For Kawachi Is Our Homeland

Because Kawachi Is Our Homeland

Seishu Hamano
A biography of a writer who sounds warnings. From Joroku, Sakai.

The Kawachi Days into Which I Was Born and in Which I Grew Up

I was born in the latter half of the Showa teens and grew up in Joroku, Noda Village, Minamikawachi District. Those days, which shaped me far more than the days that came later, are still alive within me. I was only a small child then. Yet it was the midst of war. People and their lives were stretched to the limit.

Looking back, both time and space have changed remarkably. After half a century, the people too have been replaced; all those familiar smiling faces are no longer of this world. Yet it is precisely because warm-hearted people once went about their lives there that our Kawachi hometown has value today.

I try walking from Kitanoda Station to old Joroku. Except for the tiniest surviving fragments, the changes are bewilderingly varied. Unless someone records what it looked like before, everything will vanish: we stand just before that moment. Do not let the spirit of those who came before us count for nothing.

This world is overrun with stories of heroes and mighty figures, as though ordinary people's ways of living mattered little, as though it were natural that when they died, their names and deeds should all be forgotten.

How could that possibly be so?

I even feel anger that television dramas remain as devoted as ever to hero worship. I want to rebuke them: stop spreading such profoundly mistaken values.

It is ordinary people who are admirable. People thought of as commonplace live commonplace lives; yet the days of those who lived well, though they never gained a great name, are admirable. That is what I believe. With that view, I want to leave the world a record of Kawachi during and after the war.

August 2021, the year of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.
Completing this in the very midst of them, I dedicate it to those who came before us and are now gone.

Seishu Hamano
Graduate of Tomioka Higashi Elementary School, Showa 28.

Because Kawachi Is Our Homeland

Contents

The page numbers below refer to the Japanese PDF.

• Chapter 1. History through the Mind's Eye — 5
• Chapter 2. All the Mothers Were Alive — 16
• Chapter 3. Let Our Hometown Stand Up to History — 37
• Chapter 4. Inside the Jar, Unable to See the Sky — 42
• Chapter 5. The American Mind — 54
• Chapter 6. Being in Tomioka — 74
• Chapter 7. And So Japan Survived — 94
• Final Chapter. What Happened Afterwards — 107
• Chronology, Writing Career and Other Matters — 118

Chapter 1. History through the Mind's Eye

My Mother's Blood Sleeps in a Mountain Castle

There can be no doubt that Kawachi is my native soil. Yet the blood that flowed within my mother's womb has its source at Takatori Castle in Nara.

Nara is not the countryside. It was Japan's capital thirteen hundred years ago. Takatori Castle, however, lies in the mountains. It was one of the mountain castles unusual in the Edo period, and even then it stood in a strangely mysterious realm. Even today one must climb along the ridges to reach the former keep. Dwelling in the ancient capital of Nara, yet going into the mountains: is that how it was? In the Edo age, when the warrior class held all power, my mother's ancestors lived in a curious place.

平塚らいてう, who championed women's rights in the Meiji period, nurtured many kindred spirits, including 伊藤野枝. Surprisingly, my mother too, living in one of the official residences left behind by this mountain castle, awakened to ideas of women's rights and led a life unusual for her time. With such an outlook, she naturally did not consider it proper to dwell on the pedigree of the family she came from. But from my earliest childhood she conveyed to me how thoroughly she had tired of the rock-bottom life of lower-ranking former samurai after the Restoration, and how badly she had wanted to escape it.

As a girl she also longed for Takarazuka. Her forcefulness as a woman, then, was not as thoroughgoing as that of 市川房江. She had simply inherited her stubborn father's blood and rebelled. I have inherited that blood myself, and the story of her departure from the mountain castle could even resemble The Inugami Clan.

By the time my mother became aware of her surroundings as a small child, the family was temporarily housed in an ancient, weathered mansion. Half decayed, it stood in a corner of the Takatori Castle ruins.

Living in a chief retainer's official residence might sound fortunate, but it is better understood as the final condition of a typical impoverished samurai family that had lost its hereditary stipend after the Restoration. When this little girl was born in Taisho 3, in a corner of the sprawling old mansion, she already had five older brothers and sisters. She was the sixth of eight children; I am told that she had lived in utter poverty from birth.

Of course, hers was not the chief retainer's family. It was simply a poor, fallen household. One might call it living by the room: the Ishii family occupied one of the tatami rooms divided from one another by sliding paper doors, while just beyond a single door lived another family in the same destitution.

Apparently samurai residences had stood side by side around the plateau. Together with six families that had once received similar stipends, the Ishii household cultivated nearby vacant ground and eked out a livelihood. For these people, the Meiji Restoration had been a disaster. Then again, since the status system had been abolished, perhaps my mother, with her interest in women's rights, could feel inwardly free even in such a life.

It was 福沢諭吉 who called inherited status an enemy of one's father. Even after their stipends were taken away by the Restoration, perhaps staying in the chief retainer's residence enabled them somehow to stave off hunger.

Outside were stone walls. The demolished castle was nothing but ruins, barely allowing even a distant view. When they had no firewood, they apparently gathered waste timber there and fed it into the hearth to cook. It was, one might say, a Nara version of 樋口一葉's world.

A Cone of Light

With 有島武郎 and 種田山頭火 alike, conflict within the family and the misfortune of one's origins surface again and again. Born into a sake-brewing business family, 山頭火 often reveals, deep in his heart, a life warped beyond recognition as the family business declined. Yes, with the decline of the family business. It was the same in my case.

The life balanced on the edge of death of 樋口一葉, who became the breadwinner of a fallen family in the poorer quarters of Tokyo just after the Restoration, contrasts with that of 下田歌子, who became a court poet. In that measure, 一葉 does not pluck at the reader's heartstrings.

Translator's note: The preceding sentence retains the negative ending printed on PDF page 7, “かきならず.” It has not been silently changed to an affirmative.

Perhaps my particular interest in my mother's origins came from the thought that by casting light on her childhood, I might lighten my own sorrow a little. I once wrote for 三田文学 under the unforgettable title “光の円錐,” a cone of light.

I wanted, once, to take my mother back to her hometown. That would let me understand one part of my bloodline. People devoted to literature are always thinking in such self-tormenting ways. Put another way, my mother was taken all the way back to her hometown because of the distorted feelings of her son—me.

When we arrived, there were only a few stone walls and differences in ground level. A single roof tile lay covered with soil from the field, as though staged for consolation. On the site of the chief retainer's mansion, not even its foundation stones remained. Crouching beside it and listening as my mother poured out her memories, I could hear the feelings of a young girl in her account of how envious she had been of the family whose member became a schoolteacher. Was this too the feeling of a fallen samurai household?

Looking at the car's lights on the way home, I thought: it is just like a cone of light. Only the brightly illuminated part—the part recognized—can be clearly understood. All the thousands and tens of thousands of other events that must have happened have vanished entirely.

One confession alone remained strangely vivid: before she moved to Kume, one of the village's young men had secretly spoken to her, and she had met him at the castle ruins. At dusk she climbed up to the ruins and looked for him, but the wreckage of demolition was still scattered all around. It was eerie and frightening, she said. My mother, of course, would not tell me what happened there.

Despite those circumstances and the disadvantage of being a woman, she obtained a pharmacist's license and found work in the dispensary of 石川医院, which had served as the lord's physician in Takatori. But the poverty of the years when the family still slept in the chief retainer's mansion could not be resolved by ordinary means. Eventually, after obtaining work as Tenrikyo missionaries, the family united, acquired land in Momoyama not far from Kumedera, built a church and moved there. Was it still the middle of the Taisho era?

Eventually, after obtaining work as Tenrikyo missionaries, the family united, acquired land in Momoyama not far from Kumedera, built a church and moved there. Yet their extreme poverty did not improve. From Taisho to Showa: with the Japanese economy's collapse in the Great Kanto Earthquake, Japan did not share in the benefits of the 1920s boom and gradually took on a militaristic tone.

My mother, purely a woman of Nara, came to the second floor of an Osaka munitions factory through an arranged marriage with my father in Showa 10. By then, that same year, my elder brother had already been born as the child of my father's first wife. With him in her arms, she moved to Joroku.

The Bandit of Mount Nijo

What was my mother's inner makeup before she came to Kawachi? With a religious man for a father, deep feeling for other people had been cultivated within her from childhood.

“Today I converted a bandit,” said 元吉, head of the Ishii family in Kume, my mother's home. This was exactly a hundred years ago. 元吉 was my mother's father, the central figure who decided that the whole family should join Tenrikyo. His face was usually stern, but on that day alone it was bright and cheerful.

As the story went, he had been attacked by a bandit while crossing Mount Nijo on his way from Kume in Nara to Sakai. Without flinching or showing fear, 元吉 admonished the robber: “Poor fellow. You must have your reasons for sinking as low as highway robbery. Look, here are some rice balls. Three of them… I'll give you all three, and all the money I have. So come, sit down here…”

He made the man sit on a stone beside him, listened at length to his life story, and taught him the Tenrikyo faith: change your heart and do your best; God will save you. The robber, in tears, repented and joined the faith, he said.

Hearing this, the whole family praised him. “How wonderful, Father. You could have taken the train to Osaka, but it was worth going on foot after all.”

But my mother was angry. She herself said that she had been furious.

“What are you talking about, Father?” she said. “We don't get to eat rice. We're always wishing we could eat your rice balls. And you say you gave all three to a bandit? Fool! Why? Look at all the children in this house, hungry… Never getting anything decent to eat… Yet you leave your own home to fend for itself and do nothing but help other people! Why, Father? Do you think that makes you admirable? Aren't you ashamed?”

That was what she had told him, my mother said. She recalled the story again when we visited the site of the chief retainer's mansion.

“They said Father's father was the last head of learning in the Takatori domain. But with the Restoration the domain school disappeared, and Father couldn't make a living as a scholar. At the house in Kume, he was running about trying to win converts. It was wrong of me to shout at him without understanding how he felt…”

When her father died and she hurried to his funeral, my mother wept so violently before the altar that those around her had to support her.

Yet this same mother came with me on a school outing to Nagano Yuen when I was in the first year of elementary school. At lunchtime, a crowd of filthy war orphans swarmed around the place with the red railings. They stretched out blackened hands, crying for rice balls. “Don't let them take yours!” the other mothers said desperately. But my mother said, “成生, give them everything. You don't need to eat!” And she gave away every rice ball.

I had only just become a schoolchild, and at the sight tears welled up in my childish heart. Afterwards, the scene of that funeral came back again and again, down to the altar and the way the mourners were seated. Yet the uncles, aunts and cousins who had attended in mourning clothes knew nothing of what happened at Nagano Yuen.

The house in Kume is a building attached to the church, but the right to live there remains with the Ishii family. Even now, though it is dilapidated like the house in the song 故郷の廃家, it still retains its original form, and that consoles me.

The last time I took my son to visit the graves, we came in front of this house. Drawn irresistibly toward it, I stopped. The moment I opened its rattling glass door, tears flowed without end and I could not stop them. I said to my son, “This life… Almost every year a funeral coffin was carried out from here… What do you make of it? Even so, we survived. We survived…” My son stared in amazement at his father speaking through tears.

Readers may think of the Ishii family's life after the Restoration as almost exactly like 樋口一葉's life of extreme poverty. For children today, the Meiji Restoration is merely an item to learn for examinations. Yet there are still people for whom the unbroken days of suffering it brought cannot leave their memories.

On the night we visited the church, its head—whose family had shared hardship with the Ishii family since their Takatori days—had bedding laid out for us in the finest tatami room of the guest quarters, still as they had been then, and let us stay. Evening devotions; bells and drums in the early morning. I, who had once risen as a small child rubbing sleepy eyes to those sounds, was now old, and my own child was an adult.

After receiving a meal prepared with care by the church head's wife, I slept beside my son in that room of the church where my mother's arranged marriage with my father had taken place, in the tatami guest room where I had once laid my pillow beside hers. Never had I wished more strongly than on that night that my mother's ghost might appear by my pillow.

Before marrying, my mother of the Hamano household in Joroku, Tomioka, had also served as a shrine maiden at Kashihara Shrine and danced kagura. My young father saw her, fell for her, married her, and she came to Joroku.

She was admirable in never missing a parents' visiting day at elementary school. Yet I was always ashamed to have her appear before my classmates and kept saying, “Don't come, don't come.”

My Father's Family History

My father's side is ominous too. I later learned that my bloodline was bound by old ties to Nagasone in Kawachi, so I have deep connections with Kawachi. But those connections go back as far as Gifu.

That is, the name Gifu came when Nobunaga attacked and destroyed the castle named 因幡城 in the source, made it his own seat and called it Gifu. Perhaps through achievements in the wars frequent in that age, the family established a home upstream on the Ibi River. It was a region of heavy winter snow. They acquired the surrounding fields, mountains and rivers and wielded influence as wealthy farmers. But my father 定雄, the son of a second wife, was destined to live in isolation with an elder sister born to the first wife.

Under the agricultural land law that came into being after the Restoration, once a legitimate son was born, all inheritance passed to that boy. His half-sister disliked this. In Taisho 2, she apparently persuaded their father to have her younger brother by the second wife—my father—adopted into another household.

His birth mother chased them to the edge of the village, took the little boy's hand, and cried “定雄, 定雄,” refusing to let go. I was told of the heartrending scene in which she and the man who was still trying to take him away pulled at the child's arms.

定雄's father, however, had a certain plan. He apparently reckoned that if 定雄 became the eldest son and heir of the Hamano family, owners of extensive rice fields around Mozu Hachiman, it would bring the boy great happiness too. The Hamano family dominated the area called Nagasone. There was a Nagasone in the castle town of the Ii family in Hikone as well, and they shared the crest of a tachibana orange within a circle. If the 所 family became a branch of that line, perhaps he expected the 所 family of Gifu and the Hamano family of Nagasone in Osaka's Kawachi to prosper together for many years.

As my father grew up, he learned his origins. When he developed and expanded a munitions business in Osaka, the Ii household in Hikone provided an office as a branch. This can also be told from the printing on the company's brown envelopes.

Political arrangements are not confined to marriage. Adopted sons and daughters—apparently people speak of “taking and giving” them—connected the Hamano family to wealthy farmers in Joroku too. After the war, during construction of what the source calls the Minami-Osaka subway line, it emerged that the rice fields on the site of Nakamozu Station belonged to the Hamano family. The subway company even supplied a family tree reaching back to the middle Edo period and asked us to put our seal on the documents.

In Japan, history throws its weight about. Hereditary status is both an enemy of one's father and an unexpected inheritance. But did hundreds of millions come tumbling down into our laps like a windfall?

Not so. We stamped the papers, and that was that. Over the long years of Meiji, Taisho and Showa, the Hamano family's ancestral temple had treated the land as borrowed temple property and paid taxes to the authorities. The family lost against that record of use… Case closed.

My Parents' Fateful Marriage Meeting

Before my father and mother married, he saw my young mother in white robes and vermilion hakama at Kashihara Shrine, dancing the shrine maiden's dance in the kagura hall with bells ringing shan, shan. Falling passionately in love, he pressed for the parents' consent to marriage. But he said it had been a great mistake.

It began with “I didn't know she was such a fierce woman,” and went on to “Your mother was taken in by 平塚らいてう.” Around this time he denounced my mother, who had embraced women's rights and become a pharmacist, as though she were a revolutionary fighter. But Kashihara Shrine enshrines the first emperor, Jimmu. Its great celebration of the imperial era's 2,600th year had resounded throughout Japan; perhaps he had conveniently imagined a connection with the imperial family.

Having made up his mind, he went to her family home in Kume to propose, only to find utter poverty, and was rather disappointed. But a church official present at the meeting spoke admiringly: “You see, this Tenrikyo Tosa Branch Church doesn't come from an ordinary family. Our origins are in the venerable Takatori domain in Nara. All our family and retainers lived in the chief retainer's mansion at that mountain castle. Then a revelation came from the founder in Tanbaichi, and by a special arrangement… we received this Momoyama land in Kume… and built this fine church, as you can see… The Ishii family worked especially hard…”

Hearing this, Father apparently recovered his spirits. “Is that so? From a samurai family… the chief retainer's?” And he decided to marry.

My mother certainly came from Takatori, and she certainly had lived in the chief retainer's residence as a child. But that alone could not establish a pedigree. Above all, she detested ranking human beings by such things.

Rather, she said she could never forgive what had happened to a forceful woman such as 伊藤野枝: despite living freely with 大杉栄, she had been arrested as a political offender amid the confusion of the Great Kanto Earthquake and killed by Captain 甘粕. My mother was angry at the high-handedness of 甘粕 and the Kwantung Army—甘粕, who later became president of Man'ei and even used 李香蘭 to make military propaganda films, helping to confuse and manipulate people's minds.

Why, then, did she accept without aversion a proposal from a man who was president of a munitions company? Her younger sister's explanation—that her family, being preachers, was desperately poor and she sacrificed herself for her brothers and sisters—has the greatest ring of reality.

Yet perhaps because she carried the blood of her father, the philanthropist praised as the venerable 元吉, my mother strongly wished to uphold social justice. Given a chance, she may have wanted to provide funds to revolutionaries working underground like 大杉 and his companions.

Instead, her mother-in-law controlled the household finances, and she discovered that her husband apparently had a second woman here and a third there. All her hardship seemed to have been for nothing. Her husband—my father—was then connected with the navy and traded with the South Manchuria Railway. He made a fortune by taking sole charge of bringing in steel used in making warship guns and in operating fighter aircraft. He also acquired a manganese mine in Gifu and employed the entire village in mining it.

My mother rather liked his dynamic activities. Even after the war, she would tell both my brother and me, “Your father did big things too. You must become like that. Don't turn into the sort of husband who sits beside his wife counting out peanuts to eat…” So I imagine that the bond between my parents after marriage was a fierce relationship between man and woman, half love and half hatred.

Chapter 2. All the Mothers Were Alive

Mencius's Mother Cuts Her Weaving

Mencius's mother is known as a wise woman. Her wisdom led to action, and thanks to her, Mencius became a sage second only to Confucius. My own mother was not quite so remarkable, I think, but it is true that she was devoted to her children's education. The fact that English or mathematics teachers were always lodging in our home while I was growing up makes that plain.

Mother arranged days and times and asked them to tutor us in place of paying rent. She insisted that we must never be rude to a teacher. From kindergarten age, she made me perform the fully formal bow called shin in the tea ceremony, sit correctly on my knees to write romanized Japanese, and compete with my brother at Hyakunin Isshu.

Mencius's mother was greater still. As in the story of her three moves, she moved three times to find a place suited to giving him the best education. Yet Mencius, despite all the love invested in him, tired of study and returned to see his mother. She tore to shreds before his eyes the cloth she was just about to finish weaving, and rebuked him in tears: “You are the same as this. Do you mean to end up like a piece of unfinished weaving?”

With a mother like that, even I—an enthusiast and inveterate indulger in my interests, strongly carrying the blood of my hobby-loving father—was drawn into Obino Kindergarten. Around that time she also held English and waka lessons at home. I remember learning English with 小池喜代子, now a highly active calligrapher. We did not take a break even on the day of Typhoon Jane: she was at our house, and as roof tiles flew, we practiced “This is…”

Most children at Obino Kindergarten came from homes in Obino, but 内山孝治, 政田良一 and 安本郁夫 were there too. The graduates' register is still carefully preserved; even the traces of ink seem beautiful and fragrant.

It must have been a world of plenty unimaginable from my mother's childhood, when food was never sufficient and the Ishii family barely survived by huddling together with the several other families living in the chief retainer's residence through the upheavals of Meiji and Taisho. Yet perhaps their vigorous determination to survive had been more visible when, during the great depression of early Showa, an invitation came from the rapidly rising Tenrikyo faith and they all converted, collectively offering up their houses and all their property.

When the domains returned their lands and people to the emperor in the Meiji period, those serving Takatori, which had conducted its government from the mountain castle, dispersed. But the family who stayed at the chief retainer's house and shared the castle's fate until the very end probably left Takatori with a resolve bordering on desperation and moved to the Tosa Branch Church in Kume, close to Kashihara Shrine.

The daimyo and chief retainers had been promised divisions of property, peerages and enormous stipends. Lower-ranking samurai, however, might become policemen or firefighters; finding a new livelihood was by no means easy. Those who had worked at Takatori's domain school and were late in changing course fared worse. In the climate of “Japanese spirit, Western learning,” Confucian learning was disparaged, its adherents even called useless pedants. Without studying subjects such as mathematics, how difficult the path to survival must have been.

My mother could only find her own way of living.

Perhaps that was what led her to marry into Kawachi as a second wife.

Kitanoda Too Had “星の流れに”

In the confusion after the war, women called panpan could be seen walking with occupation soldiers outside Nankai Railway's Namba Station.

星の流れに　身を占って
どこをねぐらの　今日の宿
荒む心で　いるのじゃないが
泣けて涙も　かれ果てた
こんなおんなに　誰がした

What stood out first after defeat were crowds of homeless children burned out of their homes, and girls who had lost their parents and houses clinging to occupation soldiers' arms.

As elementary-school children, we saw adults treat the homeless children as delinquents and refuse to let them near. We heard adults call women who had no means of survival except selling their bodies panpan, and repeated it unchanged, pointing behind their backs and calling, “Panpan!” How much we hurt them, we did not understand.

But Mother became angry.

