Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

“Serves you right!”

Poor thing—he finally fell into ruin.
Retribution came.
It served him right.

In this freezing cold，he was wearing two carefully worn hemp summer kimonos… “Lend me two yen.”
“Look who it is—you… With even your voice trembling—I suppose one layer would leave you freezing—I felt some sympathy—but if you’re going to shiver anyway，why not drop this absurd act of layering two summer kimonos? Never heard of such nonsense.”
“And what’s this ‘lend me two yen’? What kind of farce is that?”
“If you’re asking either way，you should go big—‘Lend me two thousand yen’—shouldn’t you?”
“First off—that’s more like you.”

Seeing you—who once sold at Yamako—in such a wretched state, even someone like me might have shed a tear… No—it didn’t come.
As if they would… You’ve fallen quite far, Mr. Kawanashi—serves you right.
Ah, serves you right… he sneered with a laugh.
He didn’t feel the slightest surprise.
What—surprised? Not a chance.
He’d seen it coming.
I had clearly seen it coming.

“Listen.”
“I’ll tell you.”
“…When I withdrew from you, I’d already foreseen this ‘present state’ of yours.”
“That’s exactly why I cut ties.”
“You seem to think you drove me out—but no.”
“I was the one who abandoned you.”
“‘That guy’s beyond saving,’ I thought—washed my hands of it all.”
“My heart raced imagining your impending ruin—I waited for this prediction to hit true.”
“And hit true it did.”
“Serves you right!”

“By the way, you took a real liking to this phrase ‘the present state’ I used earlier, didn’t you? Flaunting it left and right at those national branch manager conferences.”
“At those times, you’d go on as if you alone had brought about ‘the present state’ through your own efforts—listening to that, I felt insulted… no—rather, it was downright laughable.”
“What do you mean, through your own efforts…?”
“Now that we’ve come to this, even someone as stubborn as you would have to admit—it was all my doing…”
“Take for example—whether it was that brainchild of recruiting branch managers or the newspaper advertisements—most of the ideas were all mine…”
“Well now—I’ll let you hear it all… bit by bit.”

II

There was a time when… no—I remember—it was six years ago… A book titled *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō*—a title alone that must’ve chilled you to the bone—was published.

I have not forgotten—nor have you, I imagine—that flimsy, grubby book with its blue cloth binding and black-lettered title, a 148-page thing riddled with two or three typos per page… While it did contain some truths—no—precisely because of that, you panicked all the more, throwing yourself into buying up every copy with absurd sums of money and manpower.

Back when I was a newspaperman—or rather, since no better term comes to mind, let’s say president of a newspaper company if you prefer—I had spent years attacking others. Given the karmic irony of now being savagely attacked myself, one might expect at least a wry smile of composure. Yet you—devoid of even a speck of such grace—flew into such a frenzy that you personally raced through every bookstore in town, even ransacking used bookshops to buy up every copy.

Looking back, I had assumed a book exposing the affairs of such a petty, small-minded man would never sell well—yet contrary to expectations, to put it in exaggerated terms, they say it went through sixteen reprints in the blink of an eye. You probably don’t know this, but the first edition was 1,500 copies, and thereafter they reprinted it in batches of 500 each time.

“—Why on earth would a book like this sell?”

Even the publisher found it baffling—but there was nothing baffling about it at all.
It sold because you bought it.
As books vanished the moment they were released, the publisher, though scratching their heads in bewilderment, kept reprinting them regardless.
When the reprinted books came out, you would buy them all up again.
The publisher would reprint again.
……In this battle of selling and buying, you lost outright, of course—and since you couldn’t even tear up the stockpiled books to reuse as wrapping paper, even you were at your wit’s end and finally hit upon self-publishing *Kawanashi Tanzō’s Inspiring Tales*.

However, this sold so poorly it bordered on absurdity, resulting in him glossing over it through mass donations to schools, government offices, and organizations. Superficially, it kept up appearances, but in hindsight, it was an utter farce.
After all, criticism comes easier than praise—and crude as it was, *The Truth About...* had a peculiar appeal in its very prose.
Since we’re on the subject, I’ll insert that excerpt here.

——Given that his words were founded on principles of nonsense and lies from the start, they could not be trusted—but according to his claims, his grandfather belonged to a family line of spearmen for generations who had served Lord Mizuno, the feudal lord of Bizen-Okayama.

In the time of his fifth-generation ancestor, Kawanashi Man’emon, such an incident occurred…

At that time, Man’emon was stationed in Osaka and served as custodian of the warehouse residence.
His duty was to borrow necessary funds for the domain from warehouse agents.

However, despite the year’s end drawing ever nearer, the warehouse agent Hirano-ya kept making excuses and flatly refused to provide the funds.
With the entire household unable to see through the year unless funds were remitted to Edo by year’s end, Man’emon grew utterly desperate. He flattered and bribed Hirano-ya’s clerk with various gifts while pleading earnestly—but they would not hear him out. In the end, when he asked what more they wanted him to say—

“The manner of your request is improper—that’s why we cannot fulfill it.”

came the retort.

“I must beg to differ,”
“How dost thou dare claim this humble one’s manner of entreaty is improper? Upon what grounds dost thou speak thus?”

As Man’emon confrontationally pressed closer,

“You do not lower your hands when entreating me regarding your lord’s crucial matter.
“Under proper circumstances, you would press both palms firmly to the floor and lower your forehead in supplication when making such a request, yet…”

he was admonished.
The instant these words fell, Man’emon pressed his forehead to the tatami mat,

“—I beg you to forgive this country bumpkin’s blunder.”

He apologized, pressing his seething chest nearly to the tatami mat.

Then the clerk,

“Stay like that for a while…”

Then, clearing his throat above Kawanashi Man’emon’s skylight, he said:

“Now you understand how to make a proper request, do you?”

“Ha…”

Man’emon turned crimson and clung to the tatami mats.

“Ha ha ha…”
“Teaching someone how to beg and then lending them precious money—such a thing is unheard of in this world.”
“However—you aside—since it would be heartless to abandon your master, I suppose I’ll lend it to you.”
“You may raise your head now—that’s acceptable enough.”

The moment Man’emon raised his head, he thought to cut down his opponent and slit his own belly.
But no—he reconsidered, thinking his lord’s pressing matter was paramount and that his own life should not end in such a place. Enduring the humiliation, he successfully carried out his duty at the time, soon resigned from service, voluntarily left his stipend behind, relocated to Hiroshima, and became a man who took up the measuring scoop…

For three generations prior—that is up until his grandfather’s era—the family had maintained considerable assets through commerce and farming while living comfortably without hardship; however upon reaching his father Shinzuke’s generation they faced changing times where despite attempting various ventures each diverging from their aspirations they gradually lost their wealth until after inheriting what little remained following births of eight children Kawanashi Tanzō arrived as ninth youngest on June seventeenth Keiō three leaving them destitute.

Shinzuke worked as a laborer, and Tanzō—once old enough to understand—was abruptly made to push the cart his father pulled. But one day, Shinzuke, for reasons unknown, told Tanzō about their ancestor Man’emon.

Reflecting on his father’s intent in specifically choosing him—the youngest child whom none of his older siblings had yet heard this story—Tanzō felt a surge of determination; his ancestors had suffered unparalleled shame for money.
"Alright, I’ll…"—and with that resolve, an unexpected force welled up in his hands pushing the cart, enough to startle his father Shinzuke.

At sixteen, Tanzō left Hiroshima and, layering dreams of success at each lodging, stepped onto Osaka’s soil.
It was Meiji 15.

He was quickly hired by a medicine wholesaler in Dōshōmachi, but growing disgusted with the spiritless servitude of his employment, he sought connections to beg for a position as a live-in student at the Kōseikan of Godai Tomoatsu, the political entrepreneur who wielded considerable influence in Osaka at the time.

Godai took one look at Tanzō’s shifty-eyed, vulgar face and immediately resolved not to hire him. However, after making him come eight times for nothing and keeping him waiting for five hours, he felt obliged to at least say a few words.

“What exactly is your ambition?”

When asked, Tanzō promptly—

“I want to be rich.”

he answered.

“—I see.”
“Then you’d better go elsewhere.”
“I currently have one million yen in debt.”
“This debt will never be repaid—not even if I die.”
“Do you think someone like me could teach you the path to becoming rich?”
“Bwahahaha!”

Having stopped laughing, Godai,

“Get out.”

he said.

Tanzō subsequently drifted from one menial job to another, never staying long enough to warm his seat—at twenty he was fined seven yen for some offense or another, and at twenty-one ten yen.

