Pathway to Japanese Literature

The wind had turned cold. As they rounded low mountain foothills and passed Hodogaya, twilight sank deeper. The American military truck began accelerating further.

Parallel to them, lights glowed in the windows of the Tokaido Line southbound train running along the far side of the embankment. Shinji Obata watched the receding scenery from within the dim interior of the truck's canvas cover. The roadside pine branches, tinged with darkness, swayed like gentle waves as they rapidly diminished. The houses on both sides grew sparse—thatched-roof homes and aged cockscombs resembling congealed blood retreated as if springing backward behind the vehicle, while the overtaken bus became rapidly distant.

Inside the truck was a greasy, smoked-like stench. It clung to the stiff waterproof canopy's interior—the stench of Westerners—and Shinji slightly furrowed his brows. He recalled the humiliation of enduring people's stares at the bustling Sakuragicho station square and being herded into the truck's rear one after another as if under arrest. The American soldiers who had hoisted him up high laughed uproariously as they spun around, then jabbed their fingers into the deep hollow of his buttocks. When everyone had climbed into the truck, a sharp whistle pierced the air, and a twenty-pack cigarette box came flying to strike Shinji's forehead. “Thank you, thank you!” Manager Anzai immediately scooped it up and shouted while leaning out from the canopy's rear.

Shinji snapped his fingers. He remained silent. Even if I’d said something, it probably would’ve been pointless—in the end, I was just confused, I concluded. The people packed tightly inside the canopy continued their cheerful chatter. Shinji felt a slightly comical sensation. They were nothing but a pond generating ripples of shallow cheerfulness, that pond curving into a closed arc before him. They were nothing more than members of the band where Shinji’s brother played trumpet—the people who’d promised to pay him 250 yen per session starting that day as a band boy. Shinji wasn’t one of them, nor did he wish to become one. Shinji threw the dented beer can wedged between instrument cases toward the back of the canopy.

His brother stood up from the half-folded bench seat and, amidst the jolting vibrations, wrapped his own silk muffler around his neck. "Don't go getting all wide-eyed now," he said quietly.

That day marked his first time heading to the Chigasaki American military camp. When they left Yokohama, the city was drenched in a profusion of red light. The sunset broadly dyed the western sky ahead of them in evening hues. From beneath cloud peaks gilded with gold, straight beams of afterglow rose into the sky like a wheel's spokes, radiating in numerous streaks.

The American military truck with its dirty green canopy, after loading them up, started toward that violently blazing sunset. The station square flooded with peach-colored light like a fire quickly hid in the shadow of buildings, and the town, glowing in the western sun, receded further and further on both sides of the road.

The sunset was giving Shinji a taste of strange longing and loss. The blazing crimson sunset seemed like a gate to the next season awaiting him while simultaneously appearing to herald a farewell from something. But he was not thinking about the past. There was only the present, hurrying toward the future. In that year when four full years of peace had passed—the year he turned seventeen—each day rushed by faster than Shinji could catch up. His brother’s old, small student uniform gleamed black at the elbows and back; he was always hungry, but he wasn’t worn down by that misery. He was hurrying. Each day brought only things he had to overcome; he’d never once considered what lay beyond them. Shinji was just hurrying.

“Keep looking ahead—there’s something interesting there.” His brother said. He could no longer make out his brother’s expression. The faintly undulating pale asphalt road endlessly unfurled behind the canopy like a rolling belt, night pressing in as if devouring that path. He pressed his eye to a gap in the canopy and gazed at the truck’s front advancing through darkness, headlights casting their beams. In the blackness, nothing met his eye. Though salt wind from the sea blew against their left side, not even the shoreline’s contour remained visible.

Eventually, the engine's sound slackened.

The wheels scattered gravel as the truck sounded its horn and attempted to turn right, its headlights illuminating the nearby pine forest. In a crouched form, a massive object was there.

“It’s a tank,” he said. A large tank painted mud-colored extended its long gun barrel diagonally toward the sea through the pines.

“Did you see it?” his brother said. “But that’s just a dummy—a model.”

His brother laughed. Ahead stood the camp gate adorned with red neon lights. That was their destination unit. Shinji had not known until then that the Chigasaki camp belonged to the tank unit. "The tank unit's all white Amers." His brother said as he pulled his instrument case closer. "That's just serving as their signboard." Shinji thought he wanted to thoroughly touch an actual tank with his hands. Somehow, like warships and airplanes, tanks held something that tickled his childish dreams. Much later, Shinji learned they were modeled after Sherman tanks. But Shinji ultimately never got the chance to properly observe tanks up close. At times he could see one or two tanks placed in distant pine groves, but they always sat motionless, never occupying the same position twice.

The "sound-off" to begin the performance was scheduled for seven o'clock. Once a week, it was the band’s job there to perform several sets for the American soldiers at that camp until late at night. On the flat, expansive sandy ground lined with Quonset huts, hundreds of candlepower blazed brilliantly, and Japanese women with gaudy turbans wrapped around their heads laughed and interacted with soldiers through exaggerated gestures. The women had sharp eyes and did not cast prolonged glances toward the band members.

In one corner, oil drums were stacked in a pyramid shape.

At the end of the winding road before them, set against the night, stood a fairly large yellow circular hall. The hall was called Tankers Inn. "Hey, go get us some food, I'm starving." When Shinji finally hauled the luggage into the green room, bassist Kobayashi spoke. The band members got off the truck and, after each of their faces was illuminated by flashlight in a formal headcount, suddenly fell silent and began wearing displeased expressions. He didn’t know whether it was to endure the gazes of American soldiers and women or a zealousness toward their work. Part-time Japanese school-uniformed boys hurried past along the corridor before the broken-locked door, carrying metal trays. For meals, one had to request them from Japanese girls wearing matching pure white aprons. "Eight people?" The short, stocky-legged girl said in a slow, dragging tone that suggested exhaustion, then told him to follow her. When he entered the kitchen filled with the stifling smell of boiling potatoes, he was looking outside the screen door. It wasn’t the women who had made him feel ashamed. He was ashamed of his hunger. The similar-looking girls said nothing, their faces uniformly expressionless. The coffee poured by one of them seeped into his stomach like pain. Shinji’s stomach growled. The girl burst out laughing. She was a girl with sparse eyebrows and an emaciated frame.

“You hate jazz?” In the green room, Anzai, who had somehow appeared beside him, called out while biting into a hamburger sandwich topped with egg. “If you don’t hate it, I have a favor to ask.” “Durchie, cut it out.” While gazing into the mirror, his brother said. “What’s the harm?” Anzai laughed with sly eyes. He was called Durchie by everyone, just as he was by the American soldiers. “I’ve been preparing under the assumption I’d be sitting in myself, but I’ve got various matters to attend to. Just sitting there—a kid like you could substitute for that much, right?”

“What do you mean?” Shinji asked. “The drummer suddenly quit. “There were various circumstances involved,” Anzai said. “It’s because you complained too much,” one of the band members said. Anzai did not answer, stroking his long jaw with his left hand as he looked at Shinji through glasses with eyes that seemed to be laughing. “But without a drum set, it just doesn’t look right. This place isn’t some cabaret or club—if you just keep up appearances, no one’ll complain. How ’bout it, kid? You don’t gotta do nothin’—just put on your best drummer face and sit behind the drums here for us?”

His brother, who had finished combing his hair thoroughly, arrived there. “Stop it.” His voice carried anger. “I don’t want this kid on stage.”

“Just sitting there?” Shinji ignored his brother and pressed on. His brother’s forceful tone invited backlash. He did not belong to his brother. “Yeah, sure. That’ll fool ’em.” “Cut it out. You think this is amusing?” said his brother. “I don’t care. I’ll do anything.” Shinji said without looking at his brother. Anzai clapped his hands.

“Alright, that settles it. “I’ll bump up your pay by fifty yen.” Anzai nodded exaggeratedly and curved his lips into a smile. He kept staring at Shinji with narrow eyes. His brother remained silent. “Move it,” Anzai said.

Anzai's clothes were too big.

On this side of the stage curtain, the members were already in position, and his brother tightened the trumpet’s mouthpiece. Master Ogimura, the pianist, cautioned Shinji once again. “Just keep up with the bass, right?” Ogimura returned to the piano. The commotion beyond the thick crimson curtain grew distant as the lighting struck it in a perfect circle. He stared intently at Ogimura. Ogimura remained facing the piano and tapped the floor with the tip of his right shoe. Tap, tap, taptaptap, taptaptap. His brother put strength into the shoulder holding the trumpet and began to play the theme’s first measure. The curtain rose. Applause welled up. The audience seats roared as if trying to swallow him whole—nothing but a gaping, dull-red whale’s mouth.

He was frantically using the wire brushes. Suddenly he realized his entire body had fallen completely into rhythm. Finally raising his head, he turned his face toward the crowd dancing across the floor. Shinji was taking deep breaths. The women’s dresses wriggled and glistened like exposed intestines in garish colors. Dust-choked heat rose upward as hatless soldiers danced, their large palms caressing every outward part of the women. Among them moved bare feet clad in sandals and zori. The women were alarmingly lively.

A woman with exposed kneecaps and calves swollen like clenched fists, her face twisted in a scowl, was being spun around as she passed before the stage. "This band ain't half bad!" "Ahh, I like it too," one answered over his shoulder. "I like their opening number." Another pair of fleshy red lips barked out, "Ain't got no singer, but hell, can't complain."

“Hey!”

When the song ended, the women eagerly rushed to the stage and requested the same one over and over. The Jitterbug was good.

This scene wasn’t something he hadn’t anticipated, Shinji thought. The band was invited on days when the soldiers were granted twelve-hour leave, and he was aware the deadline fell at six o’clock the next morning. “Their routine’s set—dance in the hall instead of some cabaret, drink, take their sweet time with what they’re after. By last call, there’d usually only be one or two couples sticking around,” his brother said.

Revelry became a single colossal sound that saturated the space. Feverish noise and body odor, and warmth. The people seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. There was no gloom or misfortune anywhere; flesh pulsating with vitality was ceaselessly washed by the music. The rhythm was within him. But Shinji couldn’t let pleasure permeate his entire body. With deliberate coolness, he was conscious only of not falling out of the rhythm.

