Nureki Chimuo Archive

Behind the Tsurukame Theater lay a vacant lot overgrown with tall weeds, filthy and sprawling across the entire area.

When it rained, puddles formed everywhere, lingering and never quite drying out. It was a swamp-like vacant lot.

Adjacent to this damp, gloomy lot, a two-story wooden apartment building stood, its rear end pressed right up against the theater’s.

The front entrance of the Tsurukame Theater faced southwest, while the entrance to the apartment building faced northeast.

This arrangement meant their back doors were practically touching.

The entire first floor of the apartment building served as dressing rooms for the Tsurukame Theater, rented exclusively by the theater staff, as mentioned earlier.

The Tsurukame Theater and the apartment building had the same owner. So it wasn’t that the theater “rented out” the first floor, rather, the owner “allowed” the use of part of his own building for theatrical performances.

The second floor of the apartment building housed residents unrelated to the theater. In essence, ordinary people.

Most of them were families whose homes had been burned down by American air raids.

Among them was a family of five with the surname Nishiki.

The Nishiki family rented two rooms on the second floor of the Tsurakame apartments.

The heads of the household, Mr. and Mrs. Nishiki, who were around fifty, lived in one room. Their three daughters slept and lived in the other room, a six-mat space separated by a partition.

The names of those three sisters.

Hideyo, twenty-eight. Tamayo, twenty-one. Yukiyo, fifteen.

At sixteen, I already knew it was rude to ask a woman her age. So these ages were heard from someone other than the individuals themselves and are not precise.

The eldest daughter, Hideko, had a husband who had been drafted into the war. She was holding a baby. Her husband was in Burma, and his fate was still unknown.

The youngest, Yukiyo, was a student, but she was waiting for her school, destroyed in an air raid, to be rebuilt. She was almost my age, and like me, her school had been burned down. Yet she was a remarkably precocious beauty who looked much older than me.

The second daughter, Tamayo, was also unemployed and had the rather comfortable status of loafing around every day.

This Tamayo would become deeply involved in my fate from this point onward.

(Well, calling it fate might be an exaggeration. Perhaps she was simply the woman who provided me with the catalyst to separate myself from the Takejaku Fukunosuke troupe.)

Only the father of these three sisters worked in the Nishiki household.

He was supposedly an executive at a famous insurance company, but I had hardly ever seen the man who was their father.

Originally, they had a luxurious mansion somewhere around Meguro, but after suffering damage in the air raids, they now seem to be living temporarily on the second floor of this apartment building. They were a family with a certain leisurely, unhurried pace.

Perhaps I was drawn to and captivated by the atmosphere of these three sisters, wealthy and refined, as if transcending the chaotic and anxious postwar era.

My own home, however, was simply poor and vulgar. I half-boastingly brag about being born and raised in Asakusa, but I don’t really mean it seriously.

I don’t truly like the strangely cloying, overly familiar nature of the downtown crowd.

Somewhere deep inside, I harbor a longing for the upper class, for refinement.

I dislike stupidity and prefer things that suggest intelligence.

The reason I’m drawn to this woman, Rakka-san, is that she carries an air of having been raised in a fastidiously refined upper-class household. She possesses a fierce, otherworldly conviction and common sense. The polar opposite of my own.

I have this taste for the fallen, this inclination toward decline, but I also harbor this yearning for the upper class. (Or rather, to be precise, the middle class, or perhaps the petty bourgeoisie?) Both are jumbled together inside me.

Honestly, I don’t really understand myself. Since I don’t understand myself now, I probably never will, even until I die.

The whole thing began when the three sisters happened to come together to see a play by the Takejaku troupe at the Tsurukame Theater.

It was a performance of “New Edition: Song Festival Text, Nozaki Village.”

I was playing the role of a maid following O-Some, portrayed by my master, Ichikawa Fukunosuke. The moment I stepped out from behind the raised curtain onto the hanamichi, a young woman sitting right in front of me in the audience exclaimed, “Oh my, how cute!”

Then, the two other young women sitting on either side of her, as if caught up in the moment, burst out laughing.

The sound of that voice was so absurd that the entire audience laughed.

The cry of “how cute!” was directed at me.

The role of the maid Oyoji is traditionally played by a chari (clown). So I took the stage with makeup that gave me a slightly comical look, lowered the corners of my eyes and painted my cheeks red.

But it was the first time I had been spoken to from the audience, and by a woman.

I later learned that those three female audience members were sisters living on the second floor of the Tsurukame Apartments.

Until then, I hadn’t even known such people lived upstairs.

For me, the Tsurukame Apartments wasn’t an apartment building. It was purely the dressing room of the Tsurukame Theater.

The next day, invited by the youngest sister, Yukiyo, I went up to the second floor of the Tsurukame Apartments.

It was Yukiyo who came down to the dressing room and spoke to me, but waiting for me upstairs was the second daughter, Tamayo.

“Fukujiro-san, you were adorable. Sorry for calling out to you like that yesterday.”

Saying this, Tamayo peered closely at my face and smiled.

