9—
Early Signs of Rebellion
My parents strictly forbade their children to go to a motion picture on their own. Because they themselves had little interest in this kind of entertainment, they almost never took me or Sister to see one. I had my maternal grandfather to thank for my initiation into motion pictures. He enjoyed taking us to a movie, followed by a meal in some famous Western restaurant. The pictures we saw were all made in the West, never in Japan. Now that I think about it, I still do not quite understand the reason. Perhaps he was drawn to the lure of their exotic images that in turn brought back happy memories of his younger days in the West. The fragrance of perfume, the taste of wine, the sensuousness of a woman's hair, the expressions on people's faces, and the intonation of their utterances . . . I suppose the more elusive these experiences became in his immediate Tokyo surroundings, the more precious and unforgettable they were to him at that time. Apparently, even the dizzy play of light and shadow in the darkness of the theater could impart a significance he alone could appreciate. Often in the middle of a movie, just when Sister and I became totally captivated by the plot and mesmerized by its images, Grandfather would rise and say, "Okay, that's enough for us." As to how the plot might unfold, he couldn't have cared less.
Before the advent of the "talkies," movie houses in Shibuya always had a small band to provide appropriate background music to synchronize with developments on the screen.[1] The charging of the cavalry would call for an overture from a Rossini opera; the gathering of momentum before a tumultuous climax would usher in the exuberant mu-
[1] The talkies started to take over Japanese cinema around 1937.
sic of Offenbach of cancan fame; a tender scene of budding romance would inspire Träumerei performed on the violin. Anyone even slightly familiar with the limited repertoire of their melodies could very well tell, even without explanation, not only what was happening on the screen at the moment but what was going to happen next. Although I did not know it at the time—I was only an elementary school student—the bands at Shibuya's movie theaters were trying to accomplish what the musical accompaniment in the no[*] or the kabuki theater has been doing since the old days, only in a more contemporary and less refined style.
To make doubly sure that the audience with little familiarity with Western customs could readily understand what was happening on the screen, movie theaters also provided the service of commentators known as katsuben .[2] It worked very much like today's radio stations during the broadcast of an opera, where an announcer comes on the air to explain the plot while the orchestral music is switched off. But the katsuben in the bygone days were far more creative than today's radio commentators in terms of developing memorable stylizations in their delivery. In a kyogen[*] play, characters are often designated to play three different roles: the master, the manservant, and the second manservant. Likewise, the katsuben had their own system of categorization. Instead of calling each character in Western action films by his or her individual name, all leading females were called "Merii" (Mary), all good guys were "Joji"[*] (George), and all bad guys were "Jakku" (Jack). "Now, the villain Jakku is moving closer and closer behind Merii," the katsuben would explain the setting. " 'Oh, Joji-san![*] Joji-san!' Her desperate crying and calling to no avail, the door is tightly shut; and at the top of her voice, Merii cries 'Joji-san! Help meee . . . !' Aah! What's going to be the fate of poor Merii?" As soon as he finished, the scene would abruptly change to that of Joji[*] charging on horseback through the wilderness to come to the res-
[2] The number of katsuben , short for katsudo[*] benshi (movie interpreter), started to grow in the early 1910s with the production of dramatic films and peaked at around 7,000 in the 1920s. Some of them, most notably Tokugawa Musei (1894–1971), became quite famous. Part of their raison d'être had to do with the way they enchanted the audience with their storytelling and imaginative improvisation. Misono Kyohei's[*] study Katsuben jidai (The age of katsuben [Iwanami shoten, 1990]) is richly illustrated. For two studies in English, see Arthur Nolletti, Jr., and David Desser, eds., Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Hiroshi Komatsu and Charles Musser, "Benshi Search," Wide Angle 9, no. 2 (1987): 73–90.
cue. The majority of Hollywood movies in the past were well serve by these three roles alone, as they are in the present.
While I did enjoy watching these action films, their dualistic demarcation of good and evil had no effect on my ethical values or on my world view. My visits to Shibuya's movie theaters were not frequent enough for me to be so influenced, and years later when I did watch many more Westerns, I was already too old to be affected. My moral and ethical values were not cultivated by the motion pictures.
