Pathway to Japanese Literature

I. Bees

The garden of my house was divided into eastern and western sections by a rather tall Yotsumegaki fence.
The eastern side faced the reception room, study, and second-floor tatami room above them.
The opposite western side formed a courtyard enclosed on three sides by the children’s room, my living room, and the retirement room.
In this central courtyard, there was only a small flowerbed near the fence; the open space measuring about three *ken* square served both as a play area for the children and a cooling spot on summer nights.

This Yotsumegaki fence had wild white roses trained along it, but when summer came, morning glories and scarlet runner beans were allowed to climb all over it. Naturally growing Japanese snake gourds also entwined themselves among them, resulting in such a dense tangle of various leaves that there remained almost no gap. When I opened the morning doors, the sight of morning glories blooming in unison—red, navy, aqua, persimmon—was quite beautiful. When evening arrived, moths flocked to the smoke-like pale flowers of Japanese snake gourds peeking out from the thicket. The rose leaves remained hidden from view, but from the top of the fence, countless vigorous new shoots extended upward, growing visibly day by day. To these shoots, morning glory and bean vines entwined themselves, appearing to compete ever higher into the sky.

Amidst the lush growth of thriving plants' foliage, a single strange object of sooty color hung from a withered-looking rose branch.
It was a beehive.

I first discovered this beehive in late May—around the time when the white roses on the fence had shed their blossoms, and the morning glories and beans had just begun sprouting their first true leaves beyond the cotyledons.
While trimming a small branch where flowers had fallen, I noticed something. Upon closer inspection, it was about the size of a thumb's tip and still in its earliest stages of construction.
Clinging firmly to this, a single yellow, robust-looking bee was working.

When I found the bee, I called the children playing in the courtyard to show them.
For children raised in the city, even something like this was a novelty.
The eldest children, who had learned the fearsome nature of bee venom, warned and threatened the younger ones who knew nothing with all sorts of things.
I recalled how as a child I had angered a bee and been stung on the earlobe, then crushed and rubbed Sanshichi leaves on it.
At that time, no one knew about applying ammonia water.

Anyway, since having a beehive in such a place was dangerous, I thought about knocking it down, but believing it would be safer when the bee wasn’t present, I left it as it was that day.

For the next four or five days I had completely forgotten about it, but one morning when the children were away at school and I went down to the garden for some errand, I remembered to check. Peering in, I saw the bee working just as it had the day before—body upside down, clinging to the underside of the hive.
It was extending one of what I guessed to be about twenty hexagonal cells in the honeycomb.
Grasping the edge of the hexagonal prism wall with its jaws and spinning around in circles, it gradually extended the wall by about two millimeters.
Only this newly extended portion stood out with vivid freshness, strikingly different from the sooty color above.

Once another layer of the wall had been added, the bee would adjust its posture more firmly and slowly begin inserting its head into the newly created hole. With utmost caution, it gradually bent its body and inserted its head until disappearing from view, only to withdraw it almost immediately. It looked as though having finally felt relieved after confirming the hole’s size. And then it immediately proceeded to work on the adjacent cell.

Having never closely observed such behavior in a bee until reaching this age, I found myself driven by intense curiosity as I watched—until I could no longer bring myself to mercilessly destroy this small insect's ingenious work.

From then on, whenever I went down to the garden, I made a point to check, but occasions when the bee was absent proved rather rare.
Each time I looked, the walls of the hexagonal cells seemed to extend gradually.

At times, I noticed that it had accumulated a gray foamy substance between its jaws.
And at times, instead of extending the walls, it would insert its head into the hole and work on the interior.
However, I couldn’t understand for what purpose or what it was doing.

In time, I became caught up in some work and forgot about the bee for a while.
I thought about half a month had passed when, one day, I suddenly remembered and looked—but the bee was nowhere to be seen.
Not only that, but the nest’s construction showed no progress whatsoever compared to when I had last seen it.
It wasn’t just that my expectations had been betrayed; I felt a kind of—a very slight loneliness.

After that, no matter how much time passed, the bee was never seen again.
I wondered what had become of it and imagined various possibilities—whether neighborhood children had captured it on the street or some natural enemy unknown to me had killed it. Yet I also felt as though this bee might now be wandering lost among the groves of some distant garden, flying aimlessly through unfamiliar trees.

