SHE WANTED TO CHOOSE a train that would arrive late at night. So Koda Yukiko spent the day just wandering around the town of Tsuruga, after leaving the repatriation center where she had spent the last three days. She had parted from the other sixty or so women who had also returned to Japan from overseas and had completed several days of physical examinations. She found a house near the customs warehouse that had a small general store in it and some rooms for rent. There, Yukiko was able to stretch out by herself on the tatami-covered floor, something she...

YUKIKO CHANGED HER MIND. She would go straight to Tokyo and call on Iba. Unless the house had been burned out in the firebombing, she would stay at Iba’s until she was able to see Tomioka. Although she had nothing but unpleasant memories of Iba, there was nowhere else to go. Since she had not sent word to Shizuoka, her family would not be expecting her.

Yukiko left Tsuruga on the late-night train. On the platform, she spotted two men who had been with her on the boat, but Yukiko deliberately distanced herself from them and boarded a car at...

KODA YUKIKO HAD ARRIVED in the town of Dalat in French Indochina in the second half of October 1943. The typists assigned to the team of the engineer Mogi, who was with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, had first arrived at Haiphong in Vietnam. Mogi had been dispatched by the army to inspect forestry conditions in French Indochina. Recruiting typists who worked at the same ministry, he’d assigned one to each official in the group. There had been five candidates, one of them Yukiko.

After arriving at Haiphong in a hospital ship, they had gone on to Hanoi in...

AT DAWN, YUKIKO HAD A DREAM about Sugio. Perhaps because she had come all this way by herself, Yukiko felt a curious yearning for the warmth of a human body. She felt a loneliness like that of slipping down into hell. Although she had come this far, she wanted desperately to go back to Japan. She could not stop thinking of the busy way that Sugio would pant for breath as he stuffed the handkerchief in her mouth. Although all along she’d thought that she detested Sugio, suddenly, at this distance, he had started to seem dear to her. It...

YUKIKO, PERHAPS BECAUSE she was not used to this kind of travel, was completely exhausted. She also had inexplicable bouts of fever, which recurred several times a day. They were to stay in Saigon for five days. Here again, army procedures took a good deal of time. There was no leisure to explore the city by oneself. At Saigon, they stayed in army-designated quarters that, for the first time since Haiphong, were suited to their subordinate status. On the fourth day, Shinonoi Haruko, accompanied by a man who worked in the Army Information Section, went to lodgings at her workplace....

SIXTY KILOMETERS FROM DALAT, when they had reached a village called Prenh, the winding road began to ascend the long slope of the Ranbean highlands. The truck gunned its engines as it made the twisting ascent. Although it was evening, every now and then a white peacock would suddenly fly up from the roadside shadow of the trees, startling everyone.

Evening mist trailed across the highland. Here and there, lines of early flowering cherry trees brushed against the truck. The terraced forests were dotted with large villa-style structures. There were villas where the peony-colored bougainvillea grew profusely and others where...

AT DAWN, YUKIKO LAY LISTENING to the mountain breeze blowing through the pines. She had been dreaming a moment before that she was playing tennis with that same man on a wide grassy lawn. It had been a sweet dream, but when she tried to remember more of it, she lost the thread. In any case, he would probably be leaving here soon . . . And yet she took pleasure in the thought of this chance encounter of two people who had been brought together twice under the same roof, as if blown there by the wind. Before going...

IN THE EVENING OF THE SECOND DAY, Section Chief Makita left on an urgent business trip that would take him to Saigon and Phnom Penh for about ten days. It happened that the old man Seya was leaving to go back, so the two of them left together in the same truck. Mogi and Kuroi set out with an Annamese interpreter to survey their district. Tomioka and Yukiko were the only ones remaining behind. Tomioka had the best room—facing east midway down the corridor on the second floor. Yukiko had a curiously bleak feeling about Tomioka, the man who...

TIME PASSED, AND STILL Yukiko didn’t come back. Tomioka dozed in the draft from the fan.