The motion pictures I saw with Grandfather did play a role—and not a small one—in helping me discover a world independent of matters of right and wrong. One such picture imported by Towa[*] Trading Company enacted the meeting and separation of two destitute lovers on the night of July 14.[3] Another depicted a Russian grand duke with a local town girl in a scurrying coach in a late-night scene at an ancient capital where an international congress was being held.[4] Yet another brought the scene of a still-unknown composer dallying with a beautiful maiden in the middle of a wheat field in central Europe.[5] In the fogged-in English capital, an elusive thief who has effortlessly outfoxed the police now finds himself doublecrossed by a prostitute. As he is being arrested, he mutters that poor people must stand by each other lest the whole world collapse on them.[6] There is little question that these story lines had little social relevance to the realities of any European city. Yet to a middle-school student like me, Europe was too infinitely far away to elicit the
[3] Established in 1928, Towa Trading Company was instrumental in introducing a large number of European art films to the Japanese audience before 1945. Such activities continued into the postwar period, until overseas distribution rights for European films fell into the hands of American companies. • The meeting occurs in René Claire's 1932 film Quatorze Juillet , which depicts a few hours in the life of a flower girl in Paris's Montmartre district on the eve of the country's annual holiday celebrating the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.
[4] A reference to Erik Charell's Der Kongress tanzt (The congress dances, 1931), set against the background of the Congress of Vienna and reputed to have been one of the best early European musicals. The Russian grand duke out-smarted his opponent by having a double take his place at the congress while he assumed a secret identity.
[5] A reference to Willi Forst's Leise flehen meine Lieder (Unfinished symphony, 1933).
[6] A reference to G. W. Pabst's Die Dreigroschenoper (Three-penny opera, 1931), his second sound film based on the play by Bertolt Brecht and derived from The Beggar's Opera by John Gay. The photography of Fritz Arno Wagner records this Soho underworld of the 1890s.
slightest misgivings on my part. To be sure, the black and white images that I saw were nothing more than a silhouette of reality, but I could actually hear the noise of the coach as it ran along the stone pavement in the old European capital, and I could feel the sun and the blue sky over the expansive wheat fields of central Europe. For me, the melodies played on the accordion, the faces of young girls peeking out from the windows of their homes in the alleys, and the swirling skirts of dancing women all existed in a real, substantive way. In my early childhood, Harada Mitsuo's popular science books nourished me; after I became a middle-school student, their role fell to the fairy tales I saw in the movies.
In the world of fairy tales, all kinds of things could happen: love, ambition, betrayal, fateful encounters, and irrevocable separations. But nothing ever happened in the real world I lived in, a world consisting only of going back and forth on the city train between my Mitake-cho[*] home in Shibuya and my middle school in Hirakawa-cho[*] . Since I did not have any dramatic encounters with anyone, I could not throw myself into the flames of love or, consequently, experience the agony of separation. Although the war on the Chinese continent had begun, its impact was not felt in my immediate surroundings, and revolution was nothing more than a distant myth. The only thing I knew about was my middle school, and I was totally fed up with it and myself. The movie theater taught me a way to escape into a world of fantasy in the darkness.
The movie theater was not the only place where I could indulge myself in a world of fantasy. Returning home from school, I would go up to Father's study on the second floor, not to study my textbooks but rather to look for poetry or other literary works to read. On his bookshelves thick with German medical reference books, only a few literary works—several books of waka —could be found in some inconspicuous corner. Moreover, the majority of them were old annotations on the Man'yoshu[*] .[7] The first work of Japanese literature I read was the
[7] Man'yoshu (Collection of ten thousand leaves), a late Nara or early Heian compilation of Japanese lyric poetry and the oldest collection known today, with 4,207 tanka , 265 choka[*] , and other forms including 4 Chinese poems and 22 Chinese prose passages. Some critics consider it the quintessential manifestation of the "pure Japanese spirit." For Kato's[*] assessment of the Man'yoshu , see his History of Japanese Literature , 1:59–87. For a translation see Ian Hideo Levy, The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'yoshu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Man'yoshu[*] , but how that happened had nothing to do with my own critical judgment. When I was a middle-school student, I felt the need for a world of imagination; since watching movies could not always fulfill this need, literature became the only other avenue open to me. Fortunately—but unfortunately for me at the time—the Man'yoshu was about the only book I could lay my hands on. That was the simple explanation.
