person.
We left the Dai home, and while we were on our way to Imajuku, Mako had the driver stop in front of a large house that manufactured Hakata dolls sold wholesale. The lower floor was a kind of storeroom, the clerks visibly quite busy packing these Hakata dolls for shipping.
When we went upstairs directly from the entranceway, we found the second story formed the business office. While we were looking at several Hakata dolls in glass cases lining the walls, someone called out behind and Mako introduced me to a young woman in Western dress.
"This is Louise."
Ruiko, who had changed her name from Louise, sat smiling on a sofa. She seemed quite young, perhaps in her twenties or early thirties at most, but if I remember correctly, she had been born in 1922. When her parents were killed, she must have been a year and three months old.
As I had expected, her pretty oval-shaped face, though longer than Mako's, had the Yorozuya eyebrows and Yorozuya eyes, but her large eyes and round line of chin immediately reminded me of the Osugi I had seen in the photographs. It was either the slender legs under her skirt or the attractiveness of her hairdo bound into a chignon after being combed up at the nape that made me feel she was a strange woman whose youth, like that of a small girl, still remained in her entire body. No sign of age was visible on her smooth wide forehead.
The former owner of the doll factory had been an anarchist living in Fukuoka, and it was this association that had helped Louise acquire a side job painting these dolls. She told me she had just brought in her finished dolls and was going to take back some unglazed ones. I could see the extent of Mako's kindness in silently providing me with every convenience. And Louise also talked in an utterly unaffected way, her face all smiles.
"Well, with parents like ours, we've never benefited at all, have we? Even when I married, my husband's family was dead set against it, telling him to put an end to marrying an Osugi girl, that even a geisha or whatever would be better. The result was he left his family and cut off all connections to them so that now he lives only with me.
Her manner of speaking was also as indifferent as if she were talking about the concerns of someone else. Even this woman, who was much less bound to her parents than Mako had been, had carried on her back from the time she was aware of what was going on around her the burden of the names of her unusual parents.
"At any rate, the times we were raised in were hard times, weren't they?"
When she stood up, I realized Louise was also small. I imagined that both women resembled their mother in build. Was it right to assume that Mako, who had been told that when she was young looked more like her father than her sisters or brother had, had come to take on her mother's features as she grew older? As I gazed into the youthful and beautiful eyes of these sisters who were long past forty and nearing their fifties, I could well imagine their beauty during the heyday of their youth. What with Louise talking about her marriage and Mako's having referred previously to her second marriage, I guessed that the unusual passion in the blood of Osugi and Noe had been inherited by their daughters.
It took less than thirty minutes to get to Imajuku from there. The car ran along a straight road leading to Karatsu and before we realized it, we found the sea glittering to the right of our car window.
The blue of Hakata Bay is whiter and nearer the blue of sky than the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Inside the bay the usually raging waves from the Sea of Genkai had calmly and quietly settled, and we could see the shadows of boats gently floating on the clear waters of the sea. The beach along the coast is narrow, and I was reminded of the seacoast of Shonan with its smooth flat feeling without rocks or stones.
No one was on the beach. Our driver told us it was just at this hour that the area was the quietest and offered the best view. In summertime this coast is as thick with crowds as the coast of Shonan, so there is no room to take even a step.
Around the area where Iki-no-Matsubara appeared, painted barracks, apparently the remains of a summer resort, caught our eye. The pine trees grew in such clusters in so narrow a place that rather than call them beautiful, I received a somewhat eerie impression from them.
I had expected that the house Noe was born in would be on the outskirts of the pine grove, but I now found it was more to the west. The town of Imajuku extended along the bus route like a sash. Another stretch of narrow road continued nearer the seacoast than the wide paved road we were on, and the row of low-built houses on both sides of that narrow road probably formed the old village of Imajuku.
When at Mako's direction we turned toward the sea down that narrow road where a police box was located, our car immediately came out on the beach as if we were about to plunge into Hakata Bay. Just beneath the stone wall of a high breakwater, the sea came to a sudden halt. The sandy beach was so covered with fragments of rough stone I felt as pained as if I had been walking over it in my bare feet.
The smooth coastline of the bay revealed a clear gentle curve as if it had been drawn with a compass, Imazu Bay widely nestled in it. Myoken Cape stretched to the east, and jutting out at the end of a headland to the west was the handful of homes of the town of Imazu, one behind the other. The horizon of the spacious Sea of Genkai outside the bay extended beyond as if fusing into sky. As I stood on the shore of this coastline so deficient in variety and so smooth it seemed almost too prosaic, what glittered to overflowing in my visual field was the blue expanse of water and sky, and I felt a yearning as if my heart had been naturally lured beyond that sea spreading out like a fan unfolding. I could only nod my head in agreement as I felt that if anyone stood on this beach every morning and evening, stared at this sleepy tranquil line of coast, and gazed at the approach and return of the tracks of those waves of the sea, that person's heart, be it Noe's or not, would be filled with longing to set out on a journey to some distant world beyond. The wind from the sea was also gentle, but if I gave my mind to it, the sound of waves was continually reverberating into the wind as they quietly beat against the shore.
"This is our old family house."
Mako pointed to a dwelling behind her with its wide wooden wall at the corner of a narrow road. The one-story structure, so low it lay concealed behind this wooden barrier, had probably been built that way to provide protection from the sea wind. It was an unpretentious house in the style of a fisherman's dwelling often seen along the coast.
"Fortunately my aunt has just come from Shimonoseki where she lives, so please meet her. It's too bad you can't talk to my uncle because he's been sick in bed since the end of last year."
I almost gasped at this unexpected good luck. Though there were five children including Noe in her family, only one of the others was a girl, Tsuta by name, two years Noe's junior. And Mako had just said this very Tsuta from Shimonoseki was inside the house. The sick uncle referred to was Noe's second elder brother Yoshibei, her eldest brother Yoshijiro having died young shortly after going to Manchuria. Apparently even Yoshibei was a kind of character, what with his having left home early, living in Saga, devoting himself to inventing and designing, and holding many patents. Late in life he had returned home, had inherited his parents' house, and had led a quiet existence, but Mako said that only last year he had collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.
When I was shown through the house, I found Yoshibei lying in bed in an eight-mat room at the back of the dwelling. The invalid, whose features were conspicuously white, had been born in the twenty-fifth year of Meiji, so I guessed him to be seventy-three. This person too looked far younger than his years, and for an old man he had a soft, genial expression on a face devoid of the unusual blemishes of the aged. Even in bed his figure looked great and imposing. I recalled that the bed on which Kichi Dai had been lying was also rather long and bulky for an elderly person ninety years old.
Tsuta, who had come to
