Sad Toys

A card came from Setsuko. Again Kyōko hadn't felt well, so my wife had taken her to the doctor and found once again it was her stomach and intestines. To make matters worse, the doctor called it chronic. Setsuko felt uneasy because I wasn't there. She writes that she wants a letter from me.
I decided to go to the office after all. One reason was that I had changed my mind after reading Setsuko's letter, but besides that, I didn't want the maids to think, "He's loafing again today!"
"Well, if you don't feel like it, you can go somewhere else on the way and enjoy yourself!" With this thought in mind, I left, but once on the streetcar, I had my ticket punched for Sukiyabashi and ended up going to the Office.
In the streetcar I discovered a cute girl about three years old. As soon as I saw her, I thought of Kyōko. Setsuko would leave home in the morning and return at evening. And for the entire day only my mother and Kyōko in that wretched hole of a house! Grandmother and grandchild. When I thought about the entire day they would spend together, my eyes grew dim with tears in spite of myself. Nothing is more pleasurable to a child than food. When Kyōko would get tired of their monotonous and gloomy routine, she would most probably badger her grandmother for something to eat. But there would be nothing to give her. "Grandma, grandma!" she would cry. My mother would try to distract her, but Kyōko would not listen. "There, there," my mother would say. And lo, she'd come up with a piece of pickled radish!
In my mind's eye I saw the indigestible food entering my darling Kyōko's mouth and harming her delicate stomach and intestines.

My younger sister. A long letter had come from Mitsuko, who after leaving her parents, sister, and brother, had gone to Asahikawa this month with an English lady called Evans.

... I have recently become somewhat accustomed to this city, so it's a lot easier to bear. Still, when I am basking in the soft spring sunshine coming in through the windowpanes, I don't think of anything except my memories of Shibutami, our hometown.
I remember the time when, at your bidding, I went walking along the mountain paths looking for violets. Perhaps you sometimes remember life in those days....On my desk is a lovely adonis. While I was looking at it today, I couldn't help remembering our hometown. We often walked around the graveyard searching for violets and adonises, remember?... And I recalled so many things. I relived again the resentment I had felt when you had scolded me long ago—please forgive me. There will never be another occasion which will cause you to scold me, even if I want you to!
Why at those times did I not receive your scolding meekly? At this stage of my life I regret that more than anything else. How I wish to be scolded by my elder brother! But that is no longer possible. Truly, my attitude was wrong....Are you now corresponding with anyone in Shibutami? I myself want to write to Kiyoko Akihama, but I haven't sent her a single letter since I came to Hokkaido.
By the way, we are going to visit Otaru and Yoichi again around the middle of May to attend meetings of women's societies and moral training groups....

My eyes blurred. If I were to tell my sister my feelings as they actually were at this moment, how glad she would be! The only letters I now read to my heart's content are hers! Those of my mother and the letters of Setsuko—they're too sad for me, too hard to bear. Sometimes, if it were possible, I even want to avoid reading them. And what's more, I have now lost those friends with whom I exchanged letters that appealed so much to the heart of each of us. It's true that I read the letters from women who sometimes write me—a few young women—but theirs aren't sincere.
My sister! My only younger sister! I am thoroughly responsible for her. And yet I haven't discharged that responsibility in the least. At the beginning of May the year before last, I was dismissed from my school in Shibutami for organizing a student strike, and it was decided that my younger sister would live with our elder sister in Otaru. We went together as far as Hakodate, my intention being to go to Hokkaido to find a job. The Sea of Tsugaru was rough during the crossing. My younger sister, seasick and pale aboard ship, was tended by me. I made her take some pills. Ah! that was perhaps the one time I acted like a brother toward my one and only younger sister.
She's already twenty-two. If things had gone normally, she would obviously have gotten married, and she'd be holding a cute child. But things didn't turn out that way. I don't know how many times up to now she's made plans to support herself. Unfortunately, all those plans have ended in failure. My unlucky sister, who resembles me too much, was not made, after all, to conform to the actual world! Finally she sought God. No, perhaps she was searching for a job through God. She's now working for "God," supported by some cold foreign woman. Next year she's going to enter a mission school in Nagoya after taking their examination, and in a year she'll "dedicate her life to God" and become a missionary.
Is my sister, who is so like me, really suited to becoming a teacher of religion?
Possibly because our personalities are so similar, my sister and I have been on bad terms ever since we were little. It would probably be hard to find anywhere a brother and sister who were on such bad terms with each other. Sometimes she spoke to me like a younger sister, but I myself have never spoken to her like an elder brother, even from the time she was safely inside her straw crib!¹.
In spite of all that, my sister doesn't feel any resentment against me. And what's more, she says she wants to be scolded by me as in the old days, and she deplores the fact that it's no longer possible to be. I wanted to cry.
Shibutami! Shibutami! which I can't forget even as I try to forget it. Shibutami! Shibutami!
Shibutami, which raised me and then persecuted me!... I felt like crying and I tried to cry. But the tears wouldn't come. My father and mother, who spent the most important part of their lives there, eighteen years —on those two sad, elderly people Shibutami left memories too bitter and painful. My older sister, who's dead now, lived there for only three years, maybe five. My second elder sister at Iwamizawa has forgotten Shibutami along with her once-gentle heart. She feels that it's shameful to remember the village. And Setsuko was born in Morioka. Is there anyone anywhere who like myself has been unable to forget Shibutami? The only person in this wide world who hasn't is Mitsuko!

Tonight, I can't suppress my love for my younger sister, my poor younger sister. I want to see her! On seeing her, I want to say something an elder brother would say. I want to talk with her about Shibutami to my heart's content. I want both of us to return to those days long passed when we knew nothing of the bitterness, the sorrow, and the pain of the world. Nothing else is necessary! Sister! Sister! Will the day ever come when our family, all together, will talk happily about the old days in Shibutami?
It had begun raining without my realizing it. The raindrops sounded lonely. If only I could gather together my father, whom I haven't written to in a year, and my mother and Mitsuko and my wife and child and all of us have dinner together, no matter how simple the meal would be.