Pathway to Japanese Literature

This is the memoir of an elderly doctor practicing in a certain village in the Tohoku region of Japan.

The other day, a middle-aged man with an unkempt beard and a sallow complexion who claimed to be a reporter from a local newspaper came and asked, "You are, I hear, someone who graduated from Sendai Medical School, the predecessor of the current Tohoku Imperial University Faculty of Medicine—is that correct?"
"That's correct," I answered.

"Wasn't your enrollment in Meiji 37 (1904)?" asked the reporter impatiently, taking a small notebook from his breast pocket.

“I believe that was indeed around that time.”
I felt uneasy at the reporter’s restless demeanor.
To put it plainly, for me, this conversation with the reporter was not particularly pleasant from start to finish.

“That’s perfect!”
With a sneer on his sallow cheeks, the reporter declared with astonishing force—almost accusatory in tone—“Then you must certainly know this person,” then flipped open his notebook and thrust it toward my face.
On the opened page was written large in pencil,

Zhou Shuren

was written.

“I am aware.”

“I knew it,” said the reporter smugly. “You were classmates after all.
And then, that person later emerged as China’s great literary figure, Lu Xun,” he said, his face reddening slightly as if embarrassed by his own somewhat excited tone.

“I am aware of such matters, but even if Mr. Zhou had not later become such a renowned figure, I would still hold in esteem simply the Mr. Zhou who studied and spent time with us in Sendai.”

“Huh.” The reporter widened his eyes in feigned surprise. “Was he really that remarkable even back then? So he was what you might call a genius after all.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. Though it may be a common way of putting it, he was truly a sincere, genuinely good person.”

“For example, in what way?” The reporter leaned forward eagerly. “No—in fact, you see, when I read Lu Xun’s essay titled ‘Professor Fujino,’ it describes how Lu Xun attended Sendai Medical School around Meiji 37–38 during the Russo-Japanese War and received great kindness from a teacher named Fujino Genkuro. So I thought I’d publish this story in our newspaper’s New Year’s inaugural edition as a sort of… let’s say, ‘heartwarming tale of Sino-Japanese friendship.’ That’s why I came here surmising you might have been a Sendai Medical School student back then. What exactly was Lu Xun like back then? He must have had this pale, melancholy expression back then, I suppose.”

“No, he wasn’t particularly like that.”
I became deeply melancholy.
“There was nothing unusual about him.
“How should I put it... He was extremely intelligent, quiet—”

“No, there’s no need to be so guarded. I have no intention of writing anything disparaging about Lu Xun—as I just mentioned, this is meant to become a New Year’s story for pan-Asian amity. Especially since this matter relates to our Tohoku region, it will serve as an impetus for local culture, if you will. Therefore, for the sake of our Tohoku culture, please speak freely and unreservedly about your memories from that time. There will absolutely be nothing that would cause you any trouble.”

“No, I am certainly not being guarded in any such way.”
That day, for some reason, my spirits were heavy.
“After all, it was as long as forty years ago, and I certainly have no intention to deceive, but whether the trivial memories of a mundane person like myself could possibly be of any use—”

“No—this is no time for such trivial modesty.”
“Then I will ask some questions—please answer even just what remains in your memory.”

Afterward, the reporter spent about an hour asking various questions about those days before leaving with a markedly disappointed expression at my flustered replies—yet even so, that year’s New Year edition of the local newspaper serialized a piece for five or six days titled “Pioneers of Sino-Japanese Amity,” framed as my nostalgic recollections.
I couldn’t help but admire his professional skill in deftly selecting from my incoherent replies and compiling them into a rather engaging read; yet when I saw how Mr. Zhou, Professor Fujino, and even I were portrayed there, they all seemed like complete strangers to me.
As for my own portrayal—however they wrote about me mattered little—but reading how Professor Fujino and Mr. Zhou were depicted in ways utterly different from the images etched in my heart pained me considerably.
This too must have stemmed from the inadequacy of my responses, yet when confronted so directly with one question after another, I couldn’t help becoming flustered.
In the heat of the moment, appropriate descriptions simply wouldn’t occur to a fool like me. Flustered, even a single meaningless adjective I happened to mutter would strike the reporter’s ears with peculiar force, distorting my true intent—truly, I am ill-suited to this back-and-forth of questions and answers.
Thus disconcerted by the reporter’s visit—angered at my own flustered replies—I spent two or three sorrowful days even after his departure. But when New Year arrived and I read the serialized “reminiscences” in the newspaper, remorse toward Professor Fujino and Mr. Zhou now filled me. Having passed sixty, an age when one might properly take leave of this world, I resolved that preserving accurate records of the images etched in my heart would not be meaningless.
That said, I do not at all intend to find fault with that serialized piece titled “Pioneers of Amity” in the newspaper.
Such socially and politically motivated writings must inevitably adopt such a style.
The discrepancy from my heart’s images was unavoidable—after all, what I write stems merely from a senile country doctor’s fondness for his former teacher and old friend. My wish to carefully preserve their likenesses outweighs any sociopolitical intent; this too is inevitable.
Yet I also think that state of affairs is acceptable.
There is a saying: Rather than extol grand virtues, accumulate small good deeds.
Correcting my mentor and old friend’s images may seem modest work, yet it may indeed connect to humanity’s grand path.
Well—that’s likely the utmost this aged self can achieve.
Lately, air raid alarms have sounded frequently here in Tohoku, startling us—yet each day brings clear skies, my south-facing study staying warm as spring without a brazier. My work progresses smoothly, unhindered by enemy raids, filling me with pleasant anticipation.

Now, even if I called it the image etched in my heart, whether it was absolutely accurate was something I could hardly guarantee. Even if I intended to recount facts exactly as they occurred, a fool’s impressions resembled the parable of blind men examining an elephant—there might be glaring omissions somewhere. Moreover, this being an event from forty years ago, a fool’s impressions had grown all the more indistinct; thus, though I now took up my pen with fervor to correct the portraits of my mentor and old friend, I could not deny the apprehension lingering in my heart. Well then, I would not harbor grand ambitions but instead write with the mindset that satisfaction lay in recording at least a single facet of the truth. As one grew older, things like complaints and excuses became oddly long-winded—it was quite troublesome. After all, since I couldn’t write elegant or beautiful prose anyway, I should stop making these tedious, regret-filled excuses and simply focus on ensuring that "words need only to convey meaning," writing onward without looking left or right. “What others do not know, let them cast aside.”

In early autumn of Meiji 37 (1904), I graduated from a middle school in a small castle town in the northeastern hinterlands, came to Sendai City—known as Tohoku’s greatest metropolis—and became a student at Sendai Medical School; that February, the imperial edict declaring war against Russia had been issued, and by the time I arrived in Sendai, Liaoyang had barely fallen, followed by the commencement of the full-scale assault on Port Arthur, with impatient individuals already proclaiming Port Arthur’s imminent capture and making plans for celebratory events.
The Sendai 2nd Division’s Fourth Regiment, revered as the Ryugasaki Battalion and belonging to the Kuroki First Army, achieved a decisive victory in their first engagement at the Yalu River crossing; subsequently participating in the Liaoyang campaign where they established great merit. Sendai’s newspapers successively serialized special features under headlines like “Stalwart Northeastern Soldiers,” while the Moritoku-za theater staged impromptu kyogen plays titled “Long Live the Fall of Liaoyang,” filling the entire city with overflowing vitality. We medical students too, clad in our new school uniforms and caps, visited Zuihoden—where the mortuary temples of three generations of the Date clan stood on the opposite bank of the Hirose River flowing near our school—to pray for military victories, our hearts swelling with expectations akin to awaiting the dawn of a new world.
Most senior students aspired to become military doctors and deploy immediately; truly, people’s hearts at the time could be called simple—or perhaps vibrantly spirited. Students debated all night in their lodgings about inventing new weapons—ideas so absurd they now make one burst into laughter, like training Edo-period falconers’ hawks to carry explosives on their backs and land on enemy ammunition depots, or stuffing shells with chili peppers to detonate them above enemy lines and blind entire armies. They enthusiastically pursued these bizarre inventions, primitive even for students of a modernizing era. I even heard that two or three medical school students jointly submitted a proposal about the chili-blinding shells to the Imperial General Headquarters. Meanwhile, more hot-blooded youths dismissed such debates as half-hearted; instead, they climbed onto lodging rooftops at midnight to blow bugles. Military bugles then became wildly popular among Sendai’s students, with public opinion split—some angrily demanding they stop the noise, others egging them on to form bugle clubs. Though barely half a year had passed since the war began, national morale already brimmed with confidence, tinged by a cheerful absurdity. Around this time, Mr. Zhou remarked with a laugh, “Japanese patriotism is too innocent”—a criticism one could hardly refute, for back then not just students but all Sendai citizens frolicked like children, utterly free of malice.

Having known only a small rural castle town until then, I was already exhilarated merely by seeing something resembling a metropolis for the first time in my life—yet confronted with this extraordinary vitality permeating the entire city, I could not focus on my studies at all, restlessly wandering Sendai's streets every day.

To call Sendai a metropolis might invite laughter from Tokyoites, but in those days Sendai already had a population nearing 100,000. Electric lights had reportedly been installed since the First Sino-Japanese War a decade prior. At venues like Matsushima-za and Moritoku-za theaters, kabuki starring name-brand actors was regularly performed under bright electric lighting—admission fees of five or eight sen made standing-room sections easily accessible to the masses. We poor students frequented these cheaper sections, though they were considered minor theaters. The grand Sendai-za theater could effortlessly accommodate audiences of fourteen or fifteen hundred. During New Year and Obon seasons it hosted lavish productions featuring only top-tier actors at higher prices; beyond these holidays it continuously staged naniwa-bushi ballads, grand magic shows, and moving pictures. Elsewhere on Higashi-Ichibanchō Street stood Kaikikan—a cozy vaudeville hall where jōruri recitations and rakugo comedy ran perpetually. Nearly every famous Tokyo performer graced its stage at least once; we listened enraptured to Takemoto Ryushō’s gidayū recitations there.

At that time Bashō no Tsuji was still regarded as Sendai’s center, with rather fashionable Western-style buildings lining its streets; however in bustling activity it had already become no match for Higashi-Ichibanchō.

Higashi-Ichibanchō’s nighttime vitality was exceptional—entertainments ran until eleven at night with banners fluttering vigorously before Matsushima-za theater. Five or six garish gofun-painted billboards for plays like *Yotsuya Kaidan* and *Sara Yashiki* hung so strikingly they made one halt involuntarily. The shouts of ticket hawkers like Benya—a popular figure in town—at theater gates became one of our nostalgic memories. This district teemed with sake shops, soba shops, tempura restaurants, gamecock cuisine establishments, grilled eel joints, sweet red bean soup stalls, roasted sweet potato vendors, sushi counters, wild boar and venison butchers, beef hotpot parlors, milk shops, coffeehouses—the only thing Tokyo had that Sendai lacked was an urban railway. Large bazaars stood alongside bakeries, Western confectioneries, haberdasheries, music stores, bookshops, dry cleaners, shops selling Japanese and Western liquors in cans, foreign tobacco stores, and a Western restaurant called Buraza-an. Stores letting patrons listen to phonographs, photo studios, billiard halls and nighttime plant markets lined streets bright with decorative electric lights—creating an atmosphere of perpetual illumination where children might easily get lost in crowds dense enough to astonish this country bumpkin who’d never seen Tokyo’s Ogawamachi, Asakusa or Ginza.

Lord Masamune—founder of Sendai Domain—appeared to have been rather progressive; as early as Keichō 18 (1613) he dispatched Hasekura Rokuyemon Tsunenaga as special envoy to Rome, astonishing conservative factions in other domains. The lingering effects may have flowed into post-Meiji Restoration times—Christian churches stood throughout Sendai City so pervasively that any discussion of local character must account for this influence. Many schools bore strong Christian imprints: Meiji literary figure Iwaya Sazanami reportedly studied at Tohoku Gakuin here in his youth receiving Bible education; I’ve also heard Shimazaki Tōson came from Tokyo in Meiji 29 (1896) to teach composition and English at this institution.

The poems Tōson wrote during his Sendai period were ones I too—contrary to my usual self—cherished reciting in student days; I recall his poetic style did bear some Christian influence.

Thus Sendai at that time—though geographically distant from Japan’s center—had long been keenly attuned to modernization emanating from the capital. I marveled at its urban bustle and equally at schools/hospitals/churches proliferating citywide—modern institutions astonishing in number. Moreover owing to its judicial legacy since Edo times—hosting administrative councils then High Courts after Meiji Restoration—the proliferation of lawyers’ signs left me wide-eyed. Wandering daily like a country bumpkin with red blanket over shoulders seemed only natural—a fact for which I now show compassion to my former self.

While I was thus excited by Sendai’s modernization and civilization, I also wandered around exploring notable historic sites in the surrounding areas with an earnest expression. After visiting Zuihoden to pray for victory, I would climb the opposite mountain and gaze down at all of Sendai, letting out sighs I couldn’t comprehend; then, looking far to the right at the mist-shrouded expanse of the Pacific, I would feel compelled to shout something at the top of my lungs. In my youth, everything I saw or heard seemed momentous, thrilling me endlessly. I visited the ruins of the famed Aoba Castle, wandering aimlessly in and out of its gates—still solemnly preserved as they were in antiquity—and lost myself in endless fantasies: What if I had been born in Lord Masamune’s era? I also paid visits to graves like that of Misawa Hatsuko, locally known as “the tomb of Masuoka from the previous Hagi era,” as well as those of Hasekura Rokuyemon and Rokumusai Rin Shihei—the latter famed for his motto “Though I have no money, I have no wish to die”—bowing before each with an air of profound significance. Gradually extending my explorations to distant sites like Ryugasaki Hill, Sakuragasaki Hill, Mitaki Hot Springs, Miyagino Field, and Taga Castle Ruins, I finally resolved to use a two-day break to visit Matsushima, one of Japan’s Three Great Views.

I departed Sendai a little past noon and strolled leisurely along the roughly four-ri path until I reached Shiogama. By then, the sun had already dipped westward, and the autumn wind pierced me with sudden coldness, stirring an odd unease in my heart. Deciding to save Matsushima for the next day, I visited only Shiogama Shrine that afternoon before lodging at a worn-down inn in Shiogama. The following morning, I rose early and boarded a sightseeing boat to Matsushima. Among its five or six passengers was another Sendai Medical School student clad in the same uniform and cap as myself.
He had a thin mustache under his nose and appeared slightly older than me, but his Sendai Medical School square cap with its green line was still new, and the emblem on it glittered so dazzlingly it was almost blinding—undoubtedly a freshman enrolled that autumn.
I thought I might have caught sight of that face once or twice in the classroom.
However, that year’s freshman class had gathered from all over Japan—150 students, no, even more than that—and those from shared regions like the Tokyo group or Osaka group formed their own cliques, boisterously enjoying themselves together whether on campus or out in Sendai’s streets. Yet I alone had come to the medical school from a rural middle school, and with my naturally reticent disposition compounded by what you might call a thick rural accent, I lacked the courage to banter among these new students. Instead, I grew resentful, affectating isolation—choosing a boardinghouse far behind the prefectural office, distant from the school. Of course, I spoke familiarly with none of my classmates, nor did I often engage in open conversation with the amateurish family at my lodgings.
Even the people of Sendai had a strong Tohoku accent, but my rural dialect was in a league of its own. While I could have forced myself to use Tokyo speech, it felt embarrassingly pretentious to put on airs with polished language when everyone already knew I was from the countryside.
This is a psychology only someone from the countryside can understand—if you speak in full-blown rural dialect, you’ll be laughed at, and if you make an effort to use standard speech, you feel you’ll be laughed at even more, so in the end, there’s nothing to do but become a sullen, silent monk.
My distance from other freshmen at that time stemmed partly from those linguistic circumstances, but there was also another reason: I too took pride in being a medical school student. Just as a solitary crow perched on a withered branch appears not wholly unimpressive—its jet-black wings gleaming magnificently—whereas dozens clustered together squawking look like worthless trash, so too did groups of medical students strolling through town laughing boisterously strip their square caps of all dignity, appearing utterly foolish and vulgar. Thus I avoided them out of a resolve to maintain my pride as an elite scholar—though this explanation sounds rather noble. To confess further, during my initial enrollment period, I had been wandering Sendai’s streets in reckless excitement while actually skipping classes from time to time.
Under these circumstances, it was only natural that I became distant from the other new students, and when I encountered one of them on that Matsushima sightseeing boat, I felt a chill run through me and found myself in an excruciatingly awkward position.
I had wanted to tour Matsushima while carrying myself with great dignity as the only exemplary student among the passengers, but with another student in the same uniform and cap present, it all came to nothing.
Moreover, the student carried himself like an urbanite, polished in a way that made him appear undeniably more scholarly than I, so I couldn’t help but feel utterly dejected.
He must be a student who attends school diligently every day and studies.
Because he cast a glance at me with cool, clear eyes, I offered an obsequious smile and nodded.
This won’t do at all.
Two crows perched by the boat, and since one was bedraggled with wings lacking luster, their lack of distinction was all the more striking.
I, in my miserable state, moved far away from that seemingly brilliant student, shrunk into a corner to sit, and made every effort not to look in his direction.
He must be from Tokyo.
If I were spoken to in that fast, fluently rapid Tokyoite dialect, it would be unbearable.
I averted my face sharply, feigning deep admiration and delight for Matsushima’s scenery, yet found myself preoccupied with that seemingly brilliant student. Bashō’s famed words—“Islands beyond count: some tilt skyward, others prostrate upon waves; some stack twofold, threefold, parting left, linking right”—drifted through my mind, but my gaze remained unsettled.

Some seemed borne aloft, others embraced, as if cradling beloved children.
The pines' verdure stood rich and deep, their branches and leaves bent by the sea breeze as though naturally arching themselves.
The scene, profoundly serene, adorned itself like a beautiful woman's face.
In the awesome age of gods, could this be the work of mountain-building deities?
Even Bashō's famed "spectacle of Heaven's craftsmanship—what mortal could wield brush or exhaust words to describe it?" held my gaze restlessly. The moment our boat touched Oshima's shore, I leapt onto the sand before anyone else and hurried toward the mountains as though fleeing, finally relieved to be alone.
According to Matsushima Travelogue by Tachibana Nankei—the physician who published Tōzai Yūki during the Kansei era—which states, "Those visiting Matsushima must travel by boat and ascend Mount Tomi," I had deliberately walked to Shiogama and boarded a sightseeing vessel despite existing train access to Matsushima. But discovering aboard a student in identical new uniform and cap—one who appeared far more accomplished than I—my enthusiasm waned abruptly. What should have been Japan's supreme scenic beauty, rivaling China's West Lake or Dongting Lake, now seemed mere sea, islands and pines—nothing more. Resolving to climb Mount Tomi alone and fully survey Matsushima's panorama from above to compensate for the failed boat excursion, I hurried toward the mountains yet found myself utterly unable to locate this "Mount Tomi."
Oh well—if I could just climb high enough to view all Matsushima Bay, that would suffice. Now stripped of poetic sentiment, I stubbornly pushed through autumn grasses and charged up narrow mountain paths in reckless abandon.
When fatigue set in, I stopped to look back at Matsushima Bay—No, this isn't enough. Tachibana would never praise such a view with phrases like "resembling a West Lake scene of 808 linked islands" or "the Orient's supreme vista." He must have surveyed it from higher ground. I'll climb further—renewing my resolve, I plunged deeper into mountains until apparently taking a wrong path into dense woods where no panorama could be seen. Forcing through thickets in panic, I emerged on the mountain's far side to find only unremarkable fields below.
A steam train ran along the Tohoku Line.
I had overclimbed.
With dreary thoughts, I sat on grass. Growing hungry, I ate rice balls from the inn before collapsing listlessly to lie down and drift into fitful sleep.

A faint singing voice could be heard.
When I listened carefully, it was an elementary school song from that time—"Cloud Song".

In the blink of an eye, they blanket the mountains,
In a fleeting glance’s span, cross the sea,
How wondrous indeed are the clouds,

O clouds, O clouds,

As rain or mist, changing in the blink of an eye,

Strange and wondrous are,

O clouds, O clouds,

I burst out laughing alone.
Should I call it out of tune? It was truly, utterly terrible.
The one singing was not a child.
It was indeed an adult’s peculiar, booming voice.
A truly astonishing singing voice.
Since elementary school, I had never been good at singing—the only song I could manage passably being “Kimigayo.” Yet even so, I fancied myself slightly more competent than this astonishing vocalist.
When I listened quietly, the song’s owner repeated “Cloud Song” over and over without restraint.
Perhaps they—acutely aware of their own ineptitude—had resorted to secret vocal training in these remote mountains. As someone equally unskilled in song, I found myself growing inexplicably fond of this vocalist, an urgent desire to glimpse their form welling up within me.
I stood and followed the dreadful singing around the mountain.
At times it seemed near, then suddenly distant, yet the practice continued unabated—until abruptly I stood face-to-face with the singer.
I faltered; the other appeared far more flustered.
It was that same student who seemed the model scholar.
He flushed his pale face crimson and laughed—“Ahaha”—

“My apologies for earlier,” he said with an awkward greeting.

His speech carried an accent.
He’s not from Tokyo, I instantly concluded.
Constantly vexed by my own rural dialect, I had grown acutely sensitive to others’ accents.
Perhaps he was a student from near my hometown, I thought, kindling within me a burgeoning affinity for this vocal prodigy.

“Oh no, I’m the one who should apologize,” I said, deliberately thickening my rural accent.

It was a small hill with a pine grove behind it, and the view of Matsushima Bay was not bad.

“Well, I suppose this will do?” I said as I stood beside the student, gazing at the scenery hailed as Japan’s finest below us. “I must be impotent when it comes to scenery—I can’t figure out what’s supposed to be good about this Matsushima place at all. I’ve been wandering around this mountain since earlier because of it.”

“I don’t understand it either,” the student said in halting Tokyo-accented Japanese. “But I think I grasp it in general terms. This quietness—no—this profound silence,” he stammered with a bitter smile before uttering in German, “*Silentium*.” “It was too quiet, too unsettling, so I tried singing loudly—but to no avail.”

No—had he sung that song, even Matsushima would have been thrown into disarray—I nearly retorted, but held my tongue.

“It’s too quiet.”
“I want something else—one more thing,” the student said earnestly. “What about spring? If there were cherry trees along that part of the coast, with petals scattering on the waves… or rain.”

“Ah, if that’s how it is, then I understand.”
He’s quite an interesting fellow, I secretly admired, then carried away and said something pointless: “This scenery does seem suited for old people. It lacks charm altogether.”

The student lit a cigarette, an indeterminate smile floating on his face.

“No—this is Japan’s allure.”
“It makes you want something more—then silence.”
“Sittsamkeit—truly great art might also feel like this.”
“However, I still do not fully understand.”
“I am simply amazed at the people of old Japan who chose such silent scenery as one of the Three Views of Japan.”
“In this scenery, there is not the slightest trace of human presence.”
“For people from our country, this loneliness would be utterly unbearable.”

“Where are you from?”
I asked intently.

The other person smiled strangely and silently gazed at my face.
While somewhat flustered，I pressed my question again.

“Isn’t it Tohoku?
“Right?”

The other man suddenly made an unpleasant face,

“I am from China. You must have known that.”

“Ah.”

I understood in an instant.
I had heard there was one Qing international student who entered Sendai Medical School at the same time as us this year—so this person was that one.
It was no wonder his singing was so clumsy.
It was no wonder his speech sounded so strangely strained and oratorical.
I see.
I see.

“My apologies.
“No—I truly didn’t know.
“I came from a remote countryside in Tohoku, have no friends, find school rather uninteresting—in fact, I’ve been skipping new term classes here and there—and as for school matters, I still know nothing at all.
“I am an Einsam crow.”

