Pathway to Japanese Literature

Season of Summer Silkworms

I

In the afternoon, the rain clouds broke apart, and a faint sun began to shine.
On the muddy road after the rain, the children returning from school came in a crowd.
They were the children of Morita Village.

When they rounded a mountain corner, the croaking of frogs that had been echoing suddenly ceased.
One child suddenly hitched up his hem and stepped into the rice field.
And then, splashing about, he chased after frogs.

“Ugh!”
“Shu! You’re gonna get scolded by your father again for dirtying your clothes…”

One of the girls who had come from behind shouted.

“Don’t talk nonsense!”

Shu grabbed the frog he’d caught and moved forward confrontationally, but as if suddenly remembering,

“Hisae, wanna hunt wasp nests with this guy today?”

“Yeah! Let’s get ’em!”

“Our big brother found a nest just the other day!”

The boys all shouted at once.
Shu gripped the frog’s leg and swiftly peeled off its skin with a twist.
And then skewered it onto the tip of a stick.
They would attach raw silk floss to the frog meat, chase after the wasp that took the bait to its very whereabouts—and then locate its nest; it was one of their favorite games.

Suddenly, Shu let out a shrill voice, as if struck by a thought.

“Hey, wasp larvae rice is tasty!” he shouted.

“Michiko!”
One of the girls said.

“When I passed by yesterday evening, they were already eating dinner!”

“Why?”

“It’s nothing! They eat dinner when it’s still bright out!”

Michiko was the daughter of the village doctor who had come to take up his post last year.

When they came to puddles, the children walked along, splashing mud noisily.

“Michiko! Are those rubber boots easy to walk in?”

One of them asked.
Michiko nodded in response.

“Do you have rubber boots too, Masako?”

“Yeah, but mine are smaller ones…”

Michiko said.
Then another one spoke.

“I’m tellin’ ya, next time my mom comes back from the silk mill, she said she’ll buy me some!”

“When’s your mom comin’?”

“Next public holiday!”

“Didn’t Yoshie say that before too? She didn’t bring even a bit…”

As they rounded the irrigation ditch widely, a transport cart came clattering and bouncing down a narrow path—barely wide enough for its wheels—from the left valley.

“Hey, Shōsaku’s here!”
The children dashed off.

“Shōsaku, will you let us ride?”

Shōsaku nodded curtly.
All the boys and girls climbed aboard.
From here to Morita Village, the road winds and twists along the foot of the mountain for a little over two hundred meters.

“Hey!”
The young man who had led a horse from the opposite direction called out in that manner but immediately turned back and moved aside onto a branch path.
“Much obliged!”
Shōsaku offered a greeting as he tried to pass by.

At the bridge, the children got off.

The town office, post office, police box, clinic, general store, inn, and other houses gathered in one spot, forming a small cluster of fourteen or fifteen buildings that resembled a town.
Morita Village’s central district was its most bustling quarter.

Shōsaku stopped his horse in front of the attached rice mill and peered inside.
It appeared deserted and silent, with the rice mill machine in the corner of the dirt floor caked in dust, its belt utterly slack.
Since spring had passed, the rice mill too had become mostly deserted.

“Alright, time to head back!”
Shōsaku muttered to himself and started pulling again.
At the front of Yoshino-ya, an inn and restaurant, Shōsaku stopped his cart.

“Shōsaku, it’s been a while this time, hasn’t it!”

Otoshi, Yoshino-ya’s wife, came out and said.

“Well, ’cause it was rainin’!”

Shōsaku unloaded the cargo onto the dirt floor.

“Has any cargo been sent out from Okano-ya?”

“Dunno.”
“We’re just hauling fertilizer today!”

“Shōsaku!
“Nakaya’s widow was waitin’ for ya!”

Someone shouted like that from the direction of the hearth.

Shōsaku was tending the horse with a sullen face.

“How’s business treatin’ you?”

When he entered toward the hearth area, Tomekichi—who had been sitting on the raised edge drinking tea—suddenly asked.

“What a damn mess! I’m run ragged just tryin’ to feed this damn horse…”

Shōsaku climbed into the hearth area with his dirt-covered shoes still on while saying that. Then, sipping in small, slow draughts from the cup of sake that Otoshi had poured and brought, their conversation continued.

“I tell ya, back when Morita’s mountain timber was flowin’, I hauled three carts a day! Now the hills are bald—nothin’ left to haul but twigs. Ever since then, there’s been no fun in this work. And if they go openin’ new roads for them automobiles? Our trade’ll be done for…”
“The hills are bald now.”
“There’s not a single load of firewood being shipped out…”
“Ever since then, there’s been nothing fun at all.”
“If they go openin’ new roads here, it’ll be automobiles.”
“Our trade’s done for…”

Shōsaku said with a sigh.

“But you’re stashin’ away cash, so you ain’t troubled—but we’re flat-out ruined!”
“Even when my cocoons sold for ten ryo, I was still in trouble—so if two ryo gets chipped off now, there’s no way to make ends meet!”
“We’re just hopin’ the roadwork starts soon.”
“If we don’t find some way to earn, our mouths’ll dry up…”

Tomekichi stood up while saying this.

“I’ve got my family’s fields to tend today!”

Muttering to himself as if not meaning for anyone to hear, Tomekichi went out toward the back door.
As the alcohol took effect, Shōsaku gradually grew more cheerful.
The three-ri round trip to the neighboring village had been exchanged for a sake tip.

“Shōsaku may strut around in those geta, but don’t let your guard down around him!”

Everyone knew Shōsaku overcharged for his cartage services, but since he willingly handled even ten- or twenty-sen purchases, he was valued by the villagers.

II

Since yesterday, the summer work began, and nearly all the girls from the hamlet left for silk-reeling factories in other villages.
The village suddenly grew desolate.

Targeting the spring silkworm harvest season, various debt collectors made their rounds from house to house every day.
The employees of the town’s Agricultural and Industrial Bank went about conducting relentless negotiations from house to house, all while reeking of perfume.
Due to delinquent village taxes, the village office staff divided up and made their rounds; property seizures began here and there.
Even if two hundred thousand bales of silk thread bound for America lay idle in Yokohama warehouses due to overproduction, and even if raising more silkworms only tightened the noose of their own making—these were separate problems.
Even if the price of cocoons was low, they couldn’t afford to stop raising silkworms here and now.

“If prices stay low, we’ve got to harvest more just to keep going!”
Every household said the same thing.
And they decided to greatly increase their summer silkworm hatchings.

They planned to have the first batch mounted on frames by Bon.
Households with mulberry trees meant to start a second batch too.
That meant Bon would fall right at their busiest time.
It was an era when broken bodies couldn’t be tended.

In the evening, people gathered at Tomekichi’s house for a mutual aid association meeting, but after discussions concluded that this time too it would not be established, they dispersed. It was a small-scale mutual aid association with fifty-yen contributions, just two payments away from maturity, but they could not get it established and had to postpone it until autumn. With this, all mutual aid associations in this hamlet were postponed until autumn.

A few remaining people gathered around the hearth as they were.
It was an unusually bitter night.

“First off, every day these rascals come botherin’ us—tryin’ to sell fish or whatnot!”
“The sweets peddler who came yesterday hauled his load all the way from ten miles out!”

“Aye, times’re so hard everywhere folks can’t sit idle.”
“They keep pleadin’, ‘We’ll slash prices! We’ll slash prices!’ Fine—let ’em slash! But here we ain’t got a copper to spare! So we send ’em packin’ before they even drop their bundles!”

“So it’s finally come—the time when we can’t buy a damn thing.”
“But sometimes you just want to eat even one sardine, y’know…”

They had taken up positions at the four corners of the hearth and sat cross-legged as their conversation began.
Once sake was served, the conversation grew lively.

As if Kōta suddenly noticed,

“Uncle!”
“What’s today about?” Kōta asked Shinzō.
“I’m on Matsushita’s estate job today!”
“What? Are you building something?”
“Oh, it’s nothing—just taking stones from the back to shift that stable a bit.”

Tomekichi set down the cup he had drained,

"But Matsushita’s built up his fortune remarkably fast, hasn’t he!"

he said in a sighing tone.

"He buys up farmland, undertakes construction, hits the mark with silkworms—has enough money to lend out, I tell you! There’s just no stopping him…"

"A real rising sun, that one!"
"Over there—"

“The work just keeps rollin’ in….”
“Once things get goin’ like that, even the same job turns easy ’n’ manageable!”

Shinzō said.

"That’s right. There’s a world of difference between those who’ve got money comin’ in and those bleedin’ it out! If you want ’em to knock even a bit off the interest, you gotta buy some sake or slap a canned good on top before takin’ it over—ain’t that how it goes?"

Tomekichi said with a bitter smile.

As was often the case, talk turned to the well-off households.

"Well—Matsushita, and then Yoshimoto-ya!"
Shinzō proceeded to list them one after another.
"Just the usual ones around here!"

"Even Nagamura’s got huge debts, but they’re an old-established household—they’ve got no trouble putting rice on the table!"

