| SHUSAKU ENDO

THE SEA AND POISON

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER
 A REVIVED

MODERN

CLASSIC

THE SEA AND POISON

ALSO BY SHUSAKU ENDO

Deep River
The Final Martyrs
Five by Endo
The Girl I Left Behind
The Samurai
Stained Glass Elegies
 SHUSAKU ENDO
THE SEA AND POISON
TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER

is
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
All Rights Reserved .
© 1958 Bungei Shunju Co Ltd Tokyo
English translation © Peter Owen 1972

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or

television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
First published as New Directions Paperbook 737 in 1992
Published by arrangement with Peter Owen Publishers, London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Endo, Shisaku, 1923-

(Umi to dokuyaku. English]
The sea and poison / Shisaku Endo ; translated by Michael Gallagher.
p. cm.—(A Revived modern classic) (New Directions
paperbook ; 737)
Translation of: Umi to dokuyaku.
ISBN 978-0-81 1 2-1198-7
De hitle: II. Series.
PL849.N4U4513 1992
895.6'35 —dc20 91-41413
CIP

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
SEVENTH PRINTING
 CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: The Sea and Poison

PART Two: Those to Be Judged 81

PART THREE: Before Dawn Breaks 139

i, Eee: q Dera

Peek
 INTRODUCTION

Shusaku Endo came into prominence as a novelist in the

mid-1950s. His reputation was firmly established in 1958
when The Sea and Poison won him the prestigious Akuta-
gawa Prize. Besides writing novels, he is also a playwright, a
journalist, a screen and television writer, and, with that
busyness that for good or ill characterizes most Japanese
writers, he appears on television frequently to comment on
one thing or another and he writes a regular interview
feature for a weekly magazine.
Endo was baptized as a Catholic while a very young
schoolboy without thinking much about it or finding his
new faith either particularly irksome or consoling. He
entered Waseda, one of the most famous Japanese private
universities, with the intention of studying medicine but
eventually opted for French literature. After a short period
of military service at the end of the War, he went to France
for further study. During his stay in France, he was much
impressed by the extent to which European traditions were
rooted in Christianity and the significance it therefore had
even for those Europeans who were no longer formal
believers. He began to contrast this with the situation in
his own land and with his own attitude towards Catholi-
cism, a religion that had been, to use his own metaphor,
not so much something that was a part of him but rather
like a suit of clothes that he had put on.
According to the formulation of the perceptive American
critic and translator, Francis Mathy, Endo like so many
Japanese thinkers before, came to realize that the West ‘is

I
informed by the Christian faith, even where it is formally
rejected; the East, on the other hand, is informed by a
kind of pantheism’. Cultural intercourse thus becomes a
hazardous form of communication, and the Japanese
writer who attempts to borrow from the West undergoes
special risk. Pantheism knows no tension of opposites -
between good and evil, flesh and spirit, God and the
devil — such as is at the heart of the popular Christian life
view. Such Japanese writers, therefore, according to Endo,
have inevitably fastened upon one element, neglecting the
other which is in tension with it, either ignoring the anti-
thetical element completely or else interpreting it in such a
weak fashion that it lacks sufficient strength to make for
real conflict.
Apparently not much daunted by the alleged failure of
so many of his countrymen, Endo chose not only to try to
portray precisely this form of conflict but to set this conflict
against the calm passivity of pantheism that he sees as the
dominant Japanese religious mood. The following statement
makes evident how deliberate was his decision and how
much he realized the difficulty of the task that he had set
himself :

We can at least begin. . . . We can take our concave

world without a God and contrast it as vigorously as
possible with the Western convex world, which has
known the existence of God. By ‘vigorously’ I mean
that we must lay aside all methods of approach that
foster the delusion that our concave world is really a
convex one, a delusion that many writers even to our
day have harboured. We must not think of the litera-
ture of the Christian West as being in our own
cultural stream, nor at the same time must we hold it
off at a respectful distance, since it is this very thing,

2
 so widely separated from us, that presses down most
heavily upon us.

In the three novels in which this ‘vigorous contrast’ is most

evidently at work, Kiiroi Hito, Nanji mo mata, and
Chinmoku, Endo’s specific method is to set Japanese and
European characters against one another, Japanese and
Europeans who, for the most part, are ‘afflicted’ with each
other’s culture.
Kiiroi Hito (Yellow Man, 1955), is written in the form of
a letter sent by Chiba, a young student no longer a prac-
tising Catholic, to his former pastor, Father Brou, a French
missionary. Much of the letter consists of passages from
the diary of another French priest, an apostate named
Duran, now dead, who was married to a woman named
Kimiko. Brou and Kimiko are the extremes, neither of
them taking enough notice of the other culture to be much
disturbed by it; whereas Duran and Chiba are Endo
people: those caught in the middle. In this novel they
seemed to have gained from their personal failures the
insight that ‘yellow’ and ‘white’ sensibilities are after all
fundamentally different and that any attempt to evangelize
the Japanese must end in failure. As persons Chiba and
Duran differ sharply, a difference, however, which underlies
the apparent validity of their insight. Chiba feels nothing
but a kind of general weariness and ennui because of his
loss of faith and his loveless affair with his cousin. The
apostate Duran is tormented by guilt and the fear of
damnation.
In Nanji mo mata (And Now You, 1965), Endo portrays
the other side of the coin in more detail: if the European
in Japan is up against an impossible task in attempting to
assimilate Japanese culture, so, too, is the Japanese in
Europe confronted with Western culture. The protagonist

3
is Tanaka, a young lecturer in French literature who goes to
Paris for advanced studies. He returns disillusioned and
worn out, convinced, furthermore, that this is as it should
be, since any Japanese who came through the same ex-
perience still persuaded that he could assimilate Western
culture would be too unperceptive to realize the enormity of
the task.
Finally, in his famous Chinmoku (Silence) which won
the Tanizaki Prize in 1966,* Endo portrays the conflict be-
tween Eastern and Western thought in highly dramatic
terms. Chinmoku, like The Sea and Poison, is based upon
an historical event, in this case, the apostasy of the seven-
teenth century Portuguese Jesuit Ferreira.
Since Ferreira was not an ordinary Jesuit but the pro-
vincial of the order in Japan, a man who had worked
heroically for twenty years under the most trying circum-
stances, his apostasy under torture was a severe blow to the
persecuted Christians, a shock that was aggravated when
Ferreira, under what further pressure is not known, took a
Japanese wife and cooperated with the Shogunate officials
in the apprehending of Christians. Almost nothing is known
of Ferreira’s subsequent history, a circumstance that gives
Endo ample scope.
In Endo’s fictionalized version, the old apostate is con-
fronted with a young Jesuit named Roderigo, a former
student of his at the seminary in Coimbra, who had been
captured soon after his arrival from Macao. Another
main character in the novel is the governor of Nagasaki,
Inoue, who questions the young Jesuit and tells him that
his hopes of evangelizing Japan were empty ones because
Japan is like a swamp which indeed draws anything and

*This novel was published under the title Silence in the English
translation of William Johnston by Tuttle-Sophia University in
1969.

4
everything into itself but in the process changes it all
intrinsically. Roderigo resists this line of argument, but
when he hears the same from Ferreira, whom he had so
much revered, it has much more cogency. Even the martyrs
who seemed to have died so heroically for the faith that the
foreign priests brought them, Ferreira argues, actually died
for the sake of some vision all their own, only superficially
related to what the Europeans had tried to teach them.
Roderigo undergoes a crisis of faith, which he comes
through still believing in Christ but no longer sure that the
Church in which he had once placed such trust is actually
able to speak to all men with wisdom and authority. He
feels that Christ speaks to him — breaking the silence that
gives the novel its title—and tells him to step upon the
fumie, the bronze image of Christ used by the Shogunate
Officials to test suspected Christians and to formalize
apostasy, because Christ himself would have done so in
order to save from further suffering the poor, ignorant
farmers whom the Jesuits have converted.
In an essay so brief, I cannot present anything like a
critique of Endo’s theme or his manner of developing and
interpreting it. I think it might be of interest, however, to
call to the reader’s attention and to comment briefly upon
the charge made against Endo’s novels, particularly
Chinmoku, by both native Christians and foreign mission-
aries. As Francis Mathy puts it, Endo exaggerates the
conflict between the Eastern and Western religious outlooks
and so stacks the cards against any possibility of rapproche-
ment, even if, in the case of Chinmoku, he has to distort
history to accomplish this.
This charge, I think, has some weight to it if one accepts
its premise, something, however, that I cannot do because
I feel that to do so involves confusing theology, philosophy,
and history with literary criticism. Endo is a novelist,

5
after all, and one should judge him according to literary
criteria, which, God knows, are exacting enough.
I mention this charge, however, not solely for the pur-
pose of expressing my disagreement with it but rather
because I think Endo’s ability to provoke this kind of
strong reaction tells something about him. It sharply
differentiates him from writers such as Mishima, Tanizaki,
and Kawabata. Graham Greene, who seems to have influ-
enced Endo more than a little, once told a French inter-
viewer that the writing of novels was something altogether
different from the composition of religious tracts and so
when he sat down to write, his sole concern was to turn
out the best possible story. He would rather be known,
therefore, as a writer who happened to be a Catholic than
as a Catholic writer. These remarks were widely quoted by
critics of every shade of belief and disbelief, and can, I
think, shed light on Endo’s own position. What followed,
however, seems to have been generally overlooked: ‘When
one is a Catholic, everything that one writes is imbued with
Catholicism.’ And here, too, despite his own alleged thesis
of never the twain, we have Endo.
Christianity, whatever validity it has as a religion and
whatever validity religion itself has, for that matter, has at
least provided a dramatic view of man as a free and
therefore responsible creature put at the centre of the
universe, a being capable of either damnation or salvation.
It has been a view congenial to artistic inspiration, whatever
the repression exercised by the Church herself, and it has,
since Augustine’s Confessions, stimulated or provoked the
most intensely personal literature the world has ever
known.
Whatever Endo’s personal faith or lack of it, his artistic
impulse is altogether Christian in the sense indicated above.
He is quite taken up with the concept of freedom and

6
responsibility and altogether aware of the vital relationship
that joins the two. Thus he cannot limit himself to a private
universe of sex and sensibility as do most Japanese novelists
but in his serious work he must, willy-nilly, deal with wider
concerns capable of stirring public reactions. Thus Endo is
the only major Japanese novelist who, in the novel that
follows, has confronted the problem of individual re-
sponsibility in wartime.
Japanese novelists are unfortunate, I think, in that there
are too few critics of insight and integrity to ride herd
upon them, even though this is a misfortune that their
British and American opposite numbers would no doubt
envy them. Endo is still in his prime, and if he is willing
to write at his best and curtail some of his activity, he is,
I think, capable of achieving a position in world literature
at least as high as some of his countrymen now far better
known in the West.
The Sea and Poison, though it is a comparatively early
work, should provide the reader with a sufficient basis to
make some judgment of his own. Besides this English
translation, incidentally, it has also been published in a
Russian translation.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to express
my gratitude to Dr Helen Li, Dr Mizuide Jun, and Dr Lu
Shan-ta for reading the entire manuscript and offering many
helpful suggestions.
Michael Gallagher
 PART ONE

The Sea and Poison

 PROLOGUE
In August, the hottest time of the year, I moved out here
to this residential area called West Matsubara. The style
‘residential area’ is a caprice of the real estate agency.
Since it takes over an hour to get here from Shinjuku
Station in central Tokyo, the houses are few. A main
highway passes the local station, stretching out with un-
compromising straightness, and now the sun is beating
down upon it with a relentless glare. Dump trucks are
always going by hauling gravel from somewhere or other;
and on the back of the trucks young labourers, towels
twisted around their necks, sing popular songs, as one is
doing now.

When you sail, don’t

Pull up the anchor weeping.
Be a man, do it laughing. ...

The trucks stir dense clouds of dust every time they go by.
And then as it settles, the shops on both sides of the road
gradually loom into view once more. On the right are a
tobacconist, a butcher, and a drugstore. On the left a
noodle place and a gas station. And that’s about all there
is to it. Oh, but I forgot to mention that there’s a clothing
store too. It’s all by itself, about fifty yards past the gas
station. You wonder why the owner picked a spot like
this, so far away from the city.
Thanks to the trucks, his Gentlemen’s Clothing sign and
his show window are both covered with a thick, chalky
coat of dust. In the window is a flesh-coloured mannequin.

1]
It’s a rather unsettling figure, the kind of mannequin used
in medical exhibits and the like. It represents just the torso
of a man, a white man as it happens. From the red paint on
his head, it seems that his creator’s aim was to make him
a redhead. So, with his long nose and his blue eyes, he
smiles all day long — an enigmatic smile.
When I moved here, we were in the midst of a long,
unpleasant dry spell. The field between the noodle shop
and the gas station was parched and cracked, and in the
shrivelled stalks of corn, katydids complained of the
drought’s affliction.
‘This heat’s awful. I think I’ll go and take a bath, but
it’s pretty far, isn’t it?’ my wife said.
To get to the bathhouse, you had to walk about four
hundred yards down the highway past the station.
‘Yes, but at least there is a bathhouse. There isn’t a
doctor, and I've got to have this lung treated every week.’
The next day my wife found a doctor’s surgery. She
said that she had seen a doctor’s plate hanging in front of
a place close to the bathhouse. Last year when we all had
our chests X-rayed at my company, a small cavity had
shown up in the upper part of my left lung. Fortunately,
the pleura had not been infected, and I was able to get by
without having my rib cut; but I had been receiving pneu-
mothorax treatments for over half a year before moving
here. So now I had to find a new doctor as soon as possible.
In order to locate this Dr Suguro’s surgery, I went look-
ing for the street my wife had told me about. The windows
of the bathhouse reflected the bright afternoon sun. Evi-
dently the local farming families were already inside taking
their baths, for I could hear faintly but distinctly the noise
of splashing water and the knocking of wooden buckets.
A happy sound, I thought with a sudden unwonted
nostalgia.

12
 I soon found the doctor’s surgery, just behind the bath-
house and separated from it by a field of ripe red tomatoes.
It was a small, shabbily constructed house, more like a shed
than a surgery. There was nothing at all that could be
called a fence. Some brown shrubbery, blasted by the sun,
served as a border facing the tomato field. It was still well
before sunset. Why, then, I wondered, does he have his
wooden shutters closed already? In the garden lay a
child’s dirty red boot. A pathetic dog kennel stood near the
door, but there was no sign of a dog. I rang the bell a
number of times, but there was no answer. Finally I walked
round to the garden. Then one of the shutters opened a bit,
and the face of a man who was wearing a white medical
coat appeared,
‘Who are you?’
“Well, I’m a patient.’
“What do you mean?’
‘What I'd like to do is get some pneumothorax
treatments.’
‘Pneumothorax?’
The doctor seemed to be a man of about forty or so.
He stared vacantly at me, incessantly rubbing his chin with
his right hand. Perhaps because the house faced away from
the setting sun, the room with its shuttered windows was
forebodingly dark; and in the thick shadow the man’s face
seemed greyish and oddly bloated.
“You’ve been to a doctor before, I suppose?’
‘Yes. For half a year I’ve been getting this treatment.’
‘You have an X-ray?’
‘Well, yes, but I left it at the house.’
‘Can’t do anything without the X-ray.’
And with that he closed the shutter again. For a moment
I stood there staring, but not the slightest sound came from
the house.

13
 ‘A funny kind of doctor,’ I said that night to my wife.
‘He’s really a funny kind of doctor.’
‘Oh, I suppose he has his regular patients.’
‘May be so. But besides he talks with some kind of
accent. He hasn’t lived in Tokyo very long. He comes from
somewhere else.’
‘Well, anyway, you’d better get your lung taken care of
before you go to Kyushu. My sister’s wedding is pretty
close now, in September.’
SMOSH)
But I didn’t go to Dr Suguro’s surgery the next day or the
day after that. My breathing gradually started to become
painful as the volume of air taken into my left lung
diminished little by little. In the pneumothorax treatment,
air is pumped into the side in order to diminish the pleural
cavity pressing on the lung. The needle used to insert it is
a huge thick one, about the size of a darning needle, which
is tipped with rubber. It’s not the insertion of the needle that
bothers me so much in this process, but it’s the place where
they have to place it. The needle is inserted into the lower
side. Now this is a spot which by nature your arm covers
and protects. The moment when I have to raise my arm and
wait for the needle, I feel why I don’t know—a chilling
numbness grip my side. Part of it, of course, comes from
the uneasiness resulting from having to raise my arm and
to expose myself in such a defenceless way.
To get the needle from a doctor to whom you are ac-
customed to going is unpleasant enough. A strange doctor,
therefore, is all the more unsettling. Sometimes, if the doc-
tor is clumsy, a spontaneous pneumothorax develops,
often resulting in the death of the patient by asphyxiation.
And so when I recalled Dr Suguro sticking that grey,
bloated face of his out from behind the shutters, the room
beyond him in sinister shadow, my desire to go faded away.

14
 But be that as it may, you can’t be forever thinking about
yourself. My sister-in-law’s wedding in Fukuoka, down in
Kyushu, was only two weeks away; and since my wife was
pregnant and couldn’t make the trip, I had to go in her
place. My sister-in-law’s parents were dead, which left no
one but me to hold up her side of the affair.
O.K., I told myself, get the X-ray and let’s go. But I
brooded over the ‘let’s go’ for two or three more days.
In the meantime, I made my first appearance at the local
bathhouse. Since it was a Saturday, I had come home from
work about two in the afternoon. So many trucks had
passed while I was walking along the road that I was
covered with grey dust from head to foot. Probably because
it was so early, there was only one man there ahead of me.
He was a shrewd-faced individual, and he was lolling in the
water, loosely gripping the edge of the bath with his hands,
his chin resting upon them. After looking in my direction
for a while, he spoke.
‘The water’s really nice about now, isn’t it?’
‘Huh?’
‘The water’s nice now, isn’t it? You come later, and the
farmer’s kids around here have got it all dirty. The little
bastards even piss in it. Damn them.’
As I washed my thin arms and chest over in the corner,
not wanting to make a display of myself, I noticed that this
was the owner of the gas station. He had always been wear-
ing a white uniform and handling a pump, so I hadn’t
recognized him until now. The sound of children crying
came from the women’s side of the bathhouse.
With a noisy flourish, he lifted himself up out of the
water. His shrewd face looked back from the wall mirror.
‘All right! Let’s get down to it!’ Then he sat down on
an upturned wooden bucket and began to wash his long
legs.

15
 ‘You been in this area only a little while, uh?’
‘It’s been a week. I hope we’ll be good neighbours.’
‘What kind of work do you do?’
‘I work for a nail wholesaler.’
‘Your company’s in Tokyo, uh? Having to go there every
day’s a pain in the ass, I suppose.’
Covertly I took in his chest, its light skin protected from
the sun by his underwear. His ribs were somewhat pro-
minent, but his well-knit bone structure gave his body
a certain power. Puny men like me are afflicted with a
painful feeling of inferiority when confronted with a man
with a strong physique. On his right shoulder, there was a
scar about two inches or so in diameter, apparently the
result of a burn. The taut, twisted flesh had the shape of a
ragged blossom.
‘It looks like your wife’s pregnant.’
“Yes.-
‘I saw her walking down to the station the other day.
Looked like she was having a pretty hard time of it.’
‘Is there a doctor around here anywhere?’ I thought I’d
see if there were anyone besides Dr Suguro. My own lung
trouble and my wife’s pregnancy were beginning to weigh
upon me more and more.
“Why there’s Dr Suguro. His surgery is right behind
here.’
‘How is he?’
‘Not bad at all, according to what they say. Never opens
his mouth. Funny sort of guy.’
‘Funny, huh?’
‘Doesn’t bother you about his bill at all. Even if you
forget all about it, he wouldn’t say a word.’
‘I went there the other day, and he had the shutters
closed.”
‘That’s probably because his wife took the kid and went

16
to Tokyo. They say she used to be a nurse.’
“Been here long?’
‘Who?’
“The doctor.’
‘I don’t think so. I think he came a little before I did.’
Dirty grey water flowed from around his feet. As he
lathered himself his right elbow kept jabbing close to my
face. Red with tingling blood, his toughened flesh took on
the sleek sheen of an otter beneath the soap and water.
Envy flicked within me. The burn I spoke of before on his
right arm had now become a sodden white.
‘Is it a burn, that?’
‘What, this? This is from a trench mortar. It was in
China. The chinks gave it to me. It’s a wound to be proud
of.’
‘I suppose it hurt a lot?’
‘Oh, it did and it didn’t. Think of a red-hot iron bar,
see? Then, wham! You’re hit with it. That’s the sort of
feeling. You drafted?’
‘Uh, just at the end of the war. I was back home right
away.’
‘Oh, I see. Then you got no idea about something like
the sound of those chink mortars. Whoosh, whoosh,
whoosh! In they’d come whistling. That was something.’
I thought of the training regiment to which I had been
assigned. In the dimly lit orderly rooms had sat any number
of shrewd-faced men like the gas station owner. While they
were berating us recruits, their cruel, narrow eyes would
glitter with unmistakable pleasure. Perhaps now these men,
too, were gas station owners somewhere.
‘But we had our fun in China too. Did whatever we
wanted with the women. Any bastard that made any com-
plaints we tied to a tree and used for target practice.’
‘Women?’

17
 ‘No! Men.’ '
As he soaped his head, he turned towards me. For the
first time apparently, he noticed my scrawny chest and thin
arms, and his face took on an incredulous expression.
‘Pretty skinny, aren’t you? Why you could stab some-
body with one of those arms. You wouldn’t have made it
as a soldier. My kind. . . .. He paused for a moment. ‘Of
course, I’m not the only one. There’s one or two here of
the bunch that did their bit in China. There’s me and the
guy that owns that men’s wear store— you know it, don’t
you?’ He laughed abruptly. ‘He really raised hell in Nan-
king, I think. The bastard was an M.P.’
A radio somewhere was playing a popular song. It was
Hibari Misora singing it. From the women’s side of the
bathhouse came the sound of crying children again. I dried
myself.
“Well, excuse me. I’m going.’
In the dressing room a man with his back turned was
taking off his shirt. It was Dr Suguro. He looked at me
blinking but averted his gaze at once. Did he remember the
incident of the other day or didn’t he? The afternoon sun
struck the doctor’s forehead, which was covered with tiny
beads of sweat. As I returned home, I passed through the
tomato field. On all sides the katydids sang in a hoarse,
rasping pitch which grated upon my ears. While going by
the men’s wear shop, I stopped all at once. I had been
thinking of what the gas station owner had told me. As
before a layer of dust covered the window. Inside the shop
a man was at work bent over a sewing machine. His eyes
were sunken and his cheekbones prominent. Was this the
man who had been a military policeman in Nanking? Then
as I thought a bit, I knew that I had seen many faces like
his too. In the orderly rooms of the training regiments, this

18
type of farmer’s face had been common enough among the
veterans.
‘Can I help you?’
‘No, no! It’s just that it’s so hot.’ I was flustered. ‘It’s
really awful isn’t it? Is that a job you’re working on?’
‘No!’ He laughed with unexpected affability. ‘A job to
work on! Out here? Not much chance of that.’
In the window the mannequin kept smiling his enigmatic
smile. The two blue eyes stared fixedly into space.
After taking such trouble to go to the bathhouse, I
came back home dripping with sweat. I sat down on the
porch next to my wife, embracing her with my hands
resting on her swollen stomach.
‘Say, you know about the sphinx?’
“What’s that?’
“You know that men’s wear place by the cornfield?
There’s a dummy in the window. When the sun’s going
down, it shines in there, you see. And when I see that faint,
mocking smile, I can’t help thinking of the Egyptian desert
and the sphinx.’
‘Why don’t you stop thinking about the Egyptian desert
and be quick about getting to the doctor?’
Since my wife hadn’t left any room for argument, that
evening I took the X-ray picture and went to Dr Suguro’s.
The shutters were still closed, the child’s boot, as I had
more than half expected, still lay in the garden, and the
dog kennel was empty as before. Evidently Dr Suguro did
his own cooking while his wife was away.
The inside of the house and the examination room too
were filled with an odour of general uncleanliness. Was it
the accumulated odour of all the patients who had pre-
ceded me, or was it the smell of some sort of medicine? I
couldn’t tell. The white curtain covering the window was
torn in the middle, and half of it had been turned yellow

19
by the sun. I noticed with an unpleasant twinge that there
was a small spot of blood on Dr Suguro’s white coat. As I
lay on a creaky bed, he held the X-ray up in front of his
nose, studying it with blinking eyes.
‘I was getting 400 c.c. of air from my last doctor.’
Dr Suguro didn’t respond. I looked fixedly at him as he
took a glass bottle containing the pneumothorax needle
from a drawer of his desk, examined the hole at its tip,
inserted it into the rubber tube, and prepared the anaes-
thetic shot. His thick, hairy fingers moved like caterpillars.
There was dirt packed under the fingernails.
‘Raise your arm,’ he ordered me in a low voice.
His fingers probed my side for the spot between the two
rib bones. He was making sure of the place to insert the
needle. There was a cold, metallic chillness to that touch.
More than that, there was an impersonal, unfeeling com-
petency to it which seemed to deal with me not as a
patient but as some sort of laboratory specimen.
‘The other doctor wasn’t like this.’ I suddenly began to
shudder with that instinct belonging to a patient. ‘The other
fellow had some warmth.’
Just at that moment the needle entered my side. I dis-
tinctly felt it resting between the thorax and the rib mem-
brane. The doctor’s technique had been remarkable.
‘Ah!’ I sighed with relief.
Dr Suguro gave no sign that he had heard but gazed out
of the window. He was thinking about something else, it
seemed, something which had nothing to do with me or
with my affairs. ‘Close-mouthed and a bit odd’ had been the
verdict of the gas station owner. And indeed Dr Suguro
was a bit odd.
‘No sociability, that’s all. There’s a lot of doctors like
that,’ my wife said.
‘Mmm ... but still. . . . The way he put the needle in.

20
You don’t find that in a country doctor, you see. I wonder
what he’s doing living in a place like this.’
Putting a pneumothorax needle into a patient’s side
might seem like nothing special, but I had heard from the
old doctor I used to go to when J lived in Kyodo, that it was
an extremely difficult thing to do.
“You can’t trust a young intern to do it. Getting the
needle in in just the right way takes an experienced, prac-
tised doctor.’
This old doctor, someone had told me, had worked for a
long time in a tuberculosis sanatorium. One day he gave me
a thorough explanation of the whole process. If the needle
is new, there’s no chance of any pain, but to put an old
needle with a dull tip into the pleura painlessly and quickly,
just the right application of force is necessary. As I said
before, there’s the possibility of an attack of spontaneous
pneumothorax; and even if this doesn’t occur, if the needle
doesn’t penetrate to precisely the right spot with a single
thrust, the patient will have a painful time of it. Then, too,
speaking from my own experience, even this veteran doctor
in Kyodo would slip up once or twice a month and have to
withdraw the needle to try again. At times like that, I was
seized with pain as though my side had been ripped open.
This never happened with Dr Suguro. With one thrust he
would insert the needle quickly and surely right between
the pleura and the lung, lodging it there securely. There was
no pain at ali. It was done before I could even flinch. If
what the old doctor in Kyodo had said was true, then it
seemed that this man with the grey, bloated face had,
somewhere or other, gained a considerable amount of
medical skill. If he were so capable a doctor, there should
have been no need for him to settle in a barren spot like
this, so lacking in every attractive feature. Yet he had come.
Why, I wondered.

