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AI-Generated Graded Readers
Masaru Uchida, Gifu University

Publication webpage:
https://www1.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/a1/ai-generated_graded_readers.html

Publication date: April 7, 2026

About This Edition

This book is a simplified English adaptation created for extensive reading practice.
The text was translated from Japanese into English and simplified using ChatGPT for intermediate English learners as part of an educational project.

Target reading level: CEFR A2-B1

The adaptation aims to improve readability while preserving the narrative content and spirit of the original work.

Source Text

Original work: Shibue Chūsai (渋江抽斎)
Author: Mori Ōgai (森鷗外)

Source: Aozora Bunko (青空文庫)
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/

Original Japanese text available at:
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000129/card2058.html

The original work is in the public domain in Japan.

Copyright and Use

This simplified English edition is an educational adaptation intended for non-commercial use only.

The source text is provided by Aozora Bunko, a digital library that makes Japanese public domain literature freely available.

For information about Aozora Bunko and its usage policies, see:
https://www.aozora.gr.jp/guide/kijyunn.html

This edition is an AI-assisted translation and simplification prepared for educational purposes.

Disclaimer

This edition is an independent educational adaptation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Aozora Bunko.

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Mori Ōgai, Shibue Chūsai (Simplified Edition, Adapted and Simplified from Japanese by ChatGPT)

Part 1 

　　There is a short poem by Shibue Chūsai. In it, he says that thirty-seven years have passed like one moment. He says he studied medicine and tried to carry on the work of his family, but his talent had not yet fully opened. He says that rise and fall, success and failure, must be left to Heaven. He also says that he has changed comfort into money and does not complain of poverty. I think he wrote these lines near the end of 1841, when he was living in Edo and serving the Tsugaru house.
　　At that time Chūsai was no longer in the close service of his lord. He had once served the Tsugaru lord in the main household, but later he was attached to the retired lord’s residence at Yanagishima. He had already inherited the family position after his father’s retirement many years before. His mother had died twelve years earlier, and his father had died four years before this poem was written. He was living with his third wife, Toku, and with three children, a son, a daughter, and a younger son. They were five people in one house in Kanda, and their life was not rich.
　　The family had an income from the Tsugaru domain, but Chūsai did not seem to care much about making money. He loved old medical books and liked to study them in silence. He did not try hard to sell his skill as a doctor, so he probably had almost no extra income beyond his stipend. There was one medicine from the Tsugaru house that he was allowed to make and sell, and that may have brought in a little profit. Even so, his life seems to have been narrow and careful. His poem speaks of poverty, and it was not only a figure of speech.
　　Chūsai was a severe man in the way he lived. He did not drink at all when he was young, though later, after a stay in the cold north, he began to take a little sake in the evening. He never smoked. He did not go out for pleasure trips, except now and then to gather medicinal plants. He did enjoy the theater, but even there he went in a plain way, sitting with friends in the cheap seats. Those friends jokingly called themselves a band of men who loved honesty and hated luxury.
　　Where, then, did his money go? I think it went to only two things. One was books, and the other was guests. The Shibue family had long been a family of learned doctors, so books must already have been in the house, passed down from father to son. But even that was not enough for him. From the records of books connected with his name, we can see that he bought many more and did not like to save money when a good book was before him.
　　His house was also full of people. There were always students or young scholars living there. Sometimes there were only two or three, but at other times there were more than ten. These were not rich young men. They were men with talent and hope, but without enough money to support themselves. Chūsai seems to have chosen such men and allowed them to eat at his table and stay in his house. A man who lived so simply for himself could still spend freely on learning and on other people.
　　So when he says in the poem that he does not fear poverty, what did he really mean? If we read only the last line, we may think he had already made peace with a quiet life and had no wish for success. But I do not believe that is the whole truth. In the line about his talent, there is a sound of pain. A man does not say his talent has “grown” unless he feels that it has not been given room to grow. His words about leaving things to Heaven also do not sound like the words of a man who has cut off all desire. They sound more like the words of a man who has desire, but has had to hold it inside.
　　Still, I do not think the last line is false. Chūsai had trained himself for a long time. Even while his wish had not yet been fulfilled, he had something firm inside. That is why he could bear hardship and still find a kind of peace. Yet the peace was not the peace of a man with no ambition. It was the peace of a man who suffered, endured, and kept his pride. That is why the poem stays in the mind.
　　Three years after writing it, Chūsai at last received a better post. In 1844 he became a lecturer at the Igakkan, the medical school that had once been founded by the Taki family and later came under the shogunate. In modern terms, it was almost as if he had gained a post at the highest medical school in the country. After that he was allowed to attend the castle on formal days, and a few years later he was received in audience by the shogun. At last, when he was about forty-five, one could say that his ability had begun to be recognized.
　　Even then, however, his poverty did not disappear. He received stipends and some rewards, but his new position brought new expenses. His wife Iō, the fourth wife he had married after Toku’s death, had to sell clothes and ornaments to meet the costs of public duty. This fact moves me strongly. I have had Chūsai’s poem written out and hung in my sitting room because I deeply admire him. He is not a man widely known in the world. A few people know him as one of the authors of a great bibliographical work, but he wrote many things in many fields, and most were not printed while he was alive.
　　I did not first come to him through that famous book. When I was young, I read very widely and bought many books, though I never cared for rare and costly copies. Later, as I began to search into the past for material for my own writing, I found that I needed to study the old military directories called bukan. Public libraries did not gather them well, so I started to collect them myself. During that search I often found books stamped with the mark, “Owned by the Shibue family, physicians to Hirosaki.” From that, I first learned that there had been a Shibue in service to the Tsugaru house who had gathered many such books.
　　After some time, I began asking a new question. When had these military directories begun, and what was the oldest example still in existence? To answer that, I had to decide what should properly be called a bukan and what should not. In the course of this work, I examined very old guides to Edo residences, family crests, and battle standards. At last I reached a firm conclusion about the oldest true examples I had seen. Then I found, in the Imperial Library at Ueno, a manuscript catalogue of old military directories and maps of Edo. The writer’s name was not signed, but in several places the notes said, “Chūsai says.”
　　That made me stop and think. The manuscript also bore the red seal of the Shibue family of Hirosaki. Could this Chūsai and that Shibue be the same man? Once the thought came to me, I could not let it go. I asked friends, especially those from the northeast, “Do you know a Shibue? Do you know a man called Chūsai?” I also sent letters to people in Hirosaki. One day I asked Mr. Nagai Kimpū, and he said, “If it is the Hirosaki Shibue, he was a great book collector and one of the men who wrote that bibliographical work.” But he did not know whether the man had also used the name Chūsai.
　　Then letters arrived from acquaintances in Hirosaki. They told me that the Shibue family had served the Tsugaru house since the Genroku period. But because they had long been stationed in Edo, few people in Hirosaki knew them well. There was no family grave there, and no close descendants in the city. I was told that in Tokyo there might be a man named Iida Tatsumi who had known the family, and in Hirosaki there was a local historian named Tonosaki Kaku who might know their history. I decided first to visit Iida, who seemed more likely to have had direct contact with them.
　　I went to his large house in Nishi-Edogawachō without any letter of introduction. Even so, Mr. Iida kindly received me and listened to my questions. He said that he had known a man named Shibue Dōjun. One of his relatives had been a doctor, and whenever that doctor faced some difficult medical question, he used to go and ask Shibue for advice. “He lived in Honjo Odaidokorochō,” Mr. Iida said. But when I asked what had become of his children and later family, he could not tell me. Even so, I had taken one step forward. The shadow in old books had become a real man, and the path to him had begun to open.

Part 2 

　　I was about to leave Mr. Iida’s house with a feeling of disappointment. He had known Shibue Dōjun, and that alone was a real gain, but he could not tell me where the family had gone, whether there were descendants, or where the grave might be. Then he said, “Please wait a moment. I will ask my wife, just in case.” A few moments later his wife came into the room. When she was asked whether she knew anything of Dōjun’s family, she answered at once, “His daughter is in Honjo Matsui-chō. She is Kineya Katsuhisa.”
　　That answer surprised me. Until that moment, I had not known that a child of the author of Keiseki Hōkoshi was still alive. Yet the news did not make my next step easy. A person called Kineya Katsuhisa would almost certainly be a teacher of nagauta. Could I really go to such a woman and suddenly ask, “Did your father also use the name Chūsai?” or “Did your father collect old military directories?” The thought seemed too abrupt and rude. Even after making one discovery, I still felt that the road in front of me was narrow.
　　So I asked Mr. Iida for another favor. “Would you please find out whether there is some male relative in the family?” I said. He kindly agreed to do so. I left his house that day happier than when I had entered, because the search had moved one step forward. A few days later a letter came from him. He wrote that Katsuhisa had a nephew named Shibue Shūkichi living in Shimo-Shibuya. If he was the nephew of Dōjun’s daughter, then he must be a grandson of Dōjun himself. This was important. It meant that the line had not ended.
　　I wrote to Shūkichi at once and asked when and where I might meet him. His answer came back quickly. He was in bed with a cold, he said, but when he recovered he could come to see me himself. The handwriting looked young and lively. Still, I could do nothing but wait for his illness to pass. The search had advanced, but now it had stopped again. While I waited, I decided not to waste time. I would visit the other man in Tokyo whose name had been given to me from Hirosaki, the historian Tonosaki Kaku.
　　Tonosaki worked in the office of the Imperial Household. I went first to the ministry and learned that the department where he served was on the slope at Kasumigaseki, away from the main buildings. In a small reception room there I met him for the first time. He was not an older man like Mr. Iida. He was nearer my own age, and he was a man of history. At once I felt easy with him, as if we had known each other longer than a few minutes. After the first greetings, I explained why I had come.
　　I told him everything in a simple order. I said that I was collecting old bukan, that I had found a manuscript by an unnamed scholar who seemed deeply learned in them, that this scholar referred to himself in places as Chūsai, and that the manuscript bore the seal of a Shibue physician of Hirosaki. Then I said the thing that had been troubling my mind for some time: “I have begun to wonder whether this Shibue and this Chūsai may be one and the same man.” Tonosaki answered at once, without hesitation. “Yes,” he said. “Chūsai was the art name of Shibue Dōjun, the man who wrote Keiseki Hōkoshi.”
　　I felt a sudden lightness in my chest. At last the two shadows had joined into one figure. The collector of old books, the writer of learned notes, the physician of the Tsugaru house, and the man called Chūsai were all the same person. This discovery pleased me for another reason as well. I began to think how much this dead man resembled me. He had been a doctor. He had been an official. He had read philosophy, history, and literature as well as medicine. I too had walked across different fields, though with far less strength and far less worth.
　　That thought did not make me proud. It made me ashamed and also grateful. Chūsai had done with firmness what I had done only in a scattered way. Yet there was one thing about him that drew me even more closely. He had not walked only on the great public road of serious learning. At times he had turned into side paths. He had loved old military directories and maps of Edo, things which many people would call trifles. Had he lived in my own age, I thought, our sleeves might well have touched each other in some narrow side street of scholarship. For that reason I could not only respect him. I could also feel affection for him.
　　When I said something like this to Tonosaki, he seemed surprised by the strange path through which I had reached Chūsai. Then he gave me another important piece of news. “I know one of Chūsai’s children,” he said. “Not the daughter. I do not know her. The person I know is the son who succeeded him. His name is Tamotsu.” I asked where this Tamotsu now lived, but Tonosaki did not know. He had not seen him for a long time. Still, he promised to ask around among men from the same province and find the address if he could. I asked him not only to do that, but also to send me any written facts about Chūsai that he could gather from books near at hand.
　　Before long, a letter arrived from Tonosaki. With it he enclosed extracts from several books. Among them was a shortened form of the inscription on Chūsai’s grave, written long ago by Kaibo Gyoson. In those lines I found an answer to another question that had troubled me. It said clearly that his personal name was Zenzen, that Chūsai was his art name, and that Dōjun was his Chinese-style courtesy name. So the chain of names was now firmly set in order before me. At almost the same time, a longer letter came from Shūkichi, who had begun to recover.
　　Shūkichi’s letter was full of useful things. He told me where his grandfather’s grave stood, across from the Yanaka burial ground at Kannoji. He explained the family relations that still remained. Kineya Katsuhisa was his aunt. Tamotsu was her younger brother. Between them there had been another brother, Osamu, now dead, and Shūkichi himself was Osamu’s son. The three branches of the family had gone in very different directions. Katsuhisa had become a teacher of nagauta. Tamotsu had become a writer. Shūkichi earned his living as an artist who made designs. Because of this, and because life had separated them, the family had grown somewhat distant from one another.
　　Yet chance had recently brought them together again. Around the very time when I had begun to search for the descendants of Chūsai, Tamotsu’s daughter Fuyuko had died. Tamotsu had written to his elder sister to tell her of the death, and in that way Katsuhisa had learned his address once more. Through Shūkichi’s letter I now learned it too. Tamotsu was living in Ushigome Funagawara-chō. I sent the address on to Tonosaki, but by then I no longer needed to wait for others to find the heir. The road had opened directly before me.
　　Before going to see him, I first visited Chūsai’s grave at Kannoji. It was easy to find. The stone stood to the west of the main hall, facing west, and it bore a long inscription written in fine calligraphy. I stood there for some time and read what I could. Around that grave were other stones of the Shibue family. There were the graves of his father and earlier ancestors, of wives, of children who had died young, and of later members of the house. The place was quiet, but it was full of names, and each name opened a small dark door into the family’s past.
　　I do not need to repeat every inscription in detail. What mattered most to me at that moment was the feeling that the family had taken shape before my eyes. Until then Chūsai had been for me a scholar’s name, a seal in books, and a few rumors carried by others. Now he stood in a line of fathers, mothers, wives, sons, daughters, and descendants. I offered incense there, not only to the man whom I had come to admire, but also to the whole house around him, high and low together. Then I left the temple with a stronger wish than ever to meet the living heir.
　　But just when I meant to go to Funagawara-chō, trouble rose in my own house. My daughter Annu fell ill. I still went to the office each day, but after work I hurried home and could not go visiting. So instead I sent letters again and again to the three Shibues and to Tonosaki. They all replied. Shūkichi, now recovered, even went to visit his uncle Tamotsu and asked him to speak with me about Chūsai. Tonosaki too called on him once in my place. Thus, before I myself could make the journey to Funagawara-chō, Tamotsu came to my office. At last I was able to meet the son who had succeeded Chūsai.

