Pathway to Japanese Literature

October 25.
(1930)

At last—departure from Moscow! Departure! Departure!

I made countless trips to the post office that morning.
Because I had presented this unmistakably Japanese face at the registered parcel window far too many times, the female postal worker with frizzy yellow hair said in a slightly irritated voice,
“Haven’t I seen you twenty times since this morning?!”
she said.
“I’m sorry.
But I’ve been here in our Moscow for three years now.
And tonight I’m returning to Japan.
I can’t come back tomorrow, and there’s no one else but me to send these out, so please bear with me.”

"I see."

The female postal worker re-examined the round, small face of the Japanese woman that had been appearing before her almost daily.

Will these reach Japan?
All of them.

That I don't know.

The enormous calendar hanging in that vast space with its bold black 25, and the electric clock ticking minute by minute.
The sound of the crowd walking across the floor—a scraping, swishing noise.
The Japanese woman, searing these impressions into her mind, kept opening and closing the post office's heavy door.

After Y returned, she made her rounds of farewells, organized the leftover luggage, grew weary, exhausted, until finally all she longed for was for the train to depart so she could lie down properly.

6:15 PM.

October 26.

Three rubles ten kopeks.
Full course meal for two.

The prices had dropped remarkably.
Back around December 1927 during our outbound journey on the Siberian Railway, a three-course meal—soup, meat or fish, and dessert—still cost two and a half rubles per person.
This time, a bottle of Narzan mineral water went for thirty kopeks at this rate.
And to top it off, the soup contained actual meat!
The Soviet approach shone through in its logic—making full meals affordable for all while pricing à la carte dinner items higher.

Y was determined to buy a famous tobacco case once we reached Vyatka.

The compartment was warm. Fatigue set in, and rather than racing toward Japan, she found herself rolling along with the carefree mood of a domestic excursion.

“Be careful,” she said. “Vyatka has historical ties to the Japanese.”
“If I were to meet some clumsy pickpocket and have you spread bad publicity about the Siberian Railway route being a thieves’ landmark, that would be a problem.”

“No problem!” Y shot back. “I know what I’m doing.”

It grew dark as they arrived at Vyatka—the center of the Vyatka-Vetluzhsky Economic District. The moment the train halted at the platform, Y leapt out, clutching the leather coat that had stirred a Japanese gentleman’s honorable suspicions about its possible connection to “Kim.”

Afterward, I went to check the station’s waiting room, but there was no such famous shop.
I stepped out onto the open-air platform dimly lit by electric lights and approached a man in a State Security Department uniform who happened to be passing by.

“Where did you buy that? I’m looking for a shop—”

The man, his collar hook still undone, was loitering with two tobacco cases in hand.

“This way.”
“It’s inside that gate—I’ll take you there.”

Having stepped completely off the platform, passed through an odd gate, and leapt over a patch of mud, there swarmed a mass of people like a black mountain. The glittering eyes of a flushed woman vendor shone between the shack’s dark roof and the undulating waves of the crowd’s jet-black heads. Birchwood boxes, soapstone carvings, rings, necklaces, inkstands—indeed, this was a place and moment where anyone with spare rubles in their pocket couldn’t afford complacency. At minimum, this throng pressing inward had resolved—within the twenty-minute stop—to wrest from the sole flustered vendor either a box, an inkstand, or like Y who’d set his sights from Moscow, a tobacco case; moreover, they were determined to unfailingly claim their change too, jostling and clustering without concession. In the same vacant lot stood another stall selling bread. That too teemed with people.

After three o'clock rang, Y returned to the compartment.

October 27.

When she opened the window in the morning, there was dappled light snow on the yellow early-winter grass.

A small station in a cedar forest. On a nearby hill, several agricultural machines—their paint vivid blue and red—stood lined up. Here was how old lands were becoming new ones. Here was proof of the Soviet's tangible goal under the Five-Year Plan: quadrupling agricultural machinery production.

Nothing but pines—so thick they turned the train windows green. Suddenly the vista opened wide. The dense forest had been cleared to the horizon. High-voltage pylons marched at regular intervals into the distance. When I hurriedly looked the other way, the wires crossed over the railway tracks and vanished into a black primeval forest—dense as Hindenburg's forelock—where a flock of thrushes took wing far beyond. Who could now call Siberia a lonely wilderness?

