Pathway to Japanese Literature

“O paper money,
For you—this I, the poet—
Consider it an honor that I sing,”

"But you would sneer,

'What insolence from this pauper poet!

What even is a wild boar—

Do I care whether it's on ten-yen notes or hundred-yen bills?'

Hearing that, I froze momentarily.

But why should that shame me?

To leisurely study money's designs—

I never had such luxury.

You'd always rush through me—right pocket in,

left pocket out—a ceaseless gallop.

Were I bourgeois,

I'd pamper you better,

admire each engraved detail,

smooth your wrinkles with an iron,"

You are the darling of the age.

You are utterly unrivaled,

When struck on the cheek with bundles of bills,

no matter how solemn a general might be,

he smiled faintly,

then puffed out his chest like a General,

and slowly twisted his mustache.

He spoke to the paper money—
“Hmm, hmm, you’ve worked hard now,”
What hard work?
Victorious soldiers? Returning troops? Scouts?—
With cheerful readiness to welcome them—
Those who went out would naturally return—
An attitude that deemed it all natural—
Ah, but from where I, the poet, stood—
The paper money’s scout soldiers that had leaped forth—
Not once had they ever returned—
The General stood before bundles of bills
While he lingered obsequiously—

The war situation was changing by the moment and reversing,

Madam called the department store.

Then a car appeared at the entrance.
From within came flying out—
A silver fox priced at one thousand yen.
Madam wrapped the fox around her neck.

Standing before the full-length mirror,

The fox’s face appeared to be smiling amiably,
But in reality, it was the opposite,
The fox’s expression was not one of smiling,
Madam did not fear the fox’s glass eyes that at first glance appeared alive.

She did not fear those dead eyes that seemed alive.
But the fox at Madam’s chest,
kicking upward with its claws—
Resentful.

Resentful.

The gun—how I loathe it—

The hunter for his wife’s fur collar—

He counted out and handed over bills stamped with wild boar designs,
A live pig
paid in paper wild boars
bought a dead fox.
In the world of beasts,
paper money was thus effectively utilized,
but in the truly impoverished human world,
it did not circulate at all.

O living humans, impoverished friends,

That paper money is paper—

You must consider this more thoroughly,

Onto a single sheet of paper are printed fleas and lice and wild boars.

A single sheet of paper pursues her chastity sold in the brothel—

It chases after the chastity she sold—

One wild boar can easily buy ten girls'

One wild boar can buy a daughter’s chastity,

One wild boar can easily one person’s—

It deforms humans into monstrosities or brands them as criminals,

If you were dealing with an ignorant and greedy couple’s household—

Throw a single hundred-yen note through the skylight.

Observe steadily from the shadows,

The old woman, holding a single bill in hand,
she would dash about the entire room,
No sooner had she laid down to sleep with bills under the pillow than
she bolted upright,
—The bills would be stolen along with her head,

She was afraid of burglars,

She tried putting them into the ceiling space and taking them out again,

Putting them in the tea caddy meant her son-in-law would find them,

Putting them in the sewing box meant her daughter-in-law would find them,

Behind the low dining table,

If she glued it with paste, it wouldn’t come off.

If she wetted and stretched it, it would dry and peel away.

If she instead pasted it to the ceiling,

Under that, she would spread out her bedding, lie on her back, and keep vigil without sleep.

Once midnight passed, she would doze off into a drowse.

Once three o'clock passed, she no longer felt sleepy.
Closing her eyes would mean admitting she'd slept,
so she kept them open.
Was there no trick to letting her mind rest?
There was no telling from which tiny crevice a thief might be lurking,
no way to know if they weren't already watching.

For two days and three nights，the old woman kept her eyes wide open，
stared fixedly at the ceiling，and did not sleep.

The daughter-in-law found it strange and peered at the old woman's face,

“Oh my, oh my, what’s wrong?”

Upper eyelids and lower eyelids,

With matchsticks.

The old woman had done things like propping them open.

“No, it’s nothing—please don’t concern yourself.”

