Pathway to Japanese Literature

Kentaro woke to the sound of dripping.
And then, raising his half-gray head from the grease-stained round pillow, he listened intently with a quizzical look.

Beside the pillow was a bay window.
From the gaps in the rain shutters, several thin threads of sunlight streamed through like silk strands onto the frosted-glass shoji screens.
Kentaro realized the dripping sound wasn’t from rain.
He understood that the blizzard—which had intensified from yesterday afternoon through the deepening night—had abruptly cleared at dawn.
With this realization came the thought that it must already be nearing noon.
When sunlight fell through the half-west-facing window of this rented second-floor room at winter’s bitterest peak near New Year’s end, he could discern—without consulting a clock—that it approached the hour when grilled salmon or dried fish aromas would waft from neighboring houses. This precise awareness stemmed from having whiled away last year’s identical season in idle contemplation of winter’s brief days when first renting this room.
Yet how swiftly time flowed.
Counting backward as was his habit upon sensing another year’s passage, Kentaro found five years had elapsed since the stock crash stripped his family assets, severed his marriage, saw him expelled by his mistress, and now at fifty’s threshold left him no recourse but to retrace this history of failures culminating in renting another’s second floor.
The man who once operated a toy export wholesaler along Asakusa Kawaramachi’s tram line had now sunk to serving as errand boy for so-called senzanya brokers mediating property and telephone deals.
Yesterday’s blizzard-driven errands had broken his lone pair of geta clogs; contemplating his still-sodden tabi socks unlikely to have dried, Kentaro surrendered to self-destructive resolve—today he would indulge in bed under guise of sleeping late.
After all, this brokerage was run by his former Kawaramachi shop employee; slacking a day or two invited neither reprimand nor dismissal from one who’d once been his subordinate…

A tofu seller passed by below the window, blowing his whistle.
The squelching footsteps of straw sandals could be heard, letting one imagine how severe the snowmelt had become.
Kentaro thought that oversleeping had turned out to be a good thing.
With a sudden deafening crash that shook the house, snow from the neighboring roof slid onto the eaves of Kentaro’s rented second floor.
Next came the sound of a clothesline pole falling from the direction of the back roof.
Feeling he could no longer stay in bed, Kentaro sat up, sniffling his runny nose.
He immediately began opening the rain shutters, but the sunlight and blue sky glittered so dazzlingly over the snow blanketing every rooftop in the cramped alleyway that he momentarily shut his eyes and froze—when from below came a woman’s voice:

“Mr. Tajima.”
“Isn’t that our clothesline pole?”

From how the light from the window Kentaro had opened not only brightened the entire second floor but even flashed down below the ladder stairs, the landlady realized he was up.

“Who knows if it’s even ours,” said Kentaro, checking first whether any embers remained in his room’s hibachi rather than dwelling on the matter.

“Mr. Tajima, it’s nearly noon.”

While speaking from beyond the sliding door, the landlady finished climbing the ladder stairs. From the corridor-like wooden floor at the dead end—about one room’s width—she began forcing open the glass door to the back roof’s clothesline with a creaking noise.
The ill-fitting door, always troublesome, must have been especially dampened by this morning’s snow and become immovable.

Beneath the eaves between this glass door and the clothes-drying platform sat a box containing Kentaro’s charcoal and briquettes for daily use, upon which were placed a single bucket and a washbasin.

"Oh my, Mr. Tajima! The charcoal and briquettes are soaked through! You should’ve moved them inside somehow last night."

The landlady, having rehung the clothesline pole, wiped the reddened soles of her feet with a nearby rag as she went about it, then this time slid open the sliding door without ceremony—her face appearing with a clatter. Her thin eyebrows, downward-slanting eyes, and flat face put her age at thirty-two or thirty-three. A sturdy woman with broad shoulders—having worked for years as a maid at some geisha house in Shinbashi—she wore a collared spun-stripe kimono layered with a double-breasted work coat, draping a new Omodaka-ya hand towel around her neck while keeping her traditional chignon adorned with wisteria-colored ornaments neatly arranged. She didn’t look entirely like some back-alley drudge. Through connections from her former employer at the geisha house, she had become known to patrons like Nagayoshi of the Shinbashi-za theater as a respectable wife—though nearly five years had passed since establishing their household in the alley beside Tsukiji Nihonbashi’s main hall, they still had no children.

“Landlady! Let’s go warm ourselves at the bathhouse. Today’s a proper day off,” said Kentaro, trampling over his bedding to grab the hand towel hanging from a pillar nail. “Has the master already gone to see the play? Might drop by for an act myself.”

“They say Harimaya’s Minister of the Treasury is truly splendid.”

“You’ve not seen it yet?”

