Pathway to Japanese Literature

When Teikichi Sekizuka returned from military service, Japan had completely changed.
His military life—including his time as a prisoner of war—had spanned eight years across the Soviet-Manchurian border, North China, South China, French Indochina, and the Philippines, but what could be called a real war occurred only in Burma; here, after being routed in a terrible defeat while fleeing, the war ended and they became prisoners.
He returned to his homeland a full year and a half after the war had ended; having already received vague reports about the state of his country, he disembarked from the repatriation ship without particular emotion, passed through Tokyo, and made his way back to the mountainous region of his birth.

In truth, when he returned to his hometown and was first asked about the war—"What was it like?"—the only response he could muster was "I was hungry," a state devoid of any outward reflection.

Among the few surviving colleagues, there were those moved to inspiration by treading their homeland's soil; those who gazed upon their rediscovered country with tearful eyes; and yes, even a man who grew fervent—declaring that since his life had been salvaged, he would now become a foundation stone for the new Japan, devoting himself to realizing modest ideals.
There were those for whom living quietly with a wife and children was more than enough; those who simply wanted to eat their fill; and those with worried faces wondering what had become of the girls they’d promised themselves to—probably old women by now.
It was exactly like Urashima.

People somehow still held expectations for their homeland.
Amidst all this, Teikichi alone seemed to harbor no expectations whatsoever.
In Burma there had been a girl he had grown somewhat close to; after being deployed to the front they had remained separated. If permitted to live there with her among the natives—not that I felt any particular attachment—I would rather have chosen that; such were the thoughts he had turned over in his mind at his internment camp.

His family home was a rural old family; he had three elder brothers, and below him was a half-sister from a different mother. Teikichi's birth mother died, and the new woman who entered the household doted only on Teikichi among the four brothers. The three elder brothers were already old enough to be aware of their surroundings, making it naturally difficult for them to warm up to her; consequently—since only three-year-old Teikichi had grown attached to Mama at that time—they would exclude him from everything as he grew older, and by the time he reached middle school, after both his father and Mama had died, the house held no joy for him.

The year he entered high school, after being reprimanded by his brothers for becoming involved with a maid during his summer visit home, school lost its appeal; he neglected his studies, failed, and at that point dropped out at his eldest brother's urging. While working at a company in a provincial city where his brother was a major shareholder, he passed the military exam and was promptly dispatched to the Soviet-Manchurian border.
He felt not the slightest attachment to the homeland he was leaving behind; to him, it seemed as though the military were ushering him into a new frontier.

Compared to the burned ruins of the cities he had seen from the train window, his hometown's mountains and rivers remained as they had been, but the residents had been utterly transformed.

In this area, it had been commonplace for sons of old families to make advances on maids.
In this mountainous farmland, farm daughters married late—their prime marrying age being twenty-six or twenty-seven—and typically went to work as factory girls or maids in the city at least once.
Among such girls, there were no virgins; night visits, secret trysts, and gatherings jointly organized by the youth association and the maidens’ association took on an openly opportunistic character when it came to seeking partners. When Teikichi returned home during his high school summer vacation, there was a beautiful maid named Osono. Before he could even stir much interest, at a youth association gathering, some village classmates told him things like, "We’ve all been after her but no one’s managed to get anywhere—better not lay a hand on her."

However, when someone had formed a relationship, been reprimanded by his brother, become village gossip, and taken to hiding, the village youths proved unexpectedly nonchalant—saying things like "Well, couldn't be helped," or "Slyly pulled it off, didn't you"—bestowing the rough camaraderie of delinquents slapping his back.

This had always been that kind of place, but in the past, interactions between men and women in the village had been illicit affairs, never conducted openly.

Shortly after Teikichi returned to the village, a light theater and light music troupe arrived in this remote mountain area.
They held their performance at the village elementary school’s auditorium.

As he was about to leave briskly, an evacuee accompanying him named Kohei Miyoshi suggested they stay to watch—the Youth Association and Maidens’ Association members were reportedly borrowing a jazz band to throw a dance party.

After the elderly and children had departed, they swiftly cleared the auditorium seats, transforming it into a dance hall in the blink of an eye.
Every village girl had permed hair and wore rouge, lipstick, and eyeshadow applied to garish extremes, with some even changing from kimonos into Western dresses and proper shoes.

Most of the young men wore suits, their hair slicked back with pomade as stiff as a wall, and scarves wrapped around their necks as if by prior agreement.

The actresses and dancers of the troupe, escorted by young troupe members as they departed with excuses about being tired, were seen off through the windows by village youths shouting things like “Sly dogs!” and “Think you’re slick, huh?”—even the girls joined in with “Whoa! Have fun!” and “Yeah right, let ’em have it!”—all of them sporting the affected city manners they’d acquired working in munitions factories during the war.

The troupe leader and his wife remained with the jazz band, watching the dance party with bitter expressions—

“Is every village like this now?”

When Teikichi spoke to him, the troupe leader—a formidable man nearing fifty, nearly six feet tall, who once made his living through brawls—unexpectedly became flustered.

