Pathway to Japanese Literature

1

Dull mining barracks sprawled in long, narrow rows along both banks of the C River, snaking several lines deep.

The smelter’s copper smoke crawled low from two stubby chimneys on the bald mountain’s flank, assaulting the barracks like a toxic haze.
When exposed to that prickly smoke, even dogs would sneeze violently.
There, when it rained, both plants and crops withered away.
As the rain fell, it dissolved the toxic gases in the air.

Behind the barracks, across two parallel mountain ranges, only thatch grass grew thick and luxuriant, while the ancient giant pine trees stood like decayed teeth, scattered and rotting where they remained.

The gray sky loomed low and gloomy from above.

The mountains converged into one above the C River, stretching far into the distant, serene imperial forest.
For hundreds of years, they had never felled trees there because transporting timber proved too arduous.
No paths were discernible.
A little downstream along the river stood a sentry-post-like gate pass checkpoint.

From there westward ran a trolley track through three ri of mountain roads connecting to S Town.

The residents found themselves confined to the mountains not just by natural topography but also compelled to announce themselves at the gate pass checkpoint—staffed by upward-transferred police—whenever approaching the trolley track.
Moreover, stepping beyond that checkpoint invited surveillance from higher authorities.

The gate pass checkpoint challenged each and every one of those entering from outside like a sentry.

Long ago, a shrewd old man named Yokoi Naniemon from the lower village first began mining operations at this mine.
Ever since then, their ancestors had become miners—Imura had heard that.
Their children, their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s children—over generations, their bodies had been eroded by mine toxins.
A rough, lively man had eventually turned pallid with miner’s disease.
And then, he croaked.

Even after third-generation Yokoi Nanitaro sold the mine to M—— Mining Corporation, became a director himself, and left for Tokyo, they could not move from here.
As though they too had been sold off to M—— along with the mine.

Prices were skyrocketing.
Massive new machinery was installed.
In the ore-sorting plant, and in the smelter.
And also in the mine shafts.
And copper had reached its most exorbitant value.
They continued their silent overtime work, just as in their grandfathers’ time.

In September of Taisho X, at A Mine, 4,000 miners launched a strike.
The wives formed a crowd and surged toward the distant front of Tokyo’s Baron T’s residence.
Even at K Mine and J Mine, the miners stopped groveling and bowing their heads, raising their chisels and hammers against the mine owners.
In America and Britain too, miners were rising up.
Across the entire world, the proletariat ceased clasping their hands together and instead clenched them into fists.
It was during such times.

A strike also broke out at M—— Mining Corporation’s O Mine.

From that time onward, capitalists could no longer get away with barking orders at workers like cattle using crude codes like “Boss,” “Hustle,” or “Switch.”

At M——, as well as O Mine, S Mine, and J Mine, they could no longer employ the same outrageous accounting schemes as before.

However, only this mine remained perpetually left behind by the world’s movements.
The executives did not forget to exploit the docile livestock trapped in these mountains.
They resolved to recoup the profits they could no longer make elsewhere from this mine isolated deep in the mountains.

The strict gate pass controls on miners stemmed from M’s cunning policy.

However, no matter how strictly they enforced them, there would naturally be those who couldn’t be satisfied with life in the mine alone.
They made a night escape to the city.
But what awaited them were factory-designated lodgings where foremen skimmed off their earnings.
There was nothing good about it.
They drifted from place to place.
They ended up pawning off even the single kimono they’d taken with them.
And they returned once again.

There were two or three such people every year.
Imura too became one who spread popular ballads.
Such people brought new knowledge and new stories.

A wife got caught in the ore-sorting plant’s belt and had her head and arms torn off.
Then he flew into a frenzy and ran all over the place.
Takematsu at O Mine typically earned three to four yen per day.
They had seen that.
They widened their eyes in astonishment at the sheer severity of the disparity between themselves and others.

“At K and A, there’s some hell of bastards.”

Takematsu was a formidable figure in this mine.
He spoke in an astonishing manner.

“Executives can go eat shit!”
“Don’t give a damn about those uppity bastards—just lop their heads off with a deba knife.”
“Then take a dog’s neck and graft it onto the stump.”
“Those pricks who’ve been strutting around talking big—now all they can do is bark ‘woof woof’.”
“Heh heh—you executive bastards turned into dogs! Serves you right!—’cause they were mutts all along!”

“Hmm.”

They were intrigued.
They were drawn in even while knowing it was a fabrication.

“We’re tellin’ you—raise our wages! Raise ’em or else, damn it!”
“Coolin’ down the smelter ’n’ shuttin’ it down with a clang—ain’t nothin’ to it.”

“Mmm…”

“No matter how much the ore groaned deep underground, if we don’t dig it out, it ain’t worth a penny.”

However, unless such people were extremely careful, operating in the shadows and keeping their mouths shut, they would be immediately driven out of the mountain the moment the executives discovered them.

II

A light bulb fastened to a compressed air iron pipe dimly illuminated the pitch-black mine interior.

The damp darkness occupying the eight-hundred-foot-deep mine shaft had sucked up every bit of light.
Once five or six steps were taken from the electric light, nothing at all could be discerned.
The faint flow of air filled with the smell of earth and mold was barely perceptible.
The trolley moved along the two rails crawling through the earth's depths, creaking and groaning as it went.

