Pathway to Japanese Literature

We turned left into Tverskaya Boulevard.
At the corner Central Publishing Office，advertisements for publications in Turkestani script were posted；in the afternoon，passersby crowded around the display window to gaze endlessly at models of human and cat internal organs.
A driver of a hackney sleigh wearing a green，round Tatar hat gazed at the crowd from within his white beard.

The construction of the Central Telegraph Office was nearly complete.
Snow covered the storage shed for materials.
The mushroom-shaped roof of the corrugated iron guardhouse was also frozen white.

—Davai! Davai!
Davai!

Six horse-drawn sleighs lined up and entered a side street.
They were loading cement bags.
They were let in one by one through the construction site’s gate.
The guard slung his rifle over the shoulder of his long overcoat.

Crunching February snow under his boots, the guard walked to the right.
He walked to the left.
However, he did not stray far from his sentry post and whistled.
There was a gap between shifts—
When he abruptly raised her head from her shoulder—the woman who'd danced with him that Sunday—the guard spotted two women walking along the opposite sidewalk.
Striding across the snow—forgetting for an instant that he was trampling over the memory of his woman—the guard kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.

—Chinese women?—

One woman was dressed entirely in black.
One woman was dressed entirely in brown.
Moving their lips protruding from fur collars, they spoke words incomprehensible to the guard, and the woman in black let out a loud laugh.

The guard adjusted his rifle and continued to watch the women’s retreating figures.

The vista of the city's flat buildings.
A single balcony, unquestionably added later, jutted out meaninglessly into midair.
Below,

Hotel Passage

An electric-lit signboard was displayed.
On a morning when an early spring storm arose over the Baltic Sea, this signboard swayed.
And it creaked.
Pushing open the Hotel Passage's absurdly heavy door—adorned with a yellow paper menu—with her body, the woman in black entered first.
Then, the woman in the brown coat also entered.
—Bang!

A meat bun vendor arrived.
The steam from the portable oven he had hung from his chest scattered in the draft from the door.
Simultaneously, the warm smell of meat buns scattered along with the steam.

Within the folds of the guard’s provincial brain, the impression of the Asian women’s flat faces blurred.
Only a vague sense of curiosity lingered in his nerves.
Just then, the sled horse that had stood there endlessly raised its tail and performed its excretory function with slow contentment.
On the rain gutter of the opposite roof—damp with snowmelt—Moscow’s sparrows alighted and stared intently at the steaming fresh fodder that had fallen between the sturdy horse’s hind legs.

At the end of the hotel's fourth floor lay the Japanese women's room.
A windmill palm stood in the entryway.
From there stretched seventy-two steps to their room, a coarse black-red-green floral-patterned carpet winding upward.
There was no elevator.
Moscow teemed with elevators that existed but never moved.
The Japanese women climbed at least two hundred and eighty steps daily.
Each time they passed before the office.
The office's white door bore a blue glass handle like those in Mitsukoshi's stationery department, its posted hours reading from the eighth to twelfth hour.
Another sign hung below listing fourteen to twenty-two o'clock.
Lenin's large photograph gazed down upon new Moscow's way of life.

When looking down from the fourth-floor railing, they could see from a single distant plane: the spread green treetop of the windmill palm in the entryway, the table half-hidden in its shadow, and even the bowed back of a woman putting on her slippers.
Because of the windmill palm, people couldn't die even if they threw themselves from there.

One of the Japanese women peered down from there many times during the day.

When night fell, two small flower-shaped electric lights came on.
The corridor was quiet.
Often the maid would bring a chair near the handrail and do drawn-thread work on calico fabric.
The maid was thin.
Chestnut hair was tightly curled into ringlets.
She wore a maroon jacket and small earrings.
The Japanese woman leaned against the handrail and spoke with her using the grammar abandonment method.

“It’s cold tonight.”

It was cold!
“And your room?”
“Isn’t it warm?”

“The room’s warm, of course!”
“Aren’t you cold here in the corridor?”
“Is your home warm?”

“It was warm.”
The setting sun streamed in.
“The room was warm, but summer would be unbearable.”

“The western sun isn’t good for you.”

“It isn’t good.”

“Are you healthy?”
“You.”

“My lungs are bad.”
“Second stage—do you understand?”
“What I’m saying.”
“Here—the lungs—you see?”
“I don’t have any skills, so I can’t do other work.”

The sanatoriums were full.
Were there people with lung problems in Japan?
The flu had left such a parting gift.
When she reached stage three, she would probably be able to enter a sanatorium.
They would have such conversations.

A plain round clock hung on the white corridor wall and struck the hour above their heads every thirty minutes.
There were times when the Japanese woman would lie awake in bed and listen to that clock’s chimes until six o’clock.
Moscow of snow and soot, where beauty dwells amidst squalor—the sunrise in this oddly cozy Moscow arrives at seven-thirty.

Moscow’s population, which had been 1,028,000 in 1920, increased to 2,018,000 by 1926.
As a result, in Moscow, four households came to live in rented rooms with only one kitchen each, all elementary schools adopted a two-shift system, and Y and I had already been living in a single hotel room for two months.
Every day, on the blue serge of the office countertop, we placed six rubles for lodging and a ten percent tax.
The Torusutofuka clerk sitting by the safe handed over a receipt.
On its backside were printed hotel regulations stating fees must be paid daily and accumulated balances would incur higher taxes.
The fact that either I or Y would suddenly remember at 9:50 PM and dash downstairs to settle payment was only natural under such circumstances.
The rented rooms were full.
Vacant hotel rooms existed.
That Y and I kept sharing one room—living together, reading together, even breathing each other’s carbon dioxide on nights when ventilation failed—stemmed chiefly from our meager funds matching Moscow’s overcrowding.
Through habits formed since our Trans-Siberian journey, we banished mutual awareness from our nerves while enduring Moscow’s interminable winter nights.
Yet I could not write.
Y could not freely practice pronunciation.
This was inconvenient.
Moreover, since our rigid finances dictated this inconvenience,Y and I forfeited any right to hysteria against each other.
I sorted through my inward-turning hysteria while contemplating a blue-checked tablecloth resembling provincial handkerchief fabric.