Part 3 

　　The day I met Tamotsu, the weather was already cold, but it was not yet the season for a brazier. We sat across a desk in a room with no fire, and talked of Chūsai for so long that neither of us seemed to grow tired. Tamotsu told me first about the family as it had been inside the house. The surviving sister Katsuhisa, Tamotsu himself, and the late Osamu, father of Shūkichi, were all children of the same mother, Iō, Chūsai’s fourth wife. Katsuhisa, whose personal name was Kuga, had been born when Chūsai was forty-three and Iō thirty-two. A few years later Osamu was born in Honjo, and after another interval Tamotsu was born there as well, when Chūsai was already fifty-three.
　　Chūsai died at the age of fifty-four, so Tamotsu was only two years old when he lost his father. Yet he had one great piece of good fortune. His mother Iō lived on until the seventeenth year of Meiji, and Tamotsu did not lose her until he himself was twenty-eight. For twenty-six long years he was able to hear from her own lips how his father had lived, spoken, worked, and felt. In this way the dead man had not wholly vanished from the house. The memory of him still moved through the rooms in the voice of the widow who had loved him.
　　It seems that Chūsai had meant Tamotsu to become a learned physician. In the instructions he left before his death, he said that the boy should study the Confucian classics under Kaibo Gyoson, medicine under Taki Antaku, and writing under Kojima Seisai. He also said that at the proper time the child should be taught Dutch. This is striking, because Chūsai himself had strongly disliked Dutch learning. He had little respect for the empty fashion of chasing after the new, and when he once called the acting of Ichikawa Kodanji “Western,” he did not mean it as praise.
　　Yet even Chūsai had come, in his last years, to feel that Western learning could not be ignored. Tamotsu said that this change had come after his father borrowed and read certain writings by Asaka Gonsai. The exact book is uncertain, but it may well have been something like Yōgai Kiryaku, a work that opened Japanese eyes toward the outer world. In any case, the important thing is clear enough. Chūsai did not abandon his old learning, but he understood at last that a son living in a changing age must be given some path toward the new. Tamotsu himself later learned English rather than Dutch, but that was simply because the times had moved on.
　　I told Tamotsu how my own search had begun, and then he answered with a small memory that delighted me more than I had expected. Though he had been only two when his father died, he still remembered having been given a bukan to play with, a colored edition in which the formal objects in a daimyo procession had been painted by hand. He also remembered that Chūsai had kept many old military directories in a large book chest with a label that read “Edo kagami.” Those volumes remained together until Tamotsu was five or six. When I heard this, the old manuscript catalogue in the Ueno library suddenly grew clearer to me. If there had been a chest for old bukan, then there must also have been a chest for old maps of Edo. I could now see more plainly how the manuscript catalogue of those materials had come into being.
　　I asked Tamotsu whether he would write down, item by item, all that he remembered hearing about his father. He readily agreed. He also said that he had already printed some recollections in a journal and would let me see those as well. Soon after this meeting I had to leave for Kyoto on official business connected with a great ceremony. Tamotsu, who was a diligent man, sent word before I had even returned that he had already finished writing the notes. As soon as I came back from Kyoto, I went to see him at Ushigome, received the papers from his hand, and borrowed the printed memoir too. What I now tell about Chūsai rests in large part on the materials that came from Tamotsu.
　　The story of the family reaches far back before Chūsai himself. The Shibue line had once served the Ōtawara house in Shimotsuke. A forefather several generations earlier had sons who entered different services, and one of them, Tatsumori, went north and entered the Tsugaru house. He studied medicine under Imaōji Dōsan and was taken into service by the Tsugaru lord in Edo at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In time he followed the house to Tsugaru, received stipends and later an increase of income, and rose to a place of some weight. This Tatsumori was the man from whom the branch leading to Chūsai truly began.
　　Yet the line was not simple and straight. Tatsumori adopted a younger kinsman, Hoshiyuki, and from him the house passed on. Hoshiyuki had only one daughter, Tose, and because the family had no strong male heir, a husband was brought in for her while she was still a child. That husband, Iri, died young. Later another man, Honkō, entered the house and married Tose. A daughter named Chiyo was born, and the family loved her as the single grain from which the line would continue. But she too died young. Thus the Shibue blood almost came to an end, and the family had to look outside again in order to survive.
　　At that point they adopted a gifted boy from an entirely different home. He was the son of Inagaki Seizō, a man who had once served a lord and later lived as the keeper of an inn at Nezu. The boy had shown unusual talent even in childhood, and so he was brought into the Shibue house under the name Tadasige. This was the man who would become Chūsai’s father. He studied Confucian learning under Shibano Ritsuzan and medicine under Yoda Shōjun. He later wrote books of his own, and in both scholarship and appearance he was remembered as an extraordinary man.
　　Tadasige was said to be handsome in a remarkable way, and also strict and self-controlled. While still young he gained the favor of the Tsugaru lord. After the death of his adoptive father, he rose further under the next lord as physician and teacher. He taught both medicine and the classics to the young men of the domain, and his stipend was increased more than once. He was also permitted to prepare the domain’s famous secret medicine, Ichiryū Kintan, which brought in a large income. Though he was officially a physician and instructor, he was trusted so deeply by his lord that he could speak hard truths and give bold advice when others kept silent.
　　His private life was less calm. His first wife died without children. A second marriage produced a daughter who soon died, and that marriage also came to an end. At last he married Nui, a woman from a retainer family of the Sakura domain, and she became the mother of Chūsai. Before Chūsai she bore a daughter named Suma, and after him another child who died in infancy. Tadasige retired at the age of fifty-nine, and Nui died some years before him. He himself lived on into his seventies. Thus Chūsai was born into a house that had known service, learning, adoption, loss, recovery, and repeated effort across several generations.
　　Tamotsu said that Chūsai was born on the eighth day of the eleventh month of Bunka 2, in Kanda Benkeibashi. The place called Benkeibashi was not the name of a bridge but of a town district near the area of Izumibashi and the Yanagihara road. From old maps and from the duty records of Tsugaru physicians, it appears that the family had long lived around that quarter, moving from one nearby address to another after fire and other troubles. Whether the exact house of his birth stood on the Benkeibashi side or just across the way in Motoyanagihara is hard to prove with certainty. But at the least we can say that Chūsai was born into that neighborhood and grew up in the learned air of a physician’s Edo household.
　　As a child he was called Tsunekichi. The wife of an earlier Tsugaru lord, Lady Shinjuin, became fond of him and, Tamotsu said, had him brought to her almost every day from infancy until he was about five. She liked to watch him play at her side. We may imagine that he was a lovely child, perhaps resembling his handsome father. But beauty of body was not the only inheritance that came down to him. I cannot help thinking that he received something deeper as well: from his father’s line, seriousness, discipline, and intelligence; from the family into which his father had first been born, perhaps a kind of hard moral will; and from the long medical tradition of the Shibue house, a respect for study that did not depend on fashion.
　　What sort of world, then, received this child when he entered it? I do not wish to stop here and write full biographies of all the older men who would later teach or guide him. But it is worth looking for a moment at the stars above his horizon. Among those who would become his teachers or older friends were Ichino Meian, the great textual scholar; Kariya Ekisai, another master of old books and hard criticism; the physician Izawa Ranken; and Ikeda Kyōsui, from whom Chūsai later learned vaccination matters. There were also elder men such as Asaka Gonsai, Kojima Seisai, Okamoto Kyōsai, and Kaibo Gyoson, along with the main and branch houses of the Taki medical family.
　　Nor was the circle around him limited to scholars and doctors. In the artistic world there were men like Tani Bunchō, Nagashima Gorosaku, and Ishizuka Jūbei, all older than he, all alive, all moving through Edo while he was still a child. In other words, the city into which Chūsai was born was already full of minds and tastes that would later touch his own. The roads of scholarship, medicine, bibliography, calligraphy, poetry, and even theater were already laid out before him. The older generation was there, waiting. When I think of his birth in that place and at that hour, I cannot help feeling that the world into which he came had already prepared the teachers, the rivals, the companions, and the temptations that would shape the whole course of his life.

Part 4 

　　Among the men who stood above Chūsai in his youth, the one who later taught him medicine was Izawa Ranken. His personal name was Nobuyasu, and he was known in common life as Jian. The main Izawa house served the Kuroda lords of Fukuoka, but Ranken belonged to a branch family in the service of the Abe house of Fukuyama. When Chūsai was born, Ranken was about twenty-nine years old and lived in Masagochō in Hongo. Only later did he move into the Abe family residence at Maruyama.
　　The Abe house changed hands in time, and Ranken served there under a new lord as well. During those years there was also a small link between that world and the family of Chūsai’s later wife Iō. One of Iō’s elder sisters served in the women’s quarters of the Abe house. From her came a story about Ranken that people remembered with warmth. He was lame, and so he was allowed to ride in a small carriage inside the mansion.
　　But when he came near his lord, he had to get down and move forward on the ground. The women of the inner rooms laughed when they saw this. One day the lord heard of it and rebuked them. “Jian may lack strong legs,” he said in effect, “but he has a full man’s worth in his body.” The story is simple, but it shows how Ranken was seen: a man of real weight, whose physical weakness could not lessen his dignity. Such a man would later become one of the great medical figures in Chūsai’s world.
　　There was another line of learning that also mattered greatly to him. After general medicine under Ranken, Chūsai studied smallpox medicine under Ikeda Keisui. To us, in a time when vaccination has long been common, it is not easy to feel the fear that smallpox once brought. In those days people feared it more than many other terrible diseases. When it spread, whole communities fell into panic, and families watched in helplessness.
　　The special method of treating the disease in the Ikeda line went back to a Chinese physician named Dai Mankō, who came to Japan in the seventeenth century. He brought a more organized way of dealing with smallpox, and that knowledge passed to Ikeda Sūzan in Iwakuni, then through later men of the family, and finally to Ikeda Dokubi. Dokubi moved from place to place, first in the west, then to Kyoto, and at last to Edo. There he was called to the shogunate’s medical school, and for him a special chair of smallpox medicine was created.
　　When Chūsai was born, Dokubi was still alive and living in Surugadai. He was already an old man, yet his name was still bright. He had several names and titles, and one of them, Sensō, came from a dream in which he saw a great toad and took it as a lucky sign. The story sounds strange, but such touches often cling to men of old learning. Around them medicine, omen, scholarship, and personal fancy were never fully divided from one another.
　　Dokubi had no clear son to succeed him in the main line, and in the end one of his disciples became the next head of the house and the next holder of the official post. But here the matter grows uncertain, for there appears another important man, the Keisui who taught Chūsai. Was Keisui Dokubi’s own son, or his nephew, the son of a younger brother? Different records say different things. One text on a grave had called him a son, but a later family memorial book called him a nephew. Whatever the truth, he was of the blood of the family, yet he did not inherit the main house.
　　Instead, Keisui made his own way as a town doctor in Shitaya Okachimachi, while the official head of the Ikeda line remained in another place. Thus Edo had two faces of the same tradition. One was the formal house linked to public teaching, and the other was the working physician in the city. It was from this Keisui that Chūsai learned the special field of smallpox treatment. In modern terms, after studying medicine as a whole, he then chose a difficult special branch and trained in it with care.
　　The old Ikeda method had once been prized because it rejected wild guessing and tried instead to observe signs carefully and answer each condition in an ordered way. That was one reason it had spread so widely. Yet when I tried to learn more about Keisui himself, I found that knowledge had almost vanished. I wanted at least to know his age. Better still, I wanted to read his grave inscription and set him in his proper place among the figures who shaped Chūsai’s mind.
　　Tamotsu told me first that he had visited Keisui’s grave when he was a child, but he remembered only that it had been in Mukōjima. Later Fujikawa Yū told me that the grave stood near Jōsenji. Since I myself had lived in Mukōjima as a boy, Jōsenji was a familiar temple to me. So I went there and searched carefully, around the main hall and in the little burial grounds of the smaller temples nearby. I found many town graves, and one Ikeda grave, but it was not the one I sought.
　　I asked to see the temple death record, but the book was new and arranged in simple order, and there was no Ikeda household listed among the parish families. So I came away with empty hands. I then asked others for help. Through a friend I questioned a man well known for knowledge of Tokyo graves, but he knew nothing. After that I found a written account of the first Ikeda master, and it said that he had been buried at a temple called Reishōji in Mukōjima, beside a memorial stone for Dai Mankō.
　　I had never heard of Reishōji, though I had once lived in that district. I went back again and wandered through Shin-Kōme, Kōme, and Susaki, searching for the temple, but there was no such place. At last, by chance, I visited Kōfukuji to pay respects at my own father’s grave, and there I spoke with the priest Okuda Bokujū. When I mentioned Reishōji and the Ikeda graves, he surprised me by saying that he remembered both. Reishōji, he said, had once stood near Jōsenji, and several Ikeda graves with inscriptions had stood within its grounds.
　　But Reishōji had been closed. When that happened, graves with living family ties would have been taken away by their people, while graves without family might have been moved to a common cemetery. This was both helpful and discouraging. At least I now knew that Tamotsu and Bokujū were two living people who had truly seen the Ikeda graves. Yet the chance of finding them again had become weak. I asked where such ownerless graves were usually sent, and the answer was: to the common cemetery at Somei.
　　So I went there too, though by then the search had already begun to feel hopeless. A sharp young woman at a house beside the cemetery told me plainly that there were only regular plots with owners, and that no Ikeda family held land there now. I argued that ownerless dead must go somewhere, especially when graves were removed from a broken temple. She replied that even if such bodies were buried, stone monuments were not set up for them, and that no one had heard of temple gravestones being brought there. Her words were sensible, and I had to admit that she was probably right.
　　Still I was not ready to give up. I asked others and even tried to learn what the government offices knew. In the end I heard that the prefectural office had no useful record of Reishōji, and that the police watched only the removal of graves with known family ties. For the rest, there might be nothing more than a paper saying that they had been moved somewhere. If so, the memorial stone of Dai Mankō and the old Ikeda grave inscriptions were almost certainly lost forever. I was forced little by little to let go of hope.
　　During this search I troubled many people. Togawa Zanka asked questions for me, Kure Shūzō searched medical history materials, Ōtsuki Fumihiko made inquiries through friends, and others even went in person to Mukōjima. Yet most of this labor brought no result. Only two helpers gave me anything solid. One was Bokujū, who had actually seen the graves. The other was Fujikawa Yū, who had once copied part of a grave text with his own hand when collecting materials for medical history.
　　Fujikawa had not copied the whole inscription, and he had forgotten even the name Reishōji, which is why he had first told me only that the grave was near Jōsenji. But what he did save mattered greatly. Because of him, a few lines from a grave that was already near destruction were rescued from total loss. Thus, by strange chance, three witnesses remained to speak of those stones: Tamotsu, Fujikawa, and Bokujū. The stones themselves had gone, but their memory had not wholly vanished.
　　All this may seem a long détour merely to learn a little about one teacher of Chūsai. Yet it is not wasted effort. A man is not formed by fathers and sons alone. He is formed also by the teachers whose names stand half in light and half in darkness behind him. In trying to recover Keisui, I felt again what I had already felt with Chūsai himself: how much of the past survives only in broken traces, and how much patience is needed before even one human life can be seen clearly.

