Pathway to Japanese Literature

Dusk

The wide sky above the green rice paddies was gradually losing its light.
At what seemed to be the village entrance, the road split into three, and there was what sounded like running water.
The horse-drawn cart carrying us grazed past eaves as it turned into a narrow path.
An Ice Candy signboard caught my eye.
There was water flowing abundantly through a ditch.
The rows of houses broke at a grove only to continue again.
The national school gate appeared, followed by the village office's small building.
This road that seemed to cut straight through the rice fields—I wondered how far it might stretch.
The cart crept forward slowly.
As the houses grew more crowded, faces would occasionally peer out from under eaves, turning to stare at the cart in shock.
Children playing by the roadside shouted and came running over.

When the horse-drawn cart was halted before a house where a motor faintly hummed, the surroundings had already grown dim.
Everyone was utterly exhausted.
Only my younger sister and I could still stand and walk.
When I entered the mill, I called out to Mr. Fukai.
Mr. Fukai emerged from within, startled, then immediately withdrew again.
Now the village women surrounded the injured on the cart, each speaking to us in turn.
But in the deepening twilight, I was too overwhelmed to discern who was saying what.
Mr. Fukai diligently attended to our needs.
Though my second brother had previously arranged to rent the third house from the mill, none could have foreseen our sudden arrival as disaster victims.

Eventually, we stretched out our legs on the tatami mats in the detached room of a farmhouse.
This was the place that my second elder brother’s family, my younger sister and I had finally reached after two days and nights of sleeping outdoors.
The day had completely darkened, and the wind stirred heavily through the rice field directly across from the veranda.

An old man.

His face appeared large relative to his short stature; while his forehead had gone bald, the hair near his temples mingled white strands with glossy ones; then above all were the eyes—those round eyeballs looked desperately sleepy as if still immersed in an afternoon nap's dream, and between his slack lips rested a pipe....For an instant, the surrounding air seemed to slide downward, and even I felt somehow on the verge of anesthesia. But those dazed eyes seemed to have finally noticed us. Then, an indescribably peculiar expression surfaced on the man’s face, and his lips began to smirk.

“What’s wrong? I can’t understand if you just stand there silently.”

Having been presenting a slip of paper at that window for some time to request moving in, I found myself somewhat stunned.

"I wish to make this request—I've been trying to make this request..."

After a moment, the man silently spread the paper across his desk.
Then he began entering something in the ledger and stamping seals.
He scrawled crude characters with a worn-out pen on scrap-like paper, then flicked an abacus with thick fingertips before jotting down haphazard numbers.
Gazing intently at the window where he worked, I grew profoundly anxious—wondering whether this could possibly be adequate.
But at any rate, the moving-in procedures were thus completed.
The rice-and-grain passbook and other documents we received became valid in the village from that day onward.

The old man who had startled me would unexpectedly appear at places like the bend in the stream at the village entrance or along farm paths. The sight of him always wandering about with a hoe slung over his shoulder—he carried himself like someone going fishing in a field.

When I later moved out from this village too, I again had to impose on that old man's help. He rarely showed up at the village office, spending most days cultivating fields, but when I spotted him strolling leisurely along the middle of the village road that day, I hastily chased after him and begged him to process my moving-out papers. At the village office desk, the old man wrote out my moving-out certificate. "They say transferring to Tokyo's quite difficult these days..." he remarked while tilting his head, but wrote it out all the same.

Cremation

“My deepest condolences.”
The formulaic words that someone had uttered upon entering the tatami room without addressing anyone in particular struck me in the chest, and I felt myself sinking into grief.
“This won’t do,” I immediately tried to regain a bystander’s mindset.
On the fifth day after the disaster in Hiroshima, the man had died.
On the fourth day after moving to this village, I was participating in that funeral.

When I looked around at that moment, the villagers didn't seem particularly moved by this misfortune. What everyone was intensely concerned about was that the departure time was being delayed due to the ongoing air raid alert. Shinto ritual branches and sacred paper streamers had already been placed on the veranda there some time before. After a while, the alert was lifted. Then, as if by prior agreement, the people promptly took them up in their hands, and the men lined up along the roadside. The coffin was threaded onto a thick bamboo pole and carried by two elders. It moved forward, swaying at the head of the procession. They cut through the village road, crossed a field path, and when approaching the mountain trail, the bamboo bearing the coffin creaked. The crematorium was halfway up the mountain. When I noticed the men who had followed along this far, they were all elders.