“When you get old,

Eyes need a cane too, you know.”

and the old woman deflected,

Since this method of hiding paper money had been discovered, then the next scheme—

A last-ditch scheme born from dire desperation

First, this should do—she rolled the bills into slender coils and thrust them into her anus! If even paper money became part of her flesh, surely she could sleep now. In midnight’s depths, the old woman floated between dream and waking.

She entered Kawaya and gasped—
—Oh no, this is terrible—
Everyone, come quick—I’ve dropped the bills—

When night broke,

Quickly—call for the waste collector!

The ugliness concerning money—
well, even if I wrote it roughly, it’s something like this.
Had I delved into describing it,

I made prudish readers turn their faces away—
on a handcart, bundles of bills
piled high—
rumbling from the bank’s counter
were transported into the large vault.

The man transporting them was a feeble old man,
This man had spent fifty years in this monotonous
job he had repeated,
For fifty years he had still remained a janitor,
For fifty years he had still remained faithful.
The fact that the old man worked at the bank
despite having no sense of superiority whatsoever—
The neighbors were envious.

“Oh, not at all—”

“Even working at the bank,”

“There’s not a single good thing,”

“Well, if you were to say there was anything good—”

“The salary bills he receives monthly—”

“the uncreased new ones—”

“It’s just that he gets those, and—”

The neighbors, amidst paper money,

envied the happiness of the old janitor living buried—

When they envied him, he would invariably answer like this. For the old man, the inside of the bank had come to appear as a mysterious world over fifty years—"Tomorrow The Master will grace the bank"—muttering thus while beneath the towering great cylindrical pillars of the bank, spinning in circles while wiping the floors and marble stains with sweat-drenched cloth.

He wiped sweat-drenched floors and marble stains.
The Master was the old janitor’s master.
The Master was all bank employees’ master.
The Master was my Poet’s master.

He may well be The Master of you readers too,
He was the bestower of all labor,
the supporter of tens of thousands of sex workers—
a portly figure that seemed to have emerged
from the designs on paper money,
in other words, the evolved form of a wild boar—
he seemed to be a person.
Generals and politicians too,
for this Person whom they held in such high regard—
to call him The Master of the masses—

It could never be a mistake,

The old man would come to the bank tomorrow.

For this person who was even greater than the executives

With what fervor he had wiped the soiled

stone stairs vigorously

the reader should imagine how he had wiped them,

The time to finish up came.

The accordion-style shutter at the bank’s entrance had been temporarily lowered,

But today, the bank employees could not go home,

Once again, the iron accordion-style shutter clattered,

The shutter rolled up with a clattering noise,

Evening lights flickered on across the streets.

Neon signs blazed brighter in their five-colored glory,

as the bank's untimely commotion

under the chandelier's glare

made passersby wonder what was happening.

They flocked before the bank,

“Another May 15th Incident rerun starting?”

“Communist Party bank gangsters or...”

But none seemed to hit the mark.

“Everyone, assemble!”

When a shrill voice rang out, the bank employees filed out in a disorderly line from the back. At the main entrance like students, they fell into perfectly aligned formation.

“Today I had plans to go out with her...”

“I hate non-work-related stuff like this,” they grumbled under their breath.

The bank employees muttered their complaints under their breath.

The executive appeared and

The executive said to the car driver

“In other words,”
“The Master”
“prefers it arranged in this formation.”
“Park the car here.”
“This positioning”
“is his preference.”
“Gentlemen, and driver,”
“Don’t space out! Understood?!”

And so the rehearsal began.