The Man'yoshu more than opened up a world of imagination for me, though in that sense the works of Hitomaro and Okura could hardly rival the films of René Clair or G. W. Pabst.[8] More significantly, it also opened my eyes to the world of literary expression. The language of the Man'yoshu was so radically different from the Japanese I had read so far that if I had not relied on the annotations, in many instances I could not have even imagined what the text meant at all. I discovered for the first time a language divorced from its semantic component, and I also began to notice other nonsemantic aspects of language and the possibilities they suggest.
Plovers skimming the evening waves
on the Omi[*] Sea
When you cry
so my heart trails
like dwarf bamboo
down to the past.[9]
I was beginning to discover what could well be called the music of the Man'yoshu along with the subtleties and the indescribable magic of poetry. A number of Man'yo[*] poems I memorized at that time have become
[8] Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (dates unknown), one of the major Man'yo poets and considered to be one of the greatest in Japan, whose official eulogies and elegies have been compared to epics, though the emotional intensity in Hitomaro's private poems, such as his elegies on the death of his wife, are most admired (see Ian Hideo Levy, Hitomaro and the Birth of Japanese Lyricism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984]). • Yamanoue no Okura (660–ca. 733), a major and remarkably versatile Man'yo poet who felt equally at home composing in Japanese and Chinese, has been especially noted for the social concern and humanism in some of his works as well as for his expression of Buddhist ideas about the precariousness of the human condition. Kato[*] in A History of Japanese Literature also highlights the thematic originality in Okura's poems, which address topics such as the misery of old age and the destitution of a harsh life (1:76–77).
[9] Kato's[*] original text cites only the first half of the celebrated Man'yo poem no. 266 by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. The English translation by Levy is Ten Thousand Leaves , 162.
an integral part of me. Meanwhile, I also read the poetry collections by Toson[*] and Bansui.[10] In terms of poetic diction, however, their language was too similar to our everyday speech to have any decisive impact on me. On the other hand, the language in the John Keats poetry collection Mother owned was too far removed from the Japanese I knew. Whenever I contemplate the nature of poetry, my frame of reference is neither Toson or Bansui nor any foreign poet. The Man'yo[*] poets come to mind before anybody else. That "poetry" has come to mean something special to me is a result of the countless evening hours I spent with the Man'yoshu[*] on the second floor of my Mitake-cho[*] home. Yet the world of the Man'yoshu , just like the world of René Clair and G. W. Pabst, was infinitely removed from the intolerably boring reality I faced every day. The first literary figure to speak coherently to me about this boredom, about this intolerable burden, and about the origin and the implications of my sense of self-disgust—even though he might not have all the answers—was Akutagawa Ryunosuke[*] .[11]
I had never contemplated suicide, but I was moved by Akutagawa Ryunosuke's[*] writings. A friend of mine from elementary-school days was then a student at a girls' school and an avid reader of novels. "Oh, you are so ignorant! You mean you haven't even read Akutagawa yet?" she said. "I'll let you borrow some of mine. See what you think. I don't know if he's the type for you, though." I admired his short stories, and, more than that, I was astounded by his Words of a Dwarf .[12] It was in
[10] During the Meiji-Taisho[*] period only Natsume Soseki[*] and Mori Ogai[*] achieved literary eminence comparable to that of Shimazaki Toson[*] (1872–1943); his works include novels (Hakai [The broken commandment, 1906], Ie [The family, 1910–11)], Shinsei [New life, 1918–19], and Yoake mae [Before the dawn, 1929–35]) as well as many verse and verse-prose collections, short stories, commentaries, and children's tales. • Often paired with him as modern Japan's leading poets, Doi Bansui (1871–1952) has also been compared to Schiller and Swinburne; his major poetry collections include Tenchi ujo[*] (The sentimental heaven and earth, 1899) and Gyosho[*] (The bell at dawn, 1901).
[11] On Akutagawa see chapter 5, note 5.