So he added.

Excluding the Morita family, there were only three or four households in this hamlet that had managed to cultivate even a small portion of their ancestral fields and subsist on them.

When the Morita family collapsed, Matsushita had acquired the Dōgō fields cheaply—it was said that luck had favored him.

Yoshimoto-ya had also grown remarkably large by skillfully reinvesting small sums for profit.
Once money begins to accumulate, it works effortlessly and accumulates again.

“Even over there, with the whole household, they can’t possibly afford to eat rice now, can they?”

Kōta interjected, but
“That Yoshimoto-ya started from nothin’—not even a single bowl to their name—and built their fortune from there!”
he said with deep emotion.
Here, to resolve to acquire even a single field from a state of utter destitution—how much toil would one have to endure? Since defying their parents, marrying, and striking out on their own, Yoshimoto-ya had in fact labored three or four times as hard as anyone else.
Every child had been laid down on the ridges of rice fields and raised there.

“Those who get monthly salaries don’t know hardship! Yoshimoto-ya’s got their son bringin’ in money now—things just keep gettin’ easier for ’em!”

Shinzō paused briefly. “But when folks build up some assets, they grow stronger—so there’s nothin’ to fear…”

He said in a tone heavy with implication.

“Yeah, that place is thrivin’ nowadays, I tell ya!”

Tomekichi nodded emphatically.

“Compared to before, hasn’t the Nakaya widow’s situation improved quite a bit?”

Nakaya, too, had started getting by much better since their son became a roofer.
Since around last year, the labor-saving galvanized box method for rearing young silkworms had become popular even within the village, so roofing businesses were booming.

“They say Sagaya’s gotten better off too!”
Shinzō blurted out.

“Better off where? Me, I’m…”
Kōta shook his head.

“Went and expanded the household—now it’s nothing but debts!”

“These days there’s none without debt, but your lot—sons and daughters honest as day, really putting their shoulders into it!”

Shinzō added, his voice thick with envy.

Uhei, who didn’t drink, had been silent for some time, but now spoke up in a sullen, heavy tone:

“I ain’t harvestin’ enough rice, got too many mouths to feed, gotta pay the tenant fees in grain—and now the damn silkworms keep rot’n away! No justice in this world!”

He spat out the words.

Uhei’s household had endured relentless misfortunes—his daughter came home sick from the silk mill and died of lung rot; his wife got struck by palsy and couldn’t move a limb. Thinking it might be some curse, they’d begged Kōbō Daishi to bless ’em, only to be told their house was ill-omened. They moved, but then their second son—out working as a hired hand—went and broke his right arm clean through. With a passel of grandkids to feed, the three of ’em—Uhei, his son, and daughter-in-law—worked like mad things day in and out, yet their lot kept worsenin’ by the year.

When one thought about it, building a fortune—or failing to build one—all began with something like a small push.
No one could eat by idling there.
It was precisely a wheel that had to ceaselessly rotate.
Year-round without pause, they chased after work and managed it, and with that, they could just barely keep turning the wheel.
There was no such thing as today marking the definitive end.
――At Matsushita and Yoshimoto-ya, it was said they had gained momentum and begun to turn without rest.――

If they stumbled even slightly—and such stumbles were plentiful—it was all set up to plunge them immediately into an inescapable quagmire. If a single patient arose and the silkworms failed just once, they immediately fell into debt. If they went out for extra earnings, the wheel just got jammed up.

Thus, through cause and effect, even if they worked three or four times as hard as others, far from pulling their feet out of the quagmire, they would be dragged step by step into its depths—the gap between them and others growing ever wider—and getting the wheel turning smoothly again became more impossible than turning yesterday into today. Once it reached this point, the debt only grew larger and larger, like a rolling snowball. If they stood bewildered and dazed, the debt only grew larger.

“But if it’s come to this hell, then the borrower’s got the upper hand!”

“What can’t be repaid can’t be repaid—so you just have to steel your resolve and be done with it…… Ha ha ha ha……”

Tomekichi said, fixing his drink-blurred eyes in a steady gaze.

“That’s right… Ha ha ha ha…”

Everyone laughed and nodded along, but Kōta’s face stiffened slightly.
(The way they work ain’t the same as ours!) he seethed inside.

“No matter what folks say ’bout us bein’ hounded by silkworms like this…”
Uhei muttered faintly, his voice frail.

That same unease dwelled in every chest.

Winter earnings came mostly from charcoal burning.
To burn charcoal without owning mountains meant buying stands of trees by the lot—and lately, with regulations tightening, even the thatching grass for bales had to be purchased.
At two bales burned daily, first-grade charcoal went for five kan per bale that spring—forty sen each.

Women and children carried charcoal bales for a fee.
They would haul them over the mountain pass to the neighboring village, and on their return trip would typically buy rice to shoulder back.

Even among women, someone like Goda’s Otoki stood out as sturdy—she made her frail husband carry two bales while shouldering three herself and briskly climbing.
Her method went like this: first she would ascend to the pass summit and unload her cargo, then double back to carry her husband’s load all the way up.
Thus the payment came to fifteen sen per bale.

Depending on how the cocoon market fared, if word got around that there was no telling how far prices would drop by autumn, all means were already exhausted.

“Is Uncle Sagaya here?”

“He’s here!”
Kōta answered himself but peered through the doorway,

“Is that Yoshikō or what?” he said while remaining seated. “You just go borrow it for a bit!”

“Mr. Yoshikazu, come on up!”
Tomekichi’s wife—who had been doing laundry at the dark wellside—greeted him as he entered.

“Mr. Yoshikazu doesn’t drink, so let’s make some tea instead!”

“You can’t handle liquor? You ain’t your father’s child, are ya?”

“A fine discussion’s just getting going here…”

A burst of laughter erupted.

“Heard tell Naoki’s come back—what’s he here for?”
Yoshikazu sat down beside Shinzō and asked.

“Yeah, been ’round ten days already.”
“Who knows what that fool’s doin’… Nagoya ain’t got nothin’ worth havin’ anyhow.”
“These days, he’s just loafin’ about!”

“We’re all sick o’ rotatin’ here—I say we oughta up an’ go somewhere!”

Yoshikazu began to say that.

“I’m no good at studying anyway… As long as I can eat with the old man, that’s enough!”

“As long as you eat and get the hell outta there, that’s good enough!”

Kōta said in a deeply penetrating tone.

“That’s how it is!”
Uhei nodded in agreement like that.
The conversation drifted back to the hardships of daily life.—

Kōta thought about Yoshikazu’s age.

“In my day, I’d cut six bundles of morning grass before breakfast for sure—”
“And for night work, we had strict quotas—two pairs of straw sandals or three pairs of zori!”

“Yeah, when you think about the old days, folks these days are living like feudal lords.”
“When I talk about the old days, the young folks get sour, so I keep my mouth shut…”

Uhei muttered as if to himself.

“But nowadays, instead of making straw sandals to wear, society’s gotten so you gotta buy store-bought shoes and wear ’em, I tell ya!”
“Absolutely! That’s exactly how it is!”

For their winter earnings from weaving lime sacks, even with women’s labor working night shifts, they could barely manage fourteen or fifteen pieces. Since twenty-five pieces made one bundle, they had to weave six bundles just to get their hands on a single yen note.
Kōta remembered how his mother had often told him that when that blood-and-sweat one-yen note was stolen out of the blue, she’d been so crushed with grief she’d gone dazed.
Once again, such meager times had come back.
——
“We can’t even work like madmen anymore, I tell ya.”
“We’ve turned slothful… Just can’t stomach bone-breaking work now!”

Kōta felt this to his core and said earnestly.
“But you’ve still got some charm in you, eh?”
Shinzō laughed.

“Charm or whatever—I ain’t got none of that! I’ve gone senile—ain’t got even a speck of that left under my nails!”

Kōta laughed—“Hahahaha…”—but then smoothly stroked his deeply wrinkled hand.

Shinzō poked Yoshikazu’s shoulder.

“Forget that—you should hurry up and get yourself a wife!”

“Even if I could get one, there’s no one who’d come to me!”

“Don’t say that—there’s a perfect one right next door, ain’t there? Marry Kimiko-san!”

“Why would Kimiko-san ever come to me! She’s of different status than me!”

“Why?”
When Yoshikazu unexpectedly answered with sincerity, Shinzō’s face turned serious—

“What’s Fujiya got to swagger about? Even if they had money before, once they’re stripped bare, they’re no better than us!”

Shinzō pressed earnestly.

“Look! Even if they strutted around as Lord Morita this and Lord Ōya that—once they crumbled, they’re nothing but shacks now, are they!”

“Damn right—Morita’s turned into a shack now too!”

Kōta nodded.

“Okajima’s ended up like that too, Ōzawa’s gone under—all these landlords are dragging each other down! One falls and they all come crashing!”

“Mrs. Shizu’s had such a hard time of it too, damn right!”
Matsue, his wife, spoke up for the first time.

