Pathway to Japanese Literature

In a wooden-floored room of less than three tatami mats, there were times when even breathing seemed about to be stifled.
When it rained, spray would blow in through the glass window with its many gaps, making it impossible for him to settle down, so he often went out walking in the town.
"There’s no roof that will take me in—the rain mercilessly stings my eyes." The words from a book he’d read before now clung to him as his own reality.
He had seen a woman lying sprawled on the concrete of Yurakucho Station.
Holding a suckling infant, she lay there on bare concrete without even a mat to cushion her, staring vacantly into empty space without a trace of shame.
That was a face which made clear she had lived an ordinary life until not long ago.
Such a face was ultimately the most unbearable.
In the morning, when he awoke, the hard bed in his room turned into concrete lying sprawled in a dazed state. Startled, he shouted at himself.
"I must not die here—not yet, I must not die now!"
But the thin wooden floorboards supporting him on the second floor seemed on the verge of collapse, and a sudden vision arose of them scattering into splinters...

The barracks built on the family’s burned ruins were nearly completed—.

When he received such news from Hiroshima, he felt a desire to visit his hometown once.
In February of that year, he had gone from Yawata Village to Hiroshima's burned ruins to excavate belongings, and now those scenes resurfaced in his memory.
Where his eyes could reach stood only two or three crude huts amidst the scorched landscape that stretched unimpeded across his vision, yet he found himself gazing into the garden pond's still blue waters while dwelling on that mysterious moment from the morning of August sixth.
But Eldest Brother kept diligently gathering debris to toss outside as he directed the carpenters.
The carpenters burned surviving garden trees and ate their lunches around the flames.
Then harsh shadows spread across the nearby mountain ridges, and powdery snow began swirling through the air.
From the wooden box he had buried in the garden emerged bowls and plates stained with blackened water.
These were items he had used at waystations until returning to Hiroshima after his wife's death.
Finding them useless now, he went to deposit them with his sister.

In a fire-scarred dilapidated shack in Kawaguchi-cho where she had recently been widowed, his elder sister would say whenever she saw his face, “What are you planning to do? This is no time to be dawdling around.” This elder sister, while trembling at the terrifying things surging toward her, showed a resolve to somehow claw her way through the abyss of hardship she had been thrust into. However, since becoming a disaster victim, he had been staying at his second elder brother’s house in Yawata Village, staring at his own body as it wasted away under the torments of hunger, all while vaguely waiting for something.

“NEW HUMANS ARE BEING BORN. SEEING THAT IS SHAMEFUL. HURRY UP AND COME HERE,” a friend in Tokyo had been saying.
While waiting for the train restrictions to be lifted, the ban on moving into six major cities was soon imposed.

He too had harbored a fervent desire to see these new humans.
What he had felt from that atomic bomb could almost be called a new compassion toward humanity—and an interest in them.
Suddenly his eyes grew voracious; he began intently scrutinizing the people walking through the ruins.
At the black market formed in the sticky square before the ruins’ entrance now appeared young men with glossy hair wrapped in gaudy mufflers and women dressed in cheap clothes.
People trudged through the dead city with nowhere to rest while clattering trains groaned along their tracks.
Inside one such train he heard a fisherman-like man with defiantly crossed arms growl these words:

“Huh! They’ve started demanding we bring kimonos to trade for dried sardines or whatnot, eh! Now their game’s up!”

It evoked the figure of a spider sucking the blood of its prey. But such spider webs might soon be spun everywhere.

“From now on, you must become either a farmer or a black marketeer—either way, you can’t survive!”

Goto, who had once been a capable company employee but was now a farmer, earnestly lectured everyone before him.
It was the day when the manufacturing plant dissolution ceremony had been held at Eldest Brother’s place in Hatsukaichi.
He had been at that manufacturing plant for about half a year, so he joined this gathering together with his second elder brother.
Since becoming disaster victims, this marked both the first and last time the manufacturing plant members met face-to-face.
Miraculously, everyone had survived unharmed.
Even Nishida—who had been in critical condition with severe burns that made others fear for his life—was now hale and hearty.
But now, everyone remained quite lost about what they should begin doing.

“Even if you do open a store, you should also run a little sweet red bean soup shop on the side—work diligently in two or even three layers of meticulous labor.”