I hate this—staring at the dully gleaming drum pedals， Shinji wiped the sweat dripping on his eyelids with his hand． He panted and realized he wanted to hurl his mud-caked rage at something， as if he’d been violated． Ugly， he thought． One of the soldiers dancing past before his eyes was grabbing a woman’s breast with a drenched， red-haired palm． The woman thinned her eyes to show the whites， kept laughing endlessly with lips slick as if drool might drip． Shinji realized that at the focal point of his hatred and anger were never the American soldiers． In the slight confusion， he was awakening to a self different from what he had expected． The ones he felt disgust toward， shame toward， even acute hatred for， were none other than the Japanese women． Their brazenness was unbearable． The raw ugliness was unbearable． They were women， and they were genitals． He was feeling a sense of defeat． Drop dead， you bastards． Suffocating， the humiliation lodged in Shinji’s throat．

“That’s a nasty business.”

When they returned to the green room, Anzai patted Shinji’s shoulder. “We’re Japanese too. There’s not a man among us who doesn’t get angry seeing Japanese women being toyed with like that.” Shinji smiled thinly. His cheeks stiffened as if covered with a thin membrane, and dispelling Anzai’s misunderstanding felt wearisome. “But you’ll get used to it soon—before you know it, it won’t even matter. Overthinking it just makes you feel stupid.”

“Like us, right?” Ogimura interjected. “That’s right,” Anzai harmonized at once. “That’s right. Indifference is our hygiene—no, our morality.” The band members’ flippant repartee resembling comic banter could be written off as just that, yet somehow those words etched themselves deep into Shinji’s chest. But Shinji hadn’t imagined then that he would later come to repeat those words like an incantation. At that moment, he remained utterly convinced of his indifference toward others.

“There wasn’t a single beautiful woman, was there?” Shinji said in a deliberately calm voice.

Anzai burst out laughing. “Huh. You’ve got some nerve—this guy’s already sizing them up.” The high-ceilinged hall—said to have been converted from a former hospital—began rapidly losing customers around the third set, abruptly turning desolate. No blue or red lights were lit; it resembled an indoor arena with steel beams framing the ceiling, overlooking the stage’s rounded protruding floor, and tiered seats rose on three sides like a lecture hall. At the boundary between the uniformly lit floor and the seats, numerous tables clustered in a ring, and the soldiers drank their liquor primarily in those shadowed areas. There was a woman in a black suit.

The woman hardly ever stood up from the table. With a faint smile hovering on her cheeks, she cast a listless gaze at the people moving across the floor. Adorned with a pearl-like necklace at her black suit's collar, the fair-skinned woman with a long neck possessed strikingly beautiful features. Shinji suddenly felt himself being pulled toward that dark corner. Amidst the chaotic swirl of coquettish voices, shouts, music and footsteps—there alone, as if a soundless world had ripped through the noise—the space around her held a uniquely quiet clarity that enveloped her. It wasn't her beauty that had drawn Shinji. The woman wore a tired, listless expression. In stark contrast to the garish primary colors and crude vitality of the other women, this black-suited figure exuded a faint composure—the quiet assurance of someone who had claimed boredom as her domain. Pressing a white fist to her mouth, she released a small yawn. Reaching out, she plucked something from the chest of the soldier sitting opposite and dropped it to the floor with a shoulder shrug. She kept staring at the floor for a long time. She never let the smile leave her cheeks.

At that table, there was almost no sign of conversation being exchanged. Though not upper class, the Woman in Black seemed like someone who carried within her the history and customs of a middle-class household. Within her all-black attire that suggested a young widow, her pale smooth skin radiated with crystalline clarity. There had been only three groups of customers at the final set. Two groups left the floor during the performance. Only the Woman in Black's group remained.

The partner was a tall corporal—blond with rimless glasses—who carried himself with a quiet boyish demeanor. Shinji had noticed that the Woman never danced with any man other than her partner. They moved across the floor silently gliding. Their steps remained refined and strictly formal. Waitresses and busboys began cleaning up expressionlessly. The band played their final rendition of *Goodnight Sweetheart*. The woman had small crimson lips. Hair tied at nape fell long—straight locks cascading like black water swaying slowly sideways across shoulders.

The song was ending. Yet holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, their legs showed no sign of stopping. Ogimura gave a signal with his eyes. The band repeated the motif once more. Shinji held his breath and stared at the woman. The two had come to the center of the floor. The alto sax concluded the coda, and they stopped dancing. The band members stood up. At that moment—taking hold of the corporal’s arm as he moved toward the exit—the woman turned back toward the stage and clapped softly before her chest. She nudged his shoulder as if urging him. The corporal too began clapping. In the deserted hall, only their sparse applause echoed. The curtain began falling. The band members bowed deeply in unison.

“It’s cold, damn it.” In the truck on the return journey, Ogimura’s voice was carried off and vanished into the darkness. The wind was cold and harsh. To escape the wind, you had to stay low. Shinji sat down on the Imperial Japanese Army ammunition box containing his sticks, crossed his hands—with nowhere else to go—over his shoulders, and drew his neck in.

“Winter’s coming soon, Durchie. If you don’t start ordering us a bus or something next time, I’m done,” Kobayashi said. Anzai appeared to be asleep. Suddenly, a clamorous sound rang out from behind, and something crashed onto the road. The truck slammed on its brakes and stopped, throwing everyone forward as they collapsed onto the floor. “Oh… The back panel’s come off,” Anzai said, fumbling across the floor in the darkness.

After attaching the panel, the soldier who had climbed down said, “Hmph, you think it’s too late now, do you?” The Japanese laughed listlessly.

"Make sure you don’t toss people out, okay?" Anzai said in a deliberately bright voice.

“You got a problem?” “Then walk.” The soldier said in a sharp, irritated voice.

Inside the canopy was quiet. No one coughed, and someone let out a short, servile laugh. The soldier thrust out his chest. The soldier lit a lighter and gazed at his wristwatch. “Hmph, one o'clock.”

When the sound of military boots moving around to the front stopped, a familiar noise was suddenly heard. The soldier was spurting urine toward the wheel.

“He’s mocking us,” Shinji muttered. “It’s an insult.” “Ah, that’s no insult,” Anzai cut in. From the direction of his voice, Shinji realized he’d been the one laughing earlier. “Just different customs,” Anzai said languidly. “Those guys always use the truck for it—pissing on it doesn’t count as dirtying anything to them. Unlike us heading for bushes or trees, what matters to them is doing it without being seen. That’s how it is—so they’d never do it roadside like us.”

“Hmm,” Shinji said.

“Don’t get so worked up over nothing, kid.” Anzai leaned in closer. “They’re just unlucky bastards—all riled up.” “They gotta drive us back but still make roll call by six.” “That’s why the duty soldiers do nothing but bitch.” “You’ll get used to that crap soon enough.” His brother’s voice carried an ironic edge. The truck lurched forward. It quickly gained speed, the engine settling into a monotonous roar through the darkness.

“Kid, you gonna keep sitting there for me next time too?” Anzai said. “I’ll bump your pay up to 400 yen in one go.”

“Thank you,” he said. “By the way, you ever think about learning drums?” Shinji remained silent. “You’ve got real potential, you know.”

Anzai snorted and laughed. Shinji remained silent and closed his eyes. A new habit was beginning within him. To endure it, he imagined the postures Japanese women would be showing around this time. They cowered in exaggerated stances, shaking their hips and thrusting forward. The women groaned, sweating as they kept rhythm. But what did that matter? In the end, they were nothing more than a single faucet ceaselessly spilling out the money saved every week. None of that mattered. None of it mattered. As he thought this, Shinji closed his eyes as if clenching his back teeth tightly.

The band’s main job was at cabarets in Yokohama, but there all Shinji had needed to do was carry luggage and hand out sheet music. He went to Chigasaki every Wednesday. On Tankers Inn’s stage before work began, prompted by Anzai, Shinji had struck the drums a few times. The dull reverberation traveling through the sticks had felt pleasant. “Dumb beat!”

When he finished arranging the drums and suddenly gripped the sticks, Anzai called out like that. “Give it a good whack, kid.” “Don’t hold back.” Before he knew it, “kid” had become Shinji’s nickname. Shinji struck. He pressed both elbows against his torso, kept time with his toes, relentlessly struck the snare drum reflecting the bright electric lights, and finally hit a single cymbal. The sound still quivered near the ear.

“Alright,” Anzai stepped on the red floor and walked over. “The first strike on the drum—that’s called a dumb beat. How’s that? Feels good, right?”

“I feel good,” Shinji answered. “You’ve got strength—real strength.” Anzai said while touching the sticks. “Want me to teach you? I will.” “Mr. Anzai... you?” he said. The story of a drummer who’d had the tendons in his right hand severed by American soldiers long ago—rendering him unable to hold sticks—flickered through his mind. He hadn’t heard the man’s name. He thought that might be Anzai.

But Anzai wore the same sly smile as always. “From now on, kid, call me Durchie—your friend Durchie,” he said. “But I don’t plan to go pro.” “Who cares? I’ll teach you ’cause I want to.” “You learn—that’s all.” That’s all there was to it, Shinji thought. Asking about Anzai’s past was pointless. Other people’s sob stories meant nothing to me. Only he’d been left holding it. The noise beyond the curtain swelled. The show was starting.

“That’s unusual. The Woman in Black is already here today,” said Ogimura as he climbed onto the stage. “Ah, I saw her too—with the usual Yank again,” Anzai said. “She’s always with the same partner.”

“The woman in the black suit? She always stays until the end,” Shinji called out to Ogimura. “That’s right—the beauty,” Ogimura replied and opened the piano lid. No one said anything more about the Woman in Black. And for Shinji, that became both the first and last time people exchanged words about her in his presence. Shinji’s shoulders stiffened as if recoiling. That woman, he suddenly thought. Around that time, he had noticed she absolutely would not dance anything but slow numbers, and even then would never dance with anyone other than the Blond Corporal. The woman always wore black clothes resembling mourning attire. Amidst that vulgar, raucous whirlpool of garish primary colors—among those women who must surely symbolize our submission—there she was: a woman whose very existence suddenly seemed impossible to believe. A woman close to being a phantom... Wasn’t the reason I was so eager to take Anzai up on his offer and perform on stage—the fact that being there let me see her fully?

The Woman in Black was sitting at a table in the far corner opposite Baa. Dressed in her black dress and true to habit, she stepped onto the floor only when slow numbers played—guided by her arm held fast in the grip of that same corporal. During Trots and Rumbas, she would return to her seat early. When Jitterbug and Boogie began, she would tilt her head, pull back her shoulders, and laugh. The Corporal also obediently followed her back to their seat. Every stage was the same. However, that night she had her hair styled in an updo. Perhaps it was what they called an evening updo—her hair bundled high—and when she turned her back, two breathtakingly exquisite napes stood aligned.

