The Legend of Gold and Other Stories by Ishikawa Jun

Author:Ishikawa Jun [Jun, Ishikawa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawai‘i Press
Published: 1998-04-21T17:00:00+00:00

What was it about the boy? He had only to step into the center of the thoroughfare, and a look of sheer panic spread across the faces in the crowd. It was a reaction shared by all—one read it in the eyes of vendor and passerby alike. Every man and woman was on guard, knees bent, their bodies ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. But, somehow, like the hireling in the military boots, their legs failed them. It seemed as though they were powerless to move. Whatever had caused each and every one of them to assume an unexpectedly frozen pose, and with a conformity that was universal?

Fear. It goes by no other name. Albeit a lawless mob, this was a crowd that knew trouble when they saw it coming their way.

True, it had been a while since they experienced what it was like to live in fear and trepidation of something far more powerful than themselves. They had known the feeling, but they had driven all thought of it from their minds, and now they acted as though the terrors of the not so distant past had never really happened. Why, if one tried counting back only a mere five years, to a date as close in time as 1941, and asked them to recall the events of their lives in those fateful Showa years, surely that was to ask them to cross a mental divide that, in terms of its historical significance, measured not five but a full five thousand years!

Besides, now that they had lost their way in a land ravaged by war and fire, and they had wandered into the labyrinth of the marketplace that grew out of the ruins, what need did they have to think of the past, anyway? It was as if no one had survived from the last century and, no, there had never been an era in the history of modern Japan when people had paraded about smugly wearing the look of His Majesty’s loyal subjects—when the land had been populated by a race of so-called Neo-Confucian gentlemen who were only too happy to be of unquestioning service to the empire. No, not a soul from that day and age appeared to be alive. They had all vanished—down to every last man, woman, and child.

They were errant seeds, their feet planted on the spot where they happened to land. They had sprouted out of the ground, and with the force of a weed that reaches maturity overnight, they were now fully grown. They were the “new leaf” that had been turned over. They were the “newly created society.” They were all of the new this-and-that touted in the press of late. They were billed as a “brand-new” product: the local specialty and the showcase item of today’s “new moment in history.”

Such were the people milling about the marketplace. Down to a man they had the look of moral delinquents and social outlaws who knew no yesterday and know no tomorrow.

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