Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The season was nearing the winter solstice. From Gyou’s window, one could see the trees standing in the gardens and gate areas of the low-lying houses, their leaves peeling away day by day. The sesame plants had become like an old woman’s tangled hair, the last leaves of the cherry tree—beautifully frost-burnished—had vanished, and each time the zelkova rustled its body in the wind, hidden parts of the landscape came into view. The dawn shrikes no longer came. And then one day, from around the time when lead-colored starlings—hundreds upon hundreds of them—descended upon the oak trees standing like a folding screen, the frost gradually grew sharper.

When winter came, Gyou’s lungs ached. At the plastered wellside where fallen leaves had settled, the phlegm he spat out during washing now took on a dull blood color instead of yellowish-green, and at times it would gleam with a startlingly vivid crimson. By the time Gyou left his bed in the four-and-a-half-tatami rented room on the second floor, the housewives’ morning laundry had long since been finished, and the plaster had already dried. The phlegm that had fallen on it would not come off even when doused with water. Gyou would take it to the mouth of the drainpipe as if pinching a baby goldfish. He no longer felt any reaction even when seeing the bloody phlegm. Yet, in the cold, clear air, there was a piercingly vivid patch of color that he could not help but fix his gaze upon.

Gyou had completely ceased to feel any passion for living these days. Each day dragged him onward. And his soul—bereft of any inner dwelling place—constantly strained to escape outward.—By day he would throw open his room’s window and stare at the scenery outside like a blind man. At night he would strain his ears like a deaf person toward sounds beyond the house and the iron kettle’s clatter. The fragile November sunlight nearing winter solstice would yet begin fading outside his window each day, not an hour having passed since he left bed. In the dimmed lowland even his own house’s shadow had been swallowed whole. Seeing this, ink-black regret and frustration seeped through Gyou’s heart. The sunlit patch lingered in a gray Western-style wooden house slightly apart from the lowland—at that hour it seemed almost to gaze mournfully at the sunset sinking toward some distant horizon.

Winter sunlight shone even into the mailbox. Every tiny pebble on the road cast its own shadow, and as he gazed, each one seemed to bear a sorrow as immense as Egypt’s pyramids. In the Western-style house separated by the lowland, at that hour, the lined-up pale paulownia trees cast ghostly shadows. Gyou’s tentacles—pale as bean sprouts and heliotropic—stretched unconsciously toward that gray wooden house, caressing the traces of mysterious shadows that had seeped into it. Every day, he kept the window open with an empty heart until they vanished.

The row of oak trees supporting the northern edge of the vista swayed and danced with steel-like elasticity one day, shaking down the wind as they bent. In the lowland with its altered visage, rustling dry leaves performed a skeletal dance.

At such times, the pale paulownia’s shadow appeared on the verge of being erased. In that place, which could no longer be called a sunny spot, there still remained a shadow so faint it might be imagined. And pursued by the winter wind, it gradually faded into the distance—into that desert-like world where shadows dwelled—until its form vanished entirely.

After finishing watching it, Gyou began to close the window with a feeling akin to despair. As he strained his ears toward the winter wind that now only heralded night, at times there came the sound of a glass door shattering somewhere far off where electricity had yet to arrive.

II

Gyou received a letter from his mother. “Since we lost Nobuko, your father has aged completely. Your body isn’t ordinary—please take care of it. We don’t want to endure any more hardships beyond this. Lately I’ve been waking in the night as if startled by something. My mind is preoccupied with worry for you. No matter how much I try not to think about it, it’s no use. I cannot sleep for hours.”

Gyou grew despondent over a thought that struck him as he read it. Through nights when all others lay still in sleep, he and his mother tormented one another with mutual anguish. At such times, how could anyone claim that the ominous throbbing in his heart didn’t startle his mother awake?

Gyou’s younger brother had died of spinal caries. And his sister Nobuko, too, had died of lumbar spinal caries, passing through a landscape that had lost its will. There, many insects had gathered around a dying insect mourning and weeping. And both of them had been taken down from the white plaster beds where they had lain for the year before returning to the earth.

"Why do doctors go around saying 'this one year now equals ten later'?"

Gyou recalled the uncannily ominous emotion that had arisen within him when told this and pondered——as if he carried some ideal to reach within those ten years. Why wouldn’t they just say how many years remained until he died?

In Gyou’s head rose the landscape that had lost its will—a vision that often appeared before him.