Thus finding Osaka somehow unlivable, Tanzō fled to Tokyo. Within three days of wandering Tokyo seeking work, his meager funds ran out. Spotting a signboard for “Shinto Research” hanging from the eaves of a grimy, rundown house in Hongōdaimachi—though he had no idea what “Shinto Research” entailed—he tumbled inside. By then, he was so pitifully starved and exhausted that he could not even muster a tearful voice to beg them to take him in as a live-in student. Mocked for his speech—a mix of Hiroshima dialect and Osaka inflections—he spent three months there before joining a band of Freedom Party activists. To phrase it nobly, he traveled through various regions participating in speech campaigns led by figures like Kawakami Otojirō and Itō Chiyū… but in truth, he had merely been hired as an itinerant laborer for a touring troupe. Having quickly abandoned any prospects of prosperity, he trailed along with the troupe for about six months before finally fleeing back to Osaka.

With the money from selling off belongings he had brought without permission, he purchased a single rickshaw and—dressed in a long-sleeved happi coat, padded leggings, and a black round sedge hat—trudged into view at the rickshaw pullers’ gathering spot by Minamiji Ditch. There, in that den of dazed rickshaw pullers, Tanzō’s eyes immediately lit up; assimilating to their rough ways required no effort at all.

Whenever he spotted a country bumpkin customer, he would approach them, offering to tour them around Osaka’s famous spots for five sen…
Then, rattling around the city while giving dubious explanations of the sights, he would deliver them to an inn and threaten, “The guided tour costs five sen per location—I explained sixty spots, so pay up three yen.”
Even when a policeman happened to pass by at an inopportune moment, Tanzō didn’t back down and would never settle for less than one yen.
At the time, the standard fare from the ditch side to Kaizuka was thirty-six sen, and there was no shortage of rickshaw pullers who would run all the way to Mount Kōya for ninety sen.

However, when regulations targeting dazed rickshaw pullers were soon enacted and frequent crackdowns occurred at the gathering spot by the ditch, even Tanzō could no longer remain. After floundering about for a time, he became a contracted rickshaw puller for the Osaka Daily News.
With a dutiful expression, he crouched in the entrance, his speech abruptly shifting to polite formality—but it suited him unexpectedly well.

On a certain rainy day, after about a year of ferrying the journalists there back and forth between assignments and the company entrance—during which he had thoroughly absorbed their inner workings and tricks—Tanzō’s ambition suddenly began to smolder. Alright, I’ll become a top reporter…, he resolved, his rain-lashed eyes glinting with determination. But leaping straight from contracted rickshaw puller to journalist was as implausible as a doctor’s errand-runner claiming to practice medicine himself; seeing no hope in such a path, Tanzō earnestly resolved instead to found his own newspaper—a vision he rattled along with every day.

It was one year later that he rented the second floor of a rice cake shop by Yokobori Sujikai Bridge for three yen a month and started publishing a dubious newspaper called the Semba Newspaper from this office. Though he had painstakingly saved up over three years as a rickshaw puller, his capital remained meager from the start—the circulation barely reached three hundred copies. He distributed the first three issues for free, but by the fourth issue, he could no longer pay the printing company. Not only that, but though he had been a rickshaw puller at their gate, Tanzō—virtually illiterate and uneducated—working alone could hardly shape articles into proper form or obtain advertisements, soon plunging into financial ruin. The one who rescued him was Kozaya Bō, who would prove instrumental in Tanzō’s eventual rise to prominence. Kozaya was a man who had once studied at elite institutions, traveled to Shanghai, and even supported himself through literary work. At the time, he ran a modest printing business in an unspecified part of Tosabori…

First，it was an inoffensive approach to writing.
No matter how caustic it might later become—and indeed，it had to be to properly “expose” anything—you should have been able to stomach it up to that point.
Admittedly，having those two fines exposed must have stung somewhat…

It didn’t seem to contain any lies.
No—there was one instance.
The claim that Kozaya Bō had studied at a prestigious institution—that was a complete lie.
Having graduated from a prestigious institution—not that it was anything to boast about or helped in practical matters… especially now that… well, it hardly mattered anyway—but still, let me at least correct this falsehood.
To tell the truth, I had attended middle school for two or three years, but I never pursued any education beyond that—at least not at any place called a school.
Since I myself was saying it, there could be no mistake.

No—such things hardly matter.
“Rather than that—‘Tanzō’s rise to prominence today was aided by...’”
The fact that it properly acknowledges my role—“and so forth”—is precisely the crux of the matter.
As written in the passage I just quoted, our relationship since the founding of this Semba Newspaper had been one of both shadow and light—I had supported you all along.
To put it bluntly, had I not been there at that time, that newspaper would have folded with its fourth issue.
At that time, you too—

“Mr. Kozaya—I’ll never forget this debt as long as I live!”

He’d gone to such lengths that he’d even shouted those words.
I handled the printing practically for free and wrote the articles using my old skills.
It was me too who dreamed up those odd schemes—like that beauty contest for Semba girls called “Sprouting Reeds: Flowering Maiden Division.”
The thing worked like a charm—the papers flew off the stands, and paying advertisers started lining up.

However, having said this, I don’t particularly mean to claim any credit. Moreover, you never gained much from that Semba Newspaper to begin with. Not only that, but due to our aggressive reporting exposing a certain incident, we violated newspaper regulations and were not only banned from publication but also slapped with a one-hundred-yen fine. Subsequently, a slanderous article about a certain bank’s internal affairs caused a thirty-yen fine, and after such incidents recurred repeatedly, you ultimately lost everything—principal and interest—and of course discontinued it.

You were thoroughly bitter, grumbling resentfully about my articles being the cause of your predicament—so much so that it was almost comical—and when I couldn’t help smirking, you said:

“You really are a vile one, aren’t you?”

He was appalled.

“Now now—don’t say that.”
“Even if we’d driven it into the ground—it was never much of a paper to begin with…”

As I laughed, you stared at my face awhile—then suddenly—

“If you keep joking, I’ll hit you!”

After saying that, he stormed out and never showed his face at my place again, but a considerable time later, he came demanding fifty yen in damages.

The moment I saw that letter—demanding damages, of all things, after everything I’d done for him—I nearly stormed over to give him a piece of my mind. But it was too absurd to bother with, so I let it go.
In truth, rather than feeling angry, I found it more amusing.
Wondering where he’d pulled this fifty-yen figure from, I gave it some thought. When I realized he’d subtracted the remaining printing costs from the fine amount to get fifty yen, to tell the truth, I nearly burst out laughing.
It was so absurd that I couldn’t even muster anger.
Moreover, I too had an unexpected weakness that kept me from storming over to confront him.
To put it plainly: I hadn’t written those inflammatory articles intending to shut down the paper, but neither could I claim I’d harbored no secret hope for your downfall.
So, when it actually got discontinued, I felt somewhat pleased—serves you right.

Why had I harbored such feelings? Now that I can finally confess, the cause was Ochizuru. If I were to put it this way, you’d probably be shocked—but back then, I was still thirty-seven, young, and in love.

However, the daughter of the konpeitō shop in Bakurōmachi was an exceptionally foolish girl—of all people, she ended up becoming yours. Even if it had been like a bug drawn to bitter herbs—if she’d fallen for you through some odd mistake—that would’ve been one thing. But when I realized she’d naively swallowed your sweet talk about rigging that beauty contest to make you first place… I was deeply frustrated. It was pathetic.

Regardless of what happened afterward, initially Ochizuru wasn’t the least bit in love with you. As evidence... though putting it this way sounds terribly methodical, Ochizuru had been in love with me. No—or rather, I had deluded myself into believing so. I’d convinced myself her gaze proved it. To be sure, Ochizuru was beautiful enough in her way—though her squint made first place in that contest questionable—and perhaps I’d been mistaken all along. But one thing remains certain: she preferred me over you.

That—to put it in unpleasant terms—had been snatched away by you. Even if it had been for some other reason—but no, the bait ended up being that damned beauty contest I’d devised, or as we say in Osaka dialect, “a fool’s half-baked scheme.” To put it bluntly, I was a hopelessly naive pushover. Here I was—a man who’d traveled as far as Shanghai and earned some recognition among Chinese associates—diligently printing konpeito candy wrappers at rock-bottom rates. The humiliation stung so deeply I wished I could erase the memory entirely.

Normally, out of jealousy so intense that I wouldn’t want to even look at your face, I would have cut all ties then and there—the reason I didn’t was partly because I feared having those feelings exposed. No—the part about being seen through comes second; it was because I was ashamed of my own childishness. Still, even I—though to say “thanks to me” would be overstating it—couldn’t help secretly thinking whenever I saw you settled as president of the Semba Newspaper with Ochizuru in your grasp: This bastard’s getting all high and mighty—what face would he make if I brought him down just once…?

