Pathway to Japanese Literature

"Beyond here lies the city of sorrow."

All my friends had left me; they gazed at me with sorrowful eyes.
Friends—speak with me; laugh at me.
Ah! My friends futilely averted their gaze.
Friends—ask me.
I would tell you everything.
With these hands I drowned Son.
With demonic arrogance I wished—though I might return from death—that Son would perish.
Should I say more?
Ah! Yet still my friends merely gazed upon me with sorrowful eyes.

Yozo Oba sat on the bed, gazing out at the offshore.
The offshore was hazed by rain.

Upon waking from a dream, I reread these lines and was overcome with such revulsion at their ugliness and vulgarity that I wished I could vanish.
Oh well, how grandiose it had become.
First of all, what was this Yozo Oba business?
Not with sake, but with something far more intense—while becoming intoxicated, I had clapped my hands for this Yozo Oba.
This surname and given name fit my protagonist perfectly.
Oba perfectly symbolized the protagonist's extraordinary spirit.
Yozo, too, somehow still felt fresh.
A true newness welling up from the depths of old-fashionedness could be perceived.
Moreover, this pleasant harmony of arranging 'Yozo Oba' in four characters.
From this surname and given name alone, wasn't it already groundbreaking?
That Yozo Oba sat on the bed, gazing out at the offshore hazed by rain.
Wasn't this truly groundbreaking?

Seems good.
To mock oneself is a base thing.
That seems to stem from crushed self-respect.
Even in my own case, because I don’t want to be criticized by others, I drive a nail into my own flesh first and foremost.
This is cowardly.
I must become more honest.
Ah, humility.

Yozo Oba.

Being laughed at couldn't be helped.
A crow imitating a cormorant.
Those who see through others will themselves be seen through.
There were likely better names out there, but to me this one seemed somewhat tiresome.
"I could just use 'I,' but having already written a novel this spring with 'I' as the protagonist, continuing it again felt awkward."
If I were to die suddenly tomorrow, there was no telling whether some peculiar man might come forward—putting on a self-important air to reminisce how "he couldn't have written novels unless making 'I' the protagonist."
In truth, for that reason alone, I would persist with this Yozo Oba.
Was it absurd?
What? You're one to talk.

In December 1929, the seaside sanatorium called Seishōen was thrown into mild commotion by Yozo's admission.
Seishōen housed thirty-six tuberculosis patients.
There were two severe patients and eleven mild patients, with the remaining twenty-three being convalescent patients.
The East First Ward where Yozo was admitted was, so to speak, a special-class hospital room divided into six compartments.
The rooms on both sides of Yozo's were vacant, while in the westernmost Room He resided a tall-statured university student with a prominent nose.
In Rooms I and Ro on the east side lay young women respectively.
All three were convalescent patients.
The previous night there had been a double suicide at Tsumodegaura.
Though they had thrown themselves into the water together, the man had been pulled up by a returning fishing boat and survived.
However, the woman's body had not been found.
The three listened with pounding hearts to the shouts of village firefighters who—after violently ringing the alarm bell for a long time in their search for the woman—launched fishing boats out to sea one after another.
The red firelight of fishing boats wandered along Enoshima's shore all night.
The university student and two young women had been unable to sleep that night.
At dawn, the woman's body was discovered at Tsumodegaura's water's edge.
Short-cropped hair glistened sleekly; her face was pale and swollen.

Yozo had known that Son was dead.
When swayed along on the fishing boat, he had already known.
Under the starry sky, he regained consciousness and first asked, "Did the woman die?"
One of the fishermen answered, "She ain't dead, ain't dead. Ain't no need to fret."
It was spoken in a tone of feigned mercy.
She's dead, he realized clearly, and then lost consciousness again.

When he awoke again, he was inside the sanatorium.
In a cramped white-paneled room, people were packed.
Someone among them asked various questions about Yozo's identity.
Yozo answered each one clearly.
After daybreak, Yozo was transferred to another, more spacious hospital room.
This was because Yozo's hometown authorities, having been notified of the incident, had sent a long-distance call to Seishōen regarding his temporary disposition.
Yozo's hometown lay two hundred ri away from here.

The three patients of East First Ward felt a strange satisfaction at this new patient lying so close to them, and looking forward to their hospital life from today onward, finally fell asleep when both sky and sea turned completely bright.

Yozo did not sleep.
From time to time he moved his head faintly.
Patches of white gauze clung here and there to his face.
His body had been battered against rocks while tossed by waves.
A nurse named Mano—around twenty years old—kept watch beside him.
The scar on his left eyelid ran somewhat deep, making that eye appear slightly larger than its counterpart.
Yet he was not unattractive.
His ruddy upper lip curled faintly upward above sun-browned cheeks.
He sat in a chair by the bed staring at the sea beneath clouded skies.
She tried not to look at Yozo's face.
She found herself unable to endure it.

Near noon, two police officers visited Yozo.
Mano left her seat.

Both were gentlemen wearing frock coats.
One had a short mustache, and the other wore wire-rimmed glasses.
Mustache lowered his voice and inquired about the circumstances with Son.
Yozo answered truthfully.
Mustache was writing it down in a small notebook.
After completing a perfunctory interrogation, Mustache leaned over the bed and said:
“The woman died.”
“Did you truly intend to die?”

Yozo remained silent.

The bespectacled detective, his meaty forehead creasing into two or three wrinkles as he smiled, tapped Mustache on the shoulder. “Now, now. He looks pitiful. Let’s leave it for another time.”

Mustache, while keeping his gaze fixed straight on Yozo’s eyes, reluctantly tucked the notebook into his coat pocket.

After the detectives left, Mano hurried back to Yozo's room.
But the moment she opened the door, she saw Yozo sobbing.
She quietly closed it again and stood motionless in the hallway for some time.

In the afternoon, it began to rain.
Yozo had recovered enough strength to walk to the toilet by himself.

Hida, his friend, came bursting into the hospital room still wearing his soaked overcoat.
Yozo pretended to be asleep.

Hida asked Nurse Mano in a low voice.
"Is he all right?"

"Yes, now he is."

“That surprised me.”

He squirmed his plump body out of the oil-clay-scented overcoat and handed it to Nurse Mano.

Hida was an obscure sculptor who had been friends with Yozo—an equally unknown Western-style painter—since their middle school days. Any earnest soul in youth inevitably fashions someone nearby into an idol, and Hida proved no exception. From his first year of middle school, he had gazed in adoration at the class’s top student.
That student was Yozo.
To Hida, even Yozo’s slightest smile or frown during lessons carried profound weight. Discovering Yozo’s precociously solitary figure behind sand mounds in the schoolyard would draw from him deep, secret sighs. Ah, that rapturous day when they first exchanged words!
Hida mimicked Yozo’s every mannerism.
He smoked cigarettes.
He mocked teachers.
He learned to wander the schoolyard with hands clasped behind his head in a drunken stagger.
He came to grasp an artist’s most exalted calling.
Yozo entered art school.
Though a year behind, Hida managed to enroll at the same institution.
While Yozo studied Western painting, Hida deliberately chose sculpture—claiming inspiration from Rodin’s Balzac statue. This was pure fabrication, a calculated lie to lend his future biography dignified flair when he became eminent. The truth lay in deferential avoidance of Yozo’s chosen medium.
Inferiority drove him.
Around this time their paths began diverging.

Yozo's body grew increasingly emaciated, while Hida gradually put on weight.
The gulf between them extended beyond mere physique.
Yozo became absorbed in a blunt philosophy and started deriding art.
Hida had again grown excessively self-important.
He peppered conversations with the word "art" until his listeners squirmed.
While fantasizing about masterpieces, he neglected his studies.
Thus both graduated with lackluster marks.
Yozo had all but abandoned his brushes.
Declarations that painting amounted to mere poster-making left Hida dejected.
"All art's just flatulence from society's economic machinery," he'd say.
"Nothing but another survival mechanism."
He'd murmur half-formed thoughts like "Even masterpieces are commodities—socks with delusions of grandeur," leaving Hida thoroughly addled.
Hida retained his schoolboy admiration for Yozo, even harboring dim awe for his friend's newfound ideas, yet for himself, the tremor of potential masterpiece-making eclipsed all else.
Muttering "Any day now," he'd knead clay without purpose.
In essence, these two weren't artists so much as art objects themselves.
No—precisely why I can spin this tale so effortlessly.
Show you genuine marketplace artists? You'd retch before finishing three lines.
I stake my name on it.
"Say—why not try writing that sort of novel yourself?"
"How about it?"

Hida, too, could not look at Yozo’s face.
He used stealthy steps as skillfully as possible and approached Yozo’s bedside, but ended up merely staring intently at the rain lashing against the glass door.

Yozo opened his eyes and called out with a thin smile.
“You were surprised.”

Startled, he glanced at Yozo’s face but immediately lowered his gaze and answered.
“Yeah.”

“How did you know?”

Hida hesitated.
Pulling his right hand from his trouser pocket and stroking his broad face, he secretly asked Mano with his eyes whether he could speak.
Mano shook her head slightly with a serious expression.

“Was it in the newspaper?”

“Yeah.”
In truth, he had learned of it through the radio news.

Yozo resented Hida’s indecisive manner.
He thought Hida could have at least opened up to him more.
When morning came, he hated this friend of ten years who had somersaulted into treating him like a foreigner.
Yozo pretended to sleep again.

Hida stood by Yozo's bedside for a while, restlessly tapping the floor with his slippers.

The door opened without a sound, and a small-statured university student wearing a uniform suddenly revealed his beautiful face.
Hida noticed this and was so relieved he nearly groaned aloud.
Twisting his mouth to dispel the shadow of a smile rising to his cheeks, he deliberately walked toward the door with measured steps.

“Did you just arrive?”

“Yeah.”
Kosuge answered hurriedly while keeping an eye on Yozo.

