Читать книгу Beauty in Disarray - Harumi Setouchi - Страница 11

Chapter 2

IT WAS APRIL in the spring of 1911 that Jun Tsuji met Noe Ito for the first time. The execution of Shusui Kotoku and others for high treason had been carried out on January 25, and only two months later the spring was so ominously cold that even in the color of the cherry blossoms just after they had bloomed and even in the spring breeze one sensed the image of blood, the smell of decay.

On that spring day the entrance ceremony at Ueno Girls' High School was held. The oshima kimono Tsuji wore, bequeathed him by his father, had been hemmed up by his mother before Tsuji had set out. Because the kimono had been inherited from his father, its folds were considerably worn, but the hakama skirt, originally of superior Sendaihira silk, was neatly bound low around Tsuji's waist, and he had on a haori of black habutae silk, though the color of its crest was somewhat dulled. In that outfit Jun Tsuji's shoulders looked narrow and drooping, the skin of his oval face pale. The thin silver frames of the glasses he wore made his delicate face with its classical features seem nervous, but his eyes and their corners sloping downward gave an impression of mildness.

Behind Jun Tsuji, being led by the assistant principal into the auditorium where the pupils were already standing in rows, the murmurs of the girl students broke out, those murmurs spreading to every corner of the hall with a commotion and speed like rippling waves. When the assistant principal, who was walking in front of Tsuji, seemed to deliberately clear his throat, the noise instantly subsided, along with those voices saying "Sh! Sh!"

"He really looks terribly old."

"No. He's still young."

"He's like an artiste!"

When he caught these whispers out of the clamor that had suddenly died down, Tsuji suppressed a sardonic smile. His unusually keen sense of hearing had been inherited from his mother.

Almost all the chairs were occupied by other teachers sitting in rows near the windows at the side of the platform. Lined up in front were seats for the headmaster and his assistant and for the new appointee too. As if everyone had been waiting impatiently for these three persons to sit, the ceremony began.

Tsuji was no longer that young to feel nervous in being exposed to the glances of several hundred girl students. Born in 1884, he was twenty-eight according to the Japanese way of counting, but since he had dropped out during his second year of middle school, he had come through some unusual difficulties, studying English by himself while frequently changing jobs. What with being forced to endure a hard life from the age of twelve or thirteen, he had never known what it was to be young. Marked somewhere on his face was a dark shade of pessimism, and he was apt to be thought older than he actually was.

The strange odor which had pierced his nostrils the moment he had entered the hall had increased in intensity so that he felt more and more nauseous, every pore on his skin seemingly impregnated. He thought the smell a mixture of the body odor of the girls crowded into the auditorium and the aroma from their hair oil.

"Well, it's inevitable you'll feel nauseated by that female smell for a week. So do your utmost to prepare for it."

As Nakano, his friend who had helped get him into the school, had said, Tsuji was experiencing that "female smell." While Tsuji wondered during the formalities of the ceremony how long he would continue as a teacher in the midst of this female odor, he experienced a sensation like the sudden nausea one feels before taking up chopsticks in front of a plate piled high with food.

It was to support his mother, brother, and sister rather than for the sake of earning a living that he had sought a job as a teacher at a private school when he was nineteen by the Japanese way of counting, and at twenty he had become an elementary school instructor with a special license to teach one course, several years having followed in an instant. His beginning monthly salary of nine yen had been no more than a trifle, even though an additional salary for long service had been attached. This girls' high school was privately run, and it would probably be a somewhat leisurely place, his monthly stipend almost forty yen. Attracted only for these reasons and not for any real love of devoting his life to teaching, he had transferred to this school. If possible, he wanted to confine himself all day in his study, to bury himself among his favorite books of all times and places, to immerse himself in them from morning till night.

Ever since he could remember, he had loved books. His mother Mitsu, born at Kuramae in Asakusa as the daughter of a distributor of rice to retainers of the daimyo class, had been raised with extraordinary care and training, at the time of her marriage bringing among her possessions from her parents' home many kinds of ezōshi, illustrated storybooks flavored with Edo culture. The moment Tsuji began to understand what was going on around him, he was drawn into the world of these strange fascinating stories of the ezōshi, and from the age of seven or eight, when he was able to read, he was infatuated with the extraordinary adventures in Saiyuki, a long novel set in Ming dynasty China. Both the ezōshi and Saiyuki expanded the boy's dreams infinitely. At the end of a period of random omnivorous reading, the romantic lad of twelve or thirteen was a precocious peevish type whose favorite book was Tsurezuregusa, a collection of short sketches, anecdotes, and essays.

