Critical Asian Studies

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“Siberia under snow” by Kuroshima Denji:

Translation and introduction by Lawrence Rogers

Lawrence Rogers

To cite this article: Lawrence Rogers (2006) “Siberia under snow” by Kuroshima Denji:
Translation and introduction by Lawrence Rogers, Critical Asian Studies, 38:2, 309-319, DOI:
10.1080/14672710600671269

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 Critical Asian Studies
38:2 (2006), 309-319
Rogers / “Siberia under Snow”

TRANSLATION

“SIBERIA UNDER SNOW”

by Kuroshima Denji

Translation and introduction by Lawrence Rogers

Kuroshima Denji (1898–1943) was one of Japan’s better-regarded proletarian writ-

ers, remembered both for his antiwar stories and his fictionalized accounts of the
hardscrabble lives of farmers in prewar Japan. Unlike most of the other successful
proletarian writers, he was not a university graduate and had experienced the
harsher side of life at first hand from childhood, having been born the first of five
children into a poor farming-fishing family on Shðdo Island in the Inland Sea. He
had worked as a laborer in a soy sauce factory in his mid teens, and then been
drafted into the Imperial Army, where he was trained as an infantry medic and sent
off in 1921 to Siberia as part of Japan’s — and the West’s — military intervention
against the Bolsheviks in the civil war that followed the revolution. Kuroshima was
returned to Japan the following year and discharged. His Siberian duty aggravated
an existing tuberculosis of the lungs, but the year he spent in Siberia would later
lead him to write antiwar short stories and essays based on the experience. Recuper-
ating from his illness at his home on Shðdo Island, he wrote a number of realistically
grim short stories about the hardworking but little rewarded poor of the Japanese
countryside. Regaining his strength, he went up to Tokyo in 1925, where for the next
eight years he established a reputation as an important writer of the left and took an
active part in the proletarian literature movement. He attracted notice in 1927 with
the publication of the short story “Tongun” [The pig herd], a satiric look at pig farm-
ers and an exploitative landowner. Yet Kuroshima never seems to have received the
attention that proletarian writers such as Kobayashi Takiji or Tokunaga Sunao en-
joyed. Literary historian Donald Keene, who has never found much to admire in
proletarian literature, nonetheless sees Kuroshima as a writer far superior to Toku-
naga, and more effective than Kobayashi in the depiction of rural life.1 Given the im-
portance of personal relationships in the publication of literature in Japan, even in
proletarian literary circles, Kuroshima’s personality may have worked against
greater exposure for his work. He once described himself as “a very prickly sort,” a
taciturn, moody, disagreeable melancholic “with the smell of the piggery and the
earth clinging to me.”2
ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 02 / 000309-11 ©2006 BCAS, Inc. DOI: 10.1080/14672710600671269
 Kuroshima’s fiction focuses thematically on rural poverty and the evils of milita-
rism. The latter pieces are set in Siberia during the concerted military intervention
against the Bolsheviks, but even here his foot soldiers are young men from the Japa-
nese countryside.
Kuroshima wrote for the journals Bungei sensen [Literary Front] and Senki [Bat-
tle Flag], but also took an active part in organizing the literary left. He helped estab-
lish the Rðnð geijutsuka renmei (The Worker-Farmer Artists League) in 1927 and
several years later became a member of the central committee of the Nihon
puroretaria sakka dðmei [The Japan Proletarian Writers League]. Inevitably, he was
at the center of the frequent organizational breakups and coalescing that afflicted
the left in Japan, writers included. The government’s suppression of dissent, which
began in the early thirties in the wake of the so-called Manchurian Incident, signaled
the beginning of the end for organized opposition from the left, and this was re-
flected in the literary arena, where writers were expected to conform or remain si-
lent. Writers on the left were jailed for what they had written or merely for their sym-
pathies, real and presumed; in 1933 the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji was
arrested and tortured to death by the police. Kuroshima’s fortunes also declined. In
1932 one of his short stories had been criticized by Miyamoto Kenji, already influen-
tial in the Communist Party, for being “behind the times,” and the following year
Kuroshima suffered a relapse of his TB. He immediately returned to the family home
on Shðdo Island, where he spent the last decade of his life, ill and impoverished. He
was unable to continue his writing in any significant way, his health and the repres-
sive political climate conspiring against him.
Most of Kuroshima’s fiction takes the form of short stories. He did write one long
narrative, Busð seru shigai [Guns in the streets], about the exploitation of China by
Japan and the Western powers, but the government prohibited its sale soon after
publication. It was not published again until the end of World War II, after his death,
and even then passages reflecting unfavorably on the Western powers were excised
by order of American occupation authorities. The full text was not published until
1964.3
“Siberia under Snow” [Yuki no shiberia] was originally published in Bungei
sensen in 1927. It is one of Kuroshima’s Siberian pieces, centered on soldiers of the
expedition to Siberia in the wake of the October Revolution. It was published in a
time of relative, but not complete, freedom of expression. Through the ruminations
of his two hapless medics, the story’s principal characters, Kuroshima boldly ques-
tions Japanese foreign policy toward the newly created USSR: Why was it necessary,
they wonder, for Japan to persist in sending troops to Siberia? This is an instance of
skepticism he could not have got past the censors only a few years later. The fatal
misadventure of the two men can also be seen, of course, as a metaphor for a fool-
hardy foreign policy that leads an incautious and arrogant leadership to blunder
into disaster abroad.
While Kuroshima, in the tradition of proletarian literature, downplays the indi-
viduality of the two main characters — we don’t learn their names until we are well
into the story — he nonetheless fleshes out their characters to the extent that we see
contrasting personalities the reader can recognize and sympathize with as the two
meet their unhappy fate.
This translation is based on the text in Kuroshima Denji Zenshþ, vol. 1, Chikuma
Shobð, 1970.

