Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

Even after getting into bed last night, he had turned over various thoughts in his mind, but no suitable lie had come to him. Under the pretext that he absolutely had to buy a new book he’d seen advertised in the newspaper—even while knowing it was an utterly clumsy excuse for wasting half a day—he decided to go into town regardless.

To his mother, who had just begun kindling the hearth fire with only a thin cord, Tomota casually remarked while lighting his first smoke upon waking. "...You see, if I don't buy it soon, it'll sell out straightaway..."

“That’s how it is these days.” “Everything’s like that now.”

He felt sorry for his mother, who knew nothing of this, and when he considered how he himself was being saddled with such an immense burden, his younger brother Sōkichi now seemed utterly detestable to him. When he had suddenly received a letter from Toshie the day before—and precisely because the anxiety that she would likely bring him some trouble sooner or later had been incessantly gnawing at him—Tomota’s heart had already sunk into a leaden weight. "There’s something I urgently need to discuss, so please come to the previous inn; I’ll definitely be there by two o’clock." It stated in fairly well-constructed sentences that she wished him to understand her circumstances preventing her from visiting the village. The name on the envelope was presumably intended as a play on Toshie’s—written in a deliberately masculine hand as Yamada Toshihide. To Yoshi, his sister, who was puzzled by this unfamiliar sender but wondered who it might be, he managed to improvise a cover-up on the spot—that a friend from the Monopoly Bureau had come asking after Sōkichi’s whereabouts. He had absolutely no idea what this consultation might entail, but given that he had clearly told her back then to speak up without hesitation if anything arose, he couldn’t very well avoid meeting her. To her, Sunday was indeed a day off. However, in their village work there was no distinction between weekdays and holidays, and what initially angered him was how she showed no consideration whatsoever for him wasting this precious half-day during their busiest season. But when he calmed down and thought about it, there was no way a factory girl like her could have been considerate enough for that.

Originally, Sōkichi had kept this woman a complete secret from their parents, confiding only in Tomota and entrusting everything to him before departing—an act that demonstrated his full trust in Tomota, his half-brother. Even if there had been, deep in Sōkichi’s gut, a somewhat narrow self-interest—one that sought to use, as a sort of buffer zone, the complex psychological shadows his father and mother would surely harbor toward Tomota from their respective positions should any trouble arise with the woman’s circumstances during his deployment, thereby attempting to mitigate even slightly what might be directed at himself—such a thing could not be considered unforgivable. It was when Sōkichi was still twelve or thirteen that relatives had whispered such rumors—that while Tomota harbored no resentment, Sōkichi’s contrariness was entirely the opposite.

“Brother’s mom ran off and left you and Father behind, huh?” “Oh right, Brother—are you handing over our family’s entire property? Huh, Mother?” These impertinent, spiteful remarks had been instigated by a malicious middle-aged woman in the neighborhood, and Sōkichi—who would later graduate from higher elementary school and take a post at the Kōriyama Monopoly Bureau—from around that time ceased even hinting at matters concerning Tomota’s birth mother.

The conscription order came for Sōkichi in last year’s summer, at the height of the heat. On the evening when an official “Return immediately” telegram had been dispatched, a letter arrived from Ōtaniya Inn in Hachiken Town for Tomota, urging him to come at once. Despite having come as far as Hachiken Town—about a ri and a half away—without heading straight home, which had caused his mother to make a fuss asking what was wrong, Tomota somehow managed to calm her down and went to Ōtaniya Inn. There in the back room he found Sōkichi sitting with a woman; Sōkichi scratched his head sheepishly.

The woman was seen off to Adachi Station by Tomota and Sōkichi, and that night she returned to Kōriyama. She looked undeniably poor, her hair slightly curled, yet there was a beauty about her that called to mind a flower that had failed to bloom. As the train began moving, Tomota could still vividly recall her figure staring at Sōkichi with those desperately intense, fearful eyes. At that moment too—partly because Tomota himself was one of those demobilized soldiers—an uncharacteristic surge of sentiment had welled up within him, and he found himself patting his dazedly standing younger brother’s shoulder, unable to hold back from speaking out.

“It’s fine—I’ll take care of everything.” “Mm, I’m countin’ on ya,” Sōkichi said, lowering his eyes. “If word gets out this happened before my deployment, it’ll ruin our reputation. Keep it secret from everyone till I come back.” To Sōkichi’s request—that should he die in battle, Tomota must fully understand the woman’s feelings and resolve matters as she wished—Tomota gave a deep nod of understanding. They’d covered things at home by claiming a Monopoly Bureau friend had sent something, so they’d asked Tomota over to Ōtaniya Inn for celebratory drinks—but for Tomota, this marked when he shouldered a hidden burden. He constantly wished he could confess to just their parents, yet feared this would brutally trample his brother’s feelings, and disliked the thought of rash action leading to later resentment. In the end, keeping it locked in his chest had been the only option—a pressure that finally produced yesterday’s letter.

“...Well then, Brother, could you stop by Kato’s smithy on your way?” “I reckon the mochi Father ordered should’ve been made by now.” “Sure, I’ll swing by.” From his mother blinking smoke-irritated eyes, Tomota—guiltily averting his flustered gaze—took his hand towel with a slightly hurried air and went outside.

The sky frozen blue with stars that stabbed the eyes, ice crusted over the garden’s hollow shattered knife-sharp beneath his straw sandals. The well stood midway down the slope between garden and road. Peering into water drawn up into the stilt-legged basin through darkness still hours from lifting, he saw pale whiteness rise like a ghost’s breath.

Right around this time, the sound of a well bucket came chasing from Yumi’s house too. Every morning, driven by an unconscious competitive urge, he would charge up the slope and burst into the papermaking hut—but upon flicking on the light and checking the thermometer at minus seven degrees, the belated assault of cold would draw an involuntary shudder from his body. Even when pouring two shoulder-loads of water into the papermaking vat, an involuntary work chant would rise unbidden from his throat. By the time the front shoji screens grew faintly white, he was already on his second vat, but the temperature, with sunrise imminent, dropped even lower for a time. When he occasionally squeezed the bag of neri mixture into the vat, the thick mucilage would cling tenaciously—slimy and persistent—to his hands now nearly devoid of sensation. The morning sun streamed in through the window at an angle, and for the first time, he felt a sense of relief.

The amount of paper mulberry heaped into a small bowl called a kobachi constituted one vat's worth and yielded thirty to thirty-five sheets of paper.

Tomota, who had begun taking turns with his father in papermaking at age fifteen, was now counted among the skilled even among the younger craftsmen. In a day, from five in the morning until around seven in the evening, what was normally fifteen vats—four hundred fifty to five hundred twenty or thirty sheets—Tomota could reach seventeen vats, and when he hit his stride, even nineteen. The extraordinary record of 950 sheets that Father often boasted about was in fact achieved by working nights until eleven.

The papermaking vat measured seven shaku by four shaku (approximately 212 cm by 121 cm), with a depth of one shaku and two sun (about 36 cm). Above the vat placed by the window of the papermaking hut, a springy bamboo pole protruded high, suspending the screen frame fitted with a suzu screen. When he bent this to submerge the screen frame into the vat, his hips, shoulders, and wrists moved with subtle coordination; after shaking the thick viscous pulp three or four times, fibers that would become a single sheet were already captured on the screen—uniform in thickness down to the finest detail. He tilted the screen frame forward and back to drain excess liquid; using the hook attached to its base to pull closer the two base logs spanning the vat while settling it in place—by then most water had filtered out, leaving only fibers behind—then flipped off the upper frame and removed the screen with both hands before turning sharply around to peel the sheet onto the platform and stack it. This was the so-called *nagashizuki* method. Depending on the paper type, both the suzu screen and corresponding sugata frame differed somewhat in size. Once dried, shoji paper would be cut into two sheets and hanshi into four.

“Brother, lunch’s ready!”

When his younger sister Sen called from outside the papermaking hut, Tomota ended his work. He had still managed to finish nine vats. Making up the remaining amount would inevitably require three nights of night work. As he removed the screen frame from the spring bamboo's cord and rubbed his chapped hands, the sound of water dripping incessantly from the freshly layered paper finally reached his ears. This too had become routine—Tomota gave one firm turn to the screw on the rear pressing machine before leaving the hut.

Though he told himself there was no need to feel nervous—since this wasn’t his own shameful secret—Tomota left home with a constricted feeling in his chest, unable to eat lunch as usual. Whenever he encountered even minor matters, he couldn’t help but feel pathetic at his own agitation. During his deployment, this hadn’t been mere self-delusion—he had indeed been praised by his squad leader, and precisely because he’d been no less bold or courageous than anyone else in the unit, it frustrated him to no end how he’d reverted to his old timidity the moment he returned home.

For about two days, fair weather had persisted, and though the snow that once stood nearly two feet deep had diminished considerably, this very thaw had turned everything to treacherous mud. The narrow slope path leading to the road—stretching just over two chō—remained navigable thanks to its stepping stones. But the moment Tomota stepped down onto the main road, his rubber boots became caked thick with mire. Repeated repairs had altered the principal thoroughfares beyond recognition, while the side paths branching toward hamlets proved utterly impassable. This was Kawasaki Road, infamous throughout neighboring villages as the worst route—not merely for its mud, but for its endless succession of twisting ascents and descents. The village’s topography could be read in its numbers: 873 chōbu total area, with 338 chōbu of fields and 368 chōbu of mountain forest. Hills where woodland and farmland intertwined rolled across the landscape in overlapping waves, leaving only 165 chōbu of rice paddies scattered through narrow valleys. Every village house stood perched high above the roads, reached by climbing steep terraced slopes that forced visitors to crane their necks. While geography played its part, it was ultimately papermaking—that singular cottage industry—that had driven these households to such heights. Of Kamikawasaki Village’s 530-odd homes, seventy percent made paper—a settlement lying one ri southeast of Adachi Station on the Tohoku Main Line truly deserving its title as a paper village. Those exempt were either a handful of wealthy landowners or men bound to day labor and cart-pulling. In hamlets of about ten households, barely two families owned meager rice fields while no more than four held upland plots—yet all alike depended on papermaking for survival.