It was Kosuge.
This man was a relative of Yozo's, enrolled in the law faculty of the university, and though three years apart in age from Yozo, they were close friends without reservation.
The young man did not seem overly concerned with age.
He had returned to his hometown for winter break, but upon hearing about Yozo, he had immediately rushed over on an express train.
The two went out into the hallway and stood talking.

“You’ve got soot on you.”

Hida openly guffawed and pointed beneath Kosuge’s nose.
The train’s soot clung thickly there.

“Oh?”
Kosuge hurriedly took out a handkerchief from his chest pocket and immediately wiped beneath his nose.
“How about it?
“How’s it looking?”

“Oba?
“He seems okay.”

“I see. Did it come off?”
Kosuge thrust out his chin to show Hida the area beneath his nose.

“It came off.
“It came off.”

“There must be quite an uproar at home.”

He replied while stuffing the handkerchief into his chest pocket. “Yeah. It’s a huge uproar. It was like a funeral.”

“Is someone from your family coming?”

“Brother is coming. The old man says to leave it alone.”

“What a mess.” Hida placed a hand on his low forehead and muttered.

“Is Yozo-chan really all right?”

“Turns out he’s unfazed. That guy’s always been like that.”

Kosuge tilted his head with a smile at his lips, as if elated.
"What must he be feeling?"

"I don’t know. ――Why don’t you go see Oba?"

"No need. Even if we met, there’d be nothing to talk about, and besides—it’s creepy."

The two laughed quietly.

Mano emerged from the hospital room.

“It can be heard. Let’s not converse here.”

“Ah. Right.”
“That’s right.”

Hida shrank back apologetically, straining to make his large frame appear smaller.
Kosuge peered at Mano’s face with a puzzled expression.

“Have you both, um, had your lunch?”

“Not yet.”
The two answered together.

Mano turned red in the face and burst out laughing.

After the three had gone off together to the dining hall, Yozo sat up.
He gazed out at the rain-hazed offshore.

“Beyond here lies the mist-shrouded abyss.”

Then I would return to the initial opening line.

Well, even I must admit this is clumsy.

First of all, I detest such temporal machinations.
Detested them yet attempted nonetheless.
Beyond here spreads sorrow's metropolis.
I sought to elevate this hackneyed lamentation of hell's gate into my manuscript's hallowed opening line.
No other rationale existed.
Should this single line condemn my novel to failure, I'd still lack the spinelessness to expunge it.
To crown this theatrical pose with one final utterance.
Erasing that line would mean erasing my existence up to this very day.

“It’s ideology, I tell you—Marxism.”

This phrase was awkwardly timed yet effective.
It was Kosuge who said that.
He said this with a self-satisfied look and adjusted his milk bowl.

The wooden walls on all four sides were painted white; on the eastern wall hung a high-mounted portrait of the director adorned with three copper-coin-sized medals on his chest, with about ten long narrow tables quietly lined up beneath it.
The dining hall stood desolate.
Hida and Kosuge were sitting at the table in the southeastern corner, having their meal.

"He'd been at it quite fiercely."
Kosuge lowered his voice and continued speaking.
"With such a weak body, running himself ragged like that—anyone would want to die."

“The Action Squad’s figurehead, I suppose.”
“I know.”
Hida munched on bread and interjected.
Hida wasn’t putting on airs of erudition.
Leftist terminology like that was common knowledge among youths of that era.
“However—it’s not just that.”
“Artists aren’t such simple creatures!”

The dining hall had grown dark.
The rain had intensified.

Kosuge took a sip of milk and said, “You’re no good because you can only think of things subjectively. In the first place—in the first place, I tell you. They say that behind any individual’s suicide lies some great objective cause of which even the person themselves remains unaware. In my family, everyone had concluded it was because of the woman, but I stated it wasn’t so. The woman was merely a sacrificial companion. There’s another significant cause. The folks back home don’t know that. Even you’re saying strange things now. This won’t do!”

Hida stared at the burning stove fire at his feet and muttered.
“But the woman had a husband of her own.”

Kosuge set down his milk bowl and responded.
“I know.”
“That’s nothing at all.”
“To Yozo-chan, it’s not even worth a fart.”
“Because the woman had a husband, to attempt a double suicide—how naive!”
After finishing his pronouncement, he squinted one eye to take aim at the portrait above their heads.
“So this is the director here?”

“That’s probably right. However—the truth can only be known by Oba.”

“That’s probably right.”
Kosuge agreed lightly and looked around restlessly.
“It’s cold.”
“Are you staying here tonight?”

Hida hurriedly swallowed the bread and nodded.
“I’ll stay.”

The young men never engaged in earnest debate.
They took utmost care not to touch upon each other's nerves while tenderly safeguarding their own.
They did not wish to suffer needless contempt.
Moreover, once wounded, they would either kill the other or die themselves—they would surely resolve to go that far.
That was why they shunned conflict.
They were well-versed in numerous superficial deceptions.
Even the single word "no," they would effortlessly deploy in about ten different shades.
From the very moment they began their debate, they were already exchanging glances of compromise.
And in the end, laughing and shaking hands, they mutter in unison within their hearts:
Dimwit!

Now my novel too seemed at last to have come into hazy focus.
Perhaps this was where I should pivot—unfolding several scenes panoramically?
Don't make grand pronouncements.
Clumsy oaf—all thumbs no matter what you attempt.
Ah...if only it might succeed.

The next morning dawned peacefully clear.
The sea was calm, and smoke from Oshima's eruption rose white above the horizon.

Not good.
I hate writing scenery.

When the patient in Room I awoke, the hospital room was filled with late autumn sunlight. Exchanging good mornings with the attending nurse, she immediately had her morning temperature taken. It was thirty-six point four degrees. Then she went out to the veranda for a pre-meal sunbath. Even before being gently poked in the side by the nurse, she had already been stealing glances at Room Ni’s veranda. The new patient from yesterday sat properly dressed in an indigo-patterned lined kimono on a rattan chair, gazing out at the sea. His thick eyebrows were furrowed as if dazzled. She couldn’t even consider it a particularly handsome face. From time to time he lightly tapped the gauze on his cheek with the back of his hand. Lying down on the sunbed for her sunbath, she observed all this through half-closed eyes, then had the nurse bring her a book. Madame Bovary. Usually finding this book boring—she would throw it down after reading just five or six pages—today she wanted to read it seriously. Now, reading this seemed truly appropriate. She flipped through the pages and began reading from around the hundredth mark. She found a good line. "Emma wanted to be married by torchlight at midnight."

The patient in Room Ro was also awake.
She went out to the veranda for a sunbath, but the moment she caught sight of Yozo’s figure, she dashed back into her hospital room.
She was scared for no reason.
She immediately burrowed into bed.
The attending mother laughed as she spread a blanket over her.
The girl in Room Ro pulled the blanket over her head completely, made her eyes gleam in that small darkness, and listened to the voices from the neighboring room.

“She’s quite a beauty, I hear.”
Then came a quiet laugh.

It was Hida and Kosuge who had stayed there.
They slept in one of the beds in the adjacent vacant hospital room.
Kosuge was first to wake, reluctantly opening his narrow eyes and stepping out onto the veranda.
After glancing sidelong at Yozo's slightly affected pose, he sharply twisted his neck leftward to seek what had prompted that posture.
At the farthest veranda, a young woman was reading a book.
The background behind her bed showed a moss-covered wet stone wall.
Kosuge shrugged his shoulders sharply in Western fashion, immediately returned to the room, and shook awake the sleeping Hida.

“Wake up.
“It’s an incident!”
They took pleasure in fabricating incidents.
“Yozo-chan’s grand pose!”

In their conversations, the adjective “dai” (grand) was frequently employed.
In this tedious world of ours, perhaps it was because they wanted something to anticipate.

Hida started up in surprise.
"What?"

Kosuge explained with a laugh.
"There's a girl.
Yozo-chan’s showing off his signature profile to her."

Hida too became animated.
He thrust both eyebrows up theatrically and asked.
"A beauty?"

"She’s quite a beauty, I hear. Reading all affected-like."

Hida burst out laughing.
Still seated on the bed, he pulled on his jacket and trousers before shouting.

“Let’s go give him a good scolding,” though he had no intention of actually doing so.
This was mere backbiting.
They even nonchalantly spoke ill of their closest friend.
They simply yielded to the mood of the moment.
“That Oba bastard wants every woman in the world.”

After a short while, a great many voices of laughter erupted from Yozo's hospital room, echoing throughout the entire ward.

The patient in Room I snapped her book shut and gazed quizzically toward Yozo’s veranda.
On the veranda, only a single white wicker chair remained, glittering in the morning sun, and there was no one there.
While staring at the wicker chair, she dozed off in a drowsy half-sleep.

The patient in Room Ro, upon hearing the laughter, suddenly poked her face out from the blanket and shared a gentle smile with her mother standing by the bedside. The university student in Room He woke to the sound of laughter. Having no attendant, he lived a carefree life like a boarding house resident's. Realizing the laughter came from yesterday's new patient's room, his sallow face flushed red. He didn't consider the laughter improper. From that magnanimity peculiar to convalescents, he rather felt reassured by Yozo's seemingly vigorous state.

Am I not a third-rate writer? It seems I had become too absorbed. I attempted something as ill-suited as a panoramic style and ended up making it so tawdry. No—wait. Thinking that such a failure might occur, I had prepared these words in advance: With beautiful emotions, people create bad literature. In other words, my having become so excessively absorbed is precisely because my heart isn’t demonic enough. Ah, blessings upon the man who conceived these words. What an invaluable phrase this must be. Yet a writer may wield this phrase but once in his lifetime. That does seem to be the case. Once is forgivable. Should you repeat it two or three times and take up these words as your shield, you’ll likely end up wretched.

“He failed.”

