Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

At the end of the dusty, meandering slope stood a weathered wooden bridge.
Across the wooden bridge stretched a parched white road, and beyond that stood a red brick wall and an iron gate.
Beyond the iron gate stretched the vast grounds of the Kumamoto Tobacco Monopoly Bureau Factory. The gravel path leading to the central clocktower building still swam in the fierce summer glare, while red brick structures on either side stood imposingly with chests thrust forward.――

As usual, Sankichi descended the long slope along Kumamoto Castle’s stone walls, and from where the iron service gate came into view, his stride changed.
The gate remained closed, and the clock tower’s hands still fell short of five o’clock—the workday’s end.
Thud... thud... thud...
From every building where work still continued came the sound of labored breathing, but Sankichi paced back and forth across the bridge or stood among old women waiting impatiently with infants strapped to their backs—mothers and grandmothers anticipating daughters and brides—before the iron gate.
The guard walked boredly inside the gate, hands clasped behind his back while swinging the key ring’s large wooden tag.
The ever-sullen brick wall loomed imposingly; the poplars along its base stood whitened by dust――

Everything was dirty, parched, and weary. As soon as the electric bell beneath the clock tower began to ring, workers burst forth from every building. Even though the guard had not yet opened the gate, people had already come flooding into the grounds. Sankichi hurried across the bridge, then started walking toward the iron gate once more. ――I wonder where we’ll meet today――.

As if bursting through the iron gate, the people formed three separate streams. Two flowed left and right along the road before the gate, while the third crossed the bridge and came straight this way. Young women, old women, a stooped old man still in his tobacco-colored work uniform. The matron pressing her lunchbox against her flapping-open exposed chest and shaking her shoulders as she came. A young girl in straw sandals walked at a trot, swinging the ends of the sash tied at her back as she tried to keep up with her companion. The young women locally dubbed "snappy schoolgirls" walked with quick, mincing steps, leaning forward as they moved at a terrifying pace. Thrusting one shoulder forward as if sent flying from the factory gate, they slipped past Sankichi on either side. The smell of sweat, the smell of tobacco leaves. Short, clipped exchanges and bursts of laughter. “You’re such an idiot.” “Ouch!” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “...Tell ...chan I said hello.”――.

Hearing one of the laughs, Sankichi jolted.
The familiar laugh came unexpectedly close; he had no time to turn his face away.
Through the stream of people came a tall figure in a white yukata that stood out somewhat from directly ahead; the moment their eyes met, her head with its slightly reddish hair bowed.

As they passed each other, the woman bumped her shoulder against her companion—a young girl—and let out another laugh.
Her laughter echoed.
Sankichi went to the edge of the bridge and immediately turned back.
Together with the swiftness of the flow, he climbed the slope, circled around Kumamoto Castle’s stone walls, and emerged onto the embankment road along the rice fields.
Along the way, the flow broke into several parts, and in that area, human figures grew sparse.
The embankment slope’s shadows deepened, dayflowers blooming thickly with blossoms.

The young girl with the trailing pink underskirt and hitched-up hem would occasionally turn around to glare at Sankichi.
The small, dark face with its jutting chin showed unconcealed hostility.
The woman never once turned around, but the awareness of someone behind her was evident in every line of her retreating figure.
A distinctive walk that fluttered her hem, the slender curve of her waist wrapped in a red and purple striped obi.
The sound of her laughter—sometimes leaning into her young companion before hunching forward—startled Sankichi, but today too, by the time they reached a certain point on the embankment road, he found himself unable not only to call out but even to close the distance between them as they walked.

They split off from there, descending onto an even narrower country path that cut across the rice paddies as they made their way back to the village visible at the foot of the distant mountains. They moved away, their figures hidden up to their waists in the green rice leaves. And along the country path with its several bends—at a point where their facial expressions were no longer discernible—the woman turned back to glance this way, tilting her head. Until then, Sankichi had been standing rooted to the embankment road; now, hurriedly lowering his head, he seemed to revive with a sigh of relief.――

A high nose and a slender back.
The overly large mouth, even the thin eyebrows, took on distinctive nuances, forming an image in Sankichi’s head.
When their figures had faded blue into the distance beyond the rice paddies, only the white parched embankment road remained at his feet—just as it had yesterday, and the day before――.

Hitching up his clothes, Sankichi turned back along the embankment road this time and soon entered the outskirts town.
Staining his ankles with white dust, he unerringly made his way into the back-alley lanes lined with nothing but small houses.
Past a housewife in a single waistcloth who chased after children while shouting something and shouldering a bamboo broom, past an old man slapping his shin in nothing but a loincloth as he adjusted the wilted morning glory vines under the eaves, Sankichi turned through several clamorous back alleys bustling with pre-dinner activity before emerging at the corner entrance of a tenement’s end house—where an incongruously large signboard read “Kumamoto Branch Office of the Japan Fraternity Union.”

“Hey, Aoi.”

A voice called out to Sankichi from ahead, followed by laughter.

“How’d it go today?”

On the three-foot veranda opening onto the alley, Nagano and Fukami were drinking shochu. Nagano had hung his work jacket—adorned with a red foreman’s insignia—on the morning glory-entwined fence nearby, still wearing his shoes, while Fukami, as the master of this house, sat cross-legged in a new yukata.

“That look ain’t gonna cut it.”

