Problems at home prevented me from finishing my course at Fukuoka Nurses Training School until I was twenty-five. Then I started to work in the hospital of the Medical School. That year there was somebody I knew named Ueda who was in the hospital for an appendicectomy. I want to forget about Ueda and since, except for one thing, married life with him doesn't have anything to do with this matter, I'm not going to write about it in detail here. When I think of that man, I always remember a very hot day in early autumn with the sun streaming in at the window of his second floor room and him lying on the bed in a crepe shirt and a pair of undershorts that reached to his knees. He was short and pot-bellied, and he sweated a lot, always overcome by the heat. One of my duties as his nurse was to wipe off this sweat. At that time I had no particular liking or curiosity towards this man with the narrow, sleepy, little eyes.

One day Ueda all of a sudden rubbed his face against my stomach and grabbed my hand and held on to it. Even now I don't know why I let him do it. I think it suddenly flashed through my mind that twenty-five was starting to get on a bit as far as marriage was concerned, and then, too, his job as a clerk with Manchurian Railways wasn't a bad position, I thought to myself. And then—this is a bit embarrassing—but at that time I really wanted very much to have a baby. Not just anybody's baby, of course; but having a baby by somebody like Ueda would be all right I thought.

Outside the hospital the cicadas were making an awful noise. His hand was dripping with sweat.

Ueda's family lived in Osaka; so the wedding was held in Fukuoka, in the Yakuin area, where my brother lived. I can clearly remember Ueda, in a rented dress suit that was too short, wiping the sweat off his fat neck all through the ceremony. As soon as the wedding was over, we went to the port of Shimonoseki, where we got on a boat going to Dairen. Ueda had been reassigned from the branch office in Fukuoka to the home office of Manchurian Railways in Dairen. The boat was called the Midori Maru, and the third class quarters we were in were packed with farmers heading for Manchuria. There was an awful smell of fish oil and takuan coming from where they did their cooking. To me who had never done anything like leaving Shimo-noseki and going to a foreign place, the whole idea of crossing the sea and going to this Kanto colony, which I knew nothing about, was pretty upsetting. I sat on the matting which was spread over the floor and thought and thought. When I looked at the faces of the farmers' families—they were lying on top of old trunks and wicker baskets—I got the feeling that I too was leaving the home country and going all by myself to work in a far-away place. At night all of them would sing these war songs they liked very loudly. And Ueda, even though I was really seasick, wanted to get romantic.

`Don't! Let me go!' I was embarrassed with all the people around, and I pushed his fat body away. `Why did you have to come back third class? The company gave you the money for the return trip, didn't they?'

`Once we get to Dairen we're going to have to buy all kinds of things. What's the sense of wasting money before that?'

Then his piggy little eyes got all the narrower as he looked me over in what was supposed to be a tender way.

‘You feel like vomiting? It can't be that! It's a bit early or that, I think,' he said.

All day long the black surface of the East China Sea rose Viand fell, slanting back and forth outside the porthole. As I watched the sea with nothing at all in mind, the thought came to me: `Well, this is married life for you.'

On the morning of the fourth day we arrived at Dairen harbor. Rain mixed with coal dust dripped from the roofs of the warehouses. Some Chinese coolies came up the gangplank, ordered around by soldiers with guns at their hips. They were carrying big sacks on their backs, swaying from side to side on their skinny legs.

`Those bastards! It only takes two of them to carry a piano.' Ueda stood with his face to the porthole, fingering my earlobe.

A lot of carts pulled by long-eared mules were lined up on the pier waiting for the passengers.

‘Those aren't mules, you know. They're Manchurian horses.'

Before he came to Fukuoka four years before, Ueda had worked at the Dairen main office, and now he was proud of being able to tell me all about everything we saw on the way from the pier to the company housing area.

‘This is Sanken Street. That's Oyama Street. All the big streets are named after generals and admirals of the Russian War.’

`Will we have to have anything to do with the Chinese?' I asked holding on to Ueda's sweaty hand. I told myself that in this city there was no one I had to depend upon but him.

The place where we were to live was right by the main temple in Dairen. Winter was cold here, so the houses weren't made of wood. Our little house was built of dark colored brick. All around were lots of others just like it. None of them had more than two rooms. But they had built into the wall an unusual kind of heating system called a pechika.

