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By Root 640 0

who is sent to buy moxa for the cruel stepmother to burn on the innocent child’s skin. The description of the face of the little child who is sent to buy the instrument of its own torture was made yet more poignant for me by this incident. One day while I was at my brother’s place, the woman who lived next door came in sobbing piteously. She was crying in a way that was unbearable for me to watch, both hands clutched to her breast and shuddering convulsively. When I asked the reason, she said her next-door neighbor was torturing her stepchild again. She had heard a little girl’s terrible cries and finally couldn’t stand it any more. She looked in through her neighbor’s kitchen window and saw the child tied to a post, with her stepmother burning a large amount of moxa on her bared abdomen. She was about to describe the scene further to me when she glanced outside and suddenly closed her mouth.

A woman wearing light makeup was passing by. She bowed to us with a pleasant smile and walked on toward the main street. The woman from next door who had been sobbing her heart out now looked at the retreating figure and swore. “Until two minutes ago she looked like a raging demoness, and now she’s sweet as a lamb. Witch!”

So the woman who had just passed by was the stepmother who had been torturing the little girl. I couldn’t believe it to look at her, but the next-door neighbor immediately turned to me and began pleading, “Akira, please. Please go help that child while she’s out.” At a loss for words, half believing and half doubting, I found myself following her.

Looking in through the window of the rooms next to hers, sure enough I saw the child tied to a post with a man’s kimono sash. The window was open, so, like a thief, I climbed into a stranger’s house. I rushed to untie the sash that bound the girl to the post. But she glared at me with furious eyes. “What do you think you’re doing? No one asked for your help!” I stared at her in surprise. “If I’m not tied up when she comes back, she’ll torture me again.” I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. Even if she was untied, she couldn’t escape from the environment that bound her to that post. For her, other people’s sympathy was of no value at all. Pity was only a source of more trouble. “Hurry and tie me up again,” she said with so much ferocity I thought she might bite me. I did as she told me. It served me right.

A Story I Don’t Want to Tell

AFTER TELLING a story that makes me feel bad, I may as well go on and write about something I had not wanted to face again. It concerns my brother’s death. It is very painful to write about, but if I don’t discuss it, I can’t go on.

After I had caught a glimpse of the dark side of life in the tenements, I suddenly had the urge to return to my parents’ home. It had now become clear that all foreign movies would henceforth be talkies, and theaters that showed them decided as a universal policy that they no longer needed narrators. The narrators were to be fired en masse, and, hearing this, they went on strike. My brother, as leader of the strikers, had a very difficult time. It would not have been right for me to continue to impose on him. I went home.

My parents, who knew nothing at all of the life I had led for the past several years, welcomed me as if I had been away on a long sketching excursion. My father seemed to want to know all about what kind of painting I had been studying, so I had no choice but to keep quiet about the truth and tell a lot of appropriate lies. Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.

I wanted to paint in oils. But the entire household was being supported by my older sister, who had married a teacher from Morimura Gakuen. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for paint and canvases. I sketched.

In the midst of this, one day we heard of my brother’s attempted suicide. I believe the cause was his painful position as leader of the narrators’ strike, which had failed. My brother seemed to be resigned to the