Pathway to Japanese Literature

From the rural Main Street,

My residence, though in a small rural city, was situated on Main Street.
This lifestyle proved remarkably convenient—attending to every need with precision—if one could tolerate a little noise.
For instance, when a fire engine’s siren passed by, the advertising tower would instantly shout,
“The current fire is located somewhere around here.”

“The fire just now can be found in such-and-such place.”

It shouted.
This advertising tower proved exceedingly devoted to its vocation, never neglecting its reports even late at night.
Since all four neighbors were shops, I never had to go out of my way for last-minute necessities, and right from home could feel the town’s pulse.

But the air I truly breathed was that of Tokyo.
Though living in this small city and visiting Tokyo only twice a year, neither my daily readings nor matters captivating my heart could stray from humanity’s central essence.
My eyes and breath found themselves forever tethered to Tokyo’s sky.

I took a walk along this town’s Main Street every day.
What was reflected in those eyes was nothing more than scenery.
The place where my heart resides is another matter—that remains unchanged no matter where I live.

★

Kiryu, sustained by small-scale industry and commerce, was inherently a city of individuals; consequently, its commercial spirit thrived.
Their readiness to pluck out a neighbor’s eyeballs if one let down their guard was so brazen that it rather inspired admiration.
Therefore, when it came to these merchants’ collaborative endeavors, everything was executed in an appallingly slipshod manner.

Last year, a golf club was established in this town, and I was invited to join. I learned golf thanks to this town, though the membership fee stood at 100 yen a month. A proper indoor practice facility had been newly built, complete with clubs and balls provided, allowing me to head out empty-handed and practice daily to my heart’s content—all for 100 yen a month. While golf might have been considered some rich man’s diversion abroad, in this town pachinko cost far more money.

In the center of this city there was a small yet fully equipped municipal children’s park that was the admiration of visitors, and I too had been quite impressed. But according to the merchants of Kiryu, this wasn’t necessarily the case: “When you take two kids there, you end up paying for this and that—it adds up to 300 yen. Costs a fortune, I tell you.”

From the perspective of the merchants’ golf expenses, it was only natural that everything cost too much and became a problem.

When I went to the park for cherry blossom viewing last year, some group had hung red and white curtains all around and were holding an extravagant hanami. Peering through gaps in the curtains, about two hundred merchants reveled with boxed lunches and two-gō bottles, while the sheer number of geishas shuttling between drinking parties created a dizzying commotion.
My wife, who was with me, was astonished,

“They’ve hired every geisha in town!”
“I’ve never seen such an incredible hanami before.”
“Given how the merchants of Kiryu are, I bet they’re throwing this with a membership fee of around 1,000 yen.”

“Would they spend money like some foreign country? However, it seems unlikely we could haggle it down below seven hundred yen—it might surprisingly end up around five hundred.”

“No way!”

Later, when I asked one of the merchants,

“Ah, that fee—four hundred yen.”

★

A call came from Amma’s house, asking if our Amma was still there. She had left my house two hours prior. Since Amma was blind, I grew concerned and went out for a stroll—only to bump into her emerging from the pachinko parlor, feeling her way with the cane.

I was taken aback. “You play pachinko?”

“When I pass by and hear that sound,” she replied with perfect nonchalance, “I just can’t help myself.”

“Today,” she added, “the left side of the nth row—number X—is paying out well.”

With that casual impartation, she departed with leisurely grace.

With that, she instructed me like a master teaching disciples and leisurely returned home.
I knew Amma often spoke with a sighted person’s boldness, but never imagined she actually played pachinko.

When I shared this story with others, it sparked another unexpected fervor.

“Ah, that figures,” someone remarked.
“She works with her fingertips for a living—if she flicks those balls by pure instinct alone, she might actually win big.”

Some who heard this fell into deep contemplation like martial artists meditating on technique.
They became the very embodiment of solemn focus.

“That’s it,”
“Now that’s a useful tip!”
“I’ll try closing my eyes and giving it a shot too.”

There were others who slapped their knees, eyes sparkling with life.
All of them failed utterly to grasp the poetic elegance I had intended, their reactions proving gravely serious.

However, considering how Amma’s pachinko stirred them to such excitement, they must all be generals of a defeated army.
I do not play pachinko.
I, who enjoy golf at 100 yen a month, must be like a beggar who enjoys the tea ceremony.

A town perpetually without an ace pitcher.

Kiryu was a city that, since its planned founding as a textile metropolis four hundred years ago—a haven free from the rule of minor feudal lords—spent its days engrossed in trade and financial dealings with all Japan. From its very inception, it stood as the most Osaka-like place in the east; even today, it remains a quintessential small-scale commercial city where people rely on their skills, betray neighbors and close friends, and devote themselves wholly to trade and monetary calculations.

Prices were exorbitantly high. Only the locals remained unaware of this fact. When I moved here from Ito, the townspeople had assured me that compared to hot spring resorts, prices would be lower and living easier—yet even black market rates for rice, firewood, and charcoal proved nearly double those of spa towns. And the quality was inferior.