“Don't call them panpan! You ought to feel sorry for them!” she said, slapping my cheek. I did not understand why she was so angry.

Relatives, and even complete strangers, came one after another to the Joroku house. They gladly took home my sweaters, tattered long underpants, khaki jackets—anything and everything. Not one visitor talked without crying.

When I returned from Higashi Elementary School, there were often visitors. Most were in tears. “Oh no, another person I don't know. Mother will start crying along with them again…” Sitting in a chair on the veranda and half listening, I heard nothing but accounts of brothers and sisters unable to feed their children amid the great postwar depression.

One relative brought a child, saying that the boy had become delinquent and was causing trouble for people in town.

“Stay here. If you can't get a meal, if you're hungry, anyone might point a knife and shout, ‘Give me money!’” Mother said through tears, cradling his head. From the next day, he lived with me.

When I bathed with him, he soaped my head and said, “成生ちゃん, you're lucky. Such a good mother…” He showed me his muscles and cried.

I met that boy again after sixty years. He was an old man whose hair was gone. “真魚ちゃん, you were a lucky one,” he said with deep feeling. “If your mother is ever in trouble, let me know. I'll do anything for her…”

Perhaps Mother Was, After All, Just Like Her Missionary Father

As I wrote before, this was in Showa 22, at Nagano Yuen when I was in the first year of elementary school. Many homeless children were there. The moment we opened our lunches, they thrust out blackened hands, repeatedly crying “Give us some! Give us some!” Some grabbed at the food. Everyone ran away to keep it from being taken.

Then Mother, standing beside me, cried, “Give it to them! Give it to them!”

“成生ちゃん, you don't need to eat. Give everything to these children!” she said, giving them even her own portion.

The homeless children, unbathed, their faces black, their clothes in rags, took the rice balls in dirty hands and stuffed them into their mouths. I wanted to eat too, but Mother even gave away the rice ball in my hand.

Mother is a great person.

That was the first day when, at last, I respected her as someone out of the ordinary, an admirable person.

Looking back, Mother, who gave the homeless children even the rice ball I was holding, had done exactly the same thing as her father when he gave rice balls to the bandit on Mount Nijo. She had been angry at her father's action, yet in the end she too was a philanthropist, someone who lived for social justice.

Does that mean I carry the blood of an admirable person like “マリア・テレサ”? I would like that to be so, but things do not work that way. Half my blood is my father's. To give an example, it is the extraordinary blood symbolized by adventurers in Manchuria, people who might sometimes move an entire state; it is the blood of dissipation too. Born from that combination, perhaps I used my own extraordinary confusion as material, wove it through a troublesome character, and calmly sent into the world works that brought forth patterns of human life.

Translator's note: The personal name “マリア・テレサ” is retained as written; no different historical identity is substituted.

Perhaps Mother wished to take part in the town's politics herself. In the days when it was Tomioka Town, she helped with an election campaign because the mother of my classmate 矢野紀美 was running for the town council. This may have been one of the setbacks of a mother who struggled to manage her own contradictions. But she appeared in a photograph with about thirty people, including 紀美, in an inner tatami room of the Yano house.

Welcome Home, Boss!

It is well said that people build a house, and a house builds its people. During and after the war, the Joroku house silently took in, and silently watched, people tossed about by changing times.

“Welcome home, Boss!”

It is a very long time ago now, but when Mother married, the main family home was in Horie, Osaka. The family had moved from Nagasone to Sakai and then to Horie, where the head office and factory were built too. The number of employees had reached several hundred.

The moment my mother placed three fingers on the floor, bowed and formally welcomed her husband home, her mother-in-law instructed her without delay: say “Welcome home, Boss!” Company staff, attendants at the entrance and all sorts of people were coming and going.

The munitions industry then had something like extraterritorial privileges. A company president's status was equivalent to a colonel's—no, higher still—and apparently even military policemen stood rigidly at attention and saluted. Important men who are now figures in history came to my father's company to ask how procurement was going.

Since that whole era has become history, perhaps I may now describe the work mentioned earlier. The special steel Father traded looked at first glance like ordinary lumps of iron, yet its hardness was exceptionally high and it was ideal for wire rope. For example, the wires operating the flaps and rudders of Zero fighters came from his factory. He recalled that the wires reinforcing the bases of the battleship Musashi's main guns were also our products.

The production processes of the Imperial Army and Navy were minutely organized through the relationships of trust of the time. As long as high-quality materials could be procured, manufacturing proceeded smoothly and was completed at tremendous speed.

Ordinary iron, unlike this special steel, was subject to controls. If someone carelessly drove around with it on a truck, the military police would seize him at once. But apparently, if he said, “Don't you know? This is special steel!” they trembled and saluted: “Thank you for your service!”

Even the great men known as Manchuria's Three Suke apparently came to Father's company, ate rice with tea poured over it and went home. Mother's mother-in-law was immensely proud of Father's service to the nation. When Mother married into that household, its fervor was enough to bowl her over, she said.

But call-up papers frequently arrived for employees too. Each time, Father held a grand send-off and sang military songs. This was when the battleships Yamato and Musashi were still there. The news that Midway had cost the Imperial Navy its main carriers Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu, along with many valuable fighter pilots, came much later. Father was informed immediately, but told none of his employees and quietly kept rushing about to procure materials.

On March 10, Showa 20, the day of the great Tokyo air raid, Father decided Osaka too was in danger and resolved to evacuate his employees. Yet when the owner of a large furniture store on Tachibana-dori, lined with furniture specialists, begged him, “Hamano, buy all my furniture,” he answered, “All right!”

“I'll make it cheap.”

“Keep the price high. Osaka won't lose. It won't be burned by air raids. We'll shoot every plane down with antiaircraft guns.”

His bravado was in vain. A few days later Osaka too suffered a ferocious air raid. His head-office building, warehouses and munitions factory burned to the ground. Demand at the manganese mine, still in operation, plunged and forced it to close.

Defeat followed soon afterwards. The company ceased operating. Every company with which it did business went bankrupt. Perhaps the only assets left to Father were the house in Joroku and his works of art.

The president of such a company was little more than a vagrant. Yet in an age still colored by feudalism, retainers remained loyal even to a defeated commander. Though they settled in the president's house, they were still his servants.

In fact, these were simply former employees, filthy on their return from military service and with nowhere to live, who relied on the president's home and settled there. It was the crowded communal existence one saw everywhere.

Mother bore the consequences of the collapse of the munitions business. As many as ten former employees who had made their way to the Joroku house were lying around. “No rice, no potatoes—what are we supposed to do?” she complained.

Father apparently gathered ledgers, seals and certificates that had survived the flames, but none was any use. The streets overflowed with occupation troops. Was that when he thought of dance parties, inviting large numbers of Americans? Now it is impossible to gauge his true intention.

The Nights of the Dance Parties

Dance parties bring memories back to me. We often held them in the reception room of the Joroku house.

After the war, the American army poured in and spread throughout Japan. Russian soldiers who swept into Manchuria committed every kind of outrage; American GIs, by contrast, gave us plenty of chocolate, salty crackers, powdered milk and corn flour. There were canned goods and sugar cubes in abundance too. They had none of the desire to hurt Japanese people that Russian soldiers had, so whatever one accepted, one did not suffer afterwards or have work forced on one in exchange. It was unconditional love.

Looking back now, perhaps one could call it a policy of winning us over. Yet the free, easygoing daily life they gave us seemed too natural to be a scheme undertaken by a whole state. This continued from the beginning of autumn in Showa 20, building to its height with those Romantic Christmas parties. The presents were the best possible gifts for breaking out of a life of poverty. We were happier with sugar cubes than with chocolate.

I vividly remember when Father began holding frequent dance parties at the Joroku house around the year after the war ended. We children shook the outstretched hands of the lanky soldiers in uniforms and brimless caps who came smiling at our invitation. In the joy of receiving candy, all wariness flew away.

Even if someone told us these were the same men who had flown extremely low during the war and showered machine-gun bullets on us on the ridges between the rice fields, we could not believe it.

August 15. After hearing the emperor's rescript in the scorching heat amid the cicadas, my father had fiercely struck my mother when she said, “You men are fools, going into a fight you knew you'd lose.” Now, before my eyes, he stood in a suit and tie, smiling and shaking hands. When the reception room filled with occupation soldiers, I simply looked up at the adults drinking together, utterly bewildered.

Looking back, to make such a wild commotion in a time when there was hardly a decent thing to eat was not sane. Yet Father's decision—his complete reversal from fiercely running his factories at full capacity in concert with the army and navy to annihilate the “British and American devils,” to a mood of friendship—was probably motivated above all by a desire to avoid requisition.

Osaka was full of burned ruins. There was nowhere to sleep. Houses that survived were requisitioned. I think Father may have chosen a friendly approach, hoping if possible to avoid requisition, rather than offer futile resistance and be thrown out.

That is sly, isn't it? Even now, looking at his methods, I sometimes think so.

But at that time no one simply kept waiting for rations without turning to supplies diverted from the occupation forces. The town office had burned down; there were no trucks; no notices arrived. In such circumstances, employees and their families burned out of their homes came to us, as did every employee returning from military service in the south. When they arrived with blackened faces and bodies covered in grime, in the condition now called homeless, what was the first thing to do? Feed them something, put them in the bath, scrub them clean. There was no other way.

But from the following day there was nothing to eat.

When we told the occupation soldiers we were having a party, they gladly gave us things in abundance: whole hams, Camel cigarettes, Marlboros and more.

What we called salty rice crackers were crackers. It is pathetic, but perhaps the aim was to obtain diverted American army supplies to make up for the shortages.

I wonder whether I ought to hesitate even to write this now, but Father was probably prepared to become a black-market dealer if that was what it took to feed us and his employees. Of course the employees staying with us seem to have understood their president's state of mind and found him dependable.

“成生ちゃん, can you work the gramophone?”

“Yes, I can! I hope lots of occupation soldiers come again today.”

The young soldiers were called names like Brown and Hall. Even addressing them without honorifics seemed to make them feel closer to us.

One kept saying “Onion, onion!” and I wondered whether he meant an oni, a demon. But the son of the family at 浄教寺, who was standing nearby, looked it up in the Concise dictionary. “Ah, just as I thought. It means an onion.” When we gave him one, he spread out a newspaper, said “Dish, dish,” and put a peeled onion on a plate. Carefully trimming all the fat from slices of ham, he mixed them with it, put it straight into his mouth, and spat it out with a “Ha! Ha!”

Japanese onions and daikon were extremely pungent then. They tasted entirely different from the vegetables now sold in supermarkets. Even chopped into a salad, they were hardly the sort of thing one could eat raw.

Still, American soldiers came to our house constantly, showing Father photographs they had brought and so on. I was a boy with a close-cropped head, and they taught me fencing. They had not brought any such equipment; they played with me using the long, narrow square wooden strips I had bought for model-train rails, pretending they were foils. Even so, I felt I had become Robin Hood. My opponent was a blue-eyed young man, and I felt as though I too had become an American.

America in War and at the Dance Parties

What does it mean to lose a war?

As the dance parties at our house show, every day is filled with hunger and fear that threaten survival, desperate resistance and flattery. One's own country's culture is pushed aside. One could see this as the degradation of tradition. But does one eat and survive, or cling to Japanese pride and die?

Had we begun fighting the fully armed American forces landing from Sagami Bay at such a moment, Japanese culture would indeed have been torn to pieces. Not only Tokyo, but Kyoto and Nara too would have disappeared, completely evaporated.

Before the surrender rescript was broadcast, its draft was passed to the thinker 安岡正篤 for his opinion. He reportedly spoke sternly to the cabinet of the day: insert “義命ノ存スル所,” where righteous duty lies, and “万世ノ為二太平ヲ拓ク,” opening a way to peace for all ages; these two must on no account be lost.

The latter was adopted. For Japan—or rather, for the head of government 鈴木貫太郎, and 阿南惟幾, appointed army minister directly by the emperor—an expression that preserved pride, somewhere between an excuse and an attempt at appeasement, was absolutely necessary. Together with 安岡, they had to restrain the army reformists hot for action and escape a decisive battle on the home islands without a major rebellion.

That sense of equality remained strong in postwar Japan. As one way of refusing to fall into the condition of a subject people, were dance parties at which one danced on equal terms not an ideal strategy?

It is too grudging simply to regard the balls at the Rokumeikan and society life supported by peerages as imitations of the aristocratic tastes of advanced Western countries. Becoming friendly with American officers at postwar dance parties was a meaningful form of cultural exchange on equal terms, requiring no theoretical argument. It was enough to show that the Japanese were not a people of military power alone, but could also retain the feeling needed to engage honorably in such cultural exchange.

Young army officers directly under Imperial General Headquarters ceaselessly insisted on preserving the national polity and staking their lives on resistance to the end. The decision to bring the war to a close for the sake of all ages—that is, for those who would govern Japan's future—was therefore extremely reasonable.

After the war, despite complaints about après-guerre behavior and occupation policy, even dance parties every day and night had their value under the new Japan's democratic constitution. One lived, thought, laughed with the Americans, then went to the toilet and cried at the humiliation. Yet one did not lose pride as a people. Seen simply as part of the process by which Japan used this opportunity to rebuild its national strength, these things had a value of their own.

It was an unrepeatable era in the local history of Kawachi.

The woman writer 山崎豊子, who lived in Sakai, portrayed domineering, selfish men like my father in ぼんち and 二つの祖国. Film director 溝口健二 drew on 上田秋成's 雨月物語 to show the foolishness of medieval men frenzied by war, and the women protecting their homes were made to say how much sorrow they had suffered. In 二十四の瞳, the heroine becomes a war widow and weeps as both her husband and former pupils are sacrificed to war.

Yet at the Joroku dance parties one can see another face of postwar Japan: a Japan that, even while accepting LARA supplies and UNICEF's help, did not crawl before America.

成瀬己喜男 also adapted 林芙美子's masterpiece 浮雲 for the screen. With a typist who has sunk as far as becoming a panpan in the black market as its heroine, it portrays the lives of a man and woman returning from French Indochina after the war. 高峰秀子 and 森雅之 play the pair as they drift toward their end, the man seeming to toy with the woman's wholehearted devotion.

Those were the circumstances of the Showa twenties and thirties.

We who spent elementary and junior-high school in the Showa twenties, soon after the war, encountered films such as 雲ながるる果てに, 戦艦大和 and 二等兵物語, shown almost every week at Tomioka Theater, portraying the suffering of special-attack pilots and conscripted soldiers. At home, meanwhile, Mother would mutter to Father, “It's what you get for making such a fortune from the war,” and the endless complaints would begin.

My father, who had supplied the wires that moved the Zero fighter's rudder, was now reduced to selling belongings to eat. Mother disliked even transactions that felt like receiving charity for a scant amount of food. Taking out antiques to sell to the secondhand dealer who came almost daily, she would say, “We can't let the employees back from the war starve to death.”

Perhaps it was with those thoughts that she danced with occupation soldiers at the parties. Her vertically striped kimono resembled a cafe waitress's, and sometimes she looked like a woman plying her trade. To my childish eyes, the sight was bitter.

We lost the war.

I felt that deeply. I wound the gramophone spring and changed the needle. When the lively rhythm of a foxtrot began, Father put on white leather tap shoes and demonstrated the Charleston. The young GIs applauded loudly. But looking at his gleaming forehead, already quite bald although he was only about forty, I thought: we really did lose the war.

I glanced at my brother, and our eyes met. He did not smile back. He looked away.

Such moments passed one by one, and everything, together with the long Yoshida administration, vanished into the far reaches of Showa history.

Yet Our Home Was a House of Fire

Father planted sweet potatoes, peanuts and Chinese cabbage in the field behind the house, copying what he saw others do. But little grew properly. 丸田, the fishmonger in Joroku, was a great help.

Mother's complaints continued: “Your father was obsessed with a war they knew they'd lose. He collected special steel from all over the country. He even built a special imperial sitting room at the mine in Gifu. Honestly, everything you men do…” And then the tears came.

When Father got off at Kitanoda Station, he usually took peanuts from his pocket and gave them to my brother and me. But after he returned home and silently loosened his tie, his irritation was visible.

“Are you paying the people at the mining village? After using them for all they're worth…” Mother pressed the attack.

“That too is already… finished…” Father's expression hardened.

“Try being on the employed side. They have families to feed, and you say they needn't come any more. Do you think that settles it?” Mother said. “And the Musashi that sank… So many young sons died… How are you going to apologize?”

Another argument. She needn't say it, I thought.

“I served the military too. Musashi's main guns fired splendidly. They were nothing like the British-built warships the Japanese navy used at the Battle of the Sea of Japan. Not once did a gun barrel split.”

“But soldiers standing nearby were blown away by the blast and killed, weren't they? Poor boys.”

“I heard one was a student soldier from Sakai, so I went to offer condolences.”

“Do you think that satisfies his parents? In the end both Musashi and Yamato sank, didn't they? We even gave up the iron railings in the parks. A tiny country like this could never beat America. Yet you men, honestly… fools.”

Mother's unchanging complaints continued until around the Showa thirties. When returned employees were living with us, they came every day.

“Be quiet! The staff will hear!”

“I don't care. I'll say it as much as I like!”

Father, who had been keeping his voice low, finally exploded.

“Someone like you should go to the Soviet Union, or Siberia, or anywhere!”

A slap rang out.

Not again. Father, stop! We tried to intervene.

“Children, keep quiet!”

Clinging to his arms, we were shoved away and landed on our bottoms. We clung again, were shaken off, and went crying into the next room.

As Father continued striking Mother, we heard a member of the staff lodging with us say, “Boss, have pity on the mistress…”

“You don't know. The boss… They say he even made a geisha in Gion bear his child,” Mother was telling the head clerk.

“Mistress, we've known about that for a long time…”

“What? You knew? You see me every day, and why didn't you tell me? So it really was true?”

The head clerk nodded. Raising his face, he said, “The only person who didn't know… was you, mistress…”

“To tell a wife about a child born in Gion would go against a man's code,” he said.

“What sort of house is this? I've had enough…”

My brother spoke from beside me: “しげお, it means Father made a child like you in Gion too.”

The child from Gion was called 雪子ちゃん and was my age. Just once, she came to play at the Joroku house; we ran the gramophone and played innocently together. She was an extraordinarily adorable child, with very white skin. Near the end of her life, Mother said that Father's second woman in Gion had brought the girl under a promise that it would happen only once: the child was innocent, after all.

At the time, Mother would say through tears that, when she did as Father wanted and helped the former employees find jobs, rice was needed and train fares were needed. But everything had burned down, so there was no work. Feeding employees who said they had merely eaten their packed lunches in a park and come home left nothing for us to eat. Three meals became two. “It's you children who suffer. And your father…”

The story would shift to the extravagances of Father in his prosperous prewar days, and everyone grew weary of it.

Although she criticized him after the war, before and during it Mother, as his lawful wife, had faithfully observed the Osaka custom of sending summer and winter gifts to women who seemed to be his mistresses. Despite keeping such feelers out, she apparently had never imagined that he had reached as far as Kyoto's Gion and even fathered a child with the daughter of a geisha house.

“Even coming from Nara, you show your mettle as an Osaka mistress of the house. It's admirable,” the head clerk said. Mother replied, “Isn't it sad for the mistress who wept and said she could never compete with the word ‘wife’?” For that time, she even possessed the generous capacity expected of the woman managing a household.

But in the Gion affair alone, perhaps she felt betrayed even by the company people. “From today, I'm not making your lunches any more. What nonsense… I can't go back to Yamato now… I've no choice but to stay here…”

Even after the war ended and Hamano's munitions business was finished, this married relationship, like a Shochiku comedy, continued unchanged at the Joroku house.

Once, when Father and Mother were in fairly good spirits, we saw a Shochiku comedy at the Nakaza in Dotonbori, featuring 渋谷天外, whom Father knew well. Sure enough, it was a story of trouble with second and third women. “Well, wasn't it funny?” Father asked.

I, with my shaven head, answered immediately: “There was nothing funny about it. That happens at our house every day.”

During the interval Father had chatted with 森光子 and 森繁久彌, introduced me too, and seemed pleased with himself. But I did not care; I had hit him where it hurt. Perhaps that was because my mother's blood flows in me.

Dark Clouds Hung over That House

I was not the only one who saw the Joroku house as a house of fire. “Dark clouds hung over it” was something my brother quietly let slip when our Joroku days were already half a century in the past.

Such a complaint was unlike him. Father had sent my brother's own mother back to her family out of excessive consideration for the parent who had raised him. Yet my brother never voiced a word of complaint. From a young age, he was a remarkably mature person.

Family relationships like that cannot be repaired in a lifetime. For me, immersed in literature, there is no God or Buddha of religion to settle it; I have to resolve it myself. Perhaps my brother felt the same. He had read Hermann Hesse since junior high school.

This was before television broadcasting. Power cuts were frequent, and reading in the dark, by what the phrase calls “蛍の光窓の雪,” was normal.

Is there salvation in literature?

How could there be?

My brother recommended Hermann Hesse, but after entering junior high school I began reading Soseki in paperback. My junior-high years were filled entirely with Soseki, yet there was no way for the dark interior of my heart to brighten.

Naturally enough: Soseki too had been sent to foster homes and brought back as a child, and family ties and obligations run through his work as late as 明暗. However much I read, one work after another, my heart was not healed. I became each work's protagonist and distracted myself by feeding on bitter suffering. But we were not the only unfortunate children.

Will the History of Ordinary People Disappear?