The brush hand moved almost mechanically. Shinji became conscious of his tilting heart. He fixed his gaze as if trying to pin something down. She must be from the city, he thought. Twenty-five or twenty-six perhaps. Maybe slightly older. Come to think of it, the Corporal and her gave a strong impression of being like elder sister and younger brother too. She carried herself with that gentle maturity of an experienced wife showing poise to a youthful lover. With almond eyes upturned at the corners, she sat at the table chin slightly drawn in, those eyes fixed on some high distant point beyond the hall. The woman seemed incapable of laughing aloud.

It must have been past ten o'clock when the woman in black crossed the floor and approached the stage directly, as the crowd had thinned considerably by then. Surprised, Shinji looked at the woman. The woman, however, stood near the piano opposite the right wing where he was. “Please play ‘Deep Purple.’” She said in a crisp, clear voice. Her pronunciation was also clear. Ogimura nodded and signaled the band members. “Deep Purple” was a slow number.

“What’d you go and request, huh?” The woman in yellow said. “Deep Purple”—perhaps out of habit—the woman tilted her head slightly as the corporal took her arm and looked at the woman in yellow.

“What’s that supposed to be? You think I know that?” “A slow one—‘Deep Purple.’” The woman said gently and began to turn her face back. At that moment, her eyes met Shinji’s. Shinji did not look away. The woman in black stared at him for a while with startled eyes. In the few moments before the music began, she gazed at him with a puzzled expression, her eyes intense and angry-looking.

His chest was numb. But Shinji was determined not to look away. As the music began and she started dancing with the Corporal, Shinji became certain the woman had smiled at him. The bespectacled corporal who resembled an honor student kept his tall frame politely distant as he began to dance.

Shinji thought with a buoyant heart. Probably she was the only one. But perhaps this wasn't a relationship convertible into money or goods. Just as in my dreams, she—a well-bred girl from a good family among those evacuated—and this young corporal might share a relationship bound by formal promises that should lead to true love and marriage. He looked upon the two of them as something rather to be blessed. The Corporal might be of Scandinavian descent. They were indeed viewed as properly educated upper-class youth.

Just as he turned the sheet music and waited for Ogimura’s baton, he reasoned that none of the band members would have noticed his gaze. He used the same tactic again. When all the standing members bowed at the finale, Shinji kept his face turned toward the woman still applauding and did not lower his head.

Happiness was like a sharp-edged pain. Because she must have remembered him, his heart raced. The excitement persisted even within the truck on the return trip.

It was an extremely cold night at the end of November. Whether it was due to Anzai’s resourcefulness or simply standard procedure, on that return trip a large bus damp with mist particles was parked at Eimon Gate. It had avec seats. Shinji sat in the frontmost seat.

With his brothers sitting hunched over in their seats behind him，their coat collars turned up，Shinji forgot about the cold. That night too，the woman in black had remained until the final stage. Instruments and bundles of sheet music were stowed in the back half，and inside nearly full bus sat a single young soldier who appeared bound for town.

The bus shuddered in small tremors as it headed straight toward the sea. Along the roadside, women walked in scattered clusters—whether left behind or having already finished their work. They were rarely alone; some pairs huddled together under shared coats. These women understood Japanese powerlessness all too well. Clinging desperately to both sides of the bus, they begged only the American soldiers inside for rides into town. But the vehicle showed no sign of slowing down. A standing soldier reached forward to tap the gum-chewing driver’s shoulder.

“She’s my girl, okay?” “Cut the crap—your girl’s waiting in a town bed, ain’t she?” “But that one’s also one of my girls.”

“Just one?” “When there’s a bunch of whores they start making such a racket—one’s fine.” The red-faced Private First Class driver, having arrogantly answered the private-looking soldier, finally stopped the bus. He stepped outside.

“Just one—only one who’ll warm me up.”

A thin mist laced with sea scent flowed chillily into the space. Making the Japanese girls—clamoring with coquettish whines and whistles—line up in a row, the driver spat out his gum, then lifted each chin one by one with a sly grin for inspection. There were five or six women. The Woman in Black remained absent. Through the headlight beams, fog drifted like restless spirits.

The driver selected the tallest woman. “Your seat’s here.” The woman sat lightly on the soldier’s knee and wrapped her arm around his neck. “Ha ha!” Turning around, the driver grinned at Shinji. “Be careful with your life.” The bus started moving. The private second class remained silent in the back seat. The woman in the blanket-like coat was drunk and had narrowed her eyes. She had buttocks shaped like a mortar. From beneath the coat, the American soldier’s large, red palm covered in golden hair pressed against her chest. Shaking her head unsteadily, the woman said in Japanese, “I’ll fall off. If you’re gonna hold me, hold me properly.” The road ran straight parallel to the coast.

“That tickles! What do you think you’re doing?” The woman snapped angrily. The driver voraciously kissed her lips. His right arm, clenched with force, gripped the steering wheel. The pressed cheeks were right before Shinji’s eyes. The driver wouldn’t stop forcing the kiss. Her face contorted, and when he forcibly pulled away, saliva formed a white streak. “You damn monkey.” Japanese would do; the woman, however, forced a smile. “Good.” The soldier released his hand. On the bus floor, the woman clumsily flipped over onto her back. The soldier laughed out loud.

Instinctively, Shinji averted his eyes. He gazed at the band members in the rear. The band members were sleeping. Like corpses, everyone kept their eyes tightly shut and slept. The private second class stared vacantly out the window. While continuing to drive, the soldier roared with laughter like a siren. Shinji turned his face away. I didn't need to do anything, say anything—just keep pretending not to notice. I could keep my eyes shut too. He gripped the seat armrest tightly, kept his lips parted thinly as if panting, and continued waiting for something to go down his throat.

“How’s this?” Ordered, the woman obediently hung from behind onto the soldier’s neck this time and pressed her cheek tightly against him. “That’s right—keep doing that.” “I can’t go to heaven with you.” “Right?” While glaring ahead, the soldier continued to laugh, and the woman nonchalantly swayed her hips as she began humming a pop song. The fact that the woman utterly ignored him and all the Japanese people in the vehicle—not even attempting to seek salvation through eye contact—pierced Shinji even more deeply. Indifference was mutual. Indeed, the band members, occupation force employees, and prostitutes had constructed a complete wall of mutual indifference between them. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, they were trying to live solely within their own tribes. ...Shinji agonized. He, too, had to get used to it.

It was a night when the air felt taut. There was still some distance to the town. Forehead pressed against the glass pane, Shinji gazed out the window. Illuminated by the headlights, a woman moving to the side of the road came into view. Shinji held his breath. It was the Woman in Black. Shielding her eyes as if dazzled, her upturned eyes glinted. The woman’s coat was gray. The bus was about to stop—she would get on and stand nearby. *She’d sit next to me.* In an instant, Shinji imagined such things. But the bus didn’t change speed. Bearing the drunk woman’s lewd humming and the soldier’s foolish laughter, the bus passed by. Twisting his head around, he looked out the window behind him. The woman’s standing figure was immediately swallowed by the darkness. “...Ah,” he said. The low voice made no sound.

Shinji had never before been conscious of such an intense void. The void occupied the seat next to him. The brown leather seat vacated for one person quietly reflected the bus’s swaying light. He felt he saw there his own unfulfilled, intense hope. He wanted her to come there. He wanted to fill that space with her supple presence. He leaned back against the seat as if in collapse.

A void like the ceaseless ringing of a silver bell filled him. That she walked alone along that desolate late-night path filled him with something both happy and sad. Shinji suddenly realized. His concealed skin was exposed to the stinging cold wind. At seventeen, he remained a child. He hadn't shed a single layer of boyhood. He wanted to walk endlessly along the dark coastal road with the black-clad woman who seemed like an older sister, holding hands with just the two of them. He wanted to disappear into winter's darkness.

That night, a lieutenant claiming he needed to get to Kamakura boarded, prompting the bus to take a shortcut that sent it winding down a narrow road. The desperate driver's speeding caused tree branches to shatter a window, leaving Aoki the alto saxophonist with a head wound. The bus didn't arrive in Yokohama until after three o'clock.

Shinji wondered if life wasn't just repetition. More or less, people lived through repetition. A life as a band boy beating drums was being born within him. He could feel himself gradually growing accustomed.

The frenzied clamor saturated with garish primary colors, the sweat and blood, the crude clamor of soldiers and raw clamor of prostitutes—all of it made him want to turn his back on this powerless, impoverished reality that he hated and suffered through. Those things were merely stimuli to the outer shell encasing his solitary chamber—seasonal wind and rain that tempered the shell. For him, hardening this outer shell became his sole occupation. By erasing his own awareness of harboring resentment, he strove to eliminate the resentment itself. This half-conscious numbness gradually acclimated him to the external world—and to his powerlessness against it. Yet whether he had created a solitary room within himself to adapt, or whether adaptation had forced him to create that room, even he couldn't fully grasp. None of it mattered. Like a shellfish sealing itself within its shell, he had begun learning how to avoid.

The fact that cigarettes had been pushed on him by the boys and prostitutes had made Shinji think of becoming that broker. In that case, dealing directly with the soldiers would generate more profit. He teamed up with Anzai and shifted to selling that. Three hundred yen profit per carton—it was no trouble to move out three cartons a night.

“You’ve been making quite a profit from cigarettes, I hear.” One day, his brother said. He remained silent. The cigarettes remained in the Boston bag, left in the corner of the tokonoma alcove alongside his textbooks.

“What do you plan to use it for?” his brother said. “Who knows?”

“A woman?”

“Nothing that considerate exists.” “...Don’t you dare become some black-market broker.”

Shinji remained silent. He had no intention of arguing with his brother. If he were to say anything, without fail, his brother would curse their father—who since defeat had been like a soulless person, refusing to work at all—and would mutter that even their mother lying sick in bed was a mother in name only. He knew that arguments with his brother would ultimately become nothing but troublesome circular logic—in other words, his brother’s tirades and complaints about their parents. Shinji deliberately yawned. “Get out already. I need to study.”

“Hmph. …How much are you giving Durchie?” “A hundred and fifty yen.” “Fifty-fifty split?” “That’s how it’s set up.”

