Pathway to Japanese Literature

Dysentery

The uneven stone-paved thoroughfare was flanked on both sides by low thatched roofs—perhaps sixty or seventy in total. Every house, every single one, stood ancient and filthy: walls crumbling, pillars warped, neighbors leaning against each other as if barely propping one another up.
Inside the houses, smoke from burning green firewood smoldered so thickly that one couldn’t discern where objects were placed; day by day, it wound from gable to gable, crawling over the rotten roofs.
In the narrow, shallow ditches flanking both sides, rags and carrot ends sank into undulating stagnant mud, while murky bubbles resembling poisonous mushrooms bubbled up through the inky black water.

The bearded policeman from the police box, the one exceptionally tall policeman who had come as reinforcement from a neighboring village, the doctor in old Western clothes practicing near the train station located about three ri away, the deputy mayor of the village office wearing burnt-red black satin hakama trousers, and two orderlies carrying disinfection equipment—this group once again went house to house today conducting forced diagnoses.
The sky stretched limitlessly clear—so dazzlingly bright that looking up made one’s eyes ache—on a day without a single speck of dust in the air. Yet those few who ventured outdoors all wore the same worried, somber expressions, as if by prior agreement, stealing their footfalls like thieves.
At every house—this one and that one—farmers with fearful expressions and women of Ainu lineage—low-nosed, cloudy-eyed, bluish-swollen—came out to their doorways, assuming restless, awkward stances as they peered up and down the thoroughfare. Yet not a single soul lingered long.
Even the children did not raise their voices high.
Whenever the piercing scream of an infant—as if a drill had been driven into its chest—was heard, the neighbors grimaced unnaturally.
Those feigning ignorance were an emaciated local dog dragging the head of a dried salted trout, a pitch-black cat with a face as lifeless as if it had slept for centuries—muttering under its breath in the sunlight—and chickens copulating in the middle of the thoroughfare—that was about it.
The entire village grew damp, and day by day, the clatter of police boots and the clang of swords transmitted an indescribable unease into people’s hearts.

The stinging smell of carbolic acid mingled with a bone-chilling chill in the air, while under the eaves of every house, lime powder had been scattered liberally.
The horrific state of this desolate mountain village—struck by dysentery, steeped in crushing terror and heartache, too dreadful to behold, and utterly wretched—is unimaginable unless one has witnessed its reality firsthand.
Unless they fundamentally reformed the residents’ clothing, food, and shelter—their entire way of life—from the very beginning, or else burned down the entire village without delay when the first patient appeared, no matter how much effort was expended, prevention would be utterly futile.
Three or four years earlier, when the same epidemic had raged violently in a village about ten ri away from this one, the then-chief of the local police station had made a bold decision to completely block all traffic to and from the entire village.
Thanks to this measure, it did not spread to other villages, but approximately one-fourth of the residents died within a single autumn.
Admittedly, there was not a single year when any village went without one or two—or five or six—patients. But by skillfully concealing them and administering herbal decoctions like geranium root, they would eventually recover without spreading infection.
If patients were taken to doctors and confined to isolation wards, and police officers went around shouting at every house, then—as rumors spread—the epidemic would instantly rage through the entire village. This was what the villagers truly believed, which was why they feared the police more than the disease itself.

Within less than two months since the first patient had been detected, the isolation wards had become overcrowded, prompting them to requisition another solitary house in the mountain’s shadow—now filled to capacity as well. Out of a total population of around four hundred, there had been 102 patients since the initial outbreak: 25 deaths, 41 recoveries, and 36 active cases, with today’s diagnoses adding two more.
Seventy-five percent of households had patients in every home, while some families had entered the isolation wards in their entirety.

Autumn had already reached its end—the short days of late October had abruptly drawn to a close, and across the steel-colored sky sharp enough to bring frost, the Milky Way stretched pale and vast.
In the desolate emptiness of a winter-nearing night where even insect cries had long since vanished, though evening had only just fallen, every house’s doors were tightly shut—no passersby abroad, not even whispers escaping.
Crushing anxiety and heartache obscured firelight, locked gates, and constricted throats until the village stood desolate as some ruined settlement abandoned by humans decades past.
Today’s unwell faces—only such matters could have taken root in the residents’ hearts now.

In that oppressive silence—as if some dreadful thought had suddenly flashed—sparks would occasionally scatter onto the thoroughfare from the collapsing house at the northernmost end. It was a blacksmith’s workshop; the clang, clang of hammering on the anvil—resounding as if piercing through to the earth’s core—could be heard all the way to the village center.

The neighboring house belonged to the widow called Oyuu; its entrance door was locked, but firelight glowed on the two soot-blackened shoji screens of the shopfront—their surfaces here and there marred by hiragana transcriptions corrected with vermilion brushstrokes, pasted sideways and upside-down. In all the village, only four houses seemed to have any semblance of vitality: this house, the blacksmith’s workshop, the village office near the southern end, and the headman’s home—which peddled sundries, liquor, kerosene, and such. With a clatter, clatter, the heavy sound of a wagon echoed along the Ishidaka Road as an empty cargo wagon bound for the train station had just entered this village from the north. On the cargo wagon sat a groom, bundled snugly in a red blanket and sitting cross-legged. Then, shadows appeared on the shoji screens of Oyuu’s house, and a slack-voiced song, rising and falling in rhythm, could be heard.