His father Rokujiro, once a vassal of the shogunate, had been an apprenticed law student and had become a minor government official. He had served in the legal division of the Tokyo municipal government and, when Tsuji was seven or eight, was working in the Mie prefectural office. In Tsuji's tenth year his father's duties were again shifted to Tokyo, the family living on Sakumacho in Kanda, and there the father suddenly died. Left behind in addition to Tsuji were a younger sister and brother. The mother, raised in luxury since her birth, was weak at managing the family budget after her marriage, and with the death of her husband no funds remained in reserve.

Having withdrawn in his second year from Kaisei Middle School, Tsuji found himself the sole support of his family, maintaining his mother, brother, and sister when he was fourteen or fifteen. Even while he had to work, he attended Athenée Français and the People's English Academy; furthermore, he commuted to lectures at the Liberty English Academy at Hitotsubashi in Kanda. By listening there to the lectures of Yubi Aoyagi and Inazo Nitobe, Tsuji became acquainted with the names of Carlyle and Goethe, and his eyes opened to translated works of literature. His random reading was shifted from Japanese and Chinese literature to European works. Saiyuki was transformed into Baudelaire, extended to Hoffmann, and drawn on to Poe. Tsurezuregusa became Lao-tze and Chuang-tsu, shifted to the Bible, turned into Stirner and Sterne, and from Senancour extended to the heights of Leopardi. Besides reading, Tsuji tried his hand at short stories and made some secret attempts at translating. At the same time, it was inevitable that he would be concerned with the current trend toward socialism, which in those days was advancing like surging waves. He read whatever he could lay his hands on, from anarchistic to Marxist literature, and he was a devoted reader of the Heimin Shinbun, edited by Shusui Kotoku. As a new appointee at Ueno Girls' High School, Jun Tsuji was already a young literary enthusiast with an erudition born from this kind of spiritual background and with many complicated folds of a nihilistic mentality.

After the tedious greetings and admonitory comments of the headmaster and guests, a girl stood up in the front row diagonally across from Tsuji. The assistant principal's voice was heard, indicating the congratulatory address was to be given by the student-body representative.

The girl, short and plump, her cocoa-brown cheeks flushed and shining against her downy hair, was staring straight ahead with pitch-black pupils one would instinctively wish to peer into, both ends of her full lips raised as she walked with long strides toward the freshmen students.

Almost all the pupils, ribbons in their low pompadours, were dressed in maroon hakama skirts with crested black cotton haori, the uniform for ceremonial days.

She was the only girl who wore her hair in foreign style, gathering it together simply at the nape, the ribbonless hair strikingly black and abundant. Something slovenly and unrefined was evident in the way she had joined the neckband of her kimono and had put on her hakama.

She turned stiff as she delivered her short commonplace message of congratulations, and concluding by saying she was Noe Ito, representing all the students, she swept back to her seat. Apparently relieved at having finished her task, Noe was even more flushed, the pupils of her eyes moist and glittering.

Tsuji had paid no attention to the contents of Noe's prosaic remarks, but he had quite agreeably attuned himself to the beauty of her tense penetrating voice.

As she sat down, their eyes happened to meet. Noe made her dark eyes widen and, as if astonished, looked Tsuji straight in the face. Her eyes frankly communicated the drift of a mind full of curiosity, Tsuji parrying that lively movement with the vitality of one observing a fresh piece of fruit. The eyes of the girl, which were so voluptuous they reflected the pure childish curiosity and excitable sensitive agitation he had lost long ago, were softly tantalizing Tsuji's breast with a velvet-like touch. After the formal reply by the representative of the new students, which was twice as long as Noe's address, the principal introduced Jun Tsuji as the new teacher of English.

As he stood and walked toward the stage, he had a strange and vivid sensation of being stared at from behind by Noe's dark passionate eyes.

In no time at all Tsuji became an object of student adoration. Even those students who at the start had spoken ill of him as wavering and feminine suddenly and easily changed into devotees once they attended the new teacher's classes. Tsuji's English pronunciation was completely different from that of the old principal, who had been instructing them until then. When the young Tsuji read from the very same English textbook, he conveyed to them for the first time exotic and musical sounds. He wrote on the blackboard some of Poe's poetry which was not in their book and had them copy it. Noe and her fifth-year classmates, in ecstasy over "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven," learned the poems by heart.

