Pathway to Japanese Literature

August —— The sound of approaching geta clogs stumbled against a garden stone and staggered once. Then from beneath the persimmon tree appeared my brother-in-law, his face flushed crimson. “Ceasefire! Ceasefire!” he declared. In what seemed like borrowed geta, he stumbled there again. Stumbling, he announced, “Full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.” “I wonder if that’s true.” “It’s true. The radio just said so.”

I thudded down as if collapsing, bracing one hand on the tatami mat while staring at the sloping garden. The avalanche-like cliff of summer chrysanthemums blazed in flame-colored hues. The mountain behind emitted a silent roar, and in the depths of the western sun that seemed ready to come crashing down at any moment, countless fiery orbs whirled madly. “Anyway, at a time like this, let’s head to the mountains or somewhere.”

“No, not today…”

After the sound of my brother-in-law's geta clogs faded into the distance, I leaned back against a pillar, sat cross-legged, and continued staring at the garden. Defeated.—No, unless you see it for yourself, you can’t know. But where am I supposed to look? This village was nothing more than the remains of an ancient battlefield. The western sun's overwhelming light that had flooded fields and mountains twisted and writhed in disarray, seeming unaware of where its flow would end.

August ——

The sound of winding the pillar clock; a splash of water sounds. Looking over, four or five carp drew their mouths close to chrysanthemum petals dangling over the pond and leapt up to snatch at them. A white gourd flower with a long slender stem sways. I like this flower. Whenever my eyes come to rest here, my mind finds peace. This delicate flower stem alone seems to bear steadfastly all our defeat's bitter trials. For me now, it exists as nothing else but this single white blossom—specifically that pale blue slender part of its stem that looks ready to vanish any moment.—The wind has already become autumn wind.

August ——

The calf had fallen ill and wouldn't eat grass, so the people of this house seemed unbearably worried. They were trying to boil black beans in medicinal broth to make it drink, but today even the goat appeared withered and sorrowful. They used to call to each other with plaintive cries—so inseparable that when one was taken out to the garden, the other would thrash about in distress—yet now both stood listless. However, it wasn't just the goat and calf. Everything in sight seemed listless. My second son, a first-year middle school student who commuted by train, came home and,

“The principal gathered everyone today and said, ‘You all are so pitiful, so pitiful I can’t bear it.’ He was streaming tears,” he said. “How was it inside the train?” “Everywhere there was nothing but fighting. Adults sure do fight, huh? I wonder why that is.” When I was walking through a mountain pass, a man who had laid his bicycle in the grass was eating his lunch alone while muttering, “One soldier after another… one soldier after another…” Then he shot me a glare that seemed ready to bite as I passed by. With a metallic clank, he snapped the aluminum lid shut and stood up before nimbly mounting his bicycle and riding off somewhere.

Rie, an elderly woman who had married into a seaside village over the mountain pass from this house at seventeen, came and was gazing up at the roof of her childhood home. Though seventy that year, this rarely seen beautiful old woman—carrying the lingering aura of an ancient battlefield—made it impossible to look away from the teeth escaping her smiling lips, which seemed to draw in some profound emotion. When I saw this old woman’s smile, I suddenly sensed that spotless brightness—like a speck of dust swept away by the wind. Her youngest son had just perished in the Battle of Okinawa after boarding a submarine. If women could all become like this without the ugliness of old age, I thought, life might briefly alter its farcical course. Such was her face. She was a type of old woman I had never before encountered. Though merely a white-haired woman from a fishing village—her hair tied back, her waist perpetually bent, who had spent her life doing little beyond scrubbing floors—she now walked here and there, gazing up and down at the roof beams with an expression like one retracing childhood memories, showing no trace of weariness. Upon her curved back, which resembled life’s final glimpse, the cicadas’ cries fell incessantly. The afternoon light where white butterflies danced over ancient garden stones—the sorrow of morning glories clinging to a stunted fence.

This village—now reduced to remnants of what was once Nishi Haguro where thirty-five temple halls and pagodas had stood opposing Higashi Haguro across the plain—allowed glimpses of its former prosperity through terrain features: in the contours of mountains behind; in hillocks scattered like islands across paddies where streams from foothills vanished; in rises still bearing traces of that vanished glory. Beneath drifting clouds lay fragments of antiquity—weather-worn stones protruding from crumbled earth; streamside walls smoothed by centuries of dampness; arrowhead stones still unearthed today; paths where warrior monks once slid down or scrambled up before being driven to extinction by Higashi Haguro. Beyond one climbed pass lay the sea below. A village nestled in mountain folds wrapped in groves of magnolia and oak leaves—cedar and chestnut and zelkova trees—sloping ever downward into the plain’s heart. When Yoshitsune fled from Shirakawa in the capital toward Hiraizumi, he likely passed through here too—sleeping one night in that mountain hall. In those passes still lies what they call Benkei’s Spring.

Not a single person in this village knew my occupation, which felt liberating. Neither did the person who secured this room for me know anything about me, nor did the household members here. As a mere passerby who had drifted here aimlessly, I'd chanced upon renting a room through that lone connection—being able to make this place our temporary shelter was nothing short of fortunate. A life severed from all social ties, without acquaintances or relatives, must have been fraught with peril and inconvenience amid wartime shortages. Yet if this was indeed the final refuge we'd been driven to claim, then to me it remained more precious than any other place. Convinced there was truly nowhere else left, I resolved to move my family of four into this six-tatami room within a mountain farmhouse. Then on our third day there, the war ended. We hadn't even finished unpacking our belongings yet.

Sanemon (pseudonym)'s house was large for a farmhouse. The hearth room measured ten tatami mats, followed by twelve tatami mats, then another ten tatami mats beyond that—with the innermost six-tatami space serving as my family’s quarters, though it lacked both tatami flooring and electric lighting. The row of rooms behind the hearth room functioned as sleeping quarters for the four family members residing here; though I never peered inside, they likely consisted of two rooms of twelve and eight tatami mats respectively. Beside the entrance stood a separate six-tatami room that had become the dwelling space for the eldest son’s wife during his military service. The kitchen’s wooden-floored area spanned roughly twenty tatami mats. None of the rooms had walls, being partitioned instead by straight-grained cedar sliding doors—the entire structure preserved an atmosphere unchanged since the Kamakura period. My inner chamber featured a veranda overlooking a stone garden where Moso bamboo grew, cascading down toward a spring-fed pond. Sanemon showed no inclination to discuss our room rent—a situation that left us deeply perplexed. No matter how many times I entreated him to set terms for payment,

“I didn’t lend this place out wanting money, y’know.” “Can be free.” “But in return—I’m dirt poor—so don’t go mentioning rice, vegetables, salt, soy sauce or miso.” “That stuff’s none of my household’s concern.” “What we can give you’s just firewood and brushwood.” “Plenty of that—won’t have you fretting.”

Sanemon’s manner of speaking was clear to those he didn’t know.

Beside his house lay a vacant lot, and three ken away along the roadside stood the separate household of Kyūzaemon. This ramshackle branch household—the farmhouse that had arranged a room for us in Sanemon’s main residence—also bore no responsibility whatsoever beyond that initial gesture toward transients like us. However, my wife remembered how Kyūzaemon had suddenly muttered under his breath that since he’d secured the room, he wouldn’t do anything to cause us trouble.

“Did he really say that?” I laughed.

“Yes, he just mentioned it.” “So that brief remark is what drew us here? We didn’t mishear him?” “But he definitely said something.” “Hmm.” The reason I said “Hmm” was that it suddenly struck me—perhaps our entire existence now hinged on some single point within those muttered words from a complete stranger. Indeed, had Kyūzaemon’s house not been nearby, I would have had to alter our means of survival somehow. Vegetables, rice, miso, soy sauce, salt—not a single clue for obtaining these essentials had yet materialized. Yet here I was, having scoured every village where a room might be rented, failing utterly in all attempts before finally securing this one space through my own efforts alone. This was no time to dwell on necessities. On the evening of our arrival, as dusk thickened, my wife leaned against our still-unopened luggage in the corner and wept.

“What are we going to do?” “From now on...” “What do you mean by that?” “We’ll simply have to keep going like this for now.” “Do you really think that’s all right?” “You’re only thinking that way because it’s getting dark.” “By morning everything will become clear.” “We just need to endure until then.” “I want to go back.” And once again my wife wept. “There’s a saying—‘Take no thought for tomorrow.’ Remember?” “You can sit there so calmly—that’s why you say such things.” “When I went to the kitchen just now, it was pitch black—I couldn’t see a thing.” “Even drawing water required groping around blindly.” “If every day’s like this—what am I supposed to do?”

In the entire house with nearly ten rooms, there was no more than a single small electric light. Even that light remained hanging in the hearth room, its glow not reaching our room. Even if we tried to call the electrician, they said he wouldn’t come anymore because Sanemon’s household had long been delinquent on payments.

"Living four people to a single six-tatami room—if there’s no electric light, that’s going to be quite a problem, huh?"

However, another thought had welled up within me. Truly, for me, it was a completely renewed life—a newness that had naturally come upon me alone. All these things should be considered most convenient—but that alone was a matter of personal interest not to be disclosed. I simply needed to remain silent and drag everyone along. “Remember when we were in Tokyo. This is still better than that,” I said. “But back then, I really thought we were going to die, you know. I don’t know how we managed to endure it all.”

“That’s true too.” The reason we now understood—that believing we could finally feel safe here had only heightened our anxiety—truly existed within us. Though I had often felt before that one comes to understand the resolve to die more fully after the fact than in the moment itself, that this clarity should reemerge upon reaching this point served as proof our anxieties had indeed diminished. “That time was absurd, wasn’t it?” “The night of your illness,” I said.

“That’s right. That time was so absurd,” my wife said, involuntarily lifting her face as she laughed.

It was a bitterly cold night during an air raid when both my wife and I, each ill, lay bedridden in separate rooms, having placed our two children in the outdoor air-raid shelter. I went from my room to stay by my wife’s side—she had a fever of forty degrees—but each time the room abruptly brightened from falling illumination flares, I would pull the floor cushion over my head and prostrate myself against the hem of her sleeping form. Then, apparently growing concerned about us inside the house, our second son came lumbering out of the shelter and called in a timid voice from outside the storm shutters, “Mom.”

Because his voice came from alarmingly close range, “Hey! It’s dangerous!” I snapped from beneath the floor cushion. The child seemed to have retreated into the shelter again, but at the noise of another falling illumination flare, he came lumbering back out,

“Mom.” “Hey! Don’t come here!”

Each time I shouted, the footsteps outside the storm shutters retreated, but I thought this night would surely not end peacefully. It was that night when, having suffered from a worsening heart condition for about a week prior—so severe I couldn’t even climb the staircase—I could neither carry my wife to the shelter nor crawl into it myself, thinking that if an air raid came that night, our fate would simply be to be blown away as we were. I felt like joking around. “We mightn’t make it,” I said. “Anything you want to say?” I asked once the child’s footsteps had faded.

“There is.” “Say it.”

“But I won’t say it now.”

The explosive sounds were drawing ever closer at the heart of it all. “In that case, fine!” By the light of the illumination flares, I resolved to catch one final glimpse of my wife’s face and waited for the next explosion before standing up.

“Mom.” The voice came again. “Don’t come out.” “You’ll be okay.” Even as I shouted loudly, I thought that as long as those two in the shelter were safe, the rest— Then came another explosion—the sound of glass warping and rattling. “The rest will work itself out.”

“I guess so.”

That face of my wife—swollen as if with edema and feverish—flashed into view amid the sky’s glare. Her gaze seemed less anxious than transfixed, as though it had pierced through something and now wandered lost. When my wife now calls that time absurd, she speaks of how I looked beneath the floor cushion she saw then; when I call it absurd, I mean how our child would lumber out from the shelter each time danger loomed. On the fourth night after that perilous evening, I forced my wife and children to evacuate to Tohoku, remaining behind alone. Though my heart still faltered, I resolved to stay—reasoning that living solo under air raids would better restore peace of mind than enduring the strain of keeping my family near, and that food shortages would prove manageable so long as wild greens grew visible in the garden. Too weak to open the storm shutters, I crawled from bed to cook rice before retreating again. About a week into this haze of blank sitting and fitful sleep, a friend facing forced evacuation happened to visit. Thus began two men’s life together. Certain my house would eventually burn, I wanted at least to witness its burning. Evacuation could wait until after. Though reduced to ashes, it would be useless—still, this house had long sheltered me. Sentiment left me inert: I cooked rice while my friend handled miso soup and dishes, each taking what we did best. This unexpected tranquility made our morning tea hour—those sixty minutes when we rose and drank together—a happiness I doubted we’d ever reclaim. But even voicing this, my wife could never grasp it.

“Anyway, isn’t it a blessing above all else that our house didn’t burn down? That great Tokyo is gone now, you know. You didn’t see it, so you don’t understand,” I said. “That’s right—I don’t know, after all. That’s why... I keep muttering to myself.”

My wife sat with her head slightly bowed, her eyes bearing the look of deep contemplation. Now that I thought of it, the people of this village knew nothing at all about the terror of air raids or the horrors of war—it was not so much that they were unfeeling as that they were entirely unaware. The fact that there was not a single common ground to harbor shared sentiments regarding this matter meant that even foreigners now found themselves in the same situation. Indeed, one needed patience both to inform the villagers—though there was no means to do so—and to speak with them, now forced to converse only in those corners of their hearts already crowded with trivialities. This clearly divided distance between hearts, these sharply drawn boundaries within our chests—they were known only to us, while remaining unknown to them. It was not human matters like compassion or its absence, but rather a deep ravine—a line of disconnect. This line of disconnect—arising not only among farmers but ordinary citizens—now screamed in disarray through the tangled, overlapping chaos of apathy emerging between countless groups: those burned and those spared by flames, conscripts and stay-behinds, evacuees and host families, all twisting, wrestling, and 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. Even in mutual trust, one received fragments of a shattered heart into their hands, only to fling it away upon realizing, "Is this truly my own heart?" In times like these, moral conviction had no recourse but to first turn its anger inward. When one carelessly shouted in a fit of anger, they ended up raging at others. At something completely unrelated. In truth, people’s hearts were not truly angry at others now. Everyone was angry at this weathered line of disconnect. This was entirely new, a thing just born. Soon this would turn into despair. Next would come hope.

August —— Day Raindrops dripping from the underside of a pumpkin. The suppleness of rain-laden moso bamboo. The smooth drape of the white gourd’s skin. The orange hue of the mountain peaks shifted in intensity from moment to moment. The brightness of the rainbow clearly visible above. A bamboo grove faintly visible through milky streaming mist.

August —— Day Since moving here, the thing that has troubled me most has been the fleas. Even during the day, they would leap onto my lips as I ate. To put it grandly, if I stroked my face, there was the sense they might come tumbling through my fingers—they even leapt onto my eyebrows. As for nighttime—sleep was out of the question. With a clattering din, footsteps resounded here and there.

“I’d take air raids over this!” I shrieked first. “Honestly, it’s just…” “There’s so many of them, so many!” “Yet despite there being creatures that torment humans to this extent, what in the world does it mean that no one has addressed fleas as an issue?” “I’ve yet to see a proper critical essay on fleas, you know.” My wife couldn’t hear a word I said. She was frantically chasing fleas that ping-ponged in all directions. This was a midnight scene, yet when I considered how this torment would persist every night hereafter, it seemed strange how all other important matters scattered into futility. That very point might also be what’s strange. Yet how could something so painful also be absurd? Even as my wife and I—tormented by these fleas at the utmost solemnity of suffering, uttering groans—found it absurd, what frivolous objectivity must exist within us. The philosophy of laughter—now that was indeed a characteristically light and witty conception from Bergson. Otherwise, philosophy would be meaningless. To go on about humanity while forgetting this—and yet, how absurd.

August ——

The next morning, I sat facing Sanemon at the hearth. And gazed at his large, composed physique. What manner of man was this? He hadn’t uttered a word about the fleas—could he truly feel no irritation at all? If so, I thought, this man must be an enigma to us—this body thudding down into swarming fleas and snoring away. To contemplate it felt exhilarating, yet this composure sustaining his spirit with nerves unshaken even by fleas—though forged through childhood training—precisely why, confronted by that military-like vigor rendering our suffering trivial, what could we possibly say? Certainly all would deem us unhealthy. But was that judgment sound? In those signs of decline glimpsed beneath his seemingly robust exterior.—This extended beyond mere fleas. The world kept spinning with such disparity in what people feared and fought—like halting a propeller’s whirl, I longed to glimpse a perfectly still world just once. This vision no soul had yet witnessed—

I wanted to try using a high-speed film projector just once to project rural villages. There exists a law stating gears for perfect rotation cannot be perfect circles. High-speed projectors applied this principle. They say while mathematics held that if A equals B and B equals C then A equals C, now a new system emerged where A and C need not be equal. This partial order concept might herald revolution—but setting that aside, there was beauty in this equality’s absence. Every rural village likely differed where they existed, making high-speed machines necessary. If even one flea—as element A in partial order—could measure this village as one non-circular gear in my mechanism, I would count myself fortunate.

August —— Day

The girls who had gone out to cut grass before dawn returned from the mountains. The figures of the girls carrying grass bundles twice their height resembled livestock peering out from beneath green grass. When two or three of them descended the mountain path in succession, the hillock itself seemed to sway. After forgetting such things, whenever my gaze turned that way again, I thought, "Huh—is that the wind?" When I looked closely, it was yet another mountainous bundle of grass—more girls descending the path in succession.

“Heading out after the sun’s up ain’t work no more,” said Kyūzaemon.

“I’ve always worked twice as much as any man,” he said. “Before I was the poorest in the village, but now I’ve risen to fifth place.”

“In this village, the women work far harder, wouldn’t you say?”

“Ha ha ha ha! Now that you mention it, I suppose that’s true,” the old man laughed before pausing thoughtfully for a moment.

The sixty-eight-year-old man had never once even considered such a thing before. After all, people think of themselves first before answering. However, I too had asked such a careless question. As for the shock that being told one has no work in the village becomes severalfold more insulting than what urbanites might perceive—regrettably, the oversight lay on our part. The old man’s initial "Ha ha ha ha" laughter could not have been mere laughter. It was likely laughter accumulated over sixty-eight years of life.

I turned my attention to this particular old farmer named Kyūzaemon. The reason being that this plain was the main region producing Rikuu 132 rice. When one considered that this rice was generally regarded as Japan’s finest, yet within this plain, the rice from this particular village was said to be more delicious than that from elsewhere in the plain; and further, that Kyūzaemon’s household rice was considered the most delicious even within this village—it would seem he ranked as Japan’s foremost master of rice-growing. No one had yet said such a thing. However, if one pressed ahead to consider it, as long as there existed no other suitable line of reasoning, thinking that way held interest for me alone. Indeed, if I were to direct the same attention, I would like to have secretly settled on thinking that way.

“I’ve liked arithmetic since I was a boy, you know,” said Kyūzaemon. “Even when I watch what today’s youngsters do, they’re still worse than me, you know. I’ve come to think there’s nothin’ to rely on but arithmetic, but sure enough, nothin’ beats that.”

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

The crown of his bald head spread wide, with a scar from a stray bullet that had pierced from behind his ear to the corner of his eye remaining visible. He had enlisted in the Russo-Japanese War at twenty-two and sustained this injury at Port Arthur, but with the military pension from that time as his sole capital, even his destitute life of trekking over mountain passes to sell ropes and straw mats at Rie’s house in the fishing village had since then soared like a climbing eel. His wife Oyumi was Rie’s sister and also became the sister of Sanemon’s mother from the main household. Though Kyūzaemon had come as an adopted son from a neighboring village, he and the main household had long been relatives who required no formal reserve between them.

“There are twenty-eight households in this village, but Sanemon’s house is the main household. “In the past their wealth was the greatest, but now it’s the opposite, I tell ya.” “He drank it all away.” “Ha ha ha ha.” Kyūzaemon said this, then lowered his voice to me: “There’s somethin’ I gotta tell ya—just one thing you need to mind.” “That Sanemon’s a decent man when sober, but once he’s drunk, you’d best slip away from your seat and hide.” “He turns into a right violent drunk, I tell ya.” “I was beaten time and again.” “Lost count how many beatings I took.” “I’ve borne it all patient-like, but when that hulking strongman swings at you, there’s no standing against him.” “Fearsome brute of a man, he is.”

Sanemon was forty-eight. He was a giant of a man. He always sprawled by the hearth and never worked, 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 shaved, he became a handsome man with blue-tinged stubble where traces of drunken violence surfaced. His dashing jawline and mouth—unthinkable for a farmer—were brimming with youthful vigor; with an air utterly removed from fields and paddies, he looked ready to sling his half-coat over his shoulder and head for the morning baths.

“I’ve got no money. “I may not have money, but such things won’t come in. “As long as you can eat, that’s good enough, I tell ya. “Even living like this, I’m being eaten alive. “How about it? Don’t you think so?”

Sanemon once said. At first, thinking it might be a joke, I remained silent, but then he pressed me with an unexpectedly serious gaze and refused to look away. "Actually, I'm in the same boat," I replied with a wry smile. Sanemon did not regret in the slightest his past self who had squandered his fortune on drink. He had indeed tried to act on his thoughts. And from the depths where he had collided with what was to come, he now wore a sharp expression. However, Kyūzaemon was his opposite.

One time, he said to me,

“After all, without money you’re finished,” he once let slip. This too came about because he had tried putting his own thoughts into practice, and the results had manifested themselves exactly as they were. Given that this Kyūzaemon and Sanemon existed in a completely inverted relationship of branch and main households—and as neighbors separated by a mere three-ken-wide vacant lot at that—the sound of drunken violence during their shared drinking sessions must have carried an extraordinary resonance. “If me and Sanemon fall out, the villagers are pleased. But if we reconcile, they pull disgusted faces. Lately, even Sanemon does as I say, so it’s no fun for the villagers, I tell ya.” “Hahaha,” Kyūzaemon laughed, narrowing his eyes. It was a smile as if he had never once flared up in anger.

August --th

The afternoon after rain at Yūka Sansō—a figure sharpening a sickle, raindrops dripping from a straw raincoat. The rhythmic thud of a rope-twisting machine; a thin stream of rainwater trickling between moss-covered garden stones. As the sky gradually cleared, the sound of cicadas emerged from among the raindrops in the bamboo grove. A swirling vortex of flies——

From this village of twenty-eight households, seventeen men had been sent to the front. Only two had 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 boarding steps of the train car. Both were youths with brave-looking, sturdy bodies that were pleasant to behold. “Ahh, I’d love to get a solid six months of sleep,” said one of them, leaning against the train car’s jointed railing, his face bathed in sunlight blazing directly from the front.

“Crawling under bullets—that stuff I could handle just fine. But this sleepiness, I tell ya,” said one of the tall, handsome soldiers.

Just then, an old man who appeared to be an acquaintance from the soldier’s hometown came aboard. When their eyes met, the handsome soldier, “Defeated soldiers have come back, I tell ya,” he suddenly declared with a laugh. The old man laughed, “Ha ha ha!” then gave his shoulder a firm tap. And that was the end of it. It was a characteristically Japanese laugh.

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

"My, it’s been ages," the young woman said to the soldier, beaming with joy. In that smile lingered something reminiscent of a past lover. "We defeated soldiers have come back, I tell ya." Once again, the soldier repeated the same words and laughed. At this, the young woman who had been all smiles suddenly lost her cheer and kept her face lowered, "There’s nothing to be done about it, I tell you." With that sad utterance, she never raised her eyes again. The soldier too—awkwardly distressed at having struck too true a mark—kept blinking rapidly as he turned his face away and said nothing more.

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

“Well, it’s hot out,” he said with a slight bow, leaving it at that. The other soldier beside him remained utterly silent, not uttering a word or laughing, but when they reached his stop, he kicked the tightly packed heavy military bag and shoved it onto the platform. Chokai Mountain, glistening in the sun, trailed its beautiful skirts toward the sea. The Dewa Plain, filled with rice flowers, had likely never before heard such conversations.

I disembarked with the soldiers at Yunohama, where the train tracks met the sea. Watching a soldier's retreating form—shouldering his pack, traversing empty dunes toward home—I climbed that hill alone. Against the ocean's blue expanse clustered the deep crimson blossoms of beach nightshade. Lowering my hips, I folded my legs beneath me. This was the same dune where my wife and I had stood during our wedding summer, when no train yet ran to this shore—here too we'd seen these very flowers blooming.

Twenty years had passed since then, and though the sorrow that shifted with those crimson flowers still lingered within me, it was no longer what it once was. I imagined the soldier’s house beyond the dunes and understood exactly what he would say first when crawling through its entranceway—none of this remained separate from our own reality. I went to the deserted public bathhouse next, removed my clothes, and settled onto a board with protruding wood grain where it dug into my buttocks. Just taking a bath required riding both train and tram out here first—yet sitting on this painfully grooved plank once weekly had become my greatest pleasure now. Splashing about alone filled my heart with indolent fullness until hunger faded from mind. How I longed for a proper cigarette—two weeks already of nothing but mountain-gathered knotweed leaves—when suddenly Sanemon’s lazy streak appeared before me as sunlight hollowing his navel beneath the eaves’ shadow, and I scrubbed harder at the grime.

However, my contemplations on the day of defeat are unlikely to be settled by such things. I don’t want to say anything now.

There was a terrace on the roof of this bathhouse. From there beyond the sand dune to the right stretched the estuary of the Mogami River, where one could see a cape faintly lined with smokestacks. That was Sakata. The prisoner-of-war camp too lay beneath those smokestacks. Until the day before the war ended—so said a certain Nittsu man who had been using prisoners there—

“When it comes to soldiers—every last one of them’s 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 the prisoners—that’s just absurd. It’s not fit for human consumption. It’s so pitiful, so pitiful—I can’t bear to look anymore,” the Nittsu employee said.

Attacking soldiers had become fashionable even in the countryside, but this carried a fervor that transcended mere trendiness. When insults were shouted in a voice that transcended mere abuse, people forgot their resentment and, for some reason, suddenly found themselves listening again.

Among the cart-pulling laborers employed by this Nittsu worker, there was one of those simple, honest types particular to this region. On his way home from work each night, this young man would secretly bring the prisoner he worked with to his own house and let him eat as much as he wanted. Before long, the young man was conscripted. However, shortly after he was conscripted, the war ended, so this time their positions relative to the prisoners were reversed. The prisoners, now free, would go alone to the station every day to meet him, wondering whether the young man would return that day or the next. Just then, one day when they spotted a young man in demobilized attire who had suddenly alighted from the train, “Oh!” The two of them stepped forward and instinctively clasped hands. As I listened, tears welled up in my eyes.

American planes still flew into the skies above Sakata, dropping food to the prisoners below. I had watched these planes too from the terrace here—there were prisoners crushed to death when food parcels pierced through houses. The prisoner would take the food parcels that fell his way to the young man’s house, urging him to eat, but the young man would not consent. No commentary was needed for this story, yet within it lay many things radiating too brilliant a light to leave untouched. Another British prisoner of war, different from that one, upon returning to his home country,

“I will come back to Sakata again without fail.” With just those words, he reportedly returned.

August --

The wife of Kyūzaemon from the branch household was clearly wearing a worried expression today. Rumors had begun spreading that a ship carrying repatriating families had been sunk by an unidentified submarine around the time their eldest daughter was married off to Karafuto, but the eldest son of the main household’s Sanemon was also in Karafuto. The melancholy weighing on both households today was especially profound.

“I can’t even eat breakfast anymore.” “Please forgive me today.” “The poor hospitality—it’s not that I mean any ill will toward you all, you know.”

The wife from the branch household, enveloped by eggplants, corn, and pumpkin fruits in the field, said this as she edged her way in. Sunlight struck a back in autumn hues, and idle clouds drifted over the marsh. Day by day, the rice ears bowed lower. The rice that had escaped the first typhoon hung heavy with later-blooming flower clusters. The yielding softness of chestnut burrs— Sanemon’s wife Kiyoe remained silent as ever, betraying no anxiety. Though rumors split between whether their eldest son deployed to Karafuto might return or had been taken inland—their minds twisted between these possibilities—

“No, he’ll definitely come back.” “It’s the Soviets we’re dealing with, after all.” “They wouldn’t go killing the sons of poor folks like us.” Sanemon said. He had once gone to Karafuto as a migrant worker and mined coal there too, and the scenery of that place would immediately flood back to him. Oyumi, Kyūzaemon’s wife, came to the main household with a face drawn tight, trying to distract from their shared gloom. “Until he comes back and we see him standing at the entrance ourselves, there’s no way to know anything for certain.”

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

This woman, with her steadfastness of having no dreams beyond work—I was struck with admiration upon my first glimpse of her that very night I arrived, and that feeling has persisted ever since. Even if you gathered all the villagers’ gossip, there wouldn’t be a single soul who didn’t praise this Kiyoe. Sanemon was truly a man blessed with a good wife. In this regard, I am far inferior to him. “I’ve really never seen a woman like the mistress here before.” “And as for her features—take a good look.” “If someone dressed her in a formal crested kimono and brought her out, she’d glow with quiet dignity no matter which Tokyo hall you took her to,” I said to my wife.

“Yes, I think so too.” “While we’re here, you should do some studying too. You’ve spent your whole life finding fault with me—one shouldn’t do such things,” I found myself slipping into country dialect. “Honestly, I can’t see anything but your fault-finding.” “You’re such a fault-finder.” “Do you even have any good qualities?” This critic let slip a faint smile.

“I’ve come to feel like I’ve started understanding a bit recently—that this must be what life’s about.” “Life’s damn hard—every single day I get torn apart by critics, from the right and the left, and from within too—by you every day.” “My body’s full of holes; I wonder where on earth there’s a single satisfying part left.” “Absolutely right.” “It’s my nature to take in every bit of criticism people dish out.” “Try swallowing all this yourself.” “I’m a below-zero human being.” “Yet folks still keep hounding me—‘Write something! Write!’” “What’s this supposed to mean?” “There’s gotta be at least one decent thing about me somewhere, don’t you think?”