There are times when, after a close friend dies and I walk alone through the city, I suddenly picture them vividly strolling through some part of Tokyo—a vision that leaves me with indescribable loneliness. With this bee too, I conjured a strikingly similar illusion in my mind. The phantom of it glittering as it flew through that intensely dazzling sunlight seemed inexplicably lonely—a feeling I couldn’t dispel.

One day during a conversation, I mentioned this story to S, who came up with a completely different interpretation from mine.
"The bee probably abandoned this spot because it was no good and moved elsewhere," he said.
Hearing that, I thought perhaps he was right.
Indeed, with wide open spaces on either side of this fence, storms would rage through it, rains would drench it, and people would frequently approach—hardly an ideal location for a bee.
But whether bees truly possess the instinct or wisdom to abandon a chosen site mid-construction and move elsewhere—or whether such behavior even exists—remains something only a specialist could determine.

If S’s judgment were indeed correct, then I might have ended up forcibly killing the pitiful bee within my imagination and savoring facile sentimental emotions through a small poem themed around its death.
Yet regardless, I couldn’t help harboring slight resentment toward S for having so brusquely and methodically shattered my fantasy.
And I came to wonder whether even in such trivial matters, the distinction between optimists and pessimists might manifest itself.

When I looked today, a shelf spider had spun its web just above the beehive, and on top of it lay a filthy heap of dead leaves and debris.
Though called a beehive, I felt it resembled an abandoned house left to ruin without inhabitants.
Across from this nest bloomed crimson canna flowers in such profusion that they seemed to cast the desolate hive into deeper misery.

At any rate, I decided to leave this nest undisturbed until next summer. When next year arrived, I had a premonition that something might occur in this old nest.

II Beggar

One morning, Q came to visit.

This man seemed to always come prepared with one or two sarcastic remarks laden with insinuations that made me uncomfortable whenever he visited my house. And in the course of conversation, he appeared unable to settle down until he seized upon an opportune or inopportune moment to blurt out those remarks. In any case, once he had said it, his face—which until then had been terribly tense with a harsh expression—would suddenly soften, and his usually sickly bluish-black complexion would even take on a faint reddish tinge, transforming into something pleasant to behold.

I knew this man’s quirks well, having been accustomed to them over quite some time, and I fully understood the motives behind such peculiar behavior, so I intended not to pay it much mind—yet even so, after speaking with him, I invariably found myself in a state of mind different from my usual one.
It seems this truth was at times demonstrated through my own emotional reactions to the trivial matters that subsequently occurred around me.

The subject Q had brought up that day concerned my illness.
To put it plainly, rather than skillfully hinting that I was in a psychological state resembling that of a mentally ill person who deliberately prolongs and worsens their own condition while secretly taking pleasure in it, he appeared determined to overtly force this notion upon me.
Having already harbored suspicions that some such irrational mental state might lie hidden in the depths of my mind even before Q voiced it, his insinuation carried significant weight.

After Q left, I ate lunch.
Then I went to the children’s room and played the organ.

It was a perfectly clear, scorching hot day.
In the flowerbed behind the children’s room, the intense midday sun blazed so brightly that even the leaves of plants and trees seemed to droop.
The scarlet runner beans’ crimson flowers appeared like flames.
Yet this room being the most breezy, everyone had gathered here.
Some children lay sprawled reading books while others had taken out paintboxes to draw.
The elderly woman leaned against the sliding door, following lines in a fairy tale book through her glasses.
I sat before the organ on the wall flanked by the backyard to its left, enveloped in waves of pleasant musical tones rising from beneath my fingertips at the keys—for a while, I thought of nothing.

A cool breeze caressed my sweaty face after the meal and, at the same time, ruffled the pages of the sheet music.
And it felt as though all the turbid thoughts in my mind were swept away.

After playing a few suitable short pieces, I began Pergolesi’s *Quando corpus morietur*, which I often performed.
This was said to be a passage from the *Stabat Mater*, so it must express the Virgin Mary’s grief as she stood beneath the cross.
As I played this, despite knowing none of the song’s lyrics, I always felt an indescribable sense of piety and melancholy filling my chest.

As I neared the end of this piece, I sensed that someone had entered from the direction of the back gate and seemed to be approaching the veranda.
When I turned to look, a peculiar man stood rigidly in the sunny spot before the flowerbed.