“In springtime, Mr. Kihachirō came down with a terribly serious illness, I tell ya! Pleurisy or somethin’—nearly killed him!”

“Hmm, when you’re down, trouble comes knocking.”
“But Morita’s changed and changed again, I tell ya!”

Kōta spoke in a tone that seemed stirred by something.

“My dead mother used to say—when we’d cook pumpkin rice during the threshing break, Madam O-An of Morita would come to collect the yearly tribute, march right up to the hearthside, and go, ‘The pumpkin’s cooked!’”
“Saying that and poking the fire,” she’d go on, “you with your rice and such—even if you’ve got it, you’re always havin’ to run to the watermill…”
“Worryin’ if they’d pound too much or steal it—never a moment free from trouble, we’re all just the same… that’s what she’d say… We’d sit there listenin’ quiet-like, but it hurt so bad we’ll never forget it, I tell ya!”

As he spoke, Kōta felt a chagrin welling up inside him—as though the words being spoken were about himself.

The former Morita residence had two kitchens, and the tenant farmers could only go as far as the lower kitchen. In the days of Kōta’s mother and her generation, during New Year and Bon Festival, all the tenant farmers would bring their entire families and go to pay their respects through full prostration when summoned. It was not merely a relationship between tenant farmers and landlords; they had been bound into a strict master-servant dynamic as serfs, so the tenant farmers constantly came and went to the main house, fulfilling servant duties. This was not limited to Morita Village alone; other villages were similarly structured, with each settlement having one main house, and the tenant farmers were considered the property of the main house—no different from its forests, fields, and paddies—with even human trafficking being conducted.

Every time he thought of their ancestors, Kōta couldn’t help but feel a fierce sense of humiliation.

Wasn’t it precisely because of that thought that he had continued to work himself to the bone…?

Tomekichi suddenly grinned slyly.

“With all that, can Mrs. Shizu of Morita really manage on her own?” he said.
Everyone understood what he meant.

“Of course she can manage!”
“Even without a husband or anything…”
“When it comes to that, women are strong as long as they’ve got children!”

Matsue said in a brisk tone.
“Who knows! Even a widow gets her bloom—they’ve been saying that since the old days! Hahahaha...”

Shinzō laughed and said.

“The other day, Ofuji-san came back putting on an awfully stylish air.”
“She had an awfully youthful face…”
“Ofuji-san’s making good money through silk reeling—she’s got it all figured out!”
“How much can you even make from silk reeling?!”
“It’s just barely enough to scrape by with odd jobs!”
“She must’ve hooked another rich patron!”

Tomekichi said while looking at his wife’s face.

“But Yasukō went and died so easily…”
“He was a good match for Toshikuni-san of Morita, but…”
“That’s the drink’s doing…”
“Toshikuni-san was the same way!”

“Yeah, but with times like these, they’ve got four or five mouths to feed in that house! That widow’s got some real grit, I tell ya!”

The same kind of talk droned on and on endlessly as the night grew late.

III

When one looked around, this hamlet was home to many living as widows and widowers.
Shizu of Morita, whose husband had died last autumn; Ofuji of Kubo, whose husband had died in spring; and Genkichi, Shizu’s southern neighbor, who had long been living alone with his child Shu.
Genkichi’s wife was named Osaki—a woman with slender eyebrows and a somewhat pretty face who had been working as a teahouse girl at Yoshinoya when they met.
Genkichi made her earn money, but she often idled about.

She had grown close to an itinerant tailor and carried on boisterously in broad daylight.
Genkichi finally noticed, and a conflict erupted.
When Genkichi, his eyes wild, burst into Heikichi’s house where the man was staying, even the two of them were startled.

“Gen’s got no backbone at all! He bursts in on ’em, right? But that Konpira bastard gets all scared and begs Gen to step back five feet and talk—and damn if Gen doesn’t back off five whole feet! Should’ve just beaten him senseless when he had the chance!”

Having heard this from Heikichi, Shinzō spoke indignantly.

That artisan from Sanuki came to be called Konpira by everyone.
Konpira soon left the village, and before long Osaki too abandoned her nursing infant and fled.
Though everyone assumed she would join Konpira, that proved false—rumor instead claimed she had become a teahouse girl elsewhere.
“I’ve had my fill of scraping by in these godforsaken mountains,” Osaki reportedly told Genkichi’s uncle when he came to retrieve her, her tone utterly unperturbed.

They tried urging Genkichi to cut ties with that rotten-hearted woman and have someone else take her in, but he seemed to cling to deep-seated longing, waiting for the day she would return.

“Even though it’s unclear whose child he is, Gen-san sure takes good care of him…” Every time the wives saw Shu dressed in freshly washed and stiffly starched clothes, they often said such things.

“That kid’s got some resemblance!”
“There’s not a single bit of resemblance in him! That child! He’s got a spitting image of Osaki!”

Such stories would occasionally surface.
Investigations into paternity were treated with relative leniency.
If one probed too deeply into the details, unforeseen complications would arise.
Gossip was something that circulated—spoken by some and heard by others.

Next door to Genkichi stood the house of Jintagē, a lifelong bachelor.
Even calling them neighbors stretched the truth—a mountain and valley lay between them, over five hundred meters apart.
Jintagē possessed such fastidiousness that even when bundling dead branches, he tied them with not a twig out of place, stacking these meticulous bundles around his charcoal-hut of a home like trophies of discipline.

Lately, even the mountains had become devoid of a single dead branch to gather, and he seemed to be struggling to produce goods to take and sell to Yoshinoya and the doctor’s house—but Jintagē had never taken a wife since his youth. When spoken to, he would wave his hand and laugh. Because he was severely deaf, he had come to be known as Deaf Jintagē.

He did not engage in tenant farming at all; because he worked as a day laborer all year round, he had also come to be known as Rent Collector Jintagē. During the last election, Jintagē also received fifty sen and went to cast his vote.

“Old man, when you held out one hand, I thought you’d gotten five ryō and nearly jumped outta my skin…”

The ones who’d profited well from the election laughed as they said that.

The widow of Masuno at the southern edge of the hamlet was rumored to be doing well lately. After growing weary of her husband of fifteen years and leaving him, she’d lived alone ever since. Though a middle-aged woman subject to all sorts of rumors, around three years prior she’d brought in a man from Mikawa named Tokuji as her replacement. Since the man was over twenty years her junior—just the right age to be her daughter’s husband—everyone was aghast in private. Tokuji was of the Tenpō coin sort, but with his brute strength and working three people’s worth, it was said they’d “cleverly brought him in!”

At last autumn’s festival, she offered sake and made a formal request to the cultivators, thereby formalizing the arrangement.

Since Tokuji had joined them, they began raising silkworms on a large scale, and this winter they even built a storehouse.

Her daughter Sadako, claiming her body was weak, didn’t go to the silk mill and idled around.
Because she was good-looking, she became the center of attention.

“Once you make Miss Sadako work, she’ll get sick of it quick!”
“Might as well keep her as decoration!”

There were times when the young men would say such things and laugh.

Around this time, Sadako had been going into town, saying she would become a nurse.
Every time she returned, she grew more refined and beautiful.

The Okane sisters of Hiyoshi had the worst luck.
Both were already dead.
Otatsu, the younger sister, left home in her youth and wandered from place to place, but no sooner had she returned with a boy in tow than her tuberculosis flared violently and killed her.
Okane too had been notorious for scandalous affairs in her youth; after taking a husband only to soon leave him, she lived as mistress to the Morioka family patriarch.
Even in middle age she retained some coquettish charm, with rumors swirling about relations with the Morioka young master too.
Deep in the mountains she lived alone with Kiyoshi - Otatsu's orphaned child.
Then two autumns past, Okane suddenly lost her mind.
She stood all day facing the room's wall.
Made to sit, she'd rise at once to face the wall again.
She ceased speaking entirely.
Finally both legs swelled monstrously.
When pressed to eat she'd refuse politely: "No need to feed me so..."
Before this decline began, a quiet young man named Isa from Echigo had entered their household; honest and mild-mannered, he tended Okane with kind devotion.

Okane hanged herself one evening.
While Isa and the others were momentarily distracted, she slipped out of the house and hung herself from the persimmon tree beside it.
It had been a year of astonishingly abundant persimmons—
An old house with its homestead plot, a single field, and two large persimmon trees remained.
Though Okane herself had determined that Kiyoshi—whom she had raised as her own son—would naturally inherit these things, upon her death they passed instead to Isa's ownership.
This astonished even Kiyoshi and Isa himself.
The reason lay in Kiyoshi being Otatsu's illegitimate child, with none of the proper procedures having been completed.
Soon after, Kiyoshi found himself driven from the land he had inhabited for nineteen years and left the village.

If one were to list them all, there would be no end.

