Pathway to Japanese Literature

By the Inlet

I

The picture postcard that eldest brother Eīchi had sent from Nara was passed from hand to hand among his three younger brothers and two younger sisters.
However, apart from Katsuyo, no one else showed any interest in looking at it.

“Wherever I go, it’s lonely in the withered fields.
I’ll spend two or three days in Osaka and plan to return home around the tenth” – Katsuyo, wearing iron-rimmed eyeglasses, squinted at these characters carelessly written in brushstrokes, deciphering them intently as she read.

“The tenth would be the day after tomorrow.
Brother Ryōkichi should delay another day or two and go to school after meeting Brother Eīchi.”

“There’s no point in meeting him.”
Ryōkichi replied curtly, “Nara must be too cold this time of year to be any good.”
“When I went it was so hot I nearly collapsed, but next time I’d like to take a tour of Yamato during the flower season.”
“I want to go from Hatsuse around Mount Tōnomine, then cross the mountains to Yoshino, and even climb Mount Kōya.”
“While my legs are still sturdy, I’d better walk as much as I can everywhere—otherwise it’d be a waste.”

"I don't want to go sightseeing anywhere.
“Even if I go to Tokyo, I’ll stay cooped up in the dormitory—I don’t think I’ll go out even on holidays.”
Katsuyo said this in a voice deliberately tinged with feigned pity, turning toward Tatsuo, who had remained silent all this time with his cheek propped on his hand at the kotatsu: “Brother Tatsuo, you should take a trip somewhere far during this summer vacation.
“All the men in our family go sightseeing in Tokyo and Osaka or visit hot springs, yet you never travel anywhere—it’s pitiable.
“Don’t you even want to go to Tokyo yourself?”

“I’d go if I could...”
Tatsuo gave an indistinct reply in a low, rusted voice and licked the corners of his mouth.

“You should’ve come while I was in Tokyo,” said Saiji. “If you’d stayed at a boarding house and gone sightseeing by train, you wouldn’t have earned any money at all.”

“Since you and Brother Tatsuo have never even seen a train, you’re the most backward country bumpkins in the whole family,” he continued. “You get headaches just riding as far as Okayama—if you traveled hundreds of miles to Tokyo, you’d probably collapse. That’s why I’m worried.” His voice sharpened. “But once you go to Tokyo, I suppose you won’t come back for three or four years.”

“If you’d just go during my spring break, I’d take you along.”
“Then on the way back we could tour Yamato too—it’d work out perfectly.”

“No, no—Katsuyo should go alone.”
“You’ll never achieve your own goals without that much grit.”

“You may talk big now, but what will you do if you get a stomachache or get carsick along the way?”
“The thought of someone who can’t even walk around their own village going to Tokyo—where they don’t know their way around—and fumbling about makes me uneasy.”
“In proper Tokyo households, they don’t even let a young woman go out alone to the neighborhood.”
“You should ask Brother Eīchi properly when he comes back.”

“I’ve already resolved myself to die if need be...”

Katsuyo defiantly declared this and closed her mouth, but a sudden sprout of unease clouded her face.
Ryōkichi also diverted the conversation and tried to soothe his younger brother.

Just then, the announcement of dinner being ready was heard from downstairs, so they all clattered noisily down, but Katsuyo alone remained behind; only after hearing her mother call out two or three times did she finally leave the kotatsu.
She inserted her brother’s picture postcard into the album on the desk.
And then, squinting her eyes, she gazed up at the cold, clear evening-moon sky as she closed the storm shutters and descended to the lower floor.
Surrounding the hanging lamp, a family of ten—old and young alike—were noisily eating their meal.
Katsuyo squeezed into an empty seat and, alone, accompanied her lukewarm reheated dish with tender pickled vegetables. Grimacing at the unappetizing meal, she picked up her chopsticks.

The others’ trays were accompanied by dishes like vinegar-miso dressed rice octopus and sea cucumber, and the large mound of rice in the wooden serving tub was rapidly dwindling.

Rumors emerged from someone’s lips that the electric lights, which had reached neighboring villages, were finally decided to be extended to this village by month’s end, and topics like the number of users per village and cost differences compared to kerosene became subjects of conversation.
The children who had never seen electric lights imagined various things and were delighted.
Ryōkichi brought out foreign terms like meter and switch and tungsten and began explaining about electric lights.

“When I was at my boarding house in Tokyo, I took out the five-candlepower bulb and used a twenty-five-candlepower one instead.”
“Then it became as bright as daytime.”
“You should do the same here.”
“With just one, the whole house will be bright.”
“And then you pull a long cord in all directions.”

“Is that even possible?”
“Since we can’t rightly refuse once electric lights come to the village, I suppose we’ll install one out of obligation—but it’s ultimately useless,” said Father.

“However, if we all switch to electric lights, it’ll save effort and reduce fire risks,” insisted Saiji, the second son, maintaining they must install at least two.
He then described the beauty of Tokyo’s illuminations he had seen when visiting the Exposition.
Ryōkichi nodded along.

“Night becomes like day.”

There was no phrase as plain and simple as this that could so vividly paint beautiful cityscapes in the hearts of those who had never known the metropolis.

But Tatsuo remained as silent as ever, unmoved by such talk, though he secretly pondered the spelling and translation of the foreign word “illumination.” When the meal ended, he immediately went up to the second floor, approached his own table, and began flipping through the pages of his English-Japanese dictionary incessantly. It took him a considerable amount of time to locate that character.

“Ah, this is it,” he muttered to himself and engraved the discovered English spelling deeply into his memory.
He also searched for characters like “switch” and “tungsten,” but ultimately couldn’t find them.

On the wide desk lay two or three elementary school teacher’s textbooks, along with other English study materials cluttered haphazardly about—The English World magazine, an English-language world history text, English grammar books, and similar volumes. Western-style notebooks were also kept at hand. He would return from school in the evening and, until late at night, rarely leave his desk, engrossed in his self-study of English or sinking into thought—thus he had spent four or five years. When his hands and feet grew cold, he would find an empty spot at the kotatsu upstairs or downstairs and steal away to warm himself, but he had never once initiated conversation with his family. Tatsuo had once taught alongside his immediate younger brother Ryōkichi at a mountain elementary school in a neighboring region, so they had shared somewhat amicable conversations; but even that grew more distant with each passing year, and during this winter break, they spent the time without a single heartfelt exchange.

Yet, as Ryōkichi began packing laundry and dried fish into a small trunk nearby to prepare for tomorrow’s departure, Tatsuo too set aside his books and frequently glanced in that direction.

A memory from seven or eight winters past suddenly rose in his mind—when he had obtained a rabbit and taken turns carrying it with his younger brother on their homecoming from work.

II

Downstairs, the elderly parents, Saiji and his wife, and the children had gone to sleep early in various rooms, while the andon lamp beneath the staircase emitted a faint glow in the deep darkness.

Upstairs, Ryōkichi and Katsuyo sat at the kotatsu and talked about Tokyo—both listening to and being asked questions for a time—before eventually going their separate ways to different rooms to prepare for bed.

"I might not see you for some time, Brother Ryōkichi. When you graduate from high school next year, make sure to find a way to get into a Tokyo university if at all possible," Katsuyo said as she prepared her brother’s bedding. And, to keep the cold from piercing her, she slept with the pocket warmer pressed against her abdomen.

While listening to the peaceful breathing of his younger brother and sister, Tatsuo remained seated in his chair, devising various approaches to the Japanese-to-English translation assignment published in the magazine. From the very basics of reading the alphabet onward, he had never received proper instruction from a teacher; having accumulated entirely self-taught practice, both his pronunciation and his way of grasping meanings followed his own peculiar methods, unlikely to hold up in society. Though frequently advised by Ryōkichi—who had completed two years of formal training at a Tokyo English school—that "studying languages in the countryside is wasted effort; you’d do better to take the certified teacher’s exam sooner," and though his father and brother too urged this as the wisest course, he let it all pass like wind through a horse’s ears, never offering even a yes-or-no reply. And so the family members, unable to fathom his heart, had brought it up as a serious matter more than a few times during their teatime chats by the cooling platform or kotatsu.

