Pathway to Japanese Literature

She thought this night too would break into dawn.

Oha lay with eyes open, staring fixedly at the gray ceiling without so much as a twitch—as though plumbing some abyssal seafloor—when she called out in a low voice: “Mother!”

In the pale yellow glow of an eight-candlepower electric lamp, the mother moved with heavy quietness to place her hands on the bed’s edge.

“Are you in pain?
“Do you want some water?”

Oha continued staring at the ceiling, not knowing what to say—she was simply sad.

Mother knew everything there was to know.
Even the heart I could not comprehend, Mother knew and understood.
I simply wanted to hear Mother’s voice.
I wanted to see her move.

Oha remained silent.

“Is your leg hurting?”

“No,” she answered clearly.

“Mother, today too the night will break into dawn, won’t it.”

“Ah, dawn will break soon, so you’d best try to calm yourself and sleep.”

She closed her eyelids listlessly as she heard those words.
She could no longer think of anything.
If she thought this night too would break into dawn, then her heart needed neither thoughts nor sights.

The mother saw her daughter’s eyelids close quietly.
And thinking her daughter had grown exhausted and been claimed by sleep, she quietly withdrew and sat down on the futon.
And while pulling the pillow closer, as if trying to forcibly blind her own heart, she closed her sunken eyes and drifted into a doze.
Oha once again kept her eyes closed and, within her listless, pallidly exhausted heart, merely continued to think that this night too would break into dawn.
And drawn into that very heart which kept thinking this night too would break into dawn, she began to dimly lose consciousness.

Eventually, at some point, she opened her eyes wide and was staring at the ceiling.
When her eyelids had opened, even she herself didn’t know.
She was simply gazing fixedly.
And within her sorrowful heart,

“Mother!” she called.

Yet that voice never escaped her lips—the pale yellow light still drifted thickly around both her pupils, and the silence remained utterly undisturbed.
Not even her mother’s movements registered in her mind.
In Oha’s heart arose an inexorable surge.
“Mother!” she called again.
Her two eyes—still fixed unwaveringly on the ceiling—saw her own dry lips quiver faintly.

And she saw the air in the room shift quietly yet profoundly.
Oha felt relieved.

There was a sense that Mother was stealthily rising again.
Before long, Mother’s hand quietly touched the bed’s blanket once more.

Oha, not knowing what her mother might say next, felt that simply Mother’s act of moving had driven away the demons threatening to assail her.
And what she now sought to confirm was merely that this night too would break into dawn as always.

“You really shouldn’t stay awake like this.”

The mother said quietly while looking at the trembling strands of hair loosening around her child’s pale cheek and neck.
However, she found herself thinking this act was instead directed inward—an attempt to suppress her own overly troubled heart.
Oha remained silent and quietly pushed the blanket that had been draped up to her collar down beneath her chest.

In Oha's eyes, as if a faint curtain had been draped, everything appeared indistinct.
Although her eyelashes were dry, devoid of teardrops, everything appeared blurred in a bleary haze.

The mother quietly passed by the bed.
And she pushed open the door and stepped out into the corridor.
The sound of footsteps clattered away into the distance.

She glimpsed a black shadow before her eyes, and once again her pupils naturally began to close.
And when her lifeless pupils were narrowly opened once more, a black shadow flitted past the front of the bed.
But she did not think to call out.

The mother, driven by the clattering of her own zori down the dimly lit corridor, went to the toilet—but outside the window, moonlight hung clear and radiant, clawing at her heart.
And she felt that the instinctive love between parent and child must bury her in the earth.

The mother returned at a hurried trot but opened the door quietly; while glancing hesitantly toward Oha, she passed by the bed and buried her face in the bedding.

Oha opened her eyes again.
Time seemed not to have moved even a single moment.
When she thought it was still the same night, her eyes moved with probing anxiety, and she called for her mother again.
Now, in her heart, there was no god to cling to other than her mother.
The mother rose again.
And without saying anything more, she stared intently at her legs hidden beneath her blanket.

Thus, through this night, Oha—like an emaciated person—would weakly close her eyes from fatigue and despair, then at some point lift her heavy eyelids to gaze at the sky, unable to endure the terror of death.

Eventually, night broke.
The night bloomed open like an evening primrose containing all the world’s silence within a single blossom.

The faintly pale dawn air hung in the hospital room.

“Ahhh, dawn has broken.”

