Translator's Note: Unlike most of those who gained recognition as proletarian writers in Japan, Sata Ineko, born in Nagasaki in 1904, came to her subject having experienced poverty firsthand. Although her family had been solidly middle class, she was the love child of teenage parents—her father was still in middle school when she was born and her mother was fifteen—so Sato did not have a stable home during her formative years. A precocious child, she regretfully left school when she was eleven to work in a candy factory, after which she supported herself with menial jobs in various restaurants. Literary types who frequented a café in the Hong district of Tokyo where she worked as a waitress helped her gain entrée to the literary world, or at least publication in a small journal; they also exposed her to the ideology of the left. She joined the Communist Party in 1932, taking part in political—including feminist—activity, which led to her arrest in 1935 and detention for two months. Her turbulent private life included two failed marriages and several unsuccessful suicide attempts. Sata drifted away from the proletarian movement and took part in military-sponsored tours of China and Southeast Asia during the war, activity later criticized as cooperation with the militarists.

It was fall, the end of October, so by five o'clock it was already night,in the streets and you couldn't make out the faces of passersby, yet the afterglow of dusk seemed to linger in the darkness of early evening, the electric streetlights not yet able to make their presence fully felt. Thus it seemed even darker for the hour than it really was. People going about their business, especially hereabout, where things were regulated by the clock, manifested the tumult proper to the hour. Here in the streets, paved with wood bricks, rose the sound of shoes and clogs, and the grate of fair-weather geta. In the refracted light people moved on obscurely like figures in an India-ink painting. Only the streetcars went by raucously, casting noise and the light within them out into the darkness. Faces resigned to silence could be seen cheek by jowl under the light.

From time to time the wind would rise and sweep broadly over the ground, as though suddenly remembering that's what it was supposed to do, and plaintively penetrate to the inner being of people and remind each person walking along the street and those clumped darkly at intersections waiting for the trolley that the heart of the city where they now stood was far distant from their own home. When that happened, each would feel the anxiety—as everyone drew nearer to the person in front or in back of him—of one who had been abandoned to his own devices in the very center of the city.

At the time—this was before the big quake—there were some small watch and notions shops along the main street from 3-chōme(1) to the Nihombashi bridge, next to Yamamotoyama, the venerable tea sellers, and across from Maruzen, but for the most part you had large enterprises that in the evening would lower their steel shutters, giving the commercial district quite a modern look, yet somehow in keeping with things traditional. There were many Western-style buildings, but even the Maruzen building, whose service entrance I now emerged from, gave, in its color, the all over impression of rusted iron, and the offices of the Nozawa Association as well, catty-corner from Maruzen, were in a red brick building, a Western building style that had already become old fashioned here in Nihombashi. And it was not just that the buildings were old. The tenacious, musty traditions of old Edo had spread their roots throughout the whole of Nihombashi, so that you had shops like the Yamamotoyama, with its mammoth tile roof and broad, open entrance and tatami-laid floors. And its clerks, of course, wearing striped pattern kimonos and aprons. This was not the case only at the tea sellers Yamamotoyama. Even at the Maruzen Bookstore, which most certainly felt a degree of pride and pleasure in being the sole importer of foreign books into the country and in drawing to the store the elite of Japan's intelligentsia, the great majority of the clerks could be seen wearing their striped kimonos and aprons. And many of the customers wore geta. Thus at the Maruzen entrance two elderly men worked as footwear checkers. Both men were the placid, self-effacing sort that made you marvel at Maruzen's good fortune in finding such people. Which does not mean, however, that they were servile. One had a head of white hair that he always kept trimmed, his features those of a refined elder. The other man was a little younger and shorter. There was a hint of weakness in his flat face, but one would normally not notice this. Both walked like men who had never worn shoes, back slightly bent and stride measured. On either side of the entrance to Maruzen as you went inside were rows of hempsoled straw sandals with red thongs. Customers wearing geta would put these on before entering the store and get a claim check from the old men. Customers wearing shoes would have tan shoe covers put on their shoes. The streets of Tokyo still made that sort of thing a necessity.

