“I am as inconstant as the Autumn leaves.” Inui said such a thing, and Murosage leered.

They were sitting on the steps of a burned down temple, drinking sake they had stolen from Murosage’s brother in Mishima. The brother owned a small bar which made so little money that they had been unable to fix damage to the building. One such defect being a dubiously broken lock which Murosage was not above taking advantage of. 

Neither man remembered how long they had been drinking. However Inui was aware that before he lost himself to the bottle it was the twenty-second year of the Showa. Though what that meant on a global scale he was unable to deduce. The sake was not agreeing with him that night. 

“Is that a poem then?” Murosage grunted, sniffling his hairy nose and taking another swig straight from the bottle with as little refinement as he could. 

“It might be.” Inui thought, taking the bottle and slowly pouring some of the treacherous nectar down his dry gullet. “One of those old folks, I think Chinese, I can’t really remember though.” 

“Just as well you don’t, god knows what the soldiers would do if you were spouting old stuff like that. They might take you for an extremist.” While he spoke Murosage had somehow been unaware of a sakura button on the inside of his jacket. Inui already knew why Murosage drank, and why he had no qualms stealing from his older brother. 

“I am as inconstant as the falling leaves, or autumn leaves, what do you think that’s about?” Inui said, scratching at the red marks his ill-fitted glasses made on his ears. 

“Tonight I am sour and drunk, tomorrow I’ll be hungover, that night? Well, ‘I am as inconstant as the falling leaves.’” Murosage laughed. 

“That’s rather crude for poetry.” 

“So what? Crude, what’s so crude about it? You write poetry about life. Whether I’m sitting here with you getting sauced or waking up in the morning utterly miserable, nothing changes. Look what happens when things change!” He threw his arm out towards the temple and accidently chucked the bottle away in that same direction. Its shatter echoed around the empty grounds and he grumbled a bit before reaching over to the crate where five more were available. 

“Maybe that’s it then, it has to do with change. Like how times change and people change. But people don’t change with the times, the times change faster.” Inui scratched vigorously at the itch of his ear, which only grew more crimson. 

“Ah, shut up already, you’re ruining my mood. Honestly, what good did I think it would be to drink with a teacher? Of all the people, and I choose a limp wristed fool too sick to fight for his country. It’s fools like you that are the reason things turned out this way you know? Capitulation, I spit on the word. I saw men chewed apart by machine gun fire on the islands, and now what? I can’t even drink myself to stupidity without some bookworm talking about the times. Either you drink and joke or you crawl into the forest and die in misery, but don’t even think about trying to drag me out there with you, because I did not tread oily water so you could cry about the bloody times. So, are you drinking or not?” 

Inui was roused from the nonsensical rant. It was true he had a case of gout and was disqualified from enlisting, but that was hardly his fault at the time. Seeing the wisdom in not defending himself, he took the bottle that was handed to him and drank another mouthful of sake. It went down hard, and he flung himself forward coughing up spit. It reminded him of the coughing fits he would get at the asylum, no problem then, no problem now. Sickness ran in the family, it was best to just let the matter run its course and keep having a good time. 

In truth, he could not forget that he was dying, and his whole world had died before him. Time froze twenty years before when the teacher he always admired was arrested as a suspect in extreme leftist movements. A year or two later, the first of the Showa, Inui was diagnosed as having bad lungs. Best not to imbibe anything that would cause him sickness. Best to boil his water for five minutes before drinking, and never let him sleep on his back. Small inconveniences, that was what the Showa gave to Inui. Then, rebirthed through flame, it gave him death. Even the Showa had changed. 

“There was a song on the radio the other day, on the American channel, do you remember what it was?” Inui asked, leaning down as he wiped the saliva from his lips. A faint red hue came to his eyes, but it may have been the blood from his ear, scratched to hell. 

“You actually listen to that garbage?” 

“No, I was walking Shibamachi street and some lady selling junk had a radio playing. I don’t know, I thought you had one at your house?” 

“I do, but I don’t listen to the American channel. Leave the yankee’s to their kind, if they want to listen to that crap then have at it I say.” Inui thought about the comment. 

“Aren’t all the channels American now?” 

“True enough, it may have been mostly propaganda, but at least the old radio played good music. Place has changed for the worst” Murosage reached for the bottle Inui was holding, but Inui pulled away. Rather than get angry, Murosage laughed and grabbed another for himself from the crate. 

