Читать книгу Beauty in Disarray - Harumi Setouchi - Страница 10

Chapter 1

WHEN I THOUGHT of going to Hakata, it was merely out of a desire to stand upon the seashore at Imajuku, noted for its beautiful pine grove at Iki-no-Matsubara. If you look at a map, you will find that the town of Imajuku, which sits upon Hakata Bay on the western outskirts of Fukuoka, is about seven miles from the center of the city. Inside Hakata Bay is a smaller inlet bay called Imazu, and Imajuku is exactly in the middle of that inlet's coastline.

Four or five years ago, on a trip down this coastal highway from Hakata to Karatsu, I must have driven past Imajuku, but I don't have the slightest recollection of having done so. Only after the memory of Noe Ito began to occupy my mind did I become conscious of the name of the small coastal village of Imajuku in the Itoshima district of Fukuoka prefecture.

The name Noe Ito alone will probably not mean anything to those born in the Showa era (1926-89); and even to those born in the Taisho era (1912-26), her name will be practically unknown. But for those who have even the slightest interest in or knowledge about the Taisho era, it is inconceivable that they could not know of the two greatest events at the beginning and end of that era: the trial of Shusui Kotoku for high treason and the Sakae Osugi murder case. Even among the various massacres that took place in the confusion following the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, no event caused more indignation and consternation among the people in those days than the murder of Sakae Osugi, his wife Noe Ito, and his six-year-old nephew Soichi Tachibana. They had been strangled and beaten to death by military-police captain Masahiko Amakasu and five of his men and then dumped into an abandoned well. Sakae Osugi's too great fame as an advocate of the anarchist and socialist movements in Japan, and the brutality of accompanying his death with the murders of his wife, not even in her thirties, and his young nephew, were the main reasons that the case evoked so much public compassion and resentment. I suspect that those who remember Noe Ito as a victim in the Amakasu Incident may go even further back and recall the famous assault-and-battery case of the zany love affair dubbed the "Shady Inn Incident," after the inn of that name in Hayama, in which Osugi was stabbed by his mistress Ichiko Kamichika. The object of the woman's jealousy at that moment was not Osugi's legal wife Yasuko Hori, but his new flame Noe Ito.

The mere fact that a woman named Noe Ito turned up in these two bloody affairs, both of which created sensations in society within a few short years, is sufficient to make us aware that she committed herself to a dramatic destiny. Furthermore, you will be all the more impressed with the dramatic elements in her life when you realize that the same Noe Ito was one of those sensational "New Women" in the coterie of the Bluestocking Society and much talked about in the magazine Seito (Bluestocking), edited by Raicho Hiratsuka; that Noe Ito shared her fate to the end with Seito after proudly taking it over from Raicho; and that she was also entrusted with the historical role of bringing down the curtain on this magazine. Moreover, before Noe ran off with the anarchist Sakae Osugi, she was the ardently loved wife of Jun Tsuji, the man who had established dadaism in Japan, though according to one family census, she had been married once before. In a period of ten years she gave birth to seven children. The life she lived so fully and colorfully during the brief span of twenty-eight years was so remarkable and brilliant that it contained the measure of the lives of several ordinary women.

It was during the time that I was writing about the author Toshiko Tamura, one of the leading female figures from the last years of the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the beginning of the Taisho era, that I became acquainted with Noe Ito's name. Though I had noticed it listed among the names of the Seito staff, to which Toshiko herself was connected, I was not the least bit charmed by Noe Ito's overly subjective impressions, which were composed in a stiff style; by her so-called "short stories," which were cast in a rather immature form; or by her puerile poems published in the magazine, the following one typical:

Eastern Strand

Solitary rock along the eastern strand,

On its brown back

You grebes that have also come to perch today—

Why in that lonely way

Do you cry out?

. . .

See here, grebes! How I wish

You'd die! On that rock—

If you die, I'll die too.

If we must die after all, oh grebes,

Why not hurl ourselves into the maelstrom!

I burst into laughter after reading this poem. I was amazed that even though the magazine had come into being in the last year of Meiji, the staff had been so poorly endowed with talent that they had been forced into publishing such a juvenile attempt at literature.

When I compared this poem with the first article of the Bluestocking Society bylaws, formulated when the group was organized, I was all the more surprised by their naivete and could not help but smile sardonically:

We will strive for the development of female writers, allow each to exhibit the special gift of her inborn talent, and at some future date aim to produce female geniuses.

By chance I once more came across the name of Noe Ito, which I had hardly given the slightest notice to the first time. This is how it came about. Shortly after I had finished writing about Toshiko Tamura, I began a tenaciously long novel based on the life of Kanoko Okamoto. Kanoko had joined the Seito staff a little later than Toshiko and slightly earlier than Noe. Since not only one but two excellent female writers who had attracted my interest had, during a period in their youth, secured positions on the staff of Seito, I took another look at the magazine itself.

As a result of this examination, I was strongly caught up in the blazing enthusiasm and dazzling way of life in which Noe Ito, the youngest member of Seito, spent her youth on the magazine, defended it longer than anyone else did, absorbed from it more than anyone else had, despaired over it more deeply than anyone else, and, finally, using Seito as a springboard, resolutely sundered herself from her past to fling herself against the bosom of her lover Sakae Osugi—all at the risk of her life and for the purpose of love and revolution.

Even when considered in the most favorable light, the literary talent of Noe, who wrote poetry like "Eastern Strand" at the age of seventeen, could hardly be called full of promise. Though she later earned her living quite well from her pen by managing to produce stories and reviews and even translations, she left behind works too poor for later generations to dub her a writer of the first rank.

What attracted me to Noe was neither her literary talent nor her remarkable growth as a human being, but the elaborate drama of the lives she was entangled in, the extraordinary intensity of each of the individuals who appeared upon her stage, and the bewitching power of the dissonant play of complexity and disharmony performed by all those caught up in these complicated relationships. My feelings intensified as I read about Noe in Fumiko Ide's herculean labor Seito, and Kureo Iwazaki's elaborately detailed biography of Noe Ito entitled Woman of Flame.

By standing on the beach at Imajuku, where Noe Ito was born; by listening to the cries of the grebes, which she had written about in her poem; and by watching the blue waters of Hakata Bay, in which she had swum, I thought I would attempt to get closer to the image of Noe that had so completely captivated me.

When the jet I was on landed at Itazuke Airport, I was greeted by a reporter from the Nishi Nippon newspaper office. As soon as I got into his car, the young man, whom I was meeting for the first time, said, "I've been in touch with Mako. I expect she'll see us at the office." At that moment I didn't understand what he meant. Two or three days before my departure for Hakata, I had casually mentioned to Shizuo Kito, an old newspaper journalist who happened to drop by to see me, my reasons for going to Hakata, and he was prompt enough that very same day to arrange for me to contact the Nishi Nippon.

Kito, who had been living a long while in northern Kyushu, had told me right off, "Quite a few of Noe's relatives are still living in Hakata. In any event, go meet them. I'm positive the daughters of Osugi and Noe are also living there." Before I left, he even telephoned with journalistic promptness and solicitude to tell me he had already arranged my visit. Nevertheless, I was certainly not mentally prepared to meet Noe's relatives this soon.

Only after we had been driving toward Hakata for five or six minutes, leaving houses with thatched roofs and blossoming cherry trees far behind, did I finally realize that the name I had just heard, Mako, was that of Osugi and Noe's eldest daughter. With Jun Tsuji, Noe had two boys; with Sakae Osugi, four girls and a boy. A glance at the following diagram will indicate the relationships:

As you look at this arrangement, noting the ordinary names of Noe's children by Jun Tsuji and the extraordinary names of her offspring by Sakae Osugi, you will be startled by the amazing life force with which she continued to conceive almost without rest.

