Pathway to Japanese Literature

August ——

The clattering of approaching geta stumbled against a garden stone and faltered once. Then, my brother-in-law appeared beneath the persimmon tree with a flushed red face and said, “Ceasefire, ceasefire.” In what looked like borrowed geta, he stumbled there again. Stumbling, he said, “The Potsdam Declaration—accepted in full.”

“Is that really true?” “It’s true. The radio just said that.” I fell heavily as if collapsing, planted one hand on the tatami, and gazed out at the sloping garden. The cascading cliff of summer chrysanthemums burned with flame-colored intensity. Behind them, the mountain raised a silent clamor—countless fiery orbs whirling madly in the western sun’s depths that seemed ready to crumble at any moment. “Anyway, at a time like this, we should go to the mountains.”

“No… not today.” After the sound of my brother-in-law’s geta clogs faded into the distance, I leaned back against a pillar, crossed my knees, and kept gazing at the garden. We lost.–No–you can’t know unless you see it. But where should I look? This village is nothing but the remains of an ancient battlefield. The western sun’s full force flooding the fields and mountains seemed to twist and writhe in confusion, unaware of where its flow would end.

August―― The sound of winding the pillar clock; a splash of water sounded. When I looked, four or five carp gathered their mouths to the chrysanthemum petals hanging down into the pond and leapt up to eat them. The slender-stemmed white gourd flowers swayed. I like this flower. Whenever my eyes come to rest here, my heart finds peace. It seems as though this slender flower stem alone quietly supports the hardships of defeat. For me now there exists nothing but a single white flower. And it is that pale bluish slender part of its stem—on the verge of vanishing—the wind has turned autumnal.

August——

The calf had fallen ill and stopped eating grass, so the people of this house seemed unbearably worried. They were trying to boil black beans into a medicinal broth to get it to drink, but today even the goat appeared wilted and sorrowful. They used to call out to each other with plaintive bleats—when one was led out to the garden, the other would thrash about in protest—but now both hung their heads listlessly. However, it was not only the goat and calf. Everything in sight seemed to droop listlessly.

My second son, a first-year middle school student who commuted by train, returned home, “The principal gathered everyone today and said, ‘You all are so pitiful—so pitiful it’s unbearable.’ He was crying, tears streaming down,” he said.

“How was it on the train?” “They were just fighting everywhere.” “Adults sure do fight a lot, huh?” “Why do you think that is?”

Even when I was walking through a mountain pass, a man who had laid his bicycle down in the grass, eating his lunch alone while muttering, "Every last soldier... every last soldier...," glared at me as if to bite as I passed by. Then, with a clatter, he snapped the aluminum lid shut and stood up, then nimbly mounted his bicycle and rode off somewhere.

An old woman named Toshie, who had married into a seaside village over the mountain pass from this house at seventeen, came and gazed up at the roof of her birthplace. She was seventy this year, but as a rare beauty of an old woman who carried the scent of ancient battlefields, the teeth peeking through her smiling lips drew in some unnameable emotion, making it impossible to look away. When I saw this old woman’s smile, I sensed that single point of pristine brightness left behind when a speck of dust is suddenly blown away. Her youngest son had just perished in the Battle of Okinawa after boarding a submarine. If women could all become like this without descending into the ugliness of age, I thought, life might briefly change its farcical tune. Such was her face. At any rate, she was a type of old woman I had never encountered before—a white-haired crone from a fishing village who had done nothing but scrub floors, her waist perpetually bent, yet she paced here and there with an expression like one tracing childhood memories, gazing up and down at the roof beams without showing the slightest weariness. To that bent back—like life’s final vista—the cries of cicadas fell incessantly.

Afternoon sunlight where white butterflies danced playfully over old garden stones—the sorrow of a fence where morning glories struggled to climb.

This village, once the site of Nishi Haguro where thirty-five temple halls and pagodas stood aligned in opposition to Higashi Haguro across the plain, revealed hints of its former prosperity through the terrain: in the contours of the mountains behind, and in the hillocks scattered like islands across fields where streams from the foothills vanished into earth. Beneath drifting clouds—the ancient sentiment of bluish simplicity in stone masses jutting from collapsed earth; deeply set stone walls along the stream’s edge, their smoothness carved by time’s dampness; arrowhead stones still unearthed even now—the mountain paths where monk-soldiers, driven to extinction by Higashi Haguro, once slid down and scrambled up: cross just one pass, and below lay the sea. A village nestled in the mountain’s embrace, enveloped by mixed woodlands of magnolia leaves, oak leaves, cedar, chestnut, and Japanese oak, descending ever downward into the heart of the plain. When Yoshitsune fled from Shirakawa in the capital to Hiraizumi, he likely passed through here as well, spending a night in this mountain hall. In the mountain pass, there still exists what is called Benkei’s Spring.

The fact that no one in this village knew my occupation brought me relief. Neither did the man who had found me this room know anything about me, nor did the people of this household. By sheer chance—having wandered here in passing and secured a room through that fleeting connection—I counted myself fortunate to make this place our temporary shelter. A life devoid of acquaintances and kin, utterly severed from social bonds, must have been fraught with peril and hardship amid wartime scarcity. Yet if this was indeed the final refuge forced upon us, then to me it became more precious than any other place. Convinced there remained nowhere else to go, I brought my family of four and settled us into a six-mat room at this mountain farmhouse. Then on the third day after our move, the war ended. We hadn’t even finished unpacking.

San'emon's house was large for a farmhouse. The hearth room measured ten mats, followed by twelve mats, then another ten-mat space, with a six-mat room at the very back where my family stayed—though it lacked both tatami flooring and electric light. The row of rooms behind the hearth room served as sleeping quarters for the four family members; though I never peered inside, they likely consisted of twelve-mat and eight-mat chambers. A separate six-mat room beside the entrance housed the eldest son’s wife while he was away at war. The wooden-floored kitchen spanned about twenty mats. None of the rooms had walls, being divided instead by straight-grained cedar sliding doors that preserved an atmosphere unchanged since the Kamakura period. My rear chamber had a veranda overlooking a stone garden planted with Moso bamboo that cascaded down toward the pond. San'emon showed no inclination to discuss our room fee, leaving us in an awkward position. No matter how many times I pressed him to set terms,

“I didn’t lend this room out for money, y’know.” “It’s fine being free.” “But in return—seein’ as I’m poor—when it comes to rice, vegetables, salt, soy sauce, miso... don’t say a word about any of that.” “My household knows nothin’ about those matters.” “What I can give you’s just firewood and brushwood.” “With this there’s plenty, so I won’t have you frettin’.”

San'emon’s manner of speaking came across clearly to strangers. Beside his house, on a roadside three *ken* away across an empty lot, stood the separate residence of Kyūzaemon. This ramshackle annex—the farmhouse that had arranged a room for us in San'emon’s main residence here—bore no further responsibility toward passersby like us either. Yet—“Since I arranged the room, I won’t do anything to trouble you”—Kyūzaemon had suddenly murmured these words in a small voice, a remark my wife remembered.

“Did he say that?” I laughed.

“Yes, he just mentioned it briefly.” “So that brief remark is what drew us here, huh? Wasn’t that just a partial hearing?”

"But he did say something briefly, you know." “Hmm.”

The reason I said “Hmm” was that it suddenly struck me—perhaps the heart sustaining all of us now depended on some single point within those murmured words from a complete stranger. Certainly, had Kyūzaemon’s house not been nearby, I would have had no choice but to alter our means of survival through some method. Vegetables, rice, miso, soy sauce, salt—the path to obtaining these necessities still lacked any discernible form. Yet now, after exhausting every means to search through villages where rooms might be rented—all attempts ending in failure—this was finally the single room I had secured through my own efforts alone. This was no time to dwell on necessities.

On the evening we moved in, as dusk deepened, my wife leaned against the still-unpacked luggage in the corner of the room and wept.

“What are we going to do?” “From now on...” “What do you mean?” “We’ll just have to stay like this for now.” “Is that really okay?” “It’s because it’s getting dark that you’re thinking such things.” “Everything will become clear by tomorrow morning.” “Well, you’ll just have to endure until tomorrow morning.”

“I want to go home.” And then my wife wept again. “Take no thought for tomorrow—doesn’t that saying exist?” “You can spout such things because all you need do is sit there quietly,” she said. “When I went to the kitchen just now, it was utterly dark—I couldn’t see a single thing. Even to fetch water, I had to grope about and barely managed. If every day continues like this… what am I supposed to do?”

In the entire house with nearly ten rooms, there existed only a single small electric light. Even hung in the hearth room as it was, its illumination failed to reach our room. Though we might have called an electrician, San'emon’s household had long defaulted on payments—they said—so none would come anymore.

“Four people living in one six-mat room without electric light—that would be pretty tough.” However, another thought welled up within me. This was truly a renewed life for me—a newness that had naturally engulfed me alone. These all seemed like the most convenient circumstances imaginable—yet that very fact was a personal matter not to be divulged. I simply had to keep pulling everyone along in silence.

“Remember when we were in Tokyo. This is still better than that,” I said. “But back then, I thought we were going to die, you know. We somehow managed to endure it all.” “That’s true too.” The reason that thinking we could finally be safe here had only heightened our anxiety was indeed something we now possessed. That the resolve to die was something understood more in hindsight than in the moment was something I had often felt until now; yet the fact that this realization had become clear again upon reaching this point was clear proof that our anxiety had diminished.

“That time was so strange, wasn’t it? The night of your illness,” I said. “Yes, yes. That time was strange too,” my wife replied involuntarily, lifting her face with a laugh. It was during a bitterly cold air raid—a night when both my wife and I lay bedridden in separate rooms, unable to rise, having put our two children in the outdoor shelter. Though feverish myself, I had gone from my room to stay by my wife’s side where she burned with forty-degree fever. Each time illumination flares fell and suddenly brightened the room, I would drag the zabuton cushion over my head and press myself against the hem of her bedding. Then—apparently worried about us in the house—our second son came clambering out of the shelter. From beyond the storm shutters came his timid call: “Mother!”

Because the voice was so startlingly close, “Hey! It’s dangerous!” I scolded from beneath the zabuton. The child seemed to have retreated into the shelter again, but at the sound of successive illumination flares falling, he clumsily emerged once more,

“Mother!” “Hey! Don’t come here!” Each time I shouted, the footsteps outside the storm shutters grew distant, but I became convinced this night would not end peacefully. My heart had been failing for about a week—I couldn’t even climb the ladder to the second floor, let alone carry my wife to the shelter—and on this night when I believed an air raid would blast us to pieces where we lay. I felt an impulse toward dark humor. “We might be finished now. Is there anything you need to say?” When the child’s footsteps faded, I asked.

“There is.” “Say it.”

“But I won’t say it anymore.” The sound of explosions grew steadily closer, pressing at the core of our reality. “Then fine!” Determined to see my wife’s face one last time by the flare’s light, I waited for the next blast to sit upright.

“Mother!” A voice called out again.

“Don’t come out.” “It’s okay.”

Even as I shouted loudly, I thought that as long as those two in the shelter survived, the rest—

Then came another shell—the sound of glass warping and rattling. “The rest will work itself out.”

“I suppose so.” My wife’s face—swollen and heated like edema—flickered into view in the sky’s glare. Rather than appearing worried, it was a gaze that seemed to have pierced something and now wandered aimlessly. When my wife said “that time was strange” here and now, she referred to how I had looked with the zabuton cushion over my head that she saw back then; but when I said “that time was strange,” I meant how our child would clumsily emerge from the shelter each time danger drew near. On the fourth night after that dangerous night, I had forcibly evacuated my wife and children to Tohoku, leaving myself alone behind. My heart had still been unstable at the time, but compared to the anxiety of having my wife and children by my side, living alone under air raids had been more conducive to regaining peace of mind; as for food difficulties, I thought that as long as I could see the green of wild plants in the garden, it wouldn’t be so dire—and so I carried through with staying behind. Because I still lacked the strength to open the storm shutters, I would get out of bed, cook rice, and once it began to boil, crawl back in. About a week had passed since I’d been sitting around vacantly, lying down and getting up, doing things like that, when fortunately a friend who was being forcibly evacuated came to see me. Now began the life of two men. Since my own house would inevitably burn as well, I wanted to at least witness its burning to the end. If I were to evacuate, it could wait until after that. It would likely be useless once burned, but even so, this was the house that had protected me for so long. With sentimental attachment to the house sapping all motivation to move, I took charge of cooking rice while my friend handled miso soup and bowls—each of us assuming the tasks we did best—and this arrangement turned out to be unexpectedly tranquil. The hour or so each morning when we two would rise and drink tea together proved to be a time of happiness, one that felt unlikely to ever be recaptured. But there was no way my wife could understand such things.

“Anyway, isn’t it more than fortunate that my own house didn’t burn down? That vast Tokyo no longer exists now. Because you haven’t seen it yourself—that’s why you don’t understand,” I said.

“That’s right—I don’t know.” “That’s exactly why.” “That’s exactly why I end up muttering.”

My wife lowered her gaze, her eyes taking on a deeply contemplative look. Now that I thought of it, the people of this village were not so much indifferent to the terror of air raids and the horrors of war as they were completely unaware of them. The fact that there existed no single point which could serve as a standard harboring shared sentiments regarding this matter—now even foreigners found themselves in the same situation. Indeed, with villagers who could not be informed even if one wished to inform them, and when speaking of matters, one had to now exercise patience to converse solely in the realm of the heart where everything had become inconsequential. This clearly defined distance between hearts, these boundary lines drawn within our chests—we alone were aware of them; those on the other side remained oblivious. Not human things like humanity or inhumanity, but something like a deep valley—an impassable line. This impassable line—arising not only among farmers but also ordinary people—now howled in chaos: an entanglement of apathy born between countless groups—those burned out and those spared, soldiers and stay-behinds, evacuees and host families—their overlapping confusions contorting, twisting, biting at each other. No sooner would they shout than laugh; no sooner bow obsequiously than puff out their chests defiantly; no sooner burst into tears than stride about humming a tune. Even in mutual trust, they caught hold of these shattered fragments of the heart—only to fling them away the moment they thought, “Is this truly my own?” At such times, something like moral conviction had no recourse but to first become angry at itself. If one carelessly shouted in a fit of anger, they ended up angry at others. At something entirely unrelated. In truth, people’s hearts were not angry at others now. Every last one of them was angry at these frayed impassable lines. This was entirely new, something just born. This would soon turn to despair. Next would come hope.

August――

Raindrops dripping from the base of a pumpkin. The suppleness of rain-laden Moso bamboo. The texture against the skin of the white gourd’s smoothly draped form. The orange hue of the peaks shifting in depth from moment to moment. The brightness of the rainbow that had clearly emerged above them. A bamboo grove faintly glimpsed within milky mist flowing.

August――

Since moving here, the thing that troubled me most was fleas. Even during daylight hours, they came leaping onto my lips as I ate. To put it dramatically, were I to stroke my face, they seemed ready to spill through my fingers in droves—even swarming onto my eyebrows. At night especially, sleep proved impossible. With a clattering din, footsteps resounded here and there.

“In that case, air raids would be preferable,” I cried out first.

“It really is something, isn’t it?” “They’re everywhere—everywhere!” “But despite these creatures tormenting people so much, how come nobody’s made fleas an issue? What on earth is going on?” “I’ve yet to read a proper critical essay on fleas.”

My wife couldn’t hear a word I was saying. She was frantically chasing fleas that were hopping in all directions. This midnight scene made it seem uncanny—when I considered how this torment would persist every night hereafter—that all other significant matters scattered into nothingness. That very thought might be what’s strange. Yet how could something so excruciating also strike us as comical? Here we were, my wife and I, letting out groans at the pinnacle of solemn suffering while being tormented by fleas—what frivolous objectivity must reside within us to find this amusing. The philosophy of laughter—now that was Bergson’s characteristically light and witty conception. Without this, philosophy would hold no meaning. To prattle on about humanity while forgetting this point—but how absurd.

August――

The next morning, I sat facing San'emon at the hearth. And gazed at his large, composed physique. This man hadn’t uttered a single word about the fleas—could he truly feel no pain or itch whatsoever? If that were true, I thought, this man was a mysterious being to us. A body that had thudded down amidst the swarming fleas and now lay there snoring. Even as I found this thought exhilarating—the deftness that sustained his spirit through nerves unshaken even by fleas—though honed through countless trials since childhood—precisely because of this, what could we possibly say to that military-like soundness of health that allowed our suffering to already reside at a point beyond all concern? Certainly, everyone would call us unhealthy. But is there truly no mistake in that? To the signs of decline glimpsed beneath that seemingly robust exterior. ——This does not pertain to fleas alone. With people’s differences in what they fear and fight against persisting unchanged as the world keeps turning—like stopping a propeller’s rotation—I want to see, just once, a world brought to an absolute standstill. This alone is something no one has ever seen, though.

I wanted to try using a high-speed film projector that could capture rural villages, just once. There existed a law stating that gears used for perfect rotation must not be perfectly circular. High-speed film projectors too applied this principle. It seemed a new mathematical system had emerged where the theorem declaring "If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C" no longer held true—where instead, A and C remained unequal. They called this the semi-order concept, but more than anything else, this marked the beginning of a great revolution—yet setting that aside, there was beauty in how nothing remained equal. Perhaps every rural village—wherever villages existed—differed from all others, making such high-speed machinery necessary under these circumstances. Even a single flea—as A in this semi-order concept measuring the village—would become one of my non-circular gears; this would bring me satisfaction.

August――

The girls who went out to cut grass before dawn returned from the mountains. The sight of them carrying grass bundles twice their own height resembled livestock emerging from beneath the green grass. As they came down the mountain path two or three at a time, the hill itself seemed to sway and shift. After forgetting such things, each time my gaze inadvertently turned that way again, I thought, "Hmm, is that the wind?" When I looked closely, it was another mountain of grass from the girls who continued to descend.

“Leaving the house after the sun’s risen—that ain’t real work anymore,” said Kyūzaemon.

“I’ve always worked twice as much as any man.” “Used to be the poorest in the village, but now I’m fifth from the top.”

“The women in this village work far more diligently than the men, wouldn’t you say?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha. Now that you mention it, I suppose that’s true,” said this old man. After laughing, he fell into brief thought.

The fact that this sixty-eight-year-old man had never once considered such a thing until now. —After all, people think of themselves first before answering. However, I too had asked a careless question. As for the shock that being called idle in the village becomes many times more insulting than city dwellers would perceive—regrettably, the oversight was ours. The old man’s initial “Ha ha ha ha” laughter could not have been mere laughter. It was probably the laughter of sixty-eight years.

I turned my attention to this particular old farmer named Kyūzaemon. The reason was that this plain served as a major production area for rice called Rikuu No. 132. Though this rice was generally regarded as Japan's finest, even within this plain, the rice from this particular village was said to taste better than that from elsewhere in the region—and considering how Kyūzaemon's household rice was considered the most delicious even within this village—it seemed he might well be Japan's foremost master of rice cultivation. No one had actually said such a thing yet. However, when pressed through rigorous examination—in the absence of any other suitable line of reasoning—viewing it this way held particular interest for me alone. Indeed, were one to apply the same scrutiny, I secretly wished to entertain that notion.

“I’ve liked arithmetic since I was a boy, I tell you.”

“Even watching what today’s youngsters do, they’re worse than me, I tell you,” said Kyūzaemon. “I’ve always thought there was nothing to rely on besides arithmetic—and sure enough, there’s still nothing better than that.”

This old man also said the following. “Everyone works for their children’s sake, I tell you.” “I was like that too.”

His bald pate was widely exposed, with a penetrating scar from a stray bullet remaining from behind his ear to the corner of his eye. The scar came from a wound he sustained at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War when he enlisted at twenty-two; with the military pension from that time serving as his sole capital, even his destitute life of commuting over the mountain pass to sell ropes and straw mats to Rie’s household in the fishing village had since skyrocketed. His wife Oyumi was Rie’s younger sister and also the younger sister of San’emon’s mother from the main household. Though Kyūzaemon had come as an adopted son from a neighboring village, he had been related to the main household since before then—theirs was a kinship that required no formal reserve.

“This village has twenty-eight households, but San’emon’s house is the main household. “They used to have the most property in the village, but now it’s the opposite, I tell you. “He drank it all away. “Ha ha ha ha.” Kyūzaemon said this and then lowered his voice to me: “There’s something I gotta tell ya—just mind one thing. “That San’emon’s a decent man when sober, but once he drinks, it’s trouble—so when that happens, slip away quiet-like from where folks are gathered and hide. “He’s a fearsome drunkard, I tell you. “I was beaten—beaten. “Lost count how many times he laid into me. “I’ve borne it all this time, but against that hulking strongman’s blows? No standing your ground. “A fearsome strongman, he is.”

San'emon was forty-eight. He was a hulking man. He always lounged by the hearth without working, but when his unkempt beard grew out, he would survey his surroundings with the imposing demeanor of a general, his expression brimming with discontent. When he shaved, he became a handsome man with the traces of his drunken violence emerging across the blue stubble. His dashing jawline and mouth—unthinkable for a farmer—were brimming with youthful vitality, utterly divorced from fields and paddies. With a carefree air that suggested he might sling a happi coat over his shoulder and saunter off to the morning baths at any moment...

“I have no money. I have no money, but that kind of stuff isn’t coming in. As long as we can eat, that’s good enough, I tell you. Even keeping on like this, we’ll get eaten away. Well? Don’t you think so too?”

San’emon had once said this. At first I thought he might be joking and kept silent, but then he pressed me with an unexpectedly earnest gaze that refused to relinquish its hold.

“Actually, I’m much the same way,” I replied with a wry smile.

San'emon felt not the slightest regret for his past self who had squandered his fortune on drink. He had tried putting his thoughts into action. And from the depths where he had collided with what was to come, he now raised a sharp expression. Yet Kyūzaemon stood as his opposite. Once, he said to me,

“After all, without money, nothing works,” he once let slip. This too had been the result of putting his own thoughts into practice—they manifested exactly as they were.

This Kyūzaemon and San'emon—existing in a completely inverted relationship of branch and main household, neighbors separated by three ken of vacant land—in those scenes where they drank together, the drunken beatings must surely have resounded with reverberations beyond the ordinary. “When San'emon and I fall out, the villagers rejoice.” “When we make up, they look downright miserable.” “Lately, even San’emon does as I say, so it’s no fun for the villagers, I tell you.” “Ha ha ha ha,” Kyūzaemon narrowed his eyes and laughed. It was a smile that had never once shown intensity.

August――

The afternoon at Yūka Sanbō—a figure sharpening a sickle; raindrops dripping from a straw raincoat. The creaking rhythm of a rope-twisting machine; rainwater trickling through moss between garden stones. As the sky gradually cleared, the sound of cicadas began to emerge from the dewdrops in the bamboo grove. A swirling vortex of flies—

From this village of twenty-eight households, seventeen people were sent off to war. Of them, only two returned.

The other day, when I went to Yunohama, there were two demobilized soldiers—having just gotten off the train and now about to enter their hometown—talking at the streetcar’s boarding area. Both were young men who seemed brave, with sturdy builds, and were pleasant to look at.

“Ahh… I’d like to sleep soundly for six months,” muttered one of them, leaning against the jointed railing of the streetcar, his face bathed directly in the blazing sun.

“If it’s crawling under bullets, that’s nothing—but this sleepiness, I tell you,” said one of the tall, handsome soldiers.

Then an elderly man who seemed to be an acquaintance from the soldier’s hometown came aboard. When their eyes met, the handsome soldier suddenly said, “The defeated soldiers have come home, huh,” and laughed. The elderly man laughed—“Ha ha ha!”—then gave a single pat on his shoulder. And that was all.

It was a laugh characteristic of the Japanese.

The streetcar started running through the rice flowers, and when it reached the next stop, another beautiful young woman who seemed to be an acquaintance of the soldier boarded, bringing along a small child.

“Oh, it’s been such a long time, hasn’t it?” the young woman said beamingly to the soldier, her voice brimming with apparent delight. In some part of that smile, there lingered even a trace reminiscent of a past lover.

“The defeated soldiers have come home, huh.”

Once more, the soldier repeated the same words and laughed. Then, the young woman who had been beaming until now suddenly erased her smile and kept her face down, "There's nothing to be done, I suppose." With that, she said sadly and made no move to lift her face again. The soldier too, awkwardly discomforted by having struck too close to the mark, kept blinking his eyes and looking away, saying nothing either.

When they reached the third stop, there too an acquaintance of this soldier boarded, but this time the soldier—

“Well, it’s quite hot,” he said, giving only a slight bow. The other soldier beside him remained utterly silent the entire time, not uttering a single word nor laughing, but when they reached his stop, he kicked his heavy, tightly stuffed military bag and sent it tumbling onto the platform.

Mount Chōkai, glistening in the sun, spread its skirts beautifully toward the sea. The Dewa Plain, filled with rice flowers, had likely never heard such conversations before.

I got off at Yunohama, the seaside terminus of the streetcar, together with the soldier. While watching his retreating figure—carrying a bag on his back, crossing the deserted sand dunes toward home—I too climbed that hill alone. The deep crimson of beach eggplant flowers bloomed in scattered dots against the azure sea. Lowering my hips, I crossed my knees. This was the same dune where my wife and I had come during our wedding summer—when there’d been no streetcar—yet here I now saw those same beach eggplants flowering. The sorrow that had shifted with these crimson blossoms over twenty years still lingered within me, though changed from what it once was. I imagined the soldier’s house beyond the dunes and knew exactly what he’d say crawling through its entrance. None of this lay apart from us. I went to the deserted public bathhouse next, stripped naked, and settled onto a board with raised wood grain. To bathe meant riding both train and streetcar here for one weekly soak—yet now sitting on this painfully grained plank had become my keenest pleasure. Splashing alone filled me with indolent satisfaction until hunger faded. I craved a cigarette but only had mountain-gathered knotweed—my second week of this. Suddenly I saw San’emon’s indolence as a hollow below his sunlit navel while he scrubbed grime. But such things couldn’t settle my defeat-day broodings. I wanted no words now.

There was a terrace on the roof of this bathhouse. From there, beyond the sand dunes to the right, one could see a cape faintly lined with smokestacks marking the mouth of the Mogami River. That was Sakata. The prisoner-of-war camp too lay beneath those smokestacks. Until the very day before the surrender, something a Nittsu employee—who had been using prisoners there—had said—

“Military men—every last one of them—are nothing but scoundrels.”

At first I thought “Again?”—the young man who told me this story had apparently hesitated to speak. This young man was also a demobilized soldier. “The food they give prisoners—that’s just outrageous. It’s not fit for human consumption. It’s so pitiful，so pitiful—I can’t bear to look anymore，” said the Nittsu employee.

Attacking soldiers may be fashionable even in the countryside, but this carried a vehemence that broke slightly free from the trend. When insults were shouted with such force that they tore through the air, people forgot their resentment and—for reasons they couldn’t grasp—found themselves suddenly listening again.

Among the laborers pulling carts for this Nittsu employee was a simple, honest soul characteristic of this region. This young man, on his way home from work each night, would secretly bring the prisoner he worked with daily to his house and let him eat as much as he wanted. Before long, the young man was drafted into the military. However, because the war ended shortly after he was drafted, this time their positions with the POWs were reversed. The POWs, now free, would go alone to the station every day to meet the young man, wondering if he would return today or tomorrow. Then one day, when they spotted a demobilized young man who had unexpectedly alighted from the train there, they stepped forward—"Oh!"—and the two instinctively clasped hands. Listening to this, tears welled up in my eyes.

American planes were still flying all the way to the skies over Sakata and dropping food to the prisoners below. I had also watched these planes from this terrace—there were prisoners who had been crushed to death by food that pierced through houses. The prisoner would carry his share of fallen food to the young man’s house and urge him repeatedly to eat it all himself, but he never agreed. No commentary was needed on these accounts, yet here lay many things that could not simply be left untouched—each radiating a brilliant light. Another British POW—different from those mentioned before—upon returning to his home country,

“I will definitely come back to Sakata again.”

With just those words, he reportedly returned.

August [day]

The wife of Kyūzaemon from the branch family looked strikingly worried today. At the time when their eldest daughter had married into Karafuto, a rumor had spread that a ship carrying repatriating families had been sunk by an unidentified submarine—but the eldest son of the main family’s San’emon household was also in Karafuto. The gloom hanging over both households today was all the more profound.

“I can’t stomach breakfast anymore.” “Please indulge me today, you hear?” “This coldness of mine—don’t go thinking it’s meant for you all.”

The wife of the branch family, enveloped by eggplants, corn, and pumpkins in the field, said this as she hunched her way in. The sunlight striking backs was autumn-hued, and floating clouds drifted lazily over the marsh. The rice ears drooped their heads lower each day. The waves of rice that had safely escaped the first typhoon were heavy with their subsequent panicles now filled to bursting. The softness of chestnut burrs――

San'emon’s wife Kiyoe remained silent as ever and showed no worry. As for their eldest son who had been drafted to Karafuto—whether he could return or had been taken further inland—the rumors split into two possibilities, and their minds writhed, caught between them. “No, he’ll surely come back. The other side’s the Soviets, you see. They wouldn’t go killing the son of poor folks like us.” San'emon said. He had once gone to Karafuto to work and had mined coal there, so the scenery of that place seemed to well up immediately. Oyumi, the wife of Kyūzaemon from the branch family, came to the main house with a drawn face, trying to dispel their shared gloom.

“Until the man himself comes back and stands at the gate to see, we won’t know anything for certain, you see.”

Kiyoe merely let slip a single word in a low voice.

This woman maintained a steadfastness that held no dreams beyond work—I had been struck with admiration at first glance upon arriving that night, and that impression persisted ever since. No matter whose rumors one gathered through the village, there was none who did not praise this Kiyoe. San’emon could truly be called a man fortunate in his choice of wife. In this regard alone, I fell far behind him. “I’ve never encountered a wife like this one here. And those features of hers—look closely. Dress her in formal crested robes and take her out—she’d radiate quiet dignity through any ceremonial hall in Tokyo,” I told my wife.

“Yes, I think so too.”

“While we’re here, you should try to learn a thing or two. You’ve spent your whole life nitpicking my faults—that’s not how people ought to live,” I said, slipping into country dialect. “Honestly, I can’t see anything but your flaws.” “You’re made of nothing but flaws.” “Is there even one good point?” This critic let slip a faint smile.