When asked what distinctive features I’d observed while residing in this commercially ruthless town, I found myself wanting to answer that I’d been astonished by how uniformly vast the elementary and junior high schoolyards were. In this oppressively cramped city, only these schoolyards stood out as preposterously spacious anomalies.

The Honmachi 2-chome district where I reside has been this city’s central hub since its founding, and because its side streets have four hundred years of history, Kita Elementary located there seemingly had no room to secure a spacious schoolyard—leaving its students with one pitifully smaller than others by comparison. However, even that could not be called a small schoolyard when measured against those of elementary schools in other cities. It could adequately host a sports festival.

★

The Niigata City where I was born has long been a bustling port town—a place of revelry and a town of women.
Yet its distinguishing feature lay in elementary schoolyards being small—so small that even their minimal existence could not be taken for granted.
The elementary school where I grew up stood as a prime example—it had just enough space to barely accommodate a single tennis court for the teachers, while students were wholly deprived of an outdoor playground.
Others followed much the same pattern—if a schoolyard existed where children could hold hands to form a circle, that alone was deemed acceptable.

While Niigata’s elementary schools’ disregard for children’s outdoor play was egregious, Kiryu’s elementary and junior high schoolyards were—beyond mere comparison—downright vast. Half of them had athletic fields roughly twice as large as the municipal baseball stadium.

The children here were fortunate. In every schoolyard, multiple groups played baseball, volleyball, and handball without interference. They could swing bats with all their might without worrying about breaking glass. The only downside to ball retrieval fatigue was the balls getting scuffed.

Since every schoolyard allowed them to practice batting with full force, even elementary and junior high school baseball teams hit so well it astonished observers.

Therefore, it stood to reason that Kiryu remained Kanto’s premier powerhouse in high school baseball—even when forming first-year high school teams by selecting from those who’d naturally developed powerful swings since childhood, they already made formidable opponents. They always maintained average strength. They always had average players at hand. In other words, they never lacked ten or fifteen solid performers of reliable skill. They perpetually possessed the latent strength to reach Koshien if only a single star pitcher would emerge. Yet that single star pitcher seldom appeared.

Of course, that wasn’t a story unique to Kiryu.
A star pitcher seemed ultimately to be the sort of thing one sought through money and drums.
Osaka and Nagoya appeared to be precisely the sorts of places that sought out such pitchers with money and drums.
Thus they always put on splendid showings at Koshien.
Kiryu might shine in regional qualifiers but became a weakling at Koshien.
This held true not only in high school baseball but seemed to occupy a similar position in commercial cunning and strategies.
They lacked drive and strength.
They lacked a single crucial element in their core.

★

Niigata is nationally infamous for having both the weakest high school and amateur baseball teams, but to attribute this to its snow country status would be profoundly mistaken—the true culprit lies in elementary schools lacking even playgrounds where children could hold hands to form circles.

This climate—where girls’ play and physical activities defined the standard for model children, while boys’ wild games were deemed the mischief of delinquents—had birthed those playground-less elementary schools.

Even when they finally built high school athletic fields comparable in size to Kiryu’s elementary schoolyards, sports requiring physical habits honed from childhood—baseball chief among them—naturally remained ill-suited.

While cities like Niigata City—rare instances where girls’ conduct became the standard for boys—were uncommon, Kiryu, whose soul lay in its arid winds, mercantile spirit, and resilience through vicissitudes, proved unexpectedly feminine at its core. In Orihime Town, not only were women the financial protagonists, but the very nature of the textile industry—an ephemeral cottage trade—was fundamentally feminine. The fluctuations between boom and bust were intense, the vicissitudes extreme. The power to endure those vicissitudes was indeed feminine. Men drank themselves to ruin or took their own lives, but women possessed the calm power to endure. Kiryu was where women’s power surpassed men’s. Though they rebelled against this feminine power by grumbling about their lot or slapping women to perform masculinity, one felt deeply that this town lacked that foremost masculine strength—the final tempered core.

Hepburn and Bicycles

Kiryu City had many bicycles.
Because the streets were narrow, this abundance stood out all the more.
At certain times, it felt as though there were more bicycle riders than pedestrians passing through.
The bicycles were so numerous in this city that one felt compelled to ponder the ratio between its population and bicycles.

Bicycles lined up in neat rows before a pachinko parlor.
It was a spectacle unseen in Tokyo.
A stylish Western restaurant had opened.

At that moment, one of the town’s youths muttered to me like this.

“Even though they’ve lined up bicycles alongside it, the spot’s no good—probably won’t catch on.”

Every movie theater had a bicycle parking lot.
By looking at the number of bicycles, you could tell how crowded it would be that day before buying a ticket—so when there were too many bicycles, you could keep a respectful distance and go elsewhere.
The ratio between the number of bicycles and the number of people inside remained constant—it had never gone awry.