A tram stop in a street lined with dark, cold stone government offices. There he waited for the streetcar. Should he go home or venture out into the lively streets? He wavered. He could settle on neither decision. And no matter how long he waited, the streetcar came from neither direction. Oppressive shadows of dark architecture, bare rows of trees, sparse streetlamps receding into perspective. At the distant intersection, streetcars like aquariums occasionally passed by. The landscape abruptly lost all order. Amidst it all, he felt a violent unraveling.

The young Gyou went to submerge the mouse caught in the mousetrap in the river. In the transparent water, the mouse crawled left and right along the wire mesh, appearing as though suspended in air. Eventually it stopped moving, its nose wedged into one of the mesh holes. White bubbles rose from the mouse’s mouth one last time…… Five or six years earlier, Gyou had merely scattered sweet sorrows before the death his illness promised and moved on. Yet when he finally noticed it one day—the gourmet cravings, the indolence, the cowardice all nurtured in him by nourishment and rest—they had gradually stripped away his will to live. Still he repeatedly rallied his resolve and turned back toward life. But imperceptibly, his thoughts and actions began emitting a hollow ring until, losing their fluidity, they hardened into place. Then before him would appear such landscapes.

Many people had exhibited certain symptoms, followed a certain course, and died. The same symptoms had appeared in you. When one of the apostles of modern science first informed Gyou of it, that fact—over which he had no authority to refuse—was nothing but the name he had vaguely detested, and his mind would not accept it. He no longer refused it. The white plaster bed was prepared for the several years until he would return to the black earth. There, he would no longer even be permitted to toss and turn.

When night deepened and the night watchman’s clapper began to sound, Gyou muttered from the depths of his gloomy heart.

“Good night, Mother.” The sound of the night watchman’s clapper, through its subtly shifting echoes around Gyou’s house—where slopes and mansions were plentiful—evoked the path it traveled onward. The distant howl of a dog that he had thought was the sound of his lungs creaking. To Gyou, the night watchman appeared. He could see his mother’s sleeping form. In the even deeper depths of his gloomy heart, he murmured again. “Good night, Mother.”

III

Gyou opened the window of the room he had finished cleaning and was resting on the rattan chaise longue. Then, with a twittering sound, he caught sight of a bush warbler flitting in and out of the kanamugura hedge’s shadow. Chirp, chirp—Gyou craned his neck, mimicking the bird’s call with his mouth as he watched the little creature. He had once kept canaries at home. Beautiful morning sunlight spilled through the leaves. The bush warbler was disoriented by the sounds from his mouth but showed none of the nuanced responses canaries might display. Plump from constant feeding, its shape resembled something stuffed into a stiff waistcoat. ——When Gyou ceased his mimicry, it departed unceremoniously through the lower branches.

Across the lowland, he could see a sunlit garden belonging to a noble family overlooking the valley. On the Korean lawn withered to yellow, a red futon was laid out to dry. ——Gyou was entranced that morning when he had risen unusually early.

After a while, he left the house gate, gazing at the roof where leaves had browned and fallen, and the glossy red berries of the vine-like plant stood out.

Under a windless blue sky, the ginkgo tree—now fully yellow—quietly folded its shadows and rested. A long wall covered in white decorative bricks reflected the crystal-clear winter air. Beneath it, an old woman carrying her grandchild on her back walked slowly and deliberately over.

Gyou descended the long slope and went to the post office. The sunlit post office’s doors clattered constantly, and people scattered the fresh morning air about as they moved. Gyou felt as though it had been a long time since he had encountered such air.

He climbed the narrow slope slowly and deliberately. Camellias and Japanese aralias were in bloom. Gyou was surprised to find butterflies still present in December. In the direction they had flown, points of light from horseflies scattered by sunlight were bustling back and forth. "It’s a dementia-like happiness," he thought. And then, drowsily, he crouched in the sunny spot. Sure enough, a little ways away from that sunny spot, small children were playing something. They were four- or five-year-old boys and girls.

"They probably aren’t watching," Gyou thought as he spat phlegm into a ditch with shallow flowing water. And he approached them. There were girls roughhousing among them. There were boys acting gently among them. Childish lines had been drawn on the road with graphite. ——Gyou suddenly thought that this was a scene he had seen somewhere before. Suddenly, his heart wavered. The horsefly, shaken awake, flew off into the desolate expanse of Gyou’s past. To that radiant December morning.

Gyou’s horsefly found camellias—found the children playing where petals scattered——a scene like those rare mornings when he’d forgotten his hanshi paper at home: excusing himself from class to retrieve it while lessons continued down hushed corridors. A sacred tableau never glimpsed except through such sanctioned truancies. Thinking this, Gyou smiled.