“Purge away wickedness and grant us salvation, O Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto.”
“…You fashioned the earth and heavens of this world, and thus created husband and wife.”
“This is the beginning of this world.”
“…Line up solemnly before the *Kanrodai*.”

To the accompaniment of the song, the shadow figures on the shoji screens danced.
They made strange gestures, twisted their hips, and shifted their feet.
Some loomed large and blurred; others appeared small and distinct.

“Tsk,” the groom clicked his tongue.
“Hmph, at it again with the fox act!”

“Hey! Ain’t that Oshinba?” someone barked again loudly.
Just then, a figure tried slipping into the house, muffling their straw sandal sounds.
“Yeah…” The figure stopped under the dark eaves and answered warily, eyes darting around.
“Neighbor’s old man?”
“Yer early, ain’tcha?”

“Best hurry back ’n’ sleep.”
“Ain’t no time fer night wanderin’.”
“If prayin’ to Tenri-sama keeps the dysentery god off us, hah! What need we got fer doctors ’n’ medicine?”

“What’s it to ya? Just got a small matter with Oyuu-san, that’s all,” he said in a lowered voice, trying to placate her.

“Hmm,” she said, and with that, the cargo wagon passed by.

Oshinba soon quietly opened the door and disappeared into Oyuu’s house.
The shadow figures on the shoji screens were still dancing.
The song could still be heard.

“Through all eternity, though You cleanse the world in one sweep, none can fathom Your intent.”

“That’s how it should be—yet no one’s told us so.”
“Can’t blame folks for not knowin’, I tell ya.”

“This time, God will appear before us and impart some detailed teachings.”

Yokogawa Matsutarō was born in a village within the same prefecture—far to the south where rice fields sprawled endlessly and sericulture flourished.
His family ranked among the village's five largest landowners. Being Sakumatsu and Oan's only child—perhaps coddled from infancy—he grew frail-bodied and irresolute of spirit. Through school years he drifted without diligence or indolence, graduating from higher elementary at fifteen yet showing no initiative for further studies.
At eighteen he became a trainee clerk at the village office—precisely when Tenrikyo began storming through neighboring settlements like some divine typhoon.

One evening, Oan—timid as she was—had spoken with uncharacteristic seriousness to her husband Sakumatsu about the virtues of Tenrikyo. Matsutarō still remembered this.
Sakumatsu—a notorious miser and traditionalist who detested anything new—had at first stubbornly resisted, but after about a month underwent a complete transformation into an ardent believer. The *Shushōgi* sutras he once recited morning and evening before the Buddhist altar were replaced by the *Mikagura-uta* ritual song: “Purge away wickedness and grant us salvation.” After making a pilgrimage to the sect’s headquarters in Yamato Province—whether through his own resolve or others’ persuasion—he sold off all his land and property to fund construction of an imposing assembly hall atop a modest hill at the village center, its total cost reaching two thousand nine hundred and some-odd yen.
This became known as the Shinto Tenrikyo Church ○○ Branch.

As a result, Matsutarō and his parents were reduced to nothing but the clothes on their backs and came to live inside that assembly hall alongside the missionary.
(He had quit his job at the village office after just four months.) At first, having to dance the ritual *Mikagura-uta* together with everyone during morning and evening worship had been quite a struggle for him; whenever he complained of feeling embarrassed and hating it, he was likely scolded severely by Sakumatsu.
About half a year later, when a fire broke out nearby, his father climbed onto the assembly hall’s roof carrying a water bucket ahead of others, slipped his footing, fell, and died.
The missionary praised Sakumatsu’s virtue to the utmost, extolling him as a splendid martyr.
Then, after another half a year or so had passed, Mother Oan succumbed to cerebral anemia and died.

When his parents died, Matsutarō shed tears—but they sprang more from shock than grief.
When others offered solemn condolences, he sometimes grew distressed precisely because he wondered why he felt so little sorrow.
Even afterward, he kept living in that assembly hall, studying Tenrikyo doctrines, ritual protocols, and missionary practices—but being fundamentally timid and thus neither useful nor capable of wrongdoing, it was the very branch head who had bankrupted his family, killed his father, and caused his mother’s death that ordinarily took care of him.
Moreover, he envied no one at all.
Even when envy stirred, he lacked the drive to better himself; thus, while not starving, he hardly agonized over his lack of property.
Occasionally—when seeing elegant geisha photos in magazine frontispieces or reading scandals about wealthy heirs—he would be gripped by dangerously absurd impulses: to secretly transfer ownership of the assembly hall into his name in court-proof fashion and sell it off overnight; to murder the branch head he normally revered. Yet these rebellions only flared during those human-like whims that visited his solitary bed—come dawn, they’d already faded.