Nakaya’s Ochiyo had long been known as the widow.
Hirago of the Tsuchikata family had also lost his wife early on.
His daughter Yasuko returned from the silk mill pregnant and gave birth to a girl; without marrying anyone thereafter, she lived with her father and her own child—three generations in one household.
Raising more silkworms than they could manage and taking on side jobs, they lived with strict frugality.
To put it bluntly, how many households in this hamlet could be said to be leading a peaceful, ordinary life?
Kubo Ofuji, too, had been forced this year to relinquish her meager front field and rice paddy.
There, the Yoshimoto family’s second son branched off from the household and wedged himself into a narrow plot of land—so precarious that shifting even slightly would send one tumbling into the valley.
“I ain’t leavin’ this place unless they drag me out…”
Ofuji made a pained face.
And on the silk mill’s public holidays, she hurried back to take care of the children.

Over the long years, this hamlet too saw its share of changes.
Many could no longer hold on and left, yet their numbers also grew.
In the days when Katsuta and Shinzō were children, Morita hamlet had numbered just fourteen households; now it counted over forty.

And so, postage stamp-sized plots of land were traded and divided.

IV

The intense midsummer sun scorched down with an oily glare, and the cicadas’ cries thickened the sweltering air.

Shizu went to the field today to weed and was now astonished by the poor state of the mulberry plants. For years now, they had added no fertilizer, and so, plucking them to the limit without leaving even the main leaves, the plants had grown utterly feeble, their thin branches like fire tongs stretching out as mere apologies. The malnourished leaves had shriveled completely, covered in blotches, and the leaves on the lower branches had already yellowed and begun to wither, rustling as if on the verge of scattering.

Looking around, the buds too seemed to have largely stopped growing. The spring silkworms they had intended to sell hadn’t moved at all, and with the mulberry now growing unchecked, they absolutely had to raise silkworms this time. So, even though she knew it was more than she could handle, she decided to raise three frames of silkworms and had requested Yoshimoto-ya to incubate the eggs.

Shizu wondered if she could manage the hatching under these conditions and felt unbearably anxious.

The potatoes planted between the ridges stretched upward pitifully, their growth spindly and weak.
In the barren soil, no proper weeds grew; only stubborn bindweeds spread uniformly across the ground, their yellow flowers wilting under the midday sun.

The hoe was old and thoroughly rusted, making the weeding all the more difficult.

Because her ancestors had been this land's first settlers, and because their homestead stood on a south-facing hill backed by mountains—visible from every direction—the emaciated fields looked all the more wretched.
Having converted the mansion site directly into fields, the gritty sandy soil yielded poor growth for anything planted.
Nothing remained that might evoke the original mansion.
Only one thing persisted—a drainage pit left untouched right beside where she weeded.
Mostly buried in earth, its bottom pooled with irrigation water turned rust-colored.
The surrounding trees had rotted away, leaving only that spot where barnyard grass and smartweed flourished.

When Shizu saw that drainage pit, memories of the past flooded back. Now she could clearly determine where she stood in relation to the original mansion’s layout—this had been the kitchen’s water source. One step up lay the upper kitchen. To the east, only a narrow lattice window broke the darkness of that sunless room. They said a bright kitchen didn’t accumulate wealth, and indeed its corners were so dark you had to grope blindly.

There floated the faces: her grandmother, who had always sat imposingly in the seat of honor by the hearth; her mother, who’d toiled her whole life like a servant at the water source; her father, who kept meticulous care of the spacious mansion—each visage rising vividly before her.

In the corner of the large gabled house’s earthen floor—over ten tsubo in area—sat a stone mortar where mochi would be pounded whenever occasion demanded.
“Fair skin hides seven flaws, they say.”
Having said this, Grandmother O-An would boast of Shizu and her sisters’ fair complexions and beauty.

By nature she disliked meeting people and remained secluded.
Shizu could still recall how long the corridor had been—stretching from the dark intermediate room to the inner sitting room.

Using the imposing gate’s outer wall as her watchtower, Grandmother would frequently venture out there to survey the village houses.

The morning and evening sun glared dazzlingly off the white storehouse walls.

Mountain water overflowed the pond as large scarlet carp leapt about.

They had been blessed with overwhelming abundance—cherished and respected like porcelain dolls.

That was now but a fragment of memory, like a dream from some distant past.
Everything had vanished like smoke, leaving her powerless before the undeniable truth: only desolate mulberry fields stretched before her eyes.

However, Shizu was not thinking of that now.
Shizu found herself unable to think of anything.

How she could endure this painful present—

That thought had always occupied her mind.

When Shizu thought of what had happened four or five days earlier—when she had finally steeled herself to go borrow rice from her sister’s marital home, the sister who had died this winter—she felt as if cold sweat were trickling down her back.
That was a large household of the same clan in Kasami hamlet, about two *ri* away.

The woman who was her sister’s sister-in-law placed unpolished rice into a one-*to* bag and said, “It’s not much to speak of, lending this… but for now, please take just this much…”

She had said this in a pitying tone and handed it over.
Even if her sister had been alive, it would have been a house difficult to visit.
There, since her sister had also left behind two children, there had once been talk of wanting Shizu to come as a stepmother bringing all her own children along, but she had dismissed it as utterly impossible, and so the matter had been left at that.

Shizu paused her weeding and wiped the sweat stinging her eyes.

There is a proverb that says if three generations of adopted heirs continue, one becomes a wealthy household—but in the Morioka family, four generations of adopted heirs had followed.

Grandmother O-An was strong-willed, but having no children of her own, she brought a niece from a prominent household in the neighboring village.
That niece became Shizu’s mother.
Though addressed as Otake-sama, some whispered behind her back: “Not Take—more like Taaaake!”
With the bloodline facing extinction, O-An had no choice but to overlook such jibes.
Father Monji hailed from the Okayama family of Okayama Village.
The Okayamas were an old-stock family steeped in tradition—a fact Monji never failed to mention when drinking.

“The house I was born in is none other than one built by the Bodhisattva Kannon herself, I tell you!” he declared.

He constantly berated his wife, shouting “You fool!” at every turn.

“At least he bothers with his ‘honorable’ this and ‘mister’ that!”

They would say such things and laugh behind his back.
When tenant farmers greeted him with “Good morning,” Monji would habitually respond with a dismissive “Hmph!” through his nose.

At New Year’s, it was customary for tenant farmers to bring folded noshi rice cakes to pay their New Year’s respects.
The customary return gift was half a jū of stiff skewered persimmons.

Toshikuni came to Shizu’s household as an adopted heir from an old family across the Tenryū River.
In the splendid wedding, all the tenant farmers were mobilized to help.
At Kōshin Pass, cheers rose, and the procession entered the hamlet.
Kōta and Uhei were also participating in carrying the load.
When they reached where the spectators had gathered, those carrying the chests cheered them on and, feigning heaviness, cried “Heavy, heavy!” while staggering exaggeratedly.

“What the hell! You got rocks in here or something?!”

Gichi’s father suddenly cursed like that.
And yet, he had availed himself of today’s treat liquor more than anyone else.

“Don’t talk nonsense! Come on, have a drink…”
Sake barrels and cups were thrust out.
Women and children jostled to be first in begging for sweets from the matchmaker’s hands.
After the bride passed through, a plump groom followed.

“Today, even Madam Shizu’s freckles aren’t visible!”

From among the spectators, someone said that and got them laughing.

The following spring, Shizu gave birth to a boy.
The boy was named Kihachirō by Toshikuni.

Toshikuni, who found no happiness except in money, had secretly taken the name of Ōkura Kihachirō—the era's great tycoon.
Toshikuni boasted of this to others with a smug look.
For the first time in generations, a boy was born, and Grandmother O-An looked upon the Morioka family’s prosperity with satisfaction.

The philandering Toshikuni soon began to tire of Shizu, who remained merely quiet and never showed a happy face even when he returned home.
He began spending more and more time at the village office and Yoshino-ya.
Sasaki, the fabric merchant who would occasionally come on business from the neighboring village and open shop at Yoshino-ya, would often say:

“Morita’s young master is a man of rare good fortune.”
“Women are fond of him, and he’s got all the money he could ever want…”

And he was skilled in flattering him into constantly buying things for the teahouse women.
Next, another boy was born.
This time, he named him Zenjirō.
It was the Zenjirō from Yasuda Zenjirō.

The price of cocoons was over ten yen, and society was in the very midst of an economic boom.
In Morita Village too, rice fields were relentlessly plowed under and replaced with mulberry fields.
At Yoshino-ya, teahouse women would appear in twos and threes.

Zenjirō was frail from birth and died after growing for only about a year.
Toshikuni soon laid hands on his sister-in-law Haru and got her pregnant.

Even O-An was beside herself at that.
They soon settled the matter, but Haru remained pale-faced indefinitely.

“Haru, where exactly are you unwell?”

Shizu and her childhood friend Mine no Kanoe deliberately probed and tried to read Shizu’s expression.
Shizu’s eyes held their innate loneliness.

“Madam Shizu might keep quiet, but she’s no fool!”
Some spoke in such tones.

Toshikuni increasingly spent days away in town without returning.
Rumors began to circulate that cracks had formed in the Morita family's finances.

