Smiley ’s Reviews > This Kind of Woman: Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers, 1960-1976 > Status Update

The door of the freight car finally closed, and the starting signal sounded. I got on the train in a hurry but didn't know quite what to make of the strange scene I had just witnessed. I couldn't believe that what I'd seen wasn't an illusion, like a scene from a movie.
"I feel sorry for them. Living on into old age like that."
I turned around. A middle-aged man in a gray jacket was sitting across ... (p. 73)

It must have been seven or eight years ago, since the highway wasn't good as it is now, and traveling by car wasn't easy.
I was still staying in my summer house in Karuizawa even though it was mid-September. One day a woman's group in the nearby town of Ueda asked me to give a talk. I've forgotten what kind of group they were, but I left my house in the late afternoon and spoke to the audience ... (p. 71)

Our mission was to explain and publicize the "workers' school" we were going to open and also to feel out the current condition of the union. You smiled continually and made yourself agreeable to the union officers, but I couldn't do this. As we were leaving the factory, however, you told me that you yourself did not completely trust those union members. You said we must not, under any circumstances, ... (p. 6)