Within my chest, Japan began to pulse—inexplicably throbbing in a place exceedingly close to my heart. I could no longer sit silently with my cheek propped in my hand, idly twisting the frayed hemp threads of the tablecloth. I called Y.

She turned toward me from within that thick, striped, masculine-looking overgarment—the one American women on the Trans-Siberian Railway had viewed with contempt. I jumbled together wise and foolish things and began to speak. Before long, Y too turned her chair around and advanced with her usual tactic: “No, that’s not it.” As for how much and what we talked about afterward—only the hotel’s pale green walls know.

At that moment, a bell clamored shrilly at the maid’s station in the corner of the hotel corridor.
In front of the cupboard, the maid transferred the bedbug repellent meant for the Indian poet’s room into a sprayer.
The maid set it down below and went through the closed door of the Japanese woman’s room to the neighboring chamber.

Three minutes later, a hulking waiter resembling a sea monk—wearing a white apron and gray shirt—grabbed the handrail and came clambering up the stairs two steps at a time from below.
He was not young.
He was fat.
He was out of breath.
While letting in air with an old sulfetka, he opened Room 62 adjacent to the Japanese woman’s.
The hotel was packed with Profintern representatives.
There too were Profintern representatives!
Here too were Profintern representatives!
The Profintern representatives slept on the sofa in their boots.
The Profintern representatives’ meals were free.
The narrow dining room of the hotel—which normally had white paper spread over its tables and was decorated with colored wood-shavings flowers—would have proper cloth tablecloths laid across the dining tables when Profintern representatives were present.
Neatly folded new sulfetka and the better-quality knives and forks—shiny and heavy in their matching set—were always lined up no matter when you looked.
The sea monk-like waiter had to hoist large trays or, with empty hands, constantly flutter his white apron as he made his rounds filling the delegates’ stomachs.
He was displeased.

The Japanese woman wanted to drink tea.
The Japanese woman opened the door and stuck half her body out into the corridor.
The neighboring room’s door was also open.
There were voices of several people noisily ordering their respective meals and those of the sea monk-like waiter answering repeatedly with “Understood.”
Finally when he emerged into the corridor and she tried to speak up—another delegate shouted from inside after him:

“Bring Narzan!”

“……Understood…………………”

Y went out to Moscow First University to gaze at Professor Pereverzev’s mouth.
Though Pereverzev’s chin was enveloped in a salt-and-pepper beard, his literary criticism was not outdated.
Yet there were difficulties for Y.
This was because, just as all literary criticism books were printed in unusually difficult-to-read typefaces unlike novels, so too upon the lectern did Pereverzev’s words fail to harmonize with Y’s hearing.
Even so, Y bared her black bobbed hair from Japan in the lecture hall still littered with garbage.
And she would listen to what was presumably being discussed—aristocratic literature, middle-class literature, and folk literature in nineteenth-century Russia.

I remained in the hotel room during that time.
I attempted to voraciously utilize the precious solitary time.

And then, I would do elementary Russian conversation with Madame B.—

Since coming to Moscow, there was one thing I had deeply felt.
That was how thoroughly modern USSR had established tourist guides for foreign travelers.
Alight at Moscow Station.
If it was before three in the afternoon, he should hire a taxi and go straight to the Society for Foreign Cultural Relations on Malaya Nikitskaya Street.
Walk toward the corner desk in the lower hall of what was originally a wealthy merchant's residence.
There sat a beautiful 27-year-old woman with black hair and large eyes.
If he spoke any language other than Japanese or Italian, from the very next morning at precisely when he finished his tea, a guide would be dispatched from the Society.
If he stayed in Moscow for two days then within those two days; if said to be one day then throughout that entire day—through these arrangements—he could be shown USSR-style tourism: factories, the Revolution Museum, basic elementary schools, peasant homes, and even 1928 Moscow customs lining the boxes of the Bolshoi Theatre at night.

At the Society for Foreign Cultural Relations, he spoke English with everyone.
He was provided with an English guide.
And then, for example, he went to the Red October Confectionery Factory.
He inspected the excellent facilities of the factory nursery; had someone show him around libraries and clubs; gazed at walls plastered with slogans he could not read; got explanations for those with notable phrases; and even flashed a charming smile typical of foreign women toward those working there—but what did any of that signify?
"Indeed, Russia has such facilities.
“Impressive indeed.” This was rather Grade A performance.

I could not be satisfied with guided tours of these facilities alone, which jutted like stepping stones from the deep waters of Soviet life.
From when I first read *Cossacks* to when I read *Twenty-Six Men and a Girl*, the interest and love for Russia that had taken root in my heart coalesced into resolve during those first three minutes after stepping from an icicle-hung train onto Moscow's streets one December night—those dimly lit streets where shadows of sledges and horses brushed against automobile windows.
I wanted to cast off my English as swiftly as possible.

I will not hurry through and see nothing.
I will speak through words used by those living before and behind me.
And gradually—gradually—I will approach life’s essence as lived by those I love.

At eight o'clock on a February night—emerging from a dining hall near Art Theater with some impression—the Japanese woman stepped out.
It was a strangely desolate house.
There was only a single Polish old man—looking as if a pistol had just been fired—who served in a suit.
As we were leaving, the house’s cat clamped Y’s glove between its teeth and scurried under the table.

When we emerged onto Tverskaya Street, the entire street seemed smoky, and gradually it grew thicker.

Fog.
Fog.

Fog was the trumpet heralding a change in weather.
When I went out into the city the next day, the sweat on all the sled horses' bodies had frozen into pure white frost.
The pedestrians' beards were also white.
The real "Red-Nosed Moroz" descended upon Moscow's streets.

At 3:30 PM, the sun was sinking.
A red, round arctic sun without a halo—like a fireball blown from a blast furnace—hung over snow-crusted roofs, while from a lone smokestack, black smoke spewed toward that crimson sun.

The brewery and its structures stood pure white.
Dark masses of people walked along.
Those people appeared small.