The sound of the high-bladed geta that intermingled with the other footfalls along the main street through Nihombashi right after five o'clock came from the feet of male salesclerks in striped kimonos. Women clerks wore the lower-bladed fair-weather geta. At the time a woman who could type English was someone to be reckoned with; as for the rest, female salesclerks dominated the category known as career women. This was perhaps because Mitsukoshi, Matsuzakaya, and the other department stores employed large numbers of them. You could identify them at a glance. Even at Maruzen, where female clerks had begun to be hired some time later, they attempted to force them into this female salesclerk mold. The women put their hair up in a foreign, fluffed-out, rounded style and, by and large, wore muslin obi higher up on the waist. Behind the counter they wore a purple muslin smock over this, with a numbered badge pinned at the chest.

I'm on my way home from work now, so I'm not wearing my smock. I wear a lined, machine-woven kimono with a red splash pattern secured by a tie-dyed muslin obi. My companion wears pretty much what I do. To people on the street we can be taken for nothing more than two women clerks now off work and homeward bound. We are merely figures from an end-of-the-workday vignette that passes dimly before your eyes in the autumn wind as night falls in the city. Just as the two of us emerge into the light shining brightly into the street from within the Yanagiya on the corner with its colorful displays of floral hairpins, tiedyed chignon bands, and fancy neck bands—only available there—several male employees catch up with us, then pass us by, throwing a teasing "We'll go first, if you don't mind." That's all that happens. No one notices in the light cast on my retreating figure from the notions shop that my obi is tied rather lower than custom demands for a woman who works as a clerk. Only I am aware of this. Even my companion is unaware that my map of Tokyo extends from Ikenohata in the Ueno district to Nihombashi, that I have played the quick-change artist, going from waitress in a small traditional restaurant to salesclerk in the prestigious Maruzen.

It was an ad of several lines in a newspaper that linked me to Nihombashi, yet the groundwork that made it possible for me to make such a quick change lies in my childhood. The daughter of a low-level company employee, I felt more comfortable being a salesclerk than a waitress in a restaurant. Nonetheless, the spirit of shitamachi, the plebeian section of Tokyo where I lived my early years, had a part in forming my character and quite naturally colors my likes and dislikes. Perhaps I have within me a complexity of a kind. To others I was just another insignificant salesclerk; to myself I was a young woman with her own proclivities.

On close observation we can see that surely everyone has their own proclivities. It makes one realize that human beings may well live quite disparate lives, according to the needs of those lives. Even Satō Kimi, who was walking with me, was somehow different. She was the daughter of a lumber dealer whose business had seen better days, and having had what you might call a Fukagawa lumberyard daughter's upbringing on the river, she had at least taken lessons in traditional nagauta singing. Nonetheless, she had nothing of the temperament of the lumberyard family about her, nor in her—a strapping woman compared to me—was there any affectation of bearing. She had a face as round as the moon, though the way she did her hair was simplicity itself, making her look to be no more than a good-natured soul. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that she was, after all, a woman I had met in Nihombashi, a woman I had most certainly met at the Maruzen Bookstore.

She was the woman who excitedly told me she had seen Ōsugi Sakae(2) come down from the foreign books department on the second floor.

"His eyes are fantastic! They absolutely flash! You could be captivated by his eyes alone!"

The very excitement she felt at having seen Ōsugi, her singular feelings of the moment, radiated from her. She talked to me about all sorts of things. She told me things no one else had told me: that corruption was at the heart of Nihombashi. She said that society was rotten to the core, so it had to be smashed. Her expression as she told me these grim things was not the least bit grim.

We usually had such conversations on the way home from work, when we would go to the Hatsune in the Ningyō-chō district for a bowl of zenzai, bean jam with rice cakes. The Suiten Shrine was surrounded by a stone wall right by the main street where the trolleys ran, and you could always see tiny flames from its lanterns flickering within a sea of worshipers. Hanging lanterns ringed the shrine, which shimmered red and yellow and black, projecting an uncommon vitality beyond its walls. We would enter the Hatsune on Ningyō-cho Boulevard, indifferent to all this on our right. Inside the restaurant with its elaborate latticework sliding doors there was tatami flooring.