When Tomota stood in the old-fashioned, cavernous dirt-floored entrance of Ōtani-ya, his body—swaddled in a hooded cloak with scarves wound tight—was soaked through with sweat. To eyes still smarting from the snow’s glare, the inner storehouse room seemed even darker. “I’m sorry to trouble you when you’re busy.” Tomota started at the woman standing framed in the threshold. Even through a man’s eyes, her condition was unmistakable at a glance. Flustered, he averted his gaze and sank awkwardly onto the floorboards—yet as he received her composed greeting from this woman who’d clearly braced herself for this moment, steadiness gradually returned to his chest. That thing he privately called his damnable resolve took root deep in his gut—and yes, to put it grandly, he now faced precisely the sort of moment that brooked no retreat. With matters having reached this point, there was no need left to weigh his brother’s intentions—nor did it matter what protests their parents might raise, for things would settle where they must settle.

“I’ve been worrying alone all this time, but I’ll never do anything wrong.” All along the way here—up until this very moment—he had felt anxious and burdened by this request from his brother’s woman, agonizing over how on earth he should interact with someone he’d only met once; yet now, Tomota found himself able to broach the matter with a calmness that felt almost foreign. “I’m sorry for causing you nothing but trouble, Brother…”

Toshie fastened the collar of her haori. Her parents in Sukagawa Town had, of course, found out as well. They were avoiding making a public issue since the man in question was a conscripted soldier, but had sternly instructed that proper arrangements must be settled before the child’s birth. Last month, she quit her job at the Monopoly Bureau and moved out of the factory dormitory to share a rented room with her younger brother. She had some savings and absolutely no intention of arguing over living expenses; she had phrased it this way—that if things continued as they were, she would end up bearing a child with an unknown father—as though making it sound as bad as possible. She kept repeating at length—saying that she had already informed Sōkichi at the front, and that he would surely acknowledge it, and swearing to God that she was remaining faithful to Sōkichi alone—or something to that effect. Having been completely unaware and left things as they were until now, when Tomota apologized for having truly caused her hardship, Toshie pressed her sleeve to her face for the first time.

“No, it’s our fault. … We knew it would trouble you, but we had nowhere else to turn but to you, Brother.” Tomota, his chest gripped by some startlingly fresh emotion at being called “brother” by this woman who had been a complete stranger, found himself staring blankly at the alcove while mentally turning over that word—brother—in his mind.

II

They’d started up again—"Stop it already!"—and if Mother didn’t occasionally call out, the squabbles between Sen and Sōzō, who were perfectly matched in their bickering, would never end. During such times, though their hands moved mechanically through the work, patchy remnants of rough bark tended to remain, ensuring they’d be scolded again later when processing the mulberry. The bark stripped straight from paper mulberry trees was called *kurokozo*. After soaking in water for half a day and draining thoroughly, removing this black outer bark became “sohagi”—the first step in papermaking. They placed it on a tightly bound straw platform called *ate*, scraping each strand clean with a plane blade. With paper mulberry shortages, mulberry bark had been increasingly used as substitute material for three or four years now. Even these scraped-off remnants weren’t discarded—they became material for wrapping paper called sujigami.

The entire family, bundled up in layers around the hearth, carried out their night work while surrounded by piles of rough bark they stripped from their surroundings. The village children were made to do this night work from around the time they entered National School. A bundle of black kozo weighing approximately 600 monme: an adult could finish four or five such bundles in a night, while even a first-year child somehow managed to complete about one. But between the dim electric light and persistently smoky fire, the children would invariably end up with sore eyes before they knew it. The school doctor from Hachiken Town always repeated in his hygiene lectures that National School students here suffered trachoma at rates five times higher than neighboring villages. Admirably, ever since entering higher elementary school, Sōzō never forgot to wash his eyes before bed after finishing night work. Though always teased by Sen for being a dandy, this remained Sōzō's earnest precaution after hearing how factories shunned trachoma patients.

After finishing the four-bundle quota of contracted work each night—even after Yoshi and Sen had retreated to the inner bedroom—Tomota urged Sōzō, who kept pressing his face against the earthenware bottle of boric acid solution, with growing irritation: "Hey, go to bed already." While waiting for the sleeping quarters to fall silent, he tilted his head back to peer at the soot-blackened clock whose hands were barely discernible—already past ten-thirty. Given that it ran over an hour fast, true noon would correspond to around nine-thirty or so. By village custom, no household would rest content unless their clocks were set an hour—or sometimes nearly two hours—ahead of actual time. They called accurate time "true noon," and even homes with radios maintained their own adjusted hours, living this dual temporal existence without any qualms. That "true noon" didn't signify twelve o'clock but rather meant precise timekeeping struck one as rather absurd when considered.

“Mother, could you make some miso soup? … How about Father? Hasn’t it mostly settled by now?” Crouching before the furnace set up in the back of the dirt-floored room, his grim face half-lit red from the fire as he boiled mulberry bark, the father muttered, “Hm, seems about done,” then slowly straightened his back and shifted the pot lid slightly, peering through the steam that clung to his upper body. The white bark obtained after removing the rough outer layer was washed in water to become “white kozo”; boiling this with soda ash constituted “kozo boiling.” In a large pot measuring 2 shaku 5 sun (75.8 cm) in diameter—capable of holding approximately 1 koku (180 liters) when filled with four shoulder-loads or eight hand-buckets of water—they would loosen each strand from fifty bundles of white kozo and throw them in, then add measured amounts of soda ash once the mixture reached a vigorous boil. It took approximately four hours to boil down one pot. As fuel they used thin firewood, making this too a routine task—yet the boiling method required considerable skill, and was generally entrusted to elders who had retired from active papermaking.

“Truth is, Mother—I’m sorry for lying to you earlier—there was an important reason I went out to Hachiken Town today.” “Hmph. Did you go meet some woman or something?”

While handing over the miso soup bowl, Mother Otoki spoke in her usual tone of feigned ignorance. “You’re right, Mother—you’re absolutely right… But she’s not my woman—she’s Sō’s.” “What?” Sure enough, Mother let out a strained voice. Father’s teacup also shook as if startled, sending up small sputters of ash. “After all… there’s a baby in her belly.”

Having pushed past a moment’s hesitation and forced the words out, he couldn’t bring himself to face his parents’ shock head-on.

“Is that true, Brother?” “I met her proper today.” “Wh... where’s this girl from?” Tomota’s hurried explanation became jumbled in places, his words stammering here and there. “I apologize for keeping it from Father and everyone.” “But the thing is—no matter what—Sō and her love each other.” “Is that true? I’d no earthly idea,” Mother eventually murmured in a raspy voice. “Makin’ you shoulder all the worry, Brother. “That Sō… what manner of fool’s he turned out…”

“Mother, my worrying ain’t the issue here. After all, Sō’s on the battlefield… Of course you’d have complaints—both Father and Mother—but now that it’s come to this, we’ve got to find some way to settle this.” “But…” Until then silent, Father suddenly showed a strangely cold smile. The shadow that flickered across his contorted lips was so unnerving it sent an involuntary chill shuddering down Tomota’s spine.

“But… here before Mother and Tomo—ha ha ha—what’re we s’posed to do if that bastard Sō goes an’ repeats my own blunder? Eh?” “My failure.” “Th-that’s right—why drag that up now?!” It wasn’t aimed at Father, nor at Mother—the one who’d abandoned both Father and him. But having that hateful past he thought he’d buried clean suddenly clawed before him—this revulsion drove Tomota into white-hot rage.

“If that’s how you’re gonna talk, then just do whatever you damn well please, Father! If that’s how you’re gonna talk!” “Brother—oh Brother—” Mother stammered frantically, her words tripping over themselves.

“It’s Father’s fault—why’d you have to go bringing that up now? Sō’s situation is a separate matter, ain’t it? Why’d you… th-that’s right—that’s just… outrageous…” “Right, right,” Father Sōjirō muttered, his eyes—now hollow with a sadness like one awakening from possession—shaking his head as he picked up his pipe with trembling hands.

“Tomo, cheer up now.” “But… Sō’s situation’s a different matter, you hear?” “She’s a good girl—no mistakin’ she’s a good girl.” “Make sure t’discuss it proper with Mother.” “C’mon now, Tomo—cheer up.” Tomota wept uncontrollably.

Tomota realized for the first time that he had harbored within some corner of his heart a premonition—one he couldn’t quite grasp—that he might inevitably have to weather this storm of emotions someday. It was indeed as he had feared. Parent and child could not have been reconciled without once undergoing this baptism by storm. When his father’s older brother—who had barely scraped by as a day laborer since their grandfather’s time—caught a cold that worsened into pneumonia and, without ever seeing a doctor, passed away on the third day of taking to his bed while babbling delirious words, the villagers who had witnessed him working through constant fits of coughing spread the word that Sōtarō-san had died of tuberculosis. Sōjirō, his father and the second son, had gone to work as a migrant laborer in the Iwaki coal mines.

While this tendency existed in any rural village, in Kamikawasaki Village particularly, second and third sons—those overshadowed by eldest sons inheriting households—were treated with exceptional harshness. Mostly, they only attended ordinary elementary school (the equivalent of modern elementary education) and helped at home until their conscription exams; once they finished their exams, they were forced to choose their own occupations and leave the village. At that time, finding factory employment proved difficult, and becoming what people called laborers had become commonplace. Those who became police officers or passed certification exams to become elementary school (National School) teachers were considered exceptionally driven individuals. For second sons to receive property shares and establish branch families occurred only among a handful of wealthy households; even instances where they were given papermaking tools valued at seven or eight hundred yen to start branch families remained few enough to count on one’s fingers.

Startled by a telegram from Master Ansai that read “SŌTA DEAD. RETURN IMMED.,” he rushed over, only to have the master deliver an abrupt command the moment he stepped across the threshold. “Sōjirō, you’re to succeed Sōta now, you hear?”

Huh? Me? When he asked back in bewilderment, the master assumed a solemn expression.

“It’s only natural. Now that the eldest son has died, you must take over the Yoshiko household this time.” More than considering the future hardships of shouldering a debt-ridden poor household, Sōjirō—who felt a strange allure and pride in this unexpected reality of inheriting the Yoshiko household—ended up bowing to Master Ansai and the gathered estate residents with a formal “I humbly ask for your continued support.” He had formed a de facto relationship with a woman—the sister of a fellow miner who sorted coal—and they had just had a son. When he timidly broached the matter to Master, the latter readily agreed without reproach, saying “Then I’ll be your matchmaker and make it official”—accepting it outright.