At first Tsuji was surprised that the Noe he saw from his position as teacher was so poor in English. He expected she would be quite capable in all subjects since she had read the congratulatory address as the student-body representative, but her command of English was below the class average. Noe, small in stature, sat in the front row near the teacher's platform, and observing him as if her jet-black pupils were aflame, she stared at her teacher's face without even blinking. No matter which classroom he entered, the eyes of one or two students from among the many tens stared straight at him on the platform, but not one of those glances could obliterate the flamelike intensity burning in Noe's eyes. It was not long before Tsuji was told by Nakano, who was in charge of Noe's class, that the girl had suddenly been allowed to enter as a fourth-year student the previous year by a special selection committee, that she was poorest in English because she had until then been living in some out-of-the-way place in Kyushu, but that she was an extraordinary student with something of a natural gift for literature. Tsuji easily surmised Nakano cherished some great expectation from this flicker of talent in Noe. When Nakano showed him the school newspaper edited by her, Tsuji for the first time came to have a better opinion of the girl. That mimeographed newspaper which was brought out almost solely by Noe herself was, while immature, bolstered by a youthful single-minded passion overflowing with the vigor of purity. Already her essays and descriptive impressions, even while their touch was stiff and puerile, were products of an eye that could see with originality.

"It's decent enough, isn't it?" said Tsuji to his colleague, and for a while he still found himself following Noe's firm masculine prose on the mimeographed sheet.

From the time Tsuji began teaching her, Noe's progress in English was extraordinary. Putting aside the study of her other subjects, she immersed herself only in English. Her classmates, much quicker than their teacher Tsuji, stared in wonder at the way Noe's English improved so remarkably. There were occasions during his classes when even Tsuji, elaborating some grammatical point or offering an explanation of a particular translation, noticed Noe's enthusiasm and progress as he directed his glance at her flamelike eyes. The persons most involved were quite at ease, the last to notice they were already deliberately being whispered about by some of the more perceptive girls sensitive to the delicate pattern of feelings between Noe and Tsuji.

In those days Tsuji felt no attraction to Noe as a woman other than finding her "an interesting student." Eyebrows and eyes pressed closed to each other on her dark face, her eyes aflame and her thick lips voluptuous, Noe was emitting from every part of her body an odor and feeling like that of a wild beast warming itself in the sun. To Tsuji's eyes, with their taste for Edo culture, especially for the elegance of the downtown quarters, Noe's untidy negligence of dress was a reflection of her rustic and even dirty background. However, as her teacher he could not be indifferent to her avaricious pursuit of knowledge and the delicate susceptibility with which, like litmus paper moistened with water, she revealed a vivid reaction with precision and speed to everything he taught her. He found it interesting that without exception all the women teachers disliked her, saying she was quite assertive and conceited about everything she did and there was nothing pleasant about her. Tsuji rather felt Noe's stubbornness and serious rebellion wild and lovely.

Gradually he found himself stimulating Noe's talents outside the classroom and enjoying his endeavors at helping the hidden sprouts within her expand.

He would leave his own manuscripts with Noe, who late after classes were over was mimeographing in a corner of the teachers' room. "I've finished this. If you can use it, go ahead." Hardly daring to breathe, Noe read his translations of Gourmont, Shestov, and Wilde, and while reading his reviews of the recent works of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Kafu Nagai, she was unaware she was being taught how to appreciate literature. She became all the more engrossed in the school paper just to be able to receive Tsuji's manuscripts. Finally the rumors of her classmates reached her, but these made Noe with her unyielding spirit all the more rebellious, all the more daringly attracted to Tsuji.

She had come to feel she was not in school at all if on even a single day she did not see his face. She began to regard things the same way he did and to regard them with his sensibilities. Having from childhood adhered to her own strong ideas, Noe was at this late date quite indifferent to the opinions of others. After school she mimeographed the school paper out of the sheer desire to have Tsuji look at it, and once she finished her work, she went to the music room to search for him. She knew that usually every day until evening he played the piano there. Though he was a teacher of English, he revealed an extraordinary passion for music, and without fail he would turn up at all the student concerts, his own performance on the piano and organ as skillful as that of the music teacher. Noe had already heard from Tsuji himself that his playing of the many-holed shakuhachi bamboo flute, in which he had even more ability than he had on the piano, would have put a professional to shame. Sometimes Tsuji would capriciously turn back to Noe, sitting behind him as he was playing the piano, her chin cupped in her two hands, her body never stirring, and he would make her sing. Though she was at first somewhat shy, she would soon begin a Schubert nursery song she had learned at school, or the chic lyric of a love song she had been taught by her father, or some provincial sad lullaby. Her clear voice was lovely and maidenly and more than made up for the trace of wildness in her features.

