The memoirs of Japanese anarchist and anti-colonial activist Fumiko Kaneko, written while she was in prison, where she died most likely by suicide in 1926.

Introduction

MIKISO HANE

KANEKO FUMIKO (1903–1926) wrote her memoir, translated here, while she was in prison, having been convicted of a plot, the authorities charged, to assassinate the emperor.

Her life, as her memoir shows, was one of misery, privation, and hardship from early childhood. Her parents were not legally married, and they did not register her birth in their family register. Ever since the Meiji Restoration, the government had required each household to have its family members registered at the local government office. A child born out of wedlock often was registered as the child of the mother’s parents. This was not done for Fumiko until 1912, when she was registered in her maternal grand-father’s family register as his daughter. A person not recorded in any register, vas in effect a nonperson. To attend school, gain employment, or have any legal standing, a person had to submit a household registration certificate. Thus, when Fumiko first enrolled in school she did not have any legal status, so she was not allowed to enroll as a bona fide student; she was permitted to attend only as an auditor.

Not only did Fumiko not have any legal status, but she was virtually an orphan. Her father drank heavily and failed to hold a steady job. He gambled, had a violent temper, and beat his wife often. He eventually abandoned his family and went off with his wife’s sister. Fumiko’s mother in turn drifted from man to man. She and her family were in a continuous state of poverty, and she even considered selling Fumiko to a brothel.

In 1912, when Fumiko was nine, she was sent to Korea to be placed in the care of her paternal grandmother, who was living with her daughter. Fumiko’s aunt’s husband was a member of the Japanese colonial administration in Korea, which had been annexed by Japan in 1910.

Fumiko’s grandmother treated her in a heartless, almost sadistic fashion as an unwanted member of the family. She was punished harshly for the most trivial reasons and was kept in virtual penury. At one point, as her memoir reveals, she even contemplated committing suicide. The only people from whom Fumiko was able to gain some comfort and support were the Koreans in her family circle. This no doubt accounts for her identification with the Korean students and activists she encountered in Tokyo after she returned to Japan.

After annexing Korea, Japan imposed harsh administrative measures against the Korean people. The police and military forces were employed to crush any resistance to the Japanese occupation; large tracts of farmland were confiscated from the Korean farmers, reducing them to tenancy and poverty. Many left their homeland to seek employment in Japan, where they were used as construction workers and miners, often under harsh conditions. In March 1919, just before Fumiko was sent back to Japan, Koreans staged a massive demonstration demanding their nation’s independence. At least two thousand Koreans lost their lives, and twenty thousand were arrested.

The heartless treatment she received by her parents and grandmother as well as her observation of the harsh Japanese military administration in Korea undoubtedly conditioned Fumiko to rebel against all authoritarian persons and institutions. Out of the life of hardship, loneliness, and misery emerged a strong personality who eventually turned against all authority and embraced a nihilistic, anarchistic philosophy of life. In response to the officials who interrogated her after her arrest she wrote:

Having observed the social reality that all living things on earth are incessantly engaged in a struggle for survival, that they kill each other to survive, I concluded that if there is an absolute, universal law on earth, it is the reality that the strong eat the weak. This, I believe, is the law and truth of the universe. Now that I have seen the truth about the struggle for survival and the fact that the strong win and the weak lose, I cannot join the ranks of the idealists who adopt an optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control. As long as all living things do not disappear from the earth, the power relations based on the principle [of the strong crushing the weak] will persist…. So I decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life, but that of all humanity in this endeavor.[1]

Perhaps her life as an underprivileged member of society molded her outlook and personality more than the discrimination that girls and women of Japan had to endure in Meiji and Taisho Japan. But the fact that Fumiko was a female undoubtedly accounted for the way she was treated by her parents and other relatives. Thus, Fumiko suffered not just the economic deprivations and injustices that the underclass members of society endured, but also the restrictions and discrimination that all Japanese women had to put up with. Many strong-willed women like Fumiko struggled desperately to assert their will and fight for their autonomy and personal fulfillment. This is revealed in Fumiko’s remarks about why she chose schools attended primarily by men when she went to Tokyo. She was determined not to play second fiddle to men. Women like Fumiko, finding the existing institutions and entrenched interests indifferent if not hostile to their fight for justice and recognition of their right to be treated the same as men, turned to the left-wing reformist or revolutionary movements.

Women under Tokugawa rule were expected to live in accordance with the Confucian ideal of subordinating themselves to men. A Japanese Confucian scholar, Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), prescribed the ideal behavior for women, especially of the samurai class, in his Onna daigaku (Great learning for women). He asserted that from an early age a girl should observe the distinction that divided men and women. As wife, a woman was to serve her husband faithfully as her husband served his feudal lord. “She must look to her husband as lord, and must serve him with all worship and reverence.”[2] In all matters she was to obey her husband. A widow was not to remarry, and strict marital fidelity was to be observed. The practice of primogeniture was followed among the samurai class, and women were not accorded any property rights. In the samurai class, the family head had absolute authority over the members of his household, even the power of life and death. A husband could execute an unfaithful wife. The treatment of women was less stringent among townspeople and the peasantry, but rulers encouraged all classes to emulate the samurai class in male-female relations.

When the feudal rule of the Tokugawa shogunate ended with the establishment of the new Meiji government, numerous social, political, economic, and cultural changes were instituted, but uplifting the status of women was not on the list of reforms to be implemented. The insurmountable obstacles that prevented women from asserting their individuality remained as the political and legal systems, social mores and customs, and economic imperatives all compelled them to play subordinate roles to men. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), an advocate of liberal reforms, remarked concerning the status of women, “At home she has no personal property, outside the house she has no status. The house she lives in belongs to the male members of the household, and the children she rears belong to her husband. She has no property, no rights, and no children. It is as if she is a parasite in a male household.”[3]

A number of women participated in the movement to win “freedom and people’s rights” in the early Meiji years in the hope that women would benefit if the movement succeeded, but when the Meiji Constitution was adopted in 1889, women were not accorded any political rights. In fact, authorities restricted the rights of women even further. In 1882 the government forbade women from making political speeches; in 1890 it banned them from participating in any politicÂ•al activities, or even listening to political speeches. The civil code of 1898 gave the head of the extended family virtually absoluteÂ• authority. The head of the household was given the right to control the family property, fix the place of residence of every member of the household, approve or disapprove marriages and divorces, and so on. The wife was treated as a minor under the absolute authority of the household head. One provision stated that “cripples and disabled persons and wives cannot undertake any legal action.”[4]

Brothels were sanctioned by the government, and impoverished families sold their daughters to these establishments in most of the towns and cities in Japan. In the realm of education also, girls were discriminated against, although the Education Act of 1872 called for the education of both boys and girls. The reason for educating girls was to prepare them to become “good wives and wise mothers,” that is, to perform household duties. Educating girls beyond the elementary school level was not emphasized. Some parents believed that even this level of education was unnecessary or even harmful for girls. A poet, Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), the daughter of a lower-level government official, was not allowed to complete even primary education because her mother believed that “it is harmful for a girl to get too much education.”[5] The number of girls attending primary school remained far below that of boys, not reaching the 50 percent level until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1895 there were only thirty-seven schools for girls beyond the primary level, and most of these were operated by missionaries. A college for women was not established until 1911.

One lesson in a morals textbook issued in 1900 read, “Girls must be gentle and graceful in all things. In their conduct and manner of speech, they must not be harsh…. Loquacity and jealousy are defects common among women, so care must be taken to guard against these faults. When a girl marries she must serve her husband and his parents faithfully, guide and educate her children.” An article in an educational journal published in 1887 asserted, “The male is yang and the female is yin. Consequently, it is only natural that women should remain in the house and be docile.”[6] Thus, in the schools for girls, domestic arts such as home economics, sewing, and handicrafts were stressed.

These are not the kind of ideals a person like Fumiko could abide by. She was a woman of strong will and independent mind. This is seen in the life she pursued in Tokyo, as revealed in her memoir. She did not follow the tradition of having her marriage arranged for her as her father attempted. She went to Tokyo to build her own life, continuing her schooling while working as a newsgirl, soap peddler, maid, and waitress. As she indicates, she had been disillusioned with attending a girls’ school in central Japan where home economics was stressed. She wanted to study mathematics, English, classical Chinese, and eventually enter medical school, so she chose a school that was attended mainly by men. Her feminism is revealed when she says that she wanted to compete academically with men and win. Even though her formal education was spotty, clearly she was a bright person. She read extensively and was exposed to the ideas of Bergson, Herbert Spencer, and Hegel. She recalls that she was especially impressed by nihilist thinkers such as Max Stirner, Mikhail Artsybashev, Nietzsche, and Kropotokin.

The Tokyo that Fumiko went to in 1920 was an exciting place. It was not only the seat of government, but also the center of the economic, cultural, and intellectual life of Japan. It seethed with liberal and radical ideas. The old-line Meiji autocrats were being replaced by political party leaders and advocates of parliamentary government. The left-wing movement seemingly was on the upswing, stimulated by the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The first May Day march was staged in the year Fumiko arrived in Tokyo. The radical left had suffered a stinging defeat in 1910–11 with the trial and execution of Kōtoku Shusui, Kanno Sugako, and others who were charged with plotting to assassinate the emperor. But following World War I and the Bolshevik victory, a resurgence of activities by socialists, Communists, and anarchists hit the scene. With the second May Day march in 1921, many women activists joined the group. In 1922 the Communist party was covertly organized, but the government moved swiftly to crush the party and arrest its leaders.