“With all the New Year calls and such keeping everyone at home busy,” replied the landlady while wrapping her collar-hung towel around her head like a sister’s kerchief and tidying Kentaro’s bedding,

“Take your time going out.”
“I’ll clean up properly.”
“Mr. Tajima—oh! I completely forgot to bring it earlier.”
“The milk’s by the hibachi.”

“I’ll skip the milk this morning.”
“Sun’s out but still freezing,” said Kentaro, toothpick clenched between his teeth and still in his nightclothes, as he slid open the lattice door and stepped out.

Most of the snow in the alley had already been shoveled onto the gutter planks lining both sides, but in the narrowness that barely allowed a single rickshaw to pass, melting snow dripped from the eaves of uniform two-story houses flanking the path, sending stray droplets onto the collars of those passing below.
Thinking to avoid it by taking shelter under someone’s eaves only risked sudden roof avalanches of accumulated snow, Kentaro placed a hand towel over his head and shuffled out to the main street in his geta clogs—one tooth broken from yesterday’s misadventures.
Across the street stood the vacant mansion of a wealthy family, its plastered wall extending about a block, overgrown with old oak trees serving as a screen.
This side stretched with various small shops, and since Kentaro had come to know the area, two automobile dealerships had opened among them.
There was also a public bathhouse around here.
There was also a soba shop.
There was also a caterer.
There was also a geisha house.
At the intersection where these cluttered townhouses ended and the road leading toward Bizenbashi Bridge began, one could see in the distance Honganji Temple’s tall earthen wall and the fire watchtower; however, the main hall’s roof was blocked from view by the densely packed roofs of the surrounding houses.
Ward office laborers were loading onto a cart the snow they had shoveled together to dump into the river as nearby dogs barked at them from a distance.
Near where a thick lamppost stood, two large snowmen were built—who had made them and when, one couldn’t tell.
A chauffeur and a blacksmith’s apprentice were throwing snow in baseball stances.

When Kentaro stepped out from the narrow alleyway entrance, he felt as he always did that this ordinary street—devoid of any notable features—seemed somehow brighter and more spacious. And at times, he would think that he was not someone born and raised in the back alleys after all—that before he died, he wanted to live on the main street again someday, just as he had before. There were moments when this sentiment of Kentaro's grew particularly deep as he slid open the bathhouse's glass door and paid the bath fee to the attendant.

In this Tsukiji neighborhood, there's even a place called Mistress Lane where mistresses lived in great numbers.
Even respectable wives of an age to wear crimson hair ornaments dressed in ways indistinguishable from mistresses.
When Kentaro spotted among the women undressing beyond the bathhouse counter a petite, plump matron who seemed every inch a kept woman, he recalled the mistress he'd once installed at Daijigashi.
Her name had been Osawa.
In summer of Taisho 3 when Europe's war began, Kentaro's shop exporting toys and sundries suffered devastating losses, so hoping to recover he'd plunged into stocks.
That rapid success at turning profits became ironically the very root of his ruin.
Through four or five years swept up in nouveau riche fever, no sooner had peace treaties been signed and prices temporarily fallen than the market surged unrestrained to new heights-only to collapse again suddenly.
Kentaro ended up transferring even the real estate inherited from his parents to others, taking his children to live with his legal wife's family-while Osawa, his Daijigashi mistress, reverted to her former geisha name Sawaji.
Fortunately since the mistress residence was registered under Osawa's name, they'd sold it through mutual agreement to fund establishing Sawaji geisha house.
Though Kentaro had an eight-year-old son and thirteen-year-old daughter with his legal wife then, he'd eventually become a permanent fixture at Sawaji House.
The legal wife's family-being established hardware wholesalers-were so appalled by Kentaro's behavior that they took in the children for upbringing; in exchange they struck Oshizu from the family register and remarried her off elsewhere-or so people told it.

Around the time those discussions occurred, Kentaro had begun finding it increasingly difficult to remain at Sawaji’s house as well.
In the beginning, if people were to say he had turned traitor during his patron’s decline, he wouldn’t have been able to face his former peers.
Sawaji had been making grand declarations about how repaying past kindnesses would start now, but within a year or two she began openly staying at geisha houses.
She even went on trips to Hakone.
Kentaro had endured it all, but when even the housemaids began treating him as a nuisance, he finally left Sawaji House in the autumn before last, utterly dejected.
Perhaps out of pity, Sawaji at that time handed over the three thousand yen—the sum from when she had sold the mistress’s residence—to Kentaro.
Afterward, Kentaro drifted from one rented room to another, and by the time he moved into his current second-floor lodgings in Tsukiji Nihonbashi, the severance money of three thousand yen he had received from the woman had long since been mostly lost in Komeyachō, leaving only a countable sum remaining after nearly a year of room and board.