He was a short man who appeared to be around thirty.
He wore a soiled ogura-cloth Western suit with a speckled pattern, mud-caked gaiters wrapped around his legs, and straw sandals.
His hair—though not long—lay disheveled and grimy like a trampled field, while his chin bristled with a thick, unkempt beard.
Yet his face carried a rather gentle, amiable expression.
Only the large scar gouged diagonally across the center of his forehead stretched taut in a manner both dreadful and unnerving to behold.
Upon closer inspection, his right arm was missing from the shoulder joint, leaving the suit sleeve hanging empty and limp.
When I saw him shuffle a step or two closer, it became apparent one of his legs was crippled too.

He bowed his head repeatedly upon seeing my face.
In a hoarse, choked voice, he kept insisting on something.
The blazing sun struck his entire face, with bead-like sweat welling around the soiled scar on his forehead.

When I listened carefully, it emerged he had been a factory worker injured after being caught in machinery.
And like many beggars, he lamented lacking travel funds to return home.

As I watched his sorrowful eyes that kept looking up at me after repeated bows, I stood up, retrieved a small bill from the household chest of drawers in the living room, and handed it to the maid.
The maid called toward the kitchen and handed it over.

When I sat back down at the organ, he came around to the veranda again and thanked me repeatedly.
And said, “Sir, please take care of your health.”
Then, after politely thanking each of the elderly woman and the children individually, he dragged one leg and trudged out.

This man’s words—“Please take care of your health”—strangely seemed to seep deep into my heart.
Why was it that such ordinary words—rendered nearly meaningless through overuse—had pierced my chest at this particular moment?
The beggar’s eyes and voice had been quite pitiable, but could those elements alone have created such a mysterious impression?

With his hoarse voice strained, the word "Please," squeezed out as if wrung from his chest, seemed to pass directly from his heart to mine—and in that moment, some corner of my own heart suddenly softened. And I even felt like calling him back to give him something more.

The children, who had been silently watching the beggar's behavior, began whispering among themselves about his forehead scar and missing hand once he left, but they soon seemed to become absorbed in their respective tasks and play.
I could not know what impression the children had received.

The beggar could not have known about my illness, of course. He had likely done no more than repeat the same set phrases he repeated before everyone. However, it may have merely been that encountering this immediately after Q’s cold derision and Pergolesi’s music coincidentally resonated with my own childlike egotism.

However, when I saw his retreating figure, the sentimental mood that suddenly flashed through me seemed, upon later reflection, to contain quite a variety of elements. Suppose, for instance, that I were that beggar going from gate to gate begging. At every front door and kitchen entrance, he would be glared at with suspicion and disdain and driven away. Suppose that while walking and chewing on the bitterness of that humiliation, he happens to enter a house—not a chilly entranceway or kitchen—but a place where an unexpectedly peaceful family gathers and someone is playing the organ. In that moment, wouldn’t the emotions of oneself as a beggar undergo some change? At least, I can’t help but feel that this man at this moment must have felt such emotions. In his facial expression there was something soft and warm that I had never seen in any beggar I had encountered before.

He never came again.
Though I wondered if he might come again, it was still better that he never did.

III. Bagworm

One August day, the sky hung heavy with mouse-gray clouds, and a cool wind carrying the moisture of impending rain blew through the afternoon.

I was leaning against the desk on the second floor writing a postcard to Mr. K. When I had filled about four-fifths of the postcard's surface and found myself with nothing more to say, I kept gripping my fountain pen while gazing blankly through the veranda railing at the maple treetop in the garden. Then I noticed a bagworm hanging from a small branch protruding right before my eyes. It was rather large for such an insect. On closer inspection, the case seemed stitched together mainly from fragments of maple leaves and their petioles, but among them was one exceptionally long twig whose tip stuck out about an inch downward from the case's tapered end, curling back awkwardly. This formed what might be called the handle of this peculiar spindle-shaped object. The upper end attached to the branch had become a thread too fine for the eye to see, so whenever wind blew, the case swung in various complex pendulum motions while rotating around a vertical axis. Though it looked ready to fall at any moment, it actually held quite securely. Whether the bagworm itself slept or perhaps lay dead, trying to imagine any fragment of life hidden within this desiccated case seemed nearly impossible. So I added these words to the postcard I had begun writing.

“Right now, there’s a bagworm on the maple branch before my eyes.”
“I believe I can imagine something akin to the inner states of ants, bees, caterpillars, and most insects—but this bagworm’s state of mind alone remains utterly beyond my grasp.”

This alone had already filled the postcard’s remaining margin, but it became the starting point that led me to ponder and imagine various things about this insect.