At the beginning I thought that this colonial town was really strange. The well kept acacia trees which lined the streets and the Russian style buildings looked quite different from the flimsy houses of an ordinary Japanese town. Everybody—soldiers or ordinary people too, as long as they were Japanese—--walked fast and were bursting with energy.

`Where do the Manchurians live?' I asked Ueda.

`On the edge of town,' he answered laughing. `It's a dirty place. It stinks of garlic. You wouldn't want to go there.'

About this time at home, rationing had started to become pretty strict. So I was surprised to see how cheap things were here and how much there was of everything.

`Lady, how about some fish?' Every morning Chinese selling fresh fish and vegetables would shout at me, under-cutting each other's prices as much as they could. For only ten sen you could buy one or two big Ise crabs.'

Dammit! These bastards take you in every time. You don't go about it right at all.' Ueda would take a look at the account book every morning and usually give me a lecture.

Within less than two months of coming to this place, I realized how right Ueda was when he said that the first thing for a Japanese to learn here was the proper way of acting towards the Manchurians. For example, next door to us lived the Zoga family, and they had two Manchurians, boys of fifteen and sixteen, as servants. From across the garden I could hear Mrs. Zoga and her husband yelling at them and hitting them. At first all this racket scared me, but gradually I got used to it. Ueda told me that it was the way these Manchurians were. You had to knock them around; otherwise they wouldn't do anything. Then it happened that in place of a maid I started having a girl come in three times a week. And, sure enough, I soon got into the habit of hitting her, for no reason at all.

What with the cheap prices and the prettiness of the city and the life being better than at home, I was fairly contented. I thought at the time that this meant I was contented with Ueda. The first winter came. It was December. The inside of the room was kept much warmer than that of a Japanese house by the pechika, but anything that got a bit damp, whether it was a tangerine or a shoe, quickly got as hard as a rock. While waiting for Ueda to come home—he was often late, on company business as he said—I would spend the winter evenings sewing baby clothes—I was pregnant—and having my hips massaged by the girl. Outside, through the falling snow, you could hear the sound of cartwheels a long way off and the driver using his whip on the horses.

Innocent as I was, I had no idea that Ueda was often spending his evenings at the place of a woman who worked in a restaurant called the Iroha in the Naniwa district. The one who first let me in on this was Mrs. Zoga next door. My first reaction was, `It can't be true!' When I asked Ueda, he just narrowed his piggy eyes and laughed. When I was laughed at, I wanted to believe it was true. But in the dark of the night when I felt his hands on me, my body wouldn't listen to the cruel thing my heart had to say, and I couldn't doubt my husband then.

It was April, already spring at home, but in Dairen there was still snow piled up, blackened by the smoke from kerosene stoves. The cold was still sharp, and I was in the hospital run by Manchurian Railways waiting for the birth of my baby. Since this hospital was almost free of charge to the families of employees of Manchurian Railways, Ueda urged me to enter it as early as I wanted since this was `profitable', and I took what he had to say in good faith. I never even dreamed that he who wanted the baby so much too, once he got his wife into hospital, would bring the other woman to live at the house with him.

Even today to write about the birth is painful, seeing that I have to bring it all up again. When you read this account, maybe you'll see that it's because it turned out that I was never to have a child, that there is something missing in my heart and in my life. For some reason or other, the baby died inside me. I had chosen the name Masuo for my baby and was happy about it, but it turned out that I wasn't able to get even a look at his face or his body. As a nurse I knew how most of these stillbirths turned out, but I cried and begged the doctor to see him, but it was no use. And finally in order to save my life, it was necessary to cut out my womb altogether.

`Nothing to worry about,' said Ueda, looking at me with his narrow piggy eyes. Now that I think of it, he was probably happy from the bottom of his heart about the death of the baby because now it was easier to get rid of me. `I asked the doctor. He said everything would be O.K. What? About the operation? Almost no expense. It's practically all taken care of by the Company. It's no big loss.'

When I heard him say this, I thought at once: `He's got himself another woman, hasn't he?' Mrs. Zoga had been right. But funnily enough, I didn't get mad at him or feel jealous. When they took away my womanhood, I had a feeling as if a pit had broken open at my feet—and that empty feeling just swallowed me up. If I had been turned into stone, it would have come to the same thing. Some women have an operation to help them. But my woman-hood was torn from me, and there was nothing else for it but to go through life a crippled woman.