Two or three of them placed the coffin inside the crematorium, arranged logs beneath it, spread straw, and lit the fire.
The fire continued burning on the other side of the iron door.

“Well then, we’ll leave the rest to you,” said the old man and young widow who had carried the coffin as they departed first.

The people sat down in the cool shade of the pine trees and spent some time watching how the fire was burning.
From the iron door, smoke still leaked out, glowing fiercely.

"Look, it's exactly like grilling a mullet.
The fat's sputtering away," someone said casually.
Then, one person approached the door and added more firewood.
For a while, everyone smoked tobacco while chatting about whatever they pleased.

“It’s burning well.”
“At this rate, we should be able to collect the bones tonight,” an old man muttered contentedly.
“Well then, shall we head back?” someone said, and everyone promptly rose to their feet.
The people conducted matters impassively, their manner even carrying a faint buoyancy.
To me—still haunted by visions of Hiroshima’s horrors—this scene felt unexpectedly jarring.
Yet perhaps such lightness had become unavoidable when confronting misfortune.
The elderly descending the slope kept tilting their heads upward, pointing at something overhead.
Looking up, I saw small bamboo tubes fastened here and there among pine branches.
One old man deliberately halted, gazing at them as if beholding something novel for the first time,

"Ah! So that's it—pine root oil," he burst into dry laughter. "With pine root oil flowing, Japan will surely win."
I suddenly realized that the villagers had apparently been terribly tormented by pine root oil.

Agricultural Society

The first time I took the rice and grain passbook to that Agricultural Society, I stared intently at the lemon syrups, straw hats, buttons, and other items lined up on the earthen-floored shelves there.
“Are those for sale?” When I asked the female clerk, she nodded.
Then I took out brittle paper bills from my waterlogged wallet that had dried stiff as a board, and requested a writing brush and syrup.
“They actually sell things like that over there,” I told my younger sister, astonished by the novelty. She immediately went out and returned with syrup and buttons.
“To think you can really buy things just by paying money—it’s like a dream!” my younger sister grew strangely excited.

But after that, a world where paying money could obtain goods had arrived.

By that time, figures of demobilized youths began to appear sporadically in this village as well.
The female clerk at the Agricultural Society was being persistently asked her age by a village old woman.

"If only her disposition were good enough, I’d take her as my son’s bride."
The old woman bluntly revealed such things to her daughter.
Before anyone noticed, a wooden sign reading "Agricultural Society" was posted at its entrance.

Toy Rations

The old man was leading a cow home late at night.
A Korean man who had come up from behind kept pleading, so just as I thought he’d loaded the luggage onto the cow’s back, a voice shouted “Banzai! Banzai!” from a thicket right beside us.
When I looked, a figure stood up in the faint light, flashing a military sword.
“Banzai!
“Banzai! Banzai!” the figure continued shouting as he staggered toward us.
At that moment, the Korean man fled swiftly with his luggage, but the old man leading the cow could only stand there bewildered.
“Please stop!”
“I haven’t done anything wrong that I can recall.”
The old man pleaded desperately.
However, the man with glazed eyes brought down his raised military sword on the cow’s rear with a sharp crack, then immediately swung at the old man’s elbow.
And with that, the military officer silently walked away.
—This had happened on the evening of August 15th. While stroking the wound on his elbow that had been inflicted with the back of the military sword, the old man recounted this story with a fearful look the following morning.

About five or six days after that incident, Old Man Taguchi took the cow and went out early in the morning to retrieve toys. I found it somewhat amusing to wonder whether there would be enough toys to load onto the cow's back for the return trip.

Then Old Man Taguchi returned to the village.
After a while came word that there would be toy rations and we should come collect them.
The nephew who had gone out cheerfully turned back immediately.

“We need a wrapping cloth! We really need one!”

The nephew went out again, extremely restless.
Soon after being brought back, the furoshiki-wrapped bundle was immediately spread out on the tatami mats.
There was a flute.
There was a strange wooden piece that clattered.
A bamboo shovel.
An actress photo card.
A paper shogi set.
A wooden car.
Each and every one of these was terribly crude, but they must have been hidden away in a military warehouse for pacification purposes for a long time.
The adults weren’t very pleased—they would have preferred even a single sho of rice over being given such things—but the children were each completely captivated by the items spread across the tatami.

