Pathway to Japanese Literature

Birth

In the spring of his twenty-fifth year, he bestowed that rhomboid student cap—steeped in tradition—upon one particularly stammering, flustered freshman who had petitioned for it among many hopefuls, then returned home.
The light covered carriage bearing the hawk feather crest carried the young master and raced down the three-ri stretch from the station.
The wheels clattered dryly, harness flaps snapped, the coachman barked commands, horseshoes clanged dully—all mingling with skylark song heard intermittently.

In the northern country, even when spring came, there was snow.
Only the road remained a single dark strip, parched.
The snow in the rice fields had also begun to thin.
The gentle undulations of the snow-capped mountain range had wilted into a purple hue.
At the foot of that mountain range, where yellow lumber was piled, the low factory began to come into view.
Blue smoke rose from the thick chimney into the clear sky.
It was his home.
The new graduate cast but a fleeting glance with listless eyes at the long-unseen scenery of his hometown, then let out an exaggeratedly deliberate little yawn.

And so, that year, he spent mainly walking.
He walked through each room of his house one by one, cherishing the distinct scent of every chamber.
The Western-style room had the scent of medicinal herbs.
The family living/dining room smelled of milk.
In the guest room lingered an embarrassing odor.
He wandered out to the front second floor, the back second floor, even the detached guest rooms.
Each time he slid open a fusuma panel with that smooth motion, his soiled chest faintly stirred.
For each smell surely made him recall his time in the capital.

He strolled alone not only through the house but also across fields and rice paddies.
He could look upon the red leaves of the fields and the waterweed flowers in the paddies with contempt, but the spring wind brushing past his ears and the autumn rice fields rustling low across his vision grated on his nerves.

Even after lying down, he rarely kept by his bedside the small poetry collections he had read long ago or books with crimson covers bearing black hammer motifs.
While lying in bed, he pulled the electric lamp closer and gazed at both palms.
He had become obsessed with palmistry.
Upon his palms were gathered many fine wrinkles.
Within these gathered lines, three strikingly long wrinkles ran neatly side by side.
These three pale red chains were said to symbolize his fate.
According to that reading, he was said to have well-developed emotions and intelligence but a short life.
It was said he would die by his twenties at the latest.

The following year, he married.
He didn't consider it particularly early.
If only she were beautiful, he thought.
A lavish wedding ceremony was conducted.
The bride was the daughter of a sake brewer from a neighboring town.
Her complexion held a dusky cast, smooth cheeks still bearing downy hair.
She excelled at knitting.
For about a month, he too regarded his new wife with novelty.

In the midst of winter that year, his father died at fifty-nine.
The funeral was held on a fine day when the snow glowed golden.
He hitched up the legs of his hakama, pulled on straw boots, and trudged along the snow-covered path about ten chō to the temple atop the mountain.
His father’s coffin was placed on a palanquin and followed behind him.
Behind them stood his two sisters with pure white veils covering their faces.
The procession stretched on at length.

When his father died, his circumstances changed completely.
His father’s position had been transferred entirely to him.
And then his reputation too.

Even he became somewhat elated by that reputation.
He attempted factory reforms and such.
And so, he was thoroughly chastened after just one attempt.
He resigned himself to being utterly powerless.
He entrusted everything to the factory manager.
In his generation, what changed was that the Western-style room’s portrait of his grandfather had been replaced with an oil painting of poppies, and there was also a French-style porch lantern dimly lit above the black iron gate.

Everything remained as it had been.
The change came from outside.
It was the second summer since his father’s death.
The state of the town’s bank became peculiar.
In case of emergency, his household too would have had no choice but to go bankrupt.

The path to relief was somehow found.
However, the factory manager planned to reorganize the factory.
That angered the workers.
To him, it felt as though something he had long been concerned about had arrived with unexpected swiftness.
"Let those bastards have their demands," he told the factory manager with a feeling more of anger than desolation.
What was demanded would be given.
Nothing beyond that would be given.
That should suffice, shouldn't it?
he asked himself within his own heart.
A small-scale reorganization was modestly conducted.

From around that time, he began taking a liking to the temple. The temple's corrugated iron roof glinted on the mountain ridge right behind his house. He grew close to the priest there. The priest was emaciated and frail with age. Yet his torn-off right earlobe left a black scar that sometimes lent his face a sinister cast. Even at midsummer's peak heat, he would trudge up the long stone steps to visit the temple. The edge of the kitchen veranda stood overgrown with summer grasses where four or five cockscomb flowers bloomed scarlet. The priest would usually be napping during daytime hours. He called out softly from that veranda. Blue-tailed lizards occasionally scurried out from beneath the floorboards, flicking their slender forms into view.

