田舎教師 English

I

The sixteen kilometers of road were long.

Along the way lay the town of Hanyu, where the market for blue-striped cloth was held.

Milk vetch bloomed in the paddies, and double cherry blossoms scattered down over the hedges of the great houses.

Now and then a country girl passed, showing the red hem of her underskirt.

From Hanyu he took a rickshaw.

He wore a cotton haori with three crests, which his mother had sat up all night to sew, and a newly made sash of thin wool. The rickshaw man laid a faded blanket over his hakama and lifted the shafts.

Somehow his heart danced.

Before Seizo a new life lay spread out.

Whatever the life, a new life seems to hold meaning and hope.

Five years of middle school, and the twelve-kilometer walk from Gyoda to Kumagaya in the early morning in his Kokura uniform, were all in the past now.

The graduation ceremony, the graduation banquet. There he had met for the first time the coquettish manner of what is called a geisha, and had heard teachers who ordinarily wore severe faces raise their thick voices in songs out of tune.

As one month passed and then another, he began little by little to feel that the life he had glimpsed through the school window and life as it really was were somehow different.

First of all, his own father and mother were already proof of it.

And it showed too in the words the people around him used toward him.

The air among the friends he was always going back and forth with had changed as well, each in his own way.

Suddenly he remembered.

About ten days before, walking home from Kumagaya with his close friend Kato Ikuji, they had talked of literature, of the future, of love.

The two of them spoke first of a certain friend's relations with a certain girl.

"So he is really quite taken with her, is he."

"More than taken!"

Ikuji laughed.

"Until the other day there was no sign of it at all, so I thought it was nothing. In fact, the other day he said, 'I have seen through it all,' so I supposed he had given her up, thinking it foolish to throw away his future for love—and it turned out to be the exact opposite."

"Just so."

"Strange, isn't it."

"The other day he sent me a letter saying, 'I too thank you all for lending your strength to my love. For the first time I have known the languor of love. And now I wish this love to advance and advance, without the Physical…' or something like that."

Those words, without the Physical, gave Seizo a certain stimulus.

Ikuji too walked in silence.

Suddenly Ikuji said,

"I have a great secret, you know."

His tone was light, so

"So have I!"

Seizo laughed and matched him.

The moment fell flat, and the two walked on again in silence.

After a while,

"You know that 'Obana,' don't you."

So Ikuji asked.

"Of course I know."

"Could you fall in love with her?"

"No,"

and Seizo laughed. "Whether I could love her I don't know, but I do look at her simply as something beautiful to look at."

"And A?"

"No such thought."

Ikuji hesitated, then: "Then what about Art?"

Seizo's heart gave a small leap.

"Well now, if the chance came I don't know what would happen… but as things are, I have not thought about it yet."

He began to say this, and then suddenly, in a high-spirited tone,

"If you go for Art—well, let me see, I think I would stand toward you and Art just as I stand toward Obata and Miss N."

"Then I shall go that way."

Ikuji took a step forward.

Now, on the rickshaw, Seizo remembered that time.

He remembered too that the beating of his heart had not been normal.

And that night in his diary: "Let there be happiness for that friend, let there be much happiness. O God, O God, upon that friend's pure love, his beautiful and innocent love, let there be much happiness. With your hand that is full of tears, let there be much happiness. God, I pray, I pray for my dear friend."

He remembered writing that and then falling forward onto his desk.

Ten days or so later the two of them left that girl's house and walked the lonely, dark night road through the old samurai quarter.

That day the girl was not there.

She had gone to Urawa to take the entrance examination for the normal school.

"I think there is nothing that cannot be done if a man puts his strength into it… but I was born without the qualifications for such a thing."

"That is not so."

"But still…"

"You must not talk so weakly."

"If I were like you it would be well…"

"What is it about me?"

"I am not, like you, the sort of man who can be loved."

Seizo comforted Ikuji in various ways.

Seizo pitied his friend, and pitied himself as well.

Various faces and various events rose before his eyes and vanished, rose and vanished.

Along the road, sparse rows of alder, a wayside stone shrine, fields, farmhouses, came into view and passed as the rickshaw went on.

A carriage came up from behind and overtook them, raising a cloud of sand.

Ikuji's father was the county school inspector.

Ikuji had two sisters, Yukiko seventeen and Shigeko fifteen.

When Seizo came to visit, as he did almost daily, Yukiko always met him with a smile.

Shigeko was still a mere child, but she often read Shonen Sekai

and things of that sort.

Since the family was poor and it had gradually become clear to Seizo that studying in Tokyo was out of the question, it was decided that as there was no use idling, he had better take a post for the time being at some primary school.

That he was now at last to serve at the primary school in Miroku, near Hanyu, at eleven yen a month, was entirely the result of Ikuji's father's efforts on his behalf.

There was a small gate at the side of the road, and then a signboard reading Izumi Village Office caught his eye. Seizo got down from the rickshaw and went in through the gate.

"Excuse me,"

he called, and a man of about fifty, apparently the janitor, came out from within.

"Is the assistant headman in?"

"You mean Kishino?"

the janitor asked back, blinking his eyes.

"Yes, that is right."

The janitor took his card and the letter from the inspector and withdrew, and presently Seizo was shown into the reception room.

Reception room though it was called, there were no tables or chairs; it was an ordinary bare six-mat room with a cheap earthenware brazier set in the middle.

The assistant headman was a fat, short man wearing a striped haori.

Looking at the letter from the inspector: "Is that so. You are Mr. Hayashi. Mr. Kato spoke to me of it the other day. I will write you a letter of introduction."

So saying, he drew over a dirty inkstone box, and while he thought hard about something and kept silent a long while, he wrote a letter and addressed it to Mr. Ishino Eizo, Headman of Mita-ga-ya Village.

"Now then, take this to the village office at Miroku."

II

It was still about a kilometer from there to Miroku.

Mita-ga-ya was called a village, but the houses were not gathered in one place.

One house here, one there, three or four in the shade of a cedar grove, one beyond the fields—coming from the town, one felt like doubting whether this could really be the common life of a village.

But going on a little, houses began to line both sides of the road, and a dirty barbershop, an eating house that looked as if it might keep serving girls, and a cheap sweetshop with children gathered before it caught his eye.

Looking up, he saw a one-story primary school on the right, with an old weathered sign at the gate reading Mita-ga-ya Village Miroku Higher and Ordinary Primary School.

Classes were in session, and mingled with the voices of children reading aloud came now and then the shrill high voice of a teacher.

Sunlight fell on the glass windows soiled with dust, and here and there one could faintly make out the rows of pupils, the blackboard, a table, a figure in Western clothes.

The shoe cupboard, crowded with pupils at coming and going, was silent now, and in the yard a white-spotted dog nosed about for food.

The sound of an organ came faintly from what seemed to be the assembly hall.

The rickshaw passed on before the school gate.

There was an umbrella maker's there.

The whole house was littered with oiled paper and dishes of persimmon tannin and thread and tools, and in the middle of it a man of about fifty worked steadily at pasting umbrellas.

Around the house, oiled umbrellas not yet dry were spread out to dry, countless numbers of them.

Seizo stopped the rickshaw and asked this man where the village office was.

The office was not among the cluster of houses along that highroad.

Where the houses ended there was an embankment and a moat, as if there had once been a castle there. Bamboo grass and weeds grew thick over the embankment, and the moat, dirty and rust-colored, held the shadows of great oaks and chinquapins and looked darker and colder for them.

Turning along that moat and going a hundred meters, Seizo was told, he would find the office.

Here he paid twenty sen for the rickshaw and got down.

Beside a thicket of bamboo grass stood one thatched house, and on its old sliding door was written Cooked Food, Soba, Udon, Ogawaya. It caught his eye.

Around the house were fields, and above the green wheat a skylark sang low in a fine voice.

He had heard before that there was an eating house called Ogawaya in Miroku, where the schoolteachers held their parties and went to eat and drink.

He had heard too that for the time being that house would board him and lend him bedding.

There was said to be a pretty girl there named Otane, well known in those parts.

Seizo, taking advantage of there being no one about, stopped as he passed and looked into the garden over the low hedge.

In the garden were two or three pines and one or two cherry trees now all leaves, and the blackened paper of the sliding doors stood out particularly to the eye.

In a corner of the hedge, the thick green leaves of camellia and coral tree caught the sun.

Two or three camellia blossoms could still be seen behind the leaves.

The Akagi wind, said to be the local specialty, had stopped altogether with the coming of April, and the fields too were now beautifully colored in green and yellow and red.

A narrow path cutting through the wheat fields led to a row of lanky alders visible beyond, and through them the thatched roof of what seemed to be the village office could be seen like a watercolor painting.

The reception room was cleaner than the one at the Izumi village office.

From it the room where the clerks did their work could be plainly seen through the glass windows.

On the table, household registers and tax ledgers and bundles of applications and notices were laid out in order, and a lean man of twenty-four or five with his hair parted and a bald old man of about fifty were writing busily at something.

A bearded middle-aged man who seemed to be the assistant headman and a fat farmer who seemed to be a man of local influence were talking and laughing about something, and now and then knocking out a pipe with a tap tap.

The headman was about forty-five, pockmarked, his head half white.

He was the type one often sees in these parts, and now and then a Bushu accent crept into his speech.

When he read the letter from the assistant headman of Izumi, rolled it up again, and said, "I have heard nothing of the sort from either the inspector or the assistant headman…"

and tilted his head, Seizo was struck with a strange feeling.

He felt somehow as if he had been bewitched by a fox.

He thought too that the inspector and Kishino had been altogether too irresponsible.

The headman thought for a while, then presently: "In that case, perhaps the transfer has already been settled privately. I have heard something about changing the teacher named Hirata who is there now, since he has a bad reputation."

and then he said,

"You had better go to the school and see the principal and ask him!"

The overbearing way he spoke wounded the young man's pride at the outset.

A mere farmer who could do nothing himself, and giving himself airs just because he had money—so Seizo thought.

His first post, his first setting out into the world. He had never imagined that it would open with so cold a curtain.

An hour later he went to the school and met the principal.

Classes were in session, so he waited about thirty minutes in the teachers' room.

The teachers' room was littered in disorder with wall charts and a large abacus and books and plant specimens and all sorts of things.

A woman teacher was busily looking something up in a corner, but after a slight greeting at first she did not speak to him at all.

Presently the bell rang. The pupils came filing along the long corridor and, after the bow of dismissal,

scattered into the yard like young spiders.

In utter contrast to the quiet till then, footsteps, shouted commands, and the noise of the scattered pupils filled the school.

There was white chalk on the principal's suit.

He had a long face, was tall, and rather on the thin side, and in his manner one could plainly see that certain "air"

characteristic of graduates of the normal school.

Whether he was pretending not to know, or truly did not know, Seizo could not tell what was in the principal's mind then.

The principal said something like this.

