NUIKO WAS OUT by the gate. The instant she saw Hiroko coming, she beckoned to her urgently.

"What—?"

"Hurry up!"

Hiroko entered the house, wondering. Nuiko put her arm around Hiroko's shoulders as if to hurry her up the stoop. Inside a news¬paper lay on the tatami floor mat. Nuiko opened it and pointed out an article: "What do you think of that?"

Hiroko, with obvious but uncommitted emotion, read that the Public Peace Law of Japan would be abolished in a few days in ac¬cordance with the Potsdam Declaration and that all political pris¬oners held under this law were to be set free in the near future.

"Then, Jukichi will be back sooner than expected. Oh, how won¬derful!" said Hiroko's aunt cheerfully, coming out of the kitchen wiping her hands. "By now, they should have received the news¬paper at the station in Iwakuni and your mother must be glad, too."

Hiroko, however, found herself incapable of acknowledging her aunt's open expressions of joy, not even with a smile. "We cannot say anything until we see more how things go." Hiroko sounded so tormented that Nuiko, her cousin, took a second look at her in surprise. Hiroko, still standing, stared intensely into the news¬paper. "In such a place as a prison ... well, things are very different from what we imagine. Jukichi has been punished not only by the Public Peace Law. . . He has been tortured in many ways. . . ."

Hiroko's heart was wrenched by the news that the political offenders of the Public Peace Law would soon be released.

Jukichi had been arrested after exposure by the spies whom the Secret Police had infiltrated into the Communist Party. It just so happened that one of the suspected spies had a physical defect, and in some way due to it met an unnatural but accidental death. Since the case involved the Secret Police personally against the Communist Party, the trial seemed to be a vendetta pure and simple. When Hiroko learned of the charges and followed the proceedings at the court for the first time, it appeared to her eyes and ears that the state had used its power in too wily a manner to care about the justice or dignity expected of it. Justice here was not judged by common sense, but by a quite opposite spirit of arbitrariness. Jukichi was treated most cruelly. He alone, among the several defendants, was sentenced to life imprisonment, though the charges against all, the responsibility placed on them, were the same; he differed only in having been in the party a shorter time. Next to one name were written as many charges as seemingly could be enumerated. Hiroko felt painfully that each charge was an iron link in the chain which resounded heavily at Jukichi's every step, every movement. She looked upon the incident as a natural event of social history. She did not find anything wrong in what Jukichi and his comrades had done. It was the spies, the actions of authorities who maintained their positions by the intrigues of spies—that was a criminal way to conduct a political struggle and showed moral decadence. Hiroko could not understand: Why was it that those who were young and unselfishly absorbed in improving society in accordance with the natural process of history, why should they be penalized?

To be found guilty even under such transparently unreasonable law, was for those like Jukichi's mother something bad and fearful. How many times had Hiroko during these past ten or more years had to soothe her and struggle to make her keep faith in her son.

Right there, reading that the political prisoners punished under the Public Peace Law would be set free, Hiroko knew in her heart that here was for her the last and most unendurable torture. Immediately after the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, Hiroko had been struck with sheer joy. Quivering with anticipation, she tried to picture the inner thoughts with which Jukichi received the news. Constantly running through her head were such thoughts as "When is he coming? I wonder when he is coming. How wonderful it would be to go up to the far north to meet him in Abashiri, and come home together by sea.

Time passed. After a month or so, she began to doubt the Decla¬ration would ever be put into practice with such a questionable government in power. Could the Public Peace Law be abrogated, really? When? How? All the progressive people in Japan, who had been tortured for so long, had the same doubt as she. By the tens of millions they looked to the future, suspiciously, dry-eyed.

The instant it became known which door would be opened in that wall that was the Public Peace Law, Hiroko felt like a mother calling for her child, not yet rescued and about to be left in a flam¬ing house. "Jukichi? ... Jukichi? . . . Others are coming out .... What about Jukichi?"

Hiroko, however, had no one to whom she could unburden her anxiety. The flame, which in her mind was driving her beloved hus¬band into intolerable danger, did not show itself to anyone else.

Hiroko, the newspaper still in her hand, went listlessly back to her room and sat down at her favorite place. First her aunt and then Nuiko, not knowing what to say, quietly slipped away.

After an hour or so, Hiroko called from where she was still sitting. "Nuiko, are you in?"

"Yes, I am. Is there something you want?"

"Could you please go to the post office for me?" Hiroko handed Nuiko two letters marked with red ink for registry and special delivery. "Anyway, I think the best way is to ask Mr. Tsukamoto and Mr. Nagata. Depending on developments, I might even have Mr. Nagata go to Hokkaido to prevent any injustice being slipped over on us. You agree with me, don't you?" Hiroko asked.