When Oha's consciousness first became clear, there was only the helplessness that follows despair.
Now, the passage of time was an unstoppable force beyond any intervention.
One must follow where time flows.
She could no longer even bring herself to think why she had to have her own leg amputated today.
This too was a path through time that must be traversed.

Oha did not put into her mouth a single drop of water, not a drop of milk, not even a piece of apple.
And once again she looked at the sky, looked at the window, looked at the wall, looked at the ceiling, and grieved over her own two eyes now clearly open.
And when her gaze inadvertently met her mother's shifting eyes,

"Mother! Today—today—" she cried out unbidden.

"Mother... it's today."

Yet Mother could do nothing.
Folding her wrinkled hands and bowing her head, she thought of the hardships borne in raising a child and mourned young Oha's fate.

Oha quietly gazed at the clear, blissful world beyond the window.
And as she gazed, she suddenly recalled something she had been thinking about before and gasped in fear.

Ah, if I were to wake up, if the anesthetic wore off, if one leg were gone—that would be the natural course of things.
But how terrifying this inevitable outcome truly was—how sorrowful this foreordained fate—if one leg were gone, if one leg were gone, such things were beyond imagination.

In reality, could I possibly endure thinking such thoughts for even an hour?!
She trembled at the cruelty of the fate that awaited her, yet in that very moment, she could gaze vacantly at the beautiful sky and the red flowers blooming gloriously by the window.

And at all times, fantasies were at work within Oha’s heart. Things she had read in fairy tales, things she had seen in novels—such scenes rapidly unfurled within her small heart, overlapping and jostling.—When I was subjected to the anesthetic in the operating room, a witch secretly crept in and transformed my form into that of a deer. Having become a deer, I escaped through the window into the courtyard, dashed through the acacia’s shade, went to the side of an old well—and when water dripping from the well bucket fell upon my body, I found myself transformed into a beautiful woman walking about. Freely, as if I had no body, walking freely and joyfully—sometime, somewhere, I had a lover. Oha had become crippled, so they said they could no longer play with her. Oha had no legs, so she couldn’t get up and remained lying on the floor; day after day, she wept while thinking of somehow dying. Her parents and siblings—everyone—abandoned Oha.

The place where Oha lay was like a pitch-dark prison cell, with only one tiny window high up.
And through that window, only a faint white light entered.

Those scenes, one after another—trembling before her fate—quietly seeped into some corner of her small heart.
Memories as if from the distant past pressed heavily before her eyes, while the facts of the present moment receded into the distance like ancient fantasies.
Even when confronted with an imminent and terrible fate—as to which facts constituted her own lamentable destiny—her heart would never align with reality.
Just as humans, separated by thin silk, will never align with one another, so too will fact and heart never become one for all eternity.

The heart denies fact.
Fact denies the heart.

The sun shone brilliantly high in the sky.
The blue sky was spread limitlessly over everything.

Oha’s body had to finally collide with reality; time flowed on.
And then the solemn, hushed afternoon air filled the corridor from the fluttering hems of white-clad people; it crept in from the shadows of doors and beneath the beds in hospital rooms.
And in the nurses’ station beyond the wall, a mournful clock chimed once.

“Ah, one o’clock!” Oha threw her hands out across the blanket and said with flustered urgency.

Mother opened the cupboard door to take out a white yukata.

Like a fish being prepared for cooking and washed in clear water, Oha had to change into an immaculate yukata and become a person upon the operating table.
But the heart holds no eternal facts.
The heart is a dream.
Oha’s pale hands and chest trembled at the sound of the gurney racing down the corridor as she still lingered in dreams.
She contemplated the facts within her dream.
Soon came hurried motions—the door was opened, and the gurney brought into the hospital room.

Oha was carried and placed onto the gurney.

“Ah, Mother!”
“Now, now!”

The gurney exited the hospital room.
And the two nurses hurried down the long corridor, pulling the gurney as they went.

Why was there such frantic haste before fate?
She was indeed carried away before fate.
In frantic haste, her small body was borne away.

“Ah, now! Right now!”

Mother clung to the doorframe and stood frozen.
As the gurney began rounding the corridor’s corner, she glimpsed Oha’s black eyes in the distance.
Those eyes never met her own desperately searching gaze.
They were merely black pupils adrift in empty space; someone stumbled blindly two or three bays down the corridor, but already the gurney had disappeared—Oha was gone.

Mother staggered into the lonely hospital room, closed her red, bloodshot eyes against the white sheets, and shed dark tears—Oha was gone.