As Goto was chattering away in this comical manner, the sound of a bicycle stopping on the veranda rang out, and someone shuffled in.

“Butter here—Yukijirushi brand, forty-five yen. How ’bout it? Need some?”

The man looked down at everyone with triumphant airs, but when Goto told him, “Now, now—take a little rest here,” he finally sat down in that spot, then began speaking in a tone that mocked people’s foolishness.

“Hah! So you’re lecturing that life’s about to get even harder? That’s obvious!”
“Fundamentally, dividing ten items among ten people makes sense—but splitting three items among ten? That’s downright absurd.”
“It’s not like propping up weaklings and beggars is government policy now... Hah! Now listen up.”
“The other day when shipping goods, I barged straight into the stationmaster’s office to negotiate.”
“With folks around, I discreetly slid twenty yen across his desk and wrote my request.”
“The stationmaster knew the drill—approved it right away.”
“Hah! Everything’s running on this system lately... Now then, get this.”
“Just the other day, some snot-nosed brat I’ve known since his squalling days suddenly tells me—says thanks to me he’s running a big operation now, costs five thousand yen a month to start! They’d bust a gut laughing, but hey—human affairs all hinge on one clever trick.”

He stared blankly from the sidelines at the red-faced man with that nauseating expression.
When he finished speaking, the man rode off on his bicycle with triumphant airs.—From that moment on, he found himself unable to forget the strange tone the man had left behind.
It was a man he had seen two or three times before, but what kind of person could he possibly be?
“Hah!”—the derisive tone seemed to ridicule him.

Starving for tobacco, he walked one and a half ri from Yawata Village to Hatsukaichi searching for cigarette butts.
Since it was a country road, not a single cigarette butt could be found.
When he managed to obtain a single cigarette at his sister-in-law's place in Hatsukaichi, the feeling that had been utterly despondent until moments before suddenly welled up in his chest.

"Somehow I had been thinking I might die."
He suddenly let out a sigh.

“I’m not saying this to be harsh—you should remarry.”
“I’ve discussed this with my husband—if you were to fall ill, who would look after you these days?”

Whenever Eldest Brother stopped by Yawata Village, he would bring up that matter with him.

“In the end, what do you intend to do then?”

“I’ve been thinking of going to Tokyo soon.”

He mumbled thus, as if evading his Eldest Brother’s persistent questioning.
“How long do you intend to keep burdening them there?”
“I suppose things have more or less settled by now”—such a letter came from his widowed sister who had been staying temporarily at his second elder brother’s house along with him.……

“Makoto does so well for us—whenever I complain about something, he gets all fired up and takes on absolutely everything with such determination, working himself to the bone.”

When the sister from Kawaguchi Town saw his face, she began talking about her son.
This second-year junior high student who had lost his father now carried himself with sudden maturity; before long, he had identified supply loopholes and distribution routes, skillfully keeping them operational.
With the money thus earned, he had the roof repaired, ate to his heart’s content, and smoked black market cigarettes.
He gazed at his sixteen-year-old nephew with something close to astonishment.
However, such boys might have been growing up amidst the ruins everywhere now.

As he was vaguely making plans to go to Tokyo, the Moratorium was announced.
Since he couldn’t foresee what would come of it all, he decided to go visit his Eldest Brother in Hatsukaichi.
“Do you think there’s any idiot who’d keep revering each new measure the government enacts one after another like you do?” Eldest Brother said, looking at him.
He couldn’t quite grasp what it meant, but a sneering “Hah!” reached his ears.

When he received a reply from an acquaintance in Omori saying, "I don’t mind putting you up until you find a place," he desperately began preparing for his move to Tokyo.
Both the entry ban and blockade were formidable obstacles.
He had no idea how to overcome them and no plan whatsoever, but simply tried blindly to escape his current situation.

“Packing? You can do that yourself.” The village transport worker coldly refused his plea.

“Even if we kept your luggage here, it’d be no use—a gang of robbers would come.”
“Take them back.”
The station transport worker tried to send back the luggage he had brought after such difficulty.

Thinking a Hiroshima-departing Tokyo-bound train might have seats, he waited tensely on Hiroshima Station's platform that morning, when the train suddenly revealed itself as a demobilization transport from Ōtake.
Every entrance door remained firmly bolted, barring would-be passengers.
He ran frantically about until finally managing to slip his body into a corner of one doorway.
Though the train descended into chaos, when he transferred to the government railway at Yokohama, he found himself gazing curiously out the window.
Burned though it was, the ruins here differed from Hiroshima's devastation.