Osugi had the greatest affection for his eldest daughter Mako, to whom he gave the strangest name of all his children—Mako meaning "Demon Child"—and he often mentioned her in his works. Even when Noe took her other children back to her hometown to give birth to another infant, Mako was the only one Osugi did not allow to go. And on those trips related to his work, he did not think it an inconvenience to take her along.

Late in 1922 Osugi had himself smuggled out of the country, and disguised as a Chinese, he tried to participate secretly in the International Anarchist Conference in Berlin. Because he delivered a speech in Paris on May Day before proceeding to Berlin, his identity became known and he was arrested. He was sentenced to a three-week confinement in Paris's La Santé prison. In his record of that time, "My Escape from Japan," in which he described the whole episode, Osugi commented:

No doubt by now they know about my arrest, thanks to the telegram sent by that newspaper. Adults will merely think I have finally done what I have been intending all along, but even though I have not spoken of my plan to any of my children, they must be worried about me, especially my eldest daughter Mako, for she would instinctively know my condition, despite the fact that she was not told. In my wife's letter the other day, she noted that when Muraki (Genjiro), who has been living in our home, was wrapping books to send to some prisoners, Mako said to him in a low voice, "Don't you have anything to send to Papa?" Since I disappeared after forcing her to spend a few days away from home in order to deceive her, Mako took it for granted that I was again in prison. And even when someone asked her, "Where is your papa?" she either remained silent, not answering at all, or smoothed everything over by talking about something else, but especially at night she speaks casually with her mother about the rumors concerning her father. I thought of sending her a telegram. I actually sat down at my table to try to jot down some simple sentences. But I could not come up with any wording cheap enough. The following strange items came from what I had tried to compose in various ways:

Mako! Mako!

Now Papa's

At La Santé, Paris,

A world-famous prison.

But don't worry, Mako,

For I'm eating delicious European food,

Licking chocolate,

Puffing cigars on a sofa.

And so

Thanks to this prison,

Be joyful, Mako!

Papa will soon return.

So many souvenirs, too heavy in my bag,

And cakes and kisses for my baby!

Dance and wait!

Wait, Mako! Mako!

I spent the entire day loudly reciting these poemlike lines while walking around my cell. Strangely enough, even though I did not feel the least bit sad, large tears emerged from my eyes as I was reciting. My voice trembled, and the tears flowed incessantly.

The passage suggests the figure of a devoted parent writing openly about the daughter he loves.

The collection of Sakae Osugi's complete works, published two years after his and Noe's deaths, contains more photographs of Mako than anyone else. Since almost all the pictures serving as the frontispiece for the volume were snapshots of the day of Osugi's return from Paris on July 12, 1923, only two short months before his final days, Osugi is shown with Noe and Mako, who both came all the way to Kobe to welcome him. He appears totally worn from his travels, despite the bright look on his face, and Noe reveals a lifeless expression, her stomach swollen in just about her ninth month with Nestor, her third child in three years. Only the six-year-old Mako makes the big round eyes she inherited from her father glitter, and no matter which photograph she is in, she looks happy and intelligent.

Mako's fashion was far too chic for those days. Her clothing was European, her hat stylish, and her hair cut in a pageboy bob. Photographs of her give the lively impression of a child in an intellectual urban family that delights in modernity. I realized that very cute little Mako was now almost fifty years old.

It was just about noon when we arrived at the newspaper office. The building, which had escaped damage in the war, had excessively high ceilings, wide stairway landings, and sturdy wooden handrails painted to look like mahogany, all of which made me feel I was in an old-fashioned European manor house. The scene was much too perfect for meeting Mako, the illegitimate child of parents headed for one of the most dramatic fates of the Taisho era, the building itself having remained as it had been at that time. As I was exchanging greetings in the reception room with a few of the men on the newspaper staff, I sensed that someone was at the door, and I looked back just as a woman came quietly into the room.

The face of the small middle-aged woman was fearlessly staring directly at me. Her long thick eyebrows and the remarkably large pupils in her eyes—with their double eyelids glittering as if burning near those eyebrows— pressed down on me with an intensity that suggested those eyes and brows were all the face contained. Her cheeks were hollow, and because all the lines were gathered into her short narrow chin, her face looked for a moment neat and heart-shaped. But I could easily overlay upon that face, so small it could be enclosed completely in both of her palms, the image of the cute little round-faced Mako, whose large button eyes and long eyelashes I remembered from the photographs.

Her age was most apparent around her mouth, her teeth somewhat visible as a result, but the youthfulness that made it impossible for me to imagine that she was nearly fifty was not due to her small size only. Though her features at a glance had in them a trace of sadness, a sudden sign of gentleness, which forced the tight lines of her mouth to immediately soften, flickered in her eyes with a strong light that did not flinch as we exchanged looks, a friendliness and innocent shyness overflowing in ageless freshness in her eyes. Her rich black hair, her dark-blue woolen kimono closed tightly at her slender throat, and her long gray fur overcoat to protect her hands and legs from the cold finally came into view. An intense atmosphere radiated from the unshrinking glitter in her eyes, and the vitality of her small body had a freshness only an intellectual can possess.

The moment before she arrived, I overheard one of the newspaper staff say, "Actually, Mako is notorious for hating to be interviewed. She's a plague to newspaper reporters. She doesn't want to talk about her parents at all, and she even turns away from NHK's microphones, telling them that she had no real connection with her parents. So to get anything out of her..." From the very start of my trip, I had no real intention of pumping Mako for various details, so I was moved merely to see before my eyes this fifty-year-old child of a pitiful fate. Mako was the same age as my elder sister, and Louise had been born the same year as me. This amounted to saying that these sisters and I were women who had tasted both the sweet and the bitter of life during the very same generation. When I thought about this fact, I felt in Mako a common, practical housewife of the world seen along any street, the practical wife of a practical man of the world, and I suddenly sensed some intimate attachment to her.

When she became aware of my purpose in coming, she merely nodded and said, "I don't remember anything. But my mother's aunt is still alive, and she may have something to tell you." Mako herself guided me to the place in the city where Kichi Dai lived.

Sitting beside me, Mako came up only to the shoulders of my five-foot-two-inch frame. The diminutive Mako told me quite frankly, "My daughter living in Tokyo has presented me with a grandchild. She's the daughter I left with my former husband, but nowadays she and I keep in touch with one another. Yes, the husband I divorced has already died. Well, I've had nothing but trouble from my parents." Saying this, Mako humorously made the pupils of her eyes spin around.

From the time she entered school to the time she started working and then got married, Mako had been raised in an age when everything was tinged with militarism, so she had been subjected to unjust pressures and an unjust fate merely because she was Sakae Osugi's daughter. This I could fully imagine from having been brought up during the same period myself.

"Like the time I entered a girls' high school. I had been staying with my grandfather here until I finished elementary school, but I went to high school from the house of an uncle on my father's side who lived in Yokohama. At that time I expected, quite naturally, to take the prefectural high school entrance examination, but my teachers wouldn't let me. Even though I might have passed with good marks, my teachers, needless to say, knew I couldn't get in because I was Osugi's child. That's why I entered the private Koran Girls' High School. So this event, you see, serves as a model for everything else in my life."

Her talking so indifferently of her own affairs, as if she were speaking about someone else, struck home all the more forcefully to me.

