Pathway to Japanese Literature

February

Sunday, the 20th

In the morning, I read the New Year’s issue of *Fujin Kōron*, newspaper clippings, and other materials.
I found the article about Tokyo’s first jury trial extremely interesting.
At the same time, I detected a certain benevolence in the presiding judge’s replies and other details.
Through questions like these—posed by jurors wearing formal crested kimonos and red shoes—their guileless dedication became palpable.

Did they not try lifting fingerprints from the match? Did it not occur to them to collect fingerprints?

And which way did the smoke drift?

An amateur-like enthusiasm, a youthful vigor.
This was a good feeling.

○ New Love Explorations

Not a single briskly vital romance existed.

Three articles—the reporters’ attitudes toward each were reflected in them in an interesting way.

Ms. Yamakawa’s critical essay was delightful.
Her recent criticism of Nippon Hayashi & Co.’s monopoly on Kollontai-style love was entirely valid.
This was an essay that should naturally have been written by someone at some point.

The stupidity or lack of sincerity in journalism offered no judgment whatsoever regarding the gap between such love discourses and Mr. Masugi’s romantic-humanistic understanding as presented in Ishihara Jun’s article.

Around three o’clock, while I was dozing off a bit, Y came.
Seeing Y’s face in daylight was unusual.
Therefore, I was happy.
I performed a little feat—
the feat of raising half my body up by myself, propping on my right elbow and taking something from the bedside table with my left hand.
Then, for the first time, I could see a small table covered with a white cloth in the far corner.

Saturday, the 19th

A terrible wind.
Snow began to fall.
――As someone bedridden, I understood nothing.
There was only the pale blue wall before my eyes, untouched by sunlight.
Because Faierman was being discharged from the hospital, there was talk of bustling off to аптека to shop.

The youngest doctor came.
While he sat on a chair,

—How are you?

―Thank you. Still the same.
―Yesterday we shook our heads quite a bit.
―Why?

“Bad stuff came out. You’ll have to stay in bed for a long time.”

“Meaning? So it’s serious?”

“There were no gallstones. It appears to be cholecystitis.”

At last, I learned the name of my illness.
But since the young doctor had kindly explained it to me, the attending physician offered no explanation whatsoever.
It was as if to say, “The people should be made to follow without question.”

○ At night, for the first time, I lay alone and it was very peaceful.
However, in the room, there still remained the bed where Faierman had lain.
In the quiet night, I thought I could hear her breathing coming from there.

From this awareness, I recalled the Hayashimachi house and felt melancholy.
The lingering traces of Hideto’s youthful twenty-one-year-old breath, footsteps, and laughter must surely be drifting through every corner of the house.
He lives there.
It’s an unkind thing.

○ Day

G came.

"What does the view outside the window look like?"
"I still don't know."

"I'll tell you—three trees, the neighboring building."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

Someone gave me a copy of their own book titled *The Unknown Japan*.
A navy blue and yellow color scheme.
Cars, figures in straw raincoats and conical hats, factory smokestacks—above them all flew airplanes.
It captured something of Tokyo, Japan.

Monday

The two Nyanka changed my sheets while talking among themselves as they worked.

“This blanket cost twenty-four rubles, they say.”
“There’s a thick one for sixteen rubles.”
“But Alexandra—Kaya said so.”
“She’s probably clattering around claiming it’s ten rubles—that’s the sort of thing she likes.”
Alexandra, as they kept mentioning, was the female supervisor here.
Then Tanya shook out the linen jacket she was putting on me while—
“How much did they charge for this one?”
At that point, I said.
“Thirty rubles.”
“Twenty-seven rubles? You’re clattering around in geta?”

They all laughed.

All my white things—on both the pillowcase and nightclothes—had the number 8 written on them.
That is, I was not Yuriko Chūjō but merely a number 8.

○ On my first night in the hospital, I slept until midnight but then woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep no matter what.

In the neighboring bed, the roommate patient was breathing audibly.