“Ah, well... such are the times.”
“There’s some variation depending on the area, but I suppose this is more or less how things are now.”
“In flatland areas it’s common enough, but here in the mountains, I suppose this counts as quite unusual.”
“We were originally farmers here from spring through autumn, but since organizing this troupe—I’m the second leader—it’s been nearly thirty years now.”
“In the past we were called something like rural yakuza, but nowadays we’ve become the most old-fashioned bunch—what with us being practically all siblings, cousins, or relatives of some sort, members marrying each other or settling into arrangements—we’ve become completely out of step with the times.”
“These days, it’s not the local bosses but the regular Youth Association members who come up with pretexts.”
“Even so, with things this way—since there’s no shortage of partners for the girls—our business stays safe, you see.”

Teikichi was already twenty-nine.
The young men had their leaders in those twenty-five or twenty-six, down to the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old punks, all clad in suits with chewing tobacco—the very picture of uncle-style convention.

Teikichi thought about the years he had lost.
However, it wasn’t an age of particular regret.
He recalled the color of the Salween River’s waters.
He contemplated the breathless solitude of the jungle.
In those rich hues of the tropics, he felt there had always been a nostalgic sensual passion that enveloped him.

Although snow had yet to fall, the mountain country—with the year drawing to a close—was bleak and forlorn.
The youths’ frenzy was chaotic and disorderly, lacking any coherent form, but why did it appear even more primal than the tropical jungle?

Among the soldiers crossing the Salween River, there were barbers from Kyushu and monks from Nagoya.
There were peasants from Hokkaido and touts from Ise.
There were factory workers, construction laborers, and gamblers too.
The youths of this village must have lived lives that far exceeded the scale of rural existence—residing in Beijing, stealing chickens in Guangdong, sightseeing at Angkor Wat.
The women were no different.
Lying prone on the dirt of a Nagoya munitions company’s grounds, even the factory girl next to him was blown to pieces, entrails spilling out.
Some had gone on comfort trips to Atami with company employees, and there was also a girl who said she always entertained section chiefs at teahouses instead of geishas and slept on silk futons.

Even though the mountains and rivers remained as they always had been, it seemed only natural that the youths were nothing more than a formless, chaotic something—and nothing else. However, in the village elementary school’s auditorium, the men and women who tumbled and thrashed about in a jumble like washing potatoes to the jazz band’s performance gave the impression of root vegetables convening under cover of night for illicit unions.

Soldiers and war—the landscapes and ecosystems of conflict that Teikichi had witnessed and survived—had felt utterly primal themselves, yet even war and soldiers had never been this primitive. Teikichi too had dallied with native girls along the banks of the Salween River—and there, neither jazz bands nor even electric lights existed; the women had neither rouge nor even kimonos—yet he felt there had been a slightly more human form of nothingness and poetry than the animalistic couplings of vegetables.

However, Teikichi felt no hatred toward these vegetable couplings.
He felt no repulsion or anger.
He found assimilation slightly difficult—an itchy discomfort—but these people—farmers and greengrocers and mail carriers and monks and factory girls—whose lives had never extended beyond their narrow existence confined to eight square kilometers, had ventured out to racially distinct countries like Beijing and Shanghai and Manila and Singapore regardless of their own will, wandering without conventional notions of labor or economy.
It wasn’t particularly strange that those returning from overseas ended up this way.
And so had forms unseen abroad taken shape here like mushrooms sprouting grotesquely?
Truly, such mushrooms hadn’t existed anywhere in Teikichi’s overseas experience.
The absurdity was precisely what made him feel cheerful and buoyant.

“Oh hey, you—wait up.”
“Let’s dance with me.”

Teikichi called out to a woman.

This girl had been intermittently aware of Teikichi and cast furtive glances his way.
She was a well-built girl with thick sashimi-like breasts swelling beneath her clothes, her defiantly impudent face bearing eyes that turned fiercely animal-like when looking at men.
She gave off the air of someone who’d lived a sassy urban life for two or three years.

The girl nodded as if to say she had been waiting.
When she linked arms with him, the pungent smell of body odor struck his nose.
She was sweating.

“During the war, you were conscripted to a factory in Tokyo, weren’t you?”
“Right on target?”

The woman shook her head.

“I went there for about a year after the war ended.
“Until then, they had me working at some rural factory.
“Shouldn’t have come back.
“I want to go to Tokyo again.”

“Why not just go then?”

“No chance of that.”

“What did you enjoy about Tokyo?”

The woman did not respond to that,

“You’ll be heading to Tokyo eventually, I bet.”

“Who knows.”
“I’m the one with no prospects at all.”
“I don’t even know what I should do.”

The woman paid no heed to Teikichi's feelings,

"When you go to Tokyo, take me with you."

And then she winked.

The village’s muffler-wearing man tapped another woman on the shoulder while dancing with her and said, “Next time,” so Teikichi parted ways and headed home—but even as he left, the muffler man winked at him from across the room and waved his hand in signal.

This mountain village girl!
Winking was something foreign not just to Japan but to the very character of the Orient itself—yet when this mountain village girl suddenly did it, it suited her perfectly.
Even if the prostitutes of Singapore or the girls of the Salween River were to do it, it would undoubtedly suit them perfectly—this was not a matter of nationality but rather belonged to feminine licentiousness and bestial blood.

Teikichi, who had roamed across the Orient and lurked among different races, found this scenery—which defied straightforward acceptance despite lacking any perceptible abnormality—to be utterly alien to him. It was truly a phenomenon of the times. War and soldiers were themselves transient spectacles, and within that era of war and soldiering, Teikichi had come to feel as though he had forgotten everything old and past—all of it.

