nobuko withdrew to a quiet corner behind potted plants where they consulted with a Thomas Cook agent about tomorrow’s Paris-bound train tickets. Nobuko—having parted from their fellow ship passengers—insisted they reserve a special second-class compartment exclusively for their party of six. The Thomas Cook staff explained this compartment was only available between Marseille and Paris, constructed in open Pullman style for American tourists. Since Katori Maru had been the sole foreign ship arriving in Marseille that day, they said the compartment would likely remain empty tomorrow.

“I recommend that compartment.” “For people who’ve been traveling in a small box for forty days, open seats would be better.” Nobuko said this to the Thomas Cook agent. “Father, wouldn’t it be awkward for the others if we don’t take first class?” “If things like earlier keep happening all through tomorrow’s train ride, it’ll be such a nuisance.” At Hôtel Noailles stayed several Japanese groups who’d disembarked from the Katori Maru that day without immediately boarding the Paris-bound train. The circular table where the six Sasas sat for dinner occupied a refreshingly pleasant spot behind the fountain in the grand dining hall—its indirect lighting glinting off golden accents while water droplets pattered soothingly. The tree-shaded area held gilded lampstands and several chic two-person tables. The seaside hotel’s menu featured fresh seafood, and Takeyo surveyed her surroundings with satisfaction. Her gaze suddenly fixed on one small table where a man and woman sat facing each other, dressed for a glamorous evening.

“Oh, Koeda, isn’t that Mr. Otaka at that table over there?” Koeda, who had apparently been aware of the Japanese man sitting across from the dark-circled-eyed woman from Marseille at that small table for some time, “Well...”

Having said that, she did not try to look in that direction and her face flushed faintly. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Waichiro?” “I’m not sure.” “How absurd! It seems everyone has suddenly developed poor eyesight. My eyes may be poor, but I can see perfectly well.” The semi-formally dressed Japanese man—who had been resting both elbows on the table beside a silver champagne cooler, showing his profile to their direction as he whispered something to the woman—abruptly turned his inebriated face toward the round table where the Sasa family sat, following the sudden pull of curiosity in his companion’s gaze. He immediately turned his face back, said something to the woman, and she, while maintaining a faint smile, averted her gaze that had been steadily fixed on Takeyo’s kimono-clad figure. From where Nobuko was sitting, she could see the entire scene clearly.

Takeyo shifted her body slightly in her chair, as if avoiding something unpleasant enough to spoil her appetite. “Just this morning, he was saying things like how worried he was about his wife’s childbirth, winning everyone’s sympathy—and yet, is that the behavior of a military officer entrusted with such a great responsibility?” With a troubled expression, Taizo picked up the now-unnecessary menu again as if to examine it, “Keep shipboard acquaintances confined to the ship. That’s how it is.” “That’s how it is.”

“That may be so.” Takeyo persisted even more obstinately.

“There’s a limit to how much he can trample others—” “Mothe—er—”

Reluctantly and sorrowfully, Tsuyako pulled her mother’s hand adorned with large diamonds. After moving to the terrace adjoining the dining room and drinking coffee, Takeyo returned to discussing Otaka with Nobuko, who remained unaware of the voyage’s details. Through Takeyo’s narration, Nobuko vividly pictured the atmosphere in the Katori Maru’s first-class salon—where Flight Officer Otaka, basking in his own superiority, had lectured in a tone swelling with patriotic zeal about being dispatched to England to uncover aircraft secrets while idling passengers looked on.

“He says you should cooperate for the country’s sake if you learn even the smallest secret—and yet—” “When shown such behavior, I can’t help but think it’s all empty rhetoric.” Nobuko simply understood Takeyo’s fixation on being so displeased about Otaka’s debauchery during his first night ashore as nothing more than her mother’s usual self-righteousness resurfacing.

“You should leave other people’s matters to them, Mother.”

Nobuko said calmly. "When people come abroad, they're bound to do all sorts of things anyway. It's certainly brazen behavior, but if you let every little thing bother you like that, you'll have no time left to enjoy yourself." "You're still the same as ever, Nobu-chan." As if she had been waiting all along to encounter this very version of Nobuko—even after a year and a half apart—Takeyo spoke in a voice hardened by preconceptions.

“I know you’re an egoist.” Nobuko forced herself to remain silent with a bitter smile. And she thought: The real problem was those forty days of chaotic confinement aboard the ship. Everyone’s nerves had become slightly unhinged. What they needed was to reach Paris quickly. And for each to find their own distractions—that was essential.

Nobuko had intended to take Tsuyako and get a separate room where they would sleep. However, through Takeyo’s insistence, another bed was put into the couple’s bedroom, and Nobuko ended up staying there too.

Takeyo, having changed into a Japanese yukata nightgown, turned toward the brocade-wrapped item placed atop the mantel and struck two resonant claps. Then she got into bed. Nobuko, feeling awkward, waited for the ritual to end and lay down beside Takeyo. On the other side of mother, Tsuyako clung.

“Are you happy, Mother?” “Because it’s a sandwich!”

With eyes brimming with a happiness unimaginable from the same person who had wounded Nobuko so deeply during the day’s events, Takeyo lay upon the large white pillow, turning her head one way to gaze at the slightly perspiring face of her thirteen-year-old younger daughter, then turning it the other way to observe the face of thirty-year-old Nobuko—neat in appearance yet marked by a maturing expression. And then, she looked at the pale yellow nightgown with small flower patterns and short sleeves that Nobuko had changed into,

“It’s lovely and suits you well,” she praised. “Even so, it’s surprising that Ms. Yoshimi sent you here alone, Nobu-chan.” Takeyo, who was saying such things, seemed almost childlike. The sight of her hair—laid out in a single line on the pillow with cropped bangs now eighty percent white yet clumsily touched up with black dye—stirred Nobuko’s heart. From her youth until recently, Takeyo’s pride—the soft, ample lines from jaw to throat—had slackened with weight loss, revealing two aged cords standing out on her neck. Nobuko pressed her face against the soft underside of Takeyo’s jaw. In a small voice,

“I can still smell your scent,” she said.

“What’s with her? She’s like a little calf.” “Look over here! Mother. Turn this one into a calf too!”

In the bedroom where no one felt inclined to turn off the lights, Taizo gazed without blinking from the adjacent bed at the sight of his wife and two daughters fidgeting together in a single bed—and laughed.

“It’s quite a nice sight.” “I’m sorry, Father, leaving you all by yourself…” It was an uncharacteristically charming display from Takeyo.

“That’s fine, Father. I’ll come over there soon and make you into a sandwich too.”

The one who said such things was Tsuyako. Nobuko laughed but said nothing; however, sleeping next to her father carried an embarrassment that was hers alone. Before they had departed for Moscow—it was already a cold night in Tokyo after December had begun—Taizo, claiming to have a cold, had gone to bed early. Going to his bedside, Nobuko asked about the Chosen Bank or something. Even after finishing her business, Nobuko had kept talking. When she remarked, “This room is colder than I expected,” Taizo said, “What’s this—you haven’t even laid out a *zabuton* cushion? Come here. Come on, get in,” then lifted the sleeve of his nightwear and pulled her inside. And then, taking Nobuko’s round, smooth hands—which had turned chilly from doing such a thing—he sandwiched them between his own warm ones. “There, get in properly and warm yourself up.” As he said this, Taizo entwined one of his legs with Nobuko’s—she lay properly within her nightclothes, knees aligned—and pulled her closer. It was a completely natural gesture of paternal affection, but at the same time, it was also a man’s gesture. Nobuko still remembered the intense embarrassment she had felt in that moment. Father was innocent; she, as an older daughter who knew married life, was not. Nobuko was not one to forget that self.

Tsuyako separated and went to Taizo’s bed, and Takeyo talked with Nobuko until late into the night. The things they talked about were all matters that had happened aboard the ship. Even when their hearts had grown so close, Takeyo kept both her lips and heart firmly shut to Nobuko—her elder sister—concerning Tamotsu, never attempting to broach a single word about him.

IV

For the disheveled Sasa family group, when life began at the Hotel International—a place so ironically fitting for them—the first unexpected difficulty that made Nobuko feel overwhelmed was the task of structuring everyone’s daily schedule. Takeyo’s fatigue was visibly apparent, and it was clear Takeyo needed to take even her meals in her hotel room and remain at rest if at all possible. Because of this, someone from the family besides Tsuyako had to stay at the hotel with Takeyo. The fact that Tsuyako was a thirteen-year-old girl further complicated the group’s schedule. Due to European customs, Tsuyako was not yet included in her parents’ public social life. When Taizo and Takeyo, Waichiro and Koeda, and Motoko and Nobuko split into their respective groups to go about their activities, Tsuyako—the girl who would otherwise be left alone—had no choice but to attach herself either to Waichiro and Koeda’s group or, failing that, to Motoko and Nobuko’s group. When Tsuyako—at that ambiguous age between child and adult—attached herself to a pair of adults, it naturally meant the group’s actions would have to accommodate this condition.

The two groups—Waichiro and Koeda, Motoko and Nobuko—were alternately governed by these two conditions, and ever since the Sasa family had arrived in Paris, even for Waichiro and the others, there had not been a single day they could fully devote to themselves as a young couple. This matter became a source of profound dissatisfaction for Waichiro and Koeda regarding their stay in Paris—a honeymoon for cousins who had long been in love. Koeda remained silent with a troubled expression, but Waichiro,

“I can’t stand being made to feel like this even after coming to Paris.”

Putting his feelings into words, he said to Nobuko. "Koeda could just say she doesn't want to, but she's always dilly-dallying like this." "But Brother, that's not how it works." The complexity of emotions between Waichiro and Koeda had only deepened between when she had been his niece and now that she was his bride. Nobuko received Waichiro's dissatisfaction and Koeda's bewilderment, layering them over her own confusion. If it had been just a week or ten days—even commuting daily from the hotel on Vaugirard Street to Digne where their parents were and spending two-thirds of each day tending to their needs there—it would have been manageable. After all, Paris was where they had come to reunite with their family. And because Nobuko had made her resolve in the corner of the night train she boarded alone that evening when she went to Marseille to meet everyone. Anyway, it would serve their family's needs, she thought. Taizo and Takeyo were planning to live between Paris and London until late autumn. On top of that, Waichiro and Koeda might end up staying in Europe. However, that remained undecided—everything depended on Taizo and Takeyo's decisions. The fact that everything hinged on their parents' whims seemed only to make Waichiro more impatient.

Stepping out onto the terrace of the attic room at Hotel Garrick in Vaugirard, while gazing at the Eiffel Tower's illumination flickering in Paris's night sky,

“The state of our family is worse than I had thought, isn’t it?” Nobuko, who had returned late from Digne, confided to Motoko.

“There’s some sort of emotional entanglement among those people that I just can’t understand.” Motoko was silent, thinking—

“In any case, over on their side, we need to devise a system that lets them act a bit more autonomously.” Motoko advised, as if trying to help Nobuko escape from the swamp of familial emotions.

“That matter.” “You can see how father is，can’t you?” “He has this air of... ‘Well，just handle things properly for me，’ you know.” “He’s exhausted.”

“We need to formally coordinate with the younger group beforehand, Nobuko.” That day, together with Koeda—who had returned early to the hotel in the evening—Nobuko laid out the hem-patterned kimono and helped Takeyo dress in Japanese attire for her first formal dinner invitation since arriving in Paris, securing the maru obi. After Taizo and Takeyo departed in the arriving car, the cluster of Waichiro, Koeda, Tsuyako, Nobuko, and Motoko went to dine at a Chinese restaurant near Luxembourg Park.

In contrast to Japanese restaurants in Berlin and Paris that opened shop primarily for Japanese clientele alone, the three Chinese restaurants known among Parisian Japanese thrived within their respective upper-, middle-, and lower-tier domains through patronage from various foreigners and French people in Paris.

The staff maintained strictly businesslike interactions with Japanese patrons like Nobuko’s group. They spoke only when necessary, offering neither ingratiating glances nor smiles. This mirrored the atmosphere that had passed between them earlier when clusters of Chinese students in Luxembourg Park instantly identified Nobuko’s party as Japanese upon crossing paths. That charged air conveyed general censure and condemnation toward Japanese people—sentiments among Parisian Chinese youth born from the Manchurian incursions by Japanese militarists, the Second and Third Shandong Expeditions, and Imperial Army atrocities in Jinan. Progressive Chinese youths in France were protesting the Nanjing Government, which executed hundreds of Communists, crushed labor strikes, raided Harbin’s Soviet Consulate, and arrested Chinese Eastern Railway officials. Through *L’Humanité* headlines—whose full text she couldn’t read—Nobuko grasped that communist parties worldwide, not just France’s, denounced Nanjing. The Parisian Chinese resistance targeted twin forces stifling China’s liberation: one being the Nanjing Government. The other was Japan as an imperialist colonizer.

Nobuko walked through the pleasantly refreshing dusk of Luxembourg Park that evening in a group of five—having added Waichiro, Koeda, and Tsuyako to their number—and noticed that the Chinese youths they frequently encountered around Sorbonne University and within the park showed more overt contempt when passing by than when it had been just Motoko and herself. She felt this painfully yet naturally, even sympathizing with them. Koeda’s elegance—her own self she hadn’t yet clearly grasped— Waichiro’s unhurried demeanor that gave no impression of fighting for anything in life, no matter how one looked— Nobuko and Motoko walking among them—having arrived from Moscow with knowledge of socialist society and tangible understanding of liberation’s meaning, acquainted with numerous brave Chinese girls at Sun Yat-sen University unknown to these Parisian youths—were realities imperceptible at a glance. The blatant class character exuded by their group as they strolled—though Koeda and Waichiro remained wholly unaware—must have projected an image of Japanese class solidarity that allied neither with China’s liberation nor Japan’s people.

Nobuko became conscious of her own class identity that tormented her through this, and at the same time became aware of her own fragility—of being wounded precisely by having such sentiments extracted and isolated. The Katori Maru had also made a port call in Shanghai, where a boycott of Japanese goods was underway. Many of the passengers knew this city, after all, through things like Shanghai’s horse races and cabarets not found in Japan.

“What’s wrong? Did everyone else go ashore too?” Nobuko asked.

“I only went ashore with Father to run an errand.” “But Brother looked around here and there for five or six hours even so, didn’t he?” “I was just invited to Mr. Nishikawa’s place—didn’t do any walking.” It seemed the captain of the *Katori Maru* had imposed restrictions on sightseeing in Shanghai’s city area.

At that, too, Koeda carried herself with an air that recalled the forty-day voyage—marked by quarrels at each port of call over whether to go ashore or not—

“During our time in Naples, I couldn’t help but feel deeply how pitiable Father was.” She said regretfully, as if lamenting that what should have been a joyful journey had been so trying for everyone. Tsuyako whispered, pulling Nobuko—who was walking arm in arm—closer to herself.

“Father was crying on the deck while looking at Naples’ lights.” “Father went to Italy last time, didn’t you?” “That’s exactly why it’s even more regrettable.” “Though Naples truly seemed like such a beautiful place.” To that beautiful Naples, Takeyo—weakened by the Indian Ocean’s heat—could not disembark. Because Takeyo couldn’t leave the ship, Waichiro and Koeda’s disembarkation became disorderly too. Waichiro and Koeda finally went ashore after being invited by dining companions, then late that afternoon Tsuyako disembarked accompanied by same-aged youths and the ship’s doctor. Though someone had specially come from Milan to guide them, because Takeyo couldn’t move, Taizo had ultimately resolved to remain aboard.

The fact that it was Naples—a place her father had loved—that had caused such terrible turmoil made Nobuko deeply sad.

“But surely it wasn’t like that everywhere, was it?” “Up to the start of the Indian Ocean, things were much better all along. In Colombo, when we visited the Temple of the Tooth Relic, I was exhausted, but Mother alone went all out and drove over a hundred miles.” “In Naples’ case, that was a special circumstance, Brother.”

Koeda said, half-intending to inform Nobuko of the circumstances at that time. “Look, that morning there was the incident with Mr. Saeki, remember? Mother had such a terrible time of it.” The day before, a costume dance had been held on board to relieve boredom. A young woman named Mrs. Sakai had dressed as a Boy Scout and drawn much admiration. On the morning they reached Naples, several ladies including Takeyo were invited to the lower deck under the pretext of filming. When Koeda accompanied her to investigate, Mrs. Sakai appeared again in yesterday’s Boy Scout costume, and they filmed the England-bound Boy Scouts gathered around her. Takeyo and the other ladies had been dragooned into watching. Mr. Saeki, their Boy Scout leader, addressed the boys before the assembled spectators: “Now look closely! See how much better this lady’s posture is? You should all stand as smartly as that.” Takeyo had overheard Mr. Saeki tell the woman during the costume event, “How perfectly it suits you, ma’am! It makes me want to dance.” All this struck Takeyo’s sensibilities as an intensely stimulating atmosphere of hedonism between men and women. After returning to her cabin, she even scolded Koeda. “Japanese women do nothing but fawn over men,” she declared. “It’s disgraceful.”

“At the time, I didn’t understand what she was referring to, but later it dawned on me.” “There was a time when, following Mother’s instruction for once, I came to the dining room in Japanese clothes, remember?” “At that time, Mr. Saeki said that Western clothes suited me much better—she remembered that, didn’t she?” In Koeda’s soft, young voice as she spoke of such things resonated an innocent yet intense desire to enjoy life. It became clear that Takeyo, who had forced herself on this overseas trip despite her frail health, was imposing her own moral interpretations on each joy her poor health deprived her of, thereby placing unnatural emotional burdens on her husband Taizo and the younger members. The fact that Takeyo had embarked on this unreasonable trip had become the focal point of everyone’s unreasonable strain in every respect. Nobuko sincerely hoped it would be fortunate if Takeyo didn’t end up bedridden for long in Paris or London. She didn’t think Taizo’s financial resources could withstand that level of burden.

“Is Mother’s health truly that severe?”

Motoko, who had been silently listening to everyone’s talk, said as if angry— “Can’t you tell just by looking?”

“Can’t you tell just by looking?” Motoko said. “Brother, you did speak with Dr. Mitsui, didn’t you?” Mentioning the name of Takeyo’s trusted family doctor, Koeda glanced back at Waichiro.

“Dr. Mitsui was absolutely against it from the start.” “As a doctor, he said he couldn’t guarantee it.” After Tamotsu died, Takeyo had lost her health so drastically that she became unrecognizable.

“Even so, because Mother wouldn’t listen, Father probably had no choice.”

If that were the case, Nobuko thought, they should have brought one competent woman—fluent in languages and reliable enough to actually assist Takeyo—rather than dragging along Tsuyako and Waichiro and his wife in all that disarray. That woman and a young man who could serve as Taizo’s assistant. If the trip was to revolve around Takeyo anyway, why hadn’t everyone conceived of such an orderly travel plan from the start?

“After all, did you all want to come along?”

“That’s not funny, Sis!”

With a glare that conveyed utter indignation, Waichiro rejected Nobuko’s words. “We—far from wanting to come—had wanted to avoid coming altogether. Who knows how many times we refused? If there was money to spend, we should’ve waited until things settled down more and come properly planned—just the two of us. That would’ve actually done me some good.” “That’s exactly how it is.” “Koeda’s just Mother’s maid.” “I’d never volunteer to be some errand boy.” “It was forced.” “They said all we had to do was tag along, so here we are tagging along.”

Even to say just that, Waichiro’s face—ordinarily gentle and oval—betrayed a sullen, tense nervousness in its expression. Since Marseille, Waichiro himself had openly acted on such feelings toward his parents. Because of this, Koeda’s position was always filled with concern for both sides and was perpetually caught between them.

When Nobuko received news from Takeyo in Moscow about Waichiro and Koeda’s marriage, even the fact that their marriage had been approved by Takeyo seemed unexpected to her. When Nobuko, having been asked by Waichiro to depart for Moscow, had a brief conversation in the deserted Western-style parlor the night before departure about his resolve to marry Koeda—what had Takeyo said then? Takeyo fixed a probing gaze on her daughter Nobuko’s face—had she ever said such a thing? And in that single remark, she clearly implied her disapproval. What a wife for Waichiro! At that time, Takeyo said, “Koeda is not the type of woman to support her husband’s development—she’s too hedonistic.” When Nobuko, having been asked by her younger brother, relayed such matters to her mother, Takeyo reprimanded her in a harsh voice, saying, “Do not stir up trouble.”

The marriage of Waichiro and Koeda—who held their ceremony in March and departed for France in late May with their parents and Tsuyako—did not appear to be the endearing wedding where the young couple had simply persevered through adversity, as Nobuko had naively envisioned while in Moscow. From Waichiro and Koeda's perspective, they must have believed they had fought solely to achieve their marriage. Yet their resolve had become intricately entwined with Takeyo's shrewd planning—her unyielding determination to undertake this foreign trip—and for the young couple, it had ultimately been molded into what was, by outward reputation alone, a superficially splendid overseas honeymoon.

With an expression of barely contained indignation twisting his lips, Waichiro laid out the circumstances to his sister. "If I'd known from the beginning they just wanted to make Koeda a maid, I never would've proposed getting married back then." "I could've kept postponing it indefinitely—that's what I really regret. I've done Koeda wrong." In the hotel's cramped room where they sat side by side on the bed, Koeda—seated beside Waichiro as he spoke—flushed crimson and brimmed with tears. She started to say something, then stopped.

As for the wedding ceremony, it had been settled quite casually with the understanding that it would be properly held after returning from abroad, and regarding the bride’s wedding preparations, through discussions between both sets of parents, two-thirds of the budget had been handed over in cash to Taizo as funds for this trip. “So—do you all have that much money?” Nobuko naturally found herself unable to avoid inquiring even about such matters.

“But that’s just it—it’s not like that.” “It’s all been jumbled together.” “If it were just the two of us, we wouldn’t take taxis every time we go out, nor would we want to go to first-class restaurants—we could use the funds frugally, efficiently, like young people should.” “If things stay as they are, the total amount ends up being split per person—it’s utterly unreasonable, you know.” “Even Father should have understood that much by now.” That the young couple were only being given small allowances in increments, both on the ship and after arriving in Paris, was something Nobuko learned through that evening’s conversation.

As the conversation grew gradually deeper and more concrete, Nobuko became distressed. And she felt ashamed of the entire course of events. The parents' method of linking their approval of Waichiro and Koeda's marriage to this trip. From Nobuko's perspective, there was something vaguely unsatisfying about Koeda's use of the wedding funds. The Sasa household's outward showiness and inner lack of substance gave rise to a strain—or rather, as Nobuko would put it, a vulgarity, an unselfconscious middle-class vulgarity—and Nobuko found the sight of her family's disheveled traveling appearance painfully pitiful.

The fact that Taizo’s so-called common sense and good judgment befitting an English gentleman showed no effect whatsoever in this matter made Nobuko reflect anew. Taizo appeared to be following Takeyo’s plan entirely. Had the disappointment and grief over Tamotsu’s death crushed his spirit so completely? Was there not some unspoken memorial to Tamotsu in this compliance with Takeyo’s every word—something Taizo had never put into language? The story of Taizo weeping as he viewed Naples’ city lights from the ship without going ashore pierced through Nobuko’s heart. She felt everyone’s morbidly heightened emotions and the exhaustion weighing on Taizo’s nerves.

After a long silence, Nobuko spoke haltingly to Waichiro, who had begun smoking a cigarette with the air of someone who had finally said all he wanted to say.

“Our family is a difficult one, you know. Even you, Koeda, never imagined there’d be such a difference between being a niece and a bride, did you? In the Sasa household—certainly particularly strong characteristics are evident—but ultimately it’s the mindset of Japan’s old families, you see. And then there’s the economic fragility of Japan’s middle class, you see.” Whether it was the painful relationship that Kyosuke Isozaki—a painter living in Dut—and his beautiful, patient wife Sumiko had with their parents back home, or the quarrels plaguing the Sasa household, these were but different facets of the same matter.

“When people go abroad, they all think they’ve become somewhat free from Japan’s various constraints and believe they should act freely—that’s why the contradictions become painfully clear.” “The more people feel constrained in their own country, the more they try to stretch themselves abroad, thinking foreign countries are free.” “But even here, from the Seine River, the drowned corpses of young women are being found every day.” “You’ve seen it in the newspaper, haven’t you?” “There are poor parents and children committing suicide with charcoal gas.” “Even you all have come this far after all, so you must use your wisdom as much as possible and establish your own policies from various aspects of life.” “It’s only natural that Waichiro is angry now, but you didn’t come all the way to Paris just to get angry, did you?” “Hey, Koeda.”

“To be honest—I wish Brother would even stop getting angry.” “Even if my back were to fall out—I’m perfectly fine.” “If I just endure feeling ashamed for a little while longer, that’s all right.”

On the ship, after changing into her evening clothes, Koeda tightened Takeyo’s kimono obi. The task in the hot cabin would make Koeda—who had taken such care to dress up—sweat profusely, sometimes causing perspiration to seep through even the thin, beautiful lace or other evening wear clinging to her back. When Waichiro saw Koeda like that, he would become sullen. “Mr. Waichiro, that’s what you call a husband’s egoism.” Nobuko, after the stifling conversation, wanted to relax and— “Well, if you have a beautiful young wife like Koeda here, of course you wouldn’t want to see her sweating and showing it through her clothes,” she said with a slight laugh. “That’s one of Koeda’s good points. It might even be why you’re able to be her husband in the first place.” But Waichiro kept his sullen expression unchanged, glancing at Nobuko with a look of white-eyed reproach.

“Well, if you have a beautiful young wife like Koeda, you wouldn’t want to let anyone see her sweating like that, would you?”

With that, she laughed a little. "That’s one of Koeda’s good qualities—with such qualities, Mr. Waichiro, you might have actually become her husband by now." However, Waichiro kept his sullen expression rigid and shot Nobuko a sharp glance with eyes that gleamed white.

“I’m not saying this about Koeda out of my own feelings.” “It’s strange she’d even talk to you about my feelings like that.” “What I hate is Mother’s luggage.”

Tension surfaced on Nobuko’s face as well. Waichiro was pointing to the brocade-wrapped item containing Tamotsu’s divided remains. Ever since arriving in Paris, it had been displayed on the bedside table between two beds at the back of Taizo and Takeyo’s room at the Hotel International—now empty as both were out. “Whether it’s us or Tsuyako—we’ve all come here thinking Mother deserves our pity.” “If we didn’t feel that way—would we have come this far?” “Yet whenever Mother finds something satisfying—no matter what—she credits everything to ‘him’.” “Even things we actually did.” “Then makes us out to be responsible for every last thing that goes wrong.” “Does such a thing exist?—the living being sacrificed endlessly for the dead?” “If ‘he’s’ so marvelous—Mother should just make ‘him’ carry bags and hail taxis!”

The reason Waichiro disliked the brocade-wrapped item among Takeyo's belongings was not solely due to memories of Tamotsu's physical presence.

"I almost think it would be better if even a hotel maid were to mistake that thing for something else and lose it." Tsuyako, disliking lying alone in her parents' large, empty room, had squeezed into one of the beds in the cramped space where Nobuko, Motoko, Waichiro, and Koeda were crowded together.

The four young people thought Tsuyako was asleep—or rather, they had forgotten her presence entirely as they spoke. When Waichiro’s harsh tone left everyone silent and the room stilled, Nobuko suddenly noticed Tsuyako crying in the bed. Nobuko jolted involuntarily. With her eyes, she silently guided the others’ attention toward Tsuyako’s bed. “Tsuyako-chan, I’m sorry.”

Nobuko stood up and went over, stroking Tsuyako's girlish, sweat-dampened shoulder as she cried into the white covering.

“Did you cry because we were all talking about such awful things? It’s okay now. Right? We’ll sort things out by talking properly, and from now on we’ll keep everything pleasant.”

Tsuyako wrapped one arm around Nobuko's neck and pressed Nobuko's face against her own tear-drenched face. Then, sobbing, she whispered: "That's not it, that's not it."

Tsuyako whispered. "It's all right. I'm glad Brother is talking about everything," she said. "I truly didn't know what to do... If I'd died like Tamotsu-chan, I thought Mother would finally cherish me too." Nobuko wordlessly tightened her embrace around Tsuyako's body. Tears spilled from Nobuko's eyes.

Five

Since her family had come to Paris, that day marked the first time Nobuko went out alone with her father Taizo. When Nobuko visited the Hotel International where her parents were staying a little before noon as usual, she found Taizo still in his room—an unusual occurrence—and heard him insisting he needed to buy gloves.

“But you—in this heat—gloves?” Living in a small, inadequately equipped hotel, Takeyo was beginning to find the urban heat increasingly unbearable as July 14th—Bastille Day—approached.

“According to local custom here, even in summer you’re supposed to have gloves for formal visits.” “Oh my. Gloves not to wear but just to have—what a bother in this heat.” Takeyo laughed at her daughter with eyes that regarded Taizo—who, even in his old age, was attempting to obediently follow foreign customs—as stylish, all while seeming amused by such Parisian habits. “Since Nobuko has just come, why don’t you go together and buy them?”

At that time, Waichiro and Koeda had also gone out. Even so, the fact that Takeyo told Nobuko she could go out was evidence of her good mood. “Well, let’s do that.” “I’ll return Nobuko shortly.” Nobuko, too, had no idea where one might buy something like men’s formal visiting gloves. They should be able to buy proper items at a proper department store. Thinking this, Nobuko went with Taizo to Trois Quartiers, where at least one of the salesclerks was sure to understand English. Taizo bought two types of deerskin gloves there.

Standing under the shade of a horse chestnut tree on the sidewalk in front of Trois Quartiers, Taizo,

“Well—what shall we do?”

Taizo said to Nobuko. This was Taizo’s habit. In Tokyo, when Nobuko stopped by Taizo’s office to have lunch together with him, he would always say this. After hearing Nobuko’s plans, he would sometimes part ways with her then and there; other times, saying there was still time until her next appointment, he would drive her to a convenient location. Now, under the horse chestnut trees of Paris’s bustling boulevard,

“Well—what shall we do?”

Hearing her father’s usual way of speaking, Nobuko felt her chest suddenly tighten with flustered confusion. “And you, Father?” Out of habit as a daughter, Nobuko automatically asked in return. Being out alone with her father in Paris for the first time had made her feel subtly different from the very start of their outing that day. She had many things she wanted to discuss unreservedly with him—about his overall outlook on this European trip, about how to handle Waichiro and his wife. Even if not substantial matters, the daily hotel life where she couldn’t find calm moments to talk properly with her father pained her. That Waichiro and his wife had apparently clashed constantly during their forty-day voyage must have distressed Taizo; moreover, given how Waichiro now increasingly rebelled against his parents and grew irritable, it seemed impossible this wouldn’t affect Taizo as his father. Nobuko felt a quiet urge to lean tenderly on him—to discuss these worries like an elder daughter should.

However, Taizo seemed determined to distance himself from all things Japanese while in Paris, if only during their stay there, and appeared to relish even brief respites from the squabbles of his wife and sons—their cluttered existence in that single room at the Hotel International amid piles of luggage. Taizo, even at that moment standing in the shade of a plane tree with his thick, bushy eyebrows framing an elderly yet vigorous and ruddy face that bore an exceptionally carefree, bright expression, swiftly raised a single finger to hail a taxi.

“Since it’s a good opportunity, I’ll show you one of Paris’s antique shops.” Taizo sat down while informing the driver of their destination as Rue Bonaparte. Such antique shop visits had also been a pastime that Taizo and Nobuko had shared more than once in Tokyo. In the taxi, Nobuko lightly took her father’s hand into hers. With that gesture, as if trying to focus Taizo’s attention on her words,

“Father—the Inter is already too much for Mother,” Nobuko said. “Yesterday she was lamenting, ‘There’s not even an electric fan there,’ you know. We have to do something about it.”

“Hmm.” “What am I to do…” Taizo’s expression stiffened, as if he had been reluctantly cornered before the oppressive issue he had long avoided. “Let’s look for somewhere else. Since it’s summer, if we don’t find a more comfortable place, it’ll be bad for our health.” “Father, do you agree?” “I wholeheartedly agree.” “But even if we look for one, there’s no time.” “If Father agrees, we will handle the search.” “But since our connections are limited, Father, you’ll have to ask around whenever you meet people for any leads they might have.”

“That’s an excellent idea!” “I’ll get right on it.” After remaining silent for a while, Taizo—who had been gazing at the cityscape through the taxi window—spoke in a tone that seemed unwilling, or rather mournful. “Under normal circumstances, these are things Waichiro should be handling—but that man won’t lift a finger. Not even on the ship.” "If Tamotsu were here—" though Taizo did not say it aloud. Nobuko sensed in that moment what made Taizo himself, and she drew closer to his heart.

“Wouldn’t it be better to leave Waichiro and the others to themselves for a while?”

“That might be the case.”

Though he seemed to want to say something more, Taizo stopped at that. Taizo and Nobuko then walked around looking at three or four antique shops. Taizo, an architect with classical tastes, focused on furniture and ceramics from around the Renaissance period. As a memento of their outing that day, Nobuko received from Taizo a small Sèvres powder case that imitated Japan’s Kakiemon style in a Rococo manner.

On their way back, Taizo took Nobuko and stopped by Hotel Campbell on Friedland Avenue. The proposal made in the taxi on the way there had been promptly carried out. The hotel—which an acquaintance of Taizo’s had stayed at and praised—was compact throughout, with an orderly and pristine atmosphere.

“As a hotel, it’s certainly good—but I wonder how Mother would feel about it.” Nobuko compared this to the scene in the room at Hotel International—where even Tsuyako’s bed had been placed in the couple’s bedroom amidst the disarray of luggage.

“Don’t you think Mother would find a place like this too cramped? It’s too compact…” Takeyo believed that even when abroad—provided it wasn’t outright rude—there was nothing wrong with living by Japanese customs, and she practiced this belief faithfully. She never considered how hotel staff might perceive her making their thirteen-year-old daughter sleep on a bed placed in the parents’ bedroom. When Nobuko subtly cautioned her about this, Takeyo—

“Do you even know how sensitive Tsuyako is?” she said with a displeased expression.

“You’re always like this about everything.” Her gaze seemed poised to defend against any attempt to separate Tsuyako from Takeyo. Taizo appeared to intuit that Hotel Campbell’s subdued, tranquil atmosphere somehow clashed with the grandiose presence Takeyo carried about herself.

“After all, your mother isn’t someone who’ll be satisfied unless it’s a spacious room.”

Taizo said.

The plan to vacate Hotel International pleased Takeyo. When she heard this, Koeda—

“Oh! Really?”

Koeda stared with shining eyes and exchanged glances with Waichiro.

“So, Waichiro, you’ve got to put your mind to helping us look for a place too, okay?”

To Nobuko, who had spoken so simply and cheerfully,

“Yeah.”

Waichiro answered while weighing his thoughts heavily. "Our getting all worked up about this has its pros and cons too." "If we rush to separate and then get told something like 'How unusually fired up you're being,' I just can't handle it." "—Don't say that!"

Nobuko was surprised by the tangled state of Waichiro’s emotions.

“No way!” “Hey, Nobuko.”

In Takeyo’s absence, Koeda addressed Nobuko as her cousin and spoke with an anxious demeanor. “Do you really think that when we move from the International, we’ll be able to live separately?”

“Why? Aren’t we trying to find a place under conditions where we can live separately?” “If we could do that, how wonderful it would be.” Waichiro still did not take any action to search for a house. There was one place—an apartment that Taizo had been told about—and Takeyo also went along to see it. As it was a state-of-the-art building, its architecture seemed to blend a style that made extensive use of glass in the manner of Le Corbusier with the American Wright-style approach. The ceiling of the apartment room—furnished with straightforward pieces like tubular steel chairs—was oppressively low, and the air circulation seemed poor.

“Oh my, this is just like the Imperial Hotel!”

Takeyo’s single remark candidly expressed the impression Taizo and Nobuko had received. The construction style of the Imperial Hotel in Uchisaiwaicho had not been to Takeyo’s liking, nor had Taizo favored it either. This apartment’s so-called “latest style” amounted to nothing more than an excuse for turning four floors into five and increasing the number of rooms.

Nobuko, accompanied by Motoko, took the suburban train from Paris for about an hour to go see a rented villa in Enghien. A rented villa, so-called, meant leasing part of a villa—in other words, it was a pension-style room with meals included. The house itself stood on a high part of town, with a spacious room facing a pleasant garden planted with Italian cypress trees and featuring a terrace. There was also a small room that could be rented. When standing on the terrace of the spacious room facing the garden, the distant edge of the lake glimmered briefly into view. It was Lake Enghien, thanks to which the town was designated a summer resort. On weekends and during the approaching July 14th Festival nights, music would resound from the lakeside pavilion until nearly dawn, and the chatter of dancing people and their laughter would travel across the water’s surface, reaching all the way to the terrace of that house halfway up the hill on the opposite shore. A scene evocative of summer in the Parisian suburbs came to mind.

However, in reality, even that could not be said to suit Takeyo. Takeyo would surely grow tired of the pension’s meals and crave Japanese food, and even if they were to go into the city for that purpose, there were no taxis here. The absence of taxis meant that Taizo could not live there either. On the afternoon two days before the July 14th Festival, Takeyo and the others finally secured a prospect to move out from Hotel International. An apartment was found on the fourth floor of No. 47 Boulevard Pereire. There was a living room, dining room, bedroom, and a small room perfect for Tsuyako’s sitting area, complete with a lovely chintz-covered divan bed. It came with a kitchen, bathroom, furniture, and dishes for 2,000 francs per month, with three months’ rent paid in advance. That was less than two hundred yen per month in Japanese money. On the third floor of the same building, the pianist Hiroyoshi Kawanami had been living for the past three years. The fact that they had secured a unit on the fourth floor was also due to Hiroyoshi Kawanami’s recommendation. Even more conveniently, once Kawanami—who would soon be departing for a summer retreat in the Alps—left, an additional condition was included: the part-time domestic helper who had been managing Kawanami’s kitchen could now work for the Sasa family.

Finally, on the day they were to finalize the decision, Waichiro and his wife joined them for the first time, and all seven members of the group went to Pereire. A plentiful wind entered from the terrace of the guest room overlooking horse chestnut trees thickly grown along the quiet boulevard, passed through the corridor, and blew out through the window of a small room on the opposite side. The windows on that side of the building faced a back street, and the No.47 building stood squarely on the street corner. The dining room’s atmosphere, with its roughly arranged sturdy china cabinet and table, and the guest room with its carved fireplace and Louis-style furniture—their old-fashioned quality imparted a natural composure that suited Taizo and Takeyo.

Takeyo, catching the breeze on the sofa in the guest room,

“Ah...”

“At last, with this, I finally feel as though I’ve truly come to Paris.”

Before the summer maru obi with silver threads, she loosened the obi sash and sighed. Koeda, standing at the threshold of the opened dining room, gripped Nobuko’s hand until it hurt. The sentiment resonated so perfectly that Nobuko found herself laughing despite herself. Truly, what a relief that Takeyo had taken to this apartment. The number of rooms was ideal for her parents and Tsuyako to live in—yet its layout made adding another couple impossible—a circumstance that not only naturally liberated Waichiro and Koeda but carried profound significance for Nobuko too. That there happened to be a Japanese part-time helper to manage her parents’ and Tsuyako’s daily needs was such a stroke of luck for Koeda and Nobuko that they might well call it providential.

Six

On July 14th, Bastille Day, the men and women of Paris poured outdoors and danced until past two in the morning. In Vaugirard Street where Nobuko and the others lived, stages for musicians had been erected one after another at Porte de Versailles square, Convention intersection, Pasteur and other spots starting two or three days prior. The citizens’ festival stages—decorated with log pillars swathed in green leaves and modestly arranged with one or two crisscrossing lines of blue and red bulbs—began resonating with violin and flute melodies around noon on the fourteenth, and as night deepened, a festive atmosphere permeated the entire city.

When Nobuko and Motoko boarded the metro around nine o’clock to look around, they found a lively group of young men and women in pointed caps inside the car. With peep-peep sounds from a toy made of colored paper that extended an elephant’s trunk, they fooled around while pushing their way toward somewhere. In the lemon-colored, brightly lit metro car crowded with passengers who seemed to have no objection to the festive liveliness existing even underground, the faces of slightly drunk elderly people—quietly smiling as they watched—also caught one’s eye.

When they alighted from the metro at Pasteur and emerged into the square，the circles of dancing had spread，their fervor intensifying，and crowds of dancing men and women overflowed into the streets．Nobuko and Motoko，who were not dancing，watched for a while behind the crowd that swayed ceaselessly to the music before trailing along with the flowing stream of people and walking toward Porte de Versailles．Unlike the boulevards near the Arc de Triomphe，this part of Paris had sparse streetlights and was perpetually dark．On the dimly lit avenues，blue and red string bulbs from stages cast uneven light．To the intricate，brisk French-style dance melodies played on violins，cellos，and pianos，crowds of men and women near the musicians’ platforms danced under shifting colored lights that fell on their shoulders and profiles as they moved．Further away，other crowds overlapped as shadowy writhing figures dancing in the darkness．Around every dancing circle，dust from the streets of Paris’s outskirts—invisible to the night eye—was stirred up，and in the windless July night air，a sweltering heat could be felt．

To Nobuko and Motoko, who had grown accustomed to Moscow's holidays—bright and filled with singing voices like May Day and Revolution Day—the nighttime spectacle of Bastille Day in Paris's outskirts evoked a peculiar melancholy. Nobuko and Motoko returned to the hotel a little past twelve o'clock. It must have been because it was a holiday night. The front door remained wide open, electric lights blazing across the white stone grain. They passed through the deserted hall and began climbing the stairs beside the elevator. As they ascended the brightly lit yet empty late-night staircase—muffling their footsteps as anyone would—they came to an abrupt halt upon reaching the second-floor corridor. Before each tightly shut door along the illuminated hallway, pairs of men's and women's shoes had been neatly placed—but now through some prankster's doing, they lay not just mismatched but chaotically jumbled. At one door, an unevenly paired man's and woman's shoe faced each other mid-dance; at the next, footwear tangled as if a man had chased down a woman who lost her shoe while fleeing. Not a single pair in that corridor had escaped mischief. Had they grown weary of crafting individual stories for each set? As if declaring "Enough!", armfuls of shoes appeared to have been grabbed and scattered recklessly across the red carpet—patent leather dress shoes and men's oxfords lay strewn about in disarray, their haphazard chaos radiating an indescribable absurdity.

At the stairway leading up to the third floor, Nobuko and Motoko stood, at first wondering what it could be, and gazed at the scene. Eventually understanding the prank’s mood—which seemed to express more playfulness than a hint of jealousy—the two burst into laughter.

“So this is what makes Parisians Parisians.” “Not half bad.” “I wonder if the third floor’s the same.”

“Well, who knows?” The prankster might have been staying on the third floor of this hotel. There was nothing unusual about the third-floor corridor. Facing the bright corridor laid with a red carpet, men’s shoes lay quietly alongside women’s shoes in front of the doors.

Nobuko and the others slowly walked up to the seventh floor. When they looked, in front of the door adjacent to Nobuko’s room, a pair of women’s shoes—unseen until the previous night—had been placed alongside ordinary men’s shoes. As she walked through the brightly lit late-night corridor, gazing at the men’s and women’s shoes placed before each door, Nobuko vividly sensed people there—a sensation as if she were slipping alone between pairs locked in an embrace and dance.

“Let’s rest on the terrace for a bit.” Speaking in a low voice for no particular reason, Motoko entered Nobuko’s room with her. After briefly turning on the light and then turning it off again, they went out to the terrace to cool off. In the streets below, people were still dancing. Music drifted up from somewhere. Under the night sky stretched row upon row of Parisian rooftops with their signature slender chimneys, while far across the Seine River, the Eiffel Tower’s illuminations flickered through the Bastille Night. The lights spelled out Citroën 6, Citroën 6. Then they frantically blinked Citroën 6-6-6—an advertisement for Citroën’s newest six-cylinder model.

The General Confederation of Labor was supposed to have held a rally in the afternoon and a grand festival at night somewhere in a workers’ district of Paris for that evening’s revolutionary anniversary celebration. In a corner of *L'Humanité*, Nobuko had seen an advertisement that seemed to match. In Nobuko and Motoko’s Paris, there were no people wearing clown hats all through the night of July 14th, throwing confetti and dragging themselves from nightclub to nightclub—but neither was there anyone to guide them to the union festivals and rallies in the eastern districts.

The substance of what had been called revolution was forgotten, and Nobuko and Motoko found Bastille Day—as a night of boisterous revelry where ordinary men and women cast aside decorum—both in the city streets and within the hotel itself.

Sitting on the cool terrace past 1 a.m., Nobuko and Motoko felt a faint weariness and a sort of loneliness, and because of this, they remained silent while gently thinking of each other. The atmosphere of revelry was so brazenly open and overflowing that even Motoko seemed overwhelmed by its dazzling excess. She did not utter a single word of sarcasm reminiscent of the demimonde or malicious jests, having instead grown quiet and serious. At times like these, Nobuko thought she liked Motoko. While her skin carried an excited glow, Motoko’s taut expression was also striking.

In the nearly full hour that the two had been on the terrace, the number of musical pieces resounding here and there had gradually diminished, until now only a violin and piano being played at some nearby street corner could be heard in a strained tone—as if performing what might be the festive night’s final song. “Let’s go to bed.”

Motoko stood up from the terrace. “Aren’t you going to bed too, Bukko-chan?” “I’ll sleep.”

“…………” Motoko, who seemed to hesitate about something, took Nobuko’s hand at the boundary between the terrace and the room.

“Good night, then.” In Motoko’s voice, there was a tone that unintentionally compelled Nobuko toward her. Nobuko tightly embraced Motoko and pressed her cheek against Motoko’s. The sensation of Motoko’s backbone—its slender, fragile curvature—struck Nobuko strangely as Motoko staggered and barely kept her footing. Nobuko’s embrace gradually slackened.

On this July 14th, Bastille Day, the border between the Soviet Union and China was blockaded. On the 17th, they formally severed diplomatic relations. And on the 18th, martial law was declared in Harbin.

The Sasa parents and Tsuyako moved from Hotel International to the Boulevard Pereire apartment on the 16th, and Nobuko busily walked around department stores to buy sheets, tablecloths, and other items needed for the move. Until the daily maid arrived on the 19th, Nobuko commuted to the Pereire house and took charge of the kitchen. The rice cooked in the deep pot used for making soup turned out mushy because the water didn’t drain well, but even Taizo found it delicious.

“I’m truly glad we came here.” “Once you finish cleaning up, Nobuko, why don’t we go to Bois de Boulogne or somewhere?” Like a summer evening spent among only family members, Takeyo’s voice carried through the open door all the way to the kitchen as she said this in the living room. “Very well, let’s go.”

Nobuko thought that deciding to live here had indeed been a success. Here, as long as one stood at the apartment’s front entrance, anyone—even Tsuyako—could hail a taxi passing along the Boulevard at any time. Waichiro and Koeda remained at the hotel as planned. The two of them would gradually find a place they liked and move there on their own. In the compact kitchen floored with white tiles, Nobuko was washing pots and ladles. Tsuyako, wearing a red cellophane-like apron, was helping to tidy up—placing the pots Nobuko had washed back where they belonged and hanging the ladle on the nail it had been on. Since moving to the apartment, Tsuyako found places to help when she felt like it, had a room of her own, and seemed somewhat happier.

It was the evening before the daily help was to start coming. “Tsuyako-chan, you really must try using some of the French you learned at school—you’re being too much of a quiet one. From now on, when it’s just you and Mother, if something comes up, you’ll have to handle it…” “Sister… won’t you come anymore?” “I’ll come, but…” In Nobuko’s eyes as she washed the pots was an expression on her parents’ faces—different from the calm atmosphere they created on their own after finishing dinner—heavy and sharp, trying to discern something, their minds drawn elsewhere.

The border blockade between the Soviet Union and China that had been in effect continuously since July 14th. Severance of diplomatic relations. Regarding the Chinese side’s reclamation of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the Paris-based English-language newspaper *Daily Mail* merely reported the facts calmly. "Our most dangerous enemy is Soviet Russia. We will not abolish the privileges of the great powers by force." It carried such a declaration by Chiang Kai-shek. L'Humanité reported on the truth behind this incident. The Nanjing Government, through its war policy against Soviet Russia, had secured assistance from imperialist nations to suppress the revolution of the Chinese laboring masses. And it reported that they were vigorously amassing the Hakuro Army at the border. The fact that the Chinese side had declared martial law in Harbin, Nobuko thought, was a matter of scrutinizing the essence of that news.

In the winter before last, on their way to Moscow, Nobuko and Motoko had stopped in Harbin for four or five days. The view along bustling Kitaiskaya Street. There stood the massive Churin Department Store. The affluent Japanese in Harbin—or rather, when those Japanese residents found themselves flush with funds or hosting visitors from the homeland—would frequent restaurants and cabarets mostly operated by White Russians. Recalling the faces of several people she had met there, Nobuko could imagine what sort of interest and expectations most Japanese in Harbin harbored toward Chiang Kai-shek’s recent maneuvers. The Japanese residents must have exchanged rumors and speculations while discussing how far Chiang might push this situation. She supposed they had received news of Harbin’s martial law declaration with three parts anxiety to seven parts relief. Japan’s aggressive climate—marked by incidents like Zhang Zuolin’s bombing in Manchuria—permeated Harbin’s atmosphere too; though a covetous opportunism prevailed on one hand, those separated from their homeland still clung to some hope in the Soviet Union’s pacifist policies.

On July 22nd, in protest against the Chinese side's forceful reclamation, a general strike by employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway broke out. Chiang Kai-shek was suppressing it by military force. The Daily Mail continued to report on the Chinese side's actions in a positive light with the same calmness as before. L'Humanité carried a rallying call. Comrades, revolutionary workers of France! The initiation of war policies against Soviet Russia is a policy of slaughter directed at the laboring masses worldwide. Crush reaction and fascism! Wage a powerful class struggle against the enemies of the Soviet Union! The rallying call was linked to the appeal for a large-scale march on August 1st, World Anti-War Day, which was approaching.

From the pages of *L'Humanité*—whose legible typeface allowed her to grasp the gist by picking out recognizable characters—came a resonance that left Nobuko tense. To those unaware of its significance it might seem a minor international incident, but to those who felt its weight it carried the gravity of a critical signal—with casual yet unceasing vigilance, capitalist nations were directing their gaze toward a single border. Even within Nobuko’s meager knowledge of Russian Revolutionary history lingered the name Denikin. There were Kolchak and Wrangel too. Behind these White Armies that had surged into revolutionary Russia fluttered the flags of imperialist nations. Japan had fulfilled its role as the Orient’s watchdog and launched its Siberian Intervention, anticipating residual gains.

Nobuko felt the border living within her being disturbed. That border spread endlessly beneath the winter sky, half-Mongolian in nature. On the day Nobuko passed through there, a north wind blew.

A lone Mongolian man was walking along a desolate path beside the railway tracks. The ear flaps of the winter cap were blown about by the north wind; the hem of the Mongolian robe was whipped around the legs enough to tangle them. Two fierce black Mongolian dogs were running alongside the man.

How red was the sun sinking into the Siberian primeval forests that deeply encircled Lake Baikal! There was snow there. The whiteness of untrodden snow. A blazing red setting sun. The majesty of the primeval forest, backlit and pitch-black, standing in ancient thickets. Nobuko, now living in Paris, became aware that she loved this border with something akin to nostalgia. The Soviet Union’s borders had to be upheld for its people—those fighting famine, repelling White Armies, building tirelessly. For all who strove believing human society could grow, these borders must be protected.

The mornings and evenings in Moscow's streets. People's faces and voices. There were Natasha, her baby, and her young husband living through the various new frameworks of social life being attempted there for the first time. How abundantly human potential burned within Moscow's four seasons! And there existed new human emotions that could only be born from such a new society. Last year before May Day, when members of the Japanese Communist Party had been arrested, Taizo had sent that newspaper article marked with red-ink brackets to Nobuko in Moscow. That Nobuko was now in Paris—visiting the apartment on Boulevard Pereire once a day, accompanying her parents and siblings on strolls in the Bois de Boulogne or trivial amusements at Luna Park—so perhaps to Taizo, no matter how the Chinese Eastern Railway issue unfolded, it was nothing more than another foreign newspaper article to read.

When Nobuko saw the newspaper in Moscow with red-ink brackets somewhat roughly marked, she felt pain. Having been sent such things had left an indelible impression on her. That Taizo seemed to regard Paris as a place devoid of harsh human ideologies—a place where there existed no arduous, earnest class struggles of people striving to grow freely—this very air of carefreeness was what piqued Nobuko's interest in their Parisian life.

On the dawn of July 23rd, the Superintendent of Police in Paris had Communist Party members arrested indiscriminately throughout the city. Since the Chinese Eastern Railway issue, voices opposing fascism and demanding protection for the Soviet Union from invasion had arisen not only among workers but also from broad intellectual circles. Preparations for the August 1st Anti-War Day appeared to be advancing energetically on a large scale. The dawn raid of July 23rd was meant to disrupt them.

Around noon that day, when Nobuko appeared at the house on Boulevard Pereire as was her custom, Takeyo said: “Today, something strange happened at dawn. How about you, Nobuko?” Nobuko had known nothing while on the seventh floor of the Vaugirard Hotel. There had been nothing particularly startling to rouse her. “What could it have been?” Takeyo looked as if confirming her memory wasn’t from a dream,

“At dawn, something passed by outside on horseback multiple times.” “When I suddenly woke up, there was quite a clatter of hooves.” “When I wondered what it could be and listened carefully, they kept coming—just how many passed by like that?” “It was quite a number.” “I gradually grew uneasy and had Father get up, but we couldn’t make sense of it... What could it have been?”

At that time, Nobuko still did not know what had occurred at dawn. The fact that her mother had heard those countless hoofbeats on the street and intuitively sensed such unease was itself far more strange. Through the newspaper on the 24th, Nobuko learned of the events that had occurred at dawn the previous day. The clatter of hooves that Takeyo had heard upon waking might have been the sound of Paris’s mounted police being dispatched for that purpose. Nobuko marveled at her mother’s sensitivity in perceiving both solemnity and menace within those unseen hoofbeats overhead. She had discussed it only with Motoko and did not inform Takeyo of the incident’s details. Among those arrested under the label of Communist Party members were several foreigners. The tone of the English-language newspaper carried echoes of articles from Berlin’s Bloody May Day. Nobuko read and reread the Daily Mail article. Such incidents were not unexpected—for Briand’s government they formed part of a calculated plan, with clear signs that these events would repeat until people accepted them as routine. L'Humanité laid bare the incident’s essence: to decisively subjugate all French citizens under fascism, to break their courage in fighting for living rights while instilling fear and retreat, Briand’s government had begun by destroying communism’s vanguard. Fascists sought internationally to crush the Soviet Union and domestically to annihilate communist parties. Yet this was impossible. “Impossible”—the word reverberated through Nobuko as she stared at the newsprint. Within that brief negation lay expressed the most potent affirmation. To this she nodded.

What thoughts did Taizo have about the July 23rd incident as he read the Daily Mail? Nobuko, who had grown cautious, felt relieved that even in this situation Taizo treated it as entirely unrelated to himself, while secretly feeling astonished. That this was neither an affair within Japan nor in Moscow—that they were in France—was what allowed Taizo to remain untroubled. Nobuko thought once more about Takeyo’s sensitivity, which operated with the sharpness of a high-strung woman’s intuition no matter where she was.

VII

On a day when an evening shower had passed, pleasantly reviving the green hues of the chestnut trees throughout the city, shortly after five in the afternoon, Nobuko visited her parents’ apartment on Boulevard Pereire. She stood before the dim entrance door and pressed the bell. When no answer came for some time, she rang again. The door was opened not by the live-in maid Madame Roussel, but by Tsuyako, her face swollen.

“Ah, Elder sister!”

Tsuyako pressed her entire body against Nobuko and pulled her hand.

“Come…” Though Tsuyako’s manner was abnormal, the apartment was eerily quiet. “What’s wrong?” Nobuko thought her mother might have fallen ill.

“Is someone ill?” “No, that’s not it.” Shaking her tousled bob-cut head, Tsuyako pulled Nobuko straight into the parlor with frantic, terrible force. The windows facing the terrace stood wide open, and there sat Takeyo on the parlor sofa with her legs stretched out, the refreshing post-rain air flowing through. The pallor of Takeyo’s face caught the evening light from diagonally to the side. It was a bluish yellow that surpassed mere pallor. On the small table before the sofa lay a bottle of Evian drinking water and a glass, alongside Takeyo’s personal medicine—a paper bag of Hōtan.

“See? I knew something was wrong with you.”

Nobuko hurriedly approached her mother. “What’s wrong? You should have called me.” Takeyo, mentally drained and devoid of all strength, reached out her hand toward Nobuko. Takeyo’s right hand, adorned with a large diamond ring, trembled faintly within Nobuko’s grasp, its surface icy cold yet feverishly warm at the core. “Hey, what’s really wrong? Are you in pain somewhere?”

“It was sheer agony—Nobuko!”

Takeyo said in a voice that had grown completely hoarse, barely audible enough to be heard. “Today of all days, I was almost killed!”

Takeyo, having finished speaking, gave a cough that seemed to resist her choking breath. In the shadow of Nobuko’s expression, strained with genuine anxiety, a flicker of doubt about Takeyo’s exaggeration stirred. “To be killed—” By whom? Why? It was impossible, Nobuko thought. Nobuko glanced back at Tsuyako, who was standing beside her, as if to ask. The sight of the dazed, overweight thirteen-year-old Tsuyako, who seemed utterly crushed, was pitiful.

“I can’t make any sense of what happened at all.” At Nobuko’s reproachful tone, Takeyo—

“Waichiro was here,” she answered. “The way he raged… Tsuyako must have seen it too.” “When parents lose all discernment like that—it’s horrifying.” With a choked sob, Tsuyako spun around and fled through the corridor into her tiny room facing the guest quarters. Around two o’clock that afternoon, Waichiro had come proposing they hand over the money since he’d found a hotel to move to. That appeared to have sparked everything. The core of Waichiro’s demand was to have the full amount he and Koeda needed for their upcoming trip clearly calculated and separated from their parents’ finances then and there.

“What could I possibly do when confronted so abruptly—and above all, Father isn’t even present!”

As Takeyo was explaining the circumstances to her daughter, her voice—which had been nervously constricted in her throat—gradually began emerging more naturally.

“For one thing, if you go and hand over all the money to those people—the six months’ worth will surely vanish in three months…” One morning not long after the parent couple and Tsuyako had moved to Pereire, Taizo happened to encounter Waichiro and his wife at Wagram Square. A little past ten in the morning, the young couple was on the terrace of a café at the square’s corner, each with a glass of grape wine before them, leisurely watching the passersby. Koeda keenly spotted Taizo approaching on the sidewalk.

“—Father!”

By the time she said this, Taizo had already reached them. There, true to his character, he spoke to Koeda in a cheerful tone, joined them for a cup of coffee, and then left.

When Nobuko heard this anecdote from Koeda, she found it amusing, thinking how the young ones must have been worn out. As Nobuko laughed, Koeda looked at her with a worried gaze, “Please don’t laugh so much.”

she said.

“That morning, I somehow lacked confidence, and no matter how much I said ‘You should stop coming to places like this,’ Brother just wouldn’t listen—it was like he was digging his heels in...” Koeda’s anxiety had not been groundless. That evening when Taizo returned home, he told Nobuko—who had come to meet him—about the morning’s incident. “I thought, ‘What stray brats are coiled up here first thing in the morning?’ and went to check—only to find Waichiro and Koeda.”

Taizo knitted his brows and shook his head. "There's just no helping him." An irreparable distrust toward Waichiro had taken root in Taizo's heart. "If one intends to seriously pursue architecture in the future, there are more than enough things one ought to observe given this rare opportunity." Even when Taizo harshly criticized Waichiro, Takeyo defended him by shifting primary responsibility onto Koeda. Because Koeda was hedonistic and made no effort to instill diligence in Waichiro. In Takeyo's mind—ever vigilant about financial matters—there must have arisen the image of Koeda: wearing an elegant cinnamon-colored silk lace dress, her slender legs attracting Parisian gazes. The fact that Waichiro had come alone to discuss money matters further twisted Takeyo's feelings toward Koeda. Koeda always seemed to be needling Waichiro from behind the scenes.

“In the end, he started raging about how this was no different from fraud… Who do you—? I felt beyond tears—it’s not like you can take wealth to the grave, and everything will become his anyway—not that there’s even much to begin with…” After arguing for over two hours, Waichiro—his face contorted terrifyingly—glared at Takeyo, then suddenly stood up and raised the chair beside him.

When Takeyo refused to approve his marriage to Koeda, Waichiro threw a teacup. As Nobuko listened to Takeyo’s flustered yet patched-together account—clinging to her version of events while condemning Waichiro’s violent outburst—she began to understand the impulsive hatred that had seized him, his raw fury driving his actions. Nobuko remained silent for a while with a pained, stern expression, “Mother, when Mr. Waichiro threw the teacup before—did he throw it at you? Or did he just hurl it at the tatami or somewhere?”

“Well, you…” Takeyo involuntarily hesitated over the words about to leave her lips and turned her gaze toward her daughter’s face—sternly awaiting an answer.

“No matter how he might be, he wouldn’t have thrown it directly at me.”

“What happened today?” “……” “Mother, did you truly believe Mr. Waichiro might beat you to death with a chair over money?”

“Nobuko dear, you didn’t see Waichiro’s face back then—you don’t understand—the sheer ferocity of it!” “Of course Waichiro is in the wrong. Threatening others like that is cowardly and despicable for a man—but Mother—” Revulsion toward this entire affair, along with sorrow and fury, overflowed from Nobuko until she felt filled to the brim. She said to Takeyo in a low, pressing voice:

“You should have understood it at that very moment, Mother. The fact that Waichiro wasn’t trying to do anything beyond that—” “……”

“Then why would you say all of a sudden that you were about to be killed?” “……”

“Now, why would you say such a thing?” Bitter tears welled up in Nobuko’s eyes. “Tsuyako is so pitiful.”

Takeyo and Waichiro were both making a huge commotion and venting their emotions over the matter. How could Tsuyako, a thirteen-year-old girl, possibly comprehend the intricacies of such matters? "You must never allow Waichiro to behave so violently again."

“Nobuko dear, you should also give him a thorough talking-to.” But before that, it was Takeyo’s attitude that needed addressing, Nobuko thought. Within Waichiro had existed since boyhood a kind of cruelty inherent in nervous, self-indulgent people. How Takeyo’s stinging words—which pinned everything on Koeda—must have fueled Waichiro’s violent hatred toward his mother. Nobuko herself had experienced something similar with Tsukuda.

“In any case, Mother, since you’ve already approved of Mr. Waichiro’s marriage, there’s no good in criticizing Koeda now.”

Then Takeyo, in a tone that was unexpectedly vigorous and scathing to Nobuko,

“Oh? That’s quite an uncharacteristically compromising thing to hear from you, Nobuko dear.” Takeyo looked challengingly at her daughter. “I’d thought your principles were about never compromising at all, Nobuko dear.”

The tone was proof that Takeyo had returned to her usual self after recovering from momentary surprise. Nobuko avoided continuing the argument. "Mother, you must never let yourself grow accustomed to being intimidated by Waichiro under any circumstances." "Is that acceptable?" "It would be frightening even for his own sake." "If you would simply refrain from making unnecessary provocative remarks and maintain your resolve, that would suffice." "And shouldn't we settle administrative matters promptly through proper procedures after all?"

“Is this about money?” “Isn’t that right? Even today’s commotion was about that.” “That may be the case, but—” Takeyo consciously avoided the issue of money. Takeyo turned around on the long chair, keeping both legs stretched out. From the open terrace, she moved to a position where she could gaze across the Boulevard at the broad evening sky. “When Waichiro raised the chair, I knew exactly who was grabbing his hand there.”

Nobuko listened gloomily to Takeyo’s voice muttering without context. Takeyo’s tone was unusually grave, and this fact made Nobuko realize what she meant. Takeyo was trying to say that "he"—that Tamotsu’s spirit had protected Mother. After moving into the apartment, the white-ground brocade-wrapped bundle had been placed on the stand by the head of the couple’s bed.

VIII

Nobuko’s earnest concerns were focused on the Manchurian-Soviet border thousands of kilometers from Paris.

Nobuko’s immediate distress and turmoil were at the apartment on 47 Boulevard Pereire. It was a Sunday when Madame Roussel, the live-out maid, was off, and Nobuko had prepared dinner that day. That evening, Taizo was also there. After dinner, the matter of Waichiro came up between Taizo and Takeyo. That day too, Waichiro had come with Koeda and demanded his mother’s response regarding the handling of the travel expenses. On the previous day when Waichiro had gotten angry, Takeyo had reported the incident to Taizo without clarifying the disposition of the travel expenses, framing it primarily as Waichiro having acted selfishly and violently. Today as well, Takeyo,

“Really, what on earth could they be thinking?” Her tone sounded less like consultation than a complaint expressing dissatisfaction to Taizo. “Thanks to being brought along, they’re even getting to see Paris, aren’t they? What do they think they can accomplish with their own power?” While putting away washed cups in the dining room cupboard, Nobuko heard Takeyo say this. As long as Takeyo framed things this way for Taizo’s ears, the practical issue of distributing travel expenses could never be resolved. Nobuko thought Takeyo’s attitude was only deepening the turmoil. Since Taizo already harbored criticism toward his eldest son, depending on how his wife presented matters would only intensify his unpleasant feelings toward Waichiro. For Waichiro himself, this travel expense issue had likely been on his mind since boarding the Katori Maru. It was something that would eventually require practical handling—the sort of matter that couldn’t be settled without going through Taizo.

Nobuko said,

“Mother, since Father is here tonight, this would be the perfect opportunity. You should discuss that matter seriously with him.” Nobuko said.

“Father hasn’t heard anything directly from Mr. Waichiro.” “If you would explain things in concrete detail…” Nobuko spent some time in the kitchen, then washed up in the bathroom, and got ready to leave.

“Well, goodbye. I’ll come tomorrow afternoon, but do you have any requests? If there’s any shopping to do, I’ll take care of it when I come.”

Facing the balcony, she called out to the guest room where her parents and Tsuyako were sitting in a semicircle.

“What do you think, Takeyo? Nobuko said that—is there anything you need?”

Without answering that, Takeyo remained silent for a moment, “Nobuko, wait a little before you leave.” It was an unexpectedly firm, commanding tone. “Come over here.” Takeyo, from her chair, looked up at Nobuko’s face as she slowly approached. “Nobuko, why don’t you have a thorough talk with Father tonight? ...After all, you probably understand everything already, Nobuko.”

“What do you mean I know—what exactly?” While shifting her gaze from Takeyo to Taizo, Nobuko—so taken aback that she—What...? How...?— dragged out each word one by one. “Wasn’t what we were talking about Mr. Waichiro?” “So I’m saying you should tell Father everything you’re thinking and have him do as you wish.” “That’s strange of you, Mother.”

As Nobuko looked at her mother's shoulders where even bones showed through the unlined kimono, and at the forehead beneath tightly drawn-back hair with unevenly applied white powder, she felt a sad, disagreeable sensation. "Wasn't it you who heard from Mr. Waichiro, Mother? Not me. Besides, isn't this about money? What exactly do you imagine I know?"

“That may be so... But no one tells me which hotel Waichiro has moved to this time...”

Being told that, Nobuko realized she herself hadn’t been informed of it either. “Now that you mention it, perhaps no one knows?” If something were to happen to Takeyo’s health—Nobuko panicked at this sense of responsibility.

“Did Father hear about it?”

“It should be written in his notebook.” “It should be near Parc Monceau.” “If you knew, you should have told me sooner.”

When she thought about it—how scattered everyone was living here in Paris—the only one who showed even a modicum of interest in Nobuko and the others’ way of life and came to the hotel in Vaugirard was Taizo. Nearly a month had passed since coming to Paris, yet Waichiro and Koeda did not seem inclined to do so. Though Waichiro and the others’ lives were emotionally separate from Nobuko’s, Takeyo spoke as if Nobuko and Waichiro’s group were in collusion—though on what basis she thought this was unclear.

“Anyway, even if it’s a bother for you tonight—let’s have Nobuko say everything she’s thinking, and let me speak my piece too.” Takeyo said this with an excited, watchful gaze while fidgeting the bare toes in her silver-gray loop-fastened felt sandals. “Parents aren’t meant to argue.” “This idea that money should just flow out silently—maybe that’s what you call Nobuko’s precious ‘principles.’” “I’ll have none of it.”

It was Takeyo’s familiar, confrontational tone of voice. Nobuko tried not to take the bait, yet despite her efforts—

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Mother!”

She burst out. “When have I ever asked for even a single franc? Isn’t this about Waichiro?”

It was truly a relief that I hadn't received any travel expenses. Nobuko thought intensely. Anticipating that something like this might happen, she had kept detailed records of even the small amounts of money she received from Taizo for shopping, making income and expenses clear. Motoko was also in Paris. Motoko demanded that Nobuko - who for the past month had been straddling their own lifestyle and that of the Sasa family - establish a strict separation. Motoko took no pleasure in being invited to meals with the Sasas, even when there was no clear reason.

“If you want me to discuss Waichiro’s issue together with you, Mother, I understand—but this...! It’s as if I’m extorting money from you!” “It’s not that you’re personally at fault here. But isn’t it always you, Nobuko, who sides with Waichiro’s faction?” “Is that so? Even if he were to brandish a chair, would I be taking Waichiro’s side? When both you, Mother, and Waichiro kept getting emotionally entangled and stirring up chaos, I merely proposed handling practical matters practically.”

Taizo did not utter a word as he leaned back in the armchair with his arms crossed, occasionally moving his upper denture inconspicuously with one hand. This was a habit he exhibited when in a heavy mood. Tsuyako had been on the balcony since earlier, as if expelled there by the harsh voices of her mother and sister. Leaning against the railing, she looked down at the quiet boulevard at night where streetlamps illuminated rows of horse chestnut trees from below. The grassy-colored skirt she had been made to wear when leaving Japan—and had kept wearing ever since—was too short for Tsuyako; leaning against the balcony railing caused the back of the skirt to ride up, revealing a glimpse of plumpness between the skirt and her socks. It was the pitiful figure of a girl at that awkward age, her back turned with no one to attentively watch over her surroundings.

Tsuyako’s current figure from behind vividly reflected the mood of the Sasa household, which—even after coming to Paris—continued living amidst the ebb and flow of family turmoil, navigating each moment’s discord and reconciliations. Nobuko felt this as if inscribed in words upon the scene before her. The family had come to Paris, rented an apartment, and were living with the help of a daily servant. By those conditions alone, theirs was an upper-middle-class lifestyle by international standards. Yet how different its emotional texture must have been from the so-called middle-class sensibilities of France! The French middle class understood that socializing formed the lifeblood of their existence—the nexus of shared interests—and had traditionally been trained to exercise meticulous care in this regard. Compared to these Parisians straining with unfailing charm and shrewd calculation to bind their families to bourgeois society’s thicker vessels and stronger ropes, Taizo and Takeyo—especially Takeyo—lived in Paris with the broad demeanor of a chieftain’s wife adorned with the Legion of Honour. The couple never bothered with such petty considerations as introducing their son Waichiro and his wife—the second-generation Sasas—into their own social circles or scheming for the family’s future through Parisian connections. The simplicity of Taizo and Takeyo’s Parisian life proved to Nobuko that her parents belonged to no clan entrenched within Japan’s privileged class. For members of that privileged class—whether in Japan or France—extended capillary networks through marriages and personal connections alike, all striving to absorb even one more drop of power’s essence into their own kind.

Nobuko held goodwill toward her parents’ simplicity in that regard. Yet tonight, Takeyo had casually invoked Nobuko’s “so-called ‘-ism’” in connection with money—as if there existed in this world an ideology where one took everything from others, as if to equate it with communism—voicing those ignorant prejudices circulating among certain people globally. Precisely because money was such a tangible trigger, this genuinely angered Nobuko.

“Tsuyako.” Nobuko called out to Tsuyako, who stood on the balcony. “You should go to bed now, all right? Come tomorrow, and I’ll take you to Luxembourg Gardens again…” As if she had been waiting for someone to acknowledge her presence, Tsuyako obediently entered the guest room from the balcony.

“Elder Sister, before you go back, stop by this person’s place for a moment.” “Okay?” “You won’t forget?” Tsuyako heavily wrapped both arms around Nobuko’s neck.

“I won’t forget. So please go to bed now. Good girl.”

Without looking toward her parents, Tsuyako bid them goodnight and left the room. Nobuko formally addressed her parents, primarily speaking to Takeyo. "Given that we're on a trip and you must be feeling agitated, Mother, I want to clarify matters regarding money." "We've argued about many things before, Mother, but this is the first time you've spoken about money in this way tonight." "If you would consider what has actually occurred up to now as it truly was, I don't believe you've ever given me money even once in such a manner—simply handing it over without a word when providing it." "Don't you agree?"

Silently, Takeyo turned her face away. “Have I ever once asked you for money?” “When I married Tsukuda, Mother, you said that if I wanted to do as I thought best, I should handle everything financially on my own, didn’t you?” “That is something I’ve come to feel all the more grateful for the more I look back on it now.” “With Waichiro, Mother, you’re a bit different.” “Like with the motorcycle.” “Like with Victor.” “Waichiro has succeeded by pleading his way through things.” “When he said he wanted to marry Koeda-chan, did you tell him, ‘If you want to get married so badly, handle everything yourself’?” “—I don’t think that was the case.”

As she spoke truthfully about what was true, Nobuko saw clearly before her eyes something like the privilege that Waichiro, as the eldest son, had been accumulating through his relationship with their mother since childhood. Yet even as fellow eldest children, what existed between Nobuko—the daughter—and her mother was of an entirely different nature. And within the year and a half that Nobuko had been unaware of—with Tamotsu’s death and Waichiro’s marriage—these new circumstances had begun manifesting a kind of complexity in financial matters that the Sasa household had never before experienced. As these realities became clear one after another, Nobuko objectively grasped for the first time her position as the “daughter” within the family when confronting such issues.

“Mother, out of habit, you lump me into everything you say, but in matters like these, I naturally take a third-party position—don’t you agree?” Though phrased simply, these words contained Nobuko’s awareness of both her position as a daughter within the Japanese “household” and her consciousness of what it meant to be a woman asserting her own way of life. “…………”

"If I were not to always place myself in a third-party position regarding such matters here in this household, what would happen—"

Takeyo remained silent, her long eyelashes fluttering uneasily. She had come to grasp the meaning of what Nobuko was saying. If what Takeyo had carelessly said were true—if Nobuko were a woman who incited Waichiro to meddle in the Sasa family’s financial matters—what would become of the household’s future? In Takeyo’s state of mind—which permitted the driver Eida to address Waichiro as “young master”—there worked a strong consciousness both of the Sasa household their generation had built and of Waichiro as heir. Even in Waichiro’s heart—Waichiro who had come to Paris, lodged at a hotel unknown to his mother, and begun vehemently demanding settlement of their travel expenses—there echoed Takeyo’s habitual phrases. If it would all be his eventually anyway, there must have been an impatience—a fervor—to claim it now when needed, to demand it be given without reserve.

When Waichiro was a student, the clashes that had arisen between Nobuko and their parents—compared to tonight’s conversation—had been youthful and refreshingly straightforward, free of calculation on either side. Nobuko felt with sorrow that a new phase had opened in the Sasa household. “Mother, please remember this well. I’ve decided I’ll never involve myself in money matters between you and Waichiro again. This time it was unavoidable due to circumstances… But even now, I only handled it practically because Waichiro’s demands run deeper than you realize.”

“It’s all my fault for not being thorough enough—how inexcusable of me.”

Takeyo said this with blatantly sarcastic intonation. “What parent would go through hardships thinking it’s for their child’s benefit?!” “How could you, who’ve never borne a child, understand a parent’s feelings?” Nobuko had turned thirty and now had no husband. She had no children either. Takeyo, her mother, stood up from her chair and spoke like a harpoon aimed precisely at that point—as if Nobuko, as a woman, carried some inherent deficiency there. Just then, the telephone rang in the apartment hallway.

The call was from Motoko.

“I thought you’d gone somewhere since you were taking so long—what’s wrong?”

“Well… there’s a lot going on because of things.”

Nobuko’s voice, unable to suddenly break free from the emotional entanglement, was inadvertently somber.

“—Still the same as ever, huh.”

Motoko was thinking on the phone, but—

“Shall I come pick you up?” Her tone was buoyant with the idea. “If I come pick you up, they’ll have to let you off the hook no matter what.” “Alright, do that. When you come, put my nightclothes and toiletries in that cream-colored small bag—for two people—okay?” “If it gets too late, instead of returning all the way to Vaugirard, there’s a small hotel in the shade of the street trees at the edge of this boulevard—it might be good to stay there.” Nobuko returned to the guest room with a feeling that, like heavy clouds, a glimpse of a break had appeared. Taizo remained alone in the armchair.

“Where is Mother?” “She must have gone off somewhere.” “Just leave her be for a while.” Taizo was massaging both his temples with his thumb and little finger. “Do you have a headache?”

“It’s not quite a headache.” Still massaging his temples,

“How about it—is Ms. Yoshimi coming?”

“She said she’ll come pick me up. That’s a relief.” “That’s a relief. I thought you were planning to return alone.”

Nobuko, who had been observing Taizo’s condition, stood up and walked around behind her father’s chair.

“Father, I’m good at massaging heads. Let me do it a little.” Taizo’s head was robustly formed, its left and right temples rounded and solid. The crown sat low and firm like the sturdy shell of a ripened fruit. As Nobuko massaged him that night, his head transmitted a flushed warmth to her fingertips and carried the scent of eau de quinine she had known since childhood. How long had it been since she last touched this warm, heavy bulk of her father’s head? Through the linen handkerchief, Nobuko pressed her cheek against his balding scalp.

“Father, you’ve had your share of hardships.” “Our folks are such a handful.” “Everyone’s just saying whatever they please.” Standing behind her father and massaging his head had placed Nobuko in a position where it was easier to speak. It seemed to be the same for Taizo as well. “Waichiro is such a handful.”

It was a way of speaking that made no attempt to maintain appearances. “You know, Father—there’s something I don’t understand.” “Are you aware how deeply discontent Waichiro is?” “Why must he be like that?” “Did you truly need to bring someone like him along?” “If it had just been the two of you—” “That’s precisely it—not one soul understands my feelings.” “Takeyo became absolutely determined to see foreign lands before dying. The doctors couldn’t guarantee her health—so I considered it all.” “For Takeyo, losing Tamotsu meant losing every future hope. That’s why I resolved to fulfill her final wish at any cost.” “With the doctors’ warnings, one must prepare for contingencies when traveling.” “If anything happens, Takeyo will inevitably want to see her children’s faces.” “Regret would be meaningless then—so this time I brought everyone, enduring every sacrifice.”

The fact that even Tsuyako had been included in this trip, and moreover that no proper plan seemed to have been made for Tsuyako herself, finally allowed Nobuko to fully comprehend the situation. “Otherwise, a trip like this one would be reckless in its very planning.” “But since this isn’t something that will ever happen again, I resolved to do my best.” The story Koeda told—that due to Mother’s poor physical condition, at the port of Naples where they could not disembark, Father had shed tears while gazing from the deck of their anchored ship at the beautiful shimmering lights of nighttime Naples—when Nobuko heard it, stirred her heart. The motives behind such sentimentality on her father’s part, too, through tonight’s conversation, had become something she could now comprehend. How resolutely Father had resolved to act with Takeyo as the central figure during this trip, and how much he was restraining his own freedom for that purpose. Compared to that, Nobuko felt guilty for keeping her own heart at a distance.

But were Taizo’s considerable efforts being adequately conveyed to Takeyo? And was Waichiro truly unconvinced? Nobuko’s fingertips, which had been massaging Taizo’s head, involuntarily stopped.

“Father, have you ever properly told Waichiro and the others about those feelings?” Taizo cleared his throat. “Even Waichiro should understand well enough.”

However, that was an answer lacking in conviction.

Nobuko resumed the massage.

The late-night silence filled the brightly lit guest room of the apartment with its somewhat old-fashioned furnishings. Through this silence echoed the distant roar of a subway train emerging from underground to the surface station at Pereire Square. “Father, regarding this trip—did you part with some ceramics?” “Ah, I sold quite a few.”

“Which ones?” “The main ones were *Sekirei* and *Botan*. As for the rest—you wouldn’t know them.” Both were Nabeshima masterpieces—complete sets of ten medium and large plates each—named *Sekirei* and *Botan* after their respective designs. Within Taizo’s collection, these pieces had been valued among connoisseurs beyond their worth as mere reference items. “Since I’d only kept those things thinking they might someday be of use to Tamotsu anyway… well, it’s fine.”

Silently massaging her father’s head like that, Nobuko teared up. Within the hearts of the elderly couple—who had grown old only to be bereaved by Tamotsu—lay subtle motives unfathomable to Nobuko, still gazing only at life’s path ahead, or to Waichiro and his young wife, the eldest son’s family whose livelihoods were secured. They had been striving to reserve things for their second son Tamotsu, whom they had placed their hopes in, but it was likely Takeyo who took the lead in deciding that the couple would use those things for themselves.

Nobuko felt that for the first time, she could grasp the true nature of the Sasa family’s trip—something that had never quite made sense to her since receiving the letter in Moscow. Takeyo’s act of carrying Tamotsu’s divided remains wrapped in brocade—as though a living person accompanied them—and reserving a special place for them in every hotel room and apartment might also have been an expression of the parents’ sentiments regarding this journey: they were showing Paris and London to Tamotsu too.—

It ought to have been a journey born from nights of conversation steeped in the sorrowful resolve of parents—an elderly couple who had suffered the profound despair of losing their cherished second son to suicide in their later years—yet even so, the group spent their days squabbling, each member clinging to their own utterly disparate personalities, united only by the shared stubbornness that ran through the family: a reality quintessentially Sasa. Grief tormented Takeyo’s heart, parched it dry, and rendered it pathologically oversensitive—yet it failed to gently soothe those afflictions or free her from desire. When Takeyo touched on the matter of Waichiro’s money and said, “After all, everything will soon belong to that person anyway,” her voice carried a particular resonance.

Nobuko was about to finish massaging Father’s head.

“So what will become of Waichiro and the others? Do you intend to take them back with you?” “I think I’ll leave that lot here for a while and see how it goes. Fortunately, Takeyo’s health is better than expected.” “Here?”

“In my opinion, England would be better.—What about you, Nobuko?” “Me?”

The question leapt forward with unexpected naturalness, leaving Nobuko flustered and flushed. Nobuko answered with a tone of earnest determination in a single breath. “I will stay here while Father and the others are here, and return to Moscow.”

This was the phrase that had been tightly locked away in Nobuko’s heart since leaving Moscow two months earlier—the sole answer she had prepared for when this question arose.

Taizo did not pay particular attention to Nobuko’s tone—as though she were holding her breath—and asked nonchalantly, as if seeking her opinion about some unfamiliar land: “So you still prefer Moscow?”

“No, that’s not it. Since coming here, I’ve come to feel keenly—one by one—just how new a society Moscow is—the degree of social guarantees for women’s lives there is entirely different, you see.”

Taizo was silent for a moment, but “That’s acceptable.” he said. “You should stay until you’ve seen it through thoroughly.”

Nobuko was profoundly shocked. Taizo spoke those words without understanding their implications. To thoroughly commit to Moscow's socialist society meant nothing less than determining one's class-based position. Of course, Taizo had meant it merely as "until you're satisfied." Yet even knowing this, Nobuko felt her heart stir from her father's casual remark about seeing Moscow through completely—a shock uniquely her own. Had he known what resonance his casually spoken words—uttered beside this Parisian terrace on a summer midnight—found in his Moscow-returned daughter, Taizo himself would have been equally stunned. Nobuko's astonishment ran deep, resonating through both her inner and outer being.

It was around 1 a.m. when Nobuko and Motoko left the apartment at 47 Boulevard Pereire and took a room at a small hotel with a stylish eave lamp at the edge of the same boulevard’s tree-lined street.

The room they ascended to on the third floor—groping their way on tiptoe behind the housewife through the narrow entrance corridor where all lights had been extinguished—remained a space whose orientation they couldn’t discern until morning came; they couldn’t tell which direction its two windows faced toward the street. Above the wall between the two beds burned an old-fashioned lamp with a vitreous glass shade. Beyond one door lay a bathroom that appeared not to have been used for weeks. From the washbasin, water emerged only in a thin stream.

However wide she opened her eyes, in that room under the dim light with its heavy brown atmosphere that managed not to feel garish, Nobuko changed into her nightclothes. Seated on the bed where only the sheets stood out white, Nobuko conveyed the night’s events to Motoko.

“I see. So Bukko-chan has peered into a rather deep place, then.” After leaving her parents’ house on Boulevard Pereire and speaking about the conversation exchanged between parent and child, Nobuko recalled with especially vivid intensity the moment of emotional interplay between her mother and Ochi—a moment that had glowed like sunset clouds. That way Takeyo had wavered as a woman—the very thing that threatened to dizzy Nobuko’s young, healthy rationality. Back then, Takeyo seemed to rebel even against her own position as a mother. What remained in Takeyo now were embers and ashes; those embers and ashes, dampened by countless tears, must have been emitting such a sharply acrid odor.

“Still, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Father granted permission so readily for Bukko-chan to return to Moscow—” “That’s right. It was truly unexpected.” “It’s proof things between you and your father are progressing perfectly smoothly. People don’t just understand each other that effortlessly.” Motoko seemed to be reflecting on the intricate relationship with her father back at her parents’ home.

“Your father is an unusually generous person.”

Motoko’s words drew Nobuko back anew into the depths of her own heart. Nobuko had not told Motoko—about how Taizo’s remark that it would be good for her to stay in Moscow until she had seen it through thoroughly had struck her heart—nor had she laid bare such a self entirely before Motoko.

Nine

How had the travel expense issue—the one that had entangled the Sasa parents and Waichiro in emotional conflict—ultimately been settled? Nobuko remained entirely unaware of how matters had been concluded afterward. She continued appearing at the Boulevard Pereire house once daily or every other day as before, but Takeyo never broached the subject again. Waichiro too kept silent. From these circumstances, Nobuko came to understand that an agreement had been formed between her parents and Waichiro—one no longer requiring her involvement. Then shortly after August began, Taizo Sasa, Takeyo, and Tsuyako departed for London as a group. Having vacated their hotel, Waichiro and his wife moved into the now-empty Pereire apartment.

Thanks to arrangements made through the Paris branch of Nippon Yusen, it was decided that a portion of the Sasa family’s unneeded luggage would be shipped back to their Tokyo home before their departure for London. Large wooden boxes and metal-framed trunks were carried out into the apartment’s narrow inner hallway. Sorting clothes that needed to be kept for the upcoming journey from those no longer required, Takeyo sat on the edge of a bed piled high with them and supervised Nobuko, Motoko, and Tsuyako—who was handling transportation—as they worked around the trunks. Even when Takeyo, exhausted, lay down on the bed, the trunks had been positioned in the hallway where she could still monitor everyone’s activities.