Before long, the upheaval in the financial world began striking the sericulture regions like waves, and cocoon prices gradually fell.

With that situation unfolding, Toshikuni—whose disposition was ill-suited to steady labor—panicked and plunged into speculation, suffering massive losses.
Intending to recoup his losses, he hurriedly built a splendid silkworm room, brought in seven or eight workers, and hatched thirty sheets of spring silkworm eggs.
However, that too ended in spectacular failure.
As both the rot and recession worsened, by autumn they carried off the newly built silkworm room itself elsewhere, then dismantled and hauled away the granary and barn next.

That winter, Grandmother O-An passed away suddenly.
Mother Otake, who had lived like O-An’s shadow, soon followed her in death.

Shizu gave birth to her third son.
This time they named him Hisae.
They had taken the name from her grandfather who had been a shrewd man.
Hope gradually grew smaller.
In the house hollowed out through repeated auctions, Father Monji died abruptly while cursing his adopted son.

No sooner had it begun to collapse than everything came crashing down at once.
The mountain forests and rice fields had long since been registered under others’ names.
The clerk of Fukumoto Seisaku—the daily-interest moneylender from town—rushed about dealing with the aftermath.
The tended garden trees were pulled out one by one like teeth being extracted.

That year, a fourth child was born and named Seisaku.
The names Kihachirō and Zenjirō held no direct resonance, but many bore painful memories associated with the name Seisaku.

“Seisaku?!”
“Hmph, as if there’s some great man called Fukumoto Seisaku!”
“After being squeezed dry by him, now we’re supposed to bow and scrape? Not a chance…”

So saying, they would alternate between indignation and laughter.

Finally, the large main house was dismantled.
In the nearly two-tan estate grounds, only a single storehouse remained at the back corner.
Toshikuni and the others ended up attaching eaves to the storehouse’s roof edge, resulting in an undulating roofline.
The storehouse was owned by Fukumoto, and the grounds had been registered under the Nakamura family name—Toshikuni’s birthplace.

In the end, Toshikuni suddenly suffered a stroke and took to his bed.

“Morioka’s in utter disarray!”
When the villagers gathered，their talk would turn to that．

No matter what anyone said，watching the house splendidly collapse before their eyes was deeply satisfying．

Eventually，Toshikuni too died．
He was just past forty…．
It was when Misako had been born less than half a year earlier．
Shizu attended five funerals within a short span of years．

The surrounding circumstances had completely changed.
At Toshikuni’s funeral, Otoki from the Goda family, who had come to help,
“Back in the day, he was the top lieutenant—it’s not like he couldn’t afford to show up in a proper haori with his family crest…”
So saying, she sarcastically mocked Rinosuke Matsushita, who lived next door to Shizu.
Another younger sister also died of postpartum illness that winter.
Shizu was left behind with her four encumbering children.

In the evening, Hisae returned home from school.

His face was a tear-streaked mess—had someone made him cry on the way here?
“What were you doing… until now?!”
Shizu, working in the field, put on a slightly stern expression.

Hisae started to remove the bag from his shoulder but hesitated.

“Can I eat now?”
When Hisae saw Shizu silently nod, he energetically headed into the kitchen.

“Hurry up and eat, then come back to weed the fields…”

Shizu yelled from outside.

5

My health has improved considerably.
My back still hurts sometimes, but it’s nothing serious.

Now that summer fertilization has begun, I go out to the fields every day.

My work undergarment has torn, so please send a replacement.
My leggings have also torn.

As for rice, I will receive just one *to* before Bon and take it with me.
It seems difficult to have them give out any more from here.

When I think of my dear aunts’ circumstances, it pains me deeply.
What will you do about the silkworms at home?

Please take care of yourself.

Kihachirō

Mother

Shizu read the letter over and over.

Even just the spring silkworms had yielded over two hundred kan—the intense labor of Toshikuni’s ancestral home came back to her. Kihachirō was working there now as a manservant.

After Toshikuni’s death, the Nakamura family had declared: “We’ll suspend tenant fees for now, but you must repay the Okajima mutual aid association instead.”

It had sounded merciful, but mercy had no place here. The Okajima loans—massive sums of 1,700 yen per share—had been taken once and abandoned, interest accruing until they were now hounded to repay it all within months. This ultimatum, delivered just as Kubo’s Ofuji household mutual aid association collapsed unresolved, meant Shizu’s family bore a fatal debt—one Kihachirō now carried entire, condemned to thrash forever in this mire with no escape.

“Kihachirō’ll start bearing hardships now—he’ll grow into a loyal man! No matter what, if you eat another’s rice, you’ll never amount to somethin’ folks envy!”

Otoki occasionally said such things to Shizu.

Kihachirō was already seventeen that year.

In the evening, Shizu went to the neighboring Matsushita household.
It was exactly dinnertime, and all the household members were making lively clattering sounds with their bowls.
“Please have a seat…”
The daughter-in-law Mitsuyo said amiably.
Misako on someone’s back called out,“Mama! Mama!”
As she said that she reached out her hand.

Shizu began hesitantly to speak.

“Um, I’d like to retrieve the futon I left in your care some time ago… Kihachirō wrote saying he has no undergarments, and since there’s no fabric at all… I thought if I take that apart and sew it…”

She added as if to explain herself.

“Oh, I see! So you’ll take that!”
Omaki, the mother-in-law, stood up and came over but told her to go around to the retired quarters.
When she went outside, Misako suddenly started crying.

As Shizu passed by the side of the storehouse, she fleetingly recalled where that storehouse had once stood in the original estate.

During the time when Toshikuni was alive and healthy, he became so financially strained that he would sell off anything he could get his hands on. To prevent this, Shizu secretly transported one futon and one desk to the neighboring household and had them keep these items there.

Omaki climbed up from the veranda of the retired quarters and opened the shoji screen.
Then, right next to that shoji screen, a desk stood properly placed.
It was a sturdy desk made from a single plank seven-tenths thick, measuring a full four shaku in length.
An antiquated piece with three drawers on each side, it was something she had been told her father brought from the Okajima family when he came as an adopted son.

Shizu noticed magazines and an ink bottle placed on the desk, with a zabuton cushion laid out.

“Someone’s using it!”
The instant she realized this, her mind suddenly became chaotic, and Shizu stood frozen in place.
Omaki brought out a futon from the closet.

“Truly, this’d hold up well—good enough for wearin’ at the workshop…”
“Back in th’day, grand-house folk all had stuff like this when they wed!”

Omaki spread it out and examined it as she spoke.
It was made of hand-spun yarn woven into sturdy cloth, with a shockingly large three oak leaves family crest dyed into its back.

The indigo scent struck thickly.

“Nowadays, no one wears such heavy things anymore!”
Shizu lifted it up to examine and said.

“But even so, this cotton seems to be high-quality—it feels like a waste to take it apart!”
Omaki said.

Shizu hesitated, the words “I’ll retrieve the desk next time” nearly reaching her lips but holding back. If stated casually, it might have seemed insignificant, yet she felt such pressure that she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Seeing the desk actually in use made raising the matter painful. “Should I take the desk now too?” Not voicing this question made her feel Omaki’s silent intentions reflecting back at her. Having left it entrusted without clear terms meant they could rightfully claim it as collateral. When Shizu thought this, it became unbearable—she felt if she didn’t speak now, the chance would never come.

“Looks like Misako didn’t get her little reward!” Omaki said this and brought out two or three rice crackers from the next room, making Misako hold them. Misako snatched them up and shoved them into her mouth. Shizu ultimately failed to bring it up. (Next time instead!) she resolved inwardly once more.

“Truly, thank you for your kindness…” Shizu offered that courtesy and stepped out into the pitch-black path.

“After all, even we’ve ended up saddled with your household’s debts…”

The words she had been told so many times now clung heavily to her mind.
Pressed to the brink, even the five yen she had secretly borrowed from Omasa now seemed impossible to repay.
Shizu walked on, cradling the heavy futon as her heart sank into bottomless despair.

VI

“It was hot today, wasn’t it!”
Shizu, working in the field, looked up when called from the path above.
Otoki stood there with a tail basket attached.
“How far along are they now?”

“They’ve finally emerged from their second molting!”
Shizu replied.

“Yours are coming along well, aren’t they!
You’re taking such good care of them…”

“I only finished feeding them mulberry leaves yesterday.
Working through the night took all my time…
With not a single bud on the trees, it’s backbreaking—I just suddenly felt so sad!”

Otoki heaved a sigh and said.

"Mine have all stopped too..."

"Truly, mine have all stopped too!"
"It's this wretched weather!"
"No matter what, unless those buds burst out everywhere and we pile on fertilizer, it'll never work!"
Otoki muttered this way, then suddenly—

"Oh, do look at Matsushita's field!"
"What perfect buds they've got there!"
"So beautiful it stings the eyes!"

She said in a tone that could not conceal her envy.

The neighboring field, situated in a position overlooking the area, now lay bathed in the evening sun where the freshly sprouted mulberry buds stretched out lush and dewy like a spread mat of yellow-green as far as the eye could see.
The neighboring house was mostly hidden by the thick growth of the mulberry fields.