The snow had stopped.
Since it wasn’t a Sunday—one of those days when even turtles sun their shells—the men’s bath contained only a white-bearded retiree who might have been a flower arrangement master, leisurely undoing his obi.
On the bathhouse attendant’s counter, neither the usual old woman nor young girl were present.
The copper coins scattered beside the piled wooden bath tokens were likely the bath fee paid by the retiree.
As Kentaro tossed his bath fee and was about to remove his geta clogs, the door to the women’s bath area rattled open, and a woman entered.

Whether it was her attire—a rough-spun meisen silk kimono with colored threads layered under a matching haori—or her moderately low face with its protruding chin, she wasn’t a woman who particularly drew the eye; but between her apparent age of seventeen or eighteen and the actress-style chignon parted seven-to-three—uncommon in these parts—Kentaro glanced at her face without a second thought.
The daughter, for her part, upon seeing Kentaro’s face across the counter, looked thoroughly suspicious as she stood there motionless for a while on the earthen floor with the bath coins still in her hand, then began breathing through her shoulders as if—

“Father! It’s been so long,” she said, and then seemed unable to speak further.

“Oteru.
“I didn’t recognize you at all.”

Kentaro took advantage of the absence of others to lean against the attendant’s counter and crane his face forward.

“Father, when did you move?”

“Last year around this time.”

“So you’re not in Yanagibashi anymore, then.”

“Oteru, where are you living now? Aren’t you staying at the old man’s place in Okachimachi?”

Oteru appeared suddenly flustered. “Today’s, um… I’m just visiting a friend’s place over there.”

“I never thought I’d meet you here of all places. Oteru, since it’s right nearby, stop by on your way back. My place is the third house after turning the corner at the charcoal shop and bicycle shop right nearby. I’m staying at the Kimuras’ place, you know. After turning, it’s the third house on the right, you know. Got it?”

At that moment, two men who appeared to be chauffeurs from a rental car company—wearing Western suits and geta—entered while whistling a popular opera tune, so Kentaro, repeatedly emphasizing “Got it? Got it?”, reluctantly removed his geta and headed upstairs.
Oteru gave an awkward little nod and immediately disappeared further into the women’s bath area beyond view from the men’s side.

The landlady, who had been cooking side dishes on the long hibachi in the communal living area, observed Kentaro returning from the bath from behind the sliding door.

“Mr. Tajima.”
“If you’re having rice, I’ll steam it for you.”
“There’s soup too if the simmered dish suits you.”
“What’ll it be?”

“There’s plenty of soup,” said Kentaro, sliding open the partition door as he stood. “Landlady, strange things do happen.”
“It’s just like something out of a tale of human emotions.”
“I met the daughter I’d left behind at my wife’s family home.”
“Though I do take a peek into the women’s bath now and then.”

“Huh.”
“Well…”

“Back then, my wife was already over thirty—getting on in years—but seems she’d had her fill of me and went and married someone else. So I ended up abandoning both the girl and the boy. Count them up now, and she’s eighteen.”

“Is she coming around here?”
“Well, come on in here.”

“I’ll go put on my kimono so I don’t catch a chill.”
“Landlady, my daughter’s supposed to come visit.”
“I don’t want to look too much like a grubby old man.”

Kentaro went up to the second floor, changed into a kimono, and waited for Oteru to arrive.
He finished eating lunch, but there was still no sound of the lattice door opening.
Kentaro opened the window and sat down, forgetting to light the Shikishima cigarette he held in his mouth as he stared toward the main street from the alleyway—but his daughter was nowhere in sight.
Oteru still doesn't think much of me, it seems.
It was only natural she'd think him a heartless parent.
It's only natural she wouldn't come.
Wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand and withdrawing his head to close the window, he heard a clock somewhere strike two. The slanting sunlight no longer reached into the alley, and the second floor abruptly grew dim.
Having sat by the window so long that he'd grown chilled from his bath, he stirred up the hibachi's embers and went to fetch charcoal briquettes from the rear drying area—only to be met with the pungent aroma of chicken hotpot.

The neighbor was said to be an assistant at Hanryū Hospital in Kobikichō and had just married a nurse last December.
Because they were sweeping dust down from the second floor into our kitchen entrance without restraint, the neighbor’s landlady had snapped that country people were hopeless.
As Kentaro pinched snow-dampened charcoal briquettes to build a fire alone, he found himself inexplicably envying the assistant’s circumstances—spending this half-day pleasantly with his new wife on what must have been a day off—and unconsciously strained to hear voices beyond the single clothesline dividing them.
Then, at the kitchen entrance beneath the drying rack,

“Landlady, are you out?”
A man’s voice called, “Landlady.”
When he peered through the gaps in the clothesline, there stood a man in his forties with faint pockmarks, wearing navy-blue workman’s leggings and striped trousers hitched up at the hips, an iron-gray plain half-coat over them, and no hat.