“I thought it’d be a bit more of a proper house.”

Back when there was no Adachi Station near the village yet, on the day he first brought her home after fetching her from Nihonmatsu Station along the railway tracks, O-Kimi—sloppily carrying a baby on her back—stood at the garden’s edge and refused to enter the house for some time. “Just bear with it for now. I’ll work hard and sort things out eventually.”

Sōjirō flushed crimson with the urge to shrink away and murmured apologetically. In addition to one younger brother who was also working away from home, there was one younger sister. The mother, who had been helping at the master’s household, was still hale.

The widowed sister-in-law left, taking her daughter with her to work as a maid at a merchant house in Nihonmatsu.

Neither going out for day labor nor knowing even how to hold a hoe, O-Kimi spent all day idling around with the child. Whenever Sōjirō said anything, she would scream at the top of her lungs, calling him a liar who’d deceived her. Even when her younger sister called out “Sister-in-law” gently time and again, she wouldn’t give a proper reply. Licking her pencil over and over, she would spend ages writing letters to send to her brother in Iwaki. As for Sōjirō himself, weighed down by the crushing pressure of debt-ridden existence, he now found himself reflecting deeply—how much more freely and carelessly he could have lived back in the coal mines, where if he had just relied on brute strength alone without these mental burdens, O-Kimi’s temper would have stayed calm too. But all that was water under the bridge now; there was nothing to do but resign himself completely. Since he had returned to the village and taken over the household after all, Sōjirō began to think that he had to make paper. Once he realized that day laborers who couldn’t make paper were treated as inferior even by others in the same village, his resolve grew all the more firm. When he broached the matter with Master Ansai, the master responded after some thought, “I see. Shall we try it then?” After some thought, he said this and lent him capital, even taking care of all sorts of tools for him.

At first, it was "recycled paper" made by collecting tissues and scrap paper. However, even though he had been born in this village, there was no way Sōjirō—lacking any experience—could readily produce good paper. When he showed the first paper he’d made to the master, he was met with laughter: “Hahaha! You can’t even wipe your ass with this!” That said, the technique for recycled paper could rather be said to be difficult. Unlike regular paper pulp, it lacked elasticity and was sticky; if you simply layered sheets like this, you wouldn’t be able to peel them off one by one when drying them later. Therefore, you had to insert thin splits of Ryukyu rush—referred to as separators—between each sheet. On top of these extra steps, it was prone to tearing, and even the timing required to adhere it to the drying boards was no simple matter.

The villagers called it swollen wrists. It was when their wrists—those manipulating the papermaking frame—swelled up and became immobile. When they tried to process too many vats by overexerting themselves, they would often develop swollen wrists; needless to say, beginners would be plagued by this. Rubbing his ominously swollen wrist, Sōjirō tossed and turned several times.

It was around the time when camellias in the thicket began to bloom amidst their shadowy leaves. When he returned home at night after gathering scrap paper from town, his sister was struggling to soothe the fussily crying Tomota; by the next day, it had become clear that O-Kimi had indeed run away. Trembling with rage, the master had one quick-witted farmhand pursue her to Iwaki, but he returned empty-handed.

Sōjirō, who had gone to Iwaki with Tomota on his back, not only failed to meet O-Kimi in the end but was even confronted by her brother’s stubborn demand for divorce, forcing him to return crestfallen. By then, rumors were already spreading that she had swiftly become the second wife of a fifty-year-old man with modest savings in a nearby town. While calming Master Ansai who raged about taking legal action, Sōjirō grew dejected—he had long suspected things might come to this. Even so, for about half a year he clung to the faint hope she might return; but when this too faded, he cleanly finalized the divorce.

Before long, through the Master’s mediation, Otoki was welcomed from the neighboring village of Shimokawazaki. Her looks were not entirely unappealing, and though she appeared somewhat dim-witted on the surface, she proved a diligent worker with steadfast resolve—above all, her devoted care for Tomota would occasionally prompt the Master to boast, “See there? A fine wife indeed.”

After just two years of recycled paper, Sōjirō managed to progress to ordinary papermaking. At that time, there were no associations of hand papermakers, and materials could be obtained freely. Every day they ate crumbling rice mixed with seven parts barley and dried radish—meals so dry the grains wouldn’t stick to chopsticks—and even though the neighboring women, who themselves ate the plainest fare, often whispered that “Mr. Sōjirō’s household doesn’t even eat proper food,” by the fourth and fifth years their fortunes steadily improved. It was an era when papermaking was considered a livelihood that allowed survival but not wealth-building—so that even if a household’s production value reached about four thousand yen, with material costs consuming two thousand eight hundred yen, their income would amount to twelve hundred yen. But when converted to take-home pay after deducting food and miscellaneous expenses, this meant barely seventy or eighty sen in daily net profit. Despite this, ten years later Sōjirō had not only cleared all debts but rebuilt the paper mill into a more spacious two-by-three ken structure. He expanded the house and eventually acquired two tanbo of fields. And when people spoke of “Mr. Sōjirō of Ukitake’s shoji paper,” it had become something commanding respect even within the village.

Three

The snow that had begun falling around noon yesterday and raged as a blizzard all night long had cleared by morning into a deep azure sky, the ridges of snowdrifts glittering dazzlingly. Having had her brother-in-law tamp down the snow on the slope, Yumi—carrying a heavy bucket—crossed the road to the hut only to find Yoshi was already about to begin work. “When’s that Kōriyama fellow coming?” “Still not here?”

Though there was no one else present, when she asked in a naturally hushed voice, Yoshi—as was her habit—shook her head in minute motions.

“I hear everything’s been settled with that household through letters.” “Apparently they’re coming before New Year’s.” The village’s New Year was now a little over ten days away. Of course, given that this great war had broken out, they could hardly speak of observing Bon Festival or New Year’s—indeed, just two or three days prior, the town office had circulated a directive to that effect.

The hut stood over a dammed stream beside the rice fields, atop a pond barely three square meters in size, its miscanthus thatch overhanging as straw walls enclosed three sides. On floorboards jutting out over the water where straw-bundle seats were packed, there sometimes lay tattered zabuton cushions with cotton stuffing protruding from who knew how long ago.

These huts dotted the lowlands of the village. The white kozo boiled in soda ash still retained remnants of rough bark and tough fibers at this stage; using sickle tips to remove these while scrubbing and rinsing away the lye was what the village called “kōzo washing.” On warm days it proved manageable, but when Adatara Mountain’s howling downslope winds raged, this washing could become a task more grueling than papermaking itself. The Abukuma River flowed along the village’s southeastern boundary. Kozo rinsed in the Ōkawa River’s current was said to shed lye particularly well—hence the dozen-household washing area on this bank—but the biting winter winds sweeping unimpeded across the water’s surface made it unbearable. Compared to that, the shared hut of Yoshi and Yumi’s households—backed by a high embankment steeped in sunlight—remained relatively tolerable as workspaces went.

From the bundles of kōzo that their sickle tips deftly sliced as they soaked in ample water, the lye seeping out in faint whiteness faded indistinctly into the blue sediment.

“Yumi, what do you think of Sō-nii-chan’s... that person?”

After a period of shared silence, Yoshi suddenly brought it up again. She must have been terribly concerned about it.

From the moment she had rushed all the way to Yumi’s house and, without saying a word, dragged her to the side of the shed to breathlessly announce, “Something huge’s happened, Yumi! Our Sō-nii-chan’s bride is coming!”, she had been asking what kind of woman Yumi thought she’d be. “Mom’s just… she’s so fidgety.” “It’s nothing—just ‘be kind to Sis-in-law this, be kind to Sis-in-law that.’” “I may be a country bumpkin, but I know that much without being told.”

The next time they met, she said such things while puffing her cheeks, her eyes defying categorization as either resentment or envy. “Since she’s a woman in love with Yocchan’s brother, she must be a good woman—I had no choice but to answer like that.” When I first heard it from Yoshi—that she was already with child—I found both Sōkichi and the woman despicably wretched. But the more I thought on it, the more I began to feel an odd envy toward her. Rather than being tormented by constant anxiety about marriage like I am, wouldn’t everything become clear if things were simply settled that way? When I had thought that far, a fierce shame ignited the blood within my body. Now working at a printing company in Fukushima City, Yumi’s fiancé Ryōsaburō was utterly cold toward her, treating her with dismissive contempt; at every turn, he would remark that village girls probably couldn’t even watch newsreels, his tone implying this was somehow Yumi’s failing. During the recession of Shōwa 9, Yumi’s father had borrowed a considerable sum from Ryōsaburō’s household; but even toward this old-fashioned agreement arbitrarily decided by their parents at the time, she had resigned herself to such arrangements and made no effort to resist—resolved now to marry Ryōsaburō, whom she could never bring herself to love. But when she thought of Ryōsaburō—this man she couldn’t even find a starting point to approach—and moreover of leaving the village to live in Fukushima City, she felt crushed by an indescribable gloom.

“……Everyone’s so happy.” “Yocchan, you’ve already had your provisional wedding too.” The relationship between Shigeji—now stationed at the northern frontlines—and Yoshi from the same hamlet had been an open secret, so people merely laughed without particular discomfort; yet for Yoshi, there lingered an awkward tension she couldn’t immediately resolve, thinking that Yumi too must be similarly situated. She knew full well that Ryōsaburō and Yumi’s feelings had become thoroughly tangled, and beyond that, at various moments it would occur to her—could Yumi secretly harbor affection for her brother Tomota? Of course, there was nothing her brother could do about Yumi—another’s betrothed—and Yumi herself was undoubtedly resolved to marry Ryōsaburō in the end. In other words, might the laxity born of Yumi’s resignation—her standing at a boundary acknowledged by both herself and others as insurmountable—unwittingly lay bare the depths of her heart? In any case, Yoshi found it safer to immediately comply with whatever matters of hers were brought up in front of Yumi.

“The other day, I got a letter from him.” To Yumi—who had said she’d rather not hear about it if it was going to be forced on her—Yoshi explained that he’d had more pressing matters: around the time he was deployed, controls on raw materials had begun tightening, so he’d written out of concern for how things would fare this year. Her explanation ended up echoing phrases from Shigeji’s letter here and there. So they weren’t at an impasse worrisome enough to cause concern; everyone was working earnestly with the allocated materials. Particularly since they began making military-use paper, the villagers’ feelings underwent a complete transformation. Having written out this meaning over two nights, Yoshi wore a somewhat proud look in her eyes.