He would ask the temple priest about the meaning of kyoumon.
The temple priest didn't know at all.
After floundering for a moment, the temple priest let out a booming "Ahahaha!" and laughed.
He too laughed with a faintly bitter smile.
That was fine.
Occasionally he requested ghost stories from the temple priest.
The temple priest, in a hoarse voice, proceeded to relate twenty-some ghost stories one after another.
When he pressed, "There must be ghost stories in this temple too," the temple priest answered, "Not at all."

After that, a year passed, and his mother died.
His mother had done nothing but hold herself back around him since his father's death.
She had been so excessively timid that she shortened her own life.
With his mother’s death, he came to detest the temple.
It was only after his mother’s death that he realized—though his temple visits had included some degree of service to her.

After being bereaved of his mother, he felt the desolation of their diminished family. Of his two sisters, the elder had married into a large Japanese restaurant in the neighboring town. The younger was attending a certain private girls' school in the capital—one known for its rigorous physical education—and only returned home during summer and winter breaks. She wore black celluloid glasses. All three siblings wore glasses. He wore iron-rimmed spectacles. The elder sister's were thin gold frames.

He went out to the neighboring town and amused himself.
Around his own home, his heart would shrink and he couldn't drink any alcohol at all.
In the neighboring town, he created several small scandals.
Eventually he grew tired of that too.

He thought he wanted a child.
At least a child could alleviate the awkwardness with his wife, he thought.
To him, his wife's body reeked unbearably of alcohol.
It clung to his nose.

Thirty years old now, he had grown slightly stout.
Every morning when he washed his face, applying soap to both hands and working up a lather, the backs of his hands would become smooth like a woman's.
His fingertips were stained yellow with tobacco tar.
No matter how much he washed them, they wouldn't come off.
He had been smoking too much.
He had been smoking seven packs of Hope a day.

That spring, his wife gave birth to a girl.
About two years prior, his wife had secretly been hospitalized at a hospital in the capital for nearly a month.

The girl was called Yuri.
She did not resemble her parents and was pale.
Her hair was sparse, and her eyebrows might as well have been nonexistent.
Her arms and legs were gracefully slender and long.
By her second month, her weight reached five kilograms and her height fifty-eight centimeters, showing better development than an average child.

On the 120th day after her birth, they held an elaborate celebration.

Paper Crane

"I, unlike you, seem to be cursed with simple-minded fortune."
I married a wife who wasn't a virgin and spent three years unaware of that fact.
Perhaps I shouldn't voice such matters.
It feels merciless even toward my wife, who now appears happily absorbed in her knitting.
Moreover, it would likely harass countless couples across the world too.
Yet I speak out.
Because I want to slap that sanctimonious face of yours.

I do not read Valéry or Proust.
Most likely, I know nothing of literature.
I need not know.
I am staring at something else—something more real.
Humans.
Humans—those market flies, so to speak.
Therefore, for me, the writer alone is everything.
Works are nothing.

No masterpiece could surpass its writer.
Works claiming to transcend their creators were but delusions of readers.
You would make a disgusted face.
You—who wanted readers to believe in inspiration—would surely dismiss my words as vulgar and crude.
In that case, I could state it more plainly.
I worked only when my writings served my own ends.
If you were truly wise, you should have scoffed at such attitudes of mine. If you couldn't laugh, then henceforth you'd best abandon that pretentious habit of twisting your mouth.

I will now write this novel with intent to shame you.
The subject matter may become my disgrace.
But I shall never seek your pity.
From a position above yours, I mean to slam humanity’s unfeigned anguish against your cheek.

My wife proved as much a liar as I.
At autumn’s beginning that year, I finished writing a story.
This was a tale boasting to God of my household’s happiness.
I had my wife read it too.
After murmuring through it aloud in low tones, she said “Fine.”
Then made an unkempt gesture toward me.
However dull-witted I might be, I couldn’t help discerning some peculiar resolve beneath such motions from her.
Three nights I spent tracing the roots of her unease.
My suspicions coalesced into one mortifying truth.
I too bore that meddlesome nature fit for Judas’ thirteenth seat.