That I had become slightly sentimental made me sad. “Where? … There isn’t any,” my wife said after a silence. “No—there’s just one.” “What kind of good point?” “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 constitutes poetic refinement. “It’s slightly different from Mr. Bashō’s. “Mine is.” “What was Mr. Bashō’s like?” “That poetic refinement still has an untroubled quality about it—one that finds solace in flowers and birds, you see. “That’s the reason it prospers. “Mr. Bashō must have disliked that part of himself, I wonder. “He’s from Iga Tsuetaki—same village as me. “That’s why I understand that man’s feelings so well. “Kobayashi Hideo knows that part all too well, so he keeps urging me to write an essay on Bashō.”

“Mr. Kobayashi?” My wife looked up. “Hmm. “However, Kobayashi is slightly more progressive than Mr. Bashō.” “From what I’ve observed.” “...” “By the way, Kobayashi once praised you.” “‘Your wife’s nice—so vacant and foolish-looking,’ he said.” “Well, how rude!” My wife blushed. “But unless a woman gets praised for her foolish aspects, she’s no good.” “Anyone would praise clever aspects.” “Such things—both those doing the praising and those being praised—are still lacking.” “Even for me.”

My wife, seemingly unable to stop laughing, bowed her head and giggled. However, I had no time for such things. Immense difficulties were mounting. I could no longer afford to concern myself with someone like my wife. For now, it was slash and disregard.

On the difference between combat conducted at ten thousand meters in the high sky and combat conducted at one hundred meters above the ground—this was not about airplanes. For each and every person—a peaceful battle that must be fought once daily. With one's wife, and friends, and relatives, and acquaintances, and unknown people, and others—those who passed by in the blink of an eye. And oneself. The tactic first required adjusting the range and setting the aim, but the sights were completely off. The joy when the range was properly adjusted—it is only from there that affection can flow.

I recall a certain day. It was on a sunny winter day; as I waited for the train with the crowd at Shibuya’s Teito Line platform, the air raid siren sounded. Soon, a single B29 appeared overhead. The anti-aircraft guns began to roar. With a crack, a shell burst at an altitude just grazing the wings. Then, the unfamiliar young man who was beside me,

“Ah, that’s a perfect altitude,” he murmured.

The story ended there, but that single remark possessed a strange beauty that harmonized with the clear sky. Devoid of hostility, empty of combative spirit—a refined appreciation had unwittingly resonated with the bursting shell. I thought that the war being waged across this entire world was no longer a war. The critical spirit was merely waging its dispassionate death struggle at high altitude. The spiritual connection with the public below had been severed. Despite this, day after day, members of the public perished abruptly and without warning. Certainly, dying may have been an aspect of war, but the core of war was, above all else, hostile intent. Throughout this long war, was there anyone who had truly harbored hostile intent toward what should have been called the enemy? As for matters pertaining to this war, any attempt to wield one’s pen on other fronts without first grasping this core essence would have been futile.

It was a long war where all possessed patriotism yet none held hostile intent. And when forced to align one's very being with either of these two hearts to survive, people must have poured their fervent hopes into something. What vessel received these hopes remained unknown to others—a secret even they themselves couldn't plumb. Yet this act wasn't born of self-preservation. Even if they prayed to mistaken idols, their hearts had already grown incapable of admitting such impurities as error. Whether naming their medium fox or raccoon dog mattered little—with nothing else available, they must have transmuted whatever lay at hand into divine conduit. Here, emptiness could not exist.

Whatever the occupation forces might do or however they might act hereafter, the Japanese people would likely follow along obediently. With hearts quiet and free of lingering regrets, they awaited whatever came next. Whether it meant punishment or anything else, their hearts throbbed at things never before seen, even forgetting their own fates. What manner of thing could have defeated this strong Japan? This could not be called filthiness or apathy. Nor could it be said to have sunk into moral degradation. Yet it remained a fact that something passed through that heavy center where they had piled error upon error during the war, only to repeat them again in defeat. Though unknowable in essence, this brightness piercing through every heart must have been the unforeseen astonishment comprehended through defeat itself. Even so, they still could not easily escape the torment of believing every thought conceived in hindsight to be mistaken.

While listening to sleet rustling through dead leaves piled in our air-raid shelter this winter, there were times I brought Du Fu’s works with me intending to read them one last time. But now, the war has ceased.

What I saw there was a man with a developmental disability. This man was Sanemon’s second son. He alone sustained this impoverished farming household that barely managed to eat each day—this twenty-three-year-old man with a developmental disability. His name was Tensaku; he would commute early each morning to a white clay factory half a ri from the station and receive a wage of one hundred yen. This was why Sanemon could afford to idle about. Tensaku’s physique resembled his father’s—he was a giant of a man. Quiet and docile, he was an exceptionally filial son who worked diligently and maintained a calm nature that caused no discomfort. There could be nothing closer to divinity than a person who caused no harm to others. His work required labor equivalent to three men’s strength—digging white clay from the mountains that became raw material for Takeda Pharmaceutical’s stomach medicine. He had worked continuously through the war just as he did now, but how many people’s stomachs must have been filled by the white clay Tensaku dug out? This white clay was Normozan—the substance that absorbed alcohol and eliminated drunkards. Being developmentally disabled, Tensaku knew nothing of the war. After handing over all his wages to Sanemon for liquor and receiving four or five cigarettes in return, he would beam with satisfaction. On rare days off, he would pull weeds, cut grass, and clean the yard, but nothing brought him greater joy than playing by leading a calf and goat around. When his twelve-year-old brother did something mischievous, they would pin it on Tensaku and pretend not to know. And in his place, Tensaku would be scolded by Sanemon. I would wake at five, but the boy from the neighboring house—who sometimes worked at the same white clay factory—

“Hey, Tensaku—!”

A voice calls out invitingly from beyond the fence. Then, “Right.”

Tensaku's energetic voice responded—like a once-daily utterance—cutting through the morning mist. Looking at Tensaku's truly serene eyes—apparently content without any resentment—became another pleasure for me. This was the most grudge-free existence among humans crawling about on the ground. One could say nearly all others lived bearing traces of resentment toward someone somewhere—yet while they did so, aerial combatants waged their precise, self-oblivious death struggles above, while below lay a single peaceful scene: a man with a developmental disability digging stomach-medicine clay, untouched by any memory of war.

In the Hida region, when a child with a developmental disability was born, they revered them as gods incarnate—a custom I found good to have existed in at least one such place.

September ——

At the branch household of Kyūzaemon, his second son—a machinist of exceptional skill—had returned from the city after his factory closed down and was now idling about. He was the same age as the developmentally disabled man from the main household. While Tensaku formed the linchpin supporting his family’s livelihood, this inverse dynamic in the branch household made the equilibrium between both families seem slightly askew. Kyūzaemon’s second son had lived alone in the city since age thirteen, making it impossible for him to take up farming now. The eldest son transported an oxcart laden with gravel along the straight road from the station, his face creased with worry over his brother’s unemployment. On cheeks that had just weathered the first Bon memorial for a child lost to measles, stubble grew. The young bride kneaded wall plaster underfoot, her squelching footsteps chilling the air before a sudden rain swept in. The chorus of insects swelled.

There was no one in Sanemon’s large house. Beside the hearth where firewood smoldered hung a pot of medicinal water, while flies crawled diagonally across the coarse straw mat’s woven patterns. In the charred hollow of the pear-shaped hearth edge lay a tilted teacup. A well-washed navy work jacket riddled with patches hung on a thick door polished smooth by hand contact, and the electric lamp swayed faintly in the wind. In the trough stood shade-dried seeds lined up beside the lattice; through the water jar’s light-opening seeped persimmons’ vivid blue in thick paint-like clarity. The buzzing of flies’ wings filled the air. The lush veins of summer vegetables that had burst forth from between bamboo joints in floorboards strewn with potatoes—while outside, rain alternated between clearing and falling.

The temple priest, Mr. Sugai Kodō, brought us ohagi rice cakes. My room—this inner chamber of Sanemon’s—apparently marked his first visit in fifty years since he had come here as a young acolyte to chant sutras when the house still retained its former grandeur. He gazed at the garden and remarked, “Well, well.”

Then, suddenly noticing a single whimsical pumpkin dangling at eye level on the tip of a pole protruding over the garden pond,

“Ha ha ha ha!” he roared with laughter. According to Mr. Kodō’s account, the garden’s splendid stones and trees—unmatched in the village—had all been swindled away by Nabei from the neighboring village. Now, in the wake of that destruction, the expression of that solitary pumpkin dangling there must have matured into genuine laughter for the priest—a natural humor born of circumstance. This was the first time I had heard such laughter. The sophistication and depth of nonsense must refer to this lonely pumpkin’s ample posterior swaying precariously. This, too, resembled Tokugawa Musei’s artistry. The refined elegance of Musei’s craft truly seemed like a droplet fallen from defeated Japan.

September ——

For the first time, I split a watermelon. It is said that this year’s climate is running about twenty days behind the usual.

Kyūzaemon came to meet me every morning around nine o'clock. He had no business here; he simply came to visit. Even when I had been in Tokyo, there had been nothing as agonizing as having my morning time wasted. And whenever this old man appeared, I would remain trapped there until noon without fail. I was enduring here what was most painful to myself. I used to make it a habit to consider myself dead for the day whenever someone came in the morning, but here it happened every day. So lately, I had taken to pretending I was attending a lecture series and decided to learn about agriculture from this old man. Even so, whenever I thought that as long as I remained here, this professor’s attendance would continue every day, I couldn’t help but sigh.

“If it’s troubling you, just say you’re studying now and refuse him,” my wife said, having noticed my secret sigh.

“I’m weak-willed, aren’t I? I just can’t bring myself to say that. When I see that smiling face, I strangely find myself thinking, ‘Why not just let this old man kill me?’ You turn him away.” “Well then, I’ll tell him next time he comes.” “But wait a second. There are times when what that old man says makes me want to secretly take notes,” I continued, “but if I jot them down on the spot, my occupation will be immediately found out. That’s what’s problematic. When it comes to fine numerical details, I just keep forgetting them all.”

“But if you find him that enjoyable, there’s no harm in meeting him, is there?” “But there’s no electricity in this room at night, and with these fleas, sleep’s impossible. When morning comes, that old man plants himself here till noon, and by the time I snatch an afternoon nap—being asleep then—it doesn’t count as my time anymore. I’ve gone missing in action. The only moment I feel alive is each morning when I wake and see the color of pickled eggplant. That’s when I jolt awake.”

“I’m truly at my wit’s end with these fleas too.” “Just for one day—I wish I could sleep somewhere without fleas.” Even as we whispered such conversations between the two of us, yet another anxiety had begun to seep into us. It was that my wife, who had evacuated here in April, had transferred our meager bank passbook—due to the bank’s destruction—to another Tokyo bank from here, and it still had not been returned from Tokyo since April. Due to the fact that we had not obtained a single penny from April through September and the uncertainty of how much longer this would continue, our journey as a family of four without funds became akin to beggars—the mere thought of it sent a chill down my spine. The money I had brought with me was already nearly gone. At present, I could scarcely conceive of a way to rid ourselves of these fleas. Even when everyone was similarly struggling, facing this anxiety where devising a way to borrow from others proved impossible, there was no way to seek help. Amidst complete strangers, these days of day after day’s relentless rains.

September—— Rice distribution day—this day that should have brightened one’s spirits—held the opposite truth for our family. The distribution center lay four kilometers away, making it impossible to carry back two bushels of rice from there. Even had we sought laborers, none could be found in this shortage of hands—not a single soul with time to spare. Halfway to the station and halfway back—my eldest son and wife would make the journey together. During their absence, I read the “Mind Cannot Be Grasped” chapter from Dōgen’s works. This came from the Iwanami edition compiled by Mr. Etō—who was then evacuated to Niigata—from where his wife would occasionally visit Priest Sugai’s temple. The Dōgen collection too was something I had received from the priest, who himself had received it from the author.

“The other day, Mrs. Etō came by and told me, ‘Just once, I want to eat my fill of white rice to my heart’s content.’” “To think that Japan’s foremost Buddhist scholar should be left wanting for food—what a disgrace for the Buddhist community!” Priest Sugai once vented his indignation to me. My wife was plagued by fleas; this lady was in the midst of rice shortages. I copied the two characters “summer retreats and winter years” from Dōgen’s Zen writings into my notebook. It referred to the number of years one had trained through summer retreats in monastic communities, as noted at the end. Others: Kihai—(a master’s single bow in response to a disciple’s triple bow) Uro—(referring to earthly desires) Kikai—(the material world) Akikata—(the western direction)

Kihai – (a teacher’s single bow in response to a disciple’s three bows and nine prostrations) Uro – (referring to earthly desires) Kikai – (the material world) Akikata – (the western direction) Having copied these five terms, I found myself wavering over selecting a title for my next essay collection when Kyūzaemon appeared once more. I closed my book, and we sat facing the bamboo grove in silence, our eyes fixed on the joints of the stalks. The characters for “summer retreats and winter years” and “earthly desires” drifted between the bamboo segments. As “earthly desires” gradually grew more compelling, I covertly mouthed the phrase while studying Kyūzaemon’s face.

“About the priest—just a moment,” Kyūzaemon said.

Today he had come on an errand from Priest Sugai. This Kyūzaemon had long been selling soup and bamboo-wrapped rice cakes from a small hut next to the main hall to visitors coming from near and far to the Shakadō at the priest’s temple. That became the capital and reason he amassed wealth. That is why even Kyūzaemon cannot hold his head up before the priest. Ever since that priest began visiting my place—bringing ohagi with him for casual visits—Kyūzaemon’s treatment toward me gradually changed as well; what had previously been sitting with his knees splayed and hands clasped together now progressed to him placing both hands atop neatly aligned knees. This was thanks to the Shakadō prayer hall. Now that I think of it, our family has received unexpected assistance from the Shakadō prayer hall at Priest Sugai’s temple. It began when my wife—who had never once been to this village’s Shakadō prayer hall—took a train from her hometown city to visit it, and on that occasion of buying bamboo-wrapped rice cakes at Kyūzaemon’s stall, casually asked whether any farming households nearby rented out rooms. This was how I came to be given this six-tatami-mat space. Even now, whenever I pass over the Shakadō prayer hall nestled in the mountains, I feel as though someone whispers, “Observe this village well”—and partly for this reason, the desire to return quickly to Tokyo has yet to arise within me.

“The priest tells me, ‘Why don’t we build your house here in this village?’” “Find yourself a spot you like somewhere and let us know.” “Do that, and the villagers’ll build it there for you, see.”

The proposal was so abrupt that I found myself at a loss for words. “However, that alone is more than enough,” I told Kyūzaemon, wishing to decline with deep gratitude. However, in this village there exists one place with an excellent view. That place will not leave my sight. That single spot—the place emitting a mysterious light—has been drawing me in from the start.

It was a place called Kura-nori—a ten-minute climb from my room up the mountain behind. The view from there felt exactly like straddling a horse’s back—to the right beyond the plain stretched the Dewa Sanzan mountains—Haguro, Yudono, and Gassan in their hat-shaped row—while ahead towered Mount Chōkai. And directly below my left hand lay the sea—visible through cliffs formed by grasslands spread like wings on either side—appearing as a triangular wedge carved deep into a canyon. But what particularly captivated me was how this sea seemed to peer back from our side—some twelve hundred years prior, a single massive Buddha’s head had come bobbing across the waves to land upon this very shore where it now gazes outward. To this head they attached a body, creating a Shakyamuni Buddha statue nearly ten feet tall—marking its enshrinement not only in Nishime Village’s Shakadō but its transformation into an enduring site drawing pilgrims by train from far and wide. Though bearing vaguely Burmese features, legend claims those who worship this Buddha never want for rice—in peaceful times, they say, worshippers filled the hall daily. Even Kyūzaemon—renowned rice cultivator—found his bamboo-wrapped rice cakes thriving under this Buddha’s lingering radiance. All of it—every last detail—remained a sublime vista veiled within the sea’s ever-watchful expression.

After alighting at Uzen-Mizusawa Station and walking half a ri, I had come to want to build a room with a hearth at one particular spot here in Kuranori—at my own expense.

September―― When I mentioned building a room to my wife, she was more enthusiastic than I was. However, there, carpenters’ wages had to be paid in rice. In that case, I had already half given up on the room. As for vegetables too, this village grew only enough to meet their own needs. The village consisted entirely of farmers specializing in rice cultivation, making it quite a struggle to buy vegetables. Fish came from the sea beyond the mountains to be sold, but driven by their need for rice, the fishermen first traded them with farmers in exchange for rice and brought what remained to us.

One morning, as I was catching fleas on the veranda, a farm woman suddenly came in from the back and babbled something incomprehensible to me. When I had my wife translate it, it turned out she wanted me to write a résumé for her child to join the white clay factory. In return for writing it on the spot, she tossed one shō of rice onto the veranda and left—the first time my writing had ever contributed to our livelihood. The boy who comes early each morning from the neighboring house to call for Tensaku is the one whose résumé I wrote. When that voice reached my bedding, I too began rising. From there, we also started receiving vegetables from her. She said that if her rice ran out, she’d give a shō or two for free. This farm woman was called Sōzaemon’s Aba, but when my wife asked to buy rice in exchange for money, she waved her hand side to side,

“Don’t need money, don’t need it. I’ll give rice—I’ll give it,” Aba said. When a story became too good to be true—and we couldn’t simply go along with it—this stroke of fortune might as well have been extinguished here. “What a problem. When she says that, I can’t even buy rice,” my wife lamented. However, having caught a glimpse—as if assessing someone’s financial means—that there was indeed rice over there, I laughed all the more, proudly boasting of my writing’s power to my wife.

"But I could write a résumé too," my wife said resentfully. "But somehow that man must have sized me up as someone who could write." "That Aba." "The one who made her size me up was none other than me." "If they find out I'm writing novels from this,I won't get any more rice you know." "If that happens what should we do?" "The money from the bank—who knows when it'll arrive—and even the kimonos are dwindling.I don't know what to do."

“If the money runs out, I’ll send a telegram to Kawabata.” “There’s still some left.”

My wife seemed relieved.

A troubling situation had arisen in this village. Last year, when rice requisition quotas shifted from village-wide to individual allocations during the harvest season, the authorities had ordered them to supply as much as possible—promising a daily ration of four gō in return. The villagers resolved to comply and fulfilled their quotas completely before any other villages could. Yet instead of four gō, there had been no ration at all. The result left them forced to produce rice only to end up with none for themselves, compelling them to rescue households across the entire village that could no longer sustain themselves. Now voices lamenting the rice shortage—having reached the limits of their remaining strength—were swelling everywhere. Their sole hope lay in the autumn’s new rice harvest. Faced with deceptive requisitions carried out under the “For Victory” slogan, they hurled accusations at the honor gained by only one man—the requisition officer heading the implementation association—in the visceral certainty that he alone had profited from this fraud. The target of their criticism—the union leader—was from Sanemon’s wife’s maiden family. Moreover, this union leader—who had ranked fifth in village tax payments alongside Kyūzaemon at matching amounts and opposed him relentlessly—was finally surpassed by Kyūzaemon that year.

“I know everything,” Kyūzaemon said to me. “That union leader Hyōemon went and reported me to the police box, you know. They said I was selling bamboo-wrapped rice cakes at the temple, so I got summoned there. Since they’d given permission for temple sales, I’d been selling them after fulfilling my quota completely. When I admitted ‘Yes, I sold them,’ the police—well now—took pity on me. ‘You shouldn’t do such things these days,’ they said. ‘You know who came reporting you?’ So I told them ‘Yes, I know.’ Hahahaha—he was the informer himself! I know every last thing these villagers are up to, I tell you. Only me. They entrusted me with the rice mill’s ledger, see? I’ve made separate detailed copies of everything. Where the rice stocks lie hidden, who’s pretending poverty while hoarding grain—only I know it all! Hahahaha! I’ve kept silent all along, playing dumb, but gods and buddhas do exist. So when they curse me behind my back, I just say ‘You’ll understand someday—everything’ll come out when I’m dead.’ That’s all I say about it. Hahahaha.”

Kyūzaemon laughed once more and then afterward repeated, “Gods and Buddhas do exist.” Raising his face, he added, “I’m disliked, you know. Everyone just bad-mouths me, but the time will surely come when they understand.” He concluded firmly, “I’ve kept detailed records of everything.”

This old man’s greatest strength lay above all in confidence.

September --

Before dawn broke, the calf and kid were eating the straight bundles of miscanthus grass that Kiyoe had cut and brought. The morning sun pierced through the loosened bundles of cut grass emitting a fierce scent; the broken leaves' vivid green plunged sharply into the beasts' mouths. Dew on the grass washed teeth with an indescribable freshness. Steam rose from the compost heap, and through it came into view the magnificent sight of a great multitude of rice plants with drooping ears. The sound of water circulated around the house. The glare from the water’s surface flickered against the undersides of unripe persimmon leaves. In the kitchen lay a red stingray covered with taro leaves.

No sooner had the sky cleared than rain came sweeping in from the sea.

A farm woman wearing a straw raincoat swept the garden. A fisherwoman carrying baskets of conger eels and stingrays descended the mountain pass where chestnut trees grew. In the rain, a circle of farm women gathered one by one to peer at these fish baskets being bartered for rice. Since rice had become scarce everywhere now, the disappointed fisherwoman came around to our veranda and finally spread open her fish basket. “Money would be fine too. If there were thread, that would be even better,” the fisherwoman said in a sorrowful voice.

We purchased conger eels and red stingrays，carried them by train to Tsuruoka City，and received greens in exchange from relatives there．Here in the village and in the city they traded contrasting specialty goods，but obtaining vegetables with money here proved so difficult．Rice，of course—miso and soy sauce too—could not be bought with money．Despite this，the reason our family of four could barely manage to eat vegetables was that we occasionally received them unexpectedly from neighbors，or Kiyoe，knowing our situation，quietly gave some to us．My wife expressed gratitude here and there every day，and when I secretly listened，she did nothing but offer thanks all day long．If she kept expressing gratitude like that，she would lose where her heart resided and end up tormenting herself instead．In reality，it was merely that we didn’t go around begging like paupers—the fact remained that we survived on what others gave us．People’s kindness was something to be grateful for，but when it persisted，one came to anticipate it—and the heart rotted．

“If only I could buy things with money, how wonderful that would be.” “I’m tired of saying thank you,” my wife sighed to me yet another day. When giving us things, they weren’t imposing any sentimental obligation. They gave with a natural beauty, but precisely because of that, we were all the more troubled. I wanted to walk once with my head held high.

“I won’t let you do anything that’d trouble you, I tell you.”

And so, Kyūzaemon’s murmured words had now become lies in precisely the opposite sense. That joy when thoughts break free from reality—such a thing truly exists within people. Those who grant others the joy of forgetting kindnesses—they alone embody the true beauty of having bestowed such favors. Before long I would return to Tokyo, become an ingrate, and yet find myself growing ever more grateful to them.

To understand the work of farming households, I thought it better to fix upon a specific individual and focus one’s gaze exclusively on them. I observed Kiyoe’s actions—this woman moved without a moment’s rest throughout the day. Though this should have been the agricultural off-season before harvest, Kiyoe was already preparing winter pickles one moment and roasting soybeans in a large pot for soy sauce the next; then she cut grass, fertilized fields, cleaned every corner of their spacious house, prepared meals handled the family’s accumulated laundry—all before working late into the night on mending tasks. She combed her hair around 3:30 a.m., lit the stove when finished and prepared breakfast—from what I observed her sleep amounted to three hours at most perhaps four What astonishing labor.

“You should take a break.” There were times when I joked around and served tea，but Kiyoe said she disliked tea. People called it absurd—still being impressed by farmers’ labor now. Because it was an established fact. Yet if one ceases renewing admiration for what’s fixed，those fixed things will rot. Unless you recognize that deeming relentless labor natural embodies profound cruelty，you cannot grasp life’s essence. In these times when cities supposedly faced rural vengeance，perhaps goodness resided solely in that mental upheaval from sensing retaliation. Anxiety，turmoil，chaos—these betrayed urbanites’ lingering vestiges of untarnished morality. Still，sleep weighed on me. The fleas permitted no more than three hours’ rest each night.

The labor of us who held pens took the form of play, yet people still did not consider this labor. Truly, without labor in the form of play, from where could abstraction ever arise? And without that abstraction, where could modern freedom obtain the means to grow? I sometimes contrasted my labor with the astonishing labor of farmers and pondered them against each other—no, in fact, there were even moments when I thought my work did not fall short of theirs.

To a Korean writer, one day, I once divulged my thoughts on Mallarmé’s poetics as literature’s northernmost concept. This occurred when independence debates were growing increasingly strident. “Mallarmé secretly believed that even if all humanity perished, as long as a single line of this poem remained, our species’ existence would have been justified.” “That’s Symbolism’s fundamental posture,” I continued. “If you construe art as humanity’s symbolic manifestation in this way, then independence for you must unequivocally belong to politics.”

The Korean writer remained silent, his eyes gleaming. However, this writer had already departed for Korea.

Am I wrong to think that even as all of Japan toils with sweat-drenched labor, it might one day serve to compel some single poet to write but a single line that bears living witness?

Were the plovers along Lake Biwa's waves not heard crying, my heart would perish remembering antiquity. (Hitomaro)

What a beautiful line of poetry. Has there ever been a single line that surpassed this? Even were this nation to perish as it stands, what else could serve as proof we had lived through it? To these I would add:

Stormy seas— Now this poem stands truly desolate in its beauty. Could it truly have transformed so beautifully from what it was just last year? I wondered. In such moments when I suddenly contemplate myself, however moved I might be by others, sadness instantly overwhelms me. This writer's haunting melancholy—whether I dwell deep in mountains or receive endless gifts—finds no solace whatsoever. The loneliness only intensifies as days pass by. There remains something piercing through me.

Climbing the hill steeped in sorrow—flowering brambles (Buson) There is a reason why everyone recites this. This haiku is something that will perish along with people. That which perishes along with those who till, love, sleep, and eat is still nothing but beauty. In a world where human figures have vanished, it is that which resolutely leaves behind a single symbol—like claw marks emitting an eerie light toward what comes next, presenting a mystery. That has still not yet appeared in Japan. As long as people have existed, there must have been some trace of ancient scripts somewhere—though perhaps only fragments.

However, I will write about rice. About the rice that people here still devour ceaselessly even as attempts are made to eradicate it. About the rice they still fix their eyes upon unwaveringly, no matter how much they may loathe themselves. This is not about farming villages. It concerns the flames—eerie and rising—from valleys, rivers, mountain folds. I want to write of Jigokudani. In this unparalleled hellish moment, these figures chasing rice without discerning the flames' hues—this proves people themselves are flames. Until what burns within us extinguishes, fire will mirror fire.

September ――

It was raining. “On days like this when rain falls,” Kyūzaemon told me, “during those critical hours when rice blossoms are forming grains—mornings and evenings must stay cool while noontime needs proper heat blazing down.” “Rainy weather like today makes grains shrink—where fifty thousand per shō would do right, you’ll need seventy thousand to fill one shō.” “Means poor harvest.”

If you sow a single grain of rice in the ground, it will yield three hundred grains. To obtain fifty thousand grains per shō required one hundred sixty-six grains of seed; however, here where two koku per tan was standard yield, the requisition amount had been set at two koku per tan. In that case, there wouldn’t even be seed rice for the next year. However, not all households could yield two koku. Many households yielded only one koku seven to eight to per tan. At best, two koku two to three to. Under this system, households without enough had no choice but to borrow two to three *to* from those with surplus to cover their deficit. Once they completed their requisition payments, even the successful households ended up losing their rice—this had now become the village’s collective cry. On top of that, if there were no promised rations, going around daily to borrow rice for their own consumption became a problem of where to find lenders. Yet among these were households—those with sufficient manpower and know-how—that had yielded as much as two koku five to six to. This household alone had completed its requisitions, lent rice to others, and still kept two or three *to* to ease their own livelihood—but now people had even begun targeting this remaining stock. The one being targeted was Kyūzaemon of the branch family. Sanemon of the main family served as de facto leader of the borrowing group, and since the poor tenant farmers used this hearth as their gathering place, grievances always flared up around its fiery glow.

“They say communism’s coming soon—that’ll be something.” Such remarks would occasionally drift from beside this fire, though who spoke them remained unclear. Those who gathered at Kyūzaemon’s house belonged to the self-cultivating faction—the upper faction. Since this house doubled as a sake distribution point, even the color and burning manner of the hearth fire differed from Sanemon’s. Here stood a fortress stocked with both rice and alcohol. Now Kyūzaemon’s storehouse found itself targeted even by this upper faction. Whenever the faintest drunken murmur escaped those walls, noses around every hearth would immediately twist toward the sound.

“Hmph, where’ve they hidden it?”

And so, Sanemon’s gathering appeared restless. I often witnessed such scenes on rainy days, but the look in the men’s eyes at those times differed slightly from when rice was involved—there was a madness to it.

“Given how they’re carrying on, they must’ve been drinking nonstop since morning,” one man said. After falling silent and listening intently, another man blurted out, “Well, that’s just how it is, must’ve been.”

Another man, fidgeting restlessly, drank tea in despair beside him while Sanemon kept striking his pipe against the hearth edge. When the drunken voices grew slightly louder, his face twisted with bitterness and turned pale, rheum collecting at the upturned corners of his eyes beneath his forehead. Few faces displayed dissatisfaction as blatantly and willfully as Sanemon’s when displeased. Yet when this tension eased, his features softened into an expression so gentle that even a child might have crawled close. Within the depths of his countenance—where demonic roof tiles clashed with Buddha’s visage in a single face—lingered something of Nishihaguro Gongen, that deity within whom Sadato and mountain ascetics and princes and bandits sat cross-legged in chaotic congregation. This place was an ancient battlefield, but his expression too became an ancient battlefield—one where souls mingled without conflict.

