Around the area where Iki-no-Matsubara appeared, painted barracks, apparently the remains of a summer resort, caught our eye. The pine trees grew in such clusters in so narrow a place that rather than call them beautiful, I received a somewhat eerie impression from them.
I had expected that the house Noe was born in would be on the outskirts of the pine grove, but I now found it was more to the west. The town of Imajuku extended along the bus route like a sash. Another stretch of narrow road continued nearer the seacoast than the wide paved road we were on, and the row of low-built houses on both sides of that narrow road probably formed the old village of Imajuku.
When at Mako's direction we turned toward the sea down that narrow road where a police box was located, our car immediately came out on the beach as if we were about to plunge into Hakata Bay. Just beneath the stone wall of a high breakwater, the sea came to a sudden halt. The sandy beach was so covered with fragments of rough stone I felt as pained as if I had been walking over it in my bare feet.
The smooth coastline of the bay revealed a clear gentle curve as if it had been drawn with a compass, Imazu Bay widely nestled in it. Myoken Cape stretched to the east, and jutting out at the end of a headland to the west was the handful of homes of the town of Imazu, one behind the other. The horizon of the spacious Sea of Genkai outside the bay extended beyond as if fusing into sky. As I stood on the shore of this coastline so deficient in variety and so smooth it seemed almost too prosaic, what glittered to overflowing in my visual field was the blue expanse of water and sky, and I felt a yearning as if my heart had been naturally lured beyond that sea spreading out like a fan unfolding. I could only nod my head in agreement as I felt that if anyone stood on this beach every morning and evening, stared at this sleepy tranquil line of coast, and gazed at the approach and return of the tracks of those waves of the sea, that person's heart, be it Noe's or not, would be filled with longing to set out on a journey to some distant world beyond. The wind from the sea was also gentle, but if I gave my mind to it, the sound of waves was continually reverberating into the wind as they quietly beat against the shore.
"This is our old family house."
Mako pointed to a dwelling behind her with its wide wooden wall at the corner of a narrow road. The one-story structure, so low it lay concealed behind this wooden barrier, had probably been built that way to provide protection from the sea wind. It was an unpretentious house in the style of a fisherman's dwelling often seen along the coast.
"Fortunately my aunt has just come from Shimonoseki where she lives, so please meet her. It's too bad you can't talk to my uncle because he's been sick in bed since the end of last year."
I almost gasped at this unexpected good luck. Though there were five children including Noe in her family, only one of the others was a girl, Tsuta by name, two years Noe's junior. And Mako had just said this very Tsuta from Shimonoseki was inside the house. The sick uncle referred to was Noe's second elder brother Yoshibei, her eldest brother Yoshijiro having died young shortly after going to Manchuria. Apparently even Yoshibei was a kind of character, what with his having left home early, living in Saga, devoting himself to inventing and designing, and holding many patents. Late in life he had returned home, had inherited his parents' house, and had led a quiet existence, but Mako said that only last year he had collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.
When I was shown through the house, I found Yoshibei lying in bed in an eight-mat room at the back of the dwelling. The invalid, whose features were conspicuously white, had been born in the twenty-fifth year of Meiji, so I guessed him to be seventy-three. This person too looked far younger than his years, and for an old man he had a soft, genial expression on a face devoid of the unusual blemishes of the aged. Even in bed his figure looked great and imposing. I recalled that the bed on which Kichi Dai had been lying was also rather long and bulky for an elderly person ninety years old.
Tsuta, who had come to inquire after Yoshibei's health and to attend to his needs, had the surname Takabe. She was five years Yoshibei's junior, but with her erect frame and her height noticeably tall for a woman, she seemed much younger. She had a dark complexion, and her upper and lower teeth were missing, but her coloring was healthy. In the beauty and brightness of her large eyes with their long dark lashes and their gently arching length of brow, the charm of her early years could still be seen, unmistakable traces in her of the Yorozuya-type attractiveness. Her dark hair with its sprinkling of gray was artlessly done up in foreign style, and she had on a Japanese cooking apron over her black kimono, indications of her indifference to personal appearance. Once she began, she did not mince words as she spoke openly and frankly, and no matter what I asked, she came through with a response. While she talked, an indescribable light spread over her beautiful eyes, and I felt an easy familiarity growing between us. This generous freedom of behavior and refreshing lack of caution with strangers were common characteristics of all members of the Ito family.
It seemed to me that even Yoshibei, who hardly seemed able to talk, was attending to our conversation, and with an expression that indicated he did not dislike listening, he occasionally smiled as if faintly recalling something.
Beyond was a veranda, a garden which had been tended with great care, and the blue expanse of sea above the wooden wall at the back of the garden. As I was sitting in this room, I could hear the ceaseless sound of waves. The sound I heard was much stronger than when I had stood on the beach, and I felt as if the dull thud of wave after wave was reverberating through my entire body.
"Since my elder sister was only two years older than me, the two of us, the only sister each of us had, confided everything to one another from the time we were children, and certainly we kept no secrets. Yes, yes, throughout my life I've been put to trouble by Noe. Because from the time she was a child she didn't care about others. Well, she did like studying, and she did quite well at school. From the time she was little, she hated to play with children her age, and she was always doing something by herself. Often at supper time we couldn't find her even after we lit the lamps, so all of us at home were quite worried, but on those occasions when I opened one of the closets, I would almost always find her there. Having brought in a candle, she'd be absorbed in reading every single line in the old newspapers pasted on the walls inside the closet and behind its sliding partition. You see, our family was already poor in those days, so there were no books or magazines in the house, and for that reason I guess she even did things like that. At any rate, reading was what she liked to do more than anything else. Even at that time she was a child who wouldn't do a single thing she disliked, and she thought only of herself. Just studying by herself made her indifferent to everything else, even if it caused our mother trouble or forced the rest of us to cry. Thanks to her, I always had to take the losing part. When we were old enough to know what was happening around us, we realized our father stayed away from home. Yes, certainly from the time our father was young, he had been fond of music, singing, and dancing, and because he was by nature a clever man, he was generally good at fishing, flower arranging, tea ceremony, and cooking. His strong point was in singing to the accompaniment of the samisen, and he was so good on the samisen and at singing ballads he could put even a professional to shame. He was even skillful at dancing. I guess he deserved to be called a profligate because of these things. There were times when he stayed away from home for quite a few years, and my mother had to work hard to provide for her children. My elder sister was our father's favorite child, and she was trained early to play the samisen and to dance. Whenever a troupe of players or anything of the sort came to town, my father dropped whatever he was doing to go, taking my elder sister with him, and he often made her appear on the stage. I couldn't look on with indifference as I saw my mother working alone in the fields around our neighborhood or doing piecework in order to raise her children, so from the time I was little I tried to help her, but my elder sister was totally indifferent as to whether our mother or I was troubled. On top of that, even after Noe became an adult, she continued to mercilessly inconvenience our mother, and she never did any of the duties a child is supposed to do for a parent. Certainly my elder sister was blessed with a lucky and easygoing temperament. The only reason she went to my aunt's home in Nagasaki was to study, and that was because my aunt's place offered a more convenient environment for study than our house did. Noe's writing us that my uncle and aunt treated her harshly was complete nonsense. Even at my aunt's home she was allowed to do as she wished, just as much as Chiyoko was.
"Because