“It’s you.” “He’s definitely skimming more than that margin.” “Are you selling them at cabarets?” “Various outlets. Cabarets mean losses when they get raided.” “There are companies and stores where I used to work part-time.” “They even sell for a surprisingly high price at school.” “You’re quite the sharp operator.” His brother said cheerfully. “I’ve reconsidered you—you’re the kind of man who never makes a deal that ends in a loss.”

Shinji didn't answer and grabbed a dictionary. His brother's way of speaking sometimes took on the tone of a superior officer. He hated that.

Downstairs, with a sudden piercing shrillness that tore through the morning air, the tenant’s baby began wailing at the top of its lungs. “What an awful voice.” “That’s a monkey’s voice.” While leaning against the handrail, his brother grimaced. “It’s driving me crazy.” While answering, Shinji wanted to know what his brother was trying to say to him.

His brother brightened his tone. “Student bands are already an outdated business. But me—I feel good just blowing my trumpet, hitting high notes that no sheet music from any era or country in the world has ever written down. Right?” “Armstrong again?” He sneered. His brother would sometimes shout those words when severely drunk.

“How’s your drumming?” he asked with the same artificial brightness. “You’re taking lessons every week, right?”

“That stuff?” he said. “None of it’s serious—just sucking up to Durchie.” “I can’t afford to have him turn his back on me now.”

He realized his brother's concern had been about this all along. As expected, his brother whistled in apparent relief and went downstairs. As he reached for his textbook, Shinji noticed and opened the Boston bag. There were two extra cartons of Permel.

“...Damn it,” he said.

A strange anger toward his brother—who must have shown such kindness—assailed him. "Alright, I'll pay back every yen of this," he muttered. "Tomorrow. I'll pay you back." I want to handle everything myself. I didn't want anyone's help bearing the burden of myself. He thought what I wanted were targets to secure my solitude—in other words, mere transactional partners or enemies.

At the university on the hill, a classmate who was the son of a restaurant owner had been a good business partner. And the son of an executive in a certain conservative party. He always kept around thirty thousand yen in hundred-yen bills stuffed inside his coat pocket. Shinji succeeded in selling them cigarettes at a profit of five hundred yen per carton. I couldn't help but feel like a terribly shrewd man. The feeling that I could fully believe in my own coldness was pleasurable. Shinji was earnestly hoping for cold-bloodedness.

“That’s right—we need to expand our organization even more.”

“Yeah, they’re going to officially ban the existence of campus cells soon—we know that.”

When Shinji carried the empty Boston bag up to the rooftop, students with foam at their mouths were engaged in a heated debate. Shinji felt disconnected from them. None of that mattered—what capacity for responsibility beyond their own efforts to secure personal happiness could anyone possibly possess? But Shinji still retained a childishness that led him to voice his defiance only to a middle school classmate who happened to be there.

“What a strange guy,” answered the pallid student. “You’re an unfortunate child. You’re an idiot.”

“It can’t be helped. I’m only myself.”

From the rooftop of the university building, beyond a red brick wall separating them, lay the garden of the neighboring foreign embassy visible below. Amidst trees that had lost most of their leaves, within their mottled bone-like withered hues, there was a pond gleaming leadenly. A bird took flight from there.

Pressing his chest against the stone edge of the rooftop, Shinji suddenly muttered. “If someone fell from here, would they die?” “If they did judo, maybe they’d survive.”

“Looks like a quarry down there.” “Then it’s certain—you’ll die.”

After answering, the friend peered at him.

“Hey Obata, did you get dumped by a girl or something?”

Startled, he burst into laughter. “Ridiculous. I don’t love anyone.”

The sunlight was bright. That winter they called an anomalous warm one continued with days as mild as spring. The end of that year’s classes was imminent. Making their glasses glint, there were also figures engrossed in copying notes while sunbathing. Thinking about his complete notebook and that his tuition was almost paid off, Shinji felt a refreshing sense of satisfaction.

Bathed in the mild winter sun, five or six people were lined up on the rooftop’s concrete surface, dragging their feet as they practiced dance steps. One of the instructors approached while clapping his hands. A man walked toward him with elbows held level and a hunched posture, staggering slightly as he called out. “Hey, you want to learn too? You can’t dance, right?” “How much?” “Twenty yen per person per session,” said the teaching student as he turned around. “How about it?”

“Teach me the slow steps,” he said. “Just the slow steps are fine; I don’t want to learn anything else.”

The steps were easy. But no matter how much his friends urged him, he didn’t learn any other steps. Practice during those lunch breaks alone seemed sufficient.

“You’re already good. All that’s left is leading—actually doing it and riding the music.”

“Thanks, that’s enough.”

He hadn't told anyone about his part-time job in his brother's band. Shinji cheerfully paid twenty yen. Even though learning the steps had cost only that much, he was satisfied.

The U.S. Army Tank Corps in Chigasaki, surrounded by pine forests, had high barbed-wire fences encircling its perimeter. At times it gave the impression of a field encampment or concentration camp. This was nothing like the decorative wire fencing found in cities.

Exiting the back entrance of Tankers Inn, beyond the barbed wire-entwined fence, an expanse of young pine leaves glittered like layers of black clouds piled upon each other, and on the left shoulder of a tall iron pole—whose purpose remained unclear—the North Star shone coldly and still. The residential area on the outskirts of town beyond the gently swelling hill was visible only as a few distant lights. Passing by the kitchen’s screen door where the lukewarm mingling of sour ketchup sauce and savory bread smells drifted through, he walked along the parched sandy path, passing before drum cans piled like mountains. The restrooms were located near the pine forest, far removed from the hall.

As soon as they arrived at Camp, perhaps because of the cold, the band members headed to the restroom. Shinji always left the hall just as they were returning. There was also work to prepare music stands and sheet music beforehand, and he liked wandering alone through those frigid nights like that. Sometimes, the waitresses would open the screen door and give him freshly baked bread or roast beef. On Christmas night, they gave him a small turkey thigh.

“Mr. Boy,” the waitresses called him. “Thank you,” he said each time. Shinji thought the kindness of the waitresses was nothing more than age-based affection toward him as the youngest.

The Camp's landscape remained unchanged. Glaring lights from all directions illuminated him, making it seem less like night and more like a perpetual midday beneath the same low, narrow, and dark sky. A constant soft brightness always covered the grounds, and for him, the Camp's landscape remained nothing but that of a single night. There were rainy days when white, fine lines glittered in that smoke-hazed space of light, and there were clear ones that revealed the lofty height of star fragments at the zenith.

On days when the sea wind blew strong, amidst the rustling daylight, only this chilled night wind shook his cheeks as if endlessly washing over them. While observing the crowd gathered at the gate, he kept walking without slowing his steady pace.

The women were only permitted to pass through the gate under the pretense of being invited by their respective friends. Amidst the women jostling outside the gate—calling out soldiers’ names in loud voices or waving their hands to signal—Shinji would always try to find the Woman in Black. He would try to spot the Blond Corporal among the soldiers rushing toward the gate. On days when he couldn't see her before the performance started, he would pretend to go to the restroom during every stage intermission to search for her. Shinji was content with just looking. The woman was separated by the American soldiers. Ensuring that was the only job left for him. He watched the woman. Seized by a piercingly clear void that permeated his being, he stood still. The image that absorbed him and reduced him to nothingness even felt like a necessity of life to him. To the power that rendered himself transparent, he was perpetually thirsty.

Ogimura said. “Kid, exams keeping you busy?”

On a Wednesday after the hectic New Year season had passed, Shinji had come to his Yokohama home as usual to deliver sheet music. “It’s nothing serious. I haven’t been missing many classes,” Shinji replied as he hoisted the bundled furoshiki onto his back.

It was an era when obtaining new jazz sheet music remained difficult. The hit kits bought from soldiers didn’t contain complete new songs either, so handwritten copies multiplied naturally, making the sheet music bundles grow heavier and bulkier each day. Carrying them was just one of Shinji’s routine duties. “You alright?” After stepping outside together, Ogimura asked. “How’s your body holding up?”

“Huh?”

“Your brother was worried—said you seemed down.”

“There’s not a single thing wrong with me.” At his brother’s meddling, Shinji answered in complete anger. “I’m completely fine, you know.” Ogimura laughed as if relieved. “Oh, you’re really fine then? Because your brother says he wants to make you quit. …So kid—you still planning to keep at it?”

“I do,” Shinji said in a tone of genuine surprise. It wasn’t a lie. He had calculated that he needed to earn a bit more to pay his tuition. After all, this part-time job paid the best. “Is that so.” Ogimura seemed lost in thought. “So kid—you really planning to become a drummer?” “Well, that’s...” He faltered. “Hitting feels good, but...”

“Hmm.” “Doesn’t match what Durchie said.” As they emerged onto the train street, Ogimura in a white muffler tilted his head.

“Durchie’s version is different again.” “He’s saying he wants to mold you into our drummer—that’s why he won’t let anyone else in.”

“I’m a band boy,” Shinji said. “With Durchie, I’ve kept it vague by saying ‘Please let me think about it.’”

“I see.” “But that’s a problem—we absolutely need a drummer.” He said as if to himself, and Ogimura stopped the taxi.

Through the evening city, the taxi started toward Sakuragicho Station. "But I’ll keep it vague with Durchie for now—that’s better for you, right? He’s got that weird temper that flares up." Ogimura said. "Bands everywhere are insanely busy these days, and anyway, it’s not like I’ll find a drummer that quickly." "In any case, I’d appreciate it if you could keep at it a little longer." He repeated. "Well, just a bit longer."

“Now, just a little longer, okay?” “Yes, please allow me to continue.”

From behind the cloth-wrapped bundle held to his chest, Shinji watched the bustling streets pass by the window with an intense gaze. He realized this was likely a notice of dismissal. Just a little longer. He repeated Ogimura's words under his breath. Suddenly, a hot sensation flooded his chest. Just a little longer. There were only a few chances left. During that time I'll embrace her skin. I'll smell her skin. I'll absolutely sleep with her once. American soldiers walked through town with women in flashy coats. General MacArthur's New Year's statement had extolled the stability of governance as they welcomed their fifth New Year since war's end, and the sight of occupation soldiers moving through streets had become more familiar than chained dogs. Brushing off a shoeshine boy clinging to his long legs while laughing, an American soldier wrapped his arm around a woman's shoulder and gazed into a display window with exaggerated gestures. Pillars bearing town names adorned with dirty pine decorations passed by the window one after another. A woman in a red coat who had darted into the roadway looked back at the sidewalk, laughing and shaking her head as if refusing something. The taxi passed right by the woman's back. On the sidewalk appeared the face of an American soldier—mouth gaping wide, eyes gleaming obscenely.