The other day, I went to see *Roman Holiday*. Given that this film alone warranted opening at 10 AM every day for a week, I could tell how popular it was. Thinking it best to arrive early, I reached the movie theater fifteen minutes before the screening began early in the morning.

Sure enough, there were still only about ten bicycles. Then there were about twenty or thirty people inside. Feeling a bit self-conscious that I might have arrived too early, I bought a ticket and entered the theater—only to find it nearly full.

I caught my breath.
They were all women.
Occasionally there were men.
They were couples.
There was no man alone like me—let alone an older one.
I was glared at like an enemy.
I managed to get a seat, but both to my right and left were young madams holding babies.
To keep the babies from crying, they had brought along vast quantities of food and other supplies, leaving no detail overlooked in their preparations.

To the best of my knowledge, Hepburn was the first person to disrupt the ratio between humans and bicycles in Kiryu City’s movie theaters.

★

Of all the Hepburn critiques I’d read, what struck me as most accurate was Hibiya Movie Theater’s report.
It stated that Hepburn’s appeal resembled that of male-role performers in girls’ operas.
Audiences were reported to consist largely of girls’ opera enthusiasts.

“Doesn’t *Roman Holiday*’s entire plot mirror Takarazuka?”
The queen—disguised as a commoner’s daughter and swaying from hypnotics—uttered lines like “Let me take off this kimono” in a man’s room,
“You may withdraw now,”
she declared.
The young ladies and madams in attendance erupted in giddy uproar while this aging man sank into quiet desolation.

It seemed the Takarazuka era had arrived in the West as well.
There were precedents of defeated nations’ cultures conquering their conquerors, and Japanese girls’ opera appeared to hold potential for success across those waters.

★

I don’t care for Hepburn, but I adore Marilyn Monroe. Strip away the Monroe Walk, and what remains is a clean innocence—I can think of scarcely any actress as free from any taint of impurity as Monroe. Because the Monroe Walk plumbs the depths of human society’s strangeness and ugliness, what remains—that innocence and guilelessness—is stable, with no sense of precariousness.

The innocence and guilelessness radiating from Hepburn right from the start lacked stability. A precariousness that you never knew when it might collapse clung persistently. That was also the precariousness clinging to fans of girls’ operas themselves.

Marilyn Monroe was a feminine beauty that gave adults innocent tranquility, and in that, sexual desire could not be felt. Even if her true nature were anything at all.

★

Behind my house stood an elementary school.
There was a special classroom for special needs children there.
In other words, a classroom for children of low intelligence who couldn't handle academic work.
They didn't need a playground.
Because they lacked even the ability to play sports.
They couldn't even manage mischief.
They were simply innocent and cute.
I used to enjoy strolling to that classroom, but since the Kyoko-chan incident, passing through the elementary school gate felt awkward under suspicious gazes—a rather pathetic state of affairs.

They say disabled children are the cutest, but their parents too seem unbearably adorable—as they’re all round and plump, one can’t help but discern the parents’ hearts and feel sorrow.

The paintings decorating this classroom follow the same style as Kiyo-kun’s.
If you taught them other art styles, they might adopt different ways of drawing—or so I wonder.
Kiyo-kun’s paintings closely resemble Henri Rousseau’s style, but the round and plump features of the special needs children here somehow bear such a vivid resemblance to Henri Rousseau himself that one can’t help but laugh.

Contemporary paintings resembled tomb murals from five thousand years ago—or even more so, works by the intellectually disabled—but modern people’s aesthetic preferences, even their ideals of beauty, seemed to carry the distinct air of being entirely fixated on idiot beauty.
The overwhelming popularity of Marilyn Monroe and Hepburn stood as prime examples of this.
Idiot beauty.
And perhaps it was thereabouts that the limits of beauty lay, I thought.

If one sought the trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty within humanity itself, they would likely end up stumbling upon nothing but an idiot.
Even when framed in grandiose terms like truth, goodness, and beauty, I suspected their concrete limits lay surprisingly close to that very realm.

However, literature’s homework is not to seek idiot beauty.
Humanity cannot disentangle itself from the jumbled morass of falsehood, evil, and ugliness.

Festival of the Non-Existent Shrine

Japanese people were generally fond of festivals.
Even those who had never worshipped Christ threw grand Christmas celebrations.
It didn’t matter which deity it was.
They formed a gaggle of busybodies who couldn’t resist a festival.
On that July fourteenth, rural high school students held something called a “Paris Festival Chanson Party” to celebrate France’s Revolution Day.
When it came to absorbing festival commotion, they proved utterly devoid of any island mentality.
That was my own nature too.

Now, Kiryu City’s festival enthusiasm appeared utterly distinctive.
This thorough absurdity seemed worthy of documentation.

