Seiko ran into Sumiko's all excited, jabbering rapidly. It was about their mutual friend, one of the Tachikawa set, Rose. She had married a GI and was to leave for America soon.>"She's some sharp one, that Rose, ain't she?" finished Seiko, very much affected by the news about Rose. Sumiko didn't seem to care at all, though. Stretched out on her double bed, she just continued to smoke all through Seiko's tale and to look up at the sky through the open window. Merely "humphing" intermittently, she felt that Rose was taking a big gamble with her future.

"We are 'only ones' and that means having only one man, so that's just as good as being married," she offered.

"No, it's not," Seiko answered angrily, "Being married and being an 'only one' are two entirely different things." Crushing her cigarette with her manicured fingers, she continued, "Don't be a fool! Marriage is the only way to go; we can't just go on like this forever."

Sumiko, in her cool and contemptuous manner, felt that Seiko was being terribly stubborn and stupid about the whole thing. "Gosh, how I wish John would marry me and take me to America. Wouldn't you like that too, Sumiko?"

Sumiko just stared at the ceiling. Seiko, seemingly ignored, paced the room impatiently. "This room depresses me," Seiko said, "Let's get out of here and go see that amateur play that' on in the village."

Sumiko, too, wanted to escape from this tension "Yes. let's. My Robert isn't coming tonight." She got up and dressed quickly.

It was a balmy spring night. They walked towards the village theater. The little village of Nishitama had almost completely covered all of the old scars of the war now six years past.

The theater was small and packed with people-its air was heavy. The first play of the usual multifeatured program had already started. It was "The Son" by Osanai Kaoru. On stage, under the dim lights, the story was approaching its climax. Father, a policeman, stood face to face with his own son, whom he sought in the name of the law. As a first attempt by an all-amateur cast, the play was effectively done.

The play ended and the lights went on. The audience was quick to notice the presence of Sumiko and Seiko. Whispers of pon-pon and pon-suké echoed around them, but they were used to this being called whores, and managed to ignore it with a studied callousness. There were a hundred and fifty more girls like them in the village, and nobody knew where they had come from.

The curtain went up for the second play. A young bride and her mother-in-law were arguing about some minor kitchen matters. "You're nothing but a daughter-in-law," the old matriarch screamed, "You mind your place."

Sumiko bit her lip. Memories flashed into her mind. She saw herself again as a young bride suffering those same agonies ten years before.

"Get out of here," she heard the old matriarch again. "How dare you answer me back!"

Sumiko bit her lip harder. She fought an urge to leap onto the stage and slap the mother-in-law in the face, as she had wanted to do so many times so long ago. Tears welled in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She let out a soft whimper. Crying at a cheap amateur show like this, she said to herself, but the tears kept coming, threatening to turn into sobs. Suddenly the curtain was down, the lights were on, and she was aware that the people around her were staring in amazement, and she heard them whisper, "Imagine! A pon-pon crying."

She paid no attention, but Seiko did. She pulled at Sumiko hard and insisted, "Let's get out of here."

Outside the heavy scent of flowers and new leaves filled the air, and the great change from the mustiness of the crowded theater left them gasping. The scent and sounds seeped deep into Sumiko and moved her to new tears. She wanted to go off and cry alone.

Seiko was angry. "You sure made some scene, didn't you?" she rasped. "They were all looking at us. How could you cry at such a crummy, low down ham show anyway?"

"I couldn't help it. I tried to stop."

"Sentimentality doesn't become our type. Now, me, you couldn't get a drop of tear out of me even if you shook me upside down. Seeing you cry just makes me sick."

Sumiko felt as if she had broken some unwritten law of her set. Seiko stamped off, her heels clicking sharply in the still night.

Sumiko walked on slowly, taking deserted side roads. She was trying to calm her nerves, but the thickly scented air only seemed to open old memories, and in her loneliness the feelings she had fought down these ten long years gushed out and took hold of her.