“When he first said he wanted to learn the violin and become a musician, we didn’t let him—so I think that’s why he turned out like this,” Father once remarked, as if suddenly realizing it.

“That’s not all. The nose hasn’t fully healed yet. At first glance it might look like he’s sulking, but you don’t sulk your way through five or six years. It’s because there’s an ailment in the body,” said Saiji.

“With him like this—he can’t become a merchant or a farmer—we’ll parcel out just enough land for him to slurp gruel and leave him be.”

In the end, they settled on this solution, and no one made an issue of his circumstances anymore. To accustomed eyes, his actions no longer seemed particularly strange.

When eleven o'clock struck, Tatsuo rose from his chair and took bedding from the closet. And on his way back from the toilet, he stirred up the embers in the downstairs kotatsu, slid half his body in, and warmed himself at leisure. These twenty or thirty minutes spent like this until drowsiness naturally set in were his most enjoyable time throughout the day... While repeating the English phrases he had newly learned that day under his breath, he suddenly remembered his brother’s departure tomorrow and felt it would be regrettable if Ryōkichi left while he slept, so he left the kotatsu earlier than usual.

In his living area—divided only by a threshold and never having had fusuma sliding doors installed—he lay down on the short futon, drawing up his legs and closing his eyes.
Normally, closing his eyes would send him straight to sleep, but tonight—having broken routine by leaving the kotatsu before drowsiness set in—his mind stayed alert and his eyes restless.

The sound of a cat clawing at a shoji screen somewhere grated irritatingly on his ears.
Tatsuo went "Shoo! Shoo!" while slapping the tatami mats, but when he lit the lamp and went to investigate the noise, the cat had already jumped down from the torn shoji screen to the engawa veranda and let out a cry.
As he slid open the storm shutters a crack to chase the cat toward the roof, Tatsuo gazed at his village's nightscape for the first time in ages.
Apart from commuting to the elementary school over a dozen blocks away, he had hardly stepped beyond the gate even in spring or autumn—nor did he ever show his face at the window regardless of commotions around the house. Thus he remained scarcely familiar with everyday scenery separated by just one storm shutter.

The evening moon had already set, and hundreds of torches glowed like a painting along one side of the inlet.
When he listened carefully, the faint sound of small waves reached his ears, but both sky and sea lay still as death.
The old pines surrounding the shrine cast gloomy shadows.
Like someone returning home from distant lands, that night he saw his boyhood self staring back from various points in the darkness.
...Memories of more vibrant days floated through his mind like recollections from a time before his birth.

Even in winter, he would don a sedge hat and go down to the shore—gathering bait, standing on the pier or picking his way across the rocks of Sachinogata—often fishing alone like this. Whether he caught anything or not, it was more enjoyable than playing with his siblings and neighborhood friends. When the tide came in and hid the tidal flat, he would hike his clothes up to his chest and return to shore, so his clothes always reeked of the sea. Back then, reeds grew at the river mouth. From the tidal flats, clams, corbicula, and hard clams were often caught, and there were many shells with beautiful patterns. But now, the fish in the inlet had dwindled; even if one fished around the rocks, not a single minnow would take the hook. The scenery of the mountains and seas also seemed far more beautiful in those days than it does now. The setting sun falling on the opposite islet dyed the sky like the light of paradise. The fishermen’s physiques back then were intriguing—sometimes resembling boulders, other times like withered trees.

As he recalled how an owl had once inhabited the shrine pine tree with its eerie cries, gazing up at the dark treetops, he felt as though a bird flapped its wings and crossed the sky from that shadowed bough.

Even after closing the storm shutters and returning to his bedroom, Tatsuo felt an inexplicable sense of melancholy.
Though it had been hanging on the side wall all along, he now noticed the violin he’d long forgotten and felt like playing it for the first time in ages.
The yellowish bag wrapped around the instrument was so soiled it stood out even in the dim nighttime light.

During his time at the lonely mountain school, he had saved surplus from his salary to purchase it, produced arbitrary sounds through self-taught practice, and played with it every night—this had become a memory so tearful it moistened his parched heart.

"Tomorrow evening I'll try playing for sure. Haru Kōrō... I'll try playing that."... He felt his soul being drawn more powerfully to the unconventional tones of his long-familiar violin than to the irregular pronunciations of new English words.

Three

In Tatsuo's dawn dream appeared the mountain behind the school where bracken sprouted, with a lovely mountain maiden there exposing pure white hands to cut grass.
……Feeling as if someone had called out to him, he opened his eyes but found no one in the rooms on either side.
Hurrying downstairs wondering if Ryōkichi had already departed, he found his younger brother making an awkward bow before their father—who sat with the bamboo-handled tobacco tray on his lap—just about to set out.
Everyone stood rigidly on the raised threshold to see him off.

Tatsuo quietly moved behind everyone and silently watched his younger brother depart; then he immediately returned upstairs and looked down as the rickshaw carrying his brother passed through Hamadōri.
He did not leave the window until the sound of the rickshaw had faded away.

“Ryō-san’s already gone,” Katsuyo said. Before he knew it, she had come to his side. “If I were to leave now too, you’d be stuck upstairs all alone like some solitary monk.”

Tatsuo remained silent, his gaze vacant.

“You really ought to take a wife soon,” she pressed. “There’s a suitable match in Kogushi—old man from Tōya brought the proposal. Father says he wants to look into it properly again, settle things if possible.” Her words carried practiced nonchalance, though they followed Mother’s orders. “Even if she’s not exactly to your liking, just bear with it. If everyone thinks she’s fitting, you wouldn’t refuse outright, would you?”

“...You can ask about that yourself.”
Tatsuo said in an irritated voice, brought tooth powder and a hand towel from his room, and quietly went downstairs to emerge at the wellside.
A large sake barrel stood packed with pickled radishes, and the detested smell of fermented rice bran paste assailed his nostrils, making him gag.

"Why must he be such an eccentric?" Katsuyo thought bitterly. Was she truly the only one in this household who pitied him? Yet she quickly softened her heart, reconsidering that since their time together would soon end, she ought to cherish these moments without letting him resent her...... While all her other brothers pursued beloved studies, poor Brother Tatsuo would spend his whole life teaching in this grubby village—how pitiful. She mourned him as an unfortunate soul, deeming Father unfair. As she dusted his desk with a paper broom, peering at foreign paper slips between books where he'd painstakingly inscribed English letters in clumsy strokes, she both admired and sneered. Among these lay many phrases even Katsuyo—who prided herself on English skills unmatched by any classmate—could not decipher.

He had written the word “Nonsense” with emphasis dots and even added katakana readings beside it, treating it with apparent importance.

Katsuyo recalled how they had exchanged remarks like “What you’re saying is nonsense” among her peers and laughed to herself.
And she wanted to ask, "Does Brother Tatsuo even understand the meaning of this English?"

Just then, Tatsuo, having finished his breakfast of tea-soaked rice with pickled plum and come upstairs sucking his teeth, prompted Katsuyo to take out his Western clothes from the closet and hand them to him.

“Please let me borrow this table until evening. If I sit down and study, my stomach might really get hungry and my mood might improve quite a bit.”

“……”

Tatsuo disliked having his desk and chair used by others—even if they were his sister—but he couldn’t bring himself to flatly refuse them—even if they were his sister. Of course he couldn’t bring himself to give a cheerful consent...

