Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi
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taking pictures and interviewing them, so it must have been unbearable. When I went to Shimonoseki Station to meet them, it was so jammed I couldn't even get near. It wasn't only the reporters, for the place was crawling with busybodies trying to catch a glimpse of the children, and the entire station was in great confusion. When I finally reached them after pushing my way through the crowds, I found my father totally exhausted and the baby, who hadn't received enough milk, almost senseless.
"Mako was stomping her feet on the ground screaming, 'I hate having my picture taken!' Attracted by her cries, Ema and Louise started bawling frantically. We couldn't do anything to make them stop. There wasn't even any water to mix the condensed milk with. But just then across from us a woman also with a baby held out her thermos of hot water. I too began crying, thinking we had really found a friend just when we needed one. After finally dissolving the condensed milk in hot water and giving it to the baby and pacifying the other children, we once more boarded the train and at long last started off. I cannot forget the misery I felt at that time. For the first time I was really enraged by the cruelty of my sister's death, forcing her to leave behind such lovely children.
"Already in those days my husband was in complete sympathy with my sister and her husband, so all the articles in the newspapers and magazines that came out at the time on Osugi and her he clipped out, no matter what was covered, and he put them neatly away. He never wanted the children to see them as long as they were alive. But saying these articles might be of some use, he kept diligently cutting them out and accumulating them. Yes, the pile of clippings was handed over to Ema after she grew up—she had been raised in our home. The child who looked most like my sister is Ema, who now lives in Shimonoseki. Clearly she most resembles Noe in her younger years.
"In those days we were troubled by the fact that many people wanted to do something for these children. We were surprised that even in that era so many people still wanted to raise the children of Osugi and Noe. All of them were decent, the offers coming only from rich men and scholars and other respectable persons. There were ever so many proposals to which they appended explanatory notes and inventories, like lists of their property and rough sketches of their homes. But confronted by these wild schemes, my father firmly held out against letting even one of the children go anywhere, and he was determined to raise them himself. Even though my elder sister had put my father through terrible troubles while she was alive, she was his favorite daughter, and in the long run he had unconsciously been influenced by her, so I believe he couldn't bring himself to hand her children over to others.
"Though I was Noe's only sister, the life I lived was quite different from hers. After I married a second time, I was never in need of money, and because of our difference in age my husband overlooked everything I did and let me do as I wished with all the luxuries he gave me. Nevertheless, my way of thinking was different because of our difference in age, so without really being able to understand him, I was not that satisfied somehow.
"I tried to compensate for the loneliness and emptiness I felt by making use of luxury and diversion, so matters became worse. The only thing I didn't do was take a lover, but as for other possibilities, I drained the cup of pleasure with everything and anything that men do. Every day I went to the theatre and I went to teahouses with my friends and I even called in geisha. I gambled. I drank sake. And besides all that, I decked myself from the top of my head to the tips of my toes in the most extravagant luxuries. I put on so many diamonds and draped myself in furs to my heart's content. When our house burned in the war, we became quite penniless, but due to the fact that I had been content at least once in my life, I no longer have any interest in anything or in desiring anything.
"Oddly enough, my husband, who had been thoroughly put out by my conduct, finally became partial to my sister and once after returning from a visit to her place in Tokyo kept saying, 'Everyone keeps mentioning that Noe's a woman who's more dreadful than a man, but when I went to Osugi's, I found, on the contrary, there's no woman equal to her in femininity. In her gestures and in her consideration for others, she's really womanly. I really understand now why all the men are crazy about her. When I compare you with her, even though you look like the embodiment of all that is womanly, you are truly a masculine woman!' That was what he was complaining about. Everyone in our family line lived long, many to be eighty or ninety. If my sister had not died in this way, she too would have lived on and on in good health.
"Though I couldn't give birth to even one child, my sister had seven children in ten years and died, according to the modern way of counting, when she was only twenty-eight. That alone shows how much vitality she had. Only twenty days after the delivery of her child, she went to Yokohama with Osugi during one of those dangerous times after the earthquake. Sometimes, even now, though it's my own idea, I feel Noe and her husband wouldn't have been killed if the Great Earthquake had occurred half a year later. To tell the truth, they were preparing to abandon some of their ideas, thinking about their children's future and saying they would put an end to their dangerous affairs. They really did tell us that... Good heavens! It's gotten dark outside. Dear me! I forgot myself in talking so carelessly about the things I did, and I've made you listen to my own absurd and trivial matters. Please forgive me!"
When we returned to Hakata, the lights downtown were already glittering. Mako had the driver turn down a dark street near Hakata Station and said to me, "Please come in and meet my child."
When we entered the old two-story house with its earthen floor, the dwelling apparently in the style of a residence in a shopping district, several men and women sitting in a wooden area near the entrance were painting Hakata dolls. I realized Mako's business was now the making of these dolls. Having caught the sound of our voices, a young girl with a big round face grinned as she came down from upstairs and standing by her mother's side greeted me.
Far taller than her mother and still growing was Mako's youngest child, who was in the sixth grade and who had once said to her parent, "My granddaddy was a great man, wasn't he? That's what my teacher told me." Above her smooth cocoa-brown cheeks were the unmistakably inherited Yorozuya eyebrows and eyes. Was it my own sentimentality that made me feel the child's face looked less like her sensitive mother's than it did the photograph of Noe as a wild young girl?
Chapter 2
IT WAS APRIL in the spring of 1911 that Jun Tsuji met Noe Ito for the first time. The execution of Shusui Kotoku and others for high treason had been carried out on January 25, and only two months later the spring was so ominously cold that even in the color of the cherry blossoms just after they had bloomed and even in the spring breeze one sensed the image of blood, the smell of decay.
On that spring day the entrance ceremony at Ueno Girls' High School was held. The oshima kimono Tsuji wore, bequeathed him by his father, had been hemmed up by his mother before Tsuji had set out. Because the kimono had been inherited from his father, its folds were considerably worn, but the hakama skirt, originally of superior Sendaihira silk, was neatly bound low around Tsuji's waist, and he had on a haori of black habutae silk, though the color of its crest was somewhat dulled. In that outfit Jun Tsuji's shoulders looked narrow and drooping, the skin of his oval face pale. The thin silver frames of the glasses he wore made his delicate face with its classical features seem nervous, but his eyes and their corners sloping downward gave an impression of mildness.
Behind Jun Tsuji, being led by the assistant principal into the auditorium where the pupils were already standing in rows, the murmurs of the girl students broke out, those murmurs spreading to every corner of the hall with a commotion and speed like rippling waves. When the assistant principal, who was walking in front of Tsuji, seemed to deliberately clear his throat, the noise instantly subsided, along with those voices saying "Sh! Sh!"
"He really looks terribly old."
"No. He's still young."
"He's like an artiste!"
When he caught these whispers out of the clamor that had suddenly died down, Tsuji suppressed a sardonic smile. His unusually keen sense of hearing had been inherited from his mother.
Almost all the chairs were occupied by other teachers sitting in rows near the windows at the