Modern Japanese Stories/The Song Bird

Uguisu

The Song Bird

by Itō Einosuké

Towards evening, when the wind had dropped and the dust had settled, a little old woman with a small cloth bundle on her back came slowly up the street, dragging her feet wearily and trailing loose ends of straw from the frayed heels of her sandals. After every ten yards or so she would pause briefly, move on a few steps, and then stare intently at the front of a shop or at its sign-board. She gave the impression of someone noting in amazement the changes which time had wrought in a once familiar town; or perhaps of someone searching out a strange house at which to call. On arriving before the Inspectorate of Agricultural Products—a building fronted by broad glass doors and a particularly prominent sign-board—she stood motionless for an age, like a hawk hovering above a marsh, her neck strained towards the sign; and then, as if resolved at last, she stepped quickly forward and pushed back the glass doors.

“I’m from Akazawa”—the black uniformed clerk turned from his bored inspection of the street and waited for her to continue—“I want you to help me find where my daughter lives, sir.”

The man leaned forward, not certain that he had heard correctly, but when the old woman went on—“They said she was at the Seifū Inn, so I came to see, but she’s not there, so could you please help me find where she is, do you think?”—he broke in before she had finished: “Well, looking for people, you know—we don’t do that sort of thing here. If that’s what you want you should go to the police station.” He turned away to inspect the street once more.

“Oh, then this isn’t the police?”—the old woman cast her eyes slowly about the walls and furnishings of the room, and her face registered keen disappointment.

The police station was only two or three blocks further up the street, but on entering it the old woman found the policemen all turned the other way, watching with evident amusement a couple who had arrived before her, and it was some considerable time before anyone chose to look in her own direction. The two people—one a sharp-featured woman of about fifty, the other a girl with plump cheeks and large eyes—were standing dejectedly, with bowed heads, before an officer whose hair had receded in a broad sweep from his temples. Both women wore overall trousers, and through the side-slits in the girl’s a bright red undersash was visible.

“Now show us the money you stole”—the girl, doing as the constable directed, reached into the folds of her sash and, after much rustling about, brought out a dirty striped cotton purse. The constable examined the contents.

“Well, there it is. She hasn’t spent a thing. Ten yen, fifty sen—that’s the lot, isn’t it?”

He directed his question at the older woman, who nodded and gave a look as if of immense relief.

“This is a fine state of affairs, this is,” continued the constable. “A mother robbed by her daughter. A daughter robbing her mother. You, young woman, you’ve gone too far. But you, too,”—addressing the mother—“isn’t it time you stopped turning your daughter’s husbands out of the house? Well? …”

He paused, but the mother offered no reply, managing to convey by her silence that, as far as that matter was concerned, she had her reasons. The policeman at the reception desk now intervened. His body was twisted round in his chair, and his ruddy-complexioned face was twisted yet further round on his shoulders, to enable him to view the scene.

“Hi!” he shouted, “How many sons-in-law have you thrown out now?”

When this produced only a long silence he put his question again, this time to the daughter.

“How many husbands have you had thrown out?”

The girl raised her eyes a moment to look at her mother, but quickly lowered them and stared once more at the floor.

“The last was the fifth,” she whispered.

“What! The fifth. Five husbands at your age? That’s no joke, I should say.”

The policeman’s gaze swept back around the room and came to rest upon the face of the old woman, who was standing directly before his desk. At once, as if at a sudden recollection of urgent business, he started writing something on a sheet of paper.

“Turned out five sons-in-law, eh?” resumed the first, the balding policeman. “What on earth makes you do it? If you intend to try any more of that sort of thing we certainly can’t let your daughter go back home with you just like this. Stealing your purse is bad enough, but who knows what she might do next? Supposing she set the house on fire? What do you intend to do about it, then? Are you going to turn out any more? Well? … Are you?”

The mother was clearly shaken by the policeman’s bullying tone. She started to wipe her hands nervously with a piece of damp cloth. Her hands were black with grime, as if she had come straight from some sort of work in the fields.

“Yes, sir; I see, sir,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll do it again.” She spoke in a half-hearted mumble, keeping her sullen eyes glued to the floor.

“Don’t think? That’s not much good,” said the policeman standing at her side, the patrolman who had brought the two women in. “If that’s the best you can say, when it comes to the point you’ll do it again, just the same as before.”

Having administered this rebuke he turned to the daughter:

“You, now. How do you feel about that husband? Do you want him badly?”

The girl made no reply, but grew red in the face.

The policeman repeated his question: “Well, do you want him? Or don’t you want him?” This time the girl nodded, very faintly, and the policeman turned at once to the mother.

“This money business is settled now,” he said, “but that’s not the important thing. You’ll have to take your son-in-law back. Is that agreed? Well? … Is it?”

“Yes, I see,” the woman said simply; but the policeman, observing traces of some strong emotion in her face which suggested she was far from convinced, now abruptly changed his tone and started shouting at her angrily.

“Look here! That’s enough lip-service! You can’t go on and on—just because you’re a widow—turning your daughter’s husbands out of the house! You’re old enough to know better. It’s all very well wanting the youngsters for yourself, but there’s a limit. Tell me the truth. Are you really going to make it up with that last husband?”

At this point the young woman, her eyes filling with tears as memories of her dismissed husbands came crowding back upon her, burst suddenly into loud, convulsive sobs. Everyone turned in surprise and looked at her. She wept on unabashed, her mouth wide open, and in a matter of seconds her face was drenched in tears, which spurted from her eyes as if from a fountain.

“What on earth’s the matter now?”—the examining officer rose from his seat, turned his back to the girl, conversed briefly with the policeman at the reception desk, who was still immersed in his writing, and then walked aimlessly about the far end of the room with a look of disgust on his face.

“Mothers or daughters, there’s not much to choose between them. Look here, you!”—he approached the girl and pushed her on the shoulder—“That husband meant a lot to you, I dare say, but you can go too far with all this blubbering and stealing purses.”

Still the young woman wept noisily. The mother, who had been in distraction at the thought of her only daughter’s love being taken from her by a son-in-law, now seemed for the first time to emerge from her trance. She patted her daughter on the shoulder.

“What is it, my dear?” she said soothingly. “Really, you know, in front of all these gentlemen….”

The district patrolman, on being called to the woman’s house to investigate the disappearance from a drawer of a purse containing ten yen, had found no signs of forced entry. He had known, moreover, that the woman, since losing her husband while still in the prime of her fife, had been subject to violent fits of jealousy over her daughter, and had driven from the house a long succession of adopted sons-in-law, the latest being a particularly steady and respected young man called Naokura, and in view of this he had decided to question the daughter. He had found her working in the fields, and her answers to his questions proving evasive, had brought both women straight to the police station, where the examination had shown that his suspicions had been correct. The thief was the daughter. She had stolen the money to suggest to her mother the insecurity of a house without a man, and to get the dismissed Naokura recalled.

A door swung open noisily and the superintendent appeared, ready to go off duty. The policemen sprang to their feet, as if jerked upright by invisible strings, and saluted stiffly.

“What’s all this crying? If you’ve given them a talking to, send them home,” said the superintendent. He made as if to approach the crying girl, thought better of it, and walked out into the street. At once everyone appeared to relax. The policemen going off duty, chatting idly, started preparing to leave.

“Now, ma’am, you understand, don’t you?” said the balding policeman, who took charge of all criminal matters. “And you, too, young woman. No matter how badly you miss your husband, this stealing and such-like has to stop. If you’ve understood, you can go.”

Hanging their heads the two women moved towards the door. Constable Wakamatsu, the inspection officer, gazed idly after them as they went.

“I wish I had a way with the women,” he said, tidying the things on his desk, “like that girl’s husband seems to have had.”

This gave rise to a discussion on which of the station staff had the greatest sex-appeal.

“Whatever you say,” said Constable Miyoshi, the military service officer, “Tange Sazen is the desperado the girls admire.”

Miyoshi’s left eyebrow and eyelid were marked by a scar. While angling for trout the previous summer he had slipped on a smooth mossy rock, breaking his glasses, and because of the red scar which had formed when the wound healed, like some brand burned into his flesh to proclaim his over-indulgence in fishing, his associates had secretly dubbed him Tange Sazen, after the celebrated murderer. One purpose of his remark was to let it be known that he was aware of this nickname.

“It’s no good,” said the balding criminal-affairs officer. “People like you and me don’t stand a chance against the youngsters.” He turned to gaze in ironic admiration at Constable Kobayashi, a young man fresh from the training depot. “Now, if only the ko was knocked off his name, Kobayashi Chōjirō would certainly be our number one glamour boy.” He enjoyed his joke loudly.

“True, true,” laughed the military-service officer. “If we had Hayashi Chōjirō^[1] here I should be only second best.”

He raised his head as he laughed and, looking straight before him, noticed the old woman, who had seated herself on a bench before the reception desk. While waiting for the reception clerk to look her way, she had been overtaken by a sudden drowsiness and had dropped off to sleep.

The policeman called across to her—“Now, my old dear, what can I do for you?”—and at the sound of his voice she forced open bleared eyes and blinked vaguely about her for a few moments.

“Oh, I … I wanted some help to find my daughter,” she said. Rising slowly to her feet she moved forward and pressed her face close to the hand-rail running along the rim of the reception desk. She was short, and only her eyes and the top of her head were visible. Constable Miyoshi, who, in addition to dealing with military service matters, was the officer for general consultations, and had a flair for listening sympathetically to the most trivial problems, got down to business at once, speaking with genuine kindliness.

“Your daughter, eh? Has she run away from home?” he asked.