“It’s fine if I use it! I’ll leave the books right here like this.”

“Hmm,” Tatsuo replied faintly.
Wearing a Western-style suit without collar or tie and a short tonbi over it, he left the house through the back door carrying a lunchbox and headed to school along the narrow roadway.

When the children all went out together, the spacious house fell quiet like the aftermath of a great storm. Mother and sister-in-law bustled about, half-heartedly attending to chores as they stood and sat, but Katsuyo briskly cleaned the second floor, ate a belated breakfast alone, then had the maid light the kotatsu upstairs before shutting herself away. She had neglected her entrance exam preparations during Ryōkichi's stay and could no longer afford to lose herself in novels. Counting the days remaining until her Tokyo departure made her heart flutter with unease...... If I were to fail, I could never face them again—not the classmates who'd entered a year earlier, nor my family or the villagers. Certain she couldn't go on living should that happen, she opened her English reader with nerves stretched taut.

Though she studied diligently with a dictionary in one hand, her mind would often wander from the books, wearied by other thoughts. She spent hours alternately envisioning pitiful scenes of her failed self in Tokyo—where midnight blazed like noon—drinking morphine or some poison to end it all, and thrilling at imagined triumphs of conversing effortlessly with Western ladies, her chest swelling with pride. Due to lack of exercise, even soft foods sat heavily in her stomach, and whenever she tried to focus on studying, this leaden discomfort grew impossible to ignore.

Intending to study as single-mindedly as Brother Tatsuo, she left the kotatsu and moved to her brother’s table, but the cold at her hem and the chill in her fingertips made enduring for long impossible.
And so she returned once more to the kotatsu’s side, pressed her forehead against the edge of its wooden frame, and sank into aimless daydreams.
When her mother brought a basket of her favorite mandarins, she partook of two or three, sucking their sweet juice despite knowing they were bad for her stomach.

Tatsuo returned from school at the fixed time and was relieved to find that neither the table’s position nor the arrangement of books had been disturbed. After changing clothes and sitting in the chair, he remembered how he had yearned for the sound of the violin last evening and turned his eyes toward the wall, but his enthusiasm had already vanished, leaving him too lazy to even pick up the instrument. Once again, his heart was drawn to his English studies.

The setting sun cast a thin yellow light through a tear in the shoji paper onto the English grammar book.

The maid poured oil into the lamp and was carrying it around room to room.

IV

On the tenth, they had bought and prepared choice fish in anticipation, yet Eīchi did not return.
"I'll come home after four or five more days of leisure," he wrote on a picture postcard depicting Osaka's cityscape.

Katsuyo, more than anyone else, was the one who most eagerly awaited the eldest brother’s homecoming and kept talking to Mother about it frequently.
“If Brother Eīchi would stay home until spring, I could go to Tokyo with him… But I suppose the moment he comes back, he’ll just leave again right away.”
“He often writes in his letters that living in the countryside is happier than Tokyo, but he himself can’t even stay put here for a month... Those who’ve pursued studies would find no one worth talking to in a village full of such lowly people, and everything they see and hear would surely disgust them.”
“I’ve got Brother Eīchi’s feelings all figured out, you know?”
“...I’ve been thinking I should diligently visit my sister’s and grandmother’s graves while I still can, but the thought of people seeing my face along the way is so unsettling that I just can’t bring myself to go out.”
“Even when I hear voices of people passing outside, I sometimes feel utterly alienated, you know.”
“When they keep loudly chattering about such vulgar things and laughing uproariously like that, I just lose all patience.”
“If I had to live my whole life in a village full of people like this, I’d want to go deaf.”

The taciturn mother merely offered faint agreement to her daughter's words, but had Saiji been there listening, he wouldn't have let his sister keep talking in silence.
Among the brothers, he—the relatively sensible and mild-mannered one—never spoke harshly, yet his sharp-tongued younger sister's schoolgirlish way of speaking irritated him so intensely that he couldn't help but either tease or mock her.

One night, as Katsuyo read her Tokyo friend’s letter—filled with what resembled advice about moving to the capital—to her mother, and the two sat facing each other across the kotatsu deep in conversation, Saiji came shambling over to their side. He wore a tube-sleeved kimono, both hands thrust into his narrow heko obi sash.

“Do all your friends write letters with pens?” he said, picking up the square pink envelope.

“For old-fashioned letters full of seasonal greetings, scroll paper and brush writing suit them well enough, but for colloquial style, Western paper and pen work better.”
“First of all, you can write much more on a single sheet of paper, and as Father’s favorite saying goes—it’s more economical too.”
Katsuyo replied with a touch of sarcasm.

“Can’t you and your friends exchange letters in English yet?”
Saiji looked at the sender’s name and set the envelope down.
“Is this woman entering a Tokyo school too—spending a fortune just to study Tokyo speech?”

“Such slander doesn’t bother me one bit. Even those of us here use Tokyo speech in our letters to each other, you know.”

“Tokyo women use such weird language. Even if you just ask for directions, they babble away and it’s impossible to make any sense of it.”

“Do people in Tokyo really talk that fast?” Katsuyo suddenly asked seriously. And she worried whether her crude rural dialect would be laughed at by her peers.

“It’s not just that they talk fast—the whole place feels somehow hectic and messy.”
“While you’re young, living in that sort of city doing what you like might be fine, but it’s no place to stay once you get old.”
“Those who even sold their fields to go to Osaka or Kobe—you see them all the time, don’t you? Most end up failing and come crawling back.”
“Not even one in ten who make money elsewhere ever comes back wealthy.”
“Most just take this poor village’s money out to dump in the city, so we only get poorer.”
“Even our temple priest lately—he’s exactly the type who’d go out of his way to Kobe for some speculation scheme and lose everything.”

“Do you think the priest will return by next month’s thirteenth anniversary memorial for Grandmother?” Mother interjected.

“If there were a village funeral instead of a memorial service, what would you do then? The priest can sell off the temple’s belongings and leave if he wants, but if he wrecks everything on his way out, there’ll be no one left to serve this temple afterward. That’s trouble for the parishioners.”

“Funerals through Christianity would actually be simpler and more sacred, you know. Katsuyo dislikes Buddhist sutras and Kurozumi’s purification rituals too.”

Saiji, who didn’t particularly care about religious denominations, listened without finding fault as his younger sister recounted the ceremony when her Christian believer friend had died at the girls’ school, but soon steered the conversation back to what he had been trying to say earlier.

“When family members leave for places like Tokyo or Kobe, they should resolve to settle there for life. We must make a firm decision to stop them from coming crawling back home if life gets hard.”
“If we let city dwellers keep depending on the countryside, it’s nothing but trouble for us living frugally here—and above all, it’s not cost-effective. If we keep this soft attitude of ‘They’re siblings, so we should help them in tough times,’ we’ll all go down together.”

“That’s selfishness, though…”

“Since everyone’s selfishness is a given anyway, we might as well settle this matter decisively from the outset.”
“Even if we establish Tatsuo in a separate household within this village, we should build his residence some distance away from ours.”
“When relatives cluster too close together—whether circumstances turn favorable or adverse—they inevitably grow envious and disparaging toward one another. Nothing but nuisance comes of it.”

“In former times,” Mother remarked without objection, “people believed brothers ought to live near one another—Uncle Takamatsu built his younger brother’s house right behind his own on adjoining land, replicating everything from the floorplan down to the pillar count. But such arrangements prove unworkable in this age.”

“It’s fine to even consider siblings envying each other.”
“There aren’t such lowly people among our family’s brothers.”

Katsuyo furrowed her slender brows. “Brother Tatsuo’s like that, yet no one tends to him—it’s so pitiful. Even if I end up destitute, wherever I might live, I must become Brother Tatsuo’s support,” she declared in an impassioned tone.