Passed through Yekaterinburg-Sverdlovsk.
A two-hour difference from Moscow time.
The train advanced.
The train stopped at a height equivalent to the second floor of a stone-built station.
In the town below the station stood two covered Ford vehicles.
Even in areas only visible from the train windows, several new factories were being constructed.
The Ural region, centered around this Sverdlovsk, served as the USSR's crucial coal production zone and agricultural tractor manufacturing base.
By 1930, American capitalists no longer associated the name Ural with bear hunting.

The sky was a soft sky-blue tinged with gray.
The old town reflected the faintly cold afternoon light beneath it.
Scaffolding.
Bricks were being piled up vigorously.

October 28.

With a light blue kettle dangling from his hand, Y bounded toward the station's hot water supply with springy steps, his retreating figure watched from the train deck by me.
Everything lay blanketed in snow.

In the USSR, it was customary since olden times for every rural station to prepare hot water at train arrival times and provide it free to travelers. That was why one would often see such scenes. When the train stopped, many men clutching nickel kettles, tin kettles, or sometimes just a single teacup would dash across the platform toward some destination. Tea. Teapot. Sugar. Cup. Spoon. Those who carried such items were not limited to USSR citizens. We had them too.

Today I saw a large kolkhoz (collective farm). Straw stacks remained where tractors had worked through the harvest. Snow had settled over them.

Hurry, hurry!
I can see a tall “elevator” over there!
(An “elevator” is an automatic transport for loading wheat bags into freight cars.)

I obtained a local peasant newspaper called *Kommunа*. Published twice every five days, ten pages—the editorial office was the Railway Workers’ Union Uchik at Barabinsky Station on the Omsk Railway. No matter what we did, we had no hope of reading any issues of Moscow-published *Izvestia* or *Pravda* dated after the 25th. We were on the express train. Our train, though already eighteen hours behind schedule on just its third day out of Moscow, advanced through Siberia while disseminating news from the Socialist Federation’s central hub.

This *Kommunа* was from the 27th.
I read it cover to cover with keen interest.
This region had now entered its butter harvest season.
"By October's end, Barabinsky district plans to supply 190 zentners [100 pounds] of butter to the butter production collective.
By October 20th, 135 zentners had been collected.
We only fulfilled 75% of September's production target.
Yet in October's first twenty days, we've already met 71% of the goal.
Comrade union members and collective farmers!
Don't let this momentum slip!" An amusing critique by rural correspondents about butter production followed.

Replace the butter factory manager!

Gordeyev, manager of the Nazarovsky Butter Factory, does not wish to engage in production.
The factory is dominated by a state of mismanagement.
Not a single day passes without the factory experiencing fuel shortages.
The factory water is unclean.
As a result, the quality of the butter produced declines.

There was another butter factory in Upper Nazarov Village.
The building there was in a terrible state.
The door was broken.
It was too cold to work.

During this period, the manager had gone to Krasnoyarsk Village for the milk purchase settlement.
There he drank himself into a stupor for three days and nights, ultimately losing one of the horses belonging to the butter factory.

Gordeyev kept three horses.
In earlier times Gordeyev had maintained several tenant farmers.
He currently employed a nineteen-year-old tenant farmer named Nikolai Klikov.

As I was copying into my notebook, Y, twisting a red pencil and sorting clippings,

“What are you rustling about for?”

Do you know?
You.
How does the milk production cooperative collect milk from the farmers?

When the USSR attempted to transition to collective agriculture, the issue that proved most challenging for both farmers and the government was that of livestock.
From grain-based collective agriculture to collective livestock farming.
This remained a focal point requiring constant proactive measures.
According to this newspaper, the milk agreement had been revised with significant attention to farmers' interests.
Last year's milk agreement had been implemented without accounting for domestic consumption needs.
That is to say, without tallying household members, the agreement standard across Barabinsky district had been fixed at an average of 6.6 zentners per cow annually.
When analyzed per individual farm household,

1 head owned: 4.6 (zentners)

2 heads owned: 6.0 (same)

3 heads owned: 7.5 (same)

However, this year’s average standard per head for this district was 5.666 zentners, and the standard per head for each farm household was,

1 head | Five-person family | 3.0 (zentners)

2 heads | Eight-person family | 4.4 (same)

Such was the arrangement.