[12] Shuju no kotoba (1923–27) is a collection of Akutagawa's aphorisms spiced with paradoxes and ironies. With no coherent plot or systematic organization to speak of, Akutagawa comments on contemporary culture, art, society, life, and thought. The writer and critic Nakamura Shin'ichiro[*] praises its "very high literary value" and Akutagawa's "lucid logic, clever allegories, and the richness and originality of his ideas" (Akutagawa Ryunosuke[*] no sekai [Kadokawa shoten, 1974], 134), while other critics note his witty frivolity and generally cynical perspective.
the 1920s that Akutagawa wrote: "A military man is just like an infant." But when I read it in the mid-1930s, these words struck me as an utterance from my contemporary. Every value that had until then been held sacred in schools, at homes, and by the public at large all of a sudden crumbled before my eyes under Akutagawa's single blow. Yesterday's heroes became ordinary mortals; patriotism became self-aggrandizement; absolute obedience became irresponsibility; and virtue became cowardice if not ignorance. My eyes were opened to the possibility that the same social phenomena could inspire diametrically opposite interpretations from those offered by the newspapers, by the middle schools, and by the general public as a whole. I was filled with such jubilation that I was beside myself in a moment of frenzied excitement. In the end, I bought the ten volumes of Akutagawa's complete works from a secondhand bookstore in Shibuya and immersed myself in them. I even ended up memorizing almost all the names of numerous literary figures quoted in his writings. By my fourth year in middle school, I had finished reading all the books I could borrow from my friend, the novel enthusiast. By then I had turned into a zealous reader of Japanese and foreign novels, devouring everything I could find at home as well as at Grandfather's house. Even when my higher-school entrance examination was approaching, I was not the least motivated to spend more than the minimum time preparing for it.
Father was not happy with his son for being so taken up with "trashy novels." He argued how socially worthless this idle business of literature was to begin with, how despicable the writers' morality was—with the exception of Soseki[*][13] —and how foolish it was for me to waste my time reading novels when my higher-school entrance examination was just around the corner. But his arguments could no longer convince me. Mother came to her son's defense, saying that even if literature had no social relevance, it had its own aesthetic value. She pointed out that Father himself had once enjoyed reading the Man'yoshu[*] and composing waka . She also said that as long as I could pass the higher-school entrance examination, she thought it was best for them not to be too critical. My position was that since I had already reduced my elementary-school education from its formal six years to five, I did not feel obligated to again shorten my middle-school years from five to four. At the same time, I was optimistic about my chances of passing the entrance exam-
[13] On Natsume Soseki see chapter 12, note 1.
ination and thought nothing could be more gratifying than passing it without working particularly hard. But things did not work out the way I expected. When I failed the examination, I realized it was much tougher than I had anticipated. I felt apologetic to Mother since she had defended my reading habits against Father's objections. Meanwhile, the thought of having to spend another year—my fifth year—in middle school nauseated me. I thought to myself that at the end of my fifth year, I would take the same examination again, and luck or no luck, I would have to pass it. That would not be particularly difficult to accomplish since during the fifth year nothing new was taught. Instead, we just went over what we had learned in the last four years. While I was preparing for the examination, I would still from time to time dig out literary materials to read. I explained to Father that passing the examination did not actually require as much time studying as he thought.
"But didn't you fail the examination because you were reading novels?"
"That was because I was down on my luck," I replied.
The reason for the distance now developing between Father and me went beyond the question of the entrance examination itself. It was tied, I think, to his expectation that I would become a scientist in the future. That would explain his elation at my interest in popular science when I was in elementary school and his disaffection at my addiction to literary works during my middle-school years. Father was a Man'yoshu[*] fan and an amateur poet, an atheist and a thorough positivist, but not only did he despise the "literary youth," he considered them to be pests. And up until that time, I myself had never met one.
The first time I met a real literary youth was in the last summer of my middle-school years when I went to Shinano Oiwake.[14] It was the first time Sister and I had left our parents to go by ourselves to the highlands of Shinshu[*] to escape the midsummer heat in Tokyo. Probably financial reasons kept our parents from coming along.
We took up lodging at an oil shop then situated on the south side of the Nakasendo[*] .[15] It had served as a wakihonjin , or a subsidiary lodging
[14] A summer resort in Nagano Prefecture's Karuizawa-cho[*] , Shinano Oiwake served in the Edo period as a lodging station (shukuba ) between Kutsukake on the Nakasendo and Odai in eastern Nagano. Its prewar popularity with writers and poets such as Hori Tatsuo and Tachihara Michizo[*] gave the locale a literary flavor, and a number of writers including Kato[*] still make regular summer visits there. See Kondo[*] Tomie, Shinano Oiwake bungakufu (Chuo[*] Koronsha[*] , 1990).