“Lately, I’ve started to feel like I’m beginning to understand—just a little—that maybe life is supposed to be like this, you know. “Life is damn tough—I get pummeled every single day by critics, from the right and the left, and from within, by you day in and day out. “My body’s riddled with holes—I wonder where in it lies even a single satisfactory part. “Exactly. “I’m the type who accepts every bit of criticism people throw at me, you know. “Try accepting all of this. “I’m less than zero as a human being. “Despite that, people still keep telling me to write something. “What does this mean? “There’s got to be at least one good point somewhere, mustn’t there?”

That I had become somewhat sentimental made me sad. "There must be somewhere—No, there isn't," my wife said after a silence.

“No, there’s one.” “What part?”

"I'm the type who admires others, you know. It's precisely because I recognize my own faults that I admire others. This is what they call elegance, I tell you. It's slightly different from Mr. Bashō's. Mine, you see." "What about Mr. Bashō's?" "That elegance still has an untroubled aspect—being comforted by flowers and birds. That's the reason it flourishes. Mr. Bashō must have hated that very part of himself, I bet. That person is from Tsuwano in Iga, so it's the same village as me. That's why I understand his feelings so well. Kobayashi Hideo knows that part, so he keeps urging me to write a Bashō treatise, I tell you."

“Mr. Kobayashi?” My wife raised her face.

“Hmm. “However, Mr. Kobayashi is slightly more progressive than Mr. Bashō, don’t you think? From what I’ve seen.”

“…………” “By the way,” I said，“Kobayashi once had praise for you—‘Your Wife’s all vacant-like,’ he told me，‘just like a fool.’” “Oh my,” she replied，“how rude.” My Wife blushed.

“However, unless a woman gets praised for her foolish traits, she’s no good.” “Anybody can praise a woman for her cleverness.” “Such people—both those doing the praising and those being praised—are still no good.” “And that goes for me too.” My wife, seemingly unable to stop laughing, kept giggling with her face bowed. But I was in no mood for that. The number of formidable problems increased. I could no longer afford to care about my wife or such things.

For now, I must cut them all down.

Regarding the difference between combat at ten thousand meters in altitude and combat at one hundred meters above ground—this was not about airplanes. A battle within peace that everyone had to wage once daily without exception. With my wife and friends and relatives and acquaintances and strangers and those who brushed past only to vanish in an instant’s glance. And with myself too. The tactic began with adjusting your range and fixing your sights—but those sights were hopelessly askew. Only when you matched your calibration did that joy come—the sole channel through which affection could flow.

I recall a certain day. It was on a clear winter day, as I waited on the Teito Line platform in Shibuya amidst the crowd for the train, that the air raid siren sounded. Soon, a single B-29 appeared overhead. The anti-aircraft guns began to roar. With a sharp crack, a shell burst at an altitude just grazing the wings. Then, a young stranger who was beside me,

“Ah, that’s a perfect altitude,” he murmured. That was all there was to the exchange, but that single remark possessed a peculiar kind of beauty that harmonized with the clear sky. A refined spirit of appreciation—devoid of hostility, devoid of combativeness—unwittingly resonated alongside the shell burst. I thought that what this world called war was no longer war. The critical spirit was merely waging its deadly struggle impassively in the high altitude. The spiritual bond with the earthbound populace was severed. Despite this, the crowds continued to drop like flies day after day, perishing suddenly without warning. Certainly, dying alone constitutes war, but what forms the core of war is, above all else, hostile intent. In all this long war, who among us truly harbored hostile intent toward those we were supposed to call enemies? As for matters concerning this war, unless one perceives its core, any application of the pen to other endeavors is futile.

A long war where patriotism existed in all, yet hostile intent in none. And when one had to incorporate their body into either of these two hearts to survive, people must have directed their hopes toward something. What they directed it toward remained unknown to others—a secret even to themselves. Yet people did not do this for their own safety. Even if they had prayed to mistaken things, theirs were hearts where something as impure as error could no longer interpose itself by then. Whether one called it fox or tanuki—since there was nothing else—what served as conduit mattered little; they must have used what existed to reach toward the divine. There cannot possibly be nothing here.

No matter what the occupation forces might do henceforth, the Japanese people would likely follow along obediently. With quiet hearts free of lingering regrets, they awaited whatever came next. Whether it be punishment or whatever else, they set their hearts pounding at things they had never seen before, even forgetting their own fate. What manner of thing could have defeated this strong Japan? This could not be called filthiness or apathy. Nor could it be said that we had fallen into moral depravity. Yet it was also a fact that while they accumulated errors during the war, and postwar accumulated them anew, something passed through that heavy core. It might be unknowable, but this brightness piercing through everyone’s hearts was surely an unexpected astonishment realized only through experiencing defeat. Even so, we had yet to easily free ourselves from the torment of believing all our post hoc considerations were mistaken.

This winter, while listening to the pattering sound of sleet falling onto dead leaves accumulated in an air-raid shelter, I had once thought to bring Du Fu with me for one final reading. But now, the war was over. What I saw here was an idiot.

This idiot was San'emon’s second son. The one supporting the livelihood of this impoverished farming household—which barely managed to eat each day—was this twenty-three-year-old idiot. His name was Tensaku; he commuted early each morning to a white clay factory near the station—a half-ri away—and received a hundred-yen wage. This was why San'emon could remain idle. Tensaku’s physique resembled his father’s—he was a giant of a man. Taciturn and docile, a rare model of filial piety, a diligent worker with a serene disposition that gave no cause for displeasure. A person who did no harm to others—there could be nothing closer to a god than this. His job also required the strength of three men to dig out white clay from the mountains, and this clay became the raw material for Takeda Pharmaceutical’s stomach medicine. During the war as well, he had worked continuously just as he did now, but how much of the white clay Tensaku dug out must have ended up in people’s stomachs. That Normosan—which absorbed alcohol and eliminated drunkards—was this white clay. Tensaku, being an idiot, knew nothing of the war or such things. He would hand over all his hard-earned wages to San'emon for liquor, and in return, receive four or five cigarettes from him to tuck into his case—this simple exchange filled him with quiet contentment. On his rare days off, he seemed to find greatest pleasure in pulling weeds, mowing the grass, and tidying the garden—playing by leading around the calf and the goat. When his twelve-year-old younger brother did something mischievous, they would pretend it was Tensaku’s doing. And instead, Tensaku would be scolded by San'emon. I woke at five, but occasionally the boy from the neighboring house who also worked at the white clay factory—

“Tensaku!”

A voice called out invitingly from beyond the fence. Then, “Yeah.”

Tensaku’s spirited reply rang out—a single daily utterance piercing the morning mist. To gaze into those truly serene eyes of his, seemingly happy without a trace of discontent, became another pleasure for me. This was the most resentment-free existence among humans crawling about on the ground. One could say all others had lived harboring shadows of resentment toward someone, somewhere, while above them raged a precise life-and-death struggle where combatants lost themselves, and down here lay concealed a single idiot’s peaceful scene of digging stomach medicine, oblivious to war.

In the Hida region, they say when an idiot is born, they revere it as the birth of a god—but having at least one such place in existence seems a good thing.

September [day]

In the branch household of Kyūzaemon, the second son—a mechanic of exceptional skill—had returned from the city after his factory’s dissolution and now idled about. He was the same age as the idiot from the main household. At the very moment Tensaku the idiot served as the central pillar supporting his family’s livelihood, the inverse held true in the branch household—creating an imbalance that threatened to destabilize relations between the two families. Kyūzaemon’s second son had lived alone in the city since age thirteen, rendering farming now an impossibility for him. The eldest son transported an oxcart laden with gravel along the straight road from the station, his face clouded with concern over this younger brother’s unemployment. On cheeks still bearing the freshness of having observed the first Bon memorial for a child lost to measles, stubble grew. The young wife pliantly kneaded wall plaster with her feet until a sudden rainstorm assaulted them, drawn by the chill of those pattering sounds. The insect chorus swelled.

San'emon’s spacious house stood empty of people. Beside the smoldering firewood stove hung medicinal water, while flies crawled diagonally across the stripes of a coarse-woven mat. In the scorched hollow of the pearwood stove edge lay a tilted teacup. A well-washed navy jacket—heavily patched—hung on the thick door polished smooth by countless hands, as the electric light swayed faintly in the wind. Seedlings shade-dried in troughs lined up beside the lattice, their raw blue seeping through the water jar’s light hole like viscous paint. The buzzing of darting flies. The lush veins of summer vegetables sprouting through bamboo-jointed floorboards where potatoes had rolled—the rain alternated between clearing and falling.

The temple priest, Mr. Sugai Kodo, brought ohagi.

My room—this back chamber of San'emon’s—apparently hadn’t been visited by the priest since he came here as a young acolyte to chant sutras during the household’s prosperous days fifty years ago. Gazing at the garden, he remarked, “Well, well.”

Then, suddenly noticing a single comical pumpkin dangling at eye level from the tip of a pole protruding above the garden pond,

“Ha ha ha ha!” he roared with laughter. According to Mr. Kodo’s account, the splendid garden stones and plantings—unmatched in the village—had all been swindled away by Nanbee from the neighboring village. Now, in the wake of that destruction, the expression of the pumpkin dangling loosely there must have struck the priest as some kind of natural humor—a true laugh ripened and descended. This was the first time I had heard such laughter. The sophistication and depth of nonsense must lie in something like the size of this solitary pumpkin’s rear dangling loosely downward. This, too, resembled Tokugawa Musei’s artistry. Truly, the refined elegance of Musei’s artistry was like a droplet from defeated Japan.

September [day]

I split a watermelon for the first time. This year's climate was said to be twenty days behind the usual season. Kyūzaemon would come to meet me without fail around nine every morning. He had no business here; he just came to visit. Even back in Tokyo, there had been nothing as excruciating as having this morning time wasted. And once this old man appeared, he invariably remained rooted here until noon. Here, I endured what was most painful to me. It had been my habit to consider myself dead for the entire day whenever someone came in the morning, but here it happened every day.

Therefore, lately I took to pretending I was attending a lecture series and decided to learn about agriculture from this old man. Even so, as long as I remained here from then on, a sigh escaped me whenever I thought that this professor’s visits would continue daily.

“If it bothers you, just say you’re studying and decline,” my wife said upon noticing my secret sigh. “I’m too weak-willed.” “I simply can’t bring myself to say it.” “When I see that grinning face, I end up thinking I should just let the old man kill me—it’s strange how that happens.” “You tell him no.”

“Then I’ll tell him when he comes next.”

"But wait a moment. What that old man says sometimes makes me want to secretly take notes, but if I take notes on the spot, my profession would be immediately exposed. That’s the problem. When it comes to detailed numbers, I just keep forgetting." "But if it’s that entertaining, you might as well meet him." "But at night there’s no electricity in this room, and when it comes to sleeping, there’s no way I can get any rest with these fleas. When morning comes, that old man won’t budge until noon, and when I finally find time for a nap in the afternoon, he’s asleep—so that’s not my time either. I’m practically MIA. The only time I feel alive is that instant in the morning when I wake up and see the color of pickled eggplant. In that moment, I just freeze up completely."

“Truly, I’m at my wit’s end with these fleas too.” “Even just one day—I want to try sleeping somewhere without fleas.”

Even as we whispered furtively like this, another distinct anxiety began seeping into us. It was that my wife, who had evacuated here in April, had transferred our meager bank passbook—due to our bank’s destruction—to another Tokyo bank from here, and it still hadn’t been returned from Tokyo since April. From April through September, the fact that we couldn’t obtain a single sen of money, combined with not knowing how much longer this would continue, meant that our life on the road—traveling with a family of four without any funds—was akin to beggary; when I thought it through to its conclusion, a chill ran down my spine. The money I had brought was already nearly depleted. As for a method to escape these fleas, I couldn’t seem to find any way at present. Given that everyone was equally struggling, there was no way to devise borrowing from others; against this anxiety, one could hardly seek any aid. Amidst complete strangers, day after rain-filled day during this time.

September ——

Rice distribution day—on this day when hearts should brighten, our family stood contrary. The distribution center lay one ri away, and carrying two to of rice back from there proved impossible. Even had we sought laborers, none could be found in this shortage of hands—not a soul with time to spare. Halfway to the station they went, then another halfway—the eldest son and my wife setting out together. During their absence I read Dōgen’s “Shin Fukatoku” section from the Iwanami edition compiled by Mr. Etō—now evacuated to Niigata—whose wife would occasionally visit Priest Sugai’s temple from there, or so I’d heard. This Dōgen collection too had come to me through the priest, who himself had received it from the author.

“Mrs. Etō came by again the other day and told me, ‘Just once, I’d like to eat my fill of white rice.’” “What a disgrace for the Buddhist world—that they’ve driven Japan’s greatest Buddhist scholar to struggle for food,” Priest Sugai once vented indignantly to me.

My wife was plagued by fleas; this lady was in the throes of rice scarcity. I copied the two characters “夏臘” (summer-lá) from Dōgen’s Zen writings into my notebook. It stated that “summer-lá” referred to the number of years one had trained through summer retreats in a monastic community, with an explanatory note appended at the end.

In addition,

Kihai——(a single bow by the master in response to the disciple’s three prostrations and nine bows) Uro——(defilements [worldly afflictions]) Kikai——(realm of objects [the material world]) Akikata——(autumn quarter [western direction])

Having copied out these five terms above, I was wavering over which title to choose for my next essay collection when Kyūzaemon appeared once more. I closed my book and sat facing the bamboo grove with him, silently gazing at the nodes along the stalks for some time. The characters "summer-lá" and "defilements" moved back and forth between the nodes. Gradually, "defilements" began pressing forward more intriguingly, so while secretly trying it out on the tip of my tongue, I looked at Kyūzaemon’s face.

“It’s about the priest—just a small matter,” Kyūzaemon said. Today he had come as Priest Sugai’s messenger. Kyūzaemon had long been selling soup and bamboo-leaf-wrapped rice dumplings from a small hut beside the main hall to pilgrims visiting the Shaka Hall at the priest’s temple from near and far. That became his capital and the reason he amassed his wealth. That was why even Kyūzaemon couldn’t hold his head high before the priest alone. Ever since the priest had begun visiting my place with ohagi rice cakes in hand, Kyūzaemon’s treatment of me had begun to shift somewhat—where before he would sit with his knees sprawled and hands clasped together, these days he had progressed to resting both hands neatly atop his aligned knees. This was thanks to the Shaka Hall. Now that I think of it, our family has been receiving unexpected assistance from the Shaka Hall at Priest Sugai’s temple. The beginning of my being granted this six-tatami room was when my wife—who had never once visited this village’s Shaka Hall—took a train from her hometown’s city to come worship, bought bamboo-leaf-wrapped rice dumplings from Kyūzaemon’s hut, and on a whim asked if there were any farmhouses around here that rented out rooms. Even now, whenever I pass over the Shaka Hall located beyond the mountain’s curve, I feel as though someone softly whispers, “Look well upon this village.” And partly because of that, no desire to return quickly to Tokyo arises within me.

“The priest now, he told me to say maybe we oughta build your house right here in this village.” “You find yourself a spot that suits you and give the word.” “Then us villagers’ll put it up there for you, mark my words.”

The proposal was so utterly sudden that I found myself at a loss for a response.

“However, that alone was more than generous enough—I told Kyūzaemon I must decline with profound gratitude.” However, there was one place in this village with a superb view. That spot refused to release my gaze. That single spot—the place emitting a mysterious light—had drawn me in from the start.

That place—a ten-minute climb from my room up the mountain behind—was called Kura-nori. The vantage point there felt precisely astride a horse’s back—to the right beyond the plain stretched the Dewa Sanzan mountains: Haguro, Yudono, and Gassan arched like a woven hat, while ahead loomed Mount Chōkai. And the sea directly below my left hand peered through cliffs formed by grasslands spread like wings on both sides—a triangular wedge resembling a deeply carved canyon. It was the expression of this sea gazing inward that particularly tugged at my heart—some twelve hundred years earlier, the solitary head of a large Buddha statue had drifted buoyantly until it reached this watching shore. They had begun by fashioning a body for it as a Shaka Buddha standing about ten feet tall, and since then it had been enshrined not only in Nishime Village’s Shaka Hall but also become an object of ceaseless pilgrimage by train from near and far. Though bearing a somewhat Burmese countenance, legend held that those who worshipped this Buddha would never want for rice, and in peaceful times they said the hall overflowed daily with devotees. The flavor of bamboo-leaf-wrapped dumplings from Kyūzaemon—the master rice farmer’s hut—had also prospered under this Buddha statue’s lingering radiance. All of this—every last thread—was a panorama wrapped and concealed within this sea’s visage.

After alighting at Uzen-Mizusawa Station and walking half a ri, I came to want to build—at my own expense—a room with a hearth in one spot of this Kura-nori area.

September —— When I mentioned building a room to my wife, she was more enthusiastic than I was. However, here it was said that carpenters' wages had to be paid in rice. In that case, I already half gave up on the room. As for vegetables, this village grew only enough for their own needs. With the village consisting entirely of farmers specializing in rice cultivation, buying vegetables was quite a struggle. Fish came from the sea beyond the mountains to sell, but due to the fishermen’s desperate need for rice, they first sold to farmers in exchange for rice and brought the leftovers to us.

One morning, as I was picking fleas off myself on the veranda, a farm woman suddenly came in from the rear and began chattering something unintelligible to me. When I had my wife translate, it turned out she wanted her child to join the Shirado Factory and was asking me to write a resume for them. In return for writing it on the spot, the farm woman dropped one *shō* of rice onto the veranda with a thud and left—marking the first time my writing had ever contributed to our livelihood. The boy who came early each morning from next door to fetch Tensaku was the one for whom I had written that resume. When his voice reached me in bed, I too began to rise. From then on, we also started receiving vegetables from them now and then. They even said they’d give us a shō or two of rice for free if ours ran out. This farm woman was called Aba of Sōzaemon, but when my wife asked to buy rice in exchange for money, she waved her hand side to side,

“Don’t want money! Don’t want it! I’ll give rice! I’ll give it!” said Aba. When an offer seems too good to be true, we couldn’t very well accept it—and so this bit of good fortune was effectively nullified. “This is troublesome,” my wife sighed. “When she puts it that way, we can’t even purchase rice.”

However, having glimpsed—as if peering into someone’s hidden purse—that there was indeed rice over there, I laughed even harder, boasting to my wife about my writing’s power. “But I could write a resume too,” my wife said bitterly. “But somehow she took one look at me—‘That man looks like he can write.’ “That Aba. “I was the one who made her glare like that. “If they find out I’m writing novels with this skill, we won’t get any more rice.”

“Then what should we do?” “The money from the bank—who knows when it’ll arrive—and our kimonos have been dwindling too. I’m at my wits’ end.” “If the money runs out, I’ll send a telegram to Kawabata." “There’s still some left, I’m sure.” My wife seemed relieved.

A troubling matter arose in this village. Last year, when rice requisitions shifted from village-based quotas to individual quotas, they were ordered to surrender as much rice as possible—with the promise that four gō per day would then be rationed. Everyone steeled themselves and paid their quotas in full faster than any other village. Yet instead of four gō, no ration came at all. The result left them growing rice only to end up with none to eat themselves, forcing village-wide efforts to rescue starving households—and now cries of rice shortage swelled louder than ever, stretched to the limits of their endurance. Their sole hope lay in autumn’s new harvest; driven by bitter certainty that their “For Victory” slogan had been a ruse to cheat compliance—and that only the requisition officer, the cooperative head, had gained honor from it—they aimed their condemnation at that very honor. The cooperative head under fire was kin to San’emon’s wife. Moreover, this fifth-ranked village official—who’d paid equal taxes to Kyūzaemon and opposed him at every turn—had finally been surpassed by Kyūzaemon this year.

“I know everything,” Kyūzaemon said to me. “That cooperative head Hyōemon went and snitched on me to the police box, I tell ya.” “They claimed I was sellin’ bamboo-leaf rice dumplings at the temple—dragged me down to the station.” “But I’d been told it was allowed! Sold ’em only after payin’ my full quota, see?” “When I said ‘Yessir, I sold ’em,’ them officers took pity—said ‘Quit that now. You know who ratted you out?’ So I says ‘Yessir, I know.’” “Ha ha ha! It was him doin’ the snitchin’, I tell ya.” “I know every last thing them villagers get up to, I tell ya.” “Only me knows it all.” “Got the village rice mill’s ledger in my keepin’—made myself a secret copy of every detail.” “Where there’s rice stashed, where there ain’t—who’s playin’ poor while hoardin’—only I know it all! Ha ha! Kept mum all these years, but there ain’t no gods watchin’, I tell ya.” “So when they badmouth me, I just say—they’ll see someday. When I croak, everythin’ll come out. That’s all I say—nothin’ more.” “Ha ha ha!”

Kyūzaemon laughed once more and then, “There ain’t no gods or buddhas in this world, I tell ya,” he repeated. And raising his face, “I’m hated by everyone, I tell ya. “Everyone only speaks ill of me, but the time when they understand will surely come.” “I’ve written down every last detail, I tell ya.”

The old man’s greatest strength was, above all else, his confidence.

September [day]

Before dawn broke, the calf and kid were eating the straight bundles of miscanthus that Kiyoe had cut and brought back. The morning sun struck loosened bundles of cut grass releasing their pungent odor, the green of broken leaves sharply embedding itself into the mouths of beasts. Dew on the grass washed teeth with ineffable freshness. Steam rose from the compost heap, and through it could be seen the magnificence of a vast crowd of rice plants with drooping ears. The sound of water flowed around the house. The reflection of the water surface flickered dappled on the undersides of unripe persimmon leaves. In the kitchen, a single red stingray was laid out under taro leaves.

No sooner had it cleared than rain came falling from the sea. A farm woman in a straw raincoat swept the garden. A fisherwoman descended the chestnut-wooded pass, baskets of conger eels and stingrays on her back. In the rain, a circle of farm women gathered one by one to peer into the fish baskets being traded for rice. Since there was no longer any rice to be found anywhere, the dejected fisherwoman came around to our veranda and finally spread out her fish basket. “Money’ll do too, y’know.” “If there’s thread, that’d be even better,” the fisherwoman said in a sorrowful voice.

We purchased conger eels and red stingrays, took them by train to Tsuruoka City, and received vegetables in exchange from relatives there. Here in the village and city they traded in opposite specialties—such was the extent to which obtaining vegetables with money had become difficult. Rice, of course—not to mention miso or soy sauce—could not be bought with money. Despite this, the reason our family of four could still eat vegetables, albeit meagerly, was that we sometimes unexpectedly received them from neighbors or because Kiyoe, knowing, quietly gave some to us. My wife offered thanks here and there every day—when I secretly listened in, she seemed to do nothing but express gratitude from morning till night. If she kept saying thank you so much, her heart’s moorings would vanish, and she’d only end up tormenting herself. In truth, theirs was a life sustained by what they received—the only difference from beggars being that they didn’t actually beg. People’s kindness was appreciated, but when it persisted, you came to expect it—and your heart began to rot.

“If only we could really buy things with money, how wonderful that would be. I’m tired of saying thank you,” my wife sighed to me one day yet again.

When they gave us things, it wasn't that they were imposing any emotional obligations. They gave with a natural grace, but precisely because of that, we found ourselves all the more troubled. I want to walk just once with my head held high.

“I won’t let anything trouble you, I tell ya.”

And so, Kyūzaemon’s muttered words had by now become lies in the exact opposite sense. The joy of thoughts breaking free from reality—such a thing truly exists within people. It is precisely those who grant others the joy of forgetting kindness who embody the true beauty of having bestowed a favor. Soon I would return to Tokyo, become an ungrateful wretch, and yet find myself growing ever more grateful to them.

To understand the workings of farm people, I thought it better to select a specific individual and focus one’s gaze solely on them. I paid attention to Kiyoe’s actions—this woman moved without a moment’s rest all day long. Though it was now the off-season before harvest, Kiyoe was already preparing winter pickles, roasting soybeans in a large pot for making soy sauce, cutting grass, fertilizing fields, cleaning every corner of the vast house, cooking meals, tackling the family’s accumulated laundry—and working late into the night on repairs. She combed her own hair around 3:30 in the morning and once finished lit the stove and prepared breakfast; watching her made clear she got at most three or maybe four hours of sleep. It was astonishing labor.

“You should take a little break.” There were times when I joked and served her tea, but Kiyoe said she disliked tea.

People said it was absurd to still feel admiration for farm people's labor now. Because it was an established fact. Yet if we ceased to marvel at what was established, the established itself would decay. The mindset that took hard work for granted had to be recognized as a heart of extreme cruelty; otherwise, one couldn't perceive what life truly was. In this age when cities were said to receive revenge from rural areas, the sole good might lie in that very unrest of heart felt upon sensing this revenge. Anxiety, unrest, chaos—these were manifestations of urbanites' not yet lost nascent moral conscience. Even so, I was sleepy.

Because of the fleas, I hadn't slept more than three hours a day.

The labor of us who hold pens is labor in the form of play, yet people still do not consider this labor. Without labor in the form of play, from where could abstraction ever arise? And without that abstraction, where could one obtain the means to cultivate modern freedom? There are times when I juxtapose my labor against the admirable toil of farm people and ponder—no, on occasion I even think that my labor does not fall short of theirs.

To a Korean writer one day—positioning it as literature’s northernmost concept—I had once divulged my impressions of Mallarmé’s poetics. This occurred when independence debates were reaching their clamorous peak.

“Mallarmé secretly believed that even if all humanity perished, as long as a single line of this poem remained, it would make our existence worth having lived—or so it is said.” “That is the very stance of Symbolism—for if you interpret art as such a symbol of humanity, then for you, independence would clearly equate to politics.”

The Korean writer remained silent, his eyes gleaming. However, this writer has already returned to Korea.

Is it wrong of me to think that even Japan’s entire nation toiling with sweat might exist solely so that someday, a single poet could write one living line?

If the plovers of Lake Ōmi’s evening waves do not cry, my heart would perish with longing for antiquity. (Hitomaro)

How beautiful a single line of poetry this is. Has there ever been a single line of poetry that surpasses this? Even if this country were to perish as it is, what else could there be that would stand as proof we lived? To stand beside this, Rough seas— / stretching toward Sado Isle / the Milky Way (Bashō) Now, this poem is truly desolately beautiful. I think to myself how beautifully different this is compared to last year. At such times, when I suddenly turn my thoughts to myself, no matter how deeply moved I may be by others, I am immediately overcome by sadness. This sadness of a writer haunted by a presence—no matter how deep in the mountains I dwell, no matter how much I receive from others—finds no consolation whatsoever. Loneliness only grows stronger, and I merely pass the days. Somehow, there’s something piercing through me.

While grieving, I climb the hill—flowering brambles (Buson)

There was a reason everyone recited this. This haiku would perish along with people. What vanished alongside those who tilled, loved, slept, and ate remained nothing but beauty. In a world where human forms had been erased, it left behind one unyielding symbol—like claw marks casting an uncanny glow upon what followed, hinting at its enigma. That still had yet to appear in Japan. Yet as long as people had existed, there must have been some vestige of ancient characters lingering somewhere—

However, I would write about rice. About the rice that people here still ceaselessly devoured even as they sought to destroy it. No matter how much people might loathe themselves, they still could not tear their eyes from the rice. This was not about rural areas. From the valleys, from the rivers, from the mountain folds—it was about flames rising with a demonic aura. I wanted to write about Jigokudani. In this hellish moment that would never come again, the figures of people chasing rice without discerning the hues of those flames stood as they did precisely because people themselves were flames. Until what burned within us was exhausted, flame would mirror flame.

September [day]

Rain. On rainy days like this," Kyūzaemon told me, "since it's the critical time when rice flowers are about to bear fruit, mornings and evenings must be cool while daytime must blaze hot." "If it rains like today," he continued, "the grains stay small—where you'd normally get fifty thousand grains to a shō, you'd need seventy thousand just to make one." "This means poor harvests," he said. If you sow a single grain of rice in the ground, it will yield three hundred grains. To obtain fifty thousand grains—one shō—you need one hundred sixty-six grains of seed. Yet here, where two koku per tan was standard yield, the requisition had been set at two koku per tan. That left no seed rice for next year. But not every household could harvest two koku. Many yielded around one koku seven to eight to per tan. At best, two koku two to three to. Under this system, households falling short had to borrow two or three to from others to meet quotas. Once they'd settled their payments, even successful households lost their rice—this had become the village's collective cry. With no rationing as promised, the daily search for meal rice became its own crisis—where could they borrow from next? Yet some households—those with enough hands and know-how—had yielded two koku five or six to. One such household had met its quota, lent rice out, and kept two or three to for themselves—but now even that reserve drew hungry eyes. The target was Kyūzaemon of the branch family. San’emon of the main house led the borrowing group, while the poor farmers' faction made his hearth their meeting ground—grievances always flared brightest by that fire's glow.

“They say communism’s coming soon—now that’ll be something to see.” And such voices would occasionally—though who spoke them remained unclear—emanate from beside this fire.

Those who gathered at Kyūzaemon’s house were the owner-farmer faction—the upper faction. This house also served as a sake distribution center, so the color and manner of burning in the hearth where people gathered differed from those at San’emon’s house. This was a fortress containing both sake and rice. Now Kyūzaemon’s storehouse was being targeted even by this upper faction. If even a whisper of drunken voices escaped from here, every nose at every hearth would immediately twist in its direction. “Hmph. Where’ve they hidden it?”

And so, San’emon’s gathering seemed irritable. I had often witnessed such scenes on rainy days, but the men’s eyes at these times held a slightly different, more frenzied glint than when rice was involved. “By the sound of it, they must’ve been drinking nonstop since morning,” a man said. After falling silent and pricking up their ears, another muttered, “Well, that’s how it goes.” Another man sat fidgeting restlessly nearby, gulping tea in desperation while San’emon kept rapping his pipe against the hearth edge. When drunken voices swelled louder from across the way, his face turned sallow with bitterness, rheum collecting in the upturned corners of his eyes beneath his brow. Few could match San’emon’s face for sheer petulance when displeased—a child’s unguarded scowl made flesh. Yet once softened, that same face grew gentle enough to draw infants crawling close. Within his features—where demon-mask and Buddha-countenance warred—there lingered something of Nishihaguro Gongen’s shrine, where Sadatō and yamabushi and bandits sat jumbled in eternal repose. This land was an old battlefield; so too his face—a spectral plain where souls mingled without strife.