A large river.
Its waters were a turbid, muddy color.
On both banks, the snow lay white.
When I checked the map, this proved to be the Irtysh River.
Omsk City began beyond the iron bridge.

The train stopped in Omsk for forty minutes.

I looked around the vendor stalls outside the station.

There was plenty of butter.

I bought three tomatoes for fifteen kopeks. When I walked along the snow-covered path with them resting on my palm, they looked like crowberries. In reality, they weren’t delicious. Using an empty Narzan mineral water bottle to buy milk for 50 kopeks. A large ring-shaped bread resembling a rubber seat cushion—one ruble. The wife with children in the neighboring compartment bought two and slipped one onto the arm of her six-year-old daughter Sonya and another onto the arm of her not-so-clever three-year-old boy, who bore a name like “New World” drained of its international essence.

It was so cold it hurt my ears.
The Black Party member often encountered in the dining car was strolling with the Russian woman Party member always at his side, puffing out white breath with an exceedingly cheerful expression.
The group included Germans and Americans, and during meals, the woman Party member conducted matters in German, English, and Russian.

(Before leaving Moscow, there had been such an incident. At some factory, they had recruited American engineers. The engineer brought several workers with him, including Black laborers. Over some matter, a white worker abruptly raised his hand and struck his Black comrade without discussion. He had mistakenly believed himself back in his homeland—the free country of America, that civilized nation where police officers helpfully direct traffic during lynchings of Black people. Those witnessing it were the Soviet proletariat. Immediately on the spot, a general assembly—a comrade trial—was convened. The white worker was deported back to America by resolution of the factory workers.)

About two hours from Omsk stood a newly constructed grain transport station.
Freight cars bore icicles hanging from their roofs.
Drawn by a locomotive beneath towering grain elevators,
they passed through what struck me as an invigorating Siberian vista.

It was 3:30 PM.

The clear western sun cast its light across the fields; the snow was purple.
The forest was copper-colored.

A small station.
Birch trees.
A yellow-painted wooden station.
It was Chekhovian.
A stationmaster in a red cap came out alone and picked up a parcel that had been thrown from the mail car onto the snow.
The parcel had many stamps affixed.

October 29.

Last night around 1 AM Sverdlovsk Time, I arrived in Novosibirsk.
When I bought the ticket from Moscow to Vladivostok back in Moscow, I had even considered making a stopover in Novosibirsk.
It was the central axis of New Siberia’s production and culture.
At midnight with temperatures of minus fifteen degrees, there had been nothing to do.
I raised the blinds on my compartment window and peered out wrapped in a blanket; through it all, the gradually approaching city lights twinkled beautifully.

When I dozed off for a bit and began to wake up, the train was still stopped.
Someone from town came visiting the neighboring compartment,

“It’s four in the morning here now—this is no joke!”
A man’s voice rang out.
The clock had advanced another two hours.
I hadn’t been able to obtain a timetable for this journey.
Taking out a large economic map from my bag, I studied it.
Moscow appeared as a red dot on the map.
We were moving farther each day through Siberia’s plains and dense forests.

The train stopped at a station.
Above the entrance of the station building hung a red placard.

"Comrades! Prepare for the completion of the Five-Year Plan's third year!"

In front of it, a cluster of male and female farmers stood lined up, watching the train and the passengers who had disembarked to stroll about. Today I saw another new grain elevator. It was not yet fully completed, and a red flag fluttered at its summit.

October 30.

At 1 PM, just before stopping at Nizhneudinsk, there was a terrible noise. Without thinking, I ducked my head, and one of the outer panes of the window right beside where I was sitting shattered.

"You brat!"

Had I seen it?

There were three of them.
I saw one picking up a stone...

When we left Moscow, the conductor had come in and hurriedly pulled down the window shade.

"We have to keep these closed."

he said.

"Why?"

"They throw stones at them."

Because I couldn’t believe it, I asked again.