"Alone, all alone," she cried to herself bitterly.

As the little scooter came out of the night and stopped by the side of the house it sounded like the wings of a huge bird. Then Robert's face smiled through the window into the room. Sumiko was stretched out on the bed, but didn't get up.

Usually, she welcomed him with a hug and kiss, as she had learned from American movies. She knew if she didn't she would lose him, and with him her meal ticket. But today she just didn't seem to care. Ever since that night of the village play, she had felt accursed. She had been living, heart and soul, back in those dark days in that northern village where she had grown up. Remembering the hopes and aspirations of the young girl she had once been and looking at herself in her present state left her dispirited.

Seeing that she wasn't going to get up, Robert rushed into the room and with the extravagant physical demonstrativeness she felt so typical of Americans, he came toward her. He spread out his hairy arms to take her to him. She shook her head and fended him off. Robert winced and shrugged his shoulders. He took her hands and asked, "What's the matter, baby?"

"Nothing. I just don't feel so good."

She put her hand up to her temple, closed her eyes and turned her head to the side. But Robert put both his hands on her shoulders and sought her lips with his. He kissed her face, took her in his arms and pressed her close to him. Sumiko felt suffocated, and the smell of his body nauseated her.

Sumiko had black hair and black eyes and her face was yellow. Robert's skin, though sun-tanned, glowed pink like all those who eat meat regularly, and his body was covered with fine hair the color of corn. She had held many men like him these last several years, but today, for the first time, the foreign smell stuck in her nose. Their bodies were close, but the waters of the Pacific separated them. Sumiko closed her eyes and resigned herself to what she knew must follow.

Robert sought only to satisfy his own selfish desires and seemed to disregard her feelings altogether. But then it was his natural right. As an "only one" she was in no position to resist the desires of Robert. It was her lot always to submit to him, even though afterward she felt completely empty and drained. His emotions, penned up these last few days in the confines of a tiny cockpit, allowed only to press buttons and pull switches on his bomb runs over Korea, had suddenly found an outlet in Sumiko.

Finally, he rose and dressed. His wallet came out of his pocket and a roll of bills appeared on the table. It was the greater part of his pay, about fifty thousand yen, $140. He sat at the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Sumiko did not rejoice over the money as she usually did-she put it away and went back to bed.

Fifteen minutes later they were walking along the banks of the Tama River. Unable to stand the silence, she had suggested a walk and Robert had agreed. He was a happy-go-lucky sort, a sergeant in the Air Force who had been a clerk in a cannery firm at home. He was more than six feet tall and Sumiko, of average Japanese height, did not even reach his shoulders. Such combinations, though, were not uncommon in this neighborhood. They had already passed several similar couples as well as a few "butterflies," as the "only ones" called these transient dates dressed in butterfly-bright sweaters and skirts who flit from man to man, flitting by in contrast and seeming defiance to the peaceful scene of rolling hills and dark forests surrounding them. The couple passed a young Japanese farm boy, pulling a cart loaded with honey buckets full of human fecal matter for mulch. There was the same familiar accusing glare as the farm boy looked at Sumiko. She had beard that, to oppose the invasion of her kind of girls, the village had started a young people's movement. In the young farmer's eyes, behind his glare, glowed his dream of some day seeing tractors and combines running the fields of Musashino Valley.

The couple reached the river bank where the Tama divided, the larger branch flowing on to the great concrete and dirt channel that led it on to the great metropolis of Tokyo. In the shallow water of the other branch, the natural bed of the once great river, she saw some youngsters fishing. As she gazed at them, completely unconscious of Robert lying stretched out on the grass, the scene changed in her mind to the dirty little creek that had flowed by her house and she saw herself chasing medaka fish with her brother.