From the coarse rock surface of the cramped mine shaft, water droplets dripped down.
Ichizo advanced deeper into the shaft, his neck tensed as though threatened by a sword's edge.
He had taken his father’s place as a trolley pusher.
And with thin, faltering arms, he pushed the trolley.

In the depths of Yamaguchi No. 8 Shaft, Imura was digging ever deeper underground like a mole.
The rumbling blast of a compressed-air rock drill faintly echoed from afar.
Before them, women in work pants with tightly coiled hair scooped excavated ore into sorting trays with pans, bracing their legs as they hurled it into trolleys.
Their breasts, waists, and thighs swayed in the carbide lamp’s faint demonic light, floating up from the darkness.

There were wives, daughters, and old women there.
There was also a girl named Tae, three years older than Ichizo.

Tae deliberately loaded only a small amount of ore into the trolley to keep it light.

“You could load more if you wanted.”

“I don’t need to put on such a brave front.”

“It’s not moving at all, you know.”

And he pushed against the trolley from the side and braced himself.

The trolley weighed around one hundred thirty kan.
It wouldn’t budge even if you pushed with just your fingertips or shoulder.
He had to plant his feet hard against the railroad ties with every ounce of strength in his body to push forward.
Moreover, if he let up his strength even slightly, it would stop immediately.
And he had to keep bracing against the railroad ties from end to end—from where the women were to where the cage descended—without letting up.

He was still fifteen years old.
At times he felt pity for himself laboring in this child's form.
His eyes grew wet.
The old man had his leg crushed by a pit prop that fell from No.6 Shaft's vertical tunnel.
And so he became a cripple they called Three-legged Pine-san.

“We can’t push the trolley.”
Ichizo had doubted his thin arms until he descended into the mine.

“......”
The old man was in the smoke-stained four-and-a-half-mat room, hiding his legless limbs under the futon, his face filled with sorrow.

“The trolley must be quite heavy.”

“If there’s no one to work, we’ll get thrown out of this tenement like O-Yoshi-san.”
“If we get thrown out, where are we supposed to go?”

The son saw a glint in the old man’s eyes.

Rice was cheap, there were no extra chores, and the rent was free—with this, it was supposed to stack up against one yen fifty sen or even two yen in Tokyo.

With such reasoning, the old man consoled himself over the meager seventy-sen wages.
Even that rent-free tenement would face eviction if there were no workers left in the household.

Ichizo might have thought how much he wanted to lie down and frolic under the sun outside the mine where it shone so achingly bright.
Even sunlight—obtainable without paying a single coin and endlessly abundant—he had rarely seen.
The sun’s value became clear only after entering the mine—how much worth it truly held.
Now he was at the bottom of a colossal mountain riddled with ant-like tunnels.
Centered around the vertical shaft where elevators descended, they had dug horizontal tunnels every hundred feet underground—from four hundred to five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred feet—steadily descending deeper as they exhausted ore veins until now working eight hundred feet beneath earth.
Just to reach surface required ascending eight hundred feet via cage—six-and-a-half Mitsukoshis tall—then walking through a three-hundred-sixty-foot horizontal tunnel.

Imura was operating a rock drill in the depths beyond the women.
As the chisel penetrated the rock’s surface and bored into it, stone powder was blown out by the air, filling the entire area with dust.
Imura had bound a hand towel from his nose to his mouth and was wearing goggles.
The yellowish, long, damp stone dust coated thickly over his grown-out hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes.

On the back of a single dirty shirt, sweat had seeped out like a map.
And the area of that map gradually expanded.

“Alright, it’s loaded.”

Tae braced herself to push out the trolley.

It was only about sixty percent full.
Ichizo began bracing against the railroad ties.
Behind him, Imura was removing the rock drill and opening the dynamite bag in the dim light of a lantern.

Imura held a dynamite stick sideways in his mouth like a candy stick, inserted the fuse into the detonator, then plugged it into the dynamite he was holding.

“Hey, hey, ladies! Let’s get moving with a bang!”

“Let’s put another big hole in Tae’s ass.”

The old woman mocked from behind.

Ichizo dashed through with all his might where water droplets dripped like rain from cracks in the rock.

Afterwards, the women hurriedly caught up through the darkness.
For a while, they braced to push the trolley from Ichizo’s side, but soon veered off into the left branch tunnel.

The light bulb of the vertical shaft glowed faintly brown in the distance.
And then, the voices of four or five people came through.

“Who’s only loaded this measly bit?”
Ichizo pointed to the trolley he had pushed there earlier, and the foreman Ami, with his deep-set eyes and thick lashes, glared around the area.
“No matter how little you’ve loaded, the cage still takes up one full slot!”

The others were exchanging glances.
Ichizo found it as excruciating as having a crime exposed to lay bare this new trolley—even less full than the previous one—before the officer’s eyes.
He wanted to turn back with the trolley.
However, from behind came Imura—having finished lighting the fuse—walking briskly yet leisurely with a lantern in hand. The lantern flickered intermittently.
He veered off into a branch tunnel midway.