September [day]

Ten meters before my eyes, rain fell even as the sky here shone brilliantly. A sudden rain swept down from the mountains like a curtain. Wave upon wave of rice ears lay flattened in tiered layers.—A group of fishermen aligned their rods and marched over the mountain. The pointed tips of their rods quivered as they caught the sunlight. Through the nodes of blue bamboo dusted white, among the group of fishing rods swaying vigorously, my child too was mixed in, one among them. This child was now obsessed with fishing, but despite hardly ever catching anything, the shrimp bait he kept buying kept getting stolen. Whether it was fish stealing them or people stealing them—the answer remained utterly unclear—so one night I boiled and tried eating them, and they were far more delicious than any fish from the shore. Since then, it was I who occasionally became the thief. Even if vegetables were scarce, even if there were no fish from the sea beyond the mountains, it was no longer worth fearing. In reality, as long as I had this—had my daily life truly been so unstable that I would get excited over such things? But certainly, since discovering the small shrimp for bait, I had gained courage. The length of this one-inch translucent shrimp cradled in my hand resembled a small Buddha quelling flames. How pantheistically everything appeared as Buddha to me those days. Japanese thought seemed to have always halted at this point.

Now, what this village needed most was first and foremost rice; beyond that, salt and scraps of cloth. Kiyoe had left home early that morning and hadn't been seen since; my wife said she'd gone to harvest rice at a house in the neighboring village that had early-yielding fields. "Already harvesting rice?" I asked in surprise. Because San'emon's group had no rice to eat, they would harvest rice from fields with early-yielding crops and borrow from there to sustain themselves until their own harvest time, or so it was said. So—if there was such a free rice-borrowing method, they wouldn't need to panic—that's what I thought. To compensate for shortages caused by forced requisitions, a vast number of farmers were now imposing on others' paddies like this—but be that as it may, this year's rice had already emerged from the fields far earlier than usual. From the depths of defeat, the rice fields before my eyes—where the earth's life force now gushed forth—raised a silent uproar, appearing to call out to one another. Things that hadn't existed until last year were being born. Lumbering about belching, fluttering their eyelids, shaking their manes—and then being reaped away with such swiftness. The unrelenting cruelty of people.

San'emon developed an abscess on his leg, suffered through a sleepless night, and today made the long journey to see a doctor. Kyūzaemon seemed to be wavering since morning over whether to plant eggplants or potatoes next year, as spreading alum on the eggplant field would allow continuous cropping.

That night, twenty monme of sugar was rationed per person. From six in the evening until eleven at night, they made everyone line up before them—measuring portions, reducing amounts—and when they finally came up five hundred monme short, they took back everyone’s shares to re-measure and reduce them again. This is what happens when even a drop of sweetness reaches the village.

September [day]

A muddy path where rainwater pooled in horses’ hoofprints reflected floating clouds—along this path, my wife and I walked one ri to receive our soybean ration. Even after arriving at the distribution center, the crucial beans still hadn’t arrived. The crowd dozed as they waited. Then, at that moment, in the distant muddy expanse at the field’s edge, an oxcart loaded with soybeans could be seen stuck fast and unmoving. At the voices crying “That’s it! That’s it!”, they all opened their eyes and stared. However, even when poked or struck, the ox showed no sign of moving. The growingly impatient crowd grew agitated and pretended to whack the ox every time it moved only to stop again. The oxcart would move just a little, then stop again right away. “Ugh, I can’t take this anymore!” shouted a farm woman. “The teeth are good!” someone said, while another in monpe work pants stamped their feet restlessly.

Some dashed out on bicycles. Those returning home hungry. Amid the fuming crowd waiting in swelling impatience, the ox lumbered along at an excruciatingly slow pace. After waiting a total of three hours, my wife and I finally put five sho of beans into a sack and made our way back along the one-ri muddy path. This road stretched perfectly straight with nothing to block our view, so no matter how far we walked, it never seemed to grow any shorter. We left home at ten and arrived back at three-thirty. Since yesterday’s dinner, I still hadn’t eaten anything, and in my hunger, the crushed beans mixed with terrible amounts of sand were bitterly resented. And to make matters worse, the damn bugs had already eaten half of them.

Kyūzaemon’s eldest son’s wife was quiet and worked diligently. Yesterday morning, she had returned to her parents’ home about two ri away for the autumn festival; after staying overnight and coming back laden with lily bulbs, glutinous rice, red beans, rice crackers, horse chestnut rice cakes, and white mochi, she secretly brought them through the back door. My wife beamed with pleasure and tried to hand her a paper-wrapped gift while expressing thanks, but she absolutely would not accept it. She came silently, barefoot, rolled it onto the veranda with a thud, then wordlessly hurried back the way she had come. She always had flushed cheeks, a round face, a bosom like that of Kichijōten—the goddess of beauty—and fresh, vibrant ankles.

San'emon’s eldest son’s wife would come to sleep only at night because her husband had been called to war, but during the day she would return to her parents’ home from morning onward. When Kiyoe went to her daughter-in-law’s parents’ home, she found that in the empty house, the daughter-in-law alone was writhing in abdominal pain. Across both main and branch families in their bride competitions and son competitions, the one who continued to hold first place at present was likely the cognitively disabled Tensaku.

September [day]

The unripe persimmons steadily swell. Fern leaves tremble ceaselessly under battering raindrops. A straw-clad figure fishes for crucian carp in the swollen river. Mountain doves coo. Daytime electric light reflects in an eggplant lying on wooden flooring. Evacuees' belongings return by horse-drawn cart through the forest. Frogs leap across rain-slicked garden stones. Carp swim with backs half-arched above the water's surface amidst rippling rain—

Stone blocks with surfaces of noble quality that had preserved their thousand-year-old antiquity. On every roof, five or six forked finials were crossed alternately, while the misty rain that made them glisten blurred hazily, enveloped within the bamboo grove. The sound of sawing wood.

September [day]

The rain did not let up. This rain dealt a blow to the rice plants. If the sun didn’t shine here even for an hour—briskly—there was a fear the rice would fail to form grains while their stems grew unnaturally thick. An air of anxious dismay over this predicament permeated the entire village. Kiyoe sat facing the light at the wooden-floored entrance and probed river snails with a needle. San’emon had retreated gloomily into his bedroom since morning to sleep. To the hoo-hoo of mountain doves, the cow kept lowing—its voice swelling in pitch like an air raid siren.

In the afternoon—amid a full pile of rain-soaked green perilla leaves—Kiyoe plucked them one by one. A fragrance drifted through the air, and the leaves glistened wetly in the faint light filtering through the window. In the evening dusk where the blueness of perilla seeped and spread with raindrops across the wooden floor, rain frogs croaked; the heavy dampness from perilla fruits heaped in a basket washed over the surroundings, and night fell steeped in fragrance. Coo-coo, coo-coo—the rain persisted, and still the mountain doves called. Unsettled, oppressive night rain—

September [day]

Every farmhouse appeared increasingly depleted of rice. More households subsisted on potatoes and pumpkins. When families sold potatoes in such times, one knew immediately they possessed rice. Though they had feigned emptiness during last year's requisition despite their stocks, that pretense now lay exposed. The very lack of rice now transformed into a perverse pride; behind resentful visages of those begging grain from others lurked concealed reserves and the torment of furtive, hurried footsteps. From this resentment toward known hoarders arose unendurable anguish—no, from rigid denials that one's own home alone stood empty—and through it all the village's communal rice mill persisted in eerie silence, doors shut tight with watchful stillness that gauged precisely where stores remained and where they did not.

September [day]

When I looked up at the early morning sky and noticed signs of clear weather through the clouds, even the usually silent Kiyoe spoke up—

“It’s hazy.” “The weather’s clearing.”

she said. However, that too soon clouded over.

The grievances that had persisted alongside the bad weather for the past few days now converged upon Hyōemon, the implementation cooperative head who had plunged the village into such suffering. The group of poor farmers gathered around the hearth at San'emon’s house were all cursing him bitterly. San'emon’s desperate strategy to overcome this hardship—the attack on Kiyoe’s family home—was to attack himself before anyone else could. The fat pressed tight by his wife and the village seeped a burnt umber hue into his face, his beard growing unchecked.

“We’ll die now. We’ll die now.” Such voices too escaped from the mouths of rice-less housewives in their borrowing rounds. Kyūzaemon’s front and back gates had endured these women’s sieges continuously—but now their “We’ll die now” was no exaggeration; it had become moans within rain. Midnight storm signs intensified—a restless sky’s unnerving tepidness; clammy night wind crept across room floors. From hearth ashes where all slept soundless came buried firewood flickering alight alone once more. Only that flame kept vigil.

In the spacious Buddhist altar room, the perilla leaves Kiyoe had finished plucking in the evening still pooled moisture in their curled hollows, emitting a vivid blue-green scent.

Unable to sleep, I rose repeatedly to observe the rain clouds. Turning my back to the wind that passed with a dull roar like some black velocity—the swiftness of clouds growing ever darker—as I sat alone by the hearth, there suddenly rose up Valéry’s words I had once read: “Raw truth is falser than falsehood.” What a violent explosive shell of a statement! It’s finally coming, I thought. Not knowing what was coming, yet thinking it would come regardless, I sat watching the flames.

Raw truth is falser than falsehood. (Valéry)—This statement was indeed a sublime truth. Yet to attain this sublimity—how many lies we had to tell, and how immeasurable became the necessity to accept as truth those deceptions of others that bore truth’s semblance. Still, I heard Valéry had died. The veracity remained unclear—mere hearsay on the wind. Let it be a lie.

September [day]

In the gale, the bamboo grove screamed as the cedar grove twisted itself into knots, drilling wind tunnels through the air. The mountainside flipped the undersides of its leaves as it swayed right and left, while the rice plants in the plain beneath dense clouds let out their final cry. My head felt heavy and ached. The ceaseless lowing of the cows sounded like a warning siren. In the hearth, the fire crawled over the ashes, refusing to boil the pot. The sound of storm shutters being opened and closed again echoed through the house. In the howling wind, the rain scattered into fragments that never struck the door. Even in this farming village, every last grain of rice had vanished, and now this rain poured down upon voices openly wailing, "We’ll die—we’ll die." The master of the house where I stayed set out to borrow rice from his eldest son’s wife’s family. Seizing this storm-bound day when fieldwork was impossible, Kiyoe, the housewife, went to fetch miso from the station before spending the entire day consulting the nearby oracle called "Buddha’s mouth." Twice yearly—in spring and autumn—she visited this shrine maiden who came annually, seeking answers to apprehensions she couldn’t voice directly. I could well imagine what these secret worries of Kiyoe’s might be, but once home, I resolved to have my wife inquire discreetly. Since Kiyoe likely wouldn’t tell me herself.

The wicked desire to secretly glimpse into others' deepest worries—this was precisely what I wanted to employ against Kiyoe, this housewife. What she wished for must have been something astonishingly simple and unadorned, yet through her innermost heart, I wanted to directly feel the hearts of Kamakura-period women. Here everything remained unchanged from the Kamakura period. Customs, habits, institutions, language, architecture—all these remained unaltered. The only differences were no more than the presence of a rice mill and electric light. For this day and age, it was an extraordinarily rare village.

As the storm began to subside, the first to stir were the cicadas. When one—perhaps still struggling with its wings—came to an abrupt halt, another began singing at a much higher pitch. Before long, cicada voices filled every direction again as wind and rain fully ceased. The pond lay turbid with carp floating on its surface. Yet this too proved fleeting. The radio announced that the afternoon's gale had swept from Tokyo through Toyama Prefecture before following the Sea of Japan coastline into this Shōnai region.

Houses with their roof vents blown off. Power lines snapped, and standing trees were uprooted from their roots and toppled. Whirling tree leaves; unripe persimmons torn from their branches and sent flying. The stone walls twisted and toppled as the forest continued roaring thunderously. The fruit-laden paulownia tree fell. The pond’s surface became covered with fresh green leaves, and even the carp were nowhere to be seen. This year’s harvest was truly ruined. Amid this decisive storm, the rice problem grew more acute. Farmers who had been going around borrowing rice since morning drifted in and gathered like fallen leaves at San’emon’s hearth where I was. In the dimly lit room with the storm shutters tightly closed, they continued muttering their usual complaints day after day. Such-and-such places had rice yet went around borrowing with faces pretending not to have any; no, that place actually had none, they protested. However, they suspected that even though that fellow claimed to have no rice, when bean rations came around, he declared beans were better than rice and rushed to be first in line. No, they said that when they went to borrow rice there, even though he was an older brother, he didn’t hand over even two shō to his younger brother. So San’emon, taking pity, lent him two shō from the one to he had just borrowed from his daughter-in-law’s family.

“Things like what’s been happening lately—never happened since this village began. It’ll make a fine tale to tell, eh?” one of them said.

Tree branches pelted against the storm shutters and wooden doors. The sound of trees creaking and splintered as they fell. The melancholy cry of the mountain dove called ceaselessly. Waves of rice ears thrashed wildly in chaotic turmoil. Glass windows shattered. Carp leapt up with green leaves still stuck to their heads on the water’s surface.

At that moment, Kyūzaemon from the branch household—the one who had secured a room for me at San’emon’s—came in. This elderly man who paid his taxes in full had been refusing rice borrowers since dawn, exhaustion making his speech quicker than normal. His voice was louder too.

“They keep saying ‘We’ll die, we’ll die’—coming since daybreak.” “Lending rice shows human compassion.” “But when I lend year after year, borrowers think it’s their due—not a speck of gratitude.” “Lend again this year, and those who borrow survive while lenders die.” “If we must perish, let us all fall together.” “I refuse to be the sole corpse while borrowers walk free.”

“Yeah, I suppose that’s right,” one of them said in a dazed voice.

“Once it’s come to this, there’s nothing left but for everyone to act like they’ve got no rice.” “If we keep saying this one has it and that one doesn’t, we’ll never get anywhere.” “When they keep demanding ‘Lend from here! Lend from there!’ like this, even my rice stores won’t last.” “They say they’ll repay with new rice when it comes in, but if I lend old rice only to get new rice back—swapping one shō five gō for one shō two gō—it’s not even worth discussing.” “If they don’t return old rice as old rice, it won’t square with the measure.”

Indeed, when comparing one shō of new rice to one shō of old rice, those who lent out old rice that expanded more when cooked suffered a far greater loss. This I couldn't comprehend. Each day piled up countless things that couldn't be understood merely by observing from outside. "In the first place," San'emon said, "the cooperative director should've known about this."

San’emon said. This cooperative director was from his wife’s family. For the sake of protecting his wife Kiyoe as well, San’emon had a social obligation to be the first to loudly denounce him. “Since the cooperative director kept demanding ‘Hand over your rice! Hand it over!’ and made everyone do it, he ought to have had the resolve to take responsibility when saying such things.” “Moreover, when he’s asked to lend rice but says he can’t because he has none—that’s not putting words into action.” “Only when he’s given even what he needs to eat himself can he tell others to hand over theirs.” “To avoid suffering any loss himself while trying to claim all the honor for making the village meet its quota—that’s nothing but greed.” “There wasn’t a single person in this village who couldn’t get by.”

"That's right. There weren't any such poor folks here," another one said. "In that case, scheming to avoid losses alone amounts to wrongdoing." "If you make others suffer losses, you ought to suffer them yourself." Just then, Kiyoe the housewife returned from consulting the Buddha's mouth. Perhaps sensing her family's cooperative director was being targeted, she kept her distance from the hearth. The farmers articulated irrefutable logic through sparse words. A meticulousness blind to anything beyond their domain. Steeped in training inherited from collective wisdom amassed over generations, they wielded precision akin to exact calculations regarding their cultivated lands. This acuity had likely been refined through ancestral habits compelled to engage with the geometry of rice grains and paddy lines. Those dismissing farmers as dull-witted—ignorant of verbal economy here—perpetuated a habitual misconception. Devoid of fantasy, valuing empirical weather readings, maintaining stoicism except when assessing soil chemistry and seed selection—this steadfastness saturated every psychological crevice. Here resided a supreme musical form expressed through supra-verbal symbols. The naturalism that reduced this to mere earthiness stood accused of excessive naturalism at its core.

City people had long maintained the habit of calling farmers stingy, but this too was an error. The one sen grasped by city people and the one sen grasped by farmers might share equal monetary value, but their essence differed. The latter was a sen from a machine-like body that had proven reality through labor, containing none of the muddied gains born of speculation. Perhaps only by equating a city dweller’s one yen with a farmer’s one sen could one finally arrive at a balanced judgment regarding their respective considerations of money. For farmers, money was the sweet dew of weather patterns, the weight of geometric calculations, a flower blooming through muscle, and a sacred symbol enshrined upon an altar. Or perhaps it was a god. Unless one recognized here this sublime thing—which could not be treated carelessly and which compelled them toward what others called stinginess—any theory of rural life remained practically impossible.

The reason Kiyoe, wife of San’emon from the main household, secretly attacked Kyūzaemon from the branch family was that she considered it improper for a farmer to engage in commerce by selling things like bamboo-leaf-wrapped rice dumplings. If one did business to save money, anyone would accumulate it. She would sometimes obliquely hint her resentment to my wife, suggesting that letting them flaunt such gains would only disrupt rural customs. Moreover, regarding how the cooperative director from Kiyoe’s family home faced everyone’s attacks, he defended himself by claiming he’d only accepted the position because they all kept urging him to take it against his will. Yet these days, the villagers couldn’t remain idle unless they were attacking someone. This would likely hold true anywhere. It wasn’t about justice or injustice. Even in marital quarrels, they doggedly pursued only the most visible trivial causes—those just short of producing actual harm—and considered that sufficient. Those next in line to be torn down were now precisely what kept people’s spirits afloat. I knew nothing about the cooperative director’s character, but suspected he wasn’t a bad sort. There was even an aspect suggesting he might be the most formidable person in this village. I resolved to investigate him properly.

I told my wife what lay in Kiyoe’s heart after she went to hear the Buddha’s mouth. About Kiyoe’s eldest son—the one deployed to Karafuto with no word—it came through that though he’d been wounded in August and lay hospitalized now, he would return come October. Next concerning the sickness of the calf returned days prior to its keeper—this calf’s dung was uncommonly hard for cattle, they said, its stomach and bowels failing. When Kiyoe spoke such words channeled through the shrine maiden’s mouth, her youngest child listening beside her—twelve years old—clung fast to her knees in fear and would not let go. The room with its electric light gone out stood pitch black, only the hearth fire swaying bright and clear.

September――

The storm had ended. The rice plants had fallen over, but because rain had been driven by the wind—adding weight to the ears and causing their heads to droop deeply until they became interlocked—the grains were spared from being stripped away. Had it been wind alone, they said, the plants would have rubbed fiercely against each other, causing the grains to fall to the ground as happened last year. Yet in place of the rice, the vegetable crops had been destroyed. So long as the rice remained unharmed, even if this year's harvest proved poor, they could at least claim to have weathered the crisis.

After the storm came clear weather. Those without rice had begun harvesting the early crop. The portion of early rice that had already been harvested—though none would call it ample—was dry enough to yield edible grains. Though meager in quantity, it would suffice as a stopgap until the new rice came in. With this, they no longer had to hear desperate cries of "We'll die!" from the village. "This year's still better than last—last year was nothing but wind, eh?"

With that, bright smiles could be seen as they looked up at the sky and gazed over the fields. They had to harvest now before the next rain came―― “Ah, this year’s victory goes to the early rice. Only the early rice managed to avoid the storm.” And such cases existed. A train filled with the sleepy faces of the demobilized army passed through the prostrate rice ears.

Aster flowers; through persimmon leaves torn by the storm, the fruits emerged conspicuously. The pale aqua beauty of the serried mountain range. "Agricultural labor is grueling work," he said, "but for those who do it constantly, it's not particularly difficult, you know." "Even so," Kyūzaemon added, "for those who've never done it—this isn't something they can manage at all." Few homes had even a single book in decent condition. They lacked even the leisure to feel such interest, let alone actually want to read. Yet intricate matters were readily understood through their manner of speaking. I once asked what type of machinery would be most necessary if the village required new farm equipment—whereupon this sixty-eight-year-old uneducated Kyūzaemon—

“That’s something we’ll have to consider properly,” he drawled, falling silent for a while in deep thought. The term kentō—scrutiny—was a new word not even found in the Jien dictionary. This old farmer nevertheless maintained keen interest in social affairs, once remarking: “There’s one thing I can’t grasp no matter how much I hear—this whole Labor-Farmer Party versus Socialist Party business. However you slice it, I just can’t tell where they differ.” I too went through considerable pains explaining the distinction between these two.

The farmers around here did not consider themselves laborers. Rather, they saw themselves as producers manufacturing rice—commanders who were landowners. Even tenant farmers viewed themselves this way. Yet the village possessed communal mountain forests—ancestral property passed down through generations. As these were jointly owned forests, the ancestral faction holding ownership rights received their share of profits, while branch families alone had been historically excluded from this benefit. Consequently, even within the same lineage groups in the village, opposition had arisen between two factions: the main house and its branch families. Kyūzaemon—a branch family that had migrated from outside the village—proved no exception to this pattern. The branch faction members were made to contribute equally to all communal village projects yet received none of the mountain forests' income benefits—a situation they complained about being unable to comprehend. On this point too, the cooperative director clashed with Kyūzaemon of the branch faction; as standard-bearer of the ancestral faction, he consequently asserted shared authority with San’emon of the main house and refused to yield. For Kyūzaemon facing this formidable adversary encroaching upon his fields and forests, there remained no recourse but to amass strength through ready cash reserves. That someone like Kiyoe would attack Kyūzaemon's business acumen here could indeed be seen as ancestral faction jealousy; even through Labor-Farmer's sacred guise flowed silent contempt suppressing emerging forces.

A major incident had occurred. It concerned this village primarily, though its implications extended beyond. Within this village’s Shakadō stood a chamber called Kaidan-in. This recently constructed temple annex housed nothing but mortuary tablets from seventy parishioner households. While construction costs had naturally been borne by the village, contributions varied. Thus arose an impossibility—they could no longer enshrine each household’s wooden tablets according to ancestral seniority. Unrest persisted until they resolved to rank positions by monetary contribution, adopting a sealed bidding system where each wrote their pledged amount secretly. For the village, this constituted an earthshaking event. Since ancestral status now hinged on cash, clandestine meetings proliferated to negotiate baseline contributions. Here too Kyūzaemon proved prescient—he unilaterally paid one hundred yen before others stirred. The entire village still squabbled over bids between one and ten yen. Having no ancestral lineage himself, Kyūzaemon faced becoming progenitor. To validate his life’s efforts, he needed to surpass all lineages and manifest emergent vitality.

When the bids were opened, Kyūzaemon had decisively taken first place. Even in life, he now surveyed Kaidan-in with a commanding gaze. Though it was said there was nothing as splendid as this wooden tablet room in the entire prefecture, I too saw it once—a chamber resplendent with gold. San'emon of the house where I stayed belonged to a lineage that would originally have occupied Kaidan-in's highest tier. But having been reduced to a poor farmer in his own generation through alcoholism, he was neatly supplanted by Kyūzaemon of the branch family and nearly fell to the deceased's tier. When the village standard contribution stood at five yen, he stubbornly paid ten, barely securing a foothold on the middle platform.

“Oh, what an uproar that was back then,” San’emon would tell me. The greater part of a farmer’s lifelong labor—their sweat-drenched toil—could be said to serve either maintaining their mortuary tablets’ current positions in Kaidan-in or striving to elevate their status by one tier above their ancestors’ in their own generation. The traditional belief that dishonoring ancestral positions before Buddha would forfeit the mountains’ and rivers’ blessings remained inextricable from farmers’ very foundations. This boundless labor force was a power welling up from distant ancestors; sever it, and they would all become new progenitors transformed into urban factory workers. The gods had already fled them—what filled their minds now was materialism’s creed surging back into rural Kaidan-in to destroy it. A paradox simple yet profoundly complex—there was scarcely anything more pressing among current issues.

In Japan’s labor force, as is widely known, there existed two types: one arising from Buddha and another emerging from science—locked in combat like history and nature’s eternal struggle. Something akin to what began when the French Revolution dragged God from His altar to enshrine Descartes’ intellect had infiltrated even here. The lament of factory workers—that they could no longer till fields—pervaded every corner of this village. Even Kyūzaemon’s second son, a twenty-three-year-old skilled laborer striving to help with farm work, moved as though gasping his last breaths despite his robust strength. The conflict between intellect and sensibility had seeped deeply beyond educated individuals into our nation’s mountainous folds. Here too, what Descartes and Pascal once contested—now warped into grotesque forms—stirred faintly, its fragments rustling beyond human hearing.

There was such a thing as collective labor, where student groups from various schools would enter farmers’ rice paddies and fields for transplanting and harvesting. While this certainly provided assistance to the farmers’ labor force, it marked the beginning of rural mechanization. Had anyone paused to look up and reflect, they might have noticed flames already licking at Kaidan-in. Yet people kept growing older. No one could preserve their youth unchanged. If that were so, then humanity’s fervent wish—to leave behind a single wooden tablet testifying to their lifelong consumption of rice—would never fade. The generosity of allowing humans just one living testament—that emotion even the most ruthless rationalist must harbor—was what Pascal called a divine gift. And if one placed this above intellect, then as long as death existed among humans, this emotion would never disappear. Just as knowledge endures while life persists. Yet all these matters ultimately returned to each individual’s urgent concerns—questions rooted in personal identity rather than rural society.

Every day I conducted rural studies, but in truth, my true purpose lay in studying humanity. Day after day I mingled with farmers laboring diligently, yet peasant studies remained impossible without observing their work. That I spent my days observing with the shortcoming of not working had brought me one significant positive outcome: it was for this reason that I held farmers in respect. To devise a way not to lose this respect myself, I found it better not to work alongside them. Given that there existed a certain axiom—that valid criticism was impossible—which itself bore the semblance of an axiom, this too might therefore be mistaken; but even if we tentatively set that aside as a method to approach comparative correctness, there could indeed exist a virtue in observing from the sidelines. It wasn’t that I sought to position observation as a virtue and make it my ally. However, precisely because a mind idling alone amidst others’ labor stood in a position certain to be attacked from all sides, one naturally desired to secure whatever allies one could. When I truly considered who I should bring over to my side, there was ultimately no one but myself. Therefore, I made myself my own ally. I had always disliked this, but devising a scheme to tame even those I disliked required no small effort here. The agony of observation demanded here a moral sense that those who labored could never comprehend—my pleasure lay in feeling something beginning to sprout from this ground, in nurturing its growth and watching it stretch upward. Even so, I had grown somewhat weary of the phenomena of the visible world—of things like fighting over rice or pulling at it. I did not neglect this work, but why did I sometimes feel disgusted? What could be the reason for this tendency?

September ――

As I observed, rural villages operated entirely through habit. Whether thinking, working, or speaking ill of others— I kept watching to see if there wasn’t something that wasn’t a habit, but I had yet to discover a single instance. There was only one thing—the price of rice had risen to ten yen—and everyone wore an expression as if no one knew how to register shock at this. That something which had been twenty sen had become ten yen was already beyond imagination. However, this too would soon become a habit. If this became a habit, all other habits of the phenomenal world would be overturned. Perhaps the habits ingrained in the farmers' minds had already overturned everything through this. With prices of goods having soared a hundred and fiftyfold, did humanity possess the strength to keep the price of the heart fixed at twenty sen from days past—was such a thing even permitted? The reason being that people lacked such a habit.

Truly, thinking was fascinating. Day after day we repeat actions, yet when encountering an event that shatters a single habit, this immediate confusion of thought arises—the bewilderment of applying habitual thinking to non-habitual matters—which now occurred within myself and others, only to be ambiguously discarded and swept into oblivion within this present moment we name "now." Reaching an answer had become arduous. Though it meant one hundred fiftyfold difficulty, such was my mind's nature—insisting on treating it as mere twentyfold hardship. —And when reality unfolded with one hundred fiftyfold complexity, what recourse could people possibly devise?

After all, it was also a fact that when people were desperate to rest, there were those who could not help but want to work precisely in anticipation of that. According to communications from Tokyo, it was said that one shō of rice had become sixty yen. To farmers who day and night pricked up their ears to rumors about who sold what where for how much, when someone came from where to buy at what price—such Tokyo stories were not ones they should be told. To tell those stunned by ten yen the truth of sixty yen—and that at a time when they stood dumbfounded by the mere rumor-driven joy of rice prices leaping so high. Everywhere, in gatherings of people, conversations consisted entirely of whispers. When our footsteps approached, the conversation stopped abruptly, leaving only the hearth fire blazing fiercely. When you thought there were two people crouched in the grass whispering to each other, they turned outward with grubby smiles, exposing their yellowish teeth.

With the rice harvest beginning, the village farmers who had been eyeing Kyūzaemon’s branch household’s rice storehouse finally turned their attention elsewhere—but there was no time to relax, for now distant relatives from a vegetable-growing village began targeting it. The storm had torn away all their vegetables, leaving the relatives with nothing to exchange for rice. Moreover, the household of Rie—Kyūzaemon’s sister-in-law—in the fishing village where demobilized youths had returned now faced rice shortages. For her as his sister-in-law, there was no chance she wouldn’t fix her gaze on this rice storehouse of Kyūzaemon’s. What’s more, I myself felt an undeniable pull toward this very storehouse. My bargaining chips were clothes, but Rie’s household used fish. Meanwhile, the home of Yahee—the village’s wealthiest landowner—had been pressing Kyūzaemon: “We’ll pay whatever it takes—just give us rice.”

“Hahaha, havin’ goods at my place ain’t ’cause I want money.”

With that, Kyūzaemon said something clever and made me laugh. He was an old man who knew how to use his mind effectively.

September ――

A postcard arrived from Tomiji Ishizuka, who had been burned out of his home and evacuated to his family home in Mihara, Niigata. The postmark was from Kōriyama, Fukushima, but it stated that he had received an invitation from Yasunari Kawabata to join Kamakura Bunko and was now on a train with bright prospects before his eyes. A night train bearing a light upon its breast advanced toward Kamakura, rising before my eyes. There was nothing as beautiful as hope gradually lighting up. Even in the depths of dark fate there were stations; O window of the night train that stitched its way through them.

Do not lose heart.

No matter what occurred in the world—even if it turned upside down as it had now—there would always be those who felt neither pain nor itch. Among farming households, there were occasionally such people too. To them, the world beyond the very fields where they labored might as well have been a phantom. No—rather, it was the suffering and joy of their profiting precisely because Japan had lost. Yet entirely separate from that, there did exist the pain of rejoicing in defeat. And in the agonizing underside of these hearts emerging while cradling joy lay the fact that they wielded a certain unfathomable logic toward the future—a logic one might think loved humanity more than humans. For now, what they offered remained logic, not humanity. As humanity revived across the world, countless such offerings would likely continue spilling from this bag of human logic—the very logic that had extinguished humanity. Whether this was good or bad, I regretted to say I still did not understand. The only thing I understood was that it felt somehow regrettable.