The little brook that ran through the buraku, the Eta or pariah ghetto where she grew up, was dirty and covered with oil, its bottom filled with garbage and the corpses of small animals. Sumiko hated to play in the dirty creek and wanted to go to the clear-water brook nearer to town, but her brother would not go because many town children played there. The wings of revolt that fluttered in Sumiko's heart were too small to make the flight alone.

She went on to the town high school, boarding at a distant relative's home, and tasted for the first time the free and happy existence away from the buraku. She decided to go far away from home when she finished high school and far, far away from the stifling buraku. She hated the outcast blood that flowed in her veins, hated the buraku with its stinking animal hides that hung in every backyard. The movement to liberate the people of the buraku that had started right after World War I had penetrated her district by that time, but she remained indifferent to it. She knew that centuries of prejudice could not be wiped out in a few generations.

The day after graduation she had gone to Tokyo to join a brother who had a job in a munitions factory. The war in China that had started in 1937 while she was in high school, developed into the Pacific war shortly after her arrival. Noboru, her brother, was soon drafted.

In the home where she boarded the young son was in a leftist literary group. Sumiko had no great intellect nor desire to join their activities, but among those who came to the house was one Wakabayashi Kazuo, college student. She was attracted to his clean, naive ways, and he to her passionate eyes and sensuous red lips.

Once the group was arrested and imprisoned for weeks. She didn't know why, but she took food and magazines to them. After their release, Kazuo came not only with the group, but sometimes alone to see her. Often they would go to the Rokugo Bridge across the Tama River, far below where Sumiko now sat with Robert. Airraid drills were commonplace and there was a feeling of urgency that had caused them to draw closer.

The big moment finally came, and Sumiko remembered how she wept alone, hiding from everybody. Her heart leapt with joy a few days later when she received a letter from Kazuo summoning her to his family home. His mother had consented to their marriage, and Sumiko rushed to her new life in a home bound with old traditions.

Sumiko wanted to return to Tokyo after the ceremony, but Kazuo wanted her to stay with his aged mother during his absence in service. His mother, old and proud, had dreamed of Kazuo taking a wife from a home of equal status, and had only consented to this marriage because she was convinced Kazuo would never return alive from the war. Even at that the old woman was prostrate with shock when the customary post-marriage investigation revealed that Sumiko was an Eta, a pariah. To this day Sumiko shuddered with rage when she thought back to those dark days after Kazuo left, just as she had the night at the play.

"It certainly was a good thing that there was no child. Our blood must be kept clean or the curse of our ancestors would be upon us," her mother-in-law would confide to her favorite niece, loud enough for Sumiko to hear. She had wanted this niece for Kazuo's bride. The particular ancestor, for whom the mother-in-law wanted the family's blood kept clean, Sumiko was always reminded, was some vague figure famous in Japan's dim past.

"That's right," the niece would agree sweetly, "the important thing is the purity of the blood."

Sumiko would shake with rage and pound her head against the stone wall, cursing her birth. Hot-headed, strong-willed Sumiko could not endure this treatment long and she fled to her own home. Mother-in-law considered it good riddance-she never came after her. But to one who despised her origin, the buraku was no place to start life again. While she spent her restless days under her father's roof, the war came to an end. With it, as if shaken by a violent earthquake, the world tumbled around her. Sumiko could not stay any longer shut up in the buraku, holding the picture of Kazuo.

She fled to Tokyo, the only place on earth where she felt she could spread the wings of freedom and revolt that had been held down so long. She was startled at but not afraid of Tokyo, with its streets filled with tall, blue-eyed GIs. She tried to get a job at a factory where she had worked before, but it had shut down when the war ended. She got a job as a bar girl, lowering herself to that only, she often thought, to spite her mother-in-law. She did not realize, of course, that it was a very perverted sense of triumph.

With their warped sense of newly gained freedom, the girls in the quarters where she lived sold themselves right and left for small luxuries. These things were scarce, she granted, but she remained faithful to Kazuo, dreaming of the day he would come back to her, as thin and wan as the repatriates she saw at the stations.