21
 However, despite all his skill, I still felt uneasy about
him. More than uneasiness, distaste. Every time I felt the
touch of those hard fingers probing my ribs, the chilling
metallic touch so difficult to describe, that indefinite but
powerful instinct for life common to all patients shuddered
inside me. I thought that I felt this way merely because the
movement of his thick fingers was so suggestive of a cluster
of caterpillars, but there was more to it than that.
A month had now passed since we had moved here. At
the end of September I had to go to Kyushu for my sister-
in-law’s wedding. My wife’s stomach had swollen so that
her pregnancy was quite obvious.
‘It’s wide, so maybe it’s a girl,’ she murmured happily,
brushing a fold of her maternity dress against her cheek.
‘She just kicked! Sometimes she kicks me.’
The gas station owner, in his white uniform as usual,
walked about in front of his pumps. I’d say hello to him
on the way to work. Sometimes I’d stop, and we’d talk for
a bit about nothing at all. At the bathhouse I'd meet not
only him but also the men’s wear proprietor. Since even
my sickness was getting better, I thought of myself as
happy. Soon there’d be a baby. I had my own house, small
though it was. This amounted to no more than an ordinary
kind of happiness, perhaps, but what was wrong with that,
I thought.
But still, this matter of Dr Suguro stirred my curiosity.
Hadn’t his wife come back yet? The shutters, as always,
stayed shut. Had the child’s red rubber boot in the garden
been carried off by the dog, if there were a dog? Some time
or other it disappeared.
One day I picked up just a bit of information about him.
This occurred about the fifth time that I went to him for
treatment. I was waiting my turn outside the examination
room when I found in an old magazine a programme for

22
the graduation ceremony of Fukuoka University Medical
School. The name Suguro is not a common one, so it took
me just a moment to satisfy myself that my doctor was
indeed listed there. What was rather a coincidence was that
my sister-in-law’s wedding was taking place in Fukuoka at
the end of the month.
‘The accent is Fukuoka, in Kyushu,’ I declared to my
wife.
“What accent?’
‘His. The first day I went there, when he told me he
couldn’t help me without the X-rays. The way he said it.’
Since both my wife and I had been born in Tokyo, we
had no idea whether the accent was Western; but since
my imitation sounded amusing, we both laughed.
‘T’ll bet the wife’s run out on him,’ the gas station owner
was speculating in the bathhouse. ‘Anyway, they say he’s
got himself another nurse.’
‘A funny sort of fellow.’
“Yes, he’s funny, but that’s all right with me. My kid
got sick last year. He examined him and he hasn’t asked
for his fee yet.’
‘The wife who may have run off, what kind of woman
was she?’
‘Her? Like her husband, bad complexion. Hardly showed
her face at all and you’d never see her going to the
station.’
Each time I went to his surgery for my treatment, Dr
Suguro hardly had a word to say. Day by day the torn
curtain yellowed more and more in the sun, but it was left
just as it was. Most of the patients were farmers’ wives and
children. They’d sit on the step outside the door, leafing
through the old newspapers and magazines put out for
them, and wait their turns with untiring patience. Since

23
there was no nurse, Dr Suguro himself had to take care of
preparing the medicine.
One September evening, still heavy with the torrid heat
of summer, I was walking aimlessly along the highway
when I happened to catch sight of Dr Suguro standing
beside the road with a cane. He was staring into the window
of the men’s wear store. When he noticed me approaching,
the doctor averted his gaze and abruptly walked on. When I
bowed he gave only a nod. The window had its usual
layer of dust. The owner was nowhere to be seen. The
white, supposedly red-headed mannequin stared at me with
his thin, mocking smile. It was this sphinx that Dr Suguro
had been staring at so earnestly.
At the end of September, I headed for Fukuoka in
Kyushu, a long tedious train journey away, for my sister-
in-law’s wedding. Before leaving, I had gone for another
treatment, but I hadn’t said anything to him about the trip.
There is not much point in discussing something with
somebody if he never bothers to give you anything re-
sembling an answer.
My sister-in-law had settled upon a ‘love marriage’ with
someone who worked in the same office as her in Tokyo.
His family’s home was in Fukuoka, and so they decided to
have the wedding there. For my sister-in-law, who was
rather alone in the world, I would be the only relative in
attendance; and so I felt I was taking on a burden I was
hardly equal to.
I intended to stay overnight in Fukuoka before return-
ing to Tokyo. I had heard that it was a city with many
rivers, but its main one turned out to be murky and to have
a ditch odour about it. I saw the body of a dead puppy
and a rubber shoe floating in it. I thought of the odour of
Dr Suguro’s garden and examination room. Then, too, the
local people spoke with the same accent as him. When he

24
had been a medical student, he must have looked at this
river, walked through this town. A strange way for my
thoughts to be running.

The wedding reception was held at a small restaurant in

the centre of town. My sister-in-law’s husband was a short,
apparently good-natured office worker. Like me he was
one of the mass of commuters who wait every morning on
the platforms of Shinjuku Station. How nice if after a while
my sister-in-law had a child and settled down with this
young man in a house in a not very expensive suburb
somewhere, to enjoy an ordinary sort of happiness. Nothing
special, nothing to rave about, but as I watched the two of
them, my thoughts drifting in no particular direction, it
seemed to me that the ordinary can give one the greatest
happiness.
Seated beside me at the table was a man who said that
he was a cousin of the bridegroom. He too was short, but
thickset. He gave me his card, and I noticed M.D. on it.
‘Did you graduate from Fukuoka University?’ I asked
him. Since there wasn’t much to talk about, I happened to
think of the programme I had come across in Dr Suguro’s
surgery. ‘Did you happen to know a medical student named
Suguro, Doctor?’
‘Suguro, Suguro. . . .. My companion tilted his head to
one side. One or two glasses of saké had turned his face
quite red. “You mean Jiro Suguro?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Suguro. Do you know him?’
‘He’s my doctor. I get treatment for my lung from him.’
‘Oh. . . .” For some time he studied my face. ‘So now he’s
in Tokyo, you say. Imagine that.’
“You were a friend in college? Of Dr Suguro’s?’

25
 ‘No. He. . . . Maybe you know and maybe you don’t
know; but anyway what happened was what usually hap-
pens in a case like that.’ He lowered his voice at once and
began his story.

When the reception was over, my sister-in-law and her

husband left for the station. The relatives and I saw them
off there. Rain had begun to fall throughout the city. As
soon as the honeymooners had departed, everyone began to
feel ill at ease. The family invited me to a restaurant with
them; but I told them I was tired, and I returned to my
inn. There were scarcely any guests there. After the
chambermaid had laid out my bedding, I sat for a long
time cross-legged, thinking — thinking and smoking one
cigarette after another. After I had slipped under the thick,
quilted spread, I couldn’t sleep. I kept on thinking about
what the bridegroom’s cousin at the reception had told me
about Dr Suguro in such a stealthy voice. I could hear the
sound of falling rain on the roof. From somewhere far
away inside the hotel a group of maids with nothing to do
were laughing and talking.
If I dozed off, I soon awoke. In the darkness the image of
Dr Suguro would loom up and disappear again and again,
his grey, puffy face, his thick caterpillar fingers. Once more
I felt the chilling touch of those fingers on the skin of my
right side.
There was more rain the next day. In the afternoon I
went out in the midst of it to visit a newspaper office in
the city.
‘Excuse me, but I was wondering if it would be all right
to take a look at some back numbers of your paper.’
The girl at the receptionist’s desk gave me a suspicious
look, but she put through a call to the archives for me.

26
 ‘An article from about what time?’
‘Right after the War. There was a trial wasn’t there, about
the vivisections at Fukuoka Medical School?’ I asked.
“Do you have any kind of authorization?’
“No, no, nothing like that.’
Finally I got the necessary permission. In a corner of the
third floor archives, I read through the back numbers
covering that period for about an hour. It was the affair
involving the staff of the Medical School during the War.
Eight captured American airmen had been used for medical
experiments. In general the purpose of the experiments had
been to obtain such information as how much blood a man
could lose and remain alive, how much salt water in place
of blood could safely be injected into a man’s veins, and
up to what point a man could survive the excision of lung
tissue. There were twelve medical personnel involved in
the vivisections, two of them nurses. The trial opened in
Fukuoka but was later transferred to Yokchama. Towards
the end of the list of defendants, 1 found Dr Suguro’s
name. There was nothing in the articles about his part in
the experiments. The professor of medicine who had been
in charge of the experiments committed suicide at the first
opportunity. The principal defendants received long prison
terms. Three, however, got off with light sentences of two
years. Dr Suguro was one of the latter.
From the window of the newspaper office, I looked out
at the clouds, the colour of soiled cotton wool, which hung
low over the city. From time to time I’d look up from the
articles to gaze at that dark sky. I left the newspaper office
and walked through the streets. The thin, slanting rain
struck my face. The passing cars, buses, lorries and street-
cars made the same noises as they did in Tokyo. Young girls
in raincoats of red and blue and other vivid shades walked
along the sidewalk, which was streaming with rain. From

27
the coffee shops came the sound of pleasant, titillating
music. The singer Chiemi Eri was soon coming to town
it seemed. Her face with its open, laughing mouth lent
gaudy colour to the front of a cinema.
‘Hey, Mister! How about a lottery ticket?” A woman in
a full length apron accosted me from a doorway.
I felt tired and somehow out of sorts. I dropped into a
coffee shop and had some coffee and a roll. Parents with
their children and young men with their girl-friends came
and went in and out through the door. I saw among them
shrewd, long, narrow faces like that of the gas station
owner. And square-jawed farmer faces with prominent
cheek bones like that of the men’s wear proprietor were
frequent enough too. What was the gas station owner doing
now, about this time of day? In his white uniform, was he
filling the tank of a truck? Behind his dust covered show
window, was the men’s wear proprietor bent over his
sewing machine? When one thought of it, both of them
alike were men with murder in their pasts. So even in this
West Matsubara to which I had moved, no matter how
few its shops and houses, I had got to know two men who
had tasted the experience of killing a man. And I could
count Dr Suguro as a third.
Something, somehow, I could not figure out. How
strange, I thought, that up to today, I had hardly reflected
at all upon this. Now, this father of a family coming in
through the door, perhaps during the War he killed a man
or two. But now his face as he sips his coffee and scolds his
children is not the face of a man fresh from murder. Just as
with the show window in West Matsubara, past which the
trucks rumble, the dust of the years settles on our faces
too.
I left the shop and got on a streetcar. Fukuoka Uni-
versity Medical School was the stop at the end of the line.

28
A light rain had begun to fall again, and water was dripping
from the pagoda trees which stood in neatly ordered ranks
across the wide campus.
I soon found the wing containing the First Surgical
Department, where the vivisection had been performed.
Pretending to be someone visiting a patient, I climbed to the
third floor. Up to the third floor, the wing consisted entirely
of wards. In the corridors the smell of grime mingled with
the permeating odour of disinfectant. There could be no
doubt about it. This is what I had smelled in Dr Suguro’s
examination room — the same odour coming from the same
poisonous source.
No one was in the operating theatre. Two leather-covered
operating tables had been rolled over next to the window
ledge. I squatted down on the floor and remained still for
some time. Why I had come all the way up here I myself
didn’t know. I was thinking that somewhere in this dark
room, some years before, Dr Suguro’s grey, bloated face
had had its due place. All at once I realized with a shock
of surprise that I wanted to see him here.
I felt the start of a headache, so I went up to the roof.
Fukuoka seemed to be crouching before me like a huge
grey beast. Beyond the city I could see the ocean. The sea
was a piercingly vivid blue, which I could feel, even at that
distance, blurring my vision.

It was already autumn when I returned to Tokyo. I didn’t

tell my wife anything of course, and the next evening I went
to Dr Suguro’s. As he was fitting the needle into the rubber
tube, I remarked in an offhand way: ‘I just got back from
a trip to Fukuoka.’
For an instant Dr Suguro looked at my face, but his
habitual melancholy expression was as always. After that

29
he began to probe my rib bones with his fingers. The spot
of blood stood out on his white coat.
‘Let me have an anaesthetic shot please!’
Ordinarily there was no need to use anaesthetic for some-
one like me, who had been getting treatment for nearly a
year. But when I felt the cold touch of his fingers and saw
the bloodstain on his coat, I cried out despite myself. After
I had, I was struck by the thought that on the day of the
vivisections, the American prisoners must have pleaded in
the same way on the operating table.
Either because the sun had almost set or because the
curtain was closed, the room, I felt, was gradually growing
even darker than usual. I could hear the sound made by the
air being pumped into my lungs as it bubbled through the
water tank. My forehead was covered with sweat.
When the needle had been taken out of me, I felt a
distinct surge of relief. Dr Suguro had his back turned and
was writing something on a card, but all at once, blinking
his eyes, he began to mutter something in a small, weary
voice.
‘. . Because nothing could be done. At that time nothing
could be done. From now on, I’m not sure at all. If I were
caught in the same way, I might, I might just do the same
thing again. The same thing. . .’
I left his surgery and walked along the road, dragging my
steps. The highway stretching so straight before me-—I
couldn’t help wondering how far it went. A truck came to-
wards me stirring up its dense clouds of dust. I stepped into
the shelter offered by the men’s wear shop to wait for it to
pass. The mannequin was smiling his glazed smile.
‘Four feet in the morning, two at midday, three in the
evening— that’s man.’ I thought again of the riddle of the
sphinx which I had heard in childhood. What should I do
from now on: keep on going to Dr Suguro or not, I
wondered.
30
 1
“What time is the Old Man’s round changed to?’
‘Three-thirty.’
‘Still in conference?’
“Yes.’
‘Ah, what a world we’re in here! Everybody wants to be
Dean of the Medical School.’
The February wind whistled at the broken window. The
paper which had been spread over the glass as a protection
against the force of bomb blasts had worked loose in the
wind which was beating a tattoo against the pane. Number
Three Laboratory was on the north side of the wing so that,
even though the time was only a little past two in the after-
noon, the room was as dark and chilly as though it were
evening.
On top of his desk, Toda had spread out some news-
paper, and over it he was scraping a lump of dextrose with
an old scalpel. After scraping a bit, he would gather some
of the white crystals in his palm and with a great show of
frugality lick them up.
After spreading some yellow sputum on a glass slide with
a thin sliver of platinum, Suguro was drying it over a blue
gas flame. The disagreeable smell of the heated sputum
struck his nose.
‘Ah, there’s not enough carbol-fuchsin.’
‘What?’
“The carbol-fuchsin’s running out.’
When talking with his fellow intern Toda, Suguro would
frequently use a few words of Osaka dialect. This had been
a custom with them ever since they had become classmates

31
in college. In the past it had‘ been a tacit symbol of their
friendship.
‘Who’s sputum is that?’
‘The old lady’s,’ Suguro answered, his face reddening.
For he could feel Toda turning his gaze towards him, an
ironic, mocking smile forming on his lips, around which
there still clung a few particles of dextrose.
‘Is that right? Still at it, eh?’ said Toda, feigning great
surprise. ‘Why don’t you give up on it? You’re always
going to extra trouble for that welfare case.’
‘It doesn’t take any trouble. None at all.’
‘Whatever you do, she’s a dead duck, isn’t she? It’s just
a waste of carbol.’
But Suguro, blinking, began to smear the sputum.
Scorched by the flame, the old lady’s phlegm developed a
brown rim like a fried egg. Looking at the glass slide,
Suguro was reminded of her thin, shrivelled arms, which
were brown in just the same way. Toda was right. The
woman would last for no more than ten months. Each
morning for a long time now, when he came into the un-
pleasant smelling ward, he noticed that the light in the old
lady’s eyes was gradually fading as she lay there on the
dirty bed. She was a patient who, when Moji had been
devastated by an air raid, had fled to Fukuoka hoping to be
helped by her sister. But there she had been told that her
sister’s family was listed as missing. The police then sent
her here to the University Hospital as a welfare patient, and
since her arrival she had done nothing but lie in the Ward
of Number Three Wing.
Since the disease had wasted away half her lungs, there
was no way of saving her. The Old Man, Dr Hashimoto,
had long since given up all hope.
‘I think there’s a chance maybe something can be done.’
‘Something can be done?’ Toda suddenly burst out in an

32
exasperated tone. ‘Cut the sentimentality! Do something
for one and so what? Look, the wards and the private
rooms are filled with poor bastards who don’t have a
chance. Why this fascination with one old lady?’
‘I’m not fascinated with her.’
‘She reminds you of Mama, I suppose?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Ah, what a gentle lad you are! Your mind runs in the
same track as that of these student nurses.’
Suguro’s face reddened despite himself, as though an
intimate secret had been brought to light; and with an
offended air he threw the glass slide to the back of the
shelf. How far Toda’s description was true he didn’t know.
‘It’s because she’s my very first patient,’ he said to himself,
but he still felt embarrassment. ‘I don’t like seeing her
there every morning in the ward, with that yellowed hair
she has. Just seeing those hands of hers like chicken legs is
unpleasant enough.’ To confess as much was painful. He
felt the sharp cutting edge of Toda’s sarcasm. There’s no
room, Toda had said, for pity in a doctor in a world such
as this. For it would do no good at all and could, in fact,
do harm.
‘Today everybody’s on the way out.’ His companion
wrapped the dextrose in a piece of newspaper and put it
in the desk. “The poor bastard who doesn’t die in the
hospital gets his chance every night to die in an air raid.
What’s the point, then, of pitying one old lady. You’d be
doing better to think of a new way of curing TB.’
Toda took his white coat from a hook on the wall and,
giving Suguro the benefit of a fraternal, elder admonishing
younger smile, walked out of the room with it over his
arm.
It was already three. From the noise it seemed that the
after lunch quiet period had ended. Once again the corri-

33
dors echoed with the noise of nurses scurrying to and fro.
The patients who did their own cooking were splashing
water at the sinks. In the broken window the college
campus was framed, and he could see a car slowly climbing
the road from the city. The car stopped in front of the main
gate of Second Surgery, and a short, fat man in civilian
clothes accompanied by a medical cadet climbed into it. As
soon as the door was shut, the car started up and sped down
the grey road, quickly passing out of sight. Such brisk
movement on the deserted late-afternoon campus certainly
clashed with the dark laboratory, the shabby hospital
rooms, and the patients who lay in them. It was like a
manifestation from another world.
‘That was Dr Kando and the intern Kobori, I suppose.
Then the conference must be over,’ thought Suguro, a
thought that plunged him deeper into melancholy. ‘Con-
ferences always mean a headache for us. The Old Man’s
going to spring something on us again.’
A month before, the Dean of the University Medical
School, Dr Osugi, had collapsed with a brain haemorrhage.
It had happened at a conference of medical officers of the
Western Command and officials of the Ministry of Edu-
cation. In the middle of a meeting, the old man got up,
tottering a bit, and went to the toilet. A few moments later,
there was a thud, and everyone came running to find him
sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with his face
upturned. He was gripping the flush chain tenaciously.
Suguro remembered the funeral ceremony on the campus
of the Medical School. It had been a cloudy, cold after-
noon. The wind blowing in from the sea stirred up grey
dust, and the scraps of newspapers scattered over the
grounds, into little whirlwinds and made the canopy set
up for the funeral flap furiously. In front of the canopy
were the chairs for the high-ranking officers of the Western

34
Command, imposing figures who sat, legs arrogantly spread,
with white gloved hands gripping their sword hilts. Opposite
them sat the medical faculty. Perhaps it was because of
their civilian clothes that they cut such poor figures; but at
any rate they all wore bitter, weary expressions and looked
thoroughly haggard and shabby.
An officer delivered an interminable speech before a
photograph of the deceased, elucidating for the benefit of
the medical students every nuance of the Way of True
Loyalty which they, too, were to tread.
Even Suguro, though no more than a mere intern, never-
theless, just from seeing day after day the irascible expres-
sion on the face of the Old Man, Dr Hashimoto, was able
to sense the anxious concern gripping the senior doctors
swirling in orbit around the vacant chair of Dean of
Medicine. Recently, while making his examination rounds
and on similar occasions the Old Man had been unusually
sharp with his assistants and quick to scold the welfare
patients.
As Toda put it, the greater part of the medical faculty
was under the sway of Dr Kando, Chief Surgeon of Second
Surgery. From the point of view of age and of experience
within the hospital, Toda and Suguro’s ‘Old Man’, Dr
Hashimoto, was by all odds the logical choice to succeed to
the post of Dean of Medicine. However, the activity of the
Kando faction made the outcome less assured. For some
time now they had been strengthening their position in con-
junction with the Western Command in Fukuoka. This
story, too, came from Toda, and according to it Dr Kando
had contracted secretly with the Army to turn over two
wings of the hospital for the exclusive care of wounded
soldiers if he became Dean of Medicine. The man who
acted as the tireless liaison officer between Kando and the

35
military was the intern Kobori, who worked as an instructor
in Second Surgery.
An intern like Suguro, working at the lower levels, had
no way of comprehending all aspects of the complicated
state of affairs within the University. Though he did under-
stand something of the situation, he had no inkling whatso-
ever that what would emerge from it would have a profound
effect upon his own future.
‘I’m not going to be a great man. That’s for Dr Asai or
Toda. They’ll stay here at the University,’ he thought. ‘T’ll
go to a sanatorium in the mountains somewhere and work
as a TB doctor. That’ll be good enough. I’ll be drafted
soon, so I'll be leaving here.’
In the early evening, drab olive cars were perpetually
stopping in front of the entrance of Second Surgery. Two
medical cadets, green lapel insignia affixed to their uniform
jackets, unaccustomed swords clacking against their boots,
opened the door of one car and squat Dr Kando got in with
an air of grave composure. The sight was enough to plunge
Suguro into deep depression. For here was the source of the
Old Man’s irascibility and imperious severity during his
ward rounds.
This afternoon, too, the Old Man’s mood was a cause of
worry for Suguro. When the time came for the three-thirty
ward round, he was waiting outside the chief surgeon’s
office for the Old Man and Miss Oba, the chief nurse, to
come out. With him were Toda and Asai, another intern.
Suguro turned blinking to Asai, who, his rimless glasses
flashing, was thumbing through a bundle of charts, and
asked in a timid voice: ‘I wonder what the conference was
about?’
‘I don’t know.’ Asai stared hard at him, as though imply-
ing that a mere intern had no business sticking his nose into
the affairs of the Medical School. ‘By the way, my friend,

36
I’m still waiting for that report on Mitsu Abé’s stomach
fluid. If the Old Man asks for it today, what then?’
This intern had just returned to the University as a
reserve officer, and he was making use of the opportunity
the situation presented to consolidate his position in First
Surgery. Interns and young instructors were both swallowed
up by the military, leaving the laboratories deserted; and
in such circumstances, it was sensible of Dr Asai to con-
solidate his position. According to a rumour current in the
hospital, he was engaged to the Old Man’s niece.
Stammering, Suguro tried to defend himself; but the
other with an expression of annoyance turned away and
once again began an industrious perusal of his charts.
It was about four o’clock. The pale winter sunshine was
fading from the corridors. The Old Man, accompanied by
Chief Nurse Oba, who served as his secretary, at last ap-
peared from inside the office. Both of them seemed ex-
tremely tired. The Old Man’s green tie was askew at the
neck of his white jacket. His usually neatly arranged silver
hair seemed damp with sweat, and one or two hairs were
plastered to his forehead. Only a few weeks ago, such
negligence would have been unthinkable.
Suguro recalled that the Old Man had fallen in love with
the German woman who was now his wife when he had
been a student in Europe. ‘Nothing like that would ever
happen to a country boy like me,’ he reflected unhappily.
‘He’s testy about something today too,’ Toda whispered
to Suguro as they walked beside each other down the
corridor, following the Old Man, who had said not a word
to them. ‘Did you really check Mitsu Abé’s stomach fluid?’
‘Well, I was going to but. . . .” Suguro answered frowning.
‘You’ve got to use the tube with her and it causes her a
lot of pain. It’s really pitiful.’
Among tuberculosis patients there were some who in-

ay
sisted that they secreted no phlegm. Mitsu Abé was one of
these. Actually they swallowed their phlegm with their
saliva, and it had to be removed by means of a rubber tube
inserted into the stomach. Three days before Suguro had
subjected the woman to this treatment a number of times,
and she had finally burst into tears and vomited.
‘You couldn’t do it, eh?’ Toda shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, that’s the way it goes. If the Old Man asks, tell him
anything at all. Give him your draft number or something.’
The examination rounds began in the wards. Only a faint
light lingered at the windows this short February afternoon.
When the five of them — the Old Man in his white coat, Dr
Asai, Chief Nurse Oba, Toda and Suguro-entered the
ward, the nurse in charge hurriedly turned on the lights,
which had blackout shades attached; and several flustered
patients hastily jumped back into bed and began to
arrange themselves properly, hands on knees. The odour
which permeated the ward was an uncommon one. Re-
cently many of the patients had been doing their own cook-
ing and so now the smell of firewood mingled with that of
the dirty bedding and the urine jars stored beneath the
beds to form an amalgamated stink which floated out into
the corridor.
Suguro noticed that, depending upon whether he was
with the Old Man or alone when he came into the ward,
the expressions on the faces of the patients were utterly
different. When he came alone, they would smile slyly from
their tattered beds, complaining of various grievances and
pleading with him: ‘Dr Suguro, how about some cough
medicine. I can’t sleep with this cough.’ ‘Doctor, could I
have some calcium pills?’ Suguro knew what they were up
to. They secretly hoarded whatever they could get out of
him and used it for bartering to supplement the skimpy
ration of potatoes and beans that made up their diet. Then

38
there were some who in times of especially severe food
shortage took sedatives in order to still the pangs of their
empty stomachs.
But when the Old Man came in once a week, flanked by
interns and medical students, the patients hastily made
themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Asai would hand
the temperature chart hanging at the end of the bed to the
Old Man; and the patient, his eyes narrowed and filled with
distress, would cringe before the great ones as though
awaiting a sentence of condemnation. They would try
desperately to conceal it if their fevers had gone up or
their coughs grown more severe. They would sit, shoulders
hunched, hands on knees, hoping to escape the scrutiny of
these awesome doctors as quickly as possible.
‘Open your pyjamas,” Asai ordered a man. “Turn over
on your stomach. The rash is the same as before, but pus
is starting to come out of the ear.’
But the Old Man, holding the temperature chart, seemed
to have his mind elsewhere. The ward was dimly lit, and
since he had not even bothered to put on his glasses, it was
unlikely that he was able to make out the chart.
‘Fever?’ the Old Man asked dully.
‘Since the pain in the ear started, it’s gone up above a
hundred.’
‘It doesn’t hurt any more, Doctor.’ The middle-aged
patient, his bony chest visible through his ragged pyjamas,
screwed up his unshaven face in an almost tearful protest.
‘It doesn’t hurt at all now.’
The symptoms were clear enough. There was a small pro-
tuberance by the right ear resulting from swollen lymph
glands. Stretching out the hand in which he held his
cigarette, the Old Man pressed a long, white finger firmly
upon the swelling. The patient cringed, suppressing a cry.
‘It’s nothing, Doctor.’

39
 ‘So you say, uh?’
‘Doctor, I'll be all right, won’t I?’
Without a word, the Old Man moved on to the next
bed. As Suguro walked behind Toda and Chief Nurse Oba,
he heard Asai behind him whispering in a soothing voice
as he ran his pen over the temperature chart. “Don’t worry
now. We’ll give you some pain killer.’
The Old Man was not as testy today as Suguro had
expected. Rather than being irascible, he gave the im-
pression of being entirely taken up with something else. As
he held a fever chart or rested his hand on a patient’s
blanket, he seemed not to notice the grey ashes which fell
from the cigarette in his finely shaped fingers. He would
stand in front of each patient’s bed and then, without so
much as a gesture, move on to the next. Suguro breathed a
sigh of relief. With the Old Man in this mood, there would
be no harsh words about the matter of Mitsu Abé’s
stomach fluid report.
Outside a grey evening mist began to flow in over the
hospital grounds. From the kennels some distance away,
where the dogs used for experiments were kept, came an
insistent hungry barking. Inhibited by their blackout
shades, the light bulbs cast a feeble glow only on their
immediate surroundings. Suguro looked out at the sea,
dark beyond the grey mist. The Medical School was not
far from the ocean.
The examinations were over, but still the patients sat up
dutifully on their beds and with fearful gaze followed the
movements of the doctors. In the uneven light, their
elongated shadows ranged grotesquely over the walls be-
hind them. In one corner a woman who was no longer able
to hold herself back coughed violently into her hands.
‘All right, that’s good enough.’ In a voice worn with
fatigue, the Old Man pushed aside the temperature chart

40
which Asai had offered him. ‘No patient in crisis, is there,
Asai?’
“You're tired, Sir. Why don’t we call it a day?’
Asai, his face puckered with solicitude, smiled a smile of
unqualified servility. Toda stood sullenly by, his hands
jammed into the pockets of his coat.
“There’s just one thing.’ Asai turned all at once towards
Suguro, speaking very deliberately. ‘Suguro here’s been
checking a patient.’
‘Who?’
‘The woman welfare case over here.’
As soon as she heard this, the old lady, on her more
than ordinarily shabby bed over by the entrance of the
ward, started violently and hugged an old army blanket
tighter around her body.
‘It’s all right. Just lie quietly.” As before, Asai gave the
patient the benefit of his soothing tones. And as he spoke,
with the tip of his shoe, he deftly flicked under her bed the
old lady’s battered aluminium rice bowl, which had fallen
to the floor.
‘Actually, he knows himself there’s no hope, but Suguro
has some idea about an operation.”
‘Uh.” The Old Man’s tone was listless. He obviously had
neither curiosity nor interest to spare.
‘It’s rather a good opportunity. In the left lung there
are two diseased areas, and there’s an area of permeation
in the right. Therefore the idea would be an experimental
operation on both lungs.’
The old lady gazed up, clutching the edge of the blanket
to her chest, intimidated by Suguro’s tense, strained face.
The light did not shine directly on her bed, and she seemed
to be taking advantage of the dark shadow to hide herself,
hunching her body up as small as possible. She knew that
right in front of her these great doctors were talking about

41
her; so she held her breath and kept bobbing her head
apologetically.
‘Dr Shibata said that he would certainly like to give it a
try.’
‘Uh.’
‘So, I’m having Suguro do a preliminary examination.
After that it is for you to decide, Sir.’
Asai glanced back over his shoulder at Suguro. ‘That all
right?’
Suguro appealed with a glance to Chief Nurse Oba and
Toda. But Chief Nurse Oba’s expression was as rigid as
that of a Noh mask, and Toda, as Toda would, looked
away.
*You’ll do that, Suguro?’ Asai pushed relentlessly.
‘Yes.’ Blinking, Suguro answered in a thin voice.
After the Old Man had gone out of the ward, Suguro
leaned wearily against the wall and let out a deep sigh. The
old lady, huddled to one side of the bed and still clutching
her blanket, was looking up at him. Distressed, he averted
his eyes from that dumb, troubled gaze. In general the
chances of the patients in here surviving an operation were
no more than fifty-fifty. Furthermore, in the entire history
of the Medical School, there had been only two operations
successfully performed upon patients who had both lungs
infected. In the other ninety-five per cent of such oper-
ations, the result had been the death of the patient. But
whether there were an operation or not, certainly within
half a year her infirmities would prove too much for her
and she would die of sheer weakness.
“Today everybody is on the way out. The poor bastard
who doesn’t die in the hospital gets his chance every night
to die in an air raid.’ Suguro recalled Toda’s bitter com-
ment of shortly before. After the examinations were
finished, hollow coughing echoed for a time in the ward.