“Well, no; she was taken away by someone when she was ten years old, you see” … and the old woman started to tell her daughter’s story. The old woman’s name was Kin, and this daughter, Yoshié, was really an adopted child. Kin had decided upon adoption when she was past thirty and had lost hope of ever having a child of her own; but finding someone willing to offer a son or a daughter to a poor household like Kin’s where she and her husband earned the meagrest of livings as charcoal burners, had been no easy matter, and in the end Kin had been obliged to take in the bastard daughter of a woman called Sugi, a seller of dried seaweed who came on business into that rather remote and mountainous locality once every five days. Sugi had been delivered of the child while her husband was away working in Matsumae, and she had brought it to Kin’s house very soon after the twenty-first day, carrying it all the way herself, strapped to her back. So to Kin, who had been fervently praying for a child for all these years, the girl Yoshié had seemed from the very beginning exactly like her own baby. And then, one day in autumn, when she was ten, Yoshié had suddenly disappeared. The village was searched in vain. Parties were sent out into the nearby mountains, directed by the divinations of a fortune teller whom Kin consulted, but they discovered no trace of the missing girl. Then it was reported that someone had seen Yoshié going off with a woman who was possibly the seaweed seller, and Kin and her husband went at once to the woman’s home, and there was a heated argument. Sugi, however, perhaps because her husband was present, stubbornly maintained that she had no idea what girl they were talking about—that she had never even seen her—and the argument produced nothing. Some time later a rumour came to Kin’s ears that Sugi had sold the girl to a travelling circus troupe which had passed through her town shortly after Yoshié’s disappearance. In the years which followed Kin had never been able to forget Yoshié. If ever there was a circus encamped in any of the towns at which she and her husband chanced to call when they brought down charcoal from the mountains, Kin would somehow find the money for a ticket, and she would sit in breathless attention throughout the performance, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her Yoshié. But no one in the least like Yoshié had ever appeared.

“Now, let me see,” said Constable Miyoshi at this point, breaking into Kin’s story, “would the husband of this seaweed selling woman be a fellow called Kintarō? A horse dealer?”

Kin looked up in amazement. “Yes, that’s right, sir. She was Kintarō’s wife. But how do you know about Kintarō, sir?”

The constable made no reply to this question, but went on as if talking to himself, seemingly absorbed in recollections of the dim past. “If that’s the case,” he said, “I’ve seen that daughter of yours.”

Fifteen or sixteen years back, when Miyoshi had been stationed in a neighbouring division of the prefecture on his very first assignment in the police force, he had become involved in a squabble concerning a girl member of a circus troupe which had just arrived in town. The man who had claimed at that time to be the girl’s father had been, he could clearly remember, the horse-dealer Kintarō, now deceased. Not only the girl’s foster mother Kin, it seemed, but her real mother Sugi, had been watching out for the reappearance of this particular troupe; and Sugi—though it was difficult to know exactly what her feelings were in the matter—had, with better luck than Kin, managed to see the girl again. Her husband Kintarō had formerly been a day labourer, but when things were bad and his earnings had sunk below the level required for three square meals a day, he had switched to horse dealing, in which trade—with the help of the little capital provided by the sale of Yoshié—he had, in the optimistic tradition of horse dealers, assumed that he would soon make himself a fortune. But his various schemes had met with disaster, with the result, amongst other things, that he had been unable to buy Yoshié back. His story was that the girl had been sold by Sugi for a mere thirty yen, which was not much more than the price of a cat; and when Constable Miyoshi heard this, being new to his job and anxious to win himself laurels by some startling feat, he had exclaimed in indignation at the idea of buying a human being at such a price, cruelly deceiving a poor ignorant countrywoman, and he had gone so far as to say that the least the circus manager could do, if he wished to stay out of gaol, would be to return the girl at once, together with a fair sum of money as compensation. Unfortunately the avaricious Kintarō had seized upon this suggestion only too readily, first of all proposing a hundred yen as a suitable recompense, then raising it gradually to two hundred, and finally insisting upon three hundred, at which point Constable Miyoshi had washed his hands of the affair and told the horse dealer, if he wanted to be that greedy, to settle things by himself. And Kintarō’s impudence had been no match for that of the circus manager. The man had turned the tables on him, insisting that he would only return the girl if he, the circus manager, were given three hundred yen compensation for his trouble in keeping and training her, and Kintarō had come away with neither the money nor the girl.

“So you were the one who brought that girl up, eh? Is she still doing circus work?” asked Constable Miyoshi recalling as she spoke, a girl in a flimsy green dress, her face thickly powdered, regarding him with dull, listless eyes. But the old woman, Kin, apparently had no idea what her daughter was doing now. After some years she had heard that Yoshié had run away from the circus troupe and was working at a textile factory in Shizuoka prefecture; then, after a further lapse of years, news had somehow drifted her way that Yoshié was living with a man who worked at a cotton mill, and that she had a child; and just recently she had heard from a draper’s salesman who visited her village about a woman, accompanied by a child, who was working in this town as a maid at the Seifū Inn, and when she had questioned the man more closely she had learned that the woman seemed to have moved up just recently from somewhere in the midlands, and that when asked about her relatives she had said she knew only a foster-mother and was not sure whether she was dead or alive from all of which Kin had concluded that this must be Yoshié. She did not know what Yoshié intended, but even if she could not get her to return home to her old foster-mother, at all events she had to see her, just once. So Kin had come here today, no easy journey at her age, and had discovered that it was indeed Yoshié. But she had not seen her. Yoshié had stayed only two months at the inn, leaving again with her child at about the time the snows had started to melt, and no one knew where she had gone.

The off-duty policemen had all left by this time, and the room had grown quiet. A single electric light shone down dimly on the antiquated chairs and desks.

“Well, if we make enquiries we should find her,” said Miyoshi, “but it will take a day or two, you know. Where is it you live?”

He looked up in surprise when Kin said she was from Akazawa: “What? Do you mean to say you’ve walked from Akazawa?”

The place was some thirty miles distant, in the mountains. Added to this, Kin told him that she had no relatives or acquaintances of any kind in this neighbourhood; but when he suggested that she should stay over-night at a cheap lodging house, the old woman shrank back towards the bench as if he had threatened her.

“What ever next!” she cried, with unexpected vehemence. “It would be wicked, paying good money to sleep at a lodging house. Please, just let me stay where I am, until the morning.” She made no move to go.

Miyoshi disappeared into the night-duty room. Returning a little later, he found the old woman still standing by the bench. She was taking various articles from her cloth bundle, apparently preparing to sleep where she was, but the constable led her, much against her will, to the night-duty room. When she saw the room she drew back at once.

“Oh no, really,” she said. “I’ve never slept on a nice matted floor like that in all my life. The wooden boards back there will do me just as well.”

Eventually, however, when the policemen started opening up the supper-boxes their wives had brought them, she advanced hesitantly into the room and began to untie her own bundle. Two egg-plants tumbled out, rolling smoothly over the yellowing straw mats, and the old woman pursued them fussily as if she were chasing escaped chickens.

“Would any of you gentlemen care for one?” she asked, as she retrieved them.

“Well, thanks all the same, old lady, but we’ve got plenty. Keep them for yourself,” said Miyoshi. Glancing up he saw that, with wrinkled, dirt-lined hands, she was picking at a hash of millet, cold boiled rice, and bean paste, folded in a wrapper of bamboo bark.

“Here, you try a bit of this instead,” he said, holding out the round lid of his own chinaware supper-box, on which were set several morsels of soy-flavoured turbot.

“Oh dear, no,” protested the old woman, keeping her hands where they were. “After getting you to put me up for the night I can’t take your food too.” At that moment a strange choking noise sounded in her throat, and she stared straight ahead, her bleary eyes suddenly tensed.

“What’s the matter, old girl?”—the policemen were alarmed. Kin hiccoughed.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “My stomach’s a bit queer, that’s all.” She sat holding a ball of rice in her hand, making no further move to raise it to her mouth.

The night drew on. The old woman had dropped off to sleep, snoring loudly, and the policemen, squatting on the floor at her side, were playing chequers. The station’s detective officer, who had been on duty in the other room, called to them, passing by on his way to the toilet.

“We’ve got him!” he said. “The poultry thief!” At this the policemen hurriedly slipped on their jackets, and, fastening the buttons as they went, trooped out to look. In the custody of the constable from a village three miles down the road stood a surprisingly tall, vacant-looking farm labourer. The case was no direct concern of Constable Miyoshi, but he had often heard Yajima, the officer for penal offences, grumbling away about it: poultry had been disappearing at an alarming rate, from villages all over the district, for three or four months now, and in all this time the thief had managed somehow to escape arrest.

“Is this the man, then? The poultry thief?” he asked, gazing up at the lanky rustic over-topping him by a head. At the same moment he noticed another man, a short dumpy fellow who looked like some sort of day labourer, standing to the rear of the village constable.

“Yes, this is the man who’s been taking them all. But while he was out stealing chickens”—Constable Sasaki turned and glanced behind him—“Hey, you! It’s no good trying to hide yourself!”—he pulled away a muffler from the short man’s face—“While he was out stealing chickens, this fellow was passing the time with his missus. What do we do about it?” He put the question to Miyoshi, who was his senior.