Tsuji was quick to accompany her on any of these songs, and thinking to startle her he taught her some English hymns. Eventually the students came to catch sight of the figures of Tsuji and Noe keeping each other company on the way to and from school. By the time Tsuji accidentally realized it, he always found Noe walking beside him. Whether by investigation or other means, Noe had some great animal instinct for Tsuji's activities. But at those times the conversation of the two strollers was somewhat stiff and formal, quite far removed from any whispers of love. Usually it was talk of the kind in which Noe would give her impressions of the book she was reading at the moment and Tsuji would offer a proper response. Her facial expression, which had somehow looked gloomy and introverted, became brighter, her behavior much more lively and buoyant.

In those days Tsuji was secretly enjoying a slight infatuation with a girl quite unlike Noe. Okin-chan, the daughter of a sake-dealer in Yoshiwara, was a genuine Tokyoite. Her graceful figure was perfectly suited to her kimono of yellow silk with its black neckband, her shimada coiffure with its cloth chignon band of dappled scarlet typical of a woman of the downtown quarter. A beautiful girl who looked as if she had stepped out of one of Kyoka's novels, she also resembled a girl in love with literature, a devotee of a Kyoka story. Though she had left Ueno Girls' High School in midcourse, she was two or three years older than Noe.

Up to that time Tsuji had been attracted to several women, for example, the girl he had been friends with since childhood, her father a man who put on magic lantern shows; the daughter of an elderly minister of a church he had in his boyhood temporarily visited as if he were in a daze; and the wife of a diplomatic official living in Mukojima, whom Tsuji had taught English conversation a few times a week as a side job before he was employed at the girls' high school. With each of these women he had felt some mutual attraction bordering on love, but every instance had ended merely as passing infatuation. What had made him more timid toward women than one might have thought was the fact that he had not lived comfortably enough to wholly abandon himself to love, and there remained a lack of balance between his knowledge, more mature than might have been expected from someone his age, and his own inexperience in the real world. Even while he kept sending long love letters every day to the sake-dealer's daughter, whom he had met by chance, the fact remained he could not even bring himself to hold her hand.

Though Okin was not intellectual, she was literary enough to forward a thick reply to his letters of affection, so their relationship had lasted a comparatively long time, and they were sufficiently content to believe themselves in love. Occasionally Okin came to Tsuji's office because the school was her alma mater, and she even spent time talking with her old classmates. Noe, with a sensitivity common to those in love, was quick to suspect the relationship between the two, but her only displeasure was in wondering why Tsuji could like such a dull downtown type whose single qualification was a beauty similar to that of a toy doll. Noe was totally unaware that the jealousy of a girl in love had instinctively made her dislike this beautiful girl. Nor was Noe yet conscious that her affection for Tsuji was love.

From the time her parents had abruptly brought up the subject of marriage while she was at home during her summer vacation when she was a fifth-year student, Noe became all the more rapidly intimate with Tsuji. Against her will she had gone through the marriage ceremony in her hometown, and returning to Tokyo by herself after cutting short her summer vacation much earlier than expected, she went on foot directly to Tsuji's house and cast before him the disaster that had befallen her. The commonplace features of the man called Fukutaro, who had just returned from America, and his dullness in which nothing intellectual could be sensed summoned forth in her as she sat before Tsuji a hatred several times the disgust she had felt at home.

"My uncle's to blame! He was blinded by the condition that the other party would pay for my schooling, so my uncle arranged everything in his own way. And now that things have gone this far, my uncle blames me, saying if I refuse, my parents and our family name will be put in a very bad light."

Tsuji had the impression that in less than a month Noe, who was appealing to him with tears of mortification, had suddenly matured to take on something of the savor of a woman. The problem of her marrying, even while she was averse to it, and her anguish had unconsciously stimulated the body and soul of the woman in her and had probably roused into wakefulness this feminine vitality that had lain dormant within her. Tsuji sensed a kind of charm, absent until then, in the somewhat tight thin line along her cheeks and around her shoulders, and he observed the face of the crying and agitated woman, an ugly face yet one increasing in loveliness. She had hesitated to mention it but finally confessed she had already gone through the ceremony.

"I was so terrified I wouldn't let him take a step near me, and I just ran away."