“While we’re all so busy here, Koeda has to go and be such a nuisance.” “Why does she keep getting sick like that?” While casting a final inspecting eye over the armfuls of clothing that Tsuyako carried to the trunks, Takeyo muttered reproachfully to herself. “Catching a cold at a time like this…” That day, Koeda did not show herself, as she had a fever. Waichiro came, placed the trunk in the position Takeyo had instructed, and left immediately.

Nobuko, Motoko, and Tsuyako worked efficiently with little conversation for two days. Nobuko carefully wrapped the Kakiemon-style face-powder jar her father had once bought for her and placed it in a corner of the trunk.

The day after those two large pieces of luggage had been carried out, Taizo, Takeyo, and Tsuyako departed for London through the hallway whose carpet had somehow grown dusty. Due to the early morning departure, only Nobuko's group and Waichiro came to see them off at North Station. On the second day after the house became vacant, Nobuko and Motoko received a dinner invitation from Waichiro's household on Boulevard Pereire. Koeda—her somewhat gaunt cheeks lending a mature beauty appropriate for a young wife—attempted to maintain her modest bearing befitting their role as occupants of her in-laws' vacated home, though she couldn't fully suppress her delight at experiencing Parisian apartment life alone with her husband for the first time.

“We really had to invite you, Elder Sister, just once—we’ve caused you so much worry, after all.”

“Since you’ll both be leaving in about a week anyway, I figured there aren’t many days left, so it would be better to do it sooner rather than later.” Waichiro and his wife had decided to stay in London for about half a year; they would depart upon receiving notice once their parents—who had gone ahead—found lodging they deemed suitable. Nobuko did not leave with her parents and delayed even just a week on her own—this stemmed from her earnest emotional need. Since her parents had come to Paris and she had begun making daily visits to the house on Pereire, Nobuko’s time and energy had been consumed by the domestic squabbles of the Sasa family—transplanted wholesale from their Tokyo home. As long as Takeyo remained Takeyo, Waichiro remained Waichiro, and Nobuko herself—in all likelihood—remained Nobuko, she had grown weary of these seemingly grave yet trivial commotions that repeated endlessly like a recurring decimal or some sport for idle people. Outside the apartment on Boulevard Pereire, major events were unfolding one after another. Regarding the Chinese Eastern Railway issue—with imperialist nations backing Chiang Kai-shek’s government as they sought an opening to attack the Soviet Union—negotiations were deliberately being stalled. Wherever the Soviet Far Eastern Expeditionary Force was stationed, soviets of new Chinese people seemed to be emerging in every border village, town, and city through local residents. For China’s people in remote regions, this military presence brought not slaughter but rather taught them—for the first time—a humane way of life.

How would things turn out? In Bombay and Calcutta, naked and barefoot Indian masses marched in their thousands and tens of thousands, moving from region to region to reignite the national independence movement. The great strike of Lancashire textile workers was not merely a defense of livelihoods by fiber workers against industrial rationalization—L’Humanité called for French workers’ attention to it as a struggle against a new phase of world capitalism, an increasingly clear offensive against the working class, and the danger of fascism.

The caricatures of Chamberlain with his monocle and Chamberlain in the Russian style—which referred to the same figure—were ones Nobuko had grown familiar with through Soviet satirical cartoons. Chamberlain’s Conservative cabinet had been replaced by the Labour Party’s MacDonald cabinet in June. How much could “Mustachioed Mac” really accomplish? In Japan too, the Tanaka Giichi cabinet—responsible for the bombing assassination of Zhang Zuolin—had been replaced by the Hamaguchi Osachi cabinet. Yet even Nobuko understood this did not mean the fundamental nature of the Japanese ruling class’s ambitions toward China and the Soviet Union had changed. Feeling a passionate desire to understand all these matters more deeply, and while increasingly suffering the frustration of not knowing French, she had sent her parents off to London first.

As for London too, the map Nobuko held in her heart differed from Taizo’s nostalgic guide to the city of old. In Nobuko’s London map, a single scene had been etched from a gloomy, rain-soaked day in the 1850s. It was a scene on the sidewalk of a certain street not far from the British Museum. On the sidewalk, household belongings that had been thrown out after being driven from a house by its landlord were piled up, and beside them stood a dignified wife holding an infant, three children, and an elderly servant who appeared loyal—all looking utterly lost. This family had nowhere to go. But as soon as the pharmacist, baker, butcher, and milkman—to whom debts were owed—learned that this family had been driven out by their landlord, they gathered and seized even the child’s crib as collateral. Thus, it was Mrs. Jenny Marx and her children who were surrounded by two hundred or so onlookers. In Nobuko’s London, there was also a small map from 1903 etched into her mind. The man who drew the map was the Russian exiled revolutionary Ulyanov, who would later become known by the name Lenin. How intently Nobuko must have gazed at that small map displayed on the wall of the Lenin-related special exhibition room in Moscow’s Revolution Museum. At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party—convened by people who had secretly crossed the border from Russia to gather in London, guided by this single sheet of a map drawn with meticulous care—the party split into the Mensheviks (minority faction), led by Plekhanov and Martov, and the Bolsheviks (majority faction), led by Lenin. That Nobuko knew Covent Garden in London was not only the city’s largest produce market but also housed the publishing office of *Workers’ Life* and the Communist Party of Great Britain was only natural for her. Departing from Moscow, encountering Warsaw’s bleak May Day, and passing through Vienna—a model-like stage of democracy marveled at as “European-style”—what left Nobuko with an indelible impression in Berlin was the aftermath of worker massacres commemorated by white circular markers scattered across the square before Karl Liebknecht House. Germany’s rearmament and the advance of fascism—reflecting off the ideology of Tsuyama Shinjiro, who had been dispatched from Japan for poison gas research—were blatant. In Nobuko’s heart, as she prepared to depart Paris for London, there was a passion for inquiry that grew ever stronger, like a crescendo in music. Nobuko wanted to grasp London firmly. To do that, she needed to delve one step deeper into Parisian life—

About half a month earlier, Nobuko and Motoko had unexpectedly encountered Ryosaku Hachiya in Paris—someone they had known in Japan. Ryosaku Hachiya specialized in economics. For Nobuko, who had delayed her London trip by this one week, there were countless things she believed she could ask Hachiya. Why did the French Communist Party remain at its current level of influence despite possessing the Commune's legacy? What exactly was the perpetually problematic relationship between the Unified General Labor Federation and the General Labor Federation? The fact that Parisian workers only demonstrated in working-class districts struck Nobuko as utterly incomprehensible. Resolving to make sense of all this before departing for London, she stood poised on the balls of her feet, energized.

As for Motoko, she had begun considering returning to Moscow before the university’s new semester began. Thinking that going to London would amount to the same thing, she was trying to leave Nobuko with the family and return to Moscow alone. How much longer could she remain entangled in the Sasa family trip?—this was Motoko’s sentiment. Nobuko felt a sense of responsibility that her own circumstances had put Motoko in such a mood and insisted that Motoko should at least see the city of London before leaving.

“I’m not in such a privileged position as your elder sister, who can make her work count wherever she is.” “Truth be told, I’ve already overstayed my welcome here.”

Motoko said to Waichiro as she puffed on her after-dinner cigarette. “I can’t keep dawdling around.” “Why?” “It’s only just August.”

The new semester at Moscow University was set to begin in mid-September. “So, let’s go to London by plane. Okay? Then it wouldn’t be so tedious, right? We could just do a quick tour of the city and come back in three days—doesn’t that sound good?” With an expression that seemed to clutch at Nobuko’s hand, Koeda said: “A plane—doesn’t that seem scary? Are they really safe?” “Lately you never hear about any planes falling into the Channel anymore, do you?”

“More importantly, Sis, weren’t you prone to seasickness?” “I am.” “How about you, Ms. Yoshimi?” “Well, I’m not sure. “However, back on the ferry to Ōshima in the old days, it was quite terrible, wasn’t it?” “Then doesn’t that mean both of you are susceptible?” “It seems you do get quite seasick after all.”

“That’s precisely what makes it ideal.” “Ms. Yoshimi, if you’re only spending three days in London like this, what could you possibly remember afterward?” “So you see, to ensure you’ll never forget crossing the Dover Strait in your lifetime, it’s better to go by plane.” “Still—right about now, the old man must be walking through London for the first time in twenty years, overwhelmed with emotion.”

In Waichiro’s expression lay a satisfaction and tolerance born of savoring the liberated mornings and evenings they themselves were enjoying in Paris. “I can almost see Father’s condition before my eyes.”

Nobuko laughed at Koeda’s earnest way of speaking.

“Koeda-chan’s father—doesn’t he always come walking from that direction on Wagram Street?” Early one morning at a café on Wagram Street, they had been unexpectedly spotted by Taizo who happened to pass by—a minor incident that thoroughly destroyed the young couple’s credibility. Waichiro had finally begun pressing their parents to let them manage their travel expenses freely. The accumulated intensity of his emotions now seemed to dissolve gently amid their carefree life in the Paris apartment. The more harmoniously Waichiro comported himself as master of the Pereire household during their parents’ absence, the more Nobuko—as his sister—found herself contrasting this demeanor with how difficult he became when pushed to extremes.

However, Koeda was a young wife who regarded Waichiro’s good mood that evening as her own form of happiness, glistening with a faint brightness. “If Mother is in London, she will have her own acquaintances there, so it’s truly wonderful.” But at the hotel in London, was it Taizo who was tying Takeyo’s obi for her? Or could it be Tsuyako? With a brightness and splendor that did not involve drawing herself into those associations,

“Mother’s English is so composed. I was quite surprised when I heard her speaking on the ship…” “Well, back then she had Miss Tsuda Umeko herself drilling her—if only my *husband* weren’t around meddling with things like this, Mother’s English would hold up just fine.” “Oh my, I haven’t heard that story yet. Hey, Brother.”

Koeda, still new to living among the family, glanced back at Waichiro. “Koeda, you might be saying things like ‘the house’ or ‘the master’ about Waichiro without even realizing it.—There was a time when Mr. Brandon, an architect from New York, suddenly came to visit when Father was away.” “At that time, it was good that Mother came to the entrance, but she said, ‘My husband is not here.’” “It’s impressive how she instantly judged that you can’t just translate *taku* literally as ‘house’ (家).”

“I see… That does sound like something she’d do!”

Motoko also burst out laughing with her characteristic throaty voice. From within the laughter, Koeda— “I’m not so sure myself.”

In a situation she had never anticipated, her eyes widened in shock at discovering how little she differed from Takeyo.

“Well then—what do you think Koeda would have said?” “What should I say… In any case, I do think she must have given it some thought. Even if you call him Mr. Sasa—” She spoke in an unadorned way. “Because when you think about it, while we certainly learned words like ‘father’ and ‘husband’ in our girls’ school English, we never clearly learned how to separate those fathers and husbands from ourselves to refer to them in third person—as ‘Mr. So-and-so.’”

“Therein lies the critical flaw in Japan’s so-called ‘household’ concept.”

A sharp light glinted in Motoko's eyes. "A woman is first and foremost my wife - and then my mother." "Does an independent entity called 'Mrs. So-and-so' even exist?" Her face faintly reddening, Motoko spoke half-jokingly yet with bite. "In Japan, forget 'Mrs.' - even 'Miss' isn't recognized as having personhood..." "Though when a Miss reaches my age, they stick 'Old' in front - making it somewhat different, I suppose."

“Oh… You’re being quite harsh.” “But you see, Ms. Yoshimi—this isn’t an excuse—I’m the sort who shows respect regardless of ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’” “Brother… Well, yes.”

The subtle shadow that appeared on Koeda’s eyelids and mouth as she lowered her eyes slightly and spoke nonchalantly caught Nobuko’s eye. Motoko also noticed it. “However, Ms. Koeda, you can rest assured for the time being, since Mr. Waichiro won’t be leaving. And here, you won’t have to worry about French guests coming while you’re away.” Waichiro floated his signature soft smile—like ripples spreading across water—on his face as he slowly responded to Motoko’s words.

“Well, I suppose so.” He responded. As she gazed at that expression, Nobuko felt she had come to understand what Waichiro had been like lately. Waichiro was not only liberated from his parents. He had also been freed from the pressure he had constantly received from Tamotsu—who had been the more rigid of the two brothers—on every occasion. And, with his characteristic meticulousness, he was savoring the pleasures of a life that was passing too gently for him, she thought. That evening, not once did topics related to his specialty or social events come from Waichiro’s mouth.

Ten

The theater company of Piscator and his wife, the famous tragic actress—whom Nobuko and Motoko had missed seeing in Berlin—arrived in Paris. They opened at a small theater on Avenue Jean Jaurès near the workers' district.

Piscator was a director who had launched the proletarian theater movement in Germany, and after people’s theaters began losing their progressive edge, he employed his own theater to advance the German youth folk theater movement. When the first act of this Piscator play concluded, Nobuko in the audience felt both unexpected familiarity and surprise. This was because her eyes were immediately drawn to a large statue of Lenin hanging prominently at center stage—as if they were in Moscow itself. To its right hung three red initials I·S·R adorned with a harp and olive leaves; to its left, four initials C·G·T·U decorated with matching harp and laurel motifs. Below this stood a stage roughly the size of a puppet theater’s, upstage revealing a terrace and entrance stairs half-concealed from view. On its white wall moved shadows of legs and objects that suggested occasional foot traffic, while actors in plain costumes casually stepped beyond the small stage—one shaving his beard with a hand mirror at a table below, another woman sewing nearby. The backdrop depicted the sea. Shadows of crimson and azure lighting fell upon white cloth, skillfully evoking thickly glimmering seawater swaying with weight. It told a story drawn from Hamburg dockworkers’ strikes—the life of a laborer couple in a port town. The refined yet innovative stage design harmonized with realistic characters, framing elements like Lenin’s statue and C·G·T·U initials less as emblems of working-class struggle than as bold artistic flourishes.

Nobuko asked Ryosaku Hachiya, who sat between her and Motoko, "What does I·S·R mean?"

she asked.

“I’ve been wondering about that myself since earlier,” he said. “The I likely stands for International. Though I wonder if it means ‘Red Trade Union International’—or perhaps ‘International Socialist Revolution’?” “Then you don’t actually understand what the S signifies,” Motoko interjected. Hachiya—his soft, tea-brown hair neatly parted to the left, his large frame swathed in drab clothing—fell silent with a troubled expression at her remark. This Hachiya, who had come to Paris through what resembled an academic dispatch from a South Manchuria Railway-affiliated research institute, had been an economics professor at a Japanese university when Nobuko and Motoko first knew him. His work had involved studying economic conditions in Manchuria and China. The women had originally met him at an informal report meeting centered on his findings after a Chinese research trip—an event Sahoko Narasaki, their frequent Noh theater companion, had invited them to attend that evening.

At that time, he was questioned from various angles about the prospects of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolution. Ryosaku Hachiya listened attentively to each question with his head bowed and answered them, but his fundamental premise was that before the Chinese Communist Party’s revolution could be achieved, there was another revolutionary stage it must inevitably pass through, given China’s current production conditions. Socialism is, in principle, something that arises from the contradictions within developed capitalism. If that is the case, then since China’s Asian mode of production remains hundreds of years behind modern capitalism, before a socialist revolution can occur, a bourgeois revolution must first be carried out, and the conditions for modern capitalist production must ripen within China’s history. In that sense, he himself had doubts about definitively concluding—as some critics did—that the Chiang Kai-shek regime’s role was merely reactionary. Hachiya’s way of thinking about the Chinese Communist Revolution was along those lines. If one were to push Ryosaku Hachiya’s opinion further and state it plainly, would it not amount to saying that the Chinese Communist Party’s movement was ultimately nothing more than a disturbance stirred up by a handful of ultra-leftists who were not rooted in the lives of China’s masses? Are we to believe that February’s general strike in Shanghai and the establishment of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee were nothing more than Comintern’s revolutionary games? Someone asked that question.

At that moment, a deep shade of agitation appeared on Ryosaku Hachiya’s rounded, somewhat childlike face. Ryosaku Hachiya kept his eyes downcast for a while, fiddling with a pencil on the table, but eventually raised his head and replied that one had to acknowledge China’s unique circumstances. "For China, which has been a semi-colony of the great powers since entering the modern era," he said, "it is only natural that the demand for national independence is intense, and it can be said that the Chinese Communist Party’s movement has a unique foothold in this regard."

At that time, when Nobuko only occasionally glanced at proletarian newspapers, she could not form a judgment about Ryosaku Hachiya's theories. His professor-like manner of answering questions and the personality traits perceived there left a strong impression. Hachiya maintained an attitude of refusing to side with either faction while attempting to acknowledge both Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party as distinct entities. When looking at Ryosaku Hachiya's expression, one felt that his ambiguous indecisiveness stemmed not from caution or cunning but rather that he was simply stating things as he genuinely believed them to be.

And then, nearly three years had passed. The troubled look on Ryosaku Hachiya’s face—as Nobuko asked him about the meaning while they watched Piscator’s play in Paris that day, and he failed to give a clear answer before being pressed by Motoko—indicated that his year and a half in Paris had not transformed him into a more capable person. Now without the title of professor, Hachiya seemed instead to lay bare the tender parts of his spirit—those unrefined aspects—more than he ever had before. This was perceived by both Nobuko and Motoko as Hachiya’s approachability.

The play ended around eleven-thirty. The three of them returned from Avenue Jean Jaurès—where the dimly lonely night of the outskirts lingered—to the lively Boulevard Saint-Michel and rested on a café terrace.

Comparing it to the staging of *The Threepenny Opera* they had seen in Berlin, Motoko repeatedly criticized Piscator’s play. “It’s good that it isn’t garish or stiffly rigid like Constructivist plays trying to intimidate, but even so, it feels overly clever.” “I understand they’re aiming for a rational, vivid stage—but that just reeks of intellectual pretension.”

Using two large black velvet curtains as the background, a large semicircular spiral of tiers meant to evoke construction scaffolding was constructed before them. As Annett—the worker’s wife whose husband had been killed—climbed step by step up those tiers, her grief and fury blazing while she called out to fellow dockworkers in the climactic scene, the lines of the large gestures made by the actress playing her role (Piscator’s wife) were so refined and sharp that Nobuko found herself reminded of the woman’s relief sculpture adorning the Communards’ graves at Père Lachaise.

“Considering Parisian audiences, are they emphasizing that flavor so strongly—it was symbolic, wasn’t it? Is there such a thing as proletarian symbolism?” “There’s no such thing!” Motoko immediately denied it. “Symbolism isn’t fundamentally something that belongs to the working class. That’s why people say it reeks of intellectualism.” “But it’s not unnatural for revolutionary passion to be symbolized by a red flag. Even the Soviet Union’s ‘Hammer and Sickle’—”

Hachiya, who was not the artistic type, silently listened to the two women’s conversation. As a multifaceted aspect of foreign life, he apparently watched movies and plays from time to time. From the talk that Nobuko and Motoko would depart for London in two or three days, Hachiya—perched on one of the café chairs painted cobalt and yellow—puffed out his thick chest and said, “I also feel like I want to start moving somewhere soon.”

he said. “Then come to the Soviet!”

Nobuko said, her voice echoing, and looked at Hachiya with a gaze that was not entirely improvised. "May I speak my mind?"

“Ah, of course.—What is it?”

“I thought so when I attended the doctors’ conference in Berlin, and I’ve thought it since meeting you—why doesn’t everyone try going to the Soviet? I don’t understand why someone like you, who works in economics, would stay in France forever. If someone has been to China, I would think they’d all the more want to go see the Soviet—” With the boldness of one who knew nothing about it, Nobuko,

“Does France even have any new problems worth researching seriously?” she muttered. An amused, ironic gleam dawned on Motoko’s face. “Well, Mr. Hachiya and his fellow scholars can’t just carelessly go off to the Soviet Union or anything like that.” Motoko said, placing a certain emphasis on the word “scholar.” “—Is it because of your workplace?”

“It’s not like that—don’t you agree?” Hachiya deflected Motoko’s tone—which pressed forward with sharpness while concealing her true nature—with a faintly displeased expression.

“It’s not as if it’s been definitively decided that I can’t go.” “That may be true—but Mr. Hachiya, are you still clinging to that line where both the Chinese Communist Party holds significance and Chiang Kai-shek supposedly plays some role?”

The fact that the question had unfolded in such a manner took Nobuko by surprise. Similarly, Hachiya too appeared not to have foreseen it,

“—You remember that awfully well.” He looked embarrassed. “This may sound rude, but you scholars and professors have shallower real intellectual curiosity than one might expect.” “Having come abroad and met all these professors who claim to be studying here, I’ve felt this keenly.” “Everyone just adds some safe new knowledge to what they already possess, quietly avoiding any adventure that might truly renew their worldview or force them to completely change their way of thinking.” “It’s clear from everyone’s attitude toward the Soviet—in short, they’re afraid of being influenced, aren’t they?”

Hachiya silently listened to Motoko’s pressing words until the end. When Motoko finished speaking, he raised his eyes—which had been habitually downcast as he listened—and began tracing his thoughts slowly, “The psychology you mention, Ms. Yoshimi, certainly exists in some corners.” A faint blush rose beneath his tanned skin. “However, at least I am not limited to that.” “It’s rather difficult to articulate—” “Take this example: the Sixth Comintern Congress resolution attributes the defining features of the international situation to imperialist war and fascist dangers.” “I too consider this correct.” “Yet paradoxically, the Communist Party members and Marxists here remain surprisingly complacent about France’s own imperialist realities and fascism’s actual potency.” “Since last year, I’ve conversed with numerous individuals—this generally holds true. The French tradition of liberty differs from Germany’s.” “It diverges from Italy’s as well.” “They declare this unequivocally.” “There exists a particular pride in this.” “Consequently, the local Communists fail to clearly distinguish themselves from social democrats, oscillating between right-wing tendencies and ultra-left posturing—you’ll recall how even L’Humanité faced criticism during last year’s French crisis.” “Speaking candidly, Ms. Yoshimi—even regarding your perspective on the Chinese revolution’s progression—aligning solely with the Chinese Communist Party strikes me as an easier stance for our kind. Wouldn’t you agree? After all, our era compels us to critique capitalist society.” “Communist theory maintains clarity wherever and whenever it emerges.” “Rooted in practical reason, its lucidity becomes inevitable.” “The true challenge—and fascination—lies in observing how this crystalline rationality navigates imperialism’s tangled web of daily interests and life-extending stratagems, how it maneuvers, battles, and claims victory through actual historical processes.” “I anticipate no objections here...” “For now, I intend to burrow into French imperialism’s viscera and observe it firsthand.”

“French financial capital, you see, has had far deeper connections with both the Soviet Union and China since long ago than appearances suggest.” Hachiya Ryosaku was neither a silver-tongued social democrat with anti-Soviet aims like Ryuzo Kurokawa, whom they had met in Vienna, nor a militarist like Berlin’s Shinjiro Tsuyama, who studied poison gas while describing modern conglomerates through “Moltke’s tactics of divide, advance, and strike.” Nor was he a youth like the deceased Tamotsu, who had strained his immature and frail spirit to seek absolute correctness by insisting that only purely good methods should be used to do good. Rather than debates that merely sought to enlighten people toward socialism as a single direction, the fact that Hachiya Ryosaku was attempting to grasp reality through deeper, more complex aspects did not repel Nobuko. For Nobuko herself too was the type who wanted to know things from their very core—because she believed that what one had come to know in that way was what held true strength.

Ryosaku Hachiya, who had been deep in conversation, glanced at his wristwatch.

“Is it really this late?” He compared it with Motoko’s watch.

“Well, of course—the play didn’t let out until past eleven, after all.” The boulevard Saint-Michel still retained the bustle of early evening, with café patrons, conspicuously accompanied by women, continuously coming and going. “This is bad.”

Hachiya’s forehead creased with a thick horizontal wrinkle. "The last train to Clamart departs at one o’clock." “Where exactly is it? This ‘Clamart’ place?” “This ‘Clamart’ place?” “It’s about forty minutes from Porte de Versailles—this is troublesome.” To Nobuko, his consternation seemed less about potentially missing the suburban train than a matter confined to Hachiya’s wallet—he had made no preparations whatsoever for lodging elsewhere.

“If it’s Porte de Versailles, isn’t that quite near where we are?” “How about this?” “Let’s take a taxi and try to make it quickly.” “If we catch it, good; if not, we’ll handle that when the time comes.” “Let’s do that!” The three immediately hailed a taxi upon leaving the café. Rushing toward their destination, the taxi carrying the quietly tense trio left the brightness and bustle of Boulevard Saint-Michel, entered the desolate backstreets behind Luxembourg Park, and sped straight down Vaugirard’s lengthy avenue all the way to Porte de Versailles.

While Motoko was paying the taxi fare, Ryosaku Hachiya hurried off and approached a train that had stopped in the square there. "Did we make it in time?" "Not sure."

Ryosaku Hachiya returned toward Nobuko and Motoko—who were about to follow after him—waving his hand sideways in a "No good, no good" gesture as he came back. “Has it already left?”

“They said it just left—this is bad.” Nobuko and Motoko, who did not concretely know the distance from Porte de Versailles to Clamart’s residence, translated Hachiya’s predicament into their own remembered distress—like being stranded in Shibuya after missing the Tamagawa train back to Komazawa—and sympathized with him. “Can’t we take a taxi?”

“It’s too far, you see,” said Hachiya. “Paris taxis are cheap within the city, but once you step into the suburbs, the meter doubles each time—it’s completely unmanageable.” “If that’s the case,” Nobuko countered, “coming to stay at the Garrick where we’re staying would be far more economical. How about that? Any room would do for just one night, wouldn’t it?”

The three of them retraced their steps along Vaugirard Street at a leisurely pace this time and entered through Hotel Garrick's door. Here too, the café section still remained open. At the front desk, Hachiya began negotiating for a room. "They say there are no rooms." "No rooms?"

With a look that said there was no way that could be true, Motoko stared at the clerk. The thinning-haired clerk, with a green necktie dangling over his cream-colored shirt, spread his hands out to either side and shrugged his shoulders at Motoko, who was looking at him reproachfully. “Don’t they want some money?” Nobuko, seeing this, whispered to Motoko. Hachiya leaned against the front desk, “Monsieur Allor.” And he began negotiating anew.

“It doesn’t seem to be a lie—he says it’s because today’s Saturday.”

“Ah, that’s it! I hadn’t realized that.” On Saturday nights, there were always many inconspicuous pairs of men and women staying overnight, and the not-so-large hotel’s rooms would fill up. Hachiya, holding the soft hat he had taken off in his left hand, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief while pondering. Nobuko and Motoko also remained standing by the front desk, troubled. Originally, Hachiya had gone to see Piscator’s play to accompany Nobuko and the others. Since it was a suburban theater and tickets weren’t available at information offices, Hachiya had taken care of that as well.

If there truly was no other solution, perhaps the two women who had two rooms could gather together and open up Motoko's room to let Hachiya stay—how would that work? Nobuko thought this while remaining silent, waiting for Motoko to devise some solution. In their shared life, there existed a certain delicacy in situations like tonight's. When Nobuko took initiative to arrange accommodations for Hachiya beforehand, it carried a risk of appearing not entirely straightforward to Motoko, so she had grown cautious.

At last, as Motoko seemed to have resolved,

“Buko-chan, shall we stay together and open up my room?”

They ended up with the same idea after all.

“I’ve caused such unexpected trouble—I’m really sorry.” With that, Hachiya followed the two women up to the seventh floor. “Anyway, let’s rest here for a bit.” “Then I’ll properly arrange your place to stay.” They entered Nobuko’s room. In the attic room, the heat of the summer night—confined there all evening—lingered thickly. Nobuko opened the glass balcony door wide. And she brought chairs out onto the balcony. The illumination of the Eiffel Tower—lit all night only on Saturdays and Sundays—and the Citroën Citroën 6-cylinder 6-6 text twinkled ceaselessly tonight in the distant sky.

Ryosaku Hachiya leaned his elbows on the balcony railing and gazed at the letters running vertically along the distant Eiffel Tower, flickering on and off. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen Paris’ night view—still as wonderful as ever.” “Is Kramar really such a lonely place?”

"The surroundings are rural, you see." "There’s none of this urban night atmosphere at all." "On the other hand, it’s good for walking around though." Motoko, who had gone to her room across the hallway, came back carrying nightclothes, pillows, toiletries, and other items under her arm and brought them over to Nobuko. Hachiya stood up from the chair. "Can I help with anything?"

“No, this will do.”

Motoko also came out to the balcony and sat down. “The cityscape from here is interesting even during the day—it has far more atmospheric depth than around Pereire,” she said. “Because life overflows here, you see.” “Well, of course—over there, all you can see are the boulevard trees,” Nobuko replied. Ryosaku Hachiya had visited Taizo Sasa at Pereire and knew the apartment. The fact that he was in Paris became known to Nobuko and Motoko because Taizo had met Hachiya—who had coincidentally been at an acquaintance’s place—and the topic had come up.

Under the gradually cooling night sky, Ryosaku Hachiya spoke to Nobuko and Motoko about France’s international financial capital—interconnected like a spider’s web—and fascist groups like the Croix-de-Feu sustained by it. At its core was Finari, president of the Paris-Netherlands Bank: French representative for America’s Standard Oil with ties to German banking, electrical, and chemical trusts; an executive at Norwegian Nitrogen—German-funded during the war—who had supplied sodium sulfate to Germany; a man who had exiled himself to Italy postwar.

“Before anyone knew it, he had returned and become president.” “It was this man who made the Painlevé cabinet wage the Morocco War.” “Generals like Weygand and Lyautey—the French General Staff is a puppet, you see.” “Whether it’s the British General Staff, Mitsui of Japan, or munitions capitalists from Switzerland to New Zealand—they’re all connected to Schneider of France.” “The disarmament conference can’t reach an agreement—of course that’s only natural.” “Because those who would be troubled if the danger of war were truly eliminated hold power everywhere.”

The Croix-de-Feu, formed in 1927, was essentially a middle-class organization, with its core reportedly consisting of retired officers and non-commissioned officers from the First World War era who had received decorations such as the Croix de Feu Medal and the Legion of Honor. On the grounds that capitalists had sacrificed them in the war, they opposed both the capitalist republic and communism. The Citizens’ Alliance, serving as auxiliary police and strikebreakers, were valued by the government. Over fifty people formed a single cohesive assault unit, and whenever workers’ demonstrations intensified in Paris, they would immediately mobilize a thousand men by automobile. Ryosaku Hachiya leaned against the balcony railing, his forehead etched with deep horizontal wrinkles visible even in the dim night light,

“After all, the Croix-de-Feu have thirty airplanes alone.” “Trucks, motorcycles, light machine guns—who knows how many they’ve stockpiled?” He shook his head as if defeated by the numbers. “The French fascist groups are remarkably well-equipped in that regard.” Nobuko, who had been listening with her body tense, finally let out a small laugh after a moment.

“Mr. Hachiya—how strange. You condemn French fascism yet speak of it with such admiration.” “I agree,” Motoko said in a hoarse voice, as if her cigarette smoke had caught in her throat.

“Mr. Hachiya, sometimes those who go to retrieve mummies end up becoming one themselves.” “I’ll have none of that.” “That’s not what I mean.” “I think it’s a mistake that Marxists dismiss them in one breath as reactionaries or fascists without trying to understand their desperate strength.” “Since there’s a clear necessity behind fascism’s rise after the First World War, if we lack the courage to analyze that foundation, even in ‘Free France,’ the left will be defeated.”

“Well, of course that’s true. But if we’re speaking of postwar necessities, there’s the necessity of the Soviet Union’s birth and the necessity of socialism surging worldwide. At least we don’t see the struggle between these two forces as mere spectators watching dogs maul each other.” “The way dogs maul each other is terrible.” “But if you only look at who’s stronger or who’ll win, it becomes no different from watching dogfights. Even in dogfights, people have favorites—a side they want to see triumph…”

When discussions with their male friends grew heated, it was always Motoko who plunged headlong into the fray. Nobuko silently considered both the truth she could perceive in Hachiya’s words and the detached stance that emerged intertwined within them. “Well, shall we head back now?”

After saying this, Motoko carried the chair she had been using into the room. Hachiya followed behind while moving chairs and said, “Even so, you all are quite a different breed.”

he said.

Motoko, appearing not dissatisfied with this critique, revealed her feelings through a teasing look in her eyes. "What about you?"

Hachiya did not answer that. As he was guided by Motoko and left for the opposite room,

“When you return from London, you must visit Saint-Denis at least once,” he said, addressing neither of the two women in particular.

“The mayor there became a Communist Party member named Drio in last year’s election, and on the revolutionary anniversaries in July and November, a red flag is raised at the Saint-Denis city hall.” The next morning, when Nobuko and Motoko awoke, Ryosaku Hachiya was waiting in the opposite room, having properly finished preparing himself. After the three drank their morning coffee, Hachiya departed for home. He left his Clamart address written in Nobuko’s notebook.

Chapter Two

I

During the forty days they spent in London, not only did summer shift into autumn across Europe, but one thing after another changed in Nobuko’s immediate circumstances. On the morning of August 13th, the stark white passenger plane that had taken off from Amiens Airport—carrying twenty-four passengers—flew north from Paris and crossed the English Channel between Calais and Dover. The Channel was blanketed in thick fog. The air currents were turbulent. The white plane sank through a vortex of dense gray fog with an eerie passivity, like an elevator plunging from the third floor to the basement, only to surge back to its original altitude moments later. It felt far worse than riding a ship through violent pitching.

Motoko began feeling nauseous before Nobuko did, her face turning a bluish-yellow as she repeatedly buried it in the provided paper bag. Nobuko’s motion sickness differed from Motoko’s; she felt no nausea at all, but her head tightened as if bound by a metal hoop, and she gradually grew increasingly dazed. With eyes stiffened and creaking, feeling as though they had frozen in place, Nobuko gazed through breaks in the dense fog at the Dover Strait’s waters churning in a somber indigo blue.

The moment they entered British airspace, the color of the vegetation visible below the plane changed. The natural green of France—light and refreshing where it mingled with pale grays and pearly hues—gave way to England’s thick, darkened green. This was the predominant tone of English landscape paintings. Partly intending to save time, Nobuko and Motoko had flown to London, but when they finally arrived at the Kensington Street hotel where the Sasa group was staying late that afternoon, they merely called down to the front desk and, lacking even the strength to go greet the others, ended up sleeping straight through until dinner.

Motoko had truly stayed in London for only three days before passing through Paris and Berlin and returning to Moscow. Had Motoko become free from her usual interest in Nobuko now that Nobuko was surrounded by the Sasa family? Nobuko’s expectation that Motoko’s mood might change if they went to London proved incorrect. "I find it even duller than Paris." "And besides, it’s so stuffy." On the second day, Motoko said this. And then, on the morning of the fourth day, she departed from Victoria Station. Nobuko had not clearly settled on when she would return to Moscow.

Waichiro and Koeda arrived in London two weeks after Nobuko and the others. The two stayed only two nights at the Kensington hotel where their parents and Nobuko were lodged before moving to Mrs. Stetson’s rooms. Mr. Stetson had served as a consul in Nagasaki during his lifetime, and before the Great War in provincial Japanese towns, his wife had comported herself with the ceremonial dignity befitting a foreign consular spouse who was venerated. On their return after Nobuko accompanied him to inspect rooms at Mrs. Stetson’s residence and converse with the widow clad entirely in black silk garments, Taizo—

“Well, that should do for Waichiro and the others.”

he said. Mrs. Stetson had even informed Taizo about weekday curfews at eleven o’clock and instructed him to understand that Sunday meals would be cold dishes since the cook was given the day off. “It’s good for language practice,” he said. “That lady speaks excellent English. Did you understand, Nobuko?” For his part, Taizo had wanted to find the London residence where he had once boarded at Mrs. Layman’s and have Waichiro and his wife stay there. When they were in Paris, Nobuko had heard of Taizo’s intentions in that regard. However, upon coming to London and investigating where Mrs. Layman and her son now lived, they found that the shifts in British society over the nearly quarter-century since Taizo’s time had reduced the modest household’s livelihood to a state incomparably more destitute than when Taizo had boarded there. The only things that remained unchanged were the elegant characters in Mrs. Layman’s letters, written with her G-pen, and her inherently warm and kind nature. Mrs. Layman declined the dinner invitation from Taizo and his wife, citing that she lacked proper attire and would be discourteous. “It is regrettable that my household is not a suitable environment for the purpose of young Waichiro and Koeda learning British life for ‘their prosperous future.’” “After the Great War, our lives underwent a change that can never be reversed.” Like many of Britain’s middle-class people. The letter from Mrs. Layman, with its elegant script, conveyed such realities.

Mrs. Stetson had also begun taking in lodgers after the Great War. A twenty-six or twenty-seven-year-old woman known as Laura operated a boutique with friends near Charing Cross. Nobuko gazed at the phrase "prosperous future" for Waichiro and his wife in Mrs. Layman’s letter with a skepticism she could not voice to anyone. The word "prosperous"—which for Mrs. Layman evoked nothing but nostalgic feelings—described a modest middle-class family that postwar, pursued by the intensifying waves of capitalist economy, could no longer sustain life in central London and had been cast out to a suburban corner. To put it bluntly, Nobuko foresaw that under Waichiro’s generation, the Sasa household’s future would follow a course scarcely different from the shifts in circumstances Mrs. Layman had experienced.

Taizo and Takeyo invited Mrs. Layman and her son Jack Layman to a somewhat formal afternoon tea. The economic generational divide among London's middle class, demarcated by the Great War, stood so starkly between Mrs. Layman—a mother nearing seventy—and Jack, who had just turned thirty, that Nobuko felt physical discomfort from its vividness. Despite her advanced age and though her lace visiting dress showed slight wear, Mrs. Layman had lost only some luster in her cheeks while retaining the robust bone structure and healthy complexion characteristic of Englishwomen. A pristine elegance lingered in her gaze and bearing.

Jack had likely only graduated from a commercial school and become a clerk at a trading company; his physique was far worse than that of his elderly mother. When Nobuko rode a double-decker bus from the commercial district and wandered through London’s sprawling East End, he was among the tens of thousands of clerks she encountered there—young men with hunched shoulders, slightly stooped postures, their dull complexions lacking vitality. On Sunday afternoons, the narrow pond in Victoria Park—the large eastern park—was congested with boats rowed by those same young men, carrying either male companions or female friends.

Along the pond’s edge, lines of families strolling stretched endlessly down the path. What countless baby carriages were being pushed among them! There were young mothers walking with husbands who helped push, but more numerous were girls of seven to twelve or thirteen—their hair cropped short—doing the pushing themselves. Two or three smaller children clustered around these baby carriages pushed by their older sisters and clung to their mothers’ skirts as they walked. The Sunday clothes worn by the endless procession of children all bore sharp creases from being tightly folded—stiffened fabric that seemed to float away from their small frames. These creases testified to how carefully those shorts must have been stored when not in use. Their lives held no wardrobes for children’s clothes. The folded garments went into trunks instead, speaking of hand-me-downs passed from older brother to younger, from older sister to younger sister.

Even on a bright, hot Sunday afternoon at summer's end—what they called an Indian summer—Victoria Park's radiance could not dispel the lingering shadows of life there: the darkness in hollows, and the scent of children's bodies bathed only occasionally. Around the noses and corners of mouths belonging to adults and children strolling along that promenade, there seemed to cling a dusky shadow no amount of soap could wash away.

After riding the bus for thirty minutes, a completely different scene unfolded before Nobuko’s eyes. From a corner of Hyde Park where the statue of Peter Pan playing his flute stood, the Thames River could be seen stretching wide, dotted with serenely floating boats. There, what was called the British complexion—bright complexions and blond hair—adorned the summer attire of tall, slender young men and women, while pink and white children’s clothes moved cheerfully about. Within the large park, the section near the hotel where Nobuko and the others were staying was called Kensington Gardens, where a café with vibrant striped sun umbrellas stood on beautiful lawns.

All those colors, sounds, movements, and customs of the West formed the stage for Galsworthy’s novels and, just as such elements constituted the essence of Bernard Shaw’s irony, there was a sense of complacency. Westerners seemed to consider it utterly natural that London contained a multitude of British people who differed from them even in appearance. Nobuko, however, marveled at these two groups laid bare by capitalism, and soon found herself gripped by a bitter, teeth-gritting frustration.

A multitude of people who had begun aging from infancy, as though their growth had been stunted. A mass of young men and women with sallow complexions and slumped shoulders, their skin erupting in fine blemishes from ultraviolet deprivation and poor nutrition. In the evening rush hour, this swarm of humanity became a silent black current with tens of thousands of eyes—carried onto subway escalators, mechanically ascending and descending—a vision resembling some vast, sluggish abattoir.

Nobuko had a narrow room like a dormitory single on the fifth floor of a Kensington hotel. One window of the room overlooked the lawn of Kensington Gardens. In the evening when its gates were locked, the park stayed quiet all night, though occasionally one could hear the violent wingbeats of pigeons startled in their roost. Every night before bed, Nobuko read several pages of Ludwig Renn’s *War*. London bookstores still maintained special displays for “war books” even a decade later.

Lane’s novel was an anti-war work with rational and vivid descriptions. On the front lines where modern science was being wielded to kill humans en masse, a man—actively grasping the mechanical nature of machinery itself—measured the intervals and angles of falling shells, crawling from one shell crater to the next to save his own life alongside his comrades; this was the scene Nobuko read. Even amidst terrifying destruction, Lane’s unyielding calmness and precision awakened and invigorated Nobuko’s mind in two distinct ways as she read. Lifting her head from the novel’s pages at intervals, Nobuko thought about that day’s various sights and felt as though she were burning up. When would this horde of Londoners—their squat faces erupting with blemishes, their arms asymmetrically long—come flooding westward?

MacDonald’s Labour cabinet suppressed the great strike of Lancashire textile workers with a twelve percent wage reduction in its first month on August 22nd, not long after Nobuko arrived in London. Since 1929, the rationalization of British coal miners had become so severe that with sixteen percent fewer workers, they were extracting thirteen million more tons than the previous year. Wages were reduced from nine shillings six pence per shift to nine shillings one and a half pence. The leftists who opposed such rationalization, wage cuts, and unemployment were labeled a minority movement and were constantly denounced as acting under the influence of the Third International.

One day, Nobuko went to see a labor university on Pennen Street. At Number 13 there, on the terrace where a large "For Sale" sign was posted, two workers were lowering the Labor University signboard to the sidewalk with a thick rope. At the reception area—tidied up with only one or two chairs and a single table left for final tasks—a man in his fifties with sagging freckled cheeks explained the closure reason to Nobuko with dejection. "You know how things are now—the coal miners' union could no longer bear spending three to four thousand pounds annually to educate about thirty people." "Lately, those we educate here end up being used against us for government and capitalist interests." "That makes maintaining the Labor University meaningless." "So we've decided to close it."

Nobuko visited Toynbee Hall, world-renowned for its settlement work, and was transcribing the courses of its Labor University into her notebook. On the timeworn notice board, where summer ivy entwined its large lush green leaves, the course list for the new term beginning in late September had been posted. Economics, literature, history, English, French, German. Drama. Oratory, music, art, folk dance, first aid. Five shillings per subject.

In which of these subjects contained the necessary studies for workers to become aware of their class significance? When Nobuko glanced once more at the noticeboard after touring Toynbee Hall’s interior, her disagreement had escalated into resistance. At Toynbee Hall, the worker-students’ cafeteria occupied a dim mezzanine with low ceilings and windows cut near the floor. Bare wooden tables and benches stood in the gloom, tin teacups lined in rows. The space carried an air of medieval workshops, but after walking down the corridor, Nobuko was astonished by how drastically different the leaders’ cafeteria appeared—a room with high exposed pillars and pristine white tablecloths adorned with gleaming silver sugar bowls and spoons of various sizes. Commemorative photographs hung on the walls. What sort of people were these “leaders” solemnly named by the guide—what breed of unfeeling figures could face these immaculate tablecloths while maintaining such a cafeteria for workers? Nobuko asked about them. The guide answered only, “They come from Oxford and Cambridge Universities.” A faint smile flickered at Nobuko’s lips—that was even written in travel guides. “Are they professors or students?” The female guide thrust out her chest in a white blouse and slowly replied, “Many of them are students.”

On her way back from Toynbee Hall, Nobuko—with vivid clarity and emotion welling up in her chest—recalled the words inscribed beneath the domed roof of Moscow University. —Knowledge for all who labor. —In this single phrase lay more truth than a million words. Is this not the beauty that humanity should newly strive to win? Knowledge for all who labor—true science for all who labor. Scholarship that unwaveringly pursues society’s realities and possesses the power to develop them.—

To the man tidying up the remaining tasks at the labor school that had been put up for sale—his chubby face propped sorrowfully on his hand—Nobuko spoke of her visit to Toynbee Hall. “And if your institution had been teaching similar subjects too, it’s clear your graduates would have become convenient servants for the MacDonald government,” she said. “The two cafeterias at Toynbee Hall tell that story.” The chubby man raised his drowsy eyelids and studied Nobuko’s face anew. “Did you see those two cafeterias?” “I saw them.” “So—you didn’t care for them?” “That approach might have held some meaning before the Great War,” Nobuko replied. “But now it’s far too outdated.” The man fell silent, pinching his lower lip between two fingers as he pondered. Eventually, his honest face growing even more sorrowful, he stood up murmuring “That’s likely true,” and walked out with Nobuko in heavy steps toward the entrance where workers were lowering the sign. As they began walking, he asked in the same subdued voice, “Are you a Communist?” Surprised at being mistaken for something so definite, Nobuko answered firmly, “No.”

At the hotel on Kensington Street where Nobuko was staying, they did not deliver the *Daily Herald* because it was the Labour Party’s official newspaper. *Workers’ Life* was only sold at downtown newsstands. *Workers’ Life*, in its attempt to become a daily newspaper, carried an appeal asking what German workers had done for *Rote Fahne*.

On Sunday afternoons, at the hour when crowds gathered, walking through Hyde Park meant seeing various men set up platforms under the large oak trees along the promenade and deliver speeches. At intervals spaced just far enough to avoid overlapping voices, each platform where a man stood speaking bore the name of the group or political party to which he belonged. The strolling people walked along in crowds, viewing the Independent Labour Party here as they would familiar shop windows in town—next came free thinkers, anarchists, cooperativists, Communist Party members—and walked on with fragments of Christian Science sermons and speeches caught in their ears. If someone were to stop and listen because certain words captivated them, they were free to hear as much of any speech as they liked, to ask questions, to debate. In front of the promenade where the speakers stood in a row was a rather wide grassland, and on the grass there were men and women lying about enjoying their Sunday, as well as groups of children running around.

The people walking around this part of Hyde Park or lying on the grass were, judging by their attire, somewhat better off than the crowds pushing prams as they ambled through Victoria Park. Even among workers’ families, it was immediately apparent that many belonged to households with steady employment. Men and women stretched out on the grassland, seeking to soak up every bit of air and sunlight they could experience once a week—here and there, the sight of women stretching bare legs freed from shoes caught the eye. People either basked leisurely in the sunlight or chatted and laughed among themselves, showing scant interest in the accustomed speakers beneath the trees.

The popular scenes of Hyde Park, which occupied a vast area, and the vicinity of Kensington Gardens where well-dressed people strolled with composed demeanor were worlds apart even on the same Sunday afternoon.

Taizo too had been spending practically busy days as an architect since coming to London. Upon returning to Japan, he would immediately need to begin work on large-scale university buildings and hospital construction projects that were already planned. Using the privileges of being an honorary member of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts, Taizo sometimes went as far as Nottingham to conduct inspections of universities and hospitals.

Now that Waichiro and his wife had been settled at Mrs. Stetson’s, Takeyo too seemed to have found a lightness in her heart—spending leisurely teatimes throwing breadcrumbs to sparrows gathering on Kensington Gardens’ lawns or taking Tsuyako out to see the Tate Gallery. She was also visiting wives associated with the embassy. In London, being able to understand the language allowed Taizo to relax and eased Takeyo’s nerves.

Yet within the group, Tsuyako’s position remained as unsettled as it had been in Paris—unchanged in the slightest. Even in London hotels, Tsuyako’s bed was brought into the couple’s bedroom. From the perspective of what British society deemed proper household customs, the Sasa family—traveling without a tutor for a girl of Tsuyako’s age—could be said to be unbefitting of the standing of the hotels where they stayed. Taizo and Takeyo paid no mind to such matters.

One evening after eight o'clock, Nobuko took Tsuyako and boarded the Thomas Cook East End sightseeing bus departing from Trafalgar Square. Thomas Cook monopolized London’s tourist routes, incorporating even the nighttime scenes of East End poverty—once considered a civic disgrace until the Great War—as one of the thrills that transformed nocturnal London sightseeing. The large bus with its elegant yellow and blue paint, interior lights glittering, passed through the long desolate tunnel beneath the Thames River bed, traversed the robber-prone area near London Dock, and entered Whitechapel’s winding streets. The bus’s route nearly matched the path Jack London had traced in *The People of the Abyss*. Street children swarmed around the stopped vehicle, begging for cigarettes and coins. Drunkards spat incessantly by roadside gutters. Among them appeared women who seemed to be aging prostitutes. A pawnshop’s neon sign. A flophouse displaying a “Beds” placard. The illuminated cross blazed over Whitechapel’s main thoroughfare—its crimson light scorching through night’s darkness like solitary conflagration—engulfing within that play of shadows countless unemployed men and women adrift in homelessness.

For about an hour and a half as the bus made its rounds, Tsuyako did not utter a single word. The shock of the dismal overflowing the streets, and the impression from the raw, fierce existence laid bare, were etched onto Tsuyako’s brow. Nobuko planned this evening of sightseeing in London as a gift for Tsuyako’s heart. Nobuko wished for Tsuyako—who, though appearing to travel abroad with her parents without hardship, was in truth in a pitiable position—to gain an understanding of what life truly was and learn the necessity of managing her own life independently. Because Tsuyako was a girl. And because she was the youngest daughter. Precisely because Japanese society and its family system made it difficult for women to live independently, Nobuko could not help but wish for her younger sister’s future to be one of abundant competence as a woman.

It was their third Sunday in London. Nobuko strolled with Taizo through the inner grasslands of Kensington Gardens. Takeyo and Tsuyako, who were about to take a nap, had arranged to meet at a café after four o'clock, so the father and daughter wandered leisurely among the large oak trees. That area was usually not crowded, and within Nobuko and her father's view stood a silver-haired old man extending his ring-adorned hand to feed peanuts to a squirrel. The well-dressed old man would come here when in the mood and stand at the base of a large oak tree, passing time with squirrels as his companions. From an oak branch above, a squirrel gazing intently downward cautiously descended along the trunk. After approaching and retreating several times to investigate, it swiftly climbed up the old man's body and began eating the peanuts in his palm. When eating peanuts, the squirrel sat on the old man's cuff with its hind legs—just as it would on an oak branch—raised its thick tail, held a peanut between its two front paws, and moved its mouth in quick, tiny motions. Each time it finished eating one, the squirrel would invariably descend to the grassland and return to the oak branch.

Taizo and Nobuko stood in the distance, gazing with interest at the scene. "This is so quintessentially England." There was a note of envy in Taizo's voice. "Everywhere you go, people say things have changed since the Great War, and indeed they have, but the oaks of old England remain just as they always were." As he walked away from the old man—still standing motionless in the grassland, waiting for what must have been the umpteenth time as the squirrel descended toward the peanuts in his palm—Taizo asked Nobuko.

“Nobuko, did you go to renew your passport (travel document) visa yesterday?”

“Yes. Why?” “The hotel counter notified us last night… Your passport has a time-limited stay permit for England.” “I didn’t know.” The Croydon Passport Visa Office had written “Permission granted for residence in England not exceeding three weeks” and stamped it on Nobuko’s passport when she disembarked from the plane.

“What about Father and the others’? Was it indefinite?” “Of course they are.” That was natural, and the fact that Nobuko had received a time-limited entry permit was unexpected to Taizo—even wounding. The feelings of a father’s heart and his concern could be discerned in his eyes as he looked at Nobuko.

“What’s the reason for that?” “I don’t think it means much.” “I’m not coming from Paris like you and the others—I’m coming from Moscow, isn’t that right?” “Britain and the Soviet Union have kept diplomatic relations severed since 1926, as things stand now.” “So even though they let Japanese people enter, if you’re coming from Moscow, they just want to put a little time limit on your stay, don’t they?”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Do you think there’s something else?” Taizo fell silent. Nobuko intuited that he was once again concerned about her “ideology” because of the time-limited passport. A red-ink key seemed about to surface once more in his emotions, she thought.

“Father, please don’t worry—” “No matter where you look, I have no reason beyond that.” “If that’s all, then fine—but…” Taizo removed his soft hat and shook his heavy, bald head as though he had something to say. Nobuko said to reassure Taizo.

“England is different from Japan, Father. The Communist Party is a proper public party here. They publish newspapers and stand in elections—even as Communists they can hold their heads high. Not that I’m one of them, though…” Nobuko understood why Taizo had taken her for this walk ahead of Takeyo and Tsuyako.

When they came to the road where the café’s gaudy parasol was visible, Taizo came to a slight halt. “Did I tell you that Tsukuda died?”

“—No.”

Tsukuda had died—the late August heat of London remained only on the surface of Nobuko’s body clad in a thin silk dress as she said “No” in a quiet voice, while something cold ran through her core.—Tsukuda had died— “They were raising funds for bereaved children’s education—before leaving, I did what I could.” “Today, when I found the receipt in documents sent from the office, it reminded me—”

“When was that?” “That was—well, since it was around the time things had started getting chaotic, I think it was April or so.” “It was tuberculosis.” “There are three bereaved children, all still quite young, so his wife must be in a pitiable state.” Five years had passed since Nobuko and Tsukuda had parted. The woman who became his wife—left with three young children—was someone who, out of sympathy for Tsukuda, had married him declaring she would surely make him happy in place of the self-centered Nobuko. She had also heard that she taught at some school.

“Apparently, because all the children were frail, she had moved to Numazu or somewhere like that.” When Nobuko, unable to adjust to life with Tsukuda no matter how hard she tried, had run away, she had also heard that a friend of his from his American days had advised him that if he married again, no matter what the woman might say, he must make her bear children. Nobuko also had a memory of Tsukuda himself telling her that sort of thing. A wife who would now have to raise three frail children—the oldest being three or four years old—.

In her daily life, Nobuko maintained a state of mind utterly detached from Tsukuda. During her time in Japan immediately after their separation, whenever her train passed through the town where he resided, she would tense with apprehension at every corner, fearing his sudden appearance. Before departing for Moscow, when she had ridden a taxi from Shibuya through those same streets where Tsukuda lived—passing with cold revulsion—not even in Moscow did feelings of remorse ever rise within her. Strangely, she never once dreamed of him. She had considered it fortunate that Tsukuda found new domesticity and lived contentedly as himself. That happiness belonged solely to Tsukuda. Precisely because his happiness differed fundamentally in nature from what she recognized as such could she not remain with him. Envy springs from longing to possess what others have. Nobuko had fled from the happiness that might have been hers at Tsukuda's side.

While walking along the path through sunlit, swaying grass, Nobuko felt sorrow well up within her at the nature of human existence. To her, both Tsukuda—who had died at forty-five after briefly tasting happiness—and his wife’s fate seemed pitiable: she who had strived for his fleeting contentment only to be left with three children now demanding still greater efforts. “Thank you for contributing to that education fund, Father.”

That evening, standing by the window of the hotel room overlooking the grove of trees in the park illuminated by arc lamps—as was her custom at day's end—Nobuko recalled what her father had told her during their walk through the park. What might be called sorrow, what might bring tears—such sentimentality had been absent from Nobuko since hearing of Tsukuda's death. There remained only a still, earnest restraint.—Tsukuda's life had ended—Tsukuda's life had ended—and as she followed this thought, Nobuko's heart discovered a kind of demarcation she had never consciously acknowledged. The affair between Tsukuda and herself had reached its conclusion. Here lay fresh confirmation of that fact.

Had Nobuko been living all this time feeling some sort of responsibility toward Tsukuda? Nobuko had no such awareness. But now, having unexpectedly received news of Tsukuda’s death, what grew stronger within Nobuko’s heart was the awareness that "it had concluded." At a certain time in April of this year that Nobuko knew nothing about, a large period had been marked in her past life. Nobuko had departed Moscow without knowing anything until today and come to London. When a period had been placed on Nobuko’s past, she had already, unknowingly, begun to tread the days of her new life.

While covering her face with both hands, Nobuko knelt before the window open to the night park. Within my own life—this single existence striving earnestly to live—how many lives must have been twisted together? The young, tender, beloved life of her dead younger brother Tamotsu. The dark, awkward, yet truthful life of Tsukuda. Within this fierce craving for life, the dead were living. That reality tightened around Nobuko's chest. The matter between them had concluded. The unexpected liberation born from this awareness. All experiences that had existed between her and Tsukuda now felt accepted into Nobuko's being—this life that would keep living with greater freedom than ever before. Nobuko kept her face covered; no tears spilled from her eyes, yet her whole body quivered faintly. Enveloping the trembling Nobuko—shaking like one gripped by pre-fever chills—came the scent of dense oak leaves flowing through the wide-open window from the summer night outside.

II

Motoko’s earlier return to Moscow had brought Nobuko her first experience of living alone in five years during her time in London. During those days, she received news of Tsukuda’s death. Unaware of what new conditions these two events might impose on her life or what different undercurrents they might awaken in the depths of her consciousness, Nobuko concluded her stay in London and returned to Paris.

Once their leisurely stay in London had ended, Taizo and Takeyo felt that the central purpose of this trip had been achieved—though their hearts remained somewhat scattered. Paris, where the autumn showers had begun to fall, was merely a stopover on their return journey.

It was now the season when they wanted to light the fireplace, and in their apartment on Boulevard Pereire, the couple’s conversations revolved around their remaining schedule for Geneva and discussions about souvenirs. In the parlor, Tsuyako sat on the sofa with one leg folded childishly and the other dangling to the floor, arranging several ship postcards she had collected in London as if playing karuta alone, engrossed in solitary play. The three Sasas were scheduled to leave Paris around early November and had reserved a cabin on the Taiyō Maru.

In London, Tsuyako had friends and her attire was neatly arranged with a girlishness befitting her age, yet the instability of not having a settled place among adults remained the same whether she was in Paris or London. The prospect of returning to Japan—boarding a large ship, venturing out onto the open sea again, and enjoying the slowly shifting scenery from port to port—seemed to be Tsuyako's greatest pleasure. As her sister Nobuko peered at the ship-themed postcards lined up on the sofa, Tsuyako rubbed her bobbed head against her.

“This one really loves ships.” she said without taking her eyes off the postcards. From Waichiro, who had remained in London, arrived a postcard sent jointly by him and Koeda. Autumn was beginning in London. That Saturday there would be a season-opening concert at Queen’s Hall, and being able to hear it from Esmond Street was a blessing. Mrs. Stetson was also thoroughly satisfied, saying that thanks to this, she looked forward to winter that year. Such a message arrived written in Waichiro’s elaborately decorative script—exactly like that of a man who had ample free time within a single day.

Such correspondence from Waichiro was marked by wariness. At least, that was how Nobuko perceived it. Even while separated between London and Paris, the letters Waichiro and his wife sent to Takeyo—who remained constantly vigilant against the young couple's extravagance and waste—tended to focus on the more subdued aspects of their lives. What Nobuko wished to receive from her younger brother and his wife were accounts of their nimble, curiosity-driven life—where they went, what they saw, what they heard.

The report in which Waichiro wrote with impersonally polite phrasing about being able to listen to the Queen’s Hall concert from Esmond Street—and so on—meant to indicate that the newly installed radio was already proving its worth. When Waichiro and Koeda moved to Mrs. Stetson’s residence and came to the hotel for the third time, they first learned that their room used gas lamps rather than electric lights—a revelation that astonished all members of the Sasa family. This began when Waichiro observed, “The rent seems rather steep for gas lighting, doesn’t it?” At Mrs. Stetson’s residence, only the downstairs guest rooms, dining room, and parlor had electric lights; from the second floor upward, each chamber still employed old-fashioned pallid gas lamps.

“What on earth could it be?!” “If gas were to leak, it could be life-threatening!” “Father, you saw it too!” “No—I had not noticed that much.” “It was a good thing I brought it up after all.” Koeda interjected, as if to smooth over Taizo and Nobuko’s carelessness.

“Actually, we were quite hesitant about whether to bring it up or not. We thought you already knew about it, you see.”

“You… This is different from other matters.” The financial circumstances of London’s middle class—those who owned even a single small house somewhere in the city—had grown increasingly strained. It was said that not only at Mrs. Stetson’s widow’s residence but throughout Esmond Street, removed from the city center, houses still using gas lamps stood in rows. Upon hearing this, Nobuko realized. In the rental advertisements that appeared in various London newspapers, there had always been special notes about electric lighting. Mrs. Stetson—wearing a black silk dress with refinement and employing the diction Taizo had praised as splendid English—had informed them with ladylike authority about curfews and cold Sunday meals as she took the Sasas upstairs to see the room they intended to rent, yet she never mentioned that gas was used in that room. For Mrs. Stetson, such matters in London were likely considered something renters ought to inquire about themselves. After all, the gas lamps hung openly from the ceiling, visible to all eyes—or so the reasoning went.

The Sasa family covered two-thirds of the construction costs, and electric lights were installed in Waichiro and Koeda’s room. Incidentally, Waichiro—a radio enthusiast—also had it set up for radio listening. Takeyo had agreed with Waichiro’s argument that this was preferable to spending money every night on operas and concerts. The fact that Nobuko was alone upon returning to Paris for the second time naturally influenced her choice of hotel, and she took a room on the seventh floor of a small hotel near Monceau Park, not far from her parents’ apartment on Boulevard Pereire. The entrance and dining area had an air befitting the hotel’s pretentiously chosen name, “Monceau et Tocaville.” From one of the seventh-floor rooms came the sound of a young woman’s piano practice—she seemed to be attending the Paris Conservatoire. When her parents left Paris, she too would return to Moscow—but within Nobuko’s heart, having returned from London, a new vitality pulsed faintly, and she wanted to live out her remaining short days in Paris to the fullest. In London, Nobuko had come to realize deeply just how significant it was for a traveler to understand even a little of the country’s language. Even though she would have spent nearly three months there in total, to leave Paris without even being able to properly read a newspaper—she found that prospect utterly unacceptable.

On her second day in Paris, Nobuko rented a room at the Monceau et Tocaville for sleeping and studying, and the following day, she visited the Kazama couple—painters living in an atelier beyond Clichy—to ask them to introduce her to a French tutor. She had heard from Taizo that the Kazama couple—with whom he had shared the voyage to Marseille—were receiving convenient French tutoring.

When Madame Ragondel—that French tutor—came for the first time and left after arranging twice-weekly lessons, Nobuko sat blankly for a while on the divan bed in the attic room that served as her study. Madame Ragondel, a Parisian woman past middle age fighting for her livelihood, possessed a gentle acuity—her modest attire belying an unplaceable refinement. Nobuko learned for the first time upon meeting her that she taught the wives of embassy personnel and spoke English. Madame Ragondel emphatically declared that all the Japanese women she knew were truly kind people. When Nobuko mentioned that she wanted to learn to read newspapers, Madame Ragondel remarked that while Japan’s colonial policies had succeeded, France continued to fail in both Morocco and Algeria. With her—would she really be able to continue the lessons?

Lost in thought, Nobuko gazed out through the balcony window of her room at an interior space atop the building across the narrow back alley. To avoid being seen from the hotel, wooden boxes had been placed on that balcony to double as sunshades, with blue vines trained to climb up to the window eaves. Deep within that window, a woman’s figure flickered into view. Still wearing her floral-patterned housedress, she would appear to be cleaning one moment only to stop abruptly—now disappearing from Nobuko’s field of vision as she watched from her room, now unexpectedly reappearing half-visible nearby—all while moving soundlessly.

In the movements of someone going about unaware of being watched, there lingered a kind of loneliness particular to the metropolis of Paris. Nobuko stood up and began washing her hands at the crude washstand attached to a corner of the room. She thought about returning to Pereire. ——

There was a knock. Nobuko thought it was the neighboring door. She had not expected anyone to come visit her here. When she finished washing her hands and turned off the faucet—as if waiting for that moment—this time she distinctly heard a knock on her own door.

Nobuko said in a businesslike, slightly harsh voice, “Come in.” After hesitating for an instant, the door opened quietly.

When she saw the face that appeared from there, “Oh!” Embarrassed by the stiffness in her own voice, Nobuko hurriedly hung the towel she had been drying her hands with on the nickel rod attached to the washstand. “How did you come to know of this place?”

The person standing there was not the hotel employee. It was Ryosaku Hachiya. He was holding the hat he had taken off in one hand,

“Because I heard you had returned from London.”

He looked at Nobuko once more as if to confirm something and said. "When I stopped by Pereire, they said you were here instead." "It’s a good thing we didn’t miss each other." "I was just about to leave." "I only come here to sleep and when I need to do something."

Nobuko was troubled. With Madame Ragondel, she had sat side by side on the divan bed where the large white monkey toy bought in London was placed atop the pillow as they talked. However, the room was so narrow that there remained no natural space to spare, no matter where a male guest might sit. Under the low ceiling that followed the attic's sloping angle—a room containing nothing but a single divan, with a toy arranged like a mascot on the pillow—even Ryosaku Hachiya seemed hesitant to enter this woman's space. He remained standing there, lightly leaning against the door,

“Did Ms. Yoshimi end up returning straight from London after all?” “That person was only in London for three days.” On the evening before Motoko was to depart London the following morning, while strolling through Piccadilly, Nobuko found a white monkey toy in one of the brightly lit shop windows. The monkey’s expression—with downcast eyes and a somewhat pensive air—resembled Motoko’s face when she was being kind and wise. A white monkey toy without a trace of vulgarity was quite a rare find. Half in jest and half in earnest, Nobuko had bought it together with her, saying, “As my talisman, you know.”

Nobuko was closing the glass balcony door in preparation for going out when she said, “Mr. Hachiya, if you’d like, shall we go back to Pereire?”

Nobuko looked around her as if to say there was no alternative. "It's just... rather cramped here." "That would be acceptable too—"

Watching Nobuko's hands as she locked the door, Ryosaku Hachiya,

“If we’re going out anyway, why not walk through Monceau?” he said. “It’s a fine park in autumn. Last year too, when the ivy started turning red, it was quite pleasant.” He appeared reluctant to return to Pereire. Nobuko left the hotel with Hachiya, crossed the boulevard opposite the direction to Pereire, and entered Monceau Park. Compared to Luxembourg Garden across the Seine—with its proximity to universities and the Latin Quarter, its vast grounds open to all people in every corner, suffused with poetic atmosphere—Monceau Park had the feel of a meticulously designed garden where visitors seemed uniformly well-dressed. The arrangement of trees created an elegant, melancholic mood. The placement of rocks. Its beauty was such that any section could serve unchanged as an opera backdrop. Nobuko found this beauty excessively artificial.

“Because where I live is such an exposed countryside, walking through a place like this every now and then shifts my mood.” Hachiya walked bareheaded through the clear autumn weather, seeming to relish it as he kept his hat in hand.

“How was London?” “Three million unemployed – that’s no trivial matter. They clustered like grapes on the vine.” “Clustered like grapes?” “Near the Bank of England stands St. Paul’s Cathedral – you know the one? Famous for its Sunday choir. When I went to hear them, both sides of the grand staircase – built to mimic St. Paul’s in Rome – were crammed with what looked like unemployed men or vagrants. Dozens upon dozens of steps they were, each stair holding three people pressed shoulder-to-shoulder from bottom to top. The morning sun shone straight on them. Through the very center walked people in white gloves carrying Bibles, ascending and descending with proper decorum, never glancing sideways. What does one even call such a spectacle? So quintessentially London.”

It was an intense urban spectacle—unseen in France, which perpetually suffered labor shortages, imported workers from Poland and Czechoslovakia, then deported them back once they became surplus. “What are they doing there?” “I wonder if they’re just sitting there like that.” On those grand stairs of St. Paul’s, there were men sleeping with their faces buried in their raised knees over dirty trousers, and men lying on their sides using their arms as pillows. There was also a man spreading out a newspaper and nibbling on bread crusts. Illuminated directly by the Sunday morning sun, those packed in clusters on the stone steps were nothing but dirty, exhausted men.

“Were they receiving any money?” “No. In London, even beggars draw all sorts of pictures with colored chalk on the pavement, write ‘thank you’ on them, and sit there waiting patiently, you know.”

How ironic it was. The colored chalk drawings on the pavement were of so-called British taste—scenes of yachts sailing, pastures with sheep, necks of horses meant to be thoroughbreds, splendid dogs, and the like. “Is it really that bad?” Hachiya walked, lost in thought. “Ms. Sasa is what you’d call one of the witnesses to MacDonald’s betrayal of pledges, then.”

“That’s right.” “They’ve launched Workers’ Life and are supposed to write.” “‘Wages must be reduced’—Baldwin.” “‘Indeed.’” “‘However, through arbitration—’ MacDonald said. ‘The Independent Labour Party and minority activists were vehemently arguing that such arbitration was unjust.’”

“I suppose that’s how it is.” “The British Labour Party and trade unions—after crushing that massive coal miners’ strike in 1927 and getting a taste of success—their goal now is just to secure influence within the National Economic Council, isn’t it?”

Nobuko walked in silence for a while,

“Mr. Hachiya, I find it thoroughly strange,” Nobuko said.

“Why don’t you ever go anywhere? I think even England would be worth seeing. When I was in Moscow, I heard and read endlessly about how the Amsterdam-affiliated yellow unions were betraying the working class, but actually going to London made me understand that truth in my bones. The Japanese dignitaries in London treat the Third International like lunatics—as if they’re MacDonald’s distant cousins—but when someone states the plain truth too clearly, how they must detest it, I’m sure.”

Ryosaku Hachiya also quietly stroked his soft, tea-brown hair—neatly parted to the left—with his palm,

“You’re quite scathing.” Hachiya laughed. “I’m sorry.”

With unreserved cheerfulness, Nobuko laughed and looked up at Hachiya. "I just wound up filled to bursting here, you see."

Nobuko, wearing an indigo-and-white variably knitted woolen blouse with schoolgirlish poise, rested the back of her hand beneath her plump chin.

The place where Nobuko Sasa and Ryosaku Hachiya were talking was by the pond in Monceau Park, considered its most beautiful spot. Willows drooped long along the bank, and on the surface of the pond where water lily leaves floated, a row of columns cast pale shadows. On the stone bench, warmed by dappled sunlight, the two were sitting. In Japan, it would be akin to tall trees with oak-like treetops tinted gold, their reflections in the water vividly accentuating the whiteness of marble columns and the lush green foliage of ivy leaves still too early for autumn colors.

Nobuko had not imagined she would find herself talking so intently with Hachiya immediately upon returning to Paris. Whether she would even meet Hachiya again in Paris was something Nobuko hadn’t given any thought to. Yet through this chance encounter and conversation, she found herself sharing with Hachiya all those London impressions that she would have gradually related to Motoko day by day had they been living together—things she likely wouldn’t have kept from her daily exchanges. Since Motoko’s departure for Moscow, Nobuko had been writing London updates nearly every other day. Though everything she was discussing here with Hachiya had already been written in those letters, for the sociable Nobuko, being able to voice it all again without the combative edge of intellectual sparring felt natural and comforting.

Still, why did everyone she met in London talk as though they wanted to outargue her? As if they alone—judging every global affair through the lens of British ruling-class sensibilities—were modernity’s sole possessors of sound judgment.— As if his train of thought had naturally converged on this trajectory, Hachiya mused, “What sort of crowd actually lives in London?”

“I wonder what kind of people there are in London,” Hachiya said. Though his phrasing didn’t demand an answer—indeed contained elements that made one reluctant to press further—there lingered a sense of Hachiya’s desire to ask nonetheless.

“Ichiro Kimura—do you know him?” “Wasn’t he in Geneva?” “Since that person is an advisor, he only goes to Geneva on business trips during League of Nations conferences, I hear.” Ichiro Kimura was a minor wealthy individual who had undergone superficial bankruptcy proceedings several years prior for debt reorganization. After resigning as president of several banks, he came to London with his wife and established their household in a quiet flat on Marylebone Street. Though the couple did not own a private automobile, they became guest members of an automobile club on Pall Mall Street—known as London’s club district—and held a unique social standing among Japanese residents in London and select British individuals.

“Mr. Kimura argued that terms like ‘fair competition’ are only used during football games in England these days.” “The word ‘gentleman’ (紳士) is only used for toilets these days—that’s what the British themselves say, you know—” “Hmm.” “See, Mr. Hachiya, you’ve had the wind taken out of your sails too!”

Nobuko laughed amusedly, her voice ringing out. “That’s exactly where Mr. Kimura’s rhetorical skill lies, you see. “People from Japan who know the name of Ichiro Kimura—the formerly wealthy man—and come visiting on their Geneva pilgrimages end up thinking, in that single encounter, that Mr. Kimura is some incredible radical. “This is socialism, I tell you. “So then, Mr. Kimura gradually started talking about British commercial spirit, you see. “Finally, when he tells representatives troubled by labor issues that capitalists seeking ordinary interest rates of seven to eight percent is a rational and universally accepted norm, so they should disclose the financial reports to the workers—and if the workers still refuse to accept it, then it’s the workers’ fault—the listeners apparently come to think even that is a socialist way of thinking. “Mr. Kimura would act all dismayed—‘People come all the way to me just to hear such obvious things!’—but he was clearly relishing it.”

Ryosaku Hachiya let out a loud voice and threw his head back as he laughed.

Fixated on Nobuko having come from Moscow to London, Ichiro Kimura pressed his criticism of dictatorship with near-obsessive persistence. Conflating Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy with the proletariat’s class-based dictatorship, when Nobuko pointed this out, Kimura retorted, “Either way—if it’s called dictatorship, then it’s the same thing,” puffing out his chest in his armchair. He then recommended that Nobuko read Aldous Huxley’s lengthy novel Point Counter Point, which was then a popular topic of discussion. “In Japan,” he said, “they imitate the Soviets and carry on about proletarian novels and such nonsense—utterly unreadable. Huxley writes with true grandeur. In short, our class and the working class being point counter point—that’s the truth. They form hyperbolas that will never converge. Yet precisely because of this opposition,” he continued, “we strive to cooperate—and succeed. That is Britain’s commercial spirit. To demand dictatorship simply because we differ—that’s the Third International’s way.” Such were the views of Kimura—a minor wealthy man in private life, though bankrupt before creditors and depositors.

“I wonder what Mr. Kimura’s specialty is.” “Well, at university he studied economics—and apparently dabbled in things like the Shinjinkai.” Hachiya, after a moment’s thought, “Did you meet Ryosuke Tone?” Hachiya asked Nobuko. “I did.” “What was he doing?”

She understood he meant what research [Tone] had been engaged in, but Nobuko couldn’t respond immediately.

“That was rude of me, wasn’t it? There’s no use asking Ms. Sasa anyway, I suppose.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Nobuko acknowledged with startling frankness.

"I don’t understand it myself." Not only did she fail to grasp the subject of his research, but Ryosuke Tone himself—as both a man and a scholar—remained for Nobuko something that seemed comprehensible yet ultimately eluded understanding. "In a sense, isn’t he something of a dilettante—both in scholarship and in life?" Without saying a word, Ryosaku Hachiya looked at Nobuko with an expression that furrowed both brows. "Isn’t Mr. Tone the type who, whatever he does, discovers something to savor there and then savors his own ability to savor things in that way?"

Ryosuke Tone lived in a boardinghouse-style hotel near the British Museum's library. Every day, he spent several hours conducting research there. Marx had developed his theory of value from the Orthodox School of British economics. Tone argued that at the juncture where Marx built his own theories upon Ricardo's work, there remained an unresearched point. People dismissed Marx as beyond reproach without proper study, yet beneath his halo persisted an intellect robust enough to reveal dogmatic elements and flaws in his value theory upon scrutiny—passages forcibly wrenched from Ricardo's framework. This was what Tone intended to unearth and expose. ——

In Tone’s manner, there was a veiled contempt for those called Marxists today. Tone expressed his aversion to the Third International through his characteristically subtle methods. Nobuko had perceived it as such.

“However, I don’t think he’s acting solely from those motivations alone—there are aspects that don’t quite fit.” “It’s undeniably true that Marx’s theory warrants more rigorous academic examination.”

Hachiya himself spoke in a voice that held a certain attraction to such research topics. While twirling ivy leaves that had fallen onto the stone bench between her fingers, Nobuko suddenly fell silent. Before her lay a pond surface where white shadows of marble pillars gleamed in the afternoon sunlight that had begun to slant. The western sun shone diagonally across the clean line of Nobuko’s cropped hair at her nape. Though unaware of it herself, her earlobe glowed translucent red where backlit by this western light. On the leaf-strewn soil before the bench, Hachiya paced back and forth. He had left his hat beside Nobuko on the bench.

Ryosuke Tone and Nobuko’s interactions in London.

What had that truly been about? In the silence of Monceau Park, Nobuko was recalling that.

It was around the time when criticism of Bukharin’s opportunism and deviations published in *Pravda* had become international newspaper news, leaving Nobuko stunned. “Historical Materialism” For Nobuko—who had approached communism through *The ABCs of Communism* and Bukharin’s works—the *Pravda* critique struck with particular force precisely because she recognized its legitimacy. That shock also delivered a solemn warning: even when acting from goodwill, without theoretical solidity, one might be swept away anywhere at any time.

Ryosuke Tone, rather than seeking to understand the errors and dangers inherent in Bukharin’s theory itself regarding that issue, characteristically fixated on the authoritarian nature of the Russian Communist Party’s institutional decisions. “Even an artist like you, Nobuko—is that really the case?”

While accepting Nobuko wholly as a woman, Ryosuke Tone spoke as though savoring the intriguing tactile feedback of perpetually opposing his own ideas against her way of thinking and meshing them together. “Human instinct—in this case chiefly manifesting as a desire for power, I suppose—don’t you consider how such factors might function within *The Communist Manifesto*’s actuality?” According to him, he maintained that the Soviet regime had endured until now—and even seemed to develop—precisely because the Russian people’s cultural level remained inferior to that of European nations.

“Otherwise, you couldn’t completely control things with just a single sheet of Pravda like that.” “You’re impossible!” At that moment, in front of the table at Café Lion in Charing Cross where the two had been talking, Nobuko’s face and voice became truly angry.

“What you’re saying has too little basis.” “Who do you think is running the Soviet Union with just a single sheet of Pravda?” “Those people there have figured out how to manage a new way of living themselves.” “That you refuse to see that fact—” As Nobuko hesitated to say it’s a lie, Ryosuke Tone gazed at her with eyes gleaming with dark intellect and pressed her.

“So?—You refuse to see it?—”

Nobuko rephrased her words into a somewhat more polite expression, "I think it's intellectual cowardice," she said. "I see..."

Eventually, Ryosuke Tone laughed as if amused.

“Ha ha ha ha. Nobuko truly possesses the archetype of a delightful spirit. Intellectual cowardice, eh? —But, Nobuko, do you think Leonardo da Vinci had no doubts? Wisdom always begins with doubt.”

Nobuko,

“Let’s stop this now.”

With that, she prepared to rise from the table.

“Japan is an extremely backward country, so men hold that much more privilege than women. In that sense, women are the oppressed masses. Getting married and then divorced—this means something significant for a woman. As such a woman, I lived in Moscow for a year and a half. And through life itself—as an overall direction—I affirm that place there. I see that people can have lives filled with joy. Mine isn’t some intellectual game.”

Taking the bill in hand and walking toward the counter, Ryosuke Tone said. “So you weren’t Erasmus after all, Nobuko.” What had such conversations—in their essence—sought to clarify as they were exchanged between that man Ryosuke Tone and that woman Nobuko?

On a cloudy evening shortly before Nobuko was to leave London, Ryosuke Tone and Nobuko walked along the tree-lined path before Buckingham Palace, where few people passed by. As they walked, Ryosuke Tone said casually, “If I were to let someone like you grow completely free and write all you want to write, how pleasant that would be.” His tone carried an unusual sensation—as if enveloping and flowing around Nobuko’s body while she matched her two steps to each one of his. After walking in silence for a while, Nobuko said clearly,

"No," she said. "No—that's an illusion. What would you do if you took it seriously?" The act of nurturing a person. The act of making that person write. What method existed there, what would occur—regarding matters she couldn't even comprehend—did Tone, being a man, think he could somehow achieve such things within his own power simply because Nobuko was a woman? Moreover, between Tone and Nobuko, there were differences of opinion on practically every matter imaginable. Did Ryosuke Tone think that such things were trivial matters between men and women? The manner in which Tone spoke, drawing Nobuko in, surprised her.

“Hmm… An illusion?” “I don’t think so, but—”

“It’s an illusion!” Nobuko said，as if wrenching herself free from the atmosphere. “It’s merely that my way of thinking and temperament interest you.”

“Then—am I someone of no interest to you?” “Would I walk and talk with someone I have absolutely no interest in? But that’s different. Isn’t that right? It can be entirely separate.”

After walking in silence for a while and turning the corner near Buckingham Palace, Nobuko smiled—a smile of one liberated from the vortex she had nearly been pulled into— “Mr. Tone.”

she called.

“I’m neither Miss McDonald nor Miss Kimura. So you see, with the British way of cooperating precisely because there’s conflict, you can’t manage everything, you know.” “—I see!”

The young guardsman in resplendent uniform patrolling around Buckingham Palace like clockwork automatons at that moment executed a precise right-face turn with a solemn expression right beside Nobuko.

Nobuko wrote to Motoko in Moscow about the various things she discussed with Ryosuke Tone. She also wrote about walking around Buckingham. However, she did not mention the conversation that was briefly exchanged during that walk—the one that determined the nature of their relationship. In the letter she would write to Moscow tonight or tomorrow, how would Nobuko describe having gone out with Ryosaku Hachiya—who came to visit her on the seventh floor of “Monceau et Tocqueville”—and lingering so leisurely in Monceau Park?

In the sunny spot of the autumn park, Nobuko had been thinking about such things yet remained entirely untroubled in mind. She simply savored all that this moment contained—the ease of relaxed conversation and the pleasantness of outdoor air. Ryosaku Hachiya picked up his hat from the bench as he prepared to resume walking.

“In any case, Ms. Sasa, you’re quite practical in your approach to life,” said Hachiya. “The other night during our first proper conversation—that’s what struck me most strongly about you. Yoshimi must be quite different in that regard, wouldn’t you say? Compared to you—” Nobuko disliked discussing Yoshimi—who wasn’t even present—in such terms with Hachiya. “That person knows far more than I do—after all, her Russian is so fluent.”

Though Motoko knew many things well, her characteristic of not pushing her own life to match that knowledge was one of her traits that needed no explanation to Hachiya now. Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya walked toward the exit along a path from the pond deep in the park, taking the opposite route from which they had come.

“This time, I’m determined to walk through Paris properly.” “It’s not as if there’s any need to rush.” “If my parents return, I’ll go back to Moscow right away.” “So—well, I suppose there’s about a month.”

“Is it really that pressing?”

Hachiya seemed taken aback.

The two rested at a café in a plaza-like space before Monceau Park. As evening fell, a suddenly chilled wind rolled fallen horse chestnut leaves across the autumn park's front café where few patrons sat. Between the park's trees, streetlamps lit up. Lights simultaneously came on inside the café-restaurant, awakening Paris's nightly bustle. "Ms. Sasa," he said, "since we're here, shall we have dinner before leaving?"

Since there was no reason to refuse, Nobuko remained silent. "Since you unexpectedly let me stay over last time—this should be acceptable, shouldn’t it?" "It wasn’t me who opened the room for you—it was Ms. Yoshimi." "Then as her representative." "Here, the oysters must be excellent." The restaurant, half-built like a park gazebo, gradually filled with patrons accompanied by women. Most were stylish middle-aged pairs dressed with care.

Watching the practiced gestures of a man who locked the car he had driven there—tucking the key into his trouser pocket before lightly taking the elbow of his waiting female companion as they entered the restaurant—Nobuko... “Are you all right，Mr.Hachiya?” She laughed mischievously. “Isn’t this a bit out of character for you?” “A place like this—” “That’s not at all true.” Hachiya answered earnestly. He then turned his face away. Nobuko stood up to telephone Pereire about not returning for dinner.

III

On a cold, windy night past nine o'clock, with just two or three days remaining until September's end, a taxi that had come speeding from Montmartre came to a stop before 47 Pereire. The door opened, and from within emerged Tsuyako, Takeyo, Taizo, and finally Nobuko in that order; surrounding Takeyo—whose lace-shawled shoulders appeared chilled—they disappeared one by one through Number 47's large glass entrance. After eight o'clock, apartment entrances in this area were locked. When someone rang the bell, the janitor would flip a switch from their residence beside the foyer, causing one side of the entrance door to open only while that person entered. The Sasa family hurriedly slipped into the hall during that brief interval. Nobuko—who had been about to follow everyone toward the elevator—from the small window of the janitor's residence—

“Miss!”

She was called out to. In the janitor’s small window facing the entrance, bathed in orange light from a lamp behind him, an old man in a collarless shirt leaned out. “Voilà! A telegram for you.” He handed over a long, narrow folded piece of paper. Nobuko accepted it with a strange feeling that was both anxious and utterly free of anxiety. “Thank you.”

Placing a tip on the old man’s palm, Nobuko went to where her family stood waiting by the elevator.

“Oh, a telegram?” Takeyo blinked nervously. "It came to me." “It must be from Ms. Yoshimi.” When Motoko arrived in Moscow, she had sent a telegram to Nobuko addressed to their hotel in London; and when Nobuko and the others had just returned to Pereire, she sent another telegram. "Buko, are you well? Inform me of your lodging," written in roman letters. Motoko’s impatience—unable to wait for the exchange of letters—overflowed in that telegram. Even now, Nobuko had received this one without surprise, having decided it was seventy percent likely from Moscow. Nobuko opened the folded paper, her expression becoming bewildered.

“This is strange... What does this mean?” KESAROKUJI, ISO, ZA, KIKYŌ, SUKESHISU Nobuko, suddenly bewildered by the Romanized spelling “Sukeshisu” that resembled Greek, found her judgment all the more thrown into disarray precisely because the meaning of the opening phrase “Kesarokuji” was clear and unshakable. The only thing that was clear was that this telegram wasn’t from Motoko. What did Iso, za, kikyo, SukeshisuIsoza kikyo Sukeshisu mean?

“Let me see.”

Taizo held the telegram slightly away from his face as he read it, and Nobuko, standing beside him, peered at it as well.

“See—you don’t understand it either, do you?”

After looking at the telegram for a short while, Taizo—

“This—the spelling—seems to have been torn off here.” “The characters were supposed to connect to the ones above, don’t you think?” “Like ‘Isozaki Kyosuke,’ for instance.” “Do you know anyone by that name, Nobuko?”

“I know.”

Having been told this, goosebumps rose from Nobuko’s cheeks down to her jaw as she stared intently and reread it. Kesarokuji, Isozaki Kyosuke SHI SU――died――

“Oh!” That was Nobuko’s genuine voice of surprise. “What on earth does this mean?!” The young painter Kyosuke Isozaki and his equally young wife Sumiko, who also painted, were more Motoko’s old acquaintances than Nobuko’s friends. When they came to Paris, Motoko and Nobuko had relied on these two. After moving to the hotel in Vaugirard, until the Sasa group arrived in Paris, Nobuko and the others had been looked after in various ways by the Isozakis. Just shortly before the Sasa family arrived in Marseille, Isozaki had lost his eldest son—the boy they had entrusted to foster care in Saint-Germain.