In due time, when spring arrived that year, the branch head sent six young men—Matsutarō among them—whom he had raised in that same assembly hall to the Yamato Headquarters. After training there for three months and having obtained the “Teacher” qualification, upon their return, they were each assigned designated regions within the prefecture and dispatched as missionaries.

With a face already lacking vigor and sallow in complexion—now dirtied by dust and sweat—two small bamboo baskets slung over his shoulders front and back, the hem of his indigo-patterned unlined kimono hitched high, dragging his feet as though hauling something heavy, Matsutarō first entered this village from the south on a cloudless day at summer’s scorching peak—August 10th, just as the crimson sun began its slow slide down the western mountains.
Matsutarō had reached twenty-four years—an age common enough—but being innately timid and having traversed over seven ri of unfamiliar roads alone since morning on his first solitary journey, he was exhausted to the very marrow of his soul.
Though he had grown somewhat accustomed after three or four days, with his resolve now utterly spent, a vague sorrow—like murmuring When you think about it, this journey has no purpose!—welled up alongside thick, sticky saliva in his mouth.
And so, upon entering the village entrance—half-unconsciously glaring at a gaunt dog charging him with bared teeth—he wrung his swollen brain, mustered every shred of wisdom and courage he possessed, and resolved: “First things first—I must find lodging.”
Thus his mouth hung slackly open without his notice, timid eyes darting fearfully between houses on either side—until at last, near the village’s edge when he spotted Sangokuya’s sign—a cheap lodging house—he found himself utterly devoid of hope in this world.

When he awoke the next morning, the two lodgers he’d been asked to share the room with—a man around sixty, balding and red-nosed with anxious eyes, and his daughter, a woman of twenty-four or five whose travel-weary face lacked vigor, giving her a lonely look yet who somehow still carried an air of defiance—were already gone.
(He didn’t know where they had come from or where they were going, but Matsutarō had been persuaded to buy one of the cheap brushes they peddled as a supplement to their travel funds.)—The two had already departed, and now he lay on his back in a filthy room, amid five or six patched mosquito nets, one leg splayed outside the netting.
And then—his fragile mind tormented by the woman’s breathing and restless movements from sharing the same mosquito net the previous night, having been unable to sleep until late—he forgot all about that and frantically pulled out the wallet from under his pillow to check it.
Nothing was missing.
Then again, clad only in his loincloth, he suddenly leaped out of the mosquito net, but his belongings remained as they were when he went to sleep, positioned by the wall.
He sighed in relief but checked once more just to be sure—still, nothing was missing.
He let out a soft chuckle.

"Now, what am I to do?"
Furrowing his brow into a figure-eight crease, he scratched frantically at his legs—pocked with countless mosquito bites—and his flea-ravaged flank flushed crimson, all while turning things over in his mind.
Since arriving yesterday, Matsutarō had taken an inexplicable liking to this village—likely due to the unexpectedly kind treatment from the inn’s landlady, whose left-hand fingers curled inward like burnt twigs—and now found himself considering whether to attempt missionary work here.
“Now, what am I to do?”
He posed the question to himself again and again, yet no resolution came.
“What am I to do?”
“What am I to do? What am I to do?” The more he muttered it, the more irritation prickled beneath his skin—yet still he couldn’t decide. Not that he harbored any desire to leave.
“Anyway.”
This man’s thoughts always looped back here.
“First things first—I’ll survey the village’s condition.” Having settled on this, once breakfast ended, he borrowed the inn’s geta and stepped outside.

When he had passed through the day before, he thought there might be a hundred and twenty or thirty houses, but upon counting them found only sixty-nine.
And all of them were squalid dwellings.
Matsutarō felt joy in his heart; somehow he grew emboldened.
He possessed no confidence in himself.
Even without confidence, missionary work must be done.
For this purpose, a fairly small area would be best—preferably one without too many educated people.
When he returned to the inn and promptly summoned the landlord to inquire, it turned out as expected: Tenrikyo had not yet taken root there.
Thereupon Matsutarō attempted to lay out his plan with as much solemnity as he could muster.

The landlord of Sangokuya was a man who had long served as an errand boy at the village office—a crippled man just shy of five shaku in height. Though over forty years old, he had not a single beard, and were it not for the faint wrinkles on his forehead, he might still be mistaken for a mere youth. His pinched nostrils gave his voice a distinctly nasal quality. He had been listening with a pained expression and tilted head, muttering, “Hmm, well…” but when Matsutarō finished speaking, he blurted out: “Well now, see— This year’s crops ain’t been good. What’re we s’posed to do?! If there’s coin to donate to God, better buy kerosene with it instead.”

“Well, you see...” Matsutarō said with a timid look,

“It ain’t about folks spendin’ no money at all.”
“I ain’t that sorta person.”
“You’re payin’ the lodgin’ fee your own self, lettin’ folks listen free for a week or ten days—that’s what this here’s about, them precious teachings you’re offerin’ now.”