He immediately thought of summoning that punk starting tomorrow to collaborate, but he had forgotten both the address and the name. Since there was no alternative, he decided to make tracking them down his daily routine from tomorrow onward. For now, he had no particular objective beyond engaging in such activities.

The eldest brother, Shoichiro, was the household head, but this man had never possessed any fraternal affection and was born with a materialistic bent.
In rural old families, there were plenty of eldest sons like this—naturally suited to become vault guardians as if by birthright.
Second and third sons were like pebbles—mere adversaries of the family estate who required inheritance shares—and since unlike the Warring States period there was no need to bundle three arrows together, they served only as hindrances.

Teikichi had known such realities since before his deployment; even having returned alive, there was no reason to expect a welcoming reception.
To have returned alive was shameful.
Having come back to his family home with truly embarrassed feelings—like someone making excuses over unpaid debts—everything unfolded exactly as anticipated, and he felt not the slightest surprise.
He meant to stay until they drove him out.
That was all there was to it.

But there was one ambusher.
This was his second brother Kozo who had come rolling in from Manchuria with his wife and six children in tow.
They had nothing—no house to speak of, not even a futon.
For repatriates to come rolling back to their family homes was natural enough—but in Shoichiro’s view it was anything but natural.
Since they had formally established a branch family and received their inheritance share after all—the main house was no longer anything special.
Even in death those of branch families could not enter the main house’s grave.
In other words—it was because they were an independent separate household; just as a branch family had to erect its own grave—losing one’s dwelling didn’t mean one could return to the main house.

Moreover, he had brought along his wife and six children, and they were all showing signs of malnutrition, devouring food indiscriminately. Of course they were on separate rations—he didn’t give them even a single radish—but since they were under the same roof, the children would steal food from this side. They were no different from stray dogs or stray cats. Treating them as if they were human children was an utterly disagreeable matter.

Even without houses to live in, spirited repatriates were they not laying straw mats on the windowless concrete of war-damaged schools and living robustly? Being the children of a man lacking even that much gumption, they stole. If those thieving brats were so inclined, there was said to be a school for pickpockets in Osaka—let them train there and make them support their parents.

Shoichiro, an esteemed economics graduate, made such bold statements without exaggeration.
If one committed as thoroughly as Shylock, there was a certain charm to it—perhaps because no murkiness obscured things, allowing acceptance without the taint of impurity.

He had finally confined Kozo and his seven family members to the storehouse.
There were two storehouses, but the one that became Kozo’s residence was the dilapidated, unusable one—now holding nothing but troublesome items like stone mortars and one-to kettles that defied proper storage.
He had driven them into a space without tatami mats—if they wanted to renovate the interior into a proper residence, they would have to pay for it themselves.
Because Kozo was penniless, he was living in the storehouse at the level of zoo animals.

This Kozo was not pleased by Teikichi’s return.
It seemed that with Teikichi being one more troublemaker added to the mix, they would increasingly be seen as a nuisance—but to Teikichi, this was utterly absurd.
It wasn’t as if there was no way to abuse them any more than zoo animals.

However, they treated Teikichi as nothing more than a full-fledged troublesome nuisance.
It was because Shoichiro made a fuss over Teikichi’s return and treated him as a troublemaker that they seemed to go along with it to curry Shoichiro’s favor—a gesture not worth a single penny even if flattery were used—and thus, silently and ceaselessly, they cursed Teikichi and hindered him all the same.

His half-sister was named Kinuko.
She was five years his junior, and true to form, she too was one of this household’s troublemakers.

She had married when she was nineteen.
The man was the second son of local gentry and had been a bank clerk in Tokyo, but their married life was not happy—the story went that the cause lay in Kinuko’s willfulness.
The man was said to have been a serious-minded scholar through and through, but Kinuko never warmed to her husband, remained at odds with her mother-in-law, and was said to spend her days going out to watch movies or wander about. Though they had a son, she left him entirely in her mother-in-law’s care and was said to have never shown him motherly affection.
Her husband had been conscripted and died in the war, but even had he survived, she had reportedly resolved to divorce him upon his return—and of course she could no longer go back to her marital home, nor had she any desire to.
Thus she was one of Shoichiro’s utter nuisances, but with her child remaining in the marital household and herself being unattached—and quite a beauty at that—there were prospects of her finding placement somewhere eventually; owing to this promising future, she was allowed to live on equal footing with family members.

Teikichi had not yet established a branch family.
At a time when there was still about half a year until the New Constitution took effect—and thus under civil law he remained a family member—one could not openly declare him disgraceful for returning alive to the main house.

The third son, Tadao, died in the war.
He had established a branch family and received his inheritance share, purchased a small house for sale in Tokyo, and though he had a wife and two children, their house was destroyed in the war, so the wife and children returned to her parents' home.
She was the daughter of a landlord from a village about thirty miles away.

Shoichiro devised a scheme by the second day after Teikichi’s return, ordering Tadao’s widow and Teikichi to marry.
He had given Tadao an inheritance share of about 50,000 yen.
Because seeing it end up as another’s living expenses would be tedious, having him marry into the third son’s widow’s household would eliminate every wasteful element, making all matters convenient.