Kimi also talked about her love life. Her anarchism had come from her lover and was not merely inspired by Ōsugi Sakae's fiery eyes. She had accepted her lover's ideology as her own and given herself, with her diseased lungs, to the cause, a commitment so strong she had felt self-satisfaction in doing so. In truth, one could tell from a glance at her body, which tended to plumpness, that she was not healthy. She walked with a pronounced shuffle, her shoulders hunched, and coughed whenever she laughed.

"So, you know, I told him I wanted our relationship to be like brother and sister. At which point, his eyes insistent, this is what he says: 'I don't want a sister. I want your flesh!' A man's eyes are frightening at a time like that."

She said this with a gleam in her own eyes, then laughed, coughing lightly. The blunt word "flesh" had for some time had a kind of literary ring to it. Admittedly, it had already become a bit passé by then, but to come right out and say, "I want your flesh," without resorting to the word "love," certainly demonstrates an audacious attitude.

I just listened, saying little more than "Wow!" This was not like the shitamachi way of resorting to indirection, saying of even the man you loved simply that he was "a good person." It was not the shitamachi custom to boldly go where others feared to tread, so I was not about to ask her: "And then what happened?" And she, for her part, seemed to take pleasure in telling me only as much as she had told me.

Some time after this Kimi invited me to his house in the Koishikawa district. Her lover was fair-skinned with narrow eyes. He and his mother lived together in the small house. He was disheveled in an unlined kimono with a splash-patterned meisen weave, but with his bony shoulders thrown well back. I did not sense, however, the intensity of a man who would say: "I want your flesh."

"Don't get any ideas," Kimi said to him to forestall any move he might have made toward me. "She's purity itself."

Her lover, who had not said anything along those lines, just smiled faintly. I had sensed no particular need for her to head off anything. And to be called pure certainly was not a source of pride for me. Certainly I thought so because I had already observed much about the private lives of others.

As was true of Kimi, her lover also was consumptive.

I had not seen too much of Nihombashi in the daytime in the two-and-a-half years I had been there. I would stand behind my case of merchandise and look out and see only that part of the broad boulevard that was framed by the store's large entrance, the summer sun shining down at high noon. At the time the location directly across the street from Maruzen, where the large Takashimaya building now stands, was a vacant lot left to the weeds. The Takashimaya stood then more toward Kyobashi and had a display window that was impressive enough, but it looked like an old-fashioned dry goods store. The second floor of Maruzen sold foreign books and the floor below was divided into sections selling stationery, Japanese books, and foreign luxury goods. I was in the cosmetics department, next to the main entrance. Behind me there were high, long display shelves for perfume backed by a large mirror. The bottles of perfume, arranged on several levels of glass shelving, stood in double image, reflected in the mirror behind them and shimmering in every shape and size.

I learned to recognize the Western alphabet there and learned, together with abbreviations for the words "company" and "limited," the names of foreign cosmetic firms and the names of perfumes. Nihombashi geisha would come in to buy Amour made by the firm Roger. The geisha who came to Maruzen to buy foreign perfume wore white rough unlined silk obis over their kimonos. Under Maruzen's high ceiling even those somewhat haughty geisha looked short-legged.

"I'll take the red-box perfume," one would say, looking up at a shelf as she fanned herself with a snow-white linen handkerchief. To highlight the name, a flying Cupid, bow drawn, was embossed on a golden label affixed to the square Amour bottle. The perfume came in a red box, so everyone called it the red-box perfume, just as Race Horse Soap, wrapped in magenta-colored satin cloth, was known in Japan by the picture on its label. As for the dark-colored perfume of the English companies Yardley and Atkinson, Marchioness T always came to buy it with the marquis. A woman who owned an amusement park in Tsurumi bought up so much Colgate's White Rose we had to bring it in from our warehouse. She was a petite woman of apparently considerable influence who dressed in an uncommon fashion: a lined Ōshima kimono and a hat made of the same material. The actor Sadanji(3) and his wife were also regular customers in the foreign luxury goods department. They would buy Houbigant perfume and Binaud lotion, as well as Buckinghamweave neckties and Edgar's handwoven scarves and linen handkerchiefs. His wife walked along with Sadanji with an open bearing, her hair simply swept up atop her head, nicely complementing him in his Western clothes. Then there was a customer as beautiful as a young female impersonator in Kabuki whose movements, though, were rather too brisk for a female impersonator, who, we were told, was the head of the Kineya school of nagauta samisen. He was pleasant with us clerks, so we were not intimidated by his beauty. The plump figure of the writer and translator Uchida Roan could often be seen making a leisurely descent in traditional Japanese attire from the second floor. Since he was an executive of Maruzen, we would bow to him. And Yoshida Genjirō, the author of The Day the Songbird Comes(4) always came with his wife. It was here, too, that I first saw the author of Nobuko(5). The way an individual expresses himself and his attitude remain breathtakingly constant, regardless of the passage of time.