As day turned to dusk, I went up to the second floor.
Then from the direction of the rice fields came the sound of a flute.
And not just one.
Short, monotonous flute tones now resonated curiously from that house over there and this hut here.
Now that you mention it, lights were twinkling nostalgically both near the embankment and at the mountain's foot.
My heart too seemed to moisten slightly.
That my little niece's eyes - which had taken on an intensely fierce glare since the disaster - finally began to soften occurred two or three days after that.

Disaster Victims

The items handed over from the military were to be distributed at the neighborhood association leader’s place.
When I went to collect them, I was kept waiting at the threshold for two or three hours.
Mosquito coils, shoehorns, toothbrushes, Seirogan stomach medicine, plum pulp extract, flea powder, writing brushes, paper clips, nearly unusable safety razors, pipes—all lay scattered across the tatami mats. But when it came to gaiters, hats, and knapsacks, there were even stranger things.

The old man beside me picked up a white cloth with strings attached—something between a belly wrap and headband—and said, “This’d make a proper fundoshi.”
When I gave a noncommittal nod, he grew self-important and started rattling off one triviality after another.
Yet his sagging features and reckless tone held something inexplicable.

After that, I came to occasionally encounter that old man on the road. He always addressed me with excessive familiarity, and his terribly disheveled appearance and foolish tone—it nearly made even me into a companion in dullness. "They’ve issued an order saying we must submit potatoes, but I don’t have any fields," he said. “So I gotta buy potatoes elsewhere and submit ’em to the authorities, see?” With that, he let out a feeble "Ha ha." I already knew he was a disaster victim who had drifted in from Osaka.

At the neighboring house, a prayer master had come and was repeatedly letting out terrifying cries.
It seemed he was praying to cure the daughter of that house through massage therapy, but when I happened to listen closely to his incantations, there were all sorts of phrases strung together like "Giyatei Giyatei Haragiyatei" and "Teunenkuanzen'on, Bōnenkuanzen'on."
However, the voice was far more terrifying than the words.
—However, that prayer master was none other than that Osaka disaster victim old man—I had long failed to realize this.

The prayer master, Old Man Taguchi, sat down on the veranda and spoke to my second elder brother.
"There's someone lookin' to sell a chest—ain't you got any interest in buyin'?"
"If you're gonna buy anything, now's the time."
"It's a splendid chest made of black persimmon wood."
"Or wait, maybe it was maple wood," he continued skillfully steering the conversation, still mixing in that simpleton-like tone.

Threat

While suffering from severe diarrhea, I lay alone on the second floor.
Then came the sound of someone approaching the veranda downstairs.

"Good evening, good evening. Is Mr. Mori here?"
The voice carried a resentful tone from the very beginning, but for some reason, my sister-in-law was slow to respond.
"Mr. Mori! Mr. Mori!" The voice now bristled with irritation, but when signs finally suggested my sister-in-law was coming to answer,
"Why didn't your household report for duty?" he suddenly confronted her.

The national school building had been allocated as a shelter for the severely injured, and it was decided that two people from each hamlet would be dispatched daily for nursing duties.
But my sister-in-law was now constantly attending to her son who was on the verge of death, my second elder brother was still immobilized from his burns, and my younger sister had gone to Hiroshima around that time.
I couldn't make out what my sister-in-law was saying in her defense, but the enraged man's voice resounded throughout the area.

“What the! We won’t give rations to households that don’t fulfill their duties!”

Now he was even shouting such things. From his voice, I imagined he must have been a rather elderly man, yet there was something pathetic about him—frenzied by his own shouting while simultaneously cowering as if terrified. It was a tone that lost all restraint, like that of a child. Before long, the voice gradually grew lower; it seemed to still be muttering something, but then that too abruptly ceased. Listening to the receding footsteps, I pictured his character in my mind and found it somewhat comical.

However, this incident was no laughing matter.
Even absent that incident, we who carried the weakness inherent to disaster victims had to thereafter go about trembling in fear, watching the villagers' every expression.

My sister-in-law returned after overhearing fragments of villagers' conversations by the roadside.