If you arrive from Namba, please leave on the right-hand side in the direction of travel. Here is the Sogo Taxi car park where we lined up for school trips to Ise and shouted “One! Two! Three!” in military fashion… That is what I would like to say, but it is no longer there.

Not only the car park, but the station building that stood on the ground, the kiosk, the wooden ticket-gate doors, the level crossing, the stone steps up to the platform—every last thing is gone. The station was a gathering place for residents. It may be an exaggeration, but it even bore the aspect of a cultural inheritance.

Now nothing is left.

I often came here with my brother. It was in the Showa twenties, seventy years ago.

I cannot understand why I was born in Joroku, Noda Village—what necessity there was in it. As a child I had sensed the “heaven inside a jar” of Chinese writings. Children born in Manchuria must have felt that sort of loss still more intensely.

Wherever one is born and grows up—even if one is born in Kanda's bookshop district—without awareness, without realizing that one is inside a jar and knows nothing of the great ocean, that is as far as one goes. Those who boast of being Edo natives, lucky winners of a lottery, or who grow up in stylish Gion yet do no more than pursue its brocade, still only peer narrowly at the sky inside the jar.

Boasting of being a purebred Edo person, Naniwa person or Kawachi person is endearing in its way. Yet no one can choose the place or time of their birth. Everyone finds, on becoming aware of themselves, that they are, like the opening line of a kyogen play, “one who lives in this neighborhood.”

If that is enough for you, that is all your life amounts to.

For us, when we became aware of the world, it consisted of irrigation channels with loaches, rice fields and a great sky always sounding with air-raid sirens. The sky we looked up at from inside our jar hinted only at a bleak and violent future.

For that reason, after the war—or rather, in the first flourishing period, when politicians were already saying in Showa 30 that it was no longer “postwar”—I came to Tokyo to study at Keio. I saw that every one of them had failed to escape the sky inside their jar. I felt relief, but also disappointment, and realized: “If I come here with the easy attitude that I am going to be taught at an excellent university, I shall merely be practicing unfilial behavior by leaving my parents behind in Kawachi.”

This awareness did not change when I associated with people from the University of Tokyo. There was no one anywhere who could be called a sage of the present day. I could only wrestle with what people of the past had written.

So, in my first university year, I read Shakespeare one work after another and was disappointed. I read the Old and New Testaments and no longer knew where to find support. Dostoevsky offered a little, but D. H. Lawrence and Flaubert were unsatisfactory; 三島由紀夫 dug the trench of disappointment deeper still. 近松 gave me some relief, yet I was continually pursued by the demands of a painful life and felt as though I had reached a blind alley. I remember well returning home in despair, unable to bear it.

After the war, a charming little girl called Misora Hibari appeared singing precocious songs. The image of a lark rising did not come with the announcement printed here as “敵機来週！”—literally, “Enemy aircraft next week!”—and an ominous engine sound. Her name and the carefree girl's silk top hat opened an unlimited world of dreams. Even in Kawachi, Hibari, the girl from Yokohama, was a dream play; one could only feel relief that this was now everyday life.

Great formations of B-29s had roared across the entire sky. Carrier-based Grummans had machine-gunned people walking the rice-field ridges—da-da-da-da—then turned unconcernedly and flown away. When days like that returned night after night, one had only to jump into an earth-smelling air-raid shelter. Born and raised like the “ダブ貝” shellfish in the mud of the 西除川, we felt like catfish dragged out of the mud under the scorching sun on the day the bottom of the 大池 pond was dredged: whichever way we turned, there was no rescue.

Late at night in March, Showa 20. Joroku, Noda Village, Minamikawachi District, Osaka Prefecture. With the nightly air raids, I am directly connected to the smell of the shelter's earth.

“Air raid! Air raid!”

Mother came running, scooped me up as I fussed sleepily, and thundered off. The hole beneath the floor may originally have been a pit for storing potatoes. Slatted boards were laid in it, and the second half of my sleep was always life on those boards, breathing damp, earthy air.

I thought it again and again, so I will say it again and again: how were we different from the “ダブ貝” wriggling in the mud of the 西除川? We were the same.

Years later, I wove memories of this time into a short story, “河内１９４５.” Though it was not Proust, it was a struggle with lost time. That is, to evoke a sense of being there, one has to travel back through time and space. Yet neither the fields nor the settlements nor the station nor anything else retained its old appearance. There was no way but to use the magic of print and have readers recreate it in their imaginations. Drawing them in required passion and energy.

Chapter 3: Let Our Hometown Stand Up to History

A Hometown That Does Not Yield to History

Noda Village had grown as a settlement since the Middle Ages, and people's lives and work had continued there without interruption. I think the ancestors in the surrounding villages, who diligently worked their rice fields in an age when samurai strutted about, were admirable. They must have had to endure one thing after another. Without a firm hold on themselves, their sons would be swept up in the hunt for soldiers; their whole households would be caught in war. From my heart, I believe Kawachi's ancestors were patient people. Their descendants, our friends who lived here and whose families had farmed for generations, possessed a broad humanity that rose above the desire for power or fame. After reaching adulthood, I spent my days in the Tokyo metropolitan area crossing swords in print and scholarship—or, viewed another way, enduring tiresome days of battle. But everyone I met as I walked from Kitanoda Station was a friend with the human warmth of the Middle Ages, whose smile truly put me at ease.

I first took up my pen intending to tell the story of my family, who had lived in Jōroku. Perhaps Ki no Tsurayuki and Ariwara no Narihira influenced me—or rather, perhaps it was the occasion when my friends and I bowed before the memorial altar of our teacher Nishino of Tomioka Junior High School. Before I knew it, my pen had crossed the threshold of the Hamano household and spread to the activities of schools and teachers, and then begun to develop into an account of the region centered on Jōroku in Kawachi. This, too, I owe to Mr. Nishino, who taught us about Kyorai and Akiko.

In The Sun Smells of Grass (Taishō 15), the literary critic Susukida Kyūkin wrote, in the late Romantic period at the end of the Taishō era: “Soldiers will fight wars of armed force for us. The cultural competition that follows must be undertaken with our own hands.” He was right. Unless we resist the merciless changes of things by setting them down in print, the turbulent years of Kawachi culture will vanish without a trace.

Indeed, not long after the war ended, the sound of a koto could be heard from the home of 高田良子 in Shin-Jōroku. My mother came there for lessons, and I, a little boy with close-cropped hair, sat quietly beside her. At Higashi Elementary School, the music for the races on sports day played on and on.

１６のとき鳴り響いた　汽笛の湯気は今いずこ

As in this passage from Chūya Nakahara's “Ganzenai Uta,” when one turned in beside the Tomioka Theater in Shin-Jōroku, the elegant sound of a koto always drifted out. That was seventy years ago, yet it still returns to my heart.

The Kōya Line Connects Namba and Home

The green trains from Namba, made up of two or three cars, were the Nankai Kōya Line. They were famous for their sluggish pace. In the days when the Nankai Hawks won game after game, Namba Stadium paid no heed to Nakamozu Stadium standing empty. The source uses the wording 「中百舌鳥球場が空きあがる」 here.

After passing Tengachaya Station, the train ran alongside the main line to Wakayama for a while. It was usually slower than the Wakayama-bound train on the main line. I was a slow runner myself, and the sluggish Kōya Line frustrated me: just once, I wished, please overtake the main line! I rode with that hope, but it never once granted the fervent wish of us boys. The main-line express swept past. Our train slowed to an even more leisurely crawl and then lurched into a left turn. Parting company with the main line, it climbed a sharply curving slope to join the tracks coming from Shiomibashi.

This junction at Kishinosato no longer exists either. Soon we came to Tezukayama Station. After a little more travel through the town came Sumiyoshi-Higashi Station.

住之江の　岸による波　夜さへや
夢の通い路　人目よぐらむ

This is a poem about the visiting marriages of the aristocrats of that time; interpreted less decorously, it is a poem about the “yabai” that young women today repeat so often. One slips out to meet a lover, avoiding other people's eyes. It is literally yobai, a visit by night, which can also be read as “night” plus “bai.” Elegant affairs of love, here at Sumiyoshi-Higashi… Before that thought had time to settle, the train was on the iron bridge over the Yamato River. Looking down at the gently flowing water, I remembered a day when I came to play by the river with my parents. Why had my elder brother not been with us? Such things concern me now that I am grown. I was an elementary-school boy then, and it was the first time I rowed a small boat.

Haruo Satō writes in Akiko Mandala that Ōtori Shō—later Yosano Akiko—the young lady of the Surugaya yōkan household, also hurried across this bridge over the Yamato River amid complicated family circumstances. Until I reached home, the Kōya Line brought back Akiko's eventful life, as though she were a traveler crossing paths with my own life. And so we came to Sakai-Higashi Station.

I was a regular at the Sakai Tōhō, Shukuin Theater, and Denkikan cinemas. Yet the bitter memory that overlaps my Jōroku years is of a period in municipal housing: we reached it by leaving this station to the east and walking between the playing field and tennis courts of Mikunigaoka High School.

Leaving the Dark Valley for the Tall Tree

Looking back, I can say that those years were worthwhile as a trial of the spirit, rather than merely a burden. My father and brother were desperately trying to rebuild the company. I studied amid the powerful smell of chicken manure, constantly apologizing in my heart: I am sorry, I am sorry. Perhaps this life eventually impelled me to leave my hometown for Tokyo.

身を立て名を上げ、やよ上げてよ…。

It was a time when advancement in life, as sung in “Aogeba Tōtoshi,” was taken for granted.

When one studies history, the central concern is always how the government at the center moved. Culture, war, and various institutions swarm around that axis.

In Tokyo I would take my chance, relying on words to grapple with thought and ways of living. I began to resolve that this would be my lifelong work, something on which to stake my whole life, as I walked home along the path between Mikunigaoka High School's playing field and tennis courts.

Would all my friends studying at Mikunigaoka become members of the elite? They played tennis without a care. Watching myself watching them, in the manner of Motojirō Kajii, was a rather self-tormenting moment: a single caricature.

Diagonally across from the school's main gate stood a Christian church. As Christmas approached, how dazzling the merry voices of the elite seemed! I wanted to join them but lacked the courage. Americans were there too, and English flew back and forth. I was a lonely outsider. I was seventeen then.

Twenty years later, I was giving graduate lectures on Jewish American literature in the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Everyone listening was American. There were fourth-generation Jewish Americans and Japanese Americans too. I taught the literature of Norman Mailer. He too had been an American soldier. To these young people, all of whom spoke astonishingly fast, I talked in astonishingly fast English about The Naked and the Dead, based on his experiences, and about the philosophy of the Beat Generation.

During my time as a research fellow at the state university, I read poetry with American writers and conversed at parties with easy wit. Yet in America I carried the intense loneliness of the one Christmas gathering I had attended in the church diagonally across from Mikunigaoka High School. At our Jōroku home I had experienced parties almost every night, with many Americans invited, with après-guerre young people and panpan women present, just like the world of Shōhei Imamura's Pigs and Battleships. Then, as my father's business dwindled away, we ended up in that shabby temporary home near Mikunigaoka High School, and I felt emotionally shut out even from a Christmas party where intellectuals seemed to gather. But at the parties in Buffalo I could finally hold my head high: I am Japanese. Japan has not lost. It has merely opened the way to peace for all ages.

Following the old Chinese saying, I had left the dark valley and entered the tall tree. Even so, a deep sadness of its own never ceased.

Chapter 4: Inside the Jar, Unable to See the Sky

Never Weary of Learning

At some point, Confucius's admonition to “learn without weariness” had become a precept received into my heart. There was too much worry and hardship. Born into relationships of obligation, the child of a second wife, I had felt from childhood the alienation of having no one place hopes in my future. My body was weak as well. Throughout elementary school, a fierce heaviness troubled both my legs every day from morning into the afternoon. Sometimes it attacked my calves all night. I complained of that weariness to Mother, and almost every night Father and Mother massaged my calves until at last I could sleep. I hated showing my scrawny arms to my friends and wore long sleeves even in midsummer. Just sitting on a wooden chair at school sent that heaviness roaming through both legs. My tears came and would not stop. “Hamano is a coward, always blubbering,” they mocked. But since no one could see this weariness from the outside, my distress knew no end.

It was probably malnutrition. There was only a little barley rice and pickled radish. Everyone suffered hunger then, though farmers' children were fortunate. When Father put on dance parties with a show of bravado, food became available. When I ate canned salmon or gnawed at a whole ham received from the occupation forces, the heaviness vanished as if by magic. But I did not realize that poor nutrition was the cause. I was a frail boy, and the whole house had a prickly atmosphere of relationships bound by obligation. In my child's heart I often wondered whether living really had to be so painful.

Father and my elder brother worked themselves black every day to give me a university education. Even when I averaged ninety on mock examinations, they did not praise me. “The parts we supply to Hitachi,” Father said, “have tolerances of 0.01 to 0.03 millimeters. In the real world, ninety points is a failure.” I saw his point: I was too soft. I suppressed my sense of inferiority and kept studying. Around then my body gradually grew stronger, the heaviness receded, and I reached the point where Father acknowledged my efforts. Still, I was grateful for the sweat and labor of my brother and father. We overcame those painful days, learning from their bitterness without forgetting it. The Hamano household shed its prickliness, and we were able to leave the dilapidated house in Sakai and return to Tomioka. This time we built a new house in Ōmino's Fourth District. I gained the admission to Keio Gijuku that I had long wanted. At eighteen, my youth seemed to stand at the entrance to quite a high society—but after moving to Tokyo I learned how foolish such conceit was. There were tens of thousands of people who had entered Keio or the University of Tokyo. An elite formed by that level of schooling was no different from ordinary people. How many Aristotles or Platos were among them? Not one. Zero. Unless I saw that, I told myself, I would be nothing but an arrogant fool.

During our Ōmino years, when we hosted an exchange student from Stanford University, the bus-stop area in front of Sakai-Higashi Station was still spacious. It was while standing there with this student that my view of the world turned decisively toward America. Shioyu, burned out in the air raids and flooded with water. What had happened to Surugaya around Shukuin? Whenever I encounter Akiko's poetry, I wonder. I remember, too, myself in my forties lecturing that Japanese Romanticism had been influenced by nineteenth-century American Romanticism.

East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, starring the young actor James Dean, are well-made stories even when seen today. I watched them many times at the Denkikan cinema alongside the Kōya Line. They reflected the stumblings of my own youth. The former concerns human feeling in California during the First World War and biblical morality, but I responded above all to James Dean's painful portrayal of a sulky young man whose feelings could not reach his father. Elia Kazan also worked into the film the state of people's minds in wartime, early motorization, and the refrigeration industry. Later, when Aoyama Gakuin's English Department asked me to lecture on film and literature, I discussed this work. It faithfully portrays the turmoil within the multiethnic United States during the First World War, without the slightest waste. Wanting to know more about that America, I narrowed my research to it.

“Aspiration always seeks great happiness; the heart always seeks small happiness.” That maxim, too, is wonderfully apt. In that sense I met Mr. Cheever with American literature as my aspiration. Yet when he himself told me how he had immersed himself in films as a boy, I felt a mild surprise and such relief that it seemed I had touched the private life of a deeply human writer. For me, the cinemas at Sakai-Higashi were an outlet for the helpless misery at home caused by Father's business misfortunes. Perhaps Mr. Cheever had gone to the movies with similar feelings. A cinema was a place of peace that filled the gap between oneself and one's family circumstances. Films I saw then, such as Yūzō Yamamoto's Nami and Floating Clouds, adapted from Fumiko Hayashi by 成瀬己喜男, helped me understand relationships between fathers and children, a confused society, and a wandering life. At fifteen or sixteen, I felt I had glimpsed my own later life.

As the Kōya Line moves slowly toward Kitanoda, I sink halfway into memories and reach Hatsushiba Station. Hatsushiba Commercial School was here; my brother went from its junior-high division to Sakai Commercial School. He was clever and could easily have entered any university, yet he spent his life helping Father with his work while an ordinary fellow like me was allowed to go to university. I am sorry, Brother… Arriving at Hatsushiba brings him back again. He bought meat sold here at one hundred yen per hundred monme, and we made sukiyaki in the dark kitchen of our Jōroku house. Where did that pot go? What happened to the black four-bladed electric fan we used then? It feels as though the lost things took the memories away with them.

After Hagiwara-Tenjin Station, the train makes a broad right-hand curve and runs through rice fields. When the tracks straighten, there is Kitanoda Station. No—before it, on the right, one sees the wooden buildings of Noda Elementary School, now Tomioka-Higashi Elementary School. Today one is scolded for entering through a gap in the fence; in the days of Noda Elementary, the hedge was full of holes and one could come and go freely. During the war, however, reservists practiced crawling advances there, and around the time of the Korean War we too drilled, marching in formation. Try to trace those footprints at the school today and there is nothing at all. My short stories “Habataki no Shukuzu” and “Tensei no Tsubo” are set around here.

Concrete buildings may be good against fire, but they are not quite suitable for mischievous children to thump and clatter around in. One cannot play at rolling about on a rigid wooden floor. It has to be wood with some spring in it.

散る桜　のこる桜も散る桜

In Shōwa 20, both the men in the special-attack aircraft that took off from Chiran and the men who saw them off felt alike that their parting from this world resembled falling cherry blossoms. Are any of those old cherry trees still at Higashi Elementary now? And the morning glories we planted—what of them?

During and after the war, the Hyakunin Isshu was popular. Phrases such as 「降りゆくものは　わが身なりけり」 and 「ふるさと寒く　衣うつなり」 rang out while great formations of B-29s passed overhead. Such an extraordinary inner landscape could scarcely ever be reproduced. Yet even in a life balanced between living and dying, we savored poems from the Man'yōshū and Kokin Wakashū. It was an experience of which we could be proud as Japanese.

Now a passenger rather than a resident, I turn my gaze from my old school back toward the front and stand up to leave the train at Kitanoda.

Baseball, My Brother, and 幸ちゃん

I should describe the scene as I step onto the station platform. But unless I first speak unprompted of how we lived seventy years ago, the emotions of the station front will not return. Partings and reunions: I learned that expression from literature in junior high school, and Kitanoda Station had them too. Shimokita Photo Studio caught the scene in a splendid photograph of Kitanoda Station at night in the snow. I too keep its inner landscape intact—until this body decays, anyway. (Laughter.)

Let me first speak of my family in our Jōroku days, all of them gone now. They had nothing whatever to do with glory… Is it all right to use my own particular scale of values? Let me bring into the sunlight the Hamano family who lived just north of Tomioka-Higashi Elementary School in Jōroku. Everyone but me has gone to the other world. Yet among the figures in ragged khaki clothes soon after the war, Father, Mother, and my brother left me many stories. By telling them without concealment, I shall widen the account to Kawachi.

Looking back, my brother was lonely. He loved baseball and boasted that he was the Tomioka Hawks' fine first baseman. Perhaps he hated having to face his stepmother morning and evening. He played baseball in the schoolyard at Noda Elementary—now Tomioka-Higashi—until Father came home in the evening. As dusk approached, he would bring out his bicycle: “成生, let's go and meet Dad…” He was six years older than me, born in Shōwa 10. I rode on the luggage carrier of the bicycle he pedaled along the bumpy road past Higashi Elementary, Noda Factory, the Tenrikyo establishment, and Nishioka's rice shop, as far as Seno's household-goods shop. Then we turned left and went past the post office along the cherry trees toward the station.

Mr. Nishioka always milled the rice properly and delivered it in cloth bags. He also served as Higashi Elementary's PTA chairman. His son 幸雄 and I were good friends. He had a quiet nature but, unlike me, about three times the strength in his arms. Whenever we were close to losing at softball, 幸ちゃん would come out and smash a home run. Holding the bat near its end, he scooped up the most difficult pitch, low and inside, and sent it flying. What a reassuring sight he was! How much his father must have hoped for him. But when he was in high school, he died in a traffic accident while riding a motorcycle on family business. I must write this: thank you, 幸ちゃん. You treated me with quiet passion; I too must learn your kindness.

The rice shop still exists today. But what of the kindness 幸ちゃん showed me? Let me leave a record here of you, who have lived so long in my heart.

My brother's bicycle passed that rice shop again and again, carrying me on its rack. I too passed it. Turning time backward along the road I walked with my parents, as we approach the station we become children just past ten…

What a Scene Inside Kitanoda Station

I, a frail little boy, clung to my junior-high-school brother's dependable body as he pedaled vigorously—its heartbeat, its breathing, his hips moving from side to side. It was like branches of cherry blossoms in full bloom swaying in the wind. Even when we reached the station, Father was slow to appear. Would he be on the next train? Or the next one? We let train after train go by. That was the usual pattern.

At the end of the war my brother was ten. He waited for Father to step off the train at a station crowded with people out to buy rice and sweet potatoes. I did not realize then how lonely he was, but now I understand well. I, the younger brother, was fortunate to sleep beside Mother. How lonely my brother must have felt. Even in my child's heart, I understood that the relationships in our family were not running smoothly, and every day I sensed his loneliness, so close to irritation.

It was shortly after the war. The scenes at Kitanoda Station in those confused postwar days looked just like news photographs. Intense events unfolded almost daily.

Policemen constantly shouted at the porters to empty the bamboo baskets on their backs, searching for black-market rice.

“It isn't black-market rice.”
“Then what is it?”
“Horse manure.”
“Don't talk nonsense! It's rice, isn't it?”
“It's horse manure!”
“Then open it up!”