Generally speaking, this city didn't observe Bon Festival rituals.
Events reeking of monks chanting sutras and incense smoke enveloping the entire city likely didn't suit the town's character.
Instead of Bon Festival observances, they held Tanabata.
In a textile-producing region like this, Tanabata might have seemed natural enough—this festival where celestial lovers meet yearly did resemble Bon traditions of ancestral returns—and in Kiryu they floated bamboo decorations down rivers.
This too echoed Bon customs.
I thought Kiryu skipped Bon because Tanabata sufficed.
Perhaps Buddhist traditions had patterned their Bon after Tanabata rites all along.

In any case, Kiryu’s ethos of steering clear of ghostly rituals like welcoming fires and ancestral spirits returning was commendable; while shunning all things shadowy and somber, they went positively wild for festivals.

The Gion Festival held in July was this city’s festival of Main Street Honmachi-dori.
During the festival’s several days, this Main Street ceased to be a road and became the festival venue.

From Ichōme to Rokuchōme, each district erected stalls occupying half the road’s width, constructed shrines to enshrine their respective mikoshi, and raised torii gates. From the torii gates to the shrines, trucks brought sand and spread it across four or five ken. Not only did this occupy half Main Street’s width, but each district also had its own logistical reasons—some building stalls and shrines on the road’s right side, others on the left—resulting in such chaotic intermingling that the thoroughfare ceased functioning as a road altogether.

You would have been hard-pressed to find traffic control as patient and meticulous as Kiryu’s police. Pedestrians were on the right, vehicles on the left—if they broke this rule, officers would invariably reprimand them, so people coming from Tokyo always ended up getting caught,

“Walking in Kiryu’s town left no room to breathe.”

had become a standard example of them doffing their hats in defeat. Even the Kiryu police—with their fanatical obsession for traffic control—were no match for the Gion Festival. That too could not be helped. Because during the festival period, Main Street was not a road but a venue. During the day it hosted processions and mikoshi parades; at night it transformed into a stage for plays, music, and dances. Cars, let alone bicycles, could not pass through.

The kabuki plays performed at each stall continued from sunset until dawn.
The road itself became spectator seating, jam-packed with people who had staked out spots since noon with their own mats and zabuton cushions.
When I went at dawn, the spectators were more exhausted than the actors.

This year’s festival costumes were said to cost thirteen thousand yen.
Since textiles were a local specialty, both the fabric and patterns were flawless.
This year’s were said to be matching chirimen crepe outfits, and it had become customary to change costumes morning, noon, and night.
As long as they wore these matching outfits, there was no need to pay money wherever they drank or hired geisha during the festival.
The tab went to the town association.
The textile industry was in dire straits at the time, and Kiryu City appeared depressed even amidst deflation—with even Main Street’s old department store recently sold off to become a pachinko parlor—yet just as with the police’s traffic control, the recession proved powerless against this festival.

★

Now, regarding this festival’s shrine—this proved most curious of all.

“Which shrine’s festival is Kiryu’s Gion Festival?”

“It’s written right there on the festival lanterns—the Yasaka Shrine festival.”

However, no matter how much I searched, there was no Yasaka Shrine to be found nearby. Therefore, when I trailed after the mikoshi procession, they went to retrieve the shintai from the shrine behind my house and returned it there again at the festival’s conclusion. That shrine is called Miwa Shrine. It’s the shrine of Ōkuninushi no Mikoto. If it were Yasaka Shrine, it would be Susanoo no Mikoto. This Miwa Shrine was a historically significant shrine even recorded in the Engishiki Jinmyōchō register from the Heian period. So I asked the merchants wearing matching chirimen outfits.

“This isn’t Yasaka Shrine, I tell you.”

“It’s been decided we call it Yasaka Shrine.”

“But there’s an official noticeboard stating it’s Miwa Shrine—a name documented since the Heian period!”

“With three shrines here, one’s bound to be Yasaka.”

“Miwa Shrine neighbors Konpira-sama, and beyond that sits Ebisu-sama.”

“Shut up already,”
“Anyway, we also call it Yasaka Shrine.”
“Therefore, it’s Yasaka Shrine.”

This Gion Festival apparently began being held on a grand scale some 240 to 250 years ago as an imitation of Kyoto’s Gion Festival.
It was all well and good that festival fanatics—those who insisted Gion alone constituted a proper celebration—launched this new boisterous event with great fanfare. But unfortunately, there existed no Yasaka Shrine here.
Ōkuninushi no Mikoto might have been Susanoo no Mikoto’s grandson, son, or brother—and according to certain texts, some posit they were two aspects of the same deity: Daikoku-sama in benevolent form and Susanoo when wrathful—so perhaps they settled for making do with Miwa Shrine after all.
Not giving a damn about gods or shrines—what truly mattered was having a festival—mustn’t that have been the founding ethos behind Kiryu’s Gion Festival? Such was the conclusion I ultimately reached.
After all, a place staging such an extravagant celebration despite lacking its own shrine—I doubt there exists another like it.