From the day he arrived in Tokyo, he found himself haunted by some restless presence. When he resolved to visit the Mita school and boarded the government railway, shoulders pressed relentlessly against his chest in the airless carriage. The train plunged into such disarray that mechanical failure forced everyone off at Shinagawa. The platform seethed with a black tide of humanity. Though utterly spent, something resolute stirred within him. Alighting at Tamachi with the next train, his body cooled throughout as if emerging from boiling water. He went to see Teacher O at Mita school only to find him absent, then immediately boarded a returning train. The carriage back proved equally packed. Suddenly, a jumper-clad man beside him began smoothly inveighing against the transport chaos. He stared curiously. The man's face glowed with postwar levity, resembling an actor from some film where people clashed chaotically against each other.

The next day, he went searching toward Mejiro for Teacher O’s residence.
The burned ruins and unburned areas persistently drew his interest, but Teacher O’s house stood in an area that had remained unscathed.
The study facing a quiet garden contained bookshelves tightly crammed with volumes.
It had been truly some time since he had last gazed upon such a tranquil room.

“There might be a teaching position available.
But in exchange, the salary would hardly be worth mentioning.”

Teacher O gazed at him pityingly and murmured, “It might have been better if you’d stayed in Hiroshima.”

A few days later when he went to visit Teacher O at the Mita school, the teacher was absent again. Still unable to complete his transfer registration, he found himself in terribly unstable spirits, but upon impulsively buying a Shinbashi-bound ticket, he felt compelled to go see Ginza.... Arriving there, he found willows' fresh greenery, human tides and display windows all swirling within soft sunlight. The crimson strawberries arranged on a silver plate in the display window startled him. From every display window flickered things from his past memories and new sights he now saw. He unsteadily entered the department store and joined the line of people drawing quick lottery tickets. He felt just like a runaway country girl. What's happening? What on earth will become of me now? he wondered at himself, on the verge of vanishing within the crowd.

When he thought to visit an acquaintance at Bunka Gakuin and boarded the government railway from Omori Station, that morning had surprisingly ample seating available.

But when a crowd clattering in with armfuls of placards boarded at the next station, the train car filled with an unusual air.
"Mitsubishi's son-in-law, overthrow Shidehara!"
Placards bearing such legible characters were held up toward the train’s ceiling, flapping noisily in the wind blowing through the windows.
A young man in a suit peered at a small piece of paper while singing *The Internationale*.
A refreshing wind blew ceaselessly through the windows as the train kept up a comfortable speed.
Could those new humans be among them... He found himself somehow feeling invigorated.
When he disembarked at Ochanomizu Station, an unburned city lay before his eyes.
Buoyant and lightheaded, he nearly let himself be drawn toward it.
But when concerns about his transfer suddenly surfaced, he abruptly resolved to visit Teacher O in Mejiro.
He turned back to the station and bought a Mejiro-bound ticket.

It was about two weeks later that he secured a position at the night school division of the Mita School.
One evening when an entrance ceremony was held at the athletic field, new students came trooping into the electrically lit corridor and surrounded him.
He had to raise his voice and read out the timetable.

His commute began the following day.
The dreadful evening train from Omori to Tamachi battered and crushed him.
He started writing his "Transportation Hell Notebook."
The transfer that had long loomed over him was soon approved along with his employment.
But now from beneath dark fresh foliage, the food crisis came lunging forth with bared white fangs.

The rain-soaked slope with fresh green leaves lay dark and gloomy, like a stomach filled not with rice but only with leafy greens. When climbing the stone steps of the Mita School, his legs trembled unsteadily, devoid of strength. Upon entering the classroom, he sank into a chair and resolved to remain seated as much as possible. But with no textbooks available, he had no choice but to teach by writing on the blackboard despite his reluctance. Whenever he used chalk, his shoulders throbbed with a dull ache.

He thought of keeping a "Notebook on Hunger" too.
But starvation—tormenting him nearly around the clock—had already turned into strange illusions with each passing moment.
Somewhere, he could hear an old woman dying in soliloquy.
Why must I suffer such... such pangs of hunger... The old woman's mournful chant about food continued endlessly.
He went to the barbershop, sat down in the chair, and the moment he closed his eyes, an image surfaced of a dog he'd once kept.
The dog wagged its tail and voraciously devoured scraps—a sight that struck him as painfully mirroring his own existence.