Kosuge, who had been sitting on the sofa beside the bed next to Hida, concluded his statement and looked in turn at Hida’s face, Yozo’s face, and then at Mano’s face as she leaned against the door. After confirming they were all laughing, he slumped his head contentedly against Hida’s round right shoulder.
They laughed often.
They would burst into uproarious laughter over the most trivial matters. For these young men, crafting a smile came as naturally as exhaling.
When did they begin to develop such a habit? Not to laugh was to suffer loss. They mustn’t overlook even the most trivial subject deserving of laughter.
Ah, was this not but a fleeting glimpse of voracious epicureanism?
But the sad truth was, they could not laugh from the depths of their hearts.
Even as their laughter crumbled, they remained conscious of their own postures.
They also often made people laugh.
They craved making people laugh even to the point of wounding themselves.
This likely stemmed from their usual nihilistic hearts, but could we not infer some resolute attitude beneath that very foundation?
Souls of sacrifice.
Souls of sacrifice, somewhat listless and lacking any definitive purpose.
The fact that they occasionally performed admirable actions—actions that could even be called exemplary tales under existing moral codes—was entirely due to these hidden souls.
These are my arbitrary judgments.
Moreover, this is no mere groping in the study.
All these are thoughts I have heard from my own flesh.

Yozo was still laughing.
Sitting on the bed, he swung his legs idly and laughed self-consciously, mindful of the gauze on his cheek.
Was Kosuge’s story really that funny?
As an example of the sort of stories they found amusing, let us insert a few lines here.
During this vacation, Kosuge had gone skiing to a renowned hot spring resort in the mountains about three ri from his hometown and stayed overnight at an inn there.
Late at night, on his way to the toilet, he passed a young woman staying at the same inn in the hallway.
That was all there was to it.
However, this was a major incident.
For Kosuge, even a mere brush past a woman in passing compelled him to leave an extraordinary favorable impression—he simply couldn’t rest otherwise.
He had no particular plan of action, but in that instant of passing, he threw his entire being into striking a pose.
He genuinely held some expectation toward life.
He contemplated every possible scenario with that woman in an instant, his chest near bursting with emotion.
They experienced such suffocating moments at least once a day.
Therefore, they did not let their guard down.
Even when alone, they maintained their poses.
Even when Kosuge went to the restroom late at night, he properly donned his new blue coat before stepping into the hallway.
After Kosuge passed that young woman, he was deeply glad.
He was glad he had gone out wearing his coat.
Heaving a sigh of relief, when he peered into the large mirror at the end of the corridor, it proved disastrous.
From under his coat, two legs clad in soiled long johns jutted out.

“Good grief,”
he said with a light laugh.
"The long johns had ridden up—the leg hair showed dark through them."
"The face swelled sleep-blown."

Yozo was not truly laughing in his heart. It struck him as perhaps one of Kosuge’s fabrications. Even so, he laughed loudly. Partly out of reciprocation for this friend who had transformed since yesterday and was now striving to open up to him—for that very kindness—Yozo made a show of laughing uproariously. Because Yozo laughed, Hida and Mano seized the moment to laugh as well.

Hida was finally relieved.
He thought he could say anything now.
Not yet, he checked himself.
He had been dawdling.

Carried away, Kosuge instead stated it with ease.

"We fail with women.
"You do too, don't you, Yozo-chan?"

Yozo, still laughing, tilted his head.

“Is that so?”

“That’s right.
“Didn’t die from it.”

“A failure then?”

Hida was so happy, so happy, his chest throbbed.
He demolished the most formidable stone wall with a mere smile.
This strange success too must owe itself to Kosuge's presumptuous magnanimity—Hida felt the impulse to tightly embrace this younger friend.

Hida spread his thin eyebrows wide and clear, stammering as he began to speak.

“Whether it’s a failure or not can’t be stated in a single breath, I think.”
“First of all, the cause isn’t clear.”
This is awkward, he thought.

Kosuge immediately came to the rescue.
“That’s already clear.
“I had a big argument with Hida.
“I think it’s due to an ideological impasse.
“Hida here puts on airs, saying there are other reasons.”
Without a moment’s delay, Hida responded.
“That may be one reason, but it’s not the only one.
“In other words, he was in love.
“There’s no way he’d die with some unpleasant woman.”

From a heart that wanted nothing speculated by Yozo, he spoke hastily without choosing words—yet this very speech rang with artless innocence even to his own ears.
It had been a great success, he secretly felt relieved.

Yozo lowered his long eyelashes.
Hollow pride.
Laziness.
Sycophancy.
Cunning.
Nest of vice.
Fatigue.
Rage.
Murderous intent.
Selfishness.
Fragility.
Deception.
Virus.
A tumult shook his chest.
I thought about saying it all.
He deliberately feigned dejection and muttered.

“In truth, even I don’t understand.
Everything feels like a cause.”

“I understand.
I understand.”

Kosuge was nodding before Yozo’s words had finished.
“Such things do happen.”
“The nurse isn’t here.”
“Did she tactfully make herself scarce?”

I had mentioned this before, but their discussions were conducted more to comfortably arrange the mood of the moment than to exchange each other's thoughts. They spoke not a single truth. Yet while listening to them for a time, there were moments when I made unexpected discoveries. Within their affected words, one could occasionally perceive a sincerity so startling it stole one's breath. It was precisely those words inadvertently let slip that contained something resembling truth. Yozo now muttered "everything"—but was this not precisely the true feelings he had carelessly revealed? In their hearts lay only chaos and an incomprehensible rebellion. Or perhaps it might be called nothing but self-respect—an exquisitely honed self-respect that quivered at even the slightest breeze. The moment they convinced themselves of insult, they writhed as if ready to die. No wonder Yozo grew bewildered when questioned about his suicide's cause—it was everything.

That afternoon, Yozo’s brother arrived at Seishōen Sanatorium.
Yozo’s brother did not resemble him and was imposingly stout.
He was wearing hakama.

When guided by the director and arriving in front of Yozo’s hospital room, he heard cheerful laughter from inside.
Yozo’s brother was pretending not to know.

“Is this the room?”

“Yes. He has already recovered.”

The director answered while opening the door.

Kosuge, startled, jumped down from the bed.
He had been sleeping in Yozo’s place.
Yozo and Hida had been sitting side by side on the sofa playing cards, but both hurriedly stood up.
Mano had been sitting in the chair by the bed knitting, but she too now awkwardly fumbled to put away her tools.

“Since your friends have kindly come to visit, it’s quite lively here.”
The director turned back and whispered this to Yozo’s brother while approaching his side.
“That should suffice.”

“Yes.”
Having answered thus, Yozo was suddenly overcome with misery.

The director’s eyes laughed behind his glasses.

“How about it? How about trying sanatorium life?”

Yozo felt, for the first time, the shame of a criminal.
He answered only with a smile.

During that interval, Yozo’s brother—with meticulous formality—bowed to Mano and Hida while saying “Thank you for your care,” then turned to Kosuge with a serious expression and inquired.
“Did you stay there last night?”

“Yes.”
Kosuge said, scratching his head repeatedly.
“Since the neighboring hospital room was available, Hida and I stayed there together.”

“Then from tonight please come to my inn.”
“I have taken an inn at Enoshima.”
“Mr. Hida—you too.”

“Yes.”
Hida had stiffened.
Fumbling with the three playing cards he held in his hand while replying.

The brother turned toward Yozo with feigned nonchalance.

“Yozo, are you ready?”

“Yeah.”
Exaggeratedly putting on a bitter expression, he nodded.

His brother suddenly became talkative.

“Mr. Hida. Why don’t we all accompany the Director and go out for lunch now? I’ve never actually seen Enoshima myself, you see. I thought we could have the Director show us around. Let’s be off right away. I have the automobile waiting, you see. It’s nice weather.”

I am filled with regret.
All because I introduced two adults, everything has gone completely awry.
The slightly offbeat atmosphere that Yozo, Kosuge, Hida, and I—the four of us—had worked so hard to build up was now withered beyond recognition because of these two adults.

I had wanted to make this novel an atmospheric romance.
I had wanted to create an atmosphere of swirling vortices in those first few pages and then gradually unwind it—that was what I had been praying to do.
Lamenting my clumsiness all the while, I had somehow managed to advance my pen this far.
However, it was complete collapse.

Forgive me! It's a lie. I played dumb. Everything is my own deliberate doing. As I was writing, I grew self-conscious about this whole romance of atmosphere business and deliberately destroyed it all. If I have truly succeeded in bringing about complete collapse, then that would ironically be playing right into my hands. Tasteless. What torments my heart now is this single phrase. If one insists on labeling such a persistent preference—this urge to intimidate others without reason—then perhaps my own attitude too is in poor taste. I don't want to be defeated. I didn't want my innermost self to be laid bare. However, that is likely a futile effort. Ah! Are all writers like this? Even in confession, I embellish my words. Am I not inhuman? Could I ever live a life worthy of being called human? Even as I write this, I am concerned about my own sentences.

I lay everything bare.
In truth, even when making this man called myself appear between each scene's depiction in the novel and having him recount those unspoken matters, there had been cunning calculation behind it.
Through that version of myself, I had wanted to secretly suffuse the work with a peculiar nuance without letting readers notice.
I had prided myself on it being an ultramodern style yet unseen in Japan.
Yet I was defeated.
No—I should have included even this confession of defeat within the novel's original plan.
If possible, I would have preferred to voice that admission somewhat later.
No—in fact, I feel as though I had prepared this very phrase from the very beginning.

Ah, don't believe me anymore.
Don't believe a single word I say.

Why do I write novels?
Do I crave the glory of being an up-and-coming writer?
Or do I want money?
Answer without theatrics.
I want both.
I want them so badly I can't bear it.
Ah, I'm still spouting this brazenly transparent lie.
People swallow such lies without thinking.
Of all lies, this is a vile breed.
Why do I write novels?
What a wretched question I've dredged up.
There's no escaping it.
Though I detest this self-important pretense, I'll venture one answer.
"Revenge."

Let us proceed to the next depiction.

I am an artist of the marketplace.
It is not a work of art.
If that repulsive confession of mine were to impart some nuance to this novel of mine, that would be an unexpected stroke of luck.