42
The patients crawled in and out of their beds like fluttering
bats. Suguro felt the oppressive stink of the ward. If human
death had a smell attached to it, he thought listlessly, then
this was it.

Zz
No doubt it was a time when everybody was on the way
out. If a man didn’t breath his last in the hospital, he
might well die that night in an air raid. The Medical School
and hospital were about five miles out in the country, away
from Fukuoka; and so they had not received any direct
attacks from the air. Still there was a chance of being hit
at any time. The old wings of the hospital, which were
made of wood, had been left as they were; but the concrete
main building and the research laboratory building had
been blackened with tar. If one looked from the roof of
the main building upon the city beneath, one could see that
day by day Fukuoka was diminishing. Though when one
thought about il, it would probably be more accurate to
say that every day the brown desert of the burnt-out section
was expanding. Whether the day were windy or not, grey
ashes swirled up from the brown desert. Some of these
small whirlwinds played about the hollowed shell of the
Fukiya Department Store, which some years before had
made such an overwhelming impression upon the country
boy Suguro. Whether there was an air raid alarm or not
made little difference. Without let-up, from somewhere in
the low, leaden, winter sky would come a dull, rumbling
echo and often the sudden staccato sound like beans pop-

43
ping. Last year, when the Chushu section had been hit hard
and the Yaku’n area completely razed by fire, there had
been panic among the patients and the students. But now
hardly anyone asked about whatever section had been
burnt most recently. No one any longer paid much atten-
tion to whether people lived or died. The medical students
were for the most part scattered throughout the city,
assigned to aid stations or factories. Suguro too, as an
intern, would soon be sent somewhere on his term of
temporary service.
To the west of the Medical School, one could see the
ocean. Whenever Suguro climbed to the roof, he looked out
at the sea. Sometimes its blue brilliance was painfully
dazzling. At other times its dark surface was subdued and
melancholy. Then he could forget to some extent the War
and the hospital and his empty stomach. The changing
colours of the sea gave rise to a variety of day-dreams.
Once the War was over, he too, like the Old Man, could
go to Germany to study and have a love affair with a girl
there. And if this were too much, then something ordinary —
it didn’t matter. To go to a small town somewhere, have a
little hospital, marry the daughter of one of the town
notables —that would be all right too. If he did that, he
would be able to take care of his parents, who lived in
Itojima, easily enough. The ordinary, that was the best,
Suguro thought.
Unlike Toda, Suguro, even in his college days, had no
taste for novels or poems. He remembered only a single
poem of those Toda had taught him. One day as he was
looking out at the sea in one of its sparkling blue phases,
he found, strangely enough, this poem on his lips:

When the clouds like sheep pass,

When the clouds swirl like steam,

44,
 Sky, your scattering is white,
White like streams of cotton.

‘Sky, your scattering is white, / White like streams of

cotton.” Why when Suguro recited that single verse to
himself, especially in recent weeks, did he feel himself
being overcome by a mood of tears? Ever since he had
begun the pre-operation examinations on the old lady, he
often came up to the roof and thought about this poem.
Whenever an operation involved cutting through bone,
it was essential beforehand to determine the exact physical
condition of the patient. Asai had relegated this work to
Suguro. Almost every other day, Suguro had to bring the
old lady into the examination laboratory and submit her
to cardiograph tests, urinalysis, and to have blood taken
from her arms, which were reduced to hardly more than
skin and bone. Every time he inserted the needle, she
would wince with pain. Then, in a corner of the unheated
room, she would have to squat with her buttocks pressed
to the glass urine container, shivering without let-up.
She did not vomit any blood, but after the examination
was over, she began to run a moderate fever, something
which had not happened before. Still, perhaps because she
wanted so much to be cured, she earnestly complied with
everything which Suguro ordered her to do; and when he
looked at her, he could not bear to meet her gaze.
‘Why did you agree to the operation?’
‘What... ?’ His question had plunged the old lady into
forlorn confusion. Why did she agree to the operation? She
hadn’t the least idea what he meant.
‘Why did you say it was all right?’
‘Dr Shibata, he said it had to be done. Nothing else to
do.’
In the course of a week, bit by bit he gathered and tabu-

45
lated the examination data. Her lungs were functioning
better than he had expected, but the number of red cor-
puscles was decreasing. Also her heart was weak. Suguro
realized that the probability of her dying during the
operation was about ninety-five per cent.
‘Doctor, this operation is going to help me, isn’t it?’
When she questioned him like this, there was little he
could say to console her. What could he say to her — she
who with or without an operation would die within a few
months anyway? Suguro had no idea what to tell her. For
him the cruel thing wasto submit this dying woman to the
further pain of an operation. What else was there for
Suguro to do but to blink his eyes and keep quiet?
‘At any rate, there’s the matter of her heart getting
weaker.’ Suguro made his report to Asai. Asai was having
a glass of wine, from the hospital medicinal stock, with
Dr Shibata. ‘I don’t know, but it seems to me that an oper-
ation might not be advisable.’
‘I know it wouldn’t be advisable,’ said Dr Shibata,
leafing rapidly through the reports which Suguro had
brought. One or two glasses of wine had been enough to
redden his face considerably. ‘No need for you to worry
about it, Suguro. After all, I’m going to be the one with the
knife, eh? And at any rate, she’s a welfare patient isn’t
she?’
‘Suguro’s concerned, Doctor, because he’s in charge of
her,’ Asai interjected with a smile, his tone at its sweetest
pitch. ‘I used to be the same way myself.’
“Well, ’'m going to give something a try with our welfare
patient.’ Staggering just a bit, Dr Shibata went over to the
blackboard and took a piece of chalk out of the pocket of
his white coat. ‘It’s not going to be the usual Schmidt
technique, not at all. Suguro, did you read Corio’s thesis?’
‘Whose?’

46
 ‘About his transformation method. Well, pay attention.
Below the upper rib section, spread and make an incision.
Then you cut the ribs beginning with the fourth, then the
second, the third, and the first. This is Corio’s method. I’m
going to pay close attention to the shape of the diseased
area and the direction of the bronchial tubes.’
Suguro bowed and left the room. Out in the corridor,
he pressed his face for a time against a window. For he
felt unusually fatigued. A feeling of heaviness oppressed
him. The old odd job man who worked for the hospital was
out digging up the ground, wearing his boots. Above him
the tips of poplar branches covered with swelling buds
swayed in the wind. He turned up the black earth with his
shovel, throwing it to one side, repeating the monotonous
action time after time. A truck drove up raising dust and
passed in front of the laboratory building. On top of the
truck huddled a number of tall men of dishevelled appear-
ance, wearing green fatigue uniforms. After it had stopped
at the entrance of Second Surgery, two soldiers with pistols
slung at their hips opened the door of the truck and ener-
getically leaped down. In contrast to the vigorous movement
of the soldiers, the group wearing the fatigue uniforms
dragged their feet and moved lackadaisically as they
climbed the steps to the entrance. Since they towered over
their guards, even Suguro was able to tell at a glance that
they were American prisoners.
‘There’re some American prisoners over in Second
Surgery,’ Suguro informed Toda when he came back to
Laboratory Number Three. ‘A truck brought them.’
Toda was scratching around inside a drawer of his desk.
‘So, what’s so strange about that? They brought some
before for typhus shots, didn’t they?’ Not finding what he
wanted, Toda slammed the drawer irritably. ‘Now where

47
 the devil did my stethoscope go to? Hey, Suguro, let me
take yours for a minute.’ }
‘What for?’
‘There’s one more patient who’s going to be operated on.
Dr Asai and I are in charge of the examination. Don’t get
excited. It’s not the old lady.’ The withering smile of con-
descension with which Toda always imparted wisdom to
Suguro was a trait dating back to college days. He spoke in
a hushed tone. ‘Who do you think it is, Suguro?’
‘I haven’t the least idea.’
‘Mrs Tabé, in the private room. She’s a relative of the
late Dean, the nurses say. That lady is the one.’
Even without Toda’s information, Suguro knew about the
young and beautiful patient named Tabé. Usually the
general examinations began in the wards, continued in the
second floor second-class rooms, and finished in the private
rooms. Once in the private rooms, even the Old Man’s
manner of speaking and his examination procedure became
polite, especially so with regard to this pretty young mar-
ried woman. With her he displayed the greatest deference.
Suguro and the nurses could see written on the top of the
temperature chart ‘A relative of Dean Osugi’ in Asai’s
hand.
He could see from her case history that she was very
young. There was a moderate cavity in the upper section of
her right lung and a number of small infected areas. But
since the pleura itself was infected, pneumothorax treat-
ment could not be given. She lay resignedly upon her bed,
always face up, her long black hair spread out upon the
immaculate pillow case. Apparently she was fond of read-
ing, for a number of books unfamiliar to Suguro lined the
shelf beneath the large window which caught the sun most
of the day. When her breasts were exposed during the
examination, her skin did not seem to be that of a sick

48
woman, so lovely was it. Her husband was a naval officer,
they said, stationed somewhere far off. Perhaps because of
that, the tips of her full breasts were small and red like
those of a young girl. Once a day a woman who was most
likely her mother came with a maid who carried a basket
containing her meals. It was, all in all, a world quite differ-
ent from that of the ward patients.
“You’re on the way to recovery, Mrs Tabé.’ When he put
aside his stethoscope, the Old Man exuded well being. ‘T’ll
soon be able to demonstrate that to you. But it’s little
enough for me to do, considering all that I owe to the
kindness of Doctor Osugi.’
Still, an operation was necessary, and the time set for it
had been the coming autumn. Why, Suguro wondered, was
it suddenly moved forward to February? Had the Old Man
noticed something during the previous examination? If he
had, he had not mentioned it.
‘Why was it moved forward all at once?’
‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? The Old Man hasn’t been
putting much into the examinations recently. So this
operation. . . .. Toda craned his neck and looked out of the
window from his chair. In front of the entrance to Second
Surgery, the two soldiers, their hands clenched behind their
backs, paced like animals in a cage. Under the poplar tree,
the old man with the boots went on moving his shovel as
before.
‘I have an idea that this operation has something to do
with the Old Man’s getting the dean’s chair.’
He sat down again and, tearing a page from a small
Japanese-German dictionary, scooped some of his tobacco
ration from a can on the desk.
‘What the Old Man can do is this. He’ll gain quite a lot
of credit from a successful operation on this woman. The
election for the dean will be in April. The patient’s a

49
relative of the Osugis. The disease is limited to the upper
section of one lung. She’s not at all debilitated. Instead of
waiting until the autumn, do it this month, so by April the
stage will be well set. Then all the doctors from Internal
Medicine belonging to the Osugi faction will be inclined
in favour of the Old Man. In this way Doctor Kando of
Second can be overpowered before the election.’
Pronouncing his words strongly and deliberately, Toda
exhaled his cigarette-smoke in a way which was character-
istic of him. Toda, who was from a wealthy Osaka family,
had from college on been wont to explain to the country-
bred Suguro the intricacies of human relations in the
Medical School and the devious undertakings of the hos-
pital factions against a backdrop of cigarette smoke.
‘Sweetness and sentimentality are forbidden luxuries for
a doctor.” The sadder the expression in Suguro’s blinking
eyes, the more gleeful Toda’s. ‘Doctors aren’t saints. They
want to be successful. They want to become full professors.
And when they want to try out new techniques, they don’t
limit their experiments to monkeys and dogs. Suguro, this
is the world, and you ought to take a closer look at it.’
“So you were told to make the examination then?’ Suguro
asked. He sat down in a chair and closed his eyes. The
weariness he had felt just before in the corridor came rush-
ing back upon him. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘The old lady’s going into Dr Shibata’s experimental lab,
and Mrs Tabé is going to be a means towards the Old
Man’s advancement.’
‘Of course? What do you want? What’s wrong with
that? First of all, why are you so taken with the old lady to
the exclusion of everything else?’ Toda grinned, looking at
Suguro’s distraught face. “Yes, what’s so bad about it?’
‘I don’t know how to put it, but... .”

50
 ‘Oh come off it! Killing a patient isn’t so solemn a matter
as all that. It’s nothing new in the world of medicine. That’s
how we’ve made our progress! Right now in the city all
kinds of people are dying all the time in the air raids, and
nobody thinks twice about it. Rather than have the old
lady die in an air raid, why not kill her here at the hospital.
There’d be some meaning in that, boy!’
‘What kind of meaning?’ Suguro muttered in a hollow
voice.
‘Why it’s obvious! If she died in an air raid, the most
that she could hope for would be that her bones were
thrown into the Naka River. But if she gets killed during
an operation, no doubt about it, she becomes a living
pillar upholding the temple of medical science. And
won’t the old lady, looking ahead to the day when number-
less TB victims are brought back to health along the road
she has helped to open up, more fittingly be able to close
her eyes in peace?’
“You’re really a tough customer.’ Suguro heaved a deep
sigh. ‘I can get the picture too. Yes. Yes. ...’
‘How can you live if you’re not tough?’ Abruptly Toda
let out a twisted, mocking laugh. “You’re a real ass, you
know! Today, is there any other way to get by?’
‘If there were, would you take it?’
‘Good question. But right now, quick, how about that
stethoscope?’
‘It’s .. . it’s in my instrument case.’
Suguro left the room. As he stood in the garden, the wind
blew in his face, and he listlessly watched the old man in
the boots moving his shovel.
‘Digging a slit trench?’
‘No. Have to take down the poplar. The thing’s grown so
nice too. But the college people say cut it down. Don’t ask
me why.’

51
In front of Second Surgery, the two soldiers with hands
clenched behind their backs had disappeared. The truck,
too, which had brought the prisoners was gone. Suguro
climbed the stairs to the roof of the main building, which
had lapsed into silence again, his shoes echoing noisily on
the stairs. Below him was spread the wide campus of the
Medical School. To the right were a wing for contagious
diseases and a building containing the classrooms for First
Internal Medicine. The medical research building and the
library, both blackened with tar, together with a wooden
hospital wing, which lay between them, formed three more
ranks. Grey smoke climbed from the stack of the steriliz-
ation unit. There were about one hundred patients. About
how many nurses and other employees were there, he
wondered. He had the feeling that he was a cog on one of
the gear wheels turning here, whose movements he had no
way of understanding. ‘There’s no figuring it out,’ he
muttered to himself. ‘It doesn’t pay to think about it.’
The sea today looked dark and threatening. Brown dust
swirled up from Fukuoka and seemed to soil the clouds,
which were the colour of old cotton wool, and even the
pale sun. Win the War, lose the War — it was all the same to
Suguro. The effort it cost even to think about such things
weighed oppressively upon him.

52
 3
‘Fifty six aeons, seven thousand eras is the age of Bodhi-
sattva Nikin. To those who are true of heart, a light will
surely be revealed. . .’
‘Just like that is all right. Lie still now.’
“Yes, Doctor.’
While Suguro was making his examination, the old lady
kept her eyes shut and listened to the prayer chanted by
Mitsu Abé, who was in the bed next to her. Mitsu wasn’t a
welfare patient; but since they were about the same age
and their beds were next to each other, they would fre-
quently talk to each other in low voices.
“That’s a poem isn’t it?’
‘Oh, you! No, it’s a prayer by Shinran,’ Mitsu Abé said
wagging her chin towards the old lady. ‘Doctor, would it
be all right if I read her something from this holy book
about Buddha? She asked me to.’
‘Go ahead.”
Mitsu took her glasses from her bag, adjusted them on
her nose and sat up straight on the bed. She took a small
book with dog-eared pages and, reverently elevating it to
the level of her eyes, began to read:
‘“*The Lord Buddha deigned one day . . . to visit one of
his disciples who was sick. The disciple was suffering
grievously because he was unable to pass his urine or faeces.
The Lord Buddha. . . .”” Doctor, what’s this word?’
‘ “Hospitably.”’ Isn’t this a children’s book?’
‘Yes, Doctor. The lady in that bed over there let me take
it. “*. . . hospitably visited him. ‘Did you,’ he asked, ‘when
you were in good health, watch beside the beds of your
friends who were sick? Know that you are suffering so
terribly all by yourself because you failed to care for others
before. And now do you feel how sharp the pain is? When

53
you cross to the other world, you will be tortured with
pains that your heart will not be able to bear.’ ”’
While Mitsu read on in a stumbling voice, the old lady
kept her eyes shut. Her aluminium dish, with some brown
potato skins left in it, fell from the bed on to the floor.
The patients around became silent and pricked up their
ears.
‘Then what happens is that Lord Buddha cures him and
makes him so that he’s not mean and selfish any more.’
Like a child, the old lady bobbed her head again and
again on hearing her friend’s confident exegesis. Suguro put
away his stethoscope. How would he go about breaking the
thing to her, he wondered.
“You ought to tell him.’ Mitsu turned to Suguro to
explain. ‘She feels down at the mouth about her operation.
She would’ve liked to see her boy first and be easy in her
mind when she had the operation.’
‘She has children?’
“Yes, Doctor. Her boy is in the Army somewhere.’
Mitsu Abé scrambled down from the bed and rummaged
in a wicker basket beneath it and brought out a carefully
folded Rising Sun flag. The dyed emblem, looking as though
it would run in the first rain, showed reddish-yellow against
the cheap white cloth of the field.
“We’re getting everybody here in the ward to write
something on it for her boy. So, Doctor, would you please
write something too?’
‘All right.’
Suguro took the flag in his hands, and as he did, he knew
he could not tell the old lady that the day was set for the
operation. It had been announced that morning. First, next
Friday morning, would be Mrs Tabé’s operation, performed
by the Old Man. Then one week later, Dr Shibata would
perform the operation on the old lady. Toda and Suguro

54
were assigned to assist at both. He brooded over the pain
the scalpel would inflict, the dull sound of snapping rib
bones. With the other patients it was bad enough to have
to make the announcement which brought a week of
distress; but at the prospect of telling it to this woman who
was almost sure to die, his courage left him completely.
When he returned to the chilly laboratory, he pushed
aside some test tubes and a pair of tongs, and he spread out
on the desk the Rising Sun flag which Mitsu Abé had given
him. What could he write? He hadn’t the faintest idea of
what to write. Scrawled on the cheap white fabric were the
messages written by the ward patients. When this flag finally
reached the son, whom the ward patients praised as ‘pure’
and ‘gallant’, his mother would probably be no more than
a corpse. That image floated vacantly in his mind. He took
one of Toda’s cigarettes from the desk drawer and lit it.
After a period of fruitless thought, he finally, with a sinking
heart, put down some sort of hackneyed sentiment about
the necessity of victory.

As if to confirm all that Toda had conjectured, the prepar-

ations for Mrs Tabé’s operation were carried out with the
most scrupulous care and solicitude. Toda was as Toda
always was, but Asai, who realized that the success or
failure of this operation was of vital concern to First
Surgery to which he had immediately linked his own
fortunes, went about his duties with the utmost earnestness.
Asai looked forward with trepidation to the next day, next
year and thereafter, when the young doctors who had been
his colleagues, their tours of duty over, would return to the
hospital and the laboratories. Until then he had by all
means to establish firmly a relationship in which the Old
Man relied on him completely. So he was determined not

55
to miss a single chance to advance himself in the Medical
School, through the benevolent patronage of its most dis-
tinguished surgeon. However, Dr Shibata-—this too was
Toda’s analysis — was apparently jealous of the Old Man’s
pre-eminence. For Shibata had not been trained under the
Old Man but was a protégé of the previous chief surgeon
of First, Dr Shimogaki.
The examinations of the doctor in charge were as a rule
limited to two a week; but, before this particular operation,
the Old Man examined Mrs Tabé almost every day.
‘By autumn, you’ll be home, Dr Asai assured her as he
held up in front of the window the chest X-ray photos
which he had brought to show her. ‘After that it would be
best to rest in the country for a few months, and the follow-
ing year you’ll be completely recovered.’
Perhaps because the prospect of winning the dean’s
chair in April buoyed him with a surging expectancy, the
Old Man seemed to have regained his old self-confidence.
Puffing a cigarette, both hands thrust in the pockets of his
spotless white coat, he strode the hospital corridors reso-
lutely. The slightly stooped, withdrawn, meditative figure
fulfilled perfectly for the unsophisticated Suguro the image
which the title Doctor evoked in him. And as he dragged
his military shoes behind Toda and Chief Nurse Oba, he
felt once again the yearning sense of reverence that he
used to have towards the Old Man.
‘Doctor, is everything all right about my daughter’s
operation?’
Recently Mrs Tabé’s refined mother had been in her
room almost constantly. She wore black monpe, the trousers
that had become equivalent to a uniform for women during
the War. The young wife smiled from her bed. She was
sitting up. While fingering the neck of her nightgown with

56
one hand, with the other she brushed back the hair which
hung down over her cheek.
‘It’s all a matter of routine,’ said the Old Man. ‘In an
operation everything is done while the patient is sleeping
under anaesthetic. Naturally the night after there’ll be a
certain amount of discomfort. She’ll feel rather thirsty
perhaps. So then, it will be a matter of being patient for
two or three days.’
‘But as for any danger . . . ?’ The mother frowned
slightly as she spoke.
At her words Asai laughed on cue in his soothing
feminine tones. ‘Ah, Mrs Masuda, what an opinion you
must have of Dr Hashimoto’s skill and all our efforts.’
In reassuring her, Asai, for once, was not straying too
far from the truth. Mrs Tabé was in the best possible con-
dition for an operation as regards blood count, heart con-
dition etc. Suguro, who had not yet performed an operation,
felt that even he could have carried out this one success-
fully.
As he watched the Old Man, his stethoscope pressed to
the girl’s full breast, listening to her heartbeat, he won-
dered of what his feeling of jealously was compounded. Was
he jealous of the girl’s husband, jealous of a happiness
which Suguro himself would never be able to gain? Or
was it rather that he simply felt a sort of just anger on
behalf of all those patients who lay in the dark ward?
Whatever it was he felt, he couldn’t explain it to himself.
It was Thursday night. The night before the operation it
was the job of the nurses to shave the body hair off the
patient and rub her with alcohol. Toda, Suguro, and Chief
Nurse Oba were in the laboratory until very late selecting
and arranging the photos which would be needed in the
course of the operation. At last Suguro was ready to leave
for the ten minute walk which would take him to his

a
boarding house. As he stepped outside, he heard in the
distance the sound of a car engine approaching in the
darkness of the grounds.
When the car passed in front of him, he caught a brief
glimpse of Dr Kando’s face illumined fleetingly by the
dashboard light, beside him a stocky little officer who sat
with clenched jaw, both hands on his sword hilt. Suguro
felt that Dr Kando’s face had a somehow unclean look
about it. He felt himself touched by a dark shadow.
‘I hope the Old Man wins!’ he told himself. Tomorrow
would be a crucial day in the behind the scenes struggle
between these doctors, a struggle in which he had wanted
no part. But now, for the first time, he felt excitement.

It was ten o’clock on Friday morning. Asai, Toda, and

Suguro waited outside the operating theatre for the patient
to be brought up. They wore white surgical gowns over
rubber aprons and had sandals on their feet.
The sky was overcast. The operating theatre was off to
one side of the second floor of the hospital, and so no
nurses or convalescent patients were liable to intrude here.
The sun shone dully on the floor of the long empty
corridor.
After a while those waiting heard the distant squeak of
wheels. Then they saw the trolley carrying Mrs Tabé slowly
approaching, pushed by a nurse and her mother. Because
of the preliminary anaesthetic injection received in her
room and because of her fear of what was to come, the
woman’s face was drained of blood as she lay on the
trolley, and her hair was in disorder.
“Be brave now!” As the trolley began gradually to move
more quickly, her mother hurried a little to keep up with it.

58
‘Mother’s here with you. And your sister will soon be here
too. The operation will be over before you know it.’
The weary girl opened her eyes, as frantic as those of a
snared bird, and tried to whisper something; but her voice
would not come.
‘The Doctor will take care of everything,’ her mother
cried to her again. ‘The Doctor will!’
Standing behind the Old Man, who had already washed
his hands in alcohol, Chief Nurse Oba fastened the strings
of his surgical gown. Then like a mother taking care of a
son taller than herself, she put on him the white surgical
cap, which resembled a fez. Another nurse held out a metal
box containing the rubber surgical gloves. And with that
the Old Man, his face like a Noh mask, took on an un-
canny appearance, like some pure white totemic image.
Throughout the operation it was necessary to maintain
a temperature of seventy degrees in the operating theatre,
and already it was warm and stuffy. In order to wash away
dust and the inevitable blood, water streamed over the
floor in a light trickle. It reflected the light from the huge
ceiling lamp, and the entire operating theatre shone with a
glow like burnished platinum. Immersed in this glow, Asai
and the nurses moved about, their figures wavering in it like
seaweed swayed by ocean currents. Toda tested the instru-
ment for cutting the patient’s shoulder blade.
The two nurses placed the now naked Mrs Tabé on the
operating table, on her side with her legs drawn up. The
Old Man with a practised hand began to take the instru-
ments from the metal box which stood on the glass stand
beside the operating table and to arrange them. The scalpel
for displacing the pleura, the instrument for cutting the rib
bones, the clamps, and the others — they clattered slightly as
they struck one against another. When Mrs Tabé heard

59
this faint sound, her body trembled for an instant; but then,
as though heavily fatigued, she shut her eyes once more.
‘It won’t hurt at all, Mrs Tabé,’ said Asai in a mellow
tone. ‘We’ll soon have you under anaesthetic.’
‘Is everything ready?’ The Old Man’s voice was low but
it echoed from the walls of the room.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ Asai replied.
‘All right, let’s begin.”
Everyone turned in unison towards the Old Man and the
patient and bowed silently. The silence spread through the
theatre. Then Chief Nurse Oba moved, beginning to wipe
the patient’s white back with cotton soaked in tincture of
iodine.
‘Scalpel.’
The Old Man took the electric scalpel held out to him in
the powerful grip of his right hand and bent slightly for-
ward. A sizzling noise struck Suguro’s ears. It was the
sound of muscles being severed and burnt by electricity.
One instant the smooth white curve of flesh held the eye,
and in the next all was wiped out by the image of dark,
oozing blood. Asai deftly stopped the flow from the
severed blood vessels, and then Suguro sutured them one by
one with silk thread.
‘Pleura displacer,’ the Old Man ordered. ‘Blood intake?’
The transfusion needle had been thrust into Mrs Tabé’s
white leg. Before answering Suguro checked the flow of the
rubber tube from the container holding the ligiud com-
pound of stimulants, vitamins, dextrose, and adrenaline
into the patient’s body.
“Normal.”
‘Blood pressure?’
‘All right,’ the nurse replied.
A long time passed. Suddenly Mrs Tabé began to moan.
Besides the regular anaesthetic, procaine had been given

60
her, but still she seemed to be half conscious.
‘It hurts, Mother. I can’t breathe... .’
Sweat began to flow over the Old Man’s forehead. Chief
Nurse Oba wiped it with a piece of gauze.
‘I can’t breathe, Mother. I can’t breathe.’
‘Raspatory!’
When the pleura had been cut aside, the white rib bones
became visible. The Old Man began to cut these resolutely
with an instrument resembling a pair of secateurs. From
beneath his mask a suppressed grunt could be heard as he
put his strength into what he was doing. With a dull
snapping noise, the fourth rib, which resembled the antler
of a deer, was wrenched off and dropped into a receptacle
with a dry echo. The network of flesh covering the chest
wall and inner chest surged up like a red balloon from the
pressure of the lung beneath. The sound of the Old Man’s
low grunts, the snapping of the rib bones, and the dry
sound of their dropping into the receptacle echoed through
the operating theatre. Sweat once more covered the fore-
head of the Old Man, and the chief nurse stretched up
again and again to wipe it away.
‘Blood intake?’
‘Normal.’
‘Pulse? Blood pressure?’
‘All right.’
‘I’m taking the first rib.’
Now the most critical point in this kind of operation had
come.
Suguro noticed that Mrs Tabé’s blood had suddenly
darkened. Instantly a chill premonition struck him. But
the Old Man went on silently cutting the muscles about the
rib. Nor did the nurse say anything after checking the blood
pressure gauge. Asai, too, was silent.
‘Excision scalpel,’ the Old Man ordered, and he seemed

61
all at once to tremble slightly. ‘Is the irrigator all right?’
He had noticed the darkening blood, a clear indication
that something was wrong.
Suguro saw that his sweaty face shone as though glazed
with wax.
‘Any abnormality?’
‘The blood pressure is. . . .” The voice of the young nurse
suddenly rose in panic. “The blood pressure is down.’
‘Apply the oxygen inhaler,’ Asai ordered frantically.
‘Hurry!’
‘There’s sweat in my eyes! Sweat in my eyes!’ The Old
Man staggered as he spoke. The chief nurse’s hand
trembled as she wiped his forehead.
‘Quick with the gauze.’
They applied gauze, trying to staunch the flow of blood,
but with no success. The Old Man worked his hands
frantically.
‘Gauze! Gauze! Blood pressure?’
“Way down.’
At that moment the Old Man turned his face Suguro’s
way. It was twisted with distress, the face of a child about
to burst into tears.
“Blood pressure?’
‘None at all,’ Asai answered. He had already taken off
his mask, and he threw it down upon the floor.
‘She’s dead.’ The nurse who checked the woman’s pulse
murmured in a crushed voice.
When the nurse dropped the dead woman’s hand, the
arm of the corpse, which was torn and blood-splattered
like a ripped pomegranate, flopped limply back upon the
edge of the operating table. The Old Man stood as though
in a stupor. No one said a word. The water kept flowing
over the floor, reflecting the brightness pouring down from
the ceiling lamp.