"Apparently I was doted on by my father, but I have no memory of that at all. Even those incidents I think I have remembered are from books I read afterwards or are 'images' I got from listening to others, so I feel as if my memories have been made out of them. According to what was written in a book of my father's, a man tailing him by keeping close watch from in front of our house would wonder if my father had given him the slip or not, and he would ask me about him while I was playing outside. When he asked me, 'Is your papa in?' I would say yes, and even when he asked, 'Is your papa out?' I would say yes. And then when he asked me if my father was at home or not, it seems I gave him two yes answers. I was told that the person shadowing my father complained to my parents that he was no match for little Mako. When I was told about such events, I somehow came to believe that I really had those experiences. When I saw my father's books describing those occasions he had taken me to an inn along the coast where he often went to do his work, a kind of vague memory loomed that I had walked along the same seashore with him. All my memories are of this sort. Since my sisters were much younger than I, they can't have had any memories, can they? But, you know, strangely enough, there's only one scene I remember clearly. It was when my father wasn't at home for some reason or other, and we were living in a two-story house. Every time we heard a crowd of people at our front door, my mother's face took on an unusually frightened look, and she forced me up to the second floor, saying, 'Don't come down, no matter what!' I heard Kenji Kondo continually shouting something at the entrance of our house. Mere child that I was, I became frightened, and stretching only my neck out from the upstairs landing, I secretly glanced below. I found my mother sitting resolutely in the very center of the lowest step on the staircase with a bucketful of ashes held tight across her lap.

"That strange posture of my mother sitting smack down there and that bucketful of ashes have remained remarkably vivid before my eyes. I suppose my feeling of fear and my mother's somehow reliable figure and that bucket of ashes were strange even to a child. I guess she intended to defend us with those ashes if anyone broke into our house.

"Oddly enough, my father left me at home the very day he was murdered. Perhaps he had a premonition after all, because wherever he went, he always wanted to take me with him. But on just that day, he left me behind with our neighbor, Mr. Roan Uchida.

"My father was very kind to his relatives, so he was worried about his younger brother's family at Tsurumi, and he was anxious to visit them as soon as possible. He had gone out with my mother, intending to bring my uncle's family back to our house because they had suffered a great deal during the Great Kanto Earthquake. My uncle, though, was ill in bed, so for the time being they brought back only my little cousin Soichi. That was when the trouble occurred. If on that day my father had taken me along as usual, I would have been killed with all of them.

"Thinking about the event afterwards, Mr. Uchida told me that in spite of the fact that I always left with my father when he went away, it was strange that I hadn't even run after him on that day. I was playing over at Mr. Uchida's every day, and I was really there more than I was in my own house."

I couldn't bring myself to ask Mako, who was speaking to me in such a free manner, if she remembered anything further about the day her parents died.

Roan Uchida, in his book The Last Days of Osugi, has left us some notes on Mako's condition during the days before and after her parents' murder.

On the day they died, Osugi and Noe had departed from their house in clothing so European in style that Uchida mistook them for a European couple working at the Seisho Gakuin Mission School. But even then Mako, who was playing at Uchida's, said, "Oh, Papa and Mama!" and she jumped up and ran out, only to turn back immediately.

"Papa and Mama are going to my uncle's in Tsurumi, and they may be staying there tonight," Mako said, and all through the afternoon she played on at Uchida's. But her parents never returned.

Though practically everyone at home was almost convinced that Osugi and Noe had been assassinated, Mako was still playing cheerfully. Even in the morning, when the coldblooded murders of Osugi and his wife and nephew were finally announced, Mako came over to Uchida's house. He describes it thus:

The members of my family, who already knew about the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Osugi, finished their breakfast in silence. Since I felt Mako would probably come over to play today too, I warned my children, "Don't say anything about Mako's papa!" Even though they were too young to understand, they nodded wordlessly with an expression on their faces that something terrible had happened.

After a while, just as we expected, Mako came in through the back door as usual. When she saw us, she said immediately, "My papa and mama are both dead. My uncle and grandfather went to get them, so they'll bring them back by car today." The person she mentioned as her grandfather was Noe's uncle, who had rushed up to Tokyo after hearing in his distant hometown in Kyushu about the Osugi tragedy, news of which had spread faster in the districts than it had in the capital.

Coming into the parlor and seeing my wife there, Mako once again said, "Mrs. Uchida, my papa and mama were murdered. It's probably in today's paper."

I had strictly bidden my children, "Don't say anything about Mako's papa!" thinking I didn't want to bruise her poor young heart even a trifle, but clever little Mako already knew everything. Yet she was only an unthinking child of six. Even though she knew about the miserable fate of her father and mother, she was playing innocently as usual. Sensing that Mako was miserable, my child who was the same age gave her all her treasured dolls and stacks of colored paper decorated with lively designs.

Laughing, I asked Mako if she disliked her strange name, as I noticed that although she had retained the name she had changed the way of writing it from "Demon Child" to "True Child." In similar fashion, Ema had become Emiko ("Laughing Child"), and Louise, Ruiko ("Mindful Child").

"Well, my parents' old friends in Tokyo still call me Mako when they see me. It's not a bad name," she said, a bright smile on her face.

While we were carrying on this kind of conversation inside the automobile, we found ourselves at Tsunehiko Dai's house in Chiyomachi. Kichi Dai, the younger sister of Noe's father Yokichi, had married Tsunehiko's son Junsuke. She had taken charge of Noe in her primary school days, and even in those Tokyo days when Noe went to a girls' high school, Kichi Dai had let Noe commute from the Dai house. During her maturing period Noe had been more intimately connected to Kichi than even to her own parents. Now Kichi's home was managed by her grandchild.

We found no one else at home that day due to her greatgrandchild's having gone to take a school entrance examination. Kichi was resting quietly in bed in her room at the back of the house. Neat and pretty, her skin white, the elderly Kichi informed us that she was in bed because of a slight cold. Usually so strong that she was seldom laid up, Kichi had, even on her sickbed, fixed her white hair, which was still thick enough to run a comb through, into a prim little bun.

She had classic features. Even at her age her nose was shapely, and she had a lively expression in her eyes, which slanted down slightly. Her wrinkles and freckles were hardly noticeable on her white parchment-like cheeks, and it startled me to find traces of youth and charm on her slender delicate hands, which rested on her chest.

Smiling by my side as I continued to be impressed by the freshness of this elderly woman, Mako said, in a tone she thought Kichi could not hear, "She's quite a foppish old lady. They say she still rubs the slightest bit of leftover warmed sake or egg white into her face and hands. Her grandson's wife laughs at being no match for her youthfulness. Even her hair has to be done each day or she isn't satisfied."

While smiling and looking up at us as we were talking, Kichi occasionally nodded her head in agreement over some point. Nevertheless, she could catch our words if we raised our voices a little, all her responses clear even when she slipped on some expression, her powers of recall amazing, her mind as sharp as ever.

"Oh, I see... Yes, is that so?... Did you say you came all the way from Tokyo?... I see. Oh yes, certainly I have become senile, as you see, and nowadays I am completely useless. I wonder why I am living like this at all... What?... My age? Well, let me see. I don't know how old I am. Anyway, I've been living a long time already, and I've become useless, and now I'm wondering what I should do. Still, death hasn't come to get me yet. I was born in 1876, so I guess that I'm about ninety. Well, I may even be almost a hundred. I have not counted for a long while...

"Are you asking me about Noe? I've already forgotten everything about her. Forgotten everything so that it is all vague and hazy. What I am now remembering in this sort of drowsy way are mostly those memories of Noe in her childhood, and in addition to those memories, though I don't know why, it looks as if I cannot forget those things that touched me to the quick, whether they were happy memories or sad ones...

"Are you asking me about Noe? The reason she was living with us in Nagasaki was that her family was poor and they had many children. She was a strong-willed unyielding girl, but she was also a crybaby. My husband Junsuke sold lumber to the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. Later he went up to Tokyo, but I've completely forgotten what he did for a living during those Tokyo days. Yes, I guess he was treated kindly by Mitsuru Toyama, and maybe he did some work for a group with a name something like Gen'yosha, some right-wing nationalist society. Yes, that's right. I was his second wife, so his daughter Chiyoko was not my own child. Noe was my relative, so it was quite natural for her not to feel reserved with me, wasn't it?...

