Chapter 4 journey

In the twelfth year of Taisho (that is, 1923), I graduated from high school, and my father took me to the window of the employment agency in Ogura (the predecessor of the public employment security office). At that time, society was in depression.The clerk at the window of the employment agency saw my thin body and said, "I have a job as a handyman in a company. How about going there to see it?" Then he wrote me a letter of introduction.That company is Kawakita Electric Co., Ltd., headquartered in Osaka.Its business is near Huajie, and the houses are low and dark.It used to be a restaurant, but after some internal renovations, it became an office. No matter how good the weather is, the indoor lights must be turned on from the morning.

At first I wanted to work in a unit like a newspaper office.At that time my ideal was to be a journalist.One of the reasons may be due to the influence of his father.My father brags to others about the political situation published in the newspaper all day long, which makes me feel that a journalist is a very capable profession.He is someone my father respects, and Yuan Jing, who used to be a journalist, also filled my childish heart with admiration for the newspaper office. When I worked as a handyman, I received a bonus, gave it to my parents, and left some pocket money.I brought a gift worth about two yuan at that time, and I visited the Zhongshan Shrine. The Zhongshan Shrine is near Shimonoseki, Toyoura Village, Yamaguchi County.

Zhongshan Shrine is a shrine dedicated to Nakayama Tadamitsu, a famous public official in the Yamato Totsugawa Riot.Zhongguang was hidden by the prince Moriichi and assassinated here.When I saw the palace secretary, I took out the gift I had brought, expressed that I wanted to hear about Tadamitsu, and took out my notebook to get ready. I was about 17 or 18 at the time, and I couldn't call myself a real reporter, so I said I was doing an interview for a fanzine.Because the topic of Zhongguang was to be used, he was asked to explain it.Perhaps it was because of the extravagant (I think) gift that the palace secretary told me about the situation. When I wrote those words in the notebook, I felt like I really became a journalist, and my heart was full of excitement.

By the way, later that Kawahoku Electric Co., Ltd. closed down because of the downturn, and I lost my job. I think I was eighteen years old at that time.There is a local newspaper in Xiaocang, "Zhenxi Daily", which is dirty and has four pages.The number of copies was limited because letterpress printing was used instead of a rotary press.I thought I was qualified for the job of a local news reporter, but I climbed up to the second floor of the filthy newspaper office, met someone who seemed to be the president, and told him my wish.The old president grunted a few times and didn't pay attention to me at all.He refused without any room for discussion; "Journalists have all gone to college. People like you who haven't even graduated from elementary school are not qualified to be reporters." Dreaming of being a journalist.

Besides, Kawakita Electric Co., Ltd. is mainly a company that produces electric heaters and electric fans. In addition, it also sells motors. KDK is its trademark, and I think the electric fans it produces are probably the highest in the industry.The spiral metal strip called fan cover on the electric fan is a new design patent of Chuanbei Electric.Judging from that delicate energy, it far surpasses Hitachi, Meidensha, Yaskawa Electric and so on. The Kokura office sells the products of the company, and also contracts the subcontracting projects of a large company, the local Kyushu Electric Railway Co., Ltd.The president of Nine Rails is Kojiro Matsukata, and the manager is Matsutoshi Matsumoto.Soon this company was bought by Nishitetsu, and it also operates the trams running from Moji to Orio in the Kitakyushu area.If Chuanbei's office does not curry favor with such a company, it cannot operate.

The director of the firm is from Shikoku, and his name is Xingjia Qingming.Although he was only in his thirties, I thought he was quite old at the time.He was a very kind person and took good care of me, who didn't understand society at all.But I'm an ineffective handyman, a very ingenious handyman. The branch is in Fukuoka. I have to copy and send a copy of the invoice for the goods sold to the head office and the Fukuoka branch. This is also one of my jobs.The salary was initially eleven yuan, almost all of which had to be paid to the family.At that time, my parents opened a restaurant, but it was still in a recession, and my salary was used to pay rent.