62
 ‘Doctor,’ whispered Asai. ‘Doctor.’
The Old Man turned towards him, but his stare was
vacant.
“We'll have to put things in order.’
‘Put things in order ...? Yes... yes, of course.’
“What’s the best way? Anyway, I’ll close the incisions.’
Mrs Tabé’s sunken eyes were rigidly opened, and, with
her red tongue protruding slightly, her mouth was wide
open in a fool’s gape. She seemed to be staring fixedly at all
of them. Suguro could easily read in the wide staring eyes
the proof of the suffering she had endured during the
operation. Her stomach, hands, and face were smeared with
blood.
Suguro squatted down on the floor, the strength utterly
gone from his legs. Somewhere inside his head, he heard
incessantly a faint sound like that of glass shattering. He
felt nausea overcoming him. He rubbed his eyes re-
peatedly with his hand and wiped the sweat from his fore-
head.
Taking over for the Old Man, Asai quickly sewed up the
woman’s body as though she had been a torn quilt, and the
nurses began to wipe it with alcohol.
‘Put on bandages,’ Asai ordered sharply. ‘Wrap it
thoroughly in bandages.’
The Old Man slumped down on a chair and kept staring
listlessly at a spot on the floor. He paid not the least
attention to the sounds in the room or the voices of the
interns.
‘Take the patient back to her room. Not one word now
to the family about the operation.’
As Asai said this in a tense, strained voice, he looked at
each of them. His words sent a chill through them, and they
shrank back instinctively towards the wall.
‘As soon as we get back to the patient’s room, give her

63
an injection of Ringer’s solution. And do everything else
besides, just as you would after any operation. The patient
is not dead. She will die tomorrow morning.’
Asai’s voice was not the usual sweet, high-pitched voice
heard in the laboratory. His rimless glasses had slid down
on his nose, which was slippery with sweat.
The young nurse walked somewhat unsteadily as she
pushed the trolley on which the sheet-covered body lay. She
seemed unequal to the effort this required. In the corridor
the dead woman’s mother and a girl who was apparently
her sister hurried over when they caught a glimpse of the
pale face on the trolley.
‘She came through the operation in excellent shape.’
Making a great effort, Asai showed every sign of com-
posure and smiled a smile which must have cost him
dearly, but he was unable to do anything about the hoarse-
ness of his voice. Chief Nurse Oba placed herself between
the mother and sister and the trolley, blocking them as
effectively as she could.
‘But tonight will be a difficult one of course. Just to be
on the safe side, we’ve got to forbid visitors for a day or
two.’
“Does that include us?’ cried the sister in distress.
‘I’m sorry but it does. But don’t worry. Chief Nurse
Oba and I will spend the night by her bed.’
The door of the patient’s room stood open. The young
nurse who had been in charge of the blood pressure gauge
hurried in, on the verge of tears. She apparently had no
idea of the meaning of the orders which Asai had given.
Chief Nurse Oba stood by the door holding the box con-
taining the injections. Only this woman with the habitual
Noh mask face registered no emotion. From long experience
she was the only one who knew exactly what to do in a

64
situation like this. Asai was already waiting inside the
room.
Suguro stood sluggishly in the corridor, his face to a
window.
‘Suguro, keep a lookout here and make sure everything
stays hushed up,’ Asai had ordered him. From around the
corner of the corridor, he heard Toda’s voice. Apparently
he had stopped Mrs Tabé’s mother and sister, who had
been coming this way.
“But, please... .”
‘T’m sorry, Ma’am.’
He heard their voices echoing.
‘How did it go?’
Suguro looked up to find Dr Shibata, wearing a surgical
gown, studying his face closely.
“Was the operation a success?’
When Suguro had shaken his head, the traces of a sar-
donic smile instantly began to form on Shibata’s sunken-
cheeked face.
‘Died, huh? Well, that’s the way it goes. When was it?’
“The first rib.’
‘So? Well, looks like the Old Man, too, is getting on.’
Suguro entered the room. He was at a loss to know what
to do. At Asai’s order he removed the hypodermic needle
for the Ringer solution which was plunged into the leg of
the dead woman. He seemed to hear a sound like a clock
ticking inside his head, the same sound over and over
again: ‘What’s the use? What’s the use? What’s the use?’
Toda came in. He offered Suguro one of his hand-rolled
cigarettes from a celluloid case. Waving his hand weakly,
Suguro refused.
‘Our little comedy’s moving along nicely.’ Glancing about
the room, Toda raised the cigarette to his lips. His hand
trembled. ‘A comedy all right. A real comedy.’

65
 ‘Comedy?’
‘Sure. If she died during the operation, it would have
been the Old Man’s responsibility completely. But if she
died afterwards, maybe it’s not the fault of the man with
the knife. There’s an element of doubt. You can make out
a case for the Old Man at election time. Asai has it all
worked out.’
Suguro turned round and walked out into the corridor.
‘I hope everything is all right.’
Suguro heard the voices of the mother and sister from
somewhere down the gloomy, shadowed corridor. He went
silently down the stairs. Outside, as darkness began to settle
over the campus, a car carrying some nurses passed.
‘Miss Sakata!’ someone who was perhaps a friend of one
of them called out from one of the windows. Greyish
smoke flowed up into the sky from the stack of the
sterilization unit. Underneath the poplar tree, the old man
was still at it with his shovel. It was the usual sunset scene
on the campus, the same as every other day.
All at once Suguro felt like laughing, though he didn’t
know what it was that struck him as so funny.

4
Despite the silence of those involved, the failure of the
operation spread through the classrooms and the hospital
wings like sewage seeping into the ground. In the nurses’
rooms, in the laboratories, whenever there were two or three
together, there was no other topic but this rumour. Out of
deference to the position of the Tabé family as relatives of

66
Dean Osugi, there were no public remonstrations; but the
doctors on the faculty of Internal Medicine, all of them
disciples of the late dean, criticized First Surgery’s high-
handed method of disregarding the opinion of Internal
Medicine and hurrying the operation. At any rate all hope
of their recommending the Old Man for election as dean
seemed to have died.
All of this now seemed to Suguro a matter of no special
moment. It was all the same to him. His mind was a blank
and his body sluggish and heavy. He had no interest nor
enthusiasm now for his work, for the patients in their beds,
for the hospital in general.
Dr Shibata announced in an offhand way, two or three
days after Mrs Tabé’s death, that the operation on the old
lady would be postponed for two or three months.
‘If we make it two deaths in a row, the reputation of
First Surgery would really be shot to pieces completely, eh?’
The doctor’s sunken cheeks twisted in a laugh.
Suguro heard all this as though it had to do with events
on another planet. He did not feel any happiness at the
prospect of being able to let the old lady know.
He watched the old man working with his shovel in the
pale winter sunlight of the campus. What is he doing,
this old man, Suguro thought, but repeating the same action
again and again? Come to think of it, he had been digging
in that same spot for over two weeks now. Perhaps the old
man was working out a sombre revenge upon those who
had ordered the poplar tree to be cut down and upon the
era itself, by digging, refilling, digging, refilling.
‘Well, what now?’ Suguro from time to time would ask
himself. ‘Is this what it means to be a doctor? Is this a
medical school?’
But then, at such times, his thoughts inevitably turned
sluggish, and he became muddled. Any day now he would

67
be called up for his term of service. So whatever happened
here from now on, it was all the same to him. And this was
the mood which settled upon him. But occasionally in the
midst of this white blank of frustration, a black anger
suddenly surged up in him. It was this emotion that
overcame him the day that he slapped the old lady.
One day during his rounds, he secretly left a lump of
dextrose beside the old lady’s pillow. Mitsu Abé caught
him in the act with a sidelong glance but he pretended not
to notice. It was not the first time Suguro had done this
sort of thing for his welfare patient. The next day when he
happened to stop by the ward, the old lady was sleeping
with her thin hands over her face. She had not picked up
the yellow lump of dextrose he had given her. It was lying
on the floor by her bed.
‘Like a spoiled child! She depends on me, then she
doesn’t even take what I give her.’ He knew that the old
lady could use the dextrose as a valuable barter item in
getting food from the other patients, and he felt unac-
countably angry.
That afternoon there was a blood pressure check for the
ward patients. Mitsu Abé appeared at the laboratory, but
the old lady did not.
“Where is she?’
‘That one, she said she didn’t feel good.’
Suguro went into the deserted ward. The old lady, all by
herself, sat huddled on top of her disarranged bed. She had
her back to Suguro, and like a rat she was gnawing the
lump of dextrose, which she clutched in her two hands.
Seeing her wretched figure and yellowed hair, Suguro was
overcome by a feeling of unutterable disgust.
‘Why didn’t you come?’
‘Oh!’ The old lady, her hands pressed to her mouth,
could not answer.

68
 His mind in turmoil, Suguro roughly pulled away her
hands, and the old lady fell back upon the dirty spread. He
struck the trembling face with his open palm.

The Old Man hardly ever appeared in the laboratory now.

In his place Dr Shibata made the bi-weekly ward rounds.
In the room where Mrs Tabé had lain, the mattress had
been taken from the bed and thrown on the floor and
scattered over it were three or four pieces of newspaper
with muddy boot prints on them.
The concensus was that because the operation had been
a failure, the Old Man did not want to show his face. And
so the laboratories, the nurses’ room, the hospital wing in
general — all took on a slovenly neglected appearance. Grey
dust came in through the broken window and settled in the
corridor. The nurses on duty neglected their jobs, and the
patients themselves disregarded the restrictions of the after
lunch quiet period.
‘Japan and First Surgery are both in about the same
run down condition.’ Toda’s tone was more than usually
scornful as he walked up and down in the unheated room.
‘So be it! You'll be off as a medical cadet soon and be done
with this place.’
‘So be it, huh?’ Suguro blinked. ‘Me, I don’t care what
happens. But you, why haven’t you asked to be called up?’
If an intern requested immediate service, he could be-
come a medical officer after only a brief period of training.
‘Who, me?’ Toda’s grin as usual was tinged with ridicule.
‘To hell with that.’
‘If you don’t do it, you'll be a private.’
‘I’ll see what comes. Dying a private’s as good as any
other way.’
‘Why?’
69
 ‘It all comes out the same no matter what you do. Today
everybody’s on the way out.’

Later the same day, Suguro saw another truck-load of

American prisoners in front of the entrance of Second
Surgery. As before two young soldiers stood by the door of
the truck with pistols at their hips. As Suguro passed by,
the prisoners, gnawing at potatoes they held in their hands,
were climbing into the truck. They seemed all the taller and
their arms and legs all the longer in their loose baggy
fatigue uniforms. One of them held a switch of pine. As he
walked by them, neither interest nor curiosity stirred in
him. Some of them, with brown beards sprouting on their
chins, seemed no more than teenagers. Suguro felt neither
pity and sympathy nor hostility and hatred towards these
men. He passed them on the path with the lack of concern
he felt towards men whom he expected never to see again
in his life and whom he would soon forget. But how did
they appear to themselves? Surely as something other than
mere prisoners. Suguro’s mental sluggishness proved a
thorough block to further speculation of this sort.
A week after he had seen the prisoners, there was, for the
first time in some weeks, a major air raid on Fukuoka. It
began in the early afternoon. Since the number of planes
was larger than usual, the patients who were able to walk
took refuge in the cellar, and the others were carried there
on stretchers. Although the Medical School was some
distance from the city, the shock of the bombs was enough
to shake the windows of the hospital. The exploding anti-
aircraft shells kept up a constant chatter, and in the lead
coloured sky the lazy drone of the B-29s went on inter-
minably.
Finally, at sunset, the last enemy planes turned back to-

70
wards their South Sea bases. When Suguro climbed up to
the roof, he saw the entire city engulfed in white smoke,
which was swirling up from it. The Fukuya Department
Store was burning. Whenever the smoke thinned, Suguro
could see orange flames flaring up. Then in the east, as
though drawn by the flames and smoke, a large black
cloud came over the horizon and gradually began to cover
the city. All through the night, a cold rain fell, mixed with
ashes. At the hospital some hard biscuits obtained from the
Army were distributed, five each, as a special ration to all
the patients, including those in the wards. Suguro was on
watch that night and so did not return to his boarding
house. He wrapped his gaiter-clad legs in a blanket and
lay down to sleep on a desk in the laboratory.
Sometime before dawn, he was awakened by a nurse.
The old lady was dying she said. He ran down to the ward.
Mitsu Abé stood all by herself in the faint light of the single
candle burning beside the old lady’s bed. Was it that none
of the other patients knew, or was it that they knew and
did not care, their faces buried in their quilts? He shone his
flashlight in her face just in time to see it fall to one side
as the life went out of her. Saliva flowed from her open
mouth. He saw that her left hand was tightly clenched, and
he forced it open. One of last night’s biscuits, hard as a
stone, fell out and rolled upon the floor. When Suguro saw
this, he remembered with pain the scene of not long before,
the old woman in the deserted ward gnawing at the lump
of dextrose with her front teeth. He remembered how he
had slapped her face.
‘Her boy will get that flag at least,” Mitsu Abé whispered
forlornly.
The premonition he had felt when he wrote the cliché
about certain victory on the flag had been confirmed. Yet
he had been thinking of death in the course of an operation,

71
 not a natural death like this. The shock of the raid and the
night of cold rain had been too much for her.
The rain continued the next day too. Perhaps because
he might have caught a cold, Suguro had a severe headache.
The job of disposing of the old woman’s body fell to the
old odd job man who had been digging beneath the poplar
tree. From a window in the laboratory, Suguro watched
him and another workman carrying out the wooden crate
which contained the body.
‘I wonder where they’re going to bury her?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Toda spoke from behind him. ‘So with
that, your illusion passes. Every attachment is an illusion.’
He had been attached to that old woman, and for such a
long time. Why? Suguro wondered. Now for the first time,
he felt as though he was beginning to understand. ‘She was
the one thing in the midst of Toda’s pessimistic ‘‘every-
body’s on the way out” that I was going to make sure
didn’t die. She was my first patient. Now there she goes,
soaked with the rain, packed into an old orange crate.
From now on,” Suguro thought, ‘for myself, for the War,
for Japan, for everything, let things go just as they like.’

5
After the death of the old woman, Suguro realized that he
had caught a cold, probably brought on by the night he
spent sleeping in the laboratory. He had a fever and felt
enervated. As he sat working at his desk beside Toda, his
head throbbed, and he seemed on the verge of vomiting.

2
 “Was the old lady’s TB catching? Your face, anyhow, is
way off colour, sort of on the grey side,’ said Toda.
Suguro took a look for himself. He saw that his face
was indeed grey and puffy, his eyes dull and glazed.
‘Dr Shibata wants to see both of you.’ A nurse put her
head in at the door. She was the one who had been in
charge of the blood pressure gauge on the day of the
operation.
‘What? Does he want us now?’
“Yes, he said right away.’
‘I’ve got an awful headache.’
Bearing up as well as he could with his nausea, Suguro
went with Toda to Number Two Laboratory. When they
entered Shibata and Asai, in company with a plump, red-
faced medical officer, were seated comfortably. The officer
cast a flickering glance at the two interns.
‘O.K.” And with that single word, he got up and left.
In the charcoal brazier blue fumes blazed from the silver
embers. On top of the table were packets of cigarettes and
some tea cups which had been filled with wine.
‘Sit down. There. Our medical officer has left us, but not
without leaving us some of his bounty.’
Shibata, squeaking his swivel chair, swung his legs loosely
back and forth for a while.
‘Go ahead and smoke, Suguro, Toda. Avail yourselves
of the military’s bounty.’
Asai got up and turning his back went over to the win-
dow to look out. Both Suguro and Toda knew that there
was something on their minds, and that they had deliber-
ately planned this session.
‘Toda, your research topic is the cavity induction treat-
ment, isn’t it?’ A made-to-measure smile lit the hollow-
cheeked face. ‘How are you doing with it? Nowadays it’s
pretty hard to get anything done. Aside from Monaldi’s

73
theory, it’s impossible to get your hands on any new
documents, eh?’
Without answering, Toda took a cigarette from the
‘bounty’ and lit it. Now the distinctive odour of tobacco and
burning paper mingled with the smell from the brazier,
causing Suguro’s nausea to churn all the more inside him.
‘Suguro, it looks like I lost out.’
He somehow found the strength to answer despite his
headache and fatigue.
‘Lost out? What do you mean, Doctor?’
‘Why, that ward patient died before I could get to her. I
was going to try that new method.’
‘You feel like a fish has run off with your bait, Doctor?’
asked Toda drily.
‘No, more like the feeling of having lost at love, isn’t
that it, Doctor?’ interposed Asai’s feminine voice from over
by the window.
‘Why can’t they come to the point?’ thought Suguro
choking back the nausea aggravated by the smoke from
the brazier.
Shibata idly picked up one of the tea cups and placed it
on his up-turned palm. He lowered his eyes and began to
turn it round and round.
“Well. ... At any rate, in a day or two, you’ll be hearing
something from the Old Man himself. Actually. . . .” His
words came out almost with reluctance. ‘Actually, we talked
at length about whether or not it would be good to have
you two participate.’
After saying this much, he stopped talking and once
more began to twirl the cup on his palm. Suguro wiped off
the sweat which had gathered on his forehead. The flames
danced up from the charcoal fire, and a smell like rotten
fish floated through the room.
“Actually, on the whole, it seems better that you don’t.

74
But for a medical research man, from one point of view
that is, it is the most sought after kind of opportunity.’
The loud squeak of the chair, whose need of oil was
apparent, continued to accompany the cup twirling.
‘Both of you know, I suppose, that ever since that
operation, the Old Man feels that Second Surgery and
Doctor Kando have gained the upper hand. Now this time,
we feel that getting on good terms ourselves with the
Western Command medical people, with whom Second is
so cosy, wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Therefore we feel
there’s no need to ill-temperedly refuse their friendly
proposal and hurt their feelings. Of course, however, if the
work seems distasteful to you, that'll have to end it for us.
Five doctors from Kando’s section most likely will be glad
to get the chance. But with you two, myself, Asai here, and
the Old Man - five of us can do it well enough.’
‘It’s an operation?’ Toda asked. ‘All you have to do,
Doctor, is say the word and we take part.’
‘No, no! No forcing. However, even if you don’t take
part, I’ll have to ask you two to keep your mouths shut
about it completely.’
‘What kind of operation is it?’
‘There are going to be some vivisections performed on
American prisoners, Toda.’

When Suguro opened his eyes in the blackness, he heard

the distant roar of the sea, the dark mass of the sea surging
up over the shore, then the same dark mass falling back
again.
‘Why did I have to get involved in that vivisection busi-
ness? I didn’t have a fair chance. If it had only occurred
to me to refuse there in Dr Shibata’s room, I would have
refused.’

75
 His keeping quiet and assenting — was it because he was
drawn along by Toda? Or was it because of his headache
and the nausea churning in the pit of his stomach? And
then the blue charcoal flames and the smell of Toda’s
cigarette had made him all the more faint and listless.
‘How about it Suguro?’ His rimless glasses shining, Asai
leaned his face close. ‘You’re perfectly free, you know.
Really.’
Afterwards, the short, plump medical officer had re-
turned to the room and laughed, ‘The bastards, what did
they do but bomb indiscriminately? They’ve already been
sentenced to be shot by the Western Command. Wherever
they’re executed it’s the same. Why, here they’ll get ether
and die in their sleep!’
‘It’s all the same,’ Suguro kept thinking. ‘I was drawn
into it because of the blue charcoal flames maybe. Maybe
because of Toda’s cigarette. Because of one thing, because
of another, what does it matter? It’s all the same. Thinking.
Sleeping. No matter how much you think, it doesn’t help.
I’m just one person. What can I do with the world?’
Suguro would fall asleep; then his eyes would open again.
And once more he would fall into a gloomy doze. In his
dreams he saw himself in the dark sea, his figure a battered
husk swept round in the current.
From that day on, whenever Suguro and Toda happened
to face each other in the laboratory, they avoided each
other’s eyes. When the topics they discussed began to drift
towards the threatening vortex, one or the other would
quickly change the subject. Why they had acquiesced to
Dr Shibata’s proposal, neither of them explained to the
other. When others discussed the operations, both of them
went about their work with strained faces.
The assignment sheet for the vivisections came out the
day before the first of them and it was secretly distributed
76
by Asai. On the first day of First Surgery’s project, three
prisoners were scheduled for operations. The aims of the
vivisection experiment were described as follows:
1. Normal saline is to be injected into the blood stream of
the first prisoner. The possible quantitative limits of
such a procedure before death occurs are to be ascer-
tained.
2. Air is to be injected into the veins of the second
prisoner and the volume at which death occurs is to
be ascertained.
3. There is to be an excision of the lung of the third
prisoner. The limit to which the bronchial tubes may
be cut before death occurs is to be ascertained.
Surgeons: Professor Hashimoto, Professor Shibata
(Assistant)
First Assistant: Hiroshi Asai
Second Assistant: Tsuyoshi Toda
Third Assistant: Jiro Suguro
The experiment to be performed on the first prisoner
was of great relevance to medical practice in wartime. The
normal saline was made by dissolving 0.95 grams of salt in
100 c.c. of distilled water. Exactly how much of this solu-
tion could be safely injected as a substitute for blood into
the blood of a patient had not been determined. Since a
human life was always at stake in this procedure, the
question was still a moot point. The general view was that
something between one and two litres was safe, but beyond
that nothing was known.
The second experiment consisted of inserting air into the
veins of a prisoner. If 500 c.c. of air was inserted into a
rabbit, the result was instant death. But what about a man?
The experiment with the third prisoner involved a prob-
lem which surgeons were especially eager to solve. Doctor

77
Sekiguchi of Tohoku University and Doctor Osawa of
Osaka Imperial University had devised an extremely pro-
mising method of excising a lung, but the problem that re-
mained concerned the extent to which the bronchial tubes
could safely be cut.
As Suguro read the summary, he realized at once that
Shibata, not the Old Man, had been behind the plan for the
first two experiments. Blinking as always, he thought of the
hollow-cheeked face of Dr Shibata.
The following day was the one preceding the operations.
That evening Suguro, no longer fighting with the question
‘Why?’ devoted himself to cleaning out the drawers of his
desk and arranging the things he kept on top of it. Toda
took in this activity while smoking a cigarette.
‘I’m going home. You?’ Suguro asked.
“No.” Toda’s voice was hollow as he answered.
‘Good night.’
“Wait a second.’ Toda got up suddenly and stopped
Suguro at the door.
‘What?’
‘Just sit down a minute.’
Suguro sat down, but nothing was said. To speak would
be to lie, Suguro thought. He felt that Toda was laughing
at him.
‘Have a cigarette.’
Toda held out to Suguro the celluloid case containing
the ineptly rolled cigarettes which were his handiwork.
Suguro took one, lit it, and then gazed at the blazing tip —
gazing and saying nothing. ‘You’re another fool,’ Toda
muttered.
‘Uh.’
‘If you think you should have refused, you still have
time to do it.’
‘Uh.’

78
 “Will you refuse?’
‘I suppose not.’
“Do you think there’s a God?’
‘A God?’
‘Oh what the hell, Suguro! Well, let me give it a try.
Look, a man has all sorts of things pushing him. He tries
by all means to get away from fate. Now the one who gives
him the freedom to do that, you can call God.’
Suguro sighed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The glowing tip had gone out, and Suguro laid the cigarette
down on the desk top. ‘For myself, I can’t see how whether
there’s a God or whether there’s not a God makes any
difference.’
“Yes, that’s right. But for you maybe the old lady was a
kind of God.’
“Yes, maybe.’
He got up and carrying his instrument case went out
into the corridor. Toda did not stop him this time.

79
 PART TWO

Those to Be Judged
 1 +: The Nurse

Problems at home prevented me from finishing my course

at Fukuoka Nurses Training School until I was twenty-five.
Then I started to work in the hospital of the Medical
School. That year there was somebody I knew named Ueda
who was in the hospital for an appendicectomy. I want to
forget about Ueda and since, except for one thing, married
life with him doesn’t have anything to do with this matter,
I’m not going to write about it in detail here. When I think
of that man, I always remember a very hot day in early
autumn with the sun streaming in at the window of his sec-
ond floor room and him lying on the bed in a crepe shirt
and a pair of undershorts that reached to his knees. He was
short and pot-bellied, and he sweated a lot, always over-
come by the heat. One of my duties as his nurse was to wipe
off this sweat. At that time I had no particular liking or
curiosity towards this man with the narrow, sleepy, little
eyes.
One day Ueda all of a sudden rubbed his face against my
stomach and grabbed my hand and held on to it. Even now
I don’t know why I let him do it. I think it suddenly flashed
through my mind that twenty-five was starting to get on a
bit as far as marriage was concerned, and then, too, his job
as a clerk with Manchurian Railways wasn’t a bad
position, I thought to myself. And then — this is a bit em-
barrassing— but at that time I really wanted very much to
have a baby. Not just anybody’s baby, of course; but having
a baby by somebody like Ueda would be all right I thought.
Outside the hospital the cicadas were making an awful
noise. His hand was dripping with sweat.

83
 Ueda’s family lived in Osaka; so the wedding was held in
Fukuoka, in the Yakuin area, where my brother lived. I can
clearly remember Ueda, in a rented dress suit that was too
short, wiping the sweat off his fat neck all through the
ceremony. As soon as the wedding was over, we went to the
port of Shimonoseki, where we got on a boat going to
Dairen. Ueda had been reassigned from the branch office
in Fukuoka to the home office of Manchurian Railways in
Dairen. The boat was called the Midori Maru, and the
third class quarters we were in were packed with farmers
heading for Manchuria. There was an awful smell of fish
oil and takuan coming from where they did their cooking.
To me who had never done anything like leaving Shimo-
noseki and going to a foreign place, the whole idea of cross-
ing the sea and going to this Kanto colony, which I knew
nothing about, was pretty upsetting. 1 sat on the matting
which was spread over the floor and thought and thought.
When I looked at the faces of the farmers’ families — they
were lying on top of old trunks and wicker baskets — I got
the feeling that I too was leaving the home country and
going all by myself to work in a far-away place. At night all
of them would sing these war songs they liked very loudly.
And Ueda, even though I was really seasick, wanted to get
romantic.
‘Don’t! Let me go!’ I was embarrassed with all the
people around, and I pushed his fat body away. ‘Why did
you have to come back third class? The company gave you
the money for the return trip, didn’t they?’
“Once we get to Dairen we’re going to have to buy all
kinds of things. What’s the sense of wasting money before
that?’
Then his piggy little eyes got all the narrower as he
looked me over in what was supposed to be a tender way.