After five o'clock, Moscow's moon illuminated the town.
The golden dome of the church shone.
In a dark corner untouched by moonlight, sparks scattered between the knife sharpener's grindstone and meat cleaver, and the smell of heated metal hung in the air.

The interval between the sinking of the red sun and the rising of the bright thirteenth-night moon was astonishingly brief—the moon in the east, the sun in the west.
The allure of the northern city had seized me.

That, however, was a matter of celestial realms.

The streets—people in the evening dusk.
People.
People.
A female beggar walked clinging to the side of a woman wearing a squirrel-fur coat,

“Dear lady, miss—”
“For my little girl, please—just one kopek—for bread—” The woman walked on without so much as a glance.
On the shawl that the woman haggling with the apple seller’s old woman had draped over her head bloomed red and yellow roses.
Two Komsomolets came wearing leather coats fashionable in the USSR.
Noticing the Japanese woman—

“—From Shanghai—”

In their textbook was a poem titled "Lenin and Ritian."
At the Meyerhold Theatre: "Roar, China!"
Everyone talked about "The Red Poppy" at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Amidst these, the traditional "Madame Butterfly."
—Or perhaps an exceedingly cheerful "Chon kina, chon kina, chonchon kinakina."
Nagasaki, Yokohama, Hakodate—hoy!

There were also scenes like these.

Warm.
The large thermometer on the street corner read six degrees.
The snow on the street had softened into a heavy slush that was difficult to walk through.
Morning sunlight poured onto streets where horses labored with steam rising from their bodies amid poor footing.
The florist’s display window showed thawed flowers behind melted ice.
An old woman and one-legged man basked by a nearby wall.
Street vendors stood shoulder-to-shoulder along grimy sidewalks—
Newspaper stalls,
tobacco shops,
shoelaces with polish,
cheese stores,
cheap trinkets,
sweets,
mandarin carts.

—Davay!
Madam, good fresh mandarins!
“Twenty-five kopecks!”
“(in unison) Twenty kopecks!”
—Davay!

Through the crowd of people with baskets hanging from their arms walked an engineer in a light blue service cap.
A dog walked.
A child hung from the railing in front of the pharmacy’s display window, looking at a crudely made pessary.

Zigzagging through, I came to Nikitsky Gate.
A single apple seller was rearranging his goods right in front of me.
From behind him came a policeman.
The policeman said something as he withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket and casually lifted the large oval basket brimming with apples by one of its handles.
The apples nearly rolled onto the filthy snow.
The merchant hurriedly lifted the basket himself.—The policeman thrust both hands back into his pockets and walked off.
The street vendors too stood lined up, arching their chests under the weight of apple baskets as they amiably turned their faces toward the policeman, chatting, laughing, and moving along.—When they had walked a short distance, an empty sled emerged from a side alley as if to block their path.
Seeing this, the apple seller dodged the policeman by a single step, then suddenly brushed past the sled horse’s muzzle, clutched his heavy basket against his stomach, and—staggering yet with remarkable deftness—vanished into the crowd on the opposite sidewalk.
The policeman turned around; in the space of the roadway, alongside something like a miso strainer that had been dropped, his smile still lingered.
The back of the birch-colored coat was no longer visible.—

I couldn't help but laugh.
This was so Russian.
And so peasant-like.
There was something humorous about how skillfully he had pulled it off that made me laugh spontaneously.
Those who had stopped on the sidewalk to watch were laughing too.
The policeman didn't even attempt pursuit, gazing expressionlessly toward where the apple seller had fled before walking off toward the intersection with hands still in pockets.
The miso-strainer-like object was picked up by some peddler woman.

Ropshin had to commit suicide.
From a political standpoint, he himself would not have failed to anticipate such an unfortunate end.
But he could no longer live without Russia.
That’s why he came back instead.
And he died.
Where did the cause of his intense homesickness lie?

And there was John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World.
He died of typhus in southern Russia during the famine era.
John Reed possessed not only the acumen of an astute American journalist but also harbored a deeply personal love and interest in Russia and its new life.
In Ten Days That Shook the World, he wrote with clinical detachment, interposing no personal views, yet through the thoroughness of his documentation and the striking systematization of records, we discern the depth of his fascination with—and comprehension of—Russia.
What exactly is this charm of Russian life that captivated him, drew us in, and scarcely lets us look away?

I felt it.

On Moscow's old, narrow streets.
Amidst the crowds.
Or upon the squeaking boots of Profintern delegates striding across shabby hotel carpets.
Swiss travelers saw the Alps and blue lakes and forests.
Above all else, nature's beauty would act upon them, compelling each according to their talents to write their impressions—whether as tricolor postcards or prose poems.
Russia possesses no scenic views of this sort.
In Moscow, should one become interested in an eighteenth-century icon set within an old temple's outer wall niche, they must simultaneously register the presence of an old woman beneath that very wall selling sunflower seeds in a cup for three kopecks.
The icon's antiquity; the soiled cloth wrapped about the old woman's head; the swift movement of black stockings on a leather-coated female Communist Party member cutting across her path—such contrasting cross-sections of life came rushing into view at a glance.
If one were but a vivid living being who absorbed these life fragments leaping into their senses as scenery, then perceiving within them some nascent national ethos stirring into motion would follow as natural course.

One time, I was sitting in Hotel Savoy’s dining room.
Hotel Savoy specialized in foreign travelers—the elevator attendant would say “Please sit down” in English, and the head waiter wore a white necktie.
Before me lay salmon topped with black ikura and lemon, along with sake.
They were all Japanese.
People engaged in semi-official professions; some had begun their careers’ very first steps in Russia years prior.
Discussions comparing pre- and post-revolution Russia arose, and while my mind filled with countless questions about these arguments, eventually one person spoke in a tone seething with resentment.

“Anyway, Russia is a quagmire—once you step in, you’ll never get out. As proof, there’s not a single soul who’s made money doing business in Russia. Loss after loss—and yet somehow you still can’t pull your feet out of Russia. It’s a quagmire, I tell you.”

