戦争と婦人作家
(Sensou to fujin sakka)

MIYAMOTO Yuriko (宮本 百合子)
May 1948　

Until this point, Japan has always been engaged in a world war. Under the feudal, absolute education of the Imperial system, the people have uncritically been resigned to war as an “inevitable disaster.”

And this has brought us to the present collapse. Was there no opposition to war in Japan? As readers of Odagiri Hideo’s “Study of Anti-war Literature” will know, there has always been a humanitarian spirit of opposition to war. The political power of the Imperial system has in recent years quelled such literature under the Peace Preservation Act, branding it the work of unpatriotic people. People from other countries are surprised that Japanese women did not create a systematic opposition to such a brutal war. They misunderstand and think that Japanese people are even that cruel. However, these people must understand that the tragedy of Japan is that in our feudal society, expressions of love or of hatred were not permitted to be socialized. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the poet Ōtsuka Kasuoko wrote “One Hundred Prayers” and Yosano Akiko wrote the poem “Thou Shalt Not Die“, both becoming famous for their opposition to the brutality of war. But anti-war works like those by these two representative women have been suppressed from the histories of Japanese literature—not even one paragraph published. When Yosano Akiko’s poem was published, Ōmachi Keigetsu declared her an unpatriotic person and greatly criticized the issue of Myōjō (明星, Bright Star) in which it appeared.

In the past decades, what kind of opposition have Japanese women writers been involved in? Looking back at works which have motifs opposing aggressive wars, there are exceptionally few—other than Yoshiya Nobuko and Hayashi Fumiko, the sad truth we find is that the majority of women writers actually lent their support to the war. But it would be a mistake to say that all of them glorified aggressive wars from the bottom of their hearts. When the controls over journalism became stricter and publication was not being allowed for those who were not military-approved writers, relying on the income from the publications of the bourgeois publishers each person who made her existence as a “famous female writer,” in order to preserve her existence outside of journalism and so that her name would not be forgotten by readers, inserted glorious scenes into her works. In short, in order to continue to protect their economic independence as women who had a complete lack of stability, though they must have felt doubts, they succumbed to a fascist way of survival.

From the way that the abilities of the women in this serious culture were put into use—and when one thinks about the feeble basis for women’s economic independence—the interests of the female writers’ and all of the working women of Japan can be understood as part of the same circumstances. Just as I have come to see that there was no real difference as Japanese people between the circumstances of these female writers and the girls working in cotton mills, female writers surely understand what fascism is, what an aggressive war is, and how when one country’s happiness is crushed underfoot for the sake of another country’s interests, there is blood all over every single thing that has been crushed.

何がなく
初恋人のおくつきに詣づるごとし。
郊外に来ぬ。

It was kinda like
visiting the grave of my first love,
going to the suburbs.

年明けてゆるめる心！
うっとりと
来し方をすべて忘れしごとし。

How at peace I feel at the dawn of a new year,
like I’ve totally forgotten
just how I got to this point at all.

モスクワの姿――あちらのクリスマス――
(Mosukowa no katachi: achira no kurisumasu)

by MIYAMOTO Yuriko (宮本百合子)
December 1931

It was only the tenth day after we’d arrived in Moscow.

Christmas morning, 1928. We hadn’t the slightest clue what it would be like.

In the Soviet Union, red flags decorate the streets for May Day in the spring, for the anniversary of the October Revolution, etc.

Christmas itself, if it can be said to be the celebration of anyone’s birth, is in celebration of Jesus Christ, not the little baby Volodya Lenin. I can hardly read Russian, but I have a gosizdat (state publisher) book that I bought because the illustrations were interesting. Its title is “Nice Stories from the Bible.” Now that I’ve finally tried to read the first page, I can see that it’s written in this style:

“Dear reader, there is a book. When a priest reads from it in church, everyone kneels and listens carefully. When it is opened and then closed, each one kisses. This book is called the Bible.

“In the Bible are written a large number of miracles that are the result of God. It is written that God is all-knowing and all-powerful. But there is one odd thing: that the author of this thick Bible was not God himself. It is said that we are all God’s disciples. Disciples who signed with the names Job or Matthew wrote it. It is said that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, but if there really is a God, he must be illiterate to not have even written his own name.” Etc., etc.

No store in Moscow has a Christmas sale.

Father Frost brought pure white snow. Thick white birch smoke gushed from each chimney. When we headed toward Arbat Square with its old cathedral painted red and white, the snow was falling on the embers of an open fire and the Christmas fir sellers were out, as those who sell the New Year’s pine decorations do. Servant girls were balancing shopping baskets under one arm and pulling on a bough of a large fir with the other hand, haggling over it.

We, however, were staying in a hotel.

On top of which, it isn’t as if the traditions of putting candles on a fir tree and drinking champagne were ones we had held since childhood.

We got on a sleigh and went to another hotel, one with carpet in the hallways.

Kuroda Reiji had come over from Germany.

If anyone could get a clear sense of what Christmas means in terms of the bourgeois European sentiment, it would be the cosmopolitan Kuroda.

It was decided that they would buy a fir with candles that evening, take it to their hotel, and then we would have tea.

In the evening, scrap of paper clutched in hand, we clip-clopped our way down a set of stairs to a food shop that smelled of pickled cabbage.

Looking at the paper, despite our clumsy pronunciation, we managed to buy salted salmon roe. We bought pickled cucumbers.

We bought ham.

The fir tree Kuroda bought was settled snugly in a pot, and it had candles of various colors, about 6 cm tall, placed on each branch ceremoniously.

When they were lit, a sparkling silver glow shone over the tree’s branches like ice. It was beautiful.

As the night wore on, the frozen windows from the steam of the samovar created even more beautiful ice.

–

Christmas 1928 was spent forgetting about the idea of Christmas entirely.

The shapes of the tree sellers, with their fires lit on the snowy night, twelve degrees below freezing, disappeared from view in Moscow’s main square.

Leningrad’s Women Workers and Farmers sells 150,000 copies, economically propping up Leningrad’s Pravda.

The editor is at 306-7 Gimalayskaya. She has a daughter of just five years old. She has a dog called Chamberlain. The child had said:

“Mother! It’s so sad to chop down fir trees. I don’t want one!”

In the workers’ clubs of Moscow, there were anti-religious farces, music, and dancing until dawn.

–

As the Five-Year Plan is beginning to be carried out in the Soviet Union, churches and priests are being completely boycotted as a practical aspect of the construction of the socialist society for the proletariat and the peasants.

In the countryside, the youths, the impoverished, and the middle-class farmers have decided to organize themselves into more efficient collective farms. The rural bourgeois wealthy farmers are against it, shooting out their windows at the activist youth and killing them.

The ones who allow the priests to eat and drink through alms are the rich farmers. The priests and the wealthy farmers, under the auspices of the cross, interfere with the collectivization of the rural communities.

Drive the priests out of the towns!

As Lenin said, the anti-religious activities in the Soviet Union come from the reality of the construction of Socialism.

In 1929, the priests were begging in front of bakeries in full dress on Christmas day.

ブルジョア作家のファッショ化に就て
(Burujoa sakka no fasshoka ni tsuite)

by MIYAMOTO Yuriko (宮本百合子)
Originally appeared in Jiji Shinpō (時事新報), January 1932.

1.

In the January issue of ”Central Review” (中央公論 Chūōkōron), not one proletarian novel was put in its proper place. With the exception of Central Review, bourgeois journalism has boycotted the majority of proletarian literature. But the true state of affairs cannot be ascertained from this alone. Because the January issue of “Proletarian Literature” (the Japan Proletarian Authors Alliance’s bulletin) sold six or seven thousand issues not long after it hit news stands.

With regard to the fact that Central Review has purposefully released a January issue without even one proletarian literature story, the questions of what is class culture and what importance does opposition have are clearly shown to be of the deepest importance.

Before discussing the rise of fascism in the literary world, the reason I speak of bourgeois journalism is that, as even Nakamura Murao understands, for many years now the so-called literary world itself has been moved within journalism. To be even clearer, the literary world, originally a special cultural independent nation, has not existed for some time now. Natsume Soseki was a celebrate Japanese author, as well as part of the bourgeois intelligentsia. ——Which is to say, each writer is tied to their class by their own umbilical cord. And accordingly if the class to which we are connected controls journalism as a cultural propaganda tool, it is only natural that the authors and writers, big and small, who depend on that control will defer to it. If bourgeois journalism is fascistized, then bourgeois writers will be fascistized. This correlation is not one that can be broken. And yet, the fascistization of bourgeois writers does not appear in a simple form. Just as the strategy and tactics of bourgeois journalism are infinite, the reactionaryism of bourgeois writers is also infinite.

The bourgeois popular literary luminary Naoki Sanjugo, who has just had a polemic called Declaration of Fascism published in the Yomiuri, and Mikami Otokichi have been given the title of the heads of grassroots fascism. This is a rather interesting affair. Naoki Sanjugo, in a typically stubborn way, shows anger with the middle-class intelligentsia, who point to fascistization as well as humanitarian crises but do not clearly align themselves with the left or the right, proclaiming: “I find nothing terrifying in this world. I’ll even show you by becoming a fascist.” And though it may be the basis of Naoki’s rather pedestrian view on life, as might be expected from a thinking man, he shows a faint understanding of fascism’s temporary nature by shrewdly setting a one year timeframe for his own fascistization. Naoki and Inukai Takeru‘s attitudes have in common flashes of cleverness and a fundamental foolishness.