84
 “You feel like vomiting? It can’t be that! It’s a bit early
for that, I think,’ he said.
All day long the black surface of the East China Sea rose
and fell, slanting back and forth outside the porthole. As
I watched the sea with nothing at all in mind, the thought
came to me: “Well, this is married life for you.’
On the morning of the fourth day we arrived at Dairen
harbour. Rain mixed with coal dust dripped from the roofs
of the warehouses. Some Chinese coolies came up the gang-
plank, ordered around by soldiers with guns at their hips.
They were carrying big sacks on their backs, swaying from
side to side on their skinny legs.
‘Those bastards! It only takes two of them to carry a
piano.’ Ueda stood with his face to the porthole, fingering
my earlobe.
A lot of carts pulled by long-eared mules were lined up
on the pier waiting for the passengers.
‘Those aren’t mules, you know. They’re Manchurian
horses.’
Before he came to Fukuoka four years before, Ueda had
worked at the Dairen main office, and now he was proud of
being able to tell me all about everything we saw on the
way from the pier to the company housing area.
‘This is Sanken Street. That’s Oyama Street. All the big
streets are named after generals and admirals of the Russian
War.’
‘Will we have to have anything to do with the Chinese?’
I asked holding on to Ueda’s sweaty hand. I told myself that
in this city there was no one I had to depend upon but him.
The place where we were to live was right by the main
temple in Dairen. Winter was cold here, so the houses
weren’t made of wood. Our little house was built of dark
coloured brick. All around were lots of others just like it.
None of them had more than two rooms. But they had

85
built into the wall an unusual kind of heating system called
a pechika.
At the beginning I thought that this colonial town was
really strange. The well kept acacia trees which lined the
streets and the Russian style buildings looked quite differ-
ent from the flimsy houses of an ordinary Japanese town.
Everybody — soldiers or ordinary people too, as long as
they were Japanese — walked fast and were bursting with
energy.
“Where do the Manchurians live?’ I asked Ueda.
‘On the edge of town,’ he answered laughing. ‘It’s a dirty
place. It stinks of garlic. You wouldn’t want to go there.’
About this time at home, rationing had started to be-
come pretty strict. So I was surprised to see how cheap
things were here and how much there was of everything.
‘Lady, how about some fish?’ Every morning Chinese
selling fresh fish and vegetables would shout at me, under-
cutting each other’s prices as much as they could. For only
ten sen you could buy one or two big Ise crabs.
‘Dammit! These bastards take you in every time. You
don’t go about it right at all.’ Ueda would take a look at
the account book every morning and usually give me a
lecture.
Within less than two months of coming to this place, I
realized how right Ueda was when he said that the first
thing for a Japanese to learn here was the proper way of
acting towards the Manchurians. For example, next door
to us lived the Zoga family, and they had two Manchurians,
boys of fifteen and sixteen, as servants. From across the
garden I could hear Mrs Zoga and her husband yelling at
them and hitting them. At first all this racket scared me, but
gradually I got used to it. Ueda told me that it was the way
these Manchurians were. You had to knock them around;
otherwise they wouldn’t do anything. Then it happened that

86
 in place of a maid I started having a girl come in three
times a week. And, sure enough, I soon got into the habit of
hitting her, for no reason at all.
What with the cheap prices and the prettiness of the city
and the life being better than at home, I was fairly con-
tented. I thought at the time that this meant I was contented
with Ueda. The first winter came. It was December. The
inside of the room was kept much warmer than that of a
Japanese house by the pechika, but anything that got a bit
damp, whether it was a tangerine or a shoe, quickly got as
hard as a rock. While waiting for Ueda to come home — he
was often late, on company business as he said —I would
spend the winter evenings sewing baby clothes — I was preg-
nant —and having my hips massaged by the girl. Outside,
through the falling snow, you could hear the sound of cart-
wheels a long way off and the driver using his whip on the
horses.
Innocent as I was, I had no idea that Ueda was often
spending his evenings at the place of a woman who worked
in a restaurant called the Iroha in the Naniwa district. The
one who first let me in on this was Mrs Zoga next door. My
first reaction was, ‘It can’t be true!’ When I asked Ueda, he
just narrowed his piggy eyes and laughed. When I was
laughed at, I wanted to believe it was true. But in the dark
of the night when I felt his hands on me, my body wouldn’t
listen to the cruel thing my heart had to say, and I couldn’t
doubt my husband then.
It was April, already spring at home, but in Dairen there
was still snow piled up, blackened by the smoke from
kerosene stoves. The cold was still sharp, and I was in the
hospital run by Manchurian Railways waiting for the birth
of my baby. Since this hospital was almost free of charge
to the families of employees of Manchurian Railways, Ueda
urged me to enter it as early as I wanted since this was

87
‘profitable’, and I took what he had to say in good faith. I
never even dreamed that he who wanted the baby so much
too, once he got his wife into hospital, would bring the
other woman to live at the house with him.
Even today to write about the birth is painful, seeing that
I have to bring it all up again. When you read this account,
maybe you'll see that it’s because it turned out that I was
never to have a child, that there is something missing in my
heart and in my life. For some reason or other, the baby
died inside me. I had chosen the name Masuo for my baby
and was happy about it, but it turned out that I wasn’t able
to get even a look at his face or his body. As a nurse I
knew how most of these stillbirths turned out, but I cried
and begged the doctor to see him, but it was no use. And
finally in order to save my life, it was necessary to cut out
my womb altogether.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Ueda, looking at me with
his narrow piggy eyes. Now that I think of it, he was
probably happy from the bottom of his heart about the
death of the baby because now it was easier to get rid of
me. ‘I asked the doctor. He said everything would be O.K.
What? About the operation? Almost no expense. It’s
practically all taken care of by the Company. It’s no big
loss.’
When I heard him say this, I thought at once: ‘He’s got
himself another woman, hasn’t he?’ Mrs Zoga had been
right. But funnily enough, I didn’t get mad at him or feel
jealous. When they took away my womanhood, I had a
feeling as if a pit had broken open at my feet—and that
empty feeling just swallowed me up. If I had been turned
into stone, it would have come to the same thing. Some
women have an operation to help them. But my woman-
hood was torn from me, and there was nothing else for it
but to go through life a crippled woman.

88
 When I left the hospital about a month later, I noticed
when I came out into the street that at last it was spring in
Dairen too. At the street corners willow trees were bloom-
ing, and their blossoms were like cotton balls, all being
blown around by the wind. Some of these white petals stuck
to Ueda’s sweaty neck. He had come to take me home. The
petals floated down on the trunk which the Chinese girl
had brought. I bit my lips and shuddered when I remem-
bered that it contained the useless nappies and baby
clothes.
Two years after that Ueda and I broke up. When he told
me, I did the usual screaming and crying, but it would make
this account too long if I went into the whole boring busi-
ness, and so [’ll just leave it out.
Funnily enough, I can’t remember anything special that
happened during that last two years with him. When I
force myself to think about it, all I can remember is him
getting fatter and fatter and daily taking some kind of
brown-coloured liquid medicine because he was worried
about his blood pressure. He told me that having sex was
bad for his heart, and so he would often come home late
and be asleep and snoring in no time. Actually I knew the
truth of the matter was that the woman at the Iroha had
taken everything out of him. In the dark whenever his big,
hot body rolled over near me, I’d push it away. It wasn’t
just that I didn’t really love him any more. Even physically
I didn’t really want him. Not being able to have a child
seemed to have stopped me wanting sex. Even so for two
years I kept on living with him on account of my own weak-
ness and because of what people would say. I just didn’t
want to become one of those poor women — there were so
many of them — who were kicked out by their husbands and
had to go back home.
When I left him, I said goodbye to Dairen from the deck

89
of the same Midori Maru of three years before. Just as on
the day I came, sooty rain was dripping from the warehouse
roofs, and military police were herding coolies carrying
heavy sacks up the gangplank. When I thought to myself
that I’d never see this sort of thing again, or the city itself,
{ felt even more as if a big weight was off my mind.

When I got back to Fukuoka, the War had already broken

out in the South Pacific, and the town was filled with sol-
diers and workers. But whenever life became a bit tough, I
just thought of what I had gone through in Dairen and then
there was as much difference as between heaven and hell.
My brother and sister-in-law weren’t especially happy to
see me back, and since I’m not the kind to put up with
anything, I got mad, took a job as a nurse at the hospital,
and left their house. I rented a room in a small apartment
house not far from the Medical school. At the hospital
the faces of the nurses and of the medical department
people were all changed from those I had known four years
before, the time I got to know Ueda so well there. All the
former interns were now doctors and medical officers some-
where in the Army or Navy, and the nurses who were my
classmates had gone off as military nurses to the war zones.
I had never dreamed when I was in Dairen that the War
would already have such an effect so close to the hospital.
The head of First Surgery, Dr Inoue, had died, and now
Dr Hashimoto had taken his place, I found out. Now that
I had broken up with Ueda, I had made up my mind to live
my life and put up with whatever came my way, but even
so, starting to work in the hospital again wasn’t so enjoy-
able. The nurses who had been way behind me in the Nurs-
ing School now walked through the hallways as though they
owned the place and gave me orders. Then, too, I knew

90
that rumours about me, my coming back from Manchuria
and everything, were very popular in the night duty room.
I got permission from my landlord and bought a little
mongrel bitch. I knew how extravagant this was at a time
when food was getting harder and harder to get, but to have
some living thing with me, even a dog, was a sort of con-
solation in my lonely life. I called the dog Masu, and I was
thinking of the dead baby in Dairen, Masuo. When you
yelled at her, she’d start trembling, and if she did something
wrong, she’d run to a corner of the room to hide. She was
the only outlet I had now for my affection.
But at night in the darkness when for some reason or
other I’d wake up a bit and hear that roaring of the waves
in the dark—the ocean wasn’t so far from the flat —I’d
suddenly be hit by a kind of indescribable loneliness. With-
out knowing it I’d put my hand outside the quilt as though
I was reaching for something. When I realized that I was
looking for Ueda, whom I should have forgotten completely,
I'd start crying, feeling sorry for myself. What I really
thought at those times was how much I wanted someone to
come and live with me.

Now in this account I don’t feel like writing anything which

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

91
 Mrs Hilda was a nurse when Dr Hashimoto was studying
in Germany. I remember hearing the story of their romance
when I was a student nurse. The first time I saw her,
though, was two weeks after I started to work at the
hospital again. It was in the late afternoon. A well-built
European woman suddenly appeared at the entrance of
First Surgery, pushing a bicycle with a big basket strapped
to it. To my surprise all the nurses snapped to attention
and came running, and this foreign woman with short hair
and wearing slacks walked right into the hospital. You got
the feeling that she was a strong young man rather than a
woman.
“‘Who’s that?’ I asked a young nurse named Konno who
was standing beside me.
“You don’t know?’ She shrugged her shoulders at my
ignorance. ‘That’s Mrs Hilda, the chief surgeon’s wife.’
Mrs Hilda took a cellophane wrapped package from the
big basket and handed it to Dr Asai. Dr Asai took it,
smiling for all that he was worth. With all she had inside
her blouse and her height, she seemed to overpower Dr
Asai, even though he was a man. I saw, when she turned
in my direction, that she used too much rouge. She waved
to us and then taking big, mannish steps she went down the
corridor. Inside the cellophane package she gave Dr Asai,
there was a big stack of home-made biscuits. At that time
you couldn’t get biscuits and things like that anywhere, and
so there was a mad scramble for them. I managed to get
one.
As I ate it, I didn’t say a word, waiting to see what the
other nurses would have to say about Mrs Hilda. They
chattered away about how thick her rouge was, something a
Japanese woman certainly couldn’t get away with. Then
one said: ‘She’s really something isn’t she? Passing out
biscuits and washing underwear — that’s her speciality,’

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 Afterwards I realized that they were being catty about
her visit to the ward patients every time she came to the
hospital. She came regularly three times a month. Carrying
her biscuits, she’d go in to the wards. She’d get together all
their dirty underwear, and then the next time she came
she’d pass it out again all washed and clean. This was the
‘work of devotion’ that she had chosen.
The fact is that we nurses didn’t appreciate her goodness
very much. I think it was a lot of trouble to the ward
patients too. The ward was filled with old men and women
who had lost everyone they could depend on in the air
raids, but to have a Western woman like this talk to them
would cause them to freeze up. On top of it, when Mrs
Hilda would pull out of their old cloth packs and wicker
baskets their dirty underwear, they would get all upset and
come crawling out of their beds.
‘No, no, Ma’am. No, please! It’s all right,’ they’d plead.
The funny thing is that the patients’ embarrassment didn’t
worry her a bit. Like a big boy, she’d take these great
strides through the hospital, passing out her biscuits and
rushing the patients to give up their dirty things so she
could put them in her basket and move on to the next one.
Since I wrote all that in a catty way, I should say that
all during that time I didn’t really have any feeling against
the goodwill activity she was carrying on.
‘No doubt about it, you have to hand it to her. Today
Mrs Hashimoto cleaned Fusa Ono’s urine bottle. And she
a European lady!’ Dr Asai said in a voice which seemed all
overflowing with emotion. To us nurses she was Just
‘really something’, that’s all. Beyond that we had no special
reason to feel any dislike towards her.
The first time I did feel badly towards this woman was
on account of something else.
It was an ordinary kind of late summer afternoon. I had

93
sat down on the steps leading to the garden and was just
sitting there with my head in my hands. I was thinking
about the time I was in that hospital run by Manchurian
Railways in Dairen. About my baby’s death.
Just at that moment, a little boy of about four or five
came running oui from the shadow of the building. His face
was Japanese but his hair was light brown. I knew right
away that this must be the son of Mrs Hilda and Dr Hashi-
moto. I felt something stirring inside me. If my boy had
lived, that’s just about how big he’d be. Without thinking, I
stretched my hand out to the boy.
‘Please don’t touch him.’
All at once from behind me, I heard the stern voice of
his mother. Mrs Hilda, rouge as thick as ever, was standing
right over me with a hard expression on her face. Then, as
if she was calling a dog, she whistled to the child.
But the child looked at me and then towards Mrs Hilda,
as if he didn’t know which way to go for a minute or two.
Mrs Hilda and I both glared at each other as though we
were gambling for the boy’s affection. Why did I get so
worked up? The painful memory of the day of my baby’s
birth and my being made something less than a woman was
eating away at me. I felt all the bitterness you might have
expected me to feel towards a happy wife and mother.
‘Excuse me, please.’ Hugging the child, Hilda spoke in
fluent Japanese. ‘As you know, children can get tubercu-
losis easily. When I leave the hospital, I always wash my
hands with antiseptic.’
That night at my apartment, I felt my loneliness more
than ever. When I was feeding the dog, I noticed her
stomach was smeared with blood. Suddenly I got mad and
lifted my hand, and, even though she crouched in a
frightened way and looked pitifully at me with her eyes, I

94,
hit her over the head again and again. While I was hitting
her, for some reason or other I didn’t cry.
Suddenly I began to take an interest in Dr Hashimoto,
but of course I wasn’t interested in him because he was
somebody on a higher level but rather because he was the
husband of this Hilda. When this old man walked past the
nurses lined up in front of the patients’ rooms, dressed in
his white coat, I didn’t miss the fact that there was a little
piece of tobacco sticking to his coat. More grey began to
appear in his hair. His face was old and tired. The flesh
of his cheeks was loose. How could Hilda, who was like a
young athlete, love somebody like this? When I saw him
touch a patient’s chest with the tip of his finger, I would
imagine that finger caressing Hilda. When I saw that one of
his shirt buttons had been torn, I felt a secret happiness. I
had noticed something which his wife, Hilda, had missed.

The War gradually became worse and worse. My flat, like

the hospital itself, was pretty far from the city; so there
wasn’t any damage at all. Fukuoka itself was more than
half burnt out with all the air raids. My brother who had
lived in Yakuin near the centre of the city, had moved out
into the country about six months before, but I never
thought about going to visit him. And there were no visits
from his side either. I heard a story about Ueda moving
from Dairen to Harbin, but I never got so much as a post-
card from him. I was a woman all by myself with no one in
the world to depend upon, and I didn’t even have any idea
how the War was going, since I never felt like reading the
newspapers. To tell the truth, I wasn’t interested in whether
my country won or whether it lost. About this time, when I
opened my eyes at night in the dark, it seemed to me some-
how that the sound of the sea was getting louder. As I

95
strained my ears in the darkness, it seemed that last night
more than the night before and tonight more than last night
the noise of the waves was getting louder and louder. I
thought of the War only at those times. As that sound, big
and heavy like a bass drum, got louder and deeper, I
thought: ‘Japan’s going to lose. And then where will we
all be dragged off to?’
Dragged off anywhere, it didn’t matter. More and more
patients were dying at the hospital. Especially those in the
TB wards. Like clockwork, one died every two weeks.
You’ve got to have good nourishment with this sickness,
and eventually these patients would have no more money
to buy food on the black market. But no matter how many
died, there was such an overflow of patients that as soon
as a bed became empty, it would be filled again. Since I
was a newcomer, I was assigned to this TB ward, but I
didn’t feel like taking care of the people lying there the
way that Hilda did. I just did what I had to and beyond that
not a thing. At any rate, whatever I might have done, I
think my heart was just overwhelmed by the feeling of
helplessness. It was as though everybody was being dragged
through the middle of a dark ocean. I think that the second
incident that occurred between Hilda and me was probably
due to this mood of mine. There was an operation taking
place on the young married woman who was in the second
floor private room, so the nurses’ room was empty except
for me. Mrs Hilda had just arrived at the hospital but this
time no one went to meet her at the door. I was alone in the
duty room checking a blood pressure chart.
‘Nurse, would you come here a minute?’
An old man from the ward, in a ragged nightgown, had
stuck his head in at the door.
“Mrs Maebashi’s having a bad time of it.’
‘What’s the trouble?’

96
 ‘Don’t know, but she’s having a bad time of it.’
When I went to the ward, I found a woman patient
called Maebashi with five or six others around her. She was
in pain and grabbing at her chest with her eyes twitching.
Being a nurse, I could tell by looking at her that she had
an attack of spontaneous pneumothorax. Air was pouring
into her pleural cavity and it was dangerous. I ran to the
laboratory, but Dr Asai, Toda, and Suguro were all taking
part in the operation. Only Dr Shibata was free, but I didn’t
see him anywhere either. I knew that unless the air was
stopped, she would die of suffocation; so I called the
operating theatre on the phone.
‘Doctor Asai.’ I spoke quickly to the nurse, Miss Konno,
who picked up the receiver. ‘A patient has a spontaneous
pneumothorax. Let me talk to him.’
I don’t know why, but through the receiver you could
hear the sound of sandals scuffling quickly to and fro. It
was a strange feeling, but it seemed to me that it was much
quieter than a normal operation, as though something was
wrong.
‘What is it?’ All at once I heard Dr Asai’s angry voice
in the receiver at my ear. He seemed very excited.
‘A ward patient, Toki Maebashi, has a spontaneous
pneumothorax.’
‘There’s nothing I can do. I’m busy. Do what you can.’
‘But she’s suffering terribly... .’
‘Anyway she’s past help. Give her a shot of anaes-
thetic... .’
I didn’t hear any more because Dr Asai had slammed
down the receiver. Give her a shot of anaesthetic, I thought.
Give her a shot of anaesthetic. She’s past help, I could
hear his voice saying that inside me.
The late afternoon sun was pouring in shioueh the
window of the laboratory, and there was grey dust spread

97
over the tops of the desks. I picked up the bottle containing
the procaine liquid used as anaesthetic and a hypodermic
needle and went back to the ward. When I came in, I saw
Hilda beside the woman’s bed holding on to its frame. She
was wearing slacks.
‘Nurse, the pneumothorax equipment, quick!’ she yelled
at me. Since she had been a nurse in a German hospital,
she knew at once that the woman had a spontaneous
pneumothorax. Then suddenly she stared at the bottle of
procaine and the needle I was carrying, and her face
changed colour. She knocked me to one side and rushed out
of the ward to look for the pneumothorax machine.
As I gathered together the shattered pieces of the bottle
on the floor, I could feel the stares of the patients on my
back. I went back to the nurses’ room. The sun was just
going down in the distance. It was big, red and glowing,
just as it used to look in Dairen when I used to watch it
go down from my room in the Manchurian Railways
Hospital.
“Why were you about to give her an injection?’ Hilda
stood at the door, her arms folded like a man, and angrily
cross-examined me. ‘She was dying anyway, I suppose?
Was that it?’
‘But. . . 2 I looked down at the floor. ‘Whatever I did,
she was going to die. Can’t you help a person by letting
them die easier?’
‘Even though a person is going to die, no one has the
right to murder him. You’re not afraid of God? You don’t
believe in the punishment of God?’
Mrs Hilda pounded the desk with her right hand. From
her blouse I could smell the scent of soap. Japanese like
us had no way of getting soap, the way things were then. It
was the same soap she used to wash the clothes and under-
wear of the ward patients. I don’t know why, but some-

98
thing struck me as funny all of a sudden. Was it because
of the soap, too, that the hand she pounded the desk with
was so rough and chapped? You had the feeling of it
having been rubbed with sand. I had no idea that the skin
of white people got so dirty. The back of the hand was
covered with little blond hairs. It all seemed so funny at
first, but then as I listened, what she said began to get on
my nerves. It was as though within me the thudding drum-
beat of the sea roar I heard at night was getting louder
and deeper.
That night I was on duty. I left the hospital in the
middle of the night and was about to go back to my fiat
when I ran into Dr Asai, who was walking around outside.
“Doctor, how was the operation?’
“‘Who’s that? You? Oh. What do you want?’
He had been drinking. So much so that he who always
made such a fuss about his appearance had let his glasses
slip down to the tip of his nose.
“We killed her.’
‘She died?’
“Yes, yes, we did. The family doesn’t know a thing yet,
see. The Old Man — he just doesn’t have it any more. The
Old Man. . . . When the election comes off, old Kando will
beat him hollow. And at a humbler level, you see, there
goes my future too.’
He put his hand on my shoulder. I could smell wine on
his breath as he staggered a little.
‘Where do you live? I'll see you home.”
‘It’s just close by.’
‘O.K. if I come?’
That night Dr Asai stayed in my room. I didn’t mind at
all. :
‘So you have a dog, uh? Hilda has a dog too. Hilda. She
barged in again today, didn’t she?’

99
 ‘But, Doctor, you have so much respect for her.’
‘Respect for her, eh? Just for the fun of it, I'd like to
sleep with that white woman once.’
‘I wonder how she is in bed with Dr Hashimoto?’
‘Who, Hilda? Why she really gives, I'll bet. She’s a
woman underneath the plaster saint business. Just look at
her body! Hey, why don’t you try your luck with Dr
Hashimoto? That would really fix old Hilda!’
I felt Dr Asai’s hands on me, but there was no pleasure
in it at all. I had my eyes closed, and I was wondering how
Dr Hashimoto would go about telling Hilda that today he
had killed a patient in an operation. I thought of Hilda’s
white hands and of the scent of soap coming from her
blouse. It was only to fight against that scent that I gave
myself to Dr Asai.
The next day when I went to the hospital, Dr Asai, very
different from the night before, called me over to him with
a cold look on his face.
‘Ueda, what have you been up to with the ward patients?’
‘The ward patients, Doctor?’
‘There was a woman with a spontaneous pneumothorax
wasn’t there? I got a phone call from Mrs Hilda. She
stopped you from doing something, she said.’
‘All I was going to do, Doctor, was what you ~—’
‘Me? I didn’t say anything!’
As I looked at him, the light shining from those rimless
glasses, he suddenly became flustered and looked away.
This was the man who had so ardently wrapped himself
around me the night before.
‘Should I give notice?’
‘Nobody said anything about giving notice, Ueda.’
He put on one of those charming smiles he was so good
at.
‘But look, when Frau Hilda comes to the hospital, it

100
might be a bit awkward, you see. Take about a month off,
eh? After that leave it to me to fix everything up.’
That evening when I returned to the flat, I couldn’t find
Masu anywhere. I asked the landlord, but he just shook his
head. It was around this time that people were getting so
hungry that they were even killing and eating dogs. Some-
one probably came and took her while I was out. I sat down
for a while on the step to my room and just stared. I felt
I didn’t care what happened from then on. I didn’t care
about Dr Asai. I was thinking about Hilda, who called up
wanting them to fire me. I hated her. Just so she could play
the saint all by herself, she didn’t care at all how much
trouble she gave the patients and the nurses. For her, a
saint and a mother, somebody like me, who had everything
that made her a woman taken out of her, sleeping with Dr
Asai would be something dirty, I suppose. What was I
going to do now that even Masu was gone?
It was terribly hard staying away from the hospital for
a month all by myself in my room. When I was working, I
could get away from the old thoughts about Dairen, about
waiting for the baby. But when there was nothing to do
but lie there on the mat, I couldn’t do anything but go over
again and again in my mind about the day of my baby’s
death, and the day I was thrown out by Ueda. I even
thought that I would be glad to see Ueda again.
Then one night, Dr Asai came again.
‘I’ve got a little matter to talk over with you.’
‘T’ve been fired.’
‘No.’ With a tense look on his face, Dr Asai sat down
cross-legged on the mat. ‘This is about something more
serious.’
‘To me there’s nothing more serious than getting fired.’
‘Look, as far as that goes, I want you back at the
hospital.’

101
 ‘You want me to help you with something, eh? There’s
something that somebody like me can help out with? If
you want a nurse to kill patients, here I am.’
That was the night that I heard about the operations on
the American prisoners. The chief surgeon himself, Dr
Hashimoto, and Dr Shibata and the two interns, Dr Suguro
and Dr Toda, were going to take part; but there was no
nurse yet, he said.
‘So you’ve come to me!’ I laughed — it was almost like a
spasm.
‘Now, don’t take it like that. This is for your country’s
sake. They’ve all been condemned to death anyway. This
way they can do some good for the advancement of medical
science.’ Dr Asai gave me all the reasons he didn’t believe
himself. Then in an embarrassed voice:
‘Will you do it?’
‘Doing it for my country doesn’t mean a thing to me.
Neither does doing it for your medical research.’
I didn’t care whether Japan won the war or lost it. And
I didn’t care whether medical science advanced or not. It
was all the same to me.
‘I wonder if the chief surgeon told Mrs Hilda about this
business.”
‘Don’t joke. And don’t go saying anything to anybody
about it. Not a word, understand?’
I thought of what Hilda said when she was yelling at me
that afternoon in the nurses’ room, about not being afraid of
God, and I laughed to myself. It was a feeling a little like
that of winning. She, after all, didn’t know what her hus-
band was doing, but I did.
‘Mrs Hilda, no. How could the chief surgeon ever tell
saintly Mrs Hilda about it?’
That night in Dr Asai’s arms, I opened my eyes, and I
could hear a gloomy, deep drumming noise — the roaring of

102
the sea again. And the scent of Mrs Hilda’s soap came back
to me again. Her right hand — a Western woman’s skin with
the downy hair growing on it. I thought: soon a scalpel is
going to cut into white skin just like that.
‘Is a white person’s skin hard to cut, I wonder?’
“What? Don’t be silly. Foreigner, Japanese — it’s just the
same,” Dr Asai muttered as he rolled over.
If my baby hadn’t died in Dairen, if I hadn’t broken up
with Ueda, my life wouldn’t have been like this, I kept
thinking.