Nagano laughed, his Chaplin mustache twitching.
Nagano was a man who had drifted from Osaka and worked as an electrical repairman at the Monopoly Bureau Factory.
Separate from Sankichi’s Kumamoto Printing Workers’ Union, he had formed a Fraternity Union branch centered around the Monopoly Bureau, and thanks to his eloquence and the distinction of his leaf-green uniform—allowed only to mechanics among the tobacco-colored work clothes—he enjoyed popularity among the female workers.
Sankichi sat on the edge of the veranda and wiped his face with a hand towel, but then—drawn by the laughter of the two men—Fukami’s wife, her bun tied with a red hair cord, quietly placed a fan before Sankichi while pulling her body back, simultaneously bursting into rolling giggles.

“You’re quite the persistent one.”

When the wife said in a low voice,

“Huh?”

Sankichi answered with a straight face, and when the wife burst out laughing again, he joined in with a laugh.

Fukami’s wife, who had not long been married into the household, had small eyes, a small mouth, a small nose—all gathered into a round face atop a plump, rounded frame. The single-room house—though he couldn’t tell how many tatami mats it covered—was neatly organized, with a new chest of drawers and a mirror stand draped with red cloth.

“The leader of the Printers’ Union, Aoi Sankichi—when it comes to women, you ain’t worth squat. Hmm.”

Nagano thrust the glass. This man—who had a wife and children but sported a Chaplin mustache and long chin—was popular among the female workers in that regard as well. Sankichi stated the matter in a businesslike manner while drinking shochu. As he spoke, he grew angry with himself. No matter what, he ended up being mocked by this man.—The business matters were these: notification had been received that Takashima Sadaki from Tokyo’s Zen’ei would be coming; that officers of the Kumamoto Labor Union Federation—formed by the Printers’ Union and Fraternity Union branch—would handle publicity for his lecture meeting and discussion session; and that Fifth Higher School students would manage Takashima’s reception. However, neither Nagano nor Fukami—both fellow Kumamoto branch members of the Shinjinkai—showed much interest in this matter. This was due first to Takashima’s lack of renown, and second to his being a Bolshevik.

“Please help yourself.”

Fukami’s wife brought out a serving cloth.
As he nodded and looked down at his own ankles whitened with dust, he noticed Nagano speaking in his usual Osaka-accented Japanese about the Kumamoto City Council election scheduled for autumn.
Fukami thrust his body forward,

“Well now, if we’ve got ourselves a patron, that’s like a demon with an iron club, hmm—”

He spread open the front of his yukata at the chest and waved his fan with exaggerated motions.
Fukami, with tique in his hair, seemed conscious of his newlywed wife as well,

“―I’ll back you too. Once universal suffrage hits, we Kumaren’ve got to push through—city council seats or Diet seats, whatever it takes.”

While saying this, he now tried to bring Sankichi into the fold.

“What about you? Well, I could even find you a patron if you like.”

Sankichi thought he had to return soon. Fukami, a cutting worker at the Monopoly Bureau, had long aspired to become a city council member or such. Yet back when Ono Tetsujirou remained with the Printers’ Union—whether him or Nagano—they wouldn’t have spoken this nakedly.

“Isn’t Kousaka handling the preparations?”

This time, Nagano peered at Sankichi. Kousaka was indeed an executive of the Printers’ Union and also ran his own printing factory. While he secretly frequented the Kenshikai Party’s Kumamoto Branch, he had still followed the labor executive trio—Ono, Tsuda, and Sankichi—as long as they remained firmly in control.

“You’ll support us, right?”

When Sankichi remained silent,

“Well then, I’ll be countin’ on you too—just one favor, eh?”

Nagano said with feigned drunkenness.
Nagano and Kousaka were called members of the "Whore Faction."
And the anarchist Ono, who had coined this name, had already departed for Tokyo that spring.

“How about it—won’t you join us?”

Fukami was getting quite carried away.

“Hey, put out the meal tray over there.”

The wife began preparing inside the room, looking rather happy.

“No, I’ll be going.”
“Look, that’s how it is.”

When Nagano shook his long chin demonstratively, Fukami—as if noticing—now spoke only to Sankichi.

“Well then, you stay.”

“No, I’m heading back too.”

Sankichi said this, but Nagano took his haori from the fence and slung it over his shoulder,

“What’s with moping over one woman? Get yourself together.”

After having his shoulder patted and watching him depart in high spirits, he remained rooted to the spot.

“By the way—how old is that girl?”

As Fukami asked this, his wife answered in a lively tone.

“Shige-chan is one year older than I.”

“Twenty-one?”

Because Sankichi showed no sign of moving inside, the couple naturally came to sit behind him.

“We’re farmers, but her brother’s a carpenter.”
“Shige-chan’s getting to that age too, don’t you think?”

Sankichi looked at the darkening ground beneath his feet.
She had been a colleague of Fukami’s wife—a former paper-rolling worker—and at Fukami’s wedding ceremony, when she came to help, Sankichi had only seen her face.

“So what about that girl—has she ever been with a man before?”

“That sort of thing—”

The wife was doubled over with suppressed laughter.
“―She hasn’t, I’m sure―.”

The wife’s laughter seemed to warm Sankichi.
Should I take a wife?
No matter how poor we might be, I wouldn’t mind.
In time, we’d have lots of children, and I wouldn’t mind ending up just like my parents.—

“Should I go talk to that girl?”