“Rather than others’ matters, you should ensure your own path isn’t misguided,” Saiji countered. “What appeal could there be in a woman idling into old age to become some English-chattering schoolteacher?” He gazed at his bespectacled sister’s flat features with pitying intensity.

“I don’t have Brother Saiji paying my tuition…”
Katsuyo, frustrated that her brother kept trying to shatter her joyful ideals, blurted this out and lay facedown on the kotatsu to hide her expression.

Saiji grimaced and fell silent.

“It can’t be an easy thing for a woman to become a salary earner,” Mother muttered in a toneless voice, as if speaking to herself.

As everyone remained silent for a while, Tatsuo creaked down the wooden stairs, lumbered over, and slid his feet into the kotatsu’s vacant spot.

“Brother Tatsuo, you should put the brazier under the table. It’s not worth staying alone in a place without any fire,” Katsuyo said as if suddenly realizing.

“Leaving the lamp burning like that is dangerous,” Saiji remarked, looking up at the light filtering down from the second floor.

5

Katsuyo would place a large sake bottle filled with boiling water into her bedding whenever her stomach began prickling with pain, finding the pocket warmer alone insufficiently reassuring; but one night, when the bottle had lost its effectiveness, she was struck around midnight by an intense pain she had briefly forgotten.
She endured it all—pressing on her stomach and groaning—both out of reluctance to startle Mother or Sister-in-law by going downstairs, and more pressingly from terror that if the family discovered her still-unhealed digestive troubles, they might prevent her Tokyo departure.
But the pain showed no signs of subsiding, and her groans grew louder of their own accord.

The sound reached even Tatsuo’s ears as he slept in the next room.
He awoke abruptly; aware of it yet neither going to check on his sister’s condition nor calling out to her.
He turned over and tried to fall back asleep.
But the groans grew increasingly grating until they became unbearable.
He couldn’t simply shoo away this sleep disruptor like chasing off a cat.
...he lit the lamp and quietly carried his bedding to the adjacent room where Ryōkichi had stayed until recently.
There, the groans sounded far more distant.

“Brother Tatsuo…” Katsuyo noticed the lamplight seeping through the sliding door and uttered a helpless voice.

Tatsuo did not respond.
Shivering from the midnight cold, he burrowed into his bedding and extinguished the lamp.

Katsuyo called her brother again, but when there was no response, she crawled out of her bedding, opened the sliding door, and called once more.
“Could you get the medicine on Father’s desk?” she requested.
Despite being so averse to medicine that she had secretly discarded even the doctor’s prescribed pills every other time, now she found herself willing to rely on Father’s regular digestive remedy.

Katsuyo, certain her brother was awake yet suspicious of his lack of response, groped for matches and lit the lamp only to find he wasn’t in his usual sleeping spot.
Squinting through her nearsightedness, she finally located his bedding and, clutching her stomach, drew near to whisper by his ear.
“Bring it quietly without letting anyone know,” she requested.

Tatsuo stood up abruptly without a word.
Still clad in his short-hemmed sleepwear, he took the lamp downstairs.
The andon’s flame wavered precariously as though about to extinguish itself.
He rarely entered his father’s or brothers’ rooms—perhaps once a year at most—and knew nothing of their current state.

When he opened the sliding door without a sound and entered, the desk covered in red felt that had been familiar since childhood still stood positioned against the wall. Upon it lay large inkstones, thick account books, brush stands, and abacuses piled in a cluttered mess. As he searched for the blue medicine bottle hidden beneath newspapers, his eyes suddenly caught the characters on an envelope bearing the name Ōtani Enzō. Since this matched the marriage broker Mother had spontaneously mentioned days earlier, he picked up the envelope to examine it—yet without pulling out the letter inside—then returned it to its place. Finally glancing at the thermometer hanging from a pillar—Thirty-five degrees, he thought—no wonder it's cold—he left the room.

From every room leaked peaceful breathing sounds; not a single person was awake.
A cold wind swept through the empty house.

Katsuyo, upon being handed the long-awaited medicine bottle by her brother, immediately transferred the medicine to her palm and asked, “Will this amount work, Brother Tatsuo?”

“That medicine won’t poison you, but it won’t do any good either,” Tatsuo said through chattering teeth, looking down at his sister’s scrunched-up face contorted in pain.

“I wonder if you didn’t bring me any water…”

“……You could drink it with the hot water from the sake bottle.”

The sister found her brother’s pompous words amusing.
As instructed she pulled out its stopper and sipped directly from its mouth.
She let out a deep sigh and felt somewhat calmer,

“I wonder if everyone downstairs is asleep.
“I feel uneasy so please stay awake there a little longer.”

When told this, Tatsuo couldn’t retreat to his own bedding.

“It’s troubling that I’m this weak.”
“The other siblings are healthy, but only I…”

“……Because you don’t exercise.”

“There’s nothing but hateful people in this village—that’s why going out terrifies me…… But you’re so strong, Brother Tatsuo. That must be nice.”
“At home, our sister died young, and though I don’t think I’ll live long either, it seems women would be happier not living until they become old grannies.”
“Our sister died at home being nursed by everyone, but I’ll die alone in another land.”
As the pain subsided, Katsuyo uttered these words with tears welling in her eyes.

Tatsuo sneezed repeatedly.
He could no longer endure the cold, nor did he have any interest in his sister’s foolish remarks, so when her words trailed off, he left her side and retreated to his own bedding.
He tucked his head into the bedding and drew up his legs. As his chilled body warmed into pleasantness, the contents of the letter he had seen earlier began taking shape in his imagination—he found it utterly perplexing that he might actually acquire a wife.
...other than young female students at school, his mother, or his sister, he had never spoken to a woman nor properly looked at a woman's face; no distinct image of a young woman surfaced in his memories.
Back when he taught at the mountain school, encountering local young women would make him feel awkward enough to avert his face; now he remained unperturbed, naturally avoiding their gaze.
...From this marriage proposal business, he found himself considering how every man ended up with a wife—a thought that gave him an odd sensation.
And after Katsuyo left, he fell into deep sleep while imagining himself living on this second floor with an unseen woman—a dream-like fancy.

The next day, on his way to and from school, he found himself repeatedly contemplating marriage with peculiar intensity.
He became unable to let women pass by without unconsciously scrutinizing their figures, each coarse country woman seeping indelibly into his mind.
Though he did sit down at his desk, his patience for deciphering that day's English text quickly frayed. Restless, he repeatedly abandoned his work to slide open the shoji screens and stare outside.

The inlet lay mirror-calm after the westerly winds subsided, fishing boats and manure barges creaking oars in rhythms that invited drowsiness.
The ferry bound for the village across the water carried four or five passengers when a straw-sandaled merchant bearing a square bundle came running and vaulted aboard. The boatman—face wrapped against the cold—thrust his pole against the bank and pushed the craft into motion.
Tatsuo watched its progress until it disappeared, fragments of passenger laughter carrying across the still air to his ears.
He gazed down upon the sunset-stained sea and open-air bathhouse for the first time in years.
That night he lingered longer than usual at the kotatsu.

Six

Eīchi returned home much later than the predicted date—at a time when everyone seemed to have already forgotten, when it was no longer even a topic of conversation.
After dinner had been cleared away and everyone had scattered to different parts of the house, he suddenly entered the dark earthen entranceway with a rickshaw driver’s lantern leading the way.
The scattered family members came straggling out once more and gathered in one place.
Katsuyo, recognizing the commotion by the sounds, put aside her book and came downstairs from the second floor.