Even I was surprised at how lightly and smoothly I managed to voice what I’d been thinking.

In retrospect, that I—who so feared students from Tokyo and Osaka, who could not even open up to boardinghouse families, and whose social reserve was second to none even if not quite misanthropic—could begin interacting intimately without hesitation with an international student from a distant foreign land beyond the sea (let alone Kyoto or Osaka), was of course due to Mr. Zhou’s great character, but there also seemed another down-to-earth reason: only when speaking with Mr. Zhou was I completely liberated from my country bumpkin melancholy.

In fact, when speaking with Mr. Zhou, my rural accent never troubled me in the slightest, and I could even crack jokes and witty remarks with an ease that surprised myself. Even if I secretly got carried away, lashing my clumsy tongue to mimic an Edoite’s rough-edged banter, had my listener been Japanese, they would have either scoffed—“That country bumpkin putting on airs with his bizarre trills!”—or roared with laughter. But this foreign friend, admirably, showed no sign of noticing such things. Not only had he never once mocked my speech, but I myself had even gone so far as to ask Mr. Zhou, “Doesn’t my way of speaking sound strange?” At that, he gave me a blank look and replied, “No—your intonation is strong and quite easy to follow.”

In short, it was nothing more than this—that I found someone who struggled even more than I did with using Tokyo dialect, which greatly cheered me—and this may well be said to have been the beginning of my friendship with Mr. Zhou.

It may sound strange, but I had genuine confidence that my Japanese was better than this Qing international student’s.

And so there on that Matsushima hilltop, once I learned the other man was Chinese, I gained great courage and spoke with remarkable ease; fired by a determination to match his German with my own, I even blurted out a phrase so cringingly pretentious it made my skin crawl—that *Einsam* crow business—yet the international student seemed rather taken with the word “loneliness,”

“*Einsam*,” he murmured slowly, gazing into the distance as if pondering something, then suddenly added, “But I suppose I’m a *Wandervogel*. I have no homeland.”

Migratory bird. Indeed, he puts it well. His German seemed far better than mine. Instantly changing tactics, I resolved to stop using German.

“But when you return to China,” I blurted out this rather vulgar question, “you must have a splendid home there?”

The other man did not answer,

“Let’s become close from now on. Do you dislike Chinese people?” he said with a slight blush, laughing.

“That sounds fine.”

Ah, why did I give such an insincere, utterly frivolous response at that time?
In retrospect, it became clear: Mr. Zhou—unable to endure the loneliness and desolation of his circumstances—must have secretly come alone to Matsushima, drawn by scenery said to resemble West Lake near his hometown. Yet even there he could not dispel his melancholy; driven to recklessness, he sang clumsy school songs at the top of his voice, then earnestly sought friendship with the awkward Japanese medical student who suddenly appeared before him.
However, I—having long secretly harbored a fascination for what they called the Edo dialect—had found the perfect partner with whom I could freely attempt it without restraint, and was so elated that I understood nothing of the other’s feelings. Flushed with excitement, I absently declared, “That sounds splendid,” and even blurted out things I didn’t truly feel, like “I adore Chinese people.”

“Thank you. You—if you’ll pardon me—resemble my younger brother quite closely.”

“It’s an honor,” I said, adopting the shallow sociability of a born urbanite, “but that brother of yours—he must be clever like you? In that respect, he must be different from me.”

“How about that?” he laughed carefreely. “The fact that you’re wealthy and my brother is poor is another difference.”

“No way.”
Even someone as socially adept as me had no way to respond to this.

“It’s true.
“After my father died, the family scattered in disarray.”
“I have a hometown—and yet it’s as if I don’t.”
“When a child raised in a reasonably well-off household suddenly loses that home, they are shown the true face of the world.”
“I stayed at a relative’s house and was called a beggar.”
“However, I did not lose.”
No—perhaps I did lose.
“der Bettler,” he said quietly, discarding his cigarette and crushing it under his shoe tip. “In China, we call beggars Hwatsu.”
“It’s written as 花子.”
"For a beggar to presume Blume doesn’t even rise to the level of Humor."
"That is foolish Eitelkeit."
“That’s right.”
“Perhaps the Blut of that vanity flows through my body as well.”
“No—the current state of Qing is ganz exactly that.”
“In all the world today, the only one living in pitiable *Eitelkeit* is that *Dame*.”
“That Gans alone.”

As he grew heated and began firing off even more German, this would-be socialite found himself thoroughly discomfited.
For me—more than even the Edo dialect—German remained an unconquerable foe.
Driven to desperation,

“You appear more adept at German than your own native tongue,” I retorted with a barbed comment.
I had to silence that German somehow.

“Not at all,” replied the other man, seemingly oblivious to my sarcasm as he shook his head earnestly. “I feared you might not comprehend my Japanese.”

“No, no.”
I leaned forward, seizing my moment. “Your Japanese is excellent.
“Please, speak only in Japanese.”
“As for me, German is still—”

“Let’s stop,” he said suddenly, flushing awkwardly as his tone softened. “I’ve been spouting nothing but foolishness. However, I intend to study German even more diligently from now on. Japan’s medical pioneer Sugita Genpaku apparently began by first studying languages too. Professor Fujino taught us about Sugita’s struggles with Dutch studies during his initial lecture—but you, back then—” He trailed off and peered at my face with an awkward laugh.

“I was absent.”

“I thought so.”
“I didn’t see you there at all that day.”
“Truthfully, I’ve known you since the entrance ceremony.”
“You didn’t wear your regulation cap to the entrance ceremony, did you?”

“Yes—somehow I felt ashamed of the square cap.”

“I had certainly thought that might be why.”
“That day, there were two new students who didn’t wear their regulation caps.”
“One was you—and the other was me,” he said with a sly grin.

“Is that so?” I laughed.
“Then you too, after all—”

“That’s right.”
“I was embarrassed.”
“You see, this cap resembles a marching band’s cap.”
“After that, every time I went to school, I looked for you.”
“This morning, when we ended up together on the boat, I was happy.”
“However, you were avoiding me.”
“When we got off the boat, you were already gone.”
“But still, we met here.”

“The wind has grown cold, has it not.”
“Shall we go down?”
Strangely embarrassed, I changed the subject.
“Yes,” he said with a gentle nod.

With a somber mood, I followed Mr. Zhou down the mountain. Somehow, I began to feel as though this person were family. From the pine grove behind us arose the sound of wind through pines.

“Ah,” Mr. Zhou turned around and said, “now it’s complete. Just when I thought something was still missing, the sound of wind blowing through the pine branches completed Matsushima. After all, Matsushima is Japan’s finest.”

“When you put it that way, I suppose I can see it, but somehow it still feels incomplete to me. I’ve heard there’s a pine called Saigyō’s Return Pine somewhere in these mountains, but I don’t think Saigyō turned back because he took a liking to the shape of that solitary pine and wanted to gaze upon its branches. Rather, I imagine that when Saigyō came to Matsushima, he too felt something was lacking. As he made his way home in low spirits, he grew anxious that he’d overlooked something vital, and so from that pine tree’s location, he turned back toward Matsushima once more.”

“It’s because you love this land too much that you feel such dissatisfaction.”
“I was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province—a place called the Oriental Venice, where the famous West Lake lies nearby. Many foreigners visit, all praising it lavishly, but from our perspective, that scenery contains too much artifice of daily life to admire.”
“Should I call it the embellishment of human history?”
“West Lake is the Qing government’s garden.”
“They proudly plaster it with the grime of human hands—the Ten Views of West Lake, Thirty-Six Famous Sites, Seventy-Two Scenic Spots—all that nonsense.”
“Matsushima has none of that.”
“It’s severed from human history.”
“Neither literati nor scholars can despoil it.”
“Even the genius Bashō couldn’t compose poetry about Matsushima—isn’t that what they say?”

“But it seems Bashō did compare this Matsushima to West Lake.”

“That’s because Bashō never saw West Lake’s scenery.”
“Had he truly seen it, he would never have said such a thing.”
“They’re entirely different.”
“If anything, it might resemble the Zhoushan Archipelago.”
“But the Zhejiang Sea isn’t this tranquil.”

“Is that so?”
“Japanese literati have long admired your country’s West Lake—they come from afar to see Matsushima precisely because it resembles that lake.”

“I had heard that too.”
“That’s precisely why I came to see it.”
“But there was no resemblance whatsoever.”
“Your country’s literati must awaken sooner from this West Lake dream, must they not.”

“But even West Lake must surely have its good aspects. You too must love your hometown too much, which is why your scoring has become so harsh.”

“That may be the case.”
“True patriots are precisely the ones who speak ill of their country, you see.”
“However, I have long loved the ordinary scenery of rural Zhejiang’s canals far more than the so-called Ten Views of West Lake.”
“To me, none of the famous places that our country’s literati and scholars fuss over seem good at all.”
“The Qiantang tidal bore does admittedly excite me a bit, but beyond that, nothing impresses.”
“I do not trust those people.”
“Those people are the same as what your country calls dilettantes.”
“They have detached their writings from reality and corrupted them.”

We descended from the mountain and emerged onto the coast.
The sea was glowing red in the setting sun.

“Not bad at all,” Mr. Zhou said with a smile, clasping his hands behind his back. “What about a moonlit night? Tonight should be the Thirteenth Night, but are you returning home right away?”

“I haven’t decided yet.
School is closed tomorrow too, isn’t it.”

“That’s right.
I have also come to want to see moonlit Matsushima.
Won’t you keep me company?”

“That would be fine.”

I was, frankly, completely indifferent.
Even if school hadn’t been closed, I had already been skipping classes here and there on my own accord; using two consecutive days of holiday was merely a matter of carefully selecting such dates to avoid appearing too lazy a student in the eyes of my boarding family—though in truth, whether the holiday lasted two days or three made no difference at all.
When I obeyed too readily, Mr. Zhou seemed to sense it keenly and laughed aloud,

“However, starting the day after tomorrow, let’s attend school and take lecture notes together.”
“My notes are quite poor,” he said, pausing briefly, “but notes for us students—” He interrupted himself again, using the German word I struggled with: “—are like *Preiszetzel*. Tickets worth so many yen and tens of sen.”
“Without this, people won’t trust us.”
“It is a student’s fate.”
“Even if they’re uninteresting, we must take notes.”
“However, Professor Fujino’s lectures are interesting!”

From the very day we first exchanged words, Mr. Zhou had often mentioned Professor Fujino’s name.

That day, I stayed at a seaside inn in Matsushima with Mr. Zhou.
Looking back now, my carelessness at that time strikes me as strange, yet a righteous person does seem to impart a certain sense of security.
I had already become entirely at ease with that Chinese international student.
Mr. Zhou, having changed into the inn’s cotton robe, looked as dashing as the young master of a merchant house.
His command of Tokyo dialect surpassed even mine, but his manner of addressing the inn’s maids—using phrases like “Please give me that” and “It’s rather chilly, don’t you think?” in an almost feminine register—left me unsettled.
When I finally puckered my lips in protest and said, “At least stop that,” Mr. Zhou responded with a perplexed expression: “But in Japan, when speaking to children, one uses childish words like ‘handies’ and ‘footsies,’ saying ‘wight?’ and ‘wight?’—so shouldn’t addressing women require women’s language?”
“But that’s affected,” I retorted, “and unbearable to hear.” At this, Mr. Zhou grew deeply intrigued by the word “affected,” remarking, “Japanese aesthetics are truly austere—nowhere else exists such a precept against affectation. Qing China’s current civilization reeks of it.”
That night, we drank wine at the inn and conversed until late hours, so engrossed that we forgot entirely to view Matsushima under the moon.
Mr. Zhou later told me he had never chattered so freely since arriving in Japan.

That night, Mr. Zhou spoke with astonishing passion about his upbringing, his hopes, and the current state of Qing China.
He repeated time and again that science was the immediate problem facing the East.
He said Japan’s leap forward had been ignited by Dutch physicians.
If China did not swiftly digest Western science and stand against foreign powers, it would merely hasten to follow neighboring India’s fate while pointlessly intoxicated with self-praise as an aged empire.
The East had since ancient times perfected its spiritual realm to such incomparable depth compared to the West that even distinguished Western philosophers would occasionally glimpse it only to be astonished—yet the West sought to reinforce this spiritual poverty through science.
The application of science made extraordinary progress among Westerners—those vigorously attached to worldly life—and penetrated even into the Eastern spiritual realm.
Japan swiftly perceived science’s force, proactively learned it, used it for self-defense without disrupting national character, successfully assimilated it, and asserted itself as the East’s most astute independent nation.
Science was not necessarily humanity’s highest virtue, but a nation holding mystical thought’s jewel in one hand and science’s vigorous sword in the other would become an unrivaled ideal state impervious to foreign interference.
The Qing government—utterly incapable of confronting science’s ferocity while suffering foreign invasions—feigned confidence like a great river claiming immunity from minor streams’ pollution to gloss over defeats, busied itself patching an aged empire’s superficial appearance, lacked courage to investigate science as Western civilization’s essence, encouraged students in ornate formalities like eight-legged essays, thereby reducing China to a ludicrously pretentious nation secretly sneered at abroad.
“I love China no less than anyone.”
“This love makes my dissatisfaction profound.”
“Present-day Qing China is indolent.”
“Drunk on incomprehensible self-conceit.”
“Ancient civilizations’ history isn’t China’s exclusive possession.”
“Consider India—consider Egypt.”
“What of their current state?”
“China must tremble.”
“Self-conceit that ‘this suffices’ will destroy us.”
“China has no room for complacency.”
“We must discard vanity and battle Western science’s violence.”

“To fight this, there is no other way than to resolutely plunge into its tiger’s den and learn its essence as swiftly as possible.”
“I have heard it was Dutch studies (Rangaku)—Western science—that first sounded the alarm against the Tokugawa shogunate’s isolation policy.”
“I want to become China’s version of Sugita Genpaku.”
“Among the sciences, I am most drawn to Western medicine.”
“Why, among Western sciences, have I come to focus particularly on medicine? One reason lies hidden within my childhood sorrows.”
“My family had owned farmland for generations and was considered fairly well-off, but when I turned thirteen, my grandfather became embroiled in legal troubles and was imprisoned. Our family suddenly faced persecution from relatives and neighbors, compounded by my father falling gravely ill. We were plunged into poverty, and I was sent to live with relatives along with my younger brother.”
“However, when that household called me a beggar, I indignantly returned home—only to spend the next three years visiting pawnshops and pharmacies nearly every day.”
“My father’s illness showed no improvement.”
“The pharmacy counter stood at my eye level, while the pawnshop counter towered twice as high.”
“I would lift clothes and jewelry onto that high pawnshop counter, endure the clerk’s jeers of ‘What rubbish is this?’, pocket the meager coins, then dash straight to the pharmacy.”
“Returning home meant facing new tasks.”
“The doctor treating my father was renowned locally, yet his prescriptions demanded bizarre ingredients—reed roots and sugarcane weathered by three winters’ frost.”
“Every morning I dug reed roots by the riverbank and hunted for frost-beaten sugarcane.”
“We followed this doctor for two years as my father worsened.”
“When we switched to a more famous physician, his prescriptions required stranger things—paired crickets, ten stalks of flatland wood (*laofudai*), and rotten drumskin pills.”
“The cricket pair came annotated: ‘*Yuanpei*—original mates who shared lifelong cohabitation.’”
“Apparently even insects needed marital virtue—remarried ones lacked medicinal merit.”
“Yet finding these posed little trouble.”
“Our backyard—the Hundred Herbs Garden—had been my childhood paradise, overgrown wilderness teeming with cricket burrows. I’d arbitrarily designate cohabiting crickets as ‘original mates,’ bind them with string, and boil them alive in the medicine pot.”
However, the “ten stalks of flatland wood” left me utterly bewildered.

“No one knew what that was.”
“Whether I asked at pharmacies, farmers, herbalists, elders, scholars, or carpenters, they all uniformly just shook their heads.”
“Finally, I remembered my grandfather’s younger brother—an old man who had always loved gardening—and when I went there to ask him, he alone knew.”
“He taught me it was a spindly type of tree that grows beneath mountain trees, bearing small red fruits like coral beads—what people commonly call ‘Lao Fu Da’.”
“In this way, I somehow managed to resolve the matter of the ten plants of flatland wood, but there remained another troublesome item: the rotten drumskin pills.”
“This pill was the great doctor’s proud prescription and was said to have remarkable efficacy, particularly for patients with edema like Father.”
“The shop that sold this divine medicine was the only one in the entire region, and moreover, it was located five ri away from my home.”
“Moreover, this divine medicine was said to be made from the skin of a broken old drum.”
“Since edema is also called ‘drum swell,’ the reasoning seems to be that consuming the skin of a broken drum could immediately overcome the disease.”
“Even with a child’s mind, I could not bring myself to believe in the efficacy of something like the skin of a broken old drum, and making the five-ri round trip to obtain those pills was all the more agonizing.”
“All those efforts of mine were ultimately in vain.”
“My father’s condition grew graver by the day until he lay gasping like a dying insect, yet that great doctor remained utterly composed. At my father’s deathbed, he said to me: ‘This is karma from a past life. As the ancients taught, “Physicians may cure illness but cannot heal fate.” Still, one method remains—a secret passed down through my family. We place a spiritual elixir upon the patient’s tongue, for as the ancients said, “The tongue is the sprout of the heart’s spirit.” This elixir is exceedingly rare nowadays, but if you desire it, I could part with some. I’ll even set a special price—just two yuan per box. What say you?’”
As I hesitated, unable to give an immediate answer, my father on his sickbed saw my face and faintly shook his head.
Father too, like myself, appeared to have despaired of this great doctor’s prescriptions.
I was at a loss and could only sit by my father’s bedside, waiting for his death.
On the morning when Father’s condition seemed beyond hope, Mrs. Yan—a meddlesome woman from the neighborhood who was fond of helping others—came over, took one look at Father’s state, and exclaimed in shock: “Good heavens, what are you doing just sitting there dazed? Your father’s soul is about to fly off to the realm of demons! Quickly, call it back! Shout ‘Father! Father!’ at the top of your voice! If you don’t call out, your father will die!” she scolded me sternly.
I did not believe in such spells, but now, with the desperation of a drowning man grasping at straws—Father!
I shouted.
Mrs. Yan said, “You have to call in a louder voice.”
I shouted even louder, “Father!”

"Father!"
I kept shouting.
"More! More!" Mrs. Yan urged from beside me.
I continued shouting until my throat felt raw enough to bleed.
Yet it seemed I couldn't hold back Father's soul—even as my cries persisted, his body turned cold beneath my hands.
He had been thirty-seven; I sixteen, in that early autumn.
I still remember my own voice from that day.
I cannot forget it.
When I recall that voice now, an irrepressible fury rises within me—
anger at my own boyhood ignorance, yes, but greater still, a burning indignation toward China's present state.
Sugarcane beaten by three years' frost? Paired crickets deemed 'original mates'? Rotten drumskin pills? What worthless nonsense!
Sheer fraudulence—that's all it was!
And shouting to retrieve a dying man's soul? What shameful, wretched superstition!
As for 'Physicians cure illness but cannot heal life'—what arrant nonsense!
Nothing but brazen-faced sophistry!
'The tongue is the sprout of the heart's spirit'—whose sage words were those? I neither know nor care.
Dead language—utterly defunct!
Look how China's noble maxims now serve only as fraudsters' smokescreens!
From childhood we'd been force-fed nothing but sages' aphorisms, yet this vaunted 'wisdom of the ancients' our Orient prides itself on has decayed into social artifice—breeding only hypocrisy and idiocy, wholly divorced from its original meaning!
However great a thought may be, once reduced to parlor-talk ornamentation, its vitality perishes.

That was no longer true thought.
It had become mere wordplay.
The Eastern spiritual realm—once said to surpass the West’s in excellence—now lay nearly barren of its original richness, drunk on years of complacent self-praise.
This could not continue.
After Father’s death, my skepticism and resentment toward everything around me grew until finally, wracked by torment, I abandoned my hometown for Nanjing.
I cared not what I studied—only that it be new learning.
Mother wept as we parted, scraping together eight yuan to press into my hand.
With those eight coins clutched tight, I fled down unknown roads to strange lands, seeking an entirely different life.
In Nanjing arose the question: what school would take me?
My sole condition was one requiring no tuition fees.
Jiangnan Naval Academy met this single criterion.
There I first enrolled.
Though called a naval academy, they taught little beyond mast-climbing drills—scarcely any new knowledge.
My English lessons amounted to rote recitations: “It is a cat,” “Is ita rat?”
This coincided with Kang Youwei’s crusade—modeled on Japan’s Restoration—to smash old conventions and absorb global knowledge for China’s revival. He pressed his “Reform and Self-Strengthening Theory” upon the Emperor, who sanctioned sweeping reforms until Empress Dowager Cixi’s machinations shattered them within a hundred days. The Emperor imprisoned, Kang fled to Japan with Liang Qichao, narrowly escaping execution.
There I sat chanting “It is a cat” while this Wuxu Coup tragedy unfolded—my voice ringing hollow through classrooms thick with unease.
I was eighteen years old.

I couldn’t afford to dawdle any longer.
I wanted to reach the core of new knowledge as soon as possible.

I decided to transfer schools.
My next choice was Nanjing’s Mining and Railway School.
There too, no tuition was required.
As a mining school, it offered geology and mineralogy alongside fresh Western subjects—physics, chemistry, natural history—allowing me at last to find some stability.
Language instruction shifted from “It is a cat” to “der Man, die Frau, das Kind.”
I vaguely sensed German brought me closer than English to the core of Western learning—another source of quiet satisfaction.
The principal belonged to the New Party, an avid reader of Liang Qichao’s flagship magazine *Shiwu Bao* who privately endorsed Reformist ideas. For Chinese classics exams, rather than quoting ancient sages like other Confucian instructors, he posed fashionable topics like “Discourse on Washington”—so that those very Confucian teachers ended up whispering to us students, “What in heaven’s name is this ‘Washington’?”
Among students too, reading new books became fashionable—Yan Fu’s Chinese rendition of *Tianyan Lun* reigned supreme.
This lithographed tome translated British naturalist Thomas Huxley’s *Evolution and Ethics*. One Sunday I ventured to the city’s southern district to purchase it—
A thick volume on plain paper costing exactly five hundred mon.
I devoured it in a single sitting.
To this day I can recite verbatim its opening pages.
Translations proliferated endlessly.
Our language skills still fell short of tackling originals—we had no choice but to depend on Chinese-translated works.
“Struggle for Existence” emerged.
“Natural Selection” emerged.
I encountered Socrates.
I encountered Plato.
I encountered the Stoics.
We read everything we could seize.

At that time, obtaining such new books was deemed an utterly shameless act of selling one’s soul to Western barbarians, and they had to endure society’s fierce contempt and ostracism, but we paid no heed whatsoever and calmly continued our exploration of that demon’s cave.
At school, there was no physiology course, but upon reading woodblock-printed books such as *A Complete New Treatise* and *On Chemical Hygiene*, I came to clearly realize that Chinese medicine was nothing more than a conscious or unconscious fraud.
Just as a storm was arising in my heart, so too among China’s intellectual class did the ideology of reform and national salvation swirl like a typhoon.
By that time, beginning with Germany’s lease of Jiaozhou Bay, Russia had leased Guandong Territory, Britain Weihaiwei on its opposite shore, and France Guangzhou Bay in the south; gradually these nations also secured numerous rights related to railways and mines in China, while America had long been awaiting an opportunity to advance into the East—finally seizing Hawaii around that time, they further pressed their invasion into the East by waging war against Spain to take the Philippines, and using this as a foothold, began to ominously intervene in China.
By then, China’s independence too had come to appear like a flickering candle flame before the wind.
It seemed only natural that cries of national salvation filled the country.
However, one ominous event after another befell China.
The Wuxu Coup was one such event, and furthermore, the Boxer Rebellion that occurred two years later proved to be a fatal turmoil that fully exposed China’s incompetence to the entire world.
I graduated from the Mining and Railway School in December of the following year, but I had no confidence in my ability to locate veins of gold, silver, copper, or iron as a mining engineer.
The reason I had entered this school was not because I wanted to become a mining engineer.
I had wanted to master some new field of study to improve China, even if just a little.
And so, over these three years at this school, rather than studying mining, I had been devoting myself entirely to trying to grasp the essence of Western science.
So for me at that time, graduation was in name only—in reality, I had absolutely no qualifications as a mining engineer.
I had already turned twenty-one.