When I left the hospital about a month later, I noticed when I came out into the street that at last it was spring in Dairen too. At the street corners willow trees were blooming, and their blossoms were like cotton balls, all being blown around by the wind. Some of these white petals stuck to Ueda's sweaty neck. He had come to take me home. The petals floated down on the trunk which the Chinese girl had brought. I bit my lips and shuddered when I remembered that it contained the useless nappies and baby clothes.

Two years after that Ueda and I broke up. When he told me, I did the usual screaming and crying, but it would make this account too long if I went into the whole boring business, and so I'll just leave it out.

Funnily enough, I can't remember anything special that happened during that last two years with him. When I force myself to think about it, all I can remember is him getting fatter and fatter and daily taking some kind of brown-colored liquid medicine because he was worried about his blood pressure. He told me that having sex was bad for his heart, and so he would often come home late and be asleep and snoring in no time. Actually I knew the truth of the matter was that the woman at the Iroha had taken everything out of him. In the dark whenever his big, hot body rolled over near me, I'd push it away. It wasn't just that I didn't really love him any more. Even physically I didn't really want him. Not being able to have a child seemed to have stopped me wanting sex. Even so for two years I kept on living with him on account of my own weakness and because of what people would say. I just didn't want to become one of those poor women—there were so many of them—who were kicked out by their husbands and had to go back home.

When I left him, I said goodbye to Dairen from the deck of the same Midori Maru of three years before. Just as on the day I came, sooty rain was dripping from the warehouse roofs, and military police were herding coolies carrying heavy sacks up the gangplank. When I thought to myself that I'd never see this sort of thing again, or the city itself, I felt even more as if a big weight was off my mind.

When I got back to Fukuoka, the War had already broken out in the South Pacific, and the town was filled with soldiers and workers. But whenever life became a bit tough, I just thought of what I had gone through in Dairen and then there was as much difference as between heaven and hell. My brother and sister-in-law weren't especially happy to see me back, and since I'm not the kind to put up with anything, I got mad, took a job as a nurse at the hospital, and left their house. I rented a room in a small apartment house not far from the Medical school. At the hospital the faces of the nurses and of the medical department people were all changed from those I had known four years before, the time I got to know Ueda so well there. All the former interns were now doctors and medical officers somewhere in the Army or Navy, and the nurses who were my classmates had gone off as military nurses to the war zones. I had never dreamed when I was in Dairen that the War would already have such an effect so close to the hospital. The head of First Surgery, Dr. Inoue, had died, and now Dr. Hashimoto had taken his place, I found out. Now that I had broken up with Ueda, I had made up my mind to live my life and put up with whatever came my way, but even so, starting to work in the hospital again wasn't so enjoyable. The nurses who had been way behind me in the Nursing School now walked through the hallways as though they owned the place and gave me orders. Then, too, I knew that rumors about me, my coming back from Manchuria and everything, were very popular in the night duty room. I got permission from my landlord and bought a little mongrel bitch. I knew how extravagant this was at a time when food was getting harder and harder to get, but to have some living thing with me, even a dog, was a sort of consolation in my lonely life. I called the dog Masu, and I was thinking of the dead baby in Dairen, Masuo. When you yelled at her, she'd start trembling, and if she did something wrong, she'd run to a corner of the room to hide. She was the only outlet I had now for my affection.

But at night in the darkness when for some reason or other I'd wake up a bit and hear that roaring of the waves in the dark—the ocean wasn't so far from the flat—I'd suddenly be hit by a kind of indescribable loneliness. Without knowing it I'd put my hand outside the quilt as though I was reaching for something. When I realized that I was looking for Ueda, whom I should have forgotten completely, I'd start crying, feeling sorry for myself. What I really thought at those times was how much I wanted someone to come and live with me.

Now in this account I don't feel like writing anything which might seem to be in my own defense, but actually all during this time, the Chief Surgeon, Dr. Hashimoto, meant nothing to me except insofar as he was the man in charge of the work I did. I was just a nurse, and to me professors and assistant professors were not just on the great master level but were people who right from the day they were born, lived in a different world. The position we nurses have is just a little above scrub women. And so, funnily enough, the one thing that ties me up with Dr. Hashimoto is his wife, Hilda.