September ――

Rain fell before my eyes ten meters away while the sky here shone brilliantly. A sudden downpour swept down from the mountain like a curtain. Layered waves of rice ears bowed in swells—the synchronized footsteps of a group of anglers crossing the mountain, rods aligned. The pointed tips of their rods quivered as they caught the sunlight. Through the nodes of white-powdered green bamboo, amidst the swaying procession of fishing poles, my child walked among them. This child was now absorbed in fishing, but despite hardly ever catching anything, the shrimp bait he kept buying kept getting stolen. Whether fish stole them or people did remained unclear until one night when I boiled and ate some, finding them far more delicious than shore fish. Since then, the occasional thief became none other than myself. Whether vegetables grew scarce or mountain-shadowed sea fish disappeared—these things no longer needed fearing. Did my daily life truly teeter on such instability that I would thrill over this? Yet it was true—since discovering those bait shrimp, courage had welled within me. Cupping a translucent inch-long shrimp in my hand, it resembled a small Buddha quelling flames. How had I come to see all things pantheistically as Buddhas lately? Japanese thought seemed to have always halted there.

Now, what this village needed most was, first and foremost, rice—beyond that, salt and cloth scraps. Kiyoe had left home early that morning and hadn’t shown her face once because, my wife said, she’d gone to a household in the neighboring village that owned early-ripening rice fields to help with the harvest.

“They’re already harvesting?” I asked in surprise. Since Sanemon and his group had no rice to eat, they would cut rice from households with early-ripening fields and borrow from there to sustain themselves until their own harvest time, so it was explained. Ah—if such a free rice-borrowing system existed, I thought, one could manage without panicking.

To compensate for shortages caused by excessive requisitions，it seemed a great many farming households were now becoming dependent on others’ fields—but be that as it may，this year’s rice had already emerged from the paddies．The fields before my eyes，where earth’s life surged forth from defeat’s depths，raised a voiceless clamor，appearing to call out to one another．What had not existed until last year was being born．Lumbering belches，blinking eyes，shaking manes—and then they were reaped away with such swiftness．The cruelty of insatiable people．

Sanemon developed an abscess on his leg, suffered through a sleepless night, and today was making the long trek to see a doctor.

Kyūzaemon had spent the morning wavering between planting eggplants or potatoes next year—sprinkling alum on the eggplant field would allow continuous cropping. That night came sugar rations of twenty monme per household. From six until eleven in the evening, they made everyone line up before them—measuring portions, adjusting amounts—until discovering a five hundred monme shortage forced them to reclaim all shares, remeasure everything, and reduce the rations again. This was what happened when even a drop of sweetness reached the village.

September ――

A muddy path where rainwater pooled in horse hoof prints reflected drifting 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 waited while dozing. Then, at that moment, an oxcart loaded with soybeans could be seen stuck motionless in the middle of a distant muddy mire at the field's edge. At the voices crying “That’s it! That’s it!”, they all opened their eyes and looked. But no matter how much they poked or beat it, the ox showed no sign of moving. The crowd, having lost patience, grew restless and made show of beating it whenever it moved only to stop again. No sooner had the oxcart shifted slightly than it halted once more. “Ugh, this is infuriating!” cried a farmer woman. “Stubborn beast!” shouted a woman in work pants, stamping her feet. Someone darted out on a bicycle. Others turned back home hungry. Amid the fuming crowd’s wait, the ox lumbered forward at an excruciating crawl. After waiting three hours total, my wife and I finally put five sho of beans into a bag and trudged back along the one-ri muddy path. With nothing to block the view on this straight road, no matter how far we walked, the distance never seemed to shrink. We left home at ten and returned at three-thirty. Since yesterday’s dinner, I’d eaten nothing—the sandy, crushed beans felt like a cruel mockery of my hunger. To make matters worse, those damned bugs had already devoured half of them.

Kyūzaemon’s eldest son’s wife was quiet and hardworking. The previous morning, she had returned to her family home about two ri away for their autumn festival. After staying overnight, she came back laden with lily roots, glutinous rice, red beans, arare rice crackers, tochi mochi, and white mochi—then secretly brought them through the back entrance. My wife beamed with gratitude and tried to hand her a paper package in thanks, but she absolutely would not accept it. Silently and barefoot, she came, thudded a bundle onto the veranda, then wordlessly strode back the way she came. She always had cheeks flushed a soft reddish hue, a round face, a bosom as full as Kichijōten’s, and fresh, dewy ankles.

The wife of Sanemon’s eldest son came only at night to sleep because her husband had been deployed, but during the day she would return to her parents’ home from morning onward. When Kiyoe went to the bride’s parents’ home, she found the bride alone writhing in abdominal pain in the empty house. Across both main and branch households’ bride contests and son contests, the one currently holding first place would likely be the idiot Tensaku.

September ―― The green persimmons steadily swelled. A fern’s leaves trembled ceaselessly under the battering raindrops. A figure in a straw raincoat fished for crucian carp in the swollen river. The sound of a mountain dove cooing “hoo-hoo”. The daytime electric light reflected on an eggplant lying on the wooden floor. A horse-drawn cart carrying evacuees’ belongings could be seen returning from the forest. A frog leapt over rain-soaked garden stones. A carp swam through the rain’s ripples, its back half-arched above the water’s surface—

Stone blocks of noble quality maintained their thousand-year-old antiquity across every weathered face. On each roof, five or six crossed finials jutted upward through misty rain that blurred and billowed within the enveloping bamboo grove. The rasp of sawing wood persisted.

September ―― The rain did not cease. This rain dealt a blow to the rice plants. Unless the sun shone brightly there for even an hour, the rice stalks risked growing thick without bearing grain. A gloom born of this predicament filled the entire village. Kiyoe sat facing the light at the entrance to the wooden-floored area, prying snails open with a needle. Sanemon had gloomily retreated to his bedroom since morning and fallen asleep. To the hoo-hoo calls of mountain doves, a cow kept lowing in rising tones that mimicked air raid sirens.

In the afternoon—amid a full pile of rain-drenched green perilla, Kiyoe plucked its leaves one by one. A fragrance drifted through the air, and in the pale light filtering through the window, the leaves glistened with moisture. The blueness of perilla seeped rainwater into the floorboards at dusk; rain frogs croaked; the heavy dampness of perilla fruits piled in a basket washed the surroundings; night fell as their scent lingered. Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo—the rain persisted, mountain doves still calling. Unsettled, oppressive night rain—

September ――

It appeared every farming household was increasingly running out of rice. Households subsisting on potatoes and pumpkins increased in number. At times like these, households selling potatoes were immediately known to have rice. During last year’s requisition, they had pretended not to have what they did—and by now, it was coming to light. The lack of rice was now even transforming into a kind of pride; faced with the complaints of those going around borrowing rice, they had to conceal even what they did possess—there was also the vexation of their hurried footsteps. From the resentment gathering toward households known to have rice came an anguish that refused detachment—or rather, the stiffened expressions of those insisting their own homes alone lacked it. Even as these manifestations wandered through the rain, the village communal rice mill persisted in uncanny silence, its doors shut tight with a stillness that surveyed where and how much remained or didn’t remain, maintaining an eerie closure throughout.

September ――

Looking up at the early morning sky and discerning signs of clear weather through the clouds, even the usually silent Kiyoe uttered a single remark—

“It’s hazy. The weather,” she said. However, that too soon grew overcast.

The grievances that had persisted alongside the inclement weather of the past two or three days now converged upon Hyōemon, the cooperative head who had plunged the village into such suffering. The group of poor farmers gathered around the hearth at Sanemon’s house were each hurling abuse at him. Sanemon’s desperate scheme to overcome this crisis of Kiyoe’s family home being attacked was, before anyone else, to attack him himself. The fat compressed by his wife and the village had seeped into his face in a reddish-black hue, his beard growing wild.

“We’ll die. “We’ll die.” Such voices too escaped from the mouths of housewives in the rice-less borrowing group. Kyūzaemon’s front and back entrances had been under continuous siege by these housewives, but now it was no exaggeration—their “We’ll die” became a moan in the rain. The signs of a storm brewing since midnight grew strong—a restless sky pregnant with eerie warmth, the clammy night wind creeping along the floorboards. From within the hearth ashes where everyone had fallen asleep and no one remained, the buried log began to flicker and burn alone once more. Only that flame remained awake. In the spacious Buddhist altar room, the perilla leaves Kiyoe had finished plucking at dusk still held moisture in their curled hollows, glistening bluish-green and exuding their fragrance.

I could not sleep, so I got up many times to look at the rain clouds. Turning my back to the wind that roared dully like black velocity as clouds grew ever darker in their swiftness, sitting alone by the hearthside, there suddenly floated up Valéry's words I had once read: "The raw truth is more false than falsehood itself." What a violent detonation this was! It was finally coming, I thought. Not knowing what was coming, yet thinking it would come regardless, I sat watching the flame.

The raw truth is more false than falsehood itself. (Valéry)—This statement is indeed a profound truth. However, to attain this profundity—how many lies we must tell! How immeasurable that we must accept as truth those lies of others which seem like truth! Even so—they say Valéry has died. Its veracity remains unclear—a rumor borne on the wind. I hope it’s a lie.

September ――

In the fierce storm, the bamboo grove roared, and the cedar grove twisted into contortions as it bored wind tunnels. The mountainside fluttered the undersides of leaves as it swayed right and left, while the rice plants in the plain shrouded by dense clouds raised their final cry. The head felt heavy and painful. The cow’s ceaseless lowing sounded like a siren. In the hearth, the fire crept over the ashes and the pot wouldn’t boil. The sound of storm shutters being opened and closed again. The wind howled madly, blowing the rain apart so it did not strike the door.

In this rural village where rice had disappeared everywhere and voices openly declaring "We'll die, we'll die" were audible, now came this rain. The master of the house where I was staying went out to borrow rice from his eldest son's bride's family. Taking advantage of this foul weather that made labor impossible, Kiyoe, the housewife, went to the station to fetch miso and then spent the entire day attending something called "Buddha's Mouth" nearby. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, she would go to consult the shamaness about the worries she hesitated to dwell on. As for these secret worries of Kiyoe's, I could more or less imagine what they were—but once she returned, I wanted to have my wife quietly ask her about them. Since Kiyoe probably wouldn't tell me herself.

The malicious curiosity to secretly glimpse into the deepest worries of others' hearts—it was precisely toward this housewife Kiyoe that I wanted to direct it. What this housewife longed for must have been something astonishingly simple and earnest—yet from those heart's depths, I wanted to genuinely sense the spirit of a Kamakura-period woman. Here everything remained unchanged from the Kamakura period. Customs, habits, institutions, language, architecture—even all these—the only alterations lay in the presence of a rice-polishing facility and electric lights. For this modern age, it was an extraordinarily rare village.

As the storm subsided, the first to stir into action were the cicadas. When one, its wings still impaired, came to an abrupt halt, another began singing at a much higher pitch. Before long, the sound of cicadas began to fill the air from all directions, and the storm completely subsided. The pond was muddy, and carp floated on the surface. However, that too was temporary. The radio reported that the storm which began in the afternoon had swept through the Tokyo region to Toyama Prefecture and then along the Sea of Japan to reach this Shōnai area as well.

Houses with their roof vents blown off. Power lines snapped; standing trees were uprooted and toppled. Leaves whirled in frenzy; green persimmons were torn whole from branches. Fences twisted and fell; the forest roared with a mighty din. A paulownia tree bearing fruit fell. The pond’s surface filled with blue fallen leaves; the carp vanished from sight. This year’s harvest was truly a poor one. Amid this decisive storm, the rice problem grew more acute. Since morning, farmers going around to borrow rice had gathered like fallen leaves at Sanemon’s hearth where I sat. In the dim room with storm shutters tightly closed, they continued muttering their usual complaints day after day. They would say things like, “Such-and-such place has rice but goes around borrowing with a face that says they have none,” while others defended themselves: “Actually, that place really doesn’t have any.” Yet they suspected that even though that fellow claimed to have no rice, when bean rations came, he’d be first to rush over declaring beans better than rice. No—when someone went there seeking rice, they said the older brother hadn’t given even two shō to his younger sibling. So Sanemon took pity and lent him two shō from the one to of rice he had just borrowed from his daughter-in-law’s family.

“Things like these days have never happened since this village began—it’ll make a fine tale to tell,” one of them said.

Tree branches battered against the storm shutters and wooden doors. Trees splintered and crashed down. A mountain dove's melancholic cry sounded continuously. Rice stalks thrashed wildly in frantic waves. Glass windows split and cracked. Carp leaped up with blue-green leaves still clinging to the water's surface.

There came Kyūzaemon from the branch family—the one who had arranged a room for me here at Sanemon’s—entering. This old man who had fully settled his obligations had been refusing those coming to borrow rice since morning; exhausted, his words now spilled out faster than usual. His voice was also raised. “They keep coming since dawn, wailing ‘We’ll die, we’ll die.’” “Lending rice is human decency.” “But when we lend year after year, those borrowers think it’s their due—not a shred of gratitude.” “If we lend again this year, the borrowers survive while us lenders die—isn’t that how it goes?” “If we must die, I’d have us all perish together.” “Only borrowers surviving while I alone die—that I won’t abide.”

“That’s true enough,” one of them mutters absently.

“Once it’s come to this, there’s no choice but for everyone to act as if they have no rice." “If we keep up with ‘They’ve got that’ and ‘We don’t have this,’ it’ll never get us anywhere.” “If I keep getting told to lend here and there, there’s hardly any of my rice left.” “They say they’ll repay with new rice once it’s harvested, but if I lend old rice and get new rice back in return, exchanging one shō five gō for one shō two gō isn’t even worth discussing.” “If they don't repay old rice with old rice, there's no balancing it out.”

Indeed, between one shō of new rice and one shō of old rice, those who lent old rice—which expands more when cooked—suffered a far greater loss. This I did not understand. Days piled high with many things that cannot be understood merely by observing from the outside.

“First off, the executive cooperative chairman ought to’ve known about this.”

Sanemon said. This cooperative chairman was from his wife’s family. To protect his wife Kiyoe, Sanemon had a duty to be first in raising his voice to make accusations. “Since the cooperative chairman kept ordering everyone to hand over rice, he should’ve been prepared to take responsibility.” “And when people come to borrow from him now, saying he has none to give—isn’t that failing to practice what he preaches?” “You can only tell others to surrender their rice after giving up what you yourself need to eat.” “Trying to avoid losses while hogging all the credit for making the village meet its quota—that’s pure shamelessness.” “There wasn’t a single soul in this village who couldn’t eat.”

“That’s right—there were no such poor people,” another farmer said. “If that’s how it stands, then scheming to avoid loss only for yourself is against the law.” “If you make others suffer losses, you ought to bear equal losses yourself.” Just then, Kiyoe the housewife returned from attending Buddhist teachings. Perhaps sensing her parents’ cooperative chairman was being positioned as the prime target, she kept her distance from the hearth.

The farmers articulated irrefutable logic with sparse words. Their meticulousness left no world beyond their own domain. Steeped in training honed through the collective capabilities amassed over generations, they possessed a calculative precision akin to rigorous formulas when it came to the actual conditions of the land they cultivated. This sharpness of mind had likely been naturally honed through generation upon generation of habitual practice—an inescapable geometry formed from dots of minuscule rice grains and lines of paddies. To deem farmers foolish is a habitual error—dismissing them as such without understanding the superfluity of words there. A steadiness utterly devoid of fantasy—prizing empirical evidence in response to weather’s indications and seldom altering their demeanor except when addressing soil chemistry and seed selection—permeated every corner of their psyche. There existed a supreme musical form of life conducted through symbols that transcend words. The naturalism that dismissed this as mere earthy crudeness must be said to have had eyes that were, at their core, too naturalistic.

City people had long maintained the custom of calling farmers stingy, but this too was mistaken. A single sen earned by city people and a single sen earned by farmers might hold equal monetary value, but their essential nature differed. The latter was a sen like some bodily machine that had proven reality itself, containing nothing muddied by speculative motives. Perhaps only by treating a city person's one yen and a farmer's one sen as equivalent sums could one finally reach a balanced judgment regarding monetary values. For farmers, money was the nourishing dew of weather patterns, the weighted geometry of fields, flowers blooming in hardened muscles, sacred symbols adorning altars. Or perhaps it was a god itself. One could not treat this lightly; unless one recognized here this sublime compulsion toward necessary frugality, any true discourse on rural life remained impossible.

The reason Kiyoe, wife of Sanemon from the main household, secretly criticized Kyūzaemon from the branch family was that she deemed it improper for a farmer to engage in commerce by selling items like bamboo-wrapped rice dumplings. If one did business to save money, anyone could save it. She occasionally expressed her resentment to my wife through veiled implications, suggesting that such flaunting of success would only disrupt rural customs. Moreover, regarding the cooperative chairman from her parents' household being attacked by all, she defended him by insisting he had reluctantly accepted the position under collective pressure. Yet these were days when villagers couldn't remain idle unless targeting someone—a universal condition, not about right or wrong. Even marital quarrels saw them tracing only the most trivial visible causes preceding actual harm and deeming that sufficient. Those next in line for criticism now served to vent frustrations precisely to that degree. I knew nothing of the cooperative chairman's character but suspected he wasn't truly wicked. I even detected hints he might be the village's most formidable figure. I resolved to investigate this.

I had my wife listen to what lay in Kiyoe's heart after she had gone to hear the Buddha's oracle. Regarding Kiyoe's eldest son—the one deployed to Karafuto without any word—he had been wounded in August and was now hospitalized, though they said he would return come October. Then concerning the illness of the calf recently returned to its caretaker—its dung was uncharacteristically hard for a cow, and its digestive system was said to be failing. When Kiyoe spoke these words channeled through the medium's mouth, her twelve-year-old youngest child listening nearby clung fearfully to her knee and refused to let go. The room lay pitch dark with the electric light extinguished, only the hearth fire flickering brightly.

September --th

The storm ended. The rice plants had collapsed, but because rain had been driven into them by the wind, their ears grew heavy, causing the heads to droop deeply and become entangled with one another—resulting in the grains being spared from being stripped away by the wind. If it had been just the wind, they said, the friction would have been intense and the grains would have fallen to the ground like last year. However, it was the vegetable crops that had been damaged instead. As long as the rice plants remained unharmed, then even if this year’s harvest was poor, at least the crisis had been averted.

The weather after the storm was clear. Those without rice were now working on harvesting the early crop. The portion of early rice that had already been harvested—even if one wouldn’t call it sufficient—had dried enough to somehow become rice. Although the amount was small, it was sufficient to serve as a stopgap until the new rice came in. With this, at least cries of “We’ll starve!” would no longer be heard from the village.

“It’s still better than last year; last year was nothing but wind, you know.”

A bright smile—escaping them as they looked up at the sky and gazed over the fields—could be seen. They had to harvest now, before the next rain came—

“Ah, this year’s early rice has triumphed,” they said. “Only the early rice escaped the storm.”

Such cases existed. A train filled with the sleepy-looking faces of demobilized soldiers passed through the flattened rice stalks.

Aster flowers; from between persimmon leaves torn by the storm, fruits emerged conspicuously. The pale aqua beauty of the continuous mountain range stretched before us. “Agricultural labor is tremendous labor, but for those who do it constant-like, it’s not particularly hard work, I suppose,” said Kyūzaemon. “But still, for those who’ve never done it—this ain’t something they can manage at all.” Few households kept even a single book to their name. Wanting to read mattered less than having no leisure for such interests. Yet detailed matters were well understood through their manner of speaking. I once asked what kind of machinery would be most needed if the village required new farm equipment—whereupon this sixty-eight-year-old, unschooled Kyūzaemon,

“That’s something we’d have to examine carefully, I reckon.” With that, he fell silent and pondered for a while. The term “kentō” was a new word not even found in Jien. Moreover, this old farmer maintained keen interest in social matters too—once declaring: “There’s one thing I just can’t grasp no matter how much I hear tell—this Labor-Farmer Party versus Socialist Party business.” “Where exactly they differ and how—couldn’t understand a lick of it,” he said. I too found myself hard-pressed to explain the distinction between them.

The farmers around here did not consider themselves laborers. Rather, they thought of themselves as producers who manufactured rice and as commanding landlords. Even tenant farmers were the same. However, the village possessed communal mountain forests passed down through generations as ancestral property. Since these were collectively owned forests, the ancestral faction holding ownership rights received their share of profits first, but branch households alone had historically been excluded—resulting in conflict between two factions within the same lineage: the main household versus its branches. Particularly Kyūzaemon, a branch household that had entered from outside the village, was not bound by this limitation. The branch faction members complained that while they were compelled to contribute funds equally to all the village’s communal projects, they were excluded from receiving any benefits from the mountain forest revenues—a situation they claimed made no sense. On this point as well, the cooperative chairman clashed with Kyūzaemon of the branch faction. As the standard-bearer of the ancestral faction, he adamantly asserted authority shared with Sanemon of the main household, refusing to yield. For Kyūzaemon, to build strength against this formidable rival who had been suppressing him in the fields and mountain forests, there was no other way but to confront them through the possession of cash—money. To attack Kyūzaemon’s business acumen as Kiyoe did could indeed be seen as jealousy from the ancestral faction; here too, a silent contempt suppressing the rise of new forces flowed even through the sacred guise of labor and agriculture.

There was a major event. It was an event for this village, but it could not be said to be solely that.

In this village’s Shakadō temple, there was a room called Kaidan-in. This was a recently constructed annex of the temple—a chamber lined exclusively with mortuary tablets from seventy parishioner households. The construction costs had naturally been covered by the village, but the contributions were not uniform. As a result, they could no longer follow the traditional ancestral order when determining placement positions for each household’s wooden tablets. To settle disputes, they concluded that rankings had to be determined by each household’s financial contribution, ultimately adopting a sealed bidding system where individuals wrote donation amounts on paper and submitted them in sealed envelopes to prevent leaks. For the village, this became an extraordinary event. Since ancestral positions would now be decided by money, secret meetings to negotiate baseline contribution amounts sprang up everywhere. Once again, Kyūzaemon—anticipating future complications—unilaterally paid one hundred yen before anyone else. The rest of the village was still haggling over amounts between one and ten yen. In any case, Kyūzaemon had no ancestors; he himself would become the new founding ancestor. He needed to surpass all existing ancestors and demonstrate the vigor of a new order—otherwise his lifelong efforts would prove meaningless.

When the results were unveiled, Kyūzaemon had decisively secured first place. Even while alive, he now commanded dominion over the Kaidan-in. They say there's none in the prefecture as splendid as this mortuary tablet chamber here, but I too had seen it once. It was a room of golden radiance.

Sanemon of the house where I was staying was, by birthright, of a lineage that would have positioned him at the highest tier of Kaidan-in. However, having reduced his family to poverty through alcoholism within his own generation, Sanemon found himself deftly supplanted by Kyūzaemon of the branch household—nearly falling to the tier reserved for the deceased. Yet where villagers typically contributed five yen, he stubbornly insisted on paying ten, barely managing to anchor himself in the middle tier. “No indeed—that time sure was a huge uproar.” Sanemon remarked to me.

The majority of the lifelong labor that farming households diligently exerted through sweat and toil could be said to be either for maintaining their current positions of mortuary tablets at Kaidan-in or for striving to elevate their status one tier higher than before in their own generation. The traditional belief—that disgracing one’s ancestors’ positions before Buddha would cause them to lose the blessings of these mountains and rivers—was not something that could be uprooted from the foundation of farming households. The infinite labor power was a force emanating from the distant dead; if severed, they would all become new ancestors and laborers in urban factories. The gods and Buddhas had already fled from them; what came to occupy their minds was the system of materialism, which now flowed back into the village’s Kaidan-in ordination hall and began destroying it. A complex dilemma precisely because it was simple—there could hardly be anything more significant among their current problems.

In Japan’s labor force, as was well known, there existed two types: one derived from Buddhist tradition and another swayed by science, clashing like the relationship between history and nature. Something akin to that which had originated from the French Revolution dragging down God from the altar and enshrining Descartes' intellect in His place had crept into this place as well. The lament of those who once worked in factories—now unable to engage in agriculture—pervaded every corner of this village. Even Kyūzaemon’s second son, a twenty-three-year-old skilled laborer, moved listlessly through farm tasks; though he strove to assist and possessed ample strength, his efforts seemed feeble. The interplay between intellect and sensibility was no longer confined solely to individuals within the educated class; it had now begun to seep deeply into the very folds of our nation’s mountains and rivers. Here too, the conflict between Descartes and Pascal persisted in distorted form, its fragments resonating unnoticed.

There was such a thing as collective labor, where groups of students from various schools entered the fields of farming households for rice planting and harvesting. While this indeed assisted the labor force of farming households, it marked the beginning of rural mechanization. Had someone suddenly looked up and thought, they would have seen flames already spreading to Kaidan-in. Yet each human being grows old. No one can retain their youth unchanged. If that holds true, then people's prayer to leave behind even a single mortuary tablet as proof of having lived through continued rice consumption would never vanish. The generosity of permitting humans just one mark of existence—that emotion even the most ruthless intellectualist must harbor—the emotion Pascal called divine grace. And if one ranks this above intellect, then as long as death exists for humans, this emotion shall not perish. While knowledge persists wherever life remains. Yet all these matters ultimately circled back to my own urgent concerns—questions less about rural society than those arising from individual nature.

Every day I conducted rural research, though my true purpose lay in studying humanity itself. To research peasants while mingling daily with hardworking farmers yet never observing their labor firsthand proved impossible. However, my weakness—spending days merely watching without working—yielded one significant benefit: it made me respect farmers profoundly. To preserve this self-respect, I found it better not to labor alongside them. Given that the axiom "no valid criticism exists" might itself be flawed precisely because it claims axiomatic status, I tentatively accepted bystandership's virtue as a method approximating truth—not that I championed observation as moral superiority. Yet a mind idling amid others' toil inevitably faces universal condemnation, making even one ally desirable. When considering potential allies, only myself remained. Thus I became my own ally—a detestable arrangement requiring immense effort to domesticate my loathed companion. The anguish of bystandership demanded a moral fortitude incomprehensible to laborers; my pleasure lay in sensing nascent sprouts from this soil and nurturing their growth. Still, I'd grown weary of visible phenomena—the squabbling over rice, the tug-of-war for grains. Not that I neglected these matters, but why this periodic revulsion? What quirk of temperament caused it?

September―― As I observed, rural villages operated entirely through custom. Thinking, working, speaking ill of others—all were governed by it. I kept watching to see if there might be even one thing not bound by habit, but had yet to discover a single instance. Only the rice price surge to ten yen drew expressions devoid of astonishment. That twenty-sen rice now cost ten yen surpassed all comprehension. Yet even this seemed destined to become routine. Should such normalization occur, every habit of the phenomenal world would be overturned. Or perhaps farmers' inner habits had already upended everything through this inflation. When material prices soared 150-fold, could people truly be permitted strength to keep their hearts' value pegged at twenty sen? The reason lay clear—no such habit existed among them.

Truly, the act of thinking was fascinating. Despite doing the same things day after day, when we encountered an event that broke a single habit, there arose this instantly confusing thought—the bewilderment of using thoughts shaped by habit to contemplate matters beyond habit—a phenomenon now occurring in myself and others, this present that got dismissed half-heartedly even as it tried to fade into oblivion somewhere. The solution became quite difficult to reach. It was a hardship 150 times over, but such was the nature of the mind that wanted to settle it as a mere twentyfold difficulty. Moreover, when reality unfolded with 150 times the complexity, what in the world were people supposed to do?

After all, it was a fact that when people desperately wanted to rest, there were those who couldn't help but want to work precisely then. According to communications from Tokyo, one shō of rice had reportedly risen to sixty yen. Farmers who day and night pricked up their ears to rumors about who sold where for how much—when someone came to buy from where and at what price—were not being told such stories from Tokyo. To tell those still reeling from ten yen about the reality of sixty yen—and at a time when they were already left dumbfounded by mere rumors of rice prices leaping to such heights— Everywhere, in gatherings of people, conversations consisted entirely of whispers. When our footsteps sounded, the conversation stopped abruptly, leaving only the hearth fire blazing fiercely. Just as I noticed two figures huddled in the grass whispering together, they turned away with grubby grins, baring yellowish teeth.

With the start of the rice harvest, Kyūzaemon's rice storehouse—which had been targeted by the village's farming families—was finally released from their gaze; but before they could breathe a sigh of relief, distant relatives from a village specializing in vegetable cultivation began targeting them instead. The storm had stripped away all vegetables from these relatives, leaving them without means to exchange for rice. Moreover, Rie's household in the fishing village—where demobilized youths had returned—now faced rice shortages too. As Kyūzaemon's sister-in-law, she had every reason to fix her gaze on his rice storehouse. To complicate matters, I myself felt no small fascination toward this granary. While my bargaining tools were clothes, Rie's household used fish. Meanwhile Yahē's family—the village's largest landowners—had approached Kyūzaemon demanding rice at any price.

“Ha ha ha ha! The reason my household has goods isn’t because we want money.” With that, Kyūzaemon said something clever and made me laugh. He was an old man who knew how to use his head.

September――

A postcard arrived from Mr. Ishizuka Tomoji, who had been evacuated to his family home in Mizuhara, Niigata after being burned out. The postmark was from Kōriyama, Fukushima, but he had received an offer from Kawabata Yasunari to join Kamakura Bunko and was now on a train, his mind alight with imminent possibilities. A night train bearing a lantern in its breast advanced toward Kamakura, floating before my eyes. Nothing is as beautiful as hope gradually lighting its lamps. Even in the depths of a dark fate, there were stations upon stations; O window of the night train that plowed through them as it passed. Do not lose heart.

No matter what occurred in the world—even if it were turned upside down as now—there existed those who felt not the slightest sting. Among farming households, there were occasionally such individuals. To them, the world beyond the very fields where they labored might as well have been a phantom. No—rather, there was the anguish and joy of profiting precisely because Japan had been defeated. Yet entirely separate from this, there did indeed exist a pain in rejoicing over defeat. And within the agonizing underside of these hearts emerging while cradling joy, there dangled a logic toward some unfathomable future—a logic one might conceive as loving humankind more than individual humans. For now, these offerings remained mere reasoning; they were not human beings. As the world strove to revive humanity, countless such offerings would keep spilling forth from this sack of human logic that had eradicated humanity itself. Whether this was good or evil—regrettably—I still could not discern. The only thing clear to me was that it felt somehow regrettable.

September――

The question arises: through what part of their hearts do our nation's literary figures today connect with the external world? Four definitions have been presented—that we are Japanese, that we are Easterners, that we are citizens of the world, that we are a defeated nation. Should circumstances demand selecting one of these and constructing a logical framework for each, the problem becomes which definition the literary mind would choose.