Among scholars of old, it seems there were those who remained secluded year-round—or even their entire lives—in dim, impoverished homes, engrossed in profound contemplation and meditation. To the eyes of gossiping neighbors living right next door, such people might have appeared as unknowable as this bagworm—beings of vague existence. They might have seemed connected to the present world by only a slender thread, drifting ethereally as if blown by the wind. The sole difference from the bagworm was that after years of contemplation and research, they would publish their findings, startling the world either suddenly or gradually. Yet among them there may have been many who either failed to obtain coherent results or, having obtained them, died without ever publishing their findings. To the casual observer, such people may have been indistinguishable from this bagworm.

As I indulged in these fantasies while observing it, the fragments of leaf petioles closely packed with no gaps across the bagworm’s case somehow gave me the impression of books with their spines lined up on the shelf of this hidden little philosopher.

What comes to mind regarding this bagworm case is that when I was a child, following what I had been taught by my mother or someone else, I tried to have it create a five-colored case by placing a stripped bagworm along with finely cut pieces of various cloth into an empty matchbox.
The result of this experiment betrayed eager expectations—the insect had died.
Nevertheless, even now I can summon to mind the vivid image of that insect adorned in its beautiful five-colored case.
However, it seems that just recently my children, having also heard this story from their grandmother, were repeating my failed experiment.
Is this story actually true?
Is it a rare occurrence even if true, or is it something ordinary?
Even my own mother may not have actually experienced it herself, but until now, I had never tried to verify it.
Moreover, I had no particular desire to verify it right away.
It is because I do not think that kind of thing can be easily verified.

Following one fantasy after another from these musings, I came to consider the value of so-called authority concerning all human knowledge.
The more I thought, the more the foundations of all that knowledge I had taken for granted as secure seemed to waver from their very roots.
Yet what I had thought at that moment was too complex, too delicate, and too resistant to being organized coherently to put into writing here.

On the following day at the same hour after having such thoughts, I sat before my desk on the second floor as usual. Thinking of yesterday's bagworm, I searched the approximate area where I thought it might be but found nothing. After some time, noticing movement on a large branch much higher up, I looked closely and recognized yesterday's bagworm with its handle-shaped appendage. Unexpectedly, this little philosopher—which had lain still as death itself just yesterday—now moved with an energy that defied its former contemplative image. A black glistening head emerged from the case's upper edge. As it rippled forward, the spindle-shaped form crept downward along the branch's underside inch by inch. It paused intermittently as if searching before resuming its hurried descent; upon reaching a fork, it crossed to another limb and began hauling its cumbersome case upward instead—dragging that awkward protrusion behind with comic effort. The elongated handle-like structure seemed nothing but an impediment now.

As I watched, a comical feeling gradually welled up until I couldn’t help but laugh.
And I realized I had to correct the postcard I had written to Mr. K yesterday.
Yesterday’s philosopher was scurrying about again today, dragging its burdensome dwelling and fumbling with that awkwardly long handle.
I tried to imagine what purpose drove its movements, but could only conclude it must be in search of food.

That evening, on a whim, I looked up *minomushi* in the dictionary and found this insect had an alternate name: “wood snail.” Indeed, its crawling manner resembled that of a pond snail or perhaps a hermit crab. Then there was also the term “debt-evading insect.” This too struck me as quite interesting. Next I searched through readily available zoological books but couldn’t determine what sort of moth or butterfly should emerge as its adult form. Wondering about its English name, I opened a Japanese-English dictionary only to find it vaguely listed as “a type of insect.” Does this creature even exist in the West? If so, given its peculiar nature, I mused that surely many researchers must have written extensively about it. I keep thinking how I’d like to ask an entomologist should I ever meet one.

I recalled that "minomushi naku" existed as a haiku seasonal topic, so while investigating it I opened a saijiki and found the following story cited from Sei Shonagon's *The Pillow Book*:
"The bagworm's father was an ogre.
Thinking 'You'll likely grow fearsome like your parent,' he covered the child with his tattered garment and fled, deceiving it by saying he would return when the autumn wind blew. Unaware of this ruse, the child recognized the sound of autumn wind and cried 'Father! Father!' in longing."
Whether this legend emerged from some origin or was born from the talented woman's imagination, it remains something modern people could never have conceived.
Yet if Sei Shonagon's authority has been preserved unchanged for nine hundred years, this testifies to how long Japanese understanding of nature remained peacefully undisturbed.

