ezōshi, and from the age of seven or eight, when he was able to read, he was infatuated with the extraordinary adventures in Saiyuki, a long novel set in Ming dynasty China. Both the ezōshi and Saiyuki expanded the boy's dreams infinitely. At the end of a period of random omnivorous reading, the romantic lad of twelve or thirteen was a precocious peevish type whose favorite book was Tsurezuregusa, a collection of short sketches, anecdotes, and essays.
His father Rokujiro, once a vassal of the shogunate, had been an apprenticed law student and had become a minor government official. He had served in the legal division of the Tokyo municipal government and, when Tsuji was seven or eight, was working in the Mie prefectural office. In Tsuji's tenth year his father's duties were again shifted to Tokyo, the family living on Sakumacho in Kanda, and there the father suddenly died. Left behind in addition to Tsuji were a younger sister and brother. The mother, raised in luxury since her birth, was weak at managing the family budget after her marriage, and with the death of her husband no funds remained in reserve.
Having withdrawn in his second year from Kaisei Middle School, Tsuji found himself the sole support of his family, maintaining his mother, brother, and sister when he was fourteen or fifteen. Even while he had to work, he attended Athenée Français and the People's English Academy; furthermore, he commuted to lectures at the Liberty English Academy at Hitotsubashi in Kanda. By listening there to the lectures of Yubi Aoyagi and Inazo Nitobe, Tsuji became acquainted with the names of Carlyle and Goethe, and his eyes opened to translated works of literature. His random reading was shifted from Japanese and Chinese literature to European works. Saiyuki was transformed into Baudelaire, extended to Hoffmann, and drawn on to Poe. Tsurezuregusa became Lao-tze and Chuang-tsu, shifted to the Bible, turned into Stirner and Sterne, and from Senancour extended to the heights of Leopardi. Besides reading, Tsuji tried his hand at short stories and made some secret attempts at translating. At the same time, it was inevitable that he would be concerned with the current trend toward socialism, which in those days was advancing like surging waves. He read whatever he could lay his hands on, from anarchistic to Marxist literature, and he was a devoted reader of the Heimin Shinbun, edited by Shusui Kotoku. As a new appointee at Ueno Girls' High School, Jun Tsuji was already a young literary enthusiast with an erudition born from this kind of spiritual background and with many complicated folds of a nihilistic mentality.
After the tedious greetings and admonitory comments of the headmaster and guests, a girl stood up in the front row diagonally across from Tsuji. The assistant principal's voice was heard, indicating the congratulatory address was to be given by the student-body representative.
The girl, short and plump, her cocoa-brown cheeks flushed and shining against her downy hair, was staring straight ahead with pitch-black pupils one would instinctively wish to peer into, both ends of her full lips raised as she walked with long strides toward the freshmen students.
Almost all the pupils, ribbons in their low pompadours, were dressed in maroon hakama skirts with crested black cotton haori, the uniform for ceremonial days.
She was the only girl who wore her hair in foreign style, gathering it together simply at the nape, the ribbonless hair strikingly black and abundant. Something slovenly and unrefined was evident in the way she had joined the neckband of her kimono and had put on her hakama.
She turned stiff as she delivered her short commonplace message of congratulations, and concluding by saying she was Noe Ito, representing all the students, she swept back to her seat. Apparently relieved at having finished her task, Noe was even more flushed, the pupils of her eyes moist and glittering.
Tsuji had paid no attention to the contents of Noe's prosaic remarks, but he had quite agreeably attuned himself to the beauty of her tense penetrating voice.
As she sat down, their eyes happened to meet. Noe made her dark eyes widen and, as if astonished, looked Tsuji straight in the face. Her eyes frankly communicated the drift of a mind full of curiosity, Tsuji parrying that lively movement with the vitality of one observing a fresh piece of fruit. The eyes of the girl, which were so voluptuous they reflected the pure childish curiosity and excitable sensitive agitation he had lost long ago, were softly tantalizing Tsuji's breast with a velvet-like touch. After the formal reply by the representative of the new students, which was twice as long as Noe's address, the principal introduced Jun Tsuji as the new teacher of English.
As he stood and walked toward the stage, he had a strange and vivid sensation of being stared at from behind by Noe's dark passionate eyes.
In no time at all Tsuji became an object of student adoration. Even those students who at the start had spoken ill of him as wavering and feminine suddenly and easily changed into devotees once they attended the new teacher's classes. Tsuji's English pronunciation was completely different from that of the old principal, who had been instructing them until then. When the young Tsuji read from the very same English textbook, he conveyed to them for the first time exotic and musical sounds. He wrote on the blackboard some of Poe's poetry which was not in their book and had them copy it. Noe and her fifth-year classmates, in ecstasy over "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven," learned the poems by heart.
At first Tsuji was surprised that the Noe he saw from his position as teacher was so poor in English. He expected she would be quite capable in all subjects since she had read the congratulatory address as the student-body representative, but her command of English was below the class average. Noe, small in stature, sat in the front row near the teacher's platform, and observing him as if her jet-black pupils were aflame, she stared at her teacher's face without even blinking. No matter which classroom he entered, the eyes of one or two students from among the many tens stared straight at him on the platform, but not one of those glances could obliterate the flamelike intensity burning in Noe's eyes. It was not long before Tsuji was told by Nakano, who was in charge of Noe's class, that the girl had suddenly been allowed to enter as a fourth-year student the previous year by a special selection committee, that she was poorest in English because she had until then been living in some out-of-the-way place in Kyushu, but that she was an extraordinary student with something of a natural gift for literature. Tsuji easily surmised Nakano cherished some great expectation from this flicker of talent in Noe. When Nakano showed him the school newspaper edited by her, Tsuji for the first time came to have a better opinion of the girl. That mimeographed newspaper which was brought out almost solely by Noe herself was, while immature, bolstered by a youthful single-minded passion overflowing with the vigor of purity. Already her essays and descriptive impressions, even while their touch was stiff and puerile, were products of an eye that could see with originality.
"It's decent enough, isn't it?" said Tsuji to his colleague, and for a while he still found himself following Noe's firm masculine prose on the mimeographed sheet.
From the time Tsuji began teaching her, Noe's progress in English was extraordinary. Putting aside the study of her other subjects, she immersed herself only in English. Her classmates, much quicker than their teacher Tsuji, stared in wonder at the way Noe's English improved so remarkably. There were occasions during his classes when even Tsuji, elaborating some grammatical point or offering an explanation of a particular translation, noticed Noe's enthusiasm and progress as he directed his glance at her flamelike eyes. The persons most involved were quite at ease, the last to notice they were already deliberately being whispered about by some of the more perceptive girls sensitive to the delicate pattern of feelings between Noe and Tsuji.
In those days Tsuji felt no attraction to Noe as a woman other than finding her "an interesting student." Eyebrows and eyes pressed closed to each other on her dark face, her eyes aflame and her thick lips voluptuous, Noe was emitting from every part of her body an odor and feeling like that of a wild beast warming itself in the sun. To Tsuji's eyes, with their taste for Edo culture, especially for the elegance of the downtown quarters, Noe's untidy negligence of dress was a reflection of her rustic and even dirty background. However, as her teacher he could not be indifferent to her avaricious pursuit of knowledge and the delicate susceptibility with which, like litmus paper moistened with