Women who wished to assert their individuality and win equality and justice tended to gravitate to left-wing groups who were challenging established authorities and institutions. Among the most prominent women’s organizations was the Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), whose members had close ties to left-wing circles, especially the Communists.

As Fumiko’s memoir shows, she encountered a number of Communists and socialists, including Kutsumi Fusako,[7] who appears as Kunō in her memoir. She worked as a waitress at an eatery called Socialist Oden. Fumiko did not join any of the feminist organizations; she stayed outside of the mainstream of organized radical groups. Eventually Fumiko joined with Pak Yeol (1902–1974), a Korean nihilist. Her memoir does not discuss the activities the two engaged in, but the court records of her interrogation reveal her strong political convictions.

Although Fumiko had strong beliefs antagonistic to the established order, she and Pak Yeol did little that was injurious to the authorities or the emperor system, contrary to the charges leveled against them after their arrest. About the only thing they did was organize a two-person nihilist organization which they called Futeisha (Society of Malcontents). And yet they were arrested on September 23, 1923, two days after the Great Earthquake when the entire region centering on Tokyo fell into a complete state of disorder. Taking advantage of the chaos, the government and military authorities set out to crush, and in many instances murder, Communists and labor organizers. Also during the hysteria that resulted from the earthquake, wild rumors spread among the people that disaffected Koreans were taking advantage of the disaster to rob, plunder, and kill people. As a result, vigilante groups were formed, and hundreds of innocent Koreans were murdered. An unofficial estimate held that as many as 2,600 Koreans were killed at this time.[8] Fumiko and Pak YeoI fell victim to this movement directed against leftists and Koreans.

The authorities arrested the two and placed them under “protective custody.” They then charged them with high treason. They were accused of plotting to assassinate the emperor, a completely trumped up charge. This was done, some believe, to justify the killing of the Koreans by demonstrating that dangerous Koreans were abroad, posing a threat to society. The two were indicted in July 1925, brought to trial in February the following year, and on March 25, 1926, sentenced to death. But the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment ten days later to show the “merciful benevolence of the emperor.” Fumiko refused to accept the commutation, and when the certificate was handed to her she glared at the chief of the prison and tore up the document. Pak Yeol accepted the commutation and remained in prison until the end of World War II.

The two were sent to prison in Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture near Tokyo. Fumiko refused to perform the work she was assigned in prison, but about three months later she asked that she be allowed to work weaving hemp ropes. The next morning, on July 23, 1926, she was found to have hanged herself with the rope that she had woven.

During the course of her interrogation, Fumiko defiantly expressed her political beliefs. The authorities no doubt used her rejection of the emperor system to justify her indictment and death sentence. Fumiko audaciously rejected the value system of her society, which oppressed helpless individuals. She expressed the bitterness she felt toward her parents and asserted that she rejected all moral principles, especially filial piety. When questioned about her family she replied, “I have no family in the true sense” and pointed to the fact that she had been abandoned by her parents. “She [Mother] even considered selling me to a whorehouse…. My parents bestowed no love on me and yet sought to get whatever benefit they could out of me…. [Filial piety] is based on the relationship between the strong and the weak…. It is only coated over with the attractive-sounding term ‘filial piety.’ “

Fumiko asserted that the only path she could pursue was to “deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my life but that of all humanity in this endeavor.” Thus she turned to nihilism and decided to work toward the destruction of all things. Among the institutions that she hoped to destroy was the emperor system. She joined with Pak Yeol, she explained, because they both agreed to work toward the overthrow of the emperor system. “By nature human beings should be equal,” but people in Japan are made unequal because of the emperor system. The authorities claim that the emperor is a god, but he is really just like any other human being. “So we thought of throwing a bomb at him to show that he too will die like any other human being,” Fumiko told the interrogator.[9]

Such heretical thinking undoubtedly persuaded the judges to condemn Fumiko and Pak Yeol to death despite the fact that they evidently had made no attempt to put their ideas into practice. It appears that all they did was talk about overthrowing the existing system.

Fumiko remained defiant to the end. In November 1925 she wrote in her notebook: “The rights of people are being tossed about by the wielders of power as easily as if they are handballs. The government officials have finally thrown me in prison. But let me give them some advice. If you wish to prevent the current incident from bearing fruit, you must kill me. You may keep me in prison for years, but as soon as I am released, I will carryon as before.”[10]

The views held by Kaneko Fumiko are remarkable for a young woman of her time. She was hardly twenty, had a limited education, and had grown up in an atmosphere in which patriotism and loyalty to the emperor were viewed as the moral core of Japanese life. Not only is it remarkable that she formulated such a heretical social and political philosophy, but her refusal to grovel before the authorities is even more extraordinary. She refused to cower before the prosecutors and judges, and she expressed her views candidly, courageously, and decisively.

The records of her interrogation were not made public until after the end of World War II. The picture presented to the general public was that of a degenerate, nefarious woman. A photograph of Fumiko sitting on Pak Yeol’s lap was passed on to right-wing military officers, who used it to play up the decadent character of the “traitors” and also to criticize the existing party government, to discredit them for pampering the traitors. The public bought the image presented by the authorities. Even the radical and liberal reformers virtually condemned Fumiko to oblivion. Only one women’s biographical dictionary listed her. After the war, when some writers sought out her grave, they found it on a Korean hillside in an isolated spot, forgotten even by Pak Yeol, who, after being released from prison, returned to Korea to play an active role in the movement to unify North and South Korea. He became a fairly prominent official in North Korea and passed away in 1974.

In prison before her suicide, Fumiko composed some poems. ,One of them, discovered after her death, reads:

The little weed twisted around my finger.

When I tug at it gently, it cries out faintly,

“I want to live.

”Hoping not to be pulled out, it digs its heels in.

I feel mean and sad.

Is this the end of its bitter struggle for life?

I chuckle softly at it.

[11]

1 Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 121–22.

2 Basil C.hamberlain, Things Japanese (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), p. 501.

3 Fukuzawa Yukichi Hensenkai, ed., Fukuzawa Yukichi senshū (Tokyo, 1951–52),5:10.

4 Tanaka Sumiko, Jyōsei Kaihō no shisō to kōdō, senzen-hen (Tokyo: Jiji Tsūshinsha, 1975), p. 112.

5 Ibid., p. 137.

6 Ibid., p. 130.

7 Kutsumi Fusako (1890-1980) joined a Communist labor organizer, Mitamura Shirō, and was lactive in the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. She later got involved in the spy ring headed by Richard Sorge, a German journalist in Japan who obtained information from a friend in the German embassy and passed it on to the Soviet Union. She was imprisoned in 1941 and remained there until the end of World War II.

8 Imai Seiichi, Taisho demokurasi (Tokyo: Chiio koron sha, 1966), pp. 376–93.

9 Hane, Reflections, pp. 119–24.

10 Ibid., p. 123.

11 Nihonjin no jiden (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980), 6:491.

Preface

IT BEGAN suddenly at 11:58 A.M. the first of September in the twelfth year of Taisho [1923]. A violent rocking deep in the earth shook the Kanto region on which the capital city of Tokyo rests. Houses creaked and whined, twisted grotesquely, and collapsed. Inhabitants were buried alive, while those lucky enough to flee in time ran about screaming like crazed animals. What had once been a thriving center of the civilized world was in the space of a moment transformed into hell itself.

One aftershock came only to be followed by another violent tremor and yet another aftershock. Fires broke out all over the city, and great columns of smoke billowed up toward the sky as from a giant volcano. Tokyo was soon under a blanket of thick, black vapor.

The terrible tremors left the population in the grip of fear. Then those outrageous rumors started spreading and pandemonium broke out.

It was not long before we were taken in by the police on orders from the capital security officials. I am not free to go into the reasons for my arrest here; suffice it to say that not long after that I was summoned for interrogation to the Preliminary Court of Enquiry of the Tokyo District Court.

I was led by a guard through the door of the court where a judge and stenographer were waiting for me. The court attendant noticed me and began preparing the defendant’s seat, during which time I stood silently by the door, the prisoners’ thatched head-covering in my hand. The judge stared at me with a cold expression. Even after I was seated he kept on staring at me as if it were imperative for him to see right through to my insides. When he did speak, however, it was in a quiet tone.

“You are Kaneko Fumiko?”

When I answered that this was so, he proceeded to introduce himself in a rather friendly manner.

“I am in charge of your case. My name is Preliminary Court Judge Takematsu.”

“I see. I hope you will be lenient,” I said with a smile.

The set questioning then began, but the judge seemed to want to make the most of this formal interrogation to find out what he needed for the investigation. I will note down the conversation just as it took place, for it will help in understanding what follows in this account. The judge begins.

“First, where is your original place of abode?”

“The village of Suwa, Higashi-yamanashi County, Yamanashi Prefecture.”

“How would you get there by train?”

“Enzan is the nearest station.”

“Hmm … Enzan,” the judge said with a slight tilt of his head. “Then your village is near the village of Ōfuchi. I know Ōfuchi quite well. I know a hunter there. I often go there in the winter.”

I didn’t know the Ōfuchi he was referring to and said, “I’m afraid you’ve got me. Actually Suwa Village … well, you see, it’s my original place of abode, but actually I only spent two years there.”

“Hmm. And you weren’t born there, were you?” he said.

“No. My parents told me that I was born in Yokohama.”

“I see. And what are your parents’ names? Where do they live?”

I could not help smiling to myself. The judge was making a point of asking what he must have already known from the police report. Nevertheless, I answered as straightforwardly as I could.

“It’s a little complicated, but on the register my father is listed as Kaneko Tomitaro and my mother, Yoshi. But those are really my mother’s parents’ names, my grandparents.”

The judge acted surprised, then asked me about my real parents.