Teikichi merely grinned a vacant, awkward smile and didn’t utter a word in response, so Shoichiro made a face that said "You fool—"

“Look here—there’s no such thing as branch family inheritance shares for you.”
“As you see—since defeat, landlords have had their fields confiscated; there’s no rice to eat, no money for black-market rice; six months till the New Constitution—either way, no need to make you a branch family, no need to give you an inheritance share.”
“From the day the New Constitution takes effect, you’ll be an independent household head—another family’s master—so I’ll have you leave this house quietly.”
“You understand, don’t you?”
“There’s no good or bad here.”
“No agreeing or refusing.”
“It’s what the law decrees.”
“So taking over Tadao’s fifty thousand yen is for your own good.”

“When does the New Constitution take effect?”

When Teikichi asked, Shoichiro deepened his grim expression,

“What business do you have?”

He seemed to be contemplating the possibility that Teikichi would file a lawsuit before the New Constitution took effect.

“Since I just got back from being a soldier, I don’t know a thing about what this New Constitution is.”
“When does the New Constitution come into effect?”
“Next year’s May 5th.”

“I see.”
“So from that day on, we’ll be strangers.”
“Well then, we’ll just stick it out till then.”

“What are you persisting about?”
“Is that your answer about marrying in?”

“It’s about being a dependent, you see.”
“When that day comes, I suppose I’ll leave.”

Given this arrangement, Teikichi’s life would remain secure for another half year or so, and unless he courted some village delinquent girl, he’d have no means to get through the day.

Teikichi, too, had a certain immediate aim in mind.
For the time being, he would become a black market operator.
With no prospect of employment and no special skills to speak of, he had no choice—but in these convenient times, moving goods from right to left would bring in money.
If defeat meant living this carefree and well, then it was a fine thing indeed.
In the old days, moving goods from right to left wouldn’t earn you a single penny.

Because such convenient means existed, Teikichi felt secretly reassured.
Even while maintaining an air of nonchalance, he had naturally developed a readiness for what was to come by discreetly observing every black market operator’s ways within his sight.

Yet Shoichiro was truly wrestling with hardship.
Not that his dire financial straits made him tolerate troublemakers any more—since his days as a substantial landowner and man of wealth, he had always detested nuisances; his view held that losing even a fraction of one’s possessions grew more bitter and unbearable the more one owned. Now he understood that losing what little remained proved equally galling.

The rice fields had been confiscated, and the rice was rationed. However, he had a mountainous mass with an elevation of 1,450 meters behind his estate and a small mountain range spanning elevations from about 1,280 to 1,100 meters across the valley in front—all of which were mountains he owned.

Within his prefecture lay war-damaged cities, and as it was a cold region, there was significant demand for construction timber, charcoal, and firewood. Yet transporting goods from such remote mountains devoured profits; even with endless towering trees that formed a veritable treasure trove, they yielded not a single penny. During the war, volunteer corps and student teams had provided free transport, allowing local charcoal makers to prosper. Now that system had collapsed—surplus stock was dumped in the village at less than half the government-set price, and charcoal makers these days tilled fields instead of burning charcoal. Those fields were essentially Shoichiro’s former rice plots purchased at official rates.

Stock certificates were scraps of paper; bank deposits were frozen—in these remote mountains, one couldn’t even build a movie theater to earn new yen nor start a black-market company.

Rice, miso, and soy sauce were all rationed, and even if one wanted to at least buy chickens and eat eggs lavishly, there was no feed—what manner of situation was this?

Currently his greatest treasure was three goats; this milk alone became their magical spring—their energy, their life source—and since he didn’t want to share it with others, he forced his wife and children, all four of them, to gulp down about one to two shō of this magical spring that emerged each day.

He wouldn’t give a single drop to Kozo’s family, Teikichi, or Kinuko.

Shoichiro was a miser yet prone to vanity, so he couldn’t bring himself to plow the fields.
In these times when his landlord relatives were each reclaiming private fields with their entire families, courageously carrying manure baskets on their shoulders, he alone left not a single tan of private field—partly because he had once held three concurrent directorships at various companies and had anticipated managing somehow in the business world.
However, his wartime evacuation to the remote mountains had been his undoing; with people’s sentiments now completely transformed, he could no longer reconnect the severed thread.
The decisive homeland battle—yet before the homeland could become a battlefield, the cities burned down; these urban centers were like tinderbox structures practically begging “please burn us,” so what could come of equipping such frameworks with a single fire poker and glaring skyward in defiance?

There, he sold off his city residence, privately scoffing at fools who bought flimsy wartime structures for tens of thousands, and settled into his mountain hometown—yet at this moment, he committed an unexpected miscalculation.

He was timid and cowardly.
He didn’t know whether it was true or not—enemy planes supposedly bombed targeting lights at night—but stories circulated of remote mountain areas getting bombed despite electric lights being left on and loud snoring, resulting in individual houses being blown away or forest fires starting. Yet in his village, plenty of folks still slept without extinguishing their lights.
Putting others’ households aside, the maid named Tome and the manservant named Kame at his house were individuals of particularly poor character who never extinguished the lights.
Not only did no amount of repeated warnings have any effect, but they would talk back—“Your lordship, you think those planes flew thousands of miles over the sea just to do something so wasteful way out in these mountains? They wouldn’t bother.”
Kame and Tome were half-wits, but who knows where they’d heard that when it came to American machinery, Japan couldn’t hold a candle to them.
“Japanese planes, see—go blind at night so they drop bombs in the backcountry mountains. American planes wouldn’t do such stupid things,” they said.