All the family were familiar with Mr. Tsukamoto, Jukichi's close friend since childhood. Mr. Nagata, a lawyer, had steadily dealt with the troublesome paperwork for many years. Hiroko had written them about the news, asking them to investigate how Jukichi was actually going to be treated. She told Mr. Nagata to draw money for the trip from Mr. Tsukamoto, if he felt it necessary for her to go to Abashiri. For her absence from Tokyo, she had managed to put aside some money for any emergency that might arise while she was away.

Nuiko went right out. Hiroko thought over what else should be done now. For the several years Jukichi had been on trial, Hiroko, knowing little about the law, had judged and acted according to common sense, relying on her insight and imagination. Jukichi perhaps never realized how many of the inconveniences he had to suffer were brought about by her frequent oversights and errors.

Hiroko slept in an eight-mat room' by herself. Though it was a few days short of October, she still had to use a mosquito net in her room. The late moon rose. The daimyo bamboo cast shadows on the paper shoji panels through the outer windows of the verandah.

In Tabata there used to be a small restaurant called "House of the Spontaneous Smile." On a wall panel opening on the inner court¬yard was a sumi-ink painting of bamboo said to have been drawn by the famous Taikan while intoxicated.

Every year, a meeting of haiku poets was held there to reminisce upon Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Jukichi, as his first major academic research, had brought to light the change in the thinking of Japan¬ese intellectuals as shown by the literature and, most particularly, the suicide death of Akutagawa.

Hiroko had read that treatise of Jukichi's in a magazine she found on a table in a small hotel in a foreign country. What was the Hiroko of those days doing then? Did she ever imagine that Jukichi—whom she has thus come to know—would become so thoroughly entangled in her life as this? Who can say that Jukichi, then throwing the entire energy of his youth into his research and writing, himself imagined that in another three years he would be cast into prison sentenced to life.

Then again, Jukichi might have known that something like this would happen and had resolutely prepared himself and had gone ahead and married her anyway.

Watching the shadow-play pictures cast by the daimyo bamboo leaves stirred faintly by every wisp of breeze, reminded Hiroko, lying in bed with her eyes wide open, calling up memories of the dusty trial court shining in that late April sunlight. At 10 A.M. of the very day the appeal was to have been judged, Tokyo had been alarmed by a formation of small planes. Hiroko had gotten a call from Mr. Nagata, who had been in the court since before the appoin¬ted time.

He said on the phone that the trial would be postponed. She'd taken off the steel helmet which had been lying heavy on her shoulders and gotten out of her new mompei coveralls. By and by, the air-raid alarm was downgraded to standby. Then a second call told her that the court had suddenly decided to open and that she should come immediately.

"How spiteful they are! Surely they know the family can't make it in time," said Hiroko.

"Anyhow, please come as soon as possible. I'll try hard to delay the opening," Mr. Nagata answered.

It took Hiroko an hour to get from her house to the court. She had to walk a way, take a street car and walk again. There was no shorter way. She was out of breath when she rushed into the third¬-floor courtroom.

The hearing had already been opened and the slender-faced chief judge of the triumvirate was reading aloud in a formal drone from some paper. Jukichi was sitting in the first row of seats. Two guards had usually sat apart from him, now were close by on either side on the same bench. Hiroko sat behind Mr. Nagata, the sole audience in the otherwise deserted court.

The paper the chief judge was reading was the summary of the review and the sentence. Hiroko felt strange about the whole thing. For what purpose had there been the preliminary examinations or the trials? She found that the analysis and description of the event Jukichi and his comrades had been trying to clarify with their reasoning and an objective examination of the situation, differed very little from the one-sided presentation of the prosecution that had been written twelve years before. A slight difference could be noted, though, in less use of vilification and in the fact that the event was now judged a simple accident, not premeditated as it had been considered before. Whatever efforts Jukichi made, however reasonable his statements might be, the court had decided before¬hand. The sentence was a manifestation of judicial obstinacy.

Hiroko's amazement was renewed, though she knew she made it out too simple, at the fact that a fifty-year-old husband and father, an educated man, could stand there without the slightest hesitation, reading out the most unreasonable judgment.

The chief judge finished reading. Then pausing a minute and raising his voice, he read that Jukichi would be sentenced to life imprisonment. He continued and rattled on in a most business-like way that Jukichi could further appeal within a week if he were dissatisfied with the judgment. All the members of the court stood up at once. So did Jukichi. Hiroko, unconsciously standing up, caught sight of Mr. Nagata's honest white face, now turned an unusually deep red.

All of them followed at the chief judge's heels into the anteroom. Jukichi, leaving, turned to Hiroko and smiled. It was his usual smile. He widened his mouth to knit the edges of it in a hint of cyn¬icism. It was the smile she knew so well. It drew from her a smile. But hers was only a momentary one. Weaving between the benches, she headed straight for him. The guards on either side kept walking, as if to separate them, urging him on. All of Hiroko's movements and her facial expression revealed her concern. Jukichi accepted and understood this; he smiled another smile—one to soothe her. Then turning around and speaking so that either Hiroko or the lawyer could take it, "Well, then, see you the day after tomorrow, again." With his manacled hands, he put on a braided hat and went out. That was a Saturday.