Mrs. Hilda was a nurse when Dr. Hashimoto was studying in Germany. I remember hearing the story of their romance when I was a student nurse. The first time I saw her, though, was two weeks after I started to work at the hospital again. It was in the late afternoon. A well-built European woman suddenly appeared at the entrance of First Surgery, pushing a bicycle with a big basket strapped to it. To my surprise all the nurses snapped to attention and came running, and this foreign woman with short hair and wearing slacks walked right into the hospital. You got the feeling that she was a strong young man rather than a woman.

`Who's that?' I asked a young nurse named Konno who was standing beside me.

`You don't know?' She shrugged her shoulders at my ignorance. `That's Mrs. Hilda, the chief surgeon's wife.'

Mrs. Hilda took a cellophane wrapped package from the big basket and handed it to Dr. Asai. Dr. Asai took it, smiling for all that he was worth. With all she had inside her blouse and her height, she seemed to overpower Dr. Asai, even though he was a man. I saw, when she turned in my direction, that she used too much rouge. She waved to us and then taking big, mannish steps she went down the corridor. Inside the cellophane package she gave Dr. Asai, there was a big stack of homemade biscuits. At that time you couldn't get biscuits and things like that anywhere, and so there was a mad scramble for them. I managed to get one.

As I ate it, I didn't say a word, waiting to see what the other nurses would have to say about Mrs. Hilda. They chattered away about how thick her rouge was, something a Japanese woman certainly couldn't get away with. Then one said: `She's really something isn't she? Passing out biscuits and washing underwear—that's her specialty.'

Afterwards I realized that they were being catty about her visit to the ward patients every time she came to the hospital. She came regularly three times a month. Carrying her biscuits, she'd go in to the wards. She'd get together all their dirty underwear, and then the next time she came she'd pass it out again all washed and clean. This was the `work of devotion' that she had chosen.

The fact is that we nurses didn't appreciate her goodness very much. I think it was a lot of trouble to the ward patients too. The ward was filled with old men and women who had lost everyone they could depend on in the air raids, but to have a Western woman like this talk to them would cause them to freeze up. On top of it, when Mrs. Hilda would pull out of their old cloth packs and wicker baskets with their dirty underwear, they would get all upset and come crawling out of their beds.

`No, no, Ma'am. No, please! It's all right,' they'd plead.

The funny thing is that the patients' embarrassment didn't worry her a bit. Like a big boy, she'd take these great strides through the hospital, passing out her biscuits and rushing the patients to give up their dirty things so she could put them in her basket and move on to the next one.

Since I wrote all that in a catty way, I should say that all during that time I didn't really have any feeling against the goodwill activity she was carrying on.

`No doubt about it, you have to hand it to her. Today Mrs. Hashimoto cleaned Fusa Ono's urine bottle. And she a European lady!' Dr. Asai said in a voice which seemed all overflowing with emotion. To us nurses she was just `really something', that's all. Beyond that we had no special reason to feel any dislike towards her.

The first time I did feel badly towards this woman was on account of something else.

It was an ordinary kind of late summer afternoon. I had sat down on the steps leading to the garden and was just sitting there with my head in my hands. I was thinking about the time I was in that hospital run by Manchurian Railways in Dairen. About my baby's death.

Just at that moment, a little boy of about four or five came running out from the shadow of the building. His face was Japanese but his hair was light brown. I knew right away that this must be the son of Mrs. Hilda and Dr Hashimoto. I felt something stirring inside me. If my boy had lived, that's just about how big he'd be. Without thinking, I stretched my hand out to the boy.

`Please don't touch him.'

All at once from behind me, I heard the stern voice of his mother. Mrs. Hilda, rouge as thick as ever, was standing right over me with a hard expression on her face. Then, as if she was calling a dog, she whistled to the child.

But the child looked at me and then towards Mrs. Hilda, as if he didn't know which way to go for a minute or two. Mrs. Hilda and I both glared at each other as though we were gambling for the boy's affection. Why did I get so worked up? The painful memory of the day of my baby's birth and my being made something less than a woman was eating away at me. I felt all the bitterness you might have expected me to feel towards a happy wife and mother.