Until lately the lanky Kisuké had enjoyed a spotless reputation. He had never even been suspected of filching a sheaf of rice. But his earnings as a hired man on wretchedly small farm-holdings had begun to seem hardly worth the trouble, and when faced recently with expenses for his mother’s funeral and for the support of a newly born child, he had begun stealing chickens to help out—just two or three on isolated occasions at first, but in time it had become a habit, so that he was out stealing or selling chickens practically every night. Naturally the neighbours had grown suspicious, and, being sensitive to their remarks, Kisuké had at length stayed away completely from his own house. Deciding finally that, with things as bad as they were, he might as well take his wife and child with him and leave the district altogether, he had slipped back home this night, after an absence of forty days, to carry out his plan. The hour was late and people everywhere were asleep, but from within his own house he had heard the sound of a man’s voice. Turning aside into the garden and peering through a knot-hole in the drawn shutters he had caught a glimpse of a face in profile, and had recognized it as that of Izumiya, formerly a railway navvy in the village over beyond the bridge, but now a gang-leader in agricultural assistance work. Kisuké, even without this, was already over-excited, having hurried back in feverish anticipation of the joys of homecoming, and his immediate impulse had been to rush in and beat the life out of the man—but if he was to catch him, he had at once reflected, he might as well catch him in the act: so he had sat himself down in the dark to watch and wait.

“Do you admit this—about you and Kisuké’s wife?” asked Miyoshi, turning to Izumiya.

“Whether he admits it or not,” said Kisuké, assuming an expression of solemn righteousnesss, as if he had come to the police station expressly to complain of this very matter, “I saw it, with my own eyes. Saw it plain and jumped in on him. Saw it plain”—he asserted once more—“with my own eyes.”

At this point Constable Wakamatsu returned from the toilet.

“Did you, then?” he shouted at Kisuké. “And I suppose you didn’t see yourself stealing chickens?”

In contrast with the lanky Kisuké, whose pallor was probably the result of malnutrition and who seemed already resigned to his fate, the round-cheeked, plump little Izumiya was clearly anxious about what was to come, and the bead-like eyes in his swarthy face gleamed with apprehension. After suffering a merciless hiding from Kisuké, who had burst in from the rear of the house without a moment’s warning, Izumiya had run off, dazed and mortified, towards the local policeman’s house, shouting “The poultry thief! The poultry thief!”, yelping like a whipped dog, and then, on returning boldly behind the policeman to glory in Kisuké’s downfall, he had suffered the further discomfiture of hearing the arrested man calmly register a formal complaint against him.

“You must write an apology,” said Constable Miyoshi. “Oh, is that all you need, then?” said Izumiya his expression brightening up at once. Kisuké, however, looked utterly amazed.

“Here!” he protested. “Isn’t this wretch going to be charged?”

“The one who ought to be charged,” said the constable, “is you. If you hadn’t left her alone to starve, this would never have happened.”

Kisuké looked suddenly dispirited and said no more. With everyone in the village talking about her husband’s misdeeds Kisuké’s wife had soon found it impossible even to borrow a bowlful of rice from a neighbour, and it was in these straits that she had yielded to the smooth-tongued Izumiya, who had apparently promised her a job on agricultural assistance work.

“What sort of thing shall I write?” asked Izumiya, turning his diminutive round eyes on Constable Miyoshi, and taking up a pen.

“First of all,” said the constable, “you write ‘Guarantee’.”

“Is that the address?” asked Izumiya earnestly.

“Blockhead!” thundered the local policeman. “A guarantee’s a promise! You have to promise you won’t misbehave again. That’s the regulation.”

Izumiya was thoroughly abashed, and his next remark was spoken in a low whisper.

“But, you see,” he said, “fellows like me, with no education, can’t very well write complicated things like this….”

Constable Miyoshi wrote out the guarantee for him, and Izumiya, having pressed his thumb-mark on the document, and bowed obsequiously to all the officers, withdrew towards the door.

“And if you do it again, you wretch”—suddenly roused to a fury Kisuké thrust his unwieldy form across the room after the disappearing Izumiya—“I’ll damn well murder you!”

Izumiya, who was by this time just beyond the street-entrance, whirled around defiantly, and, like a beaten small boy calling names and making faces from a safe distance, shouted back: “Yah, dirty thief! I don’t give a damn for a fellow like you! I never want to see your ugly face again! Do you hear me?”

Kisuké, not to be outdone, was about to improve on this when Constable Wakamatsu intervened. “Get home, you fool,” he bellowed at Izumiya. “You’ll say too much!” And Izumiya promptly vanished.

When Miyoshi returned to the night room, having first lodged Kisuké in the detention cell, the old woman, Kin, who lay huddled in a corner beneath a padded quilt, was making noises which sounded like stifled moans.

“What is it, old girl?” he called across, as he poured hot water into an earthenware pot to make tea.

“It’s nothing. Just pains in my stomach—I’ve always suffered from them,” she replied; and at once she fell quiet. Presently, in the still darkness, coming from somewhere in the direction of the cell at the far end of the cement passageway which separated the night-room from the caretaker’s lobby, there sounded the clucking of a hen. The old woman, apparently too exhausted by her stomach pains even to sleep, stirred beneath the quilt.

“My!” she said, without raising her head or turning it from the wall. “So you keep hens, too—even in the police station!”

Two or three days ago a young man of eighteen, a farm hand employed by one of the leading families in a neighbouring village, had spent the night in a detention cell. The young man had lately, for want of money, been obliged to discontinue his visits to a certain girl in one of the town’s bawdy-houses, and on that night, unable to contain himself longer, he had grabbed three of his employer’s chickens, stuffed them quickly into a basket, not even stopping to secure their legs, and carried them straight off to town. But, while hurrying towards a butcher’s shop with the basket slung across one shoulder, he had suddenly noticed a policeman on patrol duty coming directly towards him down the street. Checking a rash impulse to turn and flee down a side-alley—behaviour which he realized would have been altogether too suspicious—he had walked boldly on past the policeman, luckily not a man of experience in these matters, and was just heaving a sigh of relief when the birds in the basket had started to cluck. He had been stopped at once and taken to the police station. There, while he was being questioned, the hens had broken loose and wandered idly about beneath the desks and chairs, and when the policeman at last noticed this after finishing his brief ten-line report, and tried to get them back into the basket, the hens had shown a desperate determination to avoid recapture, as if convinced that this time, with no shadow of doubt, they were to be sold to the butcher, and after fluttering wildly from desk to desk in the office had scampered through an open door into the superintendent’s room, jumping up on to the table used for entertaining visitors. The whole night-staff had turned out to join in the hunt, leaving the thief to look after himself, but, even so, one of the birds, a white leghorn, had slipped past them into the corridor and, reaching the open space between the caretaker’s lobby and the wash-house, had disappeared into the night. No one had seen it since. Constable Miyoshi, feeling certain in his own mind that the noise he had just heard was that same bird, still loitering about somewhere outside, went towards the cell to investigate, and as he did so a further series of clucks greeted him from the darkness at the end of the passage. The owner of the voice, however, was no hen. It was the newly arrested poultry thief, Kisuké.

“What’s all this?” Miyoshi shouted indignantly. “You in there, this is no place for making stupid noises!”

“But the constable asked me”—Kisuké’s aggrieved voice floated out from the blackness of the box-like cell—“the constable himself said make a noise like a hen.”

The policeman assigned to duty at the door of the cell turned to Miyoshi. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “I told him to do it. According to what he says, it’s imitating the cluck that’s the secret in stealing hens. I was just investigating, trying to find out what sort of noise it was.”

Kisuké had been telling him that the only sure method in stealing hens was to creep up close to a bird, clucking expertly all the while, and then, in one movement, seize it and wring its neck. That way, it seemed, the bird never got away, and never even scratched you.

At this moment there was a sound of voices at the front entrance, and Constable Miyoshi hurried back to the office to find a group of policemen gathered around a solitary dejected-looking woman. Her hair, bound backwards and upwards in the Shimada style, was badly crumpled and deranged, but there was nevertheless a certain professional elegance about her appearance—she wore a muslin kimono of a bold chequer pattern, topped by a black neck-piece, and was carrying a samisen—and Miyoshi summed her up at a glance as some sort of strolling entertainer.

“What is it? What’s that woman here for?” he called out from across the room; and then, moving nearer, he noticed a face which he knew, the face of a man called Sakutarō, peeping out from behind the back of Constable Kobayashi, the officer who had brought the woman in.

“You here again?” he bawled at the man. “Have you seduced this one, too?”

Sakutarō had given the police, at various times, a great deal of trouble on matters pertaining to women, and Miyoshi remembered his face only too well. Sakutarō beat a big drum, while his wife sang, and together they went the rounds of the local villages begging for money. Until the autumn of the previous year they had based themselves on this town, where they had rented a house. At about that time, however, on a visit to a town some thirty miles distant, the customary terminus of their man-and-wife busking tours, they had met up with another group in the same line of trade, and while travelling in company with these fellow artistes (both groups having decided that business would be better for all concerned if they joined forces and made one big, noisy party) Sakutarō had formed an intimate relationship with a girl in the other troupe called Sayo. His wife had caught them together one night, and had raised no end of a commotion, but Sakutarō was not the man to resign himself easily to defeat, and finally he and the girl had run away together to some distant part of the prefecture. Sakutarō’s wife and the girl’s uncle had then come to the police to request a search, and before long, thanks largely to the pains of Constable Miyoshi, the runaway couple had been returned. The girl was severely lectured and then handed over at once to her uncle, but Sakutarō, before being dismissed, was locked in the cell for a night. Within an hour from the time of his release the next morning, however, Sakutarō had come running back to the station in a state of great agitation.

“What is it now?” Miyoshi had chaffed him. “Do you want another spell in the lock-up?”

Sakutarō had feigned alarm at this. “That’s only a joke, officer, isn’t it?” he had said, cringing. “You see, something awful has happened.”

On returning to his house, it seemed, Sakutarō had found the place stripped bare. His wife, and everything from the furniture to the implements of their trade, had gone; and now he had come to ask for police assistance in tracing the woman.

“So this time it’s your wife we’re asked to look for, is it? Do you think the police force has nothing better to do all day than chase after you and your wife?”—Constable Miyoshi, heartily sick of the business, had refused to help, and Sakutarō had soon afterwards shut up his house and had apparently, ever since, been moving about from one cheap lodging place to the next.