1. Keene 1984, 616 and 620.

2. Inagaki 1971, 399.
3. Odagiri 1970, vol. 3, 407–8.
310 Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006)
 “Siberia under Snow”

1
The two men lay on their bunks in the barracks. They had just come back from
the train station. They had seen off fellow soldiers, men they had enlisted with,
who were returning to Japan without them. They said nothing for a long while,
only sighed. They would have to endure yet another year in Siberia before they
could go home.
They thought back on how dreary and long their year here had been. During
their second year as soldiers they had been stationed a while at the garrison hos-
pital, then sent off to Siberia. Over one hundred men had entered the army
around that time and taken a ship from Tsugaru. When they got to Siberia, the
fourth-year soldiers — and some of the third-year men — who had been waiting
for them went back to the home islands of Japan.
Siberia was then encased in snow as far as the eye could see. Horse-drawn
sleighs passed over rivers that were frozen solid. They went outside in fur caps
and overcoats, shod in arctic boots with wool cloth attached to the soles so that
they wouldn’t slip on the ice. White-billed crows flocked together on the snow
and pecked about incessantly.
When the snow melted, the monotonous, endless plain exposed its withered
surface. Herds of horses and cows now roamed the plain, neighing and lowing.
Young grasses at last sprouted green along the roadside. And here and there in
the grass plains beyond and in the nearer hills, new grass began to shimmer in
the wind. Before the week was out the grasslands, which had been totally dry
and sere, turned a verdant green; grasses sprouted, tree limbs grew, and geese
and ducks waddled about. In summer the two men, together with an infantry
unit, were moved near the border with China. There had been a clash with the
Red Guards in October.4 They had withdrawn from the front in an armored
train.
For a week the steppes had been shrouded in fog so thick you could not see
even two hundred feet in front of you. They encamped on a hill that had been in
Russian hands. They occupied a brick building, cleaned it up, and set up
wooden partitions to make small rooms, then furnished it with an operating ta-
ble, carried in medicine, and put up a wooden sign in front identifying it as an
army hospital.
Snow began falling in November. The snow did not melt when it fell, but was
overlain by more snow, upon which yet more snow accumulated. The water
from the spring in the valley that the coolies spilled as they shouldered it up to
the hospital would freeze, and as this happened every day, both sides of the path
were heaped with ice, which lined the path like mountain ranges.
The two men started a fire in the pechka stove and holed up in the barracks.
They thought back on the year just passed. As they saw with their own eyes sol-

