Pathway to Japanese Literature

"Won’t you write this story I’m about to tell into a novel?" said Tamamoto Jutarō.

Tamamoto had his left leg shortened by three-quarters from a Thompson gun in the Philippines campaign early in the war, but after the war ended, he managed to secure a position as an agency interpreter through his own efforts and kept himself conspicuously busy every day.

“Well, I’ll pass,” I said, and he retorted, “What a strange fellow—not even hearing me out to the end. You once said something like, ‘A Japanese who’s proper as a Japanese would become proper as an American too if they turned American,’ didn’t you? I mean to tell you that actual instance. It’s fact—an interesting tale, I tell you.”

As he said this, he blew whiskey-scented breath in my face.
Because it carried the crisp, clean aroma of authentic whiskey, I became all the more annoyed.

"A man who drinks proper whiskey alone yet only lets others catch whiffs must be a right piece of work."

Tamamoto scratched his head with an awkward "Oh..."

"Ah, right. Even if I front the advance myself, it's no trouble on my end."

Dragging his artificial leg, he fetched an Ippitsu bottle from the back and positioned it conspicuously on the mantel shelf.

From here on, I wrote Tamamoto’s story as he told it.

I

Among second-generation Japanese-Americans, there were those whom Japan wanted to keep reeling back homeward even if they clung to its sleeve.
Molly Shimotome Hideshige was one such case.
This Molly Shimotome became—or rather always had been—the protagonist of this story.

The first time I met Molly was on the lowest deck of the Dawson, a ship bound for Alaska’s Quenslow with contract salmon butchers destined for the Bering Company cannery.
Peering into that dim third-class cabin—a five-compartment barrel of a room—I found a Japanese man lying with ceremonial stiffness across the middle tier of silkworm shelves.
His well-tailored suit remained immaculate, a cigarette poised between fingers whose pallor matched his closed eyelids.
All this composure might’ve been admirable had he not radiated such absolute She-boy essence that eyes naturally gravitated toward him.
What’s this “She-boy” business about?

To call him an effeminate man wouldn’t quite hit the mark; “man-woman” felt slightly off too—in essence, he was a man whom even women might wish to resemble. That said, it wasn’t that his face was particularly handsome or anything of that sort. His physique carried such delicate languor, his hands so unsettlingly beautiful in their form that it verged on impropriety. It was magnificent. Exactly like a figure from a Watteau painting.

But this proved all grand pretense; what lay beneath was extraordinary exertion. At the time, however, I knew nothing of this. With two yellow specks amidst ten thousand white faces aboard—myself being the only other Japanese among all those Caucasians—I couldn’t help but notice him. Not that there was any need to pay it mind.

But that wasn’t possible. What do you suppose Quenslow is like? Two thousand eight hundred nautical miles from Shakō—ten degrees north of Dutch Harbor in Alaska—a cold, bleak, uninhabited region near the Arctic Ocean.

Early April meant drift ice still floated everywhere. The route required slipping through Unimak Strait, notorious for its fog and reefs, then spending three full weeks battered by the Bering’s fury before barely reaching Quenslow alive.

If I put it this way, it sounds brisk—but don’t think for a moment it was anything gentle.
Of these guarantee boats that set out for Alaska, only about four out of ten arrived safely.

Be that as it may, Quenslow was haunted by three monsters: Alaska mosquitoes, loneliness, and starvation.
And during salmon season came overtime work—times when they couldn’t sleep a wink for a week.
They did such grueling work for six months under the aurora, sun dogs, and midnight sun.
They weren’t half bad at it.

No, not exactly.
Students from Washington University in Shakō had such go-getting temperaments that they hired themselves out as lumberjacks in Canada or headed to Alaskan canneries, but their student seasons were limited to places like Ketchikan or Juneau that could be reached in two or three days—not a single reckless soul among them would sign up for such a rough contract.