Suddenly recalling a short story by Cervantes he had read around that time, he conceived the idea of writing a novel titled New Glass Scholar.
In Cervantes' The Glass Scholar, the protagonist becomes convinced his entire body is made of glass and fears nothing more than others touching it.
Yet thanks to the exquisitely delicate substance composing his body, his mind worked with precise agility, enabling him to answer any question instantly through astonishing flashes of wisdom.
For instance, when asked how one might completely avoid envying others—

“The answer is to sleep. For while you sleep, you should at least be equal to those you envy,” he answered.
However, this unfortunate New Glass Scholar finally had no choice but to let slip the following lament.

“Ah, O Capital! You nurture the hopes of reckless brutes, yet crush those of timid men of virtue!”
“Do you lavish care on shameless gamblers while letting conscientious people who know shame starve to death without a second thought!”

He found this lament deeply appealing and began imagining what would become of such a person if brought to present-day Tokyo.
That New Glass Scholar could be said to have been born from the atomic bomb’s impact.
While envisioning a man made entirely of glass, he noticed the completely shattered glass near the door when caught in a human stampede inside the train.
At once, the New Glass Scholar’s agitated state came into being.

The night school students, evidently hungry themselves, welcomed any early end to class.
When classes finished, his train ride home would sometimes intersect with crowds returning from provisioning runs.
The greater part of that fearsome throng spilled out at Ōimachi Station, while what remained climbed Ōmori Station's stairs in gloomy procession.
A swarm of enormous pitch-black bags jostled at the ticket gates before spilling into the streets and snaking up the stone-step road.
"What do you think of such sights?" he once inquired, glancing back at the New Glass Scholar, but received no answer.
...On another occasion at Ōmori Station's platform, he observed a woman attempting to hoist a bag her own size—planting her hips on the concrete with a thud while arching backward.
He watched breathlessly to see if she could rise, and when she succeeded, remarked to his New Glass Scholar: "What terrifying strength that must require."
Yet again came only silence.

One day, he went to visit an acquaintance at Bunka Gakuin, but finding them out, decided to wait awhile and wandered about the grounds until noticing a crowd gathered near the auditorium where some event seemed underway.
He climbed the stairs to reach an overlook point above the auditorium.
There he found people congregated to watch the spectacle below, so he too remained in that spot.
In the lower auditorium, artist-like figures sat around tables drinking beer.
On stage now played out an odd dialogue between a man and woman.
When this incomprehensible performance ended, next stood a boy who appeared mute, isolated on the stage.

“This younger brother is a genius pianist, but in return, even the slightest worldly stimulus causes this man’s mechanism to shatter to pieces.”

Because the introducer had said such a thing, he thought, Oh? Could there be a New Glass Scholar here?
Before long, the piano began to play plaintively, but the venue was in a state of great commotion.

“I will present an impromptu poem. The title is ‘Homeland.’”
“Homeland, O Homeland—what homeland is there anyway!”
Someone was shouting such things.
When the record began to play, everyone stood up and started dancing.

“Hey, everyone, come down here!”
When someone called out from below, all the people around him began heading toward the auditorium.
He too ended up following unsteadily and casually after the group.
The place was already filled with the bustle preceding dispersal, but as he stood dazedly in a corner, an unfamiliar man thrust forward a cup, saying, “Drink.”
……Somehow, he was already somewhat intoxicated.
When he came to his senses, people were filing out toward the hallway.
When he went out into the hallway, two young men who had appeared unsteadily from both sides of the corridor in similar states suddenly tried to grapple with each other right before his eyes.
Without a moment’s delay, someone pulled the two apart.
In the corridor’s bend, blood had flowed, and shattered glass fragments were scattered at their feet.
A drunkard was still shouting somewhere.
Wandering through this atmosphere that felt neither menacing nor novel nor intoxicated, he could no longer comprehend why he drifted unsteadily in such a place—yet even as this confusion persisted, it began to feel exactly like one of the scenes that might appear within the New Glass Scholar.