Mother once again frantically paced back and forth along the corridor, trying to hear her child’s voice crying and screaming before fate.
Yet everything was utterly silent; not a single sound could be heard.

The tightly closed glass door was opened, and they entered a dark corridor paved with black stone.
Oha closed her eyes to calm herself, merging the manifold illusions arising in her heart into one.
But the more she closed her eyes, the deeper the turmoil that welled up within her heart, and her body trembled ceaselessly in small shudders.
Before long, her gurney was pulled into a room where the overly bright autumn sun glared through the surrounding stained glass windows.
There were several nurses and two boys with bandages wrapped around their faces and chests seated on chairs.
And pale aqua sunlight flowed throughout the room.
Oha lay on her back and looked up at the tall, large pine tree through the window.
And the sky above that pine tree’s top was as beautiful as an emerald.
The nurse, who had placed her hand on the pillow and stood vacantly by the bedside, was looking somewhere—

“That pine tree,” she said.

Oha nodded quietly but was suddenly overcome with unease.
“What about the surgery?!”
“The person before you hasn’t finished yet.”

She was suddenly startled.
At this very moment, something terrifying was being carried out.
The terrifying nature of that person was present even in the instant when others were gazing at the sky.
“There, by that window—you see the pine tree?”

The nurse stood up at some point.
And while gently stroking Oha’s hair, she spoke again.

“That pine over there is called the Sōgorō Pine—the one where Sakuramon Shōgorō was crucified.”

She suddenly looked at the pine tree.
Yet even as she thought how this tree—bearing such a terrible history—stood towering under the beautiful sky on this glorious day, her heart found no peace, unsettled by the very radiance around her.

"Not yet," Oha’s heart settled slightly.

“Yes, soon now—does Mr. Sugiura have his dentures in? We must remove them all if he does, or there’ll be trouble.”

“No,” she said sadly, looking at the nurse’s face, and asked in return, “Why?”

“That’s because if dentures slip into your throat after administering the anesthetic, it’s dangerous—”

The nurse did not elaborate and answered in a soothing manner.

“And then, the ring.” When she slightly moved her hand and the ring caught her eye, Oha looked at the nurse’s face once more as though it absolutely could not be overlooked.

“Yes—just a moment.”
“It would be better to take it off, don’t you think?”

Upon the crimson finger of her small, pure white hand—itself as beautiful as a flower—the ruby ring radiated with excessive happiness.
Against the blue sky, she raised her hand to her chest while lying on her back and removed the ring that shone with happiness.
And she handed it to the nurse.
Oha felt no sadness in removing that ring.
She had not cast off any memories.
Because it was not a special thing imbued with heart that had been placed there by a lover.

Still just as it was, on the lonely finger of her hand that had been placed on her chest, the faint mark of the ring remained.
Oha was staring at it vacantly.

Before long, the sound of a ponderous door opening echoed, and in the distance of the dark corridor, a pallid, desolate window came into view.
And with the rattling clatter of wheels, a man whose facial muscles had utterly slackened like a corpse’s was carried away.

“Horrible.” All of Oha’s five senses strained to make themselves as small as possible and quivered like a leaf.

“Ah, how horrible.” She had nothing else but that.
And they pulled the white calico cloth that had been draped below and placed it up to her hairline.
Above it, the autumn sun moved and shone white.
Oha’s gurney began to move.

When something clattered, she startled open her eyes upon touching ice-cold air.

The surroundings were pitch black.
Nothing could be seen.
She closed her eyes in fear.

Then another clattering sound rang out, and she felt as though she had sunk into a low place.
And warm, stifling air enveloped her body.

And through the calico cloth, everything appeared endlessly pale red.
She was terrified.
She tried to hurriedly remove the cloth covering her eyes, but her hand wouldn’t move.
From somewhere far away came the shuffling approach of people.
Her hand finally trembled into motion.
Oha’s surroundings expanded.
And they were astonishingly bright and beautiful.
The ceiling was round and high, tightly covered with stained glass, and sunlight shone in seven colors.
And all the placed objects were shining with a cold silver light.
This beautiful yet boundless terror—she could not bring herself to look at it even briefly.
When she pleadingly turned her fleeing eyes to the left, from the far end of the room visible in the distance, white-coated, white-capped doctors were solemnly approaching.
And then, before she knew it, a nurse who had approached quietly folded a gauze cloth and placed it over Oha’s eyes.