Yozo and Mano were left behind.
Yozo burrowed into bed and, blinking repeatedly, was lost in thought.
Mano sat on the sofa and was tidying up the playing cards.
After putting the playing cards into a purple paper box, she said.

“Would that be your brother?”

“Ah,” he answered while staring at the white wall of the high ceiling. “Do I resemble him?”

When a writer loses affection for the object of their depiction, they immediately produce such sloppy sentences. No—I’ll say no more. Quite the artful prose indeed.

“Yes. The nose.”

Yozo let out a loud laugh. The members of Yozo’s family all had long noses that resembled their grandmother’s.

“How old might he be?” Mano also laughed a little and asked in turn.

“My brother?”
He turned face toward Mano.
“He’s young.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Puts on grand airs and struts about like he’s something special.”

Mano suddenly looked up at Yozo's face.
He was speaking with furrowed brows.
She hastily averted her eyes.

"My brother's still tolerable as he is.
It's Father."

He started to say something but closed his mouth.
Yozo was being quiet.
He was becoming my substitute and compromising.

Mano stood up and went to the cupboard in the corner of the hospital room to retrieve her knitting tools.
Returning to her original position, she sat back down in the chair by Yozo's bedside and began knitting while thinking.
It was neither ideology nor love; she was contemplating a cause one step prior to those.

I will say nothing more.
The more I say, the more I find I've said nothing.
I feel as though I have not yet touched upon the truly important matters at all.
That must be obvious.
I have omitted many things.
That too must be obvious.

That writers cannot comprehend their own works' value was common knowledge in the novelist's craft. Though it galled me, I had to admit that fact. I had been a fool to expect effects from my own works through my own efforts. Above all, I should never have gone so far as to verbalize those effects. The moment I put them into words, an entirely different effect arose. The instant I roughly surmised these effects might take such form, yet another new effect leapt forth. I was doomed to play the fool forever chasing after them. Whether it was a worthless piece or not entirely without merit—I resolved not to even attempt knowing that much. Perhaps this novel of mine would produce tremendous value beyond anything I could imagine. These words were ones I had obtained from others. These were not words that had seeped out from my flesh. That was precisely why one might feel compelled to rely on them. To state it plainly—I had lost my confidence.

After the lights came on, Kosuge came alone to the hospital room.
As soon as he entered, he leaned over the face of the sleeping Yozo and whispered.

“I’ve been drinking.”
“Don’t tell Mano.”

Then he suddenly exhaled hard against Yozo’s face.
Drinking alcohol and entering the hospital room was prohibited.

After casting a sidelong glance at Mano, who was continuing her knitting on the sofa behind them, Kosuge exclaimed as if shouting.
“I went sightseeing to Enoshima!”
“That was nice, huh?”
And then immediately lowered his voice and whispered.

“It’s a lie.”

Yozo sat up and settled onto the bed.

"Have you just been drinking all this time?"
"No, doesn't matter."
"Nurse Mano, is this acceptable?"

Mano answered without pausing her knitting, laughing all the while.
"It's not exactly commendable, though."

Kosuge rolled onto his back on the bed.

“We had a discussion with the Director and four others.”
“You know, your brother’s quite the schemer.”
“He’s quite the unexpected operator.”

Yozo remained silent.

“Tomorrow, your brother and Hida are going to the police.”
“They’re going to wrap everything up completely.”
“What a fool Hida is.”
“He was getting all worked up.”
“Hida’s staying over there tonight.”
“I didn’t want to, so I came back.”

“They were badmouthing me, weren’t they.”

“Yeah.”
“They were saying it.”
“They’re saying, ‘A complete idiot.’”
“There’s no telling what he might do next,” they were saying.
“But the old man’s no good either,” he added.
“Nurse Mano, may I smoke?”

“Yes.” Tears threatened to spill, so that was all she answered.

“I can hear the waves—a nice hospital, this.”
Kosuge clenched an unlit cigarette between his teeth and, breathing like a drunkard with ragged gasps, kept his eyes shut for a time.
Before long, he heaved his upper body upright.
“Oh right.”
“I brought the clothes.”
“Left them over there.”
He jerked his chin toward the door.

Yozo cast his eyes on the large furoshiki bundle with a karakusa pattern placed beside the door and frowned once more.
When speaking of blood relations, they would adopt a somewhat sentimental expression.
But this was nothing more than habit.
The education instilled since childhood had merely shaped that expression.
When it came to family, they never failed to recall the word 'property.'
"I can't handle Mother."

“Yeah, your brother said that too.”
“Mother seems the most pitiable.”
“After all, he’s even worrying about clothes for you.”
“It’s true, you know.—Nurse Mano, do you have a match?”
He took the matches from Mano and gazed at the horse’s face drawn on the box, puffing out his cheeks.
“The kimono you’re wearing now was borrowed from the Director, I hear.”

“This?”
“That’s right.”
“The Director’s son’s kimono.”
—Brother probably said something else too.
Badmouthing me.

“Don’t get all bent out of shape.”
He lit a cigarette.
“Brother’s being rather novel.”
“He understands you.”
“No—or maybe not.”
“He puts on quite the act of being a long-suffering man.”
“When we all discussed the cause of this whole affair of yours—well, they laughed.”
He blew a smoke ring.
“As Brother’s theory goes, this happened because Yozo ran out of money from his debauchery.”
“He says it with a straight face.”
“Or perhaps—and this is difficult for me to say as your brother—you must have contracted some shameful disease and gone off the deep end.”
He turned his alcohol-clouded eyes toward Yozo.
“Well?”
“No—it might actually be you.”

Since Kosuge was the only one staying over that night, they decided after conferring that there was no need to trouble themselves with borrowing the adjacent hospital room, settling instead on having him sleep in the same room. Kosuge lay down on the sofa beside Yozo. The green velvet-upholstered sofa contained a mechanism allowing it—however questionably—to convert into a bed, one Mano had been using nightly. With Kosuge having claimed her usual sleeping place that day, she borrowed a thin-edged mat from the hospital office and spread it out in the northwest corner of the room—precisely beneath Yozo's feet. Then Mano, having unearthed a low two-panel folding screen from some unknown source, enclosed her modest sleeping quarters with it.

“How cautious.”
Kosuge lay looking at the weathered screen and snickered quietly to himself.
“They’ve painted the seven autumn herbs here.”

Mano wrapped the lamp above Yozo’s head with a furoshiki to dim it, bid both of them goodnight, and retreated behind the screen.

Yozo felt oppressed in bed.

“It’s cold.”
He tossed and turned on the bed.

“Yeah.”
Kosuge also pursed his lips and nodded in agreement.
“I’ve sobered up.”

Mano coughed lightly.
“Shall I prepare something for you?”

Yozo closed his eyes and answered.

“Me?”
“No need.”
“I’m suffocating.”
“The sound of the waves sticks in my ears.”

Kosuge thought Yozo was pitiable.

That was entirely an adult emotion.
Needless to say, what deserved pity wasn't this Yozo lying here—it was oneself when sharing Yozo's circumstances, or perhaps the general abstraction of such predicaments.
Adults, thoroughly conditioned by such emotions, found sympathy effortless.
They took pride in their own susceptibility to tears.
Young people too occasionally wallowed in these facile sentiments.
If adults gained such conditioning through compromise with life—to phrase it charitably—then where exactly did youths learn their mimicry?
From this sort of trivial novel?

“Nurse Mano, tell me a story.”
“Don’t you have any interesting stories?”

Out of meddlesome concern to divert Yozo’s mood, Kosuge wheedled Nurse Mano.

“Well...”
From behind the screen, Mano answered with a laugh.

“Even a scary story would do.”
They were always itching to shudder.

Mano seemed to be thinking something and did not respond for a while.

“It’s a secret, you know.”
With that preface, she suppressed her voice and laughed.
“It’s a ghost story, I’ll have you know.”
“Mr. Kosuge—are you quite ready?”

“By all means!”
He meant it.

An incident from the summer when Mano was nineteen, newly become a nurse.
A young man who had attempted suicide over a woman was found and admitted to a hospital, where Mano attended him.
The patient had taken poison.
His entire body was mottled with purple spots.
There had been no hope of recovery.
That evening, he briefly regained consciousness.
At that moment, seeing the many small shore crabs scuttling along the stone wall outside the window, he said, "How beautiful."
Crabs in that area have red shells while living.
"If I recover, I'll catch them and take them home," he murmured before losing consciousness again.
That night, the patient vomited two basins full and died.
Until relatives came from his hometown, Mano stayed alone with him in the hospital room.
For nearly an hour, she endured it sitting in a corner chair.
Behind her came a faint rustling.
When she stayed still, it came again.
This time she heard it clearly - something like footsteps.
Resolutely turning around, she found a small red crab right behind her.
Mano stared at it and began to weep.

“How strange it was.”
“There truly was a crab there.”
“A live crab.”
“At that moment, I thought to call another nurse.”
“Even if I alone weren’t working, we could manage just fine at home.”
“When I told my father that, he laughed heartily, but... — Mr. Kosuge, what do you think?”

“That’s intense.”
Kosuge exclaimed, putting on an exaggerated show of playfulness.
“You mean that hospital?”

Mano did not answer, turned over restlessly, and muttered as if to herself.

"You know, even with Mr. Oba’s case, I considered refusing the hospital’s summons."
"It was so troubling, you see."
"But when I came and saw, I was relieved."
"To be in such good health that he would go to the restroom alone from the very beginning—that’s what he does."

"No—the hospital."
"Isn’t it this hospital here?"

Mano paused slightly before answering.

“It’s here.
“It’s here, you see.
But please keep that a secret, won’t you?
Because it would affect my credibility.”

Yozo let out a drowsy-sounding voice.
“Surely it’s not this room?”

“No.”

“Surely not,”
Kosuge parroted.
“It’s not the bed we slept in last night, is it?”

Mano started laughing.

“No.
It’s perfectly all right.
If you’re going to worry so much, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s Room I.”
Kosuge quietly raised his head.
“The only room where you can see the stone wall from the window is that one.
It’s Room I.
You know, that’s the room with the girl.
She looks adorable.”