Mouth was dry.
I reached out, took the mandarin orange placed on the chair, and sucked its juice.
In five minutes, it dried again.
This time I drank mineral water.
From the dark room through the glass above the door I could see the corridor ceiling reflecting light.
The reflected light wasn’t strong enough to reach my face.
The dead of night.

After a while, somewhere a patient began to moan.
The moaning seemed to come from a room beyond the corridor, to the left.

The times when critically ill patients suffered were generally fixed.
1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM.
It was the Earth’s gravitational pull.
The roof ridge sank three sun in the dead of night.
There had been a novel by Andreyev that wrote of midnight hospitals.
While pondering these things with piercing clarity and listening to the moans, I alternately drank mandarin juice and mineral water.

On the second night, I woke up again around 1 AM.
The breathing of the roommate patient—the ticking of the clock—the dim glow illuminating the corridor ceiling—I had once spent time in an isolation room of the pediatrics department at a Tokyo university hospital over a decade ago during summer.
Hideo was three years old when he contracted acute dysentery and was hospitalized.
I was twelve years old.
I stayed in the hospital room with my mother.
Late at night, it was my role to go replace the ice packs.

The corridor was long.
On a summer night, the electric light hung oppressively red.
Passing beneath it while hearing only the scuffing of my sandals from my heels, I entered a dimly lit room on the right.
Cold air struck my face.
I descended three steps of tamped earth, walked across an earthen floor, and found ice buried in sawdust within a large bath-like structure of hardened earth.
Both the tamped earth floor and bath-shaped structure were damp.
The dampness faintly reflected the electric light.
I felt night’s vastness, lifeless air, and dampness—solemnly immense—enveloping my small being.

I hurried automatically.
I broke the ice hurriedly and heard the sound of cracking ice echo loudly off the damp earthen floor and ceiling, reverberating down the corridor.
It felt uncanny to be the only thing moving within this stillness.
……—At that moment came the sound of two or three people hastening down the corridor.
Tense, alert footsteps.
I thought—oh, someone must have died.

The next morning, her roommate Faierman, while cutting a piece from the edge of her daily fifty-gram bread, said, “Did you hear the patient next to us moaning?”

“I heard it the night before last,” I thought. “But last night they didn’t seem to moan.”

“They called a priest the day before yesterday,” said Faierman.

It must have been for the last rites that they called him.

Is it that bad?

“Hmm, and then they died last night.”

So those footsteps were for that.
I felt a strange sensation.

She

“This place is still better since critically ill patients are placed in individual rooms,” she said.

If you look at someone who suffered terribly and died lying right before your eyes, it’s quite an unpleasant feeling.

Having suffered from diabetes for five years and been in and out of various hospitals six times, it seemed she had also experienced such things.

○ There were only twenty-seven female internal medicine patients.
A room packed with twelve people cost forty-five yen per month.

Double room: 150 rubles.

Single room: 250 rubles.

A defining feature of Russian hospitals was that instead of nurses, there existed caregivers called *nyanki* who directly handled all personal care needs.
Nurses remained few and scattered.
Between these *nyanki* and *feldshers*, there had once been an intermediate layer of *sestry*.

On the bedside table by my pillow lay a brass bell.
My unsteady neck was wrapped in gauze.
Now there was no money.
One probe was used for five patients.

Suppose the hot water bottle placed on my accursed gallbladder cooled. I took the bell and rang it. A Nyanka wearing a white smock and white headscarf came. I just had to hand over the hot water bottle I pulled out from under the blanket to her.

The Nyankas worked twelve-hour shifts—from 8 AM to 8 PM—with four groups of two each, and they also took night duty.
They earned forty rubles monthly (the Gornichnaya Hotel paid forty-two rubles and fifty kopeks).

One feldsher attended to every fifty patients; thermometers—including one that consistently read three degrees low—were circulated among them.

