who seemed to give birth pell-mell to one baby after another; and he was sick at heart.
“Let’s see now,” he muttered. “They pay me one yen ninety sen a day, and out of that we have to buy two shō of rice at fifty sen, and then we have to pay out another ninety sen for clothing and a place to live. Damn it all! How do they expect me to have enough left over for a drink?”
Then abruptly he remembered the little box in his pocket. He took It out and rubbed it against the seat of his trousers to clean off the cement. Nothing was written on the box. It was securely locked.
“Now, why the hell should anyone want to lock a box like this? He likes to act mysterious, whoever he is.”
He hit the box against a stone, but the lid still would not open. Thoroughly exasperated, he threw it down and stepped on it furiously. The box broke and on the ground lay a scrap of paper wrapped in a rag. He picked it up and read:
“I am a factory girl working for the Nomura Cement Company. I sew cement bags. My boy friend used to work for same company. His job was to put stones into the crusher. Then on the morning of October 7th just as he was going to put in a big rock he slipped on the mud and fell into the crusher underneath the rock.
“The other men tried to pull him out, but it was no use. He sank down under the rock, just as if he was being drowned. Then the rock and his body were broken to pieces and came out together from the ejector looking like a big flat pink stone. They fell on to the conveyor belt and were carried into the pulverizer. There they were pounded by the huge steel cylinder. I could hear them screaming out some sort of a spell as they were finally crushed to smithereens. Then they were put into the burner and baked into a fine slab of cement.
“His bones, his flesh, his mind had all turned into powder. Yes, my entire boy friend ended up as cement. All that was left was a scrap of material from his overalls. Today I’ve been busy sewing a bag into which they’ll put him.