Quite overwhelmed, Tsuji kept staring at her. Was it really possible for a woman to keep her husband at bay even after marrying him? Could a man exist today who remained silent while his wife dragged him down with such an insult?

Clearly feeling Noe was asking for help, Tsuji found the only thing he could do was listen silently to her resentment and her whimpering grievance. Should he thoughtlessly offer his hand, it was quite evident to him that Noe, who had already reached the point of ignition, would transfer the blazing fire of her passion to him, and in no time at all they would together go down to ruin in flames.

In any event, Noe, who had gone through the wedding ceremony, was already a married woman. And probably her name had been placed in the family register by the man who had said he would pay for her schooling. Though Tsuji felt pity for her, to get involved would prove troublesome. The worldly wisdom he had gained through long years of economic distress whispered to him to back away from her. At the same time, however, Noe's misfortune and anguish in being sacrificed to a kind of marriage of convenience and her inability to study freely as she wished due to her family's poverty, which was like his own, aroused in Tsuji a sympathy and compassion he would not have felt about another person's affair.

Noe became so emotionally stirred by the mere fact of Tsuji's mother serving her tea and cake that she began shedding even larger tears.

Inside this house with rooms of only six, four-and-a-half, and three mats, Noe's words, which continued their emotional complaint, could be heard perfectly by Tsuji's mother and sister. After Tsuji had seen Noe off and come back, he found his mother Mitsu sitting on the very cushion Noe had used only a moment ago in his three-mat study.

"Poor thing, isn't she? And still a child."

"Yes, but it can't be helped."

"That child, she likes you, doesn't she?"

"Well, I don't know."

"She's quite unsophisticated, but she's a little charmer."

"You think so? She has the blood of the old Kumaso clan in her. If you touch her carelessly, you may get burned."

"You ought to be settling down."

No longer willing to pursue the subject, Tsuji reached over for his favorite bamboo flute and turned his back to his mother. Before he put his lips to the mouth of the instrument, he waited impatiently while she cleared away the tea things and went out of the room. The piece he played was the famous "Bell of Emptiness," one of the three great traditional melodies for the shakuhachi.

His fascination with the sound of the flute had started from his seventh or eighth year. Next door to their house, which belonged to the Mie prefectural government his father was working for, there lived at that time a junior official who was quite good on the shakuhachi. His Kyoto wife could play ballads on the samisen, and Tsuji's mother Mitsu, who had rigorously acquired during her childhood the knack of playing nagauta, the long epic songs, frequently visited her neighbor to perform together. On those occasions Tsuji went with her and listened in rapt attention to the neighbor's flute. During Tsuji's middle school days when he was back in Tokyo, he found a cheap shakuhachi at a secondhand shop in Shitaya, and by following the neighbor's example he somehow came to be able to produce a few notes. It took him a month to make some flutelike sounds and about half a year to accomplish something like the passage of a song the way he thought it ought to go. Neglecting his studies, he lost himself in playing the flute from morning till night. His mother, who from the first loved songs accompanied by the samisen, suggested, "If you like the bamboo flute so much, why not take lessons regularly from a teacher?" The person Mitsu chose for her son was Chikuo Araki, the famous shakuhachi master of the Kinko School. In a tight-sleeved kimono patterned in white and blue splashes, Tsuji called on him one day to boldly ask for permission. Chikuo, who was already past seventy, allowed this unusual boy to become his disciple.

All of Chikuo's students ranked above the middle class, some of them even belonging to the peerage. In no time at all Chikuo clearly perceived that this poverty-stricken newcomer, his youngest disciple, whom he had allowed on a whim to enter his school, had unexpected genius. Immediately Tsuji became the disciple Chikuo loved beyond all others. But when this young prodigy expressed the desire to establish himself as a shakuhachi performer, the master flatly opposed him. "After all, shakuhachi is a dying art. Someone as young as you are shouldn't spend his entire life on that kind of thing. Do it as a hobby."

Tsuji eagerly went to Chikuo's home for his lessons on each day of the month with a three or an eight in it. Those lessons continued without interruption until Chikuo moved to Imado and it became too difficult for Tsuji to make the trip.

With his father's death it was impossible to play the shakuhachi at leisure, as Tsuji was continually driven to earn a living, but he again went back to the flute when he was twenty-one. At that time he was so highly praised as a performer that he was invited to give concerts at various places far and near.

His favorite instrument for the present was one made by Chikuo's most distinguished disciple, Kado, Tsuji's second master.

