Pathway to Japanese Literature

Oha thought there was nothing as lonely and anxiety-inducing as not knowing how long one might live or when one might die.
Yet if, at the very moment humans were born into this world, their entire lifespans were clearly marked in numbers, then perhaps not a single day could be lived shining with vigorous hope - crushed as they would be by predetermined loneliness and the anxiety of an approaching end.
But Oha's fragile heart could no longer endure the loneliness of existence without fixed limits.
And when she resolved to die at thirty-three - as if this were precisely the guiding light she sought, as if she had discovered hope within her aimless heart - she found herself overwhelmed by boundless strength and quiet joy.

Oha became disabled at eighteen.

“From now on, you may do whatever you like.”

The mother, as if it truly didn’t matter in the slightest, looked vacantly at Oha’s face and spoke.
Gazing at the cold, glass-clear blue sky beyond the camellia leaves in the garden, she suddenly felt an unbearable loneliness—like a bird released from its cage, confronted with the vastness of a boundless sky offering no place to alight.

The sky was vast.
Where had its beginning and end been determined?
Even the act of living was not determined for human beings.
Even the act of death was not predetermined.
When humans first looked back at themselves growing like grass and gazed up at the boundlessly clear sky's expanse, there pressed upon them a restless anxiety and formless loneliness—it was then that Oha first turned to examine her own existence.
In the twilight-filled room, she contemplated how even the silver needle she quietly sewed with might break at any moment.
Even her own five fingers—there was no guarantee two might not be lost.
Of the two legs modestly folded beneath the red belt, one had been seized by unexpected fate.
She stopped her needle and contemplated how within the future of bending each finger one by one, there lay the age of thirty-three.
She felt that year held a pale light like moonlight.
She thought it possessed a sharpness like that of a sword.
And then Oha sank into contemplation there.
Trivial emotions superstitiously dominated all who were weak there.
And yet no matter what contradictions existed, it was fine.
She considered dying at thirty-three and felt a robust strength in the preciousness of her predetermined life.

Oha sought all happiness in death, as if it were the future.
All actions were determined by death, as if that were hope.
All-seeing eyes, a contemplative mind—to these, death floated like an illusion.

She often walked through back alleys in the evening.

The child being led by their mother, while attending to distant evening clouds and maternal footsteps, walked mournfully and passed Oha.
The child suddenly grew sad and looked at their mother.
The mother laughed and turned back to the child.
The child, now appearing finally reassured, turned toward Oha with eyes shining wide in wonder.

However long one waited, the child's curiosity showed no sign of diminishing.
Then starting to walk diagonally at last, they soon tumbled into a small roadside ditch.
Even as they sprawled in the waterless ditch with one elbow propped up, the child's gaze remained fixed on Oha's body.

Even if lethal murky water had been there threatening death, would the child—captivated by this first wonder captured in their eyes—have kept staring so intently? When Oha turned back to look at the child, she couldn't contain a smile that gushed forth like springwater. The child must have first marveled that horses walk on four legs. They must have been dumbfounded seeing humans wearing headbands to pull carts. Eventually, they must have felt awe at a person walking while playing the flute with closed eyes, another walking with a back bent like a camel's, and Oha's figure leaning on twin crutches while moving her single leg.

Beside the earthen wall, girls had formed a circle and were singing loudly.
However, when Oha approached, they all stopped at once.

"How pitiful."

A small, precocious nursemaid with her hair in a ginkgo-leaf twist secretly remarked while furrowing her brows.
Then a round-eyed little child there suddenly cried out loudly:

"I hate it."

The children all clustered around to watch. Oha once again couldn't suppress the smile welling up within her.

Had this been two months ago, she would have stood with eyes brimming over with tears, calling for her mother from beyond the latticework.
Oha suddenly thought of this and felt a smile rise to her lips, yet she was also contemplating death's secret joy.

Then, when Oha walked along the quiet one-way path by the bamboo palisade fence, there were two girls with large, lonely eyes who—looking quite satisfied—exchanged glances and said, “It’s just like Father.” Fluttering their eyelids while tilting their heads back, they looked up at Oha once more. Oha turned to gaze at the distant shadows of the young children and wondered: Could their father have become disabled through licentiousness? Might it have been a calamity that struck like an unexpected gale? Or perhaps it had been the work of an illness that crept up silently, as her own had done.