The Nyankas were generally kind.
Yet upon hearing their accents, one could sense how deeply the mud of the countryside had seeped into their heels.
It became clear how far these elderly women were from anything resembling agility or medical knowledge.

Therefore, even when admitted to a hospital in Moscow, patients never experienced the serene pleasure of entrusting even the details of daily life to others as they would at St. Luke’s. The Nyankas never remembered my habit of drinking tea with milk every morning. Their minds were perpetually fresh.

“There’s a milk bottle on that table over there, isn’t there?”
“Please warm about half a cup for me—I drink my tea with milk.”

The tea is in the cupboard.

In Moscow, there still seemed to be a leniency where bedridden patients lying soiled did not bring disgrace upon themselves or the nyanki. At seven in the morning, the nurse on duty would come in and soak the edge of the hand towel until it dripped wet for me. Like a five-year-old girl, I had to wipe my face and hands meekly with that towel, apply eau de cologne, and each day begin anew by repeating my explanation about the milk bottle on that table.

Even when admitted to a hospital in the USSR, you must not lose your own will and teapot.
At the hospital, they provided hot water morning and evening.
[In the margin]

Russians and Tea.
At three in the afternoon, tea boiled.
The Shuuitsaar man walked quietly by, carrying a kurshukuru.
Eichaipira’s song—office tea—a photo of a teacup with a spoon had appeared in the Kuberuparuto Conference Tribune.

Just as the healthy villagers Nikita and Engineer Maikov did, the patients too each morning measured their own tea into teapots, poured in the hot water provided by the hospital, and if they preferred, decanted it into saucers to sip slowly.

At twelve noon, meals were distributed; after four o’clock, dinner was distributed; and at night, it was tea again.

At six in the evening, gazing at the ceiling that reflected the stark light from the shade-less lamp, I sat with my mouth open as Y fed me soup.

Sitting on the adjacent bed, having pulled a chair forward and spread a newspaper over it, Faierman ate her dinner of butter, cucumber, two boiled eggs, and tea.
She pounded the leftover meat from lunch with her knife while

“Shall I offer you this meat? It’s so delicious you’ll want to eat it—really.”

Even so, after three weeks of eating nothing but boiled cabbage dishes and finally being able to eat a hundred grams of beef, she ended up finishing that meat as well.

While walking around, she ate a sour green apple, skin and all.
She began drawn thread work.

Y

“This lamp works fine—but why no shade? Doesn’t feel like a proper hospital at all,” said Y.

—That’s the Soviet way.

In the corridor, female patients who could now walk unsteadily gathered around the benches on either side.
Uniformly clad in regulation light-gray gowns, they adjusted their collars, their robust voices—unimpaired by illness—resonating through the corridor and filling it with sound.

“Y,”

“This corridor here has a bit of an old-age home feel to it,” someone whispered.

Y wrapped the empty milk bottles and kisel pot in white wrapping paper and returned around eight o’clock.

Faierman rolled up a newspaper and skillfully covered the lamp’s light.
I saw this and strongly felt the adaptability in daily life that Russians possessed.
All Russians aged twenty or older had lived through the revolution and famine era.
There were certain fundamental conditions necessary for life.
They had learned how to survive through days entirely lacking those very conditions.

The strength of these people was the cornerstone of the USSR.

Upon sturdy-boned, robust people rested all manner of inconveniences, filth, and exhaustion.
But they would endure through those depths and survive.

As long as the USSR stands upon this vitality of its people, it will remain a far more resilient entity than American clergy could ever hope for.

After dimming the light, Faierman said to me while opening the bedside table:

“Please don’t look at or listen to what I’m doing.”

She spread her pale thighs and released a vigorous stream of water.
As soon as the sound ceased, she rose up smoothly like a white mare.—

(The entity termed *Chirigami* residing in the sleeves of Japanese women—could this be an “unknown custom” to the extremities of the USSR’s pale flesh?)

The 16th

I had long been acquainted with the parents of Mr. XX—one of the three young ideologues who led this recent Communist Party incident.