Kano turned the fan off. He quietly left the dining room and went outside to look for her. From the dense darkness of a row of early flowering cherry trees came the cry of a crow. The air was moist, as if all movement had stopped. A faint light flickered among the trees. Right beneath the forestry office, there was a scraggly-looking house built in the style of a Chinese merchant villa. Apparently no one had lived there for some time. The garden was...

TOMIOKA WAS FEELING BORED, so he said good night to Kano outside the dining room and hurried upstairs. According to the luminous dial of his watch, it was well past eleven o’clock. When he entered his room, the maid Niu was folding up his laundry and putting it away on the shelves. She was tidying up the room, with her usual sluggish movements. Somehow watching her at work gave him a feeling of unbearable loneliness, and he went down the back stairs to the specimen room. He turned on the light and sat down in a chair made of logs....

“BONJOUR...”

He woke to the sound of Marie greeting someone on the landing downstairs. Lifting his heavy head from the pillow, Tomioka looked at his wristwatch, and saw that it said nine o’clock. So that’s what time it is, he thought, slowly sitting up in bed and smoking a cigarette. His head throbbed. What should he do? His body seemed to have no desire to move. Everything felt vague. He could hear little birds chirping. When he slowly slid the window open, the clear upland sky and the greenery everywhere below reflected each other in a remarkable harmony. The air...

THERE WAS A FEELING OF FREEDOM in walking along through the forest like this, even though all around them were dense stands of giant rare deciduous and evergreen trees. Sweetish, sticky pollen dust hung thick in the air. There was also a suffocating feeling in the way they were walking along without speaking. Unseen airplanes droned overhead. Forested land surrounded the royal tomb district. Towering kacha pines and Chinese black pines grew together in the forest. At the very end of this forested area, a zone of twelve or thirteen hectares devoted to kacha pines began. Charcoal-burning ovens stood outside...

THE RAIN HAD BECOME A DOWNPOUR.

The sound of the rain coursing along the eaves became as loud as a waterfall. Yukiko was recalled to reality. She was not able to fall asleep. Brightly colored memories of Indochina, like scenes on a revolving lantern, appeared and disappeared in her mind. There was a sharp late-night chill, and she was cold with just one blanket. Although her body was heavy and tired, she also felt keyed up. She lay with her eyes open in the dark, listening to the sound of the violent rain, overwhelmed by a loneliness against which there...

AS HE CONTINUED TO DRINK THE SAKE, Tomioka’s mood grew brighter. He was freed from the troublesome tangle of feelings he had had before, and he regained the nerve to plunge into the same dangerous relationship. Even while he indulged in fantasies that were far removed from the messy reality of such things as his household or the matter of Koda Yukiko, the human core of loneliness within him made him want to stifle these thoughts and take in his arms the woman who lay weeping by his side. When he had come back to Japan, he had continued to...

THE AFTERNOON OF THE NEXT DAY, Yukiko went back, alone, to Iba’s house in Saginomiya.

Although they had not exchanged any firm promises, Tomioka had told Yukiko that even if they did live together, things would not go well unless they waited for a while.

So it can’t be helped, Yukiko thought. Tomioka had said that, at any rate, he would soon find her a place to stay and bring her a good sum of money as well. She could of course see that these were makeshift solutions, but she had no choice but to believe him.

She had parted...

ALTHOUGH TOMIOKA DID THINK about Yukiko for two or three days, he quickly began to forget about finding a place for her or raising some money for her. Rather than trying to help her, he was more inclined now to simply break off the relationship. These chance encounters were difficult to the point of suffocation. He prayed that she would simply decide to go her own way.

Tomioka was trying to launch a venture with an acquaintance in the lumber business, involving buying up lumber wholesale in the mountains. They had been planning to set off quite soon for the...

ABOUT FOUR DAYS LATER, Iba unexpectedly returned to Tokyo.

Yukiko had been on her way out when she saw him coming along the alley, walking purposefully. At first she thought that it was not Iba, but his older brother. Iba seemed to be surprised to see her as well.

“Oh, is that you, Yuki-chan?”

Yukiko blushed, with the suddenness of it all.

“When did you come back? Why didn’t you go back to Shizuoka first? So it is you, after all.”

Iba had aged tremendously in the four years since she had last seen him. Even the expression on his...