“My father’s name is Saeki Fumikazu. I believe he’s now in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. My mother’s name is Kaneko Kikuno. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think she lives near her parents’ home. In the register my mother is listed as my older sister and my father as my brother-in-law.”

“Just a minute,” the judge interrupted, “that sounds a little strange. I follow the part about your mother being listed as your sister, but if your mother and father have different names and live in different places, it’s as if they weren’t related at all.”

“That’s right,” I answered despondently. “My mother and father separated a long time ago. Now my father is married to my mother’s younger sister, my aunt, and lives with her.”

“I see. Well, I suppose there’s an explanation. When did your mother and father separate?”

“It must have been thirteen years or so ago. I was around seven at the time.”

“And what happened to you then?”

“I went with my mother.”

“And your mother brought you up all by herself from then on?”

“No, not really. Not long after my father left, my mother and I were separated too. After that, neither my mother nor my father had much to do with me again.”

When I said this I felt my whole history, my entire past, well up inside. Stupid me, I even had tears in my eyes. The judge may have noticed this, for he said somewhat sympathetically, “You must have had a hard life. We’ll get to all that in good time.”

He then took up the papers that were on the stenographer’s table and began interrogating me about the incident itself. As I said before, however, I cannot write about that here. Indeed, there would not be any point.

But then the judge ordered me to write something about my past life. It seems that there is a provision in the law that says a defendant should be asked not only about what can be used against one, but about things that may stand in one’s favor as well. Perhaps by means of this little-used provision the judge hoped to get at something in my background that might account for my having done such an atrocious thing. Of course that may not be the reason at all. He may have simply ordered me to do this out of curiosity. It does not matter. I wrote the record of my upbringing as I was told, and this memoir is that account. I do not know whether it was referred to in the trial or not. But now that the trial is over, it cannot be of any further use to the judge, so I have asked him to return it. I will send it to my comrades in the hope that it will help them to understand me better. Also, if my comrades find it worthwhile, I hope they will publish it.

My greatest wish, though, is that this be read by parents, and not only parents, but by educators, politicians, and socially aware persons as well. I would like all people who wish to better this world to read this.

Father

I CAN REMEMBER back to when I was four years of age. At that time I was living with my natural parents in Kotobukichō in Yokohama. Of course at the time I was not aware of what my father did for a living, but from what I heard later I gather that he was a detective at the Kotobuki Police Station. This period looms in my memory as the one all-too-brief period in my life when I knew what true happiness was. For at that time, as I recall, I was the light of my father’s life.

Father always took me along with him to the public bath. I would duck under the curtain at the entrance every evening, perched on his shoulders, my arms wrapped around his head. And when he took me to the barbershop, as he always did, he was at my side throughout, pestering the barber with suggestions on how to shave my hairline or eyebrows. If he was not satisfied he would take the razor in hand and shave me himself. Father was the one who chose the material for my clothes, and if something of mine needed taking in at the shoulders or waist, he would point it out to my mother and have her get out her needle and thread to fix it. It was Father, too, who stayed at my bedside when I was sick and nursed me. He was forever putting his hand on my forehead and taking my pulse. I never had to say a word at times like that; my father knew what I wanted just from my look and got it for me.

Father always took great pains when he fed me. He would cut the meat in little pieces so that I could eat it easily and would remove even the tiniest bones from fish. He always tasted the rice or any hot liquid before giving it to me, and if it was too hot he would patiently cool it. My father, in other words, did everything that the mother would normally do in most households.

I realize now that we were not well off, but my first impressions of life were by no means unhappy. Even then our home was rather shabby and we never seemed to have enough, but my father prided himself on being the eldest son in a good family that, he believed, traced its ancestry to some aristocrat or other. He had in fact lived a relatively affluent life and had been indulged by his grandparents when he was young. So although we were actually poor, he acted as if nothing were any different from the old days.

Here, however, my pleasant memories end. I realized at some point that my father had brought a young woman into the house. Now there was constant quarreling and name-calling between my mother and the other woman. My father always took the other woman’s side, and I had to look on as he hit and kicked my mother around. A few times my mother left him, sometimes for two or three days at a time. When that happened I was left at my father’s friend’s house.

I was still little, and this was a very sad time for me, particularly when my mother would go away. But then the woman just disappeared, at least that is how it seemed to me. But we saw less and less of Father after that.

I can recall being taken by my mother to bring Father home from what I now realize was a brothel. I remember Father getting up in his bedclothes and shoving Mother out of the room. But occasionally Father would come home late at night singing at the top of his voice, and my mother would docily wait on him and hang his clothes up for him on the nail in the wall. But if she came across a candy wrapper or orange peels in the sleeve of his kimono she would glare reproachfully at him and say, “Just look at this. Couldn’t you have brought some little thing home for your own child?”

Of course, Father had left the police by this time, but what he did for a living I never knew. I do know that there were always a lot of rowdy men around the house drinking and playing cards, and that Mother was constantly quarreling with Father and grumbling that this was no way to live. This life must have gotten to be too much for Father, for he finally got sick. My mother’s family helped out and he was hospitalized. Mother stayed with him, and I was taken to her parents’ home where my grandmother and young aunts looked after me for more than six months. Though I was separated from my parents, the time I spent there was quite pleasant.

When Father recovered I was sent home. Now we lived by the sea, which was considered to be more conducive to my father’s health as well as my own; for I was a sickly child. The house was located on the coast at Isogo in Yokohama, and we were drenched with salt water and blown by sea breezes from morning to night. This period did in fact transform me into a healthy person, but whether this was a blessing, or nature’s cruel scheme to bind me to the life of suffering fate had in store, I cannot say.

When Father and I had recovered, the family moved again. The place was a little way from Yokohama and was one of fourteen or fifteen houses in a village surrounded by rice fields. One morning of the winter that we moved—I remember that it was snowing—my little brother was born.

It was fall and I was six years old when my aunt, Mother’s younger sister, came. (Of the intervening period I can only remember that we were constantly moving.) My aunt had some female disease, and because she could not get proper treatment out in the country, she was to stay with us and go to a nearby hospital. She was twenty-two or twenty-three at the time, a trim, pretty woman, lively, friendly, and meticulous in whatever she did. She got along well with people and was dearly loved by her parents. But before long, a strange relationship had developed between this aunt and my father.

Father had a job as a clerk at a warehouse on the water-front not far from our house. But on this job, as on others he had had, he often stayed home on some flimsy pretext. Consequently we were not very well off, which is why, I gather, my mother and aunt spun hemp thread on a piece-work basis at home. Every morning my mother would wrap in a scarf the three or four balls of hemp that they had spun and go off with my little brother on her back to collect their pittance of a wage.

Then a strange thing would happen: no sooner was my mother out of the house than my father would call my aunt into the three-mat room near the entrance where he was sprawled out. My aunt would stay in there a long time, although they could not have had all that much to talk about. My lively curiosity was aroused, and one day I tiptoed up and peeped in through a tear in the paper of the sliding door. What I saw did not particularly shock me, for this was not the first time that I had witnessed a scene like this. From a much younger age I had often seen my parents in loose moments, something that never bothered them in the least. I was thus quite precocious, my interest in sex having been aroused by the time I was four.

The spark of passion seemed to have gone out in Mother. She never got really angry at me, nor did she ever express any strong affection. My father, on the other hand, got extremely angry when he scolded me, while in his tender moments he displayed an affection that was overdone. Which of these two personalities was I drawn to? As a small child I was closer to my father, and if I had not come to realize that he was the cause of my mother’s problems I would probably always have been close to him. But at some point I became more attached to my mother and would follow her everywhere, clinging to her sleeve. When my aunt came, however, my father would not let me go out with Mother. He had all sorts of tricks to cajole me into staying home. I realize now that he was trying to cover up what he and my aunt were doing and to allay my mother’s suspicions. As soon as Mother left the house, Father would hand me a few sen and send me out to play, to get rid of me. I did not ask for money, but he would give me some, more than usual, and tell me to go out and play and not to come back for a while. But when my mother got home, he would complain about me to her. “This kid is really brash,” he would say. “She knows what a softy I am, and as soon as you’re gone she pesters me for change and then runs off.”

It was the end of the year, New Year’s Eve, as I recall. My mother had gone out to buy some things with my little brother on her back. Father, Aunt, and I were sitting around the kotatsu in the living room. It was a wet, damp night, and both my father and aunt were looking depressed, which was unusual for them. At length my father raised his head from the kotatsu and said very solemnly, “Why is my home so unlucky? Isn’t this bad luck ever going to change? If only something would turn up in the new year.”

People are the pawns of fate, and until one’s luck changes there is nothing that can be done to better one’s lot. This is what my superstitious father believed and what I had heard him repeat countless times from as far back as I can remember.

The two of them carried on about something for a while, and then my aunt got up and went to get her box of combs from the closet. “I guess this one will do,” Aunt said as she took out a comb. “It’s a little too good, though,” she said, examining it. “It seems a shame.”

“You’re going to throw the thing out,” Father replied, “and there’s no rule that says it has to be a certain kind, just as long as it’s a comb.”

My aunt then put a comb with several broken teeth into her hair and went through the motions of shaking it out.

“You don’t have to put it in so tightly. Just slip it in above your bangs,” Father said. “If you run around in the vacant lot in front of the house, it will fallout.”

Aunt did as she was told and went out. A few minutes later she was back, and the comb had fallen out.

“That ought to do it,” Father said. “Bad luck has fled, and my luck will take a turn for the good in the new year.” Just then Mother came home.

