can judge, figures in these notebooks as the madam of a bar in Kyobashi. She is a slightly-built, rather sickly-looking woman, with narrow, tilted eyes and a prominent nose. Something hard about her gives you the impression less of a beautiful woman than of a handsome young man. The events described in the notebooks seem to relate mainly to the Tokyo of 1930 or so, but it was not until about 1935, when the Japanese military clique was first beginning to rampage in the open, that friends took me to the bar. I drank highballs there two or three times. I was never able therefore to have the pleasure of meeting the man who wrote the notebooks. However, this February I visited a friend who was evacuated during the war to Funahashi in Chiba Prefecture, He is an acquaintance from university days, and now teaches at a woman's college. My purpose in visiting him was to ask his help in arranging the marriage of one of my relatives, but I thought while I was at it, I might buy some fresh sea food to take home to the family. I set off for Funahashi with a rucksack on my back. Funahashi is a fairly large town facing a muddy bay. My friend had not lived there long, and even though I asked for his house by the street and number, nobody seemed able to tell me the way. It was cold, and
the rucksack hurt my shoulders. Attracted by the sound of a record of violin music being played inside a coffee shop, I pushed open the door. I vaguely remembered having seen the madam. I asked her about herself, and discovered she was in fact the madam of the bar in Kyobashi I had visited ten years before. When this was established, she