The landlord, who had been unenthusiastic, only became convinced after being paid a week’s advance, and from then on moderated his language somewhat.
In any case, it was settled that they would gather the neighbors starting tonight.
Waiting for nightfall felt both interminable and fraught with anxiety.
The gathering consisted of twelve or thirteen women and children, along with a young carpenter’s apprentice named Sanda and Jūbei the blacksmith.
Despite the heat, Matsutarō wore a crested cotton haori and, while wafting smoke from cedar-leaf mosquito repellent with a stiff fan, earnestly lectured in a ponderous yet feeble voice—beginning with the life story of the founder Shimamura Mikiko and proceeding through each tenet of doctrine, straining to inject what cadence he could muster.

“Haha, so that person also married into a family?” asked the woman who had come holding an infant.

“That’s correct.” Matsutarō wiped the sweat from his brow with a hand towel. “When Mikiko-sama turned fourteen years old, she entered into marriage from her family home in Shōyashiki Village to the Nakayama family in Sanmaida Village.”
“A divine account indeed.”
“At that time, the various furnishings she brought—chests of drawers, long storage chests—all amounting to fourteen loads—for one load equals one porter’s burden—so plainly speaking, it was fourteen porter-loads in total.”
“My! How divine!” she remarked with unexpected admiration. “Why now—around these parts—even our village headman’s wife has only three chests total... no—three altogether! And one o’ those’s just an old long-storage chest!”

On the second night, not a single woman appeared; instead came the children who had dozed off halfway through the previous night's talk, accompanied by Jūbei the blacksmith, Sanda, and two or three companions. When the young man began muttering disparagements, the one-eyed Jūbei glared with bulging eyes and barked at him. Then he alone remained until late into the night.

On the third day, with rain arriving around noon and mosquitoes confined indoors by lamplight time, Jūbei came alone after buying barley crackers worth about five sen. Since the main teachings had been covered, this night saw Jūbei chiefly posing various questions—what becomes of humans after death, whether Tenrikyo adherents must abandon temple visits, whether Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto might manifest in human form like Kannon with a Fish Basket to save mortal souls—all doctrinal matters queried with a sternly formal expression. Though Matsutarō's hesitant answers left much unresolved, they appeared to give Jūbei some measure of comprehension.

“Well then, Teacher,” (and from this moment on, he began to address Matsutarō as such,) “seems I’ve come to understand a fair bit of Tenrikyo’s teachings myself.”
“Jesus is from the West, Buddha from India—both are imports. But Tenri-sama’s a god made in Japan, right?”

“That’s correct.”
“After all, it’s best if it’s from one’s own country.”
“Moreover—well now—there’s Kuninotokotachi-no-Mikoto, Kunisatsuchi-no-Mikoto, Toyokumunu-no-Mikoto, Ōtomabe-no-Mikoto, Omotaru-no-Mikoto, Kashikone-no-Mikoto, Izanagi-no-Mikoto, Izanami-no-Mikoto, and then Ōhirume-no-Mikoto, Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto—these ten deities, you see, each possesses splendid virtues. But our august Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto—how wondrous it is!—embodies every last one of these ten deities’ virtues in full.”

“I see.”
“So then, Teacher—you said if even one believer crops up in this village, you won’t go nowhere else. That the truth?”
“Don’t hear that promise, seems mighty queer to me.”

“That’s the truth.”

“The truth?”

“That’s the truth.”

“So it’s truly the truth?”

“Well, why would I lie about such a thing?” Matsutarō said, but being pressed so insistently, he found himself hesitating.

“Teacher, in that case—” Jūbei suddenly thrust his knee forward.
“I’ll do it.”
“From tonight.”

“A believer?” His dull eyes suddenly lit up.

“That’s right.”
“What else could it be?!”
“Mr. Jūbei, is that really true?” Matsutarō exclaimed in a voice brimming with astonishment and joy.

On the third day, a believer emerged—a turn of events he had never anticipated. No, when had he ever possessed the conviction that his proselytizing would yield a believer?

This blacksmith Jūbei—known as the One-Eyed Blacksmith among the children—was a burly man nearing six shaku in height, his face covered in a thicket of needle-like bristles, his left eye long gone.
He was said to be fifty-two this year, having previously lived in a town some ten ri away where he had excelled at forging crude tools like machetes and hatchets—though his kitchen knives were notorious for their brittle edges. Having worn out his welcome there, he had moved to this village five years prior.
An outsider first and foremost—stubborn, headstrong, and constitutionally incapable of flattery—he remained generally ill-liked by the villagers.
Nursing perpetual grudges, Jūbei grew ever more arrogant, taking pride in his ability to pen simple letters with his own hand.
When it came to disputing village expense allocations beyond official regulations, he would invariably be the first to voice complaints.
Then came Matsutarō.
To Jūbei’s ears, his reasoning held no flaws; Matsutarō knew far more names of deities than the village temple’s drunken priest.
There seemed nothing about Tenri-sama’s divine grace that he did not grasp.
Very well—I’ll convert first and yank the nose hairs right out of those villagers, Jūbei had resolved that first night in bed after hearing Matsutarō speak.
To be sure, Jūbei had two distant relatives living far away who had already embraced Tenrikyo—he had known this through letters for some time—and when misfortune struck his younger brother’s household the year before last, people from those relatives had come urging him to convert as well.
Yet he had not so much as hinted at this to Matsutarō.

