schools at the time were very particular about things like that, and I was
ordered repeatedly to have it cut. Eventually I got fed up and ran away. For
a while I pretended to be a tramp in Asakusa Park, but the inspections were
bothersome there too, and they were strict about keeping the number of
drifters down. I changed over to women’s clothing. Then I went back to my
hometown, to the harbor. Actually I was born in Tokyo, so even though I
say ‘hometown’ there are only a few relatives there who know my face.
Momosuke’s ghost seems to have come. . . . Hearing that nearly ninety-
year-old man’s voice come from inside the storm doors that moonlit night, I
thought that I had left the world, that my life had reached its encl.’’
“Ah—and then you became an actress?”
“That’s right. I had liked acting ever since I was in middle school, and I
had always played women’s parts—I had been in the drama studies group
at my high school, too—so I figured I might as well try to be an actress. . . .
I had practiced a lot of the women’s parts in various books of plays. Small
traveling troupes were short on players during the war, so it was easy to get
taken on. But even in groups of wanderers like that, people had their names
registered—male and female actors both. Inspectors and officers in charge
of conscription came around sometimes. I was the only one who wasn’t
registered. Uryu Momosuke had disappeared, no one knew where he had
gone. Traveling actors are like fallen leaves blown together into a pile—
they don’t think very much about one another’s pasts, and more often than
not the stories they tell one another about themselves are made up.”
“You became a woman and then acted woman’s parts—that makes it a
play within a play.”
“A play within a play? . . . At the time it didn’t feel like that. I was
cursing the world and it felt good. The young soldier who told me about the
girl who looked like me—he was in the Special Attack Corps. Our
company went around performing to cheer up the troops. We went to a base
with an airfield in Kyushu that was being used by the Special Attack Corps.