How’s that?
Surprised?
Are you humbled now?
This was the true nature of my innards—the ones you took for those of a naive pushover.
And yet, when you filed for damages, wasn’t that you pulling such a naively oblivious act yourself?
Normally, someone who understood gratitude wouldn’t have dared demand fifty yen in damages like that, but by doing so, you must have grossly underestimated me—though I wasn’t nearly as soft as you took me for.
No—it wasn’t merely that you underestimated me.
That is your modus operandi.
It’s a nerve quite beyond imitation by ordinary people.
To call it thick-skinned isn’t quite right.
In other words, you might be a type who’s timid at heart.
In any case, it was ridiculous.
Of course, I did not comply with such a demand.
If I left you alone without a word, you never made another peep after that.

III

When the Semba Newspaper was discontinued, you were left completely penniless and immediately found yourself struggling to make ends meet.
As I watched to see what you’d do, Ochizuru took up piecework at home while you went back to pulling your rickshaw—it was like watching the set of a shinpa play collapse.

At the time, there was a cruise ship dock at Andōjibashi that charged two sen and five rin to take passengers to Nihonbashi, but you stubbornly stationed yourself there, bellowing in a shrill voice to poach customers bound for the cruise ships over to your rickshaw. Seeing the red flags on the cruise ships, you too fastened a similar flag to your grimy rickshaw to drum up business. But customers were honest—for the same two sen and five rin fare, they still opted for the faster cruise ships… The moment you realized this, you slunk back to street hailing. However, given the strict crackdowns that left no room for half-hearted efforts, he likely ran his rickshaw at a rate of roughly eight sen per ri with a sullen face—but as proof he had no intention of keeping this up forever… Well, around this point, since *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* surprisingly contains few typos, I’ll save myself the trouble and borrow directly from it:——

One day, when he took a customer picked up in Tamatsukuri to Muryōji Temple in Teramachi, two lines of people were lined up at the gate entrance. When he peeked inside and saw that it extended all the way to the main hall, he thought, “What an extravagant funeral,” and asked whose household it was for.

“—Ridiculous. It’s not a funeral. Today’s moxibustion day, y’know.”

he was scoffed at for this.
But Tanzō did not even force a bitter smile. When he gradually asked around, he learned that the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th days were moxibustion days—these being Muryōji Temple’s designated days—and when it came to the moxibustion here… Suddenly, he recalled Okane Bāsan, who had once lived quietly alone in a second-floor rental at the entrance of the candy shop’s alleyway in Takatsu Fourth District, where Tanzō himself had resided at the time.

Her name was Okane, but she was so poor that she never bought any food other than okara bean curd residue.
She taught shamisen to neighborhood girls for cheap monthly fees, but all that could be heard year-round was “Looking from the High Mountain to the Valley Below”—meaning her disciples never lasted long.
The reason was this: whenever new students came, she would persistently push to apply moxibustion indiscriminately—if they were ill, that would be one thing, but as young girls who had no reason to endure needless moxa scars on their bodies, most fled before even finishing “Looking from the High Mountain to the Valley Below.”
Okane Bāsan had once been a moxibustion practitioner, and Tanzō had eventually come to know her well-known reputation—that her persistent pushing to apply moxibustion stemmed from wanting to extract an extra ten or twenty sen as moxa fees beyond their monthly tuition…

That day, upon returning to the alley, Tanzō promptly grabbed Okane Bāsan and,

“Actually, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

When told it was about making money, Okane Bāsan immediately bared her gums in a grin—in other words, she was persuaded without the slightest resistance.

But when it came to figuring out how to put this into practice, Tanzō utterly lacked the wisdom—he absolutely needed a partner.
In other words, he once again required Kozaya Bō’s wisdom……

I was appalled.
No—to be honest, even I found myself astonished at how he could show up at my place so shamelessly, wearing that face pretending to have forgotten everything from before.
But more than that—

“I’ve been thinking of doing a bit of social service work.”

But when he croaked out that line—"social service"—I found myself even more appalled.

What social service?
To put it bluntly, it’s just a scheme to make quick money through moxibustion tours.
If he’d just said moxibustion fees for three ri were more lucrative than eight sen per rickshaw mile, that would’ve sufficed—but “social service”? Where do you pluck the strings to get that tune? I found it absurdly amusing. Yet even so, when I heard the proposal,

“Alright, here we go.”

With such excessive enthusiasm, I ended up agreeing—there was no helping it.

Normally, one would slap someone across the face at least once and then—

“I’m done carrying your half of the pole.”

—one would refuse.
I don’t want it to be thought that I accepted so readily… that it stemmed from greed.
In fact, I certainly had no such intention.

Even if my spirit was rotten to the core, I never dreamed of exploiting you, my romantic rival, to satisfy monetary desires—in fact, quite the opposite: I wanted to let you, my romantic rival, prosper.
This sentiment directly aligned with what even I myself found to be a touching resolve—not wanting Ochizuru to endure the hardships of poverty.
If I state it outright like this, it becomes simple, easy to understand, commendable, and well-received by the audience—though of course that aspect exists too.
But if I leave it at that, it smacks too much of shinpa drama, and I cringe.
To put it bluntly, one reason was my own rubbernecking instinct that made me do it.
When I heard about the moxibustion tour,

“—Fascinating.”

I thought.
I felt interest in the tours themselves and in you as the person who conceived them.
With someone like you…—it’s quicker to call it a cursed bond.

Since it was called “social service,” they resolved that good deeds must be done posthaste—so without delay, they took Okane Bāsan and set off for Saya in Minami Kawachi, all three of them.

They approached temples but were turned away, so they rented two of the largest rooms at a merchant inn, removed the sliding doors to create one continuous hall, and used that as their venue.
And then, they embarked on their crowd-gathering routine.

To call it a “crowd-gathering routine” might make them seem like carnival barkers, yet there was no other term that would suffice here. So thoroughly did everything from start to finish follow the carnival barkers’ ways.

First of all, their very clothing was different. It was quite elaborate. The three of them all wore white hempen robes, and to top it off, with the seven characters “Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō” emblazoned on their backs—a dubious getup even by our own standards. But far from feeling any compunction, they somehow mustered a damnable nerve and began cavorting about as if performing in some village play.

Both you and I had shaved our stubble and gotten our hair cut shorter and neater than usual. It was precisely at this moment that I realized your face actually looked rather presentable once you’d gotten a haircut.

I became strangely elated and shouted, “Japan’s greatest spiritual moxibustion! Step right up! We’ll cure any disease! Come on down to the inn! ▽▽” — even the flyer’s text practically throbbed with urgency. When the flyers were ready, you took them around and plastered them all over the village. And they gave free treatments in advance to families at gathering spots like barbershops, general stores, public baths, and izakayas, then waited in readiness for the crowd to assemble.

If the scheme didn’t catch on, paying the inn fees would’ve been precarious… Though we never voiced this thought, our eyes widened sharply as we stared ahead—then, after a tense moment, we peered out the venue’s window toward the village road. When the sight of people trudging over in twos and threes came into view, we were flustered rather than relieved: *Ah—it seems the advertising worked after all.*

“Granny—I’m counting on you.”

And immediately, I sat down behind the “reception” desk and, lining them up in the order they arrived, asked each one their address, name, age, and illness to record in the register.
At first glance, it seemed like a trivial matter, but this turned out to be strangely significant—a rather ingenious idea that couldn’t be dismissed as foolish.

You were Okane Bāsan’s assistant—twisting moxa, lighting incense and passing it to her, occasionally,

“Right away!”

he’d let out comically exaggerated shouts of effort, eventually even rubbing prayer beads,

“Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō!”

He would chant and whirl around more than necessary, but when I glanced over, you were wearing a headband.
I burst out laughing—here I was putting on airs of solemnity, and there you were with that ridiculous headband! It was far too casual, not to mention clashing horribly with the hempen robes. I made you take it off immediately.

The treatments became popular to an almost comical degree, and since the old woman grumbled that she had no time to even pause for propriety, they decided to increase her share of the profits to compensate—all while being considerate—and spent four days in Sayama,

“This dizzying work ain’t for an old one like me.”
“I’d still be better off playin’ the shamisen back in Osaka.”

They pleaded with the old woman—who kept saying such things—and continued their tour from village to village, eventually arriving at Kishū’s Yuizaki Hot Springs.

As it was a hot spring resort with many sick people and promising signs it would catch on, they raised the fee from twenty sen to thirty sen per session, but even so, a considerable number of patients came.

“So—what do you think? Mr. Kozaya, this level of success… it’s truly beyond what even I had envisioned…”

Even I was taken aback, but when all was said and done, the reason for our success was that my advertising methods had reached true mastery.

