Pathway to Japanese Literature

1. Honjo

Daidoji Shinsuke was born near Honjo's Ekōin Temple.
Not a single beautiful town remained in his memory.
Not a single beautiful house stood there.
Around his home clustered nothing but cellar carpenters' workshops, cheap candy stores, and secondhand shops.
The roads facing those buildings never knew respite from mud.
Moreover, those lanes all terminated at the Otakegura Ditch.
That broad channel choked with nankin algae perpetually emitted foul vapors.
He could not help but feel oppressed by such towns.
Yet places beyond Honjo oppressed him more still.
The Yamate district's shabby dwellings and even Edo's quaint downtown shops with their prim storefronts—all bore down on him somehow.
He loved desolate Honjo—Ekōin Temple, Komadome Bridge, Yokoami, Warigesui, Hashinoki Baba, that Otakegura Ditch—more than Hongō or Nihonbashi.
This might have been closer to pity than love.
Yet even if pity it was—thirty years later—those very places alone still slip into his dreams…………

Shinsuke had loved the towns of Honjo ever since he first became aware of the world around him.
The towns of Honjo, devoid of tree-lined streets, were perpetually blanketed in sandy dust.
But it was still those very towns that taught young Shinsuke nature's beauty.
He was a boy who grew up eating cheap candy on crowded thoroughfares.
The countryside—particularly the rice-paddied lands east of Honjo—held no interest for one raised in such surroundings.
It showed him nature's ugliness rather than its beauty.
Yet even lacking true wilderness, Honjo revealed a poignant beauty in roof weeds crowned with blossoms and spring clouds mirrored in rain puddles.
He came to love nature through these fragile beauties.
What gradually opened his eyes to nature's splendor wasn't limited to Honjo's streets.
Books too—the dog-eared copies of Roka's *Nature and Life* he'd pored over in grade school, Lubbock's translated *On Natural Beauty*—had enlightened him.
Yet ultimately, it was Honjo's towns that most shaped how he saw nature.
Houses, trees, streets—all wore that same strangely shabby aspect.

In truth, what most shaped his eye for nature was the shabby towns of Honjo.
In later years, he occasionally made short trips through Honshu's provinces.
But Kiso's rugged wilderness always left him uneasy.
Even Seto Inland Sea's gentle scenery bored him.
He loved a nature far shabbier than these.
He especially cherished nature faintly breathing within man-made civilization.
Thirty years ago, Honjo still retained everywhere this natural beauty—the willows of Warigesui, Ekōin Temple's square, Otakegura's mixed groves.
He couldn't visit Nikko or Kamakura like his friends.
But every morning he walked near his house with Father.
For Shinsuke then, this was indeed great happiness.
Yet it remained happiness he felt awkward boasting about to friends.

One morning when the dawn was fading, Father and he went for their usual walk to Hyakuhongui.
Hyakuhongui was a spot along the Ōkawa River bank particularly favored by anglers.
However, that morning, when they looked around, not a single angler was to be seen.
Along the broad riverbank, only water striders moved between the stone walls.
He tried to ask Father why there were no anglers this morning.
But before he could open his mouth, he immediately discovered the answer.
In the rippling river waves of dawn’s glow floated a single bald-headed corpse, adrift among briny-smelling seaweed and gomi-entangled pilings.—He still remembers that morning at Hyakuhongui with vivid clarity.
Thirty years ago, Honjo left countless memory-like landscape paintings in the impressionable heart of Shinsuke.
But this morning at Hyakuhongui—this single landscape painting—was simultaneously the entirety of the spiritual shadows cast by the towns of Honjo.

