going to Togakushi. Shimizu had been quite pleased, but if Tachibana had known, he would most likely have refused the invitation, whatever the consequences. Togakushi held altogether too many bitter memories for him.
He had visited Togakushi once more, after the war, in the summer of 1947. His tuberculosis had gotten worse on the Southern Front, where it had been compounded by malaria, but just when he began to think he was finished, the war ended. After this narrow escape from death, he was late being repatriated and had to spend a long time in the hospital even after that. But as soon as he was able to get around, he insisted on going to Togakushi. He was ordered by the doctor, of course, to stay put, but he was not to be stopped, and in the end he left the hospital without the doctor's permission.
In the two and a half years since he had seen it, though, the Hoko Shrine village had changed completely. Looking up in the direction of the shrine from the bus stop at the bottom of the slope, he could not believe his eyes. The rows of priests' houses were gone without a trace, and in their stead was nothing more than a scattering of poor, barracks-type huts. He rushed frantically up the slope, only to find that the Tendoh house was gone with the rest. Of that imposing structure with the secret room in which he had hidden, not a pillar was left, only the bare, dark-red scorched foundation. That was the cruelest stroke of all.
A woman in traditional work pantaloons had come out of the hut across the street pushing a bicycle, and Tachibana ran quickly over to her. When she turned around, her face looked familiar. He remembered her as the daughter-in-law of the Otomo household, whom he had occasionally seen from a window. But she didn't recognize him. That was natural enough, since he had seldom gone out, and had stayed hidden all the while he was evading the draft.
"Excuse me," he said, "could you help me?"
"Yes?" she said.
"The house that used to be here, the Tendoh house, what happened to it?"
"The Tendoh house?" She gave him an enquiring look. "You don't know about the fire, then?"
"Fire?"
"Yes. The big fire the year the war ended. The whole neighborhood burned down."
"There was a big fire?"
"Yes." The woman's look asked what else there was to say.
"What happened to the people in the Tendoh house?"
"You mean, to Taki?"
"Well, uh, yes... there was someone named Taki, and uh..." mumbled Tachibana vaguely, before he realized that he was being so cowardly as to try to conceal his identity. Angry at himself, he spoke up. "Yes, that's right. The young lady named Taki and the elderly couple who lived there."
"You want to know where they are now?"
"If you don't mind."
The woman looked troubled. "I'm not sure, but I heard they died."
"You mean, in the fire?"
"No, no, not in the fire."
"Then when, and where?"
"I'm really not sure."
"But you do know what happened to them after the fire, don't you?" Annoyed that she wouldn't give him a straight answer, Tachibana raised his voice.
"Who are you, sir?" she asked, looking up at him.
It was Tachibana's turn to try to avoid a straight answer. "Well, I stayed here once, and I haven't been back to Togakushi for a long time, so I..."
"Well then, it's better that you don't know. I'm very sorry, sir."
With a deep bow, he hurried off, imagining he saw the light of recognition in her eyes. Tachibana the returned soldier, who had lived through all the humiliations of war, was a mere shadow of the student of two or three years earlier, but he feared the shadow might be recognizable.
He went straight up the slope to the top and began slowly climbing the stairs to the shrine, noticing along the way that the village had not been totally destroyed. The two or three houses closest to the peak had survived, as if under the shrine god's protection. And he found some solace in the fact that the giant cedars on both sides of the staircase remained.
A drum sounded to signal the beginning of a dance offering, recalling for him the summer of his first year of junior high school, the morning after his first arrival in Togakushi to stay with the Tendohs, when the sound of the drum had for some reason frightened him. Now, so many years later, each beat filled him with inexpressible emotion.
He reached the top of the stairs just as the shrine maidens were preparing to come on stage. Four young girls in white tunics over crimson pantaloons, wearing gold crowns and shaking sacred bells in each hand, came across the boardwalk and around the veranda. When they had performed their ritual worship in front of the shrine and taken their places at the corners of the stage, a flute began to play a peaceful tune. The drum beat out a monotonous rhythm and the girls shook their bells in time to it, as they spread their long sleeves and began a serene dance.
He had stopped, his eyes fixed on the stage, thoughts crossing time and space to see Taki once more as a child on that same stage. She had been far more graceful and beautiful than any of the other dancers. No one could compete with her for beauty as a dancer. The dance was usually monotonous, but it never seemed so when she was performing it. The other three dancers had always seemed merely to be following her lead. Taki herself would be in a sort of trance. She had once told Tachibana that she forgot everything when she was dancing.
And now he had been told she was dead. In spite of himself, he began to cry, and the shrine maidens on the stage became but a haze.
More than thirty years had passed since that last visit. Tachibana had thought that what had happened to him at Togakushi had been locked tight away in the recesses of his consciousness, along with his war memories. In the mid 1950s he had gotten his position at the university, and in 1957 he had begun a calm, uneventful marriage. He had gone neither against the trends of the times nor with them, but had spent his whole life in mediocrity. He and his wife had never had any children, probably because of the malaria he had contracted, and she had died just before their silver wedding anniversary.
Shortly before her death, she had expressed pity for him, but when he asked her why, her response had been only a faint smile. After her funeral, he had recalled the incident and wondered why it had never occurred to him before that perhaps she had known—while pretending not to—that a part of his heart was elsewhere.
* * *
The golf-course meeting was held at the largest hotel in Togakushi, the Koshimizu Plateau Hotel, a smart, three-story, North-European style building facing West Peak across the Togakushi Plateau, splendidly located with the Togakushi Ski Slope on Mt. Kenashi right behind it.
The promoters spent from 3 P.M. to about 4:30 P.M. explaining their aims. Then came a reception starting shortly after five. July had just begun, and there were not yet many visitors to the Togakushi Plateau. Toward dusk, it began to look like rain, but there were no complaints about the weather. Guests who had disparaged the hotel as a place way off in the mountains at which they could not expect a decent meal were more than satisfied by the feast of top-quality beef dishes, as well as fresh crab and shrimp from the Sea of Japan.
Shimizu introduced Tachibana to one local person of influence after another. Tachibana exchanged perfunctory