TOMIOKA’S TRIP TO NAGANO was put off. The talks at Tadokoro’s place were going nowhere. Unless one moved quickly, market conditions kept changing so fast that it became too late to act. Rumors were flying about that the currency was going to be completely revalued. Tomioka wanted to order large quantities of lumber right now. Hearing that the sale of paper on the black market was roaring these days, he wanted to have a hand in that also. But when he was thrown out into the world on his own, he realized his own powerlessness. Everyone might look as if...

UNABLE TO CONTINUE PAYING the hotel bill in Ikebukuro, Yukiko drifted back to the Iba house in Saginomiya. Iba, however, who had returned to Shizuoka, had sent word that he would be moving back to Tokyo in two or three days. The six-mat tearoom and the four-and-a-half-mat reception room had been emptied for him. Although it was called a “reception room,” the roof consisted only of red tiles, and the tatami in the room was worn smooth. There was neither a cupboard nor an ornamental alcove.

Yukiko stayed there for one more night. Iba had left a letter for her....

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, the foreigner came to see her again. He entered the low-ceilinged shed, toting a green Boston bag. He opened it up and pulled out a series of gifts one by one, talking rapidly the whole time. He set out a big pillow, a heavy little box, rations, and candy. The little box was a battery-powered radio. When he turned the dial, sweet dance music flowed out. Putting the little radio to her ear, Yukiko showed a childlike happiness. It seemed to her that a new transcendental fate flowed out from the tone color of the music. True,...

TOMIOKA RETURNED HOME, but he could not get the disagreeable parting with Yukiko out of his mind. Apparently Kuniko had stayed up late, packing. If he had to sell the house in which they had lived so long, it would have been better for it to have burned down. It would have been a refreshing, clean break, Tomioka thought.

Everything that had constituted his familiar surroundings was vanishing. For a person improvising his life from day to day, even this much family was oppressive and suffocating. Yukiko’s way of living, on the other hand, was enviable. Yet it also seemed...

TOMIOKA WANTED TO MEET YUKIKO one more time, so he sent her a letter by special delivery. He didn’t want to meet at her place. He had no desire to sit there again, feeling intimidated. He asked her to meet at the Yotsuya-mitsuke railway station, letting her know the day and time.

The day, when it did arrive, was rainy. Christmas also had passed. But people didn’t seem to mind the rain, perhaps because they were busy getting ready for the New Year’s holiday.

Tomioka waited at the station for about ten minutes. People of every social class busily came...

IN SHIBUYA, they went into a Chinese restaurant under the girders of the railway overpass. They sat down facing each other, alongside a charcoal briquette hibachi. The blue flames gave out puffs of air through the lotus-hole vent. In a corner of the empty room, where there were no other customers, three waitresses in shabby white coats stood idly waiting.

Yukiko held her hands over the hibachi and set her muffler on the wire netting to dry.

The waitress came by to take their order, and Tomioka asked for chow mein.

“We’d like a bottle of sake as well,” he...

TOMIOKA WAS RATHER DRUNK. For the first time in so long, his heart felt at ease and liberated. Leaning against the alcove post, he sang in Annamese:

Your love and my love

That first day only, were real

Your eyes were true eyes

My eyes, too, that day only

That hour only, were true eyes

Now, both yours and mine

Are eyes of doubt

It was a popular folk song. Yukiko was becoming rather drunk too. As she followed the dimly remembered song, she felt a deep longing for the life they had led in Dalat.

Yukiko stretched out a...

TOMIOKA AND YUKIKO whiled away two days in Ikaho. It rained on both days. As might be expected, on New Year’s Eve there were no other guests. The large inn was hushed and deserted. Despite their leisure, Tomioka was unable to come to a better understanding of anything or to make a clear decision.

He felt a deep self-distrust, a distrust he suspected was probably shared by everyone who had returned from the war efforts around the world. However, the country as a whole was so small and so densely populated that each person simply responded to the situation by...

ULTIMATELY, THERE WERE TWO STYLES, Tomioka thought: to die in a moment of intense pleasure, or to die in a moment of despair. The way of despair seemed to him like a pretense for the world’s benefit. Basically, if someone did choose death, for whatever reason, there was in fact no despair at all in that person’s mind.