“My brother also says—what’ll happen if we falter here now, you know.” “It’s a great war—rationing materials is only natural.” Yumi also inadvertently gave a strong nod of agreement to this. When controls on kōzo and soda ash began tightening, she had once told Tomota about how her father kept complaining that this wouldn’t do. Tomota gave a bitter smile, thinking it wasn’t much like Yumi’s father at all.

The amount of kōzo used by the village in a single winter was 90,000 kan—nearly three-fourths of the 145,000 kan produced in the prefecture. The village’s production output was a mere 3,000 kan, so they had to rely on external sources for the majority—yet even then, they couldn’t obtain half of what they needed. The mitsumata used for producing that strong paper had long been prohibited. Whether it was the mulberry bark used as supplementary material or the washi and Western paper scraps distributed by the Industrial Association, they were indeed equally constrained. As for pulp, it stood at best at forty percent of pre-Incident levels. The soda ash from Branner Mond Company with its moon mark—once common parlance among villagers until a decade prior—had vanished entirely; its degraded remnants now rationed at one-third of required quantities. Soda ash—whether from China’s Rehe-Shandong coastal salts or Mediterranean sea salts—proved predictably scarce due to wartime demands, with union projections indicating halved allocations come next fiscal year. Compounding these woes, stakeholders’ poor comprehension had birthed a Kozo Commercial Association between raw suppliers and washi producers—a distribution system inherently prone to chaos. Still, villagers gradually resolved that all must be endured with grim cheer. Even were this great war to rage decades more, none could conceive Japanese life sundered from handcrafted kōzo paper; thus papermaking shed its identity as mere prosperity-bringing sideline.

However, above all else, it was an undeniable fact that the villagers’ resolve had undergone a clear transformation since being compelled to manufacture military-use paper. The pride that their village’s paper would directly contribute to the war effort and the sense of responsibility abruptly tightened in the people’s chests. Although they never spoke it aloud, the jealousy-tinged feelings they had harbored toward those called industrial warriors were swept away in an instant. Moreover, the raw materials for military-use paper were sent directly to the union without any complications.

When an urgent summons had been issued at the union head’s house and they were first told that we too would finally be of direct service—as if by prior agreement—everyone set down their pipes and straightened their postures. —And now, Yumi recalled that story she had heard from her father.

The snow on the roof began melting as it dwindled. “Still though, we gotta push ourselves harder.” “No... Yocchan... I don’t wanna marry into some city household—not really.” “Truth is... I wanna spend my whole life making paper here in this village...”

Yumi suddenly blurted out, and Yoshi found herself at a loss for words, swallowing her flustered panic. “Yocchan… I really…”

A sudden urgency resonated through Yoshi’s chest with painful intensity. Just as the premonition flashed through her—that hearing those next words would render everything irreparable—Tomota’s voice abruptly called out, “Yoshi!” While keenly sensing Yumi’s body flinch, Yoshi—who had raised her voice sharply—felt relief wash over her.

“What’s with you, Bro?”

As he was about to leave for Koriyama, Tomota peered into the hut.

“Yumi, you already know… I’m bringing Sō’s wife today. I’ll be counting on you from here on out.” “Oh, you’re bringing her today?” No wonder her parents and brother had been discussing something late into the night. Even though she knew she wasn’t the one who should be involved in such discussions, being spoken to in this way as she was leaving was anything but pleasant for Yoshi. She had wanted him to say just one thing—that he planned to bring Sōkichi’s wife tomorrow or so, and would she please take good care of her. After muttering, “Come to think of it yesterday, I thought Mother and the others were sneaking about,” she found herself unable to keep a certain spitefulness from surfacing.

“Whenever Brother Sō’s situation comes up, everyone makes such a big fuss.”

“Ha ha ha ha.”

The psychology of his pouting-faced sister suddenly stirred a spark of empathy in Tomota’s chest—one that had been weighed down by countless worries. “You’re right—they do make an awful fuss.”

“You should just bring her over quickly anyway.” “Then they’ll stop fussing.”

Yoshi made a violent splashing noise.

IV

When it came to their daughter, not only the man himself—but even his parents and siblings—must have had grievances they couldn’t suppress. Even from the tone he had used when meeting Toshie previously, they seemed poised to take a firm stance. Tomota had also heard from Sōkichi that he worked as a cart driver for a transport shop. If they were to meet face-to-face, starting with the usual transparent self-deprecation from him and his father—though what passed between the young people themselves couldn’t be helped—they might have been made to sit through a tedious lecture about how even the small stipends they’d been sending would cease. Tomota had prepared everything in consultation with his father, and now that he’d come this far—determined to persist with humble deference before his resolve—that goddamn fortitude of his had settled in place. Yet when Tomota was met with that awkward, embarrassed smile—one that didn’t know where to rest its gaze—from the fifty-year-old man hunched over packing bedding in the second-floor room of an amateur boarding house on the outskirts of town, he found himself flustered instead, caught in a disconcerted bewilderment that deflated his resolve.

“Because I missed a train, things still aren’t settled yet.”

Muttering half under his breath—a habit he seemed to have developed—he sat wiping the hem of his clothes with a hand towel; but when his daughter said, “Father, give Brother a cushion,” he hurriedly stood and went downstairs. Even to the awkwardness of young Tomota’s overly formal greeting, he kept nodding amiably—“Indeed, nothing matters more than your enduring martial fortune”—his responses never faltering. “Please don’t make her do any unreasonable work—I too will rest assured on that account.”

“Well now, sir—if she moves about quite a bit, it’ll actually make for a sturdier baby being born, you see.”

Certainly, these words could have carried hidden meanings, but they came across as nothing but sincere paternal affection—completely free from any sarcasm. When the father went downstairs for something, Tomota blurted out with genuine admiration, "He really is a good father," to which Toshie responded, "He says you’re not considerate at all," her face lighting up with pleasure. Toshie’s younger brother—who had gotten special permission to leave the factory during lunch—kept glancing up at Tomota throughout their meal of oyakodon. Toward his sister’s misconduct, he harbored the pure contempt typical of an eighteen-year-old, his resentment toward their father’s handling of matters now directed at Tomota as well. He barely spoke, offering only terse replies. While Tomota could understand how this young man might both generously tolerate such situations and nurse a righteous anger fitting the times, he still found the interaction unsettling. It pained him to see Toshie shrink under her brother’s pressure while their father made clumsy attempts to mediate. When Tomota tried smoothing things over by saying, "The factory must be rewarding work," the brother retorted smugly, "Some people still don’t grasp the gravity of these times"—a transparent dig. He stood to leave without proper farewells when the time came, yet still spoke up as if struck by a sudden thought.

“Take my soap ration too—I’ll manage to get some from friends.” “Well then, I’ll take Zen-chan’s share too.” When Toshie answered with slightly exaggerated cheerfulness, a voice called out again from halfway down the stairs.

“Sis, did you take the blanket?” “Then you’ll be in a pinch, Yoshii-chan.” “Idiot! I said I didn’t need it!” he barked, storming down the stairs and slamming the front door hard enough to make the frame rattle.

The father began untying the carefully packed bundle once more.

At Toshie’s suggestion, the three of them—having left quite early for the 3:30 train—visited Ansai Kunitsuko Shrine, a prefectural shrine. “When he went off to war, we visited the shrine together too.” In a voice only Tomota could hear, Toshie said. Tomota insisted on pulling it, but the father, dismissing it with “No, this is nothing,” ended up hauling the cart all the way to the station. The postcard had arrived safely, and then the father repeatedly emphasized that they must notify him immediately whether it was a boy or a girl when the baby was born. When they arrived at the station, Toshie suddenly became despondent and merely nodded in silence.

“Give my regards to your mother!”

When the bell rang, Toshie hurriedly leaned out the window with a tearful smile—then her father simply nodded this time. “I’m sorry for all the trouble.” After the train had started moving and a stretch of silence without continuation had passed, when Toshie finally spoke up, Tomota—with a slightly flustered fidget as he muttered “No”—nevertheless turned toward her with a deeply caring gaze befitting an elder brother. In both his speech and movements lingered an awkward hesitance that seemed incongruous with a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor—a prudence more suited to some youth steeped in rural soil—yet this very quality made him appear all the more approachable and reliable to her. As for the father-in-law, mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law she would soon meet for the first time, she found herself thinking how if she could shelter beneath this brother-in-law’s protection…

“Oh, don’t worry. You’ll get used to village life in no time.” “I’ll do whatever needs to be done.” “That’s right—until Sō comes back, you’re someone important we’ve been entrusted with.” "No, I—it’s troubling when you treat me that way," Toshie said, to which Tomota nodded repeatedly. “Father and Mother aren’t troublesome at all—might sound strange comin’ from me, but they’re truly good folks.” Even as he said this, she still felt uneasy and an indescribable loneliness—the sorrow of knowing even this brother-in-law could never understand it. When she lowered her eyes, the vivid image of Sōkichi, whom she’d parted from at that small station, rose before her.—Our transgression had been undeniable. But Toshie was not regretting that now. After the crushing shock of noticing the initial signs of her body’s changes came nights of fierce anguish where sleep eluded her—until she reached the point of muttering to herself that resignation was her only path forward. At last, she had regained some semblance of calm. She must endure any hardship and ensure her child was born peacefully. Once she had mustered such courage, an unanticipated warmth—something she had never imagined—began to unfold before her.

“Papermaking... Is there work that someone like me can do right away?”

Trying to dispel the swarming thoughts, Toshie shook her head and raised her eyes. "Right," Tomota made a show of considering for a moment. They were all water tasks—nothing a complete novice could easily handle—but removing rough bark shouldn't be beyond her capabilities. This labor cost couldn't be dismissed as trivial either, and as Tomota explained that what had originally been about two sen per kanmon had now risen to twelve or thirteen sen, Toshie began asking him various questions. She had heard about it before from Sōkichi too, and hadn't considered papermaking an easy job—nor had she feared the work's hardships.

If this had been an ordinary farming household, she might have had some idea of what to expect, but having plunged into a livelihood whose ways were utterly foreign to her, she felt herself becoming someone who could neither make any meaningful contribution nor find a place for herself.