Oha could do nothing anymore; as if ambushed anew, she couldn’t know what would be done to her if the doctors approached. She thought she would be killed, but her body wouldn’t move at all. Her heart alone trembled, truly like poplar leaves. And sensing a metallic clinking sound from nowhere in particular, she was constantly frightened. The white, light, and soft gauze pressed down like mist over her two pupils, absolutely refusing to let her eyes open. The voices of the people around her reached her ears as indistinct noise. Oha’s heart quietly began to grow blank. Had they left her in that state for some time, she might have plunged her own body into a drugged sleep all by herself.

Someone came near Oha’s pillow.
And when she thought something had been placed near her nose, a voice was clearly heard.

“This is anesthetic, so please stay still.”

Suddenly, there was a strange smell.
And the more she frantically tried to stay still, the more her breath grew labored and painful.
And something unknown went gulping down into her throat.

And it gradually transformed into an ungraspable suffering.
And in some distant place, unbearable pain arose.
In reality, it was unbearable suffering and pain, but there was nothing to grasp.
She couldn’t tell where in her own body it was happening—whether her hands, legs, head, torso, eyes, or ears were located.
And as they tangled together and began to form something like a round orb, the surroundings were pitch black.

And with that, just as the engine-like clatter of a night train echoed through pitch darkness, Oha’s body was carried away with a thundering rumble.
Yet the agony remained agony.
And when both suffering and velocity seemed to crest their peak, the surroundings flared into russet brightness—a vast open plain.
Her body, bound tenfold and twentyfold within that expanse, hurtled thousands of miles at dreadful speed toward no discernible destination.
Everything dissolved into void.
Oha’s consciousness had fully surrendered to anesthetic oblivion.
She knew nothing.

Clatter, clatter, clatter... From somewhere came the faint sound of a gurney.
Oha knew this, but she didn't understand where she was or what she was doing.
When the clattering gradually drew nearer, she finally realized she was being moved down the corridor on a gurney—that this sound came from her own cart.
Yet she could see nothing.
Her eyelids remained sealed as if glued shut.

Then she also knew she was being gently laid down on the bed.
And she could not help but be aware that her mother, brother, relatives and nurses were watching over her nearby.
Her mother’s concerned voice dimly reached her ears.
However Oha still did not know where her hands legs or torso were placed nor could she clearly grasp what she had just undergone.

Yet an indefinable anxiety assailed her body and though she felt she absolutely had to open her eyes when she barely managed to part her eyelids slightly the surroundings were dim as if shrouded in mist and all the human eyes were fixed intensely upon herself.

“Mother!” She had finally managed to call out to her mother, but her voice was so weak and feeble that it was unclear whether it had reached her mother’s ears.
Suddenly, an unexpected loneliness and sadness enveloped her entire being.
At that moment, the doctor administered injections of saline and camphor into her hands and feet.
And through that pain, she became able to vocalize clearly for the first time, as all her consciousness returned to her.
Her mother cooled her forehead by the pillow and moistened her dry, white lips with gauze.

“It’s over already?” Oha looked around the surroundings. However, that terrifying thing—something like having her leg amputated—she could not believe was over. Merely that some simple procedure had been completed—still thinking this—she looked around once more.

“Hot… so hot.” Oha couldn’t sit up or move.
Around her waist lay a thousand-pound weight as if someone had placed a massive stone there.
From her chest downward stretched a Rihika restraint, with a ceremonious blanket hanging heavily.
But how could she comprehend—how could she even sense—that she’d lost her leg?
Her head registered nothing but the oppressive heaviness of both legs.

“Hot, so hot.” Oha dropped her hands, which hung limply at her sides, into the golden basin filled with ice.
The cold seeped deeply into her white, dead-like hands.

During the interminable surgery, Oha’s mother had writhed in agony while waiting in the hospital room and pacing the corridors; now she thought of how she had submitted the consent form stating, “In the event of death during surgery, there shall be no objections,” and realized that might have been the last time.
She had thought that rather than Oha living crippled in her youthful body, it would be better for her to die as she was—better for Oha and perhaps even herself. But now that her daughter lay in bed like this, she wondered where that dreadful alteration had been made.
Both hands still extended soundly, not a single finger missing.
Nothing had occurred.
It felt as though nothing had happened at all—that everything she had thought was but a dream.

Mother kept gazing at Oha’s face while moistening her disheveled hairline with a cold towel.