While Mother took the crying baby from her back and nursed him, my aunt undid the bundle with the shopping. Twenty or thirty pieces of mochi, seven or eight slices of fish, a few small paper bags, a cheap battledore with red decorative paper pasted on … that was the entire contents. This was the extent of our preparations for the festive new year.

During the New Year holidays my uncle on Mother’s side came to visit. No sooner had he gone home, however, than my grandmother came to take Aunt home with her. But Aunt did not leave and Grandmother had to return home alone. From what I heard later, it seems that Uncle realized when he visited at New Year how things stood between my father and aunt. When he told the family about it, Grandmother was so worried that she came herself to get Aunt and take her home on the pretext that she was arranging a marriage for her. My father, of course, would not hear of this. He even intimated that to marry her off before she had fully recovered would be to endanger her life.

“No,” Grandmother had argued, “it will be good for her. The man is rich and has promised that as soon as she becomes his wife she will be put under a doctor’s care.”

But Father dragged out his old line about fate and said that because of his run of bad luck he had had to pawn all of my aunt’s kimonos. Of course he couldn’t send her home, he said, with only what she had now. Another excuse was that my aunt’s constitution was too weak for farm work. He would not always be so badly off, and in time he would surely be able to make a good match for her in the city. He would marry her off and would himself stand in as the parent. He gave all kinds of excuses like this and in the end managed to prevent my aunt from going home.

Poor Grandmother. Of course she did not believe Father, but she was just a simple country woman and no match for the wily city man and his barrage of lies. She returned home having failed in her mission.

With the God of Misfortune driven off, Father must have heaved a deep sigh of relief. But Mother was more miserable than ever, and there was incessant bickering at home after that. And what of my aunt?

My aunt was not exactly radiating happiness. She would be away for two or three months at a time, and I heard later that she had run away from Father and gone to work as a maid. But Father went around doggedly making enquiries until he tracked her down. The second time Aunt was brought back, we moved again. The place was in Kuboyama in Yokohama on the side of a hill. If you went five or six blocks further you came to a temple and crematorium.

Father, of course, was not working, but we somehow managed to get money with which to rent a house that was fitted out as a shop right at the bottom of the hill in Sumiyoshi-chō. Here Father opened an ice shop. The actual running of the shop fell to my aunt. Father went there during the day “to do the bookkeeping and look after things,” as he put it, and Mother and we children stayed at home on the hill. This was only in the beginning, however; it wasn’t long before he hardly ever bothered to come home. My mother, little brother, and myself had been deftly eased out of Father and Aunt’s life altogether.

I was seven years old at the time [six in the present age-reckoning system]. I had had my birthday in January, so I was the right age to start school that year. But I could not go to school because I had never been entered in the family register. I have not touched on this matter of not being registered, but I had better go into it here.

My birth had never been registered for the obvious reason that my mother had never been entered in Father’s register. Much later I learned from my aunt what I believe is the most probable explanation. According to Aunt, Father never intended to stay with my mother. He deliberately never entered her in his family register because he meant to ditch her as soon as he found a better woman. Of course, he may have just told Aunt this to win her over. Or he may have simply considered it out of the question to register as his wife in the supposedly illustrious Saeki family the daughter of a peasant from Kōshū. Whatever the reason, however, this is how it came about that I had still not been registered at the age of seven.

My mother had lived with Father for more than eight years without saying a word about not being entered in his family register. I could not keep quiet about it, however, because it was preventing me from going to school. I had always enjoyed learning, and now I pestered constantly to be allowed to go to school. Mother finally said that she would register me for the time being as her illegitimate child. But Father, always concerned about appearances, would not hear of this. “What!” he railed. “You mean you’d put her down as an illegitimate child? She’d be ashamed of it for the rest of her life.”

Not that Father made the least effort to enter me in his own register and send me to school. And for all his professed concern, he never bothered to teach me so much as a single letter of the kana syllabary. He was too busy drinking, playing cards, and loafing all day. I had reached the age for school, I wanted to go, but I could not. Later in life I came across a passage to the following effect. Perhaps the reader can imagine how I felt when I read it.

With the glorious Meiji Era, intercourse with the West commenced. Japan awoke like a giant roused from a long sleep and began to walk, leaping over half a century in a single stride. The Rescript on Education was promulgated in the beginning of the Meiji Era, and primary schools were built even in the remotest country districts. The children of every human being, regardless of sex, not physically or mentally unable to attend, received a compulsory education from the state from April of the year in which he or she attained the age of seven. An entire nation was thus showered with the benefits of civilization.

But for unregistered me, these were only empty words. I was not from a remote village: I lived in Yokohama, right next to the nation’s capital. I was certainly the offspring of human beings, and there was nothing physically or mentally wrong with me. ‘But I could not go to school. There were schools aplenty: primary schools, middle schools, girls’ high schools, colleges, universities, even Gakushūin [school for children of aristocrats]. The sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie in their Western-style clothes, their fancy shoes, some even riding in automobiles, were entering their gates. But me—what good did all this do me?

I had two playmates who lived just a little way up the hill from us. They were both my age and both went to school. Every morning the two of them would go down the hill hand in hand past our house, swinging their arms and singing as they went in their maroon hakama and with big red ribbons perched jauntily at the side of the head. I was miserable with envy as I leaned against the cherry tree in front of the house and watched them go by.

If there had been no such thing as school in this world, I would have gotten through life with a lot fewer tears. But then I would never have seen the joy that I saw on the faces of those children. Of course, at that time I did not yet know that every joy that some experience is paid for by the sorrow of others.

I wanted to go to school with my two friends, but I could not. I wanted to read, to write, but neither of my parents taught me so much as a single letter. Father could not be bothered, and Mother did not know how to read herself. I used to spread out the pieces of newspaper that Mother’s shopping was wrapped in and pretend I was reading.

It must have been around summer of that year when, one day, Father chanced to come across a private school not far from my aunt’s shop right in Sumiyoshi-chō where we were living. There would be no fuss about my not being registered, so it was decided that I would go here to school.

“School” is too fancy a word to describe this place, which was actually nothing but a six-mat room in a dilapidated row house. The tatami were dirty and ripped, the straw stuffing coming out in places, and a half-dozen or so Sapporo Beer boxes lined up on their sides served as the children’s desks. This is where my writing career began. The teacher, “Ossho-san” as the children called her, must have been around forty-five. She did her hair up in a tiny chignon toward the front of her head and wore a striped apron over her soiled yukata.

Every day I walked down the road from the house on the hill past my aunt’s shop to this splendid school, my things bundled up in a cloth that was tied across my back. The ten or so other children who treaded the boards covering the sewer in the little alleyway where the school was located probably came from circumstances similar to my own. After Father put me in that private school, the back-alley row house, he took me aside. “Now look, be a good kid,” he said, choosing his words. “I don’t want you telling any of the men that come over that you go to Ossho-san’s school. It wouldn’t be good for me if other people found out, see?”

My aunt’s shop was doing a good business, but she was not making money. It was impossible to save anything because Father drank and played cards every day. Also, at that time she and Father were so engrossed in each other that people were even talking about it.

Even so, things were not all that bad at my aunt’s. It was Mother, my little brother, and I who had a hard time. One day we did not have a single thing to eat. It was supper time and there was not even a grain of rice in the house. My mother took my little brother and me to see Father, who was at a friend’s house. But although Mother implored him, Father would not come out of the house to talk to her. I suppose Mother had reached her limit, for she suddenly opened, from the porch, the sliding door into the room and went in. Four or five men were sitting under a bright lamp playing cards. Mother exploded: “I thought so! There isn’t a grain of rice in the house, the children and I haven’t a thing to eat for supper, and you sit here drinking and playing cards!”

Father stood up, livid with rage. He pushed Mother off the porch, jumped down after her in his bare feet, and started hitting her. If the men had not grabbed him and held him back, calmed my mother, and taken Father back into the room, who knows what he would have done to her. She was saved from a beating, but we had to leave without so much as a grain of rice or a cent to buy any with. We trudged up the hill in silence.

“Hey, wait up!” came a voice from behind. It was Father. He’s come with some money for rice, we thought, but that was not it at all. What a cruel, devilish man he was. We were standing there expectantly, waiting for help, and he yelled, “Kikuno, I hope you’re satisfied. You did a great job of humiliating me in front of those people. Goddamit, you made me lose everything, and I’m not gonnna let you forget it!”

Father now had one of his wooden clogs in his hand and began hitting Mother with it. Then he grabbed the front of her kimono and threatened to throw her over the ridge. It was dark then, but in the daytime you could see that it was a steep decline with a tangle of bushes and briars at the bottom. My little brother was bawling on Mother’s back, and I was circling them helplessly and pulling at Father’s sleeve to try to stop him. Then I remembered that a friend of Father’s, a man named Koyama, lived just a little way down the hill from there in a wooden row house. I raced to the man’s house, screaming at the top of my voice.

“I thought that’s who it was,” the man said. He had just sat down to supper, but he threw down his chopsticks and flew out of the house to help.

I had barely started in at the private school when it was Bon festival time. Ossho-san told all of the children to bring two kin of sugar as a mid-year gift. This was probably the only remuneration she got, but in my case, there was no way that I could comply. Not only were we having a hard enough time just trying to make ends meet, but the house was in such a state of confusion that no one could be bothered about me and my problems at school. Thus I had to leave school before I had even learned all of my katakana.

My aunt’s shop had not survived the summer, and the two of them had moved back into our house on the hill. The ruckus at home started up again worse than before, and there was a fight between my parents at least once every three days. I always sided with my mother when my parents fought. I talked back to Father too, and this made him hit me just as he hit Mother. Once when it was pouring rain he shut the two of us out of the house in the middle of the night.