When it came to papermaking, limited as it was to Kamikawasaki Village with other villages never engaging in it at all, Toshie found herself imagining an unfamiliar, peculiar way of life. When they laid out the process step by step—from removing rough bark to boiling mulberry, bleaching fibers, beating pulp (excluding the actual sheet-forming), then pressing, trimming, and packaging—the reality remained that for a complete novice, particularly a woman not far from her due date, there were only two options: stripping bark or clumsy attempts at packaging.

Whether this was true or not remained unknown, but theirs was said to be a village craft passed down through a thousand years of oral tradition. In households that revered Prince Shōtoku as the progenitor of papermaking, they held the Prince Shōtoku Festival every November to commence the work season. Tomota chuckled, remarking that the red rice with dumplings eaten during the festival must seem like an odd dish to those unfamiliar with it.

“But why don’t other villages do it?” "Well, how should I put this..." Tomota evaded the question. However, he was not without his own thoughts. Within the prefecture, paper was also produced in the Date, Ishiro, Sōma, Ishikawa, and Aizu regions. But in Sōma there were barely thirty people involved, and apart from Aizu’s seventy, none of the others exceeded forty to sixty. The three hundred thirty workers in this Adachi region—far surpassing the combined totals of those other areas—were almost entirely monopolized by Tomota’s village, with less than ten percent allotted to neighboring Shimokawasaki. Of the prefecture’s total production value of 680,000 yen, nearly 500,000 yen came from his village. The varieties included shoji paper (divided into sizes ranging from the 8-sun 3-bu “83-monme” to 9-sun 3-bu, 9-sun 5-bu, and shaku sizes), Mino paper, hanshi, umbrella paper, lantern paper, wrapping paper, dust paper, and now military-use paper. In terms of quality, their products—called Kawasaki paper or Iwashiroy paper—ranked first in Tōhoku. Yet why did papermaking remain strictly confined to parts of Kamikawasaki and Shimokawasaki? Even if you entered another village with similarly scarce farmland as Kamikawasaki, not a single drying board could be found there. Everyone had their doubts, but according to Tomota, the village’s agricultural conditions and resulting economic circumstances clearly proved these weren’t what made papermaking a side job. Even an industry requiring little capital and no extraordinary technical skill—papermaking—would remain beyond outsiders’ reach unless they could endure near-ascetic perseverance: battling water through winter’s cruel cold. The people of Kamikawasaki carried winter conquerors’ blood in their veins, inherited through long tradition—this was Tomota’s proud conviction.

“Well, no need to help with papermaking—we’ll have you do sewing instead.” “I’m worried whether everyone will take to me.”

When she looked out the window, beyond the undulating expanse of vast, hazy fields rose Mount Adatara looming nearby, bathed in lingering sunset glow and glowing pale red.

“This makes the third time.” When they alighted at Adatara Station as dusk was falling, Toshie muttered under her breath.

After retrieving the checked luggage, Tomota brought over the carrying rope he had left at the station-front shop. “Should I carry it?”

“No, let me carry Sis’s luggage.”

As Toshie—who had been repacking her belongings at the bench—turned around in surprise, a red-faced boy approached, fidgeting and shrugging his shoulders. "I’ll carry it," said the younger brother as he offered his lantern-switched hand. Before Toshie could adjust her shawl, she bowed slightly in greeting—to which he doffed his tattered military cap with a respectful dip.

When they left the station, the biting Adatara oroshi pierced their skin.

Five From miscellaneous mending tasks to alterations of still-serviceable garments brought out one after another, she ultimately had no choice but to accept her mother-in-law's considerate attempts to keep her from physical labor. On that first night after arriving, the mother-in-law had gone out to the dark path at the foot of the slope, repeating "So cold—so cold—" in dialect, but upon entering the house immediately retreated to the kitchen where she maintained a loud stream of chatter without ever settling by the hearth. Come to think of it, even her father-in-law kept restlessly rising from his seat to pace between the back rooms. They neither inquired about her family home nor broached the subject of Toshie's previous life. The distance from station to house measured just over one and a half ri—though walking that unfamiliar night path for the first time must have made it feel much longer—as he muttered observations about tonight's cold. Sen and Sōzō kept their faces lowered, focused solely on feeding the fire. Yoshi had greeted her with stiff formality before disappearing into the back rooms; when she briefly reappeared, she wore a different apron now conspicuously ornate.

Toshie was to sleep in the back room with Yoshi and Sen. “I’m such a scatterbrain.” “Please be kind to me.” As she spoke while removing her kimono—“Oh, I’m the one who should say that”—Yoshi looked at her with unreserved eyes for the first time.

The next day, she was taken around the neighborhood by her mother-in-law. At every house, they ducked beneath pure white paper drying boards that filled the yards as they entered. There was no hiding her swollen belly—she’d resigned herself to that—yet still she couldn’t raise her face. "When Sōkichi comes home, we’ll hold a proper celebration then," the mother-in-law announced loudly at each house they visited. At the master’s house, they were served soba noodles for good fortune.

“In any case, make sure to bear a sturdy infant.”

The master, tilting his bespectacled face upward slightly as he spoke slowly, used a jumble of village dialect and standard Japanese in his speech. On the wide veranda, packaged paper was stacked like mountains. The village’s paper was all shipped out from here under the union’s name. They renovated the adjacent storehouse, turning it into the union office. Even as Toshie and the others ate their soba, people kept coming one after another to the master—the chairman of the prefectural handmade paper industrial union. The father- and mother-in-law had been looked after by the great master in their youth, and they also visited the separate house he had built for his retirement.

With Yumi, who had been mentioned in last night’s conversation with Yoshi, she found herself exchanging surprisingly intimate glances despite their first meeting. When Yumi said that coming from town made the village seem truly messy, Toshie answered, “No, it’s wonderfully refreshing—you’ll live long here.” The task of removing rough bark, which had seemed surprisingly easy at first, left her shoulders so stiff by the next day that she could barely lift her arms—and then there was the raw smell of paper mulberry and mulberry bark she was encountering for the first time, making her chest churn with nausea.

When it came to pulp processing, only the final water dispersion seemed manageable. After fully pounding the water-soaked pulp in a mortar and then dissolving it again in water, they filtered this once-sludgy mixture through a bag and blended it with paper mulberry in proportions varying by paper type. The ones doing the pounding were Father and Sōzō, while Yoshi and Sen handled the water dispersion. Toshie had been stopped by her mother-in-law who said such work wasn’t suitable, but finding it intriguing, she tried doing it in Sen’s place. Midway up the slope by the well stood a hydrolysis trough exposed to the open air. Smaller than the papermaking vat at about five shaku by four shaku, twenty-four or twenty-five bamboo stirring rods hung in a row from above the trough; they called this apparatus Magwa. Though the water’s clamor sounded lively enough, stirring met with unreliable resistance—yet strange vibrations buzzed from shoulders to waist. Leaden clouds hung low as bone-chilling cold threatened snow at any moment; after thirty minutes in this deep freeze, her lower abdomen began tightening unbearably. Having barely managed to climb up the slope, Toshie crawled to the hearthside and lay motionless for some time.

“I told you so—it’s too much!”

The mother-in-law, who had been pasting paper, threw down her straw brush and embraced Toshie’s back.

“If something unforgivable were to happen to Sō, we’d be in trouble.” When Tomota—having emerged from the papermaking hut—spoke to her with a sullenness she’d never known from him before, Toshie grew sad and tears welled up. Even the kōzo preparation she attempted alongside Yoshi with a cushion brought in had, after suffering through that night’s intensely cold abdominal pain, left nothing in the way of papermaking work that Toshie could manage until the child was born. “Once the equinox passes, this work will get much easier. Well, more importantly—after you’ve delivered, we’ll have you help with everything properly,” the mother-in-law said consolingly.

Soon the village's New Year arrived. Though they had already drained their special ration of sake by the second day, they still wore bright expressions as they gorged themselves on rice cakes until their stomachs were full.

Yoshi and Yumi took Sen and went to Fukushima to see a moving picture. When Yoshi said Sister-in-law ought to go too, Toshie laughed and replied, “How could I manage in this condition?”

“Those moving pictures with all their flickering—what’s so fun about ’em anyway?”

The mother-in-law seemed intent on comforting Toshie, who couldn’t go. She probably meant that sleeping would feel far more relaxing than watching such things anyway. Given the wartime circumstances, there were no formal New Year’s callers. Wherever he’d been feasted, Sōjirō would return red-faced and doze off drowsily by the hearth, his naps utterly carefree. Tomota attended national school meetings repeatedly. Though they’d managed to acquire a radio, with no daytime electricity they could only listen at night, and the newspaper always arrived close to noon.

Toshie wrote several letters to Sōkichi for the first time without restraint, having held back until now.

After the modest village New Year passed, Toshie had finally begun growing accustomed to her place in this household. At night after entering the bedroom, she would talk at length with Yoshi lying beside her. She heard that last year they had come to own 1 tan and 3 se of rice fields for the first time. As the village had few rice paddies, they couldn’t even tenant-farm enough to feed themselves, forcing sixty percent of households to buy rice to make up shortages. For Toshie—who’d simply assumed villages never needed purchased rice—this proved an unexpected revelation; even Yoshi’s family had apparently lacked nearly three bales annually until now. With over three tan of fields already, they grew vegetables for their own use and produced neri adhesive while dedicating the rest to mulberry. Sericulture brought nearly 400 yen last year; paper prices kept rising yearly—despite reduced material rations, last year’s earnings still surpassed the previous year’s roughly 2,200 yen. Having handled tedious bookkeeping during Tomota’s military deployment—which sparked her interest—Yoshi cited various precise figures. These livelihood discussions Toshie initiated to engage Yoshi ultimately drew them closer. Toshie embellished slightly while recounting insider stories about female workers at the Monopoly Bureau. Soon they whispered matters only women could discuss—exchanging sighs and murmurs of “How dreadful”—until Sen, thought asleep, would startle them by opening her eyes. Yoshi earnestly probed the unknown world she’d soon enter. “Sister-in-law’s baby—if it’s a boy, that’d be good, I tell ya.”

As for Sōzō, he would come to Toshie’s side while she was cooking and suddenly blurt out such things. Feeling the half-dazed gaze fixed on her body, Toshie stiffened suddenly and instinctively crossed her arms in front of herself.