"Are you asking me about Noe's mother? She was called O-ume, and she was a very wise person. She was perfect from whatever angle and gentle, and no matter from whose point of view, a wonderful person. Our family at Imajuku was called Yorozuya and came of fairly old stock. They say that our family had a prosperous shipping agency in the old days. We made a fine living when I was a little girl. I guess it was about the time Noe was born that our fortune started to decline. Her father Yokichi cared only for music and dancing, so his family was about to go bankrupt. Oh yes, Noe's father was also quite the dandy. Generally, all the Yorozuyas were well known for their faces, and everyone talked about the 'Yorozuya eyebrows' and the 'Yorozuya eyes.' I wasn't the least bit like the Yorozuyas, but all my brothers and sisters were good-looking and popular. And even Mako, when she was brought back to us from Tokyo, when she went to have some fun around Imazu, the Imazu villagers could guess at a glance, 'Ah, she's a granddaughter of the Yorozuya at Imajuku.' I dare say she was really born with Yorozuya eyes and eyebrows...

"Are you asking me about Noe's looks? Yes, yes, certainly she was pretty. She was a girl with nice clear-cut features. She liked to read books, and apparently she was not fond of the things that girls usually do, like cleaning and sewing. Still, I told her what a woman's duties were, and I forced her to take turns with Chiyoko in doing the cleaning...

"Are you asking me if Noe could swim? Oh yes, if you were raised by the seashore, you'd be able to swim as well as a water sprite. She was good at the crawl... When I was a child, I would also slip away from school and swim all day. Then I would lie in the sun on some piece of lumber and dry my wet hair, and when it was half dry, I would put my hair up as if I were quite innocent, thinking I would never be suspected... Oh no, I never wore any swimming suit. Everyone swam stark-naked. Noe loved diving, but Chiyoko was more like what you'd call an athlete today and swam as far as Nokonoshima. It doesn't seem as if the way we spent our days as children and the way Noe did were very different.

"Since we didn't have any really interesting things to do, several times a year when plays came to Shusenji village, she would go to see them, since those plays offered the greatest enjoyment she'd be able to have. She'd go to the Festival of the Dead dancing in a red cotton apron, with cutouts of colored paper proudly sewn on it... Well, Noe's love of learning was probably inherited because my mother Sato was so good at reading and writing that she taught the neighborhood children. What's more, my mother had a real taste for songs accompanied by the samisen, and the fondness in Noe's father's blood for dancing and singing was probably inherited from my mother. At village plays and other kinds of entertainment, the first person lively enough to go up on the stage and play the samisen or dance was Noe's father.

"When we moved from Nagasaki to Tokyo, we sent Noe back to Imajuku for a while, and from there she went to an elementary school in Shusenji. When she graduated from that school and got a job at the post office, Noe sent letters to our home in Tokyo day after day, letters so thick that they fell with a heavy thud. Those letters begged us to grant her wish to come up to Tokyo and attend a girls' high school like Chiyoko was doing. Living right next door to us at the time was the novelist Namiroku Murakami. When my husband showed him Noe's letters, the handwriting and the contents were so good that he advised us she showed some promise and that we ought to let her come up to Tokyo, so my husband felt inclined to do so and we decided to take charge of her again. But when she finally did come, Mr. Murakami was quite surprised to see that Noe was a girl. He was convinced on reading those letters that the writer had to be a young man. My husband was really a person who preferred bringing up someone to saving money, and he took a liking to people of character, be they friend or foe. Later on, even though he belonged to the right-wing Gen'yosha group, he felt inclined to take care of Osugi, more, I believe, from my husband's fondness for human beings than from any sympathy with Osugi's doctrines and principles...

"Are you asking me about Osugi? Yes, I knew both Osugi and Jun Tsuji real well. I found that while Tsuji was a gentle hesitating person, Osugi was a really fine man. His gentleness, especially toward women and children, was exquisite. Sometimes I wondered why the world feared such a gentle person. Certainly Tsuji was also gentle. All of Noe's men were devoted to her...

"Oh yes, are you asking me about Noe's first husband? He was a son of the Suematsu family in Shusenji, and since both fathers were friends, it was natural for the subject of marriage to come up. I've heard that the young man's entire family had settled in America and opened up a shoe store. Noe hesitated in giving her answer, but since she'd be able to go to America, she agreed. But when she found out that she couldn't go to America, she said marrying was out of the question and she began to balk. Nevertheless, during the summer vacation when she was in the fifth grade at the girls' high school, the marriage took place. Somehow, though, I've forgotten all the details concerning the marriage at the time...

"I'm good for nothing, since I'm apt to forget everything. I don't even know how I manage to go on living. You took the trouble to come all this way, and I want to give you some memento of Noe, but I've nothing to offer. Well, at any rate, during my life my husband took me to many places I wanted to go to. Yes, he took me just about everywhere. I've probably been to all the famous hot-spring resorts in our country. He even took me climbing with him to the top of Mount Fuji...

"Yes? Are you asking me about the time Noe was murdered? I certainly do remember that real well. Before the special edition came out, a newsman let us know about the murder, so my husband and Noe's father rushed up to Tokyo. The members of her family weren't that surprised. I guess they expected it. Noe had the habit of saying that she and her husband would never die peacefully in their beds like ordinary people.

"Oh yes, now I remember. When my husband went up to Tokyo to get Noe and Osugi's ashes, Mr. Toyama was kind enough to lend them his car for as long as they needed it. They told me that several men, Mr. Toyama's followers, protected them as guards. They said there was fear of an attack by some of those right-wingers.

"Yes, that's the way my husband was, and I guess Mr. Toyama was also the kind that took a liking to men of character, even if their principles were different and even if they were his opponents. He treated Noe with affection, and it seems that he gave her pocket money sometimes. Once, thanks to Mr. Toyama's help, Noe went to Shimpei Goto's house to get some money. I remember hearing that Mr. Goto, laughing, told Mr. Toyama everything with the remark 'She's an interesting girl.' It seems that Noe grabbed the money, which had been placed on a table, and as if it were natural to not even bow in thanks, had quietly left. There must have been many times when my husband took the trouble to help Osugi meet Mr. Toyama and Mr. Goto. At first, when Noe ran off to live with Osugi, my husband was very angry with him, but discovering at last that Osugi was a great man, my husband took charge of Osugi's body when he died. You see, a big gravestone, unusual since it didn't have any names on it, was set up in Imajuku for the three victims. What had been put up was merely an unworked stone, but the grave site was big enough to serve as a play area for children, and it became an attraction. Even that grave my husband built. Later the stone was removed due to some city-planning ordinance, but I don't know what became of it, though I heard that someone thought it interesting and in the middle of the night secretly carted it off and put it in his own garden. But not long afterwards, I heard that he fell into his garden pond and drowned. These are the only things I remember... Well, I'm really sorry, seeing you have come all this way..."

In the Dai home there were two large thick calico-covered albums that Junsuke Dai had assembled. The pictures of Osugi and Mako were carefully laid out, and I also found a photograph of that gravestone for the three victims, a stone that no longer existed but had looked like some queer abstract work of art. From just one of those albums I could surmise the history of the opulent, showy life of the Dai family, and I could imagine the life and character of Junsuke Dai, something of a big shot with his mind bent on business and a fondness for politics.

Mako searched one of the albums for a large photograph of a high school graduation and showed it to me. It was Noe's graduation picture from Ueno Girls' High School. Attired in a long-sleeved kimono and wearing a ceremonial skirt and a formal black jacket decorated with her family crest, Noe, her hair in the long chignon style of graduation ceremonies at girls' high schools of the time, was in the middle of the top row. While all the other students directly faced the camera, Noe was standing with her body sideways, her profile taken as her eyes stared at the sky. The moment the visiting photographer, completely hidden behind the black, red-lined cloth of his old-fashioned camera, had shouted out, "All right, I'm ready to shoot!" and released the shutter by pressing the round rubber ball with a theatrical gesture of his hand, Noe had struck this pose, her manner of looking up at the empty sky either affected or sulky. At eighteen years of age according to the Japanese method of counting, Noe had put on weight, her face, shoulders, and breasts visibly plump.

