秋 English

I

Nobuko had carried the reputation of a gifted woman since her days at the women's university.

Scarcely anyone doubted that she would sooner or later make her way into literary circles as a writer.

There were even those who went around declaring that she had already completed an autobiographical novel of some three hundred pages while still enrolled.

Yet when she actually graduated, there were circumstances not entirely simple: her mother, who had persevered as a widow raising both Nobuko and her younger sister Teruko, the latter not yet finished with girls' school, made it difficult for Nobuko to be wholly self-indulgent.

And so before she could begin writing in earnest, she found herself compelled, following the ordinary custom of the world, to settle first the matter of marriage.

She had a cousin named Shunkichi.

He was still enrolled in the literature department at the university at the time, but it seemed he too intended to cast his lot among writers in the future.

Nobuko had been on familiar terms with this university-student cousin of hers from long ago.

Once they had found literature as a shared topic, their intimacy appeared to grow all the more.

However, unlike Nobuko, he showed not the slightest respect for Tolstoyism, which was then in fashion.

Instead, he was always trading in French-style irony and epigrams.

This cynical attitude of Shunkichi's sometimes drove Nobuko, who took everything seriously, to anger.

Yet even while angry, she could not help sensing something in his irony and epigrams that she could not quite dismiss.

So it was not unusual, even during her student days, for her to go with him to exhibitions or concerts.

Though most of the time on such occasions, her younger sister Teruko would come along as well.

The three of them would laugh and talk without restraint both on the way there and back.

But Teruko alone would sometimes be left behind, outside the circle of conversation.

Yet Teruko, in her childlike way, would wander along peering at parasols and silk shawls in shop windows, and did not appear to mind being overlooked in the least.

Nobuko, however, whenever she noticed this, would without fail change the subject and immediately try to draw her sister back into the conversation as before.

And yet the one who invariably forgot Teruko first was Nobuko herself.

Shunkichi, indifferent to all such things, kept tossing out his clever jokes as always, and walked with a long, unhurried stride through the crowded, dizzying flow of passersby on the street. . . .

The relationship between Nobuko and her cousin was, of course, more than sufficient in anyone's eyes to suggest the marriage that would naturally come.

Her classmates envied and resented her future in their own ways.

Those who did not know Shunkichi were, if anything (though one can only call it absurd), the most intense in this.

Nobuko, for her part, would deny their speculation with one hand while with the other she would let its truth show through, deliberately and obliquely.

Consequently, by the time they graduated, the image of Nobuko and Shunkichi together had been fixed in the minds of their classmates as unmistakably as a wedding photograph of bride and groom.

But upon graduating, contrary to everyone's expectation, Nobuko suddenly married a young man who had recently taken a position at some trading company in Osaka, a graduate of a commercial college.

And two or three days after the ceremony, she departed for Osaka, where her husband was posted, together with her new husband.

According to those who had gone to see them off at the central railway station, Nobuko had worn her usual bright smile and was doing her best in various ways to comfort her younger sister Teruko, who kept being overcome with tears.

Her classmates were all bewildered.

Within that bewilderment was a strange mixture of a curiously glad feeling and a new kind of envy, utterly different from before.

Some, trusting in her, attributed everything to the mother's wishes.

Others, doubting her, spread the word that she had simply changed her heart.

But those interpretations were mere conjecture, as even they themselves knew perfectly well.

Why had she not married Shunkichi?

For some time after, whenever they gathered, they made this question a weighty topic of conversation, without fail.

Then, after roughly two months had passed, they forgot about Nobuko entirely.

And of course, the talk about the novel she was supposed to write vanished as well.

In the meantime, Nobuko had built what was to be a happy new household in the suburbs of Osaka.

Their home was in a pine grove, the quietest in that neighborhood.

The scent of pine resin and the light of the sun — whenever her husband was away, these two things held a living silence over the interior of the new two-story rented house.

On such lonely afternoons, when her spirits sank without reason, Nobuko would always open the drawer of her sewing box and take out a sheet of pink letter-paper folded away at the bottom; on it, in small, careful pen strokes, the following words were written.

"— When I think that after today I will no longer be able to be with you, Sister, even as I write these words the tears overflow without end. Sister. Please, please forgive me. Teruko does not know what to say before the undeserved sacrifice you have made.