Ichizo stopped the trolley four or five ken short of the cage.
And then, he fidgeted uneasily.

“You worthless brats! All you ever do is kiss up to the Section Chief and Manager Yamanaga!”

When Ami occupied the cage alone and ascended, the lame old man began to laugh.

Ichizo remained huddled small in the darkness like a criminal.

“What’s with all the cowering?”

“Hmm.”

“That guy’s putting on airs.”
“What’s his problem anyway?”

Shibata—his long hair making him look particularly unkempt—reached out to Ichizo’s shoulder in a brotherly gesture of reassurance.

“You bastard! I should chuck you down a slope tunnel!”
From the dark entrance of Pit No. 10 came a voice choked with long-suppressed rage.

“Yeah! Do it! Do it!”

At that moment, a tremendous roar of successive dynamite blasts erupted from deep within.
Shattered rocks seemed to hurtle right toward them.
Compressed air surged out as a swift, powerful gust.
Then came billowing vortices of gunpowder-tinged smoke, thick and swirling.

Three

Imura signaled Tae with his eyes and nonchalantly entered Pit No. 9.

“Hey, hey.”

Her black eyes answered.

After the dynamite exploded, they had to wait elsewhere for about an hour until most of the smoke cleared.
In the middle of Pit No. 9, a slope tunnel climbed upward and connected to a seven-hundred-shaku lateral tunnel.
He carefully crawled up the slope tunnel, taking care not to hit his head on the protruding rocks.
The intense dampness and moldy smell stung his nose even more sharply.
Patches of verdigris had formed on the rocks here and there.
And when touched, the rock crumbled brittlely, pieces tumbling down.
Down a steep slope tunnel of over thirty degrees, the fallen rocks clattered against both sides as they tumbled downward.

When he ascended seven hundred shaku, then veering slightly toward the vertical shaft, there was another slope tunnel leading upward.
Imura crawled up it again.
A spider's thread tangled in his unkempt grown-out hair.
His already filthy work clothes were further soiled by damp filth oozing from the rock's surface.
As he crawled through these narrow mine shafts, he felt he truly was a male mole.
Tae was a female mole.
They were male and female moles secretly meeting underground.

He had wandered through society and ultimately concluded that the only place moles like us could eke out a living was this mine—that no matter where else we roamed, it’d be no good—and so he’d come back.

But for the moles, even the sun and clear air—which belonged to no one—remained utterly beyond reach. Outside the mine, copper smoke from the smelter churned the valley's air with poison gas day and night without ceasing for even a minute. Inside the mine, moisture, mold, and stone dust swirled in vortices. He couldn't help thinking that even air and sunlight were money. He recalled the sun-drenched villa district of Shonan he had seen from the train window. Those without money couldn't greedily seize even the sparkling sun or the clear air. He didn't know how many more years he'd have to keep digging in this place. The thought of it sickened him. In the end—crushed in a cave-in; collapsing from miner's disease like a gnawed-away tree; or if not that—like the old man—blown apart by dynamite into smithereens.

They even loved like moles.
In the earth, the male chased the female.
In the earth, the male and female fumbled together.
Tae had smooth skin that stayed surprisingly unblemished despite handling stones.
Beneath that skin lay firm, taut flesh.
She came through a different mold-reeking shaft with light footsteps.
Imura waited at the slope tunnel's summit.
He knew Tae would come there.
The stagnant air festered.
The damp mold-stench hung so thick it felt like lungs would decay.
Yet he endured it.

When she arrived, he [××××], and she thrashed about like a mouse dangled upside down by its tail.
The scent of her, like raw wood freshly cut, erased the mold, the dampness, even the rotten air.
He felt that way.
In the mine where many girls with deathly pale lips and sickly complexions abounded, she was like a vibrant green tree from mountains untouched by mining toxins.

Once before, when operating the rock drill, Imura had discovered that the eyes of an engineer who had come to inspect the mine were fixed covetously upon this young, vigorous girl.

The engineer had a large, beard-covered jaw.
And there was a child who attended school.
However, those eyes were fixed devouringly on the girlish Tae rather than on the ore vein.
With his beard-covered jaw and upper lip curled into a brazen smile.

“This girl’ll be devoured by that bearded jaw soon enough.”

Imura found himself thinking this for no particular reason.
Then his rebellious spirit began stirring restlessly. Until then, he had only looked at her as one might gaze upon a solitary tree crowned with dewy green leaves.
Soon after, he broached the idea to her—since he had something to discuss, would she go with him to the abandoned shaft?

“What now?”

She had an innocent face.

“It’s about that talk.”
“I’m saying we’ll snatch you away and make another night escape.”

In front of others，he turned it into a joke．

“Nope．
Boring．”

She sulked．

However, after lunch, Tae was not among the cluster of resting women.
He noticed.
Suddenly, his heart began to pound wildly.
He climbed up the slope tunnel where stones came tumbling down while pressing it down.

In the six-hundred-shaku abandoned mine shaft—a cavern reminiscent of Egypt’s Sphinx—she stood with a face as pale as a ghost.