Beneath the quilt next to him, Yukiko seemed to be having terrible dreams. He listened to her moaning for a while, and then, unable to bear it any longer, he groped about for the ashtray, stubbed out his cigarette, and switched on...

THREE HUNDRED FIFTY or sixty years ago, many Japanese had lived in Heio. They had come and gone in great numbers, in the ships licensed by the shogunate of the day. They brought red sandalwood, ebony, aloes, cinnamon, and the like to Japan. But later there would be many who were unable to return to Japan because of Japan’s new closed-door policy. These people assimilated with the natives of Heio. The tombstones in the cemetery included some with epitaphs, such as “Here Lies Tarobei Tanaka.” Yukiko thought that the spirits of the Japanese people centuries ago who had drifted like...

TOMIOKA WENT DOWN the stone stairs and emerged into the narrow street that was lined with shooting galleries and cafés. Women in fur coats were window-shopping the souvenir stores. Tomioka was cold in only his padded kimono, but he went along the streets, searching for a jeweler’s. Next to a bus stop was a place that looked like a bar. A woman wearing scarlet rouge called out to Tomioka, “Hello; come on in here.” Thinking that she was likely to know the area, Tomioka briskly approached her and went inside. The cramped bar was inside a flimsy sort of house...

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE INN, Yukiko was at the kotatsu, buffing her nails with her handkerchief. Seen from behind, her figure suddenly seemed forlorn. Although the proprietor of the bar had told him that everything was due to fate, the word came home painfully to him only now. It seemed insane that until the previous day, he had fantasized about dying with this woman. Suddenly he had the feeling that suicide was out of the question. As if getting rid of the watch was a turning point in his own fate, his feelings had gradually, with the help of...

STANDING ON THE DIRT FLOOR at the foot of the dusky stairs, Tomioka abruptly embraced Seiko. Seiko pressed close to Tomioka, almost without breathing, and let him do whatever he wanted. But just as she was responding to his kisses, they suddenly heard Yukiko laugh loudly upstairs, and Tomioka let go. Seiko silently went over to the back entrance of the shop. “It’s dark, so mind your step,” she said. Tomioka grabbed Seiko again, around the waist. But she shook off his hands and went down the narrow stone stairs. The surroundings were dark, and a lamp shed a feeble...

FOR THREE DAYS OR SO, Tomioka and Yukiko stayed on at the inn. But Yukiko began to press for their return to Tokyo. With a woman’s intuition, she had somehow begun to have a reaction against Seiko. On the evening before they did in fact leave Ikaho, at the farewell party, the proprietor was once more tricked into drinking too much, but this time Yukiko drank sparingly. Her deep drinking on the first night had left her with a permanent headache and a heavy feeling in her stomach. Although Seiko poured out the sake with a liberal hand, Yukiko, stealthily...

THE TWO RETURNED TO TOKYO on the evening of the fifth. Feeling even more depressed than when she’d left Tokyo, Yukiko returned to her hideaway with Tomioka. When she went to the main house to wish a happy New Year to the kitchenware dealer’s family, the proprietress looked displeased—no doubt because Yukiko had been away for so many days. She felt almost like an intruder in someone else’s house as she opened the lock of the shed. Turning on the electricity, which had just been set up, she put the plug into the socket and fiddled with the switch...

TOMIOKA HAD ALREADY drunk most of the two liters of sake.

“You used to drink a lot of sherry in Dalat.”

Yukiko, finishing the rice, put some more coffee on and drank it. Observing Tomioka, who, as he drank his sake, was talking about whatever he felt like, by himself, Yukiko was flabbergasted that he had nearly emptied the large bottle. Perhaps the sake had become an anesthetic for him. No matter what kind of good work he got into, if he drank like this every day, he was not going to make more than a meager living. Yukiko was...

ON THE DAY OF THE FESTIVAL of Seven Herbs, Yukiko did not after all go to the Ibas. Once Tomioka had gone back home, Yukiko holed up in the shed for four or five days. She didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. She sent postcards to Seiko in Ikaho, as well as one to the place in Yokohama where Kano was said to be staying. In the card to Seiko, Yukiko deliberately sent greetings from her “husband.” It was an interesting prank for Yukiko to see what kind of reaction she would get from Seiko in her return...