"Don't be old-fashioned!" the girls would say. "What's the sense of waiting for someone you don't even know is still alive?"

But she feared her faith was not true one night after she had been tricked by her best friend into a deal with an American. That night, she remembered vividly, she went back to her room and rolled over and over on the tatami, crying and laughing. When she got over her hysteria, she calmly burned Kazuo's picture.

"I can't face him anymore," she cried bitterly.

The way after that was preordained, and she followed it. Thickly but well made up, she picked her own customers and became an expert at the game. Her spirit of revolt would not allow the various social leeches to take nearly half her rightful earnings.

Four years after the war she visited her brother who, like many of his people, had gone into the black market after his return. She learned that Kazuo was back. He had been to her home seeking her, but they knew nothing of her. He'd become very active in the Communist movement and fallen out of touch with Noboru. Sumiko felt a stab at her heart. "Too late, too late. I can't face him."

Robert had come upon the scene soon after.

A tear rolled down her cheek, her entire being embodied in it. Since the night of the play she had been existing almost as a living corpse. She could fight the accusing and hateful glances of her own people by glaring at them in return, or ignoring and pretending not to see them, but she could not fight back or run away from accusing voices in her own heart. She'd gone into this life to spite mother-in-law and the world, but wasn't there some other way out?

The days passed and with them her depressed feeling worsened. Robert continued to come and continued to release his pent-up emotions in Sumiko. Her long periods of dejection displeased him. She could neither muster the necessary feelings to hold him fast nor get up enough nerve to part with him altogether, for she had no other means of livelihood.

Robert was away when Seiko dropped in, dressed in a brightly printed skirt and loud makeup. Sumiko looked up at her and sighed enviously. Seiko was so full of life. At one time, Seiko had been a housemaid in Yokohama. She had learned enough pidgin English to get along, but could neither read nor write, which caused her quite a bit of trouble in keeping in touch with her boyfriend. In Yokohama, however, there were students who wrote English letters for the girls for a small fee, and Seiko patronized these as frequently as she did fortune-tellers.

"I just had my fortune read," Seiko snapped. "He made me sick. You know what he said?" Her ill-humor showed openly on her face.

"You're not a bad girl,' he said, 'but you're too flighty. You should try to settle down.' Yeah, that's what he said," she pouted. "Imagine. he thought I was a butterfly. So I got mad and told him, 'Don't make me sick. You may not know it, but I'm an only one.'"

"Sure" Sumiko said simply. She did not say more. Seiko seemed to think that there was all the difference in the world between a butterfly and an only one.

"Wouldn't you get mad too," Seiko continued, "if you were taken for a butterfly?"

"But if we couldn't be an only one, we would have to become a butterfly."

"Oh, no, not I, never! I am going to get married and go to America. John always says so."

Sumiko envied Seiko. She was still capable of having dreams, of thinking of America as a fairyland where there were no problems. Sumiko had seen too many cases where young women, blinded by this dream, had been smashed by a sudden change of heart, an unsympathetic chaplain, or harsh immigration laws. The women had fallen still deeper into petty crime and greater vices or had committed suicide. Sumiko had no more dreams.

"You have no interest in what I am talking about, no sympathy," Seiko cried. "I can't imagine John having a change of heart. I won't."

For all her enthusiasm Seiko revealed between puffs on her cigarette that all was not serene and peaceful within her. Sumiko perceived that Seiko and John were not getting along as well as Seiko would have her believe. To lose their present men would mean for both the loss of their livelihood. Perhaps that's all the more why Seiko clung so fast to her dream, though even she must have realized that the dream was without foundation.

Sumiko had been playing a game of solitaire, a game of fortune telling. Now, with a casual flip, the ominous ace of spades stared up at her. Seiko came closer to the table and stared at it.

"Whose is it?" she yelled.