“Isaburo, the roads must be terrible.”
“Come on up.”
Having opened the shoji at the water entrance, the landlady put a hand on the man’s shoulder,

“Today he’s on the second floor, you know,” she whispered in a low voice.

“I see.”
“The old lodger?”
“Well, I’ll come again another time then.”

“Oh, it’s fine.”
“Come on, Isaburo.”
“It’s freezing!”

After letting the man inside, the landlady quickly hid his geta and shut the water entrance’s shoji tight.
The man was Isaburo, a box maker from Shinbashi’s theater district, and it seemed they had been close since the time when the landlady of this house worked as a maid at a geisha house.
Kentaro had been idly lounging on the second floor every day around this time last year, so he knew the situation in detail.
At that time, the two of them would occasionally go out separately, being mindful of the second floor.

Kentaro thought about lighting the kotatsu and going to sleep, but having slept until nearly noon that morning, his eyelids showed no sign of closing, so he threw on his shabby double-layered coat and abruptly went out.
Indeed, there was nowhere to go.
When he recalled the storytelling hall in Hatchōbori where he used to wander aimlessly in the past, passed the time there, then had a drink at a tempura shop near Jizōbashi and returned along the back riverbank of Shintomichō, the winter day had completely darkened, and the snowmelt mud, blown by the cold wind, had already frozen solid.

When he opened the lattice door, the partition sliding door had been ostentatiously left wide open, revealing through the eight-mat room—with its long hibachi, chests, and household altar—a clear view to the washstand’s sliding door in the kitchen area, where the landlady sat alone with her back turned, polishing rice.

“Landlady.”
“She didn’t come after all?”

“Yes.”
“She won’t be coming,” said the landlady, who for some reason didn’t so much as turn around.

For no particular reason, Tajima Kentaro grew disappointed again and, upon climbing to the second floor, flung his double-layered coat over the kotatsu before collapsing flat on his back. At the Yoshikawa teahouse across the way, geisha and patrons were jointly reciting “Senzai.” As he half-listened, Kentaro had just begun drifting into a doze when a voice called out, “Mr. Tajima! Mr. Tajima!”

The landlady below stood at the top frame of the ladder’s base, apparently relaying a message: “Do come up now. He must be napping or something.” “Still can’t hear us?” “Mr. Tajima.” “Mr. Tajima.”

Tajima Kentaro jolted upright. “Oteru? Well now, come up. Come up,” he called while hurriedly descending the ladder steps.

Oteru stood in the dirt-floored entryway with a woolen muffler draped long from her coat’s shoulders down to her knees, clutching a paper-wrapped parcel in her hands. Kentaro nearly reached out to take her hand.

“Oteru.”
“You actually came.”
“Truth is, I’d thought you never would.”
“I only just got back myself.”
“Come on up to the second floor.”

“Well then, if you’ll excuse me,” Oteru offered some vague pleasantry toward the landlady before following Kentaro up the ladder steps.

“Oteru, this is where your father lives. Your father must have changed quite a bit,” said Kentaro as he stirred the hibachi’s embers. “No need to take it off. It’s cold—keep it on.”

However, Oteru turned her back and, with her coat and shawl disheveled, edged toward the fusuma sliding door near the entrance of the six-tatami room while—

“I actually thought about coming earlier today.”
“But I’d made plans to go to Asakusa with a friend.”

“Ah, the pictures,” Kentaro said as he pushed the small oblong hibachi toward Oteru.

“Father, this is just a trifle, but it’s a souvenir.”

“What? A souvenir?”
“That’s very kind of you.” Tajima Kentaro was so genuinely delighted that he took the gift Oteru had placed by the hibachi onto his lap and began unwrapping it.
The souvenir turned out to be canned goods of some sort.

“Father, you’re going to have some sake after all, aren’t you? There’s nothing in Asakusa anyway.”

“What—this is Father’s favorite thing.”

Kentaro was blinking back tears of joy, but Oteru, utterly unconcerned all along, looked around the room—and upon spotting the two-gō flask placed in the alcove, realizing her earlier remark had hit home—suddenly burst out laughing,

“Father—you still take one when going to sleep?”

“What’s that.
Ha ha ha ha.
What a thing to get hung up on.
What, this? Well, since it snowed last night, I had a drink on the way, but then they went and mistakenly brought another bottle even though I said I was done, so I just stuck it in my pocket and brought it here.”

“Father, you still haven’t had any tonight? Go ahead and have some. I’ll heat it for you.”

Since there happened to be a two-gō flask within reach, Oteru tried to place it into the copper kettle of the long hibachi,

“Is it all right to put this inside?”

Kentaro could only keep nodding; so overwhelmed with joy that he couldn’t reply, he simply stared at Oteru with tear-filled eyes.
In Oteru’s manner of placing the two-gō flask into the copper kettle, there appeared a certain practiced familiarity.