This statement affected my emotions with the same pleasant sensation as an infant's foot kicking against its mother's chest.
Amused, I laughed and agreed: "That's true."
I felt and knew Russia's depth—the very depth that angered him, along with its magnitude and weight.
And I, in complete opposition to him, loved that national depth of Russia with near passion.
This depth and magnitude, I thought, formed the primary germ of the allure that drew and captivated us thus.
Ropshin must have been unable to find this particular depth in France or Switzerland.
Had not John Reed's young American eyes comprehended this depth, recognizing within it the breeding ground of all the nation's genius and scandal?
The catchphrase that had circulated abroad alongside literature as the so-called essence of Russian character—the pre-1917 "nichevo" (it's nothing),
or "onaji kotta" (same old story)—
All the red elements and dynamic phenomena emerging post-revolution were, from certain angles, partial developments arising from this depth and magnitude.

Depth.—But this word remains vague.
To me, depth seems to have varieties.
Imagine a film subtitle reading "The Depths of Africa's Primeval Jungle."
We inevitably picture darkness beneath trees soaring from ground level high above our heads.
Deep.
But deep upward.
The depth possessed by the Russian people plunges downward into bottomlessness.
Take the apple seller at Nikitsky Gate who nimbly dodged a policeman's fine—the expressions of bystanders watching this scene, the very air they exhaled—all carried the bottomless depths of their collective psyche crashing into my observing heart.
Among those present that day, not one spectator attempted to judge this trivial incident through moral standards or civic order.
I can declare this with certainty.
A Russian's heart does not stir in such ways.
They comprehended everything—the apple seller's bumbling yet precise escape, the policeman's refusal to give chase—as reflections of their own hearts, laughing together.
Good and evil were discarded.
Introduce one German and the atmosphere shifts.
He would apply deductive reasoning to any incident's smallest corner.
Some rationale would inevitably emerge.
This upward depth—this vertical profundity—must explain why Germans spawned philosophers from pinnacle to dregs and Karl Marx himself.

The Russian people possessed no tools to first receive their lives through the head or on the verge of the heart - neither British common sense nor Japan's so-called giri (social obligation). Deeply, deeply, until life directly touched their very souls, it was allowed to seep into their inner being. When his soul touched it, what would he cry out? To what extent would he cry out? That he himself would never know. This was a highly intriguing national characteristic. The reason all the people in Gorky's The Lower Depths remained fascinating lay there. They possessed not a single shred of what was called scholarly learning. But there existed a philosophy of life. Vast, varied lives ceaselessly touched their souls and made them cry out. Life and each individual's character lived intertwined without intermediaries. Therefore, in Russia, it was not uncommon for a child raised like a beggar's offspring to someday learn letters and, following his deeply sensitive soul, become a fine writer. For example, what had been the parents of the author of Cement? They were Volga itinerant laborers. In his childhood, Gladkov had not been given a single shred of what was called education. However, as he lived on, the trials and joys of life surrounding him awakened his soul again and again, until finally they compelled him to write. In Japanese translation advertisements, Dostoevsky was always branded as a humanitarian writer, but when one observed the surrounding life here, it became clearly evident that Dostoevsky himself had written without such intent. He had simply bared his morbid yet sensitive soul and sunk deeper and deeper into the bottomless depths of the Russian life he inhabited. Dostoevsky's characters were by no means abstract fabrications.

Even if one were to extract the most abnormal individual from his works, in Russia such a person could indeed exist.
If Dostoevsky were to be criticized, it would be for how his own morbidity renders the contours of his characters so shudder-inducing.
It was not that he depicted falsehoods.

I was a foreigner.
I knew nothing of old Russia.
In what was then the most dynamic period of Russian national history—this fast-paced modern era—I lived amidst Moscow's teeming crowds.
Yet even so, there were moments when I felt Russia's terrifying depth closing in on me.
To put it plainly: when in Russia one discards prejudice and turns one's soul toward the life existing there—even as Gospels give way to historical materialism—I came to feel that survival demanded choosing either Dostoevsky's path of casting off lifebelts to sink endlessly into life's bottomless depths, or Tolstoy's way of relentlessly pursuing that first great existential question seized by the soul until hammering life upward from beneath one's own feet.
Thus did Russian life impose itself upon even a traveler's soul—demanding fierce emotions, rigorous thought, and if one willed it, formidable resolve.
Pilnyak had written a travelogue laying bare his disagreeable experiences in Japan.
Within it I found intriguing his phrase suggesting that "Japan repels Europeans."
Russia stood diametrically opposed to this.
Once drawn into its embrace, whether through one's own strength or through submersion, Russia's extraordinarily deep and vast complexity would pull one ceaselessly into its fathomless depths.

There existed a certain scene where Russia’s depth—this bottomless soul—stood as historical testament. One emerged into Red Square from either the stone bridge where Chekhov was said to have listened to Moscow’s temple bells ringing all at once on Easter night or from Hunter’s Row near the Kremlin.

The square's snow lay frozen flat and far.
At the base of the Kremlin walls stood a brown Lenin Mausoleum.
A stand for use during state celebrations had been constructed.
Now it stood empty there.
Within the fence of Lenin’s Mausoleum, the snow lay especially deep.
Where the heads of young evergreen trees emerged from the snow, a sentry stood with fixed bayonet.
Whether they would enter or not, the coats of the crowd near the fence were black.
The large clock on the Kremlin’s gate tower rang every fifteen minutes over the snowy square, and there stood a red-and-white striped sentry box of somewhat stylish design.
From that gate, looking into the city, there was only a vast expanse of sky.

The scenery here was odd.
Why did this Kremlin gate—so impressively framing nothing but sky—have to open in a straight line toward the square's execution platform?
The execution platform was circular and tall.
A parapet surrounded it.
On one side was an entrance, and from the stone steps could be seen a small platform where the person to be executed would extend their neck and a tangle of chains in the snow.
Since Pugachev’s time, countless human heads had been struck off upon this platform with the emperor’s executioner’s axe.
Judgment was "like God."
Was this a symbol of judgment being delivered from this empty gate down to the execution platform?