Shoichiro had known full well about radar’s capabilities when he fled into these mountains, coolly looking down upon the tank-charging dimwits of the lowlands—yet having his weakness exposed by Kame, he flew into a rage.

Kame had been working at this house since before Shoichiro could form memories—a half-wit who carried himself like the master of the place. He would drink down portions of the goat’s milk before delivering it, gulp four or five eggs each morning and bring back only three or four—a rat snake of a man. Even when warned that drinking milk or eggs again would get him fired, he’d just grin foolishly. “Burning charcoal these days gets ’em a hundred yen a day,” he’d say, throwing down a parting threat. “My measly twenty-yen wage don’t even half-fill my belly. Bein’ fired’d suit me fine!” Then he’d vanish for two or three days to “help” at some charcoal hut, only to return to the servants’ quarters with an air of innocence—already gulping down four or five eggs again.

Shoichiro had never once gotten up for an air raid alarm while living in the city, but after moving to the mountains, whenever an alert sounded, he would frantically dash up to the attic servant’s quarters to turn off the lights.
He kicked Kame’s pillow—“Why won’t you turn them off? How many times do I have to tell you?”—but Kame, when sleepy, wouldn’t respond, snoring away even with his pillow kicked, and when awake,

“Ah, well, Your Lordship—if they drop ’em here, it’d be a fine thing.
If them Kon’gena old mansions up in the mountains burned to ash ’stead o’ Miyako—now that’s what you call loyalty.
If they could catch American bombs with Kon’gena’s backcountry lights, then every army general worth his salt’d be stringin’ up electric lines in these mountains to fish for ’em.
America ain’t gonna bother with such trifles, huh.
That’s machine civilization for ya.”

“You’re hoping the master’s house burns down, aren’t you?”

“Hah—ain’t that what they call loyalty.”
“If this place burned down ’stead o’ Miyako—now that’d be a fine thing.”
“When war comes, there ain’t no such thing as your house or the master’s.”
“Ain’t no soldier got a life to call his own, y’know?”
“Your Lordship oughta join the army and straighten out that disposition o’ yours—do ya good.”

“Kame, you’re hopin’ I’d die in the war, ain’t ya?”

“Hah—dyin’ in the war’d make ya a loyal patriot, wouldn’t it.”
“Yasukuni Shrine’s gods, ain’t they.”
“Even a greedy bastard like Your Lordship—they’d make a god outta that too.”
“Think they’d really make you one, huh?”
“Your Lordship, if an enemy bullet went in through your backside and out the front—now that’d be a right disgrace, wouldn’t it?”

“You called your master a greedy good-for-nothing, didn’t you?”

“I did say it.”
“If it’s the honest truth, there’s no helpin’ it.”

Even in such remote mountain districts, air raid alarms would sometimes sound alongside the cities.
When the air raid alarm sounded, Shoichiro would wrap his gaiters around his national uniform, seize Kame by the nape, and shake him awake.
Since Kame also had an old work uniform, he made him put it on and stand guard.
He grabbed him by the nape and dragged him down, made him hold a fire poker, stationed him at the entrance to keep watch, and kept watch himself.

Even Tokyo residents typically only began wrapping their gaiters and fleeing in a bleary-eyed daze after bombs had fallen nearby, so keeping watch during air raid alerts in the mountains was foolish—but when it came to sheer stubbornness, there was no helping it.

When he noticed, Kame was gone.

“Hey, Kame! Hey, where are you?”

Even groping around to search, he was nowhere to be found.
When he rushed up to the attic, there was Kame, right in his futon.
No matter how many times he dragged him down, he would quietly return to his futon.

In the end, Shoichiro ended up doing something even he himself didn’t understand.

In the dead of night after the air raid alert had been lifted, he ended up setting fire to the woodshed filled with firewood behind the storehouse.

He had set the fire thinking to scare Kame and had returned intending to shake him awake.
But halfway there, he realized it mustn't actually become a fire—yet when he rushed back to check, flames were already raging fiercely.
Shoichiro leapt up to the attic like a madman and, without uttering a word, kicked Kame, struck him, dragged him by the leg.

“It’s a fire!”
“You bastard! It’s a fire!”

He didn’t know how many times he had hit him, but the next day his fingers couldn’t bend—as for Kame, his face had swollen up like a drowned corpse.

“Because you were sleeping, a fire started.
“Look! It’s a fire!”
“You bastard!”

Dragged before the burning fire, Kame stared blankly for once—then he struck him down again and doused him with water.
If he was slow, he kicked him.
He kicked him down.
He stomped on him.

The village too had what was called a fire brigade.
There was also a civil defense corps.
Moreover, there were police officers.
They spotted the flames, rushed in as one, and extinguished the fire.

When it was discovered that Shoichiro had committed arson, he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office, but after exhausting every possible means, he managed to get leniency.

When the fire brigade and police officers rushed to the scene, he had become excessively agitated and pushed the arson theory, but at that time, there had been means to cover it up—claiming it was a careless bonfire or some such.

The following night, as evidence that another arsonist existed, he stole out late at night to set fire to the village.
[He did this] in order to fabricate a fictional arsonist.
To create a madman with such a distinctive method—one who set fires only after alarms—he became so engrossed in devising this that he turned to his wife and,

“Hey, be careful.
“The culprit is a lunatic.”
“He’s the type who only goes around setting fires after alarms.”
“Be on guard when the alarm sounds.”
“Patrolling is crucial.”