When the funeral was held at Père-Lachaise, Nobuko, enveloped in painful thoughts, assisted Sumiko who stood dressed in mourning clothes. ——

It was only about a week after returning from London that Nobuko visited Isozaki’s residence. At that time there was no sign of illness anywhere in Kyosuke. He said the piece he was preparing for the Salon d'Automne was nearly finished and indeed seemed more energized and driven than ever. When Nobuko thought of Sumiko—the wife who had sent her the telegram—with her quiet beauty and few words and of the frail child who looked like white butterflies she found herself utterly unable to wait until morning.

“Father and everyone, please go ahead inside without me. I’ll be going now.”

The Sasa family had just returned after spending a long, leisurely and comfortable time at a restaurant called “Red Horse” in Montmartre. The telegram had been dispatched at 2:00 p.m. As Nobuko reflected on how they had spent their time from then until now，she felt an even more heartrending ache. She opened the handbag and checked the amount of money she had.

"I'll probably stay there tonight." Taizo also went outside and hailed a taxi for Nobuko. "If it gets late, come back tomorrow morning—not in the middle of the night."

“I will.”

And the taxi pulled away. Before departing for London, she and Motoko had often taken that late-night path—a desolate route winding from beside the Trocadéro across the Seine to the opposite bank. When they entered Rue Dutot, the windows of its diligent, early-rising residents were already half-darkened. Nobuko climbed the stairs of Isozaki’s residence—its entrance gaping as though untouched by tragedy, bathed in the faint glow of streetlamps from a town slipping into slumber—tentatively feeling her way up on tiptoe. Kyosuke Isozaki was dead. He had left behind his wife and child. Yet nowhere in the building where his family lived could even a tremor of that calamity be sensed.

The loneliness of the night, indifferent to human life and death, permeated Nobuko as she climbed the stairs alone, tentatively feeling her way forward on tiptoe. The telegram she had seen at Pèreire was gripped by a sense of disbelief.

Nobuko held her breath and knocked on Isozaki's room door. Without a word, the door opened immediately. The unfamiliar Japanese man who had opened the door upon seeing Nobuko standing in the hallway— "Oh, hello."

He said ambiguously, bowed his head, stepped back, and let Nobuko into the room. Four or five varied middle-aged Japanese men were gathered by the unadorned sofa in the room as usual. Nobuko, not knowing what to say, silently bowed to those present. “Mrs. Isozaki is over there—please.” Nobuko walked toward the adjacent bedroom that had been indicated with courteous gestures. Only one panel of the double French doors stood ajar. When she muted her footsteps and paused at the threshold, the scene entered Nobuko’s field of vision. The bed placed against the far wall of the spacious bedroom; upon it lay Kyosuke Isozaki; beside him sat Sumiko’s black-clad figure—properly positioned on a chair with her thick bob-cut head bowed low. At sensing human presence, Sumiko raised her head. The instant she recognized Nobuko, Sumiko’s slender black form rose from the chair while swaying violently back and forth. Nobuko instinctively rushed forward.

“Ms. Sasa.” Sumiko’s slender, ice-cold fingers clamped down on Nobuko’s hand like a vise. “You came.”

“I’m sorry. I only just managed to read the telegram moments ago.”

Nobuko whispered. As if trying not to disturb the slumber of Kyosuke Isozaki who lay sprawled on the bed against the wall. "If you were in Paris at all, I knew you would come." "Ms. Sasa." "This time...this time I..." Sumiko—her face buried in Nobuko's left shoulder—trembled violently through her entire body. Nobuko held her tight with both hands. How desperately Sumiko had been seeking someone to cling to like this since morning. Nobuko felt it as though her own flesh were being carved. Sumiko had just lost her elder child—the one she'd entrusted to the countryside—in late June of this very year.

“How awful this is!” Nobuko said indignantly at the grief piled upon Sumiko. “It was his tooth.” “—His tooth?” “The day before yesterday, his back tooth started hurting terribly, so he went to the doctor.” “They extracted it.” “The bacteria entered from there.” “……” When they were at the hotel in Vaugirard, Nobuko vividly remembered how Motoko had caused a commotion with her toothache. At that time, there had been a doctor introduced by Isozaki. Had Kyosuke himself gone to that doctor this time? The doctor’s consultation room, where sunlight scarcely reached, and the old sofa in the waiting room resurfaced in Nobuko’s memory.

“It was truly sudden. His heart suddenly weakened—Isozaki never dreamed he would die.” Beneath Sumiko’s thick, bob-cut bangs, both eyelids—already red and swollen from incessant crying—were painful to behold. Nobuko, guided by Sumiko, approached the bed where Kyosuke lay. Sumiko removed the handkerchief that had been placed over her face. Kyosuke Isozaki’s face, which appeared from beneath it with his eyes closed and perfectly still, was exactly as it had always been. His skin, without excess flesh, had always been pale. On the right side of his slightly swollen jaw, there was a faint purple spot about one centimeter in diameter. That single spot had taken Isozaki’s life.

While staring at Kyosuke’s lifeless, cold face, Nobuko felt her own body begin to sway back and forth, just as Sumiko’s had earlier. And it was the walls’ fault. She screamed in her heart that the walls were to blame. This house on Rue Dutot where the Isozakis lived was one of those old buildings commonly found on Paris’s outskirts. Even in bright midsummer daylight outside, the walls around the staircase leading from the entrance to each floor were so dark and damp, with such stagnant air, that one could hardly distinguish their color. The walls were stained with moisture and life’s grime—the same was true indoors. The Isozakis had kept only the barest furniture in that hollow space, living an intentionally unadorned existence. This bedroom too contained nothing but a single bed where Isozaki lay—placed on bare floorboards against the wall—and an old-fashioned wardrobe built into the room. The gray wall above the bed’s headboard had, over years, developed faint uneven patches that seeped through in vague mottling. The blurred stains on those walls and the faint purple spot that had emerged on Isozaki’s right jaw—from her very first visits to this building, Nobuko had sensed something unhealthy about these pitch-dark, damp staircase walls and their surroundings. But what good would it do to say that now?

Sumiko gently and carefully placed a handkerchief over Kyosuke's face, as if not to disturb the sleeping person.

“What became of the work?” It was the painting for the Salon d’Automne that Kyosuke had said he would soon finish when they met the other day.

“That’s been taken care of.” “The delivery was handled—perhaps that exhaustion played a part.”

The two of them spoke in hushed voices while looking down at the bed where Kyosuke Isozaki lay. “What about the little one? With Madame?” “Yes. The nurse I called this morning is a kind person and will stay with me the whole time.”

After hesitating a little, Nobuko said to Sumiko. “Since this has happened so suddenly, if my money could be of any use, shall I bring some? I don’t have much myself, but I can borrow some—”

“Thank you.” “I’m all right for now.” “Just now, something that had been sent from Isozaki’s home was still untouched, so—” As she said this, an unmistakably anguished expression flooded Sumiko’s face. For years, Sumiko had lived in apprehension of Isozaki’s parents—even when their first child died, they had declared it her failing. Amid this fresh grief, Sumiko already understood precisely how her in-laws’ disappointment would manifest toward her.

Among the four or five people gathered there, the eldest was Waichiro’s art history professor from his art school days. In restrained tones, someone mentioned Waichiro who was in London. The others close to Kyosuke Isozaki in age and appearance were all painters. Though it was natural that Nobuko spoke little when meeting these people for the first time under such circumstances, she wondered how intimate a relationship Kyosuke Isozaki himself had truly shared with them. As one of the female friends seated there for this man who had died suddenly in a foreign land, she sensed an atmosphere that compelled such thoughts. This was Kyosuke Isozaki who had strived to shield himself from Paris’s Japanese community. A death that had occurred abruptly against his will. Though these people were likely closer friends than any others, not a single memory of Isozaki was exchanged among the four or five who had come. He did not seem the sort to have left behind anecdotes that might spring spontaneously from friends’ hearts.

After a while, Sumiko emerged from the bedroom and joined the seated gathering. She faced the guests arranged in a semicircle and sat alone on a single chair set apart. The late-night electric light shone down upon the silently seated people. Sumiko placed her hands neatly clasped on her lap over the thin black woolen dress she always wore, petrified by grief and making no movement. The well-defined contours of Sumiko's face—framed by her black bobbed hair—remained undisturbed by sorrow unlike ordinary women, growing ever paler and tauter until Sumiko herself resembled a solemn statue of grief.

Nobuko gazed in surprise at such inner strength within Sumiko. Sumiko’s pure spirit was so fully immersed in such manifestations of grief that the people struck by her excessively earnest sorrow could not even find an opportunity to offer half-hearted words of sympathy. In the silence, time pressed onward with weight. Nobuko grew cold.

“Excuse me,” she said, putting on her mended coat. “Ms. Sumiko, why don’t you lie down for a bit?” “Thank you.” “Aren’t you cold?” “No.” “I’ll take my leave too,” said one of two people who had wrapped their coats around their lower bodies. Sumiko did not move. And once again, a time of silence passed.

Nobuko began to think that perhaps it was her role—as the sole woman on the host’s side—to somehow ease this painfully rigid atmosphere of sorrow for those keeping vigil through the night. In Japanese wakes, there were established customs she vaguely understood, but what did French people do in such situations? Serving hot drinks and light snacks late at night wouldn’t seem inappropriate. But how should one arrange that? In Rue Dutot, night fell early—this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where cafés stayed open until dawn. Unaccustomed to Parisian life and limited in French, Nobuko didn’t think to consult the lodging’s madame directly.

Nobuko, who had been secretly fretting for some time, finally resolved that it was best to leave everything to Sumiko. In the face of her profound sorrow, there was no need for Nobuko to fuss over conventional considerations. As long as her sorrow was not disturbed, that would be best. Isozaki and Sumiko could spend tonight in the same way they had when Kyosuke was alive and interacting with these people. That was what friends were.

Sumiko would occasionally rise from her seat and go to the adjacent room where Kyosuke lay. When Sumiko left that room, low conversations would be exchanged among the guests.

At dawn, the lodging’s Madame knocked on the door. And hot coffee was brought in.

IV

Around nine in the morning, Nobuko briefly returned to Pereire. Breakfast was about to begin. Nobuko stood by the table, drank hot milk, then entered Tsuyako’s still-uncleaned room and slept in one stretch until two in the afternoon.

After preparing to go out again, Nobuko intended to attend the final wake that night. As she was taking out another sweater from the trunk in the corner of Tsuyako's room in preparation for the deepening night, the bell rang at the apartment entrance. The sound of Madame Roussel answering the door and speaking could be heard. Taizo and Takeyo had gone out. Leaving the entrance door ajar, Madame Roussel came toward the bedroom. At that moment, Tsuyako—who until then had been quietly sketching flowers in the living room—rushed out and entered the room where Nobuko was.

“I’m sorry—I forgot. Father said to show this to Elder Sister—”

As Tsuyako handed Nobuko a business card, Madame Roussel,

“Miss,” Madame Roussel said. “Mr. Chigusa has arrived. He says he has an appointment.” This coincided with her words. On the upper portion of the business card printed with “Seiji Chigusa,” in Taizo’s handwriting, was written that he had met him at the embassy the day before yesterday and that he earnestly wished to meet Nobuko. “September 29th afternoon visit planned” was scribbled beneath. The address listed for Seiji Chigusa was that of the Japanese Embassy.

Holding the business card in her hand, Nobuko stood silently for a moment, seeming reluctant. “Thank you, Madame Roussel. I will meet him.”

Nobuko went to check the entrance. Standing there was a gloomy-looking young man who appeared twenty-four or twenty-five. Nobuko excused herself by explaining that a friend had met with misfortune and she needed to leave immediately, then showed him to the parlor. Tsuyako hurriedly flipped over the canvas on the easel. Nobuko would have preferred Tsuyako to remain. “It’s fine as you are—why don’t you stay here without leaving, Tsuyako?”

When she saw the young man settled in the parlor, there was a mismatch between the impression conveyed by the business card Taizo had received and what she directly perceived from him. Among Japanese Embassy staff in Paris, it was characteristic that not only Secretary Shuzo Masunaga but even the clerks handling documents at the front desk carried themselves with considerable affectation. While Japanese officials in Berlin affected bureaucratic airs, their Parisian counterparts postured as though only they truly understood French refinement. The young man named Seiji Chigusa now sitting on the sofa before Nobuko wore none of the attire favored by embassy staff with such pretensions, nor did he bear any diplomat-like expression. He appeared utterly ordinary and shabby—a quality distinct from both the uncouthness of Japanese painters in Paris and Ryosaku Hachiya's provincial boorishness. Nobuko,

“Was there something you required?”

she asked. “I’m sorry to rush you,” the young man named Chigusa said in a low, raspy voice, “Actually, I came because I wanted to hear about various things from you—” He made a displeased expression at Nobuko’s lack of time and turned his face away. Nobuko, from Chigusa’s manner of speaking and expressions, found herself growing even cooler toward him. Nobuko said rhetorically,

“Since you’ve come without an appointment—I must excuse myself.” She said. And then remained silent, keeping her position.

Chigusa bent his upper body forward from where he sat on the sofa, propped his elbows on his spread knees, and ran his fingers through his hair. He raised his face, “I’ve long wanted to go to Moscow, but...” he began to speak. “When I heard you had come to Paris, I absolutely wanted to ask you directly about various things regarding that—and so, in fact, I came to trouble you.” Tsuyako, who was nearby, made a gesture indicating that such talk was a hindrance. Nobuko ignored it.

“It’s rather odd for someone from the embassy to be asking me about entry permit procedures.”

In Nobuko’s voice, criticism lay veiled beneath laughter. “Of course I know that. “No—I want to enter Moscow through other means.”

It seemed he meant wanting to enter Moscow through illegal means. Why was he asking Nobuko such things? To her mind, someone leading such a disorganized life—the sort who would pose such questions to her—had no conceivable reason to need illegal entry to Moscow. "It’s misguided of you to ask me. Someone like me went through proper channels—a fully legitimate visa obtained via Shunpei Todo’s introduction..."

“That may be so, but in any case, since you were able to stay in Moscow for over a year, I think you must have naturally come to understand various connections during that time.”

Without meeting her gaze, Chigusa leaned forward on the sofa with the posture of a young man seemingly weighed down by inner turmoil, his persistent words met by Nobuko’s heavy stare fixed upon him. Had someone encountering the present Nobuko in Paris heard she went to Moscow through Shunpei Todo’s introduction, they would naturally have lifted their bowed head to regard her with faintly startled eyes—this much seemed obvious. At least Nobuko herself recognized the gulf now separating her current self from the woman who had once sought to reach Moscow. Yet this youth called Chigusa remained unmoved by such considerations as though he had already accounted for them, and while conceding her point with a perfunctory “that may be so,” his relentless return to talk of “over a year” began evoking in Nobuko an instinctive revulsion.

“When you stay in Moscow for over a year, you come to understand things that are the exact opposite of what you imagine.” “You clearly realize there’s no bridge between Japanese people legally residing in Moscow and those who go there illegally.” “There’s nothing romantic about it at all—I’m a legal traveler through and through, you know.”

“—” The young man called Chigusa remained silent for a while, as if restlessly agitated, and roughly raked his fingers through his hair again. “I’ve read what you’ve written.” “I believe I understand what feelings you hold toward the Soviet.” “I suppose that may be the case.” “I do value the Soviet.” “I believe even one more person should know its unbiased reality.” “But if you think my having such feelings implies some special circumstances—that itself would be a manifestation of prejudice.”

“—” Nobuko lowered her voice slightly,

“Tsuyako, about what time is it?”

she asked. Tsuyako went to check the travel clock in the dining room—its door left open adjacent to the parlor. “3:40.”

Tsuyako remained on the dining room chair as she was. And then, she began to spread out an album of ship postcards on the table. The young man called Chigusa, keeping his posture of not looking at Nobuko’s face, checked his wristwatch beneath his cuff as if confirming something. Before long, as Nobuko waited for the farewell greetings to begin, Chigusa—

“I just can’t believe what you say.”

Chigusa began to speak. "I think you must surely understand." Nobuko's emotions pivoted sharply. She let her voice resonate with the raw intensity of her displeasure.

“What exactly is it that you must ask me, I wonder?” She asked, placing an inescapable inflection on “what you must ask.” “Even though embassy people are generally so particular about common sense and good taste, your social skills are in a league of their own.” “Excuse me for saying so, but you should have gone to the French Communist Party rather than coming to me.” “And you should have tried saying what you just said there.” “If you are someone who should go to Moscow by a method I don’t understand, then for that very reason, you would never have come to someone like me.” “That much, at least, I clearly understand.”

“…………”

Nobuko slowly stood up from the chair.

“Excuse me, but I must be going now…”

The young man called Chigusa also stood up from the sofa in a manner that suggested he had finally resolved himself. “Shall I walk you that far?” “...I need to get ready, so please go ahead.”

In the entranceway while threading his arms into his coat, Chigusa— “In Japan, it appears quite a few Communist Party heavyweights are being taken down again.” he said. “So it seems.”

When she was in London, such articles from international news services had come to Nobuko’s attention. They did not report the specific details of their contents. At that moment, Nobuko wanted nothing more than for this man called Chigusa to leave quickly.

“It seems Sano Manabu has finally been taken down as well.”

Hearing that, Nobuko, in the same tension-free tone,

“Oh.”

Even so, she required conscious effort. “Well, I’ll take my leave.”

“Goodbye.” After shutting the thick entrance door firmly behind the departing Chigusa, Nobuko stood there and flung her arms wide like a bird shaking its wings,

“Ah!” With a gasping sound, she brought down both arms and struck her own sides.

Tsuyako,

“Sister.” She emerged from the dining room. Nobuko instinctively— “Father just had to make someone like that come over, didn’t he?”

While heading back toward the parlor, she complained to her sister in a voice choked with tears. “This person was kind of scary—” It was not the content of the conversation but the somehow unusual atmosphere that had lingered while Chigusa—a man she did not know—and Nobuko were interacting that Tsuyako pointed out with her girlish sensitivity.

“Sister has to go to Mr. Isozaki’s place now, but will you be all right alone, Tsuyako?”

“—It’s fine. Mother will be back soon, I’m sure.”

“If the bell rings, don’t answer it yourself—have Madame Roussel come out, alright? If no one’s there, then you can just leave it be.” “I will.” While preparing to go out and talking to Tsuyako, the words she had just heard—that Sano Manabu had also been arrested—would not leave Nobuko’s mind. The name Sano Manabu was widely known as that of a leader of the Japanese Communist Party. While she had been in Japan, let alone after coming to Moscow, Nobuko’s knowledge about that person had remained extremely vague; it was not something that had been theoretically deepened. However, during her time living in Moscow, the significance of what it meant for a Communist Party leader to bear such responsibility in a single country had been driven home into Nobuko’s consciousness. Nobuko keenly felt that the arrest of Sano Manabu was a blow to the Japanese Communist Party, which, though operating illegally, was steadily growing. When Nobuko had learned about the mass arrests on March 15th last year in Moscow—precisely because it had been through a newspaper marked with red-ink keys sent by Taizo—she had been acutely made to feel only the constriction of the red-ink key placed upon her as an individual. Now that Sano Manabu had also been arrested—if that was true—Nobuko felt it as an event for Japan’s communist movement. The true meaning of “suppression” against communism, the essential irrationality of a power that could not help but carry out such acts—these had come to be understood by Nobuko with vivid clarity since arriving in Europe.

Lost in thought as she set out, Nobuko abruptly halted. If she were to attend Kyosuke Isozaki’s funeral dressed as she was now—in a skirt and wool blouse—it would be far too disrespectful. Nobuko had Tsuyako hurriedly prepare to go out and left Pèreire. And at a clothing store near Wagram Square, she bought ready-made black clothes. She had Tsuyako put the skirt and blouse she had taken off into a small cardboard box, which Tsuyako would then take home while out for a walk. After resting a little at a café in the same square, Nobuko,

“If you go straight there, you’ll end up right in front of the house whether you like it or not, alright? Be careful, now.”

After Tsuyako’s back, clad in a navy half-coat, had disappeared into the crowd, Nobuko hailed a taxi.

In connection with Sano Manabu’s arrest, hundreds or even thousands of people in Japan—workers among them—were surely suffering terribly. Completely unrelated to that, in an old building on Rue Dutot, Isozaki lay dead on his bed beneath the stained wall. In Paris, Sumiko’s solitary sorrow—having lost her child and then been bereaved by Isozaki—seemed to carve into Nobuko’s very being. Though Nobuko urged the taxi driver toward Sumiko with single-minded determination, just as such events had occurred in Paris at July’s end, in Japan too many people were arrested—amid history’s old and new forces clashing violently—and entirely separate from all this, Isozaki’s life had ended, leaving behind only endless sorrow. This made Nobuko reflect deeply. Kyosuke Isozaki’s efforts as a painter and Sumiko’s struggles—having abandoned herself to support them—could be said to have consumed his brief life until it reached what might be called a newness: old things driven to their limits and forced into a distorted bloom, seen from the endpoint of his existence there.

Isozaki's residence on Rue Dutot had the sort of comings and goings typical of the day before a funeral. When Nobuko arrived, a twenty-two or twenty-three-year-old man she hadn't seen the day before was about to leave and return regarding the burial permit from the ward office. "Truly, I've been so looked after by everyone—" Sumiko, who had apparently lain down for about three hours before Nobuko arrived, sat on a chair in the parlor wearing the black clothes from the previous day, clasping her hands tightly together as if trying to support herself.

“Since everyone was so kindly concerned, I tried lying down, but I simply couldn’t sleep...”

It was Sumiko’s voice—low and steady. "You should have at least a little something." “Yes, just a little.” The fact that Nobuko was there was of no use for the practical tasks of funeral preparations. Nobuko was there as a momentary refuge for Sumiko’s anguished heart. When the tasks receded slightly, Sumiko came to sit beside Nobuko.

“Are you feeling alright?” “Yes.” Their exchanged words were limited to that, yet in the very fact that the two remained silently near each other, there lay a respite from the sorrowful busyness of practical matters. For Sumiko—who bore both sorrow in her own heart and practical decisions on her own shoulders—such moments were necessary.

That evening, after eight o'clock, only Nobuko returned home. If it were only men keeping vigil through the night in Isozaki's parlor, then there existed a manner in which even those men could relax—and consequently, it seemed Sumiko too found moments when she might unwind.

V

Two days after Isozaki’s funeral, in the afternoon, Nobuko stayed alone for a long time in the hotel attic room she had returned to for Madame Ragondel’s lesson. For those in the Pèreire household, Nobuko’s friend Kyosuke Isozaki having died suddenly in Paris—leaving behind a young wife and small child—was a matter entirely disconnected from their own lives. Nobuko had spent these past days moving between Sumiko’s house on Rue Dutot, the Pèreire household, and her own attic room, her heart aching all the while.

Nobuko, who felt like staying silent and still, lay on her side on the divan—from which she could see the terrace atop the building across the way through the passing traffic—with a white toy monkey cradled in one arm. Lately, there had been an unfamiliar chill in the air of the Pèreire household that Nobuko couldn’t quite grasp. It had a different nature from the usual bustle preceding a departure.

For instance, a theory had recently emerged that returning via the Siberian Railway would be better for Takeyo's health than enduring the Indian Ocean's heat—yet even concerning this, Nobuko could not comprehend Takeyo's feelings. Given Takeyo's deep-seated prejudice against the Soviet Union, there naturally existed various anxieties about traversing Siberia. What struck Nobuko as strange after this matter arose was that Takeyo did not propose traveling together even as far as Moscow.

About a week ago, when—after being advised by the doctor—the discussion arose of whether to cancel the cabin they had reserved in London on the Taiyō Maru, scheduled to depart from Marseille on November 6th, Tsuyako

“Really?” “Mother…” “…How dreary.”

Tsuyako sighed. “There’s no need for you to make a fuss.” “We haven’t decided yet—”

Since then, rather than being discussed collectively, this matter appeared to be addressed within Takeyo’s mind alone, with a complexity that Nobuko could not comprehend. Having spent five months in foreign countries, Nobuko had come to understand and love life in the Soviet Union more deeply and realistically than when she left Moscow. As such, returning to Moscow with a group of travelers who laughed while making jokes at the Soviet Union’s expense and drank pocket whiskey was unbearable for her. Even if Takeyo had invited her, Nobuko would have refused. Nobuko wanted to return to Moscow alone—utterly alone. To fling her heart and body toward beloved Moscow. Nobuko’s feelings were indeed such, but she felt something unnatural in how Takeyo was avoiding her regarding that matter.

Nobuko eventually sat up on the divan, placed a suitcase on her outstretched legs, and began writing a letter to Motoko in Moscow atop it.

“Since I last wrote you, only six days have passed—can you imagine what has occurred here?” Nobuko began recounting to Motoko the circumstances of Kyosuke’s funeral day, starting from that night when she had received the telegram announcing Kyosuke Isozaki’s death. The scene at Père-Lachaise where Kyosuke’s funeral was conducted—Motoko, who had still been in Paris in June when Kyosuke’s elder child died, knew it well.

"The day of the funeral was rainy again this time. On the day of the child’s funeral, it had been raining—but that was a somehow bright rain of early summer, showering the young leaves. The rain the day before yesterday was cold. It was already October in Paris, with its drizzling showers, you know, and the wet pavements of Père-Lachaise were covered with fallen horse chestnut leaves. Ms. Sumiko, the small white butterfly-like baby being held by the nurse, and the eight or nine others including myself—the pipe organ in the hollow chapel played a requiem this time for Mr. Kyosuke. The glass of the small peephole on the front door once again blazed like a ruby. When the pipe organ began to resound with its rich tones, I felt that Ms. Sumiko’s beautiful figure in black, sitting beside me, had drifted away from the child held by the nurse and, of course, from our small gathering of mourners—soaring gradually away as she clung tightly to Kyosuke. I seemed to understand that. And then, Ms. Sumiko—as the wife left behind—was forced to awaken once more to these sorrowful tasks; how difficult that must have been for her. Ms. Sumiko, however, truly passed through these painful moments admirably."

Rain blew into the colonnade of 『The City of Bones』, leaving it drenched there. When Mr. Kyosuke’s remains were placed in the compartment next to where the child’s remains were stored, and the key was put into Ms. Sumiko’s hands, my legs trembled. What a thing it is for a young woman in a foreign country to have to carry two such keys. Ms. Sumiko is quite unique. Her figure enduring this misfortune through sorrow itself has an almost noble quality. What a quiet yet powerful strength she possesses! I am the one who is confused, perplexed, far more in a fluster. When I went to Rue Dutot yesterday, Ms. Sumiko said, in that usual voice of hers, “I have decided to return.” For Ms. Sumiko to return to Japan means she will go back with a living baby cradled in one arm and two sets of remains in the other.

"For these past four days or so, I think it wasn’t only I who wished you had been in Paris. Even someone as useless as me was indeed necessary for Ms. Sumiko. But fortunately, there seems to be a young person kindly helping her with practical matters. 'Toward Ms. Sumiko as she is now, if one is human, they cannot help but be kind.' Nobuko wrote up to that point, rested for a while, and then touched upon the news she had heard from a man named Chigusa."

“To be honest, it’s an immense relief that the Pèreire household remains unaware of this matter.” “But we need to know more about it.” “I believe it would be dishonest not to know.” “Regarding Japan’s current state, you understand.” “Though I’m sure you there already grasp it concretely...” As she wrote these words, Nobuko considered that Ryosaku Hachiya might possess some inkling of these circumstances. To Motoko’s letter she had omitted this—

“Even with my mind occupied by so many layers of things, Madame Ragondel asked me twice during today’s lesson—‘Don’t you want to go out to a café?’—can you believe it! There’s no such exchange anywhere in the textbook. She kept repeating the question with an expression that suggested she was genuinely just practicing conversational phrases. I answered ‘Non’ both times. ‘I don’t want that,’ I told her. I felt both an urge to laugh inwardly and a surge of irritation. That teacher surely relates to her ‘very kind’ Japanese women students more like adversaries than pupils.”

Nobuko once again stopped her pen there. If the Pèreire group were to decide to return via Siberia, Nobuko would naturally have to ask Motoko to look after them in Moscow, even if just for a day. Furthermore, to ensure they would not lack food during the Siberian crossing where snow would soon begin to fall—especially for Takeyo, who could not go without fruit—they would also have to arrange for a sufficiently prepared food basket. If Nobuko herself were to stay put in Paris and only ask Motoko for such favors, how would Motoko take it? Nobuko had no confidence. She decided it wouldn’t be too late to send Motoko a lengthy telegram once this matter was truly settled.

However, the next day, an unexpected unpleasant incident occurred for Nobuko. A little past nine in the morning, as Nobuko—following her usual routine—was coming down from the attic room via the elevator on her way to the Pèreire house and had just reached the hotel entrance, from behind—

“Allô, Mademoiselle.”

A nasally loud voice called out to stop her. When she turned around, there stood the hotel manager—wearing a vest over a cinnamon-colored shirt and a wide white apron, as though he were overseeing the kitchen.

The man stepped behind the counter in the entrance hall and faced Nobuko, who had stopped before it.

“Mademoiselle, when do you plan to vacate the room?”

Abruptly, he asked in crude English. Nobuko had been staying on the seventh floor of the Monceau et Tocqueville Hotel without setting a definite departure date, intending to remain until the Pèreire household left, so being questioned in such a manner struck her as strange. "Why do you want to know that?"

Nobuko, careful to prevent their uncertain English—his imprecise and hers halting—from becoming entangled and causing an absurd situation, pronounced each word slowly and took care with her grammar as she responded. “When will you vacate the room?”

With his eyes fixed intently on Nobuko's face—her attire simple and student-like—the same words were repeated. In the man's eyes was a cold, unpleasant feeling—the inverse of the friendliness he usually showed guests.

"I haven't decided yet." While answering, Nobuko moved much closer to the counter. "However, that question of yours isn't one a hotel manager would normally ask a guest." Without responding to that, he said bluntly, "You don't eat in our dining room."

He said. She had once eaten lunch there, but the food used thick sauces that masked the taste of the meat and fish, which Nobuko hadn’t liked. “That is a separate issue.” “Your hotel *is* a hotel, isn’t it?” “It’s not a boarding house with meals included.” “At the entrance, it says ‘Hôtel Monceau et Tocqueville.’” A mottled flush rose to the choleric face of the man in his fifties. “We can make more profit from that room.”

The conversation became blunt and forceful. It was precisely during the hotel's nine to ten in the morning breakfast hours, and inside the narrow dining room right next to the counter, guests—mostly women—were eating. The strange exchange that had begun at the counter was now fully visible and audible to those people. Since entering or exiting the elevator unavoidably required passing by the counter each time, Nobuko found herself in what amounted to an exposed position there.

Nobuko rebelled more strongly against the manager’s overbearing attitude—his dull, white-tinged eyes glaring—than she was conscious of her own position, so skillfully imposed on her. “You are astonishingly frank.” Nobuko said without lowering her voice in the slightest. The manager was raising his voice at her so loudly it could almost be called shouting. “I’ve come to understand what sort of hotel management methods you employ. But let me remind you—I’m paying the fixed room rate, including a ten percent tip. I may not be some lavish guest, but I am a proper customer for your establishment.”

“We could make far more profit from that room!” As if appealing to the people milling around the counter about the losses he was suffering, the manager swept his gaze around and placed his hand dramatically to his temple. “A young woman like you has no right to cause me losses!” This was an outrageous, baseless accusatory gesture.

“I am not responsible. You did not post ‘boarding house with meals included’ at the entrance—that’s regrettable.” “Find a room somewhere else. To a cheaper place—a cheaper place—” With a shrug of both shoulders characteristic of the French, the man uttered something in French that Nobuko couldn’t understand. “If you don’t vacate the room, I’ll throw your luggage out into the street!”

Nobuko could no longer suppress her anger. "If you believe you have the right to do that, then go ahead and try." "—Go ahead and try!" "We shall see the result." "Is France a lawless country?" At last, the man fell silent. "Without my consent, you are not permitted to do a single thing—touch the luggage or rent the room to someone—"

With a face flushed with anger and brisk footsteps, Nobuko swiftly exited the hotel entrance. Outside, on a fine October morning, lay the bustle of Parisian streets. As she passed by the small park and turned onto the side street toward Pèreire, Nobuko felt her anger gradually subside even as her distaste toward the entire hotel grew stronger.

While Nobuko was arguing, the men and women who had deliberately passed slowly by the counter while eavesdropping, and those who had sat down in the dining room with unnecessary slowness, wore expressions of self-satisfaction. A young woman dressed like a student—apparently without any decent social connections—who came and went alone, a woman who wouldn’t let the hotel earn a single extra franc. In any event, the woman being harassed by the manager. At the counter of a small hotel near the trim Monceau Park—with its elegant arabesque-patterned glass door that matched its name—unfolded a scene straight from a Balzac novel.

To calm her agitation, Nobuko walked past the Pèreire house all the way to Pèreire Square before turning back and entering her home. In the Pèreire dining room, Taizo and Takeyo were in the midst of discussing whether to bring Tsuyako along on their brief trip to Geneva. “What do you think, Tsuyako?” True to his character, Taizo was seeking his youngest daughter’s opinion. Yet there lingered in his tone an undercurrent of burdened resignation. Even with only Takeyo—and her excessive luggage—as his travel companion, the strain of customs procedures and other formalities appeared to weigh heavily on Taizo, now past sixty years of age.

“Since it’s only four or five days… maybe I should stay behind this time… or have Sister stay over or something…” Even for Tsuyako—being dragged from one parlor full of adults to another in Geneva with her half-formed lack of confidence—it must have felt stifling. Tsuyako answered, “I’ll stay behind.” “Nobuko… you’ll stay over… won’t you?”

“Yes… I think I can manage.” “Oh my, you seem rather reluctant, don’t you?” Keeping it from everyone, but because of what had happened at the hotel that morning, Nobuko wondered—if she were to stay here for four or five days—whether her luggage at the hotel might end up in some predicament.

“It’s fine. Go with peace of mind.” If something were to happen, it would be dealt with when it happened—Nobuko resolved in her heart.

“Well then, Father, since it’s been decided, please arrange the tickets.”

Taizo soon went out, and Takeyo returned to her bedroom, saying she hadn't slept well the previous night. Seeming pleased with the prospect of living alone with her sister while their parents were away, Tsuyako cheerfully brought out her painting tools that had been pushed into a corner of the parlor. On the canvas, a landscape was taking shape with bold brushstrokes that revealed Tsuyako's personality—a scene of trees framing a terrace in the foreground. Beyond the boulevard, in the distance, a café with a red-and-white striped awning was visible from here, and that too had been included in Tsuyako's painting.

“Sister, won’t you come over here?” “Yeah.” “Come on, come over!”

“Wait a moment.” What kept Nobuko from casually rising from the cleared dining table was ultimately the unpleasant aftertaste of that morning’s commotion. Nobuko intended to return to the Monceau et Tocqueville as usual come nightfall and had not considered moving out abruptly. Such matters were not for Nobuko to dwell on. After all, there was no fault on Nobuko’s part.

However, this defiant mood toward the hotel left Nobuko unable to settle. Even if staying at Pèreire only during the Geneva trip was acceptable, Nobuko would be troubled were she placed in circumstances requiring her to continue living there afterward. Moreover, there was a contract stipulating that the premises must be vacated as soon as the Sasa family departed. Seeking stability while turning over "there" and "here" in her mind, the thought of consulting Ryosaku Hachiya suddenly occurred to Nobuko. The idea was uncomplicated, and there was nothing to make her hesitate.

Nobuko took out a small notebook from her handbag and dialed the number 845 for Kuramāru that Ryosaku Hachiya had written on the back. Hachiya was at home. Nobuko gave a very concise account of that morning’s events. “What a shameless man.” “What could he mean?” “I could go and negotiate with them for you.”

“Thank you, but that’s fine.” Nobuko had no intention of having a man step in at this point. “But you see, I thought perhaps you might have some leads about a room.”

“Then let’s do this—I have business downtown this afternoon anyway, so… let me see… around two o’clock, I’ll stop by your place—Pèreire, correct?”

As if she had summoned him, Nobuko felt awkward. “Don’t worry about that. After all, it’s on my way anyway…”

Ryosaku Hachiya visited Nobuko at the promised time that afternoon.

Six

Accompanied by Ryosaku Hachiya, Nobuko went that same day to look at a rental room near Étoile. Compared to the old-fashioned style of the Pèreire apartment building, it was a room on the third floor of a new, lightweight structure. As had been the case with the Vienna boarding house, here too the entrance to the owner’s living quarters was separate, with several doors arranged around a spacious, bright elevator lobby. A stylishly gray-clad, sharp-eyed housewife in her fifties showed Ryosaku Hachiya and Nobuko the room in a businesslike manner. The rental room had double doors on the right when exiting the elevator.

When the door opened and she saw the interior at a glance, Nobuko felt this was not a place she could live. The veranda of that long, spacious room and its two large windows offered a view of part of the Arc de Triomphe through trees tinged with late autumn colors. It was exactly the kind of luxurious and pleasure-seeking atmosphere one would expect near the Champs-Élysées. To make efficient use of the room, its owner must have scheduled interviews and placed newspaper advertisements from three to five that very afternoon—immediately after the previous tenants had left. Alongside the room’s breathtaking view lingered the warmth of the previous inhabitants’ lives—even the residual scent of perfume once worn by a woman still faintly permeated the air.

The former residents were a man and a woman—bound by a connection that was marital yet not quite a marriage—who had lived a life of luxurious freedom in this beautifully scenic room; such was the impression it gave. With an expression that betrayed no change, Ryosaku Hachiya spoke with the housewife about the rent while likely wondering what he felt about the room so unsuited to Nobuko. The rent was high, as befitted the location and as the splendid view from the two windows attested.

“If you wish, we can arrange just breakfast for you—a French-style morning meal with coffee and milk, like so.” Strolling leisurely around the spacious room along the veranda and windows, Nobuko listened to the exchange between the housewife and Hachiya with the ease of having already decided not to rent it.

“If you prefer an English-style breakfast for the two of you, like so—” “Madame, the one looking for a room is this Mademoiselle here.” Hachiya’s French—accurate yet ponderous and flat—interrupted the housewife’s fluent, supple words. “She needs a room where she can live alone.” “Well then, this room is too spacious.” The housewife’s gaze, brimming with wit, glanced over at Nobuko—wearing a beret and dressed in a style more reminiscent of an Anglophile student than Parisian fashion—as she gazed at the view from the window. When the housewife said “It’s too spacious,” it meant, in other words, that this person was out of place here. Nobuko—not merely out of politeness—

“What a splendid view!”

and praised the room. “This room is a truly luxurious one.”

While ushering Nobuko and Hachiya to the door, the housewife spoke in an ingratiating tone, “We too truly love the view from this room.” she remarked, satisfied that this single room she owned held such value simply for possessing this vista. When they emerged onto the thoroughfare, Nobuko said to Ryosaku Hachiya with a laugh,

“That Madame talked about the room’s view as if she were describing a hen that lays golden eggs, didn’t she?”

“Ha ha ha ha.” “A hen that lays golden eggs?” “I see. For her, that must indeed be the case.”

As they walked toward Pèreire, Hachiya Ryosaku and Nobuko stopped to rest along the way. "If we search around here," he said, "we inevitably end up with rooms like that." "I'm sorry for making you waste your time." "It’s no trouble at all—I have some free time anyway," he replied. "I’m not entirely without interest myself." Precisely because Hachiya had willingly made time without complaint, Nobuko felt it would be presumptuous to have him assist her further in a prolonged room search. She did not make a habit of exploiting men’s goodwill toward young women to ask favors.

“There’s another boarding house, but wouldn’t visiting two at once be tiring?” “Whereabouts is it?” Hachiya took a notebook from his pocket and checked the address.

“I haven’t been there myself, but since it’s called Caldiné Street, maybe it’s somewhere between Monceau Park and Wagram?” It was unthinkable that Ryosaku Hachiya, who usually lived outside the city, would know such minor streets of Paris. He had found the rental room near the Arc de Triomphe through a newspaper advertisement after receiving Nobuko’s call. The boarding house had likely been identified through the same method. To avoid getting too lost while escorting Nobuko, he might have consulted a map beforehand.

Nobuko started to take out the red-covered Paris guidebook she always carried. Then, while learning the spelling of “Caldiné” from Hachiya and turning the pages, she discovered it was in the same 17th arrondissement as Pèreire, where her parents lived.

“Ah, here it is.” “Here it is.” “Look, Caldiné…” “It’s close and seems easy to find.” While looking at the peach-colored map and pondering for a moment—Nobuko—

“If you could give me the address, I’ll go and see the place myself tomorrow.”

She said. Hachiya seemed somewhat unable to comprehend this Nobuko,

“I really don’t mind at all.” Hachiya looked at Nobuko with his brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t negotiating alone be troublesome?” He phrased it this way in reference to Nobuko’s halting speech.

“Thank you.—But I’d feel bad if it turned out to be another wasted trip…”

Nobuko somehow had such a premonition. “Such things are part of room hunting. Anyway, let’s go at a time that’s good for you tomorrow.”

The manager of the boarding house on Caldiné Street was an elderly man who seemed to be a former military man. That he abruptly guided Hachiya and Nobuko to the garden—insisting they at least see it—proved an astute decision. For the long,narrow garden laid with quintessentially French gravel along a compact three-story building spoke precisely to the boarding house’s character. Deep yet narrow in frontage,the garden contained a grape trellis built to shelter against summer sun,with a low hedge marking the boundary from beside the building’s entrance. Upon meticulously tended gravel stood three or four chairs matching a white-painted iron garden table.One held an elderly man with a white beard,wrapped in a black velvet dressing gown and reading a small book. A black velvet house cap covered his head. The elderly man appeared to savor time’s leisurely passage within this tranquility;after casting a natural glance toward Nobuko and Hachiya beyond the low hedge,he immersed himself once more in reading.

The fact that this boarding house primarily catered to pensioners who lived amidst Paris’s bustle while savoring its tranquility was conveyed by the garden’s appearance. And the somewhat rugged manager must have taken pride in his boarding house being maintained in the old French manner.

While heading back toward the entrance along the building, Nobuko looked up at Hachiya in a troubled manner and said, “How should we turn it down?”

Nobuko looked up at Ryosaku Hachiya with a troubled expression. "It's interesting, but I couldn't live here—it's too devoted to those circulating library editions of Anatole France..." Standing at the stone steps where he had been waiting for their return, Ryosaku Hachiya addressed the manager: "It seems very comfortable, and you maintain such a proper garden."

Ryosaku Hachiya said.

“Yes, yes, Monsieur.” “By the way, your boarding house doesn’t seem particularly accustomed to foreigners…” “Yes, yes, Monsieur.” “We shall respect your traditions. This Mademoiselle primarily speaks English.”

“Yes, yes, Monsieur.” A relieved, good-natured smile spread across the elderly man’s angular face. “Goodbye, Mademoiselle.” Just as one might come to love a great tree they had grown accustomed to seeing since childhood—a tree that had weathered years—the old man had come to love the traditions of his boarding house. That day, Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya viewed another rental room. It was a studio on the other side of the Seine River.

Passing through a stone gate facing an old, desolate alleyway, they found a studio standing immediately to their right that looked as though it had been abandoned. When they opened the small door with its large, artistically wrought iron hinges, they were already inside the brick-floored studio interior. Sunlight from the windows streamed across the brick floor worn concave at its center, while light rays from the high glass-paneled ceiling revealed dust-filmed mezzanine railings and sturdy wooden frameworks around them. Horse chestnut leaves lay scattered across the floor - blown in at some unknown time.

It was a desolate studio. As a workplace, it might have truly outlived its usefulness, but the ruin-like atmosphere meeting Nobuko's eyes stirred her imagination. If there were a loved one to share it with, living in such a place might prove interesting. The street's lonely emptiness. A studio seemingly abandoned. Unless a man and woman dwelled there, life's pleasures here could not be summoned.

Ryosaku Hachiya and Nobuko opened the small door and entered the studio, where they stood for a while in silence, looking around.

“—How about it? Shall we get going?”

It was Nobuko who had said that. In Moscow, she had searched for rooms so intensely. Yet room hunting in Moscow had truly seemed like a matter of carving out space between one busy life and another—where whether the occupant was man or woman, the foremost consideration had been solely whether the place was conducive to health. Nowhere had there been a place that could evoke the sort of fantasies now welling up in Nobuko’s heart as she looked around this studio. Was it because life in Moscow itself was seething, teeming with purposeful activity? Or was it because Nobuko had been living with Motoko?

As she walked along the old sidewalk strewn with fallen leaves, mingling the sound of a man’s footsteps with the small click of women’s heels, Nobuko—

“There really aren’t any livable places, are there?” Nobuko said to Ryosaku Hachiya, containing her turbulent emotions within the bounds of their room-hunting conversation. Since beginning her search this way, she often thought that if there were just two people, they could live anywhere. “If only there were two people”—but that other person who wasn’t herself existed nowhere in her reality.

“Room hunting is generally like this.” Ryosaku Hachiya and Nobuko walked slowly toward the Seine River’s street of used bookstores.

“If you get tired after just two days of looking, you’ll never find a room.”

“I wouldn’t tire of it, but...” In other words, Nobuko thought, it was because she still had a place to stay. Even after their arguments, she faithfully returned to the hotel each night to sleep. Nobuko usually walked back from Pèreire around ten or eleven at night—hours when the manager might or might not be at the front desk. Even when present, he never looked toward the entrance as she opened the decorative glass-paned door, continuing his bookkeeping as if he had long known it was her entering. Her luggage remained untouched in the hallway, and when she unlocked the seventh-floor attic room with her key, the white monkey toy on her pillow showed no signs of disturbance.

Even so, they were still trying to make Nobuko leave. The manager’s wife, an extremely obese woman with dangling curls framing her cheeks and a forced smile plastered on her face, approached Nobuko one morning.

“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle.” “Good afternoon.”

One should have used “Madame,” but Nobuko couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Mademoiselle, have you found a room?”

“No.” Hearing this, the wife used her own ample chest to push Nobuko into the elevator’s shadow, placed her ring-adorned hand on Nobuko’s arm, and spoke in a hushed voice laced with threat. “Mademoiselle, you do understand? Find a room quickly. I’ve been placating my husband daily—telling him you’re an educated Mademoiselle.”

“My family living in Pèreire will depart Paris by the end of October, and at the same time, I will move out.” “Oh! Mademoiselle, I already know that.”

She seemed to have heard it even from the building’s concierge, for her tone suggested she was genuinely aware of it.

“But—by the end of this month!”

The Manager’s Wife stared at Nobuko while inhaling deeply and shook her head. “Mademoiselle, look for a room. I know very well that you’re a good person. You know? Have you found one yet? Mademoiselle.”

It was like the words of a mother who, repeating “because you’re a good girl,” tried to send her reluctant daughter on an errand she disliked.

Seven

In the midst of Nobuko’s room hunting, the day arrived when her parents were to depart for Geneva. The previous night, after helping Takeyo late into the evening and staying in Tsuyako’s room, Nobuko awoke to find rain falling outside the window. Could they really depart in this weather? Nobuko wondered. Since Takeyo wore a kimono, she thought the rain would not only prove inconvenient but might worsen her condition. By rights, her parents should have left for Geneva two days prior. Taizo and Takeyo—who had set out intending to catch the ten o’clock morning train—returned wearing matching grim expressions just as Nobuko and Tsuyako at their Pèreire residence were speculating, “They must have boarded by now.” Takeyo had fallen ill, rendering departure impossible.

Even though Taizo had grown accustomed to such inconveniences arising from traveling with his sickly wife, he appeared deeply wounded by something Takeyo had said. “Nobuko, look after Mom.”

Having said that to his startled daughters who had come out to greet him, he left without even looking at Takeyo, who had finally reached the parlor sofa.

There was a painful spot in her body, making it difficult for her to sit up properly. Takeyo lowered her shoulders, leaning one hand on the sofa cushion while listlessly loosening her obi cord with the other. Nobuko worked as quickly as possible to untie the obi cord, loosen the fukuro obi sash, and adjust the datejime under-sash and other cords beneath it. The tucked-up hem loosened, and the front panel of the gaudy visiting kimono slid down onto the carpet. While slowly taking one sip at a time of the hot green tea that Tsuyako had brought in, Takeyo—

“Just how much of a show-off is your Father?” As if locating the source of her suffering there, Takeyo panted while speaking. “To think he prioritizes being considerate toward Mr. and Mrs. Asai over my health—it’s appalling.” “I don’t know how distinguished they are—they’re just young people.” The Asai couple were people stationed in Geneva through League of Nations connections, individuals who for Taizo had originally been nothing beyond formal acquaintances. Nobuko perceived that Taizo’s reluctance to change plans as much as possible—born from his desire not to inconvenience others—concerned these people who were welcoming them and managing hotel arrangements.

Nobuko did not feel like humoring Takeyo's words. To keep the feet in white tabi socks from growing cold, she placed a cushion beneath them and wrapped Takeyo's body - which seemed too exhausted to move - with a feather quilt brought from the bedroom. "Wouldn't it be better if you got into bed?"

When Nobuko suggested this after a while, Takeyo deliberately turned her face away. "Come now, what an unexpected nuisance I've caused. If you've somewhere to be, Nobuko, you should hurry along and leave."

…………

What tormented everyone was not Takeyo’s poor health itself, but this twisted dynamic. Regarding Takeyo’s physical condition, she would always lash out at the family’s sympathetic concern—their gentle attempts to care for her—meeting them with barbs. “If illnesses could be settled through formal procedures,” she said, “even I wouldn’t be suffering like this.” After a day’s convalescence, they were finally set to depart anew this morning—yet——

While watching the rain falling outside the window, Nobuko tidied herself up. When she stepped out into the hallway, she encountered Taizo heading from his bedroom toward the bathroom.

“Good morning.”

“Ah, good morning.”

“—It’s raining, Father.”

Taizo twitched his upper lip with its short white mustache. “Ah.” It was an uncharacteristically blunt reply. “I’m keeping quiet.” “Because another problem will arise.”

Was he telling Nobuko not to engage in unnecessary chatter, or was he keeping quiet because it was annoying? Whichever it was, that made Nobuko sense Taizo’s unusual mood. Nobuko stood in the hallway and watched her father’s retreating figure as he entered the bathroom and closed the door. The hurt that Taizo had suffered from Takeyo the day before yesterday had not been healed.

Nobuko went to the still-unprepared dining room and stood there blankly, but eventually knocked on the bedroom door. Takeyo was already up and had just finished arranging her hair facing a lit mirror.

Takeyo made no mention of the rain falling. From the dining room veranda spread a view of Paris' low-hung clouds, and since the veranda before her eyes lay completely drenched, she must have known it was raining. Nobuko's anxious feelings did not subside until she saw Takeyo seated in the Geneva-bound train compartment. Everyone maintained perfect alignment, avoiding any reference to the bad weather in their effort to leave her be. Had they dwelled on it, Takeyo might well have erupted in anger—and had she done so, Nobuko would not have known how to smooth things over herself. If not for those words Taizo had spoken in the hallway on his way to the bathroom, she would have remarked "What unfortunate rain" upon first seeing her mother's face.

Without voicing any particular complaints, yet showing no sign of excitement about embarking on their journey either, after the train carrying her parents sitting side by side departed, Nobuko rode a taxi to Monceau et Tocqueville with a lonely heart.

At 10:30, Sumiko Isozaki was supposed to come to the hotel. Sumiko Isozaki, who was returning to Japan on the Taiyōmaru departing Marseille in early November, had arranged to meet Nobuko at the Printemps department store to shop for her child’s travel preparations. Had things gone according to the plan decided in London, Taizo, Takeyo, and Tsuyako would have returned to Japan on the same ship.

Since coming to Paris, they had been advised to take the Siberian route due to Takeyo’s health, yet the Sasa family’s plans remained unsettled. When she arrived at the hotel, Sumiko’s note had been left behind stating that since Nobuko was out, she had gone ahead to Printemps and was waiting in the children’s section. Due to this unexpected missed connection, Nobuko looked up at the counter clock in surprise. The clock here already showed ten forty-five. How had it gotten so late? The train was supposed to depart at ten o'clock—Nobuko had taken a taxi from Lyon Station immediately after its departure—yet... She couldn’t believe forty minutes had passed during transit. Yet there remained Sumiko’s note as proof of her tardiness—left precisely at half past ten as promised.

Nobuko could not simply let matters proceed as they were—Sumiko, who had lost her child in Paris, then been bereaved of her husband Kyosuke, and was now returning to Japan carrying both their remains—as though their agreement had been treated with disregard.

When she hurried to Printemps and went searching through the second-floor children’s section, she happened to find Sumiko’s group. Sumiko had brought along the middle-aged nurse who had been with them since Kyosuke’s sudden passing to hold her younger child. Noticing Nobuko hurriedly approaching through the display stands, Sumiko set down the white children’s garment she had been holding. “Oh, thank goodness!” she said. “I’m sorry for taking up your time when you’re so busy.”

The earnest nurse, apparently from Brittany, said from behind the body of the child she was holding, “Good day, Mademoiselle.” While responding to this, Nobuko suppressed her slightly breathless voice, “I’m sorry—we ended up missing each other. “I was seeing my parents off to Geneva, so...” “But the train was supposed to leave at ten o’clock—why was it delayed, I wonder—” “Though I’ve caused you such trouble by making you busy, I’m truly glad you came—”

Sumiko, still holding Nobuko’s hand, wore a closed-lipped smile. Since Kyosuke’s death, this was the first time Nobuko had seen Sumiko’s face bear anything resembling a smile.

Sumiko carefully selected several undergarments with shapes and fabrics that would fit the child’s current small body being held in the nurse’s arms while allowing room for growth. At another display stand, she purchased a pair of pristine white leather shoes for when the child would walk, along with a pink children’s blanket and hooded cloak for the voyage. Having meticulously planned each purchase, Sumiko chose essential items while periodically consulting the nurse about fabric durability. The nurse—looking every bit an ordinary Parisian matron in her plain attire—would test the material between her fingers like an experienced homemaker whenever consulted, discussing each option earnestly. From every angle, Sumiko’s methodical shopping at Magasin—that temple of feminine consumer desire—drew Nobuko’s admiration and sympathy. There was in Sumiko’s selections a characteristic modesty and purity, as if this honest sparrow were calmly plucking only necessary items from mountains of gaudy merchandise with humble precision.

“You must be tired from handling all these small things.”

Sumiko said as she was leaving the children's department.

“I must ask you to accompany me to one more place, though.” “Where is the bag department, I wonder…” The sixth-floor bag department at Printemps was less frequented than its other sections. Trunks of various sizes lined up to the shelves’ highest reaches, their metal fittings gleaming, while amidst lingering scents of leather and paint stood a male clerk.

Sumiko walked around slowly, looking at them. “I think a hand-held style of bag would be better.” I had thought she might need a suitcase for the cabin, but what Sumiko was searching for was neither that type nor a stylish women’s handbag. “What should I call it… You know those bags that open on both ends? They’re somewhat deep—I believe it’s a traditional style.”

In both Sumiko’s footsteps as she searched through the displays and in her gaze, there appeared an earnestness different from when she had been in the children’s department, and it seemed clear that no other type would serve her purpose. “It must not be a fashionable style, I suppose.” After patiently circling every corner of the sales floor, a bag resembling what Sumiko sought was finally discovered on a high shelf.

“Ah, that’s it—yes, that seems to be the one.” Sumiko had the young clerk in a suit take down the bag. She placed the brown leather bag—a rather unfashionable double-opening style—on the counter, meticulously examined its inner lining and stitching, and repeatedly tested how well the lock fastened. Even while doing this, Sumiko seemed concerned about the bag’s capacity as she inspected it from both inside and out, but ultimately decided to purchase another of the same type.

“Are you having them delivered?” When Nobuko asked,

“We can manage—there’s the nurse with us, and we’ll be taking a taxi anyway...” Holding light but cumbersome bags in both hands, Sumiko finally wore an expression indicating today’s shopping had been completed.

Nobuko and the others finished their not particularly tasty lunch in Printemps' cafeteria. Then, having agreed to visit Sumiko's home on Rue Dutot at two o'clock on the fourteenth, they parted from Sumiko's party boarding a taxi before the department store. With the Sasa parents scheduled to leave Paris by month's end anyway, Nobuko had devised a small plan for Sumiko before both departure dates drew near.

VIII

Starting tonight, she would sleep in the Pèreire house’s bedroom—now absent of her parents—with Tsuyako. When she entered there, Nobuko gazed at the old-fashioned, solidly built interior with the same kind of look one might use when surveying a hotel room they’ve been shown for the first time. Of the four rooms in this apartment, the one least familiar to Nobuko was her parents’ bedroom. In one corner stood an imposing wardrobe, and before the wall near the window, part of the room was reflected on the surface of the dressing table’s mirror, illuminated by the electric light. The large trunks and suitcases were placed under the wall as usual, but on top of the small bedside table standing sandwiched between the two beds lined up side by side, there was nothing besides the lamp, and it had been neatly tidied up. Usually, there would be a jumble of things crammed messily on top of it, yet now...

It was unusual for Takeyo to have tidied up like that before leaving. As she slowly undressed, her gaze wandered absently toward the bedside table—when suddenly Nobuko realized, Ah!, and opened her eyes wide within the woolen-scented confines of the sweater she was pulling over her head. Usually, the familiar brocade-wrapped bundle containing Tamotsu’s portion of ashes had been placed there. And around it, decorations such as an elephant family crafted from Ceylonese ivory and a flower basket made of gold thread and velvet had been arranged.

Come to think of it, when Takeyo left home that morning, she had never once let go of her travel bag—cobalt blue with thin vermilion stripes. Takeyo had taken Tamotsu to Geneva. Tamotsu had been placed there. As this realization took hold, Nobuko came to understand the purpose behind the two identical bags Sumiko had purchased. One was for Kyosuke. The other was for the child. Sumiko had bought two bags. It now made sense why she had been so particular about their size. She had wanted to make the journey back to Japan with her husband and child contained within a single object. Because it was that kind of purchase, Sumiko had needed even Nobuko to stay by her side through it all.

Tsuyako lay beside her sister in the bedroom with the ceiling light still on, chatting cheerfully from the adjacent bed. "Elder sister, when it's pitch black, doesn't the air feel heavier like it's hard to breathe?"

"I wonder... When I was little, if I kept my eyes open in pitch darkness, my body would gradually become square and small, like a die, and it scared me." "Hmm."

As she spoke, Nobuko kept thinking. When Sumiko had walked persistently through the Printemps displays that day searching for that specific bag—uncharacteristically so for her usual self—Nobuko considered that her own restraint from meddling had been the least she could manage. There was something extraordinary about Sumiko's earnestness. That was what had restrained her. Nobuko thought her refraining from making Sumiko explain why she bought two of those bags had at least been something. She had refused delivery and carried them straight home herself. That too testified to the ache in Sumiko's heart. Compared to the emotional workings of unfortunate Sumiko, Nobuko became aware—with a sensation akin to discovering her own baseness—that her own heart, untouched by such pain, operated only in broad strokes.

After some time had passed once more, “Elder sister,”

She called out.

“What do you think Brother and them are doing in London right now?… Back in Dōzaka, I used to sleep with Brother, you know.” “Brother always came home late to bed, right? So when I went to sleep first, I made a habit of hugging his pillow.” “Once when I was sure I’d been earnestly hugging a pillow, I woke up completely shocked.” “What I thought was a pillow turned out to be Brother’s leg!”

“Oh, how awful!” Thinking of Waichiro—who hated baths—and his hairy shins, Nobuko burst out laughing. “Which one ended up upside down?” “This person—” It was through occasional conversations like this that Nobuko realized the girl Tsuyako had lately been living with a sense of loneliness. To say that the youngest daughter, Tsuyako, was not loved by her parents would be just as untrue as claiming that the eldest daughter, Nobuko, was not loved at all. Yet just as Nobuko never accepted Takeyo’s accusations of being cold-hearted at every turn, Tsuyako must have felt the sorrow of *But that’s not true* each time Takeyo called her a stone-like child.

As she was about to turn off the lamp, Tsuyako,

“Elder sister, okay? Tomorrow morning, I’ll make the coffee for you, so don’t get up until I come to call you.” “Okay?”

Having said that, she bounced over in bed and turned to face the other way.

IX

Tsuyako’s way of relaxing when alone with her sister was utterly genuine. She would place both hands clasped atop her bobbed hair, swish her short skirt as she ambled from room to room, lean against the veranda to gaze endlessly outside—then suddenly,

“Elder sister, even if I go back, I won’t go to that school anymore!” she said as though swearing an oath.

“In France too—are sisters mean?”

Until she was taken on this trip by her parents, Tsuyako had attended one of Tokyo's three convent schools. The street where the school stood coincided with Taizo's route to his office. Because Tsuyako was frail from childhood asthma—making a location convenient for car access preferable—and because three daughters of Taizo's friends had either graduated from or were attending that same convent school, she had been made to attend that institution continuously since elementary school.

Since it was a Catholic convent school, the nun principal was called Mother, the nuns who were teachers were called Sisters, and the dress code was strict—they had to wear black stockings even in summer. On an unbearably hot day, Tsuyako had gone wearing socks instead, been harshly scolded by Ma Sœur, and ended up leaving early. Even when they applied for extracurricular piano lessons, Tsuyako’s turn would get skipped over, and girls who’d signed up after her would be taught instead. The Japanese Ma Sœur had apparently said that if they had a piano at home, they should just go learn from some other teacher. For Tsuyako—stuck in that position within her class—Takeyo neither gave special support for the bazaar nor considered Christmas gifts. It was exactly how Takeyo had been during Nobuko’s own school days.

“Mother wouldn’t say she’d send you back there, would she?” “If Mother brings it up, Elder sister, think of somewhere else, okay?” “I never agreed with sending me to a convent school from the start.” “If I have to go back there again... this person will turn into a delinquent girl.”

When Tsuyako spoke of "delinquent girls"—a term she, like a late-blooming girl, used with no deeper meaning than "bad girls"—her square-jawed, stern face took on an expression as severe, somber, and single-minded as the small photograph affixed to a passport. The holiday-like life lasted only two or three days.

When Nobuko, who had gone to the hotel to attend Madame Ragondel’s lesson, returned, Tsuyako, who had been left alone, “I’m in trouble!”

She came and stood before Nobuko. “What’s wrong?” “Madame Roussel was supposed to do the laundry—I clearly asked her to—but she just said *merci, merci* and took this person’s slip home!” “What kind of slip?”

“This person’s most treasured one—” It was a pale pink crepe slip with wide, beautiful lace. “This person looked it up properly in the dictionary and said so—” Tsuyako, using the convent-school French she had been strictly drilled in—all grammar and no nuance—rigidly lined up words like “laundry” and “do,” only for the quick-witted Madame Roussel to interpret that very “do” in a way that conveniently suited her.

“It’s my own fault for not going myself.—If I’d just said it my way—‘Please take it to the laundry’—it might have worked.” Madame Roussel was not a particularly cunning woman. When Takeyo would assign some unnecessary task and hand her a tip, she would bend one knee and express her gratitude as though overwhelmed. Madame Roussel’s way of handling things managed to capture the sentiments of Takeyo, who couldn’t understand the language.

To the eyes of French women honed by life’s struggles, Tsuyako must have appeared a sluggish girl. When Nobuko imagined that quiet afternoon with only her sister present—Madame Roussel tucking the surrendered pink slip between her stately hands while retreating with an unwavering stream of *“Merci, merci”*—she found herself unable to feel anger.

“Madame Roussel must have really liked that slip,” Nobuko said. “She might have thought it was too good for the ‘clumsy lamb.’” Tsuyako, who had been sullen, burst out laughing. The term “clumsy lamb” had originated when Waichiro upset Koeda and used it before her as a self-reproachful expression, eventually becoming popular among the family’s younger members.

Even when their parents were away, Madame Roussel continued coming to prepare meals for Nobuko and Tsuyako, but Nobuko gradually noticed the menu had begun changing. The delicious small green peas had vanished; when she suddenly noticed, ordinary green beans lay on their plates. From the appetizers disappeared items like sardines and sausages. Nobuko felt this would be acceptable for a short while. If Madame Roussel and her family ate those portions instead, it ultimately meant no waste. After Madame Roussel began working for them, Taizo estimated a daily rate and had been handing her consolidated sums covering three days at a time. He also made her submit settlement statements. Madame Roussel's statements listed amounts spent on meat and vegetables without specifying quantities or types. When the couple left for their week-long Geneva trip, Taizo handed over the consolidated kitchen expenses to Madame Roussel as usual.

One evening, after Madame Roussel had brought the dishes she had prepared, the sisters sat down at the dinner table. Tsuyako, holding her fork, stared intently at the large dish on the table and made no move to serve herself.

“What’s wrong? Is something off?” Feeling a sisterly sense of responsibility, Nobuko pulled the large platter closer and scrutinized the arranged dish. Meat stewed in a thick brown sauce was served alongside potatoes and carrots. “Doesn’t it look delicious?” With a flushed face and fidgeting hands, Tsuyako asked her sister in a small, pleading voice.

“Is this rabbit?”

Nobuko pulled the plate closer and examined it. "That's right." With eyes that seemed to recoil, Tsuyako quietly set down the fork she had been holding. "Do you dislike it?"

Tsuyako shook her head. “I can’t—”

Speaking of which, Tsuyako had always hated seeing skinned rabbits hung for sale at Parisian butcher shops. She hated it because it was this person’s birth year. She had said so with complete seriousness.

“There were eggs, weren’t there? I’ll make something with those for you.” Rabbit dishes had never appeared on the table when everyone was present. Nobuko placed a scrap of paper reading “Please, beef, veal, or mutton” on the untouched large dish’s lid and set it in the kitchen.

十

The parents, who had left for Geneva on a trip planned to last at least a week—or up to ten days if extended—returned suddenly to Paris on the sixth day, not even a full week later; and since this happened on the afternoon of the fourteenth—the very day Nobuko had promised to meet Sumiko—it put Nobuko in an excruciating bind. After Kyosuke Isozaki’s sudden death, the Dutot residence where he, Sumiko, and their child had lived for three years was no longer a home. It was a shipwreck. Before the shipwreck could fully sink, Sumiko was busy organizing her life in Paris and preparing to return to Japan. Precisely because Nobuko understood how Sumiko—after Kyosuke’s death—was living through funeral arrangements and return preparations without giving herself a moment’s respite, she wanted to plan at least one day of rest to give Sumiko an environment removed from Dutot. A household, and yet a place devoid of any atmosphere of married life that would stir Sumiko’s sensitive emotions. The Perel house, where only Tsuyako and Nobuko were present, was precisely the kind of place suited for such rest, she thought.

That afternoon, Nobuko went to Dutot to pick up Sumiko and brought her to Perel. After taking a short rest, she lit the gas and prepared a bath. Sumiko was heartily pleased by this Japanese-style hospitality. “Today is a good day.” “You’ve done all this for me, and I’ve learned about the selection…”

Two days before Kyosuke died, the still life he had submitted himself had been accepted into the Salon d'Automne. That fact became clear this morning. At the same time, it was announced that Sumiko’s work had also been selected. “I had merely placed the faded flowers Isozaki painted by the window and tried my hand at painting them… Yet this time, unusually, he kept urging me to do it, and even took it there himself.” No matter how they tried to stay silent, their conversation inevitably returned to Sumiko.

“Why did he do that? When I was painting those flowers, I often recalled our time in Honolulu.” Sumiko had once told Nobuko that the month they spent in Honolulu might have been the happiest time in her life. She couldn’t seem to regard it as mere coincidence that she and Kyosuke had painted the same flowers—and that her work had been selected alongside what became his final piece.

“Kyosuke now has something he can show his parents back home.” In this way—as if Sumiko weren’t the only visitor at Perel that day but accompanied by something more—Nobuko resolved to be an attentive host to this subdued gathering. They were drinking green tea around Sumiko, her large eyes accentuated by thick bangs that gleamed blacker than ever after her bath. The entrance bell rang three times—short, forceful bursts. Nobuko’s ears pricked up at the sound. It was identical to how Taizo always rang the bell.

Following that,

“Oh là là! Monsieur et Madame!”

A lively voice of welcome from Madame Roussel rang out.

“Excuse me for a moment, all right?” It was Father and Mother after all. When Takeyo saw Nobuko’s face, “Is there a guest?” While saying this, she handed over that cobalt-colored travel bag she had been carrying. “Go get Tsuyako.” Takeyo walked straight past the corridor outside the guest room and went to the bedroom. Taizo greeted Sumiko in the parlor and then restlessly moved between the bedroom and dining room.

"I shall take my leave. You returned because your condition had worsened, I presume?" "Oh, do stay a while longer as you are." Given Takeyo's current disposition, she likely couldn't go out for dinner either, so Nobuko conceived the idea of having Japanese boxed meals delivered for everyone to eat at home instead. She had planned to treat Sumiko—who had been subsisting solely on meals at the Dutot residence—to Japanese-style sashimi.

Nobuko tried consulting Taizo.

“That might be fine—but it would be safer to check with Mother first.” When she entered the bedroom, before Nobuko could utter a word, Takeyo looked up from her pillow with a sharp sidelong glance at her daughter. “Who did you let into the bath?” When the bell rang, the very first thing that flashed through Nobuko’s mind was the steam and soap smell that must still be lingering in the bathroom. Takeyo, having heard it from Tsuyako and thus certainly aware of it by now, was asking Nobuko about it solely to ignite a dispute.

The atmosphere, which had been quietly suffused with camaraderie, transformed in an instant. When Takeyo’s condition worsened, an uneasy air began to envelop the Sasa family. This unease stemmed not from concern over the illness itself but purely from nerves, leaving the modest-natured Sumiko unbearably distressed, while Nobuko found herself powerless to alleviate the pitiful state.

“I’m sorry it turned out so unfortunately.” “No, no. I truly appreciated your kindness.” Nobuko, utterly at a loss, saw Sumiko off with shame and anguish. On the way, she stopped by a Japanese restaurant and handed her a small token for dinner. The five days in Geneva seemed to unsettle the Japanese residents there more than they entertained Takeyo.

It was around the time when plans were announced for MacDonald, the British Labour Party Prime Minister, to travel to Washington for preliminary consultations on the disarmament conference scheduled to be held in London early the following year. The true purpose of this MacDonald trip—to find a compromise in the naval expansion race between Anglo-American imperialist powers—lay clear to all. The mood of Japanese residents in Geneva’s narrow, pretentious international social circles—revolving around the League of Nations—grew further agitated by such developments, and Takeyo’s rigid disposition that refused to adapt to foreign customs appeared ill-suited both for those who visited as guests and for Takeyo herself when she became the guest elsewhere.

“Those who aren’t even ambassadors or ministers can live so lavishly in such a scenic place by using public funds like water—no wonder Dr. Tsuda says Geneva is better than Japan.” “If the wife who’s always being made to stay behind saw this, how do you suppose she’d feel?” However, within Takeyo’s resentment lurked a subtle nuance. If, by some chance, Taizo were to live in that same place in such a manner through his specialty in architecture—just as Dr. Tsuda lived in Geneva through his specialty in social medicine—would Takeyo offer the same criticism of that lifestyle as she did now?

“Even as a civilian, that’s something.” Pretending not to hear this, Taizo looked at his notebook by the fireplace in the guest room where firewood burned. Nobuko sensed a clashing undercurrent of emotions between her father and mother. The value of a doctorate that Taizo lacked, and the spectacle of how so-called civilians managed to infiltrate bureaucratic institutions, had unfolded before Takeyo during her time in Geneva.

With a vaguely irritable impression lingering after their Geneva trip had ended, the entire Sasa family became busy.

The decision was made to cancel the Taiyōmaru and return to Japan via the Siberian Railway. If they returned via the Siberian Railway departing Moscow on October 27th, they could accompany Dr. Tsuda and another person—his young doctoral student in medicine—from Geneva; it was this that solidified Takeyo’s resolve.

Nobuko sent a telegram to Motoko in Moscow to inform her of this. The Péreire house was notified that it would be returned to its owner on October 24th, at the same time as the family departed. It had become an urgent necessity for Nobuko to secure a place to live.

The fact that she had not returned for several nights in a row further soured the situation between Nobuko and the hotel.

On that day, Nobuko was supposed to go look at a room in an area near Sorbonne University—long known as the Latin Quarter—as the last of the addresses Ryosaku Hachiya had. When Nobuko climbed the stone stairs—worn down like ancient pavement—up to the fifth floor with Ryosaku Hachiya, opened the door to one of the rooms, and looked inside, she shuddered. The room’s sole window, soiled with city grime and impossible to tell when last wiped, barely let in the dim Parisian sunlight filtering through overcast skies. Its walls—aged and grimy alongside Sorbonne University’s long history—seemed to recount the countless youths eroded by the Latin Quarter, as if tuberculosis bacteria festered in every crevice. The room had not been wired for electric light. If those who had lived there were students, what kind of light had they used to spend their nights? A wooden washstand, broken and warped, stood in one corner. From the crude iron bed frame, the futon had been stripped away for some reason, leaving only two armchairs with straw stuffing spilling out onto the filthy floor. There was not a single decent thing there. There were only warped things, half-broken objects, and walls that seemed dreadful.

It was said that until the day before yesterday, a Hungarian student had been living there. The sight of the room—which felt less like mere filth and more like a nest of pathogens—and the uncanny impression left by the iron bed frame stripped of its bedding lingered with Nobuko long afterward. “Even so, I’m shocked that sort of place would advertise.”

Even Ryosaku Hachiya, who should have been somewhat accustomed to life in Paris, looked dismayed. "The Hungarian student who was here until the day before yesterday—maybe he died there." "No way." "But—then why was the bedding stripped from the bed? Can you think of anything else?" "If you say so, maybe that’s how it is." However, without lingering on Nobuko, who was still feeling uneasy, Hachiya—

“Let’s take a break here.”

They emerged onto Saint-Michel, teeming with pedestrians. “I have a proposal today.” Hachiya said that since he would be vacating his current room in Clamart, perhaps Nobuko could take it after he left. “Where are you going?” “I found a room ideal for studying right near that house.” “On the painter’s widow’s second floor.” “That one is far better for focusing on studies.” “Though the room itself is crude, it’s actually better for me.”

Nobuko looked at Hachiya with questioning eyes. When had Hachiya started considering moving? When we began searching for a room for me earlier, he walked everywhere and talked about all sorts of things, yet never mentioned a word about that.

“You never brought it up at all.” “Did it suddenly come to that?” “No—I’d been looking for a while.” The rent for the Clamart house had increased twice since Hachiya began living there as Parisian prices rose. This winter—they were told—a new rate would apply from November onward due to soaring fuel costs. “The rent kept ballooning until I couldn’t buy books.”

"Moreover, I've developed some bad habits, and truth be told, that's partly why I've been buckling under lately." A kindly wry smile surfaced on Hachiya's face—still retaining a trace of youthful softness incongruous with his age. "When I first moved there, I got so bored that I ended up inviting the Bernays' son and daughter to movies on Saturdays and such. They've settled on me treating them to films and Chinese meals, and these days it's become quite a burden for me."

It was just the sort of thing one would expect from Hachiya’s disposition.

“The daughter attending the girls’ school knows a bit of English, and I think you could certainly stay there.” Taking Nobuko’s silence as disapproval, Hachiya—

“I’m not just saying this thoughtlessly.” He looked at Nobuko with a furrowed brow and said, “If it’s that place, I’ll take responsibility—you’ll decide, won’t you?”

“Without even seeing it?” A soundless smile softened Nobuko’s lips. Nobuko did not even know how far Clamart was from central Paris. Suburban trains bound for Clamart depart from the Porte de Versailles. That much she knew. There had been a time during the summer when Motoko and Nobuko saw Hachiya running at that Porte de Versailles to catch the last train.

“If I live in Clamart, will I end up having to dash out sometimes, like you did that time?” Madame Ragondel might end up having to come a long way for lessons. From years of living habits where she would go out alone and return alone even at night, Nobuko felt that Clamart was rather too far. While feeling Clamart’s distance and its inconvenience so keenly, Nobuko found no clear resolve in her heart to refuse the room Hachiya was recommending.

From the café where Nobuko and Hachiya Ryosaku sat, they could see a sensational yellow poster plastered on one of the trees lining the Saint-Michel sidewalk. Two French Communist Party representatives and thirty-two Central Committee members had been suddenly arrested for reasons unclear to anyone. It had happened yesterday. "Ban the Communist Party!" "L’Humanité is the enemy of the workers!" "The Agricultural and Industrial Bank is stealing the people’s money!" "Prosecute the Communist Party and Communist representatives selling out France!" The yellow poster bore the Croix-de-Feu movement’s insignia. As Hachiya Ryosaku had once explained to Nobuko on a Vaugirard hotel terrace at night, the Croix-de-Feu stood as France’s most heavily armed fascist group. That there appeared to be a malicious Trotskyist secret organization within the French Communist Party was something Hachiya had also mentioned when discussing the mass arrests of central committee members at their Saint-Georges meeting just before the August 1st anti-war demonstration. These latest arrests too reeked of suspicion. What Hachiya meant was this: to sow confusion within the party and seize control, the faction had orchestrated provocations and collusion against the central leadership—including those advocating for a united front of labor unions.

Following Nobuko’s gaze, Hachiya Ryosaku, who had been looking at the yellow poster, soon— “So, Ms. Sasa,” he said in a tone meant to sway Nobuko.

“Anyway, please look at the house in Clamart tomorrow. And resolve to come to Clamart. Let’s study together.”

He continued. “At the very least, ever since I began speaking with Ms. Sasa, I’ve been truly stimulated.” “With this momentum, I’ll put my all into it too.”

Hachiya Ryosaku’s stay in Paris also had less than a year remaining.

Chapter Three 1

1

Over three months, they folded up their life in Pereire that had spread across those shelves and corners; the members of the Sasa household packed their belongings. On the appointed day, the thin middle-aged woman who owned the house came and conducted an inventory check of the apartment's built-in furniture, tableware, and even kitchen pots against the ledger. They checked whether anything was missing or had been newly damaged; leaving only Takeyo's bedroom—where she had been lying—untouched, all other rooms' doors were opened one after another.

That morning, the two breakfast coffee cups that Tsuyako had broken and left unrepaired were remembered. The one who remembered this was neither Tsuyako nor Takeyo, but Taizo. Nobuko hastily hailed a taxi, rushed to the department store, and managed to purchase a Sèvres-made replacement of similar design to replenish the set before the furniture inspection began. A dispute arose even over the French doll that Takeyo was taking back. Tsuyako had said she wanted one, so Nobuko bought a large French doll dressed as a cowboy in black and red two-tone. When Takeyo saw it, she too came to want one, and Nobuko went out to the department store again. And for her mother, she sought out a shepherdess doll that she also thought was graceful and refined. The figure of the shepherdess—holding a golden staff adorned with a pink ribbon, wearing a simple yet charming small floral-patterned dress with her legs stretched out—seemed to evoke, even at a glance, a backdrop of blooming apple trees and ivy thickets. However, Takeyo, who had cheerfully opened the cardboard box and taken out the doll, grew dissatisfied and soon accused Nobuko of mockery with tears welling in her eyes. There’s no need for it to be a shepherdess doll of all things, especially when going through the trouble of buying it in Paris to bring home. To buy a doll dressed in cotton clothes, of all things—Takeyo had no recollection of ever having mocked anyone in such a way, or so she insisted. Nobuko had not anticipated this. That the shepherdess—as if painted on an 18th-century lady’s fan—and its cotton dress would reflect this way in Takeyo’s emotions was something Nobuko had never imagined. Nobuko immediately packed that doll back into the cardboard box and returned to the department store. And this time, she selected a noblewoman doll dressed in Pompadour fashion. From beneath the hem of the apricot-tinged French pink silk dress peeked layer upon layer of pure white lace petticoat, billowing like foam, while from the same apricot sun hat spilled curls of a white wig. This doll, wearing black lace fingerless gloves on its slender hands, had a beauty mark painted below its left cheek in keeping with its attire. The doll met with Takeyo’s approval. Now, around noon on the day they were to depart from North Station at 3:27 PM, the issue arose of how to include that bulky doll as one of their pieces of luggage. Nobuko went out.

And then she found and brought back a rectangular lightweight wicker basket. She remembered having seen such baskets stacked somewhere in that sales area when she had been searching for a suitcase with Sumiko Isozaki at Printemps the other day. In Moskva too, similar large baskets were used. With faint nostalgia, Nobuko found her gaze drawn.

They scrambled from one task to another, all that chaos amounting to nothing but trivialities. Yet these matters absolutely had to be resolved before departure by any means necessary, and resolving them fell to Nobuko.

Even the landlady’s methodical way of inspecting each room in the apartment with her ledger—avoiding only the bedroom where Takeyo still lay sleeping—only gave Takeyo the sensation of being driven out on the final day of her Paris life. The fact that Taizo and Nobuko, preoccupied with their respective tasks, could not be solemn companions for Takeyo’s conversations also irritated her as a cold atmosphere, and such sentiments converged into a single stream that poured itself upon Nobuko.

A few hours before departure, Hachiya Ryosaku and Nozawa Yoshiji—who studied philosophy—came to Pereire and assisted Taizo during the final commotion. On the wide platform of North Station, Taizo, having removed his hat, greeted and shook hands with each and every person who had come to see them off; from his broad forehead, a tense expression tinged with concern did not fade.

Takeyo and Tsuyako stood before the train window, looking at the platform from inside the glass that lacked sufficient light. Nobuko clearly felt her father had grown weary from this family-accompanied journey. Takeyo too looked haggard. But for Taizo—accompanying his wife who now appeared haggard, insisted on her own infirmity, and grew increasingly difficult—there was a different, deeper fatigue to be sensed, one that gave Nobuko a vague sense of foreboding. Nobuko, staring intently at her father’s demeanor as he fought fatigue yet still managed to appear cheerful to others, found Taizo coming before her,

“Now, take care of yourself.”

When they shook hands, a lump suddenly welled up from the depths of her throat, and finally—

“Father... Please do,” she said in a choked voice. “When you arrive in Moskva, Ms.Yoshimi should take care of everything.”

Taizo once again took Nobuko’s hand and greeted all those standing around them before stepping onto the train’s footboard and turning to face her direction. Almost simultaneously, the train began to glide forward. Tsuyako hurriedly emerged onto the step behind him. Leaning out past Taizo’s shoulder, she waved repeatedly toward Nobuko.

Like a small, dusty whirlwind receding into the distance, the members of the Sasa household departed Paris. Leaving Nobuko behind alone. The dusty whirlwind receding from before her eyes had continued to prick Nobuko’s skin for these three months. Those slight welts and lingering pain were the peculiar signs of affection from the Sasa household that remained with Nobuko.

That morning, when they were having breakfast with dishes already marked as returned in the landlord’s ledger, Taizo—seated at the table facing the balcony—suddenly flushed, his face with its half-white beard—

“Leaving this kid all alone behind seems pitiful.”

He said this rapidly, letting out a stifled gasp as tears spilled forth. The sentiment of Taizo—who deliberately used the term *kid* to jokingly deflect when referring to Nobuko, who was already thirty—pierced through to the very depths of Nobuko’s heart. “But Father, I volunteered to do this.”

Nobuko answered in a cheerful voice, trying not to deepen her father’s sentimentality. “Really… After we went through all the trouble of living together like this—”

Takeyo picked up a napkin and pressed it to her eyelids.

“Mother, don’t start crying too, okay?”

That she had said this was, for Nobuko, an attempt to lift the spirits of everyone and brighten the mood. However, the result was the opposite, and Takeyo fixated on the words Nobuko had used—"sympathetic crying". “Even Madame Roussel—a stranger—kissed my hand and wept... yet you, Nobuko-chan, are something else entirely—how dare you call it ‘sympathetic crying’!” “But Mother, Father was the one who started it.” With a girlish meticulousness, Tsuyako had spoken up; Nobuko poked Tsuyako’s knee and silenced her.

“That’s not how it is,” Takeyo countered. “Nobuko’s doing all this because she wants us to leave in good spirits.” If this declaration held any truth, why had Takeyo—with that inexplicable caution Nobuko could never fathom—failed until today to delineate between Nobuko’s plan to remain in Paris and later return to Moscow, and their own resolved scheme to depart via Siberia alone? The phrase “sympathetic crying,” though spoken tenderly, rebounded from Takeyo like a boomerang and pierced Nobuko’s heart as a thorn when it returned. Bearing these unspoken barbs, Takeyo and Nobuko left the Pereire house for North Station. Through the train’s dim glass—Takeyo above on the platform, Nobuko below—their eyes met one final time. Then Takeyo departed Paris. Not led by her husband so much as dragging both husband and youngest daughter in her wake.

That day at seven in the evening, Sumiko Isozaki too departed from Lyon Station for Marseille. Nobuko returned to the now-vacant house in Pereire with Hachiya Ryosaku and Nozawa Yoshiji—the three of them together. The bedding and tablecloths her parents had used until that morning lay folded on the deserted dining room table, ready for laundering. Madame Roussel had already left for good. The Clamart boarding house where Nobuko would soon move reportedly operated a sizable laundry business separate from its residential quarters. Hachiya Ryosaku—returning there himself—took charge of the heavy paper-wrapped bundle containing the linens. After parting from Nozawa Yoshiji at Place Pereire and from Hachiya where Vaugirard curves into Rue Dutot, Nobuko made her way to Sumiko Isozaki's residence. A taxi already waited at the entrance. The landlady stood holding a frail-looking child clad entirely in white, while Sumiko—wearing a bright gray dress beneath her fur half-coat—boarded clutching in each hand a new brown suitcase purchased with Nobuko at Printemps. The young man entrusted with Sumiko's two suitcases was the same one who had assisted her during Kyosuke's funeral among the inner circle.

The platform at North Station, from which international trains departed, was deserted, with only the redcaps—loading stylish luggage onto handcarts—standing out. At Lyon Station for domestic travelers, the bustle of everyday life that overflowed in Parisians' daily lives was present there just as it was. The figures standing and moving in the bright interior of the Marseille-bound night train were as lively as that late May night when Nobuko had stood waiting to greet her parents.

Three years ago, Sumiko had arrived in France from Honolulu with Kyosuke and alighted at this Lyon Station. Tonight, with the one remaining infant in tow—one arm cradling Kyosuke and the other carrying a suitcase holding their child—she stood ready to depart for Japan. Whether placing her suitcase on the train compartment shelf or stepping down onto the platform afterward, Sumiko’s figure refused to let Nobuko find peace—so wrenching was her solitary endurance of grief. How brimming with life’s demands they all had been—down to Tsuyako—those members of the Sasa household who had left from North Station earlier. They departed Paris as if enacting one such demand. As if Nobuko’s choice to remain expressed her own demands—as Nobuko.

Sumiko gestured as if to say “You see,” her eyes indicating the two brown suitcases placed on the luggage rack in the train compartment. “On the ship, they want me to bring them as if they’re perfectly ordinary luggage—they say my mourning clothes are also causing trouble.” When Sumiko quietly said this and lowered her eyes to the silver-gray silk dress that harmonized with her thick bobbed bangs, Nobuko could no longer suppress the turbulent emotions—her own after sending off her family and her sympathy for Sumiko—that overwhelmed her.