“MY MOTHER ALSO is out at work, so I can’t even offer you any tea. On the other hand, this way, you won’t catch what I have, so it may be for the best.”

Kano gave a wry smile. Now and then he would cough violently, shaking his head.

“Shouldn’t you keep yourself from getting a chill?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have any energy left anyway. The only thing I can try to do is keep from being a nuisance to my mother and my brother. I’m determined to show my gratitude by not being a burden to others....

AROUND A WEEK LATER, at the end of a letter from Kano thanking Yukiko for visiting, he had written this verse, as a postscript. The words branded themselves on Yukiko’s heart. But she did not answer the letter.

After that, there was no word from Tomioka. It was strange to her, looking back on it, that when Tomioka had suggested suicide at Ikaho, she had felt such timidity.

The encounter with Shinonoi Haruko, also, had left her empty. But she could not drift along like this forever. She had received notice from the owner that she was to kindly vacate...

AT THE END OF FEBRUARY, Yukiko returned once to Shizuoka to see her relatives, but she quickly came back to Tokyo. She moved out of the shack in Ikebukuro and, on Shinonoi Haruko’s recommendation, she rented a room on the second floor of the home of a tinsmith in Takadanobaba. She had not seen Tomioka for a long time. Although it was near the station and the rumbling of the trains reached her ears, Yukiko liked the place because no deposit was required and the rent was a thousand yen a month. Carting the wicker suitcase and the bedding she’d...

THE SECOND FLOOR had a three-mat room and a four-and-a-half mat room. The three-mat room was the bedroom of the tinsmith’s three children. In the larger room there was a three-foot wall cupboard with a hinged door. The wall was made of composition board of compressed sawdust. A portable clay cooking stove and the ration of charcoal were stored in the alcove of the bay window. That is where Yukiko did her cooking. Beneath the bay window was a vacant lot where stalks of Indian corn grew tall. Yukiko was at more and more of a loss as to how...

YUKIKO’S COLOR WAS BAD. Looking at her face, Tomioka took out a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. He ordered two soda waters. Yukiko, leaning heavily against the wall, closed her eyes. She had no energy to think of anything. And yet, a certain day in Ranbean, when she had been standing on the white diving board at the lake, floated up before her like a mirage. Tomioka was swimming in the dusky lake. She could hear the sounds of a noisy game of rugby being played in a nearby field. If she sat absolutely still, her exhaustion was...

ABOUT TEN DAYS HAD PASSED since Yukiko parted from Tomioka. She decided to go to a small gynecology clinic in the neighborhood and have herself examined. It seemed that an abortion would cost at least five or six thousand yen. Yukiko became angrier and angrier as the days wore on. If this was any indication, then she was not going to have any help with the baby either.

Was she really going to have a child by a shallow-hearted man like that? Her feelings turned bitter, and she wound up telling Iba everything. If she could just get rid of...

ON THE DAY SHE FINALLY left the hospital, Yukiko, while paying the bill at the office, happened to see a newspaper in the waiting room. A little item in it caught her eye.

At 10:40 p.m. on the 12th, at XX address in North Shinagawa of Shinagawa Ward, Mukai Seikichi, 48, formerly a restaurateur in Iikura, summoned his common-law wife, Tani Seiko, 21, to his room, and strangled her with a hand towel. After committing the crime, he immediately turned himself in at the Daiba police booth. According to the Shinagawa police station, Mukai, while operating a bar in the...

BUT TWO WEEKS PASSED, and Tomioka still had not come.

His lack of desire to see Yukiko, who was the person with whom he could talk the most freely, was not because of laziness. He was occupied with the court case of Mukai Seikichi, and he needed to help out in the matter of a lawyer. Mukai had no relatives to help, and Tomioka felt a sense of duty. At least, by helping Mukai he could make amends to Seiko. Meanwhile, he was struck by the calm demeanor of this man who had actually killed a woman. Was sexual passion...