But Tatsuo alone did not move from his chair.
He had been engrossed in the English composition he had begun writing a few days earlier.
"The Sleeping Sea" and "Useless Acts" were among the topics he himself had chosen.
The marriage proposal that Ōtani had attempted to mediate fizzled out before any proper discussion could advance, rendering unnecessary any explicit confirmation of intentions from Father’s mouth. Yet he—after being tormented by delusions for two or three days—returned to his former self and remained nailed to the table as always.…

"When the wind blows, the waves stir; when the tide rises, the lagoon is hidden."
Fishing boats multiply year after year, while fish species decrease steadily.
Mud flows out from the river, and the sea gradually becomes shallow.
"In hundreds of years, this small sea will dry up, and grass will grow where fish once dwelled..."
He would flip through the dictionary and fill each section of these self-composed passages with English letters.

He had submitted his English assignments to magazines two or three times before, but since none were ever published, he now completely abandoned such hopes and merely kept neatly transcribing his compositions into a Western-style ledger bound with silk thread.
To his own judgment, compared to his initial attempts, his sentences seemed gradually more polished.
He also began using idioms occasionally.

The downstairs was lively, so he had refrained from going to the kotatsu, but the youngest sister came panting up the stairs, said “Brother Eīchi’s souvenir,” and placed two chestnut buns on the desk before leaving.
Tatsuo grabbed them with his ink-stained, thick-boned fingers and ate voraciously.
And then, while warming his chilled hands inside his kimono, he rested for a while.

The younger sister and mother carried bedding up from downstairs and laid out their elder brother’s futon in the next room.
Before long, Eīchi came upstairs but merely glanced back at Tatsuo before entering the next room and closing the sliding door.
He did not go to sleep immediately, instead writing letters, reading magazines, and picking up books that Ryōkichi had left behind.
The smoke from the incessantly smoked tobacco leaked through the gaps in the sliding doors and drifted near Tatsuo’s face.

Some time after the household below had settled down to sleep, Eīchi let out the smoke that had filled his room, extinguished the lamp, and went to bed.
Though he normally struggled with falling asleep as a matter of habit, the unyielding firmness of the bedding made it all the harder to find comfort.

“Tatsuo still not asleep? That light’s keeping me awake.”

The brother’s voice reaching his ears after four years retained its familiar edge.
At the sound, Tatsuo simultaneously returned his pen to the brush holder and closed the inkpot’s lid.
He extinguished the lamp too.

The next day being Sunday, Tatsuo remained reading in bed long after waking.
Mother had left one of the souvenir chestnut buns by his pillow.
Windless morning sunlight streamed through the shoji screens with springlike radiance.

Eīchi had risen early and taken a walk along the coast. After breakfast, he read for about an hour and was heading toward the stairs to go out again when he suddenly turned back. “Tatsuo… How about climbing the mountain?” he invited.
And taking two or three steps into Tatsuo’s living space, he fixed his eyes on the table.

Tatsuo stood up and for the first time stared intently at his brother’s face. …It had grown strikingly more similar to their father’s than it had been four years prior.
While his brother bent over and examined a line or two of the English composition, Tatsuo donned his hat and workman’s coat and stood upright.

One carried a walking stick and wore straw sandals; the other wore weather clogs. They passed through thicket-shaded paths and the graveyard, climbing the hill behind where young pines grew thickly.
Because they had climbed without taking a single rest, sweat dripped profusely from their foreheads.
They came to a small shrine near the summit and sat down on a rock beside it.
The small shrine was shaped like a rural mailbox.
The door was broken, and inside lay only scattered dead pine needles—there was no sacred object.
From there, beyond the twisting sea and over the mountains, the faint shapes of Yashima and Gokenzan in Shikoku could be glimpsed—but today, with the light hazy, the sea beyond lay blurred.

The brother wearing straw sandals was rather fatigued and short of breath, but as the chilly mountain wind dried his sweat and left him feeling refreshed, he broke their prolonged silence and began speaking to his younger brother about various matters.
He asked about the names of islands visible here and there and inquired about the state of villages at the foot of nearby mountains, but obtained no clear answers.

Tatsuo appeared to be surveying a foreign land and could not get his bearings.
He now noticed for the first time a small island shaped like the crown of a Western emperor he had seen in world history, located quite close to the inlet.
Even though all the fishing boats entering and exiting the inlet passed by its side, he had never once gone there himself.

“That’s Nabeshima. Since the trees are so thick, they say fish often gather around there, don’t they?” his brother had informed him, but upon hearing this, he realized the island’s name was one he had been familiar with since childhood.

“However, it resembled a crown more than a pot,” he thought, and hit upon the idea of writing an English composition on the topic of Crown Island.
The cemetery below his eyes and the flock of birds crossing the sea—to Tatsuo, they met his eyes and registered in his mind solely as topics for English compositions.
The five or six birds flying overhead—whether they were kites or geese, he couldn’t tell with his knowledge—but merely dubbing them “blackbirds” satisfied him.

“What do you intend to accomplish by studying English? Do you have any purpose?”

Eīchi, who had been gazing out at the winter-scorched mountains, suddenly turned to his younger brother and asked.

Tatsuo blinked his cloudy eyes as he watched the blackbirds recede while pondering the verb equivalent to "fly." He couldn't respond immediately.

"Planning to take the middle school teacher certification exam? ...You think English is fun?" pressed the brother.

"It's not that it isn't interesting..."
Tatsuo eventually gave this ambiguous reply, though he himself had never felt it was either interesting or uninteresting.

“Even if you self-study for years, you’ll never pass any certification exam.”
“Unlike other fields, languages need proper coaching from teachers to be useful.”

“………”
Tatsuo silently lowered his eyes.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to channel that energy into elementary teacher exams? Get properly certified faster?”
“That paltry salary at nearly thirty—it’s unsustainable.”

“………”
The sight of wind-tossed oak leaves decaying at his feet caught Tatsuo’s attention.
An acute desolation washed over him.

“I just looked at the English you wrote—it’s utterly nonsensical and doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“That’s nothing more than lining up random characters.”
“Three years, five years—working your hardest and straining your brain on that nonsense is the height of foolishness.”
“And your pronunciation must be riddled with even more mistakes.”
“You can’t rely on self-study guide kana transcriptions.”

“………”

“If you’re doing it just for amusement then anything goes, but even so, wouldn’t it be better to try traditional poetry or haiku? Something you could share even if you’re bad at it?”
“I think writing English that’s incomprehensible to others is pointless—do you actually believe that nonsense will work on anyone?”

Having said that, Eīchi’s tone was sharp.
His tone held more scorn and ridicule than pity for the younger brother’s foolishness.

“………”
Tatsuo kept his blackened lips tightly shut, but tears had welled up in his eyes.
Of course he wasn’t reading with the intention of teaching others, nor was he composing his writings to show them to anyone, and he had always been aware that his work wasn’t properly structured—but having this brother declare it utterly worthless left him feeling utterly wretched.

“Well, shall we head back?” said Eīchi, brushing dust from his hem as he descended the same path. As they neared the cemetery, he waited for his brother trudging slowly downward before visiting their sister’s and grandmother’s graves. The sunken-eyed visage of his younger sister in her final moments—her foul breath and grotesque appearance—remained etched vividly in Tatsuo’s memory, springing instantly to mind at the word “sister.” Yet standing before the new gravestone carved with “×ko’s Grave,” no fond remembrance stirred within him. Instead rose the image of her corpse’s putridness beneath that stone—the maggots devouring flesh within the coffin.

Since the priest became engrossed in speculation, the temple had its storm shutters fastened and became as filthy as an abandoned house, while the path to the graveyard was left to weeds and scattered leaves.
The brothers descended from the cemetery, stepping on decaying leaves.

“If the family permits it, Tatsuo, do you intend to enter school and study English seriously?”
Eīchi spoke calmly now, his manner different from before.

Yet Tatsuo made no effort to craft an obliging reply that might indulge his brother’s words.
“I’ve no particular wish to enter school,” he answered in a desiccated, formal tone.