I had to decide my path in life as soon as possible.

The Boxer Rebellion had laid bare the Qing government’s incompetence not only to foreign powers but also to China’s own populace, giving rise to a surging ideology that a great revolution to overthrow the Qing and revive the Han was urgently needed to preserve China’s independence. Sun Yat-sen, who had earlier fled into exile abroad, had already completed his political program, the Three Principles of the People, and was guiding domestic comrades under this banner of Chinese revolution. Most of us Western-study students became ardent devotees of these Three Principles, with many abandoning their studies to directly join the revolutionary movement, proclaiming the need to overthrow the decrepit Qing government, create a new Han nation-state, and thereby resist foreign aggression to safeguard independence.

I too, stimulated by this trend, had come to perceive that some kind of revolution must be resolutely carried out to save China from crisis; however, it seemed to me that above all else, what urgently needed doing was to investigate even more deeply into the essential nature of foreign nations' civilizations.

My knowledge was still immature.

I could say I knew almost nothing.

While I could understand the patriotic fervor of those who abandoned their studies to immediately throw themselves into political movements, even though our ultimate goals were the same, my current passion lay not in practical political activism but in investigating the driving forces behind the wealth and power of foreign nations.

At that time, I had not yet clearly concluded that this was science, but with a vague assumption that the essence of Western civilization could perhaps be most reliably grasped by going to Germany, I came to think that my life’s direction might also be resolved through studying there.

However, I was poor.

For me, who had barely managed to abandon my hometown and come to Nanjing, the thought of how I could possibly traverse thousands of miles to study in Germany felt like gazing at a castle in the clouds.

If studying in Germany was impossible, then there remained only one other path.

Going to Japan would be the way.

At that time, the government had begun funding and sending Qing international students to Japan year by year in small numbers.

Two or three years prior, Zhang Zhidong’s renowned *Exhortation to Learning* had already vigorously emphasized the necessity of studying in Japan, praising it thus: “Though Japan is but a small nation, how swiftly has it risen! Figures like Ito, Yamagata, Enomoto, and Mutsu—all were students who went abroad twenty years earlier. Resenting how their nation was threatened by Western powers, they led over a hundred followers to Germany, France, and Britain, where some studied governance and commerce, others military strategies for land and sea. Upon completing their studies and returning, they became generals and ministers, transformed governance, and established Japan’s dominance in the East.” The text concluded that “for study abroad destinations, none surpass Japan,” though its reasoning was as follows:

First: The route being short allows reduced expenses, enabling the dispatch of many students.

1. Japanese writing is close to Classical Chinese and thus easy to master.

2. Western studies are extremely vast; as for all elements of Western studies that are not essential, the Japanese have already abridged and adapted them.

3. The circumstances and customs of Japan and China being closely aligned, adaptation comes easily.
Achieving twice the result with half the effort—nothing surpasses this.

In this manner, they were by no means admiring Japan’s inherent national character—for what ought to be learned was still Western civilization—but since Japan had already succeeded in abridging and utilizing the essence of Western civilization, they advocated studying in Japan based on temporary expediency: that by learning in nearby Japan rather than venturing to distant Western lands, one could absorb Western civilization more easily. To call this an overstatement would hardly be excessive.
At that time, the number of students studying in Japan was increasing year by year, and almost all of them departed under circumstances marked by intentions that were largely similar yet oddly distorted compared to the ideas expressed in the *Exhortation to Learning*—and I too must confess that, no exception to this pattern, having deemed a journey to Germany impossible, I instead arrived at the decision to pursue studies in Japan.
I took the government-sponsored international student examination and passed.
What kind of place was Japan?
As for me, I had no preparatory knowledge whatsoever about that.
I visited a senior from the Mining and Railway School who had previously traveled in Japan and inquired about advice on studying in Japan.
According to that senior’s advice, the most troublesome thing in Japan would be *tabi* socks—Japanese *tabi* were utterly unwearable, so I should resolutely bring many Chinese *tabi*. Additionally, since paper money could sometimes be inconvenient, it would be better to exchange all funds into Japanese silver coins. Taking this to heart, I promptly bought ten pairs of Chinese *tabi* and converted all my money into Japanese one-yen silver coins. With my now terribly heavy wallet weighing on my mind, I boarded a ship in Shanghai bound for Yokohama.
However, that senior’s study abroad advice seemed to have been a bit too outdated.
In Japan, students wore uniforms and had to wear shoes and socks.
There was no need for *tabi* at all.
Moreover, those embarrassingly large one-yen silver coins had long since been abolished in Japan, and I had to go through great hardship to have them exchanged into Japanese paper currency.
That is a story for later, but when I—at twenty-two years old in February of Meiji 35—safely landed in Yokohama and thought, *This is Japan! I too can finally devote myself to new studies in this advanced nation*, an indescribable, warm joy I had never before experienced welled up in my chest, so thoroughly scattering even my aspirations for Germany that I truly felt such miraculous liberation might never be experienced again in my life except perhaps on the day China’s reconstruction is achieved.
I then boarded the train bound for Shinbashi, but upon catching a glimpse of the scenery outside the window, I intuitively sensed that Japan possessed a unique cleanliness found nowhere else in the world.
The fields were beautifully and neatly organized, likely without conscious intent.
The factory district that followed was shrouded in billowing black smoke, yet between each factory, a refreshing wind seemed to sweep through—an air of fresh order and tension wholly unseen in China. In my later days, whenever I strolled through Tokyo’s streets at dawn, I would see women in every household wearing crisp hand towels on their heads and sashes across their shoulders, busily dusting *shoji* screens. Their figures, tensely poised under the morning sun, struck me as symbolic of Japan itself, making me feel I had glimpsed the essence of a divine nation. Yet even in that initial fleeting view between Yokohama and Shinbashi, I could readily discern a similar valiant cleanliness.
In essence, there was no excess.

The shadow of weariness was nowhere to be found.
My heart raced with the thought that coming to Japan had been the right decision; too excited to remain seated, I stood nearly the entire hour from Yokohama to Shinbashi despite there being ample seats.
Upon arriving in Tokyo, my lodging was arranged through senior international students' help, after which I visited Ueno Park, Asakusa Park, Shiba Park, the Sumida Embankment, Asukayama Park, the Imperial Museum, Tokyo Educational Museum, the zoo, Imperial University Botanical Garden, and the Imperial Library—utterly absorbed in a frenzy, indeed with an ecstasy ten times greater than what you described about your first excitement upon seeing Sendai. I wandered aimlessly through Tokyo’s streets, but once I enrolled at Kobun Institute in Ushigome and began my studies, I gradually awoke from this sweet intoxication and found myself increasingly plagued by my old doubts and melancholy.
From around Meiji 35 [1902] when I came to Tokyo, the number of Qing international students rapidly increased; within just two or three years, over two thousand students from China had gathered in Tokyo, leading schools teaching Japanese along with basic geography, history, and mathematics to emerge one after another—among which even appeared dubious institutions offering shady accelerated education schemes aiming for quick profits. Yet among these many schools, Kobun Institute where we enrolled held status akin to headquarters for Japan-bound students, boasting large facilities and earnest teachers; despite this, I found myself growing more disheartened daily.
One reason might lie in that peculiar psychology you mentioned—how hundreds of crows with identical plumage appear vulgar when gathered—though I too strove to maintain pride as a Qing international student dispatched from China as a "selected scholar," the sheer excess of these elites roaming Tokyo left me deflated.
When spring came, Ueno Park’s cherry blossoms unfurled countless flowers like crimson clouds—yet beneath them sprawled groups of these scholars lounging and chatting, making calm appreciation impossible.
These scholars coiled their queues atop their heads under school caps that bulged like Mount Fuji—a sight so ludicrous one could only call it farcical.
Some fashion-conscious ones devised methods to flatten queues against their scalps with oil—their efforts almost admirable—but cap removal revealed bizarrely androgynous figures whose alluring silhouettes made one shudder.
Yet they looked contemptuously at those like me who had cut our queues—unbearable.
When these scholars crowded into streetcars, they’d begin commotions by ceremoniously offering seats—as if declaring "Here we demonstrate propriety!"
When A told B to sit, B declined for C.
C refused for D.
D bowed deeply urging A again.
Amidst Japanese passengers watching dumbfounded, their loud deferrals continued until the train lurched—sending them tumbling in a heap.
I watched hidden in corners, feeling beyond shame—indescribable.
Yet this wasn’t worth deep condemnation.
Perhaps my pretentious heart viewing compatriots’ innocent efforts coldly held sin.
Another cause for melancholy existed.
The students’ lack of diligence.
Regarding China’s revolutionary movements—though unclear on details—secret societies like Triad Society, Elder Brother Society, and Revive China Society had united under Sun Yat-sen’s leadership long ago.Kang Youwei’s reformist faction proved incompatible with Sun’s national revolution ideals; Kang secretly left for Europe.Now Sun’s Three Principles overwhelmingly dominated; based on this platform they entered vigorous action.Sun himself appeared in Tokyo strategizing with Japanese patriots—making Tokyo revolution headquarters.The students’ excitement grew intense; wherever gathered they raised "Overthrow Qing" banners while abandoning studies entirely.

Yet even this could be seen as an outpouring of patriotic sentiment—hardly unreasonable—but among them were those who exploited the confusion to scheme for personal advancement. The worst cases included eccentric students who had learned soap-making methods through those accelerated education programs, obtained dubious diplomas after just one month of “study,” then swaggered about loudly proclaiming they would return home immediately to manufacture soap and make fortunes. Whenever I occasionally visited the Qing International Students Association Hall in Kanda-Surugadai for errands, each time I would hear thunderous thudding from the second floor as though some violent brawl were underway, causing the ceiling boards of downstairs rooms to vibrate and dust to rain down, leaving the lower floor perpetually hazy.

As these disturbances occurred too frequently, one day I asked the office staff what kind of commotion was taking place on the second floor. The Japanese old man at the office replied with a bitter smile, explaining that it was the students practicing dance.

I could no longer endure being with these scholars.

For China now was precisely when new learning was absolutely essential.

To resist the fierce might of foreign powers, the political movement to overthrow the Qing and revive the Han was undoubtedly an urgent necessity—yet was it not also our duty as students to pursue through new learning the essence of those powers’ strength?

Undoubtedly I revered Dr. Sun and intended to be second to none in my sympathy for his doctrine of the Three Principles and Five-Power Constitution—yet among Nationalism, Democracy, and People’s Livelihood within those Three Principles of the People, Livelihood’s tenets were to me most readily comprehensible.

What always flickered before my eyes was my wretched younger self—shuttling daily between pawnshop counters and apothecary stalls for three years while trying to cure my father’s illness; believing frauds who styled themselves “eminent physicians”; frantically searching for flatland wood and original-paired crickets.

On sleepless nights crept into my ears that wretched voice—my own cries at my dying father’s bedside as I foolishly tried through superstition to anchor his soul, screaming his name until my throat might tear.

That was China’s people.

Even now it had not changed in the slightest.

The words of sages served only as life’s ornaments while superstitions of immortals flourished; patients were forced into buying costly “rotten drumskin pills” only to waste away daily.

What was to be done about this state of China’s people?

Out of indignation toward this wretched reality had I entrusted my soul temporarily to Westerners and devoted myself to Western studies.

I had betrayed my mother and abandoned my hometown.

I had but one wish:

The rebirth of our compatriots.

Without enlightening the people—what reform? What restoration?

Moreover—if not by our own hands as students—who else could possibly achieve this people’s enlightenment?

I must study.

More—more—I must study.

At that time, I tried reading a Chinese-translated history of the Meiji Restoration. Through it, I learned how Japan’s Restoration ideas had received tremendous impetus from a group of Dutch studies scholars. This is it, I thought. It was precisely this that allowed Japan’s Restoration to achieve such brilliant success, I concluded. Above all else, unless one first awakened the people through science’s power and elevated them to Restoration-like faith, any revolutionary means would undoubtedly face extreme difficulties. First—science! Reading that Restoration history made me feel I had finally found my life’s guiding principle. China must now wield this scientific force—on a grand scale to combat foreign aggression and preserve independence; on a smaller scale to enrich each citizen’s daily life and kindle hopes for rebirth. Was this merely my naive dream? Let it be a dream then. I would dedicate my entire life to realizing it. My future would likely hold no grandeur—an utterly plain existence. Yet I would impart revitalizing energy to each individual among the people, gradually guiding them toward revolutionary faith. Patriotic fervor should manifest diversely. Immediate plunge into direct political action wasn’t essential. I needed to study more now. First within science—I would master medicine. What taught me new learning’s necessity were those childhood doctors’ deceptions. That era’s fury had driven me to abandon my hometown. One could say my scholarly aspirations had been tied to medicine from the start. Hadn’t that wretched voice—screaming my father’s name at his deathbed—always struck my ears and spurred me onward?

I will become a doctor.
According to the History of the Meiji Restoration, most Dutch studies scholars at that time were doctors.
No—many had begun studying Dutch precisely to master Western medical techniques.
To such an extent was advanced medical science thirsted for by the Japanese people before any other field.
Medicine holds the closest connection to people's daily lives.
Curing illnesses is the first step in enlightening the masses.
Here I concretely determined my life's path: first master medicine in Japan; return home to cure patients like my father—those deceived by doctors awaiting death; demonstrate science's power; devote myself to awakening people from foolish superstitions; and should China clash with foreign powers, serve as a military doctor to build a new China. Yet surveying my surroundings, I saw student caps peaked like Mount Fuji, excessive courtesy on trams, soap factories, and dance practices resembling brawls.
Then in February this year, Japan solemnly declared war on Russia—that northern colossus. Youths rushed to battlefields; parliament unanimously approved vast war funds; people endured sacrifices while thrilling to extra edition bells.
This war will be fine—Japan will win.
A nation this vibrant cannot lose.
Yet since war began, shame has overwhelmed me.
However others view this war, I see China's weakness as its root cause.
Had China governed itself competently, this war might never have occurred. Now it seems Japan fights to preserve China's independence—how humiliating! While Japanese youths bleed on Chinese soil, our compatriots watch calmly as if at a distant fire.
When I saw Chinese youths my age still engrossed in dance practice at the Qing Students' Hall, I resolved.
I shall live apart from these international students.
Was it self-loathing? My compatriots' carefree faces filled me with shame, resentment, unbearable frustration.
Ah—to go where no Chinese students exist.
I'll leave Tokyo far behind, forget everything, devote myself to medical research alone.
No more hesitation.

I went to the Qing Legation in Nagatachō, Kōjimachi Ward, stated my desire to enroll in a provincial medical school, and was soon admitted to Sendai Medical School.
Farewell, Tokyo.
Farewell, handpicked scholars.
When parting finally arrived, even I felt profoundly lonely.
Departing Ueno by steam train, I passed through Nippori Station—the characters for “Sunset Village” mirroring my melancholy so perfectly I nearly wept.
Later at Mito Station—where Master Zhu Shunshui, loyalist of the fallen Ming dynasty, had died in exile—I drew courage from that *Wandervogel* forebear’s tragic resolve and reached Sendai.
Though touted as Tōhoku’s grandest city, Sendai proved a cramped town barely one-tenth Tokyo’s size.
The locals’ speech stopped short of gibberish but carried odd emphases that often baffled Tokyo-trained ears.
Its bustling center evoked Kagurazaka’s charm, yet the entire city felt insubstantial—a frail pretender to Tōhoku’s leadership.
True power seemed concentrated further north in Morioka and Akita; here, so-called civilization’s veneer barely masked tremulous rule over enlightenment’s frontier.
Founded by daimyo Date Masamune, this needlessly urbane city made me suspect Japan’s “Date-mono” dandies took their name from Sendai’s hollow posturing.
In essence—a “Date-style city” puffing its Tōhoku primacy without substance. Yet as you noted earlier, hinterland arrivals see resplendent modernity here, precisely as Masamune intended when crafting this showpiece to awe northern lords—a tradition persisting thirty-seven years post-Restoration in trembling provincial gentility.
Do not mistake my criticism for malice.
Provincial capitals starved of industry all wear such mournful airs.
Entrusting my life’s pivotal chapter to Sendai compelled thorough scrutiny—though perhaps such affectation suits scholarship.
Truth be told, my studies flourished here.
Rarity breeds value: being Sendai’s first and only Qing student made me prized like your crow metaphor—unremarkable yet striking when solitary on bare boughs, jet wings glinting. Teachers treated me as honored guest till I grew abashed.
Never had I known such universal kindness.
They overvalue this branch-perched crow.
Gratitude mingles with dread of betraying their expectations.

My classmates too—likely out of novelty—would usually smile at me when we met eyes in the morning classroom. The student sitting next to me would proactively lend me knives and erasers. Among them, a tall student named Tsuda Kenji, who took some pride in having come from Tokyo Metropolitan First Middle School, seemed to hold the most fervent interest. He would constantly give me meticulous instructions—"Your collar is soiled; have it cleaned," "Buy yourself a pair of rain boots"—meddling even in matters of dress until he finally came over to my lodgings and declared: "This won't do. Move out immediately and come stay at my boarding house."

My lodgings were located before Miyagi Prison in Komegabukuro Kajiyamae-chō—close to the school and with excellent meals that I greatly appreciated—but according to Mr. Tsuda, this boarding house was problematic because it also served meals to prison inmates. He repeatedly advised me that for a distinguished Qing international student scholar like myself to eat rice from the same pot as prisoners was not merely a question of personal dignity but would ultimately tarnish my country’s honor, insisting I must move immediately. Though I laughed and said I didn’t mind in the slightest, he persisted: "No, no—you’re just being polite! The Chinese value face above all else. Claiming you don’t care about sharing meals with prisoners is false! Quickly abandon this ill-omened place and come to my lodging!"

He would say such things with an extremely serious face, yet inwardly he might have been mocking me.

I couldn’t say for certain, but since flatly rejecting a friend’s goodwill would only lead to needless conflict, I reluctantly moved to Mr. Tsuda’s boarding house in Aramachi.

This time, although farther from the prison, the meals couldn’t be said to match their former quality.

Every morning brought a dish of raw taro mashed into a thick paste that left me utterly perplexed, unable to bring my chopsticks to it. Then one morning Mr. Tsuda peered into my room and immediately demanded why I wasn’t eating it. He insisted it was highly nutritious—if mixed thoroughly into miso soup, he explained, it would make a delicious tororo broth to pour over rice. From that day onward, I had no choice but to stir it into my miso soup each morning and eat it over rice.

That man didn’t seem malicious by any means, but his excessive kindness proved rather overwhelming.

Still, at present Mr. Tsuda’s meddling caused only minor discomfort; beyond that, I had no complaints.

Everything progressed smoothly.

I might even have called my circumstances fortunate.

All school lectures felt fresh and new—it seemed my long-held aspirations had finally been fulfilled upon coming here.

Among them, Professor Fujino’s anatomy lectures proved particularly fascinating.

The lectures themselves contained nothing extraordinary, yet perhaps they reflected that teacher’s character—not only I but all other students listened with apparent enjoyment.

According to stories from the so-called old foxes—senior students who had failed to advance the previous year—Professor Fujino cared little for appearances, often forgetting his necktie when coming to school. In winter he wore an antiquated overcoat so short it barely covered his knees, perpetually shivering as if chilled to the bone. Once on a train ride, the conductor had reportedly deemed him suspicious and abruptly warned all passengers: "Beware—pickpockets have been active lately!" Beyond such anecdotes, he appeared both noble-hearted and deeply committed to lectures brimming with scholarly substance. Yet perhaps due to this unworldly eccentricity, the class’s old foxes found him approachable—during his lessons they would erupt in uproarious laughter at the slightest provocation, transforming classrooms into boisterous scenes.

During his first lecture too, this professor—slightly hunched over, arms laden with books of various sizes—appeared in the classroom. After stacking the numerous volumes high on the lectern, he began in an extremely slow tone, “I am Fujino Genkuro—” whereupon the usual old foxes burst out laughing. I found myself feeling rather sorry for him.
However, this first lecture was on the history of anatomy’s development in Japan, and the books of various sizes brought in at that time were Japanese works on anatomy spanning from ancient times to the modern era.
Among them were Sugita Genpaku’s *Kaitai Shinsho* (*New Book of Anatomy*) and *Rangaku Kotohajime* (*Beginnings of Dutch Studies*).
And with his distinctively slow tone, Professor Fujino recounted the tension of Genpaku and others dissecting a criminal’s corpse at Kozukappara execution grounds—yet that first lecture seemed to both foreshadow and encourage my future path, leaving me profoundly moved.
Now, at last, my path can be stated in a single word.
To become China’s Sugita Genpaku.
That is all.
To become China’s Sugita Genpaku and raise the beacon of China’s restoration.

At that Matsushima inn, Mr. Zhou—then a twenty-four-year-old international student—shared with me the general circumstances outlined above. However, let me clarify: that night did not consist of Mr. Zhou delivering some lengthy, systematic lecture about the Qing's current state or his personal history. Rather, after sharing some sake, we conversed until nearly dawn about various matters. To this account I later supplemented knowledge I had acquired, compiling it into the form presented here.
In any case, I was deeply moved that night by Mr. Zhou's candid revelations.
Unlike someone like myself—who had entered medical school with such a casual attitude, simply because my father was a doctor and I as eldest son was expected to follow—I marveled at how this man who had crossed oceans indeed harbored such profound circumstances and exceptional resolve. My respect for this foreign prodigy grew anew, and though incapable of offering tangible assistance, I felt my righteous spirit surge with desire to see his lofty purpose fulfilled.
Mr. Zhou had remarked that I resembled his younger brother, while I secretly rejoiced in being liberated from anxieties about my rural accent whenever we spoke—such factors might have contributed to forming our close friendship. Yet there's no need to enumerate each plausible reason meticulously, for what people call "clicking," that minor miracle, may simply be a phenomenon occasionally occurring even between those of different nationalities.
Yet even into this remarkably generous friendship—forged mysteriously between two solitary souls on Matsushima's shores counted among Japan's Three Scenic Views, devoid of scheming or calculation—strange interferences would sometimes intrude.
A purely carefree friendship between just two people—perhaps such a thing isn't permitted to exist in this world.
There always seem to be interventions from third parties—restraints, suspicions, mockeries.