The man lowered his load before their eyes. “I'll really dump it out, you know…”
“Go ahead. Let's see…”
R-r-r-rumble… It was genuine horse manure!

Real horse manure scattered across the station. What a stink! What a stink! Well done, old fellow! Clap, clap! The people around even broke into applause. Meanwhile, the men and women carrying goods were escaping with their loads still on their backs—off they went, off they went… Everyone roared with laughter. Even the policeman, saying something like “He got me,” had begun to laugh.

Shoeshine boys and wounded veterans begging. Pickpocketing and robbery everywhere. Amid all this, the disorder outside Kitanoda Station was no exception. Under occupation-force instructions, passengers were also doused over the head with DDT powder without a chance to object. Women with long hair were full of lice, their bodies covered with bedbugs. The men, of course, were still in military uniforms, full of fleas and lice too.

DDT was advertised as “harmless to humans and animals.” Harmless indeed! Later, after this toxin was sprayed on pasture, it passed through dairy cows into milk, which Americans consumed, suffering harm to their health. DDT was a leading example of the poisons whose fearful effects Rachel Carson revealed to the world in Silent Spring, and we too had been repeatedly covered in it from head to foot. It was the Jewish American writer Bernard Malamud who said that Jews were exposed to the snow of history. We Japanese militarist boys and girls of the loyalist corps likewise had this white powder poured over us, as though it symbolized that very snow of history.

Father Returns

Kan Kikuchi wrote of a father who, after many years away, casually returned home: a story of brothers suffering through conflict with a dissolute, rootless father. Men—especially a man like my father, who went through life as a lone wolf—seem to me to carry limitless elements of the déraciné within them. Kikuchi's protagonist abandoned his family to wander. A man may return home out of responsibility because he has a family, while really not wanting to return at all… Imagining that state of mind, I later wrote the novella Father's Lodging. When Father died at eighty, I alone attended him at the end. For roughly the preceding week I had returned home and helped him eat and cared for his bodily needs. Thinking deeply about his life, I recalled his prosperity in military supplies from my childhood onward, his lavish revels with Nobusuke Kishi when Kishi was commerce minister, the years when everything went as he wished… The stream of consciousness rushed down like falling water.

“Tell me about the other woman, apart from Mother.” While tending to his bodily needs, I wiped around his withered penis with a wet tissue. My tears fell onto the lifeless skin of his emaciated body.

“Your mother, you see, is just as you know…”
“I don't want to hear that. Tell me about the other woman you kept…” I said.

Father's bearded face shifted into a grin, but he said nothing to me.

Father's Lodging, first published and then serialized in the monthly Chishiki, tells of a married man meeting the woman he loves at the secret inn he learned of from his father on his deathbed. It became much talked about, and the Izu inn grew busy. Perhaps because the sense of being there was so convincing, whenever I visited the editorial office everyone pressed me to say whether it was true.

Every son has seen only his father's retreating figure. Right up to his death—indeed, even after he has died—we do not know our father's real self. I discussed this with Kuniko Mukōda too. We who went to meet Father at Kitanoda Station likewise had no way of knowing his true nature. We simply loved him, loved him, and waited for him to come through the ticket gate.

“Ah, there's Dad!” Today I spotted him first. Father appeared at the station gate in a soft felt hat and suit. The policeman let him pass freely. I do not think it was because he recognized Father; he simply stepped aside because here was a man wearing a suit and tie in such times. We flew to him and threw our arms around him. My brother and I both loved Father dearly. The three of us walked along the bank of 尻田池 in the evening sun.

“The cherry blossoms are out in full. Aren't they beautiful?”

That pond, 尻田池, no longer exists. Where did they drain the muddy water in which we caught little fish? It has all been filled in, and a supermarket stands there. At the corner by the post office—no, the post office's stylish Western building has also been torn down, so I should say we turned the corner by Seno's household-goods shop. Just after the turn, on the left stood a row of four dwellings that we called the Terada house. Next door lived the writer Sakunosuke Oda. My brother, Father, and I passed the pond and Oda's house, went past Nishioka's rice shop, Konishi Clinic, and Higashi Elementary, then turned left onto the path beside the stream and reached our Jōroku home.

It was a journey without incident, in which nothing happened. Yet though we did not speak of it, we thought that a bond of fate let us walk together like this. If my brother's birth mother had not been driven out by her mother-in-law, my mother would not have come to the Hamano household. Yes—if Mother, bullied by her mother-in-law, had returned to her own family and not noticed in the mirror after a bath that her nipples had darkened, I would have been born in Nara, a fatherless child. I would not have gone with my brother every day to meet Father… My brother must have thought: if Mother had not been sent back to her family, 成生 would not exist, and I would not have had to live through these difficult days with that mother.

Such lives continued as we walked straight from Kitanoda Station to Seno's hardware shop, and we kept thinking even after turning right. Meanwhile, Father took peanuts from his overcoat pocket and gave equal shares to both brothers. At the sweet shop next to the post office, he bought milk caramels—the source prints 「三論がミルクキャラメル」—and divided these equally too. We walked from the front of Nishioka's rice shop along the wall of Konishi Clinic and past Noda Factory. Nothing remarkable happened; life itself was, in a sense, absent. Yet when I think that those thoughts remain intact along this route, a tender longing wells up.

Chapter 5: The American Mind

The Postwar Years, in Jōroku and in New York

I cannot help feeling that the dance parties at our Jōroku home were a miniature of history at the end of the war. The occupation-force men came in couples to dance. Sometimes they came with Japanese women with complicated circumstances. The story may seem to jump, but this was exactly like a scene I later turned into a short story from my memories of an American writer. It looks like a chain of strange events woven through my life. They are connected, simply leaping across time and space.

Years later, when I had begun publishing various stories in literary magazines and was teaching at universities—at that time Hitotsubashi and Waseda—the monthly literary magazine Umi, published by Chūōkōron-sha, asked me to hold a conversation with John Cheever. He lived in the suburban town of Ossining, north of New York City, about twenty minutes north of Manhattan Island by train. When I arrived at the station, he came to meet me by car.

As soon as I got in, I said, “This is a typical suburb, isn't it?”
“Rather, it is the country,” Mr. Cheever replied. “It is a residential district of the great city now, but it was originally an area where Dutch people lived. My house dates from that time too.”
“I see. New York was New Amsterdam then,” I said.

New York had originally been Dutch territory and had been named directly after their capital, Amsterdam. The British bought it and made it the new city of York. That much was only textbook knowledge of American history, which I taught at university. But the conversation with Mr. Cheever that followed was unforgettable and richly rewarding.

The home to which he took me was a single-story house, not one distinguished by conspicuous old farmhouse pillars. He showed me into the living room and pointed to a calligraphic board on the wall. It was by Yasunari Kawabata! Although it had never really come to the surface in Japanese literary circles, Cheever's writing about middle-class life was highly acclaimed in The New Yorker, and its portrayal of the lives of suburbia had a poignantly affecting pathos. One story became a film. Burt Lancaster, famous for his macho presence, played an aging suburban man. He discarded his customary image of fists and force and fitted perfectly into the story of a life filled with failures: even in a suburban house with a swimming pool, the spread of rumors alone could cost a man his family and his home.

Mr. Cheever suggested that we drink in the garden. Out on the lawn, a bottle of Daruma—Suntory Old—stood on the garden table. As we poured drinks for each other and spoke of boyhood cinemas and suburban parties, I heard a story of a situation identical to the parties in Jōroku to which we had invited so many occupation troops.

During the great war, when the protagonist liberated Poland from the Nazis, a woman who had submitted to their demands under Nazi rule was denounced after liberation. Just as Chinese troops publicly punished such women as hanjian, traitors, she was shaved bald, stripped naked, and thrown onto the street as an example to everyone. And then, at an American suburban party, there she was—a maid without a trace of makeup, silently doing her work. He encountered her before his very eyes: that was the story.

Whether in the European war, the Sino-Japanese War, or the Pacific War, women leading ordinary lives became caught in war and sold their bodies to survive. Its immediate form was the woman becoming a panpan for the occupation forces; its eventual outcome was the pitiful woman's later life in Cheever's story. I once discussed this work in an English-literature seminar at Japan Women's University. It was also a living likeness of the parties at our Jōroku home.

Looking back now, some of the women who came with the American officers Father invited, danced, and went home were such unfortunate women. Mother welcomed them without once showing displeasure. Some came to visit even when there was no party. There were days like that too.

During the parties, I, an elementary-school boy, was in charge of the gramophone. Ms. 猪子, who returned from Burma—present-day Myanmar—and later became an English teacher at Tomioka High School, was there, as was the son of Jōkyōji Temple, returned from military service. As I shall write again later, I remember those dance-party scenes as though they were yesterday. The source prints 「三ヤンマー」 for Myanmar.

Ōmiyu and Noda's Grandmother

Walking north toward Namba for about five minutes along the road one street west of the railway, one came to a bathhouse called Ōmiyu. It was a two- or three-minute walk from the station. Try asking, “There used to be a shop selling roasted sweet potatoes beside that bathhouse…” Perhaps no one remembers anymore. But we close-cropped boys born before the war knew the taste of that shop's potatoes well.

An elderly woman in dark glasses and a cooking smock chose a delicious-looking potato for us. She lived alone with her grandson. He was a champion fighter whom everyone feared. Once, I wrestled this strong boy in the sandpit at Higashi Elementary. The teacher called out for someone to oppose him, but everyone shrank back in fear. Then, because I was class representative, the teacher said, “Hamano! You do it!”

Here was the lanky, timid author. Noda could simply have shoved a fellow like me over, but instead he took a proper four-handed grip and slowly executed an overarm throw. It was splendid. Even in defeat, I felt no bitterness. I was glad that he had understood my feelings and treated me carefully.

I was neither strong at sumo nor a baseball boy like my brother. My stomach and bowels were constantly out of order, and I myself thought I might be bound for the other world around the age of twenty. That match between Noda and me was a sudden whirlwind. From then on we understood each other.

I began looking forward to buying roasted sweet potatoes from Noda's shop after the bath. He would choose one that looked exceptionally good. Father stood beside me, and Noda, a little tense, said nothing. But his feelings reached me. “Thanks…” Feeling almost as though I were doing something wrong, I spoke softly, as if apologizing. Noda gave a faint shake of his head. Why were people afraid of such a good boy? We must cherish him. I shouted it again and again in my heart.

俊ちゃん's Theory of the Rising and Falling Mosquito Larva

When Ōmiyu opened at three in the afternoon, a man would come straight in and recite naniwabushi:

海道一の親分は　三河音頭に　打ち太鼓　ちょいと太田の仁吉どん　後ろ姿の　粋なこと…嫁と呼ばれてまだ三月　惚れてくれるな　名がすたる　厭な渡世の　一本刀　男度胸の…

Hearing it every day, one learned it by heart. 中村俊ちゃん came in too.

He was a very bright boy, and the most earnest in our class as well. He could scarcely be put in the same category as someone with my scattered interests, yet somehow we got along and remain close today. He sometimes said biting things, which I liked about him. Once he said, “Life is just a mosquito larva bobbing up and down. Especially for businessmen. Your dad too is a mosquito larva. Up and down.”

Normally one would be angry to hear one's own father called a mosquito larva. Yet I was oddly impressed.
“You're right, 俊ちゃん. That's a good way of putting it.”
I felt sorry toward Father, but since I had been thoroughly tossed about by his ups and downs after he restarted the company around the Korean War, I admired 俊ちゃん's remark.

History Reappears in Strikingly Similar Forms

History repeats itself. The investor George Soros compared Japan's bubble era with America's Great Depression in the 1930s, overlaying graphs of stock-price fluctuations to predict when and under what conditions a crash would occur. Just before it, he sold everything, avoided enormous losses, and emerged the sole winner without losing assets worth trillions of yen. I used stories of this kind to enliven university lectures. By chance, when Hitotsubashi University asked me to teach, I bought a book about successful online businesses. A young man came to ask about it, saying it was interesting and that he wanted to do that sort of work. I recommended study at Harvard University. He went, learned thoroughly, and returned. That student was Mikitani.

I had the same information but no inclination to act on it. Perhaps in the formative years of childhood I had developed the habit of looking askance at the great men of such success stories. After all, I was not suited to business. In junior high school I often went on literary walks in Kyoto and Nara with Father, who was a businessman. Poor man: he ought to have become a historian or a literary man like Mokichi, but the times and circumstances were wrong. Before he knew it, was he in the munitions industry? The Kwantung Army rose from the South Manchuria Railway guard force to reach across all Manchuria and even into the Sino-Japanese War… I think Father followed a road to collapse like that overreaching Issēkai. Watching his back, I therefore did not choose the same road. This too was something I felt deeply in my hometown.

But as situations begin to resemble one another, one can predict what catastrophe comes next: just as with fluctuations in stock prices, one can foresee the moment of disgrace through an affair. Ordinary people who cannot read these signs—finance officials and prefectural governors among them—are certain to sink, and scandals deal wounds like the Lehman shock. To my mind, I had already learned at home, under my parents, the courses of the many reversals now occurring at the nation's center in the twenty-first century. It feels as though they taught me precisely those twists and turns of life—though it is unfair to them to call it their delusion.

War too returns without learning its lesson. Why do I now, as a writer sounding the alarm, issue warning after warning in newspapers? Because the situation closely resembles the chain of causes before the war, spreading from the Manchurian Incident to the Shanghai Incident, then Xuzhou, Nanjing, the three towns of Wuhan, the bombing raids across the water to Chongqing, and Pearl Harbor. When I compare the course from around the time of our birth to the great air raids with everyday life in our hometown, I can foresee danger. That is why I came to write warning articles for newspapers almost every day.

People today know far too little about war. The whole world is filled with such generations. That is why it is dangerous and cannot be prevented. Try asking the American military authorities whether they know the battleship Yamato. Or ask about the aircraft carriers Lexington and Yorktown. They will hardly know them. Self-Defense Force officers are probably the same. About all they know is Yamato. It is those things called summit meetings that drive such unstudied politicians and military figures back toward war. I cannot keep silent.

My Lectures in American Studies Also Begin with Hometown Experience

Japan–United States relations seem to have changed and changed again recently. We must see a regression since the MacArthur era not only in appearances but in the level of understanding too. I suspect few of you have seriously read the Security Treaty. Nowhere does it say that a dependable elder brother will shelter a weak younger brother, charge fearlessly through flying stones, and come to Japan's rescue. Japanese people who assume America is such a reliable elder brother will first lament their ignorance when they are covered in blood and wandering along the line between life and death.

Those who think “Surely not!” should read it. You will understand how little reliance can be placed on the Japan–United States Security Treaty. It therefore needs major revision accordingly—but will America agree? In that case, I would advise you at least to consider how you will defend your hometown and your own families if air raids begin.

The previous time, when the Korean War broke out in Shōwa 25, North Korean forces scattered the American garrison and took control of the whole Korean Peninsula. “Surely not,” you say? It is true. Only Busan at the southern tip remained. If they conquered that, all the peninsula would have come under North Korean control. Then Japan alone would be next to invade. All Japan ran about as if a hornets' nest had been stirred. Elementary and junior high schools suddenly became militarized. Every day we practiced marching in formation in the schoolyard. The “Warship March” played on a gramophone, and we hastily made new recruits, only ten years old, became imitation soldiers steeped in the spiritual doctrine of the old Imperial Army and Navy.

Only when one's backside catches fire does one understand. Human beings are about that much. The process of deliberately bringing about progress is as slow as Darwinian evolution. In nineteenth-century America, the entire economic world, amid industrialization, brought forth one form of human-directed progress after another. Under the paradoxical idea that an eight-hour working day and a weekly day off would enrich business, labor and the president joined together to advance economic activity and in effect overtook the European economy.

An Amoeba Life: This World Is Hard to Live In

Human beings do evolve rapidly after all; the essential thing is awareness. Correct! Exactly. In the Meiji period, Natsume Sōseki learned from English literature how people degenerate into selfishness. Perhaps thinking that human beings were thoroughly troublesome animals, he wrote that if one relies on intellect one makes sharp corners; if one poles along on feeling one is swept away; if one argues logically one feels cramped—in any case, this world is hard to live in.

But my view differs a little. Shakespeare is a master at depicting deception, betrayal, suspicion, coaxing, and outwitting. I would never want to drink with such people. Some human beings are indeed like that. Yet I object: that is not all.

Follow the process from amoeba to the birth of humankind over five hundred million years, and one sees the flames of war spanning time and space. Now a woman's body makes that in a mere ten months. Mass production of inferior goods! (Laughter.) A man's sperm resembles in shape an amoeba, a marine creature of five hundred million years ago. After fertilization, at one stage the fetus becomes a seahorse. It floats and splashes in amniotic fluid with the same pH as the sea. That stage too passes in an instant, and it becomes a soft-bodied creature with an oversized head like an octopus. A skeleton emerges, it begins to swim like a crocodile, and when it starts kicking the mother's inner wall, Papa and Mama—the male and female of the previous generation—are delighted. Only a few months until this aquatic creature leaps onto land! They take maternity leave and receive early congratulations from the males and females of two generations before. After ten months, pop! It transforms from a water creature into a land creature, and on the maternity-hospital bed comes 「こんにちわ、あかちゃん、わたしがママよ」.

The evolution of human consciousness begins after that, and this takes an extraordinary amount of time. For a while it is a caterpillar; then it crawls and becomes a chameleon, and suddenly it stands upright: Homo sapiens. Human beings are creations of a God who loves mischief and play. You and I were made one after another as diversions for the Creator's hands. I had lived with this sort of resignation since my days in my hometown.

死ぬときゃ一緒に死のうじゃねえか

The contents of Genesis in the Old Testament are copied directly from the Torah, the Jewish scripture. The Torah was written six thousand years ago, about forty-five hundred years earlier than the Kojiki. Already then it lamented the delusions of human beings after birth. Many Greek tragedies written before the Common Era survive today as cultural heritage. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides teem with ugly wars waged for power and with incestuous love, such as killing one's father out of excessive love for one's mother. These are the same subjects Shakespeare took up sixteen hundred years later, no different from the dramas of antagonism and separation unfolding in every present-day nation.

Living creatures inevitably pass from one generation to the next. Once the reproductive years are over, however hard one struggles, the world of death unfailingly sends its taxi to collect one. People join their hands before the hearse, fashioned like an elegant hired car: an equally solemn sight in East and West. Yet the furious quarrels over inheritance that follow seem to prove how little humankind has progressed.

The only transcendent being is God, Creator of all things. God alone remains unchanged, whatever Nietzsche says or Hemingway declares in the face of war. Created human beings, rich and poor alike, are sent without discrimination into the world of death.

At Ōmiyu in Kitanoda, exposing my skeletal forty-eight-kilogram body, afflicted with stomach and intestinal illness, to the mirror, I thought only of when I would die and what I could do before then. My hometown was the starting point of that question. On the bathhouse radio, 廣澤虎蔵's naniwabushi recited 「生まれたときは別々でも、死ぬときゃ、一緒に死のうじゃねえか」 and 「馬鹿は死ななきゃ治らねえ…」. The God of creation has no such human feeling.

I was a close-cropped first-year junior-high boy, all ribs and shoulder bones jutting out on either side. Life was Mount Kōjin. Should I too follow Kira no Nikichi, fling a divorce letter at the wife I loved, tie back my sleeves, take a long sword in hand, and head for Mount Kōjin? Or should I choose a life of being wounded every day at the company and staggering home? Father, Mother—I had done nothing but behave unfilially and had hardly repaid them… Our Japanese teacher at Tomioka Junior High taught us this poem, which he introduced as a Man'yō poem:

世の中に　さらぬ別れも　なくもがな
千代もと祈る　ひとの子のため

However dearly one loves a parent, death brings separation. Narihira clings and weeps, begging the parent to live a thousand, ten thousand years, but God kicks him aside and carries his beloved protector high into heaven. “No, I don't want that. God, how heartless you are!” Narihira was throwing such a tantrum. I certainly thought about it then. Without resisting the law of rebirth, might my bones be sent to the grave in Takamatsu on the day before I borrowed someone's womb somewhere in Kawachi and was born again as a baby? Thinking so, I made my way to visit the graves.

Mr. Nishino, the literary man of stern integrity whom I encountered at Tomioka Junior High, completed a magnificent calligraphy of the Heart Sutra for me. With great reverence, I keep it now in my modest home in Hayama. It is our family treasure.

Among Narihira's tanka is this one too:

つひに行く　道とはかねて聞きしかど
きのふけふとは　思はざりしを

Death comes to every household. None of the mothers who came to classroom observation days when we were in elementary or junior high school is alive today. That is why we must slip through time and recreate those spaces.

Mr. Nishino of Tomioka Junior High Was Our Japanese Teacher…

We knew nothing of the hardships Mr. Nishino had endured as a boy during the war. We simply feared a strict teacher concerned only with discipline, and so we rebelled and made flippant remarks.

Years later he said to me, “In those days, all the pupils were struggling desperately too. Yoshioka was a good boy. What do you think, Hamano?” Those were his first words when he came to meet me by car.

Yoshioka was a small boy, unfortunate in both his times and his family. Perhaps it would be more proper to call him Y., but that would be sadder still. He was one of us. Our meeting in this world, too, was a bond carried from another life. Even after leaving Tomioka Junior High, Mr. Nishino kept Yoshioka, who had been so unfortunate in this world, in his heart. I am grateful to have studied under such a teacher.