He noticed it only when the lantern he extended nearly collided with her.
Water droplets fell in sporadic drops at their feet.
The lantern flame flickered unsteadily.

He found the trivial romantic formalities and incessant chatter to be a nuisance.
After hooking the lantern on a protruding rock, he suddenly seized her with his sturdy arms without uttering a word.

“What talk?”

“This is her—the woman that bearded bastard was trying to devour!”

While looking closely at the woman’s face faintly illuminated by the lantern, he thought. And he tightened his arms. The woman’s hot breath washed over his face.

“Boring!”
She had such eyes.

However, nimbly spreading her relatively small, dirt-covered hands, she reached for his neck.

“Tae!”

He said only a single word.
Imura felt the smooth, egg-white-like skin against his own.

Then, each time, they began crawling up to six hundred shaku from separate paths.
At times, Imura climbed up along the ladder beside the cage.
At other times, they pointed out the dark, chilling mine shaft at five hundred shaku to each other and slipped through the log barricade.

He realized it wasn’t just Engineer Ishikawa who was after her.
Supervisor Ami, Sakata, and Endo were also after her.

“Mr. Ishikawa—isn’t he acting strange toward you?”

Imura said such things while bringing his mouth within an inch of hers.

"I know that perfectly well."

"Ami and Endo too."

She nodded calmly.

“What’ll you do if they corner you?”

“It’s nothing.”
Tae laughed.
“If they do that, I’ll go to that wife and spill everything.”

IV

When he dug sideways about five hundred meters, Imura felt he had come far underground. He was struck by a desolate feeling, as if he had descended into a hell from which escape would be impossible even if disaster struck. The mineral vein suddenly began widening to the right around five hundred meters. The mine walls glittered with high-quality copper ore. As the vein expanded, he flared the shaft outward like a trumpet’s bell. But no matter how much he widened it, the copper ore still glimmered ahead endlessly. From experience, he knew this meant encountering a massive ore boulder. Damn it! Imura considered bringing soil to bury the thing. No matter how much high-grade ore they dug up, none of it would ever benefit him—it only fattened that M Building towering over Marunouchi, a structure he’d seen firsthand. Here in the pitch-dark mountain depths they labored, while the more high-grade ore they extracted, the fatter grew M’s clan—those who drove automobiles and obsessed over golf. Damn it all! If nothing else, hiding the ore would be some small consolation.

The women behind him were clattering ore into the trolleys.
He had come quite far from the cage.
Under normal circumstances, this would be where they should stop digging.
The women, who had been chattering while sorting ore, suddenly fell silent with restraint.
Imura looked back into the darkness behind him.
The white-uniformed section chief’s glasses glinted sharply in the lantern light.

“So? What sorta spot you diggin’ here?”

Regarding mining performance—since it also affected his own record—the sharp-eyed section chief had already sensed through what Ichizo had pushed out with the trolley that they had struck high-grade ore.

"Damn!"
Imura thought.

Ami followed behind the section chief, bowing obsequiously.
The section chief, checking to ensure no rocks had been left behind, looked around up, down, left, and right as he made his way to the rock drill.
Then, he pressed the lantern and his gold-fitted rimless glasses against the rock face.
There, Imura’s rock drill had bored three holes.

“We’ve struck a good one here.”

He pressed his glasses and lantern even closer against it, inspecting the mineral vein’s direction.
“Imura, we’ve hit upon something tremendous here.”
Imura remained silent.

“This area’s had that particular odor for a good long while now.”
“Mhm, quite so,” Ami responded.

Ami asked something difficult and academic.
The section chief began to explain.
The section chief, who had been a top student in university, enjoyed explaining academic matters in meticulous detail.
Ami understood that knack.

“Truly, I also thought there was something incredible here and had them dig for it.”

"Damn!"

Again, Imura thought.

The section chief’s face was vividly glowing in the darkness.

Before long, additional miners were assigned to Pit 8.

The section chief ordered that every last corner of the area containing ore be excavated to the fullest extent possible.
Imura’s estimation had not been wrong.
It was a terrifyingly massive lump of ore.

“So even the achievements you’ve made yourself get snatched away by the higher-ups, huh?”

Tae approached in a whisper.
The lantern cast a dark shadow across Imura’s face, set in an unfriendly, sullen grimace.
She flinched involuntarily.
But paying no heed,

“You were the one who suspected there was something huge here and dug it up—why didn’t you say anything?”

Her voice was reproachful.

“Shut up!”

“Even though you were the one who dug up such a huge ore deposit yourself, they’re acting like it’s someone else’s achievement. How fucking stupid!”

“Shut up!”
“Shut up!”

The chalcopyrite glittered endlessly ahead and in all directions—up, down, left, and right—no matter how deeply they dug.
They kept excavating it.
There formed an enormous pitch-black cavern.
Again more miners were assigned.
The iron pipes delivering compressed air were lengthened.
Soon it reached about eight tatami mats in area.

Then, as they drilled holes with rock drills and set dynamite charges—sixteen tatami mats, twenty tatami mats—the cavern continued to expand.

“Just how much is this lump worth, I wonder?”

“About six thousand ryō, I suppose.”

They did not know the market price of the copper they themselves dug out.