`Excuse me, please.' Hugging the child, Hilda spoke in fluent Japanese. `As you know, children can get tuberculosis easily. When I leave the hospital, I always wash my hands with antiseptic.'

That night at my apartment, I felt my loneliness more than ever. When I was feeding the dog, I noticed her stomach was smeared with blood. Suddenly I got mad and lifted my hand, and, even though she crouched in a frightened way and looked pitifully at me with her eyes, I hit her over the head again and again. While I was hitting her, for some reason or other I didn't cry.

Suddenly I began to take an interest in Dr. Hashimoto, but of course I wasn't interested in him because he was somebody on a higher level but rather because he was the husband of this Hilda. When this old man walked past the nurses lined up in front of the patients' rooms, dressed in his white coat, I didn't miss the fact that there was a little piece of tobacco sticking to his coat. More grey began to appear in his hair. His face was old and tired. The flesh of his cheeks was loose. How could Hilda, who was like a young athlete, love somebody like this? When I saw him touch a patient's chest with the tip of his finger, I would imagine that finger caressing Hilda. When I saw that one of his shirt buttons had been torn, I felt a secret happiness. I had noticed something which his wife, Hilda, had missed.

The War gradually became worse and worse. My flat, like the hospital itself, was pretty far from the city; so there wasn't any damage at all. Fukuoka itself was more than half burnt out with all the air raids. My brother who had lived in Yakuin near the centre of the city, had moved out into the country about six months before, but I never thought about going to visit him. And there were no visits from his side either. I heard a story about Ueda moving from Dairen to Harbin, but I never got so much as a post-card from him. I was a woman all by myself with no one in the world to depend upon, and I didn't even have any idea how the War was going, since I never felt like reading the newspapers. To tell the truth, I wasn't interested in whether my country won or whether it lost. About this time, when I opened my eyes at night in the dark, it seemed to me somehow that the sound of the sea was getting louder. As I strained my ears in the darkness, it seemed that last night more than the night before and tonight more than last night the noise of the waves was getting louder and louder. I thought of the War only at those times. As that sound, big and heavy like a bass drum, got louder and deeper, I thought: `Japan's going to lose. And then where will we all be dragged off to?'

Dragged off anywhere, it didn't matter. More and more patients were dying at the hospital. Especially those in the TB wards. Like clockwork, one died every two weeks. You've got to have good nourishment with this sickness, and eventually these patients would have no more money to buy food on the black market. But no matter how many died, there was such an overflow of patients that as soon as a bed became empty, it would be filled again. Since I was a newcomer, I was assigned to this TB ward, but I didn't feel like taking care of the people lying there the way that Hilda did. I just did what I had to and beyond that not a thing. At any rate, whatever I might have done, I think my heart was just overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness. It was as though everybody was being dragged through the middle of a dark ocean. I think that the second incident that occurred between Hilda and me was probably due to this mood of mine. There was an operation taking place on the young married woman who was in the second floor private room, so the nurses' room was empty except for me. Mrs. Hilda had just arrived at the hospital but this time no one went to meet her at the door. I was alone in the duty room checking a blood pressure chart.

`Nurse, would you come here a minute?'

An old man from the ward, in a ragged nightgown, had stuck his head in at the door.

`Mrs. Maebashi's having a bad time of it.'

`What's the trouble?'

`Don't know, but she's having a bad time of it.'

When I went to the ward, I found a woman patient called Maebashi with five or six others around her. She was in pain and grabbing at her chest with her eyes twitching. Being a nurse, I could tell by looking at her that she had an attack of spontaneous pneumothorax. Air was pouring into her pleural cavity and it was dangerous. I ran to the laboratory, but Dr. Asai, Toda, and Suguro were all taking part in the operation. Only Dr. Shibata was free, but I didn't see him anywhere either. I knew that unless the air was stopped, she would die of suffocation; so I called the operating theatre on the phone.

`Doctor Asai.' I spoke quickly to the nurse, Miss Konno, who picked up the receiver. `A patient has a spontaneous pneumothorax. Let me talk to him.'

I don't know why, but through the receiver you could hear the sound of sandals scuffling quickly to and fro. It was a strange feeling, but it seemed to me that it was much quieter than a normal operation, as though something was wrong.