2 ° An Intern

About 1935 in Rokko Elementary School on the eastern

edge of Kobé, there was only one pupil with long hair, and
that was me. Now the district has become a large resi-
dential area, but at that time the school was surrounded
with onion fields and farmhouses. And the Hankyu trains
going to Osaka and back would have these fields to either
side of them. Most of the pupils were the children of
farmers. No lads like me with long hair. Among the mass of
bald, shaven heads, were many boys who came to school
with babies strapped to their backs. The babies would wet
their nappies during class and start to set up a howl, up-
setting the young teachers no end.
‘Take him outside,’ they’d say, pointing to the corridor.
The way the boys were addressed was different from
Tokyo. It was always the first name, Maseru Tsutomu, or
whatever it was. Only when I was called on in class, was
there a difference. Then it was always ‘Master Toda’. The

103
pupils made the same distinction as did the teachers, and it
wasn’t considered a bit strange. This was due to my being
the only one who wasn’t a farmer’s son. My father was a
doctor, and he had opened a surgery not far from the
school. And these teachers, with their tight-collared jackets,
were no doubt in awe of a great personage like a doctor
and of the plate with M.D. on it. At any rate, I wasn’t a
very strong boy, but right from the beginning, I got nothing
but A’s on my report card, and I was the only boy in the
school who was going to continue his education. Every
school year, I took the leading role in the plays, enter-
tainments, and so on. Then, too, when I drew pictures for
the school exhibitions, I received the prize as a matter of
course. Without going about it in a deliberate way, I made
a practice of pulling the wool over the eyes of adults. These
included not just my tight-collared teachers but also my
mother and father. I didn’t have any trouble reading their
unsubtle eyes and facial expressions in order to estimate
how best to make them happy or to extract praise from
them, sometimes playing the innocent role, sometimes that
of the bright child. I perceived by a sort of instinct exactly
what adults wanted to see in me: a blend of naiveté and
wisdom. Overplaying naiveté wouldn’t do nor, on the other
hand, would seeming too wise. However, if one doled out
these commodities to adults in just the right measure, they
would inevitably respond with praise. The me who is writing
now, today, doesn’t look upon the me of that time, the
bright little boy, as having been especially crafty. I’d like
you to think a bit about your own childhood. All bright
children have more or less the same kind of slyness about
them. And then it sometimes happens that they foster in
themselves the congenial illusion that they are good children
precisely because of this capacity.
On the first day of class of the second term, when I was

104
in the fifth form, the teacher came into the classroom with
a small boy, who wore glasses and had a white band, the
designation of a new pupil, wrapped around his head. He
stood beside the teacher’s dais hanging his head to one
side like a girl, staring at a spot on the floor.
‘Boys,’ the young teacher in yellow-belted trousers
addressed us in a loud voice, his hands on his hips, ‘here’s
a new friend who has just changed schools from Tokyo.
Treat him well. Otherwise you may regret it.’
Then he wrote on the blackboard the name Minoru
Wakabayashi.
“You, Akira. Can you read this boy’s name?’
There was some commotion in the classroom, and in the
midst of it, many boys secretly looked my way. They did
this because this boy Wakabayashi had long hair just like
mine. I looked at him, the band wrapped round his head,
with a feeling compounded more or less of hostility and
jealousy. As he was pushing up his glasses which had
slipped down his nose, he suddenly stole a glance at me and
then quickly looked down again.
‘Boys, you brought your compositions today on what you
did during the summer, didn’t you?’ the teacher asked.
‘Masier Wakabayashi, sit at that desk and listen. First,
Master Toda, read yours.’
To hear him say ‘Master Wakabayashi’ was a severe
blow to my self esteem. That way of being addressed in this
class had been up to today my exclusive privilege.
I got up as ordered and began to read my composition.
I had always taken keen pleasure in this moment. To have
my own composition as the model for all and to read it
aloud before the world was a glorious sensation, but today
I felt unsettled as I read. The glasses of the new pupil
seated to one side of me got on my nerves. He came from a

105
Tokyo school. He had long hair. His collar was white, and
his clothes were fashionable.
‘I’m not going to lose out!’ I muttered to myself.
When I wrote a composition, I always made it a point
to put in two or three purple patches. For such vulgar
embellishments were exactly what the young teachers just
out of training college took the most delight in. I hadn’t
planned it in cold blood precisely, but in order to get
praise from this particular young teacher, who had read us
selections from Miekichi Suzuki’s The Red Bird. 1 had
concocted a scene meant to be evocative of naive purity
and boyish sentiment.
‘One day during the summer vacation, I heard that
Master Kimura was sick, and so I thought that I would go
to visit him.” ’ I began to read aloud in front of everyone.
So much was true enough, but the part which followed
was, characteristically, a piece of my own devising. As a
present for the sick Master Kimura, I picked out a box of
butterfly specimens, which I had gone to great efforts to
collect, and started for his house. As I was walking through
the onion fields, I was suddenly struck by misgivings about
what I had decided to do. Any number of times, I was on
the point of stopping and going back home; but finally I
came to Master Kimura’s house. Then after I had seen the
expression of joy on his face, I felt great peace of heart,
and so on.
‘All right.’ The teacher, with an expression of utter con-
tentment on his face after I had finished reading, looked
around at the faces of the boys in the class. ‘Now what was
especially good about Master Toda’s composition? What
part? Doesn’t anybody know? Anybody who knows raise
his hand.’
Two or three boys, full of self-confidence, put up their
hands. What they answered and what the teacher was

106
bursting to say turned out to be just what I had anticipated.
It was true that I had brought a butterfly collection to a
boy named Maseru Kimura, but it wasn’t for the purpose
of consoling him in sickness. It was true too that I had
walked through the onion fields filled with chirping grass-
hoppers, but I had never thought of regretting giving the
collection to Kimura. Why? Because all I had to do was
to ask my father and he would buy me three more just like
it. Kimura wasn’t especially delighted, and what I thought
at the time was how dirty farmers let their houses get, and
what I felt was a sense of superiority.
‘Akira, tell us what you think.’
‘I think that Master Toda giving that butterfly collection,
something really valuable like that, to Maseru, was very
generous.’
“Yes, yes, of course it was, but. . . . How about the good
thing about the composition?’
Seizing the chalk the teacher began to write on the
board. He wrote the three Chinese characters for conscien-
tious.
“When he was walking through the onion fields, he felt
sorry about giving the butterflies, and that’s just the way
he wrote it down. All of you sometimes put lies into your
compositions. But Master Toda here has frankly written
exactly how he felt. That’s being conscientious.’
I gazed at the three figures on the board which signified
conscientious. From a classroom somewhere, the faint
sound of an organ could be heard. The girls’ choir was
practising. My conscience wasn’t at all troubled about
having lied or having deceived the teacher and my class-
mates. This was the way I had always acted whether at
school or at home. And by so doing, I had become known
as a good boy and a first-class student.
I stole a sidelong glance at the long-haired new boy, who,

107
his glasses slipped down a bit on his nose, was staring
fixedly at the blackboard. Did he feel my look? At any rate,
he twisted his head with its white band and looked in my
direction. For a few moments we looked at each other as
though searching each other’s face. His cheeks reddened a
bit, and a thin smile played around his lips.
‘You fooled them all, eh? But I know.’ His smile seemed
to be telling me just that. ‘Walking through the onion fields,
feeling sorry about giving the butterflies — all lies. You did it
cleverly. But even though you put it over on adults, you
don’t fool a Tokyo boy.’
I looked away. I could feel the blood rushing up right
to the tips of my ears. The organ stopped. The girls’ voices
were not singing any more. The figures on the blackboard
wavered before my eyes.
From then on my self-confidence began, bit by bit, to
crumble. As long as that boy, Wakabayashi, was near me,
in the classroom or on the playground, I felt as though some
intangible humiliation were hanging over me. Of course my
marks did not go down at all because of this. But when I
was praised in front of everybody by the teacher, when my
handwriting or my pictures were put up on the wall, when
my classmates chose me as a member of the school council,
I would, with a sort of compulsion, steal a look at his eyes.
When I think now of the expression in his eyes, I know
that they were by no means the eyes of an accusing judge;
nor were they the eyes of conscience threatening punish-
ment. It was no more than a matter of two boys sharing the
same secret, in whom the same seed of evil was implanted —
each of whom perceived in the other the image of himself.
What I felt at that time were no pricks of conscience but
rather the humiliation that comes of having another in on
one’s secret.
He played with nobody at all. During break when every-

108
one else was playing ball, he stood off by himself in a corner
of the schoolyard, leaning on a seesaw and staring in my
direction. During calisthenics, too, his white-banded head
could be seen in the distance as he stood looking on. When
the boys talked to him, he gave unenthusiastic answers like,
‘I don’t care for it,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Even though his hair
was long like mine and he wore city clothes, as soon as the
other boys realized that he was neither strong nor good at
classwork, they began to make fun of his pale girlish face.
Finally, I too lost my fear of him. I forgot about that first
day’s humiliation.
Then one day he was teased by two farmers’ boys. I had
just finished my after-school duties as a monitor, and was
leaving the school building for home, when I saw two boys
called Maseru and Susumu pulling his hair over by the
sandpit. He struggled with them, but then he was hit and
knocked down and lay face up in the sand. When he tried
to get up, they knocked him down again. As I watched
this scene, it never occurred to me to try to stop them. I
didn’t pity him at all. Rather I was wishing that Maseru and
Susumu would hit him harder and pull his hair more. I
hadn’t noticed that a teacher had suddenly appeared at
one of the windows, and so I stood there and watched
the struggle for a few moments longer. But as soon as I
became aware of the teacher coming down the hallway
towards the entrance, I snapped into action at once and ran
over to the sandpit.
‘Cut it out! Cut it out!’ Fully aware of the teacher’s
presence behind me, I shouted at the top of my voice.
Maseru! You shouldn’t tease a new boy. Wait till teacher
comes!’ )
When Maseru and Susumu turned and saw the teacher
coming, their faces turned red. The boy still lay in the sand.

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 ‘Master Wakabayashi, what happened? Are you all
right?’ :
As the boy raised his face, the afternoon sun lit it and
caught the grains of sand clinging to it. His glasses, their
frames twisted, had fallen into the sand. When I went to
brush the sand off his cheek with my hand, the boy sud-
denly turned his face away and knocked aside my hand as
though it were an unclean thing.
‘What, you still want to fight? Even though I stopped it
for you?’
Without thinking I clenched my fists, but just at that
moment I realized that the teacher was now beside me.
‘Maseru again!’ I muttered as though to myself.
‘Now what’s this all about, Master Toda?’
‘Sir, Maseru, he. . . . Master Wakabayashi here... .” I
stammered, unwontedly flustered. ‘As soon as I saw it, I
rushed over to stop it.’
Then, as I regained control and began one of my usual
performances, the boy, the afternoon sun full in his face,
looked neither at the teacher nor at me but stared vacantly
in another direction. It was the first time I had seen his face
without its glasses, and the uncanny feeling surged up in me
that, no doubt about it, here was one person able to see to
the bottom of my heart.
“You did a good job, Master Toda. You two! Maseru,
Susumu! If you’d only be a little bit like your president.
You see the way he... .’
“Your president’ — that was me. While the simple-minded
teacher scolded the culprits, the boy, not saying a word,
brushed the sand from his face, picked up his canvas bag,
which was lying on the ground, and walked away, like one
in no way involved.
The following spring Wakabayashi changed schools
again. That day, just as on the first, the teacher brought

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him, a white band around his head, to the front of the room
and had him stand beside the dais. He wrote on the black-
board as he had on the first day, but this time the word he
wrote was Ashio.
“Yoshimasa! What kind of place is Ashio?’
No response from Yoshimasa.
‘Tomio?’
“Copper. It’s a place where they mine copper.’
‘That’s right. These past few months, Master
Wakabayashi became a good friend of ours, but now be-
cause of his father’s work, his family is moving to Ashio.
So today is the last day he’ll be in this class.’
On occasions like this, the teacher became all at once
the soul of gentle consideration. As for me, I thought about
this boy going to the copper town of Ashio. Bare, treeless
hills surrounded it and black smoke stacks dirtied the sky
above it. There he would stand hanging his head like a girl
looking down at the ground. Wrapped around his head,
just like today, would be a white band.
‘Master Toda, on behalf of the class, say goodbye to
Master Wakabayashi,’ said the teacher.
‘Goodbye, Master Wakabayashi.’
He didn’t say anything. But then as he was leaving the
classroom at the end of the day, as though twisting that
white head band, he suddenly turned, looking back towards
me. One last time that faint smile of mockery curled his
lips.
After that I forgot about him. At least I wanted to forget
about him. For a while the desk where he had sat stood
solitary and empty. But then the janitor took it away some-
where; and so there was nothing at all to remind me of him.

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There was no need now to steal a look at that face. Once
more I was the good boy. Once more I read my com-
positions in a loud, firm voice and received the teacher’s
praise.

The summer vacation came. One day around noon, when

the heat was at its height, I was walking alone through the
onion fields near the school. The grasshoppers were sing-
ing raspingly in the grass, and some distance down the path
a man selling ice candy was pulling his squeaking cart.
All at once the thought of the composition I had written
the summer before came back to me. I wrote that I had
brought a butterfly collection to a sick boy named Kimura.
I had written it for the express purpose of reading it aloud
in front of everybody, and I had put in those purple
patches which I had remembered from The Red Bird in
order to make the teacher happy. The only one who knew
the secret was Wakabayashi.
I turned and ran back to my house. I looked for my
best fountain pen, the one my father had brought home
from Germany for me. I put it into my pocket and ran over
to Kimura’s house.
‘Here! Take it, it’s yours.’
‘Huh?’ Kimura stood in front of the family cowshed;
and, backing slightly away, he looked craftily from my
sweat covered face to the pen.
“What do you mean “Huh?” Do you want it or not? It’s
a good pen isn’t it?’
“Well... . If that’s the way you want it. . . . I'll take it.’
‘Okay, but first listen. Don’t tell anybody I gave it to
you, see. Nobody in your family. No teacher, see. Nobody,
you understand, nobody!’
As I walked through the onion fields on my way back

112
home, I was thinking that at last I had escaped from the
one who for over six months had made me feel humiliated —
from the mockery on the face of that boy.
As though nothing had happened, the grasshoppers went
on complaining loudly in the weeds. The ice candy man had
stopped his cart and was urinating by the side of the path.
My heart was blank and empty. There was not the least
trace of exultancy. The joy and satisfaction which come
from doing a good deed — not the faintest hint of anything
like this welled up in my heart.
I am not the only one who had such thoughts in his
boyhood. You, too, were probably much the same, however
different the form your thoughts took. But to keep on think-
ing in this way, to have thoughts like those which follow —
perhaps this is something peculiar to me. Or is it that you,
too, also have experiences like these hidden within your
heart?
The school which I entered next was a middle school on
the eastern edge of Kobe. It was one of those schools which
long before had confused the aim of education with the
tangible achievement of getting a high percentage of its
pupils through the entrance examinations to the first rank
universities. And so, dressed in our distinctive khaki uni-
forms, we did nothing for five years but wrestle for all we
were worth everyday with drills and other preparatory
study for the entrance examinations. Each class was divided
into three sections, A, B, and C, according to aptitude, and
the class designation stamped on the collar insignia we
wore, marking us as irrevocably as convicts. In this school
I sank to the average level of an uncelebrated pupil of the
B group. It wasn’t that I neglected my studies to any great
extent, but rather that the boys around me, unlike the
farmers’ sons of Rokko, were all from the same sort of

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environment as mine; and like me they were able to see
through the teachers and size up those around them.
My father was a doctor. So I, too, decided to become a
doctor. I wasn’t motivated by any enthusiasm or idealism.
Rather, from childhood on, I had had the conviction that
as far as the surest way of always having enough to eat was
concerned, the best course was to become a doctor. Then,
too, as my father had told me, when it was time for my
military service examination, classification as a medical
student would be beneficial.
In my pre-medical studies, I found natural history the
most interesting subject. I spoke before about the butterfly
collection and Kimura. And even after I had entered middle
school, I got my greatest joy from collecting insects, in-
jecting them with anaesthetic, and putting them in a con-
tainer smelling of naphthalene.
The natural history teacher’s nickname was Okoze, tiger
fish, because with the jutting bones of his forehead and
cheeks he looked like a tiger fish. He stood before us in his
baggy-kneed, worn out suit; and, blinking his small eyes,
he told us how he had devoted his whole life to studying
the insects in the neighbourhood of Mt Rokko. I was a
fourth year student at this time. After he had given a lecture
describing the varieties of butterflies which were found in
the Osaka-Kobe area, he brought from the specimen room
a small glass case wrapped in a carrying cloth.
‘Now this, you see. This I caught a year ago near the
upper stream of the Ashiya River.’
Blinking proudly, he held up the glass case in his thin
hands and looked around at our faces.
I had never seen such a strange butterfly. The huge
wings taut like a curved bow, the soft, richly swelling
body —both seemed to gleam with a silvery sheen. There
were only two antennae, white as threads of raw silk. Some-

114
how the thought stirred in me of a beautiful young dancing
girl, white feathers in her hair and silver powder covering
her body, one leg lightly poised, about to leap into the air.
‘A mutation, you see, of course. But even though a
freak, beautiful. Doctor Matsuzaki of Kyoto Imperial
University said “‘Give it to me!”’ but I wouldn’t hand it
over.”
As he spoke, Okoze caressed the glass case with sad
restraint, over and over again.
All that afternoon that silver butterfly kept flashing
through my thoughts. I heard almost nothing that was said
during the classes. I felt something very much like lust. I
wanted to have the pleasure of inserting a hypodermic
needle into that soft, silver gleaming body.
As usual, once classes were over, I went out through the
gate of the schoolyard with a friend. But just at that
moment, I remembered that I had left my lunch box in the
classroom, and this with no conscious duplicity. I went
back alone to the classroom. The afternoon sun poured
over the dusty, deserted desks and benches and spilled on
to the floor. The corridors were still. My footsteps turned
towards the natural history specimen room. I pushed the
door and found that it was not locked. By some extra-
ordinary chance, frightening though it was, the circum-
stances were just right. In the naphthalene-smelling room,
the setting sun shone upon the glass shelves on which were
arranged in proper order the cases containing all sorts of
rocks, plants, and insects. I stared at the small box in the
corner wrapped in Okoze’s black carrying cloth. Quickly
I picked it up, threw the black cloth on the floor, and thrust
the case inside my canvas book bag. No one could have
seen me. I stealthily opened the door again and went out
into the hall, which just as before, was completely deserted.

115
 When I came to school the next day, the boys in my
class were talking about something in whispers.
‘Poor old Okoze. Somebody made off with his butterfly.’
‘No kidding! Somebody took it?’
I felt my face stiffen despite myself, and I looked away.
‘But they got the guy that did it.’
‘Who?’
‘Yamaguchi in C. The janitor saw him going out of the
door of the natural history room after class.’
Yamaguchi’s little monkey face flashed across my mind.
He was in the C class, the least apt group in the school.
He had won for himself the undisputed reputation of class
clown and the contemptuous popularity that went with it.
It was Yamaguchi they said.
‘They got the butterfly back then?’
‘No, no. It looks as if he lost it somewhere. What an idiot
he is!’
‘A real idiot!’
All day long I kept looking out of the classroom window
to the playground where the pathetic figure of Yamaguchi
stood. Each time I stole a look, I had to catch my breath.
There he was taking my punishment for me. Why hadn’t he
denied everything to the teachers? By afternoon it looked
as though he was worn out. He was slumping, his shoulders
sagging.
‘So what! An idiot like him. Why did he go there if he
didn’t want to steal something?’ To ease my conscience, I
put together a theory. ‘He’s an idiot. So he let himself get
caught. If he hadn’t got caught, he would’ve got away with
it like me.’
That day when I got home from school, I took the butter-
fly out of its case, and IJ started a fire in the garden. From
the wings, which flared up and burnt like paper, a trace of
silver powder brushed off and, caught in the breeze and

116
scattered, was gone in a moment. That night in bed, I felt
a sharp pain in a tooth on the right side of my jaw. The
weary figure of Yamaguchi returned again and again in my
dreams.
The next day, nursing a swollen cheek, I came to school.
In front of the gate, I saw him standing surrounded by a
number of his friends, all talking and laughing about some-
thing. At once I began to walk more slowly.
‘Boy! What a stunt to pull!’
After I had passed, I could still hear their voices behind
me. For a day at least, it looked as if Yamaguchi was going
to be treated as a little hero by C class. And he was playing
the role gladly, explaining proudly with body movements
and gestures.
‘Old Okoze! He all but broke down! Boy, it was really
funny!’
‘Hey, Yamaguchi! Whatcha do with the butterfly?’
‘The butterfly? Aw, I threw that inna ditch.’ :
Wonderfully enough, the instant I overheard these words,
all that I had suffered since the day before from the pangs
of conscience—my shortness of breath, my worries — all
vanished with dazzling rapidity. Even more strange, my
toothache itself was eased. If this was how things were, I
thought, then I hadn’t burnt up that silver butterfly after
all. So just as on the day before yesterday and all the days
previously I again sat relaxed in class, taking notes, my only
worry being that I had forgotten to bring my gym kit to
school.
No matter how you choose to record such experiences,
you can never attain objectivity. You’ll always blend in
some shade of difference. Sorting through experiences like

117
these of my childhood and early youth, one could line them
up any number of ways. All I’ve done, in fact, is to select
one or two incidents which stand out most vividly in my
mind.

Despite what I’ve written, I didn’t think of myself as a

person whose conscience had long been paralyzed. For me
the pangs of conscience, as I’ve said before, were from
childhood equivalent to the fear of disapproval in the eyes
of others—fear of the punishment which society could
bring to bear. Of course, I didn’t think I was a saint, but I
felt every friend I had was just like me under the skin. Per-
haps it was no more than a stroke of luck or an unbroken
series of them, but it so happened that nothing I ever did
seemed to merit punishment; that is, my actions never
brought down upon me the censure of society.
For example there’s a stigma attached to adultery. When
I was studying science at Naniwa High School in Osaka, I
committed this sin. But even so, the experience did not
leave scars, nor was I brought to task for it; instead, my life
went on as tranquilly as before. As a future doctor, every
day I would go to the laboratory and examine patients. I
felt neither pity nor sympathy towards them, but with
great complacency, I would accept their trust and hear
them call me ‘Doctor’.
And then, too, the time I committed adultery, I didn’t
appear to myself as a heartless betrayer. There was some
regret, some uneasiness, some self-contempt; but as soon as
I was sure that no one had ferreted out my secret, all this
soon went away. My pangs of conscience, no matter how
well I nurtured them, never lasted more than a month at
most.
The woman I committed adultery with was my cousin.

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She was five years older than J, and while she was attending
a girls’ academy, she had stayed for a while at our house.
Perhaps she remembers well the stay with my family, but
I can hardly recall the details. All that comes to mind about
her as she was then is her hair plaited in two braids which
hung down her back, her teeth which showed very white
when she smiled, and a dimple on her right cheek. She got
married as soon as she had graduated, and I didn’t see her
for a long time. Her husband had graduated from a private
university in Osaka and worked for a wholesaler in Ozu on
Lake Biwa.
But one summer when I was studying science at Naniwa
High School, it suddenly occurred to me to go and visit her
in Ozu. So I went and was sharply disillusioned. She had
turned into a woman worn down by the world. She had
been married for less than two years, but from her fatigued
expression she seemed like one utterly careworn and
oppressed by life. The little three-room house, perhaps be-
cause it was close to the lake, was filled with a dampness
which made the reek from the toilet even more oppressive.
Her husband was a man with sunken eyes, a spiritless
white-collar worker.
Since there was nothing else to do, I went swimming in
the afternoon; and in the evening, putting up as best I
could with the incense supposed to repel mosquitoes, I had
no choice but to leaf through some old magazines or to
open the textbooks I had brought along. On the other side
of the panel, I could hear my cousin and her husband
arguing in low voices. My cousin was berating her unre-
sourceful husband mercilessly.
‘Why don’t you show some spirit! If you leave that place,
can’t you get a job somewhere else?’
‘Don’t talk so loud.’ I could hear the husband’s quiet,
suppressed voice just as distinctly as hers. ‘He’ll hear us.’

119
 And I could also hear their interspersed coughs and tea-
sipping as well.
‘I’m fed up. I’m just fed up.’
After the husband had gone to work the next morning,
my cousin thumped down cross-legged on the mat, sighed
deeply, and began brushing up her straggly hair.
‘What a life! It just doesn’t pay for a girl to get married
as soon as she’s out of school.’
‘But he’s not a bad fellow really, is he?’ I replied with
less frankness than I might.
I had determined the day before to leave at the earliest
opportunity. That night my cousin’s husband had to stay
overnight at his office and did not come home. After we had
finished a melancholy supper, there was nothing more for
the two of us to do. So until about ten o’clock, I was
treated to a long recital of my cousin’s complaints. Then in
the middle of the night, I heard her crying. The night
echoed with the sound of lapping waves from the lake, and
the humidity was especially oppressive.
‘Tsuyoshi, could you come here please?’ I heard my
cousin’s somewhat strained voice. ‘I’ve got an awful
headache.’
I could never have imagined that the thing to which my
curiosity and desire had been directed for so long would
turn out to be such a dreary, empty experience.
‘Don’t tell anybody. If you promise not to, go ahead.’
So without passion, without exultation, my virginity came
to an end.
The next morning the husband, his face weary, came
home.
‘Tsuyoshi, your bus will be here soon.’ My cousin hurried
me on my way. I noticed little wrinkles of pain between
her eyebrows.
‘Jiro, Tsuyoshi’s going now.’

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 So, carrying my book bag, I left their house. The lake
water was black and dirty, with rubber shoes and fragments
of wood floating on its surface. As I walked along the shore
of the lake, I felt nothing special, neither excitement, nor
depression. I knew my cousin would never speak of what
had happened the night before. As long as she held her
husband in contempt she was never going to make any con-
fessions of wrongdoing to him. I was at ease, then, knowing
that the secret was never going to come to light.
‘Having to stay at a dirty little place like that! Last night
was just a partial compensation,’ I muttered. I felt that
there hadn’t been any profit for me 1n it at all. I wasn’t
troubled by any thoughts about being a nasty fellow who
for his whole life would live as one who had betrayed an-
other man. In fact when the husband’s sunken-eyed face
occurred to me, I felt nothing but contempt for him.
So this was my act of adultery. The cousin now is the
mother of two children. I have no idea whether or not she
suffers any pangs of conscience on account of that night.
In all probability she doesn’t. But at any rate up to this
day, she hasn’t said a word about it to her husband, so he
still knows nothing about it and thanks to his ignorance,
she holds her place today in society as a wife and mother,
as I hold mine as a simple intern.
But it isn’t just a matter of adultery, nor just a matter of
having a deficient sense of sin. My callousness extends to
another area. Today it’s probably necessary to tell you all
about this too. To put it quite bluntly, I am able to remain
quite undisturbed in the face of someone else’s terrible
suffering and death. My life as a medical student has for
some years brought me into the midst of suffering on a
large scale. I’ve seen people die in their beds, and I’ve seen
them die under a surgeon’s knife. If they turned their faces
towards me, it did them no good.

121
 ‘Doctor! Please! Give me a shot of anaesthetic.’
Patients who had been operated on for tuberculosis
would groan unremittingly; and although their families,
unable to bear it any longer, would plead with me tearfully,
I was able to shake my head. ‘No, any more anaesthetic
would be extremely dangerous,’ I would say; but what I
was actually thinking was how troublesome and incon-
siderate these patients and their families could be.
A patient would die. The parents and the sisters would
wail; and I would put on a sad, sympathetic expression.
But once out in the corridor, the spectacle would pass out of
my mind. It seems as though being in the hospital, through
the attrition of ordinary daily life as an intern, any
sympathy or pity that I might have felt towards these
people was worn down to the point where it vanished.
My lack of any urgent sense of responsibility for Mitsu
Sano — was that its cause? Mitsu was the maid who took
care of my room when [I lived in the Yakuin section of
Fukuoka. She was a girl from Saga Prefecture, in Western
Kyushu. I, a third year medical student then, rented a little
house just for the two of us. Her parents had died when
she was very young, and her family consisted only of a
sister and an older brother. One day, to my dismay, I
heard Mitsu vomiting in the washroom. What flashed
through my mind was not a feeling of concern that I had
marked this girl for life but rather that there would be hell
to pay if a baby were born.
I still remember vividly what took place that night. If
there had been the least slip-up, it would have very likely
been a matter of killing the girl, so dangerous was the
method. Under some pretext or other, I borrowed the
necessary instruments from a friend studying obstetrics,
and with my own hands, I scraped out the foetus. To see
what I was doing, I had nothing to depend upon but one

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flashlight. And so with sweat pouring off me, I pulled out
the small, bloody lump of flesh. The intention foremost in
my mind was never to let anyone know about this unhappy
miscalculation, not to have my whole life ruined because
of a girl like this. The spectacle of Mitsu suffering, as she
leaned against the wall, her face drained of blood, clenching
her teeth to bear the pain, touched me hardly at all. When
I think of it, such a clumsy and unsanitary procedure
might easily have caused peritonitis.
A month later I sent her back to her home. I moved from
the rented house in Yakuin to a boarding house where I got
my meals. I used the pretext of no longer needing a maid.
The truth of the matter was that I couldn’t bear to look
at her any more. As the third class car moved away from
the platform, Mitsu kept her small face pressed to the
glass. It was a wet, foggy day. As the train disappeared in
the mist, I must say that I breathed a sigh of relief. Then
as I reflected a bit upon Mitsu’s suffering, sitting there
with her face pressed to the window, ‘I’ve done something
bad’ was the thought that came to me. Nevertheless, the
remorse was not especially acute.
Beyond this, it would be well to write something further.
I’ve stressed this point before: I am not writing about
these experiences as one driven to do so by his conscience.
The affair of the composition, the stealing of the butterfly
and letting Yamaguchi take the blame, the adultery with my
cousin, the affair of Mitsu — all these memories are distaste-
ful to me. But looking upon them as distasteful and suffer-
ing because of them are two different matters.
Then why do I bother writing? Because I’m strangely
ill at ease. I, who fear only the eyes of others and the
punishment of society, and whose fears disappear when I
am secure from these, am now disturbed.
To say ‘disturbed’ is perhaps to exaggerate. To say ‘feel

123
strange’ would probably be nearer the mark. There is
something I would like to ask you. Aren’t you too, deep
down, unmoved by the sufferings and death of others?
Aren’t we brothers under the skin perhaps? Haven't you,
too, lived your life up to now without excessive self-
recrimination and shame? And then someday doesn’t there
stir in you, too, the thought that you’re a bit ‘strange’?
For me this happened on a day at the beginning of this
winter. From the roof of the hospital I was idly watching
the B-29s bomb Fukuoka. Suguro and I were wardens, and
our duty was to go to the roof during air raids. The attack
that day was a fierce one. In no time at all white smoke was
pouring up from every section of Fukuoka, and where it
thinned we could see the flames spurting up. One group of
B-29s circled the sky overhead for a full half-hour before
heading back out to sea. And in the west the second
formation appeared, like so many scattered poppy seeds.
And when they were gone, a third group came in. The town
hall, the prefectural government headquarters, the news-
paper offices, the department store were all, one by one,
enveloped in smoke and flames. It seemed to be happening
so close to us that we could reach out and touch it.
When sunset came, the enemy planes at last disappeared.
A frightening stillness seemed to descend. The sky was a
sullied, murky colour. If you strained your ears, you could
hear, together with the crackle of the flames, another sound,
a dull, hollow echoing sound. At first I wasn’t aware of it,
but gradually I began to notice it, a weird noise like that of
distant moaning.
‘What’s that?’ I asked Suguro.
‘The sound of buildings collapsing, isn’t it?’ Then
Suguro listened more carefully. ‘No, that’s not it. It’s wind
from the bomb blasts.’
But if it had been buildings collapsing, it would have

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been a much more violent sound; and if it had been wind
stirred by the bombs, it wasn’t likely that it would have
persisted so long after the raid. There was no doubt that it
was like the voices of a vast number of people groaning.
To a doctor such groans were familiar: resentment, sorrow,
bitterness, curses — all these elements compounded together
went into a man’s groans. And whatever the source of this
sound, the tone was just the same.
I whispered to Suguro, ‘It’s the voices of those dying
from the raid.’
Suguro didn’t answer but just stood there, blinking his
eyes.
And with that, weary of it all, I forgot about the voices.
But that night as I lay in bed, the drawn out hollow moans
came to my ears again. At first I thought it was the noise
of the waves, since the sea was not too far away, but the
clamour of the sea came from another direction.
At that instant there surged up in my mind memories of
the school at Rokko, as well as the setting sun shining into
the natural history room at my middle school, the weary
figure of Yamaguchi standing on the playground, the
morning I walked along the shore of Lake Biwa, the hot
humid night I held my cousin in my arms, the eyes of
Mitsu as she pressed her face to the glass of the window in
the third-class car. I don’t know why. I thought at that
moment that one day I would be punished. I felt with
a sharp insistence that one day I would have to undergo
retribution for what I had done so far in my life. This
was a time when each day people were being swallowed
up to perish in smoke and flames. Only I, without so much
as a scratch, went on living unpunished as though I had
never done anything wrong-—and this seemed not quite
right to me. But even this thought, which persists now, is
not one which brings any great pain 1n its wake. It seems

125
rather as something to be taken for granted, as an evident
truth. And so it’s there within me, as one and one make
two, and two and two make four.
And that’s about it. The other day when Dr Shibata and
Dr Asai broached that matter to us, I sat staring into the
blue flames of the charcoal brazier and thought:
‘After doing this will my heart trouble me with re-
criminations? Will I shudder fearfully at having become a
murderer? Killing a living human being. Having done this
most fearful of deeds, will I suffer my whole life through?’
I looked up. Both Dr Shibata and Dr Asai had smiles on
their lips. These men were, after all, no different from me.
Even when the day of judgment comes, they’ll fear only the
punishment of the world, of society. I felt a deep, unfathom-
able weariness, coming from I don’t know where. I snuffed
out the cigarette Dr Shibata had given me and got to my
feet.
“Will you take part?’ he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered, my voice no more than a mutter.

