with my friends and I even called in geisha. I gambled. I drank sake. And besides all that, I decked myself from the top of my head to the tips of my toes in the most extravagant luxuries. I put on so many diamonds and draped myself in furs to my heart's content. When our house burned in the war, we became quite penniless, but due to the fact that I had been content at least once in my life, I no longer have any interest in anything or in desiring anything.
"Oddly enough, my husband, who had been thoroughly put out by my conduct, finally became partial to my sister and once after returning from a visit to her place in Tokyo kept saying, 'Everyone keeps mentioning that Noe's a woman who's more dreadful than a man, but when I went to Osugi's, I found, on the contrary, there's no woman equal to her in femininity. In her gestures and in her consideration for others, she's really womanly. I really understand now why all the men are crazy about her. When I compare you with her, even though you look like the embodiment of all that is womanly, you are truly a masculine woman!' That was what he was complaining about. Everyone in our family line lived long, many to be eighty or ninety. If my sister had not died in this way, she too would have lived on and on in good health.
"Though I couldn't give birth to even one child, my sister had seven children in ten years and died, according to the modern way of counting, when she was only twenty-eight. That alone shows how much vitality she had. Only twenty days after the delivery of her child, she went to Yokohama with Osugi during one of those dangerous times after the earthquake. Sometimes, even now, though it's my own idea, I feel Noe and her husband wouldn't have been killed if the Great Earthquake had occurred half a year later. To tell the truth, they were preparing to abandon some of their ideas, thinking about their children's future and saying they would put an end to their dangerous affairs. They really did tell us that... Good heavens! It's gotten dark outside. Dear me! I forgot myself in talking so carelessly about the things I did, and I've made you listen to my own absurd and trivial matters. Please forgive me!"
When we returned to Hakata, the lights downtown were already glittering. Mako had the driver turn down a dark street near Hakata Station and said to me, "Please come in and meet my child."
When we entered the old two-story house with its earthen floor, the dwelling apparently in the style of a residence in a shopping district, several men and women sitting in a wooden area near the entrance were painting Hakata dolls. I realized Mako's business was now the making of these dolls. Having caught the sound of our voices, a young girl with a big round face grinned as she came down from upstairs and standing by her mother's side greeted me.
Far taller than her mother and still growing was Mako's youngest child, who was in the sixth grade and who had once said to her parent, "My granddaddy was a great man, wasn't he? That's what my teacher told me." Above her smooth cocoa-brown cheeks were the unmistakably inherited Yorozuya eyebrows and eyes. Was it my own sentimentality that made me feel the child's face looked less like her sensitive mother's than it did the photograph of Noe as a wild young girl?
Chapter 2
IT WAS APRIL in the spring of 1911 that Jun Tsuji met Noe Ito for the first time. The execution of Shusui Kotoku and others for high treason had been carried out on January 25, and only two months later the spring was so ominously cold that even in the color of the cherry blossoms just after they had bloomed and even in the spring breeze one sensed the image of blood, the smell of decay.
On that spring day the entrance ceremony at Ueno Girls' High School was held. The oshima kimono Tsuji wore, bequeathed him by his father, had been hemmed up by his mother before Tsuji had set out. Because the kimono had been inherited from his father, its folds were considerably worn, but the hakama skirt, originally of superior Sendaihira silk, was neatly bound low around Tsuji's waist, and he had on a haori of black habutae silk, though the color of its crest was somewhat dulled. In that outfit Jun Tsuji's shoulders looked narrow and drooping, the skin of his oval face pale. The thin silver frames of the glasses he wore made his delicate face with its classical features seem nervous, but his eyes and their corners sloping downward gave an impression of mildness.
Behind Jun Tsuji, being led by the assistant principal into the auditorium where the pupils were already standing in rows, the murmurs of the girl students broke out, those murmurs spreading to every corner of the hall with a commotion and speed like rippling waves. When the assistant principal, who was walking in front of Tsuji, seemed to deliberately clear his throat, the noise instantly subsided, along with those voices saying "Sh! Sh!"
"He really looks terribly old."
"No. He's still young."
"He's like an artiste!"
When he caught these whispers out of the clamor that had suddenly died down, Tsuji suppressed a sardonic smile. His unusually keen sense of hearing had been inherited from his mother.
Almost all the chairs were occupied by other teachers sitting in rows near the windows at the side of the platform. Lined up in front were seats for the headmaster and his assistant and for the new appointee too. As if everyone had been waiting impatiently for these three persons to sit, the ceremony began.
Tsuji was no longer that young to feel nervous in being exposed to the glances of several hundred girl students. Born in 1884, he was twenty-eight according to the Japanese way of counting, but since he had dropped out during his second year of middle school, he had come through some unusual difficulties, studying English by himself while frequently changing jobs. What with being forced to endure a hard life from the age of twelve or thirteen, he had never known what it was to be young. Marked somewhere on his face was a dark shade of pessimism, and he was apt to be thought older than he actually was.
The strange odor which had pierced his nostrils the moment he had entered the hall had increased in intensity so that he felt more and more nauseous, every pore on his skin seemingly impregnated. He thought the smell a mixture of the body odor of the girls crowded into the auditorium and the aroma from their hair oil.
"Well, it's inevitable you'll feel nauseated by that female smell for a week. So do your utmost to prepare for it."
As Nakano, his friend who had helped get him into the school, had said, Tsuji was experiencing that "female smell." While Tsuji wondered during the formalities of the ceremony how long he would continue as a teacher in the midst of this female odor, he experienced a sensation like the sudden nausea one feels before taking up chopsticks in front of a plate piled high with food.
It was to support his mother, brother, and sister rather than for the sake of earning a living that he had sought a job as a teacher at a private school when he was nineteen by the Japanese way of counting, and at twenty he had become an elementary school instructor with a special license to teach one course, several years having followed in an instant. His beginning monthly salary of nine yen had been no more than a trifle, even though an additional salary for long service had been attached. This girls' high school was privately run, and it would probably be a somewhat leisurely place, his monthly stipend almost forty yen. Attracted only for these reasons and not for any real love of devoting his life to teaching, he had transferred to this school. If possible, he wanted to confine himself all day in his study, to bury himself among his favorite books of all times and places, to immerse himself in them from morning till night.
Ever since he could remember, he had loved books. His mother Mitsu, born at Kuramae in Asakusa as the daughter of a distributor of rice to retainers of the daimyo class, had been raised with extraordinary care and training, at the time of her marriage bringing among her possessions from her parents' home many kinds of ezōshi, illustrated storybooks flavored with Edo culture. The moment Tsuji began to understand what was going on around him, he was drawn into the world of these strange fascinating stories of