When Inukai Takeru wrote for White Birch, he was a humanist. Nonetheless, as he grew up he came to see the flaws of humanism. That he knew that a half-baked humanism is useless when it comes down to brass tacks is part of Inukai Takeru’s foolishness, but putting his humanism behind him to become his father’s secretary and then take his place in the Seiyuukai is the embodiment of the bourgeois ideology, which is limited in scope, and of his conclusive confession of his class status. Naoki is the same. It’s all fine and well to go so far as to grind your teeth at the attitude of the unorganized intelligentsia who hesitate to define themselves as being on the left or right but make no practical effort, but the bourgeois thinking man has lapsed into his cleverness, and along with the Naoki-esque discussion of scientific purpose embodied in his “Diary of Youthful Behavior”, while stamping off in all directions he has marched into the fascist camp.  

It is particularly interesting that when he said “I’ll become anything, anything at all,” he did not become a communist but a fascist instead. Indeed, he could not have become anything, anything at all; he could have only become a fascist. But when this kind of conman declared that he’s a fixed-term fascist, people have to laugh.

2.

When I read Naoki Sanjugo’s declaration, I remembered a story from long ago.

A yokel met a goblin on a terrible mountain path. The goblin had finally escaped from the realm of the beaked goblins. He had a great red nose and eyes like burning torches. The goblin had been watching the yokel.

“Oi, insect. Prepare to meet your fate! Mmm… I can’t wait to eat you.”

The yokel was shaking in his light yellow work trousers, but he managed to say this:

“Oh, y-you, you must be a goblin. The goblins I’ve heard about in stories must have been like you, then. I’ve heard ever since I can remember that if you meet a goblin you’ll be torn limb from limb and eaten. A-and there’s nowhere to escape in these here mountains. I’ve prepared myself. But even a yokel like me has one last wish. Will you not hear it?”

“Oh, what the hell, make it quick,” said the goblin, generously.

“In the stories, they say goblins are really flexible creatures. Since I’m going to be eaten anyway, I want to see whether you are really a goblin or not before I die.”

“That’s easy. Tell me what you want. Whatever it is, I’ll do it,” the goblin said, laughing loudly.

The yokel bowed. What he requested was:

“I’d like to see you turn into a cedar, larger than any of the cedars on this mountain.”

At once the goblin turned into a giant cedar, towering over the yokel. He patted the goblin cedar’s trunk again and again in wonder.

“Wow, ‘at ‘ere really is great. I can die happy now I’ve seen such a sight.”

“So, was that enough for you?” said the goblin cedar, sounding self-satisfied.

The yokel asked the goblin if he would turn into a very, very big stone next.

Finally the yokel said to the goblin, “From your shadow, I’ve seen you become the largest of the large, what I always wanted to see. My last request is just that you would turn into something very small. If you would turn into a single poppy seed that I could hold in the palm of my hand, I could die with no regrets.”

The goblin, contempt on his face, said, “All right. I’ll turn into whatever you want,” and turned into a tiny poppy seed in the palm of the yokel’s hand. Taking joy in the fact that he was a human himself, the yokel put the poppy seed in his mouth, gnashed it between his teeth, and the next day, shat it out.

Perhaps Naoki Sanjugo has never heard this story?

3.

Additionally, as a form of fascistization of bourgeois writers, seemingly, there are a lot of people who have begun to write liberal (or perhaps revisionary) works and are clearly on the path to fascism. For example, while Makino Shinichi’s Zeron and some of Kawabata Yasunari’s works, etc., on the surface show an escape from an individualist reality, they personally shield their eyes from the realities of class conflict which pop up like fireworks these days, simultaneously cutting the readers off from a scientific world view and perfectly playing the role of fascism’s crutch. Gunji Jiromasa has clearly proved that his own pen is the military’s pen; when Literary Struggle‘s (文芸戦線 Bungei sensen) Satomura Kinzou became correspondent for Renovation (改造 Kaizou) serving as the military affairs reporter, he wrote up “The Heroic Tale of Second Lieutenant Sakamoto” without any class-based criticism about it whatsoever, elequently showing that the Social  Democratic Party and the Labor-Farmer Party, just as much as the democrats, are nothing other than servants of the bourgeoisie. Just as clear as these examples are, fascism in culture and the arts are definitely all tied up together on one side of a boundary line, but the other side of that line is no pretty picture either. Take a look at a magazine or a newspaper, or perhaps even listen to a conversation in a coffeeshop—the will of the masses who have chosen to crush fascism and its pervasive influence includes opposition.

In the arts, the struggle against fascism must actually be fought in the most everyday, detailed way, and that struggle can only lead to the proper development of proletarian literature.  This means the establishment of a world proletarian journalism. The Japanese Proletarian Culture Alliance’s publishing house has an important class duty to carry this out.

Each proletarian cultural organization, each particular branch, is determined to accumulate knowledge about proletarian cultural tactics. We are beginning in earnest mass cultural activities with the correct meaning behind them. But in fairness, the writer’s association’s struggle against fascism has had a tendency to be rather slow off the block. Aside from “Fascism” by Tokunaga which is being released this month, no outstanding works which represent the artistic struggle against fascism have yet appeared. A fascist just might think, “Hmph, what’s that?” upon observing this phenomenon.

However these days the writer’s league is working at a fast pace and the acceptance of the cultural demand to reflect the lives of the struggling masses of today has led club activities and literary magazines to be envigorated.

We must acknowledge this, without fear of our own slowness to act or our inexperience in tactical matters. Because in our case, to acknowledge one imperfection is to overcome that imperfection.

Because the bourgeois economic mechanism has at its heart inconsistencies which cannot be removed no matter what, bourgeois culture is simply on a downward spiral.

Unlike the bourgeois ideology which fails to recognize fallacies as fallacies, the proletarian world view which is capable of scientifically dissecting and criticising the bourgeois ideology, as well as engaging in strict self-criticism, has the correct dialectical basis.

And unlike fascism, however much it may triumph, the establishment of a proletarian literature is a task which has been assigned to us all.

蹴りたい背中
(Keritai senaka)

by WATAYA Risa
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, 2003

Soon after track practice started, large raindrops began to fall with a clatter. Practice was stopped and we all sheltered under the gymnasium roof. Enjoying the cool under the roof, bra straps showing through on our soaked backs, we dried ourselves off with towels. The immensity of the sound of the rain hitting the ground overwhelmed us, and we were silent. But in the middle of that smoke-like rain, coming from the athletic field towards us, the coach could almost be seen, bringing everyone back to life.

“His hair, it’s uncurling!”

His trademark natural perm had become soaked and stuck down to his forehead with the rain. Everyone pointed and laughed, but as the coach came closer their expressions turned to doting ones, eyes blinking as if surprised. They acted clever, though the truth was they weren’t like that at all. I remember what they said next, just as the coach certainly does.

“He-ey, coach! Since it’s already raining can’t we just go home?”

It was a story I was already so used to. But ever since the day that the coach had hid the information about the photochemical smog warning from us, scenes like this had become more bitter than before. The older girls were sitting next to me on the mat.

“If it rains like this we can’t practice at all. I mean, we changed clothes and all that, but it was just a waste of time, right?”

“It’s probably just an evening shower. I think it’ll probably stop soon.”

“Mm, me too. That’s why I just gave the pestering corps the ‘hurry up!’ signal. Whether they can persuade the coach before the rain stops is the real game.”

With their eyes twinkling, the older girls watched the team members who had surrounded the coach. Whether they were talking to me because we had the time, or whether they were talking to me out of true kindness, I don’t know.

“If we’re tired, why can’t we just go home?” When I didn’t say anything to that, another one of the girls responded.

“No, we’d have to put everything away. Like the hurdles. They get rusty when you leave them out.”

“If all of us girls just said, ‘We don’t wanna clear everything off in this kind of rain,’ surely he’d let us off without doing it. Don’t worry, the coach is really reasonable.”

The coach is really reasonable. Even if they ‘forgot’ about the maintenance of the track equipment, even if they forgot to lock up the storeroom, even if everyone went off after practice to drink, it was just—“really reasonable.” I couldn’t hold back a small, scornful noise. Because, really, to hear someone call an adult with white hairs mixed among the black something like “really reasonable” was just depressing. I wondered if it meant something to do with having lived a long time.

“The track and field team has a good feel to it now, too. Last year’s advisor was too tough on us; you could tell he was the kind of guy who only looked at the results, so a lot of new students who joined just quit instantly. But this year everyone gets along with the coach well, so track is fun.”

“Isn’t it just because you’ve trained him?” I said it as if I were spitting it out. Well, now you’ve done it, I thought. The air between us became turbulent, chilling my skin. One of the older girls, still facing forward, replied in a low voice.

“Your eyes always cut so sharply, but in reality you can’t see anything at all, can you? I’m going to say just one thing now. We really do like the coach. More than you, anyway.”

—————

This is an excerpt from a full-length translation of The Back I Want to Kick, already translated in German, Italian, French, and Korean. If you happen to be in the position to get it published, drop me a line: allwrongsreversed at gmail.com

摩周湖紀行 ー北海道の旅よりー
(Mashūko kikō: hokkaidō no tabi yori)

by HAYASHI Fumiko (林 芙美子)

I arrived at an old station called Takikawa on the Sōya Main Line. It was dusk, and I didn’t know anyone around. I had fully looked up all the places I planned to go in a guidebook, but on the way I had changed my mind and decided to get on the Nemuro Main Line.  I had gotten off in a rush at Takikawa.  I caught a porter as I walked down the platform, to ask him where I could stay the night. Since I was supposed to be on the sleeper from Sakhalin to Tokyo, my purse was a little light.