I accused my wife.
I spent three nights on this too.
My wife instead laughed at me.
At times she even grew angry.
I employed a final underhanded scheme.
That short story had recorded even the joy of a virgin being bestowed upon a man like me; seizing upon that passage, I tormented my wife.
"As I'll become a great writer soon enough," I declared, "this novel too shall endure in the world for a hundred years."
Then I threatened her: "You'll be memorialized as a liar alongside this novel for centuries to come."
My uneducated wife indeed took fright.
After some deliberation, she finally whispered to me.
"Just once," she breathed.
I laughed while caressing her.
"It's merely an old injury from your youth," I reassured her, making her recount everything in detail.
Ah—after a pause, my wife amended: "Twice."
Then came: "Three times."
Still laughing gently, I asked: "What manner of man?"
The name meant nothing to me.
As she spoke of him, I embraced her without design.
This was wretched lust.
Simultaneously, it was true affection.

My wife finally blurted out "about six times" and burst into loud sobs.

The next morning, the wife wore a cheerful expression.
When we sat facing each other at the breakfast table, the wife playfully pressed her palms together and bowed to me.
I too put on a cheerful show of biting my lower lip.
Then the wife assumed an even more relaxed demeanor and peered into my face—"Does it hurt?"—didn't she?
"I answered, 'A little.'"

I want to make you understand. That any eternal form must inevitably be vulgar and crude.

How I spent that day—I will tell you this as well.

At times like these, I must not look at my wife’s face, her discarded tabi socks, or anything else connected to her. It was not merely because I recalled my wife’s unpleasant past. It was because I ended up reminiscing about the peaceful days we had shared until recently. That day, I went out immediately. I decided to visit a young Western-style painter. This friend was unmarried. A married friend would have been unsuitable in this situation.

I remained vigilant along the way to keep my mind from emptying.
I immersed myself so thoroughly in contemplating other problems that last night's events found no crevice to invade.
Matters concerning life and art proved somewhat perilous.
Literature especially summoned those raw memories with immediate effect.
I twisted my thoughts toward roadside plants.
The trifoliate orange constitutes a shrub.
It blooms with white flowers at spring's end.
I did not know its botanical classification.
After some time passes in autumn small yellow fruits form.
To dwell deeper would risk danger.
I hastily shifted focus to another plant.
Silver grass.
This belongs to Poaceae.
I had indeed been taught Poaceae.
This white plume they call obana.
One of autumn's seven grasses.
The seven being bush clover Chinese bellflower karukaya pink and silver grass.
Two remain missing but what could they be.
Six times or so.
The whisper pierced my ear abruptly.

I quickened my pace, nearly breaking into a run.
I stumbled countless times.
These fallen leaves.
No—plants will do.
Something colder.
Something colder.
Staggering, I nevertheless regained my composure.

I recited the (A + B) squared formula in my mind.
Next, I studied the formula for (A + B + C)².

You feigned a strange expression while listening to my story.
But I knew.
No doubt you too—when faced with my sort of calamity, no, even when confronted with far milder troubles—would find yourself overwhelmed by your usual refined literary theories, and would likely cling not just to mathematics but even to a single rhinoceros beetle.

While enumerating each and every name of the human body's internal organs, I stepped into my friend's apartment.

After knocking on my friend’s door, I looked up at the round goldfish bowl hanging in the southeastern corner of the hallway and examined the number of fins each of the four swimming goldfish had.
The friend was still asleep.
He opened only one eye reluctantly and emerged.
Entering my friend’s room, I finally felt relieved.

The most frightening thing was loneliness.
Having someone to talk to helped.
If the other person was a woman, it made me uneasy.
A man was better.
A man was better—especially a good-natured one.
This friend fulfilled these conditions.

I talked volubly about my friend’s recent work.
That was a No. 20 landscape painting.
For him, it counted as a large-scale work.
It depicted a Western-style house with a red roof standing by a marsh of clear water.
Though my friend had bashfully placed it face down against the wall with the canvas reversed, I unhesitatingly flipped it over again to examine.
What kind of critique had I offered then?
If your art criticism could be considered splendid, then my critique at that time wasn’t entirely without merit either.
Because I too, like you, had delivered criticism in that obligatory must-say-something style.
On the motif, on the color, on the composition—I managed to find fault across all fronts.
With every conceptual term at my disposal.