The next night closed in again, unchanged.
And it was a stiflingly long night, even more than the previous one.
Just like a traveler in a desert suffering from the heat, she longed only for water through the unchanging night.

She woke her mother time and again.
And when her mother left the corridor holding a cup, she strained her ears and heard the distant sound of ice being chipped.
And how long she must have waited for the door to open.

When she placed the cup on her chest, grasped it with white yet burning hands, and dropped the ice chips into her throat, she finally felt a buoyant sensation rise within her.
And she was able to glimpse very brief dreams.

After that, Oha strained to catch every footstep in the corridor.
And when those footsteps halted abruptly before the door—when a white uniform peered cautiously from the doorframe’s shadow—she clung desperately to that nurse’s fantastical gaze.
Then she begged for another sliver of ice in her cup.
Each time she awoke, she asked for the hour, tormented by time’s silent progression.

“Ah, the night still hasn’t broken.” Oha was utterly exhausted from not sleeping. But if dawn broke, she could completely escape her exhaustion; she felt as though a refreshingly beautiful day would come.

The days when she was made to lie on her back and couldn’t sit up continued for two weeks.
That entire period seemed like nothing but grey overcast days.
The blue sky did not enter her eyes, nor did bright rays shine upon her cheeks.
And with her eyes welling up from the pain in her back as she lay on her back, she gazed at the ceiling.
And while gazing at the ceiling, she thought of the happiness that would come as if in a dream.
She didn’t know what happiness was.
When she was little, she would watch with a quietly joyful heart as the morning sun rose over the mountains, wondering if happiness might come.
When the setting sun faded behind the mountain’s shadow, she felt as though happiness existed within that distant silhouette.
And she became a girl.
Yet even now, while contemplating that thing called happiness in the same way, she remained convinced it would surely draw near to her.

When dawn broke, the rain was falling softly.
Through the clouded glass, the ventilation tower atop the roof of the front building emerged distinctly from the mist, and she saw a sky like tarnished silver.
And by the window, the camellia leaves were shining glossily.
Oha lightly wiped her face with the damp towel her mother had handed her and, after her mother went out into the corridor, blankly looked up at the cosmos flower by her pillow.
The pale flower seemed to quiver as though it could not endure even within this silent air of the room.
However, happiness was not seen in anything within the room.
All the air settled into peaceful stagnation, and a tomorrow that seemed to hold some happiness—some good thing—was still just another unchanging today.
And her own body did not move and lay still on the sickbed.

Oha was seized by unbearable loneliness and sorrow.
And even as she was gripped by that loneliness and sorrow, she found herself inexplicably drawn to nurses' laughter echoing through corridors.
When a nurse would burst in flustered yet laughing—
she waited breathlessly for them to say: “How are we today? You slept well last night.”

After meals ended, Oha would instantly fixate on clattering slipper sounds down hallways while awaiting medical rounds.
Through days of listening came recognition—the particular slap of footwear worn by that red-faced military doctor in khaki-striped trousers beneath his white coat—until she never misjudged his approach.
And when footsteps halted sharply outside her door,
her face would instinctively tighten into anxious anticipation.

“How are you?”
“Are there any changes?”

The military doctor glanced at the temperature chart and said quietly.
At that moment, Oha surely felt that the pains in her legs from the previous night and the ache in her back from that morning had vanished as if they were nothing, so—

“No, nothing in particular,” she laughed.

She saw nothing but pleasant dreams. Times when she held hands with friends and peered into dazzling display windows of bustling night streets, or when she went out to play joyfully in fields with crowds—these manifested in her dream world. Before entering this hospital, Oha had taken to bed around when camellias bloomed and remained there—unable not only to walk on soil but even step on tatami or stand by leaning against pillars. Yet in dreams, even her fingertips felt no pain. As she lay gazing upward at the sky from bed, buds burst violently from what had seemed a withered paulownia tree, youthful green leaves fluttering gently in wind. And camellia flowers crumbled one after another, falling to earth. She—recalling how before this bedridden period she had dragged her painful leg down Kudanzaka slope with Mother to buy a celadon parasol at Kanda Jimbocho's Western umbrella shop, now stored unused in closet—suddenly wanted to see it. So she immediately had Mother retrieve the parasol, spread it open facedown on tatami. Oha lay sideways staring fixedly at it. She saw daylight streaming from edges flow across parasol surface. And she felt exactly as if visiting fields, leaving parasol distant in grass while picking flowers then glancing back. Then she blanked out. Just then her younger sister returned energetically, shoes clattering loudly rounding hedge. When those shoe sounds resonated sharply, Oha's eyes had already clouded completely—hazy like mist—seeing nothing. Tears spilled from closed eyelids, rolling thickly down cheeks.