The relationship between Father and Aunt was as cozy as ever. But Aunt’s family kept after her to come home, and finally, with Father’s agreement, she said she would. Needless to say, this cheered Mother and I no end.

But Father said that he could not let Aunt go without any decent clothes, so he used the money he had gotten when he disposed of the shop to buy her long crepe under-garments, a sash, and a parasol, worth at the time about seventeen or eighteen yen. And just as he had himself overseen my care when I was little, he now insisted on himself purchasing these things for Aunt. But this time it was a woman, not a child, on whom he lavished his care and attention.

It was autumn. Father packed all my aunt’s belongings for her and put in the best bedding we had in the house. Mother, my little brother on her back, and I went along to see my aunt off. As we walked along, Mother kept apologizing, tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry to have to send you home with hardly a stitch on your back, your wedding ahead of you and all. But with our luck down like this, what could I do?”

We went only halfway, then returned home. Father, who saw Aunt all the way to the station, got back in the evening.

What a perfectly wonderful night we had! Even I, young as I was, sensed tremendous relief. How quiet, how peaceful it was! But little did Mother and I guess the all too peaceful time that lay in store. Four or five days later, Father disappeared once again.

“Oh this is too much! The two of them have just run off and left us,” Mother uttered through clenched teeth.

Seething with rage, and aware that we were looking for a needle in a haystack, we set out to track them down. And one day we did find them; we spotted the bedding they had taken from home out sunning. A lot of good it did us, though; we only ended up with another clouting from that wooden clog!

Mother

ABANDONED by Father, we were at a complete loss. In the beginning we still had a few things that could be sold to buy food, but these were soon all gone. Father, of course, sent us nothing. We had to live somehow, so I cannot blame Mother for what she did, taking up with an iron-smith by the name of Nakamura. Although I was too young to understand why, I remember that Mother’s tone was distinctly apologetic when she told me about the arrangement. “This man brings home a good daily wage of one yen, fifty sen. Things will be much easier for us than before, and you’ll be able to go to school and all, see?”

Nakamura came one day with a small bundle of his belongings and that was it: he was living with us. He went off every morning in his overalls and carrying his lunch to a nearby foundry. He was about forty-eight or forty-nine, had graying hair and deep-set, mean eyes. Short and stooped, he cut a very poor figure. My father had been raised like a young lord and looked down on working people. I suppose this attitude had rubbed off on me, for I could hardly stand to speak to this nobody Nakamura, much less become close to him. Even though he was, for the time being at least, my foster-father, I called him “Mister” as I would a stranger. Mother did not bother to correct me; in fact, she herself referred to him derisively as ‘Whiskers” behind his back.

I used to pick up on his words and talk back to him, and he in turn would use any excuse to harass me. When Mother was out of the house he would sneak some rice for himself and then put the rice tub high up out of my reach. Or he would roll me up in the quilt and throw it in the closet. One night he tied me up with fine rope like a ball and suspended me from the bough of a tree at the edge of a nearby river. Mother must have known that this sort of thing was going on, but there was nothing she could do about it, except, of course, curse my father and aunt for putting us in this situation in the first place. “They’ll get what’s coming to them one day,” she would say, “and end up dead in the gutter.”

But the saddest thing that happened to me while we were living with Nakamura had nothing to do with his harassment: my little brother was taken away. One day I overheard Nakamura and Mother talking. “The sooner you take him, the better. As long as he’s going to be theirs, he should go before he gets too big,” Nakamura said.

“Giving him to a man like that, I can’t help but worry. But what else can I do?”

I knew what they were talking about and was so upset that I finally came out and asked, “Mama, are you gonna give Ken to somebody?”

Mother explained that when she and Father separated they had agreed that she would raise me and that my father would take my brother. I was miserable all the same. My brother was the only real friend that I had. But more than that, I wanted someone I could love. I begged: “Mama, please! Starting tomorrow I won’t go out and play at all. I’ll take care of Ken all the time, from morning ’til night. I’ll take such good care of him he’ll never even cry. Don’t take him to Father’s. Please, Mama, please! I’ll be so lonesome all by myself.”

But Mother would not listen. “It won’t work, Fumi. If that child stays it’ll be all that much harder for you and me. And besides, your father has been here asking for him.”

No matter how I pleaded, Mother would not budge. The next day when Nakamura was out I brought up the subject again. “Mama, if Ken has to go to Father’s, let me go with him. I’m scared to be here with that man all by myself.”

But grownups have their own reasoning. Mother turned a deaf ear to my pleas; she seemed incapable of understanding how I felt. This was to be my fate, and in the end there was nothing I could do but submit to this power greater than myself.

Shortly after that Mother put my brother on her back and took him to Father’s. They lived in Shizuoka then, and you had to take the train to get there.

Not long after my brother left, we moved again, or rather, we rented a room in someone else’s house. The house, which was up against a fence made of charred railroad ties beside the tracks, had just one six-mat room and one four-and-a-half-mat room. There were five in the family, and the man was a longshoreman or something. They lived in the six-mat room and we occupied the smaller room. The place was incredibly dirty. Sooty, yellowed newspaper was pasted on the sliding door, and the straw was coming out of the ripped tatami. The biggest hole was in the tatami beneath the window, and Mother put the long hibachi there to cover it. She put pieces of cardboard over the other holes and sewed them down as best she could with white thread. That kept the dust from rising up into the room.

Nakamura continued to work at the foundry, while Mother had found a job sorting beans at a warehouse by a nearby river. I did not stay home all by myself, however. A primary school in the neighborhood had given in to Mother’s earnest entreaties and allowed me to attend school even though I was not registered.

Naturally, I was delighted; I even forgot my loneliness at losing my little brother. For this was not a fly-by-night school like the one I had gone to before; it was everything I had ever dreamed a school should be. Most of the children seemed to come from good families. The girls had beautiful clothes and wore a different ribbon in their hair every day. Some were even brought to school by maids or houseboys. But once again I had to suffer for this. I hadn’t been going there long when we were told not to use slates, which were supposed to be bad for the lungs, but to bring a pencil and notebook to use. For me, however, this would not be easy. Nakamura would never have bought them for me, and Mother was unable to come up with the money right away. I had to miss several days of school until I was able to buy them. Mother wanted to transfer me to a less expensive school but couldn’t because of residency regulations.

Then one day Father turned up out of the blue. He must have been selling something at the time for he was carrying a large cloth bundle on his back. His face was haggard; even I was shocked when I saw him. But I was glad to see him, this father of mine whom I had so much cause to resent. He put the bundle down in a corner, and as he sat talking with Nakamura by the hibachi I felt how far above the other man he was. I even wanted to be fussed over by him again, and when Nakamura stepped away for a moment I put my mouth up to Father’s ear and whispered, “Buy me a rubber ball.” How I longed for a ball like all my playmates at school had!

That night Father took me to the fair. When we had left the path in front of the house he said, “How about a piggyback ride” and stooped down to put me on his back just as he had put me on his shoulders when I was a little child. At the fair I found some rubber balls at one of the stands, and Father said I could have whichever one I liked. I took two, one large and one small, both with red flower designs. There were many other things hung on the stand, and I gazed at them completely absorbed.

“Anything else you want?” Father asked. I shook my head. “Poor thing … ,” Father said in a voice that choked as we hurriedly left. “Sure, there are lots of things you still want. And I want to get them for you. But ‘your Father is so poor. Be patient with me, eh, Fumiko.”

I felt I was going to cry, but I managed to control myself. Although only a child, I would have been ashamed to cry in front of all those people. We walked around the night fair for a while and then went home. When we had turned off the brightly lit street onto the dark, deserted alley Father spoke again. “Fumiko, your father was bad. Please forgive me. Everything I did was wrong, and it was innocent you that had to suffer. But you know, Fumiko, I’m not always going to be poor like this. And then the first thing I’m going to do is to make you happy. Will you wait until then?”

Father was actually crying now, and he choked when he tried to hold back the sobs. I was crying by this time, too, but not like a child. And when I spoke it was as an adult. “I don’t care. I don’t care how poor you are. Only take me with you. Please take me to Ken’s.”

“I know how you feel, I know,” Father replied, sobbing now without restraint. “I’d take you if I could. No matter how poor, I wouldn’t let you starve. But if I took you with me now your mother would have no one. You’re the only one your mother has. So be patient for a while. Listen to what your mother and this father tell you, and wait. Father’s going to come for you, he really is.”

Father stopped walking and just stood there by the side of the road crying. I clung to his back and cried too. But he did not go on like that for long, and when at length he spoke, his voice was quite controlled. “Well, let’s go home now. Your mother will be waiting.” He then set off with a firm step. When we entered the alley beside the house he put me down and wiped my tears with a white handkerchief.

Late that night Father hoisted the bundle onto his back again and trudged off for home. After that visit, I would run out to the road in front of the house every evening and scrutinize the people passing by, for I really believed that Father would come for me. But he never did.

We moved again, and the first thing that Mother did was to go to the principal of the primary school in the neighborhood and beg him, tears in her eyes, to admit me. Her request was finally granted.

Compared to the one I had just attended, this school was downright shabby. Most of the pupils were the children of poor people, so I should have been right at home there, yet it was always made perfectly clear to me that I was not wanted.

At the start of class in the morning, the teacher called the attendance. Though I was present as surely as anyone, my name was never called. The names would be called right up to the child next to me, and I would be skipped over. Now, of course, I realize that this was not important, but it is hard when you are a child to be belittled like that. The times that I did not deliberately come late, I would open the desk top and stick my head inside while the teacher took attendance. Or I would open a book and read. When the teacher scolded me for this I merely fidgeted with my hands in my apron.