He likely no longer thought of death. To live each day, he had sown various seeds day after day. His soul and body had been divided and must have grown ever more deep-rooted and vast.

He could not kill himself alone. When he resolved to die, the many lonely children who inherited a soul divided from their father and the woman fused with him in life would witness sorrows like his own—losing legs and hands. Thinking how he, forbidden from death, would be abruptly deprived while living through successive hopes, Oha grieved with a darkened heart for this unknown man.

Oha walked through the bustling street again.
She saw passersby stumble as they were so intent on staring at her.
She remembered how from the alley lined with various posters for moving pictures, a legless beggar had crawled out on his hands, dragging himself along.

Oha was at first frightened as if frozen in place.

But soon her heart burned with shame and anger.
Had Oha not held in her heart that vision of a truly happy, fulfilling death at that moment, she might have lingered there wearied by lamentation.
Oha walked on, trying neither to think nor look.

It was a day after the rain had cleared.

Oha walked under the eaves of the tool shop with downcast eyes. When she suddenly looked ahead, unbearable shame overwhelmed her, and she tightly shut her eyelids—she had seen a girl leaning on crutches identical to her own, making her way through the center of the street. A soiled peach-colored ribbon adorned the girl's head. Her eyes darted about curiously at the surrounding shopfronts. From beneath the short kimono hem protruded a single leg as long as an unpainted wooden pole, ending in a tall geta sandal. Like wooden supports bracing a structure, the crutches hoisted the girl's armpits from both sides, propelling her forward in whirling motions like some wooden-and-rubber toy.

Oha hunched her shoulders instinctively, drawing her own leg deeper into her long-skirted kimono as if to shrink from view, bowing her head as she walked. The street teemed with people. Every passerby tugged sleeves and stared at the girl. With desperate focus, Oha willed herself to escape comparison between them—If they notice that girl, don't let them turn and find me too. If they've been watching me, please make them look away from her now. But human eyes wander freely. The same curious gazes that had tracked the girl soon slid from Oha's disheveled ginkgo-leaf hairstyle down to her feet as she crept along under the eaves. Discovering the leg half-hidden in her swaying hem—identical to the toy-like girl's—their eyes widened.

A haughty young woman pulled her companion's sleeve and whispered sharply. Their eyes flickered between Oha's retreating form and the advancing girl before settling into indifference, continuing their stroll unperturbed. When Oha reached an emptier street, she lifted shining eyes to the vast sky. And within her heart cried out: I truly will die—I will die at thirty-three.

No one would know.
No one knows about my impending death, nor how happy my death will be.

As she began to walk, she thought of the girl she had passed earlier.
That girl must still be unable to even contemplate something like death.
Consequently, without being aware of any joy in being alive now, she grieved at the thought that her precious life was being inevitably crushed into meaninglessness.

Oha believed in death to the very end.
At the age of thirty-three, she believed in her own death without ever doubting it.

Her death might be vanity.
It might be rebellion.
It might be revenge.
Oha saw no ugly shadow of age.
She feared a ravaging like storms that snap trees and grasses.
When she were to truly die at thirty-three, how radiantly powerful that thirty-three-year life would become.
At that moment, death would be a triumphal return.
Having fixed death as her destiny, she hadn't cast everything aside.
Oha found illumination in all things through this death-bound resolve.
And she contemplated both a happy death and a happy life when death was achieved at thirty-three.
"My life belongs to me."
"I wanted to make it as happy and beautiful as possible."

Oha could die at twenty-five and it would pose no issue.
She could die at thirty and it would pose no issue.
She could die at thirty-two and it would pose no issue.
She grieved at the thought that some chance occurrence in this transient world might drag her past thirty-three.
Just as dusk leaves a day's regrets lingering in one's heart, just as dusk preserves hopes for what they call tomorrow, so too did she dread that in this year called thirty-three, should she come to contemplate the year called thirty-four, all her earthly attachments might persist.
In one day, the affairs of that day must conclude.
The day named today must not spill into the day named tomorrow.
To be dragged along by everything was a terrifying prospect.
When dragged onward to witness the age called thirty-four, fifty-six and seventy-eight would inevitably follow in procession.
How wretched and ugly it would be—waiting for both death's vigor and life's strength to wither away before being plundered.