The town was cold.  Cold enough for a woolen suit.

I asked the porter if Miura Kaen inn was good. Entrusting my baggage to the porter from Miura Kaen, I walked through Takikawa to the inn as the sun was setting. The small town made me feel like a government clerk or shopkeeper was quietly approaching behind me. When I arrived at the inn the women who greeted me looked me over from head to toe.

For a woman to travel alone was perhaps odd. I had a bath and dinner first, but it was unbearable, I had to have some sake. I only drank two cups, but my chest already felt so heavy. I got in the bed but as soon as I did, I was wide-awake, unable to sleep.

For an unprepared traveler who arrived at nightfall, there was no steam train to Nemuro– by accident I had no choice but to stay the night in Takikawa, there was nothing else to be done.  Next to my pillow on the tray with the water pitcher was a little train timetable, for guests who were only staying overnight.  On the reverse, it had a section from Doppo Kunikida‘s 1903 story, The Fatalist.

“Where is your destination?” Suddenly a man’s voice was directed at me. “I’m going to Sorachibuto.” “Ah, then you should have a look into staying the night at an inn called Miura.”

I don’t know whether Doppo stayed the night at the Miura inn, but I found the solitary journey of a man who felt bleak isolation, seemingly without any affection or pity, surprisingly interesting. I was the same. I was born in 1903. Still I was sure this area, in Doppo’s day, had been wilderness.

I turned off the overhead light and turned on the bedside one. If I’d read a book I would’ve been able to bear this feeling that I, one who felt bleak isolation, seemingly without any affection or pity, had – but I didn’t feel like reading. I heard a lovely voice in the dark of the night, but from the servant’s greeting of, “We have a cafe here as well– if you’re not too tired, why don’t you give it a try?” the sweet voice was that of a waitress.

I was strangely tired, too tired to go to the cafe, and with the bedside light on I fell asleep.

The next morning was, unhappily, foggy. I got on the 9:15 steam train on the Nemuro line.

The scenery of Sorachi was depressingly flat. It was expansive enough to make me think that my map of Hokkaido must have fluttered because it couldn’t really be that small. The plain was larger than the sky. Rather than a parody of Bon, in the torrential rain that struck up on the way through Sorachi, the white crabapple flowers flashed like a rainbow. The people out tilling the blackened fields carried out their sweat-soaked, thankless task without any need for thanks.

I had been on the train since the morning, but since there were no express trains on the Nemuro line, I saw every single station in the middle of these fields.

It was eight when I got to Kushiro, and when I got off, the morning fog was hanging low as if I’d gotten off at a foreign port. Between the rain and the fog my glasses quickly got steamed up. The family of a railway staff member who was coming off shift, who had ridden together from Obihiro, said that they would enjoy walking through the town, and dragging their children through the rain they showed me around.

I took a room at an inn called Yamagata. It was an old inn that smelled of the sea, and there was a bearskin spread out in my room. Walking through such-and-such town, taking a room for the night– just arriving at night in a place with the sound of a foghorn going off every three minutes was somehow lonely. The sound of  the distant foghorn made me feel like a cow was mooing constantly.

I had come here because I had received a letter recommending it from Mr. Itou from the Asahi Shimbun, but I did not go to visit Mr. Itou,  quietly taking a room instead. Some suspicion had arisen when I wrote I was unemployed. The aging woman at the desk was very formal with me, for some reason. I ate the typical late-night meal that the inn provided and stretched out on the bearskin rug. It was weird, as if I was really trying to ride on the back of this bear.

While I was writing a letter, two girls of just sixteen who had worked in the dining car of the train I had been on that day came in, as we were sharing the room. I was taken aback by their beauty when they changed out of their waitress uniforms. They told me that tomorrow their steam train back to Hakodate would leave at ten. For some reason I enjoyed their chit-chat as they drank tea and ate sweets. Their monthly salary was thirty yen so their parents were living together, too, they said.

After having a bath I spread the bedding out, but the bearskin rug was frightening, so I dragged the bedding into the next room. When I laid down the sound of the foghorn kept me wide awake. The house was so old it felt strangely like it was breathing. The heavy rain seemed, in the middle of the night, more like a torrential downpour.

——June 16.

If I was crossing through Hokkaido I would see that stretched-out blue sky again. I called Mr Itou and ate breakfast. If you’re going somewhere you must know a little something about that place, so I had a plan to spread my map and travel schedule out on the train to Nemuro.

Shuukichi Itou was really quite a good person.

Either he had gone early to meet someone, or he wasn’t leaving the inn at all, but it was said that the inn the woman runs in Takuboku’s poem ‘Kakutai’ was here, so I borrowed a bicycle. I had the letter of introduction that had been sent to the inn, but the loneliness of traveling had gone right to the core of me.

Settling my account with Yamagata inn and stepping out to the road, I found that directly in front of the inn was an end of nowhere station. My stay at this inn hadn’t been great, but with this end of nowhere disused station, which seemed more like a fertilizer warehouse, right before my eyes, I recited Takuboku’s poem to myself as if it were my own.

「さいはての驛に降り立ち雪あかり、淋しき町に歩ゆみ入りにき」

Alighting at a station at the end of nowhere
The snow glistening,
I enter a lonely town

The road in front of this end of the earth station was muddy, and when I closed my eyes I could imagine the way the snow would cling to this scene.

The woman who ran the Kakutai inn in Takuboku’s poems was called Koyakko but now was a woman called Jin Oomi. It was a new, large inn, located between the old town and the new town. Jin said she was forty five years old. Koyakko had been here before the current woman, and she thought Koyakko and Takuboku must have been about the same age. If she had lived, she would be in her fifties. Everyone had heard their love story, said that Takuboku had been a kind person, told stupid stories about him as if they were meaningful. Jin was a large, bony woman, but she wasn’t thin and bony like the proprietor of a run-of-the-mill inn would be. She showed me a picture of her beautiful daughter, who she had lost and was grieving for, but more than the stories that everyone knew from Takuboku’s memories, from the stories that Jin told me about her daughter, I somehow grew to like her.

I met many divers people from Kushiro at this inn. There was a man called Yoshida who was studying the historical relics of the indigenous people, a man called Nojiri who recited poetry, a female reporter called Fujii and so on, and I heard various bits of local history from people who cared deeply about it, but fearing that I would start to want to take a notebook and walk around copying things down, I decided I would walk alone around the circumference of the nearby lake. After being treated to lunch by Jin, I excused myself from the inn early, and I took the most difficult of the paths around Lake Akan.

It was fair in Kushiro, and since the weather was nice the foghorn was not sounding.

On the way, I passed by the Kushiro News office where Takuboku had worked. It was a red brick building, and as it had been built in 1907 it was fairly new, perhaps, but now it was rather antique-looking, and somehow childlike in a nice way.

I went to Shireto cape, where the foghorn sounded from. As I ascended the hill to the cape, the reclaimed land from Pacific Ocean coal mining sites extended to the northern seawall, making it really seem as though the sea had been cut in two. In Sakhalin I’d only been able to see the gray Sea of Okhotsk, but at Kushiro the sea was azure and glimmering and, perhaps because of the good weather, I could see straight to the harbor.

A dredger with a red smokestack was bellowing out mud from a derrick, moving with a sound much like that of a great downpour. The one respect in which the scene differed from the mainland was that it was bitterly cold.

I could see many ships in the harbor. It was said that the navy did their exercises in the sea at Akkeshi, and people said that they would probably take place at Kushiro as well.

When I arrived at Kushiro station, the 3:30 to Abashiri was there so I boarded it. Fujii, the young, female journalist from the Kakutai inn, said she wanted to travel with me and carrying our bags we got on the train. I saw no reason to refuse such kindness from good people. Out the window I could see a vast marsh full of oak trees. Near Shibecha it started to rain suddenly. The promoter for the river onsen had gotten on and I was amused by his spiel.

“Lake Mashū is frequently covered in fog, and if you’re not lucky you can’t see it at all.”

As he’d said it wasn’t visible today, we decided to stop at an onsen in Teshikaga. When we got off at Teshikaga’s little mountain hut-esque station, the cottages in the village already had their lights on, and a rain was pouring down fiercely as if to dig up the soil. We shoved all our things in a muddy hired car with us and went to Chikamizu Hotel, which had been recommended to Ms. Fujii. An architect named Yoshiya Tanoue had designed it, it was said, in the style of Wright. Nevertheless for a mountain onsen I didn’t feel for a moment that it wasn’t rather like an apartment building instead. I don’t like Western-style rooms, so I asked to be shown to a Japanese-style room instead. It seemed like a very fine room. It was no difficult thing to have Japanese rooms available at an onsen. The maid was quiet and kind.

More than anything I wanted to look out at the torrential rain, listening to the dreadful sound of the thunder, a cracking, harsh sound, I thought, but refreshing. The little upper stream of the Kushiro river ran gently down below. When the rain stopped intermittently the cicadas would start up.

I was, nevertheless, a bit of an unhappy traveler. Though I was looking out at this kind of scenery, my mind was going back, back, and my traveling partner was also silent, to the point where the atmosphere was poisonous.

We went to the baths together.