Behind him, the couple began their discussion.

“Or should you ask her instead?”

“Perhaps.”

“Either way, that Aoi guy’s the sort who couldn’t speak up himself even after three years.”

Then, after the couple burst into laughter once more, the wife—as if suddenly noticing something—let go of the fan she’d been using to hide her face,

“Hey, Mr. Aoi.”

When Sankichi hurriedly turned his face toward the lamplight, she pressed close with a good-natured person’s lack of reserve, her powdered face bringing its scent with her.

“Are you really all right with that?”

she said.
Sankichi nodded without turning from the darkness.
Night had fully fallen, and every house hung with straw screens seemed filled with mealtime’s abundant quiet.

“Well, you’ll settle down soon enough—”

Fukami—whose simplemindedness stemmed from being quick to take offense—

“When I met your mother recently, she expressed such concern.”
“Sankichi talks of going to Tokyo, but if he were to leave now, it would create difficulties—you being the eldest son and all.”

went on.

“―Kumaren would be in trouble too.”
“Ono and Tsuda are already gone, and the Fifth Higher School group will have graduated and left before we know it.”
“A capable person like you staying in Kumamoto and fighting on—that’s exactly what we need—”

In the end, Sankichi ended up not letting the newlyweds eat dinner and sat on the edge of the veranda until late into the night.

II

Under the eaves of the house, with a sunshade mat hung, Sankichi was making bamboo ladles.
With a hessian sack tied by rope that served as his work apron, he pressed down on the root of a massive moso bamboo—six inches in diameter—with both big toes, shaving it using a cooper’s adze: a blade with handles protruding left and right.
Scrape, scrape, scratch—...
The metal-hard bamboo nodes occasionally repelled the adze before it slid through, and raindrop-like sweat plopped, plopped down before him.—

In the cramped city of Kumamoto, Sankichi too was one of those who had been "driven to the wall." He had been fired from a newspaper company for joining a strike, arrested as one of the organizers of a “labor issues lecture meeting” at a power plant, and upon participating in the printers’ union’s activities, had become notorious enough that no employer would hire him anymore. His comrade Ono had fled to Tokyo, while Tsuda—another associate—had washed up at the Goro Newspaper in Fukuoka; rumor claimed he now paraded about in hakama trousers. The Fifth Higher School group confined their activism to the Shinjinkai branch, steering clear of union affairs. Takashima and Nagano in particular patronized the students like children. Five or six years senior to Sankichi’s circle and entrenched as local power brokers, they began pushing their brand of “parliamentarism” with increasing boldness as implementation of the Universal Suffrage Law grew imminent.

“You needn’t make bamboo ladles. I could arrange factory work for you.”

Even when Takashima made this offer, Sankichi resisted going.
To be employed by him meant enduring his master-class disposition—it was plain that even regarding union affairs, he wouldn’t permit Sankichi to speak as an equal.
The countryside truly confined.
Once cast adrift, unless one compromised with local powers, there remained nowhere left for one’s body.

Scrape, scrape, scratch—... Instantly, Sankichi threw down the adze and leapt into the house.
Along the road in front of the house, a cream-colored parasol passed by, bursting the sunlight into splinters.
It wasn’t that the face hidden beneath the parasol belonged to someone in particular—he felt ashamed before young women in general.
Even my beggar-like appearance, even making bamboo ladles filled me with shame.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

The mother, sitting nearby shaving bamboo sticks, asked in surprise.
Sankichi shook his head, went to his bookcase to feign composure, took out a letter from Ono among other things, and returned to his workspace.
Why was being seen by young women so mortifying?

Pretending to reread the letter, Sankichi pondered.
He had been accustomed to bamboo craft work since childhood.
Peeling off bamboo bark with an adze, shaving down the outer protrusions at each node, thinning the hard inner thickness, then drilling a hole and attaching a handle—this produced sturdy though clumsy bamboo ladles of the sort commonly used by farm households across southern Kyushu.
Starting before breakfast, he made forty a day, but this shame was something he could never grow accustomed to.
Even when female students on group tours saw him at the printing factory, it was mortifying, but bamboo work was even more so.
After all, the one being watched was all alone.
There was also the fact that a decent young man was doing something like handicraft work.
But why was that so wrong?
Why am I so ashamed?
And sure enough, whenever young women passed along the road in front, Sankichi would notice them first and leap back into the house.

“But still, if you keep making ladles like this, it’ll bring in two yen a day. We’ll have firewood, no need for socializing—it’s way better than the factory’s two yen.”

His mother said this, deliberately feigning ignorance about why her son kept leaping back into the house. The two-yen profit included help from his mother and siblings, but his mother feared nothing so much as her son running away.

“Well now, Tokyo money might be easier to get, but money that flows in easy flows out easier.”
“And the money you’d be sending every month sure ain’t gonna stick around.”

Beyond Agari-gamachi lay his father, who had been bedridden since sustaining a major injury at work that spring in his freight wagon business, and beside him was his infant sister, still laid there nursing. For his mother, the small bookcase in the corner of her son’s room and the letters that had recently started arriving occasionally from Tokyo were what concerned her most.

“In Germany, you see—Joseph Dietzgen was indeed a handicraft worker, a tanner.”

When the son, who had been silent for some time, suddenly blurted out such things, his mother stopped her hands and looked bewildered.

"No, but he was a craftsman like me—participated in the German Revolution alongside Marx, wrote philosophy books... they say he was an extraordinary man."