Their home was in Kyushu.
When I returned to Japan before coming here, Mr. XX’s father made a special visit to see me, during which he recounted:

“When XX had just one year left before graduating university, he suddenly announced, ‘I want to quit school.’ I was so shocked it felt like the heavens and earth went dark.”
“But there was nothing to be done.”
“He left school and went into the mines.”
“Then he became a leader in the labor movement.”
“I simply cannot comprehend my son’s way of thinking.”
“All sorts of rumors reached me.”
“My own position gradually became precarious.”
“Yet when he ended up imprisoned over that incident, his conduct during the public trial remained commendable.”
“Even facing imprisonment or worse, his resolve never wavered.”
“This I cannot fathom.”
“As you know, he graduated middle school at the top of his class.”
“He was performing well at university too.”
“Since he has committed himself so utterly, I believe there must be some truth in that work.”
“What manner of truth is this? I wish to know it—to understand what drives my son.”
“When you next go to Russia, please observe conditions there closely.”
“I should like to hear your various accounts.”

——Was this not truly the heart of a parent?
So I asked him:
“How have you raised your son until now?”

As Mr. XX stated:

“—I raised him solely by telling him not to lie.”

I answered,

“It can be said that your wish has been completely fulfilled.”

I felt that not telling lies in this world meant precisely this much.

This story moved me.
While listening, tears welled up, but later when I tried to tell Y about it, I couldn’t speak through to the end without pausing.

The 25th

About ten days had passed, yet the impression I received from this story showed no sign of fading.
The force with which one heart strikes another does not dwell solely in “reasonable theories.”
To live it—this force resides within the totality of a way of life steeped in unfeigned sentiment.

――○――

○ Day

m came.
I talked about how when I went on Christmas Day, they hadn't been there.
It turned out they had returned to their home in Leningrad.

K’s illness appeared to involve issues with his lung sac but seemed attributable to Mr. Basedow.
He had received a month and a half of leave from his workplace at the National Publishing House and was staying at a sanatorium in Crimea.

“—What was it like?”

“At first it was very good, but he wrote that afterward it wasn’t so much,” said m.
“But he should be returning soon.”

“Why?” I asked.
“Even if he doesn’t recover?”

“Since the leave is only a month and a half,” replied m, “if his condition worsens again, he’ll likely have to take another leave.”

“Couldn’t they stay longer with a certificate from the sanatorium doctor?”

“No,” said m.
“That cannot be done.”

m shook his head without hesitation and said, “No, that cannot be done,” but I find this point unreasonable.

The system where workers of the USSR can take leave and be sent to sanatoriums is excellent.

However, there are shortcomings.

The journey between Crimea and Moscow required at least five days of continuous train travel. The train had no dining car. Just as Chekhov had run with a kettle dangling, K too had to scramble to find food.

He had managed to stay at the sanatorium for a month and a half. Without fully recovering, he would become exhausted from such a journey, go around Moscow visiting doctors to obtain permission again, and once it was finally decided that it was still no good, by the time he returned to Crimea, the month and a half of rest would have been entirely for naught.

The lack of communication between sanatorium doctors and workplaces causes an appalling waste of money, time, and energy.
It is the grand, quintessentially Russian inconvenience born of the undaunted surge of Russians who spare no exhaustion.

○ Day

Faierman told this story.
It happened in a village near Leningrad.

Someone took two girls—aged seven and four—into a deep snowy forest and abandoned them naked in the severe cold of sub-zero temperatures around minus ten degrees.

The girls began to freeze and started crying violently.

It was already dusk—in winter, it becomes completely dark by four in the afternoon—when an empty sled came along the snow-covered road toward the village.

