The univited guests were overwhelmed at the idea of such a sum.
True, they had held the land from one generation to another, but the money paid them for quitting would amount to a sum such as they had never even dreamed of. Each would have something like six hundred and sixty yen!
This was considered to settle the matter. … But it was not long before they realized that they had been fooled. Once they had left the land they did not know what to do. It was impossible for them to live in Yotani.
“If you are in difficulties, why not try working in Igari’s factory in Kyoto? I’ll arrange it all for you myself.”
And so Tauboi Zangoro, the former bailiff of Igari, sent about fifty families to Kyoto. They all began to work in Igari’s aniline plant, in the suffocating fumes of dyes and chemicals.
Only a hundred families remained in the village of Osawa.
The excavators and workers of the new company invaded Yotani and began mercilessly to blow up the land that the peasants had looked after for decades as tenderly as if it had been their own bodies. This they did in the very eyes of the remaining peasants.
The fields were turned into roads and building lots. A clearing in the forest was made and a building in the foreign style put up. This was the hotel for the springs.
A delicatessen store, a department store and twelve small restaurants were built in Motomura,