"I know nothing whatever about it… but if Mr. Kato says so and Mr. Kishino knows of it, some order will come in due course. I should like you to wait a little…"

Depending on circumstances he might send a messenger at once and inquire thoroughly; so for tonight, inconvenient as it might be, Seizo should stay at the village office.

Teachers were coming in and out of the teachers' room.

An old teacher of about fifty named Hirata and a young assistant teacher in a suit named Seki stood by a pillar in the corridor talking about something for a long time.

The two of them glanced this way now and then.

The bell rang again.

The principal and the teachers all went out.

The pupils came flooding in like a tide.

The woman teacher, as she was about to leave the room, gave Seizo a sidelong look and went out.

It seemed to be the singing hour; the pupils gathered in the hall, and presently the slow sound of an organ began to be heard through the quiet school.

III

That one night at the village office was lonely.

He was to sleep in the janitor's room.

At dusk he went out by the kitchen door to the side of the well, and as he watched the distant mountains that ringed the plain grow dark, a sadness that seemed to draw his very body into it stole over his heart.

His father and mother came back to him with a pang.

When he was small there had been many brothers.

In those days his father kept a draper's shop in Ashikaga.

They had been fairly well off.

He remembered dimly the time when, at seven, the family fell and came to Kumagaya.

He remembered too having thought it strange that his mother wept.

Now—now that both his elder brother and his younger brother were dead and he was alone—he could not say such free things about family matters as his other school friends could.

Having a good-natured father and a frail, deeply affectionate mother, he had come into the world already carrying an unlucky fate.

Thinking so, the usual sentimental feeling pressed hard upon his breast, and tears came as if forced out.

The near woods and roads and fields were quite dark, but the peaks of the distant mountains were still bright.

The smoke of Asama trailed across the sunset sky as if swept with a brush, and its far end spread wide as though blurred.

The voices of frogs began to be heard here and there.

Lamps were lit in the farmhouses here and there, and somewhere far off a voice went by singing.

He stood there, motionless.

Suddenly he sensed someone coming near the row of alders in front, and then there was the sound of gay laughter and hurrying footsteps.

Thinking it was the janitor come back from Ogawaya with the lunchbox and the bedding, he saw a black shape carrying a great bundle of bedding move out of the dusk as if floating, and behind it a shape that seemed to be a woman came trotting along.

The janitor set the bedding down in the room with a thud and drew a breath as if it had been very heavy, then lit the small lamp he had cleaned that day.

All at once it was bright.

"Thank you for your trouble."

Saying this, Seizo came inside.

At that moment Seizo saw the fair face of the girl standing there.

The girl set down the lunchbox she had brought and looked around the suddenly bright room as if it dazzled her.

"Otane, why don't you stay and visit a while."

The janitor said this.

The girl smiled at him.

She was not so beautiful as to be talked about, but there was something about her eyebrows that people found charming, and a rich fullness showed plainly in her cheeks and arms.

"I hear your mother is unwell. How is she? Is she better now?"

"Yes."

"A cold, I suppose."

"I tell her and tell her not to let herself get cold, but she just goes and falls asleep like that… so she caught a cold…"

"Your mother takes it easy, doesn't she."

"She really is a trouble."

"Still, Otane is the earner, so your mother can take it easy."

The girl laughed without speaking.

After a while,

"Shall I bring the gentleman's lunch tomorrow too?"

"Yes, do."

"Well then, good night."

and as the girl started to leave,

"Come now, stay a while, why don't you."

"I can't stay and visit; I have the clearing up to do from now on… well then, good night."

and she went out.

In the lunchbox were an omelet and pickles.

The janitor poured him lukewarm tea from a used pot.

Presently the old man went off to one side and began beating straw for his side work.

The night was hushed.

He felt as if the house and his own body were being buried in the voices of frogs.

He was tired even of imagining, and as he had brought no magazine to read, he took from his bundle a notebook of foreign paper bound sideways and began writing his diary in pencil.

He wrote April the twenty-fifth, following on from the day before, then had a thought, turned the pencil over, and rubbed it out with the eraser.

Today was at least the first commemorative day of entering a new life in his lifetime.

In a novel it would be the place where a new chapter begins.

So he left the back of the page half blank and began afresh on the next page.

April the twenty-fifth (at Miroku)…

Having written about a page of it briefly, he counted up his expenses for the day while he was at it.

The Tengu cigarettes bought at Shingo, ten sen; the rickshaw on the way, thirty sen; the Seishintan medicine, five sen; the lunch taken at the school, four sen five rin; total forty-nine sen five rin. Deducted from the one yen twenty sen he had brought, seventy sen five rin still remained in his purse.

Next he calculated the expenses of coming here this time.

Twenty-five sen…………………………seal

Twenty-two sen…………………………calling cards

Three sen five rin…………………………tooth powder and toothpicks

Eight sen five rin…………………………two brushes

Fourteen sen…………………………inkstone

One yen fifteen sen…………………………hat

One yen seventy-five sen…………………………haori

Thirty sen…………………………sash

Fourteen sen five rin…………………………clogs

――

Four yen seven sen five rin

Adding the seventy sen five rin, he wrote a total of four yen seventy-eight sen, and then remembered how his father and mother had struggled to get this money together.

He thought with a dull bitterness of the pitifulness of a household that could not easily raise even a single yen.

The collar of the bedding was soiled.

The slow sadness of travel drew sweet tears from him.

Before he knew it he was snoring faintly.

The next day he was asked to copy out the school budget and spent the day at the village office.

When that was done he wrote and posted a letter to his father and mother.

At dusk a messenger came from the principal's house.

The principal's house was not far.

Here and there among the green wheat fields ran a ridge of yellow rape blossoms.

It was a single thatched house, but built entirely like a farmhouse: a wide entrance, and before a six-mat and an eight-mat room in a row a small garden—so that the wife's untidy figure, the crying face of a child, the long brazier of the living room, the soiled and torn mats, were all visible to anyone coming from the front.

In the principal's room could be seen books on school management and psychology and the red covers of an educational review.

"I am truly sorry for you. The truth is it was only arranged privately and had not been made public…"

So saying, he poured out a cup of the tea his wife had brought. "You may know it yourself, but that old teacher named Hirata—he has grown too old to be of use, and we were saying we would have him transferred or dismissed, when just then Kishino said Mr. Kato had spoken of this, so we decided to ask you. But you came a little too soon…"

He began to say this and laughed.

"Was that it. I knew nothing at all about it…"

"Of course, of course, there was no way you could know. It would be well if Kishino were a little more careful, but he is like that, quite indifferent to everything."

"Then that teacher was still there?"

"Yes."

"Then he still did not know?"

"Privately he must know… but it has not yet been announced publicly. We mean to settle it all in the village council within two or three days, so I think you can begin next week…"

Saying this, he broke off a little, then:

"At my school they are all good people and everything goes smoothly, so it is easy to work here even for one newly come. I hope you too will put your whole effort into it. Your salary too will improve by degrees in time…"

He drew a puff on his pipe and tapped it out.

"You do not yet hold a full teacher's certificate, do you?"

"No."

"Then it would be convenient in every way to get one. With your middle school certificate, a little of the practical subjects is nothing at all… Have you read any of the teaching methods?"

"I have read a little, but somehow I find it dull and it troubles me."

"Teaching method is a thing one cannot find interesting until one meets it in practice. Once you try it, you will find there is quite a flavor to it after all."

A man interested in the practice of school teaching method and a youth who yearned after poetry and song thus sat facing each other for a long while.

For the tea, five or six large salted rice crackers were set out on a tray.

The principal's wife, greeting him, looked at the guest with the pale face, the high nose, the wide space between the brows, and thought him a frail person.

In the next room a child born that year cried the whole time they talked, yet the master never said it was noisy.

Diapers were scattered about, and the iron kettle on the brazier boiled with a dry rattle.

There was talk of middle school.

There was talk of the normal school.

There were stories of experience in teaching.

There was gossip about the men who were to be his colleagues.

Seizo, carried away in spite of himself, spoke openly of his ideals and of sacrifice for the sake of his family and of many other things, and even hinted that he had no intention of being a primary school teacher all his life.

Unlike when he had met him at the school the day before, Seizo discovered that this principal had a rather good nature after all.

According to the principal, this Mita-ga-ya was a place where the headman and the pupils' parents held great power, and steering among them was no easy matter.

Nor was its reputation of the best. In the villages nearer the Tone—Hotto, Kamimuragimi, Shimomuragimi and the like—weaving blue-striped cloth on commission was flourishing, and with young men and women coming and going the morals were rather bad.

Children of seven or eight learned the coarsest songs and sang them at school without a thought.

"It is three years now since I came here, and in those days the behavior of the pupils was truly dreadful. At first even I thought I could never manage in such a place. Now it has improved a good deal, at least."

So the principal said.

As he was leaving,

"Tomorrow is Saturday, so I should like to go back to Gyoda once over Sunday. Would that be inconvenient?"

So he asked.

"By all means… then let us have you begin from next week…"

That night too he slept in the janitor's room at the village office.

IV

When he woke in the morning a spring rain was falling softly.

The green of the wet wheat and the yellow of the rape blossoms colored the fields more beautifully than usual.

A snake-eye umbrella passed along the village road.

Past eight, Seizo borrowed a coarse paper umbrella and went out into the rain.

On the umbrella was written in large black letters, Mita-ga-ya Village Office.

From the thicket by the riverside next to Ogawaya, raindrops fell scattering onto the umbrella.

In the rust-colored black water a newt showed its red belly.

Suddenly, out of the house at the entrance to the highroad, Otane of Ogawaya, the fair-skinned girl, came hurrying this way without an umbrella, her hair covered with a white towel, through the shade of the trees where great drops were falling; two or three steps before him she met Seizo's eyes, bowed slightly with a smile, and passed by.

Classes had not yet begun at the school, and from the gate to where the shoe cupboard could be seen the pupils' umbrellas came on in a long line.

Boys and girls alike mostly came walking with their bundles slung at their hips and their skirts tucked up.

There was a mischievous boy who came getting wet in the rain, spinning his umbrella on the ground like a wheel, and there was a girl of twelve or thirteen who came walking with the handle of her umbrella pressed against her neck while she worked her knitting needles and wool.

Thinking that from next week he would be teaching these pupils, Seizo passed before them.

Since the rain had begun only at dawn, the road was not yet so very bad.

Where carts and horses had passed it was slushy, but if one picked one's way there were plenty of places that were not mud.

Into the dry earth at the edge of the road the rain had only barely soaked.

He called at the Izumi village office to see the assistant headman, but he had not yet come to work.

In the long dirty ditch along the road, algae and rushes and the new shoots of reeds and arrowhead grew in a tangle, and a thicket of bamboo wet with rain hung over it.

Raindrops fell pattering down.

Beside the road stood a small farmhouse with a leaning eave, and on the wall hung a spade and a plow and other tools, and an old straw raincoat.