“Ms. Sumiko—I... I can’t just leave you standing here alone like this.” Nobuko took Sumiko’s hand.

“Let’s go to Marseille.” “We can still buy tickets.” To the young man standing beside them, holding the baby in his slender arms, Nobuko— “I’m terribly sorry to trouble you, but could you please go and buy the tickets?” she requested. The young man answered ambiguously and looked at Sumiko as if unsure what to do. “I can’t let you go to such trouble—truly, I’ll be all right…” “But I know you’re exhausted—doing it all alone…”

Sumiko had been hesitating, but “Since this person has arranged to come to Marseille with me…” She turned her face to the young man standing beside her, holding the baby.

“Ah—if that’s how it is, what a relief! Please—do take good care of her.” A departure with few words, yet meticulously prepared. That too was so like Sumiko.

As departure approached, from behind Sumiko's slender figure standing on the train step, the faces of two or three foreigners trying to greet people on the platform overlapped.

“It feels dangerous here—like we’re about to be pushed from behind. Let’s move over here, to the window.” Following the window as it began to move, Nobuko walked hurriedly along the platform for a time. As the train picked up speed, Sumiko’s bobbed head—still waving her hand—was soon obscured by the crowd ahead.

II

The two farewells that had overlapped on that single day—both left Nobuko, remaining in Paris, with sadness and loneliness. The next day, Nobuko spent all day alone living in a deeply resonant emotional state and accomplished the errands in the city that needed settling. At Nichifutsu Bank, she received money sent to her from Bunmeisha and dispatched funds her father had left behind for Waichiro and the others in London through the same bank. On the final postcard that had arrived addressed to Pereire, Waichiro had sent word that he and Koeda had begun weekly one-hour English lessons together.

“Well, that’s how it is.” The phrasing Waichiro had written gave an impression that evoked the faintly warm atmosphere of his and Koeda’s life in London.

The exchange rate that day was one franc to twelve sen. The money from Bunmeisha combined with roughly half that amount—leftover funds Taizo had given Nobuko—would constitute her living expenses going forward. She had to work. Nobuko thought this both economically and in terms of the work itself. Since leaving Moscow, she hadn’t written even a single travelogue. Bunmeisha had sent payments separately calculated for manuscripts she submitted ad hoc. This system had sustained her finances even during her Moscow years. Now alone in Paris, she wanted to cultivate a mindset where work came naturally. This was what Nobuko had been yearning for.

The monthly rent in Clamart was 1,950 francs, which included weekly baths and covered laundry costs for bedding and similar items. If Parisian workers earned an average of sixty francs per day, then Madame—by taking in Nobuko—made slightly more than a full worker’s wages. After deducting travel expenses for returning to Moscow, what remained in Nobuko’s possession was just enough to cover less than two months in Clamart—funds for writing projects that might become her next income source, plus some money for art books. There remained no margin in the winter season to buy new clothes.

In the attic room of the Monceau et Tocqueville Hotel, Nobuko made such detailed calculations. Then the next day, Nobuko moved to Clamart with Ryosaku Hachiya, who had come to pick her up. In the new room in Clamart, when she had finished unpacking her few belongings, Nobuko suddenly—

“Oh no!”

She pressed a hand to her cheek and stood frozen. Nobuko had left the white monkey at the hotel. Thinking to keep it free from dust, she had put it into the wardrobe. She had left it there just as it was— The white monkey toy she had bought in London because its face resembled Motoko’s when she was being kind. The fact that she had crammed it into the hotel cupboard and forgotten it gave Nobuko an unpleasant feeling, as if she had abandoned a living creature. It felt as though she had somehow disregarded even Motoko’s presence—that connection to herself—in doing so.

Nobuko went down to the parlor on the lower floor. “Well, the parlor’s free today—that’s rare,” Hachiya remarked as he guided her there. In the parlor, Francine—now fifteen and pleased to be treated as a proper young lady by Hachiya—was talking about a portrait painted by a Japanese artist. The Bernays, who ran the laundry factory, had their eldest son Jack assist with the shop, and through the mother’s plan to find a more suitable marriage partner, Francine alone was sent to attend a girls’ school in Paris where relatively upper-class daughters gathered.

“Oh no, I’ve left something behind!”

With earnest concern showing on her face, Nobuko spoke about the white monkey. “—It’s just a toy anyway.”

“That may be so, but…” Francine looked between Hachiya—his face impassive as if he couldn’t understand why Nobuko would fuss over a mere toy—and Nobuko standing with her hand on the chair back. “Monsieur Achiya.”

Pronouncing the H in the French manner as A, she asked. "What did Mademoiselle say?" "I've left my mascot at the hotel." "Oh! "What kind of mascot?"

Francine’s English was awkward and terribly nasal.

“A white monkey.” Francine glanced briefly at Hachiya. It was the gaze of a girl putting on adult airs. The urge to immediately go back alone and retrieve what she had forgotten, and the feeling that even that was too hasty. Nobuko was torn between these two feelings. “If you’re that concerned, we were already planning to go into the city later anyway—we can check on it while we’re at it.”

Around the time Nobuko had moved in, once Jack returned from the shop, they planned to go out with Francine—all four of them—to eat Chinese food.

The mention of Chinese food troubled Nobuko once more. Ever since the boycott of Japanese goods had begun, Nobuko had considered it only natural that the Chinese in Paris—lumping Japanese imperialism together with the Japanese people in general—harbored antipathy toward them. Since they were running a restaurant, they must have been fine with anyone coming as customers. But Nobuko could not remain indifferent. The store workers who had been sitting on a small chair behind the counter adorned with red banners, chatting and laughing, noticed their entrance and instantly changed expressions. To eat what one liked in such places—Nobuko, who was very fond of Chinese food—felt all the more animalistic about forcing her way through that peculiar atmosphere among the shop’s people to eat there.

However, it seemed Francine had already been told about the plan,

“It’s about time Jack returns. I must excuse myself.”

Seemingly to change her clothes, she went up to the second-floor room. The one managing the Bernay household was the wife’s mother. After informing that person, the four went to a Chinese restaurant in an alley near Sorbonne University. Jack, who was tall and lanky, was nineteen years old that year. At seventeen, Jack had gotten a girl of the same age—employed by his family—pregnant, and when this became an issue and he tried to run away from home, it was Hachiya who somehow managed to calm him down and get him to help with the shop.

It was the story of when she first went to Clamart and saw Bernay’s room on her way back. Nobuko,

“And what happened to the girl?”

she asked. “It’s exactly the same as the Japanese way. Over there, my mother took charge and apparently resolved it with money.” Jack did not speak a single word to Nobuko during their first meeting—she being unable to converse freely. He was a boorish, slow-witted young man. Excited, Francine occasionally brushed aside the dull chestnut permed hair hanging by her face as she leaned one elbow on the table, stretching her nasal voice to sound more adult-like while speaking with Hachiya. With her Romanian father’s heritage, Francine’s features held an Oriental cast. She seemed convinced that adopting an air of listless elegance constituted a refined pose to accentuate these characteristics.

The white monkey within Nobuko grew increasingly vivid, asserting its presence. If it were gone, she could no longer suppress the feeling of losing something intrinsic to herself. Why had she rushed so frantically—so much that she carelessly forgot the monkey—to come to Clamart? Though Hachiya had resolved to remain indifferent once Nobuko arrived—dismissing whatever she forgot as just a toy—this very indifference unsettled him. On the whole, he found it distasteful to harbor such thoughts about himself.

Nobuko,

“Francine, I’m sorry.”

Having said that, she stood up from the table.

“My monkey’s calling me.” “I must go bring it back.”

At Versailles Gate, having arranged to meet everyone forty minutes later, Nobuko had a taxi rush her to Monceau et Tocqueville. She flung open the hotel’s front door like a gust of wind, borrowed a key, and climbed up to the seventh-floor attic room. She opened the wardrobe. It was there. The white monkey remained safely where she had left it.

“Monkey!” Nobuko clutched the white monkey to her chest in her autumn tweed coat and sat on the divan bed there for about a minute. “Monkey!” When she called out like that aloud, Nobuko felt Motoko’s presence keenly in her heart. The white monkey seemed to have angry eyes. Nobuko soothingly stroked the white monkey’s long and pure white fur. The day before yesterday, when the Sasa group had departed from North Station for Moscow, Nobuko entrusted Tsuyako with a bag sewn from light blue satin. In the hectic living room of the Pellerin house, Nobuko had sewn that bag for Motoko whenever she found time. Inside that clumsily made bag, its mouth cinched with a golden ribbon, Nobuko had placed white French crepe just enough for Motoko to make a blouse, two molded necklaces likely to charm the girls at the inn where Motoko was staying, and a uniquely woven tie for Motoko, who adored neckties.

III

Paris’s autumn was deepening, and life in Clamart lay at the very heart of the season.

The day after Nobuko moved was a Sunday. It was an impossibly beautiful autumn day in Clamart—on such a day, staying shut indoors was unthinkable. Nobuko was invited by Hachiya Ryosaku and Shibagaki Kozo, a painter living in the area, and took a long walk with them through Clamart’s sparse forest and the true woods of Meudon Hill until evening.

Even though it was called the main street, there were only small shops lined up and a single-track suburban train running intermittently through the modest town of Clamart. From the train-lined street, a gradual slope led up to a residential area. The compact middle-class-style houses were uniformly enclosed by iron fences, each with a front garden between gate and entrance, every house planted with fruit trees. On one side of the wide, deserted entrance of the elementary school on a gentle slope—quiet on a Sunday—was written "Girls", while "Boys" marked the other side—a distinction Nobuko found amusing. Though Paris too had elementary schools, only in Clamart did Nobuko first discover a French school entrance maintaining such antiquated segregation.

The café considered the best in town was closed on Sunday mornings, with chairs placed upside-down on tables in tidy rows. Under the horse-chestnut tree in that café's square, the small stage that had gathered festival crowds until late last night now sat forgotten, still decorated with rustic artificial flower arrangements. Leaving the town behind, the road flattened out into fields. After walking a short distance along this path, they entered the forest of Clamart. On the woodland path, chestnuts lay scattered as if even Clamart's children had tired of collecting them. When Nobuko bent down in delighted curiosity to gather the chestnuts, she occasionally glimpsed through the moderately spaced trees an old woman in a light blue apron picking mushrooms some distance away.

Meudon Forest stood majestic and dignified, like a large black wig. Close to town life, Clamart Forest was the forest of France’s common people. On the forest path where Nobuko walked—slipping on fallen leaves or deliberately kicking them up with the toes of her low-heeled walking shoes—a pleasant champagne-like aroma lingered, born from the deepening autumn’s nightly dampness blending with the scent of steel-colored leaves dried by the strong daytime sun.

“Ah, how wonderful!” Clamart Forest stood sparse, its sunlight piercing through the branches of growing trees; the abundance of deciduous trees too formed part of autumn’s beauty. “Everyone—have you always spent such splendid Octobers here year after year?”

“That’s right.” “Isn’t it truly splendid?” Shibagaki Kozo answered with expressive, nimble eyes—the eyelids bearing a painter’s vitality—that seemed to dance above his cheeks.

“So you see, when you move here, by around the second year, anyone ends up getting all foggy-headed.” “Really?”

Nobuko looked back at Hachiya Ryosaku. Hachiya Ryosaku, wearing his usual black soft hat, walked heavily beside Nobuko. “That’s probably not the case.” Shibagaki continued walking while whistling intermittently, but eventually, as if to sarcastically mock Hachiya’s earnest reply, he muttered in a manner resembling a soliloquy.

“You must be an exceptionally healthy person—perhaps only fragile specimens like us feel affected by Clamart’s climate.” To Nobuko, this amounted to declaring that Hachiya Ryosaku was a dull man. Hachiya Ryosaku, whether he sensed the sting in Shibagaki’s words or not, kept walking with his round face turned full toward the western sun that melted and glimmered in the light wind. What kind of paintings did Shibagaki create, she wondered. Nobuko grew curious.

"I wonder if I might see your work someday, Mr. Shibagaki?"

Then Hachiya said, “Francine’s portrait was painted by Shibagaki.” Nobuko had not seen it.

“Ah, there’s no helping that!” “I’m not exactly skilled myself, but the models have absolutely no character.” “For us, anyone willing to model for free is a godsend.” “But she’s gone and shouldered it all with that.”

The Japanese residents in Clamart were Hachiya, Shibagaki, another painter couple, and Junzo Yoshizawa, who was said to be studying French rural areas. Hachiya stopped by the doorways of these people’s residences during their walks and introduced the newcomer Nobuko—so that she could visit freely whenever she felt inclined. The house where Yoshizawa rented a room stood on Clamart’s outskirts; following the garden path around to the back revealed a quintessentially rustic two-story structure facing a spacious field, complete with a grape arbor. The Kameda couple lived on the second floor of a rather large, clean storage shed built in what resembled someone’s backyard, using it as both studio and residence, while Hachiya’s dwelling—closest to the tram line—was at No. 98 in Saint-Ouen. From Saint-Cloud Street where Nobuko boarded, all these residences lay scattered within five to ten minutes’ walk. Every house and person had settled into Clamart’s rhythms, immersed in the autumn of 1929.

The Wall Street panic of October 29th manifested itself to Nobuko—who sat beneath the pear tree in Madame Bernay’s garden in Clamart—in an exceedingly gentle form.

At eight-thirty in the morning, Bernays' old woman appeared. “Good morning, Mademoiselle.” Though her voice carried its customary cheerfulness, she brought the morning tea with strictly businesslike efficiency. On a tray draped with a white napkin sat a yellow Seto-ware milk jug and teapot. Two small round bread rolls. A saucer holding a scant portion of jam. Four butter pats shaped into spheres. The not particularly spacious room was dominated by a large bed that looked comfortable to sleep in. At its foot stood an old-fashioned walnut wardrobe flanked by a desk pressed flush against the left wall. As if trying to habituate herself to this corner through sheer force of habit, Nobuko gazed out the window while deliberately sipping her faintly flavored morning tea at this desk. That Hachiya had inhabited this room for over two years struck her as unfathomable. Where could he have kept his books? On the mantelpiece perhaps? Maybe he'd used the wardrobe? Wedged between wall and wardrobe at this desk where both elbows felt constricted—if Hachiya had managed to settle here undisturbed, was it because his discipline was economics? In this room Nobuko felt there wasn't even enough air for her own existence.

Nobuko took the newspaper and went down to the garden. As Nobuko exited through the front door and walked along the gravel-covered garden path toward the back, Bernay’s grandmother emerged from the opposite direction, wearing a large gray apron and holding about five pears in both hands. Bernay’s grandmother would make her rounds of the garden each morning to gather pears, then neatly arrange them in four rows on the glass-enclosed veranda floor to dry. There were already forty-two pears, and dried fruit to be eaten during winter was being made from them. When she took Nobuko and Francine for their first tour of the garden, the old woman showed Nobuko the pears drying on the veranda,

“Mademoiselle, if you find any fallen pears while out walking, please pick them up and leave them here.” she instructed. And, pursing her wrinkled lips as if for a kiss,

“It’s truly delicious dried fruit, you know.”

“Mademoiselle, if you find any fallen pears while out walking, please pick them up and leave them here,” she instructed. Francine, her complexion sallow, shrugged her shoulders in utter scorn and said through her nose, “They’re terribly sour.” She glanced sideways at Nobuko. Beside the pear tree stood the Bernays’ garden back gate—its iron door rusted against the concrete wall. A stone bench had been placed nearby. This was Nobuko’s favorite spot, a corner concealed from both the entranceway and kitchen windows, hidden too from the gaze of passersby on the main street.

Nobuko spread out the English-language newspaper in the pleasant natural light of an autumn morning. Along with the smell of ink, several lines printed in oversized type caught her eye. "The Great Panic on Wall Street." "10 Million Shares Dumped onto the Market!!" "Stock Exchange Closes." "Millions Bankrupt Overnight." "Suicides Surge." "Major Banks Under Morgan's Direction Strive to Halt Deepening Panic." "The Wall Street Panic Has Delivered a Severe Blow to the Global Economy"—.

Nobuko’s eyes widened. That Wall Street. In front of the exchange stood a statue of Lincoln, stained pitch-black by grease from monetary greed and dust. That Wall Street where Nobuko, not yet twenty years old, had witnessed the burning of the Kaiser’s straw effigy amidst a frenzied New York crowd on the afternoon of the World War I armistice day. On that day, from every window of the towering buildings on either side, scraps of paper in various colors were thrown, and clusters of stock ticker tapes hung down from all the windows of Wall Street like dingy strands of white hair. So relentlessly had it been touted—this belief that America alone was the “eternal prosperity” immune to depression, which even Americans themselves had come to embrace. It had been shattered in a single day—yesterday, October 29th. The Wall Street crash—the vision of endless chaos that must have struck those bowler-hatted crowds scurrying through the canyon of skyscrapers—conjured in Nobuko’s mind vivid images of people drained of color in panic.

With her eyes wide open, Nobuko thought that it had indeed been right. "The American boom will not extend into 1930." Varga’s words had hit the mark. A flame burned in Nobuko’s tense eyes. "The American boom will not extend into 1930." This foresight had been demonstrated by facts. That Bukharin’s theory of "organized capitalism’s stability" had been scathingly criticized as a deception at the Comintern’s Tenth Executive Committee Plenum in July—that this criticism had been justified—gripped Nobuko’s heart with emotion. Those who held Bukharin’s theories existed within both the American Communist Party and the German Communist Party. They had supported Bukharin under organizational pressure, slandered comrades who acknowledged the Comintern and its critiques, and even engaged in selling out as was happening in the French Party. However, reality had been demonstrated before the world.

Even to Nobuko, who possessed only a rudimentary understanding of economics and politics, the meaning behind the assertion that the Bukharin faction’s fallacies were not accidental had become clear.

In the garden on a clear autumn morning, several scenes overlapped and passed before Nobuko’s mind’s eye. On a summer Sunday, London’s unemployed were packed on every step of St. Peter’s grand front staircase, bathed in morning sun. On Bloody May Day, Berlin’s workers had been gunned down. The Berlin square marked with its large white commemorative circle. Warsaw’s May Day. The park’s backstreet after rain—damp and faintly chill. A gunshot-like crack. The profile of a hatless young man pressed against the café window where Nobuko and Motoko had taken refuge—strangely flattened and pallid.—Scenes drifted slowly through Nobuko’s consciousness. As they passed thus, each fragment reaffirmed how her impressions from those sights—her judgments—had not erred.

―It was all true.―

This confirmation steadied Nobuko's spirit. At the same time, this confirmation of reason caused something like the sound of a joyous bell—steadily growing stronger—to resonate within her. It was all true— Within this lay the truth of the twenty-two months Nobuko had lived in Moscow, and the conviction that the emotion now constricting her throat was something authentically human.

Nobuko walked back and forth under the pear tree again and again, still holding the English-language newspaper Excelsior. She wanted to embrace Motoko and squeeze each other tightly. This panic that Wall Street had never before experienced had not erupted suddenly—it had been predicted by more rational people. This fact proclaimed the reality that a new force of wisdom was being brought into world history. Nobuko could not help feeling that within this stark reality existed something even more certain and beautiful precisely because of its unflinching truth.

IV

When Ryosaku Hachiya came to visit at four in the afternoon, Nobuko found it wearisome to follow Bernay’s grandmother—who had climbed to the second floor to notify her of his arrival—as she descended each stair step. Hachiya stood beside the oval dining table—left bare except during meals—wearing an expression that suggested he had rushed over.

“Good afternoon.” With their customary greeting without a handshake, Nobuko, “How about it?” Her eyes sparkled with a prideful, mischievous glint.

“What do you think of ‘organized capitalism’?”

“It seems quite significant—did you read it?” “Even if I did read it, there are so many parts I don’t understand—but look, it was right: ‘1930 will not be included’…” During the summer, after the Comintern’s criticism of Bukharin had emerged, Hachiya and Nobuko had discussed Varga’s prediction. Hachiya had said that each stage of revolution and economy was concrete and should be examined individually, and that any hasty conclusions should be taken with reservations.

“……I thought it would last a bit longer……” “Regretting it already?” “Such a thing—it’s not like I’m a Standard Oil shareholder…”

With a hint of irritation, Hachiya pulled the chair from beside the hearth closer to the table and sat down. Then, he took out a temporarily bound book from his pocket, placed it face down, and set it in front of himself. That day was the second study day for Nobuko and Hachiya. With Nobuko, who had moved to Clamart, as his audience, Hachiya had begun his lectures on *Capital* starting that Tuesday. He had guided Nobuko to a stationery and general store near the tram line, and when placing an order there for the English-language newspaper and *L’Humanité* to be delivered anew to the Bernays’ house, he had persuaded her to purchase two student notebooks. Then, in a manner befitting a professor with long experience lecturing to students from the podium, he had Nobuko start taking notes on “The Production Process of Capital. Commodities and Money.” he had her begin taking notes under “I. Commodities.” “The two factors of commodities, namely use-value and value (the substance of value and the magnitude of value).” “In a society where the capitalist mode of production predominates, the wealth of society presents itself as an ‘immense collection of commodities,’ and the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.” “Therefore, our research begins with the analysis of commodities.”

The back of Nobuko’s brown hardcover notebook contained basic diagrams separated into lines, surfaces, and solids for students beginning geometry—straight lines, curves, circles, planes, spheres, and cones. On the left side of each page, vertical peony-colored lines had been drawn, likely intended for writing headings. Nobuko, following Hachiya’s instructions, opened the notebook and began taking notes, but when she reached a particular section, she raised the tip of her left hand—the one not holding a pencil—as if signaling,

“Could you wait a moment?” she said. “Somehow, I feel like this way of doing things is strange.” While her face flushed red, Nobuko looked up at Hachiya with a troubled gaze. From the very first day, Hachiya had decided that his seat would be on the hearth side directly opposite where Nobuko was sitting. Leaning one elbow on the table beside the unlit hearth, he read aloud from the temporarily bound book the passages Nobuko was to transcribe.

“Mr. Hachiya—are you reading exactly what’s written in that book?” “It’s not precisely that…” Unaware of how her blunt question had startled Hachiya, Nobuko continued hesitantly. “Forgive me, but I’ve never studied economics before, you see? Even if it’s technical jargon, I can’t grasp words like ‘elementary form’ without pondering them first. Wouldn’t it simply mean ‘elemental form,’ if I may put it plainly?”

“You could say it generally means that,” Hachiya replied. “However, to explain precisely, in German it conveys a more complex and organic meaning than the English ‘elemental’...” Nobuko pressed further, “Could I possibly take notes in plain language? It’s not like I’m going to become an economist anyway.” She leaned forward slightly, her pencil hovering over the notebook. “For example—‘Because the wealth of capitalist society appears in the form of an accumulation of commodities, each individual commodity corresponds to an element of that wealth.’ If it’s not mistaken to phrase it that way with ‘Therefore,’ that would be clearer...”

Hachiya smiled wryly, stroked his soft hair, and rearranged his legs on the chair. If Hachiya were to read from the book he had and take notes verbatim, Nobuko thought it would be redundant. After all—if I were to borrow that book directly and read it myself before having him interpret it—that would suffice. But saying that much felt like an insult to Hachiya.

“You’re surprisingly impatient, aren’t you?” As if guiding a rearing horse with the bit through calm will, Hachiya began to speak. “The study of such troublesome things, unlike intuitive literature, can only be pursued through relentless logical rigor. First taking notes up to a certain section, and then moving on to detailed interpretation—that’s the usual method, ordinary though it may be. From now on, you see, explanations about what use-value actually *is* will also begin.”

Nobuko grew quiet and listened to Hachiya’s words. “Ms. Sasa’s comprehension is astonishingly broad in scope, but this field is, so to speak, uncharted territory—please try to endure it for a while.” “For someone like you, an interest in logical analysis must arise after all.” Thus, between four and five-thirty on that first day, Nobuko found her muddled and vague understanding of the essence of things called use-value and exchange-value somewhat organized.

The second day began with "When we consider commodities apart from their use-value, what remains is solely the one property of being products of labor." From the usefulness of various labors and their concrete forms came "all being reduced to uniform human labor, that is, abstract human labor." That the expenditure of human labor power congealed into value—this was what Nobuko attempted to comprehend with the difficulty of ascending a treacherous mountain path where each forward step revealed no discernible way ahead.

Even so, Nobuko could not help thinking as she took notes. How did the Wall Street panic come about? What, fundamentally, was a panic? What exactly were the stocks—those ten million shares dumped on Wall Street on October 29th? Nobuko had believed she understood the general outline of what a panic was from the start. She had thought she grasped stocks too. General Electric, which had reached a high of 403 in 1929, fell to 250 on October 29th—a 38% decline; Steel Trust dropped from 261 3/4 to 185 1/2; and Chrysler Motors plummeted 71% from 135 3/4 to 39 3/4. She understood this meant losses for people holding stocks. *L’Humanité* had written: "Hilferding’s mask has been stripped off." "The 'planned economy of organized capitalism,' through losses amounting to 25 billion dollars, is plunging the lives of workers, engineers, office workers, small and medium-sized business owners, farmers, and millions of small investors into ruin," it stated.

In this panic, those truly ruined were the small investors and their families—the millions of ordinary Americans and their kin who had converted their hard-earned savings into stocks—while the billionaire Morgan family was increasingly concentrating wealth through the terrifying chaos. Here lay the inhumanity of capitalism, sapping away the lifeblood. In Nobuko’s eyes—eyes that should have known panics and stocks merely as written concepts—the groan of social life ignited a fierce fire and stimulated throughout her entire body an investigative desire accompanied by indignation.

Nobuko had him end the note-taking session early. And just as they began discussing that morning’s news—as if understanding Japanese—the door between the kitchen and dining room opened, and Madame Bernay’s grandmother entered with practiced charm. She then suggested to Hachiya that he stay and have dinner with everyone. “Monsieur Hachiya, even if you move away, you will remain our kind friend.”

“Thank you, Madame.” “I certainly have no reason to decline.”

The Bernay household's dinner was at seven o'clock.

“The stingy old woman inviting someone—that’s unusual. I wonder if something’s up.” While dinner preparations were underway, Nobuko and Hachiya left the house and strolled down the street toward the fields. How often did the Bernays use their guest room in a year? Though the interior beyond the closed door remained a mystery, pears lay neatly arranged on the veranda floor of the shuttered guest room facing the garden. Whether Hachiya visited Nobuko or Madame Ragondel came by, they were always received in the dining room. Since Nobuko’s arrival, there had been no visitors to the Bernays.

V As the meal drew to a close, Nobuko came to understand what the Bernay family wanted to know—particularly what Albert Bernay, owner of Clamart's first-class laundry factory, was keenly interested in: how the Wall Street panic would affect the French economy. Ryosaku Hachiya, who had prevented Jack's runaway and earned the Bernay family's trust, was clearly expected by all household members to speak as a professor regarding the Wall Street panic issue.

That evening, the scene around the Bernay family’s table was an intriguing one. Madame Bernay’s grandmother—her knuckled, red, square hands placed on the table with fingers interlaced as if upon a prayer stand—fixed her grayish blue eyes upon Ryosaku Hachiya. Beside her, Jack—a nineteen-year-old unsure what to do with his long shins—slouched slightly in his chair, looking down as he kneaded breadcrumbs with the fingertips of his free hand, the one not in his pocket.

Francine wore a melancholic expression and occasionally fiddled with her curls using slender fingers. Madame Bernay sat with proper posture in her role as a housewife, her robust frame wrapped in a plain serge dress adorned with embroidered decorations that concealed her intense interest. Albert had come to France as a soldier from his native Romania when—for reasons unclear even to himself—he ended up marrying this wife. The explanation he had given Nobuko was that his golden beard—now cropped short and stripped of its former luster—had once enchanted local girls with its silken beauty. That story too seemed half-true. In Clamart, the foundation of this family—owners of a stone house with gardens and a laundry factory—lay rooted in a red-handed mother and her daughter who became their daughter-in-law; while Monsieur Bernay held nominal authority, the family business was truly managed under the watchful eyes of that square-handed grandmother and her stout, practical daughter. That Francine was being raised apart from the laundry factory also formed part of the grandmother and mother's design.

In the American market, over the past several years, securities prices had been inflated by speculation, and even in just the recent year and a half alone, they had risen by an average of one and a half times. Since dividends for steel stocks and others were over 25%, everyone across America who had managed to save even a little was swept up in the investment frenzy. This phenomenon naturally signified danger, yet Charles Mitchell, president of the Bank of the United States, and other financial leaders continued to assert that high stock prices were grounded in the firm expectation of even greater future profits, and that dividends too were anticipated to grow larger still. All of America’s "amateurs" had been completely deceived by it.

“Among experts who calmly observed the facts,” Hachiya continued, “there were those who had warned that the market would collapse under its own artificially inflated weight.” “This became evident when the first signs of panic surfaced in September.” Bernay interjected, “The French—who’ve never received twenty-five percent dividends or anything of the sort—want no part of America’s panic.” “At least,” he added with a self-assured nod, “I certainly don’t.” Nobuko sensed Bernay had made this remark to showcase his discernment as household head—a man occupying a singular position—to family members following his exchange with Hachiya.

“France has maintained a more stable economic situation than any other part of Europe since the devaluation of the franc. France won’t be immediately thrown into chaos by the panic. However, it is absolutely impossible that this large-scale American panic would not affect the world economy.”

“Absolutely?”

Seated properly in her chair, Madame Bernay retorted from the far end of the table.

“The impact on France may manifest gradually, or perhaps appear last.” “But avoiding it would be impossible.” “Hmm.” “Even with smallpox—the pockmarks of those who catch it last always leave the deepest scars.” “It’s all war.” “War doesn’t leave behind a single good thing.” The grandmother sighed as she pulled the thin woolen shawl draped over her shoulders toward her chest with both hands that looked redder than ever.

“Look here,” “It was America that profited from the war.” “Prosperity! Prosperity!” “Prosperity! Prosperity!”

Madame Bernay’s grandmother, stubborn as ever, pursed her lips like hissing steam and spat out, “Boom! Boom!” “And now panic! That’s what’ll make the whole world quake!” “Pa-nic,” the grandmother enunciated, spitting each syllable from between her lips like bitter seeds. “But your line of work has a high safety factor.”

Hachiya said there were no people who did not eat bread and that laundry had become an everyday necessity in modern times. "Occupations tied to people’s daily needs always remain strong." "That’s precisely it! Professor Achiya!"

Monsieur Bernay nodded with satisfaction as he leaned firmly against the back of his chair and thrust both legs out under the table. Francine, with eyes threatening to turn teary, twisted her neck and signaled to her mother. The wife did not respond. Francine had always resented that her parents were laundry workers.

“Our trade is an honest one, you know.”

The conversation around the dinner table eventually shifted to talk of how rising fuel costs were causing the laundry business’s profits to dwindle more and more. Then, returning to the American panic, Japan’s raw silk and silk fabric exports would naturally suffer significant damage. The conversation turned to Hachiya’s remarks that Germany would be the most directly affected by the turmoil in Europe. Fortunately, the Bernays were not German; Hachiya was a professor, Mademoiselle was a writer, and they were not Japanese silk exporters—this was the best thing. The Bernay family’s unpalatable wine-accompanied dinner came to an end in such circumstances.

When they realized no sudden blow would strike their own family, the Bernays—from the red-handed grandmother down to Francine—became utterly calm about the panic. The grandmother stood in her usual apron-clad posture, gathering pears to dry inside the glass-paned veranda. At the dinner table, Francine spoke through her nose with such languidness that it spoiled even Nobuko's appetite.

Through the daily newspaper reports, Nobuko learned that this Wall Street panic was the largest since Wall Street’s inception. Those who threw themselves to their deaths from forty-story buildings onto Wall Street were not limited to female brokers driven mad by the crash’s shock. The president of the New York City County Trust Company had committed suicide with a pistol. Yet the big bankers and President Hoover kept dawdling somehow. When the “Capital-Labor Agreement” was finally announced, it merely permitted America’s big capitalists—the railroad kings, oil kings, automobile kings and others—to reduce bank interest rates while granting them a one-year income tax exemption of $160 million. Meanwhile, workers found themselves prohibited from wage increase struggles thanks to Green and Wool, forced only to pledge that “workers shall cooperate with industry through all possible means in resolving all their problems.” This agreement stipulated launching eighty billion dollars’ worth of new projects for economic stabilization—yet this would prove a temporary facade that never materialized. The panic would find no relief, merely being prolonged through gradual transformation. For if Hoover and the capitalists’ plan were realized, the very cause forced into violent resolution by this panic—the imbalance between society’s productive capacity and consumptive power—would only grow more acute through eighty billion dollars of increased production. Under the headline “Ford’s Demagogy,” L’Humanité analyzed the Automobile King’s brazen statement. On November 21st, as panic intensified, Ford abruptly announced his company would not lower but raise wages for 150,000 employees—six dollars starting pay instead of five, seven dollars minimum instead of six—while reducing car prices. What followed told another story: Ford suspended operations at most factories under pretext of restructuring for cheaper models, discarding tens of thousands from now-unneeded workplaces. These workers—having labored four or five years under world-notorious murderous rationalization—faced bleak prospects for reemployment. All knew they had been squeezed dry.

The reason Ford automobiles became cheaper was that the commission for the tens of thousands of salespeople who made their living attached to Ford had been reduced from 20 percent to 17.5 percent. For example, for a Ford car that had become twenty-five dollars cheaper, the burden on the salespeople—whose commissions had been reduced—amounted to seventeen and a half dollars out of those twenty-five. The Ford Company merely bore seven and a half dollars. Through the burden on the salespeople, from the wallets of people who had grown poorer than before, Ford was attempting to profit even more than it had before. When November began, the number of unemployed people exceeded four hundred thousand.

"What do all these things signify?" "The struggle over world markets will intensify further." "That very fact will heighten the crisis leading to a Second World War." Whether it was the conversation at the Bernays' on the thirtieth evening or these facts reported by *L’Humanité*, none could have been understood by Nobuko—with her limited language skills—without Ryosaku Hachiya's help.

Nobuko's pre-dinner walks had gradually been moved earlier in time. While walking along Clamart's farm roads toward the forest, she would sometimes pass through Saint-Cloud's streets in the afternoon, cross the quiet lanes of Saint-Ouen where Hachiya resided, then return to converse in his modest second-floor room within that house which felt oddly vacant. It was fortunate the Sasa household had departed Paris on October 24th. For Taizo, as an architect engaged in large-scale projects, it became evident he couldn't escape some form of indirect impact from this economic panic. That Takeyo rode in a private car while Tsuyako spent her girlhood in an atmosphere utterly different from Nobuko's own youth in the Sasa home was not unrelated to the enormous profits Japanese shipping companies had reaped during the First World War.

Nobuko could not help but acknowledge that the Wall Street panic was an ominous blemish manifesting upon global capitalism itself—a phenomenon that foretold the successive exposure of contradictions, the rallying toward fascism, war, and ultimately the collapse of such an entire system.

During their walks together with Ryosaku Hachiya,

“I’ll give you this.” She handed him a white envelope. “What?” While looking at Nobuko’s face with skepticism, Hachiya gazed at the envelope placed on his palm. “It’s strangely light.” “It’s a beautiful thing.”

While continuing to walk at a slow pace, Ryosaku Hachiya opened the unsealed envelope and took out a small white paper-wrapped item from inside. “What could this be?” While amusing herself with the process of its contents being revealed, Nobuko said again, “It’s a wonderful thing. I’m certain you don’t have one of these.”

“—I don’t know.” Hachiya carefully unfolded the small, white, and completely flat rectangular package with his thick fingertips.

“Oh!”

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Nobuko laughed innocently, both from the delight of having surprised Ryosaku Hachiya with something unexpected and from the heartfelt satisfaction of truly finding it beautiful. “You don’t have one, do you?” “I don’t have one.” It was a 30-kopeck postage stamp of the Soviet Union. On a crisp, rectangular light-blue base, a white map of Asia and Europe appeared, upon which the Soviet Union’s entire territory—occupying one-sixth of the Earth—was printed in a vivid red so striking it seemed to leap from the surface.

“Do you even carry something like this when you travel?” “I really do like this. That’s why I keep it in my pen case.” The face of Ryosaku Hachiya, who was looking at the small, beautiful postage stamp, appeared large, and the palm holding it also appeared large.

“Even if you just glance at it, isn’t it beautiful? If you look closely, it’s even better. Down to the finest details, it’s a real map.” “I see—even the unevenness here is properly represented.” Ryosaku Hachiya examined the section of China’s coastline with the interest of one who actually knew the area. The part of Europe depicted on the stamp extended eastward, but France beyond that point was omitted. “O Japan, you are a single string stretched taut over the sea. No matter from which direction the wind blows, you cannot help but resonate—don’t you truly think so?”

Nobuko stopped in the street before it was stored back in the paper and peered at the beautiful stamp resting on Ryosaku Hachiya’s hand.

VI

Nobuko received an unexpected letter from Moskva. Sasa’s party arrived in Moskva on the morning of October 27th as scheduled. Motoko, who had been informed of the time by telegram, came to meet them at the station. And, as passengers passing through Moskva typically do, she tried to guide the Sasa party to the embassy to spend the time until they would board the Trans-Siberian Railway that night. Motoko had written in the letter that it was because Buko-chan had also communicated her plans in such a manner.

However, what arrangements had been made at the station—alongside Motoko came Military Attaché Takeo Fujiwara from the embassy. When the international train stopped at North Station’s platform, Army Major Takeo Fujiwara in a suit stepped ahead of Motoko, located the Sasa party’s carriage, handled their immediate luggage, and even arranged taxis—scarce in Moscow and difficult to secure—in advance. In this way, someone had done everything I should have needed to do—which proved a great help—and Motoko’s fine pen strokes continued narrating beyond the manuscript paper’s margins. Had Mother planned from the start not to go to the embassy in Moscow but to Mr. Fujiwara’s residence? Only Takeyo parted from Taizo Sasa, Tsuyako, and their group—who were heading to the embassy—at the station, riding in Takeo Fujiwara’s automobile to his quarters. And until evening came—when the Japanese group boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway would dine at Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel—Takeyo remained entirely at Fujiwara’s place. Regarding Takeyo’s actions, Motoko concluded her report tersely. Since Father was present for this matter, I thought I shouldn’t interfere—that’s why.

The day she received that letter was a late autumn afternoon in Clamart when rain was falling. Gazing at the bright rain falling on the russet autumn treetops, Nobuko sat at the desk wedged between the wall and wardrobe in the Bernays' second-floor room—its cramped space making her shoulders hunch—and read the letter repeatedly. Motoko's writing remained concise, devoid of any superfluous impressions. Takeyo's actions in Moskva were recounted with clinical brevity. Reading it from distant Clamart, Nobuko could see Motoko's face—tight with suppressed tension—beneath the calm pen strokes. I think I understand why Buko-chan didn't want to return with us. But tell me—had Buko-chan actually returned to Moskva together with us, would things have unfolded the same way? That much even I cannot say. This phrasing too revealed Motoko's characteristic delicacy. Regarding Nobuko's decision to remain in Paris while others departed, later planning to return alone to Moskva, Motoko had never addressed the matter directly nor expressed any definitive opinion in her subsequent letters.

Nobuko's state of mind—or rather, her thoughts—had been swayed twofold, even threefold, by Motoko's letter. That Takeyo, upon arriving in Moskva, had gone alone from the station to Takeo Fujiwara's residence and remained there the entire day was news that struck Nobuko not so much as unexpected but as complex. What reason could Takeyo have had for behaving so deliberately in Moskva?

At the beginning of this year, when Nobuko had developed hepatitis and was hospitalized at Moscow University’s affiliated hospital, the number of military attachés at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow had been increased to two. The newly assigned Army Major Takeo Fujiwara had arrived to assist Lieutenant Colonel Kibe—a heavy drinker who always carried himself with boisterous openness. Unaware of such matters, Nobuko, who had been hospitalized since the beginning of January, was slowly recovering from her illness when one day in late February she suddenly received a visit from Takeo Fujiwara. He introduced himself to Nobuko, whom he was meeting for the first time, entirely in a personal capacity. The eldest son of a man who had long frequented the Sasa household happened to marry a woman who was the sister of Fujiwara Takeo’s wife, and through this wedding reception Fujiwara Takeo became acquainted with Taizo Sasa and Takeyo. Upon learning that he was being stationed in Moscow, Takeyo visited Takeo Fujiwara’s home on the very night before his departure and requested that once he went to Moscow he must observe Nobuko’s condition and inform her in detail—or so he had been asked.

The crown of Takeo Fujiwara’s high-boned head, reminiscent of a Zen monk’s, had thinned in a manner unbefitting his age—as might be expected of a man who, as a serious military man, had done nothing but wear military caps. His tone was meticulous, lacking any coarseness. With that casual manner of speaking, he then asked Nobuko what she thought about the Japanese Emperor. In 1917, Russia abolished the Tsar. The French Revolution guillotined Louis XVI. He had heard that Nobuko sympathized with Soviet society and was asking what she thought about the Japanese Emperor. Nobuko felt an instinctive wariness. She clearly felt the fact that her thoughts were being scrutinized by military personnel.

Nobuko, who had not yet grasped a coherent understanding of the Japanese Emperor within revolutionary theory, spurred by intense wariness, posed a counterattacking question instead. Japan and Russia stood under entirely different conditions—so why must they discuss the Emperor here? Did Fujiwara himself acknowledge that the Japanese Emperor was an evil entity equivalent to the Tsar?

Fujiwara Takeo had been calmly weighing Nobuko’s words when he finally said, “You’re free to hold whatever views about society you like—but I’d advise particular caution regarding matters of the Emperor.” He then informed her that under the revised Peace Preservation Law—which listed “alteration of the national polity” under Article One—the penalties were exceedingly severe. After fifteen months of living in Moscow, Nobuko found Fujiwara’s visit irritating—a response shaped by Soviet social sensibilities she had naturally absorbed. She resented how Takeyo had gone out of her way to have him check on her like this. And since he seemed busy—having only visited the hospital once without ever calling at her boardinghouse—she considered his absence a relief.

Fujiwara Takeo had come to Moscow on assignment due to the Eastern Chinese Railway issue at a time when conflict was beginning to emerge between Chiang Kai-shek’s government and the Soviet Union. During this summer when Sasa’s party had been living in Péreire, Paris, the Soviet Union and China severed diplomatic relations. That it was imperialist countries outside China supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s government in prolonging the Eastern Chinese Railway dispute with the Soviet Union became clear to Nobuko as she observed these developments from Paris. Even without Pravda in Paris, L’Humanité told the facts.

The fact that Takeyo had spent her twelve-hour Moscow layover before boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway at Takeo Fujiwara’s residence was beyond anything Nobuko could have anticipated. In her Parisian life, Nobuko had nearly forgotten Takeo Fujiwara’s existence. Yet Takeyo had focused on Moscow—on Fujiwara’s presence there—and contacted him with singular intent. Nobuko found her mother’s methods terrifying. When had Takeyo coordinated this Moscow meeting with Fujiwara? After settling on returning via the Trans-Siberian route, Takeyo ceased urging Nobuko to accompany them home. All while forcing Nobuko to assist with preparations, she kept separating her—separating them—repeatedly. Though Nobuko found this strange, she ultimately concluded only that her own plan to return alone to Moscow had grown simpler. But Takeyo had schemed to leave Nobuko in Paris while meeting Fujiwara in Moscow. What purpose could that serve—?

Gazing at autumn treetops wet with midday rain and tinged copper-red, Nobuko sank into thoughts that chilled her fingertips. How fortunate she had maintained no affiliations with political groups in either Moskva or Paris. Otherwise—even hearing it as a third party—her mother’s actions would have defied simple explanation: that Takeyo, who had spent hours daily with Nobuko in Paris, had gone alone to Fujiwara Takeo’s residence immediately upon reaching Moskva—where he was stationed as a Japanese intelligence officer—and remained there all afternoon.

Takeyo, being true to herself, had likely thought things through, concluded that Taizo was unreliable, and convinced herself that this was something she must handle alone. Through Motoko’s letter, Nobuko had learned something unexpected for the first time, and she could not help but ponder what hidden motive had made her mother act so beyond measure in Moscow.

Nobuko read through Motoko’s letter from the beginning again and again. Had Motoko received the souvenir bag I had sent through Tsuyako? On five half-sheets of manuscript paper, in any line of Motoko’s densely written letter, there was no mention of the souvenir bag that Nobuko had sewn herself and tied shut with a golden ribbon.

7

On the morning four or five days later, it was already late in the day. Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya emerged from the front entrance of the Franco-Japanese Bank into the bustling Cambon Street crowded with pedestrians. Nobuko’s handbag now contained cash from a check for ninety-nine yen and seventy-five sen that had just been converted into francs. Standing at the edge of the sidewalk leading to Madeleine Square and blending into a group of men and women attempting to cut through the stream of automobiles, Nobuko said to Ryosaku Hachiya,

“I’ll treat you to lunch,” she said. “But it’s a bit unconventional—eating a meal that costs just seventy-five sen in Japanese money. Are you really okay with that?” “Seventy-five sen? That’s a little over six francs... But where did that exact seventy-five sen figure come from?” “Ms. Yoshimi gave me a check for ninety-nine yen and seventy-five sen. This is what’s left after the tail end of that seventy-five sen.” There was a reason Nobuko found amusement in planning such a meager six-franc lunch for them both. Motoko Yoshimi had undertaken several translation projects until then, and her capabilities had gained moderate recognition. Yet she had produced neither original works nor critical essays herself. Am I just someone who can only translate? I hate that. Even during their time living in Komazawa, Motoko would occasionally voice such thoughts. The fact that Buko-chan writes makes this both an advantage and disadvantage. Unconsciously, I find myself shrinking back.

Even after coming to Moskva, Motoko wrote nothing. Why? She knew so much about literary news—what a waste. If only she would write—it would be of use to everyone. Being not very proficient in Russian, Nobuko sometimes even suggested that Motoko’s casual conversations should be reported to Japan. Motoko Yoshimi, who had written nothing at all up to that point, went to London with Nobuko that summer, then returned alone to Moskva afterward and wrote a critical essay on recent developments in Soviet literature. That was published in Bunmei-sha’s comprehensive magazine. And the manuscript fee was sent to Motoko Yoshimi in Moskva. The ninety-nine yen and seventy-five sen was the manuscript fee. “Since this is my first time, I’m presenting all of it to Buko-chan.” That was written in Motoko’s letter. “It was always Buko who encouraged me to write.” “And since Buko was over there and I was all alone, with no one to talk to, I suppose I ended up feeling like writing such things.”

Nobuko gazed at the check with a somewhat distant look at first. The letter that had delivered the check had also informed her of Takeyo’s actions on the very day it arrived in Moskva.

Nobuko wrote an illustrated thank-you letter to Motoko in Moskva at the cramped desk on the second floor of Berne. In the center was Motoko's figure from behind, seated at her desk facing a double window in Moskva with its small square ventilation window, oriented toward that direction. Nobuko twisted her neck and drew Motoko's characteristic sloping shoulders as accurately as possible. Around it, as a border decoration, she drew various things: the Kremlin walls with a red flag fluttering above them; the Parisian rooftops they had viewed together from the sweltering seventh-floor terrace of Hotel Garrick in Vaugirard when Motoko stayed in Paris; countless slender chimneys distinctive to Paris standing in dense clusters; and in addition to the distant Eiffel Tower, she sketched the cover illustration of the Matisse sketchbook she planned to buy with the check she received. From where she drew a round eye on the map labeled Porte de Versailles, a toy train ran to Clamart where Madame Bernay's figure with a billowing large apron appeared, alongside a large lumpy Western pear and *Capital*. All these were things Motoko should have recognized from Nobuko's previous letters.

While drawing such things one after another with faint, unsteady pen lines, Nobuko’s heart grew teary as she compared the sentiments of Motoko Yoshimi—who had given her that initial ninety-nine yen and seventy-five sen—with the stern, ever-vigilant conduct of her mother Takeyo in Moskva, who regarded her own daughter with suspicion.

“So you see, I intend to use today’s 856 francs with particular care.” “Hmm—” “So that’s the nature of the bond between you?”

Ryosaku Hachiya,

“Even Ms. Yoshimi has her good points after all.” He remarked rather pensively. “If that weren’t the case, how could she have managed to live here for so long?” “So that’s how it is.—Well, yes, that’s certainly true.”

Nodding as though he had deeply grasped her meaning, Ryosaku Hachiya lowered his head. If Motoko—despite everything—hadn't possessed that heartbreaking tendency to suddenly erupt in anger at unexpected moments, if when enraged she hadn't turned frighteningly severe and oddly defiant... Even having received this check and genuinely rejoiced over it, there would still remain unchanged the fact that Nobuko couldn't follow Motoko during those outbursts. This incapacity to follow had been growing stronger on Nobuko's side throughout her Moskva life. Because regardless of who confronted her, Nobuko had learned to despise that version of herself—the self who let others frighten her to tears.

Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya had a simple lunch at a café-restaurant on a street corner in the shopping district where small merchants discussed business over meals. “Today I’m being really stingy. For the entrée, we’ll stick to our earlier agreement.” “Then I’ll take care of the wine and dessert.”

Though the menu was modest, the crowded interior—filled with middle-aged men and women savoring their midday meal like true Parisians while conducting business discussions—hung heavy with the smell of cheap cigars. Nobuko found it amusing to be led by Ryosaku Hachiya to such mysteriously chaotic spots for meals. On one Sunday when the Sasa family still resided in Paris, Hachiya had taken her to the famous flea market. Nobuko wasn’t the sort of woman to peer into old objects of dubious origin and lose herself in treasure hunting. What delighted her more was the scene of Parisian workers’ Sunday leisure grounds—occupying an area slightly removed from the flea market—with its vitality and unselfconscious energy. Hachiya and Nobuko had sat on shabby chairs in a restaurant where a player piano clattered, facing a bare wooden table as they ate raw oysters like everyone else there. When they imitated the locals’ way of eating—holding oyster shells in their hands and sucking up the pooled liquid—it tasted cold and bracing, carrying the sea’s briny freshness. Later, passing the restaurant’s back entrance on their return, they found a mountain of large black shells discarded like Japanese ark clams.

Seated across the white stone table from Hachiya, Nobuko continued to survey the surroundings with an intrigued expression. In such places, Nobuko herself was being observed, but she was in an easygoing mood without dwelling on it.

“—It seems like it’s all just talk about money.” On the hat rack hung a black bowler hat worn by a Parisian petit-bourgeois man, and in that interior where even the waiters’ aprons fell short of pure white, money talk filled the air—figures cited so vigorously they reached even Nobuko’s ears. Yet the sums she overheard remained mundane amounts befitting such a restaurant. The Wall Street panic that had erupted on October 29th still festered unresolved, millions becoming fifty to sixty billion dollars poorer within days. This coincided with reports of New York pawnshops reaping unprecedented profits. Just as Berne—owner of Clamart’s laundry factory—had fretted over his business’s prospects on October 30th’s eve, the men with bowler hats lining the restaurant’s racks and their female companions now debated, over modest lunches, the unstable profits flowing from the cauldrons of France’s twelve capitalist titans controlling economy and politics.

When they had finished their post-meal ice cream and some time had passed, Nobuko urged, “Shall we leave?”

Nobuko urged Ryosaku Hachiya, who was calmly smoking his tobacco. How much had Paris's main streets changed since the panic began? Nobuko had wanted to see that.

VIII

On one corner of the grand boulevard that passes through the Champs-Élysées and meets the Opéra, there was a women's shoe specialty store called Pine. One summer day, when Nobuko happened to glance inside as she passed by, American women customers buying shoes at Pine were crowded into the store with its chic cinnamon-colored carpeting. The young female shop clerks, dressed in black uniforms with small white collars and cuffs, knelt before the footstools placed in front of their assigned women customers. Patiently standing or sitting like maidservants, they attended to the clients who tried on pair after pair of new shoes.

Pushing open the glass door and entering Pine’s interior, Nobuko found exactly the sight she had anticipated. The American women customers—who used to cluster around footstools with that peculiar flushed fervor of women straining to buy hats and shoes—had vanished from the store. Stylish display shelves; footstools upholstered in soft green velvet. In the desolate store interior, the well-mannered salesgirls—observing Nobuko’s beret-clad figure that had wandered in and Ryosaku Hachiya’s attire trailing behind her—made no particular move to approach from their stations.

“How stark the change is.” After exiting the store, Nobuko seemed rather to marvel.

“Those ladies who bought splendid shoes there and seemed to have no troubles anywhere—I wonder what they’re doing in America now…” In the season when horse chestnut trees cast deep green shadows, speaking of the boulevard after lunch meant speaking of colorfulness—it brimmed with an atmosphere created by leisurely people from various countries strolling through Parisian afternoons. The boulevard along which Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya walked today, observantly surveying their surroundings, carried a calmness that surpassed mere late autumn tranquility. While pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks had decreased drastically, what surprised Nobuko more was how nearly empty the terraces of famous cafés facing the boulevard had become. Whether at Café de la Paix by the opera corner—always so packed that vacant seats were scarce, with waiters sporting arm napkins darting cheerfully between tables—or at Cupole near Étoile farther away, those sitting in chairs watching passersby could now be counted on one’s fingers. Those people’s attire tended toward dark colors, most being elderly beyond middle age. The young crowd who used to parade along the boulevard in pale flashy suits—those who sauntered with soft hats tilted rakishly, eyes declaring pleasure as their moral—had all vanished somewhere.

“Paris has returned to its own people.” “But being like this must still cause problems,” he said. “After all, France has maintained its balance through tourist spending and America’s purchases of luxury goods.” The high-end jewelry stores along Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevard kept up their opulent displays with pride untouched by the panic.

Centering around the Boulevard, Nobuko walked on, turning and cutting through from that avenue to this street as the mood took her. Ryosaku Hachiya continued to accompany her without showing any signs of tiring, but “It’s interesting walking with you, Ms. Sasa.” he said. “Though it seems haphazard at first glance—when you look closely—we’re walking with a sort of determination.” “—Because I can’t read. I have no choice but to see with my eyes and feet.” “Because I have no choice but to see with my eyes and feet.”

“It’s not just that—when we were looking at rooms back then, that’s when I realized it.” Nobuko responded absently, “Oh.”

she replied. Before moving to Clamart was decided, Hachiya had helped Nobuko search for rooms. When they walked together looking everywhere yet could find no place where Nobuko might live, she felt it wrong to keep dragging Hachiya into this endless task and tried to refuse his assistance. At that moment, Ryosaku Hachiya looked at Nobuko as if probing the meaning behind her attempted refusal, and slowly—

“I’m not approaching this with your sort of single-minded practicality,” he said. Nobuko had dissolved those words of Hachiya’s into the entirety of that day’s conversation. Even now, she continued walking—answering with a mere “Oh” as if she had forgotten those very words she remembered—those words she had not, in fact, forgotten.

After watching the Soviet film *Asia in Turmoil*, Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya stepped out onto the boulevard that evening as well, by which time it was nearly nine o’clock. “Ah, that was incredible!” Upon emerging from the cinema’s stifling air, Nobuko stretched her body within her autumn coat as she walked and spoke. “It was fascinating. They had to cut *Asia in Turmoil* that way for it to be shown in France, you know. How pitiful!”

“France is always nervous about colonial issues—it’s almost a wonder they even released something dealing with Mongolian independence.” Ryosaku Hachiya had invited Nobuko to see *Asia in Turmoil*, but as they watched the screen, Nobuko repeatedly—

“Oh! They cut that part again!” Nobuko turned to Hachiya sitting beside her. Eisenstein’s *Asia in Turmoil* told the story of Mongolian people rebelling against colonial subjugation and rising up for independence. Considered Eisenstein’s masterpiece following *October*, when Nobuko had seen it at Moscow’s First Sovkino Cinema, his signature acerbic satire had given the screen taut precision. In a Western-style bedroom, a large-framed elderly woman devoid of beauty stood before a full-length mirror, having her maid tighten her corset strings. Staring at her reflection, she barked constant orders—“Tighter! Slimmer!”—all the while. In the adjacent room, before an identical mirror, an elderly gentleman with an extravagant mustache had his valet wrap black satin around his protruding belly to construct a dignified silhouette. The scene of this foreign envoy couple preparing to attend the Dalai Lama’s audience—exchanging disparagements about “barbaric Mongolia”—stood in deliberate contrast to preparations for the Lama dance they would witness: primitive costumes and grotesque makeup laid bare. The audience found themselves confronted by European barbarity itself.

In the plush seats of the Champs-Élysées Cinema, her tense face illuminated by the auditorium’s dim light as she watched the screen, from Nobuko’s lips—

“Oh! They cut that part!” The sharp whisper had escaped because that impactful portion of *Asia in Turmoil* had been completely cut out. The Lama dance, stripped of its contrast between imperialism and primitiveness, had become merely an exotic landscape of uncivilized Asia. While the narrative of *Asia in Turmoil* could be followed through its shifting scenes, Eisenstein’s call to action—crafted frame by frame with such intensity to evoke the audience’s visceral response to Asia’s storm—had been entirely stripped away.

Nobuko earnestly spoke to Ryosaku Hachiya about the interesting aspects and significance of the portions that had been cut from *Asia in Turmoil* in Paris. “Eisenstein uses that same technique in *October* as well.” “Flash, flash—the Tsar’s photograph and a Japanese Okame mask would pop up alternately.” “It may seem a bit intellectual, but it’s eloquent.” “In *Asia in Turmoil*, which they’ve cut up so much, they’ve completely erased the inevitability of a storm rising in Asia—making it seem like some natural phenomenon, as if such a thing could just happen in Mongolia on its own—falsifying the very notion of ethnic independence—”

With a lively, relatively brisk pace matching the conversation’s tone, they were making their way from Place de la Concorde toward the bridge spanning the Seine River. “Still—in Paris, it’s something that you can even see such things at all.”

Ryosaku Hachiya’s prudish-sounding remark suddenly provoked Nobuko’s rebuttal.

“……Is it a habit of scholars like you, Mr. Hachiya, not to get too moved by anything?” “That’s absurd.” “Is that so?… From my perspective, you all seem to somehow settle within the scope of what you’ve already understood.” “For example, what kind of cases?”

“In situations like this—even with the crucial parts cut—you’d still say it’s good enough that we can see *Asia in Turmoil* here at all, wouldn’t you? If it were me, I’d want to find a way to see it uncut. Censorship isn’t limited to films, you know. And if you truly want to, you can see it.” “In what way?”

One should simply go to Moscow. However, Nobuko remained silent about that matter. Ryosaku Hachiya, having been in Paris for over two years, would have had no reason not to go to Moscow if he had earnestly wished to do so. Yet just as the Japanese medical scientists Nobuko had met in Berlin were like that, and just as Ryosuke Tone in London was like that, Ryosaku Hachiya too was one of those people who, while constantly keeping the existence of the Soviet Union in mind, had subtly avoided engaging directly with life there.

“I cannot remain unmoved by this panic.” “America’s prosperity will not extend into 1930.” “When that was said, I think a great many people around the world must have scoffed.” “They’d say, ‘Here we go again.’” “But now, in reality, it is being proven.” “I think it’s truly remarkable to grasp the essence.” “It has a truly strong, inexpressible beauty.”

Walking briskly, Nobuko made a slight movement to tighten the nape of her bob-cut neck beneath the beret.

“—Though, it’s also a bit frightening…” For a while, the sound of their footsteps walking in silence echoed through the quiet night along the Seine’s riverside boulevard. “Lately, I often find myself thinking… I met you too late, Ms. Sasa.” Nobuko involuntarily felt as though the body heat of Ryosaku Hachiya walking beside her had suddenly drawn closer to her.

“I wonder if you realize how profoundly you’ve been reinvigorating me, Ms. Sasa.” “Through my perspective?” “Not just that—through your entire way of being… Like when you gave me that Soviet stamp right in the middle of Clamart’s main street the other day. That manner of yours.”

Nobuko felt within herself both the self being drawn into Hachiya’s conversational rhythm and the self that, knowing this, resisted—two selves coexisting simultaneously as one within her.

“Sentimental journey.” That’s what Nobuko thought. As they walked, she saw Ryosaku Hachiya’s profile—the shadows of nighttime city lights blocked by the brim of his black fedora. When she saw Hachiya’s plump face with its vague yet earnest expression, Nobuko instead felt her mind grow unburdened, roused by something akin to a sense of responsibility. “Mr. Hachiya, you might be feeling a bit homesick.” She truly thought so.

“Let’s get on the Metro soon.” “That way you’ll be safe.” “I don’t need to be safe at all.” “No! Stop acting like such a spoiled child…”

Nobuko laughed in a manner free from lingering attachment. Then Ryosaku Hachiya turned a deeply sullen face toward Nobuko.

“I am not homesick at all.” “My married life isn’t like that.” Then what is it like? Nobuko restrained herself from uttering the words that threatened to draw her in. Ryosaku Hachiya’s wife was a pediatrician living in Japan. Hachiya had married that person with the thought that, in various situations, it would be better for his wife and children’s lives to become self-sufficient without involving him. If one intended to pursue something like economics from a progressive stance, they might lose their job at any time in their life for any number of reasons. In places like Japan, even worse things might happen. Unless it was with someone who was fine with that, he couldn’t get married when the time came, being a man of no property. Once, Nobuko had heard such a story from Ryosaku Hachiya.

“Tomiko may be reliable, but at times she’s unbearably economistic.”

“If that’s the case, isn’t that your responsibility?”

Nobuko separated from Ryosaku Hachiya’s side, stopped matching her steps with his, and began to walk.

“Let’s stop this sort of talk—you must agree.” “…………”

“Talking about such things and walking on and on like this—I can’t stand it.” At Deputé corner, while slowly descending the stone steps toward the underground train station, Nobuko said, “Mr. Hachiya, promise me.” “Let’s promise not to get sentimental—that would be better.”

It seemed the train had just departed, leaving sparse passengers waiting on the platform. Ryosaku Hachiya walked back and forth in front of Nobuko. “Ms. Sasa, you’re really avoiding everything tonight, aren’t you?” He came to an abrupt halt right in front of Nobuko. “In the first place, I’m not saying this out of homesickness.” “And I’m not getting sentimental as you say.” “Please acknowledge at least that much.”

“—That’s a difficult request.”

Unlike the stubbornness of the words being spoken, Nobuko had a gentle look in her eyes. "But I don’t feel that way." Ryosaku Hachiya escorted Nobuko as far as the outside of the iron gate of the Bernay house.

“Well then, goodbye—thank you very much.”

Following Nobuko as she tried to enter the gate,

“You’re doing it tomorrow at five, right?” Hachiya called out. It was about the lecture on Capital. “And you?”

“Of course I’ll continue.” “Well, please do.” “I’m fine too.” Amidst the sound of Nobuko’s footsteps treading along the upward-sloping path paved with small gravel from the gate to the entrance, the heavy tread of Ryosaku Hachiya’s shoes receded into the distance of the thoroughfare.

IX

Ryosaku Hachiya was far too unbothered by walking with Nobuko—

After walking outside all day, Nobuko thoroughly washed her dusty face, brushed her bobbed hair, wiped down her body, changed into fresh nightclothes, and lay down on her bed while gazing at the ceiling. The room was brightly lit by electric light, and on the small bedside table, the wristwatch she had taken off her wrist and placed on the white monkey’s forelimb was gleaming. “I don’t need to be safe or anything.” The forced voice of Ryosaku Hachiya who had said that, and the sensation of his heavy body walking beside her as he spoke, remained imprinted on Nobuko’s senses. But why had he been so emotional that while she felt softly troubled, it had simultaneously compelled her to become critical?

During the summer when Motoko was in Paris, Hachiya, having missed the last train to Clamart, had once stayed in Motoko’s room at a hotel in Vaugirard. The three of them talked on the terrace until midnight. They talked about this and that with refreshing frankness, without any particular agenda.

When Nobuko alone returned from London to Paris and they took walks together in Monceau Park, there was nothing special about Hachiya. Nobuko felt reassured by that aspect of him and felt a sense of closeness.

What Nobuko sought in her relationship with him was a friendship free of precarious edges. Compared to what women shared in friendships with each other, she felt close to Ryosaku Hachiya as a male friend who carried a naturally distinct quality. Around the time she moved to Clamart, Hachiya had begun occupying a fixed place in Nobuko’s daily rhythms. She hadn’t rejected this development. Yet that didn’t mean Nobuko felt captivated by him. Ryosaku Hachiya wasn’t the sort of man who possessed any particular charm for her. It was precisely his lack of striking appeal—the ordinary clothes everyone recognized as part of his character, the commonplace studiousness—all this very ordinariness that formed her sense of familiarity.

That night, from that ordinary Hachiya Ryosaku, something like low, wavering tongues of flame flickered intermittently. Was it Nobuko who had stirred up that flame? She couldn't bring herself to think so. In the middle of Clamart’s thoroughfare, Nobuko had given Hachiya a beautiful Soviet stamp. Then they had stopped in the thoroughfare and peered at the small, vivid, beautiful thing. Had she acted that way because it was Hachiya Ryosaku? Nobuko was the type who would act with such enthusiasm toward anyone she liked who wanted something they favored. If Hachiya failed to understand her as a woman of such disposition and instead interpreted her actions as stemming from romantic interest specifically toward him—then that, she thought, was a mediocre aspect within his ordinariness. Being methodical, he might press on with the conviction that she must certainly like him. If he were to say such a thing insistently, how utterly juvenile. With mischievous eyes, Nobuko lay on her back atop the brightly lit bed and laughed unreservedly. At what point along the broad spectrum of vague emotions—beginning from mere non-dislike—should one place Hachiya Ryosaku? No shadow of love intruded upon her feelings. Nobuko—who knew clearly her heart remained unentangled by romance—calmly continued examining this emotional path where intricate landscapes had begun unfolding. All while being unconsciously indulged in the process.

The fact that Ryosaku Hachiya had touched upon matters concerning his wife was what made Nobuko feel distinctly uncomfortable. Though Hachiya's wife and Nobuko had never even met—being entirely separate entities that should have occupied wholly different angles of existence even for Hachiya himself—he had spoken in a manner that seemed to compare them as if placing them side by side. This wounded Nobuko. To Nobuko, the position of being the woman who was Ryosaku Hachiya's wife held not the slightest interest.—

Nobuko, who had been lying on her back in the middle of the large bed for a long time, turned over vigorously between the clean sheets and lay on her side. Tomorrow, if such an opportunity arose, she would state it clearly to Ryosaku Hachiya. She brought closure to the thoughts she had been slowly tracing—the need to prevent any misunderstanding of her feelings. The other thing was that by analyzing what drew his interest in her, she resolved to focus on how various elements added through her life in Moscow—rather than her innate qualities—should lead Hachiya to adopt a realistic mindset. Those elements might truly distinguish Nobuko both from Hachiya’s wife and from any woman he had undoubtedly encountered since coming to France. There lay a subtle intricacy. To assume Nobuko’s impulse to give him that Soviet Union stamp stemmed solely from affection would contradict their actual relationship. Had there been no October 29, 1929—that day of economic panic—and had Nobuko not been moved by humanity’s awakening rationality centered on the Soviet Union, Hachiya would never have received that pale blue, red, and white stamp from her. He needed to understand this. That was Nobuko’s conviction. Though it remained another separate truth that expressing her convictions in such moments was simply her nature.

The following evening, when Ryosaku Hachiya came for his usual lecture, he wore a somewhat stern expression toward himself—more so than usual. He was clearly trying to distance himself from last night’s mood. He answered Nobuko’s questions with some awkwardness and explained the difficulties faced by the newly formed Tardieu cabinet that had replaced Briand. Hoover’s capital-labor agreements served only to sharply highlight the contradictions and conflicts within American domestic production, while French capitalism was beginning to show the panic’s effects in its automobile sector. The Citroën Automobile Company—which busily advertised its “6-cylinder 6-6 Citroën 6” by illuminating the Eiffel Tower every Saturday and Sunday night, even using a gimmick where fake flames atop the tower had water cascading down like a waterfall—along with other French automakers could not avoid the severe blow from Ford’s price reductions. Though Japanese raw silk exports to America were plummeting, the Hamaguchi cabinet intended to fulfill its pledge to lift the gold embargo next January. With this lifting would come industrial rationalization that clearly meant unemployment for Japan’s small businesses and laboring masses. Yet this same rationalization manifested as work transferring state enterprises into big capitalists’ hands at nominal prices. Thus were the few large capitals strengthened. But ultimately, even before them lay no escape route from the global panic.

It was a good thing that Ryosaku Hachiya had resolved to deliver only such necessary current affairs commentary in his blunt manner. Nobuko, like a schoolgirl, confined the mood to the width of the notebook spread open before her.

10

When she saw Yoshiji Nozawa’s way of living, the extent of Ryosaku Hachiya’s restlessness became vividly clear to Nobuko.

In the suburbs of Paris, an international student dormitory was built where several students from Japan stayed. One day, Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya were invited by those people. When the suburban train stopped at the makeshift station erected hastily in a field, they found themselves in an area developing into a town centered around the International Student Dormitory. Trolley tracks ran over excavated ground, with sidewalks barely formed only where people walked. There stood a wooden cafeteria—modest yet clean, operating on a self-service system—alongside a simple sundries shop, while the completed main building stood slightly apart, its gray-and-white rectangular form rising neatly. From the window of a new-style room with wide glass panes like an atelier and a low ceiling, a Japanese scholar wearing a muted Yūki-tsumugi silk robe layered with a lined haori gazed at the chaotic construction site while discussing religious philosophy. To Nobuko, these people gave the impression of large-winged black birds trapped within glass. Though called international students, those gathered in the room that day were all middle-aged men with families and children back in Japan. Huddled in a dormitory room, they seemed determined to maintain an air of intellectual pleasantness through logic or wit. Yet Nobuko, as the sole woman present, could not ignore how the atmosphere betrayed an unconscious yearning they all carried. For these men, she realized, this rootless existence went against their very nature. How deeply Japanese men are conditioned to domestic life! The dormitory residents—all around Hachiya’s age of thirty-five to forty—shared his air of unresolved melancholy, like skies perpetually on the verge of rain.

Nobuko’s father Taizo had been around the same age as the people now gathered there when he studied in London, and the circumstances were similar—Nobuko had been five years old at the time, with two small boys beneath her. When she felt she could understand the unresolved intricacies of the psyches of the people there, Nobuko thought she had touched upon a previously unseen aspect of her father’s life in London. In that place, there existed a more human kind of thirst—something beyond what not only Takeyo but also many wives might imagine with jealousy. And Nobuko was struck by how the years had slipped by unnoticed, bringing her—once that five-year-old girl—to this age where she could think such thoughts, now alone in Paris.

When they returned from the suburbs to Gare Saint-Lazare station, Hachiya invited Nobuko. “That was quicker than I expected.—Since it’s just a short way from here, why don’t we stop by Mr. Nozawa’s place?”

“That’s fine with me.” When the Sasa family members departed Paris，Ryosaku Hachiya and Yoshiji Nozawa—who had coincidentally come to the Pereire residence—assisted with packing and accompanied them to Gare du Nord．Since then，Nobuko had neither met Nozawa nor written him any letters．

After turning through several nighttime backstreets of Paris, Nobuko was guided into a building through a dimly lit desolate entrance that resembled an empty warehouse. To Nobuko's eyes - having come through the narrow bustling backstreets' tangled lights - a wide iron staircase ascended directly from the dusty concrete floor where only vague outlines of large piled objects were discernible. Just as the hollow entrance had been nearly pitch-dark, this broad iron staircase too was faintly illuminated enough to barely distinguish one's footing. Silently supported by Ryosaku Hachiya's arm as they climbed, Nobuko thought the upper level would likely be bright. She imagined there might be something resembling a hotel reception desk.

However, though an electric light was lit on the second-floor landing, dimly illuminated by feeble lamplight, the space remained utterly barren and devoid of anything, with several doors facing it closed unwelcomingly. Taking the lead ahead of Nobuko, who was treading softly out of a mix of curiosity and slight unease, Hachiya knocked on a door. The voice that responded had clear enunciation—Nozawa’s voice, one she recognized—

“Please come in.” The voice resounded, suggesting the spaciousness of the room.

What met Nobuko’s first glance as she entered through the door was two large windows reflecting the night sky directly ahead and a large desk strewn with papers and books. It was a spacious, old, brownish room with several chairs. “Well, this is a surprise.” On the bed hidden from the door by the protrusion of the room’s small wall, Yoshiji Nozawa sat up. “Welcome. Have you come to this area?”

He said to Nobuko, “I’ve caught a cold.”

Nozawa took the room garment sewn at the foot of the bed and put it on. “Thank you for the other day.” “Not at all.—I hear you’ve moved to Clamart?” “That’s right.” “The suburbs must be nice this time of year.”

Nobuko pulled a nearby chair closer and sat down.

“Since I’ll be leaving soon, you should remain lying down.” “No need—I’m alright now.” “Besides, I don’t have a fever.”

Hachiya seemed to have recently visited here. “Have you been like this all along since then?” Hachiya asked.

“Yeah, I might be a bit too cautious. But I intend to make a full recovery.”

Nozawa had developed a throat fever and had been lying in bed for several days now. Though it was called a hotel, in this building where not a single hotel-like facility could be found anywhere—was there someone who brought meals to the bedridden Nozawa? In Nozawa’s way of life, there was a consistent order in all matters. Nobuko found it difficult to broach that subject. “Take care now. I don’t want to fall ill in France.”

“What do you mean by ‘especially in France’?” “Once during summer, Ms. Yoshimi developed a terrible toothache and caused quite a commotion.” “At that time we had no medicine at all, so when we went to the pharmacy, they gave us dried pansy flowers to brew and drink.” “—You’re being made to drink some kind of brewed leaves too, aren’t you?”

Nozawa laughed in amusement.

“Fortunately for me, I took Bayer’s aspirin.”

“The leaves you mentioned, Ms. Sasa—they’re camomile, aren’t they?”

Ryosaku Hachiya explained without even a smile. “Ah—camomile—that’s something people often drink, isn’t it?”

Around six o'clock the following afternoon, Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya once again climbed the dusty iron staircase of Yoshiji Nozawa's building. Hachiya carried a paper package in one hand while Nobuko held a smaller paper-wrapped bundle. The previous day upon leaving, Nozawa had remarked abruptly: "Since tomorrow's my birthday—if I weren't bedridden—I'd want us three to share a meal or something..." His regretful voice carried tones of weariness from days spent alone in forced stillness. Nobuko—who had begun rising—found herself arrested by that quality. Pausing mid-motion to consider, she turned toward Hachiya beside her.

“Mr. Hachiya, are you busy tomorrow evening?” Nobuko asked.

“Not at all.” “Then, how about this?” Nobuko proposed they gather in a circle to discuss matters together. “Since Mr. Nozawa shouldn’t move, let’s handle everything ourselves—what do you think of that plan? We’ll all three eat birthday congee together—I’ll make it right here.”

“Congee for a birthday celebration—that’s an unconventional idea.” “But we mustn’t cause him any trouble.” “I’m fine.” Nobuko

“Mr. Hachiya.”

She confirmed with Hachiya, who stood there uncertainly. “Let’s do that, then.”

The next day at four-thirty, Nobuko was to stop by Hachiya’s place near the Clamart station, from where they would go together. An alcohol lamp paired with a pot. After preparing a small coffee boiler, Japanese tea, seaweed, and such into two packages, Nobuko left Madame Bernay’s house at the appointed time and stopped by Hachiya’s room in Saint-Ouen. There, the inn’s landlady—a painter’s widow—appeared wearing a large black satin apron and greeted Nobuko with a dubious look.

“Monsieur Achille has just left.”

Nobuko looked at her wristwatch. At the promised time of four-thirty, there were still five minutes remaining. Even if he had been early, Nobuko hadn’t been late in arriving. —— Hachiya’s lodging was located at the bottom of a long, gentle slope in Clamart’s hilltop residential area, a mere two or three minutes’ walk from the tram stop. Nobuko walked the short distance alone without hurrying. Perhaps her watch had been slow. But even if she were three or five minutes late, Nobuko couldn’t comprehend why Hachiya Ryosaku had gone ahead and left her behind when they had agreed to meet at his place. Nobuko did not know Yoshiji Nozawa’s exact address. Hachiya knew that very well.

If he disagreed with Nobuko’s idea of preparing congee for everyone to eat in celebration of Nozawa’s birthday today—despite Nozawa being ill—he could simply withdraw. Nobuko wasn’t trying to stop him. Even though they had arranged to meet, if Hachiya—having gone out ahead alone—was trying to make Nobuko realize something through this, she absolutely refused to understand such an absurdly sulky approach. That’s what she thought. He could sulk alone all he wanted.

When she arrived at the tram stop, she found Hachiya standing there, buffeted by the November evening wind and looking rather sullen. When he saw Nobuko, he extended his hand to receive the package, his face remaining sullen.

“—Why did you come here ahead of me?”

“Wasn’t it here we agreed to meet?” “We were supposed to meet at your place at four-thirty.” Ryosaku Hachiya, “—I must have misremembered,” he said while inexplicably removing and readjusting his black soft hat. Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya reached Yoshiji Nozawa’s lodging without much conversation along the way. Yoshiji Nozawa’s aged brown room remained exactly as Nobuko had seen it the previous evening. Nothing had been tidied, and he still lay on the sagging double bed in the corner—the unchanged state of things loosening the tension Nobuko had carried from Clamart.

“It’s really just congee.”

“Absolutely—it’s been ages since I’ve had proper Japanese congee like this.” “When I was hospitalized in Moscow for three months and nearing recovery, I desperately wanted—oh how I wanted—to taste cold sōmen noodles.” “And then that strong sea scent from Japan’s shores—the briny smell when waves come rushing in—I wanted to bury my face in that fragrance.”

“Come to think of it, isn’t the Japanese seaside the only place where the smell of the tide is so strong?”

In Nozawa’s room, there was another door in a corner separate from the entrance. Outside, there was a dimly lit corridor with a faucet and a small sink attached. There, Nobuko transferred Caroline rice from the cardboard box into the pot and washed it. And placing an alcohol lamp at the edge of Nozawa’s large desk, she set the pot on it. Eggs and fruit, still in their paper bag, were placed beside it. Nobuko, keeping watch over the pot, sat sideways at the desk while Hachiya and Nozawa on the bed formed two points of a relaxed triangle as they conversed at a distance.

The two men were talking about the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan. “*L’Humanité* reports this as a new fact sharply contrasting with America’s economic crisis and the contradictions of global capitalist production—the first-year results of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan had far surpassed even the Soviet people’s own expectations.” The Soviet Union’s fiscal year ends in October. When this plan for increased production was announced as new progress during the 1928–29 fiscal year, capitalist countries dismissed it as typical Soviet exaggeration or the baseless delusions of powerless communists trying to bluff. No one believed the Soviet Union—with its backward production technology in heavy industry—possessed any real foundation for realizing this “grand and glorious plan” concocted through self-complacent so-called national planning. Such remained the general opinion among foreign experts and industrialists.

Nobuko had come from Moscow with only a vague understanding of the Five-Year Plan. The production of the Soviet Union had, by its very nature, always been conducted according to state plans. Each production sector—even film production—examined the Gosplan and carried it out. The production plans that had been implemented annually came to hold significance as a special Five-Year Plan from the 1928–29 fiscal year through 1933 in that each production sector was planned to raise their previous average production levels by twofold or more during these five years. Through this, the Soviet people could place their socialist society upon an even more realistically solid foundation. By combating the collapse of capitalist production, they could safeguard the independence and freedom of the socialist state and defeat war provocations.

Every essay and speech regarding the newly planned Five-Year Plan emphasized the same point. Back when she was in Moscow, laboriously working through those texts, there were times Nobuko would say aloud, “I understand.” All words spoken about the Five-Year Plan were so consistent that the meaning of this plan became clear. That was what Nobuko thought at the time.

Nobuko, who had entered Moscow life from a literary perspective, possessed only meager knowledge of the world economy. With her insufficient knowledge of class-based production, she suddenly affirmed the Soviet Union’s planned production method with her characteristic straightforwardness. The manner of her affirmation was simple in her characteristic way yet concrete. She continued to tour factories, workers’ clubs, maternity hospitals, daycare centers, children’s homes, schools, theaters, film studios, and Soviet operations; she could not help but accept the reality of social security—where male and female laborers shared responsibilities among themselves—as a merit of what it meant to be a socialist society. She had inductively come to accept the significance of socialist planned production from such phenomena.

From December 1927, when she first arrived in Moscow under falling snow, for over ten-odd months, Nobuko had continued to see everywhere—not only in the capital city of Moscow itself but also in Baku, the oil-producing city, and the coal-rich Donbas region—the slogans "Industrialization" and "Electrification" being displayed there. Along with the collectivization of rural areas. To Nobuko’s vague knowledge, the "Five-Year Plan" appeared as an extension of those slogans. Alternatively, it could also be perceived as if several successive slogans had gradually coalesced and, upon reaching that singular point, burst forth with intense radiance.

In a large, brown, antiquated room in Paris, in a corner where an old ship seemed to have drifted ashore, Yoshiji Nozawa was talking with Ryosaku Hachiya in a pose tinged with inadvertent humor—as though raising his small upper body from within the vessel.

“Even someone like me has come to grasp, to some extent, the significance of the Five-Year Plan now that international economic conditions have reached this state.”

Nozawa, wearing a black cap and dressed in loungewear, spoke with quiet precision that followed the unhurried unfolding of his thoughts—as if placing each word one by one in its proper place. Through his habitual manner of speech like this, Nobuko sensed the distinctive qualities of Nozawa’s innate character. Yoshiji Nozawa specialized in philosophy but also wrote poetry. It had been Nozawa who took Nobuko to an intimate gathering at the home of René Martine, France’s renowned anti-war writer.

“If the Soviet Union could truly realize this Five-Year Plan, it would certainly be a tremendous undertaking—they’ll likely do it.” Ryosaku Hachiya spoke as though something thick and viscous were being squeezed from a tube. “But broadly speaking, since the First World War, the whole world has been moving toward planned economies—if one wants to salvage capitalism somehow, everyone now understands there’s no alternative but that direction.”

Beside the alcohol lamp burning at the edge of Nozawa’s large desk—cluttered with books, binders, and newspapers—Nobuko stared at Ryosaku Hachiya as he spoke with both hands in his trouser pockets. That’s absurd! Nobuko’s heart objected. How could socialist planned production and planned production meant to save capitalism possibly share the same essential nature of “planned production”? “Mr. Hachiya, when we discussed capital-labor agreements before, you taught me that true rationality can’t exist in capitalist production.”

“That’s true.” Maintaining his position, Hachiya looked at Nobuko standing beside the distant table with his characteristic furrowed gaze and said: “That’s undoubtedly true.” “However, in reality, even within capitalism’s framework, there can temporarily exist aspects that partially incorporate elements of planning.” “Capitalism remains a living entity after all—it’s inevitable that it would pursue every possible method to survive...”

“So, is that an inevitable part of capitalism’s natural workings, or is it just one of the methods capitalism employs in its struggle to survive?” “The latter.” “Then that’s reformism, isn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what you yourself taught me as ‘deceptive social democracy’?”

Ryosaku Hachiya remained silent for a while, shaking one knee as he sat in the chair. Then he said slowly, “Even if that’s its essence, the very fact that capitalism has moved beyond its liberal era and must now adopt planning is a factor in today’s history. Even when speaking of developing socialism, one must pass through capitalism—in that process, I think we should assign positive value conversion to what are now called reformist methods. Concrete circumstances differ in each country. Therefore, even if socialism remains undoubted as our direction, every process can’t possibly follow the same course everywhere.”

As she listened to Ryosaku Hachiya’s words, Nobuko felt as though an invisible door in her mind had silently opened, and through its gap, she could glimpse the distant depths of his thoughts. He began lecturing Nobuko on *Capital* and explained the American economic crisis from a Marxist perspective. When viewed solely from that aspect, Hachiya appeared to be a Marxist, yet deep within his being, there seemed to be something persistently stirring its tactile senses, seeking to find a path separate from Marxism. Was such a thing even possible? But in reality, he was indeed searching for something. Was the essence of what made Hachiya’s emotional state so unstable not that very searching deep within his inner self? If that were the case, then it was not a lie when he had told Nobuko that it was not homesickness.

In the antiquated large room where three people resided, quiet nights truly existed, but stepping out into the Parisian backstreets—those clamorous lanes of disarray—Nozawa appeared undisturbed even by the creaky double bed situated in the sparse hotel. The desk strewn with books and papers seemed to bear witness to the enjoyable hours spent there. When observed through the atmosphere of Nozawa’s life—harmonized by his personal order—Hachiya’s instability became defined with greater clarity than Nobuko had ever discerned before.

While carrying egg porridge to Nozawa’s bedside and nibbling on bread with cheese and drinking coffee with Hachiya, Nobuko felt as relaxed as if she were in a Moscow boarding house. “It was good you came. The porridge isn’t bad, is it?” “It feels good to eat something freshly boiled and hot after such a long time.” “It feels like my insides are being cleansed.” The reason Nobuko felt so at ease in Nozawa’s room was not merely because it was spacious enough to walk around freely, because there were three people with whom she need not worry about her words, or because it lacked the duplicity and stifling irritation she experienced when wedged among the Bernay family.—Right now, in her absence, the Bernays were likely openly placing wine bottles on their dining table and eating their elaborate Oldouble. When they realized Nobuko did not drink alcohol, the Bernay family completely removed wine from the dining table. Before calling Nobuko down from the second floor to join them at the dining table, the family members seemed to have already finished the first half of their meal by themselves in the kitchen behind the dining room. The family members sat with faces slightly flushed in apparent contentment, and the dining table—where only a token offering of tough sausage had been set out as an appetizer for Nobuko—was not a way to make her feel warmly welcomed simply because she didn’t drink alcohol.

Through Francine’s English, Nobuko did not know how to convey that matter to Mrs. Bernay, and she had not informed Hachiya either. Tonight, it was not only the ease of having slipped away from the Bernays’ dining table but also the psychological dynamic between Hachiya and Nobuko—the naturalness of its lack of romantic intent on her part—that had gradually become clear, leaving Nobuko in buoyant spirits.

At the headquarters of the CGTU, it had been decided that Gorky’s *The Petty Bourgeois* would be performed. Nozawa gave Nobuko and Hachiya one ticket each. It was Nozawa who had taken them to Martine’s house, and it was Nozawa, not Hachiya, who had given them the CGTU theater tickets—this Nozawa had organized his life in a sphere entirely separate from Nobuko’s. Celestial bodies, imbued with the universe’s own force, orbited while rarely colliding with one another. ――Yoshiji Nozawa might be someone trying to live in such a manner. Nobuko thought so. Compared to that, Ryosaku Hachiya was soft and indeterminate throughout his entire being, oozing liquid when crushed. What about herself?

Absently lost in thought as the Metro jostled her, Nobuko suddenly came to her senses. Ah, right—tonight without fail, she must remember to write that letter once she returned home, she thought. Recently, Nobuko had been thinking of canceling Madame Ragondel’s lessons. With less than half a month remaining in Paris, having to stay indoors during the mid-afternoon hours of November—when there were so many things she wanted to see—due to Madame Ragondel’s lessons was becoming increasingly inconvenient for her. For Madame Ragondel, who came all the way to Clamart far from the city center, extra tuition fees were being paid.