Of course, literature was not geometry. If that were so, then definitions would have to regress infinitely to their origins, forcing us to conclude that literature was definition itself. "The Potsdam Declaration shall be accepted"—this solemn and explicit definition. By this single definition had all Japanese lives been saved. From this point innumerably expanded each geometry, and if we were required to prove the proposition that we constituted a democratic populace, there existed two methods of demonstration at this juncture: either engaging in actions signified by said proposition, or investigating what already existed within the populace. Yet setting that aside, when compelled by humanity's fundamental condition—the necessity to live—to illuminate this matter through such means, neither past nor future proved serviceable for contemplation. To tentatively consider the present—since life's substance always resided in the now—nothing mattered more than focusing on this moment. Now farmers and laborers stood like royalty. Against this reality rose nothing higher. Never before had the present been so thoroughly democratic, yet now there existed no unifying spirit. What all sought most was rice and spirit, yet money disrupted this equilibrium. Yet strangely enough, when people obtained even a little rice, they immediately forgot about it through force of habit. Among things deemed inconsequential whether present or absent, what had long mattered least to humanity were rice and gods. In other words—the twin representatives of matter and spirit. Having reached the point of wondering what became of humans who forgot these two, at last only rice—only material things—caught their eye. This time, if they possessed things at all, through their chasing and scrambling those things would vanish. Next came spirit. Yet where it resided remained unknown even now. When it grew unclear, they denounced one face as evil. All sought to wipe their bloodied swords upon that single face.

September――

The rice harvesting progressed. From the coastal village, the elderly woman Rie arrived. She had come to hear the Buddhist oracle and have the spirit of her youngest son—killed in action in Okinawa—summoned, but she also took the opportunity to consult her sister-in-law, Kyūzaemon’s wife, about rice. While looking up at the clouds in the sky, I could see the figures of the two sisters heading out together toward the station where the Buddhist oracle resided. The elder sister was seventy; the younger sister was sixty-one. The younger sister had gone out wanting to meet her dead grandson; as this would be her first chance to see him since the first bon festival, she bustled with anticipation. The autumn sky was clear, the rice ears bowed low to both sides of the road, and the overlapping lines of distant mountains resembled waves drawn with strands of life. There walked two figures who had utterly convinced themselves that this single beautiful golden-hued path—so suited for souls to tread while still among the living—would surely see their own children coming to meet them once they too soon passed away. The autumn wind blew.

I took a solitary walk along the path encircling the marsh. My wife, who had left early that morning for Tsuruoka, was on her way back. Thirty minutes had passed since the train went through the distant rice fields. That must have been her train. Along the half-ri country path from the station, a single black speck of shadow was moving toward me from the opposite direction. As I closed the distance while thinking it might be her, she approached in a way that suggested she thought likewise. Across the vast plain stretching before me, I thought—that must be her, the one person diligently searching for food to feed me. Her misfortune had been living with an incompetent like me.

Just as our embarrassed expressions grew unmistakable—she alone on her side, I alone on mine—we happened to meet atop the wooden bridge. “I thought so.” “Hmm-hmm.”

The wife laughed, letting the pumpkin’s skin protrude from the edge of the cloth wrapper. The river water flowed beneath their feet. Twenty years ago—on a day when we weren’t yet married—I suddenly thought that something like this had happened once before, but now we had become two people relentlessly pursued by flames and utterly exhausted.

September――

The black cat’s eyes glowed sharply yellow like phosphorescence. A pillar clock tolled quietly amidst swarming flies in the vacant room. Sunlight wavered between shadow and brilliance. Light rays pierced through latticework into the vermilion of pumpkins aligned in rows. Each time the wind ceased abruptly, the medicine pot on the hearth would begin clanging strangely before boiling over. In the village, they had collectively borrowed an early-ripening rice field from one household and joined in harvesting it; starting that day, they began polishing the obtained rice to sustain themselves until their own fields could be harvested. Though knee-deep in mud from days of rain during harvest, beneath the electric lights of the polishing shed at night, farmers stood arrayed like samurai warriors clad in full armor. They lined up in a silence as intense as that before embarking on a night raid. This must have been their annual moment of peak tension. There also appeared the figure of a youth exhaling a satisfied puff of tobacco into the night air—a vision of striking beauty.

October――

The hearths of every farmhouse had taken in some new rice. This was also to keep the rice from swelling when cooked; in Sanemon’s household, where four people had managed with 2.5 shō per day, they now found themselves slightly exceeding 4 shō from today with the new rice—and it still wasn’t enough. Mornings and evenings had turned chilly enough to need charcoal in the hibachi, but this village had nothing but firewood everywhere—only exhausted charcoal remained.

The fresh weight of new rice; the dampness when cradled in the palm; from the depths of its waxen luster came breaking dawnlight. There was indeed lyricism in this new rice’s scent. The roar of infinite history surged like wave sounds across my palm—and I grew sentimental—

“Ah, Japanese rice has lost its vitality. This war was a defeat.” There was a brown rice researcher who had muttered such things. He was the one who made that prophecy during the Second Sino-Japanese War before retreating into the mountains. I suddenly remembered him. They say human genius loses its vital force as genius by twenty-five. Perhaps rice too possesses this genius-like vitality. The dawn-tinted genius of rice might have vanished, but the genius of effort still remains. Some say genius amounts to nothing—merely building fools to inhabit them. Rice too seems to harbor sorrow akin to having just finished constructing those fools. Come to think of it, their teardrop shape now appears not as irony but as stark truth.

“I can’t tell whether this year’s new rice makes me happy or sad,” I said. “Look at this.” I showed my wife—who had come to my side—the new rice resting in my palm. “But it’s beautiful,” she said. “How it sparkles! Look—it’s glittering so brightly.” “They say it’s lost all vitality now. Japanese rice has.” “Mr. Sakurazawa... I wonder how he’s doing these days.” Her voice softened. “I’d like to see him again.”

My wife was an avid reader of Mr. Sakurazawa Juichi’s works and had once even attended one of his lectures; 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 been visiting Mr. Sakurazawa, but one day around the time the Pacific War began, one of them—Mr. A—came and said: “This war will inevitably be lost—it’s evident in the rice,” Mr. Sakurazawa said. “Thinking it was a crisis, I turned pale. “What should I do?” “Is it really true?”

I did not answer. The ideology derived from rice possessed an unfathomable depth and terrifying power. It was time we realized that any vision incapable of discerning traces of the future from what we had consumed for millennia must be fundamentally deficient. With this thought, I remained silent about myself. Yet even if I had realized it, there would have been nothing to do. It was all after the fact. "Do not think of winning. Take care not to lose," Priest Kenkō had said five centuries prior. Nevertheless, this youth called A became rootless after that day, wandering aimlessly across the nation, occasionally sending postcards that arrived like sudden gusts from unexpected places.

When I returned from abroad, having landed at Shimonoseki and traversed all of Honshu by train—passing through Niigata Prefecture via the Jōetsu Line from Tokyo before entering Yamagata Prefecture’s Shōnai Plain—I thought for the first time: Ah, this here is the most quintessentially Japanese scenery. For when I looked out across that sweeping view, there were nowhere else but here fields planted with nothing but rice. In other regions’ farmlands, even where rice paddies stretched far and wide, one would notice various other crops scattered among them; only here existed fields of rice with ears uniformly aligned like waves. I remember when the train stopped at Uzen-Mizusawa Station—the first bleak station marked with a sign in this plain—I had been so moved by the beauty of those rippling rice stalks that I nearly wept, taking a deep breath. And yet here I was now. Back then, having no ties to this place whatsoever, I never imagined I would settle here—yet ten years later, finding myself cast adrift to such a place with nowhere left to go—this had become the war’s outcome for me. And now, taking new rice into my hands here for the first time, I thought that no matter how abundantly rice might grow elsewhere in this vast world, there was nothing that could replace it.

Has it already lost its vitality, this? That’s absurd. Before I knew it, I found myself compelled to say the same and somehow stepped outside. Outside, rice harvesting was in full swing. From the open doorway of the rice mill, powder scattered out, swirling and turning the surrounding tree trunks white.

October --

In the village of Kyōta, located about twelve kilometers from here, my eldest son, who had been working as a substitute teacher, was dismissed when the regular teacher returned from military demobilization. At their farewell, the students—

“Teacher, are you returning to Tokyo? Stay with us a little longer! We’ll give you sweet rice cakes,” they said. My eldest son, who had learned life’s sorrows at nineteen, seemed unable to express the bitter hardship of having finally received his first salary after trudging home late at night along pitch-dark muddy paths in clogs with broken thongs, only to be immediately dismissed.

“Are you sad?” “Just as I thought,” I asked with a laugh. “Yeah... saying goodbye to the students feels sad somehow.” “Though I hated the teachers’ room.” “Let me see the pay envelope.” When I opened the envelope he’d been shyly hiding, its heavy rolled bottom slid down limply, revealing a few stiff banknotes inside. About seventy yen.

“That’s quite a lot.” “Not bad at all.” “That’s right—there’s a night duty allowance included.” “If it were just the base salary, it’d be thirty-five yen though.” I recalled the precious moment when I first received forty-two yen as a monthly salary during my time as a university teacher. Back then, I had thought salaries weren’t actual money—but my eldest son’s was even less so. “To get a salary just once and be dismissed immediately—this shows how swiftly impermanence strikes.” “But you got more than I did back then—damn impressive.”

Feeling happy, I asked my wife to place the pay envelope at Sanemon’s Buddhist altar.

"I’d been thinking the same thing myself," she said. "But this altar belongs to another family’s household. Do you think it’s proper?" "It makes no difference which altar we use." I still wanted to show my deceased father his grandchild’s first salary—in times like these, I thought, one naturally follows such customs without protest. Yet when I’d received my own first wages long ago, though we had a family altar at home, I’d squandered the money on my way back. Now faced with my child’s earnings, I found myself strangely incapable of similar recklessness. This warm satisfaction blooming wherever I turned—this primal, almost bestial joy tinged with shame—what could it possibly mean?

“You came back late every night.” “That long, pitch-dark muddy path—you managed to make it back every night.” I didn’t say such things aloud, yet within me they seemed to echo constantly, until suddenly I found myself remembering my own father again. My father too had maintained an outwardly cold demeanor, never betraying his feelings—but when I was twenty-five, after having my first work titled *Namboku* published in *Ningen* and sending it to him, he read it in Keijō and died that very night of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by excessive joy. My *Namboku* was met with scathing reviews upon publication, crushing me completely in a single blow. Since then, *Ningen* became for me a training ground in life’s comedies—it remains an ill omen even now—though it wasn’t until twenty years later that I came to see demons as Buddhas. The face shaped by passing years reveals neither tears nor laughter.

“What are you going to use that salary for?” I asked my child. “I’m going back to Tokyo with this.” “I want to go back quickly and play the piano.” “That’s fine—even if I go back early.”

“Hmm.” “I received some allowance the other day—maybe I should give back just ten yen of it.” What on earth was he saying now? As I stared blankly at him, “But if I don’t give some back right away, I’ll end up using it all—just one bill, you know.” “My, my, this has turned into quite a situation, hasn’t it?” my wife said while listening nearby, then handed our child the bag she’d 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; I accepted it, but felt I’d made a mistake—the realization that I’d never once done such a thing for my own father suddenly filled me with sorrow. My child was doing this before me now without knowing a thing, yet this very act of unknowing had become the truest thing done. As for me, I had neither known nor done anything. This struck my heart even more painfully, and I thought this kid had more promise than I did. In reality, I seemed to be impressed by something not even worth discussing. However, across three generations—father, child, grandchild—there existed their own appropriate shifts in conduct. Not only could people not directly see beyond three generations, but there were also various things they couldn’t understand until reaching fifty. Though it might seem old-fashioned, the differences between generations had grown increasingly fascinating to me with each passing year.

“Ah, I want to play the piano soon!”

The child was still saying such things, lying on his back.

“You can go to Tokyo tomorrow.” “Really? I’m so happy! Ah, I’m happy!” The child pulled the futon over his head, then abruptly poked his head out again, “Mom, Dad says I can go to Tokyo tomorrow. Is it really okay? Can I go?” He was still such a child. When I was nineteen—the year I first came to Tokyo—I hadn’t even mentioned to my father which school I wanted to attend, nor had he ever asked. Then, on the day before my departure, I simply told my mother, “I’m going to Tokyo tomorrow,” and without any opposition, I left Yamashina in Kyoto carrying just one wicker trunk. Reflecting on this, I realize that not only was my father a far better parent than I, but my child also surpasses me in embodying what it means to be a child.

October --

My feet grew cold. The chestnut burrs were still soft. It was a day when rain-soaked firewood burned poorly and pots boiled slowly. Even in roadside conversations amidst the fields, lies about their own poor harvests mingled with boasts, and honesty seemed to shift by degrees depending on the weather's whims. On this rainy day, there was also the risk that rice hung on drying racks might rot. Just when one thought it was clearing up, a sudden downpour would come—violently shifting light and shadow. Every minute alternated between sunshine and cloud cover, with only flies swarming in droves.

However, there was something else lurking here that compelled the villagers to lie—something that masqueraded behind the weather’s guise. The reason one could not help but sympathize—despite their awkwardness at feigning dishonesty—lay in the fact that this year’s rice requisition quotas, which should have been decided by now as in previous years, remained undecided; these were people unaccustomed to lying from the start. In that eerie silence, suspicion thickened like a shadow, and clumsy defensive gestures emerged in this manner. In any case, because this village had been the most honest and exemplary in fulfilling its payments ahead of all others, it had now become a place where rice shortages sparked greater turmoil than in neighboring villages. To feel that this year, of all years, they must lie no matter what—this was only natural. In truth, from what I had observed, this village was an exceptionally rare and good one—unquestionably top-tier in virtue—but considering that even here there lingered some taint of corruption, one could likely imagine the state of other villages without being far off the mark. I considered farmers to be one of Japan’s greatest prides, but were they to decline, one might as well declare Japan finished.

“They keep saying ‘poor harvest, poor harvest,’ but is it truly that bad? There’s something odd about it all,” I asked Kyūzaemon. “That’s how it goes,” he replied in a low voice. “Around here, it’s not so terrible. It’s those newspapers writing ‘poor harvest’ over and over that drive rice prices up. They’d have done better to keep quiet.” “Still, that’s better for the village—though it leaves us in a bind.” “Ha ha ha, indeed it does.”

The reason we had come to speak so bluntly was partly because Kyūzaemon always told me, "Don't buy expensive rice—if it runs out, we'll manage somehow." Thinking that someone would take care of it made us complacent, and so we couldn't bring ourselves to immediately ask them to share their rice; even then, we remained stuck, unable to voice that request. It was a fact that evacuees were the cause of disrupting rural areas. I could have made arrangements to secretly stockpile rice, but since I still hadn't lost the desire to critique this village internally, engaging in such criticism required both the patience to suppress my desires somewhat and considerable effort. This was thoroughly exhausting work; though as someone who claimed to be a writer of some standing, I hadn't entirely lost my resolve to test myself by plunging headlong into it at least once. Yet here lay the rub—try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to dismiss these foolish matters as outright foolishness in the way others did, and this very struggle refused to release its grip on me. It wasn't that I was playing the saint. No doubt our many friends were also, here and there, being quietly forced to endure such hardships in secret.

“Gods and buddhas ain’t real.”

The reason Kyūzaemon repeated these words to me like a mantra likely stemmed from what perpetually occupied his thoughts—matters of gods and buddhas. He would insist, “I’ll give you rice, I’ll give you rice,” yet never actually provide any, only to later add, “Gods and buddhas are matters of feeling—same as human hearts.” Perhaps there had never been an era when people contemplated deities more intensely than now, but hearing him reduce gods to mere matters of sentiment felt akin to receiving an organic sermon—strangely more satisfying than had he actually given me rice.

"I no longer want rice from you," I declared silently within my heart. It wasn't sarcasm. Because I'd come to want to give him rice instead.

October --

The wind raged through transparent light. A clump of flies collided against eyebrows. The head of a snake slithered down a tree trunk. Chinese cabbages stretched out into the field. Red dragonflies swarmed fiercely in horizontal motion. Among the vegetables that had gathered and scattered across the dining table, only the green shiso continued to emerge unchanged. Rice harvest—the recent harvests were mid-season rice. This mid-season rice had encountered the recent storm and yielded poorly. The wind did not blow in the direction the rice ears bent but instead struck them from the opposite side, causing the stalks to snap at their base; even subsequent fair weather did little to aid their fruition. The poor harvest was confirmed to be nationwide. The eerie silence of requisition orders that still refused to even indicate a direction lingered. With this, the farming households had gradually maintained their silence in a tense standoff, while during this time, black market buyers from hot spring towns crept in at unknown prices. The tactile sense persisted in its delicate tremors. Though feigning surface-level insensitivity, in response to the ceaselessly shifting turmoil both within and without, they seemed to be quietly altering their hues beneath this silence.

In this village where people rarely praised others, those universally commended were Kiyoe—wife of Sanemon from the household where I stayed—and the bride of Kyūzaemon's eldest son from the separate family. Whenever I saw these two, I too felt compelled to praise them, and when alone with my wife, we would end up quietly extolling their virtues—neither certain who began it. Kiyoe would return briefly from rice harvesting and snatch whatever moments she could to remake a new straw mattress for her eldest son's bride. She worked with astonishing swiftness.

“When my bride came into this house, her mother-in-law treated her real good. So now I gotta treat my own daughter-in-law right too, haven’t I?” he said. Brides have their traditions too. My wife came to my side,

"I wish I'd had a mother-in-law too," she said with a solemn face. For some inexplicable reason, I burst out laughing. "Well, that would've lasted three days."

“Is that so? But if that had happened, I don’t think I would’ve become this selfish.” “The hardships of being a bride are one of life’s most painful trials. Perhaps even the greatest of them all.” “No, I’ll manage.”

I stared at my wife’s face in astonishment. However, it was still better than being told we were happy for lacking a mother-in-law. Can she endure it? No, she can’t—I thought again. “Still, if someone could endure all that, as a woman I’d give her eighty points.” “But something like that...” “You’ve got this tendency to sit on your husband’s neck, so maybe you actually could manage it.” “Though for a man, nothing’s worse than getting chewed between his mother and wife.” “Like sleeping between saw teeth.” “Your so-called hardships amount to nothing more than me being by your side daily—right?”

“Honestly, I often think how wonderful it would be if you were working somewhere else,” she said. “Just imagining the hardship of having you by my side every single day—it makes me shudder. It’s exhausting—utterly exhausting.” My wife’s usual lament had begun.

At the annex house of our neighbor Sōzaemon visible from here, where the eldest son had been conscripted the day after his wedding and his bride still remained with her mother-in-law, the couple had spent just a single day together. My wife seemed to have recalled this simultaneously, "Over there, they only spent one day together," she said, drawing her neck in slightly as she looked at me. "Can you imagine?"

I suddenly recalled a moment during the war when, at a Western-style restaurant in Ginza, I found myself staring vacantly at the wall while waiting for my dinner to arrive. Hanging on the wall was a print of Millet's The Angelus. Though I had never felt any particular connection to Barbizon School paintings in daily life, I was suddenly overwhelmed by emotion at the modest beauty of a young farm couple offering silent prayers against the backdrop of a temple spire visible beyond the fields. I tried searching through my life's remembered scenes for anything resembling this experience, but nothing surfaced readily. But why can neither I nor anyone else attain such simple happiness and purity? I found myself pondering something that seemed fundamentally uncomplicated. Is there no true religion? Or is it due to our individual failings? Or should we blame society's flawed foundations? It likely isn't any of these. At this moment, wasn't my wife's gaze—the one she'd given me moments earlier when drawing her neck in slightly—actually akin to that very happiness?

I thought: people were like boats floating on a sea of happiness—their bellies submerged while keeping heads above water—perhaps drifting as winds of impermanence buffeted their faces.

October --

The bride of Kyūzaemon’s eldest son from the branch family, having lost her four-year-old only son this past May and showing no signs of another pregnancy, was already being glared at by the old couple. Despite her anxiety over not knowing when divorce might come, lately the bride had begun working with a resolve that suggested she’d steeled herself for whatever might come. However, in the main household of Sanemon there, since the return of their eldest son—who was deployed to Karafuto—remained uncertain, the bride stayed at her parents’ home. When she returned here only at night to sleep, the care with which the bride was treated resembled that of a queen, but the palpable anxiety over when she might leave for good drew Sanemon and his wife’s whispered discussions time and again. Even this calm and good-natured bride still remained a daughter who moved at her parents’ behest—a situation where one imagined that Sanemon’s absent eldest son must have been an exceptionally fine young man rarely seen, given her current status as having moved from the village’s second wealthiest household to become the bride of its poorest one. “That eldest son over there is remarkable.” “There’s not a single one like him,” the villagers said.

When he was conscripted, all he left behind was a request for his father to keep a strict record of each day’s expenses every night. As a restraining nail against the father who had drunk the family into ruin, this was the surest method. Unripe persimmons rustled on their branches in the wind. The grove stood cold beneath clouds scudding over the plain stained with sunset. Kyūzaemon’s eldest son’s bride, who had returned pulling a handcart glinting with farm tools and piled with wet green grass, bowed politely to me by the river’s flow. With a healthily flushed, round face, she stood silently bowing in the luminous clarity of dusk. I too found myself feeling a pure sentiment akin to Millet’s and, wishing for her happiness, returned her bow. Indeed, the beauty of the evening bell comes to everyone once each day.

When I entered Kyūzaemon’s house, he had just emerged from the bath and sat before the hearth with a tanzen robe draped loosely about him. As I watched his expressions shift between the serene countenance of a Chinese scholar and the piercing eyes of a stern realist, I thought that this Kyūzaemon, at sixty-eight, might then be experiencing the pinnacle of happiness in his life. He lacked nothing at all. None of his children had been conscripted, and the value of his belongings only continued to rise. From extreme poverty, he had at any rate become first in the village regarding cash ownership. He alone knew the village’s secrets. When it came to economic matters, no one in the village besides him exercised their intelligence. With every successful action making others appear hopelessly foolish through his composure, all he needed was to glare piercingly at his daughter-in-law. The hem of his tanzen robe, draped from his shoulders and flowing in a Mount Fuji-like shape, carried a peaceful air that suited him perfectly then.

“The carpenters are coming tomorrow to raise the eaves,” said Kyūzaemon. “Since they want their wages in rice, I told ’em we’d make it square for both sides.” He laughed heartily. “When you’ve got rice, you can get anything at a fair price.” I rarely visited this hearth of Kyūzaemon’s just three ken away, which seemed to displease him considerably. Though he had secured my current room and the villagers saw him as my caretaker, my deliberate distance left him understandably vexed. That the villagers’ harsh words about him reached my ears mattered little to me—what kept me away was how his roadside hearth drew constant crowds. And since those crowds included the village’s most influential figures, my reluctance only grew stronger.

“Could you ask Mr. Kyūzaemon about the rice? There’s none left at home anymore.” “There’s none left at home anymore.”

My wife whispered such things to me as I was leaving, but I had no desire to speak to him about rice or anything else. No—I had no intention of asking Kyūzaemon for a single thing. Moreover, until now, I had no recollection of ever consulting him about matters like supplies. “Did your family come to this village through Yamizaemon’s arrangements?”

“Did your family come to this village through Yamizaemon’s doing?” — such a question had once been put to my wife by a neighbor’s daughter. That people sometimes called Kyūzaemon “Yamizaemon” suggested we too were being eyed suspiciously. Yet as I had experienced no particular unpleasantness from him myself, whether to trust him remained a matter for later consideration. Still, in the month since our arrival, each passing day brought more bad rumors about him. Never once did I hear anything good.

Possessing a rare sharp intellect for a farmer, his exceptional insight had kept others perpetually off-balance—a fact one could all too easily imagine. However, such matters were only to be expected. “What exactly is this ‘traveler’s melancholy’?” Kyūzaemon suddenly asked me this again. He must have been referring to last night’s broadcast about my traveler’s melancholy, but since only his house had a radio, I hadn’t heard it. When I kept silent, Kyūzaemon once again:

“The story was credited to Yokomitsu Riichi.” “I don’t know how to listen to this Second Radio Program thing.” I strove to keep my profession hidden, not wanting it to be known, yet time and again found myself confronted with these unavoidable situations. Once, when old newspapers discarded in the latrine box caught my eye with my work printed in large characters, I had torn them up. Not something from here, but another time—I suddenly recalled an incident that had occurred in Osaka City. It was near Dōjima Bridge, around the front of Asahi, when as I walked, a handcart loaded with large boxes dashed past before me. At that moment, colliding with the tram’s front, the handcart—boxes and all—toppled over right before my eyes. In that instant when I thought “Ah!”—as books labeled “Yokomitsu Riichi Collection” came spilling from the crate and the tram clattered over them—there stood my stunned self. Times like finding an empty train seat only to discover the passenger ahead engrossed in reading my collected works without glancing around—in such moments, the author’s emotions felt closer to wretchedness than pride. Why was that? I returned from Kyūzaemon’s place that evening without having grasped anything of substance.

“How did it go with the rice?” my wife asked, coming over with a smile. “I don’t know anything about rice.” “It’s all about mindset.”

“I thought as much.” My wife looked disappointed and seemed thoroughly exasperated. Not only in such matters, but I had a certain foolish streak that had caused everyone great trouble during the war. Yet observing her, I saw my wife shared this trait. “You should be the one to say it. Matters like rice shouldn’t be a woman’s job.”

“Rice matters are something men should handle.” “That’s how it is everywhere.”

“What decent man would that be?” “But even someone as esteemed as Mr. S came by bicycle, didn’t he?” I thought she might say that—and indeed she had skillfully brought up exactly what I’d been thinking, leaving me at a loss. Mr. S was a veteran writer of the literary world whom I respected, but when I heard from young Mr. M that he had ridden his bicycle to borrow rice while wearing a backpack, I found myself reflecting on my own actions and admiring his directness.

“Yamizaemon and Mr. M are different,” I said painfully. “What should we do? There’s really none left.” The wife’s hands, removing the lid of the rice bin and measuring with a masu cup, produced a cold, clattering sound. I consumed four cups a day, while the three others had ten cups each—altogether, it came to just over one shō. Yet at Sanemon’s house where I was staying, though they had the same number of family members, four shō still wasn’t enough. There was a time when I mentioned consuming four cups a day. Sanemon let out a “Hmph,” stared hard at my face, and then said, “You’re not human.”

However, two or three days ago in the morning, there was an incident where a donburi bowl rolled violently by the hearth with a loud crash. At the same time,

“Who the hell eats two shō of rice?!” Sanemon roared. When I asked for an explanation, it turned out that Tensaku—the developmentally disabled second son, twenty-three years old—had involuntarily eaten two shō by himself on the day they switched to new rice. Unluckily, the night before, Kyūzaemon had come by when there was talk of a merchant from Osaka buying the village’s rice at ¥1,000 per bale. When ¥5 was the village’s standard price, the value of ¥1,000 per bale became a staggering event; from that point onward, rice prices skyrocketed, but Tokyo’s rates remained beyond what villagers could discuss.

October --

In the house emptied of all people, the polished wooden floor glistened blackly, and a goat walked across it, clattering its hooves. I thought about chasing it but stopped and watched. The pure white fur shimmered across the broad wooden floor’s glossy surface, lending the space the dignified air of an aristocratic manor where one might behold precious sculptures. For me, tormented by fleas and flies, this was an unexpectedly hushed solitary moment of a morning. A persimmon hung on the tree, bearing the pale imprint of someone’s bite. The leaves on the mountainside began turning autumn colors. I lit a fire in the hearth and boiled water.

There, Tensaku returned early alone from the white clay factory. This was my first time being alone with Tensaku. I had him sit by the hearth and served him tea. “How is it?” “Hmm,” Tensaku said and gulped it down in one go. Powerful muscles protruded from his exposed chest.

“How about this?” I poured another cup. He downed that in one gulp. With his usual faint smile lingering—perhaps from self-consciousness—he turned sideways and sat cross-legged. It seemed this was the first time in his twenty-three years anyone had served him tea; when I poured another cup, he said, “That’s enough.”

“The factory’s closed.” “Yeah, they said there’s no sulfuric acid.” Given this, Tensaku didn’t seem as much of an idiot as people claimed, but when I thought about him eating two shō a day, I found myself wanting to say, “He’s not human.” The sight of four cups and two shō secretly facing each other this morning was supremely tranquil. Beyond the lattice window, a tall oak tree stood high on the mountain, and a flock of siskins dotted the clear sky as they gathered there. Tensaku gave in to his usual habit and lay down using the threshold as a pillow. Because the soles of his feet were facing me,

When I beheld the farmer with blackened soles, drifting clouds allowed sunlight to filter through. A tanka like this took shape. This was my first tanka.

When two families shared a house, we constantly sought moments of solitude—yet whenever those rare opportunities arose without warning, Kyūzaemon would inevitably lumber through the door. His visits had grown into a peculiar dread for me. But displeasing him would mean losing my place in this village I loved. Yet even if I left, a man without labor power like myself would only bring hardship wherever I went—to everyone, I was an enormous burden. I could well imagine what sort of existence a household head represented when he couldn't even procure a single grain of rice for his family. The sole pride I could claim was subsisting on no more than four cups daily. Of the two gō and one shō ration allotted to me, nearly five shō invariably went to others—this paltry offering became my universal charity wherever I wandered, rendered meaningless through repetition. Walking the half-ri road to the station, watching rice ears sway like ocean swells on either side, I remembered how my heart had swelled here upon returning from abroad—now this path felt like divine retribution laid upon those who labored not by sweat.

Even now, taking advantage of Kyūzaemon’s absence, I slipped out of the house to get soy sauce at the station and once again walked that familiar road. A half-ri stretch of perfectly straight road, consisting entirely of flat land without a single house. Somehow, a straight road was an inescapably tedious thing that left one with nothing to do but think. I could not tell 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 sharp-witted wasn’t because they were naturally compelled to organize their daily thoughts on this road.

“There are gods and Buddhas.”