“Why?”
“There are troublemakers who do such things—as you’re well aware.”

When I went out after the train stopped, another window in the rear had been damaged.
The one there—apparently the stone had been small—had only a single small hole as if struck by an airgun pellet, with cracks radiating out.
This one was completely shattered.

The child was caught, apparently.
The parents would likely face a hefty fine.

Somewhere under a pine forest，the train came to a stop.
It seemed they had spotted a rabbit.

In the corridor,

“The residents around here don’t eat rabbit,” a man’s voice said.

“But they catch plenty of them， don’t they? They should just build a cannery or something，” she answered reflexively.
After that， it fell silent.
A pale sun shone on the snow.
That day， time and again， the train stopped at places that weren’t stations and even reversed course.

Because the windowpane was broken and it was cold, I shifted toward the window side, put on my hat, draped a sleeve of my coat over myself, and sat there looking like a vagrant child.

The two of us took turns typing on the typewriter to create a book catalog.

October 31.

Pine trees stood on the snow. A dark, powerfully striking view spread before us—somehow Oriental in style. Mongolians made their horses pull carts, long hems flapping as they trudged briskly through the snow.

Irkutsk.
The train advanced for an hour.

The train conductor’s compartment was located in the corner of each car. There was a samovar. There were small Russian-made boxes containing charcoal that emitted a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide. A railing stood there, inside which cups with saucers and spoons were stored. The conductor served tea to the passengers. There was also a small transformer. I found a list of onboard equipment posted on the wall.

“When you return to Moscow, does everything get inspected?”

“Yes,” he said. “They inspect everything.”
“Because that glass broke, we two have to pay eleven rubles.”
“As for yours, since they caught the culprit and processed the paperwork, it’s settled, but...”

Now I understood.
The day before yesterday, when the glass in the door of the deck leading to the dining car had been broken, without thinking,
“Who broke it?”

I asked.
Then, indeed, this young Party-member conductor answered in an uncharacteristically sullen manner.

“I don’t know.”

The conductor received a monthly salary of seventy-five rubles.
In СССР workers possess many rights; for example, even when dismissing them—excepting cases of workforce reduction at factories, taking three days off without reason within a month’s span, or being imprisoned for two months or longer—employers generally require worker consent.
Instead, responsibility rests firmly on their shoulders.

November 1. Clear.

The train passed through Chita as we slept.
The clocks had advanced by one hour.
0:05 past.

The train stopped on a small wooden bridge.

When I pressed my face against the window and looked to the left, something like a station could be seen over there.
But that was far off; the train had stopped near a hill buried in snow.
“What station is this?”

Novomir was listening in the corridor.

“Wooden station!”

Holding a doll in her hand and standing by the side, the older sister replied. In the distance, another boy was asking his father the same question. “It’s a station no one recognizes.”

The conductor came in—his boots packed with snow, the tip of his nose bright red—while removing his gloves.

“Phew!”

“Did something happen?”

“The axle under the soft-class car over there broke,” he said.
“It nearly tipped over.”

I stepped out onto the bridge and gripped the side rail with both hands, leaning out to look toward the rear—a bonfire had been lit in the deep snow.
A train engineer in long boots and a green regulation cap kept peering under one of the cars while barking orders.
Rods lay scattered about.
Something pitch-black and metallic had been hauled over and abandoned in the snowdrifts.
A peasant-like man threw off his goatskin coat onto the snow and crawled beneath the car.
Only the tips of his winter boots remained visible from where I stood.

The sun sparkled brightly.
The snow was frozen.
It was cold.
A Mongolian boy wearing a triangular hat with a red tassel shoveled snow and walked toward houses visible beyond a low fence.
A dog tagged along behind.

When I retreated into the corridor, the wife from the compartment at the far end stuck her head out,

“What happened?”

The husband turned his broad back toward the wife, stood in the corridor with legs apart and pipe clenched between teeth—
“Just an episode.”

He was giving that sort of response.

In Mongolian villages, dogs were numerous everywhere—……

The train had stopped in the snow for over two hours for repairs.