Part 5 

　　Even after the search for Keisui’s grave had reached a dead end, the effort was not useless. The priest Bokujū of Kōfukuji did not stop helping me when the new year came. At last he borrowed for me a memorial record of the Ikeda family that was then kept at Kaifukuji in Shimo-Meguro. It was a small manuscript, only fifteen leaves without the cover, but it opened many doors. It had been written in the first autumn of Keiō by Naotaka, the son of the second Zuisen, on the fiftieth death anniversary of the first master Dokubi. He had newly prepared memorial tablets for the line and written out the record with his own hand.
　　In this family record more than a hundred names were listed, men and women together. Some entries gave burial places and some did not. Only a few were clearly said to have been buried at Reishōji, yet if Keisui’s grave had stood there, then it was natural to think that other members of the branch family in Okachimachi had also been laid there. So the record did not solve every doubt, but it did make one thing firm. The lost graves at Reishōji had not been a single accident. They had belonged to a real family line with several branches, now mostly broken and scattered.
　　One discovery in that record was especially strange. It said that Dokubi had a younger brother named Genshun, and that Keisui was Genshun’s son. In other words, the man whom some had called Dokubi’s son was, in this account, only his nephew. Yet another source, copied from a grave text long ago, seemed to call Keisui Dokubi’s son and to say that he had been cast aside. These two accounts do not have to fight each other completely. A nephew can be adopted and treated as a son, and later pushed away. Still, the difference is large enough to trouble the mind.
　　The more I looked, the less simple the story became. The family record suggested that Dokubi first made this blood relative Keisui his heir, but later put him aside and chose instead a gifted disciple, Muraoka Shin, to continue the line and the office. If that is true, then there must have been some human struggle hidden behind the smooth outer shape of medical succession. We do not know the whole drama, but we can feel it. An old master, a talented but perhaps troublesome young man of the family, and an able disciple from outside: these are enough to make the air heavy, even when the papers are cold.
　　Yet when I looked at Keisui’s surviving books, it was hard to think of him as a foolish or worthless man. He wrote several works on smallpox, and one of the books that Chūsai helped put into shape had been taught directly from his mouth. A man who could do that was no ordinary drifter. If Dokubi truly cast him off, then either the old man was severe beyond measure, or Keisui’s faults were of a sort not visible in his writings. I cannot judge with certainty, because the full grave text is lost and its writer is unknown. That is a great loss.
　　Nor could I accept everything said in the formal family record without question. Such records often praise one man and pass quickly over another. In the account written by Shin, the adopted heir is raised up in noble language, while nothing is said in sympathy for the one who may have been replaced. On the other side, the lost grave text seems to have spoken with unusual harshness about Keisui, even for a memorial inscription. Between these two voices I hear not calm fact, but wounded human feeling. What exactly happened among Dokubi, Shin, and Keisui I cannot say. I can only say that the matter does not look simple.
　　At least one thing became clear at last. The family record gave the dates I had long wanted. Keisui’s father Genshun died at sixty. His mother died young. Keisui himself died in 1836 at the age of fifty-one. This meant that he had been born in 1786 and was about twenty when Chūsai was born. So among the men who later taught Chūsai, Keisui was the youngest. The four teachers standing above the child at his birth were now finally set in order: Meian, Ekisai, Ranken, and Keisui.
　　Among the older scholars who later touched Chūsai’s life, the first was Asaka Gonsai. He was not the closest of Chūsai’s friends, but he mattered in another way. He was the man whose thought later helped Chūsai turn away from a narrow hatred of Western learning. Gonsai had been born in the north, come to Edo in hardship while still a boy, and made his way through learning and discipline. When Chūsai was born, Gonsai was sixteen and had not yet fully entered his public life. But he was already one of the lights rising above the horizon.
　　Next came Kojima Seisai, a younger man than Gonsai but still older than Chūsai by ten years. Seisai was known for fine calligraphy and belonged to the line of Ekisai. Then there was Okamoto Kyōsai, a learned man of broad reading, and Kaibo Gyoson, who would later write the inscription for Chūsai’s grave. When Chūsai entered the world, Gonsai was sixteen, Seisai ten, Kyōsai nine, and Gyoson eight. They were still boys or youths, but they were already present, waiting in the same age into which he had been born. It is from such facts that one begins to see how a life is prepared before the child himself can know anything.
　　Among physicians older than Chūsai, the Taki family must be counted next. Keizan of the main line was already a mature man. His son Ryūhan was seventeen. In the branch line, Saitei was eleven. Of these, Saitei later became especially close to Chūsai, while Ranken’s son Shinken, only a year older than Chūsai, would become a dear friend almost of the same age. Thus, in medicine too, the child who had just been born already stood beneath a small sky full of names that would later become teachers, colleagues, and companions.
　　After scholars and doctors, there remains another class of older men who must not be pushed aside. These were the men of art, and above all the men of the theater. Today some would still talk as if a love of the stage were a low taste, unworthy of a serious scholar. But that is a shallow judgment. If drama is taken as one form of poetry given living body, then it must be admitted among the higher arts. Chūsai’s later love of the theater was not a foolish weakness. It was one part of his mind opening toward human expression.
　　In painting, the great elder who stood above him was Tani Bunchō. When Chūsai was born, Bunchō was already in his forties. Chūsai himself later learned a little painting, so Bunchō might almost be counted among his teachers rather than merely among admired elders. But beyond painting there were also men whose art lay in appreciation, performance, talk, memory, and the whole living world around the stage. To call them simply critics may be too narrow. They were devotees, connoisseurs, lovers of theatrical life.
　　One of these was Masiya Gorosaku, a confectioner of Kanda who also held a hereditary place in service to the Mito house. Rumor even said that his family had some blood tie with the Mito lords, though such talk is hard to prove. What is easier to believe is another detail, passed down in family memory: he was a very handsome man. Iō, Tamotsu’s mother, used to say so. His face had a bitter strength in it, the kind of face people remember after many years. He was not only a merchant. He was also a man of letters, of theatrical taste, and of wide social standing.
　　Gorosaku had several names and art names, as men of that age often did. What matters more than those names is the role he played. He inherited the title of Gekishinsen, a sort of sacred badge within the world of theater lovers, from an older figure called Takarada Jurai, and later passed it on to Chūsai. So the line runs from Jurai to Gorosaku and then to Chūsai. This is not a small matter. It shows that Chūsai’s later place in the world of the stage was not a private hobby hidden in the dark. It was recognized by those who had authority in that realm.
　　Gorosaku himself was born in 1769, so he was thirty-seven when Chūsai was born, nearly of an age with Meian. He lived long, dying at eighty, which means that Chūsai received the title from him at about the age of forty-four. Long before that, Gorosaku had been close to Chūsai’s father Tadasige. He did not merely watch plays. He even wrote small stage pieces for favorite actors, and his reading voice was famous. He was one of those men who gather art, gossip, texts, stories, actors, and friends around themselves until they become centers of a whole circle.
　　He was also a man of strange habits and real discipline. Though he loved the theater, he did not love drink. He took care of his health. Once, when he fell and injured both arms, the famous bone-setter Nagura said that only three things had saved him from collapse: he was a man who did not drink, he lived strictly, and his spirit was strong. If even one of those had been missing, Nagura said, the injury would have been far worse. Such a story may sound small, but it gives us the shape of the man more clearly than many formal praises.
　　Gorosaku could also write well. I say this on my own judgment. Some spoke of him lightly, but they were wrong. A long letter of his came into my hands, written in a fine, close script. It showed that he had a clean and exact way with words. He may not have written novels, and for that reason the world does not count him among the famous men of letters, yet in skill he was not beneath some names that are better known. Chūsai later moved in such a circle and learned to value it. This too belonged to the air he would breathe as he grew.
　　Another theater-loving elder was Ishizuka Jūbei, only six years older than Chūsai. He belonged almost to the next rank down, nearer to companionship than to authority. With such men standing around him, and with scholars, physicians, painters, and stage lovers all already living their busy lives in Edo, the child born at Benkeibashi did not enter an empty world. He entered a city already alive with roads that could lead him in many directions. Before he had spoken a word, the teachers, friends, and passions of his later life were already there, waiting.

Part 6 
　　
　　Among the older men who stood around Chūsai, there was another lover of the theater whom I should not pass over. This was Ishizuka Jūbei, also called Shigebei. He was only a little older than Chūsai, not old enough to belong to the high rank of masters, yet still old enough to stand before him as one of the men of the earlier circle. His family had come long before from Kamakura in Sagami and had settled in Toyozumichō in Shitaya. For generations they sold mustard powder, and so people called them the Mustard House, though their true shop name was Kamakuraya.
　　Shigebei himself would sometimes go down into the yard and tread the mustard mill with his own feet. Because of that, and because of the place where he lived, he called himself Hōkaishi, meaning the mustard man of Toyozumi. He also used the name Hōtei, again taken from the place name, and another studio name besides. Such names may seem playful, but in Edo they were part of the way a man made a place for himself in the world. Shigebei belonged at once to trade, to letters, and to theater talk.
　　He had two daughters. A husband was first brought for the elder daughter, but the man fell into bad living and the marriage was broken. Later, after the family had moved to the west corner of Suwachō in Asakusa, that same son-in-law was called back again. The detail is small, but it shows the loose, human, half-comic air that often hangs about people in the theater world. They were not always models of order, yet they had ties that did not easily break.
　　In the first year of Bunkyū, when he was sixty-three, Hōkaishi set out for Kyoto and fell ill on the road. He died before he could complete the journey. His descendants later became unclear. Years afterward, when a man visited his grave, the temple priest said that on the day of his death anniversary only one visitor still came, Kawatake Shinshichi. When asked why, Shinshichi answered that he himself had entered the line of Mokuami only through Hōkaishi’s introduction. Even after death, therefore, the old man still stood at a crossing of living roads.
　　When one counts the older friends and elders around Chūsai in this way, the circle grows large. Among scholars there were Gonsai, Seisai, Kyōsai, and Gyoson. Among doctors there were Saitei and Shinken. Among artists there was Bunchō. Among men of the stage there were Jūami and Hōkaishi. A child does not choose such a world. He is born into it. The roads are already laid before him, and if he has quick eyes and a strong mind, he begins to walk on them early.
　　Chūsai did begin early. In 1809, when he was only five, he entered the house of Ichino Meian. Then, in 1814, when he was ten, he began the study of medicine under Izawa Ranken. His father Tadasige did not wait for the boy to grow slowly by chance. He wanted him trained early, in letters as well as in the family art of medicine. It is likely too that Chūsai met Kariya Ekisai from childhood, both in his own house and in the house of Meian, and that he also became close at an early age with Kojima Seisai, who studied in the same scholarly world.
　　The first formal mark of his public life came in the last month of that same year. On the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month of 1814, Chūsai was presented for the first time before his lord, Tsugaru Yasuchika. The lord was fifty. Chūsai’s father was fifty-one. Chūsai himself was only ten. We may imagine the scene at the upper residence in Honjo, where the child was shown as one who belonged to the Hirosaki service house. This first audience was the beginning of the respect due to him as a young retainer of the domain.
　　Yet respect did not at once become office. Seven years passed before he was ordered into regular monthly attendance. Eight years passed before he entered official duty and inherited the family headship. In the meantime his inward life also advanced. One event in particular mattered greatly. In 1817, eight years after entering Meian’s school, he formed the tie that would later become one of the great bonds of his life. This was his connection with Mori Kien.
　　Kien was younger than Chūsai by two years. Later he jokingly called the event his own “entry as a pupil,” as if the thirteen-year-old Chūsai had taken the eleven-year-old boy under his wing. Kien’s full names changed with time, as names often did in that age, but the important thing is simple. He was the son of a physician in service to the Abe house of Fukuyama, and he was born in the north district of Edo. The two boys who would later join their names on Keiseki Hōkoshi first clasped hands here, in youth, before the world knew either of them.
　　Another boy entered with him, a son of a Hirosaki physician. So this was not the lonely rise of a single genius. It was the beginning of a small brotherhood of young men in books and medicine. In such friendships the true shape of a life is often formed. The older teachers give method and law, but friends of the same age give warmth, rivalry, laughter, and the courage to continue. Chūsai and Kien would carry such a friendship far into later life.
　　In 1822, when Chūsai was eighteen, the formal transfer of the house to him was ordered. Even before that, in the previous year, he had been told to appear in monthly service. Then, in the second month of 1822, he was placed as an apprentice physician in attendance, and in the third month he entered the regular place. After the headship passed to him in the eighth month, he at once received instruction in the making of Ichiryū Kintan, the secret medicine of the Tsugaru house. So by eighteen he had already been drawn fully into both the honor and the burden of the family line.
　　It was in that same month and year that the rebel Sōma Daisaku was executed in Edo. I do not mean to turn away from Chūsai merely because of that coincidence in date, yet the matter has some connection. Daisaku had hated the Tsugaru house under the false belief that its ancestors had once served the Nanbu house. Because of that grudge he planned violence against the Tsugaru lord on the road. Later, Tonosaki Kaku, who helped me in my search for Chūsai’s descendants, argued strongly against this mistaken account of the Tsugaru line. I note the fact here because the small roads of history often cross in such ways.
　　The next year brought another important change. At nineteen, Chūsai married for the first time. The woman was called Sada. Officially she was presented as the daughter of a retainer family of the Sakura domain, but in truth she was the daughter of a poor masterless house from Sano. Chūsai’s father had wished for a daughter-in-law who had grown up in hardship and would know how to endure. It was a deliberate choice. Chūsai was nineteen, and Sada was seventeen, when they married.
　　During the same year Kien changed his path of study and went directly under Ranken. In that school there was another odd young man named Shiota Yōan, and Kien and Yōan were treated as a pair of strange fellows, full of tricks, mimicry, and unusual habits. Kien loved to copy the gestures and voices of actors. Yōan wandered with a bamboo stick balanced upright on his finger. The school of medicine was not a place of dry faces only. Youth brought its own comedy into it.
　　In the seventh month of 1824 Chūsai’s mother shaved her head and took the religious name Jushō. Then, in the third month of the following year, the house where Chūsai lived in Motoyanagihara partly burned. In that same year the Tsugaru house changed lords. Yasuchika retired, and Nobuyuki, only five years older than Chūsai, became lord in his place. Thus the life of the house and the life of the young physician moved side by side, both changing at once.
　　The year 1826 was heavy with events. First, Chūsai’s elder sister Suma died at twenty-five. Then his old teacher Meian died at sixty-two. At the end of the year Chūsai’s first son, Tsuneyoshi, was born. Out of grief, loss of a master, and the birth of an heir, one can already feel adult life closing around him. It seems to have been after Meian’s death that Chūsai moved more fully under Kariya Ekisai. When one teacher falls, another often becomes the pillar.
　　The year 1829 was still fuller. In the third month Ranken died at fifty-three. A few days later Chūsai was appointed assistant physician in close attendance. In the sixth month his mother died. In the eleventh month his wife Sada was divorced. Why? We cannot say clearly. It may be only that the qualities which the family had hoped to find in a woman from hardship were not in her after all. At any rate, the marriage ended, and before the year was out a new wife entered the house.
　　This second wife was Ino, daughter of Hirano Bunzō, a man of position in the same domain. If the first marriage had been a search for endurance in poverty, the second seems almost the opposite, a marriage into a firm samurai house. Ino was welcomed in the Shibue family, though she did not live long. Even later, after she had died and another wife too had passed away, her father still acted gladly as ceremonial parent when Chūsai took a fourth wife. That fact alone suggests that there had been no bitterness between the two houses.
　　The Hiranos were people of strong samurai temper. Ino’s grandfather had been a bold man, skilled in letters, painting, and the sword. In wild youth he had even roamed the riverbank with a Muramasa blade, dreaming of cutting down a thousand men. When Chūsai heard this story, he did not admire the violence. Instead he sighed and said, in effect, that he himself wished to save a thousand men through medicine. In that answer his whole nature stands clear. He was not weak. But his force turned toward healing, not toward blood.
　　In 1831 his daughter Ito was born, and only weeks later Ino died at the age of twenty-six. Before the year ended, Chūsai married again. This third wife was Toku, daughter of Okunishi Eigen, physician to the Abe house of Fukuyama. The connection came naturally, since Toku’s brother Gentei had studied under Ranken alongside Chūsai and had become one of his literary friends. Thus family life, friendship, and the world of study were all tied together in one knot.
　　By this time Chūsai’s house contained his retired father, his new wife Toku, his son Tsuneyoshi by the first wife, and his daughter Ito by the second. Then, in 1833, he traveled for the first time to Hirosaki with Lord Nobuyuki and remained away until the eleventh month of the next year. During that absence his old lord Yasuchika died. His father’s stipend was raised, perhaps because he was now serving the retired lord more closely. Chūsai was moving from his twenties into his thirties, and the world around him was widening.
　　In 1835 Ekisai died. That same year Chūsai’s second son, Yasuyoshi, was born, and Kien too had a son in his own house. The next year Chūsai rose from a rank near the close attendants to the position itself. In the eleventh month of that year Keisui also died. So, one by one, the older teachers went out. Chūsai was no longer the child beneath a sky full of masters. He was becoming one of the men who had to stand on his own feet.