4. A Bolshevik-led militia created during the Russian revolution.

Rogers / “Siberia under Snow” 311
diers being wounded, having their arms or legs amputated, or dying, the two
men had always kept Japan in their mind’s eye and waited for the day when their
replacements would come and they would be able to return home.
The replacements came. It was exactly the same time of year that they had
been sent to Siberia the previous year. Most of the third- and fourth-year sol-
diers were to return to Japan. Of the third-year men, however, two were re-
quired to remain behind to take charge of the second-year soldiers, who had
just completed their basic training in the home islands.
The medical officer and the chief medic had talked it over. They wanted to
use this opportunity to send back soldiers who were ill tempered, wild, and dif-
ficult to deal with. And so the doctor ordered Yoshida and Komura, who were
well behaved, worked hard, and were easy to deal with, to stay in Siberia.

2
No one wanted to stay in Siberia for very long.
There was a man named Yashima with a smudge of a moustache under his
nose, a bold sort enamored of brutality who was always brandishing his bayonet
and who amused himself by cutting up Russians, and when there were none of
them around would stab and kill the cows and pigs that wandered about.
“There’s no way I could do this back in Japan. I’m gonna have my fun here in
Siberia, where there’s no law to stop me.”
He harassed the medical officer and the chief medic a good deal. Once, for
example, he grabbed a pistol and chased after the medical officer. He had been
provoked when the doctor asked him to perform his duties in a more profes-
sional manner. He took aim and fired — the shot was deafening — at the fleeing
man. His aim was off and the bullet went through one of the double windows.
Everyone assumed he wanted to stay in Siberia. His attitude was devil-may-
care when he talked to others.
“Makes no difference to me if I stay in Siberia a long time, say a year or two,
not when you think how long a man’s life is. It’s no big deal.”
Yet when the medical officer and the chief medic decided who the returnees
would be, they wrote Yashima’s name at the very top of the list. Which is to say, it
would have been dangerous and worrisome to keep a man who, among other
things, was wont to brandish his bayonet and shoot off his pistol.
There was a man named Fukuda who had volunteered to come to Siberia. He
was able to speak a little Russian. He had volunteered to come in order to prac-
tice his Russian. He had a certain audacity and when he talked with Russians he
would ignore his work and chat on with them for two or three hours. He wanted
to return to Japan only after he had gotten much better in the language.
Nonetheless, Fukuda likewise found his name right there on the list of re-
turnees.
There were other such examples.
One man left the hospital without authorization and stayed at a Russian’s
house for three days. It was desertion, and in wartime desertion is punishable
by death by firing squad. Yet in the end they covered it up and he was able to es-

312 Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006)

cape punishment, in return for which he and everyone else understood that he
was to be kept in Siberia until he had finished his third year in the army.
Yet there was his name, too, clearly on the list.
The two who were to stay behind were the diligent, useful Yoshida and Ko-
mura. They had always made the extra effort, assuming that if they worked hard
their reward would be an early return. They never slackened in their duties;
even when they had a touch of a cold and were weary, they would push them-
selves.
And the only thing they received as a reward for this was another year in Sibe-
ria — for the sake of their country, they were told.
The two men felt as though they had been sandbagged, and in their outrage
could not keep themselves from recklessly venting their anger at those around
them.

