Communist Party

The Communist Party is invoked in conversation as a sign of political change in postwar Japan, but the novel gives no account of the organization’s structure, program, or activities. Its specific relevance is narrower and more personal: Ogata-San and his family discuss whether his former acquaintance Shigeo Matsuda has joined it, while responding to an article in which Matsuda criticizes Ogata-San and another retired educator. The party’s uncertain association with Matsuda becomes a way for Ogata-San to interpret dissent that challenges the authority of his generation.

Appearance and Context

The party first enters the conversation through a teachers’ periodical that Ogata-San finds in a library in Nagasaki. He describes the publication as unfamiliar and remarks that reading it would give the impression that teachers throughout Japan had become communists. His observation links a new political vocabulary to a changing professional world: a periodical that did not exist during his own career carries criticism of the educational establishment he once belonged to.

Ogata-San’s account does not establish that the periodical represents the party or that its contributors are party members. Rather, his description conveys his perception that communist ideas are spreading among teachers. His son responds that communism is growing in the country, making the publication seem to him part of a broader national shift. The conversation offers these statements as impressions, not as independently confirmed facts about membership or influence.

Matsuda’s Article and the Dispute

The political reference becomes consequential when Ogata-San says that Shigeo Matsuda has written in the periodical and mentioned him by name. Matsuda’s article discusses Ogata-San and Dr Endo in connection with their retirements. As Ogata-San understands it, the article suggests that the profession was better off without them and goes so far as to argue that they should have been dismissed at the end of the war.

This is a direct challenge to Ogata-San’s standing and to the value he assigns to his career. The dispute is not presented as a formal confrontation between the party and a particular institution: the evidence establishes an article by Matsuda and Ogata-San’s account of its argument, but it does not identify Matsuda as its author writing on behalf of the party. The political label instead gathers force through the family’s attempt to explain how a former pupil could make so severe a judgment about a respected teacher and colleague.

Uncertain Affiliation

When the possibility of Matsuda’s party membership is raised, Ogata-San does not confirm it. He says he is not certain, although Matsuda expressed sympathies of that kind the last time they met. The distinction matters: the novel presents communist sympathies as reported and party membership as a question, not as an established biographical fact. Even the conversation’s earlier impression of a countrywide political transformation remains unverified within these scenes.

Ogata-San calls the prospect a great pity and says that many things in Japan can sway a young man. He then speculates that Matsuda may have been carried away by ideas and theories and may not have stopped to consider what he was doing. In Ogata-San’s account, political conviction is therefore both an explanation for Matsuda’s article and a way of diminishing its deliberateness. His prediction that Matsuda might back down and apologize depends on the belief that a reminder of personal obligations could make him reconsider. This is Ogata-San’s expectation, not a reported outcome.

Narrative Significance

The Communist Party has no depicted organizational presence in these passages; it enters through perceptions, suspicions, and political language. That limited presence makes the disagreement especially revealing. Ogata-San interprets Matsuda’s criticism through the possibility of communist influence, while the article’s reported content raises a question that cannot be settled simply by naming that influence: whether former educators such as Ogata-San deserved to retain their authority after the war.

The exchange places generational and political change in tension with personal loyalty. Ogata-San remembers Matsuda as a boy who came to his house to play, and recalls that his own mother spoiled him. Against this affectionate history, the article’s criticism feels to him extraordinary, while Matsuda’s possible political alignment offers a framework for expecting him eventually to apologize. The party thus functions less as a fully described institution than as a contested explanation for dissent—and as a test of whether inherited personal obligations can override a young man’s public judgment.