Mountain Girls and Radio

It was customary for work to become impossible in summer, but this year—having spent most of the time in Ikaho at someone’s suggestion—I was able to work.

Mountain hot springs generally lie along valley streams surrounded by peak after peak, but Ikaho perched on a mountainside where an expanse of open space before it let winds journeying across the distant sky flow in with refreshing clarity.
But since the entire town sloped with stone steps, I—being fat—found strolling through town challenging.
Driving to Haruna Lake and walking there became my enjoyment after work.
Perhaps due to being all deciduous trees, Haruna’s distinguishing feature was how remarkably bright both its mountain paths and lake appeared.

★

During breaks from work, I had my one-year-old child brought from home.
The child liked playing in the hot spring.
One day when the child broke the lid of the inn’s water pitcher while playing with it as a toy and I apologized to the maid, she immediately replied, “Well, just recently another guest broke the base of a water pitcher—this works out perfectly.”

said the maid.
I was utterly flustered by her response, yet found it oddly refreshing—more so than the mountain’s cold air blowing through the window.

Even in hot spring towns far from the coast like Ikaho and Kiryu City where I resided, this year’s distinguishing feature was the relative abundance of marginally better tuna. Last year in Kiryu, there had been no real tuna to be found except during festival time. This year, real tuna was constantly available. It seemed to be a year when the countryside ate tuna. I too, trusting the Geiger counter tube, ate heartily. In Ikaho, though only for a single night, I encountered splendid toro and went back for seconds.

★

In Kiryu, the live fish that could be eaten were only eel and summer ayu.
Therefore, summer hospitality for guests consisted solely of ayu.
Since last year, a weir had been installed on the Kiryu River, so we decided to buy directly from it—but when grilled, the ayu’s oil burned as intensely as saury’s, sending up billowing black smoke.
When eaten, there was hardly any ayu aroma.
It was a strange ayu, but since there was no helping it, to friends—

“It’s what we call Kiryu’s *sanma*-ayu.”
“It’s precisely being Japan’s worst that gives it value.”
“Billowing smoke comes out, and the lack of ayu aroma makes it a rarity.”

With that, I recommended it.
My friends also tried it.

“Indeed, it’s a most unusual ayu.”

They were amused.
I began to think.
On the stones in the riverbed of the Kiryu River clung countless insects that local children called “choro.”
They resembled ragworms shrunk to miniature size and rendered transparent.
I thought perhaps the ayu here turned into saury from eating those.
Maybe because Ito’s ayu grew fat on hot spring inn slops, you couldn’t catch them without bait.
But then the other day came a fishmonger from the fishery cooperative.

“The ayu from Kiryu River are Japan’s finest. Here they are—please try some.”

“I don’t need to eat it to know.”
“Billowing smoke comes out, and I bet it tastes just like saury.”

“No, you see, last year was our first time setting up the weir, so even a little flooding kept breaking it constantly, and we couldn’t catch any ayu.”
“We had no choice but to get farmed ayu from Maebashi and pass them off as the real thing.”
“Well, since these ayu were raised on pupae, it’s only natural they’d smoke up, y’know.”

Once I realized its true nature, it was disappointing. The ayu that fed on choro insects and were dubbed Japan’s most unpalatable seemed to possess a certain perverse charm.

★

Dr. Y recommended to my wife.
He advised that we hire only local girls for maids, casually writing down three middle schools from memory and telling us to send request letters to them.
By good fortune this coincided with graduation season; they arranged one new graduate from each of two middle schools, with mothers and teachers accompanying them.
The teacher kept repeating:

“Since they truly know nothing, please at least be prepared for that.”

They were visibly small girls.
I grew so concerned about whether we should make such young children do any work.

I too knew those villages, having once passed through them by bus.
They lay about an hour and a half to two hours upstream along the Watarase River from Kiryu.
People call Hida a remote mountain country, but even there you could see terraced fields on the slopes visible from train windows.
In the villages of Watarase Gorge, where not even proper terraced fields existed, I often wondered what people here had subsisted on in days past.
It seemed only natural to me too that maids from this area would stay the longest.

They didn’t know how to use the telephone nor how to turn on the gas. When the telephone rang, they would quietly open the door, bow politely, and announce: “The telephone is currently ringing.” There was no need to report what everyone could already hear. Their unhurried manner and rustic elegance had its charm, but proved impractical. Coming from mountain villages where electricity was their sole modern convenience, they naturally assumed gas valves worked like light switches—a misunderstanding that nearly got someone killed on occasion. Yet these girls who came to work knowing so little only made them more pitiable and dear. I felt responsible for teaching them what they needed to become proper brides during their time with us.

The one thing these girls knew as well as city children was popular songs.
It was the radio’s doing.
They knew any song, rather more than city children did.
It must have been because there was nothing but the radio.
The other day, I happened to hear them singing the theme song from a novelty music program, and it struck me how naturally a one-man government would fret over radio broadcasts.