From within the forest came children's cries.
The peasant was terrified.
He thought it was Chimi’s doing.
He took the reins and struck the horse’s belly.
From within the forest, the children’s cries gradually drew nearer, and a small naked figure came darting out onto the snow-covered road.
And while crying and screaming, she began to chase after the sled.
The peasant frantically urged the sled faster.
The small naked figure also chased after them, crying and screaming even more intensely.
Continuing to strike the horse’s hindquarters, the peasant finally reached the village and recounted his terrifying experience to the people.

Suspicious, people emerged from the village.

On the snow-covered road from which the peasant had fled, the corpse of a seven-year-old girl was discovered—her arm torn off by the sled’s brake.
The four girls had frozen to death in the forest.

24th

There was a thin rubber tube.
The tube was about two meters long.
At its tip was a small elliptical gold ball resembling a tea strainer.
I had to swallow it from the ball end.
It was a therapy to extract bile from the duodenum，but when this so-called zond was applied，it felt like some sorrowful circus act.
It proved more troublesome than the sword Fusevarodo Ivanov had swallowed during his days as an acrobat.
Ivanov’s blade had contracted by one-third each time through spring mechanisms.
This rubber tube truly needed swallowing all the way down to my intestines.
Wiping tears from my eye corners with my knuckles，I lay on my right side and waited for bile droplets to fall into the cup.

The doctor was a young man who had graduated from university last year.
At his place, there was a setter-breed dog and a wife.
His French blue garment had a frayed collar.
Before Amanullah Khan fled from Afghanistan, they had hired a doctor for six hundred rubles a month.
Unfortunately, he did not yet have a diploma at that time.—

A piece written by a German female Communist Party member—about women’s life in the USSR—had been published in *Bungei Sensen*.
*Month Issue, Page ○

The text was clear and unquestionable in its phrasing, yet in practice described a reality requiring fuller explication—purely as a matter of present and future hygiene.

Tatyana Ivanovna married the principal dancer of the Mariinsky Theater in Leningrad.
When her handsome husband took hold of her and taught her several elementary toe-dance steps and how to extend both legs into a straight line on the floor, Tatyana Ivanovna realized she was pregnant.
The dancer husband sullenly—

“I don’t want a baby.”

he said.
Tatyana Ivanovna underwent artificial abortion surgery.
Having paid twenty-five rubles, she was supposed to lie in the hospital’s artificial abortion ward for three days.
Three days became March.
In the fourth month, when twenty-two-year-old Tatyana Ivanovna returned home having lost her hair, appetite, and permanently healthy uterus, she realized she had lost one more thing.
Her husband was no longer Tatyana Ivanovna’s husband.
He was a Mariinsky dancer and had become the spouse of another woman with a resilient uterus.—

Are there many cases like this—cases where artificial abortions fail?

The percentage is low, but there are cases.
“One artificial abortion is not a big deal.”
Three or four times—if done like the women of Moskva do—there is absolutely harm.

In the cases you know of, what’s the highest number of times someone has had one?

At XX Hospital, there was such a case.
A woman who had undergone six artificial abortions wanted to naturally give birth to her seventh child.
However, after six surgeries, her uterine tissue had been completely destroyed, so she couldn’t sustain the fetus’s development and died from a uterine rupture.

To what extent did the film *Love in the Third Meshchanskaya Street* serve to enlighten the USSR’s ignorance—which reduced artificial abortion to small numbered tags, a maximum of 25–30 rubles, and three days of bedrest—regarding social hygiene?
Third Meshchanskaya Street was a working-class neighborhood.

The heroine, who had conceived a child with both her husband and his friend, discarded the artificial abortion number tag she had been clutching in her palm and left to embrace motherhood.

Even in such moments, at the seventy-fifth bed of the artificial abortion ward in the hospital bearing Semashko’s name, a new patient would be lying down.

And between her three days and March, she would risk it.

The Japanese woman’s gallbladder inadvertently posed a question to the USSR’s social hygiene.
Even if the golden ball attached to its tip were made of pure gold, the feat of inserting a two-meter rubber tube into the duodenum was neither elegant nor comfortable—it was no supreme art.
I thought many times in my life that I did not want to repeat this.
So I asked the doctor with eyebrows about three times as long as his eyes.