2. Milk

Shinsuke was a boy who had never suckled his mother’s milk.
His mother, who had always been physically weak, did not give him a single drop of her milk even after bearing him as her only child.
Moreover, hiring a wet nurse was unthinkable for their impoverished household’s finances.
For that reason, he had been raised on cow’s milk from the moment he was born.
For Shinsuke at that time, this fate was one he could not help but hate.
He despised the cow’s milk bottle that came to the kitchen every morning.
Even if they knew nothing else, he envied his friends who at least knew their mother’s milk.
Around the time he entered elementary school, his young aunt, who had come for New Year’s or some such occasion, began to fret over her engorged breasts.
No matter how much she squeezed, the milk would not come out into the brass rinsing bowl.
With a furrowed brow, his aunt said half-teasingly, “Shall I have you suckle it, Shin-chan?”
But he, having been raised on cow’s milk, naturally had no way of knowing how to suck.
His aunt finally had the neighbor’s child—the daughter of an underground carpenter—suckle her firm breast.
The breasts had blue veins standing out across their swollen hemispheres.
Even if Shinsuke, prone to bashfulness, had been able to suckle, he surely could never have brought himself to suck his aunt’s breast.
But despite that, he still hated the neighbor’s girl.
At the same time, he also came to hate his aunt for having the neighbor’s girl suckle her breast.
This minor incident left nothing but oppressive jealousy in his memory.
But perhaps beyond that, his *Vita sexualis* may have also begun around that time………

Shinsuke was ashamed of knowing nothing of his mother’s milk beyond bottled cow’s milk. This was his secret. It was his lifelong secret—one he could never reveal to anyone. This secret also carried a certain superstition for him at that time. He was a boy with an overly large head, so thin it seemed eerie. Not only was he prone to bashfulness, but his heart would race even at the sight of a butcher’s honed cleaver. This trait—especially this trait—was utterly unlike his father, who had braved gunfire in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi and daily boasted of courage and fortitude. He became convinced—though from what age or by what logic he couldn’t say—that this unlikeness stemmed from cow’s milk. Or rather, he believed even his physical frailty came from cow’s milk. If this were true, showing any weakness would surely let his friends pierce his secret. For this reason, he always accepted their challenges whatever they might be. There were many challenges of course. Sometimes leaping across Otakegura Ditch without a pole. Sometimes climbing Ekōin Temple’s great ginkgo without a ladder. Sometimes brawling with one of them. Facing the ditch, Shinsuke already felt his knees tremble. Yet shutting his eyes tight, he desperately leaped over duckweed-dotted water. This fear and hesitation assailed him too when scaling the ginkgo or fighting a friend. Still each time he conquered them courageously. Though rooted in superstition, this became undeniably Spartan-style training.

This Spartan-style training left a scar on his right kneecap that would never fade. Perhaps even upon his character—Shinsuke still remembered his father’s overbearing reprimands. “You’ve got no backbone, yet you’re stubborn in everything you do.”

However, fortunately, his superstition gradually faded away. Not only that, but within Western history he discovered something approaching refutation of his superstition. That was a passage stating that it was a wolf who had given milk to Romulus, the founder of Rome. He grew increasingly indifferent to never having known his mother’s milk since then. No—or rather, the fact that he had been raised on cow’s milk became a source of pride for him. Shinsuke remembered that spring when he entered middle school, going with his elderly uncle to the ranch his uncle was managing at the time. He particularly remembered how he had finally managed to lean his uniformed chest over the fence and given hay to the white cow that approached before his eyes. The cow looked up at his face as it quietly extended its nose toward the hay. When he gazed at its face, he suddenly sensed something almost human in the cow’s eyes. A fantasy?—Or perhaps it was indeed a fantasy. But within his memory, even now, a single large white cow beneath a flowering apricot branch leaned against the fence and gazed up at him. Deeply, nostalgically.
………

III. Poverty

Shinsuke’s family was poor.
However, their poverty was not that of the lower class crammed into partitioned row houses.
But it was the poverty of the lower-middle class—poverty that had to endure even greater suffering to maintain appearances.
His father, a retired official, had to support a household of five—including the maid—on an annual pension of five hundred yen, aside from some interest from savings.
Of course, this necessitated practicing frugality upon frugality.
They lived in a five-room house with an entranceway—a residence with a small garden and formal gate structure.
But no one ever had new clothes made.
Father always resigned himself to evening drinks of inferior sake not even served to guests.
Mother too hid a frayed obi beneath her haori.
Shinsuke too—Shinsuke still remembered his desk reeking of varnish.
Though they had bought an old desk, both the green baize covering its surface and the silver-glinting drawer fittings appeared quite presentable at first glance.
But in truth, the baize was worn thin, and the drawers never opened smoothly.
This was more a symbol of his house than of his desk.
It was a symbol of his household’s life that always had to keep up appearances………