“Please don’t make a fuss and go to sleep now.
It’s a lie.
Just a made-up story.”

Yozo was thinking of something else. He had been thinking of Son's ghost. He had been picturing her beautiful form in his heart. Yozo was often detached like this. To them, the word "God" was nothing more than a casual epithet—a blend of mockery and goodwill bestowed upon foolish individuals—but perhaps this was because they themselves had drawn too near to God. If I were to touch upon this so-called "problem of God" in such a careless manner, you would surely condemn me with harsh words like "shallow" or "facile." Ah, forgive me. No matter how wretched the writer, each secretly yearns to draw their novel's protagonist closer to God. Therefore, I shall speak. He alone resembles God. To Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who releases her beloved owl into the twilight sky and watches with a secret smile.

The next day, the sanatorium was abuzz from morning.
Snow was falling.
About a thousand low shore pines in the sanatorium’s front garden were uniformly cloaked in snow, and a thin layer settled on the thirty-some stone steps descending from them, extending onto the sandy beach beyond.
Falling and stopping intermittently, the snow continued until around noon.

Yozo lay prone on his bed, sketching the snowy landscape.
He had Mano buy charcoal paper and pencils, and once the snow had completely stopped, he set to work.

The hospital room was bright with reflected snow.
Kosuge lay sprawled on the sofa, reading a magazine.
Occasionally he would crane his neck to peek at Yozo's drawing.
He felt a vague reverence toward this thing called art.
It was an emotion born solely from trust in Yozo.
Kosuge had known Yozo since childhood.
He had always thought him somewhat peculiar.
While playing together, he'd arbitrarily concluded that all of Yozo's peculiarities stemmed from cleverness.
Kosuge had liked Yozo since boyhood—Yozo with his dandyish lies, his lechery, even his cruelty.
He'd particularly loved those blazing eyes of student-days Yozo whenever he listened to teachers' gossip.
Yet his manner of affection differed from Hida's—it was an attitude of detached appreciation.
In other words, he was shrewd.
He would follow along until reaching his limit, then grow disgusted and turn aside to observe from the sidelines.
This must have been what gave Kosuge that certain novelty surpassing even Yozo and Hida.
If Kosuge held any reverence for art at all, it meant precisely the same as straightening one's collar while donning a blue overcoat—a heart desperate to find some object of expectation within this endless daylight existence.
Since a man of Yozo's caliber was creating it drenched in sweat, it must surely be something extraordinary.
He merely thought this lightly.
In that regard, he still trusted Yozo.

But sometimes he was disappointed.
Now, even as Kosuge stole glances at Yozo’s sketch, he felt let down.
What was drawn on the charcoal paper was merely a scene of sea and island.
And it was an ordinary sea and island at that.

Kosuge gave up and buried himself in reading the magazine’s serialized tale.
The hospital room lay hushed.

Mano was absent.
In the laundry room, she washed Yozo’s woolen shirt.
Yozo had worn this shirt when he entered the sea.
The faint scent of brine still clung to it.

When afternoon came, Hida returned from the police.
He flung open the hospital room door.

“Hey,”
Seeing Yozo sketching, he exclaimed grandly.
“You’re working hard. Good.”
“For an artist, working remains your true strength.”

While saying this, he approached the bed and stole a glance over Yozo’s shoulder at the drawing.
Yozo hurriedly folded the charcoal paper in two.
While folding it further into four, he said with a bashful air:

“It’s no good.
“When I don’t draw for a while, my head races ahead.”

Hida, still wearing his overcoat, sat down at the edge of the bed.

“Maybe so.”
“You’re rushing it.”
“But that’s fine.”
“That’s because you’re passionate about art.”
“Well, if that’s how you see it—what exactly did you draw?”

Yozo kept his cheek propped on his hand and jerked his chin toward the view beyond the glass door.

“I drew the sea.”
“The sky and sea were pitch black, with only the island white.”
“While drawing, I started feeling pretentious and stopped.”
“The concept itself is amateurish from the outset.”

“Not bad at all. All great artists have something amateurish about them. That’s exactly how it should be. You start as an amateur, turn pro, then become an amateur again. Take Rodin—he caught a glimpse of the beauty in amateurs. Or maybe that’s not quite right.”

“I think I’ll make the painting better.” After tucking the folded charcoal paper into his coat, Yozo spoke as if draping his words over Hida’s earlier remarks. “Paintings are too tedious for their own good. Sculpture’s no different.”

Hida swept back his long hair and agreed too readily. “I can understand that feeling too.”

“If possible, I’d rather write poetry. Poetry’s honest.”

“Yeah. Poetry’s good.”

“But it’s still boring in the end.” I’ll make everything utterly boring, he resolved. “What suits me best might be becoming a patron. Earn money, gather up good artists like you, and dote on them all. What do you think? Art’s become shameful.” Still propping his cheek as he gazed at the sea, he finished speaking and quietly awaited the reaction to his own words.

“Not bad. That does sound like a proper way to live. We need people like that too, you know. Honestly.” As he spoke, Hida swayed unsteadily. Being unable to counter anything, I grew disgusted with how thoroughly I resembled some cheap entertainer. His much-vaunted artistic pride might have finally elevated him to this height. Hida secretly tensed for the coming words.

“What about the police?”

Kosuge suddenly interjected.
He had been expecting a non-committal answer.

Hida’s agitation found its outlet there.
“You’re indicted.”
“The charge is aiding suicide.”
He immediately regretted saying it.
It felt too cruel.
“But ultimately—it’ll likely be suspended.”

Kosuge, who had been lying sprawled on the sofa until then, abruptly sat up and clapped his hands with a sharp smack.
“This has gotten troublesome.”
He had tried to make light of it.
But it didn't work.

Yozo twisted his body sharply and lay on his back.

You all, who likely felt indignant that their attitude remained far too carefree for people who had just killed someone, would finally shout in triumph there.
Serves you right.
However, that is too cruel.
What carefree existence could there possibly be?
If only you could understand this sorrow—of perpetually dwelling beside despair while painstakingly cultivating the fragile clown’s flower, shielding it from even the slightest breeze!

Hida, flustered by the effect of his own words, lightly tapped Yozo's leg from atop the futon.

“It’s fine.
It’s fine.”

Kosuge lay back down on the sofa again.

“Crime of aiding suicide?”
Still forcing cheerfulness.
“Such a law even exists?”

Yozo said while withdrawing his legs.

“There is.
That’s prison time.
And you call yourself a law student.”

Hida smiled sadly.

"It's fine. Your brother's handling it well. Your brother, for all that, has his admirable qualities. He's been very earnest about it."

"He's a real operator."
Kosuge solemnly closed his eyes.
"You might not need to worry. He's quite the schemer."

"Idiot."
Hida burst out laughing.

He got down from the bed, took off his coat, and hung it on the nail by the door.

“I heard a good story.”
He straddled the round Seto brazier near the door and spoke.
“The woman’s partner,” he began hesitantly,
then lowered his eyes before continuing.
“That man came to the police today.”
“I spoke with my brother about it, but when I later heard his account of their conversation—it struck me.”
“He said he didn’t want a single penny. Just wanted to meet me.”
“My brother refused him.”
“‘The patient remains agitated,’ he told him by way of refusal.”
“Then that man made such a wretched face and said—‘Then give your brother my regards. Don’t trouble yourself over us. Just focus on recovering your health...’” His voice died.

His chest fluttered at his own words.
It was from pent-up resentment toward Yozo's brother—who had recounted how the partner looked every bit the destitute unemployed man in his shabby clothes, even letting a scornful smirk play vividly at his lips as he spoke—that he had deliberately exaggerated and made the story beautiful.

"He should just let us meet."
"Quit his fucking meddling."
Yozo stared at his right palm.

Hida shook his large frame once.

"But—better not meet."
"After all, better stay strangers now."
"He already returned to Tokyo."
"Your brother saw him off at the station."
"Gave two hundred yen in condolence money, they say."
"Made him write some oath about cutting ties."

"He's a sharp one."
Kosuge thrust out his thin lower lip.
"Just two hundred yen?"
"That's something."

Hida fiercely scowled, his round face glistening greasily from the brazier's heat.
They lived in mortal fear of having their intoxications interrupted.
Therefore, they too acknowledged each other's intoxications.
They strove to match their rhythm.
This was the unspoken understanding between them.
Kosuge was now breaking it.
Kosuge hadn't thought Hida would be so moved.
He had found the partner's weakness exasperating, and as for Yozo's brother who exploited it—what a brother indeed—he'd heard it all as just another tiresome tale of worldly affairs.

Hida started ambling and came over to Yozo’s bedside. He pressed his nose against the glass-paned door and gazed at the sea beneath the overcast sky.

"That person is noble."
"It’s not because your brother’s a schemer."
"Don’t you go thinking that’s how it is."
"He’s truly noble."
"It’s the beauty born from the human heart’s resignation."
"They cremated her this morning, but he apparently returned alone carrying the urn."
"I keep picturing him on that train."

Kosuge finally understood.
Immediately, he let out a low sigh.
"A noble tale."

"A noble tale, isn't it? A fine story, right?"
Hida jerked his face toward Kosuge.
His mood had lifted.
"When I encounter stories like this, I feel the joy of being alive."

Resolutely, I make an appearance.
Otherwise, I cannot continue writing this.
This novel is riddled with confusion.
I myself am staggering.
I was at a loss with Yozo, at a loss with Kosuge, at a loss with Hida.
They grew impatient with my clumsy brush and took flight of their own accord.
I clung to their muddy boots, shouting "Wait! Wait!"
If I didn't reorganize my approach here and now—first and foremost—I couldn't bear it.