The brick-enclosed bath protruded into the river. We could see the river flowing through the large, dusky glass window. I thought it would be great if there were a deep, lush forest nearby. Perhaps because the land surrounding the hotel was so new it felt like a wilderness, the river was sufficient on its own. We were told that the hotel’s proprietor, Seiichi Endo, would eventually grow vegetables and fruit in the garden, but I rather preferred the garden with the lofty white birches and oaks.

I got out of the bath and opened the window. I could see the tall mountains that she said she’d climb tomorrow. Mount Pirao, Mount Oakan, Mount Meakan–I could see their peaks from far away, as if drawn in thin ink. From those mountains the moon and stars would be clear. The moon was still just a sliver. I didn’t know how long it would be before I headed back to Tokyo, and suddenly I started thinking about that. I hadn’t written or read anything other than letters, and this letter was nothing more than just a diary, simply writing down that day’s events and thoughts, curiously empty.

When I went to bed, the journalist started talking about various personal things, but my mind was far away, thinking about other things.  The rain didn’t stop.

When I woke up the next morning, it was so sunny that it was like I could clearly see the trees on the mountain, past the river, the other bank, and the dripping young leaves. I opened the door and stood dumbfounded at this beautiful sky.

After attending to equipping ourselves for our trip to the mountain, a Mr Endo from the hotel offered to be our guide. Though we felt we were causing trouble, the three of us set off happily together. Conveniently enough he said that we could get a hired car to Lake Mashū, so we set off toward the mountains in a car.

In this area, sumacs, poplars, birches, oaks, pear, and a tree similar to a pagoda tree were numerous, and they were not as green as on the mainland.

Mt Mashū had a height of 350 metres above sea level, while the lake was just 200 metres deep, it was said. From halfway up Mt Mashū the lake appeared like a mirror set down. In the center of this mirror-like lake, like a beauty mark, is an island called Kamuishu, which rather seems as if it’s floating. The passing clouds were reflected, bright like in a Russian movie, on the utterly still waters. It looked as if within the lake the sword-like peak of Mt Mashū was hidden in the clouds. From a cliff where it was difficult to descend to the shore of the lake, its bottomless depths were submerged in darkness. It was said that sockeye and crayfish had been released, but the waveless lake looked dead.

The dwarf bamboo and sapling white birches at my feet were blown about by the wind from below. This area was more precisely called Akan area, and from the dwarf bamboo-covered hill I was standing on I had a panorama of Mt Akan’s peak and the outline of the gently drifting ridges of Mt Shari.

雲のよ
雲の海かよ渦卷く霧に
煙る摩周湖七彩八變化
かはる姿のとなこ
おもしろや。

Clouded over
Is that a sea of clouds? in the whirlpool of fog
Tonako’s form, transformed
Into Lake Mashuu, submerged
How funny…

This might be called Lake Mashuu Lament, but in the poem Lake Mashū, too, is too tragic. I had come to Hokkaido with an interest in Lake Mashū and Lake Shikaribetsu, in the Obahiro area. Lake Mashū had surpassed my imaginings of it. As an isolated lake with shores unaccessible to people, it had a simple majesty. To look at it in the sunshine, it appeared as if it was always covered in mist or clouds.

To get to Lake Mashū, we would have to go from Kushiro to Shitakara station and go around Lake Akan in order to enjoy the best scenery on our approach. Rather than doing this, we climbed down the mountain and went back to Lake Kussharo near the northern edge.

As we descended the mountain, the weather had already turned for the worse, and an ill wind full of the promise of rain was rushing through the treetops of the woods along the path. Lake Kussharo’s circumfrence was 47 kilometres making it appear more like a sea. We first approached from the south. On the imperial estate on that side were the villages of Pontou, Osatsube, Entokomappu, Sattekinai, and so on, and at Wakoto Elementary School on the way they were having a sports day. There was also a horse tied up inside the wooden fence around the sports ground.  The wind filled the black and white banners surrounding the school building so they looked like a lion dance. The teachers in their white sportswear held megaphones up to their mouths. This isolated school, out in the middle of the wilderness, this tiny school building had, at the side of the sports field,  a tiny confectionery shop stuck on.

We passed through this little village and went onward into the Wakoto Peninsula. At the water’s edge there was a single teahouse selling boiled eggs and crackers.  Just before the teahouse there was a natural, open air bath, with the bath formed in the crack between the rocks. The town’s people and children were gossiping loudly, their skin as red as if they had been boiled. I could easily imagine this natural onsen at night, natural and utterly without any human handiwork. How lovely it would be in the bright moonlight! Yellow mineral deposits had accumulated on the rocks and it looked for all the world like they were bathing at Ayameike in Nara. Like a small child, I dipped my hand into the water. The old woman washing her back next to me was saying, “I don’t know if it’s the weather today or this terribly hot water, but I just can’t hardly move.” There was a little shack at the mouth of the water, with what appeared to be a dressing room.

This lake had no sense of isolation like Lake Mashū did, as on the shore here and there were lively little inns. To the south it is surrounded by Chisenupuri and Iwatanushi mountains, and beyond that run the Kotonipuri, Osappenupuri, and Samakkenupuri mountains.

The lake was so vast it couldn’t all be seen in just one look. The shoreline was sandy and, much like the seaside, if dug into it would fill with water. The waves on the shore were yellowy, string-like waves of minerals. It was a bizarre scene.

It was called the Wakoto Peninsula though it was only a small peninsula, but I had heard that Oomachi Keigetsu had named it.

On the way back, going around Lake Kussharo’s coast, we headed back toward Kawayu village. En route we went up Mount Iou as well. We came upon a field of creeping pine and wild rosemary, heavy with white blooms. The wild rosemary flowers when in full blush gave off a sweet-smelling fragrance, which permeated the air incomparably.  This field covered a 150-160,000 sq.m. radius at the base of Mount Iou.

There wasn’t a single tree or shrub on Mount Iou. However, halfway up the mountain, a fencepost read ‘forest reserve’. Suddenly, this active volcano we were climbing shook as if we were walking on top of a running motor and began to spew rocks and sulfur from its vent. As the rocks fell they crumbled to tiny particles in a mesmerizing way. My silver ring turned pitch black.

The bare mountainside was white and yellow and emerald green with moss. I felt as if we were climbing a mountain made of candy.

At the foot of the mountain was a sulfur factory. In 1886, Yasuda Kazuha had managed a sulfur mining operation here, transporting it as far as Shibecha station, it is said.

Kawayu Onsen station was one further on than Teshikaga, on the way to Abashiri. In the village the fragrant wild rosemary was blooming, and hot water bubbled up from a shallow, withered-looking riverbed. I remembered that on the train to Teshikaga I had met the station master for Kawayu, but unfortunately it had begun to rain. Here there was a shop selling souvenirs and two or three places selling automobiles.

With a “Looks like a big storm,” a young chauffeur in a yellow jacket suddenly turned the wheel and took off, forty miles an hour, down the route from Kawayu to Teshikaga through a dark wood.

The thunder was worse than the day before, and after a bolt of lightning there was a terrible crack above our heads. Shocked as a bird that’s just lost its feathers we were running away towards the woods. Whenever I looked behind I could see the shape of a bird, slick with raindrops, trying to escape.

“For the children of man, not being born nor seeing the fiery light of the sun is far better than anything. But if you are born, as soon as you can, pass through the gates of Hades. Under the warm blanket of earth there is no suffering.”

In the middle of a forest at the far reaches of the north, despite being in the midst of thunder that exhausted my ears, I remembered this disperata-esque stanza from Buchia (?).  And yet suddenly I felt optimistic. Normally I was chatty, not thinking of myself. I contemplated this under the sky I was journeying under—after all I am a coward to the bottom of my shoes, who merely didn’t know what to do with my empty body, nothing left but the dregs.

When I got back to my room, the female reporter was talking to me about her life, but the truth was that I was far inferior to this woman.

Stuffing my face with sweets or sleeping or talking about nothing.
Onsens are the most fun. I washed myself three times before dusk.
I wanted to hear some music but there wasn’t any.
Ended up staying two nights here.

Got up at four-thirty in the early morning, got ready to go back to Kushiro.
When I opened the window, the cicadas were already singing.
Got the five-thirty train to Kushiro. Bought two third-class tickets.
The guard who punched my ticket said, to us two women,
“Are you going home already?”

I arrived in Kushiro around eight o’clock. Checking my bags at the station, I went into the restaurant/bar in front of the station. Next to me, a commissioned officer of the army was eating a bento on his own. It made me want a bento, too, so I ordered udon and a bento. It looked like the female reporter was not used to traveling, and she seemed rather tired too.

After finishing our bento, we went to Mr Itou’s house. I met his beautiful wife, little baby and daughter. After giving my regards to Mr Itou, I thought I would leave Kushiro and go to Obihiro.

There was still time until the afternoon train, so I went to the governmental branch office, walked around some historical sites to do with the aboriginal people, and went to Lake Harutori on the outskirts of Kushiro.

Lake Harutori, unlike Lake Mashū or Lake Kussharo, was very Ainu-like, a rustic yet busy lake. 

It seems like all I’ll be seeing during my trip in the north for the rest of this month are lakes, fields, marshes, and forests. It’s going to continue being warm. The people you meet in these unknown places are surprisingly fat, aren’t they, she said. Little old 90lb me had gained another ten pounds, probably putting on meat somewhere. This life of looking at fields and lakes, staying in inns and eating nothing but milk, salmon, and bog rhubarb. In the past month, maybe I had turned into an optimist. Being alive was fun.

