Komazawa Fusaé saw her husband in January of each year when he
came to see her. Zenjirō was busy and seldom came to see her at other
times. For five years now Fusae had been laid up in a national sanato-
rium in Utano, Kyoto, for her illness.

During the war, when the company switched to military production,
Fusae worked to help her husband with little sleep or rest Even after
the war, she hid the illness she had contracted and only agreed to
submit herself to the sanatorium in 1948, when she also had laryngeal
tuberculosis. By then streptomycin was available, though at the whop-
ping price of ¥3,000 a vial on the black market, and her life was saved
by the antibiotic; but her infected lungs would not allow surgery, and
she had been in more or less the same condition ever since. She was
fifty years old now, and though her illness worsened only very slowly,
there was no prospect for recovery, either.

If anything, Fusaé took the company more seriously than
Komazawa did. She told him not to stay away from it, because she
thought his business was important. At first, many from the company
came to see her, but she sent them away by scolding them. If you have
the time to come to see a sick person like me, use it for your company
work. That's the proper thing for company workers to do. If any of you
still come to see me, she said, I will take it to mean you do it not
because you care for a sick person, but because you want to fawn on

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