A stout woman with disordered hair leaned against a pillar giving the breast to the baby born that year, while a bearded man of forty who seemed to be her husband, bored at not being able to work in the rain, stretched out his arms and yawned hugely.

The old thatched shrine of the tutelary Hachiman stood where it could be seen from the highroad.

Beside the torii the names and sums of those who had subscribed to the repair of the shrine were written up side by side, old ones and new.

On the great zelkovas round about, new buds had already begun.

Before the offering box two nursemaids with their forelocks bound in towels were singing a lullaby in good time.

There was a shop where yesterday's leftover steamed sweet potatoes were laid out looking unappetizing.

The rain, fine as thread, brushed past those low eaves as it fell.

In the fields, mulberry just beginning to bud, rape blossoms yellow enough to wake the eyes, ridges grown over with milk vetch and violets and grass. Far off, the white walls of a rich farmer surrounded by a grove of cedar and oak could be seen.

The sound of weaving blue-striped cloth was heard here and there.

A busy rhythm, chankara chankara, came ringing without pause.

Sometimes there was no house in sight that could be the source, and one wondered where the weaving was going on.

Sometimes a song came in a young, fresh voice.

At the corner where the road branched off toward Hotto landing stood a noodle shop said to be famous in those parts.

From morning the water boiled in the great cauldron, and a man who seemed to be the master rubbed flour over a large rolling board and worked away at stretching the dough.

A young serving girl with a red cord tying back her sleeves stood laughing and talking with a farmer who seemed to be a regular.

At a bend in the road an old stone was set up.

It was a boundary stone from before the Restoration, and on it was carved, "From here, the Hanyu domain."

So it read.

A row of lanky alders on one side of the road ran on for a good stretch between the paddies.

Along it a narrow stream flowed, and small fish darted in the shade of the sprouting water plants.

The omnibus running from Hanyu to Okoshi went by, flinging mud.

On the way out, on the roof over the second story of a shabby shingled tavern by the road, a quilt with a soiled collar had been hung out in the mild noon sun, and below a pale-faced woman had been busily washing and stretching cloth; but today the sliding doors were shut tight, and green moss growing where the sun did not reach caught the eye unpleasantly.

The road grew worse and worse.

There was no longer any place where one could pick one's way without squelching.

Even walking without lifting his heels, mud kept splashing up from his worn clogs.

The wind rose and the rain came slanting in, and his sleeves too were soaked.

The town of Hanyu was lonely.

Only now and then a paper umbrella or a snake-eye umbrella passed; the wide street with its long eaves was hushed.

Before the post office a young woman stood waiting to collect a money order; in the draper's the head clerk and the shop boy were gathered talking; in the tabi shop, amid piles of blue-striped cloth and stout weave, a workman sewed tabi steadily.

Before a shop of imported goods newly built with glass doors, a bicycle stood, half wet with the drip from the eaves.

At the crossroads of the town a fire-bell tower stood high.

From there the road to Gyoda branched off.

A tobacconist, a noodle shop, the large entrance of a doctor's house, an oddly shaped pine towering above a wall, a great house where a spring well spouted clear water. Passing them and coming out beyond, there was a ditch grown with weeds, and on a gate with the white paint peeling hung a sign reading Hanyu Police Substation.

A policeman came out, rattling his sword, into the pouring rain.

Then the back-street houses continued again.

Most of them were old, poor, shingle-roofed houses.

Before the coach house stood one omnibus, apparently about to leave, with two or three passengers already aboard.

Seizo stopped and asked, but unluckily it was full and there was no room for him.

Seizo's figure could be seen a while longer among the old houses of that back street, and then suddenly he opened the sliding door of a certain small house and went in.

Inside was a middle-aged woman.

"I should like to borrow a pair of clogs… I have been caught in the rain all the way from Miroku and it has quite done for me."

"That is no trouble at all."

The woman brought out a pair of high clogs.

The teeth of the high clogs were worn down and crooked, and they were uncommonly hard to walk in.

They were better than the low ones, but the mud still splashed up a little at a time.

At last he took a rickshaw from Shingo for fifteen sen.

V

The house was in a side street running from the main street of Gyoda toward the old castle ruins.

On the corner was a bathhouse called Yanagi-no-yu, and facing it could be seen the entrance of a restaurant where pretty serving girls worked.

It was a low-eaved house, like one unit partitioned off from a row tenement, and on the sliding doors blackened by wind and rain the thread-fine rain slanted down.

Next door lived a man who dealt in silkworms, and in that season the narrow sitting room, the kitchen, the living room, the entrance were all filled with white cocoons and people came and went in confusion from morning till night; but now the ill-fitting doors were shut tight and all was still.

Seizo slid the door open with a rattle and went in.

His mother, a woman of about forty with her hair in a neat married knot, sat before her cutting board with scissors and spools and a needle box scattered about her, working steadily at her piecework; and when the door opened and her son's face appeared there,

"Why, is that you, Seizo,"

she cried, and rose and came to him.

"Why, what a hard time you must have had in this rain!"

She took in at once the wet sleeves and the mud-spattered hakama, and went on,

"What bad luck, my dear. From yesterday's look of it I never thought the weather would turn like this… did you walk the whole way?"

"I meant to walk, but there was a cheap returning rickshaw at Shingo, so I rode."

Seeing the unfamiliar high clogs he wore,

"Where did you borrow those clogs?"

"At Mineda."

"Is that so, you borrowed them at Mineda… It really must have been hard."

Saying this, she started to fetch a cloth from the kitchen, and

"A cloth will not do, mother. Please draw me some water in a bucket."

"Are you so muddy as that?"

she said as she drew half a bucket of water from the kitchen and brought it.

She set out a dry towel there as well.

Seizo washed his feet clean, wiped them with the towel, and stepped up into the house.

Meanwhile his mother set out for him a padded kimono of Yuki stripe and a haori made over from a pongee garment of her own, and nimbly hung the haori and hakama he had taken off on the clothes rack.

Presently the two of them sat down before the long brazier.

"How did it go?"

His mother, stirring up the fire under the kettle, asked about the matter that had been on her mind.

When Seizo told her briefly,

"So I hear; the letter came this morning. How could such a mix-up have happened?"

"It is nothing; I simply went a little too soon."

"And so how was it settled?"

"I am to begin next week."

"That is good."

A look of joy came over his mother's face.

The talk went on from one thing to another.

What sort of man the principal was, whether he seemed kind, what sort of place Miroku was, whether there was a good place to lodge—his mother brought up all sorts of things and asked.

Seizo told her about each of them.

"And father?"

After a while Seizo asked this.

"He set out saying he would go as far as Shimo-oshi. He said he simply had to raise a little money… I told him it was raining and he had better make it tomorrow, but…"

Seizo fell silent.

His poor home came round again in his head.

That his father had no power to earn seemed to him vexing; but on the other hand, that a man good-natured, decent, weak and dull enough to be easily deceived should make his living by palming off forged paintings and calligraphy on people filled him with keen disgust.

To his honest heart it always seemed that his father's trade was not an honest man's work.

If only he had not been deceived, he could still have kept a respectable draper's shop even now.

Thinking so, along with his sympathy for the mother who knew nothing, he pitied his aging father, who—dishonest trade though it was—went out on such a rainy day to a place four kilometers off for the sake of a mere fifty sen or a yen.

Presently the kettle began to sing.

His mother took the tea canister and the teapot from the old tea cabinet.

The tea had already gone to powder.

In the paper bag in the drawer of the brazier only two salted crackers were left.

Until near dusk Seizo sat under the dark window beside his sewing mother, writing letters to a school friend in Kumagaya and reading the newspaper.

In the letter to his friend he wrote two and three sheets of ruled paper about love and poetry and the songs of the Myojo school, things that even he felt were youthful.

From about four the rain lifted.

The road was still slushy.

His father had come home having failed, so the air of the house was somehow heavy, and as the three of them ate their supper in silence, "Excuse me,"

came a voice first, and then someone tried to open the ill-fitting door.

His mother got up and went,

"Why—do come in, please."

"No, indeed, I only went to the bath, and on the way back—Ikuji said to stop at your house and ask whether Seizo had come home, since it is Saturday… I am always so remiss in calling, truly."

"Do please sit down… oh, and Yuki with you—come, Yuki, do come in this way."

and the two women fell to chattering.

Ikuji's sister Yukiko was a slender, well-made girl, unusual for the country. Her white face, lightly powdered after the bath, stood out clearly against the darkening dusk air, and she stood holding a wet towel with a soap box wrapped in it.

"Come, it is a poor place, but…"

"No, no, we shall not stay."

"Still, do sit down a moment."

Seizo, gathering from this talk who it was, set down his chopsticks, rose, and came out.

He glanced at Yukiko standing beyond the two mothers exchanging greetings, and at once looked away.

Ikuji's mother, seeing Seizo's face,

"So you are home. Ikuji is waiting for you…"

"I was thinking of coming this evening."

"Then please do come and visit. When someone who used to come and go every day suddenly stops coming, he seems to find it unbearably lonely… and besides, he has no other close friends…"

Presently Ikuji's mother went home.

Seizo and his mother sat down again at the table.

Mother and son ate their supper in silence as before.

While drinking the hot water, his mother said suddenly,

"Yuki has grown very pretty, hasn't she!"

as if speaking to no one in particular.

But no one took up her tone.

The sound of his father bolting down tea over rice came with a rustle.

Seizo crunched at a pickled radish.

The day was drawing in.

The rain began to fall again.

VI

The Kato house was not five hundred meters away.

Turning left partway along the park road and going a little between the back streets, one came to wheat fields on one side and a hedge on the other, where in summer red and white rose of Sharon bloomed and cucumbers and pumpkins ripened.

There had been times when he chased fireflies with Yukiko and Shigeko in the dusk under layered shade, and times when he had sat up over cards on a cold winter moonlit night and come home with his clogs clattering loudly.

The gate and tiled roof deep behind the cedar hedge on that narrow lane—for him it was truly a place of no few memories.

Today the lamplight through the cherry leaves glittered, wet with rain.

Yukiko's fair, prim face, Shigeko's innocent smiling welcome, the father talking cheerfully in his cups after supper—he seemed to see them all plainly before he had even called.

More than once or twice he had envied his friend's peaceful home, where laughter never ceased.

A county school inspector is generally rather feared in the country, and most of them are difficult, argumentative men hard to approach; but Ikuji's father was quick to understand, gentle, kind, and was thought by people to carry a good deal of weight in what he said as well.

His beard was half white and gray showed here and there in his hair, but in spirit he was rather on the young side, and he would talk of education to young men without ever tiring of it.

He would come into the room where Seizo and Ikuji were talking and speak with them of all sorts of things.

When he opened the gate, a bell rang with a small tinkle.

Following the stepping stones and standing before the latticed door of the entrance, Seizo, in the darkness, saw Shigeko's smiling face come out to meet him with a lamp, as if it floated toward him.

"Mr. Hayashi?"

she said, peering out, and then,

"Brother, it is Mr. Hayashi!"

in a high, innocent voice.