Part 7 

　　By this time Chūsai’s household had settled into a new shape. His aged father Tadasige was still living in retirement. His third wife Toku was in the house. The children now there were the heir Tsuneyoshi, the girl Ito, and the younger boy Yasuyoshi. It was a respectable family on paper, yet not a rich one, and the burden of learning, service, guests, and household expense still rested on one narrow base.
　　In the third month of 1836 Chūsai rose another step and became a close attendant of his lord. Until then he had stood only in the rank just below that place. The change was real, but it was not the kind of success that fills a house with sudden ease. It meant more duty, more nearness to power, and more watchfulness. In the same year his teacher Keisui died at the age of fifty-one. So again, just as Chūsai moved upward in service, one more of the elder hands that had guided him fell away.
　　There is something severe in that pattern. Each time Chūsai advanced, he seemed to do so while one support after another disappeared. Meian was gone. Ranken was gone. Ekisai was gone. Keisui too was now gone. The younger man had no choice but to stand more firmly on his own feet. Advancement in the world and loneliness in the mind often came together in his life.
　　The next year brought both honor and grief. On the fifteenth day of the first month of 1837, his eldest son Tsuneyoshi was presented before the Tsugaru lord for the first time. The boy was only twelve. It was one of those formal moments by which a family line feels itself carried forward into the next generation. The father who had himself once been shown before his lord now saw his own son take the first step into that same hereditary road.
　　In the seventh month of that year Chūsai followed Lord Nobuyuki to Hirosaki. What might have seemed at first like a journey of service soon grew heavier than that. In the tenth month his father Tadasige died in Edo at the age of seventy-four. Chūsai was far away in the north when the news came. Distance, cold, obligation, and filial grief all struck him at once.
　　Under ordinary custom he might soon have returned to Edo. But that year the lord remained in the north through the winter and did not go back at the usual time. Chūsai too had to remain. He therefore entered, not for a short duty tour, but for a long northern stay that would carry him through two winters. Before the worst cold came, he tried to prepare for it in practical ways, thinking of fuel, warmth, and all the small defenses a man of Edo would need in that harder land.
　　Among the things he did was to have piglets brought in and raised, part of a general effort to meet the severe climate by unusual means. The detail is vivid, and one can almost see him examining methods of warmth and diet with the same seriousness he gave to books. Yet for all these devices, the true cold was not only in the air. His father was dying, then dead, in Edo, and the son could not go to him. Service held him where he was.
　　It was at this point that one habit of Chūsai’s life changed. Until then he had not been a drinking man. But in Hirosaki, unable to return home and heavy with inward distress, he began to take sake in the evening to drive away his gloom. At the same time he began to eat meat. These were small facts in themselves, yet they show how deeply the northern stay worked on him. A man’s custom often changes only when his heart is under pressure.
　　Chūsai later remained a restrained man. He never became a loose drinker or a man of indulgence. But after this stay he was no longer the same absolute abstainer he had once been. The change had come not from pleasure, but from necessity and sorrow. The northern winter had written itself into his body. What had begun as one period of service had become part of his lasting daily life.
　　When at last he returned to Edo, he returned as a man who had passed through another gate. His father was gone. The old generation in the house had become thinner. He himself was now in his middle thirties, no longer young, yet not yet at the point where his full powers were recognized in the larger learned world. He had a wife, children, official work, inherited learning, and a growing inward store of disappointment.
　　And yet disappointment did not make him idle. In the year after his return, in 1840, we can still catch him moving among books with the same hunger as before. One note in his hand shows that he borrowed and had copied an old work from the collection of Yamasaki Bishō. The act is small, but it means much. He was still reading, still comparing, still gathering, still living with texts as other men live with wealth or office.
　　His relations with other learned men also remained alive. He may not have been intimate with every owner of books whose shelves he used, but there was trust among them. Houses of learning opened to one another. A manuscript might be borrowed, copied by a friend’s hand, and carefully corrected by the owner of the note. Such work does not make noise in the streets, yet it is the real labor from which later fame sometimes grows. Chūsai was doing that labor steadily.
　　By the end of 1841 he was thirty-seven years old. He had by then long since inherited the house after his father’s retirement, had lost his mother twelve years earlier and his father four years earlier, and was living with Toku and the three children, Tsuneyoshi, Ito, and Yasuyoshi, in Kanda near Benkeibashi. His stipend stood at three hundred koku, but his manner of life left little room for ease. He did not push himself forward as a fashionable doctor. He read old medical books, received students, bought books, and let money slip away from his hands where a harder man might have gripped it.
　　At that time he had also been shifted in service. Though he belonged to the Edo establishment of the Tsugaru house and had become a close attendant, he was now attached to the retired lord Nobuyuki and chiefly served at the Yanagishima residence. Outwardly this was still honorable service. Inwardly it cannot have felt like the full unfolding of a strong man’s capacity. The years had gone quickly, and still his larger talent seemed to him not fully used.
　　It was in this state that he wrote the poem of resolve with which this whole story first opened before us. The lines speak of thirty-seven years passing like a moment, of studying medicine and carrying on the inherited work, of leaving rise and fall to Heaven, and of not complaining of poverty. But such words should not be read too simply. The poem is calm on the surface, yet there is tension beneath it. It is the speech of a man who has trained himself to endure, not the speech of a man who has never felt a wound.
　　He had not failed. That would be too easy a word. He had become learned, trusted, useful, and morally firm. He had a household and a place in service. His son had entered the hereditary road before him. Yet the man who wrote that poem still felt that his true reach had not been tested in full daylight. The line about talent “growing” sounds almost like a bitter smile. It is the voice of a man who knows his strength and also knows that the world has not yet given it full room.
　　Still, there was no collapse in him. The most striking thing is that pain and composure remain joined together. He does not cry out. He does not flatter Heaven. He does not curse poverty. He simply stands in the narrow place given to him and makes it bear his weight. If later recognition would come, it had not yet come. At the close of 1841 Chūsai stood in the middle of his life, burdened, disciplined, poor, learned, proud, and still waiting.

Part 8 

　　The waiting of which Chūsai had spoken in his poem did not continue forever. Three years after he wrote those lines, in 1844, he was appointed lecturer at the Seijukan, the medical school that had long stood under the Taki family and then under the shogunate. This was no small honor. In the world of his day it was close to being called into the highest medical teaching office in the country. At last the quiet scholar of the Tsugaru house had been brought into a brighter public place.
　　With that appointment his outer rank changed as well. He now had the right to attend the castle on formal days, and in 1849 he was granted audience with the shogun Ieyoshi. Such a meeting raised him above the common level of retainers and placed him among men who could be seen. If one wished to say that his talent had finally begun to open in the world, this was the point at which one could say it honestly. The bitter undertone of the poem was not removed, but it had at least been answered in part.
　　Yet the answer was incomplete. Recognition came, but ease did not come with it. The shogunate later granted him stipends, first support for fifteen men and later an additional five-man allowance, with a small yearly silver reward at the end of each year. On paper this looks respectable. In real life it was not enough, because each rise in rank brought new expenses in clothes, ceremony, gifts, and the whole burden of keeping one’s place before the world.
　　Here again the figure of Iō stands beside him. In the year of his audience with the shogun, she is said to have sold her clothes and ornaments to cover the necessary costs. I do not think such a story should be told quickly, as if it were only a colorful detail. It shows the true shape of the household. Chūsai’s name was rising, but the house still lived by sacrifice, and the sacrifice was not only his own.
　　This is why I cannot read his life as a simple story of late success. He did rise. He did receive office, honor, and learned work worthy of him. But the life around that rise remained narrow and difficult. What the world saw as advancement, the household often felt as a fresh weight pressing down on it.
　　The world at large, even now, does not know him well. A few know him as one of the authors of Keiseki Hōkoshi, but that is only one face of him. He wrote on medicine, on books, on matters of thought, and even on things close to the arts. Some of these writings were left unfinished when he died in 1858. Others were finished but not printed, because printing learned books was not easy in those days.
　　Of the works that were actually printed while he lived, only one serious medical book may be named with confidence: Gotō Yōhō, a work on vaccination and smallpox treatment based on the teaching he had received from Keisui. Besides that there was a little nagauta text called Yotsu no Umi. It was published not under his own name but under that of Fujita Senzō, an actor he favored, because he did not wish to expose his own dignity too openly in such a matter. Even this small fact is revealing. Chūsai’s mind moved freely across medicine, scholarship, and the world of performance, yet he still knew the limits imposed by public appearance.
　　If one asks what he loved most, apart from duty itself, the answer must be reading. I do not mean simple reading for pastime. His lifelong labor with old printed books and manuscripts belongs to the very center of his being, and it is too large to count as a mere hobby. Within that great labor two books seem to have held a special place near him: the Suwen, which he kept always close, and the Shuowen, to which he turned again and again in later years.
　　In his final period he even held a monthly Shuowen meeting. Around him gathered Kojima Seisai, Mori Kien, Hirai Tōdō, Kaibō Chikkei, Kitamura Kōsō, Kurimoto Jōun, and others. One can almost see the room. Books are opened, old characters are discussed, opinions are tested, and the evening passes not in noise but in a concentrated pleasure that only learned friendship can produce. This too was part of his true life, no less than official service or family grief.
　　Iō appears here again in a softer light. After marrying her, Chūsai found that she could bear a little drink and encouraged her to taste sake. She liked it. In time she urged her brother Eijirō, her sister’s husband, and Hirano Sadakata to drink as well, and they too acquired the habit. The scene is gentle and domestic, far from the stern image that the name of a learned physician may suggest. It reminds us that the house of Chūsai was not built only of books, deaths, and stipends. There was warmth in it too.
　　His friendship with Mori Kien also deepened during these years. Kien was full of gifts and also of faults. He had brilliance, appetite, wayward habits, and more than one bad tendency. Chūsai seems to have seen all this clearly and yet to have valued the man’s learning above the disorder. Such judgment is not common. Many men admire virtue and fear talent. Chūsai, without loving vice, could still recognize worth where it truly lay.
　　This became especially plain when Kien was called to Seijukan in 1848 under the title of assistant in charge of medical book carving. The work then under way was the carving of the Beiji Qianjin Yaofang, using a precious Song edition that had once belonged to Hōjō Akitoki and had later been presented to the shogunate by the lord of Yonezawa. This was not ordinary printing. It was the rescue and public shaping of rare medical text, a task that required learning, care, and patience. Chūsai and Kien were now laboring side by side in a field where scholarship itself became an act of transmission.
　　Iō, seeing Kien’s household near them, treated his wife Katsu with remarkable kindness. She provided things from hair ornaments down to sandals and underclothes, as if opening a storehouse whenever help was needed. Katsu seems to have accepted this care with calm simplicity, almost as if such help were part of the order of nature. There is something almost comic in the picture, but also something noble. It shows how naturally generosity could flow from Iō, and how broad the house of Chūsai remained even when it had so little to spare.
　　By 1854, however, a darker season came. On the fourteenth day of the second month, his fifth son Senroku was born, the child later called Osamu. Less than a month later, on the tenth day of the third month, his eldest son Tsuneyoshi died. These two blows, birth and death standing almost face to face, must have shaken the whole household. The line moved forward with one infant while the first heir disappeared from it.
　　Chūsai’s conduct after Tsuneyoshi’s death shows again what kind of man he was. He pitied the poverty of his daughter-in-law Ito’s father and gave him more than one hundred ryō. Then he arranged for the widowed young woman to remarry a man named Arima Sōchi. He did not keep her bound to a dead house merely for form’s sake. Even in grief he thought practically, humanely, and with responsibility toward others.
　　That same year the Seijukan side of his life grew heavier. At the end of the year he was granted an additional five-man stipend because of his position as lecturer, and only three days later he was ordered to assist with the carving of another medical classic, the Ishinpō, said to have been compiled by Tamba Yasuyori in the tenth century. For men of his kind this was an event of real grandeur. A text long hidden and treated almost as a treasure of secrecy had suddenly come into the light.
　　In Tamotsu’s notes there is a phrase, “the appearance of the Ishinpō.” That phrase is excellent. It catches the feeling of a hidden jewel suddenly taken from its box and set before men’s eyes. Okunishi Gentai, brother of Chūsai’s dead wife Toku, even wrote a poem in joy over the event. Learned men of that world did not greet such discoveries with dry professional interest alone. They felt them as revelations.
　　So Chūsai’s later middle age was not empty waiting after all. It was full of work, births, deaths, sacrifice, friendship, teaching, and the opening of ancient books. Yet nothing became easier in a simple way. Honor brought expense. Learning brought labor. Family continuity brought fresh grief. Even joy arrived with strain bound tightly to it. If one wishes to see the true dignity of Chūsai, it lies here: not in a smooth rise, but in the power to carry all these things together without letting the mind grow base or the hand grow slack.

Part 9 

　　After the joy over the sudden “appearance” of the Ishinpō, Chūsai’s later years did not become calm. The work of collating and carving old medical books still lay heavily on his mind. The source says that the Seijukan edition of the Ishinpō, the work that stayed in his thoughts until death, was completed in that same last year, and that Mori Kien and the others received a silver reward. Even in that small note there is something sad, because it suggests a labor brought to completion at the edge of a man’s life. 
　　In that same year another older light went out. Asaka Gonsai, the man who had helped Chūsai see the need for Western learning, died in the eleventh month. Chūsai had liked to repeat a passage in which Gonsai praised Washington, a foreign hero born among warlike men but still worthy of deep respect. This detail matters. It shows again that Chūsai, though formed by old learning, was not shut up inside it. 
　　His own house also still moved forward in outward form. On the twenty-eighth day of the second month of that final year, his seventh son Shigeyoshi was presented before the Tsugaru lord. It was a small ceremony, but such ceremonies meant much in a hereditary house. A child was being shown to the lord, and the line seemed to continue. At the same time, however, the father’s strength was already nearing its end. 
　　The illness came on hard. On the twenty-third day, when he had been due for duty at the Hama-chō middle residence, he excused himself because he was unwell. That was also the day on which vomiting first appeared. From then until the twenty-seventh, the signs only grew worse. Whatever hope there was at first soon began to narrow. 
　　Several learned physicians gathered at his bedside and did all they could. Taki Antaku came, and so did Genkitsu, Izawa Hakken, and Yamada Chintei. These were not careless men, and they did not spare their effort. But the illness would not turn back. A doctor who had spent his life among texts and treatments now lay beyond the power of medicine. 
　　One detail from those last days has stayed in my mind more strongly than many larger facts. Chūsai sometimes spoke in delirium, and when those around him listened, it sounded as if he were still collating the Ishinpō in his dreams. Even with his mind clouded by fever, he seemed to be at work. It is a hard and moving image: the scholar not released from his book even in the half-darkness before death. 
　　On the twenty-eighth day his condition improved a little for a short time. During that brief easing he gave instructions about the education of Shigeyoshi, whom he had already chosen as heir. The boy was to study the Confucian classics under Kaibo Gyoson, penmanship under Kojima Seisai, and the Suwen under Taki Antaku. Then, when the time was right, he was to learn Dutch. The dying father was still arranging the future with care. 
　　That last instruction about Dutch is especially striking. Chūsai had once disliked Dutch learning deeply, yet in the end he did not close that road to his son. He wanted the old books, the trained hand, and the classical base to remain firm, but he no longer believed that the next generation could live on old learning alone. Even at the edge of death, his thought still faced forward. 
　　In the night of the twenty-eighth, at the hour of the ox, he died. In modern time that was about two in the morning on the twenty-ninth day. He was fifty-four years old. His body was buried at Kannoji in Yanaka. So ended the life of the man whose mind had moved through medicine, bibliography, old texts, theater, and friendship with such unusual force. 
　　The house that remained behind him was still full of life, but it was a life burdened with many mouths and many sorrows. At its center stood the widow Iō, forty-three years old. With her were Yajima Yūzen, Chūsai’s twenty-four-year-old second son by Toku; the daughter Kuga, twelve; the daughter Miki, six; the son Senroku, later called Osamu, five; the son Suizan, four; and the heir Shigeyoshi, only two. Except for Yūzen, they were all children of Iō. 
　　By then Chūsai had already buried many children of earlier years. The source names his dead eldest son Tsuneyoshi, his eldest daughter Ito, another daughter Yoshi, a son Hachisaburō, another daughter Tō, a son Genkō, a daughter Kishi, and a daughter Saki. The bare list itself is enough to make the heart heavy. A man may seem severe in public and yet carry the memory of many small graves behind him. 
　　There was one more change already under way before his death. In the second month of that same year Yūzen had been restored to the post of outward physician in the Tsugaru service. In other words, he had returned to the first position from which he had once fallen away. This matters because it shows that even before Chūsai died, the next generation had begun to take up places in the world again. The father’s house was weakened, but not extinguished. 
　　News of his death also brought out the loyalty of humble people around the family. One man who had long owed his recovery and livelihood to Chūsai was the artisan Chōhachi. Years earlier Chūsai had treated him when illness had stopped his work, had housed him, and had given food and clothing to his family. When Chūsai died, Chōhachi helped with the funeral, went home, drank his usual little cup in the evening, and said that now his master had gone, he himself might well follow too. 
　　That small story is not beneath the dignity of a great man’s ending. On the contrary, it tells us something exact. Chūsai had not only taught friends, written books, and served lords. He had also helped poor people in practical ways and left behind gratitude that did not disappear. A life is measured not only by titles and printed works, but also by what kind of memory it leaves in those who stood near the door. 
　　So his end was not the end of a solitary scholar cut off from the world. He died with unfinished labor still in his mind, with a plan for his son’s education still on his lips, with a crowded family behind him, and with affection still alive in the houses of friends, pupils, and dependents. That is why his death does not close the story. It only changes its center. From this point on, the weight of the narrative must pass to Iō and to the children who remained. 