Shinji now understood. He clearly hated that blond corporal. A scene he’d been trying not to recall rose before his eyes. Once more after that, he had seen the Woman in Black walking along the coastal road from inside the returning bus. The woman in a gray coat was laughing as the blond corporal in a hat firmly held her shoulders.... Was he still only thinking of the Woman in Black as a prostitute? Shinji was viscerally aware of that white skin offered up to American soldiers. His sorrow was his own powerlessness; his suffering was undoubtedly jealousy.

“What the hell kind of holiday is today anyway?” Kobayashi said. He sounded slightly irritated. “Staying overnight out of nowhere... That’s just cruel.” “Ain’t no choice—the client’s askin’ all nice-like. Let’s just do it. Don’t wanna risk ’em axin’ future gigs.” Thrusting out his long chin, Anzai answered. “Hey, Boss.” “Can’t be helped.”

Ogimura was a quiet man. “Everyone okay with this?”

“There’s an exam,” Shinji said. “But there’s an English exam during third period tomorrow.”

“Third period?” “Then it’s in the afternoon, right?” “It’s fine—you can make it back on the morning train.” Anzai hurriedly slipped into his coat again. “Right—need to go negotiate lodging.”

“The same place as last time?” said Kobayashi. Aoki continued after that. “There? “The Christmas one.” “What a dump!”

“But there’s nowhere else for lodgings like these, I tell ya.” “The soldiers ain’t giving us rides either. If we get turned down at that inn, you’ll be sleepin’ rough.”

It was the first Wednesday since February had begun.

I later learned it had been the day when repatriation orders were issued to some staff officers. The soldiers were probably celebrating, thinking their own homecoming was imminent. This coincided exactly with that Wednesday. But the officers weren’t our clients. The band had been invited for the soldiers’ sake. Though only some officers were being sent home, the troops’ revelry grew excessive—their whistles and shouts of “Open the damn stage already!” became so loud they rattled the green room walls. “Hell of a night,” his brother said, grinning. “Generally speaking, the more customers flood in, the better jazz plays.”

His brother’s trumpet began blaring “Doing What Comes Naturally” with boisterous vigor. That song was the theme. Before the curtain had fully risen, the soldiers were already shouting in unison. “...Naturally! Naturally!”

Shinji was growing excited too. While wielding two drumsticks, yet out of habit, his eyes searched beyond the seething mass of soldiers and women dancing with seemingly delighted abandon for the figure of the Woman in Black. He still couldn't find an opportunity to approach her. However, every time he came to Chigasaki, he never forgot to put the bundle of nearly 10,000 yen he had saved up into his inner pocket. He had been thinking—if it came to that. He thought he understood what the absence of money made people forfeit in reality.

The poorly ventilated hall was filled with a faintly white haze of cigarette smoke; despite being midwinter, a sweltering heat—mingling with the Americans’ distinctive odor and alcohol-tinged breath—gradually intensified in density. The Woman in Black arrived midway through the second set. She took a seat at a front-row table to the stage’s right—no more than five or six meters from Shinji, who drummed using his right sleeve. Shinji’s heart raced. It was likely due to the unusually early crowd filling the hall so quickly, but she had never before taken a seat that close. Uncharacteristically, she turned a bright smile toward the dancers and clapped along with everyone, both hands keeping time. Beside her sat the usual Corporal.

Shinji bowed his head. The usual despair that bound him whenever he saw her had seized him once again. To imagine her skin, she had to remain unseen. More than women as breasts, buttocks, skin, or genitals—toward this Woman in Black who stood visible yet apart—he was coming to realize he could direct something more precious, something more fervent, a love more devoted. It might be cowardice, or immaturity, or escapism—perhaps an unhealthy fixation on a dream. Yet Shinji couldn’t abandon the pleasure of being petrified and consumed by a single crystalline void as he gazed at her, nor the euphoria of becoming that very void—saturated yet hollow. He wanted to lose. Not to himself—he wanted to lose to her. To his powerless self confronting reality, becoming perfectly suited to himself, evaporating into nothingness, being wholly possessed by her—this alone was his hope; his desire was not to possess her.

That was the understanding he reached each time he faced her presence—recurring and unchanging. Shinji bit his lip. "In the end, I probably won't lay a single finger on her." "To touch her with even one finger would make her stop being herself." "See? I'm scared of that right now." When he switched drumsticks, he hunched over as if hammering down his rage and struck the drum with full force. His toes pressed the pedal while he frantically played through a chorus. "Hoh," Kobayashi turned around and pursed his lips. Shinji shrugged his shoulders and stuck out his tongue.

“You’ve gotten good, kid.”

When the curtain fell, Kobayashi said. "I was reminded of Durchie's past—he used to do it just like that, all fierce-like back in the day."

“Kobayashi,” Ogimura said in a low voice. It was a sharp, sunken voice unlike him.

“My apologies,” Kobayashi said immediately. Shinji sensed the band members’ unspoken rule. They never spoke of Anzai’s past, and Anzai himself never spoke of anything. During every lesson—as Anzai never once gripped the drumsticks—Shinji knew he was the drummer from his brother’s story: the one with severed tendons. Shinji had also refrained from touching on it. But Shinji’s restraint was merely a conscious rejection of anything beyond himself and an adherence to habit. For the band members, avoiding mention of each other’s pasts or private lives in that way was both a unifying force and a method to preserve it. Now even Shinji didn’t find this entirely unpleasant.

In the green room, Anzai sat in a chair with a sullen face. "Violent pounding isn't your only talent," he said lowly. "Kid—lately when you hit hard, you always play like some hysterical woman."

"Tonight's going to get rowdy," Ogimura said in his usual relaxed voice. Shinji thought he was talking about the customers.

The signs of impending chaos were indeed thickening when, midway through the next set, an officer who never normally entered appeared in the hall. Shinji saw the soldiers near the entrance murmur and split apart. A single American soldier entered holding a transparent liquor bottle in one hand, his face crimson as he grinned and bared white teeth—an officer with severely curly hair and an aquiline nose.

When he later considered it, the man had likely been one of those officers being sent back to their home country. Though Shinji caught snatches of soldiers' whispers interspersed with "States, States," he had remained unaware of such circumstances at the time. The man was stocky with a thick neck reminiscent of a Mexican's and chestnut-colored curly hair. From the very beginning, Shinji had taken a dislike to that vigorous air about him. Responding to the soldiers' cheers and whistles, the officer waved one hand and shouldered through the dancing crowd toward the stagefront. On closer inspection, he was a lieutenant.

At that very moment, the hall overflowed with ragtime’s swift rhythm. His brother’s face flushed as he continued to blow the B-flat high note with desperate intensity. His brother’s forehead glistened with sweat.

With a gin-like bottle dangling limply from one hand, the lieutenant stared intently at the soldiers and women dancing past to avoid him. Those eyes came to rest on the table in the right corner.

Shinji was distracted. He forgot how to move his hands.

The lieutenant walked straight to the table where the woman in the black dress sat. He slammed the gin bottle onto the table. Through the woman in black’s motions—tilting her head, smiling with an upward glance, shaking it side to side—it became clear that the lieutenant had asked her to dance and was being refused. The corporal said something from the side, and the lieutenant shrugged his shoulders exaggeratedly. But the lieutenant did not give up. He shook his head like a petulant child, approached the woman in the black dress, then suddenly grabbed her hand and yanked her toward himself. The chair toppled over with a clatter.

The drumsticks had completely stopped. The corporal pulled back a chair, stood up, and crossed his arms. His face was pale with anger. However, the tall corporal did not remove his rimless glasses. He had no intention of physically confronting his superior officer.

When it came to other women, it was a common occurrence, and everyone would normally just watch and laugh without saying anything. But what infuriated Shinji was how the soldiers—who should have known the Woman in Black danced only with the Corporal—were silently watching things unfold. Most soldiers kept dancing and drinking with feigned ignorance. The Woman in Black wore a strained smile that seemed troubled. The lieutenant forcibly dragged her out onto the floor and pulled her into an embrace. He bent his knees and shook his shoulders as if keeping rhythm. He began to dance. ……However, the woman’s legs stopped at the second step. Staggering, she shook her head. “No, I can’t dance to fast songs.”

Shinji almost felt as if he had heard the woman’s voice.

The woman furrowed her brows apologetically and laughed. Pulling back her small white chin, she stared at the lieutenant with unyielding resolve. He shook his head and tried to resume dancing. The woman staggered at the hips. Still wearing that same smile, she said something again and shook her head. The two were now right before him. Shinji had lost all sense of time and place. He rose slightly from his seat, ready to kick over the drum and lunge if the lieutenant attempted to dance again. But the lieutenant released his grip. “Solly.” He uttered the single word and stepped away from her. Immediately, he could be seen dancing with a plump woman in a red dress.

The woman who had returned to the table was pressing her right hand against her left elbow. Her face showed no anger. When the Corporal leaned over and said something, she gently shook her head. She wore her usual weary smile. The Corporal supported the woman as they moved through the crowd toward the exit. On the table sat a transparent gin bottle alongside a beer and the woman’s handkerchief. Shinji felt his heart hollow out abruptly like a retreating tide. He readjusted his grip on the brushes. His hands held no strength as they struck the side drum. The woman had avoided the lieutenant by going out with the Corporal—she would surely return. He tried to make himself believe it.

However, the woman did not show herself during that stage performance. Would she come back? Or wouldn't she appear again tonight? Shinji could think of nothing else. That day, the woman had worn her long hair down. She hadn't been wearing her pearl necklace. When she had been dragged across the floor by the lieutenant and came close before him, he had been able to scrutinize her face closely. Her eyes held faint shadows beneath them, and when her pupils moved, her eyelids seemed to form fine wrinkles. There had been a long, smooth white throat like porcelain. In the green room, Shinji found it painful to sit still with his head bowed. Stepping onto the stage, he quietly peeked into the hall from behind the thick curtain. The soldiers had begun thinning out, and a busboy was wiping down several empty tables. The handkerchief still lay on that same table. Turning the corner of the green room, he exited through the back entrance. The night was cold as ice pressed against bare skin. Changing his mind, Shinji went back into the green room to fetch his coat. He could just say he was going to the bathroom. Anzai called out to him. "Hey, you've only got about ten minutes left of break time." Shinji answered as planned.