In half a month, she would no longer be in Paris—this was a plan that had become entirely clear to Nobuko. The fact that it stood so completely certain and immutably fixed struck her as strange.

Eleven

Careful not to wake the sleeping household, Nobuko quietly opened her room door and stepped into the hallway. At the staircase lingered the cold light of early winter, only just beginning to pale. Moving soundlessly down the stairs, she entered the dining room and passed through to reach the kitchen. The kitchen tools—left neatly arranged since last night's cleaning and still untouched this morning—existed with an eerily lifelike presence in the deserted silence: the cooking stove squatting heavily on one section of brick floor, rows of pots and pans hanging gleaming with polished aluminum. As Nobuko peered through the keyhole and opened the kitchen door, she felt these kitchen presences silently watching from behind her. When her feet finally met the stepping stones outside, she released a held breath. Then she laughed soundlessly at herself—as if she'd been playing hide-and-seek without realizing it, tensing muscles that needed no tension.

How absurd! That morning, before everyone awoke, Nobuko left the house; the fact that she would be visiting Verdun had been communicated to the Bernay family the previous evening. Last night before going to bed, Bernay’s grandmother had taken Nobuko to the well-organized kitchen—half out of pride—and taught her how to unlock the back door. Though her actions held no secrecy whatsoever, within the house where people slept soundly in their respective rooms, the mere act of quietly opening and closing several doors and slipping out alone—as if someone in one of those rooms might have woken and begun listening—made Nobuko’s heart flutter faintly.

Nobuko walked boldly down the gravel path sloping toward the gate and descended along the chilly dawn street in the direction of Rue Saint-Antoine. In the cold early morning streets—where it remained unclear whether the sun’s emergence would bring fair weather or overcast skies—Nobuko encountered Ryosaku Hachiya slowly walking toward her while smoking a cigarette.

“Good morning.” Nobuko greeted him with the brisk cheer of a school excursion morning. "You were early. “I thought there was something fishy about it.” “Is it because I’m a late riser? But I’m fairly well-trained, you know. When I must get up, I make myself wake up.”

The two of them emerged onto the tram thoroughfare and entered a corner café. The interior remained dim, with three or four workers drinking coffee at the counter illuminated by electric lights. In the bearing of these laborers who had risen during others' sleeping hours to begin their daily toil lingered an unshakeable residue of drowsiness. Beside Nobuko, a man who had finished his coffee struck a match slowly as if pondering something, lit the cigarette between his lips, deliberately flicked his wrist to extinguish the flame, then—like someone regaining focus—tugged down the hem of his buttoned jacket with both hands before tucking the rectangular newspaper parcel from the counter under his arm and departing.

“I wonder if we need to hurry...” Ryosaku Hachiya glanced at the watch on his other wrist holding the coffee cup.

“It should be fine—we just need to reach Montparnasse by seven forty.” The local train bound for Verdun had departed from Montparnasse Station. They had arranged to meet around noon at the hotel restaurant before Verdun Station with four Japanese exchange students from the International Student Hall who would take a different route. When Hachiya and Nobuko had previously visited these students at their hall, they discovered none had yet seen Verdun. Though often discussed, the four lacked the resolve to cover six people’s car fare—so went their explanation. At that moment, Nobuko immediately requested, “Might I ask you to take me along?” From 1917 through 1918, at the First World War’s end, the names Verdun and Somme could not be uttered without awe. For Germany’s forces, these places meant valleys of endless annihilation; for the Allies, valleys of endless sacrifice. The steadfast resilience that held Verdun was said to have sealed the Allied victory. During the armistice, Nobuko—then a girl under twenty who happened to be in New York—found herself indelibly marked by Verdun’s name, unable to remain indifferent to its resonance.

That summer, when she spent several weeks in London, Ludwig Renn's *War* was being widely read in Britain, and advertisements even appeared showing Churchill—looking every inch the British politician with an umbrella hooked over his arm—holding the book with captions like "Churchill reads *War*."

The parents had reserved a spacious room on the fifth floor, taking Tsuyako along. In a small room on the seventh floor of the same hotel, Nobuko continued reading a few pages each night, drawn into the novel's entirely new rationality and emotions. As a Special Duty Sergeant Major in the German Army, Renn had entered France alongside soldiers sent to the front with music, flowers, and national anthems, experienced the battles of the Marne and the Somme, and been wounded himself. Finally in 1918, when revolution broke out in Germany and the Kaiser fled into exile in the Netherlands, the entire German front lines—including his own unit—were annihilated. Up to that point, Renn had depicted it all through calm, objective prose so incisive that one could not help reconsidering what humanism truly meant and what war truly was. Nobuko's immediate urge to see Verdun upon hearing its name came from how Renn's novel—with its raw descriptions—had inadvertently reawakened some unresolved ache she had long left dormant.

Boarding the 7 a.m. metro that ran from south to north through Paris from Porte de Versailles to Montparnasse, Nobuko was struck for a time by breath-stopping astonishment. The train car was tightly packed with workers. It wasn’t exceptionally crowded in any particular way, yet systematically filled to capacity—no space remained for even three more people—and the petite Nobuko’s shoulder pressed firmly against the coarse-striped jacket sleeve of the laborer standing beside her. What truly astonished Nobuko was discovering that every worker packed into this train car—each being transported to factories—held open copies of *L’Humanité*. All these people boarding the early morning metro wore hunting caps. They had neatly wrapped their collarless necks with stylish striped scarves characteristic of Parisian workers and fastened their coat buttons. Among those reading *L’Humanité* while clutching newspaper-wrapped lunch bundles under their arms, not a single voice could be heard. Roaring through Paris’s underground while charging northward, within this Metro car crammed with workers jostling together in silence, they read the Communist Party’s organ newspaper with attentiveness connecting to each individual life. There lay a morning tableau of class—the workers’ world.

Beneath the black forest of morning-departing workers and the unceasing wave of *L’Humanité*, Nobuko’s petite frame became submerged. As the train swayed, the edge of a neighboring worker’s newspaper grazed her beret. Each time this happened, she detected the pungent smell of ink fresh from the press. Nobuko had grown accustomed to seeing only scenes of middle-aged men in bowler hats—their bellies beginning to swell—boarding the metro around ten o’clock and unfurling L’Ami du Peuple as if by prior arrangement. She knew that those of the class who read Le Matin mostly used automobiles, riding first-class cars when they took the metro at all, never entering the standard class where she ordinarily rode. Yet here was the seven o’clock metro running so spectacularly freighted with working-class lives—

Montparnasse Station was crowded with commuters pouring into Paris, but at that hour few people were leaving the city, and the compartment where Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya had boarded remained nearly empty. Having rushed in loaded with crowds of workers heading to their jobs, the train now retreated slowly toward the suburbs—its narrow doors clanging heavily at each station stop—as it gradually advanced eastward through the clear morning scenery of the outskirts into the Lorraine region’s layered hills.

The morning sun sparkled through the train window from a direction that didn’t dazzle. Nobuko sat by the window, gazing endlessly at the scenery outside. Ryosaku Hachiya sat apart from her on the deep wooden seat spanning the car’s full width, legs crossed as he spread out a pocket map. Nobuko glanced once or twice in Hachiya’s direction as if wanting to speak. The refreshing early winter scenery and nearly empty train relaxed her into an excursion-like mood that made her want to talk. Since their long walk at Trocadéro that night, Hachiya had continued lecturing her on *Das Kapital* and accompanying her on outings as before—yet when alone together, an unresolved awkwardness lingered. This seemed to stem from Hachiya’s honest stiffness, though at times it also felt like an attitude conveying his awareness of having been emotionally wounded by her. Nobuko wasn’t so naive as to break Hachiya’s map-studying silence and draw him into her chatter while they sat apart on the same seat.

Alighting at Verdun Station, Nobuko was astonished by the profound silence of the surroundings and the white station building that shone enveloped in that silence. From one end to the other, the station was stark white. It was an unfamiliar religious cleanliness. Mingling briefly with people scattering here and there toward the station square, Nobuko and Ryosaku Hachiya went to the hotel where they were to meet those from the International Student Hall. The small hotel’s dining room was decorated in white, gold, and faint cream-colored lace curtains, with a single elderly woman in mourning sitting at a small table on the far side. Her slender black figure was softened by the folds of cream-colored lace, and the space around her was filled with a desolate daytime brightness. Nobuko involuntarily whispered in a small voice,

“How quiet…” she whispered. “Why is there no sound at all?”

To the waiter who came to take their order,

“In which direction is the town located, I wonder?”

Ryosaku Hachiya asked. “Sir.”

The waiter pressed his left arm, which was holding a napkin, to his heart and replied solemnly. “Our Verdun—the city itself is a memorial tower.” “Verdun is a city of silence.” “Very few residents live here.” The place where Nobuko and the others now stood was already somewhere within Verdun’s city limits—a place where few living residents remained.

“Wouldn’t it be better for us all to have our meal together after the others arrive?” “Since that group won’t arrive until past twelve anyway—and if we were to wait for them, it’d only cause complications.” “Let’s just take care of it ourselves.”

As if eager to have the meal with just the two of them, Ryosaku Hachiya ordered a simple lunch. "I wonder how long the sightseeing will take." "Hmm... Probably four or five hours." "But once you see this place, Ms. Sasa, I expect you'll insist on visiting Sedan and Metz too." "Oh?" Sedan and Metz were both place names famous in World War I history. "Can we reach them from here?"

“Metz probably wouldn’t take even two hours from here—Sedan is north of Reims, so we might need to transfer around Châlons, you know, that area we passed through earlier.” At the mention of Reims, Nobuko recalled the spire of the Saint-Remi Basilica there—renowned for its beauty since the French medieval period. Yet this silence of Verdun! However quietly one might speak, Verdun was so profoundly hushed—and yet bright—that one’s own voice would ring conspicuous.

A small group from the International Student Hall appeared, all at once disrupting the crystalline silence with their physical presence.

“Hey.” “We kept you waiting.” “What about the meal?” “We’ve finished.” “Well, let’s have a cup of coffee and head out right away.—I hear it’ll take quite some time for everyone to see everything.” Though collectively referred to as Verdun, it was said that the several fortresses worth visiting were each separated by several miles and scattered across the hilly region near the border.

Twelve What protected Verdun was not human. They were lions. This phrase had described the impregnable Verdun that endured a fierce ten-month siege toward World War I's end. Modeled on those words, atop a monument shaped like a sheer cliff rising beside the thoroughfare one block from the hotel lay a lion reclining imposingly. As the open car carrying six Japanese people passed through narrow streets and sped along roads empty of houses and pedestrians, they realized Verdun—the city that once thrived with over thirteen thousand residents—now stood in utter ruin. The remains of Verdun City Hall presented only foundation stones and several thick buttressed columns neatly arranged against the blue sky. The dates of the first bombardment. The final bombardment suffered when later used as a field hospital, and the day two hundred wounded perished there. Among columns standing beneath open sky, an explanatory plaque stood erected—white background bearing black text in legible English and French. Where schools had been. Where hospitals had been. The six Japanese walked as through Pompeii's ruins, tracing all sites where buildings once stood. Through gaping windows in walls with collapsed ceilings, the saturated blue of clear sky pierced their eyes. The guide car driver's resonant voice carried far through deserted air. The gravelly terrain transmitted even faint footsteps—shadows moving across sand—upward into vast emptiness. The driver in his forties, who likely had family back home, navigated this ruinous wasteland as if apologizing,

“On weekdays it’s this quiet, but Saturdays and Sundays always bring quite a crowd.” “On Armistice Day, the hotels are packed full.” Someone said, “If there were crowds of people trailing through here, it would ruin the solemnity.” They passed through what had been the city center and emerged into a place offering a panoramic view of distant hills. That place was the cemetery for soldiers who had died at Verdun. The seven thousand graves stood endlessly like a forest, their rows of white crosses aligned with the same discipline they had maintained when lining up helmet visors and shouldering rifles in life. Beyond this white silent forest of crosses lay sun-warmed mountain ranges veiled in haze. At the cemetery’s edge grew several Italian cypresses lush with green, while slightly to the right stood an unexpectedly inhabited small house, its side fluttering with white laundry swelling in the gentle breeze. Around them stretched a radiant, warm solitude where sunlight seemed to cast audible shadows. The spacious beauty of the scenery—bright and alive with distant laundry billowing like scattered light—stirred tenderness in Nobuko’s heart toward these seven thousand graves. Nobuko crouched to examine one nearby cross. Though arranged as if in soldiers’ rigid formation, what stood out most on each tombstone was not their names but their military service numbers from life. 626・Alexandre・550R — Died for France.

The car increased its speed and climbed up a wide road heading toward the hills. Northeast of Verdun’s ruins, in the hilly region bordering Luxembourg and Alsace, over thirty fortresses—large and small—had been constructed, forming France’s first-class fortifications during World War I. Over a decade had passed since this place was a battlefield. Yet as the large sedan carrying Nobuko and the others raced forward, its engine roaring toward some distant horizon, the ground on either side of the road remained scarred with continuous shell craters where tall wispy grass grew high. Not a single standing tree remained in the vicinity.

The desolate road continued, and when—without anyone noticing—a sense of sentimentality had crept into everyone’s hearts, a grand edifice built of black and white marble appeared ahead. It was an ossuary modeled after a Greek temple. White marble panels set high between the columns bore countless names inlaid in gold. Before each name stood their military rank, and those inscribed on the inner walls of the hall were all officers. Even among these officers, distinctions of rank were preserved. Second Lieutenant, Lieutenant, Captain. Those of these ranks occupied one wall. Majors through colonels were placed on marble panels of other walls. The names of major generals and lieutenant generals were inlaid in gold in large characters near the ceiling—specially designed for easy legibility—yet their number seemed less than a thousandth of the total fallen officers filling the hall’s marble panels.

“In this Verdun, four hundred thousand French people died.” “The German army suffered six hundred thousand casualties.” But the gold-inlaid capital letters glimmered as sparsely as stars at dawn near the ossuary’s summit. From the front of the hall, the fertile Champagne horizon that encompassed Verdun’s ruins spread peacefully. The ossuary seemed to reign over the fertile French plains as if sovereign. At the same time, it appeared to conduct an eternal military review, leaving twenty thousand soldiers exposed to Verdun’s harsh winds and snow. Facing the hall’s front, twenty thousand white crosses stood in formation. No mention was made of what they had thought while living or what agony they suffered in death—only their numbers and names were inscribed on the crosses.

Tears not of sadness welled up in Nobuko’s eyes. The group of people looked up at the ceiling and called out the names of famous generals.

From Nobuko’s lips—she stood apart from the group—Russian words escaped like a groan. For what? Truly, for what? These people died; a hall built by a class system that endured even in death had been erected; and in scenic Geneva, surrounded by luxurious trappings, a comfortable disarmament conference was being staged.

“Died for France.” But for whom in France was that supposed to be? It was a well-known fact that French politics were controlled by a handful of people—the directors of the Paris-Netherlands Bank. The Paris-Netherlands Bank had ties with the German arms manufacturer Krupp—the very Krupp that produced the long-range Big Bertha cannon which shelled Paris in 1918—and with I.G. Dye Industry, which manufactured poison gas. The proposer of the League of Nations had been President Wilson. Yet America had not joined the League that was thus formed. Meanwhile, the League of Nations continued to reject the participation of the Soviet Union. Seizing every opportunity, an anti-Soviet crusade was being prepared—a will to never wage war again. These twenty thousand white crosses, lined up in numerical order, were precisely what should move like the forest that once encircled Macbeth’s castle—surrounding those silk-hatted men who spoke of peace and demanding they answer for the truth.

Fort Souville. Then Fort Vaux. When the car carrying Nobuko’s group turned onto the road leading to Fort Douaumont—where Verdun’s most brutal battles had been fought—the clear day was nearing its end, and in the slanted western sunlight, the mountain’s profile loomed black and unnervingly close. As they climbed the path of thistles beginning to wither under the thin frost of morning and evening, they unexpectedly came upon a brown stone structure resembling an altar. Several pillars stood on the slope at a height of about two meters. Their shadows had already faded into dim twilight. There, thirty or forty bayonets protruded from the earth amidst the thistles.

The bayonets were rusted red. The French infantry, who had been advancing in dense formation up this slope, were buried beneath the soil just as they had been arrayed.

From the "infantry trench"—which somehow did not escape the feeling of being an artificially added memorial—Nobuko discovered something glinting in the grass about a yard further up ahead. As she approached, crouched down, and ascertained what the small golden ring-like object glinting in the shade of the thistles truly was, a shiver ran down her spine. It was a single gun barrel. The small mouth peering out from the ground proclaimed the life that had once been there, proclaimed that he had lived, and yet proclaimed that he had now been dead for a long time. Nobuko involuntarily stroked that golden mouth. The golden mouth was small, round, and pitifully hard.

Nobuko crouched there for some time. She understood why this golden mouth gleamed. When coming here and finding this single ring lying amidst the thistles, any woman from any country—were she a woman of common birth—would surely find herself involuntarily crouching to stroke it.

Descending the narrow backstreets alongside Douaumont’s artillery battery, one found rusted iron helmets and empty cans scattered in a shell hole where plumes of pampas-like grass swayed. On the precarious ochre path in the shadow of the hill—its soil still loosened by the morning frost and soon to sink once more into evening gloom—Nobuko saw the clear imprint of a woman’s shoe heel.

13 In Nobuko’s pupils gleamed the small golden ring among Douaumont’s thistles. On her forehead lay the imprint of a woman’s shoe heel, shaped like a ginkgo leaf. Nobuko gazed at the driver and his three companions playing cards around a nearby table through eyes that felt alien to her. The six Japanese returned to their starting point before Verdun Station after night had fully fallen. The hotel had closed its main dining room beside the front entrance used during daylight hours, leaving only the side-street café-restaurant open. There in a corner, the six finished their modest evening meal. The driver-guide had eaten at a table in another corner of the establishment and now sat smoking a cigarette while playing cards with his male companions.

Leaving her male companions in the tobacco smoke, Nobuko was stretching her legs on a bench some distance away. In the tile-floored interior of the establishment, illuminated by insufficient light, the thirteen or fourteen people seemed to be all those still living in Verdun that night.

Along the banks of the Meuse River remained a cluster of fragments from old Verdun City, where there was a shop selling souvenirs. One could imagine that cluttered little shop and the figures moving within it, but between the glow of that riverside store and the interior of the café-restaurant where Nobuko sat spread a deep silent night.

The depth of the night's silence, devoid of living things—how unique a sensation it was!

The six Japanese people all spent a day with little conversation. Even after finishing the day’s tour—and though a flush from wine colored their faces—no laughter rose from the men’s table. It was the same everywhere. “One general’s triumph withers ten thousand bones”—that was absolutely true. As they descended from Fort Douaumont, someone in their group had muttered with apparent depth of feeling. That sentiment flowed through all six of their hearts—yet Nobuko felt not mere fatigue but physical and mental anguish. This sensation connected to an intense protest spreading elusively within her. And in her eyes as she watched four men quietly playing cards burned a black flame of fierce intensity.

Throughout the afternoon, what seared through Nobuko’s body and mind—which had traversed the ravaged battlefields—was a frank, unyielding assertion of life. It was a protest against the enormity of death. To Nobuko, Verdun came to feel like a creation of those who used the words “for France” to deceive reality. The horrific remnants of destruction, solemnly arranged as commemorations of heroic actions, astonished people with their sheer destructive magnitude before one could even contemplate war’s crimes or for whose sake it had been fought. The good-hearted people, shocked and moved to tears, would surely grow sentimental—rather than indignantly rejecting war itself and those who instigated it—cherishing those who had lost their lives there while praying “God grant them peace,” before being loaded onto trains departing Verdun.

The small golden mouth that glinted among the thistles of Fort Douaumont bathed in the setting sun weighed heavily on Nobuko’s eyes. Nobuko could not allow herself to let this searing emotion be confined to the effect intended by the “Verdun Memorial.” The sensation of life surged up inside Nobuko.

Life exists for living. Lane’s *War* had been written through clenched-teeth hatred of war and observations restrained through masculine will. Some of that reality had become clear to Nobuko— The people from the International Student Hall were returning via a different rail line, while Nobuko Sasa and Ryosaku Hachiya would depart about fifty minutes later. “Ms. Sasa, you must be quite tired by now?”

Ryosaku Hachiya moved over to the table near the bench where Nobuko was sitting. “Not really.” “Perhaps it would be better if you tried having a little wine instead.” Nobuko shook her head.

“It’s not that I’m tired—you know, Mr. Hachiya, there’s something I’ve been thinking about.” “Go on, tell me. It seems like you hardly spoke at all today.” “What I’ve been thinking is this—that when Moscow goes on and on like that, incessantly denouncing the crimes of imperialist war, the deceptions of imperialist war... it was all true.”

“…………” “I realized that when I sometimes wondered, ‘Why do I keep repeating this? I already understand,’ that was the height of presumption.” Ryosaku Hachiya remained silent, stirred slightly, and crushed out his cigarette on the ashtray.

“And another thing I realized—why people still never cease visiting Lenin’s Mausoleum in the Soviet Union.”

On a summer Sunday in London, at the edge of a stone-paved square that looked up at the front grand staircase of St. Paul’s Cathedral—where unemployed people hung in clusters on every step—stood a memorial tower for London citizens who had perished in World War I. The memorial tower inscribed with “For the honor of those who died for their homeland” was covered in droppings from the hordes of pigeons inhabiting St. Paul’s and looked thoroughly filthy. Nobuko recalled that memorial tower, sullied by pigeon droppings within the scenery of a sunny London Sunday. People who are alive are busy. She had felt society’s egotism acutely—that feeling too was now recalled. What persisted in Nobuko’s London scenery was Ryosuke Tone’s keen black eyes and the distinctive smile he had directed at her from beneath his stylishly shaped mustache. Even if he had seen the few people playing cards in the terrifyingly deep silence of Verdun tonight, could he have criticized Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow with such irony as he had done while reclining on the grassy field where deer roamed in Richmond Park—just as he had once said to Nobuko?

Ryosuke Tone said, “Lenin’s Mausoleum exploited the primitive Russian populace’s relic worship for communism.” “The people are likely unaware of this,” he continued. “It’s precisely because they’re at such a low intellectual level that the Soviet regime persists in Russia.” At that moment, Nobuko felt Ryosuke Tone’s words—which dismissed the people as ignorant—as a personal insult directed at herself as one among them. She had argued with him then, resisting the prejudice of those who counted themselves among an intellectual elite and sought to brand the Soviet Union as primitive—people like Tone himself who considered themselves superior. For Ryosuke Tone, she realized, no leader who opened history’s doors toward life for the people would ever inspire genuine awe in his lifetime. He was likely several times more intelligent than Nobuko. Yet his intelligence seemed only capable of criticism. This was the root of her irritation—an irritation that now resonated faintly within her as she sat on a leather-upholstered bench in Verdun’s dimly lit café, its tiled floor reflecting muted light. The vast, deeply rooted protest trembling within her after a day touring battlefields—this pressure mounting from not knowing how to give it form.

Amidst the silence, the sound of cards being thrown could occasionally be heard.

Nobuko suddenly, “I want to stay here tonight.”

“I want to stay here tonight,” she said. Ryosaku Hachiya suddenly raised his eyes and looked at Nobuko as if jabbed from somewhere.

“There must be at least one vacant room, isn’t there?” Nobuko wanted to spend this night’s peculiarly agonizing passion—the kind that drove one to rebellion—just as it was in silent Verdun. If it was to be a sleepless night, she wanted to experience that very sleeplessness here in Verdun.

“You said you’d stay here—” Nobuko’s gaze was drawn to the vague confusion that had surfaced on Hachiya’s forehead at those words.

“You can go back, of course.”

After remaining silent for a long time, Ryosaku Hachiya, as if reaching a decision,

“Let’s go back today.”

He said.—Today? The thought of coming to Verdun a second time was unthinkable. “Let’s go back.” Hachiya repeated, as if to reinforce his decision more firmly. “—You should go back.” “Are you concerned about the people at Bernay’s house?” If that was his concern, Nobuko thought, then it would suffice if Hachiya stopped by the Bernays’ house after returning to Clamart tonight to inform them she would be staying over.

However, Hachiya stubbornly blocked Nobuko's attempt to remain alone in Verdun. "I simply cannot leave you here by yourself, Ms. Sasa."

When there were only ten minutes left until the train to Paris departed,

“Well,”

Hachiya took Nobuko’s handbag and handed it to her.

“Let’s go.” In that somewhat large travel handbag was the silver commemorative spoon that Nobuko had bought for Berne’s wife at a souvenir shop on the Maas riverside.

Though advancing toward Paris along the same route they had taken that morning, the late-night train—its scenery along the tracks shrouded in thick darkness—felt utterly desolate with its clattering solitude. In one car where passengers were sparse, the compartment containing Nobuko and her companion held only Nobuko and Hachiya. Because the bench’s backrest was set much higher than the seated passengers’ shoulders, in the night train where one couldn’t see the outside scenery, Nobuko’s field of vision was blocked by faded brown wooden partitions, giving her an indistinct sensation of being inside a livestock transport car.

“Oh, this train! “It’s the lamp!” The reason the car seemed so dim became clear. Exactly behind where Nobuko and the others were sitting, on the high lattice partition, a lamp with a glass cover was placed. At the other end of the same car, the same light was lit, but it was impossible to read anything by that light.

When they had passed several stations whose small electric lights flickered in the vast darkness, Nobuko—

“It seems like it’s gotten a bit cold, don’t you think?” she said. Hachiya took off his overcoat and tried to put it around her. “Then you’ll catch a cold.” “I’ll be fine.” “Really?” Hachiya nodded. “Then I’ll take it.”

Putting on the overcoat, Nobuko leaned her shoulder against the corner where the window met the latticework partition behind her and closed her eyes.

“If you sleep, you’ll really catch a cold—you mustn’t.”

“I’m not going to sleep.”

Though her back felt slightly chilled while the core of her head burned hot, Nobuko thought this was because they had spent the whole day riding in an open car cleaving through the wind. “Are you unwell?” “No.”

Sharon Station, seemingly a somewhat large town in the area, had dark figures moving across its brightly lit platform, but no passengers entered or left Nobuko and her companion's compartment. Perhaps there had been no one at all on the other side of the partition—invisible from where they sat. "I've started feeling a bit cold somehow," he said. "Let's sit closer." "This train is just too empty..."

Nobuko moved away from the corner by the window and reseated herself beside Hachiya, who was in the middle of the bench.

Breaking through the silence—a silence that seemed engulfed by the monotonous clatter of wheels echoing through the night—Hachiya asked abruptly. “Ms. Sasa, are you truly planning to leave Paris by the end of November?” “Yes.” “—We must go somewhere nearby once more.” “Somewhere we don’t have to endure such a long train ride.” “What sort of place?” “Oh, there are options.” “But neither of us has any proper money to speak of.”

Nobuko burst out laughing. "I'm making sure to save every bit of my travel money for getting back to Moscow." With a sidelong glance that seemed to furrow his brows, Hachiya looked at Nobuko laughing beside him.

"I’d thought bringing the others along today was a mistake." "Why?"

Nobuko’s attention, which had been absentmindedly adrift, was suddenly awakened. Nobuko’s voice regained its clarity of tone.

“Having exactly six people worked out perfectly, I think.” “That’s not it… Ms. Sasa, today you weren’t yourself at all.”

Indeed, throughout the day in Verdun, Nobuko spoke little. It was the profound impression she had received that made her so.

“It’s because everything I felt seemed sentimental when put into words…” “If the others hadn’t been there, Ms. Sasa would certainly have been more free.” “That’s what I find regrettable.” Without giving Nobuko time to speak,

“I just don’t understand it at all. A person like you, Ms. Nobuko—why must you always be so afraid of becoming sentimental?” Hachiya’s tone sounded angry, his voice restrained.

“Even being sentimental can be an emotional truth.”

“That may be so.” “But… even if something is an emotional truth—it can still differ from passionate truth.” “Emotions and passion are different—I hate conflating emotions with passion.—” “I don’t make such distinctions.” “Oh!—How odd.” Nobuko’s arm—midway through gesturing—was caught by Hachiya’s hand resting beside hers on the bench. “Such a person—will soon be gone.” As Nobuko shifted her posture to face Hachiya, his heavy head suddenly loomed over her face. Holding her breath, Nobuko lay slightly supine with lips parted—Hachiya’s lips pressed against hers. When he pushed harder, his lips met Nobuko’s teeth, which remained entirely passive. Slowly, mournfully, Hachiya’s lips withdrew.

“Ah! You don’t even know how to kiss! You don’t even know how to kiss!” A sensation of pain as if being torn apart and a sensation of humiliation pierced through Nobuko. Nobuko moaned softly. Hachiya’s head was seized between Nobuko’s hands. And it was pulled down onto Nobuko’s face.

Fourteen

Nobuko did not resist her association with Ryosaku Hachiya, which had become utterly unstable, and let herself drift.

There was no change in the outward appearance of their lives. Hachiya would come to the Bernays’ dining room, lecture on *Capital* at their table, take walks together with her, and on nights when they watched movies or plays in the city, after midnight, the sound of a couple’s footsteps could be heard on Clamart’s quiet streets, until eventually only Nobuko’s footsteps echoed along the gravel path from the Bernays’ gate to the front door.

In the flow of time that passed in such a manner—like river water striking something unexpected, sending up small white waves and sprays—a brief, intense entanglement arose between Nobuko and Hachiya. “No! No, really—don’t!” Nobuko avoided Hachiya’s face, at times gently pushing his face away with her hands as she turned her own face away or walked apart from him for a while. At such times, Ryosaku Hachiya would call her by her given name or address her by her surname.

“You’re being unreasonable. If it’s just once—then why did you return the kiss yourself when I kissed you for the first time?” How could Nobuko have made Hachiya understand that surge of emotion from that night’s moment? Ms. Nobuko doesn’t even know how to kiss! Those words had pierced Nobuko so violently that she became a spark and seized Hachiya’s lips. She could not forget her own emotions—deeply wounded and enraged—that had moved her in a manner almost akin to leaping at him. It was the emotion of a female animal on the attack. Could that even be called a kiss?

Nobuko, deep in thought, looked at Hachiya with a face that appeared more petite than usual. “That was a burn.” “That’s why there won’t be a repeat.” “A… burn?” “Saying such a thing—” On the farm road between Clamart’s forest and town where the two had been walking, Hachiya came to a stop. “I don’t think so—it’s not that I don’t think so—it’s actually not like that. Ms. Sasa, what are you afraid of? I can’t understand it.”

Hachiya took Nobuko’s arm and began to walk.

“Ms. Sasa, aren’t you completely free?” “That’s right.”

As if keeping watch over her own heart, walking with downcast eyes, Nobuko answered in step with their slow, two-person pace.

“That—I am free… but what remains unclear still eludes me.” “What needs clarifying?” “My feelings belong to me—” “Mine to me, yours to you.” “I’ve grasped that all too well.” “I’ve pondered it every single day.” “What?” “Ms. Sasa, why must you strain so hard to unbecome yourself?”

An impulse different from love—a behavior closer to hatred that had arisen in the moment—existed between her and Hachiya, manifested in the form of a kiss. Though she did not refuse to meet Ryosaku Hachiya and walked along country roads with his arm around her shoulders, somewhere in Nobuko’s heart remained perpetually alert, declaring this was not love. Ah—Nobuko doesn’t even know how to kiss! That single phrase had made her so ferocious. She had made him press his lips as if to inflict a deep wound—there lay Nobuko’s astonishment. There was an incomprehension. On that Verdun night, in the dim café of the city of death, there had been a discrepancy between the feelings tormenting her—the protest, the fury at deception, the desire to immerse herself in those passions’ depths—and Hachiya Ryosaku’s reaction when she said she wanted to stay in Verdun: his expression had betrayed secret agitation. The demands of Ryosaku Hachiya and Nobuko, remaining at odds, flowed with the current and now neared the rapids. At the rapids of man and woman— But was this love? Love-that-was-not-love—Nobuko could not comprehend it.

Hachiya Ryosaku’s single-minded obsession with casting emotional lassos—throwing them relentlessly while remaining rooted in his own position, refusing to look at where his life and ideology stood—left Nobuko bewildered. Yet Hachiya’s lasso grazed the edges of Nobuko’s being; there were moments when it seized her senses entirely, moments even he himself could not perceive. Times like these—

At the table in Bernay’s dining room, Hachiya Ryosaku was seated on the side near the usual fireplace, and Nobuko was seated nearer the door—their customary study session began. Hachiya made Nobuko take notes in his usual voice squeezed out as if from a tube.

“First, let us have Robinson appear on that island.” “Though Robinson was inherently frugal by nature, he possessed various desires requiring fulfillment and thus had to perform all manner of useful labor.” “He had to make tools and furnishings, tame mules, fish, hunt, and such.” Ah—so this was the famous Robinson story, Nobuko thought as her pencil worked. The Robinson story that had made Ryosuke Tone attend the British Museum Library in London—

“Although his productive functions differed in various ways, they were all merely different forms of activity of the same Robinson—in other words, nothing more than different modes of human labor—as he himself knew.” That was naturally so. Without stopping her note-taking, Nobuko nodded. Robinson, who had managed to salvage a clock, ledger, ink, bread, and other items from the shipwreck, eventually began keeping a table showing the average labor time required to obtain fixed quantities of various products. Robinson had to allocate the time he worked for his own needs among his various tasks,

“Which functions occupied a greater scope in all his activities, and which a lesser, depended on the magnitude of difficulties to be overcome in achieving the intended practical effect.” What dreadfully rigid phrasing! “All relations between Robinson and the various objects constituting the wealth created by his own hands are in this case extremely simple and clear.” Omitting the cited proper nouns unnecessary for Nobuko’s level of understanding, Ryosaku Hachiya continued.

“Moreover, all essential elements in value determination are contained within this relationship.” “Now, let us turn our eyes from Robinson’s bright island to the gloomy medieval Europe.” “There are no independent humans there—”

Nobuko raised her head from the notebook.

“Wait—I’m sorry.” “Is that all for Robinson?” “So we’re suddenly jumping to medieval Europe?”

Interrupted, Hachiya lowered his gaze to the text he held and answered without looking at Nobuko. "That's how it should be." "Doesn't Friday appear?" Nobuko asked, watching Hachiya's face that refused to turn toward her.

“In this section analyzing the prototype of value, it’s being addressed separately from Friday’s appearance.” Facing Hachiya’s face—which avoided her gaze as he answered with a serious expression—Nobuko’s senses were suddenly stirred. She was drawn to those lips. —But Hachiya did not notice. What kind of maelstrom Nobuko had nearly been swept into. —Nobuko lowered her eyelids onto her notebook and listened to Hachiya’s voice from a slight distance, along with the pounding of her own heart.

“In any person,” he continued, “one finds mutual dependence—serf and lord, vassal and daimyo, layperson and priest—the ‘i’ in ‘izon’ is the character for ‘to lean,’ you see, with the radical 亻—mutual dependence.”

The mornings and nights in Clamart had grown winter-like in their coldness. “Good morning, Mademoiselle.” Past eight in the morning, Madame Bernay knocked on Nobuko’s door and entered, her hands growing ever redder as she had brought kindling for the fireplace. While Nobuko still lay in bed, Madame Bernay knelt on the jute rug beside her, her large apron spread beneath her knees, and skillfully lit the fire. In the Bernay household, they only lit the fireplace fire in the morning and evening. Upon seeing the Bernays’ fireplace, Nobuko understood why all the chimneys lining Paris’s rooftops were so narrow. The people of Paris used bean coal in their fireplaces. The bean coal’s heat flared up too fiercely, seeming to rush only to her face, and left her feeling unwell. Until the bean coal in the fireplace had fully ignited, until the prickling odor irritating her skin had dissipated, Nobuko would sometimes read the newspaper by the washroom window.

The American economic crisis entered November, and even as the month reached its midpoint, no definite stability had been found. The European money that had been put to work on Wall Street was now flowing back to Europe in massive quantities. It became clear that in Europe, only Britain and France could compete with American capital exports. The Bernay family, satisfied with France’s steadfastness that had withstood the blows of the economic crisis, discussed at the dinner table—while encouraging their son Jack—the need to catch fuel thieves at their laundry factory.

Nobuko’s life seemed to hold nothing particularly interesting to Madame Bernay and the Albert couple. The commemorative spoon that Nobuko had bought as a souvenir from Verdun,

“It’s silver!” Madame Bernay nodded with a glance, “How thoughtful of you.” While once again expressing her gratitude to Nobuko, Madame Bernay handed it to Bernay’s wife—her daughter—who then passed it to Bernay’s husband, and that was all anyone saw. But within that Bernay household, the demeanor of sixteen-year-old Francine made Nobuko sense something. One afternoon, Nobuko had made plans with Shibagaki, a painter living in Clamart, to visit an art bookshop in Montparnasse and several galleries. The store had a collection of Matisse’s sketches. Nobuko never tired of viewing that sketch collection. It bore Matisse’s handwritten signature and was a numbered limited edition. In preparation for her departure from Paris, Nobuko had been gradually collecting art books; even if she had to give up three or four other volumes, she wanted that sketch collection and wished to have Shibagaki see it as well.

On the promised afternoon, for some reason, Shibagaki did not come to invite her. Having been stood up, Nobuko went to town at dusk to mail a letter to Moscow and unexpectedly encountered Shibagaki beside the post office. “Oh!” Shibagaki and Nobuko gazed at each other with widened eyes. “Were you unavailable today?”

“No.”

Shibagaki looked Nobuko up and down, suspiciously and scrutinizingly. “Weren’t you out since this morning?”

“No.” “Were you at home?”

“I was.” “Since you didn’t come, I wrote this.” She shook a thick square envelope addressed to Motoko. “Hmm.” Staring at Nobuko with a scrutinizing gaze, Shibagaki swung one arm widely from his shoulder and snapped his fingers. “Did you get your fill?” At the promised time, when he went to the Bernays’ entrance, it was Francine who came out and informed him that Nobuko had left before noon. Nobuko had been on the second floor and had not known.

“That girl’s up to some little scheme, isn’t she?—Not that I thought so, mind you. I figured your plans might’ve changed suddenly due to some circumstance.” A wrinkle that couldn’t quite be called a smile appeared at the corners of Shibagaki’s mouth. The thoughts Shibagaki harbored toward Nobuko—who had lately been seen walking exclusively with Ryosaku Hachiya—were all encapsulated in that gesture. “It was lovely meeting you, wasn’t it?”

Though making no effort to explain anything, Nobuko spoke with an expression that did not seek to dispel misunderstandings. "A promise is a promise, no matter who makes it."

“No—in fact, that settled everything for me.” Nobuko headed toward the Bernays’ house while Shibagaki went on ahead along the tram street where the post office stood; they parted ways.

At that autumn exhibition, works by Kyosuke Isozaki - who had died in Paris - and Sumiko Isozaki - who had returned to Japan carrying his remains - were selected. Additionally, Ishioka Hakutei's *Orchard* received special exhibition through Nikakai and drew considerable attention. Hung on one side of the same wall as a portrait that merely layered emerald and lapis lazuli effects like Amanjan's soap bubble paintings, *Orchard* displayed qualities of modern classicism. When Nobuko had seen this work at a Japanese exhibition venue earlier, she hadn't noticed how distinctively lines functioned in its composition. Since most salon entries focused solely on clever color effects and striking compositions, *Orchard*'s orthodox conventionality struck her as paradoxically interesting. Around that time, a certain Japanese cartoonist residing in Paris also exhibited a large silk scroll depicting Zhong Kui trampling a demon while wearing Chinese-style boots. To Nobuko, this ink painting resembled nothing so much as a Boys' Day festival gift.

A plan was settled among the Japanese residents of Clamart to go view it all together once more.

That afternoon, though Nobuko thought it too early, she arrived a full thirty minutes ahead of the appointed time at the home of the Kameda couple—painters who used the second floor of a storage shed as their atelier. Ryosaku Hachiya was also supposed to come. Wouldn’t people think she had come early too? When Nobuko, uncharacteristically self-conscious, opened the atelier door, she found to her surprise that the entire group had already gathered. “You all were quite early,” she said. “Yes,” replied Mrs. Kameda from beside the dual-purpose cooking stove, her youthful voice chirping through the colorful rubber apron draped over her silk dress. “That’s why we came to meet you.”

Mrs. Kameda, who had donned a gaudy patterned rubber apron over her silk outdoor dress, said to Nobuko in a youthful, almost chirping tone from beside the multipurpose cooking stove. “I’m glad you could come sooner than expected, don’t you think?” “Yeah.”

“They went to meet me—but who went to meet whom?” Nobuko had not been welcomed by anyone. Was she too early? She wondered this repeatedly while checking the watch on the white monkey’s arm as she made her way there. “Oh, come now, Nobuko-san!” Mrs. Kameda tilted her bobbed head charmingly and laughed. “Didn’t you say through Francine that you couldn’t come any earlier than the appointed time?”

“Me?” So taken aback, Nobuko pressed a hand to the chest of her tea-colored winter coat.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Shibagaki was sprawled on the couch spread with a checkered blanket. "So, it's that old trick."

While brushing the ash from his pipe, he said in a hoarse voice.

“She seems worn out by some *image* lately.” “I’ve experienced it too—the *image* compels an answer.” “No—what does that mean?” “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Kameda, the painter and husband, patted his wife on the shoulder to calm her and said plainly, “You did go there for sure, and since Ms. Sasa showed up early, that’s good enough.” The wife’s curiosity remained undiminished, and as she walked with Nobuko to the tram stop, she asked in a lowered voice, “Ms. Sasa, wouldn’t it be fine if you told me? It gives me the creeps—this *image* business...”

“I’m not entirely sure myself, but when Mr. Hachiya was at Bernay’s place, didn’t Mr. Shibagaki and everyone often go there to visit?” “Yes, my husband also used to draw Francine.”

“It’s because I’m not sociable that Francine feels lonely…” The wife paused as if considering, “Ah, you know. That might be the case for a young girl, I suppose.” After walking a few more steps in silence, she suddenly—

“But that girl is still a child, isn’t she? She may be large-framed, but… people around here are so precocious.”

Laden with protest, she produced a voice that seemed too deep for her frame. And so Nobuko sensed it— that Shibagaki and Kameda had likely visited Francine more frequently alone than with their wives. Ryosaku Hachiya detested Francine's petty schemes. "I can't stand those gloomy, clingy girls. What a nuisance. —Nothing but chaos." When storms of passion between couples stirred near her very person, how could anyone expect composure from Francine? Freckles dotted Francine's sallow sixteen-year-old face. Lately those freckles appeared to have darkened. From her overly long Romanian nose—like the drooping curls on her cheeks—she—

“But… it’s cold!” With a nasal voice and a look that imbued her complaint of coldness with unspoken implications, Francine twisted her body toward the dining table while glancing at her mother. Madame Bernay had been urging Francine to ride her bicycle and take a short spin outside after meals, hoping to improve her daughter’s complexion.

“Jack, go with her.”

Jack, the eldest son, silently shook his long knees. “Go together now.” “Now, you really should get a little exercise.” “—It’s cold…” Eventually, Bernay’s grandmother stood up from the table first, as if brushing something off both her shoulders. Then the wife, then the husband. They had work at the factory starting in the afternoon. And Nobuko too. Concerning the peculiar handling of matters, Nobuko did not mention a single word to Francine.

The days passed one after another.

The time for Nobuko to leave Paris drew near. The tension between Hachiya and Nobuko only intensified. Hachiya Ryosaku cast his emotional lasso ever more forcefully, and though Nobuko resolved to keep company with others besides him, in practice it was always Hachiya with whom she walked out—and more than once during those times, she found herself caught in his snare. She remained suspended halfway between the ferocity surging within her and an equal measure of doubt. Nobuko had already become conscious that she must not lose her sanity. That even while maintaining such clarity, sensuality could still bind one—this truth. Nobuko’s true heart yearned for love. A romance that might deepen into true affection. —herself ensnared. Nobuko took up a hand mirror and studied her reflection intently. Might there be some new beauty gracing that face?

Fifteen

One evening, Nobuko sat up halfway in the middle of the stark white sheets of a large bed—big enough for about three people to lie side by side—and stared fixedly at the faint red light lingering deep within the ash-covered bean charcoal briquettes in the fireplace. Bernay’s grandmother, being good at managing a household, had never bothered to make meals more enjoyable for Nobuko who didn’t drink wine. But when nights in Clamart grew cold, she began tucking a hot water bottle—wrapped neatly in a white napkin—at the foot of Nobuko’s bed each evening.

At her feet, freshly washed with hot water, Nobuko felt the pleasant warmth of the hot water bottle. By the time she returned to her room, the stove—stoked with blistering charcoal briquettes—had warmed the space moderately and showed embers befitting the late hour. Though the indoor night scene remained tranquil, Nobuko's face looked severe as she sat up wearing a white nightgown patterned with thin pink stripes and a round collar. On the bedspread where her hand rested lay a letter torn in two. Relatively thick, it remained split down the middle—four or five sheets of manuscript paper still stacked together, their weight unevenly distributed from being ripped apart.

Moscow and London. Moscow and Paris. A little over two months had passed since Motoko and Nobuko had begun living separately. Nobuko, being relatively diligent with correspondence, would write quite detailed and lengthy letters to Moscow whenever the mood struck her. Motoko, too, had been sending letters at a rate of about one per week to Nobuko during her time in London and after her return to Paris.

But tonight’s letter made it seem as though Motoko—her mouth twisted into a confused expression, her left shoulder hunched in her white blouse—was bearing down on Nobuko with a terrifying gaze. She had finally realized what kind of person she was—one who would make others waste a month writing letters. She had long since stopped expecting Nobuko to return to Moscow. It’s perfectly fine if you never come back at all. You, after all, are someone who does only what you want, so even me saying such things from here would be, in a way, ridiculous—don’t you think?

Motoko was saying she’d made her waste a month writing letters, but what did that even mean? Nobuko wondered if she might have failed to respond to one of Motoko’s letters. She felt certain she had answered every single letter and postcard Motoko sent. After the Sasa family members had returned home via Moscow, Nobuko’s extended stay in Paris—prolonged by moves to Clamart and other delays—hadn’t been dragged out indefinitely without informing Motoko. When moving to the Bernays’ house, she had explained her general plans, stating she wanted to stay in Paris until around the end of November.

Motoko’s letters had repeatedly accused Nobuko of faithlessness. And finally, I have been staying up all night lately doing flower arrangement. This too—for two nights in a row, I’ve come back and written in my room. It had been written.

That evening, Nobuko went with Ryosaku Hachiya to a meeting held in a certain part of the workers’ district in southeastern Paris, and upon returning late, she found a letter from Motoko propped against the white monkey. That night, the place where Nobuko and Hachiya went was an area known as the station quay along the Seine River. The neighborhood, lined with warehouse-like buildings, was so dark that the faces of passersby could not be discerned. A plank bridge spanned the canal, and passing through such darkness that footsteps crossing it could be discerned by their sound, there stood a building that resembled a converted warehouse turned meeting hall, where an anti-fascist gathering was held, centered around Polish workers living in Paris. On October 30, Poland’s fascist government used military force to storm the parliament and forced the adjournment of proceedings. The following day, the rally organized by the Socialist Party in protest was forcibly dissolved, and eight Socialist Party Diet members and workers were injured. The Socialist Party’s organ newspaper *Rōdōsha* had its publication suspended. In France, a large number of migrant workers from Poland had come to work. The C.G.T.U., striving to unify the labor front against fascism, integrated the fervor of workers seeking to protect the freedom of their homeland Poland and called not only upon its own members but also upon all workers—regardless of union affiliation or political stance—to gather at that night’s anti-fascist assembly.

Since summer, the suppression of France's Communist Party had intensified. Given that this was a meeting organized by the C.G.T.U., police might storm in at any moment—and with potential provocateurs possibly mixed among the diverse crowd—the atmosphere at the venue remained tense. Through some connection, Ryosaku Hachiya had secured tickets for that night's event. The memory of that year's Warsaw May Day—strangled by Piłsudski's regime—still burned fresh in Nobuko's mind; undaunted by being the lone foreign woman among four or five hundred men in attendance, she took a seat on a bench near the podium.

People stood up one after another and gave speeches. A young man who truly seemed to be a factory worker. A laborer with a foreman’s age and sturdy build. A man in a colored tie who appeared to be a union office executive. Even among them was a long-haired man with a thick black Bohemian necktie cascading down his chest. All the speeches were in French. The essence of the speeches Hachiya summarized for Nobuko remained uniformly consistent—protests against fascism and appeals for Polish people’s freedom. Yet before long, Nobuko noticed an intriguing fact about the speakers. Paradoxically, her limited grasp of the language itself sharpened her focus on their gestures and expressions directed at the crowd, until she could roughly discern each speaker’s ideological inclinations. The speeches seemed meticulously structured, and among them, those who particularly captured Nobuko’s interest—rational speakers with measured gestures—appeared at a ratio of roughly one in every three or four.

Despite the tense, vigilant atmosphere before the meeting began, the assembly concluded without incident. Finally, all attendees stood up and sang *The Internationale* in unison. Enveloping Nobuko’s small frame, the singing voices filled the warehouse-like venue. Just as in that early morning Metro ride days before, when the white wave of *L’Humanité* had hidden Nobuko beneath its ink-scented waves. Nobuko sang along in Russian. French and Russian—ah, *The Internationale*—all melted into a single rising melody within that one refrain, and when they finished singing, the laborer in his fifties sitting next to Nobuko—

“That was very good.”

He gripped Nobuko’s hand tightly and shook it.

Throughout the singing of *The Internationale*, Ryosaku Hachiya stood there, remaining solemnly silent. He did not know *The Internationale*. He stood without singing the song he did not know. There was no falsehood in that, nor was it an unnatural attitude for him. Yet as the crowd—gathered in this desolate place tonight, risking some danger—overflowed with song born of their exalted solidarity, Hachiya stood alone, lips sealed and posture heavy. His presence, so near that their arms might brush against each other, only accentuated the peculiar feeling Nobuko had always harbored about him and herself: the astonishment that they could exist so close as to sometimes press their lips together, and the estranging sense of an unbridgeable distance rooted in the essence of their respective lives—a dissonance that now intensified within her heart.

When they finally caught the last train to Clamart and were walking under the trees on Saint-Cloud Street where the Bernays’ house stood, Ryosaku Hachiya said, as if he had been thinking it over during the long journey, “Actually, Ms. Sasa, you have a fire that isn’t just theoretical.”

“You fit right into places like that so easily.” “I’ve realized someone like me has a truly spineless intellectual streak.” “...I just get flustered.” What Nobuko had sensed at the meeting was now being articulated from Hachiya’s perspective. “Since we’ve come this far—it’s practically right there—why don’t we rest a moment before continuing? You don’t mind, do you?”

Slightly away from the lamplight illuminating the bare branches of winter trees along the avenue, there was a stone bench. Nobuko, once again seeing herself grow dispirited while being restrained by him, as if resisting it— “Since when are November nights good for stone benches?”

From the beginning, the two of them were neither walking hurriedly nor slowing their pace.

“The truth is, I’m terrified of having met you, Nobuko.” “……” “To me, a new life is beginning to appear.” “I can’t help but pursue it.” “But still... Ms. Sasa is about to leave Paris... Nobuko, what am I supposed to do?” On their way back from the anti-fascist workers’ rally, such conversations would pass between them—Nobuko and Hachiya—a man and a woman. It was Hachiya’s indulgence—his clinginess—that made Nobuko blush with awkward discomfort and feel sorrow.

“Mr. Hachiya, please—I’m begging you—no acting spoiled—.” “You went to the trouble of taking me to such a meeting, and yet…” As Nobuko reached for the small entrance of the Bernays’ gate, Hachiya restrained her,

“Just one.”

He leaned in. Nobuko entered the gate, still feeling Hachiya’s lips grazing the space between her cheek and ear. Nobuko climbed the quiet stairs of the Bernays’ house with a heavy heart. Resisting Hachiya meant resisting something wavering within herself. It strained her nerves. When Nobuko turned on the light with unsettled eyes, she found a letter from Motoko propped against the white monkey figurine on her bedside table.

When she first found the letter，Nobuko’s expression shone with joy． Deliberately keeping her hands from touching it while gazing at the envelope，she changed clothes． Then she washed her face，hands，and feet in the bathroom． After changing into nightwear，sliding into bed，and locating the foot warmer with her toes，Nobuko—lingering over each motion—slowly opened Motoko’s envelope stamped with Russian and French postmarks． In her earlier correspondence，Motoko had vividly depicted Moskva under their Five-Year Plan’s first-year successes． *Buko-chan will surely be surprised*． *Moskva has changed*． *The black-market stalls at Akhotny Ryad have disappeared*． *Construction cranes dominate every street*． She’d painted this new skyline．

What kind of Moscow was Motoko talking about in this letter? This expectation felt all the more urgent against Nobuko’s emotions tonight. However, what rose from Motoko’s opened letter toward Nobuko was a billowing cloud of thick black smoke. When Nobuko read the lines Motoko had written—lines accusing her of selfishly remaining in Paris, lines that culminated in Motoko resuming those frivolous pastimes again lately, writing this in her room for two consecutive nights after returning—Nobuko was seized by an emotion so intense it felt as though she were gripping Motoko’s wrist beneath her own hand. Motoko Yoshimi! What utter repugnance. To deliberately write about engaging in those very diversions Nobuko so detested—

Motoko knew full well that Nobuko detested such pastimes. If Motoko, of all places in Moscow, was starting to indulge in such things again, then the motive for that misery was Nobuko’s selfish stay in Paris—that was what Motoko was trying to say. To Nobuko, it could only be interpreted that way. But Motoko Yoshimi was a fully-fledged adult—a woman over thirty, wasn’t she? If Motoko was relying on such petty habits—unable to remain cold-hearted, exploiting Nobuko’s softness to make her fret and thus trying to force her back from Paris—then—Nobuko erupted aloud in anger. Devil!

As if violently shaking Motoko’s arm through her blouse—a sensation she could feel in her hand—Nobuko’s heart assailed her. In all her previous letters, had Motoko ever once told Nobuko to come back quickly? When the Sasa family transferred via Moscow to board the Trans-Siberian Railway for their return to Japan, Motoko’s letter had shown no opinion about Nobuko remaining in Paris. Nor had she mentioned a single word about the assortment of small souvenir bags Nobuko sent to Moscow. Had Motoko even received those bags from Tsuyako, who had been entrusted with their delivery? Did she like them? Did she not need them? Through this silent treatment of the souvenirs, Nobuko sensed Motoko’s disapproval of her staying in Paris.

Nobuko disliked having her actions controlled through insinuations. It was not that there had been no such instances during her years of life with Motoko; rather, Nobuko now reflected that she had accepted such situations too readily as her own wretchedness. Nobuko had divorced Tsukuda because she could not endure the position of being a wife; yet to accept similar implicit constraints from Motoko simply because Motoko was a woman was absurd.

If Motoko was writing such a letter now, why had she left Nobuko behind so easily when departing from London? The realization hit her exactly as the phrase suggested—Nobuko felt her breath catch. At that time, all members of the Sasa family had been present in London. Motoko had regarded that familial environment as Nobuko’s safeguard. Therefore, while her parents were in Paris, Nobuko’s remaining there had not caused Motoko anxiety.

Nobuko began to tear the letter from Motoko—slowly, yet with a decisive motion. For the first time in their five years together, she became aware of herself tearing up a letter from Motoko like this—and while being conscious that this marked something new in her life with Motoko. Nobuko's fingers—her eyes darkly smoldering as they fixed on the fireplace embers—soon began moving automatically, tearing Motoko's letter, already split into two large pieces, into narrow vertical strips, then shredding those into even smaller fragments. The fragments of the letter, like paper snow falling on a stage, were scooped up by Nobuko's hands and fluttered down through her fingers onto the bedspread. Scooped up again and dropped again, the fragments fell upon Nobuko's heart, upon the streets of Moscow in early winter, and upon the sole window facing the inner courtyard nestled among Astozhenka's oaks. A desk filled the only window. Motoko, wearing a thick-striped indoor garment like a Tatar man's outerwear, sat facing it. She would have a pipe clenched between her teeth. Exposing her narrow, receding hairline, the bulky nightwear made her sloping shoulders appear like an adult's borrowed clothing— The money order for ninety-nine yen and seventy-five sen that she had sent, and the clumsily drawn yet cheerful illustrated letter that Nobuko—delighted upon receiving it—had written to Motoko came to mind. A quiver threatening to become a sob ran through Nobuko. Did her life in Paris amount to deceiving Motoko?

In the letters she wrote to Moscow, Nobuko had omitted any mention of the ambiguous emotional tug-of-war that had recently arisen between her and Ryosaku Hachiya. If this constituted a lie, then Nobuko was no longer being honest with Motoko. But even if told that, as a thirty-year-old woman, she must not tread any emotional bypaths Motoko deemed unnecessary, that was something Nobuko could not do. If Motoko believed that just because the Sasa family had all been in London, all of Nobuko’s emotional life there had been secured by her, then Motoko knew too little of the human heart. Just because Nobuko had many criticisms of Ryosuke Tone’s attitude—his relish for wit in both life and scholarship—it was not proof that he occupied no position whatsoever in the depths of her consciousness.

Nobuko had indeed remained silent about the turbulent matters that had arisen in her life since being alone. Given that Motoko, with whom she had lived openly for so many years, was in Moscow, it had to be considered natural that she would sense something unspoken beneath the letters Nobuko sent from Paris. Truly, Nobuko had lately been swayed by emotional turbulence she had not spoken to Motoko about.

For if she were to commit it to writing, it would seem to solidify into reality—this anxiety that made Motoko, even as she swirled complaints like eddying water, still unable to confront you directly with "You're probably having some affair where I'm not around"—this quintessentially Motoko way of suffering.

—— Admitting it was wrong not to confide in Motoko—but how was Nobuko to inform her about the delicate struggle with Hachiya of late? She picked up the fragments of letter that had been scooped and scattered across the bedspread, gradually placing them into the envelope beside her. In the end, Ryosaku Hachiya would remain Ryosaku Hachiya, and Nobuko would remain Nobuko. Yet that premonition stood so clear. Despite it, there were moments when her heart held a resolute determination to pursue this experience without retreating up to a certain point—Nobuko could not bring herself to tell Motoko any of this exactly as things stood.

The next morning, immediately after breakfast at the Berne house, Nobuko went to the Clamart post office. And then she sent a telegram to Motoko in Moscow. BUKO APOLOGIZE ADJUST MOOD WHAT OCCURS IN MOSCOW TROUBLES MIND. Nobuko was responsible for the cause of Motoko’s anxiety. She could not help but honestly admit that. But even though Motoko was suffering, Nobuko could not conceive of bending her own course in any way. Regarding all these points, Nobuko felt like saying “I’m sorry” to Motoko.

16

Without any prior notice, Ryosaku Hachiya did not come to his usual lecture. Even by the next morning, there was still no word from him.

Nobuko wondered what she should do. When she thought about it, his lodging was on the second floor of an elderly, lonely painter’s widow’s house—a place where there was no one to casually ask for errands. Outside, it was a day when the early winter rain was falling. With the intention of stopping by Hachiya’s lodging while taking a walk, Nobuko left the Berne house before noon.

The rain-drenched Parisian suburb lay quiet, devoid of pedestrians. In the front garden of Hachiya's lodging—where the gate had long stood open and left to grow wild—a shallow puddle had formed. Nobuko climbed the stairs from the unoccupied first-floor corner to reach the second story. While anxious that her wet shoes might leave marks on the steps. She knocked on the door of the room where the lodging's widow lived.

“Oh, Mademoiselle.”

“Good day, Madame.” “Is Mr. Hachiya in?” “Yes, yes, he is here.” “He seems a bit unwell—he hasn’t taken his meals last night or this morning.”

With an air of wondering how he was now, the lodging’s widow stepped forward and knocked on the door of Ryosaku Hachiya’s room, located down the hallway to the right at the top of the stairs.

“Come in.”

It was Hachiya's listless voice.

“It’s Mademoiselle Sasa.”

Standing side by side with Nobuko at the doorway, the widow in a brown apron saw Hachiya lying on the bed, shook her head, and retreated. “What’s wrong?” Nobuko moved toward the bed with tentative steps. “A cold?” “—I don’t know what’s wrong.” “Since yesterday?”

With his head resting on the pillow, Hachiya gave a slight nod. His hair was impeccably groomed, making him seem unlike a man who had taken ill and remained bedridden since the previous day. Noticing this detail, Nobuko observed that Hachiya's pajamas—visible from the chest down beneath his blanket—were freshly laundered crisp garments in pale cream with green stripes. Though this orderly appearance was preferable to seeing him in disarray, Nobuko found herself blinking involuntarily.

“Do you have a fever?” “There’s no fever... I suppose.” As she gazed at Hachiya’s face—his neat appearance, his usual way of staring at her from atop the pillow with horizontal wrinkles creasing his forehead and furrowed brows—Nobuko’s heart softened with a motherly warmth. Nobuko brought a plain chair from beside the hearth and placed it next to Hachiya’s bed. “If you’re unwell, you must get proper care quickly.”

“Yes.” “Does Madame here know any proper doctors, I wonder?” After Kyosuke Isozaki developed sepsis and died overnight following a tooth extraction, Nobuko had come to distrust every chance-met doctor in Paris.

“Perhaps I can go ask at the Berne house for you? Perhaps even Mr. Kameta’s place might know someone.”

In his neat pajamas, Hachiya spoke in a voice that sounded as though his chest were constricted, his breath passing only thinly.

“It’s fine, Nobuko.” “Are you sure it’s really okay to leave you like this?” As he nodded, Hachiya drew a deep breath inward. “I was sure you’d come, Ms. Sasa.” Something like a tearless sob coursed across Hachiya’s face as it lay against the pillow. “Ms. Sasa, I’m suffering.” While her hand was being seized, Nobuko conflated the meaning of Hachiya’s physical discomfort somewhere in his body being painful with the meaning of the tension between them being painful.

“The kindness you showed when you came in just now and looked at me.” Releasing Nobuko’s hand, Hachiya stretched both arms toward her as far as he could, like a small child would do. “I’m suffering, Nobuko.” Before she knew it, Nobuko had risen from the chair. Then, tilting her head, her delicate-featured face suffused with a strange glow, she silently looked down at Hachiya lying against the pillow with solemn intensity. Without knowing when her shoes had been removed, Nobuko’s body slipped lightly and smoothly beneath the covers of Hachiya’s bed, her solemn yet gentle expression never leaving him as she gazed. —

Through the sheets, Hachiya’s entire body trembled, and a full-palmed force stroked down Nobuko’s back. At the same moment, Nobuko heard a voice that sounded torn. “Ah, Nobuko—you’re still fully dressed in your kimono!” Still fully dressed in her kimono—? What was he talking about? Still fully dressed in her kimono... With the same lightness and suppleness with which she had slid under the covers, Nobuko slipped out of Hachiya’s bed. And she grasped the nearby chair. She did not take her eyes off Hachiya.

“What kind of person are you?! You don’t have to torment me so much, you know?” Nobuko never once intended to torment Hachiya. But the idea of herself not wearing a kimono at all was something Nobuko couldn’t fathom. “I’ve known from the start that you don’t love me as I love you… So you don’t have to insult me.”

Insult—? That, too, was not something Nobuko recalled.

“Come here.” The face Hachiya wore as he spoke those words was unfamiliar to Nobuko.

“…………”

On the contrary, Nobuko moved around to the other side of the chair, increasing the distance between the bed and where she stood.

“Hey, come here.”

“No.”

It was Nobuko’s voice—confused and hoarse.

“Why?”

“But… it’s different.” “What is?” “—You’re no tovarishch.” With a jerk, Hachiya’s upper body sat up on the bed. “Then, if it’s a tovarishch, would any man do for you?” “Why would it come to that…”

Nobuko, who had not yet fully regained her composure, retorted in an unnaturally slow tone.

“But—that’s how it is, isn’t it?” “I am not a Kollontayist.” “Am I not a tovarishch to you?” “That’s not it.” Nobuko’s answer was soft yet hard to resist, and at the same time, clear. Nobuko suddenly began to realize. How excruciatingly difficult it was to explain the distinction between when she herself had unexpectedly called someone a tovarishch and when she had not. And Ryosaku Hachiya, too, seemed to have his emotional focus redirected at an unexpected moment. He gazed at Nobuko, who stood leaning against the wall, as if examining something unusual.

“Well then, what about Motoko Yoshimi—to you, Ms. Sasa? —Is she a comrade?” After thinking for a while, Nobuko answered. “I think I can say that’s true—more than you.” Hachiya lowered his upper body, which had been sitting up, and laid his head on the pillow. Nobuko eventually put on her coat. And leaving Hachiya—who had covered his face with both pajama-clad arms over his eyes—in the bed, she went out into the hallway.

17

The next morning, after breakfast at the Bernays’ house, as Nobuko was about to go upstairs, Ryosaku Hachiya arrived.

When he saw Nobuko, “I was truly rude yesterday.”

He held out his hand.

“I thought you might be angry and had even started preparing to leave Paris.”

Nobuko remained silent, blinking her eyes. “Let’s walk a bit—there’s something I must have you understand.” “—But what about your illness?” “It doesn’t matter—I’m fine.” Under the clear sky after the rain, the Bernays’ garden, now stripped of leaves, deepened its early winter atmosphere. Nobuko and Hachiya avoided the morning streets where Clamart’s residents were going about their work, and after passing through the fields, chose the path leading toward the forest.

“I’ve been thinking ever since then, and I’ve finally realized something.” “The truth is, until yesterday, I hadn’t understood the essence of who you are, Ms. Sasa.” “I’ve come to fully grasp that fact.”

Nobuko kept walking, her eyes fixed on the withered grassy path five or six meters ahead.

“I’ll never make such a trite misunderstanding again.” “This time, I truly understand.” “Nobuko, you’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

The reason she found it difficult to speak was that Nobuko, too, considered herself at fault. Yesterday, after returning from that encounter, Nobuko too had been unable to stay awake. In the bed that seemed to sway beneath her body, Nobuko could not calm her own unexpected feelings. In her attempt to figure out what to do, Nobuko slipped into the space between Hachiya’s bed covers. What Nobuko could clearly recall was only the strange brightness and clarity—a luminous transparency—that had gently, ever so gently filled her heart as she watched Hachiya’s face resting on the pillow. It resembled the sensation of love. Nobuko had never before been in such a state of self-forgetfulness toward him.

Hachiya had misinterpreted the meaning of Nobuko’s actions. That was an awkward situation for both of them. However, Nobuko could instead admit that she herself was at fault in this matter. Given that Hachiya was a man whose ways of thinking and feeling were largely conventional, it was only natural that Nobuko’s state at that time—having become a single glowing entity, her very flesh sublimated—had been misinterpreted. But could it truly be said that this was solely Hachiya’s misunderstanding? Was it not rather that Hachiya had interpreted with more candor than Nobuko the desire that made her resemble a luminous being, accepting it at face value?

With surprise at herself, Nobuko delved into her own unfathomable nature. The mysteriousness of the human heart. At that time, Nobuko had no choice but to forgive herself—she who had acted upon desire without recognizing it as desire. But that word—tovarishch—a word that, the more Nobuko thought about it, the more it made her ponder—had grown in the unacknowledged depths alongside her desires, and in that instant, this single utterance had acted with immovable force. ——

All of these were a complete surprise to Nobuko herself. Rather than blaming anyone, Nobuko was startled to re-examine the aftermath of the electric shock that had occurred between Hachiya and herself—a shock that had repelled them both. As she walked, Nobuko said to Hachiya in a voice that sounded more tired than usual.

“I’m sorry too.”

“I don’t like you saying it that way.” “Nobuko—from someone like me—you’re astonishingly humanistic.” “You felt genuinely sorry for me—you were being so kind—and yet I was utterly crude.” In being strict with himself, Hachiya seemed to have found composure. “I’m not such a saintly being either.”

Nobuko did not want to lose sight of herself as she truly was in reality. “Mr. Hachiya, but why did you get so angry like that? When I said you weren’t a *tovarishch*—even though that was the truth—”

Ryosaku Hachiya removed his black soft hat, put it back on, and made a pained expression. “I was jealous.” “I was jealous—so intensely I couldn’t bear it.” “When I think that someday, if such a *tovarishch* appears, he will confidently make Nobuko’s entirety his own…”

Make all of that his own—even a *tovarishch*? A vague, yet intense look of doubt floated in Nobuko’s eyes.

“Now it’s different.” “If such a contender were to appear now—I could wish him well.” “Are you saying… he would claim my entirety as his own?”

“That may be one aspect.” “But more than that—for your own sake.” “For my part, having gone through fire and water like this, I believe we can now move forward with true friendship.” “You won’t deny that, will you?” “I wonder…”

Had that matter between them truly been settled already? The fact that they had stepped onto separate new paths remained unclear to Nobuko. Her senses still wavered somewhere. Could it truly be said that these two walking along Clamart's forest path since morning shared ordinary emotions? Even Hachiya—who seemed determined to convince himself of Nobuko's platonic nature—retained uncertain feelings. Against Hachiya's ambiguity, Nobuko felt herself distinctly grounded as an earthly counterpart. There she sensed her own uncertainty—Hachiya tightly pulled her silently walking arm toward himself.

“Ms. Sasa, there are times when you’re as innocent and kind as an angel, and then times when you’re as cold and sharp as a demon.” “Why?” “I wonder…” she trailed off.

Nobuko felt as if her breath had stopped. Hachiya’s impassioned critique, being itself a commonplace expression, struck directly at Nobuko’s own commonplaceness. The inadequacy of Nobuko’s attitude—remaining ambiguous yet drawn to something—was vividly laid bare by Hachiya’s words, devoid of malice or design. “I will never do anything that troubles Ms. Sasa again.” “At least I can be confident of that.” “So, at least resolve to stay in Paris for the rest of this year.”

That was something Nobuko could not do. But more than that—the shame of herself appearing as such a woman to Hachiya. The shame cast Nobuko’s own figure in a completely different light—illuminating her in the various scenes she had shared with Hachiya over the past month or so of Paris life.

Eighteen

A reply to Nobuko’s letter arrived from Motoko in Moscow. "Buzhishinpaisuruna." The Romanized telegram text scrawled by the Clamart post office telegraph clerk on pale green paper was divided by quintessentially French-style peculiar errors. The clerk had taken the initial S of "Suruna" and attached it to the end of "Pai," writing it as "Pais." Back when the Sasa family was still in Paris, when they received the telegram at the Pèreire residence informing them of Kyosuke Isozaki’s death, it had been misspelled as “Skesis” in a manner resembling Greek.

The telegram from Motoko lay on Nobuko’s desk on the second floor of the Bernay residence. Next to it were stacked brown notebooks. Hachiya Ryosaku’s lectures continued as if clashing with Nobuko’s resolve to depart for Moscow. Nobuko felt herself like a ship ready to set sail the moment the signal drum sounded once. What existed between her and Hachiya that required a drum to sound? Even though it had become so clear that freeing herself from these bonds was her responsibility— —But Nobuko waited for the drum to sound. In some corner of her heart, she waited for the drum to resound loudly.

That was the kind of day it had been.

The Kameda couple held a simple meal gathering. It was the couple’s hospitality to let friends living alone in Clamart and central Paris enjoy Japanese-style pickles and bancha tea. Nobuko and Hachiya had also been invited. Nozawa was present too, along with two other painters Nobuko didn’t usually associate with. Shibagaki—who seemed to spend hours daily at Kameda’s atelier—lay sprawled on the sofa with a pipe between his teeth as if it were his favorite spot. Nozawa sat neatly on a low chair in the corner, much like he did at Martinet’s house, while the host couple, Nobuko, and a pastel painter named Toyooka gathered around the central stove.

Kameda’s atelier had a leisurely atmosphere that seemed inherent to Kameda himself as its central figure, making it the place where Nobuko felt most at ease in her Clamart life. Mrs. Kameda manifested her understanding of her husband’s art and her desire to support it through her talent for preparing simple yet delicious home-cooked meals and her innate dexterity in studying Western-style dressmaking. “After all, someone as reserved as us could never become a master like Mr. Sagata—you know.”

That evening too, while remaining amid the men's conversations, she mentioned in the women's private discussion the name of a Japanese painter then gaining fame in Paris. "I've made peace with living as a poor painter all my life." "If anything, that makes me more carefree." "I'm enjoying this life in my own way—isn't that what happiness really is?" "It's about making even simple meals taste wonderful."

Without particularly seeking Nobuko’s response, she said in a chirpy tone, and Mrs. Kameda imitated a French woman’s coquettish way of shrinking into herself. On Mrs. Kameda’s lap, the centerpiece of an unfinished lady’s hat was being adjusted. “Aren’t you impressed? With this, I’ll soon be a full-fledged seamstress—I’ve kept at it for three years, you know. So you see—I think it’s about time I get serious about hat-making too. That way I’ll feel more secure, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Kameda lowered her bobbed bangs toward Nobuko, whispered as if amused, and giggled softly. "No matter how many of *them* there are, all they can do is stain their fingers brown with tobacco tar or smudge them with oil from unsold paintings—but in the meantime, *my* lovely fingers here are earning money! Not that any of you would ever notice." What a contrast there was between Kyosuke Isozaki and Sumiko—who had frittered away their anguished lives amid artistic torment within the weathered walls of Rue Dutot—maintaining their restrained lifestyle to the end, and the way of living practiced here in Clamart by the Kamedas. Through an atmosphere of kitten-like vivacity that sometimes seemed deliberately performed, through the laughter of a woman adept at domestic life, and through the soft, brightly colored fabric scraps perpetually strewn about her, Mrs. Kameda appeared to be drawing the very spirit of her painter husband’s work into her cheerful sewing room.

When everyone went to see the Salon d’Automne, the paintings titled Flowers by Kyosuke Isozaki—who had died in Paris—and Sumiko’s Flowers did not particularly attract the Kamedas’ attention. Or rather, among the lives being waged within the vast city of Paris, unless such works achieved master-level success, the fate of a single Japanese painter like Isozaki seemed incapable of stimulating either jealousy or sympathy.

With the needle pressed against the Western-style thimble fitted on the tip of her middle finger, sewing the stiff fabric of a lady’s hat, Mrs. Kameda— “I have one grand aspiration, you know,” she said.

“If you won’t laugh at me, shall I say it? Somehow, I do so want to send Kameda to Italy and let his talent flourish to its fullest extent.” Mrs. Kameda placed the roughly formed hat on her left hand, moved it slightly away from herself, and examined it carefully. “Ms. Sasa, you’d agree with me, wouldn’t you? Kameda’s paintings are all so dark.”

“Can I really call it dark—not just subdued?” “Aren’t they gloomy either way?” Nobuko sensed Kameda’s composed character in such moments. “Paintings by someone like Kameda—no matter where you show them, they’re at a disadvantage.” In the tone of a supportive spouse blending experience-born conviction with anxiety, she said. “We’re poor, aren’t we? So I think that’s why Kameda’s paintings end up using all those muted colors—they say Matisse’s lifestyle was simply splendid, you know.” “And Mr. Sagata is now being remarkably promoted, so I hear he’s living quite lavishly.”

What about Carrière? What about Modigliani? What did those artists possess? When Nobuko saw the grimy hues of Rue Dutot’s walls, she thought: Ah—here lay Carrière’s colors. A melancholic sepia and a whiteness like chalk drained of light. There, in those tones, spoke the sorrows of Paris’s impoverished lives. It was the era when people read Montparnasse, a novel casting Modigliani as its protagonist. To monopolize Modigliani’s brilliance—dealers who foresaw his posthumous value exploited his destitution, paying him scrap-paper wages while wresting paintings from his hands. In all Modigliani’s years—when had he ever known true recognition?

“People who can spend as much money as they want are so fortunate, aren’t they?” In Mrs. Kameda’s avoidance of saying “people who can earn as much money as they want,” Nobuko sensed the quintessential quality of those living in Clamart. That they resided in Clamart, removed from Paris’s citizenry, meant these were people who neither frequented Montparnasse’s trendy cafés nor retained any desire to cultivate acquaintanceships with master artists. Simultaneously, even among fellow Clamart residents, these people received news of the American economic panic—which had been unsettling the world since late October—in a manner wholly distinct from the pragmatic expressions with which the Bernès couple and their grandmother absorbed such information. The psychological ease stemming from their paintings’ lack of market value in Paris... These individuals reveled in their detachment, thinking, “After all, it hardly concerns us.”

When Nobuko had moved to Clamart in autumn, a season passed, winter came, and in her heart—Moscow!

Even as something whispered incessantly within them, the people trying to quietly see out the year as it stood were busy evaluating wines for Christmas. From their talk of alcohol, they found themselves discussing rumors about a certain man in Paris afflicted with alcoholism.

“How’s the work front? Has there been any change?”

“Hmm… If anything, isn’t it getting even more hopeless?” “Then he’s just a common drunkard, isn’t he?”

“As I’ve always said—even if they imitate addictions without possessing what’s essential, no real painter will ever emerge. Not one person has become Picasso just by doing handstands and copying deformations.”

It was Shibagaki, lying on the sofa, who said this. "What kind of self will emerge? The patience to endure until that 'I' is born—that's the first lesson of training."

Even as he spoke, Shibagaki kept his pipe suspended in midair away from his lips, focusing his gaze intently as he watched Mrs. Kameda’s hands at work. Standing beside the stove, she was making coffee. In the household of a close friend, there existed a man who showed more interest in the wife’s cooking than in the husband. With the gaze of friends who had grown accustomed to such habits over time, Shibagaki was watching Mrs. Kameda’s hands at work.

Last winter too, had Shibagaki not likely been here like this, waiting for his own birth? Almost all people frequently think with action in mind. Yet almost all people do not act as actively as they think.—Nobuko felt this now within herself as she mingled in the endless chatter of Kameda's atelier.

“Ah, this is delicious!” The person who was studying pastels praised Mrs. Kameda’s coffee-making skills. “A place that serves something as good as this—there’s probably nowhere around here.”

“To tell the truth, I’m not entirely without confidence myself, you know. When I return home, I’ll eventually open a shop, so please do keep me in mind.”

“Speaking of delicious—it makes me wonder, when one’s mind gets a bit unhinged, do women’s hands start to look skilled?” Shibagaki said without breaking his characteristic pose. "There are cases in art history where ears became a concern." "Van Gogh, right?" "My story concerns hands—women’s hands." “Has anyone actually done that?”

Everyone burst into laughter.

“Tsukui Shunkichi, right?” It was the name of a widely known writer. “When his mind became slightly unhinged—well, since he wasn’t an ordinary patient, his family and doctors faced extraordinary hardship.” “To avoid causing him anxiety or despair, they decided to call it a severe nervous breakdown—rest came first—and drilled into him that he must never go hungry.” “So you see—after being told this relentlessly—Mr. Tsukui became utterly convinced that feeling hungry meant certain doom.” “Even right after eating, once he started worrying he might get hungry again, he’d genuinely begin feeling empty inside.”

Nobuko found herself listening intently to the story. Knowing his works, she could only nod in understanding at how he had believed the doctor’s words so completely. When a family member took Tsukui along on their way to Hakone—after getting off at Odawara Station—they suddenly lost sight of him. They searched everywhere but couldn’t find him. As they panicked, a rickshaw driver waiting nearby asked, “What’s wrong, sir? Are you looking for a hatless gentleman—a rather peculiar one?”

"Yeah, exactly—that's how it went down," he continued. "When they pressed him, it turned out that very rickshaw driver had just escorted them to the waiting room. So off they went, and there was Mr. Tsukui thrashing about on the tatami floor. 'I came here starving,' he kept wailing, 'but you won't feed me a thing!'" They hurried downstairs to beg the staff—"The man's unwell, just give him anything edible"—then returned upstairs to check.

“What a shock!” In the alcove stood beautifully arranged roses. “Mr. Tsukui went right up to them and was devouring those beautiful roses with both hands, wasn’t he?” Hearing this, Nobuko started. Every detail of the circumstances—how utterly characteristic of the writer. The roses were so beautiful that he must have thought if something could be that exquisite, it would sustain his life to eat them—so he ate them with both hands. Though several stories about the same writer from that period were told, this tale of Tsukui Shunkichi and the roses distilled the very essence of his soul. The balance of common sense had vanished, yet his sensitivity to beauty had manifested itself so achingly—Nobuko was struck by what made this so quintessentially Tsukui.

What did it mean that this heartfelt anecdote—though told by someone who was an artist—was being related solely from the angle of him having eaten roses? The laughter of others became unbearable to Nobuko. Hachiya's gaze turned toward Nobuko who did not laugh. Nobuko sensed it. But Nobuko did not respond. She could laugh at Hachiya instead. That concerned his way of living.

Tsukui had kept a lover in a town with its own demimonde quarter, but being habitually shy, even when accompanied by that artist who was his close friend, he would never hold her hand or kiss her in public. Returning from Hakone with the woman, near Tsukui’s house in Yamanote, she stepped out of the automobile. “Well then, I’ll take my leave here,” the woman said as she alighted—whereupon Mr. Tsukui, uncharacteristically silent, tightly gripped her hand. “After all, in five years he’d never once done such a thing to her—so she was overcome by a tumult of emotions.” She began to weep. “Then Tsukui suddenly started biting into her beautiful white hand—” “He was hungry.”

This time, people did not laugh much. That sparked a debate about whether it was an expression of love. “To think that way is common sense.” “Absolutely not.” “He was hungry.” She was neither condemning the storyteller nor criticizing the people engaged in the topic.

A painful emotion churned within Nobuko herself. The feeling was being distilled into that single phrase: "He was hungry." But the heart that tries to take beautiful things, beloved things, into one's own mouth. In relation to living in this society with such yearning, there was something in Tsukui's story that seized Nobuko's heart. In the late autumn dusk at Verdun, within the frost-bitten grasses beginning to wither around Fort Douaumont, lay a gun barrel—its muzzle glinting like a small golden ring. That silent golden mouth had appealed to her; such raw appeals seemed to pulse within the behavior of artists whose balance of common sense had shattered, and Nobuko found it agonizing.

Nobuko stood up from the chair. She took a few steps around where she had been sitting. Hachiya’s gaze followed her from across the atelier. Ignoring it, she paced back and forth once or twice across the same spot before stopping when she turned at the atelier door. With unblinking eyes, she fixed her stare on Hachiya. Between him, seated deep in the sofa, and her standing by the door lay a sea of faces. Tobacco smoke hung in the air alongside coffee’s bitter scent and murmured voices. Hachiya shifted uneasily under her unwavering gaze. Nobuko’s eyes took in these details yet registered nothing truly. Her ears strained instead. A faint drum had begun beating in her heart—the drum signaling her imminent departure for Moscow now growing steadily clearer.

Chapter Four

I

When she had boarded the train from Moscow seven months earlier, the border must have been crossed in exactly this manner. Yet somehow, Nobuko couldn't recall the scene from that time.

The Berlin-Moscow train now left the Polish border station and was slowly making its way along a primeval fir forest that remained deep green even in December. From the moment it departed the border station, the train's speed had dropped considerably. White smoke from ahead billowed into the treetops of firs that pressed close to the train windows, their branches heavy with midwinter green; as it cleared, thick boughs appeared first, then slender twigs. The train progressed so slowly that Nobuko's eyes could follow every detail.

Nobuko stood facing the window, her legs—shod in low-heeled shoes—slightly apart like a boy’s, her hands behind her back, a gaudy neckerchief hanging over the chest of her beige sweater, her eyes never leaving the scenery outside. While earnestly watching the scenery along the border through the train window, Nobuko recalled the paint box and cardboard box containing a white toy monkey she had left behind in her panic when she disembarked from the Paris train upon arriving in Berlin.

Ah, I really dozed off and ended up coming here!

The final twelve hours before leaving Paris had exhausted Nobuko so thoroughly.

The packing, which she had thought would be simple, turned out to be unexpectedly chaotic. When her parents withdrew from Paris, they had left behind linens and tablecloths on the dining table of the Péreire apartment. With no space remaining anywhere in Nobuko’s scant belongings to accommodate them, Ryosaku Hachiya returned to his lodging and brought back a medium-sized suitcase for her to borrow. Amidst such chaos, Hachiya lamented the circumstances that had left him alone in Paris.

While locking the navy-blue trunk filled with art books on the floor of Nobuko’s room on the second floor of Berne’s house, Hachiya pleaded.

“That I—who want so desperately not to let you go—am the one helping you depart more than anyone else—”

Yesterday, when they went together to the Louvre department store, it had been Hachiya who helped Nobuko buy that trunk, and it had also been Hachiya who arranged the tickets to Moscow. “From now on,” he said, “I don’t know how I’ll manage living alone in Paris.” Nobuko took out the linens she had once laid flat and put away, and without pausing her hands—now tightly rolling them to pack beside the borrowed suitcase—she spoke. “But Mr. Hachiya, you’ve already lived in Paris for two years, haven’t you? My being here was the coincidence.” “You’ll manage perfectly well on your own.”

“That’s why you don’t understand, Ms. Sasa—when you weren’t here, that was one time, and now is entirely different.” “Then what do you propose I should do?” With eyes blazing, Nobuko stared fixedly at Hachiya’s sorrowfully contorted face. "You do nothing but try to keep me in Paris, yet you’ve never once suggested going to Moscow yourself—do you realize that?" "That fact—"

Facing the window, Nobuko brought over assorted notebooks, writing supplies, and bundles of letters from the desk cramped between the wardrobe and the wall, and began packing them into the women's travel case. On the case was pasted a stylish red-and-white label from when she had flown between Paris and London. “Right—we came to know each other down to the very limit, wouldn’t you agree? “And I’ve become certain it’s time for me to return to Moscow—to drag each other into some strange place through mere inertia—that’s something I refuse to do.”

“That’s right—you… that’s how it is.” It was past two in the middle of the night when Nobuko and Hachiya—with the chaos of packing spread between them—exchanged such words, bending over the floor or standing before the trunk placed on a chair. The Berne family had fallen silent in sleep, or at least appeared to have done so, and through the flung-open door, bright light streamed only from Nobuko’s room.

Nobuko and Hachiya stayed up through the night like that. Nobuko consciously avoided fostering a relaxed atmosphere throughout the night. The compartment of the Berlin-bound train departing early in the morning from Gare du Nord was dimly lit; in that faint chill and gloom, Ryosaku Hachiya gripped Nobuko’s arm through her coat with a numbingly tight force. “Ms. Sasa!—This is the last time—at least for me, this is the last time……”

It was only after such opportunities arose between her and Hachiya that Nobuko unreservedly and spontaneously cupped his face between her hands and kissed him—imbued with wishes for a good life for them both. What in their Clamart life together could have justified contempt toward Hachiya or self-reproach for Nobuko herself? Each had come to know a man and woman previously unknown, discovering themselves existing as precisely that man and that woman. Within their subtle, fierce, and boundaryless interplay—this perilous drawing near and pulling apart, this dance-like struggle testing themselves—their contest was ending in stalemate. Within that struggle lay a tension between equals unlike the centuries-old desire for mutual conquest between men and women—a tension carrying some new significance. In conclusion, their struggle found expression through Nobuko’s resolute departure toward Moscow—

“Well then, truly goodbye.” “Thank you for everything—let’s live properly, yes?” “We surely will.”