How richly endowed I was with talent for advertising—though I shall elaborate on this in due course—I will keep brief here. For instance, upon spotting a gossipy-looking, chatty-seeming old woman among the patients who gathered on our first day in Yuizaki,

“Now—this moxibustion may be the greatest under heaven, but if you want its true effects to manifest, there’s just one thing you must do. No, no—don’t let that word ‘must’ trouble you. It’s nothing difficult at all.”
“Immediately after applying the moxibustion, soak in the hot spring, then do not leave the bathhouse for thirteen hours—just keep the moxa holes constantly exposed to the steam.”
“To put it in difficult terms, this is called hot-spring moxibustion therapy…”
“Ah, never mind the terminology.”
“Got that?”
“You must stay in the hot spring for thirteen hours.”

There was indeed a term called “moxibustion,” but “hot spring moxibustion therapy” was such an absurd phrase that I found myself struggling to contain my laughter again and again as I solemnly proclaimed it.

Sick people were generally honest by nature, and being elderly folks who’d been lured by advertisements to receive moxibustion, they wouldn’t question my instructions even by accident.

Bustling eagerly into prolonged baths to stave off boredom, they’d corner bathhouse visitors—making small talk that inevitably led to mentioning how effective moxibustion was being offered at such-and-such place, a charitable service by the Nichiren sect, a blessed thing indeed, and since I myself had just recently…—the topic was bound to arise. Without a thought for those poor souls growing dizzy from endless soaking, I too had peddled this deceptive advertising—but it all proved a foolish endeavor in the end.

I no longer remember how much we earned over that week, but I still recall being impressed at the time—and thus remember to this day—that you had secretly put together a money order to send funds to Ochizuru, whom we had left behind in Osaka. For all his faults, it seemed even this guy couldn’t help worrying about her—a surprisingly decent act, I thought then.
Of course, when I later learned that the money had apparently been embezzled in secret from the “sales” (as you called it—meaning revenue), my enthusiasm waned…

In any case, they made a profit.
You were over the moon,

“If we just keep a firm grip on Okane Bāsan, we can make a fortune!”

He kept repeating to me in that oddly menacing voice while massaging the old woman’s legs in the bathhouse—legs she kept complaining were about to give out from overwork—or treating her to bottles of sake at dinner with exaggerated courtesy. But on the fifth day since arriving in Yuizaki,

“My legs’ve gone clean out.”

With that declaration, the old woman collapsed into bed.

They scrambled to hire a masseur and apply half-learned moxibustion treatments, but when these proved futile—and humiliated by their own signboard’s “We Cure All Diseases” boast—they secretly called a doctor for examination,

“This is neuralgia.”
“Well, take your time soaking in the hot spring and rest up.”
“Why don’t you try your ‘hot spring moxibustion therapy’ or something?”

As if he’d known all along, we were mocked so effortlessly that we panicked. For three full days we took turns nursing her, but the old woman’s back—which had in truth been felled by a stroke—showed no sign of recovery.

“If I had to say… it’s ’cause you worked me to the bone.”

Okane Bāsan mumbled this in a voice growing increasingly slurred. The inn and doctor’s fees kept mounting, and having her bedridden made for a social embarrassment worse than “physician, heal thyself.” I was thoroughly disgusted, but you—you were even more—

“At this point—either we start drumming up guests for the inn or we skip town. One or the other.”

He wore an indescribably bitter expression.

I found it amusing how both drumming up guests and skipping town seemed equally suited to you—each option thoroughly characteristic—but doubted privately whether you’d prove dutiful enough to keep soliciting guests until the old woman’s stroke healed. When sure enough, one day—

“To blow off some steam, I’ll go have fun in Tanabe.”

You left restlessly and never returned to the inn.

The moment I heard the steamship’s whistle, I realized you’d fled—heartless beyond measure—and immediately rose to chase after you and beat you senseless. But I couldn’t very well abandon the old woman, and just then—

“Mr. Kozaya… I’m sorry… could you help me relieve myself?”

Attending to the old woman who had let out a pitiful voice, I changed my mind and moved behind her. As you had always done, I lifted her under the arms with unexpected care and helped her relieve herself.
Her body was gnarled.

After nursing her for four or five days—until payments to the inn and doctor grew urgently unavoidable—I could bear it no longer. Hoisting the old woman onto my back, I crossed from Tsunashirazu to Tanabe, then boarded a ship back to Osaka. All along that wretched journey, I endured quite a pitiful ordeal.
All of this is your fault.

IV

On the fourth day after returning to the tenement in Takatsu, Okane Bāsan breathed her last.

She appeared to have no relatives, and no eccentric soul came forward claiming to be her former employer. With the help of a few shamisen students and the tenement residents, I took care of all the funeral arrangements.
You, who were supposed to be a resident of the tenement, had already vanished somewhere by then.

When I asked around, it turned out that the day after fleeing Yuizaki, he had absconded under cover of night with Ochizuru.
To borrow the suddenly vulgar, antiquated prose of *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* from around this point in the narrative:

Now having resolved to abscond under cover of night with Ochizuru in tow, Tanzō drifted aimlessly until—leaving behind the moon of his homeland—he reached Busan in Korea.

The bitter winds of this unfamiliar land cut through their vagrant bodies all the more keenly, and their idle muscles could barely endure the lament of disuse—yet if this too was but rust of their own making, then their destitute selves had no one to resent. Plagued by bedbugs and lice, licking at cloudy liquor and chili peppers, they wandered from ondol room to ondol room.

Yet with bare hands and no skills, they found no means to act. As day waned with the cold mountains still distant, they wandered lost in a five-league fog until, fortunately discovering an elder sister residing in Daegu, they visited her to consult about their path—only for her husband to promptly solicit them for three hundred yen.
The sister and her husband too wallowed in utter destitution.

“I don’t even have five yen to spare, let alone a hundred.”

When he deliberately used Osaka dialect to bluntly refuse, the sister’s husband said:

“I see… That’s too bad. If there were 100 yen here now, I’ve got quite an opportunity…”

He wore a thoroughly disappointed expression.
Taking the bait,

“So… some lucrative opportunity?”

When he asked about this, it turned out there was a gold dust mining area up for sale. Upon hearing they could either find a financier to extract it or resell it for tenfold profit, Tanzō’s eyes gleamed bone-dry—not a tear shed—and exploiting Ochizuru’s shamisen skills, he sent her off to work at a suitable establishment.
And then he bought the gold dust mining area, but…

Copying this text, I was astounded by how perfectly it captured your repulsive nature—but anyway, despite having bought that gold dust mining area, it seemed luck still hadn’t favored you there either.

About two years after you had vanished from Osaka, as I was walking in front of Goryō Shrine one day, a shabby-looking man tried to hand me a flyer.

Assuming it was just another Bunraku flyer and too bothersome to pull my hands from my sleeves, I was about to walk past when—catching a glimpse of that face—its flat, wretched contour with only the cheekbones standing unnaturally high and those bulging eyes glaring feverishly was no ordinary visage. I knew instantly: it was you.
Your diminutive frame, slightly hunched in that habitual stoop, remained unchanged from two years prior—still your characteristic posture.

“You bastard!”

Replacing the words that had nearly burst out unbidden with a forced “Hey!”, he hastily accepted the flyer but didn’t look at it,

“What have you been up to? What an odd place to run into you.”

When I insinuated—with a suggestive tone—whether he’d sunk so low as to distribute flyers, he showed no trace of shame whatsoever and instead went *ahem ahem*,

“Oh, it’s been quite some time since we last met… I caused you quite some trouble the other day…”

And so, having disposed of the Yuizaki incident, he continued:

“Actually, after that, I went to Korea and tried my hand at gold dust mining, but got thoroughly swindled. Ended up destitute and had to come crawling back here.”

“That must’ve been rough,” I said magnanimously, feigning forgetfulness about Yuizaki.

“So what are you doing now? Even after all this time, you’re still…”

When I vaguely asked whether you were still with her, you immediately grasped it concerned Ochizuru.

“Oh… Her?”
“I left her in Korea.”
“I’ve been doing this.”

He pretended to hold a shamisen and acted nonchalant.

“I see… huh.”

With that, I kept a straight face—but who knows? In truth, I was groaning inwardly. But thinking it odd to keep asking about Ochizuru in a street-corner chat, I promptly changed the subject,

“By the way, how about you—what are you up to now?”

When he asked this,

“I’m running a medicine shop.”

“Huh?”

He leaned in sharply toward the surprised face,

“And that’s a proprietary cure I’ve formulated myself, you see.”
“I’m the one formulating it.”

“That again.”
“Depending on what it is, I might consider contributing by taking a dose—but what exactly does it cure?”

“It’s for lung disease.… Appalled, aren’t you?”

“Unbelievable.”

I had to smile, realizing you must have figured out this approach from your past experience profiting from patients using Okane Bāsan, though I was equally appalled.