Shinsuke hated this poverty.
No—even now, the hatred from that time leaves an indelible echo in the depths of his heart.
He wasn’t bought books.
He wasn’t sent to summer school either.
He couldn’t wear a new coat either.
But all his friends were enjoying those very things.
He envied them.
At times he even resented them.
Yet he refused to acknowledge this jealousy or envy.
It was because he despised their talent.
Still, his hatred of poverty remained undiminished by this.
He hated the old tatami mats, the dim lamp, the fusuma paper with peeling ivy designs—every shabby aspect of his household.
But that was still bearable.
He hated the parents who’d given him life solely for their shabbiness.
He especially hated his father—shorter than himself, balding.
Father kept attending school guarantor meetings.
Shinsuke felt ashamed to have such a father seen by his friends.
Simultaneously, he felt ashamed of his own baseness in being ashamed of his flesh-and-blood father.
His work “A Record of Not Deceiving Oneself,” modeled after Kunikida Doppo, left a passage on one of those yellowed ruled sheets.
――

“I cannot love my parents.”
“No—it is not that I cannot love.
Although I love my parents themselves, I cannot love their appearance.
To judge others by their appearance is what a gentleman would find shameful.
How much more so when it comes to discussing one’s own parents’ appearance?
Yet no matter what I do, I cannot love their appearance.……”

But what he hated even more than such shabbiness was the falsehood born of poverty.
Mother presented relatives with castella packed in Fūgetsu confectionery boxes.
But the contents were not from Fūgetsu at all—they were castella from a neighborhood confectionery shop.
Father too—how earnestly must Father have preached "diligence and martial virtue"!
According to Father’s teachings, even purchasing a Chinese-Japanese dictionary beyond an old copy of the Gyokuhen was still considered “extravagance and scholarly weakness”!
Not only that, but Shinsuke himself was by no means inferior to his parents in piling lie upon lie.
This was both to secure even a single extra sen for his fifty-sen monthly allowance and, above all else, to purchase the books and magazines he hungered for.
He pretended to have dropped his change, to need a notebook, to pay school club fees—under every convenient pretext, he tried to steal money from his parents.
When even that wasn’t enough, he skillfully curried favor with his parents to try wringing out the following month’s allowance.
In particular, he tried to flatter his elderly mother, who had been lenient with him.
Of course, to him, his own lies were as unpleasant as his parents’.
However, he told lies.
Boldly and cunningly, he told lies.
That must have been necessary for him above all else.
But at the same time, it must have also given him a morbid pleasure—a pleasure akin to killing a god.
He had indeed come close to resembling delinquent boys in this one aspect.
His “A Record of Not Deceiving Oneself” left these lines on its final page: —

“Doppo is said to have declared, ‘To love love itself.’
“I shall hate hatred itself.
“I shall hate all hatred—hatred of poverty, hatred of falsehood.……”

This was Shinsuke’s heartfelt sentiment.
He had come to hate even the hatred of poverty itself.
This double-looped hatred continued to torment him in his twenties.
Still, it was not as though he had no happiness whatsoever.
He ranked third or fourth in every exam.
Moreover, a certain lower-class beautiful boy showed him love even without being sought.
However, even those things were to Shinsuke but a ray of sunlight filtering through cloudy skies.
Hatred oppressed his heart more than any other emotion.
Not only that—it also left indelible scars upon his heart.
Even after escaping poverty, he could not help hating poverty; at the same time, he could not help hating luxury in precisely the same way.
Even luxury—this hatred of luxury was a stigma branded by lower-middle-class poverty.
Or perhaps it was a stigma given solely by lower-middle-class poverty.
Even today he feels this hatred within himself—
the moral terror of Petty Bourgeois who must fight this poverty.…

In the autumn just after graduating from university, Shinsuke visited a friend who was enrolled in the law department.
They were talking in an eight-tatami-mat room with walls and fusuma paper that had aged.
The one who appeared from the back was a man in his sixties.
Shinsuke intuitively perceived a retired government official in this old man’s face—in the face of an alcoholic old man.

“My father.”