His mother, in a manner that suggested she had grasped the gist,

"So, it's Socialism after all?"

she said—

Sankichi would sometimes find courage by summoning thoughts of Dietzgen. Though he knew few details about this German laborer who had built a dialectical materialist philosophy separate from Marx and Engels, the man made him feel something—something pure, even artistic. Even if he couldn’t match Dietzgen’s stature, the notion of dedicating his life anonymously in the provinces felt beautiful. And with this bamboo ladle work, no matter how often the Kumamoto police came prowling at dawn or dusk, there was no risk of being dragged away in handcuffs.

However, would she ever become the wife of a bamboo ladle maker?

And then, returning to that thought, Sankichi stiffened.
The idea of seating her—with her high nose, slightly reddish hair, and resonant laughter—on the mat beside him felt utterly impossible.
He felt like darting into the house, just as he had when seeing the parasol.
"But, but—" Sankichi thought as sweat dripped down, plop, plop.
Wouldn’t she understand?
Just as he had never once thought of her as some "daddy's girl student," he felt that as long as he remained pure, his wishes might be granted—

“When the time—”

Buried in bamboo scraps—the mother having apparently been pondering something herself for some time—lit a single puff on her pipe and spoke.

“About that… from the other day.”

“What’s ‘that’ supposed to mean?”

Lately, whenever Sankichi encountered his mother’s probing tone or attitude about one thing or another, he found himself barely able to suppress the urge to lash out. And so,

“You know, the one from Mr. Kan’s hou—”

The moment his mother said this, he seemed to snap out of a dream.

“I already said I don’t want to!”

However, without opposing her son’s curt reply, his mother silently took another puff, then began working again with a sullen expression. That was all the more irritating to Sankichi. His mother had not given up on that marriage proposal. Her son, branded a “socialist” wanted by the police, was effectively a cripple—a status that suited him all too well. However, Kan-san’s daughter—whose family was also in the freight wagon business—had recently returned from maid service; Sankichi knew this, but it was utter humiliation. First of all, her nose was flat. Her eyes, mouth, eyebrows—not a single part of her body held any sparkle. To Sankichi, a low nose seemed to render one numb to everything—poverty, servility, all of it.

“But you’re already twenty-four.”
“When Tsuneo from Yamamura came back from the army, he went and got himself a wife right away.”
“And Hatsu from Ota’s already got two kids.—”

His mother began listing the names of young men from town who had been Sankichi’s classmates in elementary school, repeating her litany once more.
While early marriage might have been customary in rural areas, above all else lay her crude desire to anchor her son’s restlessness with deadweight.

“—Oxen pair with oxen.”
“A bamboo ladle maker needs a bamboo ladle maker’s bride—that’s how it goes.”
“Even if she’s flat-nosed, even if one-eyed…”

He could no longer sit still.
Grabbing a hatchet and smashing two or three half-finished ladles in quick succession, Sankichi rushed outside.

At times like these, the Sankichi of old would have gone to see Ono or Tsuda, but now even that was beyond him.
After reaching the town outskirts and wandering about, he had somehow come to Tatsudayama.
Though only about a hundred meters high, it was a mountain with deep tree density and profound depth.
When he reached the view-commanding summit and sat hugging his knees on a rock, Kumamoto City came into sight all at once.
Surrounded by rice fields and mountains, Kumamoto City—abundant with trees—appeared dust-covered and slightly soiled.
The courthouse’s red bricks, the Prefectural Office with its lightning rods, the school roof tiles, the Tsuboigawa River’s dully glinting current, the horses and people faintly moving along the white thoroughfare—and himself, his mother, everyone—all appeared slightly soiled and bound to this dull, lifeless town.

Should I go to Tokyo?

Sankichi took out Ono's letter from his breast pocket but immediately put it back in.
That letter in its kraft paper envelope too—he felt no inclination toward it.
Ono had joined the typesetting department at Jiji Shimpo in Tokyo.
Besides Ono, comrades from Kumamoto—T, N, and K—were also working at various printing factories across Tokyo.
And Ono had written—I'll get you into Jiji Shimpo, so come out here—but Jiji Shimpo was the anarchists' stronghold, and he'd proudly written how after moving to Tokyo he'd dragged his fellow townsmen T, K, and N into the Seishinkai too.
If Sankichi were to go there he'd have to become a Seishinkai member himself—but he found that detestable.
Why he detested it wasn't something he could clearly explain in theoretical terms—but detest it he did.

Ever since Ono left for Tokyo, the sky over the capital suddenly felt narrower.
Sankichi, who had hardly ever left this slightly soiled town, did not know Tokyo—yet from that earlier Tokyo had come people like Tado Takeo, still a university student; Miwa Juzo, freshly graduated; Akamatsu Katsuuma; and members from the Shinjinkai headquarters.
They propagated ideas of syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism, and Ono, Sankichi, the Fifth Higher School students, and members of the Fraternity Union branch at the Monopoly Bureau had been able to maintain unity—as long as revolution remained a matter of sentiment.
However, when "Bol" swiftly infiltrated the Fifth Higher School students from Tokyo, a rift emerged.
When magazines with red flag covers like *Zenei* ("Vanguard") and *Tane Maku Hito* ("The Sower") began flowing in from the Fifth Higher School crowd, a publication bearing a black flag cover titled *Jiyū* ("Freedom") came washing up to Ono’s doorstep.
Sankichi had read both, but he hadn’t really understood them.
What Sankichi did understand was how the unpleasant aspects of Ono’s character had become strikingly apparent, as if they alone were being picked at and brought to the surface.