Otoki continued talking for a while longer.

“And how is Kihachirō-ma doing! He’s still in that same good condition, isn’t he!”

“Thank you very much.”

Shizu bowed her head slightly but told her that he was in a much better condition.

“I caused you so much concern back then…”
Shizu bowed her head once again.

Before the spring silkworm season, when Kihachirō had fallen gravely ill over there and Shizu had been beside herself with worry, Otoki had brought her a certain black-burned medicine.

“It’s just the leftover from when my father was gravely ill…”
She had said this and handed it over—the medicine had been obtained by Otoki’s sister, who was married into Ōsawa Hamlet, and was said to have cost fifteen yen for just four times this amount.
Shizu thanked Otoki for her kindness with tears streaming down her face.
And she came to rely on Otoki more than anyone else.

“Well now, Kihachirō-ma’s doing well enough too.”
“No matter what you say, young ones bounce back quick as anything, I tell you…”

Otoki suddenly adopted a hurried air. “Do come up now, won’t you?”
With that farewell, she began descending the slope.

There was no woman who worked like Otoki. She gave birth to children every year, but by the third day she was already up and working. She took great care of her elderly and frail husband—Otoki’s devotion to her spouse was well-known—and never missed preparing herbal baths for him every other day. Shizu occasionally took the children and went when invited to baths.

“Otoki manages everything all by herself like that—no matter what you say, she’s such an amazing mistress, they can’t even spread a single rumor about her!”

Such was the talk behind closed doors.

Shizu descended from the manor field and entered the field below the stone wall.
It was a narrow field pruned for the equinox.
The far side stretched continuously into the neighboring household’s field.
At the property boundary lay narrow divisions.
The deep ditch that had once marked it was now filled in.
As the neighbors dug forward shovel by shovel, Shizu’s side found itself retreating step by step under their encroachment.
Even shovel by shovel, given enough time, a great gap would form.

Otoki too had once mentioned that matter,

“Truly, people who can manage their households have something different about them!”

She had said it with such an admiring tone.

Shizu picked as many soft leaves from the shade as she could find, but sun-scorched and already withered, they yielded little.

At the property boundary, the improved large-leaf mulberry plants that the neighboring household had cultivated were thriving with leaves as big as burdock leaves.

When Shizu saw those sap-rich, glossy mulberry buds, she felt a surge of irritation for no discernible reason.
A feeling welled up painfully in her—as if it were her own appetite—to let the newly hatched silkworms eat these nutritious, soft leaves to their heart’s content.

Shizu plucked a single leaf with a snap and examined it.
The leaf was thick and unyielding.
From the cut end, white sap oozed thickly.
Shizu made an effort to pretend to be unfazed.
And then she hastily plucked three or four leaves and stuffed them into the basket.

Evening dusk settled quietly as a cool wind rustled through the mulberry fields.

In the mountains, lacquer blossoms bloomed and scattered.

Morita Village was a basin atop a high mountain; to reach other hamlets, one had to descend or ascend slopes no matter which direction they went. Okada Village as a whole had a terrain where each hamlet formed in valley after valley; interactions with other hamlets were relatively sparse. Most matters were often settled within the hamlet.

With the decline of the Morita family, the forests that had encircled Morita Village in layers upon layers were completely cleared to the ground.

It truly was the blink of an eye. A large number of loggers swarmed in and felled the great cedar, cypress, and pine trees one after another. The logs stripped of their bark descended the mountain daily, were loaded onto transport, and hauled away to town.

In their wake, the mountain’s reddish-brown flesh lay grotesquely exposed, with rocks and severed stumps jutting out jaggedly to create a thorny, forbidding landscape.
The mountain floor, where fallen leaves had piled and rotted beyond measure, gave an oddly spongy softness underfoot.
Across the slopes now left with useless pieris and azaleas drooping dejectedly, wood chips lay scattered in untidy heaps.
Most villagers quietly carried off those wood chips to their homes.
Some had piled them behind their houses.

“That Genkō bastard’s swapping wood chips and his old hag!”
(Meaning: exchange)

When Genkichi’s wife took a lover and left the village, such malicious gossip had been spread.

The village stripped of its windbreak forests stood abruptly exposed.
The distant town of Iida—once requiring a climb to high ground to glimpse—now lay visible from every direction.

When winter came, the Komagane Oroshi battered them head-on.
The gaunt village sank deeper into desolate snowdrifts, its houses growing shabbier and more wretched by the day.

In the northern Mizusawa land registry of the village, there had long been a spring that welled up.
Clear, pure water gushed forth ceaselessly, its volume so abundant that it could turn a waterwheel.

“Nakai’s water is the best in the village.
“It tastes like sweet dew.”
“When I die, fetch Nakai’s water for my deathbed.”
O-Yasu, the Morita family’s grandmother, had repeated those words like a mantra.

Shizu and her sisters would sometimes go draw water with a bucket at their grandmother’s bidding.
In recent years, the spring’s water had lost its distinctive flavor and become ordinary.
The spring itself grew shallow and still as death, earthworms now exposing their pallid bellies.

“Even the water’s changed,”
some murmured in bewilderment.
But there was nothing strange about it.
The cause lay plain—the deep woods had been stripped bare.

“When the Morita grandmother was dying, Nakai’s water wasn’t even there anymore!”

Katsuta of Sagaya would stop by the spring to drink water on his way to the valley rice fields, lost in deep reflection.

Seven

Even after the Morita family’s collapse, most of the villagers remained poor.
On the contrary, just the loss of the mountains alone had brought visibly dire hardships.

For example, in the past, if they bowed their heads and said, “Begging your pardon,” they could enter the nearby mountains to gather dead branches.
Even if they felled trees without permission, the miscellaneous trees were overlooked.
Now, even obtaining a single wooden stake had become no easy task.

Four or five years ago, a legal accusation arose over the illegal logging in Fukumoto’s mountains.
The old customs had come back to haunt them.
The matter was settled through mediation, but it had been a grave threat.
Nowadays, even gathering a single piece of firewood had become such a hassle that most households lived struggling for fuel.
Households with enough resourcefulness could finally prepare their winter firewood by taking on underbrush clearing for the plantations.

With the disappearance of the matsutake mushroom mountains, Yoshikazu’s father and Shinzō could no longer earn their secret pocket money.

The logged-off mountains had once again seen grass grow thick and trees begin to sprout, gradually and unnoticed.
In the matsutake mushroom mountains, small pine trees began shooting up all at once, while in the mixed forest mountains, young lacquer trees had come to thrive in profusion.

And there, cypress saplings—some already two or three feet tall, others five or six—were now growing lushly.
This was because Fukumoto from town had immediately planted them in the logged-off areas.

“When these grow up, they’ll be something tremendous!”

As they passed by and looked at the mountains, the villagers were astonished by the splendid growth of the cypress trees.

Fukumoto had also acquired and owned the mountain forests in the neighboring Okajima hamlet when the Okajima family fell, so across hundreds of chōbu of contiguous mountains—cypress and cedar forests—their value would only increase year by year even if left untouched.

“If they build a Chubu Electric power plant in Okajima district and run a railway through here, Fukumoto’s mountains will fetch a hell of a price!”

“You’re such an idiot! He’d planned it all from the start, hadn’t he? Even if all these cunning bastards around here ganged up on him, could they ever match Fukumoto? Even Sawatariyama—didn’t he get that too because he wanted it to be contiguous land…? Even Mr. Toshikuni Morita was just a frog marked by a snake from the start… Squeezed dry under some pretense or other!”

“Hey, hey! He was just flattered into throwing up a little geisha party and causing a commotion!”

“Even so, they say Fukumoto’s been acting all meek lately—donating here and there—so he doesn’t get cursed out like before anymore!”

“He’s got ambitions for the prefectural assembly!”

In gatherings of youths centered around Shōzō, the son of Sagaya, such topics would occasionally come up.

They recalled Fukumoto’s compact yet fiercely sharp face—how he had once come with his family to inspect his mountains and stayed at Yoshinoya for a couple of days.

They had also noted the delicate build of Fukumoto’s daughter, who was said to be attending school in Tokyo.

“Lend you a thousand yen and slice off four hundred as interest… Just sit back watching your fortune grow with their hands tucked warm once they’ve got your seal stamped! What damn fools they take us for!”

Shōzō fell into deep thought,

“Hmm, more importantly—isn’t Fukumoto someone from town? And yet he drags his wife and son all the way out here—over six ri into these mountains, to land he’s got no ties to—parading around like ‘These are our mountains! Our land!’ with that smug face of his… Not that legal technicalities matter… The people here have lived in this place since their ancestors’ time, yet they have to pay money even for a single piece of firewood, don’t they? Mountain owners keep planting trees more and more, and on top of that, they say the prefecture doles out hefty subsidies… You ought to think about that contradiction!”

He said each word with fervor.