I left Kushiro on the one-thirty train. Again it was a normal slow train, so I saw each and every station as we approached. It was raining at the Karikachi Pass.

We arrived at Obihiro around five o’clock. It was sunny and flat, and the line of acacia trees was thick with leaves.

Had Mr Itou gone ahead and called him from Kushiro? I was to be met here by a man called Okubara.

I went into the inn called North Sea in front of the station.

When I entered the inn, the feeling that I was totally alone grew. In front of the inn there was the street that went to the station, a fruit shop, and a 10 sen stand. Before dinner, I took a walk around Obihiro alone. It was a deserted, lonely town.

I walked through the town, wondering if anyone really did live in this town since it was so old. There were a surprising number of second-hand bookshops. Perhaps I still couldn’t sleep back at the inn. I went in one of these shops and bought a couple books. I bought a copy of a book called White Birch Forest from 1918 for 30 sen. The binding said Mr Leech, and on the frontispiece were three pictures of Rodin sculptures.

“A Little Shadow”, “Bust of a Parisian Rogue”, “Mignon”—and there were also sketches from Jean and Lamb. It was quite interesting.

As I ate my dinner silently, I held the book open and read it.  Arishima Takeo’s To a Small Person was waiting. Shiga Naoya’s To Abashiri I read with great interest.

At night it was still raining.

I was asked if Mr Okubara wasn’t out walking through the town in this rain.

“When I came out to try to meet you then went home, while I was out I received notice that I would be changing post, to my surprise.”

“Well, I suppose it’s for the best, isn’t it? Let’s take a walk through the town to celebrate.”

The gentle rain seemed to have settled in for a long spell over this town as we walked around, looking for a meager restaurant to stop at for the sake of Mr Okubara, who seemed so excited about his change of post, but in the end the two of us, in the rain, went into a cafe to get an ice cream. A record of Hokkaido University’s school song was on there, and somehow it gave me a nice feeling.

Since I had got on to the Nemuro line, there had not been enough days with good weather. Tomorrow I must go to Lake Shikaribetsu early in the morning, but I’ve been told that the path may be cut off in the rain.

Mr Okubara and I parted ways, and I returned to my room just before nine o’clock. If it rained tomorrow I would try to go to a sugar beet factory. While I was writing to friends that I was tired of looking at lakes and fields, it was like I was chasing lakes for some reason. I had to be more cheerful.

At my bedside, I was entertained by a book full of pictures of the lake that I was going to see tomorrow from every angle.

Late at night the maid came and brought me a water-drenched lily of the valley. She told me she had never even been to Sapporo.

Shikaribetsu is still lit, and the maid said it was very nice there. It seemed there was only one inn. I opened my empty wallet and said, “Surely this room isn’t that expensive?” Because if it’s not, I want to stay two or three days.

蒼穹
(Sōkyū)

by KAJII Motojirō (梶井 基次郎)
March 1928

by Flickr user kankan (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kankan/)

One late spring afternoon, I was on the embankment that runs next to the road through the village, basking in the sunshine.  In the sky, there was a giant cloud which had not moved for quite some time. The side of the cloud facing down at the earth had a dark blue gloom to it. And the huge size and dark blue gloom of the cloud somehow filled me with a vague sorrow.

Where I was sitting was the the edge of the widest open space in the village. Mountains and valleys could be seen in most directions in this village, so no matter where one looked there was nothing without some kind of slope. The scenery was always threatening you with the law of gravity.  And the transition from light to dark always gave people in the valleys a confused feeling. In such a village, there was nothing that could calm one’s mind more than spending the day on a sunny field, far from the valleys. But myself, I was nostalgic to the point of sadness at the sight of the sun-splashed scenery that day. The land where the lotus-eaters live, where it is always afternoon——that is what it made me imagine.

The cloud stretched over the tree-covered mountain on the other edge of the field. There were always cuckoos singing on the mountain. At the base, aside from a water wheel shining, I could not see anything moving, and I felt that within the gentle late spring sunlight shining over the hills and fields there was a good deal of quiet languor. And I thought somehow that the cloud had perhaps made me sad over the misfortune of that languor.

I shifted my eyes in the direction of the valley. Just beyond was where the two valleys from the small mountain range on the peninsula met. Between the two valleys, like a lynchpin, stood a mountain, and between it and another mountain which blocked it in the front like a folding screen, at the upper reaches of one valley the folds of the mountains became thick, like twelve kimonos. And on the horizon, on the mountaintop, there was one huge dead tree, and as if put there to raise one’s spirit, one mountain soared above the rest. Everyday, the sun passed over the two valleys and sank behind that mountain, but this early afternoon sun had only crossed over one valley so far, and it stood out that the mountain that stands between the two valleys was resting under a death-like shadow. Halfway through March, I had seen smoke rising from the cryptomeria forest that covered the mountain, as if there was a wildfire. That had been a cloud of pollen that had blown away from the forest all at once, on a day when the the wind was as strong as the sun, a day when the temperature was good enough or very good indeed. But pollenation should already be over by now, and a brown mass was settling in over the forest. The zelkovas and oaks, covered with young shoots like a gaseous haze, felt very early summery. In each maturing new leaf there was not yet such a shadowy, gaseous dream.  Only the burgeoning beech trees, rising up tall in the valley, had started to look as if they were covered with flour. When my eyes, flitting over this scene, saw this cloud, so thin I could still see the blue sky over the forest that separates the two valleys, continually advancing, they were unwittingly drawn into it. The cloud was rushing forward, expanding across the sky before my very eyes, over the area that was shining in the sun.

On one side, as it formed inexhaustibly, it was also slowly rotating. The ragged edge of the other side was gradually being swallowed by the blue sky. Someone seeing this kind of change in such a cloud would not have any particularly deep, indescribable feelings called to mind. But my eyes, gazing at that transformation, were drawn into that never-ending creation and destruction, and within that repetition, a strange feeling like fear gradually rose within my heart. This feeling choked me, gradually sapped the feeling of equilibrium from my body, and I thought that if that state continued for a long time, at the worst, I might fall all the way down to somewhere like hell. And like a paper doll set among fireworks, all the energy drained from every part of my body.——

My eyes could not believe the decreasing distance between me and the cloud, and I was becoming swallowed up in the feeling that I described before. Then I suddenly noticed a strange phenomenon. It was there, between the part of the cloud that was surging forward and not far above the forest that had been thrown into shadow, in the gap. It was then that I  could first faintly see it coming. And then before my eyes, its looming shape was revealed.——

I was seized by the mysterious feeling that there was something like a mountain which I could not see in the sky. Then suddenly the thought crossed my mind: this is what the dark of night is like in this village. 

That night I walked the dark road home without even a paper lantern. On the way there was only one house, and a lamp in that house lit up from the peephole in the door out to the scene around the house in that vast darkness, casting light onto the road. Suddenly a shadow in the shape of a man appeared. Probably just a villager walking, like me, without a lantern. It isn’t that I didn’t find anything particularly strange about that shadow.  But I watched the shadow disappear into the darkness without a word. And the light on the back of the man slowly decreased and then was gone. Just a feeling in my retinas, just a trick of the imagination in the darkness——and eventually that trick of the imagination just went like that, too. And then, in that darkness so dark I couldn’t tell which way was where, I felt a faint shiver. I imagined myself disappearing into the darkness just as hopelessly; I thought about that unspeakable fear and passion.——

When that thought came to me, I understood instantly. The thing that had suddenly appeared in the disappearing sky was nothing like a mountain at all, nothing like a mysterious cove, it was sheer nothingness! Darkness rising in broad daylight. As if my eyesight had weakened, I had felt a tremendous unhappiness. Deep blue, that spring sky with smoke rising in it—the more I had looked at it, the more all I could feel was the darkness.

Somehow, something good will happen tomorrow,
part of me thinks.
I yell at it and go to sleep.

何となく明日はよき事あるごとく
思ふ心を
叱りて眠る。

Quitting time is
All I wait for.
Working again today.

家にかへる時間となるを、
ただ一つの待つことにして、
今日も働けり。

新しきシベリアを横切る
(Atarashiki shiberia wo yokogiru)

by MIYAMOTO Yuriko
January and February, 1931.

Miyamoto Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko lived in Moscow from 1927 until 1930.  Yuasa would go on to become one of the best known Japanese-Russian translators, particularly for her translations of Chekhov. After their return, Miyamoto left Yuasa and remarried.

　October 25th (1930).

Departing Moscow at last, at last, at last!

Went to the post office a million times in the morning. After frequently presenting my unmistakably Japanese face at the registered parcels window, the female clerk with messy blonde hair said, a little annoyed,

“Haven’t I already seen you more than twenty times just this morning!”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been living in your city for three years. And tonight I’m returning home, to Japan. I shan’t be back again tomorrow, and I haven’t anything else to send off, so please bear with me.”

“I see.” The clerk took a second look at the small, round Japanese woman’s face for the first time that day.

“Will this reach Japan? All of it?”

This I did not understand.

A big calendar page with “25″ in black numerals hung on a blank space, and an electric clock that moved every minute. The shuffling sound of the group walking and stopping along the floor. The Japanese woman took all this in as if classifying it, as the post office’s heavy door swung open and closed.

After Y got back, we said our goodbyes, gathered our bags, and exhausted, exhausted, we waited only for the train to leave soon and to lay down. 6:15pm.

　October 26th.

3 roubles, 10 kopeks. Set meal (obed) for two.