Then he said, “While you were at school, I was afraid to go into your classroom.” What! I was astonished.

Later, after Mr. Nishino had died, my friends and I went to offer incense at his home in Ochikata, Tondabayashi. His wife told us that he had beautifully written out the Heart Sutra and had it mounted as a hanging scroll. Having received it, I wonder intensely whether I deserve it. Looking at the movement of the characters, I see his meticulous nature in the writing. To a teacher who brought his life to such a fine conclusion, I apparently said and did a great many insolent things while he was alive. At seventy, I must confess, feeling as though I were being scolded: you know what you did.

When it is put to me, yes, I was a bad boy. Yet in an age when a slap readily flew at a child who misbehaved, Mr. Nishino never once brought that thick palm against my cheek.

His wife said that when he was still in junior high school, during the last phase of the war, boys and girls had no chance to study but were driven into factories as mobilized students. Working a difficult lathe exhausted him every day. When he occasionally came home, he was so wasted that his parents looked at his face and asked, “Who are you?”

Knowing nothing of the severity of his life, I, a delinquent boy, was troubling him in class. Tears came when I imagined him walking along Tomioka Junior High's tar-smelling corridor, thinking, “Will Hamano ask another strange question today?”

What had I said? I must confess that too, or I would be doing him an injustice. Was it during midterm examinations? When I went to Tomioka Theater to see a film we had been told not to see, I troubled the teachers then as well. That too I must confess. A hometown is also a landscape of the spirit. What ought to be a rich, fertile plain seems twisted by inner distortions.

New York and Tomioka Theater Are the Same, Aren't They?

It was the golden age of cinema. From around Shōwa 25 through the middle of the Shōwa thirties, it was the most enjoyable of spaces. Cat-ghost films with Takako Irie and Bandō Kōtarō; Arakan and little Hibari in Kurama Tengu; mother stories with Aiko Mimasu that made one cry three times. I saw Ayako Wakao's Jūdai no Seiten here too.

It was the afternoon of a midterm examination. I had nothing to do, so I went. Was it one film in a triple bill? I was sitting close to the screen when I heard familiar voices behind me. Many teachers had come too. I caught one teacher's eye and ducked my head. Somehow I sensed I might be scolded for going to the movies during examinations, and thought I had hidden, but I was seized by the scruff of the neck. It was Mr. Nishino.

“What are you doing when everyone ought to be studying?” he scolded.
“But…” I said. “You teachers are here too…”
“Hamano, you mustn't do that… that sort of delinquent thing.” Another teacher spoke from beside him.
“Then who is allowed to?”

This film gave rise to the genre called seiten films, a phenomenon in which the sexual liberation that began with postwar striptease descended to younger generations. But I had no way of knowing any of that. I had come solely because of the poster: the schoolgirl protagonist, in her sailor uniform, sitting on a bed.

I was a film enthusiast then, going to Sakai's Tōhō, Denkikan, Shukuin Theater, and others whenever the program changed. I knew Tomioka Theater very well. At the Western-film cinema that opened next door I also watched Stalag 17, On the Waterfront, and From Here to Eternity, including films drawn from American literary works. This nourished my later choice of profession. At the time, though, it was simply a memory of doing something wrong and being scolded by a teacher.

My Literature Began at the Bookshop beside Kitanoda Market

Now, returning to the map, about three buildings closer to the station than Ōmiyu stood a workshop that reworked cotton filling. All day it made a languid clattering sound. Now there is no sign of cotton being worked. Naturally—the building too has been demolished. Dusty air spilled out through the lattice. The cotton workshop was hardly a pleasant environment, but one could unmistakably hear the daily work of the people living there. It was like Shūgorō Yamamoto's preservation in Aobeka Monogatari of the rustic, worn-out fishing town of Urayasu. Each person has a way of life, and in Kawachi there certainly was a life resembling the breath of the beka boats in Urayasu.

Speaking of that breath of life, about fifty meters north of Ōmiyu on the right was a lending bookshop. I borrowed Sazae-san volumes there one after another and read them all: Noboru Baba's “Post-kun,” Ryūichi Yokoyama's “Fuku-chan” and “Densuke,” and Suihō Tagawa's “Norakuro.” When I returned books and entered through the back door, I was astonished. The bookseller was reading philosophy, with books piled high: Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard… I stood rooted to the spot inside the rear wooden gate. Philosophy… I opened a book and began to read. It was interesting. These heavy volumes with gold lettering on their spines unexpectedly taught the meaning and weight of living. My feelings eased.

Then a shōji rattled open. “Interesting, young fellow?” said a hoarse voice. Ah, I would be scolded for reading without buying! I looked up and found a bearded man smiling. “Do you want it?” Did he think I was going to steal it?

He shook his head. “If you want it, take it.”
Something that must cost thousands of yen… He could not possibly give it away… I put it down. He picked it up and said, “It's all right, all right. Things like this don't sell. It's yours,” and pressed it into the hands of the close-cropped boy.

He said he had seen me at Momijiya too. Momijiya was Kitanoda's only bookshop. It faced a muddy alley at the eastern edge of Kitanoda Market. Heibon and Myōjō were stacked there, and beside them lay Sunday Mainichi, Waseda Bungaku, Shin Nihon Bungaku, and Mita Bungaku. Without that encounter, I probably would never have turned toward literature.

Mita Bungaku was a traditional literary magazine launched from Keio Gijuku through the efforts of Nagai Kafū and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. Waseda Bungaku featured many writers from Waseda. As for Shin Nihon Bungaku, its name meant “New Japan Literature,” and people frequently called the country recovering after defeat “New Japan.” Opening it, I found Hiroshi Noma, Shigeharu Nakano, Ineko Sata, and other writers whom my literature-loving brother also mentioned.

Were they about eighty yen a copy then? It was far beyond my pocket money, so I quietly put them down and went home. I remember begging Mother, buying one at a time, and reading them absorbedly. Looking back, it seems strange that such overly serious literary magazines, unlikely to be profitable, were displayed in flat stacks. But perhaps in those days it was taken for granted that people who loved books ran bookshops, and so the owner opened across the way from Kitanoda Market, reached by turning off the shopping street. Miyamoto's clothing shop was packed, and since my classmate Miyamoto was there, I often went. But Momijiya diagonally opposite ended up changing my life.

When the time came for university, I set my sights without hesitation on Keio Gijuku's Faculty of Letters. Traced backward, that was because of the lending bookseller who gave me the philosophy book and this Momijiya. My encounter with Mita Bungaku in Kitanoda eventually made me willing to move all the way to Tokyo to attend Keio. The power of the pen is considerable.

A few months after entering Keio, I published the short story “Shakkatsu” in the student-only Keio Bungei. It embarrasses me, but I had no talent, a weak body, and a dark disposition. A protagonist like that rescues a woman from a house shattered by the Ise Bay Typhoon and discovers a light by which to live. When I showed this ego-filled work to Professor Ōhashi of American literature, he told me not to write about such a selfish man. Read Henry James before writing, he said. He even told me not to write until then.

I did not tell the professor, but the Mita Bungaku editorial office had telephoned and allowed me to help with editing. So, hiding it from Professor Ōhashi, I had already begun a literary man's characteristically dissolute life. Kafū was still alive, haunting the backstage rooms of Asakusa strip clubs. I delighted in the dilettantism of his younger days, when he commuted from the unlicensed pleasure quarter of Tamanoi to lecture at Mita. It was the beginning of unfilial behavior.

By the time Bunshun and Chūkō approached me, I was writing criticism for Mita Bungaku. At the Higashi-Nakano office that published Shin Nihon Bungaku every month, I met Hiroshi Noma, author of the celebrated Vacuum Zone. Repeated conversations around the stove brought us into sympathy, and I came to visit the society's office as an editorial committee member. All of this, too, began in my hometown.

Like Urayasu, Kitanoda devoted itself to nurturing people's hearts. If I ask people today whether they know where Urayasu is, they look puzzled: why ask such a thing? Yet ask whether they have been to Disneyland and everyone nods. One's inner landscape would be better preserved by riding a beka boat in the Urayasu of old than by visiting such an artificial district. In the same place there is now a Mississippi riverboat; the fishing town has given way to a castle, called 「ノイエル・シュタイン城」 in the source, and a princess. Somehow it resembles the redevelopment of Kitanoda.

Feature Films and Us Children

What does it mean that Japanese people revere their ancestors yet calmly demolish old houses? Semba and Shimanouchi, engulfed and erased in the crimson flames of war; Dōshōmachi; Shinmachi and Amidaike. The violence of war damage extinguished the Kamigata culture of the great merchant houses. Nothing else brings such remorse. Yet in peacetime, we ourselves, without feeling, voluntarily erased with our own hands so many rows of houses, rice fields, ridges, and paths between them.

Hundreds of white herons flew from the right of Emperor Nintoku's mausoleum, placing Jōroku in Noda Village and Minami-Noda within an ink painting. In the cinema called Tomioka Theater, built modestly in a corner of this rice-growing landscape, Arakan's Kurama Tengu straddled a white horse, holding little Hibari in her Kakubei-jishi costume, and galloped like the wind to thunderous applause. Yet the white herons remained the unhurried protagonists of the ink painting.

Reading Shunkinshō brings prewar Dōshōmachi back to life. The film of the same name, made in Shōwa 8 with Kinuyo Tanaka and Kōkichi Takada, preserves Osaka's traditional streets. Like the poet who lived in Amherst and sent words to later generations, if this work does not capture the hearts of those who come after, the people of old should be able to live on. The source prints the negative condition 「この作が後世の人々の心をとらえなければ」; it is retained here rather than silently changed to an affirmative condition.

Chapter 6: Being in Tomioka

Once Again: Where Is Tomioka?

Something tremendously proud-making happened. The girls of Tomioka High School danced across the stage of NHK Hall as though it were too small to contain them. They were like the women's curling team at the Pyeongchang Olympics that made Kitami famous overnight. Our Tomioka High girls were number one.

Living in Hayama near Tokyo, I tell my friends how wonderful Tomioka is and urge them to go and see it. They ask, “Where is Tomioka?” I see their point. Tomioka existed as a town name for only a period, and now survives mainly in the names of elementary, junior high, and high schools. But to us it was the name created when the rural districts of Kitanoda, Jōroku, and Minami-Noda merged with the residential area centered on Ōmino. It was an incomparably close-knit community of tens of thousands, fit to form a literal circle around the fountain and dance the “Tomioka Ondo.”

The elementary-school song ended 「登美おうか、ひィがぁし　小学校」. Its opening was 「金剛かつらぎ　遠く見て　歴史ゆかしい野田の庄…」; that made things understandable. Noda is a name with a distinguished history. Noda Castle stood here too. When I explain that it has been an important place since the Middle Ages, people understand.

Walking north from Kitanoda Station, one saw the wooden buildings of Noda National School in the rice fields. To the east there was nothing but paddies. Two coupled cars on the Kōya Line rattled along. In the distance stood Mount Nijō, the Ikoma range to its left and the Kongō range to its right.

During and after the war, Noda Elementary had no budget even to repair broken windowpanes. In winter we pasted newspaper over the broken windows to keep out the cold wind during lessons. When the older pupils graduated, everyone sang “Hotaru no Hikari.” The song taught that one should naturally study by firefly light in summer and reflected snowlight in winter. “Aogeba Tōtoshi” told us to respect our teachers and later go to the capital to establish ourselves and make our names. That passage stirred me. A feeling that we must become people who could move the nation seemed to fill the freezing classroom.

Word came that this Noda district would merge with Ōkusa Village to form a town. In no time Tomioka Town was created. From village to town—how lively and splendid! We boys and girls shared the joy. The person who named it was 木村亀次, deputy head of Noda Elementary. He taught in military style, ran faster than anyone, and was an exceptionally skilled watercolor painter. Pupils and parents alike jumped for joy when he became their class teacher. The elementary school had until recently been a military drill ground, so “Fall in! Attention! Number off!” continued in the new school system, and we obeyed without question.

Perhaps there was some resistance. Yet we who entered school in the second year after defeat, and our parents too, positively longed for education by former military men if possible. Looking back, I realize deeply that we belonged to an older age. But perhaps after Tomioka Town was formed, this spirit gradually faded.

There were frequent grappling fights at Noda Elementary. Mr. Kimura would rush over and bellow at the two boys to smile and shake hands. The mischievous pupils shook hands. “Will you be friends?” “Yeah.” “Say yes!” “Yes.” “Yes.” The two who had fought became wonderfully good friends.

That Noda Village merged with Ōkusa Village, which included the mansion district of Ōmino, to create Tomioka. Their temperaments differed considerably. Would they get along? No need to worry. After the war, Japan–United States relations were exceedingly cordial. The two villages also enjoyed a very fine relationship, which has continued for decades, even after incorporation into Sakai City. Tomioka Town's name remains in the junior high and high school. It testifies to the friendship between the two villages.

Strafed in the Jōroku Rice Fields as a Small Child

Even if I write chronologically, the confusion of memory will not fall into order. Yet precisely because of that, the past becomes visible. I was born in March of Shōwa 16 in Jōroku, Noda Village—now Jōroku, Higashi Ward, Sakai City. The attack on Pearl Harbor came that December. When the country was boiling with the mood of victory, I was still a baby and knew nothing. By the time I was crawling and beginning to sense, in my child's heart, the insidious war between Mother and Grandmother, Grandmother was often confined to bed. In Shōwa 19 the funeral procession clattered toward Takamatsu Cemetery. Before long, days of fleeing air raids arrived.

I wrote the scenes of this abnormal final phase in the short story “Kawachi 1945.” The American fighters supporting the B-29s were not particularly impressive in performance, but the Zero fighters on which we depended had all gone to the southern fronts. What remained were battered aircraft on special-attack missions from places such as Chiran in Kyushu. So the B-29s did as they pleased over Osaka.

The Grummans had no opponents on whom to use the machine-gun ammunition they brought. It would look bad to return with it all untouched, so they made targets of people walking on the ground, as though toying with them. I became one of those targets in these Noda rice fields.

The terror remains stuck in my mind. In the middle of the night I scream and bolt awake. Once again Grumman bullets rain from the sky. Little me runs along a field ridge and drops into the mud. Plop, plop, plop—the bullets stab into it. When I raise my face, the aircraft is already far away.

“You lousy shot! You lousy shot!” I shout. But if it circles back, this time a bullet will go straight through from the top of my head to my anus.
“It's all right. He's missing us on purpose,” my brother says. “There's no point killing us. He'll go home just like that. It's no good now…”
“What's no good, Brother?”
“Hmm?”
“Is Japan going to lose now?”

My brother says nothing. Father is with us too. Houses now stand in rows on the rice field where we were strafed.

The short story “Kawachi 1945” centers on a protagonist still in early childhood, a boy who cries when fireflies released inside the mosquito net are dead by morning; a mother who thinks the war can never be won but obeys for the neighbors' sake; and a brother striving as a militarist boy. It also brings in the mother-in-law and mother, the mother and father, and the child Father had a woman bear in Gion: a complicated household unfolds in Kawachi just before defeat. The young son of Jōkyōji Temple becomes a Zero pilot… Please read it. Such days happened right here in Jōroku. It is a true story, but everyone has disappeared, so I wrote it down.

Ōmino and Old Jōroku

I attended Ōmino Kindergarten, in what was called the two-year program. During the war I walked past Ōike Pond to the kindergarten beside Ōmino's fountain.

Ōmino was another world, a district of mansions. Every house had walls of large stones from Shōdoshima, densely planted hedges above them, a crossbeam gate, and invariably a Western-style building. Their appearance created an atmosphere quite different from old Jōroku, where our house stood.

Ōmino was a gathering of luxurious residences. Old Jōroku, where I lived, had nothing of that atmosphere. All the villagers farmed; only our family was unusual, with a company in Osaka City connected to military supplies. Only Jōkyōji and our house had telephones. People from Jōroku came to the telephone room, and we welcomed them with tea.

The priest from Jōkyōji came each month to pray before our family altar. We chanted the nenbutsu together. Afterwards came tea and talk of the departed, of Jōroku's Bon dancing, of cleaning the ditches before rice planting. 次郎兵衛 from the neighboring field brought Chinese cabbages as thanks for receiving our night soil. We were the ones grateful to him for emptying it. The smell of excrement, called the perfume of the countryside, was always present, but old Jōroku's atmosphere had a special goodness.

This was before cars became widespread. When Honda's motorized Cub bicycle, with its white tank and red engine, appeared on the roads, our company used Cubs for sales calls too. Occasionally one came to Jōroku. A horse hauling a cart went along the bumpy road, dropping manure and urine as though firing a cannon; the Cub dodged it, scattering a shrill engine noise as it traveled the uneven road past Higashi Elementary. That was an ordinary scene then.

It was already the latter half of the Shōwa twenties. The economy was improving a little. At first the allied forces in the Korean War lost again and again, and there was fear that North Korea might advance from Busan into Japan. We spent every day marching in formation for military drill. Yet ironically, military demand rapidly lifted Japan's economy from its depths, and expensive American cars such as Cadillacs and Lincolns became conspicuous in Ōmino.

The road surfaces remained the same, and luxury cars drove over bumps and puddles. Father's company prospered too and bought a Toyopet Crown Deluxe with doors that opened from the center. My friend Nakamura, whose own businessman father was also prospering but who remained cool about it, said, “Mosquito larvae, Hama-chan. They bob up and down. Your family too is a mosquito larva.” How apt! I admired the insight with which 俊ちゃん delivered this barb with a perfectly straight face. Even now the subject sometimes comes up between us.

The Absurdity of War's Chaos and an Ill-fitting World

My life in Jōroku begins with an awakening to selfhood through intense experiences in air-raid shelters. This was before the Cub. When I finally sensed that I had been born, unwillingly, into an extraordinary situation, I was physically experiencing the first page of my personal history.

I then spent elementary and junior high school in my birthplace, so it became deeply familiar. Yet looking back now, I cannot entirely escape the feeling of being out of place. There was no necessity to it. This sense of absurdity also applies to the relationship between my parents and myself. Even after moving to Tokyo for university and returning home, that feeling did not seem likely to leave.

If I ask whether Hayama on the Miura Peninsula, where I now live from day to day, is free of that feeling, I can only answer no. Hayama's landscape produces in my heart a stronger sense of alienation than Jōroku's. Perhaps that is why people return to their hometown after retirement, hoping one day to come home. But what happens to the life they have lived? Are they not travelers who have come back after leaving their suitcases and everything else at an inn?

The French writer and philosopher Sartre advocated existentialism. Albert Camus, who said that existence lacked rationality—that it existed, but without a law of cause and effect—was also an existentialist. Both recognized “existence.” Yet examined one by one, these existences are absurd, with no relationship discernible between cause and result.

My settled life in Hayama has a curious calm. Perhaps, after experiencing that absurdity thoroughly in the great city of Tokyo, I reached a kind of understanding. This state of mind is the exact opposite of what I feel when I step out at Kitanoda Station: deep inside I deny it—Kitanoda Station was not like this! The absence of the familiar ticket-gate enclosure and kiosk becomes nonexistence, and an unsettled alienation grips me.

Then I tell myself: wherever one lives, peace and ease depend on one's state of mind. Even if one resists the transformation of familiar things, all things are impermanent. Existence has long since become nonexistence and calmly formed another world. Wherever one goes, the same other dimension awaits. That is all I can tell myself.

The poet Chūya Nakahara wonders where the steam from the whistle he heard at sixteen has gone. An apparently trifling little scene can in fact carry far more weight than a house deed, flying into the thoughts of one's deathbed, fastening itself there, and assailing one.

People return home. I too am a traveler who has done so countless times. The horse leader who puts a traveler on his beloved horse, takes its bridle, and goes back and forth on the same road throughout life is also a traveler, passing into worlds of time that resemble the same life but differ from it. Each time, one feels something and turns homeward.

My early short story “Tensei no Tsubo,” published in Bungakukai, concerns the emotional contact between a widowed art critic living at the foot of a pine-covered hill called Nishino in my hometown village and the young maiden 蕗子, who comes to do household chores. It holds memories of going with my parents to a Nishino temple when I was still a boy.

Anything with form will one day break. There is no point in accepting an old Oribe ceramic, something to which one becomes attached only for it eventually to break. One day, while climbing Mount Kongō together, his wife slipped and died. Though he had hardly looked after her properly, she left a hollow in his heart and now exists nowhere. In the same way, only desolate memories remain. How painful it is to live and endure them. Better never to have met his wife at all. If recognizing a new existence means that it will suddenly disappear from sight, or break or suffer an accident and take on a pitiful form, better not to meet it in the first place. Thinking of it, even one's hometown is a painful scene.

So the man cannot accept the feelings of the girl along with the Oribe, though she implores him to take it because the temple priest is giving it to him. That temple may still stand, but Nishino's hill has been entirely destroyed and transformed into housing.

In elementary school I once came to that hill with Father to cut branches for New Year gate decorations. This was before such decorations existed as commercial products at all. Those memories too have been broken. Looking back, the area where the art critic lived would be around Tomioka High School.

Yutaka Yukawa was then editor-in-chief of Bungakukai; he later became a professor at Tokai University. For some reason he took a particular liking to “Tensei no Tsubo” and asked where it was set. When I told him about Nishino, he actually went to see it.

蕗子 is a girl I created, but there was a junior-high classmate who supplied her image. I cannot give her name. Her face narrowed around the chin, and her bobbed hair made her look like an Ichimatsu doll.