“That’s right,” said Constable Kobayashi. “The fellow’s back to his old games. Picked this woman up. Thought he’d seduce her. But …” Constable Kobayashi, who was fresh from the training depot and had lately, with admirable thoroughness, been reporting everything from a bicycle without lights to a public urination, now assumed an expression of intense seriousness, saluted his senior colleague Miyoshi, and continued: “… the thing is, this woman’s a man. I found them together at a lodging house, in the course of my patrol, and brought them in.”

Miyoshi looked at the woman. The skin on her face and neck was hidden beneath a thick layer of powder but the bushiness of the eyebrows, and a certain directness in her gaze, did seem somehow more appropriate to a male. The hips, too, were surprisingly narrow.

“So this is a man, eh? Hi, you! Lift those skirts a bit, and let’s see your legs.”

The woman fidgeted about, pleading with her eyes to be spared this indignity.

“Come on, roll them up!”—Constable Wakamatsu now intervened, rising from his desk. Seeing the look of obstinacy on the woman’s face, however, he took an abacus from a nearby desk, and with this quickly lifted up the skirt himself. A thick, hairy skin was revealed. The man in female guise clutched at the deranged skirts in a flutter of coquettish modesty and gave a little shriek.

“Now really,”—the voice was shrill and feminine—“what ever are you gentlemen doing?”

Miyoshi was taken aback. “Well, listen to that! Are you sure this is a man?” he queried.

The same momentary doubt was clearly registered on the faces of his colleagues.

“Hi, let’s hear some more like that,” urged Constable Wakamatsu. “Speak in that womanish voice again.”

But the ambiguous person stood silent with downcast eyes. Constable Kobayashi took the abacus from Wakamatsu’s hand.

“Where,” he cried, delivering a resounding and well-aimed blow with the flat of the implement, “would you find a woman with breasts as hard as this?”

His surprised victim tottered backwards and fell to the floor. Constable Wakamatsu tugged roughly at a sleeve of the man’s kimono.

“And how did you get hold of these woman’s clothes?” he demanded. “Pinched them?”

Still the bogus woman made no reply, but fumbled fussily with the material at the base of one sleeve, where a seam had been split open. The hand was delicate, like a woman’s, but the wrist, peeping out from the mouth of the yellow sleeve, was decidedly large-boned.

“Well, that’s as you say, I suppose,” said Miyoshi, turning now to look at Sakutarō. “But what’s this other fellow done?”

Constable Kobayashi resumed his posture of stiff formality.

“Ha, this fellow, of course, is a fellow having a relationship with the person masquerading as a woman, and I found him in heated argument with that person at a cheap lodging place near Sengan temple and brought him in.”

All this was delivered in one breath. Then, “Hi, you! Come here!” he shouted, and he pulled the man forward. Sakutarō, his hair thinning and his skin burned almost black—both conditions the result of his restless, year-round wanderings up and down country roads—was painfully embarrassed, and he gazed with apprehension at Constable Miyoshi, whom he had given so much trouble in times past.

“Where and when did you fall in with this person?” he was asked.

“It was this evening, sir,” he replied. “We met at Iwasaki.”

The two of them had walked back together to the town after that, singing and begging from door to door as they went, had done a further round of the gay quarters in town, and then, late at night, had put up at a cheap lodging house, where they had drawn their hard, wafer-thin mattresses together and lain down side by side like man and wife. So far all had gone smoothly; but Sakutarō, utterly woman-starved since the decampment of his outraged wife after that last unfortunate affair, had even at this late stage failed to observe the truth about his partner. And, out of the warmth of his feelings, he had not only treated her this evening to a bowl of rice and fried prawns, but had even, when she had complained of having no money for face-powder, allowed himself to be wheedled out of the whole of his day’s takings.

“You damned swine!” he had shouted, in his moment of disillusionment. “Give me that money back!”

But his companion had been stubborn—what had been given, she said, was given to keep—and before long the quarrel had roused the whole house, and a toffee vendor, a clog repairer, and a hawker of drugs had joined in, protesting vigorously against this disturbance of their night’s repose.

It was just at this moment that Constable Kobayashi had come by on his patrol. On reaching the otherwise deeply stilled neighbourhood of Sengan temple and hearing the angry shouts emerging from this lodging house, he had been prompted to investigate at once, and what had particularly roused his curiosity was the fact that earlier this year, at the time of the snows, he had run across a similar sort of disturbance at this house. It had been at this very hour, and the culprit on that occasion, grown wild and disorderly with drink, had been one of those begging priests who walk about playing a bamboo pipe. Kobayashi had been horrified at what he had seen on forcing his way into that room. The priest was grappling furiously with the toffee vendor, who was attempting to restrain him from further drunken violence, and on seeing the constable he had stumbled across to embrace him, fixing him with glassy, befuddled eyes, and had wailed sorrowfully and incoherently: “Constable, ah Constable, haven’t touched a drop for years. Not for years. Is this a divine punishment. Constable, for drinking again after all these years? Ah Constable, Constable.”

The money he had spent on the saké had been an allowance for his child’s funeral. His wife, who was lying on a mattress, still suffering from the after-effects of her recent confinement, had a moment before been hurling venomous abuse at her drink-sodden husband, but now, with a vacant expression on her pallid, sickly features, as if she had completely forgotten the cause of all this commotion, she was gazing fixedly at a sliding door, where the paper had been torn in the recent scuffle. Close by her pillow, however, in an orange crate before which there burned a single half-ounce offering candle, lay her child, born less than half a month ago, and dead since yesterday. According to the toffee vendor’s account, this now drunk and incapable priest, having no money to bury his child, had gone in tears to the district welfare man to plead for help, and as a result had received a grant from the Town Office of five yen, but he had come home swinging a half-pint bottle of saké in one hand, which, though little enough in itself, had been quickly augmented by a pint bottle and then a quart bottle; and when he had finished them all off and was in a most exhilarated frame of mind his wife had started to cry, saying how could they ever send the child to the cemetery now that all the money had been drunk, and he had shouted, “If it hadn’t been for you lazing about in bed all day the child would never have got ill!”, and had shaken and kicked her so violently that the toffee vendor, unable to bear the sight any longer, had rushed in to the woman’s rescue. The next morning, after a night in the cell, the priest had been brought before the superintendent. In the days before drink and women had ruined him, it turned out, he had been the resident curate of a small branch-temple. “And what”—the superintendent had exclaimed before dismissing him—“do you think of a temple priest who can’t even bury his own child?” “Ah, I don’t know what to say,” the man had replied, as he backed towards the door, pale and heavy-eyed, almost doubling himself up in apology. “I don’t often see a wad of money like that nowadays, you see, and I just lost my head. It’s unforgivable.”

Memories of that affair had been in Constable Kobayashi’s mind as he had rushed in to investigate this second disturbance. At his entry Sakutarō, seeing that it was the police, had at once stopped his shouting.

“It’s nothing, officer,” he had said, composing himself. “This woman here made some remark I couldn’t understand and then she started a row. That’s all.”

But the woman, seated on the flimsy mattress and now hastily re-arranging her dress, was showing considerable agitation, and while Kobayashi was eyeing her suspiciously the toffee vendor, who had, as usual, been seeing all that he could, had sidled up to him.

“Constable, Constable,” he had whispered confidentially, bobbing his glistening, prematurely bald head up and down in an obsequious manner, and assuming the expression of one about to render a great service, “that’s a Kabuki actor. A female impersonator.”

“Hi, you! You’re a man, are you?” Kobayashi had demanded.

But there had been no reply. The person on the mattress, readjusting a disarrayed neckline with meticulous care, had silently fixed the officer with the sulky stare of a woman wronged. Young Kobayashi had experienced a moment of panic, during which he stood rooted helplessly to the floor, but, with sudden resolve, he had thrust a hand inside the person’s kimono, in the region of the breast. And, sure enough, it was a man.

“Do you still pretend you’re a woman, then?” he had shouted, feeling considerably relieved. “You come along with me to the station.”

“Hi, come over here!”—Constable Kobayashi moved across to his own desk, took out his pocket book, and began a leisurely interrogation, making notes as he proceeded—“When did you start dressing up like this? …”

It was much as the toffee vendor had said. The man had formerly been an actor of female parts, going by the stage name of Kawakami Yoshio, in the ‘New Kabuki’ troupe of Hanamura Masao which had done a tour of the North-east, on foot, some two or three years past. It had been at a time of depression for farming people, and the company had broken up after a series of disastrous failures—whereupon Kawakami Yoshio, stranded in the wilderness, had exploited his dramatic gifts and training off-stage, walking from village to village in the guise of a female entertainer, complete with samisen and dancing kimono. He had done well by comparison with the ordinary kind of strolling beggar, but circumstances had obliged him to engage as a side line in the risky business of flaunting his charms and wheedling money out of male admirers. For the poisonous white powder with which he habitually plastered himself in order to conceal his sex from the public had unfortunately worked itself into his system, and life had lately come to seem intolerable without morphine.

“And you”—Constable Kobayashi turned banteringly to Sakutarō—“What technique did you use in attempting to seduce this woman? A demonstration, please!”

Sakutarō looked as if he had just stepped on a pile of cow dung. When they told him he could go, he merely pursed his lips, and continued to loiter about.

“Look here,” he said at last, “I’m not going till you get that fellow to give me back my money.”

But Kawakami Yoshio had already spent it on morphine, and they could find nothing in his purse except a solitary brass sen.

“That’s a just punishment,” Sakutarō was told, “for being too sexy.” And, glumly scratching his sparsely covered head, he shuffled away.