The Man Who Exploited Deflation

An unusual incident occurred not even a hundred meters from my house.
A merchant named S went bankrupt and was subjected to mob justice.
A wholesale merchant refers to a shop that purchases textiles from local manufacturers and supplies them to retailers nationwide.
S was a postwar upstart whose business had been thriving.
It stood to reason that a thriving business shouldn’t go bankrupt, but they came to realize something as peculiar as a “thriving bankruptcy” could indeed occur.

S aimed for an even greater leap forward by deliberately going bankrupt.
Just as deflation was being proclaimed, he saw this as a divine opportunity—seizing the moment for bankruptcy, he steadily worked to conceal his assets from spring onward, reportedly removing even household furnishings and evacuating his family.
Having done this, from around May he began recklessly issuing bad checks, and by summer’s end the man himself had vanished.

The merchants caught holding bad checks numbered approximately one hundred, with individual losses ranging from forty or fifty thousand to five hundred thousand yen, totaling twelve million yen—but since S was a small independent shop, the victims who had supplied products there were primarily small-scale home-based manufacturers.

In these times of deflation and recession, it’s typical for textile towns like this one to see a spate of bankruptcies and business closures—planned ones being common enough occurrences, they say—but these usually involve cases where ceasing operations causes less damage than continuing with many employees on payroll. Someone like S executing such deliberate planning was reportedly rare.
It was a crime that exploited deflation.
For the victims, being unable to roar with laughter at “so you’ve gone and exploited deflation too” was only natural—and thus, an even more unusual incident occurred.

The victims agreed not to press charges and took turns stationing several members at a time to stay overnight at S’s shop and await his return home.
S strolled into his shop one day at 2 AM.
Upon being alerted by the on-duty member who had apprehended him, the victims gathered despite the late hour, and the grilling began—demanding he confess where he’d hidden the assets.

When dawn broke, gawkers swarmed before the shop, but with a hundred victims already inside, there remained no space left to enter.
Those interrogating, those tallying accounts, those sleeping wrapped in blankets, those preparing meals—all jostling together in chaos.
They interrogated him throughout the night that day as well.
Those conducting the interrogation took turns sleeping to their heart’s content, but the interrogated party wasn’t permitted any sleep.
However, being a man who could exploit deflation to such an extent, he apparently put up quite a fight.
It seems that when he reluctantly confessed to having deposited such-and-such amounts under such-and-such names at such-and-such banks, all of it was apparently fabrications at first.

“Kiryu’s number one villain is a man with this face.”

They occasionally shoved him into the gawking crowd or interrogated him in the streets, but what seemed to affect Mr. S most was not being allowed to sleep.
And finally, he confessed to hiding seven or eight million yen in assets, but the next morning—claiming illness—he was escorted by his monitors to see a doctor, then rushed to the police to seek protection.
Afterward, this incident developed into a problem of overreach by the interrogators and human rights violations.

The mob justice was indeed excessive, but there is one thing here that I cannot accept.
It concerns the pitiable fact that they had to make an agreement not to press charges.
If they pressed charges, they would create a criminal sentenced to less than a year in prison for issuing bad checks, but the extorted money would never be recovered.
Mr. S appeared to have been expecting to be charged.
And it seemed that by serving a brief prison term, he had devised a scheme through which he could cleverly exploit deflation.
However, caught up in the townspeople’s grilling, he ended up having to confess to hiding seven or eight million yen in assets.
If the law were capable of exposing Mr. S’s hidden assets and returning them to the victims, there might indeed be human rights concerns—but if all it does is manufacture criminals while letting the actual profits remain with those very criminals, then are we not headed straight toward a world where villains prosper and honest folk can do nothing but weep into their pillows?
The legal system itself must first engage in rigorous self-reflection regarding its loopholes, deficiencies, and powerlessness.

The informant who had been telling me various behind-the-scenes stories about this incident suddenly changed his tone and said to me:

"Do you know what the people of this town desire?"

“I don’t know.”

“First off, ninety out of a hundred people want a life where they can enjoy television in their living room after dinner.”
“However, televisions cost 200,000 yen and are out of reach, so they’d like to make do by drinking beer or coffee while watching TV at a café, but even that money tends to be in short supply.”
“So when TV time comes around, the children’s park gets jam-packed with adults.”
“Because there’s free television, you see.”

Being the town’s well-informed gossip, he certainly knew how to put things cleverly.
This probably wasn’t limited to Kiryu.
Many Japanese people must surely have desired a life where they could at least enjoy television in their own living rooms.
But when you thought about it, civilization had indeed advanced.
In the past, only royalty could summon entertainers and athletes to their homes at will and enjoy their performances, but now one could experience royal pleasures simply by flipping a switch.
I wanted to declare that even the world’s royalty now amounted to a mere 200,000 yen—but alas, this humble self had yet to attain royal stature.

“Televisions in every home within a few years.”

I couldn't help wondering whether some great statesman might emerge who would make such promises.
Nothing had ever been more foreign to Japan than the appearance of someone who considered a politician's supreme duty to be raising the people's standard of living.