“I rather like the American music I think, it reminds me of my childhood. They used to have foreigners come out to Tokyo and play in the performance halls there. I went three times with my father.” 

“Well, isn’t it great to be so decadent? What was your old man?” 

“A politician.” Inui said, feeling a distinct gas forming in his stomach

“Ha! No wonder his son turned out to be so weak.” 

Inui let out a slew of bile onto the steps below, hacking up dry rice and stale seaweed he had eaten several hours before at a rundown stall. A blessing that it was cheap at least. Murosage saw red in the bile and laughed. 

“What’s the codger doing these days then?” 

“He died, air raid up north. He was visiting my mother’s family and the house caught on fire. He was carrying my grandmother out when a beam fell and killed them both. I think it was in Kose? It was some town that started like that.” Murosage grunted affirmatively as if in condolence. 

“Well, cheers then? In memory of the old idiot?”

“Yeah, and cheers for his weak son too.” Inui laughed, clinking their bottles together and taking down large chugs yet again. Murosage stood, placing his bottle in the crate and lifting it up against his robust stomach. 

“I’m hungry, why don’t we go into town and find something to eat?” To Inui the idea of food suddenly appealed. He stood, taking care not to step in the mess, and followed his friend down the steps. They went through the forest before emerging on the Tokaido road which led through Mishima. They were still about half a kilometer out of town, or a little over five cho, though Inui kept the musing to himself. Another remnant of his childhood which he had not learned to understand well enough to use correctly. 

“I think eel sounds good.” 

“Eel? In Mishima? My friend, you have a funny sense of humor. Where in the hell are we going to get eel in Mishima?” 

“Still, I don’t think I’ll be able to settle for anything else.” Inui said, his eyes losing themselves in the sky as he spoke. Murosage looked up much the same as Inui did, in as deep a thought as the brute could muster. 

“There is a fishmonger I know, but I can’t imagine he’ll have eel. If you’re insistent then we’ll go for it, at least it will be something salty. I could eat a whole barrel of salt right about now.” 

They passed a few travelers on the road, mainly patrolling soldiers or policemen. The two were already well known in the area, if not by name then by reputation. Inui knew what those passing authorities saw in the men. A pair of lazing drunkards. They wandered into the city of Mishima, winding through the cobbled streets and paved roads. Eventually reaching muddy alleys and wooden buildings reminiscent of the old Mishima. The town that progress had yet to reach. It had no name, it was just an area of the northern part of the city that was not being reconstructed for some reason or other. Soldiers remained prevalent, but were interjected by many more civilians loitering about. As it was already early morning, many of the pedestrians were on their way to work. It was in the shuffling shadows of people that Murosage somehow managed to find his fishmonger friend. 

The man was tapping around in old gita clogs that exposed large, hairy, feet more fitting of a mountain climber than a fisherman. Likewise he was wearing some cloth or other that was hastily fashioned to appear as though it were a well made haori from a distance. Up close, however, the stitches made it clear that this man was just as much a criminal miscreant as Murosage was. Only while Murosage had the fatigues of a soldier, the man had the appearance of austerity. The sight of them astounded Inui, and he became suddenly aware of the strangeness the three of them must have pervaded to onlookers. 

A washed up soldier, a fake noble, and a sloppily suited educator. It felt like the beginning to some sort of bad joke. Three eras of their history all convening in one place for the sole purpose of eating salty eel. He was repulsed, but his hunger forbade any urge to disband the cohort. The three of them moved on towards the shop further down the street. 

“You want eel?” The man asked, befuddled. 

“Yeah, do you have any Yo-san?”

The man's name was Yoshukura. What mattered more than his name was that Yoshukura’s business looked fairly well managed from the outside. The shop was actually a stall that he ran out the front of an apartment wherein he had storage for goods. A thin old man with a bag of fish was waiting for him by the door, and the two traded money and bounty respectively. The fishmonger was not a fisherman, the feet made more sense. 

“You two have a seat, I’ll see if Oba caught any eel for you idiots.” Right around the time he finished speaking, a young boy in a junior high uniform rolled up to the apartment on his bike and dropped it as he ran inside. For a moment the two freeloaders could hear shouting from their seats at the stall, and the boy reappeared with a notepad. 

“Any drinks?” He asked. 

“Nope.” Murosage laughed, lifting the crate of sake to the counter. 

“Then he’ll be right out.” The boy sat behind the counter, waiting for other customers to arrive. 