“Is it bad if it’s a girl? Do you dislike them?” When she asked casually, he suddenly turned red and averted his eyes. “Well, a girl’s... either’s fine, ain’t it.” No sooner would he do one thing than he’d abruptly ask what the population of Kōriyama was in tens of thousands. It wasn’t that he was particularly testing his sister-in-law; rather, he would mutter to himself about whether Kōriyama or Fukushima had more factories.

“Do you want to go to a factory?” “Yeah… Once I finish higher elementary, I wanna go.”

At this, he looked embarrassed. When Toshie peered into the kitchen water jar, I set down the bucket I’d fetched. Seventeen-year-old Sen had a certain prickliness about her—though I thought she resembled Sōkichi most—that made her somehow difficult to ask favors of. Sōzō would throw down his tool bundle upon returning from school and without fail ask Toshie if there was any work needing done. Then, munching on a sweet potato or such, he’d head to the papermaking hut, relieve Sen, and set about beating kōzo fibers. The first time she heard it, Toshie couldn’t tell what that sound was.

Against the wall of the papermaking hut sat a flat stone measuring about three shaku by two shaku—positioned at the low height required for seated work—that served as the kōzo-beating platform. The one in their household, according to Tomota, was a particularly fine granite slab gifted by the landlord as a congratulatory present when his father Sōjirō returned from the charcoal mountains and finally took up papermaking. While those in other homes measured about three sun thick, theirs was said to be an exceptional five sun or more. They would place small batches of bleached paper mulberry on this platform and pound them thoroughly with a thick round pole, reducing the fibers completely to a mushy pulp. This marked the final stage of processing the kōzo. Each small bowlful—enough for one vat—required about an hour of beating. The wall behind bore white splatters of kōzo fragments stuck fast across its surface. Thud, thud, thud—the simple, dull pounding would sometimes draw Toshie, sewing in the main house’s living room, into a helpless state tinged with something like nostalgia. During these moments, the tense atmosphere that made conversation scarce even with Mother-in-law Otoki—busily drying paper in the dirt-floored workspace—left Toshie feeling profoundly alone.

The paper drying process called kamitsuke had mostly become Otoki’s responsibility. The bundles of paper, now just damp to the touch after having their moisture thoroughly squeezed out by the pressing machine at the back of the papermaking hut, were placed on a plank and carried to the main house’s dirt-floored area. Each sheet would be peeled off one by one and pasted onto drying boards—set on mortar bases—using a straw brush. For large-format shoji paper, two sheets could be pasted on one side of a board; for hanshi large-format, three sheets; and for Mino paper or umbrella paper, four sheets. The pine drying boards—measuring 2 shaku 2 sun in width and 7 shaku 5 sun in length, called "paper boards" in the village—weighed over four kanmonme, yet when shouldered by someone pasting paper, they appeared as light as a single long sheet. Even on days when the sun didn’t shine, they would dry in about an hour by using both sides alternately, so every household kept around thirty of them. When we first began this work at home, we could barely manage to gather five boards that would have cost just two yen apiece back then, leaving only the kōzo-beating stone gifted by the landlord gleaming there disproportionately—or so Mother-in-law once reminisced.

Father-in-law Sōjirō constantly went out to the landlord’s residence to help with office work. The landlord’s younger brother and a middle-aged man who had risen from farmhand served as clerks there, but with three or five people hauling in paper along snowbound paths where carts couldn’t pass—processing each batch and paying out cash—they found it hard to keep up. When the landlord called out from his office desk, “Sōjirō—you there—sort this out,” he would rise slightly with a casual “Right, I’ll take a look.” The fact that they were now allowed to interact almost as relatives due to their longstanding relationship was a quiet source of pride for the Sōjirō couple, and they never forgot their debt of gratitude for this. On the other hand, for Mr. Yasuo Ansai, the union chairman—who had taken special care of the honest Sōjirō since his father’s generation—Sōjirō was someone he could entrust with work more than anyone else.

Whenever Sōjirō returned home with his usual calm expression, he would invariably slowly drink leftover tea. A taciturn man, on warm days when mending su screens on the engawa veranda, he could pass half a day in complete silence. At first, Toshie worried whether she might have upset his mood, but she gradually grew accustomed to this as well. “Well, five years at most.” “By the second year, you’d have to reweave it anyway.”

Whether it was the su screen or su frame—both would become unusable after about five years of use—but when Toshie asked how many sheets could be made in that time, he slowly explained it would amount to a hundred thousand sheets. Even when Toshie marveled at how no other screen called su could match this one’s exquisite precision among all such tools bearing that name, he remained utterly indifferent to such matters, merely muttering “That’s how it goes.” It was truly another fine day when Toshie—borrowing Tomota’s rubber boots to navigate snowmelt paths—went under Sōzō’s guidance to deliver lunch to Sōjirō charcoal-burning on a small hill five blocks distant. True to form he spoke little, yet his face showed plain concern: “You’ll manage walking that far?”

“They say you should get a bit more exercise.” When she showed him the butterbur sprouts she’d found on the path’s embankment as they sat down together, he narrowed his eyes and murmured, “Hmm… So it’s already that season.” “How’s Sō doing?” “He must be fine—I don’t even have dreams about him.”

With that, the conversation broke off once more.

As for charcoal burning—since they relied solely on open fires—they would borrow the landlord’s mountain to produce only what they needed for their own use: three or four bales a year were enough. Chirp, chirp—a small bird sang from a withered branch as thin blue smoke curled up from a makeshift charcoal kiln. Though patchy snow still lingered in shaded areas, sunlight from the deep blue sky carried a springlike softness—Toshie, who had long lived on the outskirts of a provincial town, found herself captivated by this reawakened vitality. Yet more than that, the quiet warmth of sitting wordlessly beside her father-in-law seeped deeply into her heart.

Even Sōjirō, this father-in-law of theirs—when he brought out the large willow cutting board to the living room’s center to trim large-format paper—moved with lingering slowness, yet carried an unmistakable thread of dignified resolve in his bearing. Trimming ranked as the second most vital technical skill after the papermaking method itself. They would stack about a hundred sheets at a time to cut, but even when recycling the surrounding trimmings into new paper, the quality degraded and—worse still—left visible seams. To minimize waste as much as possible, shoji paper in the 9-sun 3-bu size was crafted with a mere one-sun extension at top and bottom, allowing not even a one-rin deviation in the trimming plane’s precision. Meanwhile, the large-format Japanese paper—stacked solidly in hundreds of sheets—radiated an overwhelming nobility of sheen, as if answering the trimmers’ taut concentration with its own austere grace.

But deep within Sōjirō’s chest as he prepared to begin the trimming, there welled a profound joy—unnoticed by any of the family members, let alone Toshie, who could not possibly have glimpsed it.

Before beginning to trim, Sōjirō would always stroke the paper’s front and back several times, immersing himself in reflections that were his alone. This could well be called Sōjirō’s cherished secret. There was not the slightest difference between the paper he himself had made up until two years ago when Tomota had been conscripted and the paper Tomota was making now. When he mentioned this to his wife once—only to have her dismiss it as obvious, saying it merely proved Tomota’s skills had reached his father’s level—he resolved never to speak of it again. But for Sōjirō, there was something that could never be settled so simply. Needless to say, even for first-grade shoji paper made with eighty percent paper mulberry and twenty percent pulp, differences in quality—discernible at a glance by experts—arose from variations in material processing and the papermaker’s skill. Even for Grade 2 products made with fifty percent paper mulberry and fifty percent pulp, there would naturally be differences in quality specific to that grade. Sōjirō’s secret source of profound satisfaction did not stem from equivalence in such appraised paper quality. At first, he thought it might be due to the same tactile quality stemming from the brushwork on the paper’s reverse side. The one who did the paper drying was Mother Otoki in both cases, and her twenty-odd years of handling had become so mechanized that there was not a fraction of error. But he gradually came to understand that it wasn’t merely something simple stemming from the paper drying process, but rather something deeper and more inherent. However, Sōjirō could not put it into words. ――It was what could be called the paper’s inherent nature. What he perceived in their father-and-son paper was the same inherent nature of paper that flowed through military-use paper and shoji paper alike, through both Grade 1 and Grade 2 products.

VI

“Auntie, hurry! It’s terrible!”

The child from the neighboring house came shouting that they had found Sōjirō lying face down under the eaves of their house. “Tomota, quick!” Otoki cried out in a frantic voice. Toshie, who had been learning packaging from Sen by the living room shoji screens, descended unsteadily to the earthen floor on trembling knees.

It was a cold, sunless mid-March afternoon—not even a month and a half since Toshie had arrived—when Mount Adatara glowed dully in the bleak sky. About four years earlier, he had once suffered a similarly severe seizure. The doctor said it seemed to be cardiac asthma and gave him an injection. Though he didn’t typically have violent coughing fits, the family members looked unconvinced at the asthma diagnosis. Afterward, there were no further incidents—just occasional slight palpitations that would have him lying by the hearth.

Carried on a door plank, Sōjirō lay with his forehead—now completely earth-colored—beaded with oily sweat. By the time Tomota brought the doctor from Hakkemachi, he had long since lost consciousness. Irrationally afraid to look at the patient’s face, Toshie had been trembling together with Sen—but when she was called into the inner room, vacant white eyes turned toward her. It was a death that defied acceptance. Until the funeral day, Otoki remained so dazed she couldn’t even shed tears.

“Ain’t no use tellin’ me to quit… I’ll handle Father’s share too. You gotta pull yourself together same as me, Mother. If even you start fallin’ apart, we’re done for.” Even so, when Tomota said that to her after the funeral, she replied with words that belied her own depleted strength: “I know, but I’ll earn Father’s share too.” When she thought of how they’d built their life up from the days of making recycled paper to now, her husband—who’d vanished into death here—seemed infinitely dear to her. Years before, she’d heard through some news that a woman named Okimi—who’d abandoned her husband and Tomota—had died of typhus, but until now it had never even crossed her mind; yet ever since Sōjirō’s death, she found herself occasionally recalling it. Was that woman meeting her husband face-to-face in the afterlife now? No, she thought—a woman foolish and hateful enough to abandon such a good husband must surely inhabit a different realm from where he resided.

“Honestly—to die without even seeing his grandchild’s face—Father was such a fool of a father.”