"Sister, you decided on this marriage for my sake. Even if you say it is not so, I understand it well. One evening when we went to see a play at the Imperial Theatre together, you asked me whether I liked Shun-san. And then you said that if I did, you would surely make every effort, and that I should go to Shun-san. By then, Sister, you had already read the letter I was going to give to him, hadn't you? When that letter disappeared, I truly resented you, Sister. (Please forgive me. For that alone I cannot say how sorry I am.) So that evening, even your kind words felt to me like something sarcastic. That I was angry and gave you barely any reply in return — surely you have not forgotten. But two or three days later, when your own engagement was suddenly decided, I thought I would die to make amends. For you, too, love Shun-san, Sister. (Do not try to hide it. I know it well.) Had it not been for me, surely you would have gone to Shun-san yourself. And yet you told me over and over that you felt nothing for him. And in the end you entered into a marriage that was not in your heart. My dearest Sister. Do you still remember when I brought the chicken that day, and asked it to come and pay its respects to you before you left for Osaka? I wanted even the chicken I keep to apologize to you alongside me. And then even Mother, who knew nothing of it all, began to cry.

"Sister. Tomorrow you will be gone to Osaka. But please, never abandon your Teruko, no matter what. Every morning as she feeds the chickens, Teruko thinks of you, and weeps where no one can see. . . ."

Every time Nobuko read this girlish letter, tears would well up without fail.

Especially when she recalled the figure of Teruko, who had quietly pressed this letter into her hand at the very moment she was about to board the train at the central station, Nobuko was moved by an indescribable tenderness.

But was her marriage truly the sacrifice her sister imagined it to be?

To entertain that doubt, after the tears, tended to spread a heavy feeling through her heart.

To avoid that heaviness, Nobuko would for the most part simply remain still and steeped in a pleasant sadness.

While watching, through the window, the light that lay across the pine grove slowly deepen and change into the colors of dusk.

II

For roughly three months after the wedding, they, like all newly married couples, passed happy days.

Her husband was a man with something feminine about him, a man of few words.

Even so, every day when he returned from the company, he made a point of spending several hours with Nobuko after dinner.

Nobuko would move her knitting needles and speak of novels and plays that were causing a stir in the world.

In those conversations, there were times when a view of life tinged with the Christian spirit of women's college sentiment would be woven in.

Her husband would sit with cheeks flushed from his after-dinner drink, an evening newspaper resting on his knee, listening with apparent curiosity.

However, he never once offered anything that resembled his own opinion.

Almost every Sunday they also went to Osaka or to some sightseeing spot in its vicinity to spend a carefree day.

Every time Nobuko boarded a train or streetcar, she found the Kansai people who thought nothing of eating and drinking anywhere in public all seemed vulgar.

By that measure, she was pleased to feel that her quiet husband's manner was far more refined.

Indeed, her husband's neat appearance, in the midst of such crowds, seemed to radiate from his hat, his suit, and his lace-up red leather shoes a kind of fresh, clean atmosphere, not unlike the scent of scented soap.

Especially during the summer holiday, when they extended their trip as far as Maiko, she could not help feeling a certain pride when she compared him against his colleagues from the company who had gathered at the same teahouse.

Yet her husband seemed surprisingly at ease with those same vulgar colleagues.

In time, Nobuko remembered the writing she had long set aside.

She decided to sit at her desk for an hour or two at a time while her husband was away.

When she mentioned this to her husband, he said, "So you're finally going to become a woman writer?"

And showed a thin smile at his gentle mouth.

But though she did sit at the desk, the pen moved less readily than she had expected.

She often found herself, chin resting idly on her hand, lost to the cicadas in the blazing pine grove, listening without quite knowing it.

Then, around the time the lingering summer heat was giving way to early autumn, her husband one day was about to change his sweat-stained collar before heading to the office.

But as bad luck would have it, every last collar had been sent to the laundry.

As fastidious as he was, her husband's face clouded with displeasure.

And while fastening his suspenders, he said, "It won't do if you do nothing but write novels."

He made this pointed remark in a tone unusual for him.

Nobuko silently lowered her eyes and brushed the dust from his jacket.

Then, two or three nights later, her husband moved from a rice price article in the evening paper to suggesting that perhaps they could cut back a little on their monthly expenses.

"You're not a schoolgirl anymore, you know."

He let that out as well.

Nobuko gave distracted replies while doing needlework embroidery on her husband's cravat.

Then her husband said, with unexpected persistence, "Even that cravat — wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy one?"