That Kyūzaemon would say such things might also have been taught by this long road. Here I was too, unable to stop myself from endlessly thinking—about kindnesses received from others, the preciousness of friends, life’s harshness, marital love, children’s education, matters of gods—when my wife and children often...

“That road is unbearable.” “It’s so long.”

When the wife would say things like that, or when the child would respond with "Yeah, it really is," these too were somehow instances of each person being made to think. Once you pass through there, yesterday’s self is no longer today’s self, and each day people have engaged in literature in their own way. And then, when I suddenly raised my head from the road, what a magnificently dignified beauty the mountain range stretching across the distant sky possessed.

"Ah, those mountains!" When Tolstoy saw the Caucasus range and uttered this exclamation, it was not solely because Muscovites had seen nothing but flat grasslands.

"If the words 'Know thyself' inscribed at Delphi's temple marked philosophy's birth, what meaning lay in our mountains here?" "What does it mean to be human?" Hopping over puddles in muddied water reflecting clouds—now, in this present age where the conclusions from answers devised by many philosophers tormented since Socrates' time had finally become the human countenance beneath the atomic bomb's overarching canopy— I wondered where any connection could exist between this continuity of spirit since Greece and a human being like myself. There was nothing. Those mountains were nothing but the prayers of the Mononobe and Soga clans—bloodlines slaughtering each other. Had the gods—showing no trace of ever having traversed this melancholic mountain range—not merely allowed Buddhas to nest briefly in scattered hollows? And yet, I had not even despaired.

From amidst the rice fields of the vast plain came a sudden French-like pronunciation— "Dada, where are you going?"

I heard a voice call out. When I looked, it was Souzaemon's aunt. Her round, perpetually startled eyes gazed at me as she smiled nostalgically. The round-faced bride stood beside her, pressing arm guards to her forehead. With pale purple Mount Chōkai at her back, the aunt pointed toward the station with her gleaming sickle blade. "That way?"

“That’s right,” I nodded.

In this village, the only person who ever initiated a conversation when approaching from the opposite direction was this farm woman in her fifties. This widow was an eccentric who reportedly wouldn’t utter a single word to those she disliked even if they stood right beside her, yet being called out from amidst swarming locusts felt as bright and refreshing as gazing up at the sun. For a while afterward, the air carried a lingering echo, as if the rippling waves of rice ears still whispered and chased after me.

October — As I lay in bed listening to villagers conversing here and there, the local pronunciation increasingly sounded like French to my ears. It might have been particular to this valley alone, but not understanding the meaning made it feel as though I were in the French countryside—I lay entranced beneath the covers, listening raptly. According to my wife, this village’s dialect had a pronunciation unique even within Japan, yet it was truly rhythmic and supple. Disliking how waking would rupture this dream, on such mornings I prolonged my lie-ins as much as possible, ears attuned to the pleasure of France gathering in the mountain folds encircling this place alone. Among the villagers, Souzaemon’s aunt and Sanemon’s pronunciations came closest to French.

The wife had not left for Tsuruoka on the first train while it was still pitch dark. Today, wanting to somehow get hold of tobacco, I too thought of going to Tazuya in Tsuruoka, and when the urge to taste real tobacco in one puff became unbearable, I leapt up. The third train was at eleven o'clock.

I arrived at the Tazuya main store around three o'clock. The proprietor, Sasaki-kun, was absent. After sitting at the shopfront waiting some time for his return, customers looking to buy books came in a steady stream. Amidst the crowd was a man—when had he arrived?—wearing a light tanzen coat, a slender pale figure with ronin-like dignity standing and gazing at the shelves. From the side view, he looked unmistakably like A-kun, but since there was no way A-kun would be in Tsuruoka now, I supposed he must still be back home lamenting our nation's defeat. As I thought this, it proved indeed to be A-kun. He seemed startled to find me there, but he had always been one to never let his expression betray anything in such situations. He glided over and spoke. He was a practitioner of a particular martial art.

“It’s a relief to see you well.” “Ah, what an unexpected place to meet!” “What brings you here?” A-kun spoke of having come here a month earlier, taking a new wife, and how all his Tokyo properties had burned down, but he never mentioned that prophecy he’d once made to me about rice’s vitality having come true. I too found it disagreeable to speak of.

“And why today?” asked A-kun. I spoke about things like the tobacco I’d been without for so long and the mountain village where I was now staying, and laughed. “I see.”

I also learned that he had been stationed at the barracks for about six months prior to the war’s end, but regarding the defeat itself, A-kun still made no attempt to broach the subject. Indeed, when prophecies came true, their value diminished terribly—and now both of us belatedly shared this hollow realization: what had believing in such things ever amounted to? What had A-kun been doing all that time we had wandered about believing in something utterly futile? “In the art I practice, there have been two factions since ancient times—the Heavenly Faction and the Fallen Faction.”

And once, he had told me about that technique—said to be Japan’s oldest martial art—of defeating an enemy without touching them. According to his account, the Heavenly Faction strictly avoided allowing women near their persons, honing their skills in the mountains through waterfall discipline and mist-breathing, whereas the Fallen Faction refined their art by moving from woman to woman. He also explained that these two factions never competed against each other—hence why no one had ever determined which was superior—but even then, A-kun still did not reveal which faction he belonged to. Moreover, since he began studying this technique, he not only abruptly ceased speaking about Valéry, whom he had previously been engrossed in reading, but also became intensely earnest as a person—even going so far as to deliberately return three replacement cigarettes after smoking three from my reception room supply on the same day. He was likely of the Heavenly Faction.

"However, there is one forbidden technique that neither the Heavenly Faction nor the Fallen Faction may ever use," he said. "It involves lightly tapping a specific part of the opponent's back. When performed, the struck one will collapse dead several hours later." After this explanation, A recounted how a certain genius of the Fallen Faction had been mysteriously slain in Osaka by an unknown assailant. This extraordinary practitioner's death baffled all his fellow martial artists—until the mystery was eventually unraveled. The man had secretly tested the forbidden technique on a coolie's back while crossing Manchuria. When he stealthily followed to observe, the laborer had indeed collapsed and died exactly as foretold.

“The end of a realist?” At that, the two of us had laughed. In nations as well as ideologies and literature, there are forbidden moves—such is what I now find myself thinking.

October --

I had been away from home for three days. When I returned to the village, accumulated fatigue struck me and my hemorrhoids had worsened severely, but this cave-like six-mat room tucked deep within proved sufficient for collapsing my body. The thin smoke drifting from the hearth felt unmistakably like home. I had come back storing up a story to tease my wife with, and merely thinking about it made me naturally begin to smirk. The tale's substance was nothing more than an amusing anecdote, yet it might contain that profound depth of circumstance where perhaps I myself was being toyed with by someone.

The day before yesterday during my stay at Tazuya in Tsuruoka—just as I started to rise to return home this morning—two promising young major landowners from S City came for a bride viewing. Since they would likely arrive soon, I was asked to participate in the evaluation and give my opinion.

While I waited, they came around noon. Both were sprightly youths who looked like jockeys poised to gallop at the crack of a whip. I thought the woman who would become this bride was fortunate. One had just returned from military service, his eyes bright and his large frame stretching freely. That was the groom. The other was a strikingly handsome youth brimming with talent—he seemed to have come as an assistant. Since both were complete strangers to me, I simply remained silent and listened nearby as the bridal candidates were narrowed down to two, with apparent struggle over which one to meet first—they discussed at length the family circumstances and personal qualities of each young woman. However, as for the young woman poised to become this fortunate bride, an inexplicable sense of connection to myself began permeating the air until even I—against all reason—found my heart quickening as though this matter intimately concerned me. About what had happened then, I told my wife—who was also raised in Tsuruoka.

“Hey, guess who one of the bridal candidates is—you know, the daughter of that ship agent you were supposed to marry. I pretended not to recognize her though.” My wife feigned indifference with an “Oh, really?” This too was pretense of ignorance. Yet for me—had I been that ship agent—it would have been a matter of avoiding such an outcome over mere trifles, yet here was his daughter now being marked as the top candidate in that very same setting. It was impossible not to feel intrigued—my own wife had once been selected as that ship agent’s primary choice only to flee. And now I found myself in this rare scene of appraising that man’s daughter.

“Well, that girl’s perfect.” “The old man’s a bit of a braggart, but the daughter’s quite impressive.” And recalling how the Tazuya innkeeper who had mediated this conversation had told the youth about it the day before yesterday, I recounted it all exactly as it happened to my wife. “Yes, that man’s daughter is a good person.” “She is a good child, I must say.”

After saying that, she suddenly lowered her voice and fell silent. Observing her sad demeanor—likely recalling how her own children seemed unlikely to become someone to boast of like that daughter—I suddenly lost all courage to continue the conversation further. We both already knew all too well that a woman’s happiness or misery lies mostly in her children. Even after going to bed, however, I secretly hoped that the marriage discussion from the day before yesterday would come to fruition.

I also felt a strong sense of atonement. In the end, I returned without meeting any of the candidates, but that day—joined by those young men—five of us men went to Tagawa Hot Springs and stayed overnight. On the return trip, no matter how long we waited, the automobile never came, so reluctantly, we had no choice but to get a 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 so keenly the things slipping moment by moment from me. With the sensation of watching a meter needle clatter and sway, I gazed at the button on the young man's chest within the black transport vehicle—positioned precisely at eye level—as though it were petals in full bloom, lush and fresh.

However, in this coal-filled compartment, I couldn't simply remain defeated. Even I possessed a few fragrant secrets within my memories of Tagawa Hot Springs—memories dating back to when I was about this young man's age, during that spring soon after marrying my wife. Having visited her family home for the first time, her father had suggested Tagawa Hot Springs with its resident deer as a suitable workplace, where I wrote "The Laughing Empress" for submission to Chūōkōron. Though I was writing about Emperor Nero's wife, my wife would occasionally visit me at my deer-inhabited lodgings from her family home. One day when she was absent, I found myself alone soaking in the men's bath. Someone entered the adjacent women's bath—also alone—creating watery sounds. Initially unaware, I muttered phrases like "Your legs... your legs..." while devising lines where Nero woos his friend Oso's wife, needing humorous touches to capture his character properly. The water around my legs began trembling incessantly. Glancing down, I realized the baths were separated only by a wooden partition below water level. Through sunlit transparent depths, I saw white ripples—the neighboring woman's legs bending sharply like the character く. Truly beautiful. The bath's allure—where only rhythmically extending legs appeared without face or form—overflowed with sensual suppleness akin to precious feather fragments surfacing from memory's depths. Could such beauty exist only here? As emotions swelled at the thought that even Nero's Rome—where he besieged bathers while Petronius lay dying—lacked such aqueous beauty, I kept watching those legs, regretting not having gazed sooner though considerable time had already passed.

“You must have realized.” Just then, she suddenly called out from the adjacent room. The voice certainly sounded like my wife’s. Something felt off. I stayed silent for a moment before asking, “Is that you?” “Yes. It is,” my wife answered from beyond the wall.

“What? When did you get here?”

“Just now, on the one o’clock bus.” “I’ve been waiting for you, you know.” “Hmm, show me your legs a bit more.”

“No,” she said, immediately withdrawing her legs. “Your legs are as slender and graceful as a night deer’s,” I finally made Nero utter, but the whiteness of those translucent legs glimpsed through the bathwater remains in my eyes even now—twenty years later—like flecks on a deer’s coat transformed into a flower tinged with melancholy. The young man before me would likely return here again if matters were settled with him as the top candidate, but now every bath has become civilized like those of Rome.

Late at night, when all the family members had gone to sleep, the eldest son suddenly returned from Tokyo. He had stuffed his rucksack full of sweet potatoes harvested from our own field and looked utterly exhausted. Because these were the first potatoes harvested from our field this year, I opened the bag and, after lightly stroking their tops, went to sleep. “How was Tokyo?” The wife got up and asked the child. “It’s interesting—Jeeps are zooming around everywhere.” “Are there a lot of people starving to death?”

“Yeah.” “I’ve been playing piano since morning and didn’t go out anywhere, so I don’t know.”

“How trivial. That’s all you have to say about Tokyo?” My wife and I had, before we knew it, become people who—merely by being guests from Tokyo—were seen as having children who might as well be strangers. I thought it was about time I returned, even if I had to go alone. As for me, I simply wished to see the harvest through to its end, but I could no longer bear maintaining this observer’s mindset toward the villagers’ kindness.

October — Day

At times, even I found myself overcome by unpleasant feelings. Despite being an evacuee like any other, I found myself overcome by feelings that were somehow unlike those of an evacuee. In fact, I was still the head of the household in Tokyo, while here my wife had become the head of the household. Though my wife and children were evacuees, I alone was not—my coming here with a researcher’s mindset was for the sake of a certain contemplative task I considered a kind of duty. Even so, I felt I had grown far more humble compared to how I had been at first, but when measured against my wife’s wholehearted gratitude toward this village, there still seemed to be something rather unlikable about my own disposition.

On May 24 during the air raid, I completed my duties as group leader and even received a ten-yen commendation from the neighborhood association before leaving Tokyo. When departing, I entrusted caretakers H and I with responsibilities and came here intending to research charcoal burning while declaring I would return soon—to this day I still don't feel like an evacuee. That very attitude proved obstructive. The hollow stubbornness of wanting to maintain my research spirit until complete exhaustion, combined with the desire to suppress this inhuman observer's mentality—this internal politics within an individual had become horribly discordant and ugly. I still hadn't conquered literature. I thought overcoming this must take absolute priority.

October — Day

The rain began to fall frequently. Both yesterday and today were days of heavy rain. On the radio, there seemed to be reports across all lines of trains halted due to nationwide rain. Rice plants without grains, rotting rice plants, rice plants washed away, rice plants choked by sand and left unharvested—the prediction that this year’s rice might not merely be a poor harvest but something far worse spread to every farming household. In this situation, the terror that even the meager rice harvested there might meet some unknowable fate now joined their anxieties.

The sound of water in the weeds was loud. The tips of the bamboo grove hung heavily, and beneath their dripping, a carp swam with its white whiskers stiffly raised. Whenever people gathered, they would invariably speak ill of Execution Committee Chairman Hyōemon. It was nothing new, but lately their complaints had grown more vehement. Their methods of attack were utterly formulaic—it was astonishing how they could repeat the same things like that—and their tenacity was terrifying. Persistently grumbling under their breath, their complaints even numbed the senses.

“Hand over the rice! Hand it over!” they’d say, making everyone comply, then take all the rice meant for the villagers to eat and have him alone monopolize all the honor. This had escalated into a kind of chorus—serving both as solace and as an outlet for their pathological grumbling—yet when the rain fell, these very complaints seemed to transform into memories of hardship. However, the mother of Execution Committee Chairman Hyōemon secretly brought vegetables to us. Kiyoe, Sanemon’s wife, seemed to have spoken of our hardships as if they were her own family’s affair. We had once received miso pickles from there as well. How delicious those pickles were; I had never before eaten such pickles. With the feeling of savoring a splendid treasure unearthed from the villagers’ collective stream of complaints, I placed this in my mouth and relished it.

The inherent flavors of miso and daikon radish, purging each other of impurities to become a pure compound belonging to neither, demonstrated through their semi-transparent jade hue the most sublime crystallization of taste imaginable—a heaven-sent marvel one might call perfection itself. When I placed this fragment on my tongue, its aroma—where saltiness reached its zenith only to seep into sweetness—evoked the visceral pleasure of communing with ancient masters of fermentation. Yet as I savored this, I found myself pondering: could any human being, through prolonged immersion among others, become such an exquisite compound? If even a daikon radish could produce such flavor, then people wouldn't perish so readily. Or perhaps there exists no human capable of discerning such humans.

“People all speak ill of Hyōemon, but he himself said he didn’t want to become committee chairman—they dragged him out and forced him into it, you know.” With this, Kiyoe secretly defended her own family to my wife.

“Even though he kept saying ‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ they forced him into it anyway—if following the authorities’ orders was wrong, then there was nothing he could have done.” I had seen this Hyōemon only once. A handsome man over forty with a sorrowful, taut demeanor—from the brief glimpse I caught of him through the lattice, he seemed a man of ill fortune. In a village near this one, there was a requisition officer who committed suicide after feeling responsible for a shortfall in requisitioned quantities. Throughout the long war, there had not been a single requisition officer nationwide with such a strong sense of responsibility—a fact famously reported even by Tokyo newspapers—and while this village where I resided shared certain similarities, its distinction of having achieved splendid full compliance sooner than any other village now led, through postwar rice shortages caused by defeat, to only the committee chairman being attacked.

“Where are you staying?”

In Tsuruoka's streets, people would often ask me where I was staying, but when I answered Nishime, everyone would say, "Ah, that's a good village."

October — Day

Morning rain glistened on aligned white scallion roots. A morning rain hung milky in the air as though groves of intertwined cypresses advanced through downpour. Over mountain passes descended red sashes of fish-selling girls. Those bare feet—people were gathering at Sanemon’s hearth. Lately it seemed villagers had begun treating even me as part of their neighborhood group. I will stop observing. That too was becoming possible.

The group leader brought a report from the town office to this gathering at the hearth and said—

The national flag must not be displayed unless ordered; strict adherence to left-side traffic; children under fourteen must not drive cattle or horses; all weapons and swords must be surrendered—the above were the orders from the Occupation forces. And then, the group leader— “If you violate these, there’s no telling what punishment you’ll face—I tell you.” “I see. In that case, we can’t let things stay like this.” Immediately, Sanemon stood up and removed the small national flag, still tied to its pole, from the bamboo tube. Then he removed the hanging scroll inscribed with “Long-lasting Military Fortune” from the alcove and rolled it up.

“Oh dear, what a terrible mess we’re in.” “As for His Majesty the Emperor’s photo, that should stay up, don’t you think?” With that, he looked up at the Imperial portrait above the lintel and refused to remove this one. “Ah, we lost, we lost,” a man said. “The way they forced requisitions on us deceived us—that’s why we lost,” said Sanemon.

“They make us grow rice, and then we who grew it can’t even eat our own and are left starving to death—how can such a thing be possible?” “No matter what they say this year, we’re absolutely not handing it over.” “I won’t hand it over,” said another. “I won’t hand it over either.” “They fool us again, and the ones who made us hand it over get all the credit.” “That’s such nonsense.” “That’s right! Through such tricks—what excuse will they use this year to make us hand over our rice? I’ll ask ’em straight up!” This marked the first time defeat’s direct effects had reached our village in such fashion. For a while after, villagers’ talk blossomed with rumors about Allied forces appearing in Yamagata Prefecture—strangely, most stories tended toward favorable accounts. I’d yet to hear a single negative report, though I once heard from a police officer that Yamagata handled relations between both sides more smoothly than anywhere else in Japan.

October — Day

The lily root miso soup remained delicious. Yet today brought another heavy rain. The farmers who had watched the weather until yesterday found no more room for hesitation. Now they needed to save the rice plants before saving people. Then came the establishment of the rice requisition method. The farmers' debates appeared to have intensified again. Last year, guarantee payments meant to ensure compliance had been given to farming households based on their efforts toward meeting set quotas. This year however, production incentive payments would be distributed not according to efforts, but based on production volume. The difference lay in how this year's requisition amount no longer stayed fixed like last year's but changed to being determined by production volume. Precisely because this contained ambiguities compared to last year's system, its inherent severity carried weight—the scope and depth of its scrutiny were formidable. At first glance sympathetic toward those facing requisition, this method showed its true colors by letting cunning evaders slip through only to tighten the screws later—a strategy demanding constant vigilance.

“Yes, yes, I’ll say it upfront. Let them do whatever they want. If we don’t hand it over, that’s that,” one man said. “They say it’s based on production amounts now. If it were individual quotas, I’d understand, but going by the whole village’s production means we’d have to follow the median yield, wouldn’t we?” another argued. “Then those below median will starve again. Same old story,” said a man who looked like a poor farmer.

“After all, we still haven’t received either last year’s guarantee payment or incentive payment, have we? The government claims they’ve paid out, but we haven’t gotten a thing. They snatch up everything they can take yet give nothing back—and now they’re already pressing us for this year’s new rice? That’s downright absurd.” “They haven’t followed through.” “Just leave it be! Let it go!”

As I pieced together the way those people spoke, I found it interesting how I’d come to understand the shift from last year to this year. Then the person next to me—

“The rice we’ve grown—no matter how you try to hide it, you can’t hide it.” “They’ll find out everything.” “Since they’ll know anyway, we should just hand over what’s required. As for what’s left—within the village, whether people deal in the black market or not shouldn’t matter. That’s how we ought to handle it.” They likely spoke this way because someone unconnected to farming households—like myself—was listening nearby. Had I not been at this hearthside, I would have pitied myself imagining what whispered discussions might have unfolded. If anything, since I invariably side with them, I tend to put favorable spins on unfavorable matters—a tendency requiring constant self-vigilance. Whether history should be written with clinical detachment or viewed through compassionate eyes remains an eternal quandary, but I’ve always despised methods that compromise the essence of reality in chasing material truths. This constitutes estrangement from truth itself.

October — Day Droplets fell from the split mouths of burst-open akebi fruits. Children darted between wind-shaken chestnut branches, their clothes thrown open to let rain beat against bare chests. Children compared lengths of green bamboo poles, eyes shining with joy at shrimp caught for rock-fishing bait, knocking down chestnuts. Dense clouds advanced from the sea, hanging so low no patch of clear sky remained. The bitter cold intensified until every rice harvester had returned by afternoon—all except Sanemon's wife Kiyoe. Yellowed lower boughs of cryptomeria enveloped rain-slicked roofs. Rain seeped smokelike into the woods; flies clung motionless to the forgotten electric light.

At dusk, Kiyoe returned. She wore a white headband as if she’d been wielding a naginata. But she did not even try to remove it, taking off her raincoat and wringing out her thoroughly soaked sleeves at the entrance. During the rice harvesting in the rain, it seemed the water had soaked through even the belly band. She stroked her chilled fingers—which felt strangely unfamiliar—and hung the work clothes she had removed layer by layer on the shelf above the hearth. “I’ve never had such a cold rice harvest before, look—” Kiyoe said this as she showed her chilled hands to her child, but today, with a gentle gaze that recalled her youthful beauty, she seemed happier than usual. After Kiyoe, her husband Sanemon also returned home soaked. He hardly ever went out to the fields, but for some reason today he came in smiling cheerfully.

"How auspicious! Today, a bird made a nest in our rice plants." "There were eggs too!" In this area, when birds build nests among rice plants, it signifies impending household prosperity—a phenomenon so envied by local farming families that they celebrate by making rice cakes. That evening, Sanemon cheerfully told visitors about the nest by the hearth. "Your efforts have been rewarded," my wife said. "Let's hope so." "It wasn't your effort. It was Auntie's." "Auntie's."

“I wonder if I’m the one who caused hardships.”

No matter what was said to him, Sanemon looked happy. Kiyoe pressed blue bamboo leaves against the torn edges of her tattered, misshapen woven hat and mended it, “My fingertips are still numb. They won’t straighten out. Like this, see.” Kiyoe’s youngest child, who had been sleeping with their feet toward the hearth, flinched and drew their legs back each time the tongues of fire from the burning wood crept near, even in sleep. A night of such high spirits for this household was rare of late. Unintentionally, I found myself staying up late by that hearth.

October — Day

The weather kept alternating between rain and breaks. The wind also picked up. Could there be any place where such wretched weather persisted like this? No sooner had the thick clouds broken for just two or three minutes and the sun shone 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, I tell you,” Kyūzaemon came and said. The children, their faces wet with rain, stuffed their pockets full of akebi fruits tangled in the mountain trees and came back to scatter them with a clatter by the hearth. Then, they stuffed miso inside, coated the skin with oil, grilled it over the fire, and exclaimed, “Mmm! This is it!”

In the unattended hearths of farming households where everyone had gone out, only the fire was burning. Just when it seemed a quiet afternoon had settled in with cats arching their backs, the wind grew stronger again, sending leaves swirling through the air as persimmons beginning to color stood out conspicuously on branches stripped bare by the gusts. A day of indeterminate weather. That night, Sanemon and his wife, having harvested all their rice fields, returned home with the bird’s nest and placed it before the household Buddhist altar. Inside the fresh straw still bearing its ears, swollen like a natto package, lay three small eggs.

Stars were visible in the sky that had long been unseen. While listening to the clamorous sound of wind in the bamboo grove, Sanemon and Kiyoe discussed where they would go to help with the rice harvest starting tomorrow. Sanemon would go to their eldest son’s wife’s parents’ home, and Kiyoe would go to the fields of the committee chairman’s house in her own parents’ home village. On this night, the two of them retired to their bedroom earlier than usual. In the past, their vast rice harvesting had required assistance from others, but now the opposite was true—a loneliness akin to cradling a dream of that bird’s nest permeated the damp night. Somehow, it was a profoundly still and lonely night.

October — Day

It was the first good weather in a long time. Because the wind still lingered, the paulownia pods on the high treetops were drying out first. The juice of wild grapes was emitting a sake-like aroma in the bottle. The peels of green persimmons for making vinegar had been packed into a barrel. The fire chopsticks testing natto's viscous liquid were thrust into the straw, the ceiling's light opening sucked up smoke, and the grain of the cedar in the plastered door glowed brightly with the hearth flame's color.

My wife and I went out to gather firewood in the mountain behind our house. Our goal was to reach Kurabari Pass—a climb of twelve or thirteen minutes—but the slope leading there left us breathless. As we climbed while collecting fuelwood, each step revealed new vistas of the plain below unfolding its full splendor—a rare sight in its entirety. Though I had often come here alone to gather itadori leaves for tobacco, I brought my wife hoping to show her more scenery than firewood on her first ascent—yet this woman persisted in searching only for kindling. Before long I grew mildly annoyed.

“Don’t you only come here once in a while? Look at the view more—the view!”

“But you’ve already seen it.” “Scenery like this isn’t something you come across so easily.” “It could even be called a magnificent view.” “Because you kept going on about what a magnificent view it was, I was expecting something truly wonderful.” “This is just mountains and fields, isn’t it?” However, I thought that perhaps scenery was just that sort of thing. Once I started wondering what was good about it, no matter what kind of scenery it might be, it was already spoiled.

“It’s because you’ve been accustomed to these mountain views around here since you were small that they don’t strike you as novel. Here I am, a foreigner, admiring the scenery of your homeland, and you’re such an insensitive woman. Use your head rather than firewood!” “No, I want firewood, firewood.”

Suddenly it occurred to me that my entire life had been filled with things just like this, but I thought that this was just fine. The Japanese knotweed growing thickly throughout the valley was already beginning to turn yellow and wither. I had been greatly helped by this as a substitute for tobacco, but if I didn’t gather them now, they might not be of use anymore. When we reached the pass, below us came into view the clear autumn sea. This Kurabari Pass, with its saddle-like ridge evoking the sensation of straddling a horse’s back, offered an excellent view no matter when one gazed upon it. I decided to stop our marital quarrels. The sea surface, sandwiched between grassland cliffs that cascaded down almost vertically, was calm today. As I looked beyond the plain on my right at the overlapping peaks of Haguro, Yudono, and Gassan—the three sacred mountains—the saddle-like terrain evoked an equestrian urge to contend with nature itself; this was a vista that made one nod in understanding of how Nishihaguro, which once made this land its stronghold, had been defeated by Higashihaguro across the way, sowing the seeds of its downfall. Mount Chōkai ahead also stood splendidly clear today.

“Unless I can see the sea like this, I can’t consider it a good view.” “This spot is perfect.” “It’s truly wonderful.”

“It’s too late to say that now.”

With firewood on her back as we climbed up Kurabari Pass’s ridgeline to the left, my wife brought up again that she wanted to build a house where the sea was visible here. However, water would have to be carried up from below at this location. We also had to anticipate the sea winds striking harshly. “I’d once mentioned that if we turned this grassy slope from here down to the sea into pastureland, it would make excellent grazing grounds,” I said. “When I did, Priest Sugai told me that even when an agricultural expert visited later, he’d also said this place was ideal for pasture.”

It had taken on a boastful shape, but in truth, I recalled a cow with a bell around its neck walking alone through such a place in the Tyrolean meadows and thought that even the pasture expert must have seen similar locations. “This really is a magnificent view here.” “If you don’t call this a magnificent view, then there’s no such thing as good scenery.”

I no longer wanted to gather firewood or anything like that and, with the rope tied around my waist, wandered through the bushes. The crimson thorn berries were like secret jewels that had dripped down, and the autumn sky above them remained utterly clear and azure. If the plain extending inward on the right here were the sea, this ridge would evoke Amanohashidate. However, compared to being the sea, this plain offered more variation and was preferable to me.

One summer some seventeen or eighteen years ago, I came to a fishing village called Yura about one ri to the left from here for sea bathing and there completed writing a work titled Machine. The other day, when I heard Yura was close by here, I felt nostalgic and decided to cross over the pass. On the second day after the war's end, when I too lacked vigor and could only retrace memories, I looked up from the road below at the second-floor room I had rented to see an unfamiliar evacuee woman at the window—leaning on her cheek with that same expression of uncertain contemplation about her path ahead—gazing down at me. The landlord from eighteen years earlier, Wada Ushinosuke, had already died, and at that time I passed straight through the twilight fishing village without entering. The old woman Rie—born at Sanemon's place where I now reside—had married into this Yura, so that day I was treated to a fish meal at Rie's house.

“It’d be nice if Granny from Yura came.” “It should be about time she arrives.”

"My wife says this. We both liked old woman Rie—so much that whenever the children heard her voice, they'd come running out shouting 'There she is!'—but I found myself wondering what she might have been doing back when I was watching those same waves from Ushinosuke's second floor. As we searched for firewood among the bushes that day, my wife and I talked about those summer days long ago when we went swimming in the sea. The crimson thorn berries seemed to prick up their ears in quiet attention. Her gaze held something like the sound of snugly fitted swimsuits soaking in water. Ah, this one—"

Since they had gathered a considerable amount of firewood, the two of them decided to descend the mountain after gazing at the sea for a while.

“Heave-ho!” my wife said as she hoisted the firewood onto her back. Somehow when I shouldered the bundled firewood I suddenly became aware of my age. Both of us, while looking at each other’s figures,

“Looks like we’re done for.” “You’ve turned into an old man, and I’ve turned into an old woman,” we laughed together.