Ono was three years older than Sankichi—a man who had worked as a mail carrier, a tobacco factory laborer, then became a typesetter in middle age; who had only completed third grade yet taught himself through libraries; who single-handedly founded the “Kumamoto Literary and Ideological Youth Society” during the Taisho Rice Riots year, leading Tsuda and Sankichi—a rare figure in provincial Japan.
Sankichi had been taught Kropotkin by him, along with Russian and French literature.
On the literary page of the local newspaper, his unique writings made Kumamoto’s poets and Tolstoyans tremble.
A man standing under five shaku, plagued by stomach troubles, his withered small face perpetually wrinkling at the nose as he wore a sardonic smirk.

“Hohon, that’s splendid—”

This “Hohon” was Ono’s trademark. Because he was a small man, he would always crane upward as if to scoop them up, staring with his narrowed, gleaming tea-brown eyes as he spoke.

“Hohon—so you’ll use our workers as stepping stones to climb your way up to Diet member or minister someday? How splendid.”

Whether it was Kousaka or Nagano, this little man’s “Hohon” turned them bright red and sent them into a frantic dance. He always wore straw sandals, the ends of his obi dangling limply, and combined with his severe bowleggedness, he looked like a beggar. He seemed to deliberately rub this fact—both into others and himself—with full awareness, but it grew even worse after “Bol” arrived.

“Hohon, well now, that’s just splendid—‘centralization’ to squeeze the workers dry—”

One evening, during an argument with students at a town café—though drunk at the time—Ono thrust his face under his opponent’s chin and said:

“So then—what do you suppose you’ll become? Mr. Lenin?”

However, the students in bell-shaped cloaks were not the same as Nagano and Kousaka.
“Centralization: For or Against?”
“For and Against the Bourgeois Parliament.”
“Soviets” and “Free Association.”
On the workers’ side, Ono was holding his ground single-handedly.
However, Tsuda found himself not only unable to comprehend why Sankichi remained silent but also dissatisfied with Ono’s attitude—an attitude steeped in extreme suspicion and sentimentality that sometimes even appeared frivolous.
For instance, whenever the debate’s focus became clear, Ono would leap to conclusions like “That’s just shackling workers’ freedom,” steering it into utterly unmanageable territory.
When the students grew frantic trying to drag it back down from the altar, Ono suddenly interjected with a drawn-out “Hai!” in his distinctive Kumamoto accent.

“Hai! My mother cleans toilets at the Monopoly Bureau.”
“When our stations differ so, our thoughts must differ too.”

Seeing Ono laughing boisterously while tears streamed down his face, the students fell silent.
Then Sankichi, fearing what might come next, took Ono’s arm and helped him stand.

“What nonsense! You think you bastards understand a worker’s heart?”

His face turned fierce, and he grabbed the ashtray over his shoulder to throw it. When Tsuda and he stopped him and went outside, Ono now turned on Sankichi—"Hey, Aoi—are you a Bol?" "Hey—why aren’t you saying anything?—" Then suddenly, leaning against Sankichi’s arm, he began to sob—. "Hai! My mother is employed as a toilet cleaner at the Monopoly Bureau." "Hai!—"

It was not long after that when Ono left for Tokyo, departing without even a word to Sankichi.
Ono’s household had no father, and his mother—who cleaned toilets at the Monopoly Bureau—would complain: “Like some cripple—twenty-seven and still can’t get himself a wife.”
Like Sankichi, Ono had been unemployed, but the primary reason he had left for Tokyo was that “Bol” had arrived.

A rift.
Some kind of enormous rift.

Though he could not yet fully grasp Bol’s theories, Sankichi felt himself drifting further from Ono with each passing day. And so he fell into that great rift—a rift compounded by the status-bound distance separating him from Bol’s students, who were regarded locally as “Fifth Higher School gentlemen.” —And as this irritation festered, even the tedious, grime-streaked scenery of Kumamoto’s streets became unbearable to behold for long.

“That’s what you call an ideal—a fantasy. Yes.”

At night, when Sankichi went to Takashima’s factory and wrote posters in the corner of the plank-floored room—*Come and Listen! Grand Lecture on Social Issues* adorned with red circles—Takashima could be heard beyond the glass door at the accounts desk, shouting in his trademark resonant voice at Fifth Higher School students like Furutō and Asakawa.
And even Bol’s students found debates with Takashima—with his saw-toothed nerves—considerably challenging.
When Fukuhara from Fifth Higher School, who had been writing posters alongside him, threw down his brush and went over there, Sankichi found himself alone.

“Of course, it’s all well and good for you lot to go on about your ideals—Bol this, Ana that.”
“But, but—well, you’d do best to listen to me, but you see, workers around Kumamoto can’t grasp such sevenfold complexities.”
“Ah, the Universal Suffrage Movement is finally…”

Furutō’s hurried speech tried to cut in—

“I-Ideal? It’s not an ideal.”
“It’s... it’s reality!”
“T-Tokyo workers….”
“A-Ana-Anarcho-syndicalism or something...”

Though he grew increasingly frantic, his severe stutter meant Takashima’s voice—several times louder—immediately drowned him out.