"Nobody's in particular," Sumiko answered coolly. "It could be yours and it could be mine. Whosoever it is, we might as well face it. Neither of us will come to a good end, that's for sure." Sumiko threw down the cards and lit a cigarette.

Seiko's cheeks were white as she glared at Sumiko, "You sure are acting funny lately . . . depressed and mean." Then she quickly changed her mood and continued on in her old flighty tone, "Oh, yes, John has been transferred to the camp at Fuji and I'm going with him." She stood up, smiled, and strode to the door. Sumiko could tell she was only bluffing. Her defiant gestures confirmed how helpless her position really was.

Seiko turned when she reached the door. "Good-bye. We may leave suddenly, so I may never see you again."

"You will come to see me if you return, won't you?" Sumiko said, trying hard to be gentle.

Seiko went out without answering. Vain Seiko, poor Seiko, she is through with John. She must be going to Fuji and the new camp there to seek another partner. Sumiko decided. She had heard that already hundreds of women had gathered there. Sumiko could see a bit of herself in Seiko and a cold chill ran down her spine. She lay on her bed, arms crossed on her breasts and eyes closed. If she had only waited for Kazuo .... She pictured herself in her mind's eye, baby tied on her back, shopping bag on one arm and worn-down getas on her feet, going from shop to shop looking for bargains, and she longed, with all her heart, to be as she pictured. "I wonder what he is doing?" and she felt a million little pangs in her heart.

The sound of Robert's scooter broke her reverie. Lately, she had noticed he was always in a bad mood. She knew it was not entirely because of her gloominess. The peace talks that had been going on all summer had gotten nowhere and the hopes that she was sure Robert entertained of going home to his wife and children had dwindled. Robert never told Sumiko that he was married, she just assumed it and felt a womanly sympathy towards him and his loved ones at home.

"Let's go down to the Ginza and have something good to eat." Sumiko coaxed.

"Okay, anything you want to do," Robert consented.

When they reached the station, Sumiko saw Harue, a butterfly, buying a ticket to Kure, Kyushu. When Harue saw Sumiko, she bowed, showing a respect a lower person always shows a superior. Harue had come to this base from Hokkaido last spring; now she was already leaving for Kyushu. What would become of these women? Sumiko sighed to herself.

Sumiko had heard that Harue had been a nurse once. Going home late one night, she was picked up and raped. Her parents never saw her after that. She was too ashamed to go home and had taken up the trade.

While waiting for the train, Sumiko and Robert met Robert's friend, William, with his Japanese girlfriend and their son. The boy, a beautiful child of four, had his father's features and his mother's complexion. Robert picked up the boy and held him high in the air, much to the child's delight. Sumiko saw in this how much Robert must be longing for his family. She felt cold and lonely inside.

The peace conference continued to drag on in Korea and Robert continued to fly on his missions. He never talked much about it to Sumiko and she never cared to hear about it. To live on the money he had earned by killing other people, was that all her life amounted to? The less she talked about it the better it was.

Then Robert stopped coming. It was not like him. It was not likely that he had gone on to another woman. Maybe, he had been shot down. No, not that. Still, she felt little emotion about the latter possibility.

Early one morning a note came from William's girlfriend. Robert's plane had not returned from the last mission. There was no way of knowing if he was safe or dead. He was merely listed as missing.

Her heart went cold, she could feel the blood leave her face. She felt dizzy and lay herself down on her bed. But she could not cry.

I am free, she thought. Then she thought of how she would have to make her living. She felt dizzy again, but still there were no tears. She felt sorry for Robert, yes. He had wanted so much to go home and with that close at hand to have to die seemed cruel and unjust. But there was herself to think of now.

She spent the following few days in a despondency never experienced before. She had lost all ambition to go find another partner, as Seiko had done; she knew there was nothing else she could do to earn a living-not the kind she had gotten used to since she had met Robert. One night an American plane crashed while landing nearby and burned several Japanese homes. That night she had a nightmare in which thousands of her own people stood before her screaming accusations at her for the accident. She woke up in a sweat. The dream shook her spirits, and she made up her mind to quit her present life forever.

