one hundred years from today

[nnozomi]

I got a one-hundred-year-old book in the mail today. It’s The Cheerful Prisoner (or The Optimistic Prisoner, if you prefer, there isn’t a standard translation that I know of) by Sakai Toshihiko. He was a socialist, journalist and translator, born in 1870 and died in 1933; I just read a biography of him and fell madly in love with him. Someone in Tokyo was selling this book, in its original Meiji 44 (1911) edition, for six thousand yen—about sixty dollars, and in absolute terms a ten-thousand-percent markup on the original price of sixty sen. (One yen=100 sen, prewar.) It’s in surprisingly good condition. He published it just after a two-year prison term for being a naughty socialist, in effect; it’s mostly letters he wrote to his wife from prison. Unlike most of his comrades, Sakai was highly uxorious—faithful to his first wife until her death, and to his second wife until his own. Tameko, the second wife, supported herself while he was in prison, raised his daughter Magara (a feminist activist in her own right), and though not an active socialist herself, dealt (with a rueful expression most of her life, I imagine) with her husband’s left-wing shenanigans. It helped, probably, that he had an active sense of humor in all contexts, was a feminist himself, and—again unlike most of the other left-wingers of the time—was robustly competent at daily life, not allowing idealism to take undue precedence over practicality.  
He reminds me irresistibly of my friend T—the skill at both thinking and living, the slightly black humor, the eye-of-the-storm calmness which other people inevitably turn to for support. It’s never occurred to me to fall in love with T, but possibly I should consider it.