The father had gone to Kumagaya that day and was out.

With no children about, the rooms were neatly in order.

The cleaning too was thorough, and the lamp in the living room was bright.

The mother sat before the long brazier with a cheerful face.

Yukiko had been clearing up in the kitchen, and as she had just finished, she came into the living room wiping her hands on her white apron.

While they were exchanging greetings, Ikuji came out from the back and took Seizo straight off to his own study.

The study was four and a half mats.

Old paulownia bookcases were piled up, with white slips pasted on them reading Kokan Ekichiroku, Shiki, the Five Classics, Prose of the Eight Masters of Tang and Song. In a small three-foot alcove hung a scroll of orchids by Soun, dimly visible in the far light of the lamp.

On the large magnolia-wood desk that held the lamp lay Myojo, Bungei Kurabu, the Manyoshu, the complete works of Ichiyo, scattered in disorder.

As if they had not met for a year, the two talked eagerly.

All manner of talk came from their lips without a break.

"What has been decided for you?"

Seizo asked after a while.

"I have decided to try for the higher normal school next spring. Until then there is no use simply staying at home, so I shall serve as a teacher at the school here and study…"

"Obata in Kumagaya wrote me the same. He too will try for the higher normal."

"So he wrote to you as well. He wrote to me too."

"Kojima and Sugitani have already gone to Tokyo, I hear."

"So it said."

"What will they enter, I wonder?"

"Kojima seems to be applying to the First Higher School."

"And Sugitani?"

"Who knows what he will do… at any rate he has no worries about school fees, so he can do as he pleases."

"Is anyone from this town going to Tokyo?"

"Let me see,"

Ikuji considered. "Sato said something about going."

"In what line?"

"He seems to mean to enter a technical school."

Talk of their schoolmates came without end.

For Seizo, friends who had fixed their course for the future and were each setting out in the direction they wished were enviable beyond anything.

Even while at middle school he had not failed to imagine beforehand what his circumstances would be after graduation, but at the time he had forced his heart to be easy, telling himself that then would be then, and that some unlooked-for fortune might come from some unlooked-for quarter.

But that had been a fancy.

The poverty of his home brought him day by day nearer to actual life.

And he had inherited from his mother gentle, warm blood.

From childhood he had read Uncle Sazanami's fairy tales and had boiled with youthful feeling over novels and songs and haiku.

As his body developed, his heart burned and cooled by turns.

He came to be able to read the look in the eyes of the young girls of the town.

Before he knew it he had learned the taste of love.

Urged by a certain Desire, he sometimes did filthy things where no one knew.

Sometimes he thought the world spread before him an interesting and pleasant stage; sometimes he thought it showed him a foul and ugly face not to be approached.

When he thought of his own unsatisfied desires, and of the world like a beautiful flower, and of his own future which he could not tell what would become of, his heart always turned dark and desolate and unbearable.

From talk of his friend's love in Kumagaya, talk of the lady of Art came up.

"I am wretched, and there is nothing to be done."

"There ought to be some way of managing it."

The two of them said such things.

"I met her in the park yesterday. She said she had come back from Urawa for a little. She had the look of one who has grown fat to no purpose."

Ikuji said this and laughed.

"Fat to no purpose—that is good."

Seizo laughed too.

"Your sister is her friend, and her elder brother is there too; there ought to be some way of managing it."

"Come, let it alone. It hurts to think of it."

Ikuji put on the face of a young man secretly nursing a love in his breast.

As he had said of himself before, Ikuji was no handsome man.

He had a manly, decided air, but with his big frame, his square shoulders, his sharp eyes, his prominent cheekbones, there was nothing about him that women would find attractive.

The kind of torment young men suffer was in his breast as well.

Compared with Seizo, his circumstances were good.

His home was good.

Even if he could not enter the higher normal school, his father was willing to pay for a year or two of study in Tokyo.

And being of good physique, his way of thinking was sound, without Seizo's sentimental streak.

When Seizo spoke of this move to Miroku as though it were the utmost despair—as though it were the first step toward being buried in the country and never getting out—Ikuji answered, "Come, there is nothing of the sort. That men are governed by circumstance is no doubt true to some degree, but from any circumstance whatever, if a man means to get out, he can get out"

—and even from that one can see one side of Ikuji's character.

At the time Seizo said,

"You say so, but that is because you do not know how terrible the bondage of circumstance is. In short, it is a word that comes out of the happiness of your home."

"That is not so."

"No, I think it is. I cannot help feeling that I shall be buried here for good."

"And I, even granting for the sake of argument that man is that kind of animal, could not submit to so negative a view."

"Then you say that from any circumstance whatever a man can get out by his own way of thinking alone."

"Just so."

"In short, that comes to a doctrine of human omnipotence—the argument that there is nothing that cannot be done."

"You always push it to extremes, but of course there are exceptions there."

Then came the usual simple talk of ideals.

Positive views and negative views got mixed up together, and it ended without coming to any point.

Their circle had often argued about literature and about life ever since their school days.

They had also composed new-style waka and haiku and lyrical prose and shown them to one another.

When one of them took the pen name Senkotsu, the proposal was made that they should all take names using the character kotsu, and amusing names appeared—Hakotsu, Shakotsu, Rokotsu, Tenkotsu, Kokotsu—and for a while they all used these kotsu names in writing letters and in talking.

Kokotsu was one of those who, like Ikuji and Seizo, had walked the twelve kilometers to Kumagaya early in the morning; his true pen name was Kizan, and he was the son of one of the leading blue-stripe dealers in town, who ordinarily wore a stiff sash and always had silver-rimmed spectacles on his pale face.

He was one of those extremely earnest lovers of literature one often finds among country youths; he subscribed to nearly every magazine there was, and at first sent in contributions of all kinds and delighted in seeing his pen name in print; but of late he had come to feel that contributing was beneath him, and had begun to hold forth freely to his circle with criticism of the novels and poems and songs in each month's magazines.

Moreover he liked to keep up acquaintance with fellow contributors, and since he was always exchanging letters with the editors of small provincial magazines, the provincial literary notes often carried such lines as: in Gyoda of Bushu there is Ishikawa Kizan.

He knew two or three writers of name in the literary world of the day as well.

There was another who had taken a kotsu name—this one did not understand much about literature and had been let into the circle merely out of sociability; but his elder brother ran the only printing business in the town of Gyoda, and passing before it one could see, at the glass-doored entrance, a large ink-stained signboard reading Gyoda Printing House, and inside a single old-fashioned hand press with its great arm swinging back and forth, back and forth.

Advertising handbills and calling cards were the main work; sometimes they were asked to print simple reports for the county office or the police station, but that was very rare. There were few types in the cases ranged on the shelves.

Setting the type, making up the forms, printing—the master did it all alone.

On Sundays and the like one always saw his younger brother, in a soiled tube-sleeved coat, standing before the hand press turning over the printed sheets.

It cannot be that they marked him for a rich man's son and, counting on his pocket money, set him up to it; but at the beginning of that April Kizan came to the printing house to visit and talked a long time with the master and his brother, and as he left he said, "Well then, if you are ready to lose seven or eight yen a month, it will be quite safe. Even if we pay nothing for manuscripts there will be plenty of writers, and besides, twenty or thirty copies will sell."

The face with which he said it shone with joy at the new plan.

"Gyoda Bungaku"

—the talk of starting a little magazine of that name arose among that circle from this point.

Kizan said at that meeting,

"And then, there is Yamagata Kojo at the Jogan Temple in Hanyu. For all that, he is a man of some note in the literary world, famous for new-style poetry, so first of all we should get him to lend his name as a patron. If we ask through him, we can get a manuscript from Hara Kyoka too."

"They say that man Kojo is of a samurai family from here."

"So they say… So it will be nothing at all to make him a patron."

Just then Seizo was about to take his post at Miroku, so the circle laid on him the duty of calling first at that temple.

That night, when talk of "Gyoda Bungaku"

came up, Ikuji said,

"Did you stop there?"

"Unluckily I was caught in the rain."

"So you were."

"Next time I go, I will stop in."

"Speaking of that, Ogyu went to Hanyu today; did you not meet him?"

"Ogyu did?"

Seizo thought it remarkable.

Ogyu was one of the same circle, the son of a restaurant in the same town, who was working at the post office in Kumagaya.

He had now been posted to the Hanyu office, and Ikuji had met him at a corner of the town just as he was setting off by rickshaw.

"Will he be there long from now on, I wonder?"

"Of course he will. The man who runs the Hanyu office is a relative of Ogyu's."

"That is good."

"I thought so too—that you would have someone to talk with."

"But we are not so very close…"

"You will grow close at once; he is such a gentle fellow…"

Just then Shigeko came in, saying, "They were made in the daytime, so they have gone stale, but…"

and brought in rice cakes with bean paste and poured tea.

She sat down beside her brother and spoke a word or two in an innocent tone; and then this time her elder sister Yukiko showed her tall figure there and said, "Brother, Mr. Ishikawa is here."

So she said.

Presently Ishikawa came in.

Seeing Seizo in the room,

"I just called at your house."

"Did you."

"Your mother said you had come this way."

Saying this, Ishikawa sat down. "Well, has the schoolmaster managed all right?"

Seizo laughed.

Ikuji put in from the side, "He says he has not tried yet, so he does not know whether he can or not."

So he said.

Yukiko and Shigeko, seeing Ishikawa's face, both greeted him and at once withdrew.

While Ikuji and Seizo were talking there was no constraint in the conversation, so they would often sit long beside them; but when a stranger joined, they always grew formal.

So close were Seizo and Ikuji.

So close was Seizo with this household.

The way Ikuji and Seizo talked also changed completely when Ishikawa came.

"At last I mean to bring out the first number from the fifteenth of next month."

"Is it all settled then?"

"From Tokyo, among the big names, Reisui and Tenzui are to write for us… and a good deal of manuscript is coming in from the provinces too, so I think it will be all right."

So saying, he brought out five or six kinds of little provincial magazines and Tokyo literary magazines, and picked out in particular a twenty-four-page duodecimo called "Shobungaku,"

published in the Okayama region, and said,

"I mean to make it roughly like this. I consulted Sawada—the printer—too, and he says that would be best; but I am not much taken with the inside style, so I mean to set the type differently."

"Yes, the inside is not very handsome."

and the two of them looked at "Shobungaku."

They looked at it.

"What about this one?"

and Ishikawa showed a two-column page of eighteen lines of twenty-four characters.

"Yes, indeed."

The three of them turned over several kinds of magazines.

The magazines Ikuji had were brought out there too for reference.

The lamp lit clearly the three young men with their heads together and the magazines scattered in disorder about them.

Presently they settled roughly on one of them.

Among the magazines Ishikawa had brought was the April number of "Myojo."

It was there.

Seizo took it up, and at first looked at the bright woodcuts by Fujishima Takeji and Nakazawa Hiromitsu, and then gazed intently at Akiko's poems.