Then, while still lying down, Oha had them let her hold the parasol in her hand; then she herself reluctantly snapped it shut and promptly stored it away neatly in the closet.
However, she never even dreamed that she would never in her life be able to walk with a parasol, swaying the hem of her clothes comfortably on both legs.
When she saw the red sun, she felt as though she could step onto that soil comfortably at any moment.

Before long, around that time when she was lying there, far beyond the bars of her window, bright red, bright red flowers bloomed in full.
Every day—whether the sun shone or rain fell—they blazed into her eyes.

“What flowers?” she asked, addressing no one in particular.
But no one answered her.
She absolutely wanted to know what those flowers were.
And she wondered why that flower was so red.

“I want it,” she said again.

“Even a fallen one would do—just one would be enough—”

“Probably a pomegranate,” she murmured.
And gradually，the flower hid itself among the green leaves.
And Oha，riding on a gurney draped with light blue curtains，was placed into a hospital room where Nikolai’s bell echoed by her pillow morning and evening.
On the way，a child wearing red woolen shoes ran into the house shouting，“Mom! A funeral procession is passing by!”—a scene Oha watched from between the curtains.
It was a bustling streetcar thoroughfare.

From there, this gurney went around the brick wall once more and was placed into this hospital room.
And now everything—the world she saw in her dreams was irrevocably severed from her, never to be approached in her lifetime, yet—

Before long, she was transported on a gurney with apprehension and a faint glimmer of joy to have her bandages changed.
Patients on gurneys from various rooms gathered in numbers before the waiting area.

Oha still refused to believe her leg had been amputated.
Fidgeting with her hands and stroking her face, she thought herself whole—no different from anyone else.
As she gazed toward the garden, she imagined strolling freely across that courtyard lawn and happily sitting on that bench.
When she suddenly glanced sideways, the woman on the gurney by the window smiled with nostalgic warmth.

“Are you feeling any better?”

Startled, Oha finally managed to answer, “Yes,” and blushed.
She didn’t know what to say.
Her gurney was wheeled into the dressing room as it was.
She couldn’t tell whether that person had finished her dressing change yet, whether she hadn’t, or even which room she had returned to.

She spent the whole day thinking about the woman.
And opening a heavy book across her chest, she read five or six pages.

After that, she woke countless times during the night.
And as though dawn would bring her all happiness, she waited only for the sky to whiten even a second sooner.
Yet when she awoke too many times within such a brief span—fearing this dark night might never break again—she fixed her gaze beyond the white-hanging curtains and strained to hear dawn’s stealthy approaching footsteps.

Clatter, clatter... clatterclatter... clatter... clatter—she did not hesitate to conclude that dawn was near when she detected this sound from the distant darkness. It was the sound of carts. That was unmistakably the sound of carts. Through the pale dawn sky, along the desolate road, quietly—clatter, clatterclatter...—came the intermittent sounds of several carts lining up in succession. Oha lay there in the pitch-black night, hands placed on her chest, listening to the clatter of carts.

And while thinking how nice it would be if the nurse would quickly roll up the curtains, she imagined the joy of the morning’s cold, white, pure air flowing over her steam-dampened cheeks and gently stirring the hair clinging stickily at her hairline.
She then heard that sound each time she awoke at midnight and waited for dawn.
And though she thought morning was near, she had no idea what those carts were for, where they were headed, or why.

Oha met the unfamiliar woman who had spoken to her before in the exchange room both that day and the next.
She was placed diagonally by the corridor window, gazing at the sorrowful droop of phoenix tree leaves in the falling drizzle.
Beside her, a woman of about thirty lay face-up on a gurney, staring fixedly at her own hands.

At that moment, the woman’s gurney was pulled out from inside the exchange room.
The woman in the purple kimono, who had been covering her face with pale red sleeves, came before her and suddenly opened her eyes wide in surprise.
And with gentle, nostalgic-looking eyes, she gazed at Oha.

“How are you today?”

“Yes.” Flustered again and unable to say anything, she nodded and smiled.
The gurney had already passed by.
Even after returning to her bed, Oha could think only of the woman in the purple kimono.
Yet the hospital rooms were like a prison, each divided by walls so thick that even her neighbor remained unknown.