`What is it?' All at once I heard Dr. Asai's angry voice in the receiver at my ear. He seemed very excited.

`A ward patient, Toki Maebashi, has a spontaneous pneumothorax.'

`There's nothing I can do. I'm busy. Do what you can.'

`But she's suffering terribly. . . .'

`Anyway she's past help. Give her a shot of anaesthetic. . . .'

I didn't hear any more because Dr. Asai had slammed down the receiver. Give her a shot of anaesthetic, I thought. Give her a shot of anaesthetic. She's past help, I could hear his voice saying that inside me.

The late afternoon sun was pouring in through the window of the laboratory, and there was grey dust spread over the tops of the desks. I picked up the bottle containing the procaine liquid used as anaesthetic and a hypodermic needle and went back to the ward. When I came in, I saw Hilda beside the woman's bed holding on to its frame. She was wearing slacks.

`Nurse, the pneumothorax equipment, quick!' she yelled at me. Since she had been a nurse in a German hospital, she knew at once that the woman had a spontaneous pneumothorax. Then suddenly she stared at the bottle of procaine and the needle I was carrying, and her face changed color. She knocked me to one side and rushed out of the ward to look for the pneumothorax machine.

As I gathered together the shattered pieces of the bottle on the floor, I could feel the stares of the patients on my back. I went back to the nurses' room. The sun was just going down in the distance. It was big, red and glowing, just as it used to look in Dairen when I used to watch it go down from my room in the Manchurian Railways Hospital.

`Why were you about to give her an injection?' Hilda stood at the door, her arms folded like a man, and angrily cross-examined me. `She was dying anyway, I suppose? Was that it?

'But. . . .' I looked down at the floor.

`Whatever I did, she was going to die. Can't you help a person by letting them die easier?

'Even though a person is going to die, no one has the right to murder him. You're not afraid of God? You don't believe in the punishment of God?'

Mrs. Hilda pounded the desk with her right hand. From her blouse I could smell the scent of soap. Japanese like us had no way of getting soap, the way things were then. It was the same soap she used to wash the clothes and underwear of the ward patients. I don't know why, but something struck me as funny all of a sudden. Was it because of the soap, too, that the hand she pounded the desk with was so rough and chapped? You had the feeling of it having been rubbed with sand. I had no idea that the skin of white people got so dirty. The back of the hand was covered with little blond hairs. It all seemed so funny at first, but then as I listened, what she said began to get on my nerves. It was as though within me the thudding drumbeat of the sea roar I heard at night was getting louder and deeper.

That night I was on duty. I left the hospital in the middle of the night and was about to go back to my flat when I ran into Dr. Asai, who was walking around outside.

`Doctor, how was the operation?’

'Who's that? You? Oh. What do you want?'

He had been drinking. So much so that he who always made such a fuss about his appearance had let his glasses slip down to the tip of his nose.

`We killed her.'

`She died?’

'Yes, yes, we did. The family doesn't know a thing yet, see. The Old Man - he just doesn't have it any more. The Old Man. . . . When the election comes off, old Kando will beat him hollow. And at a humbler level, you see, there goes my future too.'

He put his hand on my shoulder. I could smell wine on his breath as he staggered a little.

`Where do you live? I'll see you home.'

`It's just close by.'

'O.K. if I come?'

That night Dr. Asai stayed in my room. I didn't mind at all.

`So you have a dog, uh? Hilda has a dog too. Hilda. She barged in again today, didn't she?'

`But, Doctor, you have so much respect for her.'

'Respect for her, eh? Just for the fun of it, I'd like to sleep with that white woman once.'

`I wonder how she is in bed with Dr. Hashimoto?'

`Who, Hilda? Why she really gives, I'll bet. She's a woman underneath the plaster saint business. Just look at her body! Hey, why don't you try your luck with Dr. Hashimoto? That would really fix old Hilda!'

I felt Dr. Asai's hands on me, but there was no pleasure in it at all. I had my eyes closed, and I was wondering how Dr. Hashimoto would go about telling Hilda that today he had killed a patient in an operation. I thought of Hilda's white hands and of the scent of soap coming from her blouse. It was only to fight against that scent that I gave myself to Dr. Asai.