The departure bell rang through Nobuko’s words. With a guttural groan, Hachiya embraced her tightly enough to nearly crush her spine. Without looking back, he left the compartment.

Nobuko began to sleep. Completely exhausted and at the same time enveloped in an indescribable feeling of liberation from herself. Nobuko passed the border between France and Germany in a daze. The several hours in Berlin were hours in which Nobuko opened her eyes between sleeps, ate, spoke Japanese, and bought a fiber suitcase. Neon streaked across the night sky. Eastward, ever eastward.

In the compartment of the international train with large windows, a modest British-made brown coat hanging on the seat corner's coat hook swayed silently from night to morning and morning to noon, and beneath it, Nobuko continued sleeping. Before Nobuko’s senses, refreshed by sleep, the border’s deforested zone slowly passed by. Over a width of dozens of yards, the primeval fir forest had been cleared with a clarity and regularity not found in nature. In the distance lay the horizon of the northern country. In the distance, a sentry post constructed from assembled logs could be seen.

The train that had been running along the fir forest for some time made a temporary stop beside a grove where greenish light seeped into the compartment. It remained halted there for about a minute before starting to move again. The train’s speed had diminished further, and the locomotive now panted heavily as it slowly advanced across the grassland. There lay a landscape utterly devoid of ambiguity. In both the grassland and the neatly trimmed straight-line exits of the fir forests bordering it on either side. Within this desolate northern wilderness, some unspoken pact had been established; though no signals or human figures were visible, the train would stop at appointed points according to this pact, reset its speed anew, then halt once more after passing fixed locations. This progression—these brief cessations and recommencements—strangely stirred Nobuko’s heart.

In Europe, Nobuko passed through several borders. At one point, the border manifested to her as several silver coins that had become useless there and, in their place, a few pieces of different silver coins lined up at the edge of the dining car’s pure white tablecloth. At those places, there were always bustling people. Between one roof and another, there was a border.

In this vast uninhabited expanse where only fir forests grasslands and horizon existed，the train now passed through that point with ritual solemnity．With each labored gasp of the locomotive，old Europe receded．From ahead spread the new land—Soviet Russia．On the cleared grassland，the fir forest’s right-side exit withdrew like a green wall．The left-side entrance drew near．Nobuko，standing facing the window，pressed her hands—unconsciously clasped before her neckerchief—tightly against her chest．She felt it resonate within her：the stage was turning．—herself who had chosen that stage and returned．Herself who had left Paris．That self of hers grew certain．

When they arrived at Strupce Border Station, the interior of the wooden building in the northern night was illuminated by reddish electric lights. A shabby wooden-planked border baggage inspection office. On the white birch board partition hung a notice reading "Five-Day Week." There was a power plant poster proclaiming "Five-Year Plan in Four Years!" Crude desks and crude camp stools. Everything was crude and unrefined, but from the smell of wood drifting through the rough-hewn building to the figure of a woman working there with her headscarf wrapped around her head—all were things found in no other country's border stations. Here lay Russia. Seven months earlier when she had passed through this place, there had been a Soviet Union border station where construction slogans Nobuko hadn't known were newly resounding.

When she lowered the hand luggage she had carried in both hands—along with her entire body—onto the inspection counter, Nobuko involuntarily exclaimed, “At last!” she said. “I’ve returned!” Holding a pencil that turned into indelible purple ink when wet, the young blond-haired attendant who happened to be standing before the luggage platform where Nobuko had positioned herself cheerfully inquired.

“Where did you come from?”

“From Paris.” “From Paris—?” Nobuko had just returned from old Europe. She had returned from a single choice—from turmoil within herself that she hadn’t known during her time in Moscow.

II

Motoko’s boarding house room had changed.

When the young buds lining Moscow’s avenues were still sharp green dots, it had been in the rear room of Lukyanov’s kvartira that Nobuko herself sewed a gray angora collar to her coat’s lapel as she prepared for her departure.

After being discharged from Moscow University Hospital, Nobuko returned to Motoko’s room—a narrow space built to the exact width of a single window. The solitary window faced the building’s inner courtyard. It was so cramped that Motoko and Nobuko could not move about simultaneously within its confines. Within the same kvartira, Motoko’s new room was now a proper chamber. Two windows stood generously open toward Astozhenka Square, while upon its cleanly polished floor rested two simple beds, one clothes chest, a desk with bookcase for Motoko’s use, and a single small dining table.

At the station, Nobuko embraced Motoko who had come to meet her.

“How have you been?” When Nobuko asked this, Motoko—

“Well, do come back and see,” she said. “This time, it’s a good room—spacious.” Lukyanov’s elder daughter had become engaged, necessitating a room of their own. Therefore, Motoko had moved into the larger room where the two daughters had been until then, and Vera had ended up in the eel’s narrow bed, or so it was said.

“For our folks, it’s killing two birds with one stone. After all, this time the room fee is double, you see.”

Motoko wore a new coat trimmed with kangaroo fur. The rare fur's soft, muted hue complemented her wheat-toned complexion - cheeks flushed from December Moscow's biting air. Nobuko kept her eyes glued to the taxi window, searching every passing street corner for signs of the Five-Year Plan that had even reached Strupce's birch-paneled border station. That Motoko now occupied a spacious room seemed to promise stability for her own place too. Wanting nothing more than this assurance, Nobuko passed through Astozhenka's wooden gate and waited while the portly housing manager - trunk hoisted on his goatskin-coated shoulder - finished hauling her luggage up to Lukyanov's kvartira. Her shoes met exposed cement stairs splintering at the edges. Within the heated building lingered cement's faint dry odor. This was Moscow's new tactile reality - underfoot textures and airborne scents.

At Lukyanov’s place, both the double doors of the dining room and the kitchen door were closed, and Motoko’s room next to the dining room was open. Without any prior expectation, standing at the entrance and looking around the room, Nobuko,

“Oh.” As if unable to believe it, she fixed her eyes on the area beneath one window.

"My place?"

Still wearing her coat, she strode along the right-hand window ledge. Of the two windows facing the square, the left one was now Motoko’s study space. On the desk lay scattered an Ural stone ashtray, a half-read book, and newspapers. Between this window and the other stood a bookshelf about eighty percent full, and behind it sat another desk and chair.

There was nothing on the desk, and it stood completely empty. However, a lamp with a green flat circular shade had been placed there, ready for use at any time.

“How amazing… I actually have my own place here…” “—Because Buko got held up and didn’t come back forever, I ended up wasting a month’s payment, didn’t I?” Within Motoko’s reproachful tone resonated the reassurance that Nobuko had already returned there. “What were you dawdling over?” “What do you mean—?” Without directly answering Motoko’s question, Nobuko hung her coat on the wall. Nobuko, in her familiar loungewear, relaxed. Nobuko, having washed her face, relished the jam-filled fried bread prepared by Madame Lukyanov and began drinking tea. Nobuko’s unselfconscious appetite and the Parisian-style neckerchiefs and handbags carelessly scattered across the bed—a carelessness born of someone who no longer thought of going anywhere—gave Motoko both the novelty of another person beginning to inhabit that room and the sense that a life long familiar had finally returned there in full. Nobuko sensed it from each and every one of Motoko’s gazes that followed her movements. And Nobuko herself, having returned to Astozhenka, felt that she no longer wished to go anywhere else—yet there was something in Motoko’s gaze that seemed to grasp at shadows lingering in the depths of Nobuko’s consciousness. There was a scrutiny directed at Nobuko, probing toward something.

After taking a short rest, Nobuko began organizing her belongings. She placed the trunk of art books by the wall to the left of the door where it could be opened frequently for viewing, and hung her meager change of clothes on the clothes chest with Motoko’s considerate assistance. As she was pushing the empty suitcase under her own bed, Motoko—who had been watching Nobuko’s actions with her arms resting on the back of a chair placed sideways and her chin propped on them—

“There’s a suitcase I don’t recognize here.”

Nobuko turned around, and she indicated the brown medium-sized suitcase with her eyes. That was the suitcase Nobuko had borrowed from Ryosaku Hachiya when she could no longer pack all her belongings. “It’s not Buko’s.”

Nobuko was surprised by Motoko’s perceptiveness. “I borrowed it from Mr. Hachiya when I ran out of space to put things.” “Do you have to return it?”

“There’s no need for that.” Neither Hachiya nor Nobuko had thought about what to do with the borrowed suitcase. If it had been decided that she must return it, what meaning would that hold for Motoko? Regarding her life in Paris, Nobuko had resolved to humbly conceal herself before Motoko and had returned.

Silently, Nobuko continued organizing her belongings. After a while, as if Motoko had shifted her demeanor—half persuading herself— "Oh, fine then!"

she said. “Hachiya could’ve at least done me the courtesy of dealing with that suitcase.”

The notion of calling the object right before her eyes "just a suitcase" seemed so absurd that Nobuko burst out laughing.

“Why ‘just a suitcase’?” “But—isn’t that right?”

Motoko fixed her gaze—her pupils narrowing smoothly—on Nobuko’s face. In her eyes flickered the dark flame that had burned intermittently over these past several months. For a while, Nobuko met Motoko’s gaze. Nobuko understood Motoko’s resentment. But in truth, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—for Motoko to resent. She walked quietly over to Motoko. And she pressed the boundary between her own cheek and throat against the tip of Motoko’s nose.

“Here, give it a good sniff—do I smell different? Like something… not like Buko?” “Buko-chan.” Nobuko released her hands from the trunk behind her and leaned in with just her face; Motoko hugged her through the soft loungewear. “Don’t you dare say you’ve only half come back.”

“I know, I know.”

The two of them stayed up late that night. As the night deepened, the absolute sense of distance separating Paris and Moscow grazed Nobuko's heart like a new-honed blade more than once. Motoko's hand—this slender woman's hand—now rested completely entrusted to Nobuko with peace of mind. This narrow-fingered hand that had pinched and struck her at the Vienna hotel. That she had returned was not, after all, to this very hand itself. This awareness proved too persistent to shake off, and Nobuko lowered her eyelids before Motoko.

Moscow was beginning to change. The extent of its transformation might have been unbelievable to those who hadn't seen it. What Motoko had written about this was true.

Moscow was beginning to change. On the right side of the road leading from Astozhenka—where Nobuko and the others lived—to Hunter’s Square along the Moskva Riverbank, a massive construction project had begun that would likely become a building of at least seven or eight stories. It was the Soviet Palace. From within the inconvenient medieval buildings of the Kremlin, work had started on this modern structure where the Soviet government would relocate upon its completion. The very sight of Hunter’s Square had also transformed completely. When Nobuko and Motoko first arrived in Moscow around the time of 1927’s first snowfall—particularly Nobuko, who after settling into boardinghouse life had centered her movements around that square connecting Tverskaya Street, Red Square, Theatre Square, and Astozhenka—the rows of street vendors that once defined Hunter’s Square had mostly vanished upon their return after seven months away. In their place stood two shops now open side by side—shops that in spring had merely displayed signs reading “Cooperative Sales Office” while keeping their rust-red iron doors shut. The stores lacked sufficient goods. A woman with a shopping basket on her arm and her head wrapped in a platok had stepped up to one of the counters.

“When will the butter be available?”

“In a week.” “Why?” “That’s absurd!” “When I came here a week ago, you told me ‘in a week,’ and yet—!”

“Once again, it’s in a week.” “It’s always like this! I have children at home.”

A white-haired, plump old woman who had been standing by listening to the exchange spoke in an old-fashioned Moscow tone. "Look here, this is why, ma'am—that's why housewives have to form shock brigades for the cooperatives, you see." The large eyes of the old woman, who had experienced much of life and was far from senile, glanced sideways at Nobuko standing beside her.

“They don’t understand. They’re still at an age where they only have to worry about feeding their own mouths, you see.”

In the first year of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet people built machine tools, tractors, and even several factory cities to manufacture them. But shortages of butter and soap would have to persist for the time being. The street vendors who once formed dense rows displaying every kind of foodstuff had vanished along with the pedestrians who used to shuffle past them daily, leaving an unobstructed view from Hunter’s Square toward Theatre Square. At the corner leading to Red Square too—where until spring there had been women and elderly men standing with baskets full of eggs, butter, homemade cheese, and chickens—those vendors were gone. Nobuko had sometimes bought butter there, and eggs too. Such sellers no longer existed. Moscow’s private merchants had dwindled to two percent. One needed only walk down Tverskaya Street to feel how close this was to reality.

Nobuko went to see the vicinity of Hotel Passazh. Just before the turn to the hotel, there was a place that had merely put up a sign reading "Central Publishing Office" and until recently, whenever one looked, had displayed in its gloomy, empty show window a photograph of Lenin alongside models of human and cat internal organs. The Moscow Evening News had relocated there and undergone a complete transformation. At the entrance, there was a somewhat rustic yet stately electric sign lined with small bulbs reading "Vechernyaya Moskva," and the comings and goings of people were lively. Why the cat and human organ models had been placed beneath the photograph of Lenin—this perpetual mystery that had accompanied Nobuko whenever she passed by to look—now remained only as Lenin’s photograph within the show window. On the white-painted, stylized bookshelves, pamphlets related to the Five-Year Plan were displayed. As a backdrop, a poster written in white on a red background proclaiming "Five-Year Plan in Four Years!" was displayed. In addition to the editorial office of the Moscow Evening News, a printing workers’ club also appeared to have been established, and beyond the palm planters to the left of the entrance, there seemed to be a casual cafeteria.

The Central Post Office had been constructed. When one spoke of the Central Post Office—until Nobuko and her companions had departed on their travels—it had remained Moscow’s most celebrated edifice.

Two years ago, from the very first morning Nobuko and Motoko arrived in Moscow, what they saw was this construction site's wooden fence. Tracks of sleds left on the snow, horse droppings lying there. The mushroom-shaped roof of the watchtower encased in midwinter ice. The entrance of Hotel Passazh and the entrance of the construction site faced each other obliquely across a narrow road. Now, on that side street, the side of the grand five-story building showed its windows neatly aligned on each floor. On Tverskaya Street stood a porte-cochère so ceremoniously imposing for a post office that upon entering, both the figures handling business at spacious counters and the sparse crowd shuffling across smooth Ural marble floors appeared uniformly small beneath high white ceilings bright with indirect lighting. The brass counters shone like pipe organs. The novelty of a building interior where no crowd smells yet lingered! In Moscow, how rare to see such freshness! When she pushed against the large varnished glass door to leave, Nobuko's body slid effortlessly with it across Ural marble flooring to emerge outside. Pasted on the light brown end wall: "Five-Day Week. Uninterrupted Week."

To ensure all production and office work would proceed efficiently without interruption, the Soviet people divided the eight-hour workday into five-day intervals, shifting from two shifts to three. The European weekly system—where all city activities halted on Sundays, leaving only pharmacies, cafeterias, and theaters open—had been abolished. Just before Nobuko returned to Moscow, this new system was adopted starting October 1st, the Soviet fiscal year’s commencement. Foreign-language newspapers in Paris unanimously declared their skepticism toward the figures released by the Soviet government regarding the Five-Year Plan’s first-year achievements. In identical rhetoric, they condemned the Soviet government—which had adopted the Five-Day Week, a method “not even America employed”—for challenging global Christian customs and expanding forced labor to the entire population. Since the Five-Year Plan’s implementation in the Soviet Union, unemployment had been rapidly declining. 1929 being the year even Nobuko had witnessed London’s unemployed masses, the fact that unemployment—once numbering 500,000—was vanishing in the Soviet Union alone, coupled with wages projected to rise by seventy-one percent, displeased capitalist nations’ sovereigns. When it came to the Soviet Union, eighty percent of everything was propaganda. Having settled on this view, their anxiety and envy became veiled by prejudice.

Unemployment and beggars had indeed decreased.

Nobuko noticed that upon returning this time, the men, women, and children who used to loiter in the cafeteria had disappeared. The men and women who used to sit on the benches of the tree-lined avenue with aimless expressions had vanished. The evident reality that no unemployed remained unabsorbed lay vividly before Nobuko's eyes. In the figures of workers traversing scaffolding along Moscow's riverbank structures, and beside the roaring crane hoisting iron beams under its red flag near Kuznetsky Bridge, industrial production was expanding to more than three times its prewar levels.

At the edge of Nobuko’s desk, pamphlets concerning the Five-Year Plan were piled up one by one. Even in those pamphlets being published in large quantities, the publishing Five-Year Plan had been realized. Among them was a picture book titled *Five-Year Plan for Children* that Nobuko particularly liked and would often spread open to gaze at. A large, square-format book that, when opened, depicted the state of production and culture in pre-revolutionary Russia—oil, coal, iron, and so on—alongside the contrasting figures of the foreign capital that then reigned over these industries and the Russian workers who lived and toiled in wretched barracks, all while indicating through diagrams the number of oil derricks and the varying sizes of coal piles. The pages were fold-out style. When the folded pages were opened, there emerged—through simple lines that would ignite children’s curiosity and beautiful colors—the abundance of Soviet oil upon the Five-Year Plan’s completion, the worker housing situated there, and the Labor Palace. Children's homes and schools for the children were depicted. A magnificent black mountain of Soviet coal. The extent to which electrification in mining areas had progressed was explained by the number of light bulbs arrayed in rows, in a manner even small children could grasp. Downstream on the Dnieper River—which originates in the Valdai Hills and meanders thousands of kilometers from Belarus to Ukraine, its floods periodically overflowing into fields and drowning cattle and children—a large hydroelectric power plant was being constructed. When the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Plant was completed, its electricity would enable agricultural machinery plants in Ukraine—the Soviet breadbasket—to produce this many tractors, allow Soviet Ford factories to manufacture how many cars, and let flour mills grind such an abundance of wheat into flour for bread without worrying about old-fashioned windmill blades standing still in windless skies. The productive capacities set to unfold across the vast Dnieper basin were depicted in statistical diagrams as wheat bags perfectly suited to children’s lives, cultivation machinery, schools, and more. The painter was Denika. He, who possessed a remarkably clear and dynamic talent even among Soviet’s young painters, must have harbored new hope in his heart as he poured such effort into illustrating the Five-Year Plan’s pictorial narrative. Rather than just drawing winter sports illustrations as he had done the previous winter, there must have been more motivation.

Denika had also drawn effective satirical illustrations for posters countering the anti-Soviet campaign. A long gun barrel jutted out toward the red map of the Soviet Union. At the tip of the black-glinting gun barrel sat a pope wearing a papal tiara. He was waving a ceremonial staff and directing. Behind him clung a soldier bedecked with every last medal, holding binoculars and a map. Nobuko encountered them everywhere in Moscow. There was a compelling reason for this. The anti-Soviet campaign was ardently desiring that the Five-Year Plan would come to naught from all directions across the borders. While propagating that the Five-Year Plan was impossible, it was because—in order to destroy Soviet socialist construction—a world counter-revolutionary organization had been attempting to infiltrate even into the highest political leadership. The Bukharin issue had shocked Nobuko while she was in Paris.

The seven months had not passed uneventfully in Moscow. During that time, the Soviet people fought to decisively elevate the essence of their socialist society. The things Nobuko had seen and heard during her two years in Moscow—the full scope of details she had lived through and absorbed—took on three-dimensional form as they entered a phase of more systematic and planned development. Within a brief period, many unfamiliar newly coined abbreviations began appearing to Nobuko. Every one of them related to the Five-Year Plan and production economic plans. A strong sensitivity to numbers—not only Nobuko's first experience but undoubtedly new for Soviet people too—manifested in the general sentiment. Numbers ceased being confined to scribbles between graph paper lines. Numbers became living gauges of energy where people monitored the accumulation of their own efforts. Certain numbers were read with clear joy. Harsh criticism was provoked against particular types of numbers. And as long as one lived in the Soviet Union, escape from those relentless numbers proved impossible.

III

The seven months Nobuko spent outside the Soviet Union had caused her to grow. London. Paris. Berlin. Warsaw.

The contrast between life there and life in Moscow was starkly concrete. Despite their various instances of crudeness and mechanical aspects overall lay the question—where did society’s possibility for better living conditions reside? Capitalism or socialism? Which would bring hope to those forced into society’s lowest strata? Nobuko’s understanding deepened through this reckoning. Understanding transformed into life’s passion. How fortuitous that Nobuko remained merely one young woman. How invaluable that Londoners and Parisians freely revealed their Soviet attitudes before her while explicating capitalist foreign policies’ essence. Through Parisian and London days Nobuko solidified within herself Moscow’s inherent worth.

Despite such development, Nobuko remained deficient in another respect - having spent over half of those twelve historically charged months of 1929 outside the Soviet Union. Two days after returning to Moscow, she began feeling this deficiency acutely. Motoko kept careful watch over her condition, wordlessly conveying that this shortcoming required Nobuko's own resolution. Between Motoko's side of their shared bookshelf and Nobuko's own lay an unevenness spanning at least three months' growth. This palpable gap carried an air of Motoko's benign retribution. Nobuko commenced studying Soviet developments to the limits of her language skills. Immersed once more in Moscow's rhythms, London's unbridgeable wealth chasm and the generational misery overflowing East Side tenements pressed upon her consciousness with renewed force.

Nobuko went out and read; on days she did not go out, she began writing her London impressions.

At Rukeanov's boarding house, Thursday nights were bath days for Nobuko and the others. Nobuko, resolved to finish the dusty tasks before her bath that day, pulled out the bundled newspapers and magazines from Japan that had been tucked beneath Motoko's bookshelf as soon as dinner ended.

Motoko, who had been sitting at her desk,

“Oh right—before you do that, there was something I needed to have Buko read.”

Without rising from her chair, she handed two opened envelopes to Nobuko with her hand behind her back. One was a letter from Kawano Umedo. The other was unusually from Asano Fukiko. Fukiko had only occasionally sent postcards since Nobuko and the others had begun living in Moscow and, true to her sparing use of words, had not written many letters. Nobuko, somehow comparing the two letters, began reading Fukiko’s first.

The serious script spoke in prose that held a rounded fullness, like the curve of Fukiko's lips when she glanced at Nobuko with that faintly lingering look and smiled.

The postcard you both sent from Paris was a delight to receive. Since then, I tried countless times to write to you but ultimately couldn't. Something unexpected had happened on my end. My younger brother passed away suddenly. Suddenly—do you understand? I believe you, Ms. Sasa, will understand. You, Ms. Sasa, will understand—my younger brother died suddenly. This was wording that could only be interpreted as Tasu having died in the same abrupt manner. Fukiko's brother—why had he killed himself? Within the implication that "Ms. Sasa would understand," one could sense the cause was also being hinted at as something ideological, like Tasu's. Nobuko felt a lump rise in her throat and her voice catch.

“Did you say something to Ms. Fukiko?” “How could I possibly write that? Even though it’s addressed to both of us—how could I write ‘Buko hasn’t returned’?”

“That’s one matter, and this is another.”

How meticulously Motoko had prepared her punishment for Nobuko.

Nobuko continued reading Fukiko’s letter while feeling a twofold surprise. Fukiko’s brother had been studying Western painting. He had been highly regarded not only due to his sister’s favoritism but also through genuine promise. He too had been assailed by the anguish tormenting modern artists. This pertained to theories of art—caught between his inability to remain committed to art for art’s sake and other emerging doctrines, he had met his demise. Fukiko spoke vaguely, mindful that letters bound for Moscow would inevitably pass through someone’s scrutiny in Japan. Yet one could infer that her brother, as a painter, had ultimately chosen death after agonizing over his place—unable to reconcile with the so-called theories and styles of proletarian-class art. Fukiko wrote: "He was a sincere young man. I was not a good sister to him. I now regret having been so consumed by my own affairs." Taking what must still be Fukiko’s plump hand in hers, Nobuko felt compelled to whisper, “Yes… Yes, exactly.” As these words had been written, one could feel the tremor in Fukiko’s lips. When Nobuko had received news of Tasu’s death in Leningrad the previous year, what had kept her from regaining ordinary composure for days—the same boundless tenderness toward a lost brother and gnawing self-reproach—now saturated every line of Fukiko’s letter.

History advances in this way, I suppose. When she read that, Nobuko's vision blurred with tears. Around April, many sacrifices occurred among his friends who were outstanding individuals. That incident had made him even more skeptical about living as an artist. At that time, I was thoughtless. I did not think it had such an impact.—Let me add for clarity that on this point, my brother’s views and mine were not necessarily the same. I have given it considerable thought, but I cannot believe that I am wrong. Such detailed matters can be discussed when we next have the opportunity to meet. I am trying my best to stay well. When I consider his conscience, I cannot help but live in the best way possible.

Speaking of April—it was the April 16 Incident, in which many communists were arrested in Japan. Nobuko had heard about it briefly in Paris. Japanese newspapers had lifted their reporting ban over seven months after the incident around November 20th, and Nobuko, after returning to Moscow, read them in a newspaper she had pulled out from under Motoko’s bookshelf yesterday. It appeared that Fukiko’s younger brother had moved to the capital after Nobuko and the others came to Moscow, and while living with his sister, had been commuting to a research institute to study Western painting. Fukiko spoke of Nobuko as someone who had experienced similar grief before her. However, Fukiko’s sorrow was considered deeper and more unique than Nobuko’s own experience. Tasu sought things that cannot exist—absolute truth, absolute goodness and fairness—and was defeated. Tasu, while subjectively seeking truth with fierce intensity, had barricaded himself within his absolute fortress in real life, resisted the tide of history, and met defeat in certain aspects. According to her letter, the way of life and suffering of Fukiko’s younger brother—a young art student—seemed entirely opposite to Tasu’s. The young man acknowledged the inevitability of proletarian art. However, upon discovering elements in its theories and actual artworks that he could not fully accept, he ended up driving himself to death as one deemed worthless by history, unable to overcome their negative aspects.

Fukiko’s letter had unwittingly evoked a memory in Nobuko. In early summer 1923, there was an incident where Takejima Yūkichi, known as a progressive humanitarian writer, committed suicide in Karuizawa. The complex contradictions within and around Takejima Yūkichi—the writer who had liberated the large farm in Hokkaido owned by his family for the farmers—were deeply personal, yet they also stemmed from entanglements with the naivety of the social thought and proletarian literary theories then sweeping Japan. Takejima Yūkichi had escaped these complexities through death with a certain woman. Takejima Yūkichi had several younger brothers, one of whom was a literary figure. At a roundtable discussion held to reflect on Takejima Yūkichi, centered around his younger brother who was a literary figure, the writer brother said something to this effect: “If my brother had just persevered for one more year, he surely would have stopped thinking about dying. If he had lived through that earthquake, he surely would have stopped thinking about dying.” When Nobuko read that conversation in a literary magazine, it left an impression she could never forget. When the writer brother said that, he might have meant that if one had witnessed such massive loss of life in the earthquake and fires, they would have been so struck by the preciousness of being alive that they would never have considered taking their own life. This younger brother, who was a writer, stood in stark contrast to his older brother Takejima Yūkichi—whose daily life and literary foundations were rooted in Western humanism—in that he maintained a life philosophy affirming compassionate passions even within the Japanese-style world of pleasure and dissipation. He had never accepted his brother’s death as a defeat since the incident occurred. Hearing the words “If one survives the earthquake, they wouldn’t end up dying” spoken amid the atmosphere after a disaster that had been exploited in an extremely abnormal manner—spoken of as if what had occurred there was merely a natural disaster—Nobuko felt a truly strange sensation.

In the Great Kantō Earthquake that occurred three months after Takejima Yūkichi’s death, massacres of Koreans were carried out across various regions amid the chaos, while at Kameido Police Station, Hirasawa Keishichi and nine other labor activists were killed by the authorities, their corpses abandoned in the Arakawa Waterway. It was also at this time that three individuals—Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe, the anarchist leaders who were husband and wife, along with their six-year-old nephew Munekazu—were strangled to death by Captain Amakasu of the Military Police and thrown into an old well. Seizing the earthquake as an opportunity, the government established a policy of perpetual and brutal suppression of left-wing elements. This atmosphere made even Nobuko—who possessed scant knowledge of leftist movements and no connection to them—sense the danger that this barbaric authority might threaten the lives of those it disfavored at any moment. The writer brother’s words carried the tone of someone who could remain comfortably settled in affirming each individual’s biological existence, indifferent to the righteous fury of that era. In what this person remained unconscious of, there was sensed a “live for the moment” approach to life—something characteristic of many people in Japan.

Around the time of her divorce from Tsukuda, within each passing moment of Nobuko’s days, a desire to take active control of her life seethed. If everyone could follow this writer brother’s life attitude—reconciling their inner motives with external circumstances while discovering there an adaptable morality—how effortless living would be. Nobuko thought that she too was naturally among those who chose to live. But that way of living was not like the writer brother’s—

If that writer who had spoken thus about Takejima Yūkichi’s death were to critique the death of Fukiko’s younger brother—the art student—what would he say? Now, in her Moscow boarding house, Nobuko rose and went to the bathroom—where lingered the faint smell of the gas water heater—to check the bath’s temperature, sinking into thought as she moved. Within Fukiko’s life—she who was plump, gentle-mannered, with small red lips—a death born of desperate yearning had thus been encompassed. As Nobuko had accepted Tasu’s death into her own life’s fabric. For Fukiko, her brother’s death would forever stand before her—because that young man had not fled what he could not overcome, but had cast himself into its very heart.

While scrubbing soap suds across her body, Nobuko remained trapped in the long tail of her unrelenting thoughts. There existed those who passionately entrenched themselves in positions to argue from them, and honest people without pretense who—compelled by these debates—rigorously examined themselves and sought to determine life’s value through their own responsibility. Nobuko could not stop wondering how they had all been living in relation to others. Their mutual friend Kōno Umeko had sent word of resolving to enter a belated marriage—one tinged with accidental-seeming unease—and being determined to see it through. The partner was said to be a philosopher who had read Umeko’s novels and expressed wanting to nurture her literary growth. "It has been nearly two full years since I last met either of you. Lately I too have begun seeking something new unfolding within my solitary life—"

During the days she lived in Moscow, and then during the days she went to live in Paris, Nobuko would occasionally write letters to Umeko. But had they ever truly felt mutual friendship in such a way that it had been two years since they last met Umeko?

IV

December’s snow began to fall in Moscow. The entire city transformed into a beautiful black-and-white snowscape. On the distant vista of the tree-lined avenue beginning at Astozhenka Square, a single black trampled path formed.

The snow fell tenaciously day after day; people went about their lives unsparingly staining the snow's whiteness, and Moscow's cheerful, bustling winter began.

This year’s snowscape differed from last year’s. The street vendors who had filled Moscow’s squares had vanished, erasing the market scenes where snowflakes once swirled into buckets of frozen pickled cucumbers lining snowy sidewalks. Instead, Moscow’s snow now fell upon red placards declaring “Five-Year Plan in Four Years!”, skimming past institutional cleansing posters reading “We are cleansing” that hung from the National Bank building’s high eaves.

Across all Soviet institutions, criticism of bureaucratism had been carried out continuously since the beginning of Nobuko and the others' life in Moscow. The manga magazine Wani had always satirized bureaucratism. The term "bureaucratism" was one of the earliest terms Nobuko learned in Moscow. As the implementation of the Five-Year Plan progressed, the evils of bureaucratism came to be harshly criticized by the masses in every workplace. Those who had been arrested and secretly betrayed their comrades when the Bolsheviks were still an illegal party; those who concealed or falsified their past involvement in non-people's professions such as officers, military police, or police-related roles and infiltrated the Russian Communist Party now holding power. Even dubious elements could be preserved in relative safety as long as bureaucratism remained rampant in Soviet production and governmental institutions. Bukharin—exploiting his position that commanded blind trust as an international leader—had continued to monopolize the Comintern institutions entrusted to him. This fact had been exposed before everyone. He advocated anti-socialist theories—the socialist transformation of kulaks and the theory of world capitalism's reorganized stability—and attempted to delay defense against the imminent danger of a Second World War: an endeavor to eradicate socialism from this earth. Bukharin maintained liaisons within the Communist parties of various countries. In America, Germany, and France as well. In those countries, the Bukharin faction controlling the party apparatus used organizational power from top to bottom to ignore, suppress, and—under institutional pretext—persistently slander legitimate assessments of circumstances raised by minority voices.

Bureaucratism was the hiding place for unclean elements. Bureaucratism was the most hospitable breeding ground for counterrevolution. Newspaper articles stated that the poet Mayakovsky was writing a play themed on attacking bureaucratism. Nobuko read with interest the articles about "cleansing" in Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda. When conducting a cleansing at an enterprise, there was an obligation to announce it. We are cleansing. Letters from the masses outside these enterprises regarding unclean elements were permitted. There were various significant discoveries, along with comically naive exposures. All workplace members would gather for cleansing assemblies. At these assemblies, reports included cases like Engineer Golekov—disliked by everyone for his usual bureaucratic behavior—who had tried to court Musha, a female worker, despite being married, been rejected by her, then attempted to woo her friend Maruha only to be rejected again, after which his self-criticism was demanded. Such articles came from labor correspondents within the enterprises.

Under Moscow’s snowy sky where fine flakes fell, a red placard stood out with white letters reading “U·nas·chiistka·ijotto” (We are cleansing). There were no passersby who looked at it mindlessly.

The vivid cleansing announcement placards that had been spread across the eaves of the National Bank were eventually hung around the high bellows of the Cooperative Union Headquarters.

This year’s Moscow snowscape held a vigor unlike any previous year. Nobuko felt such profound empathy that even her own heartbeat seemed drawn into its tempo. The Soviet Union was indeed growing earnest for a single great undertaking.—

It was on a certain afternoon of such snowy days. Nobuko was at a desk in the Astozhenka lodgings, pondering a letter she now had to write.

Regarding writing that letter, Nobuko first found herself needing to calm her irritation. Toru Kinoshita, president of Bunmeisha, had proven unreliable. Things had unfolded exactly as Motoko warned him that time in the Komazawa house parlor. The amount Nobuko could receive from Bunmeisha had been capped at 10,000 yen under their agreement. This agreement made with Kinoshita had already been half depleted since her arrival in Moscow. At summer's end, Nobuko had written from Paris requesting another fixed remittance to Moscow. Upon returning, she found no money—only a confidential company letter addressed to her. President Kinoshita's failure in last year's general election had severely damaged company finances, making cessation of payments unavoidable. "Kindly understand these circumstances without taking offense," it read. There it was—the accounting clerk's signature in Kinoshita's brother's handwriting, identical to those on previous checks.

Nobuko and the others’ stay in Moscow had also been planned to last approximately three years. When Nobuko returned, Motoko said, “Well, I suppose we’re more or less at our limit here.” Nobuko neither agreed nor disagreed with the vaguely suggested idea of returning home, but she found it unpleasant that Kinoshita—when unable to send the money he had personally taken responsibility for—casually settled matters by having his brother in accounting write a perfunctory business letter. It revealed Kinoshita’s timid nature, obsessed with keeping up appearances. The fact that a remittance statement from the accounting department had been enclosed with that letter also left Nobuko with an unpleasant feeling. According to the statement, Nobuko had borrowed over three thousand yen.

Nobuko picked up a general magazine lying beside her desk. Flipping through its pages here and there, she thought practically. She didn’t know how much money she currently had, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop staying in Moscow just because the remittances had ceased. Even if she sold that coat she bought in Vienna—she pictured the trench coat with its lilac-colored exterior and checkered lining. Even if she sold those pale dressy ankle boots—selling the silk stockings and shoes would sustain their modest Moscow life for three months. Even without such measures—perhaps she could manage to give lectures on Japanese literature at the Oriental Language School—

As she fiddled with the magazine while thinking, Nobuko suddenly found her eye caught by a literary critique included there. It was a critique that touched upon Aikawa Yoshinosuke’s life and literature. The subject matter caught Nobuko’s interest. The author of the critique, Shigekichi Ishida—a name she had never seen before—had written at the beginning of the text. "In this writer’s ‘penetrating world of intellect,’ I had only vaguely sensed delicate nerves and a cold detachment toward life," he wrote. Nobuko found it interesting that there were also those who perceived Aikawa Yoshinosuke as being what one might call boorish, just as she herself had felt. "I had nothing more than a vague impression of ‘too artificial, too literary.’" However, "the desperate fluttering of this ‘man of letters,’ so prominent in 1927, and his suicide as a conclusion—" had caused the author of this critique to change his view of Aikawa Yoshinosuke. Shigekichi Ishida wrote with candor that at this time, he tentatively considered whether this suicide had made him sentimental. But when he solemnly re-examined Aikawa Yoshinosuke anew, there was Aikawa Yoshinosuke, desperately struggling while bearing with all his might the heavy armor he could never remove in his lifetime—a struggle enclosed by anxiety. As Shigekichi Ishida discovered Aikawa Yoshinosuke lamenting with anguish the inevitable conclusion that assailed him while painfully recounting the shadows of a transitional era, he pursued the various contradictions that had existed in Aikawa Yoshinosuke’s life and literature.

Where it stated that "Friche's words now lie before me," and where it addressed Aikawa Yoshinosuke's tragedy as a clear contradiction of capitalist society and its intelligentsia—considering these aspects, the young author of this critique, Shigekichi Ishida—Nobuko, out of curiosity, absently flipped to the essay's end, saw the author's photograph printed there showing him in a plain uniform that suggested no affluent lifestyle, and read the brief biography concluding with "I do not wish to speak much about myself," which noted he was currently enrolled in Tokyo University’s Economics Department—could not be considered unrelated to the proletarian literary movement. However, this critique of Aikawa Yoshinosuke possessed a different quality from any literary criticism Nobuko had read in the past two or three years. From the prose—which combined reasoning structured with youthful earnestness and relentless focus while unsparingly deploying emotion, candidly expressing part of his own thoughts on life and literature—there shone both spiritual resilience and the luster inherent to such a spirit. That the young Shigekichi Ishida, amid the forceful advance of his critique's robust logic, allowed his own youthfulness to permeate through was something Nobuko found rare.

Nobuko was drawn into the critique. She temporarily forgot about the letter she was supposed to write to Bunmeisha.

“Buko!” “Huh?” “What are you doing?” “Yeah.”

After a while, Motoko stood up, came over, and peered into Nobuko’s desk. “What’s this! Weren’t you writing a letter? Because you were being so eerily quiet, I thought you might be writing a love letter to Mr. Hachiya or something.” Motoko picked up and examined the statement from Bunmeisha that Nobuko had left lying by her side.

“Kinoshita’s more spineless than people think.—He can’t even write a proper refusal letter himself.” Without responding, Nobuko looked up at Motoko standing beside her and showed her the open magazine page. “Did you read this?” “—What is it?” Something had lodged itself in Motoko’s heart too.

“Still a student, huh?” Even as a student, Shigekichi Ishida had touched upon "The Half-Life of Daidoji Shinsuke" in his analysis, making Nobuko feel self-conscious about her own shallow critique. The critique stated that the voracious desire for knowledge—a defining trait of Aikawa Yoshinosuke—was both a personal characteristic of his as someone belonging to Japan’s lower-middle class who possessed no traditional means of livelihood in this society, and that knowledge for Aikawa Yoshinosuke served as a weapon in life, a means of survival, and a pleasure—the very desire Nobuko had always found pedantic and rebelled against. There seemed to be contained within it an understanding not merely profound but deeply earnest on the part of the author.

In Shigekichi Ishida’s critique, there were indeed parts that made Nobuko, reading it in Moscow, feel a faint sense of discomfort. That is, the proletariat advances at the forefront of the times with fervent passion. Following such a statement, and yet before us, the shadow of this transitional era still looms large. It was the phrase that followed "the literature of yesterday," which had emotionally influenced us through the long past. “On our Komsomol desks, beneath *The ABC of Communism*, lies a small volume of Yesenin’s poetry”—could these profoundly suggestive words apply solely within the Soviet Union? “Who can assert that on the bookshelves of the intelligentsia—aligned with the ranks of the proletariat and striving to walk their path—Mr. Aikawa’s *The Words of a Dwarf* does not sit alongside the Party’s newspapers?”

Nobuko read that section of the critique repeatedly, probing her own emotions as she did so. Yesenin’s poetry sprang from the very essence of what might be called Mother Russia itself—its melancholy and love for Russia captivated even foreign dancers like Isadora Duncan. When Motoko read “A Letter to Mother” with beautiful cadence, the muffled weeping of Yesenin’s soul resonated in Nobuko’s chest too. Since around last year, certain Soviet voices had grown strident in criticizing affection for Yesenin. The argument held that Soviet youth being drawn to Yesenin’s poetry today was an anachronism—anti-socialist. Yet it wasn’t ordained that Yesenin must lie beneath every copy of *The ABC of Communism*. Nobuko possessed her *Azbuka*. But beneath it lay no Yesenin. Even had there been a volume of his poetry there, she couldn’t fathom through lived experience how it might oppose the *ABC* with equal emotional weight. Propelled by Soviet society’s own force, Nobuko found herself unified emotionally without ever realizing it had happened.

However, Shigekichi Ishida was not speaking by positioning himself between *The ABC of Communism* and Yesenin. "We must clarify the distance placed between us and Mr. Aikawa." "We must bring down our pickaxes upon his literature, which has unwittingly transformed into a fin-de-siècle idol atop Japan's Parnassus." "We must stride beyond the literature of defeat—and the class soil from which it springs." April 1929. This was the conclusion of Shigekichi Ishida's essay.

Even after finishing the critique, Nobuko still sat deep in thought. Then, once again, she opened the page and looked at the small photograph of Shigekichi Ishida included at the end. He was a young man with thick eyebrows and broad shoulders, far from what one would call stylish. "Regarding myself, I do not wish to speak much"—Nobuko involuntarily smiled. He’s already written this much about himself! And when Nobuko’s eyes fell once more upon the birthdate of this young man named Shigekichi Ishida, she felt her heartbeat quicken abruptly for an instant, then stumble and come to a halt. The young man named Shigekichi Ishida was the same age as Nobuko’s brother Tamotsu, who had committed suicide.—

Five

Yesterday’s snow was covered by this morning’s snowfall, and tomorrow’s fresh snow would pile atop that, as Moscow’s December marched onward into the heart of winter.

Nobuko’s days were filled with one new event after another. And just as the ceaselessly falling snow was burying the roots beneath it—roots that would bloom earliest upon thawing somewhere in Sokólsky Nature Park—so too in the Astózhenka lodgings overlooking the snowscape, beneath Nobuko’s new days, the name of a young man called Shigekichi Ishida and impressions of his literary critique were being buried.

On January 21st, Stalin’s paper titled "On the Policy of Liquidating the Kulaks as a Class" appeared in *Red Star*.

The entire city of Moscow became like pure white sugar candy, bustling under the harsh winter sun as thick black smoke from birch firewood billowed up. This Moscow—even to Nobuko, a foreigner unaffiliated with any organization—received from this single paper a shock that was unmistakable. The fact that the kulaks were disrupting the Soviet grain production plan had been clear to everyone since 1928, the time known as the grain crisis. This reality awakened in the workers of Leningrad, Moscow, and other cities an interest in the necessity of cooperating with collectivization. Aiming for the spring sowing season of the following year, teams were organized from Moscow’s “Dynamo” factories and the “Hammer and Sickle Factory,” and from other sources as well, assistance teams organized to establish kolkhozes departed for rural areas across various regions, primarily in Ukraine. It was during the autumn to winter before Nobuko fell ill with a liver disease and was hospitalized.

The workers assisting the kolkhozes, sent off by their factory comrades amidst lively send-offs as they departed the city, eventually began to encounter unexpected experiences among farmers in various places. Workers dispatched from factories were often removed from harm, but it became increasingly common for young political officers who had gone ahead to villages to guide kolkhozes and for the minority of poor peasant youths in the village soviets—those opposing the influential kulaks and wavering middle peasants of their villages to support collectivization—to be killed by kulaks.

In *Komsomolskaya Pravda*, the details of such incidents were reported with relative thoroughness, and among them were several stories that Nobuko could not forget.

Two young instructors for collective farm formation went to a certain village. That area was a stronghold of kulak influence, and the two young men proceeded with caution. However, when they actually arrived, the atmosphere at the village soviet meeting was far more supportive of collectivization than they had anticipated, and the village kulaks received the two young instructors with great courtesy. After the official meeting, many villagers gathered at the kulaks’ house and continued their lively discussion, and by the time "the two guests" grew tired and went to sleep, it was already well past midnight. Given that they had been hospitably received in a Russian village, the two young instructors must have eaten and drunk as heartily as they had spoken. "The two guests" were lodged in a hay cottage—soft, fragrant, and considered the most comfortable sleeping place—as one of the special courtesies extended to them.

Then, before dawn, a fire broke out from the hay cottage. “The villagers were exhausted because, after all, they had debated intensely until late,” the correspondent quoted someone from the village as saying. “The master was also fast asleep and didn’t notice until the fire had enveloped the hay cottage.” Eventually, the fire was discovered, and the village’s sleigh bells were rung. The villagers rushed to the scene. The flames were already enveloping the hay cottage. A brave young man rushed through the flames toward the cottage, but the lock was fastened and there was nothing he could do. The “two guests” were discovered in the ashes as two completely charred corpses. As he was being taken away by the local police, the kulak master muttered these words and spat on the ground. “Hmph! Instructor! They don’t even know you shouldn’t smoke in a hay cottage! All they ever bring is disaster.”

However, that night, one of the farmers among those who had sent "the two guests" into the hay cottage witnessed the following. One of the instructors—who had been smoking a cigarette—discarded it before entering the cottage and thoroughly stamped it out. "The two guests" had not been particularly drunk. When questioned about why he had locked the hay cottage, the kulak answered: "Hah! What a question! In your parts, do those hay rats lock themselves in from the inside? I only meant to keep them from being mistaken for guests. They burned themselves up—never thought it'd cause such trouble.—"

This story, and the account of the political officer who had been shot dead by a sniper through the window behind them during their discussion. The story of the local soviet official who had come by sled along a forest road when a large tree began to fall toward him, crushing him to death beneath it. All these things reminded Nobuko of the experience Gorky—just past twenty—had in a village on the lower Volga where he lived with the populist Romashin. In that village, Gorky and Romashin opened a general store for peasants while attempting their “work of instilling reason into humanity.” But when kulaks hostile to these outsiders set fire to the store, Romashin and Gorky found themselves surrounded in the chaos and nearly killed. Romashin—who had endured various ordeals in Siberian exile—whispered to Gorky: “Press your backs tight together. Break through the circle just like this.” Izoot, the poor peasant who had daily assisted Gorky and Romashin with their work with kind devotion, had his head smashed and was killed in a boat on the Volga before this incident occurred. This was at the end of the 1800s. The era of the Tsar.

In 1928, the measures taken by the kulaks to prevent the progress of collectivization into kolkhozes were no less ferocious than those of that earlier time. "Leaders Who Understand" Stalin’s article in *Red Star* declared that Soviet policy had shifted—no longer “isolating and overcoming individual units” as before, but rather adopting “new policies to exterminate the kulaks as a class”—against those kulaks who, under Bukharin’s factional protection, had developed into a distinct class within Soviet society since 1921. “To isolate the kulaks as a class, it is necessary to crush their resistance in open battle and deprive them of the productive sources of their existence and development—the free use of land, production tools, land leases, the right to hire labor, and so forth.” “This is precisely the shift to a policy of exterminating the kulaks as a class.”

This paper carried the sensation of freshly fallen snow—its scent struck people’s faces with a biting chill and invigorating crispness. When Nobuko returned, the Moscow street vendors who had vanished from Hunter’s Square—the roots of their black market were being uprooted nationwide. This decisive expression—interpretable only as “deprive them of their sources of production”—informed Nobuko that it would inevitably be realized. In her experience since arriving in Moscow, anything announced under Stalin’s name had either already been accomplished or would unquestionably come to pass. What this paper demonstrated was nothing less than a revolutionary resolve. It declared that the steering wheel had now been firmly gripped toward an ever-sharper direction for securing and building Soviet society.—

The London Disarmament Conference was fundamentally a coordination of military expansion centered on the Soviet Union's existence, making it natural that the Soviet people had resolved to remove the class attempting to destroy their society from within for self-preservation. That snow-shrouded Moscow in harsh winter seemed to detect a scent fresher and sharper than new snow owed not solely to the theoretical clarity of Stalin's paper. The unyielding class-based resolve underpinning the paper pressed so vividly—not merely upon those who were no kulaks themselves but even upon all daily workers in Moscow's factories and enterprises—that it compelled them to reexamine themselves. During that period, whenever people met and asked "Have you read it?", they meant the paper in *Red Star*.

While Nobuko was in Paris, Motoko had found a female friend named Olga Petrova who would consult with her on language matters. Motoko would spend several hours at a time in her room once a week. Olga lived on the outskirts of Moscow, within a gate shaded by old-fashioned large linden trees where the urban planning of the Five-Year Plan had yet to reach. The lower floor of the small, aged Russian-style log house stood unoccupied, while upstairs lived Olga—a woman past thirty—making do with just a single oil stove and tin kettle as her household implements. Meals were managed at her workplace’s union cafeteria.

When Motoko finished her studies, Nobuko would sometimes go there while taking a walk.

Olga’s hometown was a village somewhere near Minsk. In the countryside there were a mother and younger siblings, and Olga doted on her younger brother’s son—about four years old—calling him “my hero.” In the Soviet Union, where such things were still uncommon, snapshots of this nephew were shown to Nobuko and the others. “I want to show you all the real Russian countryside!”

In Olga’s round, businesslike cheeks and eyes—accustomed to years of office life—a longing surfaced. “How absorbed you would become! I know exactly how you’d feel!”

Opening her cigarette case and offering one to Olga while mockingly calling herself a "foreigner," "We’ve seen at least some of what you call ‘the Russian countryside’ ourselves," Motoko said.

“At the very least, the flies of Taganrog know the tip of my nose.”

The town of Taganrog, which had a park at the edge of its main street sloping down toward the Sea of Azov, was Chekhov's birthplace. In Taganrog there existed a single Chekhov Museum where it seemed anything unfamiliar to the townspeople or unrelated to daily life - whether it had any direct connection to Chekhov or not - ended up being brought in and put on display. There stood vermilion-lacquered ceremonial bowls with maki-e designs and shell-encrusted pails that the Ainu people called ikoro - items once supplied by Japanese traders in exchange for bear pelts and vast quantities of herring - now exhibited as Japanese artworks. Nobuko and Motoko walked through the town as two Japanese women who drew stares from children, spending a night at a hotel bearing the imposing name Metropolitan.

The charm of rural towns and hotels. But in the town of Taganrog, Chekhov had written a novel with a protagonist—a bored man who spent his days catching flies. The flies were dreadful! To put it slightly dramatically, Nobuko and Motoko pushed through the flies to sit at the dining table, and to avoid swallowing flies along with the Sea of Azov’s famous fish soup, they had to constantly protect their spoons while keeping their left hands in motion.

“I imagine Taganrog’s Five-Year Plan must include that fly extermination.” “Our villages stay clean.” Olga’s eyes shone with pride and simple contentment. “The forests circle our villages—magnificent forests.” “Most homes keep well-tended dairy cows—mushrooms simmered in cream!” “If you could see it!” “That’s real living.”

In Olga’s bare, square room, a bed stood on one side while three cups sat on the table pushed against the opposite wall. The three talked over tea, but as Nobuko listened to Olga’s manner of speaking, she sensed Moscow life’s distinctive quality—steeped in both nostalgia for her village and pride in its merits. Olga’s kind gray eyes held an expression that seemed to reflect forest and farmland vistas exactly as they were. Stories of village life appeared ready to spill forth at any moment. Yet Olga never spoke of her rural family beyond necessity. Again and again—if Nobuko and the others could only see that place!—she extolled the village’s natural abundance, yet never once suggested, “Let’s visit my hometown together.” Here lay Moscow’s propriety. Given Olga’s status as a serious worker and Nobuko’s group being foreigners residing privately in Moscow, such restraint was natural—indeed, this very restraint embodied Soviet order.

The first person to ask Nobuko “Have you read it?” regarding the paper in Red Star was Olga. “I think he writes with great decisiveness.” Nobuko replied.

“Yes. That’s absolutely… isn’t it?”

"I can only understand within the limits of what I’ve read—but it’s certain that a major panic is occurring."

“Panic?”

With a surprised look—her eyes suddenly filled with concern—Olga gazed at Nobuko.

“What kind of panic?” “Of course, it’s with the kulaks.” “That’s obvious, isn’t it?” “And in all foreign newspaper reports.” “Just you wait and see.” “They even wrote that compulsory labor under the ‘Five-Day Week’ had been expanded to all residents—I read that in Paris.” Olga muttered very thoughtfully, as if taking responsibility for each word she spoke. “That’s their custom.”

“Olga Petrovna, may I speak my mind?” “Please go ahead.” At the point marked “Pa,” she paused once, then Olga said “Jarista” with emphasis. “I don’t feel sorry for the kulaks—and it’s not because I don’t know the countryside. They’ve already killed enough young leaders and slaughtered cows and pigs too.”

When it became clear that collectivization was a policy from which Soviet power would not retreat, destructive livestock slaughter spread through villages that opposed it. The regulation stated that individual animals such as cattle, horses, or pigs could continue to be raised by their owners even after collectivization. By propagating the idea that even their few chickens must be surrendered as collective farm assets, they stirred the farmers' reckless desperation—a scheme orchestrated by those not so different in kind from people who might entertain two guests in a hay hut.

Even though she had brought up the topic herself, Olga was particularly terse when discussing the *Red Star* paper.

I wonder what kind of life that person’s family back home in the countryside leads.

In the desolate snowy night road, the circle of arc lamp light trembled.

Walking briskly toward Astozhenka, Motoko said as if to herself.

“Given how they are, they’re not poor peasants.”

In this manner, with a depth and sharpness that even reached Nobuko and her companions, the *Red Star* paper permeated into the most hidden corners of all Soviet citizens' lived emotions.

VI

The coverage of the Crocodile (鰐) cartoons has undergone a shift. Satire against bureaucratism and senior officials who, from the morning after deciding to begin a "cleansing" in their own operations, suddenly become amiable and humble toward their subordinates. In addition to the wife—her curled hair hastily wrapped in a red headscarf as she frantically tidied away playing cards and cognac bottles—becoming a new subject of derisive laughter, a kulak in glossy boots appeared on the pages of *Crocodile*. Collective Farm Membership Qualification Screening Committees had been organized in every village. The Qualification Screening Committees conducted property investigations of the villagers and designated middle peasants and poor peasants as eligible to join the collective farms. The screening committee members arrived at the inner courtyard of a kulak household. Elfimov, who was usually fat, had grown even stouter today and seemed to be struggling for breath. How voluminous the hem of Elfimov’s wife was today, of all days. One of the quick-witted committee members forcibly seized the hand of the wife who was glaring at the red-cheeked group that had entered and began to dance. With her hands seized and her body spun around vigorously in a circle until she couldn’t escape, strange items began tumbling out from the wife’s voluminous yubka. City-style women’s evening shoes adorned with imitation jewels. One white fur-trimmed bedroom slipper from a pair. Caucasus-crafted women’s long boots. From around Elfimov’s belly, ten yards of woolen cloth appeared. On top of that, he was wearing a court dress coat with gold braid and had fastened the rubashka buttons.

The lists of hidden kulak supplies reported in *The Peasant Newspaper*, *Komsomolskaya Pravda*, and *Moscow Evening News* evoked in Nobuko a mingled sense of ludicrousness and the painful darkness of their avarice. Those items narrated how, during the famine years from 1917 to 1920, urban upper-class residents and petit bourgeois—in exchange for a mere lump of bread—had disgorged every manner of bulky object toward the countryside, starting with silver samovars. Regarding livestock, the kulaks had acted in a practically cunning manner all along. The fact that a “middle peasant” who had kept only one dairy cow and two pigs over these past several years actually possessed nearly ten cows and horses, all of which had been lent to poor peasants in distant villages, was also investigated.

The screening committees were investigations conducted from the perspective of "those who do not possess," through a mechanism free from village favoritism. A vast amount of grain had been discovered. In every village, a second "October" was unfolding. In Moscow, the congress of the Moscow Regional Proletarian Writers’ Union began. Mayakovsky—the Futurist poet—transformed his "Left Front," an organization he had maintained with fellow traveler poets, into the "Revolutionary Front" and joined the Russian Proletarian Writers’ Union. Since 1917, Mayakovsky had been celebrated for his "bold expression and radiant passion," and that winter theater season saw him staging the satirical play *The Bathhouse* at the Meyerhold Theater.

The staging of *The Bathhouse* bore all the hallmarks of having been devised by two geniuses: Meyerhold and Mayakovsky. The center of the stage remained a stationary circle, around which several small revolving stages had been constructed. These small revolving stages conveyed the six-act play featuring Chudakov—a young Soviet Edison of worker origins—by rotating while carrying their respective scenes. At key moments, the revolving stages would suddenly whirl around once or twice, expressing the crowd's psychological agitation. A biomechanics troupe from the Meyerhold Theater maintained constant activity onstage, using unified rhythmic gestures resembling gymnastics to represent every movement of protagonist-inventor Chudakov and his companions as they assembled and transported a grand invention—a machine whose physical form never materialized onstage.

In the play's climax, an airplane arrived from the socialist state's capital to welcome Chudakov. It was said that in future society, airplanes had advanced so much they no longer needed runways and could land atop skyscrapers. From a high platform at the rear of the stage, Svoboda (Freedom), a female envoy in silver and red flight gear, came to greet them. Chudakov's group ascended step by step toward the stage's heights through biomechanical marches while transporting their crucial unseen invention. Commoners who'd begun climbing a tall scaffold hoping to ride Chudakov's glory into socialist society, along with anti-socialist saboteurs who'd hindered his invention, came crashing down onto the stage amid explosions and smoke. Finally, with propeller roar echoing from beyond the audience's view, the airplane soared away toward socialist society.

Rather than being theater, *The Bathhouse* was a Meyerholdian "spectacle." In the climax, the worker audience was left behind onstage with the intruders who had been thrown down from the scaffold, while Chudakov himself vanished high beyond the smoke and din—which, depending on perspective, could be seen as ironic. The sight of foreigners in fine coats prompted Mayakovsky's sharp satire against meddlesome guides from the International Cultural Liaison Association. Nobuko, as one of Moscow's foreigners without a fine coat, felt this reality keenly. Yet such sharpness remained merely a minor success.

Perhaps Mayakovsky and Meyerhold had been dimly aware of the script's emptiness all along, and grown anxious about it. That might explain why they'd resorted to devising those showy new revolving stages and erecting towering scaffolds. "But ultimately, that's all it amounted to..." It was merely Meyerhold's trademark scare tactics. And those very scare tactics now stood exposed as a fundamental weakness in Soviet theater.

As she rode back with Motoko on a sleigh through the frozen tree-lined path, Nobuko felt not mere dissatisfaction at having wasted an evening on that tedious play, but something more persistent—an irritation that clung like burrs to wool. “That socialism should be reduced to such symbolism here—” This was precisely what fueled Nobuko’s infuriated protest. In Moscow’s very fabric, socialism lived as something visible, tangible, vibrantly real—this was why she so cherished the city’s fervor. And precisely because she believed this winter would be her last in Moscow, even the jolts from the sleigh’s stiff springs—transmitting every frozen rut in the snowy path—lodged themselves in her memory with tenacious clarity. —

“Compared to that, ‘The Shooting’ at least still functions as a proper play.”

Motoko said in a theater-savvy manner. While it had the flaw of characters being fixed as heroes and villains, Bezymensky’s verse drama took as its theme the activities of factory shock troops that emerged from the Five-Year Plan. It was also Meyerhold Theater that was performing *The Shooting*.

“Meyerhold must currently be at the stage of trying this and that.”

As Motoko had said, *The Shooting* was indeed staged in a thoroughly realistic manner. But how much distinctive character could Meyerhold’s now-realistic stage be said to possess compared to that of the Revolutionary Theater?

Nobuko sat at her desk thinking of various things and pasted the program and ticket from last night’s performance of *The Bathhouse* into her black-bound notebook. Since returning from Paris, she had been preserving mementos of every play she attended during her final season in Moscow. The Art Theater, known for its meticulous repertoire selection, had not particularly pursued scripts themed on the Five-Year Plan this season either. They were performing Dostoevsky’s *Uncle’s Dream*, *Othello*, *Resurrection*, and others. For *Resurrection*, they employed an entirely unprecedented production style. During Katyusha’s trial scene, Kachalov stood at the edge of the stage. In Nekhlyudov’s moment of anguish, he loomed behind him like a manifestation of conscience itself, reading directly from the novel’s text with unparalleled intensity. Clutching a short pencil in his right hand while tucking his left into his coat pocket, Kachalov—dressed entirely in black—stood below the stage and narrated Katyusha’s lament in a rust-stained voice: her desperate pursuit of Nekhlyudov vanishing into the blizzard until she collapsed unconscious. The entire audience became one with him, utterly transfixed. That magnificent richness. "But in Moscow," she thought, "no artist can remain confined to flawless 'completion'." Even if *The Bathhouse* was a failure, Mayakovsky had thrust himself into expansive new territory...

Someone knocked on the door, snapping Nobuko out of her thoughts.

“Please come in.”

Nobuko replied without turning from her desk.

“Is this a good time?”

The one who revealed half his body through the door was Rukeyanov, the owner of the boarding house where Nobuko and the others resided. Nobuko blinked slightly. Since they had moved in, there had been no precedent of Rukeyanov, the landlord, personally visiting their room. “Please come in.”

Nobuko stood up from in front of the desk and went over to the door. Rukeyanov, keeping one hand on the doorknob, “Are you alone?” he asked.

“Ms. Yoshimi will return for dinner.” Rukeyanov tilted his face—with its thinning chestnut hair—slightly and seemed to consider something, “Very well.”

Though hurrying, he spoke in a tone that had resolved to wait.

“Then, after dinner—”

“If it’s convenient for you, shall we come to your place instead?”

“I’ll come by. Later, then.”

The sound of Rukeyanov’s footsteps—who had closed the door and left—echoed for a while on the bare floor of the adjacent room used as a dining hall, until eventually the entire kvartira fell silent.

Something was happening. Something unpleasant—for Rukeyanov and Nobuko and the others. She could not doubt that premonition, but Nobuko could not surmise what exactly this undoubtedly unpleasant matter entailed.

The residence certificate document that became required this year. That was something Nobuko had gone to the relevant office of the Moscow Soviet to obtain just the other day—a three-month certificate. Food ration coupons—those had been handed over in full for two people's worth to Rukeyanov's wife, and Nobuko and the others were living with meals provided.

Motoko returned. As if following in her footsteps, Rukeyanov’s wife entered. “Shall I serve dinner?” “Please do.”

Nobuko,

“Right?”

Nobuko looked at Motoko. “Something’s going on, isn’t there?” She always calmly brought the plates and sometimes, “How is everything? Do you like it?”

Rukeyanov’s wife, who sometimes stood by the table, was behaving with the stiffness of an honest and kind housewife concealing a sudden awkwardness that had arisen toward lodgers with whom she had lived without conflict for nearly a year.

“Well, never mind.” “If he has something to say, let’s hear it.” As though they had been impatiently waiting for the fifteen minutes after dinner to pass, there was a knock at the door. Rukeyanov sat down on the chair that Nobuko had set out, facing the round table after the meal had been cleared. Now without a chair, Nobuko perched on her own bed.

“The matter in question is of this nature.”

The housing management law had been revised. Previously, each building had been managed by a management committee elected from among its residents; for instance, the residence at Astozhenka 1-chome had been overseen by a management committee that included Rukeyanov himself as one member. Under the new law, ward housing committees would now comprehensively manage residences throughout each district. A representative from this building’s management committee to the ward’s management committee had been selected. And it had been decided that those who had privately managed rooms until now must vacate them for redistribution among union members struggling with housing shortages.

The enforceability that the words "has been decided" held for Rukeyanov and Nobuko was something Nobuko and the others understood well from their two years in Moscow. Since such a decision had been made, it became impossible for them to remain as Rukeyanov's lodgers.

“I understand the circumstances,” Motoko said, “but we can’t very well live on the sidewalk.”

Motoko said.

“At least until we find another place, you’ll wait for us, won’t you?” A confusion—more than perplexity, an utter impasse—spread across Rukeyanov’s face, that of an earnest, dutiful worker now marked by caution. Having a weak heart and not being a smoker, he was at a loss and began rubbing the knees of his crossed legs.

“The deadline is only ten days.” “Only?—Let’s go speak to the ward housing committee! Have them reach an understanding! Finding a room in Moscow in ten days?!” Rukeyanov stared at Motoko—her face flushing crimson with anger—with panic-stricken gray eyes. Then, as if driven into a place with no escape,

“Did you not read the proclamation that was in the newspaper?” He looked back at Nobuko, who had been silently listening until then, and posed the question.

"What kind of proclamation had it been—" Ah, now that he mentioned it. —Nobuko remembered. She had skimmed through it without realizing it was a proclamation, but about a week ago, there had been a small article in Izvestia. Foreigners residing in Moscow would no longer be permitted to live in private apartments. Foreigners were required to live in hotels. That had been what it meant. Nobuko hadn’t felt they would be counted among such foreigners. Indeed, all sorts of foreigners lived in Moscow. Take Fujiwara Takeo, for instance. That sort of person occupied fine apartments. Therefore, such measures were naturally to be expected. She had simply read it with that understanding.

“It has been decided that foreigners will generally not be accepted in private apartments.” When Rukeyanov said this, Nobuko was struck by an unanticipated sadness. She felt deeply wounded. Though undeniably foreigners themselves, Nobuko and her companions were not the sort to load multiple trunks onto sleds bound for the Bolshaya Moscow Hotel; nor had they inhabited Soviet society with such a mindset.

Motoko also fell silent. She was silently exhaling cigarette smoke.

While watching the two women, who had fallen silent with stern faces, Rukeyanov seemed overwhelmed with unease. He repeated, “Is that clear? I expect that you will fully understand the circumstances.”

he said.

“It’s not at all due to personal reasons—not at all…” “That is perfectly clear.”

Motoko removed the red pipe from her mouth and answered gravely. "If it were a personal matter, we would insist that we haven't caused you any trouble whatsoever in over a year." "There's not one personal reason why we should have to leave this room!"

After Rukeyanov left, Nobuko and Motoko also remained silent for some time. Eventually, Motoko—as if gathering her various emotions, self-mockery included, into a single focal point—

“What’s this! Quit being so jumpy!”

A sarcastic smile floated at the corner of her mouth. “They’ve been profiting in secret all this time, so now they’re just terrified of getting caught.”

No matter what they said about Rukeyanov, how could it change the fact that in ten days Nobuko and Motoko would be left without a place to live? Nobuko remembered the months they had lived as if forgetting they were foreigners, owing to the total absence of ethnic prejudice from those around them. Shortly before Stalin's treatise on liquidating kulaks appeared in Red Star, a major conspiracy had been uncovered in Leningrad. Even during the production sabotage schemes in the Donbass mining region, foreigners had taken leading roles. The wariness and indignation Soviet people held toward "foreigners" stemmed from reasons entirely different from the prejudices and preconceptions people of other nations held toward outsiders. The vigilance and anger of Soviet people were aimed not so much at individual foreigners as more broadly at imperialism in general that sought to poison Soviet society.

Nobuko had profoundly felt with emotion the fundamental differences inherent to Soviet society as she passed through the Stolbtsy border station and returned to Moscow from Paris. Feeling both herself and the people here, Nobuko had come back. Yet in their outwardly visible life at Astozhenka, how much of the goodwill within their hearts could truly be said to have been put into action? The future life maturing within Nobuko's mind—one she secretly anticipated—remained a change existing solely within her heart, something she had not even revealed to Motoko.

A measure born from the necessity of people in present-day Moscow who had no time to delve into the minutiae of Nobuko's subjectivity—that fact, Nobuko understood well.

Nobuko looked at Motoko with eyes that restrained sadness.

“What should we do? Shall we ask at the Passage?” “There’s no need to rush.” Motoko said in a voice that seemed to weigh down her chair. “But when that time comes, having no room will be a problem.” “That place doesn’t do such things.” “How do you know?” When Moscow hosted all-Soviet-scale assemblies, Hotel Passage had even accommodated people by putting four beds in a single room.

“What have we even done? This is absurd!” Motoko looked at Nobuko with a gaze where the whites of her eyes shone intensely. “Where’s the need for even Buko-chan to join in and panic?” Anxiety swept through Nobuko’s heart. Was Motoko perhaps thinking that by confronting Rukeyanov in her usual bold manner, they could postpone moving out? The circumstances when they had just rented a room at Sokolsky’s place—only to have it suddenly seized by a Health Commissar who changed residences—and this imminent eviction were entirely different matters.

“Anyway, I’ll go to the Passage tomorrow and see.” “That’s entirely your prerogative.”

“That’s entirely your prerogative—” Under Nobuko’s winter boots, the early spring Moscow snow—softened during the day—creaked, and Motoko’s words creaked in kind. Above the entrance door of Hotel Passage, just as when Nobuko and the others had been there, a dinner menu written in purple ink was posted. The downstairs concierge who took care of winter boots had been replaced by a young man they were seeing for the first time. Nobuko ascended to the office over the coarse carpet with red and green small flower patterns.

The office chairs remained completely unchanged, and what was posted on the wall—"Five-Day Week, Uninterrupted Week"—matched exactly what could be seen inside the adjacent Central Post Office. A man in his forties, wearing a suit jacket over a grape-colored tunic, stood before the office desk. Nobuko couldn’t recall whether he had been there from the beginning.

Nobuko stood on this side of the office desk. And then she came right out with it. “Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon.” “Do you have any rooms available?” “We’re full.”

It was a simple and truly clear answer. Nobuko involuntarily blinked. Even if it was full now, given that this was a hotel with constant comings and goings, it was impossible that not a single room would ever be vacant. "We would like a room—either one like Room 74 or a small one like Room 70." The man in the grape-colored tunic looked up at Nobuko, who was standing on the other side of the desk, with renewed attention. The implication that Nobuko had stayed at this hotel before had registered.

“When do you need the room?” “The sooner the better.” Nobuko explained the circumstances.

“In any case, we’re full today.” “Please come check back tomorrow.”

“Around what time should we come?” “Around this time is fine.”

Nobuko returned straight to the Astozhenka boarding house. It was Rukeyanov’s wife who answered the bell and opened the entrance door. The wife smiled upon seeing Nobuko, but there was a faint anxiety in her earnest blue eyes. Nobuko and the others wondered if they would indeed be able to find a room somewhere—if they would be able to vacate their current room by the deadline. The housing shortage in Moscow had not been alleviated in the slightest.

Motoko, still unable to settle down, entered the room as well. When she saw Nobuko, immediately—

“How did it go?”

she asked. “Full!” “Full?—Could such a thing happen there?”

To Nobuko silently taking off the coat,

“Oh well… We still have ten days left anyway.” Motoko had not gone to negotiate herself, yet spoke with apparent optimism about having some lead. Nobuko listened with her back stiffened. Nobuko had clearly explained their predicament at the hotel as well. She explained that they had no prospects of finding a room anywhere other than the Passage. In Moscow’s way of life, even when they spoke of hotels, these were not of the same nature as privately-run guest businesses in other countries; thus, in this case, whether Passage would provide Nobuko and the others with a room was, in essence, something that indirectly reflected even the objective conditions of whether Nobuko and the others had any possibility of remaining in the Soviet Union. Was the fact that it was full today merely coincidental? Or was it a reply of a different nature? Nobuko had returned without understanding that point.

Nobuko could not speak of her concerns to Motoko.

The next day, at the same time, Nobuko appeared at the Passage Hotel's office. Today was more crowded than yesterday, with three men surrounding the office desk. All three were presenting slips of paper bearing signatures and stamps as they negotiated for rooms. These were rooms reserved for people dispatched to Moscow from provincial areas on union business.

After waiting for the three men’s business to conclude, Nobuko stood up from the wooden bench in the office and approached. The clerk looked at Nobuko. Without a word, he shook his head and spread his right palm over the large room allocation ledger lying open before him. It was a gesture that seemed to say, "See for yourself." When they said full, it truly meant every room was occupied. The situation had become about eighty percent certain. Nobuko actually grew cheerful.

“Well, that’s fine. Please don’t worry. I’ll come tomorrow.”

Nobuko made it her daily routine to go to the Passage.

The Five-Year Plan tightened coordination between Moscow, the capital, and activities across various regions of the Soviet Union. The number of travelers with business in Moscow suddenly increased. "So this was our Five-Year Plan," she thought.

They had felt themselves engaging with the Five-Year Plan’s struggles by gazing at grand photographs of the vast state farm Gigant or reading newspaper lists of items confiscated from kulaks—but Nobuko, at least regarding herself, gradually came to critique this self-perception while taking personal responsibility, finding it comical and even laughable.

“This is our challenge.” Nobuko had begun to consider their unavoidable move as a challenge common to all foreigners. How would they themselves solve this challenge, and what answers would they draw from it? She came to regard it as one of those opportunities that would test the true power of the feelings she had clutched to her heart while gazing at the approaching forest entrance near the border. The problem was not—as Motoko angrily asserted—that Nobuko and the others had done something harmful to the Soviet Union in their individual lives. How Soviet society viewed imperialism’s methods, and to what extent Nobuko’s group understood its inevitability—therein lay their approach to the challenge. If people were measured solely by whether they were foreigners useful to the Soviets—as Motoko perceived—Moscow would eventually be left with only servile foreigners and zealous ones who might outwardly appear as Communist Party members due to secret schemes. If the Soviet Union truly accepted this, why had such public criticism arisen against Bezymensky’s *The Shot*? The play’s characters were divided into the factory’s good udarniki and villains opposing the Five-Year Plan—precisely this failure to find means of engaging the greater number of well-intentioned workers in intermediate positions was provoking harsh dissatisfaction.

When she reached this conclusion, Nobuko rose from her chair with involuntary joy born of fresh conviction and foresight. She forgot the day's disappointment when returning from the hotel after being told it was full for the third time. Without exaggeration or self-deprecation, Nobuko could confirm herself exactly as she was - someone permitted to remain in Moscow. Because Nobuko was transforming herself toward socialism. As Soviet society itself progressed daily toward higher socialism, Nobuko too existed within that life as part of its substance. ——

When the topic of housing arose among Motoko and three others at Olga Petrovna's place, Nobuko spoke haltingly yet with conviction. "We believe we have the right to find lodging." "We may lack 'notes' from important figures, but we possess our support for the Soviet and everything we've spoken and written through that commitment." "And Olga Petrovna—if 'notes' truly held such absolute value, Moscow wouldn't need this widespread cleansing everywhere."

Considering such points, it seemed that even the circumstances of the Astozhenka union housing complex where Nobuko and the others had been staying until now might be problematic. In the building erected by the railway workers' union housing committee, there lived people like Lyubakov—who had first helped Nobuko's group secure a room and always wore a green engineer's cap to work—but what sort of railway employee had Sokólski been, who for some political reason had sheltered a People's Commissar of Health and driven them out? Then there was Karl Radek. Radek was a politician who had misguidedly led the Polish Revolution and served as one of Pravda's editorial writers. In recent years, he had become a figure problematic through his associations with Trotskyists. When Motoko had asked the portly doorman to carry up a wooden box of books to Lukyanov's *kvartira*, a gaunt man in a leather coat came clattering down from the floor above with hurried footsteps. The man,

“Looks heavy.”

He greeted the doorman, slowly slipped past him, and then returned at the same speed to descend toward the building’s entrance. From the facial features Nobuko had glimpsed in that one look, the name of the person she thought it might be came to her mind, and Motoko said at the same moment: “That must be Radek.” Afterward, for some reason, Motoko had once remarked that Radek’s wife was a slender, beautiful woman who seemed extremely shy. Radek's first wife was Larisa Reisner. Larisa, who was the daughter of Dr. Reisner, had worked as a political instructor on the domestic war front from 1917 to around 1921. She was remembered by people as someone who never once said she was tired. There existed a collection of fascinating reports and essays she had written during that time, and Motoko had been intending to translate it someday. Reisner died of typhus in the same year the disease killed John Reed. Because of such interest, Motoko’s eyes would catch on Radek, whom she occasionally saw, and the woman believed to be his current wife.

“Radek is a man who values appearances, isn’t he? In photographs, Reisner was beautiful too, but even the current one is strikingly beautiful—rare for Moscow. But she’s not at all political.”

Nobuko had somehow never encountered this beautiful woman. Yet hearing Motoko's rumors and considering Radek's political stance, she could surmise that even if his current wife were equally beautiful, she must be a woman of entirely different character from Reisner. Thus their belongings were carried out from Astozhenka 1-chome—that building where diverse lives unfolded within its walls—on the very eve of the ten-day deadline. That day Nobuko went to the Passage once in the morning and again in early afternoon. When she went the second time, she waited three hours on a long bench against the office wall for a room assignment.

Seven

Every night at midnight, a passage from *The Internationale* was played from the Kremlin's clock tower. That sound flowed through the night sky once more and came to be heard at the window of Nobuko and the others' room.

Nobuko’s relief at being able to live in the Passage was enriched by unexpected joy. By chance, she had managed to secure Room 74—the same spacious room she had once lived in—but when Nobuko stayed there from winter to spring of 1928, the first Moscow winter scenery she beheld was the view of desolate skeletal ruins of steel frames and snow falling upon them. The origin of the name "Passage Hotel" seemed to lie in the fact that there had once been an exhibition hall displaying local products beneath the large building at the corner of Tverskaya Street that encompassed this hotel. It was likely that merchants from various regions who came there for business transactions had made the present-day Passage Hotel their regular lodgings.

Beneath the window of Nobuko and the others' room—positioned overlooking the back of the exhibition hall—the glass-paneled roof of the Passage still lay destroyed, its steel skeleton exposed. Moscow's snow fell ceaselessly yesterday and today, accumulating on the steel frames of skeletal ruins before vanishing into black bottomless chasms between them. As Nobuko stood at the window watching snowflakes fall and vanish, fall and vanish, she felt a slight dizziness. Across the narrow thoroughfare, large-scale construction work on the Central Post Office was underway. Even at night, powerful spotlights illuminated scaffolding laden with snowdrifts. The stark contrast seemed to speak all too vividly of yesterday's and today's Moscow.

The moment she opened the door to Room 74 this time, Nobuko felt as though it had become an entirely different place. A glittering brightness reflected throughout the room surrounded by pale blue walls. The roof of the Passage had at some point been completely fitted with glass. When viewed from Tverskaya Street, it was the roof bearing the imposing yet gaudy electric signboard that read "Moscow Evening News." At night, Nobuko doubted her own eyes and ears. The glass roof began to glow softly like a glass lantern, mirroring the abundance of lights lit within. From the depths of that gentle brightness came music. Since the window of Nobuko and the others' room stood higher than the Passage's roof, both that glass roof's radiance and the faintly welling-up music served precisely to soften the hotel nights' monotony without interfering with their lives.

The hushed nights of Astozhenka's tree-lined streets had transformed into nights brimming with Moscow's vitality. Then one afternoon, Nobuko suddenly noticed something on the glass roof below her window and quietly rose from her desk to approach it. In early spring, when snow lingered only in shaded areas, three young men and two girls emerged onto the parched glass roof. The two girls stood side by side in front while two young men lined up meticulously behind them, striking poses. On this side - revealing his profile near the window where Nobuko looked down - a blond youth held a camera between both hands, peering intently through the viewfinder.

Until last year, there had been no such thing as seeing Moscow youths carrying cameras. During spring and summer, photo studios would set up shop in the shade of the linden trees along the tree-lined promenade and thrive. Nobuko thought from the bottom of her heart—Good heavens! These people had started carrying cameras! There was an indescribable freshness in the youths' demeanor. The blond young man peering through the viewfinder said something and signaled with his right hand. The two young men standing at the back took a step closer to each other, shortened the distance between them, confirmed their positioning with mutual checks, turned front again, and repositioned their pose. The young man who had been peering into the viewfinder seemed deeply troubled by technical difficulties until he finally lifted his face and said something that made the girls burst into uproarious laughter. Though she couldn't hear their voices through the window glass above them, their jubilant demeanor was so vivid that laughter spread contagiously to Nobuko watching from her vantage point. They were laughing with such unbridled joy. The photograph still hadn't been successfully taken.

After taking a drag of his cigarette, the blond young man—seeming determined to finally press the shutter this time—removed his coat, and to Nobuko’s astonishment, despite the lingering snow in the air, he was now wearing nothing but a summer sports shirt with bold navy and white horizontal stripes. The four once again arranged themselves in their previous formation and froze into position. And after several seconds of tension that made even Nobuko’s body stiffen as she watched from here, the shutter was pressed.

The film must have been extremely precious. For the snap, the shutter was pressed just once. For a while longer, the youths enjoyed being on the glass roof before eventually climbing back down.

They must have been mere trivial scenes. Yet each one touched Nobuko’s heart. Each touch resonated with something unnameable. Between these sudden visions unfolding beneath Nobuko’s eyes and Motoko buying silver spoons, she felt a contradiction as though some force were crushing her body.

Not long after moving into the Passage, Motoko invited Nobuko out for a walk before dinner. “How unusual! Where are we going?” “You’ll understand once you go and see.”

Motoko went straight along the street in front of the Art Theater and walked toward the commercial district. Nobuko thought she was heading to the National Exchange. It had become certain that Bunmeisha would no longer send money. If the money she had deposited at the National Bank ran out, Nobuko had decided to sell the coat and shoes she bought in Vienna. She had also considered selling the black coat she wore until last year and the monkey fur lining its interior. To exchange such items at honest market prices, the people of Moscow used the National Exchange.

However, the grand door that Motoko opened and entered turned out to be the National Precious Metals Store. Without paying heed to Nobuko—who trailed behind in surprise—Motoko took her place at the display counter and made the clerk produce large silver soup spoons, medium-sized spoons, and small coffee spoons. The clerk likely assumed she belonged to diplomatic circles. With polite efficiency, he set aside three varieties of simply designed spoons Motoko had chosen—half a dozen of each—to one side. Once this was arranged, Motoko turned to Nobuko,

“It’s better to have the initials engraved after all, don’t you think, Buko-chan?”

“Motoko said.”

Nobuko could not grasp the meaning behind such purchases as a whole. Seated beside Motoko with sunken eyes, she stared at the beautifully gleaming silver spoons of various sizes. Motoko shook her for not giving a clear response. “Hey Buko, what do you think?” “I’m asking you!” “Well, doesn’t it depend on how they’ll be used?” “We’ll use them eventually.” Silver spoons? What kind of life would require those, and where... To Nobuko, it felt utterly divorced from reality. She said,

“If we add yours,” Nobuko said. “There’s no need to make such a disinterested face. After all, there’ll be times when you’ll use them yourself—you’ve got to find something that works for both.” Motoko Yoshimi and Nobuko Sasa. When written in Roman letters, the first common element between the two names was the letter S. In Russian letters, it was С, and having just that single character as an ornamental design felt too desolate. The clerk and Motoko spread out a catalog of decorative lettering styles and examined it. Nobuko’s feelings—which had remained disinterested in the silver spoons themselves—were drawn to the decorative lettering design. While taking up a pencil and experimenting with various sketches, she discovered a form where two Сs—one large and one small—interlocked like chain fragments, the smaller one caught on the larger С.

“Hmm, this has a certain charm—it’s interesting.” They decided to engrave that design on the initials. After arranging to return in a week, Nobuko and the others left the store. “How terribly conscientious of you.”

Motoko, looking at Nobuko from the corner of her eye as she walked awkwardly beside her, teased her. “You’re the one who bought things like ashtrays and liqueur sets in Prague, saying Bohemian glass was beautiful.”

Motoko was implying that buying spoons in Moscow now was no different from those purchases made abroad. Though Nobuko had acquired similar items in foreign countries, her apparent wariness about doing so in Moscow—Motoko seemed determined to sharply underscore this contradiction. Yet the Prague-bought trinkets weren't in Nobuko's suitcase at all; Motoko had stored and kept them. More than dwelling on that physical absence, what preoccupied Nobuko was the dissonance between Moscow's vibrant daily life surrounding her and this act of procuring silver spoons—between those spoons and her own uncertain future, which somehow persisted within a constant, faint rustle of vague premonitions she couldn't articulate. Through this tenuous connection, she sensed some profound error at work, leaving her unsettled.

Mayakovsky committed suicide with a pistol. The news that shocked everyone came the morning after Nobuko and Motoko, their moods soured over the silver spoons, had gone to bed without speaking.

VIII

――My love’s little boat foundered――

In the poem Mayakovsky left behind when he died, what love’s little boat was that—what love’s little boat could it have been? Mayakovsky had committed a grave error. However, the contributions he made as a poet of the revolution and the proletariat until his final day will not be erased because of that. ―Such words were written in Pravda. And in the Crafts Museum’s grand auditorium where Nobuko and Motoko had been until just moments earlier—until around eleven o’clock that night—the emcee of “Leningrad Writers’ Literary Evening” addressed the audience packed all the way to the high seats at the back, their attention fixed on the brightly lit podium, repeating those same words and requesting everyone to rise in mourning for the poet. At the high position behind the thoroughly illuminated podium, a bust of Lenin and the red flag of the USSR were displayed. Beneath it, a large photograph of the late Mayakovsky received the gaze of hundreds. Beneath the photograph of Mayakovsky—with his unusually large forehead and unusually large eyes—there was a grand piano. On top of the black lid, the two initials of the poet V.V. Mayakovsky’s name, made from red cut paper, were clearly reflected upside down. While silently watching the two red inverted V.V. initials, Nobuko, as one of the audience members, heard the words stating that Mayakovsky had committed a grave error. What was being cited as Mayakovsky’s grave error was the socialist society’s criticism of his act of abruptly concluding his life through suicide.

However, while criticism remained criticism, what dominated the atmosphere of the venue was the affectionate sentiment toward Mayakovsky and the compassion that vaguely welled up from the depths of people’s hearts in response to his death. Nobuko and Motoko boarded the No. 19 tram in front of the Crafts Museum and joined the very end of the funeral procession stretching to the Kudrinskaya street corner around nearly midnight. Mayakovsky’s funeral was supposed to be held at the Writers’ Club that night, from 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM. Illuminated by faint streetlamps, a mostly silent black procession slowly moved along the sidewalk; on its outer edge lay clumps of dirty April snow from Moscow. Along the roadway, three mounted police officers quietly patrolled back and forth along the procession, all the way to the main gate of the Writers’ Club several blocks ahead. The procession moved forward step by step, and when they reached the outside of the low wall surrounding the Writers’ Club building—once the estate of Soroguv—a new line had formed behind Nobuko and the others at the very end, stretching all the way to the corner of Kudrinskaya Street.

Gradually, the procession moved forward, and as it began to approach the front of the Writers’ Club, a young girl who had come alone in front of Nobuko and the others let out a sigh as if unable to contain the welling emotion. And then, turning to look back at Nobuko and Motoko, she spoke in a voice softened by grief and longing, “Did you read Mayakovsky’s poetry?” she asked.

“Yes.” “He was a wonderful poet.” Having said that, the young girl, her head wrapped in a dull-colored beret, turned her emotion-filled eyes toward the scene beyond the gate. On the pristine white grand entrance columns of the Writers’ Club building hung over a dozen long banners of black and red. The intense light from funeral lamps installed in two locations illuminated the winter-bare inner garden where a black procession snaked through. As they entered the garden, lights flickered in the hall of the building opposite, and through the glass came into view yet another procession moving solemnly under bright lamps.