Hiroko could not picture how she herself had looked then, though for the rest of her life she would never forget how Mr. Nagata's face had turned so violently red, or how Jukichi, face smooth and pale from years of illness and being cut off from sunlight, with his gentle but indomitable black eyes, smiled almost humorously.

Those eyes and that smile of Jukichi were formed in the play of daimyo bamboo shadows upon the autumn mosquito net—as they were on the small pillow covered in white, and across the palms of Hiroko's hands. Jukichi's hair, which had not yet been cut short, fell long and disheveled over his forehead and gave her a delightful feeling when she ran fingers of memory through it. How many years have passed since her fingers actually touched it?

There is the word "cruelty," so is there the fact of cruelty. If Jukichi and his comrades were not released from prison, while others are set free with the abolition of the Public Peace Law ... this is cruel ... too cruel....

I wonder if cruelty itself is not but power used in such a way that harsh treatment cannot be considered to be impossible.

She sat up in her burning bed, passion billowing forth from her longing for Jukichi, swelled by resistance to the cruelty of power.

In none of the few-minute meetings over the past twelve years had Jukichi shown confusion or suffering on his face. Seeing that face. Hiroko would be refreshed, forget her agony. One summer when he met her in the reception room he had been suffering from dysentery and didn't even have enough strength left to sit up properly on his chair. He came in his nightgown and sank in a heap on the chair. From across the table, his hair, which had fallen out almost completely was but a thin suggestive wraith of a hairline and random wisps, exactly as an artist would draw a ghost. Hiroko, blinking, stared with wide-open eyes. Even then when he was perhaps dying, he still had that smile, which was her salvation. When she looked at that smile, Hiroko spontaneously returned it, and her round face reflected the ripple of excitement which stirred within.

Hiroko, however, knew that night must come for her. She knew too that night undifferentiated from the interminable night-like day, also was Jukichi's plight. Enduring the variety of days and nights, she began to feel that she and Jukichi had become a myste¬rious ship. Night and day meant to her, not an aimless lapping of waves against their ship asea, but a tidal flow of time which would never ebb, a transition of history.

* * * * * *

After leaving Himeji, Hiroko spent a day getting on and off trucks, walking hurriedly along leaning on some cart or other. Now she is on a wagon, her tired feet dangling down like a child's

To both sides of the highway spreads the broad Banshu Plain illuminated by the diaphanous setting sun of autumn. Mountains are seen in the westward distance where Mt. Rokko would be rising behind Kobe City. Beautiful light white clouds floating across the sky sooth Hiroko as she gazes at them from the cart.

On such an autumn afternoon Hiroko is unexpectedly on an old wagon on her way east through the Banshu Plain. She is going forward to Jukichi .... This expectation makes the slowness of the old-fashioned cart seem very comforting. Banshu Plain has a unique undulation, different from that of Tokyo's Kanto Plain or that around Nasuno along the far northern Tohoku Line where Hiroko used to live. These fertile fields are plowed lightly to blend with the remote mountains of Hanshin, which though high and steep, rise calmly in the evening sky. Here and there are dazzling pools like shallow lakes.

Their baggage on the cart with Hiroko, two young men follow along the highway. Once accustomed to walking, they put their suit jackets over their arms and begin to whistle.

Both are cheerful youths with beautiful teeth, which almost seems a Korean characteristic as much as crooked teeth are a Japanese. They often joke and smile. They speak in Korean. All the other Koreans Hiroko has seen on her trip were moving west, in the direction of the channel and home; only these two are going toward the east to Osaka or perhaps even Tokyo.

They seem to have something good waiting for them at their destination; they jest and run after each other like frolicking puppies; they sing songs at intervals. Still, they never wander far from the cart.

The autumnal sun, combed by the breeze, melts Banshu moun¬tains, fields, small village and trees into one golden glow. The wagon moves very slowly along the solitary highway toward their destination. The clatter of the wheels, "katori, katori ..” unexpec¬tedly harmonizes with the gaiety of the young men. All is in har¬mony with Hiroko's heart, filled as it is with various memories. Such would never happen to her again, to be carried so along the highway like this. Hedges of a small town, rusty remains of large factories standing beyond the pine wood of Akashi--Hiroko stares at them.

She feels in all sincerity that the whole of Japan is surging forward like her slow cart.

Gluck, Jay. Ukiyo: Stories of the “Floating World” of Postwar Japan (3rd ed.). Ashiya, Japan: Personally Oriented, Ltd., 1993; 89-96.