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world he personifies, may, as individuals, be charming and lovable. They understand Bash ō ; they understand Tolstoy. They understand Ike no Taiga and Mushanok ō ji Saneatsu. They understand Karl Marx. Yet what is the result? Of fierce love, the joy of fierce creativity, or fierce moral passion they are ignorant. All in all, they know nothing of the sheer intensity of spirit that can render this world sublime. And if they are marked by a mortal wound, they surely also contain a pernicious poison. One of its properties is direct, enabling it to transform ordinary human beings into sophisticates; another works by way of reaction, making them all the more common. Someone such as Koen is a case in point, is she not?
    â€œAs we know from time immemorial, thirst will drive one to drink even from muddy water. That is to say, if Koen had not been in Wakatsuki’s milieu, she might not have wound up with the balladeer.
    â€œIf, on the other hand, she finds happiness . . . Well now, I suppose to the extent that she has her new lover in place of Wakatsuki, she has already found it. What was it that Fujii said just now? We all findourselves riding the same merry-go-round of life and, at some moment as we turn, encounter ‘happiness,’ only to have it pass us by in the very moment that we reach out for it. If such is truly our desire, we should jump off . . . Koen has, as it were, dared to do just that. Such fierce joy and sorrow is something that the likes of Wakatsuki and other men of the world do not know. As I contemplate life’s value, I shall willingly spit on one hundred Wakatsukis, even as I honor and revere a single Koen.
    â€œWhat say you all to that?”
    Wada’s tipsy eyes shone round the silent room, but Fujii at some point had put his head down on the table and was now blissfully and soundly asleep.

THE HANDKERCHIEF
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    Hasegawa Kinz ō , professor in the Faculty of Law at T ō ky ō Imperial University, was sitting in a rattan chair on the veranda, reading Strindberg’s Dramaturgy . Such might come as something of a surprise to readers when informed of the professor’s specialized field of research: colonial policy. He was, however, renowned as an educator as well as a scholar, and so to the extent that leisure allowed, he took it upon himself at least to glance through works which though not immediately useful to his discipline were nonetheless in some way relevant to the thoughts and feelings of today’s students. Being at the time the headmaster of a higher professional school, he had even endeavored to peruse Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and Intentions , his sole motivation being their popularity among his pupils.
    Thus, there would really have been no cause for astonishment in seeing him absorbed in the world of modern European plays and actors. Indeed, among his charges there were not only those whowrote commentaries on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck but even some passionately seeking to follow in the footsteps of these up-to-date dramatists and to devote themselves to the theater.
    Whenever the professor finished a chapter, each filled with penetrating insights, he would put the book with its yellow cloth cover down on his lap and throw a desultory glance at the Gifu lantern that hung on the veranda. Curiously, his mind would then wander from Strindberg to his wife, with whom he had gone to buy it.
    The professor had studied in America, where he had first met her; naturally enough, she was an American. Yet she, no less than he, was enamored of Japan and of the Japanese people. She was particularly attached to Japan’s exquisitely wrought handicrafts. It would thus seem reasonable to assume that the lantern was more a reflection of his wife’s taste than of his own.
    Such moments invariably set him to thinking—about his wife and about the lantern as representative of Japanese civilization. It was his belief that for all the considerable material