When Oha lay alone in bed contemplating a day that had ended without work or thought, she felt so vexed she could cry.
That mind helplessly sought what they called tomorrow.
The mind that sought tomorrow—wouldn't that soon become a mind seeking thirty-four?

Oha truly had to live fiercely.
And she also thought she must die fiercely.
Thus when walking roads or working at home, she feared unexpected death's assault.
As she tried crossing train tracks left resonating with terrible echoes, she shuddered imagining her disheveled black hair upon those gleaming rails.
While walking on gravel in a quiet evening park—when a stone beneath her crutch suddenly spun and fell with a thud—she started at the thought she might never rise from earth again.
When sewing her sister's friend-dyed kimono, she wondered if she'd become unable to see this world once more—as if blindfolded by tomorrow's single sleeve that refused attachment.

Oha stood at the second-floor window, gazing endlessly at the city sinking into dusk like a purple sea.
The lights came on.
One by one the lights came on; birds called out in the loneliness of tinted ginkgo trees.
At that moment, for the first time, she contemplated the longing for the man imprinted in her heart.
When white plum blossoms were scattering, within eyes that had begun to shine brightly, Oha saw the figure of that young man.

The young man came to visit her house from time to time.

When he climbed the dark stairs and came up to the unlit second floor, he struck a match and lit the gas for her.
When Oha, who had been sitting with her head bowed in the evening gloom, lifted her head as if waking from a dream, within the now fully brightened room, the beautiful young man’s eyes were shining.
Oha had moments when the young man became unbearably dear to her.
The young man loved Oha.

She, now in a dreamlike state of mind, felt a melancholic mood enveloping her heart.
Now, she thought, might she not forget death for the sake of the happiness of being loved?
And dragged along by the inertia of her longing heart, she thought she might have unexpectedly seen the ugly shadow of age there.
It was all momentary happiness and the joy of chance, yet—
Oha’s heart was easily swayed by the moment.
All people lived in fortuitous happiness.
At that moment, she thought of the sadness of living.

The young man once exclaimed cheerfully.

“Hey, we walk ahead of fate.”

At that moment, Oha smiled together with the young man.
And while looking down, she plucked the dahlia in the vase.
Her own death at thirty-three was truly not being controlled by fate—it meant walking ahead of fate itself.
She had determined her own life; that was not fate.
Oha smiled again.
Yet the figure of the young man sitting before her, unaware of her heart, looked profoundly lonely.

Oha avoided looking at her own body as much as possible.
Yet when she removed her clothes in the dimly lit bathhouse late at night, her swollen breasts throbbed with sorrowful palpitations.
She soaked in the tub for a long time, quietly contemplating a death like a dream.
When she opened her eyes as if waking and first noticed her own body sitting on the platform, at times a violent palpitation would pierce through her chest, making her think she had to frantically call for Mother.
Oha pressed a towel to her chest and held her face for a while.
At that moment, the blissful death that belonged to her alone soothed Oha’s heart.
When Oha raised her face again and contemplated the stillness within, moonlight streamed through the narrow window, rendering her body as pure and beautiful as a god’s.
Oha wrapped cloth around her waist and draped a garment over her shoulder, giving thanks for having been born not in the Age of the Gods when people wore no garments.

Around the end of summer, Oha's household had to temporarily move to a house without a bathhouse.
She went to the new house accompanied by her mother.
But Oha sadly thought about the prosthetic leg packed on the cart along with various tools.
The prosthetic leg in a white bag was stacked beside the charcoal stove and pot, and as she peered at it through the bamboo fence, her eyes clouded over.

"Nah, it's fine."
"I'll put a mat over it, so no one'll see a thing."

Oha’s brother said while tying ropes over the luggage.

“Miss, it’s fine. Even if someone did catch a glimpse, no one would know it’s your prosthetic leg, Miss.”

The rickshaw driver laughed loudly in agreement with her brother.

When Oha sat down next to her mother in the train, she thought of the cart climbing the slope of the bustling street. And she thought that the prosthetic leg clad in split-toe socks packed inside was indeed just a tool. There was no blood, no flesh, no bone either. She thought about how the inside of the thigh was hollow and coated with black lacquer. She thought about how the part above the knee was made of paulownia wood and the part below the knee of magnolia wood, and how when shaping the leg’s form, they had planed it down.