While drying paper, Otoki muttered to herself. By late March, the paper had come to dry noticeably faster. Being constantly occupied with drying boards while having Yoshi help her shuttle between the earthen floor and garden during daylight hours remained manageable enough—but come nightfall, she would be assailed by an unbearable desolation. Crouched before the paper mulberry boiling furnace as he broke firewood, Tomota’s silhouette would sometimes startle her with its fleeting resemblance to her husband’s form. Even when going to the outdoor toilet at night accompanied by two groups—Toshie and Sen, Yoshi and Sōzō—she found herself made inexplicably irritable.

“But you all—Father must be terrifying.” “Mother here’s been thinkin’ how nice it’d be if Father would show himself somehow.”

When spoken to with such a dead-serious expression, Toshie and the others could find no words to reply. In reality, Otoki wasn’t merely paying lip service—when she stepped outside at bedtime, she would stand transfixed, peering into the darkness as if searching for her husband’s figure.

The reply to their initial report about deciding to take Toshie into the household finally arrived from Sōkichi in Central China after nearly two months. He wrote that should he return safely, he would apologize properly to his parents, but in case of the worst, he entrusted everything to their care. "Apologies or not—Father’s already gone," Otoki thought as she placed the letter before the new mortuary tablet with tearful laughter. “Apologies don’t matter—Father understood everything. But...to go without ever seeing his grandchild’s face...”

Without even wiping her overflowing tears, she would lapse into her usual soliloquies—but in moments like these, neither Yoshi nor Toshie could find any words to offer their mother, left to shrink into the distance. “If only Tomota had married long ago, it would’ve been better.” “My own lack of sense makes for poor talk among folks.” She would abruptly bring up such matters and start naming people Tomota’s age who already had two or three children. He was twenty-seven this year and the family heir—by village standards, undeniably late. Whenever this topic arose, Tomota himself would remain evasive, leaving things unresolved as always—yet now that she had lost her husband, Otoki suddenly began agonizing over it as if it were her personal failing. Moreover, though she had never felt any restraint toward Tomota during her husband’s lifetime, now alone, an unaccountable hesitancy had taken root—words she meant to say catching in her throat before they could form. Of course there was no reason for Tomota’s demeanor to have changed; it was simply that with Father’s death, she herself had become foolish—so Otoki secretly believed.

The ones most troubled by Mother’s visibly growing irritation were, as ever, Yoshi and Toshie. “Since Father died, Mother’s become all grumbly, hasn’t she?” Yoshi said, making Toshie anxious beside her,

“Whose doing do you think made you the woman you’ve become, Yoshi!”

The voice came sharper than expected. What Mother said felt misdirected and slightly incomprehensible to Yoshi in this situation—though she wanted to argue back, the unforeseen intensity of Mother’s angry demeanor left her no choice but to stay silent. Mother kept sullenly quiet, clattering dishes in the kitchen. “If Brother were to bring home a bride, I think Mother’s temper might settle.”

When Toshie said this in the sunlit spot before the storehouse, Yoshi blinked her discerning eyes rapidly. “Even if Yumi says no, I think there are plenty more.” “If it were Yumi-chan, that’d be good though...” “Brother’s different from the rest of us—so rigid...”

After saying that and laughing, Toshie went into the papermaking hut. “Brother, you should get a bride soon.” Even when addressed so abruptly, Tomota didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow. Maintaining his stern profile utterly absorbed in the task, he dipped the sugeta frame into the vat with a splash. “So there’s some good girl available?” he nevertheless responded verbally while working.

“If it’s Brother, there are plenty who’d marry him, right, Sen?” When she said this with a straight face, Sen—who was beating paper mulberry beside her—ducked her head and stuck out her tongue.

Yumi still came by from time to time. No sooner would she be chatting with Otoki than she would come to Toshie’s side and peer at the baby clothes being sewn. Back in Koriyama, she had somehow managed to assemble a basic set by timing it when her brother wouldn’t notice, but since coming here, her mother-in-law had provided various old items, so now she had several cotton pieces made—items that were hard to obtain these days. Apparently on orders from the village office, a midwife familiar with the village had come by twice or so.

“How are you feeling right now?”

Even when Yumi asked her, Toshie simply kept smiling. Whether the baby was a boy or girl didn't matter—all she wanted was to send word of a healthy child's birth to Sōkichi at the front and her mother in Sukagawa. It was a thoroughly simple feeling—if she had to call it a feeling, that was the entirety of what filled her heart.

“Toshie looks so happy.”

Having heard everything from Yoshi, she could immediately grasp the hidden feelings behind Yumi’s words—yet precisely because of that, she found herself only able to respond to their surface meaning: “Yes, I’m truly happy.”

“Where’s Yocchan?” Yumi entered in a somewhat flustered state unlike her usual self. “What’s wrong? They’re soaking paper mulberry downstairs,” she answered and hurried out.

The sound of someone rushing down the slope filled Toshie—for whom even moving about had become laborious with her due date imminent—with an inexplicable envy. Even climbing from the well to the garden required her to pause for breath once. She tried to break off a branch of the plum blossoms blooming there, but in the end couldn’t stretch high enough, and only caught the scent melting into the balmy sunlight. At the edge of the mulberry field, a small beetle’s antennae kept brushing against the red buds of the peony. When she raised her eyes, the distant woods were hazed in pale green—on such days in April, even the sound of water from the papermaking hut carried a heartwarming warmth.

There was no managing Sister-in-law, and Yoshi, who had returned shortly, came over after all but throwing down the bucket of paper mulberry in the dirt-floored room.

What Yumi had rushed into the bleaching shed to suddenly talk about was her quarrel with fiancé Ryōsaburō. Ryōsaburō—back in the village on company leave—had treated Yumi with his usual manner, but some tangled words seemed to have pushed even gentle Yumi beyond endurance. She’d finally snapped at him: “If that’s how it is, why don’t you marry some woman you actually like?” There was no reason she should endure such mockery from that man. What grated most was Ryōsaburō being village-born himself—a man who’d merely lived five or six years in Fukushima! Yumi kept repeating this point, her agitation mounting. Yoshi had initially hesitated over how to respond but soon joined her in mercilessly denouncing Ryōsaburō. As she spoke, Yoshi’s eyes too blazed with fervor. Toshie felt anger rise within her—this was no abstract grievance.

“If things get this tangled up, what on earth will happen later?” She didn’t voice it aloud, but the absurdity of being bound by such parental arrangements was utterly exasperating to Toshie. On an evening two days earlier than the midwife’s predicted date, signs of labor came to Toshie’s belly. She had to step outside so many times it became embarrassing. Even so, she also did kitchen work with Sen. Even when Tomota’s visiting friend made some rather crude jokes while leaving, she forced a high-pitched laugh to avoid letting on, but soon the intermittent pains assaulting her grew unbearable. When she called out “Yocchan,” Yoshi—noticing for the first time—exclaimed “Mother!” in an excited voice.

“Is it?” Otoki, who had entered from the rear bathhouse while fastening her waist cord, scooped up Toshie—now collapsed forward—with rough urgency and barked, “Yoshi! Lay out Sister-in-law’s futon quick!” But then—“No, Yoshi can’t handle it—Mother’ll do it”—she dashed into the inner room. This ferocity seemed alien to the mother who had lately been sapped of vigor. She barked orders at Tomota and Yoshi in a shrill voice, bustling about until she gasped for breath. Even at a hurried pace, reaching the midwife’s house in Hachikencho took over an hour. Tomota hunched to watch Toshie disappear deeper inside—*So Sōkichi’s child is finally coming*—his cheek tingling oddly as if brushed by something. He removed the lantern from the dirt-floored room’s wall. “Hey!” he snapped at Sen, who had abandoned her packaging work to loiter. After telling her to assist Sister-in-law, he stepped out beneath stars sharp with lingering winter chill.

Seven In her desperation to conceal her spirit—utterly drained by the bleakness—she only ended up being seen through by Yoshi and Toshie, yet she kept raising her voice with strained vigor at every turn. Otoki, who had swung between succumbing to a vulnerability that dismissed all pretense of pride and deliberately airing petty grumbling before her daughter and daughter-in-law, found a raw vitality reviving in her very demeanor from the day Toshie’s child was born. The midwife came only for three days; afterward, Otoki took charge of bathing the infant. She was a big-eyed girl who looked just like Sōkichi when he was born.

“Hey, Katsuko, what a fool Gramps was to die without seeing such a sweet little face,” she murmured, stroking the infant in the basin. With that, she would mutter her habitual refrain and caress the baby in the basin.

But an event that would force the household’s way of life to change completely—as though testing Otoki once more—lay in wait. Tomota received another conscription order.

“Mother—you listening? I’m being called up again.” When Tomota thrust the red paper at her with eyes wide open, Otoki’s chest constricted as if pierced through, her jaw going slack like a simpleton’s. Though there had been men summoned twice before in the village—and though she’d told herself to brace for this possibility—the reality had never truly pressed upon a woman like Otoki until it materialized abruptly before her eyes. Managing to haul her buckling frame to the bedroom after croaking out “Just—wait,” she collapsed to her knees and muttered “Father…Father” through ragged breaths. For some time she stayed motionless, eyelids sealed shut,

“I see. In that case, I have my own plans too.” “Of course, Father—you watch over us. I’m not just some fool of a woman.” And this time, she muttered in a slightly higher voice.

The union chairman Mr. Yasui Yasuo, who had rushed over, busily surveyed Yoshi and the others by the hearthside. After asking “Where’s Mother?” and declaring it unthinkable for her to be sleeping at such a time, he unceremoniously headed toward the inner room—only to be addressed in a clear voice by Otoki, who sat formally there. “Chairman sir, how will our military-use paper fare?” Military-use paper? Such concerns were unnecessary—the allocations had mostly been settled, he explained, and the remaining amounts would be appropriately distributed elsewhere to ensure no complications arose. This was, of course, the union chairman’s responsibility.

“Guess womenfolk like me ain’t cut out for this after all.” “You’re taking this on yourself, Mother?” Yasui felt mild exasperation at her resolve, but pity stayed his hand from direct criticism. “Not sayin’ it’s impossible… Your hanshi’s quality ain’t in question…” Otoki knew better. Someone who’d only occasionally filled in for Sōjirō at the vat could never produce military-grade paper that’d pass muster. The weak thought—If only Father were here—threatened to surface again, but she clenched her gut and thrust it down.