“Who cares about that? It’s easily worth fifty or sixty thousand ryō.”

“No, no—it’s way more. Must be a hundred fifty, hundred sixty thousand ryō at least.”

They had no idea how much copper came out of this mine annually, what the expenses amounted to, how much profit was made, or where the copper was sold—they knew none of it.
From then on, they were utterly blindfolded.
They simply had to go into the pit, work quietly, and dig out ore—that was all.
As extraction volumes grew, more hauliers and women were brought in.
Ichizo labored among adults, caked in dirt and sweat, bracing against railroad ties while being hounded by trolleys from behind.

The miners clung to the periphery of the cavern like ticks and continued their work.
Women three months pregnant who gasped for breath and elderly men with bad legs—who had to scramble out a full two minutes before the others just to get clear when the dynamite charges were set—labored alongside everyone else.
Among those present there, whether it was a toe, a finger, some muscle, or a bone, there was hardly anyone who hadn’t had something severed.
At home, they were caring for a tottering old man, a crippled son, or an infant with bad eyes.
The women often had miscarriages.
It was not uncommon for children to be born only to die when the milk ran out.

The executives repeatedly came in for inspection rounds.
The ore glinted above their heads too.
The executives ordered that it be excavated as well.

“If we don’t put up support pillars, there’s gonna be a cave-in for sure.”
The elderly man with bad legs anxiously raised his lantern and peered up at the cavern’s vast ceiling.

“The rock’s solid—it’ll hold.”

The old man kept moving his lantern as if searching every corner of the roughly hewn ceiling.
Sand occasionally trickled down from between the glittering chalcopyrite in intermittent streams.

“This seems really dangerous.”

“Nothin’ to worry about.”

They expanded their digging left and right.
At the same time, they built shelves and dug upward toward the ceiling.
The horizontal shafts were being driven further ahead too.
From above, sand and gravel kept trickling down in intermittent streams.

After lunch, Imura came to the ditch in the horizontal shaft and pissed.
Lanterns dotted the cavern’s earthen floor and rock crevices, burning dimly.

“If I went out to the shaft now, the sun’d be shining bright.”
It was Ichizo, his voice beginning to crack.

“Yeah.”

“So our five-day break’s been scrapped ’cause of some inspection. Tch.”
“Tch.”

Another voice sounded.

After their meal, everyone spent thirty minutes resting each in their own way—spreading out mats and sitting on pit props.
The lanterns were like fishing boat lights on a dark night.
They only somewhat brightened their immediate surroundings.
However, the entire cavern did not grow any brighter.
The terrifying darkness still clung stubbornly to the place.

Imura was about to finish urinating.
And then, at that moment, a deafening roar nearly knocked him over.
A sudden fierce wind whirled up.
The hat was blown off.
The lanterns were extinguished in an instant, plunging everything into pitch darkness.
At their feet, someone had been flung down as if thrown out and lay collapsed.
It was a terrifying and tremendous thing none of them had ever experienced before.
It might have been a roar hundreds of times louder than dynamite blasts.
He was struck by a terror as though a massive earthquake had caused the mountains to collapse.

In the damp darkness, sandy dust swirled thickly like billowing smoke.

Afterwards, small fragments clattered down into the void again.
What had happened—how it had happened—they didn’t know at all.
Legs and hips stiffened up and trembled uncontrollably.

“Imura!”
A trembling voice came from the depths.

“Hey, Mr. Tsuchida.”

“Miyaike!
“Is Miyaike here!”
“Shibata!”
“Shibata!”
“Mori!”

Fragmented moans pleading for help reached Imura’s ears.
He also called out his comrades’ names.
Amid the damp air，the pungent smell of blood reached his nose.
A woman’s soft body gave off blood and a sour stench as it rolled.

Imura，trembling with fear，crawled on all fours and frantically searched the area．

After a while，lanterns and frantic voices approached from behind．
The miners from other shafts had rushed over，startled by the tremendous vibration and deafening roar．
They too had turned pale．

Imura felt a wave of relief revive him with the new lantern.
Over where there had been trolleys, miners crouching by pit props, women, and empty lunchboxes from finished meals, a new towering mountain of rocks had come crashing down.
And many people were nowhere to be seen.
In the shadow of a massive boulder like a mountain, only a few ghostly faces—pale and trembling violently—flickered intermittently.
They’re the only ones who survived?!
Imura suddenly thought.
From the unseen depths of the massive boulder within the mine shaft came a trembling voice.
It was Tsuchida.
There, the path leading out had been completely blocked by a mountain.
The lantern light did not reach there.

“Oh, a leg’s been torn off here!”
One of the young miners leapt up.

Earth soaked in raw-smelling blood clung to feet with an eerie clamminess.
Scattered about were meat chunks as if hacked apart, bones shattered into fragments, and viscera.
The pregnant woman—blown away while apparently striking something hard—lay in a corner gasping weakly, the breaths faint and labored.

Of the twenty-one, only seven bodies could be identified.

Of the seven, four were still fully alive.

Tae, who had been waiting in the abandoned mine, crawled down like a cat.

“Shibata!”