He said it in the same nagging, wheedling tone.

She found herself even less able to speak.

Her husband eventually fell into a blank look and sat reading some trade magazine or other with an air of boredom.

But after the light in the bedroom was turned out, Nobuko, her back still turned to her husband, said in a near-whisper, "I won't write any more novels."

She said it in a murmuring voice.

Even then her husband said nothing.

After a little while, she repeated the same words, even more faintly than before.

Shortly afterward, the sound of weeping escaped her.

Her husband scolded her briefly.

Even after that, her sobbing could still be heard, breaking off and fading.

But before long Nobuko had drawn close and clung tightly to her husband. . . .

The following day they were again, as before, an affectionate couple.

Then there came an evening when her husband still had not returned from the company even past midnight.

And when at last he did return, he was breathing out a reek of alcohol so strong he could not remove his raincoat alone.

Nobuko frowned but dutifully helped him change his clothes.

Nonetheless her husband, his tongue thick, even managed a cutting remark.

"Since I didn't come home tonight, I suppose your novel made great progress."

Words like these fell more than once from that womanish mouth.

When she got into bed that night, tears fell from her eyes unbidden.

If Teruko were to see her like this, how she would weep along with her.

Teruko.

Teruko.

You are the only one I can lean on. —

Nobuko called out to her sister in her heart again and again like this, tormented by her husband's alcohol-laden breathing, and lay awake turning restlessly nearly the whole night long.

Yet that too, by the next day, had naturally resolved itself into a reconciliation.

As such things repeated themselves a number of times, autumn deepened gradually.

Nobuko had imperceptibly grown seldom to sit at her desk and take up her pen.

By then her husband, too, was no longer as interested in her literary talk as he had once been.

Each night, sitting across from each other at the brazier, they had come to learn how to kill the hours with talk of petty household finances.

And besides, such topics were, at the very least, the most engaging for her husband after his evening drink.

Even so, Nobuko would sometimes glance sympathetically at her husband's expression.

But he, knowing nothing, would gnaw at the beard he had let grow of late and say, more cheerfully than usual, "Once we have children —"

and muse on like that.

Then around that time, the cousin's name began to appear in the monthly magazines.

Since her marriage, Nobuko had cut off correspondence with Shunkichi as though she had forgotten him.

His movements — that he had graduated from the university's literature department, that he had started a coterie magazine — she learned only through letters from her sister.

Nor did she feel any desire to know more about him beyond that.

But seeing his stories appear in the magazines, the old fondness was the same as it had ever been.

As she turned the pages, she found herself smiling quietly to herself again and again.

Shunkichi was wielding the twin weapons of scorn and wit in his fiction just as he had always done, like Miyamoto Musashi with his two swords.

But perhaps it was her imagination — it seemed to her that behind his light irony lurked something she had not sensed in him before: a lonely, reckless undertone.

At the same time, perceiving this made her feel not entirely free of guilt.

From that point on, Nobuko began to behave even more gently toward her husband.

Her husband found her face, always bright and smiling, on the other side of the brazier in the cold nights.

That face was younger-looking than before and invariably made up.

She would spread her needlework and talk of memories from when they had held the wedding ceremony in Tokyo.

The detail of those memories both surprised and seemed to please her husband.

"You really remember things like that, don't you."

When her husband teased her like this, Nobuko would invariably make no verbal reply but show in her eyes alone an answer with a certain warmth.

Yet she herself often wondered inwardly why it was she remembered so well.

Before long, a letter from her mother arrived announcing that her younger sister's betrothal gifts had been exchanged.

The letter also mentioned that Shunkichi had set up a new home somewhere in the hilly outskirts of Tokyo to welcome Teruko.

She promptly wrote long congratulatory letters to both her mother and her sister.

"As we are short of hands here, it is with regret that I find myself unable to attend the ceremony . . ."

While writing those words, her brush faltered more than once — though she could not have said why.

When that happened, she would raise her eyes and gaze, without fail, at the pine grove outside.

The pines stood thick and dark blue-green beneath the early winter sky.

That evening, Nobuko and her husband talked of Teruko's marriage.

Her husband smiled his usual thin smile and listened with apparent amusement as she mimicked her sister.

But to her own feeling, it was somehow as if she were speaking of Teruko to herself.

"Well, shall we go to bed?"

Two or three hours later, her husband stroked his soft beard and rose lazily from before the brazier.