Given your apprenticeship at a Doshōmachi medicine wholesaler and hearing you’d slavishly copied a prescription some local doctor wrote for your sister in Korea—she’d been suffering from lung disease—I could grudgingly nod along. But even then, to pose as a legitimate pharmacist with such flimsy credentials and suddenly open a medicine shop… Truly, only you could manage that. For a time, I marveled at the sheer gall.

What also appalled me was your inexplicably shabby appearance and the fact that you were personally distributing those medicine advertisements.
But these circumstances are detailed in *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō*.

Having gone bankrupt in Korea and left Ochizuru behind in the brothel district, Tanzō returned once more to Osaka. Seized by some peculiar inspiration, he resolved to produce and sell his own lung disease remedy. With what remained of his meager funds—how he scraped them together remains unclear—he rented a tiny nine-shaku-by-two-ken shop in Kawaramachi. Guided by a prescription scribbled by a Korean doctor, he kneaded out large, clumsily shaped pills resembling broad beans using his dirt-caked hands.

And without giving a thought to whether tuberculosis patients might be inconvenienced by having to swallow such enormous pills, he racked his brains solely over how to sell them.
After covering the medicine's production costs, he was left practically penniless—reduced to a state where unless he sold every pill made that day, he would go hungry.
There was no way smashing his wallet open would yield enough for newspaper ads, and he had absolutely no funds for signboards or flyer printing.
Having exhausted all options, what he devised was hand-printing.

He barely managed to procure woodblocks and hanshi paper, then hand-printed flyers by rubbing fifty or a hundred sheets at a time with bamboo bark.
But he had no money to hire laborers.
Reluctantly, he went himself, stood in a bustling area around Goryō Shrine, and handed them out one by one to passersby.
And he would hurry back, sit in his shop, and wait for customers to come.
However, it didn’t prosper much…….

It was only natural that it didn’t prosper.
It wasn’t a family heirloom remedy, nor was it a renowned formula—honestly, amateurishly handmade pills of dubious efficacy being sold in what amounted to a back-alley tenement. Who would come to buy them?

Of course, you were fully aware of all this, but in any case, you threw yourself into promotional efforts with all your might—distributing flyers plastered with outlandish claims—yet those very flyers were your undoing.

I received one from you and looked it over, but between the poor-quality printing and paper too flimsy even for children’s calligraphy practice—not to mention being monochrome black—it was the sort of thing you’d expect even naniwabushi recital ads to use slightly better materials for. Taking into account that one had to read with considerable effort just to decipher it, it was truly as if he were single-handedly undermining any credibility his medicine might have had. To make matters worse, he didn’t even bother to properly package the pills—just tossed them into white candy bags like those “buy one, get one free” treats sold at night stalls... No wonder they wouldn’t sell.

Given such a pitiful state, you running into me at that time was like a Buddha descending into hell—for you, it might as well have been encountering the god of fortune himself. As you know, first I employed my expertise in letterpress printing to craft elaborate two-color flyers for him. Next came the packaging. The boxes boasted designs remarkably bold and modern for their era—in sheer presentation alone, they stood as innovative creations rivaling any pharmaceutical product on the market. Furthermore, though limited to Osaka City proper, I even secured three-line newspaper advertisements for him.

Of course, I did all this at my own expense—and while I did eventually receive appropriate repayment afterward, at the time I wasn’t counting on any of it.
To put it simply, it was pure kindness—nor did it stem from some petty mentality of splitting profits later.

To you, for whom everything was a calculation, my kindness must have been utterly incomprehensible. Even as you tearfully repeated apologies—I’m sorry, so sorry; I’ll owe you this debt for life—deep down, you were likely baffled, thinking: Just how far does this guy’s goodwill extend?
Indeed, that must have been the case.
To tell the truth, even I myself didn’t fully understand why I had gone to such lengths to be kind to him.

When I heard about Ochizuru, whom you had left behind in Korea’s brothel district, pity welled up in me—and yes, there was certainly a part of me that thought if I enabled you to turn a profit here, you would go retrieve her. But—as I’ve repeated often—that wasn’t the whole of it. It was what people call infatuation. No—to be precise, you did possess qualities that could inspire such infatuation in others. At least, in someone like me…

For instance, when he abruptly transitioned from being a retained rickshaw puller to managing a newspaper, I had already begun to think he was no ordinary man—and sure enough, he would devise moxibustion tours or vanish somewhere entirely, only to reappear settled into a nine-shaku-by-two-ken shop that nonetheless claimed status as the headquarters of a pharmaceutical enterprise. This was no feat an ordinary man could accomplish—or should I call that audacious? Should I call it tenacity? I became infatuated with that extraordinary drive of his.

Moreover, that gaunt face of his and those sharply gleaming eyes—to me, it was a gaze that spoke of a man not merely scrambling to get by.
I judged him too valuable a man to discard so carelessly.
All my petty resentments faded away...

Long ago, during political parties' heyday, there existed a man who harbored no ministerial ambitions himself yet ceaselessly schemed and maneuvered in shadows to elevate someone he deemed worthy—though not a perfect parallel, I suppose my own sentiments had been somewhat akin to his.

However, I wouldn’t say the flyers and packaging were those [schemes]. If one were to boldly list those scheming tactics, then the branch manager recruitment system I devised by racking my brains not long afterward would surely count as one such example. As per usual, I would quote from *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō*.

Five

Though clumsily kneaded out by unpracticed hands into crude handmade pills, they were not outright fraud on the level of passing off tooth powder as stomach medicine—having been crafted with reference to an actual prescription—and in some cases, there emerged those who claimed the treatment had worked.
Three-line advertisements began appearing in corners of city newspapers, and sales gradually began to pick up.
Once sales took off, the medicine was marked up ninefold.

No sooner had Tanzō’s greed swelled than he conceived manufacturing every type of medicine imaginable—stomach powders, hemorrhoid cures, beriberi remedies, venereal disease specifics, eye drops—all alongside his lung disease cure.
So to speak, with the resolve that if one remedy failed he’d try another, he churned out medicines based on dubious prescriptions, determined to turn every last sick person across Japan into his customer.

Before long, he vacated his shop—little better than a back-alley tenement in Kawaramachi—and put up a signboard reading “Kawanashi Medicine National Headquarters” near Kasumichō. Reasoning that if he was going to erect a signboard anyway, it might as well be taller, he glanced sideways at Tsūtenkaku Tower right under his nose and hoisted an absurdly large and high one atop the two-story roof.

In that way, he had managed to put up a decent front—but substantial debts had piled up with the medicine wholesalers in Dōshōmachi. Or rather, even that signboard’s cost alone… In such dire straits, no matter how grandly he presented himself as the national headquarters or how much medicine he concocted……Moreover, even with that medicine, the wholesalers—now growing wary—ceased supplying ingredients, rendering him unable to meet even local retail demand, let alone sustain a “national” operation.

There, Tanzō—having conceived this plan—placed advertisements in newspapers nationwide to recruit branch managers as a means of fundraising.

Under the sweetly phrased headline “Sufficient profits to support a wife and children,” the headquarters would cover store rent, electricity, and water bills while providing unlimited medicine on consignment.
Moreover, all were guaranteed medicines of unquestionable efficacy—with wholesale prices set at forty percent of retail—so that selling them for ten yen yielded six yen profit.
Furthermore, the conditions—including fixed forty-yen salaries regardless of sales—were impeccable, and inquiries flooded in through sealed letters and postcards until even postmen began complaining.

Without delay, Tanzō sent a reply stating as follows: —By virtue of your application, you are hereby appointed branch manager of Kawanashi Trading Company.
In accordance with this appointment, you are hereby requested to remit six hundred yen as a security deposit.—It was a beautifully letterpress-printed appointment document.

And when he waited, the world proved vast.
If they could support their wives and children for a lifetime, they must have reckoned six hundred yen in deposits was a bargain—applicants came from Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe in the west to Mito in the east and Kagoshima in the south, totaling roughly thirty people.
Whether they had scraped together their meager savings or strained to raise funds through desperate means—in any case, this was clearly no surplus money. The letters accompanying the money orders all bore vivid expressions of the agony of parting with such hard-won cash; even the briefest phrases like “Please take care of this” were imbued with profound sincerity.
"I finally managed to scrape together five hundred yen."
"I will somehow manage to remit the remaining hundred yen within ten days, so please appoint me as branch manager…"—there were even those who pathetically rushed to send their payments.

The funds thus collected amounted to roughly eighteen thousand yen, and thinking that this would suffice for capital, Tanzō couldn’t help but grin—yet immediately his face turned sour,

“It’s still not quite enough.”

He muttered in an unsettling voice.

“...Should’ve set the deposit at eight hundred yen from the start.”