Fundamentally, this novel isn't interesting.
It's all posture.
If it's a novel like this, whether I write one page or a hundred pages, it makes no difference.
Yet I had steeled myself for this from the very beginning.
As I wrote, I'd clung to the hope that at least one unvarnished truth might surface.
I'm being affected.
Affected though I am—might there not linger some redeeming quality?
Despairing at my own pompous, malodorous prose, I rummaged through every corner seeking something—anything—worth salvaging.
Gradually, my limbs began locking in place.
I was finished.
Ah, novels demand to be written in utter vacancy!
Through beautiful sentiments do people craft wretched literature.
What arrant nonsense.
May supreme calamity strike these very words.
How could one possibly write fiction without descending into stupor?
When each word and phrase rebounds against your breast with ten discordant meanings, you must splinter your pen and cast it aside.
Yozo needn't posture so grandly—nor Hida, nor Kosuge.
Their essential natures lie already exposed.
Mellow, mellow.
No thought, no mind.

Late that night, Yozo's brother came to the hospital room.
Yozo was playing cards with Hida and Kosuge, the three of them.
When his brother had first come there yesterday, they must have been playing cards as well.
However, they weren't just fiddling with playing cards all day long.
Rather, they disliked playing cards to such an extent.
They never brought them out unless thoroughly bored.
Moreover, games in which one couldn't fully express their individuality—they would surely avoid those.
They favored sleight of hand.
They would devise various card tricks of their own invention and perform them.
And then they deliberately let the trick be exposed. They laughed.
And then there was more.
They placed a playing card face down, and one of them said, “Now, what is this?”
“Queen of Spades.”
“Knight of Clubs.”
Each of them spouted their own inventively contrived nonsense.
They flipped over the card.
They had never once guessed correctly, yet they believed that someday they would hit it exactly right.
How delightful it would be if they guessed right.
In other words, they disliked drawn-out contests.
All or nothing.

They loved decisive contests.
So even when they took out the playing cards, they wouldn't keep them in hand for ten minutes.
Ten minutes a day.
In that brief span of time, his brother came twice.

The brother entered the hospital room and slightly furrowed his brow.
He had mistakenly thought they were playing cards as usual in their carefree manner.
Such misfortunes are common in life.
Yozo had felt this same species of misfortune during his art school days.
Once during French class, he had yawned three times - and at each precise moment found his eyes meeting the professor's.
It had indeed been exactly three instances.
The elderly professor - among Japan's foremost French scholars - upon this third occasion said in a voice strained beyond tolerance:
"You do nothing but yawn during my lectures."
"You yawn a hundred times per hour."
To the professor's mind came vivid conviction that he'd factually tallied this excessive tally.

Ah, behold the fruit of void thought and mind.
I write on and on without end.
I must regroup my forces anew.
That state of writing emptied of worldly thoughts remains utterly beyond my reach.
What manner of novel will this become.
Let me read it again from the beginning.

I was writing about the seaside sanatorium.
This area seemed to have quite a pleasant view.
Moreover, the people in the sanatorium weren't all villains.
Especially the three youths—ah, these were our heroes.
This was it.
Difficult logic wasn't worth a damn.
I was merely asserting these three.
Alright, that was decided.
I'd force it through.
Don't say anything.

Yozo’s brother gave a brief greeting to everyone.
Then he whispered something to Hida.
Hida nodded and signaled with his eyes to Kosuge and Mano.

After waiting for the three to leave the hospital room, the brother began to speak.

“The light’s dim.”

“Yeah.
They don’t let us use bright electric lights here at the sanatorium.
Won’t you sit?”

Yozo sat down on the sofa first and said that.

“Oh.”
Yozo’s brother did not sit down, instead pacing about the narrow hospital room while glancing up at the dim light bulb with apparent worry.
“It seems my side has been sorted out.”

“Thank you.”
Yozo muttered this under his breath and gave a slight bow of his head.

“I don’t give it any thought.
But going home now will bring another uproar.”
He wasn’t wearing hakama today.
The black haori somehow lacked its cord.
“I’ll do what I can, but you should write Father a properly composed letter too.
You all seem carefree, but this is a grave matter.”

Yozo did not respond.
He picked up one of the playing cards scattered across the sofa and stared at it.

“If you don’t want to submit it, you don’t have to.”
“You’re going to the police the day after tomorrow.”
“The police had been considerate enough to postpone your interrogation until now.”
“Today, Hida and I were questioned as witnesses.”
“When they asked about your usual conduct, I answered that you were quiet.”
“When they inquired about any ideological suspicions, I said there were absolutely none.”

Yozo’s brother stopped pacing, planted himself before Yozo’s brazier, and held his large hands over the charcoal fire.
Yozo gazed vacantly at the faintly trembling hands.

“They asked about the woman too.
“I told them I knew nothing at all.”
“Hida was apparently interrogated about mostly the same things.”
“It seems to align with my testimony.”
“You should just tell the truth.”

Yozo had discerned the subtext of his brother’s words.
However, he pretended not to notice.

“There’s no need to say anything unnecessary.”
“Just answer clearly what they ask you.”

“Will I be charged?”
Yozo muttered low, stroking the edge of a playing card with his right index finger.

“I can’t say. That I can’t say.”
He strengthened his tone as he spoke.
“Since you’ll likely be held at the police station for four or five days regardless, prepare yourself accordingly.”
“I’ll come to fetch you here the morning after tomorrow.”
“We’ll go to the police together.”

The brother lowered his eyes to the charcoal fire and fell silent for a while.
The sound of melting snow droplets mingled with the roar of the waves.

“As for this incident itself—”
Abruptly, the brother spoke out.
Then, in a tone feigning nonchalance, he continued smoothly:
“You need to start giving proper thought to your future.”
“It’s not as if our family has unlimited funds.”
“This year’s harvest was disastrous.”
“Telling you changes nothing, but our bank’s in peril too—it’s chaos.”
“You might laugh, but whether artist or otherwise, livelihood must come first.”
“Why not reinvent yourself and make a proper effort?”
“I’ll take my leave now.”
“Have Hida and Kosuge lodge at my inn.”
“Their nightly commotions here will bring complications.”

“Are all my friends doing alright?”

Yozo lay facing deliberately away from Mano.
From that night onward, Mano resumed sleeping on the sofa bed as before.

“Yes.—The one you mentioned, Mr. Kosuge,”
She turned over quietly.
“He’s quite the interesting one, isn’t he.”

“Ah.”
“Despite that, he’s still young.”
“Since he’s three years younger than me—twenty-two.”
“The same age as my dead brother.”
“That bastard keeps imitating only my worst traits.”
“Hida’s admirable.”
“There’s another one too.”
“Steadfast.”
After a pause, he added in a hushed voice:
“They exhaust themselves cleaning up my messes every time I pull these stunts.”
“Forcing themselves to play along with us.”
“Stalwart in other matters yet timid around us alone.”
“No good.”

Mano did not answer.

“Shall I tell you about that woman?”

Still facing away from Mano, he deliberately spoke those words slowly.

Yozo had a tragic habit—whenever he felt socially awkward, he knew no way to avoid it, instead being compelled to recklessly amplify that discomfort to its utmost extreme.

"It's a stupid story."

Before Mano could say anything, Yozo began to speak.
“You must have already heard it from someone.”
“Her name was Son.”
“She worked at a bar in Ginza.”
“Honestly, I only went to that bar three times—no, four times at most.”
“Neither Hida nor Kosuge knew anything about this woman.”
“I didn’t tell them either... you see?”
“It’s a stupid story.”
“The woman died from life’s hardships.”
“Until the moment of death, it seems we were thinking completely different things.”
“Before jumping into the sea, Son said something like ‘You resemble my teacher.’”
“She had a common-law husband.”
“He’d been an elementary school teacher until two or three years ago.”
I wonder why I tried to die with that person.
After all, I must have loved her.
One must no longer believe his words.
Why are they so poor at speaking about themselves?
“Even someone like me was involved in left-wing work.”
“Distributing leaflets, staging demonstrations—doing things that didn’t suit me.”
“Ridiculous.”

"But it was truly agonizing."
I had been lured by nothing but the vainglory of being some enlightened vanguard.
This isn't me.
No matter how I thrash about, doesn't everything just keep disintegrating?
Someone like me will probably wind up a beggar soon enough.
If my family went bankrupt, we'd starve from that very day.
"I can't do a single decent thing—yes, a beggar's what I'll become." Ah, this colossal misery—the more I spoke, the more I felt myself a dishonest fraud!
"I believe in destiny. No pointless struggling."
"The truth is... I want to paint."
"I want to paint like mad."
He scratched his head vigorously and laughed.
"If only I could paint something worthwhile..."

"If I could paint a decent picture...," he said. Moreover, he said it while laughing. The young men couldn't say anything when they got serious. Above all, they mask their true feelings with laughter.

Dawn broke.
The sky held not a wisp of cloud.
Yesterday’s snow had mostly melted, leaving only mouse-gray remnants in the shadows beneath pine trees and the corners of stone steps.
The sea was filled with mist, and from deep within that mist, the sound of fishing boats’ engines could be heard here and there.

The Director visited Yozo’s hospital room early in the morning. After carefully examining Yozo’s body, he blinked his small eyes behind his glasses and said:

“It should be mostly fine.”
“But do take care.”
“I’ll make sure to properly inform the police as well.”
“You’re still not fully recovered yet.”
“Miss Mano, you can remove the gauze from his face now.”

Mano immediately peeled off Yozo’s gauze. The wound had healed. Even the scab had come off, leaving only mottled red and white patches.

“I know this may sound impertinent, but from now on, please apply yourself diligently.”

Having said that, the Director turned his bashful-looking eyes toward the sea.

Yozo, too, was struck by an uncomfortable thought.
Remaining seated on the bed, he silently adjusted his removed clothes and redressed himself.

At that moment, with a loud burst of laughter, the door swung open and Hida and Kosuge came tumbling into the hospital room.
Everyone exchanged morning greetings.
The Director also exchanged morning greetings with the two, then spoke haltingly.

“Today is the day. I do feel some regret indeed.”

After the Director had left, Kosuge was the first to speak up.