The next morning, Matsutarō promptly sent a letter addressed to the XX Branch.
Four or five days passed, and a reply arrived.
The reply letter congratulated Matsutarō on swiftly gaining a believer, encouraged the prospects of his missionary work, granted his request to reside in the village, and added that henceforth they would send five yen each month as missionary expenses.
Matsutarō showed it to Jūbei and delighted him, then initiated such a discussion.

“What do you think, Mr. Jūbei? If I stay at Sangokuya, what with all the charges, they take fifteen sen from me each day. That adds up to four yen and fifty sen a month—leaving me just fifty sen for pocket money, you see. It’s rather a problem. As someone serving God, I don’t mind about food—millet rice would do—so isn’t there somewhere I could lodge much cheaper? What am I to do, Mr. Jūbei? I’ve only you to rely on…”

“Hmm, right!” Jūbei gravely tilted his head and crossed his arms like logs of firewood.
Four yen and fifty sen per month was indeed high for this village.
There were two or three houses—that one and that one—that might lodge him for even cheaper than that.
However, Jūbei detested lowering his head to ask others for favors, regardless of the circumstances.

The next morning, Jūbei came saying a house had been found.
It was the house of Oyuu the widow next to the blacksmith’s workshop—three yen a month—but in exchange, he said one would have to endure meals of eighty percent millet rice.
Contrary to his rough exterior, what a kind old man—Matsutarō thought gratefully.

"So... this widow Oyuu—is she living completely alone?"

“That’s right.”

“I see.”
“So she must be quite old, I suppose?”

“Hahaha!”
“No need to worry, Teacher.”
“She’s forty-one, but the ugliest hulking woman in the village—plus, she’ll down a whole *shō* of liquor and turn into such a dyspeptic drunkard she’d out-tussle any man,” Jūbei said, aiming to intimidate. But when he saw Matsutarō’s eyes widen in shock, he abruptly shifted his tone,

“Even so… she’s honest at heart—all said and done, an easygoing woman.”

Strike while the iron is hot—he moved into Oyuu’s house that very day.
When Oyuu—breaking green firewood in the hearth and huffing as she blew on it—saw Matsutarō timidly entering behind Jūbei, she suddenly—

“You’re the one who’ll be lettin’ me stay?” she barked bluntly, like a scold.

“That’s correct.”
“As for me…” Matsutarō, slightly flustered, launched into his introductory greetings with earnest formality when—

“What’s the fuss? Cough up three ryō each month, and I’ll let ya stay till ya croak.”

With the intention of celebrating the move, Jūbei bought five gō of sake.
The two urged Oyuu to join Tenrikyo as well.

“What’s the use? For a wicked woman like me, gods and buddhas ain’t got no purpose ’less it’s my time to die.”
“What’s it matter? If your own place wasn’t like this, it’d be trouble for ya, wouldn’t it? Since I’m like this—a drunk who ain’t got no right to fuss—any hole’ll do.”
“Well then—long as my drinkin’ don’t vex ya, any corner’ll suit.”

With her teeth stained where black dye had flaked off, Oyuu bared them in a vulgar grin and laughed—a man’s raucous “Wahahaha!”
On both the blacksmith’s gate and this house’s gate, nameplates measuring about five sun tall—glass-fronted and inscribed with “Shinto Tenrikyo Church”—were hung.

A few days later, Matsutarō—with nothing better to do—wandered out of his lodgings and climbed Eastern Hill alone along field paths dotted here and there with red lilies in bloom.
A charmless hillock resembling an overturned manjū hat. Where the winding path ended at its crest, eight or nine thick cedar trees stood towering over a dilapidated Atago Shrine—two ken square—that lay in ruins.

When he sat down on the shrine’s steps, he found himself directly facing Western Hill—slightly lower than his current position but mirroring its shape.
Forming a shallow depression between them was a thoroughfare that ran straight through its base—a desolate path of this transient world, dusty white, strewn with stones, and little traveled.
Both hills were cultivated from their mid-slopes, the fields forming gentle gradients that encroached up to the back doors of the houses.
The village lay spread out below at a glance.

On that thoroughfare too，in days of old，telegraph poles once stood in orderly rows，and every day around noon，the lively notes of a trumpet would ring through the clear mountain air as red and yellow painted Entaro carriages came charging vigorously into this village from both north and south.
The blare of that trumpet had not been heard even once in twenty years.
Ever since a train station had been built in the neighboring village，traffic had ceased entirely，and even the telegraph poles had been removed within a few days.

In that era, the village also had three or four proper inns and nearly ten rickshaws.
Cargo wagons and packhorses were kept as if every household had them, fieldwork was neglected like women’s side work, and only livelihoods catering to travelers thrived with ample income and bustling activity.
When summer came, ice sellers’ shops were also set up.
All of that now remains only faintly in the elders’ recollections, and year by year, the village declined as if a straw fire were dwindling away.
Livelihoods were taken away, taxes grew higher, expenses rose, and only children increased in number.
The owner of the sole remaining rickshaw had died five years prior, leaving no one to pull it; with its shaft broken, that rickshaw had remained visible by the well behind his house until just recently.
The large two-story building that had once been an inn—its second-floor latticework broken and warped—now hosted mice playing there even in daylight.
Now, Sangokuya—a lodging where guests paid for their own firewood—was the only one remaining.