While Tsuji listened to the tones he produced on the shakuhachi, the agitation from Noe's visit that had so disturbed his peace of mind gradually subsided.

The night wind passing over the wooded area and meadow sparsely dotted with human habitations swept into this quiet home on a hill at Somei. The heat of the afternoon was at last gone, and before Tsuji realized it, the cries of insects were coiled round the sounds of his flute.

Tsuji had set himself free on the wind of night, his mind lucid as water. The serenity of tranquillity—which could not be violated by anyone at this very moment—was a handful of happiness, which he had at last acquired at twenty-eight years of age. Though this was a rented house with only three rooms in which three persons lived, his mother and her children, Tsuji was satisfied with it. Probably because the owner was a gardener, he had been careful, even though the house was small, to select timber of the finest quality when he built it, Tsuji's three-mat study at the back of the house having been made into a detached room in tea-ceremony style surrounded on all sides by a veranda.

Hanging in the alcove was an India ink drawing of the Goddess of Mercy Kannon by Chikuden, and adorning the opposite wall a portrait of Spinoza framed in lignitic Japanese cedar, and below the picture a desk. On it were only a few books, some European works, and some Japanese and Chinese classics. Tsuji's personal needs and meals were sufficiently looked after by his mother and sister. Though his remuneration from the high school was by no means large, his income was the highest in his life until then and the most reliable. If he desired a woman, he could easily buy an ignorant yet gentle prostitute with the money from his side jobs.

He had long lost any interest in making his life successful. Nor was he concerned any more about social reform. A mere glance at the ominous silence and icy indifference of the social reformers since the trials for high treason had made it quite evident to him that the realization of their ideals was even more remote. His three-mat study and bamboo shakuhachi which would not inconvenience anyone were satisfying enough, a handful of happiness for the young nihilist. He had been blessed. To become entangled in the destiny of a girl from the country whose soiled neckband smelled would have been unbearable. He was by nature, he thought, a wanton, like water. Water conforms to the shape of its container and without a moment's delay swerves into the slightest opening. Was not the strategy of water that of escape? To escape made one the victor.

While playing with perfect clarity a classical melody, Jun Tsuji found sufficient justification in his heart to leave Noe to her unhappy fate.

That summer day in 1911 in which Noe for the first time in her life was immensely troubled as she stood at a crucial turning point in her destiny was a memorable day worthy of special mention in the history of women in Japan. While Noe was suffering from the oppression of her family and their lack of understanding, some people in an obscure corner of Tokyo were steadily beginning preparations by which they would ignite the signal fires for the liberation of women, allowing them to extricate themselves from long-established customs and live freely as human beings. With Raicho Hiratsuka as chief editor several young women were bustling about in a terrible sweat under a scorching August sun for the publication of the women's literary magazine Seito.

It was several days after Noe had visited Jun Tsuji, the third day of the new month of September. Having spread out the morning papers on his bed as usual, Jun Tsuji raised his head with a cry. In the advertisement section on the front page of the Asahi, his eyes had come across a notice for a strange magazine jammed in between announcements of such famous journals as Chuokoron, Taiyo, and Nihon Oyobi Nihonjin.

Seito immediately reminded Tsuji of the word bluestocking, which had its origin in the salon of Lady Montagu in the fashionable world of eighteeth-century London. Someone had once translated the word bluestocking as aotabi, or Japanese-style blue stocking. The advertisement had declared it the only female literary magazine in Japan. Tsuji felt something fresh and intellectual in the spirit of the women editors who, anticipating the sneers and taunts of the world, had called themselves "bluestockings."

Tsuji promptly purchased a copy of Seito, which appeared in the bookstores several days later. It was unmistakably a magazine for women's liberation though literature so fresh and bold it was much more than he had anticipated or hoped for. He immediately surmised that its editor Raicho Hiratsuka was Haruko Hiratsuka, who three years earlier in a suicide attempt with Shohei Morita had created quite a stir in the incident labeled "Wandering in the Snow at Shiobara." Tsuji, who was by nature a feminist, believed himself interested in and warmly sympathetic to Haruko Hiratsuka's speech and behavior since that incident three years ago. He also remembered the moment on the last day of August three years ago when he had opened his Asahi and had read on the society page an article under a large headline extending over several columns:

CULMINATION OF NATURALISM

GENTLEMAN AND LADY

SUICIDE ATTEMPT

LOVER A BACHELOR OF ARTS

AND NOVELIST

MISTRESS A GRADUATE OF A

WOMEN'S COLLEGE

[omission]