Days of chillingly gloomy rain dragged on, with frequent violent southern winds.
One day, a man carrying a DDT can came and left his narrow room coated in white powder.
It instantly made him choke.
Even ordinarily, he would often gag on things and cough harshly.
The cough had lingered unceasingly for ages.
He had once considered getting a medical examination, but if told now he was ill, there would truly be nothing to be done.

However, finally resolving himself, one day he visited Shinanomachi Hospital.
Then once more, from within him, the New Glass Scholar opened his eyes and began observing his surroundings.
In the narrow corridor of the burned annex’s internal medicine examination room, electric lights remained lit even during the day, and a steady stream of laborers filed through ceaselessly.
As he sat down on a chair waiting his turn, the high school student and doctor who had emerged by the doorway suddenly caught his attention.
The student bore some resemblance to the boy he had seen playing piano days earlier at Bunka Gakuin, but looked utterly lifeless, as if he might collapse at any moment.

“There’s no need for you to come here by train or such means.”
“Go home and lie down on the bedding.”
“Keep the windows open and remain at rest.”
“Sufficient nutrition, and then, a composed mindset—never ever give in to pessimism.”

When the doctor calmly advised him, the young man weakly nodded, saying, “Yes, yes.”
Suddenly, he was reminded of his wife who had died of illness, and it felt unbearably pitiful.
But when his turn came, he had returned to being the New Glass Scholar.

“Have you been this emaciated all along?” asked the doctor as he touched his naked body.

“It’s because there’s no food that I’ve become emaciated.”
He had intended to give an ordinary response, but it also seemed to carry a note of protest.
When he looked now, the doctor examining him had a glossy complexion despite the lack of rations.

Once the erythrocyte sedimentation rate test was completed, he was to have his white blood cells—there had been a need for examination since there were cases where white blood cells drastically decreased due to the atomic bomb’s effects—examined.
He was made to lie down on a bed by the window, and the doctor tried to draw blood from his ear.
Even as he scraped the edge of the ear with a scalpel, the blood refused to emerge.
“How strange. I wonder what’s wrong,” said the doctor, tilting his head slightly.
It must be because it’s a glass ear that no blood comes out—he thought with hollow detachment.
But in his eyes as he lay on his back, the maple leaves’ verdure was darkly and beautifully battling through the windowpane.
It seemed to suggest the sole remaining means he could take if he were to be diagnosed with an illness.
……When he left the hospital, he walked unsteadily toward the outer garden.
Strong sunlight and a raging wind were shaking and tossing the green leaves.
Moreover, all the benches around were cruelly destroyed.

When he visited the hospital for the second time, the doctor informed him of the previous results.
The erythrocyte sedimentation rate was thirty, and the white blood cell count was four thousand—this was indeed a considerable decrease—but he said there was no immediate cause for concern.

“Well, just be careful as you carry on,”
When told this, he pursed his lips, and then his New Glass Scholar too instantly regained vigor.
But his body remained unsteady, and his head stayed as hazy as before……

"I’m so itching to write right now, but…" he said one day, turning to his young friend.
“I lack the physical strength to write.
“If only I could live for two weeks forgetting this hungry feeling… After all, I’ve been hungry and thirsty ever since the disaster.”

He and his friend were standing on the platform of Ochanomizu Station.
At the very edge where trains arrived and departed, a roughly ten-year-old child with unkempt hair sat dazedly crouched, one foot in a shoe and the other in a zori.

“There are children like that too,” he murmured to his young friend, but the jostling crowd scarcely noticed such things.

The madness intensified.
—he recorded in his notebook during those days.
The train chaos grew fiercer with the heat—daily he witnessed people clambering onto roofs, flames spouting from couplers, men bleeding through white trousers.
And within those train cars,

〈By famine's scorching heat, our skin burned like furnaces〉

He mulled over those words.

When vacation came and train commutes ended, he finally felt some ease.
But now the relentless summer light pouring through his single-pane glass room became unbearable.
The New Glass Scholar passed the summer napping and reading atop floorboards that threatened to steam him alive.
At daybreak, an uncanny cough would seize his throat.
Then when crisp autumn winds finally arrived, the bathhouse scale showed his weight had dwindled to nine kan—a mere thirty-three kilograms.