Nobuko had not yet decided on a gift for her sister and was still writing characters in the ash with the fire tongs; she looked up suddenly at that moment and said, "It's strange, isn't it — to think that I'm getting a younger brother too."

She said it.

"Of course you are, since you have a sister."

Even when her husband said this to her, she kept her thoughtful expression and made no reply.

Teruko and Shunkichi had the ceremony in the middle of the twelfth month.

On the day itself, white flakes began to fall a little before noon.

After eating alone at midday, Nobuko found for a long time that the smell of the fish from that meal lingered in her mouth and would not leave.

"I wonder if it is snowing in Tokyo too."

Thinking such thoughts, Nobuko sat still, leaning against the brazier in the dim sitting room.

The snow grew heavier.

But the fishy taste in her mouth obstinately persisted. . . .

III

The following autumn, Nobuko returned to Tokyo for the first time in a long while, accompanying her husband on company business.

But her husband, with much to accomplish in a short time, found almost no day to take her out, except for the brief visit he paid to her mother's home.

So when she went to visit the new home of her sister and brother-in-law in the suburbs, she went alone in a rickshaw from the end of a streetcar line that had the feel of a new development.

Their house was near where the rows of townhouses gave way to onion fields.

But in the neighborhood, newly built rental houses of similar appearance crowded together, eave to eave.

Low gates side by side, fences of photinia, laundry hung on poles — every house was the same.

This commonplace scene of the neighborhood disappointed Nobuko somewhat.

But when she called out for someone, it was unexpectedly the cousin who came out.

Shunkichi, just as before, seeing this unexpected visitor, cried out "Oh!"

in a cheerful voice.

She noticed that his close-cropped hair had given way to something more tended.

"It's been a while."

"Come in. I'm afraid I'm alone."

"Teruko? Is she out?"

"She's gone on an errand. The maid too."

Feeling a strange shyness, Nobuko quietly removed her coat with its bright lining and set it in the corner of the entryway.

Shunkichi led her to an eight-mat room that served as both study and sitting room.

Wherever she looked in the room, books were piled in disorder.

Especially around the small rosewood desk by the paper screen where the afternoon sun fell, newspapers, magazines, and manuscript paper lay scattered in hopeless confusion.

Among all this, the only thing that spoke of a young wife's presence was a new koto leaning against the alcove wall.

Nobuko kept her curious eyes on these surroundings for a while.

"I knew from your letter that you were coming, but I didn't expect you today."

Shunkichi lit a cigarette and looked at her with eyes that were, as one might expect, warmly nostalgic.

"And how is life in Osaka?"

"And you, Shun-san? Are you happy?"

As she exchanged a few words, Nobuko too became conscious that the old familiar warmth was flowing back, just as in the old days.

The awkward memory of two years during which they had barely corresponded troubled her less than she had expected.

They warmed their hands at the same brazier and talked of many things.

Shunkichi's fiction, gossip about mutual acquaintances, comparisons between Tokyo and Osaka — there were almost too many topics, as many as they could want.

But both, as if by unspoken agreement, touched not at all on matters of daily life.

This made Nobuko feel all the more strongly the sensation of talking with her cousin.

Sometimes, however, silences would fall between them.

Each time, she kept her smile and dropped her gaze to the ashes of the brazier.

Within that, hardly enough to be called waiting, was a faint expectation of something.

Then, whether by design or by chance, Shunkichi would quickly find a new topic and always shatter that feeling.

She gradually could not help stealing glances at her cousin's face.

But he drew calmly on his cigarette and showed no sign of affecting any particular unnatural expression.

By and by Teruko returned.

The moment she saw her sister's face, she was overjoyed, nearly taking her hands in her own.

Nobuko too smiled with her lips, but her eyes already held tears.

For a while the two of them even forgot Shunkichi and asked and were asked about each other's lives over the past year.

Teruko in particular, vivid color glowing through her cheeks, did not forget to tell even the news of the chickens she still kept.

Shunkichi sat with his cigarette in his mouth, looking contentedly at the two of them, grinning his usual grin.

Before long the maid returned as well.

Shunkichi received several postcards from the maid's hands and promptly turned to the desk beside him to write busily with his pen.

Teruko showed surprise that the maid had also been out.

"So when you arrived, Sister, there was no one home?"

"No, only Shun-san."

Answering this made Nobuko feel she was forcing herself to be unconcerned.