When Noe went up to Tokyo, she often continued studying through the night for her entrance examinations, all of a sudden deciding to take them to enroll in the fourth-year class at Ueno Girls' High School, where her cousin Chiyoko, two years older than Noe, was in attendance. Noe succeeded. As a result, she finished high school in only two years. This was the fruit of Noe's effort to reduce as much as possible the burden of her uncle Junsuke Dai's school expenses, but it also revealed she was endowed with real talent. In a corner of this graduation picture was a round photograph of Jun Tsuji.

It was in the spring when Noe was in the fifth-year class that Jun Tsuji assumed his post as an English teacher at the school. Pictured as a handsome man with delicate features on a slender face, Jun Tsuji is wearing glasses whose thin frames seem to be made of silver, his kimono neckband joined so tightly at the neck and showing his dark undergarment that instead of looking like an English teacher at a girls' high school, he appears more like a Japanese dancing instructor or a young actor impersonating a female. His features alone give the impression of a nervous person.

We left the Dai home, and while we were on our way to Imajuku, Mako had the driver stop in front of a large house that manufactured Hakata dolls sold wholesale. The lower floor was a kind of storeroom, the clerks visibly quite busy packing these Hakata dolls for shipping.

When we went upstairs directly from the entranceway, we found the second story formed the business office. While we were looking at several Hakata dolls in glass cases lining the walls, someone called out behind and Mako introduced me to a young woman in Western dress.

"This is Louise."

Ruiko, who had changed her name from Louise, sat smiling on a sofa. She seemed quite young, perhaps in her twenties or early thirties at most, but if I remember correctly, she had been born in 1922. When her parents were killed, she must have been a year and three months old.

As I had expected, her pretty oval-shaped face, though longer than Mako's, had the Yorozuya eyebrows and Yorozuya eyes, but her large eyes and round line of chin immediately reminded me of the Osugi I had seen in the photographs. It was either the slender legs under her skirt or the attractiveness of her hairdo bound into a chignon after being combed up at the nape that made me feel she was a strange woman whose youth, like that of a small girl, still remained in her entire body. No sign of age was visible on her smooth wide forehead.

The former owner of the doll factory had been an anarchist living in Fukuoka, and it was this association that had helped Louise acquire a side job painting these dolls. She told me she had just brought in her finished dolls and was going to take back some unglazed ones. I could see the extent of Mako's kindness in silently providing me with every convenience. And Louise also talked in an utterly unaffected way, her face all smiles.

"Well, with parents like ours, we've never benefited at all, have we? Even when I married, my husband's family was dead set against it, telling him to put an end to marrying an Osugi girl, that even a geisha or whatever would be better. The result was he left his family and cut off all connections to them so that now he lives only with me.

Her manner of speaking was also as indifferent as if she were talking about the concerns of someone else. Even this woman, who was much less bound to her parents than Mako had been, had carried on her back from the time she was aware of what was going on around her the burden of the names of her unusual parents.

"At any rate, the times we were raised in were hard times, weren't they?"

When she stood up, I realized Louise was also small. I imagined that both women resembled their mother in build. Was it right to assume that Mako, who had been told that when she was young looked more like her father than her sisters or brother had, had come to take on her mother's features as she grew older? As I gazed into the youthful and beautiful eyes of these sisters who were long past forty and nearing their fifties, I could well imagine their beauty during the heyday of their youth. What with Louise talking about her marriage and Mako's having referred previously to her second marriage, I guessed that the unusual passion in the blood of Osugi and Noe had been inherited by their daughters.

It took less than thirty minutes to get to Imajuku from there. The car ran along a straight road leading to Karatsu and before we realized it, we found the sea glittering to the right of our car window.

The blue of Hakata Bay is whiter and nearer the blue of sky than the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Inside the bay the usually raging waves from the Sea of Genkai had calmly and quietly settled, and we could see the shadows of boats gently floating on the clear waters of the sea. The beach along the coast is narrow, and I was reminded of the seacoast of Shonan with its smooth flat feeling without rocks or stones.

No one was on the beach. Our driver told us it was just at this hour that the area was the quietest and offered the best view. In summertime this coast is as thick with crowds as the coast of Shonan, so there is no room to take even a step.

Around the area where Iki-no-Matsubara appeared, painted barracks, apparently the remains of a summer resort, caught our eye. The pine trees grew in such clusters in so narrow a place that rather than call them beautiful, I received a somewhat eerie impression from them.

I had expected that the house Noe was born in would be on the outskirts of the pine grove, but I now found it was more to the west. The town of Imajuku extended along the bus route like a sash. Another stretch of narrow road continued nearer the seacoast than the wide paved road we were on, and the row of low-built houses on both sides of that narrow road probably formed the old village of Imajuku.

When at Mako's direction we turned toward the sea down that narrow road where a police box was located, our car immediately came out on the beach as if we were about to plunge into Hakata Bay. Just beneath the stone wall of a high breakwater, the sea came to a sudden halt. The sandy beach was so covered with fragments of rough stone I felt as pained as if I had been walking over it in my bare feet.

The smooth coastline of the bay revealed a clear gentle curve as if it had been drawn with a compass, Imazu Bay widely nestled in it. Myoken Cape stretched to the east, and jutting out at the end of a headland to the west was the handful of homes of the town of Imazu, one behind the other. The horizon of the spacious Sea of Genkai outside the bay extended beyond as if fusing into sky. As I stood on the shore of this coastline so deficient in variety and so smooth it seemed almost too prosaic, what glittered to overflowing in my visual field was the blue expanse of water and sky, and I felt a yearning as if my heart had been naturally lured beyond that sea spreading out like a fan unfolding. I could only nod my head in agreement as I felt that if anyone stood on this beach every morning and evening, stared at this sleepy tranquil line of coast, and gazed at the approach and return of the tracks of those waves of the sea, that person's heart, be it Noe's or not, would be filled with longing to set out on a journey to some distant world beyond. The wind from the sea was also gentle, but if I gave my mind to it, the sound of waves was continually reverberating into the wind as they quietly beat against the shore.

"This is our old family house."

Mako pointed to a dwelling behind her with its wide wooden wall at the corner of a narrow road. The one-story structure, so low it lay concealed behind this wooden barrier, had probably been built that way to provide protection from the sea wind. It was an unpretentious house in the style of a fisherman's dwelling often seen along the coast.

"Fortunately my aunt has just come from Shimonoseki where she lives, so please meet her. It's too bad you can't talk to my uncle because he's been sick in bed since the end of last year."

I almost gasped at this unexpected good luck. Though there were five children including Noe in her family, only one of the others was a girl, Tsuta by name, two years Noe's junior. And Mako had just said this very Tsuta from Shimonoseki was inside the house. The sick uncle referred to was Noe's second elder brother Yoshibei, her eldest brother Yoshijiro having died young shortly after going to Manchuria. Apparently even Yoshibei was a kind of character, what with his having left home early, living in Saga, devoting himself to inventing and designing, and holding many patents. Late in life he had returned home, had inherited his parents' house, and had led a quiet existence, but Mako said that only last year he had collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.

When I was shown through the house, I found Yoshibei lying in bed in an eight-mat room at the back of the dwelling. The invalid, whose features were conspicuously white, had been born in the twenty-fifth year of Meiji, so I guessed him to be seventy-three. This person too looked far younger than his years, and for an old man he had a soft, genial expression on a face devoid of the unusual blemishes of the aged. Even in bed his figure looked great and imposing. I recalled that the bed on which Kichi Dai had been lying was also rather long and bulky for an elderly person ninety years old.