September ――

I found myself wondering through which part of their hearts our nation's literary figures connected with the external world. Four definitions had been put forth: that we were Japanese; that we were Easterners; that we were global citizens; and that we were a defeated nation. And if a situation arose where one must select from among these and perform their respective geometries, the question became: which definition would the heart of a literary person choose?

Of course, literature was not geometry. If that were so, then definitions would have to infinitely regress back to their origins, forcing us to declare that literature was definition itself. "The Potsdam Declaration shall be accepted"—this resolute and unequivocal definition. Through this single definition, all Japanese lives had been saved. Were we to develop innumerably from this foundation and undertake proof of being democratic citizens, two methods existed at this juncture: either executing what the proposition implied, or investigating what already resided within the citizenry. But regardless, when forced to enlighten this matter under humanity's need to survive, considering past or future proved futile. To tentatively consider the present—since life's substance always lay in the now—nothing mattered more than focusing on this moment. Now farmers and laborers stood like kings and princes. Against this elevation, none could raise their head in opposition. Never before had the present been so thoroughly democratic, yet now it lacked any unifying spirit. What everyone sought above all was rice and spirit—yet money alone threw this into disarray. But curiously enough, people showed this peculiar habit: upon obtaining even a little rice, they promptly forgot about it. Among things deemed inconsequential whether present or absent, what had long mattered least to humanity were rice and god. Or rather—they were the twin representatives of materiality and spirit. Only upon reaching the point of wondering what would become of humanity without these two did rice—mere materiality—finally catch their eye. This time, no matter what they claimed, if people held material things at all, those very things vanished amid their chasing and scrambling. Next came spirit. Yet where this one element dwelled remained unknown even now. When it grew unclear, they condemned a single face. All sought to wipe bloodied swords with that same visage.

September ――

The rice harvest was underway.

The old woman Rie arrived from the seaside village. She had come both to summon through shrine maidens' divinations the spirit of her youngest son who died in Okinawa and to consult her younger sister—Kyūzaemon’s wife—about rice provisions. Looking up at shifting clouds, one could see the two sisters walking together toward the station where these spiritual consultations took place. The elder was seventy; her sibling sixty-one. The younger moved with eager steps—this would be her first chance since her grandchild’s initial Obon memorial to meet his spirit again. Autumn sky stretched flawlessly clear above bowed rice ears lining both sides of the road; distant mountain ridges overlapped like waves etched by an artist’s finest brushstroke. There they walked—two figures now convinced their children would someday tread this same gilded path suited for living souls seeking departed kin when their own time came. An autumn wind stirred.

I decided to walk alone along the path encircling the marsh.

My wife, who had left early this morning for Tsuruoka, was now returning. Thirty minutes had passed since the train made its way through the distant rice fields. In that case, it must have been that train. Along the country path stretching half a league from the station, a solitary black speck was moving closer from the opposite direction. As I closed the distance while thinking it was probably her, she drew nearer in a manner that suggested matching recognition. In the midst of the vast plain stretching before me, I thought that must be the one person diligently searching for food to sustain me. Living with my incompetent self had been her misfortune. As we each stood alone—she on one side, I on the other—our awkward expressions growing increasingly evident, we met precisely on the wooden bridge.

“I thought so.” “Hmm.” My wife laughed, letting the pumpkin’s skin protrude from the edge of the cloth wrapping. The river water flowed beneath their feet.

Twenty years ago, on a certain day when we weren't even married yet—it suddenly occurred to me that something like this had happened once before—but now both of us had become people relentlessly pursued by flames and utterly exhausted.

September ――

The black cat's eyes glowed sharply yellow like phosphorescence. In an unoccupied room, amidst a swarm of buzzing flies, a pillar clock tolled quietly. Sunlight dimmed and glared. Light rays shone through the lattice gaps onto the vermilion of the arranged pumpkins. Whenever the wind stopped abruptly, the medicine pot on the hearth would begin to make a strange noise and then come to a boil.

In the village, they had collectively borrowed an early-ripening rice field from one household and conducted the harvest together to cover their food needs until their own fields were harvested, beginning today to polish the rice obtained there. The harvesting was submerged in mud up to their knees from days of rain, but at night under the electric lights of the polishing shed, the farmers stood assembled like dignified samurai clad in imposing armor, their spirits roused. They stood arrayed in a silence as fierce as that preceding a night raid. This must have been the tension reaching its annual peak. A young man was also visible in truly beautiful form, exhaling a puff of tobacco into the night air with evident relish.

October ――

Every farmer’s hearth now contained a little new rice. This was also because the rice didn’t expand when cooked—at San’emon’s house, where four people had been managing with two and a half shō per day, they were now using slightly over four shō daily with the new rice yet still found it insufficient.

Mornings and evenings grew chilly enough to require charcoal in the brazier, but this village held nothing but firewood—nowhere fresh charcoal remained among its spent ashes. The lush weight of new rice filled my palm with cool dampness; beneath its faintly luminous waxen sheen came a dawning glow breaking through. Indeed there was lyricism in this scent of new grain. The roar of infinite history washed over my hand like wave sounds until I grew sentimental— “Ah—Japanese rice has lost its vitality. “This war is lost.”

And there was one brown rice researcher who had muttered such things. He was the man who had made those prophecies during the Second Sino-Japanese War before retreating into the mountains. I suddenly remembered him now. They say human genius peaks at twenty-five—that everyone’s vitality as a genius fades by then. Rice too might possess this kind of genius-like power. The dawn-tinted genius of rice may have vanished, but the genius of effort still remains. Some say genius amounts to nothing—that it merely builds fools and dwells within them. Rice too seems to harbor a sorrow close to having only just finished constructing those fools. Come to think of it, their tear-shaped forms now appear not as irony but as plain truth.

"I can't tell whether this year's new rice makes me happy or sad," I said as my wife approached, showing her the grains in my palm. "Look at this." "But it's beautiful—how it sparkles. Look how it glitters." "And yet they say it's lost its vitality now. Japanese rice..." "Mr. Sakurazawa... I wonder how he's been these days," she murmured. "I'd like to see him again."

My wife was an avid reader of Mr. Yoshikazu Sakurazawa’s works and had once even attended one of his lectures, so it seemed the existence of this man who had prophesied Japan’s defeat was now sparking her interest. Among the young men who came to me, there were about two who had also been frequenting Mr. Sakurazawa’s place, but one day around the time the Pacific War began, one of them—A-kun—came and said:

“This war cannot be won—it’s written in the rice, Mr. Sakurazawa says.” “It seemed so dire that I turned ashen.” “What should we do?” “Can this truly be real?”

I did not answer. The ideologies derived from rice possessed an unfathomable profundity and terrifying power. When a vision incapable of discerning any semblance of the future from something we had consumed for thousands of years existed, it was high time we recognized that there was some deficiency here. With that, I fell silent, thinking of myself. However, realizing it now changed nothing. It was all water under the bridge.

"Do not think of winning. Take care not to lose," said Kenkō Hōshi, but that was five hundred years ago. Even so, this youth called A became itinerant with no fixed address, wandering aimlessly across the country, and would occasionally send a postcard as fleeting as the wind from some unexpected corner.

When I returned from abroad, landing at Shimonoseki and traversing all of Honshu by train, passing through Niigata Prefecture via the Joetsu Line from Tokyo before entering the Shonai Plain of Yamagata Prefecture, I thought for the first time: Ah, this is the most quintessentially Japanese landscape I’ve ever seen. For when I looked out over the expanse, nowhere else but here had fields planted with nothing but rice. In the fields of other regions, even where rice paddies stretched wide, one’s eye would catch various mixed crops growing within—but only here were there rice plants with uniformly aligned ears as far as the eye could see. I remember when the train stopped at Uzen-Mizusawa Station—the first desolate station on this plain with its posted sign—I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the rippling rice ears that I took a deep breath, nearly moved to tears. Yet here I am now. Back then, having no connection to this place whatsoever, I never imagined I would sink roots here—yet now, ten years later, bereft of any destination, to have been cast ashore in such a place by chance—this was the war’s outcome for me. And for the first time, taking this new rice in my hands here, I thought that even if rice existed in abundance elsewhere, there was nothing in all the wide world that could replace this.

“Has it already lost its vitality, this?” “What nonsense.”

Before I knew it, I too had no choice but to say such things and found myself stepping outside. Outside, rice harvesting was at its peak. From the rice mill’s wide-open doorway, powder blew out and swirled whitely around the trunks of nearby trees.

October――

In a village called Kyōta about three ri away from here, my eldest son—who had been working as a substitute teacher—was dismissed when the regular teacher returned from demobilization. At their farewell, the students— “Teacher, are you going back to Tokyo? Stay a bit longer. We’ll give you botamochi,” they told him. At nineteen, having learned life’s sorrows, my eldest son returned late at night along a pitch-dark muddy path in geta with broken thongs, received his first salary, and was immediately dismissed—seemingly at a loss for how to express this bitter hardship.

“Are you sad?” “Just as I thought,” I asked with a laugh. “Yeah, somehow saying goodbye to the students is sad.” “But I hate the faculty room.” “Let me see your pay envelope.” When I opened the envelope he’d been shyly hiding, the rolled pouch’s weighted bottom sagged downward, and from within emerged what appeared to be crisp banknotes. About seventy yen was inside. “That’s quite a sum.” “Not bad at all.” “Yes, there’s a night duty allowance included.” “Though the base salary alone is thirty-five yen.”

I recalled the precious moment when I first received my forty-two yen monthly salary as a teacher at a certain university. At that time, I had thought a salary wasn't real money—but my eldest son's salary felt even less so. "To get your first paycheck only to be fired straightaway—how fleeting life is," I said. "But yours being more than what I got back then—that's damn impressive." Feeling pleased, I asked my wife to place the pay envelope before San’emon's Buddhist altar.

“I’d thought the same thing myself, you know.” “But this here’s another family’s Buddhist altar, isn’t it?” “Do you think it’s all right?”

“It’s all the same wherever you go.” I still wanted to show my deceased father my child’s first salary, and thought that in times like these, one ends up doing what everyone else does without protest. Yet when I had received my first salary back then—despite there being a family altar at home—I had immediately spent it on my way back, but when it came to my child’s salary now, I found myself unable to do the same. This inexplicable animalistic joy that welled up wherever I looked—so embarrassingly primal—what on earth was this about?

“You came back late every night.” “You managed to make it back along that long pitch-dark muddy path every night.” I didn’t say such things aloud, but somehow found myself constantly repeating them internally, when suddenly I remembered my own father again. My father too had maintained that aloof exterior, never letting emotions surface. But when I was twenty-five and first published *Namboku* in *Ningen* magazine—when I sent him a copy to Keijō—he read it and died that very night of a cerebral hemorrhage from overwhelming joy. My *Namboku* was torn apart by critics after publication—crushed in one blow. Since then, “human beings” became my dojo for life’s comedies—still my vulnerable spot—though it took twenty years before I came to see demons themselves as Buddhas. An expression carved by years is neither tears nor laughter.

“What’re you going to use that monthly salary for?” I asked my child.

“I’m going back to Tokyo with this. I want to hurry back and play the piano. It’s okay if I go back first, right?” “Hmm.” “The other day I got some pocket money—maybe I should give back just ten yen of it.” What’s he coming out with now. As I stared vacantly, “But if I don’t give it back right away, I’ll end up spending it—just one bill, okay?” “Oh dear, this is quite a situation,” my wife said while listening nearby, then handed him the bag she had brought down again from the Buddhist altar.

“Here. Ten yen.” The child took out one bill and gave it to me, then carefully tucked the rest between his coat buttons, but though I accepted it, I felt I’d failed—suddenly overcome with sadness at realizing I’d never done such a thing for my own father. My child was doing this before me now without knowing anything, yet this very act of unknowing had become the most genuine deed. As for my father—he had neither known, nor had I done. This struck my heart even more painfully, and I thought that this kid showed more promise than I ever had. In truth, I seemed to find myself impressed by matters that defied all reason. That said, across three generations—father, child, grandchild—each naturally undergoes their own appropriate modulations in action. Not only can one not directly see beyond three generations, but there are also various things one must reach fifty to comprehend. Though it might sound like an old man’s ramblings, with each passing year I find these generational differences increasingly fascinating.

“Ah, I want to play the piano soon!”

And the child was still saying such things as he lay on his back. "You can go to Tokyo tomorrow if you want."

“Really?” “I’m so happy!” “Ah! I’m so happy!”

The child pulled the futon over his head, then immediately popped his head out again, “Mom, Dad says I can go to Tokyo tomorrow—is it okay if I do?” He’s still just a child.

When I was nineteen—the year I first came to Tokyo—I hadn’t said a single word to my father about the school I wanted to attend, nor had he ever asked me about it. And on the day before my departure, I simply told my mother, “I’m going to Tokyo tomorrow,” and without any opposition, I set out from Yamashina, Kyoto carrying a single wicker trunk. Not only was my father a far better parent than I was, but my child also seems to surpass me in embodying what it means to be a son.

October [day]

The tips of my feet grew cold. The chestnut burrs were still soft. It was a day when rain-soaked firewood burned poorly and the pot boiled slowly. In conversations along country paths, lies about their own fields’ poor yields mingled with the talk, and honesty seemed to shift slightly depending on the weather’s vagaries. With this rain today, there was even a risk that the rice laid out to dry might start rotting. No sooner had it cleared than a sudden shower struck, bringing violently shifting light and shadows. The sky alternated between clearing and clouding over every minute, with only the flies swarming in great numbers.

However, there existed something compelling the villagers to lie—another factor lurking beneath this weather pretext. The reason one couldn’t help but sympathize with their clumsy falsehoods—these people unaccustomed to deception now wearing expressions of dishonesty—was that this year’s rice requisition quota allocation remained undecided when it should have long been settled. In that ominous silence, shadows of suspicion deepened as their awkward defensive gestures took shape. After all, precisely because this village had been foremost in honest full payments compared to others, it now found itself in greater turmoil over rice shortages than any neighboring hamlet. That they felt compelled to lie this year—this very conviction—deserved recognition as a natural human response. In truth, from what I observed, this village stood as exceptionally virtuous—unquestionably first-rate in moral character—yet even here murky currents flowed; extrapolating this to other villages would likely prove accurate. I believed Japan’s farmers ranked among our nation’s greatest prides—should this foundation crumble, one might declare Japan itself finished.

“They keep saying ‘poor harvests, poor harvests,’ but is it truly that bad? Something feels off about it,” I asked Kyūzaemon. “Well now,” he murmured in a low voice. “It’s not so terrible round these parts. The papers keep blaring ‘poor harvest’ this and ‘poor harvest’ that—makes rice prices shoot up. Should’ve just kept quiet.”

“But that’s better for the village, though it’s a problem for us.” “Hahaha, that’s how it is.”

The reason we had come to speak so bluntly was partly because Kyūzaemon always told me, "You shouldn't buy expensive rice—if it runs out, I'll manage somehow." Thinking something would be done about it made us complacent, and so we couldn't bring ourselves to immediately ask him to share rice with us—even then, we remained stuck, unable to voice that request either. It was a fact that evacuees were causing disruption in rural areas. I could have made arrangements to secretly stockpile rice if I tried, but since I still hadn't lost my appetite for critiquing this village internally, engaging in such criticism required both the patience to suppress desires and considerable effort. This proved exhausting indeed, but though I—being a writer of sorts—hadn't lost my readiness to test myself by taking at least one bold swing, there remained an inescapable struggle here: an inability to dismiss foolish matters as mere folly the way others might expect. It wasn't that I was putting on airs of being virtuous. Undoubtedly, many of our friends must have been secretly enduring similar hardships across various places too.

“There’s no god or Buddha.”

The reason Kyūzaemon habitually said such things to me was probably that what constantly concerned him ultimately stemmed from matters of gods and Buddha. While declaring "I'll give you rice, I'll give you rice," he never gave even once, and afterward would also say things like: "Gods and Buddha are matters of the heart—human intentions are what they are." There had likely never been a time when people thought more about gods and Buddha than now, but hearing him reduce deities to matters of the heart felt like listening to a natural sermon, and in some way left me feeling better than if I had actually received rice from him.

"I no longer want rice from you," I vowed silently within. This held no irony. For now it was I who wished to give him grain instead.

October [day]

Wind howled through shafts of clear light. A swarm of flies battered against my eyebrows. A snake's head slid down a tree trunk. Chinese cabbage spread through the field. Red dragonflies darted in fierce horizontal swarms. Among vegetables that came and went from our table, only green shiso remained constant. The rice harvest—these days it was mid-season crops. This mid-season harvest yielded poorly after being battered by recent storms. The wind had blown against the direction of the bent rice ears, snapping stems and rendering subsequent fair weather useless for ripening. A nationwide poor harvest was confirmed. An eerie silence hung over the undetermined requisition orders. Farmers maintained their silent standoff while black market buyers from hot spring towns crept in with unknown prices. Delicate tremors continued beneath the surface. Though feigning insensitivity, they seemed to shift colors secretly—this silence adapting to relentless internal and external changes.

In this village where people rarely praised others, those praised by all were Kiyoe—the wife of San’emon at whose house I stayed—and the wife of Kyūzaemon’s eldest son from the branch family. These two women made even me want to praise them whenever I saw them, and when alone with my wife, we would end up quietly extolling them together without either taking the lead. Kiyoe would return briefly from rice harvesting and, finding whatever spare moments she could, would remake the new straw-stuffed futon for her eldest son’s wife. She worked with remarkable speed.

“When I took a bride, my mother-in-law treated her real well—so I’ve got to treat my own bride proper too,” he said. Brides too have their traditions. My wife came to my side,

“I wish I’d had a mother-in-law too,” she said with solemn earnestness. For some reason, I burst out laughing. “Well then—three days, wouldn’t you say?” “Do you think so? But if I had one, I don’t believe I’d have become this spoiled.” “The trials of being a bride—they’re among life’s bitterest hardships. Perhaps the bitterest of all.” “No—I’ll prove myself.” I stared speechless at my wife’s face. Still, this was preferable to being told we were fortunate to lack a mother-in-law. Could she endure it? No—she couldn’t, I thought once more.

“But if a woman could endure all that, she’d rate about eighty points as a wife.” “But that’s hardly…” “You’ve got this knack for keeping your husband under your thumb—maybe you could manage it after all. But let me tell you, nothing’s worse for a man than being torn between his mother and wife. It’s like sleeping between saw blades. Your ‘hardships’ barely compare to having me around every day.”

“Honestly, I do think how wonderful it would be if you were working somewhere else.” “Day after day, just thinking about the hardship of having you by my side makes me shudder.” “It’s exhausting, really, truly.”

My wife’s habitual lament began.

In the neighboring ramshackle house of Sōzaemon visible from here, the eldest son was drafted the day after his wedding, and though his bride still lives with her mother-in-law, the couple spent only a single day together. My wife had apparently recalled it at the same time, “Over there, they spent just a single day together—with honorific respect. What do you think?” she said, drawing her neck in slightly as she looked at me. I suddenly remembered a moment during the war when I was about to have dinner at a Western-style restaurant in Ginza and found myself staring blankly at the wall alone, waiting for the food to arrive. On the wall hung a print of Millet's The Angelus. Despite having never once felt moved by these Barbizon school paintings in my daily life, I was suddenly overwhelmed by emotion at the modest beauty of a young couple in farming attire offering silent prayers before a temple spire visible beyond the field's edge. I tried to recall if there had been anything similar within the paintings of my lived memories, but for a while, nothing readily surfaced. However, why is it that such simple happiness and purity cannot be obtained by me or anyone else? I then became lost in thought over something that held no particular difficulty. Is it because there’s no good religion? Is it due to our own misconduct? Or should we say that the very structure of society is flawed? It probably isn’t any of those things. At this moment, wasn’t the gaze my wife directed at me—her neck slightly drawn in—actually akin to that very happiness?

I thought that people were like boats floating on a sea of happiness—with only their bellies submerged and heads raised above the water—so they might drift, battered by the winds of impermanence.

October――

The wife of Kyūzaemon’s eldest son from the branch household, having lost her only child—a four-year-old boy—this past May and showing no signs of another pregnancy, was already under the disapproving gaze of her elderly parents-in-law. Despite the anxiety of not knowing when she might be divorced, lately the daughter-in-law had begun working with considerable determination. However, at the main household here—San’emon’s home—the eldest son remained deployed to Karafuto with no word on his return, so the daughter-in-law had gone back to her parents’ home and stayed there. When she returned here only at night to sleep, they treated her like a queen during those moments, but given the palpable anxiety over when she might leave for good, San’emon and his wife’s whispered conversations always drifted down here. Though she was a quiet, good-natured bride, she still obeyed her parents’ every word. Given her current situation—having come as a bride from the village’s second-wealthiest household to its poorest farming family—San’emon’s absent eldest son must have been a remarkably fine young man. “Their eldest son is remarkable. There’s no one else like him,” the villagers said.

When he was conscripted, they say he had only asked his father to be sure to record each day’s expenses every night. As a nail driven into his father—who had ruined their household through drink—this was the surest way to secure it. Unripe persimmons still on their branches rustled noisily in the wind. The grove stood cold beneath clouds racing across the plain where evening light streamed. Kyūzaemon’s eldest son’s wife, having loaded wet green grass onto a handcart with gleaming farm tools and pulled it back, bowed politely to me by the riverside. With her healthily flushed, round face, she stood silent in bowing—a moment of crystalline clarity in the twilight. I too found myself unexpectedly filled with a pure, Millet-like serenity, and bowing in return, wished for her happiness. Indeed, the beauty of the evening bell comes to everyone once a day.

When I entered Kyūzaemon’s house, he had just emerged from the bath and was sitting before the hearth with a tanzen robe draped softly over his shoulders. As I watched his expressions shift between the serene face of a Chinese scholar and the stern eyes of a realist, I thought that Kyūzaemon, at sixty-eight, might now be experiencing the pinnacle of happiness in his life. He lacked nothing. None of his children had been conscripted, while the value of possessions only continued to soar. From extreme poverty, he had at any rate become number one in the village regarding cash ownership. He alone knew the village’s secrets. As for economic matters, there was no one in the village besides him who applied their intellect. With every action succeeding and an unshakable composure that made others appear foolish, all he needed to do was fix his piercing glare upon his daughter-in-law. The hem of his tanzen robe, draped from his shoulders and flowing down in a Fuji-like shape, now suited him with its tranquil appearance.

“The carpenters will come to raise the eaves starting tomorrow, I tell you.” “Since they asked for their wages in rice, I just told them, ‘Then let’s both go by the official rate.’” “Hahaha!” “When you’ve got rice, everything goes by the official rate, I tell you.”

I hardly ever visited this hearthside of Kyūzaemon’s, located a mere three ken away, which seemed to displease him considerably. Despite him having arranged my current room and the villagers believing Kyūzaemon to be my caretaker, since I kept my distance, even he couldn’t help feeling somewhat displeased. That the villagers’ harsh criticisms directed at Kyūzaemon must have reached my ears was beyond doubt, but such matters meant nothing to me. For me, his roadside hearthside was a place where many people gathered, so naturally my feet wouldn’t carry me there. Moreover, since those gathering included many village influentials, my steps grew heavier still.

“Won’t you try asking Mr. Kyūzaemon about the rice? We’ve none left at home.” “We’ve none left at home.” My wife whispered this to me as I was leaving, but I didn’t want to speak to him about rice. No—I intended not to ask Kyūzaemon for anything at all. Nor could I recall ever having consulted him about supplies from my side before now. “Did your household come to this village through Yamizaemon’s arrangements?”

And so, one day, a neighbor’s daughter asked my wife such a question. From how people called Kyūzaemon “Yamizaemon” and such, one might surmise that even we were likely being eyed with suspicion; however, since I had yet to experience anything particularly unpleasant from him, whether to trust him or not would have to wait. Yet in the month since arriving here, with each passing day, nothing but bad rumors about him reached my ears. I never once heard anything good. For a farmer, he possessed an unusually sharp mind—his extraordinary perceptiveness had likely kept everyone else perpetually off-balance, one could easily imagine. But such things were only to be expected.

“What does ‘travel melancholy’ mean?”

Then Kyūzaemon suddenly posed that question again. He must have been referring to last night's broadcast about my "travel melancholy," but since the radio was only in his house, I hadn't heard it. When I kept silent, he continued: "The story was listed under Yokomitsu Riichi. Though I don't know how one listens to this so-called Second Broadcast." I strove to keep my occupation hidden, yet kept finding myself cornered by such unavoidable exposures. Once I'd spotted my work printed large in old newspaper pages stuffed into the privy box and torn them out. Unrelated to this place, I suddenly recalled another incident from Osaka City. Walking near Dōjima Bridge by the Asahi building, I'd seen a handcart loaded with a large box come careening out. It collided head-on with a tram, overturning completely before my eyes. In that instant when I gasped—as books titled *Yokomitsu Riichi Collection* scattered everywhere and the tram clattered over them—I'd stood there dumbstruck. There were also times on trains when I'd find an empty seat only to see the passenger ahead absorbed in reading my collected works, utterly oblivious. At such moments, an author's feelings lean closer to misery than pride. Why should this be? That evening I returned from Kyūzaemon's place no closer to securing rice.

“How did it go with the rice?” my wife asked, approaching with a smile. “I don’t know anything about rice. “It’s a matter of feeling.” “I thought as much.” My wife looked disappointed and seemed thoroughly exasperated. Not only such things, but I had a foolish streak that had caused everyone great trouble during the war—yet observing her, my wife seemed much the same. “If you say it, that should suffice. “Aren’t rice matters like that women’s work?”

“Rice matters should be handled by men. That’s how it is everywhere.” “What kind of decent man does that?” “But even someone as esteemed as Mr. S went there by bicycle, didn’t he?” She might say that, I thought—and indeed, she had skillfully brought up exactly what I’d been anticipating. I was at a loss. Mr. S was a venerable literary figure and a writer I deeply admired, but when I heard from Mr. M about how this rucksack-clad man had bicycled over to borrow rice from the young acquaintance’s place, I found myself marveling at his straightforward action while reflecting on my own conduct.

“Yamizaemon and Mr. M are different,” I said painfully. “What should we do? There’s really nothing left.” My wife’s hands made a cold clattering sound as she removed the rice bin’s lid and measured with a masu. I had four cups daily while the other three had ten cups each—just over one shō total being sufficient—yet at San’emon’s house where I stayed, though they had the same number of family members, four shō still proved inadequate. When I’d once mentioned my four-cup ration, San’emon exhaled—“Hah…”—scrutinized my face intently, then declared: “Are you even human?”

However, two or three mornings ago, there was an incident where a donburi bowl produced a violent clattering sound as it rolled by the hearthside. At the same time,

“Who the hell eats two shō of rice?!” San’emon roared. When I asked what had happened, it turned out Tensaku—their twenty-three-year-old second son with cognitive disabilities—had unintentionally eaten two shō by himself on the day they switched to new rice. As ill luck would have it, Kyūzaemon had visited the previous night and told of an Osaka merchant buying village rice at one thousand yen per bale. When five yen was the standard village price, this thousand-yen figure became an earthshaking event—from that moment rice prices climbed like an eel up a waterfall, though Tokyo prices remained something we couldn’t breathe to the villagers.

October――

In the emptied house where no one remained, the polished wooden floor gleamed darkly, and there a goat walked with a clacking of hooves. I thought about chasing it but stopped to watch. The pure white fur rippled across the wide wooden floor’s luster, imbuing the surroundings with the dignity of a nobleman’s estate, as if beholding precious sculptures.

In this time when I was tormented by fleas and flies, a moment of solitude in this unexpectedly quiet morning felt almost surreal. A persimmon fruit bearing someone's white teeth marks remained on the tree. The leaves on the mountainside were beginning to turn crimson. I lit a fire in the hearth and heated water.

At that moment, Tensaku returned early alone from the white clay factory. This was my first time being alone with him. I had him sit by the hearth and served tea. "How is it?" "Mm," Tensaku said, gulping it down in one go. Sturdy muscles bulged from his exposed chest. "How is it?" I poured another cup. He lapped that up instantly too. With his usual faint smile—perhaps feeling shy—he turned sideways and sat cross-legged. When I poured yet another cup, he said, "That's enough," seeming as though this was his first time being served tea by someone at twenty-three years old.

“The factory’s closed.” “Yeah, they said there’s no sulfuric acid.” Given this, Tensaku didn’t seem as cognitively disabled as people made him out to be—but when I thought of him eating two shō a day, I found myself wanting to say, “He’s not human.” The morning scene of my four cups and his two shō secretly facing each other was supremely tranquil. Through the lattice, a tall oak tree stood atop the mountain where a flock of siskins had gathered, dotting the clear sky as they alighted here and there. Tensaku lay down with the threshold as his pillow, as was his habit. Since the soles of his feet faced me,

As I gazed at the farmer with soles blackened, flowing clouds filtered shafts of sunlight through their gaps.

One such tanka poem had taken shape. This was my first poem. When two families lived in one house, they were always trying to find moments to be alone—but whenever such rare good fortune did come their way, without fail, Kyūzaemon came lumbering in. His visits had recently become a kind of terror. But if I were to offend him, it seemed I could no longer remain in this beloved village. That said, even if I were to go elsewhere, someone like me—without any labor capacity—would only bring suffering wherever I went, making me an immense burden to others. As for what manner of existence a master who couldn’t even buy rice for his family must be to them, I could well imagine. The only thing I could take pride in was merely not eating more than four cups a day. Because of this, out of my rationed portion of two gō and one shō, about five shō ended up belonging to someone else—this much, wherever I went, I gave to others—but once it became routine, even that lost its impact. As I walked the half-ri path to the station, gazing at the rippling rice ears on either side, I recalled the overwhelming emotion I’d felt here upon returning from abroad—and thought how this road had now become one that made me feel the harsh punishment meted out to those who no longer sweated from their brows.

Even now, seizing the moment before Kyūzaemon arrived, I slipped out of the house and walked again along that usual path toward the station to get soy sauce. A half-ri stretch of road, perfectly straight and entirely flat, without a single house in sight. Somehow, a straight road was a tedious thing that offered nothing better than making one think. I could not know how many different things I had thought about on this road. I also sometimes wondered if the reason the people of this village were unexpectedly intelligent wasn’t because they naturally organized their everyday thoughts on this road.