“Hmm, there’s no reasoning with those who don’t own mountains.”
“The Agricultural Association and such are out there promoting side businesses—telling us to grow shiitake mushrooms, grow white wood ear mushrooms…”
“No matter what they say, those who can do profitable work are the very ones who can get by without lifting a finger, I tell you!”

“That’s right! Even with this new low-interest fund they keep talking about—they won’t lend unless you’ve got the ability to repay… But it’s *because* there’s no way to repay that we’re all stuck like this!”

“Hmm, they say even just Okada Village applied for eighteen thousand yen in low-interest funds—but that’s nothing but a drop in the bucket…”

Tadao said with a long sigh.

“It’s no wonder the village council’s always squabbling.”
“It’s a poor village, I tell you… Everyone’s like chestnuts trying to measure up—all just as stunted as each other.”
“And yet those who need help all need the same damn things! They’re shoving this huge burden onto the smaller folks!”

“With this, they say even Okada Village’s land alone is bigger than other villages!”

“Hmm, but that sort of thing isn’t an issue at all! In other villages too, the poor stay poor no matter what… We’ve got to speak more radically!” Shōzō declared in a resolute tone. “Anyway, even folks around here are heading straight into an impossible dead end. How we’ll rise up from this—that’s the root problem, I tell you!”

The conversation would invariably gravitate toward matters of social ideology—this was the norm.

“There ain’t a place as ideologically backward as this village!”
Shōzō said this like it was his catchphrase.

In other villages, there already seemed to be some new momentum stirring.
Free universities and citizen lectures were being energetically established in most villages.
Not a single notable figure ever properly visited this poor, remote village.
Elementary school teachers, too, now seemed utterly listless and were unreliable anywhere.
The desire to know more and more things never left Shōzō and his group’s minds.

From Kiyoshi of Hiyoshi—who had returned once this winter—came stories told with great interest about urban life and the inner workings of labor unions.
Kiyoshi had been a young leader among those in the village, but after departing on his travels, his most left-wing leanings had grown even more pronounced.

“No matter what, we’ve got to establish a foundational organization!”

Kiyoshi kept repeating that point time and again.

Shōzō was sometimes surprised to hear unexpectedly well-grounded words from his sisters returning from the silk-reeling factory.

Shōzō’s sister Chibo was a model top worker at the Asahikan silk-reeling factory in the neighboring village.

“I can’t fathom why I was so fixated on those self-cultivation meetings…”

Chibo once said.
And she would borrow banned issues of *Senki* and bound editions of *Musan Shinbun* from someone, and upon returning home on public holidays, she would avidly read them.
The recent progress and changes among the young girls were astonishing.

Shōzō felt at every turn that they were falling behind.
"I have to do something about this."
Restlessness perpetually drove him.
And his inability to grasp anything he could confront directly left him frustrated and unfulfilled.

“Shōzō, we’ve got to get you a bride soon…”
“We can’t keep leaving Chibo and the others like that forever—not with us being short-handed like this—we’ve got to do something…”

Osumi began speaking in that manner.
“There’s no use bringing a bride into this poverty…”
“I ain’t gettin’ married till I’m thirty!”

Shōzō answered curtly.

“But you can’t very well go on not gettin’ married till you’re thirty, can you?”

Katsuta interjected abruptly.

Among Shōzō and his group, there seemed to be no room even for talk of marriage prospects.

VIII

When August arrived, the temperature suddenly sweltered upward, and days thick with rain followed one after another. White stiff disease had begun appearing in every household's silkworms. No matter how many they picked up, more kept whitening and dying behind them. In the worst cases, entire batches turned stark white and hardened overnight. Even when they sprinkled the medicine from the village office over the silkworms and tried disinfecting them, it showed no effect at all. Staring at the dead silkworms piled into white mounds on their earthen floors, the people exchanged expressions drained of hope.

There was a rumor that every day, silkworms discarded upstream would come floating down the Tenryū River.
And day after day, the newspapers increasingly reported the decline in cocoon prices.

“Good grief, I’ve grown downright sick of raising silkworms!”

The wives said this, their faces growing pale.

At Shizu’s house too, once food rationing began, she could no longer manage alone.
Shizu had to scurry back and forth between the mulberry fields and the house.
No sooner had she finished one round of feeding than she was immediately driven to the next mulberry leaves.
The silkworms could no longer be kept solely within the narrow storehouse, so she spread straw mats in the eaves and moved them there.
And she built shelves to set up two-tiered rearing.
In the direction where the morning sun shone, she had Hisae cut and hang branches from the oak tree beside the storehouse, creating shade.

Nowadays, simple outdoor rearing had become popular everywhere, with some households raising them in open-air tent setups, so Shizu tried moving hers to the eaves as well—had she not done so, there would have been no way to manage replacing the silkworm waste each time.
Shizu was sleep-deprived.
When she opened her eyes each morning, her body creaked and ached so badly she could barely stagger upright.

Because rain had fallen incessantly since yesterday, they had no choice but to spread out the mulberry leaves they’d picked—soaked through—from the earthen floor to the hearth and throughout the house to dry them.
The area around them was soaked through, leaving no place to set their feet.
Silkworm droppings had even fallen into the rice tub, swelling sodden.
Shizu felt she had no room to tend to her children’s needs.
Because the two children couldn’t go outside, they clung to her everywhere in the cramped house.
Fusako’s development was delayed, and now that she had just begun to toddle unsteadily, she couldn’t take her eyes off her for fear she’d hurt herself.

Moreover, her head was covered in boils from which pus oozed thickly, making her even more irritable.

"This comes from hereditary poison, so it won’t heal quickly."
She had once been told that by the doctor.

Shizu had long been aware of a grave malfunction within her own body.
At times she felt violent bouts of dizziness.

She gathered the mulberry leaves whose dew had finally begun to dry and hurriedly began feeding them to the silkworms.
The silkworms were completely transparent.
For some time now, Seisaku had been whining about something.
Because Shizu was busy and paid him no attention, Seisaku gradually raised his voice.

“If you don’t give me even one sen?”

“Once I finish feeding them, I’ll give it to you…”

“Ugh, if it’s not now…”
Seisaku let out a tearful cry, but upon seeing his mother feeding them with an unaffected expression, he began shrieking and suddenly rattled the kitchen’s shoji screen violently.
That stirred up Shizu’s already frayed nerves.
This time, he suddenly thrust his foot into the shoji screen and ripped it with a tearing sound.
And he kicked the body of Misako, who was crawling nearby.
“Waah—” Misako cried out.
Shizu rushed over.
And then she suddenly smacked Seisaku’s head with a sharp crack.
Tears of frustration welled up in Shizu’s eyes.

“Even if I say I’ll give it once I’m done feeding them? You impossible child!”

Shizu took out one sen from the cupboard and said “Here—” as she handed it over.
Seisaku’s mood improved—he wiped his tears but gripped the coin and went outside.
“Sei!”
Shizu called from inside the house.

“Hurry up and go buy it! Your mother’s busy, so you look after Mii-chan, you hear!”

“Uuun,” he drawled in reply, then Seisaku dashed off down the slope.

Shizu would sometimes be reminded of her dead husband, Toshikuni.
There were still times when she felt as if he might suddenly return from somewhere.
One evening, Toshikuni returned home dead drunk and tumbled into the ditch in front of the gate.
and he no longer had the strength to get up, could only groan “Ugh… ugh…”.

“Father! Father!”

Shizu clung desperately, tears streaming down her face.

After months had passed, Toshikuni finally became able to move half his body, but his mouth would not function properly, drool streamed down, and he had become a shadow of his former self.

Toshikuni, now clinging to a cane, began making constant trips to his family home across the river to beg for rice and money.

“When Toshi comes begging, it feels like my whole body shrivels up!”

The mother across the river lamented thus.

Even so, out of parental affection, when she returned and opened the bag, it was not once or twice that paper-wrapped bundles containing two or three 50-sen silver coins had appeared mixed in with the rice.

“Did Father bring any rice?”

Hisae and Seisaku looked worried as they whispered to each other in secret about it.

Days of misery too wretched to speak of to others had dragged on for two or three years by now.

Shizu recalled how occasionally Toshikuni would keep her company as she carried manure buckets to the fields with unsteady steps.
This version of him—who now accompanied her—seemed like a different person altogether from the husband who had once indulged in dissipation and with whom they had always exchanged cold glances.

It was toward such a husband that she had finally been able to feel a settled, marital affection—or so it seemed. Shizu couldn't help resenting Toshikuni—this man who had selfishly pushed every burden onto her only to die first. She felt she couldn’t possibly fend off the anxieties of life that ceaselessly, relentlessly surged upon her alone. On the day of mounting the cocooning frames, Shizu relied on Otoki. At Otoki’s place, they had finished mounting the cocooning frames two days prior, and now that they’d just managed to finish gathering the stragglers, she came right away.

Because the silkworms that had spun their cocoons were in an uproar, Shizu and Otoki kept moving so busily they grew dizzy. For those raised under the eaves through the branch mulberry method, they cut chestnut branches, let the silkworms perch on them, then beat the branches. They transferred them one by one to the Imamaki frames and placed them on shelves.