Yet these modern times—having scraped the bottom of corruption and decadence—were precisely the era that might become fertile soil for cultivating such statesmen.
History proclaimed it so.
Still, one couldn't claim Japan alone remained untouched by this sense of rampant moral decay.

Golf Unconcerned with Scores

In Ashikaga City, there was a factory called Tokyo Textile.
In its yard, they had arranged for golf to be played alongside baseball and soccer.
That said, being fundamentally just a factory yard, the entire area amounted to no more than the size of a high school sports ground.
Within this space, they had constructed six courses—led by a 150-yard one, each approximately 100 yards in length.
Even so, since one could practice approach shots—those close-range swings—and hitting out of hazards like bunkers, I too was permitted to join the group.
This membership fee ran at 200 yen per month.

When the three o'clock siren sounded, the workers came running, each gripping one to three golf clubs in their hands. In groups of three or four, they surrounded their respective patches of turf and began practicing approach shots and rolling balls into the holes. To drive the ball with full force would require learning proper form under a teacher’s guidance—but there was no need for that here. When someone like me tried to drive the ball with full force, it often ended up in hazards. They rolled from the start. No matter how they rolled it, the next shot became an approach, and this method resulted in fewer balls landing in hazards. Rolling the balls, approach shots, and dropping them into the holes on the turf could all be mastered through self-taught methods. They could manage quite well through sheer practice alone. So as long as they played on this course, their skill was magnificent. Even professionals couldn’t win. Because while professionals landed in hazards, they could usually get the ball into the hole by rolling it twice and on the third try. It was golf as marbles in its purest form—yet they were quite enjoying their golf.

“Tsk! Socketed it!”

and so on,

“Tsk! Topped it!”

They’d even mastered spouting proper golfer’s English like that, but when you’re just rolling the ball, there’s no such thing as a socket or a top. Those watching found it highly entertaining too. It seemed they occasionally held Factory Worker Golf Tournaments, and their practice was earnest.

There, caddies (boys who carry your golf clubs) cost ten yen per hour.
When I became a member here, from the caretager,

“Don’t give the children extra money and drive up the prices.”

I received strict instructions. However, far from giving extra money, I made it a point to avoid using caddies as much as possible. Because three or four clubs sufficed, and the children weren't passionate about their ten-yen part-time job, they didn't keep track of where the balls went. If I relied on them, the rate of balls going missing increased significantly. Since the balls cost five hundred yen each, there was nothing more cost-ineffective than this. On top of that,

“It’s time for the evening paper delivery, you know! Oh!”

When the mother called out from outside the gate, the child would throw down his club and run off, so using caddies there amounted to nothing more than poor taste.

Separate from worker golf, there existed a merchants’ club called the Ashikaga Golf Club at this location, where the merchants themselves would occasionally hold tournaments.
Among them were proper golfers who’d taken formal lessons, but most participants in these tournaments were self-made merchants who’d honed their skills there—a formidable sight.

“Wow, the ball went up high!”

There were even merchants being praised.
Of course, not only was golf etiquette meaningless there, but scorekeeping was equally pointless.
No matter how many empty swings they took, those weren’t counted—and just as with commercial ethics, inflating their stroke counts by two or three per course was carried out as openly as any legitimate business practice.
That’s why one shouldn’t participate in rural merchant golf tournaments.
It was nothing but infuriating.
However, as long as I avoided tournaments—where nothing provoked anger—both worker golf and merchant golf became richly enjoyable pursuits.
My golf was famously poor, but only there—

“That’s what proper training gets you,” they’d often remark. I was frequently praised with such comments.

In Kiryu, my golf partner was a man named Kamiage Saemon who served as my landlord. He had built an indoor practice range in his home’s backyard and had been obsessively devoted to golf alone for over twenty years. I began golf under this man’s guidance. As my partner, he proved truly ideal; I doubted there existed another golfer in this world quite so eccentric yet composed.

This man had played golf for over twenty years, devoting himself day and night to studying his form—tweaking this, adjusting that—and nothing else. Consequently, his form underwent a complete transformation nearly every week. No matter how much instruction he received from professionals, he never neglected his own research—hence his form continued changing radically each week without fail. For him, achieving a low score while navigating the course mattered not at all. What delighted him was simply sending the ball soaring far with his first mighty swing.

“The true pleasure of golf lies in the driver shot.”

Declaring this with conviction, even when visiting regulation courses, he would have the caddies retrieve the balls and spend half a day—or even a full day—tirelessly practicing nothing but driver shots. If I invited him, he would accompany me around the course, but when it came to most others,

“That person’s golf is all about score-chasing.”

He disliked them and refused to play along.
In other words, he acknowledged that my golf wasn’t about chasing scores.
Therefore, he and I would swing our clubs with all our might—he sending balls primarily into the left thickets, I into the right—then trudge separately from thicket to thicket as we made our way around the course.