CAUSE OF THEIR DARING ATTEMPT

Bachelor of Arts Morita had graduated two years earlier, gained distinction as a talented student, and become well known after publishing a few novels. Though he had a young wife and child at home, he happened to be a colleague of Haruko (written with a different Chinese character) at a certain high school for girls, and so they had become ill-fated lovers, and due to their having the same literary tastes, they had reached a point of inseparable intimacy with one another. On the other hand, it was impossible to live together openly since he had a wife and child, and with real bitterness against their ties in this floating world, they resolved to commit their double suicide. First, Bachelor of Arts Morita, after eliminating his major difficulty by leaving his wife and child in her hometown, departed from Tokyo with Haruko in search of a place where the two could die, but luckily or not, they were unable to find one and were finally apprehended by the police. Though there have been many love-suicides from ancient times, it is actually unprecedented for a man and woman who had received an education at the highest academic institutions to imitate the foolishness of common people. It must be said that it is a news event that represents the ultimate in naturalism and gratification of the passions. And yet was it not madness that when the two lovers were seized by the police at the summit of Obana Pass, the man declared, "My conduct demonstrates the sacredness of love. I have done nothing wrong in the sight of God and man."

Such was the tone of the article, all newspapers imitating it and violently censuring the "folly" of the two lovers. Yet the chance encounter of these two people was different from the newspaper's account, for they had become acquainted at the Women's Literary Circle sponsored by Choko Ikuta, with Sohei the lecturer and Haruko a member of the audience. Though a talented student of Soseki, Sohei Morita was almost consigned to social oblivion because of this affair, yet it was due to Soseki's kindness that from January the following year Smoke, a confessional I-novel dealing with this event, was published serially in the Asahi. In Sohei's novel, in which he tried to show the truth of the affair so erroneously conveyed by this article and others, the relationship of the two persons remained to the very last platonic. As heroine, Haruko is portrayed as a completely different type from women seen up to that time, a woman aroused by the demands of a modern ego, her excessive self-consciousness of speech and behavior often strange, eccentric. Her abrupt and unexpected conduct in everything took on a fresh charm and made the hero look upon Haruko as an enigmatic, sphinxlike woman.

In the novel the hero finds himself dragged along by a woman who will never say she loves him, and finally, even while realizing the woman will never love him, he attempts a double suicide with her on a snow-filled mountain. The woman is so overly self-conscious that even before this confrontation with death, she writes a suicide note: "I have carried out the plan of my life. I perish through my own will. No one can interfere with me."

Smoke resurrected Sohei as a literary figure, but readers found the affair even more incomprehensible, and Soseki himself, all things considered, treated it contemptuously as no more than an idle love story. Haruko Hiratsuka wrote a severe rebuttal of Smoke, but it was almost totally ignored.

It was through this event that Jun Tsuji recognized in the unknown Haruko Hiratsuka the possibility of a new woman awakened to an ego that had not been seen in any of her sex up to that time, Tsuji cherishing his interest in and sympathy for Haruko, whom he had never met.

It required little intelligence to know that an unmarried woman so scandalously written up in the newspaper and so thoroughly struck down by the world was already no better than someone put to death by society. Now, however, three years later, that woman, the common butt of a public scandal, had proudly lifted her head to bring forth a splendid magazine. With the unexpected feeling of wanting to applaud her, Tsuji found himself turning over Seito's pages.

In the table of contents lined up with the name of the well-known writer Akiko Yosano were the names of Shige Mori, wife of Ogai, and Haruko Kunikida, wife of Doppo, and also cited was Toshiko Tamura, who had just made a brilliant debut in January that year by having her work named the best novel in a contest sponsored by the Osaka Mainichi newspaper. Also listed were such unknowns as Ikuko Araki and Kazue Mozume. From Tsuji's point of view all the compositions were immature, all in forms impossible to classify as literary. Nevertheless, he felt in them a tense and passionate sincerity that forcefully moved him:

Rambling Thoughts

The day has come when these mountains move.

Though I say so, no one believes me.

For only a short while have mountains been dozing.

In days of old

Mountains moved, burning in flame.

Still, this you need not believe.

All women who have been dozing are now awakened and moving.

I wish I might write solely in first person singular

I am a woman

I wish I might write solely in first person singular

II

As might be expected, this opening selection of Akiko Yosano's poem sang out forcefully and unreservedly about the aspirations and dreams of the magazine.