Even if he claimed there was a lunatic who set fires only after alarms, since their own shed had been the sole target of arson, his wife wore an expression of utter incomprehension.

First Kame was detained, then as details gradually emerged, Shoichiro was arrested—though by that time, the prevailing talk in the village already held that Shoichiro had gone mad.

He exhausted every connection to beg leniency from the prosecutor’s office, but when pardoned and returned to the village, he stood so triumphantly that he lined up his wife, children, Kinuko, Tome, Kame and the entire household in the parlor—

“It’s because you all lack vigilance, lack proper awareness of the war, know nothing of this grave era, and are deficient in tension that fires get set upon you!”

“What a thing to say—just like General Tojo.”
“It’s Your Lordship who set the fire, ain’t it?”

“It’s because you all lacked vigilance that I set the fire to test you.”
“It was to give you an understanding of the times and to beat some sense into your warped dispositions.”
“When the entire nation is united in war, you dare sleep with lights on during an air raid alert—utterly inexcusable scoundrels!”
“To chastise you, the heart of God possessed me and made me set the fire.”
“So even the prosecutor’s office was moved to apologize, saying, ‘Please do return home—we deeply regret having summoned you.’”

“What a thing to say.”

“Your warped disposition is beyond correction, so I’m firing you right now.”
“I’m firing Tome too.”
“Let this be a lesson—when the alarm sounds, turn off the lights.”
“Consider the principle of Hundred Million Hearts as One.”

Having delivered this pronouncement, he fired them.

He still retained only his wife, children, and Kinuko,

“You must reform your minds and recognize the times from now on.”
“No more maids or servants.”
“You’ll do the cooking yourselves.”
“You’ll heat the bathwater too—if you endure battlefield hardships, you can manage anything.”
“Even a single rice ball must be eaten with gratitude.”
“I won’t tolerate complaints.”
“You must obey superior officers’ orders.”
“In this house, my commands are absolute—obey them without reply. The power of life and death rests with me.”
“You shan’t eat meals until I give permission.”

The war had ended, and democracy had become the new order.

The young men had gone off to the military or been taken for conscripted labor, leaving behind only useless old folks who knew nothing of the current situation.
During the war, they knew nothing of the war; after defeat, they knew nothing of defeat.
However, Shoichiro pontificated that since the young men had been hardened in battlefields and factories, their return would revive a true militaristic spirit in the village—one more steel-forged than during wartime itself—but the youths returning from fronts and factories threw themselves into dances, plays, amateur revues; men smeared pomade through their hair, women sported permanent waves with rouged cheeks and lips—far from any stage of militaristic spirit.

Of course, Shoichiro was not one to fixate on such matters.
He became the village’s foremost democrat, espousing that those who do not work shall not eat, equality and equal rights, and that even brothers were strangers.
Humans must be independent, self-reliant, and free.
Dependence was not permitted.

“How about you go to Tokyo and become an office worker?”
“You could become a dancer too.”
“Women can make a living even through prostitution.”
“With your own beauty as capital, you could build an independent life anywhere—maybe even achieve glory.”
“That’s capitalism’s virtue.”
“Under communism, you’d work as a factory girl—survive that way too.”
“I’ll cover your train fare.”

Yet now he couldn’t even scrape together a mere hundred yen for rail tickets.

In this area, rice could be bought in any quantity if one paid forty yen per shō.
Shoichiro had reached a status where he could no longer casually purchase even five shō of rice, and whenever he ventured to the city to sell artworks and antiques, they would dismiss them as counterfeits and force him to sell at practically giveaway prices.

Kozo sidled up,

“Elder brother, you’re no good at selling—leave it to me.”
“We’ve got a storehouse packed with ancestral calligraphy and paintings—if you keep fussing over them like this, you’ll become a laughingstock.”
“Since there was no war damage here, there’s both Western clothes and kimonos available, aren’t there?”
“So if you can’t barter fifty or even a hundred bales of rice with all that, it’d be downright strange.”
“Please let me handle this.”
“Just give me ten percent as commission.”
“I’ll cover the train fare, lodging expenses, and incidentals all from my ten percent commission.”

However, Shoichiro merely shot a sharp glare of displeasure.

He thought Kozo’s eyeing the sale of the storehouse full of calligraphy and paintings and the bartering of Western clothes and kimonos was something that could not be overlooked.

Kozo, who was supposed to have nothing, had been boiling potatoes and daikon radishes beyond the rations and feeding the children plenty of rice gruel—there had to be some sort of mechanism at play.
He inspected the storehouse.
He meticulously replaced the lock as well.

He finally visited Kozo’s storehouse residence,

“Hey—let me see your belongings.”

“Why?”

“I want to observe what sorts of items repatriates choose to bring back.”

He scrutinized every last thing—even the futons and diapers heaped in corners—

“Hmph. You’ve hauled back quite a stash.”
“This should sustain your livelihood.”
“Oh—this pot’s new.”

“Well, the other day when I went to town, I swallowed my tears and bought it at this place called the black market.”

“What’s this? Not only haven’t your things decreased—they’ve actually increased!”

“But I have nothing—if I don’t build up supplies, I can’t cook meals.”

“So you don’t deal in bamboo shoots?”

“There’s not a single extra thing here to even handle bamboo shoots with, is there? Those who can deal in bamboo shoots must be happy, I think. That’s why I’m saying—Elder brother, you should start dealing in bamboo shoots too and let me help you.”