At that Matsushima inn, we cast aside formalities as we talked and laughed about everything on our minds. The next day, we returned together to Sendai by train, parting with mutual gratitude for our unexpectedly delightful little trip—"See you tomorrow at school," "Thank you for everything," "No, it is I who should thank you." The following morning, buoyed by the prospect of meeting my new friend again, I rose so early that even the people at the boarding house were surprised when I left for school. Yet Mr. Zhou was nowhere to be seen—not in the schoolyard nor in the classroom.
I spent that entire day in a desolate mood listening to various teachers’ lectures.
I had not pursued this path into medicine with as keen a purpose as Mr. Zhou had, so none of these lectures struck me as particularly valuable or novel.
I attended Professor Fujino’s lecture for the first time that day as well, but it proved far less enjoyable than Mr. Zhou’s passionate descriptions had led me to expect.
At that time Professor Fujino had just concluded general osteology and moved into specific osteology lessons. With a life-sized skeletal specimen placed beside him—which he caressed as if they were his own kin’s bones—he delivered lectures of excruciating meticulousness determined to make every last student grasp the material flawlessly. Whether one called this conscientiousness or obsessive earnestness mattered little; to someone as impatient as myself, it felt unbearably convoluted.
I later learned anatomy was inherently complex, but even so found myself overwhelmed by Professor Fujino’s relentless explanations.
His appearance then was impeccably formal—neck-tied without a trace of ethereal eccentricity—with a dark angular face framed by iron-rimmed glasses whose lenses magnified eyes ceaselessly scanning the room. Far from nostalgic familiarity, he struck me as more formidable than any other instructor.
Yet just as Mr. Zhou had described, the old foxes at the classroom’s rear erupted in raucous laughter over trivialities. From my observations however, these repeat students seemed oppressed by lectures so scrupulous they bordered on oppressive—their antics mere bravado proclaiming “What nonsense! Freshmen needn’t strain so!” I even suspected their entire cohort had failed Fujino’s anatomy exams and now vented through such clamor. Regardless of their motives, Professor Fujino’s lectures themselves proved nothing like spring breezes but rather painfully earnest affairs stripped bare of pretense.
This sense of painful earnestness perhaps resonated most strongly with me alone.
The reason lay in how visibly Professor Fujino labored over his diction during lectures—a struggle mirroring my own anxiety about rural speech patterns—making me hypersensitive to his linguistic plight.
Professor Fujino spoke with a heavy Kansai accent.
Though he made extraordinary efforts to conceal it—even Mr. Zhou being foreign had noted its distinctive cadence—the lectures remained thoroughly imbued with Kansai inflections.
Reflecting thus leaves me disheartened that our later alliance between Professor Fujino Mr.Zhou and myself might have been mere fellowship among Japanese language strugglers—though this seems too flippant a conjecture.
That my rural dialect anxiety served as one humble catalyst for our initial rapport remains undeniable—a fact I’ve tediously reiterated—but I must insist our bond transcended such superficiality thereafter.

Then, what were these other lofty reasons?
The truth was, even I did not clearly understand them.
What it might be—I could not articulate it in a word—but in any case, while the explanation of having "clicked" felt natural when applied to young men like Mr. Zhou and myself suddenly opening up to one another, when Professor Fujino joined this friendship between two people, even attempting to explain it through such a crude colloquialism as "clicked" seemed insufficient.
In truth, within the alliance formed thereafter by the three of us, there existed a conviction and striving toward something grander—something that transcended notions like "the Japanese-strugglers group" or "clicking"—but what exactly that was, I found myself unable to grasp.
Was it mutual respect? Neighborly love? Or perhaps something we should call justice? No—it felt like something more expansive, a nebulous amalgamation of all those sentiments combined.
Or perhaps what Professor Fujino often spoke of as the "original Way of the East" might correspond to it, but I still could not quite grasp it.
From Professor Fujino’s Kansai dialect, our discussion had veered into strange territory, but in short, I wished to state my regret that the alliance we later formed was by no means merely a solidarity of the Japanese-strugglers group—it was truly unfortunate if perceived as such.
What was the essence of our alliance? To pass judgment on that lay beyond my capacity; perhaps we must leave it to future thinkers to opine. For now, I resolved to content myself with meticulously recording the memories of my mentor and old friend. Abandoning ambitions for greater achievements, I would simply continue writing this meager account.
Now, as I wrote before, even into the carefree friendship between Mr. Zhou and myself—formed through that chance encounter in Matsushima—strange interferences would occasionally intrude. But this unpleasant meddler appeared with startling swiftness from an unexpected quarter.
That day, I had risen earlier than usual and gone to school, looking forward to seeing Mr. Zhou—yet his figure was nowhere to be found. Moreover, Professor Fujino’s lecture, which I had anticipated, turned out to be so rigidly serious it could be called stiff, leaving me feeling somewhat overwhelmed. In the end, nothing of interest occurred that day, and as evening fell, I vacantly exited the school gate after classes—

“Hey—you there.” I was called out to, and when I turned around, a tall student with a large nose, an oily face, and an affected air stood smirking.
The first disruptor of the friendship between Mr. Zhou and me was this man.
His name was Tsuda Kenji.

“There’s something I want to discuss with you.”
It was an imperious way of speaking.
However, there was no accent.
He might be a Tokyoite, I thought, growing tense in secret.
“How about joining me for dinner around Ichibancho?”

“Haa.”
When it came to Tokyoites, I was extremely reticent.

“You’ll agree, then.” He strode ahead briskly. “Now, where should we go... The tempura soba at Tokyo-an is too greasy to eat, and Brother-ken’s cutlet might as well be shoe leather—honestly, Sendai has nothing decent to offer. What a nuisance. Well, perhaps it’s safer to just tuck into a chicken hotpot at some random little eatery. Or do you know of any better place?”

“No, uh—nothing in particular.”
I was overwhelmed by his forceful manner and became utterly flustered.
I felt deeply uneasy about what this student—who carried himself like an Edo native—could possibly want from me. Yet he seemed wholly indifferent to my feelings, chatting idly about whatever came to mind as he marched ahead with military briskness like some superior officer. As a country bumpkin, I found myself utterly at a loss; all I could do was follow behind him with a faint, wry smile plastered on my face.

“Well then, let’s just head to Ichibancho and try to find some new place to explore.”
“I wish there were a place that served proper kabayaki grilled eel, but Sendai’s unagi always tends to be sinewy.”
He enthusiastically exhibited his peculiar food connoisseurship.
What exactly constituted the sinew of an eel—this profound mystery remains settled deep within my heart as an insoluble enigma even now, forty years later.
Then we went to Ichibancho—Sendai’s answer to Asakusa—entered what he called a “randomly chosen” little eatery, and proceeded to tuck into what he termed a “safe choice” chicken hotpot. But once he had seated himself across the table from me, he first presented a business card.
It read: Sendai Medical School, Class Meeting Secretary, Tsuda Kenji.
With these titles, it remained entirely ambiguous whether he was a teacher at the medical school doubling as class meeting secretary, a student, or indeed which year’s class meeting secretary he might be.
That very ambiguity might have been his intention.
At that time, unlike today, students at specialized school-level institutions were treated as gentlemen by society, so many students carried business cards bearing their school’s name. However, a business card printed with such an absurd title was truly a rare thing.

“Oh, is that so?”
I suppressed the urge to burst out laughing. “I don’t have a business card, but Tanaka—” I began introducing myself when—

“No, I know. Tanaka Taku. H Middle School graduate. You’re a person of interest in the class. Haven’t you been coming to school at all?”

I bristled. Just because I didn’t attend school regularly didn’t make me a “person of interest”—the label felt absurdly exaggerated. How rude. I remained silent.

“That’s a joke,” he laughed. “But I heard all about you from Mr. Zhou yesterday. You two apparently stayed up all night debating something at that Matsushima inn? Thanks to your little escapade, Mr. Zhou caught a cold and took to bed. Given his slight tendency toward Lunge, you really shouldn’t let him pull such reckless all-nighters.”

At that moment, I abruptly recalled.
That night, Mr. Zhou had said he was at his wit’s end with some meddlesome student’s overbearing attentions—and now I felt certain that student’s name had been Tsuda.
Oh! So that adviser of tororo soup was none other than this Mr. Gourmet right before my eyes?

“Does he have a fever?”

“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t seem serious, but he doesn’t appear to have a very robust constitution.”
“Well, I intend to let him take two or three days off from school.”
“Foreigners really are such a hassle to look after.”
“By the way, would chicken hotpot be acceptable?”
“And we’ll have some sake too.”

“Haa, whatever you say.”

“If the meat’s tough, that would be a problem.”
“Perhaps we should just have them prepare it pounded.”
“In that case, it’s a safe choice.”

I inadvertently stifled a laugh.
It was because I had discerned that Mr. Tsuda’s entire upper jaw consisted of unsightly dentures.
I wondered whether his denouncement of Brother-ken’s cutlet as shoe leather, his peculiar theory about eel sinew, and his request for pounded chicken might all have some connection to these dentures.

“Honestly now,” Mr. Tsuda said, apparently misinterpreting my laughter, “I’d rather not endure some watery hotpot broth thin as nasal mucus.”
“Country dishes demand being pounded.”

Thus the pounded chicken and sake were ordered, Mr. Tsuda officiously preparing the hotpot himself before exchanging sake cups with me—

“You must exercise utmost caution when fraternizing with foreigners.”
“Japan remains at war—this fact must never be forgotten,” he began declaring with peculiar gravity.

I was bewildered,

“Huh?” I said.

“This isn’t a ‘huh’ matter,” he retorted. “I’ll have you know I graduated from Tokyo Prefectural First Middle School. The tension in Tokyo since this war began—why, you couldn’t begin to imagine it in this provincial backwater.”

It was an absurdly pompous way of speaking.

“Qing exchange students? There are thousands of them in Tokyo.”

“Nothing remarkable about them at all.”

“The more that emerge, the stranger it becomes.”

“But you see, this student issue requires careful consideration.”

“After all, Japan is currently at war with the great northern power.”

“Port Arthur shows no sign of falling soon, and they say the Baltic Fleet has finally set sail for the East—this could turn catastrophic.”

“At this critical moment, the Qing government maintains a—how shall I put it—benevolently neutral stance toward Japan. But who knows how that might change?”

“The Qing regime itself grows unstable.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he continued, “but revolutionary ideas spread through China like wildfire these days.”

“The pounded chicken’s ready. Have some.”

“Overcooking would toughen the meat.”

“Now then—about this revolutionary thought. Its vanguard turns out to be these Japan-educated students. Complicates matters.”

“You really mustn’t let people chatter about such things.”

“This stays between us.”

“As for my expertise on China’s affairs—Tsuda Seizō. Know him? My uncle. ‘Tsuda’ with ‘clear’ and ‘storehouse.’ You must have heard—though I suppose not in these rural parts. Feels odd boasting about family, but in Japan’s diplomatic circles today, he’s what you might call a top young talent.”

“If you don’t know him, there’s no helping it.”

“Anyway, with an uncle like that, naturally I’ve become quite the foreign affairs expert.”
“Oh, this pounded chicken is dreadful, isn’t it?”
“With pounded chicken, you must add plenty of eggs and mix them thoroughly—otherwise it won’t taste right.”
“They clearly skimped on the eggs.”
“Doesn’t it reek oddly of wheat starch?”
“This isn’t properly made at all.”
“Countryside cooking through and through.”
“Well, nothing to be done about it.”
“Let’s eat.”
“Now—about that revolutionary thought. This is confidential, strictly between us. Listen with that understanding.”
“Their headquarters are now in Japan.”
“You’re shocked, aren’t you?”
“Shall I spell it out more plainly?”
“The Qing international students in Tokyo form their central force.”
“What do you say? The tale grows truly fascinating now, doesn’t it?”

However, I found it not the least bit interesting.
Regarding China’s revolutionary movement, I had heard far more detailed accounts of its actual conditions from Mr. Zhou than such flippant “just between us” talk, so there was nothing at all surprising about it.
I simply nodded vaguely along to that foreign affairs expert’s secretive whispers, keeping my head buried in the chicken hotpot the whole time.
To this country bumpkin, even that ill-reputed pounded chicken didn’t particularly smell of udon flour and tasted rather delicious indeed.

“The crux lies here.”
“Listen—I want you to give this some proper thought tonight.”
“The Qing government funds sending students to Japan, and yet those very students are rallying to overthrow the Qing government—it’s a strange state of affairs.”
“In this situation, it’s as if the Qing government were providing international students with research funds for their own collapse.”
“The Japanese government seems to be, for now at least, turning a blind eye to these international students’ revolutionary ideas—but Japan’s civilian patriots are actively supporting this movement.”
“Now, don’t be shocked.”
“The leading figure of China’s revolutionary movement—a hero named Sun Yat-sen—has been sheltered in the home of a certain Miyazaki, a Japanese chivalrous figure, for quite some time now, you know.”
“Sun Yat-sen.”
“You should remember this name.”
“He’s apparently an incredible man.”
“He is said to have a lion-like appearance.”
“The international students will listen to anything this man says.”
“Absolute trust.”
“The advisors to those fearsome heroic figures are Japan’s civilian patriots, starting with that certain Miyazaki person.”
“This is where it all hangs by a thread.”
“Even if the Japanese government were to turn a blind eye, if this revolutionary thought were to develop a powerful anti-Qing movement in Tokyo, Japan’s capital, what feelings would the Qing government harbor toward Japan?”
“If it were peacetime, it wouldn’t matter.”
“If saving the great nation of China—a country with such an excellent civilizational tradition—from foreign aggression absolutely requires revolutionary means, then there’s no reason to hold back from acting against the Qing government.”
“I too would rush to join that hero Sun Yat-sen and give him some hearty encouragement.”
“Japanese people all possess at least that much sense of honor.”

“The essence of the Yamato spirit lies in honor.”
“But understand this—Japan now stakes its national fate in war against a northern power.”
“If the Qing government were to grow hostile toward Japan, abandoning its favorable neutrality to lean toward Russia—what then?”
“Might this war become exceedingly difficult for Japan?”
“This is where it hinges.”
“Listen well—here lies diplomatic strategy’s essence.”
“War on one front, diplomacy on another.”
“What’s amusing?”
“Pay proper attention.”
“These are matters of grave national importance.”
“You’ve been guzzling drink alone like a fool—what of settling the bill?”
“I haven’t that much money.”
“Exactly how much do you carry?”
“First secure clarity on your nation’s finances before war—else it’s perilous.”
“Check promptly and report.”

I took out my purse, checked the amount inside, and reported it to the Foreign Minister.

“Alright, we’re fine.”
“If there’s that much, then we’re fine.”
“I have fifty or sixty sen myself.”
“Let’s drink a bit more.”
“As for the pounded chicken, I’ll pass.”
“Let’s keep it simple and go with simmered tofu.”
“In country cooking, well, that’s probably the safest choice, isn’t it?”

However, I couldn’t help but wonder if that too might have some connection to his dentures.

The pot was replaced, and more sake was brought over.

“You sure eat and drink a lot,” he said, watching me with an irritated glare as I blew on steaming tofu while drinking alone with one hand. “I hear you drank quite heavily in Matsushima too.”
“This may seem trivial, but who paid the bill?”
“It’s an important matter.”
He said this while changing his tone.
I set down my chopsticks and answered.

“We split it half and half.”
“I intended to pay for everything, but Mr. Zhou absolutely wouldn’t allow it.”

“That won’t do.”
“That’s exactly why you’re no good.”
“One thing leads to another.”
“You should stop associating with Mr. Zhou.”
“You compromise national policy.”
“No matter what Mr. Zhou said, you should have paid for everything in full.”
“When interacting with foreigners, you must act as if you’ve become a diplomat.”
“First and foremost, we must give them the impression that all Japanese people are kind.”
“My uncle’s efforts in that regard are truly tremendous.”
“After all, we’re in the middle of a war now.”
“With people from neutral nations, we must employ truly complex and delicate diplomatic strategies.”
“Qing international students are particularly troublesome.”
“This student was dispatched by the Qing government yet plots its overthrow.”
“If we simply indulge him recklessly, wouldn’t that contradict our current government’s diplomatic policy?”
“Mere kindness alone isn’t enough.”
“The key for today’s diplomat lies in adopting a superior’s attitude that combines kindness with guidance—that’s what I maintain.”
“This right here.”
“You mustn’t show any weakness to your counterpart.”
“When socializing together, we must always cover the entire bill ourselves.”
“We must always stay one step ahead.”

“Even I’ve been struggling mightily with that, I tell you.”
“You didn’t attend the recent class meeting, did you? From now on, you must attend. At that very meeting, Professor Fujino told me—as the organizer—‘Exercise caution in your dealings with international students.’”

That was something I could not let pass.
I felt as if Professor Fujino had betrayed me.

“No way... Professor Fujino would resort to such foolish diplomatic tactics.”

“What do you mean by ‘foolish’?”
“You mustn’t say such rude things.”
“You’re a traitor!”
“During wartime, all third-country nationals could potentially be spies.”
“Especially Qing international students—every single one of them are revolutionaries.”
“In pursuing revolution, there could even be cases where they seek assistance from Russia.”
“Surveillance is necessary.”
“It’s kindness on one hand and surveillance on the other.”
“That’s precisely why I’ve dragged that international student into my boarding house—while tending to him in various ways, I’m also making various efforts aligned with Japan’s diplomatic policies.”

“What exactly are these ‘various efforts’ of yours? Isn’t that rather stingy?”
I was also quite drunk.

“Well! How dare you call me stingy.”
“You are precisely a traitor!”
“You’re a delinquent.”
His face turned red.
“You insolent oaf!”
“So even the countryside has its delinquents like this.”
“You don’t even know my uncle’s name? How pathetic. Study harder.”
“You’ll fail before long!”
“Go home already.”
“Pay for what you’ve eaten and drunk, and get out of here quickly.”
“It’s as if you ate all the tataki and yudofu by yourself!”

I dumped all the money from my wallet onto the tatami and stood in silence.

“You wanna go, huh?” bellowed Mr. Tsuda, sprawling in a wide-legged sitting position with his elbows planted.

I gave a wry smile.

I said only "Goodbye" and went outside, but I couldn't help feeling bitter.

Very well, I resolved to meet Professor Fujino directly tomorrow and verify the truth of this matter. If there was any chance Mr. Zhou might be a spy while I was being branded a traitorous delinquent, I felt compelled to speak out. I returned to my boarding house behind the prefectural office and washed my face at the well, scrubbed my hands clean, and rinsed my feet. Feeling somewhat refreshed in both body and mind, I slept deeply through the night. The next morning, I marched to school with purpose and knocked on Professor Fujino's laboratory door before classes began. His voice called out to enter. Without hesitation, I opened the door to find sunlight streaming into the room where the professor sat surrounded by unsettling human bone specimens—skulls, limb bones, and other skeletal remains—reading his newspaper with unshakable calm. He swiveled his chair slightly toward me and set the newspaper on the desk,

“What is it?”
In the laboratory, Professor Fujino was much kinder than his classroom counterpart.

“Um… Am I not allowed to associate with third-country nationals?”

“Huh? What’s that?”
Professor Fujino countered, his Kansai accent unfiltered.

“It’s about Mr. Zhou.”
I couldn’t suppress a smile at his broad dialect.
Now steady-voiced, I continued:
“I was told yesterday by someone that I shouldn’t associate with Mr. Zhou Shuren.”

“Who was it?”

“I won’t disclose the name.”
“I didn’t come here to inform on that person.”
“It’s simply that I heard you had issued such an order, so I only came to inquire whether it was true.”

With Professor Fujino as well, I found myself able to speak my mind relatively smoothly, just as I had when interacting with Mr. Zhou. As for what might be considered the reason, I had written about it many times before—perhaps to the point of tedium—but ultimately, it may have been due to Professor Fujino and Mr. Zhou’s character. When faced with those people, I felt a certain sense of ease.

"That’s strange," Professor Fujino said with dissatisfaction, vigorously rubbing his mustache. "Would I ever say such a foolish thing? Isn’t that right?"

"But," I pouted and began, "At the class meeting, you—" when—

“Ah—Mr. Tsuda, isn’t it?” he said, bursting into laughter. “That fellow’s all bark and no bite.”

“So that was a lie?”

“No, I did say it.” His tone suddenly turned serious, like during lectures. “When our school admitted its first Qing international student, I told Mr. Tsuda: ‘Collaborating with this individual in medical studies will, in microcosm, birth new medicine for China. In macrocosm, our mutual efforts to rapidly assimilate Western medicine in the East shall create a beneficial stimulus for advancing global academia.’ That’s the level of resolve I expected from our class representative.”

“Nothing more was said.”

“I see.”
In a deflated tone, I continued, “During wartime, third-country nationals might become spies or something like that—”

“What are you talking about?”
“Take a look at this,” Professor Fujino said, pushing the newspaper on the desk toward me.
When I looked, at the top of the newspaper in large print,

Imperial Chrysanthemum Viewing Ceremony

At Akasaka Palace

Domestic and Foreign Persons: 4,092 Individuals

Headlines such as “Imperial Chrysanthemum Viewing Ceremony,” “At Akasaka Palace,” and “Domestic and Foreign Persons: 4,092 Individuals” were printed.
Without even reading the article, I understood.

“Shouldn’t we have faith in the nation’s light—eternal and profound?”
The professor lowered his eyes and said solemnly.
“The sublime virtues of our national essence”—if I may put it that way—“I feel them all the more profoundly in wartime.”
Suddenly shifting his tone, he asked, “Are you Mr. Zhou’s close friend?”

“No—by no means am I his close friend—but I had intended to become friends with Mr. Zhou from now on.”
“Mr. Zhou came to Sendai with far higher ideals than someone like me.”
“Due to his father’s illness—from age thirteen for three years—Mr. Zhou spent every single day running between pawnshops and pharmacies.”
“And he kept calling out to his dying father until his throat tore raw—yet still his father died.”
“He says even now that voice—his own endless screaming—remains stuck in his ears.”
“That’s why Mr. Zhou declares he’ll become China’s Sugita Genpaku and save our nation’s suffering patients.”
“But just because he’s at revolutionary thought’s vanguard—this mix of kindness and surveillance—these diplomatic maneuvers... It’s too much.”
“Too much.”
“Mr. Zhou truly possesses ideals worthy of youth.”
“Young people must have ideals.”
“And so—that’s why—young people must cling to ideals—ideals alone—” I began before breaking into tears where I stood.

“Revolutionary thought,” Professor Fujino murmured quietly to himself before falling silent for a long moment.
Gazing out the window, he continued, “There’s a family I know—the eldest brother works the fields, the second son serves as a judicial officer, and the youngest, an eccentric sort, makes his living as an actor.”
“At first they quarreled like typical siblings, but now they seem to hold each other in deep respect.”
“It defies logical explanation.”
“How should I put this... Even if each believes they’ve blossomed individually, together they form one grand flower.”
“A household is a mysterious thing.”
“To call them a distinguished family in their region would be exaggeration—let’s say they’re an old established lineage there.”
“And even now, the local people continue placing their trust in them.”
“I consider all of East Asia to be one household.”
“Each member may bloom as they will.”
“Regarding China’s revolutionary ideologies—though my understanding is limited—I believe even their Three Principles of the People takes root in what might be called national self-determination... no, rather, national self-initiation.”
“While ‘self-determination’ sounds formal and detached, ‘self-initiation’ represents the most heartening phenomenon for a household’s flourishing.”
“I prefer to regard it as each people’s historical enlightenment.”
“Our trivial meddling serves no purpose.”
“Several years ago at Tokyo’s Bansei Club—this I heard secondhand—when they held the founding ceremony of the East Asia Common Culture Society and elected Prince Konoe Atsumaro as chairman, a fierce debate erupted between revolutionary faction supporters and Qing dynasty loyalists during deliberations over the society’s charter.”
“The factions stood opposed without compromise until it seemed the assembly might collapse—at which point Chairman Prince Konoe rose solemnly and declared: ‘Whether advocating Chinese revolution or supporting the Qing to prevent foreign partition, both positions amount to meddling in another nation’s affairs—utterly contrary to this society’s aims.’”
“‘However,’ he proposed gravely, ‘since both sides ultimately seek China’s preservation, let us adopt “Preservation of China” as our official purpose.’ This silenced the hall—both factions approved it unanimously with thunderous applause, establishing it henceforth as Japan’s China policy.”
“What more need we say?”
“China too has many great minds.”
“The matters we ponder—China’s pioneers have surely considered them thoroughly.”

“Well, national self-determination then.”
“That’s what I anticipate.”
“China’s national character differs from Japan’s in certain respects.”
“Some argue China’s revolution is ill-advised for destroying tradition, but one might equally posit that its very preservation of noble traditions bred revolutionary fervor in their inheritors.”
“Only superficial forms get severed.”
“Family customs or national heritage—such traditions never truly cease.”
“The foundational ethics of the East—that subterranean current—persists eternally somewhere.”
“Through this primordial Way, we Easterners remain bound together.”
“One might say we share a common fate.”
“Like that family I mentioned—however diversely each member may bloom, they coalesce into one great flower. Trust in this principle and engage wholeheartedly with Mr. Zhou.”
“No need for overcomplication.”
The professor rose with a laugh. “Can’t we distill it thus?”
“Never look down upon the Chinese.”
“That suffices.”