The miner, whose entrails spilled from his side onto the earth, twitched his one remaining leg.
They directed their lanterns and froze in horror.
The two men had half their bodies sheared off by the cave-in.

“They’re still breathing!
Hurry up!”

The supervisor, pushing through the crowd, shouted in a trembling voice.
When they placed their hands on the sides—slick with blood—to lift him onto the stretcher, the broken bones creaked.

“They’re still alive.”

The supervisor emphasized his point and repeated it.

The three corpses were transferred to stretchers.
They were then carried all the way to the vertical shaft and hoisted up one by one in cages.

If a death occurs in the mine, the body must remain untouched until an inquest officer and doctor arrive from the town police station.
Moreover, in cases of instant death within the mine, a lump-sum burial fee alone simply cannot suffice.
Therefore, the executives reclassify the deceased as severely injured and have them carried to the hospital.
This had become their standard method.

“How pitiful!”
The miners walked while carrying stretchers and shed tears.
“Their bodies are torn to pieces—there’s nothing left to recognize.”

“This ain’t just somebody else’s problem!”
“This is what happens when they’re too damn stingy to use proper support pillars!”
Takematsu muttered while covering the deceased with his coat.
“I can’t take this anymore today! It’s like we’ve been murdered on purpose!”

“At the very least, I wanna get 'em even a single penny more for their sake!”

Outside the mine, tense wives huddled together, tormented by anxiety and fear.
The wives of the casualties were wiping their tear-filled eyes.
The three stretchers passed through an area where cold air blew out and emerged into the dazzling exterior of the mine.
There, the sunlight that the deceased had always longed for poured down generously.
The wives of the deceased clung to the bloody stretchers from within the crowd.

“Chieko-san’s aunt died.”

“Hey!
“Be quiet!”

The mother was scolding the heedless child.

Imura started at Three-legged Pine-san Matsuzan’s wildly glaring gaze of frantic desperation fixed upon him.

“Is my Ichizo all right?”

Not a shadow or trace of Ichizo had entered his vision.
Imura lowered his eyes, sighed, and passed by Matsuzan toward the hospital.

“Is Ichizo all right?”

Matsuzan’s voice, trembling with anxiety, echoed behind Imura once more, carried by the stretchers arriving afterward.

……

There too, the miner sighed and lowered his eyes.

“Is my Ichizo all right?!”

When Takematsu entered the hospital operating room reeking pungently of carbolic acid, he casually asked, “Doctor, if someone’s side gets sliced off and their stomach has a hole, can they survive even a minute?”

“Of course it’s instant death.”

The doctor answered.
Takematsu was suddenly brimming with energy.

“So, Doctor, on Mori and Shibata’s death certificates, you’ll write that they died instantly in the mine, right?”

“I wasn’t in the mine at the time.”
His tone grew evasive.
“Since the supervisor had them hauled all the way there like this, they might’ve still been alive then, of course.”

“If you saw it as instant death, then writing it exactly as you saw it would be fine, wouldn’t it?”

There was no reply.

“When we went to check, there was already no breath left.”

“If only it were Dr. Murakami!”
In a corner, a thumbless miner whispered.
Dr. Murakami had come to the mine hospital three years prior, stayed about four months, and was dismissed.
That Murakami too was by no means a doctor who particularly sided with the miners.
He simply never distorted the facts as they were.
And fairly, he would let miners or child laborers into the first-class ward whenever it was unoccupied.
Even his mere refusal to distort the facts and his fairness alone were as precious as a parent to the miners.
But precisely because of that, in this mine, it immediately became grounds for expulsion.

“Damn!”

As they returned to the mine, they burned with even fiercer hatred toward the doctor.

“If the town were closer, we’d haul ’em to another doctor and show ’em what’s what!”

“What’s the use? It’d be the same damn thing no matter who we show ’em to!” Takematsu spat out hatefully. “Just you wait! I ain’t gonna let this slide for free!”

The pregnant woman was later recorded in the medical log as having died from "concussion."

V

This time, they had to dig out fourteen people pinned beneath a mountain-like collapse.
Tsuchida, who had been trapped in the pitch-dark side tunnel deep within the cavern, crawled across the landslide of rubble, trembling with fear that a second cave-in might strike at any moment, hunched his body small, and scrambled out.

Three-legged Pine-san Matsuzan descended from the cage and entered the mine.
He pressed his ear against the massive ore deposit, straining to detect even the faintest groan from his son.

“Ichizo! Ichizo!”

He called out loudly again and again.
There was no response at all.

"It's no use!"
He slumped.
But immediately after, he kept calling out again, "Ichizo! Ichizo!" to his son.

From there came neither groans nor death rattles—nothing could be heard at all. Only the compressed air leaking from iron pipes kept hissing without end.

“There’s no way through this!”

He was so dejected he buried his head between his shoulders.

The bereaved families who had gathered turned deathly pale with panic, yet clung to the faint hope that their loved ones might still be alive within the bowl-shaped depression. They staked everything on this improbable chance. In truth, before collapsing, the ceiling had been hollowed out at its center like an upturned bowl during excavation.

They set about digging them out. The miners found themselves unable to break through the rocks with pickaxes and shovels. Then new rock drills arrived, and sacks of dynamite were lowered down.