She dressed as modestly as possible and went to visit her brother Noboru. He had recently found a job in a butcher shop. When she entered the store, Noboru threw down his butcher knife and hurried her out to a tea shop a few doors away.

"Good Lord, Sumiko. People can tell right away," Noboru began even before Sumiko sat down. "You just don't look like a decent Japanese girl anymore. Don't embarrass me."

"Don't be like that, please," Sumiko pleaded faintly. "I tried to dress sensibly, today."

Noboru dragged on his cigarette, his eyes cast downwards. "I went home the other day," he started, "they were worried about you. Cousin Taichi was talking about your Kazuo. It seems he's become a big shot in the Communist party...He's married again..."

Sumiko's breathing stopped. She could hear her pulse beating in her head. " . . . Taichi is in a movement to liberate buraku people. Wants me to go in with him, but I'm not smart at all, you know. . ." Noboru went on, but Sumiko only half heard. After the first of the shock was over, she was able to look into her own heart objectively and realized that she had still held a faint hope of going back to Kazuo or she wouldn't have been shocked so much.

"Why don't you wash your feet," Noboru suddenly remarked, "leave this life and start anew?"

Sumiko sat up. "That's what I came to talk to you about, but I have to think it over some more."

"What do you mean, 'think it over'?"

"I just realized that life isn't as easy as it seems. I don't think I can ever lead a straight life again."

"You fool, you would continue being an embarrassment to your family?" Noboru screamed at her. These words stung deep and only served to wound her more. She went white with rage.

"What a thing to say. What a help you are. If that's all you're worried about. I'll never bring you embarrassment again. I'll never come to you again." And she walked out, her brother staring at her back, dumfounded as she disappeared from his life.

She went to the nearby house of Maki. a friend of hers. Maki had married a third national last year, but lived with him only three months. He was Taiwanese, a dollar broker. He also ran dope in the Tachikawa district and was hooked up with international gambling groups on the Ginza. Three months after their wedding, he got wind that the police had something on him and disappeared. Now Maki rented a room in Showa-machi, the tremendous new licensed quarter, and was in business again as a butterfly.

Maki was in her room. She greeted Sumiko sympathetically in her usual open manner. "You might as well realize, Sumiko," she started, while preparing tea, "yes, you'd better realize that once you fall into this life, you can't get out. It don't do you no good to yearn for a home life."

There was more truth in Maki's words than Sumiko would concede, or Maki, too, for that matter.

"Why, we can't even cook rice proper. We don't know how to sew or wash. Too much trouble to raise kids." She laughed hollowly. "All we know how to do is rub a man's back."

Yet Maki seemed to enjoy her life. Sumiko envied this, just as she had envied Seiko. Maki was the type born to the life. Even Sumiko, a woman, was aware of the sex that oozed from Maki's being. Sumiko watched the smoke of their cigarettes rise and disappear into nothingness and her own spirit went with it.

The realization that she could never go back to a decent life, that she could never walk the same road with the rest of her people, not even her own brother, let alone Kazuo, hit her harder than anything else had so far. The year was drawing to its end, and people everywhere hustled about preparing to greet the new year. The rush of their movement seemed to stir up cold breezes that flowed into Sumiko's already cold heart.

One day just before Christmas, she made up her mind to end her meaningless life. To her great disappointment, mingled, with a slight joy she could not deny, the overdose of sleeping tablets she took proved no poison to her system. Too long had she been addicted to the tablets for a normal night's sleep. When she came to this time, the sun was setting in the west and its faint cold winter light filled her drab room.

If I can't die. I must live, she thought to herself. And to live I must do the only thing I know. She closed up her house and rented a small room in Showa-machi near Maki.