Part 10 

　　After Chūsai’s death, the house did not fall at once into silence, but it changed its center. The learned father was gone, and what remained was a widow with children of different ages, some already grown, some still very small. Iō stood at the middle of that circle. Around her were Yūzen, Kuga, Miki, Senroku, Suizan, and the little heir Shigeyoshi, while the memory of many dead children already lay behind the family like a second, invisible household. 
　　The record does not linger equally over every one of the first years after Chūsai’s death. When it becomes clear again, we see the house still tied to Hirosaki and still holding together through custom, marriage, and old duty. In the eleventh year after his death, now Meiji 2, the fourth daughter Kuga was married to Yagawa Bunichirō. Even in the new age, the family was still moving by the old forms of alliance and household arrangement. 
　　In those same unsettled years, old connections from the past still reached the Shibue house. During the fighting against Enomoto in Hakodate, the son of Shin’en’s line, Tōken, came north and visited the Shibues at Tomita-Shinmachi in Hirosaki while carrying out an errand connected with Ichiryū Kintan. Such a visit was more than a passing courtesy. It showed that even after the fall of the old order, the lines of friendship, medicine, and memory around Chūsai had not yet broken. 
　　Poverty, however, remained as real as ever. In the twelfth year after Chūsai’s death, when Hiranō Sadakata finally reached the north after a long and useless wandering, the family had to pawn thirty-five swords in order to raise twenty-five ryō and bring him from Aomori to Hirosaki. This is a hard fact, and it should not be softened. A house that had once served lords and preserved books now had to turn inherited blades into travel money. 
　　By the fourteenth year after Chūsai’s death, the center of hope in the family had become Tamotsu. He had gone to Tokyo to study, and from there he repeatedly asked the authorities to let him bring his mother from Hirosaki. At first the men in power thought it strange that a mere student should support his mother in the capital. Yū wrote the petition for him, and at last the officials agreed. 
　　The years that Iō spent in Hirosaki after Tamotsu had gone away seem to have been lonely ones. The record says almost nothing happened there, except that before the abolition of the domain the Shibues were granted a tract of woodland at Manaitabayashi, part of a scheme meant to help old service families support themselves. The very smallness of that note tells its own story. There was little movement, little relief, and little to record but endurance. 
　　When Iō finally left Hirosaki, she did not come alone. She naturally brought back Miki, who had returned from Murata Kōtarō’s house, and Kuga also came with her husband Bunichirō. Before leaving, Bunichirō arranged his affairs in the north by making Kudō Hantoku his adopted son and leaving him behind there. Such details may seem dry, but they show the practical labor required when an old household loosened one place and tried to take root in another. 
　　In the fifteenth year after Chūsai’s death, now Meiji 6, the Shibue family settled at Aioi-chō in Honjo. Iō was fifty-eight, and Tamotsu was seventeen. The image is a strong one. The widow who had once sold her clothes to support Chūsai’s public rank was now back in Tokyo, leaning not on an office or a stipend, but on a teenage son still making his way through study and uncertain work. 
　　Life in Tokyo did not suddenly become easy. In that same year Kuga, who had come back with Iō, opened a sugar shop in Midori-chō under the name of her husband. The household was clearly trying many means of support. In the same year Kaibō Chikkei died, and after his death Tamotsu took Shimada Kōson as his teacher in Chinese learning. So even while the family struggled for money, the old claim of study remained alive in the son. 
　　The following year, the sixteenth after Chūsai’s death, brought both illness and remembrance. Iō suffered from an eye disease that dragged on until treatment by Yajima Shūtei and another doctor finally cured it after some months. Miki remarried a western-goods merchant in Fukagawa. The family also held a memorial service for Chūsai at Kannoji, and those who gathered included Iō, Tamotsu, Yū, Kuga, Miki, Sadakata, and Iida Yoshimasa. 
　　In that same year the family received its commutation bond for the lost hereditary stipend. But the amount, after reductions, was trifling. The source says plainly that it was hardly worth talking about. So the memorial service and the formal bond belong together in a bitter way: one honored the dead head of the house, while the other showed how little of the old material base still remained. 
　　As the new age moved on, Tamotsu’s road widened beyond Tokyo. By the nineteenth year after Chūsai’s death he was in Hamamatsu, where the school in which he served was renamed a middle school. He later moved to another house there and at last was able to place his mother in one of the former retainers’ residences near the castle. This matters because it shows that the boy who had once begged leave to support his mother had in fact done it. He had not spoken bravely and failed. He had carried her with him into the new life. 
　　Iō’s power over the household did not weaken in those years. In the twenty-first year after Chūsai’s death she summoned Osamu to Hamamatsu because she worried about both his health and his moral life after he had begun newspaper work with Yū. In the same year Tamotsu resigned his post in order to enter Keiō and study English more deeply, for he had long admired Fukuzawa and had never given up the wish to master that language. Here the force of the mother and the will of the son stand side by side. She still gathered the children toward herself, while he turned toward the future with deliberate hunger. 
　　So the years after Chūsai’s death do not read like a clean decline. They are poor years, uncertain years, years of petitions, removals, illness, small trades, and improvised support. Yet they are also years in which Iō keeps the house from collapse and Tamotsu slowly becomes the new center of effort. Chūsai’s mind had died, but his discipline had not wholly died with him. It had passed, in another form, into the widow’s endurance and the son’s stubborn wish to learn. 

Part 11 

　　In the years after Chūsai’s death, Tamotsu did not move along one straight road. He was still trying to make himself into a scholar of the new age, but he had to do so while carrying his mother with him and while watching over the broken branches of the family. In Meiji 12, the twenty-first year after Chūsai’s death, the school in Hamamatsu where he served was renamed a regular middle school. Even this small administrative change reminds us that the world around him was shifting quickly, and that he was trying to stand upright inside those changes. 
　　That same year Iō drew another son back under her eye. Osamu, whose health had long worried her, had become a newspaper man together with Yajima Yutaka. When she saw in a letter to Tamotsu a phrase suggesting early drinking, she grew seriously afraid. Her fear was not only for his body, though asthma already troubled him. She also feared the moral habits of the newspaper trade and did not want him drawn into them. So on the second day of the ninth month she ordered him to come to Hamamatsu at once. 
　　Iō’s action is entirely in keeping with the woman we have already seen. She did not wait for illness or bad habit to become fixed. She intervened. There was severity in her, but the severity came from watchfulness and responsibility. Chūsai had once held the house together through learning and moral force. After his death, that same force often appears in another form through Iō’s decisions. 
　　In the very same year Tamotsu himself made a decision just as serious. On the fifteenth day of the tenth month he resigned his post, and permission was given on the twenty-eighth. He did this in order to enter Keiō Gijuku and study English. The source is plain about his motive. He had long wished to master English fully, and all the earlier stages of his life—normal school, school service, paid teaching—had been things accepted under pressure of poverty rather than from true inward choice. He had also already come to admire Fukuzawa Yukichi deeply. 
　　This makes Tamotsu’s resignation more than a career change. It was an attempt to recover the road he had wanted all along. One feels in him a stubbornness very like his father’s. He had done what necessity required, but he had not mistaken necessity for vocation. When at last the smallest opening appeared, he threw away secure employment and went back toward study. That is not the act of a cautious man. It is the act of one still governed by hunger. 
　　So Iō and Tamotsu left Hamamatsu on the thirty-first day of the tenth month and reached the house at Matsumoto-chō in Tokyo on the third day of the eleventh month. There was one sorrow mixed into the return. Tamotsu and Osamu were once more together in Tokyo under their mother’s care, but Yajima Yutaka could not wait for her arrival. He had already left on the eighth day of the tenth month for Hokkaidō, having received an appointment under the Kaitakushi and gone to serve in Sapporo. Thus one son returned to the mother while another moved farther away into the frontier of the new state. 
　　The women of the family were also scattered in practical ways. Kuga remained at the Kamezawa-chō house and continued to teach nagauta. Mizuki, who had come back from the house of Hyōgoya, was living with her. Katsu-hisa had judged Mizuki’s husband, Hatanaka Tōjirō, not to be dependable, and before Osamu was even summoned to Hamamatsu she had already consulted with the family and brought Mizuki back to her own side. Again we see the same pattern: this was a family constantly forced to rearrange itself in order to survive. 
　　Tamotsu did not come back from Hamamatsu alone. Two companions traveled with him to Tokyo. One was Yamada Yōzō, a youth from Tōtōmi whose father kept a tatami shop. He had attended Hamamatsu Middle School through the Shibue household and had now graduated. The other was Nakanishi Tsunetake, an older man who had studied at Aichi Normal School and served as a teacher at Hamamatsu Middle School. Both men wished, like Tamotsu, to enter Keiō Gijuku, and so they came up together. 
　　The house at Matsumoto-chō was therefore not merely a family home. It became once again something like the old houses of learned poverty that had stood behind Chūsai’s life. In it lived Iō, Tamotsu, and Mizuki, while young men also came and went around them. The source says that among the resident students there were Yamada and a former Hamamatsu pupil named Fujimura. The pattern is familiar. Even after the fall of the old order, the Shibue house still half lived as a place where study and daily struggle shared the same rooms. 
　　But this kind of life could not continue on wish alone. Tamotsu still wanted to go deeper and deeper into English, yet the money he had saved by cutting down his food and clothing during his Hamamatsu days finally ran out. That fact is worth pausing over. His return to Keiō was not supported by wealth, family estate, or stable patronage. It was supported by coins painfully saved from a teacher’s narrow pay. Once those coins were gone, study alone could no longer sustain him. 
　　Opportunities did come, because a Keiō education was then highly desired in the world. One proposal was that he should become editor-in-chief of the Mie Nippō. He refused it after hearing that the Mie prefectural office was supplying money through Fujita Mokichi. Another chance opened with a newspaper in Hiroshima, and for a time he seemed ready to accept it; then a school appointment drew his mind away, and the negotiations stopped before the matter was completed. These refusals are revealing. He wanted work, but not work at any price. He still preferred the path of education to the path of journalism. 
　　The school position that finally claimed him was the headship of Aichi Middle School. The matter was settled in discussion with Abe Taizō, and on the third day of the eighth month he left Tokyo with Iō and Mizuki. Yamada Yōzō remained behind and entered the Keiō boarding house. Thus the household divided again. Tamotsu was drawn back into educational service, Iō followed him as always, and the younger generation of students took root in the capital. 
　　There is something almost relentless in the rhythm of these years. Tamotsu escapes into study, then poverty drives him back toward office. He gathers his mother around him, but brothers and sisters scatter into other trades and cities. One son goes into journalism and is called back; another leaves for Hokkaidō before the mother even arrives. The family is never wholly broken, yet it is never still. It keeps itself alive by movement. 
　　If one asks what held such a family together, the answer cannot be money. There was too little of that. Nor can the answer be rank, because by then the old rank had already thinned into memory. What held it together was something more difficult to name: a habit of endurance, a respect for learning, and the continued authority of Iō at the center. Chūsai’s house had changed form, but it had not yet lost its inward law. 

Part 12 　　

　　When Tamotsu went to Aichi Middle School, he did not go into a dead place. Around him gathered a number of young men who later made names for themselves in many fields. Among them were Hatta Ikutarō, Inagaki Chikayasu, Shimada Juichi, Ōya Jinzaburō, Suganuma Iwazō, and Mizobe Korechika. The source remembers them not as a mere school list, but as living figures who passed through the rooms around Tamotsu. Some later entered the navy, some taught in middle schools, and some moved into government service. Even in those difficult years, therefore, the house and school around Tamotsu still sent living force outward into the world. 
　　Of these men, Mizobe is remembered in the strangest way. One day he came by chance, stayed the night, and then simply remained. He wore lined clothes and even a lined jacket in the heat of summer without shame and without any sign of suffering. Everyone knew he was from Nagato, yet no one knew his real age, because he never told it. To those who looked at him, he seemed about Tamotsu’s own age. Later he entered public office and at last became governor of Tochigi. 
　　But in Aichi the most important new tie for Tamotsu was not with a student. It was with Takeda Junpei. Junpei was the elder brother of Abe Taizō, the man who had stood between Tamotsu and the school when he was first invited there. Junpei lived at Kōfu and practiced medicine, yet he was known less as a doctor than as a political man. He belonged to that rough and lively world in which local influence, speech, personal force, and public quarrel were often mixed together. 
　　One story told about Junpei shows what sort of man he was. He had once been chairman of the Aichi prefectural assembly. At a banquet held after the assembly closed, he went up to the prefectural governor, offered him a cup, called out for the fish dish, then turned his back, lifted his robe, and exposed his bare backside in protest. It was a wild act, and not one to praise simply. Yet the story makes his temper clear. He was not a man who disliked authority in silence. 
　　When Tamotsu came to Kōfu, he and Junpei quickly grew close. Junpei suggested that they should become brothers by ceremony. Tamotsu, modest as always, answered that it would be more proper for them to become father and son. So they exchanged cups and made that bond instead. Junpei was forty-four, and Tamotsu was twenty-five. The age difference, the form of the tie, and the speed with which it was made all tell us something. Tamotsu, for all his learning, could still enter fully into the living customs of strong men around him. 
　　At that same time politics in Tokyo had begun to blaze. The newspapers reported the rise of new parties, one after another, and the whole political world seemed full of banners, names, and loud movement. Tamotsu and Junpei, living far from the capital, looked on and said that the political world of Tokyo was splendid and noisy. Yet they did not remain mere watchers. The source says that after a series of political arguments, Tamotsu came to be known by men such as Shimada Saburō, Numa Morikazu, and Koezuka Ryū. Later, when he entered the staff of the Yokohama Mainichi, that connection was one reason it could happen. 
　　So the years in Aichi did more than give him school work. They widened his road into public discussion and journalism. That matters, because until then Tamotsu had moved mainly through schools, teachers, and study. Now another side of him came forward. He did not cease to be a man of books, but he also became a man who could step into current argument and make himself heard. In that too he shows something of Chūsai’s blood, though the field was now new. 
　　By the ninth day of the twelfth month he used the school vacation to go to Tokyo. In truth he had already decided that he wanted to leave Kōfu. The country school, useful as it had been, was no longer enough for him. He had gained pupils, friends, and political links there, but he was again being pulled toward the capital. A man like Tamotsu did not stay long in any place once it had given him what it could. 
　　The wider family was also moving through change in that same year. Yajima Yutaka, who was in Sapporo, was restored in the ninth month to the Shibue family register. Then, in the tenth month, his wife Chō died at the age of thirty-four. Osamu, for his part, was appointed a technical worker and served at telegraph offices in Nihonbashi and at the Tokyo prefectural office. These details may seem scattered, but they show the real condition of the family after Chūsai. No single line remained still. One branch was in Hokkaidō, another in the telegraph service, another in schools, and all were trying to live within the new age. 
　　The next year, Meiji 16, made the break final. Tamotsu entered Tokyo at the end of the previous year and lived for a time at Shibatamachi. At the same time he submitted his resignation to the Aichi prefectural office and looked for work in the capital. He found the work first, and only afterward received the formal notice that he had been released. On the eleventh day of the first month he became a teacher at Kōgyokusha, and on the twenty-fifth he also became a teacher at Keiō Gijuku. In the morning he went to Keiō, and in the afternoon to Kōgyokusha. 
　　This was a natural stopping point in his life. The Aichi years had done their work. They had shown him as a schoolman, gathered students around him, given him the bold friendship of Junpei, opened the way toward political writing, and then sent him back to Tokyo better known than before. Now he stood again in the capital, carrying two teaching posts at once, with the next stage already beginning to open in front of him. 