His friend simply introduced the old man like this.
The old man rather haughtily dismissed Shinsuke’s greeting.
Before heading inside, he said, “Please make yourself at home.
There are chairs over there as well.”
Indeed, two armchairs were lined up on the darkened veranda.
However, they were high-backed antique chairs from half a century ago, with faded red cushions.
In these two chairs, Shinsuke sensed the entirety of the lower-middle class.
At the same time, he also sensed that his friend was ashamed of his father in the same way he was.
Such minor incidents, too, remained etched in his memory with painful clarity.
Thoughts might continue to cast multifaceted shades upon his heart.
However, he was first and foremost the son of a retired government official.
He was a product of lower-middle-class poverty—a poverty that had to resign itself to falsehood more than that of the lower class.

4. School

School too left Shinsuke with nothing but dim memories.
Throughout his university years, save for two or three lectures he attended without taking notes, he had never once felt interest in any school lessons whatsoever.
Yet progressing through schools—from middle school to high school, then university—remained his sole lifeline for escaping poverty.
Though during his middle school days, Shinsuke had refused to acknowledge this truth.
Or at least not clearly.
But from around his middle school graduation onward, poverty's threat began pressing on his heart like a leaden sky.
During his high school and university years, he repeatedly planned to drop out.
Yet each time this threat revealed some dim future prospect that casually thwarted such plans.
Of course he hated school.
Particularly the oppressive middle school.
How cruelly must the gatekeeper's bugle have blared.
How thickly must those melancholy poplars have grown on the grounds.
There Shinsuke learned Western historical dates, chemical equations he never tested, population figures of foreign cities—all manner of useless trivia.
The work itself wasn't painful if one made minimal effort.
Yet he found it impossible to forget their essential futility.
Dostoevsky wrote in *The House of the Dead* of prisoners driven to suicide by meaningless labor—transferring water between buckets only to reverse the process.
Shinsuke endured such prisoners' mental anguish within mouse-gray school buildings—amidst tall poplars' rustling.
Not only that—

Not only that, but it was also middle school where he came to hate his teachers the most.
The teachers, as individuals, were undoubtedly not evil people.
However, "educational responsibility"—and particularly the right to punish students—naturally made them into tyrants.
They did not hesitate to use any means necessary to inoculate their prejudices into their students’ hearts.
Indeed, some of them—such as an English teacher nicknamed Daruma—repeatedly subjected Shinsuke to corporal punishment on the grounds that he was "insolent."
However, the reason for this “insolence” was none other than Shinsuke reading works by Doppo and Katai.
Another of them—this one being the Chinese Classics teacher who had a glass eye in his left eye—
This teacher did not welcome his lack of interest in martial arts and sports.
Because of this, he repeatedly mocked Shinsuke with, “Are you a woman?”
Shinsuke flared up and retorted, “Are you a man, Teacher?”
Of course, the teacher did not fail to impose severe punishment for his insolence.
Furthermore, were one to reread the yellowed pages of *The Record of Not Deceiving Oneself*, the humiliations he suffered would prove too numerous to count.
Shinsuke, with his strong self-respect, had to repel such humiliations out of sheer pride to protect himself.
Otherwise, he would have ended up despising himself like all delinquent youths.
He naturally sought the tools of his self-discipline in *The Record of Not Deceiving Oneself*.—

“Although the infamies I have incurred are many, they may be divided into three.”

“The first is bookish weakness.”
By 'bookish weakness' is meant valuing mental strength over physical.

“The second is frivolity and superficiality.”
By “frivolity and superficiality” is meant loving things of beauty beyond utility.

“The third is arrogance.”
By “arrogance” is meant not recklessly yielding one’s convictions before others.

However, it was not that all teachers persecuted him.
Some invited him to tea parties attended by their families.
Others even lent him English novels.
He remembered finding an English translation of *A Sportsman’s Sketches* among these borrowed books when he graduated his fourth year, reading it with delight.
Yet “educational responsibility” constantly hindered their ability to interact as fellow humans.
This was because gaining their favor carried a servility of currying authority.
Or else it hid the ugliness of pandering to their homosexuality.
Before them, he could never behave freely.
Not only that—he sometimes affectedly reached for his cigarette case or boasted of plays seen from standing rooms.
They naturally interpreted this rudeness as insolence.
Their interpretation was only natural.
By nature he was no likable student.
The old photograph at his box’s bottom showed a sickly-looking boy with a head too large for his body, eyes blazing with futile intensity.