As he passed the kitchen, the back screen door opened. “Mr. Boy.” A voice called out.

“Here.” The thin girl in the white apron handed him an aluminum cup. Hot chocolate was inside. “Careful, it’s hot.” He laughed. The sweet, hot, viscous liquid warmed his body and tasted good, but his heart was racing.

“Where are you going? The bathroom?” the girl asked. She was a girl with thin eyebrows and a small-featured face.

“Just a walk,” he answered.

“Well then, if I need to go to the bathroom, would you escort me there?” said the girl. “But…” Shinji hesitated in his reply. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he was concerned about the Woman in Black and wanted to find her. The girl, however, had easily misunderstood. “It’s fine. If you’re worried about time, you can just walk with me while drinking that.” The girl immediately came out wearing a shabby woolen topcoat. Shinji reluctantly walked alongside her in front of the drum can.

“That coat’s awfully small, isn’t it?” The girl laughed deep in her throat. She stood about chest-high to him.

“But it’s still as good as new, I tell ya. I bought it from my old man.” “Oh… you bought it from your father?”

“Yeah, haggled him down hard. On installments.” “Oh… on installments?……”

At first glance she was a flat-chested girl with a small nose, but upon closer inspection her features were lovely. She wore a white cloth tied behind her ears that left only her bangs exposed. Turning her white-capped head away, the girl burst into laughter. "Really. That's priceless." "Even my old man's strapped for cash." "Yeah..." The girl suddenly stopped laughing. She spoke in a low, weathered voice. "So things must be pretty rough for you too, huh?" Shinji brought the cup to his lips.

The cup emptied before reaching the bathroom. Waiting for the girl to finish her business, Shinji gazed at the gate. The night felt familiar. Soldiers with women partners kept exiting through the gate in groups. The corporal and Woman in Black remained absent. Had they really left already? He walked behind the bathroom spinning the cup on his finger. The standalone building's graveled rear—where he'd sometimes glimpsed kissing couples in coarse shadows—lay deserted. No human presence lingered there either.

A strange sound reached his ears immediately afterward. The sharp growl-like noise cut off abruptly, leaving Shinji bewildered. Then came an unmistakable scream tearing through the air. Shinji charged into the bathroom. "No!" roared a tear-choked voice as he deliberately stomped his feet and flung open the door. "No! No!" The protests were smothered as if a palm clamped over the mouth, followed by the thud of something slamming against the wall. Before him hunched the broad back of a military uniform, flanked on either side by the frayed edges of the thick-waisted girl's faded crimson skirt.

“What are you doing?” He shouted with all his might. The man had curly chestnut hair. An ugly face glistening with greasy sweat turned around. It was that lieutenant. “Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” Shinji shouted in a strained voice. When he clung to his waist, finally, the lieutenant let go. The girl, now deathly pale, had legs as thin as sticks. In a deep voice that didn’t match her frame, she screamed again, “No!”

“Mr. Boy,” the girl began crying in a strained voice. The white cloth she had worn had fallen to the floor and been soiled with mud; her hair looked as if it had been clawed at. Sobbing convulsively, the girl had her legs give out in the cramped corner. A white scrap of cloth fluttered down onto Shinji’s shoe. He immediately knew it was the girl’s torn underwear. “...Goddamn.” Gasping for breath, the lieutenant with the terrible hooked nose was clutching his trousers. A glaring, fiery gaze was fixed on Shinji. Shinji remained silent, glaring back at close enough range that their chests almost touched.

Distorting his thick rubber-like lips, the Lieutenant grinned. “It was a joke,” he said. “Get out.” English would do—Shinji pointed to the exit. Shrugging his thick shoulders, the Lieutenant left. The Lieutenant was still panting. The girl did not stop sobbing. He adjusted her slipped-up top and helped her stand. “Are you okay?” “Are you hurt anywhere?” The girl nodded while choking back sobs. “...Let’s go,” he said.

The girl was trembling in small, rapid shivers. Supporting her, they came out to the front of the bathroom. “Boy.” A voice rang out in the darkness. Shinji felt the girl’s trembling intensify and grow into something immense. “Let’s go,” he said. “Boy.” The voice called again. “I need to talk. What happened earlier—I was in the wrong.” The voice was persistent. “Come here. Come here for a second.” “Can you get back alone?” Shinji asked. “No, no.” The girl looked up with trembling eyes. “Then wait here.”

Shinji went around to the back of the toilet. The cigarette's glow flickered like fishing boat lights, and the lieutenant's face emerged. The cigarette ember was thrown into the darkness. At that moment, a ferocious punch landed on Shinji's chin. Shinji fell backward onto the sand. From his left jaw to his lips spread a dull yet searing pain, as though something scalding had been pressed against his skin. Stars danced before his eyes, and Shinji couldn't get up for a while. Something slippery touched the palm he was pressing. His lip was split.

Blood was in his mouth too. When he stood up, he spat. His body swayed unsteadily. He could barely keep standing. “Hey.” The voice spoke. The Lieutenant gripped Shinji’s arm. “Is that girl your sweetheart?” “No.” He said fiercely. “No? “Hmph—then why’d you follow her here? “Why stop me? “Think this ain’t your business?”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” When his shoulder was shaken, a stinging pain shot through his bones. Groaning, Shinji held his chin. The Lieutenant raised his voice.

“Hey, Waitress, come here.”

“Why are you calling her?” Shinji gasped. “She doesn’t need to come.” “I don’t care,” said the Lieutenant. He shouted again loudly. The girl who had emerged into the light hugged the front of her coat against her chest, looking cold. She ran over and clung to Shinji. “Blood!” The girl didn’t ask why. Terrified, she clung tightly to Shinji, and the two of them braced against each other with their legs. “Is this boy your sweetheart?” The Lieutenant slowly repeated it to the girl. “Huh? Sweetheart? L-lover?” “...Yes.” The girl said, trembling.

“Look at this coward!” The Lieutenant spitefully jabbed his finger at Shinji’s forehead. “Did you hear what she said?” “No, we’re not lovers,” Shinji said lowly, choking back humiliation. A throbbing ache pulsed through his skull. “It’s not like that, just…”

“What’s this?” The Lieutenant took out an aluminum cup and struck Shinji’s head with it. “You’d been secretly getting something, huh?”

The Lieutenant snickered. “It was lying over there.” He jerked his chin. Shinji remained silent.

“Go.” The Lieutenant said. “I’ll keep quiet for you.” “So you keep quiet too.” “Got it?”

“Let’s go.” Shinji said to the girl. He tried to start walking.

“Hold on,” a voice called out again. The voice was cheerful.

“What now? What more could there be?” “I’ll teach you two lovers’ etiquette.” The Lieutenant let out a shrill laugh and approached with a jovial expression, wrapping both arms around their necks. The girl screamed again. “Stop! What’re you doing?” Shinji struggled desperately. There had been that time soldiers forced him to drink in the green room, but this humiliation belonged to another category. Not comprehending what was happening, the girl arched her flat chest and thrashed about with broken cries. Shinji was seized by the neck, restrained, unable to wrench free. The Lieutenant’s strength proved overwhelming. The girl’s cheek—still damp with tears—brushed against Shinji’s lips. It drew closer to his mouth. “Stop.” With one hand he desperately shoved aside the topcoat and sank his nails into the Lieutenant’s arm. As he tried to shout again, their lips were forced together. With necks bent at an awkward angle, her cold lips came to rest inside his. Teeth clacked against teeth with a hard sound. The Lieutenant finally released them. Staggering, Shinji collapsed once more.

"Goddamn it." Shinji got up. A hand was grasping a fist-sized stone. I don’t care if I die, he thought in that instant. He let out an incomprehensible shout, raised his hand, and charged at the Lieutenant.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The stocky Lieutenant nimbly dodged sideways. Staggering, Shinji felt a crimson flash violently burst across his face's center. The dark sky spun and crumbled away.

Bright soft sunlight shone upon the large glass window of the classroom. The school term exams had come. Shinji took them. By allocating cigarette operating funds to cover minor shortfalls, he had managed to obtain his identification papers. He could no longer work as a cigarette broker. He was dismissed. Yokohama and Chigasaki—that day was the last.

The buzzer rang. Two or three students who had been hunched over their desks looked up and glanced at the proctoring teacher. Shinji slowly stretched his back, took his exam paper, and walked to the lectern. It was the final exam of the school year. Carrying his bag and overcoat, he wandered aimlessly across the hilltop still nearing noon.

His heart was light and empty. When he finished descending the winding stone slope, he tried walking along the tram street in the direction opposite the station. There was a small weathered torii gate. Turning there, he veered into the silent residential district. In a wide carriage porch entirely covered with gravel, a small foreign car was parked. He came out in front of the gate of the foreign embassy next to the university.

It was an aimless stroll. The tranquility of the dully shining surface of the pond—the one that looked as if lead had been sunk into it, which he’d once seen from the rooftop—was beckoning him.

Perhaps due to war damage, the main entrance was a small red-brick ruin. When he called out to the Japanese man washing a jeep, the man said, “Please wait a moment,” and went inside. “Very well, go ahead,” said the man as he emerged, then smiled at Shinji’s school cap. “Your boat club is quite strong, isn’t it? They donated a boat here recently and came by just last week with their thanks.” He seemed kind and talkative.

“I see.” Shinji bowed. He made his way around to the garden alone. On the withered lawn, creeping pines were lined up, and beyond them was a pond. The sunlight was dazzling. He felt tired.

On the gently sloping lawn leading down to the pond, Shinji remained in a daze for a long time. Before he knew it, he fell asleep. While sensing the dazzling warm light pour over him, he was having a brief dream.

He was in what seemed to be the Yamate district of Yokohama. On the green lawn that appeared to lie between neat Western-style houses, he lay sideways. His head was resting on a woman’s knees, and the woman was the Woman in Black. “This is serious,” she said. “You’re badly hurt!” The woman in black pressed a handkerchief to his nose. It rapidly became dyed a bright red with blood. “There’s no need to worry.” The woman laughed. “Are you all right?” Shinji asked. “How silly of you.” She rocked Shinji as if soothing him. He was looking at the blue sky. “Why did you do such a thing? ...weak as you are.” “I was frustrated,” he said. “I was so frustrated…” About to scream, Shinji returned to reality. He noticed himself almost on the verge of tears. In the pond, drawing two silver trails, a duck moved while maintaining a posture like an ornament.