One morning about a month after I started school there I handed in the envelope with my school fee to the teacher. Presently I was called into the teachers’ room. I did not know what I was being summoned for, but I was not worried. My teacher showed me the envelope I had given him and said, “I’ve got your envelope here, but there’s nothing in it. What happened?”

Of course I had not the faintest idea. Mother had put the fee in the envelope, and this I had brought .to school. I replied the only way I could: “Nothing happened.”

“If nothing happened, why is there no money in this envelope? You bought something on the way to school, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Then I suppose you lost the money on the way?”

“No. I had it in my bag….”

The principal, a menacing look on his face, joined the attack. He accused me of spending the money on sweets. Finally they searched my bag, but they found nothing, neither the money nor anything I could have bought with it. They were angrier than ever, convinced that I had spent the money. But no matter how they upbraided me, the fact remained that I simply did not know what had happened to the money; and I stuck to my guns.

The office boy was sent running off to get my mother. Summoned before the principal, Mother was at a loss at first. But it was not long before she realized vvhat must have happened.

“This girl would never do anything like that. Oh no, she would never do that. I put the money in the envelope last night and she put the envelope in her bag so as not to lose it. My husband saw that. She hung the bag up on the wall, and I think my husband may have taken the money out when he went to work. It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened.”

Mother even went on to give examples. I knew that this had been going on. I had gone home in tears one day because a pencil I had put in my notebook was not there when I got to school. And it was not just once or twice that this kind of thing had happened.

The principal must have been moved by what Mother told him. I was right there, and I can still remember what he said to her. “It’s too bad a good girl like this has to be left in that kind of environment. I wonder if you would consider giving her up to me for adoption. I would do everything in my power to take good care of her.”

Whether he said this out of genuine sympathy for me, or because it occurred to him that it might solve his own problem of being childless, I do not know. I was delighted, however, because not only were those awful doubts about me gone, but the principal had thought kindly enough about me to make this offer.

Mother thanked him, but of course she could not have parted with me. “This is the only child I have. She is the only joy I have. No matter how hard it is, I want to raise her myself.” The principal did not pursue the issue further. Mother took me by the hand and we went home.

Mother and Nakamura must have quarreled after this. He had often gone out drinking before this incident; in fact, it was probably for that that he had needed my school money. But now it got worse. Mother would sometimes find receipts or bills from eating places in the pockets of his work clothes, yet he would get after her to scrimp more on food or complain that she was wasting charcoal.

When we left Nakamura we took our belongings and went to a friend’s. Mother left me there during the day while she went out to look for work, and she would issue a warning before leaving in the morning. “You mustn’t play out in the street in front; Nakamura might find you.” I gather that mother had left Nakamura against his wishes.

Mother traipsed around every day looking for work, but she found nothing in the city to her liking. But a lady friend of hers had an older brother who was supposedly a foreman at a silk mill in the country, and Mother evidently decided to go there. She sounded quite pleased when she told me about it. “This man is apparently a foreman, so he must have a lot of pull. If we entrust ourselves to him, I’m sure he’ll be sympathetic and things will work out.”

Mother’s dependency was so bad it bothered even me, young as I was. She was incapable of taking a step on her own without someone there to support her. But I was only a child; I had to do what Mother said.

We went to the mill, but nothing came of it. There was no one there, foreman or otherwise, for us to depend on. The man in question turned out to be a menial who worked in the kitchen. We spent three months there, however, although the only thing that I can remember about this time is that Father showed up one day with some Korean candy for me. .

I was delighted to see him. He had kept his promise and come for me, I thought, so things must be looking up for him. This was not so, however. Father looked awful, even worse than when he had bought me that rubber ball at the night fair.

Mother stopped working at the mill when Father came and we lived with him. The two of them were just like they had been before. Then Father disappeared again. I cannot remember how long he was with us or when he left, so little did we mean to each other by that time.

Back to town we went, Mother having evidently found a job there in a spinning mill. We rented a flat in a row house, and I started back at the school with the sympathetic principal. We had nothing, so of course life was not easy, but with just the two of us and no encumbrances, things went fairly well. Though lonely, our life had a deep intimacy, and I thought that, barring some calamity, the two of us could have gone on like that quite happily. I wanted to pray with all my young, childish heart that we could remain like that forever, but of course this was impossible. There was Mother’s ingrained dependency for one thing, and for another, she was the sort of woman, I realize now, who cannot live without a man. This time she took up with a young man. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven, seven or eight years younger than Mother. I knew him because he rented a room at the home of a widow friend of Mother. He wore a blue silk neckerchief and had long, neatly parted hair which he kept plastered down with pomade. He was always lolling around smoking cigars. I think Mother had already decided to live with him when she said to me, “They say he’s hard working. And being so young, if he does work hard, you and I will have things easy.”

I did not like it at all. I was a little cheeky anyway and tried in a roundabout way to object. “I don’t think he’s so hard working, Mama. I saw him myself yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, just hanging around.”

But Mother paid no heed. A cold, she insisted, had kept him from going to work the past few days. And anyway, hadn’t the widow said that he was unusually industrious?

It could not have been more than three days after this conversation that he came to our house … and just never left.

Kobayashi was the man’s name. He was a dock worker and about as lazy a man as you could hope to meet. He had been more or less forced on my mother by the middle-aged widow at whose place he was boarding; they had in fact been living as man and wife. Even this woman, who had a record of several convictions, found him too much, so she neatly disposed of him by inveigling Mother into taking him on.

Once Kobayashi got into the house he never left. On the few occasions when he did set off for work, he soon came strolling back, saying that he had been too late and missed out on the work, or some such excuse. Before long Mother quit her job at the factory and the two of them just lay around all day. They tried to get rid of me whenever they could.

One night, past nine o’clock, I was doing homework or something in the corner of our one and only six-mat room. Mother, who was cavorting with Kobayashi in the bedding right beside me, suddenly told me to go buy them some roasted sweet potatoes. She reached under the quilt by her head, pulled out her coin purse, and casually flung it at me. Three or four copper and nickel coins fell out and rolled over the tatami.

“Mama, sweet potatoes at this hour?” I protested. “That sweet potato man closes early; he’ll be in bed by now.”

Mother was peeved and yelled, “That’s not the only sweet potato man. Go to the one next to the bathhouse on the street in back; they’ll be open. Now get going!” I shuddered at the mention of this place, for to get there I would have to pass under the big trees in the woods around Hachiman Shrine.

“Mama, can’t I get cakes instead? The cake shop is right over there where it’s light.”

“No! I said sweet potatoes,” she yelled. “Do as you’re told. Get going, you spineless girl. What’s there to be afraid of?”

Mother’s menacing look convinced me. “Well, how many should I get?”

“There’s five sen by the foot of the table,” Mother said from under the covers, motioning with her chin. “Get whatever you can for that.” I reluctantly picked up the money, rose, and, grabbing the cloth for shopping, stepped down into the kitchen stoop.

When I opened the door and peered out I flinched; the wind was so strong and the night so dark! The sharp staccato of the fire lookout’s wooden clappers could be heard in the distance. Off to the left loomed Hachiman Shrine, pitch black. A deathly stillness hung over the woods that seemed ever so much more impending now than in the daytime. And I would have to go through it all by myself! There was no getting out of it; I would have to go.

I was standing before the door petrified, when Mother suddenly got up and came over. “Will you get going!” She pushed me out and slammed the door behind me. I would just have to resign myself to my fate. Screwing up every ounce of courage, I started running for all I was worth, dreading the worst. I cannot even recall now how I got through those woods. At the shop I had the man wrap the hot sweet potatoes in the cloth and then made another non-stop dash home through the woods, racing as if I were being pursued. I flew into the house.

But the sight that greeted me was such that I had to turn away my gaze and flee once again into the darkness without. My mother had not wanted sweet potatoes at all; she had only meant to get rid of me.

Spring came, and with it the end-of-the-school-year ceremony. Although the school authorities in their benevolence had allowed me to attend classes, I was not to be given a certificate and hence could not pass on to the next class. Mother once again went to the principal to plead on my behalf, and he finally agreed to give me a letter stating that I had completed the first grade. I went to the ceremony in a kasuri cloth kimono that belonged to the son of one of my mother’s acquaintances and a saffron crepe obi.

The table at the front of the hall was covered with a white cloth and piled high with certificates and prizes. The teachers and the mothers, dressed in kimonos embroidered with their respective family crests, sat stiffly in rows on either side. The children, who were also decked out in their best, were seated behind the table.

The program began, and after a short speech the principal called the children one by one up to the table and handed each of them a certificate and a prize. The children took them, beaming with pride, and returned to their seats.

I was the last to be called. When I heard my name, I slipped through the rows of children and stood in front of the table, beaming too, of course. I bowed deeply and raised my hands high to receive the certificate. The principal handed me a piece of paper. That is all it was: just a plain piece of paper! The other children had received a proper square certificate with real printing, but for me there was only a piece of folded rice paper on which a few tiny characters had been scrawled in brush and ink. The thing drooped limply in my hands.

How mortified I felt. It was as if this whole ceremony, my classmates with their certificates and prizes, their families and the teachers lined up on either side, the whole thing had been held for the sole purpose of humiliating me. I should never have come in the first place. And to think that I had even had to borrow a boy’s kimono to wear!

That was not so bad. But at home things had gone from bad to worse, and we were able to eat only by selling our belongings. Even the food container went, as did the hibachi. One after another, everything that could be turned into cash was disposed of. Finally it was my turn: I was to be sold as a maid in a brothel.