My friend acknowledged each and every thing I said.
No, no—I had kept chattering from the very start to such an extent that I hadn’t even allowed my friend the opportunity to interject a single word.

However, such chattiness was not altogether safe.
I broke it off at an opportune moment and challenged this younger friend to a game of shogi.
We sat on the bedding, arranging pieces on grid paper marked with squiggly lines, playing game after game of rapid shogi.
My friend would sometimes take long pauses, be scolded by me, and become flustered and fumble about.
Even for an instant, I didn't want to be left with idle hands.

Such a desperate state of mind could never last long after all.
I even began to sense danger in shogi.
I had finally begun to feel fatigue.
"That should do it," I said, clearing away the shogi pieces and burrowing into the bedding.
The friend also lay on his back next to me and smoked a cigarette.
I was careless.
Stopping was a great enemy to me.
A sorrowful shadow had grazed my chest countless times.
I muttered "Well, well" meaninglessly and kept chasing away that large shadow.
I couldn't go on like this.
I had to keep moving.

Will you laugh at this?
I lay face down on the bedding, picked up one of the nose-blowing tissues scattered by the pillow, and began folding it into shapes.

First I folded the paper along its diagonal into two, then folded it again into four to make a pouch. Next I folded this end—these would be wings—and that end—this would be the beak—then pulled and shaped it thus before puffing breath through the small hole there.
"This is a crane."

Waterwheel

They approached the bridge.
The man thought about turning back here.
The woman quietly crossed the bridge.
The man crossed too.

The man pondered why he had needed to follow the woman all this way.
He still felt attached.
The moment he separated from her body, his passion should have drained completely.
When the woman silently began preparing to return, the man lit a cigarette.
Noticing his hands weren't trembling made him feel all the more hollow.
He could have left things as they were.

The man left the house with the woman.

The two walked slowly along the narrow embankment path, sometimes leading and sometimes following each other.
It was an early summer evening.
Chickweed flowers bloomed white, dotting both sides of the path.

There exists a group of unhappy people who cannot feel concern unless it’s toward someone of the opposite sex they detest beyond endurance.
The man was also like that.
The woman was also like that.
The woman had visited the man’s house in the suburbs again today and showered each of his words with unintelligible ridicule.
The man, in response to the woman’s persistent contempt, resolved that now was the time to employ physical force.
The woman perceived this and braced herself.
Such desperate quivering stirred up their warped carnal desires.
The man’s force manifested in a different form.
When they each reclaimed their bodies, the two were clearly made aware of the fact that they did not love each other at all.

And so they walked side by side like this, yet felt an irreconcilable repulsion toward each other—they had only intensified their previous hatred.

Under the embankment flowed a river about four meters wide, its current gentle and unhurried.
The man stared at the dully gleaming surface of the water in the dim light and thought, Should I turn back again?
The woman kept walking straight down the path with her head lowered.
The man followed the woman.

It wasn’t lingering attachment.
It’s for resolution.
Unpleasant as it was to say, it was for tidying up afterward.
The man had finally found an excuse.
Walking about ten paces behind the woman, he swung his walking stick to cut down the summer grasses lining the path.
If he were to whisper Please forgive me to her, it seemed a resolution spanning several months might be achieved.
The man had been aware of that too.
But he couldn't say it.
First of all, the timing was off.
This seemed to be the sort of words that would only prove effective when uttered immediately afterward.
Now that they had renewed their confrontation, wouldn’t bringing this up now be utterly foolish?
The man cut down a single blue reed.

The train's roar sounded immediately behind them.
The woman abruptly turned her head.
The man too hastily wrenched his face backward.
The train was crossing the iron bridge downstream.
The illuminated passenger cars streamed before their eyes one after another—next, next, next, next.
The man felt the woman's gaze fixed upon his back almost painfully.
The train had already passed, leaving only the clatter of its cars echoing from beyond the forest ahead.
The man resolutely turned to face forward.
If their eyes met now, he would snort derisively and say this:
"Japanese trains aren't half bad."

However, the woman was walking briskly some distance ahead.
The newly tailored yellow dress with scattered white polka dots burned into the man’s eyes through the evening gloom.
Does she intend to just go home like this?
Why don’t I just marry her.
No—or rather, I don’t actually intend to marry her, but I’ll try proposing it anyway to tidy up afterward.