THREE WEEKS HAD PASSED, and still Tomioka had not come, so Yukiko had made up her mind, despite the rain, to go see him. Observing Tomioka’s expression when he opened the door, Yukiko just knew that no matter what efforts she might make, the affair with Tomioka would be over today.

“It must have been quite an ordeal for you.”

Tomioka, pulling together the front of his worn-out yukata and sitting down by the window, did his best to turn a smiling face toward Yukiko. “It was terrible. It must have been terrible for you too? Is it all right...

WHEN EVENING FELL, the rain grew all the more violent. Tomioka made his pen fly across the page.

The jurisdiction of the Mountain Forestry District of the Dalat region where I was stationed encompassed 15,700 cubic meters of kacha pines. On the army’s orders, we forestry employees, in the rapid development of the resources, embarked on a course of rather reckless deforestation.

Even the faces of the various army officers at that time were fading away from Tomioka’s memory.

“What was the name of the last station on the line from Dalat?” Tomioka suddenly asked Yukiko.

So that’s the kind...

THE NEXT MORNING, when Tomioka woke up, Yukiko was putting on her makeup at Seiko’s small dressing stand. The rain had completely cleared, and the sky was crystal clear and blue.

Tomioka, lying in bed, watched Yukiko. He felt as though he were being dragged into a swamp.

Yukiko was using Seiko’s powder and puff. He was put off by her lack of respect for the dead. But on second thought, wasn’t he actually the one who was the most callous person in this situation? The Yukiko reflected in the dressing stand mirror was thin to the point of emaciation....

IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR THE VOICES of people praying, which sounded a bit like animals howling in the mountains, the entryway would have seemed that of a small, country hospital. As soon as Otsu Shimo saw Yukiko, she immediately stood up and came over to her.

“Welcome. The Teacher has been waiting impatiently for you.” Otsu Shimo took a new pair of slippers from the sandal box and placed them before Yukiko. Shimo’s demeanor was placid, and her expression virtuous.

“You certainly seem at home here,” Yukiko said, putting on the slippers.

Shimo, displaying a strange pride like that...

TOMIOKA, ON MUKAI’S BEHALF, visited a lawyer. Unless he did what he could to help the man legally, there would be no way to make amends to Seiko. Tomioka felt only a terrible indifference toward Yukiko, as if she were an absolute and total stranger. Apparently Yukiko was devoting herself lately to some religious cult. Tomioka thought that was just as well. There were no indications that Tomioka would ever leave this room, with its memories of himself and Seiko. Every day, he lolled about in bed or worked on his manuscript for the agricultural journal. The magazine occasionally sent...

THROUGH THE FALL, Yukiko managed the accounts section of the Great Sunshine Religion. Behind the scenes of the religion, indescribable confusion prevailed. The Founder, Narimune Senzo, was nothing short of a miser when it came to decisions about expenses. He was always having violent quarrels about money with Iba. Yukiko observed the behavior of these two closely and did not neglect to squirrel away some money for herself.

Both Senzo and Iba were always saying that money was everything in life. Yukiko even commented cynically at times that it was not the Great Sunshine Religion but the Great Money Religion....

“A DISCOURSE ON LACQUER” finally brought in some money, which meant that Tomioka was just able to eke out a living. After paying a little of the back rent for his room, he was able to live on the rest of the money for about two months. He turned his hand, by fits and starts, to writing “Memories of a Certain Forestry Technician,” which he hoped the same agricultural journal would take. His main intention was to write about his nostalgia for the forests of the south. Although he had compiled many research notes about his work in French Indochina,...

WINTER ARRIVED.

Tomioka, in the midst of his poverty, had written almost five hundred pages of “Memories of a Certain Forestry Technician.” But it came to nothing. Told that because of stringent conditions in the publishing world, the book could not be published at the present time, Tomioka lost hope. He felt as if he were standing at the head of a steep slope and about to tumble down it at any minute. He could not sustain a life in which there was no stability. Tomioka tried going to employment agencies and visiting friends from his days at the Ministry...