Moreover, this pale-faced boy took supreme delight in constantly hurling poisoned questions that tormented his good-natured teachers!

Shinsuke always achieved top marks in his studies whenever exams were held.
Yet his so-called conduct scores never once surpassed six.
He sensed the sneers of every teacher in that Arabic numeral 6.
Indeed, they truly mocked him using these conduct scores as their shield.
Because of those six points, his grades never rose above third place.
He hated this form of retaliation.
He hated the teachers who exacted this retaliation.
Even now—no, now he had unwittingly forgotten the hatred of those days.
Middle school had been a nightmare for him.
Yet being a nightmare did not necessarily mean it was misfortune.
Through it all, he had at least cultivated a temperament to endure solitude.
Otherwise, the path of his life would have been far more agonizing than it was now.
He had become the author of several books, just as he had once dreamed.
But what he had been granted was ultimately a desolate loneliness.
Now that he found peace in this solitude—or rather, now that he knew there was no alternative but to accept it—when he looked back twenty years, the middle school building that had tormented him lay instead bathed in a beautiful rosy twilight.
Though the poplars in the schoolyard alone remained unchanged, their luxuriant treetops cradling the sound of a desolate wind.
………

Five Books

Shinsuke’s passion for books began in his elementary school days.
What taught him this passion was the Teikoku Bunko edition of Water Margin that lay at the bottom of his father’s bookcase.
The elementary school student with a disproportionately large head reread *Water Margin* countless times under the dim lamplight.
Not only that, even when he wasn’t opening a book, he would imagine the banner of “Acting for Heaven,” the giant tiger of Jingyang Ridge, and the human legs hung from the beam by Zhang Qing the Gardener.
Imagination?—But that imagination was more real than reality itself.
He would again and again take up a wooden sword and grapple in the backyard hung with dried vegetables with characters from *Water Margin*—with Yi Zhang Qing Hu Sanniang and Hua Heshang Lu Zhishen.
This passion continued to dominate him ceaselessly for thirty years.
He remembered often staying up all night with books before him.
No—he remembered reading books zealously on his desk, in carriages, on the toilet—and at times even on the road.
The wooden sword was, of course, never again taken up by him since *Water Margin*.
But he laughed and cried many times over books.
That was, so to speak, a metamorphosis.
It was a metamorphosis into the characters within books.
He passed through countless past lives like an Indian Buddha.
Ivan Karamazov, Hamlet, Prince Andrei, Don Juan, Mephistopheles, Reineke Fox—and moreover, some of these metamorphoses were not limited to temporary ones.
Indeed, one late autumn afternoon, he visited his elderly uncle to receive pocket money.
His uncle was from Hagi in Chōshū.
He deliberately expounded on the great undertaking of the Restoration before his uncle and lavished praise on Chōshū’s talents, from Murata Seifū at the pinnacle down to Yamagata Aritomo.
But this pale-faced high school student, brimming with feigned enthusiasm, was less the Daidoji Shinsuke of that time and more akin to a young Julien Sorel—the protagonist of *The Red and the Black*.

Such a Shinsuke naturally learned everything from books.
At the very least, there was not a single thing that owed nothing to books.
In truth, he did not observe pedestrians on the street to understand life.
Rather, he sought to understand life through books in order to observe pedestrians.
This might have been a roundabout strategy for understanding life.
However, the pedestrians on the street were merely pedestrians to him.
To know them—to know their love, their hatred, their vanity—he had no choice but to read books.
Books—especially the novels and plays produced by fin-de-siècle Europe.
In that cold light, he finally discovered the human comedy unfolding before him.
Or rather, he had discovered his own soul that did not distinguish between good and evil.
That was not confined to life alone.
He discovered the beauty of nature in the streets of Honjo.
However, what added some sharpness to his eye for nature was still several beloved books—above all, the Genroku haikai.
It was through reading these works that he discovered “the shapes of mountains near the capital,” “the autumn winds over turmeric fields,” “the full sails and lone sails of squalls offshore,” “the cries of night herons fading into darkness”—and even the beauty of nature that the streets of Honjo had never taught him.
For Shinsuke, this “from books to reality” had always been the truth.
He had felt love for several women in the course of his life.
But not a single one of them taught him the beauty of women.
At least, they taught him no beauty of women beyond what he had learned from books.
He learned of the shadows of eyelashes cast upon ears and cheeks illuminated by sunlight from Gautier, Balzac, and Tolstoy.
Women still convey their beauty to Shinsuke for that reason.