“Without dealing in bamboo shoots, how can you buy potatoes, daikon, rice—any of it?”

Seeing the glint in Shoichiro’s glaring eyes, Kozo realized.
Shoichiro was suspicious.
The reason he had inspected every last one of their belongings lay precisely in this suspicion—that they were stealing items from the storehouse or something from the mansion to sell and sustain themselves.
Kozo shuddered.

“Elder brother, that’s outrageous! I haven’t laid a hand on a single thing from this mansion.”

“What nonsense are you spouting? I’m not calling you a thief. I’m asking how you can buy rice, potatoes, or daikon without dealing in bamboo shoots.”

“I also cultivate a small field. Moreover, since the villagers say we’re pitiful repatriates, they sometimes give us rice or potatoes.”

“Are you a beggar? Hmph. Pitiful repatriate, huh? And the villagers are probably badmouthing me. Hey, come take a look at my kitchen—there’s not a single grain of rice here. You, the pitiful repatriate, are the one eating luxurious things! Even if I waste away to nothing—first of all, I won’t stoop to begging. Don’t you dare disgrace your ancestors!”

“Please understand the untenable position of us repatriates.”
“To survive, we must even beg.”
“With five children to care for, when they cling to me crying—they want rice, they want potatoes—I have no choice but to steel myself to do even degrading things.”

“I’m not doing it.”
“I haven’t eaten a single grain of rice these past three days.”
“My children eat nothing but potatoes.”
“In this village, the only one living such a wretched life is my household, I tell you.”
“Even so, I won’t stoop to begging.”

“Elder brother, I’m sorry. I can give you some of my rice, if you’d like.”
“I don’t want any rice you got through begging.”
“But Elder brother, I paid the official price for it.”
“I see. In that case, I’ll buy it at the official price.”

Shoichiro meticulously measured out Kozo’s meager three sho of rice and paid exactly the official price.
Of course, he wouldn’t let Kinuko or Teikichi eat that rice.
He would make them into rice balls that only they themselves ate as snacks.

Kinuko had her wedding garments and such—when she married, she had been made to take a chest packed with seven sets of clothing—so by selling those off, she managed without hardship.

Teikichi had no personal belongings whatsoever.
What Shoichiro provided were strictly rationed goods alone; because he made sure to consume any extra provisions separately from meals with only his own parent and children, Teikichi was always hungry.

Throughout the war and even as a prisoner of war, he had been constantly starving; but even after returning to his homeland, the starvation persisted—worse than during his captivity.

Fortunately, Kinuko fed him.

From childhood, Teikichi and Kinuko had grown up like true siblings, so she alone welcomed his return with genuine warmth; but after an eight-year gap that transformed her from a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl into a twenty-four-year-old woman returned home after marriage, he could no longer grasp her true nature at all—was this even the same Kinuko?

She was indeed beautiful.
There was something unnervingly alluring about her.
She might have had a passionate, wanton disposition.
There was something brazenly composed in how she seemed to have life figured out, yet he couldn't begin to guess what schemes she might be nurturing within.

“How long do you intend to stay here?”

Even when Teikichi asked that,

“I don’t know about what lies ahead.”
“In time, it’ll work out somehow, I suppose.”
“I’m letting things take their course.”

she answered, perfectly composed.

“I’ll be starting up a black market operation soon. When I do, you think you could front me the capital?”

“What kind of black market? A big one?”

“Nah, small-time black market.”
“Just enough to scrape by.”
“Well, since I’ve got no comrades or proper connections, I’ll just be the lowliest black market operator—shuttling by train with a rucksack on my back.”
“I could rent a room in this village, make that my base, and commute to Tokyo, couldn’t I?”
“Defeat sure has its conveniences.”

“I suppose so.”
“It’s a relatively convenient world we live in, isn’t it.”
“I can manage just fine with bamboo shoots, you know.”
“When you become a full-fledged black market operator, Tei-chan, you should live in Tokyo.”
“I might go to Tokyo then and do something.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I still don’t know.”
“I suppose I’ll have to do something.”

Kinuko’s composed smiling face was a strange, utterly inscrutable thing.
What was she planning to do?
She might have been planning to become a pan-pan.
There were aspects where she could calmly consider such things, and yet also aspects where she seemed to harbor some sort of enormous, unimaginable dream.
The writer Kohei Miyoshi, who had evacuated to this village, seemed fond of Kinuko, coming to visit nearly every day and engaging in long conversations, but Kinuko appeared more mature than thirty-six-year-old Miyoshi.

Kohei would speak of things like how the scenery was, whether there was poetic sentiment, how tradition held up, or matters of flavor and elegance.
Those things were completely lost on Kinuko.
What Kinuko saw seemed to lie far deeper than those things.

It was precisely because Kinuko, sitting cross-legged with unflappable composure as she lived her solitary bamboo-shoot existence enveloped in these primitive, unadulterated forms of money and desire, that such elegant discourses about refinement must have gone in one ear and out the other like wind past a horse’s ears; yet even Teikichi sometimes found her a bit irritatingly cunning, or else thought her an endearing little thing.