Nobuko had come to feel breathless in the chilly early spring night. She raised her face and looked at the sky. It was a star-filled night. In the deep night's starry sky, spring's white clouds lay scattered here and there. The procession passed through pillars adorned with long banners at the main entrance and entered the building's interior through a large door standing open in one place. Red Army soldiers stood guard on both sides of the door. The procession, with Nobuko and Motoko among them, ascended the grand staircase and gradually advanced down the wide corridor, accompanied by the cautious yet heavy footsteps of people still wearing winter boots. The corridor was decorated with potted flowers precious in Moscow - hydrangeas and large chrysanthemums. Placards hung on the wall between the high windows. "I give all my poems to you, to the fighting class" - words from Mayakovsky's poem.

This grand corridor section of the Writers’ Club building was new to Nobuko. When the "Japanese Literature Evening" had been held there in December 1927, the entrance through which Nobuko and Motoko were guided had been at the end of a stone-paved path continuing from a small gate beside the main facade. From there one could reach not only the small auditorium where the event was held but also the Writers’ Union office. Having gradually grown accustomed to walking Moscow alone, Nobuko went multiple times from that entrance to the union office. There she learned about the structure and activities of the writers’ mutual aid fund, heard about the "House of Creation" where Novikov-Priboy had completed his *Battle of Tsushima*, and read notices on the narrow corridor’s bulletin board about the Writers’ Union’s collective coal purchases. The Writers’ Union included not only the Russian Proletarian Writers’ Alliance (RAPP) but also the Left Front group that Mayakovsky had belonged to until about two months before his death, along with the All-Russian Peasant Writers’ Organization and the Constructivist Smiths. Facing the narrow corridor that led up from the back entrance, these literary groups were crammed together with their respective nameplates displayed above each door.

Mayakovsky’s remains had been brought into this Writers’ Club where his feet had grown accustomed to tread and his voice had resonated daily, and seemed to be laid to rest in one of the halls located in the left wing. When the procession advanced near the end of the grand corridor, it turned left. That was the hall where the remains were laid to rest. From the procession, one could see both the empty chairs lining the left-hand wall of the hall and, opposite them, Mayakovsky’s figure in a suit lying in state within a coffin decorated with red flags and flowers, its head positioned against a black curtain on the right side. On either side of the coffin’s head, Red Army soldiers stood at attention in ceremonial posture. There were about three people who appeared to be young poets. A woman in black attire, who seemed to be Mrs. Mayakovsky, stood apart from the coffin before the wall on the side where chairs were arranged. At that point, the funeral procession took on an even more solemn air; proceeding in silence with slow shuffling steps past the foot of the coffin while gazing at the remains, they eventually filed out one by one through the hall’s far exit, their faces marked with mourning.

Just as that scene in the hall entered her view, the procession of mourners advancing two by two at Nobuko’s position was brought to a halt.

Nobuko came to a halt in an unexpected place—past the hall’s threshold, at the foot of the coffin. Before Nobuko’s eyes, now halted, were the soles of Mayakovsky’s large boots, jutting out sharply from the coffin as if about to spill over. To be looking directly at the soles of shoes worn by someone no longer living was an eerie feeling. The large soles of the boots, in their fixed position, appeared all the more enormous to the eye. When Nobuko inadvertently averted her gaze once then returned it to the large boot soles, her eyes revealed a faint look of shock and an expression of urgently trying to comprehend something. On the soles of Mayakovsky’s enormous, enormous black boots, two edge protectors had been nailed and were shining. In Japan, students and earnest commuters have triangular studs attached to prevent their shoe soles from wearing down. Those unmistakable studs were struck into the soles of Mayakovsky’s boots. Studs are always struck in places that wear down faster due to one’s walking habits—like the edge of the heel or the right or left side of the flat part that gets stepped on. The places where the studs were struck on Mayakovsky’s boot soles were neither at the heel nor at the part where the force of the big toe is applied. The edge protector studs were struck at the very tip of Mayakovsky’s large boots.

The purely practical edge protectors struck at the toe had already begun to wear, though some days had clearly passed since they were struck, yet they shone as if they had been at work until just moments ago. The entire hall was solemnly illuminated by numerous lights, and the attention of all the mourners was directed, as per custom, toward the face of the deceased. By chance, merely because the procession had been halted where she was, Nobuko stared fixedly at the soles of Mayakovsky’s boots and felt as though she were hearing directly—from the small edge protectors shining at the tips of those large boots—the story of the poet Mayakovsky’s life and death. Mayakovsky, with his exceptionally large forehead and exceptionally large burning eyes, had indeed always hurried ahead like this. The toes had worn down to the point where studs had to be driven in. —

From 1917 onward for ten years, Mayakovsky had likely continued hurrying his steps, determined not to fall behind even a moment. Endeavoring not to fall behind the speed of the revolution and striving not to lag in socialist construction. Mayakovsky had undoubtedly not only refused to fall behind but had always demanded of himself to stand at the forefront of history. He must have desired to live with the conviction that all his poems were poems of the fighting class.

However――Nobuko recalled the emptiness of the satire play *The Bathhouse* that she had seen at the Meyerhold Theater. In Moscow, there were no people who owned several pairs of shoes. Perhaps these very boots of Mayakovsky’s had walked energetically across Meyerhold’s stage, their toe-tip studs faintly clattering as they moved. "Changing 'Left Front' to 'Revolutionary Front' and joining the Russian Proletarian Writers' Alliance―how hurriedly these boots must have trod Moscow’s paved paths from winter to spring.—"

―My boat of love has been wrecked― All those meanings pierced through Nobuko’s heart, flashing into comprehension.

Despite Mayakovsky’s unceasing haste to stay ahead of even the foremost ranks of the fiercely advancing Soviet cause—no, that wasn’t it—the more he strove with a poet’s integrity and passion to take on ever-higher duties, the more the symbolism and romanticism forming the framework of his revolutionary lyric poetry became a burden. However much he hurried—or rather, the more he hurried—the more intolerable grew the sluggishness of trying to outpace himself, to overtake himself, until Mayakovship wrecked his little vessel of love for the revolution and the people’s construction.

Mayakovsky was publicly said to have committed a grave mistake, yet Nobuko felt no cruel condemnation in those words. Tonight at the Crafts Museum, the "Literary Evening" by writers from Leningrad was held, where Fyodorin recited Mayakovsky's poems with heartfelt emotion. That poem was a work Mayakovsky had written when Yesenin committed suicide. The poem seemed as though raw heartbreak and life's certainty had blended into a strange, almost miraculous fervor. Mayakovsky had boldly and frankly acknowledged in that poem that the times were harsh for poets. But through life's force aligned with socialism's ceaseless advance—vaguely, abstractly—he affirmed life and the poet's duty, just as all his revolution and socialism, though brilliant sparks, had always remained symbolic. Fyodorin read that poem especially tonight, at Mayakovsky’s farewell. The fact that these writers and poets were not present at the farewell ceremony simultaneously being held at the Writers' Club in a separate location also made Nobuko ponder.

Ribedinsky, instead of coming here, was at the "Literary Evening" venue answering public questions about his recent work *The Birth of a Hero*—a piece that had sparked various debates due to its muddling of naturalism and psychologism. While Alexei Tolstoy was reciting a passage from *Peter the Great*—the work he was currently writing—Nobuko and Motoko quietly slipped away from their seats and came to the farewell ceremony.

Not only Nobuko and her companions, but the venue for that night's "Literary Evening" was packed to capacity as usual—yet it lacked its customary composure, with the grand hall's side doors constantly opening and closing to let people flow in and out. Most people spent that night oscillating between two locations: the "Literary Evening" that had commenced at nine o'clock sharp, and Mayakovsky's farewell ceremony. At the farewell service, Nobuko recognized in the procession the young man and woman who had ultimately arrived via Tram 19.

A single lamp was set high on the left side of the coffin, and bathed in the strong light pouring down from it, the studs on Mayakovsky’s large boot soles before Nobuko’s eyes continued to shine sharply. In a manner of light that spoke of having been worn down and polished on Moscow’s paved roads until the very end—

As Nobuko stared at the shining object, her eyeballs stiffened until blinking became difficult, and a heartrending ache welled up within her. At Fort Douaumont in Verdun, a golden ring lay fallen in the frost-brittle thicket—a small gun muzzle that glistened in the western sun like an infant’s rounded lips. That small circular band of gold, bearing an infinitely lonely plea, had embedded itself into her vision—now Nobuko had become one who could not read the word “war” except through that golden ring. Mayakovsky, who had ended his own life. Yet the small triangular iron studs that still shone with vital intensity on the soles of Mayakovsky’s rigid boots—boots that had affirmed Soviet society and its people’s lives with redoubled resolve—seemed to sear Nobuko’s soft breast like a violent bruise blooming livid purple. Tears pooling in her eyes, Nobuko followed the procession as it slowly resumed movement, passing the coffin’s edge where she caught a fleeting glimpse of Mayakovsky’s austere jaw and domed forehead. Borne along by the line of mourners, they descended stairs from the hall’s rear corridor into an inner courtyard frozen beneath a star-strewn sky veined with white clouds. When she stood at the courtyard’s dark center, turned back toward the building they had exited, and saw the procession’s shadowy forms still shifting behind the bright large windows, a profound shudder racked her body. Nobuko felt she had received tonight—from the soles of boots belonging to a man she’d never met alive—a secret little treasure clutched tight within her palm.

Nine

About a week after Mayakovsky’s farewell ceremony, the premiere of the late poet’s *The Bedbug* was held at the Meyerhold Theater. In the socialist society of fifty years later, all troublesome “pests” that plagued current Soviet daily life—such as bureaucratism, petty bourgeois mentality, conspiracies, and selfishness—were eradicated, and a single “bedbug” was kept as a commemorative relic of past eras in the socialist zoo.

It was a stage where socialist youth of fifty years later, seated in a tiered classroom, observed the bizarre and grotesque relic from the past, reacting in choral unison with gasps, outbursts, and curses. Acts I through IV of *The Bedbug* consisted of satirical scenes targeting anti-socialist elements in 1929, while from Act V onward, it shifted to scenes set in a socialist society fifty years later. Onto the stage, a giant prop “bedbug” was transported under strict precautions.

"The bedbug was far from being a rare creature in the reality of the masses—indeed, it was an everyday pest akin to lice—so much so that it had prevented Nobuko from sleeping peacefully in her bed at a hotel in Stalingrad; thus, the very premise that in a society fifty years later, this insect would exist as a single preserved specimen was something that could not help but make the audience laugh." The absurdity of treating bedbugs as something extremely harmful to be guarded against. The satirical humor of the natural history teacher’s lines, which explained in meticulous detail the dubious habits of that insect.

Meyerhold’s wit and Mayakovsky’s verbal magic were lavishly displayed on this stage. And each scene of *The Bedbug* proceeded with mechanically segmented clarity amidst the audience’s uproarious laughter. Nobuko and Motoko, drifting through laughter that periodically shook the hall like tidal waves or threading between surges of mirth, found themselves unable to suppress a peculiar lethargy. The audience’s very laughter pained Nobuko. That evening, Meyerhold’s auditorium seemed filled with people who had come solely to laugh, primed for explosive mirth. When particular satirical lines or scenes arrived, they erupted as if they had been waiting. Yet these hundreds of laughs were not lingering reverberations but abrupt explosions—laughter severed cleanly at the tail, devoid of afterglow. There was humor in life, but this was no spontaneous laughter of the heart—as Nobuko perceived it, it resembled a neural reflex induced by the Five-Year Plan itself.

Motoko, the theater lover, muttered in an annoyed and regretful manner.

“Leaning so heavily on the spectators—the play can’t possibly hold up!”

“Maybe it’s better to just be spectators.” “The labor union isn’t just distributing tickets for here because—”

However, for Nobuko, the emptiness of *The Bedbug* remained uncomfortable. The audience might have intended to laugh at the satire directed toward *The Bedbug*. But would the young men and women of the socialist society fifty years later—after completing ten Five-Year Plans—truly make such an exaggerated commotion over a single bedbug, rolling their eyes and throwing up their arms? Those actually battling bedbugs while being bitten could not help but laugh—embedding in their laughter a critique from an unacknowledged reality; through this satire of bedbugs, she found herself unable to resist laughing at the absurdity of socialism’s privileged youth.

Nobuko hardly laughed and watched the stage. In her eyes glittered the rim-reinforcing studs that had shone on the soles of Mayakovsky's boots as he lay in death. "The Bathhouse" and "The Bedbug". What must Mayakovsky have thought when he saw these two works of his performed on stage? With what feelings had he walked through late-night Moscow back to his study? As he trod those thought-heavy paths, ever more force entered his toes, making those rim-reinforcing studs shine brighter—when the initial vague doubts about himself had gradually accumulated in his heart, and at a certain moment his own limits became undeniably clear—Mayakovsky's studs emitted a raw light, as if they still belonged to someone who had walked straight from the pavement to lie there on that burial night.

Nobuko, with the literary newspaper still spread out on her desk, rested her head on her propped-up elbow and gazed through the hotel’s unopened double-paned window at the rooftop of the *Moscow Evening News* building.

The other day, there had been two groups of young people enjoying taking photos of each other on this rooftop. Since then, once again, a pair of young men had appeared on the rooftop. They—as if needing to attach the photos to some document—stood with businesslike efficiency, focused, pressed the shutter, and descended. That was the last time Nobuko saw youths ascending to the rooftop. The building management committee must have prohibited it. Motoko surmised as much. After all, no matter how thick the glass was, they couldn’t tolerate having those lively people clattering up there. Those coming up to the rooftop did not appear to be youths working for the Moscow Evening News, but rather young men who frequented the Print Workers’ Club within the same building.

For Nobuko, it was pleasant to watch the young people enjoying themselves on the rooftop from her high vantage point, and equally comforting to see the rooftop today—carefully preserving its glass roof—appearing devoid of human figures. From Moscow’s three stations, groups departed daily—factory workers, theater troupes, writers’ delegations—bound for kolkhoz cooperation and observation in regions where spring activities had begun. On the literary newspaper spread across Nobuko’s desk lay that very article, alongside a published appeal from the All-Russian Peasant Writers’ Alliance. The peasant writers’ organization had composed its message in rigidly formal prose. Among their ranks, a group calling itself the “Mechanized Workplace” had formed at some indeterminate time. These peasant writers had established as their principle the promotion of rural mechanization through propaganda and cooperation. Through the elimination of kulaks carried out across various regions since January in preparation for spring sowing, the unexpected nature of this “Mechanized Workplace” had been laid bare. While they had indeed collaborated on rural mechanization, it became clear this cooperation served not to transform villages into kolkhozes, but rather to help kulaks in one region concentrate tractors under their control and monopolize their use.

The All-Russian Peasant Writers’ Alliance published zealous self-criticism. The appeal published in the literary newspaper announced a reportage contest from kolkhoz peasant correspondents for the upcoming May Day. Why did Mayakovsky have to grasp socialism through the symbol of "bedbugs"?

Even when looking at the various changes manifested in the Passage Hotel’s internal way of life, the very leap itself was realistic.

On that night in 1927 when Nobuko and Motoko first arrived in Moscow—gazing at the first snow falling outside their window, hearts pounding as they listened to a passage of *The Internationale* chiming from the Kremlin clocktower—the two waiters at the Passage Hotel were utterly busy. It was not just that they had carried up the samovar to the room filled with tobacco smoke where Nobuko and several other Japanese were after ten o'clock at night, brought up the tea utensils for supper, and gone up and down two steep staircases. If there were orders, they had to carry full-course meals to any room in the Passage Hotel; and when Nobuko encountered Boris—the no-longer-young waiter with coarse hair sprouting from his thick neck flushed red, beads of sweat on his forehead as he climbed up clutching a lightly soiled napkin just to deliver a single bottle of mineral water—she could not help but feel sorry for him. Somewhere in the hallway, one of the doors had been left wide open, and from it came the loud voice of a careless man,

“Daway Narzan! (Bring Narzan water!)”

shouted, and Boris’s displeased, throaty voice—far older than that of the man who had shouted—responded in the same obsequious manner that servants of old used toward their masters, “Slushayu-s (Understood).”

When she heard this response, Nobuko felt a sense of anachronism. She was made to feel the rough manner in which those who had once been used by others now wielded their authority over people.

Three years had passed, and now that Nobuko and Motoko were living at the Passage once more, Boris—who had been called "Umibōzu" among them—was no longer at the Passage. Nosov, the dandy—wearing a ring on his little finger, applying pomade to his chestnut-colored mustache and curling it up—was now the only one working. However, this fashionable Nosov no longer needed to climb three floors carrying samovars or balance large black trays on his shoulder as he had three years prior, nor did he have to gasp out *Slushayu-s*. The Moscow Hotel Management Committee had established as part of Five-Year Plan improvements that guests at domestic traveler hotels like the Passage must take both tea and meals in the dining hall. In exchange, lodgers could now obtain hot water from the hotel kitchen at any time, just as travelers received it at stations.

Nobuko wholeheartedly welcomed the day-to-day changes in this new hotel life. When traveling from Harbin to Moscow, she took out a sky-blue enameled kettle—also purchased in Harbin—from the large wicker basket an acquaintance had entrusted her to bring. The kettle’s small base and bulbous shape made it slow to boil water, rendering it unpopular among boardinghouse mistresses. Morning and evening, Nobuko carried this sky-blue kettle to fetch hot water for tea from the kitchen. The small room at the corridor’s farthest end—which she inevitably passed through—served as the employees’ break room. From one corner of this room emerged a vividly decorated “Red Corner,” its crimson hues so intense that Nobuko’s sky-blue kettle seemed to cast red shadows as she slowly walked past. Above the room’s entrance hung a sign reading “Hotel Passage Cell.”

These developments opened a new phase in the life of Katya, the cleaning woman responsible for Nobuko and the others’ room. Katya—a young mother with a richly beautiful voice and full bosom—was scrubbing the floor of Nobuko’s room with a long-handled oiled rag as she said: “Lately our lives have completely changed—they’ve even started political education in our corner.” “That’s wonderful, Katya.—Especially wonderful for you,” Nobuko replied. “My husband is a diplomat, but I know nothing about his work. That sort of situation would be truly unfortunate.”

Katya’s husband—according to her own words—was said to be studying to become a diplomat. Katya, making her ample bosom undulate as she scrubbed with an oil cloth,

“It’s true—women always get left behind in the end.” And with her front tooth missing, she laughed at Nobuko observing her work, “Learn while there are still those to teach you.” She made an improvised proverb-like remark and left carrying a bucket. Just as the building in Astozhenka where Nobuko had lived had come to belong directly to the district housing management committee, so too it seemed the management of the Passage Hotel was now more closely administered by Moscow’s People’s Food Committee. One morning, when Nobuko went to the kitchen to fetch hot water for tea, she discovered a young woman who had set up a table in the hallway midway between the kitchen and dining room entrances and was arranging a ledger and abacus there. When Nobuko went to the dining hall for dinner, she saw the young woman—wearing a white blouse and her hair wrapped in a white platok—diligently placing an abacus as she calculated the cost of the served meals.

With the arrival of women in such supervisory roles from outside, the carefree atmosphere that had permeated the small hotel’s corridors—flowing between the employee break room, office, dining hall, and kitchen—had changed imperceptibly. In the dining hall, even when Nosov served meals, he was now strictly prohibited from accepting any tips. For Nosov, this was not so much a matter of the small amount of money as rather an issue concerning his professional pride as a waiter that he had maintained over many years, or perhaps his daily habits. The reason was that, after about a week, Nobuko had noticed several changes that had appeared in Nosov. Before one knew it, Nosov had stopped applying pomade to his proud curly mustache. One day at dinner, when she looked, his chestnut-colored mustache—once curled up—had been trimmed down to an ordinary stubby mustache. The ring on the little finger of his serving hand remained as before, but the uniquely waiter-like rhythmic lightness in his movements had vanished. The curves and spring reminiscent of nightlife work rapidly disappeared from every part of Nosov. Before long, the woman who had been stationed at the corridor table was replaced by a flaxen-haired young man of similar age—mid-twenties—who appeared to have graduated from a commercial school. Voices began to be heard again in the kitchen and break room. The young man even addressed Nobuko as she went to the kitchen with the sky-blue kettle to fetch hot water.

During her time living at the Passage, Nobuko had been buying one piece of butter every morning for one and a half roubles. Even after she began fetching only hot water and having her morning tea with bread and pickled cucumbers bought with her own rations, she still purchased the butter from the cafeteria. The black market at Apootnui Ryad had disappeared. The food store on Tverskaya for the diplomatic corps was a place Nobuko and the others did not wish to frequent, and the goods there were at special prices. Since Nobuko and the others were not employed in factories or management, they did not use workplace food stores, unlike most Moscow citizens—including Motoko’s friend Olga—who benefited from them. For Nobuko and the others, butter and cheese were items they could only obtain with difficulty from the Passage cafeteria.

Since people began setting up desks in the hallway and crowding in, there were days when Nobuko could not purchase butter. It was not that Nosov refrained from selling out of deference to those supervisors’ scrutiny, but rather that on days when—due to circumstances—the total butter allocated to the Passage barely met the daily service quota, there remained none for Nobuko to buy. On butterless days, Nobuko and the others would make do by topping their bread with thinly sliced salted cucumbers or salmon roe. Had they taken breakfast or supper in the dining hall, they could naturally have obtained butter. But after Bunmeisha refused to send Nobuko further funds, she and the others tightened their habits and now took only their main meals in the hotel dining hall.

Bunmeisha had stopped sending funds to Nobuko—citing losses from their president’s electoral campaign—which strained her finances, while the Soviet Union’s closure of the Far East Bank in Vladivostok complicated how Motoko handled her own money received through her Tokyo cousin. Nobuko and Motoko were both financially strained. Nobuko thought their current hardships in Moscow were ultimately beneficial. Concerning the Five-Year Plan’s grand design and the extraordinary efforts driving its implementation, people could read about them in *Pravda*, view them through panoramas and statistics at workers’ clubs, and hear them discussed in speeches at every assembly. At the Chemical Workers’ Club, they had built a truly magnificent model of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station under construction. The male and female workers standing around it must have been gazing intently—with such pure admiration, expectation, and pride—as they activated switches on this model of “our achievement,” watching red and blue pinpoint lights alternately sparkle at key locations across the massive structure.

In their days of striving to complete the mesmerizingly grand, beautiful, and proud Five-Year Plan, how intently were the Soviet people streamlining their individual lives? The reality Nobuko came to grasp through lived proximity was the butter shortages at the Passage, the meaning behind Nosov’s dejection, and that single table installed in the hallway between kitchen and dining hall with its visiting woman—why had the hotel’s lower floors turned so gloomy during her tenure? Then came the question of why, after being replaced by that young man, it had become possible again to hear Katya’s laughter.

Nobuko’s modest existence perceived, through life itself, all the grandeur of the Five-Year Plan while simultaneously savoring and contemplating each unavoidable mundane phenomenon that pressed itself upon her daily reality.

One evening, upon returning from the theater, Nobuko found her throat had become unbearably dry. Having just removed her coat, Nobuko resolved, "I'll fetch hot water."

She picked up the sky-blue kettle.

"They're probably closed by now." "Well, regardless—I'll go check."

Down the back stairs past midnight, Nobuko ran to the lower floor. As she hurried down the corridor toward the kitchen, the employee break room was long dark, but fortunately, the kitchen door at the end remained open. From the back came the sound of dishes being washed. Nobuko entered through the door. Despite the late hour, steam was billowing from the nickel-plated faucet of the large water heater.

“Oh, what luck! Please give me some hot water.”

The woman washing the pile of dishes stacked in the large sink was someone Nobuko had never seen before—a person around forty. With a bony, sturdy-looking build, the woman who was washing dishes alone looked at Nobuko from the wash tub.

“Here you go.”

She didn’t say *pazharista* but used *pazhariche* brusquely, like street vendors often did—a gravelly voice. The woman had rough features in her face and hair yet didn’t appear disheveled, not the sort one typically saw at the Passage. “Why are you washing dishes so late?” Nobuko asked through the steam while positioning the sky-blue kettle under the nickel water heater’s faucet.

“A delegation arrived from Germany.” “They ate after they arrived.”

“Are you temporary?” “Yes, I am.” While washing dishes, the woman continued, “Temporary work’s no good—there’s always too much to do…”

She raised a wet hand and wiped her forehead with her arm.

“Temporary work has temporary allowances, doesn’t it?” “How much do you get?”

The woman cast a swift glance at Nobuko’s modest white wisteria-patterned silk blouse. “There’s no such thing as ‘any amount.’”

To the silent Nobuko, the woman said in a gravelly voice, as a matter of course. “It doesn’t amount to much, but these days, there’s been continuous work.” “That’s what’s important.” “It means you can get by without strolling the tree-lined avenues… You understand, don’t you?” In Moscow, to speak of strolling the tree-lined avenues was to speak of selling oneself— Nobuko felt that the foundation of her understanding—which had been probing the depths of Moscow’s life—had through this woman’s words touched a place of utmost certainty at its very bottom. Five-Year Plan. Socialist construction. Though it tended to be perceived solely as a grandeur that soared ever upward—if one looked at *The Bathhouse*, Mayakovsky must have felt the same way. Or perhaps one had been compelled to consider that this was how it should be felt—but the most solid and expansive foundation of socialism lay in those few words spoken in the gravelly voice of the temporary night-shift dishwashing woman, who may have been somewhat afflicted by illness. “—Because there’s been continuous work, that’s what’s important. It means you can get by without strolling the tree-lined avenues—” “It means you can get by without strolling the tree-lined avenues—”

When she addressed Nobuko as *Panimaesshi* in an unreservedly familiar way, there was an unmistakable sincerity in her tone—the candor of women who understood what it meant to keep living.

X

In her Moscow life, Nobuko was guided by an intense desire to draw herself deeper and deeper into its foundations rather than spread widely across the surface of its vigorous activities.

Eventually, they were to leave Moscow. Funds were being depleted toward that end. Though not imminent within twelve months, as preparation for their impending absence from Moscow, Motoko had been systematically acquiring books she wanted, starting with essential ones. When visiting the Folk Art Museum, Nobuko too purchased beautiful embroidered decorative handkerchiefs and tablecloths. While buying these items as if readying for repatriation, Nobuko only half-believed in her own actions. Would she truly be leaving Moscow? The necessity of returning to Japan remained unclear to her.

When Motoko decided to travel to the Soviet Union, she proceeded with her departure preparations without getting entangled with Nobuko, who was dawdling nearby. Nobuko followed along. Motoko appeared to have settled on the plan to return to Japan during Nobuko's stay in Paris. All her daily affairs were directed toward that end. Would Nobuko ultimately leave Moscow following Motoko after all? That was something Nobuko herself did not comprehend. What Nobuko did grasp was the sole fact that Moscow still exerted a powerful pull on her. Though Motoko and Nobuko had spent years living together day after day, they weren't particularly discussing that reality—yet now they found themselves confronting this issue.

One afternoon, when Motoko had gone to the university and Nobuko was alone in the hotel room, gazing at the clear early spring sky from the window, Nobuko suddenly felt the urge to go see right away. For some time, Nobuko had been thinking frequently about the Lux Hotel located on Tverskaya Street. There lived Yamagami Motokichi, an old Japanese revolutionary. The fact that Yamagami Motokichi was there was something of an open secret, and she had heard that Hida Reiji, a newspaper reporter, had met him.

Nobuko called Hotel Lux. She asked if she could speak with Yamagami Motokichi. Soon, Yamagami Motokichi's voice came through.

“Ah—” “Hello? Hello?” It was the somewhat impatient yet vigorous voice of an elderly person. “I am Nobuko Sasa—” Fearing that a drawn-out self-introduction might seem tedious, Nobuko adopted a direct approach— “Would it be possible to meet with you?”

she asked. “Sure. Come.” “When’re you coming?” “I can come now.” “I’m calling from the Passage right now.”

“Well then, let’s say I’ll be waiting at 2:40.”

Nobuko hurried after him in a flustered manner and emphasized her point a bit more strongly. “Even though I’m coming up without any particular business, is that all right?” “That doesn’t matter—at 2:40 PM. Got that?” Yamagami Motokichi informed Nobuko of one or two things she needed to know about visiting the Lux and hung up the phone.

After hanging up the receiver, Nobuko lingered for a short while at the corner of the corridor. How simple it was. Because what she had been contemplating for days had been settled so straightforwardly, Nobuko thought that her own faltering had been nothing but futile hesitation.

Returning to her room, Nobuko kept checking the clock about every five minutes. The distance between Passage and Lux was about fifteen minutes or so at a leisurely walk. Nobuko left the hotel early and walked up Tverskaya Street, which formed a gentle incline. Before the Revolution, the place that had been Morozov’s store had become a grocery store exclusively for the diplomatic corps. A little further ahead on the right stood Hotel Lux. Exactly at the appointed time, Nobuko pushed the glass door at the entrance and stepped into the deep marble-tiled hall.

The hall was devoid of people. As her figure was reflected in the mirrors mounted on the marble wainscoting lining both sides, Nobuko handed her passport to the receptionist seated at the desk at the far end. She wrote her full name and that of Yamagami Motokichi, whom she was there to meet, on a small piece of paper. The receptionist’s gaze was calm yet carried the sharpness of one who remembered well what he saw.

The inner corridor of the building where many people lived was rather poorly lit, and the heated air carried the smell of shchi—cabbage soup—simmering, likely from a nearby dining hall. Through the corridor where people busily came and went passed a woman carrying an aluminum pot. Nobuko found it novel to sense an atmosphere that was both businesslike and domestic. Lux was supposed to house only those affiliated with the Comintern. The imposing impression Nobuko had associated with the Comintern's name was made strikingly human by the scent of shchi wafting through the corridor.

With the tension in her shoulders easing, Nobuko turned left from the main corridor toward an even dimmer side passageway, advancing while gazing at the shut double doors ahead. The number 318 was painted directly on the door in white. This was meant to be Yamagami Motokichi's room.

Nobuko knocked with considerable force.

“Hey.” Such a reply came. It was Yamagami’s voice she had heard on the phone earlier. Nobuko opened the door slightly and positioned herself where she couldn’t see inside, remaining there—

“May I come in?”

“Come in.” At the desk on the right side of the old, large, cluttered room, Yamagami Motokichi was typing on a typewriter. “I’ll be done soon, so sit there and wait. Anyway, you’re not in a hurry, I suppose?” That way of speaking carried a straightforward familiarity Nobuko had sensed in the Autobiography, delivered with brusque efficiency.

“Please take your time. I’m not in a hurry.” Beside a wide, three-paned bay window—referred to as an Italian-style bay window—stood a corner table draped with white cloth, with a built-in bench for two along the far wall. Nobuko settled herself into the nook. Yamagami Motokichi—wearing a soft leather jumper comfortably worn with age—continued typing without rising from his desk, having addressed Nobuko from his position from the start. The corners of her mouth relaxed involuntarily. His typing carried a peculiar dissonance: though his fingers moved with an awkward cadence, each keystroke struck with such force that the letters threatened to pierce through the paper—clack, clack, clack-clack—resounding loudly.

At the bay window were various items of indistinct shape—objects whose contents and purposes would be unclear to an outsider. None were for office use; one could discern they all served domestic purposes. A single rope had been stretched across the bay window. There hung women’s socks with a carelessly casual air. Viewed from where Nobuko sat to the left, those socks dangling directly before the window appeared extraordinarily long. Ah—the daughter was here. Nobuko thought with gladness for Yamagami Motokichi.

Fifteen or sixteen years had already passed since Yamagami Motokichi left Japan. About a year ago there had been rumors his youngest daughter came to Moscow; Nobuko had even read Japanese newspaper articles framing it as an “escape from Japan.” His family had been persecuted solely for their connection to him—not only were his wife and three children denied peaceful mornings within their own home’s confines—they were barred from any means of employment for survival. Reports stated Ikuyo—now arrived in Moscow—spoke of how brutally they’d been tormented in Japan and vowed never again to reside in such horrors. Though his eldest daughter—a dancer—appeared initially present too; ultimately only seventeen-year-old Ikuyo remained at her father’s side.

The limply stretched-out, hanging women’s socks made Nobuko imagine the unguarded life of father and daughter in this room and evoked thoughts of the woman who was Osugi Sakae’s sister. The woman named Satsuki had married and had a son named Soichi. Soichi, a six-year-old boy, was strangled to death by the Kempeitai on September 20, 1923, alongside Osugi Sakae and Ito Noe. There had been an occasion when a woman named Shizuko Mishima, who published an independent magazine through her own editing, held a gathering to console Mrs. Satsuki. That gathering too was conducted privately among close acquaintances on the second floor of Shizuko Mishima’s residence. From the way she styled her hair to her entire bearing, Mrs. Satsuki carried herself with the unassuming demeanor of a middle-class housewife—a woman who, from birth and as Osugi Sakae’s sister, had suppressed everything to become what ordinary standards deemed an irreproachable wife and mother. Not a single word of anger toward the Kempeitai’s brutality escaped Mrs. Satsuki’s lips. Modestly folding her hands on her lap and raising her face that had been bowed until then, she said, “I too have lost my reason to live because of this matter.” She spoke quietly. It was said her husband had married her believing Osugi Sakae and his sister Satsuki were separate entities. The couple’s conviction that mutual understanding would let them build a happy home gradually revealed itself as naive. Her husband—competent and employed at a company—was stripped of promotions at the final moment whenever opportunities arose, because he had married Osugi Sakae’s sister. Since their marriage, this had happened three or four times. The thought of her husband’s unvoiced anguish became unbearable, and Mrs. Satsuki had repeatedly considered removing herself from his life. Each time, the fear of young Soichi losing his mother had bound the couple together. Even Soichi was killed for being Osugi Sakae’s nephew. “No matter how I strive or wish for others’ happiness, it is a fate never permitted.”

Nobuko’s body, present at that gathering, felt as painfully constricted as if bound in a straw mat by Mrs. Satsuki’s words. Unable to settle into married life with Tsukuda and having drawn closer to Shizuko Mishima’s active daily life, Nobuko thought with single-minded conviction that Mrs. Satsuki and her husband’s way of thinking was too self-victimizing. If they were a couple who intended to love each other under unconventional circumstances, why would they remain entangled in conventional company employment and promotions there forever? They could have at least carried their own cooking pots, she thought. But for Mrs. Satsuki, altering the belief that “if only I weren’t around” seemed to disrupt her entire course. It was clear Mrs. Satsuki had not come to that day’s gathering expecting comfort from several women.

Nobuko had met Mrs. Satsuki only once, both before and after that occasion. Osugi Sakae also had a daughter named Mako. That girl survived because she had happened to be visiting her grandfather in the countryside. When one thought about it, Mako was not living like Yamagami’s daughter—who had come to Moscow and hung her leisurely washed socks before the Lux’s bay window without concern for others’ judgment.

The lively sound of the typewriter stopped. The printed paper was removed from the machine and fastened with a clip. “There, finished.” Yamagami Motokichi’s stocky frame—not tall but solid—moved to the worn armchair across from the table where Nobuko sat. “Kept you waiting too long.” Then Yamagami’s distinctive sanpaku eyes—which Nobuko knew well from the large Pravda photo marking his seventieth birthday last December—fixed directly on her. Nobuko met the unguarded, appraising gaze of this elderly revolutionary who had lived in exile and unexpectedly become a father in his twilight years. Even softened by aged muscles, Yamagami’s square jaw betrayed a stubbornness that seemed to embody an indomitable spirit. Knuckled thick fingers. Rigid brows. Neither Yamagami’s room nor his person contained anything that could be called new. Yet like the ancient stones of Hyuga—weatherworn but enduring—the seventy-year-old man stood stubbornly firm and uncluttered. Nobuko felt an odd kinship rise within her, like when an old hound and pup sniff warily yet find no cause for quarrel.

“I had the honor of reading your Autobiography long ago.” “And then, the one that came out in *Imprecorr* the other day—” Yamagami Motokichi’s paper titled “Japan in the Course of the Global Economic Crisis” taught Nobuko, who was unfamiliar with the affairs of the Japanese Communist Party, about its duties, the current state of struggles being waged, and how deviations within the party constituted right-wing opportunist liquidationism. Nobuko also learned a great deal about Japan’s economic crisis linked to the Wall Street panic and the circumstances of its war preparations.

“I see. I also read a novel you wrote in some magazine quite a while back—though I don’t remember what it was called.” When Yamagami Motokichi said “boku,” it carried the air of an old man wearing indigo work clothes. “I had heard you were in Moscow. Well, you made it here after all.”

When writing papers and such, Yamagami Motokichi used English. When Nobuko visited this room, what he was typing was also an English typescript. However, the Japanese he spoke was not the least bit rusty; it was vibrant. When asked how she felt about Soviet life, Nobuko answered truthfully.

“I think those seven months wandering about—seeing even glimpses of London and Berlin—did me real good.” “In Japan I’d been utterly ignorant, but witnessing places like London made me fundamentally grasp what capitalist society truly is.” “As for Germany—though I only caught a glimpse of Berlin—the whole place left me uneasy.” “I’ve come to properly digest the Soviet Union’s worth.”

“Ha ha ha ha, so you’ve swallowed it whole, have you?” “That’s just how it goes.” “Same as when I saw London and Edinburgh’s slums in ’94 and started chewing on socialism for real.”

Yamagami Motokichi talked for a while, and “I’ll treat you to one of the jams I made.”

He stood up lightly and withdrew to a corner of the room where Nobuko had been avoiding looking too intently. In that corner lay a bed with weakened springs. At the foot of the bed stood a modest screen, behind which there appeared to be a water source—a space that seemed to serve for washing one's face and brewing tea. From beyond the screen, Yamagami Motokichi called out loudly to Nobuko, who remained by the window some distance away.

“I’m a much better cook than someone like you!” “In my youth, in America, I did all sorts of menial jobs.” “Making jam is something I’m particularly good at, you know.”

Nobuko burst out laughing.

“Then in Moscow, there are plenty, aren’t there? Strawberries and all sorts of berries are abundant and cheap.” “But I’m so busy I can’t even find time to make much jam.” In his hurried manner, with both thick-fingered hands holding a cup of poured tea, Yamagami Motokichi appeared from behind the screen. Nobuko felt it would be impolite to remain seated and let him serve her. “Let me help.”

She began rising from her seat.

“There’s nothing left to do.” “I’m just bringing the jam.” A glossy yellow raspberry jam in a small glass container was served.

“Try it. It’s good.” As she was told, Nobuko took some jam onto a small plate and, while drinking her tea Russian-style, found the jam genuinely delicious rather than merely polite. It was indeed skillfully made, and Nobuko and the others had been living without sweets apart from the dried fruit compote served with dinner. “Don’t you drink alcohol?” “No.” “Rosa was a woman who could hold her liquor.” “Do you mean Rosa Luxemburg?”

“Ah.” “At the Amsterdam conference, Rosa interpreted for me—she was an extraordinary woman.” “A woman of fire.” “She’d drink wine from dawn, always merry like that, but when her mind sharpened in those moments—why, men were left floundering.”

His tone suggested her visage had revived itself there before them.

“We only know Rosa from photographs with her hair in a sidelock and wearing a white blouse—” “That woman was extraordinary.” “I met Clara then too, but compared to Rosa, Clara was far more... conventional.” “You mean Zetkin?” “Ah.” “That woman was conventional.” Nobuko listened to Yamagami Motokichi’s storytelling with soft attentiveness to its nuanced depths. She felt something stir within her—this man who had turned seventy amid lifelong struggles could still recall Rosa with such undimmed vividness. Even his manner of comparing her to Clara Zetkin unconsciously revealed his preferences as a man toward women. For someone perpetually busy like him, these rare moments of relaxation with Nobuko—someone unconnected to his official duties—naturally drew out such reminiscences, and she cherished this entire atmosphere with quiet joy.

“At that time in Amsterdam, you met Plekhanov too, didn’t you?” “Yes, yes.” Yamagami Motokichi—his three-white eyes with pouches beneath both lower lids—looked at Nobuko sitting primly before him as if startled. “You know such things in detail.” “But”

Nobuko laughed amusedly.

“It’s written down, you know.” “That can’t be true.”

A sharp, straight gaze—as if reproaching—shot from Yamagami Motokichi’s eyes. Nobuko sensed he had conflated this with matters concerning the “autobiography.” “It’s not about your ‘autobiography.’ These are things others have written about you.”

“Ah, I see. I understand.”

“Things like making an appeal against Russia’s invasion war at the Amsterdam conference, the congress passing anti-war resolutions, and Heimin Shimbun opposing the war—aren’t these old matters relatively well-known?” “Hmm.” For just an instant, an expression—as though trying to recall some distant, elusive memory—flitted across Yamagami Motokichi’s deeply wrinkled face. That expression, with decades folded within its shadow, vanished immediately.

“Have you ever seen the Heimin Shimbun?”

“No.” “Shall I show you?”

“Really? Do you have it with you?”

“I’ll show you.” Yamagami Motokichi withdrew again to the corner where the bed stood and returned to the table by the window far sooner than Nobuko had anticipated. “They’re properly complete from the inaugural issue.” The bound volume of *Heimin Shimbun* on the table bore twenty-six years of age yet remained remarkably preserved—not a single edge of its newspapers curled or torn. “My word, how immaculately kept they are!”

Nobuko marveled wholeheartedly. She thought she could understand Yamagami Motokichi's feelings in preserving with such care the Heimin Shimbun they had once published in Japan long ago. Japanese newspaper journalists who occasionally succeeded in interviewing Yamagami Motokichi always spoke of his nostalgia. They wrote that he, as a world-renowned Japanese revolutionary occupying an important position within the Comintern, still harbored a deep-seated nostalgia for Japan in his heart. When meeting journalists and such, Yamagami Motokichi would likely discuss topics unrelated to his current activities, just as he did with Nobuko. And the Heimin Shimbun would come up too. That Yamagami Motokichi cherished the Heimin Shimbun so dearly—indeed, it was remarkable how he had carried it around the world for so many years—but she thought interpreting this as mere homesickness for Japan would be utterly preposterous. This bound collection, accompanied by Yamagami Motokichi as its most fitting annotator, had moved to Moscow as what could be called a small overseas Japanese revolutionary library.

Nobuko stood up from the stool and began looking through the Japanese Heimin Shimbun starting from the November 1903 issue. Kōtoku Shūsui, Sakai Toshihiko, Nishikawa Kōjirō, Kawakami Kiyoshi, Kinoshita Naoe, Takano Fusajirō, Sawada Hanjirō. Some were names Nobuko recognized as historical figures; others were names of people she didn't know at all.

“This is Japan’s first class-based newspaper. They did substantial work. Kōtoku Shūsui wrote this inaugural manifesto.”

As she turned through each page one by one, Nobuko vividly felt how various people had been swept away within history’s current, their figures eventually drifting into oblivion. “That someone like Nishikawa Kōjirō would be writing here—it feels so strange. When I was little, I once saw a long-haired man wearing a white sash with ‘Nishikawa Kōjirō’ written on it standing by the roadside giving a speech. Would that be him?”

“That’s right. This man too eventually became an anarchist and met a peculiar fate. Sakai too—at first he wrote editorials opposing tax increases and was thrown into jail for publishing his co-translation of *The Communist Manifesto* with Kōtoku Shūsui—but being inherently shrewd, he ended up vulgarized. The one who truly wasted his potential was Kōtoku Shūsui. That man was the genuine article—the first in Japan to speak of imperialism.”

Yamagami Motokichi, seeming to have a particular issue he wanted to show Nobuko, flipped through the bound volume of *Heimin Shimbun* himself.

“Look at this.” “Isn’t this fascinating? This is that famous ‘Letter to the Russian Socialist Party’ from *Heimin Shimbun*, to which Lenin wrote a reply in *Iskra*.” It was a document appealing for Japanese socialists opposing Russia’s invasion and the Russian Socialist Party to cooperate and fight together. “Didn’t people like Kuroiwa Ruikō and Uchimura Kanzō also oppose the Russo-Japanese War at some point?”

“That was before *Heimin Shimbun* was published. Kuroiwa had advocated anti-war theory in *Yorozu Chōhō*.” “In about half a year, he lost heart and completely changed his tune by the time he was holding lecture meetings at the Youth Hall.” “What about Uchimura Kanzō? He maintained his position, didn’t he?”

“This was ruined by the Great War.”

How had it been ruined? As Nobuko was about to open her mouth to ask, there came a knock at Yamagami Motokichi’s door. The knocking instinctively suggested someone Japanese—a rhythmless, insistent rapping without pause between strikes. Nobuko grew uneasy at the thought that one of the Japanese regulars here might enter. “I should be going.”

Nobuko said. “No.” Yamagami Motokichi, who had gone out to the door, simply returned to the table.

“You can stay another fifteen minutes or so.” The Japanese *Heimin Shimbun*, which had been published weekly, continued for one year before being discontinued in January 1905. The final issue was printed in red.

Nobuko thought it thoughtless that she had remained in the room for a much longer time than she had initially intended.

“Thank you very much. I had the opportunity to view such rare materials—” No longer attempting to return to her original corner, Nobuko asked as she began preparing to leave.

“Were there any women who participated in *Heimin Shimbun*?”

"There were women in administrative roles, but none in editing." Yamagami Motokichi remained standing as well, watching Nobuko put on her coat with aged eyes that showed white beneath the irises. "How about literature? Have any women of promise begun emerging in Japan?" "Do you read publications like *Bungei Sensen* or *Senki*?" "I've been reading *Senki*." "Don't you think young people are starting to emerge through such channels?"

“Yeah. That’s how these things work.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Nobuko left Yamagami Motokichi’s room. Then, after retrieving her passport at the entrance reception desk, she walked straight down Tverskaya toward Red Square. After exiting Hotel Lux, Nobuko walked at an unconsciously hurried, excited pace for a block or two. Her footsteps gradually calmed and slowed. She had emerged from Yamagami Motokichi with complex impressions. That he was an elder of Japan’s socialist movement. That he had been tempered through decades of experience in international movements. There was not the slightest falsehood in any of it. His theories. His movements. Though all belonged to the world at large—when he spoke of Rosa, declaring “She was a remarkable woman”—there lingered in Nobuko’s senses as a young woman a subtle resistance: the presence of a man from early Meiji Japan. Yamagami Motokichi’s Japanese remained lively, yet its linguistic sensibilities were distinctly Meiji. For Yamagami Motokichi’s presence in Moscow and the Japanese men around him, there existed work that rendered such matters trivial—and a way of life that made it so.

Midway, Nobuko emerged onto a tree-lined avenue and walked beneath the linden trees with their still-firm buds before May Day. For those people, everything must be so clear-cut—so distinctly this or that. And yet, despite his being seventy years old, a unique vitality radiated from Yamagami Motokichi’s distinctive triangular eyes, stubborn jaw, and brusque manner of speech—awakening the Japanese woman within Nobuko and resonating with his own Meiji-era masculinity—how fascinating it all was.

Yamagami Motokichi's walnut-like firmness. Ryosaku Hachiya, who had recently lived in Paris, came to mind like a plum or something of that sort. And within herself too, there clung a watery pulp that might already be rotting. Nobuko could not believe Yamagami Motokichi had failed to see it.

Eleven

On May Day, Nobuko and Motoko did not secure places in the viewing stands along the Kremlin walls within the square as they had two years prior; instead, they walked through the marching columns pressing toward Red Square, moving from street to street. Last year’s May Day had been in Warsaw. Warsaw’s May Day had been crushed under an ominous pressure. Behind the marchers’ heads, how uneasily those red flags must have swayed. With the flags’ trembling, a fragment of *The Internationale* suddenly rose—only to snap off short—until even the red banners vanished completely somewhere.

In Berlin, it was "Bloody May Day." In the square in front of the Karl Liebknecht House, workers' blood was shed. The large white circle of protest remained marked on the square's stones. On the black rough-stone base of the adjacent building, several spots showed white paint scrapes. These were traces of bullet holes left by police who had even injured workers' children during May Day.

A small golden ring that Nobuko had not possessed two years ago when watching the parade from the foreigners’ viewing seats in Moscow’s Red Square now lay sunken and gleaming in the depths of her black eyes. It was a gun barrel. It was a gun barrel that, buried entirely in the shade of frost-withered plains grass at Verdun, revealed only its muzzle like a small golden ring; that glinted in the late afternoon sun; that, when Nobuko—unthinkingly dropping to one knee—brushed her fingertips against it, whispered and declared to her, “I want to live.”

The impressions carved into Nobuko’s heart and body from countries outside the Soviet placed her spirit in a peculiar aridity as Moscow’s joyous May Day preparations advanced. The gazes of people from other lands—those unknown to inhabitants living solely within Moscow who envisioned tomorrow amid Soviet conditions—the retreating figures of workers hastening away, the unclean damp peculiar stench that had saturated East End parks—all these revived through Nobuko’s very gaze and posture the odor of a certain way of life, their fierce contrast now pressing upon her unbearably.

Now, this was Moscow’s May Day! Look carefully. Ah, here was Moscow’s May Day. With a mind that seemed to verify each member of the invisible multitude accompanying her, Nobuko walked through streets filled with forests of music, red flags, and placards—linking arms with Motoko, colliding with the jostling crowds, being pressed from all sides.

Nobuko and the others walked up and down Tverskaya Street for a while, then detoured around Theater Square and went to the Moskva River Embankment Park. On one side where the Kremlin’s Tatar-style outer walls soared high, facing the Moskva River’s broad flow, this park—beloved by people for its beauty in June when lilac thickets burst into bloom and its rare waterside vistas within Moscow—stood as a cherished space.

Nobuko and the others entered the park from a direction that went against the human tide. This was because all columns that had finished marching through Red Square would invariably first descend toward this park's vicinity before dispersing to their respective directions. From Red Square came ceaselessly surging Hurrahs that thundered toward them. This year, loudspeakers had been installed in this riverside park too, so voices celebrating May Day and delivering words of encouragement from Red Square's stands mingled with the roar of Hurrahs, resounded through the dust-filled air of the park, and spread out across the sun-warmed midday surface of the Moskva River.

Standing by the lilac bushes, Motoko lit a cigarette and listened intently to the glittering river surface, the moving multicolored human waves, and every rise and fall of the sounds resonating through sky and ground—until finally, she muttered: “It’s different from two years ago.”

Motoko muttered as if unable to contain that impression.

“Do you think so too?” Nobuko was happy! she exclaimed.

“Where do you think it’s different?” The moment Nobuko left the hotel that morning and took in the marching columns filling Tverskaya Boulevard at a glance, she intuited that this year’s May Day differed from two years prior. What a multitude of flags—large and small—had multiplied! Their fabric, designs, and even flagpoles had completely changed from two years ago, now sturdier in quality. Moreover, brass bands had increased. While groups still played accordion-like garmoshkas and sang during the procession’s wait—as tradition dictated—factory bands now stood at the forefront with instruments glittering as if specially prepared for May Day, their cheerful yet solemn pride evident in every earnest gesture. Though struck by these changes, Nobuko noticed the marchers’ attire remained largely unchanged from two years before. Both women and men still wore sneakers. The only difference lay in whether they were freshly washed or brand new; otherwise, just as Nobuko had seen previously, people wore their modest May Day finery in haphazard mismatches.

As she walked along the sidewalk overflowing with parade cheer, Nobuko's chest tightened. These people had prepared union flags and cell unit flags for this year's May Day with care—crafting placards meticulously and even bringing brass bands to march—while treating their own attire as secondary. The atmosphere radiated working-class pride and each individual's conviction in their own existence. What would May Day look like with so many unemployed? Nobuko recalled Warsaw Square's oppressive air—the ashen profile of a man pressed against café glass.

Still gripping Motoko’s fingertips tightly, Nobuko watched the procession intently but did not voice such impressions. To Nobuko, these thoughts were truths from her heart’s depths—she had no desire to see how Motoko’s clever, sardonic lips might twist.

But Motoko, too, was feeling what she felt—— “Hey, where do you think it’s different from two years ago?” “Various things are different—” Motoko, her left hand holding a cigarette while supporting her elbow, thrust out her chin. “Just the way these people are walking is completely different from two years ago.” “How exactly?” It seemed Nobuko could discern what had caught Motoko’s eye too. But she wanted to hear it from Motoko herself.

“Their bodies and spirits haven’t fallen apart in the slightest.” “There’s none of that now—like two years ago when just finishing the march would make everyone slide and slip all the way home like schoolchildren after an outing.” “What a tremendous difference.” “They’re marching so briskly now, aren’t they?”

By the lilacs where Nobuko and the others stood watching, men and women flowed through the park—not merely passing before them but streaming in from all directions—gathered in large and small groups, laughing and chatting, shifting the now-furled heavy flags from shoulder to shoulder as they moved. Yet just as Motoko had said, not a single face among them bore the slackened expression of those who had concluded their annual event. The density of people's mood had not diminished.

“There’s a tautness to them,” Motoko said. “Every person carries themselves as if their spine were steel.” Moscow’s May Day had been celebrated year after year, yet this particular mood—absent not just in the festivities of two years prior—bore the distinct cadence of the Five-Year Plan’s second year.

Before Nobuko and the others who were watching passed a large crowd of men and women carrying flags and placards. They were publishing workers. Five-Year Plan in Four Years! A red-covered book-shaped prop with the slogan as its headline. Eradicate Illiteracy! Beneath it was written out the Five-Year Plan's illiteracy eradication expenditure of 246.37 million rubles. This year's characteristic feature was how one in every four union placards displayed their workplace's Five-Year Plan production growth index. A cluster of young female workers had uniformly tied their hair with red headscarves. Round faces, slightly sallow narrow faces. All manner of faces. Their blonde hair glowed golden against the red headscarves' sheen. Canvas sneakers, pale coarse socks. Walking briskly along the riverbank, they remained unaware of their socks beginning to sag and twist downward as they moved.

Within that group, Nobuko discovered an unusual placard. Depicting a distant view of a kolkhoz landscape, it bore the words: "Read the Peasants’ Newspaper!" Then precisely where there should have been magnificently undulating wheat fields across the cultivated land’s sky—though unfortunately, due to poor artistic skill, the wheat ears drawn on the placard amounted to nothing more than a flood of yellowish paint—were written: “Don’t be Dazzled by Success.” Stalin. Collectivization! Mechanization! Rural Five-Year Plan! The slogans continued. The placard carrier was an elderly man—one of Moscow’s workers who dyed their attire cream-colored from May Day for summer hunting. His slightly stooped, small frame wore what was customary in Moscow: a grape-colored raincoat doubling as an overcoat.

“Hey, take a look at that placard.”

Nobuko prompted Motoko to take notice. Motoko’s eyes also showed a faint interest as she looked, but—

“Huh, looks like the old man made that himself.” “Hmm, I wonder…”

For May Day, the preparation committees of every workplace had devised ideas to bring new innovations to their placards. However, with "Five-Year Plan in Four Years!" and "Oppose imperialist war!" being major immediate themes shared by all, whenever these committees selected slogans, they favored phrases beginning with imperatives like "Annihilate!" As a result, the placards rippling through the streets Nobuko and the others walked were—just like the thousands upon tens of thousands of red flags streaming without a single alternate color among them—repetitions of similar phrases. "Annihilate!" Following this, some targeted imperialist war, others hoarders. "Annihilate!" Bureaucratism. And so on— ——

Bathed in ample sunlight, the black letters of the placard—"Don’t be Dazzled by Success!"—slowly making their way back along the dusty riverside path in the park felt strangely fresh to Nobuko, awakening a sense of lived experience as they captivated her heart.

While her attention was held by the placards, the image of the "red corner" in Hotel Passage’s employee room rose in Nobuko’s mind. When Nobuko and the others had moved from Astozhenka, on the pale blue wall of that room, an essay by Stalin cut out from Pravda had been pasted up as a wall newspaper. The title of that essay was "The Dazzlement of Success." The slogan had undoubtedly been taken from there.

The collectivization of rural kolkhozes had rapidly succeeded, and by late February, 50 percent of farms across the Soviet had been collectivized, with 90 percent of seeds for spring sowing already gathered under the plan—all of which the newspapers had just boisterously reported not long ago. Stalin’s essay was an astonishingly frank work that cited concrete examples of various coercive methods being implemented under the guise of such “success” and demanded self-criticism. The success of the kolkhozes had given rise among some leaders to the sentiment that “since we can rush to achieve socialism’s complete victory in one stroke—” it had fostered a mood of “We can do anything!” In the Turkestan region, there had been instructors who threatened farmers with force, intimidating those reluctant to join kolkhozes by withholding irrigation from their fields or cutting off industrial supplies. Nobuko learned these rumors had been true. Stalin’s essay criticized the “policies” of instructors who—without distinguishing between the differing conditions of Turkestan and Ukraine—rushed for fame through “bureaucratic decree-driven authoritarianism and petty threats,” paper-only resolutions, and “boastful resolutions about nonexistent kolkhozes,” likening them to the “policies” of Sergeant Prishibeyev, protagonist of Chekhov’s satirical novel. The plow of criticism powerfully turned over garbage heaps, and there Nobuko saw strange insects and foul waste being unearthed and exposed to sunlight. the kolkhoz organizations’ “easy” and “unexpected success”—an atmosphere where such conditions could only arise— Through dispassionate analysis, the essay pursued with relentless clarity how this “slovenly, foolish mood—‘We can do anything!’”—had emerged solely from success-induced intoxication that frequently eroded clear reason and sober perspective.

Even on the wall newspaper in the employee room of the Passage that Nobuko passed by while carrying her sky-blue kettle, this essay by Stalin had been read repeatedly by everyone until it became quite worn. The essay had awakened a strong trust in people’s lived experiences. Because the unreasonable methods that had manifested in the collectivization process and been passed from mouth to mouth had been vaguely anticipated ever since the January essay on the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. The unreasonable methods of some altered form or unfamiliar new systems manifested even in such details as the People’s Food Committee newly dispatching personnel to manage the Passage, and in the hearts of citizens, a kind of unrelenting pressure had been accumulating day by day.

The fact that Stalin’s essay had fundamentally criticized the "ludicrous attempt to leap over oneself" provided all honest Soviet citizens with a foundation for their conscience.

Regarding the progress of the kolkhoz organization as a class-based endeavor, the attitude with which this essay meticulously elucidated—as an inseparable whole—both “practical results” and points of critical significance “for the Party’s internal life and education” instilled in Nobuko herself a sense of trust and joy.

Having devoted tremendous effort to reading that essay over two days, Nobuko drew a thick red pencil line under the final passage and murmured with deep satisfaction, "Exactly!" "The technique of leadership is crucial." "Against two fronts—namely, both against those who lag behind and those who rush ahead—we must fight." Nobuko thought this was precisely right.

Now, unexpectedly finding a placard that read "Don't Be Dazzled by Success!", Nobuko recalled all those things. She had spent long hours leaning over that essay, elbows planted on its pages, pondering every implication. That essay was the one. That referred to Afinogenov's four-act play Chudak (The Eccentric), which she'd seen at the Second Art Theater days earlier. The heroic mold of Five-Year Plan protagonists had solidified onstage - all meaningful action now seemed predetermined as Communist Party territory. Afinogenov's comedy shattered that template, capturing how a non-Party "eccentric" achieved class cooperation through his own methods. While skillfully holding the audience's attention, it showed workplace cell leaders who understood the flexibility needed to let such eccentrics thrive.

“Chudak” (The Eccentric) was watched with warm laughter. The protagonist of Mayakovsky’s “The Bathhouse” (Banya), a proletarian inventor, was named Chudakov. That was a name derived from a play on chudo (miracle). He disappeared into a strange elevated spot at the curtain call. Chudak was an eccentric just as the name implied, but the essence of Chudak was by no means that of a stubborn oddity. As she watched Chudak—earnest at heart yet on a lively stage delivering lighthearted jabs that fiercely attacked bureaucratism and stubbornness, making people laugh—Nobuko sensed something in Afinogenov’s life that was entirely different from Mayakovsky: a supple, resilient sort of wisdom. At the same time, she felt that the reality changing under the Five-Year Plan had also begun to affirm a different way of thinking than before regarding the existence and evaluation of such ordinary people who were not Communist Party members and their activities.

“Don’t be Dazzled by Success!” The slogan on the placard—while striking Nobuko anew with its calm yet potent force that sustained all of today’s May Day brilliance—gradually receded beyond the human tide until, stretching upward at last, it vanished from her vantage point. Released momentarily from tension, Nobuko found herself enveloped once more by the crowd’s roar and the “Ura!” resurging from Red Square.

“This year’s May Day seems to have so much substance to it, doesn’t it?”

Following the flow of people and retracing their path toward Tverskaya Street, Nobuko said to Motoko, who accompanied her with an air of reducing complexity to simplicity.

“Now that you mention it, I suppose so.” “It’s not just about being energetic—like that placard earlier—don’t you think there’s a new vertical depth emerging within that vigor?” That solid foundation at its core—Nobuko felt as though she had taken it into her heart.

Twelve

On this May Day, armed workers marched in Kawasaki, Japan. When Nobuko came across such an article amidst the May Day news from various countries that were being reported one after another in Pravda, she was shocked. Nobuko wondered what on earth Japan had become.

“It says hundreds of revolutionary workers marched with weapons—but why?” It did not seem to have the same meaning as the 1918 Rice Riots. The act of arming was not carried out nationwide; such actions occurred only in Kawasaki City.

"The idea of them being armed sounds odd," "when clashing with the police would be their limit anyway—what's the point of arming themselves—" Junji Kambara, the young painter sitting on the auxiliary bed near the entrance to Nobuko and the others' room, added as if explaining Motoko's skepticism: "Things have gotten absolutely terrible lately!" He went on to describe aspects of Japan that Nobuko and the others hadn't known about.

“Even during the tram strike, when the employees were keeping quiet, they suddenly fired tear gas.” “Did you see them?” “Since I was already in Berlin by the end of last year, I didn’t witness the actual events, but did you see the photos that appeared in *Senki*?” Nobuko and the others had been living communally in a single hotel room with Kambara Junji, a young painter who had unexpectedly come from Berlin to Moscow about two weeks before May Day.

Kambara was considerate, stepping away when taking off his nightclothes at bedtime or when the two women were getting dressed in the morning to avoid inconveniencing Nobuko and Motoko. Within those parameters, having a man live with two women wasn't particularly troublesome, but the circumstances of Kambara Junji's sudden appearance in Nobuko and Motoko's lives had been abrupt from the beginning.

One afternoon, a phone call came to Nobuko from VOKS (Society for Foreign Cultural Relations). To Nobuko, who had not been visiting VOKS much lately, they said there was something they urgently wanted to ask of her and that she should come immediately. "I wonder what this is about." She wondered if someone from theater or film had come from Japan again, and perhaps it was something like assisting in those negotiations. "They should have called you instead." While getting ready, Nobuko's tone carried a hint of complaint.

“If it were you, you’d grasp the language properly.” “I don’t want to.” “Bukko-chan should handle it.” “In the end, Bukko’s scattergun Russian would prove more useful than my painstakingly correct stammering.” “As long as Bukko-chan can pluck the right words from the barrage, her Russian gets straight to the point, doesn’t it?” “Anyway, I’ll go check.” “If it’s beyond me, I’ll decline properly.”

“Right, of course that’s fine.” When she visited Novamirsky on VOKS’s second floor, there sat a young Japanese man beside his desk. Upon seeing Nobuko enter, the young man half-rose with a look of recognition. Novamirsky,

“Oh, Ms. Sasa!”

He stood up, bent his towering frame over the desk toward Nobuko, and took her hand.

“Please have a seat, Ms. Sasa.”

When Nobuko sat down, he leaned his elbows on the desk, propped his body back, and began in that peculiar bass voice of his—the kind that made his Adam’s apple seem to have dropped an octave lower.

“This is the situation, Ms. Sasa.” “The Japanese youth here is a painter who has just come from Berlin.” “Heru Junji Kanbāra.” Novamirsky introduced Junji Kambara to Nobuko.

“He speaks German. However, he doesn’t know Russian at all. How about this—could you and Ms. Yoshimi somehow manage to settle him in?”

Nobuko felt something about the conversation seemed backward. VOKS was supposed to be an organization that arranged accommodations in Moscow for people like him. “I don’t fully grasp the matter,” she said. “Why should we have to look after him—personally?” As she spoke, various concrete doubts welled up within her.

“We never met him in Berlin.” “We’ve only just met him now for the first time.” Whether Kambara Junji truly knew no Russian whatsoever or had somehow grasped bits of it, Nobuko disregarded such considerations and spoke unhesitatingly in her grammatically precarious Russian.

“I don’t know what kind of painter he is,” Nobuko said. “How he lived in Berlin—we don’t know that either. Are you aware of all these things?” “I don’t know either,” Novamirsky replied. “But he has brought several paintings he did in Berlin, which the art department is currently reviewing—please wait a moment.” Novamirsky stood up, strode around the corner of the desk, and went out into the hallway. The area where Novamirsky had been could be called a reception room, while the Art and Propaganda Department was a large hall on the opposite side of the stairs.

When they were alone, Junji Kambara, the young painter, assumed the relaxed expression that comes naturally between fellow Japanese. "I'm terribly sorry for the trouble," he said with the air of someone already settled into being looked after by Nobuko.

He greeted Nobuko as though it had already been settled that she would take care of him. “No—but this is so sudden. When did you arrive?” “About two hours ago—I came straight here by taxi from the station. Before returning to Japan, I absolutely wanted to visit Moscow once, and since the only place I know here is VOKS…”

Junji Kambara had been in Berlin since the beginning of December last year. When Nobuko returned from Paris to Moscow that same December, she had been in Berlin during her train transfer. During her stay there for a few days on her way to Moscow, she had met Kawase Isamu, but Kambara's name never came up in their conversations. Kambara wanted to stay in Moscow for at least a month to study both the Tretyakov Gallery—which collected exclusively works by Russian painters—and the activities of new proletarian artists.

"My German isn't reliable, but based on my paintings, it seems they might introduce me to the Proletarian Artists' Union here. If that comes to pass, I'll paint something here and should be able to cover my expenses while in Moscow—"

When Kambara and Nobuko had nearly given up waiting，Novamirsky returned to the room． “I am pleased，Herr Kambara．” He said this in German and grasped Kambara’s hand；the young man’s face flushed faintly with relief and confusion．

“Ms. Sasa.” “Mr. Kambara’s painting technique has been approved by the art department.” “I will immediately arrange his introduction to the Proletarian Artists’ Union.” “The Union will give him work.” “And we will also provide financial assistance.” “What a relief!” Nobuko conveyed to Kambara exactly what Novamirsky had said. “I am deeply grateful.”

While expressing gratitude, Junji Kambara blinked in a manner that suggested lingering questions remained. Nobuko shared the same sentiment. "Then if we take him to the union office, could they arrange his lodging?"

“That’s exactly it, Ms. Sasa.” Novamirsky lowered his bass voice to an even deeper bass, “We must rely on your kindness.” “We can give him work.” “However, unfortunately, arranging lodging is difficult—he had just enough money to come to Moscow, so at present he cannot afford lodging expenses.” “Is that so? Mr. Kambara.” “Is that so? Mr. Kambara.” “I can manage pocket money somehow, but…”

Novamirsky said, “That’s the situation.” Nodding deeply, he looked into Nobuko’s eyes. While steadily staring back at those gray eyes, Nobuko spoke, weighing each word as she formed it.

“As you know, in Moscow, foreigners are not allowed to have individual rooms, so I don’t know how to accommodate him.”

“—Well now—”

That matter seemed not to have even occurred to Novamirsky. "If I have to bring along someone I don't know at all, shouldn't I call Ms. Yoshimi?"

“That’s exactly right!”

Motoko surprisingly readily consented to Junji Kambara coming to Hotel Passage.

“That’s perfectly acceptable. If that’s the situation and it won’t be long-term, we’ll have another supplementary bed brought into this room. Since morning tea isn’t substantial anyway, we’ll share that, but dinners separately. Agreed? You’ll pay for the supplementary bed yourself. It’s only two rubles after all.”

With his thick, stiff Japanese hair neatly parted to the left, his slightly protruding front teeth, and high cheekbones, Junji Kambara thus came to live in a corner of Nobuko and the others' room. Kambara was the first Japanese painter to come to Moscow. The Proletarian Artists' Union requested him to paint a depiction of Japanese May Day to decorate the workers' club. A No. 100 canvas and studio were provided.

Kambara would leave Nobuko and the others’ room once morning tea ended and work in the communal studio until the last possible moment of daylight every day. When it was mostly completed and the preliminary viewing was conducted, Nobuko also went along. Michenko, a large-framed painter who worked in the secretariat office of the Proletarian Artists’ Union, stared fixedly at Kambara’s work propped against the plank wall,

“You have considerable skill.” After pausing for a moment,

“Given your technical skill,” Michenko said, “you should capture more distinctive features of Japanese workers’ faces and physiques. Not just generic Eastern features—” Nobuko finally understood the vague dissatisfaction she’d felt toward Kambara’s canvas. His May Day painting showed red flags, workers locked in scrum formation, black-coated figures attempting to arrest a lone laborer surrounded by police with sabers and chin-strapped spats, marchers resisting in chaotic struggle—all meant to embody Japan’s May Day spirit. Yet despite these elements, the composition felt weak, lacking realistic fervor and physical weight.

“Listen here, Tovarishchi.” Michenko, with a slightly playful manner, placed his large palm behind one ear, widened his eyes, and made a show of listening intently toward the canvas.

“I can’t hear it. I can’t hear a thing.” “This painting doesn’t let us hear the resounding footsteps of May Day.” “Their brows are furrowed in indignation.” With the fingertips of his left hand, he pushed up his own eyebrows. “They’re shouting with their mouths.”

He mimicked the shape of the shouting worker’s open mouth in the painting. “But there’s no voice—there’s no uproar. There’s a lack of true emotion.” Junji Kambara accepted without reservation those critiques that Nobuko relayed, which included her own agreement.

“I guess that’s how it is... It’s intimidating.” Kambara had not brought to Moscow the sketches and croquis of Japanese May Day required for this type of work. After truthfully explaining these circumstances and holding fresh consultations, it was decided he would change his subject to depict the incident where male and female employees were assaulted with tear gas during February’s Tokyo City Tram strike.

While walking back from the Proletarian Artists’ Union office together with Nobuko, Junji Kambara remarked, “These painters are straightforward, aren’t they?”

Regarding the fact that his own work did not pass, he did not appear particularly dejected or even surprised.

“These painters seem to view artworks through the very eyes of the masses,” Kambara remarked. “They don’t get bogged down in métier like artists from other countries do.” As a young Japanese painter—art-school educated, having observed German leftist artists before coming to Moscow—Kambara appeared to be piecing together something about this new realism Soviet painters pursued, using the critiques of his own work as his guide.

“In this current work, even if they criticize me endlessly, I don’t feel resentful. It’s the perfect experiment to understand how painting is conceived in the Soviet Union—for me, this is a once-in-a-millennium opportunity.”

And having waited impatiently for the late morning tea with Nobuko and the others to end, he set off for the Proletarian Artists’ Union’s communal studio.

All of this had happened before May Day. For the 1930 May Day, various labor union clubs were each presented with paintings to decorate their club walls as commemorations of the Five-Year Plan’s successful first year. Junji Kambara had been asked to contribute a work depicting Japanese May Day as part of this initiative. When he read about it in *Komsomolskaya Pravda* and saw the photograph of udarniks smiling beneath the workplace painting received by the Chemical Workers’ Club, Junji Kambara appeared to viscerally grasp the disappointment of his own work’s rejection.

He had been staring fixedly at the painting of the chemical factory interior featured in the newspaper photograph when an idea seemed to strike him,

“Ms. Sasa.” From his bed, he called out to Nobuko. “What is it?” Nobuko had been studying Russian grammar on the tea table.

“As for my current painting, the underpainting is mostly done,” Kambara said. “For this piece, instead of getting critiques after finishing like last time, how about having them look at it at this stage?” “If you think that’s better,” Nobuko replied, “I don’t mind accompanying you again.” “Sorry to trouble you, but could you arrange some time tomorrow? Since this is a work I’ll be leaving in Moscow after all this effort, I want to use paints that won’t fade as much as possible. I managed to get another canvas after the last one fell through, but if I mess up again, the paint costs will sting.”

Nobuko, Motoko, and even Kambara himself burst into laughter.

“I see. So there are hardships we weren’t aware of.”

“One request.”

With a canvas bearing a charcoal underpainting, Nobuko and Junji Kambara visited the Proletarian Artists’ Union secretariat once again.

“Oh, Comrade Kambara!”

Michenko stood up and came over. When he saw the canvas Kambara was holding, “Let me see it, let me see it!” He pressed impatiently, as though he had been waiting eagerly. The canvas was propped up against the wooden wall. Nobuko explained the reason why they had come to show the underpainting. Without touching on Kambara having confided his concerns about the paints to Nobuko and the others.

“Not bad at all?”

As a painter himself, Michenko seemed to find interest in viewing foreign painters' work from the underpainting stage. "You've made earnest efforts." After making Kambara take a cigarette, putting one in his own mouth, lighting it, and inhaling deeply while keeping his eyes fixed on the canvas, Michenko suddenly— "Comrade Kambara."

Michenko called Kambara's name. And in a tone that sounded astonished at his own discovery, "Why didn't you fully depict the figures' bodies?" With his characteristic gesture,

“From the feet up—the entire body, all the way to the head.” He traced his own body’s contours with his index finger, moving from feet to head. In Kambara’s composition, the crowd of tram workers struck by tear gas loomed large on the left in three-quarter length, their forms depicted beyond the fallen body of a female conductor through which the customary police squad could be seen.

“Depict the entire story. “When workers suffer such barbaric assaults, they must always fight with their whole bodies. “Look—like this.” Just as shown in Kambara’s composition—a worker struck by a gas grenade reflexively shielding his face with both hands while twisting his shoulders—the painter Michenko used his own body to demonstrate how the man’s hips, legs, and feet would move in that instant.

“Look.” “The entire body moves like this.” “They resist with their entire bodies.” “They fight with their very flesh!” With his large palm, he tapped Kambara on the shoulder. “You have the technique.” “Try doing it.” “I do not doubt your success.”

This critique contained something that kept Junji Kambara rooted before the wooden wall where his underpainting leaned, immobile for a long time. Michenko’s criticism had spilled beyond technical remarks about a single sketch to address how workers must live under exploitative power structures. It became a chapter in the story of that truth. Nobuko felt pierced by the visceral reality of Michenko’s critique. Junji Kambara stood with hands thrust in pockets and legs spread wide, his dusky young Japanese face bowed as he stared upward at his work through lowered brows. In his bearing appeared something never before seen since his arrival in Moscow—a frank admission of defeat. The foundation of artistic problems lay rooted in the reality of workers’ lives as Michenko had bluntly illustrated. This was a truth Kambara could no longer deny. And this realization seemed to make him conscious of the superficiality latent in his own earlier words—words spoken with faintly critical undertones about these painters’ amateurish naive realism, their way of viewing art through the masses’ very eyes.

Nobuko gazed at Junji Kambara with affection—not so much for his painterly qualities, but for the youthful earnestness with which he had taken Michenko’s criticism to heart.

Thirteen

The Proletarian Artists’ Union supported Junji Kambara’s second attempt and handed over to him early a portion of the money scheduled to be paid upon completion of the work. With that money, Kambara rented a room in a house said to belong to a relative of a young painter he had met at the Union’s office and vacated the Passage Hotel. On the other side of the Moscow Riverbank, entered from Warehouse Street where horse dung and straw scraps were scattered over the cobblestone-paved road, it was a corner of a backstreet.

A wooden gate with peeling paint stood tilted. Surrounded by a disorderly, desolately empty inner courtyard stood several old wooden houses. Inside them, several groups of families seemed to live crowded together, while on the entranceway stairs facing the courtyard—where laundry hung out to dry—children clustered and played. Kambara’s rented room was heavily stained with grease, and part of the floor was rotten.

“I hear Moscow has strict regulations, so I’m not an official tenant here—just a temporary lodger.” “Makes sense. It might be rather severe as hospitality, but since you’re an artist, this beats staying at some hotel.” “You couldn’t paint anything worthwhile in a hotel.” “The atmosphere’s all wrong there.” “Exactly.”

Kambara nodded in satisfaction, his motive for leaving Nobuko and the others’ place being naturally understood by Motoko as well. “Plus, I myself am a bit too put-together—a drawback as an artist, I suppose, but maybe it’s just how I was born.” “Hm, hm.”

Motoko looked at Kambara with an older woman’s eyes that blended goodwill and teasing as she regarded the young man. “If you were to put on airs as an artist, our place would be cleared out in a single day.” Whether consciously or not, Kambara lived as a neutral presence toward both Nobuko and Motoko. With the auxiliary bed removed, Nobuko and the others’ room felt spacious for the first time in ages. The morning sun streamed through the window onto the now-empty patch of floor. Being able to take off and put on clothes without self-consciousness was a novel comfort for Nobuko.

One such morning, during a leisurely time alone together as Nobuko and Motoko sat facing the tea table, there came a knock at the door. Somehow, it was an unfamiliar knocking sound. Nobuko and Motoko exchanged glances. “Please come in.” The door opened with Motoko’s voice, and there stood Yuu Kawase from Berlin. “Oh—having tea now, are you?” As if he had just come from right nearby, Kawase started heading toward the vacant sofa.

“How have things been since then?” “What about you?” “Well… changing while staying the same, I suppose.” “Mr. Nakatate seems to have returned to Japan.” “Ah. He ended up deciding to go back—don’t you think that’s better?” The previous early summer, when Nobuko and the others had been staying in Berlin, Koichiro Nakatate had mingled with Yuu Kawase’s group and agonized over various problems regarding a new way to live as a film director. When Kabuki came to Moscow, Nakatate had also been there studying Sovkino’s work methods.

“Even back then, he seemed quite lost…”

“Everyone gets lost in their own way. But I guess that was for the best.”

Yuu Kawase spoke in his own way, omitting explanations. “By the way—what about you yourself?” With his long legs crossed as he sat on the sofa, Motoko deliberately looked Yuu Kawase over from head to toe. “How did things turn out with that person?” “I got married.” On the face of Yuu Kawase—whose large eyes could be mistaken for those of a Chinese youth—the area below his ears reddened slightly. “Then we have to do something to celebrate.”

For Kawase’s new wife, whom she had never met, Nobuko wondered what would be good to send. “That’s true—but really, how long are you planning to stay here?”

“I’m leaving this afternoon.” “L-leaving?—You’re serious?” “It’s true.” “You’re impossible! So when did you even arrive in Moscow?” Kawase remained silent while looking at Motoko’s face and began swinging his crossed legs idly. To him, Motoko’s question appeared inconvenient to address. “Well... Never mind that—if you’re leaving this afternoon, we can’t exactly invite you for a meal either...”

Motoko seemed deeply regretful that they had ended up meeting Kawase—who had taken care of them daily in Berlin—only after there had been no time left to offer him hospitality despite his coming to Moscow. “This is such a bother…” “I thought you might have already gone out, but I wanted to see you at least once.”

It was almost eleven o'clock. Nobuko, in a manner befitting a kind young woman, broached the matter to Motoko.

“So what should we give Mr. Kawase as a congratulatory gift? We have to make him take something—we can’t send things from here.” “I don’t need anything.” “That won’t do.”

As they considered this, Nobuko and Motoko both began to speak at once.

“Let’s take out the things we bought the other day at Kustarnyi (Folk Art Museum) and have you look at them. It would be best to have you pick out something you like from among them.” “I was just thinking the same thing. Then we’ll take them out right away.” Kneeling on the floor, Nobuko pulled out the large wicker basket that had been shoved under her own bed. Then she arranged several table centerpieces adorned with Russian embroidery and an unsewn women’s rubakha on the table.

“Ho.— This is beautiful.”

As Russian folk art, embroidery was renowned throughout the world. The colors, designs, and embroidery techniques were all remarkably diverse; the color schemes and patterns of works from the northern regions and those from areas near Ukraine were entirely different.

Nobuko spread out the rubakha fabric. “Let’s go with this one, Mr. Kawase. I’m sure it would suit your wife perfectly—what do you think?”

On the coarse linen fabric, geometric patterns resembling tiny blossoms were embroidered in light blue and lemon yellow with a golden sheen, here and there studded with deep blue. If she were a German woman, she would have abundant blonde hair. And if she were Kawase’s wife, she would surely be someone with a fresh complexion. If this rubakha were tailored and worn with such blonde hair and natural complexion, Kawase’s eyes would find it quite pleasing to behold in the summer. With that thought, Nobuko recommended it.

“But someone bought it to be worn, right?” “It’s not necessarily like that, so it’s fine.” “It would look more striking on someone with blonde hair than on someone with black hair.”

“Well, that might be true… This color scheme…” Nobuko spread out the fabric and arranged the embroidered cloth into the shape the rubakha would take when completed—this for the collar part, this for the cuffs, this for the vertical chest collar—as she indicated each section.

“Ah, I see. So that fabric goes there.” Muttering to himself while watching Nobuko’s hands at work, Kawase suddenly spoke in an ordinary tone,

“The old man says he absolutely wants to see you again.”

Kawase said. Nobuko raised her face and looked at Kawase, her expression deeply troubled. She had not told Motoko about having visited Yamagami Motokichi before May Day. Seeing Nobuko's troubled expression, Kawase, "I see. My apologies." However, he continued in the same ordinary tone as before.

“He said to come at three today.”

“Hmm.”

Motoko exhaled cigarette smoke with a displeased expression around her mouth.

“So that’s how it was.” “My apologies. I thought both of you already knew about it.” “I don’t know anything about it. But it’s none of your business.” In a tone that tried to regain composure in the moment, she said, “Well, fine—anyway, it’s not my business. Let’s decide on this one, shall we?” In the end, Kawase accepted the rubakha as a congratulatory gift from Nobuko and the others.

“Is it all right if I take this and go?”

Because there was still business in Moscow he needed to settle before departing, Kawase left Nobuko and Motoko's room within thirty minutes. Now alone together, Nobuko grew increasingly perplexed. Keeping silent, she began putting away the embroidery spread across the table. As Nobuko moved slowly, she felt Motoko's gaze fixed upon her like oppressive patches of pain clinging to her flesh.

When the scattered table had been nearly tidied up, Motoko asked Nobuko. “Buko, you’re going, aren’t you?”

It meant that she would go, keeping to Yamagami Motokichi’s message to come at three today.

"I think I'll go." Steeling herself so as not to be intimidated by Motoko's displeased, fearsome expression, Nobuko stood by the table and replied.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

But whether her having gone alone to meet Yamagami Motokichi the other day was truly something she needed to apologize to Motoko for—Nobuko was not entirely clear. In Nobuko's emotional process of first beginning to think of meeting Yamagami Motokichi and then carrying it out alone, there had matured some secret motive unique to her—one that even Nobuko herself had not yet made clear. Beyond Mayakovsky's suicide, the Second Art Theater's *The Eccentric* (The Oddball), and their stimuli, there existed something within Motoko's own daily emotional life that compelled Nobuko to go to Yamagami Motokichi's place without informing Motoko.

“It’s your right to go, Buko. Keeping it secret from me was also your right. But if…”

Motoko’s voice trembled and broke off. Motoko’s eyes filled with tears. “If I had wanted to go too, Buko, what would you have done?” It was precisely because she had not anticipated such a possibility that Nobuko had come to feel like going out to Lux without telling Motoko. Nobuko flushed, tears welling up in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

She apologized sincerely.

“Because I couldn’t see it that way…” Finally finding a path forward, Nobuko said to Motoko: “If you’re also inclined to go, this would be perfect.” “Let’s go together today.” “Last time there wasn’t any real business anyway—let’s try going together this time.” “Do you really think that’s possible?!” With the cigarette—its ember long extinguished—still clamped between her lips, Motoko turned her face toward the bright windowpane.

“He told you to come, didn’t he? He didn’t tell me to come either. I’m not some child’s playmate—if you think about it, you should understand I can’t just tag along without any reason!”

That may be so, Nobuko thought. "It's not like we're being invited to a feast, so I don't mind, but..."

As a matter of procedure, she could call Lux, inform Yamagami Motokichi that Motoko would also be coming today, and obtain his consent. Nobuko did not think that was impossible.

“So, it’s all right to do that, don’t you think? Last time, your name was mentioned too, so…”

“Absolutely not! If I want to meet him, I’ll go on my own.” Nobuko felt resistance toward herself as she strove to soften Motoko’s mood. Had Motoko ever once thought of meeting Yamagami Motokichi on her own initiative?

Fourteen

When Nobuko stood at the corner of Tverskaya Street—crisp and clear, bustling with pedestrians—she involuntarily shook her beret-covered head and took a deep breath. The oppressive mood of the hotel room—as if she had been pinned before Motoko—how excruciating it had been.

When she went outside, her mood brightened so much. That fact saddened Nobuko. With a slow yet steady stride of one who had a definite purpose, Nobuko climbed up the gentle slope of Tverskaya Street. And then she entered through Lux’s front door. The man at the reception desk was the same one who had been there when Nobuko first came. He procedurally took custody of Nobuko’s passport.

On the second-floor corridor, the faint smell of stew lingered again today.

But without encountering a woman passing by with an aluminum pot, Nobuko knocked on Gen Yamagami’s door in the dimly lit corridor around another bend.

Today, the typewriter had been put away. The women’s stockings that had been drying at the bay window were also gone. The bay window, its inner double glass now opened as the season approached June, no longer held any trace of the cluttered items that had been there before. Gen Yamagami, as soon as he saw Nobuko, “Did Kawase come by this morning?” he asked. “He did come by. So he went upstairs, but…”

“Yeah… Well, sit there for now.” Gen Yamagami sat facing Nobuko, put both hands into his trouser pockets, and stretched his legs all the way under the table. In the bright light reminiscent of early summer, the bags under Gen Yamagami’s lower eyelids became clearly visible to Nobuko. In the blunt tone of someone unaccustomed to social niceties, “I hear they want what you’ve written for *Senki*.” he said.

“If you can write it, you should send it.” “If what I write can be of use, I will send it.” “Not only would it be useful—it’s necessary.” “Just write as much reportage as you can—anything at all.” Nobuko was suddenly struck by a humorous impulse. She recalled a passage in Gen Yamagami’s autobiography where he, in his Christian youth, had felt novels were frivolous. There had been another passage describing how his landlady had lectured him about literature’s value—arguments he had ultimately failed to accept. After living through decades of revolutionary upheaval, what Japanese novels could Gen Yamagami—now seventy—possibly be reading? The one certainty was that he had never read any novels Nobuko had written before coming to the Soviet Union. Yet here he was urging her to contribute to *Senki*. She did not believe she could write articles with the strong class-based perspective of *Senki*’s Berlin dispatches. Nobuko said with a laugh,

“You’ve never read anything I’ve written before, have you?” Nobuko said. “If I were to have you write something like this, I’d consider it improper,” he replied. “No—I did read it.” Thrusting out his small yet angular jaw that looked stubbornly elderly, Yamagami gazed at Nobuko with those characteristic sanpaku eyes of his—the whites visible beneath both irises.

“What was it—after you came here, I did read something you wrote about Moscow.” “—Was it in *Bunmei*?”

"That's right, that's right.—It was quite interesting." Nobuko's body flushed with heat. The Moscow impressions Yamagami had read were what Nobuko had first written after arriving in Moscow. Over two years had passed since then, and compared to current Soviet life, those impressions had fixated too much on Russian national character. Moreover, they had only grasped class issues in a manner even more immature than Nobuko's present understanding.