It was from about then that Coty cosmetics became popular. I had come to feel quite comfortable with my work and would go to Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya to look at their prices. By this time Mitsukoshi no longer had customers change into store slippers. I would set off in the felt sandals I was using for work. When I was walking through Nihombashi on a work-related errand I was all business and walked along at a good clip. Even these days, when the Nihombashi area is being rebuilt, with shacks going up on the burned-out ruins, it would appear that what one still sees more than anything else are the busy gait of men carrying briefcases and the sight of women office workers walking about in their uniforms, all on commercial or company business. Even shoppers walk along with obvious purpose. Though carpenters are no longer in work aprons, one comes across them in Nihombashi even now looking very much part of the scene(6). Not surprisingly, the main street around 3-chōme has the deeply chaotic, rust-colored tinge of burned out ruins, and there have developed gaps, their fate elusive, that leave the street squalid, yet from the intersection to the other side of the bridge even now one senses the character of the old waterside fish market that used to be there, and the aroma of fish cooking draws passersby(7).

As for Nihombashi in the days when I would walk along on store business, the Shioze bean-jam bun shop in front of the Shirokiya department store was an extravagant presence, both Japanese and Western in style; the back of the shop was traditional, but at the front were glass shelves on which sat stemmed display jars containing bolo sweet balls and cookies. Next door, in the spacious show window of the Kurokiya, a lacquerware shop, there were top-of-the-line hand warmers, on display with individual gold-lacquered candy dishes and candy caskets.

The bridge Nihombashi is named for smoothly insinuated itself into my heart; I never stood there and gazed in wonder at those decorative lamps encased in iron filigree of such imposing workmanship. And the riverside buildings that rose straight and high along the water gave form to the beauty of the river that flowed the length of the city, yet I did not have the time to look upon prospects of this sort either. Since I made my living in Nihombashi, I merely walked briskly along its streets.

As I stood at the cosmetics counter in the Mitsukoshi department store I would casually check the price of their Cutecura soap. I would buy a bottle of Coty's L'Origan or the red-box perfume. If the red-box perfume at Mitsukoshi's was 5 yen 50 sen and our price at Maruzen was higher, I had to go back to the store and drop it to the same price. With the shrewdness of your average Nihombashi salesperson, I would make the rounds of the other stores, checking their merchandise and prices. I was happy that in contrast to the department stores that carried a wide range of products, we concentrated in one area, stocking only imported goods.

Since almost all of the articles we handled were foreign goods, the young men who worked at the store would return to their dormitory when they left work and take English lessons. That they were taught English by a certain peer—a son-in-law of the sixteenth shōgun—who came to the lessons driving his car himself also says something about the novelty typical of the time. And this plebeian peer of imposing lineage would come to shop at Maruzen with his wife. I suspect that the lady's doing her hair in a chignon meant for them that she had chosen a style close to that of the commoners. The young shop boys who had His Lordship teach them English wore their men's obis fetchingly over narrow-sleeved kimonos. They were called Saku-san, Toshi-san, Katsusan, and Zen-san, and the like. After a fixed period, when they reached eighteen or nineteen, they would be allowed to wear the traditional cotton haori. Even then they were, for all that, former shop boys, so they were called Man-san or Yoshi-san in the manner of the old merchant houses. This convention applied even in the foreign books department on the second floor. There were clerks in foreign books who wore suits, but just one or two; those who waited on customers in the store naturally maintained the old clerk-shop boy traditions. When these shop boys made their rounds of the regular customers to settle accounts, they were sent out in rickshas.