Those aboard the guarantee boat paid no mind whatsoever to such things—whether the midnight sun rose from the north or south, whether a seal barked a hundred times in a single night. If they hit a big haul, these pros—true veterans who turned dazed under the golden goddess’s sidelong glance promising over two thousand dollars a season—would stake even their lives. Wherever you looked, amidst that swarm of hell’s crows in black rubber boots up to their waists and linseed-oil waterproof coats, the sight of that well-tailored suit like a Watteau painting could hardly be called peaceful.

I felt I couldn’t just leave him be, so I went over to his side,

“Well now, off to Ketchikan to pick some ‘gun orchids’ or something?”

When I called out to him, Watteau’s painting answered in English with slightly rolled Rs,

“I beg yer puddin’, you said something, sir?”

It was an exceedingly courteous greeting meaning, “Excuse my rudeness, but did you say something?”
So I too responded with utmost courtesy,

“How may I humbly serve by inquiring whether your esteemed self might be deigning to take a stroll in the vicinity of Ketchikan?”

Then Watteau’s painting bowed even deeper and began fluently, “I am sorry. My Emperor of China.”

“I have never had the honour of visiting the Orient.”

“With all due disrespect, Emperor of China—though I have yet to have the honor of visiting the Orient,” which likely meant “I hate Japanese people,” but by this point I could no longer keep silent.
Since it’s troublesome, I’ll skip the details of our petty exchange, but I too grew increasingly disheveled, until finally—

“No matter how territorial the Nationality Law may be, it seems they still can’t change their skin color.”

When I said that cruel thing, Watteau’s painting instantly twisted into a face like a Picasso—lunging at me with a “Damn!”—so this bastard must’ve been truly reckless. I grabbed his collar and shoved him hard; when his head cracked against the cargo hold door, he went limp like a ragdoll.

“Hey, you listening?”
“I’m listening.”

II

After all, April meant storm season in the Aleutians.
If this were a revue, it would be just before the final act—the steamship rolled onward through the grand ensemble of foul weather: waves, wind, blizzard, fog, and drift ice, performing somersaults all the while.

The fog clung like condensed milk, and drift ice incessantly battered the hull, making it feel as if we were trapped inside a massive bell.
Because the steamship was performing an acrobatic dance, the passengers couldn’t remain silent either.
Every last one of them was flung from their bunks, tumbling into a chaotic jumble of every conceivable object as they leapt up to the ceiling and plummeted back down, creating an endless uproar.
With this being a continuous performance spanning two weeks, it was no easy feat.
Even if I were to write this part with some exaggeration, it wouldn’t be a lie.
I’ll leave the descriptions to others—but do see that it’s handled properly.
“Understood.”

Even crows are living beings after all—they couldn’t endure being tossed around like that. They vomited profusely. I discovered, more than I cared to, the truth that Westerners vomit all the same.

But I didn't vomit.
A formidable restraint was in place—the idea that vomiting would compromise Japanese dignity—so even if I wanted to vomit, I couldn't.
This feeling might seem too simplistic, but its very simplicity made it true.

“I get it already. Move on.”

However, as I watched, Watteau’s painting did not vomit either.
He had grown as thin as someone down-and-out, yet kept his eyes tightly shut and held on stubbornly.
I might have called it plucky resolve, but I didn’t see it that way.
Annoyed, I waited in anticipation—would he vomit today? Tomorrow?—but he never obliged me, not even when we finally entered Saint Michel’s harbor.
After going ashore at the port,

“Well now, you’ve gotten willow-slender, haven’t you?”

When I teased him, Watteau’s painting clung to the pier’s bollard while—

“Oh, not much—just my size.”

“Hah! No—just about right,” he retorted with undiminished cheek.

From there aboard the company’s tugboat, we ascended the Yukon River for a hundred nautical miles. The place where we were unceremoniously dumped—proclaimed as Quenslow—turned out to be a snow-flecked marsh with sedge sprouting in patches. A skeletal copse of trees and a half-collapsed wooden cabin, tilted askew, loomed dimly through the fog.
Truly, it was an awful place—the sort that made you furious just laying eyes on it.