The man tucked the walking stick snugly under his arm and started running.
As he drew closer to the woman, his resolve began to unravel.
She walked with slightly hunched thin shoulders and precise steps.
He ran up to a position a few steps behind her, then began walking slowly.
He could feel nothing but hatred.
It seemed to him that an unbearable, unpleasant odor was emanating from all over her body.

The two continued walking in silence.
A cluster of river poplars floated abruptly into view in the middle of the road.
The woman walked along the left side of the river poplars.
The man chose the right side.

I should run away.
I don't need any resolution or anything.
Even if I remain in the woman’s heart as an oily villain—that is to say, as an ordinary man—it doesn’t matter.
After all, men are like this.
I should run away.

When they had passed through the cluster of river poplars, the two walked together again without meeting each other's eyes.
Shall I say just one thing? he wondered.
I won't tell a soul.
The man fumbled for cigarettes in his sleeve with one hand.
Or perhaps put it this way:
Once in a young lady's lifetime, once in a wife's lifetime, once in a mother's lifetime—it happens to everyone.
Have a splendid marriage.
Then what would this woman say in response?
Strindberg?
She'd undoubtedly retort like that.
The man struck a match.
The woman's livid cheek remained contorted as it floated just before his nose.

Finally, the man came to a stop.
The woman also stopped.
With their faces turned away from each other, they stood motionless for some time.
The man, vexed that the woman didn’t even seem to be crying, deliberately cast a casual glance around.
Soon on the left side, there was a waterwheel hut that the man liked to visit for his walks.
The waterwheel was turning slowly, slowly in the darkness.
The woman sharply turned her back to the man and started walking again.
The man lingered while savoring his cigarette.
He made no attempt to call out to stop her.

Nun

It was late at night on September 29th.

Thinking that if I endured one more day and went to the pawnshop after October began, I could gain a month’s worth of interest, I spent that entire day lying in bed without even smoking.
As punishment for having slept so much during the day, I couldn’t sleep at night.
Around eleven-thirty at night, the sliding door to the room rattled with a knocking sound.
I thought it must be the wind, but after a while, it rattled again.
Oh? Thinking someone might be there, I wriggled my upper body out of the futon and stretched my arm to open the sliding door—there stood a young nun.

She was a nun of medium build and slightly petite stature. Her head had a bluish pallor, and her entire face resembled an egg in shape. Her cheeks were dusky with a powdery texture. Her eyebrows arched like Jizo’s crescent moons, her eyes were wide and bell-like with remarkably long lashes. Her nose rose in a small dome; her pale red lips sat slightly large, parted by about the thickness of a sheet of paper to reveal a row of pure white teeth. She had a slight underbite. The black-dyed robe appeared starched, every crease standing sharply defined, cut somewhat short. About three inches of her legs showed—peach-colored limbs swollen like rubber balls, covered in thin downy hair, their ankles tightly constricted by undersized white tabi socks that made them taper inward. In her right hand she held blue prayer beads, in her left a slender book bound in crimson.

I thought Ah it’s my sister and said “Come in.”
The nun entered my room quietly closed the sliding door behind her walked to my bedside making a rustling sound with her stiff cotton robe and then sat down properly.
I burrowed into the futon and lying on my back gazed fixedly at the nun’s face.
Suddenly terror struck me.
My breath caught and the world went pitch black.

“You look just like her but you’re not my sister.”
It was then that I first realized—I had never had a sister to begin with.
“Who are you?”

The nun answered.

“It seems I’ve come to the wrong place.”
“It cannot be helped.”
“They’re much the same anyway.”

The fear gradually receded.
I was looking at the nun’s hands.
Her nails had grown out about a quarter of an inch, and the joints of her fingers were blackened and withered.

“Why are your hands so dirty? Yet while I lie here looking at you like this，your throat and such are so beautiful.”

The nun answered.

“Because I did something dirty.”
“I know that too.”
“That’s why I’m trying to hide them with these prayer beads and sutra books.”
“I carry prayer beads and a sutra book for color coordination.”
“The blue and vermilion show up nicely against the black robe, making my figure appear more refined.”
As she said this, she idly flipped through the pages of her sutra book.
“Shall I read?”

“Yes.”
I closed my eyes.

“This is the Ofumi Sutra.”
“Observing the fleeting nature of human existence—truly, what lacks permanence is this world’s span, as transient as a phantom from beginning to middle to end—embarrassingly cloying drivel! Who could bear reading this?”
“Let’s read a different one.”
“The bodies of women—burdened by the Five Hindrances and Three Obediences—bear sins too deep for men to fathom. Thus must all women be—ridiculous.”