From the Kremlin walls, golden crosses and imperial emblems stood densely toward Red Square and the execution platform.
They resembled shrieks.
When one looked around, crosses towered in almost every direction of the sky encircling Red Square from a distance.
The crosses in this square did not represent peace.
They spoke of terror.
They showed the terror of the people and the terror that had resided in the rulers' souls.
The crowd surged like the sea.
At the execution platform, the executioner’s axe had already been sharpened.
Blood would soak into the snow.
God!
Our Emperor-Father!
O Merciful Empress!
The castle walls were thick.
Those inside could not be seen.
The gate closed.
The comfort and answers for all were the golden crosses and eagles—would monks and soldiers provide them? (Or so one might ask.)

We saw the historical testament of a bygone era in 1928's Red Square with several times more realistic effect than at the Revolution Museum.
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The Tsar had erected many golden crosses atop the Kremlin walls and hidden himself from the people’s appeals.
It was written that Japanese rulers had surrounded the area regarded as the Imperial Palace with moats from the feudal era to separate themselves from the people.
Today, I cannot fill in the deleted characters.
Author’s Afterword) The willow of the moat is reflected in the water.
What is peeking out from the moat's stone wall?
A pine branch.
The pine branch, always deep green—the pine is a natural plant—what do humans feel when they look at pines?—...

He would come to realize one thing as if through divine revelation.
"This makes perfect sense.
That Russia had its October—
"and that today a single red flag had to fly high above these countless crosses and eagles—"
As a discerning traveler, he came to understand the unbearable weight that had pressed upon the Russian people.

As for this weight, even the modern Russian populace themselves had not forgotten it.
In Labor Newspaper's special graphic feature appeared a photograph of the 1912 Lensky Incident.
A strike had occurred at the Lensky Gold Mine.
The laborers who led it were arrested.
It was an incident where they opened fire without warning on a crowd of workers who had gathered demanding their release, killing 270 people.
When questions regarding this fact were raised in parliament, Interior Minister Makarov responded as follows.

“That’s correct.”
“It will continue to be so—indeed it will.”
This was a concise and cruel statement.
Yet one must note how such incomprehensible brutality paradoxically revealed the extraordinary capacity for leaps latent within the Russian people.
The depth and magnitude inherent in them—alongside their thick beards—possessed a disquieting spaciousness; if something could dwell within human hearts at all, this quality allowed both sacred and monstrous things to develop to their utmost limits.
Even such tyranny—too absurd to take seriously when merely described—never exceeded what their nation could bear while it persisted.
Through an ineffably Russian expansiveness—so long as tyrants’ lives didn’t churn everyone’s existence to its depths—those retaining room for both bread and patience in their souls never fretted over who dallied with whom in amber-paneled rooms.
“It’s not me.”
And they tenaciously endured.

When at last their souls had cried out day and night—"We can't endure this!"—how did they cast off the burdens on their backs?
They cast them off so violently that people across the world stood aghast with hair on end, soon erupting in collective outcry.
Russians become most terrifying when they rise up from some state groaning, "We can't endure this!"
He leaps.
With his utmost capacity, he leaps toward one pole or another—
Toward God or toward the Devil.
The people, in their innocence, seem unaware of this genius and terror within themselves.
I think every great and terrible moment in Russian history connects psychologically to this feverish populace's capacity for leaps within their goatskin coats.

If one can observe aspects of a people's character through their bathing practices, then the Russian bath stands unique.
It follows neither the Japanese method of boiling water in wooden tubs nor scientific approaches using thermometers while pouring heated water.
There exists a steam chamber.
In one corner rises a stone structure reaching chest height.
This stone gets heated.
This stone glows vermilion-hot.
Without warning comes water dashed against its surface.
Splash!
Steam erupts.
In moments the chamber fills with vapor.
Within this steam bath they purge Slavic sweat and oil—but proper stone-dousing requires technique.
One must bend low and hurl water upward against the heated mass.
Stand erect while pouring water,
and sudden steam strikes naked chests full-force.
People perish.
The heat swallowed by stone—the warmth held in stove bricks—this becomes Russian human warmth.

When this warmth passed through the vocal cords and emerged, we came to know what constitutes so-called Russian eloquence.
In matters of oratory too, they belonged to the school of life.
If one wished to make them lend an ear to words, one had first to draw examples from the long boots on their legs.
Poetic and elegant prose possessed no power whatsoever to captivate them.

Their hands were slow.
They did not strike readily.
A quick-tongued people.
They knew nothing of that Japanese sensibility where one falls silent precisely because many eyes are upon them.
They spoke precisely because they wanted as many people as possible to hear their assertions.
They spoke with earnestness and considerable skill.
Moreover, the people possessed a certain familiarity with and sensitivity to words that made them exceptionally good listeners.
Even amidst crowds, they would listen to whatever voice rose above the rest and jeer.
Or agree.
There was criticism.
This stood as one of Moscow's delightful urban characteristics—how this populace, half illiterate before the Revolution, had been trained in language and honed their talent for sifting words—a process I found deeply intriguing.
Had the Russian people not possessed this peculiar innate gift, revolutionary circumstances could never have unfolded as they did in 1917.
When you saw them erupt into Russian eloquence with voices trembling musically enough to rival Chaliapin's own, you heard others dismiss it as carefree nonchalance.
Yet here, the very substance of this nonchalance differed entirely.
Japanese carefreeness meant receiving all things lightly upon the heart's surface.
Or signified swift forgetting and utter indifference.

Russia’s Ivan could not do that. He had to go from Moscow to some village. He went to the station. The line for the ticket office snaked twice around the waiting room. Of course, he missed the train scheduled to depart at the appointed time. The next one looked doubtful too. The night deepened. But they would likely have things running again by tomorrow morning anyway. Thinking this way, persisting in waiting on his hemp sack without abandoning his original purpose—this was the carefreeness of Russia’s Ivan. Japanese carefreeness was—Ah! This one was startled. What a great person—let’s stop this, let’s quit this! How absurd! Rather than that, he’d go off somewhere—play mahjong or have a drink, depending on his preference.