Tsuta, who had come to inquire after Yoshibei's health and to attend to his needs, had the surname Takabe. She was five years Yoshibei's junior, but with her erect frame and her height noticeably tall for a woman, she seemed much younger. She had a dark complexion, and her upper and lower teeth were missing, but her coloring was healthy. In the beauty and brightness of her large eyes with their long dark lashes and their gently arching length of brow, the charm of her early years could still be seen, unmistakable traces in her of the Yorozuya-type attractiveness. Her dark hair with its sprinkling of gray was artlessly done up in foreign style, and she had on a Japanese cooking apron over her black kimono, indications of her indifference to personal appearance. Once she began, she did not mince words as she spoke openly and frankly, and no matter what I asked, she came through with a response. While she talked, an indescribable light spread over her beautiful eyes, and I felt an easy familiarity growing between us. This generous freedom of behavior and refreshing lack of caution with strangers were common characteristics of all members of the Ito family.

It seemed to me that even Yoshibei, who hardly seemed able to talk, was attending to our conversation, and with an expression that indicated he did not dislike listening, he occasionally smiled as if faintly recalling something.

Beyond was a veranda, a garden which had been tended with great care, and the blue expanse of sea above the wooden wall at the back of the garden. As I was sitting in this room, I could hear the ceaseless sound of waves. The sound I heard was much stronger than when I had stood on the beach, and I felt as if the dull thud of wave after wave was reverberating through my entire body.

"Since my elder sister was only two years older than me, the two of us, the only sister each of us had, confided everything to one another from the time we were children, and certainly we kept no secrets. Yes, yes, throughout my life I've been put to trouble by Noe. Because from the time she was a child she didn't care about others. Well, she did like studying, and she did quite well at school. From the time she was little, she hated to play with children her age, and she was always doing something by herself. Often at supper time we couldn't find her even after we lit the lamps, so all of us at home were quite worried, but on those occasions when I opened one of the closets, I would almost always find her there. Having brought in a candle, she'd be absorbed in reading every single line in the old newspapers pasted on the walls inside the closet and behind its sliding partition. You see, our family was already poor in those days, so there were no books or magazines in the house, and for that reason I guess she even did things like that. At any rate, reading was what she liked to do more than anything else. Even at that time she was a child who wouldn't do a single thing she disliked, and she thought only of herself. Just studying by herself made her indifferent to everything else, even if it caused our mother trouble or forced the rest of us to cry. Thanks to her, I always had to take the losing part. When we were old enough to know what was happening around us, we realized our father stayed away from home. Yes, certainly from the time our father was young, he had been fond of music, singing, and dancing, and because he was by nature a clever man, he was generally good at fishing, flower arranging, tea ceremony, and cooking. His strong point was in singing to the accompaniment of the samisen, and he was so good on the samisen and at singing ballads he could put even a professional to shame. He was even skillful at dancing. I guess he deserved to be called a profligate because of these things. There were times when he stayed away from home for quite a few years, and my mother had to work hard to provide for her children. My elder sister was our father's favorite child, and she was trained early to play the samisen and to dance. Whenever a troupe of players or anything of the sort came to town, my father dropped whatever he was doing to go, taking my elder sister with him, and he often made her appear on the stage. I couldn't look on with indifference as I saw my mother working alone in the fields around our neighborhood or doing piecework in order to raise her children, so from the time I was little I tried to help her, but my elder sister was totally indifferent as to whether our mother or I was troubled. On top of that, even after Noe became an adult, she continued to mercilessly inconvenience our mother, and she never did any of the duties a child is supposed to do for a parent. Certainly my elder sister was blessed with a lucky and easygoing temperament. The only reason she went to my aunt's home in Nagasaki was to study, and that was because my aunt's place offered a more convenient environment for study than our house did. Noe's writing us that my uncle and aunt treated her harshly was complete nonsense. Even at my aunt's home she was allowed to do as she wished, just as much as Chiyoko was.

"Because my aunt's family went up to Tokyo, Noe came back home and graduated from Shusenji Higher Elementary School about two and a half miles away. She was immediately employed at the local post office for a while, but she was quite disgusted at living in a town of this kind and thought only of going up to Tokyo.

"From the very start she had no interest in working at a post office in a country town, and she took an examination to enter the Kumamoto Communications Bureau. Though she came out first on the written test, her fingers were clumsy, not skillful enough in striking those telegraph keys, and she failed. Well, Apparently she was a person unskilled in the use of her fingers. At least she could sew a kimono. When she was a young girl, she didn't take the slightest interest in love or anything like that. She never had the least bit to do with any of the young men around here. Of course, she was bright at school and pretty and attractive, and there were some men who liked her in a friendly way. Generally speaking, though, she studied hard when she was young and had no interest at all in young men.

"She was strong-willed, and though I'm rather talkative now, I was quite reserved in my younger days, since my sister would speak rapidly about whatever she felt like saying to anybody. When she grew up, though, it was just the opposite and she became quiet.

"You want to know about her first marriage? Well, she wrote that our parents and her uncle Dai and his wife had mercilessly decided everything according to what they wished and that she was the victim, but it wasn't that way at all.

"Of course, I'm not denying the marriage was arranged by our parents when my elder sister was at that girls' high school, but marriages of girls in those days were arranged in this way all over Japan, weren't they? The other party was well acquainted with all the members of our family, and even I had often gone to his home on festival days and other occasions. She wrote she had never seen the fellow's face or even known his name, but that wasn't the way it was. Not only that, for although she said she had no intention whatever of marrying him and that our parents heartlessly and forcibly made her, she did once definitely consent. Yes, of course, she never took a fancy to him even once from the very first, but she was fascinated by the prospect of going to America, and she told me that if she did get there, she'd definitely run away from him. So when they celebrated the wedding during the summer vacation when she was in the fifth grade in her high school, she certainly had consented. Even now I remember her hair in the shimada style with the bridal hood over it and her short-sleeved crested coat of gauze crepe, and I can remember she was talked about as one of the prettiest brides ever seen in our vicinity. It may sound strange for me to say this, but when she was very young, she didn't spruce up at all and didn't care in the least about her hair and clothing, but she was really pretty then.

"But when she was getting ready for the wedding ceremony, she flared up in anger, saying she didn't like him after all and, as if she were a man, deliberately walked along recklessly kicking up the skirt of her bridal outfit. She so worked off her bad temper on everyone around her she made all of us quite uneasy.

"The day after she married, she came running back home and promptly hurried off to her school in Tokyo. It seems she hadn't allowed the groom to make the slightest move toward her.

"'I wouldn't let even one of his fingers touch me!' she boasted, but we talked it over among ourselves and decided that we had never heard of the existence of such a submissive husband. Well, actually, he was a most unattractive man. All he had to him was that submissiveness, and even I found him distasteful. But as soon as my sister came home, she said quite calmly to me, 'Tsuta, it's better if you marry him instead.' That was her way of talking. And she really thought so. But even I found this kind of man disgusting.

"Though I sarcastically and severely asked how on earth a person like her could live, thinking only of herself and never paying any attention to her family or parents, she arrogantly declared our parents were poor out of their own choice and so it wasn't our responsibility. Nevertheless, with total indifference she continued to inconvenience others. Oh yes, as for me, she gave me lots of trouble until she died, and I never received a single world of thanks from her.

"Later on I settled down in Shimonoseki, and when she was on her way back home from Tokyo, she'd stop off at my place. She always bought her ticket only as far as Shimonoseki. And when she was returning to Tokyo from Imajuku, without fail her ticket was bought only to Shimonoseki. She had decided the remaining portion of her ticket would be handed to her by me, and as for some extra spending money, she had decided that I, of course, would hand that out too.