3 * Three O’clock in the Afternoon

February 25th was a cloudy day on which snow threatened

to fall at any moment. While brushing his teeth in the
washroom of his boarding house, Suguro looked covertly
at his face reflected in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot
from his cold and from lack of sleep. His face was pale and
puffy, but it was in the main the same melancholy face
that had looked back at him all these years before today.

126
 ‘It’s today. Today is the day.’ Suguro spoke as though
imparting the information to himself. But still he felt no
excitement, no profound emotion stirred in him. His mind,
strangely enough, seemed composed.
‘Good morning.’ A student who was a fellow boarder
came into the washroom dressed in work clothes. ‘It looks
as if it’s going to snow, doesn’t it?’
“Yes, it does,’ Suguro answered, plying his toothbrush.
“You’ve got volunteer work today, Takahashi?’
‘The factory work is at night. I go on in the afternoon.
And you, Doctor Suguro?’
‘I’m leaving in a minute.’
For breakfast Suguro always ate whatever was available
in the hospital dining room. And so he started for the
Medical School, walking on the path, whose surface was
crumpled and twisted with the pressure of the frost. As he
walked along, his footsteps crunching upon the half-frozen
ground, he stopped from time to time. The words that Toda
had said last night in the laboratory came back to him, ‘If
you’re thinking of refusing, then there is still time to do it.’
Right now, if he were just to turn and walk back to his
boarding house. . . . He looked behind him. That would be
the thing to do, he thought. But the path stretched before
his eyes, shining dull silver with the frost. If he followed it,
it would take him right to the main gate of the hospital.
In front of the gate he ran into Chief Nurse Oba. He
knew that she, too, was to take part in the vivisection. She
was dressed in monpe, and as she passed Suguro, she
glanced quickly at him with her expressionless Noh mask
but then turned her eyes away just as suddenly and, shoul-
ders sagging slightly, kept on walking. When he opened the
door of the laboratory, he found that Toda had arrived
already and was sitting at his desk, his back to the door. He
didn’t turn round when Suguro came in, nor did he say

127
anything to him. With an unusually grave expression, he
was writing something in a notebook. The hand of the old
alarm clock on the desk indicated nine o’clock. It was to
begin at three in the afternoon.
All through the day up to three o’clock, Toda and Suguro
hardly spoke a word. While Toda was making ward
rounds, Suguro, with nothing else to do, stayed at his desk.
On other days when he arrived at the laboratory, there were
always all sorts of odd jobs clamouring to be attended to.
Why on this day was there such a feeling of everything
being settled and in order? There was nothing to be done,
nothing to engage him at all, he felt, other than what was to
happen at three o’clock in the afternoon. So when Toda
came back to the laboratory, Suguro got up and went out
into the hall, as though he had thought of something. When
after a while he came back, he found that Toda had left
his notebook face down on the desk and gone off some-
where. They were avoiding each other and the chance of
having to exchange words.
But, finally, close to three o’clock, as Suguro was about
to go out, Toda blocked his way at the door.
“Hey, why have you been avoiding me?’
‘I haven’t been avoiding you.’
“There’s no way out. That’s for sure, isn’t it?’
He stared hard at Suguro’s face for a few moments. Then
realizing the ineptness of his own question, he gave a
twisted, bitter smile. And they both stood like this before
the door. There was an uncanny silence throughout the
hospital wing. The patients were waiting for the end of the
quiet period, no concern of theirs what was to happen
within half an hour. There was not a sound from the nurses’
room either.
However, when the two of them climbed the stairs to the
second floor operating room a bit later, the painfully

128
oppressive atmosphere was unexpectedly shattered. The
corridor, in fact, echoed with laughter. Four or five officers,
whom Suguro and Toda had never seen, were leaning
against the window ledges and puffing cigarettes while tell-
ing jokes in loud voices. It was as though they were waiting
to be served lunch at the Officers Club.
‘It’s after two-thirty, isn’t it? And the prisoners aren’t
here yet.’
The chubby little medical officer who had been in Dr
Shibata’s room that day clucked his tongue, as he opened
his camera case.
‘According to the order they were to be taken from the
compound thirty minutes before. So they ought to be here
before long,’ an officer sporting an under-developed mous-
tache answered, consulting his watch.
‘I think I’m going to get some good pictures today,’
said the medical officer, spitting on the floor and rubbing
the spot with his boot.
“You really know how to handle one of those, don’t you,
Sir? That’s a fine camera,’ said the officer with the mous-
tache, ingratiating himself as best he might.
‘Oh, the camera. It’s German made. After this there’s
going to be a farewell party for Lieutenant Omori in the
hospital dining room. They say the experiment is going to
be over at five o’clock. So we made it five-thirty.’
‘How about the food?’
‘Well whatever else, thanks to the prisoners, we’ll be able
to dine on a bit of American liver.’
With not a glance in the direction of Toda and Suguro,
the officers laughed uproariously. The door of the operat-
ing theatre stood open, but the Old Man and Doctor
Shibata and Asai were not there yet.
‘You know in China. . . .” The medical officer, scratching
his buttock, began a story. ‘No joke. I heard in my outfit

129
there was a bunch who opened up a chink and tried his
liver.’
‘They say it goes down surprisingly well,’ said the officer
with the moustache, his face aglow with knowing com-
placency.
‘Well, what do you say? Let’s give it a try at dinner
today!’
At that moment Asai came slowly down the corridor,
his rimless glasses catching the light as always. With the
officers he turned on his customary charm.
‘The prisoners have just come, gentlemen.’ His feminine
tones assured them that all was well.
‘Yeah, but Shibata, where is Shibata?’
‘He’ll be here in a moment. No need for hurry, gentle-
men.’
With that, he gestured with both hands to Suguro and
Toda who were leaning against the wall as though to gain
support against the oppression weighing upon them.
‘Come here a minute, both of you.’
After he had called them into the operating theatre, he
shut the door.
‘They had to come, that bunch! The patients are going
to sense that something is up. But anyway, first of all, the
prisoners haven’t been warned at all about what’s going
to happen. They think they were brought here to get a
medical check up before being sent to the camp at Oita.’
After he said this, his thin voice betraying his uneasiness,
he took an ether container from the shelf. ‘I want you to
take care of the anaesthetic. O.K.? Today there are two
prisoners. One of them has been wounded in the shoulder.
With him, there'll be no trouble. We’re giving him an
anaesthetic in order to treat him. But it’ll be awkward if
we do anything to alarm the other one. So when they come,
I'll pretend that I’m giving them an examination, you see.

130
Finally, I'll ask them to lie down on the table so that I can
check their hearts.’
“We'll have to strap them down, won’t we? Otherwise
during the initial anaesthetic period, they’re liable to start
resisting.’
‘Of course, of course. Suguro, you’re familiar too, aren’t
you, with the anaesthetic stages?’
“Yes, Doctor.’
There were three stages before the patient was fully
anaesthetized. Furthermore, since the patient was easily
roused from this kind of anaesthetic, it was essential
throughout the operation to keep a careful watch.
This was the task entrusted to Suguro and Toda.
‘The Old Man and Doctor Shibata?’
‘They are putting on their surgical gowns in the room
below. Once the anaesthetic takes effect, I’ll call them. If
everybody is here from the beginning, you see, the prisoners
are liable to get alarmed.’
As he listened, Suguro had the impression that there was
nothing unusual about the operation he was about to take
part in. It was only the word prisoner that jolted him out of
that illusion. He found himself oppressed by the realization
that he had at last come to the point where it was irre-
vocably a matter of going ahead or turning aside.
‘We are about to kill a man.’ All at once a dark wave of
fear and dismay began to flood through him. He grasped the
handle of the door of the operating theatre. He could hear
the echoing laughter of the officers on the other side. Their
laughing voices seemed to thud against Suguro’s heart,
to block off his way of escape, a massive, thick wall in his
path. Soon the stream of water, gleaming in the light from
the ceiling lamp, would begin to flow across the floor of
the operating theatre, with a light trickle, ready to wash
away the patient’s blood. Asai and Toda took off their

131
jackets and shoes in silence and began to put on their
surgical gowns and wooden sandals.
The door opened and Chief Nurse Oba, her Noh mask
expression fixed as always, came in with a nurse called
Ueda. The women too had a sombre air as they opened the
cabinets and began to lay out the scalpels, scissors, oiled
paper, and absorbent cotton, on top of the glass table next
to the operating table. No one said a word. All that could
be heard now were the voices of the officers talking in the
corridor and the trickle of the water, which had just begun.
Suguro wondered why, besides Chief Nurse Oba, the
nurse Ueda was taking part in the vivisection. She had not
been at the hospital long, and Suguro had seldom had any-
thing to do with her while making his rounds; but he had
a distinct impression of her as a woman of dark mood,
forever staring at something far in the distance.
Suddenly the laughter in the corridor stopped. Suguro
looked to one side at Toda, his eyes fearful. Toda was
Toda, and though his expression was shot through with
pain for an instant, he gave a mocking smile as though in
challenge.
The door of the operating theatre opened, and the officer
with the under-developed moustache, who had been
officiously consulting his watch before, poked his shaven
head into the room.
‘Is everything ready here?’
‘Bring one in please,’ Asai answered in a strained voice.
‘How many are there? Are there two?’
“Two.”
Suguro sagged back against the wall. And then he saw a
tall, thin prisoner come into the room as though he had
been pushed. Just like the other prisoners Suguro had seen
outside the entrance of Second Surgery, this man was
dressed in a loose, ill-fitting green fatigue uniform. When

132
he looked around at Suguro and the others in their surgical
gowns, he smiled in a flustered way. Then he gazed at the
white walls of the room.
‘Sit here.’ Addressing him in English, Asai pointed to a
chair; and the man, awkwardly bending his long legs, sat
down trustingly.
Suguro had seen many movies starring Gary Cooper.
This American prisoner —his face, his way of moving—
somehow resembled the actor. When Chief Nurse Oba had
taken off his jacket, Suguro saw that he was wearing a torn,
Japanese made vest. Through the rips in his vest, the thick,
chestnut coloured hair of his chest was visible. When Dr
Asai reached for his stethoscope, the prisoner shut his eyes
as though dismayed, but then suddenly he became aware of
the odour which floated through the room.
‘Say, that’s ether, isn’t it?’ he exclaimed.
‘That’s right. It’s to cure you.’ As well it might, Asai’s
voice shook slightly, and his hand trembled as it held the
stethoscope.
The patient seemed to become more relaxed as the
examination progressed and followed all Asai’s directions
obediently. It was evident from his gentle blue eyes and the
frequency of his friendly smile, that he had not the slightest
misgivings about Suguro and the others. It seemed that the
confidence that men have in doctors as a profession was
quite enough to put the prisoner at ease. While giving him
the explanation about the heart examination, Asai indi-
cated the operating table, and the prisoner readily lay down
upon it.
‘The straps?’ Toda quickly asked.
‘In a minute, in a minute,’ Asai answered keeping his
voice low. ‘If you do it now, it will seem funny. When the
second stage comes or if there are any spasms, then do it
right away.’

133
 ‘The medical officers have asked if it’s all right if they
come in,’ said Chief Nurse Oba, putting her head in from
the anteroom.
‘No, not yet. I'll let you know later. Suguro, have the
anaesthetic mask ready.’
‘No, I can’t, Doctor Asai.” Suguro’s voice was almost
breaking. ‘Let me go. I want to get out.’
Asai, over his rimless glasses, looked up searchingly, but
he said nothing.
‘T’ll do it, Doctor Asai.’ Taking Suguro’s place, Toda put
layers of oiled paper and cotton on the mask which lay on
a wire screen.
When he saw this, the prisoner looked as though he were
about to ask something, but Dr Asai quickly put on a smile
and gestured with his hand. Then he put the mask over the
prisoner’s face. The liquid ether began to drip upon it. The
prisoner moved his head from side to side as though trying
to dislodge the mask.
‘Fasten the straps! The straps!’
The two nurses, bending over, fastened the straps of the
operating table to the prisoner’s legs and body.
‘First stage,’ Nurse Ueda whispered, looking at the dial.
During this stage a patient, feeling his consciousness slip-
ping away, struggles instinctively.
‘Stop the ether flow,’ ordered Asai, pressing the hand
of the prisoner.
A low animal-like groan began to come from beneath
the mask. It was the second stage of the anaesthetic. During
this stage, some patients roar angrily or sing. But this
prisoner, in a voice like that of a dog howling far off, did
nothing but utter drawn out, intermittent groans.
‘Ueda, bring the stethoscope.’
Taking the stethoscope from Nurse Ueda, Asai hurriedly
placed it upon the prisoner’s hairy chest.

134
 ‘Ueda, start the ether again.’
‘All right, Doctor.’
‘The pulse is slower.’
Asai released the prisoner’s hands and they flopped back
on to the operating table on either side of him. Then Asai
began to examine his eyes with a flashlight the chief nurse
had given him.
‘No reflex in the cornea. All right, that does it. I'll go and
call the Old Man and Dr Shibata.’ Asai took away his
stethoscope and put it into the pocket of his gown. ‘Stop
the ether for now. If you give too much, he’ll die, and that
would be awkward. Miss Oba, get all the instruments ready
please.’
Casting a cold glance in Suguro’s direction, he went out
of the operating theatre. The two nurses went back to the
anteroom and did as Asai had directed. The bluish shine
from the ceiling lamp was reflected from the walls. As
Suguro leaned against the wall, the transparent stream of
water flowed relentlessly around his sandals. Toda stood
by himself beside the prisoner on the operating table.
‘Come over here.’ Toda suddenly spoke in a low voice.
“You won’t come and help?’
‘It’s no use, no use at all. I can’t,” Suguro muttered.
‘I... I should have refused before.’
‘You’re a fool. And what do you have to say for your-
self?’ Toda turned, glaring at Suguro. ‘If it were a matter of
refusing, yesterday or even this morning would have been
time enough. But now, having come this far, you’re already
more than half way, Suguro.’
‘Half way? What do you mean, half way?’
‘You’re already tarred with the same brush as the rest of
us.” Toda spoke quietly. ‘From now on, there’s no way out,
none at all.’

133
‘The Lord Buddha deigned one day .. . to visit one of
his disciples who was sick. The disciple was suffering
grievously because he was unable to pass his urine or
faeces. The Lord Buddha hospitably visited him. ‘Did you,’
he asked, ‘when you were in good health, watch beside the
beds of your friends who were sick? Know that you are
suffering so terribly all by yourself because you failed to
care for others before. And now do you feel how sharp the
pain is? When you cross to the other world, you will be
tortured with pains that your heart will not be able to
bear.’ ”’’
Holding the dog-eared pages close to her face, Mitsu Abé
read for the old man in the next bed, who was a charity
patient. The bed was the same one in which the old lady
had lain when she died a week before, on the night follow-
ing the air raid. It was hardly past four; yet the ward was
gloomy. Mitsu read as best she could by the faint light
which came in through the windows.
‘Doctor Suguro won’t do his ward round today. There’s
an operation or something.’ She laid the book down and
spoke to the old man. ‘Look, you ought to talk to the
Doctor too, see. He did an awful lot of good for the woman
who was in that bed before.’
The old man, feeling around in the bed for his teacup,
listened like a child.
‘She got to feeling pretty weak, you see, before her
operation. That night after that big air raid, she died. And
she wanted so much to live to see that boy of hers again
that was off in the War somewhere.’
‘That’s how it is with us.’ The old man, gripping his cup
with both hands, answered, listlessly. ‘We can’t do nothing
— it’s all the same.’

136
 Mitsu got out of bed and went over to the window. The
wind was blowing hard in the garden, but the old workman
in the boots was still at it with his shovel, digging into the
black soil.
‘My goodness, how long is this War going to go on?’
Heaving a sigh, Mitsu muttered to no one at all: ‘When
will it be over?’

137
 ae agae, ee

Seren
| ds
iy: Us
Bad a oe
 PART THREE

Before Dawn Breaks

 1
The Old Man and Dr Shibata appeared at three o’clock,
dressed in surgical gowns, their faces half-hidden by their
masks. They were surrounded by the officers. The Old
Man stopped for an instant at the threshold and glanced at
Suguro, who was still leaning against the wall on the verge
of weeping. Then he quickly looked away and walked in.
Behind him, with all the power of a surging avalanche,
came the officers; but even they, when they caught sight of
the prisoner lying face up on the operating table, hesitated
for an instant.
‘Go ahead, gentlemen. Move a little further up please.’
Behind them Asai smiled just a trifle ironically. ‘As military
gentlemen, you’re surely used to the sight of bodies.’
After they did as he suggested, the officer with the under-
developed moustache, still intent upon currying favour
asked, ‘Hey, you, is it all right to take pictures during the
operation?’
‘Of course, of course. We, too, are going to take some.
Someone is coming from Second Surgery with an eight
millimeter movie camera. The experiment is certainly an
important one.’
‘What’s today?’ Breaking in, the short fat medical officer
who had left the ‘bounty’ in Dr Shibata’s room made a
gesture with his finger on his shaven head. ‘Are you going
to cut here?’
‘No, no lobotomy. Tomorrow Doctor Kando and Doctor
Arajima are going to perform that sort of experiment on
another prisoner.’

141
 ‘Then with you it’s just the lung?’
‘Yes, sir. I know there’s no need to explain anything to
you as a medical officer, but for the guidance of you other
gentlemen, who are so kind as to take part today, Til
explain briefly what we are going to do. The experiment
to be carried out on today’s prisoner is a simple one. It is
a matter of investigating to what degree it is possible to
cut away the lung in tuberculosis surgery. That is to say,
the problem of how far one may cut a man’s lung without
killing him is one of long duration in the treatment of tuber-
culosis and also has a bearing upon the practice of medicine
in wartime. And so today, therefore, we intend to cut away
completely one of this prisoner’s lungs and the upper
section of the other. That is, to put it into a nutshell... .’
While Asai’s pleasant voice was echoing from the walls
of the operating room, the Old Man stood slightly bent,
staring down at the water running across the floor. His
slumped shoulders had a strange, painfully sad look about
them. Only Chief Nurse Oba kept an expressionless face.
She took some mercurochrome over to the operating table
and began to paint the side of the prisoner. The liquid
stained red his strong neck and chest and the breast covered
with thick chestnut-coloured hair. And further down, his
white stomach, still untouched by the liquid, softly rose
and fell. As Toda looked at that broad, white stomach, with
the fine golden hair growing on it, he seemed for the first
time to become aware that this was a white man, an
American soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese.
‘The bastard’s sleeping peacefully, isn’t he?’ laughed one
of the officers in the rear, perhaps with the intention of
dissipating the gathering tension. ‘Little does he know he’ll
be done for in half an hour.’
The words ‘done for’ reverberated hollowly inside Toda.
The realization that this was an act of murder had not yet

142
taken form in his mind. To strip a person of his clothes, lay
him on an operating table, give him ether— all this he had
done to patients countless times, from his student days up
to the present. Today it was the same. In a moment the
Old Man would in a low voice call for the formal bow to
the patient, and the operation would begin. There would be
the metallic clicking noise of the scissors and tweezers and
the dry crackling sound which accompanied the electric
scalpel, and the Old Man would begin to cut in a line
describing an ellipse on that chest covered with chestnut
hair. What was the difference between this and other
operations? The brilliant bluish white glare from the ceiling
lamp and the white figures in surgical gowns moving slowly
about in it with the gentle rhythm of floating seaweed had
become familiar to him over the years. The figure of the
prisoner lying with his face towards the ceiling differed
in no way from that of ordinary patients. The prickly
sensation of being about to murder someone did not stir at
all in Toda. He felt that all would be brought automatically
to a proper conclusion. With a certain sluggishness, he
inserted the long, thin catheter tube into the prisoner’s
nostrils. The nose was long with a reddish tip, the nose of
a white man. All Toda had to do was to adjust the nozzle of
the oxygen machine to complete the preparations. The ether
seemed to have taken full effect. The prisoner was sleeping,
a slight snore coming through the tube. Thick leather straps
firmly bound his legs in the green fatigue trousers and both
his hands. Oblivious to the gaze of those around him, he
faced upwards towards the ceiling. This expression was so
relaxed that it looked almost as though a faint smile were
playing about his lips.
‘We should get started, eh, Doctor?’ Dr Shibata asked
the Old Man after checking the blood pressure gauge.

143
 The Old Man, who had been staring at the floor, gave a
start as he heard the question.
‘We're going to get started.’ Asai spoke sharply. The
atmosphere was so hushed that the sound of swallowing
which followed could be heard distinctly.
‘The vivisection is beginning at 3.08 pm. Toda, put that
in the record.’
The Old Man took the electric scalpel in his hand and
bent over the prisoner. Toda could hear the dull whir of
the movie camera behind him. Dr Arajima of Second
Surgery had started to record the vivisection process. At the
same moment with startling abruptness, a chorus of throat
clearing coughs and snuffles arose from the officers.
As he looked at the blood pressure gauge, Toda felt a
strange thought pressing in upon him, ‘I’m going to be in
this film too. Think of it! I’ve just checked the gauge. My
head moved. The movement of a person, of me, of me
engaged in the murder of a human being. My actions are
going on to that film down to the last detail. The actions of
a murderer. Afterwards, when the film is shown, will it
rouse any special emotions in me?’
Toda felt an unaccountable disillusionment and fatigue.
He had expected this moment, but he had hoped for a more
lively fear, a keener heartache, a violent self-accusation.
But the sound of the water flowing over the floor, the
crackling echo of the electric scalpel — these were merely
dull and monotonous and strangely sad. There was lacking
even the usual atmosphere of tense concern—the worry
about the patient being threatened with shock, his pulse
becoming too rapid, his breathing changing abruptly. Every-
one knew that this man was to die. There was no reason at
all to prolong his life. So the movements of the Old Man
holding the electric scalpel, of Asai, who assisted him, of
Shibata, who stood by, of Chief Nurse Oba, who took care

144
of the instruments and gauze -all of them had a certain
perfunctory and sluggish quality.
The whirring of the eight millimeter camera went on as
before, blending with the noise of the electric scalpel and of
the scissors.
“What is Arajima thinking as he takes his pictures?’ Toda
wondered. ‘Where did I hear that sound before? That’s it!
The sound of cicadas. I heard it the time I went to my
cousin’s house in Ozu, when I was going to summer school
at Naniwa. Why am I thinking now of the damned foolish
thing I did then?’
He turned his head and stole a giance at the officers
gathered behind him. On the edge of the group, one young
officer with glasses had turned his head away, his face like
wax. It seemed that the first graphic sight of the innards
of a living man was a bit more than he had bargained for.
But when he became aware of Toda’s glance, he straight-
ened up and frowned.
Beside him, the officer with the moustache stood with his
mouth foolishly agape and his face glowing with sweat. He
stood behind the fat medical officer, craning his neck to
peer over his head and licking his lips again and again, as
though intent on missing not a moment of the spectacle
unfolding before him.
‘Silly bastards,’ muttered Toda to himself. “What silly
bastards!’
But why, and what he himself was, “Toda did not have
sufficient energy to speculate upon. To think at all required
too much effort. The warmth of the operating theatre was
enough in itself to make one feel faint. The sultry air
oppressed him and Toda found himself unable to concen-
trate upon what he was to do.
The prisoner on the table began to cough violently. The
secretion was flowing into his bronchial tubes. Asai reached

145
for the anaesthetic mask, and Toda heard him question the
Old Man.
‘Should I use cocaine?’
‘No need.’ Suddenly the Old Man straightened up from
the operating table and spoke in a voice choked with anger,
‘He’s no patient.”
His furious tone disconcerted everyone, and the silence
of the operating theatre deepened. Only the dull, drawn out
whir of the camera continued unabated.
In front of him, as he leaned against the wall, Suguro saw
the backs of the officers: From time to time they would clear
their throats or shuffle their feet as they felt the pinch of
numbness. Often at such times, a space would open briefly
between two of them, and Suguro would catch a fleeting
glimpse of the Old Man and Dr Shibata bent over the
operating table and of the patient in his green fatigue
trousers bound to the table by leather straps.
‘Scalpel.’
‘Gauze.’
‘Scalpel.’
Dr Shibata directed Chief Nurse Oba in a hoarse voice.
‘Next,’ Suguro thought, ‘it’ll be the raspatory and cutting
the rib bone.’
As an intern, he could tell just from Dr Shibata’s com-
mands where the Old Man was cutting on the prisoner’s
body and could picture exactly what was occurring.
Suguro shut his eyes. He shut his eyes and tried to think
that he was not really involved in a vivisection being per-
formed on a prisoner but that this was a routine operation
performed on a regular patient. He tried to force his
imagination: ‘Let’s help the patient. Let’s get busy. Give
a camphor shot. Supply some fresh blood.’ His mind
worked. “There’s Oba’s footsteps. She’s going to give the
patient some oxygen.’