Part 13

　　The next great loss in the house was not a son, but the woman who had carried the house after Chūsai’s death. In the twenty-sixth year after him, that is, in Meiji 17, Iō died at the Karasumori house on the fourteenth day of the second month. She was sixty-nine. Until then she had been a woman of uncommon health. After Chūsai’s death she had suffered once from an illness of the eyes and now and then from sharp abdominal pain, but after her sixtieth year she had been almost entirely free from disease. 
　　The first sign of decline had come only a few months earlier. In the previous August, when Tamotsu stayed away from home too long, Iō became so troubled that she stopped eating. She had been able to endure separation when she herself remained in Hirosaki and sent him to Tokyo, because that had been done by firm decision. But to wait day after day for a son who ought to return and did not return was something else. In this we can see again where her deepest attachment lay. Among her sons she loved Tamotsu most, and his absence struck directly at her body. 
　　Yet at the opening of the new year she seemed to recover. Tamotsu remembered that on the night of the ninth she ate tempura soba, warmed herself at the brazier, and talked of history until late. On the tenth she again ate soba at midday. In the afternoon, about three o’clock, she went out alone to buy tobacco. For two or three years she had obeyed her children’s warnings and generally avoided going out by herself, but the path from the house to the tobacco shop ran only through the grounds of Karasumori Shrine, where no carts passed, and so for that one errand she still went alone. 
　　Tamotsu did not even know she had gone out. He was in his room, reading. When she returned, she stood behind him and began to talk. He answered while continuing to read. He had only recently begun the study of German, and the book before him was Scheffel’s grammar. After a little while he noticed that her breathing had grown short and hurried. “Mother, you are breathing very fast,” he said. She answered lightly, “It is only age. If I walk a little, I lose my breath.” Even then she did not stop speaking. 
　　A moment later she fell silent. Tamotsu turned and asked what was wrong. She was sitting before the fire basin with her head slightly bent. At first he did not understand, but then he saw that her posture was strange. He rose quickly, went to her side, and looked at her face. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, and saliva was running from the corner of her mouth. He called to her again and again. She answered only once, “Ah,” as if no clear understanding remained. He laid bedding down, put her to bed, and himself ran for a doctor. 
　　The scene is plain and terrible, and perhaps for that very reason it remains in the mind. There is no long sickbed, no slow preparation, no gathering of relatives before the end. There is only a book, a son reading German, a mother returning with tobacco, a short exchange, and then sudden collapse. A house that had so often lived by her force found itself almost at once without it. Iō had held many separate lives together. When she fell, the whole moral center of the family shifted again. 
　　It is not enough, however, to say that she was merely a strong widow. The source does not leave her there. After recording her death, it turns back and shows what sort of woman she had been from the beginning. She had been educated almost as if she were a son. In the Tōdō house she was called “Danosuke” for her skill in martial exercises, while in literary circles she was also called “New Shōnagon.” Her teachers were not mean ones. In classical learning she was taught by Satō Issai, in calligraphy by Ubukata Teisai, in painting by Tani Bunchō, and in waka by Maeda Natsukage. She learned in fragments, returning from service to take lessons, get corrections, and carry work back again, but she learned enough to leave a deep mark on those who knew her. 
　　She also possessed a mind that did not stop at the old bounds. Even before Chūsai had opened himself toward Western matters through Asaka Gonsai, Iō had already heard talk of the earth’s motion and had read books such as Kikai Kanran and Chiri Zenshi in her brother’s room. After she married Chūsai, when he once complained that flies dirtied the ceiling, she answered that people too, at night, were like flies standing upside down, because the earth moved. Chūsai himself was startled to find that his wife knew the heliocentric view. Later, not satisfied with Japanese and Chinese translations of Western writings, she had Tamotsu teach her spelling. Before long she advanced to Wilson’s reader and then began slowly reading books of world history, American history, and economics. 
　　Such details change the whole figure. One sees that she was not only energetic, practical, and sharp in household government. She was intellectually alive. Even her marriage to Chūsai seems not to have been a passive matter. The source says that while it was outwardly Chūsai who sought the match, a hidden truth lay behind it. The doctor Ishikawa Teihaku advised him to marry her, but it was Iō herself who had first moved Teihaku to make that suggestion. In other words, the marriage may have been achieved as much by her own will as by his. 
　　This is a remarkable thing, and it fits the woman perfectly. The same force that later sold clothes to meet ceremonial expenses, summoned sons back from bad air, learned foreign books in age, and managed a collapsing house through the Meiji years had been present from the start. She was not simply chosen. She acted. That Chūsai, who was no foolish man, could live with such a woman and rely on her tells us something about him as well. But in this place the light belongs to her. 
　　The year of her death brought another family loss. On the second day of the twelfth month, Yutaka died in the old Honjo Aioi-chō house. He had left office with a weakness of the heart and had been under the care of Kiyokawa Gendō after returning to Tokyo. So long as he sat quietly indoors, he did not suffer much. On the day he died, he had been writing since morning. Around noon he said only, “Ah, I am tired,” lay back, and never rose again. He was forty-nine. The second son born to Toku thus followed his father and his stepmother out of the world. He left no children. 
　　The source judges him in a mixed but generous way. It calls him a prodigal in youth, yet says that after entering official life he showed real ability, though he held only modest posts. He was warm in feeling, and many relatives and friends had received kindness from him. He wrote a fine hand in the style of Kojima Seisai. Above all, he knew the theater deeply. In dramatic criticism, the source says, Mori Kien and Yutaka should be counted among the pioneers. So even the son whose life looked irregular on the surface carried forward one of the most living strains in Chūsai’s house. 
　　Thus the seventeenth year after Chūsai’s death was not merely another date in a family list. It was the year in which the widow who had preserved the house vanished, and in which one of the older sons vanished soon after. Yet the record does not leave only sorrow behind them. In Iō it recovers a woman of learning, force, wit, and initiative. In Yutaka it recovers a man of talent, affection, and theatrical knowledge. The house was losing its elder generation, but it was also, in these losses, revealing more clearly what had been hidden within it all along. 

Part 14 

　　After Iō’s death, Tamotsu did not withdraw into a quiet private life. He was already living in Tokyo and carrying more than one kind of work at once. In the first month of that period he had begun teaching at Kōgyokusha, and later in the same month he had also become a teacher at Keiō Gijuku. Then, in the sixth month, another road opened before him. He entered the editorial staff of the Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun. Until then he had been linked to the paper only as a contributor, but now he stepped inside the work itself.
　　Journalism did not mean only sitting at a desk and writing what he pleased. The paper sent him on many errands, and he had to travel often in order to manage different practical matters for the company. During that same year he gave up his teaching post at Kōgyokusha in the eighth month, and on the first day of the ninth month he moved his house to Sakuragawa-chō in Shiba. The family circle was also shifting around him. Osamu left his engineering work in the twelfth month, and Mizuki set up a separate house of her own in Shinsenza-chō. Tamotsu’s life, in other words, was still changing in several directions at once. 
　　That year, the twenty-seventh after Chūsai’s death, became important for another reason as well. On the tenth day of the tenth month, Tamotsu returned from one of his journeys and found a letter from Mori Kien lying on his desk. Kien had written on the fifth and asked when he might come and speak with him face to face. Tamotsu went to visit him the very next morning. Kien was then living in Mizuya-chō in Kyōbashi, with his son’s widow and a granddaughter in the house. The old friend of Chūsai had grown older, but he was still moving actively in the world of books and public writing.
　　Kien’s request was simple enough. He wanted Tamotsu to help him enter the theater column of the Yokohama Mainichi. By that time Kien was no longer living in the poverty of his earlier years. Important printing projects had passed through his hands, including the carving of Kariya Ekisai’s work and the publication of Keiseki Hōkoshi. Because of such labor, his house was not as poor as it had once been. Even so, he still wished to enter the newspaper world more fully, and for that he turned to the son of his old friend. 
　　It is hard not to feel something moving in that scene. Chūsai was gone. Iō was gone. Yet one old link from the father’s world still stretched forward into the son’s new life. Kien, who had once studied and written beside Chūsai, now came asking help from Tamotsu in a modern newspaper office. The old and the new touched each other there very clearly. But the touch did not last long.
　　Kien soon died. The source says that the Printing Bureau did not forget what he had done in earlier years. While his coffin was being carried to burial, it was stopped before the government office, and the staff all came out and bowed in respect. He was buried at Dōunji, and later I learned where that temple had been moved after removal. The grave line continued, though in a changed form, through his descendants, and the memory of the house did not vanish. Still, for Tamotsu the death must have been a sharp blow. It closed one more living door back into his father’s age. 
　　Tamotsu’s own body was also beginning to trouble him. The source says that he sometimes fell suddenly into fainting fits. Because of this, Matsuyama Tōan advised him to leave the city. After Kien’s death, Tamotsu gave up the work of newspaper man and moved his legal residence to Inui Village in Tōtōmi. This did not mean that he had lost all energy or ambition. It meant rather that his body had forced a retreat where his mind would not have chosen one. The pattern is familiar in this family. Again and again, desire went forward, and then hardship dragged it sideways. 
　　The next year, Meiji 19, he reappeared in a new place. He moved to Minamiura-chō, Anzai 1-chōme, in Shizuoka and became vice-principal of the private Shizuoka English School. The owner was Fujinami Jinsuke, and among the foreign teachers were Mr. and Mrs. Cassidy and Mrs. Cucking. This was a fully modern school world, very different from the learned Chinese and medical circles of Chūsai’s time. Yet Tamotsu entered it with the same seriousness that his father had once carried into old books. Among the students there was even a young man who later became well known, Yamaji Aizan. 
　　By this point another fact appears quietly in the record. Tamotsu was thirty years old, and beside his name there now stands that of Matsu, whose family name was Sano and whose registry name was Ichi. She had been born in the first month of Meiji 2 and was eighteen. The source gives the ages plainly and without ornament. Even in that plainness, however, one sees the shape of a new household beginning. The son who had once been carried by Iō was now becoming the head of a house of his own. 
　　Not all the news of that year was happy. Ono Fukoku’s son Dōetsu died of cholera in the eighth month. He had been a learned and capable man, educated in the classics, penmanship, and medicine, and he had inherited both the Tsugaru service line and something of the family skill in practical affairs. Yet his life too had been touched by modern uncertainty. When he had once been away at Kanazawa, his wife had lost much money in speculation in Tokyo, and later Tamotsu had helped him obtain a small place in the Historiographical Office through the introduction of Shigeno Seisai. Such small acts of assistance show that Tamotsu, like Chūsai before him, was not living only for himself. 
　　Another death followed in the same year. Seki Shinpachi also died, still only forty-eight. One sees in these notes how densely the old generation continued to fall away. Around Tamotsu, men of learning, medicine, and public work disappeared one after another, while he himself was still trying to find a stable shape for his own life. The burden of memory in such a family must have been very heavy. Yet the work did not stop for that reason. 
　　Then came Meiji 20, the twenty-ninth year after Chūsai’s death. On the twenty-seventh day of the first month, Tamotsu became chief editor of the Tōkai Gyōshō Shinpō, a newspaper published in Shizuoka. At the same time, he continued his work at the English school as before. So his double life returned in a new form. He was once again both teacher and newspaper man, both schoolmaster and public writer. In this, too, he resembles his father, though the father had moved between medicine, scholarship, and theater, while the son moved between English education and modern journalism. 
　　If one looks only at the surface, these years may seem restless and scattered. Tamotsu changed houses, schools, and occupations; he entered a newspaper, left it, fell ill, moved away, and then entered another newspaper in another city. But there is an inner line running through all of it. He wanted learning, public speech, and useful work, and he went after them wherever the times allowed him to go. His father had once turned old books into a life of hard, quiet labor. The son, born too late for that exact road, was trying to turn schools and newspapers into something equally serious. He did not yet have peace, but he had not lost direction.