“These little creatures work themselves to the bone! Might average six kan this time… And your lot didn’t get much pebrine!”

Otoki said such things while gathering the silkworms.

“Can they really yield that much?!”
“The total might barely reach that!”
“Rushing into raising them—with these pitiful mulberries—it’s hopeless!”

“The mulberries truly are wretched—hopeless! Forget kan counts—there’s no silk to speak of… Where we’re from, no matter how much we deliver, they always cut us down on thread weight!” Otoki said.

“Kanoe-san’s place always manages splendidly—they haul in loads, I tell you!”
When Shizu said this, Otoki snorted and replied.

“How should I know?!”
“At that place, they’re always fudging the seed counts… Even with spring silkworms—Kanoe-san kept saying ten sheets at eighty-five kan each—but truth is, they swept eleven sheets!”

The number of kan one could get per silkworm egg frame had become a competition nearly everywhere.
Unlike rice crops, silkworms made farmers boast their yields to each other as much as they could.
With spring silkworms—depending on variety—you’d typically harvest eight kan on average, but summer silkworms never cooperated like that.

Shizu felt her heart waver when she thought how many kan she might obtain after all this effort.
"Once the silkworms finish...?"
She had staked everything on this, yet when she considered it properly, it would hardly bring any meaningful income.

Her purse was stretched so thin she couldn't even begin to decide what to apportion where.

Hisae and Seisaku, in their growth-spurt hunger, ate with such abandon it made one anxious.
Shizu was often plagued by miserly thoughts.

"Shall we rest a spell?"

A section of the cocoon work had been completed.
Otoki stretched her back as she spoke.
In the storehouse where no sunlight entered, the air stayed surprisingly cool even at summer's peak.
Shizu kindled a fire at the hearth to brew tea.
Otoki settled onto the grimy hearth mat.

A single piece of paper was pasted on the wall.

Morita Ward Women's Association Agreement

1. In light of the current economic depression, let us uphold as much frugality and thrift as we can manage.

2. Abolish tea and sweets; eliminate all other unnecessary expenses and proceed with self-sufficiency.

3. Eat more supplementary foods like wheat, buckwheat, chestnuts, beans, and daikon radish, and let us devise ways to save rice whenever possible.

It is the responsibility of housewives.

4. Therefore, let us devote ourselves to field work and not neglect intercropping.

5. Let us collect five *gō* of rice and one rag each month to form a savings association.

One shall join either one of the two.

Rags shall measure one shaku (approx. 11.8 inches) in length and eight sun (approx. 9.5 inches) in width; stitching shall be done with double thread.

Otoki read it with an impassive face.

This had been proposed during the spring Women’s Association meeting, with Omaki of Matsushita and the bride of Yoshimoto-ya as its main proponents.

Rice was to be sold to the rice polishing mill, and rags to Asahi-kan—contracts had been finalized and implementation had begun.

“Otoki-san, have you already handed over this month’s share?”

“Just the rice part, I tell ya! As for sewing rags—we ain’t got neither time nor cloth… I know it’s supposed to help us out, but they’re so blasted strict about that part…”

Shizu nodded silently.
Since there was no silk-reeling factory in the village, most villagers had joined production cooperatives in other villages to supply their cocoons.
Otoki’s household was also part of the Asahi-kan cooperative.

Shizu wanted to take this batch of cocoons to the production cooperative rather than have them bought up here by the village cocoon buyers for a paltry sum like one yen and eighty sen. The production cooperative had given a two-yen advance for the spring silkworms, so even after paying Shōsaku for transport, she would still come out ahead. For that, asking Otoki and borrowing her household’s name to submit them was the best strategy.

Shizu tried bringing up the matter.

“And?”
Otoki said, twisting her face.

“In our case, we’ve got debts with the production cooperative—even for the spring silkworms, we had to borrow just to scrape by—and now with these summer ones, we’re raising ’em just to see, but there’s even less to spare… Ain’t no help comin’ our way.”
“Unless we add a whole lot more from our side, the numbers just won’t add up… We keep gettin’ approvals to borrow more and more ahead of time, but all it does is pile up the troubles one after another!”

Otoki let out a deep sigh.
In Otoki’s household, not only did they have a bountiful silkworm harvest, but with two daughters working as factory girls at the production cooperative and earning well, so it would be a lie if things weren’t easier—

“They never talk ’bout nothin’ but complainin’ ’bout not workin’ hard enough or whatever… When Bon comes ’round an’ there ain’t no clothes, Kiyoko an’ the others get all sad-like—an’ I can’t do a damn thing ’bout it no matter how I rack my brains!”

Otoki said that and laughed sadly.

Nine

The rain that had persisted all day grew fierce with wind by evening, becoming a tempest, but come dawn, it finally abated.
After the autumn storm passed, the mountain-top hamlet suddenly turned chilly and autumn-like.

The heavy rain the previous night had sent torrents of earth and sand surging down from the mountain behind the Morioka family cemetery, leaving the entire grounds ravaged beyond recognition.
Puddles had formed everywhere, and what’s more, a gaping hole had opened in the side of the mound on Toshikuni’s grave.
It appeared that water had flowed in from there; the roof had flipped over, and the grave marker had crashed down with a thud.

Early that morning, Otoki, who had taken a shortcut while cutting morning grass, discovered it and exclaimed in alarm, “How terrifying!” Then she hurried the little boy along, warning, “Come on, hurry up and walk, or Mr. Toshikuni’s ghost’ll come out!” Otoki called out to Shizu from the top of the slope and went to tell her about it.

The next day, Shizu asked her neighbor Genkichi to help and began cleaning the cemetery.
The imposing ancestral gravestones formed rows stretching across multiple lines.
The vast grounds lay utterly ruined and desolate.

In the frontmost row stood Zenjirō’s, Oan’s, Otake’s, Monji’s, and Toshikuni’s.
With no stone monuments erected, they were all mere earthen mounds—the characters on their grave markers barely legible.

“Grandmother’s is the sturdiest one.”

Genkichi said this.
No matter how one looked at it, when Oan had died, the Morioka family had still retained some lingering dignity.
But in Toshikuni's case—the last of them—it had been a hollow formality.

The Reverend they'd hired from the neighboring hamlet, still wearing his soiled white tabi socks, recited a perfunctory prayer and left it at that. With the bitter north wind whipping across that exposed graveyard—too cold to endure—even the villagers who'd gathered out of obligation soon made their excuses and withdrew.

Genkichi worked with Shizu, digging out soil, rebuilding the mounds, and repairing the roofs. After Hisae and Shu returned from school and came up to the graveyard, it suddenly livened up. Genkichi set up the bamboo tubes he had made from green bamboo cut from his own thicket one by one beside the graves.

“Why’re you setting up those bamboo tubes?”
Shu asked his father.

“We’re setting up flowers to offer.”
“For the Buddha.”

“We’ll light a lamp for Father, you know.”

Shizu said to Hisae.

“How do you offer a lamp?”

“Like we did at Shin-chan’s place once before, maybe? Light lots of candles…”
The two children asked in unison.

“Yeah—hundreds of lamps.”

“Where are we lighting the lamps?”

“We’ll set up the lamps from around here all the way to the highway.”

Genkichi said to Shizu as if seeking her agreement.

Shu and Hisae, who had been persistently pestering them with questions, found themselves exchanging glances in that moment.

“Aah!” they cried out in voices brimming with delight.

“Aah! They’re gonna light lamps…”

The two children ran off toward the highway, shouting as they scrambled along.

In the past, this entire hamlet followed Buddhist funeral rites, but since the Reverend’s method was simpler and less costly, most households now held Shinto-style funerals.

Still clinging to old customs, villagers would offer autumn flowers at graves during Bon, while households observing their first Bon waited for nightfall to light lamps around the cemetery and hold their rites.
The children could hardly wait for Bon to arrive.
“Once Bon’s over… what’ll we wait for next…”
The girls returning from the silk mill, their enjoyment so fleeting, sang.

Genkichi took a short rest and sat down on a nearby rotten tree stump.
He took out his pipe and had a smoke, but as if he had suddenly noticed,
“I wonder if there are three new Bon observances this year?” he said.
“There’s ours, Niiya’s daughter, Nakaya’s old man… and Kubo no Yoshimatsu was in spring, so that was settled last year!”

“Wasn’t Kaido’s child also this year?”

“Hmm, come to think of it... Then that makes four this year.”
“Years like this don’t come often.”
“Nothing but tearful burials—”
“Well, Nakaya’s old man had his years, so that’s only natural...”
“Then you’ll see lights all around this year!”
Genkichi stood up with his pipe tucked at his waist and began tidying the tools. “This high spot’s lights’ll look more showy than anybody else’s, I reckon...”

He muttered as if to himself.

Shizu went down the slope to fetch water.

The Bon Festival was looming two days away.

1930-12

(“Tsubasa”
Volume 2, Number 4)