Though I’ll skip the scenery as it’s irrelevant to this story—once we reached the cannery, Molly went to the American group’s wooden cabin beyond the grove while I joined the tents of Greek and Armenian immigrants, and though this was such a cramped place, we scarcely ever crossed paths after parting ways.

It seemed that when confined within such boundless wilderness, humans grew needlessly desolate—so much so that even upon seeing snow buntings hopping fearlessly by the marsh’s edge, one might feel compelled to call out “O my friend.” Even if they found someone unpleasant, humans could not help but sustain friendship through either camaraderie or conflict.

The reason we two rarely met was that he avoided meeting me—Molly’s attitude struck me as thoroughly disagreeable—but setting that aside, what never left my mind was this: why had a She-boy like Molly, picturesque as a painting, been compelled to come to this godforsaken edge of Alaska? This I would come to understand later—there existed a reason sufficient unto itself for that.

Molly’s father, out of excessive love, had kept Molly’s Japanese nationality reserved so that he could return to Japan at any time, but this became the seed of Molly’s torment.
As he approached conscription age, he was driven into the difficult position of finally having to decide whether to choose Japan or America.

For the person in question, this was apparently not as simple a matter as choosing between bread or macaroni.
Once hesitation takes hold, it seems to prove difficult to resolve.
And so, after agonizing for a long time, Molly began using snow—that is, cocaine—to escape that pain.
Why one would agonize so much over something like that belongs solely to the person themselves; it is not something for others to pass judgment on.

However, since cocaine held no key to solving the problem, he had merely acquired the bad habit of addiction, leaving the issue fundamentally unresolved. It later struck me that those abnormally delicate and astonishingly beautiful hands—which had first startled my eyes aboard the Dawson’s dancer—were essentially the telltale mark of a habitual cocaine user. The story was growing somewhat more intriguing.

The real interest lies ahead.
As for what finally made that Molly take the plunge—I never did get to the bottom of that—but at any rate, he resolved at last to become American, filing his nationality renunciation at the consulate while signing up for a season contract in Quenslow.
Once he'd gone twenty-six hundred miles into the Alaskan interior, there was no returning to America until the six-month season ended.
Moreover, Alaska's snow was Snow with a capital S—the real article, never cocaine.
It all stemmed from this grand scheme: six months isolated from both cocaine and the "Old Man's Ghost," during which he'd remake himself into a loyal American citizen—sound in mind, sound in body.

That such a pitiful Molly had to be hounded all the way from Shako to Alaska by me—a supposed kinsman of the “Old Man’s Ghost”—was indeed one form of misfortune. Just when he had finally steeled himself to leave Japan behind, being hounded by someone like me must have made it utterly impossible for him to focus. That he tried so hard to avoid my pestering glances in order to concentrate his mind on America was, quite simply, only natural.

To put it simply, Molly had been earnestly undertaking a serious “ascetic practice” to fully become a loyal American.

III

After some time had passed, I got into a fight with Molly over something trivial.
That’s how it came about.

Before that, let me talk a bit about salmon.
The salmon ascending the Yukon River are of four species: King, Chum, Sockeye, and Coho.
The King Salmon—while the other three measure from two and a half feet up to three at most—boasts a length of four and a half feet with a girth of one and a half feet, less a king than a monster in its majesty.
That nearly all bore “U.S.A.” and the United States mark stamped on their bellies made for a curious sight.
Don’t joke about this.

This is no joke—it’s the truth. It was simply that fry released into this river long ago by the Fisheries Bureau—marked with imprints—had grown and returned to their ancestral spawning grounds through their innate homing instinct. Once one understood this, it seemed trivial, but when seeing a large salmon with “U.S.A.” stamped on its belly ascending the river shallows, its dorsal fin rippling, anyone would startle at first, thinking, “Goodness—has a fox bewitched it?”