“God and Buddha do exist.”

Perhaps even Kyūzaemon’s occasional utterances like this were lessons imparted by this long road. Here on this road, I too found myself endlessly contemplating—the gratitude I’d received from others, the preciousness of friends, life’s harshness, marital love, children’s education, matters of God—unable to stop these cascading thoughts. My wife and children often... “That road is unbearable. It’s so long.” When she would say such things or the children would respond with “Yeah, I guess,” it was surely something that made each of them think. Once you passed through here, yesterday’s self became no longer today’s self—each day, in its own way, people engaged in literature. And then, when I suddenly raised my head from the road—the mountain range stretching across the distant sky—what majestic beauty it possessed!

“Ah, those mountains!” When Tolstoy beheld the Caucasus range and uttered this exclamation, it was not merely because he—a Muscovite—had only ever seen flat grasslands.

"If the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi—'Know thyself'—marked the birth of philosophy," I thought, "then what did these mountains of ours hold?" "What does it mean to be human?" Jumping over puddles in muddy water that reflected clouds, I reached this present moment where the results of many philosophers' answers—tormented by this challenge since Socrates—had finally taken shape as human expressions beneath the canopy of the atomic bomb. I wondered where there had been any connection between this continuity of spirit since Greece and myself as a human being. There was nothing. Those mountains were nothing but the prayers of the Mononobe and Soga clans—blood relatives slaughtering each other. Had Buddha merely formed fleeting nests in the hollows of those melancholy mountain ranges where God had never once passed? And yet, I still did not despair.

From amidst the rice fields of the wide plain, suddenly in a pronunciation resembling French,

“Dada, where are you going?”

I heard a voice call out. When I looked, it was Sōzaemon’s Aba. Her round, lively eyes—always with that startled look—gazed my way and smiled nostalgically. The round-faced bride was also there, pressing her arm guards to her forehead. With the pale purple Mount Chōkai at her back, Aba pointed toward the station with the gleaming blade of her sickle.

“That way?” “That’s right,” I nodded.

In this village, the only person who initiated conversations from their side was this woman farmer over fifty. This widow was said to be an eccentric who wouldn’t utter a single word to those she disliked even when they stood beside her—yet being called out from among swarming locusts felt as bright and refreshing as gazing up at the sun. For a while afterward, an afterglow lingered as if rippling waves of rice ears were still whispering and chasing from behind.

October [day]

As I lay listening to villagers' conversations drifting from all directions, the local pronunciation increasingly sounded like French to my ears. It might have been unique to this valley alone, but since I couldn't comprehend the meaning, it felt like being in rural France—I lay entranced in bed, utterly absorbed. My wife claimed this village's dialect had a peculiar pronunciation even within Japan, but I found it truly rhythmic and mellow. Dreading to rise and shatter this illusion, I deliberately lingered abed on such mornings, savoring how France seemed to pool within these encircling mountain folds as I strained my ears. Among all the villagers, Sōzaemon's Aba and San’emon's pronunciations came closest to French.

My wife had not left for Tsurugaoka on the first train while it was still pitch dark. Today, wanting to somehow get hold of tobacco, I too thought of going to Tasuke-ya in Tsurugaoka, and when the urge to try smoking real tobacco became unbearable, I jumped up. The third was at eleven.

I arrived at Tasuke-ya main store around three o'clock. The proprietor Mr. Sasaki was absent. I sat waiting at the shopfront for his return when book-buying customers began coming and going in succession. Amidst this bustle stood a man—when had he arrived?—wearing a light tanzen coat, his slender pale frame bearing the dignified air of a ronin as he gazed at shelf-bound books. From the side he looked unmistakably like Mr. A, though since A could hardly be in Tsurugaoka now, I imagined him somewhere lamenting our nation's defeat. As this thought formed—it was indeed Mr. A. He seemed startled upon noticing me, yet being one who never betrayed emotion in such moments— He glided forward. He was an exponent of certain martial arts.

“It’s good to see you well.” “Ah, what an unusual place to meet.” “What brings you here?” Mr. A told me he had come here a month ago, taken a new wife in this place, and lost all his many owned houses in Tokyo to fire—but of the prophecy about rice’s vitality coming true that he had once told me, he said not a word. I too found it distasteful to mention. “And why today of all days?” Mr. A inquired. I laughed as I spoke of things like the long-lacking tobacco and my current dwelling in this mountain village.

“Ah.” I learned that he had been in the barracks for about half a year before the war’s end, but when it came to the matter of defeat, Mr. A still did not attempt to broach the subject. In truth, when prophecies come true they lose much of their value—and now both of us could only share this bitter realization of what believing in such things had amounted to. I wonder what Mr. A was doing all that time we wandered about believing in something so utterly futile. “In the art I practice there have traditionally been two schools: the Celestial Faction and Degenerate Faction.”

He had once told me about that technique—said to be Japan’s oldest martial art—of defeating an opponent without physical contact. According to his account, while the Celestial Faction strictly forbade any proximity to women and honed their skills through waterfall asceticism and mist-breathing in mountain seclusion, the Degenerate Faction cultivated their art by moving from woman to woman. He also explained how these two schools never engaged in direct competition—leaving their relative superiority eternally undetermined—yet even then, A conspicuously avoided disclosing his own affiliation. Since beginning his study of this art, not only had he abruptly stopped discussing Valéry—whom he’d previously read with obsessive intensity—but he’d grown unnervingly earnest in character. When he smoked three cigarettes from my parlor’s reserve, he would make a point of returning three replacements later that same day. He likely belonged to the Celestial Faction.

“However, there exists one forbidden technique that neither the Celestial nor Degenerate factions may ever employ.” “It involves lightly tapping a specific point on the opponent’s back.” “Should someone perform this, the victim will collapse dead several hours later.” After this explanation, A recounted how a certain genius of the Degenerate Faction had been mysteriously cut down by an unknown assailant in Osaka. This man had been considered peerless in skill, making his death by blade incomprehensible to fellow practitioners—until the mystery finally unraveled. It was said that while traveling through Manchuria, he had secretly tested this forbidden technique on a coolie’s back. When he later stealthily followed to observe, the laborer had indeed fallen dead where he stood.

“So that’s a realist’s end?” There had been a time when we both laughed at that. In nations, in ideologies, in literature—forbidden moves exist—this truth now lingers in my thoughts.

October [day]

I had left the house unattended for three days. When I returned to the village, considerable fatigue set in and my hemorrhoids worsened terribly, but this cavernous six-tatami room recessed like a cave sufficed for stretching out my body. The thin smoke drifting from the hearth felt distinctly characteristic of my home. Having returned with a story I’d stored up to tease my wife, I found myself naturally smirking whenever it came to mind. This anecdotal material amounted to nothing more than a jest, yet contained within it lay the depth of a reversal where perhaps I myself was being made sport of by someone.

The day before yesterday during my stay at Tasuke-ya in Tsurugaoka—just as I thought to return this morning and began rising to leave—two promising young landowners from S City came for a bride viewing. Since they would likely arrive soon, I was asked to join the assessment and share my opinion. As I waited, they came around noon. Both were light and agile youths who at first glance resembled spirited jockeys ready to gallop off at a whip’s crack. I thought whoever became this bride would be fortunate. One had just returned from military service, his eyes bright and large frame relaxed. That was the groom. The other was a youth of striking features brimming with brilliant talent—he seemed to have come as an assistant. Since both were strangers to me, I simply sat silently listening nearby as they discussed having narrowed the candidates to two girls, debating which to meet first while weighing each family’s circumstances and the daughters’ qualities. Yet regarding the girl destined to become the fortunate bride, an air of some connection to me began gathering until I found my own heart unexpectedly fluttering—no longer able to remain detached. I later recounted those events to my wife, who was also raised in Tsurugaoka.

“Hey, who do you think one of those bride candidates is?” “You know—that shipping agent you were supposed to marry back then? It’s his daughter.” “Though I pretended not to recognize the connection.” My wife affected indifference. “Oh? Is that so?” This too was feigned ignorance on her part. Yet for me—had I been that shipping agent myself, the slightest misstep might have altered everything—here was his daughter now standing as the primary candidate in this very scenario. How could I not feel intrigued? After all, this was the man who’d once marked my wife as his first-choice bride before she fled. And now I found myself evaluating that same man’s daughter—a situation so rare it bordered on cosmic irony.

“Well, that girl’s perfect.” “Her father’s a bit of a braggart, but the daughter’s quite splendid.” Recalling how the Tasuke-ya Innkeeper had interjected this story while telling it to the young men the day before yesterday, I tried relating it to my wife exactly as it had been said. “Yes, that person’s daughter would be a good match.” “That girl is a good one.” After saying that, my wife suddenly lowered her voice and fell silent. Seeing her saddened appearance—as though she had recalled how her own child could never become something to boast of like that daughter—I suddenly lost all courage to continue speaking any further. The two of us already knew all too well that most of a woman’s happiness or unhappiness lay in her children. Even after lying down, however, I secretly hoped that the marriage discussion from two days prior would work out well.

There was also a sense of atonement involved. In the end, I returned without meeting any of the candidates; however, that day—after mixing with those young men—five of us went to Tagawa Hot Springs and stayed overnight. On the return trip, since the automobile never came no matter how long we waited, we reluctantly had to ride in the pitch-black box of a coal transport truck. As I watched the groom swaying amidst the coal, I—

"Ah, the flowers have bloomed," I thought. Never before had I felt time's passage so acutely. With the sensation of watching a meter needle clatter and sway, I gazed at the button on the young man's chest inside the black transport truck—positioned exactly at eye level—as though it were a dewy petal in full bloom. Yet within this coal-filled compartment, I couldn't remain defeated. Even I possessed fragrant secrets nestled within my Tagawa Hot Springs memories. This too occurred when I was about this youth's age—that spring following my marriage. Having first visited my wife's family home, her father suggested Tagawa Hot Springs with its roaming deer would make an ideal workspace. There I wrote "The Laughing Empress," meant for Chūōkōron. Though writing about Emperor Nero's wife, my own spouse would occasionally visit from her parents' home to my deer-surrounded inn. One absent-wife day found me soaking alone in the men's bath when someone entered the adjacent women's bath—another solitary bather. Unaware at first, I devised lines for Nero seducing his friend Oso's wife—absurdity being essential to his character—when I caught myself muttering, "Your legs, your legs." Water surged violently around my calves. Glancing down revealed wooden partitions separating baths while water flowed freely beneath. Through midday-lit transparency, I glimpsed white fabric—a woman's foot bent in ku-shaped undulation next door. Truly beautiful. This bath's enchantment—where only stretching legs manifested without face or form—overflowed with feather-soft sensuality, precious fragments rising tremulously from memory's depths. Was this peculiar to these baths? Musing how even Nero's Rome—where Petronius died as we bathed with maids—never knew such aqueous beauty, I lamented not observing sooner while watching those legs persist through time's relentless flow.

“You understand now, don’t you?”

At that moment, she suddenly called out from the adjacent room. The voice certainly seemed like my wife’s. Something’s off.

I remained silent for a moment before asking, "Is that you?" "Yes. That's right," my wife answered from beyond the wall. "What? When did you get here?" "A little while ago, on the one o'clock bus." "I've been waiting for you." "Hmm, show me your legs a little more." "No," my wife said, immediately pulling her legs back. "In the end, I had Nero utter this description: 'Your legs are as slender as a deer in the night.' Yet the whiteness of those translucent legs glimpsed beneath the water remains in my eyes even now, twenty years later—a flower tinged with sorrow, like the dappled hide of a deer." "Probably, if the young man before me were to be confirmed as the primary candidate, he would return here again in this manner; but now, every bath has become civilized like the baths of Rome."

At night, when all the family members had gone to sleep, the eldest son suddenly returned from Tokyo. He had packed his rucksack full of sweet potatoes harvested from our family’s field and looked utterly exhausted. Since these were the first potatoes harvested from our field this year, I opened the sack, gently stroked their tops, and went to sleep.

“How was Tokyo?” My wife got up and asked the child. “It’s interesting—Jeeps go vroom vroom all over the place.” “Are there lots of people starving to death?”

“Yeah.” “Yeah. I was just playing the piano from morning and didn’t go out at all, so I don’t know.” “Such trivial things. Is that all there is to your Tokyo story?” My wife and I had somehow become people who, simply by being visitors from Tokyo, now saw even our own child as a stranger.

I think I'll go back soon, even if just by myself. All I want is to stay until I've seen the harvest through, but I can no longer bear maintaining this observer's mindset toward the villagers' kindness.

October――

At times, I would feel a disagreeable sensation rising within myself. Though positioned as an evacuee like others, some part of me refused to inhabit that role properly. In truth, I remained head of our Tokyo household while here my wife had assumed that position. My wife and child were evacuees; I alone had come driven by academic purpose - what I considered an observational duty tied to contemplative work. Even recognizing my increased humility compared to initial arrogance, my disposition still seemed unseemly when measured against my wife's wholehearted gratitude toward this village.

On May 24th during the air raid, I fulfilled my duties as group leader, and even I received a ten-yen reward from the town association before leaving Tokyo. When departing, I entrusted H and I with looking after the place—having stated I came to study charcoal burning but would return soon—so I still don’t feel like an evacuee. That’s what’s causing trouble. The hollow resolve to preserve my research spirit until exhaustion and the desire to suppress this inhuman observer’s mentality have made the internal governance within me profoundly disharmonious and ugly. I still haven’t conquered literature. First and foremost, overcoming this seems crucial.

October――

The rain started falling more often. It rained heavily both yesterday and today. On the radio, reports seemed to be coming in from every line about trains stopped by nationwide rain. Rice plants without grain, rotting rice plants, rice plants washed away, rice plants choked by sand and unrecoverable—the prediction that this year’s crop might go beyond poor harvest to something far worse had spread through every farming household. Now even the meager rice harvested here became accompanied by terror—there was no telling what fate might befall it.

The sound of rushing water among the weeds grew louder. The tips of the bamboo grove drooped heavily, and beneath the dripping water, carp swam with their white barbels stiffly raised. Whenever people gathered, they inevitably spoke ill of Executive Committee Chairman Hyōemon. This was routine, but lately their criticisms had grown particularly intense. Their methods of attack were monotonously uniform—so much so that one marveled at how they could repeat the same accusations endlessly—and their tenacity was terrifying. Relentlessly, grumbling under their breaths, they seemed to dull even the senses.

“He made everyone hand over their rice—‘Hand it over! Hand it over!’—took all the villagers’ food for himself, and monopolized all the honor,” they would say. This had become a kind of chorus—both a solace and a morbid outlet for grievances—yet when rain fell, such grumbling seemed to transform into memories of hardship. However, the mother of Executive Committee Chairman Hyōemon secretly brought vegetables to me. Kiyoe, San'emon’s wife, must have spoken of our difficulties as if they concerned her own family. We had once received miso pickles from them too. How delicious those pickles were—I had never before tasted such miso pickles. As if savoring a splendid jewel unearthed from the villagers’ barrage of complaints, I placed it in my mouth and relished it.

The essential flavors of miso and radish, mutually purging each other of impurities to become a pure compound distinct from either, manifested in semitransparent lapis hues as the most sublime crystallization of taste imaginable—a celestial marvel one might call exquisite. When I placed this fragment of perfection in my mouth, its aroma—where saltiness reached its zenith only to seep into sweetness—gave me pleasure akin to communing with ancient fermentation masters. Yet I found myself absorbed in thought: Could any human being, through prolonged immersion among others, become such a splendid compound? If even a radish could develop such flavor, then people couldn’t die so easily. Or perhaps there were no humans capable of savoring such a human.

“People all speak ill of Hyōemon, but even he was dragged out by everyone when he said he didn’t want to become committee chairman and made to take the position, you know.” With that, Kiyoe secretly explained her own family’s circumstances to my wife. “He kept refusing—‘No, no’—but they forced him into it. If following the authorities’ orders was wrong, then what else could he have done?”

I had seen this Hyōemon only once - a man past forty, handsome with drawn-tight features veiled in melancholy, who from my fleeting glimpse beyond the latticework seemed fated for misfortune. In a neighboring village there had been a rice quota officer who killed himself over delivery shortfalls. Throughout the long war, not one official with such fierce sense of duty had existed nationwide - this being common knowledge through Tokyo papers' reports. Yet our village here, which had matched that ideal of perfect compliance faster than any other, now saw its committee chairman singled out for blame over postwar shortages born from defeat.

“Where are you staying?”

When people in Tsuruoka would ask where I was staying and I answered Nishime, everyone would say, "Ah, that's a good village."

October――

Morning rain in which the white roots of green onions stood clear and uniform. A morning rain that seemed to have clusters of intertwined cypress trees advancing from within the milky-hued downpour. The red sash of the fish-selling girl who descended after crossing the pass. Those bare feet—people were gathering at San'emon’s hearthside. It seemed lately villagers had begun treating even me as a member of their neighborhood association. I should stop observing. And stopping too had begun seeming possible.

The group leader brought a report from the village office to this gathering at the hearth and said: — The national flag must not be displayed unless ordered; roads must strictly adhere to left-side traffic; children under fourteen are prohibited from leading cattle or horses; all weapons and swords must be surrendered—these were reportedly the orders from the Allied occupation forces. And then, the Group Leader—

“Break these rules, and you’ll get what’s coming to you.” “Is that right? Then I can’t let this stand.”

San’emon immediately stood up and removed the small national flag that had been tied to a pole from the bamboo cylinder. Then he took down the hanging scroll inscribed with “Continued Military Fortune” from the alcove and rolled it up. “Oh dear oh dear, this is dreadful,” said one of them. “But His Majesty the Emperor’s portrait should stay right where it is, don’t you think?” They gazed up at the imperial portrait above the lintel and left this one object untouched. “We lost,” another man muttered. “We lost.”

“The way they forced the rice deliveries deceived us—that’s why we lost,” said another man. “Making us grow rice only to starve us who grew it—how can such a thing exist? No matter what they say, I won’t deliver any this year!” “I’m not delivering,” said another. “Me neither.” “Deceived again, and the bastard who made us deliver gets all the credit?” “That’s just stupid!” “Right, right—using that kinda trickery, what excuse’ll they make to take this year’s rice? I’ll go ask ’em.”

This marked the first time the direct effects of defeat entered the village in this manner. After that, for a while, the villagers’ talk blossomed with rumors about the Allied forces that had appeared in Yamagata Prefecture, but curiously, all these gathered rumors tended to be of a favorable nature. I have yet to hear a single bad report, but I have also heard from a police officer that Yamagata Prefecture is where things were going most smoothly between the two parties in all of Japan.

October――

The lily root miso soup continued to be delicious. However, today too brought heavy rain. The farmers who had been observing the weather patterns until yesterday also no longer had any room for hesitation. Now, it was the rice that had to be saved rather than the people.

At that very moment, the method for rice delivery quotas was established. The farmers’ debates seemed to have intensified once more. Last year, guarantee funds had been distributed to farmers as security for their efforts toward meeting the set delivery quotas. This year, however, it was said that production incentive payments would be distributed not based on farmers’ efforts, but on their production volume. The difference lay in how this year’s delivery quota was no longer fixed as it had been last year but had changed to being determined according to production volume. Precisely because this system contained ambiguities compared to last year’s, its latent severity spoke volumes—the breadth and depth of its oversight were vast. At first glance, it appeared sympathetic toward those delivering their quotas, yet one could discern an intent to let cunning evaders slip through only to clamp down afterward—a method that permitted absolutely no complacency.

“Alright, alright, I’ll just say this and be done with it. “I don’t care what happens. “And if we don’t deliver, then that’s fine,” one man said. “They say it’s according to production volume, you see. “If it’s individual quotas, that makes sense. But if it’s based on the whole village’s production volume, then they’ll have no choice but to follow the middle producer’s amount, won’t they?” said one man. “Then those below the middle won’t be able to eat again!” “It’s the same thing,” said a man who seemed to be a poor farmer.

“After all, we still haven’t received last year’s guarantee money or incentive payments, have we? The government claims they’ve paid out, but we haven’t gotten a thing—they take everything they can take without giving anything back, and now they’re already pressuring us about this year’s new rice. It’s downright unreasonable, I tell you. They haven’t done a thing! Forget it, just forget it!” By compiling their manner of speaking like this, I too came to understand something of the transition from last year to this year and found it interesting. Then, the person beside them—

"The rice we’ve harvested—no matter how you try to hide it, you can’t hide it." "They’ll know every last grain." "Once they know how much we’ve harvested, we should just deliver that amount. What’s left in the village—whether folks deal in the black market or not—we ought to decide not to care about that. That’d be best."

Those who spoke this way likely did so because someone unrelated to farming households like myself was listening nearby. If I hadn't been present at this hearthside, I couldn't help feeling deeply sorry imagining what sort of whispered discussions might have progressed. If anything, since I always take their side, there's a tendency to interpret even unfavorable matters in a positive light—a disposition that makes me cautious about how I record my impressions. Whether it's right to write history with a cold heart or right to view history through affection remains the fundamental difficulty in all cases, but I've always detested the approach of pursuing material truth while endangering essential reality. This drives one further from truth.

October――

Droplets fell from the gaping mouth of a split-open akebi fruit. Between the lower branches of chestnut trees swaying in the wind, children ran about with their chests bared to the beating rain. Children, overjoyed at having obtained shrimp to use as bait for rock fishing, their eyes gleaming, compared the lengths of their green bamboo sticks and knocked down chestnuts. Dense clouds advancing menacingly from the sea hung low, offering no glimpse of clear sky. The cold grew more intense, and by afternoon all those who had gone out for rice harvesting had returned—all except San’emon’s wife Kiyoe. The yellowed lower branches of the cypress enveloped the wet roof. Rain smothered the forest; the flies clinging to the lamp left burning remained utterly still.

After dusk had fallen, Kiyoe returned. She wore a white headband tied as if she’d been wielding a naginata. Yet she made no move to remove it, taking off her straw raincoat and wringing out her soaked sleeves at the entrance. From working in the rain-drenched rice fields, water seemed to have seeped through even to her belly band. She kept stroking her chilled fingers—which felt unfamiliar—over and over, then hung each piece of her removed work clothes on the shelf above the hearth. “This is the first time I’ve done rice harvesting in such cold, look—” In front of the child, Kiyoe showed her numb hands as she spoke, but today her gentle gaze—hinting at her youthful beauty—made her seem happier than usual. After Kiyoe, her husband San’emon came home drenched too. Though he hardly ever worked in the fields, for some reason that day he entered grinning.

“What luck! Today, a bird made a nest in our rice plants.” “There were eggs too!” In this area, when a bird builds its nest among the rice plants, it means the household’s fortunes will rise—a phenomenon envied by local farmers who celebrate by pounding mochi. That night too, San’emon smiled at visitors and spoke about the bird’s nest by the hearth. “Your efforts have been rewarded, I suppose,” my wife said. “I hope that’s true.” “It wasn’t your hard work. It was Auntie’s.” “It was Auntie’s.”

“I suppose I’m the one who’s brought hardship upon us.” No matter what anyone said, San’emon remained cheerful. Kiyoe pressed a blue bamboo leaf against a tear in her misshapen woven hat—its edges frayed beyond recognition—and began mending it as she spoke: “My fingertips are still numb.” “They won’t straighten properly.” “Look—like this.” Her youngest child lay sleeping with feet toward the hearth, legs jerking back instinctively whenever flames licked too close. Such familial contentment had grown rare these days. Before I knew it, I found myself keeping vigil by their fireside late into the night.

October――

The weather alternated between raining and stopping. The wind also picked up. Was there any place where such terrible weather persisted? No sooner had the thick clouds parted and the sun shone for a mere two or three minutes than it turned to rain and wind again. Despite the violent shifts, the mountains by the sea gradually began to brighten.

“There’s never been an autumn with this much rain,” Kyūzaemon said when he came. Children with rain-drenched faces returned from the mountain trees, their clothes stuffed full of akebi fruits tangled in the branches, and dumped them clattering by the hearth. They stuffed miso inside, spread oil on the skins, roasted them over the fire, and cried out, “Mmm! This is something!” In every farmhouse whose occupants had gone out, only the hearth fires still burned. Just when I thought the afternoon had turned quiet with cats arching their backs, the wind strengthened again—leaves whirled through the air, and persimmons beginning to color emerged conspicuously from branches stripped bare. A day of indecisive weather.

That night, having finished harvesting all their own rice fields, San’emon and his wife returned home with the bird’s nest and placed it before the household altar. New straw still bearing grain ears, swollen like a packet of natto, contained three small eggs within. Stars were visible in the sky that hadn’t been seen for a long time. While listening to the clamorous sound of wind in the bamboo grove, San’emon and Kiyoe discussed where they would go to help with the rice harvesting starting the next day. San’emon would go to his eldest son’s bride’s parental home, and Kiyoe would go to the fields of her family home, the cooperative head’s house. That night, the two of them retired to their bedroom earlier than usual. In the past, their vast rice fields required others’ help to harvest, but now the opposite held true—a loneliness akin to cradling the dream of that bird’s nest permeated the night. Somehow, it was a still, lonely night.

October――

It was the first fine weather in a long time. Since the wind still lingered, the paulownia fruits on the high treetops dried out first. The juice from wild grapes gave off the scent of wine in the bottle. The peels of green persimmons for making vinegar were packed into a barrel. The fire chopstick testing the natto’s sticky threads was thrust into the straw, the ceiling vent drew up smoke, and the cedar grain of the plastered door glowed brightly, reflecting the hearth’s flames.

I set out with my wife to gather firewood in the mountain behind the house. Our objective was to reach Kuranori Pass—a climb that should have taken twelve or thirteen minutes—but the slope up to that pass felt suffocating. As we climbed while gathering kindling, each step revealed more of the plain below us unfolding into a rare and breathtaking panorama. Though I had often come here alone to collect Japanese knotweed for tobacco—and though I’d brought my wife hoping to show her more scenery than brushwood—this woman kept searching doggedly for firewood. Before long, I began growing irritated.

“You don’t come here often, do you? Look at the scenery. Look at it.” “But I’ve already seen it.” “You don’t find scenery like this just anywhere. You could even call it a magnificent view.” “You kept going on about this ‘magnificent view, magnificent view,’ so I wondered what could possibly be so special. This is nothing but mountains and rice fields, isn’t it?” However, I thought that perhaps that’s just what scenery is. Once you start questioning what makes it good, any kind of view becomes ruined.

“You’ve grown up seeing these mountain views since childhood, so they don’t feel new to you. Here I am—a foreigner marveling at your country’s scenery—and you remain so unfeeling. The view over firewood!” “No, I’m firewood through and through.” It suddenly struck me how much my whole life resembled this very exchange, yet I concluded this was for the best. The Japanese knotweed filling the valley had already yellowed and begun to wither. This had been a great help as a tobacco substitute, but if I didn’t gather it now, it might become unusable. When we reached the pass, the crisp autumn sea appeared below. Kuranori Pass, with its horseback-riding sensation, always offered an exceptional vista. I abandoned our marital squabble. The sea surface cradled by nearly vertical grassy cliffs lay calm today. Gazing past the plain to my right at Haguro, Yudono, and Gassan—the Three Mountains overlapping—the saddle-like ridge stirred a desire to defy nature itself, framing a view where one grasped how West Haguro’s defiant spirit, having once made this land its stronghold, fell to East Haguro across the way and led to its downfall. Ahead, Mount Chōkai too stood magnificently clear under today’s sky.

“If the sea doesn’t come into view like this, I can’t consider it a good view, I tell you.” “This spot is perfect.” “It really is splendid.”

“It’s too late to say that now.”

Carrying firewood on her back and ascending the Kuranori ridgeline path to the left, my wife once again said she wanted to build a house where the sea could be seen from here. However, here we would have to carry water up from below. We would also have to anticipate the fierce winds blowing in from the sea. "I once mentioned that if we turned the grassy slope from here down to the sea into pastureland, it would make good grazing land," I said. "Then Priest Sugai told me that when experts came here once, they also said this place would be ideal for pastureland."

It had taken on a boastful shape, but in truth, I found myself recalling a lone cow with a bell around its neck walking through such a place in the Tyrolean meadows and thinking that the pasture experts must have also seen similar locations. “This really is a magnificent view.” “If you don’t call this kind of view a magnificent one, then there’s no such thing as a good view.”

I no longer wanted to gather firewood and wandered through the bushes with the rope still tied around my waist. Vivid crimson thorn berries hung like hidden jewels dripping downward, while above them stretched an autumn sky endlessly clear and blue. If this plain curving inward to our right had been sea instead, this ridge would have evoked Amanohashidate. Yet compared to ocean vistas, I found this plain's variations more pleasing.

Seventeen or eighteen years ago one summer, I came to a fishing village called Yura about one ri to the left from here for seawater bathing and wrote a work titled "Machine" there. The other day, hearing that Yura was close from here, I grew nostalgic and ventured out to cross the pass. Two days after the war’s end, I too was listless and could do nothing but retrace memories—but when I looked up at the second-floor room I’d rented from the road below, an unfamiliar evacuated woman was at its window, cheek propped on her hand, looking down at me with the expression of someone pondering an uncertain future. Eighteen years earlier, the landlord Wada Ushinosuke had died, and at that time I passed straight through the dusk-cloaked fishing village without entering. The old woman Rie, who was born at San'emon’s place where I’m currently staying, had married into this Yura, so that day I was treated to fish and such at Rie’s house.

“Granny Yura should come visit.” “It should be about time she arrives.” “It should be about time she arrives,” my wife said. Both my wife and I were fond of this old woman Rie, and the children would come running out shouting “There she is!” whenever they heard her voice. Yet I found myself wondering what she might have been doing back when I was staying in Ushinosuke’s second-floor room all those years ago, watching those same waves. My wife and I talked about that summer day long ago when we’d gone swimming in the sea as we gathered firewood among the bushes that day too. The crimson thorn berries seemed to be quietly straining to listen. Her gaze held the sound of water soaking into a snug swimsuit. ――Ah, this wretch――

Since a considerable amount of firewood had been gathered, after watching the sea for some time, they decided to descend the mountain.

“Heave-ho!” my wife said as she hoisted the firewood onto her back. For some reason, whenever I carry firewood on my back, I’m suddenly reminded of my age. We looked at each other’s figures while, “Looks like we’re done for.” “You’ve become an old man and I’ve become an old woman,” we laughed together.

“Let’s stay strong now. You must keep your spirits up.” “No, I’ve already given up.” “But becoming young again—I wouldn’t want that.” “I’ve had more than enough of all that business.” As we looked down at the valley where horse chestnuts fell, our laughter cascaded down the slope until it abruptly ended.

