ABSTRACT
The last few months of Shozo’s life were among the busiest he had ever known. ‘Drunk with work’ he calls himself in February 1913. Some quiet moments there were. New Year’s Day and the two following days he spent with the anarchist Ishikawa Sanshiro at the Yokohama house of Fukuda Hideko, the woman Socialist and writer, triumphantly producing a five-yen note when he arrived on her doorstep, for her to buy oranges and sweet New Year saké as his contribution to the festive occasion. For him, five yen was now a sizeable sum, as little likely to pass through his hands as five hundred-as he implied in the poem he gave his hostess along with the money:
The little party was a singularly happy one, Mrs. Fukuda records, with Shozo more lively than she had seen him for years, breaking for a brief space his no-saké vow, talking freely of the past, and writing a whole series of New Year poems in his powerful but flowing calligraphic hand. Later that month he visited some friends in western Tokyo, finding shapely stones by the roadside, as his custom was, to present to any he thought might appreciate them.