The tendency of the new "Myojo school"

felt to Seizo's parched breast like a very spring of water.

Ishikawa saw this and laughed.

"Already looking at it. A worshipper is a different creature indeed!"

"But it really is good."

"What is good about it? The language is all in pieces; the thought may be new, but they gather up phrases no one can understand and suppose that makes a poem. Those Myojo people are more than I can bear."

The old argument for and against the Myojo school—the three of them went over it again.

VII

It was already past twelve at night.

The sound of the raindrops still went on.

Now and then one could catch the sense of a shower passing over.

Near the marsh of the castle ruins the cry of a grebe sounded lonely.

In one room three beds were laid out.

A small married knot of hair and a bald head lay side by side there, asleep.

His mother had been awake until just before, and had said any number of times, "You will be sleepy tomorrow, so go to bed early,"

and had said it again and again.

"It is dangerous to fall asleep with the lamp lit by your pillow,"

she had warned him too.

Now she too had fallen asleep, and mingled with his father's snoring her faint breathing came softly.

The paper shade was old to begin with, and he had not noticed that the wick had been turned up too far a while ago, so the glass chimney had blackened halfway and the light was disagreeably red and dim.

Seizo read the borrowed "Myojo"

so intently that he almost forgot himself.

The camellia, the plum too, were so, and they were white: the color that does not ask my sin I see in the peach.

The color that does not ask my sin I see in the peach, see in the peach, see in that red peach—the heart that sang so sank deep into his breast.

It seemed strange, and it seemed unnatural too.

And again it seemed that in this strange, unnatural place a new spring welled up and up.

In the very division of the fourth and fifth lines at "the color, in the peach," there seemed to be a fragrance beyond words.

For every poem, for every page, he was compelled to lay the book face down and taste the feelings that welled up in him.

In that moment he had quite forgotten the desolation of sleeping at the village office the night before, and the misery of coming from Miroku to Hanyu soaked through with rain.

Suddenly he remembered the argument with Ishikawa that evening.

He could not understand how a man could take up literature with such coarse feelings.

By contrast, he was thankful to himself that his own feelings could touch a new current of thought so vividly.

He tried too to imagine the poor dwelling of the poet and his wife in the lonely depths of Shibuya.

It seemed somehow sad, and somehow enviable.

He stopped reading the poems, and gave himself up entirely to longing for that magazine, filled from its format to its typesetting to its cover design with a new fragrance.

Even when the clock struck two he was still lying in bed with his eyes wide open.

The sound of mice crossing the ceiling was noisy.

The rain fell and cleared and fell again.

Now it would pass over with a lonely rush, as if drawing a man's heart into another world; now the raindrops would come dripping down the eaves gutter with a steady patter.

There was no use longing forever.

"I had better sleep,"

he thought, and got up, took the dim lamp in his hand, and went to the privy past the foot of the bedding where his father and mother slept.

When he opened one shutter to wash his hands, the lamp he had set on the veranda lit the darkness sharply, and the rain falling on the wet nandina leaves glistened.

At the sound of the door closing his mother woke.

"Is that Seizo?"

"Yes."

"Are you still not asleep?"

"I am just going to bed now."

"Go to sleep quickly… you will be sleepy tomorrow."

she said, and turned over.

"What time is it now?"

"Two struck just now."

"Two… it will be light before long. Go to sleep."

"Yes."

So he got into the quilts and blew out the lamp with a puff.

VIII

About one o'clock the next afternoon, Seizo, wearing a white-striped hakama and carrying the borrowed high clogs in his hand, and his father, half bald and wearing an old striped haori of new pongee, walked out together at the edge of the town of Gyoda.

The sky after the rain was somewhat cloudy, and now and then, as if remembering, a thin sunlight fell.

In the river that marked the boundary between town and village, reeds and rushes and white poplars had already put out green shoots; five or six ducks quacked, and a paper umbrella and a snake-eye umbrella were set out side by side on the bank to dry.

A farmer from nearby who had come to town to shop sat eating noodles busily.

The backs of father and son walking side by side moved quietly along between the rows on either side—low eaves and roofs tiled with local tile, eaves hung with drying diapers, a stonecutter's yard, a smithy, a house where a girl wove blue-striped cloth, a sweetshop where children had gathered.

And then, from the other way, a candy seller came along beating his drum merrily, a stand balanced on his head with countless little flags fluttering above it.

Two or three days before, his father had left five or six hanging scrolls of painting and calligraphy at a great house in a place called Shingo nearby.

Thinking he must go today and turn them into some money, he had set out together with Seizo, who was going to Miroku that afternoon.

On the way here his father met two acquaintances from the town.

One was a crony he could speak freely with. "Where are you off to? So, to Shingo, is it? That place, now—nothing but stingy people, no getting anywhere at all,"

and the middle-aged man laughed loudly.

The other was the master of a great house in town who was a fancier of painting and calligraphy; when he came along from the other direction, Seizo's father greeted him politely and stopped.

"That last one seems rather bad, you know—it looks doubtful,"

said the other; and "No, no, there is nothing of the kind. The provenance is sound, so it is guaranteed,"

his father explained eagerly.

When Seizo looked back from about ten meters ahead, his father was bowing low again and again.

The thin sunlight shone glaringly on his bald forehead.

The highroad to Kazo and the highroad to Tatebayashi divide in two at the edge of the town.

Beyond that it becomes wide open country.

Here and there in the fields were thick clumps of woodland, and among them one could see the white-walled storehouses.

In the paddies not yet plowed, milk vetch bloomed beautifully as though a red carpet had been spread.

A man who seemed to be the young master of a shop came riding smoothly along the flat highroad on a bicycle.

The road went from field into village and from village out into field again.

There were great houses ringed with tall oak hedges, and there were crumbling houses of rough plaster fronting ditches where green moss grew dirtily.

The voices of chickens came peacefully here and there.

On the highroad a wholesale sweet dealer was unloading his goods, and the woman of the village sweetshop, her hair all in a tangle, came out without even her sash tied and, saying this and that, had him leave just what she needed of bean sweets and hard candy balls.

When the fork for Shingo drew near, father and son had this conversation.

"When will you come next time?"

"I shall come home next Saturday."

"Could you manage something by then?"

"I do not know, but it is the end of the month, so I expect they will give me a little."

"Even a little would help."

Seizo made no answer.

Presently they came to the parting place.

To Shingo one could get from here by crossing a single stretch of paddy.

"Well then, take care."

"Yes."

A wayside stone shrine stood there.

The figure of the bald father walking away round-shouldered, and the figure of Seizo in his brown hat and white-striped hakama, could be seen for a long while on the road across the fields.

IX

That night he stayed at the village office.

He called on the principal, but he was out.

In his diary he wrote, "Ah, shall I be able to endure in the end? Ah, shall I in the end be buried as a mere country schoolmaster? Tomorrow! Tomorrow all will be settled. The evening meeting of the village council! Ah! I leave this one word for a later day,"

so he wrote.

He meant to write out his feelings in more detail, but as he did not think he could ever express them fully, he decided to keep them in memory.

The next day he went to the school at nine in the morning.

But that man Hirata was still there, so he went back once to the village office.

About an hour later he set out again.

This time the teacher was gone.

Classes had already begun.

The voices of teachers instructing the pupils came clearly from each classroom.

The clear voice of the woman teacher could be heard as well.

Seizo's heart somehow danced.

When he entered the teachers' room the principal was at his desk looking through some papers, but

"Come in, come in,"

he said, and waited for Seizo to enter, and offered him a chair beside him.

"I am sorry for you. It is all settled at last. It has been quite troublesome… all sorts of things came up at the meeting last night too."

So saying he laughed. "The village is small, and there are tiresome school committee men in it, so it is difficult."

The principal went on,

"And what do you mean to do about lodging? You can hardly come every day from Gyoda. Well, for the time being you may stay at the school… have you any plan?"

"Is there no good place to lodge anywhere?"

Taking this as his opening, Seizo asked.

"It is the country, so there is nothing quite suitable…"

"It need not be here; a little distance would do…"

"Well now… let me think about it. There may be somewhere."

When the second hour ended, Seizo was introduced to those who were to be his colleagues.

The assistant teacher named Seki had a smiling, easy manner about him.

The second master, named Oshima, was about forty-five or six, his head already quite gray; at first glance he looked a stiff sort of man, but when he laughed a gentle expression came into his face, and he seemed thoroughly skilled in elementary teaching.

"Ah, this is Mr. Hayashi. My name is Oshima. I hope we shall get on well."

There was something of the man of the world in the tone of that too.

Next he was introduced to a certified teacher named Kano with a wart on his face, and to a stout normal school graduate named Sugita.

The normal school man greeted him somewhat curtly. The woman teacher looked down and smiled.

Before the next hour began, the principal gathered the pupils in the first classroom.

He stood at the platform and introduced the new teacher to them.

"A new teacher named Mr. Hayashi has come, and he will be teaching you. The new teacher is from Gyoda, he has studied at middle school, and he is a very able teacher, so you must all listen well to what he says and study hard."

The new teacher standing beside the principal, looking down a little with a red face, seemed to the pupils somehow embarrassed and shy.

The pupils listened to the principal's words in silence.

The next hour, the figure of that new teacher appeared before the platform of the third classroom.

There the pupils of the first year of the higher course, twelve and thirteen years old, sat in rows before him chattering about something; but when the teacher came in they all turned their eyes toward him and fell silent.

The new teacher came to the platform and sat down on the chair, and his face was red.

He had brought one reader, but with his face bent over the desk he spent some time turning the pages of the textbook.

Now and then there were whispers at the back.

The glass doors of the classroom were smeared with dust and dirty gray, but just there the sunlight fell yellow, and outside the sparrows were chirping busily.

The creaking of a cart in the street was heard rattling by.

From the next classroom the thin, sharp voice of the woman teacher began to be heard.

After a while, as if he had made up his mind, the new teacher raised his face.

On that face with its grown-out hair, broad forehead, and thick eyebrows, a kind of effort could be seen.

"From which lesson is it?"

The voice that said this spread out and was heard through the wide classroom.

"From which lesson is it?"

he repeated, and then, "How far have you been taught?"

By the time he said this the redness had already left his face.

Answers rose in confusion from here and there.

Seizo opened the page of the reader the pupils showed him.

By now the pain of standing in a classroom for the first time had eased a good deal.

He was, in any case, a man who could not get out of teaching.

In any case there was nothing for it but to do his best.

Whatever people might say, whatever they might think, this was no time to trouble himself about that.

Thinking so, his heart grew light.

"Well then, we shall begin."

The new teacher began to read the sixth lesson.

The pupils heard a quick but smooth, flowing voice.

Compared with the low, spiritless voice of the old teacher before him, like the droning of a bee, it was a great difference.

But that voice was rather too fast, and much of it did not catch in the pupils' ears.

The pupils looked at the teacher's face rather than at their books.

"Well, do you understand it like that?"

"Please read a little more slowly."