The next day when I went to the hospital, Dr. Asai, very different from the night before, called me over to him with a cold look on his face.

'Ueda, what have you been up to with the ward patients?'

`The ward patients, Doctor?'

'There was a woman with a spontaneous pneumothorax wasn't there? I got a phone call from Mrs. Hilda. She stopped you from doing something, she said.'

'All I was going to do, Doctor, was what you—'

'Me? I didn't say anything!'

As I looked at him, the light shining from those rimless glasses, he suddenly became flustered and looked away. This was the man who had so ardently wrapped himself around me the night before.

`Should I give notice?’

'Nobody said anything about giving notice, Ueda.'

He put on one of those charming smiles he was so good at.

`But look, when Frau Hilda comes to the hospital, it might be a bit awkward, you see. Take about a month off, eh? After that leave it to me to fix everything up.'

That evening when I returned to the flat, I couldn't find Masu anywhere. I asked the landlord, but he just shook his head. It was around this time that people were getting so hungry that they were even killing and eating dogs. Someone probably came and took her while I was out. I sat down for a while on the step to my room and just stared. I felt didn't care what happened from then on. I didn't care about Dr. Asai. I was thinking about Hilda, who called up wanting them to fire me. I hated her. Just so she could play the saint all by herself, she didn't care at all how much trouble she gave the patients and the nurses. For her, a saint and a mother, somebody like me, who had everything that made her a woman taken out of her, sleeping with Dr. Asai would be something dirty, I suppose. What was I going to do now that even Masu was gone?

It was terribly hard staying away from the hospital for a month all by myself in my room. When I was working, I could get away from the old thoughts about Dairen, about waiting for the baby. But when there was nothing to do but lie there on the mat, I couldn't do anything but go over again and again in my mind about the day of my baby's death, and the day I was thrown out by Ueda. I even thought that I would be glad to see Ueda again.

Then one night, Dr. Asai came again.

`I've got a little matter to talk over with you.'

`I've been fired.'

`No.' With a tense look on his face, Dr Asai sat down cross-legged on the mat. `This is about something more serious.'

'To me there's nothing more serious than getting fired.'

`Look, as far as that goes, I want you back at the hospital.'

`You want me to help you with something, eh? There's something that somebody like me can help out with? If you want a nurse to kill patients, here I am.'

That was the night that I heard about the operations on the American prisoners. The chief surgeon himself, Dr. Hashimoto, and Dr. Shibata and the two interns, Dr. Suguro and Dr. Toda, were going to take part; but there was no nurse yet, he said.

`So you've come to me!' I laughed—it was almost like a spasm.

`Now, don't take it like that. This is for your country's sake. They've all been condemned to death anyway. This way they can do some good for the advancement of medical science.' Dr. Asai gave me all the reasons he didn't believe himself. Then in an embarrassed voice:

`Will you do it?’

'Doing it for my country doesn't mean a thing to me. Neither does doing it for your medical research.'

I didn't care whether Japan won the war or lost it. And I didn't care whether medical science advanced or not. It was all the same to me.

`I wonder if the chief surgeon told Mrs. Hilda about this business.'

`Don't joke. And don't go saying anything to anybody about it. Not a word, understand?'

I thought of what Hilda said when she was yelling at me that afternoon in the nurses' room, about not being afraid of God, and I laughed to myself. It was a feeling a little like that of winning. She, after all, didn't know what her husband was doing, but I did.

`Mrs. Hilda, no. How could the chief surgeon ever tell saintly Mrs. Hilda about it?'

That night in Dr Asai's arms, I opened my eyes, and I could hear a gloomy, deep drumming noise—the roaring of the sea again. And the scent of Mrs. Hilda's soap came back to me again. Her right hand—a Western woman's skin with the downy hair growing on it. I thought: soon a scalpel is going to cut into white skin just like that.

`Is a white person's skin hard to cut, I wonder?’

'What? Don't be silly. Foreigner, Japanese—it's just the same,' Dr. Asai muttered as he rolled over.

If my baby hadn't died in Dairen, if I hadn't broken up with Ueda, my life wouldn't have been like this, I kept thinking.

Endo, Shusaku. The Sea and Poison. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1972 (originally published in Japanese, 1958); 81-103.