It’s getting awfully cheap. In November 1927, a three-course meal (soup, meat or fish, dessert) for one on the Trans-Siberian Railway was two and a half roubles. Now 30 kopeks buys a bottle of Narzan mineral water. What’s more, there’s meat in the soup! Making the full-course meal cheaper so that everyone can eat it and making ordering dishes à la carte more expensive is Soviet rationality.

Y insists that when we get to Vyatka she’ll buy boxes of the local cigarettes.

The compartment is warm. Our exhaustion shows, but we’re in good spirits, like we’re just going somewhere in the same country, not returning to Japan.

“Please be careful. Vyatka is a popular tourist destination for Japanese. I’ve had my pocket picked when I wasn’t paying attention, and it would be terrible counter-propaganda if people said it was the most well-known spot for thievery along the Trans-Siberian Railway.”

“We’ll be fine! We’re smart.”

We arrived at Vyatka after dark, the centre of the Vyatka-Yetrujesk * economic region. As soon as the train pulled into the platform, Y, fed up with a Japanese gentleman, put on her leather overcoat which caused one to suspect she had perhaps had some connection to “Kim” and got off the train.

She tried to go to the station waiting room, but there was no shop selling local goods. A man wearing the uniform of the National Security Bureau (?) who happened to pass by on the open-air platform, faintly shining in the electric light.

“Where did you happen to buy those? I’m looking for a kiosk.”

The man, with one snap undone on his shirt, was carrying two packs of cigarettes in his hand.

“Just over there. It’s in that vorota (gate). Shall I take you there?”

They left the platform altogether, went through an odd gate, and where they jumped over a mud puddle, there was a throng of people. The woman serving and doing business had sparkling eyes which gleamed through the dark roof of the shack and the undulating pitch black heads of the crowd. A wooden box made of birch, handiworks made from agalmatolite, rings, necklaces, inkstands.

Certainly for a person with a few extra roubles in their pocket this was a dangerous spacial and temporal environment. The crowd which rushed for the kiosk in the 20 minutes that the train would wait at the station were all vying for a box or inkstand, or perhaps like Y, for a box of cigarettes that she had had set her sights on since Moscow, from the one woman vendor, but all were intent on waiting to get the correct change back, jostling without ever giving way and bunching together. There was another kiosk in the same space, selling bread. It was also packed with people.

When the warning bell rang, Y came back to the train.

　October 27th.

When I opened the window in the morning, there was a dusting of snow on the yellowy early winter grass.

A small station in the middle of a conifer forest. On the hill next to us, there were several pieces of farm machinery lined up, painted  in brilliant colors of blue and red. Were they in the process of turning this old land into new land somehow? This was the very embodiment of the Soviet Five-Year Plan to increase farm machinery by 400 per cent.

We were surrounded by pine trees, so much that the train window was green. Then suddenly, the view opened up. The dense forest was being felled as far as the eye could see.  High-voltage scaffolds were set at regular intervals in one direction.  If you quickly looked in the other direction, the electric cable crossed over the tracks and on the side of the dark, dense forest, like Hindenburg‘s moustache, a flock of thrushes perched on it far into the distance. Now I could see why someone could call Siberia a desolate wilderness.

We passed through Ekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk. Two hours difference between here and Moscow time. We went on. The train stopped at a stone-built station tall enough to be two stories. In the town beyond the station there were two Ford open cars. Even from just what we could see from inside the train, there were several new factories being built.

The centre of the Ural region is Sverdlovsk, and it is an important coal and farm tractor producing area for the CCCP. In 1930, when the American capitalists heard the name ‘Ural’, what they already associated it with wasn’t bear hunting.

A light blue sky with a tinge of grey. The slightly cold afternoon light reflecting back from the old town below. Scaffolding. Bricks being piled up.

　October 28th.

I watched Y get down the red kettle and disappear off toward the station’s hot water supply house with the skillful steps of a dancer from my viewpoint on the train. Snow all around us. In the USSR since many years prior it had been the custom to have hot water prepared for travelers when trains arrived at even the most rural of stations, free of charge. So I often saw this sight: great numbers of men racing up the platform bearing nickel or tin kettles, or even a single teacup. Tea. Teapot. Sugar. Cup. Spoon.  It wasn’t just the citizens of the USSR carrying these. We had them as well.

Today we saw a large kolkhoz (collective farm). The tractors were at the piles of straw left after the harvest. The farm was being covered in snow.

Oh, look, look! There’s a gigantic elyevator over there! (An elyevator is an automatic transporter for loading sacks of wheat onto freight cars.)

I got a copy of a local farmers’ newspaper called Kommoona (Коммуна). Issued twice every five days, ten pages, from the Barabinsk railway workers’ union’s uchik, where it was edited. No matter how you tried, after 25 days there would be nothing left to read in Moscow’s Izvestia or Pravda. We were on the klieskii (express). Though it had been three days since our train left Moscow, and while there was already an eight hour time lag, news from the heart of the socialist republic must have been making its way out to parts of Siberia.

This issue of Kommoona was from the 27th. I read it from cover to cover with profound interest. Just now in this area it is butter producing time. “The Barabinsk area intends to supply 190 centners (100 pounds) of butter to the Butter Producers’ Union in the month of October. As of October 20th, 135 centners have been collected. 75 per cent of September’s production plan could not be fulfilled. However, in the first twenty days of October we satisfied seven per cent of the plan. Union comrades and collective farm comrades! Don’t lose this tempo!” And there was an amusing criticism from the agricultural correspondant about butter production.

“Replace the manager of the butter factory! Manager Grodeyev of the Upper Nazlov Butter Factory does not want to engage in production. The factory is being dictated by a lack of management. There is not a day when the factory does not want for fuel. The factory water is dirty, hence the quality of the butter produced is lowered.

“In Upper Nazlov village there is another butter factory. That building is in a terrible state. The door is broken. They cannot work for the cold.

“The other day the manager set off to Klasnoyalsk village to settle the milk purchasing accounts. He spent three days there rolling around drunk and as a result, he managed to lose the horse that had been entrusted to him by the butter factory.

“Grodeyev has three horses. Previously, Grodeyev had some servants or tenant farmers. He is currently using the 19 year old tenant farmer Nikolai Klikov.”

As I was copying all this down into my notebook Y, fiddling with a red pencil and sorting through some clippings, said:

“What is that rustling sound?”

“Do you know? How does the Milk Producers’ Association collect the milk from the workers?”

When the USSR began to move toward the communal farming system, the most difficult thing for both the farmers and the government was the issue of livestock. From grain farming collectives to livestock collectives. This was always something that was actively encouraged. From looking at this newspaper, the milk agreement was a strong gauge of and influence on the farmers’ wellbeing. The previous year’s milk agreement had not taken the farmers’ consumption into account. In short, without counting how many people lived in each farm house, they had set the production rate for the entire Barabinsk region at 5.5 centners per cow per year.

And for individual farming families:

1 cow　　　  4.5 centners
2 cows　　　6.0     “
3 cows　　　7.5     ”

However, this year the average standard per animal for this region is 5.666 centners, and the norm for individual farming families per head of cattle is:

A large river. Muddy dark color. White with snow on both banks. I looked at the map. This was the Irtysh River. Omsk City begins on the other side of the railway bridge.

We stop in Omsk for 40 minutes.

There is a souvenir shop just outside the station.

With a lot of butter.

I bought three tomatoes at 15 kopeks. As I walked down the snowy path with them in my hands, they looked like snake gourd. They weren’t actually very good. I took an empty bottle of Narzan mineral water and bought 50 kopeks of milk. A big, round loaf of bread like a rubber pants’ lining was one kopek. The woman with children next to us on the train bought two, giving one to her daughter called Sonya who was just six, and one to her not-very-smart three year old son with a faddish but not international name like Novomir (new world).

It was so cold my ears hurt. In the dining car, a black party member that we often saw was strolling around most pleasantly with a white female party member he was always with, puffing out white breath. One group on the train is a mixture of Germans and Americans, and at mealtimes the female party member will announce it in German, English, and Russian. (Before we left Moscow, there was an incident. A factory somewhere had invited an American engineer to visit. The engineer brought some people along with him, including a black worker. The white workers got in a dispute over something and suddenly one raised a hand and hit their black friend. He didn’t understand that at a time when black people were being lynched in his own free country, America, that he could be in a civilized country where police officers directed traffic and would help him. But he watched the actions of the Soviet proletariat that surrounded him. Quickly they called a general meeting and an employees’ tribunal on the spot. The white worker, after a vote by the factory workers, was sent back to America.)

Just two hours from Omsk, a brand new grain transport station is being built. A freight car with icicles hanging down from the top is being pulled up to the soaring elyevator by a locomotive.

What a image of the brand new Siberia.

3:30 in the afternoon.

The setting sun shines down on the fields, the snow is purple. The forest is copper.

A small station. White birches. A wooden station painted yellow. Chekhov-esque. A lone station master wearing a red hat emerged, picking up a parcel from the mail train and dusting the snow off the top of it. The parcel had so many postage stamps on it.

　October 29th.

At about one in the morning, Sverdlovsk time, we entered Novosibirsk. When we bought our tickets from Moscow to Vladivostok, we had still been considering whether or not to have a stopover in Novosibirsk. It is the axis of culture and production in the new Siberia.

At night it’s -15 degrees so what could we do? Pulling open the blind on the window in the compartment and peeking out while still under covers, the lights in the approaching town flickered prettily.

We drifted off and when we opened our eyes, the train was still stopped. At the next compartment, someone had come up from the town to visit.