I once read in a kōdan that long ago in the Nambu domain, there was a great samurai with a hooked nose named Sōma Daisaku, and that the pun “Southern Salmon with a Hooked Nose” originated from him—but in Japan, chum salmon are called “Southern Hooknose.” Admittedly, its nose wasn’t entirely unlike a bulldog’s, but as a name, “Hooknose” carried more elegance than “Dog Salmon.”

Sockeye salmon were, in essence, sockeye—their disposition stood unmistakably clear—but when it came to coho salmon, some resembled king salmon while others were dead ringers for Hooknose, yet they weren’t hybrids. They existed ambiguously in between. If Mr. Four and a Half Feet represented America and Hooknose stood for Japan, then Coho Salmon would be Japanese-Americans, I supposed.

This is a digression, but come late April, the salmon began their upstream run. Salmon boats gathered them from sprawling nets and tossed them relentlessly into flat-bottomed barges along the riverbank—and before you knew it, a thirty-foot-square fish landing was piled high with mountains of salmon.

I was working at the fish landing, sorting Kings and Chums and tossing them into the elevator bound for the filleting machine when Molly sauntered over from the office direction and stationed himself beside the fish hoist to watch.

I hadn’t realized Molly had been avoiding me so resolutely, and being bored at the time, I launched into a comparative lecture about salmon. Molly snatched a Chum Salmon from the fish pile, held it upside down by the tail, and studied it intently before—

“Yep’, he’s look like it.”

“Hey, it really does resemble you,” he said, eyeing my face.
Then I shot back, “Well then, what’re *you*?” Molly answered with perfect composure, “Since I’m an American citizen, naturally I’m a King Salmon,” which made me burst out laughing,

“That’s not how it is.
“You’re just a Coho Salmon through and through.
“If you’re so hellbent on being American, show me the U.S.A. stamp on your belly.
“Well? Can’t do it, can you, blockhead!”

I finished at him.
Molly turned pale and glared at me, but

“Looking at you!”

Declaring “To your health,” he suddenly hurled the chum salmon he was holding at my chest.
Well, well—this was quite something—so I grabbed that Chum Salmon and went over to Molly,

“The same to you!”

“Returning the favor,” I said, striking Molly across the cheek with the salmon with all my might, then grabbing the staggering man by the collar and seat of his pants to bury him in the salmon pile. Molly ended up covered in scales from head to toe, looking like some prince straight out of the Arabian Nights.

When June arrived, the salmon season finally began in earnest, and things became so busy it made your head spin.

At this point, I’ll briefly explain the cannery process: The salmon that were transported up via elevator from the riverside fish landing went straight into the filleting machine, where their heads and tails were cut off before emerging into the fish washing area.

Those cleaned of blood and remaining entrails passed through a box equipped with a rotating blade, becoming two-and-a-half-inch-wide cut pieces that fell into a receiving tub.
At that moment, empty cans would slowly descend along a seven-inch incline from above, scoop up a portion of fish meat and a pinch of salt, then leap onto the conveyor belt to flow into the processing table where the can pounders worked.

There, they were given their final touches, passed through the lid-closing machine’s iron pipe, cooled once, then placed into the steam retort—such was the sequence—but the most difficult role belonged to the can pounder performing the final finishing.

The ones riding the conveyor belt were by no means in proper condition.
That was the wretchedness of machines—they gave absolutely no consideration to our aesthetic impressions when opening the cans.
Once they scooped up fish meat slightly less than one portion along with a fixed amount of salt, whether the meat protruded or twisted, they sent them relentlessly onward without a care.

The can pounder would pound it onto the iron plate of the processing table to stabilize the meat inside the can, insert filler pieces into any gaps, and skillfully adjust twisted fish skin before pressing it all into place.
Unless they could do all this within three seconds, they wouldn’t be called a full-fledged can pounder.
Flat cans were manageable enough, but tall cans lay far beyond what fledgling fresh eggs could handle.

Even when pounding cans against the iron plate, there was quite a knack to it—do it carelessly, and the contents would burst out of the cans and become unmanageable. You had to ensure the can’s bottom always struck the iron plate flatly, and it couldn’t be too weak or too forceful.