Ever since encountering her at the bathhouse counter that afternoon, Kentaro had burned to ask about his daughter's circumstances.
However, from the time he had kept shop in Kawaramachi onward, he had left all matters concerning the children to their mother Oshizu and had scarcely even seen their faces.
By the time he rose in the mornings, his daughter would already be off to school.
By the time his daughter returned home in the evenings, Kentaro would have gone out himself—eating dinner at his mistress's house and not coming back until past midnight; thus when he saw how suddenly grown his daughter appeared today, he felt utterly inadequate as a father and grew vaguely terrified she might secretly resent him—so much so that Kentaro found himself too constrained to ask what he wished to ask.

In truth, during that period, Kentaro had come to utterly detest even the sight of his wife’s face.
Her lack of tact and doughy plumpness might have been tolerable, but since she had a severe congenital body odor, he detested her so utterly that he naturally grew distant even toward the children born between them.
The geisha Kentaro took a liking to at that time were all slender, delicate-framed women—so shabby that onlookers would call them poor-looking.
Apart from Sawaji—for whom he had even bought a mistress’s house in Tabatamachi—there were women he regularly supported in Nihonbashi and Asakusa each month, but all were petite, delicate-framed women who seemed to shrink further when clothed.
No matter how fine their features or imposing their presence, Kentaro paid little heed to large-framed women—joking that such women ought to have been made great courtesans in former times or actresses in this modern age, likening them to some massive bigeye tuna flopped on a cutting board: impressive but lacking refinement. This was no accident, for though Kentaro himself possessed a sturdy frame, he was a small-statured man of unremarkable build; whenever he saw his wife Oshizu—taller than himself—adorned in her grandest traditional chignon, he could not help feeling somehow overwhelmed.

As he recalled these things from that time, Tajima Kentaro observed that while his daughter Oteru’s facial features resembled her mother’s, her build—though perhaps inherited from himself—was not nearly so bulky; at the same time, his mind wandered to an odd thought: what had become of that mother’s underarm odor?
However, at that very moment, the landlady downstairs began baking hardened winter rice cakes, and their aroma mingled with the air, making it impossible for him to verify.

Oteru had been monitoring the sake’s temperature with the fire needle in her hands when she seemed to catch the aroma of hardened winter rice cakes. “Father, how are you managing your meals?”
“Do you have them downstairs?”

“When I’m home, I do that, but… Since I commute to Okemachi every day for work, I bring a packed lunch and on my way back stop by Hanamura or somewhere for a drink.”

“Father.”
“So you’re a salaryman now?”

“It’s nothing respectable. You probably don’t remember since you were just a child, but there was a dark-skinned, stout man named Kuwazaki who used to come to the shop in Kawaramachi. He’s now succeeded and runs a splendid shop. I’m going there to work.”

“I remember Mr. Kuwazaki, you know. He’s from somewhere in the country, isn’t he? These days it’s all country folk wherever you go. All the country folk are succeeding these days, aren’t they?”

“You mustn’t turn out like me.”
“The Okachimachi grandpa ain’t no Edokko either.”

Kentaro, seizing the opportunity as the conversation naturally arrived here to ask about what had happened afterward, said, “Oteru. Why didn’t you go along when your mother remarried? Was there some talk about not being allowed to bring a child along?”

“Well, not exactly…” Oteru kept her eyes downcast as if trying to avoid Kentaro’s intent gaze. “Father, the sake seems ready. What should we do?”

With her fingertips, she plucked out the two-gō flask and let a drop fall gently into the ashes.

“Oteru, where on earth did you learn how to heat sake like that?”

“I’m not a child anymore, you know.”
“Everyone knows that,” she said while placing it on the hearth board. “Father, where are the cups?”

Kentaro set aside the crucial conversation and took out the tea stall cup he’d bought at the night market,

“How about you have a drink too. Seeing how well you can gauge the sake’s temperature, you must be able to handle a drink or two.”

“I’ve had enough,” Oteru picked up the bottle and poured into her father’s cup.

“Oteru. Since today’s the auspicious day we’ve met again,” he said, downing his cup in one gulp, “I’ll pour for you. If you can’t drink, just pretend to.”

“Right,” she said. “Then I’ll have some while you’re at it.”

Not only did Oteru immediately drain the cup that Kentaro had modestly filled to seven-tenths, but her manner of wiping its rim against the hibachi’s edge before returning it struck him as strikingly practiced; Kentaro stared at her face in blank amazement.

“Father.”
“Oh, really now.”
“You’ve been staring at my face this whole time.”
“I’m not a child anymore.”

“Oteru, have you seen your mother since she remarried?”

“No.
“She’s not in Tokyo anymore—they say she has a shop in Osaka now.”

“How’s Kakutaro doing?”
“If you’re eighteen, then Kakutaro must be thirteen.”