[15] Sometimes known as the Tosando[*] (road through the Eastern mountains)as opposed to the coastal route along the Tokaido[*] , the Nakasendo was the main road between Nihonbashi in Edo through Ueno, Shinano, and Mino (now southern part of Gifu Prefecture) to Kusatsu in the southwestern part of present-day Shiga Prefecture, where it merged into the Tokaido some famous lodging stations along the way were Omiya[*] , Karuizawa, Tsumago, Magome, Sekigahara, and Echigawa.
house for travelers, in the old days. Its structure dated back to the Edo period and it still had many traces of its former self as a prosperous lodging station before the opening of the Shin'etsu Main Line. Overhanging its wide frontage facing the Nakasendo[*] was its second floor with grid-lattice windows. In the Edo period courtesans presumably waited behind those windows for travelers passing through town, just as Saikaku and others have chronicled.[16]
Along the streets of Oiwake today, there remain only two or three houses with the same design dating back to the Edo period. But it is no exaggeration to say that at the time we were there, there were rows and rows of these structures, the largest one being the oil shop. The passing years had given the heavy pillars and the interior floorboards a black luster, and even when the shoji screen doors were closed, a gap was formed with the supporting columns. The house had electricity, but there were no lights along the corridor. In order to go to the toilet at night, it was necessary to carry a candle for light. Because there were few attendants at the lodging house, all the lodgers would gather in a spacious room for their three meals. Sightseeing attractions in the vicinity were limited to Mount Asama alone, so nearly all of the guests stayed only for the two summer months. Most of them were university students preparing for the senior civil service examinations, or higher-school students waiting to take their university entrance examinations. No one
In the Edo period magistrates (bugyo[*] ), the chief retainers, or councillors of daimyos[*] stayed in the wakihonjin ; the more imposing and elaborate honjin (main lodge) was for the daimyos themselves along with members of the aristocratic kuge class and important bakufu officials.
[16] Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), a haikai poet, perceptive chronicler of the mannerisms of the merchant class in the Edo period, and highly accomplished pioneer of realist fiction in the ukiyo-zoshi[*] (floating-world fiction) genre. Saikaku's works include Koshoku[*] ichidai otoko (The life of an amorous man, 1682), Koshoku gonin onna (Five women who loved love, 1686), Budo[*] denraiki (The transmission of the martial arts, 1687), Nanshoku Okagami[*] (The great mirror of manly love, 1687), and Nippon Eitaigura (The Japanese family storehouse, 1688). See Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
brought his family along, and the local farmers did not hold banquets there, preferring the restaurants in Komoro.[17]
The student lodgers at the oil shop would sometimes go hiking together, and sometimes they would walk for about half an hour to play tennis near the train station. But ordinarily, after taking a short walk, they would shut themselves in their rooms and "hit the books" until late into the night. Through the sliding door, any talking in the next room was clearly audible, but almost none of them stayed for any long conversation. I suppose my parents must have somehow heard about the reputation of the oil shop and thought it would be a good place for their son to study.
As a matter of fact, there was nothing to do except study. After living together under the same roof for over a month, I got acquainted with a number of the university students. From them, I heard stories about fellow lodgers such as the poet Tachihara Michizo[*] and a "literary youth," as the law students sarcastically called him. Tachihara Michizo was a student of architecture; he wrote poetry and was recognized by Hori Tatsuo.[18] The literary youth was reading the collected works of Shestov and generally refused to recognize the talents of any Japanese writer other
[17] An old castle town a short distance west of Shinano Oiwake on the Shin'etsu Main Line, Komoro was also known in the Edo period as a lodging station on the Nakasendo[*] . As Kato[*] notes below, the Oiwake oil shop was destroyed by fire, but a remarkably well preserved Edo period honjin and a wakihonjin still remain, a short walk from the Komoro train station. The poet-writer Shimazaki Toson[*] spent six years in Komoro as an elementary school teacher (1899–1905), and the town fondly remembers him today with a Shimazaki Toson Memorial Museum (Shimazaki Toson Ki'nenkan).