In the small, old-fashioned station building, where the only room of any distinction was the superintendent’s private office, there was considerable confusion and over-crowding during the remainder of that strangely eventful night. The old woman, Kin, who had passed the whole time in the night-duty room, left at about seven, her ceaseless moaning having effectively deprived Constable Miyoshi of all rest. Again and again she had risen to go to the toilet, and each time, on returning, she had settled herself down for no more than a few moments before stirring and departing once more. It was clearly a case of severe diarrhoea, with violent stomach pains, and Miyoshi, kept awake by her sounds of distress, had at one time half risen from his mattress and called across: “Here, old lady, if it hurts that much shall I fetch a doctor?”

But the old woman had scorned the idea. “It’s nothing,” she had answered. “I’m used to these stomach aches. Sometimes they go on for four or five days. And, as for calling a doctor, the bills finish you off quicker than the disease.”

Miyoshi rose at dawn, and Kin rose too, with much fussing and rustling, and started preparing at once for the journey back.

“Hold hard, old lady, are you going to walk back on an empty stomach? Will you be all right?”

But Miyoshi’s concern was wasted on Kin, whose will, for all the weakness of her flesh, was of manly strength.

“I shall be all right,” she said. “So do what you can, please, to find Yoshié. I shall come again.”

She folded her cloth wrapper about the remains of the millet and boiled rice, fastened the bundle across her shoulder with a cord, and left. The interrogation of the bogus woman had proved a fairly simple matter, and soon after the superintendent arrived a written report was ready for his inspection, but in the case of the poultry thief it was clear that little headway could be expected, no matter how many hours the penal officer devoted to his task. The number of chickens stolen ran into several hundreds, and Kisuké, who had never taken more than one from one place, found it impossible to recall each individual house he had robbed. The first twenty or thirty he managed to identify smoothly enough, but for every case after that the sieve-memoried Kisuké would mumble “Well, let me see, what house might that be? … What day was that, I wonder?” and lean his head sideways for interminable periods of vacant, open-mouthed silence.

Miyoshi was worrying, in a vague and drowsy way, about Kin—had she collapsed, perhaps, somewhere along the road?—and was stifling yawn after yawn as he listened at the same time to the vapid, painfully slow replies of Kisuké immediately behind him, when a gentleman in a dark blue jacket entered the room and bowed with stiff formality before the reception desk. Miyoshi, glancing at the title of ‘Junior School Instructor’ on the card handed him by the reception clerk, rose to attend to the visitor.

“Please, please,” he said, “come this way.”

The owner of the card, Onozaki, rose and slowly approached.

“The fact is,” he began, after a brief bow, “one of my girl pupils is being sold as a factory hand, and is due to leave on the next south-bound express. I’ve just come from seeing her at the railway station. It didn’t look”—he continued, with signs of annoyance—“as if I had any chance of stopping things by myself, so I hoped someone might come along with me and talk to them.”

“Much obliged, sir,” said Miyoshi, accepting the information as if it had been offered with no other purpose than to assist the police in their efforts to suppress this sort of traffic. “Very good of you, taking the trouble to let us know. Fujioka!”—he turned to one of his subordinates—“Get along quickly to the station with this gentleman.”

The two men had scarcely gone before another visitor arrived, a woman of forty in a serge kimono, with her hair bound tightly back, and with the ample girth of a Sumo wrestler. Judging by the way she puffed and panted, and by the redness of her face, she had walked no little distance to get here. It was the unlicensed midwife Ueda Yaé, who had been served with a summons two days ago, and immediately she sat herself down before the legal affairs officer. Her flesh bulged over the chair’s rim and whenever she moved the chair swayed to one side or the other, creaking alarmingly as if in imminent danger of collapse.

“About how many births have you assisted at?” she was asked.

Yaé, who had just carried her considerable weight some six miles on foot, wiped the sweat from her brow with a neatly folded hand towel, probably a token of someone’s gratitude for recent assistance, and replied quite frankly: “Well, I couldn’t give you the exact figure. I’ve had any number of children myself, you see, so I know a lot about these things, and if ever there’s a birth in the neighbourhood I’m asked in to help, and nowadays it seems people won’t have anyone else.”

Just lately a qualified midwife had come to work in the district, sponsored by the Prefectural Health Authority, but until her arrival it had been the universal custom at the time of a birth—unless a midwife was called in from the neighbouring district, or the patient brought about her delivery unaided, heaving on a rope suspended from the ceiling—to go running off for help to Yaé’s place, and after the death of her husband Yaé had come to rely for her subsistence almost entirely on the rice or bean-curd given her in appreciation of those services, and gradually had even come to feel that this was her profession. Even now, when a fully qualified midwife was available, the women in the village still went only to Yaé. They shrank from the newcomer, convinced that her fees must be exorbitant. Until recently there had never been any talk behind Yaé’s back, nor any feeling that it was wrong to give payments to a person like that; but when the new midwife appeared—having returned to her native village after long years of nursing in a succession of large city hospitals, resolved to settle down quietly in the country for the rest of her days, even if it meant being a midwife—and discovered that there was surprisingly little demand for her services, she at once took a strong dislike to Yaé and started to create trouble. Realizing that she could not overthrow her rival merely by calling her an unqualified amateur, she had spread the rumour that Yaé was unlawfully practising as a doctor—and it was this charge that the legal affairs officer now wished to investigate.

“Well then,” he continued, slowly coming to his point by a purposely devious route, “what sort of payments do you receive for this work?”

Yaé, who had no idea what was in the constable’s mind, prattled on as if she were enjoying the conversation immensely.

“Payment? There’s not many who bring me anything like that, I can tell you. Times are bad, of course, so you can’t blame them, but as like as not they’ll just promise to bring a present over after the next good harvest, or say the child will give me something when he gets older, or could I please let them do a bit of work for me instead?—or, at the best, they’ll send me over a bag of bean-curd or a pound of rice. In fact, far from getting paid, I often have to provide all the cloth and cotton wool from my own stocks, free of charge.”

Hawkers occasionally came peddling their wares even inside the police station, and at this juncture a woman in overall trousers, with a cotton towel draped over her head and fastened beneath her chin, entered hesitantly and called out: “Would any of you gentlemen like to buy a bird?”

“Buy a bird?” said a policeman, glancing up from a bowl of noodles. “To eat, do you mean? Or to keep in a cage?”

“It’s a beautiful song bird,” the woman replied. “An Uguisu.” And, looking thoroughly pleased with herself now, as if she had already found a buyer, she advanced further into the room and began to untie a cloth-wrapped bundle.

“Well, look at this!”—the policemen, sitting or standing idly about and delving with chopsticks into their lunch-boxes, peered into the smoke-blackened wooden cage resting on the floor—“It’s an Uguisu, right enough. But, does it sing?”

“Well, really, would I try to sell a bird that doesn’t sing?”—the woman looked genuinely shocked.

They asked her the price.

“Well, now, how much is it worth, I wonder?” she said, looking enquiringly round at their faces. “I don’t know what they sell for, myself, but if any of you gentlemen will say what you think is a fair price, anything will do.”

“Anything will do, eh?” laughed one of the policemen. “You’re the first hawker I’ve met who doesn’t know the price of his goods!”

“I’ll give you fifty sen,” said another.

“How much did you say?”—the woman’s face fell—“Can you buy an Uguisu for fifty sen?”

“I thought you said you didn’t know about these things,” said the policeman who had just named the price. “In any case, you can’t expect much from poor fellows like us.”

But the woman was not to be put off so easily.

“If officials like you, with monthly salaries, haven’t got any money,” she retorted, “just where is the money in this town, I should like to know.”

Constable Miyoshi had meanwhile joined the group, and now, catching sight of the woman’s face, he looked suddenly annoyed and shouted: “You again! Have you come to talk more of that silly nonsense?”

“Oh, no, not this time, sir—I’m trying to sell a bird,” she said, evidently flustered.

“You are, eh? Well, if that’s all …”—and Miyoshi peered into the cage.

Miyo was the woman’s name, and when her husband had been arrested two months back for the unlicensed brewing of saké, and had been given a spell in the workhouse in place of a fine, Miyo had come along to the police with the awkward request that she and her children, since they now had no idea where tomorrow’s meals might come from, should be sent to the workhouse too, and she had argued obstinately in this room for the best part of half a day, giving Miyoshi no end of trouble. The brewing of a rough, cloudy saké from crushed rice was a time-honoured custom among the impoverished petty farmers roundabout, any form of refined saké being hopelessly beyond their means, and since it was impossible to stop this practice the police had abandoned imposing fines and, instead, merely consigned offenders to the workhouse. Miyoshi, recalling now the pinched, sad-eyed faces and soiled kimonos of the three children Miyo had brought with her on that occasion, felt strongly inclined to make some sort of offer for the bird himself.

“My, how, it’s an Uguisu!” he exclaimed, bending over the cage. “How much are you selling it for?”

But at that moment Constable Fujioka, who had been to the railway station, reappeared with the teacher Onozaki and some other people, and Miyoshi returned to his desk. Yaé was still being questioned by the legal affairs officer, but on seeing her neighbour Harukichi with his daughter Haru enter in the custody of a policeman she beamed at him with her fat, moon­ like face and cried: “Just fancy! You here too! What have you been up to, then?”

Harukichi had intended to accompany his daughter on the train as far as Owari, and now, dressed for the trip in a dark blue kimono, with the white sleeves of his knitted underwear showing for several inches on each arm, he was following behind Onozaki in evident dejection at this sudden confusion of his plans, but when he saw Yaé’s face he appeared to recover his spirits a little, as if he had found an ally.

“I’ve done nothing wrong, as far as I can see,” he said, “but just as I was thinking to send this girl off to a job in the central provinces along came somebody and said I mustn’t do it.”