Then Shunkichi, his back still turned, said, "Be grateful to your husband. I was the one who made that tea."

He said it.

Teruko exchanged a glance with her sister and gave a mischievous little laugh.

But she made no reply to her husband — deliberately, it seemed.

Before long Nobuko found herself sitting down to dinner with her sister and brother-in-law.

According to Teruko, the eggs on the table had all been laid by their own chickens.

Shunkichi, urging wine on Nobuko, said, "Human life is sustained by plunder, you know. Starting with something as small as these eggs —"

and rattled off an argument with a socialistic ring to it.

And yet, of the three of them sitting there, it was without question Shunkichi himself who was most attached to the eggs.

Teruko found this funny and burst into a childlike peal of laughter.

Even in the atmosphere around this table, Nobuko could not help recalling the lonely sitting room in the distant pine grove at dusk.

The talk went on even after the fruit was finished.

Lightly tipsy, Shunkichi sat cross-legged beneath the long-night electric light and held forth vigorously in his characteristic sophistry.

His lively discourse made Nobuko feel young again, just once more.

With eyes shining with a kind of fever, she said, "I wonder if I should start writing fiction again."

She said it.

Her cousin, in reply, hurled an epigram from Gourmont at her.

It was: "The Muses are women, and so it is only men who can truly hold them captive."

Those were the words.

Nobuko and Teruko formed an alliance and refused to acknowledge Gourmont's authority.

"Then does that mean no woman can become a musician? Isn't Apollo a man?"

Teruko said even that, in all seriousness.

In the meantime the night grew late.

Nobuko ended up staying the night.

Before bed, Shunkichi opened one of the rain shutters on the veranda and stepped down, in his nightclothes, into the narrow garden.

Then, calling to no one in particular, he said, "Come take a look. The moon is beautiful."

He called out.

Nobuko alone stepped down after him, slipping her feet into the garden clogs at the step.

Her feet, bare of tabi socks, felt the cold of the dew.

The moon hung in the branches of a lean, withered cypress at the corner of the garden.

Her cousin stood beneath the cypress, gazing up at the dimly lit night sky.

"The weeds have grown something terrible, haven't they."

Nobuko made her way cautiously through the overgrown garden toward where he stood, with a vague unease.

But he still gazed at the sky and only murmured, "Must be the thirteenth night of the moon."

He merely murmured that.

After a silence had continued for a while, Shunkichi quietly turned his gaze back and said, "Shall we go look at the henhouse?"

He said it.

Nobuko nodded silently.

The henhouse was exactly at the opposite corner of the garden from the cypress.

The two of them walked shoulder to shoulder, unhurriedly, to that spot.

But inside the reed-mat enclosure there was nothing but a dim play of light and shadow smelling of chickens.

Shunkichi peered into the coop and, almost as if speaking to himself, whispered to her: "They're sleeping."

He whispered it to her.

"The chickens whose eggs are taken away by people."

Nobuko stood motionless among the grass, and could not keep herself from that thought. . . .

When the two of them returned from the garden, Teruko was sitting vacantly before her husband's desk, staring at the electric light.

At just the one electric light, with a single pale moth creeping along the shade.

IV

The next morning Shunkichi dressed in his one good suit and left quickly for the entryway after breakfast.

It seemed he was going to visit the grave of a friend on the first anniversary of the friend's death.

"All right? Wait for me. I'll be back by noon without fail."

He said this to Nobuko as he threw on his coat.

But she stood holding his soft felt hat in her slender hands and only smiled silently.

Teruko, having seen her husband off, invited her sister to sit across the brazier and dutifully offered her tea.

The story of the neighbor lady, the story of a reporter who had visited, the story of a foreign opera company she had gone to see with Shunkichi — she seemed to have a number of other pleasant topics still in store.

But Nobuko's heart was heavy.

When she became aware of herself, she found she had been giving nothing but vague, distracted replies.

Eventually even Teruko began to notice.

Her sister looked at her face with worried eyes and asked, "What is it?"

Like that.

But Nobuko herself had no clear idea of what was the matter.

When the hall clock struck ten, Nobuko raised her languid eyes and said, "It doesn't seem as though Shun-san will be back for a while."

She said it.

Teruko too, following her sister's words, glanced up at the clock for a moment, but replied with an unexpectedly indifferent air, "Not yet —"

and said only that.

In those words, Nobuko felt she could sense the heart of a young bride whose love for her husband was fully satisfied.