“Had you but resolved yourself four years sooner and pressed Father firmly enough, you might have gone to Tokyo for English studies.”
“Even Katsuyo will be going now... Though for you to start at this point would be far too late.”

When he returned home, Tatsuo sat down at the table as if there were no other place for him, but he felt reluctant to turn his eyes toward the half-written sentences.

When afternoon came and found himself at loose ends, he began reading a grammar book or such, but could no longer maintain his usual air of complete absorption as if alone in the room, and upon hearing his brother’s footsteps, pushed the book aside.

Seven

While the parents and Saiji were attending to household chores downstairs, upstairs the three of them each secluded themselves in their rooms, reading and writing.
None of them entered each other's rooms to engage in idle chatter very often, but it was even rarer for Saiji or others to come up from downstairs and disrupt their studies.
The lively laughter and casual chats that had been present when Ryōkichi was there had completely vanished from the second floor, and Eīchi’s homecoming did not bring the brightness into the household that Katsuyo had anticipated.

Eīchi had no intention of forcing conversation upon Tatsuo, who seemed reserved around him, but at times found himself acutely attentive toward his brother. There were moments when he felt he could perceive through the sliding doors even the faint twitches in the livid facial muscles of his younger brother—who beneath the lamp was exhausting his youthful perseverance on incomprehensible English script. Yet toward Katsuyo, who kept trying to endear herself to him, he maintained an air of detached observation. He neither spoke to his sister about the customs of Tokyo girls' schools and female students that she longed to hear of, nor offered any clear opinion regarding her proposed journey to Tokyo. He couldn't bring himself to seriously entertain—let alone comment upon—the naive declarations of this girl under twenty who yearned for a Tokyo known through novels: enrolling in some English academy there, making her way through scholarship, and vowing lifelong spinsterhood. And secretly he thought: "If even girls are being sent for advanced studies now, the family fortunes must have grown considerably."

When the family members were gathered around the kotatsu,

“The year I first returned from Tokyo and fell gravely ill—bedridden in the sitting room—Katsuyo would crawl up to the mosquito net, causing mischief and wetting herself. It was so bothersome I didn’t know what to do.”
“Now that she’s going to Tokyo all by herself, I must have aged without realizing it,” said Eīchi, gazing intently at his sister’s face—which changed so remarkably each time they met after years apart.

“Brother Saiji looks older than Brother Eīchi, though.”
“Brother Saiji’s head has a whole lot of white hair growing.”
“It’s not just premature gray anymore...”

When Katsuyo said that and compared her brothers’ faces, the others too unconsciously began looking at one another’s faces and heads.
Upon closer inspection, the years they had spent apart were etched into every face.
It wasn’t only the sister in her growth spurt who was different.

“After all, once you near forty, people start declining,” Eīchi said to his brother. “We ought to try doing what we want to accomplish in life now. I feel this is also the time to put our money to proper use.”

“I’ve been contemplating that matter even more earnestly,” Saiji interjected. “With steady capital, there are ventures here that could yield substantial profits. But since nobody will freely invest the capital and leave it to my discretion, I can’t implement anything whatsoever.” As he spoke, he subtly revealed his resentment toward their father, who still hadn’t transferred any portion of the estate to them despite the years passing.

“I don’t intend to start any business ventures, but I’d at least like to take a carefree journey while I still can. It would be best if I could go West for two or three years with ample travel funds, but even just traveling leisurely from end to end of China, Korea, or Japan’s mainland would suffice.”
“When you get a bit older, your legs weaken or you grow indolent, making long journeys tiresome—the very pleasure of travel diminishes.”
“If it’s the mainland, travel expenses wouldn’t amount to much at all.”
“With a thousand yen, you could leisurely wander about various places for half a year or so.”

The notion of spending 1,000 yen on travel expenses struck Katsuyo as the height of extravagance,

“If you live in Tokyo—where everything worth seeing and hearing is already gathered—there’d hardly be any need to travel around.”
“Wouldn’t even Tokyo grow monotonous if you stayed there year-round?”
“I’ve scarcely stepped beyond our gate since last spring.”

“I’ve no mind for travel or study either, but unless I test my plans myself—success or failure be damned—I can’t rest easy.”
“At my age,” said Saiji, “I’ve never once acted on my own judgment.”

“Is there something interesting?”

“It’s not something I can talk about right now, but there’s no point in meddling in fishermen’s affairs when it doesn’t benefit me.”

“But wouldn’t improving this village’s fishing grounds and bringing prosperity be an interesting venture? Not having to worry about food while doing such public service work—wouldn’t that be satisfying?”

“If it’s someone else’s business, there’s no motivation. Even if the fishermen suggest it, the group leader would do better hiring competent outsiders and paying them sufficient salaries to work. People needing wages to eat would naturally work hard—whether competing with other villages or patrolling fishing grounds—and might even handle unreasonable demands from fishermen. But an honorary group leader can’t manage such acts. I can’t bring myself to scramble around fulfilling unreasonable orders just because they’re asked.”

“That might be true.”
Eīchi casually agreed with his younger brother.

“They say off Kishū and Tosa you could haul tens of thousands of mullet or yellowtail in a single net, but here in our inland sea the fish species keep dwindling year after year. That’s why disputes over fishing grounds between villages keep getting fiercer.”
“Lately, even the fishermen have started to somewhat realize there’s no future to hope for, and some have boldly become farmers—but as farmers, they can’t very well eat their rice with fish. In a village like this, there’s nothing good to be had either at sea or on land.”

There was force behind these words of Saiji’s.

“But the folks around here are all physically strong and can endure quite strenuous labor, so if someone with wisdom and capital were to take the lead and put them to work, they’d be useful, but…”

“That’s how it is everywhere.”

Eīchi did not attempt to probe deeply into his younger brother’s plans, but Saiji, sensing that this was his chance to finally vent the simmering frustrations he usually kept bottled up inside to his brother, launched into an unsolicited monologue about various matters. Since a family of considerable means had petitioned to adopt Ryōkichi as their heir, he argued they should quickly finalize that arrangement to reduce the household burden—insisting it would benefit Ryōkichi more than receiving a meager share of assets—and declared that if there were opportunities for married couples to adopt heirs, he himself would endure joining even a mediocre household, as that would be preferable to growing old while dragging things out like this. He spoke in a tone that suggested he found it extremely irritating that his younger brother and sister were furtively studying nothing but English he didn’t understand.

After listening in silence for a while, Eīchi said defensively, “But if Tatsuo finds pleasure in English and can continue it his whole life, shouldn’t we just let him do as he likes? He doesn’t cause trouble for those around him.”

"He may not be causing immediate trouble," Saiji countered, "but when a family member shares your rice tub day after day, it naturally puts those around him off."
"Since he’s neither simple nor mad, we must treat him like any other brother—which makes him all the more vexing—but truly, he’s a strange creature."

"I wonder if it doesn’t mirror how I felt as a boy," Eīchi mused.
"Had I stayed shut up here, I might’ve turned out just the same."

Eīchi said this with a smile and steered the conversation away from his brother’s topic.

Katsuyo had long since left the kotatsu and, taking the younger brother with her, gone out to the veranda of the sitting room to bask in the sun.
She descended into the small garden soiled with fallen leaves and chicken droppings, and even climbed the hillock for the first time in ages, but the old garden clogs felt heavy on her unaccustomed feet, and she soon grew short of breath.

VIII

Eīchi climbed the back mountain as part of his daily routine and looked out over the open sea.
There were days when Seto-bound steamships stood clearly visible beyond the islands, the Sanuki mountains hazed under a spring-like sun, and occasional days when westerlies raged across waters stripped of fishing boats, taking on gloomy hues reminiscent of northern lands.
On those wind-lashed days, the large house felt like a windswept plain; no matter how tightly they closed every sliding door and panel, drafts found their way through unseen gaps, leaving no defense against the creeping cold.