He studiously avoided looking at either Onozaki or the policeman as he spoke.

“Nothing wrong, do you say?” broke in Miyoshi. “Do you call it right to sell a girl that age into forced service?”

Onozaki, too, looked highly incensed. “This time I’ve had enough!” he said angrily. “You asked me to help, so I got in touch with the employment clerk, and now you’ve done this. You just don’t know a promise is a promise!”

It was some while ago that Harukichi, embarrassed by an excessively large family of small children, had first told Onozaki that he wished to put Haru out to service; but the girl was a promising student, and on that occasion Onozaki had managed to persuade Harukichi to let her stay on and proceed to High School, arranging meanwhile that she should receive a grant, and covering all minor expenses himself. Shortly after the start of this term, however, there had been expenses for the grandmother’s funeral, and Harukichi, now desperate for money, had once more come along to say that he wished to send his daughter out to work. Onozaki had reluctantly agreed, and, enlisting the help of the employment clerk at the Town Office, had undertaken to find a suitable opening. But Harukichi, whose visits on this matter had been fairly frequent for some while after this, had just lately ceased to show himself, and yesterday morning, by which time Onozaki was already growing suspicious, Harukichi’s sister-in-law had come to the school in his stead on some business connected with Haru. The school’s spring excursion was only four days ahead, and it had been decided that the students of Haru’s class should take the two-hour train journey to the town which was the seat of the prefectural government. It had also been decided that certain money held in trust at the school, being the proceeds of a sale of straw rope made by students at home, should be used for the children who could not afford the fares; and Haru was one of those children. But Haru—her father’s sister-in-law had said—would unfortunately not be able to go on the excursion, so could they please have her share of the rope money now? When pressed for a further explanation the woman had merely shaken her head as if she knew nothing more. Onozaki had felt almost sure then that Harukichi must have fallen for the smooth talk of some commission agent and sold his daughter into service, and on enquiry at the Town Office he had found—as he had expected—that the procedure there, at any rate, was not yet completed. Today, to add to his uneasiness, Haru had failed to appear at school and when he had heard her classmates, during the play hour, mention seeing Haru and her father set out that morning in the direction of the town, he had ridden off on his bicycle at once, asking a colleague to take over his class, and had discovered the two of them at the railway station, waiting idly for a train which was not due for almost another hour.

Onozaki had felt that now he really knew what they meant when they talked about the foxy cunning of these rustics. If the man was going to do this why hadn’t he come along decently and asked him to stop his enquiries? To treat their private agreement as if it had never existed, to go slyly behind his back and carry on secret negotiations, to pretend he wasn’t doing a thing … inwardly seething, he had controlled his temper and tried to reason with the man quietly. But Harukichi had stubbornly refused to move from the waiting-room bench, claiming, with the despairing looks of a man hounded by fate, that the twenty yen advanced to help with the preparations had already been spent on family needs and payments to creditors. It was then that Onozaki had gone to the police for help. Haru, wearing an apron of red muslin over her cheap, gaudily patterned kimono, and white cotton socks holed at the toes, was gazing up in awe at the faces of Onozaki and the policemen, making herself inconspicuous behind her father’s back, but when Constable Miyoshi, who was a fearsome sight with the red scar running across one eyebrow, started severely lecturing her father—“What! When the gentleman takes all this trouble on himself to find a good job, you go to an agency? And don’t you think it’s hard on the poor girl—eh?—sending her off to years of forced labour?”—she trembled suddenly, as if on the verge of tears, and turning abruptly away pressed her hands to her face.

The job which the employment clerk had been recommending was with a certain large spinning factory, but it had offered an advance payment of only ten yen, and, since Harukichi’s situation had moved hopelessly beyond the stage where that sort of money could be of any use, he had decided, even if the conditions of work should be a trifle rough, that there was nothing for it but to sell the girl’s services for a fixed period to some small factory which would give him a good lump sum of ready cash in advance. And he had not had the face to mention this to Onozaki, who had busied himself in so many ways to help his daughter.

“Ah, what can I say?” Harukichi began. “There were the debts, you see, and nothing to eat in the house, and when, on top of that, my third eldest, Zenkichi, fell off a ladder and broke his leg and we had to have the doctor….”

Children in Harukichi’s household, whether there was anything for them to eat or not, sprouted into being like baby potatoes, and the eighth had been born at the close of the last year. Harukichi had been vaguely thinking, therefore, that with a family of eleven to support (for, although the grandmother could now at last be counted out, there were still, in addition to the eight children, two parents and a grandfather) and not the remotest chance of managing it on the scanty produce of his single acre of land, he might reasonably be excused if, in order to reduce the number of mouths by one at least, he considered some arrangement for Haru now that she had finished Junior School; and in any case—he had reasoned—no matter what sort of job the girl was sent to, she could hardly be worse off than she was now, living on starvation rations in a jerry-built shack crawling with children. And when the boy Zenkichi had injured his leg, and the bone had become infected, so that expensive treatment became necessary, Harukichi had finally made up his mind to go to an employment agent and beg an advance on the security of his daughter’s services.

“Here, how old are you?” asked Miyoshi suddenly.

“Thirty-four, sir,” Harukichi replied, with a puzzled air.

“Thirty-four”—Miyoshi looked at the man in amazement—“Eight children at thirty-four! That’s good work, eh? … Is it the truth, though?”

Yaé leaned across at this. “Eight it is, sure enough,” she said. “Starting with this girl here I’ve helped to bring out every one of them, so there’s no mistake. He’s not telling lies. If ever you go to his house there’s always two rocking baskets there, side by side.”

Miyoshi, who had been gazing in surprise at Yaé as she rattled briskly on, looked suddenly annoyed and shouted: “Hi, that’s enough! Who asked you to talk?”

“Yes, that’s how it is,” said Harukichi, glancing apologetically towards Yaé, who had lapsed into a pained silence. “And we’ve never given you a thing, have we, for all that trouble. It isn’t right.” He turned and indicated his daughter. “I was thinking, though, that when we’d sent this girl out to work we might have a chance to do something for you.”

The hundred yen he had expected to receive on delivering Haru at the Owari weaving factory was to have been applied chiefly to the settlement of certain pressing debts, contracted on the security of the house, and to the provision of the family’s immediate needs—but Harukichi’s plans for the money were laid in some detail, and even things like a gift for Yaé had not been forgotten.

Miyoshi, on being told that the twenty yen advanced as preparation money had all gone, and knowing, moreover, that every penny in the Town Office’s various relief funds was already out on loan, could think of no answer to the present problem, and he retired to confer with the superintendent; but there too, it seemed, no solution presented itself.

“Well, I really don’t know,” Miyoshi mumbled as he came back from the superintendent’s office. “What’s it best to do, I wonder?”

Onozaki had at first listened to the excuses of the nervous, shifty-eyed Harukichi with unconcealed disgust, but as he came to learn more of the circumstances behind the case his angry, tensed features had gradually relaxed, and now he turned abruptly to Miyoshi and said; “That’s it. I’ll lend him a little money. If I do that”—he looked across at Harukichi—“you can manage all right, eh?”

“Well, seriously, you know, I just can’t take it.” Harukichi recoiled at the offer, his yellow, wizened face becoming momentarily resolute. “I’m not going to put you to any more trouble, sir, not on my account.”

But Miyoshi was looking immensely relieved. “Now you,” he said quickly. “That’s no way to talk. You should accept a kindness in the proper spirit. Let’s settle things the way the gentleman says—and let’s hear no more about sending this girl into service.”

Miyoshi was obliged to devote a large part of each day to people who came to the police to beg help of some sort, getting them issued with cards for free medical treatment, arranging for assistance to be given from the Town Office, and so on, and Onozaki’s simple solution seemed to attract him strongly, for he now added, as good measure: “And tomorrow I’ll go to the Town Office myself and see if they’ll let you have a bale of rice.”

At that moment there was the sound of a motor-car drawing up outside the entrance. Visitors of this sort were rare, and as the policemen turned towards the door in curiosity there emerged from the car a man whose face was a familiar sight to everyone in the town. It was Dr Yokota. He entered without removing his hat, and, reclining unceremoniously across the hand-rail of the reception desk, cast affable, beady-eyed glances about the room from the depths of his thick-lensed spectacles. After a few bantering remarks—“Hello Miyoshi, has the fishing started yet?”—his expression grew suddenly serious and he turned towards Saitō, the hygiene officer. “I’ve just had a call from that prayer-mongering priest at Tora-no-kuchi,” he said, “and I find it’s a case of dysentery.”

The hygiene officer rose from his chair. “Is it the priest who’s bad, then?” he asked.

“No such luck,” said the doctor. “It’s an old woman putting up at his house. No one knows where she comes from. And, what’s more, the so-called medicine he’s giving her is stewed pine-leaf juice or something of that sort, so you’ll have to investigate this thoroughly.”

With surprising suddenness Dr Yokota now resumed his former cheerful manner, and started gossiping with the other policemen. From across the room, where someone—to see whether the Uguisu would sing or not—he lifted the cage on to a window ledge, there now sounded a single, brief, melodic call—“Ho-o-kekkyo!”

“Did you hear that?” cried the country-woman excitedly. “Isn’t that a lovely voice, now?” She moved across to where Dr Yokota was sitting—“How about it, sir? Wouldn’t you like to buy that bird?”

The doctor, it so happened, wasted a great deal of time and money on pet birds, boasting quite a collection of them in his house.