"So then, will all those Hiroshima people end up starving to death?"

"They'll starve to death, I tell you."

Their tone seemed to secretly wish for us townspeople to fall into even more wretched circumstances, my sister-in-law feared.

"They promised to give us potatoes in return for the coat, but all they did was take things first, and what they gave us was just this much," my younger sister remarked, astonished by these villagers' methods.

I too observed the village people discreetly and tried my best to understand them.
But having stayed in that village for barely half a year with scarcely any contact with farmers, as someone raised in the city, I found nothing I could comprehend.
Originally, this village lay one and a half ri from the coastal town and just over five ri from Hiroshima; its language and customs weren't so different from ours. Yet grasping this village's essence seemed more difficult than understanding the peasants Tolstoy depicted.

When I peered through the toilet window, there was a man positioned beside the chicken coop wall diligently working straw.
Even on rainy days he continued his handiwork in the same spot. His long face tilted downward bore a splendid black mustache and showed a slight resemblance to Thomas Mann.
Generally speaking the men's faces in this village appeared shrewd.
They were faces tightened through labor - faces guarding their own narrow domains.
Among the young women some had faces of entrancing quality.
Their clear eyes and plump cheeks seemed almost untouched by worldly corruption.
With their sturdy arms they effortlessly pushed handcarts along.
But among the older women many had protruding lips and faces contorted in pain.

One day, oil distribution was being conducted in the vacant lot of the village office.
Where they had been buried, several military drum cans now appeared there, and two young men from the village office diligently measured the contents with a scale and poured them into bottles.
The women who had come from each group with bottles took turns one after another, but only my group remained until the very end due to our leader's mistake.

As I blankly watched the monotonous motions of measuring with that scale and pouring into bottles, I grew thoroughly exhausted.
But the women must have been overjoyed. “Your shoulders must be stiff. Let me rub them for you,” said one of them, placing her hands on the young man who was pouring the oil.

Suddenly, at the window of the village office, the Village Chief's face appeared.
Then everyone gave a slight bow, but the seemingly gentle Village Chief in his open-collar shirt, letting his cigarette smolder, looked down at them all composedly.

“Since we’re giving you oil, you’ll have to work next time.
It won’t do if you only come bustling out energetically when there’s something to receive, then play dumb when it’s time to work,” he said in an insistent yet casual tone.

Tongue-cut Sparrow

One morning, I was mending the shoji screens on the second floor.
The rain fell in hushed continuity; the sky above the mountains stood chalk-white while rice ears swayed thickly.
After repairing merely four or five shoji panels, I found myself drained to the marrow, utterly spent.
The two bowls of watery gruel I'd swallowed that morning had already vanished from my stomach, with two or three hours remaining until the next meal.
Suddenly my eyes fixed on the paste lingering in the pot.
(This is American flour.
Then it's edible.) First testing a pinch between fingertips, then devouring it all in an instant.
"Tongue-cut sparrow, tongue-cut sparrow," I murmured, wiping paste from my lips with a solitary grimace.

When the autumn rains ceased, the hot days returned.

In the village, compulsory labor service was imposed on each household to repair the roads.
When I went to the national school grounds with unsteady steps, a man holding a ledger promptly noted my name and said, “You handle the carts.”
“As I’ve just recovered from illness, please assign me to the easiest task possible,” I entreated.
At last I was assigned to digging earth.
We were breaking down the cliff towering behind the schoolyard with shovels, but for me in my starved state, even the glaring sunlight alone felt crushing.
The earth and sand kept emerging endlessly as the villagers worked with dogged persistence.
Those loading carts with the earth and transporting it outside all worked vigorously, including a woman with cloth-wrapped cheeks whose gaze seemed refreshingly cool.

“A belly full of porridge won’t give you any strength.”

Before I knew it, Old Man Taguchi was standing beside me.

Giant

On the morning after the typhoon had passed, the ears of rice bowed their heads in the direction the wind had departed, while in the sky above the low mountain ahead, blue heavy-looking clouds lingered.

The mountain, viewed from the second floor at nearly eye level, took on various expressions depending on the time.
The scenery that met my eyes was roughly confined to the rice fields spreading from the mountain's base, the village shrine visible just before me, and the embankment demarcating the left side of the rice fields.
Beyond the embankment was a river, and if one went as far as that area, the view of this mountain stream would evoke a feeling akin to visiting a hot spring in the mountains—but famished as I was, I rarely ventured out.