Various voices rose from here and there.

The second time he read in a deliberately slow manner.

"Well, can you understand it at this speed?"

Showing a smiling face, he spoke to them familiarly.

"Sir, we understood the second one well."

"A little faster would be all right."

the pupils said.

"How many times has the teacher read it for you until now? Twice? Three times?"

"Twice."

"Twice, sir."

came voices from here and there.

"Then this will do."

and Seizo, encouraged by the unexpectedly innocent tone of the pupils, "But the first reading was too fast, so I shall read it once more. Listen carefully."

This reading was clearer still.

It was neither fast nor slow.

He had those who could read raise their hands, and had a pretty fair-skinned child in the front row read, and so on.

Some could read and some could not.

Seizo picked out the difficult characters from the passage, wrote them on the blackboard, and had the pupils learn them one by one.

For especially difficult characters he put a mark and wrote the reading beside them in katakana.

The pain of standing before a class for the first time had somehow been wiped clean away, and the pleasure of finding that he too could do it if only he tried filled his breast.

Presently the hour came and the bell rang.

His lunch was brought over from Ogawaya.

At the noon recess the pupils all went out to play in the yard.

Some rode the swing, some played at tag.

The girls naturally formed groups apart from the boys and played at cat's cradle or with beanbags.

Bordering the yard, the green leaves of white poplars stood in a sparse row, and between them a wide green field could be seen.

Seizo leaned against a pillar of the corridor and gazed at the pupils playing without a care.

There came the teacher named Seki.

His gentle eyes and smiling, mild face had, from the first meeting, given Seizo the feeling that he was a good-natured man.

He felt too that with this man he could talk without reserve.

"How was it? Have you finished your hour?"

"Yes…"

"The first time is always an awkward business… I myself came here only three months ago, and at the beginning I was quite at a loss."

"I am not used to it, that is all."

Seizo was glad of this sympathy.

"What sort of man was the one who served before me?"

"There had been talk for some time of dismissing him because he had grown old. He is from Imaizumi and has been teaching a very long while, they say… but the young men keep coming on… and besides, he is not a man who would be in difficulties if he left teaching."

"Has his family property?"

"Property is hardly the word, but his son keeps a hardware shop."

"I see."

Even such commonplace talk became the occasion of bringing these two young men closer.

The two stood there talking until the bell rang.

In the afternoon he taught science and penmanship.

At night he stayed in the duty room.

The duty room was six mats, and next to it was the janitor's room.

In the janitor's room a fire burned red in the big hearth, and the kettle hung from the pothook was always boiling over.

Beyond that was the sink, with bowls and chopsticks set beside a hand pail.

On the shelf a tub and a grinding bowl lay upside down.

That night the teacher Oshima was on duty, and they talked together in an open way about many things.

He was from Tochigi Prefecture and had taught long in Utsunomiya; the year before last he had come to Saitama Prefecture, had been a little while at Urawa, and had then been posted here, he said.

His home was near Okoshi, and he had a daughter of fifteen and a boy of nine.

The impression at first meeting and the impression when they had talked openly were altogether different.

Oshima, red as a beet from his one measure of evening sake, told him with an air of satisfaction of his experiences in teaching and of things that would be useful to a young man.

There was a bathhouse on the street.

He had seen smoke rising blue and black from its narrow chimney.

The latticed door divided into men's and women's baths, and going in there was the attendant's stand.

Within the steam that hung thick and white, a box lamp burned dimly, and the sound of the rinsing water falling from the wooden pipe rang loud.

The bath room was not well cleaned, so that it was unpleasantly slimy underfoot.

Soaking in the hot water, Seizo pictured his new life to himself.

X

One morning, before beginning the lesson, Seizo stood at the platform and said to the pupils in a serious tone,

"Today I have one happy thing to tell you all. On the twenty-ninth of this month, Her Imperial Highness the Crown Princess Sadako safely gave birth to a new prince. I am sure you have already heard this in the newspapers and from your fathers and mothers. That the Imperial House should prosper is a matter of the greatest joy to us subjects; a thousand autumns, ten thousand years, as it says in the song of Kimigayo that you all sing every day, until the pebbles grow into a great rock and are covered with moss. And the day before yesterday there was the ceremony of naming the prince, and it was announced that he is to be called His Highness Prince Michi, Hirohito."

So saying, he turned his back, took the chalk, and wrote large on the blackboard the six characters, Prince Michi Hirohito.

XI

"I should be most grateful if you would consent to become an honorary patron… and also a manuscript of some kind. However short, it would be quite enough."

Saying this, Seizo looked at the face of the priest of the Jogan Temple sitting before him.

He thought him a man of less impressive appearance than he had heard.

New-style poetry, fiction—his name was fairly well known even in the literary world of Tokyo.

Seizo had once been a devoted reader of his poems.

He had also read a story of his that appeared in a magazine.

That he had become priest of this temple the year before last was owing to an unavoidable connection from the former incumbent, and though the temple was one of the foremost in the town of Hanyu, it was rumored that such a man was wasted on a country temple.

That this should be so short, so small, so frail-looking a man, Seizo had not dreamed.

On his way home on Saturday he had called at the Hanyu post office to see Ogyu Hidenosuke, and as Hidenosuke happened to know Yamagata Kojo of the Jogan Temple, they went to call together.

"That is interesting… that is interesting indeed."

The priest said this over and over.

"Gyoda Bungaku"

was talked of among the three of them.

"Of course I shall do what I can… well, for the first number let me give you a poem or something. I shall write to Hara in Tokyo as well…"

So saying, the priest gave a slight bow.

"Please, by all means…"

Seizo asked.

"Are you one of the company too, Mr. Ogyu?"

"No, indeed, I… understand nothing of literature."

and Ogyu laughed and scratched his head with something of the air of a tradesman's son.

From his middle school days, unlike Ishikawa and Kato and Seizo, he had had little to do with literature or religion.

Consequently there was nothing fanciful about him.

As soon as he left middle school he took a post at the post office he had been helping at before, and went out into the world with neither complaint nor discontent.

The priest's room was a single ten-mat room, and the ceiling was high.

In front lay a garden set with yew and pine and azalea and osmanthus, and adjoining it a long corridor ran to the main hall.

The tiled roof and the blackened paper doors of the six-mat annex off the main hall could be seen.

The bookcase was full of Western books.

The priest talked with unusual animation.

Speaking of the frivolity of the present literary world and the evils of its cliques: "One can never study in Tokyo. It is only natural that voices should be heard calling for a country life,"

and so on.

His appearance was unimpressive, but there was a kind of heat in his words that stirred the breasts of the young men.

From poetry to fiction to drama; it seemed it would not easily come to an end.

Talk of the poems of the Myojo school came up too.

The priest also praised Akiko's poems.

"Just so. There is no need to be so strict about language. To pour in new thought, new arrangements of words are needed as well…"

So saying, he agreed with Hayashi's view.

Then the subject of ideals came up, and when it did the priest's face suddenly took on a lively color.

The years when the priest went to Waseda to study were the years of Koyo and Rohan.

He had gone about too with the men of feeling of the so-called "Bungakukai"

circle.

He had been intimate as well with university students who loved the poems of Heine.

To him, coming from the Soto sect seminary in Azabu into the free literary world of Waseda, it had felt like coming out of a winter-withered mountain into a field of green leaves.

Now that he had gone back to such a life as this, he was much subdued; but even so, at times the old passion burst out.

"A man is no good without ideals. Religion too regards this matter of ideals as extremely important. To be assimilated, to be drowned in something, is to be without ideals. The heart that longs for a beautiful love—that too is an ideal… there is power in not wishing to obey love blindly as ordinary men do. The Buddha too spoke of the one mind that is thus, and taught the unity of spirit and flesh; and of course we must in the end obey the force of nature—but that a man should have an ideal there, and something that yearns after things, is what gives him meaning as a man."

With his natural stoop bent still more, and a faint flush on his pale face, the priest's earnest manner and words gave Seizo the feeling of being drawn straight into them.

Those words struck home hard in his breast.

The thought and the longing he had once read of in books and in poems—that had still been fancy.

Look about him as he might, there was not one man who spoke of such things.

If it was not talk of silkworms it was talk of making money, talk of whose salary was more and whose less; most people in the world live on talk of bread.

If one so much as mentions ideals, one is silenced in a word as a milk-smelling youth who does not yet know the world.

In the priest's words there was this meaning: "Success or failure has no value whatever as regards a man's worth. Most people assign value by such a standard, but I think it truer to assign value by the standard of ideals and taste. Even a beggar may have a fine character."

That was the sense of it.

To Seizo it seemed that he had found, for his lonely life, a very powerful comforter.

Between host and guest two earthenware hand-warmers were set, and confetti sweets had been put in the sweet dish.

The tea poured by the wife—dark-skinned and sturdily built, the very opposite of the priest—had gone cold and turned a cloudy yellow.

An hour later the two friends were walking along the long paved path that led from the main hall to the temple gate.

Beside the bell tower stood a Fudo hall with its doors shut fast, and on its high veranda two or three nursemaids with their forelocks bound in towels were playing.

There were five or six great ginkgo trees, and between trunk and trunk a woman of twenty-five or six with her hair in a comb-wound knot had stretched the warp of blue-striped cloth she was about to weave and was busily setting the threads in order.

"An interesting man, isn't he."

Seizo said, turning to his friend.

"For all that, he is a very good man."

"I never thought there was such a man in this bit of country. I had heard it said he was wasted on a country temple, and it is quite true…"

"He said he had no one to talk with and it troubled him."

"Well he might, for in the country there are only farmers and townsfolk."

The two passed through the gate and came out on the highroad along a way lined with alders.

On one side of the highroad was a dirty ditch, and as they walked, frog after frog leapt from the grass into the water.

Black and green moss and algae floated on the water.

With the sliding door half open, a fair-skinned girl showed her profile as she wove blue-striped cloth, chankara chankara.

As they passed before it,

"Is there not a room in the main hall of that temple?"

Seizo asked.

"There is. A six-mat room."

his friend answered, turning round.

"I wonder, now. Would they not let me stay there?"

"I expect they would… until recently a policeman rented it and did his own cooking."

"And that policeman is no longer there?"

"I heard he was transferred to Iwase the other day."

"You are on good terms with them—would you ask for me? I would cook for myself or anything; if only they would lend me the room, without troubling them about meals…"

"That is a good idea."

Ogyu agreed.

"From here it is less than eight kilometers to Miroku… and not too far to go home to Gyoda on Saturdays…"

"And besides, I could learn all sorts of things there. Far better than lodging in some dull place about Miroku."

"Indeed. And I should have someone to talk with, which is good."

It was settled that Ogyu would ask by next Monday, and the two friends parted at the corner by the police substation.

XII

Yesterday afternoon half a month's salary was paid.

Seizo's purse rattled with silver and copper coins.

An old, soiled purse with its binding broken!

Never before had so much money been in this purse.