When afternoon came and the sun tilted to its usual angle, this thought saddened Gyou. In the faded photograph from his childhood, a pale sunlight—like that of a sunlit spot—had lingered, illuminating the objects.

How could one who cannot hold hope cherish memories? Had he ever sensed in his future, in these recent days, a brightness like this morning’s? And wasn’t this morning’s notion merely clear proof that—like Russian nobles taking their morning meals around two in the afternoon—such habits had settled into his daily life?

——

He descended the long slope again and went to the post office.

“Regarding this morning’s postcard—I’ve changed my mind and decided to cancel, so please call off the request I made.” That morning, he had contemplated spending winter on a warm coast and asked a friend living there to search for a rental house.

He gasped with intense fatigue as he climbed back up the slope. The ginkgo tree that had quietly folded its shadows in the morning sunlight now had its branches thinned by the wintry wind before even a day had passed. The fallen leaves brightened the sun-deprived road. He felt a faint affection for those fallen leaves.

Gyou returned to the road beside his house. From his house, the sloped road lay atop the cliff. The usual scenery he viewed from his room was now being mercilessly battered by the winter wind before his very eyes. In the cloudy sky, clouds moved with a leaden gloom. And below that, Gyou saw that the second floor of a house where electric lighting hadn’t even been installed yet already had its doors locked. The door’s wood grain lay bare, exposed to the outside. ——Moved by a profound emotion, Gyou stopped in his tracks there. Beside him was the room where he lived. Gyou began to gaze at it with a new emotion—one he had never before gazed upon it with.

The second floor of a house where the electricity hadn’t even been connected yet already had its doors locked—the bare wood grain of those doors suddenly stained Gyou’s heart with a rootless wanderlust.

——I have no food. I have nowhere to stay. And though the day grows dark, this foreign town has already rejected me.——

A gloom, as though it were reality, cast its shadow over his heart. A feeling—as though such memories had once existed within his former self, a strangely sweet sensation—pained Gyou. Why do such fantasies arise? Why does that fantasy make me so sad, and why does it call to me so intimately? Such things seemed to dimly make sense to Gyou.

The savory smell of roasting meat mingled with the evening chill. A man who seemed to be a carpenter having finished his day’s work passed by Gyou and briskly climbed the slope, making a faint sound of exhaling.

"My room is over there." While thinking this, Gyou fixed his gaze on his room. Enveloped in twilight, its form now appeared utterly powerless against the void spreading through the landscape like ether.

The room I loved. The room that welcomed my dwelling there. Inside that room lay all my belongings—and perhaps even stored within were emotions from each day’s life. If I were to call out from here now—that ghost might open that window and lean out. Yet wasn’t this scarcely different from how a discarded inn’s robe would gradually evoke my own body within its folds? Staring at those insensate roof tiles and windowpanes like this—I began feeling more like a passerby. Those insensate surroundings would surely remain unchanged even while sheltering someone on suicide’s brink. Yet even so—I couldn’t simply walk away from here following that summoning fantasy.

If only the electric lights would come on soon. If the polished glass of that window were to let a yellow light seep through, this passerby’s heart might imagine someone content with their allotted life within that room. "The power to believe in that happiness might arise."

To Gyou walking along the road came the sound of the downstairs grandfather clock: *bong... bong...* Thinking he'd heard something strange, his feet plodded down the slope.

IV From the street trees to the street itself—after the wind swept away all dead leaves—even its sound began to change. When night fell, the city’s asphalt began freezing as if burnished with pencil lead. On such a night, Gyou went out from his quiet town to Ginza. There splendid Christmastide and year-end sales had begun.

Whether friends, lovers, or family—nearly everyone on the sidewalk had companions in tow. The faces of those walking alone bore the look of those expecting to meet friends imminently. And even those who truly walked solitary, so long as they possessed money and health, found no disapproving gaze from this marketplace of material desires. “What am I doing coming to Ginza?”

Gyou often thought this when the pavement had already begun to offer him nothing but fatigue. At such times, Gyou would recall the face of a girl he had once seen on a train. The girl wore a modest smile as she hung from the strap before his seat. A neck reminiscent of an “older sister” emerged from a kimono that hung loose on her body like a padded robe. Her beautiful face made him intuit at a glance what illness afflicted her. Her porcelain-like white skin was shaded by abundant downy hair. Grime clung around her nostrils.

"She must have escaped from her sickbed."