Vacantly, I gazed at that low mountain. The sky visible through its slightly hollowed center began to seem like some giant's mouth—whether deep blue or white with clouds. Was that enormous mouth starving too? Before I knew it, starving as I was, I found myself weaving a foolish fairy tale about that mountaintop maw... That giant's mouth dined quite sumptuously indeed. Each morning saw the great sun rise from there; each evening brought forth the round moon from that same place. Clouds and stars too were offered to that gourmand giant's jaws... Yet even so, those hungry lips still seemed somehow unsated.

Rotten Wood Bridge

In the quiet stream of the Indian summer day, a waterwheel was turning.
Though this was my first time coming to this area, my sister-in-law hurried ahead of me.
The house that would share firewood with us seemed to be still further ahead.
The other day, on a farm path in the rain where my sister-in-law had been walking while picking up scraps of wood, a passing man had called out to her, saying, "I can spare some firewood if you need it."
So my sister-in-law was taking me to that house to get firewood.

Beneath the cliff flowed water spanned by a single rotten log, beyond which stood a farmhouse.
My sister-in-law crossed that bridge, circled around to the farmhouse's front, and called out.
A dark-skinned man promptly produced four or five bundles of firewood.

“You should carry them on your back.”
“Shall I lend you a carrying frame?” he said, bringing one from the shed.
Carrying such a thing was my first time today.

“I can manage three bundles, but that might be too much for you.”

“Yes, and also… I’m not used to that bridge area… Could you carry it across that part for me?”

I had been desperately anxious about this for some time now. The man gave a firm nod, shouldered two bundles of firewood, and strode briskly across the Rotten Wood Bridge.

Road

How many times must I have walked that one-and-a-half-ri Road since becoming a disaster victim?
The scenery of that Road still floats vividly before my eyes, and the famished feeling I had while walking there still has not vanished.
If there is such a thing as patience—if it is not something forced but something naturally formed—then such experiences would surely prove useful.
Following along the stream for about one and a half ri from the village brought one to the coast where H-town lay.
There was my eldest brother’s temporary dwelling.
If I went to that house, at least I could get something to eat there.

So ravenous my innards seemed to gnaw at each other, I came shuffling out to the village outskirts.
Then the road split three ways, a bridge coming into view straight ahead.
By the time I reached this area, my legs had finally grown accustomed and my vision begun to expand—yet the road stretching from there along the river all the way to the sea proved truly interminable.

As embarrassing as it was, driven by extreme hunger, I would often go visit my eldest brother.
But even when I managed to fill my stomach there, another one-and-a-half-ri Road awaited on the return journey.
Particularly at night, that Road along the river—it felt desolate like life itself.
Guiding myself by the light visible at the bridge, no matter how far I walked, no matter how much I trudged onward, it seemed the light kept receding further into the distance.
When I finally reached that bridge, at least I felt I had returned halfway.
Every time I went to H-town and came back, my knee joints would turn rigid like sticks, leaving me unable to sit properly.

Clouds

The harvested fields lay jet-black across the land, yet in one corner fires would sometimes burn late into the night, and there I could always see people working busily.

I went out to the second-floor veranda and was trying to light my cut tobacco with the sun's rays using a lens.
The clouds were moving incessantly, and the sun rarely showed its face.
Just as I thought the sun's outline was beginning to emerge from beneath the thick clouds, a golden patch of sunlight suddenly surfaced halfway up the opposite mountain—while here at the edge of the veranda, everything remained dimly overcast.
No sooner had I thought the sun, cleansed by clouds, was shining sharply toward me than it was immediately covered by clouds spreading from behind.
I stood blankly, at a loss with the lens.
But at such times, my eldest brother from H-town would often appear here quite unexpectedly.
He sat down next to me on the veranda and,

“What on earth do you intend to do?” he cut in.

Since the bombing, my younger sister who had been staying with me at our second elder brother’s place had already moved out by then; in exchange, my second elder brother’s sons had returned from their student evacuation.
My indefinite idling here would no longer be tolerated.
But what in the world was I to do? I felt like I was grasping at clouds.