"It's all over now," he thought. He probably wouldn't be able to meet the Woman in Black again. What I had seen in her was a sisterly kindness—a tenderness that would fully embrace me, a quiet light that turned me into a transparent void. I had been seeking my own loss through her power. Shinji recalled Anzai's misunderstanding. That night, it had been Anzai who lifted his unconscious body and immediately took him to an inn for care. But Anzai knew Shinji was drawn to the woman in black. "What do you think I've been doing during our stage performances?" he had said with his usual smile. It seemed Anzai had heard from the waitress that their opponent was a chubby lieutenant with curly hair; he understood that Shinji had gone outside to punch this officer out of anger over his own crude attempt to force a dance with "the Woman in Black" in the hall.

“No,” Shinji said. “That’s not it.” “Then why’d you tell me you were going to take a piss?” “That you didn’t go to the bathroom—I heard that from the girl.” “The girl—you know, like Cinderella before her makeover.” Anzai snorted through his nose. “To think you picked a fight over that bastard—what an idiot.”

“It wasn’t for anyone—the fight was for myself.” While cooling his nose with a wet handkerchief, Shinji said. “Hmph, Mr. Logic—surprised you didn’t try to punch that blond corporal too.” He couldn’t say he’d never imagined that. Shinji fell silent. “I saw your inner pocket,” Anzai said. “Huh?” “Kid.” “Why’re you carrying around so much?” Shinji’s complexion had changed. “Huh, were you planning to buy even that prostitute? “Or that ‘Woman in Black’?”

He couldn’t answer. Anzai's voice dropped. “What’s this... hit a nerve?” After a pause, Anzai spoke again. “Do you like her that much?” “That woman…?”

By the third day, the nose had healed. When evening came, Shinji went to Ogimura’s house. Anzai was there. In the parlor, Anzai was wearing an overcoat. “Kid, that’s enough.” As Shinji tried to lift the large furoshiki bundle, Anzai called out to him. “I’ll take it to the cabaret.” “Why?” Shinji looked alternately between the two men.

“We have had to ask you to leave,” Ogimura said. “It was decided just now.”

“...I still have business here,” Shinji said.

Ogimura made a troubled face. “Your brother insists we make you quit,” he said. “But I still have a bit…” “You say it’s inconvenient, but Obata here thinks that ‘inconvenience’ means money—am I wrong?” Anzai went to the piano in the parlor and sat down. “I’d like the kid to quit too.” “Why?” Shinji repeated. “Why? Because no matter the circumstances, if we get into trouble with soldiers, we can’t handle it.” “Just think of it as bad luck.”

“Fortunately,” Shinji said. Anzai continued, swinging his leather-slippered legs. “Well, with that last incident—since they didn’t report it officially—we got lucky, but I can’t take you along anymore, kid.” “I was just the one who got hit—they attacked me first,” Shinji said.

“Did you forget that you charged at them?” “...I won’t do anything that stupid again. I absolutely won’t.” Biting his lip, Shinji repeated in a low voice: “I won’t do anything anymore.”

Anzai didn’t respond. Ogimura had changed into a black suit for going out. He said nothing. He stood up from the sofa and left the room. “...You should stop the drum practice too. Right?” Anzai said gently. “I realized you don’t really care much for the drums.”

Shinji stared stiffly at the vase atop the piano overflowing with large yellow and white chrysanthemums. "...This." Ogimura, who had returned, handed him an envelope sealed with white cellophane tape. "Severance pay: Mr. Shinji Obata" was scrawled across its face in Anzai's clumsy handwriting.

“I thought they might get mixed up, so I left them with my mother,” Ogimura said.

A wind crossed the pond, gathering fine ripples. Upon closer inspection, beneath the lily pads in the stagnant water, a single scarlet carp lay submerged. The scarlet carp was still.

I wonder if that girl told Anzai about my angry forced kiss. Shinji tried thinking such things. I didn’t want to say anything either, so I kept quiet. But it was already too late, and none of that mattered anymore. That was nothing more than forced lip contact. As for the girl’s feelings, he only dimly thought it couldn’t be helped.

On the veranda, a young girl and boy were playing with dolls. With a high-pitched cry, the boy of about five descended into the well-trimmed lawn garden. A girl of about eight, likely his sister, raised her arm and beckoned. It was an astonishingly white arm. The foreign children all had golden hair. Excited, the boy darted left and right across the ground.

The boy wore a navy striped shirt and shorts, while the girl had on a white dress with a vivid red shawl. A foreign gentleman in a suit emerged from the room. After nodding with a smile at Shinji, the gentleman stepped down into the garden, caught from behind a boy about to fall in the bamboo shade, and hoisted him into his arms. The girl spoke something and pointed toward the ginkgo tree shaking its bare branches. She began running in that direction. A shadow dropped. The gentleman holding the boy crouched to retrieve that shadow, cradling it in his right arm. What had seemed a shadow proved to be a red shawl. The gentleman sprinted after the girl across to the pond's far side.

Shinji stood up. The sunlight was gently fading. Turning his feet toward the gate, he realized he now had absolutely nothing to do. I need to find a new part-time job, he thought. He walked past the shrubs adorned with glossy red berries.

His brother’s band had stopped going to Chigasaki and continued making their rounds through places like Tachikawa, Asaka, and the Azabu cavalry brigade as before, using Yokohama cabarets as their base. Brother rarely came home. One night already in summer when Brother returned at dawn, he informed them of Anzai’s death. At the Zama officers’ club, Anzai had been beaten down by one of the soldiers and struck his head on a thick steam pipe, losing consciousness momentarily, they said. “I’m fine,” he himself had insisted, so they continued toward Tokyo by truck, but his consciousness soon faded, and by the time they brought him to the hospital, he had already died completely. “We decided to say he was thrown from the truck,” Brother said. “That way his sister might still find some acceptance—for her sake anyway.”

It was on the night of Anzai's wake that Shinji met the band members for the first time in several months. Late past midnight, the band members arrived at Anzai's house in Kawasaki in two taxis. For them, up until then, it had been work.

“Hey kid, long time no see.” Kobayashi said as he sat down on the zabuton cushion provided by Anzai’s still-unmarried sister. “Since Chigasaki, right?” “We haven’t been going to Chigasaki lately either.” Kobayashi amiably came over beside Shinji and spoke. His breath carried a faint trace of alcohol. “Apparently these days they’re doing landing craft drills until evening along the coast near Tsujido.” “An amphibious landing?” Shinji asked. The war in Korea had begun, and nearly one month was about to pass.

“With tanks on them?” he asked.

“Well, I haven’t heard that much.” “But they say it’s exactly like a movie.” “You know those landing crafts with square fronts and flat boards—sea-colored ones marked with white letters like ‘A3’ or something—they’re doing drills at terrifying speeds, beaching and evading, kicking up pure white waves as they circle around in the Enoshima-view sea. That’s what they say.” “That’s the stuff.” “That board’s designed to fall forward the moment it beaches, you know.”

“Mr. Kobayashi, were you in the war?” Shinji asked. “Cut it out. I’m the same age as Ogimura and your brother, even if I don’t look it.” Kobayashi twisted his mouth as if something were rotten. “It’s no joke—the only one among us who really knew war was Durchie.” “Durchie?” “Yeah, he was a Potsdam lieutenant with all that.”

Shinji did not know. Kobayashi’s face took on a flustered look as he steered the conversation back. “Planes swirling in the sky. Destroyers lined up offshore in rows. Not bad at all—I’ve always liked war, you know? Those days leave an ache, how nostalgic they feel. Hell, every day was packed full of meaning.” Abruptly, Shinji recognized within himself the same war-longing he sensed in Kobayashi. The vision of crimson blood splattering vividly across his chest held a strangely intense power. Since June 25th, he had been waiting with this apprehension coiled tight inside him.

He felt one season had already turned decisively away. Bazookas, F86Fs, MiG-15s. America’s weakness was unexpected. Something momentous was about to occur. He became aware of the coming turmoil as if an immensely thick cloud had suddenly materialized from around a bend in the road. There would surely be a war—he had concluded that much. Within his emotions, expectation had indeed mingled. He dreamed of nothing but war. The extraordinary event—a situation where he could act solely through being an utterly isolated existence—resembled both terror and his dream world. It was a pure world, a primordial world—clean, dazzling, precise—as if a blue sky had descended to earth, a world where people could exist only as solitary beings.

“But, well…” said Aoki. “They say Chigasaki Camp’s full of Black GIs and Korean soldiers now—night after night you hear homesick Negro spirituals and those mournful Korean folk songs drifting over. War doesn’t concern me either way, but damn if I don’t miss that cheerful camp. Everything was so lively, and the girls were decent quality back then.”

“Then, what about the American troops there?” asked Ogimura.

Kobayashi answered. “They’ve all shipped out.” “Now it’s just Whitey instructors left.” “According to a friend.” Accompanied by his brother who had been silently keeping the incense from going out, Shinji returned to his house in Omori on the first train. The train’s lights were still on.

“I wonder how the women are faring now.” “Well... Seems plenty are following along too—they say rents in Kokura and Fukuoka have shot through the roof.”

His brother was watching the sky lighten into a pale blue. A waning moon hung in midair, while at the edge of the eastern sky where the color had grown faint, beautiful pale reds and blues were beginning to pull away from the horizon lined with chimneys.

“I’ve been thinking about quitting the band,” said his brother. "I just don't think I'm cut out for that line of work." “...Maybe you’re right.” But Shinji was not thinking about his brother or Anzai. The Woman in Black had never truly departed from within him. At that time, the part-time jobs he had found were tutoring and working once a week as a messenger boy. He transported company prototypes and important documents directly by train to branch offices in Osaka and Kyoto, as well as to the headquarters. The job required ascending to the fourth floor of an unnaturally tall, narrow building in the Ginza backstreets, where he simply had to receive items from a sallow-faced middle-aged man. The Woman in Black was surely in Kyushu. Shinji believed it. Therefore, each time he asked about the job’s destination, he was disappointed. The destinations on the receipts were limited to Nagoya or, at best, the Kansai region. His eighteenth birthday came and went. His brother did not quit the band. A Nagoya-bound job came up. Shinji was asked to send the reply from Nagoya to the main office in Yokohama. The payment was a thousand yen, and this was something he should have kept quiet about to the building man.

He stayed one night in the trading company's duty room. The next day, he arrived in Yokohama in the afternoon. As he was about to exit the ticket gate at Sakuragicho Station, Shinji unexpectedly saw the Woman in Black for the first time in half a year.