If he had not learned from them, he might have perceived only females where there were women.
…………

Yet poor Shinsuke could never freely acquire all the books he wished to read.
That he managed to escape these straits was owed first to libraries.
Second to book lenders.
Third to his thrift—so severe it drew accusations of miserliness.
He remembers clearly—the lending shop facing Ōmizo Canal, its kind old proprietress, the floral hairpins she crafted between rentals.
She trusted the innocence of this “young master” newly entered into elementary school.
But unbeknownst to her, that “young master” had devised how to feign browsing while stealing reads.
He remembers too.
The Jinbōchō Street of twenty years past, crammed with used bookstores; Kudanzaka’s slope where sunlight gilded their rooftops.
Of course, no trams nor carriages traversed that Jinbōchō then.
He—the twelve-year-old scholar—would clutch lunchbox and notebooks underarm, trudging this street time and again to reach Ōhashi Library.
A three-mile round journey.
From Ōhashi Library to the Imperial Library.
He recalls too his first awe within those halls—terror at vaulted ceilings, terror at towering windows, terror at multitudes filling endless chairs.
Yet this dread dissolved after two or three visits.
Soon he grew intimate with reading rooms and iron staircases, catalog drawers and basement canteens.
Then onward to university libraries and high school libraries.
He borrowed hundreds upon hundreds of volumes from these sanctuaries.

And among those books, he loved dozens upon dozens of them.
However――

However, what he loved—what he loved was the books themselves, almost regardless of their content—was ultimately the books he had bought.
To buy books, Shinsuke did not set foot in cafés.
But his pocket money was of course always insufficient.
For this reason, he taught mathematics (!) to a relative’s middle school student three times a week.
Even then, when money remained insufficient, he had no choice but to go sell books.
Yet even for new books, the selling price never amounted to more than half of what he had paid for them.
Moreover, handing over books he had kept for years to a used bookstore was always a tragedy for him.
One snowy night, he went peering into each used bookstore along Jinbocho Street.
In the course of this, he discovered a copy of *Zarathustra* in one of the used bookstores.
Nor was it merely an ordinary *Zarathustra*.
It was the grime-stained *Zarathustra* he had sold about two months earlier.
He stood at the storefront and reread passages here and there in this old *Zarathustra*.
The more he reread it, the more a sense of nostalgia began to well up within him.

“How much is this?”

After standing there for about ten minutes, he was already showing *Zarathustra* to the used bookstore’s female owner.

“One yen and sixty sen—as a courtesy, I’ll let it go for one yen and fifty sen.”

Shinsuke remembered having sold this book for a mere seventy sen.
But after finally haggling it down to double what he had sold it for—one yen and forty sen—he ultimately decided to buy it once more.
The streets on that snowy night were subtly quiet—both the houses and the trams alike.
On his long way back to Hongō through such streets, he remained constantly conscious of the steel-colored cover of *Zarathustra* nestled against his chest.
But at the same time, he repeatedly mocked himself under his breath……

VI. Friends

Shinsuke could not make friends regardless of their level of talent.
Even if they were gentlemen of any description, young men with no merit beyond their conduct were but useless passersby to him.
No—rather, they were clowns he could not help mocking every time he saw their faces.
This was undoubtedly a natural attitude for him, given his conduct score of six points.
He mocked them relentlessly as he passed through schools—from middle school to high school, and from high school to university.
Of course, some resented his mockery.
Yet others among them were such paragons of virtue that they remained oblivious to his scorn.
He always felt a certain pleasure in being called an “annoying wretch.”
But when his mockery drew no reaction at all, he himself could not help seething with indignation.
Indeed, one such gentleman—a humanities student at a certain high school—was an admirer of Livingstone.
Shinsuke, who shared the same dormitory, once gravely told him the fabrication that Byron too had read Livingstone’s biography and wept uncontrollably.
Twenty years have passed since then, and today this Livingstone admirer continues extolling him in the organ magazine of a certain Christian church.
Moreover, his article begins with this line:
“What does it teach us that even the demonic poet Byron is said to have shed tears upon reading Livingstone’s biography?”!