The streets behind the Maruzen led to the Nihombashi geisha quarters. People there had resigned themselves to the fact that the main street out in front did not belong solely to their neighborhood now; it was also the heart of the metropolis of Tokyo and had become a thoroughfare. Thus they had created their own world in those backstreets. On these streets took place the most homely enterprises of the area. There were small pickle shops. And there were neighborhood fishmongers. And samisen makers and geta makers. And geisha houses with wide-lattice doors and eave-hung lanterns on which the house name was written in kana script also lined the side streets as far as the street that goes to the Gofukubashi intersection.

There was a ricksha stand in one of the alleyways that ran off the backstreets. It had several pullers and the shafts of two or three rickshas were always lined up in readiness on the dirt floor. The owner was an older man, amiable, heavyset, his hair receding from a ruddy forehead. Yoshiko, his only daughter, had come to Maruzen and was working with me in the foreign luxuries department, so I had occasion to stop off at this ricksha stand. This was after Satō Kimi had left Maruzen, her health, as we feared it would, having quickly worsened. The rickshas for taking the store's shop boys to collect payments from our regular customers were dispatched from her father's stand, so from the day Yoshiko started working at Maruzen she had a jump on the other women clerks, given her familiarity with this person and that one on the staff whom she already knew. Her home was so close she came to work in the sandals we wore in the store.

This young woman lived under a kind of curse: the considerable degree to which the pride of being a child of Nihombashi determines one's nature. She had been born on the second floor of a backstreet ricksha station, yet around her modern steel-reinforced concrete buildings strove, unchecked, to be the tallest, and here, of course, was the heart of the economy of Japan, not simply Tokyo, the place whence commercial prosperity on a modern scale began its expansion. As the family business was rickshas, they put up several young pullers in their home, and they had an old woman who did the cooking. Yoshiko had became an English typist when she graduated from Nihombashi Girls High School. There weren't that many English typists at the time. This says something of her mettle. And she had worked for a trading house in Nihombashi ward but had quit her job and come to Maruzen.

"A waste of talent, don't you think? Why did you give up being a typist?"

"It was a bother somehow. My house was close to work, right? I thought it would be better to quit."

Her tone of voice was always a bit high and her speech was rapidfire and rasping.

"Then this job is a step down for you?"

Her haughty expression took no account of her questioner's feelings. Her response was matter-of-fact.

"Yes, you could say that."

Yoshiko always gave the impression of being on the defensive. Even in making a haughty response like that, she seemed to be putting up a front to keep others from treading her vulnerabilities underfoot or getting off the first shot. She walked erect, shoulders back, inevitably taking rapid, mincing steps. There was something self-consciously elegant about such a gait. When she talked about a man she liked she bubbled, like a geisha playing up to an actor in a Japanese movie. She saw nothing but foreign films, however.

If you asked her the time she would answer in English, "Just now!" then give you the time.

We got off work and were walking along the Ginza. As usual, I was walking fast to keep up with her rapid pace. We practically never looked into a store's show window. When we had gotten to the outskirts of the Shimbashi area, she turned her head smartly like a foreign soldier to look back at me. "Come back!" she said jokingly in English and did an abrupt aboutface. Ginza at the time still had plenty of room for strollers. Although the working women of Tokyo had abandoned geta and now wore felt sandals, she—and I—were most certainly the avant-garde, simply from the fact that she lived near a thoroughfare that had been paved, and from the fact that we had changed our coiffure by taking a curling iron to our fluffed-out clerk-style hair.

This was when the Blue Bus ran from Kaminari Gate in Asakusa to Shimbashi. Yoshiko had an aunt in Mukōjima and often stayed with her after seeing a movie in the Asakusa's Rokku district. I was commuting from Hikifune, but I almost never went with her. That was because she always took the Blue Bus, a cut above the streetcar. The Blue Bus would speed on, violently shaking its way along the road, which at the time had a stretch so rough it was likened to the Genkai Channel, yet it got you to Nihombashi five minutes sooner than the streetcar and brought a sense of the new to the city.