Tanzō scratched his head in calculation.
Soon he dispatched letters to thirty branch managers declaring: —To enhance branch performance, storefronts require proper decoration.
To this end, headquarters shall furnish each branch with two cabinets, two zelkova hanging signs, two paper banners, and one gold folding screen.
Therefore, you must remit 200 yen to cover expenses.
In exchange, we shall provide 100 yen worth of medicine free of charge.

……The branch managers, suddenly faced with a demand for 200 yen, turned ashen as if drenched in cold water.
Even scraping together the six hundred yen deposit had pushed them to their limits.
Where in the world could they possibly squeeze out another two hundred yen now?
Yet if they refused to pay, their hard-won deposits might vanish into thin air—though of course he’d never explicitly threatened this—they couldn’t help fearing it.

Moreover, when they considered it—absurd though it was—they’d be getting 100 yen worth of medicine free alongside those decorations.
It wasn’t such a bad deal after all—in the end, they had no choice but to scrape up the 200 yen like wringing drops from a parched cloth.

The result was a total collection of 6,000 yen. From this amount, subtracting the actual costs—70 yen per store for decorations and 10 yen per store for the complimentary medicine, totaling 2,400 yen across thirty stores—left roughly 4,000 yen flowing into Tanzō’s pocket.
Combined with the earlier deposits, it came to 22,000 yen—though roughly 3,000 yen went to newspaper advertising costs—leaving 19,000 yen net profit, Tanzō calculated on his abacus…

It was an almost laughable success.
That it would succeed this thoroughly—you… no—even I hadn’t anticipated.
I, who am rarely surprised by anything, found myself disgusted to the point of self-loathing this time alone.

Of course, this was my sentiment alone—as for you, clutching that nineteen thousand yen, you were scrambling about in a daze of elation.
“A sour face”
I wrote “a sour face” or some such, but that’s wrong.
That was just rhetorical flourish—other instances aside, this time alone, I never once glimpsed anything resembling your so-called “sour face.”

By the way, let me note that not only regarding the phrase "sour face," but at least in this section, the author of *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* had committed a grave oversight. It writes as though you conjured this entire branch manager recruitment scheme from your own mind—though maintaining that framing would amplify the exposé’s impact—but of course, I ought to have included my name here. No—to be more precise, I should have been the one who drew up the entire blueprint.

While such oversights existed, the subsequent passage—though it feels odd to say so—compensated for those earlier factual omissions with such vigorous dramatic flair that the narrative force suddenly sharpened.

――One whose mouth holds honey has a sword stored in their belly.

He took eight hundred yen from each person, but whether he actually kept the promises made in the newspaper advertisements was another matter.

To be sure, for the first month he delivered one batch of medicine and a fixed salary of forty yen, but thereafter he concocted pretexts and ceased sending both resupply medicine and salaries.
He put on a face that had forgotten all about rent and electricity bills.

Treated in such a manner, the branch managers—driven to ruin with no alternative—sent desperate protest letters almost daily, but to no effect.
When they finally thought a reply had arrived, the text demanded that if they wanted to make demands, they should earn more sales first.

Then he abruptly sent clerks to ambush branch managers during their absences—leaving their vital business unattended—and demanded, “What do you mean by going out?”
“Do you think this lets you fulfill your duties as branch managers?”
“It’s precisely this sloppiness that keeps your results from improving,” he retorted, suddenly flipping the blame onto them.
He would then inspect the sales ledgers to find fault.

For instance, when cornered—driven by utter desperation—they might falsify ledgers or dip into sales proceeds (though in reality, this meant borrowing their own unpaid salaries or rent from those funds; formally, it counted as embezzlement). The moment he uncovered this, that alone became ample grounds for dismissal and deposit confiscation.

Thus, the branch managers driven out numbered more than a few; moreover, through his ruthless scheme of installing new applicants—those who had paid deposits—into their vacated positions, Tanzō further fattened his own coffers. Consequently, the voices of resentment from branch managers left destitute inevitably swelled.

One such branch manager—though how he scraped together the travel funds remained a mystery—came all the way from Shizuoka to storm into the Kasumichō headquarters in near-lunatic fury. The moment he laid eyes on Tanzō, his agitation peaked—blood began gushing from his nostrils,

“Kawanashi!”
“Drink this blood!”
“This blood.”
“I’ll make you suck every last drop of my blood!”

he bellowed.

Naturally timid, Tanzō had been trembling violently the moment he saw the branch manager’s face, but no sooner had he glimpsed the nosebleed than he let out a sharp cry—the diminutive Tanzō ducking between the man’s legs like a weasel—and fled barefoot, vanishing for two days…….

By this point, *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* had finally begun to take on the appearance of legitimacy—yet simultaneously, it started to reek of falsehood.
The facts were also lies.
Particularly with the nosebleed passage—while someone might acknowledge that it insightfully captures your timid nature—any reader can tell it’s a lie.
The same goes for the deposit confiscation incident.

If it were some miserly schemer content to clutch nineteen thousand yen and call it a day—fine. But even so—no matter how you slice it—I never stooped to those illegal, credibility-eroding tactics you were so eager to employ.

As evidence that we didn’t exclusively wield such ruthless methods—though mentioning ‘first term’ risks self-incrimination—there should have been quite a number of branch managers from that initial period who later rose to executive positions at Kawanashi Medicine.

Admittedly, we didn’t entirely refrain from weeding people out—for instance, those who clearly misappropriated sales proceeds were dismissed as their guilt was evident, and their deposits were confiscated per the original contract.

However, even this wasn't some premeditated scheme from the start—call it ruthless if you must—but hardly something worth going out of one's way to "expose." If we're talking about "exposing," there should've been far more effective material in what was left unwritten.

Namely, it was the act of suddenly establishing headquarters' direct stores right under the noses of underperforming branches without any warning. To put it in Osaka terms—placing Sennichimae before Namba, Kyōmachibori before Dōjima, Tenjinbashi before Tenma—they built direct stores in strategic locations all over and installed handpicked employees as managers.

Branch stores and direct stores differed first and foremost in their storefronts—customers naturally flocked to the direct stores—and even now, I pride myself on there having been no more effective method for driving the branch stores to self-destruction. However, if I were to justify this, it was a matter of looking at the results—I had no deliberate intention to destroy the branch stores. Common sense would dictate that there was no need to go out of one’s way to establish direct stores just to destroy branches that weren’t even obstructive in the first place—needless to say, the direct stores were nothing more than a means to sell more medicine, so to speak, a purely business strategy.

At the same time, it could also be said that—while already operating numerous branches nationwide, the business had grown so prosperous that it was now venturing into managing direct stores—so it was said. In fact, as evidence that they hadn’t indiscriminately closed down branches or anything of the sort, compared to the time of the first recruitment period, their number had increased threefold. Of course, to achieve such prosperity, they would have needed considerable years of time and no small amount of effort. Because the efficacy was outstanding, the medicine sold well—you wouldn’t spout such foolishness.

Six

――No matter what one might call grotesque, there was nothing as grotesque as Kawanashi Medicine’s newspaper advertisements.

Tanzō spared no expense on newspaper advertisements, utilizing fifty major and minor newspapers nationwide to vigorously conduct advertising.
There was hardly a single day when a full-page advertisement for Kawanashi Medicine didn’t appear in some newspaper.
Not only were they vast in scale, but in their sheer unscrupulousness, there was nothing across all eras and regions that could rival them.

First, he declared war on doctors—the sworn enemies of patent medicine vendors—and poured all his energy into this campaign.
“Physicians Without Mercy,” “Misdiagnoses and Overprescribing,” “Twentyfold Drug Markups,” “Doctors: Disease Spreaders”
“The Mystery of Consultation Fees”
“Rotten Trends in Modern Medicine”
Under headlines like “Nothing But Gold in Their Eyes”—phrases that, with minor tweaks, could have damned Kawanashi Medicine itself—the ads launched straight into declarations like: “Modern doctors are devils.”
They railed against physicians’ profit-driven amorality—then contrasted this with grandiose boasts about Kawanashi Tanzō’s meticulously formulated remedies… even running caricatures of horned demon-doctors. Not content there, they turned on fellow medicine peddlers with lines like “Patent sellers are congealed lies”…

Even I feel somewhat embarrassed writing this down.
The reason is—as you well know—these newspaper advertisements were, as per usual, my idea.

Of course, there was no need to declare that something as basic as placing newspaper advertisements was my idea—anyone could have conceived it without borrowing my wisdom. But to execute it with such boldness, verging on recklessness—that could only have been done by me.
As for expenses—to the point where one might marvel at how freely we spent—take that nineteen thousand yen for example: only twenty percent went to paying drug wholesalers, with the remainder entirely devoted to advertising costs.
Twenty thousand, thirty thousand yen wouldn’t suffice.