Shinsuke could not make friends regardless of their level of talent. Even if they were not gentlemen, young men who lacked intellectual hunger remained mere strangers by the wayside to him. He sought no tender affection from his friends. His friends could even be youths devoid of youthful passion. No—so-called close friends rather filled him with dread. Instead, his friends had to possess intellect. Intellect—solid, fully formed intellects. He loved owners of such minds more than any comely youth. Yet simultaneously, he hated these intellectuals more than any gentleman. In truth, his friendships were always passions laced with hatred within love. Shinsuke still believes today that no friendship exists beyond this passion. He believes at least beyond this passion lies no camaraderie free from the stench of *Herr und Knecht*. Moreover, those friends of yore were—on one plane—implacable mortal foes. He wielded his intellect as a weapon, ceaselessly clashing with them. Whitman, free verse, creative evolution—battlefields sprawled everywhere. He would vanquish friends on these fields or suffer defeat himself. This spiritual combat was undoubtedly waged foremost for slaughter's ecstasy. Yet amidst it all bloomed new ideas and fresh visions of beauty—this too stood undeniable. How three a.m. candle flames lit their debates, how Mushanokōji Saneatsu's works ruled their arguments—Shinsuke vividly recalls one September night when great flame-chasing moths came swarming to the candles. The moths emerged resplendent from darkness's depths, as though birthed sudden into being.

But as soon as they touched the flames, they fell lifelessly, as though it had all been a lie.
This might be nothing worth marveling at as if newly discovered.
Yet even now, whenever Shinsuke recalls this trivial incident—whenever he remembers these mysteriously beautiful flame-seeking moths' lives and deaths—he cannot help feeling a certain loneliness deep in his heart.........

Shinsuke could not make friends regardless of their degree of talent.
The standard was solely that.
Yet even this standard was not entirely without exception.
It was the social class discrimination that severed the space between his friends and himself.
Shinsuke felt no reservations toward middle-class youths whose upbringings resembled his own.
But toward upper-class youths he had only recently come to know—and even at times toward upper-middle-class youths—he felt a strangely alien hatred.
Some were lazy.
Some were cowardly.
Others were slaves to sensualism.
Yet what he hated was not necessarily due to these traits alone.
No—it was rather for something more nebulous than any of these.
To be sure, some among them too harbored hatred for this "something" without being conscious of it themselves.
Because of this, he again felt a pathological bewilderment toward the lower class—toward their social antipodes.
He sympathized with them.
But his sympathy ultimately proved futile.
This "something" always pierced his hand like a needle before any handshake.

On a windy, cold April afternoon, when he was a high school student, he stood on the cliffs of Enoshima with one of them—a certain baron’s eldest son. Beneath them lay a rugged shore. They threw a few copper coins for the “diving” boys. Each time a copper coin fell, the boys dove into the sea with a splash. However, one female diver alone remained by the trash fire burning at the base of the cliff, merely smiling and watching.

“This time I’ll make that one jump in too.”

His friend wrapped a copper coin in the silver paper from a cigarette box.
No sooner had he leaned back than he hurled the copper coin with all his might.
The copper coin glittered as it fell into the wind-whipped waves.
Then, already, the female diver had leapt first into the sea.
Shinsuke still remembers his friend, the cruel smile vivid at the corners of his mouth.
His friend possessed linguistic talent far beyond the ordinary.
However, he also certainly possessed canine teeth sharper than most.…………

(Continued below)

Note: I intend to continue this novel three or four times longer than this.
Given that only this portion is being presented now, the title *The Half-Life of Daidoji Shinsuke* is undoubtedly inappropriate; however, as there is no alternative title to replace it, I have reluctantly decided to use it.
I would be most grateful if you would consider this as Part One of *The Half-Life of Daidoji Shinsuke*.

December 9, Taishō 13 (1924), Author’s Note.