The car, carrying the executive, drove about half a chō,
it returned to the front of the bank,
The executive, playing the role of The Master,
The car was meant to be The Master’s private vehicle,
The driver, on the paved stones drawn by the executive,
brought the car to an exact stop at the white chalk mark.
The executive calmly alighted from the car and puffed out his chest,

Having reached the top of the stairs,

He glanced sharply to both sides.
Because of his refined upbringing, he carried himself with true magnanimity.
The bank employees all at once
bowed deeply.
“Very well,”
“Tomorrow, follow the same procedure
without oversight,”
they carried out the rehearsal.
The bank employees filed into the back.
The old janitor watched dazedly, as if witnessing some strange phenomenon.
The executive muttered to himself:
“Everything is proceeding smoothly according to procedure.”
As he said, everything must have been proceeding smoothly.
If everything were always conducted like these rehearsals,

But there were numerous procedures—

One rehearsal took place at the bank’s entrance—

One rehearsal took place on the plains of Manchuria—

One rehearsal took place at the factory’s entrance—

Exactly—absolutely everything was proceeding smoothly according to procedure.

Paper money was piled up,

one after another with a clunk-clunk,

punched into round shapes using an iron machine.

The old janitor, drenched in sweat,

loaded these bundles of bills onto the cart

and transported them to the bank’s backyard.

A sudden gust of wind came blowing in.

sent one of them fluttering up

the one that had fallen onto the distant paved road

Even if someone had picked it up,
these bills punched into round shapes
would be of no use for anything.
The ritual of incinerating old bills began.
The executive and the section chief too were present at the scene.
To the bills piled up like a mountain,
the duty of lighting fires fell to the old janitor.

When the gnarled fingers of the old janitor struck the match,
As always, people’s eyes were fixed,
They turned their eyes to the first small flame,
The fire spread and the bills crackled.
In the end, like a tambourine,
they burst into a discordant song.
The black smoke rose high into the air,
Taking on an unknowable guise while assuming the shape of an object.
While my poet was present at the scene,
I was like Hamlet,
he traced with an index finger drifting into the sky
while pointing at smoke from paper money.

[he] struck a grand kabuki pose theatrically

“You must look like a camel,
you must look like a whale—
Oh! With a rifle slung askew,
the bloodied soldier staggers on,”

The smoke departed without leaving a single trace,
What remained behind was only ash,
The old janitor scooped the ash in the backyard

Into the large trash can, he poured the ash with a whoosh.

He slammed the lid shut with a clang and departed.

The ash became a pure white human,

leapt out from the trash can—

"What a terrible thing to do!"

he muttered complaints under his breath.

No—perhaps ash turning into a human had it backwards,

a human became covered in ash—

It was merely that an ash-covered human had emerged from the trash can.

He looked around with an ash-caked face,

eyes rolling with a dull gleam,

the man guffawed raucously, heedless of time's passage,

laughed without ceasing,

Into the scraps bag for leftovers—this ash

he began busily stuffing,

With unsteady footsteps,

He began walking through the night streets toward some destination,

He took up bill's ash

to the pleasure quarter of paper lanterns, latticework, and shamisen—

To the back entrance of the teahouse where kimono-clad gentlemen waited—

The Tramp Leader in the trash can emerged.
He lumbered forward boldly.
He thrust out the ash-filled bag hanging around his neck.
When a beautiful woman handed him a fifty-sen coin,
he pinched a bit of ash, wrapped it for the woman, and handed it over.
He went from one to the next,
door to door selling ash.

By the time he had sold all the ash, wearing a new hanten, he had a new money pouch.

The brothel woman mixed ash and salt,

She piled it up in a triangular shape on the entranceway paving stone,

She brought flint from the household altar,

―Clink, clink.
“Today, let my patron appear!”
With that, she struck the flint with passion,
emitting a sparkler-like flame.
The auspicious ash from burned paper money’s
trusted promise of endless customers—
she prayed with pious devotion,
her hands moving like beckoning cat paws
in ritualized entreaty.

She made a strange hand gesture like that of a beckoning cat.
The man who had sold ash soon
disposed of the new hanten jacket somewhere,
reverting to his former self.

To procure materials，he came again to the bank’s
trash can and crawled inside，

Finally, no ash came raining down from above.

The Executive solemnly told the old man at that time,

"You mustn't take ash outside the bank."

"It seems there's been someone selling ash lately,"

"Everything belongs to the Master,"

"Even turning paper money into ash—"

They refuse to become the property of beggars.