Young though I was, I realized what a hard time we were having just getting food to eat. Yet one day Mother brought home a hair ornament with red plum blossom trim that she had bought for me. This was something that I had always wanted, and I was beside myself with joy. Mother combed out my hair and arranged the ornament in it. As I had only one kimono to my name, I of course had nothing fresh to change into, but Mother smoothed the kimono I was wearing so that it would show to best advantage. She was talking all the while about how badly off we were and what a shame it was to leave me like this until before I knew it I was on the point of tears.

Then, however, Mother suddenly switched to a cheerful tone. “But you know, Fumi, you’re lucky that there is someone who is willing to take you. They’re not poor like us. You could even end up riding in a fine carriage.”

I was forlorn at the thought of leaving Mother and being given to strangers. But realizing what a hard time Mother was having caring for me, I felt that if there were a place like that that wanted me, I was prepared to go. Naturally, I had no idea what the “carriage” referred to [marriage to a rich man], but the thought of riding in such a vehicle was quite pleasant. Thus it was with mixed emotions that I set out from home with Mother.

The house Mother took me to looked quite nice. The two of us sat on the stoop inside the door and waited a while until a middle-aged woman with a black satin obi appeared and exchanged greetings with Mother in a patronizing tone.

In retrospect, it is clear that the woman handled geishas and prostitutes—was a trafficker in human flesh, in other words. She stared long and hard at me. Then, the merchandise between them, my mother and this middle-aged woman began their bargaining.

“Say what you like, the girl is too young. It’s going to be five or six years at the very least before she’s good for anything, and in the meantime she’ll just be one big expense. We can’t just let her play all day, you know; she’s got to be sent to school, and she’s got to graduate, even if it’s only primary school. And then she’s going to have to be trained before we can have her waiting on customers. You can see that it’s going to mean sinking a lot into her before there is anything to show for it.” This was the other side’s line of approach. .

And Mother? I think Mother was genuinely distressed. She choked back the tears when she spoke. “I—I’d never see this child become a prostitute for the money. I don’t care about the money. It’s just that I’m so poor; I thought it might be better for her this way.”

“And you’re right. If she makes something of herself, a prostitute can end up quite well off.” The buyer was hitting Mother in her weak spot, but her opponent too was determined to take advantage of this turn in the conversation. Mother now took out the copy of Father’s family register that she had brought with her for the purpose of impressing the woman with the supposedly high social standing of my family, the so-and-so’s on Father’s side. “With a family background like this she can be proud of herself; and I’m sure she’ll get ahead,” Mother concluded.

The woman probably felt that she already had her prey in the trap. Mother was not dissatisfied with the amount offered, and the matter seemed to be just about settled. Although I realized that this arrangement was not what Mother had told me when we set out for this place, I had no idea what either a geisha or a prostitute was. And considering that I was to be sent to school and to be taught good manners, the prospect of coming here did not appear altogether bad.

But when the discussion got around to where I was to be sent, Mother began to have second thoughts. The woman said that I was to go to Mishima, which is on the Tokaido Line. Mother’s expression clouded over when she heard that the place was Mishima. “I wonder if it couldn’t be someplace closer,” Mother all but begged. “Mishima is so far; I’d hardly ever be able to see her.”

“No, I suppose not,” the other said, somewhat disconcerted. “Unfortunately there’s no opening close by. Mishima is the only place that has a position to offer.”

Mother asked repeatedly for someplace closer, but the woman refused. Mother finally gave up. “I guess we’ll just have to ask your help some other time.” Mother reluctantly turned down the offer and we went back to the dark and dreary house. I can just imagine how happy I would have been at that place! I do not think Mother herself believed what she said about it being for my happiness. If she had truly thought so, she would not have turned down the offer just because she could not see me as often as she wished.

Unable to dispose of its last “possession,” the household was in desperate straits. The landlord was around practically every day clamoring for the rent, and the neighborhood stores would no longer give us anything on credit. Mother and Kobayashi evidently had a quiet talk at this point, for one night we loaded ourselves down with the remaining items in the house and slipped away in the darkness. We landed at a flophouse on the edge of town; we had finally reached rock bottom. We rented a three-mat room. The occupants who lived on top of one another in the rest of the house included a dockworker, umbrella mender, fortune teller, sleight-of-hand artist, and a carpenter of sorts. Most of the boarders hung around the house day in and day out, and only when they became absolutely desperate did they reluctantly don their happi, smooth the wrinkles in their torn hakama, and set out for work. On the way home they would drink themselves into a stupor on cheap saké, and then a ruckus would start up. They would gamble, try to outdo each other’s outlandish boasting, and end up in a big fight.

Kobayashi, lazy enough to begin with, was not about to go after work in an atmosphere like this. I was thoroughly disgusted, though only a child. It finally got to the point where he achieved the feat of spending entire days fast asleep in the corner of the room.

We hardly ever had three meals a day, and not even one, as often as not. My stomach was always empty. To this day whenever I am hungry I recall the time I roamed the streets famished and found some scorched rice thrown out on a garbage heap. I stuffed it into my mouth, praying that no one would discover me. Oh how good it was!

Mother was constantly apologizing to me. “I’m so sorry for all that you’ve had to go through.”

“It’s all since that man came to live with us,” I would say, making her all the more depressed.

“I thought he was a good worker, that guy. But I’ve had it; I’ve learned my lesson. We were better off on our own, no matter what anybody said. If only we had stayed the way we were, just the two of us, we would never have had to stoop this low.” Mother hung her head and her speech broke off in places. When she raised her head again, she seemed resigned and her voice was clear. “But I couldn’t leave now even if I wanted to. If only I had gone ahead and just left that time I was planning to.”

I did not know what she was referring to, but it upset me to see her so bereft of self-respect.

Mother was forever getting after Kobayashi, but to move him would have been like moving a mill stone. She evidently gave up, for she started doing piece work spinning hemp thread. But Mother too quit after a while and lay around listlessly as if there were something wrong with her.

As bad as things were, however, I was a child and, like all children, wanted to go outside and play. One day I was playing by the riverbank with some neighborhood children when Mother came over with heavy steps and called to me.

“What is it, Mama?” I answered.

She asked in a spiritless voice if there were any ground cherry bushes around. Children are kind, and these children all helped in the search. We soon found one at the foot of a nearby bridge. Actually one of the children had known where to look because she had been keeping an eye on it herself, waiting for it to get big. But she pulled it up by the root and gave it to Mother.

“Thank you,” said Mother, and then snapped off the root, put it in the sleeve of her kimono and went home.

That night I saw the yellow ground cherry root wrapped in an old newspaper beside the oil lamp on the shelf in our room. I now realize that Mother was pregnant at the time, and I believe that she wanted the ground cherry root to abort herself with.

Kobayashi’s Village

FALL came at last. I don’t know how they did it, but Mother and Kobayashi managed to get some money and took me with them to Kobayashi’s native village. I cannot remember the name of the village, but it was located in Kitatsuru County, deep in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture. Kobayashi’s family were farmers and at least were able to get by. There were three brothers, not one of them very bright; but of the three, Kobayashi, who was the second brother, was by far the sharpest. When their father died he, rather than the eldest, had taken over management of the finances and after a while had run away with some of the family’s money. The family had worried about him but had had no word for a long time. When now he suddenly turned up with an older woman, everyone was pleasantly surprised, and they all went out of their way to do what they could for him.

As I said, I cannot remember the name of the village, but the hamlet was called Kosode. It was a quiet place with fourteen or fifteen families, all of whom were related much as in a clan society. When we arrived, there was no place for us to live, but everyone put their heads together and it was decided that a woodshed located to the west of Kobayashi’s sister-in-law’s parental home would be cleaned up for us to live in.

The place had been used for storing logs and straw and was now in a state almost beyond repair: the floor was rotten, the walls were crumbling, and the roof leaked when it rained. But after some old planks had been nailed on, a mud mixture plastered on the walls, and the cracks stuffed with straw, it was rendered inhabitable. The shack was a square space the size of a ten-mat room and had a wooden floor. Two old tatami were laid down in the back, and this area served as our living room, dining room, and bedroom. We cut out part of the floor near the entrance for a hearth, but since the place was originally a woodshed, there was neither a door nor doorsill. On summer nights we made do with a straw mat hung over the entrance, but for the cold winter we got a couple of old doors from someone and tied them to the entrance with a rope. On nights when there was a snowstorm, however, this did not keep out the freezing wind and snow, and we often awoke in the morning to find a pile of snow beside the hearth. As if the place were not bad enough, on the other side of our flimsy wall on the left was a stable, while on our right was the outhouse which we shared with the main house, making this about as foul a place as you could hope to find.

But wonder of wonders, once Kobayashi settled down here he actually began to work. For the time being he was to receive a wage for making charcoal for his family. Mother did sewing for the homes in the neighborhood, and in return she brought home daikon, potatoes, and other vegetables, so we were at least assured of something to eat. As for me, for the first time since that humiliating experience at the end-of-school-year ceremony I was going to school. I will have more to say about this land of learning that so enthralled me, but first I had better give an overview of what life was like in the hamlet of Kosode.

To a person from the city accustomed to seven- and eight-story buildings and the brightly lit show windows of Ginza, to someone who rides to assignations or cafés in a private car, to someone who can at will turn on a fan in summer or a heater in winter, what I am about to relate will doubtless seem incredible. Nevertheless, be assured that I am not lying or even exaggerating. As I see it, the prosperity of the city is based on an exchange between country and city, an exchange in which the country is hoodwinked.