After that, whenever I went upstairs and looked carefully, the number of bagworms was not merely one or two. Of various sizes, there seemed to be at least seven or eight. Those with long sticks were still present elsewhere. Among them were some that resembled one-legged scarecrows. Or there were some resembling a samurai resting two long sticks horizontally. Most of them remained still, but around noon, I occasionally noticed them being active. I wondered if even they had set working hours or meal times. One time I found a large one just as it was eating a maple leaf; stretching out its head, it voraciously devoured the foliage from one end, bending down a high leaf in the same manner as a silkworm consuming mulberry. The nearby leaves had already been quite devoured. As I observed them in this state, my feelings toward the bagworms gradually began to change. And as the insects' lives gradually came to appear closer to those of humans, various poetic illusions vanished one after another.

When Mr. M came over and I told him this story, he laughed and said, “You seem to have quite a lot of free time.” However, Mr. M himself also seemed to have quite a lot of free time, as he told me about his recent experience of digging up an ant nest all the way to the bottom.

IV Nova

Every summer, when the evening breezes began to feel longed for, the bamboo cooling platform stored in the shed was brought out to the central courtyard.
The day this was brought out marked an important, distinct demarcation in my monotonous year-round life.
The suggestion that we should bring out the cooling platform tomorrow or the day after would come from someone’s mouth.
But if the next day was rainy, or even if not, we would get caught up in various matters, and before we knew it, the plan would be postponed by a day or two.
At last, when the day finally arrived, the platform was taken down from the attic of the storage shed in the morning. A year’s accumulation of dust and mold was carefully wiped away with a damp cloth, then left to dry in the backyard’s shade.
And when it was finally brought out to the central courtyard in the evening, that was when I truly felt summer had arrived at my home.

Three folding chairs were arranged outside the cooling platform as everyone gathered in the central courtyard.
In the lingering evening light, some jumped rope while others sketched Grandmother’s back in their drawing pads.
Some counted and announced tomorrow’s morning glory buds.
The two young girls sometimes lined up flowers on the veranda to play florist.
At nightfall came fireworks, fairy tales, and Grandmother’s “stories of home.”
To these children who had never seen it, their parents’ homeland seemed filled with marvels like a storybook fairyland.
Even mundane tales—of ducks lining up by their old house’s stream, retrieved each dusk by an upstream owner’s boat—stirred dreamlike visions in their minds.
Thus they always clamored for “hometown stories,” until one would say “I wanna go there too!” and another echoed it.
Stories of their late grandfather’s youth often surfaced too.
Hearing tales I’d been told as a child now emerge from my mother’s lips made them feel like ancient history—unbelievable as accounts of my father who lived until recently.
For children who never knew Grandfather or remembered him faintly, tales of the Aizu War and Satsuma Rebellion rang like fragments from dusty history books.
Yet precisely this distance, I imagined, would purify their nostalgia into something enshrined within their minds’ inner sanctums.

At the beginning of this summer, shortly after the cooling platform had been brought out, my eldest son spotted a large reddish star shining in the southern sky during the evening and asked what it was.
When I looked, it was near the ecliptic and didn’t twinkle, so I thought it must be a planet.
And when I checked the recently published astronomy magazine, it became immediately clear that it was Mars.
When I took out the star chart and checked, I found that it was located slightly east of Spica, the first-magnitude star in Virgo.
So I marked its current position on the chart with a pencil, wrote the date beside it, and resolved to track this planet’s path across the chart throughout the summer.

Motivated by this, on clear evenings, the children would occasionally take out the star chart and compare prominent stars. At that time, Vega and Altair were still positioned quite far to the east in the early evening. In the western part of Leo, a large white Jupiter cast an icy light over the roof.

A question arose about what "variable stars" on the star chart were. I gave a simple explanation and had them observe the fascinating changes in brightness of Beta Lyrae right next to Vega, which was currently visible. Night after night, I kept careful watch, and indeed, the fact that the light changed exactly as predicted in the astronomical magazine—how this registered in the children’s minds was something I could not fathom.

As we gazed at the sky, meteors occasionally streaked by.
As I spoke about meteors, I also told them about dedicated meteor observers keeping watch through the night, then went on to explain the discovery of so-called novas.
I also told them that if one had memorized the major constellations, even an amateur might have the chance to discover a nova.