“Say, lad, how old are you?” Murosage seemed bored enough to inquire. 

“Fourteen.” 

“My word, fourteen and Yo-san has you working this early. Don’t you have school?” 

“I wear my uniform to work, and I go to school right after. Is it surprising?” The boy seemed genuinely confused by the line of questioning. 

“I never worked a day when I was your age.” Inui mused. “I would just sleep in and get in trouble for tardiness. In those days we could afford to be lazy and daydream, even after everyone moved out here because of the earthquake.” 

“I did some stuff for my old man.” Murosage chuckled between sips of liquor. “But my older brother usually did most of the work. Don’t mind my friend here, boy, he was a bit spoiled growing up and now he’s paying for it by lacking morals.”

“Can you lack morals?” The boy asked, not following the whims of drunk conversation. 

“Well I should say so!” Inui laughed, amused and hearty again after more prescribed drink. “To grow up like I did you can only end up feeling terribly at odds with yourself. If a person lacks a path of struggle, then they become one who is successful and should be happy, but does not have the affirmation that they deserve happiness. Affirmation, young man, do you know that word?” The boy nodded slowly, clearly he did not know. 

“Ah, shut up with that nonsense, you’ll ruin the kid's childhood.” Murosage laughed. 

“Say, young man, do you know how long a cho is?” 

Yoshukura emerged with a smaller bag of fish. Most of the contents he poured into a pot behind the counter. Wearing a big smile on his face, he pulled out five small black eels, as wet and dead as autumn leaves in the rain. He fileted them and thread sticks through the meat, then threw some salt and some undeclared red spice on them before kneeling down to light the grill fire. As the flames emerged he stood proud and pulled another bag from behind the counter.

“You guys want rice with that?” 

“I do,” Murosage confirmed, “but my man here just wants straight meat. He can have an extra portion, I don’t particularly care. Salt mine more than his though, I could kill for a bunch of salt right about now.” 

“May I have some rice too?” The boy asked meekly. 

“What, your mother doesn't feed you? Honestly, what has this country come to that a man can’t even feed himself with his own money? Fine, if it’ll keep you quiet I’ll give you some damn rice.” Yoshukura measured out two robust servings of rice into a pot to the side and pulled a bucket of water from somewhere beneath him and filled the pot. 

“What’s up with his mom?” Murosage asked. 

“Philcher if you ask me, but most call her a waitress. Some cafe on the other side of town, woman barely has enough money to pay off the landlord so she  makes her kids go out and work like this. Shameful display if you ask me, and I hear she’s got eyes for her customers, but those are only rumors.” The boy seemed either dumb or stalwart to such statements, and uttered not a word of repudiation beneath his bright, expectant eyes. 

“What of his father?” Inui asked. 

“Him? Died in Shimoda…must be four years now. He was a dockworker loading munitions onto some ship, someone dropped a shell or something exploded. No permanent damage to the ship, but something like eight people died. I forget his name though, the boy is Kasahara Ichishi.” 

The sun began to rise off on the other side of the mountains, and the cold air of night became the frigid, moist, atmosphere of morning. As they sat there the boy drew himself closer to the fire for warmth, but the two customers remained steadfast, unable to feel the cold air any longer due to their intense inebriation. Seeing the boy go towards the flame made Inui feel pathetic, and somehow inhuman. How was it that a boy like him, so poor and stupid, knew better how to survive in this world than he did? Maybe that trash about affirmation was right. The boy, for all he was deprived, at least had the stupid affirmation that he was normal. He knew no other way, and the distinctly impoverished situation he was in seemed fine. To throw such a boy into the bright splendor of the fourteenth year of the Taisho would be like throwing Inui in the twenty second year of the Showa. Life would be too easy for him, and he would simply devolve into a mess of emotion. Life was too cruel for Inui, and he was fading quickly from the world in an addled haze. Even the life of an innocent child reminded Inui of death in the end, and it was an oblique thought. He drank from his bottle again. 

“Say, Yo-san, what month is it?” Murosage suddenly asked. 

“What the hell? Don’t you even know what month it is?” 

“No, that’s why I’m asking you, idiot, just answer the question.” Yoshukura flipped the eel on the grill as he stared daggers through his two customers. 

“How long have you two been drinking?” 

“Since the twenty-second year of the Showa.” Inui groaned, turning away from the sunlight as it peaked quietly over the hills and trees. 