“Eh, what sort is it?” he asked. He rose and walked over towards the window, moving round the rear of the small group centred on Harukichi. On the way he passed Constable Saitō. The constable, with great zest, was pulling out the sterilization equipment for use in case of infectious diseases, rejoicing that the time of action had arrived at last; for he had long been meaning to check up on this priest, a mendicant holy man who had established himself last spring in a shack near the Tora-no-kuchi cremation ground, and after acquiring a devoted flock of followers by the recitation of weird prayers for long life and happiness, had even, just lately, been credited with miraculous healing powers.

“I hear there’s any number of sick people nowadays going to that priest,” the doctor called out as he passed; and then, drawing up some two or three yards short of the window, lest the bird should take fright and refuse to sing, he peered from that considerable distance at the little creature fluffing its glossy yellow-green feathers inside the cage, and, turning to the country-woman, said: “How much do you want?”

“Well, first of all, sir,” said the woman, gazing hopefully at the doctor in his smartly cut lounge suit, and clearly expecting a handsome offer, “how much would you be prepared to give?”

As she stood waiting for his reply, the Uguisu, apparently finding the warm spring sunshine to its liking, gave vent to yet another full-throated, high-pitched burst of song. Constable Miyoshi looked up sharply at the sound. His face was now stern, as if some irregularity had just occurred to him, and striding quickly across the room he stood directly before Miyo and glared at her accusingly.

“Here you,” he said, “this is a protected bird. Where did you get it, eh? It’s against the law to catch birds like this.”

“I didn’t catch it, sir,” Miyo replied. “It flew into my house all by itself.”

But Miyoshi had already formed his own opinion on the matter, and was obviously prepared to listen to no excuses. “Now then, no lies!” he scolded. “Who ever heard of a bird flying into a house of its own accord? You caught it with a net, there’s no doubt about it.”

In truth, however, Miyo had done nothing by design. That morning, shortly after dawn, a small bird had come flying into her house, beating its wings noisily against the walls, and when she and the children, after a wild and disorderly chase, had eventually trapped it inside a bean-paste sieve they had discovered that it was an Uguisu. Miyo was in ill health, unable to do heavy work as a labourer, and after her husband’s departure to the workhouse, and the rejection of her tearful request to be put in there with him, she had racked her brains in desperation for some means—when there was not even food in the house for tomorrow—of keeping herself and the children alive for the next three months, until her husband came out again. Eventually she had decided, rashly, to borrow ten yen from a money-lender, at a daily interest rate of five sen, and with this as her capital had walked about the town selling apples; but although she had been able, for a few days, to buy sometimes five and sometimes ten gō of rice, in less than a month she had run through both capital and profits, and after that she could find nothing but occasional odd jobs here and there, at the more well-to-do houses, helping in the kitchen or weeding the garden, and the three children had eaten rice hardly once in ten days. When the bird, in the midst of these misfortunes, had flown of its own free will into her house, Miyo had felt convinced that this was the work of providence. “Today,” she had told her dejected and starved-looking children, “I’m going to town to get you some presents. So just be good and wait.”

First she had gone the rounds of the shops, choosing those which looked likely to have old people somewhere on the premises, living in retirement, but no one had wanted a bird, and her hopes had been sadly dashed. Then, thinking that the salaried workers in public offices might, after all, be more likely customers, she had abandoned her tour of the shops and come to the police station.

“Why not forget about it, officer?” said Dr Yokota, interceding on Miyo’s behalf. “Let her sell the bird to me.”

Miyoshi, however, ignored the remark. “We’ll have to set it loose,” he said, and he moved towards the cage.

“But, officer!” Miyo pleaded, turning red in the face, and clutching at Miyoshi’s coat. “Even if it is against the law to catch these birds, I didn’t catch it with a net or a trap or anything like that! If it really flew into the house of its own accord, it’s all right, isn’t it?” But by this time a shadow had darted across the square of pale blue sky framed by the window, and the bird was gone.

“What an awful thing to do!” wailed Miyo. “Just when this gentleman”—with a bewildered, mortified air she turned to gaze at Dr Yokota—“was going to buy it, too! I’ve spent my whole day trying to sell this bird, and what shall I say now when I get home? Can’t you gentlemen do something?”

No one had anything to say to this, and Miyo, realizing that the bird was irretrievably lost, and growing steadily more indignant as she visualized the faces of her children, waiting impatiently at home for their mother to return from town with the presents, walked red-faced from the room. Soon Harukichi too departed, drifting aimlessly off like a kite from a snapped string; but Haru clattered hastily after him in her flaking red-lacquer clogs and, looking straight up into his face, cried: “Dad, will you let me go on the outing?” Having been told that if she went with her father to Owari she could have rice to eat on the train and wear her red kimono, Haru had lost all interest in the school excursion, but now, after today’s events, the thought of missing that too was unbearable. Harukichi’s mind, however, was fully occupied on other matters—as far as the advance from the agent was concerned he thought he could get Onozaki to settle that, so there was nothing much to worry about there; the railway fare, too, would have to be returned, but he had that intact in his pocket; and, before all else, something (though he couldn’t imagine what) would have to be done about the debts on the security of his house.

“The outing, eh? Let me see, that’s the day after tomorrow, isn’t it?” he mumbled vaguely. And he walked on again.

The examination of Yaé, on which the legal affairs officer was still engaged, was concerned not merely with her midwife activities but with the question of whether or not she was setting herself up as a doctor. But on this latter point Yaé had quite openly confessed that the neighbouring country people, rather than go all the way to a doctor and be asked to pay a fee which they could not possibly afford, frequently came to her house for advice on things like burns, stomach trouble, or boils, and that on these occasions—since she had done some nursing in her younger days and was not entirely uninformed—she would say to the best of her knowledge what treatment was best for this or that, and sometimes give the people medicines or ointments out of her own household stock; and it did not seem likely that there was any more than this to the charges of the qualified midwife that Yaé gave medical treatment and dispensed medicines. While the examination was proceeding, and not ten minutes after the departure of Harukichi, a woman of middle age, big with child, came half running, half stumbling into the entrance way. Close behind her, clutching at her mother’s sleeve, gripping a mud-splattered rubber ball in her other hand, and gaping up stupidly at the policemen, came a podgy girl of six or seven; but the woman seemed almost in a trance, completely oblivious of the child’s presence.

“I need help, please, I need help,” she managed to gasp, and then her pallid face twisted in pain and she sank down, as if crushed by a weight from above, and crouched low on the floor.

Even at this the reception clerk remained stolidly motionless in his chair, but Miyoshi, who had been watching from the rear of the room, now came up shouting “Here, here! What’s all this? What’s all this?” and peered over the hand-rail of the reception desk.

The woman, letting her kimono flap loosely open at the front, was pacing up and down the stone-floored porchway like a caged animal, apparently in agony.

“Help me, please,” she was crying. “It’s dreadful! The birth has started!”

Miyoshi, who had been merely gaping at the woman in wide-eyed bewilderment, now seemed for the first time to grasp the situation. “A baby, eh? Oh, this is serious, this is! What shall we do?” He had run out into the porchway, and, in a panic of indecision, was following behind the woman wherever she moved, when a surprising thought seemed suddenly to strike him, and he dashed back into the room towards the desk of the legal affairs officer.

“Hi, you’re a midwife, aren’t you?” he called out to Yaé. “Just give us a hand, then. It’s you or nobody, so come on. Quickly!”

“Oh, a birth? Here?” said Yaé, used to these things and rising unhurriedly. Realizing, however, after a brief glance at the woman, who was hovering about distractedly in her almost crawling posture, that the head must already be more than half way out, she said; “We’ll have to lay her down somewhere on a matted floor. And you”—with a calming gesture to Miyoshi—“stop running round in circles, and lay out a mattress as quick as you can.”

Leading the woman by the hand she followed Miyoshi into the night-duty room. Two other policemen hurried across to help Miyoshi, and the old caretaker also came out to lend a hand, and when the four of them, with a tremendous amount of fussing, had got the woman safely stretched out on the mattress, Yaé lowered her own massive form ponderously on to the matting, and, sitting there in rock-like solidity, moving only her head, directed a stream of instructions at the policemen—to get boiled water, to go out and buy cotton wool, and so on—and, having taken her hand towel from her pocket and spread it out ready, in case the cotton swaddling cloth should not arrive in time, drew the sliding door across behind her. For a time there was only the sound of Yaé repeating again and again, in a school-teacherly tone: “Don’t strain, now; don’t strain”; but this was very soon followed by the thin, uneasy wail of a baby.

“It’s arrived!” one of the policemen cried out involuntarily.

“I wonder who the woman is?” said another, in a low voice. “Left it pretty late, didn’t she?”

But the legal affairs officer rose quickly from his chair and said: “The child’s safely born, that’s the important thing. Even an unlicensed midwife comes in useful at a time like this, eh?” And he walked excitedly up and down, beaming with pleasure, as if it was his own child which had just been born.

At this moment, however, he saw Constable Saitō and a patrolman, who had just driven back in the station’s car from their task of disinfecting the room of the dysentery patient, enter in the company of the prayer-chanter, garbed in black robes like a genuine priest, and he turned to greet them.

“What’s this?” he asked. “So he’s really been doing doctor’s work, has he?” Constable Saitō saluted, and setting a bundle of roots, weeds, and tree-bark on the table, together with a large bottle of cloudy white liquid which he had hastily transferred to his left hand before saluting, said: “Doctor’s work? I wouldn’t call it that. This is the sort of stuff he doses his patients with, he says. Hi you! That’s right, isn’t it?”