One winter day I received a short note from Satō Kimi scrawled with a well-used brush dipped in India ink. All it said was An important matter has suddenly come up. I beg you to come. The wording struck me as somewhat exaggerated and affected. And I was taken aback by the phrase I beg you to come. Kimi, who had quit her job because she was ailing, had suddenly married out of pure whimsy, and pure whimsy is the only way to put it. Of course, this is if we accept her story at face value. She said that one day at the home of her boyfriend, the one familiar with anarchism, she had come out with the following.

"I really think it horrible for me to burden my mother with my illness. I want to throw away this ailing body of mine somewhere, anywhere."

That day there was a man at the gathering whom she had never met before. He was a middle-aged man who had returned from America and was said to be operating a ranch somewhere. The man, taking her at her word, responded: "Well then, I'll retrieve you."

She had married him and now they had a home in Kamata. I had met him—his name was Ōta something—once before when the two of them invited me somewhere on my way home from work. He was a thin-lipped man turning paunchy in his middle years. His lower lip seemed to curl up into his mouth, and he would go on and on—even to me—about the project he was about to embark on, about ranch land he had bought somewhere or other. He spoke softly and without inflection and scarcely opened his mouth. Only his thin lips fluttered excitedly.

"It would seem," Kimi whispered to me, "that if you live in America a good while you tend to embellish a bit."

Kamata was being developed then, and rental houses, their paint faded, stood in rows on land apparently reclaimed from the bay with industrial slag. I encountered Kimi in the shopping district that ran from the train station. She sauntered toward me, a thick wool shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

"My goodness! What a pleasure to see you!" she said with complete composure. As though she had forgotten what she had said in her note. I told her I'd come in my concern over the note.

"Oh, that. Well, Ōta created quite an uproar while I was back with my parents, having taken sick. He hired a housekeeper. It had to do with her. This is perfect. I can tell you on the way home. I'll get some meat."

Kimi continued to talk even at the shop she stopped at to buy beef, an amused expression on her face, as though she were telling me about someone else's problems.

The housekeeper's husband had come bursting into the house in the middle of the night and dragged Ōta, still in his nightclothes, out into the street. The housekeeper joined her husband in beating Ōta, and when the neighbors came out—their kitchen door was right next to Ōta's—he told them to go and get a policeman.

"The housekeeper and her husband would have been in trouble if the police came, so, well, that was the end of it. Ōta summoned me by telegram, and it was a surprise, I'll tell you. It'd be an understatement to say we stand embarrassed in the neighborhood."

So that was what An important matter has suddenly come up. I beg you to come was all about. She had asked me to come, and I had, but there was now absolutely nothing for me to do. Kimi herself had forgotten her pointless request.

Just as he was a man without inflection in his voice, Ōta was also a man without changes of facial expression.

"Hi, glad you could come. Oh, you got the meat, did you? That's great."

His expression was even less that of a man who had confronted "an important matter."

"Take up the bedding, would you."

"Right, I'll do it now."

Ōta began clearing away the futon Kimi had just been lying on, opening with a clatter the sliding closet door, the paper covering of which buckled as he pulled at the handle. The house was cheaply built, only three rooms, and no yard; when you opened the window you were confronted immediately with an alleyway. He looked back at me as he carried the bedding. His movements were incongruously smart for his portly frame.

"She's like this all the time, you know. So I have a wife, and at the same time, I'm forever just like a bachelor."

In the kitchen Kimi laughed loudly.

"No, really," Ōta went on, disregarding her, "I do as much for her as the average husband would."

"Drop that," she responded, interrupting. Her voice was husky. "I've already told her everything."

Ōta betrayed neither pain nor pleasure. His expression was unchanged.

"I can't help thinking they were in collusion."

This time Kimi agreed with her husband.

"It was the old badger game, clear and simple. Ōta's an easy mark, so he got taken. It was an ugly scene, to put it mildly. For a man to be dragged out in his nightclothes ... but for a woman to do that."