October ――

No sooner had it cleared up than this day too brought a sudden downpour. A sudden rain poured into the midst of a vast army—hundreds of thousands of rice sheaves impaled on poles across the plain embraced by distant mountains, arrayed as if in offering, overflowing as far as the eye could see. The beauty of the great sky adorned with harvest was graced by a rainbow that drew a vivid, perfect semicircle. At the main house of San'emon’s family, they began pounding mochi from dusk. It was the customary bird’s nest celebration. Thanks to the Herculean Tensaku doing the pounding, a full mortar was completed in no time, and we too ate the bird’s nest mochi.

Desolate hope——

October ――

On a tall oak tree visible on the mountaintop, each day more numerous flocks of siskins came flying from the direction of the Sea of Japan to alight. Chestnuts had gathered at the roots of trees in the valley. Walnuts that had fallen with each rain lay piled in a basket on the untouched wooden floor, where a black cat sniffed around for the scent of fish. The stalks of asters, their flower clusters whitened, collapsed along the fence.

In the branch family of Kyūzaemon's household, a marriage proposal arose for their youngest daughter, Setsu. Both sides appeared to be progressing favorably, with even that shrine maiden called Buddha's Mouth certifying this as an auspicious match through her official appraisal, making his household lately bustle with unusual activity. The groom was said to be a young man from Shinsho who worked as a stud handler at a ranch. This large-framed, corpulent youth with thick lips had already come by train from distant Shinsho and showed no inclination whatsoever to leave Kyūzaemon's house. Though only a few days had passed since their first meeting and no formal decision had been made, they were already staying there together. It was a rather peculiar way for a marriage arrangement to unfold.

“They say Osetchan is the most beautiful in this village.”

“They say Osetchan is the most beautiful in this village,” my wife told me once. This youngest daughter Setsu had been meant to marry the youngest son of Yura’s Rie, but when he died in the Battle of Okinawa, Rie—in those hesitant days when time itself seemed suspended—took responsibility upon herself and arranged this match with the groom from Shinsho. Setsu was nineteen, a girl whose beauty carried a poise beyond her years. With her father’s coldly realist eyes and lips that held a reddish softness, she resembled him in unsettling ways. “That Kyūzaemon household will get its comeuppance soon enough,” the villagers muttered.

This is what the villagers said, but apparently the reason was that they had sold goods to worshippers at the temple and profited from it.

November――

Today turned into a torrential downpour. The bridge was submerged up to its belly in water, the rice fields were nowhere to be seen beneath the surface, and only the road floated long and bridge-like upon the water. From between the autumn leaves deepening in color, a vibrant indigo akebi fruit hung in a vivid curve, while azuki beans with their lustrous sheen and bristly burdock seeds lay arranged across the wooden floor. From the direction of the split-open fig orchard came the moist calls of a wood pigeon—hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo.

November――

The pale crimson buds of myoga basked in sunlight. The rain seemed to have passed.

Rie came from Yura to Kyūzaemon’s house because Setsu’s wedding day had been set. Though she herself had arranged the match with the new groom, being Setsu who was supposed to have been bound to the child lost in the war, she seemed to find it difficult to remain in Kyūzaemon’s household brimming with restless joy, and whenever she could steal time away, she would come to the hearthside of her birth family at San’emon’s house to air her grievances. However, as there appeared to be a custom of displaying bridal trousseaus, when my wife was summoned to Kyūzaemon’s house, this time Setsu’s older sister slipped away to San’emon’s hearthside, where she lamented having had nothing at her own wedding and wept enviously over her sister’s lavish trousseau.

“The furnishings were quite splendid.” “But over there they’re all smiles, here we’re sniffling, and today even I got swept up in the rush.”

While saying this, my wife came to the room where I was—and suddenly asked, “What exactly is a ‘horse stud handler’?”

Indeed, she might not know about such a profession. However, I had no desire to explain it aloud. Even at our age, I thought, there remained things I couldn't discuss with my wife—this being one of them. My wife, seeming to sense my silence, immediately began speaking of other matters. "When it comes to that household, why does everyone speak so ill of them?" "The groom-to-be gets thoroughly maligned too." "They say his lips hang slack and drooping, that he stays sullenly puffed up without uttering a word, that he looks like some sumo wrestler—things of that sort." "And what's more, though they bill themselves as great landowners, they apparently lack even a storehouse." "So people mutter things like 'What landowner goes without a storehouse?' and keep right on badmouthing them."

“Even if they say that now, it’s too late.” “That Kyūzaemon would ever slip up?” Now that I thought of it, Kyūzaemon and I hadn’t met for three days now. He would always come in the mornings, and though I had finally escaped the agony of him consuming my mornings, somehow, now that this old man’s face had disappeared, I still found myself feeling lonely. For me, this old man called Kyūzaemon had become the only person in this village with whom I could hold a proper conversation. Before I knew it, I had dug out a single channel for conversation in this village—my own peculiar way—and had been pouring my words into it daily from there. But perhaps—it was not him intruding upon my time, but rather that I had been stealing his time away.

“Talking with you—I don’t know why, but it’s just so endlessly fascinating—” Kyūzaemon had muttered this abruptly once. That I still hadn’t broached the rice matter was likely another consequence of us talking too much every day. Whenever I met him, our conversations would naturally—without any particular intent—turn to my experiences in various other prefectures I had visited. Through this repetition, I realized I had somehow ended up traveling to every prefecture in the country. Naturally wherever I went in those regions, I made sure to sample all local foods without exception. As we spoke, landscapes from those places would rise before my eyes—yet inevitably our talks would stall when reaching this saddleback hill’s view of plains and sea, the exquisite flavor of local rice and sea bream and small flounder—qualities unique to this land—only serving to reinforce Kyūzaemon’s pride.

“As for Tokyo, I only passed through once during the Russo-Japanese War when I was drafted.”

For someone like Kyūzaemon, it was only natural that my stories about Tokyo would pique his interest. Among these, the story of Hideki Tojo seemed to particularly captivate this old man after he learned that Tojo and I had belonged to the same town association. “That man built a house or something—for a time even here they spoke ill of him,” he said. “There was actually something odd about that house.” And I too once ended up recalling and recounting something better left unsaid. Shortly after returning from abroad, I had wanted to feel a direct affection for the land—to possess a piece of it myself. One day, as my brother-in-law and I wandered around the Tamagawa area where he lived, we came to stand before a small hill called Hachimanyama at the site of a former shrine.

“This place is nice,” I said.

I had wanted to buy that place. On a sloping hillside where many red pines grew, this conveniently sized vacant lot basked in sunlight, its grass soft.

“It’s nice, but someone hanged themselves from this red pine,” said my brother-in-law, indicating a pine tree with fine branches. Suddenly, for no particular reason, I felt uncomfortable. “Then it’s no good.” However, halfway up that regrettable slope, that single red pine alone leaned its body with incongruously drooping branches, its smooth bark basking splendidly in the sunlight—a thing of beauty. Then, one or two years later, when I stood again before that small hill, within the area that alone had been cordoned off, a signpost reading “Hideki Tojo Construction Site” had been erected. What a terrible place I had bought—even though I had tried to stop it—when before long, the area was beautifully cleared and transformed into a vast, eye-opening space.

“But somehow things turned out this way—if I’d bought that place back then—”

When I laughed, Kyūzaemon let out a bird-like cry of “Ho, ho,” and then— “Hanging, eh…” he said, and fell silent.

“The second generation used a pistol, but it’s still the neck.” However, Kyūzaemon also faced the inconvenience of having to stop the conversation there. The reason was that he was, as people said, a man who had made his fortune selling goods at the temple. Though it seemed inconsequential, it was still somehow difficult to bring up. In other words, that very point must be what constituted his unfortunate aspect. Indeed, in such a conservative village, bound by endless customs, the very nature of tragedies inherently differed. That was always the difficult part when talking about it.

November――

The rice harvesting still hadn’t ended. Due to the continuous bad weather, progress in every field was lagging. I had intended to return to Tokyo once I’d seen the farmers’ harvest through, but at dusk when wild geese crossed the sky, I imagined that those exiled to Dewa long ago must have felt much the same way—the skies of Tokyo appeared a thousand miles distant, and my longing to return flared up time and again. However, my wife opposed this, saying it was fine to just bury ourselves here as we were—she didn’t want to go anywhere else.

“But there’s no sense staying here forever.” “Then do you truly wish to return so urgently?” “It’s not that I particularly want to go back, but I’ve never experienced winter here.”

When the conversation turned to winter matters, my wife fell silent. My wife’s family, who were been raised in Dewa, apparently originated from Kyoto in the distant past; such words exchanged between us each winter must have continued throughout our lives. Moreover, Tokyo’s winter remains the finest of the entire year—little rain or wind, sunlight soft and mild. Whenever I thought of Tokyo in winter—overcome with unbearable nostalgia—Kyūzaemon would come over and start talking about how blizzards here pile up several feet high—

“The cod here is delicious. The winter cod here is exceptional.”

And so, every time he said just one good thing like that, he ended up blunting my resolve through food. I also quite liked winter cod. That might not be so bad either, I found myself idly thinking. Such fleeting thoughts proved troublesome in their aftermath, but when I considered my first-year middle school child trudging through blizzards to catch the earliest train at that interminably distant halfway station, then commuting three more stops to Tsurugaoka—this winter would be far more trying for them than for me. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like,” Kyūzaemon said to me, but San’emon retorted—

“I don’t think you can stay here. For those new to this place, winter’s impossible.” Living together with another family in one house made it impossible to gauge how much we were inconveniencing them, that ambiguous realm of the mind occasionally asserting its rights to cast shadows. Shadows being projections of the heart regardless of scale meant the strained expressions we forced upon each other left mutual wounds. Yet such things rarely occurred among the farming households here. San'emon’s rudeness and selfishness stood splendidly brazen, much like his manner of idleness.

November――

I found myself astonished: How long would this self of mine persist? It was remarkable that I hadn't grown tired of being myself.

Outside, mountain trees shed leaves with each rainfall. The thicket widened its gaps, multiplying crimson leaves that brightened the slopes. In seed boxes lining the room, adzuki beans emitted a carmine allure. Burdock seeds with bristled husks revealed surfaces traced with lacquer-like cloud patterns; beside candle beans' creamy whiteness, black ingen beans glistened darkly. Yet to my melancholic eyes, these now appeared merely as riverbed stones quietly upholding time's passage.

The girl with red sashes crossed the autumn rain-soaked mountains ablaze with crimson leaves and came to sell fish. With a swiftness that seemed to outpace the sea itself, bamboo baskets filled with flounder, squid, rays, and Okhotsk atka mackerel tumbled across the wooden floors of every house. From where cabbages stood piled high with their splendid leaf veins came the rhythmic thud of pestles pounding harvest rice cakes. The mountain slopes glowed stark white like daikon radishes beneath wet tree trunks— Rie, the old woman from Yura, single-handedly managed all meals at Kyūzaemon’s house while its occupants were away harvesting rice.

“Why don’t you just stay here instead of going back to Yura and become our bride?” someone teased. Even after Setsu of the Kyūzaemon household was taken by her mother to her prospective son-in-law’s rural home for a two-night stay and returned, he came back with them. The two seemed to be sharing a bedroom despite not having held their wedding ceremony. Amid the carefree group, only Rie grew irritated by this and would escape to San'emon’s hearthside to sigh like this.

“Back when we were brides, we were too shy to even speak to our grooms—what sort of girl is that?” “Gabbing away with her groom, taking walks together already, shutting themselves in their room all day without coming out.” “What could they possibly be doing without even holding a proper ceremony?” Might visions of her own war-dead child have risen before her? The old woman spilled grievances all through the night. Because of this, San'emon’s wife grew utterly worn down from sleeplessness and now complained to my wife about her exhaustion—though the ripples from those newlywed dreams seemed to have finally lapped against my own chest and settled there. For me, such matters already felt superfluous.

November――

Day after day, the labor that was agriculture repeated the same tasks. However, upon closer inspection, the types of labor were gradually changing. The labor set aside on days now forgotten sent forth sprouts; what daily ripened into visible results was gathered, preparations were made for the next task—the work’s rhythm left no room for weariness. There seemed to be no other entertainment to speak of, but such things could surely be endured with just the festivals. As long as it didn’t become urbanized, there seemed to be an inherent entertainment value within agricultural labor itself.

I had not brought a single book or sheet of manuscript paper from Tokyo. Not bringing my professional necessities had been an experiment to see how completely I could isolate myself from my vocation, but whenever I found printed scraps in my child’s schoolbag, I would drag them out and read them like drinking water. If there happened to be abstract passages within them, my head would abruptly awaken from drowsiness, and I would feel a sense of purpose. By now, abstract words seemed to have transformed into a narcotic for me, making the world of labor surrounding me appear as insubstantial as a dream or illusion. What was this about? The law that organisms perish when separated from their herd must have indeed begun taking effect in me.—At such times, I would board an overcrowded train where I might get thrown off and go out to Tsuruoka town. My labor consisted of being turned right and spun left, twisted about at the train’s entrance—this became quite a pleasure for me.

Last night I stayed at Tazae-ya in Tsuruoka, where the proprietor Mr. Sasaki hung a scroll of Ryusei Kishida’s fruit painting for me. It was a light ink-wash painting, yet in my recent life—so long removed from artworks—I received it like a single drop of celestial ambrosia that had trickled down from heaven, and through this sensation, the mountains and rivers I usually saw had vanished from my sight. I find myself in agreement with this new theory that the capacity to find joy in perceiving beauty constitutes the wellspring of intelligence. The place from which the old philosophies will be overturned is likely here as well.

When I returned and looked, Rie, the old woman from Yura, had taken out the three-year fermented miso—which her sister had hidden away like treasure—from Kyūzaemon’s kitchen and thumped it down in San'emon’s kitchen. and, urging them to eat and eat,

"That old hag's greed knows no bounds. If I hadn't stolen it like this, they'd never hand it over." This three-year fermented miso was something Kiyoe had long wanted, but no matter how many times she'd asked Kyūzaemon's wife, the woman had refused to part with it. At dusk Rie came storming in again, "That son-in-law takes me for nothing but a rice-cooking crone. He won't so much as nod my way. Would it kill him to exchange a word or two?"

She kept ranting and raving like this. She seemed terribly sad.

November――

The rain continued to fall. Even farmers who had finished reaping could not gather their harvests due to the rain. Because of this, an unexpected lull arose in every household right in the middle of harvest season, so other agricultural tasks—going out to town, returning to hometowns, visiting distant rural relatives—such comings and goings around hearths everywhere became frequent. When such human interactions flourished, the topics that came together naturally turned into rumors about the prices of goods, resulting only in the low-priced village goods beginning to fluctuate upward.

Stories from deep mountain life reached every hearthside—tales of evacuees who bought one *shō* of sake for thirty yen only to carry it to the city and sell it for three hundred; of an evacuee gathering rice at ten yen per *shō* and reselling it for seventy; of a ludicrous tale where a too-trusting village, carelessly swept up in buying up rice, ended up depleted and forced to repurchase it at inflated prices from those very evacuees—and peals of laughter arose around every hearth.

“We can no longer tell just how much money those city folks have.” “They’ve got endless amounts, I tell you.” And so, this conclusion of the villagers now seemed to hold true everywhere—they likely had a rough estimate of how much money I and others possessed—but among them, there was even one farmer hosting an evacuee who grumbled, “Our evacuee hasn’t bought a single thing from us.” For my part, I wanted to spend my money in this village rather than elsewhere, but whenever I tried to buy something, they would say things like, “We’ve never done business here before, I tell you,” implicitly targeting Kyūzaemon, with whom I was connected.

November――

Kawabata Yasunari sent me three thousand yen. It was an advance payment for Kamakura Bunko’s “Monshō,” and though I had never once pressed for it, the remittance arrived perfectly timed—as if they had guessed my needs—and I was grateful. With this, I had managed to prepare for my return if only provisionally; yet perhaps because it was the first payment I had received since the end of the war, it felt like the first breath of a literary world beginning to stir back to life—something precious.

From within the lingering misty rain emerged Japanese cedars, podocarpus leaves, and chestnut branches like silhouettes.

At San'emon’s house today, they began pounding harvest celebration mochi starting in the evening. For the evening celebration, our family too was treated to a feast in the adjacent room with the Buddhist altar. In the large central pot was a full helping of azuki mochi that had softly melted and collapsed; in the medium pot, a full portion of white refined mochi. And in the magnificent oval chest was heaped white rice, while surrounding it were arranged trays bearing aburako—a fish known as such—that San'emon, the master of the house, had caught that day while fishing along the shore. Beside the master, the ritual meal for his eldest son—who had yet to be demobilized—was placed, and alongside this and his wife’s tray, these two alone were elevated.

For our family of evacuee guests, every dish seemed to shine as though each grain were the very crystallization of a year’s toil. The soup and mochi simmered over time in a thick iron pot were truly delicious. The aburako fish—a small creature measuring four or five sun in length—was highly prized in this area. It had a delicate flavor, like a milder version of catfish. In addition, the soy sauce, miso, buckwheat, natto, and vegetables—all of these had been made through the labor of Kiyoe alone here, and I thought it only natural that people would sing of her working “through rain and wind.” The old woman from Yura too this night was solemnly eating at the tray before me. San’emon had somehow obtained sake from who knows where and poured me a rare cup—my first in ages. San’emon’s youngest daughter Yuki was also present; she who never returned even on holidays now stood beside her brother’s bride in the Buddhist altar room, their presence making the space glow while Tensaku’s hands moved with striking swiftness beside them as he cleared away dishes. At first I wondered how we could possibly consume all this mochi, rice and soup—yet in moments they vanished under hands reaching from all directions with such speed that my own appetite seemed devoid of survival value altogether. Once again I thought profoundly: I was indeed born to see.

November――

White clouds floated between the serenely layered folds of the mountain range. Migratory birds passed in flocks over the harvested fields. In the valley, horse chestnuts fell silently. Kyūzaemon said while watching the young men still harvesting rice in the field.

“When I was young, I’d harvest two hundred fifty bundles in an hour.” “But these days, even the best of the young’uns don’t do more’n a hundred twenty bundles, I tell you.” “Look there—they don’t even know how to lay down the bundles they’ve grabbed and cut.” “They grab and cut a bundle, then immediately lay it sideways.” “That’s no good unless it’s set upright, I tell you.”

“Haven’t your rice fields been harvested yet?” I asked. “This year it’s three weeks behind. The rice won’t dry. The late-ripening rice is yet to come, I tell you.”

When they caught a bit of sunlight, they turned over each sheaf of rice on the racks to dry. When even after reaping the paddies it took three weeks for the grain to become edible, farmers who had managed to barely replenish their supplies through the early rice harvest found themselves borrowing food again due to the slow-drying stalks—and so Kyūzaemon’s household stores became everyone’s target once more. Kyūzaemon’s troubles, which had once eased, now seemed to swell again. “Not having any’s a problem,” he finally complained, “but having it’s just as bad.”

Rie, the old woman from Yura, had not yet returned from Kyūzaemon’s place, but today as well she came rushing into San’emon’s hearthside,

“I finally had it out with that old woman.” “Even though we’re sisters, she won’t even lend me rice anymore.” “Generous, huh? Here, I brought it. Eat up, eat up.”

As she said this, she pulled out a simmered vegetable and potato stew from under her apron. Kiyoe simply kept smiling. At Yura’s fishing grounds, the Tokyo-based net owners had burned down, leaving them unable to repair their nets; with the rising cost of fuel oil making it unattainable and another demobilized son returning home, they found themselves compelled to secure rice from Kyūzaemon’s household by any means necessary. The old woman’s struggle—having promised to procure fish for Setsuko’s wedding while now demanding rice—took shape as these daily morning quarrels that noisily animated the kitchen, though Rie had this habit of wiping the wooden floor every time she visited.

“This here’s the house where I was born, you see.” “If I don’t scrub and clean like this and leave it properly beautiful, I don’t feel like I’ve come at all, I tell you.” It wasn’t particularly meant as a jab at us. She continued wiping all the way to the edge of my room’s veranda, and whenever she paused briefly, she would gaze at the bamboo grove in the garden.

“This garden here was beautiful long ago, you see.” “And now there aren’t any stones or trees left either.” No sooner would this old woman chatter away nonstop and innocently than she would immediately be fast asleep by the hearthside. For seventy years, she had not traveled between this village and the fishing village one and a half ri away, yet she knew everything about both—and whether people wanted to hear or not, she would talk nonstop about all manner of things: who profited how much from whom, who courted whom into marriage, which fox had possessed whom—until even my children came to know it all. Kiyoe was listening with a smile, but—

“Even so—when she goes back home—she’ll get bullied by her daughter-in-law,” Kiyoe whispered quietly to my wife. Yet no matter when one looked, this old woman from Yura was beautiful. I often thought how good it would have been if I had an old woman like her. Once, when San'emon and the others had gathered, I inadvertently blurted out, “That old woman is quite beautiful,” and their eyes all widened in unison as they turned toward me. There had been a time when they fell silent in surprise at my unexpected remark—likely until then, no one had ever considered whether the white-haired old woman from the fishing village was beautiful or not. Through this old woman’s presence, I couldn’t tell how much more vividly the village and its mountains and rivers stood out to me, how the farmers’ thatched roofs and rice paddies seemed to radiate with life. Come to think of it, San'emon’s laziness had a similar effect. The very fact that he was such an utter idler somehow lent this village a comical yet leisurely quality—a settled character. At the ration lotteries he always drew first prize, and somehow this too would stir ripples of laughter among the people.

At night, Kiyoe pounded sugarcane stems she had cut from the field at the hearthside. Even in this cold region, they had begun planting sugarcane this year to make homemade sugar, and with tonight being their first attempt, the hearthside was bustling with activity. They cut the stems into lengths of about a foot, pounded them flat on a large cutting board, and tossed them into a huge pot again and again,

“Oh, this is sweet! Indeed, this might just turn into sugar.” San'emon, with his thighs splayed out, chewed on the green sugarcane stalks and chuckled to himself—huhu, huhu. When the pot had simmered a bit, he removed the lid and dipped a finger into the liquid. “Oh, sweet! Sweet! Just you wait—I’ll coat ’em in botamochi and let you eat some real tasty ones!” San’emon said to my children. The children, finding it amusing, kept slicing off pieces of sugarcane with kitchen knives—*swish*, *swish*. As San’emon stirred with a ladle, the liquid in the pot gradually transformed into a thick, amber-colored syrup.

“Oh, this is delicious!” “It’s sugar!” San’emon grinned broadly as he said this, two long streaks of pot soot clinging to his bearded face like burn marks—a far cry from the usual scene on nights when they made miso or soy sauce. The only one who looked like an adult was Kiyoe.

November――

Thorn berries emerged from both sides of the road. Persimmon fruits shone high in the recovering sky. The sound of a pheasant’s wings taking flight from within the autumn leaves resounded through the empty valley. The farming households seemed to grow busy again in this way. A horse’s mane swayed in the morning mist. The creaking sound of cartwheels on the road where frost began to fall—

A black-market dealer asking them to arrange twenty-five bales at fifteen hundred yen per bale had been sneaking into this village since the other day. The idea of transporting it by truck all the way to Tokyo—they concluded such a thing was impossible, and though this deal fell through, from that moment onward, the price of rice surged suddenly. The price per shō rose to around forty yen. According to reports from Tokyo, it had reached sixty to seventy yen. “There’s nothing in this village sold above five yen per shō,” Kyūzaemon had declared back in summer. When it reached twenty yen, the villagers were astonished, but now everyone merely gazed at the rice paddies as though watching an unbroken stallion let loose.

“At this rate, many will starve to death this winter, I tell you.”

Kyūzaemon said with apparent pity.

“Now that things have come to this, it would be better to return to Tokyo and starve to death together with our neighborhood association people.” “Let’s go back.” “Let’s go back,” my wife whispered to me. The fact that we had resolved to return was a good thing. That night, my wife bundled up some clothing and secretly slipped out the back to the abandoned house of our neighbor Sōzaemon. And then, after returning,

“Sōzaemon’s widow, Sōzaemon’s widow,” she murmured cheerfully.

Here’s what happened. When my wife pleaded whether she would sell us rice at four hundred yen per bale, this widow widened her eyes and blinked rapidly, then after a while, “Punishment will come, punishment will come,” she apparently said, shaking her head from side to side. “It can’t be sold at such a high price. If you turn it in as a quota delivery, you only get sixty yen! And four hundred yen—punishment will come, punishment will come,” she said again. “But even so, if we can’t buy rice, we’ll starve to death.” “Please sell it to us at four hundred yen, won’t you?”

“It can’t be sold, I tell you,” Sōzaemon’s Widow said. “Just the other day at the regular meeting, they decided that up to two hundred yen isn’t considered black market, you know. I hate the black market. If it’s one hundred fifty yen for just one bale, then maybe something can be done.” “But that’s too unreasonable,” my wife countered. “Then, three hundred yen.” From the side, the daughter who had married into Tokyo and returned to help was listening. When she saw the clothes my wife had brought, she spoke up: “I want that. Make it into my kimono.” There, the discussion seemed to reach an agreement: they wouldn’t sell the rice but would provide small amounts only when shortages arose.

"I thought there were still people like this around these days. "I fell twice on my way back—oww! Right here! —oww!"

My wife slumped sideways and was now rubbing her waist. I thought that there’s always someone above and someone below.

November――

The autumn foliage grew increasingly vivid from the mountain gorge up to the summit. The crimson leaves that had draped the mountainside like a swaying curtain resembled a quiet festival without human presence. In late autumn, even as sunlight pierced through brilliant foliage and sudden rains poured down, persimmons glowed crimson on denuded branches while rice plants beneath them ripened into grain. Chrysanthemums bloomed from morning and evening chill. In every household’s Buddhist altar room, fresh-straw rice bales released their fragrance as hearthside gatherings brimmed with the vibrant breath of harvest’s zenith.

In the ten-tatami Buddhist altar room of San’emon’s house too, rice bales tightly bound with fresh straw around their middles were piled so heavily that they warped the floorboards—a splendid year’s harvest that finally rewarded housewife Kiyoe’s labors. Through this accumulation of tangibly grasped realities, a new scent—as if purifying both body and mind—permeated the room. Bright.—Yet Kiyoe’s eldest son, who had been conscripted, still had not returned home though snow already clung to the distant mountains. Ginkgo nuts fell.The Chinese taro—the same as satoimo—grown here in muddy paddies found Kiyoe immersed since morning in the mire, sloshing and churning as she dug them up.I felt terror rather than admiration.Could it be this woman had become obsessed with labor?

I once again walked alone along the path surrounding the marsh. This path was flat and had never known human presence. Enveloped by drooping chestnut groves with fallen leaves piled up, I found myself coming there to be alone. Then, invariably, acid would rise in my stomach causing abdominal pain, and resting on a tree stump, I sat gazing down at the dense water chestnut fruits in the marsh. My head sinking into nature remained motionless with unbearable gloom; with an unfeeling heart that could not be roused no matter how I tried, I merely gazed around at the vanished ruins of Nishihaguro’s temple pagoda.

Humanity as a whole had no purpose—I suddenly thought. Then there could be no means either. Even when I tried believing life should be enjoyed, acid surged up inside me as if death were approaching from within. Sunlight fell on mountaintops layered in glassy hues of kudzu-mochi gray—only there lingered a faintly luminous air where gods might dwell—yet the acid kept rising through the folds of my stomach without cease. With each breath I sensed some bond between us, mountain folds reflected in my eyes binding ever deeper into my gut until even those undulating ridges began aching as though being eroded. A god about to be severed—on the path where fallen leaves lay soaked by tree drips, chestnut burrs glistened damply. Only one goat kept moving through weeds along the marsh’s edge. Its whiteness—tethered by a taut rope that forced circular paths while it bleated and kicked at grass—appeared like a struggling mass of pure white torn from distant snowcaps. Meanwhile in deepening dusk, the motionless marsh’s surface grew ever more vividly still——

November――

I traveled from Amarume along the Mogami River to Shinjō. The autumn foliage along the Mogami River stretched endlessly. It glowed like passing through a procession of countless lanterns. Even the pitiful stories recounted by three women who had just returned from southern Korea nearby—bathed in the autumn leaves' crimson hues—failed to carry sorrow through their voices; the train pressed onward through the congestion, growing ever more resplendent as if woven into brocade. I remembered my wife's late father mentioning he owned land near a waterfall visible from the train in this area. Scanning the opposite bank, I saw a waterfall cascading through autumn leaves clinging to a sheer cliff face. This must be it, I realized.

“How mercenary people can be.” “Even the Koreans we used to talk with every day stopped speaking to us completely from that day on.” “Our money, our homes—everything gets taken away,” one said.

“I wasn’t like that.” “They told me, ‘Why don’t you just become Korean here now,’ or something like that.” _I thought I might as well become one._ “There’s no point in me going back to my hometown now.”

Leaving such voices behind, I arrived in Shinjō at three o'clock. I headed toward the residence of Mr. Inoue Matsutarō, the soy sauce brewer. I was attending the symposium to be held here that night.

Mr. Inoue’s garden was a magnificent expanse of several thousand tsubo, with a large pond at the center of the broad grounds surrounded by several annexes connected by corridors, and a massive Japanese torreya tree whose trunk split into five from its base spread its branches. The rectangular stone bridge spanning the island was beautiful, and the room assigned to us overlooking the left edge of the pond even had a sunroom. A light rain began to fall, and from beyond the garden where wet leaves drifted, a Chopin étude could be heard. It was said to be the piano from the room of the Prosecutor General of the Supreme Court, who had been evacuated here. A melody perfectly suited to the quiet pondside strewn with fallen leaves—I felt as though the beauty of late-autumn Tokyo had migrated to this very place.

Salmon caught in the Mogami River was served for dinner. The flavor was exquisite, with other dishes including tuna, tofu, nameko mushrooms, yellow chrysanthemum petals, tempura, fresh sweets, and salmon roe.

The people who had gathered for the symposium numbered twenty to thirty, and under the title "Rural Cities and Cultural Figures" that I had conceived the previous night, I presented an outline of about twenty weighty themes.

“In our class, resignation is considered the paramount training,” one woman declared. I hadn’t understood what sort of class she meant by “our class,” but after all had departed, it emerged that this woman was the wife of a former daimyō from this region.

After that, the three major landowners from this region were again vigorously discussing tenant farmer issues. It seems the landowner class here lacks training in resignation—such was the thought that suddenly occurred to me.