“So I’m telling you—from back when Ono was around, I never supported Ana or any of that nonsense.”
“That’s right—exactly so.”
“Generally speaking, you all call me a lazy union hack or a brothel patronizer—but you see, but you see, actual workers…”

The glass door rattled, then clattered open, and an enraged Furutō burst out.
Then, at the entrance, he hurriedly thrust his feet into his geta and dashed off along the garden path toward his nearby boarding house.

“Ideals are all well and good.”
“Anarchism, Bolshevism—it’s all fine by me.”
“So I’m providing posters, venue fees—everything.”
“But you see, you’re all students—let me make this clear—living off your parents’ coattails.”
“Now, now, no need to get angry—but you see, when push comes to shove, what can you all…”

Finally, even the quiet Fukuhara silently left.

“You bunch of idiots—”

As Sankichi painted posters in the plank-floored room, Takashima emerged through the doorway—snapping his folding fan with sharp cracks—pat-chi, pat-chi—as he came.
Proudly claiming descent from some chief retainer of the Hosokawa domain or some such lineage, he stood tall in a neatly pressed yellow hemp summer kimono.
Dragging a chair over and sitting down, he was still saying, but—
“What’s this, Mr. Aoi—all alone?”
As if suddenly realizing something, he then shouted loudly toward the factory beyond the corridor where night work was still underway.

“Yasuo! Take—”

The two typesetters who had been summoned entered absentmindedly, their hands still grimy.

“You lot, that’s enough for tonight—help with the posters.”

He jerked his chin sharply.
Take-chan and Yasuo—union members Sankichi knew—kept their attention fixed on the master alone.

"You can head straight home. I'll log three hours of night work."

When they stepped outside bearing the paste bucket and poster bundle, the two bowed courteously at these words from the master.

“Hey!”

When passing beneath Furutō's boarding house, Sankichi shouted, but there was no response.
From the bright second-floor shoji windows, Furutō's voice—singing a foreign song while strumming a mandolin—alongside Fukuhara's and Asakawa's laughter reached Sankichi's ears as something utterly different, as if from a distant world.

III

The “Grand Lecture on Social Issues” proved wildly unpopular.—Takashima Sadaki, whom the students had brought from the station, wore a high-collared black student uniform and sported a newsboy cap. This short-statured man—with his thick-bridged nose and sun-darkened face—still retained a boyish innocence in his features, as if unacquainted with worldly ways.

“Hmm, so this is Bol?”

In the venue’s green room, Nagano—his workman’s jacket hanging open at the chest, hands draped over the back of a chair—didn’t even bother to stand up at first sight. He always wore vegetable-dyed work clothes when giving speeches, but this time he left halfway through, clearly dispirited. Fukami and Kousaka spoke during the opening acts.

After Fukami’s speech delivered in Sendaihira hakama like a Naniwa-bushi balladeer, Kousaka took the podium with a gold chain draped across his vest. When he launched into his trademark universal suffrage spiel using Nagai Ryūtarō-style grand inflections, the hall’s cavernous emptiness became all the more glaring. Around the podium clustered some fifty union members and students, while three or five general audience members hunched in half-crouched postures at the far corners of the spacious hall, clutching their removed shoes. Yet even these listeners drifted away without ceremony once Takashima had been speaking for about five minutes, stifling yawns as they left.

Indeed, this "Tokyo Vanguard Society Dispatch" orator was unimpressive. Being small, only his head barely protruded above the table. What's more, his speech came at a breakneck pace with neither inflection nor pauses, making it nearly incomprehensible—yet to Sankichi, there was something inexplicably fascinating about it all. The Russian Revolution and Bolsheviks. Lenin. Russia's famine and counter-revolution. Then Suzuki Bunji and attacks on anarchism.—But for Sankichi, the orator himself proved more intriguing than the speech's content. He pushed against the table with his right shoulder, tilting his head back behind rimless glasses in a way that suggested severe nearsightedness as he leaned forward aggressively. At moments when one might feel moved to clap, there was never time.—When declaring "We worker vanguards—", he'd grind his teeth and pound the table—*don-don*—with hammer-like blows.

However, when one thought about it, it was a peculiar lecture meeting.
The union members returning from the factory were dozing off with their lunchboxes still on their laps, while the students were excitedly shouting.
The clownish Asakawa, when the speaker descended from the podium, became so overjoyed that he threw his hat toward the hall’s ceiling and danced about shouting “Bravo! Bravo!”
Fukami, Kousaka, and the union members had gradually left, and by the time the lecture meeting ended, aside from Sankichi, only students remained.

“That’s right, Aoi.”

Walking back through the dark town surrounding Takashima toward Furutō’s boarding house while trailing behind the students, every so often Furutō would turn around—turning back to seek Sankichi’s agreement.
While he was reporting the local situation to Takashima, Sankichi himself was thinking that with tonight’s lecture meeting, the "Kumamoto Branch of the Shinjinkai" was effectively finished.

“So the worker group is now just Mr. Aoi all alone.”

When he went up to the boarding house’s second floor, Fukuhara had taken Furutō’s place and was explaining.
Asakawa too,

“Since Ono went up to Tokyo, the Printers’ Union’s anarchist influence has actually grown stronger, huh?”