The chance that two celestial bodies—scattered at distances so vast they are measured in units equivalent to how far light travels in one year at 186,000 miles per second—might accidentally approach each other and manifest as a nova seemed as rare as the opportunity described in Shakyamuni’s parable: a blind turtle surfacing once every hundred years to strike a floating log with a hole in the vast ocean. Yet due to the sheer number of celestial bodies, novas are not so uncommon after all.
However, those with notably strong luminosity are relatively rare.

What delighted the children more than these stories was that the nova’s light was something from tens to hundreds of years in the past.
The news of a cataclysm that had erupted in some distant corner of the universe at the very moment one of our ancestors was going about their life somewhere finally reached this world in our present age.

However, now that I mention it—is what we call “the present” nothing more than an isolated point upon time’s eternal path? Upon closer consideration, it didn’t seem to exist in such isolation. In other words, wasn’t what appeared before one’s eyes merely the integrated sum of all events from the distant past to the recent past—each multiplied by their respective coefficients?

While pondering such things, there were times when I listened to my mother’s well-worn tales with a newfound interest unlike before.

From the start of August, rainy and cloudy days persisted for some time, and the cooling platform remained propped in a corner of the storage nook for many days.

One morning, as I was reading the newspaper, there was an article stating that Mr. K—a Bachelor of Science who had graduated that year—had discovered a nova in the Cygnus constellation while observing meteors.
When evening came that day, I went out to the cooling platform with the children and searched for it; we found it immediately.
That I had not been looking for some time was made evident by how Vega and Altair now reached directly overhead in the early evening—a sign of how far the season had advanced.
And there shone the nova near the zenith, its brilliance rivaling that of Cygnus’s largest second-magnitude star as it twinkled.

“Since I’d been slacking off lately, I missed my chance to discover that nova,” I said. The children’s faces turned bright red as they laughed uproariously.

I had meant it as a joke, but doubted they truly understood my meaning. To prevent any misunderstanding, I felt compelled to offer this explanation:

“The occurrence of novas is exceedingly rare.
The opportunities for amateurs like us to survey the constellations are equally scarce.
Therefore, the probability that a nova would appear and we would then discover it amounts to multiplying two tiny fractions together—resulting in an already minuscule chance made even smaller.
In contrast, for experts who vigilantly watch the skies every night, ‘chance’ pertains mainly to the star’s appearance itself—not this dual coincidence involving both celestial phenomenon and human observer as in our case.
If pressed, one might say their only uncertainty lies in whether clear skies or daily obligations let them spot it a day sooner.”

This explanation seemed not to be well understood by the children.

Before long, cloudy days returned, and mornings and evenings already carried the feel of autumn.
At times, the night breeze grew too cool.
The cooling platform also tended to be forgotten.
Therefore, it seemed the matter of the stars had already vanished from the children’s minds.
The work of astronomers who must study the nova’s future changes was now beginning, so night after night, scholars likely gazed at the cloudy sky, waiting out the hours for breaks in the clouds.

V. Childish Ennui

In recent years, it had become customary to take the children on a day trip to a nearby beach at least once during summer vacation.
Previously, we had made it a practice to go on trips lasting about a week, but whenever we did so, someone would invariably fall ill at our destination.
One year, my mother contracted severe enteritis and was plagued by it for about half a year.
Another year, the father and his two children all came down with fevers and intestinal troubles, forcing them into the care of unreliable, questionable doctors.
In time, acquaintances lost their beloved children to dysentery at health resorts.
Because of this, the very idea of sea bathing became terrifying, and I could no longer bring myself to go on overnight trips.
Even so, feeling it would be pitiful for the children not to go at all, I came up with the idea of a day trip and settled on that.
The children seemed perfectly satisfied even so.

This year I became unable to go due to illness. Not only that, but as the two boys also had health complications making travel inadvisable, we ultimately decided not to go anywhere at all.
Instead we resolved to buy each child their desired books or toys, thus managing to avoid this new variety of paternal obligation that modern times had created.

The older children bought books.
Yaeko—second youngest and newly enamored with painting—purchased watercolor paints and brushes at once, exhausting her entire allocated sum.
The youngest Fuyuko bought sparklers and chiyogami paper along with various trifles only little by little, so her meager allowance seemed comparatively longer-lasting.
This disparity appeared to draw some notice from her elder sisters and brothers.