In the evening, with Yoshi before him, Tomota brought out the ledger and examined each item from the previous year—food expenses 365.61, housing expenses 40.15, clothing expenses 180.81, public levies 10.40—giving instructions for their livelihood during his absence. For the immediate future, there was the matter of allocating the field work that would soon begin along with synchronizing the silkworm rearing schedule. Then came next year’s paper. As they wondered how much the women alone could possibly produce now, they gazed with deep emotion upon records from the fifteenth year’s papermaking—a time before military-use paper had existed. Shoji paper: 191 bundles (93-size, ¥19.10 per bundle) ¥3,757.80; Lining paper (3,100 sheets) ¥64.07; Miscellaneous paper ¥153.00; Total: ¥3,974.87. Expenses: Paper mulberry bark, soda ash, etc. ¥1,367.24; Labor costs ¥200.50; Fuel ¥80.00; Net balance ¥2,292.13. With six family members working 200 days, the daily wage had come to over eleven yen; yet when it came to Mother, the sisters, and Sōzō, one had to admit they’d be doing well to reach half that amount.

“Shouldn’t we keep the nori at half what we’ve been using too?” “Reckon so...”

When nori was mentioned, Tomota harbored a particular sentimentality—one he would occasionally recall and gently caress. When he discovered a vast cotton field in full bloom at the Central China battlefront, for a brief moment he fell into the illusion of standing in his hometown's nori fields. They crushed the roots into bags, for the mucilage squeezed from them was paper’s sole adhesive—and though its leaves were palmate like cotton’s, those of the sunset hibiscus that villagers often called *nire* in their dialect split into far deeper lobes. Upon closer inspection, the lobes had coarse serrations, the stem’s shape differed, and compared to cotton’s rounded form, one side bore stiff hairs along elongated, pointed ovals. Yet the single-petaled yellow flowers blooming with similar fullness—without even needing to peer into their purple bases where red dominated—evoked the nori fields in Tomota’s mind.

Muttering “Nori, huh… guess that’s right,” Tomota stepped down into the dirt-floored room and looked up at the remaining bundles of nori still hanging from the beams, their roots caked with earth.

Tomota’s household consumed about eighty kan annually, and three se of farmland sufficed for cultivation. However, while procuring fertilizers like potash and phosphate grew more difficult each year, paper couldn’t be made without nori—so the villagers grew it with desperate fervor. Even if they kept producing it as before to compete, with Tomota gone, it was clear they’d only end up letting it rot. Yet, unable to declare they needed less than half as much as before—a clinging reluctance—Tomota kept gazing up at the ceiling beams. He already knew all too well the unspeakable brutalities of the battlefield. Today, he became that soldier once again. Now that he had become someone for whom all that mattered was advancing through bullets with bayonet in hand—everything else reduced to trivialities of no concern—Tomota found himself unbearably irritated by this other self that had detached so carelessly from that soldier’s state, this separate mind still vexed and wavering over nori cultivation.

The man who would soon embark on a journey beyond life and death gazed up at the ceiling with an expression utterly divorced from that harsh reality—Toshie, lying in her recovery bed after childbirth, watched him with profound dissonance. They could just leave things like the nori up to Yoshi to handle as she saw fit. In the confusion where even handling objects felt impossible—the whole family fidgeting restlessly—her brother-in-law showed none of the urgency expected from someone holding a conscription order, whether from thick nerves or something else, making him seem almost offensive. When she’d learned of Sōkichi’s conscription there’d been no trembling agitation, but now Tomota’s impending absence left her unanchored, driven by a restlessness that kept jostling her kneecaps.

The next day, as Tomota—preparing for his farewell visits—was slipping his arms into his uniform sleeves, he peered at Katsuko and asked, “What’s wrong?” Toshie ventured, “Brother... don’t you feel lonely?” “Why?” he countered. When met with this response, he momentarily faltered for words. He had stayed up late again the previous night discussing matters with Yoshi. For men Tomota’s age in the village, conscription usually meant leaving behind wives and children—or at least having a promised woman waiting. Yet here was Tomota being drafted again without ever having known a woman’s touch. One might dismiss this as trivial sentimentality from a young woman’s perspective, yet still feel compelled to acknowledge its inherent loneliness. Even so, Toshie secretly cherished an admiration for this stony detachment—a man departing devoid of romantic entanglements—which paradoxically amplified his masculine appeal.

“I spoke with Yocchan last night.” When Toshie said this with a laugh, Tomota responded, “Hmm… Well, maybe it’s better this way—clean and simple.” “After all, I couldn’t snag a proper girl like Sōkichi did.”

It was a rare joke from Tomota. "But there might be someone." In the heat of the moment, even Toshie couldn't help letting slip a sarcastic remark that escaped her lips. She fired back at me without flinching, but Tomota—having immediately grasped her meaning—averted his eyes. If this continued any longer, things would likely spiral out of control.

“You’re all too carefree,” he said. “Ain’t got no mind for women’s talk now.” While tying his shoelaces with Toshie’s “I know that” at his back, he pictured Yumi—who’d learned of his conscription just yesterday—standing quiet on the earthen floor, her face taut with urgency. When he’d called “Yumi,” her eyes had brimmed with tears poised to fall. Had she gone to Ryōsaburō?—The thought lashed him like a whip, and he felt with cruel clarity the spasm in her cheek as it paled to cold ash. As a conscriptee, he did possess that unyielding sense of duty. Yet might there not also have been some vulgar pride at work—this boast of purity untouched by romance, so diametrically opposed to his brother who’d left a pregnant woman unknown to their parents? But even this was ultimately just another refuge his escapism had carved in desperation—and thus coexisted with that cloying sentimentality: a heart secretly heavy with attachment as he marched to war. (Moreover, that such vanity and sentiment were mere childish games—something Tomota should’ve understood clearly upon returning to battle—was knowledge he already possessed.)

The day before his departure to the garrison town dawned with last night’s rain clearing into a pristine sky, and the airplanes that had been crossing over the village daily lately traced brilliant arcs at great heights.

If they papered through the entire summer, there was no doubt they would be able to produce military-use paper by winter this year. "Yes, no matter what, I’ll keep making paper through this summer," Otoki declared aloud while carrying the infant’s soiled laundry to the wellside, voicing her resolve.

When November arrived and autumn work concluded, there came no respite before the Taishi ceremony marking papermaking season's commencement awaited them. From crossing into the new year until early May's 88th night stretched six full months of paper season—though rare were households that continued through the remaining half-year too, managing vat liquids quick to spoil in heat while juggling farming and sericulture as secondary tasks. For Otoki—whose sole aim was honing her skills—processing two or even three vats daily posed no issue. With that quantity of materials, consulting the master would settle everything.

("You're a mother to two soldiers now, and you've got your first grandchild—hang in there, Mother.") These words from the master had greatly pleased Otoki. From the wellside, Otoki called loudly to Tomota as he returned along the narrow straw-sandal-worn path on one side—walking with military precision from the national school send-off ceremony. "This must be Sōzō’s old diaper—I recognize it." To this remark, she added that she remembered it well, then grew slightly more solemn.

“Brother, I think we should try making paper all through summer, I tell you.” “I’ve turned it over every way, but if we don’t do this...” “Summer papermaking, Mother...”

"Nah, it’s a different matter altogether, I tell you," Otoki hurriedly cut him off. Seeing his mother’s eyes—shining with childlike simplicity as she squared her shoulders in declaration that she’d hone her skills to make paper surpassing both Father and Brother this winter—Tomota found himself speechless.

“That’s right—if we keep at it all summer, we’ll surely make proper paper come winter, I tell you.” He could only nod. Several households had already sent all their menfolk to battlefields and were managing with women alone. This must be Mother’s refusal to be outdone by such circumstances—soon enough, military-use paper would indeed be completed by her hands from the Yoshida household too. It struck him that perhaps Mother wanted to hear him say he could leave with peace of mind, but voicing this felt somehow shameful, and what emerged instead was an offhand comment.

"But Mother, don't push yourself too hard, I tell ya." "Mm, I'll be fine." "You be careful now, Brother."

When he looked toward the pulp-mixing vat, clusters of yellow narcissus flowers there—past their prime, wilted and shriveled—swayed heavily in the faint breeze that had risen. "This is the great war we're talking about—this time, don't you go expecting my return... Not for Sōkichi's sake, nor Yoshi's Shigeji-kun... As a son, I'm telling you straight—Yoshi'll handle the household... Even if the worst comes... You understand me, Mother?"

"Of course I understand," she responded, yet Otoki's eyes remained fixed straight ahead.

“No matter what comes… Brother, even if three coffins were laid before you, Mother won’t so much as flinch, I tell you.” “Then I’m relieved too.” The words he’d never been able to voice now slipped out smoothly for the first time—. The materials prepared exclusively for first-grade shoji paper still filled about four vats. Though they’d weighed on his mind, he’d been distracted by the whirl of preparations; now that the moment had truly arrived, an unavoidable regret took hold. "I tell you, we should at least finish those remaining vats," Tomota insisted. While Yoshi listening nearby understood his desire to settle all affairs before departure, she found something pitiful in his insistence that spending this final night papermaking would be excessive—yet couldn’t help perceiving the wretchedness of his clinging.

Though it was called a farewell dinner, once they finished the modest meal attended only by the master and branch chief, Tomota made his way to the papermaking shed. When Mother said to leave it as is and let her make the paper, he deliberately replied, “It’s first-grade stuff—doubt Mother can handle it,” and Otoki laughed too, saying, “You said it yourself, Brother—remember that.”

Twisting on the twenty-watt bulb, Tomota surveyed the shed's interior emerging coldly in the light. The scent of nori vat liquid he hadn't smelled these past few days struck his nostrils with startling freshness. Noticing this, he bent down and peered into the vat's gray-stagnant water where two or three winged insects—slightly larger than mosquitoes—floated motionless. These insects falling into the vat served as proof that the 88th night marking papermaking season's end would soon arrive.

While squeezing nori from the second vat, Yumi’s voice saying something reached him from the direction of the main house. With a start, he placed his hands on the paper mold frame, but as he dipped sheet after sheet, he soon unwittingly slipped into his usual papermaking trance—so that even when footsteps suddenly halted outside the shed, Tomota’s mind remained still as an abyssal pool. “You’re still making paper even though you leave tomorrow?” “That’s why I’m making it now.” She gave her characteristic stifled laugh—hu, hu—and stood motionless for a moment before departing without farewell, the sound of Yumi’s straw sandals gradually fading from the papermaking shed.