From the high, pitch-black new ceiling, gravel and sand clattered down in a relentless cascade.
Each time, they ducked their necks as if recoiling from a bullet’s whizzing aftermath.

Matsuzan threw away his two wooden crutches and grabbed a chisel and hammer.
He could not work standing up.
And squatted.
He cushioned the stump of his single leg with rags to avoid pain.

The rocks were gradually broken apart.
Each time the glinting pyrite burst apart, flattened feet and rock drills crushed flat emerged from beneath.
When broken legs began to appear, they could not bring themselves to spur on.

“Dig! Dig! Dig from under the rocks!”

With pickaxes and shovels, carefully avoiding cutting into the corpses, they dug beneath the fallen rocks. The stench of foul blood and crushed flesh wafted anew.

“Ichizo! Ichizo!”

The lame old man kept calling. But from there, no groans or shouts could be heard at all.

“Ichizo!
“Ichizo!… There’s no way through this!”

Matsuzan's voice conveyed a mournful reverberation through the dimly lit cavern.
Imura turned his face away.

The foul stench grew even more intense.

“Ah—Old Man Yasuke.”

The old man who had been wary of cave-ins was literally pulled out, his skull and pelvis flattened like dried squid into boards.

The daughter who had been waiting in the darkness behind suddenly leaned against the crushed corpse of the old man and began to cry.

“Don’t cry.”
“Don’t cry.”
“Crying now won’t change anything.”

Takematsu, thinking it wouldn’t do for tears to fall on the corpse, grabbed the daughter’s shoulder and pulled her back.

“Don’t cry.”

However, even as he said this, he himself was tearing up.
Then, another miner was pulled out. His bones were shattered to pieces like a flattened crab.
As they transferred him to the stretcher, his shattered remains threatened to scatter into pieces.

They forgot both hunger and fatigue.
They couldn’t tell whether it was night or day.
They were desperate to dig out their comrades.

As two, then three were dug out, the hope that someone might still be alive in the bowl-like depression gradually faded away.
There appeared those who looked like papier-mâché dolls crushed vertically from the head while still standing, ××, and a woman whose voluptuous body had been completely flattened, identifiable only by her tangled hair.

Three-legged Pine-san pressed his nose against and sniffed each corpse as it was pulled out, calling his son’s name.
He shuffled forward on his leg wrapped in rags, using a rock drill and swinging a hammer.

At last, they had managed to dig out only nine.
But Ichizo had still not been found.

Company executives entered.
And they ordered everyone to exit the cave.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“It’s an inspection. Some pain-in-the-neck inspector from the Mining Supervision Bureau has shown up.”
“If they see a place like this, it’ll be a disaster.”

“But there are still five of our comrades left here!”

“Ah, what’s the difference? They’re already dead anyway—so what if digging them out gets delayed by two or three days?”

VI

They were concealing from the Mining Supervision Bureau’s inspectors the dangerous areas, sections lacking support pillars or barriers, and parts where water was seeping out.
They had been shamelessly using spliced broken hoisting cables for seven months.
Every time the miners rode the cage to ascend or descend, they couldn’t help but shudder.
They never knew when the splice would snap with a pop.
The hoisting cable had been replaced with a new one.
The entrance to the abandoned shaft was sealed.
In the vertical and inclined shafts branching off from the horizontal tunnels, they hastily nailed log barriers.
The cedar support pillars had been lowered by cage in such a haphazard manner that they were causing storage problems.
The support workers fitted the cedar logs upside-down against sections prone to collapse.

Ami was running around inside the mine to cover up the flaws.

When Three-legged Pine-san reluctantly followed everyone out from Shaft No.8, workers immediately brought a wall to block the tunnel midway.
Matsuzan emerged last, leaning on his crutch as he shuffled forward unsteadily.
His face contorted with grief, only his eyes glittering in the miner’s lantern light.

“Don’t they always make us work in nothing but dangerous spots? Let’s show them those very places without hiding a thing!”

“That’s right, that’s right.”

“Those bastards only care about putting on a fucking show for appearances! They didn’t give us proper supports, so the whole damn thing caved in! Leaving it like that for a whole five or six days! Anyone who can spout that shit with a straight face ain’t fucking human!”

“Bastards!”
“Let’s expose everything to the inspectors!”
“They’ve gone to such creepy lengths to pretty things up!”

They had nowhere to direct their discontent and anger.

When the inspector went up, they threw the half-emptied waste buckets back into the abandoned shaft.
They knocked off the inclined shaft barriers and newly installed support pillars one after another.
They also broke down the wall that had been piled up midway in Shaft No. 8.
Three-legged Pine-san shuffled unsteadily past that spot and entered the cave where his son had been crushed.
After the support pillars were removed, the collapsed rocks and soil came avalanching down with a deafening roar as the pillars were knocked out.

“I wish we could show them these spots!”

Around eleven o'clock, Imura came up to the mine entrance.
And waited for the inspector to come in.
Near the riverside public hall, there was a sense that a considerable number of people had gathered, and something like a song could be heard.