“What a smooth operator,” Kosuge said. “Face like an octopus.” They took an obsessive interest in people’s faces—tried to judge a person’s entire worth by their features alone. “There’s a portrait of him in the dining hall,” he added. “Medals pinned all over his chest.”

“Awful painting,” Hida retorted, then stalked out to the veranda. He wore his brother’s hand-me-downs that day—sturdy brown fabric that hung heavily on his frame. Adjusting his collar with fussy precision, he sank into a wicker chair.

“Looking at you like this，Hida，you’ve got quite the stately air about you.”
Kosuge also went out to the veranda.
“Yozo-chan.”
“How about a game of cards?”

Carrying chairs out to the veranda，the three of them began an incomprehensible game.

Midway through the game，Kosuge muttered earnestly.

“Hida’s putting on airs，isn’t he?”

“Idiot.”
“You’re the one.”
“What’s with those hands of yours?”

The three began chuckling softly and simultaneously stole glances at the neighboring veranda.
The patients from Room I and Room Ro lay on their sunbathing beds, faces flushed as they laughed at the trio’s antics.

“A complete failure. Did you know?”

Kosuge opened his mouth wide and signaled to Yozo with his eyes.
The trio burst into uproarious laughter, their voices ringing out.
They often performed this sort of clowning.
When Kosuge suggests playing cards, Yozo and Hida already grasp the hidden scheme.
They know the entire plot up to the curtain call by heart.
Whenever they discovered a naturally beautiful stage setting, they would inexplicably feel compelled to perform.
It might have been meant as commemoration.

In this instance, the stage's backdrop was the morning sea.
Yet this very laughter spawned an incident whose magnitude not even they could have foreseen.
Mano had been reprimanded by the sanatorium's head nurse.
Scarcely five minutes had passed since the laughter began when Mano was called to the head nurse's quarters and sternly ordered to maintain silence.
Tears brimming in her eyes, she fled the room to inform the three men lounging about playing cards in the hospital ward of what had transpired.

The three were so dejected it hurt, and for a while they simply exchanged glances. The voice of reality had come crashing in, scoffing at their ecstatic farce as if to say, “Enough already.”
This could even prove nearly fatal.

“No, it’s nothing at all.”
Mano said, trying instead to encourage them.
“There are no critically ill patients in this ward, and besides, just yesterday when I met the mother from Room Ro in the hallway, she said it was nice to have some liveliness and seemed quite pleased.”
“Every day, we end up laughing at your stories—that’s what she said.”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s nothing to worry about.”

“No,”
Kosuge stood up from the sofa.
“This isn’t right.
Because of us, you were shamed.
Why doesn’t that head nurse say it to us directly?
Bring her here!
If they hate us this much, they should just discharge us right away.
We’ll check out anytime.”

All three of them, in that sudden moment, seriously resolved to check out.
Yozo particularly envisioned from afar the cheerful figures of four people fleeing by automobile along the beach.

Hida also stood up from the sofa and said, laughing.
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s all go storm into the head nurse’s office?”
“Scolding us like that—how idiotic.”

“Let’s check out.”
Kosuge gently kicked the door.
“Such a stingy hospital isn’t any fun.”
“I don’t mind being scolded.”
“But it’s the attitude they have before even scolding us that I can’t stand.”
“They must’ve been thinking of us as some kind of delinquents all along.”
“They think we’re just dimwitted, bourgeois-stinking, smooth-talking ordinary modern boys.”

Having finished speaking, he kicked the door a bit harder than before. Then, as if unable to hold back, he burst out laughing.

Yozo collapsed onto the bed with a heavy thud.

“Well then, I suppose I’m what you’d call a fair-skinned romantic idealist.”
“No more.”

They still had their guts churning with rage at these barbarians’ insults, yet soberly reconsidered and attempted to casually brush it off.
They were always like this.

But Mano was straightforward.
Leaning back against the wall beside the door with both arms twisted behind her, her curled-up upper lip deliberately pursed tightly, she said.

“That’s exactly how it is.”
“It’s utterly unreasonable.”
“Last night too—she gathered a crowd of nurses in her office and made such a ruckus playing karuta!”

“That’s right.” “She was clattering away past twelve.” “Bit of an idiot.”

Yozo Oba muttered this while picking up a single sheet of charcoal paper scattered by his bedside and, lying on his back, began to doodle on it.

“It’s because you’re doing bad things yourselves that you can’t see what’s good in others. It’s only a rumor, but they say the Head Nurse is the Director’s mistress.”

“I see.”
“She has her merits.”
Kosuge was overjoyed.
They regarded others’ scandals as virtues.
They found this admirable.
“Did his medals get him a mistress?”
“There’s some merit to that.”

“Truly, everyone—you speak of innocent things and laugh about them. Don’t you realize?”
“Please don’t concern yourselves—it would be far better for you to make a great commotion.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“It’s only been a single day, you know.”
“Truly, all of you have such fine upbringings and have never been scolded by anyone, yet...”
She covered her face with one hand and suddenly began to cry softly.
Crying, she opened the door.

Hida stopped her and whispered.
“Going to the Head Nurse’s office won’t help.”
“There now.”
“It’s nothing at all.”

Covering her face with both hands, she nodded two or three times in quick succession and stepped out into the corridor.

“What a moralist.”
After Mano left, Kosuge smirked and sat down on the sofa.
“She’s gone and started crying.
“Got carried away by her own words.”
“Even if she goes around spouting all that pretentious grown-up talk, still just a woman in the end.”

“Acting strange.”
Hida trudged around the narrow hospital room.
“From the start, I thought she was acting strange. How odd.”
“Because she tried to run out crying—startled me.”
“Couldn’t have gone to the Head Nurse’s office, could she?”

“That’s not true.”
Yozo Oba feigned a composed demeanor as he answered and tossed the doodled charcoal paper toward Kosuge.

“The Head Nurse’s portrait?”
Kosuge doubled over in raucous laughter.

“Let me see.”
Hida peered at the charcoal paper while remaining standing.
“A she-monster, isn’t she?”
“It’s a shoddy job.”
“This thing.”
“Does it look like her?”

“It’s the spitting image.”
“She once came to this hospital room too with the Director.”
“Skillfully done.”
“Hand over the pencil.”
Kosuge borrowed a pencil from Yozo and added to the charcoal paper.
“This is where we’ll sprout horns like so.”
“Now it’s really starting to look like her.”
“Shall we post it on the Head Nurse’s office door?”

“Let’s go out for a walk.”
Yozo Oba got down from the bed and stretched.
While stretching, he muttered furtively.
“Master of Punch cartoons.”

Master of Punch cartoons.
I'd grown tired of this.
Was this not a popular novel?
This was an episode I began with the faint hope it might serve as an antidote—for my own nerves that stiffen so readily, and likely for yours of similar disposition too—but it seems this attempt had proven far too naive.
Were my novel to become a classic—ah, had I gone mad?—you would all find even this commentary of mine an obstruction. You would generously offer presumptuous conjectures about matters the author never conceived, then loudly proclaim the very reasons it became a masterpiece.
Ah, how fortunate are dead great authors.
The foolish author who lives on sweats over appending nothing but misguided annotations to his work, hoping even one more person might come to love it.
And so he creates this clumsy hackwork cluttered with annotations.
To dismissively say "Do as you please"—I lacked such resolute spirit.
I'd never become a proper writer.
Still too soft after all.
That's right.
Ah, what a discovery I'd made.
This weakness sprang from my very core.
It was precisely within this frailty that I found temporary respite.
Ah, none of it mattered anymore.
Leave me be.
The clown's flower—or whatever one might call it—seemed to have withered there after all.
Moreover, it had withered vulgarly, uglily, filthily.
Longing for perfection.

Invitation to a masterpiece.
"I've had enough.
Creator of miracles.
You wretch!"

Mano slipped into the washroom.
She resolved to cry her fill.
Yet found herself unable to weep that much after all.
Peering into the washroom mirror, she wiped her tears, tidied her hair, then went out to take a late breakfast in the dining hall.

Near the dining hall entrance, the university student from Room He sat alone at a table, an empty soup plate placed before him, his posture slumped in dejection.

He smiled at Mano.
“The patient seems to be in good spirits.”

Mano stopped and, while firmly grasping the edge of the table, answered.

“Yes, he’s been saying nothing but innocent things and making us laugh.”

“Then that’s good.
A painter, you say?”

“Yes.
“He’s always saying he wants to paint magnificent paintings.”
She started to speak, then blushed to the tips of her ears.
“He’s serious, you know.
“Because he’s so earnest—because he’s so terribly earnest—that’s precisely why such painful things occur, you see.”

“That’s right.
“That’s right.”
The university student also flushed crimson as he wholeheartedly agreed.

The university student had become increasingly magnanimous now that his discharge had recently been decided.

How's this for sweetness?
Would you all despise such a woman?
Damn you!
Laugh at how old-fashioned it is!
Ah, even respite has grown shameful to me.
I cannot love even one woman without annotations.
A foolish man bungles even his rest.

"That's the spot."
"That's the rock."

Yozo pointed at the large flat rock glimpsed flickering through the withered branches of a pear tree. Patches of yesterday’s snow lingered in its crevices.

"That’s where we jumped from."
Yozo said, rolling his eyes comically wide like a clown.

Kosuge remained silent.
Was he truly speaking unaffectedly? Kosuge tried to gauge Yozo’s state of mind.
Yozo wasn’t speaking nonchalantly either, but he possessed the artifice to say it without sounding unnatural.

“Shall we head back?”
Hida gathered up the hem of his kimono with both hands in a swift motion.

The three of them began walking, churning up the sandy beach.
The sea lay calm.
Bathed in midday sun, it shone white.

Yozo threw a stone into the sea.

"What a relief," he said. "If you jumped now, nothing would matter anymore." Debts, the Academy, hometown, regrets, masterpieces, shame, Marxism—and friends too, forests and flowers—none of it would matter anymore. When I realized that, I laughed up there on that rock. "What a relief."

Kosuge, trying to conceal his agitation, began frantically gathering shells.