THE CLOCK CHIMED TWELVE. Tomioka had the water run for his morning bath. He felt liberated from a poverty-stricken life in which he had not even had a bath for five or six days. The small tub lined with cobalt tiles was filled to the brim. While washing himself off with a white cake of foreign soap, Tomioka felt pity for his wife, who had been emaciated when she died. Looking out of the little window at the falling snow, Tomioka felt he was seeing a cross-section of human society and that it was vast and threatening indeed. His heart...

AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE RITES for Kuniko, Tomioka stayed five days or so in Urawa. When the funeral was finally over, he felt relieved, as if he had shed a heavy burden. He had sold off Kuniko’s bedding and personal articles to a secondhand dealer and so had got rid of all his memories of her. For Tomioka, his wife, Kuniko, had been a stranger for some time. His memories about Seiko were painful, but his only feeling about Kuniko was a refreshing sense of relief. At the same time as the funeral, everything to do with Kuniko was...

YUKIKO, WITH ONLY LIGHT, personal items that she could carry, and without saying anything to the housekeeper, left the house. She meant never to come back to this house. She felt as if she was ripping her life up by the roots. She hailed a taxi and went to Tomioka’s apartment. But when she encountered a strange young girl there who seemed almost crazy, she changed her mind. Leaving Tomioka’s apartment, she got back into the taxi, which she had kept waiting outside, and went to Shinagawa Station. From there she boarded a train for Shizuoka. She had no particular...

YUKIKO LOOKED HARD at Tomioka’s face. His unfeeling words—that he didn’t need a wife or even a woman—were not sentiments that needed to be expressed to her, Yukiko thought. For a while, she was silent.

At some point Tomioka had become quite drunk.

With his elbows on the table and the cup at his lips, he was looking at Yukiko, but his eyes were empty. The cold expression of his eyes, which had not been there before, was perhaps the look that was natural to him, Yukiko thought. His cheeks were hollow. Each time he raked his fingers...

WHEN THEY AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, it was nearly noon. Tomioka lay in bed for a while, reading the newspaper. A strike by the National Railway Union scheduled for the beginning of February was featured prominently. Tomioka quickly lost interest, tossed the newspaper off to the side of his pillow, and gave a big yawn. Yukiko looked fixedly at a dirty stain on the white curtains. When she thought that Tomioka could just go back to that room, but she herself had nowhere to go, Yukiko grew forlorn. Bathed in the yellow morning light, she took her hand from under...

IF TOMIOKA WAS GOING BACK, Yukiko did not want to linger behind at the inn by herself. Leaving the inn, the two went by trolley to Mishima, where they boarded the train for Tokyo. Tomioka could not just discard Yukiko, who had no place to go. There was no choice, really, after all, but to take her back to his room. The two got off at Shinagawa.

On the platform of the Yamanote Line, they smiled at one another and Yukiko went to Tomioka’s room.

More even than in Izu, the cold in Tokyo chilled one to the very marrow....

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH. It’s as if there’s a demon inside me. These were phrases that Kano had often used at Dalat. When asked who that devil was, Kano would point his jaw at Yukiko.

The train journey was long and tedious. Tomioka was flabbergasted at the way Yukiko, who did not seem at all bored, kept eating sloppily.

They arrived at Kyoto in the morning. If Yukiko had not been there, Tomioka would have liked to spend a day in the city.

Perhaps because Yukiko had money to spare, even at Kyoto she went down to the platform...

SINCE THEY HAD GOTTEN THIS FAR somewhat thoughtlessly, Tomioka felt a considerable shock at Yukiko’s becoming ill.

The second day, the weather was fine.

The rain had ended. The day was windy. When the maid came at daybreak, bringing charcoal for the brazier, she kindly informed them that a ship called the Terukuni would be leaving that morning at nine. But Yukiko’s condition had not improved. Deeply asleep, she was still coughing. When he heard those coughs, Tomioka felt a pain as if his own skin was being scraped off.

Seen from the veranda window, Sakurajima was lost in the...

DISCOVERING A SMALL WATCHMAKER’S SHOP not far from the inn, Tomioka went up to the display window and looked at the watches for a while. All of them were imitations of Swiss watches, but one with a price tag of 3,600 yen caught Tomioka’s fancy. Thinking he would like such a watch as a memento of Yakushima Island, he entered the store and asked the shop clerk to show it to him. He had sold the watch he had purchased in Indochina in Ikaho to Seiko’s husband. After that had followed a period of deprivation, when he had had no...