He had been immersed in contemplation where civilization meant nothing during his years in Burma's jungles and subsequent captivity as a prisoner of war.
In other words, he wanted—no rather found himself willing—to live a truly primitive tribal existence with that Burmese woman by the Salween River.
Thus he came to regard this imagined self not merely as fantasy but as his entire being—all thoughts and essence—for at that time no other ideologies existed.
No emotions remained.
Though even now he seemed devoid of any coherent philosophy compared to those days when homeland meant nothing—no war or victory mattered—no civilization or culture required—no electric lights nor postcards needed.
If permitted to live as primal tribesmen do—tilling fields by day and hunting game by season—he believed spending life eating and sleeping would suffice.

He had returned to his homeland, and even when seeing pomade-slicked men and permanent-waved women entwined in crude dances deep in the mountain villages, he felt not civilization but rather primitiveness—recalling Burma’s jungles—yet through Kinuko alone was he made to sense something that first spoke of civilization, or rather, of being distinctly non-primitive.
This also held true for the foundation upon which Kinuko sat—the very character of the Sekizuka family—and for Shoichiro’s primary-colored selfishness and self-interest; in his naked desire, one could not help but sense not primitiveness but something historical.
Is that what they call house and tradition?
It felt like bedrock that had been exposed after the surface soil had eroded away over a long period of time.

What Kinuko gazed upon differed from what the tribal girl had gazed upon.

He sensed something—that the very foothold for his return to culture and civilization seemed to reside in Kinuko, compelling him to recognize that his own ideology must inevitably take its starting point from her existence.

"What does it matter? She’s merely a woman," he would occasionally think.

And each time he became conscious of Kinuko, he would thrust her away and pine for his own tribal emotions.

And he tracked down the charcoal-burner’s daughter he had danced with at the elementary school dance party, and was considering having a tribal tryst with her—as if transplanting Burma’s jungle wholesale to Japan.

The next morning, he promptly went to one of the charcoal-burners’ hamlets. He walked around there and even started heading toward the charcoal-burners’ mountain, but he couldn’t catch sight of the girl.

The next day, undeterred, he went to a different charcoal-burners’ hamlet.

Then, on the mountain path, he saw a woman by the spring below, hauling out a bucketful of laundry and splashing away at her washing. But when he realized it was Osono, he found himself rooted to the spot.

The farmhouse on the edge of that mountain path—its rough walls daubed with wood chips and topped with stones, resembling a ruined house—

“Did you come here as a bride?”

“No, this is the house where I was born.”

Osono laughed, her face bright and clear.
Since she was two years younger than him, she must have been twenty-seven that year.
Once cute and small with lively eyes, she had now become a robust farm woman imbued with the vitality of soil.
The face he once found charming still retained traces of its former self, though her cheeks now glowed with sunburn even under winter skies, and her hands—no longer those of a maid—had become large farmwoman’s hands: rough-hewn, swollen with vigor, firmly risen and weathered through.

Her bright, guileless laugh retained the strongest vestiges of her former self that made him feel nostalgic, but in all other aspects she had changed completely into a different farm woman altogether.

“Didn’t you get married?”

“Oh, my husband was killed in the war, you know.”
“Young master has returned safe and sound—nothing could bring me greater joy.”

“Didn’t you have any children?”

“Oh, there was one boy.”
“I left him with their family as the heir.”

At that moment, from one of the three houses clinging to the cliffside along this valley mountain path, a girl with a permanent wave and monpe pants came darting out.

That was the very girl.

“Oh, your house is here?”

“Oh my, well aren’t you two lovebirds from way back getting along nicely.”

Osono let out a large, ringing laugh,

“Young master, I heard you danced with Ms. Tsuneko.”

Teikichi laughed too.
Then Tsuneko burst out laughing, guffawing raucously.

I see, Teikichi thought.
It was only natural that the girl’s gaze as she looked at him seemed to already know his background—she was a resident of the house next to Osono’s.

“Off somewhere?”

“Yes—there are rehearsals at school for both the year-end party and New Year’s play.”

“Well then, let’s go there together.”
“Wouldn’t that be unkind to Ms. Osono?”

Osono let out another large, ringing laugh.

In daylight, Tsuneko’s face lacked the clarity of complexion one might expect from her vigorous physique. Her cheeks were bright red with rouge, but the roughness of her skin was noticeable. This only heightened the impression of a wild, carnal vigor that knew no restraint—her coarse face bore oddly small, sunken eyes that seemed forever fixed on reflecting objects in a lake of lust, giving her the air of a beast.

“Do you act too?”

“Yes—male roles, female roles, revues too. Erotic revues. I’m the lead. The erotic lead. Because I have to go completely naked.”

“You’re the one who—”
“Yes, only me.”
“Even so, everyone lacks the courage to go naked, don’t they?”
“So do come see the show, won’t you?”

“When?”

“Christmas. Whether it’s the 24th or 25th—people are split into two factions arguing about which is the real Christmas Day, and it’s still not settled, you know.”

“If it’s Christmas Eve, that’s the 24th, isn’t it? There’s only three days left now.”

“The 24th, that’s right. Thanks a lot. Let’s go have fun in town sometime. Take me along.”

“Ah, let’s go.”

“Won’t you come hang out at the school now?”

Teikichi hesitated for a moment but decided against it. He wanted to be alone with this woman in a place severed from all others—to forge their own separate realm of primal, illicit union. Let them at school or in town do as they pleased with whomever else and whatever pomade they liked. He himself would mindlessly cut away all those connections and revel in his own aboriginal nostalgia—that would suffice. The woman winked again and, with a “Well, bye then,” dashed into the school.

(Unfinished)