But in the story 蕗子 says that everything breaks. If everything is going to break and disappear anyway, it would be better to take the plunge and let the relationship between the teacher and herself go too far. Yet even with those feelings before him, the critic cannot surrender to them and only hesitates. The girl grows impatient, more and more impatient, until finally… I shall not write that part here; please read it. This maiden makes herself like the inlaid dragon on the surface of the jar: even if it ruins the jar's surface, she is like a dragon that tears through it, leaps out, and ascends to heaven. One day, suddenly… The story also became a television drama. Did it fully portray how everything that had stood firmly in the real world changes its form?

The Kōya Line—and the Feelings That Arose in Rice-field Jōroku

The writer Shōtarō Yasuoka, who served for many years as an Akutagawa Prize judge, told me repeatedly that such prizes did not matter. He urged me to write works like Motojirō Kajii's. He himself had written of days when, suffering from tuberculosis, he did not know whether he would live or die. But Endō—Shūsaku Endō—kept bringing in religious doctrine. That was no good; such things were not literature. I was greatly influenced by Mr. Yasuoka.

I did not quite reach a Kajii-style novel of ideas, but my short story “Kawachi 1945” seems packed with thoughts resembling Kajii's “Lemon.” It depicts the blazing summer of Shōwa 20, the war's final year, in rice fields where the road running north from behind Tomioka Theater, around the Takada home, vanished into the paddies.

It was the year the war ended. Great B-29 formations came over Kawachi's sky as though they owned it, dropping many bombs on urban Sakai and Osaka. The pilot of the Zero pursuing them in hatred was, astonishingly, a temple's son from Jōroku. This was over the rice fields between the Kōya Line and Tomioka-Higashi Elementary, now turned into housing. Leave the gate of our Jōroku house and walk east with the elementary school on the right, and once there were rice fields everywhere. No amount of wishing will bring that scene back. Nor the two-car Kōya Line trains rattling along. Nor the elementary school's wooden building looming directly in front of our house.

In summer an ice-lolly seller came ringing a bell. Tomioka Theater stood near the turn on the shortcut from Kitanoda Station, but it too is gone. Where is the scene of little Hibari's Sugisaku riding a white horse with Arakan's Uncle Tengu? The sense of loss is so strong because remembered scenes and reality have diverged too far. Am I a relic of the past? Everything has disappeared without a trace because civilization has developed; is it not good that we are richer? Even when I tell myself so, civilization's destructive power is mercilessly harsh.

Was it Toshio Mae who published a poetry collection called Sanga Dōkoku, cursing civilization's relentless destructive power? From the same viewpoint, Tatsuzō Ishikawa's long novel Kizu-darake no Sanga presents a businessman modeled on the Tsutsumi family of Seibu Railway. It became a very fine film, with Sō Yamamura fully embodying this ruthless man.

Seibu Railway was a company that destroyed Musashino extensively. Shōhei Ōoka's Musashino Fujin likewise foretold that, as the times changed and Musashino urbanized, it would soon become a housing district where people asked whether Musashino had ever existed. Kenji Mizoguchi made a splendid film of it.

For Kawachi too, it is desperately lonely to think that only my “Kawachi 1945” records the Kawachi around Jōroku in Noda Village. Even the roads have not been properly left. My old school, now Tomioka-Higashi Elementary, was entirely wooden, but not one of its buildings remains. Only the shabby factory building adjoining the southern side of the grounds looks as memory says it did.

This Noda Factory is in fact a witness to the calamities of tragic modern history. It is the very Noda Factory that appears in Wakizō Hosoi's Jokō Aishi, written until the flame of his life went out. It still exposes its prewar form to the present. Yet perhaps no one remains to tell its history, and most people live without reading Jokō Aishi even when its name is mentioned. Incidentally, the Noda Factory building still exists even in the year of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, so I recommend preserving it as the town's cultural heritage.

My old house in old Jōroku stood beside the rice fields. Fields spread westward in the setting sun, with ridges forming a web all the way to the bank of Ōike Pond. But the paths between the fields became a bus road. Because that road was built, our detached quarters were cut away, and the space where Mother had slept beside the infant author during the war became a bus route. The neighboring field of 治郎兵衛 is a parking lot; the ridge leading toward it has vanished and a coffee shop stands there. Further on are a kindergarten, a park, and a coffee shop. This is where Taike Pond once lay.

It was around that pond that my three beloved ducks played, and anglers spent the whole day with lines cast for crucian carp. There, the battery-powered motorboat I built with my meager pocket money had weeds catch on its bent rudder, straightening it so that it went out to the center of the pond. Unable to withstand the water gradually entering, it sank helplessly… My brother stood beside me as I cried. “成生, don't cry over something like that,” he said. That is the very place. Now it is a park, and the children playing innocently there have no way of knowing the scene.

Both Elegance and Life's Splinters Vanish with Time

With the passage of time, a place changes its appearance completely. New residents replace old ones, and every one of the old inhabitants has gone to the graves at Takamatsu. On Taike Pond's bank stood the Kobayashi house. A stream ran below the path to it. Around Shōwa 25, I saw a bride arrive with her hair in a bunkin takashimada, cross the stone bridge, and duck through the gate of her new husband's home. Reckoning the years, if it was around 1950 and she was twenty then, she was born in 1930. It is now 2021, so she would be ninety-one. I would be happy if she were still alive.

Every farm in old Jōroku kept chickens. Mother received freshly laid eggs and fed them to me. We too had several rice fields in Jōroku, but after the war we gave them all to the tenant households, so it was the landowners who became poor.

Our Jōroku home was complicated and chilly with stepfamily relationships, yet a spirit of elegance kept raising its head in its peculiar atmosphere. The mood of kouta was one example. Becoming absorbed in the Hyakunin Isshu likewise seemed only natural. So Mother, crying after being bullied by her mother-in-law, might suddenly change her mood, look at a white heron descending into the rice field, and hum with lilting turns:

シラサギは　小首傾げて　二の足　踏んで
ひとあし　ひとあし　深くなるよ

Was it the song of someone being led away? Such pathos drifted about, and I, an elementary-school boy, watched the white heron innocently pecking at loaches in the paddy. The herons normally nested and raised their young in the pines of Emperor Nintoku's mausoleum, then flew all the way over the Mozu-Hachiman rice fields to settle in Jōroku's fields. It was a mysterious, profound world beyond the imagination of today's residents.

This hauta is of course a love song. Yet just as its words suggest, a still ink-painting world could be seen every day in these fields, seeming likely to continue for another hundred or five hundred years. Now it has suddenly vanished.

Not long after the war, around the time I entered school, Noda National School became Noda Village Elementary. Its black-painted wooden buildings had no heating at all, and teachers returned from military service still shouted “Attention!” and “Number off!” My story “Habataki no Shukuzu” depicted conflicts between teachers and pupils in that period. Precisely because I am far away in Hayama, these scenes return vividly; standing on the actual site, I would have no way to recall them.

Many occupation troops came from America. Their manner was remarkably gentle, understanding, and cheerful. We shared peanuts and ham from canned military surplus they gave us and did not starve to death. We had nothing but favorable impressions, and boys and girls were made to walk amicably hand in hand.

During the war, the wooden school buildings served as a soldiers' training ground. The sewing room was used as sleeping quarters, and its tatami mats were worn to pieces by so many men sleeping there. Children were told not to enter. Soon after the war, burglars broke into the school almost every night, so male teachers stayed on overnight duty. The telephone would ring: “Is that Hamano? I'll buy you snacks, rice crackers. Come and play.”

When I went after such a summons, Nagashima, Sakata, and Uchiyama were there too. We slept around the teacher after eating rice crackers in the staff room. In the middle of the night someone would say, “Teacher, I need to pee.” Taking the bat beside the pillow, everyone went to the lavatory together. It was frightening—because, they said, a soldier had hanged himself there during the war… About ten boys also surrounded Mr. Ikeno on corridor patrol, some carrying bats, as we made our way with him through the long, pitch-dark U-shaped wooden school building, relying only on a flashlight.

Such experiences are fittingly recalled only with a wooden school building there. It is a genuine school ghost story. I once set the short story “Habataki no Shukuzu” around here and published it in the monthly Chishiki. Unlike the earlier-mentioned “Tensei no Tsubo,” it does not show attachment to such breakable things. “Habataki no Shukuzu,” which the literary critic and Waseda professor Katsuhiko Takeda praised, tells of a fight like a peasant uprising among us elementary-school children, near starvation just after the war. But the fallow ground between Ōike Pond and Tomioka-Higashi Elementary, once nothing but rice fields, is now a residential area.

The friends who slept beside me around our teacher 池野喜和 in the night-duty room are all still alive for now. Once a month we gather at a drinking place, sharing cups far into the night with memories as our accompaniment.

Noda Elementary is now Tomioka-Higashi Elementary, and its buildings have been replaced by concrete ones. Returning home, I feel forced to replace my thoughts with concrete too. Was it Takuboku who said 「ふるさとは遠きにありて想うもの」? The feeling is wonderfully apt. But concrete somehow resists connection with memories. Yet they do remain, properly.

Sakai Is a Sea of Fire in the Air Raid

What was Jōroku like during the war? I wrote about it in the short story “Kawachi 1945.” It is unpublished, but I am told it will be included in my corner at the Higashi Library. With Mr. Yukawa no longer at Bungakukai, I do not feel like taking it there.

During the war, as night fell, we feared the roar of aircraft, switched off the lights, and went to the air-raid shelter. It was a damp hole where water seemed to seep up, shared with centipedes and rats. A small child soon gets used even to a life like a bear cub's. I breathed the muddy air and slept until morning.

Sakai burned. One night, the adults opened the window of the detached room and stared into the distance, stunned. The sky was brilliantly bright. A sunset?
“How pretty,” I said.
“It's an air raid! What's pretty about it? People are burning beneath that.”
“Are air raids frightening?”
I looked at the northern sky with Father and Mother.
“They'll drop bombs on Jōroku too.”

I still clearly remember the air raid on Sakai seen from that detached room. It was just before I entered kindergarten: May of Shōwa 20. The garden azaleas were in full pink bloom. Beside them, Father was digging the ground.

“What are you doing?”
“An air-raid shelter. Directly under the house, we'd be burned alive.”

I did not understand. Watching Father swing his pronged hoe and dig, I heard him say, “成生, suck an azalea flower—it's sweet…” Indeed, there was a faint taste of nectar. I spent several days like that. Meanwhile in Okinawa, high-school girls of the Himeyuri unit were fleeing fierce street fighting every day and dying one after another. I would not learn that until more than ten years later.

Before long it was midsummer and the emperor's rescript came over the radio. That day, Father struck Mother violently. She fell and could not get up. Father tended to her, and afterwards kept rubbing her as she suffered persistent chest pain, saying, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

On the day the war ended, unable to bear witnessing my parents' quarrel, I fled the garden, ran along the stream bank, and crouched in a rice field. This is the poem I made of that scene:

戦敗れ　父母泣き　稚児の　稲田里
いま他所人の　我勝ちに住む

I composed this tanka at seventy. I was on my way to the graves at Takamatsu. The old Jōroku houses were inconspicuous, while rows of houses stood on what had been rice fields… Perhaps it will be carved on my gravestone.

“We knew from the beginning we'd lose a war like this,” Mother said. She need not have said it, but because she did so immediately after the imperial broadcast, Father flew into a rage and struck her violently. That is why I have no good memories at all of early childhood.

My half-brother said that dark clouds hung over the Jōroku house. His loneliness and poor relations with his stepmother were part of it. The inner room was therefore always chilly. Many people starved to death in the winter of the war's last year, and we too had little to eat. Lying hungry in the eight-mat room, I felt drafts blowing through the gap between a pillar and the earthen wall. In summer the western sun shone through that same gap onto the gramophone.

Beside the full-width alcove with a hanging scroll of Kusunoki Masashige was a floor-level alcove. The gramophone stood on a single plank. There was a Buddhist altar too. I played mischievously with its lamp, and my apron caught fire. “Mother, this happened,” I said, showing her my burning body. Horrified, she threw water from a nearby teapot over me and put it out.

I also once slipped on the veranda facing the garden, put my head through the glass of a sliding door, and needed seven stitches. My socks had slipped. I do not remember Mother clearly then, but they say she tucked me under one arm, held cotton wool against the blood spurting from her small child's head, and ran desperately to the doctor. A mother is a blessing. She let me eat as many bunches of grapes as I liked and did not mind even if they upset my stomach. Father scolded me to stop, but I thought he was being stingy.

I knew both Father and Mother had poured love into raising me. Yet when applying for university, I did not sit for a single university in Kansai, chose a Tokyo university even as my fallback, and at eighteen moved to the capital to live apart from them. Living with one's parents was the natural thing. To live separately was therefore the greatest unfilial act, but I had the egoism not to notice. I am sorry. I ought to have lived with them. At this age, remorse catches hold of me again and again.

I was triumphant at entering Keio straight from school. Yet from deep in my heart, every day after coming to Tokyo, I reproached myself for being unfilial. As though atoning, I returned to Osaka dozens of times as a student to show my face. I did not live with them again until I myself was growing old. There is no greater unfilial act. Even now I wonder why I did it. Absorbed in seeking possibilities in Tokyo and working hard, I thought only of myself. I cannot stop regretting those years now.

Let us return to before the war's end. I wrote a short story about this period and put it in the Buddhist altar. I have no thought of publishing it anywhere. I do not want to show it to Tokyo people, who could not understand life in Kawachi.

Just before the war ended, or the year after, I entered Ōmino Kindergarten. I think I stayed two years. Mother took me every day from Jōroku to Ōmino and brought me home. Amid a food situation with little to eat and the whole country on the brink of starvation, she worked so diligently for me. Now she is around the middle of the ground floor, in a kimono for funerals, at the same level as my gaze. Thank you for living with me.

Chapter 7: And So Japan Survived

My First-grade Teacher Was 桂愛子

Leaping back through time again, I am a first-grader at Noda Elementary. The windows are still broken. If I arrive too early, no one is yet in the wooden building. It is cold, and my bottom hurts. Yet I sit properly and endure it. What a fool I was.

I shall never forget my class teacher, 桂愛子, an oval-faced young woman of only twenty-four or twenty-five. She was very kind to me, but I so hated finishing last in the sports-day race that I stayed away from school. Then she came to fetch me. Our house was directly behind the school. With the spirited racing music playing over and over, she said she would take me there.

“No! I don't want to go!” I protested. Mother grew angry and said I should start running just before the pistol went bang. “Isn't that right, Teacher?” It was outrageous. Yet my teacher whispered to the physical-education teacher, and they let me start early. I ran for all I was worth.

Those humiliating few seconds remain in my memory. In the end I was fourth. I was happy. Not last! Third place would have earned a prize; I had run almost as fast as that! How self-serving we are. I had no athletic ability whatever, but my refusal to lose was fiercer than anyone's. Perhaps in later years it was that alone which carried me through.

I still remember the warmth of 桂愛子's hand as she led me to school. Thank you; I would like to see you again… I thought it many times afterwards. But now, even if she were alive, she was twenty years older, so she would already be ninety-six.

Apart from such stories of affection between teacher and pupil, several teachers were expelled in the postwar Red Purge. General MacArthur, commander of the occupation forces, was concerned that men repatriated from the Soviet Union had become communist, were spreading revolutionary ideas among coworkers, and were increasingly opposing American policy. That was the reason for the purge. Knowing nothing, we called people “Reds” and made them targets of bullying; I remember doing so.

Teachers also made “language cards,” about the size of hanafuda cards, and gave them to all pupils as instruction to use standard Japanese. If one spoke Osaka dialect, a card was taken away. Today Osaka dialect is considered friendly, and even people from outside the area use it. The earlier change aimed to eliminate dialect differences, unite the nation, use a common language for Japan's reconstruction, and soften discriminatory feelings even a little. Now that such fears no longer exist, local speech is an important culture emphasizing the qualities of each region.

In Fourth Grade, Troubled by My Family Circumstances

Was I in fourth grade? Stalin died, and in my child's heart I worried about what would happen to the Soviet Union. My classmates cared nothing about it and were absorbed in dodgeball and treasure-taking games. I played too, but felt detached as I did. This was not interesting; it was pointless. What mattered was what would happen to Japan–Soviet relations. That was the issue. It was no time to leave that alone and play dodgeball.

I had become an insolent, precocious child, viewing the world with a strange coldness. Then as now, I was a difficult child. Probably war had distorted my heart from an early age. The endless “women's war” between Mother and the second and third women Father had kept when he made a fortune in military supplies before the war was also a cause. There were those stories, and memories of how Grandmother, who died during the war, tormented Mother, who wept in the detached room clutching me in her arms.

Those memories had not cooled, and when I was around fourth grade, coming home from school for lunch, I found Mother setting a pot on the brazier and stirring sizzling rice porridge, subjecting me every day to the same unending complaints. I was thoroughly tired of it. Emotionally, though I was an elementary-school pupil, my heart had become adult.

Yet compared with the feelings of my brother, who did not have his birth mother, my troubles were far easier. Only about a month ago, I happened to need a full copy of his family register and obtained it. I had been using a telephone line in his name, and when I no longer needed it and wanted to cancel it, I required documents proving our relationship.

My brother grew up with an unusual name: a single horizontal stroke, the numeral 一, read “Hajime.” They said his birth mother was driven out soon after he was born. Father, 定雄, died without ever explaining the circumstances to me. I secretly hoped that the copy of my brother's register might contain his parents' names. But it did not! On the day 定雄 and 秋野 married and 秋野 formally entered the Hamano register as his wife, 一 was registered too. In other words, the mother of both 一 and 成生 was equally recorded as 秋野.

Such complicated family relationships remained a constant knot during the war. Though a boy, I was terribly sensitive. When my parents quarreled again, I crawled alone into the cold bedding laid in the room and cried quietly. Father came in, noticed, flung back the quilt, and said, “成生, why are you crying? Boys don't cry. A man cries only when his parents die!”

That was the boy I was, but the times were the times. I was also a militarist boy. The Pacific War was an ignominious war in which we lost disastrously. Having attacked America ourselves, we were struck back and everything was burned away. Most Japanese came to dislike Japan. Yet however we lost, we were proud of the battleship Yamato, with the Imperial forces' chrysanthemum crest at its prow, driving through the white waves. We were proud of the Zero, lightly looping behind a Grumman and firing 7.7-millimeter machine-gun rounds through its fiercely spinning propeller to knock down a P-38.

I could not escape that fixed idea. I made many rubber-powered battleships and Zero fighters, floating them in the garden pond or flying them on the school playing field. Any number of Zeros could take off from an aircraft carrier. Although that was already a phantom, throughout elementary school I remained convinced it might return at any time.

“Play the Warship March!” I said.
“We mustn't play it, Hamano,” said 桂愛子, turning her oval face toward me with a smile.

During physical education, although the record was there, she did not play it. Instead it was “Kane no Naru Oka.” ミドリの丘の赤い屋根…。 When that sad story of parentless children rang through the schoolyard to a lively rhythm, we marched in step.

Yet Mr. Kimura, returned from military service, called “Fall in!” When we formed a line within so many seconds, he moved straight on to “Number off!” We shouted “One, two, three, four…” without a pause. If we hesitated, he cried, “Too quiet!” “Attention!” If we swayed or lagged, a slap flew. It grew fiercer still with the outbreak of the Korean War, and the Warship March played every day. That year the American soldiers disappeared. “Poor fellows, they seem to have died in Korea,” our parents said.

That gentle, tall, thin Brown had taught me fencing. And what happened to Hall? Had they all died?

The Young Men of the Occupation Forces Came to Our House

Memory goes back a few years before that. Occupation soldiers as tall as telegraph poles walked with Japanese women. At our house, Father invited many American officers, and day after day was spent in dance parties.

The wooden school building amid the rice fields was Noda Elementary. Our house adjoined it on the north, and its reception room was Western-style, with a sofa, marble display shelving, and an electric heater in the fireplace. We moved the gramophone from the alcove in the inner room of the main house to the reception room and played jazz. No, that is wrong: it had been in the reception room, was moved to the inner room during the war, and then returned to the reception room. Operating it was my job.

Father had been a modern boy of the jazz age. He owned many smart suits fitted at the waist. With his left hand in his waistcoat pocket and a cocktail glass raised in his right, he said something in English, and the party began. Sometimes Mother wore a dress. But when she appeared in a vertically striped kimono, I disliked it: she looked to me like a café waitress. The occupation soldiers, however, liked the kimono and asked her to dance. Mother loved Takarazuka, and took a soldier's hand and began dancing. I disliked it more and more.

We really had lost the war. That was when I felt it in my heart. A little earlier, employees sent to the southern fronts as soldiers had returned, all saying so with their unwashed bodies. We must have lost. But I did not feel it.

“Dad, what happened to the war with America? It's a lie that we lost, isn't it? Is it true?”
“We lost. That's why we have to get along…”

I still remember Father's half-smiling expression. His eyes turned to the records. “I'll show them some tap dancing… Ah, play this.” Since I was the gramophone attendant, I put on another foxtrot. Changing the needle, I asked:

“But why are you all such good friends? Isn't war killing each other?”
“It's peace now. It's only natural to shake hands and get along…” He began to say it, then became serious. “You're right. I understand how you feel…” He looked into my eyes.