The wooden leg was carelessly broken, and the sharp plane glided over its surface.
When the multitude of wood shavings that had fallen on the white cloth met Oha’s clouded, teary eyes as she sat sideways with hands propped and face down, the entire surface appeared drenched in flowing gore—as if flesh were being sliced piece by piece like beef and falling onto the white cloth.

When Oha looked up at the sky and then forward again, an unpleasant wood grain stretched across the white leg like an engraving, and a mindless coldness transmitted itself to her fingertip upon contact.

A month later, it came to be covered in glossy reddish-brown leather like a laborer’s shin; the foot was soft as a white eraser, with five toes that moved. What shame Oha must have felt inside her clothes when she put on that prosthetic leg. The leather on her shoulders and the bands around her chest and waist creaked each time Oha moved. Beside the soft downy-haired flesh-colored limb lay one that gleamed like a hand-polished antique. Moreover, it was a meaningless apparatus that bent stiffly like a tailor’s dummy, then extended with a clank. No matter how strongly it was stepped on, the leg remained standing stiffly like a rod for all time.

When Oha undid all the bands and blatantly discarded her prosthetic leg, in that breath of relief—as though escaping all sin and responsibility—she attempted to slip into unconsciousness right then and there.

Oha went up to the second floor of the new house and looked around.
Against the indigo evening sky, the towering bathhouse chimney rose high, its faint white smoke drifting gently.
And in the quiet, empty sky hung a slender moon like inlay work.
Oha’s heart sank desolately into the roar that echoed from somewhere within heaven and earth.
The new bathhouse now stood out beautifully in the blue gas light, where a floral scent wafted up and danced.
Oha's eyes had at some point begun gazing curiously down at the house across the way, listening to the sound of the shamisen leaking from its latticed window.
It was impossible to make out what song it was.
However, her heart, which had been moving in that rhythm, was abruptly severed, and Oha was left dazed.
The shamisen stopped playing, and just as the lattice door clattered open, a girl with a narrow satin sash tied around her waist and her hair done up in a Chinese-style chignon dashed out and was swept into the bathhouse as if drawn inside.

“It’s completely different from my own world.”

Oha somehow found herself thinking such things.

If her own body were real, then the world she now saw felt like a painting.
If the painted world were reality, she would be dreaming now.
She, as if compelled, imagined the steam rising like mist in the bathhouse where countless beautiful bodies mingled, all while feeling such thoughts arise within her heart.

Afterward, Oha stood before the cold lake-like bathhouse mirror with her mother in the quiet morning and undid her long obi and red under-sash.

The woman from the Mitsukoshi advertisement cast her dark eyes down from the wall above.
When the colors of the tie-dyed yukata she had changed into appeared beautifully in the mirror, Oha gazed fixedly into the reflection with melancholy eyes.

The single leg did not know how to move.
When the fingers of both hands, pressed firmly against the window frame, finally reached the edge of the bathtub, the water her mother scooped and poured flowed over the soles of her feet as if startled—and yet pleasantly.
When her mother mercilessly rolled up the hem of the yukata about to get wet, Oha—with no means to resist—looked back at her with eyes that were resolute yet filled with melancholy, but regardless, the yukata had to be removed there.
Stripped of everything, Oha gazed at the cruel attitudes of the healthy while lamenting with bitter sorrow the ugliness of her limbs—so unlike those of a mermaid said to dwell on the seafloor.
The abundant morning sunlight streamed brightly and purely through the high glass doors and side window panes into the silent bathhouse, filling it to the brim, while the bathtub lay deeply, richly azure and calm like a lake.
For the first time, Oha felt the beauty of her own body, a sense of nostalgia, and a fear of something pressing in from the overwhelmingly vast surroundings.

She kept pouring bucket water over her shoulder and shuddered at her own body so starkly exposed in this brightness.

"My, you've gotten plump."

Mother let out a cry of surprise at Oha’s body, which she had not seen in so long.
The ribs of her chest were concealed by abundant flesh.
The hollow at her collarbone etched with lines had filled out; her shoulders rounded; her arms stretched long.
And over flower-like breasts, Oha lowered her long eyelashes.

“The bathwater feels so nice, doesn’t it? Such wonderfully comfortable bathwater.”
“You should get in now.”
“Shall I hold you steady?”