“Let’s stay strong. Please keep your spirits up.” “Nah, I’ve already given up.” “But I don’t want to become young again.” “I’ve had more than enough of that already.” Gazing down at the valley where horse chestnuts fell, the slope came to an abrupt end in a cascade of laughter-like descent.

October --

No sooner had it cleared up than this day too brought a sudden rain. A sudden rain poured into their midst—a vast army of rice sheaves impaled on drying racks across the plain encircled by distant mountains, standing arrayed in their hundreds of thousands like ritual offerings, spreading endlessly as far as the eye could see. The great sky showed its beauty, adorned with harvest beneath a rainbow that had drawn a vivid, perfect semicircle. At the main house of Sanemon’s family, they began pounding rice cakes from dusk. It was the celebration of that bird’s nest. Thanks to Tensaku’s formidable strength at pounding the rice, a full mortar was quickly finished, and we too ate the bird’s nest rice cakes. A lonely hope—

October――

On a single tall oak tree visible at the mountaintop, flocks of siskins from the Sea of Japan came to perch in increasing numbers each day. Chestnuts gathered at the roots of valley trees. Walnuts that had fallen with each rain piled up in a basket, and a black cat sniffed around the fish smell in the untouched wooden-floored area. The white-flowered asters' tall stems sagged along the fence.

A marriage arrangement arose for Setsu, the youngest daughter of Kyūzaemon’s branch household. Both sides appeared to be proceeding favorably—even the shrine maiden called Buddha’s Mouth had endorsed it as an auspicious match—and his family had lately become markedly animated. The groom was a young man from Shinjō who worked as a stud horse handler at a pasture. This burly, obese youth with thick lips had already arrived by train from distant Shinjō and showed no inclination whatsoever to leave Kyūzaemon’s house. Though scarcely any time had passed since their first meeting and no formal decision had been made, they were already staying together under the same roof. It was an oddly accelerated courtship by any measure.

“They say Setsu-chan is the prettiest girl in the village.”

My wife told me this once. This youngest daughter Setsu had been meant to marry the youngest son of Rie from Yura, but when he was killed in the Battle of Okinawa, Rie—feeling responsible during those days of unresolved hesitation—had taken it upon herself to arrange this match with the groom from Shinjō. Setsu was nineteen, a girl with a beauty that seemed older than her years—realist's eyes as cold as her father's, lips soft and ochre-hued. "That Kyūzaemon household will get their punishment soon enough, mark my words."

This is what the villagers say, and the reason seems to be that they made a profit by selling goods to worshippers at the temple.

November――

Today became a downpour. The bridge was submerged up to its belly; the rice fields vanished beneath the water, and only the road floated long upon the surface like another bridge. From between autumn leaves deepened in color, lapis lazuli-colored akebi fruits hung in vivid arcs, while azuki beans with lustrous sheen and fuzzy burdock seeds lay arrayed across the wooden floor. From the direction of the gaping fig orchard came the sodden call of a mountain dove—hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo.

November――

The sun shone on the faintly red buds of myoga. 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 new groom’s match, Rie seemed to find it hard to stay in Kyūzaemon’s household—now brimming with restless joy—since Setsu had been meant to marry her own war-dead son. She would steal moments to visit her birth family’s hearthside at Sanemon’s house, where she vented her grievances. However, as there appeared to be a custom of displaying bridal trousseaus, when my wife was called over from Kyūzaemon’s house, Setsu’s elder sister now slipped away to Sanemon’s hearthside. There she lamented the destitution of her own dowry-less marriage and wept enviously over her younger sister’s lavish display.

"The bridal furnishings were quite splendid." "But over there they’re all smiles, here they’re in tears, and today even I got caught up in the commotion." While saying this, my wife came into the room where I was, and suddenly—

“What exactly does a ‘stud horse handler’ do?” she asked. She might not have known about such a profession. Yet I felt no urge to explain aloud. I thought how even at our age, there remained things I couldn’t discuss with my wife—this being one of them. My wife, perhaps sensing my silence, swiftly changed tack. “Why does everyone speak so ill of that household?” “The groom-to-be gets it worse.” “They say his lips hang slack, or that he’s sullen and swollen-faced without uttering a word—like some sumo wrestler.” “And though they’re touted as great landowners, they’ve no storehouse at all.” “People keep muttering, ‘What kind of landowner lacks a storehouse?’ while badmouthing them endlessly.”

“Even if they complain now, it’s already too late. Kyūzaemon wouldn’t let anything slip through the cracks, would he?”

Now that I mention it, it had been three whole days since Kyūzaemon and I last met. He would come every morning without fail, and though I’d finally found respite from having my mornings consumed by him, I still grew inexplicably lonely when the old man’s face disappeared from view. To me, Kyūzaemon had become the only person in this village with whom I could hold a proper conversation. Before I knew it, I had carved out a single channel for dialogue here—one shaped to my own rhythms—and through it poured words daily; perhaps it wasn’t he who trespassed on my time, but I who encroached upon his.

“When I talk with you—it’s just so endlessly fascinating—” Kyūzaemon had once murmured this abruptly. That I still hadn’t made any requests about rice was likely another consequence of us talking too much every day. Whenever I met him, our conversations would naturally—without any particular intent—drift toward my travels through other prefectures, until through these exchanges I realized I’d somehow visited every prefecture in the country. Naturally, wherever I went, I made sure to sample all the local foods. As our talks unfolded, landscapes from those regions would rise before my eyes—yet whenever we reached topics like the view of plains and sea from horseback riders here, the exquisite flavor of local rice, or the unmatched taste of sea bream and small flatfish unique to this region, our conversation always halted there, ultimately bolstering Kyūzaemon’s confidence.

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

Given this about Kyūzaemon, it was only natural that my Tokyo stories would pique his interest. Among them, the tales about Tojo Hideki seemed to have particularly captured the old man's attention ever since he learned we shared the same town association. "That fellow built himself a house or some such," Kyūzaemon said, "and for a time even folks here spoke ill of him." "Actually, there was something odd about that house." I too had once ended up recounting something better left unmentioned—a memory from shortly after returning from abroad, when I'd wanted to experience firsthand a love for the land and thought of acquiring some property myself. One day I walked around the Tamagawa area where my brother-in-law lived until we stood before a modest hill called Hachimanyama at an old shrine site.

“This is nice,” I said. I wanted to buy that place. On a sloping terrain where many red pines grew, the suitably sized vacant lot there basked in ample sunlight, its grass tender. “It’s nice, but someone hanged themselves from this red pine,” my brother-in-law said, pointing to a pine tree with fine branches. Suddenly and without reason, I became uncomfortable. “Then I can’t take it.” However, halfway up that regrettable slope, that single red pine alone leaned its body with branches stretching down disproportionately, its smooth bark bathed generously in sunlight—it was beautiful. A year or two later, when I stood again before that hillock, within an area that had been cordoned off, a sign stood reading “Construction Site of Tōjō Hideki.” What a terrible place I had bought—even though I had tried to stop myself—yet before long, the area was beautifully cleared and transformed into a vast, eye-opening space.

"But somehow things ended up like this—if I’d bought that place back then."

When I laughed, Kyūzaemon let out a sound like a bird's call—"Hoo, hoo"—and then,

“Hanging, you know,” he said and fell silent. “The second generation used a pistol, but it still ended up at the neck.” Yet Kyūzaemon faced the inconvenience of having to end the conversation there. The reason was that he was, as people said, someone who had profited by selling things at the temple. Though it might have seemed trivial, there was still something about it that felt vaguely difficult to articulate. In other words, that must be what constituted his unfortunate aspect. Indeed, in a village as conservative and bound by endless customs as this, even the nature of tragedies took on its own distinct form. That was always the difficult part when talking about it.

November —

The rice harvesting had not yet finished. Due to the continuous bad weather, progress in every field was slow and sluggish. I thought of returning to Tokyo once I saw the farmers’ harvest through, but in the evening twilight when flocks of wild geese crossed the sky, I imagined that those people exiled here to Dewa in ages past must have felt much the same way—and then the skies of Tokyo appeared a thousand miles distant, and I found myself overcome with homesickness. However, my wife opposed this, saying she’d be content to stay buried here and had no desire to go anywhere else.

“But there’s no point in staying here forever.” “Then do you truly wish to return so badly?” “It’s not that I particularly want to return, but I don’t know the winters here.” When the conversation turned to winter matters, my wife fell silent. Since my wife’s maternal family, who had grown up in Dewa, appeared to have originated from Kyoto in ancient times, such words exchanged between us each winter likely continued throughout our lives. Moreover, Tokyo’s winters were the finest of the entire year, with little rain or wind, and the sunlight soft and mellow. When I thought of Tokyo in winter, I was overcome with unbearable nostalgia—but just then Kyūzaemon would come by and start talking about the blizzards here piling up a full ten feet,

“The cod here is delicious. “The winter cod here is exceptional.” Every time he mentioned just one good thing—always about food—he ended up weakening my resolve. I was also extremely fond of winter cod. That might be nice too, I occasionally thought. These fleeting thoughts proved troublesome once they arose, but when I considered how my first-year middle school child had to brave the blizzard to reach the long station halfway here in time for the first train, then commute three more stations to Tsuruoka daily, this winter became an even greater trial for him than for me.

“You can stay here as long as you like,” Kyūzaemon told me, but when Sanemon heard this, “You won’t last.” “Winter’s impossible for newcomers,” he said.

Living together with another family in one house meant never knowing how much we were inconveniencing them—that indistinct realm of the mind would occasionally assert its rights and cast shadows. Since shadows were projections of the heart regardless of their scale, the strain that surfaced in each other's expressions wounded us mutually. Yet such things rarely happened among the farming households here. Sanemon's rudeness and selfishness stood as brazenly magnificent as his artful idleness.

November —

How much longer will this self of mine persist? It’s astonishing I haven’t grown weary of being myself—I marvel at this.

Outside, the mountain trees shed their leaves with each rainfall. The thicket widened its gaps to reveal more autumn foliage, and the mountain grew bright. In the seed boxes lined up in the room, adzuki beans emitted a crimson, alluring gloss. On the surface of the burdock seeds—their bristly husks peeled away—delicate cloud-shaped lines resembling maki-e lacquerwork traced intricate patterns, while beside the waxy white flesh of candle beans, hyacinth beans lined up with a glossy black sheen. However, to my melancholy eyes, these too now appeared merely as riverbed stones quietly supporting the passage of time.

A girl with a red sash crossed the mountain where autumn rain fell through crimson foliage, coming to sell fish. With a swiftness that seemed to outpace the very color of the sea, bamboo baskets filled with flounder, squid, skate, and hokke fish sprawled across every household's wooden flooring, while from where cabbages stood piled high with their magnificent leaf veins, the thud-thud of pestles pounding newly harvested rice cakes could be heard. The daikon-white clarity of the mountainside, the wet tree trunks—

Rie, the elderly woman from Yura, was managing all the meals single-handedly at Kyūzaemon's house where everyone had gone out for rice harvesting. "Why don't you stop returning to Yura and stay here as our bride instead?" they kept pressing her. Even after Setsu of the Kyūzaemon household returned from a two-night stay at her fiancé's countryside home—where her mother had accompanied her—her fiancé had come along too. The pair seemed to be sharing a bedroom though they hadn't yet held their wedding ceremony. Amidst this easygoing company, only Rie grew agitated by the situation; she would flee to Sanemon's hearthside and sigh like this.

“In our day as brides, we were too shy to even speak to our grooms—what sort of girl is that?” “Chattering away with her fiancé, taking walks together this early on, keeping their room shut tight—those two don’t come out all day.” “What in the world are they doing without even holding a proper ceremony?”

Was she seeing visions of her own child who had died in battle? The old woman poured out complaints all night long. Because of this, Sanemon's wife grew utterly exhausted from sleeplessness and began complaining to my wife about her lack of rest, though the ripples from those newlywed dreams seemed to have finally reached my chest and settled there. To me, such matters already felt superfluous.

November —

The labor called agriculture repeated the same tasks day after day. Yet upon closer inspection, the types of labor were gradually changing. The work they had set aside on forgotten days now sprouted buds; they gathered what had daily ripened into tangible results and prepared for the next phase of tasks—such was the rhythm of their work that left no room for weariness. There seemed to be no other entertainment to speak of, but surely such things could be endured through festivals alone. If only it avoided urbanization, agriculture itself appeared to contain an element of amusement within its labor.

I did not bring a single book or sheet of manuscript paper from Tokyo. I had wanted to test how thoroughly I could isolate myself from my profession by not bringing any of its essential tools, but whenever I found scraps of printed paper in my child’s schoolbag, I pulled them out and read them as instinctively as one drinks water. When there was abstract writing among them, my head would suddenly awaken from drowsiness, and I felt a sense of purpose. By now, abstract words had transformed into drugs for me, and the world of labor surrounding me appeared as a dream or illusion. What did this mean? The law that living beings perish when separated from their herd must surely have begun taking effect on me as well.—At such times, I boarded an overcrowded train where I might be jostled off and rode out to Tsuruoka. My labor consisted of being turned to the right or spun to the left, twisted around at the train’s boarding entrance—and this brought me considerable enjoyment.

I was allowed to stay overnight at Tasuke-ya in Tsuruoka last night, where the proprietor, Mr. Sasaki, hung a hanging scroll of Kishida Ryūsei’s Fruit Painting for me. Though a light-toned ink work, in my recent life so distant from artworks, it felt like receiving a single drop of celestial nectar—the mountains and rivers I ordinarily saw vanished from my sight. To this new theory that the capacity to feel beauty’s joy forms intelligence’s root, I find myself agreeing. This must indeed be where old philosophies will be overturned.

When I returned, Rie, the old woman from Yura, had taken the three-year fermented miso mash—which her sister had hidden away like a treasure in Kyūzaemon’s kitchen—and plopped it down in Sanemon’s kitchen. And while urging them to eat up, "That old hag’s greedier than a crow," "If I hadn’t gone and stolen it like this, she’d never have given us a speck." This three-year fermented mash was something Kiyoe had long coveted, though no matter how many times she’d begged Kyūzaemon’s wife, it had never been granted. Then when evening fell again, Rie came rushing in,

“That fiancé thinks I’m just a kitchen drudge.” “He doesn’t even give a single greeting.” “Wouldn’t it be nice if he’d at least say a word to me?” After saying such things, she would rant and rave. She seemed terribly sad.

November —

The rain continued to fall. Even farming households that had finished reaping could not gather their harvests due to the rain. Because of this, an unexpected lull arose in every household during what should have been the height of harvest season. With other agricultural tasks now requiring them to go into town, return to their hometowns, or visit distant relatives in the countryside, every hearthside became frequented by such comings and goings. When such human interactions flourished, the topics that came together naturally turned into rumors about prices, resulting in nothing but the village's low costs beginning to rise unsteadily.

Stories from mountain life reached every hearthside, sparking roaring laughter—tales of evacuees who had bought one shō of sake for thirty yen only to transport it to cities and sell it for three hundred; of evacuees gathering rice at ten yen per shō then reselling it for seventy; of a good-natured village that carelessly let itself be swept up in rice hoarding until its own stocks ran out, forcing it to repurchase rice at inflated prices from those very evacuees.

“We can’t even begin to guess how much money those city folks have anymore.” “They’ve got endless amounts.” This conclusion of the villagers now seemed prevalent everywhere, and while they’d likely formed a rough estimate of how much money I and others possessed, there was even one farmer housing an evacuee who grumbled, “The evacuee staying with us hasn’t bought a single thing from our household.” As for me, I preferred to spend my money in this village rather than elsewhere, but whenever I tried to make purchases, they said things like “We’ve never done business with your kind here,” implicitly alluding to my connection with Kyūzaemon.

November —

Kawabata Yasunari sent me three thousand yen. It was an advance payment for Crest from Kamakura Bunko; though I had never once requested it, I felt grateful for this perfectly timed remittance that arrived as if anticipating my needs. With this, my preparations to return were complete for now—yet perhaps because it was the first payment I'd received since the war's end, like the first breath of a literary world stirring back to life, it felt precious.

From the lingering misty rain emerged Japanese cedars, Japanese black pine leaves, and chestnut branches like shadow puppets. At Sanemon’s household, they began pounding harvest celebration rice cakes from evening onward that day. For the evening celebration, our family was treated to a feast in the adjacent room with the Buddhist altar. In the large central pot, azuki bean cakes melted into a gooey collapse; the medium pot was filled with white translucent rice cakes. In a splendid oval chest sat heaped white rice, while on trays arranged around it lay fish called aburako that Sanemon had caught through shore fishing that day. Beside him was placed a ritual meal for his eldest son who had yet to return from military service; alongside this and his bride’s tray stood only two elevated offerings.

To us evacuee guests, every dish—each surely being the fruit of a year's labor, grain by grain—seemed to shine with brilliance. The soups and rice cakes simmered for hours in thick iron pots were truly delicious. The fish called aburako measured four or five sun in length—a small creature, yet one highly prized in these parts. Its flavor was delicate, like a subdued version of catfish. All else too—the soy sauce, miso, buckwheat, natto, vegetables—were products of Kiyoe's solitary labor here. No wonder people sang of her working "through rain and wind." That night, the old woman from Yura ate solemnly before me at her tray. Sanemon poured me a ceremonial cup of sake—a rare gesture whose provenance remained mysterious. It had been ages since I last tasted liquor. Even Yuki—Sanemon's youngest daughter who never returned home for festivals—was present. This seventeen-year-old maid serving the village's largest landowner stood beside the eldest son's bride, their combined presence lending an unexpected luster to the Buddhist altar room. Beside them moved Tensaku's hands—devouring everything within reach with startling deftness. At first I marveled they could consume such quantities of rice cakes, rice and soup, but watching those reaching hands empty everything with such speed made my own appetite seem devoid of survival value.

After all, I was born to observe—this thought struck me with profound clarity.

November —

White clouds floated between the overlapping layers of clear, stacked mountain ranges. Migratory birds flocked over the harvested fields. In the valley, acorns fell silently. Kyūzaemon looked at the youths still harvesting rice in the fields and remarked. “In my younger days, I could cut two hundred fifty bundles an hour. However, even the best of today’s youngsters can only manage a hundred twenty bundles, I tell ya. Look there—they don’t even know how to lay down the bundles they’ve grabbed and cut. They grab and cut it, then just plop it down sideways right away. They gotta lay ’em vertical, I tell ya.”

“Your rice fields still haven’t been harvested?” I asked. “This year’s harvest is three weeks behind. “The rice plants just ain’t drying, I tell ya. “The late crops’ll be trouble yet.” When there was a bit of sunlight, they turned over each sheaf on the drying racks one by one. At a time when even after cutting the paddies’ rice, it took three weeks for the grain to become edible; when farming households that had barely replenished their stores through early harvests found themselves borrowing food again due to the slow drying; word came that Kyūzaemon’s household rice reserves had once more become everyone’s target. The worries that had once eased from Kyūzaemon now seemed to be mounting again.

“It’s a problem not having any, but having it is just as troublesome,” he finally complained. Rie, the old woman from Yura, still hadn’t returned from Kyūzaemon’s place when she came rushing into Sanemon’s hearthside again, “Finally had it out with that old hag.” “Sisters we may be, but she won’t lend me rice anymore.” “Feast your eyes! Brought this just for you—eat up!” As she spoke, she pulled a stew of vegetables and potatoes from beneath her apron. Kiyoe merely laughed.

At Yura's fishing grounds, the Tokyo-based fishing boss's premises had burned down, leaving them unable to repair their nets. With oil prices soaring and supplies unavailable, they now had an additional demobilized son to feed—making it absolutely necessary to secure rice provisions from Kyūzaemon's household by any means. The old woman’s struggle—pressuring Kyūzaemon for rice now to fulfill her promise of procuring fish for Setsu's wedding—transformed into these morning sisterly quarrels that clattered life into the kitchen; yet whenever Rie came, she also had this habit of wiping the floorboards.

“This is the house where I was born, you know,” she said. “If I don’t clean it up nice and pretty like this, I don’t feel like I’ve really come.” It wasn’t particularly meant as a jab at us. She would keep wiping all the way to the edge of my room’s veranda, then take a brief rest to gaze at the bamboo grove in the garden. “It was beautiful long ago, this garden here, you know,” she murmured. “And there’s not a stone or tree left anymore.” This old woman would chatter away nonstop with innocent abandon one moment, only to immediately fall asleep by the hearth the next. For seventy years she had not traveled between this village and the fishing village a ri and a half away, yet knew everything about both; whether people wanted to listen or not, she would talk incessantly—about who had profited how much from whom, who had courted whom into marriage, which foxes had attached themselves to whom—until even my children came to know it all. Kiyoe was listening with a smile,

“But when she goes home, her daughter-in-law bullies her, I tell you,” Kiyoe whispered to my wife. Yet whenever I looked at her, this old woman from Yura was beautiful. I thought it would have been good if I had such an old woman myself. Once, when I inadvertently let slip “What a beautiful old woman” where Sanemon and others were gathered, they all suddenly widened their eyes and looked at me. There had been a time when they fell silent in apparent surprise at this unexpected remark—likely no one had ever considered the beauty or ugliness of a white-haired old woman from a fishing village before. Because of this old woman’s presence, I could scarcely grasp how much more vividly the village and its mountains and rivers stood out to me, how the farmers’ thatched roofs and fields seemed to glow with vitality. Come to think of it, Sanemon’s idleness too contributed to this. The very fact that he was an utter idler somehow gave this village a comical yet leisurely and settled flavor. When it came to lotteries for rationed goods, he always drew first prize—and for some reason, this very fact would send ripples of laughter through the people.

When night fell, Kiyoe was at the hearth beating sugarcane stalks she had cut from the fields. Even in this cold region they had begun planting sugarcane that year to make homemade sugar, and tonight being their first attempt made the hearthside unusually lively. She would cut the stalks into foot-long pieces, crush them on a large cutting board, and toss them repeatedly into an enormous pot. "Hoh, this here's sweet," "Well now, this might just make sugar after all." Sanemon sat with his thighs splayed wide, chewing on green sugarcane stalks while laughing with a "Huh-huh, huh-huh." When the pot had simmered awhile, he removed the lid and dipped a finger into the liquid,

“Hoh, so sweet!” “Just you wait—I’ll slather this on some botamochi and let you kids eat your fill of something real tasty!” Sanemon said to my children. The children, amused, kept slicing off pieces of sugarcane with their knives in smooth, swishing motions. As Sanemon stirred with a ladle, the liquid in the pot gradually transformed into a viscous, amber-colored syrup. “Hoh, this is delicious.” “It’s sugar.” Sanemon’s bearded face, relaxed as he spoke, bore two long streaks of pot soot like burn marks—a scene quite different from nights spent making miso or soy sauce. The only one who looked like an adult was Kiyoe.

November --

Thorn berries emerged from both sides of the path.

Persimmon fruits gleamed high in the clearing sky. A pheasant took flight from among the autumn leaves; its wingbeats resounded through the empty valley. Farming households thus once again seemed to have grown busier. A horse’s mane swayed in the morning mist. The creak of wagon wheels on the road where frost had just begun to form—

A black-market dealer who said he would arrange twenty-five bales at 1,500 yen per bale had infiltrated this village a few days prior. The idea of transporting it by truck all the way to Tokyo—they concluded such a thing wasn’t feasible, and it seemed this plan fell through—but from that moment onward, the price of rice surged abruptly. The price per shō had risen to around forty yen. According to reports from Tokyo, it had reached between sixty and seventy yen. That Kyūzaemon had remarked—"There’s nothing in this village that sells for over five yen per shō, I tell you"—had been back in summer. When it had reached twenty yen, the villagers had been astonished, but now everyone merely gazed at the fields as though watching an unbroken stallion let loose.

“With this, many will starve to death this winter, I tell you.” Kyūzaemon said with pity.

“Now that things have come to this, we might as well return to Tokyo and starve to death with our neighborhood association people. Let’s go back.”

“Let’s go back,” my wife whispered to me. It was a good thing we had resolved to go back. That night, my wife bundled up some clothing and slipped out the back to the house of Sōzaemon’s widow next door. And then, after returning,

“Sōzaemon’s widow, Sōzaemon’s widow,” my wife muttered cheerfully. Here’s what happened. When my wife asked if she would sell rice at four hundred yen per bale, this widow widened her eyes and blinked rapidly, then after a moment, “Punishment will come, punishment will come,” she was said to have uttered those two phrases while shaking her head. “I can’t sell it for such high prices.” “It’s sixty yen when requisitioned.” “And four hundred yen—punishment will come, punishment will come,” she repeated.

“Even so, if we can’t buy rice, we’ll starve to death. Please sell it to us—at four hundred yen.” “I can’t sell it, I can’t sell it. At the recent regular meeting, they decided up to two hundred yen isn’t black market, you know. I detest the black market. If it’s one hundred fifty yen for just one bale, I suppose I could manage.” “But that’s too unreasonable. Then, three hundred yen,” my wife said.

From the side, the daughter who had returned from Tokyo after marrying to help out had been listening; when she saw the clothes my wife had brought, she said, “I want that. Make it into my kimono.” It seemed their discussion had reached an agreement: while she wouldn’t sell rice outright, she would provide small portions as needed before shortages occurred. “I wondered if there were still people like this these days.” “I fell twice on the way back—Ah, it hurts, I hit here—Ah, it hurts!” My wife slumped sideways and was now rubbing her waist. There will always be those above and those below, I thought.

November――

The autumn foliage had grown even more vivid from the mountain gorge up to the summit. The crimson leaves that had unfurled across the mountainside like a great curtain resembled a silent festival without human participants. In late autumn, amidst this vivid tapestry where sunlight would blaze through one moment and sudden showers lash down the next, persimmons glowed crimson on denuded branches while rice plants beneath them ripened into grain. Chrysanthemums emerged from the morning and evening chill. In every household's Buddhist altar room, new straw bales exuded their earthy scent, and those gathered around hearths seemed filled with the vibrant energy of their prime.

In Sanemon’s ten-mat Buddhist altar room, rice bales tightly bound with new straw were piled so heavily that they warped the floorboards—a splendid year’s harvest that finally rewarded the housewife Kiyoe’s toil. Through this tangible accumulation of harvested realities—each fact grasped and examined—a purifying new scent lingered in the room, cleansing both body and spirit. It was bright. —Yet Kiyoe’s eldest son, still away at war, had not returned. Though snow had already fallen on the distant mountains. Ginkgo fruits were falling. The Chinese potatoes—the same as satoimo taro—were grown there in muddy fields, but Kiyoe had been immersed in the mud since morning, sloppily churning through it to dig them up. I felt more terror than admiration. Could it be that this woman had become a work maniac?

I tried walking alone again along the path surrounding the marsh. This path was flat and had never known human presence. Enveloped by a drooping chestnut grove where fallen leaves had piled up, I ended up coming here to be alone. Whenever I did, acid would inevitably rise in my stomach, causing pain, and I would sit resting on a tree stump, gazing down at the water chestnuts densely clustered in the marsh. My head, submerged into nature, remained motionless in unbearable gloom; with a numbness that resisted even attempts to rouse it, I simply gazed around at the vanished remains of Nishihaguro’s temple pagoda.

Humanity as a whole had no purpose—the thought struck me suddenly. Then there could be no means either. Even if I thought I should enjoy life, the acid rising through me made it feel as though death approached from within. The mountaintops layering glassy blues and kudzu-mochi grays were bathed in sunlight, that lone spot glowing with an almost divine presence—yet acid kept surging relentlessly through my stomach's folds. With each fleeting breath came a sense of connection—as if the mountain ridges mirrored in my eyes bound themselves deep into my gut—and those undulating slopes ached like eroded flesh. A god being severed—on this path of fallen leaves dampened by arboreal tears, chestnut burs lay moistened. Only a single goat crawling through marshside weeds moved without cease. Tethered by a rope stretched taut at full radius, this bleating creature tracing circles while kicking grass appeared as a struggling mass of pure white—snow ripped from distant peaks—while the stagnant marsh waters deepened their vivid stillness in the twilight hour——

November――

We traveled from Yome along the Mogami River to Shinjō. The autumn foliage along the Mogami River stretched endlessly. It shone as brightly as if passing through a procession of countless lanterns. Beside us, three women recently returned from southern Korea told pitiful tales, their stories illuminated by the crimson leaves yet finding no mournful echo; the train pressed onward through thickening scenery that blazed like embroidered silk. I remembered how my wife’s late father had mentioned owning a mountain near the waterfall visible from this railway section, and as I peered intently, I saw the cascade plunging through the reverse side of autumn leaves from a cliff across the river. This must be it, I thought.

“How mercenary people can be.” “Even the Koreans we chatted with daily stopped talking to us outright from that day on.” “They took everything—our money, our homes,” said one of them. “I wasn’t treated that way.” “They told me, ‘You should just become Korean here.’” “I thought maybe I would,” she said. “There’s no sense in me returning to my hometown now.”

Leaving such voices behind, we arrived in Shinjō at three o'clock. We headed toward the residence of Mr. Inoue Matsutarō, the soy sauce brewer. The reason I was heading there was to attend the discussion meeting being held that evening. 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 detached buildings connected by corridors, and a great Japanese torreya tree whose trunk split into five at the base spread its branches. The stone bridge shaped like a chopping block 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 came the sound of a Chopin etude. It was said to be the piano from the room of the Supreme Court’s Prosecutor-General, who had evacuated here. The piece suited the quiet pondside with fallen leaves, and I felt that the beauty of late autumn Tokyo had found its way here.

Salmon caught in the Mogami River was served for dinner. With splendid flavor, along with tuna, tofu, nameko mushrooms, yellow chrysanthemum, tempura, fresh sweets, salmon roe, and more.

About twenty to thirty people had gathered for the discussion meeting. Under the title "Rural Cities and Cultural Figures" that I had come up with the previous night, I presented roughly twenty weighty themes and attempted to outline their essentials.

“In our class, resignation is considered the foremost training,” said one woman. I didn’t understand what kind of class my class was supposed to be, but after everyone had left, it became clear that the woman was the wife of a former daimyo in this region. After that, three major landowners from this region were vigorously discussing tenant farmer issues. It occurred to me that the landowner class here seemed deficient in cultivating resignation.