Japan had lost the war. Everyone said it, but it had not felt real to me. Yet at the dance parties in our reception room, seeing Mother in her kimono dancing in a tall occupation soldier's arms, I felt in my child's heart: it is true; Japan has lost the war.

Years later, when I collected my criticism of American literature in Portraits of Contemporary American Writers, published by Kenkyūsha, I wrote this memory in the preface. That was all. Yet Professor Kenzaburō Ōhashi of the University of Tokyo noticed it, and Tateo Imamura, professor at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, teasingly said, “So you were rich, Hamano.” I had not expected a page from our Jōroku home just after the war to become a topic in Tokyo.

Ms. 猪子, Tomioka High School's First English Teacher, Lived with Us

The door leading to the main house opened. “Ah, it's Ms. 猪子!” I said. She had returned from Burma with nowhere to live, so we lent her our detached room as a temporary home. This brisk-spoken teacher, who wore no makeup at all, was my favorite. I had learned English from her, returned from Burma, since second grade. Later, when Tomioka High School opened, she became its first English teacher.

At that time she was still a repatriate… Every day when she returned from going out, she called, “I'm home!” We answered without a pause, “Welcome back!” Those days were extraordinarily bright, intellectual, and enjoyable. That teacher joined the dance party in our reception room with a Concise English–Japanese Dictionary in one hand.

Ms. 猪子 was a hope of the new age. Dark clouds hung over our house: I remember the phrase again. My brother, who later said it, had a birth mother bullied and driven out by her mother-in-law. My own mother came from Nara as Father's second wife and was also bullied by her mother-in-law. To ensure that she and my half-brother would not get along, Grandmother impressed on him the fact that Mother was only his stepmother, burdening him with a dark past. That atmosphere always drifted through the house.

The darkness of Japan's household system continued stubbornly, whether the war ended or the Americans came. Our Jōroku home was dark and lacked an intellectual spirit. Yet in my child's intuition, Ms. 猪子 brought a bright future with her.

Although I received daily marching drills in elementary school, the remembered days when Ms. 猪子 and many occupation soldiers came had an enormous influence on the formation of my future. Indeed, I am now a scholar specializing in American studies and try to live with a refinement like hers. Living in Hayama, I also own a house in Yokosuka and rent it to a GI couple from the base without any resistance. That too is probably due to these early-life experiences.

After entering junior high school, I met one memorable teacher after another—Mr. Ōno in mathematics, Mr. Nishino in Japanese, Mr. Yoshida, called “Ūtan,” in English, and others—and my plans for the future gradually took shape. Yet I think it was the interweaving of wartime experience, postwar disorder, and relationships within the family that naturally inclined me toward literature.

Air Raid! To the Shelter—Then the Telephone Rang

Another cause, I think, was the endless mismatch of my parents' feelings, their continual conflict. For example, near the war's end a makeshift searchlight position appeared in Jōroku's rice fields. At night antiaircraft guns fired at the white, pig-like bellies of B-29s. Now no one knows of that either.

At our Jōroku house, lifting the boarded floor by the kitchen's shoe-removal step revealed the air-raid shelter. We went in and out so often that I regressed to a baby who could not sleep deeply without that earthy smell. Children now could not imagine such a wild little life. Memories of air raids still traumatize me, so I shall tell them again and again.

In the middle of the night, Mother's pounding footsteps made me think, ah, again. “しんぎょちゃん! Air raid! Air raid!” She bent over the small child in his nightclothes, wrapped both arms around my back, hauled me up, and ran. At the kitchen's boarded floor, Father yanked up the boards beneath the step, and the four of us descended the stone steps into the underground shelter. It happened almost every night.

Inside, cushions were laid on the earth and I was put to bed on them. Muddy, earthy smells. Snakes might come. No, and centipedes too. With such thoughts, I fell asleep for the second time.

One day those days ended, as though an evening shower had stopped. Had America and Japan called off the war? It was midday. Cicadas were crying. The radio was broadcasting something. A while after it ended, Mother said, “We knew from the start we'd lose. Dad, why are you so upset?” She need not have said it, and a huge quarrel followed. I have already written that story.

But I have not yet recorded here the extraordinary telephone call during an air raid. Mother left the shelter and hurried into the telephone room. “Who is it? Osaka City must be a sea of fire tonight.” Then she heard this:

“Is this the Hamano house?”
“Yes… Who is speaking?”
“That doesn't matter. Just tell him that mother and son both got away safely.”
“Please tell me your name.”
“Just tell your husband that. He'll understand everything!”
Clack! The line went dead.

Mother returned to the shelter in a fury. Who was that woman? She had escaped safely with her son… A woman, and even a child… Who on earth was she? A lovers' quarrel in an air-raid shelter.

After the war, Father apparently held a parting ceremony with his second and third women. For a peacetime industry, he made forks for lifting horse fodder and went around selling them to farmers. But they soon broke, and complaints came one after another. He suffered.

Partway through my first year of high school, Father's business failed and our Jōroku house was taken as collateral. Everything was lost. Mr. Nishioka bought most of our household goods. Taking only the better things, we moved into shabby municipal housing in Sakai. Father recovered once and built a fine house in Ōmino, but in the end it was in this municipal dwelling, at around noon on June 30 amid the ceaseless drizzle of the rainy season, that I attended him as he drew his last painful breath with a rattle in his wasted throat and was called to heaven.

Mother died more than ten years later. My brother too—the half-brother with whom I became so close in later years—died without seeing me.

The Jōroku house, which passed into other hands long ago, was once surrounded by rice fields. The route to the Hamano graves goes from the station past this house and onward on foot. But every surrounding paddy has become a perfectly complete residential district. 治郎兵衛's rice field from the days of the air raids, the stream, and the bank of Ōike no longer have the appearance that welcomed the white herons from Nintoku's mausoleum. The field we called “the back field” has been cut through by a wide road. The detached room from which the four Hamanos watched the great air raid on Sakai in the distance is gone too.

If anything remains, it is the white-walled storehouse beside it. Mother locked me in there several times. A symbolic building of our cloud-darkened old home, it now adjoins a paid parking lot rather than a rice field, so its atmosphere has been completely blown away. A highway runs straight over the paddies: convenient, convenient. One can laugh. Reckless development violently blasted the tragedy away. Civilization and economic power changed the face of my hometown more than war did. The original landscape of early childhood collapsed completely, along with my parents' existence.

The rescript ending the war, my parents' furious quarrel, and myself out in the rice fields after leaving the house—all seemed a still frame from a film. Urban planning around the Shōwa fifties blew it away.

Even now in Hayama, if I call up Kawachi's fields, JOBK's voice returns, ringing across the paddies before my eyes: “Air-raid warning! Air-raid warning! A large formation of enemy B-29s is heading north over the sea south of the Kii Peninsula!” Looking up at towering summer clouds in the blazing sun, I listen: wuon, wuon, wuon… the bombers' engines.

The war ended in defeat. That is an unmistakable fact. Yet we small children were a generation that had known only war from birth. War existed naturally every day; it was routine, natural, eternal. When it suddenly vanished, the only feeling that welled up in me was: I had been deceived! That emptiness remains even now. It can no longer be erased. We were children born of war, refugee children living on struggle.

Now, when Bon-dance season comes, I remember Jōroku.

みいなあさあまにたのうみましょ　やれこらせ　どっこいせえ…

The fine rhythm rings in my ears with the sound of green bamboo being struck. Three great drums together. Kawachi Ondo is the sound of military drums from which I want to flee, and the heat of a village-festival crowd into which I want to rush.

It's all right. Here is all right.
No, I hate a place like this. Why was I born here?

The hateful Hamano household. Endless family quarrels. That too was Kawachi. Whenever I remember, I feel sorry for Father and Mother. Even if Kawachi's rice fields disappear and turn into coffee shops and highways, their souls drift there. Noda Factory is there too. So this year again I am drawn back, join my hands before the stone monument, shed tears, share drinks with friends, and talk without end. But in the next chapter, my junior-high years, I was still living in this old Jōroku house.

Final Chapter: What Happened Afterwards

A Person's Fate Is Largely Unexpected

Many occupation soldiers came on the Kōya Line… Dance parties. Kawachi people met GIs whom they should never have met, smiling happily. A chronology of foolish days.

To put it in the manner of haiku, in those circumstances I walked along rice-field ridges to a new school built on the field-covered ground called Ōmino. An anxiety accompanying a life that seemed to drag me along was always with me. That was Tomioka Junior High.

The new-system junior high school, unlike the old system that seemed to train an elite, was a school everyone attended after elementary school. Yet years later, for a time I taught English at a high school where fifty pupils a year entered the University of Tokyo and all the rest went to Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hitotsubashi, Waseda, or Keio. Then I understood well: in schools where parents enroll their children because the path ahead is already fixed, the pupils themselves may fail to see their goal for a lifetime. I think a school like Tomioka Junior High is good precisely because it tells you nothing definite about what you will become.

In my case, I did not study. Amid the ceaseless conflict between Father and Mother, it was a wonder I did not go astray, let alone study. Entrance examinations arrived while I still had no idea where to go.

“Children who are good at study go to Mikunigaoka. Why don't you try too?” Mother said. If I said no, there would be apprenticeship, carrying parts by bicycle, a world of so much pay per day. I hated that. “Then become a priest instead. I know an important person at Chion-in.” And so I went to Uenomiya, commuting daily to a school in Osaka City.

I did not want to become a priest. The teachers were priests, and I could not accept a single thing they said, so I had no choice but to apply myself seriously to study. If I disliked becoming a priest and wanted foreign languages, I was told to enter the foreign-language faculty at Tenri University. Perhaps I could go to America through its church. Intending to escape, I applied only to Tokyo universities: Keio and Gakushuin. They required fewer examination subjects, and Keio published Mita Bungaku. At the small Momijiya bookshop on Kitanoda's market street, Bungei Shuto, Waseda Bungaku, and Mita Bungaku stood beside Bungakukai.

The time was shortly after the war, Shōwa 28, before even the nostalgic Shōwa thirties had begun. The place was Kawachi in Osaka. Rice-field Noda Village in Minami-Kawachi, famous for Kawachi Ondo, merged with neighboring Ōkusa Village to create Tomioka Town, and a junior high school appeared there too. It was still a time when white herons flying from Nintoku's woodland settled in the paddies and pecked at loaches as an everyday sight.

In the single-story room adjoining the north side of Tomioka-Higashi Elementary, Mother warmed herself at the brazier, watched the herons, and sang:

白鷺は小首かしげて二の足踏んで　一足、一足、深くなるよ

“That's a love song, isn't it?” Though only a first-year junior-high boy, I understood astonishingly much about the arts and devices of love and could read the heart of a kouta. I seem to have viewed Kawachi's scenery then with considerable knowingness. Yet the rice fields of old Jōroku were as beautiful as a Southern-school ink painting.

At dusk, bamboo groves could be seen beyond the fields. To their left, the bank of Ōike Pond, rich in plumes of pampas grass, caught the sunlight. The glass windows of the wooden Higashi Elementary glittered. As night descended, countless large dragonflies flew about. When they rested on branches beneath the leaves, freezing moonlight poured onto the school building.

Noda Elementary—now Tomioka-Higashi—had stood amid the rice fields since before the war. Its buildings were wooden and boarded, coated in tar: a two-story U-shaped school that, toward evening, evoked the chilling scene of a vampire howling at the moon. I entered this building one year after the war. The tatami in the sewing room where soldiers had slept was worn to pieces. The staff room held teachers who were returned soldiers. Every day we went into the schoolyard for formation drills.

“Attention!”
“Number off!”
One, two, three, four, five… We shouted at the top of our voices, standing rigidly still. If one's body wavered, a teacher hurried over and delivered a slap. When I came home with my cheek red and swollen, Mother thanked the teacher at the parents' meeting for training me so well. Such were the times.

Tomioka Junior High's predecessor was a new-system school begun in vacant classrooms borrowed from Noda and Ōkusa elementary schools, where militarism had not yet faded. What was democratic education? What was freedom? Did the teachers understand it themselves or not? One said democracy meant that boys and girls at seven should share a seat. He lined boys and girls in bloomers up in the yard and made them hold hands. If they disliked it and fidgeted, he slapped them: “You! You don't understand democracy!” Another teacher had boys and girls wrestle sumo in the sandpit.

There was no bayonet fighting or crawling-advance drill, but the rigid posture of “Attention” continued until elementary-school graduation. From Shōwa 25, when the Korean War began, it was war again. The gramophone was brought into the yard, the Warship March played, and marching-in-formation drills were repeated.

At that time, junior-high pupils, short of classrooms, carried wooden desks and chairs onto the playing field for open-air classes. They looked somehow lonely. I wondered whether we would become like that too. Then in the fields of Ōmino's Eighth District appeared a single-story mortar-finished school building called a “white palace,” with a playing field. This was the present Tomioka Junior High. We entered in its first or second year of use. The oil stain on the floors gave off an unbearably strong smell, but even if one disliked it, one had to study there. Such were those days.

Tomioka Junior High Felt Like a Private School

Tomioka Junior High was newly built, wooden and single-story, finished in mortar. On its western side lay a spacious playing field with a two-hundred-meter circuit. Facing it stood two rows of two long, narrow buildings, like railway cars. The staff room was to the west. When the bell clanged to begin lessons, uniformed boys and girls sat at wooden desks, on wooden chairs. Everything was varnished. Seated facing west, we had sunlight entering from the south-facing windows, screened by thick white curtains.

Japanese: Mr. Nishino and Mr. Morii. Mathematics: 大野早苗 and Mr. Yano. English: 吉田市郎, called “Ūtan,” Mr. Sasaki, and Mr. Wachi. Science: Mr. Nakatsukasa, who came as a trainee and stayed as a full-time teacher, and Mr. Kawakami, returned from North China with the army. Physical education: kind-hearted Mr. Ikeda and 坪井忠治, who made us run 3,500 meters repeatedly. Calligraphy: the calligrapher Mr. Sakabe. Music: 馬庭. Vocational studies: Mr. Nakaji. Social studies: Mr. Mori, “Napoleon,” and Mr. Tanaka. Art: Mr. Ueda. Headmaster: Mr. Takei.

All were passionate teachers in their thirties or forties. Their emotional bonds with pupils were incomparably stronger than those of today's public high-school teachers. There was no anxiety that they would naturally be transferred elsewhere. Tomioka Junior High brimmed with the spirit of a private school: not merely connected to school life, but closely bound to pupils' lives themselves, always spending time together.

Each year had five classes of about forty-five pupils, almost half boys and half girls. Civilization was finally moving from radio to television. Early black-and-white sets scarcely showed a proper picture, and a fourteen-inch set cost two hundred thousand yen. When the price gradually fell to one hundred forty thousand yen—perhaps when I was in my second junior-high year—Father bought one. It became the talk of the town. Twenty visitors came to watch the celebrated bouts between Tochinishiki and Wakanohana and then went home.

That period lasted less than a year. People began buying televisions everywhere. I remember going around Jōroku's houses calling “Watch out for fire!” with clacking wooden blocks, while people watched the Red and White Song Contest.

The Depths of the Heart, Visible Precisely in Blindness

The scene reflected in the eyes may be a physical reality without being the true thing. Even without deception, real things are altered, broken, and destroyed independently of our wishes. As hometown scenery changes completely without regard to our thoughts, we must realize that its sense of reality is also disappearing from everyone's mind.

Thinking back, my own childhood was like blindness: I seemed to see my surroundings, yet they left hardly any impression. This probably has something to do with Father selling our Jōroku birthplace in June of my first high-school year. A child without a home, I went to municipal housing in Sakai and learned cruelly at that moment that my fate was to leave my hometown. A lifetime of wandering, then? If so, let me spend my life composing words. A boy of sixteen came to understand the mind of the priest Saigyō.

It was exactly Chūya's poem 「思えば遠く来たもんだ」. Was I Saisei, or 表棹影? I had no choice but to search, frightened by anxiety and death's approach through my frail constitution.

In The Makioka Sisters, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki describes an upper-town life that even a born Osakan could not write. In Shunkinshō, he reveals the hearts of Dōshōmachi merchants with almost maddening clarity. Encountering Shunkinshō was therefore also a matter concerning myself.

An unforeseen accident or a deliberate act? Shunkin, unfortunately blinded in childhood, and Sasuke, who never ceases to adore her: their strange relationship of mistress and servant. The punctuationless depiction is nothing less than a way of living hidden deep in the heart. Even in a work of words, instrumental music leaks endlessly between the lines. Shunkin's passions overflow too. This is no ordinary power of writing.

Words are signs that stir imagination, but did Tanizaki himself feel a degree of frustration? When a film starring Machiko Kyō was decided upon, they say he was captivated by her seductive beauty and utterly absorbed. I wondered whether I should say such things. An ordinary person might hold back, but in literature one is released from that restraint. The family says Shunkin had no model. Who knows? Shunkin, a product of imagination, is more intense than Kawabata's Matsuko.

Longing above all for her expression, Tanizaki sent two fine films into the world during his lifetime: Shunkin and Sasuke in the early Shōwa years, with the young Kinuyo Tanaka and Kōkichi Takada; and after the war, a film with Machiko Kyō as Shunkin, fully portraying the willful daughter of Osaka's Dōshōmachi. What clung inside Tanizaki and would not leave him as he devoted himself wholeheartedly to their production? What continuing family shackles arose from it?

Our family too had shackles of that kind. I wanted to ask the family and make certain. With those feelings, yesterday I met 百百子, Tanizaki's granddaughter. We have known each other for many years through Mita Bungaku, which Keio Gijuku founded around Tanizaki and Kafū. She is a granddaughter of both the Tanizaki and Satō—Haruo Satō—family lines. She spoke of feelings she had long kept concealed.

I had not asked before solely because I felt one must not inquire into wounds of the heart. Perhaps she spoke because I first told, in my own words, the deeply entangled traditions of my forebears—call them karma, or bonds of fate. People who speak of literature speak of the horror of inherited blood relationships. Sōseki and Dazai, and even Fitzgerald and Shakespeare, whose work may seem unrelated to family history, weave its shadow deeply into their writing. They torment themselves into uttering questions that cannot leave their families at peace. Kawabata's The Izu Dancer is a prime example. The poets Akiko and Tomiko also wish to break with the entanglements of their origins but cannot, entrusting their wounds to poems.

Tanizaki's granddaughter and I spoke in an Asakusa sushi restaurant busy with foreign visitors. I went prepared. 百百子 said she had nothing to tell, yet spoke without concealment about the feelings of the family left behind. If I wrote down every detail here, researchers like private detectives might be delighted and claim it as an achievement. But darkness holds feeling precisely because it is darkness.

What lay deepest in the hearts of the family left behind strangely connects with my own origins too: the bonds by which our generation lives. I can only ask you to open the works in which Tanizaki and Chikamatsu left their portrayals of Naniwa people.

Afterword

Human beings are extremely fragile floating things, tossed by a distorted flow of history. Life is as elusive as floating weeds. Yet life, as something breakable, therefore becomes all the more pitiable, impossible to abandon—indeed, I hate those who abandon it—and something to keep safe and treasure. That is why I wrote many short stories.

“Tensei no Tsubo,” a story of a delicate love between a ceramics critic living in my hometown of Noda Village and an orphan girl raised at a temple, appeared in a magazine in that form. There was a reason Bungeishunjū placed it in its monthly literary magazine Bungakukai, said to be the shortest route to the Akutagawa Prize. Perhaps it was because these lonely figures of a man and a woman seemed so unlike pages flooded with foreign literary currents.

The shape of that love remains as an echo in my heart, unforgettable even now. No—today too, the characters are together by day in this small house containing only a kitchen, two tatami rooms, and a study, tending the garden trees. Yet on this particular day they do the evening meal's work, unfold a round table on the tatami, and eat with lonely but delicate consideration for each other.

They are not husband and wife. A girl too young to be his wife and an aging man eat a poor meal across a low table. The wife he lost in the mountains will not leave the man's heart. Aware of it, the girl quietly says, “You still love her, don't you?” Their conversation continues in fragments.

Mr. Y. at the editorial office must have been deeply caught by the story. He said he had to see the place called Jōroku, and went all the way there specially. That is the world of my Kawachi.

The Nankai Kōya Line runs through unbroken rice fields. After Hagiwara-Tenjin Station it curves slowly right. On the right lie Jōroku's houses. Just before the elementary-school building enters view, one catches a glimpse of my birthplace. Then the announcement sounds—“Kitanoda!”—and the train glides into the station.

This is Tomioka's entrance. The area is the setting of my novella “Kawachi 1945.” If you begin walking from there, you can enter the world of typical Kawachi people, myself included.

Sakunosuke Oda once rented a house in this town for a short time. In Meoto Zenzai he tirelessly depicted the conflicts between Ryūkichi and Chōko, but set them only in Osaka's streets and did not portray Jōroku in Noda Village. Nevertheless, Shirō Toyoda's film Meoto Zenzai became popular. Hisaya Morishige, master of Osaka dialect, played the good-for-nothing 維康柳吉, and Chikage Awashima his caring wife. Near the end, as they walk under one umbrella through snowy Hōzenji Yokocho, unfilial Ryūkichi says the celebrated line, “Old girl, I'm counting on you.” Even we junior-high pupils repeated it.

Mr. Morishige had returned from Manchuria and visited our home with Mitsuko Mori and others, so the whole story belonged to events within our house.