Having worked extensively in Ketchikan and Juneau, I was immediately assigned to tall-can pounding when salmon season arrived—but then, after some time, to my astonishment, Mario the Italian at the third workstation withdrew, and Molly came to take his place.

The office must have reasoned that if I—a full-blooded Japanese—could handle it adequately, then Molly—being half-Japanese—shouldn’t be incapable either. But those doing the assigning were something else altogether, and Molly taking it on was no ordinary matter either.

“Hey Molly—wouldn’t you be better off fiddling with salmon guts in the fish washing area?”

“Take it fromme—I’m not telling you anything bad,” I advised, whereupon Molly, as usual, began twitching his temples violently while—

“You don’t knowme yet.”

You do not know me as an entity.
It became a thorny matter of “If Japanese can do it, why can’t Americans?” ain’t it?

I conceded defeat—“Fine, give it a try then”—and left him to it. Sure enough, he botched the pounding and scattered salmon everywhere. He’d frantically gather them up in a sweat and cram them into cans, only to spill them again—a spectacular mess.
Before long, it became utterly unmanageable; he kept haphazardly stopping the conveyor belt, so cans gradually piled up into an irretrievable state.

I didn’t feel particularly sorry for him. Finding it rather amusing deep down—I was entertained by the situation—I watched with interest to see what he might do next. Molly went off somewhere, brought back sugar tongs, a mustard spoon, and a chair, then plopped down onto the seat. Without so much as glancing at the accumulated cans, he settled into an infuriating composure and began meticulous work using the tongs and spoon, as if performing fine engraving.

IV

How obsessively Molly threw himself into working those salmon cans—to recount it in detail would lay bare his sheer obstinacy in all its fascinating absurdity—but I'll refrain from delving too deeply here.

Whenever he had free time, Molly would practice can pounding with scrap meat and empty cans.
When complaints arose from the nearby camp about being unable to sleep through the pounding noise, he moved to work on the flat-bottomed boat moored at the riverbank.

Molly’s obsession likely stemmed from wanting to smash my record and put me to shame, but before he could break that record, Molly himself was the first to fold.

To say he folded didn’t mean he died.
Despite lacking any real stamina, he kept overexerting himself until accumulated exhaustion finally knocked him flat.

If we’re calling things unreasonable—Molly coming to Alaska in his physical state was unreasonable from the start—then ultimately every damn thing Molly did was unreasonable. All that unreasonableness gave him vicious anemia and these delicate fainting spells like some society dame—a real pain to handle.
Even then, pigheaded as ever, he leaned on that Eskimo’s shoulder to drag himself to the cannery, but soon even that stopped working and he crashed hard into bed.

Molly lay in a log-cabin storehouse at the edge of the mixed woods, but July meant King Salmon season had ended and Chum Salmon season was now in full swing—the busiest period of the salmon run with daily processing between six thousand to ten thousand fish. With even backup machinery mobilized for round-the-clock operations continuing today and tomorrow alike, there wasn’t a single soul who could spare time to look after Molly.
Dirty dishes from the previous day remained thrown across his bedside table until the following evening.

When work ended and supper was finished, it would usually be past midnight, but no matter when I went to see him, Molly would be facing the window, vacantly gazing at the faintly lit northern midnight scenery that hung indistinct between twilight and dawn.

When I entered, Molly said in a cold tone:

“What’s the matter?”

He showed no sign of weakness through questions like “What’s wrong?”
Yet he never told me to leave.
I sat by Molly’s bedside and talked about whatever I wanted.
Molly didn’t utter a single word.

Isn’t this what they mean by kindness backfiring—a case like me and Molly?
Had I known showing more kindness would make Molly suffer more, I’d never have visited him—but back then, I knew nothing of this.

Molly remained bedridden until mid-August in a state of neither recovering nor deteriorating.
I kept visiting patiently.

Summer came to Alaska, and kingcups and bellflowers bloomed along the marsh banks. When I picked them and brought them to him, Molly would each time wear a look that seemed both bewildered and bashful—an indescribably strange expression.