“It’s four in the morning here, are you joking?” a man said.

Set the clock ahead two hours again. We had not been able to buy a timetable on this journey. I took a large economic map out of my satchel to have a look. Moscow had stamped it in red at the top. Day by day we were traveling a long way through the fields and forests of Siberia.

We stopped at a station. Above the entrance to the station building there was a red placard.

LET’S PREPARE, COMRADES, FOR THE COMPLETION OF THE THIRD YEAR OF THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN!

In front of it, a cluster of male and female workers were lined up to see the train and the passengers who came walking out of it. Today I’ve seen yet another a new elyevator. It hadn’t been completely finished yet. A red flag flew from the top.

　October 30th.

At one in the afternoon, just before stopping at Nizhny Nojinsk, I heard an awful sound and as I scrunched my neck without thinking, the outside pane of glass on the window right next to where I was sitting was broken.

“Malchick!”

“Did you see him?”

“There were three of them. I only saw one of them throw a stone, though…”

The conductor from when we had left Moscow came in and, hurriedly pulling the window shade down, said: “We must not lose this.”

“Why?”

“They’re throwing stones.”

I didn’t understand so, again, I asked him, “But why?”

“There are some men making mischief. As you can see.”

When we went out to look when the train stopped, another window at the back of the train had been broken, too. That window had just a small hole, like it had been hit with an air rifle, and a crack in it. It was ruined.

We heard a child had been caught. His friends will likely get a hefty fine.

The train stopped somewhere in the forest. It seemed they could see hares. In the corridor:

Man’s voice: “The people ’round here don’t eat rabbit.”

Woman’s voice:  (without thinking) “But they sure catch a lot, don’t they? I wish they’d build a canning factory or something…”

And with that, it was silent. The sun shone weakly on the snow. Today we’ve stopped somewhere without a station and had to go back so many times.

It’s cold because of the broken window, so I slid over to sit next to it, putting my hat and one sleeve of my overcoat on and sat there, dressed like a waif.

We’re taking turns using the typewriter just to document it.

　October 31st.

Pine trees above the snow. A dark and strongly impressive scene. Somehow Oriental. Mongols using horses to pull carts, their long hems flapping in the wind, moving swiftly through the snow.

Irkutsk. One hour forward.

The conductor’s room is in the corner of each car. It has a samovar. It has a small box filled with Russian charcoal which gives off terrible amounts of carbon dioxide. And behind a barrier, cups with bases and spoons and so on. The conductor dispenses the tea to the passengers. There is a small, strange appliance as well. I came across it on a catalog of carriage contents posted on a wall.

“When we return to Moscow, will there be an inspection?”

“That’s right. Everyone will be inspected. We’ll both have to pay eleven roubles because that glass got broken. You’d better do it since you caught the criminal and filed all the paperwork.”

With that they broke it. The day before yesterday, when the glass in the door of the corridor to the dining car was broken, I heard someone ask casually,

“Who broke this?”

Then the conductor, the young party member, said in an unusually ill humor,

“I do not know.”

Conductors receive a monthly salary of 75 roubles. Workers in the USSR have a lot of rights – for example, except in cases where work at the factory has been reduced, where the worker has taken three days off in a month without a reason, or where the worker has been imprisoned for more than two months, the worker’s consent is generally required before he can be dismissed. On the other hand the responsibility rests firmly on their shoulders.

　November 1st (clear).

We passed through Chita while we were sleeping. The clock’s gone forward an hour.

It’s five minutes past midnight.

The train has stopped over a small wooden bridge.

If you put your head to the window and looked left, you could see something that looked like a depot. But the long train had stopped near a hill, buried in snow.

“What station is this?” Novomir asked in the corridor.

“It’s a station for trees!” said his sister, standing beside him, doll in hand.

Behind them, another little boy asked his father the same thing.

“It’s a station that nobody knows about.”

The conductor, shoes covered in snow, red-nosed, came in and took his gloves off.

“Whew!”

“What happened?”

“The axle of one of the sleeper cars back there snapped. A little further and we would’ve turned over.”

When I looked out at the disembarking passengers from the rear going out on the bridge, clinging to each other with both hands going forward, they were starting a bonfire in the middle of the deep snow. The train technician in his tall boots and green cap was peering under a car and giving instructions. A stick had been tossed out. A pitch black iron thing was brought and set down in the snow. Putting a goat-skin overcoat down on top of the snow, a man who looked like a peasant crawled under the train. Only the soles of his snow boots are visible from here.

The sun is shining. The snow is thawing. Cold. A Mongol boy wearing a three-cornered hat with red tufts pushes his way through the snow, walking off towards a house on the other side of a low fence. A dog follows behind.

When I came back down the corridor, a woman from a compartment on the other end stuck out her neck.

“What’s happened?”

Her husband, his broad back turned to his wife, legs wide, smoking a pipe in the corridor, replied:

“An anecdote.”

In Mongolian villages there are so many dogs everywhere.  ………

The train has been stopped in the middle of this snow for repairs for over two hours.

Nearly all day, we’ve been traveling alongside the Shillka, upstream of the Amur river. Snow, deep snow. This is a scrub area, no evergreens visible. A mountain. Unlike in Siberia, the houses here have thin shingle roofs. Every house has a fence around it, with cows, horses, pigs, goats, and so on. The houses are low, as are the enclosures. And there’s the snow.

The snow that covers the riverbank is rife with the little footprints of hares or some other little animal. The river is frozen over.

The land has a stark Eastern beauty, utterly different from the rich black soil around Moscow and the dense forest-covered central Siberia. On the other side of the extensive mountains was the Mongolian People’s Republic.

November 2nd (partly cloudy).

There was a rock hillside just outside the train window. In the afternoon, if you looked out the window you could have been deceived into believing that it was the same part of rocky hillside.

“What boring scenery!”

“That’s why Bezais said, ‘Oh, I’m so fed up with this already!’ at pretty much this same mountain.” **

A historical play called “Our Youth”, about the feelings of civil war-era Komsomol officers, the mistakes they make due to their youth and the heroic acts they undertake to redeem themselves, was being put on on small stages. Bezais, who is secretly traveling to Khabarovsk, gets on a painted freight train. The above is from a conversation he has with a girl he helped on board.

It’s been nine days since our train left Moscow. We are just outside of Khabarovsk.

When we passed through one small station, I saw a woman carrying a long pole with wooden buckets on either end to get water. There was a square well in the field next to the station, with a cover over it. It had a device which was a large circle with a smaller circle attached that turns and loosens a rope, bringing the water out. In Siberia as well, the wells in the countryside are like this.

In Japan it is women who must go to get the water. In Russia it is the same. And in the village of the woman carrying the pole, the town’s red Soviet flag is flying in the snow.

As the scenery was so boring, I read Kolkhoz Zarya (Kholkoz Dawn) all day, feeling as if I was just sitting at home.

From 1928 to 1929, the Soviet Five-Year Plan for increasing production was launched, and those engaged in the beginning of the push for the creation of a Socialist society weren’t just those directly involved in production. Artists, writers, and film producers were all mobilized. For these artistic laborers, it was their important duty as a class to vividly reflect the reality of the production increases in the new Soviet Union, as well as the tremendous changes that were taking place in the daily lives of the peasant workers and social sentiment – as well as to transcend art and advance the people’s class consciousness by some degree to complete the construction of a Socialist society.

The young film producers went out into the farming villages, the coal mines, and deep into the forests. (And Japanese cinema enthusiasts saw the masterpiece Turksib in Tokyo.)

And the writers and reporters, armed with their chemical pencils that when their notebooks got rained on made the words look as if they were written in purple ink, went out to the rural villages where a new life centered on the collective farm was beginning, out to the fishing areas and to remote regions (Central Asia and Siberia). The writers’ organization recruited volunteers, and together with Meyerhold‘s young actors and theater workers (TRAM) they set off from Moscow on a specially-run train to spread culture.

So many interesting works full of information about the new way of life in rural areas came out. The national publishers brought out 5 and 20 kopek bargain editions.

Kolkhoz Zarya cost me 15 kopeks. Kolkhoz Zarya contains a few brief sketches showing objectively, with no adornment, what kind of difficulties were faced in organizing in the many villages which faced opposition from rich landowners, what kind of people were involved, in what way – or the passion with which even a stupid milkmaid called Wassika decided to move a tractor, or the “October” in villages where some couples had split up in order to support collective farms.

It depicts the reality of the situation, where the new force is set by strong, ancient roots, but where old rural customs will in due course be reformed by it. You don’t need a dictionary to read this kind of book.

November 3rd.

The clock has gone forward by yet another hour. Now we’re on Far Eastern time – the same as Japan. In Moscow, sometimes when we’d be up doing something until late at night I’d suddenly think to ask:

“What time is it now in Japan?”

“It’s… two o’clock now, so it’s nine o’clock in the morning. School’s already starting.”

This nonstop service to Vladivostok is already delayed by twenty-some hours. We were supposed to arrive in Vladivostok this evening, but it might well take until tomorrow night. When you ride on a train for ten days, you don’t think much of being half a day or even a day late. Everyone is quite buoyant. As well as looking forward to when our journey will finally be over.

Two men in the corridor were saying:

“How much longer will it take to get to Vladivostok, at this rate?”

“We are at least five hours behind schedule.”

“Oh well, it’s not like this train can go anywhere past Vladivostok anyway.”

The scenery told me we really had gone east. The snow on the trees swelled softly.