“With things like this, you can’t even settle in for winter.”
“Perhaps I should return to Tokyo soon,” said Eīchi, having satisfied himself with just observing his hometown’s state, and he prepared to go back to his small rented house in the city.
With the ongoing poor catches, local specialties like sea cucumbers and rice octopuses rarely made it to the table; he couldn’t settle down to study; and above all, he found it unbearable how being among family made him suddenly feel old.

“I’ll leave tomorrow,” Eīchi abruptly decided—but the one who secretly rejoiced at this was Tatsuo.
Starting tomorrow evening, no matter how late into the night he kept the lamp lit, there would no longer be anyone to complain.
There would be no one left to startle him by showing signs of wanting to test his English pronunciation or mercilessly criticize his English compositions.
……Lately, Tatsuo had found himself unable to engage with English letters—his mind would scatter outward at the slightest thing, and this lonely, empty feeling that had begun to take root—he blamed it all on his brother.

“Since I’ve finished reading this book, I’ll give it to you—and since I want to keep my luggage as light as possible,” said Eīchi on the night before his departure, placing two volumes of English books on his brother’s table.

Tatsuo stared at the title and the author’s name but found himself unable to decipher either their readings or meanings. And fearing being assailed by unknown characters, without opening them, he covered them with his familiar books and shoved them to the desk’s corner.

Because it had been decided this would be his final night, everyone gathered around the kotatsu downstairs.
Even Father had unusually joined them, making the conversation lively, but Tatsuo alone remained as always, immobile upstairs.
Endless doubts kept arising about his half-written English composition, making it impossible to continue writing, so he sat with hands tucked in sleeves staring vacantly at the wind-rattled shoji.
Then his mind went slack, and without realizing it, he lowered his head onto the desk and began to doze.

Before long, startled by a sound in his dream, he suddenly awoke to find the lamp knocked off the desk, its flames now spreading across the shoji.
...Tatsuo stood frozen with a vacant look on his face, made no sound, and did not immediately reach out.
...Outside, the wind roared noisily.
The tatami mats were soaked in kerosene, spewing blue flames.
...As the thought This house will burn struck him, the image of the estate reduced to ashes rose in his mind.

Eventually, he gripped with both hands and moved the table—which hadn’t been budged in years—to the next room, with the books still lying atop it.
And just as he was rolling up a floor cushion and trying to smother the flames, clattering footsteps sounded on the staircase.

"Fire..." Eīchi's panicked shout pierced through the ears of those downstairs.
It startled even passersby outside.

A crowd swarmed in, barking rough instructions as they tore burning shoji screens from the roof and flung them outside, then scooped water from storage jars with buckets and pails.
Father's eyes turned bloodshot.
The younger sister ran barefoot to the well, gasping for breath.
When everyone erupted into commotion, Tatsuo stepped back and stood rigid in the shadows.
As the kerosene burned out, the flames rapidly dwindled, leaving his table and books thoroughly drenched.
The notebook that had tumbled down lay half-reduced to ash, its pages fluttering feebly.

The father and brother who had been scolding Tatsuo for his carelessness now that the fire was out and their minds had settled all turned their eyes toward him and pressed him with questions, but growing exasperated at how he remained motionless like a stone and kept his mouth tightly shut, they gradually stopped engaging with him.

They lifted the tatami mats to clean the soiled areas, checked every room on the second floor as a precaution, and went back downstairs—but everyone remained wide awake, and even the children refused to go to bed easily.

After the neighbors who had come to check on them left, they closed the front door, brewed fatigue-easing tea, nibbled on cheap sweets, and stayed up late into the night celebrating their narrow escape.

“If we’d gone with electricity, there wouldn’t be dangers like this,” Eīchi said, to which Father—

“Electricity isn’t just wasteful—they’ll bore holes through our pillars and lintels, ruining the house. That’s what needs considering.”
“If there’s going to be another night like this, maybe we’d better get ourselves insured.”

“I kept thinking that fool Tatsuo might pull some idiotic stunt,”
“From now on, we shouldn’t let him keep the lamp burning late into the night.”
“If Katsuyo leaves too and Tatsuo ends up alone upstairs, there’ll be no containing his carelessness,” said Saiji, knitting his brows.

“But such things likely won’t happen again. At any rate, if we make him take a wife this year, have him establish a separate household, and get him to manage his own affairs, he might become somewhat normal.”

“Well,”
Saiji received Father’s words with hollow compliance. “A household’s misfortunes can spring from anywhere.”
“Even tonight—had we noticed any later, there’d have been no undoing it.”

Just as everyone's words came to a halt, the clock struck one.
The wind rustled noisily, sounding cold.
Father lit a hand candle, checked each room, and entered his own bedroom.

Katsuyo, disliking sleeping next to the fire-damaged area, began dozing off indefinitely by the kotatsu.
The two brothers had been engrossed in conversation until the end when Tatsuo came down stealthily, and no sooner had he gone to the toilet than he climbed back up the staircase.

"Are you still up?" Saiji called out.
Concerned, he lit a hand candle and went to check, but found Tatsuo sleeping on a tatami mat in the fire-damaged corner, covered with a night robe.

"Why don't you sleep in Brother Eīchi's room?" he gently urged, but

“I’m fine here,” said Tatsuo, adjusting his pillow and closing his eyes.

Even with his eyes closed in the darkness, he kept visualizing the soiled fire-damaged surroundings and catching their scent through his nose.
He thought he must dry the waterlogged books and notebooks in the sun, thought he must inspect what exactly had burned away—yet also felt inclined to reduce everything to dust and debris as it stood...... The night’s disaster struck like a final hammer blow to that resolute heart of his which had begun fracturing around his eldest brother’s homecoming, though it had once rested secure upon his desk.

Then the shabby image of himself idling through each night's long hours after returning from school flickered before his eyes...... Back when he'd abruptly grown weary of the violin, an interest in language study had awakened, pulling his heart toward that pursuit—but now no new path appeared to open.

A gloomy, listless mood seeped deeper into the very marrow of his bones with each passing hour of the night. And he found himself wishing that tonight's fire had spread further—that it had engulfed his desk, his books, the house, even himself in its flames until everything turned to ash.

He dreamed of flames spreading from house to house, the entire village becoming a sea of fire, with familiar villagers wailing as their faces and limbs were scorched.

Nine

The next morning, Tatsuo left the house immediately after waking up to avoid discussing the fire.
Since he had ample time before school started, out of having nothing better to do, he turned his steps toward the mountain he had climbed with his brother days earlier.
Passing through the graveyard, his field of vision widened with each step—the sharp morning sun brightly lit the calm sea—yet last night's unpleasant memories stubbornly clung to his mind.
Unlike those previous days when the vista before him had appeared as fresh material for English compositions, now it looked as desolate as prison walls that had confined him for endless years.
...How he could keep living in this land for five or ten more years—he found no way to survive.

He suddenly considered running away—setting out beyond the sea where white clouds drifted, wandering from place to place without destination—but this too remained but a fleeting delusion. Without travel funds, he lacked the reckless courage to venture even a day or two into foreign lands.
"Strangers wouldn’t even give me a single bowl of barley rice."
He now deeply considered the fact that they wouldn’t let him ride trains or steamships for free—and with that, he regretted having squandered his monthly salary all this time on buying useless books.
And while calculating how much it would have amounted to if he had saved all his salary up until now, he went down the mountain to school.

When he returned home after finishing his classes, his elder brother had postponed his departure by one day due to the previous night’s commotion.
The aftermath of the fire had been dealt with—the shoji screens newly replaced, the table wiped clean for the first time in ages—but the waterlogged books lay haphazardly tossed onto the veranda where the western sun streamed in.
They had dried into wrinkled forms.