The cooperative house built by Engineer Lyubakov stood on the corner of Kropotkinskaya Square.
On the crude wooden fence were affixed an enamel round address plaque and a square plaque.
The square plaque bore the postal address Moscow 34, while on the pillar of the wicket gate attached to the wooden fence hung a notice.
"No toilet inside the gate"—yet come evening or night, passersby would slip through the narrow gap of the wicket gate regardless.
Engineer Lyubakov lived in Room 9 of the cooperative house with his wife—dismissed three months earlier from the State Publishing House due to staff reductions—their child, his sister, a maid, and a pair of lodgers.
There were two large rooms and two small ones.
Kitchen. Bathroom.
Forty years later, the room would become Citizen Lyubakov's property.
Until two months prior, the lodgers had been a Persian man and an Odessa-born woman; the man's legal wife remained in Persia.
After their departure, the housewife drove out both the lingering passion and bedbugs from the eighteen-square-meter room and consulted the classifieds section of the Moscow Evening News.

The Japanese woman at Hotel Passage placed an advertisement.
The balcony of Lyubakov’s room and the maid Nadenka’s expression drew the Japanese woman in.
Lyubakov, in a striped shirt with the collar removed, typed up two copies of the contract on the typewriter.

Citizen Lyubakov’s balcony overlooked the crossroads square and the bus terminal.
In the center of the square stood an electric-lit clock.
Late at night, when the streetlights went out and darkness fell, only the clock still shone round and bright.
From her own window, the Japanese woman would sometimes read the numerals showing 2:30 AM through her opera glasses.

April arrived.
The red flag of the Kremlin visible from the window began fluttering vividly.
The sky was blue.
Small white clouds floated in the sky, and golden reflections flickered in the wardrobe mirror of the Japanese woman’s narrow room.
From the golden dome of the Christ the Savior Cathedral atop the hill across the thoroughfare, spring light reflected back.

Flew over Moscow City by aircraft—low, low.
And gazed down upon the city.
They would see Moscow City as an ancient religious mosaic studded with countless temples—with only the *Izvestia*’s illumination, absent by day, remaining—and nothing else.

The low-altitude obstacles that his pilot was carefully avoiding were neither the concrete flat roofs of office buildings nor chimneys.
They were the high spires of temples and glittering crosses.

Through the binocular lenses came a conclusion that even permeated his most peaceable common sense.
“Now this is something remarkable!”—and one recognized that the inevitable reason Ilyich had proclaimed religion to be opium lay particularly in the hearts of those who inhabited this Moscow.
Some small old chapels in Moscow’s backstreets captivated even passing travelers with a beauty utterly divorced from reason.
This was north, this was south—yet within Moscow’s chapels, those cluttered wax-smelling caverns where lamplight flickered in shadow, lay the beauty of a Tahitian girl’s naked dark skin—primal and unadorned—with pink flower clusters pressed into her hair.

On Easter night, all theaters and cinemas were closed, and the Bolshoi Theatre opera performers sang hymns at Christ the Savior Cathedral.

The Labor Newspaper wrote a commentary on this matter a week ago: “Where are the workers going? To church? The theater?”—this issue piqued our interest. Because workers received daily anti-religious education. How old ethnic festivals were to manifest in 1928 with new forms and content had to stand as a conspicuous wedge in USSR life.

A tram stopped at Arbat Square.
A beggar entered the tram.
He had no lower body.
The end of his torso was a square board; beneath the board were four water wheels.
He wore roller skates on both hands.

“Help me, this unfortunate soul.”
“Help me—”

He was young.
Eternal anger resided in his eyes.

A magazine vendor arrived.

“Crocodile!
The most interesting magazine, *Krokodil*!
5 kopecks!
*Krokodil*!”

The *Krokodil*, a prime example of Soviet ironic satire, was the Easter issue.
On the cover was such a picture.
A laborer in a green shirt walked over carrying a bucket filled with water, with a white cloth draped over his head.
He was asking the woman.

“Are you going to the club’s anti-religious lecture today?”

“Enough already with that kind of religion!
Going to the temple is much better—Feierberg is performing there today.”

On the eve of Easter, nearly all grocery stores had their bread and liquor shelves emptied.
The Japanese woman, who had not anticipated such a thing, had no bread.

Despite the Labor Newspaper’s editorial, on the evening of the fourteenth hundreds of candles were lit along all four walls of Christ the Savior Cathedral, and opera performers sang hymns.
A huge crowd packed the stone steps while handcart walnut sellers did brisk business on the frozen slope at two in the morning.

At clubs bearing Lyubakov’s name and throughout Moscow that night, bands played.
Komsomolets and Komsomolkas danced the Charleston.
The stage decorations in Lyubakov’s namesake club hall presented a burning-at-the-stake scene through red electric lights illuminating Bibles, crosses, and bishops’ miters.
Anti-religious satirical wall newspapers covered every surrounding surface alongside notices announcing “Dancing until 5 AM tonight.”
The tram ran packed through dark streets where even tobacco shops had closed.

On the marble paving stones of Christ the Savior Cathedral, a minor scuffle broke out among the crowd. A young woman draped in cloth, straining to catch a glimpse of the distant altar ceremony, seized a holy banner and hauled herself up onto its platform. An old woman—her face lit from below by candlelight cupped in her palm—grabbed the elbow of the woman's coat with one hand.

—What.
—Get down from there—perched up like that.

“Why?”

The old woman shot a sidelong glance at her companion and shrugged her bony shoulders.

“Because it might break.”
“In the first place, this isn’t a place to use as a foothold!”
“What a waste!”

“You’re not supposed to be standing on the altar!”

“It’s the same thing.”

A man standing while shielding his candlelight waved his hand toward the woman on the holy banner platform.

“Stop.”

The woman covered in cloth did not move; looking down at the surrounding crowd, she made a terrifying face. And then she hurled low, rapid-fire abuse. Another woman who had been holding onto the same holy banner quietly began to descend from there. The woman in white cloth seized her arm and would not let her descend.—It was certain that her upper body, along with the club’s new education, had shed Church Slavonic down to just below where her heart resided in her ribs. She did not acknowledge any religious mist rising from the holy banner, unlike the old woman and man standing there holding candles in their palms in an old-fashioned manner. The gold-embroidered flag flapping about was ultimately just a flag, and when its support precisely provided the forty-five-centimeter height she needed as a foothold, why should there be anything wrong with climbing up there? Especially when the support was sturdy enough to hold one or two women.