Today, he could finally expose everything and show the inspector just how dangerous the mine was.
He could show them just how many regulatory violations they’d committed.—He thought about how many people had died inside the mine.
It was as if they were treating human lives and copper as interchangeable.
Back when they hadn’t installed the cage yet, grandmother and mother would climb ladders with steps carved into logs—carrying heavy ore on their backs from depths of three hundred or even four hundred feet below.
It was no easy task even to climb the three-hundred-foot ladder with just one’s own body.
And yet, they carried heavy ore on their backs.
They were forced to arch their backs backward under the weight of the ore.
Hands and feet were terribly tired.
They endured and endured again as they climbed.
But when they had managed to reach the third or fourth ladder rung, they could endure no longer—misstepping with their feet, losing the strength in their hands to support their bodies—and fell.
The person above began to fall onto the head of the person climbing up from below.
Then, the person below was dragged down by it, and the two fell together.
The person below was dragged down again.
While falling, they struck the jagged rocks protruding within the mine.
Before they reached the pit bottom, their breasts, arms, waists, and stomachs were struck against jagged rocks and torn apart.
And then, they were crushed to dust.
It became impossible to tell which hand belonged to whom, which foot or head was whose—they were scattered into such disarray. Who knows how many times such things had happened.

That had been kept hidden from inspectors since long ago.
His grandfather had died when a pit prop falling from a hundred feet above crushed his waist.
The old man had been done in by overwork.
His mother and her sister had also died in the mine.
From a terribly high point in the vertical shaft, a stone about the size of a thumb came whistling down and struck her.
At the same moment, as if struck by a rifle bullet, she collapsed.
The stone pierced through her skull and entered her cerebellum.
How many tens—hundreds—of people had died digging out copper!
When he thought of that, even an inch of copper wire or a single copper kettle seemed tinged with miners' blood.

A cold, moldy-smelling wind whistled out from the depths toward the mine entrance.
There, Imura waited for the inspector.
The presence of people and songs from the public hall gradually grew louder and clearer.
The collapsed section of Shaft No. 8 was visible beneath the rocks.
He anticipated taking the inspector there.
The Mine Superintendent and the section chief would turn pale and start to panic.
Serves you right!
The group inside the mine were proceeding smoothly with their plan to expose everything.
Just exposing the executives’ hypocrisy would be unimaginably satisfying.

They waited until two o'clock.
Takematsu, unable to wait any longer, came out to the mine entrance to check the situation.

“Hey, you.”
Takematsu brought his mouth close to Imura’s ear and whispered in a low voice.
“Either way, if we expose ’em, we’ll just get kicked outta here.”

“It’s all or nothing.
So what if we get kicked out? I don’t give a damn.”

“No—right now, everyone needs to stick together tight as one.”
“Even if they try to boot us out, we ain’t lettin’ ’em!”

The others also came up to the mine entrance.
The inspector still showed no sign of coming.

“Are they—coming soon?”
Tae, wearing monpe pants, came running out with a broad smile.
“They’ve even reattached the cage’s rope back to the original spliced one.”

“Today’s the day—damn it—I’ll show them every last thing.”

“No matter how many of us die, the burial costs don’t even amount to a single trolley-load of ore. As long as they can dig out the rocks, the company doesn’t give a damn what happens to us.”
“Those bastards! They think ore’s more important than human lives!”

“Hmm, you’re right. But today’s the day I’ll get my revenge!”
“Just you wait!”

The miners fixed their eyes from the mine entrance at the mountain’s base toward the riverside public hall.
Shichigorou—scrawny and nimble as fire tongs—crossed the plank bridge and bounded off toward the public hall to investigate the situation.

“Hey! They’re drinking! They’re drinking!”

With a laugh that sounded crushed underfoot, Shichigorou came scrambling back.

“What’re they drinking?”

“The damn execs all gathered ’round the inspector drinkin’!”

“They ain’t even checked the sortin’ plant or smelter yet!”

“Still drinkin’ though.”
“Drinkin’.”

“Tch!”
“They’re tryin’ to chase ’im off with booze.”
“Goddamn bastards!”

At 3:30, Ami came from the public hall.
His thick-lashed eyes had turned red from alcohol.

“Hey! They’ve already left, so go on back! Go on back!”
He crossed the plank bridge and called out from afar with a sly yet gleeful laugh.

“Damn it! So there’s no inspection anymore?”

“It’s finished.”

“Without even coming to inspect, how the hell did they finish it?!”

“They looked at the rough diagram and wrapped it up.”
“Bastards!”

“Bastards!”

The miners stood there blankly for a while.

From the mine entrance, they could see five or six roofed trolleys carrying inspectors and executives descending the bridge downstream.
The trolleys glided smoothly along the tracks as if delighting in their descent down the mountain.
Imura felt how his attempt to show the inspectors the true dangers they faced in the mine had been utterly outmaneuvered.
Bastards!
Those inspectors were completely useless!
They'd been completely useless from the start!
He finally swallowed that bitter truth.
He came to understand that even colluding with executives would never make them allies of ours.

“Now they’re off to S Town for a second round!”

Ami, still wearing that sly yet self-satisfied smile, belched repeatedly—liquor-tainted breath gusting into the miners’ faces.

(October 1929)