“Well!” Yoshukura laughed. “I suspect you two have broken some kind of record. That’s at least six months of drinking you’ve been doing. It’s June of 1948, since you seem to have forgotten your watches at home.” 

“It’s not as though we’ve been like this the whole time. I worked as a woodcutter for a few months, and this one disappeared to Tokyo for god knows what.” Murosage clumsily motioned for Inui. 

“It was my mothers funeral.”

“Sorry to hear.” Yoshukura sighed. 

The mood died down while the crowd of people passing by grew. The sound of footsteps and chatter among civilians becoming louder than the near silent sizzling of the meat. The boy had fallen asleep in his chair, comforted by the warmth of the grill, and Yoshukura, though unrefined and crass, took off his fake haori and threw it around the boy's shoulders. It made Inui want to hurl again, seeing the mark of historical nobility thrown upon the uniform of modernity. The aesthetic displeased every sense of good and evil Inui had ever formed. There was no justification for it. However, in the end, it was just the dead symbol of a bygone era, no more than warm cloth for a sleepless child. Inui’s mother had wanted a proper Shinto funeral, and for some reason performing the rites made him feel like he was signing the death certificate of his whole nation. 

How many more of those tawdry old processions would take place? Another forgotten piece of history lost beneath the supposed era of peace. A legacy torn apart by fire bombs and machine gun fire. The Christian way would prevail, as it already had begun to do before the war. Though the titans resist, the simple relent. Inui thought of his mother as a simple person, like himself, but in those robes he realized how inferior he was to her. It was in the procession, moving through the streets to the grave, that he decided he would have no funeral at all. At least then he would not be a traitor. 

“Anyways,” Murosage spoke towards Yoshukura, “I was thinking about when we should go down to Shimoda. You mentioning it reminded me that we used to go down there in our teens and work the port. You remember that? Old Kanbe was there too, and Suzuki. We’d go down and pick fish out of stores and sell them on the street for half the price. Those were good times we had, but I wonder if the weather is still good down there this time of year?” 

“Yeah I remember, and I also remember you getting caught and running almost halfway up the peninsula to get away from the police.” Yoshukura smiled, picking the eel off the grill and setting down a new set. 

“I remember that, and Kanbe found me down in Izu. I’ve never run so hard in my life, not even when I was in training. Old Kanbe though, he was a real friend, just picked me up and practically carried me all the way back to my house without even asking for a thanks. Whatever happened to the little guy?” Murosage found his bottle empty and reached for a new one. 

“He became a pilot, died in Leyte.” Yoshukura said, slowly winding down his laugh. “Here, let me have some of that if you’re just going to keep bringing up old ghosts. No wonder you both have been drinking for so long, I’m getting more miserable just looking at you, let alone talking. After you eat I want you gone, I don’t need your stinking sentiments scaring my customers away any longer than necessary.” 

“Don’t worry Yoshu-san.” Inui belched. “Don’t worry one bit, I’ll take this old heap of military foolishness off your hands right away, but about that eel…” 

“Here!” Yoshukura grunted, practically throwing a piping hot slice of eel at Inui. 

The drunk predictably failed to catch it, resulting in the sliver of meat sliding off the edge of the counter and making a wet splash in the mud at Inui’s feet. Not one to back down from a challenge, he picked up the sodden flesh and sliced it in half with his chopsticks. Taking one half and placing it between his foul smelling lips. 

It tasted awful. 

It had no spark of that old world that he had sought, no memory for him except the taste of the earth to which he would be thrown upon his death. Rather instead, the crass but simple hearted fishmonger had undercooked it. While he could cut through it with ease, it still had spots of cold meaty life which caused him to spit it out onto the ground. 

“It’s not cooked!” Inui scorned, but he still pulled a few coins out of his pocket. 

“Shut up.” Yoshukura grasped the money. 

“Well, maybe you should stop bugging the man while he’s trying to cook then. Who’s a fool now?” Murosage laughed between gulps. 

“I am.” Inui said, slouching back in his seat. “I am a fool, and you are a fool, and we three are all fools. The only one not foolish is this boy, but even he is no longer a creature similar to us. Perhaps his mother is a fiend, and he is the child of fiends, the countryman of fiends. The boy is no fiend.” 