Kosode, as I said, was a kind of primitive society consisting of fourteen or fifteen interrelated families. It was located at the base of a fairly steep mountain, but because it faced south it got quite a lot of sunlight. There was not even one rice field in this village, however; there was only the mountain and the gardens that had been carved out on its slopes. From spring to summer the main industry in the village was silk worm cultivation. The fields were planted with a little barley and mulberry as well as vegetables for the villagers’ own consumption; sandy soil was planted in wasabi. In winter the men went into the mountains to make charcoal while the women stayed at home and wove straw bags. I would guess that a good 70 or 80 percent of the income of the villagers in this mountain hamlet came from charcoal.

The villagers’ diet was of course very plain. Their rice was mixed with barley as is ours, but theirs was inferior to our prison rice. Although ours is only four parts rice to six parts barley, the rice is polished rice. The villagers, however, never saw so much as a grain of polished rice. On the other hand, their rice did not have the insects, tiny stones, and pieces of straw in it that ours does. And there, as here, vegetables were cooked without sugar. The only fish that was available in the village was salmon, and that was so highly salted that you practically jumped out of your skin when you took a bite of it. You were lucky, though, if you got even that once a month.

But please do not suppose that the people were not healthy on this simple diet—they were. And you need only go into the mountains to learn why. The akebi, pears, and chestnuts that are so abundant in the mountains are rich in the “vitamins” that everyone talks so much about these days as well as the sugar and calories so lacking in our diet. The adults picked these things just as the children did. What was left was food for the crows and mice, and what escaped their notice weighed down the branches, was eventually covered with earth, and rotted right on the branch. Should anyone have wanted to hunt them, rabbits and other small animals hopped about on the mountain behind the village or in the woods on the road to school. No one did; however, the children merely chased them for the fun of it.

I was truly close to nature at this time. This period enabled me to appreciate how ideal, how healthy, and how one with nature village life is. Why, then, has the life of the villagers become so wretched? I do not know what it was like in ancient times, but in the Tokugawa Era [1600–1867] and in this present civilized age of ours the villages have been bled for all they are worth for the benefit of the cities.

In my view, if a village can cultivate silk worms, the peasants should spin silk thread and wear silk clothing, even for work. There is no need for them to buy striped cotton “country clothes” and obi from traders from the city. But, of course, the villagers cannot do this. The villagers sell their cocoons and charcoal to the city and then must turn around and buy inferior cotton and hair ornaments, losing the money they earned to the city in exchange.

The temptation, money, is there, and they sell their cocoons and charcoal in order to get it. Merchants from the cities come into the villages to take advantage of them. A peddler bundles up boxes of goods which he carries on his back into a village. There may be ten kimono collars in one box, seaweed and dried goods in another, fancy goods in another, and assorted sweets in another; a few pair of wooden clogs, more seaweed, and groceries are added onto the stack for good measure. He need not bother to peddle from house to house in the village; he simply picks out a relatively prosperous-looking house and temporarily sets up shop there. “The trader is here,” someone announces, and in no time word has gotten round the whole village. Then the women flock around to pick up and gaze longingly at everything and ask prices.

“My, that’s expensive,” someone remarks. “Why, not ten days ago Mrs. Omasa bought this for twenty sen in town.” The peddler has an explanation, on which he has all the time in the world to elaborate, as to why the item is really not all that expensive, and how it is different from the other. It is not only a case of deceiving, but of making the customer believe she has to have a particular item, no matter what. The bargaining drags on and on. And why not? Even if the peddler has to spend the night in the village, he still only pays a fourth or a fifth of what he would have to pay for a room in town. It might even work out that he will be welcomed as a guest in someone’s house and will not have to pay a thing. It matters little how long it takes; even if he only sells a few things, he still comes out ahead.

Girls buy collars and hair ornaments without telling their fathers. Mothers come with cocoons or hand-spun raw silk or dried persimmons, or wasabi still covered with earth and wrapped in straw, and exchange these things for something worth only a third as much. Year in and year out, villagers have the fruit of their hard labor stolen by such people.

Mail was delivered only once every week or so. In winter when the postman came, he would kick off his shoes, install himself at the kotatsu, and kill time over cups of tea and small talk with the family, or in reading and discussing postcards and showing around photographs that he took out of mail to be delivered to other families. At mealtime he would leisurely get up and make his way home. When there was mail for the temple, he would ensconce himself in the priest’s quarters and keep the priest company over one artless game of go after another, oblivious of the day slipping by.

But let me get back to the subject of school. The village school was located at the edge of a town called Kamozawa and consisted of only a primary school section with perhaps sixty or seventy pupils. This was the most poorly equipped school I had seen since “Ossho-san’s” place, and the teacher, if he could be called that, was a heavy drinker who could become quite violent. The school was located about one ri from Kosode down a lonely mountain road. The snow was very deep in winter, and the girls and boys wrapped towels around their cheeks and wore boots made from bamboo bark.

Though not many, there were a few items such as pens, paper, and ink that we needed for school. But cash did not exist in this village. A child who needed something would set out for school with one or two bags of home-produced charcoal on his or her back to take to the store beside the school. Children could get the supplies they required from that store until the exchange value of the charcoal was used up. Here was another case of barter. But there is one thing about this that I must not omit. How old do you suppose the children were who toted a whole bag of charcoal on their back over one ri up and down the mountain path? Nine-year-old girls did this. I wanted to try too, but for a city girl like me it was out of the question. For one thing, my family had never had that much charcoal for me to have carried around.

While I am at it, let me mention something that, although trivial, someone raised in the city might find l1ard to imagine. In the village, people never use paper when they go to the toilet. To do so would be the height of extravagance. Even for letter writing, the only paper the villagers had was what was too sooty and ripped to serve anymore for covering on the sliding doors. What did they use instead of paper? They would put branches and chop-stick-length pieces of bamboo in the boxes in their toilets; after use these would be placed in another box. When a lot of dirty sticks had accumulated, they would take them to the stream at the foot of the mountain and wash them to use over again. This is a fact; I am not making it up.

One day in early spring a child was born in our house. The grandmother at Kobayashi’s was delighted. The baby was called Haruko, after the season, and her birth celebrated as that of a first-born. The mare was loaded with five or six bags of charcoal and led off, her foal trotting behind, to the town five or six ri distant. She returned with a meager bundle on her back of things purchased in exchange for the charcoal: a little rice, some dried sardines, and some clothing. These were in celebration of the first-born. Haruko turned out to be a healthy child.

It was the end of March, and once again I was going to attend a ceremony commemorating the conclusion of the school year. How many times had I been humiliated on this occasion! But this time I would be spared. The teacher had said that this was the country, and that I would be given a certificate just like the other children even though I was not registered. As strapped as we were, Mother managed to make me a kimono of striped cotton cloth with a matching jacket for the occasion. I set out for school in my new outfit with all the other children, dancing for joy.

The ceremony, a stark affair, began, and everyone beamed as they received their certificates. In spite of what the teacher had told me, however, I, and only I, did not get one. Up to the very last moment I kept thinking that this time it would be me, this time for sure…. Finally I knew there was no point in waiting any more.

The ceremony was over and everyone prepared to go home. I merely stood there in a daze, however. Then the teacher came up to me and waved the certificate and an honor award in front of my nose. “I’ve got your certificates, two of them, right here. Now if you want them, tell your mother to come and get them, see?”

Around the time of the ceremony the children’s families always sent something, usually saké, to the teacher. He was saying in so many words that I could have the certificates in exchange for saké. My family had not sent the teacher anything. We had nothing to send in the first place, and I do not believe that Mother even realized that it was expected.

Oh, how mortified I was! I walked home all alone by a back road to avoid the other children, .and when I reached home I cried my eyes out by the hearth. Mother said, to comfort me, not to worry, that she would take the saké and get the certificates for me. But the hurt would not go away. “No, Mama, I don’t want them.” Nothing she said could dissuade me, and I finally just dropped out of school.

I was desolate. It is impossible adequately to. express how I felt at the time, but oh how I cried! I cried until the tears would not come any more. This went on for several days. Then one day, quite out of the blue, my uncle, Mother’s younger brother, turned up.

The first New Year’s after we arrived in this place I had written a card for Mother to her family; this is how Uncle had known where we were. Mother had told me at the time why she was sending the card. “After all that’s happened, I couldn’t ask them straight out to come for us, but I think that if they see this card they might come on their own to take us home.” She talked about going home frequently after that. ‘We’ll have to put up with a lot of talk if we go home, but it would be so nice not to have to live poor like this. And think how pleased your grandmother and grandfather would be.” Mother was convinced that, if only she sent that card, her family, who had worried about us ever since Father had left, would immediately come for us.

“Well, if it isn’t Sister!” Uncle said as he stepped in.

“You came! You came!” Mother greeted him, tears rolling down her face.

The two of them just stood there, talking away happy as could be. What I could make of the conversation was that Uncle had wanted to come as soon as they had received our New Year’s card. (Even a woman could have made the trip in two days, it seems.) But the snow was so deep that he had had to turn back three times to wait for it to melt. I also understood that, just as Mother had hoped, Uncle had come for the purpose of bringing her home.

As soon as Kobayashi got home, a conference began on the spot. Kobayashi’s mother and father and close relations came over to take part. The discussion went on for some time, but the upshot of it was that Mother could go home if that was what she wanted. The problem was what to do with the baby, who was still nursing. Kobayashi’s elderly mother scolded Mother. “Couldn’t you have given us a little warning? If only you had told us sooner, I’m sure we could have worked something out.”

Although I did not grasp at first what “work something out” referred to, I gradually began to understand. Mother’s reply provided a clue. “I thought of that, but … the poor thing.”

This reminded me of something I had heard before, a piece of information gleaned from a conversation between Mother and the girl from th