Matsutarō knew nothing of such matters. With his pallid, listless face—slack as though recovering from a nervous illness—bathed in the dazzling afternoon sun, he gazed down at the village with an air of curiosity when suddenly, the sensation of surveying that village from the hill where Ikemura’s father had built his church rose unbidden in his chest.

Aimless fantasies surged forth all at once. Perhaps due to his foolishness, his sweaty, lifeless complexion gained a faint flush, and his dull eyes began to glimmer. He pictured in his heart a great joy he had never even dreamed of until now—the dawn of victory when he alone had fully converted this village through his own power.

"The church will rise there!" he declared, fixing his gaze resolutely upon Western Hill’s peak.

“Yes, there it shall rise!”
The moment this thought formed, there vividly appeared before Matsutarō’s eyes that pure white great hall—majestic as a painted castle, with its innumerable windows towering imposingly.
Upon the tip of its lofty, soaring canopy—there the morning sun would cast its first light, and there the evening sun would suspend its last…

He then began imagining how he might raise and instruct the neighborhood boys he scarcely knew—just as he himself had been reared in Ikemura’s church—and, seizing upon the absence of bystanders, practiced adopting a solemn bearing toward them.

“To begin with, Tenrikyo is—”

Adopting the tone and manner he had been taught by the branch chief, he glared at the stone before him.

“It is precisely because of this base mind called selfishness that humans conceive all manner of wicked schemes.
The source of sin is selfishness—it is selfishness that brings disorder to this world.
Is that not so?
By purging and purifying that base mind from human hearts, we shall create a true paradise of equality for all four classes—noble and commoner alike.
That is the primary objective of this religion.
Understood?!”

Even as he spoke these words, he shifted his gaze to look at Western Hill’s summit, then peered down at the village lying at the base of the depression.
It was the same exhilaration venerated missionaries of antiquity must have felt when they first gazed upon the lands of heathens.
The thatch-roofed houses, lined up in two rows as if crushed, from which the crowing of chickens could be heard at intervals.
There was not even a customary breeze.
The mid-August sunlight overflowed as though dancing.
When he came to his senses, not a single figure was visible in the fields.
It was exactly the fourteenth day of the Bon Festival.

Matsutarō, somehow feeling as though there was purpose in life, inhaled deeply, deeply, the cedar resin-scented air.
But after a moment—perhaps because his eyes had grown tired from the dazzling light—his mind began to grow somewhat restless.

“Just you wait!”
“Just you wait!”

Having blurted this out impulsively, he startled to his feet and began pacing around the base of the cedar trees with a deliberately excited gait.
Then, tripping over a thick tree root creeping along the ground, in that moment the still-new geta’s thong snapped clean through.
He clicked his tongue in frustration and squatted down, but the fantasy had vanished without a trace.
He tore the hand towel hanging at his waist and, after a long struggle, managed to thread it through.
And trudged down the mountain.

There was a millet field where the ears had begun to emerge.
The leaves rustled,

“Mr. Teacher!”

A youthful girl’s voice suddenly reached his ear nearby in a teasing tone.
Matsutarō halted abruptly and darted his eyes around, scanning his surroundings.
No one was visible.
A millet ear flew swiftly and struck his chest.

“Who’s there?”

He called out in a somewhat eerie manner.
Not a rustle could be heard.

“Who’s there?”

Even after calling twice and receiving no response, he forced a wry smile and started to walk when—

“Hohoho.”

A clear laugh rang out, and the face of a young girl wearing a white hand towel appeared above the millet stalks several yards away.

“What’s this—Otsune-chan?!”

“Hohoho,” she laughed again. “Mr. Teacher, you ain’t doin’ that fox dance right! Wanna dance with me tonight? Bon’s startin’ tonight.”

“Heh heh,” laughed Matsutarō.
And he urgently looked around.

“Now, Mr. Teacher,” teased Otsune, her round, sparkling eyes utterly devoid of guile.

She was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, dark-skinned, cheerful and guileless young girl, the second daughter of the neighborhood sweetshop.
Whenever Matsutarō passed by, if she happened to be at the shopfront, she would invariably tease him with those eyes.
She would sometimes throw peanut shells at him.

He suddenly discovered a different, entirely different world brimming with newfound purpose within Otsune’s round, sparkling eyes. And before he knew it, he too had stepped into the millet field. Otsune stood there laughing. Matsutarō too drew near, a spasmodic smile twitching at his lips and his heart racing.

Ever since this incident, Matsutarō grew strangely restless, and whenever he had a spare moment, he would saunter along the field paths with his hands tucked into his sleeves. When a white hand towel became visible in the distance along the path he walked, he would already be brimming with joy. If he pretended not to notice and walked on, the girls would inevitably tease him as they passed by.