3
Yashima talked to them as he waited for the train.
“I’ll tell ya, when you get right down to it, you guys are damn fools. If you
wanna get home early, do like I did. Everybody naturally wants to keep well-be-
haved, sheep-like sorts working under them, right? But Siberia or wherever, one
year or two, it’s all the same when you look at the whole of a man’s life. Well,
take care of yourselves, guys.”
Hearing this didn’t make Yoshida and Komura feel any better.
The men going back were chattering away: what they would do after they got
back to Japan; how the girlfriends they had before they came into the army
might be doing now; who would come to meet them. They had completely for-
gotten the prostitutes they had ardently patronized until just hours before.
“As soon as I get home I’m gonna get me a wife.”
Even Fukuda, who had volunteered for Siberia, was eager to return to the
home islands.
“No need to learn Russian. If I succeed my old man, I’ll have no trouble
feedin’ myself. Siberia’s a place where the partisans5 could get you at any mo-
ment. I’m sick and tired of it.”
The two men had been separated out from their fellows who were going
home, and stood subdued in a corner of the waiting room. They were not bud-
dies who had hit it off well before. Komura was shy and would do whatever any-
one told him to; he was not inclined to take an active part in matters. Yoshida
was a pushy sort. But he was decent, so it happened that he would take it upon
himself to poke his nose into things and in the end would have to shoulder all
responsibility. When the two were together, Yoshida always decided what was to
be done, and according to his lights. He adopted a mature pose. Komura, in his
heart of hearts, found this hard to stomach. Now, however, they realized the two
of them had to get along with each other from here on out. They knew that even
though there might be things one didn’t like about the other, they had to toler-

5. Russian guerrillas.

Rogers / “Siberia under Snow” 313

ate each other. They were the only two left from the same cohort. They had to
get through the next year by helping each other.
“Well, thanks for comin’ to see us off.”
When the train came, the returnees, hand-carrying their packs crammed with
exotic souvenirs, scrambled onto the train, every man for himself. They each
found a seat, took off their arctic hats, their faces visible through the window.
No platform had been built next to the tracks. The two men stood between
the tracks and looked up at the huge train before them. The homebound men,
framed by the windows, were laughing and yelling to them. Yet when the two at-
tempted to respond and join in the laughter, they found somehow that their
faces were contorted and they felt close to tears.
They didn’t want the others to see them like that, so they stood there unsmil-
ing and silent.
The train began to move. The faces that had been peering from the windows
immediately withdrew inside. The two men, who had suppressed their sadness
until then, could do nothing about the tears that were suddenly coursing down
their cheeks.
“Hey, let’s go back to the hospital,” Yoshida said.
“Uh-huh.” Komura’s voice broke.
Yoshida reacted to this with a challenge: “I’ll race you to the bridge.”
“Uh-huh,” Komura answered, his voice unchanged.
“Okay? One, two, three!”
The two men ran for a hundred yards, Yoshida in the lead, but slowed to a dis-
pirited walk before they had gotten halfway to the bridge.
They dragged themselves to the hospital, their legs leaden. They turned all of
their duties over to the second-year soldiers and slept like dead men in the bar-
racks for almost a week.