—I am interested in what exactly caused my gallbladder to swell.
Since I’ve realized the zond isn’t pleasant, I want to be careful and avoid swallowing it again, but...

His answer was thus.

“You said you had been eating at Stolovaya in Moskva all along, didn’t you?”
“That appears to be the cause.”
“Stolovaya is generally not good.”
“It’s unsanitary and they don’t pay attention to ingredients—because sometimes they even use spoiled things—so from now on eating at Stolovaya is strictly prohibited.”

This was an answer I would rather transcribe into Russian script than write in Japanese characters to show to Minister of Hygiene Semashko.

To be fair, my cursed gallbladder was already two-tenths compromised while I was still in Tokyo, Japan. However, it remains a fact that the bacteria which caused inflammation by traveling back up the bile duct and making their host groan had been supplied over the course of a year by the dining halls of Moscow, USSR.

The bacteria that had entered this Japanese woman’s gallbladder were invading, at every moment, the stomachs of Moscow citizens wrapped in rubashkas. What percentage of Moscow’s entire population could claim access to hygienic home-cooked meals?

“While women remain shut away in kitchens, the social revolution will never be completed.”

The USSR sought to liberate women from the burdens of excessive pregnancy and childcare while simultaneously attempting to free them from the stoves—both large and small—in every household.
At assemblies, they would recommend:

“We citizens of the new society* must learn to utilize our individual energies most beneficially.”
“Where is the necessity for housewives to stand before oil stoves half a day merely for two bowls of soup and two plates of cutlets?”

As reported in the Moscow evening newspaper: “Stolovaya Closing Hours—Because Moscow’s Stolovayas are only open until midnight in the center and otherwise close at 8 or 9 PM, night-shift workers cannot eat hot oběd.”

Mossovet would likely permit extended closing hours in consideration of nearby labor conditions.

The pamphlet published by the Society for Foreign Cultural Relations featured a photograph of the new communal kitchen’s steam cauldron.

“Preparation to eat” had been a problem since humankind wrapped animal pelts around their waists and fought mammoths with clubs and stones.

The citizens most liberated from kitchens since Sparta would be found in Moskva and New York.

The final and greatest problem lay in how to eradicate superfluous bacteria being sent into bodies from this social cauldron.

○

Pale green walls.
There was a round table bearing a red cyclamen pot.
Because the window frames were old, air streamed through the room with the January sunlight.
The swaying cyclamen flowers made this evident.
Beside the pot—her right arm swathed from shoulder to wrist in a white woolen shawl—she lay on her back writing vertical Japanese characters into a notebook resting on her chest.

Six male and female third-year medical university students entered the Japanese female patient’s room, led by a physician.

A red-faced girl wearing a Young Communist League uniform under her white coat began asking questions to compile clinical records.
Course of the illness.
Date of birth Occupation Past health status Health status of parents and siblings

"—Did your grandfather have venereal disease?"

"Biological genes show the greatest interest in third-generation guinea pigs."
"—But I don't even remember my grandfather's face."
I spread my hands and said.

"—This answer was difficult."
"I merely know that my parents and I do not have it."

“—Understood.”

Then the female medical student asked.

“—Have you ever been starved?”

“Have you ever been starved?”
“No,” I answered, but this simple question—one unlikely to be asked at Irkawa Internal Medicine—left a powerful impression on me.

The closeness of the interrelation between society and illness weighed down on me.

January 30th

I have been lying here for twenty-six days.
It has been three weeks and one day since I entered the hospital.
My diet consists of milk, tea, soup, kisel, mannaya kasha, baked apples and orange juice—the rest being my own subcutaneous fat.

This was the first time I had been bedridden for so long and could only consume semi-liquid food.