And to think that it was the first he had received for his own work gave it somehow a different meaning.

Calling back his mother as she was about to go to the kitchen, he took the purse from his breast and laid out there three yen eighty sen in notes and silver.

His mother looked at her son's face as if she could not contain her joy, and "When I think that you have come to work and bring in money like this, I am truly glad,"

she said from her heart.

Her son told her that the remaining half should come in four or five days, and "That is what is so troublesome about the country. Sometimes it comes in three or four installments, they say… they are so stingy about it."

His mother, making a show of raising the money reverently to her forehead, stood and set it before the household shrine.

On the shrine, azaleas and kerria had been arranged in a small vase as an offering.

Seizo, seeing how much gray hair had lately come into the little knot of his mother's turned back, thought how her gentle heart had been battered by the storms of living, and pitied her.

To rejoice so at even this much money is the heart of a parent.

He could not help thinking of the envy that flared in him whenever he heard of friends going straight from middle school to Tokyo, and of his own place as a son facing the love of parents living in such poverty.

That Saturday passed pleasantly.

His mother went out herself and bought the country buns he liked and made tea for him.

His mother's smiling face with its many fine wrinkles and his son's pale, frail, lonely smile sat facing each other for a long time across the long brazier.

Seizo brought up the plan of lodging at the Jogan Temple in Hanyu from next week if it suited them, and told her about the young, learned priest and the kindly Ogyu.

His mother said she wanted to wash his bedding and clothes before then, and to make him a lined kimono as well.

She went on too about how poorly his father's trade was going.

Talk of the well-off household of Seizo's childhood came up as well.

That evening he bought sweets and went to Ikuji's house.

Yukiko met him with a smile.

The talk in the study showed no sign of easily coming to an end.

Even repeating the same things over, the two were so close that it did not seem the same thing at all.

Simply to sit face to face and look at each other was for the two of them a pleasure beyond anything.

Talk of "Gyoda Bungaku"

came up, and talk of Yamagata Kojo came up.

Just then Ikuji's father, who happened to have come home the day before, came out and said, "Well, Mr. Hayashi, how is it… is the school going well?"

and so on.

"That school should be free of friction, which is good. The principal is a graduate of the twenty-seventh year, but for all that he is a man who understands things fairly well… and he is well thought of in the village."

The county inspector told them such things.

When Yukiko came to pour tea, she took a picture postcard from her sleeve and said, "A letter like this came just now from Mihoko in Urawa,"

and showed it to the two of them.

Mihoko was that lady of Art.

Yukiko did not yet know her brother's secret.

The picture postcard was one that had come with Jogaku Sekai, entitled "Early Summer,"

showing a stylish woman standing in the shade of new leaves with a slender parasol of the latest fashion.

There was nothing particularly out of the way in what was written.

――Miss Yukiko, are you well?

It is already two months since I came here.

Life in the dormitory—it is more than others could ever imagine. Now and then I think of how we played happily together this spring.

By way of apology for my long silence… Mihoko

Seizo laid the card on the mat and said,

"You will be going to Urawa too this time, will you not?"

"Not I."

and Yukiko laughed.

That smiling face Seizo remembered in the darkness on his way home.

They had been facing each other only a moment.

The lamp had lit her profile.

He thought her beautiful, unlike her usual self.

He had always found the touch of primness about her disagreeable, but tonight it seemed to him rather to give her an air of refinement.

Mihoko's face passed next before his eyes.

Yukiko's face and Mihoko's face overlapped and became one…

Frogs cried on the paddy ridges, and the light of the second floor of the town hospital leaked from a window.

＊　　　　　　＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

Behind the town there was a small temple.

Entering the gate, one saw the thatched roof of the priest's quarters and the black paper of the window doors weathered by wind and rain.

The Buddha in the main hall shone black, and the wooden fish drum rested on a red woolen mat.

In the graveyard behind, a bamboo thicket marked off the neighboring land, and the trails of slugs remained plainly on the gravestones.

Among those many gravestones was the grave of Seizo's younger brother.

His brother had died in the spring of the year before last, at fifteen.

His illness had been long.

He had wasted away by degrees and his face grown paler day by day.

The doctor wrote tuberculosis on the certificate, but his father and mother said there could be no such illness in the family's blood and did not believe the doctor's certificate.

Seizo sometimes remembered that young brother.

The grief at his death—more than that, he thought how glad he would be if the boy were alive now and could be someone to talk with.

Each time he would take flowers and visit the grave.

On Sunday morning he set out with star anise and kerria.

He borrowed a pail at the priest's quarters, drew water, and carried it round to the back with his own hands.

No stone had yet been set up; a wooden grave marker blackened by wind and rain stood lonely on the little mound of earth.

His father and mother too seemed not to have visited for a long time; the flower holder was cracked.

It was no use putting water in it.

Seizo stood a long while before it.

The new green of May already made all about it bright, and the voice of a warbler came from the bamboo thicket.

In the afternoon he went to the printing house and called on Ishikawa.

He knew that if he did not go back to Miroku today he would have to leave home at four in the morning to be in time for his lessons; but somehow he hated going back—hated giving up the pleasure of talking with close friends to return to a place where there was hardly anyone to talk to—and before he knew it he had let the time pass.

After supper he went to the bath, and on the way back he called on Ikuji again and they walked in the bright evening fields.

The castle ruins had lost their old form so far that at a glance one would hardly know them.

In the small pasture of a dairy five or six cows lowed, and from the long narrow building of the blue-stripe weaving company next to it the voices of the women workers singing could be heard clearly through the sound of the looms.

The evening sun shone as clear as a picture on the marsh, which, filled in with paddies year by year from about where the great gate was said to have stood, had grown as narrow as a brook.

Newly sprouted reeds and plume grass, sedge and cattail, and rust-colored water filling it all: here it was dark, there it was bright.

Crossing the plank bridge over the marsh, a narrow path wound out into the fields, and the faces of the farmers coming with their carts were colored red by the evening sun.

Wheat fields and mulberry fields, and the two of them walking as if threading between them.

Talk followed talk and showed no sign of easily coming to an end.

Before they knew it the road had brought them out near the old samurai quarter.

There were houses here and there.

Few of the samurai families had held on until now.

Once the houses had stood one after another, but now, like stars at dawn, one or two remained between field and field.

Old-style black clapboard and white walls, great chestnut trees and persimmon trees, well curbs in the shape of the character for well, sparse hedges through which one could plainly see the old veranda, the low eaves, the sliding doors papered with literati paintings.

On a summer day, passing there, sometimes roses of an eye-waking red bloomed on the hedge, and sometimes a new green blind hung at the veranda and a wind-bell rang coolly.

On a misty autumn morning the well sweep creaked, and a bitter gourd, turned yellow, opened its mouth over the hedge.

Now and then the sound of a koto could be heard as well.

In this samurai quarter the former samurai still lived on, left behind by the world.

Some served at the village office, some were teachers at the primary school.

Some had property and passed their days doing nothing; some lived by raising silkworms on a small scale.

Some lent money.

There was one rich house among the samurai dwellings, at the side of the road.

The coral-tree hedge was thick and one could not see clearly inside, but even so the white-walled storehouse and the high-ridged house were plain.

Looking in through the gate, there was a fine entrance, and beside a shed chickens were picking up food.

The two walked along that hedge.

Where the hedge ended, a narrow stream full of water flowed pleasantly.

On the bank willows dipped their leaves in the surface and made ripples.

A narrow plank bridge crossed where the stream bent.

Mihoko's house was near from there.

"Shall we go and see? Kitagawa will be at home today."

So saying, Seizo invited his friend.

The house faced the wide fields across a broad country road.

There was an old black gate.

It too was a low-eaved thatched house, and its foundation was somewhat out of true.

In the garden pines and cypresses and camellias grew thick.

From January to March of that year the young people had often come to this house to play cards.

There were Mihoko's elder sister Iyoko and her younger sister Sadako, and a beautiful girl named Tomoko, the sister of a man named Kokufu.

Those girls and the young men—Ikuji and Seizo and Ishikawa and Sawada and Mihoko's brother Kitagawa—would fill the eight-mat room and put their heads together under the light of a five-wick lamp on a bamboo stand, absorbed in taking the cards; and beside them Mihoko's mother, half gray, refined, with a Kuwana accent, would put on her spectacles and read the cards for the young people in a high clear voice, never tiring of it.

At tea, mandarin oranges and the ginger served with the mixed rice made a bright show before them all.

It was always past eleven when they went home.

Along the lonely road in the shade of the bamboo thickets of the samurai quarter the young men and women went home laughing and chattering.

Kitagawa had gone to the bath and was out.

"Why, how good of you to come… he will be back in a moment now…"

So saying, the mother met the two of them with a smile.

In that smile Ikuji remembered Mihoko's smile.

The voice too was very like.

The two of them were shown into Kitagawa's study facing the garden.

Where the father had gone was not to be seen.

The mother kept them company for a while.

"I hear Mr. Hayashi has taken a post over at Miroku. Well, that is fine… your mother must have been very glad."

She said such things.

Talk of Mihoko in Urawa came up too.

"Her father says there is no use in a girl doing such things… but she will not listen to us at all… of course, being a girl's doing, one knows nothing much can come of it…"

"Still, she is well, I suppose."

When Seizo asked this,

"Yes, quite… she does nothing but romp, they say."

and the mother laughed.

At once she went on, this time to Ikuji,

"And how is Miss Yuki?"

"She is idling about as usual."

"Do send her over to visit. Sada is bored too…"

While this went on, Kitagawa came back from the bath.

He was a tall man with prominent cheekbones, wearing a hand-woven cotton kimono and a splash-pattern haori.

He had a way of bursting into loud laughter in the middle of a conversation.

Unlike Ishikawa and Seizo, he took little interest in literature.

At school he had been a famous athlete, and in baseball no one in the class was his equal.

He meant to be a soldier, and as soon as he graduated he studied hard and sat for the military academy examination that April, but failed in mathematics and English.

Yet he was not much cast down.

He said that in the September term he would go up to Tokyo, enter a suitable school, and prepare himself thoroughly.

The three of them talked with open hearts.

But the talk here and the talk between Seizo and Ikuji were very different.

The same closeness, but merely the closeness of schoolfellows.

Though they talked frankly, they never laid bare to one another the bottom of their hearts.

Here it was mostly talk of school, of hopes for the future, of preparing for examinations.

Kitagawa told the two of them about the military academy entrance examination he had taken in Tokyo.

"There was no time to spare in that examination, and it was hard. In the English dictation they read it only once, which is a trial. And the examination hall was so large and wide that the voice scattered and one could not hear well, so I quite lost my head. On top of that the algebra was absurdly difficult."

He had copied a quadratic equation problem into his notebook.

He hunted for it here and there, in the drawer of his desk, in the closet, in his letter box, and at last found it and showed it to the two of them.

It was indeed a difficult problem.

Even Ikuji, who was good at mathematics, could not do it.