"Each time she came home, my mother had to work like a horse. Yes, whenever my sister gave birth to a child, whether by Tsuji or Osugi, she came back to Imajuku. You're asking why? Of course, it was because she had made up her mind that the cheapest way of having a baby and getting a rest before and after the birth was at home. My mother, who was already old, often complained about being forced to wash diapers even while having to watch Noe's other small children. Though I told my mother it would be all right to abandon a daughter who had never once since childhood helped her, the fact was my mother was a gentle person, and saying, 'Still, she is my daughter,' continued to look after my sister's needs. Even during the time of a birth, Noe would be reading her books whenever she had a moment to spare, and during that period when she came home, she never washed any diapers or anything else.

"Everyone in our neighborhood whispered about how such a good mother had ever given birth to such a daughter. To make matters worse, there were many times when she came either with Tsuji or Osugi as her husband. When she turned up with Osugi, our father was angry and for a long time broke off with them with the remark that he couldn't show his face to the world, but finally he gave in, and she again began bringing Osugi with her.

"Yes, well, she was lucky with men, wasn't she? Both Tsuji and Osugi were quite kind, and they thought highly of her, referring to whatever related to her by saying 'my dear Noe-san' this or 'my dear Noe-san' that. Both of them were good men, but I guess Osugi was much the better after all. He was more of a man, kinder, more dignified.

"In a way, Tsuji was somewhat feeble and gave one the impression of shilly-shallying. My sister finally complained he was a nincompoop, a good-for-nothing.

"Even now I can remember Osugi with his big body bent down by the side of our well as he washed their babies' diapers. Whenever he came, he worked hard doing this kind of thing, even washing Noe's undergarments for her.

"As for Tsuji, of course, she loved him very much at the beginning. He was quite an expert on the shakuhachi bamboo flute, and I remember how they often played together, my sister accompanying him on the samisen.

"She played it quite well, and she was also good at singing, since she'd been trained in both by our father. After she married Tsuji, she was taught how to sing and play the long epic songs of Japan, thanks to Tsuji's mother, who was quite accomplished in the arts, especially in these epic songs, because she was the daughter of wealthy rice distributor at Kuramae in Asakusa. You see, what my sister learned at home were short ballads and love songs, things like that. You can probably imagine how my mother felt, constantly having to take care of either Tsuji's children or Osugi's. My father and mother were rural people, and no matter which man came they said he was, after all, their daughter's husband, so it seemed they worked as hard as possible.

"After Noe lived with Osugi, our small quiet village came to be thrown into a turmoil. Up until then the police officials stationed in our village had nothing to do after they came to live here, and they were quite happy to come and just go fishing, but the moment my sister began living with Osugi, the officials were put to much trouble. Each time they went to our house, they complained it was just their bad luck to have been ordered to be stationed in such a town. Well, every three days without fail they had to appear at our house to ask us what letters had arrived from Tokyo or if any strange things had occurred. And if at that moment while they were questioning us, my sister and her husband happened to turn up, the police were quite alarmed. For a whole day they would have to loiter around our house as they stood watch outside. And besides that, since my sister and Osugi openly accompanied each other on quiet walks, the police were ready to drop with fatigue from following them. In the long run, my sister won these constables over, and she sent them off on errands and made them watch her children. She always had them carry her luggage from the station.

"As usual, she didn't care about her appearance in the least, and when she came back home, she'd be wearing her shabbiest kimono, intending to have it mended by our mother, and so Noe wore it nonchalantly, the cotton bulging out of the kimono seams. The strings for tying her haori half-coat were always twisted pieces of paper. When our mother, unable to look on with indifference, said, 'At least why not set your hair when you come back to the village, since every soul is looking at you!' Noe would declare arrogantly, 'Before long, women will be wearing their hair like mine! Just wait and see.' When I think back to that now, my elder sister's prophecy has actually come true, hasn't it?

"Yes, about the time she was killed, she was often wearing foreign-style clothing. Her hair was bobbed, and she even wore a hat. Osugi was a born dandy, and it being his way to be finicky about clothes, he was extravagant in appearance. I guess my elder sister was influenced by him. Osugi was quite particular about their children's clothing, and Mako-san was made to wear the kind of stylish outfit Osugi liked. So even when we looked after the children here, he made them wear only European dress and brought them wearing the latest fashions. In those days no children in the rural districts wore European clothes, and girls with a Dutch bob were even rarer. Certainly it was quite unusual for a woman to wear European dresses in 1923, even in Tokyo, don't you think? But there was something becoming about my sister in her European attire. She was exceedingly confident that whatever she wore or whatever she did was suitable, so it seems everything and anything became her.

"Oh yes, I just remembered something very interesting about Tsuji. When I returned home after escaping from the family I had married into, my first marriage having failed, it was just then that Tsuji first came to our house and I happened to meet him. At that time he said he would take me up to Tokyo to make me an actress in the Imperial Theatre, and he kept insisting he could definitely turn me into a success. Even Noe was in earnest about it and encouraged me. It sounds strange to remember that now, but when this was told to me, I somehow felt it wouldn't be a bad thing to appear on the stage, having always liked singing and dancing, and I came to want to go. But for some reason or other my father was against it and wouldn't let me. In those days Sumako Matsui, who acted the parts of Nora and Katucha, had created a sensation all over the country, not to mention the actresses at the Imperial Theatre, so I couldn't deny I had a longing to become an actress. Though my father was fond of singing and dancing and even forced his daughter to dance on the stage as one of his favorite diversions, he nevertheless felt that being a professional actress was worse than being a geisha, obsessed as he was with the old-fashioned idea that no woman should degrade herself by becoming an actress, the word for actress, kawarakojiki, equivalent to beggar.

"Oh, is it my marriage you're asking about? The first was when I was seventeen and married a very wealthy man from a neighboring prefecture after he took a fancy to my looks. But since he was a person who had never had to worry about money, he was deceived by a swindler just after our marriage and went prospecting for gold with him after he had told my husband they could find a gold mine in Kagoshima.

"The moment they arrived there, they indulged in all luxuries regardless of expense. They continued their foolish diversions by being spectators at the theatre from morning till night after reserving box seats for a full month and by having geisha parties at teahouses, even asking me to join them, and then when they finally went into the mountains, there was nothing to take out because it was all nonsense from the first, so little by little my husband got in financially beyond his depth and in less than six months found himself quite penniless. The swindler made off with all my husband's money, and I was turned into a prisoner by being forced to stay by myself at the mine while my husband went down the mountain to raise some cash. The money he sent me was seized on the way by his associates, and all of them absconded. The time kept passing and I still couldn't come down from that mine. All the villagers around me kept watching me because everyone connected with my husband had bought everything on credit and had avoided paying their bills at the inns and eating houses and grocery stores. Finally even I ran out of food, and all my clothes were taken away one by one so that I was left only in my kimono undergarment and the long cloth around my loins. For three days, from morning to night, I spent my time in bed. The children who occasionally came to peek in at me soon found me in bed whenever they came and once, thinking I was dead, raised a great outcry.

"Someone advised me there was no other course than to run away at night, so I escaped by the skin of my teeth, but when looking like a beggar I finally found my way to my husband's house, I was told it was no longer ours. My husband had received such a severe shock he had become deranged and entered a mental hospital. While I was nursing my husband, who immediately after enjoying the very heights of luxury had been thrust into the very depths of poverty and who had gone berserk without understanding what was what, my aunt Dai, who had married me off to him, came to see me and suddenly made me go back with her. I was still young and unable to make heads or tails of what it was all about, but in only one year I had been raised to the summit of life and flung to its very abyss, and that was how it ended for us. It was then that I met Tsuji. If my disposition had been like my elder sister's, I probably would have ventured up to Tokyo regardless of my father's opposition and would have let Tsuji make me into an actress. There's no knowing about one's destiny. I had learned a costly lesson by my marriage, and I felt no man deserved to be called such unless he could overcome adversity when put to the test. My next marriage was to a person twenty-seven years older than me. My sister said at that time as if treating me with contempt, 'Why on earth marry a man whose age is so different from yours! Will it satisfy you?' And since I couldn't forget her words, I also said to her when she married Osugi, 'Why on earth do you want to marry a man who has so many women around him? Will it satisfy you?'