“Heehee.”

And thus—well—he laughed just enough to avoid damaging his own dignity.
And then, when he returned home, his appetite became unusually hearty.

He grew close with the people in the neighborhood. His work was to write letters for those people. When evening came, he would go to visit the blacksmith’s shop. Otherwise, he would meet Otsune at their promised spot. When Oyuu was invited to some houses for feasts where drinks were served, there were times when he would sneak the girl in. After the girl left, he would sit alone by the hearth grinning a repulsive grin, and sure enough, Oyuu would come staggering home dead drunk, hurling abuse at nobody in particular.

“What the hell is this bastard? Why’re you in this house?”
“Ugh—this fox bastard! What’s your game?”
“Sleep?!”
“You little shit!”
“Shut up, bastard!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Why don’t you shut the hell up?!”
“You beast! Beggar! Leper! Tenri monk!”
“Get out now, you damn beast!”

Suddenly spewing this filth, Oyuu collapsed with a thud onto the entranceway’s wooden floor.

“There, there.”

With those words, Matsutarō dragged her into the futon like handling a stepmother and pulled the quilt over her. He’d learned her rhythms in mere days. However much she cursed, she never actually fought. Even after bedding down, Oyuu would rant freely for five or ten minutes until her fury spent itself into peaceful snores. Come morning, she’d be calm as dew. Sometimes she apologized for the night before; sometimes she didn’t.

Outside the gate of this house and that of the blacksmith’s workshop, no signboards reading “Shinto Tenrikyo Church” had been erected.
Matsutarō did not particularly agonize over this.
When occasionally invited to neighborhood evening gatherings, he would deliver his obligatory sermons.
These too were given in a tone that suggested it mattered little either way.
One day, the wife from Yaseumakui came requesting holy water, saying her child had stomach troubles.
Three or four days later, she returned with barley crackers bought as thanks.
It later emerged this had been dysentery.

When the 210th day arrived, households with horses went to the mountains at Tomarikake to cut bush clover for fodder.
When that young man fell ill in the mountains and saw a doctor, they said it was dysentery, so he was confined to the isolation ward.
Even ordinarily, this was a destitute village—remarkable even among Iwate Prefecture’s many impoverished mountain hamlets—and now, with this year’s harvest faring poorly and spirits already low, this incident cast a shadow over every face in the village.
One by one, another and another—until at last the abominable plague had spread throughout the entire village.
Terrible anxiety fanned the flames of superstition among villagers who already believed in shamans and foxes even in ordinary times.
The demand for holy water swelled like that for a liquor store’s sake.
Within a little over a month, eleven new households had become believers.
Matsutarō found the world growing more intriguing.

But as the disease's rampancy gradually intensified, he himself was not in robust health, and even he could no longer avoid feeling anxious.
What he recalled then was something from five or six years prior—perhaps around the time he had been working at Ikemura’s village office—when he had read in a newspaper advertisement for Kōsatsu Grape Wine that it had efficacy in preventing infectious diseases.
He began to say such things.
“Tenri-sama likes grape wine.”
“If you offer what he likes and pray proper-like, you wouldn’t catch no disease.”

After all, fearing the eyes of the police officers, the women who came to receive holy water after waiting for nightfall began producing small nondescript bags to buy grape wine.
Matsutarō offered it upon the altar, performed the prayers, danced the ritual dance, reverently mixed a few drops into the holy water, and sent them home.
What remained was for him to drink.
On the kitchen shelf in Oyuu’s house stood eighteen or nineteen empty grape wine bottles lined up.

What had happened? Even the blacksmith’s sound ceased unusually early tonight.
Beneath the high-flowing Milky Way, the village lay silent like a corpse.
A moment ago, a single lantern had wandered out from what seemed to be the village office’s gate—swaying unsteadily like a will-o’-the-wisp—and disappeared after about fifty meters.

In the large hearth of Oyuu’s house, flames licked upward in flickering tongues, painting red and black patterns across the varied faces gathered around it.
Three or four neighborhood women sat there, Oshinba among them—the last to arrive.

The prayers and ritual dances had concluded.
Matsutarō lay thoroughly drunk in a slovenly heap, legs splayed carelessly across the floor.
His unkempt head lolled forward with a heavy sway.
Behind him lay an overturned wine bottle amid scattered pickled dishes and shattered teacups.
“Does it pain you so? You oughta lie down, Oyuu-san.”

said a woman with a withered face.

“Nothin’ wrong!”

Saying this, Oyuu, supporting herself at the waist with her right hand, reached out to poke at the smoldering embers in the hearth. Her disheveled hair in wild tangles, that ruddy large face bore the agony of suppressed pain. Though she was a shrew who had taken four husbands by forty-one and driven them all out, ever since her foster son Kinsaku had died of tuberculosis, her sharp tongue hadn’t dulled—yet an indefinable decline had begun to show. Disheveled hair now bore several streaks of white.

“It’s the truth, I tell ya.”
“Lying down’ll cure ya,” Oshinba chimed in.