For nearly the entire day, it ran along the upper reaches of the Amur River’s Shilka River.
The snow was deep.
In the shrubland area, no evergreen trees were visible.
There were mountains.
The houses, differing from those in Siberia, had thin plank roofs.
Each house was surrounded by pasture fences and kept cows, horses, pigs, goats, and such.
The houses were low; the pasture fences were low.
And there was snow.

In the snow that covered the riverbank, small footprints—perhaps a rabbit’s or some other animal’s—trailed off into the distance.
The river water was beginning to freeze.

The landscape differed entirely from the fertile black soil regions near Moscow at the start of the journey and the majestic forest zones of central Siberia covered by dense woods—it held the desolate beauty of the Far Eastern frontier.
The land beyond the continuous mountains was the Mongolian Republic.

November 2.
The weather alternated between clear and cloudy.

A boulder-strewn mountainside brushed against the train window.
Even when I looked outside around noon, an identical rocky slope still skimmed past the glass.

What tedious scenery!

Bezaisu had meant that he’d grown thoroughly weary of similar mountains in your region.

At the Art Theater’s small stage, they were performing *Our Youth*—a historical play dramatizing Komsomol members during the Civil War era: their fervor, the errors born of youthfulness, and their courageous efforts to amend those mistakes through action.
Bezaisu boarded a freight car painted with images as part of an underground movement to Khabarovsk.
There he conversed with the girl he’d been asked to take aboard midway.

Our train had also reached its ninth day since departing Moscow.
The train was passing through the outskirts of Khabarovsk.

When passing a small station, I saw a woman who had come to draw water, wooden buckets hanging from both ends of a carrying pole.
There was a well in the open area beside the station.
The well structure was square.
The lid fitted securely.
A large wheel stood there, its small handle designed to turn the mechanism that loosened the rope and drew up water.
Even in Siberia, country wells had been shaped like this.

In Japan, women also drew water.
In Russia, women were doing it too.
And in the hamlet of these female villagers carrying shoulder poles, the red flag of the village soviet fluttered from beneath the snow.

Because the scenery was so monotonous, I spent the entire day reading *Collective Farm: Dawn* with a feeling as if I were sitting at home.

From 1928–29 onward, after the Soviet Production Expansion Five-Year Plan was initiated, it was not only workers directly engaged in production who began advancing toward the construction of a socialist society. Painters, writers, and filmmakers were all mobilized. These artistic laborers vividly reproduced within their art the realities of the new Soviet production expansion, the transformed daily living conditions of workers and peasants arising from it, and their social sentiments; furthermore, through their art, they bore a significant class-based role to advance the people’s class consciousness one step closer toward the completion of a socialist society.

Young filmmakers took their cameras and ventured into rural areas, coal mines, and deep forests.
(And Japanese film enthusiasts in Tokyo watched the masterpiece *Torukshibu*.)

Writers and journalists, equipped with chemical pencils that turned their notebook writings into characters resembling purple ink when wet, set out for rural villages centered around collective farms where new life was beginning, fishing grounds, and frontier regions (Central Asia and the Siberian polar regions).
The writers’ group recruited volunteers and departed Moscow on a specially outfitted train for cultural propaganda alongside Meyerhold’s young actors and an expedition team of theater-worker youth.

Various documentary records and reports on new rural life emerged.
The State Publishing House produced low-cost editions priced at five and twenty kopeks and began selling them.

*Collective Farm: Dawn*—fifteen kopeks.
*Collective Farm: Dawn* chronicled, through several short stories rendered in unadorned and objective prose, how the collective farm had been organized amid struggles against nearby kulak-dominated villages; what kinds of people employed what methods—even detailing how the slow-witted shepherd Vashika fervently tried to operate a farming tractor—and how rural “October” saw marital separations arising from support or opposition to the collective farm.

It depicts the actual state of affairs where the new force is determined by deeply rooted old forces, but ultimately someday that very new force will gradually reform rural old customs.
This kind of book does not require a dictionary.

November 3.

The clock advanced another hour.
It was now fully Far East time—the same as Japan’s time.
In Moscow, there were times when I would be doing something until late at night and suddenly remember,

I wonder what time it is now in Japan.

Hmm... it’s 2 o’clock now—so that would make it 9 in the morning there.
School has already started there—

We discussed such things.