“Kaku-chan’s still properly in Okachimachi, right?”
“He’s a boy, you know.”

“Couldn’t you stay as a girl?”

“It’s not that I couldn’t have stayed, but I was the one at fault.”
“Because I didn’t listen to Grandfather.”

“Then why don’t you just apologize?”
“Can’t you even apologize?”

“This isn’t like other matters—I can’t go back now.”
“It’s more carefree this way.”

“Different from other matters?”
“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? You should understand without me spelling it out.”
“Father, you don’t seem like someone who’s lived it up, you know.”

“I get it, okay. But there’s still something I don’t quite grasp. Oteru, you’ve got no reason to feel awkward about anything. If we’re saying such things, then it’s your father here who doesn’t have any face left to show you. If you’d stayed properly at the Okachimachi house like a good girl, we couldn’t have met like this halfway and talked, now could we? Right? This old man got his punishment for abandoning his wife and children—ended up getting tossed out like worn-out clogs from the geisha house too. That’s exactly why I can keep talking with you like this.”

“Well, that’s true.”
“Even if I left the Okachimachi house, if you were still in Yanagibashi like before, visiting would still feel awkward somehow.”
“Father, why did you leave Yanagibashi?”

“I didn’t leave them.”
“They drove me out.”
“Enough about those old matters.”
“Instead, Oteru—tell me your story.”
“Since we met at the bathhouse out front, you must be staying nearby—so where exactly?”
“Did you go get married or something?”

“Hohoho.
“Father.
“I’ve only just turned eighteen.”

“If you’re eighteen, you’re a full-fledged woman, aren’t you?”
“You could go get married or whatever.”
“Didn’t you yourself just say you weren’t a child anymore?”

“Well, I’ve had all sorts of worries and hardships, you know.”

“You can heat sake and pour drinks—they wouldn’t leave you in some corner.”
“Must’ve picked up all sorts of things taking after your old man.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha.”
“Wanna hear my guess?”
“For a teahouse girl, that hairstyle and getup are too modern.”
“First thought—café or bar. Am I right?”
“Oteru, quit laughin’ and just tell me already.”

“I thought you’d already worked it out.”

“So it was a café after all.”
“I’d had a feeling that was the case.”
“But there aren’t any proper cafés around here—so where is it?”

“Until recently, I was at the Miyako Bar in Ningyocho.”
“But I’ve already quit.”
“When I was in Hibiya before, I became friends with a woman who has a household in the First Block ahead—so I’ve come to stay for two or three days while visiting.”
“I’ve had enough fun, so I’ll have to start working again soon.”

“They say cafés make good money—is that true?”
“About how much does that come to in a month?”

“Well, even at the very beginning when I was still new, it would come to thirty or forty yen.”
“When I was in Ginza, it really was all about location.”
“It never fell below 100 yen.”
“But in busy areas, what with kimono expenses, it all comes out the same in the end.”

“Hmm. That’s impressive.”
“You really have to be a woman for that.”
“Father here could walk his legs off every day, and how much do you think that’d amount to?”
“Barely eighty yen.”
“Out of that, twenty yen goes to the rent, and then there’s eating every day to manage.”
“Compared to that, thirty yen would be easier if you don’t have living expenses.”

“So if you try to save, you can actually save quite a lot.”
“Some save five hundred or even six hundred yen, but just when you think they’ve managed to put it all together, it ends up going to waste, so they say.”
“So someone like me has never saved a thing.”
“There are times when I end up spending it all on going to plays or the pictures on a whim.”

“Don’t you ever get taken out by customers?”
“It’s the same with cafés, isn’t it?”
“Just like the madams at teahouses and meeting houses, you must have good customers and patrons.”

“Some have them and some don’t.”
“Father, you should consider this enough now.”

Oteru tilted the two-gō bottle and poured into the cup. “What time is it? I really should be going soon. I’ll let you know once I’ve decided where I’ll go within the next two or three days.”

“It’s still fine.”
“That night watchman doesn’t start his rounds until after he’s struck nine.”

“Tonight I still have to attach the underkimono collar and do all sorts of preparations.”
“I’ll come again tomorrow evening.”
“I’ll bring sake and something tasty,” Oteru said, beginning to rise. “Father, where’s the toilet in this house?”

Oteru kept her promise and returned the following evening, having a clerk from the main street liquor store carry a four-gō bottle of Gingama Masamune while she herself brought a packet of Ginza sweet chestnuts wrapped in a furoshiki cloth bearing Shiromiya’s emblem, and visited Kentaro once more.
The sweet chestnuts were intended as a gift for the landlady downstairs.
Through this gift, the landlady had grown quite friendly, and when Oteru went downstairs to draw water from the iron kettle, she nearly tugged at her sleeve—

“Miss Oteru, if you’re going to heat the sake, please use this hibachi.”
“The copper kettle is full of boiling water.”
“It’s perfectly fine.”
“At home, they won’t be back until eleven o’clock anyway.”
“Why don’t you stay and talk here tonight?”
“Mr. Tajima—hey, Mr. Tajima,” she called out, and having managed to persuade even Kentaro—who had followed her down to the washroom—the two of them sat down beside the long hibachi.

