A summary of Shiokari tôge (Shiokari Pass)
In the final year of the Meiji Period (1909), there was a train accident at Shiokari Pass near the town of Asahikawa on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Just as the locomotive had reached the top of the pass, the passenger car broke away from the steam engine and began an uncontrolled descent down the tracks. A train company employee who happened to be a passenger on the train that day, threw himself onto the tracks at just the right moment and succeeded, at the cost of his own life, in stopping the runaway car before it would have derailed and crashed. The novel Shiokari tôge is based on this actual event and the man who acted to save the lives of the passengers.
The plot follows Nagano Nobuo (inspired by the actual man, Nagano Masao) through early childhood till the moment he sacrifices his life to stop the train. Nobuo is raised by a strict grandmother who teaches him that as a descendent of the samurai, higher standards are expected of him than of commoners, while his father, who works for a bank, quotes the words of Fukuzawa Yukichi, who believed that all men are equal.
Nobuo grows up to be a thoughtful young man with big ambitions. Then he meets Fujiko, the bed-ridden invalid sister of his close friend and colleague Yoshikawa. His friend warns him that Fujiko is a “Yaso,” the derogatory term for a Christian. Nobuo’s own mother had been expelled from the family for being a Christian when Nobuo was still very young, and his grandmother has made sure to instill a horror of that religion in him. But Fujiko’s character is one of the factors influencing Nobuo’s search for a solution to the unrighteousness he senses in himself, and eventually he comes to believe in the God of the Bible and the sin-atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
Nobuo and Fujiko grow closer and closer, and Nobuo proposes to her, telling her that he will wait as long as it takes for her health to recover enough for them to marry. Fujiko’s health does improve and Nobuo is on his way to meet her for their the long-awaited engagement ceremony, when the train accident occurs. The incident goes a long way in softening the extreme social prejudice against Christians, and while Fujiko feels the loss of Nobuo very deeply, her faith in God saves her from despair.