One day, having become dejected, he trudged along the sloping road leading toward Ōmori Station.
Suddenly, his eye caught a paper notice on a utility pole that read “High-Priced Clothing Purchased.”
When he looked more carefully, he saw those placards pasted on nearly every pole.
He abruptly remembered the crested kimono lying at the bottom of his wicker trunk.
It was something he had worn at his wedding long ago—an item that had survived only because he’d evacuated it elsewhere.
The next day, wrapping the crested kimono in a furoshiki and taking his bankbook, he visited that shop for the first time.

Money tormented him repeatedly.
He had lost most of his collection of books but carried the remaining ones bit by bit to used bookstores.

Parting with books was truly painful. But now, he tried to convince himself that merely surviving was enough. But every time he woke in the morning, indescribable despair clung to him.

“Hah! ‘New Glass Scholar,’ eh? That’s not even worth a laugh.
“I can see right through you now,” came the sneer of the slick-headed monk-like figure.

Even though his work didn’t start until five-thirty in the evening, he would leave his room around three o’clock and often trudge about wearily. There were moments when each incremental shift of the late autumn sun sinking lower pressed upon his heart with such poignancy it nearly drew tears. From the classroom window at dusk—the withered trees visible below, shelf-like clouds massed in one skyward corner with a crescent moon suspended among them, lights flickering companionably through the mist—such an unremarkable vista would suddenly console him. Something to quench the heart, something to quench the heart—this he kept seeking earnestly now.

One day, it occurred to him, and he went to visit Ueno Museum.
But because the museum was closed, when he wandered off toward Hirokoji, there on the stone steps lay a woman sprawled out, clutching an infant.

Was it because frost-laden air already pressed against the windowpane by his pillow? In his unyielding morning bed, he found himself pierced by nostalgia that clawed at his heart. Visions came unbidden—the pristine skies over plateaus divorced from human society, snow-capped peaks floating in that crystalline expanse. Then abruptly surfaced the memory of a Segantini painting seen long ago. That work should still be viewable in Kurashiki, he recalled. Suddenly envisioning his sister there, an irresistible longing to visit overwhelmed him. Hers remained the sole household among his kin spared from disaster’s touch.

According to word from Hiroshima, the barracks built on the burned ruins still lacked proper fixtures; it would likely be around year-end before they could be lived in, the letter stated.
Around that time, he too began wanting to set out on a journey.
To cover travel expenses, he took out his Oshima aizome-lined kimono.
As he was planning this year-end journey, an article appeared in the newspaper stating that trains would be reduced by eighty percent due to coal shortages.
That newspaper too had been reduced to tabloid size.
Yet another obstacle attempting to block his path had appeared, but the reduction of trains due to coal shortages made people shudder.
But he absolutely wanted to set out on a journey.
To obtain a ticket, he stood in front of the Transportation Bureau from before dawn.
In order to board the train, he had to wait on the platform for six hours.

……When the night of turbid air broke, outside the window came into view crystalline waters and blue mountain ranges.
When he got off at Kurashiki Station, he inhaled the surrounding air as though devouring it, feeling for the first time that he had arrived in a quiet town.
His younger sister's house was right near the station.
When he settled himself in the tatami room of the house, he felt a nostalgic warmth at being able to sit on tatami mats again after so long.
The modest garden with its visible pine trees and moss-covered stones—an utterly ordinary sight—seemed novel to his eyes, but during his long absence his nieces had grown tall and strong.
Though still in her third year at national school, his tall niece wearing cotton kasuri-patterned trousers was as lovely as a schoolgirl.

“All people, gather and praise, the long-awaited…” sang his niece together with her younger sister, who attended kindergarten, on the veranda.

“Who taught you that song?” he asked.

“Mommy... this part here, ‘the long-awaited…’ it’s so pretty, isn’t it?”

The next day, when he returned home after viewing the Ohara Collection, his little niece held out one of the five candies she had received through rations,

“Here, Uncle,” she said.

“Thank you, but Uncle’s all right. You have it.”

When he said that, this little child opened her round eyes wide and made a somewhat dissatisfied face.

"Since she went through all this trouble wanting to share her rations with you, you should take it," his younger sister chimed in from beside him.

……The next day, he was on a train again.
As evening approached his arrival in Hiroshima, rain began to patter down.
From the station square, the commotion of the barracks continued without pause.
He crossed the bridge and hurried along the road, ignoring the small new single-story shops that stood crowded tightly on both sides, their interiors cluttered.
When he crossed the next bridge, from there the barracks grew sparse, and the town had yet to take proper shape.
In a vacant lot set back quite a ways from the road, a small house came into view.