She thought of the woman's beautiful eyes. She thought of the beautiful hands. And she thought that woman must surely be happy. And thinking that the woman was someone living a love as beautiful as a story, she couldn't help feeling deeply nostalgic. And she couldn't stop worrying if even a single day passed without meeting her. It felt lonely and unsatisfying, exactly like being in love. And at that time, Oha had almost no awareness that she was now ill. And she might have been seized by such depths of despair and sorrow. She merely slept when tired, smiled when seeing people's faces, and lived immersed in various illusions while reading books. And her mother was glad she wasn't overcome by sorrow through all these developments. The nurse praised her strong heart. However, she knew nothing of her present state.

That evening she woke early at night due to having slept during daylight hours.
Oha had been hearing cart sounds for some time while romantically composing letters in her mind to send to the woman in purple whom she had met that afternoon—the woman who now occupied her thoughts ceaselessly—but with night stretching endlessly before her and her body aching too severely to rise up properly from bed.

“Mother,” Oha called out upon sensing her mother might be awake though she had nothing particular to say.

“I keep hearing those carts clattering away yet dawn refuses to break.”

“A cart?” Her mother listened intently.

“Has the rain started again? I wonder what time it is.” When Mother looked at the clock, it was barely half past one.

“It’s still deep night. You’ll probably sleep easier if we raise your pillow a bit more.”

“But Mother—are those carts already out and about this early?” To Oha, the carts being pulled along the desolate road with their clattering noise were vividly visible.
Mother, adjusting Oha’s pillow higher, said “That’s just the sound of raindrops falling,” and studied her daughter’s face with a puzzled look.

The next morning dawned beautifully clear for the first time in a long while, and autumn light, like water, streamed down as though blessing everything.
And the rain-drenched tree leaves glistened with a glossy sheen.
After finishing her meal, Oha entrusted a letter she had finally mustered the resolve to write to the nurse and had it sent to the woman in purple, who was alone in some hospital room.
But immediately afterward, she regretted it and blushed with shame.
The woman in purple was a beautiful woman as noble as a poem, so she thought someone like herself could never approach such a person.
Before long, the nurse returned holding a slender envelope.
Oha apprehensively opened it as though confronting something dreadful, but it was merely a short letter—gentle and nostalgic yet unsatisfying—of the sort always exchanged during fleeting encounters via gurneys: “How are you today?”
Oha repeatedly read the letter written gently and beautifully on pale scroll paper, burying her entire existence within her imagination.
She was happy.
After that, the two of them would write about the day’s events and send them.
Through the nurse’s mediation, the two who could not walk exchanged nostalgic conversations.

One Sunday, Oha was permitted to sit up.
After the friend who had brought her beautiful dahlia flowers left, she sat up on the bed with her mother’s assistance.
There was not a shred of joy or gladness.
Her legs whirled like electricity in a vortex, unable to stop even for a second like a spinning top, so she held back her tears and lay back down on the bed.
And as before, she looked up at the sky through her eyelids, placed dahlias on her chest, and took each one in her hands to stare fixedly.
And while she remained convinced she couldn’t sit up, she stared resentfully at her mother’s face.
However, each day she was made to sit up once by either the nurse or her mother.
The room seen from below and all differences visible when sitting upright, along with that dizzying strangeness, gradually faded away.
And to see people passing by the open doorway ahead, she began asking her mother on her own initiative to help her sit up.

The various people passing through the corridor—she couldn’t grasp just how novel it felt to sit up and watch them.
And how much must the sight of that downtown girl—who passed by every day with her elaborate topknot, humming a folk song—have tugged at her heart.

As time passed in this manner, Oha had to practice walking.
That even walking required practice—practicing walking—was something Oha couldn’t comprehend.
Ever since the black-lacquered clove-shaped cane had been placed before her bed, she had stared at it daily with resentful eyes, her gaze unfocused.
How am I supposed to walk with that?
That I had my leg amputated—Oha could think of nothing else.
And each time the nurse came, she asked why the surgery had been performed.

“No, it would be better if you didn’t ask about such things.”

The nurses did not speak about any of it.
And after talking about how beautiful Oha’s hands were and how thick her hair was, they left.
Oha couldn’t help but feel sad.
And though she wrote of her own fragile circumstances and sent it to the Woman in Purple, all that came back to Oha were faint, gentle, and ultimately unsatisfying words.

“Good day.” she asked every day.