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of that smile.

It wasn’t just beauty. It was the beauty of a woman.

To the eyes of a sixteen year old boy, Tamayo’s smile was bewitchingly, sexually beautiful.

Seeing Tamayo’s smile, overwhelmed, I looked up the word “bewitching” in Japanese and learned it existed.

The beauty of Tamayo’s smile could not be expressed in any other word than “bewitching.”

From that moment on, for about half a year, my heart was in love with Tamayo, and I believe Tamayo loved me too.

Whether this romantic feeling developed through such psychological processes, or the details, I no longer remember.

After all, it was over sixty years ago.

I carelessly wrote “love” or “affection,” but was that truly love or affection?

If I embellished those six months, organized them neatly, and strung them together like a novel under a plausible story, readers might accept it. But I simply don’t have the energy for that now.

Or rather, writing like that wouldn’t satisfy me.

But when scenes with complex, intertwining emotions come up, I still think, “I’m just not smart enough,” and I get flustered.

I can’t write it well.

I’m painfully aware, even now, of my lack of expressive power and my poor writing skills.

In other words, this is the only way I can write.

After finishing my day’s work, I go to the three sisters’ room upstairs, lie down, and rest my body.

After ten o’clock at night, nearing eleven, futons are spread out to fill the entire six-mat room, and the fifteen-year-old, twenty-one-year-old, and twenty-eight-year-old women sleep there, their bodies piled next to each other.

If I’m still in that room by that hour, they all start saying things like this, inviting me to join them:

“It’s already late, Fukujiro-san. You should sleep here too. Your house is over an hour’s walk from Matsudo Station, right? There are no buses anymore, so it’s really tough. Just stay the night here.”

Even the eldest daughter, Hideyo, says things like this to me.

But she does lower her voice when she says it.

The walls between the rooms in this apartment are thin. The door was just flimsy board painted brown, little more than a formality.

Hideyo playfully placed her index finger over her lips as she spoke.

“Do it.”

“Do it, Fukujiro-san,” the second and third daughters whispered, smiling.

Hideyo’s baby was sleeping in the parents’ room. Even during the day, Hideyo rarely looked after her own child. Hideyo’s mother was always holding or carrying the baby.

Her husband had been conscripted into the army and taken to Burma. She didn’t know when he would return, or even if he was alive or dead. Yet here was Hideyo, a wife and mother of one child, telling me, a lowly, easily blown-away actor, to stay the night. I couldn’t help but feel uneasy.

The room was so small, the futon completely covered the tatami mats. It was a room for young women only.

(This woman, Hideyo, still thinks of me as a real child.)

And I felt a little pissed off.

I had enough common sense to know that much.

Even so, I had written several plays, even if they bordered on plagiarism, on themes like love, romance, and parental affection. They had been staged, and I had been paid for them.

While I’m a bit annoyed at being treated like a child, I’m still pleased by their invitation.

Truly, walking home from the station to the house on the hill late at night, my body exhausted, was grueling. After a full day’s work, I simply didn’t have the strength.

More than the joy of spending the whole night in the same room with them, I was grateful not to have to drag my feet along that dark, long path from the station to the house.

“Yeah, I’ll stay,” I said, and crawled into the futon at the foot of the bed where the three sisters slept with their heads pressed together.

It was winter. This was an era without heating or air conditioning, yet I wasn’t cold.

Far from cold, the room was stiflingly hot, heated by the young women’s body heat.

One quilt was more than enough.

They weren’t in pajamas, but old yukata nightgowns.

The air in the room was suffocating with the scent of their bodies, but that suffocation was a sweetness I’d never tasted before.

In a typical SM novel, this is where the young man I was would suffer brutal sexual humiliation at the hands of the three sisters, awakening to the pleasure of being a masochist.

I myself have written several such novels.

But in reality nothing like that happened.

They paid no attention to my presence. After turning off the light, they chatted freely and then fell asleep, snoring softly. Though I was tired, I felt a little tense about sleeping between the body heat of three women. But as soon as I lay down, I grew sleepy.

When I woke from the nap, moonlight streamed into the room through the glass window facing outside.

I felt a little more energetic.

Even though it was a winter night, the room felt even warmer.

The women slept with their feet sticking out from under the quilt.

The hems of their nightgowns were pulled up high.

The women’s thighs were visible in the moonlight.

The white thighs looked even whiter in the moonlight.

I didn’t know whose thighs they were.

They must have belonged to one of the three sisters.

To my eyes, those thighs appeared with a shocking eroticism.

I think this was the first time I clearly felt and became conscious of the eroticism emanating from a woman’s body.

If my sixteen year old self had then thrown myself passionately onto those thighs and clung to them, it would have been a scene straight out of a pulp SM novel. But in reality, I frantically looked away.

And then I burrowed back under the futon.

So, I only saw those thighs for just a moment.

Perhaps it was precisely because it lasted only an instant that it burned itself so intensely into my heart.

And it was precisely because it lasted only a mere instant that, even now, over sixty years later, I still cannot forget it.