“What a lovely voice,” I said while keeping my eyes closed. “Please keep going. Day by day, I am unbearably bored. That I neither feel surprise nor curiosity when visited by people of unknown origin—that I can converse like this with my eyes closed without asking anything—the fact I’ve become such a man makes me happy. How about you?”

“No.”
“But there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Do you like fairy tales?”
“I do.”

The nun began to speak.

“Let me tell you a tale of crabs. The reason moonlit crabs grow so thin is that they fear their own ugly shadows cast upon the sandy shore, wandering all night without sleep.”
“How refined it would be if they slept meekly in the swaying kelp forests of the deep sea untouched by moonlight, dreaming perhaps of the Dragon Palace—yet the crabs, bewitched by the moon, simply rush toward the shore.”
Upon reaching the sandy shore, they immediately found their own ugly shadows, were shocked, and were afraid.
“Here is a man, here is a man,” the crabs muttered as they stumbled along, bubbling foam.
“Crab shells are easily crushed.”
“No, by their very shape, they are made to be crushed.”
“When a crab’s shell is crushed, they say you can hear a crunching sound.”
“Once, a certain large crab in England was born with a red and beautiful shell.”
“This crab’s shell was tragically on the verge of being crushed.”
“Is that the sin of the people?”
“Or is it a retribution that large crab invited upon itself?”
“The large crab, all day long, desperately shook its shell from which white meat spilled out, and crawled into a certain café.”
In the café, multitudes of small crabs had gathered, smoking tobacco and talking about women.
Among them, one small crab born in France gazed with clear eyes at the form of that large crab.
“The shell of that small crab was densely crisscrossed with dull gray stripes of an Eastern style.”
“The large crab, seemingly dazzled by the small crab’s gaze, averted its eyes while whispering furtively—so it is said.”
“You there—it’s not right to torment a crab whose shell has gone crunch.” Ah, compared to that large crab, this wretched little thing—so small, so pitifully insignificant—had now forgotten all shame and come frolicking forth from the northern seas.
“It had been deceived by the moonlight.”
“When he went out to the sandy shore, he too was shocked.”

"Is this shadow—this flat, ugly shadow—truly my own?"
I am a new man.
Yet look at my shadow.
It’s already being crushed.
Is my shell truly this misshapen?
Was it always this frail?
The tiny crab muttered thus as it stumbled along.
Did I ever have talent?
No—even if I did, it was some queer knack.
A talent for getting by in this world.
What coy glances did you cast at editors when hawking manuscripts?
That hand.
This hand.
For tearful pleas—eye drops.
The intimidation ploy?
I should don fine robes.
Never append a single note to your work.
Say it with feigned boredom:
‘If only it were possible.’ The shell aches.
The moisture in my body had dried away.

The scent of seawater was my sole redeeming quality.
If the briny scent fades—ah, I want to vanish into nothingness.
Should I return to the sea once more?
Should I dive down to the very deepest depths of the sea’s bottom?
O how I yearn for the kelp forests.
Nomadic schools of fish.
The small crab stumbled along the sandy shore, gasping for breath.
In the shade of a thatched hut in the inlet, he took a brief rest.
In the shade of a decaying fishing boat, he took a brief rest.
Ah, this crab.
What crab is this?
A hundredfold they spread.
Tsunuga crab.
It sidles away.
“Where does it end…?”
He fell silent.

“What’s wrong?”
I opened my eyes that had been closed.

“No.”

The nun answered quietly.
“It’s such a waste.”
“This is from the Kojiki’s…”
“Divine punishment will befall you.”
“Where might the lavatory be?”

“If you leave the room and go straight down the corridor to the right, you’ll come upon a cedar door.”
“That is the door.”

“When autumn comes, women grow cold, you see.”
After saying that, she hunched her neck like a mischievous child and rolled both eyes around.
I smiled.

The nun left my room.
I pulled the futon over my head and thought.
I wasn’t contemplating anything lofty.
Well now, I’ve scored quite the windfall here—was nothing more than smirking like a villain to myself.

The nun returned in a flustered manner, shut the sliding door firmly, and then, still standing, said:

“I must sleep.”
“It’s already twelve o’clock.”
“You don’t mind, do you?”

I answered.

“I don’t mind.”