However, regarding those impressions, Yamagami seemed to remember nothing beyond the fact that he had read them. Broadly, "You should just send things like that," he said.

It was said that *The Sunless City* was being translated from German into Russian. It was said that *March 15, 1928* would also soon be translated into Russian. “Before long, Japanese proletarian literary works will be translated one after another—after all, graduates from the Japanese department of the Oriental Language School are rapidly increasing.”

Gen Yamagami fell silent for a while, his gaze fixed on the wall ahead as if absorbing Nobuko’s presence, but—

“Well then, shall I treat you to some more jam? The one from last time was delicious, wasn’t it?” He stood up from the chair and disappeared behind the screen at the foot of the bed. Soon he reappeared just as before—clumsy yet competent hands holding teacups—his unadorned appearance stirring strong affection in Nobuko. That spontaneous warmth young women sometimes feel toward elderly men filled her chest. Sitting on the small two-seat bench fixed in the corner, she watched with visible delight as the stocky Gen Yamagami brought over cups without ceremony, as he always did. Each visit meant tasting his special jam—a ritual they both enjoyed with childlike earnestness. Nobuko imagined her own face must look quite juvenile at that moment.

“Oh, what’s this? Something unusual.” After the teacup came a jam made from cherry-sized fruits with apple-like skins. “It’s a type of apple.” Having said this, Yamagami drank his tea Russian-style—clamping the sugar spoon between his index and middle fingers.

After Nobuko had politely finished eating the jam, Yamagami spent some time looking at the few fruit seeds left on the glass saucer before her—then abruptly, “So, what do you think—have you no intention of staying here?” he said. Nobuko looked up and met Yamagami’s eyes.

“In Moscow?” “Yes.” She felt as though the entire room spun around once, along with the chair she was sitting in. “Stay…?” “Don’t go back to Japan—stay here for good.” “You’ll work here.”

Nobuko found it excruciatingly difficult to comprehend what Yamagami meant—not his actual words, but the very framework of his thinking— "What work could I possibly do?"

I had never thought of becoming a woman who engages in political activities. However, if Nobuko—being Japanese—were to remain in Moscow and not return to Japan, her position there could not be anything but political. The people who had passed by Nobuko on Tverskaya Street and its tree-lined avenues up until now—those who seemed Japanese—would adopt an unreadable expression when they noticed her approaching, making it impossible to tell whether they were Japanese or Chinese, and then walk right past her. Other than joining their ranks, Nobuko could not conceive of a life staying in Moscow.

Nobuko grew agitated. The fact that she was being judged as someone permitted to remain in Moscow. Her heart surged violently at this proposal, as though it might leap from her mouth. It was something she had never even considered. That she had been perceived in such a way—— But,

"Is there something I could do?"

Worriedly, Nobuko lowered her voice a little. For someone like Nobuko to participate in such a structure, all the mechanisms connected to the name Gen Yamagami were far too vast and imbued with authority.

“There’s plenty you could do.” Gen Yamagami stretched both legs out under the table once more and, from this posture, now stared directly at Nobuko’s agitated face—flushed and heated.

“There’s nothing to worry about. Stay here and write as many Japanese novels as you like. Even foreign writers staying here to write novels isn’t unusual at all.”

Bela Illesh was a Hungarian novelist who had come to Moscow in exile. Nobuko also bought the issue of the literary newspaper that featured his photographs and works as a special edition. Bela Illesh was indeed a novelist who had come in exile. Bela Illesh was not someone who wrote only novels. He had engaged in revolutionary activities in his homeland of Hungary and, as a result, had come to Moscow with those achievements.

How had I been living in Japan?

Nobuko thought it would be regrettable if Gen Yamagami were laboring under some misconception. That he could know anything about her would have been strange enough to call miraculous—after all, Nobuko had no connection even to Japan's proletarian literary movement. "If someone had been actively engaged back home," she said, "writing novels here might serve some purpose—but as you're aware, I am not that sort of person."

“I know that perfectly well.” “But with your technical skill and experience, staying here doesn’t automatically mean you can’t write Japanese novels.” “Look at me.” “I’ve been away from Japan for twenty years.” “Yet I can still grasp its realities clearly and make accurate assessments of the situation.—”

“That’s because you have access to reports.”

Nobuko involuntarily let out a high-pitched voice.

“Of course that’s right. You write based on reports—novels aren’t much different either.”

Amid intense turmoil and confusion, Gen Yamagami’s words gave Nobuko a small place where she could stand as herself. To Yamagami, how literary works came into being was not understood at all. “The reason you can concretely judge various issues through reports is—more than anything—because you yourself were involved in the labor movement back in Japan, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

For some time, the conversation between the two of them lapsed. Eventually, Yamagami asked Nobuko.

“In Japan, how many books are being published now?” “Do you mean the number of copies?”

“Yeah.” “For literary books, it’s probably around 1,000 or 2,000 copies.” “As for something like *Daibosatsu Toge*, it’s probably in the tens of thousands.”

“Such is the case. And what about your books?”

“Mine are quite low.” Nobuko relaxed her smile somewhat. “The novel I wrote before coming here seems to have sold between 1,000 and 2,000 copies.”

“That’s no way to get anything done!” Gen Yamagami shook his white-haired head firmly.

“Do books by proletarian writers really sell so few copies in Japan too?”

“That must be higher. Even *Senki* seems to be selling quite a bit, and of course *Taiyō no Nai Machi* and *Kanikōsen* are being published in even greater numbers.”

“Even that must be nothing much in Japan.” “Over here, works like Fadeyev’s are read in a million copies.” That was why. Libraries, workers’ clubs, and school-factory-government office libraries—all public facilities throughout the Soviet Union—were striving to equip themselves with every classical and modern representative work. That was part of the Five-Year Plan’s cultural agenda.

“Japanese readers have to buy even a single book from their own pockets, so it’s hard for them.” “That’s true too.”

Gen Yamagami pondered for a moment. He too had lived a life in his youth where even buying one book was difficult.

“So, how about it—have you really no intention of staying here?” “I’m glad to hear that, but...”

“But what do you say?”

“It’s just… it’s so unexpected.”

“You don’t mean you need your parents’ approval for this decision, do you?”

To settle down in Moscow like this was a different form of exile. What could there possibly be to discuss with Sasa’s parents?

“Then it’s just a matter of your own resolve, isn’t it?” “I could stay here, but I don’t know what work I’d do.”

From the moment Gen Yamagami told her to stay in Moscow, Nobuko’s mind had already been ninety percent made up, so to speak. What Nobuko couldn’t resolve in that final one percent was the practical question of what work she should do if she stayed in Moscow. Compared to her age, Nobuko had started working in literary professions from a young age and had continued to make a living from it. “There’s nothing to worry about. With your ability, there are plenty of things you can do. More than enough. No matter how good a novel you write, compared to Japan where sales top out in the thousands, having a hundred thousand copies read here would feel incomparably better for you as a writer. In the Soviet Union, any book that gets published has a minimum print run of a hundred thousand copies.”

That a work being read by many was undoubtedly gratifying for any writer. Yet even so, there remained no doubt that the foremost requirement was producing quality works—proper works. This was what Nobuko failed to grasp. What struck her most keenly was how Gen Yamagami—the man she spoke with—failed to comprehend such practical minutiae, or rather, how his life as an international revolutionary had never required direct engagement with these realities. The significance of literature could not be measured solely by print runs.—

"How about this approach?" This time, Nobuko made the proposal.

“After a week has passed, I will come to give my answer once I’ve made up my mind. So, how does that sound?” “Let’s do that!”

Gen Yamagami, too, had likely begun to feel that continuing their back-and-forth like this was a waste of time.

“That’s fine.” “Then, same day next week.” “That works.” “Let’s make it three o’clock after all.”

Nobuko thought awkwardly—from Yamagami’s perspective, what an indecisive and fussy woman she must be. As Nobuko was about to leave, Yamagami— “Oh, there’s something I need from you.” “Wait.” —stopped her. He brought two books from the high bookshelf fixed to the wall opposite the bed. “This is for you.”

It was the biography of Vera Figner. One of the Russian Revolutionaries Series, that book published in 1922 shortly after the revolution was printed on crude straw-based paper that spoke volumes of the destitution of those times through its very printing.

“You know Figner, right? She was a female revolutionary of the People’s Will Party.” As Nobuko looked at the lithographed photograph of Vera’s slender, dignified face, Yamagami said: “I want you to translate this one.” He showed her another volume with similar binding. It was Nechaev’s biography. “He was the man who sanctioned the spy that had infiltrated the organization. In a cave behind the pharmaceutical school in Leningrad—” A scene from Dostoevsky’s *Demons*, which she had read long ago, suddenly came back to her with vivid clarity. A cave in the hills behind some specialized school in Leningrad, much like the one described, where a young traitor was sanctioned. They had been depicted with Dostoevsky’s characteristic darkness and pallor.

"I wonder if this is the incident Dostoevsky wrote about in his novel."

Ignoring that, Gen Yamagami,

“Nechaev was a remarkable man,” said Gen Yamagami. “He was caught, thrown into prison, dragged out to court time and again, but he never said a word about the organization. Read that, and you only need to translate the parts you think are appropriate.” Yamagami’s tone left no room for refusal.

“There’s no rush for that—you can take your time. Though once mid-June comes, I’ll be off to Crimea. Because the Japanese intelligentsia have too little backbone, we need to teach them that there are solid men like Nechaev.”

Nechaev was a contemporary of Vera. They were revolutionaries of the late-1800s, people who should have belonged to that transitional period when Russia’s revolution evolved from terrorism toward Marxist revolution. Nobuko did not grasp the substance behind Yamagami’s criticism that Japan’s intelligentsia lacked backbone. Nor could she fathom what direct influence biographies of heroes from the People’s Will Party—a group with an entirely different revolutionary history—might hold for Japan’s people today.

Without fully comprehending, Nobuko exited the Lux carrying two books with yellowed edges on their pages.

Fifteen Nobuko walked down Tverskaya Street, her eyes absorbing every detail of the cityscape yet seeing none of it. She could stay in Moscow—this possibility unexpectedly revealed to her overwhelmed Nobuko more and more with its unbelievable reality as the Lux building grew distant behind her. That through Gen Yamagami she had come to be regarded in such terms—it felt akin to having every conscientious effort and well-meaning struggle of her life validated before history’s grand march.

Considering Gen Yamagami’s position, it was unthinkable that such a proposal to Nobuko had been made based solely on his own opinion. The confirmation that she could become someone of use to the beloved Soviet made Nobuko’s heart and body tremble with emotion as she walked along Tverskaya Street. Nobuko—with an emotion so intense she could scarcely believe it was her own reality—was throwing herself into that acknowledgment. It already felt as though everything had been decided. I will stay in Moscow.—But why? When the topic had come up earlier in Gen Yamagami’s room, Nobuko had trembled with unexpected joy—yet somewhere within her, in that very same moment, there had been a sharp, unshakable incomprehension. The incomprehension expanded in equal measure to Nobuko’s growing emotion as she walked along Tverskaya Street.

A few passersby looked at Nobuko with puzzled eyes. Nobuko, caught up in her thoughts and oblivious to herself, walked alone among the crowd hurrying past on the late afternoon boulevard, moving so slowly that everyone overtook her. Nobuko, having half-unconsciously pushed open the entrance door of Hotel Passazh, returned to their room in the same stride she had maintained since leaving the Lux and walking along Tverskaya Street.

Motoko quickly turned around from her desk.

“What’s wrong, Buko?” “I’m back.” “What’s wrong?” “Yeah.” Nobuko removed her beret and sat down on her bed. Motoko stared intently at Nobuko, who, unlike her usual self, seemed preoccupied and dazed. Then, in a voice tinged with worry and displeasure, she said reproachfully, “You were told something, weren’t you?” Motoko came and stood in front of Nobuko, who remained silent. “What were you told? Buko!” “Buko!”

“—They asked if I wouldn’t stay in Moscow.”

Just saying that much left Nobuko’s voice breathless and hoarse. Her chest felt unbearably full. Moreover, at such moments, she avoided meeting Motoko’s eyes, instead directing her gaze to the diagonal space across from where she sat on the bed. Nobuko could not bring herself to look at Motoko’s face—nor could she bear having to confess what had just begun boiling inside her to Motoko so soon. “So, Buko—what answer did you give?”

“I won’t answer—next week.”

Nobuko faintly heard Motoko’s derisive snort.

“I knew it’d be something like that.” Motoko began pacing back and forth across the floor before Nobuko, who sat on the bed.

“What’s wrong with that? For you, isn’t this exactly what you wanted?” “……”

“You don’t need to hold back on my account.” Motoko suddenly laughed—a short, brittle “ha-ha-ha” that crackled with nerves. “So you weren’t one to hold back on my account after all?” She turned her back on Nobuko, who still couldn’t speak, and returned to her desk. With one sharp motion, she jerked her chair into place and sat down facing away, as if declaring that only this single formal matter now remained between them.

“Buko, do as you please. I’ll pass on being your mother’s explainer. You write her a letter or whatever.” The emotion of surprise and joy had transformed into a face contorted with anguish as Nobuko watched Motoko’s silhouette, backlit by the window. With her back pressed tightly against the chair, arms crossed and short-cropped head raised, Motoko’s shoulders appeared to tremble. Motoko was crying.

After a while, Motoko said in a voice still thick with tears, still looking at the window.

“I am, after all, made to be someone who will never be told such things.” “That much, I know full well.” Motoko’s voice broke off, then resumed.

“The two of us came to Moscow together.” Sadness welled up, shaking the pit of Nobuko’s stomach. Yet her unblinking eyes remained dry, her entire being consumed by swirling thoughts. Myself remaining in Moscow. But this incomprehension—what is it?

When they headed down to the hotel dining room for the late dinner, Motoko said to Nobuko.

“As for me, no matter how you decide, I’ve resolved not to mention this matter even once more.” “Well then, as for me, I suppose there’s nothing left but to prepare to go back, isn’t there?”

The strong force of habit alone came to govern Nobuko and Motoko’s daily life. They would wake up around the same time as always, face each other at a single table to drink tea, and going out to buy ikura and pickled cucumbers for supper was still Nobuko’s role. Nechaev’s Biography was placed on Nobuko’s desk. Motoko picked up the slightly plain old book and “Huh,” she said.

“What are you going to do with this kind of book?” “It means I’ll translate a part from it.” “I see. So it’s a test right off the bat, is it?” Motoko looked at the perplexed Nobuko with an ironic gaze, her oval face faintly reddening. “Well, do your very best then.” Motoko knew all too well Nobuko’s inadequacy in language skills.

Nechaev’s Biography began by chronicling his upbringing from childhood. The details of his activities as a member of the People’s Will Party. The discovery of spies and their elimination. Arrest. His life in Petropavlovsk Fortress. Nechaev’s struggle in the courtroom. Nobuko was troubled by Gen Yamagami’s request for her to translate this biography without specifying which sections. What part had Gen Yamagami deemed essential for the Japanese intelligentsia to read?

At her desk while examining all the chapter headings in the volume, Nobuko thought Motoko's sarcastic remark might have been right. Whether Nobuko could select an appropriate chapter for Japanese readers would demonstrate her political comprehension and actual discernment.

Even so, Nobuko could not detect any deceit or ill intent in Gen Yamagami’s approach. Regardless of such things, she would fulfill the new task assigned to her to the best of her ability. That alone was her duty, Nobuko thought. After a long investigation, Nobuko decided to translate only Nechaev’s courtroom statements. Even just that part alone would amount to forty or fifty pages on the half-sized manuscript paper Nobuko was using.

Courtroom terminology. Legal terms. Even without that, there were truly a vast number of words Nobuko didn't know. And the old-fashioned font printed on straw-based paper intimidated Nobuko, who was accustomed to reading pamphlets. She spent more time flipping through the dictionary with her left hand than holding the pen in her right. Nobuko rewrote each phrase into Japanese bit by bit.—Defendant Nechaev had appeared in court. He took his seat in the defendant’s dock. The judge began questioning him about his full name, date of birth, and family circumstances—and so.

By next Thursday—yesterday having been Thursday when Nobuko went to Lux at Kawase’s request—it was clear she couldn’t finish in time. But fundamentally, was this even a task Nobuko could complete? Having no experience with translation work, Nobuko had begun converting the text into Japanese line by line from the very start, working only with what she understood as she read. There were moments while flipping through dictionary pages when the characters she sought would slip away somewhere. Eventually her attention drifted from the text entirely as she sank into thought. Stay in Moscow. But— That strange incomprehension. The incomprehension that meant nothing to Yamagami yet refused to leave Nobuko’s mind.

Gen Yamagami thought that Nobuko, having stayed in Moscow, might even write novels drawn from reports about Japan. But this was impossible. Not only impossible—Nobuko sensed an unbearable emptiness lurking there. What sort of life would that be?

While pondering the unpredictable contours of this prospective life, Nobuko kept drawing incomprehensible geometric patterns across the scribble-filled manuscript paper. That she had been permitted to stay in the Soviet. This brought not mere happiness but pride swelling through her. To think she could contribute to these Soviet people marching forward. Here lay a purpose and passion so vital it compelled one to clasp their own chest with both arms. Did being useful to the Soviet people mean nothing more than writing reports for Japanese readers—reports brimming with fundamentally sympathetic interpretations of Soviet life? If that were all, it seemed like work fitting a journalist’s remit. And if that were truly all, then any progressive traveler might do the same.

The reason Nobuko, as a Japanese woman and a Japanese writer, could feel with true conviction that she was of use to the Soviet people was precisely because she was, in truth, a Japanese literary figure and a chronicler of the hardships and struggles of the Japanese people.

To Gorky, Nobuko signed her name in Japanese, wrote a dedication in Japanese, and sent a copy of her own full-length novel. Though it was a clumsy work, on a certain May morning in Leningrad, Nobuko had been able to express her genuine heart by doing so because that novel depicted a facet of Japanese social reality absent from Gorky’s literature. It was precisely because it was a story of the intense desire of a Japanese woman living in that society to live a better life. And it was precisely because Nobuko deeply believed without doubt that the very intensity of a woman’s desire to grow liberated from the pressures of Japanese society and the Japanese household stood upon a path connected to the construction of today’s Soviet society that she had dedicated to Gorky—who would never read it himself—a novel written in Japanese.

Over the long years to come—Nobuko drew a bold triangle on the paper—herself writing a novel from reports composed in words—Nobuko pulled three long lines from the triangle on the paper—she could not imagine how such a thing was possible. A life that couldn’t exist. "There’s plenty of work to be done." That’s what Gen Yamagami had said. There was plenty of work. —There was no doubt that was true. Indeed, even translating Nechaev’s courtroom records was one of the tasks that Nobuko performed.

Nobuko reached out and took the literary newspaper placed in the far corner of the desk. It was a special feature on Iressh’s novel. This novel, introduced as Iressh’s representative work, was one Iressh had written in his homeland of Hungary. Within this fact lay a suggestion that attracted Nobuko’s persistent incomprehension.

The summer after arriving in the Soviet Union, when Nobuko was in Leningrad, she wrote a novel spanning about ninety pages. It was a work constructed from impressions of her time living in Moscow’s Astozhenka district—drawing on Soviet life—and observations from her boarding house days in Leningrad. At that time, Nobuko had not truly understood the history of class. She had not understood the revolutionary processes of individual nations either.

A full year had passed since then, and now—having observed Moscow society through life in Berlin and London before returning once more to Moscow—Nobuko found it all the more difficult to write novels. Nobuko could no longer write novels that simply captured fragments of life passing before her eyes, as she had done in the summer two years prior. Class society—the socialism that the Russian people had fought for through revolution and were solidifying into an unshakable world reality. As Nobuko came to understand Soviet society more deeply and concretely, she felt the meaninglessness of literary prattle and the difficulty of speaking truth.

Even Soviet writers seemed to be confronting such difficulties. Mayakovsky’s “Shipwrecked Love Boat” was not a boat of romance. Today Libedinsky was being criticized by young readers for the somewhat antiquated sensual psychologism of *The Birth of a Hero*, but he had *A Week*. This was proof that thirteen years earlier Libedinsky had genuinely lived through “October” as one of the people. This fact too held some meaning. What part of Japan had Nobuko truly inhabited? Nobuko’s various struggles, her unadorned expressions—through these the history of class had merely been unconsciously laid bare.

A dark shadow fell over Nobuko's face. The dark shadow lingered between her brows, forming a severe expression that Nobuko never showed in public.

Before Nobuko’s mind’s eye was a newspaper photograph. That was the image of the young couple’s return to Japan—amiably lined up on the upper deck of a fine European liner that had arrived in Kobe—captured by the photography team. When Nobuko discovered in a newspaper sent from Japan this homecoming photograph of her brother Waichiro and Koeda—who had parted ways with her in London—she gave a sisterly wry smile. In the life of the young couple, Koeda was flourishing and growing more beautiful. When Japanese men lived abroad, every one of them appeared more composed and better-looking than when they were in their home country—and Waichiro stood beside Koeda with just such an expression. Attached to the photograph was a short interview article. When she read that article, Nobuko felt her entire body burn with anger. What was written as Waichiro’s remarks was neither about how that young architect couple had scraped together their meager travel funds to study Italian architecture and art, nor about France’s Corbusier and his new architectural “avant-garde” interior design. Waichiro—for whatever reason—was stating: “Following my older sister’s suggestion, I have come to observe and learn from British family life.” British family life! He came to learn from that! The words “older sister’s suggestion” were accompanied by parentheses specifying “the writer Nobuko Sasa,” complete with a footnote.

Nobuko could only let tears of frustration well up in her eyes.

“Oh, just look at this!” Nobuko brandished the newspaper and showed it to Motoko. “Ha ha ha ha!” Motoko threw herself back in the chair and laughed. “How wonderfully carefree he’s being—isn’t that just perfect?” “‘Following my sister’s advice’—what a brilliant touch.” “At this rate, even your dear mother must feel reassured.” “—Spare me your nonsense!”

What sort of answer was this for Waichiro's life ahead? Nobuko couldn't keep herself from thinking this.

Nobuko had no way of knowing whether that account truly reflected what Waichiro had said. Yet even if not entirely accurate, there was no denying that the tone of Waichiro’s interview was precisely the sort to produce an article focused on the young couple’s carefree manner. Though not as defined as outright expectation, the vague hope Nobuko had dimly harbored toward Waichiro crumbled. In the end, was Waichiro just a man who would live a self-indulgent life? Such was the domestic scene of the Sasa family—Takeyo affirming this Waichiro, so detached from societal reality, while harshly viewing Koeda as a young wife lacking supportive capability. That place held no desire for Nobuko to return to.

In Japan, the Communist Party was repeatedly being hunted down. In February as well, a great many people had been arrested. In Japan, where male and female streetcar employees were being struck down by tear gas bombs in the streets. While gradually, gradually causing the Sasas’ home to collapse, Japan’s history was moving along an axis unknown to the Sasas themselves. About which of all these minute details of that moving history—this matter, that matter—could Nobuko claim to know anything? Whirling rapidly, her thoughts settled on a single point. There lay a round golden ring that had shone in Verdun’s autumn thicket. There was the black and white stone-paved corridor of Pension Somolov where someone had fainted when she walked there. There were memories of the dead Tamotsu. There was Asano Fukiko’s pure small red lips that trembled while enduring sorrow—her brother too had ended his life amid Japan’s suffering. I don’t think I was a good sister to him.—

Overwhelmed by the relentless poignancy of her thoughts, Nobuko raised her head and stretched her smooth white throat as if trying to ease her breathing. Nobuko quietly stood up from the desk and left the room. Nobuko’s entire being was a painful question mark. The ongoing translation work—the original forms of words before their textual transformations—required constant dictionary consultation, yet words whose original forms she couldn’t determine kept appearing frequently. Nobuko nearly began asking Motoko a question.

“You took on the translation because you thought you could handle it, didn’t you?” Motoko said this and refused to engage with Nobuko. “Why don’t you just look for it yourself?”

Nobuko might remain in Moscow. Nobuko had been proposed such a thing. But I was different. I would return to Japan. Motoko seemed determined to demonstrate that their lives had diverged—down to the boundaries of where they each walked on the floor of the room they still shared. Since Thursday, Motoko had stopped approaching Nobuko’s desk. In that room, the wardrobe they shared stood beside the wall where Nobuko’s bed was placed. When Motoko needed something from the wardrobe, she no longer naturally walked over to Nobuko’s bed to temporarily place the clothes she had taken out. All those changes were deliberate, and they pained Nobuko.

Motoko was suffering too. The fact that they would no longer live together was not something easily endured, but what tormented Motoko most about this situation was what could only be called wounded pride. On Thursday, Motoko had said, “The two of us came to Moscow together.”

That had been the only time Motoko ever pleaded those words to Nobuko. Nobuko and Motoko—who had come to Moscow together—would one day see only Motoko return. What the Sasa family might say to Motoko when she came back alone, leaving Nobuko behind—this Nobuko could imagine; yet she also imagined those words would not fundamentally shake Motoko. What rendered Motoko’s position unbearable was the premonition of something like belittlement—inevitably directed at herself—reflecting the outcome of Nobuko’s decision to remain in Moscow. Even if it was not contempt for the academic achievements she had reaped there, the fact that Nobuko stayed in Moscow stood in stark contrast to Motoko’s manner of living—returning home laden with books, thoroughly versed in Russia’s modern classics. Over their three years living in Soviet cities and others abroad, the differences that had accumulated between Nobuko’s emotional approach to life and Motoko’s practical attitudes had surely become something harshly insurmountable. Had it all begun with Nobuko? Writhing in anguish, Nobuko wanted Motoko to consider this point. When they first arrived in Moscow—when Nobuko still knew no Russian—she had once been startled upon hearing the Passazh concierge say “Kholodnovata” and told Motoko about it: “That concierge’s quite witty, isn’t he? He called the snow ‘cold cotton.’” Hearing this, Motoko had burst into laughter. It wasn’t “cold cotton”—the concierge had actually said, “It’s a bit chilly today.”

During that time when Nobuko had so little grasp of the language and tried to rely on Motoko—in what manner had Motoko trained her? On a piece of paper: pugovitsa (button). It was Motoko who had made her write down kalichnevi (brown) and nitka (thread), then sent her out to do the shopping. Food shopping. VOKS errands. Room searches and their negotiations. Motoko had needed to study. Thus all such tasks had become Nobuko’s responsibilities. And so, with her still-lopsided Russian, Nobuko became able to go anywhere—to experience various places and situations, see what she wished to see, walk where she wanted to walk. She had come to viscerally distinguish how Soviet daily reality differed—in what ways and to what degree—from even the finest capitalist societies; how agricultural machinery produced under the Five-Year Plan, though derided as unremarkable or antiquated in other civilized nations where such tools had been used for fifty years, held an entirely separate meaning for the Soviet people.

Truly, before she knew it, Nobuko had naturally become that way. While Motoko sat in university classrooms analyzing Pushkin's poetic meter, organizing book lists, and expanding them. If only someone would address the problem that had arisen between them as this situation born of their long process. What complicated Nobuko's pain was the element of excessive emotion from Motoko's side that had accompanied their shared life. Motoko's sensitivity. A vehement emotional habit that could only interpret every one of Nobuko's actions as either devotion to herself or, failing that, betrayal.

Motoko herself, crushed by that anguish, maintained a punitive, detached attitude toward Nobuko. Nobuko began spending fixed hours each day on translation work before going out more frequently. There were times she ran errands like reserving magazines in Motoko’s stead. There were times with no errands at all. Still, Nobuko went out regardless. In their bookshelf-divided room, facing each window, Nobuko monitored Motoko’s slightest movements while Motoko tracked every shift in Nobuko’s wavering indecision—this mutual vigilance became unbearable for both.

Nobuko had always been by nature a sociable person. With childlike meticulousness, she would call out cheerfully, "I'm off now," as though the hotel door were a proper entrance. But now, Nobuko passed through the door with the absentminded quietness of someone whose mind was preoccupied deep within. With a look as though she herself didn’t know where she was going, she slowly put on her beret, took the red Russian leather coin purse from the desk into her pocket, and left in her light blue blouse without a word—not returning for hours.

Moscow. Moscow. Beloved Moscow. But I don't know. Nobuko went to the park along the Moskva River embankment where she had been on May Day. In the park facing the river, the lilac flower clusters had begun to open about a third of the way, and bumblebees flew around the abundant white and purplish-red blossoms.

Standing in line at the bread shop, lining up at the oil shop, enveloped in the fragrant aroma of freshly baked bread or inhaling the pungent smell of petroleum that stung her nose, Nobuko occasionally looked with newly awakened eyes at the crowd of women around her—their shopping baskets hanging from arms—as if posing a silent question. Soviet society. It was not Nobuko who had built it to this day. She could not help confirming this. However much her heart might be drawn to it, she had endured no hardships to stand here today. How easy it would be for Nobuko to praise this Soviet life now fully formed. However sincere her praise might be—coming from one who had never done revolutionary work—those who had starved for it, performed Saturday labor for it, gathered at the Moscow Soviet's first assembly, had lived through a history no praise could ever exhaust. And still they lived through its continuation. Facing these people while writing a Japanese novel based on reports—herself here in Moscow where it might sell a hundred thousand copies. This thought contained a vulgar emptiness that sickened her physically. To Nobuko, it felt almost like deception.

Burdened by the weight of her thoughts, Nobuko unconsciously muffled her footsteps as she ascended the stairs of Hotel Passazh, forgot to knock, and quietly opened the door to their room.

Motoko started and turned from the desk.

“What’s wrong, Buko!” “It’s nothing.” After several days, Motoko approached Nobuko with her characteristic face and voice.

“Are you really sure nothing’s wrong?” Nobuko nodded in understanding. “Buko, don’t go getting yourself run over by a bus or something.” Nobuko nodded again. When she spoke, her voice trembled as if she might cry.

In Moscow, the white nights had begun. What was it she ought to do? Resolutely, Nobuko had come to think that she must return to Japan. Not to the Japan from which she had emerged alongside Motoko, but to the Japan that, through three years in Moscow, had come to be seen by her with new meaning. That was a Japan unknown to those of the Sasa household. To a Japan with millions unemployed and groups of people persistently resisting authority, Nobuko resolved to return as a complete newcomer. There, in what kind of relationships her life would be placed—that was something she could not comprehend at all. But if it was certain that she had achieved some growth over those three years, then it was also true that she wished to live out a Japan she had never known before. The reply that she had decided to return to Japan would not bring joy to Gen Yamagami. It might be a reply that invited contempt. But Nobuko could find no other answer. When presented with the possibility of leaving that place, she had grown all the more deeply attached to Japan’s suffering. A place where her own setbacks might lie. A place where she herself might be destroyed. But there lay the reality of Nobuko’s life. And there was a song of life that she desired to sing, devoting her heart to it.

Nobuko stood rooted before her desk, clasping her hands tightly together. "Nobuko returns." But to voice those words aloud was frightening.

Materials

Chapter One

I

Now, Nobuko was walking through the streets of Paris.

With Motoko. Beside Motoko walked a young painter and his wife, huddled together as they carried a frail-looking infant girl dressed in white clothes in their arms. On the plane trees of Boulevard du Montparnasse, where the high domed roof of the station could be seen to the left, June sunlight poured down. The streets overflowed with color, movement, and sound. Between the soft new greenery of the tree-lined street and the sidewalk, awnings with red and white stripes and yellow and indigo stripes were stretched out. At the subway entrance, discarded tickets—pink, yellow, white—lay like litter, while wastewater flowed from beneath an advertisement tower plastered with bold black-and-white text and flashy designs, its structure resembling a public toilet, emanating a faint ammonia smell in one corner of the lively, bustling street.

In this corner of Paris, life overflowed with unpretentious vitality and spirit. Beneath the plane trees stretching their large branches toward the roadway, people streamed constantly in and out of the public toilet—almost entirely men—while those emerging from the Metro carelessly discarded their now-useless pink and white tickets nearby before briskly scattering in every direction. The bustle of Montparnasse Boulevard during lunch hour from just past one to just past two was softened by the fresh greenery of tree-lined streets and colorful awnings stretched beneath them. In Paris, taxis had been monopolized by a single joint company. Every taxi was painted a heavy deep wine color as proof of its function. This proved an astute strategy. In a city so teeming with automobiles that all taxis bore this instantly recognizable hue, the scheme not only subtly flattered private car owners' pride without their awareness but also created an impetus for Americans—who nightly thronged the grand boulevards—to purchase "Parisian" private vehicles. A bicycle moved beneath the plane trees grazing the sidewalk where Nobuko and her companions walked, avoiding the stream of passing cars. A short stepladder was securely lashed to its side. Paint cans dangled from the handlebars. A man around thirty wearing a workman's beret and blue overalls pedaled slowly along the sidewalk edge while humming tunelessly—until catching a snatch of Japanese from the group made him turn his head sharply. Sunlight filtering through the branches danced across his face.

As they walked, Nobuko’s gaze was occasionally drawn to the child cradled in the young painter’s arms. Amid the lunchtime crowd flooding the June sidewalk, amidst the stout black-clad shoulders of the top-hatted men whom Masereel had sharply carved out in his black-and-white woodcuts, and amidst the forest of stubborn, greed-heavy gazes, the lightness of the small child’s white clothes—still and quiet in the young father’s arms—evoked in Nobuko a feeling akin to discovering a young white butterfly, its wings still damp, perched unexpectedly on a tree trunk. Wearing an old green-and-brown striped velvet vest over his shirt and a large white apron, an urchin slipped through the crowd with a gliding gait and deliberately headed straight toward Nobuko. At the last moment, the urchin skillfully twisted both legs, glanced up at Nobuko, dodged, passed by, and whistled three steps behind her.

Nobuko and the others were walking back along this Montparnasse. The crowd gradually grew distant. They came to a place where the gray of the wide sidewalk and the fresh greenery harmonized, stretching far into view along the street. In that area, the black top hats became extremely sparse. Looking into the shop window, they saw mimosa flowers lushly arranged in a vase inside; there, picture frames and paints were sold. At the shopfront, newspapers and magazines were hung invitingly, and there was also a small bookstore. If the Montparnasse around the station had been rendered dusty by the money of middling or lesser transactions, then this area was the Montparnasse of painters and writers. It was the Montparnasse of those who sought to live scorning all the pettiness, conventionality, and ambitions for money of the petit bourgeois symbolized by Paris’s black top hats.

On the right side stood a large Café de la Rotonde. A little further ahead, the large Café du Dôme stretched its awnings out over the entire sidewalk. Both were said to be central gathering places for artists and art enthusiasts who flocked to Montparnasse. However, for some reason over the past year or two, La Rotonde had become more popular than Le Dôme—people said that if you wanted even a distant glimpse of Paris’s renowned artists or world-famous artists visiting Paris, you should go to La Rotonde. Men who looked like regulars were leisurely puffing their pipes, and a woman with a bob hairstyle and blue bead necklace around her neck was letting smoke drift from a red-lacquered long-stemmed ladies’ pipe. Nobuko’s family-like group, accompanied by small children, drank coffee while watching passersby from La Rotonde’s terrace. For lunch today too, they ate at RIJIO—the Bulgarian-run bistro beside the Metro. RIJIO’s owner, with his neatly trimmed black mustache, seemed to have thoroughly grasped that foreigners in Paris—especially those short on funds and connections, particularly when accompanied by women—were like fledglings with unspread wings; once satisfied there, they wouldn’t venture far. He always took their orders personally. Today he served them delicious shrimp. Instead of their usual thin red wine in flask-shaped bottles, he recommended a glass of white wine to each of the four,

“It has a good flavor. “It’s wonderful!” Accompanying it was a gesture Nobuko somehow knew well without understanding why she recognized it—a pinching motion with three fingertips, as if describing something adorable, while saying *C’est bon*, paired with a slight shrug of his shoulders and neck.

The hotel where Nobuko and Motoko were staying stood overlooking the domed roof of Montparnasse Station. It was called the Edward VI Hotel—though no one knew who that namesake had been.

When the train from Berlin pulled its dust-dulled dark green carriages alongside the platform beneath the vast glass ceiling of Gare du Nord, Nobuko felt a vague anguish welling up within her as her body absorbed the train's final jolt. The vastness of Paris. The elusive complexity of life in an unfamiliar metropolis. The atmosphere of Gare du Nord struck Nobuko. Nobuko, who had resolved to live in Paris precisely because it resembled neither Vienna nor Berlin, felt all the more adrift as they stepped onto Gare du Nord's platform without knowing their destination. Nobuko and the others deliberately lingered, walking toward the exit last. Each carried a single suitcase holding all their belongings. ——

The young painter Kyosuke Isozaki and his wife Sumiko had come to meet Nobuko and the others, holding a child dressed in white clothes. The sight of the young family made a strong impression on Nobuko. The soft fullness of the small child's white clothes at Gare du Nord's soot-stained black iron fence appeared not only unnaturally pure white but also resembled flower petals. That a small child—carried in the arms of a father who seemed almost too young—had come to meet them at the station spoke volumes about the life of Kyosuke and Sumiko Isozaki in Paris. At the same time, it was a cross-section of Parisian life itself that had shaped the Isozaki couple’s existence in such a way.

Nobuko stepped without a hint of hesitation into the fissures of Paris’s vast life—opened before them through the humble guidance of the Isozaki couple, still not yet thirty, who were studying painting together.

The Isozaki couple, during their four years of frugal life in Paris, knew Montparnasse better than anywhere else—there lay hidden their passion for living. But they had no idea where to find a hotel they deemed suitable for Nobuko and the others. Indeed, what sort of hotel would even be suitable for Nobuko and Motoko—that too they did not know. Motoko had known Sumiko since her girlhood. Sumiko was the daughter of Professor Tosasaka, under whom Motoko had studied when she was in the Russian literature department of a university. However, Nobuko was meeting her for the first time. The young and honest people had resolved to make Nobuko and her companions spend as little money as possible upon arriving in Paris, no matter what.

Nobuko, Motoko, and the Isozaki couple—a group of four—surrounded the small girl in white like the pistil of a flower, took a taxi to Montparnasse Street, and entered a room at the Edward VI Hotel. The front entrance faced Montparnasse Street, but the hotel rooms seemed to have been allocated by partitioning a portion of the large stone building vertically into narrow sections, and the staircase that Nobuko and the others ascended was dark. The third-floor room had cobalt and yellow narrow-striped wallpaper pasted on its walls, giving the feeling of being inside an aged paper-lined box. From one window, the setting sun poured in harshly.

Standing in the center of the room and looking around, Sumiko meekly tilted her bob hairstyle back toward her young husband. “I’m sorry— Only such a room was available.” she said in a perplexed manner. “As soon as we received your telegram, we checked one or two places we had in mind—but unfortunately there were no rooms available anywhere.”

Isozaki said while gently lowering the child—who had been curled up in his arms for a long time—onto the bed. Even within this box-like room, the figure of the child dressed in white clothes somehow particularly caught Nobuko’s eye. "Actually, this room was still occupied when we checked earlier." "This will do just fine—if anything comes up, we can always think about it later—thank you for your trouble." Nobuko also—

“It’s truly fascinating.” she said with genuine feeling. From the front window, the noise of Montparnasse and the western sun streamed in strongly, but the back window was dark, pressed closely against some building. Nobuko was satisfied that her first hotel in Paris was such a place—a room where the child’s white clothes, glowing in the western sun, were the only beautiful thing there. In this vast city where one either floats endlessly upward or sinks irrevocably down, how splendid it was to begin life consciously from the bottom rung. When July came, the Sasa parents would come here with their family. By then, Nobuko wanted to have experienced their own Parisian life in Paris. It was a life interwoven among those who lived ordinarily in Paris; a life attuned to frugality that calculated expenses down to the centime; and above all, a life striving to grasp the spirit unique to Paris—the Paris that had lived through history as Paris itself.

The Isozaki couple had their first dinner with Nobuko and the others at RIJIO and, saying the child was too exhausted, returned home before night had fully fallen. These people lived in a town called Dutot, just a short walk from Montparnasse. Nobuko and the others bought a map of Paris. On its red cover were silver letters reading "Classified Paris." At that time, while everyone was resting at the café’s round table, Kyosuke Isozaki opened the map to the page of the Sixth Arrondissement. At that moment, the location where Nobuko’s group stood was approximately halfway along the broad, long stretch of Montparnasse Boulevard. Montparnasse met Boulevard Saint-Michel at the Observatory corner, with Luxembourg Gardens to its left and Sorbonne University further along on the right bank of the Seine.

“We live around here, you see.” From beside the white clothes of the child seated on her lap, Sumiko youthfully pushed forward her bob-cut bangs and peered at the map. “There it is.” Isozaki said, “In any case, I’ll come by the hotel again tomorrow—should I draw a line here?” He drew a soft pencil line in a painterly manner over the short street labeled DUTOT. “Huh, so this is Dutot? That’s exactly why I can’t stand French. If it were me, I’d end up reading it as Dutotto. Because that’s how it’s written!”

At Motoko’s grumbling words, Isozaki laughed and,

“Ms. Sasa, will you be speaking?” he asked.

“Well now—how much French do I know? First, bonjour. “Then, merci. “I don’t speak French.”

“But you mustn’t say that,” Sumiko said in her slow, deliberate manner—the measured tone of a young woman naturally sparing with words. “Because if you do, they’ll retort, ‘But you’re speaking it perfectly well!’” “Still, within Paris itself, you won’t find English any hindrance, will you?”

She said as though half-seeking Isozaki’s agreement.

"Moreover, most shops here sell things with fixed-price tags after all." In Sumiko’s intervention—she who had just married, begun life in Paris, and become both housewife and mother all at once—there was, beneath its casualness, a kind of mutual understanding that resonated with Nobuko and Motoko as women. Speaking of fixed prices, even the coffee saucers that Nobuko’s group had emptied and placed on the round table were marked in black with 1F50.

Even after parting ways with the Isozakis, Nobuko and Motoko walked for a while through bustling Montparnasse—vibrant with pedestrian traffic from ten to eleven at night—toward the side streets. The Berlin night was pierced by unnervingly vivid neon signs—red, blue, orange, violet—forming motionless ribbons of flame that rent the dark sky; tracing those luminous bands only made the darkness spreading at vision’s edge seem more palpably alive and eerie. Montparnasse Boulevard with its old-fashioned illuminations became a place where countless men and women trailed along the thoroughfare, their flickering lights disrupted by each other’s black shadows as they openly displayed their desires for pleasure. The scene remained grounded in earthly reality, the very dreams captured there forming a nightscape of tangible realism.

II Four days later, Nobuko and Motoko moved to Hotel Garrick. This relocation too came through information from Kyosuke Isozaki. From the Porte de Versailles at Paris's southwestern edge stretched Vaugirard—the city's longest thoroughfare—piercing through Montparnasse and Raspail before curving hockey-stick-like to meet Saint-Michel Boulevard at Sorbonne University. The Garrick stood near Vaugirard's Porte de Versailles end. Much as Tverskaya Street—inevitably recalled by Nobuko's group at any mention of Moscow—had served since Muscovite princely times as a dusty highway linking Tver's markets to the Kremlin walls, so Vaugirard formed a stone-paved artery running between Versailles and the Tuileries Palace. Beyond the Porte de Versailles gateway lay squares still paved with Paris's traditional worn cobblestones—those very stones that throughout French history had repeatedly sided with the people, becoming weapons even women could wield—yet upon entering Vaugirard proper, this gave way to sleek modern pavement. Amid rows of aging buildings rose a new seven-story structure. Hotel Garrick occupied part of this edifice. Neither excessively modern nor lacking the brightness and spaciousness uncommon among Parisian hotels of its class, its defining feature was a sizable café-restaurant facing the street beside the entrance.

At Hotel Garrick, guests who had visitors but did not wish to take them directly to their rooms could apparently use the café instead—for the white stone-walled entrance hall offered no seating area for conversation and connected directly to an automatic elevator. After ten o’clock at night, when the elevator ceased operation, Nobuko and the others would walk up the white, clean stone staircase behind it to reach their third-floor rooms.

On the evening of the day they moved to Garrick, Nobuko was delighted to make a discovery. It was that Parisian elevators were actual elevators that properly ascended. The elevator at Garrick would not come up when called from the third floor. Parisians made it a practice not to waste electricity.

During the nearly year and a half she lived in Moscow, Nobuko often walked all over the city by herself. Whether she had errands or not. In Paris, Motoko walked with her. Carrying the red-covered Paris District Map beneath their handbags. One day starting from the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile; another time from the Louvre Museum toward Rue de Rivoli and Madeleine. The boulevards' afternoons overflowed with foreigners everywhere. On pleasant walkways under June's early horse chestnut shade, and on café terraces too.

As they rested on the terrace of Café de la Paix at the corner of the Grands Boulevards gazing out at the street, an Arab man passed before Nobuko and the others—his ebony skin gleaming from beneath a pure white robe, exuding an exotic aura that stood in stark contrast to the deep verdure around them. A Spanish man wearing a cocoa-brown soft hat with flair and a pale cinnamon-colored suit strutted pretentiously down the street, flaunting Valentino-style long sideburns. Chattering rapidly with a distinctive "shu-shu" lilt to their words, two American women passed by. Mingling among the colorful tapestry-like crowd was a uniformed messenger boy. A Breton-style old woman in black clothes and a white apron. A woman walking a dog with eye shadow and thick lipstick. Both women wore identical white fur stoles draped diagonally over their shoulders—eyes made up beneath wide-brimmed hats casting glances toward the café terrace as they walked, supple bodies swaying with deliberate grace. Soon along the sidewalk distant from the terrace came three nuns dressed in large black robes and stiffly starched white headdresses resembling towers approaching briskly in single file. On the café terrace young waiters skillfully maneuvering large trays held high with their elbows moved ceaselessly among bustling patrons to distribute glasses and coffee cups; from saucers left behind by departed customers who had paid drink costs with ten percent tips included, they deftly poured coins into their palms and slipped them into trouser pockets.

The Grands Boulevards were said to be for wealthy foreigners, yet these foreigners—men and women alike—seemed so utterly at ease, immersed in their enjoyment of Paris here without a hint of doubt in its savor. Nobuko secretly marveled at how they too, seated on the terrace of de la Paix along the Boulevard in that afternoon of beautiful new greenery, had become a vignette from the Orient. How full of vitality and yet calm the people of Paris were—and how uniquely they lived, without causing the slightest offense to others, keeping separate the lives of foreigners on the Grands Boulevards for their enjoyment and their own reality as citizens of Paris.

Just two or three days earlier, Nobuko and Motoko had gone to the Japan-France Bank located in the commercial district. The congestion was intense around where the narrow, busy Rue Cambon merged with another street leading to Madeleine—not only were men and women with quick strides passing each other on the sidewalks, but the roadway was terribly packed with traffic. Amidst the private cars—and even more numerous than those—the familiar deep wine-colored Paris taxis emerged from the depths of two narrow streets, clinging to the bumpers of the vehicles ahead as if being pushed forward. And the moment they approached the three-way intersection leading to Madeleine, every car that had been crawling along in the deadlock suddenly regained a vitality-like speed, swiftly cutting curves to the right and left as they raced onward. But the spectacle in that corner was something to behold. In Berlin, how obtrusively the red, orange, and blue three-colored traffic signals would be flashing—halting the flow of vehicles in one direction while allowing it to proceed in another, inevitably regulating the pedestrians’ movements on the sidewalks accordingly—such a place it would be. At Paris’s intensely trafficked three-way intersection, there existed only a single safety zone—constructed like a delta fanning out from Madeleine toward two streets. The dense streams of cars overflowing from two street mouths skillfully jockeyed and wove around each other at this delta-like junction, their respective flows—like flocks of June swallows in Paris—swooshing away in light arcs that traced their rhythmic paths. Pedestrians attempting to cross at that point would stand on the delta-like island in the middle of the roadway, and once a few had gathered—with what seemed like Parisian intuition—they would find a brief lull in the ceaseless stream of cars and swiftly traverse the road as a single group. The great, powerful arc of the stream of cars. Pedestrians, clustered softly like a school of fish, swiftly darted through the gap. Beneath the young leaves of Japanese lime trees, in the ceaselessly shifting scene of that street, a taut rhythm danced.

Similar scenes could be seen around the Arc de Triomphe, further enhanced by the grandeur of the surrounding streets. Twelve grand boulevards traversing Paris radiated from the Place de l'Étoile, centered on the Arc de Triomphe. The ceaseless streams of cars flowing from those twelve boulevards blended into each other's orbits, circling the monument as if savoring the pleasant centrifugal force, then—upon reaching their respective street entrances—were drawn whoosh, whoosh into those directions with the same rhythm they had maintained while racing along the vast circumference. Nobuko stood at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and Étoile, often captivated by that rhythm. The sensation of this motion—the precise rhythm and expansion and contraction of lines. There was music there, and a sensation of dance. And in Paris, Nobuko was left with an inexpressible impression regarding how it was people wearing flat caps who embodied this sensation. The workers of Paris were not wearing top hats.

At the center of the Arc de Triomphe's sturdy inner wall lay the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the Great War. Day and night, a lamp dedicated to the Unknown Soldier burned ceaselessly there, a soldier standing guard on each side of the tomb. This scene at Étoile exerted an utterly unique effect against the Grands Boulevards' vitality-saturated atmosphere. Solemn, beautiful, and stylized, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—this symbol of grief—refrained from confronting Boulevard foreigners with war's explicit horrors. Even death mingling with life was woven into Paris' landscape like an unforgettable nuance. The Avenue de la Grande-Armée began at this Étoile, lined with Paris' finest mansions as it stretched toward the Bois de Boulogne enclosing Longchamp Racecourse.

Nobuko spent most of her days with Motoko, wandering here and there through the streets of the city.

Just as Moscow had done before it, Paris too held something at its polar opposite that inevitably enthralled Nobuko. But what was it? What aspect of Paris stimulated her so intensely? Nobuko and Motoko only lingered around the boulevards until evening. When the western sun filtering through plane tree leaves transformed into quivering golden threads, and daytime litter on the narrow stone-paved street behind Madeleine Church began resembling grimy refuse, they would cross back to the Seine's opposite bank—yet in these evening streets where they wandered aimlessly, they frequently met young women returning from work. Girls spilling out from tailor shops and milliner's workshops would cast professional appraising glances at the pair when their paths crossed, then immediately resume their cheerful chatter as they passed by. When Nobuko first encountered such a group in a side street, she witnessed something that engraved itself upon her consciousness: The seamstresses of Paris wore black cotton stockings—not silk—on workdays. These young women in coordinated black dresses and stockings moved briskly through twilight backstreets bordering boulevards where prostitutes parading as noblewomen glittered extravagantly, their strides purposeful and unhesitating.

In Paris, even the salesgirls in the large department stores along the boulevards uniformly wore smart small white collars and black uniforms with cuffs. In the Luxembourg Gardens and Parc Monceau, well-dressed boys and girls—their expressions a blend of shyness and willfulness—played with dogs and hoops under the supervision of women in white-collared black dresses. In the women’s shoe sections of large department stores and inside the famous women’s shoe shops along the Grands Boulevards, it was also the supple young women in white-collared black dresses who knelt at the feet of each excited woman customer crowded together and jealously demanding better service. They would make customers try on one new shoe after another, take them off, then bring armfuls of different shoe boxes from the shelves in response to impulsive requests. Their young bodies, wrapped in black dresses, were made to employ their tireless suppleness and agility on luxurious carpets throughout the workday. The contrasting scene of women customers of all ages crowding to buy shoes and young salesgirls straining their backs startled Nobuko, who was accustomed to Moscow’s salespeople. Nobuko had failed to buy her own shoes at that very moment due to the customers’ overbearing behavior.

Nobuko had heard and read that Parisiennes knew how to skillfully use black, spoken of as if it were a chic Parisian taste akin to the refined elegance of Japan's pleasure quarters. But in Paris, there was also women’s black clothing that carried the same significance as men’s hunting caps. —as attire for men and women that showed they were not those living off interest but people surviving through daily labor.

After March 1929, the cost of living in France rose, and Paris was no longer a city of affordable prices and comfortable living.

“Meat, eggs, things like butter, beans, and potatoes have all gone up quite a bit here lately, haven’t they?” Sumiko Isozaki spoke in her usual calm manner, as if seeking agreement from her young husband. “Even though it seems strange to us—they say wheat has actually gotten cheaper this year, yet bread prices have risen—” “Things produced here have become more expensive.”

“For painters as poor as us, it truly takes its toll.” “And we have a family to support.” Regarding their newborn child, Kyosuke and his family had entrusted their four-year-old eldest to a country house near Fontainebleau through arrangements with Madame Dutot’s household. A shadow of silent suffering passed over Sumiko’s youthful face with its elegant features that diverged from typical Japanese contours.

“But lately, it’s like this everywhere.” “Even Madame complains about it.” The housekeeper at Kyosuke’s home was a kind widow whose two sons worked at a factory in the suburbs. For several years now, France—second only to America in Europe’s gold reserves—had maintained economic stability without Germany’s unemployment rates or labor strikes. Even with persistent labor shortages requiring worker imports from Poland and Belgium, wages remained frozen at Paris’s comfortable-era levels. As prices rose to match global standards, most Parisians found themselves increasingly forced to survive on meatless diets.

“Even here lately, male and female workers have started holding up signs demanding wage increases and staging demonstrations.” “Oh?”

Nobuko regarded themselves with suspicion,

“For some reason, we haven’t encountered any of those demonstrations even once,” she said. “Well, of course that’s how it is.”

Kyosuke laughed amusedly.

“Workers’ demonstrations rarely come out to places like the Boulevard, you see. They usually only hold them in the working-class districts of eastern Paris.” “Then they’re not effective at all, are they?” Motoko also seemed surprised.

“A demonstration that doesn’t parade through the liveliest areas—how strange, this Parisian style—”

“After all, in France, a portion of the annual revenue comes from money spent by foreigners.” “This year, Italy and Spain had jumped into competing for tourists, and because the French government had spread false propaganda about imposing special tariffs on luxury goods purchased by foreigners—this was around the time just before you arrived.” “The government was in a great rush scrambling to retract it.” “The people who spent money in Paris had all come here to forget things like unemployment in their own countries or strikes at their own companies.” “What they wanted to see in Paris wasn’t demonstrations, I suppose.”

“I see.” Putting away the short translucent red pipe—its mouthpiece bitten down from use at the Komazawa house, then in Moscow, and brought all the way to Paris—Motoko puffed on her tobacco using a newly purchased black long slender lady’s cigarette holder adorned with thin gold and silver lines.

“So wage negotiations aren’t even worth mentioning before customers, you mean?” “But everyone had such earnest expressions.” Sumiko conveyed her personal resonance with the determined faces of men and women she’d glimpsed elsewhere. “Of course they’re earnest.” “I’m only noting that for now, the eastern districts remain their base—but when pressed, they’d march down the Champs-Élysées itself if needed.”

“Well, of course that’s how it is. Paris’s pavements belong to those people.” Nobuko said this, but apart from that conversation, she sensed a vague friction of lived emotions drifting through the exchange between young Kyosuke and Sumiko and fell silent for a while.

“Understanding the real Paris is such a difficult thing, isn’t it?” Since coming to Paris, Nobuko had begun to harbor a certain question that occasionally flickered through her mind. On French coins—even down to the small ten-centime pieces—were minted three humanistic mottos: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The French people had upheld this motto since the Revolution. Even these weighty, impassioned three mottos—had they not, within the lives of Parisians in 1929, gradually been stripped of their original fermenting power and stylized into a quintessentially French symbol that everyone knew and took pride in? Such thoughts occasionally crossed her mind. How many of the small centime coins stamped with the three great words—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—must have been worn down. Occasionally, Nobuko received a small centime copper coin—about the size of the pad of her index finger—whose half-circle shape had been worn down as if ground by a whetstone, its edge on that side thinned to a delicate sliver. There were also coins where the entire surface had been worn flat, their embossed words—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—long since vanished, leaving them gleaming a coppery hue like small burn scars.

In Moscow, even the coins that Nobuko kept in a red Russian leather wallet and used bore minted slogans. On both the characteristically Russian thick, large copper coins and silver coins were cast the words, “Workers of the world, unite!” This was crude, but it was a phrase that pointed toward theory and practice. The copper coins bearing those cast characters were still new in the Soviet Union’s tenth year. Even if worn down into any shape, the characters cast there seemed to wage a ceaseless protest against their own erosion. For the resonance of the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—like the word *love*—suddenly touched people’s emotions through tradition’s force, Paris’s worn-down coins made those who saw them vividly feel the minute hardships of life being lived within that vast Paris.

“I wonder if Parisians view those words on their money with such profound irony.” While referring to the words “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” Nobuko said. Kyosuke Isozaki,

“Well—” Kyosuke showed no particular interest in such topics.

“No matter what words they write,” he said, “it doesn’t change the fact that what ten francs can buy keeps shrinking. The people of Paris aren’t dreamers, you see. Isn’t that right? Sumiko.”

Sumiko, questioned by Motoko, remained silent, her large black eyes opened wide with earnestness beneath straight bangs framing her round face. Since coming to Paris, what had impressed itself upon Nobuko’s mind lay beyond Motoko’s capacity to fully interpret.

III

One afternoon around three o'clock, Nobuko and Motoko stood before a jeweler's display window on the Grand Boulevard for a long time, gazing at a single bracelet displayed inside. The imposing show window of that jewelry store was deeply recessed into a high stone dado, its base covered in refined silver-gray silk velvet positioned at eye level for the petite Nobuko. Within the window where June's Boulevard light filtered through sunshades, the green of young leaves, buildings' black smooth stone surfaces, and silver-gray silk velvet formed a harmonious gradation through their mere juxtaposition. Amid this composition sat displayed a solitary bracelet—a transparent sapphire-colored stone cut into sharp facets and accented with quality small diamonds—whose design grew increasingly fascinating the longer one looked.

Facing the Boulevard with its large entrance, this jeweler’s black smooth stone exterior wall had three modern display windows spaced at appropriate intervals, always showcasing what appeared to be expensive items. Having only glanced in passing before, that day was the first time Nobuko and the others had stopped before it. Nobuko’s footsteps had ambled aimlessly,

“When something’s this grand and imposing, even an imitation can hold its own quite well, don’t you think?” Laughing and making a sarcastic remark, she suddenly stopped and began to gaze at the bracelet. That year, women’s fashion featured flowing lines from head to toe, with dominant colors centered around soft flesh tones and stylish russet hues. Instead, the color transitions and accessories women wore often featured strongly accented straight-line patterns. The bracelet in that display window epitomized that mode. The substantial rectangular sapphire-colored stone—whose name Nobuko did not know—was cut into a sharp fifteen-sided polyhedron and connected to small, high-quality diamonds. As if to receive the soft lines flowing down along a woman’s body with a pleasing resistance, the women’s gloves of that year had a high, flared decorative edge reminiscent of Western fencing gloves. This bracelet, too—with its supple wrist—was likely intended to accentuate the soft lines of a woman’s body exposed from chest to back by tautly cinching them with heavy intensity. As if to inversely emphasize the thinness, whiteness, and suppleness of a woman’s wrist living in luxury, the sapphire-colored bracelet possessed an almost excessive weight, an austerity, and simultaneously a luxuriousness.

After gazing for a while, what Nobuko found herself intensely captivated by was the Parisian designers’ sensibility toward the female body and its lines. Such designs were not created by women. Seized by interest, Nobuko thought. She found it intriguing how men—through their sensibilities—consciously perceived women as both physical and spiritual beings, and how they crafted accessories like this bracelet to enliven those women, draw out their qualities, transform them, and ultimately express them *as women*: heavy, strong pieces designed not to blend with feminine softness but to accentuate it externally. Parisian women's furniture followed the curves of a woman's body, while accessories were conceived to accentuate beauty through contrasting angles against those curves. The designs by Japan's renowned pearl merchants—likely influenced by their relationship with Japanese women's clothing—always clung closely to the female form, but in pieces like necklaces and rings, a lack of crispness in the lines and a dullness in their composition stood out. Once again, disapproval of the commonly held notion that French and Japanese tastes were similar welled up in Nobuko’s heart. Within that disapproval lay concealed her feelings as a woman toward Japanese men—how strange it was, Nobuko thought as she gazed at the single bracelet glittering atop ripples of silver-gray silk velvet. Even if it were said that in France women were understood as creatures who ought to be this beautiful, which of the millions of French women did that refer to?

Josephine Baker, the Black dancer, was a magnificent nude who would immerse her body in clusters of grapes to make her naked radiance all the more luscious—but it was Coty, the perfume king, who compelled her to do so, and Coty’s zaibatsu stood among France’s fascist leadership. Shortly after arriving in Paris, Nobuko and the others witnessed a fight break out between a Black woman carrying a shopping basket and a Parisian woman inside the Métro—the Parisian suddenly slapped the Black woman’s cheek with an open palm. In the lemon-colored electric lights illuminating the grimy subway car’s swaying interior, the Black woman’s face—framed by a faded soot-hued complexion beneath her light blue apron—flushed with anger, eyes bloodshot. Her purplish-gray thick lips erupted in Black-accented French. Who could have treated this woman’s quarrel seriously? When the doors opened at the next station, the soft-hatted young man who had been leaning against them with folded arms—watching the fight—began shouting rapid words in an unknown language.

“There!”

He pushed the Black woman out through the open Métro door onto the platform. Quite roughly. For Nobuko, who neither knew how the fight had started nor understood how the argument had escalated—merely watching it unfold—the sight within the Métro was painful: even as the Black woman was struck in the face, not a single soul moved to stop it. Even though that Black woman had paid for her Métro ticket with silver coins stamped "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."

The Black woman’s bloodshot white eyes and her grayish-purple lips moving as rapidly as possible rose to the forefront of Nobuko’s mind. Moreover, in that very appearance—declaring themselves to be young women without money, living by their labor—were the countless young women of Paris in their black attire. And yet, among this throng of women walking along the June Boulevard—women whose countries and circumstances remained unknown—who among them would actually buy such a bracelet to adorn themselves?

A woman who wore such a splendid bracelet must exist somewhere—precisely because this was Paris. Those who saw this and passed by thinking so found themselves stirred into fantasies of a remarkable woman—the very image the bracelet subtly suggested as a matter of course. Nobuko thought it conjured fantasies of a living environment existing somewhere such a woman might dwell. A single beautiful bracelet—while its owner remained undetermined—sold the fantasies Paris stirred up to countless passersby. A buyer who would someday appear from somewhere would pay money containing the measure of fantasies sold to people for that purpose, and in doing so, would even purchase their own dreams.

Nobuko stood motionless, gazing at the bracelet with no sign of moving away. Motoko— “You’re terribly taken with it, aren’t you?” She let out a short laugh.

“Haven’t you had enough? Let’s go.” “Wait—just a little longer.” Grabbing Motoko’s hand to keep her from walking ahead, Nobuko pleaded.

“Because ‘My Paris’ is taking shape—because somehow, I’m starting to grasp it—don’t move!”

It was complex and hard to explain properly. As she gazed at the bracelet, vortices swirled tightly and unraveled within Nobuko's heart until she felt she had come to understand—without quite knowing why—the subtle emotional nuances behind why people around the world uttered "Paris, Paris" with such special reverence. "Why do you think people around the world come to Paris every year to spend so much money?"

With an absorbed gaze and holding Motoko's arm as they walked beneath the horse chestnut trees, Nobuko began to speak. "You see—" "People around the world are boosting French government revenue for Paris's expressive power—don't you agree?"

“...” “Paris expresses—through every form of expression—the feelings of those who yearned to articulate so much yet could not. It demonstrates the utmost limits of expression, the diverse fascination of its manifold forms...” “In Paris, therefore, surely the expression of luxury must be more luxurious than luxury itself, and the expression of pleasure must be far more pleasurable than pleasure itself.” “Don’t you think so?” “The people creating expressions—they must all be here in Paris, sober, modest, and sharp—that’s what I think.” “It’s their work, you know...”

Art stood on expression. In that sense, Paris being called the capital of art had indeed been a fact. "But you know—what have Parisians been expressing toward since the Great War?" "You know." "Where could such fierce expressions possibly be headed?" The impression of Derain’s red pine forest—a wall-sized landscape painting at the art dealer’s gallery where the Isozakis had taken her—crossed Nobuko’s mind as she walked beneath green leaves that cast shadows on her beret-clad forehead. Next came Chirico’s plaster-hued fragments of broken columns, an unreal horse, and human figures hanging on another wall. In what was dubbed the year of Matisse and Picasso, the two or three galleries they visited displayed Matisse’s works—overflowing with meltingly sweet harmonies and restful tonalities—alongside Picasso’s uncanny compositions. Each time Nobuko pushed open those gallery doors and stood before paintings displayed from the very entrance, she felt individualities bristling like steel—ruthlessly asserting their uniqueness against one another. How fiercely these painters strove to dismantle and rebuild themselves! Each sought novel creations through calculated barbarism, tearing free from past traditions. The spectacle had been magnificent.

However, the originality of contemporary France’s talented painters—what a case of originality for originality’s sake. It was said that schools of art no longer existed in French modern art. When viewing that reality through this forest of painters’ individualities, what lay before her was the novelty of conception—a novelty promised by the surreal aggregation and dissolution of each painter’s subjectivity, their deformation, and a harmony of sharply measured disharmony.

In France, literature did not collapse even after the Great War. From the violently shifting history of humanity, it firmly and actively erected the framework of the spirit. It stood as the progressiveness of nations that did not become socialist societies through the Great War, a reflection toward higher wisdom, and the exploration of humanity. Nobuko found this in Romain Rolland, knew it through the author of *Clarté*, and was able to feel it through Martinet.

Why had art in France shattered and dispersed into sensations before literature? Did those now studying painting in Paris harbor no doubts about French art only being able to debut by breaking real reality into such forms—stripping it of substance and flattening it into planes? What did it mean today in France to be called painterly? To Nobuko, the decomposition of reality, diagrammatic explanations, and competing deformations seemed built upon an acknowledgment that they were attempts at new beauty—sustained by the tolerance the modern age had resigned itself to endure. It appeared less about perceiving beauty through vision than a cognitive matter—almost like experiments arising from that cognition. The true emotional core of painters would surely grow weary amidst such leaps, she thought—for reality always remained more solid and substantial than any painter’s subjectivity. Nobuko desired a new beauty—one neither drained of blood nor flattened into transparent fragments. But where could such beauty emerge? To claim it came from the Soviets—that new society—was facile enough, but as Nobuko sank into thought, she considered how their decade had shown painting’s renewal to be more fraught than literature’s. How intriguing it would have been to discuss these matters frankly with Kyosuke Isozaki. Yet Kyosuke had not shown Nobuko and the others a single work of his own making. This had naturally drawn a line in their interactions—leaving Nobuko’s group, complete amateurs regarding painting, with no choice but to exclude themselves from artistic discourse.

As the two of them walked back along the long Vaugirard street toward the Garrick Hotel, Nobuko kept thinking about Russian paintings. The paintings of the classical Russian realist school filling the Tretiakov Gallery. The world of those paintings, where all the colors were confined within the walls, had been liberated by Repin. In literature, it would be the era of Tolstoy. Who was the painter that walked alongside Gorky? And then the Soviet painters of the post-1917 era, entering the age of Fadeyev and Furmanov. Nobuko could only recall Denica’s paintings with visceral immediacy. Hundreds of thousands of posters and satirical illustrations overflowed, yet... The vast field of new Soviet paintings was, first and foremost, a place seldom trodden. Compared to literature, it was astonishing how sparse it was.

There, too, lay hidden a secret about the characteristics of artistic genres that compelled consideration—from the opposite direction—of how painting in France had fragmented more than literature. That was where Nobuko’s focus rested. She recalled the disarray of the homecoming exhibition by three young Soviet painters she had seen in Moscow.

"No wonder." Sympathizing with the chaos and resistance into which those young ones had been plunged, Nobuko did not consider it someone else's affair. "If you go to the Louvre—there's that spectacle..." At the Louvre, Egyptian sculptures from 5000 BCE filled the floors of its grand halls, while works by painters from Giotto to the Post-Impressionists covered every wall in two or three tiers.

“Modern painters’ work is like this, and…” The very sense of deformation was not a necessity in Soviet social life. Just as Parisian drivers circled round and round the Arc de Triomphe at Étoile with their relentless speed and ingrained rhythm—avoiding collisions before vanishing precisely from street corners—so too did modern French talent pursue their own paintings, honing their individuality without compromise through nerves unshaken by vertigo, slipping repeatedly between the towering mountain of accumulated classics and today’s dazzling fragments of freely deformed forms.

Today, as she stood before the jeweler’s display window on the boulevard gazing at bracelets, the conviction that Paris was an international market for what was deemed beautiful grew increasingly unshakable in Nobuko’s heart. The names of Matisse and other famous Parisian painters were known throughout the world, along with those of Parisian couturiers whose names even Nobuko did not know. The market value of such painters was set at the same international rate as gold itself.

“You know, France isn’t just using its gold as export capital. “‘Expressive power’ is also written down in their export catalogs. “Paris is an international market for expression itself—don’t you think?” Nobuko had paused her words but broke the silence herself again. “That’s why most people come from America. “They have more than enough material things over there. “But those things are merely produced—no matter how fine their quality, they’re just products. “For those products to become expressions of luxury and prosperity—there must be something slightly lacking in them— To satisfy wealthy customers who demand not just objects but even that very atmosphere as commodities—Paris must surely be their master——”

Nobuko pulled Motoko’s hand—the one that remained silent— “You can’t possibly agree!” she said. “If that weren’t the case, Modigliani wouldn’t have had to die so poor. The wife who loved him wouldn’t have had to throw herself from her parents’ window to her death. Don’t you think? Modigliani’s paintings are more than decoration—they have life in them. Even Gauguin—despite his wretched life—it’s only the world’s wealthy who can buy Gauguins now.”

Nobuko and Motoko descended the steps of the metro station. As usual, around the ticket gates, white and yellow discarded tickets were scattered. Due to the awkwardly in-between hours of the afternoon, the platform was extremely deserted. Nobuko and Motoko stood near where the name of Shinbashi Station was written in mosaic on the wall. It was when Motoko, looking as though she wanted to light a cigarette, let a slightly unsettled expression surface in her eyes. Suddenly,

“Damn it!”

In a low voice, she shouted through clenched teeth as Motoko quickly turned to look behind her. At the same time, she swept one hand behind her back and stroked down her skirt as if brushing something away. “Groping my ass like that!” “?” Driven by both absurdity and surprise, Nobuko too turned to look behind herself. Who could have done such a thing? Near Nobuko and Motoko stood no one who seemed responsible. A short distance away lingered two tall middle-aged men wearing soft hats tilted at angles. Both exhaled cigarette smoke while conversing and glancing their way with utter nonchalance.

“How strange… There’s no one here.” “What do you mean? It’s one of them.” Motoko said, glaring at the men standing some distance away. “The moment they passed behind me, they groped me.” With an angry expression, Motoko jutted out her chin as if ready to start a fight and glared back at the men again. “Don’t look at them.” Nobuko admonished her with a seriousness that half-concealed her amusement.

“You’re still enjoying this?” “How skillfully Parisian men grope!” “They barely touch you yet still manage to paw you properly!”

The metro arrived. Nobuko boarded first. When Motoko tried to board next—so harshly that even Nobuko could hear it— “Tch!” she clicked her tongue.

“What’s wrong?” “They did it again!”

However, the men had not entered the car that Nobuko and Motoko had boarded.

IV

On one of the two beds placed side by side, Motoko lay. A sheet draped over her body, a white cloth tied into a bow hung down to keep the ice bag pressed against her left cheek from slipping off. Her head rested on two pillows stacked high. Motoko, who had developed an intense toothache and hadn’t slept a wink the previous night, finally settled after applying ice. Motoko might be able to sleep now.—

Nobuko had moved away from the bed in the hotel’s narrow single room—to the French-style balcony area where she had spread a cushion and sat. Nobuko too was exhausted.

The fact that her tooth had started hurting today of all days—a Sunday—was truly dismaying. Last night, Motoko—who had said she felt a bit unwell and gargled with saltwater before bed—at around seven this morning,

“Bukko, please wake up.”

Motoko woke Nobuko from her own bed. “I can’t stand this toothache anymore.” “I’ve been waiting since dawn.” “Kyosuke-san must be up by now.” “Go ask a doctor—”

Nobuko did not immediately recall it was Sunday when awakened. She hurriedly changed clothes and went out to Boulevard Vaugirard. Though still early morning, it was nearly eight o'clock—a time when commuters would typically hurry along sidewalks. But this morning—whether she looked downstream toward Versailles Gate or upstream—only morning light flickered through plane tree branches, leaving streets hushed. Nobuko stood on the hotel's sidewalk waiting for taxis. Not a single one ran that morning. Even then she still forgot it was Sunday. Growing impatient, she walked toward Duto along avenues swaying with dawn shadows until encountering two girls at the first corner—dressed for church with white gloves clutching Bibles. Seeing them, Nobuko thought: Honestly! She realized today was Sunday. This realization deepened her dismay. On Sundays all doctors would be closed. Visiting Isozaki for dentist recommendations had been futile from the start.

After finally catching a taxi, Nobuko got in. She informed him of Duto No. 58 and the direction where Isozaki’s residence was located. As the taxi drove through the morning town where every street lay silent and sparsely populated, Nobuko suddenly began to feel uneasy. Even from in front of Garlic Hotel, Duto had been only about five minutes away by taxi. Five minutes passed. But the streets that met Nobuko’s eyes from the taxi were all unfamiliar scenery. If there was any resemblance to Duto’s vicinity, it lay in these streets’ impoverished state and the sight of windows with blue shutters closed forlornly across from narrow sidewalks. The hardware stores and bakeries lining these streets were also closed this Sunday morning. That she was being driven through streets that were not Duto had become impossible for Nobuko to doubt. Could this be some kind of mistake? Or was the driver acting with some ulterior motive? The anxiety grew stronger. Regardless, when I reach that corner, I'll make the taxi stop and get out. Having made that decision, as Nobuko stared at the old wall visible at the dead end and tensely leaned forward from her seat, the taxi she rode in came to an almost violent stop right there. The driver twisted his neck—still wearing the bird-hunting cap—toward Nobuko.

"Well, here we are at Dito Street, I tell ya," he called out.

“Dito?” Puzzled, Nobuko leaned out of the stopped taxi window and craned her neck to look at the circular street nameplate affixed to the wall at the end of the sidewalk. It said DITOT there. It turned out there really was a town called Dito. “You’re mistaken.” Nobuko, flustered, finally found French words close to English and pieced them together in fragments as she spoke. “That’s incorrect. I told you—Duto Street. Go to Duto Street.”

Nobuko, unable to accurately pronounce the R or U sounds, shook her beret-covered head and strained her tongue, attempting to make the driver digest the street name she uttered with at least some clarity in her enunciation. The realization that it had been a misunderstanding about the destination put Nobuko at ease.

The driver, still facing forward, listened with his back to Nobuko’s words that fell like dripping rain, but— “You want Duto?” He twisted his thick neck sharply and looked back at Nobuko.

“Yes! Yes!” Resettling himself and stomping on the clutch, the driver cursed as if spitting invisible saliva.

“Devil!” “Chyort!” When she heard that, Nobuko’s face flushed. Moscow’s “Chyort”! Russian she could understand. The driver, as it turned out, was one of the numerous White Russian émigrés who had come to Paris. Nobuko suddenly leaned out from her seat and began speaking to the back of the driver in the bird-hunting cap and striped suit. “You probably understand Russian.” “I have to go to Duto Street No. 58.” “There’s a sick person, and I have to go get a doctor.”

The driver did not respond at all to what Nobuko said. However, what eventually came to a stop was the dimly lit, square entrance of Isozaki’s residence—familiar yet left wide open and gaping. While getting out of the taxi, Nobuko spoke again in Russian.

“From here to the doctor’s place, I’ll take this taxi again—if you can wait here, then wait. —I’ll pay the waiting fare—how about it?” The driver, with a curtness that seemed determined not to betray any emotion,

“Very well.”

“Very well,” he said. This White Russian driver spoke only French himself. The “American Dentist” at Jacob Street corner that Nobuko had learned about from Isozaki was closed on Sunday. As a backup plan, she had been introduced to a Japanese man named Shibamura living on the fifth floor of No. 20 Dauphine, and Nobuko went there too. For Nobuko, rousing a young man from bed barely past nine on a Sunday morning to ask about dentists proved quite an ordeal. The man in garish pajamas,

"Well, this is troublesome..." he said, scratching the back of his head.

“Well, it is Sunday after all.”

He had said everything would be handled come Monday. On Monday, both the "American Dentist" and the Japanese-operated dental practice would open. At his wits' end, he accompanied Nobuko to the American Dentist's branch in Saint-Lazare. There too, only the elderly night attendant had appeared at the window. Taking pity on the distressed Nobuko and the even more flustered man, the elderly fellow gave her a scrap of paper bearing the name of a painkiller. With this, Nobuko returned straight to Vaugirard, apologizing to the young man who'd been dragged from his bed. Only pharmacies kept their doors open on Sundays - several per neighborhood. Nobuko alighted from the taxi upon spotting a pharmacy just short of the hotel. In that cab driven by a Russian-speaking yet stubbornly monolingual driver, Nobuko had wasted over an hour that Sunday racing through a shuttered Paris in futile search of a dentist.

Wearing a soiled white coat with his reading glasses slipped down his nose, when Nobuko peered into the bag the elderly pharmacist had handed her, she found a small amount of dried pansy flowers inside. At that moment, she felt through her entire being both the dusty shopfront of that pharmacy and the ancient traditions rooted in French commoners' lives. For colds, chamomile decoction. For pain relief, dried pansy flowers. This too would likely become a decoction. Carrying the bag of dried pansies that Parisian men and women must have brewed and drunk since Catherine de Medici's time, Nobuko returned to her modern-style hotel room—devoid of any facilities for slowly simmering such things.

Motoko had placed a clock beside her pillow and waited for Nobuko. Unable to find any doctors available on Sunday, while explaining that they would have to endure until Monday as she produced the bag of pansies, Nobuko—troubled as though this predicament stemmed from her own helplessness—felt sweat dampen her underarms. Motoko, from her toothache and mounting frustration, was on the verge of losing her temper.

“When I was in Berlin—how careless of me—I should’ve at least bought aspirin.” “Should I try asking about some medicine like that?” “Stop it.” Motoko looked up at Nobuko with eyes brimming with unshed tears, her whole body shuddering in pain.

“If you’re bringing pansies like this, I can’t feel reassured at all. Forget it.” Sitting beside the bedstead and gently stroking Motoko’s limp hand, Nobuko remained anxious that her companion’s toothache might be something grave. Though nearly half a month had passed since arriving in Paris, their social circle still remained confined to the Isozaki couple. One could say this extreme narrowness of their interactions in Paris was leaving them helpless in situations like today. Nobuko kept reaching out to touch Motoko’s forehead.

“Since there’s no fever, it can’t be an infection—you’ll be fine—but does it hurt?” “Obviously! You dummy!” Motoko, consumed by pain, seemed not to have considered this matter, but within Nobuko’s heart lingered an anxiety about her own feelings. Their conscious avoidance of socializing with Japanese people in Paris stemmed strongly from Nobuko’s own convictions. ——

It was a day not long after they moved to the Garlic Hotel. Upon returning from their outing, Nobuko and the others were handed a business card along with their room key at the front desk. This belonged to a Paris correspondent from a newspaper who had lived there for several years. Through him, occasional reports on Parisian literary, art, and music circles appeared in the paper's cultural column—pieces Nobuko had read since her time in Japan. His long residency and distinctive temperament meant these dispatches often transcended mere reporting. They carried an air of camaraderie with France's renowned artists and Japanese luminaries visiting Paris—a chronicle of convivial connections. From these traits, Nobuko had gradually come to remember both his name and defining characteristics.

The business card handed over at the front desk had the purpose of the visit succinctly written in a single line. That year was said to be when Japanese writers had gathered in Paris in greater numbers than any recent year. The same income from Bunmeisha’s large-scale literary anthology—which Nobuko had used as travel funds to first come to Moscow—was enabling several Japanese writers to arrive in Paris that summer, some accompanied by spouses, others by friends.

If someone were to make a call, the Paris correspondent’s business card even had the phone number properly printed on it. But Nobuko spent the day leaving the business card on the dressing table in her hotel room. She wanted to avoid the so-called cosmopolitan literary socializing—considered quintessentially Parisian—that would inevitably spread from meeting that person. Even in Japan, the social customs of literary circles had been something alien to Nobuko; though these interactions might be simplified through the shared lens of being Japanese in Paris, she still wished to remain simply herself—unsophisticated yet driven by inquiry, in a state of perpetual mental agitation. However those people might enjoy Parisian life and moods, however comfortably they might forge friendships and carry on their daily routines, Nobuko had come to Paris after a year and a half in Moscow. During that interval, there had also been her younger brother’s suicide. Within Nobuko’s heart lay many elements differing from those people’s sentiments. If experiencing Parisian life could teach her anything, it ultimately seemed there was no path except pursuing that which she consciously recognized as different from everyone else—what she carried within her life and heart as Nobuko.

On the evening two or three days after receiving the business card, Motoko was at the dressing table, “Is it really okay to leave this lying around?”

Sandwiching the business card between her fingers, she waved it at Nobuko. Nobuko, wearing an inexpensive nightgown of purple-tinged crimson with fine patterns, sat on the bed, “What do you want to do?”

Nobuko looked at Motoko and asked in return, “I think I’ll take my leave of them… Would that be wrong…?” Motoko gazed at Nobuko’s face for a while before saying, “It’s up to you, Bukko.” “I’m rebelling, you see,” Nobuko continued. “When Japanese people talk about Paris or France, they become unbearably dilettantish—posing as connoisseurs. I think that’s wrong. Even comparing a single curve, France feels like steel arabesque to me. Repelled by that strength, they affect dilettante postures—I refuse such adjustments.”

With that, Nobuko thought. Moreover, in Paris, besides French cuisine, there are peculiar dishes like Mussolini-style macaroni and so-called Grand Duke-style roasted lamb (the name of a Caucasian dish). Even among the literary figures here, there must unexpectedly be people who adore such things. I can’t tell the difference at all.

Nobuko shrugged her shoulders. "I'm still perfectly content being a clumsy little bear from Moscow with thick ankles," she said. Since 1917, Paris had housed symbolist poets like Gippius, Balmont, Bunin, and other exiled writers. The activities of these former grand dukes and nobles alongside the émigré literati amounted to nothing but slander against the Soviet Union's new society and persistent counter-revolutionary movements. Rather than transforming their irrepressible attachment to the homeland they'd abandoned into genuine understanding, these people expressed it through suspicion and hatred stripped of all passion or logic. Such pronouncements became ideal kindling for the invasion plans against the Soviet Union—increasingly active across nations with Paris at their center—and for schemes to destroy Soviet society. In the autumn two years prior, Romain Rolland—unable to attend as an honored guest for the revolution's tenth anniversary—had sent greetings to Moscow's evening paper. This Soviet endorsement infuriated Parisian exiled writers and anti-Soviet intellectuals, prompting Bunin and Balmont to issue a signed protest against Rolland. The detailed reply Rolland wrote had been translated in Moscow's *Literary Gazette*, which Nobuko finally read at length the following year. How earnestly yet resolutely Rolland must have written in that letter: "You refuse to know anything or see this new society. In your encircled environment, you cannot." With concrete examples, he demonstrated how all culture flourished in Soviet society—how in literature, "young writers proliferate, published and read in numbers far exceeding those released in France." Through Rolland's text, Nobuko learned Duhamel had visited the Soviet Union. That he'd spoken of being moved by Soviet children and youths' vibrant lives. This revelation about Duhamel—whom she'd considered an aloof poet—made her feel an unexpected kinship with him.

While Nobuko remained silent like that, once again, the newspaper person stopped by the hotel and left a business card. As expected, it had happened while Nobuko and Motoko were out. Nobuko and Motoko gazed at the business card they had received upon returning from both sides and remained silent for a while. Nobuko said, “Hey, staying silent is its own form of expression, don’t you think?”

Nobuko said to Motoko. “I’m still keeping quiet.”

And the days passed. But now, as both were at a loss over Motoko's Sunday toothache, Nobuko began to think the Parisian lifestyle she herself had proposed might have been too obstinate. It made her fear Motoko might have to endure prolonged suffering as collateral damage.

Nobuko was finally saved by the idea of cooling the aching tooth with ice. “Ice—where would you even find that sold around here?” “Don’t worry, it’s definitely in the restaurant downstairs—they must have a refrigerator there after all.”

Nobuko flipped through the daily English-French conversation guide. She bought an ice bag at the pansy pharmacy, then went to the hotel’s downstairs restaurant and had them give her two francs’ worth of ice. At first Motoko did not even feel the coldness of the ice, but eventually had her place a handkerchief folded in two under the ice bag. Around that time, drowsiness began to come over Motoko.

Nobuko sat with a cushion spread at the boundary between the veranda and the room. Right beside her, the room’s wall began. The wall was papered in fashionable Matisse-style patterns—bold yellow designs on a navy blue ground. A gray carpet covered the floor. The furnishings were simple: a wardrobe, a dressing table, and two beds. Yet since arriving in Paris, Nobuko had been struck by how much space the beds occupied in this hotel room. Now, with Motoko lying drowsily on one of them, the two large beds placed side by side took up over two-thirds of the floor space. With only a narrow walking path left between the wardrobe and dressing table, Nobuko had no choice but to sit like this—perched on a cushion at the threshold of the wide French doors opening onto the veranda—unless she wanted to lie on the bed beside Motoko or sit facing the mirrored dressing table.

From the balcony of Nobuko and Motoko’s third-floor room, through an old stone wall half-hidden by dense plane trees, the neighboring inner courtyard offered an intriguing view. They couldn’t determine who owned the small garden or its purpose, but beneath a large plane tree with sprawling branches stood something like a green-painted gazebo, its roof thatched with straw. A small window bore a yellow curtain. Driven by curiosity toward this fairy-tale-like cottage with its green thatched roof, Nobuko would invariably look down whenever she stepped onto the balcony—yet she never once glimpsed a human figure. Still, people were clearly there at times. For almost always, the green cottage’s window stood open, a yellow curtain peeking out—this much was certain.

The backside of Vaugirard was quiet and hushed even during the day; the green cottage, its entrance and exit skillfully concealed, was surrounded by a stone wall. Outside that wall ran a single French-style gravel path. Separated by that path stood a three-story house with an entrance of five steps adorned with iron handrails. On each floor of the side visible from Nobuko’s position, five windows were open, and the attic room had two windows—one small and one large. Though no one was visible there now, there were signs suggesting it might be an orphanage for girls.

One morning, upon waking, Nobuko opened the French-style window leading to the balcony and absentmindedly glanced at the neighboring small garden, only to find two girls of eleven or twelve doing laundry in a narrow concrete courtyard, having set up a table there. The washed-out gray cotton tops of the girls reminded Nobuko of the color of the gray cotton clothes she had seen in Berlin’s remand prison. The two girls neither chatted with each other nor sang; by all appearances, they worked in the reluctant manner of those forced into laundry day’s labor. Nobuko and Motoko watched the scene for a while, and they came to believe that the always quiet three-story building was an orphanage for girls.