“—What are you doing with all these advertisements?
Let’s be reasonable here.”

In the end, even you began to worry… no—rather, to get angry.

“—Idiot! Even though you once made your living through newspapers, don’t spout such nonsense. Have you forgotten how we secured nineteen thousand yen in deposits with just three thousand yen in advertising costs? Even if we spend thirty thousand yen, as long as we have forty thousand yen left, there should be no complaints.”

That was exactly right. For better or worse, the name Kawanashi Medicine became imprinted ever more strongly and freshly each day in the memories of anyone who so much as glanced at a newspaper. Even after raising branch managers’ deposits from six hundred yen to fifteen hundred yen—though “streaming in” might be an exaggeration—the fact that applicants still kept coming spoke volumes. And of course, the medicine sold absurdly well.

It wasn't because it worked that it sold well.
Needless to say, it was thanks to advertising.
It was thanks to those massive and unscrupulous advertisements that nearly destroyed the visual appeal of newspaper pages.
Of course, we didn't spend the whole year just attacking doctors.

I wasn't that unimaginative...

——After patent medicine regulations were revised to prohibit slandering physicians, they began publishing daily lung disease recovery photos, sensationalizing claims about patients who'd failed to be cured by medications from Dr. So-and-so or So-and-so Hospital making full recoveries with Kawanashi Medicine.
When it came to deceiving public trust, nothing surpassed this.
Why?
The truth was: those recovery photos were almost entirely staged.

The very conception of this photo advertisement by Tanzō began with him targeting the clever promotional tactics of a certain temple that published patients’ letters of gratitude as part of its lung disease medicine sales strategy—pushing it even further in audacity—yet no matter how they searched, they could not find a single soul who had fully recovered through Kawanashi Medicine.

Thereupon, Tanzō seized upon Inui Bō of the direct store—who had once suffered respiratory issues—binding him through master-servant obligation to forcibly extract fabricated letters of gratitude and photographs.
This became the pioneering instance of photographs featured in lung disease full recovery advertisements during Taishō 10 (1921).

Subsequently, he ordered branch stores and direct stores nationwide to display lung disease consultation office signboards, while simultaneously announcing that stores providing recovery photographs would receive compensation at rates of 200 yen per beauty, 200 yen for those treated by numerous doctors, and 100 yen for ordinary cases.……

This much should suffice.
Even this much alone should sufficiently convey the rigging’s extent.
If you wish to know the details, consult pages 164 to 175 of *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō*.
Over eleven pages, it meticulously exposes—complete with statistical tables—how branches and direct stores ingeniously amassed recovery photographs.

Furthermore, pages 176 to 179 of the same book contained somewhat humorous exposés—instances where subjects of recovery photographs had died shortly afterward, or where patients supposedly deceased somehow revived in photographs printed on newspaper advertisements during their hundredth-day memorial services, gushing about their full recoveries—though surely such things never actually occurred. Even if they had existed—human life being as precarious as it was, with no guarantee of tomorrow—one could always find some excuse. There had been no need to pursue the matter so doggedly.

However, this advertisement was quite detested. Precisely because of that, in terms of advertising, there was nothing else quite as effective even now. It sold. It sold disgracefully well.

At the time—though I doubt the term itself had yet been coined—even among what one might call the intellectual class, those wholly skeptical of things like a medicine’s efficacy and who ought to have fully understood the extent of rigging in recovery photos, for example,

“—To tell the truth, I’m feeling rather unwell—but not nearly bad enough that I need to trouble myself with Kawanashi Medicine yet.”

They would make such remarks, yet when matters grew dire enough, they had steeled themselves to take it as a mere placebo—so when speaking of the general public’s blind faith in Kawanashi Lung Disease Medicine, it truly resembled Salvarsan prescribed for diphtheria—and that is no exaggeration.
There were even accounts of secretly peeling off labels before administering Kawanashi Medicine to patients, fearing to plainly inform them they had lung disease.

From this, one could grasp its popularity.
All of it was thanks to these advertisements—that is to say, thanks to my own schemes—wasn’t it?
And another thing—this too was my handiwork—creating two varieties of the same medicine, standard and special edition, proved extraordinarily effective.
After all, the contents hardly differed, but by dubbing it “special edition,” people imagined swifter recoveries—and though outrageously priced, or rather precisely because it was so costly, it sold even better.
Unbeknownst to you, you had amassed a colossal fortune.

VII

My objective—and simultaneously your long-cherished ambition—had thus finally been achieved. But when I observed what you did with that colossal sum of money, you promptly revealed your vulgar nouveau riche mentality in all its glory.

Having built a grandiose mansion in Kamimachi and planted trees costing thirteen thousand yen each was all well and good, but then you had to drag every visitor over to those trees,

“Even a tree like this costs twenty thousand yen, you know. Ahaha…”

“You might as well hang a sign from the branches saying ‘This tree costs thirteen thousand yen.’”

When I mocked you like that, even you finally made an unpleasant face.
Posting signs like “All Matters of Frugality” and “No Donations Accepted” at the entrance was still preferable to his vulgar displays—like tipping redcaps twenty yen and inn managers thirty yen during his travels.
However, this was limited to times when many people were watching.
Of course, he also kept mistresses.
To my knowledge, there were two—a seventeen-year-old and a thirty-two-year-old; the latter was Ochizuru’s cousin.

By that time, Ochizuru—who had already been ransomed from the Korean pleasure quarters, called back, and settled into her position as the lady of the Kawanashi household—

“I could endure anything else—but to take my own cousin as your mistress…”

—as if this were all my doing, she turned on me. Given the awkwardness of the situation,

“Now now, no need for such fury.”
“Anger only harms the angry.”
“You know full well what sort of man Kawanashi is.”
“Were this any ordinary fellow, I might have advised against taking that particular woman. But with Kawanashi? I stayed silent—any warning would’ve been wasted breath.”

I had delivered this rather cutting sarcasm, but Ochizuru—more incensed at her cousin than at you, her husband—paid no heed to my words. Two or three days later, she stormed over to her cousin’s place with a furious expression.

They had clearly not only quarreled but engaged in a violent grapple—as evidenced by how, when she arrived at my house by automobile that day claiming to be returning from it, her sleeves were torn and her hair disheveled in a wretched state.
Her squinting eyes were hysterically upturned, and blood oozed from her lips.

“Is this really the woman I was in love with?”

And yet, faced with Ochizuru in such a state, I found myself abruptly disappointed—but then a thought suddenly occurred to me, so—

“Ms. Ochizuru—this is rather troublesome, you know. Coming here in such a state—first of all, if someone were to see you, there’d be no possible way to explain yourself no matter how you’re suspected.”

As I spoke—I might as well confess this now—I was suddenly seized by an odd impulse and tried to grab her hand… When I look back on it, it was such an absurd thing to do. At that moment—why had I felt such an urge?—Ochizuru looked hideously ugly. It might have been because of that. No—it must have been exactly that. Because although there had been ample opportunities before, this was the one and only time—of all possible moments—that I’d felt such an impulse…

Ochizuru was startled and shook off my hand,
“Keep your hands off!”

With that, she hurried back home—but the sight of her retreating figure, hips swinging recklessly, appeared all the more unsightly. It transcended stirring any peculiar feelings in me, instead evoking sheer brutish repulsion. After that, I never again engaged in such conduct.

Now, even when Ochizuru discovered your mistress, you remained utterly unperturbed—on the contrary, you went so far as to recruit strikingly beautiful female clerks at the main office in Kasumicho and tried to lavish attention on them. First, as an initial step, you secretly slipped them theater tickets you’d received from an advertising agency; then, forcing cigars—which they, as women, had no need for—into their handbags, you curried favor. When these women, having sensed your intentions, expressed their wish to resign while things were still safe, you—

“Why would you say such a thing?”
“Ms. ×ko—why won’t you stay?”

And then he shed tears profusely—wretched.
If those false tears were genuine, perhaps they sprang from the sorrow of seeing the flower he’d struggled to pluck slip through his grasp.
I can’t believe it—but then again, perhaps you did have such an unexpected side to you after all.

Reduced to tears by his weeping, the female clerk abandoned her resignation—or so the story goes, proving nothing’s more fickle than a woman.

This being how your conduct had grown so brazen in society’s eyes, articles titled “Exposing Kawanashi Medicine’s Underbelly” began appearing in newspapers—their venom stoked by envy of your nouveau riche swagger.

Of course, major papers raking in tens of thousands in annual ad fees wanted no part of this muckraking, leaving it to third-rate rags without advertising contracts. Yet still you panicked.

“What should I do?”

As he said that and looked at my face, for some reason, I was disappointed by that gaze of his—a timid look utterly devoid of its former edge.