"They were in it together. They had it all planned. Anyway, I've finally got the ranching project off the ground. I cant be doing dumb things like that, I'll tell you. It would be better if Kimi were in good health and could help me. I don't suppose there's someone who could. If I could get someone like you it would really be great. Right, Kimiko? What do you think? Couldn't we get Miss Tajima here to give me a hand?"

Kimi's response was, not surprisingly, halfhearted.

"Uh-huh."

That day when Kimi saw me back to the station, she told me Ōta was trying to get money from her family.

When the ferroconcrete building with its glass windows rocked violently I could hear a loud clatter, like the shaking of crated chinaware or boxes filled with beer bottles. It was right at lunchtime and there was little happening: half of the staff had gone to the cafeteria. There were few customers in the store. My coworker and I clung to each other, swaying back and forth by the display case in the middle of the room. At the back of the store white hatboxes flung themselves in quick succession off their high shelving and crashed to the floor. Bottles of perfume, toppling from their shelves, crossed my line of vision with the grace of a flock of birds flying from one branch to another. I was startled and felt almost physical pain to think of the bottles of perfume being smashed to pieces on the concrete floor. The necktie rack sitting atop the display case fell over, revealing people on the other side of the case running toward the door, backs bent in a semicrouch and arms flailing. Each time the large building would shake violently, I felt like a toy placed inside a big box. But it was a huge box, vast and towering, and these dimensions terrified me much more than the high ceiling that had been over me every day.

When the initial shaking stopped someone shouted, "Everybody out!" and I went out the entrance with the coworker I had been clinging to. The instant we emerged, the red brick building of the Nozawa Association catty-corner from us collapsed, cascading into the street. In that instant I realized for the first time what I was experiencing: This is a major quake. The main street was in the process of going from a moment of nightmare paralysis to the pandemonium of alarm. We gathered in the vacant lot where there had been construction going on directly across from our store. Those who had been in the cafeteria came out the main entrance. I now watched from across the street as people emerged from Maruzen.

We soon heard that the elegant restaurant Matsumoto-rō in Hibiya Park was burning, and that a large crevice had opened up in the street in front of the Takashimaya department store and that a shopper, a woman, had fallen into it. It was soon decided that Maruzen employees were to break up into groups and make our way home with no further ado. The streetcars had stopped running. I and my group had the farthest to walk. I thought I should travel a bit lighter, so I asked Yoshiko to take care of my lunch box. Frightened and nervous, and resigned to having to walk home, my body trembled ever so slightly.

"You all right?" Yoshiko asked, taking my lunch box. "Take care." She watched me leave, concern in her eyes.

I started walking. I was with three others, a woman from the foreign books department and two male coworkers. The red brick of the Nozawa Association building had collapsed into a mountain of rubble in the street. As we passed it, a lone patrolman, standing atop the hillock of brick, was waving his arms. He had set up a sign written on a scrap of wood that said in large script that a Blue Bus was buried under the bricks. The woman from the foreign books department was a quiet, fair-skinned woman who was terribly nearsighted. She commuted from South Senju, so some days we found ourselves on the same train. She was the sort who normally didn't have much to say, but one day when she was next to me she turned and looked up at me and said in a thin, almost cooing voice, and without the slightest of preliminaries: "Really, Tajima-san, your skin is as white as a lily." In fact, these words described her better than they did me.

Our group of four, including the two young men I knew only by sight, crossed Nihombashi Bridge and made its way to Hongoku-chō. As we came to the Mitsukoshi department store, we could see flames bursting one by one through the windows high up in a building on the side street where the Nimben store is(8). The billowing flames were bright red, notwithstanding the fact that it was in the middle of the day. The bizarre spectacle of seeing no one attempting to deal with this terror provoked dread in my already shaken soul. The streets were in absolute chaos, though no one was shouting. There were a great many people on foot. When we got to Misuji-machi, having crossed Izumi Bridge, we saw a man who had brought his valuables out of his house to the street and was sitting by the side of the road and gazing up at the sky, blackened by the smoke roiling up from the earth. As we made our way from Umaya Bridge to Azuma Bridge, the sky over Senju was already jetblack, and at the approach to Azuma Bridge we couldn't make any headway because of the people who were fleeing toward us from Senju.