While gazing at the girl’s face—her smile flickering like ripples—Gyou thought. What was it she kept wiping away, as though blowing her nose? Like a stove that had shed its ashes, at such times a vivid flush would rise momentarily to her face. Clutching the image of the girl—whose pitiable charm grew alongside his own fatigue—Gyou struggled to spit out his phlegm in Ginza. Just like the girl from the Grimm fairy tale from whose mouth a frog would leap whenever she spoke.

He had once seen a man spit phlegm at such times. Suddenly, a shabby geta appeared and crushed it. But that was not a geta being worn on someone’s foot. He saw an old man—who had laid out a straw mat by the roadside to sell tin tops, his face now betraying anger—stacking another geta atop those at the mat’s edge.

“Did you see that?” With such feelings, Gyou looked back at the people passing by. But no one seemed to have noticed it. The spot where the old man sat was far too close to catch the notice of passersby. Even without that, the tin tops the old man was selling must have already been trite things even in a rural candy store. Gyou had never once seen those toys sell.

“What am I doing coming here?” He would buy expensive French spices while feeling something akin to anger, after purchasing coffee, butter, bread, and brushes as excuses to himself. At times, he would linger at a corner restaurant until the hour when street stalls closed up. Warmed by the stove, enlivened by a piano trio, with glasses clinking, glances glinting, and smiles bubbling up—the restaurant’s ceiling had a number of listless winter flies fluttering about. Aimlessly, he found himself watching even those things.

“What am I doing coming here?” When he went out into the street, the sweeping wind had already thinned the crowd of laborers. Into the late night—where flyers seized by people at dusk were unnaturally blown into a single spot in the town, and spat phlegm froze instantly among scattered geta clasps—he ultimately had to return home.

“What am I doing coming here?”

That was nothing more than the lingering remnants of his old life’s vitality within him. Eventually, I will cease coming here, he thought with a leaden fatigue weighing upon him. The nights he experienced in his room stretched endlessly like hospital corridors—no yesterday’s night, no night before that, and likely no tomorrow’s night to come. There, his former life lay suspended in deathly air. His thoughts amounted to nothing but plaster filling the bookshelves. The star chart on the wall sat dust-shrouded, its dial forever fixed at 3 AM on some October date past midnight. When he visited the bathroom late at night, frost resembling moonlight glimmered on the roof tiles beyond the small window. Only then would his heart briefly lift—a faint brightening amidst the gloom.

The hard bed, when he left it, awaited a day that would begin in the afternoon. The tilted winter sun projected its light around the window like a magic lantern—such were his days. And that strange sunlight gradually laid bare both the fact that everything was but an illusion and that, precisely because they were illusions, things were imbued with a spiritual beauty. The loquat trees were in bloom, and from a distant sunlit patch, citrus fruits caught the eye. And the early winter showers had already turned to sleet, racing along the eaves.

Sleet struck the black roof tiles one after another, tumbling and rolling away. The sound of sleet striking the corrugated iron roof. The sound of sleet striking glossy leaves. The sound of sleet vanishing into withered grass. Eventually, the hiss of it falling across the world began to reach his ears. And then, piercing through the white winter veil, a crane’s cry arose from a nearby mansion. At such times, Gyou’s heart too could feel a fresh joy. He leaned against the windowsill and thought of the old days when eccentricity had existed. Yet applying that to himself was something Gyou could not do.

V

Unnoticed, the Winter Solstice had passed.

On one such day, Gyou went to a pawnshop in the town where he used to live—a place he had long avoided. Because money had come, he went out to redeem his winter coat. But when he went there, it had already been sold off.

“Mr. Gyou, when was that again?” “Here.”

In the time since he had last seen him, the young clerk—now grown quite adult-like—flipped through the ledger.

Gyou began to find strangely altered the face of the clerk whose explanation flowed out with relative fluency. At one moment he seemed to speak while barely suppressing intense resentment; at another he appeared utterly unperturbed as he spoke. He thought he had never been so perplexed in trying to read someone’s expression. This was the clerk who usually engaged in friendly small talk with him.

Through the clerk’s words, Gyou was reminded for the first time in reality of how many times he had received mail from the pawnshop. In the depths of a mind corroded as if by sulfuric acid—while sensing a bitter smile at the thought of telling such things to this clerk—he too feigned indifference on his face like the clerk’s, listened through the account of items disposed together with it, and left the shop.

A single emaciated dog, its haunches quivering in an ugly stance by the thawing roadside, was squatting to defecate. Gyou, feeling a perverse compulsion inching closer, watched the dog’s repulsive form until it finished. Even on the long train ride home, he endured the part of himself that kept threatening to succumb to collapse. And when he got off the train—the Western-style umbrella he was supposed to have taken when leaving home—he did not have it.