"Don't tempt me." Hida forced out a laugh. "Bad taste."

Yozo also began to laugh.
The three's footsteps crunched crisply and pleasantly resounded in everyone's ears.

“Don’t be angry. That last part was a bit of an exaggeration.” Yozo walked with his shoulder brushing against Hida’s. “But this much alone holds true. The woman—what did she whisper before jumping in?”

Kosuge narrowed his eyes—burning with curiosity yet feigning nonchalance—and deliberately walked apart from the two.

“It still clings to my ear. ‘I want to speak in country dialect,’ she said. ‘The women’s country lies at the southern edge.’”

“No good! That’s too refined for me.”

“True.
“You—it’s true.”
“Hah.
“That’s all that woman was.”

A large fishing boat had been beached on the sandy shore and was resting there.
Beside it lay two magnificent fish baskets that appeared seven or eight shaku in diameter.
Kosuge threw the shells he had gathered with all his might at the black hull of the ship.

The three of them were feeling awkward to the point of suffocation.
If this silence had continued for another minute, they might have nonchalantly leapt into the sea.

Kosuge suddenly shouted.

“Look! Look!”
He pointed at the shore ahead.
“Room I and Room Ro!”

Holding seasonally inappropriate white parasols, two girls walked slowly toward them.

"Well, look what we've discovered."
Yozo too was seized by a sense of revival.

"Should we strike up a conversation?"
Kosuge lifted one foot to shake the sand from his shoe and peered into Yozo's face.
At the first command, he was about to dash out.

"Stop it, stop it."
With a stern expression, Hida gripped Kosuge's shoulder.

The parasols came to a stop.
They conversed for a while, but then abruptly turned their backs to them and began walking quietly again.

“Shall we go after them?”
This time Yozo began acting playfully.
He glanced at Hida’s downcast face.
“Fine.”

Hida was unbearably lonely.
He now clearly felt his own withered blood gradually growing distant from these two friends.
Could it be from life? he wondered.
Hida’s circumstances were rather strained.

“Still, it’s nice though.”
Kosuge shrugged in Western fashion.
He strove to somehow deftly patch over the situation.
“They must’ve seen us walking and gotten curious.”
“They’re young after all.”
“They look cute.”
A peculiar sensation came over him.
Oh—they’re gathering shells.
“They’re copying me.”

Hida reconsidered and smiled.
He met Yozo’s apologetic eyes.
They both flushed.
They understood.
Their hearts were full of wanting to care for each other.
They cherish frailty.

The three of them, blown by the faintly warm sea breeze, walked while gazing at the distant parasols.

Far below the white buildings of the sanatorium, Mano stood waiting for their return.
Leaning against a low gatepost, she squinted as she held her right hand to her forehead.

On the final night, Mano was elated.
Even after lying down, she chattered at length about her humble family and distinguished ancestors.
As the night deepened, Yozo grew withdrawn.
True to form, he turned his back to Mano, replying absently while thinking of other things.

Eventually, Mano began to talk about the scar on her eyelid.

"When I was three,"
She had tried to speak nonchalantly but faltered.
Her voice caught.
"They say I overturned a lamp and got burned.
It healed all crooked-like."
"When I started elementary school, this scar was much bigger then.
My classmates called me Hotaru, Hotaru."
A slight pause.
"That's what they called me.
Each time, I swore I'd get my revenge."
"Yes, truly."
"I vowed to become someone grand."
She laughed alone.
"Isn't it absurd?
Could someone like me ever become grand?
Maybe I should wear glasses?"
"If I wore glasses, this scar might hide a bit—don't you think?"

“Stop it.”
“It’d only look more ridiculous.”
Yozo interjected abruptly, as though angry. When he felt affection for a woman, he too must have possessed that old-fashioned tendency to deliberately act harsh toward her.
“You’re fine as you are.”
“It doesn’t stand out.”
“Why don’t you just go to sleep?”
“We have an early start tomorrow.”

Mano fell silent.

Tomorrow we would part.
Oh—we had been strangers all along.
Shame on me.
Shame on me.
I will hold onto my own kind of pride.
She coughed, sighed, then thrashed about violently as she tossed in bed.

Yozo pretended not to notice.
What they were anxious about could not be said.

Let us rather listen to the sound of the waves and the cries of the seagulls.
And let us recall these four days of living from the very beginning.
People who called themselves realists might have said:
These four days were filled with frivolity.
Then I would answer.
The fact that my manuscript had apparently served mostly as a kettle stand on the editor’s desk and was returned with a large black burn mark was also frivolous.
Blaming my wife’s dark past and vacillating between joy and sorrow over it was also frivolous.
Even when passing through the pawnshop’s curtain while straightening my collar and putting on airs to conceal my downfall was also frivolous.
We ourselves were living a frivolous life.
The attitude of forced endurance displayed by a man crushed beneath such reality.
If you could not comprehend this, then I would remain forever a stranger to you.
If it had to be frivolity, then let it be good frivolity.
True life.
Ah, that was so distant.
I would at least take my time—slowly, ever so slowly—to cherish these four days brimming with human warmth.
There were times when the memories of mere four days surpassed five or ten years of living.
Ah, there were times when the memories of mere four days surpassed an entire lifetime.

Mano’s calm breathing could be heard.
Yozo could no longer endure his surging emotions.
As Mano tried to turn toward him, twisting her long body against the sheets, a fierce whisper came at her ear.

“Stop!”
“Don’t betray Hotaru’s trust.”

By the time the night had paled into dawn, the two of them were already up.

Yozo was to be discharged today.
I had been dreading the approach of this day.
That must be the sloppy sentimentality of a foolish writer.
While writing this novel, I wanted to save Yozo.
No—I had wanted this botched Byron impersonator, this mud-fox, to be forgiven.
That alone had been a secret prayer amidst the anguish.
However, as this day drew near, I became aware that a desolate aura had once again begun to creep over Yozo—over me—even more intensely than before.
This novel is a failure.
There is no leap forward, no liberation.
I seem to have been too concerned with style.
Because of that, this novel has even become vulgar.
I stated matters with many words left unspoken.
Moreover, I feel as though I have left out many even more important matters.
This is an affected way to put it, but were I to live long and years later take this novel in hand, how utterly wretched I would be.
Before I even finish reading a single page, I will writhe in unbearable self-loathing and be certain to close the volume.
Even now, I lack the strength to reread what lies before me.
Ah, a writer must not lay bare their own form.
That is a writer’s defeat.
With beautiful emotions, people create bad literature.
I repeat these words three times.

And then, I shall grant acknowledgment.

I know nothing of literature. Should I start over from the beginning?
You—where should I even begin?

Was I not but a mass of chaos and self-respect? Was this novel too nothing more than that? Ah, why must I hasten to conclusions about everything? This wretched need to impose order on every thought before I can go on living—who ever taught me such petty resolve?

Shall I write?
I shall write of Seishōen's final morning.
It must be as it must be.

Mano invited Yozo to view the scenery at the back mountain.

“The view is truly wonderful, you know. Right now, you can definitely see Mount Fuji.”

Yozo wrapped a jet-black woolen scarf around his neck, Mano put on a haori with a pine needle pattern over her nurse uniform and wound a red woolen shawl around her face until it was nearly buried, then together they stepped out into the sanatorium’s back garden in their geta. In the garden's immediate north stood a tall ochre cliff, to which clung a single narrow iron ladder. Mano went first, climbing the ladder with nimble footwork that slickly scaled its rungs.

The back mountain had withered grass growing thickly, with frost covering the entire ground.

Mano blew white breath onto her fingertips to warm them as she hurried up the mountain path in a near-run. The trail twisted with gentle inclines. Yozo followed, crushing frost underfoot. He whistled brightly into the frozen air. A mountain devoid of people. Anything might happen. He hadn't wanted to give Mano cause for dark suspicions.

They descended into a hollow. Here too withered reeds grew thickly. Mano halted. Yozo stopped five or six paces behind. Beside them stood a white tent-cabin.

Mano pointed at the cabin and said.

“This is the sunbathing area.”
“Patients with mild cases gather here naked.”
“Yes, even now.”

The tent too was covered in frost.

“Let’s climb.”

Without knowing why, he felt restless.

Mano dashed off again.
Yozo also continued.
They came to a narrow avenue lined with larch trees.
The two of them were tired and began to walk aimlessly.

Yozo, breathing roughly through his shoulders, called out loudly.

“Are you spending New Year’s here?”

Without turning around, she answered back just as loudly.

“No.
“I plan to return to Tokyo.”

“Then come visit my place.
“Hida and Kosuge come to my place almost daily.
“Surely you won’t end up spending New Year’s in jail or anything like that.
“I’m sure it’ll go smoothly.”

He even pictured in his mind the refreshing smile of the prosecutor he had yet to meet.

If only it could end here!

Old masters would meaningfully conclude their works at such junctures.
However, Yozo, I, and likely all of you have already grown weary of such deceptive comforts.
New Year’s, jail, the prosecutor—none of these matter to us anymore.
Have we ever truly cared about the prosecutor from the very beginning?
We simply want to reach the mountain's summit.
What is there?
What could there be.
We cling to nothing but a faint hope in it.

At last they reached the summit.
The summit had been roughly leveled, exposing about thirty square meters of ochre soil.
In the center stood a low pavilion made of logs, and even what resembled garden stones had been placed here and there.
Everything was covered in frost.

“No use.
“Fuji isn’t visible.”

Mano’s nose flushed crimson as she cried out.

“Right here—it shows up perfectly clear.”

She pointed at the cloudy eastern sky.
The morning sun had not yet risen.
Clouds of a strange color, fragmented, would boil up only to stagnate, then stagnate only to drift languidly again.

"Nah, it's fine."

A gentle breeze cut their cheeks.

Yozo looked down at the distant sea.
Immediately from their feet stretched a thirty-jō cliff, and Enoshima appeared small directly below.
In the depths of the thick morning mist, the seawater swayed languidly.

And then—no, that was all there was to it.