Containing Tsuboi's eight stories written from 1941 to 1943, many of
the stories in this book describe the daily life of girls during the war.
The title piece "Yûgao no Kotoba," for example, is about
Yasuko, a high school freshman. She is a poor girl who lives with her mother
and her brother. She wants to be a teacher on the one hand, and, on the
other, she wants to work and earn money to help her mother. Her brother
gives her moonflower seeds before he leaves home to join the army. She
loses them, but her teacher gives more to her. Yasuko sends a pressed moonflower
to her brother on a battlefield. After his death during a battle, Yasuko
thinks about giving up her dream and working at a factory; however, her
mother tells her that her becoming a teacher was her brother's dream, too.
Yasuko looks at the seeds after the moonflower has withered, and feels
as if they talk to the people who regret that the flower has gone.
By describing common people's everyday life, Tsuboi showed her resistance
in her own way to the nationalistic tendency during the war. She chose
Shôdoshima, where she was from, as a setting of some stories, such
as "Minato no Shôjo" ["A Girl at a Harbor"].
This is one of the characteristics of her writing, which can also be seen
in her later works.
A reprint of the original was published by Holp Shuppan in 1971. |