But this Vladivostok direct train had already been delayed by some twenty-odd hours. We should have arrived in Vladivostok tonight, but it would likely take until tomorrow evening. After riding a train for ten days, a delay of half a day or even a full day felt like nothing. Everyone grew nonchalant. And they were gradually coming to relish the journey’s end.

Now, how many more hours would we be delayed before reaching Vladivostok?

We’ll be delayed by at least five hours.

Ah, never mind. This train won’t go beyond Vladivostok anyway.

In the corridor, two men were talking.

The scenery bore the marks of the east.
Snow resting on the trees swelled into soft rounded shapes.

When I was in the night dining car, a man who had sat down at the adjacent four-seat table licked his fingers briefly while eating roasted kuropātoka (a type of wild bird) that crackled loudly with each crisp bite.

Was there already snow in Siberia?
I asked myself.
Really!
The train was running through Primorsky Krai.

The dining car was lively tonight.
Those who had ridden continuously from Moscow were in a mild state of anticipation on the eve of their long journey finally ending tomorrow.
The group that had newly boarded today ate their first dinner on the train.
(The train dining car serves better fare than regular restaurants.) The man who had asked about Siberian snow now addressed his bespectacled companion eating kuropātoka at a table across the aisle.

“How about yours?”

He lifted his shoulders just enough to avoid notice,

“Well, this is about what you’d expect.”

“The butter’s good, but it really doesn’t sit well in the stomach—though I suppose that’s fine…”

Roasted kuropātoka (half portion per plate): 1 ruble 50 kopeks.

Strangers at various tables were exchanging inquiries about the weather and such in other regions.

At night, when I went to make Japanese tea, I went to borrow a cup for boiling water from the conductors' area, and the older conductor—the one who wasn't a Party member—told me to give him some Japanese tea if there was any left.

“Do you know Japanese tea?”
“It’s green, you know—Japanese tea, drunk without sugar.”

“Of course I know!”
“I know it well—I drank it all the time when I was in Central Asia-Tashkent.”
“Over there we always drink green tea—it’s excellent for beating the heat.”

When I brought over the small can with what little remained at the bottom, he poured it into his palm and bit into it between his front teeth.

This was truly welcome!
The tea was good—authentic green tea.

November 4.

We would finally arrive in Vladivostok tomorrow, but the exact time remained unclear. It might be around 2 AM. However, it might apparently be around five o’clock. Last night, Y had fretted that if we were to arrive at 2 AM, a hotel room would be needed. We had started drafting a telegram to a certain person in Vladivostok on a message form, but upon hearing the conductor say it would likely be around five o’clock, we abandoned the telegram.

Since tomorrow will be hectic regardless, I have to get my luggage sorted out properly today.

The ferry departed at twelve o'clock.
It sailed once a week.

As we passed through a certain station and entered its grounds, we saw a large wooden overpass spanning above the train.
It was unfinished, and white snow had accumulated on the fresh wooden surface that no one had yet trodden upon.
Beautiful.

The Five-Year Plan aimed to expand the Soviet transport network from 80,000 kilometers in 1928 to 105,000 kilometers.
In 1930, railway freight reached 281 million tons.
(Planned to reach 330 million tons by 1933.) This fact was proven merely by recalling how many freight cars had been brought into major stations along Siberia—prepared with cargo or marked with chalk codes—waiting on sidings for departure during our journey there.
This overpass was no exception.
In the past, this station had never seen several long lines of freight trains stopping like this.
Pedestrians must have once crossed the station tracks at their leisure, clad in Russian rubashkas and long boots.

However, as freight trains kept arriving in increasing numbers and it became difficult for pedestrians to pass under them, this new wooden bridge was constructed.—

The new overpass was not the first one we had seen there.
We had already seen about two more somewhere before this.

November 5.

The area was still dark.
While I was washing my face under the lavatory light, someone rattled the door,

“In twenty minutes, we’ll be in Vladivostok!”

The conductor went around notifying.

Y, worried about oversleeping, had lain down last night almost fully clothed.
Descending from the upper berth,
“Damn, it’s freezing!”
he said in a freezing voice.

“It’s still early, you know—we haven’t slept enough either.”