I stayed overnight there with Mr. Sasaki Katsuyoshi, who had guided me from Tsurugaoka, and the next day, we returned on the four o'clock train. When we reached Yome, Mr. Sasaki—carrying a large five-shō soy sauce barrel on his back—asked, “How will you manage to take this back to Mizusawa?” “Is that barrel mine?” “Yes,” he replied. “Mr. Inoue said to give it to you as a gift.” I felt deeply indebted to Mr. Sasaki, who had silently carried the heavy soy sauce all that time without complaint. That night, I stayed at Mr. Sasaki’s place in Tsurugaoka, making this the second time I felt profoundly obliged.

November——

In my village, they said there was no road worse than those in November throughout the entire year—and truly, this month's roads were not roads at all. Sanemon went to the mountains to dig for yamaimo. Among all the work he did, there was said to be nothing as enjoyable as this. My wife lay bedridden with a stomachache, while Sanemon's wife was out in the muddy fields stirring sweet potatoes. These were essential provisions for surviving the winter. The air grew colder; the whiteness of daikon radishes on the rain-drenched mountain slopes stood out starkly in the stillness, and only fallen leaves came scattering down as though shaken loose.

I finished reading a book on Chinese philosophy that I had bought from Mr. Sasaki's place, but failed to grasp its main points. In the period following Confucius' era, I found much that remained unknown to me in the thoughts of those reclusive thinkers resembling Greek Sophists. These unnamed superior intellects that had sustained civilization perished through their very refinement, leaving us only with mundane bones thick with concepts. Yet to strike these bones and hear the resonance of their flesh would demand extraordinary spans of time.

The other day, when Mr. Sato Masaaki visited from Tokyo, he spoke of his father—the late scholar Mr. Shōhan, a master of Chinese studies who had passed away several years ago in his seventies. This scholar had devoted seventy years to his specialization, ultimately reaching the academic study of character origins called Shuowen before his death—a field still considered virtually untouched by anyone. “Does your specialty in French also take seventy years?” I asked.

“It probably does take that long.” “Then literature would seem to require the least time, but does it really?” “It does take that long.” “Then I still have twenty years left.” “Very well—twenty more years,” we both laughed at this juncture. Later, when I met Kyūzaemon and asked what proved most challenging in farm work, “Selecting the seeds,” he answered without hesitation. The difficulty of choosing which seeds to plant in which fields remained beyond even Kyūzaemon’s grasp—Kyūzaemon, now sixty-eight and a master of his craft. He likely wouldn’t comprehend it even given a lifetime’s effort. We must be like eggplants or tomatoes that cannot endure repeated planting in the same soil, yet none instructs us how. What does it mean to refine oneself? No one has ever addressed this. No—I cannot even discern whether I am tomato or pumpkin. Seventy years pass—a hundred— All I do is await that transient moment when a butterfly might visit my existence. Did China’s hermits perish fruitlessly? Was not seal engraving’s beauty a symbol of life’s splendor adrift upon death’s sea?

November—— Farming households everywhere held a three-day harvest festival. Apart from Obon and New Year's, this was their grandest celebration. We received rice cakes from every household in the neighborhood association. By evening, my six-mat room lay half-speckled white with rows of rice cakes. Each household's rice cakes bore their own character. Observing them resembled studying seal engravings - the rise and fall of families manifested in these circular forms. Guessing their origins - this one from here, that one from there - my conjectures mostly hit true. That the present moment took shape in these cakes must stem, I thought, from how these handcrafted circles - simplest yet most exacting of dignified forms - had been shaped unconsciously. Prayer reveals itself in rice cakes.

I alone was treated to lunch at Kyūzaemon’s house. Setsu’s new son-in-law was also there, but this groom remained completely silent throughout, his face expressionless as he noisily devoured his food until finally uttering just a single abrupt remark: “Before taking a wife, I bought women—bought them,” he said something strange. Then, “Hey, Setsu—light this,” he added, hurling a cigarette toward her corner of the room two meters away. There was nothing particularly suspicious about it. These crude displays of affection meant for show had already become ordinary in their shared life—even this work of natural destruction called stallion breeding, conducted day after day between them as a gentle bond—and I found myself inadvertently accepting it all as normal life, moving my chopsticks alongside theirs.

Then, for dinner, I was summoned by Sanemon and treated to a meal in the usual Buddhist room. At this time, before me sat a young man who had just returned from the Special Attack Forces—a guest who had been moments away from taking off solo when the war ended. This was a youth who had dedicated himself to training that nonchalantly carried out the destruction of life in an instant. “Ah, I can’t tell anymore—whether I was saved or died, I just can’t tell.”

Saying such things with utter nonchalance, he had sake poured for him by his father sitting beside him. Having already forgotten about the adzuki bean mochi soaked in sugarcane syrup that had been simmering for days and now melted in the large pot, my wife—ever since being told he was a Special Attack Force member—had changed her expression as though suddenly seeing the war unfold before her eyes. And then, “Weren’t you afraid of dying?” she asked timidly. “That sort of thing’s nothing.” “You wouldn’t understand, you see.”

Even beside such a young man, I found myself moving my chopsticks while thinking it all perfectly ordinary. Everything was obliterated as it advanced at a terrifying speed. The speed itself terrified me; within this dazed and foolish self of mine, I no longer knew what transpired. The Special Attack Force member hummed through his nose as he pulled out a case from his pocket, tapped a cigarette he'd extracted, and declared they would perform a play at the temple that night. In these days when abnormality had come to appear as mere everyday mundanity, we all shared this seething sense of newness. I didn't even know how much I myself had changed, yet there existed no words for anyone to express this. Surely no one could articulate their own emotions anymore. Even that instinctive naturalness which made everything ordinary—until now there had still been some connected psychology within it. But now even that had vanished. Life always holds intermissions prepared somewhere—though whether these pauses belonged to humans or gods remained unclear—and within them existed one still corner of tranquility. There seemed to be whispers there too, though likely not human voices.

"The play's starting!" someone exclaimed, and the children dashed off toward Shakadō Hall. The Special Attack Force members also left. After that, as I listened from the adjacent room to Sanemon and the young man's father continuing to drink together—their speech growing increasingly slurred—their exchanges remained tangled endlessly without resolution. Sanemon had been asked to make nigori sake and was now furious, declaring that being told to express gratitude was distasteful—it felt coldly impersonal. That, in turn, the Special Attack Force member's father tried to explain away. Amidst these two drunkards' unceasing performance, the temple play concluded and the Special Attack Force members returned, yet Sanemon and his group in the Buddhist room maintained their 'impersonal coldness'. The performance showed no sign of stopping. It was finally a moment. And then came the final lines of the two men:

“They say communism’s coming soon. That’ll be something, eh? Ahahahaha—” “But anyway—if I’m thanked for brewing it, I won’t have it—that sort of thing, I—” “Even under communism, there’ll be nothing for the likes of us. Ahahahaha.” “But anyway—” “Ahahahaha! Can’t stand drunks, me.” “No—if I’m thanked—”

And this was how it went. Even verbosity became interesting when it crossed a certain threshold. With this, life never grows dull.

Before long, one person fell asleep where they sat, then another followed. My eyes remained wide awake - now would begin the true battle against fleas, but this futile torment surpassing a hundred days was my own drama of unimaginable agony. For me, it seemed that with only fleas to occupy my thoughts, boredom had become impossible.

November -- Day

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

That muttered remark reached all the way to the veranda where I stood. On the second day, this widow was already bored with the festivities. At the house behind ours today, all the girls from my neighborhood association and young brides had gathered to eat freely to their hearts’ content with potluck items and spend the day amusing themselves. From the house currently on duty, the lively voices of girls bustling in and out could be heard clearly. The girls’ entertainments were said to be nothing more than that, but while to an outsider’s eye their amusements might seem trivial, for the girls themselves there could surely be no greater pleasure. Away from the stern eyes of the elders, amidst their chattering conversations, the occupation of Setsu’s new husband—reputed to be the village’s greatest beauty—must have been blooming like some exotic flower, setting off a flurry of whispers.

Sugai the priest appeared. Whenever the priest of Shakadō Hall appeared, Sanemon would invariably vanish from inside the house. His aversion to the priest bordered on comical—he fled with the swiftness of a schoolboy dodging his teacher. I borrowed a desk from this priest and received ohagi rice cakes, persimmons, and potatoes. He was an expansive old man devoid of any monkish affectations; in Atsumi hot springs town ten ri distant, people spoke of him as "Ah, that eminent priest." Yet here in this village, his lack of sacerdotal airs seemed to diminish his worth—they never spoke ill, but only smirked. Even without invoking Goethe's maxim that no man is a hero to his valet, here too operated that principle whereby remarkable figures appear ordinary to those near them. How much truth lay in society's judgments of this priest whose freewheeling conduct shifted with every ri—like distant waves lapping a shore's circumference? When one dies, the resonance they leave alters not through distance but time—yet ultimately, human worth remains inscrutable whether viewed from proximity or remove. Time's passage changes nothing. Terms like lesser emptiness, middling emptiness, great emptiness—when pursued to their end—culminate in "Throughout heaven and earth, I alone exist" (not "am honored," but simply exist). This truth seemed manifest in Shakyamuni Buddha's solitary head enshrined at Priest Sugai's Shakadō Hall. Incidentally, Shakyamuni first uttered "Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one" on December eighth. The Pacific War too began on that date—and soon that day would come again.

November -- Day

The passbook arrived safely. From April it had been missing for over half a year, and when we had the Tokyo bank investigate, it turned out a female clerk there had been withholding it all this time. Not getting angry at anything amounts to moral corruption. Yet I found nowhere to direct my anger. Wanting to at least take my family to a hot spring somewhere, I abruptly decided to use this Saturday for a trip to Atsumi. My second son still hadn't returned from school, forcing me to wait until three o'clock in vain. After instructing our eldest son to bring his brother starting tomorrow, I resolved to set out ahead with just my wife.

“It feels like we’re running away from the children.”

my wife said dejectedly. “It’s fine once in a while. It’s been ten years since our last trip to a hot spring. But I don’t know if the inns are still operating, so that’s a bit worrying.” Even as we hopped along the muddy path to the station, our spirits had somehow lightened, but in the rain that kept starting and stopping, I began to think our plan to head for an inn of uncertain operation might have been a bit reckless. Even so, there was a strangely irresistible freshness to this feeling of running away from the children.

“Today we’re terrible parents, both of us.” “That’s right.” “Somehow it feels strange.”

The muddy path to the station, streaked with rusty water runoff, didn't seem so very long when we thought of it as our shared escape. Even though we were carrying soy sauce, miso, and rice, they weren't all that heavy. "The two of them left behind will surely be reveling in triumph tonight with their laundry now that the ogres are away." "That's right. I'm sure they're so happy they can't stand it."

The upbound train came immediately but was packed to capacity. As I shoved my wife into the crowded car and belatedly tried to board myself, a boy slipped past my ribs and leapt out from inside. It was my second son. I slapped his shoulder from behind— “Hey!” The boy who’d jumped down turned around, but the train was already starting to move.

“Hey. We’ll come tomorrow,” I said. The second son, who still didn’t know about the trip to Atsumi, seemed not to understand what was happening and stood frozen on the platform, looking this way. He couldn’t hear over the crowd and the noise of the train. His face turned pale. “We’ll come tomorrow.” Even as I repeated this, my words seemed to reach him even less, and the train moved away. We arrived in Atsumi a little past five o’clock. All the buses were packed, and the one that finally came was broken. In the rain, we walked once more to Taki no Ya. It was already pitch dark. This inn was one we used to visit every summer before the war—ten years had passed since then. I have written about this hot spring I love many times, yet never once mentioned its name. I had assumed it must have been badly damaged during the war, but it had actually been fully occupied as lodging for naval sick and wounded soldiers until just this morning, and now stood empty. They assigned us a good riverside room.

“You are our first guests.” “You’re very fortunate people.” The housewife spoke these words. Though a decade had passed since I last saw this woman, she showed no signs of aging whatsoever. At any rate, it was a relief. Exhaustion and hunger left us immobilized. The sharp odor of disinfectants hung in the air—upon closer inspection, this appeared to have been a nurses’ quarters. Several tanzaku strips bearing resolute waka poems of the sort women might favor were pasted to the walls. While my wife went straight down to the baths, I found it too troublesome to undress and sat alone warming my hands over the brazier when the telephone rang again. It was a request from the cultural department insisting I attend an impromptu roundtable discussion. Barely ten minutes had elapsed since our arrival at the inn when this new demand arose. They pressed their case by mentioning Mr. Sasaki Kuni’s presence, but the prospect of social interaction under these circumstances felt oppressive—we sighed at being denied even our first proper dinner together as husband and wife. Then came direct intervention from a cultural department representative renewing their appeals: “We’ve slaughtered a chicken for you. It’ll be ready to eat shortly—they’re stewing it now.” “This is precisely the era when people should speak their minds freely. We’re calling this a ‘forum for unfettered expression.’”

“When there’s so much I can say that I could say it all, I end up unable to say anything at all.”

I smiled wryly. In the end, I was hauled off and escorted away by this person. My wife, having come up from the bath, simply watched blankly. It was the same expression the child had worn while standing blankly on the platform looking at me earlier that day.

This was the first time I had encountered a roundtable discussion as absurd as this one, yet there existed within it something that might be called a kind of fascination.

“Tonight, you see, a duck came—suddenly, as evening fell, a single duck arrived—” After the cultural department representative’s introduction, I was made to sit down in a cold corner of the hall and forced to keep listening to some doctor from this town deliver his scientific lecture alongside the audience—nothing more. “Just the other day,” the doctor addressed the crowd in theatrical tones, rising to read his manuscript, “Mr. Iwane Shigeo came all the way from Tokyo to tell me, ‘Your story’s fascinating—you simply must write it down!’” For nearly an hour, his corpulent frame—ruddy-faced and well-fed—held forth with sonorous eloquence on scientific matters. He was drunk. At any rate, people nowadays seem desperate to get drunk. If intoxication’s possible, perhaps this is an age when one can’t afford to mind anything at all.

“The greatness of Newton, who declared that though the beach’s sands may be exhausted, the sands of truth shall never run dry. “That Newton—”

The audience of about a hundred people sat silent, casting pitying glances at Mr. Sasaki and me as they kept their heads bowed low. I remembered how this doctor had once cut open an appendicitis patient's abdomen, sewed it up with scissors still inside, then panicked and ripped it open again only to have the patient die. This was a notorious tale in these parts. Had even one poisonous stone existed among the beach-sand multitude of memories, those sands would surely have run red with blood. Yet perhaps Easterners—the Japanese especially—were born with a magnanimity that forgave such brazen scientific blunders as mere laughable mishaps. This doctor was thriving.

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

“I can’t help but wonder why Tōhoku people are so foolish,” the person said. “After all—three administrations with Tōjō, Yonai, and Koiso! That level of idiocy—becoming Prime Minister precisely when it was most foolish, when no one else would take the role, getting hoisted up and neatly playing into their hands—there’s never been anything like it. They’re all Tōhoku people.” I was again thinking of something else entirely. If they refused to acknowledge the sincerity of those who took on what everyone else was evading, then from what other aspect did they expect those people to be recognized? However, this was one of the problems that would become difficult in the future. When everyone recognized a great crisis, there emerged the cunning of those who darted about evading it and the resignation of those who sat down in acceptance. Even if not a crisis, this was something that befell people every day. Tonight again I had been ambushed and made into a duck, losing even this once-in-a-decade evening my wife and I had finally reached. When I returned to the inn, my wife had already gone to bed but got up.

“How was it?” “The dinner here tonight—it was really delicious.”

“As for me, that famous doctor came out and monologued his lecture.” “I just went to hear that man’s scientific talk.”

If I mention that doctor, you already know who I mean. “Ah, that man. If it’s him, that’s just how he is.” “That’s the man who was heading to Tsuruoka.” “You know, that man who left scissors inside someone’s stomach.” My wife also seemed to recall it immediately and chuckled quietly as she said that. He had a strange sort of notoriety. However, once I returned to the inn and settled down like this, I became aware of a strange fascination welling up within me, and afterward, it felt rather pleasant. It might have been due to the intoxication brewed by that doctor’s careless anecdote—dissolved into the scatterbrained air so characteristic of the countryside.

November —th

Around noon, the children came clamoring into the room. Then they immediately began undressing and jumped into the bath. The complete absence of anything resembling proper rest on their part made me feel surrounded by lively, leaping fish scales, causing my own moment of respite to seem all the more truly restful. Since Kyūzaemon's wife had sent us a bag stuffed with edible yellow chrysanthemum flowers, we boiled them in the hot spring's scalding water and ate them. My wife kept gazing at it, saying she had taken a liking to the New Kutani teacup that the clerk had brought.

“I want to come back here again just to see this teacup.” “That’s fine.” “Look.”

Delighted to encounter beauty after so long, she was scrutinizing it from every angle, but I was more concerned about the charcoal fire in the brazier dying out. The one shō of sake delivered last night by the Cultural Department as a token of gratitude held little interest for me, who no longer drinks alcohol. I had the clerk inquire whether there might be a guest willing to exchange this sake for tobacco, but to no avail. Here, tobacco seemed to be scarcer than alcohol. It grew colder in the afternoon and was chilly.

November —th

I decided to take the eleven o'clock morning bus back. My wife still lingered reluctantly to part with the inn's teacup, her hesitation both comical and pitiable. "I wonder if they'd secretly let me have just one—there's nothing like this even in Tokyo." Balancing it on her palm, she muttered that she'd pay any price if she could buy it. "If they won't give me one, maybe I'll just take a single cup home secretly."

“Hey now, don’t go stealing anything.” “As if!” She was joking around, even going so far as to say such things, but the teacup wasn’t all that appealing to me. After my wife finally arranged the five teacups and put them away in the corner of the room,

“Well, let’s go,” she said, standing up. As we walked toward where the bus waited, I felt a fresh interest arising from my wife—who still clung to her fascination with that single teacup—and found myself swayed by an emotion distinct from hers. During my long evacuation, I had never become so attached to any object, and I thought of myself as someone who merely wished to carry away the villagers’ hearts. Yet I wondered how many people’s hearts I might now be bearing from all those I had met. Perhaps this single human being called myself was exactly that sort of creature. Perhaps I was nothing but a bag walking about, filled with nothing but others’ hearts. When I died—in that sense, all those hearts would die too—I swayed on the bus thinking such thoughts. The bus shook violently. Crammed into the rearmost seat by a mass of bodies blocking my view, I twisted to glimpse outside: beneath a sheer cliff, sunlight glinted on white creases of waves crashing below. Our bus—bending, lurching, rolling forward—seemed to stagger perilously along the wind-buffeted cliff edge.

It was two o'clock when we got off at Mizusawa. Standing on the muddy path where a stream flowed, the four of us decided to eat our rice ball meals there. Licking the rice grains stuck between our fingers and imagining the long muddy road ahead that stretched like a lifetime of nomadic wandering with my family in tow, I realized we needed to lighten our load there. All the rice in every field had been harvested. Across the plain directly ahead, one ri away, we could see the mountain where we now stood—a mountain of fine form. We walked along the straight muddy path to reach there—Mount Arakura, which after just three days unseen had already grown dear once more. I thought it was a mountain of dignified and fine form.

November —th

In the morning, I got up and sat down in front of the hearth. The stout oak tree that always caught my eye stood solitary atop the mountain; it had not been cut down. It was said to have been sold for a hundred yen. We would likely no longer be able to see migratory birds alight there.

From dusk, a thin snow began to fall. Kiyoe, surrounded by a ring of washed daikon radishes, still crouched beside the water. Every household stood amidst the white spectacle of daikon radishes, and winter seemed at last to be descending upon this mountain village. The coldness of the pillar against which one leans. The dusk's hem-chill seeping into the fork of a bifurcated daikon radish.

November —th

An unfamiliar eighteen- or nineteen-year-old youth came, so I, who was house-sitting, went out. He was a well-groomed young man with round, lively eyes. I inferred the purpose and tried to bring the borrowed Western-style umbrella from the back. “This must be the one someone from my household borrowed.” “Thank you very much.” The other day, when my wife and child were returning home from the station in the rain without an umbrella, an unfamiliar youth who had come up from behind handed them a high-quality silk-covered Western-style umbrella. And since he insisted they take it despite their refusal, they borrowed it, but no matter how much they asked for his name, he would only say he was from the neighboring village. He had said he would come retrieve the umbrella himself and only asked for our address. Nowadays, one doesn’t lend a fine Western-style umbrella to complete strangers without even exchanging names. In this youth’s eyes, there was a noble resolve that acted without hesitation over such dangers, and they were beautifully clear. The youth to whom I thrust the umbrella merely said, “That’s the one,” showed no sign of answering when I asked his name, and only after some time finally uttered in a low voice, “Matsuura Masayoshi,” before disappearing without accepting any gratitude. He was exactly the kind of young man who sustains civilization. For me, soon to return to Tokyo, this was the finest possible keepsake. If I had not met this young man, then even after coming to Tōhoku, I would have ended up not encountering a single youth who truly embodied the spirit of this region’s young men. If there is a youth who stands resolute with a healthy spirit, he can offer respite from the corruption of a hundred others.

Snow had accumulated since nightfall.

November —th

Both Mount Chōkai and Mount Gassan stood pure white. This was my first time seeing snow fall in Tōhoku. I could no longer manage daily life without rubber boots. In the afternoon, Priest Sugai appeared and said there would be a discussion meeting with agricultural association members at Shakadō hall, instructing me to attend. After consenting, I asked the priest about Matsuura Masayoshi. He explained that after returning from a Yokohama factory, young Masayoshi had lamented the village's entrenched self-serving customs and was among those determined to revitalize the community through youthful energy—though he could find no starting point for concrete plans. The priest seemed to strongly endorse the youths' passion, stating he didn't want to let them decay in their current state.

After the priest had left, Sanemon made this remark about the youths' new spirit.

“Those nineteen- or twenty-year-old lads—whatever they try’s useless.” “Hmph.” This was what the fifty-year-olds said, but in this village, even those in their prime at fifty held no real power—authority rested first with the sixty-to-seventy-year-old elders, and ultimately with a single eighty-year-old patriarch from the household of Yahee, the village’s foremost landowner. “Unless he gives his blessing, they can’t do squat.” “The rest only think about snatching an extra shō or two for themselves.” “As for other matters—they don’t know beans.”

Like autumn leaves accumulating layer upon layer, it must have come to be that way through such sedimentation over time. To demand anything beyond that required striving to act as young Masayoshi did. His lending of the Western-style umbrella to my wife likely manifested that awakened resolve; truly, it was from such trivial daily acts that fallen leaves first began burning to enrich the soil as fertilizer. The interior of village elder Yahee’s house lay in disarray. Though his current wife was a second spouse, this woman occasionally came selling fish at my dwelling. She had once worked as a hostess in Yura’s drinking establishments alongside Rie before being ensnared by the elder’s amorous advances and installed as his wife—yet with true economic control resting in the hands of the first wife’s sixty-year-old son, she now appeared to covertly procure fish from Yura for secret resale. Stately ancient cedars encircled the grounds in dignified formation, creating a shrine-like residence befitting the village patriarch. Beneath the second wife’s plump flesh lay eyes clouded by life’s sediment—their yellowish whites tinged with melancholy that spoke of joyless days. Whispers that Yahee maintained yet another replacement consort reached us through gaps in the cedar grove. Sanemon’s youngest daughter served in this household, but his downfall—once equal in prestige to Yahee’s lineage—inspired no pitying sympathy from others. Rather, his blunt forthrightness provoked derisive laughter—the very quality defining Sanemon’s peculiar charm.

“What a fool Sanemon is, I tell you—doing nothing but laze around, drinking himself silly, and ruining the house like this.” The fact that Oyumi—Kyūzaemon’s wife and their aunt—would say such things meant Yahee’s household always lurked behind her words as the true target. On holidays, Sanemon’s youngest daughter would return to her own home from there. 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 there, remember?” “You ought to go back and sleep at the main house.” “Understand? You’re going back tonight.” Sanemon calmly counseled his daughter in this manner. The girl retreated with tearful eyes, but even the combative Sanemon softened his voice at such times, sitting dejected as though murmuring apologies to her. With Kyūzaemon’s nineteen-year-old daughter Setsu from the branch family marrying in three or four days, he could no longer delay making proper arrangements for his own seventeen-year-old daughter’s future. I wanted to leave whatever money I could with this household before departing, but—

“I don’t need money—that sort of thing—” Whether out of rivalry with Kyūzaemon or lingering vestiges of his former landlord-like demeanor, there was simply no way to intervene. In reality, unless there were people who wanted at least a little money, I found myself troubled by the many inconveniences that arose. We were staying at this house of Sanemon’s, and yet we still had not bought even one shō of rice from here. Of course, we had never received any either.

November —th

It was sudden, but something unexpected occurred. A stranger from Tokyo who had come to purchase farm tools visited Sanemon’s place to buy firewood and tried to return via a chartered freight train, but with insufficient cargo tonnage preventing its departure. He wanted someone to help arrange luggage from returning travelers. Thereupon, we were approached about those parcels. As for this customer, not only did I not know him—Sanemon didn’t either. My luggage being sent as cargo belonging to this complete stranger turned into a tale of adventure. Yet for us to move through such deep snow, we likely couldn’t have roused ourselves without such abrupt impetus. First I wanted to meet this man face-to-face and judge him by his looks, but they said loading must happen within three days.

However, I had this strange quirk—there was always a part of me that couldn’t believe human destiny was something set in motion by others. When I thought it was about time we had to return, the fact that such a perfectly convenient opportunity had arisen entirely by chance—due to my habit of trusting serendipity over people—led me to place greater importance on how this matter came about rather than on the customer’s appearance. I felt this might actually get the luggage moving. Was such a thing as judgment entirely free from influence even possible? I was trapped by my own habits. This was a physiological function.

“Did you see that man—the one who came to buy firewood?” I asked my wife.

“I did see him briefly.” “Does he seem trustworthy?”

“Well… He didn’t seem like a bad person.” “But somehow, he was just so fidgety and couldn’t stay still at all.” “Why on earth is he so fidgety all the time, I wonder.” “I just don’t understand it.” “So, the man seems trustworthy, huh?”

“Yes. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would do such strange things.”

Alright, I'll meet him. He said he'd come again tomorrow. I asked my wife to start organizing our luggage. In the past, people thought such timely arrivals by boat meant Buddha had come; thinking that way, meeting this person tomorrow filled me with anticipation. I too must be gradually returning to the Kamakura period, just like this land.

November —th

At ten o'clock, the customer in question came wearing a straw raincoat. This Buddha-like man of mine was past thirty with a cropped head, narrow upturned eyes, and a timid yet deceptively honest boyish face. The large military boots he wore suggested he was demobilized. With his round face, gently protruding mouth, and earnest movements that defied suspicion—indeed, I had often seen such Buddha statues in Nara and Kyoto temples. Even while facing me across the hearth, he seemed pained by my scrutiny, constantly turning sideways as he spoke.

“I’m going to buy a cart as a souvenir to take back to Tokyo now,” he said. “Then I’ll head to Haguro, come back, and make the rounds to Daisen—I don’t even know what’s what anymore, it’s all such a rush—” Even as he spoke these words, he kept fidgeting and twitching nonstop. When I tried visualizing the circular route he’d be walking that day in my mind, it formed a loop of about fifteen ri. Somehow, I found myself growing intensely amused at considering this man a Buddha.

“Can you really get all that done in a single day?” I asked. “Since I was in the military until recently, well… this sort of thing—” “Since I’ve got to go back to Tokyo and farm, I’m gathering farm tools.” “They’re hard to find, and when they do have them, they demand outrageous prices.” Anyway, he told me he was born in a nearby village and was an adopted child—since his adoptive father had come to Hizumisaki, I should consult with him about the luggage. When I brought out the red bean rice cakes received from Priest Sugai, he ate them eagerly. From sorting the cargo for loading to gathering purchases, it seemed this man was doing everything alone. His busyness—appearing to have not a moment’s rest—was almost pitiable.

“I’ll return to Tokyo with the luggage, but I’ll turn right around and come back again,” said the man. Amidst these crowded trains, merely getting home was all I could manage, yet this man was attempting to do ten times as much as I planned to accomplish. As I watched his retreating figure, the straw raincoat slung over his shoulder fluttered so swiftly it looked ready to take flight. I thought he could likely cover fifteen ri within the day. I set out along a field path spanning nearly one ri to Hizumisaki. The mountain foothills encroached into the rice fields through intricate folds. The path followed these contours, winding like a coastline until reaching Hizumisaki—a sleet-drenched promontory jutting into view. This being an ancient battleground, they’d likely launched their flaming arrows from here. In mud-choked fields devoid of dwellings stood a solitary farmhouse doubling as a hot spring inn, its viscous bathwater—unchanged for a month—reputed to cure neuralgia. From the murky depths emerged glimpses of white flesh—the backs and waists of peasant women bathing nude. The man I sought sat by the hearth in a padded kimono, past sixty years old. With glaring eyes that bulged unlike his adopted son’s, this sullen potbellied figure produced a slender foreign cigarette from his grime-stained robe front. He resembled either a bandit chief or master stagehand depending on one’s perspective, though he too seemed to have misjudged me, maintaining a surly silence. This establishment was indeed an inn—though unlike any hot spring lodging I’d encountered. The thought that this man amidst this muddy hostelry crowd might handle my freight gave me pause. A miscalculation here could cost half my worldly possessions.

“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 for a transport company?” I ventured. “Yes. I’ll handle it,” he said tersely.

That was all. "I’d like you to write down one thing—the Tokyo address here," I said, presenting my notebook. The man took the pencil and smoothly wrote down the name and address. The handwriting was unexpectedly good. A bad man couldn’t possibly write such characters. To some extent because of that, I came to trust that this man was a good person, contrary to his appearance. When dividing the freight charges equally and determining other necessary matters such as transportation to the station, “You don’t need to pay the freight charges.” “Anyway, since I’ll be sending things regardless,” the man said.

In the hearth, dried pine needles released a pleasant fragrance. The fragrance was excellent. As I started to rise to leave, “What about the rice?” the man asked. “I haven’t included any rice.” “Why?” He asked again, looking doubtful. “No time to buy any. I’ll manage somehow.”