He turned sharply to the priest standing behind him. The scanty remnants of the man’s hair were cropped close, and his eyes were cold and dull. He had formerly been an itinerant beggar, walking from village to village with an alms-bag strung about his neck, but, instead of spending his takings on drink and tobacco, he had economized assiduously, and last spring he had built a ramshackle hut for himself on the outskirts of the town at Tora-no-kuchi, banged away on a big drum, and commenced prayer-chanting. The sound of the drum had drawn large numbers of old women to his place for secret consultations, and in a very short time it was widely believed that you could be cured of chronic diseases if you asked him to pray for you, and the fame of the Tora-no-kuchi prayer-chanter had spread even to the remotest mountain villages.

When Constable Saitō had arrived in all haste at the hut the priest had shown no trace of agitation, greeting him with foolishly elaborate ceremony. On an altar raised in the hut’s dim interior were offerings of apples and other fruit, set on dishes of chipped red lacquer, and, as a further decoration, there was displayed a volume entitled ‘One Hundred Sutras’, or something of that sort, from which the priest apparently gave recitals to his assembled flock twice each year, in the spring and the autumn; but it was in the three-mat room next to this, beneath a thin cotton quilt, that the sick woman lay. She was breathing very faintly, and showed no sign of seeing Saitō’s face when he bent low and peered at her. He saw that it was Kin, the old woman who had passed the previous night in the night-duty room at the police station. Like all those other old women—too poor and too settled in their ways to think of consulting a doctor—who had come from far and wide on hearing of the mystic powers of the priest, Kin too had called in here for a cure on her way back; and even when Miyoshi had been vainly urging her to see a doctor she had probably already secretly decided on this course. As for the priest, he had started his drum-beating and prayer-chanting immediately, thinking that this was just another fine bird flown into his net, but he had soon seen that he had taken on a difficult proposition, and, realizing that things might be very awkward if the old woman should thoughtlessly pass out on him, he had called in Dr Yokota to make an examination.

“Up to now, about how many patients have come to see you?” he was asked.

“Well, even if you put it as low as one every three days,” the priest replied, without a moment’s hesitation, “that would make it about a hundred.”

“And have they all been cured?”

At this question the priest assumed a look of humility and said: “Ah, whether they have really recovered completely or not is something I can’t say. But any number of them have come back and said that, thanks to me, they are feeling much better.”

The legal affairs officer picked up some of the plantain leaves and pieces of tree-bark which had been thrown on to the table, and thrust them close under the priest’s nose.

“Do they get better by swallowing stuff like this?” he shouted angrily. “Are you serious?” Taking the written report handed him at that moment by Saitō he vanished immediately into the superintendent’s office, returning in a few moments to say briefly: “For today, just lock him up.”

Constable Saitō led the priest to a corner of the room where he obliged him to remove his waist-band.

“Come on, down here,” he said, and, pushing his way towards the corridor through the crowd of policemen gathered outside the night-duty room to see the new baby, he dragged his charge without ceremony to the detention cell. There was a melancholy grating of bolts, and then the constable returned and went over to speak to Miyoshi.

“It’s a shame, you know,” he began. “The patient up at that priest’s place was the old lady who stayed here last night.”

Miyoshi was leaning forward, gazing intently at the woman in the night-duty room. Now that the afterbirth, too, had been removed, she was lying perfectly still, and her eyes were shut.

“Eh, the old lady?”—he swung round, opening his eyes wide—“I told her to see a doctor, didn’t I? And she wouldn’t listen! Will she pull through?”

“At her age it’s unlikely,” said Saitō. “They’ve moved her to the isolation hospital, but she’s in a bad way, and there’s not much hope.”

From beyond the front section of the main office, deserted now except for the policeman on reception duty, there had sounded the steady beat of a rubber ball being bounced, but now, the noise ceasing abruptly, a girl came running in with a loud clatter of wooden clogs, and poking her head through the barrier of policemen, yelled at the top of her voice: “Mum, I’m hungry! Give me something!”

But when her ravenous gaze lighted on the wrinkled face of the new-born infant, wrapped in her mother’s cloak and silently wriggling its hands and feet at her mother’s side, she rounded her eyes and stared in blank, speechless astonishment.

“How is it?” one of the policemen called across to Yaé. “Everything all right?”

Yaé, squatting on the floor and looking as massively immovable as ever, wrinkled the slender corners of her eyes in a brief smile.

“You don’t often get a birth as easy as this one,” she said. “It’s a little on the small side, but it’s a fine, strong baby.” She adjusted the edges of the woman’s bedding, and then, turning to the old caretaker, called out: “Hi, dad, I suppose you haven’t any oil, have you? Camellia hair-oil, or anything like that, will do.”

“Well, a bald-headed fellow like me doesn’t keep fancy things like camellia oil,” the old man laughed, but he soon returned from the scullery with a bottle of sesame oil, and Yaé, after rubbing a little of it over the baby’s body, started to bathe the baby in a pail of warm water. Constable Saitō, however, seeing that the mother continued to lie inert with eyes closed, now burst out angrily, in a voice so loud that everyone standing at the woman’s side jumped in surprise: “Hi, all you people, where have you come from? What are you doing here?”

The woman, who had apparently been lying thus quietly, with eyes tightly shut, from some overwhelming sense of shame at her mismanagement, feeling that she would like to creep into a dark hole and hide herself, now opened her eyes with a start, and at once commenced to apologize.

“Forcing myself on you in this state, and giving you gentlemen so much trouble. I don’t know what to say…” she began.

“Now, that’s all right,” said Miyoshi, restraining her as she attempted to rise. “You get some sleep. Don’t try to move yet.”

But the woman seemed not to hear him, and, making no attempt to return to her former position, went on: “I’ve been at Higashiné until now, but I couldn’t stay there any longer, you see …”—two broad tear stains appeared unexpectedly on her face, a face so emaciated and drained of colour that one had imagined its owner to be no longer capable of feeling any misfortune or suffering, and then suddenly, like streams swollen by a cloudburst, the tears came flooding down in glistening torrents—“… and I had nowhere to go, so I thought I’d come here for help.”

Miyoshi had been studying her face intently. “Here,” he now asked abruptly, “did you work in a circus troupe when you were a girl?”

The woman was clearly shaken. “Well, how did you know that?” she exclaimed, staring at him in blank astonishment.

“So it’s true, eh? You had a child with you, too, so I thought you might be the one. And it’s true, eh?” Miyoshi repeated.

When he had told her the complete story—how her foster-mother, Kin, had come on foot the whole thirty miles from Akazawa just to find her, had fallen sick with dysentery, and was now lodged in the isolation hospital—Yoshié, who had at some time raised herself on the mattress to a sitting position and was now staring straight ahead with a dazed look on her face, said, “Then I must see her just once. It would be awful if she died,” and rose unsteadily to her feet.

“Hi, stop!” cried Miyoshi. “You can’t go anywhere in that state!”

“I’m all right,” she replied obstinately. “And I must see her, just once, you see.”

But, for all this display of determination, within a few moments her face turned deathly white and she crumpled exhausted on the floor.

In January of the previous year, being left without means of support by the death of the man who worked at the cotton mill, Yoshié had decided that if times were to be bad she would prefer to be in her native village, where she hoped she might also see her foster-mother, and, selling her few household possessions to provide money for the journey, she had come all the way back to these parts after an absence of twenty years. But the snows had checked her progress, falling, as they had always fallen, until it seemed the houses would be buried up to their roofs; and since, in any case, she had no idea what to do next in the aimless quest for a person called Kin, who might or might not be alive, and whose village was no more to Yoshié than a vague childhood memory, she had taken a room in this town at a cheap lodging house near the railway station, where her landlady, seeing her sit for days perplexedly staring out at the snowy skies, had eventually taken pity on her and, employing Yoshié as a serving maid, had allowed both her and the child to remain as long as they pleased.

Then, taken in by the usual promises of marriage, Yoshié had foolishly allowed herself to be got with child by a travelling timber dealer who stopped briefly at the lodging house each month, and as soon as her condition became obvious the man had ceased to call any more. The thought of showing herself in this state before her kind landlady was more than she could bear, and, carefully draping a sleeve of her kimono across the now prominent bulge in her figure, she had moved to the Seifū Inn; and there, with the time of the birth steadily approaching and with no idea where she could stay when it came, she had met up with a ready-tongued sympathizer called Yashichi, who, unlike the timber dealer, had very soon taken her back home to live with him; but he too, it seemed, had wanted no more than a little temporary amusement, and, as if worried that things might get even worse if he waited until after the birth, he had seized as an excuse upon the bickerings between Yoshié’s daughter and his child by his late wife, and the resulting deterioration of his relationship with his mother-in-law, and thrusting a single five-yen bill into her hand, had driven Yoshié forcibly out of the house. In a deep calm following upon the tremendous labour of giving birth, Yoshié, with an abstracted and rather troubled look in her eyes, had turned to regard in silence the baby at her side, which was crying continuously and wrinkling up its face.

But now Miyoshi came hurrying back from the inner office, where he and the legal affairs officer had been discussing matters with the superintendent, and called to Yaé: “Look, it’s all right for you to go now, so do you think you could take this woman with you and put her up at your place? How do you feel? Will you do that? We’ll talk about the details later, eh?”

Yaé, squatting on the floor, turned cumbrously to face Miyoshi. “That’ll be fine, officer. If you’ve no objection, there’s plenty of room at my place,” she replied, looking as if this was just what she had been hoping for; and at once she started making her preparations.

Soon the station car was noisily starting up its engine outside the crowded entrance way, and Yaé, holding the baby in her arms, and squeezing herself through the car door with the greatest difficulty, had settled down in her seat beside Yoshié and her daughter.

“Drive slowly,” she exhorted Constable Kobayashi at the wheel; then, turning earnestly to the crowd of policemen gathered to see them all off, she called out: “If you need my help again, just send for me!”

Itō Einosuké (b. 1903)
This story was first published in 1938
Translated by Geoffrey Sargent

1. A well-known film-star.