Kitagawa was good at Chinese studies.

His father had been one of the foremost Chinese scholars of the domain and often composed Chinese poems.

He had given it up now that he had taken a post at the town office, but until three years before he had taught the reading of the Four Books and Five Classics to the boys of the town and the samurai quarter.

From about three in the afternoon until sunset, a droning like the humming of bees always leaked from the hedge of this house.

In those days Mihoko wore a red woolen sash and her hair in a braid, and played with the neighborhood children before the gate.

Even then Seizo had known that Mihoko's eyes were beautiful.

It was past nine at night when Ikuji and Seizo took their leave.

Young people, though they say there is nothing to talk about, always have something to talk about.

The two left the house and walked in silence for a while.

The shaded road where the bamboo rustled was dark.

In Ikuji's breast and in Seizo's breast alike, Mihoko, at school in Urawa, rose to mind just then.

"That time—when Ikuji confessed it—why did I not bring myself to say that I too was in love?"

so Seizo thought.

But his friend's love had not yet been made known to Mihoko.

Before the one who was loved knew anything of it, the heart of the one who loved had been confided to him by that man himself.

That much made it painful.

And that much, too, kept him from pressing the question to its end.

Sometimes he thought, "It is not settled yet. Who knows what will come of it when it is put to the test… it is not as though all hope were quite gone…"

and such things.

The wish to sacrifice himself for his friend was there, of course.

The wish that his friend's love should succeed was there too.

By his nature, by the circumstances of his home, by the present state of his love, there was still a good distance and a good margin before it could burn fiercely.

But that night, strangely, both their hearts were beating.

Even walking in silence, their hearts were saying many things.

As they came out into the fields there were places where the road had been made bad by yesterday's rain.

Their low clogs sank in with a squelch.

"A bad road."

So they said to each other.

But in their hearts both of them were thinking of Mihoko.

For Ikuji's part, he wished to tell this friend, without holding anything back, all his torment over the girl.

He thought too that if he confessed it, his breast might grow a little quieter.

But somehow he could not bring himself to speak it out.

The two walked on in silence as before.

The woods of the castle ruins showed black.

Here and there the marsh caught the stars of the dark night.

Reeds and cattails stirred with a rustle in the night wind.

The lights of the town could be seen here and there.

They came into the town from the park.

By then the two were no longer silent.

Ikuji began in a low voice to chant his favorite Chinese poem.

The aftermath of the excitement in his heart could be heard lingering in it too.

Even when they came to the corner where they parted, they felt somehow unsatisfied at parting so.

"Will you not come by my house and have some tea?"

When Seizo invited him so, Ikuji came along.

Seizo's mother was still working busily at her piecework, bent over the cutting board.

They had tea made for them and talked another hour or so.

What never came to an end however much they talked was the feeling of young people.

Twelve struck, and when Ikuji at last made up his mind to go, Seizo saw him off again as far as the corner by the bathhouse.

The main street of the town was already hushed.

The next day both mother and son overslept.

The clock was past seven.

Seizo bolted down tea over rice in a hurry and set out.

Hurry as he might, it was a long, long sixteen kilometers, and by the time he reached Miroku it was well past ten.

The morning sun already stood high on the glass windows of the school, and the principal's voice teaching ethics could be heard loud and clear about the place.

When he hurried in, the pupils of his own class were making an uproar.

XIII

In the town of Kumagaya too he had a fair number of schoolfellows.

One named Obata, one named Sakurai, one named Kojima—and with Obata in particular both he and Ikuji were on unusually good terms.

Since graduating and being unable to meet, they exchanged letters almost daily, joking and arguing.

Once or twice a month Seizo would be sure to go over.

From the town of Gyoda to the town of Kumagaya was ten kilometers, and the road ran along the bank of an irrigation channel filled with clear, abundant water.

A village for every stretch of paddy, a stretch of paddy opening out for every village; on summer days there were farmhouses where wheat was being threshed in the yard, fields where pumpkins ripened splendidly, the white-walled storehouses of rich farmers.

On clear autumn days carts loaded with rice creaked from the fields toward the villages, and in the yellow ripened paddies country girls with towels over their heads paused with their sickles to watch the travelers passing along the highroad.

All sorts of things passed along that highroad.

The omnibus between Kumagaya and Gyoda, the carts of the blue-stripe dealers going the rounds for cloth, the bicycles of rich gentlemen then in fashion; and in the rickshaws all sorts of people rode by.

There was a tottering old rickshaw man pulling with difficulty two country grandmothers who had gone to town to shop; and there was a bearded gentleman who looked like a town doctor riding briskly in a fine black-lacquered rickshaw.

At transplanting time the rain would drizzle down, and in the churned mud of the paddies countless bent bun-shaped hats could be seen in rows.

Planting songs sung in good voices could be heard too.

The green of the finished paddies was beautiful.

On the ridges and on the grass at both sides of the road, bundles of leftover seedlings were sometimes thrown away.

In the fine weather of May one always saw white cocoons drying under the eaves and on the roofs of the village houses.

Beside the channel stood a cool-looking rest teahouse.

A great elm grew thick over it as if covering it, and in the shop the melons grown in that district were kept in a pail of water.

In a flat shallow tub, jellied seaweed noodles were kept as well.

Seizo remembered how good it had tasted, coming along the hot shadeless road, to take off his sweaty stand-collared Kokura summer uniform here and eat a melon.

He knew too that the old woman of that shop had a daughter who was in service in Akasaka in Tokyo.

The view of the mountains ringing the Kanto plain—the beauty of that view too was one of the impressions he could not forget.

From the end of autumn, when leaves came rolling along the highroad from nowhere, to February and March when the spring haze lay over them like a thin veil, the beauty of those mountains was of a special kind.

The Nikko range shining with snow, the smoke of Asama trailing white like a fleece, Akagi near and Haruna far; and on the intricate folds of the mountains about Ashikaga the evening sun poured its light as beautifully as a painting.

The troop of middle school boys who walked from Gyoda to Kumagaya came home along this way, laughing and larking and running.

The town of Kumagaya presently showed its tiled roofs and chimneys and white-walled houses at the far end of the wide plain.

Kumagaya was a town incomparably more lively than Gyoda.

The rows of houses were well ordered, there were many rich men, the population was over ten thousand, and there were a middle school, an agricultural school, a courthouse, a tax office.

Each time a train reached the station, the omnibuses for the Gyoda district and the Menuma district each waited for passengers, then went rattling along the town's wide main street with their trumpets sounding shrilly.

At night electric lights came on in the shops, the fancy-goods shop and the Western-goods shop and the draper's all looked festive, and the cheerful sound of samisen came merrily from the restaurants.

This town was for Seizo a second home.

At eight years old he had left Ashikaga, and the family had settled its fallen fortunes deep in a lane in front of the post office on the street.

That lane held all sorts of memories for him.

There lived the post office janitor, and errand runners, and day laborers who took whatever work people gave them.

There was a hearty old woman, born somewhere about Yamagata, who had drifted here and there and still had not lost the speech of her home.

From eight to seventeen—from primary school to the second year of middle school—he had lived in that little house of six mats, eight mats, three mats.

The primary school was on a back street of the town.

Turning right at the torii of the Myojin shrine, going along a narrow lane where the ditch boards rattled underfoot, turning left at the corner by the sweetshop, and going on a little, one saw ahead a large two-story building and a playground with swings and a wooden horse.

The noise of the pupils came in a babble.

The principal's fat face, the second master's severe face, the gymnastics teacher's smiling face—he could see them all plainly even now.

Among the girls who came dressed up for the graduation ceremony there had been three or four he liked.

The one who came in a purple arrow-pattern kimono and a maroon hakama stayed in his eye most of all.

That child came from a town at the edge of the town.

He had heard that she was the daughter of the principal of the agricultural school.

When Seizo was in his first year at middle school her family moved away to Nagano, so that he could find those clear eyes nowhere in the town; but even now he sometimes remembered them.

Another was the daughter of a geisha house; she was now called Kotaki, and having come out as a full geisha the year before last, she was counted among the popular ones even in the town.

When he happened to meet her on the street in her full dress for a party, "How rude of you, Mr. Hayashi,"

she would say with a bright laugh in greeting, and pass on.

She had come to the banquet celebrating their middle school graduation too, and sang in a good voice and played the samisen.

When Obata, sitting beside her, said, "Kotaki is our geisha. Isn't that so, Kotaki,"

and pressed his drunken face up to hers, she said, "No, Mr. Obata, you have bullied me ever since we were children. I shall remember it,"

and made as if to strike him.

Just then the question, "Which of your classmates do you like best?"

came up unexpectedly.

A good many classmates from primary school days were gathered about her.

And Kotaki, without showing the least hesitation, said, "Why, it would be the same for anyone, wouldn't it… Mr. Hayashi, of course!"

So she said.

Kotaki too was drunk.

A storm of applause broke out.

After that, whenever he met Obata or Sakurai or Kojima, talk of Kotaki often came up.

In the end they would send him postcards saying, "How is Kotaki? Is he well?"

and the like.

"Kotaki"

had become his nickname.

Seizo too, half in fun, changed Kotaki to "Shiratki,"

made it a second pen name, wrote it on the cover of his diary and signed his letters with it.

He even composed a new-style poem in five-seven meter, four lines to a stanza and five stanzas, called "The Song of Shiratki the Singing Girl,"

and deliberately wrote it out and sent it to Obata.

Sometimes Seizo thought seriously about what a geisha is.

At such times he was sure to set himself and Kotaki side by side in his thoughts.

Sometimes he pictured a romantic scene.

At other times he imagined the unhappy life of a geisha who can guard neither her chastity nor her body herself, and shed tears of pity.

Seizo did not yet understand such things as geisha.

He remembered clearly, too, the time when they moved from Kumagaya to Gyoda.

His father came home from somewhere and said suddenly that they would move that night.

His mother said, would it not be better to do it tomorrow; but there were reasons why they could not move openly in the daytime.

Eight years of life in Kumagaya had left his family nothing but no small amount of debt.

His father went out jingling the money in his purse—barely enough to hire two or three carts—and after he had gone, his mother and Seizo packed the two of them alone, so that the neighbors should not know.

The winter moon shone on the long Gyoda highroad.

The shadows of the two carts and the shadows of the four of them fell lonely and black on the ground.

Thinking that this was the image of a family come down in the world, Seizo was unbearably sad.

When they reached the new house in Gyoda that night it was already nearly twelve.

As he stood before the dark paper doors with no light behind them, tears ran down his cheeks.

But it is a world in which one somehow manages to live.

Four years had already passed since then.

Even that narrow Gyoda house, once he was used to it, no longer seemed so cramped.

Now and then he tried to call to mind the present house in Gyoda, the house in Kumagaya, and the house in Ashikaga.

The Kumagaya house was still there.

An old couple lived in it.

The Matsu-no-yu bathhouse he had often gone to had been rebuilt and grown so fine one would hardly know it.