No matter how impoverished I was, I had resolved since boyhood to at least keep beautiful futons, so even when faced with such an unexpected overnight guest, I wasn’t flustered.
I sat up, pulled out one of the three futons I had laid out, and spread it next to my own.

“This futon has a strange pattern, doesn’t it? It looks like stained glass.”

I removed only one of my two cover futons.

“No. I don’t need a cover futon. I will sleep like this.”

“Is that so.”
I immediately burrowed into my futon.

After quietly slipping her prayer beads and sutra book beneath the futon, the nun lay down atop it in her robes, without any bedding.

“Please keep looking closely at my face.”
“I’ll fall fast asleep.”
“Then immediately I’ll grind my teeth with a shrill sound.”
“Then Lord Buddha will arrive.”

“Lord Buddha?”

“Yes.”
“Lord Buddha comes for his nightly visits.”
“Every night, you know.”
“Since you must be bored, you should take a good look.”
“The reason I declined earlier was precisely for that purpose.”

Sure enough, as soon as she finished speaking, the sound of calm breathing could be heard.
When a shrill, piercing sound was heard, the room’s sliding door rattled.
I leaned out from the futon, stretched my arm, and opened the sliding door to find Buddha standing there.

He was straddling a white elephant about two feet tall.
On the white elephant was placed a golden saddle that had turned black with rust.
Lord Buddha was somewhat—no, rather emaciated.
Each rib stood out distinctly, resembling the panels of an armored door.
He was completely naked save for a tattered brown cloth wrapped around his waist.
His mantis-gaunt limbs were covered in spiderwebs and soot.
His skin was simply pitch-black, and his short hair was tightly curled and reddish.
His face was about the size of a fist, with neither nose nor eyes discernible, merely a mass of crumpled wrinkles.

“Lord Buddha?”

“That’s correct.”
Lord Buddha’s voice was low and hoarse.
“I could no longer remain concealed and emerged.”

“It’s kind of smelly.”
I sniffed repeatedly.
It stank.
The moment Lord Buddha appeared, an indescribable stench filled every corner of my room.

“I see how it is.
This elephant is dead.
Though I had added camphor, it still seems to smell, doesn’t it?”
Then he lowered his voice further still.
“You see, live white elephants are rather hard to come by these days.”

“Even an ordinary elephant would’ve sufficed.”

“No—given Lord Buddha’s dignity, that’s simply not possible.
“Truly, I’ve no wish to parade myself about in this state.
“It’s those detestable wretches who haul me out.
“They say Buddhism’s been thriving these days.”

“Ah, Lord Buddha.”
“Please hurry and do something about this.”
“I’ve been feeling like I was going to die from the stench and suffocation since earlier.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”
Then he faltered for a moment.
“You.
“When I appeared here，did it not seem ridiculous?”
“For a Buddha’s manifestation，didn’t you find it somewhat inelegant?”
“Please say exactly what you were thinking.”

“No.”
“That was splendid.”
“I thought you looked truly magnificent.”

“Hoho.”
“Is that so?”
Nyorai leaned his body forward slightly.
“That puts my mind at ease.”
“I’ve been terribly concerned about that alone since earlier.”
“I might be something of a poseur, you know.”
“Now I can return home reassured.”
“Allow me to show you a departure truly befitting Buddha.”
When he finished speaking, Nyorai let out a sharp sneeze—no sooner had he muttered “Oh no!” than both he and the white elephant turned transparent like paper dropped into water, their elements splitting soundlessly into fragments before scattering like clouds and vanishing into mist.

I burrowed back into the futon and gazed at the nun. The nun was smiling softly while still asleep. It seemed like a smile of ecstasy; a sneer of contempt; an innocent grin; an actor's practiced smirk; it suggested obsequious flattery while simultaneously conveying rapturous joy—a laugh-cry hybrid that defied categorization. The nun kept smiling softly. As she laughed and laughed and laughed, she gradually grew smaller, until with a rustling sound like flowing water, she became a doll no more than two inches tall. I extended one arm, picked up the doll, and examined it in detail. The dusky cheeks remained frozen in their smile, the raindrop-sized lips still faintly red, the poppy seed-sized white teeth neatly aligned in perfect rows. The snowflake-sized hands were faintly blackened, and the pine-needle-thin legs bore white tabi socks no larger than grains of rice. I tried lightly blowing on the hem of the ink-black robe.