There was silence while he went on this ramble, spitting out bits of mud. When he finished he grabbed the second half of his eel and chucked it into the crowd. Predictably it hit a man who happened to be walking by. He walked over with a red face and grabbed Inui by the collar while screaming. Murosage stood and tried to calm down the raging man while Yoshukura yelled at them all to leave his stall while calling for a policeman. Soon an officer did appear and try to pull the two men apart, which prompted the incised man to throw a punch at Inui that landed square in his jaw. After that a handful of policemen appeared and subdued both men. Murosage bowed to Yoshukura a few times before grabbing his crate of sake and following his companions party to the police station. 

In the battle Ichishi had woken up and watched as the man who lacked morals was taken away. Laughing while spitting blood, mud, and raw eel from his cracked teeth. 

“I am as inconstant as the falling leaves! Death to the fiends!” Inui cackled. 

For some reason one curiosity struck Ichishi. 

“Mr. Yoshukura?” 

“Yes, Kasahara?” 

“What’s a cho?” The older man laughed and patted the boy on the back a few times. 

“Well, it was a length of distance, similar to kilometers. I don’t remember how far it is though. I think the distance to your school, for example, is about two and a half cho. Does that help?” 

“You’re pretty smart Mr Yoshukura.” 

“No, I’m just old. Now get on, you’ve got classes soon. And don’t be late tomorrow, got it?” Yoshukura quickly grabbed the meat Murosage had left behind and some of the rice. Wrapping them in a bit of wax cloth and handing it to the boy. Ichishi happily accepted, sliding the parcel into his bag and riding off towards his school. 

He got there quickly, as it was only two hundred and seventy meters from his work. He left his bike alongside several others. Rochiyu, a boy from his grade, slammed his palm into Ichishi’s back with full force. The two both laughed at the encounter and proceeded on towards the school building as Rochiyu produced a newspaper. 

“Check this out, a wild article about someone who committed suicide by tying himself to a prostitute and throwing himself in a river.” 

“What? That’s crazy. Hard to see why someone would do such a thing.” Ichishi mumbled, only half-interested in his friend's strange hobby of grim tales. “Wait a second, didn’t you tell me about a joke you read in the paper a few weeks ago? The one with the Buddhist monk.” 

“Yeah, what of it?” 

“How did it go again?” A few greetings came from other students as they slid on their indoor shoes. 

“It was about this shop owner who set up on the Tokaido road during the Edo period. One day a monk passed by. In reverence of the monk the owner told him that he could eat for free at the shop. On his first visit the monk ordered green tea, a few days later he passed again and ordered plain water. This went on for several weeks, with the monk ordering something different each time until he had consumed one of every item the owner had on the menu. When the owner told him he had nothing new the monk grew solemn. The owner told him to just order something he’s already had, but the monk refused. Declaring that, despite loving the shop, he would never go again because he was…” Rochiyu paused to think for a moment. 

“‘As inconstant as the falling leaves.’ I think he said. Then he left and the shop owner never saw him again.” 

“What? Why’d he do that?” 

“Well when the owner went into Kyo one day for some business he happened to run into someone who knew the monk. They got to talking and it was revealed that actually the man was not a monk at all. He was just some bum. Some monks had tried taking him in several months before, but all that happened was he shaved his head and got some nice clothes.”

“Then why did he stop going? He had a pretty good thing with the free food.” 

“That’s the thing, neither of them could figure it out. So they just chalked it up to some crazy bums mad rambling. The punchline is something like; ‘men of wisdom are as inconstant as the autumn leaves.’ Why did you want to know?” 

“Nothing serious, something just reminded me of it.” 

Rochiyu changed the topic to some drama about their classmates. As they entered their classroom this talk toned down and was replaced with more greetings. A few moments of catching up and they all sat down as the teacher entered the room. He scribbled the date on the board and followed it up with the beginning of the lesson plan. When he turned, however, he made a tired sort of expression. 

“Mr. Kasahara, may I ask what it is that you are wearing?” 

Ichishi looked down and realized he was still wearing Mr. Yoshukura’s ragged haori. He only then remembered having awoken with it on. He blushed and quickly stuffed it into his school bag. The day went on without much happening, just the usual boring class behaviors and the teasing at his odd entrance. Kasahara Ichishi did not think about his father, he did not consider the neglectful flippancy of his mother. He did not give a single thought to the two indistinguishable men who had been his customers that morning. Indeed, he did not mind that he had to leave early in the morning and work at a food stall. He liked Mr. Yoshukura, and he liked the customers who came through and ordered their food. In total, he loved Mishima. Though the faces he saw each day changed, passing off into the future and past, the character of Mishima was the same.