The other day at the Yomiuri Literary Golf Tournament, the organizers took pity on me and had Great Master Miyamoto Tomekichi accompany me around the Kawana Course.

“Do you really have to swing so hard?”

Thus did Japan’s greatest master thoroughly chastise my ferocious brand of golf—the sort unconcerned with scores.
In reality, golf divorced from scorekeeping cannot exist.
There and then I resolved to reform myself and become a disciple of Mr. Tome.

The Birth of a New Snow Country

After the war, this year I went to Niigata twice with a brief interval between autumn and winter. Before setting out on my winter trip, I had written an essay for a certain magazine about the darkness of snow country winters—how even elementary school children there came to adopt utterly resigned ways of thinking and speaking in that land where one cannot see the sun from mid-autumn until winter’s end. I sent that off by express mail and set out on my journey, but then to a traveling companion I happened to meet on the train—

“The moment you pass through this Shimizu Tunnel, the weather changes abruptly,” he declared. “On the other side of the tunnel, there’s no sun left. Dark skies hanging low, sleet tapping at the windows—day after day, that’s how it remains beyond Shimizu Tunnel all winter long. Hard to believe, but once we cross that tunnel, this sun will inevitably bid us farewell—that’s just how it is.”

he emphasized and went on to explain,

“Another distinctive feature of winter in Niigata is that the rice fields stretching as far as the eye can see transform into vast lakes.”
“Farmers harvest their crops using small boats.”

he had elaborated.
Yet when we emerged from the tunnel, sunlight streamed down.
Unlike the Kanto side, a crystalline sun blazed in a cloudless azure sky.
What’s more, not a drop of water remained in the Echigo Plain’s rice fields—let alone lakes.
Both my autumn and winter journeys proved identical.
Day after day throughout my travels, that dazzling sun burned overhead.

“It’s been like this since Showa 23.”
“Until mid-January, the sun always shines here just like in Tokyo winters.”
“The snow doesn’t start falling until after mid-January.”

The local residents explained it like this.
When I was growing up in this region, the sound of the sea could be heard all winter long, even in town.
The sea lay like a lake without a single wave; all winter long, not even the north wind blew—only the sea, the beach, and the dunes shone blindingly across the entire expanse.

Even when I was growing up, heavy snow wouldn’t begin until after mid-January—that much remains unchanged—but from mid-October until then, it was typical for drizzle and sleet to fall incessantly, the sky hanging low as the sun vanished day after day.
When the sun rarely showed its face after a snowfall, within a short time it would turn the whole town into mud.
The winter sun was something that only showed its face briefly to leave behind such ill effects.
And it instilled utterly resigned ways of thinking and speaking even in the children.

If the sun shone over snow country from mid-October to mid-January just as it did in Kanto, wouldn’t that eradicate winter darkness at its very root? Niigata along the coast basked in weather milder than even Kiryu—that inland town in the Kanto Plain—while the Kanto Plain itself saw snow about a foot deep fall two or three times yearly after mid-January. Kiryu’s snow differed from Niigata’s as powder low in moisture; even a dusting lingered stubbornly. For skiing, Kiryu’s snow proved more suitable than Niigata’s.

Could one not view the Echigo Plain and Kanto Plain as having become nearly identical in all conditions? At the very least, what I found most unbearable about being born in snow country was this anguish of being unable to see the sun from mid-autumn through the entire winter. If that sun could now be seen until mid-January just as in Tokyo’s skies, then for me, snow country would cease to be snow country—I could conceive of it no other way. One must recognize that even the sorrow of snow country boys who had profoundly resonated with Goethe—Goethe who once urged his carriage toward Italy in pursuit of sunlight—had now disappeared. Gazing up at that autumn and winter sun of snow country blazing dazzlingly yet serenely overhead day after day, I found myself compelled to feel this truth with piercing intensity.

If this weather anomaly belonged not just to Niigata but to all snow country, and if double cropping became feasible not only in Niigata but also in the rice fields of Akita and Yamagata, Japan’s food situation would undergo a transformation.
It may have been an amateurish thought, but having been born in snow country and raised in what felt like drowning in the anguish of being unable to see the sun from mid-autumn through the entire winter, when I looked up at the serene sun shining overhead day after day during winter, I could not help but conclude that snow country had ended and regard the Echigo Plain as no different from the Kanto Plain—this seemed only natural to me.
The rice fields of Kanto were now being dug up and converted into wheat fields, and soon the wheat-treading would begin—yet I found it utterly perplexing that the same couldn’t be done under that sun of Niigata.

After all, having just written about the darkness of snow country winters immediately before departing on my journey, it was only natural to be bewildered by this brightness that defied expectation—and thus I was made to feel with utmost force that the snow country that had seeped into my heart, the snow country I had grown accustomed to envisioning, had already come to an end.
I came to feel from the bottom of my heart a desire to pray for the birth of a new, bright, and abundant snow country.