“Thank you very much.”

“These’ll add a bit of decoration, you know.”

“For people who come all the way to Alaska to work, flowers are meaningless.”

he said things like that.

One day, Molly—unusually showing a flush in his face—had been asking about Japanese wildflowers when he began speaking of how his father had emigrated from a village called Sōma near Morioka, but he suddenly made an awkward face and fell silent.

Because kōdan was my most favored form of storytelling, associations immediately stirred—

“Your Japanese name was Shimotome Hideshige, wasn’t it? So you’re saying you’re a descendant of Sōma Daisaku?”

When asked, Molly appeared reluctant and answered that his father had once said such a thing.

I grew amused—

“Huh, so that’s it.”
“So that hooknose of yours comes from your bloodline after all.”

He said.
When Molly asked what he meant by that, I told him how Shimotome Hidenoshin—later known as Sōma Daisaku—a retainer of the Nambu domain, had overthrown three generations of Tsugaru domain lords who usurped Nambu territory, finally achieving his lifelong ambition; how he staged ambushes with cannons at Yatate Pass and lured enemies into traps at Sada Crossing; and how the saying “Southern Hooknose Salmon” originated from this Sōma Daisaku. After listening in silence until the end, Molly...

“He arrived …… but my soul never get anywhere …… what am I living to ……”

he muttered in a low voice.
“He arrived… but my soul never reaches anywhere… What am I living for…” A literal translation would go something like that, but it sounded too disjointed, so when I asked what he meant by that, Molly—

“I just ……”

He started to say something—then abruptly clamped his mouth shut.

About three days later in the evening, an Eskimo named Joe came to report that Molly had left his cabin and hadn’t returned.

When we went to check the cabin, sure enough, the bed lay empty. As we wondered where he had gone and searched around the area, we found Molly’s footprints leading from beside the smokehouse toward a mudflat called Omiyaku. It was a treacherous mudflat where a careless step could claim one’s life, and as I followed the footprints toward its bank—thinking this had taken a bad turn—there indeed was Molly, submerged up to his chest in the mire, staring motionless in our direction with a terrifying composure as if resignedly awaiting death.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

I called out, but there was no reply.

I tried to return to the cannery to call for help, but when I looked, Molly was sinking into the mud inch by inch with imperceptible slowness.
I thought of using a pole or something similar, but naturally there was nothing of the sort to be found.
I concluded that my only remaining option was to enter the mud myself and push Molly up.

This was an extremely dangerous approach, but I reasoned that if Molly could just plant his foot on my stirrup and nimbly pull himself free from the mire, then given my physical strength, it wouldn’t be impossible for me to struggle out alone afterward.

So I stepped in without hesitation, and before I’d taken three steps, I suddenly sank squelching up to my waist. Still, I somehow managed to reach Molly’s side, and when I tried to slip my hands under his armpits to pull him up, the momentum caused me to sink deeper into the mud than Molly. This must be what they mean by being beyond saving, but there was no time to dawdle—when I asked if he could move his legs, he replied that he could somehow manage to move his right leg. So I,

“Since I’m standing here like this, you keep kicking my hip bone or stomach or wherever and struggle upward bit by bit—got it?”

At this, Molly kept his eyes downcast and did not respond.
I was getting irritated,

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

When I said this, Molly—

“I do not have the courage to kick you.”
he blurted out something nonsensical.
I got angry—
“Don’t talk nonsense! If you keep dawdling, I’ll die too—hurry up!”
I barked.
Something squirming began to tickle around my flank.
When I wondered what it was—it was Molly’s hand searching for my hand.

V

When the jeep began moving through downtown Tokyo, I found myself remembering Molly again.

There was simply no way I could not remember it.
Molly’s delicately balanced anguish had ultimately stemmed from caring too much about this thing called Japan—but I believe it was the moment he resolutely kicked me in the Omiyaku mudflat that he first managed to wrench himself free from its ghosts.
Considering that, given Molly’s sincerity, he must have become an unparalleled fine American.

