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closes her eyes when it appears she might have to meet somebody in the valley. The subtle, long-felt resentment in the postmaster’s wife would dash icy water on the tepid sentimentality rising in him. But there was no danger his happiness would be uprooted. That lady’s got no one left but only her one son, and they say he’s dying of cancer, so she’s leaving for Tokyo with that urn of ashes of her war dead that did her honor twenty-five years ago. And do you know she hasn’t shed a tear, and her head is straight up and her eyes shut tight—she’s a hard old lady! Of course, she’s not one to believe other folks, so she maybe thinks those doctors are wrong and her son doesn’t have cancer. And that’s what most of us around here think too, yessir!
    ____It’s cancer, all right,
liver cancer,
and it’s only a matter of days now! She just learned the truth, that’s what made up her mind to leave the valley.
    ____Have you heard that straight from the doctor? That he’s really got himself cancer? Because that’s what we’ve been hearing all along. …
    ____That’s right, cancer. And I don’t have to hear anything from the doctor because I’m the son from the Manor house and I’m dying of cancer right now! he would say, then signal the nurse to replace the receiver that had probably become too heavy for him to handle by himself.
    ____I surely want to beg your pardon, yessir! the voice would whine like a mosquito speeding away, weakly fade, and disappear.
    “Wearing” an urn of ashes “upon her bosom” meant that his mother had tied the ends of the white cotton cloth in which the urn was wrapped behind her neck. Toward the end of the war this had suddenly become a style frequently encountered in the valley. But the urn his mother would be taking with her was more than twenty-five years old. Shortly after the disastrous naval defeat at Midway this very urn and white wooden box and cotton cloth, still unusual at a time when the tide of the war had only just begun to turn against Japan, had come home to the village from the Chinese Mainland with a bit of dust representing the “repatriated bones” of his elder brother, the first war casualty in the valley, and had opened decisively the rift between
a certain party
and his mother which was never to close so long as they lived. At the time,
a certain party
had already withdrawn from the multifarious operations of the “committee” directly in league with the military based in Manchuria and was living in seclusion in his native village in the valley. When his eldest son, while attached to the very Japanese division on the Chinese mainland that formerly had been the chief sphere of
a certain party’s
activity and influence, had left the front and been shot by the enemy, or possibly a comrade, his mother’s hatred for
a certain party
had become manifest. Never again was the word “father” spoken in the house in the valley deep in the forest. Such was the specialsignificance of the urn containing his elder brother’s ashes which his mother would now take out for the first time in nearly thirty years and “wear upon her bosom” as she set out for Tokyo in a three-wheel truck, across the dizzying ninety-nine-curve-pass, feeling, in her anxiety at having emerged from the forest, as if a vacuum had formed just behind her and was pulling her back.
    When he had enjoyed the supreme game to this point in his conscious mind he decided on a whim to reinforce his pleasure in his subconscious. What if he couldn’t remember anything about his dreams when he awoke, assuming it was a fact that he did have dreams, he ought to accumulate at least the physical experience of dreaming while his condition permitted it.
    As he was falling asleep again on the single sleeping pill the nurse had given him he tried suggesting toward his subconscious that he would like particularly to dream about ninety-nine-curve-pass. Since childhood he had tried repeatedly to determine whether