Part 15

　　In the twenty-ninth year after Chūsai’s death, Tamotsu had become chief editor of the Tōkai Gyōshō Shinpō while still keeping his place in the English school. That double burden did not vanish at once, but the next clear turn in the record comes two years later, in Meiji 22. By then a new road was opening before him, one that would draw him away from Shizuoka journalism and toward book production in Tokyo. 
　　On the eighth day of the first month of that year, Tamotsu answered a request from Hakubunkan in Tokyo and sent them his personal history, photograph, and writing samples. This was the true beginning of his later relation with that publisher. The negotiations advanced little by little, and as they advanced he moved farther from the Gyōshō Shinpō and nearer to the world of commercial publishing. One can feel in this another shift from the spoken urgency of newspapers toward the steadier labor of books. 
　　By the end of the year the change had become plain. On the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month he informed the newspaper company that he would resign the chief editorship at the year’s close. Even then the paper did not wish to lose him entirely and asked that he continue to write editorials after leaving the office. So the break was not one of anger or failure. It was rather the sign that his center of work had begun to move elsewhere. 
　　The wider family was also still growing in different directions. In that same year the eldest son of Osamu, Shūkichi, was born on the first day of the twelfth month at the Shibue school in Takajō-machi. He is the very Shūkichi who later became known as a designer and who wrote to tell me about the family when I was searching for Chūsai’s descendants. Thus, while Tamotsu was stepping from newspaper life toward publishing, another branch of the house was giving birth to one of the living heirs through whom the memory of Chūsai would reach the present. 
　　Then came Meiji 23, the thirty-second year after Chūsai’s death, and with it a decisive move back to Tokyo. On the third day of the third month Tamotsu left Shizuoka and entered the capital, lodging first at a place called Takenoya in Yūrakuchō. Before leaving he closed the Shibue school and gave up his teaching posts at three schools, though he agreed still to write the editorials for the Gyōshō Shinpō from Tokyo. On the twenty-sixth day of that month he began writing and translating for Hakubunkan in earnest. 
　　A few months later, on the eighteenth day of the seventh month, he moved again, this time to the house of Toyoda Shunga in Naka-Sarugakuchō in Kanda. The movement may look restless from outside, but it has an inner logic. Tamotsu was trying to root himself in the publishing world, and that required him to come physically close to the center where printers, editors, booksellers, and writers gathered. His life had once been split between schools and newspapers in the provinces. It was now being drawn into the literary machinery of Tokyo. 
　　Yet this change of work did not protect his house from grief. In that same year a daughter named Fuku was born on the thirtieth day of the first month and died less than three weeks later, on the seventeenth day of the second month. Then, on the eleventh day of the seventh month, his three-year-old son Sankichi also died. The child later named on the Kannoji gravestone as Chiun Dōji was this same little boy. So even as Tamotsu was opening a new chapter in public life, death entered again into the nursery of the house. 
　　Osamu’s line was moving restlessly too. On the twenty-ninth day of the fifth month he came alone to Tokyo and in June became an English teacher at the Hoshū Gakkai in Iidamachi and at the Yūshū School in Kanda Sarugakuchō. His wife and child followed in July. But before the year was out he changed course again, entered the Railway Bureau as a hired employee in its Second Division, and was sent to Fukuroi Station in Tōtōmi. Once more the whole household had to move. 
　　The following year, Meiji 24, brought a more solid mark of settlement for Tamotsu. He chose a site for a new home at 5 Naka-Sarugakuchō, and construction began on the seventeenth day of the seventh month. The house was completed on the first day of the tenth month. This was not merely a change of address. For a man who had moved from school to school and city to city, to build a house in Tokyo meant that the shift from provincial educator to metropolitan man of letters had at last taken material form. 
　　Osamu, meanwhile, was transferred again, this time becoming assistant stationmaster at Sano Station in Suruga. So the two brothers now stood on sharply different roads. Tamotsu was settling into the world of publishers and written work in Tokyo, while Osamu was being drawn deeper into the network of railway offices that marked the practical new age. The divergence is striking, but it does not mean the family had lost its unity. It means only that the unity now had to live across distance, occupation, and repeated movement. 
　　These years therefore form a real turning point. Tamotsu left behind the unstable balance of teaching and local journalism, opened a durable relation with Hakubunkan, came back to Tokyo, and at last built a house there. At the same time, the family continued to suffer the old familiar blows of infant death, small means, and scattered employments. Chūsai’s descendants were no longer living in the world of domain medicine, but the old pattern remained: learning, labor, grief, endurance, and the stubborn effort to keep a house standing. 

Part 16

　　After the house at 5 Naka-Sarugakuchō was completed in the autumn of Meiji 24, one might expect the Shibue household to become quiet at last. But quietness did not come. The new house gave Tamotsu a firmer base in Tokyo, yet the life within it remained touched by the same old pattern: work opening on one side, family grief entering on the other, and another branch of the family moving again just when one seemed to settle. 
　　The next year, Meiji 25, brought another child to Tamotsu’s house. On the eighteenth day of the second month his second son Shigeji was born. But the child did not live. On the twenty-third day of the ninth month he died in infancy, and the Kannoji grave later recorded him under the posthumous name Shikyō Dōji. The sequence is painfully familiar. Even after the return to Tokyo and the beginning of steadier literary work, the house still could not escape the old sorrow of children dying young. 
　　While this was happening in Tamotsu’s home, Osamu’s line was again being rearranged. In the seventh month of that same year he asked to be released from the Railway Bureau, came up to Tokyo, and lived in Atagoshita-chō in Shiba. There he entered Shūeisha as a proofreader of Chinese characters. A second son, Yukiharu, was born to him in that year. Thus one brother was trying to root himself in Tokyo through publishing and authorship, while the other was being drawn into the practical labor of modern printing. 
　　This parallel is worth noticing. The sons of Chūsai were no longer physicians of a domain house. One was becoming a man of books through Hakubunkan, translation, and steady writing. Another was entering the publishing and printing world from the lower, harder side of correction and daily office labor. The fields were new, but the underlying bond with texts remained. The old family habit of living by learning had not disappeared. It had merely changed its tools. 
　　Then came Meiji 26, the thirty-fifth year after Chūsai’s death. On the twenty-first day of the twelfth month Tamotsu’s second daughter Fuyu was born. After the deaths of Fuku, Sankichi, and Shigeji, the arrival of another child must have touched the household with both joy and fear. In such a family, no birth could be simple. Every new child entered not only a house, but also a memory crowded with the names of little brothers and sisters who had not lived. 
　　Osamu too was changing in this year, though in a different way. The source says that from this year onward he began to compose haiku. One surviving line is quoted: “In leather tabi, I have stepped into my forties.” The poem is small, but it catches something exact. The restless younger brother, who had moved through newspapers, railways, and printing work, had now begun to gather his life into a brief literary form of his own. 
　　I do not think that detail should be passed over as trivial. In this house, literary impulse appeared in many shapes. Chūsai had moved between medicine, bibliography, and theater. Yutaka had known the stage deeply and left unfinished theatrical writing. Tamotsu was now working for publishers and building a life through prose. Osamu, less stable in outward career, turned at least in part toward verse. The family had lost its old hereditary office, but it had not lost its inward need to turn life into words. 
　　The next year, Meiji 27, brought another small grave to Osamu’s house. His second son Yukiharu died on the thirteenth day of the fourth month at the age of three. We have already seen this shadow more than once in the Shibue line: children are born, a household begins to hope, and then the child is taken away before memory has had time to ripen. Such things were common enough in the age, but that does not make them light. In this family they accumulate until the whole later history of the house seems to move beside a line of invisible tombs. 
　　For Tamotsu, however, these were not years of inward collapse. The record here is brief, but the brevity itself says something. It no longer needs to explain every shift of employment or every uncertain move. That is because by this time his general course had become clearer. He was settled in Tokyo, attached to Hakubunkan, and living in the house he had built in Naka-Sarugakuchō. The life was still struck by grief, but the public direction of the man had at last taken a firmer shape. 
　　It is also important that the movement of the brothers no longer appears merely as wandering. Osamu had entered Shūeisha, which means he too was now placed inside the world of books and printing rather than the railway network. The two brothers were not doing the same work, but the distance between their lives had narrowed. One stood on the author’s side, the other on the proofreader’s side. Both were now earning their bread in the modern city through printed language. 
　　If one looks at this period from a higher point, one sees something almost ironic. Chūsai, the great physician-scholar, had struggled all his life for recognition and had died with learned work still in his delirious mind. His sons came too late to inherit his exact field. Yet in another sense they did inherit it. They could not continue the old domain medicine of Edo, but they continued a life among texts. The father had collated ancient books; the sons corrected proofs, translated, edited, taught, and wrote in the new print world of Meiji. 
　　So the years after the building of the Tokyo house are not to be read merely as years of domestic record. They show the gradual hardening of Tamotsu’s life into something durable. The house remains vulnerable to the death of children, and the collateral branches remain unstable. Yet the center no longer drifts as before from school to school and city to city. It has begun, at last, to hold. That is why this stage matters. The Shibue family, after long poverty and dispersal, was beginning to form a new kind of house in the capital—less a house of hereditary office than a house of print, learning, and persistent memory. 

Part 17

　　In Meiji 28, the thirty-seventh year after Chūsai’s death, another son was born into Tamotsu’s house. On the thirteenth day of the seventh month came Junkichi, his third son. The bare entry stands quietly in the record, but after the earlier deaths of Fuku, Sankichi, and Shigeji, no new birth in that house can be read as a simple matter. Each child entered a family already trained by hope and loss to feel joy with caution. 
　　Around the same time, another branch of the family was finding a more stable shape in Honjo. Kuga, who had long continued on the path of nagauta after the interruption once caused by Yutaka, had by then built a new house on land in Matsui-chō. The source says plainly that this became the dwelling she still occupied. That fact matters because it shows that the Shibue descendants were no longer merely drifting from room to room or living by temporary lodging. At least in some branches, the family was beginning to root itself again in fixed places. 
　　Yet even here the old pattern remained. Stability never came to all at once. Tamotsu’s house had gained a son, Kuga had gained a settled home, but elsewhere in the family movement and uncertainty still went on. The Shibue line in the Meiji years did not gather itself into one firm trunk. It spread into separate lives—publishing, music, proofreading, railway service, teaching—each trying in its own way to become durable. 
　　In Meiji 29, the next turn came through Osamu. In the first month he moved from ordinary Chinese-character correction into European-language proofreading at the Ichigaya plant of Shūeisha. At the same time he removed his house to Ushigome Nijikkichō. This was a real shift, not merely a change of desk. He was moving deeper into the modern world of print, where foreign languages, typesetting, and exact correction were beginning to matter more and more. 
　　That same month, on the twelfth day, Osamu’s third son Chūzō was born. Again, birth appears side by side with a change of work and a change of address. In this family, domestic life never seems to unfold apart from labor. A child is born, a man changes office, a household moves, and all these things occur not one after another in clean order, but almost on top of one another. Such compression gives the later history of the house its peculiar restlessness. 
　　Still, Osamu’s movement into European-language proofreading is worth more than a passing note. His father Chūsai had once lived among Chinese books and old medical texts. Tamotsu had moved into translation, publication, and the making of practical books for Hakubunkan. Osamu, standing lower in the hierarchy of the same broad world, now worked in the technical correction of foreign-language print. The exact forms had changed with the age, but the family’s life among texts had not ended. It had simply taken on modern machinery. 
　　In Meiji 30, another unexpected side of Tamotsu came forward. In the ninth month he entered the gate of Nemoto Ugaku and began to ask about the Yi, the old divinatory classic. The record even traces the line of instruction upward: Ugaku’s teacher had been Nogami Chinrei, and Chinrei’s teacher had been Yamamoto Hokuzan. This is not a trivial curiosity. It shows that Tamotsu, for all his work in commercial publishing and practical prose, had not wholly ceased to seek older kinds of learning. 
　　To a shallow eye this turn toward the Yi might seem strange in a man already living by modern books. But in truth it fits the Shibue line very well. Chūsai had not been a one-sided scholar. He had moved through medicine, bibliography, textual learning, theater, and many bypaths of knowledge. Tamotsu too, though shaped by the Meiji print world, was not made to remain inside one narrow lane. Even while writing for the market, he still wanted contact with older systems of thought that claimed to read order beneath the surface of events. 
　　The next year brought both public and private changes again. In Meiji 31, Tamotsu was appointed lecturer at Ugaku’s Gidōkan on the thirtieth day of the eighth month, and on the seventeenth day of the twelfth month he became one of its councillors as well. In the same year Osamu’s eldest daughter Hana was born in the twelfth month. But another older connection died: Shimada Kōson passed away on the twenty-seventh day of the eighth month at the age of sixty-one. So even as new roles opened before Tamotsu and a new child entered Osamu’s house, one more figure from the learned world around the family disappeared. 
　　These years, taken together, do not offer any single dramatic climax. Instead they show something slower and perhaps more important. Tamotsu was no longer merely struggling to survive from one appointment to another. He was becoming a man with recognized standing in more than one intellectual sphere, both in publishing and in more traditional study. Osamu, on his side, was planting his household more firmly in the technical labor of modern printing. The Shibue family had long since lost the old life of hereditary physicians, yet by the close of the century it had unmistakably become something else: a family still poor in security, still marked by small graves and constant movement, but persistently alive in the written world. 

Part 18

　　After the close of the thirty-first year, the record passes into the years beyond the fortieth anniversary of Chūsai’s death. By now the great struggles of simple survival had somewhat changed their form. The family was no longer trying merely to keep body and soul together from one season to the next. Instead, the separate branches were beginning to harden into distinct lives, each with its own work, grief, and small continuity. 
　　In Meiji 33, Tamotsu’s house received another child. On the second day of May his third daughter, Otome, was born. The fact is entered briefly, but in a family so often marked by the deaths of children, even a brief birth notice carries weight. Each new child meant not only joy, but also a silent memory of those who had not lived. 
　　The following year, Meiji 34, belongs more clearly to Osamu’s line. In that year he received the haikai name Gingetsu from Kinishijo, the second master in that poetic line. This is worth noticing. The younger brother, who had already moved through newspapers, railways, proofreading, and printing offices, was once again turning life into words, now under a poetic name formally given by a teacher. 
　　The same year brought loss as well. Mizuki died on the twenty-sixth day of the first month at the age of forty-nine. Her life had already crossed several houses and several fortunes, and now it ended before old age. So another of the women standing between Chūsai’s generation and the present generation passed out of the family record. 
　　Public life outside the house also changed in that year, and the source notes it in a way that matters to Tamotsu’s world. Fukuzawa Yukichi died on the third day of February at the age of sixty-eight, and Ōhashi Sahei, head of Hakubunkan, died on the third day of November at sixty-seven. These were not indifferent names to Tamotsu. Fukuzawa had long stood as an intellectual ideal for him, while Ōhashi had helped give practical shape to his life in publishing. Their deaths marked the passing of two larger supports in the world around him. 
　　In Meiji 35 the movement falls chiefly on Osamu again. In October he left Shūeisha and entered Kokubunsha in Kyōbashi Sōjūrō-chō as a proofreader. Such a change may seem modest, yet it shows his continued life inside the machinery of print. He was not drifting away from letters. He was still earning his bread through the exact labor of correcting text, one printed line at a time. 
　　That same year, on the fifth day of December, Osamu’s fourth son Sueo was born. So the house of the younger brother, though repeatedly shaken by work changes and by the deaths of children, still continued to grow. The pattern remains familiar: a birth appears right beside a shift in employment, as if family life and office life in this line could never be separated into calm compartments. 
　　Meiji 36 brought another bold turn. In September Osamu went down to Shizuoka and reopened the Shibue Juku at Minamiura, Anzai 1-chōme. He did this on the advice of Kawada Masazumi, principal of the prefectural middle school, in order to give local middle-school boys help with review and preparation. The detail matters because it shows that the old house still retained, even in changed form, the habit of becoming a place of study for others. 
　　Yet that same year the old shadow entered again. Osamu’s eldest daughter Hana died on the fifteenth day of March at the age of six. The source places the fact plainly beside the reopening of the school, and the contrast is painful. A house opens itself again to pupils and promise, while inside it a child’s life is cut short almost before memory can fully gather around it. 
　　Then, in Meiji 37, Tamotsu moved on the fifteenth day of May to 1 Misaki-chō in Kanda. The entry is brief, but such moves are never meaningless in this narrative. Each new address marks a fresh attempt at durable footing in Tokyo, a slight re-centering of a life built out of books, teaching, and steady written labor. Tamotsu was no longer the wandering young teacher of Hamamatsu and Kōfu. He was now an established man of the capital, even if his establishment remained modest and always somewhat precarious. 
　　What strikes me most in these years is not any one dramatic event, but the way the family’s old character persists under modern conditions. Tamotsu remains tied to books, publishers, and intellectual authority. Osamu remains tied to text as proofreader, poet, and school founder. The women and children still stand inside a life where births are followed too often by deaths, and where every gained footing costs effort. The old medical house of Chūsai has truly ended, but the house of learning has not. It has simply changed its outer dress. 