Starting over from the endpoint of her logic—yet I felt it in my Japanese heart, devoid of Greek Orthodoxy.
Why does she, so combative as befits a USSR citizen, desire a forty-five-centimeter foothold with such fervor?
Why couldn’t she be satisfied with gazing over the heads of the crowd at just the glow of the large candles swaying back and forth on the altar nearly fifty meters away and the tops of bishops’ miters?
There was something within her that revived with the tolling of bells—as many times as the number of Easter eggs she had eaten before the Revolution.
Something exceedingly subtle, something indefinable—that drives her onward.
Without making [her] clamber onto the holy banner platform and witnessing the spectacle of bishops bending and rising with crosses aloft, her soul—shed by one-third within the atmosphere of the USSR’s new culture—could find no satiety.

All power to the Soviets.

A red placard fluttered in the October wind over the city.
Since then, USSR slogans underwent various transitions, and by then red cloth even appeared at the curtain call of the former Bat Constellation Theater—now the First Satirical Theater.
White letters were on it.
The letters boldly proclaimed from left to right: "Toward industrialization!"
On May Day, all of Moscow’s city trams ceased operation.
In the city where automobiles and horse-drawn carriages had nearly vanished, flags, music, a red wave of an eight hundred thousand-strong procession, and choruses overflowed along both banks of the Moscow River.
On the ground: dust. In the sky: planes. Weaving through the cheerful throng, a single truck passed.
Two women rode on it and scattered leaflets.
The leaflets also scattered onto the sprouting linden tree roots beneath the Kremlin walls.
Scattered in disarray, the ink proclaimed "Industrialization!" in the spring light.
Industrialization!
Comrade!
Industrialization!! Hooray.

As a theatrical staging technique, the placards appearing at curtain calls were already beginning to lose their novelty—along with the method of actors abruptly emerging from the audience seats. Just as Russians' beloved black bread looms large, here everything existed in excessive abundance. From placards to actors leaping out from spectator rows—Moscow’s stages overflowed with such elements to the point of occasional absurdity. Yet contrary to expectations, these slogans constituted a far more critical vanguard of social consciousness than could be imagined in Tokyo—where none beyond 'Safety Day' slogans were known. Slogans did not merely indicate key policy points of their era. For instance: an American magazine journalist boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway bound for Berlin. In the international sleeper car he found himself idle. He took out his coin purse and tallied small change—calculating profit or loss from exchanging US currency in Harbin.

Looking closer, every Russian coin—from fifty-kopek silver pieces down to one-kopek coins—was stamped with the hammer and sickle emblem and inscriptions.
USSR—this was easy to understand.
Translated into English, it would be USSR.
The subsequent phrase began with the word "proletariat".
If he had carried even a single pocket Russian dictionary, he would have understood that every Russian coin jingling in his purse had been cast from molds stamped with Marx’s words: "Workers of the world, unite!"
The hundreds of plates in the Trans-Siberian Railway’s dining car also bore the hammer and sickle and this slogan.
If one sat in a Moscow hotel for several hours waiting for a train, they would see that every inkstand in the hotel had "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" embossed on its pen tray.
How many state-run hotels existed across all of Russia?
How many rooms did each hotel have?
When one considered that even these inkstands alone must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and when one considered that the USSR had passed a mere ten years since its revolution, the impression that came to his mind was no light matter.
He saw clearly with his own eyes that the regime meant—even at its smallest extremities—hundreds of thousands of newly cast inkstands upon which one could inscribe preferred slogans.
——The impression would linger in his mind even after arriving in Berlin and having his head scrambled by his dreadful German.

“Rationalization of production” and “Industrialization” were slogans of profound significance for the current USSR.
Russia was an agricultural country.
For every one worker there were eight peasants.

For grand purposes they initiated construction of a power plant and dam on the Dnieper River as a waterway connecting the White Sea to the Black Sea.
The dam would have a total length of 766.75 meters.
Upon completion it would see a remarkable increase in industrial efficiency across the entire USSR and would save at least five million tons of coal annually.
The payment for these generators required to realize all these beneficial outcomes meant several bags of wheat that had been indirectly exported.
The work of sowing wheat reaping it and packing it into bags was that of the peasants.
With their peasant souls appearing magnanimous yet wielding Balda’s wisdom—who even noticed Pushkin—never to be outwitted in their own affairs how did they comprehend these economic relations?

Until just before Easter, Moscow city struggled with a butter shortage.
The hotel’s butter slices gradually grew thinner, and a line of women and children carrying baskets stretched over a hundred meters from the dairy products storefront into the bitter cold.

“Why is there such a shortage of butter?”

――Because the country cows are sleeping.

The ones sleeping were not cows.
It was the hands of the peasants who kept cows that slept.
They refused to relinquish their homemade butter at the official rate of two rubles and forty kopecks per kilogram.
Yet even amidst this scarcity, beneath the shelves of privately-run stalls lay butter carefully wrapped in paper.
There was butter being sold at sixty kopecks for two hundred grams—or seventy.

Industrialization sought to install several motors along the banks of the Dnieper River.
From the basic hygiene practice of trimming nails to the highest ideological principles, the entire USSR had to rush toward this "cultural revolution."
In the fact that even Lenin had likely been bitten by bedbugs lay the unique nature of Russian culture.
Taking Moscow as their center, they sought to radiate the new culture in all directions.
Through theater productions, cinema screens, and club education—if someone who understood these observational essentials spent forty-five minutes at the state publishing house—they would comprehend how fervently the contemporary USSR strove to systematically disseminate knowledge ranging from the Radio Assembly Law to treatises on why two parties couldn't coexist in the USSR, all priced between three and fifteen kopecks.
Henri Barbusse’s new work could be read immediately in the twenty-five-kopeck Novel Newspaper even by factory comrades who knew no French.