At just that time, the composer Masao Ōno, who stayed briefly in our Jōroku reception room, released “Koisan no Love Call,” sung by Frank Nagai. Masao's elder brother was the mathematics teacher at Tomioka Junior High. I also learned English from this teacher, 大野早苗. Now when I sing “Koisan no Love Call” at karaoke, I cannot stop my tears. No Tokyo person sitting with me knows why I weep as I sing. That is just as it should be.

When this song was sung on television and by people in Tomioka, Father, Mother, and my brother were all living healthily in the Jōroku house where we spent time with the Ōno family. Scenes of those days rise intertwined with the complexities of family life; that is why the tears do not cease.

If the Ōno family embodied an exceptionally refined modernism, how should I express my own family's history? Family history is a bloodline, a distortion, one of the dwelling places of the ordinary world.

Thinking back, the junior-high days when the Ōno family lived with us until their house was rebuilt were not yet ten years after we heard the rescript ending the war.

Summer. Brown cicadas cry in the garden pines. From the same three-valve radio that repeatedly announced “A large formation of B-29s is heading north over the sea east of the Kii Peninsula!” comes the wistful song 「こいさ～ん、こいさ～ん」. The Red and White Song Contest has begun too. Masao goes out to Asahi Broadcasting. His father is absorbed in Japanese painting in the inner room. I, a junior-high pupil, watch Masao's back as he leaves, then gaze at the painting…

One day, more than half a century after that, I write this preface.

November 16, 2020
Seishu Hamano, writer sounding the alarm

Chronology

Years, ages, titles, and biographical statements below follow the original chronology. They have not been recalculated or updated. English renderings of Japanese book titles are descriptive unless an English title is printed in the source.

Shōwa 16 — 1941

Born on March 25 at 245 Jōroku, Noda Village, Minami-Kawachi District, Osaka Prefecture. Real name: 濱野成生. Father: 濱野定雄. Mother: 濱野秋野. Hence the pen name 成秋, formed by placing 秋 after 成. Father ran a company dealing in specialty steel and obtained mining rights to a manganese mine in Gifu, operating a mining business.

Mother came from Takatori, Nara Prefecture, and lived in the official residence of a chief retainer of the Takatori domain. She was the third daughter of the Ishii family. Her great-grandfather was head of the domain school. Whether the family had former-samurai status is unknown, with no record. After the Meiji Restoration, the family living together in the chief retainer's residence converted to Tenrikyo and moved into the missionary's house at the Tosa branch church in Kume, Nara Prefecture. The first preacher, 石井元吉, was Mother's father. Mother 秋野 grew up to become a pharmacist and worked at Ishikawa Clinic in Takatori, formerly a domain physician's practice. Several years later, through an arranged meeting, she married a company president in Osaka.

Her husband 定雄 was born the eldest son of the large landowner 所弥太郎 in Ōno Village, Ibi District, Gifu Prefecture. As the child of a second wife, at seven he was sent, at the suggestion of 初枝, a daughter of the first wife, to be adopted by 濱野清太郎, a large landowner in Nakamozu, Minami-Kawachi District, Osaka. The Hamano family was in Nagasone and was a branch of the Ii family of Hikone, with many heirlooms, including tiered boxes bearing the family crest. Having gained an heir, things seemed secure, but relatives objected to the arrangement, and 定雄 was raised under 清太郎's second wife, しげ. Thus arose the relationships with adoptive father and mother. Even after 成生's birth, complicated family ties continued to bring unending anxiety.

Elder brother 一, read Hajime, was born on March 19, Shōwa 10. His birth mother was punished by her mother-in-law しげ and divorced. While he was still an infant, 秋野 entered the family register as the second wife. The home was then still in Horie, Osaka City, close to the company's headquarters. Under her mother-in-law's instructions, 秋野 raised her stepson as her own. Seeing him become too attached, the mother-in-law announced before him that 秋野 was not his real mother. From then on, brother and mother became estranged. 秋野 continued to suffer her mother-in-law's punishments and returned to her own family, but realized she was pregnant, came back, and gave birth to 成生.

That year a house with a white-walled storehouse had already been purchased as a second home in Jōroku. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. 定雄 ran a trading company specializing in military specialty steel and was a close friend of commerce chief Nobusuke Kishi. Business flourished, but 成生 did not fully enjoy its benefits; even nursing was difficult, and he grew up weak.

Shōwa 19 — 1944 — Age 3

Mother-in-law しげ died of illness at sixty-four. She is said to have taken 秋野's hand and reconciled before dying, but the relationship between 秋野 and brother 一 was not repaired. Shortages grew ever worse, and life was not easy.

Shōwa 20 — 1945 — Age 4

From March, frequent American air raids. Father 定雄's office buildings, headquarters, and factory were all burned down. The family suffered daily B-29 bombing raids and strafing by escort fighters. 成生 entered Ōmino Kindergarten. Strafed, he received lacerations at two places on his head and lay near death on the Tosabori riverbank. Rescued, he recovered in the air-raid shelter beneath the kitchen of the Jōroku house. During an air raid Father's mistress's house burned down, revealing his misconduct. In August, defeat.

Shōwa 21 — 1946 — Age 5

Family relations were tense. Since the city air raids, 成生 had been frail, hovering between life and death with gastrointestinal disorders. Many former employees returned from military service. He received English instruction from the high-school teacher 猪子静子, repatriated from Burma.

Shōwa 22 — 1947 — Age 6

Entered Noda Elementary, later Tomioka-Higashi Elementary. His class teacher was the newly appointed 桂愛子. All grades were excellent. Graduated after receiving honors throughout six years. When 成生, weak at athletics, missed sports day, his teacher worried and came to fetch him. Her affection is unforgettable.

Shōwa 24 — 1949 — Age 8

Class teacher 池野喜和 had no military experience and did not slap pupils. Mothers praised the slapping deputy head, Mr. Kimura, and spoke disparagingly behind Mr. Ikeno's back. When on overnight duty, Mr. Ikeno telephoned and asked him to come and sleep there. Nagashima and Yasumoto were there too. At midnight they patrolled inside the school with bats and felt the school's ghosts. The sewing room, used as barracks during the war, had torn, dirty tatami. They said a new recruit had fled from there to the lavatory and hanged himself.

Shōwa 25 — 1950 — Age 9

The Korean War broke out. Received military drill at Higashi Elementary. Friends included 安本郁夫, 西田毅, 林文也, 内山孝治, 中村俊一, 長島国男, 上口宗弘, 木下辰夫, 中林義男, 諏訪明子, and 小池清子.

Shōwa 26 — 1951 — Age 10

Spent a summer in the care of relatives in Kume and Oka Village, Nara Prefecture. Nearly drowned in the Asuka River. Around this time, the deaths of his maternal grandparents, the eldest son on Mother's side, and his aunt in Oka impressed on his child's heart the impermanence of the human world and the fragility of death. Went with Father to Gifu, to Father's birth family in Kojima Village, Ibi District. Stung by a poisonous creature in a stream, he cried out for Father and was rescued. Perhaps this incident spared him being fostered out in Gifu. Became absorbed in Seishi Yokomizo's detective stories and Gen'ichi Kume's adventure stories in Shōnen Club. Frequently wrote things resembling compositions.

Shōwa 28 — 1953 — Age 12

Entered Tomioka Junior High. Classmates included 林文也, 松岡恒雄, 石倉, 政田良一, 内山孝治, 置田恵子, 大亦郁子, 矢野紀美, and 小林恵. Class teacher: 大野早苗. Became interested in visiting the traces of Sakai-born Yosano Akiko, Sakunosuke Oda who lived in Jōroku, the Shin Kokin Wakashū, and haiku poets Matsuo Bashō and Mukai Kyorai. Visited Rakushisha in Saga, Kyoto, with Father, and also Hōryūji, the Tatsuta River, and Ryōanji. Began writing stories. Interested in photography, became absorbed in camera-making, developing, and printing. Enthusiastic about films, attended Tomioka Theater, Sakai Denkikan, and Shukuin Theater.

Shōwa 29 — 1954 — Age 13

Class teacher 大野早苗's house burned down. Lent the family our Jōroku reception room until rebuilding. The teacher made a photographic printing apparatus by hand for him. Moved by this fine teacherly spirit, he considered teaching himself in the future. The teacher's father, 大野桂遷, was a master of Japanese painting. Lent him the inner room at the Jōroku home and observed his work. Learned dozens of kouta from him simply by listening nearby. The teacher's younger brother, composer Masao Ōno, had a great hit with Frank Nagai's “Koisan no Love Call.”

Shōwa 30 — 1955 — Age 14

Devoted himself to Natsume Sōseki and began reading the trilogy Sanshirō, Sorekara, and Iku Hito (「行く人」 as printed). Perhaps Inside My Glass Doors was around this time too.

Shōwa 31 — 1956 — Age 15

Entered Uenomiya High School, directly affiliated with Chion-in of the Jōdo sect. Did Father intend to make him a priest? There was a promise with board chairman 小林大厳, a gon-daisōjō. In June, the Jōroku birthplace was sold to Mr. Hashimoto (橋下). Most furniture was left with 西岡圭一郎, and the family moved to municipal housing in Enokimotomachi 5-chōme, Sakai. Father suggested entering the priesthood, but he gave an evasive answer and continued at Uenomiya. Went to study English with his English teacher 富山善三郎.

Shōwa 33 — 1958 — Age 17

Read Sōseki's Light and Darkness, Kokoro, To the Spring Equinox and Beyond, and Gubijinsō. Submitted “Yume no Kuni” to a fiction competition in Kō-ichi Course and received an honorable mention. Aimed for Keio Gijuku's humanities program in order to join the Mita literary society. Father built a house in Ōmino's Fourth District, and the family moved in the spring of the third high-school year. Thanks to brother 一, Father's business was doing well. Saw Yasujirō Ozu's Equinox Flower with Mother. The film adaptation of 「源治鶏太」's Santō Jūyaku was a great hit; went twice with Father to Tomioka Theater to see it. The author name is retained in the form printed in the source.

Shōwa 34 — 1959 — Age 18

Entered Keio University's Faculty of Letters and joined the voluntary student Literary Research Society. Greatly stimulated by contemporaries Gōzō Yoshimasu (poet), 合田千恵子 (poet), Takahiko Okada (art criticism), Teruo Inoue (head of the New York academy), 山口佳巳 (poet), and Masako Yamaguchi (head of the Yomiuri Shimbun's Paris bureau). Parentheses describe their later careers as given in the source.

Read nearly four hundred literary books that year: Kenzaburō Ōe, Shūsaku Endō, Shōtarō Yasuoka, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yosano Akiko, Raymond Radiguet, Yukio Mishima, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Yasunari Kawabata, 「植田秋声」, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Descartes, Kant, Goethe, and others. Also many literary films. Lodged at 2323 Jiyūgaoka, later at 29 Kitayachō, Shibuya Ward. Frequented Kanda's secondhand-book district and the office of French-literature associate professor 白井浩二.

Published “Shakkatsu” in the coterie magazine Keio Bungei. At the request of 永井亘 of Mita Bungaku, undertook editorial-office errands. Professor Yoshinosuke Ōhashi instructed him to read Anderson and Henry James; visited the professor's Musashiseki home. Frequently absent from classes. Running out of book money, worked part-time as a singer at the Showboat cabaret in Shinbashi and received instruction from Dick Mine.

Shōwa 35 — 1960 — Age 19

The year of the 1960 Security Treaty protests. Schools everywhere held strikes. 成生 formed ranks in Shimizudani Park and marched in a demonstration toward the Diet. “Down with Kishi!” rang throughout Japan. On June 15, entered the Diet grounds. Detained by police, admonished in the Metropolitan Police chief's office, and returned to his lodgings. Learned it was Father's instruction. Broke relations with Father for several months, then reconciled. Immersed in literary books.

Shōwa 38 — 1963 — Age 22

Graduated from Keio's English Literature Department. Appointed an English teacher at Tōhō Boys' High School in Kunitachi, Tokyo. On the first day, opposed a plan to cut down the “Miyabayashi” woodland for a school extension. With the support of all staff, the building-model plan was withdrawn because of this statement. The woodland still survives. Perhaps this was thanks to warm-hearted headmaster 児玉実雄. Continued a good lifelong relationship with him.

Shōwa 41 — 1966 — Age 25

Resigned to study in America. Anti-Vietnam-War campus unrest spread across the United States, preventing the study abroad. Attended Keio's foreign-language program. Joined a Dutch trading company and trained in practical English.

Shōwa 42 — 1967 — Age 26

Part-time lecturer at Kōsei Gakuen Girls' High School. Received intensive lessons in life from Headmaster Amemiya and Deputy Head Esumi. Many teachers were admirable people, but anxiety grew that he would become forever removed from scholarship. Continued creative writing and literary research.

Shōwa 44 — 1969 — Age 28

Head of English, head of year, and deputy academic-affairs head at the high school attached to Joshibi University of Art and Design. Overwhelmed by school duties. Around this time, works began appearing in literary magazines.

Shōwa 47 — 1972 — Age 31

Full-time lecturer in Tsurumi University's Faculty of Letters, teaching American literature. Around this period, presented studies of Jewish writers, including Updike, Bellow, and Malamud, at the American Literature Society. Published the critical essay “A Tale of a Certain Situation: The Case of Saul Bellow” in Mita Bungaku's September issue, and wrote in Waseda Bungaku, Umi (Chūōkōron-sha), and Bungakukai (Bungeishunjū), including studies of Cheever, Barthelme, and Vonnegut. Participated in lectures and symposia at the University of Tokyo, Rikkyo, Keio, and elsewhere. Also published short stories.

Shōwa 49 — 1974 — Age 33

Published the essay “Cone of Light” in the November issue of Mita Bungaku.

Shōwa 50 — 1975 — Age 34

Full-time lecturer in Tohoku University's College of General Education.

Shōwa 52 — 1977 — Age 36

Published “An Archaeology of Ideas in an Age of Fragments: The Debris of Consciousness in American Fiction” in the May issue of Waseda Bungaku.

Shōwa 53 — 1978 — Age 37

Passed the selection examination for an ACLS special research fellowship and went to the State University of New York at Buffalo. Discussed postmodern American literature with Professor Leslie A. Fiedler once a week, serializing the English discussions in Kenkyūsha's Eigo Seinen. At the same time, at the request of Chūōkōron-sha's monthly literary magazine Umi, produced a series of conversations with postmodern writers. Interviewees included Vonnegut, Federman, and 「ま®マッド」, the last name printed in this corrupted form in the source.

Shōwa 54 — 1979 — Age 38

Published the university textbook After Civilization, What? with Yumi Shobō. The book predicted great transformations with the emergence of computers. Later used it as a part-time lecturer at Waseda and Hitotsubashi. Students included 橋下徹 and 三木谷浩二, whom he unexpectedly influenced greatly. Published a conversation with American writer Barthelme in Umi, and also an essay on critic Klinkowitz there.

Shōwa 56 — 1981 — Age 40

Published “Dark River” in the February issue of Umi (Chūōkōron-sha), later collected in The Heart Is a Lonely Traveler. Co-edited and co-wrote An Outline History of American Literature, published by Kinseido. Central to its planning, writing, and editing. Eighteen contributors in all, including Tohoku University professors; 440 pages.

Shōwa 58 — 1983 — Age 42

Established a graduate program in the English Language and Literature Department of Meisei University's Faculty of Humanities in Hino, Tokyo. Moved from Tohoku University with full doctoral-supervision qualifications for both earlier and later doctoral stages. Published English Vocabulary for the Passing Line with Kenkyūsha. Though a university-entrance reference book, it included study methods and became a million-seller. Began lecturing in Waseda's School of Political Science and Economics. Won the affection of students who had passed using the book.

Heisei 7 — 1995 — Age 55

Became president of the Japan Malamud Society. First undertaking: the co-edited America's Counterculture (Osaka Kyōiku Tosho), on America during the anti-Vietnam-War movement of the 1960s. Widely read and discussed.

Heisei 10 — 1998 — Age 58

Published America Seen through Film and Literature with Kinokuniya, serving as overall editorial adviser in his capacity as president of the Japan Malamud Society. Published the edited Minorities in American Film and Literature with Osaka Kyōiku Tosho, supervising it as the society's president.

Heisei 12 — 2000 — Age 60

Published Jewish American Life, comparing New York Jews and Japanese Americans: a history of American immigration.

Heisei 13 — 2001 — Age 61

Published the following five literary volumes through 日本優良図書出版会, all short-story collections or novellas:

• Volume 1, the standalone novella Father's Lodging, first appearing in the monthly Chishiki.
• The Season of Parting, a short-story collection: the spring part, “Dance of the Cedars,” set at Mount Miwa in Nara, first in Chishiki; the summer part, “Tensei no Tsubo,” set in Kawachi, first in Bungakukai; the autumn part, “Snow in the Wilderness,” first in Chishiki; the winter part, “Nobitaki,” set in the City of Trees, first in Mita Bungaku.
• Kamagure, newly written for publication.
• Young People, the Land of Asuka, a novella first in Mita Bungaku.
• The Heart Is a Lonely Traveler, a short-story collection, first appearances in Chishiki, Mita Bungaku, Umi, and elsewhere.

Heisei 14 — 2002 — Age 62

Published The Family in Japanese and American Film and Literature and How Japanese and American Film and Literature Viewed War. The source names 日本優良図書出版会 and Kinseido in this publication statement. Served as planning editor-in-chief, with nineteen authors besides himself. The subtitle was “War That Must Be Written About for Young People.” Supervised by Hitotsubashi emeritus professor 斎藤忠利.

In July, published The Pleasure of Reading Japanese Aloud with Graph-sha. It became a bestseller. Twenty-five principal writers were included.

Heisei 16 — 2004 — Age 64

April 1: first edition of Practical English Conversation Spoken Aloud; second printing the next month. Covered practical English idioms not taught in school. Well received and adopted across faculties at many universities, beginning with 「碧山学院」, as named in the source.

In July, published the novel The Absurd Juvenile Law with Chūōkōron-Shinsha. The protagonist, a lawyer and guardian of the law, suffers from the standpoint of victims denied a right of revenge as he judges the many juvenile crimes arising from shortcomings in juvenile law.

Heisei 17 — 2005 — Age 65

Following Japan and North Korea: If They Went to War, wrote the novel Japan's Next War, warning of the harm to Japan from being led into war.

Heisei 18 — 2006 — Age 66

August 10: published Japan's Next War with Goma Books. Using the Koizumi Cabinet as its model and the head of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau as protagonist, it imagines the process by which Japan, provoked by a foreign group that initiates war, suffers even a nuclear attack.

September 10: Goma Books issued Chūkō's Japan and North Korea: If They Went to War in paperback, in two volumes. Third printing on October 16.

Heisei 19 — 2007 — Age 67

April 15: acquired publication rights to Kenkyūsha's English Vocabulary for the Passing Line and published it with Osaka Kyōiku Tosho exclusively for the newly established Power Course at his alma mater, Uenomiya High School. Issued by the Uenomiya Academic and Cultural Promotion Association.

Heisei 20 — 2008 — Age 68

December 20: first edition of Marriage License, published by Sekai Bunka-sha. Written with his own reflection and an intention to admonish the contemporary tendency for marriage to be delayed into people's thirties, for men and women to cherish self-centered lives, disregard their parents' worries, and neglect the lives of successors and the next generation. Managing director Uchida was favorable, but the editor and others within the company tended to exclude Keio graduates. Sales were entirely neglected, resulting in little market presence.

Heisei 21 — 2009 — Age 69

January 1: published Learning Rapid Study Methods from Jewish People with Graph-sha. Using examples of how Eastern European and Russian Jews who immigrated to New York devised ways to gain time, study independently, and succeed, and drawing on his own experiences, it explained methods of study. It became a bestseller.

Graph-sha began suffering repeated financial failures around this time. Despite this book's strong bestseller sales, the company went bankrupt, and royalties were paid only through the third printing. After bankruptcy, returned copies were sent in place of royalties. Even now dozens of copies remain in cartons in the Hayama library. Yet I ask you of later generations, who inherit my blood and DNA, to cherish this book down through the generations and become successful. Though the title says to learn from Jewish people, in fact it argues that you should use as lessons the results of my own self-devised study during my formative years. Please learn from it.

March 20: the English-literature graduate program in the Faculty of Humanities at Japan Women's University, where I worked, issued a commemorative number for Professor 濱野成生's retirement. In the same academic year, my final lecture was held in the university's Naruse Memorial Auditorium. My service fell one year short of the prescribed period, so I was not eligible for the title of professor emeritus. As a sign of trust and honor, the university authorities instead made the founder's memorial auditorium available exclusively for me. The president and board chairman attended, and emeritus professors from my alma mater Keio and from Waseda also attended and offered congratulations. These events formed a fitting conclusion to my life as a professor.

Heisei 22 — 2010 — Age 70

Became a full-time professor in the graduate school of Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Since Heisei 1, I had served in its literary graduate program as a professor with 「〇合」 qualification, commuting every week by Shinkansen, but my monthly pay was about seventy thousand yen. Such efforts were unrewarded. Defamation appeared online asking why I should be paid twelve million yen a year, and campaigns to exclude me never ceased. The authorities, failing to appreciate my sincerity, seemed to have been brought down by such people. Despite my years of supporting graduate students in English, not even a farewell gathering of thanks came from the faculty council. In Heisei 27 it all ended. The board chairman nevertheless treated me as a visiting professor. A warm friendship.

Subsequent activities in newspapers, television, magazines, and other fields are too varied and extensive, so all are omitted here.