"She said quite calmly, 'As for those women, I don't care how many there are. Because I'll be the one to monopolize him before long!' Well, it absolutely turned out the way she said. That was really strange. And even about her death she told me, 'After all, we won't die normally on straw mats. In all probability we'll be murdered when we least expect it. So if that time should come, never be confused or grieve over me. Even if we should be killed, we ourselves will be happy because we have always done what we felt was worth doing.' Even those words turned out to be true. Yes, at that time we were informed by the Dentsu news agency even before the special edition of the newspapers came out. Perhaps because we had often been told of such a possibility by my sister, we merely thought, 'Well, at last it's so,' and we were neither too surprised nor too suddenly saddened. Even our parents told me they felt the same way.

"My second husband ran a house in a red-light district in Osaka and later in Shimonoseki. Although my sister had principles, she never criticized our business. Nor did Osugi. Instead, though, their taking money from us seemed like the most natural thing in the world. They often came to our house in Shimonoseki. At first my husband, his age being what it was, couldn't understand them in the least and didn't like to associate with them, and so after receiving my sister's letter, I always went to the station to meet them and handed them some money there, and that was how I met them to talk over many things. But gradually my husband was able to understand them, and my sister and Osugi came to see us at home. Yet what troubles we had after they arrived! Without fail, we would be summoned by the police and even asked what time they woke up and when they ate. The questioning took all day, and it disgusted us! During their stay with us, two or three detectives would be standing around our house watching. It was an absolute torment! So finally when my sister reached the station, she herself telephoned the police and told them they had just arrived. In the end there was the spectacle of the police carrying her luggage and riding the children on their backs and sending all of them up to our house.

"Speaking about misery and happiness, I have never been as miserable as the time my sister and her husband were killed and my father and uncle Dai came back from Tokyo with the children. Because my sister was killed twenty days after the birth of her last child Nestor, this last baby couldn't even hold its head properly. The older children were two-year-old Louise, three-year-old Ema, and Mako, who was seven. Yes, I'm counting their ages in the Japanese way so they were even younger. My father was carrying the baby in one arm while holding Louise's hand with the other, and my uncle was leading Ema and Mako with both his hands.

"Each time they arrived at one of the stations between Tokyo and Shimonoseki, many newspaper reporters suddenly crowded onto the train, taking pictures and interviewing them, so it must have been unbearable. When I went to Shimonoseki Station to meet them, it was so jammed I couldn't even get near. It wasn't only the reporters, for the place was crawling with busybodies trying to catch a glimpse of the children, and the entire station was in great confusion. When I finally reached them after pushing my way through the crowds, I found my father totally exhausted and the baby, who hadn't received enough milk, almost senseless.

"Mako was stomping her feet on the ground screaming, 'I hate having my picture taken!' Attracted by her cries, Ema and Louise started bawling frantically. We couldn't do anything to make them stop. There wasn't even any water to mix the condensed milk with. But just then across from us a woman also with a baby held out her thermos of hot water. I too began crying, thinking we had really found a friend just when we needed one. After finally dissolving the condensed milk in hot water and giving it to the baby and pacifying the other children, we once more boarded the train and at long last started off. I cannot forget the misery I felt at that time. For the first time I was really enraged by the cruelty of my sister's death, forcing her to leave behind such lovely children.

"Already in those days my husband was in complete sympathy with my sister and her husband, so all the articles in the newspapers and magazines that came out at the time on Osugi and her he clipped out, no matter what was covered, and he put them neatly away. He never wanted the children to see them as long as they were alive. But saying these articles might be of some use, he kept diligently cutting them out and accumulating them. Yes, the pile of clippings was handed over to Ema after she grew up—she had been raised in our home. The child who looked most like my sister is Ema, who now lives in Shimonoseki. Clearly she most resembles Noe in her younger years.

"In those days we were troubled by the fact that many people wanted to do something for these children. We were surprised that even in that era so many people still wanted to raise the children of Osugi and Noe. All of them were decent, the offers coming only from rich men and scholars and other respectable persons. There were ever so many proposals to which they appended explanatory notes and inventories, like lists of their property and rough sketches of their homes. But confronted by these wild schemes, my father firmly held out against letting even one of the children go anywhere, and he was determined to raise them himself. Even though my elder sister had put my father through terrible troubles while she was alive, she was his favorite daughter, and in the long run he had unconsciously been influenced by her, so I believe he couldn't bring himself to hand her children over to others.

"Though I was Noe's only sister, the life I lived was quite different from hers. After I married a second time, I was never in need of money, and because of our difference in age my husband overlooked everything I did and let me do as I wished with all the luxuries he gave me. Nevertheless, my way of thinking was different because of our difference in age, so without really being able to understand him, I was not that satisfied somehow.

"I tried to compensate for the loneliness and emptiness I felt by making use of luxury and diversion, so matters became worse. The only thing I didn't do was take a lover, but as for other possibilities, I drained the cup of pleasure with everything and anything that men do. Every day I went to the theatre and I went to teahouses with my friends and I even called in geisha. I gambled. I drank sake. And besides all that, I decked myself from the top of my head to the tips of my toes in the most extravagant luxuries. I put on so many diamonds and draped myself in furs to my heart's content. When our house burned in the war, we became quite penniless, but due to the fact that I had been content at least once in my life, I no longer have any interest in anything or in desiring anything.

"Oddly enough, my husband, who had been thoroughly put out by my conduct, finally became partial to my sister and once after returning from a visit to her place in Tokyo kept saying, 'Everyone keeps mentioning that Noe's a woman who's more dreadful than a man, but when I went to Osugi's, I found, on the contrary, there's no woman equal to her in femininity. In her gestures and in her consideration for others, she's really womanly. I really understand now why all the men are crazy about her. When I compare you with her, even though you look like the embodiment of all that is womanly, you are truly a masculine woman!' That was what he was complaining about. Everyone in our family line lived long, many to be eighty or ninety. If my sister had not died in this way, she too would have lived on and on in good health.

"Though I couldn't give birth to even one child, my sister had seven children in ten years and died, according to the modern way of counting, when she was only twenty-eight. That alone shows how much vitality she had. Only twenty days after the delivery of her child, she went to Yokohama with Osugi during one of those dangerous times after the earthquake. Sometimes, even now, though it's my own idea, I feel Noe and her husband wouldn't have been killed if the Great Earthquake had occurred half a year later. To tell the truth, they were preparing to abandon some of their ideas, thinking about their children's future and saying they would put an end to their dangerous affairs. They really did tell us that... Good heavens! It's gotten dark outside. Dear me! I forgot myself in talking so carelessly about the things I did, and I've made you listen to my own absurd and trivial matters. Please forgive me!"

When we returned to Hakata, the lights downtown were already glittering. Mako had the driver turn down a dark street near Hakata Station and said to me, "Please come in and meet my child."

When we entered the old two-story house with its earthen floor, the dwelling apparently in the style of a residence in a shopping district, several men and women sitting in a wooden area near the entrance were painting Hakata dolls. I realized Mako's business was now the making of these dolls. Having caught the sound of our voices, a young girl with a big round face grinned as she came down from upstairs and standing by her mother's side greeted me.

Far taller than her mother and still growing was Mako's youngest child, who was in the sixth grade and who had once said to her parent, "My granddaddy was a great man, wasn't he? That's what my teacher told me." Above her smooth cocoa-brown cheeks were the unmistakably inherited Yorozuya eyebrows and eyes. Was it my own sentimentality that made me feel the child's face looked less like her sensitive mother's than it did the photograph of Noe as a wild young girl?