As they said such things, Takashima—who was the same age as Furutō and the others—didn’t so much as turn around. With his face propped on an elbow against his cross-legged knee like an elder, he kept his gaze fixed solely on Sankichi and uttered, “Hmm.”
This man, who had come from Fukuoka that evening and would go to Kagoshima tomorrow before returning to Kumamoto days later to lecture at Furutō’s school, appeared taciturn and terribly arrogant.
With hot lips pressed tightly together, he gave Sankichi the impression of something bluntly colliding.
Before long, while the students still argued endlessly about his speech’s content—about Bol’s revolutionary theory—Takashima was found sleeping in the corner like a stray pup, hands clasped around his knees and using a small bag as a pillow.
The complete absence of anything emotional or sentimental shocked Sankichi.

“You—”

As Sankichi alone began descending the ladder-like stairs intending to leave first, the rimless glasses appeared all the way up to the landing.

"—You... why don't you try going to Tokyo once?"

Sankichi was startled.
Had he been thinking about Sankichi while asleep?

“If you go, I’ll write you a letter of introduction.”
“Hah—”

He naturally assumed the manner one would toward an elder. Abruptly, Sankichi understood—this man was likely trying to make him properly master Bolshevik theory. This path stood diametrically opposed to Ono’s trajectory: departing for Tokyo to actively work as an anarchist while spreading his influence back home. Sankichi kept his face lowered toward the ladder stairs, rimless glasses casting his profile in the lamplight from the room as he stood turned away.—

Tokyo!
Within the Tokyo that Ono had blocked off, another Tokyo seemed to have gaped open before him.
Bol in his newsboy cap became a new fascination for Sankichi.
Ōmori's Vanguard Society in Tokyo!
The Red Flag Vanguard Society!
What kind of place could that be?
He imagined this as he walked home along the dark road.
Yet Sankichi never gave Takashima any reply.
This anxiety—even if he told that student Bol in the newsboy cap—would never be understood.
The Bol that Sankichi saw remained just a student, while Sankichi's own life—the injured father bedridden at home, his many siblings, the mother pushing for some low-nosed bride—these were things beyond explanation.—

——A chasm.
——

On the evening after Takashima departed for Kagoshima, Sankichi—as was his custom—traced the stone walls of Kumamoto Castle, descended the slope, gazed up at the clock tower beyond the Iron Gate, then paced back and forth across the wooden bridge, sensing something akin to fate.
——If she were to accept him, he would become a bamboo ladle maker and remain in the countryside permanently.
He would become the last of the worker trio and rot away.—And this very prospect even soothed Sankichi’s heart.
Alongside his mother’s satisfied face, her image appeared before him, radiating boundless warmth.
It was rescuing him from this throat-parched feeling, but the moment it did, Sankichi began to panic.
What should he say first to her—this thing he’d been considering since last night? —Fukami had broached the matter—today Sankichi was to have an “arranged meeting” with her.

The electric bell began to ring, and the Iron Gate opened.
All at once—as if a dam had burst—people began pouring forth, and Sankichi hurriedly climbed a side path from midway up the slope to reach a small park that had once been part of the castle’s drill ground.
This was the spot arranged with Fukami—beneath a weathered wisteria trellis stood a stone round table and a rain-battered bench.
Now—what should I say first?
Sankichi grew flustered, alternately sitting and standing on the bench.
It was something he’d been considering since last night, yet still hadn’t resolved.
She would surely remain silent.
At best, she might press her face against her lunchbox and laugh.
I must say something—but.
——Of course there were countless things to say.
That he was a bamboo ladle maker—that no one in Kumamoto would hire him anymore—then his ideals—Joseph Dietzgen...
But what should come first?
No matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t decide.

“Oh—”

Fukami ascended the cherry tree-lined slope path with affected composure.
She followed, concealing herself behind his back.
Fukami too carried a lunchbox on his return from the factory but wore a gauze haori over his shoulders.
She—white rose hairpin in her hair, red lunchcloth pressed to her chest—was all Sankichi could make out.

“This should do.”

Fukami brushed dust from the bench, seated her beside him, made Sankichi—still standing stiffly—sit on the opposite bench, then cleared his throat with an “ahem,” his affectation when adopting formal airs.

“This is Mr. Aoi Sankichi—and this is Ms. Nogami Shige—”

With a high-pitched ringing in his ears, Sankichi lowered his head without looking at her.
Then, unexpectedly, the reddish hair that had been bowed swiftly looked up.
“—Let us proceed cordially with this courtship.”

Fukami took out a cigarette from his sleeve and lit it.
Sankichi also tried to light his cigarette from that flame, but his hands trembled and he couldn't get it to catch.
While it wouldn't light—hssss—the sound struck heavily in his head.

“First and foremost, mutual understanding between both parties is of utmost importance in such matters.”
“Without mutual spiritual comprehension—why, that would amount to nothing more than a base illicit affair—”

Sankichi wanted to stop Fukami—who leaned one elbow on the stone table in his oratorical tone—but she sat upright listening with grave attention.
Her high nose and somewhat large mouth appeared slightly stiff.
Sankichi deliberately tried to disrupt him by asking for matches repeatedly, yet Fukami’s sermonizing showed no sign of abating.
Then abruptly, he shifted even the timbre of his voice.