He was also somewhat keyed up.
The compartment lights were on.

When I peered outside, it was the darkness before sunrise; stars were visible. In the distance, the city lights were shining.

After proceeding slowly for a long time and coming to a stop once within the station where red and green signals were visible, the train gradually entered Vladivostok platform.
Empty luggage carts were on the frozen concrete.
Two or three station staff walked over, swinging lanterns sleepily.

“Hasn’t anyone come out?”

“No one has come out.”

When it came time to take out the luggage, there were remarkably few Red Caps.
They were all taking turns.
They stood on the deserted platform, keeping track of the luggage the conductor had unloaded.
They had lost all sensation in their toes.

“It’s cold.”

A man with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder and wearing a fur cap stood before the mountain of luggage, stamping his feet, and said:

"It’s because the wind here is harsh that it’s so cold."

Finally catching a Red Cap, they carried them little by little and headed to what looked like a freight storage area.

"Where are you taking us?"

"We’re boarding a Japanese steamship—where’s the pier? Won’t you carry them for us?"

Wearing a large hemp apron with a nickel number tag hanging from his chest, the elderly Red Cap replied in a dazed tone:
“The pier’s separate.”
the elderly Red Cap replied.
“Far?”
“From here.”
“Quite…”
Apparently, they had to find a horse-drawn cart.

“Wait here!”
“Is that okay?”

Y took the Red Cap and went off somewhere.
After about ten minutes, only the Red Cap returned.
When I followed along to carry the last of the luggage, there was a Chinese horse-drawn cart—harnessed to donkey-like Manchurian horses—stopped at the front of the station, and our belongings were piled on top of it.

The Chinese cart driver was a rare sight, reminding me of the scenery in Harbin I had passed through three years ago.
In three years, China had changed.
China now had worker-soldier Soviets in over a hundred counties.

“Pretty good find, huh?”
“He said seven rubles to the pier.”

It was already bright.
Trams rarely passed through this street with sparse foot traffic—where Chinese people and Russians walked half-and-half—as we followed behind the horse-drawn cart.
To the right, the sea was visible.
A steamship was also visible.—

It was a long way to the pier.
Y caught up to the cart trotting ahead at a brisk pace, then one after another tossed the briefcases he had been carrying in both hands and the document case into the luggage secured with ropes at the back, before nimbly hopping sideways onto a thick rod protruding from the rear.
The long-tailed Manchurian horse, loaded with luggage of various shapes and Y in his leather coat, proceeded along the stony road.
I continued along the sidewalk as usual.
Continued.

――

I descended the long, gradual slope toward the coast.
Warehouses were lined up.
Rails had been laid.
Horse droppings lay between the cobblestones.
We emerged onto the wharf; before a merchant shipping association building that looked half warehouse and half office, the horse-drawn cart came to a stop.
Directly ahead lay an aged cargo ship at mooring.
That was the Amakusa Maru that would take us to Japan.

From there stretched an intricately folded sea surface and beyond it a view of Cape Dezhnev’s slopes densely packed with buildings. Now sunlight warmly bathed both sea and cape while illuminating along the wharf the backs of Chinese laborers pushing carts. In Vladivostok I had imagined even its urban energy would feel coarse—but arriving showed otherwise. Perhaps owing to the hour, both town and harbor lay quiet under sunlight glinting on water’s expanse. I gazed at that radiant sea surface charged with an emotion defying simple description.

The real edge of the USSR was here.

From Moscow to Vladivostok: 9,235 kilometers.
The Soviet Union was planning to build a new large hemp-processing factory here under the Five-Year Plan.
Simultaneously, it was seeking to purge capitalism and imperialism—which came crossing over the Sea of Japan—from this coastline.
Once, from Vladivostok, the Japanese Imperial Army—alongside Kolchak’s forces—had attempted to crush the proletariat’s Soviet Russia but failed; here, the unaware, mobilized sons of the Japanese proletariat had come and gone.
Next, the concessionaires, geisha, and restaurant proprietors withdrew from Vladivostok.
In 1930 today, inside the metal-barred windows of the Bank of Korea, there was a vault sealed by Soviet authorities.
[January–February 1931]