The weakened mother’s arms stretched out before Oha.
However, Oha draped her arms over the bathtub’s edge, fingers brushing the tranquil water’s surface as she gazed at the reflection of her black hair below.
And she thought that if there existed a bottom from which one could never resurface, she would sink into it now.
Now the morning sun cast slanting shadows through the glass pane across Oha’s shoulder to chest.
Her black hair rippled with light, while the blue jewel of her hairpin cast gloomy shadows there.

Oha was startled upon touching the flesh of her single leg, which had grown overly tense.
The leg remained perpetually strained to its utmost limit, extending without the slightest slack.
This leg supports my entire body.
Oh, the ugliness of this leg that knows how to support!
Yet her right hand—softly white, like grass in the shade—pressed down upon the stunted, fleshy mass of her right foot.
It truly trembled pitifully, like an infant.
And warm blood flowed slowly.
Oha contemplated the ugliness of humans striving to live.
Especially when her own body, gradually transforming into deformity, was now shown before her eyes—she felt wretched.

A certain person said to Oha.

“It’s gradually becoming deformed, isn’t it.”

At that moment, as she took up her crutches, she felt her soft palms transforming into something like soles of feet and was fumbling with the hand resting on her knee.

Oha left the house at dusk and, listening to the quiet sound of an organ from atop the stone wall, returned home alone along the narrow path with sadness.

No matter how ugly she became, did she have to keep living?
The sole thought now filling her mind—the desire to end both her life and body in the most beautiful way—could only be realized through death itself.
Oha would indeed die.

Moreover, a heart housed within a deformed body could only become deformed itself.
She thought of spiritually deformed geniuses and madmen.
Yet geniuses found no happiness in this world.
However blissful madmen might be, one could never comprehend how much physical pain those bearing flesh must endure.
And ugly bodies did exist in this world.
Oha wanted neither to see nor know anything ugly.
Death was pure and beautiful—eternally precious.
Quietly contemplating Death at Thirty-Three, Oha smiled.

When her water-smoothed hair shone beneath the blue sky, she walked along the road with her cane and, seeing that the cane had been newly painted glossy black, felt relieved. She did not want all of herself to be soiled by habit and experience. She did not want to age.

Oha grieved being reminded of the antiquity of her disability by the agedness of her crutches. When she now thought of that calamity five years later, her pain feared becoming an old, faint memory. Her calamity was fresh, her pain was fresh.

Oha recalled a time when she had passed by Aoyama Cemetery in a car and seen a disabled soldier leaning on a whitewood crutch wrapped in soiled bandages.

She went out to the veranda and cut her fingernails.
And when she cut her toenails, she imagined how somewhere the nails of a single leg were being beautifully trimmed to a cherry hue and arranged like flowers.
It was a day with a beautiful sky.
Leaves lay scattered at the opened window.
Oha sat up on the bed and thought of how she had been immersed in purple-tinted water to cleanse her body that had ached the previous day.
At that moment, in the stillness of a body meant to end purely, Oha took up the scissors and cut away all impurity.
The fingernails were beautifully trimmed.
Eventually she was wrapped in bandages and quietly trimmed the white nails of her right foot, from which only the tips of five toes protruded.
There, without lament, she blankly opened eyes that would never be seen again.

At that moment, the nurse who had arranged white tea flowers in a vase came holding silver scissors and pushed open the door. She looked at Oha's nails. With slightly exaggerated surprise, the nurse exclaimed, "My, how lovely they've become!" "Yes," Oha replied, nodding lonesomely. "Please wait quietly here—I'll come back for you soon." The nurse flipped up her skirt and hurried away.

Eventually, at one o'clock, the transport vehicle carried her far, far down a narrow corridor. After that, Oha could no longer see the white nails she had trimmed until now. Had those nails grown? Those nails now seemed to her—in some quiet place—to be fragrant with the hue of flowers.

Oha eventually became close with the young, ignorant mistress of the new bathhouse.
And she would comfort Oha as she soaked in the morning bath when there were no others present, soothing her fear of newcomers as if they were pursuers.
And she cried for Oha’s sake.
But again, when Oha removed her yukata and wrapped herself in a Yuzen-patterned underkimono, the ignorant woman at the attendant’s counter envied that happiness.

Oha stealthily left the bathhouse.
She feared that if people saw her leaving the bathhouse and came to know of her physical defect, they would wonder and imagine how she managed to bathe.
And when Oha approached the narrow path, she would occasionally meet an elderly lame rickshaw driver.