The children attending school reviewed their studies every morning.
Fuyuko, who was still in kindergarten, seemed to feel a lonely sense of exclusion during that time, as there was no one to keep her company.
So I too would sometimes spread out a picture magazine before Grandmother’s knees and engage in a sort of review as well.

From around April and May，their father painting every day influenced the children，turning them all into enthusiastic amateur artists.
It was unclear whose idea it was，but they created a small “picture magazine.”
The five children each secretly drew their works，which the eldest daughter would compile and bind before presenting it.
Naming it “Misosazai” and publishing it about once a week had unexpectedly continued，and it seemed the ninth issue was recently released.
The cover illustrations appeared to be assigned in turns.

While creating their submission artwork, they intensely disliked others watching them and would all duck their heads into various corners of rooms to draw. It seemed complaints were being submitted by the smaller children before their mother and grandmother—that the older brothers would forcibly try to peek in on them from time to time. Among artists, there seem to be quite a few who dislike having others see their unfinished works. Undoubtedly, there must be various complex practical reasons for this. However, beyond that, it also appeared likely that a certain peculiar psychological mechanism they had possessed since childhood was playing a role in some cases.

The paintings drawn by the five children each conspicuously asserted their own small individualities. Not only that, but each of them was already beginning to develop a kind of fixed pattern. By far, the free drawings of the youngest child, Fuyuko, possessed the most numerous original touches; yet once those interesting aspects were recognized and praised, they became her signature element—for instance, once Mount Fuji appeared, it would inevitably manifest in every subsequent painting. This time, she still hadn’t yet developed any notion of trying to surprise them by changing her approach.

Before long, another issue of "Misosazai," titled the Prose Issue, was published.
In the room next to where I was reading, Yaeko and Soji would whisper together, and when I noticed Soji writing something on hanshi paper, it turned out he was transcribing a fairy tale created by Yaeko.
When I looked at what they had completed, there were quite a variety of writings and songs.
The eldest son’s contribution was of a reflective nature, discussing the tendencies in his sisters’ and brothers’ paintings and writings.
Yaeko’s diary contained considerable detail about snacks and side dishes.
There was something like a song titled “Hoshi” by Fuyuko, but it was completely Futurist-like, its meaning ultimately unfathomable.

While the children played together in this relatively harmonious and enjoyable way, summer vacation passed mercilessly by.
The question of how many more nights of sleep remained before school or kindergarten would begin began to be repeated daily by the young children.
Perhaps because I viewed them with this thought, a shadow of weariness could be detected somewhere in the children's faces.
Every time I saw postcards sent from summer retreats by various relatives and acquaintances, I couldn't dispel the feeling that I still owed some sort of debt to the children.

One evening, as everyone gathered on the cooling platform and veranda talking about various things, someone brought up how last year they had all gone to Ginza one night and eaten ice cream.
Hearing this, Yaeko and Fuyuko began pleading to be taken to Ginza again this year.
In truth, we had only gone that once last year and never since.

The next evening, with the sky clear and no threat of showers, the breeze cool enough for strolling, I sent my wife to take all five children out to Ginza.
The two youngest rejoiced as if expecting some marvelous destination, had their mother dress them in their preferred school clothes an hour early, and were already dashing about in their shoes.
As I compared these rather shabby-looking outfits of theirs, I felt a certain desolation.
This desolation was likely what fathers of our class commonly feel in such situations.

After the children went out, I was talking with my mother on the cooling platform, just the two of us. As the lights in the zashiki had mostly been turned off, the garden was dark. The house was unusually quiet, and the sound of insects rang out loudly from the front garden.

Around ten o’clock, when I had gone to bed and was reading a book, the gate door opened and everyone came bustling back in. For some reason, Fuyuko came in crying, and even after changing her clothes and getting into bed, she continued to sob quietly. Even when we asked what was wrong, she wouldn’t say anything, and for some reason, the others couldn’t figure it out either.

While walking through Ginza and looking around the night stalls, Fuyuko apparently kept asking repeatedly, “Why aren’t we going to Ginza sooner?” Even when they explained that this was Ginza, she didn’t understand. It seemed she had thought “Ginza” meant a house where there was ice cream. She had returned energetically as far as the house gate, but upon entering it, she apparently burst into tears for some reason.

“It must be overstimulation from going to such a bustling street for once,” I said. The moment I spoke these words, Fuyuko abruptly stopped crying. She then looked as though she were pondering something, but soon drifted peacefully off to sleep.

(November of Taishō 9 [1920], *Chūō Kōron*)