THEY ARRIVED AT TANEGASHIMA at about two o’clock.

The yellow, flattish island came into view suddenly in the porthole window. Tomioka, while smoking a cigarette, gazed at the long, lonely-looking island. Yukiko was fast asleep. For no particular reason, Tomioka thought how far she had come to reach this place.

In the little harbor, far in the distance, many small boats were moored together in a jumble. The black and white roofs of the houses along the shore, like paper cutouts, were unlike anything Tomioka had seen before.

Taking its time, the boat entered the outer western harbor of Tanegashima....

THE MAN WEARING THE RAINCOAT was named Tatsuke. The middle-aged man who held the oilpaper umbrella went by the name of Noborito. Both were employed in the office and did not work on the mountain. Every day, a handcar made two round trips from the mountain. A small official residence had been fixed up for Tomioka, but since Yukiko was ill, she would probably find it uncomfortable. It would probably be better if she stayed at the inn for five or six days. Tomioka agreed with this decision. But it was likely to be lonesome for her.

The rain continued...

EVERY TIME THAT YUKIKO drew another labored breath, Tomioka, who was holding her sweaty hand, put his face near the tatami and counted the breath. “But God said unto him, thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” As if he were praying, Tomioka suddenly remembered a passage to that effect. He had a bad feeling. Although he had forgotten where he had read them, now, suddenly, those lines came to mind. Now and then he cried out Yukiko’s name. Her eyes were unfocused, but she opened...

THEY COULD NOT STAY AT THE INN FOREVER, so on the fourth day, Yukiko was taken on a stretcher to the official residence during an interval of clear weather. The islanders, wondering what was going on, peered at the stretcher as it was carried past.

The sun, visible again after so long, shone down from the blue sky. The trees and shrubs, pressing in from both sides, sparkled with raindrops in the sunshine. The color of the sky was so dazzling that it was impossible to look at directly. It was a blue, warm color—such that it could not...

RIDING IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAR, next to the engineer, Tomioka felt as if his body were suspended in air as the train, with a formidable hollow roar, pushed its way up along the narrow gauge railway. Below him, the Abo River, blue and clear, shone as it wound its way deep through the dense forests. Tomioka somehow felt awkward about the business cards in his breast pocket, printed just today, with his title of technical official.

“You’re not having a smoke?” The engineer looked at Tomioka with some surprise.

Below them was a sheer precipice. The plants called hego, which...

THE ROAD LEAVING THE HEART of Saigon entered a neighborhood called Kyaden, where there were many Japanese soldiers. Traveling from Kyaden to Bienhoa, one passed through fields of sugarcane, orchards, coconut groves, and betel palm groves, all flourishing, as well as several little hamlets. The road went over two long iron bridges stretched across the Donai River, and then went through the beautiful neighborhood of Bienhoa. Yukiko, Kano, and Tomioka had spent one night at a small hotel here. A French hotel, it was called the Maison Poisson. The signboard was just a picture of a large fish tail. There...

UP ON THE MOUNTAIN, there was an unusually heavy downpour. Tomioka put off his return to the town for a day and, warming himself at the office stove, drank some sweet potato sake with five or six of the mountain workers. He didn’t have the courage to go back down to the town to the official residence. Telling himself that Yukiko’s illness was nothing to worry about, he became more coldhearted as he got drunk from the sake.

Tomioka, thinking that the shape of this mountain resembled the Buddhist temple at the heart of Angkor Tom in French Indochina, talked...

ONE MONTH PASSED. Tomioka took a week’s vacation and went to Kagoshima. In early spring, completely dried out and with very little rain, Kagoshima was an utterly different world. First, Tomioka arrived at the inn where he had stayed before. In just a short time, all the maids and waitresses had changed. He was led to the front room where he had stayed with Yukiko, which seemed like a strange coincidence. He thought that he would have his rain-damaged watch repaired, so he went to the shop where he had bought it. He was told that the proprietor had injured...