It was the end of that excessively bustling month when the national census overlapped with various events and several themed weeks. Breathing Yokohama’s air after so long and gazing at autumn’s clear sky through the train window, he could perceive within himself both that day when he had merely set out toward the Woman in Black and the long year that had since raced away. A year, he thought. Exactly one year. He bore that year’s weight on his shoulders and felt himself sinking endlessly into the earth’s depths. The Woman in Black had grown hard and dark within him like a decayed fruit pit, burrowed deep into the flesh as it began to solidify. Shrugging his shoulders and turning from the window, he returned to being himself within the monotonous work of a mailing tube. The train rushed into the platform. Shinji passed through the ticket gate amid jostling crowds.

The high-ceilinged dome was dimly lit. Ahead, several arched openings of the station entrance framed a bright blue sky that shone with overflowing light. Passengers entered bearing that dazzling radiance on their backs. Amidst them clustered women in garish colors like flower beds. They walked while calling out loudly and laughing. Women whose profession was unmistakable at first glance—all vigorous—gripped large trunks and suitcases in their hands. Shinji’s casually wandering gaze halted. It was a woman walking along the right edge.

Shinji strained his eyes. His chest went hollow. That was the Woman in Black.

The woman carried a gaudy checkered suitcase, a yellow shoulder bag with fine pores slung over the shoulder of her bright green dress as she strode briskly. She was chewing gum. With an untroubled expression, the woman did not glance around her. Shinji stood frozen. The woman was conspicuously taller, beautiful, and brimming with vitality. He couldn’t believe it. But there had been no mistake after all. A familiar pearl necklace coiled around a long neck. Eyes with upturned corners and a small white chin were there.

“Kid, you… you’re still a kid, aren’t you?” The short woman with garish lips called out. She was the one who had tried selling him cigarettes a couple times in Chigasaki. He remembered the other women’s faces too. There could be no mistake now. “Well now, you really are the kid—all grown up... So where’re you working these days?” “At one of the cabarets around here?” “...I quit the band,” Shinji forced out. The woman alone stopped, chewing gum as she smiled with familiarity.

“So what’re you doing now, kid?” “What about you? What are you all doing here?” While adopting the stance of someone engaged in casual conversation, he finally realized he was regaining his composure. Shinji returned a smile. “Where are you headed? Off on a trip?” “What’re you on about, talking all carefree-like? ‘Off on a trip,’ huh?” The woman in the yellow dress with exposed shoulders was cheerful and terribly ugly. “The war in Korea’s started, ain’t it? See, us girls, Chigasaki went bad on us—we were scraping by here, you know, but it dried up completely. So we all decided to head to Kyushu. They say that place is crawling with soldiers, and the money’s supposed to pour down like rain from what I hear.” The woman set down her trunk and hitched up the neckerchief-patterned cloth wrap. She spoke in a full-blown Sagami dialect.

"So it's migrant work, huh? Well, just make a killing then." Shinji realized he had never spoken to women this familiarly before. But apparently, the woman had forgotten that too. "With the others?" Shinji said, throwing a glance at the other women walking away without concern. The Woman in Black threw back her head, laughed brazenly, and was talking loudly with someone. "That one at the end—the tall one," Shinji said, averting his flushed face. "That one too?"

“Oh, Yuri, you mean?” The woman said. “She’s one of us.” “She always wore black clothes.” Watching the woman nod as if remembering something out of the corner of his eye, he said: “She was always with him, wasn’t she? The Corporal.”

The woman tilted her head. “Oh, Henderson, you mean? The tall one with glasses—the blond,” she continued without pause. “He’s dead, y’know. In Korea.” “Right at the beginning.” The woman’s cheerful expression remained unchanged. Seeing her companions gathering past the ticket gate, she twitched her chin. “That Yuri bitch—she ain’t one of our real comrades, y’know. Flaunting her looks, she made a killing there.” “Sucked Henderson clean too, y’know.” The woman suddenly lowered her voice with a serious, country-like earnestness. “Now don’t go spreadin’ this around,” she lowered her voice, “but for all her airs, that one’s got a real greedy streak. Wherever the money’s good, she’ll hightail it there faster’n you can blink.” “Ain’t that the truth.”

“Take care of yourself,” Shinji said.

Waving her hand, the woman swung her balloon-like taut buttocks and dashed toward the ticket gate. To the woman who had joined her boisterous companions, and to the women themselves, the crowd cast nothing but curious or contemptuous glances. Shinji pondered the meaning behind the woman’s familiar volubility. The woman must have seen some sort of family in me. The woman might have been enjoying a precious sense of ease in Shinji’s unreserved smile—as if she’d encountered one of her few comrades.

But Shinji already felt his own eyes were no different from the crowd's. He no longer had any connection to those women.

But as he was jostled by the clamorous streetcar, he realized. The Woman in Black was full of vitality. Young, with taut smooth skin that was beautiful. Her eyelids bore not a single wrinkle; she radiated robust health. One might even say her face was far more beautiful than he had imagined. But wasn't that precisely the true reason for my disillusionment? The fact that Yuri was at most twenty-one or twenty-two and had been so vibrantly alive.

If Yuri had been as I'd imagined, that yellow-dressed woman's chatter would have killed the Woman in Black, leaving me only with the taste of sorrow and futility. But Yuri was not my Woman in Black. She was nothing but a stranger. "The Woman in Black never existed." "Do I really care that much? About her?" About her? Suddenly he recalled Anzai's cunning smile from their Chigasaki days. The sole person who had known of Shinji's obsession with the Woman in Black—and even that one was dead. Now he stood alone. Toward that Woman in Black, he now had neither allies nor adversaries. Shinji thought he might later visit the cabaret near Yokohama Station where his brother and former band members were. He wanted to remember Anzai more clearly.... With angry, intense eyes, he stared at the grimy streetcar floor.

After finishing his business at a trading company near the sea, he took the streetcar to Yokohama Station. As he descended the stairs, a white-uniformed boy was scrubbing a black carpet with a cleaner. Shinji headed up to the inner stage.

“Well, this is a rare sight.” Ogimura, who had apparently been working on an arrangement, turned around. “What brings you here?” “Is everyone still here?” he said. “Yeah, your brother’s still around too, I think. But two or three must’ve shown up by now.” “Hmm, the drum is already set up here.”

He approached. “What’s this—the screws are loose. No wonder the sound’s so muffled.”

"They're newbies," Ogimura said. "The members are mostly newbies. It’s been rough." My brother had also mentioned that the only original members remaining were himself and Nakamizo on clarinet. “It must be tough,” he said.

“If Durchie were here, things would’ve stayed tight.” Ogimura said the same thing as his brother. “Is that so?” Shinji felt no interest in the Durchie that mattered to them. He said, “Maybe I’ll try playing. It’s been a while. Is that okay?” The feel of the cloudy amber-colored leather was irritating him.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Dam Beat!” he shouted. He slammed the sticks down with all his might. The rhythm wouldn’t come. He took off his jacket and tried again. “Dam Beat!”

Dam Beat. Leaning his upper body as he struck the drums, Shinji thought of Anzai who had shouted that way. The drum's first beat. He entrusted himself to the drum. I still haven't finished playing my Dam Beat. Shinji hurled the sticks at the side drum. The sticks produced nothing but an irritated clatter. He laughed bitterly. "No good," he said. "I've gotten worse than before." "That's what you're thinking, right?"

Ogimura laughed. He didn't answer. Shinji stood up. The drum too was rejecting me. "It's abandoning me," he thought. He went out front just like that.

During the brief time he had been in the underground passage, he realized the light was rapidly fading. The light was indeed autumn's transparent, weightless light, but it had already lost both its dazzle and buoyancy. Before anyone knew it, the town was slipping into dusk.

Shinji climbed up to the station platform. On the long-distance platform were U.S. soldiers clad in green combat uniforms, rifles and bags slung over their shoulders—clearly headed to Korea at a glance—overflowing the space. The soldiers smoked cigarettes, slouched carelessly on the platform, and whistled at young girls standing across on the neighboring platform. The girls weren't prostitutes. However much the war situation might have improved, this didn't look like people preparing for battlefronts. Their well-polished rifles gleamed dully. They're off to slaughter people, Shinji tried telling himself. Those guns would kill flat-faced Korean soldiers like rabbits or ducks in a hunt. And some of those guys would disappear forever in that fight against the North Korean army. Being ordered around to slaughter people like game—might not be so bad after all. He laughed and kicked the platform with his shoe. When dealing with others, you either submit or fight—nothing else.... In the distance, a freight train sped past along the tracks like an express. A long freight train it was. Shapes covered with camouflage-patterned sheets stretched on in a line—crouching elephants that were actually tanks with long gun barrels. Every fifth one had a steel-helmeted soldier standing guard, while others with ruddy cheeks waved as they passed by. Airplanes followed with silver wings folded up like cicadas'. Shinji thought the day when those silver wings would glitter across Japan's skies must be drawing near. War was certain to break out.

"I don’t care," he told himself. It didn’t matter either way. In Korea, the American military had been regaining momentum. MacArthur boasted he would annihilate the enemy forces in one stroke, but Shinji couldn’t bring himself to mentally prepare for a day when the war wouldn’t spread to Japan. Shinji aimlessly paced the platform, watching the lines of American soldiers departing for the front. Laughter erupted as they—these gum-chewing soldiers—chattered among themselves and laughed again. The cause of their laughter appeared to be an old woman crawling along this side of the platform like a beggar in filthy rags. “Hey!” Across the tracks, one of the soldiers threw a chocolate. It landed before the old woman. She looked up at the soldiers’ platform with clouded eyes, picked it up, and dropped it into the bag slung over her shoulder. She started to walk again. “Hey!” “Hey!” The soldiers vied to throw candy and even cigarettes at her. Some wound up and hurled their projectiles like fastballs aiming to hit. Sunburned barefoot boys with close-cropped heads swarmed like ants to scavenge them.

Shinji simply felt that the lives and ways of those alien creatures—the crowd with peach-colored skin dotted with dark freckles, the crowd with large palms, long legs, and eyes like transparent glass marbles—would never penetrate beneath his skin. He no longer held any further interest in them.

He turned his back to the soldiers and gazed at the western sky where the light had begun to thicken and grow heavy. He was trying to discern the setting sun there. As if peering into the very essence of his longing, he wanted to see that glow stained red as it descended through the sky.