The man exchanged glances with the innkeeper before him and remained silent. When loading the freight car, when dividing the cargo upon arrival, and during other occasions that should require our presence—since I did not intend to attend any of them—I had to mark my luggage. “By the time the luggage arrives, I intend to be in Tokyo, but for now, could I leave mine at your house?” “Otherwise, I have no idea how the transportation situation in Tokyo has been since the war ended.”

“Let’s go with that.”

This too was unsettlingly simple. After all, these were all trivial matters for him, but for me, it felt like gambling away a portion of my fate. Once I took the plunge, it would be me being dragged along relentlessly. Yet since people's countenances had all turned grim from the war, I placed my trust in handwriting. With this method, I had rarely been wrong before. Light snow was falling over the marsh. As I walked along the marshside road, trying not to lose my luggage while contemplating my own self-interest in seeing people as Buddhas, I thought that perhaps even self-interest could be virtuous. Had I lacked such self-interest, I might have spent my entire life viewing people merely as ordinary humans. And yet—who taught us to perceive humans as humans? Might this not be the greatest illusion of all? When the self brims with phantasms. Truly, Baso who declared "Though there is no self" had already escaped this. Yet I believe in this illusion. Even when choosing between two options, I remained a novelist perpetually drawn to the rejected alternative. Certainly I am no sage. Though all phenomena should dwell clearly within me, I border on foolishness.

Standing beside the persistent red clay, I turned to look back toward Hizumisaki. The place where warrior monks had slaughtered each other likely stretched from that area to around here, but even in those thoughts sinking through mud—with each passing moment bringing death closer—the light snow must have fallen like this——

November -- The luggage was packed into eleven parcels. Sanemon tied them up, but his usual practice was too effective, making each look like a rice bale. “Well, we’ll finally be going back too, then.” My wife gazed at the luggage with a lingering sense of farewell. The only ones who were happy were the children. I looked around the hollowed-out room with loneliness. The carp had sunk deep into the water. “Every year we raise them and they get stolen. But this year with you here,” Sanemon said delightedly, “even the carp stayed safe.”

Sanemon said delightedly. He went to the mountains with Kiyoe to collect the firewood I had ordered. A letter arrived from our Tokyo house. It wrote about how difficult it was to obtain food and that we should postpone our return due to frequent robberies. It was too late. However, my wife seemed to suddenly feel terror upon seeing the letter. “Ugh…” “They say Tokyo’s crawling with robbers.” “But it’s too late now.” “What was that Hizumisaki man like?” “Do you think it’ll be all right?”

Because we were from Tokyo, even robbers might come all the way to Hizumisaki—since at present we had absolutely no way of assessing transportation safety rates. In fact, this came right after we had been tormented for over half a year after our passbook was invalidated. As for the whereabouts of these belongings of mine—thrown into the very midst of this anarchic state as a stranger’s luggage—once I began thinking about it, my anxiety became endless. There was not a single part that could be put at ease. Yet from beneath the swirling suspicions that assailed me like sinister clouds, what emerged with crystalline clarity was his impeccable handwriting. That alone undeniably supported something firm. It held a beauty like seal engraving. That was the symbol of life. I believe in the East. I believe in Japan. I thought all people were beautiful.

“It’s okay,” I said. “This luggage will arrive safely.” “Maybe… but if even one thing gets lost, they’re all things we can’t replace anymore.” “No—it’ll be fine.”

Kyūzaemon arrived. And he said to my wife: “On account of Setsu’s wedding being tomorrow, I was too rushed to come earlier—but they say you folks went and entrusted your luggage to complete strangers. I was worried and came to check. You folks shouldn’t do that kinda thing. After all the trouble I’ve gone to look after you folks safe and sound till now, if somethin’ dangerous were to happen at this point, I’d be in a real fix, y’know.”

In any case, my wife apologized for having prepared the luggage so abruptly without a word of consultation, saying it had been deeply rude. If I were to bring up such things with him again, I feared it might smother Sanemon’s hard-won goodwill, for being caught between these two men had often meant dealing with numerous unseen nuisances—a reality I had keenly felt all along.

“Let’s hope it all works out, y’know.” “I don’t know the man either, y’know.” “It’s better not to send important items, y’know.” “Since Sanemon doesn’t know the man either, I can’t fathom why someone would do such a thing—that’s what worries me—” Certainly, what Kyūzaemon said made sense. This wasn’t the only instance—he had loved us deeply, and the affection he showed me in particular was extraordinary. When he met someone, he immediately intuited whether they would benefit him, and only then did he take care of them—this bad habit of Kyūzaemon’s had drawn criticism from the neighbors, and I was not unaware of it. Sanemon showing a cold demeanor toward us may partly have stemmed from courtesy toward Kyūzaemon, but it might also not have been free from resentment. However, even when viewed as someone who assessed people and stopped at calculation, I thought Kyūzaemon was slightly different. His calculations were the law governing his own life, and even he could not easily violate its sanctity. Yet for Kyūzaemon, there was a sense that affection felt inherently separate from the law. His administrative prowess—the negotiation tactics during discussions, the tolerance in interactions, the rhythmically beautiful handling of instantly assessed gains and losses in key exchanges, the halting speech that let unclear trains of thought drift sideways into obscurity, the sharp exploratory ability to grasp threads for orderly progression—could not exist apart from numbers. Moreover, it was even equipped with an artistry capable of modulating its tempo at will. In his rare calculative prowess, there was indeed a touch of genius—and to those around him, it even possessed an outstanding tragic quality that appeared as mere calculation.

“Everyone speaks ill of me, but once I’m dead, they’ll understand everything.” Seeing Kyūzaemon say this, I felt certain he had arranged matters so they would eventually understand. He was the sole person in this village who had truly conquered agriculture. Moreover, his blurting out something about God to me served no calculative purpose. Surely even he wouldn’t contemplate selling God to me.

“God’s about feelings—it’s human feelings that count, y’know.” After sixty-eight years of wrestling with tradition, what Kyūzaemon had finally grasped as his true treasure was precisely this. Now all he needed was to die—then he’d want for nothing more.

November —th

Snow was dancing. The time for my luggage to depart was drawing near. Sanemon, who had emerged from the back door of Kyūzaemon’s house where the wedding was being held, still wearing his hakama, loaded the luggage onto the horse-drawn cart. When the carter struck the reins once, the horse, tossing up its mane, leaped forward, and the cart began to move. My luggage disappeared from view amidst the thin snow. Why does it seem that luggage survives more tenaciously than people? I stood in the snow, listening forlornly to the fading sound of cart tracks, and entered the house.

Setsu's wedding ceremony was being held at the Shinjō groom's house. At Kyūzaemon's house, a proxy ceremony was underway, and Kiyoe and my wife were entirely occupied with helping there, but when night fell and the celebration unraveled, the voice of wildly drunk Sanemon could be heard from the hearth. My wife and the children went to bed early out of fear. On nights when he drank to violent extremes, Kiyoe would clear away every nearby object and keep her distance. Iron kettles, medicine pots, rice bowls—whatever came to hand—Sanemon would hurl at Kiyoe while bellowing his customary refrain: "Get out! Go home!" But tonight, riding high on wedding spirits, he cheerfully sang songs. With his large face framed by hakama trousers beaming broadly, he kept everyone laughing for a time, though what might follow remained anyone's guess.

“If Sanemon gets drunk, you’d best slip quietly from your seat,” Kyūzaemon had cautioned me. “He’s got terrifying strength. I’ve been beaten by him more times than I can count.” There had indeed been an occasion when Kyūzaemon warned me thus. The children, amused by Sanemon’s clumsy singing, kept lifting their heads from the futon. “They’re coming now, I tell you,” my wife said, and they flopped back down again. Yet when one knows a wedding is being held next door, anyone would recall their own such moments. Even through Sanemon’s drunken haze, Kiyoe’s phantom likely flickered and faded before him. The two had been classmates—I myself had seen their graduation photo showing them side by side.

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

The marks from him poking it repeatedly while saying such things were dotted across Kiyoe’s face in the photograph. The phantom of Sanemon—who drank away his home, left his wife and children behind to labor in Karafuto for ten years, and now found it too late to recover—a man my own age nearing fifty, had transformed into a faltering rendition of the Ōryokkō-bushi song. “Between Korea and Shina—oh—that Yalu River—hey, hey, you do it too.” “Do it already—” Sanemon, who was flapping his legs and speaking to Kiyoe, had been born there by the hearth as an only child, traveled, and now was singing obliviously by the same hearth where he was born. Whether he raged or threw things around, it was no one else’s concern. No matter how one thrashed about, the sorrow of the hearth’s charcoal could not be dispelled. Outside, snow was falling.

Late into the night, Sanemon entered the bedroom. There was only a single cedar door separating it from the room where I slept, making it feel even closer to where I lay. The tips of his feet seemed near my head, but just when I thought he had quieted down by falling asleep, he began singing again. It was the same song he'd sung by the hearth earlier, repeated endlessly, and I couldn't sleep. Yet through our shared awareness of being the same age—as if plunging hands into time's depths—the warmth of his pulse reached me too.

“Keep going—that’s good,” I said.

Our youthful dreams, caught between Meiji and Shōwa in the Taishō era, would find no time hereafter when they might hold relevance. "Between Korea and Shina... rafts drifting... hey, you do it, hey, do it already." Whenever Sanemon paused his slurred singing for a moment, he would shake Kiyoe's pillow. This had continued two or three times when— "Have the plantain sellers come... "I went out to see as far as the edge of the rice field..." Kiyoe's song could be heard. It was a voice as deep, calm, and clear as her eyes. And now, it no longer seemed bashful. Sanemon had likely never imagined that Kiyoe would sing, and now caught off guard by his wife's unexpected song, he too fell silent for a time. But suddenly interjecting, he clapped his hands and said, "Splendid, splendid, splendid." But by now, Kiyoe carried herself as though such things no longer mattered,

“The plantain sellers don’t come—they’ve no business here—yet still those peddlers come around.” It struck me that this might have been the first time Sanemon ever heard Kiyoe sing. She seemed wholly unlike someone who would sing at all. When Kiyoe stopped, Sanemon tried mimicking her a moment later, but his rasping voice proved unbearable. He pressed her insistently to continue. Then Kiyoe sang again.

A transparent, refined singing voice perfectly suited to the silent chill of midnight. There was not the slightest falter in its rhythm. Quiet yet with a solid foundation, it was an Obako-bushi ballad. What had initially been meant to comfort her husband gradually transformed into a voice unclouded by hesitation—pure and resonant—as melancholy evoking her youthful self came to the fore. As I listened, it seemed to me that Kiyoe alone stood resolute in our stead—Sanemon and I who had fallen behind—confronting the onrushing tide of youth with the magnificent bearing of one shouldering our era like a dancer.

“Splendid, splendid, splendid, splendid, oh!” Sanemon clapped his hands again in delight, but in the darkness his hands only half met each time. However, now that this had happened, Sanemon showed no sign of letting Kiyoe go after she finished singing. Urged by him, Kiyoe sang again. “Between Korea oh, and Shina’s border—that Yalu River oh—” When it came to the Ōryokkō-bushi song, Sanemon too seemed unable to restrain himself any longer—“The raft drifting…” This time the couple began performing the subsequent part together. I too felt intensely uplifted. Resolving to spend the rest of this fine night together like this, I lay listening joyfully to their singing from the adjacent room. It seemed as though youth were gradually being restored.

December — Day

The snow had piled up and still showed no sign of stopping. After I finished washing my face with water from the bamboo pipe, when I thought of last night’s events, the thickness at the base of the icicles hanging from the stone felt pleasant. The vitality that had long crumbled away was now welling up. The fact that I was supposed to meet with the people from the agricultural association at Shakadō starting this afternoon had weighed on me unpleasantly for days, yet now I found myself mustering the resolve to go ahead and meet them.

For the first time in three months, I tried holding a razor to my hand mirror. With a posture reminiscent of buds sprouting in the blade’s wake, facing the garden where snow-laden moso bamboo stood densely, I fastened a tie that lent me a youthful air.

“I can’t keep going on like this forever.” Suddenly I blurted out meaningless words to my wife. From my earlier demeanor, she seemed to have sensed something. “That’s right. You’re still young after all. I do like that tie.” “This one?” This was the tie praised by a Hungarian dancer named Irene in precisely the same tone my wife had just used. That night on the Danube—joyfully sensing through my toes the steps of the Hungarian dance Irene had taught me by taking my hand, surveying that assaulting swarm of youthful snowflakes—I grew calm with confidence that I too was prepared. And I felt my turn had finally come. Sanemon’s attempt last night had been the first round—a failure; Kiyoe’s turn next had been splendid; now mine approached. The stage I sought remained indistinct—resembling both today’s agricultural association gathering and a Tokyo overrun by burglars, yet neither. Instead, it seemed to manifest as the youth of this turbulent world’s muddy currents, appearing now in these wildly swirling snowflakes.

After leaving the house in the afternoon wearing boots, even when stepping through the snow, I felt uncharacteristically energetic. The cedars lining both sides of the approach path to Shakadō stood thick, their trunks lined up through the snow as they rose. On the gentle slope of the stone pavement stood a single temple gate, and to the left, a plain that had sunk like a valley lay blanketed in snow. The people I was now going to meet were the headquarters that provided plans to all the villages across this vast plain, pushed them into execution, devised countermeasures for crises, and governed 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 mere glimpse of their resolute will in a single word. What these people required from me was likely criticism. There was no doubt those people would be disappointed, but for me, there was only benefit.

The gathering was in the priest’s study at the north end of the main hall. The clean refinement showed the Zen priest’s character without monastic austerity, and the rosewood shelf’s luster harmonized perfectly with the tatami’s grain. At one edge of the front alcove hung a photograph of a handsome young man in student uniform with keen features. When I looked up at it and asked the priest—whose face resembled Ito Hirobumi’s—he told me his eldest son had been deployed to Taiwan as a telegraph operator and was now strongly suspected dead. Before I knew it, I found myself seated at the center of this grand tragedy’s chamber.

“But if it’s Taiwan, then perhaps…”

I started to say, “No—it seems he was attacked on the ship mid-voyage.” “I had them investigate, but it seems there was no hope left.” The youthful vigor that had buoyed me since morning suddenly collapsed flat, and I sat down. I felt the avalanche from the mountain behind me seep cold into my back, and the young era assaulting us appeared as wounded saplings in a desolate field where trees lay fallen. What was I trying to do by opening my mouth to criticize there now? I had already heard a stately song rising from beneath the excavated snow late last night. Wasn’t that Kiyoe’s prayer in the midnight that had lost all sense of time?

Dark twilight came from the valley, and the people had gathered. Next to me was the village head, next to him the former village head, followed in order by agricultural association technicians on both sides—about ten people in all—but the cold didn’t seem to come from the temple’s tatami mats. Under the restrained dignity of elders who had long valued public welfare—their eyes keenly bright—the room fell silent for a time, only the warmth of hands held out to the hearth remaining. Before long, the meal was served. Priest Sugai, who bore the deepest grief, laughed most heartily and made appropriate conversation, yet as we gazed upon this tidal wave of calamity rolling back higher than the horizon, what could anyone say in their present state of mind? It soon became clear through their subsequent talk—of which everyone already knew every word—that this was a well-meaning gathering meant to console me tonight.

Sake was served just warm enough, and along with sashimi, salmon roe, chicken stew, sweet red bean soup, and other dishes presented in the Zen hall’s unclouded beautiful bowls and with chopsticks, the neatly cut green pickled vegetables cleansed our teeth on that snowy night. I was truly grateful for this meal. When I thought of giving some token of gratitude, I was instantly struck by the sadness of having nothing—but even as I searched my heart, there was still nothing. With a sigh, what emerged then was— “Last night was quite interesting. In the middle of the night.” “In the middle of the night.”

I ended up making such a disgraceful display of myself. However, this brief account of Sanemon and his wife’s midnight episode last night delighted everyone tremendously. The elders in particular bloomed into even broader smiles, while the priest expressed his emotions with great intensity, "That is quite an unusual tale." "Hmm, you’ve observed something noteworthy there, hmm." When he said this, the conversation began to flower, and the gathering abruptly grew animated.

Amidst all this casual talk, only one agricultural technician—who had remained silent all along—did not laugh. The tale of Sanemon and his wife was undoubtedly the kind that would likely hold little interest for anyone but the elderly, but what continued to resonate within this young technician’s heart was something else entirely. Whenever he opened his mouth to mutter something, he would 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 one of those meals to use as a substitute, and thereby increase their rice supply by one meal’s worth.”

For the agricultural technician, after having inspected every corner of the plain, his tone suggested that this was the only emergency measure possible. It was probably so. “However, when it comes to something tasty to replace rice—” “Well, I suppose it would be barley.”

“However, when it comes to something tasty to replace rice—” “Well, I suppose it would be barley.” “But that can’t possibly rival rice, I suppose.” “That would be problematic.” “But well, there’s nothing better than that.” “However, under current conditions—even if we switch to barley—is it possible for them to achieve a harvest greater than this?”

“It can’t be done, you see.” “Therefore, we’ve planned to reclaim new land—five *chōbu* on average per village.” “Then have them plant barley there—” “Is five *chōbu* actually feasible everywhere?” “That can be done.”

Since a concrete implementation plan had been established, the central topic had effectively been settled. As for other topics—if one were to broach them like a stag beetle’s pincers—they would be land readjustment issues, the tenancy situation in this village where half the arable land was owned by landlords, and the economic problems arising therefrom. And as for these matters—their fluctuations within the waves of the global economy, where they were inevitably dragged by commerce and industry from within the framework of Japanese economy and transformed—the predictions stretched endlessly. However, what I secretly wanted to know—something I shouldn’t speak of—was about the embryo of a farmers’ union that had yet to come into being. Sooner or later, it was certain that it would emerge in this village in the near future. The natural enemy of this embryonic union would inevitably be tonight’s gathering here, dominated as it was by landlords. Then where in this plain would that emerge from? An embryo never knows it is an embryo, but perhaps that lay in the gathering of young men like Masayoshi who had lent us that umbrella.

In any case, the agricultural association was beginning reclamation now, while that union had yet to emerge.

“What impressions have you formed of this village having observed it?”

At last came the first question from the elders directed at me. The poor water quality that could be remedied if addressed, the terrible roads left neglected despite their scenic potential, the indifference toward livestock farming—these were some impressions I had. “However, I cannot elaborate in detail at present.” “The reason being—agriculture isn’t merely facing hardships, but even to an amateur’s eye, current farming practices appear to have reached an irreversible saturation point under intensive conditions. If you reform one area, wouldn’t it induce subtle transformations throughout the entire system?” “Yet if we first require a new agricultural implement under current circumstances—a machine whose necessity will inevitably arise sooner or later—what sort of machine would that be here, I wonder?”

There was no answer. My question may have been somewhat overly difficult. However, no matter what government might emerge or what revolution might come, sooner or later this problem alone would inevitably become pressing. “Reduce three meals to two, remove rice from just one of those meals, and instead focus on what to produce now—” And the Agricultural Technician said again. When this was presented, its sheer reasonableness brought the discussion to a halt. In truth, at this point, everything apart from what this technician proposed was nothing but futile.

“I work for the local government office, but I want to infuse culture into rural villages.”

“What would be considered good for that?” asked a young, spirited man. “That’s something I’d like to ask too—what aspect of culture do the people here desire most? That’s also one of the things I want to understand.” “In truth, they might not actually want any of those things at all. We must consider whether thoughtlessly urbanizing them by forcing in unnecessary elements is wise.” “What exactly do the villagers want?” “The neighbor next to where I’m staying muttered to himself, ‘Ahh, how boring,’ when he had two days off in a row.”

"When I speak of wanting to infuse culture, I mean 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 an elegant act, something done with a truly unburdened mind and leisurely spirit. That's exactly what I intend." Indeed, I was struck by how his manner of expression sprang from a depth attainable only by one who genuinely cherished his native soil.

“In any case, even so, their working hours are too long—they seem overworked.” “Aren’t they overexerting themselves?” Even as I said this, it struck me that agriculture in our country constituted a religion—the Cult of Labor. And its deity was rice itself. Western agriculture might be termed a pastoral religion, I mused, its divinity perhaps music—but this seemed too audacious a notion to voice aloud. “When American agricultural experts came to inspect Japanese farming, their assessment was apparently something like: ‘This isn’t agriculture—it’s horticulture!’” “Seeing every single weed plucked by hand would make anyone laugh, wouldn’t it?” “They say when American POWs were shown Nagoya’s largest factory, they declared: ‘This isn’t industry—it’s handicraft.’” “Yet such differences between foreign countries and Japan extend beyond agriculture and industry—they permeate everything.” “The distinction between theater and drama, literary arts and literature—even our military amounts to a religion.” “Officials, scholars, even art—somehow all Japanese institutions take on religious forms and grow increasingly rigid.” “One cause of our wartime defeat may well have been this ingrained tendency—how various sects became entangled and turned against each other.” “The enemy resided within us all along.”

After saying this, it occurred to me that even Japan's left-wing was taking on sectarian forms. Science and literature were no different. And what of myself?

—— “Even for us, there must be some merit to advancing in religious forms.” “No matter what ideals religious groups profess, saving people remains their fundamental purpose. Even the worst organizations must have that ideal flowing through their foundations—that’s how I see it.” “So what we’re seeing now isn’t a loss of morality, but the turbulence of building truer virtue.” “In reality, everyone has suffered.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me—this was a Zen temple. In Zen, wasn't even killing considered an act of salvation? Wasn't it a method of discipline to view oneself as wood and stone and annihilate the self through rigorous practice? And I thought—how many Zen-shaped sparks must have flown from Japanese bodies when people interacted in daily life! Moreover, when I considered how deeply rooted this had become, permeating even unconscious habits, I couldn't help but feel this was precisely where the inscrutability of the Japanese people resided. When everyone fell silent,

“Mrs. Sanemon, how fascinating that you sang that song. Hmm, what an intriguing story that was.”

And the priest said this again, crossed his arms, and expressed admiration. I thought that this priest was indeed a kind of distinguished monk.

Since I was the only guest tonight, I left my seat and returned home ahead of everyone else. The shrine approach lined with thick cedars was completely unlit and long. Using a Western umbrella with a broken handle as a cane, descending the stone pavement where not an inch ahead was visible while groping my way, only the sound of my own footsteps served as my guide. The snow in the valley occasionally showed white through gaps in the tree trunks. A wooden figure departs at night, boots donned. A stone woman returns at dawn, hat crowned. From the clack-clack of footsteps, those lines by Zen Master Shishitetsu mingled in my mind. The title of this poem, Night Boots, which evoked the beauty of the lonely sound made by humans turned to wood and stone, was something I liked. Even after the stone pavement turned into a village road, no lights could be seen anywhere. The road had grown somewhat hazy in the snowlight, but water seeped up to my ankles from beneath the trampled snow, gurgling noisily.

December --

From the icicles under the eaves that had glittered in the daylight, droplets were dripping. When I saw the fish-selling girl coming down the snowy mountain pass, she swiftly appeared at the veranda where I was and dropped her basket with a thud. As my wife was buying fish to give to our eldest son departing for Tokyo tonight, Hizumisaki arrived and reported that the luggage had been safely sent. As if chasing after those parcels, our eldest son departed at four in the afternoon. After my wife returned from seeing him off at the station, she said, “It’s already extremely crowded there. “If it’s four o’clock, you won’t be able to get back alone.”

My departure was timed to coincide with the arrival of the luggage，but I intended to take the first morning train．To take that train，I would have had to stay somewhere near the station from the previous night；otherwise，I could not traverse the muddy night road leading there．Night brought another snowfall．In the room where luggage had halved，even one child’s bedding had disappeared，making the empty spaces spread further．

December――

The snow had begun to melt. Water flowed along the sloped village road, exposing pebbles from its base.

For five or six days I spent my time preparing to return to Tokyo, but when I finally tried to rouse myself and depart, I felt my roots clinging to the soil with an unexpected depth. I will probably never come to this village again. When I thought this, even the bend in the slender stream flowing between stones seemed to be washing my boots for me.

After preparing my luggage, I gazed at the nodes of the Mōsō bamboo in the grove and watched the mountains in the descending twilight. The sound of firewood being broken at the hearth could be heard. For some reason, I wanted to see the carp in the garden and peered in, but in the dusk they lay submerged among the roots of the stone wall and were not clearly visible.

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

Kyūzaemon stood in the garden wearing a black bell-shaped cloak and had already taken down my luggage. I went to the hearth to bid farewell to Sanemon and his wife. Before Sanemon’s round knees protruding white, tears welled up in my eyes as I bowed. The hearth smoke crept low across the straw mat where Kiyoe too was seated.

“In about a week, my wife and the others will depart as well, so until then, I humbly ask for your kind assistance.” Though it was my departure, since I was to stay that night at the station-front soba shop Kyūzaemon had reserved for me, there was no need to mind the time—but with Kyūzaemon waiting for me, I couldn’t linger either. Moreover, the night road would soon become invisible. I also went around to bid farewell to Sōzaemon’s aunt. The bride wearing leggings came out, but the aunt was out. After stepping outside, I went to greet Kyūzaemon’s eldest son as well. The old woman from Yura had also come out to the back door. When I tried to greet the eldest son of the branch family from the front entrance, he—apparently thinking I was with everyone at the back—circled around to the rear. When the bride and old woman watching outside called out, “Front! Front!”, he apparently circled around to the front this time. However, by that time, sensing that the eldest son was circling around to the back entrance, I had circled back to the rear again. Since those watching could see both sides, they laughed heartily at us two playing our game of cat and mouse while calling out “Front!” and “Back!” Not knowing which was front or back, we only grew more and more perplexed.

Kyūzaemon did not take the usual path to the station but instead chose to walk along the mountain-side path toward Shakadō Hall. Though slightly longer, that path was said to be better. It was the path Tensaku took every morning from before dawn to dig out white clay, and also the path along which the old woman from Yura came. When we reached below Shakadō Hall, I had Kyūzaemon wait there and visited the hall alone. The stone-paved approach leading up to the hall was long, but I wanted to express my gratitude for the good fortune that had allowed me to stay in this fine village for a time.

On the stone pavement where damp cedar branches lay, boots clattered, their sound echoing through the valley. The surroundings had already grown dark, and the closed door of the hall ahead stood slightly ajar. I tried pulling from below on the thick seam of the double doors that opened outward, but with the key having fallen into place inside, only a clattering noise came from the gap. I paid my respects before the still-closed door. Then, when I had retraced my steps a short way—perhaps because he had heard my suspicious-sounding footsteps in the mountains at this hour—the door to the abbot’s quarters opened, revealing half of the priest’s figure in the gap.

“Who is there?” In the darkness where one needed to draw near to discern anything, I silently approached the priest. “Ah, it was you.” “Please, do come in.” To the astonished priest, I offered my farewells while standing there, explained that I had someone waiting below, and immediately turned back. The snow remaining along the mountain’s edge showed white between cedar trunks. On the village road below, Kyūzaemon stood with both feet neatly together, maintaining his earlier posture without shifting.

As the two of us walked along the winding muddy path, our surroundings had completely vanished from view. He crossed the mud as though stepping into the tracks of a horse’s hoofprints. Through the depths of a dark night where nothing but uniformly identical cut rice fields stretched endlessly, a single narrow road ran straight ahead. When we reached its midpoint, Kyūzaemon came to an abrupt halt and gazed at the fields. “This here is our family’s rice field,” he said. “How can you tell in this pitch darkness?” I asked, and he replied that you could tell by the cut ends of the stubble.

I suddenly recalled that Kyūzaemon’s wife had died after giving birth to a child in Sannin Field. Pretending this might be the field where one of them had been born, he remained motionless for a while, rooted there in the darkness of the night. “With this, the rice for this year won’t be finished until after New Year’s,” Kyūzaemon said.

It was a long way to the station. When we climbed up to the immaculately cleaned 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 the war. Beneath it we sat facing each other across the charcoal brazier waiting for our meal, but I noticed how every house I'd visited bore scattered scars from war's calamity - and though this plain had finished its harvest, it now lay as nothing but stubbled fields riddled with those same wounds. When this thought came, the darkness pressing against the windowpane struck me with its bone-deep cold.

The meal came with sake as well. As Kyūzaemon grew slightly intoxicated, he began muttering something in a barely audible tone, his words spilling out haltingly to himself.

“I was beaten, beaten. “I’ve lost count of how many times that Sanemon beat me.” He—likely sensing we would never meet again—mumbled haltingly as if trying to spill out every ounce of endurance from his past. “You must’ve had it rough too, living alongside that man.” “Even so, he’s a good soul at heart.” “Though I’m just a branch family member of his, he’d beat me whenever I made money—but he’s a good soul at heart.”

Kyūzaemon, after saying this, now began to lament at length 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 being a nuisance. “When I talk with you, it’s so interesting—so interesting—that even though I try to hold back, thinking I shouldn’t bother you so much, it’s just too interesting. If I don’t come, I get so lonely.” “I’ve never heard such interesting stories.”

The thing that caused me the most trouble from him—I admit this was indeed my failing. As long as this world lacks thieves stealing others' time, my own sphere cannot turn. Regarding this matter—reserving deeper contemplation for later—I kept pouring him sake while expressing gratitude. Past ten o'clock, we had two beds prepared and lay down. Beneath the stiff handwoven cotton futon of snow country, I slept heavily with only one layer cast aside, while Kyūzaemon fell asleep the instant he reclined. I remained wakeful through it all. Freight trains passed through the station in endless cycles of arrival and departure. Tomorrow I would spend the full day aboard a train; should we reach Ueno by midnight, I'd wait there until morning. And so it was December eighth 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 a snore. Every time I looked—in his straight-backed, properly supine posture—the faint smile at his slightly parted lips seemed to say, “I worked and worked.” It was a sleeping face whose very bones laughed from their foundations. Kyūzaemon’s mortuary tablet gazing down from Kaidan-in’s highest tier would likely not wait long before being placed upon his forehead—marked by that bullet-wound scar—as he lay there sleeping thus. And I would likely never see this face again. The night train passed through the wintry wind.