4
“Hey! You wanna go rabbit huntin’?” asked Yoshida.
Komura was in bed, his blankets pulled up to his nose: “You’re tellin’ me
there’re rabbits around here?”
“Sure are. Look there!” Yoshida pointed outside the window. “There’s one
hoppin’ there.”
For some time he had been lying on his stomach and looking out through the
double windows toward the hills beyond. The hills undulated, running to the
mountains far in the distance. Clumps of grass and clusters of scrub brush dot-
ted the hills and in one place gravel had been heaped into a pile. All this was cov-
ered with snow now, indistinguishable under a blanket of white.
A rabbit would inevitably scamper from a grassy area, then disappear in the
snow, and a little later spring out from somewhere else. The very first thing you
noticed were the big ears. Yet if you weren’t really paying attention, you could-
n’t make them out; they were part of the snow.
“Look, there’s one!” Yoshida whispered fiercely. “He’s bouncin’ like a ball!”
“Where?”
Komura got to his feet listlessly and came to the window.
314 Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006)
 “You can’t see anything out there.”
“Take a good look. He’s hoppin’. See? He’s runnin’ toward that pile of rocks.
You can see his long ears, can’t you?”
The two men had wearied of sleeping. And yet they could not bring them-
selves to put in an honest day’s work. It seemed foolish to go back on duty. Their
former comrades might well be arriving at Tsugaru about now. Their time in the
service would soon be up and they could return to their homes! That’s all the
two men thought about. They remembered the night before they had embarked
for Siberia, the night they had stayed over in Tsugaru. They recalled the port
town with fondness; what a splendid place it had been! How many years had it
been since they’d seen the ocean? It felt as though they had been in Siberia now
more than three, no, five years. Why was it necessary, they wondered, for Japan
to persist in sending troops to Siberia? The soldiers killed Russians and were
killed by Russians. Had Japan not started dispatching troops, they certainly
wouldn’t be third-year soldiers forced to stay in a place like this.
The two men regretted that they had been altogether too serious and
mild-mannered. It was to one’s advantage to behave irresponsibly and solely in
one’s own interest. Over the next year they decided they would do as they
pleased.
Yoshida put on his arctic clothes, picked up his gun, which was loaded, and
ran out of the barracks.
Komura, also pulling on his cold-weather gear, was apprehensive.
“Hey! It’s okay to use live ammo to hunt rabbits?”
“You think I care?”
“Don’t you think Bu will get mad?” Komura asked, using the chief medic’s
nickname.
The hospital had also been issued guns and ammunition, but there was a pro-
hibition on using them except in an emergency. An emergency meant being un-
der enemy attack.
Yoshida set off heedless of this regulation. Komura likewise picked up a gun and
followed after Yoshida. He was sure that things would work out later somehow.
Yoshida leapt over the fence that surrounded the hospital, walked twenty or
thirty paces, and immediately came to a halt and pulled the trigger.
He had often gone deer hunting in Japan. He was used to firing shotguns. In
shooting at a target with an infantryman’s rifle you settle down, take aim, and
squeeze off your rounds slowly, but there is no time for that when you’re hunt-
ing. Your target is an animal fleeing for its life. You have to aim in an instant and
fire. Yoshida was used to shooting as soon as the gun came to rest in the palm of
his hand. And he was good at hitting his target.
The instant the gun went off — it sounded like a shot fired in battle — the rab-
bit leaped away, describing an arc in the air some six feet high. It had certainly
been hit.
“Got ’im! I got ’im!”
Yoshida, lowering his gun, turned to give Komura a meaningful look, and
then ran ahead. They found the rabbit lying childlike on the ground, its entrails

Rogers / “Siberia under Snow” 315

exposed, and the snow dyed red with its blood. Komura was not about to con-
cede anything.
“I can get me one too. Maybe another one’ll show itself.”
“They’re out there. I saw two or three.”
The two men went up a hill, descended into a valley, then went on to climb
the next hill. There was scrub brush in an area slightly lower than the land
around it. As soon as they approached, their boots crunching through the snow,
a long-eared fellow sprang up from the foot of a bush right in front of them.
Yoshida was the first to see it.
“Hey!” Komura shouted, checking his friend’s upraised rifle, “lemme take a
shot at it!”
“Can you get a good shot at it?”
“Sure can.”
It took Komura longer to aim than it did Yoshida. But his bullet did not go
astray. The rabbit flew through the air a dozen or so feet, then fell to the ground.