Though Raicho Hiratsuka's inaugural message, which chanted aloud in soprano-like tones, revealed various logical contradictions in its long passages, it had sufficient charm to arouse in its readers a powerful response:

In the beginning Woman was the Sun. She was a genuine being.

Now woman is the Moon. She lives through others and glitters through the mastery of others. She has a pallor like that of the ill.

Now we must restore our hidden Sun.

The following day Tsuji gave Noe his copy of Seito. The moment she glanced at Raicho's words, she was passionately impressed:

I want, together with all women, to convince myself of the genius that is lying in women. I put my faith only in that one possibility, and I want the heartfelt joy of the happiness which comes from being born into this world as women.

We are no longer waiting for heaven's revelations. Through our own endeavors we will lay bare our natural inner secrets and make these our own spiritual revelations...

On that day we will possess the entire world, everything in it.

On that day we will be Rulers alone throughout heaven and earth, and on our own feet we will become genuine persons who will be self-existent and independent at the very core of Nature without the necessity of self-examination. And we shall know how pleasant and how abundantly satisfying it is to be in splendid solitude and loneliness.

No longer will Woman be the Moon. On that day she will be, after all, the Sun of her beginnings, a genuine human being.

We will erect a huge circular Palace of Gold radiating high on the Crystal Mountain to the east of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Women! Never forget that when you draw your portraits, always select a vaulted ceiling of gold!

Even though I perish midway on our quest, even though I sink to the bottom of the sea like a shipwrecked sailor, I will raise both my benumbed hands and with my last breath cry out, "Women! Advance! Advance!"

As Noe read aloud these words of Raicho as well as Akiko's poem, her jet-black eyes were overflowing with large tears. At this very moment when women were awakening as women, when they were extricating themselves from worn-out customs established long ago, hoisting their own flag and walking bravely by standing on their own feet, she alone was caught up in ancient conventions, bound by the chains of her old household and fettered to a loveless marriage.

Noe felt that the yearning for women's awakening and liberation pervading the pages of Seito would arouse the sympathy of each and every woman in Japan. A vision came to her of all women linking arms and encircling the earth like a garland, and she became so mortified and ashamed in seeing only herself left alone outside that line of women her body trembled.

Tsuji was moved more than he expected by Noe's sensitive response to Seito. Though he wanted to avert the danger of lending a helping hand to the grievances which came from her circumstances, he felt it his duty as her teacher to ease the pains he was witnessing and to lend some assistance to the proper craving of a soul longing for maturity. On their way to school and back or in the deserted music room after classes were dismissed, Tsuji, with Seito as his text, explained to Noe the history of the awakening of women in Japan.

In 1899, when the Girls' High School Decree was promulgated, there had been only about twenty such schools, but that year the number increased sharply to 250. As for colleges, Umeko Tsuda established Women's English College and Yayoi Yoshioka, Tokyo Women's Medical College, both in 1900. The following year Japan Women's College was created by Jinzo Naruse, and the Fine Arts Academy for Women by Tamako Yokoi. Still, even though ways of learning were opened to women in the Meiji era, no more than a handful of the privileged elite had been able to partake of these benefits. Just to receive an education at a girls' high school, how many miracles and how much exertion was needed for girls like Noe, raised in rural areas and in poor families!

On the other hand, before and after the Russo-Japanese War, publishing began to be established as an enterprise, and magazines solely for women were put out in rapid succession. Among them were World of Learning for Women, New Learning for Women, Women's Circle, Women's World, Paragon of Womanhood, Women's Literary World, Mauve, Women's Companion, Women's Review, Women of the World, World of Women, and Women's Pictorial. Yet these magazines were classified first into young women's literary magazines whose quality was low and content tinged with romanticism, and then into those of a practical order to teach housewives home economics. Although these magazines were not viewed as a strong active force in stimulating the advancement and awakening of women, at this time the trend in the European publishing world was to introduce ideas on the emancipation of women.

"Miss Ito, have you read Hideko Kageyama's Half of My Lifer

"No, not yet."

"You'd better read it. Viewed from the history of the awakening of women, Hideko Kageyama is the heroic woman who lit the signal fires for the first time in our country. She's from Okayama, and she was active in the movement for democratic rights."

"Is she living now?"

"Certainly she is. She's fallen in love and been married many times and has given birth to ever so many sons. She even fell in love with a man much younger than she was, Sanshiro Ishikawa, who was her husband's houseboy, student disciple, and comrade in the socialist movement."