in modernity. I realized that very cute little Mako was now almost fifty years old.
It was just about noon when we arrived at the newspaper office. The building, which had escaped damage in the war, had excessively high ceilings, wide stairway landings, and sturdy wooden handrails painted to look like mahogany, all of which made me feel I was in an old-fashioned European manor house. The scene was much too perfect for meeting Mako, the illegitimate child of parents headed for one of the most dramatic fates of the Taisho era, the building itself having remained as it had been at that time. As I was exchanging greetings in the reception room with a few of the men on the newspaper staff, I sensed that someone was at the door, and I looked back just as a woman came quietly into the room.
The face of the small middle-aged woman was fearlessly staring directly at me. Her long thick eyebrows and the remarkably large pupils in her eyes—with their double eyelids glittering as if burning near those eyebrows— pressed down on me with an intensity that suggested those eyes and brows were all the face contained. Her cheeks were hollow, and because all the lines were gathered into her short narrow chin, her face looked for a moment neat and heart-shaped. But I could easily overlay upon that face, so small it could be enclosed completely in both of her palms, the image of the cute little round-faced Mako, whose large button eyes and long eyelashes I remembered from the photographs.
Her age was most apparent around her mouth, her teeth somewhat visible as a result, but the youthfulness that made it impossible for me to imagine that she was nearly fifty was not due to her small size only. Though her features at a glance had in them a trace of sadness, a sudden sign of gentleness, which forced the tight lines of her mouth to immediately soften, flickered in her eyes with a strong light that did not flinch as we exchanged looks, a friendliness and innocent shyness overflowing in ageless freshness in her eyes. Her rich black hair, her dark-blue woolen kimono closed tightly at her slender throat, and her long gray fur overcoat to protect her hands and legs from the cold finally came into view. An intense atmosphere radiated from the unshrinking glitter in her eyes, and the vitality of her small body had a freshness only an intellectual can possess.
The moment before she arrived, I overheard one of the newspaper staff say, "Actually, Mako is notorious for hating to be interviewed. She's a plague to newspaper reporters. She doesn't want to talk about her parents at all, and she even turns away from NHK's microphones, telling them that she had no real connection with her parents. So to get anything out of her..." From the very start of my trip, I had no real intention of pumping Mako for various details, so I was moved merely to see before my eyes this fifty-year-old child of a pitiful fate. Mako was the same age as my elder sister, and Louise had been born the same year as me. This amounted to saying that these sisters and I were women who had tasted both the sweet and the bitter of life during the very same generation. When I thought about this fact, I felt in Mako a common, practical housewife of the world seen along any street, the practical wife of a practical man of the world, and I suddenly sensed some intimate attachment to her.
When she became aware of my purpose in coming, she merely nodded and said, "I don't remember anything. But my mother's aunt is still alive, and she may have something to tell you." Mako herself guided me to the place in the city where Kichi Dai lived.
Sitting beside me, Mako came up only to the shoulders of my five-foot-two-inch frame. The diminutive Mako told me quite frankly, "My daughter living in Tokyo has presented me with a grandchild. She's the daughter I left with my former husband, but nowadays she and I keep in touch with one another. Yes, the husband I divorced has already died. Well, I've had nothing but trouble from my parents." Saying this, Mako humorously made the pupils of her eyes spin around.
From the time she entered school to the time she started working and then got married, Mako had been raised in an age when everything was tinged with militarism, so she had been subjected to unjust pressures and an unjust fate merely because she was Sakae Osugi's daughter. This I could fully imagine from having been brought up during the same period myself.
"Like the time I entered a girls' high school. I had been staying with my grandfather here until I finished elementary school, but I went to high school from the house of an uncle on my father's side who lived in Yokohama. At that time I expected, quite naturally, to take the prefectural high school entrance examination, but my teachers wouldn't let me. Even though I might have passed with good marks, my teachers, needless to say, knew I couldn't get in because I was Osugi's child. That's why I entered the private Koran Girls' High School. So this event, you see, serves as a model for everything else in my life."
Her talking so indifferently of her own affairs, as if she were speaking about someone else, struck home all the more forcefully to me.
"Apparently I was doted on by my father, but I have no memory of that at all. Even those incidents I think I have remembered are from books I read afterwards or are 'images' I got from listening to others, so I feel as if my memories have been made out of them. According to what was written in a book of my father's, a man tailing him by keeping close watch from in front of our house would wonder if my father had given him the slip or not, and he would ask me about him while I was playing outside. When he asked me, 'Is your papa in?' I would say yes, and even when he asked, 'Is your papa out?' I would say yes. And then when he asked me if my father was at home or not, it seems I gave him two yes answers. I was told that the person shadowing my father complained to my parents that he was no match for little Mako. When I was told about such events, I somehow came to believe that I really had those experiences. When I saw my father's books describing those occasions he had taken me to an inn along the coast where he often went to do his work, a kind of vague memory loomed that I had walked along the same seashore with him. All my memories are of this sort. Since my sisters were much younger than I, they can't have had any memories, can they? But, you know, strangely enough, there's only one scene I remember clearly. It was when my father wasn't at home for some reason or other, and we were living in a two-story house. Every time we heard a crowd of people at our front door, my mother's face took on an unusually frightened look, and she forced me up to the second floor, saying, 'Don't come down, no matter what!' I heard Kenji Kondo continually shouting something at the entrance of our house. Mere child that I was, I became frightened, and stretching only my neck out from the upstairs landing, I secretly glanced below. I found my mother sitting resolutely in the very center of the lowest step on the staircase with a bucketful of ashes held tight across her lap.
"That strange posture of my mother sitting smack down there and that bucketful of ashes have remained remarkably vivid before my eyes. I suppose my feeling of fear and my mother's somehow reliable figure and that bucket of ashes were strange even to a child. I guess she intended to defend us with those ashes if anyone broke into our house.
"Oddly enough, my father left me at home the very day he was murdered. Perhaps he had a premonition after all, because wherever he went, he always wanted to take me with him. But on just that day, he left me behind with our neighbor, Mr. Roan Uchida.
"My father was very kind to his relatives, so he was worried about his younger brother's family at Tsurumi, and he was anxious to visit them as soon as possible. He had gone out with my mother, intending to bring my uncle's family back to our house because they had suffered a great deal during the Great Kanto Earthquake. My uncle, though, was ill in bed, so for the time being they brought back only my little cousin Soichi. That was when the trouble occurred. If on that day my father had taken me along as usual, I would have been killed with all of them.
"Thinking about the event afterwards, Mr. Uchida told me that in spite of the fact that I always left with my father when he went away, it was strange that I hadn't even run after him on that day. I was playing over at Mr. Uchida's every day, and I was really there more than I was in my own house."
I couldn't bring myself to ask Mako, who was speaking to me in such a free manner, if she remembered anything further about the day her parents died.
Roan Uchida, in his book The Last Days of Osugi, has