The school bell had been ringing for some time.

“What does the Imperial Rescript on Education state?”
“It says: ‘Friends shall trust one another,’ does it not?”
“Friendship means trusting one another.”
“Nothing else is required beyond that.”

I rushed up, seized by the impulse to shake Professor Fujino’s hand, but restrained myself—and the moment I politely bowed,

“Your face doesn’t seem familiar—have you attended my lectures before?”

“Ah,” I said with a tearful smile, “well, from now on.”

“You’re a new student, aren’t you? Well then—everyone, please encourage one another and carry on. I’ll have a proper word with Mr. Tsuda myself. I too ended up making unnecessary meddlesome remarks at the class meeting. From now on, let us adhere to ‘deeds, not words.’”

I ran out into the corridor, took a relieved breath, and thought: No wonder Mr. Zhou speaks so highly of him—Professor Fujino is remarkable indeed, but Mr. Zhou himself shows keen discernment—finding myself equally impressed by both mentor and student.

I resolved then to become as devoted an admirer of Professor Fujino as Mr. Zhou without being outdone—during lectures, I would secure a front-row seat and take meticulous notes—but first wondered whether Mr. Zhou had come to school that day.

Eager to meet him at once, I hurried to the classroom only to find his usual spot empty again—and there glinted Mr. Tsuda’s unpleasant gaze from across the room.

Yet somehow I’d grown magnanimous, offering a slight smile and nod of acknowledgment.

Mr. Tsuda didn’t seem entirely disagreeable after all.

He appeared momentarily flustered before returning a thin smile and nod.

But throughout that day, we moved in orbits of avoidance, neither attempting conversation.

After school, I considered visiting Zhou to assess his illness, but lacking knowledge of his boarding house’s location—and dreading another lecture from Tsuda who shared those lodgings—I returned directly to my room. Come evening, I wandered out to Higashi-Ichibancho where Nakamura Shuzaburo’s troupe performed *Sendaihagi* at Matsushima Theater—curious about Sendai’s rendition of this local drama—I slipped into the standing gallery.

*Sendaihagi*, as you may know, dramatizes what appears to be an internal feud within Sendai’s Date clan—so entrenched in regional lore that Tsutsujigaoka Hill even boasts a grave purportedly belonging to its heroine Masuoka. I’d presumed this play must have enjoyed wild popularity here since antiquity, but later learned the opposite held true: banned as forbidden material during the feudal era. Though post-Restoration performances became permissible, Sendai itself long refused stagings. Even when mounted under altered titles, self-proclaimed former retainers would confront theater managers—“Even if Masuoka existed,” they protested, “this play’s very structure defames the Date clan! Withdraw it!” By mid-Meiji such objections ceased, and audiences ceased attending out of local curiosity—indifferently watching what might as well have been some foreign tragedy.

Unaware then of this history, I entered expecting Sendai’s crowd to erupt over their own storied past—only to find calm spectators in a half-empty hall. *How peculiar*, I thought, yet marveled: *Truly metropolitan composure—watching their domain’s turmoil enacted with such detachment!* Fresh from mountain-country naivety, I found myself absurdly admiring this urban poise—until Shuzaburo’s Masuoka delivered her heartrending “Yet still, how pitiful!” line, reducing me to tears.

Glancing sideways through blurred vision—there stood Mr. Zhou.

Still weeping.

This undid me completely—I fled to the corridor, sobbed unrestrainedly alone, dried my face, then returned to tap his shoulder.

“Ah,” Mr. Zhou said, laughing as he looked at my face and wiped his tears with the back of his hand, “have you been watching since earlier?”

“Yes, I’ve been watching since the beginning of this act.”
“And you?”

“I have as well. This play—whenever children appear on stage, I somehow end up crying.”

“Shall we go?”

“Yeah.”

Mr. Zhou left Matsushima-za with me.

“I heard from Mr. Tsuda that you caught a cold.”

“Is he already spreading it even to you?”
“Mr. Tsuda is so troublesome.”
“When I coughed slightly, he forcibly made me lie down and declared it was Lunge.”
“He’s angry because I went to Matsushima alone without inviting him.”
“He’s the real Kranke.”
“Hysterie, isn’t it?”

“If that’s how it is, then fine—but you did feel at least a little unwell, didn’t you?”

“No.
“Gar nicht.”
"Since he told me to stay in bed, I spent yesterday and today reading while lying down, but I got so unbearably bored that I sneaked out and came here."
“Starting tomorrow, I will go to school.”

“Well,”
“If you keep listening to everything Mr. Tsuda says with those ‘yes sirs,’ you’ll end up contracting real tuberculosis before long.”
“Why not simply change your boarding house?”

“Yes, I’ve considered that, but then he would feel lonely.”
“He can be a bit annoying, but to be honest, I don’t dislike him all that much.”

I blushed.
It was because I thought that perhaps I was even more of a jealous type than Mr. Tsuda.

“Aren’t you cold?” I changed the subject.
“Shall we have some soba?”

Before we knew it, we arrived in front of Tokyo-an.

“Perhaps Miyagino would be better? According to Mr. Tsuda’s theory, the tempura soba at this Tokyo-an is apparently too greasy to eat.”

“Well, Miyagino’s tempura would be greasy too,” he replied. “Tempura that isn’t greasy is counterfeit.” Like me, Mr. Zhou didn’t seem particularly discerning about food.

We entered Tokyo-an.

“Let’s try that greasy tempura soba,” said Mr. Zhou, who appeared genuinely intrigued by the tempura’s very greasiness.

“Yes, let’s do that.”
“Strangely enough, I sense it might be good.”

We ordered tempura soba and sake.

“Since your country is said to be the land of cuisine, you must find the food here rather meager and troubling.”

“That’s not the case,” Mr. Zhou said, shaking his head with a serious expression. “This idea of China being a ‘land of cuisine’ was started by wealthy foreigners who come to China for leisure.
“Those people come to China solely for their own pleasure.
“Then when they return to their own countries, they become so-called China experts.
“In Japan too, those called China experts generally go around wielding their self-serving prejudices about China.
“Connoisseurs ultimately become cowardly people detached from reality.
“In China, those eating delicious so-called Chinese cuisine are only a small number of wealthy Chinese or foreign tourists.
“The general populace eats terrible food.
“Isn’t Japan the same?
“The lavish meals served at Japanese inns aren’t eaten in ordinary Japanese households.
“Foreign travelers still eat those inn’s lavish meals thinking they’re everyday Japanese cuisine.
“China is by no means a country of cuisine.
“When I came to Tokyo, my seniors treated me to so-called Chinese cuisine at places like Kaieraku-en in Hatchōbori and Kaifurō in Kanda—it was the first time in my life I’d eaten such delicious meals.
“Since coming to Japan, I’ve never once thought the food was bad.”

“But what about the grated yam soup?”

“No—that’s special. But after mastering the Tsuda-style cooking method, I somehow managed to eat it. It’s delicious.”

The sake arrived.

“What do you think of Japanese theater?”
“Is it interesting?”

“For me, Japanese theater makes far more sense than scenery.”
“To be honest, I didn’t truly grasp Matsushima’s celebrated beauty either.”
“When it comes to landscapes, I suppose I’m rather like you—” He faltered mid-sentence.

“Impotenz?” I interjected bluntly.

“Well... yes,” he admitted, eyelids fluttering like moth wings against lamplight. “I’ve adored paintings since childhood, but natural vistas never moved me.”
“Music poses another difficulty.”

I burst out laughing. It was because I had suddenly remembered that instance of the song “Clouds, Oh Clouds” in Matsushima.

“But what about Japanese Jōruri?”

“Well, I don’t dislike that.”
“That’s more of a narrative than music.”
“Perhaps it’s because I’m a common man, but I prefer popular, straightforward stories over lofty scenery or poetry.”

“Rather than Matsushima, Matsushima Theater?”
Even though I was a country bumpkin, in front of Mr. Zhou, I could casually toss out such pun-like remarks.
“Lately, moving pictures seem to be extremely popular in Sendai—how about that?”

“I saw them occasionally in Tokyo as well, but I felt uneasy.”
“Applying science to entertainment is dangerous.”
“Generally speaking, Americans’ attitude toward science is unhealthy.”
“It’s heresy.”
“Pleasure is not something that should be advanced.”
“In ancient Greece, did they not exile a musician who invented a new type of lyre by adding an extra string?”
“In China’s Mozi, it is written that an inventor named Gongshu showed Mozi a magpie he had made from bamboo, boasting, ‘If you release this toy into the sky, it will fly about for three full days.’ But Mozi made a bitter face and said, ‘Still, it cannot compare to carpenters making wheels,’ then made him discard that dangerous toy.”
“I consider the inventor Edison to be a dangerous figure in the world.”
“Pleasure exists abundantly in its primitive form.”
“Look at what became of China when alcohol ‘progressed’ into opium.”
“I am anxious that Edison’s various entertainment inventions might lead to similar consequences.”
“In the next forty or fifty years, Edison’s successors will emerge one after another, and I even fear the world will become deadlocked in pleasure, unleashing an unimaginably horrific hellscape.”
“I can only hope my fears prove unfounded.”

While talking about such things, we enjoyed eating the “greasy” tempura soba and left Tokyo-an.
As for who paid the bill then—whether it was me or him, whether we heeded Mr. Tsuda’s advice—even now, I can’t recall.
That night, I decided to escort Mr. Zhou back to his lodgings in Aramachi.

The moon was out.
That much I remember without doubt.
Even we fellow sufferers of Impotenz toward scenery couldn’t help but be moved by the moonlight alone.

“Since childhood, I’ve loved theater,” Mr. Zhou said quietly.
“I still remember clearly—every summer I would visit my mother’s hometown, and about one ri by boat from her family home stood a village playhouse—”

After sunset, we would board a covered boat along the river winding through bean and wheat fields—always just children, no adults—with the older ones taking turns rowing.
Moonlight dissolved into the river mist, blurring everything; blue-black mountain ridges arched like leaping beasts’ backs as fishing fires flickered distantly, while mournful flute notes drifted from unseen sources.
The stage stood on a riverside clearing where we’d moor our boat, watching from deck that small phantom theater glowing in five colors.
There a long-bearded hero brandished a spear with four brocade banners fluttering from his back; half-naked men flipped in unison; a shrill-voiced young actress sang until a red-swathed clown got tied to a pillar and whipped by an old salt-and-pepper-bearded man.
“Even when we turned homeward, the moon still hung high—the river brightening until that stage became matchbox-sized under red lanterns, alive with commotion.”

“On moonlit nights, I sometimes recall that.”
“Well, this is probably my only elegant memory.”
“Even a common man like me seems to grow somewhat sentimental when bathed in moonlight.”

From the very next day, I resolved to attend school nearly every day without fail.
It was solely because I wanted to meet Mr. Zhou and talk about various things that I developed such a commendable attitude.
Truly, when I think about it, the fact that a carefree fool like myself managed to graduate without failing, contrary to Mr. Tsuda’s prediction, was entirely due to Mr. Zhou.
No—Mr. Zhou and one other.
I believe my affectionate regard for Professor Fujino spurred me on and saved me from the disgrace of being a failing student.

Four or five days after that moonlit night, I believe it was the day Sendai saw its first snow. On my way back from school, I took Mr. Zhou to my lodgings where we settled around the kotatsu, talking about various things while eating manju. Then Mr. Zhou, with a peculiar smile floating on his face, took out a notebook from his bag and slid it toward me.

When I looked, it was Professor Fujino’s anatomy notebook.

“Open it,” Mr. Zhou said with a laugh.

I opened it and widened my eyes in astonishment.
Every page was filled with such densely packed red ink corrections that they appeared almost crimson.

"They’ve been heavily corrected."
"Who corrected it?"

“Professor Fujino.”

It struck me.
That day, I felt I finally grasped what Professor Fujino had meant when he’d murmured “silent action” as if to himself.

“Since when?”

“From the very beginning.”
“Right from when the lectures began.”

Mr. Zhou explained in further detail: after Professor Fujino had given that initial lecture on the development of anatomy, about a week later—it was definitely a Saturday—the professor’s assistant came to summon him. When he went to the laboratory, he found the professor surrounded by a cluster of human bones, smiling warmly as—

“Can you take notes of my lectures?” he asked.

“Yes, I believe I can manage somehow.”

“Do you really think so? Bring your notebook and show it to me.”

When Mr. Zhou took the notebook to him, Professor Fujino kept it, and after two or three days had passed, he returned it, whereupon—

“From now on, bring your notebook every week,” he said.

Mr. Zhou opened the notebook returned by Professor Fujino and was astonished.
From beginning to end, every page bore red ink additions—not only were numerous omissions neatly filled in, but even grammatical errors had each been painstakingly corrected.

“And since then, it’s continued every single week.”

Mr. Zhou and I exchanged glances and remained silent for a while.
I will study.
I will attend Professor Fujino’s lectures no matter what happens.
I thought that these small acts of kindness, carried out silently and unknown to anyone in some corner of life, might indeed be the true gems of this world.
This minor incident inspired even me—a mere bystander—so much so that this lazy crow began diligently attending school thereafter, and thanks to that, I managed to obtain my medical license without issue; in short, I can say that I am now able to carry on my ancestors’ profession.

The corrections to the notebooks continued without cease thereafter, diligently carried out by Professor Fujino himself in silence; but in the autumn when we entered our second year, an unpleasant incident occurred because of these notebooks.
However, that is a story for later. In any case, from the winter of Meiji 37 (1904) to the spring of the following year, this period became for me—in more ways than one—the most purposeful time.
Japan had finally launched its full-scale assault on Port Arthur; domestic tensions reached their peak. We students too adopted measures to prevent gold outflow—discarding woolen garments for cotton ones, denouncing gold-rimmed spectacles, holding endurance sessions under the pretense of "frontline living," while pre-dawn snow marches became frequent occurrences. Our fervor grew increasingly intense as we all waited with uniform impatience for Port Arthur's fall.

Finally, on January 1st of Meiji 38 (1905), Port Arthur fell.
On the 2nd, Sendai citizens swarmed through the streets clutching extra editions that had arrived announcing Port Arthur's capitulation.
We won.
We'd truly won now.
Whether we were shouting New Year's greetings or victory cheers became indistinguishable—we simply kept bellowing "Congratulations!" over and over, staggering into the homes of near-strangers to drink ourselves senseless. On the fourth night, we lit a colossal bonfire in Aoba Shrine's precincts. The fifth marked Sendai's official victory celebration: at ten that morning, a single cannon fired from Atagoyama triggered every factory whistle in the city to wail while police bells and temple gongs clanged frenetically alongside drums beaten near to bursting. Citizens spilled into streets pounding metal washbasins, tin cans, anything resonant—then roared "Banzai!" in unison, shaking the city with their cacophony. That evening saw students from every school parading lanterns through Sendai, each of us clutching one paper lantern and three candles as we endlessly chanted "Banzai! Banzai!" while marching.
Mr. Zhou, our foreign classmate, appeared to have been hauled out by Mr. Tsuda as per routine; smiling faintly, he walked beside Mr. Tsuda bearing his lantern.
Though not openly hostile since that incident, Mr. Tsuda and I moved through an unspoken friction—exchanging perfunctory nods in classrooms but never genuine conversation.
Yet that night found me naturally initiating contact with Mr. Tsuda.

“Mr. Tsuda, congratulations,” I said.

“Oh, congratulations!” Mr. Tsuda replied cheerfully.
“I’ve been terribly rude in many ways,” I promptly added, taking the opportunity to apologize for my usual silence.

“No, I should be the one,” said the diplomat’s nephew with his characteristic diplomatic smoothness.
“That night, I drank too much and acted disgracefully.”
“Later, Professor Fujino reprimanded me.”

“What are you referring to?” Mr. Zhou interjected.

“Well, Mr. Tsuda treated me to a mashed bird dish, and we drank,” I deflected.

“It’s not merely that,” Mr. Tsuda started, then abruptly shifted his tone. “Haven’t you told Mr. Zhou anything yet?”

“Yes,” I nodded slightly and urgently signaled with my eyes for Mr. Tsuda to say nothing.

“Is that so!” Mr. Tsuda exclaimed loudly. “You’re a good fellow.”
“Informing Professor Fujino was inexcusable, but that was my fault.”
“Alright, let’s drink.”
“Tonight, let’s all three eat mashed bird again. Banzai!”
Mr. Tsuda already seemed somewhat drunk.

That night, I came to deeply realize that in war, one absolutely must prevail at all costs. As long as there was victory, nothing else mattered. All of Mr. Tsuda’s so-called diplomatic circumspection would be swept away in an instant. When it came to patriotic fervor, there was ultimately no difference between him and any other upstanding young man of the nation. According to what he had confessed to me in hushed tones that night—careful to keep his voice from reaching Mr. Zhou—two months earlier, upon hearing reports of the Baltic Fleet’s imminent departure, his anxiety had grown so acute that everyone began appearing suspect. Even Mr. Zhou’s solitary excursion to Matsushima struck him as potentially espionage—a Russian spy measuring bay depths to guide their fleet toward Sendai’s annihilation. This paranoid diatribe, he claimed, had been mere venting of frustration over Port Arthur’s delayed fall. Though inwardly aghast, I accepted this explanation. Victory rendered all such concerns moot. This was precisely why wars demanded absolute triumph—should tides turn unfavorable, even comradeship would fray. The masses’ psychology remained inherently fragile. To preserve daily ethics on a minor scale and uphold what Professor Fujino termed “Oriental moral principles” on a grander one—for these very ends, I concluded that night, victory must be secured regardless of sacrifice.

When the fortress of Port Arthur fell, Japan’s interior—though it may be an extravagant comparison—brightened as if the Heavenly Rock Cave had opened, making everything dazzlingly bright, and the Imperial New Year’s poetry composed for the Utakai Hajime ceremony was:

The morning sun glowing at Mount Fuji’s base until it fades into haze,

The tranquil sky heralding the new year.

It could indeed be said that Japan had decisively defeated Russia at this time.
Around the end of that New Year, civil unrest erupted in Imperial Russia, signs of defeat grew increasingly evident, and Japanese forces advanced with unstoppable momentum—culminating in decisive victories for the Army and Navy on March 10th and May 27th, dates no Japanese citizen could forget. Japan’s national prestige radiated in all directions, and the people’s spirits soared to the heavens. Yet this great Japanese triumph delivered an impact so profound even our foreigner Mr. Zhou—beyond anything we could have imagined—was deeply shaken.
When Mr. Zhou first came to Japan, he had intuitively sensed that the scenery outside the train window between Yokohama and Shinbashi possessed a uniquely clean order unlike anywhere else in the world. Moreover, he had considered that the adorable yet diligent figures of Tokyo women—wearing red sashes and pristine white tenugui cloths tied around their heads like older sisters, dusting sunlit shoji screens—might symbolize Japan itself. Even at that Matsushima inn, he had predicted that Japan would surely win this war, reasoning that a nation overflowing with such vitality at home could not possibly lose. Yet when he witnessed this victory unfold before his eyes in a manner several times more splendid than he had ever imagined, it appeared to me that he now found himself astonished anew by Japan’s mysterious power.
Mr. Zhou seemed to have begun studying Japan anew, with the fall of Port Arthur as his turning point.
According to Mr. Zhou, Chinese youths who came to study in Japan at that time did not choose the country out of admiration for its inherent national character or civilization, but merely as a temporary expediency—a convenient means to easily acquire Western learning nearby. Yet he too had initially arrived with such intentions, only to soon discover an unexpected tension within this nation and sense that there was something unique here. However, upon witnessing the resounding fact that Japan had subdued Russia—then a first-class world power—he seemed compelled to look beyond mere “something,” now immersing himself in not just Chinese-translated histories of the Meiji Restoration but also directly procuring and devouring various Japanese-language history books, ultimately arriving at a significant revision of his previous views on Japan.

“In Japan, there exists what might be called the strength of the national essence,” Mr. Zhou had said with a sigh.

This may indeed appear to be an utterly ordinary observation, yet I cannot help feeling that it is precisely the kind of thing I should emphasize with the greatest force in these meager notes.
This discovery of Mr. Zhou’s, stimulated by Japan’s great victory in the Russo-Japanese War, dealt a profound setback to his ideology of medical salvation for the nation and ultimately became the very cause that completely transformed the course of his life—or so I believe.

He began asserting that the Meiji Restoration had never been propelled by Dutch scholars.
The ideological wellspring of the Restoration was ultimately national studies.
Dutch studies were merely an exotic blossom that flowered by the roadside.
From two centuries of Tokugawa peace emerged diverse literary arts; as these flourished, opportunities to engage with ancestral literary thought multiplied, and earnest scholarly inquiry began. Simultaneously, the Tokugawa shogunate entered its twilight—domestically powerless to alleviate peasant destitution, externally impotent against foreign threats—bringing Japan to collapse’s precipice. At this critical juncture, researchers of ancient thought rose as one to reveal the grand path of national salvation.
They declared: awareness of national essence and direct imperial rule.
The driving force behind the Meiji Restoration proved to be this awakening to Japan’s true form as a divine realm—where the Heavenly Ancestor first laid foundations, sovereignty passed through the Age of Gods to Emperor Jimmu, and an unbroken imperial line solemnly governed.
Recognizing no salvation existed save through heaven-and-earth’s universal justice, Shogun Yoshinobu led by submitting reverently; after 250 Tokugawa years, feudal lords competed in restoring domains to the Emperor.
Here resided Japan’s strength.
However far they strayed, once crisis struck they cast all aside like chicks flocking to their mother-hen sovereign.
This embodied national essence’s quintessence.
The sacred instinct of imperial subjects.
When this erupted, Dutch studies and all else scattered like storm-blown leaves.
Hearing Mr. Zhou muse “Truly Japan’s national essence possesses fearsome power,” my heart raced, tears flowed unbidden, and sitting upright I asked him:

“So, are you saying there exists something surpassing Western science in Japan?”

“Of course.”
“It’s disappointing that you, a Japanese person, would say such a thing.”
“Didn’t Japan defeat Russia?”
“Russia is an advanced scientific nation.”
“They must have possessed many weapons that applied scientific knowledge to the highest degree.”
“The fortress of Port Arthur was also built with the Essenz of Western science, wasn’t it?”
“And yet the Japanese military is capturing it with almost bare hands, isn’t it?”
“Foreigners may find this mysterious fact difficult to comprehend.”
“Even Chinese people wouldn’t understand it.”
“Anyway, I want to study Japan even more.”
“There’s so much that fascinates me,” he said with a refreshing smile.

Around that time, Mr. Zhou began visiting my lodgings behind the prefectural office frequently without any reservations. While I remained characteristically reticent and had yet to grow close with the boardinghouse family, Mr. Zhou had already become acquainted with them before me. The lodging—what one might call an amateur boardinghouse—was home to three people: a middle-aged carpenter, his wife, and their ten-year-old daughter, with myself as their sole lodger. Though the carpenter drank heavily and occasionally started marital squabbles, compared to Mr. Zhou’s commercial boardinghouse in Arachō that accommodated many tenants, this place held a touch of domestic warmth. For Mr. Zhou, who was then fervently immersed in studying Japan, even this humble household seemed to become an object of considerable curiosity. He actively sought interaction with the family members, particularly befriending their somewhat plain, dark-skinned daughter around ten years old—telling her Chinese fairy tales while learning school songs from her in return. One day, when the daughter composed a comfort letter for her uncle at the front and asked Mr. Zhou to revise it, he appeared thoroughly delighted by this guileless request and showed me her letter,

“This is excellent. There’s nothing I can correct anywhere,” he said, still meticulously savoring the daughter’s composition. By all accounts, it was a composition of such unremarkable nature.