5
Yoshida and Komura were secretly taking live ammunition from the hospital
storeroom. Every day the two men were setting off for the hills with ten rounds
or so hidden in their pockets. They returned, kill always in hand.
“At this rate,” Yoshida would say, “Siberia’s gonna run out of rabbits.”
Yet when they would go the next day, a rabbit would be startled at the sound
of their boots in the snow and jump up from behind a clump of grass, its long
ears drooping. Once they spotted their prey, it never escaped.
Yoshida and Komura, now obsessed with hunting, neglected their duties.
The chief medic tried to discourage them from leaving the hospital.
“Where the devil are you two findin’ the ammo?”
“We get them from the regiment,” Yoshida told him.
“They say that the partisans are poppin’ up all over the place these days. You
be damned sure you don’t walk into somethin’ dangerous.”
“If partisans come around, we’ll shoot ’em dead like rabbits.”
Winter deepened. The two men went hunting, venting their anger and keep-
ing boredom at bay. Rabbit tracks in the snow grew fewer. New snow fell on the
snow that their boots had disturbed and turned its surface steamroller smooth.
Almost no new rabbit tracks came to be imprinted on that snow, however.
The two men laughed: “Looks like Siberia’s run out of rabbits.”
Day after day they made their way farther into the countryside, crossing dis-
tant hills, traversing valleys, climbing into the mountains, and in doing so, pass-
ing now under the barbed wire the regiment had set out to indicate its security
perimeter. The snow was deep, reaching at least their knees, sometimes their
hips. This amused the two men, who strode forward vigorously, kicking up
snow as they went.
The kill gradually dwindled. There were times when they would spend half a
day and be only able to bag one rabbit for each. When that happened they would
retreat to a hilltop on their way back and in frustration shoot off all their remain-
ing bullets wildly into the air.
316 Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006)
 One day they slipped under the barbed wire and went down into the valley.
From the valley they next climbed a mountain. There was snow as far as the eye
could see. The sun shone pale and weak and the day was windless. The only
thing they could hear was the sound of their own boots crunching snow under-
foot. Blocked by the hills behind them, neither the town where the regiment
was stationed nor the rise the hospital stood on was visible. They walked along
the crest of the hill for a while, then descended into the next valley. There was a
swamp in the valley. It was choked with ice. They could see several houses al-
most buried under snow on the far side of the swamp.
The two men had not shot a single rabbit yet. They had flushed out one
long-eared fellow, but had not been able to get a bead on him. They chased him
to where they thought he had hidden and searched about, but the animal abso-
lutely refused to show himself again.
“Let’s go back.”
Komura had stopped walking; he didn’t like the looks of the unfamiliar
houses.
“Go back without a single rabbit? No thanks!”
Yoshida quickly made his way down to the swamp. Komura reluctantly fol-
lowed his friend.
The valley was deep. A stream fed the swamp, and it appeared to be frozen
over. It looked as though the stream entered the swamp, then flowed out on the
far side.
As they were making their way down, a huge rabbit leapt up at their feet. In-
stinctively, they raised their weapons and fired. The rabbit was shot dead before
it could go even fifteen yards.
The bullets apparently hit their mark at almost the same time. The hand-
some, appealing beast was struck by bullets meant for human beings, and the
head with its long ears cruelly ripped from its body. Perhaps the barrage had hit
the neck an inch apart.
The two men now rested, their catch before them, its blood trickling down
onto the snow and freezing. They were tired and thirsty.
“Let’s go back,” Komura urged.
“No, let’s go as far as that swamp and see what’s there.”
“No, I’m goin’ back.”
“What’s the matter? It’s right over there, isn’t it?”
Yoshida picked up the rabbit, still dripping blood, and as he was about to
stand, glanced back up at the hill they had come down.
“Oh no!” he shouted in instinctive alarm.
There had been neither man nor beast as far as the eye could see atop the hill,
only snow, but now Russians with light brown beards, wearing fur overcoats
and carrying guns, were looking down at them. They were most certainly ban-
dits or partisans. Komura was unable to stand, his legs paralyzed by fear.
“Hey!” Yoshida said, “let’s get out of here!”
Komura could not get to his feet, try as he might: “Wait a minute!”
“There’s no reason to panic,” Yoshida reassured him. “It’s all right. When
they get near I’ll shoot ’em dead.”
Rogers / “Siberia under Snow” 317
 But Yoshida was flustered as he attempted to make his escape. And on the
flank of the hill where he had assumed there was an escape route open to them
and certainly no houses, there in fact stood under a blanket of snow a half dozen
dwellings, and they were very close. There could be no doubt: these were the
homes of Russians.
The Russians up on the hill spread out. Soon they were approaching the two
men from all sides. Yoshida picked up his gun, took aim, and began firing at the
approaching Russians. Komura also raised his rifle. Now, however, they were
not lightheartedly shooting, as they had been when they were picking off rab-
bits; it was not so simple. They might draw a bead on someone, but their fingers
trembled and their rifles would not do their will. They had soon spent their bul-
lets, less than ten, after which they moved forward, rifles brandished overhead,
to beat the approaching Russians, but the powerful men who had clustered
around them soon seized hold of their arms and wrested the guns from them.
Yoshida was twisted down to the ground by youths who smelled of gunny-
sacks. He could scarcely breathe. A brawny old man with a fearsome gleam in his
eyes gave orders of some sort in a strong, authoritative voice to those who were
restraining them. The youths atop Yoshida responded briefly to the older man,
then got Yoshida up on his feet. The old man walked up to Yoshida and Komura,
who were held immobile by a good half dozen tenacious hands, and asked them
something in Russian, his implacable eyes telling them they had no choice but
to tell the Russians every thing they knew.
Neither Yoshida nor Komura understood Russian. Nonetheless, they could
guess from the old man’s eyes and gestures that he suspected they had come to
spy on the Russians and that he was trying to find out how many Japanese
troops were stationed in the town. The old man even appeared concerned that
Japanese troops might come storming down the hill as they spoke.
Yoshida resorted to an expression he had picked up: Nye ponimayu, “I don’t
understand.”
The old man fixed the two with his searing glare. A youth wearing a dark blue
hat interjected something.
“Nye ponimayu,” Yoshida repeated again and again, “Nye ponimayu.” His
tone imperceptibly shifted to one of entreaty.
The old man said something to the younger men, who then set about strip-
ping the two of their winter clothing, uniforms, underwear, boots, and even
their socks. Yoshida and Komura stood naked in the snow. They realized now
they would soon be shot. Several of the young Russians carefully probed the
pockets of the confiscated uniforms. Two other youths, guns in hand, headed
toward a spot a short distance away.
The bastards are going to shoot us. Instinctively, Yoshida shouted out some
Russian he had picked up: Help! Help! But he had misremembered the word.
He meant to say spasite, “help,” but what he said was spasibo, “thanks.”
There was no sign the Russians were going to heed the mens’ pleas. The old
man’s baleful eyes showed no interest in them now. The two youths who had
distanced themselves from Yoshida and Komura raised their guns. Yoshida, who