Road

The driving snow shackled the sky beyond the mountains into blackness, but over the sea, the sky remained faintly bright.
Whether I was lured by that snow or driven headlong by it—in any case, I came once more to the usual road.

Even when the new year came, there was no change in the starvation and cold, and the Andersen fairy tale I happened to read told of insects on the verge of freezing to death.
I felt I too must escape somewhere, or else death’s footsteps would soon draw near.
The image of beggars wandering Hiroshima’s ruins on starvation’s brink remained etched in my eyes, but neither could I forget the figure of that young man who had trudged through this village just days before in his summer shirt—his soiled undershirt and blackened skin seeming to still reek of that peculiar stench lingering right after the atomic bomb.
According to a minister’s statement published in the newspaper, weren’t they saying ten million people would starve to death this winter?
I must surely be counted among those ten million.

I felt as though I were walking through the driving snow while shouting something.
I must escape this village soon...
But train service was still restricted, and moving into Tokyo Metropolis had already been prohibited.
Moreover, they said that every night at stations in this vicinity, groups of robbers would appear and make off with cargo—no matter which way I turned, the roads remained darkly barred.

Mr. Fukai

Mr. Fukai had often urged me to remarry, but when I finally resolved to leave the village, he lamented, "What a pity—I had just the right person in mind." On the day of my departure from the village, I received hospitality at Mr. Fukai's home.

“Was it last February, perhaps?”

“January.”
“We moved here in March—it’ll soon be exactly one year.”

Mr. Fukai slowly set down his cup.
Last January, he had closed his shop in Keijo and withdrawn to Hiroshima.
But even after moving to Hiroshima, having perceived the situation as precarious, he relocated once more to this village.
Even this alone demonstrated clairvoyant-like accuracy, but on top of that, the household trade he had chosen there was flour milling.

“After all, it’s a business where one squeezes people by the throat...”
People often described Mr. Fukai in such terms—a distasteful expression, but apt nonetheless.

“Yes, it’s an easygoing trade,” he replied. “Once you’ve listened to the machine’s condition, the machine handles everything else.”
“And there’s wheat the village wives bring discreetly,” Mr. Fukai added with a cheerful laugh.
Yet Mr. Fukai was never idle—he could often be seen diligently tilling the field behind his house.
With so many dependents, he always appeared to be striving for their sake.

In this village, I too had come to rely solely on Mr. Fukai, constantly depending on his help for one thing after another.
That I had somehow managed to keep my life sustained was also due in part to Mr. Fukai.

Road

Radiant sunlight was lavishly spilling down.
When I reached the outskirts of the village, though I thought this was finally the farewell, I did not look back.
Ahead, a bridge was visible, and a stream leading to H-town continued on.
I walked resolutely down that road at that time.

Having moved to Tokyo, I soon tasted many disillusionments thereafter.
It wasn’t that I had convinced myself everything would be solved by moving to the capital, but the city lying in wait for me proved to be nothing but a hellscape of starvation and ceaseless suffering.

At times, the feeling I had while walking that road would revive within me.
On the peaks of early spring, clouds drifted faintly; the hills where young grass sprouted, the fields, and the clear streams evoked the prelude to a Pastoral Symphony.
How wonderful it would be if I could sit there leisurely, fix my gaze intently upon the scenery.
But my eyes were ravaged by hunger, and my mind was consumed solely by thoughts of escape.
Moreover, the searing memory of that tragedy would immediately blend into the landscape around me.

Then, near that Kawaguchi area where the pines grew thick and dark, there was a railway crossing.
When I approached that spot, I would often encounter trains coming through.
I sometimes felt they were as dynamic as trains appearing in films.
Someday, I would board that train and leave this place—I felt a thrill like a boy.

The Hiroshima-bound train stopped at R Station, a short distance from that railway crossing. At that station, a smirking ticket puncher would always sing, "I understand exactly how you feel." This filled me with an overwhelming sense of frustration. The men wearing military trousers tight around their ankles struck me as unbearably repulsive, while the women who had suddenly taken to thick makeup—parading their ignorance like some kind of adornment—sent shivers down my spine.

Abandon it!
Such a rural backwater...

I was always shouting at myself.

While menaced by daily sustenance, even now I still vividly recall that country road.
The road I trudged on and on with famished gait still lies far ahead of me.