“Though we regrettably neglected correspondence last year, we heard with joy that you, Uncle, remain in good health while stationed in those moon-frosted fields, capturing Russian prisoners and even joining an honorable suicide squad—as befits your noble spirit, we have all been quietly celebrating. Needless to say, please continue to take care of yourself as we pray you serve His Majesty the Emperor and the Empire of Great Japan. Farewell.”

The moon froze so hard it seemed to crackle—and Mr. Zhou appeared to find this at least somewhat to his liking. While Mr. Zhou claimed not to be particularly drawn to scenery, it seemed he didn’t exactly dislike the moon. However, more than that, what drew a deep sigh from Mr. Zhou was the vivid loyal heart that ran through this brief letter.

“It’s clear,” Mr. Zhou declared with a proud expression, as if he had accomplished some great feat. “Without any hesitation, she states it so fluently, doesn’t she? ‘Serve for the sake of His Majesty the Emperor’—she states this so coolly and decisively, doesn’t she? It’s as if it’s already become natürlich.”

“The entire thought of the Japanese people is unified by the concept of loyalty through einen, isn’t it? Until now, I had thought the Japanese might lack philosophy—but might it not be said that they have been Fleischwerden since antiquity through the Einheit philosophy of loyalty?”

“It’s precisely because this philosophy has been too purifiziert that I failed to notice it,” he admiringly exclaimed, peppering his speech with German as was his habit when excited.

“But wasn’t the ideology of loyalty and filial piety transmitted from your country to Japan?” I ventured, deliberately saying something to stir the pot.

“No, that is incorrect,” Mr. Zhou immediately denied. “As you know, China’s Son of Heaven has never maintained an unbroken lineage—it began with Yao and Shun’s abdication. The Xia dynasty lasted four hundred years through seventeen generations until King Jie was exiled to the wilderness of Nanchao by Tang of Shang, which one might call the origin of armed revolution in China. Since then, violent seizures of the throne have recurred repeatedly. Even when such acts were deemed unavoidable *Operation*, the newly enthroned rulers still seemed burdened by conscience somewhere. They would typically invent some self-justification, rendering the concept of loyalty strangely complex and ambiguous. In its place—though it sounds absurd—they vigorously emphasized filial piety instead, attempting to establish this as the foundation of governance and overwrite the people’s ethics entirely with its hue.”
“Therefore, in China, even when we speak of loyalty and filial piety, loyalty merely serves as a prefix attached to filial piety—one might say the main subject lies with filial piety.”
“However, since this filial piety was originally a moral promoted with such policy-driven intentions, those in power exploited it to extremes—branding any opponent with the stigma of unfiliality to justify killing them, turning it into a tool for political machinations—while those below, never knowing when they might be killed under the same pretext, lived in constant fear day and night. They began ostentatiously exaggerating their parental devotion until even absurd legends like the *Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars* came to circulate among the populace.”

“But that’s going too far,” I countered. “The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars are Japan’s model of filial piety. There’s nothing foolish about them.”

“Then do you actually know each of these Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars?” Zhou pressed.

“I may not know them all,” I admitted, “but stories like Meng Zong’s bamboo shoots or Wang Xiang’s frozen carp—when we heard those as children, we truly revered those filial sons.”

“Those might be harmless enough,” Zhou conceded with a sardonic edge, “but you’re unaware of Lao Laizi’s tale, yes? The one where he acts like an infant toward his ninety- or hundred-year-old honorable parents even at seventy? You don’t know this story? His method of infantilizing himself was quite elaborate—constantly wearing floral-patterned baby clothes, shaking a rattle drum, crawling around his ancient parents while babbling ‘goo-goo ga-ga’ to amuse them. What do you make of this? As a child, I learned it through picture books with grotesque illustrations. The image of a septuagenarian in infantile garb brandishing a toy drum was downright monstrous—unbearable to behold. Do you honestly think any parent would find that endearing? In my childhood books, those centenarian honorable parents wore expressions of utter boredom.” His voice sharpened. “They stared at their idiot son’s antics with looks screaming ‘What an embarrassment!’ Exactly! It’s Wahnwitz—sheer madness. And here’s another gem.”

“There was a man named Guo Ju who had long been poor and agonized over his inability to provide his elderly mother with sufficient meals.”
“Guo Ju had a wife and child.”
“The child was three years old.”
“One time—though she’s called an ‘elderly mother,’ from her three-year-old grandchild’s perspective she was a grandmother—this grandmother was seen sharing food from her bowl with her grandson. Upon witnessing this, Guo Ju felt ashamed: even without this act, his elderly mother already lacked enough rice to eat, and now his own child was taking more away. ‘Why not bury this child?’ he concluded cruelly. The picture book showed an illustration of this three-year-old—destined for live burial—smiling in his mother’s arms while Guo Ju sweated profusely digging a pit nearby. After seeing that picture, I began secretly avoiding my grandmother.”
“Because around that time, my family was growing poorer by the day—I feared if Grandmother gave me sweets, Father might feel compelled to say something dreadful like ‘Why not bury this child?’”
“Suddenly family itself became terrifying to me.”
“This renders even Confucian scholars’ earnest teachings meaningless.”
“They only breed opposite effects.”
“The Japanese are too wise to truly take these Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars as models of piety—you’re merely flattering me.”
“I recently heard a rakugo called Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars at Kaikikan.”
“When he asks Mother if she wants bamboo shoots to demonstrate filial devotion, she snaps ‘My teeth can’t handle bamboo!’”
“That made me realize Japanese cleverness.”
“They refuse to be duped by absurdities.”
“Civilization isn’t about Westernizing lifestyles.”
“Its essence lies in perpetual vigilance.”
“In detecting hypocrisy through instinct.”
“Shouldn’t we call those with such discernment cultured people?”
“The Japanese inherited fine cultural discernment from ancestors.”
“They instinctively absorb only sound aspects of Chinese thought.”
“In Japan you imagine China as Confucian—but China is Taoist.”

“The object of the people’s faith is not Confucius and Mencius, but immortals.”
“It’s the superstition of eternal youth and longevity.”
“Yet in Japan, they pay no heed whatsoever to such myths of immortality.”
“They’ve made them into prime comedic fodder.”
“They consider the very word ‘immortal’ practically synonymous with ‘idiot’ or ‘madman.’”
“Since Japanese thought finds unity in loyalty, neither immortals nor the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars hold any necessity.”
“Loyalty itself becomes filial piety.”
“Masaoka from that play we saw together—he too urged nothing but loyalty upon his child.”
“They don’t teach children to revere their mothers.”
“But since loyalty constitutes filial piety itself, that suffices.”
“And when Japanese people witness this loyalty, they all weep.”
“Immortals and the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars get adapted into rakugo tales—transformed into laughingstock material.”

“Oh, well,” I said, struggling to suppress my reverential awe, “the Japanese have sharp tongues. It’s not that they scorn such teachings from your country, but they do possess this disagreeable tendency for caustic mockery.”

“No, when Japanese people criticize others, it’s merely vigorous—if anything, rather straightforward,” he countered. “To call it ‘caustic mockery’ misses the mark entirely. In China, we have a curse called *tamade*—now that deserves to be called true acerbity.” His voice lowered. “It’s an appalling term. Too vulgar to explain its meaning—I daresay no other nation on earth could have conceived such a lethal invective.” A bitter smile twisted his lips. “In this alone, we are indisputably world leaders.”

“I don’t know what this *tamade* or whatever is, but beyond that alone, I feel there are indeed other things in China that give a sense of being number one in the world.”
“This is, so to speak, just my intuition talking, but I cannot help feeling that in your country flows a great tradition beyond our imagination.”
“You speak quite harshly about your country, but Professor Fujino also said that precisely because China retains fine traditions, rebellions emerge from among those who inherit them. Yet whenever I hear you criticize China, I always end up sensing its resilience instead.”
“China will never perish.”
“If there were ten people like you, China would become a first-class nation in both name and reality.”

“You shouldn’t flatter me,” Mr. Zhou said with a wry smile. “China as it is now won’t do.”
“It absolutely won’t do.”
“So long as they harbor such complacent self-satisfaction about ‘reserve,’ it won’t do.”
“The Japanese people all wear their work sleeves rolled up.”
“They’re driven.”
“They’re earnest.”
“China must learn this attitude from Japan.”

Around that time, whenever the opportunity arose, discussions that could be termed Sino-Japanese comparative discourse would spark between Mr. Zhou and me in this manner.

Mr. Zhou had been enthusiastic about going to Tokyo once the school year ended and summer vacation began, intending to enlighten his fellow Chinese students in Japan with the pure, straightforward monistic philosophy of the divine nation he had discovered. But when summer vacation arrived, Mr. Zhou went to Tokyo while I returned to my mountain village hometown, and after living apart for about two months, when I saw Mr. Zhou’s familiar face again in Sendai with the start of the new school year in September, I thought—Huh? I thought. It wasn't that anything in particular had changed, but somehow, he seemed different from the Mr. Zhou I had known before. It wasn’t that he seemed distant, but his pupils had become smaller and sharper, and even when he smiled, there was a chilling shadow across his cheeks.

“How was Tokyo?” I asked, but he only smiled with a strangely pained expression,

“Tokyo has become so busy—the streetcar lines are expanding day by day in all directions. Well, I suppose that’s the symbol of Tokyo now—clattering and terribly noisy. On top of that, with people saying they’re dissatisfied with the peace terms of the war, the citizens of Tokyo are in a frenzy, holding indignant rallies everywhere. The situation is extremely volatile, and there were even rumors that martial law would soon be imposed on the imperial capital.”
“The patriotism of Tokyo’s people is too naive.”

“How was the Monism of Loyalty received among your country’s students? Did it provoke any reactions?”

Mr. Zhou twisted his cheek as though suddenly struck by a toothache,

“This too has become so hectic that I can no longer make sense of anything,” he said with a cold smile. “Japanese patriotism may be volatile or whatnot, but at its core it’s innocent and bright—whereas my own patriotism is complex and dark. Or rather, perhaps that’s not quite it? Anyway, there are many things I don’t understand. It’s difficult. I don’t understand anything at all.”

“However, Japanese youths are now earnestly studying world literature. I went to the bookstore and was surprised—books from various countries had arrived in great quantities, and young Japanese people were enthusiastically selecting and buying them all. Are they striving for something like… the fullness of life? I followed suit and bought a few of those books to bring back. I intend to keep up and study them from now on. My competitors are those young people in Tokyo. They seem to be erwachen to some new world.”

“Well, that’s more or less my report on Tokyo.”

After that, when classes ended, he would promptly return to his own lodging and almost never came to visit mine as he used to.
On a night of fierce wintry winds, Mr. Tsuda, who rarely visited, came to my lodging with a strange expression on his face,

“Hey, an unpleasant incident has occurred,” Mr. Tsuda said and took out a letter from his pocket to show me.
The addressee was written as Mr. Zhou Shuren.
The sender was listed as Chokugen Sanjin.
What a clumsy pseudonym, I thought with mild exasperation, and with a frown, I began reading the letter’s contents.
The text of its contents was even more poorly written.
The characters were in a vulgar script with awkwardly rigid strokes, making the letter so filthy it seemed to emit a foul odor.
First,

Repent, thou!

“Repent, thou!” was written in large letters.
I shuddered.
I have always detested such prophetic-sounding pretentious phrases, both then and now.
What followed was a peculiar attempt at so-called “direct words.”
It was somehow a long-winded “direct words,” exceedingly difficult to understand, but in short: Thou art cowardly; thou hadst Professor Fujino leak thee the anatomy examination questions beforehand—as evidence, Professor Fujino had marked something in red ink within thy anatomy notebook.
Thou hast no qualification to pass; repent!
That was the gist of it.

“What is this?”
When I tried to tear up the letter, Mr. Tsuda hurriedly—

“Ah, wait, wait!” he said, swiftly snatching the letter from me. “This is a major incident. I want to discuss various matters with you from now on. What a truly unpleasant incident. I can’t go without having a drink. I wonder if there’s a little sake in this house.”

I smiled wryly and asked the family at the lodging, “I wonder if there’s any sake.”
“The sake was all drunk by the master tonight, but there’s beer if you want,” came the wife’s reply.

“Is beer all right?” I asked Mr. Tsuda, whereupon he made a slightly agonized face and,

“Beer?”
“Drinking beer while listening to winter winds may epitomize boorishness... but very well.”
“Never mind.”
“Bring it.”

Mr. Tsuda gulped down the beer by himself,

“Brr, it’s cold! Autumn beer is no good!” he shouted, shivering violently, then began stuttering through an explanation of this incident’s gravity. But with his lips turned purple and his entire body trembling uncontrollably as he lectured, it began to take on a foreboding atmosphere—as though this were no trivial matter.

“This is an international issue,” he declared with his usual grandiosity.
“Mr. Zhou may seem like a solitary figure, but he is far from alone.
At present, Qing students are scattered throughout Japan, their numbers already nearing ten thousand.
In other words, behind Mr. Zhou stand ten thousand Qing students.
Should Mr. Zhou grow angry, these ten thousand students would surely rise to support him.
In such a case, the disgrace to Sendai Medical College would go without saying—it might even force our Ministry of Education and Foreign Ministry to issue formal apologies to the Qing government.
This would stain Sino-Japanese amicable diplomacy irreparably.”
“What do you think about this?” he pressed, but as this was his usual routine, I half-heartedly brushed it off as always,

“Did Mr. Zhou see that letter?”

“He saw it. When we returned from school together today, this letter had arrived at the lodging. Mr. Zhou received it from the front desk, casually stuffed it into his pocket, and started climbing the stairs—but at that moment, I was struck by a sort of divine inspiration.”

“Wait,” he called out.

“Open that letter there right now,” he said.

Mr. Zhou stopped in the corridor and silently cut open the letter.

“And then, after reading just a bit of its contents, tried to tear it up.”

“That’s how it was. Such a filthy letter—anyone would want to tear it up.”

“Oh, don’t say that.”
“The moment I took up the letter and read it—‘That bastard’s really gone and done it now,’ I thought.”

“Oh, I see.”
“You seem to know who sent this letter, don’t you?”

“What’s there to hide? I know.”
“Yajima.”
“That’s him.”
“That Landdandy.”

Being told that, I suddenly recalled a minor incident from a few days prior.
It was time for Professor Fujino’s class.
At the very moment Professor Fujino entered the classroom, Yajima—the newly appointed class representative—abruptly stood up, went to the blackboard, wrote about tomorrow’s class meeting being held, added “Please ensure all attend without omission,” then marked the character for “leak” (漏) with a double circle.
Five or six students burst into laughter.
I assumed he had emphasized “without omission” because class meetings usually didn’t gather many people.
However, that was Yajima’s mean-spirited insinuation.
Because both Professor Fujino and Mr. Zhou were present there, Yajima resorted to a petty trick, intending to implicitly mock the “leak” of exam questions.
When I realized this, I became indignant and,

"I should beat him up."
I thought merely dismissing it as something vile wouldn't suffice.
In my sixty years of unremarkable life, I can say there was only this single instance when I resolved to actually hit someone.
Tonight, I resolved to go to his house and give him a proper beating.
I had always detested this student named Yajima with his splendid mustache.
He was a graduate of some Christian school in Sendai—Tohoku Gakuin or the like—though that likely had little to do with it. To borrow Mr. Zhou’s terminology, he was a *der Stutzer* of the Date Domain; or per Mr. Tsuda’s phrasing, a “country dandy”—an insufferably pompous man of that ilk. Though he had initially behaved meekly even in classrooms—his father being some Sendai magnate—this patriarch’s reflected glory gradually began to exert influence. Before anyone noticed, he had become something of a power broker in the class, and in the new academic year’s class representative reelection, he ousted Mr. Tsuda to emerge as the new representative.
I could not condone the attitude of students from Tokyo and Osaka who treated Tohoku as provincial and looked down on it, but neither could I abide the tendency of local Tohoku students to conspire in underhanded ways to make petty retaliations.
Especially since I myself was a Tohoku native, whenever confronted with those country bumpkins' warped vindictiveness—now compounded by self-disgust—I found myself hating the local students even more fiercely than those from Tokyo or Osaka.

“Don’t hit him—that’s a private fight,” said Mr.Tsuda abruptly adopting a composed demeanor as I began growing agitated.“Your opponent isn’t merely Yajima; he commands an entire entourage of provincial simpletons.I intend to exploit this occasion for chastising their exclusionary ideologies.Are we not both gentlemen?Let us engage through ideological combat!”

“But Mr. Tsuda,” I said.
“I’m a country bumpkin too.”
Whatever meaning it had been used with，to my ears，the term “country bumpkin” was unpleasant.
Yajima，a local，was thoroughly disagreeable，but then again，the mentality of Mr．Tsuda—a Tokyoite who would use such words—was not exactly noble either．They were both as bad as each other，I had come to think．

“No—you’re different，” he countered．
“You are by no means a country bumpkin．”
He made a troubled face．“In a sense…I might rather call you a city person，” he fumbled，growing increasingly flustered before blurting out： “That’s it—you’re Chinese！ Yes，that’s what you are．”

I was dumbfounded.

“That’s precisely why even your fellow Tohoku natives like Yajima and his ilk keep their distance from you,” declared Mr. Tsuda in his most plausible tone. “In other words, your current position is identical to Mr. Zhou’s—though I don’t think so myself—it’s become class consensus that your face resembles a Chinese person’s! You’re always clinging to Mr. Zhou—that’s the problem! As for your name Tanaka Taku...the class secretly calls you ‘Tanaka Taku’ behind your back—didn’t know that? How about it? You’re ‘Mr. Tanaka.’ Unpleasant business!”

I wasn’t particularly bothered by such things.
However, even someone as obtuse as myself was gradually beginning to understand why Mr. Tsuda had brought this current problem to me and was making such a fuss with his incoherent venting tirades.
Mr. Tsuda remained bitter about Yajima having stripped him of the honorary class representative position.
Thus this disheartened petty politician must have come to me with a desperate scheme—to escalate Yajima’s letter into a scandal forcing his resignation from the post, thereby reclaiming his former title so he might once again brandish business cards bearing that grand designation.
First he likely imagined provoking me—being closest to Mr. Zhou—into angrily reporting to Professor Fujino again as before, thereby orchestrating an ideal sequence where the shocked professor would summon Yajima for harsh rebuke and strip him of his prestigious role—a suspicion that now fully dawning left me utterly disenchanted,

“You’ve known all these things for some time—so why didn’t you prove Mr. Zhou’s innocence to Mr. Yajima and the others?” I retorted with a pout.

“It’s no use even if I say anything,” he said. “They’ve already concluded that I’m one of Mr. Zhou’s accomplices too, you see. I, you, Professor Fujino, and Mr. Zhou—the four of us are all similarly treated as defendants for now.” His voice rose indignantly. “This is utterly unconscionable! To even doubt Professor Fujino’s esteemed character—this is utterly outrageous! By all means, we on our side must unite and devise countermeasures.” Leaning forward, he pressed, “You—at any rate, go and appeal to Professor Fujino tomorrow. I’ll rally other comrades later.”

Sure enough, it was just as I had suspected.
I had had enough.
All intention to strike Yajima had vanished; I simply wanted to extricate myself from this idiotic political squabble as quickly as possible.

“There’s one thing I’d like you to promise me,” I said with cold stubbornness. “Since I’ll be going to Professor Fujino’s laboratory tomorrow, could you refrain from mentioning this letter to anyone until we receive instructions from him?”

“Why?”
Mr. Tsuda twisted his mouth into a scowl and glared at me.

“No reason,” I said, forcing a smile. “But could you at least wait two or three days before rallying your comrades? Otherwise, I will become your enemy.”

At that moment, all I could think was how pitiable Mr. Zhou was. I also felt deeply sorry for Professor Fujino, who had devoted such strenuous effort to Mr. Zhou’s studies. My concern now resided solely with them; everything else ceased to matter.

“Hmm.” Mr. Tsuda turned away irritably. “So you really don’t trust me, do you?”

Without paying any attention to that,

“If you don’t promise me this, I’ll become your enemy and speak plenty of ill about you to Professor Fujino.”

“That’s rather unreasonable.”

“I don’t care if it’s unreasonable.
That’s what it means to be enemies.
So, will you promise me?” I pressed firmly, riding my momentum.

Mr. Tsuda reluctantly nodded,

“I’m not good with Tohoku people,” he said in a low voice.

The next day, I went to Professor Fujino’s laboratory and gave him a concise report of the circumstances.

“Mr. Tsuda is also extremely indignant and says he wishes to await your instructions and be of service,” I conveyed Mr. Tsuda’s sentiments in favorable terms, carefully omitting Yajima’s name, and simply requested that he dispel this misunderstanding for Mr. Zhou’s sake.

“What’s there to dispel?” Professor Fujino replied with an unexpectedly carefree smile. “Mr. Zhou’s anatomy grade is a failing mark.”
“His other subjects’ scores were decent enough—that’s how he achieved his overall standing.”
“Now, what was his rank again?”

"Well, I suppose around sixtieth place?"

When we advanced from first year to second year, there were an unusually large number of failing students.
A third of our classmates—about fifty students—suffered the misfortune of failing, and both Mr. Tsuda and I barely managed to pass with ranks in the eighties or nineties. To us, Mr. Zhou’s sixtieth place seemed only natural for a scholar of his brilliance and diligence, yet to those less acquainted with him, that sixtieth rank might have appeared somewhat dubious.
Moreover, the failing students—neglecting their own lack of study—likely wished to find fault with the advancing students at every turn, and it could not be denied that Mr. Zhou, the Qing international student, had become the scapegoat sacrificed on behalf of all those who passed.

“Sixtieth place?”
To Professor Fujino, even that sixtieth place seemed unsatisfactory. “Not exactly a commendable ranking, is it now?”
“He must study more rigorously.”
“Your cohort’s anatomy marks from last year were decidedly subpar.”
“Anatomy forms medicine’s foundation—neglecting thorough study now will bring future regrets.”
“Such absurd controversies arise precisely because we all grow lax.”
“Had you encouraged one another in diligent study, neither misunderstandings nor envy would have taken root.”
“Harmony is no passive state.”
“‘When loosed, all find their mark—this we call harmony.’ Does not the *Doctrine of the Mean* state thus?”
“It embodies heaven and earth’s vital dynamism.”
“Draw tight—” Here Professor Fujino mimed pulling a bowstring to full draw, “—then *hyo!* The arrow flies true to the target’s heart with a *spon!* of crystalline clarity. That resonance—that is harmony.”
“When released, all strike true.”
“Never forget this act of releasing.”
“Study earnestly.”
“Though we revere harmony as most precious, it signifies more than mere camaraderie.”
“Mutual encouragement in scholarship—this constitutes true harmony.”
“You appear close to Mr. Zhou. Since he came expressly to Japan seeking knowledge for China’s renewal, you must spur him toward loftier academic achievements.”
“I too have harbored concerns—sixtieth place reflects poorly indeed.”
“He must rank first or second.”
“Japan too once dispatched scholars to Tang and Song China, indebted to that nation’s wisdom.”