318 Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006)

had been standing docilely in the snow, suddenly ran forward. Komura ran after
him.
“Help! Help! Help!” the two screamed as they ran, yet the Russians heard
only “Thanks! Thanks! Thanks!”
Two shots reverberated across the valley.
The old man had the young men gather up the guns wrested from Yoshida
and Komura, their uniforms, cold weather gear, boots, and the rest, and made
his way back toward the snow-covered houses.
“And don’t forget that headless rabbit either!”

6
Three days later, when the full complement of two companies, officers and
men, at last found them, Yoshida and Komura were frozen, their color as it had
been in life. The only mark on each man’s body was a wound in the back, the
size of the tip of a little finger.
The expression on both their faces suggested they were calling out to some-
thing; their eyes were open and frozen solid.
The chief medic stood before Yoshida and Komura, now surrounded by a
large number of soldiers, and talked like a man free of any blame.
“I warned them. This never would’ve happened if they hadn’t gone huntin’
for rabbits.”
It didn’t occur to him that it would not have happened if he had sent them
back home with their comrades. What he was thinking about was that he would
now have to write a report explaining the loss of two weapons and clothing for
two.
(March 1927)

References
Inagaki Tatsurð. 1971. Kuroshima Denji no rinkaku [A profile of Kuroshima Denji].
In Gendai nihon bungaku taikei, vol. 56. Tokyo: Chikuma shobð.
Keene, Donald. 1984. Dawn to the West: Japanese literature in the modern era, fic-
tion. New York: Henry Holt.
Odagiri Hideo. Kuroshima Denji Zenshþ [The complete works of Kuroshima Den-
ji]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobð, 1970. For an English translation of selected fiction,
see A flock of swirling crows and other proletarian writings. Trans. Zeljko Ci-
pris. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
q

Rogers / “Siberia under Snow” 319