I stayed overnight here with Katsuyoshi Sasaki-kun who had guided me from Tsuruoka, and the next day we returned on the four o'clock train. When we reached Amarume, Sasaki-kun was carrying a large five-shō soy sauce barrel on his back, "How will you take this back to Mizusawa?" he asked. "Is that barrel mine?" "Yes. Inoue-kun told me to give this to you as a gift." I felt deeply indebted to Sasaki-kun, who had been silently carrying the heavy soy sauce barrel all this time. That night I imposed on Mr. Sasaki again in Tsuruoka - my second debt of obligation.

November――

In my village, they said there was no road worse than those in November throughout the entire year—but truly, the roads this month were not roads at all. San'emon went to the mountains to dig wild yams. Among all his tasks, it was said there was nothing he enjoyed more. My wife lay with a stomachache, while San'emon’s wife stirred Chinese yams in the muddy field once again. This was essential food for surviving the winter. The air grew colder; upon the wet mountain slopes, the white of radishes stood piercingly still, while only fallen leaves came scattering down as if shaken.

I finished reading a book on Chinese philosophy that I had bought from Sasaki-kun's place but failed to grasp any of its essence. In the philosophies of hermits from the era following Confucius - those who resembled the Greek Sophists - there was much I still did not comprehend. These unnamed, highly intelligent beings who had sustained civilization perished precisely because of their sophistication, leaving us only with the bare bones of robust concepts. Yet to strike these bones and hear the resonance of flesh would require decades of effort. The other day when Satō Masaaki-kun visited from Tokyo, he spoke of his father - the late scholar Shōhan, a master of Chinese studies who had passed away several years ago in his seventies. This scholar had dedicated seventy years to his field before reaching the academic pursuit called *shuowen*, the study of character origins - a domain still considered virtually untouched by others.

“Does your specialty in French also take seventy years?” I asked. “Ah, I suppose it would.” “Then literature would seem to require the least time—but does it really?” “Ah, it does.” “Then I still have twenty years left.” “Very well—twenty more years,” we both laughed at this point. Later, when I met Kyūzaemon and asked what aspect of farm work was most difficult,

“It’s selecting the seeds,” he answered immediately. The difficulty of choosing which seeds to plant in which fields was something even Kyūzaemon—now sixty-eight and a master farmer—still couldn’t grasp. He claimed he’d likely never understand it even if he spent his whole life trying. We too were probably like eggplants or tomatoes that shouldn’t be grown in the same soil year after year, yet there was no one to teach us how to rotate our crops properly. What did it mean to cultivate oneself? No one had ever spoken of such things. No—I didn’t even know whether I was a tomato or a pumpkin myself. Seventy years might pass, a hundred even—all I did was wait for that fleeting moment when a butterfly might visit me in my lifetime. Had China’s hermits died in vain? Wasn’t the beauty of seal engraving a symbol of life’s fragile grace adrift on death’s vast sea?

November――

Every farming household held a three-day harvest festival. After Obon and New Year, this was the grandest celebration. I received rice cakes from every household in the tonarigumi. In the evening, my six-tatami room became half-speckled with white from rows of rice cakes. Varying with each household, the rice cakes had their own individuality. As I looked at them, they resembled seal engravings, with the rise and fall of each household manifesting in the circular forms of the rice cakes. This one here, that one there—when I guessed based on imagination, I was almost always correct. But I think that the present manifests itself in the rice cakes because they unconsciously created these circular forms, the simplest yet most difficult and dignified shapes made by hand. Prayers manifest in rice cakes.

For lunch, I alone was treated to a meal at Kyūzaemon’s house. Setsu’s new son-in-law was also there, but this groom never spoke a word the entire time, devouring his food with an expressionless face, until finally uttering just one phrase—suddenly, “Before taking a wife, I used to buy women, buy them all the time,” he said something strange.

And then, no sooner had he said, “Hey, Setsu, light this for me,” than he flung a cigarette toward Setsu, who sat about twelve feet away in a corner of the room. There was nothing particularly suspicious about it. This coarse behavior—a pretense at showing affection—had already become an ordinary part of their life together. Even this work of natural destruction called stallion breeding—conducted daily between them through a gentle bond—I too found myself moving my chopsticks alongside them, momentarily convinced it was ordinary life.

Then, for dinner, I was summoned from San'emon’s place and treated to a meal in the usual family altar room. At this time, before me sat a young man who had just returned from the Special Attack Forces—one whose sortie had been aborted at the last moment when the war ended—now here as a guest. This was a young man who had devoted himself to training that nonchalantly accomplished the destruction of life in an instant. “Ah, I can’t tell anymore—am I alive or am I dead? I just can’t tell.”

While saying such things, he was being poured sake quite nonchalantly by the father sitting beside him. My wife had already forgotten about the red bean mochi soaking in the sugarcane syrup that had been boiled down over the past few days and now melting in the large pot; upon being told he was a Special Attack Forces member, her expression changed as though she were suddenly seeing the war unfold before her eyes. And then, “Were you not afraid of dying?”

“Were you not afraid of dying?” she hesitantly asked. “It’s nothing special. I just didn’t get it.” “I just don’t get it, you see.” Even beside such a young man, I found myself thinking of it all as utterly ordinary while moving my chopsticks. Something was advancing at a terrifying speed, obliterating everything in its path. What terrified me more was the speed itself—within this dazed self that felt like some deranged creature, I no longer knew what was transpiring inside me. The Tokkōtai survivor hummed through his nose as he took a case from his pocket, pulled out a cigarette and gave it a light tap, saying he would be performing in a play at the temple tonight. In these days when even the abnormal had come to appear as nothing but mundane occurrences, the emotional state we all shared was one of equally seething newness. I didn’t even know how new I had become myself, yet there existed no language for anyone to express this. Undoubtedly, no one could manage to articulate their own innermost feelings anymore. Even considering the naturalness of our instinct to render everything ordinary, until now there had still existed some connective tissue within our psyches. But now, even that was gone. In life there is always an intermission prepared—though whether this intermission belongs to humans or gods remains unclear—somewhere there exists a single tranquil place. Hushed whispers seemed to linger there, but most likely, they weren’t human voices at all.

"The play's starting!" someone said, and the children ran off toward Shakadō Hall. The Tokkōtai survivor also left. After that, San'emon and the young man's father kept drinking together, their speech growing increasingly slurred. As I listened from the adjacent room, their tangled exchange dragged on endlessly. San'emon had been asked to make nigorizake and grew furious at being told they would thank him for it, calling the gesture standoffish. Then the Tokkōtai survivor's father tried to explain it away. Amidst the ceaseless theatrics of these two drunkards—the temple play having concluded and the Tokkōtai survivor returned—San'emon and the others in the Buddhist altar room remained "standoffish." The drama showed no sign of stopping. It finally reached one o'clock. And then came the final lines of the two men—

“I hear we’ll be communist soon. How amusing.” “Ha ha ha ha——” “Anyway, if I’m supposed to make it just to be thanked, I don’t like that sort of thing—I—” “Even if we do become communist, there’ll be nothin’ for the likes of us, I reckon. “Ha ha ha ha!”

“Anyway—” “Ha ha ha ha! I can’t stand guys who get plastered.” “No, being thanked—”

And so it went on in this manner. Redundancy becomes amusing when taken to extremes. This way, life never gets boring. Before long, one fell asleep where he sat, and then the other did too. My eyes were wide awake—the battle against the fleas was finally about to commence—yet this futile suffering of over a hundred days was my own excruciating drama, beyond all imagination. For now, it seems I have nothing but fleas to keep me from boredom.

November――

On the second day of continued celebrations, Sōzaemon’s widow from the neighboring house was pulling green onions from under the eaves while— “Ahh, how tedious this is.”

That muttered remark reached all the way to the veranda where I stood. By the second day, this widow was already bored with the festivities.

At the house behind this one today, all the daughters from my tonarigumi neighborhood group and young brides had gathered, passing the day freely eating and amusing themselves with the provisions they’d brought together. From the house currently serving as duty station, the lively voices of girls coming and going could often be heard. When it came to their amusements, they apparently had only that much—yet though their games might seem dull to others’ eyes, for the girls themselves there was likely no greater pleasure than this. Away from the stern gazes of elders, in their chattering conversations, the occupation of Setsu’s new husband—reputed as the village’s greatest beauty—must have been blooming like some strange flower and buzzing with excitement.

Monk Sugai appeared. Whenever Monk Sugai of Shakadō Hall came around, San’emon would vanish into the house. His aversion to the monk bordered on comical—he fled with the speed of schoolchildren bolting at their teacher’s approach. I borrowed a desk from this monk and received ohagi rice cakes, persimmons, and potatoes. He was a jovial old man devoid of priestly pretension, yet in Atsumi Hot Springs ten ri away, people spoke of him reverently: “Ah, that eminent monk!” Here in this village, though, his lack of sacerdotal airs earned no appreciation—not that they disparaged him, but met him only with smirks. Even without invoking Goethe’s maxim that “no man is a hero to his valet,” here too proximity reduced remarkable figures to mundanity. How substantial were society’s judgments of this monk’s ever-changing ways—as truthful as distant waves lapping a shore’s curve? When men die, the echoes they leave shift not through space but time—yet ultimately, human worth eludes comprehension whether observed near or far. Time’s passage changes nothing. Terms like minor emptiness, median emptiness, great emptiness—pushed to their limits—resolve into “Throughout heaven and earth, I alone exist” (not “worthy,” but simply “exist”). This truth found perfect expression in Shakamuni’s solitary enshrined head at Monk Sugai’s hall. Incidentally, Shakyamuni first declared “Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am worthy of honor” on December eighth. The Pacific War too began on that date—and soon that day would come again.

November――

The passbook arrived safely. It had been missing for over half a year since April, and when I had them investigate at the Tokyo bank, it turned out a female clerk there had been suppressing it all this time. To never get angry at anything is, in essence, to be morally decayed. Yet I had nowhere to direct my anger. Wanting at least to take my family somewhere like a hot spring, I abruptly decided to use this Saturday to go to Atsumi. The second son still hadn’t returned from school, so we reluctantly waited until three o’clock, but he never appeared. I instructed the eldest son to bring the second son starting tomorrow and decided to set out ahead with just my wife.

“It feels like we’re running away from the children, doesn’t it?”

my wife said dejectedly. “Once in a while is fine. It’s been ten years since we last went to a hot spring. But I’m a bit worried since we don’t even know if the inn is still operating.” Even as we hopped along the muddy path to the station, our spirits had somehow lightened, but thinking of the inn ahead—its operational status unknown—amidst the intermittent rain, I began to feel our venture was perhaps a bit reckless. Even so, this feeling of fleeing from the children had a strangely irresistible freshness to it.

“Today we’re both such terrible parents, aren’t we?” “That’s right.” “It does feel rather odd, doesn’t it?” The muddy path to the station—stained where burdock root soup had spilled—did not seem so far when we thought of fleeing together. Even though we were carrying soy sauce, miso, and rice, none of it felt particularly heavy. “The two left behind will surely be singing triumphant songs tonight with the ogre gone.” “Yes—they must be absolutely beside themselves with joy.”

The upbound train arrived promptly but was terribly crowded. I squeezed my wife into the packed carriage and was about to board myself when a boy slipped past my side from inside and jumped out. It was my second son. He slapped my shoulder sharply from behind— "Hey." My son turned around after leaping down, but by then the train had already started moving.

“Hey. “You’ll come tomorrow,” I said. The second son, who still didn’t know about the Atsumi trip, seemed not to understand what was happening and remained standing stiffly on the platform, looking our way. The noise of the crowd and the train must have drowned it out. His face had turned pale. “You’re coming tomorrow!” Even though I repeated it in a way that made it even harder for the child to hear, the train pulled away. We arrived in Atsumi a little after five o'clock. All buses were packed, and the one that finally arrived was broken down. In the rain, we walked again and went to Takinoya. It was already pitch-dark.

This inn was one we used to visit every summer before the war, but ten years had passed since then. I have written about this hot spring I love many times, yet I have never once included its name. I had assumed it must have fallen into disrepair during the war, but it turned out that until just earlier, it had been fully occupied as lodgings for naval sick and wounded soldiers, and from this morning onward had been vacated and was now empty. A room with a good riverside location was assigned to us.

“You folks are our first guests,” said the housewife. “Lucky ones, you are.” I hadn’t seen this woman in ten years, yet she showed no signs of aging. At any rate, we were relieved. Exhausted from fatigue and immobilized by hunger, I could barely move. A chemical smell wafted through the air—upon closer inspection, this appeared to have been a nurses’ quarters. Two or three resolute tanka poems of the sort women might favor hung on the wall, written on traditional paper strips. While my wife immediately went down to the bath—too weary to bother undressing—I sat alone warming my hands over the brazier when another call came through. It was a request from the Culture Department: they were starting the discussion meeting immediately and insisted I attend. We’d barely settled into our room for ten minutes when this happened. Though they claimed Mr. Kunishige Sasaki was already there waiting, socializing under these circumstances felt burdensome—I sighed at being denied even our first proper dinner together as husband and wife. Then someone from the Culture Department arrived in person, renewing their appeals. “We’ve slaughtered a chicken for you,” he said. “It’ll be served up soon—should be done boiling any minute now. Tonight’s your chance—we’re calling it a ‘speak-your-mind meeting,’ since we’re in an era where anything can be said.”

“When you can say anything you want… you end up having nothing left to say at all.” I gave a bitter smile. In the end, I was dragged away from the spot by this person. My wife, having come up from the bath, was just watching blankly. It was the same expression our child had worn earlier that day when standing blankly on the platform watching me. This was the first time I had encountered a discussion meeting as absurd as this one, yet there was also something that could be called a kind of fascination to it.

“Tonight brings us a duck—it came suddenly at dusk—” After an introduction by someone from the Culture Department, I found myself seated in a chilly corner of the hall, compelled to listen alongside the audience to some doctor from town hold forth on scientific matters. “Just recently,” declared the doctor in ringing tones as he stood to read from his manuscript, “Iwane Shigeo came all the way from Tokyo to tell me, ‘That story of yours is fascinating—you simply must write it down.’” For nearly an hour he lectured—this stout man with his well-fed ruddy complexion holding forth in resonant eloquence about science. He was drunk. People these days seem desperate to get drunk. When you can drown yourself in drink, perhaps this becomes an age where nothing else matters.

"The greatness of Newton, who proclaimed, 'Even if the sands of shorelines are exhausted, the sands of truth shall never be exhausted.'" "That Newton—" The audience of about a hundred people fell silent, looking at Mr. Sasaki and me with pity, and simply sat there dejectedly with their heads bowed. I recalled how this doctor had once cut open an appendicitis patient's abdomen, left scissors inside after suturing it, then frantically tore open the belly again when he realized his mistake—only for the patient to die. This was a famous anecdote in the region. If among memories as countless as shoreline sands there existed one poisonous pebble, those sands should have been stained crimson—yet when it came to scientifically honest errors, Easterners, particularly the Japanese, might have been born with a magnanimity that pardoned such things as laughable twists of fate. This doctor remained popular.

After the meeting ended, the person who had brought me there said this to me.

“I can’t help but wonder—why are Tohoku people so fundamentally foolish?” “I mean, just look at Tōjō, Yonai, and Koiso—three successive administrations! To be paraded out as prime ministers at the most foolish time when no one else would take the role, only to fall right into their hands—that level of idiocy is simply unparalleled.” “They’re all Tohoku people.” I was thinking about something else entirely. Without acknowledging the sincerity of those who took on what everyone else was avoiding, where else do they expect to find recognition from those people? However, this is one of the problems that will become difficult in the future. At times when all recognize a great crisis—the cunning of evasion and the resignation of acceptance. Even when it’s not a crisis, this is something people encounter every day. Tonight again I was waylaid and made a fool of, losing even that fleeting evening as husband and wife that had come around in our tenth year. When I returned to the inn, my wife had already gone to bed but got up.

“How was it? The meal here tonight—it was really delicious.” “On my side, that famous doctor came out and gave a solo lecture. I only went there to listen to that man’s scientific lecture.” If I mentioned “that doctor,” you’d know exactly who I meant. “Ah, him. That does sound like him,” she said. “He’s the one who used to be in Tsuruoka. You know—the one who left scissors inside someone’s abdomen.” My wife seemed to recall it immediately too, offering this with a quiet chuckle. It was a strange kind of popularity.

However, upon returning to the inn and settling down like this, I became aware of a strange sense of amusement welling up within me—afterward, there was a peculiar kind of enjoyment to it all. Perhaps it stemmed from that intoxication brewed by the doctor’s careless anecdote, now steeped in the utterly rustic air of leisurely country life.

November――

The children came bustling into the room around noon. Without a moment's pause, they began stripping off their clothes and plunged into the bath. The lack of any customary pretense of rest made me feel surrounded by shimmering fish scales, rendering my own stolen moment of respite all the more precious. Having received a sack full of edible yellow chrysanthemums from Kyūzaemon's wife, we boiled them in the hot spring's scalding water and ate. My wife became utterly absorbed in examining the Shin-Kutani teacup the clerk had brought, murmuring repeatedly about how much she admired it.

“I want to come back here again—even if only to see this teacup.” “That’s a good idea.” “Look.”

Delighting in this rare encounter with beauty, she examined it from every angle—but I found myself more concerned about the charcoal fire in the brazier dying out. The one shō of sake that the Culture Department had delivered last night as a token of gratitude held little interest for me, who no longer drinks alcohol; I had the clerk ask around to see if there was anyone who might exchange this sake for tobacco, but to no avail. Here, tobacco appeared scarcer than alcohol. It grew cold from the afternoon and was chilly.

November [day]

I decided to take the eleven o'clock morning bus back. My wife still lingered, reluctant to part with the inn's teacup—a sight both comical and pitiful.

“I wonder if you could secretly let me have just one... Even in Tokyo, there’s nothing like this.” Placing it on her palm, she muttered that if she could buy it, no price would be too high. “If they won’t give it to me, maybe I should just secretly take one home.” “Hey now, don’t go stealing that.” “I wouldn’t!” She was joking around, even going so far as to say things like that, but the teacup held little appeal for me. My wife finally gathered all five teacups and tidied them away in the corner of the room,

“Well, let’s go,” she said, standing up.

While walking toward where the bus waited, I felt a newfound interest in my wife—who still clung to her fascination with that single teacup—and found myself swayed by an emotion distinct from hers. Throughout my long evacuation years, I had never fixated on any object like this; I considered myself one who merely wished to carry away the villagers' hearts within me. Yet now I wondered how much of all those hearts I'd gathered from people met over years might weigh upon me. Perhaps an individual like myself was indeed such a vessel. There might be no true self at all—only a sack trudging through life amassing others' hearts. When I died, so too would perish all these accumulated hearts—such thoughts jostled through me as the bus lurched violently. Wedged in the rearmost seat by a crush of bodies blocking my view, I twisted sideways to glimpse sunlight glittering on white wave-crests below sheer cliffs where breakers crashed. Our bus wound perilously along precipices, swaying drunkenly in the wind as it careened forward.

We got off at Mizusawa at two o'clock. Standing on the muddy path where a stream flowed, the four of us decided to eat our rice balls there. Licking the rice grains stuck between our fingers, when I thought of the long muddy road ahead—like a life of wandering with one’s family in tow—it became necessary to lighten our load here.

Every rice field had been harvested. Across the plain directly before us, one ri away, we could see the mountain of fine form where we now stood. We would walk along that straight muddy path to reach it—Mount Arakura, which had already become nostalgic after just three days of not seeing it. I thought it was a mountain of dignified and noble bearing.

November――

I woke up in the morning and sat down before the hearth. The thick oak tree that always drew my eye, standing solitary atop the mountain, remained uncut. They said it had sold for a hundred yen. Before long, we would lose even the sight of migratory birds alighting there.

Light snow began to fall at dusk. Kiyoe, encircled by a ring of washed daikon radishes, still crouched by the water's edge. Every house stood amid the whiteness of daikon—a majestic sight—as winter seemed at last to begin settling into this mountain village. The chill of the pillar pressed against my back. The creeping cold of twilight seeped into the cleft of a forked daikon.

November――

An unfamiliar eighteen- or nineteen-year-old youth came, so I, who was house-sitting, went out. He was a well-groomed youth with round, lively eyes. I guessed his purpose and tried bringing the borrowed Western umbrella from the back.

“This must be it—the one someone from our household borrowed.” “Thank you, thank you.”

The other day, when my wife and child were returned home from the station in the rain without an umbrella, a young man I had never seen before approached from behind and handed them a high-quality silk-covered Western umbrella. He insisted they take it despite their protests, so they borrowed it, but no matter how much we asked his name, he would only say he was from the neighboring village and refused to give it. He had told them he would come retrieve the umbrella himself and had asked only for our address. In these times, lending such a fine Western umbrella to strangers without even giving one's name—such an act was inconceivable. In this youth's eyes lay a noble resolve that acted without hesitation toward danger, clear and beautiful. When I thrust the umbrella toward him, the young man simply said, "That's the one," showed no sign of giving his name when asked, finally murmured in a low voice, "Matsuura Masayoshi," then refused all thanks and immediately disappeared from view. He was what one might call a young man who sustains civilization. For me, soon to return to Tokyo, this became the greatest keepsake imaginable. Had I not met this youth during my time in Tohoku, I would have left without encountering even one young man who truly embodied the essence of Tohoku's youth. If there exists a youth who stands firm with a sound spirit alone, he can grant respite to a hundred others mired in corruption.

During the night, snow had accumulated.

November――

Mount Chokai and Mount Gassan were both pure white. This was my first time seeing snow fall in Tohoku. I could no longer manage daily life without rubber boots.

In the afternoon, Sugai Oshō appeared and said I should attend a discussion meeting with members of the agricultural association at Shakadō Hall. After giving my consent, I asked the monk about Mr. Matsuura Masayoshi. According to him, after returning from a factory in Yokohama, the young man Masayoshi had lamented the village’s hidebound and makeshift customs and was among those determined to revitalize it through youthful energy—yet he could find no starting point for concrete plans. The monk too seemed to strongly approve of the youths’ passion and stated he didn’t want to let those young people rot away as they were.

After the monk had left, San’emon remarked on the new vigor of the youths.

“Those nineteen- or twenty-year-old lads—no matter what they try, they’re hopeless.” “Hmph.” This was what those around fifty years old would say, but in the village, even men in their prime at fifty held no real authority—first it lay with elders from sixty to seventy years old, and even that seemed to rest solely with the eighty-year-old patriarch of Yahee’s household, the village’s largest landowner. “If he doesn’t give the word, they can’t do a damn thing.” “The others—they’re just looking to grab an extra sho or two whenever they can, that’s all.” “As for other matters, they don’t understand a thing.”

Like fallen leaves piling up, it must have been because things had come to be that way. To demand other things, we must strive to do exactly as Masayoshi does. That act of lending my wife the Western umbrella must have been a manifestation of that awakening; indeed, it is precisely from such trivial daily occurrences that fallen leaves first begin to burn, enriching the soil with nutrients. Inside the house of this patriarch Yahee, chaos reigned. The wife was a second wife, but this woman sometimes came to my place to sell fish. She had once worked as a geisha in the same village as Yura’s Rie, at an exclusive restaurant, before being caught in the patriarch’s lustful net and installed as his wife. Yet since the real economic authority in the household lay with the son from his first wife—a man over sixty—she now appeared to be secretly selling fish she had procured from Yura. At first glance, stately old cedars befitting its status encircled the grounds, making it a shrine-like structure—a house worthy of the patriarch. From there, the second wife who sneaked out to sell fish—beneath her plump, corpulent skin, her eyes clouded with the stagnant melancholy of her former life, their lower halves pale—seemed far from happy. Rumors that the patriarch had taken yet another replacement wife also reached our ears through gaps in the cedar grove. San’emon’s youngest daughter was in service at this household, but there was nothing pitiable in his current downfall—he who had once been part of a prestigious family equal to Yahee’s—that might invite people’s sympathy. Rather, there was a brightness about him that provoked suppressed laughter—precisely what should be called the distinctive flavor of San’emon’s character.

“What a fool San’emon is. He does nothing but loaf around， drink himself into a stupor， and ruin the house like this.”

The fact that Oyumi—Kyūzaemon’s wife, who was like an aunt—made such remarks also meant that Yahee’s household always lurked as the true target behind her words. On festival days, San'emon's youngest daughter returned home from here. I often saw her eating mochi and such, but even when the daughter said she wanted to stay overnight at home tonight, “You’re in service after all. You ought to go back and sleep at the master’s house. Listen—you’re going back tonight.”

With that, San’emon calmly instructed his daughter. The daughter returned with a tearful face, but even the stubborn San’emon, at such times, lowered his voice as if apologizing to her and grew subdued. Especially now that the wedding of Kyūzaemon’s nineteen-year-old daughter Setsu from the branch family was just three or four days away, he would have to start giving serious thought to his own seventeen-year-old daughter’s future. If I were to part with the same amount of money, I thought, I wanted to leave it here at this household before returning home—but

“I don’t need money—that stuff—”

Whether in defiance of Kyūzaemon or as vestiges of his former master-like demeanor, there was no way to intervene. In reality, if there weren't people who wanted at least a little money, there would be many inconveniences causing trouble. We were staying at this house of San'emon's and had yet to buy even a single shō of rice from here. Of course, we had never received any either.

November――

It was sudden, but an unexpected thing occurred. A stranger from Tokyo who had come to collect farm tools visited San'emon’s place to buy firewood and was returning to Tokyo by chartering a freight car, but due to insufficient cargo tonnage, the freight car could not depart. He wanted someone to help arrange borrowing luggage from those who were returning. Thereupon, we were consulted about that luggage. As for this customer, not only did I not know him, but San'emon didn’t either. It turned into an adventure story of sending my luggage as cargo belonging to that man whom I didn’t know at all. However, for us to start moving from such deep snow, it would not be easy to rouse ourselves unless prompted by such abrupt circumstances. First, I wanted to meet this man they called the customer and judge by his physiognomy, but they said the day for loading the luggage fell within the next three days.

However, I have this strange habit—there is always a part of me that cannot believe human destiny is something set in motion by others. When I was thinking it was about time I had to return home, the fact that such a perfectly convenient opportunity arose entirely by chance—due to my habit of trusting such karmic connections more than people—led me to place greater importance on the origin of the matter rather than the customer’s physiognomy. This—I felt it might actually get my belongings moved. Could judgment truly exist unfettered by any influence? I remained ensnared by my own propensities. This was a physiological reaction.

“Did you see that man—the firewood-buying customer?” I asked my wife. “I saw him briefly.” “Does he seem trustworthy?” “Well… He didn’t seem like a bad person.” “But somehow, he was just fidgeting and not calm at all.” “Why on earth is he so fidgety all the time, I wonder?” “I just don’t understand that.” “So he seems trustworthy then?”

“Yes.” “He didn’t seem like someone who would do such strange things.”

Alright, I'll meet him. He was coming again tomorrow. I asked my wife to begin organizing our luggage. In times like these when help arrives unexpectedly, people in the past would have thought the Buddha had come—and thinking of it that way, I found myself looking forward to meeting this man tomorrow. I too must be gradually reverting to the Kamakura period, just like this land.

November――

At ten o'clock, the customer arrived wearing a straw raincoat. This Buddha-like man before me was past thirty with a Billiken haircut - narrow upturned eyes suggesting timidity, an honest-seeming boyish face that made one instinctively trust him. Those oversized military boots marked him as likely demobilized. His round face with its gentle protruding mouth and earnest movements reminded me precisely of those Buddhist statues I'd often seen in Nara and Kyoto temples. Even seated across the hearth, he kept turning sideways as he spoke, unable to endure my steady gaze.

“Now I’m going to buy a cart as a memento for Tokyo,” he said. “Then I’ll go to Haguro, and after coming back, swing by Daisen—I don’t even know what’s what anymore, it’s all so hectic—” Even while saying this, he kept fidgeting and twitching nonstop. When I tried visualizing the circular route he’d walk that day in my mind, it formed a radius of about fifteen ri. The very notion that I was trying to see this man as a Buddha had somehow become intensely amusing to me.

“Can such a thing be done in a single day?” I asked. “Well, since I was in the military until just recently, this sort of thing is nothing. Since I have to go back to Tokyo and become a farmer, I’m collecting farm tools. They’re really hard to come by, and even when you find them, they ask for exorbitant prices.” He told me he’d been born in a nearby village and was an adopted son, adding that since his adoptive father was here in Hibutsumisaki, he wanted me to discuss the luggage arrangements with him. When I presented the red bean rice cakes received from Sugai Oshō, he brightened and ate them immediately. It seemed this man was handling everything alone—from organizing the cargo for loading to collecting it—and his ceaseless busyness, without a moment’s respite, struck me as almost pitiable.

“I’ll return to Tokyo with the luggage but turn right back again,” said the man. For me, merely getting home through those crowded trains would have been struggle enough, yet this fellow was attempting to do ten times what I planned. Watching his retreating figure, the straw raincoat slung at his side seemed to flutter as if flying. At that pace, I reckoned he could cover fifteen ri within the day. I walked nearly a ri along country paths to Hibutsumisaki. The foothills’ twisting contours spread into rice fields like intricate veins. The path followed these curves like a coastline until reaching what appeared as a sleet-drenched cape – Hibutsumisaki itself. This being an ancient battleground, they’d likely launched fire attacks from here long ago. Amidst mudflats devoid of other houses stood a solitary farmhouse doubling as a hot spring inn. Its murky waters – unchanged for a month – were said to cure neuralgia. From the mud-like depths emerged glimpses of white skin – backs and hips of bathing farmwomen. At the kitchen hearth sat my contact: a man past sixty in a padded jacket. His glaring eyes and stocky build contrasted with his adopted son’s demeanor. From grime-blackened pockets he produced a pristine foreign cigarette. He might’ve passed for bandit chief or head stagehand; clearly regretting this meeting, he sat sullenly silent. The so-called inn behind him defied all my notions of hot spring establishments. That this man amidst mud-inn chaos might handle my consignment gave me pause. A misstep here could cost half my worldly goods.

“Once the luggage arrives in Tokyo, transporting it to my house will be troublesome—I’m rather at a loss about that. Could you arrange a transporter?” I ventured. “Yes, I’ll do it,” he said abruptly. That was all. I asked him to write down a Tokyo address here and took out my notebook. The man took the pencil and smoothly wrote down his name and address. The handwriting was unexpectedly good. A bad man couldn’t write such characters. To some extent because of that, I began feeling inclined to trust that this man was decent despite his appearance.