In the remote mountains of the Caucasus, where there had been no writing system until now, a plan to create a new alphabet arose.
At the same time, a single letter from Siberia arrived in Moscow.
"There is not a single school yet in my village."
"We have to make do with oral learning and meager self-study as before."
"I hope we can be delivered from this situation at the earliest possible moment."
The Russian land was so vast.
To deliver culture even to the remotest regions, the center had to intensify its pressure—higher, ever higher.

The circular tree-lined avenues surrounding Moscow were now adorned with the fresh greenery of May. From Strastnaya Square to Nikitsky Gate, beneath the shelter of soft young linden leaves, waves of red, yellow, and navy placards billowed in the gentle breeze. Along both sides of the tree-lined avenue, vendor stalls stood in rows, each displaying their designed store names—"Agonyok," "Gosizdat"—beneath the fresh greenery. This was Moscow’s book market. The fresh green of linden trees; placards against the sky. The colors of the Constructivist-style stalls’ paint—all fresh. Passing through its archway, it drew in countless citizens. When sitting on a bench beneath the trees, there was a music to observing this bird’s-eye view of Moscow’s reading populace—men and women across all fields and ages, specimens ranging from professors, writers, laborers, and students to Party members who now strode boldly with picture books under their arms, future Pioneers—all set against the symphony of their motley attire. Ice cream vendors cheerfully did business in red, blue, white, and striped huts. Amid a vibrant scene where motifs from short stories or colorful satires glimmered in the sunlight, we could buy Veresaev’s *Apollo and Dionysus* for sixty-three kopeks and *The Liberated Don Quixote* for a mere twenty kopeks. How could one ever have imagined such a pleasant deluge of books from Maruzen’s second floor and the catalog of the defunct Borisov Bookstore!

The embodiment of the USSR's energetic engagement in the cultural revolution through printed materials was the poetry of Demyan Bedny.
The rotary press of Pravda Newspaper Company operated every day except Sundays and May Day.
Bedny's poetic works almost always accompanied the rotary press!
Bedny, dressed in a robe, spread out a newspaper.
Probably on page two's top-left corner, his poem from yesterday had been printed.
A photograph of a laborer killed in Warsaw on May 1st appeared.
He looked at it.
He felt.
A few lines of horizontal writing were penned.
The next day, that poem would appear in the newspaper.

At the other end participating in the cultural revolution existed labor correspondents and village correspondents.
"Correspondence requires facts tied to precise locations, times, and the lives of the masses."
"Avoid fantasies, empty revolutionary phrases, and foreign words."
"Always stick to facts."
A worker would take out another notebook, warm with body heat, from between their identification papers and club membership card; then, shaking a thick-tipped pencil over the paper again and again, would write about the gas poisoning at an indoor shoe factory where no safety devices had been installed.
How should one effectively use one thousand words?
While working on the third rewrite at the sole table in his semi-basement residence, at a dormitory elsewhere Milanov of the Komsomolets was debating colleagues.
He drank no alcohol.
He smoked no cigarettes.
Yet Milanov—this youth born in southern Tiflis—could not manage without flowers.
He bought a potted plant and placed it by the window.
Though the room had grown comfortable with that single potted flower, his comrades mocked him and threw it away.

“You’re bourgeois!”
“You’re such a delicate little miss!”
“Petty bourgeois mentality!”

But what exactly was this "petty bourgeois mentality"? Was preferring purity considered petty bourgeois mentality? M. Organovich had acknowledged the necessity of writing to the labor newspaper to combat this USSR-style prejudice.

Kōriya, who liked soccer and was skilled at assembling radios, was reading a newspaper in his home on the third floor of the municipal bank.
At the center of the table, the lamp he had repaired was lit.
Mother was translating a German academic paper on the opposite side.
Mother worked diligently.
Kōriya respected his mother.
On the front page of the *Izvestia* that Kōriya was looking at, a headline article titled “Padishah Amanullah Khan’s Arrival in Moscow” appeared with a photograph.
“Amanullah Khan and Comrades Kalinin, Voroshilov, Karakhan at the Station.” “Kalinin and the Afghan Padishah in an Automobile.”
Next to the round-faced king in military uniform with a short black beard sat Kalinin in his fedora and white beard, looking down at something.
“The King, Kalinin, Voroshilov, and Afghan Ambassador About to Depart Station”
Finally, “Military Review Before the Station”—Kōriya was boyishly staring at the Padishah’s manner of saluting and his gleaming boots when suddenly—

“Mama!”

He called out to his mother.

"What?"

"Mama, why are they welcoming the Padishah so much? They killed their own emperor for being bad—so why welcome some other country’s emperor?"

——………………….

Mother did not answer.

“Mama!”

Mother, her disheveled head still bowed over her work, answered briefly.

“Because it’s necessary for diplomacy.”

Raindrops had accumulated on the terrace railing of the Japanese Woman’s room.
It had rained yesterday.
Today too, it rains.
It was May rain.

From Moscow where she had lived for six months, the Japanese Woman strongly felt the Russia where new life had just begun. The USSR was striving to possess something valuable that existed nowhere else on twentieth-century Earth. Simultaneously, it possessed incompleteness and hardships on a colossal scale found nowhere else.

A wind blew from the Moscow River, making the power lines sway.
Raindrops on the wires glistened and fell; on the walkway of Christ the Savior Cathedral, four empty benches lay wet beyond bare tree branches.
Someone passed by holding an open umbrella.
In Citizen Lyubakov's kitchen, a cactus sprouted buds in an unglazed pot while maid Nadenka in her red apron kneaded breadcrumbs.

The lodger Mikhail Georgievich, always neatly dressed with a leather watch chain smoothed against his chest, found it impossible to purchase a house in Tashkent. A woman who had borne him a child sued Mikhail Georgievich for nonpayment of 1,300 rubles in child support, and the court seized the house in Tashkent. The Turkish embroidery in his room wouldn't fetch even four hundred rubles.

The two Japanese women would depart for Leningrad by the sea.

Postscript: Regarding new Russia, there was still much I wished to write about, and things I had to write about. Even as an impression of Moscow life, this was just a fragment. I intended to write about theater and other matters separately as a sequel. (From around May 30th, white bread disappeared in Moscow. The weather was unseasonably cold.)

[August 1928]