If you want to talk about the pain at that time, it was meeting elementary school classmates who had already gone to middle school on the road.I wear a suit and carry the delivered goods on my bicycle.If at this time I saw friends in uniforms carrying schoolbags with textbooks in groups, I would immediately flee from the side road.From time to time, I also subscribed to the lecture notes issued by Waseda University, and sometimes went to English evening classes, but because of my weak will, I didn't learn anything.As a result, reading turned to literature and art. During the three years at Kawahoku Electric Co., Ltd., I mainly read the things published by the then Chunyang Bunko and Shinchosha.Especially works to be read first.At that time, Akutagawa published a series of short story collections, such as "Spring Clothes" and "Hunan Fan", which I greedily read when I went to the bank to do errands and waited in a chair.I would like to wait as long as possible.

At that time, the magazine "Bunyichunqiu" had already been published, and it was a foregone conclusion that Hiroshi Kikuchi (a famous Japanese writer) would dominate the literary world.From the novels and plays published in the periodicals, I gradually found writers to my taste.In terms of drama, I like Suzuki Izumi Saburo (Japanese playwright), Sekiguchi Jiro, Kishida Kunishi, etc., and the works of Yamamoto Yuzo should be read first. Among the writers of the Meiji era, I have generally read the works of , Ogai, , and others. I am not very interested in naturalist writers.Compared with his works, such as "One Soldier", I still like the travel notes he wrote continuously in the past.I read "Clay Dolls" and felt very boring.I feel that things written by private novel writers are not in line with my hobbies.I also didn't feel the charm of Shiga Naoya's "Dark Night Journey" which was highly rated.On the contrary, his "Reconciliation" moved me.There are also works like "Go to the Net", "The Apprentice God", "In Kinosaki", etc. I don't know what is good about them.At that time, what I pursued in novels was pure novels.

Therefore, Akutagawa and Kikuchi cannot but attract my interest.In particular, Kikuchi's "Ancient Stories" and Akutagawa's "Notebook from Hokichi", although they also belong to the same private novel system, are much more interesting than the works of so-called naturalistic writers.I feel bored and can't appreciate the flat works of naturalist writers. At that time, "Bunyichunqiu" serialized his love works with Yamada Junko, but why did he write these?I can't understand it anyway. In terms of drama, I was attracted by Kikuchi's works influenced by the modern Irish theater style, and I also came into contact with Kishida Kuniji's French-style chic, relaxed and bright works, which gave me a very fresh feeling. "The Best Chestnut Tree in the Village", "Two Men Playing with Fate", "Autumn in Merano", "Storm", etc., I read almost at the same time as the magazine was published.

Foreign literature is familiar from the earliest collection of world literature published by Xinchaosha.Dostoevsky's works were also read by this opportunity, and the one that attracted me was "The Poor".It is impossible for a hobby like mine to be interested in private novels.I remember reading Gorky's "Nightclub" (also known as "The Bottom") translated by Hara Kyuichiro. I felt very close to the miserable life in the book.Moreover, according to the introduction of the translator Yuan Shi in the monthly magazine, he seems to have lived in a small inn. I am very interested in his short essays on the past. I will never forget.The article "Nightclub" reminded me of my father's small inn.