In the dining car tonight, the man who sat down next to the four of us was eating a broiled kuropatka (a kind of wild bird) with a tremendously loud crunching sound and, licking his fingers, he asked himself out loud:

“Was there already snow in Siberia?”

Honestly! He was going to the maritime provinces.

The dining car was bustling tonight. People who have been on board since Moscow are in a joyous mood on the night before their long journey ends. Those who newly boarded the train today were enjoying their first dinner on the train. (The diners on trains are a bigger treat than the usual ones.) The man who asked if there was snow in Siberia started talking to a man wearing glasses and eating kuropatka at a table across the aisle.

“How’s yours?”

Raising his shoulders nearly unnoticibly,

“Well, it is what it is.”

“It’s good with butter, but it does take its toll on the stomach, though of course that’s not all bad…”

Half of a broiled kuropatka is one rouble, 50 kopeks.

People at tables here and there were asking comrades they did not know about the weather in various areas.

At night, when we were making Japanese tea, when we went to the conductor’s quarters to get cups of hot water, the conductor (an older, non-party member) asked if he could have some if there was any leftover.

“You know about Japanese tea? Green, and drank with no sugar?”

“Of course I do! I know all about it. When I was in Central Asia, Tashket, we drank it all day.”

They always drink green tea there, to help them cool down in the heat.

When I brought him what was left in the bottom of the small can, he took a small pinch and put it between his front teeth.

“I’m very grateful! This is good tea, real green tea.”

November 4th.

We will arrive in Vladivostok at last tomorrow, but at exactly what time, we don’t know. Perhaps around two in the morning. But then I’ve also heard it could be around five in the morning. Last night, Y was worrying whether there would be rooms available at hotels if we arrived at two. She said we should send a telegram to a certain friend in Vladivostok, and she was just about to fill in the telegram form but stopped when the conductor said we would probably arrive at five.

“At any rate we’ll be in a rush tomorrow so we should do up the luggage today.”

The ferry leaves at noon. It only runs once a week.

As we were approaching a station we were due to pass through, I saw a large wooden overpass suspended above the train. It was unfinished, the white snow piling up on the surface of the new wood which nobody had yet set a foot on. It was beautiful. Part of the Five-Year Plan is to expand the Soviet transportation network from the 80,000 kilometers it covered in 1928 to 105,000 kilometers. Soviet rail freight in 1930 was 281,000,000 tons. (By 1933, it should be 330,000,000 tons.) In the time between us passing through Siberia and coming here,  the reality of this was being proved at the main station, just by how they made preparations for freight for how many freight trains and how much cargo they could take, writing all kinds of signals in chalk, and remembering which lines had departures arranged. The same with this bridge. There wasn’t a long line of freight trains waiting at this station. Probably because those on foot happily crossed the trackbed in their rubashkas and tall boots.

However, because with increasing numbers of freight trains coming, it is already becoming difficult to come and go, this new wooden bridge is being built.

This wasn’t the first new bridge that I’ve seen. I’ve seen just two before somewhere else.

　November 5th.

It’s still dark out. After I washed my face beneath the light in the washroom, a knock came at the door:

“Twenty minutes to Vladivostok!” the conductor announced as he walked.

Y had said it wouldn’t do to sleep to pass the time, so she spent last night just laying there in her clothes. Coming down from the top berth, she said, “Ahh, it’s so cold!” sounding terribly cold indeed.

“It’s still early, you haven’t slept enough.”

She was somewhat excited. The light was on in the compartment. When I peered outside, I could see the stars in the darkness before the sunrise. Far off, the city’s lights were shining.

We went slowly for a long time, stopping where the red or green signal was visible, steadily making our way to the platform in Vladivostok. An empty baggage carrier waited on the frozen concrete. Two or three station staff members came out dozily carrying torches.

“Is nobody else coming out?”

“No.”

There were no more than a few porters to unload the baggage. One by one. Standing above this lonely platform the conductor kept guard of the unloaded baggage. I lost feeling in the tips of my feet.

“Cold, isn’t it?” said a man with a fur hat on and a rifle on his shoulder, standing guard in front of the mountain of baggage.

“The wind is very strong here.”

We finally caught a porter, moving the baggage over to a holding area piece by piece.

“Where is it you’re going to?”

“We’re taking a steamship to Japan, but where is the wharf? Could you possibly take us there?”

The old porter in a hemp apron with a nickel tag hanging from his chest said distractedly,

“The wharf is another matter entirely.”

“Is it far? From here.”

“Considerably.”

It looked as if we had no choice but to look for a coach.

“Wait here, all right?”

Y went off to look with the porter in tow. After about ten minutes only the porter returned. As he attended to carrying the last piece of baggage, a Chinese person on a wagon pulled by a Mongolian horse which looked like a donkey stopped in front of the station, packed full of our luggage.

Seeing the Chinese man’s wagon was so odd, it made me remember scenes I had seen three years before in Harbin. China has changed as well in the past three years. There are now workers soviets in more than 100 prefectures in China.

“Didn’t I do well? It’s seven roubles to the wharf.”

It was already light. We went off in the coach through the town. It wasn’t only the train that infrequently passed through – there were very few people on the street as well, about half Chinese and half Russian. On the left, I could see the sea. And the steamer. ――

It was a long way to the wharf. Y jumped off from the coach, which would be going on ahead, and pulled our satchels and document cases off from the back where they were tied on, ably putting them and herself sidesaddle on a thick pole which then emerged. The long-tailed Mongolian horse took off down a stony road, loaded with our various bags and Y in her leather overcoat. I set off on the footpath as always. As always. ――

I descended the gentle slope down to the shore. There was a row of storehouses there, with rails laid out. There was horse dung in between the cobblestones. When I got to the shore, the coach had stopped in front of the merchant shipping associations’ buildings, which halfway looked like offices which halfway looked like storehouses. The ancient freighter was mooring just before my eyes. This was the Amakusa-maru, which would take us to Japan.

And now, we can see the surface of the sea we are heading into and on the other side, the mountainous headland, covered with buildings. The sun is shining warmly down on the sea and the headland, and on the back of the Chinese woman pushing a trolley back on the wharf.

The people of Vladivostok are also thought of as being wild. If you visit, you will see that is not true. Depending what time it is, the town is quiet. The harbor is quiet. The sun beams down on the sea.

I’m looking out at the gleaming surface of the sea with inexpressible emotions.

This is the true edge of the USSR.

From Moscow to Vladivostok is 9,235 kilometres. Under the Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union is building great new hemp spinning factories here. At the same time, the capitalism and imperialism that crosses over the Sea of Japan is being washed from this shore. It was Vladivostok from which Kolchak‘s army, the Japanese Imperialist Army which tried but did not succeed in crushing the proletariat’s Soviet Russia, and the unknowing, conscripted proletariat sons of Japan came and went. And then, the profiteers, the prostitutes, and the restaurant proprietresses left. – And today, in 1930, within the metal-barred windows of Korea Bank, there is a cashbox with the seal of the Soviet authorities.

—-

* I have no idea what this is supposed to say, nor could my feeble research turn up a region that even vaguely resembles what she’s written.

** As Miyamoto sort of explains, Bezais is a character from the 1928 short novel Po tu storonu (translated variously as ‘Over the Border’, ’On That Side’, etc) by Viktor Kin. “Entertainingly written, it opens with a description of one of those endless train journeys of the civil war (the time is 1921). Two young Komsomol officials – Matveyev is twenty, Bezais is eighteen – are travelling to Khabarovsk in the Far East. Their conversations, the girls they meet, the general tone of the novel, are initially witty, laconic, even a trifle facetious. No other novel of the period treats the civil war in such a light-hearted manner. In Khabarovsk, however, Matveyev is shot in the leg and it has to be amputated. Though he makes a good recovery, the lightness of heart has gone.” (Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak, p 160)

海
(Umi)

by DAZAI Osamu (太宰治)

When we lived in Mitaka in Tokyo, bombs were falling nearby nearly every day, and I didn’t care if I died, but when I thought that if a bomb fell on my child, she would die without having seen the sea once, it was hard to take. I was born in the middle of the Tsugaru Plains, so I didn’t see the sea until late in life, taking my first trip there around the age of ten. And the great excitement of that became one of my most treasured memories for all time. I wanted to give her the chance to see the sea at least once.

My daughter was five years old. The day came when our house was damaged by a bomb, but nobody in the house was injured. We moved to my wife’s hometown, Kōfu. But before we knew it, Kōfu was being attacked by enemy planes, and the house we were in was burned down. But the battle continued on. At last there was no choice but to take my wife and child back to the place where I was born. That was our last stand. And so we departed Kōfu for my parents’ home in Tsugaru. It took three days and nights for us to finally reach Higashi-Noshiro in Akita prefecture, and when we transfered to the Gonō line there, I relaxed a little.

“Which side can you see the sea from?” I asked the conductor straight away. The line follows the coast closely. We sat down on the side where the sea is visible.

“Yes, you’ll be able to see the sea. Soon. You’re gonna see the same sea that Urashima Taro sailed on.”

I was the only one all excited.

“Look! It’s the sea! You see it? That’s the sea? Look, how enormous it is…”

Finally I was able to show my daughter the sea.

“Look at the river, mama,” said the child, unmoved.

“The river?” I was astonished.

“Mm-hm, the river.” My wife smiled, half asleep.

“That’s no river, it’s the ocean. They’re totally, completely different! Calling that a river, honestly.”

Knowing it was truly pointless, I gazed out alone at the sea in the dusk.