146
 But then there was the dull sound of a rib bone snapping
and, a moment later, the lighter sound of it dropping into
the receptacle echoing from the walls of the operating
theatre. The ether had been cut off perhaps. The prisoner
suddenly let out a low pitched groan.
The pounding in Suguro’s chest, the whispering within
him increased in tempo: ‘To help, to help!’
Suddenly the scene of Mrs Tabé’s operation surged up in
his mind. That morning all those standing around the table
on which her body lay, ripped and torn like a pomegranate,
drew back towards the wall, their faces taut. The only
sound then had been the faint trickle of the stream of water
flowing over the floor under the glare of the ceiling lamp. It
had been Chief Nurse Oba who had brought the dead
body, as though still alive, back to the room.
“The operation was successful.’ The feigned smile on his
face, Dr Asai had spoken to the mother and sister in a dark
corner of the corridor.
‘Not to help?’
Suguro suddenly felt a rush of shameful futility blocking
his chest with such intensity that it choked his breathing.
What he could do would be to lift his hands and knock
aside the shoulders of the officers lined up before him. He
could snatch the raspatory from the Old Man’s hand. But
when he looked he saw the stern shoulders of the officers
packed together in a broad mass. Hanging at their sides,
their swords shone with a leaden dullness. One young
officer happened to turn and, seeing Suguro standing be-
hind them dressed in a surgical gown, looked at him sus-
piciously. The look became an angry, accusing one.
‘What’s the matter with you, afraid?’ those eyes asked.
‘How can a young Japanese be so weak?’
He writhed under the officer’s stare, aware of what he
seemed: a doctor unable to carry out his duties — and

147
aware too of what he really was: a spineless coward who
had been unable to refuse Dr Shibata.
‘I can’t do anything at all,’ he groaned, looking towards
the figure in green fatigue trousers on the operating table.
‘I can’t do anything for you.’
At that moment Asai’s voice echoed sharply: “The
prisoner’s left lung has been removed entirely. Now the
excision of the upper section of the right lung is in process.
In experiments performed up to now, when half of both
lungs together have been excised, the result has been
instant death.’
Then the officers’ boots began to make an unpleasant
squeaking sound. At some time or other, the noise made by
Arajima’s camera had stopped, and now the only sound
that spread through the room was that of the light flow oi
water.
‘Forty . . . thirty-five . . . thirty.’ Toda was reading the
blood pressure gauge. “Thirty . . . twenty-five ...
twenty ... fifteen . . . ten. That’s it. It’s over.’
After he had relayed this information to the Old Man and
Dr Shibata as his job demanded, Toda slowly straightened
up. For a few moments the silence continued; but at last,
like a dam bursting, the officers began to cough and scrape
their boots.
‘So it’s done!’ The fat medical officer standing in the
front row wiped the sweat from his head with a handker-
chief. “What was the time?’
‘4:28,’ Asai answered. ‘The operation began at 3:08;
therefore the time taken was one hour and twenty minutes.’
The Old Man looked down at the corpse, not saying a
word. His gloved hands, gleaming with smeared blood
under the ceiling light, still tightly gripped the scalpel. As
though to thrust him out of the way, Chief Nurse Oba
pushed herself between him and the table and covered the

148
 corpse with a white sheet. Staggering slightly, the Old Man
retreated two or three steps, but he still just stood there,
without making a move.
When the officers had opened the door of the operating
theatre and gone out into the corridor, the weak afternoon
sun was shining through the windows. Looking out of a
window, the officers stood for a time rubbing their eyes,
twisting their necks with annoyed expressions, massaging
their shoulders, and affecting wide yawns.
‘Nothing special at all,’ one suddenly offered in a voice
which, as he had intended, echoed loudly from the walls.
‘Lieutenant Murai, your face—you look as if you’ve
just had a woman!’
The speaker pointed a finger at the eyes of his com-
panion, his taunting voice not without a touch of wonder.
“Your eyes are all red.’
But it was not just he whose eyes were red. Actually, all
of them had faces flushed with blood and covered with
sweat — the sort of look which follows upon sexual
consummation.
‘It’s the truth. A face just as if you’d slept with a woman.’
‘Is that so? Well, I’ve got an awful headache too.’
‘Lieutenant Omori’s farewell party’s at five-thirty. Let’s
get some fresh air.’
Their footsteps clattered noisily as the officers went down
the staircase.
When they had gone, Chief Nurse Oba cautiously put her
head out into the corridor. When she had made sure that
no one was around, she and Miss Ueda wheeled out the
trolley bearing the thing covered with the white sheet.
Suguro, who had come into the anteroom, watched them as
he supported himself against the wall. The squeaking of
the trolley seemed to exert a fascination upon him. The
sound would stop and then recur from time to time until

149
it ceased completely after the trolley had disappeared down
the long, deserted corridor, whose floor shone dully in the
pale sunlight.
Where he should go he didn’t know. What he should do,
he didn’t know. The Old Man, Asai, Shibata and Toda
were still in the operating theatre, but Suguro could not go
back in there.
‘Killed him . . . killed him. . . killed him . . . killed
him. . . .” In his ears someone’s voice was chanting with a
formless rhythm.
‘I didn’t do anything
at all.” Suguro made an effort to
shut out the voice. ‘I didn’t do anything at all.’ But this
plea seemed to reverberate within him, churning itself into
a whirlpool devoid of meaning.
‘That’s it! You’ve hit it there! You didn’t do anything at
all. The time the old lady died, this time too — you didn’t
do anything at all. You’re always there. You’re always
there — not doing anything at all!’
As he walked down the staircase, his footsteps sounding
in his ears, the thought came to him that just two hours be-
fore, the American soldier, suspecting nothing at all, had
climbed these same stairs. At this he saw clearly once more
the figure of the American prisoner with a desperate expres-
sion on his face. Then there was the abrupt image of Chief
Nurse Oba roughly throwing a sheet over the slashed,
bloody flesh.
He felt his throat violently constricted by the urge to
vomit. He leaned against the window and told himself that
he should have become used to seeing bloody flesh, con-
sidering his experience which stretched back to the begin-
ning of medical school. But, still, the colour of that blood,
the colour of that flesh differed from what he had seen in all
previous operations over that long period. But was it the
colour of the flesh and blood that provoked the nausea in

150
him, or was it the thought of the ugly brutality of Chief
Nurse Oba’s action?
Outside the window, the wires leading from a trans-
mission station hummed in the cold afternoon air. Two or
three birds flew across the overcast winter sky. Smoke
climbed slowly from the stack of the sterilization unit.
From the distant back entrance a work-party of nurses
were returning, dragging their shovels and carrying their
baskets wearily. Everything was just as yesterday, just as
the day before, the ordinary scene about the hospital on a
winter’s evening. Leaning on the window sill, he waited
for a second surge of nausea to pass. Then, with dragging
footsteps, he went down the staircase.
He didn’t see the officers in the garden. The nurses who
had returned by the rear gate had laid their baskets on the
lawn and now, wiping their faces with towels, were coming
in his direction.
Instinctively he tried to avert his face and hurry past
them as though he were fleeing. But one of them, who had
sat down on a rock to rest, called out cheerfully to him:
‘Doctor, won’t the chief surgeon make his ward rounds
today either?’
Suguro didn’t answer. ‘It’s nothing,’ he thought. ‘There’s
nothing to worry about. These nurses don’t know anything.
Why am I trying to hide?’
‘Doctor, are you going to come?’
“Yes, I’ll be there,’ he finally was able to say.
‘She’s right. All day the thought of the ward rounds
never crossed my mind at all. But right now if I go into
the wards, what then? To talk to the patients as though
nothing at all had happened, to take X-rays, to fill out
examination charts. . . . Tomorrow, again Ill live my
intern’s life. With the Old Man, with Dr Shibata, with Dr
Asai, and Toda. Will I be able to make the rounds just as

151
before? Will I examine the outgoing patients? Is all this
possible? Will the pleasant face of that blond-haired
prisoner never stare up at me out of their faces? I can’t
do it. I can’t forget.’
He looked down at the ground, and in some grey furrows
cut in the earth he saw the severed roots of the poplar. It
had been cut down at last, the job that had taken the old
workman so long to accomplish was finished. Suguro gazed
vacantly at the stumps. Suddenly he thought of the old
lady —the old lady carried out beneath the falling rain
inside a wooden crate. The poplar tree was gone. The old
lady too was gone.
‘I’m not going back to the laboratory. I’m quitting.’ Then
he whispered to himself, ‘You’ve ruined your life.’
But was it only him? Couldn’t the same be said about
everyone? He didn’t know.

2
When Toda, the last to leave, was coming out of the
operating theatre Asai was waiting in the corridor, holding
a receptacle of the kind used during operations. It was
wrapped in gauze. He was smiling.
“Toda, wait a minute. Would you bring this up to the
conference room for me?’
“Yes, Doctor.’
“The military gentlemen are having a farewell party up
there.’
“What is this?’

152
 ‘Something Medical Officer Tanaka ordered. It’s the
prisoner’s liver.’
Asai lifted the gauze and handed the container to Toda.
A dark brown mass of flesh was soaking in a thick liquid
stained dark red with blood.
‘What’s the idea?’
‘It can be pickled in alcohol, maybe, and make a good
souvenir,’ Asai answered in a brisk tone. His voice was
just as composed as it was at other times, as when, after
finishing an autopsy or something similar, he turned to the
next order of business.
As Toda dropped his gaze to the slippery mass of flesh,
he could clearly visualize the broad white stomach of the
prisoner, as he lay face up on the operating table. The
stomach which had glistened with an almost glaring
whiteness when Chief Nurse Oba was applying the mer-
curochrome. He was gone now. He wasn’t anywhere at all.
Not anywhere at all —but here in this heavy lump soaking
in this clogged, dark red liquid. Was that the truth of it?
He felt a weird sensation pressing upon him, as though
all this were a dream. That broad white stomach, this dull
brown chunk of flesh —he could not reconcile them; and
his incomprehension held him for a few moments in a sort
of stupor.
‘Not much to it, is there?’ Asai whispered softly all at
once. ‘We’ve all got used to looking at corpses, but senti-
mentality is never too far off.’
Quietly, Toda raised his eyes and stole a look at Asai’s
face. The rimless glasses had slipped down his nose. No-
thing had altered in it. It was the face of the man who had
a special talent for tossing sweet, comforting words to
patients during ward rounds. The face of the man who
would appear in the laboratory whistling and who would
cluck his tongue as he ran through the examination charts.

153
There was no trace upon it of his having killed a man just
a short time before.
‘And my face is the same.’ The thought was painful to
Toda. ‘Nothing is changed. My heart is tranquil. The pangs
of conscience, the stabs of guilt that I’ve waited for so long
haven’t come at all. No dread at having torn away some-
one’s life. Why not? Why is my heart so devoid of life?’
‘Toda.’ Asai, the enigmatic smile still on his face, pressed
the other’s arm, which was holding the receptacle. “There’s
something I’ve got to talk to you about. Afterwards, have
you thought about staying on here at the University?’
‘At the University?’
“Yes, as an assistant. Doctor Shibata said something
about it recently. So if you happen to be willing. . . .’
‘Well, I don’t know. There are other people better
qualified than I,’ Toda answered, looking down, sensing
that there was something behind Asai’s words. ‘There’s
Suguro.’
‘No, not Suguro. He’s hopeless. Toda, about him. Today,
just at the critical time, where did he go to?’
‘He was there in the operating theatre. I’m sure he was
watching from the back.’
“He won’t say anything, that fellow, I hope.’ All at once
Asai’s face came very close, an uneasy expression on it. ‘If
there is the least chance of anything leaking out... .”
‘Don’t worry about him. He just can’t take it, that’s all.’
‘If that’s so, I feel better. Well, anyway, think over what
I said, will you? The Old Man too —he doesn’t have what
it takes any more. From now on, Dr Shibata and I together
plan to get First Surgery on its feet again. If you’d like to
join in, such a matter as your recommendation as assistant
will be a mere trifle. Then too — something to bear in mind —
with regard to today’s matter: from now on we are going

154
to have to stick close together. We’re all in just as deep,
you see.’
When Asai had disappeared down the deserted corridor,
Toda, still holding the container, felt a deep, all pervading
fatigue.
***To stick close together,’’ he says. He wants to make
use of the accomplice spirit to draw me in and prevent
any whisper of the affair leaking out. As though I couldn’t
see what he’s up to: dangling attractive bait in front of me
in order to make his own position solid in First Surgery.
That bastard Asai. What does he think about the chunk of
flesh here, I wonder?’
The prisoner who had been alive just two hours ago, a
tense look in his brown eyes —had Asai already forgotten
all about his death? Immediately after stepping out of the
operating theatre, he was quite capable of neatly tying up
every loose end to secure his own future. Toda marvelled at
this remarkable ability to sort things out so coolly.
‘But what do I think, me, who am holding this right
now, this bucket with the flesh in it? This drab brown lump
pickled in dark red liquid. What I’m afraid of isn’t this.
My heart is so odd that I feel nothing, no pain at all when
I look at something that was part of a man whom I mur-
dered.’
He pushed open the thick, heavy door of the conference
room with his shoulder. Three or four officers turned in his
direction. They had removed their jackets and were sitting
beside a table upon which saké cups and other tableware
had been laid out, warming their hands over a charcoal
brazier.
‘Is Medical Officer Tanaka here?’
‘He’ll be here soon. What do you want?’
‘It’s something which he ordered.’
‘Thanks.’
155
 One officer got up. He was the man whose face had
been as pale as wax throughout the operation. When he had
pulled aside the gauze and looked inside, his face became
painfully contorted.
‘What is it, Lieutenant Ebara?’
‘It’s the prisoner’s liver,’ said Toda. And having duly
fulfilled his assigned task, he turned and walked out of the
silent room.
After he shut the door of the conference room, the floor
of the long corridor, with its dull leaden shine, stretched out
before Toda. There was no one to be seen. If he were to
walk back straight along this corridor, he would be at the
door of the operating theatre once again. As he thought
about this, Toda felt churning within him a desire to go
back and look at that room, an excitement which he found
hard to control.
‘Just once more. I want to see what will happen if I go
back there after that.’
The last light of late afternoon gradually faded from the
windows. It was quiet. From the conference room behind
him, the low sound of voices could be heard every now and
then through the door.
After descending one or two steps of the staircase, he
stopped. Then he turned around abruptly and with the walls
of the corridor echoing his footsteps, he walked in the
direction of the operating theatre.
The door stood open a little. When he pushed it, it gave
with a dull squeak. The faint smell of ether came to his
nostrils. On the blank white top of the table in the prepar-
ation room, an anaesthetic bottle lay forlornly on its side.
Toda stood for a few moments in the middle of the
room. Here it was, he recalled, that the prisoner had ex-
claimed, “That’s ether, isn’t it?’ The childish tone of the
exclamation was still in his ears. A formless fear for a

156
moment clutched at his heart, but Toda kept his control.
The fear dissolved into ripples and disappeared, leaving
him an uncanny composure.
What he wanted now was a feeling of bitter self-re-
crimination. The sharp pang stabbing at the breast, the
remorse which rips and tears at the heart. But even though
he had returned to the operating theatre, no such emotions
welled up within him. Unlike a layman, he had long been
accustomed to entering the operating theatre alone after an
operation. Those other times and now-—was there any
difference? If there was, he found himself unable to grasp
it.
‘Here we took off his fatigue jacket.’ Tracing over
insistently in his mind every aspect of the scene which had
taken place, he waited in vain for the pain of remorse to
wring his heart.
‘That prisoner, he seemed as embarrassed as a woman
about his chest with its blond hair. He covered it with his
hands. And then, just as Asai told him to, he went into
the operating theatre there.’
He softly opened the inner door. He flicked the light
switch, and the ceiling lamp’s bluish white glare was reflec-
ted from the walls of the room. The operating table had a
slight crack on its surface. Next to this lay a small piece of
gauze that had been overlooked. There was a dark stain of
blood upon it. Even confronted with that, Toda felt no
particular pain.
‘I have no conscience, I suppose. Not just me, though.
None of them feel anything at all about what they did
here.’
The only emotion in his heart was a sense of having
fallen as low as one can fall. He turned off the lamp and
went into the hallway once more.
The corridor was already wrapped in the darkness of

157
evening. As Toda walked along, he heard the sharp echo of
footsteps from the staircase towards which he was going.
Someone slowly came up the stairs and turned in the
direction of the operating theatre. For no particular reason,
Toda stepped into a window recess and watched as a man
in a white jacket approached, his figure looming up in the
dark like a spectre. It was the Old Man.
Without noticing Toda, the Old Man stopped in front of
the door of the operating theatre. With both hands plunged
into the pockets of his coat, the Old Man, his back bent,
stood facing the door, not moving. Toda could not see his
face clearly, but the impression conveyed by the sagging
shoulders, bent back and the white hair visible in the
blackness was one of old age, weary and enervated. For a
long time the Old Man stared at the door. Finally, his
footsteps echoing once more, he went off in the direction
of the staircase.

“Doctor, would you come to the ward for a moment please?

There’s a patient who’s had a fever since this morning.’
Suguro heard a nurse’s voice behind him.
‘All right,’ turning his head, he answered in a low voice.
“We didn’t see anything of Doctor Asai or Doctor Toda
or anybody today. Was there an operation?’
‘No, no operation.’
‘But the chief nurse wasn’t around either. All at once
they sent us out to dig slit trenches. What was it anyway?’
Suguro stole a quick glance at the young nurse’s face. Her
expression was guileless as she awaited his answer.
‘T'll come to the ward. I have to fetch my stethoscope.’
He walked into the ward; and when, from the three rows
of beds looming up white before him in the gloomy shadow,
he felt the concentrated gaze of the patients fasten upon

158
him, his knees shook. Eyes cast down, he passed down the
aisle in front of the beds as though running the gauntlet.
‘I can’t look them in the face any more,’ he groaned
within himself. ‘And these people don’t know anything
about it at all.’
The patient with the fever was the old man lying in the
bed next to Mitsu Abé, where the old lady had lain a
month earlier. When he saw Suguro, he displayed his
purplish gums almost devoid of teeth. He screwed up his
face and tried and tried to express what was wrong.
“He wants to say that his spit gets stuck in his throat,’
Mitsu Abé broke in. ‘You'll be all right now. Just leave
everything to Doctor.’
Suguro gently grasped the old man’s outstreched arm. It
was so emaciated that he could have easily encircled it with
his thumb and forefinger. The touch of that skin covered
with white splotches and rough with wrinkles made him
think of the arm of the old lady.
‘Please do something for him, Doctor. Please do some-
thing for him.’ Blinking repeatedly, Suguro heard Mitsu
Abé’s faint voice at his side.

Chief Nurse Oba and Nobu Ueda slowly descended to the

dark basement in the squeaking hospital elevator.
‘Say, this elevator makes an awful noise. It needs greas-
ing, don’t you think?’ Nobu Ueda muttered, looking up at
the metal ceiling of the elevator, from which the paint had
almost entirely peeled off.
But the chief nurse, leaning against the wall with her
eyes shut, didn’t bother to respond. Nobu thought that the
chief nurse’s face was gaunter than usual and her cheek-
bones more prominent. Nobu hadn’t had a chance to study
the chief nurse’s face so leisurely at close range before, and

159
she was startled to notice how much grey was mixed with
the black hair that had escaped the white cap.
‘Why this one is really up in years.’ With ill-disposed
eyes, Nobu studied the other’s profile. Years ago, before
her marriage, when Nobu was registered at this hospital,
Chief Nurse Oba had been four years ahead of her and no
more than an ordinary nurse. Now, estranged from her
companions and without anyone who could be called a
friend, she strode about with her expressionless face, highly
prized and made much of by all the doctors, but berated by
the other nurses as ‘Miss Curry-favour’ behind her back.
To wear a little lipstick and makeup as the other nurses
did would be unthinkable for Chief Nurse Oba. Then, still
more, it would be hard to imagine her dark face with its
jutting bones bewitching the heart of any male patient.
‘So now you’re the chief nurse, eh?’ Nobu whispered
to herself, feeling a surge of envy and dislike for this
woman who had become her superior.
When the elevator had reached the basement, Nobu
grasped the handle of the trolley, which was between them,
and pulled it out into the corridor. Naked light bulbs
burned gloomily at forlorn intervals in the ceiling, which
was lined with exposed pipes. Before the War, this section
had been a place for shops and tearooms run by the
hospital. Now the rooms were abandoned to the dust, used
only as shelters during air raids. Since the morgue was at
the far end of the corridor, Nobu began to push the trolley
in that direction, but the chief nurse, who had been silent up
to then, stopped her.
“The other way, Mrs Ueda.’
“But shouldn’t it go there?’
“The other way.’ Her expressionless face hardening, the
chief nurse shook her head.
‘But why, I wonder?’

160
 ‘It doesn’t matter why. Do as I say.’
She wheeled the trolley with the white sheet over it down
the corridor, filled with the odour of damp cement, towards
the opposite end. While she pushed the trolley, Nobu
studied the thin, stubborn back of the chief nurse, who was
gripping the handles at the front of the trolley.
‘She’s like a stone, that’s what she is. No human sym-
pathy in her at all.’
At the very thought of the blank, stony face of this
woman, Nobu felt a sudden shock at her breast as though
from a collision. The light from the naked bulbs, leaving
dark shadows, fell upon scattered bags of cement, broken
laboratory tables, and various kinds of chairs with the
stuffing protruding from them. The wheels of the trolley
kept up their monotonous squeak.
‘Chief?’ Nobu intentionally said ‘Chief’ instead of ‘Miss
Oba’. ‘Before, did anyone talk to you about today?’
But her companion did not glance back. She stubbornly
gripped the handles and kept moving forward. Seeing this,
Nobu let an ironic smile begin to form on her lips.
‘Did Doctor Asai? Doctor Asai told me all about it.
Quite unexpectedly, he turned up at my apartment. Was
I surprised! He had been drinking saké. Afterwards he... .’
‘That will do, Mrs Ueda.’ Chief Nurse Oba suddenly
took her hands from the trolley handles. ‘Stop the trolley.’
‘Here? Is this all right?’
The chief nurse said nothing.
‘Is someone coming to take care of it?’
‘Mrs Ueda, the function of a nurse is to carry out what
the doctors direct and keep her mouth shut.’
On the trolley between them, the sheet-covered corpse
loomed white in the darkness. The two women stood for
a moment glaring at each other with flashing eyes.
‘Then, too, Mrs Ueda’ -the chief nurse narrowed her
161
eyes — ‘why don’t you just take the rest of the afternoon off
and go home. And there should really be no need to say
this, but don’t speak about today to anyone. If by chance
you should be loose mouthed about this. .. .”
‘If I’m loose mouthed, what’ll happen then?’
‘There’ll be a great deal of trouble for Doctor Hashimoto.
Can you understand that?’
‘Is that right?’ Nobu Ueda’s mouth tightened. ‘So we
nurses can be that important to doctors, eh?’
Then as though talking to herself, she whispered loud
enough for the other to hear. ‘Unlike somebody else, I
didn’t take part today just because of Doctor Hashimoto.’
In that instant, before Nobu’s eyes, pain shot through the
chief nurse’s face, as, her lips twisted and trembling, she
tried to make some retort. From the time she had started at
the hospital, Nobu had never seen the chief nurse show
the least distress before a subordinate.
‘Just as I thought!’ Nobu’s heart swelled with the joy of
having at last struck the other’s weak spot. ‘Isn’t that
something! This flinty woman is in love with Doctor
Hashimoto.’
Without another word to Chief Nurse Oba, she turned
and, ignoring the elevator, ran out through the recently
built emergency exit into the garden.
Night had already swallowed up the garden. Before the
War, when she had been a nursing student, when evening
came lights would be burning in the windows of the Medical
School buildings and of the hospital. To her they somehow
resembled ships at anchor with all their flags flying and so
recalled to Nobu the harbour festivals of neighbouring
Hakata, where she had once lived.
Now, however, the only lights were faint ones, those in
the hospital reception room and the office. She heard the
loud voices of men singing military songs. They came from

162
 the second floor conference room of First Surgery. That
window, too, was covered with black curtaining, but some
light flickered out through an opening.
‘It’s the officers who were there today,’ Nobu thought.
‘They’re really something aren’t they. At a time when we’ve
got nothing to eat but beans, they eat and drink as much as
they want. I wonder what they’re eating?’
Then Nobu remembered that after the vivisection was
over, a fat little officer had put his mouth close to Dr Asai’s
ear and whispered.
‘Would you cut out the prisoner’s liver for me?’
‘For what?’
As Dr Asai’s rimless glasses flashed, the fat little officer
smiled sardonically. “The medical officers are going to have
a little fun with the junior officers by having them try some
of it.’
And with that, Dr Asai, too, seeing what sort of man
the other was, smiled a thin sardonic smile of his own.
When Nobu recalled this exchange, she shuddered with
instinctive distaste. However, apart from this passing mood,
it was all one to her whether the officers ate the prisoner’s
liver or didn’t eat the prisoner’s liver. As a nurse she had
grown used to operations and the sight of blood, and today
the fact that the man on the operating table was an
American prisoner hadn’t roused any particular appre-
hension in her. When Dr Hashimoto cut in a straight line
into the prisoner’s skin, the only association of thought that
this had provoked in Nobu was that of Hilda’s white skin —
the thought of the white hand of Hilda which had pounded
the desk in the nurses’ room as she fiercely scolded Nobu
about the procaine injection for the patient with the
spontaneous pneumothorax attack. And today, just as with
Hilda’s skin, faint golden hair had covered the prisoner’s
skin.
163
 ‘Will Doctor Hashimoto say anything about today to
Hilda, I wonder? He won’t, I don’t think.’
Nobu forcibly invoked within herself the sensation of
having scored a joyous triumph over Hilda. ‘No matter how
much of a blessed saint Mrs Hilda is, she has no idea of
what her own husband did today. But I know all about it.’
When she returned to her apartment, the room was com-
pletely dark. She sat down on the entrance step, suddenly
overcome with weariness. She sat for some time, her shoes
still on, her hands gripping her knees, staring down.
‘Mrs Ueda, I put half of your soap ration by the window.
Later on give me the money please.’ She heard the land-
lord’s cold voice echo down the corridor and afterwards
the slam of a door.
In the darkness of her room, the whiteness of bedding and
dishes strewn about shone dimly. From a radio in the
house next door a warning buzzer sounded with a tearing,
metallic noise.
‘What’ll I do now?’ It was always the same. Whenever
Nobu returned from the hospital to this cold room, she felt
herself overwhelmed by loneliness and isolation.
“Today as usual, work is over. All over... .’
Yes, today as usual work was over. What she was think-
ing of right now was no more than that. Since she had been
away from the hospital for what had seemed to her to be a
terribly long time, she felt especially weary, physically and
mentally. Tomorrow again it would be a matter of checking
the patients’ blood pressure, their saliva and all that. Mrs
Hilda, all unknowing, might come to the hospital. That
would be nice, she thought. And then she thought about
Chief Nurse Oba.
‘She’s in love with Doctor Hashimoto. I’m the only one
that knows that.’
She pulled off her shoes and threw them to one side and

164
then turned on the light, which was shaded with a wrapping
cloth. She turned on the gas and put on a pan of water con-
taining beans. She faced the usual lonely, cheerless meal.
And as she always did, she took from the closet the baby
clothes which she had made for Masuo. These she spread
upon her lap, and, not moving, she sat for a long time
looking blankly down at them.

In the darkness the tip of a lighted cigarette glowed.

‘Is that you, Suguro?’ Toda called in a low voice after he
had come out on the roof.
Wes,’
‘You, smoking?’
Suguro didn’t answer. He was leaning on the guard-rail,
his chin in his hands, and looking straight out. Fukuoka
was blacked out, prepared for an air raid. Whether there
was a warning or not, when night came, not the least light
would show. It seemed not as though there were lights
which were hidden but rather that death had overwhelmed
both lights and men.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
Then Toda became aware that Suguro was staring
fixedly at the only part of the surrounding scene which was
shining brightly. He was looking out at the sea. The low
rumble of the black waves as they pushed in upon the sand
set up a melancholy echo.
‘Ward rounds tomorrow again, eh?’ Yawning de-
liberately, Toda muttered in a sleepy voice. “Tough, wasn’t
it? Today was really tough.’
Suguro put out his cigarette and turned towards Toda.
Then he sat down on the concrete roof and, his arms
wrapped around his knees, looked up.

165
 ‘What is there to do?’ He spoke in a weak voice. ‘What
are we going to do?’
‘Nothing. Just do as we always do. Nothing has changed.’
‘But today! Toda, it doesn’t bother you at all?’
‘Bother me? What do you mean, bother me?’ Toda’s
tone was dry. ‘Was it the sort of thing that should bother
somebody?’
Suguro was silent. Finally as though to himself, he spoke
in a still feebler voice. ‘Toda, you’re strong. As for me....
I shut my eyes today in there. I don’t know what to think,
even now. I just don’t know.’
‘What is it that gets you?’ Toda felt a painful constriction
forming in his throat as he spoke. ‘Killing that prisoner?
Thanks to him, we’ll now be better at curing thousands of
TB patients — because we killed him. Should we have let
him live, you think? The conscience of man, is that it? It
seems to vary a good deal from man to man.’
Toda raised his eyes and gazed at the black sky. Slowly,
slowly he felt cutting through his heart all the old memories
—of the summer vacation while at Rokko, the figure of
Yamaguchi standing in the corner of playground, the
sweltering night beside Lake Biwa, the bloody lump he had
torn from Mitsu’s womb in the rented house in Yakuin.
Really there was nothing changed at all. Everything was
just the same as before.
‘Still . . . some day, we’re going to have to answer for it,’
said Suguro, leaning close suddenly and whispering. “That’s
for sure. It’s certain that we’re going to have to answer for
its
‘Answer for it? To society? If it’s only to society, it’s
nothing much to get worked up about.’ Toda gave another
obvious yawn. ‘You and I happened to be here in this
particular hospital in this particular era, and so we took
part in a vivisection performed on a prisoner. If those

166
people who are going to judge us had been put in the
same situation, would they have done anything different?
So much for the punishments of society.’
Toda felt an indescribable sense of weariness and stopped
talking. Explain as he might to someone like Suguro, what
good would it do? A bitter surge of futility welled up
within him.
‘I’m going home.’

‘Is that it then?’ Suguro mused. ‘Things are just the same
with us as before?’ Left alone on the roof he gazed out at
the sea shining amid the blackness. He seemed to be trying
to catch sight of something there.
‘ *‘When the clouds like sheep pass. . .. When the clouds
like sheep pass. . . .””’ He forced himself to form the words,
barely able to whisper. ‘“‘In the sea over which moist
clouds sail. . . . In the sea over which moist clouds
SMe tas
But he found he could not do it. His mouth was parched.
‘“Sky, your scattering is white, white, / White like
streams of cotton. ...””’
Suguro could go no further. He could go no further.

167
New Directions Paperbooks—A Partial Listing
Walter Abish, How German Is It. NDP508. Caradoc Evans, Nothing to Pay. NDP800.
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Death on the Installment Plan. NDP330 James Joyce, Ecol ah Wake: A Symposium. NDP331.
René Char, Selected Poems.+ NDP734. Stephen Hero. NDP133.
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it. NDP1052. Bilge Karasu, The Garden of the Departed Cats. NDP965.
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Gregory Corso, The Happy Birthday of Death. NDP86. Heinrich von Kleist, Prince Friedrich i ek NDP462.
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Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems poe the Book of Hours.+ NDP408. The Wisdom of the Taoists. NDP5S09.
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WA
San Mateo
Public Library
 San Mateo Public mint il

FICTION m 3 9047 08524122 8

SHUSAKU ENDO
THE SEA AND POISON

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GALLAGHER

The novel The Sea and Poison won the Akutagawa Prize when it was
published in Japan in 1958 and established Shusaku Endo in the forefront
of modern Japanese literature. It was the first Japanese book to confront the
problem of individual responsibility in wartime, painting a searing picture of
the human race’s capacity for inhumanity. —
At the outset of this powerful story we find a Doctor Suguro in a backwater
of modern-day Tokyo practicing expert medicine in a dingy office. He is
haunted by his past experience and it is that past which the novel unfolds.
During the war Dr. Suguro serves his internship in a hospital where the senior
staff is more interested in personal career-building than in healing. He is
induced to assist in a horrifying vivisection of a P.O.W. “What is it that gets
you,” one of his colleagues asks. “Killing that prisoner?...The conscience of
man, is that it?”

Cover art: Detail of a Katazome textile from All-Japan: The Catalogue of Everything
Japanese, A Quarto Book. Photograph by Dana Levy. Design by Hermann Strohbach.

A NEW DIRECTIONS
PAPERBACK ISBN 978-0-8112-1198-7
;

¥ ||| il)
$12.95 USA 9"780811"211987 | Ul
$16.00 CAN www.ndpublishing.com