The landlady and Oteru poured drinks while crunching away on kaki rice crackers and sweet chestnuts.
Kentaro was uncharacteristically drunk,

“Oteru, if you weren’t my daughter—if this were some mistress instead—I wouldn’t need life or anything.”
“If this were the old days, this’d be the role of Dan-san.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“What’s this ‘Dan-san’?”

“Dan-san is Danjirō of Tōgoto-ya. Don’t you get it? That’s why girls these days are so damned boorish there’s no dealing with them. Ask the landlady and see. What do you mean she doesn’t know?”

“Oh my, I don’t know either. Do you call people who like sake Danjirō? Aah, I understand now. Because you turn red, that’s why they call it the ‘crimson seal’ wordplay, isn’t it?”

“Well I’ll be damned.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“The Demon Harati of Koreire Valley? Ha ha ha ha!”

“How carefree can you be! You really are, Father.”

“Whether I drink or don’t drink.”
“When Kamakura calls, eh? Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“But I do seem rather drunk tonight.”

“People who drink sake lack virtue,” said the landlady. “They forget all their troubles and everything else.”

“That’s why they’ve called it ‘the jeweled broom that sweeps away sorrows’ since ancient times!” Kentaro retorted. “What meaning do cherry blossoms hold for a man without sake? As long as I’ve got drink, I don’t need anything else. Don’t need money. Don’t need any damn landlady either.”

“Even if you say that, Father, being alone is no way to live. You can’t keep living like this forever.”

“Even if I can’t stay here anymore, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Ah, Oteru—let’s drop that talk. After all, tonight’s finally started feeling like New Year’s. Oteru, shall I let you hear your father’s number? I didn’t practice this on some phonograph, you know.”

Before long, the husband returned.
He wore a haori bearing an actor’s crest with twin stripes, but from his build—which suggested someone from the neighborhood—to his facial features, there was nothing thespian about him whatsoever.
He was the sort of man who could pass for a gardener or something of the sort, and while he didn’t appear much older than his wife, his droopy left eye had a large mole at its corner, and two deep wrinkles creased his narrow forehead.
The landlady spoke in a tone one might use with a younger brother,

“Dear. This is Mr. Tajima’s daughter.” “She brought a gift, you know.”

“Is that so.” With that brief “Much obliged,” the husband sat in a corner and took the Eyashippu cigarette butt he’d tucked behind his ear—whether because he couldn’t reach the hibachi or not, he simply pinched the extinguished tip between his fingertips.

“How about it? The theater’s packed every day, isn’t it?” said Kentaro in his drunken craving for companionship.

“Let me pour you a drink. This year’s cold is something else entirely.”

“Thank you very much… but sake…” The husband fidgeted while tucking the Eyashippu behind his ear again.

“Mr.Tajima.”
“I really can’t.”
“Even Nara pickles are too much for me.”

“Is that so? I hadn’t known at all. When it comes to drink, you’re better off abstaining altogether. Drinking only leads to mistakes. Landlady—what fortune to have such an exemplary husband.”

The landlady stood without reply and began preparing the meal in the kitchen.

Because the alley was deserted, not only could one hear the ringing of telephones being dialed at the Machiai Yoshikawa meeting house across the way, but even voices placing catering orders carried clearly.

“Father, starting tomorrow I’ll be going back to the Hibiya Café where I worked before. If you pass by, do drop in—I’ll treat you,” said Oteru, adjusting her hairpin and tucking the handkerchief into her sleeve.

Though drunk, Kentaro suddenly felt lonely. "Be careful out there in the cold," he said. "You're going to your friend's place in Ichōme as usual tonight?"

"I'm still trying to decide what to do," she replied. "I think I'll go straight to Hibiya tonight. I already went and talked to them this afternoon—I know how things work there now."

"Isn't it too late tonight?"

"It's only twelve o'clock. There are trains, and Hibiya Bar stays open quite late. In summer, sometimes we even see dawn break."

Oteru was seen off by the landlord couple and Kentaro as she opened the lattice door.

“Ah, what a fine moonlit night.”

Because the snow from two days prior still lingered on the tightly packed houses’ roofs, the cold moonlight streaming into the alley appeared dazzlingly bright.

“Indeed, it’s a fine moonlit night.”
“Doesn’t seem to be any wind either,” said Kentaro, peering out from the threshold before casually stepping outside.
Kentaro found it more convenient to relieve himself in the alley by opening the lattice door than to use the washstand next to the kitchen, so he often went out before bed.