Back when you were waging your indiscriminate campaigns through the Semba Newspaper, there came a day when some hired thug barged into your office. You stood rigid in the corner then, arms crossed and face pale, glaring daggers at them—that gaze! And those sharply glinting eyes you’d had while handing out flyers before Goryō Shrine, eyes fiercely guarded even when no threat existed! Recalling all this, I found myself aghast at how thoroughly you’d changed—and scorned you all the more bitterly.

“After all, once a man gets his hands on money, he’s done for—” I thought.
“There’s no ‘what should we do’ or ‘let’s do this,’ I tell you.
“Leave it be!
“Or are you scared?”

I snapped a single retort, said nothing more, and pretended not to know.
Then, once again, the weakness in your gaze as you nervously glanced up!

“Urk—”
“Don’t you have any good ideas?”

You kept tilting your head in puzzlement, but before long, the recovery photos vanished from Kawanashi Medicine’s advertisements, replaced by slanderous articles targeting representative figures from all classes—historical heroes and greats, modern politicians, businessmen, literati, famous actors, geisha—as well as defamatory pieces on prominent current affairs issues.

To prevent himself from being attacked, he resorted to attacking celebrities—a method akin to seizing his opponents’ weapons and turning them against their owners. Observing this, I begrudgingly conceded he’d devised a clever tactic—but when I saw the signature “Kokushi Kawanashi Tanzō” on those slanderous articles, truth be told, tears sprang to my eyes.

Yet since this too served as a means to peddle medicine—what alternative was there?—I steeled myself and kept watching. Before long, the typeface of that signature swelled progressively larger, and commensurate with this inflation, he took to wearing crested haori and hakama throughout the year.
Then he threw himself headlong into every variety of self-aggrandizing spectacle.
By precedent, he’d grown intimately familiar with *Exposing the Truth*.

Changing tactics and approaches—among the various self-promotion schemes Tanzō employed for advertising material—if there was one that could be said to have somewhat benefited society, it would be his free medicine distribution to the poor and sick. However, whether even that truly stemmed from charitable intent is doubtful. Setting aside for a moment the ulterior motive behind requiring such convoluted procedures—where recipients had to present certificates from ward offices, town or village offices, or police stations to receive free medicine, with both the medicine and ten-yen consolation money distributed through those very offices—what on earth was the deal with those grandiose free medicine advertisements?

Even as I drafted this manuscript, he advertised the dubious results of his free medicine campaign in newspapers nationwide.
According to that advertisement, over the past four months, he had provided free medicine to seventy poor and sick individuals.
To boast so grandiosely—as if they’d captured a demon’s head—about merely administering treatment to a paltry seventy people (though it may yet reach higher numbers) out of the nation’s hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients was sheer exaggeration.

Now, estimating the total expenditure for that free medicine program: consolation money amounted to seven hundred yen for seventy people, medicine cost two thousand one hundred yen, and with production costs including stamp tax totaling four hundred twenty yen—the actual amount spent came to a combined total of one thousand two hundred yen.
However, to distribute this 1,200 yen in charity, Tanzō had spent tens of thousands of yen on advertising—the initial advertisement alone would have sufficed.
To spend nearly ten thousand yen in advertising costs solely for self-praising results reports—I simply cannot comprehend it….

You were being had, weren't you?
You were completely seen through...
No—I had absolutely no intention of nitpicking your charitable acts then...
Regardless of intent...
If you had used those tens of thousands...
However... I wanted...
I suddenly came...

Until then, I had thought your self-promotion stunts were mere advertising to sell medicine and watched in silence, but now that this no longer seemed the case, I sank into gloom. He carried himself with an odd pretense of patriotism, making him all the more ridiculous. The very word “patriot” wept.

In short, you craved honor at any cost. They say the nouveau riche fixate on marrying into pedigreed families, but after money comes honor—that’s been the immutable law since antiquity. Considering this, it shouldn’t surprise—yet having it thrust so starkly before your eyes proved unbearable nonetheless.

Above all, your actions were those of someone quivering in fear of something.
That’s why I came to loathe you even more.
The nouveau riche needed only have money.
What more could you possibly want?
Under the tremendous pressure of having made money, you should have just endured quietly.
There was no need to fuss about.
If having money caused you suffering, you should have donated it all to the state.
Struggling like that was cowardly.—I could no longer stand by and watch in silence.
No—I had grown even more silent.

To make you rich, I worked tirelessly in shadows and sunlight alike, employing every stratagem—but having achieved that goal, I concluded this was no longer my stage to stand upon.

I did only what I wanted to do.
What more could there possibly have been to do?
Moreover, nothing good would come of remaining entangled with you indefinitely now that you had become like this.
I resolved to leave some money in your grasp and make my swift escape.
Like those tanuki from rakugo tales…
That opportunity soon arrived.

Had even journalism finally realized its own transgression, leading it to refuse publishing Kawanashi Medicine’s exaggerated advertisements…

You immediately rushed to the newspaper company in crested haori and hakama,

“Call the advertising manager!”

And when the advertising manager came out,

“—What’s wrong with my advertisement?”
“A nobody like you could get fired on my say-so any second!”
“I’m shelling out eighty thousand yen a year to your newspaper!”
“Call the president!”
“Tell the president to get his ass out here!”

The president refused the meeting.
You slunk back home and consulted me.
I pulled a sour face and,
"So you're going to immediately have that article attacking the newspaper published as an advertisement, eh?"

The usual *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* came out not long after that.
I’d already told you about how pathetically you’d panicked back then.

I laughed aloud at that disgraceful display and cut all ties with you.
Whether you were actually sad about losing me or had some other motive, you bawled your eyes out while bargaining down the severance pay you owed me to a third of what we’d agreed.
Not that even that reduced amount wasn’t enough to live on comfortably for life—but something about it rubbed me wrong, and I blew through every last sen of it in under a year.
Stocks.
I had a knack for making others money, but when it came to earning my own? Utterly hopeless—not that I’d call it dirty money exactly, but it never stuck to my hands anyway.

On the other hand, you—whether being cast aside by me marked the end of your luck or not—found society gradually turning its back on you, and your medicine stopped selling. To begin with, even with the lung disease medicine, better new drugs had emerged, and the public had grown more savvy—what with this and that, the strain from all your reckless overexpansion had finally taken its toll.

When you could no longer run garish newspaper ads, your name had all but vanished from public memory—if not entirely forgotten, your presence had unmistakably faded into obscurity. Then you tried making society gasp again by dumping what funds remained into doomed ventures like sunken ship salvage and political donations—until even bystanders could plainly see your steady decline.

And yet—that you’d come begging for two yen today, five years since our split—though I’d foreseen it, seen through it—still, your arrival came far too soon.

VIII

Granted, you were getting on in years, but even so,your complexion had deteriorated significantly compared to before.You were coughing with that nasty rasp too.No—not that I was making some sarcastic comment about whether you'd ruined your lungs.Moreover,your lung disease medicine business was long gone.Now you were struggling over a mere two yen.What's more,you weren't even trying to hide it.Pitiful.How come you didn't demand two thousand yen in grand Kawanashi Tanzō fashion?

However, even if you were to ask me to lend you two thousand yen, I didn't have two yen to my name—let alone two thousand.
It was embarrassing, but true.
As you could see, I couldn't even afford a doctor—much less money for medicine.
Brewing cheap herbs to drink—the stench had seeped into the tatami until their color changed—that's how long it had been since I first fell ill.

In the end, you left empty-handed, trudging off utterly dejected.
I almost called you back—
“—How’s she...?”
I’d wanted to ask about Ochizuru—but knowing she must be struggling regardless, and that hearing of it would only deepen the hurt—I held my tongue.
Ochizuru had aged too.
Somehow memories of that old moxibustion woman came drifting back—now that I thought of it, Ochizuru too had been a pitiful woman, stripped of any lingering allure, someone who truly deserved heartfelt sympathy.

However, your retreating figure looked utterly dejected.
That chillingly threadbare figure of yours now flickers hotly behind my eyes—I can't banish it.
The slump of your right shoulder was an old habit—I won't last much longer either.
Which of us will go first—you or me?

When I think about it, the retribution for all the ill deeds we'd done had come.
It's too late now, but one shouldn't do ill deeds.
I've grown remarkably weak-spirited lately.
Like you...

In truth, you were a weak-spirited man.
You weren’t such a bad man.
You weren’t the inherently wicked man described in *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō*.
Since I’m the one saying it, there can be no mistake.
Because—and I’ll tell you this now that the time is right—the author of that *The Truth About Kawanashi Tanzō* was none other than yours truly.
That is precisely why I was able to expose everything in such excruciating detail.
The writing itself should make that clear.

(*Osaka Bungaku*, September 1942 Issue)