“But when all’s said and done—it’s up to you two to work things out properly.”
“As for me—I’m just the matchmaker here, you know? What happens from here on out isn’t my business—”

When Fukami laughed, she joined in laughing.
Fukami departed down the path beyond with his characteristic pretentious air and a meaningful nod that felt almost insulting, but Sankichi found himself somewhat calmer for some reason.
Even though they were now alone, the anxiety and unease he’d felt until moments before—about how to broach the subject—had significantly faded.

“Umm—”

She was the one who spoke first.

“I have known of you for some time.”
“The state of your admirable endeavors—”

Sankichi was dumbfounded and stared at her overly large mouth.

“Some time ago, you wrote an article titled ‘The Mission of Modern Youth’ in the newspaper, did you not?”
“I was profoundly moved.”

She spoke without laughter while mixing Tokyo dialect into her speech.
Even as he averted his gaze from her face, Sankichi could see with painful clarity how quivering movements around her mouth and nose were mercilessly shattering the mental image of her he’d held in his mind.

“Since your home is far away, the commute must be difficult.”

In an attempt to grasp her phantom image, Sankichi said such things.
Even as he spoke with unexpected composure, he felt a lonely awareness of himself doing so.

“Yes, but when walking along Tanbomichi, I find I can compose poems—”

“Poems?”

When he noticed, she had slipped a thin magazine between her lunch bundle.
Her unspoken expectation made Sankichi—who didn’t understand poetry—feel compelled to open the magazine.
And as he flipped through it, unable to discern which poems were hers, he kept his eyes vacantly fixed on the pages until she snatched it back.

“Won’t you take a stroll?”

When addressed with phrases utterly foreign to his daily existence, Sankichi scrambled to his feet—and in that flustered moment of rising, he could not help but feel himself irretrievably distant, left far behind.
Descending the cherry tree-lined path and taking the shortcut through the drill ground’s thicket shade, when they emerged onto the embankment road she always took home, the distant Inada fields—where even the evening glow had vanished—lay shrouded in purple haze.

“You’ve always come here, um, haven’t you?”

In that familiar way—as if bumping her shoulder—she then doubled over forward with laughter.

“Yes.”

While answering, Sankichi saw himself truly standing there in a daze. What in the world was this?—Her shoulders hunched forward, the red-and-purple obi at her waist—the illusions he’d harbored until yesterday had already vanished from there. Without descending into the fields at the fork in the road where it always diverged, she walked ahead along the embankment road with feigned unawareness. From that point onward, rows of ancient cedars flanked both sides of the embankment, forming a shortcut to Kamikumamoto Station—a place locally known as a lovers’ rendezvous—but to Sankichi, it had already become tedious.

“Um, Mr. Fukami said that you—”

Where a cluster of wild chrysanthemums stood out distinctly in the twilight’s depths, she squatted to pick them while tilting her face upward.

“That Aoi will become a Diet member someday—this too I believe.”

Her—she’s just some affected schoolgirl!—Sankichi screamed inside his head as she fumbled with the chrysanthemums, gathering her hair at her chest.

—Now, nothing remained.
Only a gaunt fatigue, like that of convalescence, lingered.
For two or three days after parting with her and trudging back home, he stayed mute as stone beneath the house eaves, carving bamboo ladles.

One evening, Fukami came to tell him that since Takashima was departing for Fukuoka, they would hold a farewell party that night,
“By the way, what do you want to do about that matter?”
When he asked, Sankichi—

“I’m ill.”

That was the only answer he gave.
He thought explaining anything to that perplexed face would be futile.

“I’m going to Tokyo.”

After Takashima—who hadn’t even attended the farewell party—had left for Fukuoka, Sankichi said this to the mother.

“What’s this sudden nonsense?”

As if caught off guard, the mother was startled.
Until the eve of his departure, the mother continued to plead with him in every way she could.
The father remained silent, though of course he did not agree.
But Sankichi had resolved in his heart only this: he would pursue Takashima to Fukuoka, obtain a letter of introduction there, and go to the Bolsheviks’ Tokyo—.

“Aren’t you going to tell Mr. Takashima and Mr. Fukami you’re leaving?”

His resigned mother came along to see him off partway while carrying the youngest sister on her back and spoke.
Sankichi merely nodded, still facing away.
When they emerged from the town outskirts into Tanbo and reached that familiar embankment road, his mother stopped in her tracks.

“No matter how far you go, it’ll be the same thing—”

Sankichi turned around, holding only a single basket—

“They say it’s three hundred ri from here to Edo—”

With that, his mother jostled the sister on her back and continued onward.
Sankichi’s mother still called Tokyo by its old name.

“If I die, don’tcha come back even if they pay your way—but when your father goes, you come home then, hear?”

Sankichi nodded.
He began walking while nodding.
Even partway along, he didn’t turn toward where his mother likely still watched him go.
The memory of her at the embankment cedars—plucking wild chrysanthemums, pressing them to her chest as she spoke—now refused to surface.

From the direction of the station where the embankment road ended in the distance, a train whistle sounded—but no eager heart stirred.
The figure of the Bolshevik student in a flat cap had been his sole guidepost, but the life awaiting him in Tokyo—a Tokyo separate from Ono and the others—where he’d need to secure work starting tomorrow and send money back home, filled him with many times more unease.
With each step, puffs of sandy dust that buried up to his ankles stained even his shins where they crept upward.
In the sweltering afternoon heat, he walked on, conscious of the throbbing, throbbing tinnitus in his ears.
As far as his gaze could reach, the white parched road that stung his throat continued endlessly.