Tatsuo gathered them into the bookcase and sat down before the table where not a single scrap of paper remained.
Fire—Conflagration—Nonsense—various English words surfaced in his mind, their spellings darkly etched across his consciousness.

The younger sister brought a newly purchased two-wick lamp, but Tatsuo did not light it even after night fell.
In the darkness, he endlessly spelled out and dismantled, dismantled and spelled out the English engraved in his memory.
Unwilling to risk disturbing his elder brother’s already prepared travel baggage—and thus spending the entire day idly passing time by having Katsuyo read English and explain questionable phrases—their voices reached Tatsuo’s ears through the sliding door.

“Are you there, Tatsuo? Without even lighting the lamp?”
Eīchi slid the fusuma door slightly open, peered into the darkness beyond, and insistently beckoned, “Come here, come here,” urging him toward the vacant spot.

On her desk lay a blue desk cover, and atop it were a wooden Nara doll and a photo frame holding a picture of their deceased younger sister. The bright light from the lamp placed on its woolen mat illuminated the English book held by the brothers sitting across at the kotatsu. Tatsuo sat in a place where he wouldn’t obstruct the lamplight.

“When I was in school, I threw myself into conversation—even attended night schools taught by Westerners. There was a time I could discuss most things freely.”
“But now I’m completely useless, aren’t I?”
“I can’t even manage simple greetings in English anymore without careful thought.”
“When you’re in Japan there’s no chance to speak with foreigners—studying conversation turned out to be pure wasted effort.”

Eīchi hummed the everyday phrases from his sister’s "Practical Conversation Manual" for the first time in a while, but Katsuyo gazed intently at the subtle movements of his lips.
Wondering if she too would be able to skillfully master it like that in two or three years, she felt a sense of expansiveness,
“...Compared to country people, those born in Tokyo must become better at English pronunciation more quickly, don’t they?”

“Why? It’s the same thing.”

“...In the countryside, even Japanese pronunciation is crude and stubborn—that habit takes root and makes it hard to produce smooth English sounds too, don’t you think?”

“That’s absurd! ...You’ll start using Tokyo speech and mocking country folks within three months of going there.”
After saying that, Eīchi turned to Tatsuo: “You’ll never catch up even if you start studying now—try farming or some practical business instead.”
“You’ve got such a sturdy body and patience—it’s pitiful seeing you wither at your desk.”
“Borrow that island we saw from the mountain to plant peaches, cultivate that muddy hill behind us—don’t you think you could manage something?”
“Don’t copy your brothers—you alone’ll end up mud-caked as a true country bumpkin.”

“That’s not something we can do, Brother Tatsuo,” Katsuyo interjected. “Last year they spent two hundred yen for the Youth Association to plant pines on the mountain, but they withered away in no time. And peaches get planted wherever there’s soil to grow them—I don’t think this land will decline any further than it already has, but it won’t improve either. This island up ahead has become a place where fishermen go to gamble to avoid being caught by the police, you know.”

“Huh.”
“So that’s the fishermen’s gambling den?”
“When I think about it that way, it’s rather amusing, isn’t it?” Eīchi said this to hide his embarrassment at having what he thought was a proper, clever idea easily dismissed by his sister,

“However, if you intend to work the fields yourself with farming tools, there’s no reason you couldn’t do something.”

"It’s not impossible," Tatsuo replied with unexpected clarity.

"Well then, how about getting a share of the farmland and fully committing to being a farmer?"

"I do feel that way… but farming rice and wheat isn’t interesting enough."

"Even if it’s not interesting, we’d be in trouble if wheat and rice don’t grow in the fields, wouldn’t we?"
"...If you grew Western flowers and plants instead, they might be beautiful and interesting though."

“When it comes to flowers, I prefer those that grow wild.”
"When I was in the mountains, I did collect some plant specimens at least."

“Plant collecting around here probably doesn’t yield anything rare, though the mountains of Sakushū must have alpine plants.”

“Huh.”
“There were all sorts of rare things.”
“I collected two or three hundred different kinds—shade-dried and kept them—but when I quit that school, I burned them all.”

“That’s a shame.”
“They might’ve been useful to a botany professor if you’d donated them to a school.”

“Since I didn’t know their names, they wouldn’t help with teaching.”
“No one else could’ve understood them but me.”
Tatsuo had collected whatever weeds or leaves came to hand, assigning them arbitrary names.

“Can you really be satisfied with that? Can you really find joy in just collecting things without knowing their proper names established by society?”

“Huh. I must have found some enjoyment in it back then.”

As he listened to his brother Tatsuo speaking with uncharacteristic briskness tonight for some reason, Eīchi felt that he could no longer view him as either the imbecile or eccentric the family had long concluded him to be. But when he looked at his face—the dull eyes devoid of light, the broad flat nose with wide nostrils, the hard-looking black skin—it inevitably made him appear like a fool. He possessed no softness or warmth in his body that might invite others’ affection.

“If you have any wishes or complaints, you should just say them openly. If I hear them before I leave, there might be something I can do to help you,” Eīchi gently inquired, trying to sound out the depths of his brother’s heart, but—

“There’s no use in me telling such things to others,” Tatsuo replied coldly.
Even when pressed further, he stubbornly kept his mouth shut and let a seemingly spiteful expression linger at the corners of his mouth.

“There’s no helping it—sooner or later, you’ll have to depend on your brothers to survive. You need to have our parents make arrangements while they’re still healthy—no matter how much you selfishly study useless things, it won’t put food on the table.”

As his brother’s voice grew sharper, Tatsuo lowered his eyes and let his mind wander elsewhere.

“When I graduate and can earn money, I intend to give it to Brother Tatsuo, because I hate selfishness.”
Katsuyo said with an affected air.

With that, he ended the conversation. Eīchi lay down and, listening to the rhythmic sound of the mill, drifted into a drowsy half-sleep.
Katsuyo had developed a headache from the overheated kotatsu that left her flushed, yet she still refused to leave her seat,

“My mouth feels all sticky and gross—I really want a mandarin orange.”
“Will Brother Tatsuo treat me?” she begged.

“If you go buy it yourself, I’ll treat you.”

“But I’ve never gone out to buy anything before.”
“You could just send someone else to do it, couldn’t you?”

“If you won’t go yourself, then I won’t pay a cent,” Tatsuo said stubbornly.

“Brother Tatsuo does say spiteful things sometimes, doesn’t he?”

Katsuyo went downstairs and placed one of the mandarin oranges she’d wheedled from their mother before her brother, but Tatsuo did not take it.

10

The next morning, when Eīchi left the village by rickshaw, he felt a sense of liberation.
On the way to the station two ri away, the rickshaw driver kept talking about village matters—according to him, people from a neighboring prefecture were planning to soon run a horse-drawn bus along the nearby national highway.

“If that happens, you’ll all be in trouble,” he asked. “Those horse-drawn buses won’t last long,” replied the rickshaw driver. “From what I hear, that financier did some nasty business and only just got out of prison recently,” he continued, “and they’re all saying you made a fine fortune before coming back home, young master.”

When the rickshaw driver’s talk turned to matters concerning himself and his family, Eīchi stopped engaging.
And when he boarded the train, even Katsuyo’s and Tatsuo’s faces grew faint in his mind; all that remained was the image of that old-fashioned large house by the inlet’s edge where such younger siblings lived—recalled without hatred or affection.

"I wonder if Tatsuo reads the ○○ English novels I sent him," he suddenly thought, but that too vanished in an instant.

Tatsuo spent two or three nights sitting at the table with his arms tucked into his sleeves.
...while listening to the sound of his sister turning pages.