"Yes, Senju is already afire," a man coming from the opposite direction responded as he went by us.

"What am I to do?!" the other woman bound for Senju said, bursting into tears. Beyond Azuma Bridge, Narihira Bridge was pouring black smoke into the air. I had to get across the bridge before I was cut off by the flames. I left the three of them and ran across Azuma Bridge.

One saw many things amongst the flow of refugees walking the tracks of the Keisei line over the next two or three intense days. A man carried on his back the limp form of an injured Kabuki actor still wearing the red costuming of a young maiden. Hideously, the white makeup that thickly coated his face as it lay against the shoulder of the man bearing him had now taken on the appearance of a mask, suggesting that he had already breathed his last. The heavy hem of the red maiden costume was tucked up, exposing a man's slender legs, which dangled limply beneath it. Corpses floating facedown in the purple water of the Hikifune canal into which drained wastewater from factories. A rumor that Koreans were poisoning water wells made the rounds. Someone said that he was pursued all night by Koreans but got away. Whereupon a married woman who lived in the same tenement, a woman who did not suffer fools gladly, spoke up.

"What on earth are you talking about?! It's the Koreans who had to run. You were just running in front of them. Anyone can see Japanese outnumber them a hundred times over. There's nothing to fear from them."

I was impressed by her assessment of the situation. Nonetheless, I kept at hand a fireman's axe my younger brother had brought home from somewhere or other. It was bright and shiny and remarkably heavy. Stripped emotionally, we now could begrudge others absolutely nothing and shared some of our padded tanzen kimonos with an elderly couple who had come from somewhere else and were sleeping on the rubblestrewn grounds of a factory, exposed to the dampness of the night. Still afraid to go into our house, we also slept on the factory's open field. I found out that Yoshiko had visited our house in our absence.

"Your friend dropped this off, saying that you had left it with her. " An older woman who lived in the neighborhood handed me my lightweight aluminum lunch box. The lunch box wrapped in a soy saucestained furoshiki resting lightly in my hand, I felt myself become both a bit annoyed and teary-eyed at Yoshiko's indefatigable reliability. The bridge at Nihombashi, which she normally would have taken, had to have been consumed by flames the day of the quake.

One night a month later I passed through the gate of the absurdly cavernous exposition hall building that stands like a cadaverous ruin even now in Ikenohata(9). The streetlights that dotted the area provided little light and the empty open area within the high, pale yellow walls suggested the grimness of a prison yard. When I had worked in Ikenota several years earlier, this structure had been in its glory as an exposition hall. I hadn't known what it had been used for subsequently, but half of it stood deserted in its jerry-built shoddiness, its ornamention stripped away, and if that wasn't bad enough, now an unpleasant air hung over it, since in the wake of the earthquake it was serving as a free clinic. The gloom was to be expected. And it was nighttime, which added an inexplicable, willful inscrutability.


(1) A several-square-block area south of the Maruzen bookstore.
(2)Osugi (1885-1923) was an anarchist and left-wing leader who, together with his wife and nephew, was beaten to death by military police in the chaos following the great earthquake of 1923.
(3)Ichikawa Sadanji (1890-1940), an actor remembered as a modernizing force in Western-style theater and Kabuki.
(4)A collection of essays on the place of religion in life that enjoyed some popularity when it was published in 1921. Yoshida (1886-1956) also wrote fiction and for the theater.
(5)Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), a prominent left-wing writer with whom the author co-edited a magazine about working women in the early 1930s. "Nobuko" is a largely autobiographical novel depicting the breakup of a marriage.
(6)Nihombashi was at one time known for its lumberyards and attendant carpenters.
(7)The wholesale fish market was moved after the arthquake of 1923 to the Tsukiji district, but restaurants specializing in seafood still remained.
(8)A seller of dried bonito in Nihombashi since the Edo period.
(9)A section of Ueno Park and the site of a series of industrial expositions beginning in the Meiji era.

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Reference