Last January, I contracted grippe.
My fever ran high; my head and neck stiffened until I grew momentarily dazed.
After I had improved somewhat, Y would tell me countless times each day: "You'll waste away—have something to eat, think of something you want."

“There are things I want to eat, but it’s no good.”

“What is it? Just go ahead and say it.”
There, atop the piled-up white pillows, I answered hesitantly with an indescribable sort of smile.

I want cold sōmen.

Several years ago at a certain place, I was served chilled sōmen with an exceptionally delicious broth where the soy sauce flavor had been nearly eliminated.
That flavor and the slippery coolness of the noodles—their crisp texture pressed through Moscow’s meter-thick walls to reach me here with extraordinary sensory vividness.

During my time lying here, the cultural mirage that most frequently appeared in my mind was the waves resonating with forest murmurs at a Japanese seaside—the scent of tidewater, the sun-warmed sand's comfort in sunlit spots, and this sōmen.

Of course, that delicate white Eastern foodstuff had not been packed in our trunk.
I ate a green onion omelet and regained strength.
In Moskva at minus fifteen degrees, hens do not lay eggs.
—Eggs arrive in wooden boxes.

When I fell ill again that first year, what I now recalled was neither the Japanese seaside nor somen noodles. It was Japan’s long engawa. Autumn’s clear sunlight had shone upon that engawa, where the shoji were closed white. A small branch’s shadow lay upon the shoji. I faintly sensed the scent of shoji paper—

The first thing I wanted to eat was stewed Chinese cabbage soup from Chinese cuisine. Then daikon simmered in broth. Tofu hot pot.

Mr. Saitō Shigeyoshi, the author of distinctive essays, provided a short piece titled *Kiryō Warabi* ("Wandering Fern").

Mr. Tanijōji set out on his pilgrimage to the New World as one of two travelers.
And as Mem Tani, through her feminine adaptability, zealously tried to become one of them via trendy Parisian cuisine, Mr. Tani reported the menu of a London Japanese restaurant with even greater fervor.

They had resolutely left behind what Europeans call *soyu* (soy sauce), edible wood shavings (katsuobushi), and rice—beyond the strait.

I, too, have ended up giving voice—if only slightly—to this gustatory nostalgia.

Even so, did Lafcadio Hearn leave somewhere in his many essays any sentiments about delicious American chicken pot pie? Even in the hedges of Kobe, snails must have crawled—but upon seeing them, did Loti’s heart remain so untroubled?

In the coffee fields of Brazil, the souls of barefoot Japanese emigrants harbor an undying homesickness.
There exists a physiological homesickness constituted by *soyu* that belongs solely to Japan.
This intense sensory longing remains unknown to the Japanese ambassador residing in Washington, D.C.
(At the embassy, there must be chefs who can fill lacquered Zen trays with arrays of small plates and bowls.) Japan—an island strung like a bowstring between 40＊ and ＊＊ degrees north latitude—trembles sensitively to winds from west and east, reacting yet still retaining its decisively unique *soyu*.

The value of a human being living in this world as a person lies in whether one can speak of anything—terrifying things, outrageous things—to that person.
It is a question of how far this extends beyond merely "admittedly."

There must be more than one person who felt unable to say anything foolish to Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
Akutagawa had his own preferences regarding human affairs—that’s why there was so little affection.

From Rembrandt as a Realist to the Leap of Rembrandt’s Realism

When you are ill,

1. I wish morning would come quickly.
When things are bad, even six o’clock or so.

1. I want to see a beautiful, healthy woman.

• Sunlight is a joy.

• Things that sprout green buds and grow.

January 1929

Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan had been a popular figure the previous spring when he toured Britain, France, Russia, and other countries.
Britain provided money and instigated a rebellion.
Amanullah fled Kabul at the start of this year.
When fleeing, he escaped aboard a British airplane.
He would return again after some time.

In Kabul there was Bache-Sakao (Баче-Сакао), but by January 31 he was trying to escape.
(To the more peaceful Indian border) A British military airplane would likely take him there.