"You can bring guests in," the landlady said, "but I don't want you bringing business." Sumiko didn't mind this. At least she could keep some remnant of independence and decency. She was through being an only one. Better to be a butterfly and free even if a butterfly of a cheaper type than she had been before she had met Robert.

She decided to make the Tama-no-ya her regular hotel. She took her first guest there and a boy brought in some cheap whiskey and a light snack. She got up and locked the door and went back and sat on the edge of the bed. Her guest poured a big shot of whiskey and downed it in one gulp. He glared at Sumiko and appraised her body, her past, her present, her future, and all its immediate possibilities and potentialities in one long lewd glance. Sumiko winced at the passion and violence she saw in that glance She expected him to pounce on her with a bestial growl and to give vent in one violent spasm to all that had been behind that long glance. All he required of her was a piece of flesh to get his money's worth. In her mind's eye she pictured the fight between some pre-human stone-age man and woman, and prepared herself.

He looked down at her, the soul of primeval male subjugating the female to his will reflected in his eyes. Sumiko killed all her emotions, coldly set about to calculate the other's ardor and desire. She would measure mechanically how animal-like are the desires of those who satisfy their hungers through money and superior physical power.

She despised more and more her inability to wash her hands of this life. She learned techniques to please men more. The hotels where she went with her guests took a large percentage of her earnings, but still she thought it better than suffering the loss of her last escape into decency and independence by using her own room.

The year ended and the world rejoiced at the new year, 1952, the year in which the peace treaty was to take effect and the Japanese would once again be free people. But to Sumiko it all made little difference. She stood at her street corners rain or snow.

One time she picked up a blue-eyed youngster who had no money to pay when the business was over. She had to stand the hotel fee. After that she checked, and when he came to the hotel looking for her she asked sarcastically, "Got money today?"

"Sure," and he patted his breast pocket.

"Let's see," she asked. But the bills he took from his pocket were all military scrip of small value.

"You think you can buy me with this?" she shouted in his face. "You must think you're some slick operator. Now, get out!"

She walked back to the kitchen, to the cupboard where she kept her bottle, lifted it to her mouth, sucked several gulps. She fell into bed in a heap, face down. She didn't want anyone to see her cry.

She stayed in her room for the next few days. In her veins a living venom, capable of rotting her very brain, was advancing into the final stage of its attack; a condition so inevitable she had never bothered to think about it.

Winter and spring came and went. On the first of May, not realizing what day it was, she went to a movie. On her way home, she saw a crowd gathering talking excitedly of what had happened in downtown Tokyo that day.

"It was awful. All those beautiful automobiles upset and burnt." Sumiko could only catch fragments of their conversation. First she couldn't figure what it was all about, but as it gradually came to form a coherent picture in her mind, she trembled with fear. You will be next, she heard the whispers inside, and she knew she couldn't run away this time.

"Pon-pon" the voice inside her whispered again.

When news of the anti-American riot was confirmed on the radio that night, she groaned. She pictured herself being dragged about over flaming coals by a demon, tongues of hot flames licking at her face and body. She saw the flames engulfing her and the hideous grin of the devil laughing at her, his lips parted from ear to ear.

The laughter of the devil echoed sharply in her head as she staggered across the room to her bureau drawer. The cackle grew louder as she took Robert's old jackknife from the drawer.

Could it be that the venom had finally reached her brain?

She held it high, ready to plunge it deep into her throat the instant she heard the devil laugh again.

Nakamoto, Takako. “The Only One” Ukiyo: Stories of the “Floating World” of Postwar Japan. Ed. Jay Gluck. New York: Vanguard Press, 1963, 171-184. Originally published in 1954 and 1963.

For more on Nakamoto’s earlier fiction, see translation of story and biographical note, “The Female Bell-Cricket.” To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913-1938. Ed. Yukiko Tanaka. Seattle: Seal Press, 1987, 135-149.