He approached the house and, after confirming the nameplate, immediately tried to open the front door.
But the door was locked, and whether there was anyone inside or not, even when he called out, there was no response.
"Had they not yet moved from Hatsukaichi? Even so, today was already New Year’s Eve—what could have happened…" he wondered while circling around to the veranda, surveying the burned ruins turned into fields surrounding the house.
There, luggage lay scattered in disarray, and among it he could see his nephews moving about busily.
They had only just managed to bring in the luggage that very day.

The next morning, he went out intending to visit his wife’s grave—a place he had not been to even once since before the atomic bomb. Along the road leading to that temple, he noticed that quite a number of houses had been built. The cemetery remained beautifully preserved, and on the temple’s burned ruins stood a makeshift worship hall constructed from barracks materials.

He wandered aimlessly toward what had once been a bustling street. The old downtown area appeared to be reviving once again from that vicinity, with bookstores, banks, cafes, and such beginning to line up. There were markets too, their eaves uniformly aligned but not yet open.

In that area where his second elder brother from Yawata Village was supposed to have built a barracks, he searched for the house. A nameplate that seemed to be written by his brother immediately caught his eye, but the front door was locked. Looking for a way in from the side alley, he found that the bath area was open.

Inside the house, there were still no shoji or fusuma sliding screens, with blankets and curtains hung all around instead. In the dim, cramped room, luggage lay scattered about, and emaciated little nieces in soiled simple clothes and nephews with sunken faces rustled around. The haggard-faced Second Elder Brother rested his chin on the kotatsu,

“There’s no room for New Year’s or trivialities here,” he muttered.

There, even to him, the bleak impressions from the disaster period seemed to revive.

After leaving that house, he went to visit his elder sister in Kawaguchi-cho.
When he called out from the veranda side, his elder sister—who had been working the sewing machine in the room's corner—turned around with a gesture of busyness.
After stepping away from the sewing machine,

“They’ve been tapping away nonstop, you see,”
“But well, since it’s New Year’s today, let’s take a little break,” she said with a laugh, settling before the hibachi.

“The brothers, oh they all struggled tremendously. Tapping, tapping away at their work, that’s how they built those barracks.”

My elder sister started talking about such things.
It carried a tone similar to when she had previously advised him, “What do you plan to do? This is no time for idleness.” ……While he wandered aimlessly through Tokyo, still without a settled place to stay, his brothers had at least managed to build a house capable of sheltering their entire family.

He stayed at his eldest brother’s house for two or three days.
Eight-tatami, six-tatami, three-tatami rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom—it was a compact house with just these, but whenever former neighbors came to visit, his sister-in-law would

“Anyway, it’s quite conveniently built and seems a comfortable place to settle into,” she would say.
Compared to this house, their pre-burned home had been like a palace—yet his sister-in-law would often complain about that very house: “In such a sprawling place, cleaning takes all day and you can’t get anything done!”
His sister-in-law’s face bore an expression somehow reminiscent of having set down a heavy burden, one that made him recall his mother’s countenance around the time of her death.
Since their evacuation, they had been renting someone else’s house, so his sister-in-law must have lived a life full of reservations.

“This is from the field over there,” his sister-in-law said, pointing to the Kyoto greens on the table.
The wasteland around the house had been cultivated into a vegetable garden, but the pond behind where the garden once stood still remained untouched.
The place where the storehouse had been was encircled by stones and built up higher, yet this too had been converted into a field.
The mountain he used to glimpse from the second-floor window through tangled trees and houses now lay completely exposed, unobstructed by anything.
Eldest Brother kept working constantly—organizing items in the storage area and finding tasks to do.

When he returned to Tokyo after completing his hurried journey, his room was deathly still and cold. A winter without fire's warmth had begun. When the cold grew unbearable, he would wrap himself in bedding and lie down to sleep. Shivering, he recalled the events of this recent journey. For some reason, the memory of his two nieces in Kurashiki seemed to warm his heart.

The strains of a song—"All people gather..."—lingered in his ears. When those little nieces grew up properly and eventually found worthy partners to celebrate a beautiful Christmas night... such dreams would suddenly flit through his mind.