This was by no means the first time I had remembered Molly with such intensity. Shortly after the war began, when I landed in the Philippines, there was not a single moment—not a minute or a second—when I wasn’t thinking of Molly, one could say.

Seven years ago when we parted at Shako Port’s Second Pier—Molly said:
“My contract with America isn’t anything like this cannery work.
No advance pay comes first,
and then there’s this endless season stretching on.”

Molly said.

That Hooknose must have charged straight into battle against America’s enemies—and since if he were coming anywhere, it’d be the Philippines first—there always lingered in me something like the conviction that I’d inevitably meet Molly there.

At the fringe of that miniature sea of trees, likely near the base of some solitary trunk up ahead, I kept pushing forward with *This time—this time for sure* burning through my skull.

If, say at a narrow bend in a ground crevice, we'd suddenly come face-to-face—which of us would fire first?
No—either one firing immediately would've been better.
Thirty minutes of us grinning at each other while—

“Hello, Jutarō.”

“Hello, Molly.”

“We finally meet—how’ve you been?”

“We finally meet.”
“Are you managing alright?”

If we were to exchange such greetings and then raise our guns anew to aim at each other, there could be no crueler moment in this world.

In any case, since there was no avoiding that, I had grown a beard haphazardly so that in such situations, I wouldn’t be recognized.

In the Philippines, I never did meet Molly.
The one who shortened my left leg by three-quarters was another American—not Molly.

The war ended, and the Americans came ashore to Japan as victors.

I wanted to meet Molly.
I wanted to see for myself, under the crisp Japanese autumn sky, just what kind of splendid American that bastard who kicked me had become.
The reason I somehow managed to take up the role of government interpreter and busily work at it was none other than because I thought doing so might give me even the slightest increase in opportunities to meet Molly.

“So did you meet Molly?”

“You ask something quite unbecoming of a novelist.”
“If we hadn’t met, this story wouldn’t have any closure, would it?”
“We did meet. Of course we met.”
“And we met in broad daylight, on the grass of Meiji Shrine Outer Garden.”

Under the zelkova tree to the right of the art museum, there was no mistaking that the man sitting with legs flung out and smoking a cigarette was indeed Molly. When I called out, "Hey, what are you doing?" Molly didn't even turn around,

“None of your business!”

“It’s none of your business,” he snapped.
The Hooknose demeanor remained unchanged from the old days.
When I called out, “Hey—it’s me! Jutarō!” Molly suddenly stood up,

“Oh, Jutarō! So you were hiding in a place like this during the war.”

With that, he suddenly hugged me.
When I silently rolled up my pant leg and showed it, Molly let out a sharp whistle and—

“Oh, this is messed up,” he said. “If it were me, I would’ve handled it better.”

He made a genuinely disappointed face.

Molly said he’d just come back from visiting Sōma Daisaku’s grave in Sōma Village during his vacation up in Morioka.

“I only went to pay respects at Daisaku’s grave, but good know how many of them started hollering ‘Hide’s here! Hide’s here!’ and force-fed me mochi bullets and seki-han rice till I wanted to puke.”

he said with a happy expression.
I flared up,

“Nonsense. Weren’t you supposed to be an American?”

When I snapped back at him, Molly—
“Yes, Americans are Americans, but the Molly you know is a different matter.”
“Let me show you.”

With that, he landed a ferocious straight left to my jaw and pinned me to the grass with a ground wrestle that left me immobilized.
My mouth went dry with rage,

“Don’t get cocky just because America won.”

Shouting, I struggled desperately, but frustratingly, the artificial leg made it impossible to break free. When I resigned myself and went limp, Molly—

“You can use your right leg, can’t you? Why aren’t you kicking?” he advised.

I thought he was right and kicked Molly’s waist with all my strength, sending Molly rolling to the base of the zelkova tree.

“Jutarō, with this, we’re even.”

With that, Molly began laughing with a foolish grin.