At that moment, she thought what a pitiful world this was.
And when the elderly lame man gradually began to look at her and, as if forcing sympathy that sought pity for a fellow disabled person, started to smile, Oha felt sorrowful.
The fact that—just as people in the world gather by their kind—I must be cared for solely among the disabled and live in harmony was unbearable.
And how utterly miserable and sad that must be.
Oha prayed that she would never lay eyes upon anyone with physical defects like her own.

Those who live without ever seeing a mirror are fortunate.
When one becomes aware of one’s own form, one first comes to know the sorrow of the world.
Oha thought that if possible, she would be the only disabled person in this universe.
Let there be none who see her form.
And she prayed that through Oha’s form, there would be none who felt the same sorrow as herself.

Before long, Oha's house had to move again.
And she was to meet her older brother and sister-in-law from whom she had been separated for three years.

“Thank you for all your kindness…”

Oha bade farewell to the young bathhouse mistress she had grown close to and went to a quiet single-story house set deep within.
Between her brother and sister-in-law, whom she was meeting for the first time in ages, only laments over having lost their young child were being repeated.
And regarding the calamity of Oha cooking stew in the kitchen, there were none who spoke of it as if it had been forgotten.
As Oha occasionally moved back and forth with her crutches, the mother watched her sadly while being considerate,

“You must have found it quite troubling too, but these days there’s nothing that can’t be done—though if you had come then, I imagine you would have been so shocked—”

and blinked back tears.
Older Brother nodded without saying anything.
Sister-in-law was searching amid the scattered luggage, saying there was no key.
Oha was listening to it from behind the shoji screen.
And quietly striking a match to light the gas stove—the blue flame began burning with a lonely, quiet sound like phosphorus—the aluminum pot cast a pure color.

When her older brother and sister-in-law married and departed on their distant journey, Oha recalled her seventeen-year-old self who had gone to the station to see them off.
At that time, a light blue ribbon was attached to the hair.
And in the shadow of the gas lamps along Station Street, white acacia flowers were faintly fragrant.

“And Oha, when letters come later, make sure to bundle them up and send them to Brother’s place—”

When such a voice came from the train window, Oha found herself crying uncontrollably for no reason at all. At that time, she couldn't understand what was making her sad. But the tears flowed freely. Now, even in moments so painfully sorrowful that her chest ached, Oha reflected on how tears would not come easily. Her heart remained perpetually lonely and cold, and she felt there was nowhere from which something warm like tears could well up.

At that moment, so many people surrounded Oha that it was suffocating. When a shrill steam whistle sounded, the train had already departed before she knew it, and tear-soaked Oha was left alone.
Oha returned home with her younger sister without saying a word.
At the gate stood the mother, forlorn and alone.
She once again recalled the wedding day.

Mother, her older sisters, and younger sister, dressed in their finest, formed a procession of carriages with her brother and sister-in-law and raced through the evening streets toward the splendid Western-style mansion.
In the evening dusk, the neighbors’ faces floated pale.
Oha pressed herself tightly against the gate and gazed fixedly at the swarm of mosquitoes rising there.

Eventually, she stretched out her right leg—which wouldn’t bend past a right angle—by the window frame of the family room where sake, boxed meals, appetizers, and such lay scattered, and sat sideways.
In the unlit room, Oha’s flannel undergarment was merely white and lonely.
In her room with the sliding doors opened wide, a faintly white new chest of drawers could be seen, and the mirror of the dressing table shone like the surface of a distant lake.
Oha, while faintly listening to the approaching drone of mosquitoes, sank into thoughts of the uncertain future.

At that moment, she contemplated a death like a dream.
A death as beautiful as the sky was the future outcome Oha now envisioned.
Oha's heart was pure.
But purity is lonely.
The pain in her knee joint—like water seeping in—at that very moment acted as a pleasant stimulus, tears welling up in her blankly open eyes.

Oha remained seated in the kitchen and thought back to those days.
And she quietly gazed at the gas flame, but the tears that seemed ready to surface did not easily moisten her eyes.

“She had such bright eyes, and her hair was so intensely black—”

Oha’s older brother would sometimes say such things vacantly, as if chasing after the lost child.