Probably at that moment, "The Monk and His Disciple" became what is now called a bestseller.One night, when I heard that a reading of that book was being held at a temple in the city, I rushed to it.In the dim main hall, five or six young men and women were reciting the sermons from the book together. This atmosphere made me feel very noble.This is simply not a group for someone like me to join.I feel that a primary school graduate like me, a handyman in a company, and a person who is at the bottom of society cannot be exposed to such things at all. At that time, I was deeply disappointed in the future.The company I worked for was struggling in the depression and issued social bonds hastily in an attempt to get out of trouble.At that time, Hitachi and Mitsubishi had begun to play the role of monopoly enterprises, and my company probably failed under their pressure.The basis for this is that the banks accepting our company's social bonds are all below the second-tier banks, and the company tragically went bankrupt due to lack of strong support. That was some time before the bankruptcy. For a handyman like me who only reads literature books, the people in the company will not feel comfortable using it.Soon, in a downsizing, I was kicked out together with other employees. But, thinking about it now, I think the age of sixteen to eighteen was the period when I felt the freshest, and being able to squeeze in some time to read some books indiscriminately has a considerable effect on today.I read "The Poor" and wandered all day in the desolate wilderness described in "The Decline of the Gatekeeper's House".I wanted to stay in an inn that didn't even have a name, and I wandered alone on the road along the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture. At the age of nineteen, I did nothing and wandered around for a year.Looking for a job but nowhere to hire me.One of the reasons is that I only graduated from elementary school, I am not too old or young, I do manual labor, and my body is too weak. Fortunately, at this time, the restaurant of my parents has improved slightly, and I can no longer count on my salary.It may also be because the room of the restaurant is too narrow, so we rented the second floor of a nearby grocery store.As mentioned earlier, we lived with my grandmother at that time. The grocer who was the landlord was an agent for a large wholesale store and had no store.In my opinion, wives are better educated than husbands.They already have a girl, but the wife's displeasure with her husband can always be felt through some gestures.The husband was one of those cunning men who are common among brokers, and he took the wares from his store and sold them to his neighbors at a great price.It is doubtful whether these commodities were brought back through proper channels.That wife was always immersed in reading books such as the Complete Works of World Literature, and of course, because of the age difference with me, she never talked about novels with me.However, she is a person who gives people a good impression. In Kokura there is a factory called Dongyang Pottery, which produces coffee cups and western tableware.I have a classmate who is an employee in the factory.Through his introduction, I got to know Mr. H who was about ten years older than me in the factory. Mr. H was also a young man who loved literature. He didn't write novels himself, but he called himself a "poet".However, I have not once seen his poems.I went to his house to play, and there are many books on his bookshelf, which is very enviable. Among Mr. H’s friends are some workers of the Yawata Iron Works, who are seven or eight years older than me, and they really start writing novels.From this I began to associate with these people, sometimes showing them short things I had written myself. I may have been influenced by Akutagawa at that time, and I seem to have written something with the same tendency.I have about one or two essays.One day, there was going to be a work presentation, and we gathered in a small teahouse near the Enmeiji Temple where the stele of Miyamoto Musashi is kept on the outskirts of Kokura. To this day, I still vaguely remember that the short story I disclosed that time was about a famine in North Korea, and people ate steamed buns made of soil.Of course, the story is fictitious, and it was not written out of proletarian consciousness, but the people at the Yawata Steel Works unduly praised it after hearing it, saying that my short story belonged to the proletarian literature that was rising at that time. I don't know anything about Tokyo's literary world, but I just stand there and read some novels I see in magazines in bookstores.Speaking of magazines back then, there was something called Article Club.Takeo Kato commented on manuscripts for each issue.Although I also wanted to submit a manuscript, I lacked the courage.I was therefore ignorant of the proletarian literature that was produced at that time. However, my friends who worked at the Yawata Steel Works were genuinely interested in proletarian literature, and they asked Tokyo to deliver the magazine directly, which seemed to be "Literary Front". Ryunosuke Akutagawa committed suicide.On the headline of the social section of the newspaper, the words "Hero of the Literary World" were printed.The wife downstairs deliberately brought up the newspaper for me to read.I saw the advertisement of Bungeishunju Club in the newspaper, so I sent money and asked them to send me a photo of Ryunosuke.On the back of the photo is the ink signature of the photographer Shutaro Nambu.

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Notes: ,, "Kappa" and so on. Wait. Wait. , "Women's Line Map" and so on.