“Yes, surgery day.” The nurse replied, promised to stop by later, and left.
Unintentionally starting to describe that day’s surgical procedures, she began to speak of things like the amputation when questioned.
Then one of those nearby would invariably notice Oha’s wide-eyed, rapt attention,

“Stop that.”
“All of that—it’s all lies,” she interjected to silence them.
But even as she pictured the cutting of flesh, sawing through bone, stitching skin—she couldn’t fathom such things being done to a living human body.

In the midst of all this, the day arrived when Oha was to walk.

"Now then, today let's practice walking a little, shall we?"

However, she was so terribly afraid that she couldn’t lower her leg beneath the bed.

“Oh, I’ll bring some sandals. Please wait a moment.”

The nurse hurried off and aligned a pair of red-thonged sandals at her feet.
Oha, trembling, gently lowered her lifeless white leg that seemed like a dead thing.

“Oh, even though one was enough—I’m such a fool—”

The nurse who had brought the sandals laughed loudly then.
She trembled in terror while staring vacantly at the woman’s face.
At that moment, the light in the room suddenly darkened, making everything appear dim and mournful.
How could I possibly stand up from the floor?
Her leg dangled from the bed, shaking violently.

“Now, hold onto me and try to stand up.”
“Like this, clamp the crutches under both arms,”

She firmly grasped the crutches.
She managed to stand up, but whenever the nurse’s restraining hands loosened even slightly, she swayed unsteadily like duckweed, her eyes unable to see things clearly as if in a dream.

“Now then, little by little, you’ll move forward. I’ll hold you steady.”

She feared nurses like this.
Though she knew she had to move, she had completely forgotten how to lift her legs—how to move them at all.
And when she finally managed to lurch forward, her feet had barely shifted an inch.

Oha wept on the floor still clutching the clove-shaped cane, unsteady as a thing suspended between heaven and earth.
She had never imagined walking could feel this sorrowful, terrifying, and precarious.
Back on the bed—she wanted to burrow into the blanket on the bed right now.
The nurse finally dragged her to the windowsill.
A mere six feet felt to Oha like the gulf between ocean and mountain.
When she first saw the sky through the window—its height and breadth and beauty so astonishing—she could only stare upward through tears.
And there were red camellias blooming freely, joyfully from earth to sky.

The space between earth and sky—the light there—was all unexpected.
And how beautiful the corridor across must have appeared, how pure those figures in white must have been.
The scenery outside the window that Oha saw for the first time was utterly filled with profound emotion.
Yet precisely because of this, how her body—unable to walk through this unstable air brimming with vitality—must have been grieved.

The next day, Oha was again supported by a cane and people, her body as unsteady as duckweed, and made to stand by the door. Then, gazing at what seemed like an endless corridor ahead, she felt a melancholy heart. She had not known until now that such an endless corridor continued before her hospital room. She was astonished by the endless corridor that glistened as if wet with tears—vast and lonely.

Every day, Oha had to walk one more step than the day before. However, no matter how hard she tried, reaching that corridor proved impossible. At night, steadied by a nurse for the first time, she went out into the corridor. The electric light cast a faint glow at her feet, and stars peered blue from the dark sky through the open window. Step by step—startled by the sound of her cane and her own footsteps, stumbling on the hem of her trailing kimono—she walked as if in a dream to the window ledge. But tears enveloped her eyes like a phantom, and Oha could not see where the pale red moon had gone.

When the weather turned fine in the afternoon, she would lie down on the lounge chair in the corridor with a blanket draped over herself.
And then she became engrossed in various stories.
The day flowed as smoothly as water, and in the courtyard there was no trace of autumn's decline.
The leaves glistened green, and with red-and-white sasanquas and camellias blooming beautifully, she could not even mourn her ailing body at the sight of leaves fluttering down radiantly in the sunlight.
Between the benches lay a bed where a patient like plaster coated in pure white medicine was sunbathing.

Oha's heart was now spring. As she did this, she had no worries or pain. She couldn't even contemplate how her own body had changed or how she had lost her freedom. The young green buds of the trees were breathing as if in a dream, quietly absorbing the sunlight.

The pale flowers in the shade, bathed in the lonely autumn light, dreamed their quiet dream for but a fleeting moment.
Oha lingered in that fleeting dream, remaining on the lounge chair only briefly.

The mother had been standing by the corridor pillar for some time, gathering sorrowful thoughts for the dreaming daughter.

(『新小説』 Taisho 4, Vol. 1)