Oteru stood waiting two or three steps ahead for Kentaro, then suddenly remembered something. "Father, that person's one of the theater people. He really doesn't look the part at all, does he?"

"He’s a sullen, strange man," said Kentaro. "He’s been in the same house for over a year now, but I’ve never had a proper conversation with him."

"He doesn’t seem much like a husband at all," Oteru observed. "I’ve ended up feeling so pitiful."

When they exited the alley, a Chinese soba shop was unloading goods outside the wall across the way. The streets were utterly devoid of pedestrians, with only vehicles that seemed to carry geisha coming and going, and the only establishments keeping their front doors open being car shops and meeting houses. The public bathhouse had apparently just drained its water, for steam welling up from the gutter—pure white under the cold moonlight—drifted all the way to the eaves of the houses, accompanied by a rain-like sound of water.

"I'm ridiculously drunk tonight."
"I'll walk you that far."

“Father, that’s dangerous!”
“It’s fine—long as I think I’m drunk myself, it’s fine.”

“Hey, Father. I don’t think that landlady loves her husband.”

“What’s this? Back to talking about the house again?”

“I wonder if everyone ends up like that when they’re with someone they don’t love. If something’s truly unpleasant, you’d think people would just cut their losses and walk away.”

“Passion and marriage are two different things. They say lovers grow selfish—that’s why it never works out. You’ve got nothing but hard lessons ahead of you. You’d better watch yourself.”

“Father. There’s someone who’s been sending me letters every single day without fail ever since my Ginza days, you know. If it’s something I ask for, he’ll do anything. He’s bought me quite a lot of different things, you know.”

“Is that so. A young man, eh?”

“He’s twenty-five, from Keio. The other day we went together to have our fortunes read. So then—they said there’ll come a time when we have to part ways. But they said if we stick it out till the end, things will surely work out as hoped.”

“A young man from a good family, eh?”

“Yes, his father is a bank president.”

“Well, that’s something.”
“Because he’s too good, his parents wouldn’t approve.”

“That’s why I went to have my fortune read.”
“But… Father.”
“If they absolutely won’t let me into their household, then we should run away together.”
“Father… if that happens… you’ll have to help me out.”
“Please hide me upstairs.”

Kentaro, troubled by how to respond, took refuge in a cough that wouldn’t come out. At some point he found himself walking along the straight, wide thoroughfare that turned at the liquor store’s crossroads and led out to the tramway.

“It’s fine.
“Father, I wouldn’t do anything so reckless either, so it’s fine.
“As long as I keep working at the café, I won’t have to rely on anyone—we can see each other every day.
“Maybe it’s better if I just live like this my whole life.”

“Oteru—you angry?” Kentaro asked worriedly, trying to read her expression—just as a man in Western clothes came hurrying from the tramway direction and glanced at Oteru’s face in passing,

“Teru-chan? They told me you'd be at Hibiya.”

“This way now,” said Oteru as she hurried toward him with a backward glance toward Kentaro’s direction.“Father—well then... goodbye... Enough now... Goodbye... My regards to Madam.”

Left behind, Kentaro stood dumbfounded under the cold moon’s light, watching the young couple walk away hand in hand with shoulders brushing—their retreating figures and shadows dragging across the ground.

As he watched them go, Kentaro suddenly recalled without any link Sawaji of Yanagibashi being taken by another man.
He remembered that moonlit night when he’d seen Sawaji and another man leaning against each other as they crossed Yanagibashi—their departing forms making him resign himself to hopelessness.
After remembering this, Kentaro tried to determine why such a memory would surface now.

Oteru and Sawaji were not the same.
There was no reason they should be the same.
Oteru was the daughter cast out into the world after being abandoned due to her father’s outrageous miscalculation.
Sawaji was the woman who had discarded not only her household but even her own family—then carelessly cast out me, the one who had thrown himself entirely into her.
The circumstances and people involved were entirely different.
Yet at this late hour on a town corner, finding myself left utterly alone—this lonely feeling of watching a couple depart under moonlight—I couldn’t entirely deny that it bore some resemblance [to the past].

Even so, why had Oteru gone out of her way to let this callous old man drink?
Strange things do happen.
If that was strange, then it must also be said that Sawaji—to whom I owed so much—doing something that left me stranded was equally strange.

Having gone out without even wearing a hat, the alcohol his daughter had made him drink was beginning to wear off suddenly.
A red streetcar ran past the main thoroughfare.
When Kentaro returned to the alley and opened the lattice door, inside he found the husband’s snores and the wife’s sounds of opening drawers.
After closing the front door, Kentaro went upstairs and drank chilled water from the iron kettle while removing the bedding.

The automobile outside the alley began roaring its engine—likely guests departing from the Ōmukō-side teahouse.

Taisho 11 (1922) January–February Manuscript