“Nothin’ wrong!” Oyuu said again.
And for the third time since earlier, she appended the same excuse in an equally listless tone: “In the evenin’, I tripped over the tree stump in the yard and took a spill. That’s why my back’s killin’ me.”

“Let me give it a rub,” said Oshinba.

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong!”

“Wahaha.” With a sluggish laugh, Matsutarō raised his head.

“Hahaha.”
“Get drunk… wanna sleep,” she sang out, “sleep, then what comes next?”
“Huh? What was it again?”
“Hahaha.”
“Drive out evil ’n’ save us, we beg Ya.”
“Hahaha.” She swayed again.

“Mr. Teacher’s soused,” whispered one wrinkled woman to her neighbor.

“Do it proper-like.”
“Wanna scram?” she said to Oshinba beyond.

“Ain’t time yet,” Oyuu muttered as if to herself.

“Hey! Woman of the house! Why ain’t ya drinkin’ tonight?” Matsutarō raised his face again.
His tongue wouldn’t move properly.

“Hmm.”

“Hahaha.”
“Well then, shall I dance?”
“No—drunk—completely drunk.”
“Ha.”
“The gods have appeared in this world, huh?”
“Hahaha.” He made strange gestures while remaining seated.

The heavy footsteps of four or five people drew near outside.
The woman with the withered face was first to prick up her ears.

“They’re sending someone else to the isolation ward again.”

“Who d’you think?”

“It’s Otsune-chan, I reckon,” Oshinba whispered, lowering her voice.
“Earlier, when I was comin’ here, the police officers went to their house.”
“During today’s inspection, someone hid in the shed out back—must’ve been someone who told on them.”
“She’s been lookin’ poorly since yesterday.”

“So Otsune-chan’s caught it too,” Matsutarō slurred under his breath—and instantly every eye in the room darted furtively toward him.
Oyuu’s eyeballs glared sharply.

Matsutarō hung his head, drooled, and groaned a guttural "Ugh...".

The footsteps faded into the distance.

"We should head back," said the woman with the withered face, rising first.
Matsutarō thudded down, collapsing like crumbling earth as he lay.

After that, about an hour passed.

Matsutarō blinked awake.
He was cold.
The hearth fire was dying out.
With a violent shudder, he trembled and tried to half-rise—and there before his eyes lay Oyuu’s large form.
Had she fallen asleep—she didn’t stir.
Pressed her right cheek flat against the wooden floor, she turned her face toward the hearth.
A faint firelight flickered frightfully, casting its wavering glow over her.

A different coldness spread through Matsutarō’s entire body.

Look at Oyuu’s face!
Clenching her teeth, tightly shutting her eyes, the muscles at the corners of her eyes twitching spasmodically.
Her hair remained disheveled, her clothes still half-on...

An icy terror struck Matsutarō’s chest like an axe.
He now, for the first time since birth, came face to face with the ugliness of existence stripped of all pretense.
A forty-year-old woman ravaged by drink, barren, her repulsive visage!

Matsutarō did not know of Oyuu’s suffering.

“Ugh… ugh… ugh…”

Oyuu groaned.
Her eyes began to open.
For some reason he thought—Matsutarō rolled over again, lay down, shut his eyes, and held his breath.

Oyuu groaned two or three times, her body tensing as if to rise. Her lower abdomen ached; she couldn’t endure the blockage in her bowels. While stealing glances at Matsutarō’s sleeping form, she moved heavily around the bedside and put on her wooden clogs—but the pitiful smallness and shabbiness of that sleeping figure stirred a feeling of compassion in Oyuu’s heart. If I were gone, how would he manage to eat? No sooner had she thought this than a sudden, inexplicable fury stabbed at her heart.

“You damn liar! Tenri this and shit that...”

Just this much, Oyuu shouted in a pained voice. And then she left through the back door.

He bolted upright with a start.
And without looking back, he rushed into the next room and, before even pulling out the futon, crawled inside it.

Before long, Oyuu returned.
Matsutarō, who should have been sleeping, was nowhere to be seen there.
Supporting her stomach with both hands and grimacing fiercely, Oyuu stood rigid as a stick—but when she thought Matsutarō had overheard what she’d said on her way out, an inexpressible fury erupted alongside her physical agony.

“You beast!” came a hoarse roar.
“You beast!
“Fox!”
“Liar!”
“Tenri monk!”
“Listen up! I’ve got the dysentery!”
“Bastard!”
“Liar!”
“Bastard!”
“Guh…”

The thud of Oyuu collapsing.

Inside the futon, Matsutarō lay as though he had forgotten how to move his limbs—didn't so much as twitch.
As if every last lifeline had snapped at once—into a dark, dark, deep, deep, bottomless hole his solitary soul fell like a stone, falling, falling.
And from his tightly closed eyes, tears overflowed like a waterfall.
A phrase like 'like a waterfall' must be what one uses to describe such a moment.
Even when held back, they overflow.
He did not even try to hold them back.
The gnawed futon lining, the pillow—soak, soak, soak........

(Manuscript completed December 4, 1908)

[Unpublished during the author's lifetime · November–December 1908 draft]