[18] Tachihara Michizo (1914–39), a member of the coterie poetry journal Shiki (Four seasons) founded by Hori Tatsuo in 1933, was known for the delicate lyricism and musical quality of his sonnetlike poems in fourteen irregular lines, many of them inspired by his experiences in Shinano Oiwake; his three poetry collections were Wasuregusa ni yosu (Dedications to the day-lilies, 1937), Akatsuki to yube[*] no shi (Poems of dawn and dusk, 1937), and Yasashiki uta (Gentle songs, 1947). • Hori Tatsuo (1904–53) was a renowned early Showa[*] novelist noted for his melancholy lyricism. A disciple of Akutagawa Ryunosuke[*] and the poet Muro[*] Saisei, Hori also avidly read modern French poets, including Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau, whose translations he published in the literary journal Roba (Donkey), before turning to Radiguet, Proust, Mauriac, and Rilke. Kaze tachinu (The wind has risen, 1936–38), Hori's most celebrated work, brilliantly evokes a young couple's subtle reactions to death at a sanatorium. During the war Hori's growing interest in the Japanese classics inspired his Kagero[*] no nikki (The gossamer diary, 1937) and Arano (Wilderness, 1941).
than Hori. While listening to their stories, I realized that my own knowledge of literature was not good enough to follow even the main thrust of their conversation. I hadn't read any of Hori Tatsuo's works, and as for Shestov, I hadn't even heard of him before. I already felt a sense of inferiority toward the literary youth before I ever saw him. But very soon my opportunity came.
He was a young man with a pale complexion and a thin, small build. He slouched like an old man, and his stroll on the street was punctuated by occasional coughs. When we passed each other, my companion, a law student, said, "You look really awful! You'd better not rack your brains too much composing poems. That's not good for your health, you know!"
The young man raised his head abruptly, mumbled something to the university student in a voice too low to be audible and didn't even bother to cast a glance at me. What an arrogant man, I thought. But that was not the incident that led to my understanding of what Father might have in mind when he used the expression "literary youth." That came later, when I saw the same young man who had acted with such discriminating arrogance then behave like an errand boy in front of Hori Tatsuo. I also witnessed how completely he changed his demeanor toward me after he learned that I was acquainted with Hori. Or rather it was the time when I read his poems before he died of tuberculosis. His garbled diction was filled with such saccharine expressions as "gods" and "angels," words that by themselves had nothing to do with Shestov or with Christianity. It was certainly not ideals loftier than the senior civil service examination that made this literary youth contemptuous of the law students in the Oiwake lodge. It was simply his illusion that honeyed words vaguely represented something superior to the subject of civil law. For this he had his intellect to thank, an intellect that would have disqualified him from even preparing for the senior civil service examination. This, I suppose, was precisely what Father had in mind when he talked about literary youths.
Only once during that summer did I have an occasion to talk with the poet Tachihara Michizo[*] . One afternoon while I was taking a stroll on the Nakasendo[*] toward Kutsukake, I saw a tall, lanky young man heading in the same direction. We fell into conversation with each other, and as we walked along, the young man said, "I am Tachihara." Along the way he picked a feathery cluster of eulalia, twirling it playfully in his hands. He said he was on his way to Mr. Hori's house in Karuizawa and inquired whether I was going to study science or the arts when I en-
tered higher school. Then he talked with me about architecture and poetry, and he even told me that he did not know what to pursue in the future. At that time I had not yet read his poetry and so had not yet been captivated by its magic. But I was impressed by the lucidity of his thought and found an unpretentious charm in his personality. After I returned to Tokyo in the autumn, I heard that the oil shop had been destroyed in a fire and that Tachihara, then living by himself on the second floor, had almost been killed but that the firemen had finally rescued him by sawing open the lattice window. The news brought back memories of him: the young man in a straw hat twirling the silky white crown of eulalia as we walked along the Nakasendo[*] on a sunny summer afternoon. I remembered fragments of his incessant flow of quiet conversation, and his large, curiously impressive eyes. Large not because they betrayed anxiety or because they were overflowing with vitality or burning with ambition. On the contrary, his wide-open eyes almost had a frightened look about them, a fragility bordering on the morbid. When I went back again to the village in Oiwake the following summer, Tachihara was no longer there.