When dividing the freight car fees equally and settling matters like transportation to the station and other necessities, "I don't need the freight charges," "Since I'll be sending my own things anyway," the man said.

In the hearth, dried pine needles emitted a pleasant fragrance. That scent was also good. As I started to rise to leave,

“What about the rice?” the man asked. “I haven’t put any rice in.”

“Why?” He asked again, looking doubtful. “I had no time to buy any, but it’ll work out somehow.”

The man exchanged glances with the innkeeper in front of him and remained silent. When loading the cargo onto the freight car, or when sorting it after arrival, or any other matters that should be handled with our presence—since I intended to do none of these—I had to mark the cargo. “Around the time the cargo arrives, I intend to be in Tokyo, but could I first have you keep mine at your house?” “Otherwise, I have absolutely no idea how the transportation situation in Tokyo has been since the war ended.”

“I’ll handle it that way.” This too was alarmingly simple. After all, these were all trivial matters to them, but for me, it was like staking a part of my fate. Once I boarded, it would be me who was dragged along without end. However, since people's physiognomies had all deteriorated due to the war, I put my trust in their handwriting. With this approach, I had rarely been wrong up to now.

Light snow was falling on the marsh. As I walked along the marshside road, trying not to lose my luggage while contemplating my own selfishness in trying to see people as Buddhas, I thought that sometimes selfishness could be a good thing. Had I lacked such selfishness, I might have gone through life viewing people as nothing more than mere humans. Yet who taught us to think of humans as merely human? And isn't this itself the greatest illusion? At times when my very being brims with illusions. Truly, Baso who declared "Though there is no self" had already transcended this. Yet I cling to this illusion. Even when choosing between alternatives, I remained ever the novelist drawn to the option I rejected. Certainly I am no sage. Though all truths should dwell clearly within me, I stand closer to a fool.

Standing by the ochre path that ran straight through, I turned to look back toward Himosakizaki. The area where monk warriors had slaughtered each other likely stretched from there to here, but even as they spent each moment mired in thoughts of impending death within the mud, this same light snow must have been falling—

November ――

The luggage was packed into eleven bundles. San’emon had tied them up, but his usual practice proved too effective—they all ended up looking like rice bales. “Well, it’s finally time for us to go back too, then.” My wife looked at the luggage with lingering reluctance. The only ones who were happy were the children. With a lonely heart, I looked around the room that had emptied out. The carp too were sinking deep into the water. “Every year, no matter how many I raise, they get stolen. But this year, thanks to you all being here, the carp managed to remain un stolen.”

San’emon said cheerfully. He went out to the mountains with Kiyoe to collect the firewood I had ordered. A letter arrived from our vacant house in Tokyo. It stated how difficult it was to obtain food and that due to frequent robberies, we should put off returning. It was too late. However, my wife, upon seeing that letter, seemed to have suddenly been struck by fear. “Oh no... They say Tokyo’s crawling with robbers!” “But it’s too late now.” “What kind of person was that man from Himosakizaki? Will it be okay?”

The fact that we were coming from Tokyo meant robbers could show up all the way to Himosakizaki, but at present we had no way to gauge transportation safety whatsoever. In truth, this came right after we had endured over half a year of hardship from having our passbook invalidated. Casting these belongings of mine into the very heart of this anarchy as some stranger's luggage—whenever I began contemplating their fate, the anxiety stretched endlessly before me. Not a single element offered reassurance. Yet from beneath those swarming suspicions that assailed like ominous clouds, what emerged clear and unwavering was his precise penmanship. That alone undeniably anchored something within me—a beauty akin to seal engraving. That was life's very symbol. I believe in the East. I believe in Japan. All people are beautiful, I thought.

“It’ll be fine. This luggage will arrive safely,” I said. “Do you really think so? But even if we lose just one thing, there are so many we won’t be able to replace anymore.” “No, it’ll be fine.”

Kyūzaemon came. And he said to my wife: "Since Setsu's wedding is tomorrow, I couldn't come sooner—but anyway, I hear you folks went and entrusted your luggage to strangers." "I was worried and came to check." "You shouldn't have done that, I tell you." "After all this time I've been looking after you without incident, if something dangerous happens now, it'll put me in a real bind too." In any case, my wife apologized for preparing the luggage so abruptly without consulting him first. If I were to bring this up with him again, it might trample San'emon's hard-won goodwill—I had often felt from the beginning that being caught between these two men involved numerous unseen yet vexing complications in how things played out.

“If things go well, it’ll be fine, I tell you. I don’t know those people either, I tell you. You’d best not send out important items. Since San’emon says he doesn’t know those men either, I keep wondering why you’d go and do such a thing—that’s what worries me—”

Indeed, what Kyūzaemon said was reasonable. Not limited to this matter alone, he had shown us immense affection, and the particular care he extended to me was extraordinary. I knew full well how neighbors criticized his bad habit—how he would first intuit whether someone could benefit him before offering help. San’emon’s coldness toward us likely stemmed partly from deference to Kyūzaemon, though resentment might have played a role too. Yet even when viewing him as someone who reduced people to calculations, I sensed something different about Kyūzaemon. His calculations formed the sacred code governing his own life—a code even he couldn’t easily transgress. Still, there existed within him a place where love felt inherently separate from this law of practicality. His political skill—the bargaining during negotiations, generous hospitality, rhythmic precision in assessing gains and losses, halting speech that blurred unclear perceptions into obscurity, and sharp instinct for seizing opportunities—all depended on numbers. Yet this very skill carried an artistry that could modulate its tempo freely. Within that rare talent for calculation lay something truly genius-like—a tragic quality perceived by others as mere scheming, yet towering above them all.

“Everyone speaks ill of me, but once I’m dead, all will be understood.”

Even seeing Kyūzaemon say this, I knew he must have phrased it to be understood. He was the only person in this village who had conquered the art of agriculture. Moreover, there had been no need for him to utter something about God to me through self-serving calculation. Surely even he wouldn’t have thought to peddle God himself to me. “God is about feelings—it’s people’s hearts that matter.” After sixty-eight years of grappling with tradition, the true treasure Kyūzaemon had finally attained was precisely this understanding. All that remained was for him to die, and then he would find peace.

November --

Snow was swirling. The time for my luggage to depart was approaching. San'emon, who had come out from the back door of Kyūzaemon's house where the wedding was being held, loaded the luggage onto the cargo wagon while still wearing his hakama. When the carter struck the reins once, the horse tossed its mane, reared up, and the wagon began to move. My luggage disappeared into the thin snow. Why did it seem that the luggage had survived more tenaciously than the people? I stood in the snow, listening sadly to the sound of the wheel tracks fading away, and entered the house.

Setsu's wedding ceremony was being held at the groom's house in Shinshō. At Kyūzaemon's house they held an absence ceremony, and Kiyoe and my wife were completely occupied with assisting there; but when night fell, the celebration dissolved, and the voice of the wildly drunk San'emon could be heard from the hearthside. My wife and children, frightened, went to bed early. On nights when he, prone to drunken rages, was intoxicated, Kiyoe would put away everything around her and not go near his side. Iron kettles, medicine jars, rice bowls—whatever came to hand—San'emon would hurl at Kiyoe while incessantly shouting "Get out! Go home!"—but tonight at the wedding, that same man was cheerfully singing songs. Grinning his large face clad in hakama, he kept everyone laughing for a while, but there was no telling what would happen next.

“When San’emon gets drunk, you’d best slip quietly from your seat.” “He’s a frightfully strong man.” “I’ve been struck by him over and over since then.”

There was also Kyūzaemon, who had warned me in this manner. The children would occasionally lift their heads from their futons, amused by San'emon's off-key singing— But when my wife said, "That's right, he's coming," they flopped back down again.

However, when one thought that the neighboring house was holding a wedding ceremony, everyone recalled their own experiences from that time. In San'emon's drunkenness, Kiyoe's phantom likely flickered and vanished. The two were classmates, and I too had seen a photo from their graduation ceremony where they appeared together.

“Well now, I never thought this one’d end up as my wife.” “And then this one—”

The face of Kiyoe in the photograph was dotted with dents from being poked repeatedly as he said this. Having drunk away his house and left his wife and children behind to labor in Karafuto for ten years—too late now even if he tried to recover—the shadow of San'emon, my contemporary nearing fifty, had transformed into a faltering Kōryōkō-bushi melody stripped of its rhythm. “Between Chosun oh, and Shina’s border, that Yalu River oh—hey, hey, you do it too.” “Do it already—” San’emon, flapping his feet as he spoke to Kiyoe, had been born here at this hearth as an only child, traveled, and now sang mindlessly at the very same hearth where he was born. Whether he thrashed about or hurled things, it was no one else’s concern. No matter how one thrashed about, the soot’s sorrow clings stubbornly to the pot. Outside, snow was falling.

Late at night, San'emon entered the bedroom. There was only a single cedar door separating it from the room where I slept, bringing him even closer to me. The tips of his feet seemed near my head, but just when I thought he had settled down to sleep, he immediately began singing again. It was the same song he'd sung by the hearth earlier, repeated over and over, keeping me awake; yet through our shared memories of living through the same era—as if reaching hands into time's depths—the warmth of his pulse transmitted itself to me.

“Keep going, that’s good,” I said.

Our youthful dreams had been caught in a pincer between Meiji and Shōwa during Taishō—there would be no time hereafter when they might hold sway. "Between Korea oh, and China's...rafts floating...Hey, you do it! Hey, do it already—" When San'emon briefly paused his slurred song, he seemed to shake Kiyoe's pillow. This happened two or three times in succession when— "Has the plantain come?... "I went out to the edge of the rice field..."

Kiyoe's song reached my ears. It was a voice as deep, calm, and clear as her eyes. Yet it no longer held any trace of bashfulness. San'emon had apparently never imagined Kiyoe would sing; caught off guard by this unexpected turn from his wife, he remained silent for some time. But suddenly interrupting mid-song, he exclaimed, “Marvelous! Marvelous! Marvelous!” and clapped his hands. However, Kiyoe now carried herself as though such reactions meant nothing—

“The plantain doesn’t come, and with no purpose,” “the tobacco peddler comes by.” I thought this might have been the first time San’emon had ever heard Kiyoe sing. Kiyoe was not someone you would imagine singing at all. When Kiyoe stopped singing, San’emon tried to imitate her a moment later, but his raspy voice was unbearable. He immediately pressed her again to continue. Then Kiyoe sang once more.

It was a clear and elegant singing voice befitting the silent chill of midnight. Not a single note was out of tune. It was a quiet yet resonant Obako melody. What had begun as an attempt to console her husband had, at some point, transformed into a clear, unhesitant voice—a resonant singing voice that now evoked the plaintive tones of her younger self. As I listened, it seemed to me that instead of San'emon and I being left behind, Kiyoe alone stood resolute, confronting the surging crowd of youth with a splendidly poised bearing that carried the weight of our era.

"That's good! That's good! That's good! That's damn good!" San'emon clapped his hands joyfully again, but in the darkness, his hands met only halfway. However, now that it had come to this, San'emon was not about to let Kiyoe off after she finished singing. Kiyoe sang again at his urging.

“Between Korea oh, and Shina’s border—that Yalu River oh—” When it shifted to the Kōryōkō-bushi melody, San'emon too seemed unable to hold back any longer. “The rafts drifting...” This time, the couple began singing the continuation together. I too felt profoundly uplifted. Resolving to see this good night through together just like this, I lay in the adjacent room listening joyfully to their singing. Youth itself seemed to be gradually reviving.

December ――

The snow had piled up and still showed no sign of ceasing. Even after I finished washing my face with water from the bamboo pipe and thought of last night’s events, the thickness at the base of the icicles hanging from the rock felt pleasant. The vitality that had long been sapped was now welling up within me. I had been scheduled to meet with the agricultural association members at Shakadō Hall starting this afternoon, and though I had felt reluctant about it for days and found it unpleasant, I now felt motivated to go ahead and meet them. For the first time in three months, I tried shaving in front of a hand mirror. With the posture of a sprout emerging in the blade’s wake, facing the deep, spacious garden of snow-laden Moso bamboo, I tried fastening a youthful necktie.

“I can’t go on like this forever, you know.” Suddenly I blurted out words that made no sense to my wife. From my demeanor since earlier, she seemed to have sensed something. “That’s right.” “You’re still young, you know.” “I like that necktie very much myself.” “This one?” This was the necktie that had been praised by a dancer in Hungary—a girl named Irene—in the same tone my wife had just used. That night on the Danube came back to me joyfully; I felt the steps of the Hungarian dance Irene had taught me by taking my hand tingling in my toes, and as I surveyed the youthful swarm of snowflakes that seemed to assail us, the confidence that I too was prepared brought me calm. Then I thought that finally my turn had come. The first round had been San’emon’s failure last night; next came Kiyoe’s splendid success; after that would be mine. The stage I envisioned remained indistinct—it seemed akin to today’s gathering of agricultural association members, or perhaps to Tokyo’s rampant banditry, yet ultimately resembled neither. Instead, the turbulent youth of this muddied world appeared before me as swirling snowflakes in flight.

From the time I left home in the afternoon wearing boots, even when stepping through the snow, I was unusually energetic. The cedars lining both sides of the approach path to Shakadō stood thickly, their trunks rising in a line through the snow. On the gentle slope of the stone-paved path stood a mountain gate, and to the left, a plain sunken like a valley lay blanketed in snow. The people I was now about to meet were the headquarters that provided plans to all the villages across this vast plain, pushed them into action, devised countermeasures for crises, and commanded every aspect of the land and people’s lives. They were people with whom I had no connection whatsoever, but I needed only catch a single word that revealed a fragment of these healthy people’s will. What these people required from me was probably criticism. There was no doubt those people would be disappointed, but for me, there was only benefit.

The gathering was in the monk’s study at the north end of the main hall. The clean aesthetic reflected the Zen monk’s character without any incense-heavy solemnity, and the rosewood shelf’s luster harmonized perfectly with the tatami’s grain lines. On one end of the front tokonoma hung a photograph of a handsome, keen-looking young man in a student uniform. When I looked up at it and asked the monk whose face resembled Hirobumi Ito’s, he told me his eldest son—deployed to Taiwan as a telegraph operator—was now strongly suspected dead. Before I knew it, I found myself sitting at the very heart of a great tragedy.

“But if it’s Taiwan, there might still be…” As I began to say, “No, it seems he was killed on the ship along the way.” “I had them investigate, but it seems there was no hope left.”

The youthful vigor I had felt since morning suddenly collapsed flat, and I sat down. I felt the cold of an avalanche from the mountain behind seeping into my back, and the advancing young era began to appear like wounded saplings fallen across a desolate wilderness. What could I possibly be trying to start criticizing here now? I had already heard a dignified song rising from where snow had been shoveled late last night. Wasn't that Kiyoe's prayer in the midnight hour when time stood forgotten?

Dark twilight descended from the valley, and everyone gathered.

Next to me sat the village head, beside him the former village head, with agricultural association engineers extending out on either side—about ten people in total—though the cold seemed to originate not from the temple’s chilled tatami mats. Under the restrained presence of elders who had long prioritized public welfare—their eyes keenly bright—the room fell silent for a time, only their fire-warmed fingertips retaining any warmth. Before long, the meal was served. Sugai Oshō, who bore the deepest grief, laughed most jovially and made fitting remarks, yet facing this tidal wave of calamity surging higher than the horizon, what could anyone present possibly say? Through their subsequent conversation—which already knew everything—it became clear this gathering tonight was a well-intentioned attempt to console me.

Sake was served just warm enough, and the meal in the Zen hall—featuring sashimi, salmon roe, chicken stew, sweet red bean soup, and more in unclouded beautiful bowls with chopsticks—was accompanied by a green pickled vegetable dish with neatly aligned cuts that cleansed our palates on this snowy night. I was truly grateful for this meal. When I thought to offer something as a token of gratitude, I was instantly struck by the sadness of having nothing. But even after searching through my heart, there was still nothing. With a sigh, what emerged at that moment was—

“Last night was quite amusing.” “Late at night, you know.” I ended up making a disgraceful spectacle of myself. Yet this story about San’emon and his wife’s brief feast last night greatly pleased everyone. The elders in particular broke into even broader smiles, and the monk was deeply moved,

“That is a remarkable story.” “Hmm, you’ve noticed an excellent point there... hmm.” At this remark, the conversation blossomed, and the gathering suddenly grew lively. Amidst all this casual talk, the one agricultural engineer who had remained silent throughout did not laugh. The story of San’emon and his wife was undoubtedly the kind that would fail to interest anyone not elderly, but what continued to reverberate within this young engineer’s heart was something else entirely. When this person did open his mouth to say something, he would only repeat the same things over and over.

"At present, what we must have farmers do is simply this: reduce their three rice-based meals to two, have them produce something tastier than rice for just one of those meals to substitute it, and thereby increase their rice supply by one meal’s worth." For the engineer, this was the only emergency measure that could be implemented after having inspected every corner of the plain—or so his tone suggested. That was likely true. "But when it comes to something tasty to replace rice—"

“Well, wheat, I suppose.” “But that can’t hold a candle to rice.” “That would be a problem.” “But there’s nothing else to work with.”

“However, given the current conditions, even with wheat, is it really possible to achieve a harvest greater than this?” “It’s not possible.” “Therefore, we have been making plans to newly cultivate an average of five chōbu per village.” “And we will have them plant wheat there—” “Is five chōbu feasible everywhere?”

“That can be done.” With the concrete implementation plan now established, the central discussion could be considered concluded. As for other matters—to state them bluntly—they would include land readjustment issues, the tenancy situation in this village where landlords owned half the cultivated land, and the economic problems arising from these conditions. Then there were the fluctuations within the tides of the global economy—how these matters would inevitably be transformed after being pulled from the framework of Japan’s economy into commerce and industry—and so on; such speculations stretched endlessly into the future. Yet what I could not speak of—what I secretly wished to know—concerned the still-unformed seeds of a farmers’ union. That such a union would soon emerge in this village was certain. The natural—indeed inevitable—enemy of these seeds would be tonight’s gathering here, dominated as it was by landlords. But where in this plain would such a movement take root? Seeds always remain unaware they are seeds, but perhaps they lay among those youths around Masayoshi—the ones who had lent us that umbrella. In any case, the agricultural association had to commence their reclamation efforts now, before this union could take form.

“What are your impressions of this village after seeing it?”

The first question from an elder directed at me had finally come. There were several thoughts I had—the poor water quality that could be fixed if addressed, the scenic roads left to deteriorate, the indifference to livestock—though only to a certain extent. “However, I can’t discuss specifics at present.” “The reason being that current agriculture—not just its obscurity—appears even to an amateur’s eye to have reached an irreversible saturation point of intensification, so reforming one area would likely cause subtle changes throughout the entire system.” “But if we first require a new machine as the essential farming tool under current conditions—though this problem will inevitably arise eventually—what sort of machine would that be here?”

There was no answer. My question may have been a bit too difficult. However, no matter what government emerges or what revolution may come, sooner or later this problem alone will become imminent. “Reduce three meals to two, eliminate rice from just one of them, and instead focus on what can be produced now—” And the agricultural engineer spoke again. When this was presented, it was so irrefutably valid that the conversation would halt there. For in reality, at present, everything apart from what this engineer said was nothing but futile.

“I’m from the town office, but I want to infuse culture into the countryside,” said a young spirited man. “What do you think would be good for that?” “That’s something I’d like to ask as well—what aspects of culture do the people here desire most? That’s one of the things I want to understand too,” replied the agricultural engineer. “In truth, they might not actually want such things at all. We must consider that thoughtlessly injecting unnecessary elements and recklessly urbanizing them could be problematic. Do the villagers truly desire this? The neighbor lady next door where I’m staying muttered to herself, ‘Ahh, how boring,’ when holidays lasted two days straight.”

“When I say I want to infuse culture, what I mean is this: when people use fans, I want them to feel it’s not just because they’re hot—I want them to perceive it as something elegant, something that truly reflects a mind at ease and a leisurely spirit. That’s the kind of meaning I intend.” I was impressed, thinking that the way he expressed this could only have come from a depth born of someone who truly loves their homeland.

"In any case, even so, their working hours are too long—they seem to be overworked." "Aren’t they working too hard?" Even as I said this, I thought that agriculture in our country was a religion called the cult of labor. And this god was rice. Western agriculture could be called a pastoral religion, and I thought that perhaps its god was music, but that seemed too bold a notion for me to voice aloud.

“When American agricultural experts came to inspect Japanese farming, their impression was apparently something like, ‘This isn’t agriculture—it’s horticulture.’ When they see them pulling weeds one by one by hand, they can’t help but laugh. When they showed American POWs the largest factory in Nagoya, it’s said that they remarked, ‘This isn’t industry—it’s handicraft.’ But such differences between foreign countries and Japan aren’t limited to agriculture and industry—it’s true of everything. The difference between theater and drama, or between literary arts and literature—even when it comes to the military, Japan’s version of that is a religion. Whether it’s bureaucrats, scholars, or art—everything in Japan has this tendency to take on the form of religion and become more rigid. One of the reasons for our defeat in the war may indeed have been the result of these ingrained tendencies intertwining and various sects battling each other. The enemy was within ourselves.”

After saying this, I briefly thought that even Japan's left-wing was advancing in sect-like formations. Science and literature were doing the same. And what about myself?

―― “Even for us, there must be positive aspects to things advancing in religious forms.” “In religion, regardless of what ideals groups profess, their purpose is to save people—so I believe even the worst organizations have that ideal flowing through their foundations in some way.” “Therefore, what I see now isn’t morality being lost, but rather the turbulence of trying to establish a truer sense of virtue.” “After all, everyone has suffered.”

Suddenly, at that moment, I thought: This was a Zen temple. In Zen, wasn't even killing considered salvation? Wasn't it a method of viewing oneself as wood and stone, killing [the self], through rigorous practice? And I thought of how many sparks must have flown from Japanese bodies in Zen's form whenever people interacted in daily life. Moreover, when I considered how deeply rooted this had become as unconscious habit, I couldn't help feeling that Japanese inscrutability also resided there. When everyone fell silent,

“Mrs. San’emon, that song you sang was quite amusing. Hmm, yes—a most interesting tale indeed.”

And with that, the monk said again, crossing his arms and nodding in admiration. I thought that this monk was indeed a kind of distinguished monk.

As I was the only guest that night, I rose from my seat and left before all others. The thick cedar approach path stretched long and utterly lightless. With a broken Western umbrella as my cane, I descended the stone pavement I couldn't see an inch before me, relying solely on the sound of my own footsteps. Through gaps in the tree trunks, the valley's snow intermittently showed white.

A wooden figure dons shoes at night and departs A stone woman dons a hat at dawn and returns

From the clattering footsteps rose verses from Master Shishitetsu’s poem, muddied in my mind. The very title of this poem, "Night Shoes," with its evocation of the lonely beauty in sounds made by humans turned to wood and stone, was something I cherished. Even after the stone pavement changed to a village road, no lights were to be seen anywhere. The path grew hazy in the snow’s glow, but water seeped up to my ankles from beneath the trampled snow, gurgling as it flowed.

December [day]

Droplets dripped from icicles glistening on sunlit eaves. When I spotted the fish-selling girl coming down the snowy mountain pass path, she swiftly appeared at my veranda and thudded her basket down. While my wife was buying fish for our eldest son—departing for Tokyo that evening—Hitasaki arrived and reported having safely dispatched the luggage. As if pursuing those parcels, my eldest son left at four in the afternoon. When my wife returned from seeing him off at the station, she said, “It’s already chaos there. If you take the four o’clock one, you won’t make it back alone.”

I had timed my departure for when the luggage was due to arrive but intended to take the first morning train. To board that one would require staying overnight near the station beforehand—otherwise there’d be no navigating that muddy night road leading there.

Night brought snow again. In the room where the luggage had been halved, one of the children’s beds had disappeared, making the gaps between things grow even wider.

December [day]

The snow had begun to melt. Water flowed along the tilted village road, with pebbles exposed from its base. For five or six days I had spent preparing to return to Tokyo, but when I finally roused myself to depart, I felt my roots clinging to the soil with unexpected tenacity. I doubt I will ever return to this village again. When I thought that, even the bends of the narrow stream flowing between the stones seemed to be washing my shoes.

After preparing my hand luggage, I gazed at the nodes of the Mōsō bamboo in the grove and watched the mountains descending into the gathering dusk. There was the sound of brushwood snapping at the hearthside. For some reason I wanted to see the carp in the garden and peered in, but they lay settled at the base of the stone wall in the twilight and I couldn't make them out clearly.

“Mr. Kyūzaemon has arrived,” my wife said.

Kyūzaemon stood in the garden wearing a black bell-shaped mantle; he had already taken down my luggage. I went to the hearthside and bid farewell to San'emon and his wife. Before San'emon's round knees protruding pale from his seated posture, tears welled in my eyes as I bowed. Kiyoe too sat on the mat where hearth smoke crept low.

“In about a week, my household will be leaving too, so until then I ask for your patience.” Though this was my departure, since I was to stay that night at the soba shop near the station that Kyūzaemon had reserved for me, there was no need to mind the time—yet I couldn’t linger comfortably with Kyūzaemon waiting. Besides, the night path would soon become impassable. I went to bid farewell to Sōzaemon’s widow as well. The daughter-in-law wearing gaiters came out, but the old woman was away. After stepping outside, I went again to greet Kyūzaemon’s eldest son. The old woman from Yura had also come to the back entrance. When I tried to approach the branch family’s eldest son from the front entrance, he—apparently thinking I was with everyone at the back—circled around to the rear. When his wife and the old woman watching outside cried “Front! It’s the front!”, he seemed to loop around to the front this time. But by then, having sensed his movement toward the back entrance, I had already doubled back there again. The spectators who could see both sides laughed uproariously at our weasel-like game of tag, shouting “Front!” “Back!” Unable to discern which was truly front or back, we only grew more hopelessly confused.

Kyūzaemon did not take the usual path to the station but instead chose to walk along the mountain-flanking road toward Shakyadō Hall. Though somewhat longer, this route was said to be better—the same path Tensaku used each morning before dawn to dig white clay, and which the old woman from Yura traveled when coming here. When we reached the base of Shakyadō Hall, I had Kyūzaemon wait below while I climbed up alone to visit the hall. The stone-paved approach stretched long before me, but I wished to express gratitude for having been granted the fortune of dwelling in this good village awhile.

On the stone pavement where damp cedar branches had fallen, my shoes clattered, echoing through the valley. By now, the surroundings had grown dark, and the closed door of the hall ahead stood slightly ajar with about an inch-wide gap. I tried pulling from below on the thick joint of the double doors, but with a key having been lowered from inside, they only rattled in their opening without yielding. I paid my respects from outside the still-closed door. When I had retraced my steps a short way—perhaps because he had heard the suspicious sound of my footsteps in the mountains at this hour—the double doors of the abbot’s quarters opened, revealing the upper half of the monk’s body in the gap.

“Who’s there?” In the darkness where one had to draw near to see, I silently approached Monk Sugai. “Oh, it was you. Please, please.” To the astonished Monk Sugai, I offered my farewell while standing there, explained the reason for having someone waiting below, and immediately turned back.

The remaining snow at the mountain's edge appeared white between the cedar trunks. On the village road below, Kyūzaemon stood with both feet neatly aligned, maintaining his former posture without alteration.

As the two walked along the winding muddy path, their surroundings gradually disappeared from view. He crossed the mud as if stepping into the hoofprints left by a horse. A single narrow road ran straight through the depths of a pitch-black night where nothing but uniform harvested fields stretched endlessly. When we reached about halfway, Kyūzaemon came to an abrupt halt and gazed at the fields. “This is my family’s rice field,” he said. “You can tell even in this pitch darkness?” When I said this, he replied that you could tell by the cut stubble.

Suddenly I remembered that Kyūzaemon's wife had died after giving birth to three children in the fields. With an air suggesting one of them might lie in this very field, he remained motionless there in the dark night, not moving his feet for some time.

“With this, this year’s rice won’t be ready until after New Year’s,” Kyūzaemon said. The station was a long way off. When we climbed to the spotless, well-polished second floor of the soba shop, dinnertime had long since passed. Here too, in the alcove hung a large framed photograph of an eldest son killed in battle. Beneath it, we waited for our meal facing each other across the brazier, but as I noticed the pockmarked scars of war’s devastation on every house I’d visited, it struck me that even this plain—though its harvest was finished—now lay spread out as nothing but scarred-over harvested fields. When this thought came, the darkness pressing against the windowpane struck through me with its vast cold.

Sake was also served with the meal. As a slight drunkenness came over him, Kyūzaemon began muttering something intermittently in a barely intelligible tone. “I’ve been beaten, beaten so many times. “I can’t even tell how many times that San’emon beat me.” He, likely sensing we would never meet again, seemed to be stammering out all the endurance of his past. “You too must have had a hard time with all the worry by that man’s side, I imagine.” “Even so, that man has a good heart.” “Even though he beat me for making money despite me being a branch family member of his, he’s a good man.”

After saying this, Kyūzaemon now began to persistently grumble about how clever his first grandchild—whom he had lost—had been. After all, his greatest sorrow seemed to be the loss of his grandchild. Next, he apologized for always taking up my time and interfering. “When I talk with you, it’s so interesting, so interesting—no matter how many times I think to hold back and not bother you, it’s just so interesting that if I don’t come, I get so lonely.” “I’ve never heard such interesting stories.”

The greatest trouble he caused me was something I must admit was indeed my own fault. As long as there are no thieves of others' time in this world, one's own space cannot function. Regarding this, deciding to think more on it later, I poured him sake repeatedly and thanked him. After ten o'clock, we had two beds prepared and went to sleep. Under the heavy handwoven cotton futon of snow country, stiff against my body, I slept using just a single layer, while Kyūzaemon fell asleep the moment he lay down. I couldn't sleep at all. Freight trains passed through the station again and again. Tomorrow I would spend all day on the train; arriving at Ueno by midnight meant waiting there until morning. And December 8th would be when I passed through my home's gate.

Because I couldn't sleep, I occasionally turned on the light and peered at Kyūzaemon's face. He slept soundly without even snoring. Each time I looked, his properly aligned supine posture and the faint smile at his slightly parted lips seemed to say, "I worked and worked." It was a sleeping face where even his foundational bones laughed. The day when Kyūzaemon's mortuary tablet—gazing down from Kaidan-in's highest tier—would be placed upon the forehead marked by a bullet wound of him lying here asleep might not be so distant. And I would likely never see this face again. The night train passed through the wintry wind.