Part 19

　　At this point in the story, the line of years is no longer enough by itself. The family has spread into several living branches, and if we are to see what has really become of Chūsai’s house, we must look directly at the people who still remain. Among the descendants alive in the present, the first place must be given to the Ushigome branch, that is, to Tamotsu himself. He was Chūsai’s seventh child and the son who became heir. 
　　His education had been broad and restless from the beginning. He learned the classics under Gyoson and Chikkei of the Kaibō line, under Shimada Kōson, under Kanematsu Sekkyo, and under Nemoto Ugaku. He learned Chinese medicine from Taki Unjū. He was trained as an educator in the normal-school world, studied English at Kyōritsu Gakusha and Keiō Gijuku, served in Hamamatsu and Shizuoka as principal or vice-principal, and at the same time wrote as a newspaper man on politics and public affairs. Seen from outside, it was an active and many-sided life. 
　　Yet the author’s judgment of that life is severe. The place where Tamotsu spent the greatest amount of energy was his writing and translating for Hakubunkan, and the books he produced for that publisher are said to have reached about one hundred and fifty volumes in all. Those books did help to awaken and instruct readers of the time. Even so, the judgment given here is that most of them were written in answer to the immediate demands of the book trade and the fashion of the moment. His power, in other words, was expended too cheaply. 
　　The thought is stated with striking bitterness. The right relation between writer and bookseller ought to be one of mutual benefit, but in fact, the author says, it had become parasitic. Tamotsu had played the host-body in that relation. The phrase is harsh, but it is not empty. It suggests that a man of larger intellectual force had been drained by the constant need to produce what the market wanted, rather than what his mind most deeply wished to build. 
　　And indeed, those deeper wishes still lived in him. The source lists five works that he wanted to complete: a history of private punishment, a history of Chinese criminal law, a set of independent studies on the classics and the masters, a work on the Book of Changes, and a long bibliographical work called Fifty Years of Reading. This last one was not merely a dream. It already existed in a great heap of draft papers. The ambition behind it was vast: to enlarge the spirit of Chūsai’s own bibliographical labor, extending it from ancient to modern times and from East to West. 
　　There is something painful in this. One sees that Tamotsu knew, and the author knew, that the best work of his life was still unwritten. He had gathered material, formed plans, and carried whole books within him, but the world had not yet given him the freedom to complete them. The question is left hanging in the air: will he ever be able to fulfill those intentions, and will society ever truly allow him to do so? It is the old problem of Chūsai’s poem returning in another generation under new conditions. 
　　At the time from which this account speaks, in Taishō 5, Tamotsu was sixty years old. His wife, née Sano, was forty-eight, and his daughter Otome was seventeen. Otome had been studying painting under Kaburaki Kiyokata since Meiji 41, and from Taishō 3 she had also been a student at the Atomi Girls’ School. Even in that small note one feels the continued movement of the family into arts and modern education. The old line had not dried up. It had simply taken on new forms. 
　　After the Ushigome branch, the next place belongs to the Honjo branch, to Chūsai’s fourth daughter Kuga, now the nagauta teacher Kineya Katsuhisa. She too was still living in the present, and by Taishō 5 she had reached the age of seventy. Her road had been very different from Tamotsu’s. Yet it too shows how the children of Chūsai carried old cultivation into unexpected modern forms. 
　　Kuga’s musical training had begun astonishingly early. When she was only four years old, in the Kaei era, she was sent for lessons to the second Kineya Katsusaburō, the famous master called Oni-Katsu of Bakurochō. At that time she was still living out as a foster child in the house of a carpenter named Shinpachi at Koyanagi-chō and had to go from there to her lessons. The source says that her mother Iō had had a fine voice, and that Kuga too possessed a beautiful one. Katsusaburō praised it openly. She remembered melodies well and progressed so fast on the shamisen that before long she was already going out with her teacher to larger rehearsals. 
　　Katsusaburō took special pains with her training. On fixed days each month he came in person to the Shibue house, bringing two pupils with him. Kuga would be brought back from her foster home and would be waiting. After she had performed her pieces, there would be further playing, and then food and drink were served. The dishes always came from Aoyagi. Even after the Shibue family moved to Honjo Daidokoro-chō in Kaei 4, this visiting instruction continued. The scene is vivid: amid all the strain of rank, poverty, and learned work in Chūsai’s house, one small girl’s musical talent was being carefully cultivated by a first-rate master. 
　　Later, when the Shibue family had once moved north to Hirosaki and then returned to Tokyo, Kuga opened a sugar shop in Midori-chō, Honjo. That was not because she had first come there intending to become a shopkeeper. She had simply built a small house on a corner of empty ground belonging to an Inaba family. After she settled there, close relations grew between her and that household, and it was by their advice that the sugar shop was opened. Later, when the shop had closed, it was again the same Inaba family who helped her stand on her own feet as a music teacher. 
　　The source lingers over this with affection, and it deserves that attention. The Inaba widow and her daughter treated Kuga with real tenderness. They took her to the bath, washed her back and hands, and even arranged her hair each day in different styles. Then the widow said plainly that it would not do for a young woman to sit idle. Since Kuga had been born in a physician’s house and knew how to weigh things accurately, she should open a sugar shop, and a trustworthy wholesaler could be introduced. So the shop was opened. 
　　It succeeded at once. The goods were good, the weights were honest, and people came even from some distance to buy there. Sweet shops came. Cookshops came. Customers came even from Komatsugawa. One day a noble lady arrived with several maids, bought rock candy and other sweets, and told Kuga that she had heard of a former samurai daughter who had bravely begun to trade for herself, and had therefore come on purpose to support her. She urged her not to give up halfway, but to endure and become an example to others. Later it was said that this visitor had been the wife of the Tōdō house. 
　　On another day Iō and Tamotsu went to a storytelling performance. Enchō was the main act, but before he entered the body of his story he mentioned that in Midori-chō a high-born young lady had opened a sugar shop and was prospering greatly, and that it was a fine example suited to the times. Iō, hearing this praise in public, is said to have been deeply moved. It is easy to understand why. The daughter of Chūsai was not merely surviving. She had become a figure of moral meaning in the ears of the town. 
　　Yet the shop did not continue. It was closed while still flourishing, not because trade had failed, but because difficulties within the family made it impossible to go on. Once she was free from the shop, the Inaba widow came to visit again, and their talk turned by chance to nagauta. The widow had once studied it herself. Kuga loved it more than food. They tried singing together, and before even one section had ended, the widow cried out in admiration that Kuga was no amateur at all and must certainly become a teacher. She herself, she said, would be the first pupil. 
　　Thus the path that had begun in childhood under Oni-Katsu and had been interrupted by family hardship returned at last to its true course. In Tamotsu the blood of Chūsai had gone into books, schools, and planned works never fully freed from the marketplace. In Kuga it had gone into voice, rhythm, discipline, and a public art handed from master to pupil. The family was scattered, altered, and often poor, but it had not become common in spirit. Each branch, in its own way, was still trying to turn ability into a life. 

Part 20

　　Once Kuga was pushed back toward nagauta, the talent that had begun in childhood did not merely return as a pastime. It became the true public work of her life. The source is careful to say that her character, though naturally gentle and quiet, was also firm in principle and rich in a sense of duty, and that this can be seen clearly in the course of her career as a teacher of nagauta. She was not a noisy or showy woman. Yet beneath the light movement and cheerful speech that made her pleasant to others, there was a strong inner line. 
　　Even in smaller matters, this side of her appears. The source says that she first learned hairdressing by arranging the hair of an old woman in a simple style. Later she dressed the hair of her mother, her younger sister, and even the maids, always doing her own hair herself except on formal occasions. When the family was in Hirosaki, women came bringing sweets and asking her to arrange their hair. She refused payment, dressed the hair for them anyway, and even gave fashionable ornaments besides. This is more than a charming anecdote. It shows the same habit of skill joined to generosity that had marked the best members of the house before her. 
　　Her public rise as a music teacher came slowly but firmly. Four years after she had first put out her signboard, on the third day of the fourth month in Meiji 10, she held a great public performance at Nakamurarō in Ryōgoku to celebrate the spreading of her professional name. The scale of the occasion was remarkable. Tents, curtains, cords, gifts, and decorations came not only from pupils and fellow musicians, but from fish-market wholesalers, women disciples, family patrons, actors, and even houses of the nobility connected with her. Some noble households sent money and goods, and some even sent elderly female attendants in person. 
　　One should not read this merely as social glitter. Such support meant that Kuga had already become a recognized presence in the world of nagauta. This was no longer the daughter of a fallen physician’s house trying to survive by private lessons in a rented corner. By the age of thirty-one she had made herself into a public teacher with a circle of pupils, patrons, and artistic allies around her. Her success did not erase the poverty and hardship from which she had risen, but it did prove that the house of Chūsai still had living force enough to create a new kind of standing. 
　　Later, when she built the house in Matsui-chō where she still lived, her teacher Katsusaburō was delighted and composed a poem for her with his own hand, had it mounted, and sent it to her as a gift. Kuga then used that poem as the basis for a musical piece entitled “Matsu no Sakae,” and opened the new composition at Ibumurō in Ryōgoku. Katsusaburō himself was there, and so were many of the leading figures of the Kineya school. The printed text of the piece was prepared in fine form and distributed to the guests. 
　　That moment has a beauty beyond its outward ceremony. Chūsai, in his own lifetime, had once written Yotsu no Umi in the world of nagauta and had concealed his authorship under another man’s name out of regard for public appearance. Now, by a strange turn, one side of his taste had flowered openly in his daughter. What had been half hidden in the father had become a public artistic life in the daughter. The source notes this with quiet satisfaction, and rightly so. It is one of the clearest places where inheritance in this family appears not through office or bloodline alone, but through shared sensibility. 
　　Katsusaburō did not live much longer. He died on the fifth day of the second month in Meiji 29 at the age of seventy-seven. The source then briefly traces the larger Kineya line back to its theatrical origins and notes that the principal hereditary house still continued at Nihonbashi Sakamoto-chō. Such a note is not idle learning. It places Kuga exactly where she belongs: not as an isolated female music teacher, but as a real figure inside a long and respected artistic lineage. Her work had a house behind it, a school behind it, and a tradition behind it. 
　　Up to this point, one might think that the living descendants of Chūsai in Tokyo were exhausted by the Ushigome branch of Tamotsu and the Honjo branch of Kuga. But the source says plainly that there was a third Shibue house in the capital. This was the Shimo-Shibuya branch, headed by Shūkichi, the son of Osamu. Kuga herself, though older than Tamotsu only as a sister is older, continued to call Tamotsu “elder brother” throughout her life because he was the heir of their father. The old consciousness of household order remained alive even across these changed and scattered branches. 
　　Shūkichi, the head of this third house, was already known in the present as a designer. In Taishō 3 he had entered the circle of Tsuda Seifū, and by Taishō 5 he was twenty-eight years old. This is an important final turn in the story of the descendants. The arts of the family had now moved beyond medicine, Chinese learning, nagauta, journalism, and proofreading into modern design and visual work. The line of Chūsai had not hardened into one profession. It had continued to divide and re-form itself according to the needs and possibilities of each new age. 
　　Shūkichi also had two younger brothers. Chūzō had completed the course of the Meiji College of Pharmacy in the previous year and was twenty-one, while the youngest brother, Sueo, was fifteen. Their mother, Osada of the Fukushima family, was living in Shizuoka and was forty-eight, the same age as Tamotsu’s wife. The fact is given quietly, but it gives the third branch its full human shape: not a single surviving artist, but a living household with brothers, a mother apart, and its own separate continuity. 
　　Thus, by the end of the work, the descendants of Chūsai stand before us in three visible houses. In Ushigome there is Tamotsu, worn by practical literary labor yet still carrying large unwritten plans. In Honjo there is Kuga, who turned inherited cultivation into a public artistic career in nagauta. In Shimo-Shibuya there is Shūkichi, already moving into the modern world of design. The old physician’s house has long since vanished, but the family itself has not vanished. It remains divided, altered, often burdened, and yet unmistakably alive in learning, art, and craft. 

Part 21

　　Yet the third house at Shimo-Shibuya cannot be understood through Shūkichi alone. Behind him stood his father Osamu, the man who had once been called Senroku in childhood. His life moved through many kinds of work. He had been with newspapers, telegraph offices, the railway service, printing houses, and small private schools. If Tamotsu represents one branch of public writing and Kuga another branch of music, then Osamu represents the hard Meiji life of a man who remained close to words and print while never finding an easy resting place. 
　　I have already followed him through those restless years. He passed from Shūeisha to Kokubunsha, and later reopened the Shibue Juku at Shizuoka so that middle-school boys might have help with review and preparation. The old family habit of turning a house into a place of study was still alive in him. Yet that school, too, could not last forever, because public-school regulations changed and the need for such a private support school weakened. 
　　In 1905, the thirty-eighth year after Chūsai’s death, Tamotsu moved to South Shinagawa, and in that same year Osamu closed the revived Shibue Juku at Shizuoka. A learned official who had helped make the school useful had gone away, and the conditions that had once justified the juku no longer held. This is typical of Osamu’s life. Again and again he built something within a passing set of circumstances, and again and again those circumstances changed before the work could become secure. 
　　The following year he came up again to Tokyo and entered the Hakubunkan printing office in Koishikawa Hisakata-chō as a proofreader. Thus the younger brother moved still closer to the very world in which Tamotsu had long been laboring. One brother wrote, translated, and planned books. The other read proofs in the printing office and carried text through its harder and more exact mechanical stage. In a different way from their father, both were still living among books. 
　　Osamu’s life, however, was not made only of labor. In Meiji 26 he had begun writing haiku, and one surviving line is quoted in the source. I do not want to leave him only as a railway man, a newspaperman, or a proofreader. I would rather let one of his own small poems stand for him. 

　　In leather tabi—  
　　I step at last  
　　into my forties. 

　　That is a very small poem, but it is enough. It tells me that even while moving from office to office and town to town, he kept an inward eye alive. In this, perhaps, he resembles not Tamotsu but Kuga. Each found a small and exact art through which the pressure of daily life could be changed into form. 
　　His end came in the autumn of 1910. He had already been coughing for some time, but until the fifth day he continued to work at the Hakubunkan printing office. On the sixth his cough grew violent, fever rose, and he took to bed. The illness became catarrhal pneumonia, and he died. The record is brief, but behind that brevity I feel the whole life of a working man who did not stop when he should have stopped, because labor and habit still drove him forward. 
　　After his death, the headship of that branch passed to his son Shūkichi, who moved to the present house in Shimo-Shibuya. So the third branch, which appears only near the end, was not an accidental remainder. It was a real house, carried forward through the father’s death into the hands of the son. This matters because the whole structure of the work has been moving toward just such a point: not toward the extinction of Chūsai’s line, but toward its altered survival in living descendants. 
　　Even after Osamu’s death, the family record does not stop at once. There is one more brief note. In 1911, Tamotsu’s third son Junkichi died at the age of seventeen. The blow falls quietly, almost after everything seems finished, and for that very reason it is moving. The later history of Chūsai’s house has been full of children born and children lost, and the very last note returns me once more to that old sorrow. 
　　This is, I think, the true ending of the whole work. It does not end at Chūsai’s death. It does not end at Tamotsu’s partial success, or at Kuga’s artistic flowering, or at Shūkichi’s emergence as a modern designer. It ends with the family still alive, still divided into several houses, still active in books, music, design, and print, and yet still subject to the same blows of illness and death that had struck it from the beginning. The line survives, but survival is never easy and never complete. 
　　So Chūsai’s story, when seen in full, is not the story of one learned physician only. It is the story of a house that moved from domain medicine to modern publishing, from old textual scholarship to journalism, from hidden literary taste to open public art, and from hereditary office to fragile individual effort. The father’s life gives the work its center, but the children and grandchildren give it its true final breadth. Through them I see what remained after rank was lost, after stipends vanished, and after the old order broke apart. What remained was discipline, cultivated taste, endurance, and the stubborn need to turn life into learning or art. 
　　In that sense, the book closes exactly where it should. The seal in old books, the grave at Kannoji, the scholar at Seijukan, the widow who sold her ornaments, the son drained by commercial writing, the daughter who rose as a music teacher, the younger son who left behind a small haiku, and the grandson working in modern design all belong to one long pattern. It is a pattern of force continually driven into new shapes by history. Nothing in it is smooth, but almost nothing in it is spiritually wasted either. That is why Chūsai, though long dead, still seems to stand within the living current of his descendants.