The more she thought so, the more she could not keep her spirits from sinking into gloom.

"Teruko, you're so happy."

Nobuko said this, half jokingly, sinking her chin into her collar.

But she could do nothing to keep out the earnest note of envy that had slipped in of its own accord.

Teruko however, with an air of innocence, still smiling her vivid smile, said, "Just you wait."

And pretended to glare at her.

Then immediately added, "But Sister, you're happy too."

In a coaxing, clinging tone.

Those words struck Nobuko squarely.

She raised her eyelids ever so slightly and said, "Do you think so?"

She said it back.

And the moment she did, she regretted it.

Teruko made a strange face for an instant and met her sister's eyes.

In that face, too, a feeling of unmistakable regret was stirring.

Nobuko forced a smile. —

"Even just being thought happy is happiness enough, I suppose."

A silence fell between the two of them.

They sat beneath the ticking of the hall clock, listening without quite listening to the sound of the iron kettle simmering on the brazier.

"But your husband is kind to you, isn't he?"

Teruko said this in a small voice before long, hesitantly.

In her voice there was plainly a compassionate note, but in that moment what Nobuko's heart resisted above all else was pity.

She set the newspaper on her knees and looked down at it, deliberately saying nothing in reply.

The newspaper, just as in Osaka, carried articles about the price of rice.

Then, in the quiet sitting room, the faint sound of someone crying began to be heard.

Nobuko looked up from the newspaper and found her sister on the other side of the brazier, her sleeve pressed to her face.

"You needn't cry."

Even when her sister comforted her so, Teruko showed no sign of stopping easily.

Nobuko felt a cruel pleasure, and for a while kept her silent gaze fixed on her sister's trembling shoulders.

Then, leaning toward Teruko as if wary of the maid's ears, she went on in a low voice: "If I've done something wrong, I'll apologize. What I want more than anything is for you to be happy, Teruko. Truly. If Shun-san loves you —"

She continued in a low voice.

As she continued, her own voice, moved by her own words, gradually grew more and more sentimental.

Then suddenly Teruko dropped her sleeve and raised her face, wet with tears.

In her eyes, unexpectedly, there was neither sorrow nor anger.

But only an uncontainable jealousy, making her pupils burn as if with fire.

"Then why, Sister — why did you last night, too —"

Before she could say it all, Teruko buried her face in her sleeve again and began to weep in violent, convulsive sobs. . . .

Two or three hours later, Nobuko was riding a hooded rickshaw, hastening toward the end of the streetcar line.

The outside world that reached her eyes was only the square celluloid window cut into the front of the hood.

Through it, the houses of the back streets and the tips of the turning autumn trees flowed past, slowly yet ceaselessly, receding farther and farther behind.

If there was anything that did not move among them, it was only the cold autumn sky, drifting with thin clouds.

Her heart was quiet.

But what governed that quietness was nothing other than a lonely resignation.

After Teruko's outburst had passed, a reconciliation, with fresh tears, had easily restored the two of them to the same close sisters as before.

Yet the fact of it still would not leave Nobuko's heart, even now.

When she had entrusted herself to this rickshaw without even waiting for her cousin's return, a feeling had already been spreading through her chest, cruelly, like ice: that she and her sister had become strangers to each other forever. —

Nobuko suddenly raised her eyes.

In that moment, through the celluloid window, she caught sight of her cousin's familiar figure, walking through the cluttered street, carrying a walking stick.

Her heart lurched.

Should she stop the rickshaw?

Or should she pass him by like this?

She sat beneath the hood, holding down the flutter of her heart, and for a moment did nothing but hesitate, emptily.

But the distance between Shunkichi and her was closing rapidly, moment by moment.

He walked with unhurried steps in pale, thin sunlight, along the puddle-strewn road.

"Shun-san."

For one instant, those words nearly escaped from Nobuko's lips.

Indeed, Shunkichi had already appeared right beside her rickshaw, in his familiar form.

But she hesitated again.

In that moment of delay, he — knowing nothing — had passed this hooded rickshaw by.

A hazy sky, sparse rows of houses, the yellowed tips of tall trees — behind was nothing but the same back-street town, as always, with its thin trickle of passersby.

"Autumn —"

Beneath the faintly cold hood, feeling loneliness with her whole body, Nobuko could not keep herself from thinking, quietly and deeply, this one word.

(March, Taisho 9)