“Truly, I may have waited for a grandchild more than any of you ever did—though if one had surely come, I’d have said every day, ‘It’ll be like this,’ or ‘It’ll be like that.’ And if Oha were sitting here like this now, I imagine they’d be trailing after her, begging to be carried on her back—or so I’ve thought at times—”
Then Mother, as if muttering to herself, compared her older son’s head to Oha’s figure by the brazier and reddened her eyes.
Oha quietly went to the next room and turned the pages of a magazine.
However, regarding that, her older brother again spoke as if with deep emotion.

“She was truly such a clever child…”

“She must’ve died from being too clever.”

The sister-in-law's voice said casually along with the sound of walking footsteps.

Oha’s older brother eventually set out on a journey.

And on a winter's quiet night that had grown fully dark, the family went out together to the neighborhood bathhouse.
Oha sat alone at the kotatsu and thought about her walk outside that evening.
It was when she turned a certain corner.

“You have a rather good figure, don’t you.” When this voice reached her ears, Oha sharply stopped her crutch and looked back.
At the corner stood a black post, and the figure behind it was unclear.

She paused for a moment in the evening dusk and gazed at her soiled meisen kimono—the everyday clothes she had come out still wearing. And as she began walking again in that manner, she thought that she still had to maintain a graceful figure as she walked. People in society must think that those who walk around on crutches are nothing but beggars or something of the sort. "I must not present a shabby figure," Oha thought at that moment, yet she felt not the slightest sadness. Now Oha thought about that matter, but the idea of walking in nice clothes wasn’t much of a lonely act of brave resistance or anything at all. The kimono she had taken such care to change into soon had its underarms torn by her crutches, and its knees were visibly worn thin. Silently watching the thinning fabric under the arms of her kimono was, for Oha, a lonely and inexpressible slight despair. “For me walking is first and foremost an unavoidable thing.” “And it is the saddest thing.”

"You should stop walking already—never go outside again," Oha’s conscience commanded.
But what the conscience commands is always lonely.
And then sorrow without any resistance came pressing in.

Oha’s heart suddenly grew sorrowful now, and while thinking of men and women gathering at an unfamiliar bathhouse to unabashedly scrub each other’s bodies, she wondered when she might be able to nostalgically behold her own pitiful flesh within the dim bath chamber.
And then the hue of the young bathhouse mistress’s narrow eyes floated up nostalgically.
Even after four or five days had passed, no bath had been purchased for the new house.
Oha’s skin had dark red grime rising on it.
And so, early on a cold morning, she went with her mother to the nearby bathhouse, just the two of them.

“Welcome. Please do wait just thirty minutes more.”

A young man who had come out from the back said politely and brought a brass brazier.

“It is quite cold. Please do warm yourself.”
The mother and child quietly listened to the sound of dripping water as they gathered around the brazier.
While quietly looking up at the playbills hanging on the wall, Oha stared intently at Mother’s face.
Even in trivial matters, she would contemplate the sorrow of living—to live was to grieve.

Oha wondered sentimentally—as the house became new—whether she would have to wander from one unfamiliar bathhouse to another with her mother on cold mornings. While gazing at her mother’s face, she thought how this aged mother would surely die before her, and her chest tightened.
And she thought that all her strength—and the ugliness of living on—existed for the sake of this mother before her eyes.
It is precisely because Mother is here that I can live—that I do live.
Oha, now suppressing her chest where weakness had suddenly welled up, was stirring the brazier’s ashes when Mother’s voice spoke quietly.

“You must have understood for the first time now.”
“That’s precisely where the pain lies—when others enter.”
“Even I, your mother, might not have had to worry if you had been healthy.”
“And then it would have been acceptable for me to die——”

Oha’s tears overflowed while she kept her face down.
And she contemplated the unrelieved loneliness of living for her mother and living for her child.
"I will die at thirty-three."
Yet there was no knowing when her mother might be taken away.
Oha felt her tears would never cease.
Bowing her head before the brazier, she knew her mother would soon remove her obi and kimono.

“Since there are no people in the morning hours, please take your time entering.”

A woman’s voice was heard overhead, and a barefoot woman pattered past in front.
Oha finally raised her head and leaned against the wall.
In the cold full-length mirror, the pale woman—her ginkgo-leaf chignon undone at the roots, traces of tears remaining—sank as if into unfathomable depths, not moving in the slightest.

(May 1914, "Shinshōsetsu")