“Now it is Japan’s turn to repay that favor by teaching what we know to those people over there; however, since the Japanese students around them are doing nothing but idling and not studying at all, even though Mr. Zhou and others have come all the way to Japan with noble aspirations, they end up getting dragged into it and becoming lazy.”
“If you are truly Mr. Zhou’s close friend, this time I may give you two a research Thema.”
“How about something like the Gestalt der Knochen of foot-binding?”
"If possible, I think a Thema that interests Mr. Zhou would be best."
“But right now, I don’t have a Modell on hand, so it might be difficult.”
"In any case, we must make Mr. Zhou develop more Pathos toward medicine."
“Mr. Zhou hasn’t seemed quite himself lately, has he?”
“Isn’t he becoming reluctant about things like anatomy practicums?”
"The Chinese people have their own beliefs regarding Leichnam; they do not cremate them and seem to mostly practice burial."
"As it says in the Doctrine of the Mean, 'The virtue of the spiritual beings is indeed abundant,' they hold in great awe and reverence the spirits of the dead."
“Could it be that the cause of Mr. Zhou’s recent despondency lies in something like us treating Leichnam too carelessly, thereby making him grow somewhat disenchanted with medicine?”
“If that is indeed the case, you should tell Mr. Zhou this.”
“The Japanese Kranke greatly rejoice in contributing to the advancement of medicine after death—if they knew this would eventually benefit your country of China as well, they would rather consider it an honor. That’s what you should say to encourage him.”
“If he’s getting pale over mere anatomy practicums, he won’t be able to perform even a small operation in the future,” he kept saying, talking only about Mr. Zhou.

“Well, then—what should be done about the letter?”

“There’s no need to worry about that at all. However, it would be problematic if Mr. Zhou were to start disliking the school over such a matter, so I trust you will properly comfort and encourage him on that point. We could simply ignore the letter matter, but if someone like Mr. Tsuda meddles and inflames the situation unnecessarily, that would be tiresome. Well, I’ll instruct the class representative to investigate who wrote that letter. There’s no need to report to me who wrote it, but that person should go to Mr. Zhou’s lodging, thoroughly examine his notes, and once they realize their wrongdoing, honestly reconcile with him. Well, wouldn’t that suffice? The class representative this time is Mr. Yajima, was it?”

The problem was that this class representative happened to be the very author of the letter. However, I thought there was a certain irony in Professor Fujino entrusting the culprit investigation to that very Yajima, and that it might lead to an interesting outcome,

“Yes, that’s correct.”
“In that case, please leave it to Mr. Yajima,” I said, and when I turned around sharply, from behind me—

“Not only Mr. Zhou, but all of you must study harder now.”
“When each individual acts of their own accord—this is what we call harmony,” I was rebuked.

What kind of impulse this incident stirred in Mr. Zhou’s heart—that even I could not comprehend.
Around that time, there was something unapproachable sensed in Mr. Zhou’s demeanor, and even when we met at school, we would exchange faint smiles,

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

I could only exchange utterly fainthearted, non-committal greetings and failed to bring up even a single topic of comfort or encouragement that Professor Fujino had instructed.
Moreover, I thought it would be pointless if clumsily broaching such matters ended up making the sensitive Mr. Zhou feel constrained instead, and so I feigned complete ignorance of both this notebook calamity and everything else.

However, about a week later came a night of heavy snowfall. Mr. Zhou arrived at my lodging with his overcoat pulled completely over his head, his entire body whitened by snow.

“Come in. Come on,” I said, my heart leaping at this long-awaited visit from Mr. Zhou as I rushed out to welcome him at the entrance. But he hesitated strangely,

“Is this all right?
You’re not studying?
I’m not disturbing you?” he said with an uncharacteristically timid reserve, practically needing to be pulled inside by me before entering the room,

“Just now, I went to that Mii Church, and on my way back, I felt so unbearably lonely that I thought I’d stop by for a bit.”
“Am I not a bother?”

“No, I’m always just lazing about.”
“But what’s this about going to a church?”

Mr. Zhou, like myself, held profound respect for Christ’s teachings of neighborly love and by no means lagged behind others in revering the fate of righteous men compelled to bear the cross; however, he had grown thoroughly weary of both the hypocritical, mournful expressions of professional foreign priests at churches and the affectedly prim attitudes of young men and women who attended them. Consequently, he adopted a policy of avoiding the many churches scattered throughout Sendai—especially since Mr. Zhou himself had concluded that “the foreignness of these priests proves they are not true followers,” and had even asserted that just as Chinese Confucian scholars had distorted the spirit of Confucius and Mencius, so too had foreign priests corrupted Christ’s teachings.
Yet now he had gone to Mii Church.

Mr. Zhou said shyly,

“No—I’ve been a Kranke lately.”
“So I’ve neglected everyone and become a completely einsam crow.”
“But those days were fun, weren’t they?”
“When we stayed together in Matsushima, raising childish enthusiasm—” he began, then lowered his eyes. Burrowed into the kotatsu, he remained silent for a while before suddenly lifting his face. “Actually, yesterday Mr. Yajima came to my lodging to apologize.”
“I heard that Mr. Yajima was the one who wrote that letter.”

I had also heard about the circumstances from Mr. Tsuda and knew them. Yajima had been tasked by Professor Fujino with investigating the culprit and was also told to continue showing care for Mr. Zhou. Whether it was due to that moral fastidiousness particular to people from Tohoku that he possessed, or whether he had acquired the virtue of repentance through his Christian faith, he abruptly burst into tears, confessed that he himself was the author of the letter, deeply apologized for this foolish misunderstanding, voluntarily offered to resign as class representative, and recommended Mr. Tsuda as his successor. However, Mr. Tsuda found himself unable to accept this arrangement alone, and in the end, it was decided that both Yajima and Tsuda would serve as co-representatives, neatly resolving the situation on all fronts. Mr. Tsuda patted my back, repeatedly calling me “Strategist.” Strategist or not, it was simply that my lack of a plan had unexpectedly succeeded.

“Since I always have Professor Fujino correct my notes, it’s no wonder such a misunderstanding arose. I actually ended up feeling sorry for him.”
“I didn’t like him much before, but through talking about various things together, I realized he’s actually quite an honest person.”
“I said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘You’re a Christian, aren’t you?’ Whereupon he nodded earnestly and replied, ‘Yes—being Christian does not mean I do not commit sins.’”
“‘On the contrary,’ he continued, ‘it is precisely someone like me—riddled with flaws and constantly committing sins—who becomes a champion of Christianity.’”
“‘The church is a hospital for those like me who are prone to committing faults.’”
“‘It’s a *Krankenhaus*.’”
“‘And thus,’ he said, ‘the Gospel becomes our *Herz* patients’ *Krankenbett*.’”
“Mr. Yajima’s words pierced my heart strangely, and I too suddenly felt like knocking on that *Krankenhaus* door.”
“‘I am indeed a *Kranke*.’”
“‘So today I wandered to the church and tried going there, but I simply couldn’t come to terms with those Western-style exaggerated rituals—I ended up disappointed.’”
“‘However, the sermon happened to be on Exodus from the Old Testament—hearing how Moses struggled to save his brethren from slavery sent a shudder through me.’”
“‘Moses desperately preached his grand ideal of escaping Egypt to a million brethren living in city slums amid clamor and indolence, his halting speech only troubling everyone more. Yet through scolding and shouting, he somehow led them out—only for those million followers to wander forty years in wilderness, every last one cursing him instead of giving thanks: “That meddler’s why we’re miserable! What good came of escaping? Back in Egypt—slaves or not—we didn’t care! We ate bread till bursting, with duck and leeks bubbling in meat pots!”’”
“‘“Would that we had died by Jehovah’s hand in Egypt,” they whined, “when we sat by fleshpots eating our fill! You brought us here to starve us all!”’”
“‘Hearing these filthy complaints while thinking of my own country’s masses today became unbearable—I fled mid-sermon and rushed here to you in desolation.’”
“‘Despair? No—even “despair” feels disgusting and pretentious.’”
“‘What should I call it?’”
“‘That’s simply how masses usually are.’”

“But although I know nothing about the Bible, even that Moses ultimately succeeded, didn’t he? Atop Mount Pisgah, pointing to the beautiful basin of the Jordan River, there was that part where he shouted, ‘I can see my homeland! I can see my homeland!’ Wasn’t there?”

“Yes, but he had to make his discontented brethren endure forty years of hardship—going without food or drink.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Not five or ten years.”
“Forty years.”
“I’ve lost all understanding.”
“What I gained from this summer in Tokyo was renewed skepticism about saving the masses.”
“Today you’ll endure another of my lengthy diatribes.”
“Our Matsushima fervor was joyous,” he said with a mirthless laugh, “but tonight’s confession is bleak. I laughed just now.”
“Why did I laugh?”
“Egyptian slaves must’ve occasionally leaked such laughter—unintelligible even to themselves.”
“Slaves do laugh.”
“No—perhaps they laugh precisely because they’re slaves.”
“I’ve studied the expressions of Russian POWs strolling through Sendai. They rarely laugh.”
“Proof they cling to hope.”
“Mere anxiety to return home still surpasses slavehood.”
“I sometimes gave them papyros too. They’d accept with faces declaring it their due.”
“Those men haven’t yet become slaves.”
That year saw up to two thousand Russian prisoners quartered in Sendai—in Aramachi temples, Shinji Koji shrines, Miyagino-hara shacks. Come autumn, they wandered streets freely, constantly demanding “papyros” (tobacco, we assumed). Sendai children learned the word, shouting “Papyros hoshii ka?” When prisoners nodded, boys raced triumphantly to tobacconists, returning with cigarettes like victorious envoys.
“When I gave them papyros, their utter composure shamed me.”
“Felt like insult.”

Could it be that these prisoners have discerned I am Chinese? Knowing that China’s current state teeters on becoming enslaved by foreign powers, might they harbor a particular sense of superiority toward me? No—this was assuredly my own bitterness.
That’s right.
What I brought back from Tokyo this time was this bitterness.
I felt anxious.
I had come to feel tremendous anxiety regarding my country’s salvation.
Now that I reflected on it, that fervor I displayed at Matsushima had been terribly childish.
I felt both nostalgia and shame toward my simple naivety of those days.
Every time I recalled it, I blushed alone.
How utterly intoxicated I had been by those guileless theories!
Back then, I had fancied myself deeply informed about China’s condition, but it was all a youth’s saccharine delusion.
I knew nothing at all.
And now I only grew more bewildered.
Far from grasping China’s reality, I could no longer comprehend what manner of man I myself was.
My fellow Chinese students in Tokyo called me a Japanophile.
Some even branded me a traitor to the Han people.
There were those spreading absurd rumors about me strolling with Japanese women there.
Why did I displease everyone so?
Was it because I criticized China while praising Japan’s philosophy of loyalty?
Or because I hadn’t joined them in plunging directly into revolutionary activities?

"I too greatly sympathized with those people's passion for revolution," he said.
"Now that the handshake between Huang Xing’s faction and Sun Yat-sen’s faction had finally been realized, and the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance had been established—with most overseas students being members—hearing them speak made it seem China’s revolution was on the verge of achievement. Yet why was I like this?
The more their momentum rose, the colder my heart grew.
What about you?"

"Ever since childhood," he continued, "when others clapped enthusiastically, joining them felt awkward to me.
When listening to an impressive speech that moved me deeply, seeing others cheer wildly made me unable to applaud.
The greater my inner emotion became, the more applause felt like hollow courtesy—if anything, disrespectful. Silence seemed truer respect, making me detest the clamor.
I felt this same way during school sports festivals’ cheering sections."

"As for Christianity," he added, "while I deeply respected Christ’s ‘Love thy neighbor’ teaching—even nearly clinging to him—the church’s grandiose gestures obstructed my faith."

"You once remarked how strange it was," he said, "that I never quote Confucius or Mencius despite being Chinese.
To you all, this must seem peculiar—yet I deliberately avoid it.
I detest those who spout Confucian maxims like puns.
Even someone as admirable as Professor Fujino—when he cites ancient sages’ words—I grow uneasy.
I wish he’d stop."

"From childhood," he sighed, "Chinese Confucian scholars forced us to memorize ancient sages’ sayings until we loathed them—raising us into men who abhor Confucianism.
Yet I don’t disparage Confucius’ teachings.
Their essence has been called benevolence, the Mean, or forbearance—but I believe it lies in ritual.
Ritual’s philosophy is subtle—a methodology of love, one might say philosophically."

“I think it’s fair to say that human suffering stems entirely from our inability to express love.”
“Could this very clumsiness of expression be the root of mankind’s misfortune?”
“If we could resolve this alone, then naturally—as matters of course—the proper order where rulers rule, subjects serve, fathers father, and children child would emerge through song itself, freeing humanity from all humiliation and the agony of constraint.”
“Yet those Confucian scholars reduced it to superficial etiquette, debasing it into a hypocritical tool for rulers to humiliate subjects and fathers to bind children.”
“This tendency appeared long ago—even during the Wei period, esteemed scholars fled to bamboo groves and drowned themselves in drink, unable to endure ritual philosophy’s degradation.”
“Their manners were deplorable.”
“They drank themselves senseless while stark naked.”
“Contemporary ‘moralists’ denounced them as thuggish degenerates—no, even now, refined gentlemen curl their lips at their conduct.”
“But those bamboo grove scholars never considered their lives exemplary.”
“They had no choice.”
“Bamboo thickets became their only refuge.”
“Society endlessly invokes ritual as pretext—slapping charges of filial impiety on dissenters, overthrowing critics while securing their own status and wealth. The earnestly devout grow furious witnessing this hypocrisy yet remain powerless—‘Fine then! I’ll never utter ritual’s very syllable again!’ This obstinacy takes hold until they spitefully curse ritual itself or start guzzling wine naked—don’t you see how this unfolds?”
“Yet in truth, only these souls cherished ritual teachings like treasures in their hearts.”
“One couldn’t uphold ritual philosophy without adopting such ‘degenerate’ postures.”
“The ‘moralists’ of that age maintained impeccable façades while destroying ritual’s essence—they didn’t believe a word of it.”
“True believers became ‘degenerates,’ fleeing to bamboo groves to drink like vagabonds.”
“I’ve no intention of stripping naked to carouse in bamboo thickets now—yet my heart still wanders those shadowed groves.”
“I’ve grown sick unto death of Confucians’ transparent hypocrisy.”
“I must have confessed this countless times at that Matsushima inn—once ideas become parlor flattery, all is lost.”
“To escape these rotting ideological corpses, I abandoned home for Nanjing’s new scholarship.”

“And I believe we discussed everything that followed during our time in Matsushima.”
“But this summer in Tokyo, I became lost in an even more painful bamboo grove.”
What that grove represents—I don’t know. No—even if I do know, voicing it clearly terrifies me.
Should my suspicions prove true, suicide might be my only recourse.
Ah—if only this suspicion were mere delusion.
Let me state plainly: Lately, even within my fellow overseas students’ revolutionary movements, I’ve detected whiffs of those ominous grand gestures.
This inability to match their fervent gestures may be my cursed fate.
Their movement is undoubtedly righteous.
I revere Sun Yat-sen.
I devote myself to the Three Principles.
I cherish them like precious jewels.
They are my final lifeline.
Were even this ideology to forsake me, I’d become drifting duckweed.
A slave.
Yet now I tread the path of those bamboo grove scholars.
I strove earnestly.
The students’ passion isn’t misguided.
Why not join their shouts?
Calling it embarrassment—that’s your vanity.
You reek faintly of sickly nihilism.

That slave’s smile is starting to show on your face.
Watch yourself.
“Expel the darkness from your heart—even if it feels unnatural—and try adding a bright light,” I scolded and lashed myself, with the resolve to chart my course and nail down the helm. I even thought of asking to be made a member of the revolutionary party, but—” I began, then suddenly grew restless. “What time is it? Isn’t it already late?”

I informed him of the time.

“Is that so? May I impose a little longer?” he wore an ugly, servile smile. “Lately I’ve completely lost my grasp of people’s feelings. Even among fellow Chinese, there’s so much we fail to understand about each other—how much more so between people of different nationalities? Yet I fear I’ve grown too dependent on your kindness until now. Not just you—with Professor Fujino too, even the landlords here at this boarding house, I’d let myself become complacent. Letters like Mr. Yajima’s—I actually find their bluntness refreshing. When they plainly state that Chinese are inferior and couldn’t possibly earn good marks, it clarifies things. Helps me find my footing. Compassion becomes unbearable agony. From now on, please tell me exactly what you think. Wouldn’t they resent someone like me keeping you talking so late at this boarding house? Are you certain this is acceptable?”

I remained silent.
I thought that if a guest were to be this disgustingly reserved, even the boarding house people might come to detest him.

“You seem angry.”
“But still, I find myself feeling at ease only with you.”
“Since Matsushima, I’ve burdened you with nothing but petty grievances.”
“Medical science saving the nation?” He snorted. “That childish syllogism was my own fabrication.”
“What they call sophistry, isn’t it?”
“Science.”
Why had I once revered it so?
“Like a child’s glee with matches?”
“Pathetic tenderness.”
“But imagine children wielding science’s weapons unchecked.”
“It could breed catastrophe.”
“They think only of play.”
“Cure their sickness, and they’ll dash to bathe in rivers—returning fevered anew.”
“Awakening masses through science’s might, spurring hopes for renewal, steering them toward restoration faith—that crude logic lacks even syllogistic form.”
“Shameful contrivances.”
“Sophistry pure and simple.”
“I hereby renounce that salvation-through-science doctrine.”
I must reconsider everything calmly.
“Moses needed forty years.”
When despair grips me thus, Japan’s Meiji Restoration inevitably surfaces in memory.

Japan’s Restoration was not achieved through scientific power.
This much was certain.
The spark came from spiritual enlightenment by writers—Mito Kōmon compiling *Dai Nihon Shi*, Keichū, Harumichi, Mabuchi, Norinaga, Atsutane, Sanyō of *Nihon Gaishi*.
They never used material comforts as tools of indoctrination.
Here lay the genesis of Meiji’s miracle.
To deploy science’s pleasures for national salvation was perilous—
a tactic Westerners wielded to pacify invaded peoples.
In educating compatriots, spiritual awakening must come first.
Curing bodily ills to inspire renewal? Such circuitous stratagems smacking of spiritual tutelage were wholly needless.
This defied human nature.
Even I—were I to master Japan’s monism of loyalty, that lucid philosophy—might find salvation.
Would licking ice cream, sucking caramels, watching kinetoscopes do more than briefly divert me?
Japan’s monistic philosophy steadied me through its silent execution—no grand gestures, just matter-of-fact enactment.
When conviction runs deep, perhaps clamorous zeal ill becomes it.
My Tokyo comrades parroted “Three Principles!” like some shibboleth dividing man from beast—at this rate, true believers might vanish into bamboo groves... No, this twisted fancy must be mine alone. I’d grown estranged even from understanding what those Principles were.
Yet their ardor demanded trust.
No—reverence.
These men staked lives crying out to rescue our nation from dissolution.
My path left no choice but to race alongside them.
Though no revolutionary party member, I’d not play the coward.

I am prepared to die alongside them at any moment.
The rudder of my ship seems already nailed toward a fixed course, whether I will it or not.
I must now make myself useful to them.
Yet when I consider how to begin achieving this, that gloomy bamboo grove materializes before my eyes once more.
They call me a traitor to our nation.
They call me Japan-obsessed.
But I cannot help thinking how fortunate it would be if those very people refrain from betraying our nation themselves.
In other words—I must simply lack understanding of politics.
What weighs on me is not the ebb and flow of party members nor shifts in leadership rosters, but the chasms within individual human hearts.
To state it plainly: my concern now lies more with education than politics.
Not advanced education.
The people's elementary education.
I possess neither original philosophy nor religion.
My thought remains impoverished.
All I desire is to teach Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People—which I wholeheartedly believe—to the masses in plain terms, awakening national consciousness.
Upon deeper reflection, I've come to feel my sole possible contribution as their comrade lies in such humblest labor.
Yet even this proves no easy task for one as inept as myself.
With everyone's help I might perhaps become a physician—but an educator? How?
For public education—Japan's Restoration shows—writing proves most effective means, yet my own prose remains utterly unformed.
To become China's Rai San'yo rather than China's Sugita Genpaku feels a hundredfold more daunting.

“In the end, politicians, doctors, educators—none feel reliable to me at all. Today I went seeking a Krankenbett at the church, was made to hear some ill-omened tale about slaves, rushed to your place in astonishment, and rambled on with this absurdly foolish monologue. I’ve become exactly like a clown now, haven’t I?”

“My apologies.”

“You must be bored.”

“With this, the clown exits the stage.”

“The boarding house residents still seem awake.”

“You don’t suppose they were listening to my talk after all?”

What on earth was that Chinese man ranting about?

It’s unsettling.

If he doesn’t return soon, we can’t lock up.

Careless and troublesome—that’s what.

“Have I changed?”

“I think you alone might understand me—or do you?”

“Lately I’ve resolved to trust no one.”

“Well then, goodbye.”

“I have a request.”
“Please stand outside the entrance for just one minute.”

Mr. Zhou made a strange face but nodded faintly and stepped outside.

I faced the living room where the boarding house family members were and called out loudly,

“Auntie, Mr. Zhou has gone home.”

“Oh dear, he should have taken an umbrella.”
That was all.
It was so simple.
That was exactly my intention.

When I went to meet Mr. Zhou, who should have been standing outside the entrance listening to our conversation, he was not there, and in the darkness only the snow fell incessantly.

After all, it was a story from forty years ago.
I cannot say my memory was free from error.
However, I distinctly remembered that it had indeed been on that heavy snowfall night when I first heard Mr. Zhou voice his doubt—that a nation’s restoration could hardly be achieved by relying on Western practical sciences or such, but only by devoting effort to the people’s basic education and first reforming their spirit.
While it was not impossible to consider that this doubt of Mr. Zhou’s eventually led him to take interest in writing and later became the catalyst for the birth of the literary giant Lu Xun, it seemed to me that the commonly held theory these days—that this doubt suddenly welled up in Mr. Zhou’s mind due to the so-called “lantern slide incident”—was somewhat mistaken.
It was said that in his later years, Lu Xun himself wrote recollections of his Sendai period and indeed affirmed that it had been due to the so-called “lantern slide incident” that he turned from medicine to literature—but might this not have been because he wrote it by rounding off and simplifying his past for some reason?
It seemed human history must often be reorganized and conveyed in such an efficient manner.
For what reason Lu Xun had needed to structure his own past in such a manner—so to speak, “dramatically”—was something I did not understand.
However, if one were to carefully trace back through the circumstances of China at the time he explained his own past, the state of Sino-Japanese relations, or his position as a representative writer of China, one might perhaps have arrived at something worthy of assent—or so it seemed to me. But with my dull wit, such meticulous investigation remained beyond my grasp.
It was common in plays for a beautiful woman to turn into a demon woman with a single spin, but wasn’t such a vivid transformation impossible in human life?
The turning points of the human heart were, of course, unknowable to others—and wasn’t it that even the very person themselves did not clearly understand them?
In many cases, would it not have been that people were startled to realize, before they knew it, that foreign blood flowed within their own bodies?
The so-called “lantern slide incident” also did indeed occur in the spring of the following year.
However, that had not been his turning point; rather, as I perceived it, it served merely as a small trigger through which he became aware of the blood that had been changing within his body without his notice.
He had not suddenly aspired to literature upon seeing that lantern slide; to put it simply, he had liked literature all along.
This was an utterly mundane judgment by laypeople—one so banal that even I found it tiresome—but for someone like me, I couldn’t help but think that was exactly how it was.
I couldn’t help but feel that such a path could not be pursued unless one truly loved it.
And even I couldn’t help but think that rather than dwelling on that single lantern slide image—which acted as a mischief-maker that fueled and ignited his long-held passion for literature—it would have been more straightforward to cite the literary fervor that had been boiling among Japanese youth at the time.
When it came to the literary fervor in Japan at that time, it was something extraordinary—a raging force that declared one not human if they didn’t discuss literature. Even in Sendai, female students paraded about proudly clutching poetry collections and novels (whether they actually read them was unclear), likely members of the Seikinhai school, mostly bespectacled and glaring at our rustic selves with what seemed like neurotically furrowed brows. Literary plays were frequently staged at Sendai’s theaters, and even a philistine like me ultimately succumbed to this torrent, sneaking peeks at Toson’s new-style poetry. If even northeastern Sendai presented such a spectacle, what must it have been like in the floral capital of Tokyo?
Must it not have been something beyond our imagination?
When Mr. Zhou went to Tokyo during summer vacation, must the first thing he felt not have been that roaring tidal wave of literary activity?

Was it not the deluge of literary books in bookstores? And was it not a throng of young men and women swimming through that torrent with unnervingly earnest expressions? What could these people possibly be seeking? he must have wondered, joining them in meandering through those bookstores. And indeed, he purchased stacks of literary works and carried them back to Sendai. He'd been muttering that those crowds were his rivals. As his ardor for literature thus kindled into flame, what ceaselessly haunted his heart—never departing even momentarily—were the revolutionary cries of his homeland's youth. Medicine, literature, revolution—or rather, science, art, politics—had he not become ensnared in this maelstrom of threefold chaos?

I knew almost nothing about his voluminous later works.
Therefore, I knew nothing about what literary achievements the so-called Great Lu Xun had actually made.
However, the one thing I knew for certain was that he had been China's first patient of civilization.
The Mr. Zhou I knew during his Sendai period had suffered from modern civilization and even knocked on church doors seeking its sickbed.
Yet there had been no salvation there either.
He had grown weary of their ceremonial gestures.
In the end, after all that anguish, that noble and honest young man had come to wear even a slave's smile upon his cheeks.
Self-loathing—that special product of chaos.
Could it not be said that in these civilizational sentiments, he had indeed been one of China's pitiable pioneers?
And might not this hell of painful introspection have ultimately driven him closer to literature—that tapestry of human emotions?
It was, after all, his "beloved path."
Exhausted, might he not have crawled onto this sickbed and found some slight relief?
Of course, this was merely my vulgar presumption.
It seems even the person themselves cannot properly explain matters of the heart—let alone someone as dull and unlearned as me comprehend another's feelings. Yet I found myself unable to accept the common theory regarding Lu Xun's turning point, hence this laborious attempt at reasoning through my clumsy logic.

About a month after that heavy snowfall night, I believe it was around New Year’s of Meiji 39 (1906). Around that time, when Mr. Zhou had not shown his face in class for about a week, I asked Mr. Tsuda and was told he had an upset stomach and was resting. So on my way back from school, I decided to stop by Mr. Zhou’s lodging to see how he was doing. Mr. Zhou had a somewhat sickly pale face, but when I arrived, he immediately got up and—ignoring my attempts to stop him—quickly folded his futon,

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m fine now. According to Dr. Tsuda’s diagnosis, there was suspicion of pestilence and he pronounced it hopeless—but it turned out to be a gross misdiagnosis. I simply ate too much herring roe during New Year’s. Japan is truly an exhilarating country—celebrating New Year’s with nothing but deliberately plain foods like herring roe and beans.”

I surveyed the many books scattered around my desk. Nearly all were literary works. German Reclam editions predominated, though works by Japanese authors like Mori Ōgai, Ueda Bin, and Futabatei Shimei were interspersed among them.

“Which country’s literature is best?” I asked Mr. Zhou, facing him as I burrowed into the kotatsu and posed my usual foolish question.

“Well,” Mr. Zhou said with unusual cheerfulness that day, “since literature acts as a mirror of its nation—when a country earnestly suffers and strives, that’s precisely when fine literary works emerge from it.”
“Though literature may appear merely as refined men and women’s diversion,” he continued, “having no relation to a nation’s survival or collapse—this very thing accurately manifests a country’s strength.”
“You might call it ‘the use of the useless.’ It’s not to be underestimated.”
“I wanted to understand Egyptian and Indian literature,” he added, flipping through his notebook’s pages, “so I searched every Tokyo bookstore—yet found not a single volume.”
“India possesses an older civilization than China itself. Surely someone there must now awaken to ethnic pride and attempt literature resisting foreign oppression.”
“Being too analytical myself,” he confessed with a blush, “and lacking talent for poetry or novels—I wish to seek out such works from oppressed nations, translate them into Chinese for my compatriots.”
“Yet even translation fails if poorly executed.”
“My brother Zuoren back home—forgive my bluntness—shares your smile’s likeness,” he said hesitantly, “but surpassed me in writing since childhood.”
“Perhaps through his guidance—a fraternal collaboration—I might gradually attempt literary translations.”
“Lately I’ve practiced writing various pieces,” he admitted, producing manuscript pages from his drawer. “What think you of this? Though Chinese text would surely baffle you...”
“Shall I render one passage into Japanese?”

He effortlessly wrote several lines on the letter paper, then suddenly blushed and hesitantly handed it to me. Upon reading it once through, I thought it masterful writing. That day, I insisted on taking that sheet home with me. For some reason, it felt like a keepsake. Though I hadn’t clearly foreseen then that I would soon have to part from Mr. Zhou, whether by some premonition or not, I felt a strange attachment to that single slip of paper. For a long time afterward, I kept that slip tucked in my notebook, secretly taking it out during tedious lectures to savor its excellence while longing for the distant Mr. Zhou—but just before graduation, a classmate snatched it away, something I now find deeply regrettable. Well, that comes later; having repeatedly recited and cherished that essay from those days, I still remember most of it even now. Its title was something like “On the Essence of Literature,”

The essence of literature has no connection to the existence of individuals or nation-states; it holds no practical benefit, nor does it pursue ultimate truths.
Therefore, its efficacy does not surpass historical records in increasing wisdom; it is inferior to maxims in admonishing people; it cannot match commerce and industry in generating wealth; nor does it equal a graduation certificate in achieving merit.
Only when there is literature in the world do people nearly attain fulfillment through it.
When the harsh winter lingers long and spring’s warmth does not arrive—if bodies live on while spirits lie as though dead—then even in living, the proper path of human existence is lost.
Is not the use of the useless in literature to be found herein?

Given my poor memory, there may be two or three inaccuracies here—if you take any parts where the tone seems weak to be such instances, please imagine that the original essay was a literary masterpiece ten times more splendid than this.

The thrust of this short essay seemed to point in a somewhat different direction from what Mr. Zhou had previously described as literature meant "to assist our compatriots' political movements," yet considerable depth could be sensed in the phrase "the use of the useless."
In the end, it served a purpose.
However, unlike actual political movements that wielded strong leadership over the masses, it gradually infiltrated people’s hearts and fulfilled them—such was its purpose, or so I thought.
Such an interpretation of literature did not strike me as the least bit regressive.
On the contrary, it seemed an extremely sound approach.
With such an approach, even we laymen in literature could begin to dimly perceive its great power.

Was it that day or another—Mr. Zhou had further enlightened me with such an impromptu parable.

“Shipwrecked—swept into raging waves, dashed against the coast, desperately clinging to a lighthouse window ledge. ‘Oh joy!’ he tried to cry for help, but peering inside saw the lighthouse keeper’s family—husband, wife, and young daughter—sharing their modestly happy dinner.
‘Ah, this won’t do,’ the man faltered momentarily.”
“He held himself back, you see.”
“Then with a thunderous crash came a great wave—swallowing that timid castaway whole, dragging him far out to sea. Let us say such a tale exists.”
“The castaway stood beyond salvation.”
“Tossed by tempests—perhaps on some blizzard-ridden night—he perished alone, unknown to any soul.”
“Naturally, the lighthouse keeper continued his familial supper undisturbed—had it been a snowstorm, neither moon nor stars would have witnessed it either.”
“In the end, none knew.”
“They say truth outstrips fiction in strangeness, yet this world holds truths no eye has glimpsed.”
“Moreover—precisely in such unwitnessed corners of existence—noble jewels often gleam unseen.”
“Literature seeks these out through innate, wondrous antennae.”
“Thus literary creation approaches truth more nearly than celebrated facts.”
“Without literature, our world would brim with voids.”
“Like water flowing to low places, literature naturally suffuses those unjust hollows.”

Hearing such stories, even an uncouth country bumpkin like me could grasp it—yes, without literature in this world, like a wheel with insufficient oil, no matter how vigorously it spins at first, it would soon creak and collapse into ruin. Yet on the other hand, whenever I thought of Professor Fujino, who was so earnestly guiding Mr. Zhou’s medical studies, I would grow sorrowful and sometimes let out a deep sigh.
Even then, Professor Fujino remained unaware of this and continued to diligently add red-ink corrections to Mr. Zhou’s notebook once every week, just as he always had.
Even so, being a teacher sensitive to his disciple’s state after all, Professor Fujino seemed to have intuitively sensed Mr. Zhou’s growing listlessness toward medical research these days, frequently summoning him to the laboratory for what appeared to be reprimands—and I too was subsequently ordered to report to the laboratory two or three times,

“Mr. Zhou seems to have been lacking energy lately—can you think of any reason for this?”

“Is there anyone in class bullying Mr. Zhou?”

“Have you consulted with Mr. Zhou regarding the research *Thema*?”

“Is he still harboring an inward aversion to anatomy practice?”
“Have you thoroughly explained to him that Japanese patients, if it benefits medical science, would rather proactively wish for things like postmortem *Leichnam* dissections themselves?”

I had to endure such a relentless barrage of questions.
And so, I always gave only half-hearted responses.
Mr. Zhou’s belief in medical salvation had begun to waver, and upon investigating Japan’s Restoration more closely, he came to understand that it had been ignited by the writings of a group of thinkers. However, as Mr. Zhou currently found composing difficult ideological treatises beyond his capabilities, he focused on literature as a means of primary education for the masses and was now studying literary works from around the world—if I were to disclose such realities, which would come as a complete shock to Professor Fujino, imagining how astonished and despondent he would feel made even someone as obtuse as me have no choice but to obfuscate my words.
Even so, I once tried to indirectly convey the professor’s concerns to Mr. Zhou.

“How about we take the research Thema from Professor Fujino this time and try working on it together? The bone structure of bound feet might make an interesting subject, don’t you think?”

Mr. Zhou faintly smiled and shook his head.
He seemed to have already perceived everything.
By that time, Mr. Zhou had stopped making those chillingly cold expressions tinged with hidden malice that he'd worn right after summer vacation. Yet even so, he mostly just smiled vaguely, like someone inhabiting a world apart from ours—and over this, that ever-anxious Mr. Tsuda fretted,

“That guy’s gone off the rails.”
“At his boarding house, he does nothing but read trivial novels—hasn’t studied properly for school at all.”
“Has he finally joined the revolutionaries? Or perhaps had his heart broken?”
“Either way, this situation can’t continue.”
“He might fail this time.”
“He’s an elite scholar chosen by the Qing government and sent to Japan.”
“If Japan doesn’t properly educate him before sending him back, we’ll lose face with the Qing authorities.”
“That’s why we as friends bear such grave responsibility.”
“Lately he seems to look down on me—no matter what advice I offer, he just smirks silently.”
“It’s become unsettling.”
“He might listen if it comes from you.”
“What if we gave him a proper thrashing someday?”
“Wake up!”
“If we shout that while delivering a solid punch, he might reform and start studying seriously.”

I now regret that in two or three places within this memoir, I employed a narrative style that mocked Mr. Tsuda.
When I think about it carefully, I even begin to feel that perhaps it was this Mr. Tsuda who had loved Mr. Zhou the most.
When the time finally came to part with Mr. Zhou, I hosted a modest farewell gathering at my boarding house. The attendees—a hard-drinking carpenter and his ten-year-old daughter, both class representatives Tsuda and Yajima, myself, and our guest of honor Mr. Zhou—all stood together and performed an utterly bizarre chorus so laughably absurd in its vocal grandeur that looking back now, it nearly makes me burst out laughing,

When I Look Up, How Noble—My Teacher’s Kindness
In the garden of teaching, how swiftly have passed the years

When I look back, how precious these years have been

Now is the time for parting—let us bid farewell

The bonds we've nurtured together, the kindness of our days

*Even in the time after parting—oh, do not forget*

Amidst singing these verses, the first to whirl around and burst into tears was none other than Mr. Tsuda.
Though he talked a big game, parting with Mr. Zhou must have left him more desolate than anyone.
As I spent time with Mr. Tsuda and came to see this admirable side of him, I no longer found urbanites as intimidating or disagreeable as before.
Moreover, Yajima-kun—that so-called "country dandy"—proved upon closer acquaintance to be simply an intensely earnest soul, much like Mr. Zhou had once observed of Sendai folk: "They've grown rigid under the weight of responsibility from Tohoku's once-powerful domains."
Their obsession with what might be called "Sendai's dignity" made initial greetings stiff to the point of arrogance, but approach them unreservedly and they'd suddenly turn bashful, revealing unexpected kindness and generosity.
It struck me that perhaps these haughty salutes were attempts to mask inner vulnerability.
Even that tactless letter to Mr. Zhou, I began to suspect, held no intent to demean Chinese inferiority—rather, it might have contained awed respect for that foreign scholar.
Perhaps reverence had warped into awkward rivalry—a determination that "Sendai shan't be slighted"—twisting itself into that ill-conceived missive.
When earnest men fixate thus, their brushstrokes twist into clumsy nail-like scrawls while their prose plumbs depths of ineptitude.
In essence, he was sincerity incarnate.
Around then, noticing Mr. Zhou's waning academic zeal—and tormented that his own foolish letter might be partly responsible—he grew deeply troubled. He gifted Mr. Zhou a German lexicon, shouldered his homework burdens, and during lectures always claimed the adjacent seat to fuss over him. Yet despite these efforts from Professor Fujino and all concerned, Mr. Zhou soon departed our midst.

I think that was certainly around the end of our second academic year. The snow had melted, the weeping cherries of Tsubakigaoka Hill had begun blooming, and the mountain cherries in the schoolyard were opening their weighty blossoms amid sticky brown young leaves—it was around that time we began preparing for year-end examinations. Then occurred that so-called "Lantern Slide Incident," and Mr. Zhou's familiar figure abruptly vanished from our midst.

As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Zhou didn't suddenly switch from medicine to literature upon seeing those slides—the shift had been gradually underway for some time—yet one must acknowledge that incident served as the decisive pretext. It became, so to speak, the springboard for his withdrawal from Sendai.

When we entered second year, bacteriology was added to our curriculum. Instructors used lantern slides in class to demonstrate microbial shapes, explaining their characteristics through projections. Even after lessons ended, they'd show scenic or current event slides during leftover time to entertain us.

The vibrant colors of Kegon Falls and Yoshino Mountain remain vivid in my memory even now, though wartime images overwhelmingly dominated—the Port Arthur blockade, Shuishiying meeting, Mukden occupation—all scenes from the Russo-Japanese War. Whenever such heroic images appeared, we students would erupt in cheers and applause.

One day near term's end during bacteriology class, following routine projections of 203 Meter Hill's fierce battle and Battleship Mikasa slides that made us clap wildly, the image abruptly changed with a clatter—a Chinese man being executed as a Russian spy.

At the instructor's explanation, we again burst into enthusiastic applause.

That's when I noticed a student quietly opening the side door of our dim classroom and slipping into the hallway.

I startled.

Mr. Zhou.

Somehow I felt I understood his feelings.

Unable to leave him be, I too slipped out after him.

Mr. Zhou had already vanished from the hallway.

The school building stood utterly silent during class hours.

Peering through a corridor window into the schoolyard, I spotted his figure.

Mr. Zhou lay supine beneath a mountain cherry tree.

When I went out and approached him, I found his eyes closed—unexpectedly smiling faintly.

“Mr. Zhou,” I called softly, whereupon Mr. Zhou abruptly sat upright,

“I was certain you would follow.”
“There is no need to worry.”
“Thanks to that lantern slide, I have finally been able to reach a decision.”
“After a long time, I have met my compatriots and renewed my resolve.”
“I will return to my country immediately.”
“When I saw that, I could not stay still anymore.”
“The people of my country are still in such a slovenly state, are they not?”
“While Japan, our ally, fights bravely as a nation, I cannot fathom why anyone would become a military spy for the enemy—though I suppose most were bribed. But what I could not bear was not those traitors. It was the foolish faces of the onlookers gathered around, vacantly staring at it all.”
“That is the expression of the Chinese people today.”
“It is ultimately a matter of the spirit.”
“What is important for China now is not physical robustness.”
“Those onlookers all had good physiques, did they not?”
“Medicine—I have deepened my conviction that it is by no means crucial for them now.”
“It is a renewal of the spirit.”
“It is the reform of the national character.”
“As things are now, China will never be able to establish the honor of being a true independent nation.”
“Whether it is Overthrowing the Qing and Reviving the Han or Constitutionalism—if you merely change the political signboard while leaving society’s fabric untouched, what good will it do?”
“I had lived apart from those people with vacant expressions for some time, so my mind lacked focus—I wandered through uncertainties. Thanks to that, today my focus has crystallized.”
“Having seen that, I did well.”

“I will immediately abandon my medical studies and return home.”

I too had thought I should no longer attempt to stop it.

However,

“Professor Fujino,” I let slip.

“Ah,” Mr. Zhou said, hanging his head. “That’s it. You could say I’ve lingered aimlessly at this school until today because betraying that teacher’s kindness felt too painful.” He raised his face. “But… I can no longer hold back. Having seen those compatriots’ expressions, I can’t afford to glance left or right anymore. Japan’s monism of loyalty—might this not be what it truly is? Exactly. I’ve finally grasped that philosophy. After returning home, I’ll first launch a literary movement to reform those people’s spirits. I’ll devote my entire life to this purpose. In any case, once I return, I’ll consult with my younger brother back home and together we’ll publish a literary magazine. Yes—the magazine’s name has also been clearly decided today, right now.”

“What’s the name?”

“New Life.”

He answered with a single word and smiled.
In that smile, there was not a trace of the servile shadow resembling what Mr. Zhou himself had called the “slave’s smile.”

The old doctor’s memoir ends here; however, I (Dazai) would like to append a few additional lines for the readers’ reference.

The great Eastern literary master who should be celebrated worldwide, Mr. Lu Xun, passed away in the autumn of Showa 11 (1936); however, approximately ten years prior to that—in Showa 1 (1926), when he was forty-six years old—he had published a short essay titled “Professor Fujino.”
If I were to excerpt a portion of it,

(Based on the translation by Mr. Matsueda Shigeo)

“(Omitted) At the end of my second academic year, I visited Professor Fujino and informed him that I intended to abandon my medical studies and leave Sendai.”
A deep sorrow floated on the professor’s face, and though he seemed to want to say something, in the end he did not speak out.

"I intend to study biology.
The knowledge you have taught me will still be useful for that as well, I think." But in truth, I had not resolved to study biology.
Having seen Professor Fujino looking deeply sorrowful, I told an insincere lie in an attempt to comfort him.

"The anatomy I taught for medicine's sake will likely be of little use in biology," Professor Fujino said with a sigh.

Four or five days before my departure, Professor Fujino called me to his home and gave me a photograph of himself.
On the back of that photograph were written the two characters "Farewell in Sorrow."
He also asked that I give him a photograph of myself in return.
But at that time, I had not had any photographs taken.
Professor Fujino requested that I take one to send him in the future, and that I would occasionally write to inform him of how I was faring.

After leaving Sendai, I had not taken photographs for many years.
Moreover, my subsequent circumstances were uninteresting, and thinking that informing him would only disappoint the professor, I couldn’t even bring myself to write a letter.
As even more years passed, I became all the more bewildered about where to begin my account; even when I occasionally thought of sending a letter and took up my brush, I found myself unable to write a single character.
And so, from then until today, I have ended up passing the days without ever sending a single letter or photograph.
From my professor’s perspective, once I had left, it must have been as if I had vanished without a trace.

But for some reason I cannot fathom, even now, twenty years later, I still find myself thinking of my teacher from time to time. Among those I regard as my teachers, it was Professor Fujino who most profoundly moved me and who encouraged and spurred me on. At times, I think like this: Professor Fujino’s ardent hopes for me and his unwearying instruction—in a narrow sense, these were for China’s sake, that is, he hoped new medicine would arise in China; in a broad sense, they were for academic study’s sake, that is, he hoped to transmit this new medicine to China. Professor Fujino’s character remains great in my eyes and in my heart. Those who know the professor’s full name are likely extremely few.

The notes that Professor Fujino had corrected for me, I bound into three thick volumes with the intention of preserving them as a permanent memento and carefully stored them away. Unfortunately, seven years ago, when moving, I broke a bookcase en route and lost half of my books; as it happened, these notebooks were also lost along with them at that time. I pressed the shipping company to search for them, but there was absolutely no response. However, only Professor’s photograph still hangs on the eastern wall of my Beijing residence, facing the desk. At night, when I am wearied and exhausted and my mind grows indolent, if I raise my head and catch a glimpse of Professor’s dark, gaunt face within the lamplight, it seems as though he is about to address me with those words of measured cadence. Then suddenly, it rouses my conscience and redoubles my courage. So I light a cigarette and once again continue writing the kind of prose that is deeply detested by those so-called “upright gentlemen.”

Later in Japan, when Mr. Lu Xun’s selected works were to be published, the Japanese editors inquired of him about which pieces they should include. He reportedly responded: “You may choose freely at your discretion—but I absolutely want ‘Professor Fujino’ included in that collection.”

Afterword

Though this Farewell in Sorrow was indeed a novel I wrote under commission from the Cabinet Information Bureau and the Literary Patriotism Society, even without any request from either party, it was a work I had long wished to write someday—having collected materials and pondered its conception for years.
In gathering materials, the person who kindly advised me on various matters was Mr. Odakeo Takao, a senior novelist to me.
As for Mr. Odakeo’s connection to Chinese literature, there can be no one unaware of it.
Were it not for Mr. Odakeo’s approval and assistance, I even suspect my slothful self might never have resolved to undertake such a laborious novel.
While Mr. Odakeo has his Biography of Lu Xun—a sweet masterpiece like spring blossoms—just as I was about to begin writing this novel, Mr. Takeuchi Yoshimi’s recently published Lu Xun—a severe masterpiece akin to autumn frost—was entirely unexpectedly sent to me by that scholar himself.
I have never met Mr. Takeuchi.
However, I had respectfully read papers on Chinese literature that Mr. Takeuchi occasionally published in magazines, and even presumptuously held private expectations for his work.
I had even considered asking Mr. Odakeo to introduce me to Mr. Takeuchi someday, but then heard he had been drafted into military service.
Thus this painstakingly crafted masterpiece by Mr. Takeuchi was published during his absence—perhaps he had left instructions when departing for war like “Once completed, send a copy to Dazai too”—for the publisher included an accompanying letter stating: “By the author’s instruction, we present you this copy.”
This alone would have been wondrous grace enough, but further still, the postscript revealed an unexpected fact—that this brilliant scholar of Chinese literature had long enjoyed reading my clumsy novels—leaving me flustered and blushing, yet inspired by this strange fate to begin writing with boyish vigor.

However, the result is as you can see, and I remain deeply uncertain whether I have been able to properly repay Mr. Odakeo for his many acts of kind assistance or Mr. Takeuchi for his support from afar.

Moreover, as I embarked on this work, for the historical investigation of Sendai Medical College, I received letters of introduction from Dr. Ono of Tokyo Imperial University and Drs. Hirohama and Kato of Tohoku Imperial University; furthermore, through the kindness of Sendai Kahoku Shimpo, I was able to read through every last one of their strictly confidential, invaluable materials to understand Sendai’s history—I cannot measure how much this aided my work. That such conveniences were obtained by an almost unknown writer like myself was, I believe, due to the influence of the Cabinet Information Bureau and Literary Patriotism Association; yet I shall never forget the goodwill of all those who kindly drafted letters of introduction for a shabby, impoverished student at first glance and graciously permitted me to freely examine materials too precious for public access.

Finally, there is one last matter I must absolutely add: this work was written entirely freely under the sole responsibility of myself, Dazai, a single Japanese writer, and that neither the Cabinet Information Bureau nor the Literary Patriotism Association uttered a single word of cumbersome instruction that might have constrained my writing.
Moreover, when I completed this work and submitted it to the authorities, it was approved unchanged—not a single character or phrase received correction.
Should I call this "government and people united as one"? This cannot be my happiness alone.