He reflexively averted his eyes, which had been trying to follow the train aimlessly. Dragging heavy fatigue, he returned along the evening road. When he had gone out to town that day, he had vomited something red; it was still clinging to the base of a hibiscus by the roadside. A faint shudder ran through Gyou. —to that red color which, when he vomited, he could only think he had done something bad. ——

The time of evening fever had arrived. A cold sweat crawled unpleasantly beneath his arms. He sat rigidly in his room, still wearing his outdoor clothes with hakama unremoved. Suddenly a dagger-sharp sorrow pierced him. When he imagined his mother—who had lost loved ones one after another—with her occasional dazed expression, he began weeping silently.

By the time he went downstairs after having dinner, his heart had already returned to calmness.

At that moment, a friend named Orita came to visit. He had no appetite. He immediately went upstairs.

Orita brought down the star chart that had been hanging on the wall and kept adjusting its markings. “Hey.” Orita did not answer that,

“What do you think? Isn’t it magnificent?”

After that, he did not try to raise his face. Gyou suddenly swallowed his breath. He could believe just how magnificent that view truly was. “I came here thinking I’d return to my hometown now that my vacation’s started.”

“So it’s already your vacation?” “I’m not going back this time.” “Why?” “I don’t want to go back.” “From home…” “I sent a letter saying I won’t be returning home.” “Are you going on a trip or something?”

“No, that’s not it.”

Orita stared back piercingly into Gyou’s eyes and did not ask further. But stories about friends’ gossip, school, and old times gradually emerged.

“Lately at school, they’ve been demolishing the burned ruins of the auditorium.” “Well, you see, the workers climb up the burned brick walls of the ruins with pickaxes…”

Orita depicted—with gestures—the laborers wielding pickaxes against the very brick walls they were standing on. “Up to the point where one more strike would do it, they’re up there with their pickaxes pressed against it.” “Then they move to a safe spot and give it one solid whack.” “Then the big one comes crashing down with a thunderous boom.”

“Hmm.” “Quite interesting.” “It’s interesting.” “That’s why it’s such a hit!” Gyou and the others drank endless cups of tea as they talked. But whenever he saw Orita—using his own teacup—drinking tea incessantly, each time his mind would drift away from their conversation. That obsession increasingly weighed down upon Gyou. “Do you mind using a consumptive’s teacup? Every time I cough, germs go flying everywhere—if you’re fine with that, then you’ve got a poor sense of hygiene, and if you’re putting up with it out of some sense of friendship, then I think it’s just childish sentimentality—that’s what I think.”

After saying it, Gyou wondered why he had uttered such unpleasant words. Orita remained silent, his eyes narrowing sharply once and holding that gaze. “Has no one come by for some time?”

“No one came for a while.” “Do you resent them when they don’t come?” This time Gyou fell silent. Yet somehow he found this exchange oddly pleasant. “I don’t resent anyone. But these days… I’ve begun thinking differently myself.” “I see.”

Gyou told Orita about the events of that day. “I just can’t stay calm at times like that.” “Calmness isn’t unfeeling—for me, it’s emotion.” “It’s agony.” “But my path lies in that calmness—watching my own body and life decay.” “…………”

“I think true calmness will come once my life is completely shattered.” “Like a leaf settling on a rock at the water’s depths…” “That’s Jousou.” “…I see. So they haven’t come by for a while.” “Such things… But this kind of thinking only deepens the loneliness.” “I think it’d be good if you considered moving elsewhere for a change of climate.” “Even if they tell you to come home for New Year’s, you still don’t plan on going back?”

“I don’t plan on going back.”

It was an unusually windless, quiet evening. On such nights, there were no fires either. As the two of them talked, from outside occasionally came the sound of a small, whistle-like call. At eleven o'clock, Orita left. Just as he was about to leave, he took out two train discount tickets from his wallet,

“Since going to school to retrieve them would probably be a hassle,” he said and handed them to Gyou.

VI

A letter came from Mother.

“There must be something different about you now. So I’ve arranged for Dr. Tsue—who will be visiting the capital for New Year’s—to call on you. Be ready for that.” “Since you said you wouldn’t return, I sent spring clothes. This year I made a dōchaku and included it; a dōchaku is a garment worn between your kimono and underrobe. You mustn’t wear it directly against your skin.” —— Dr. Tsue was the son of Gyou’s mother’s teacher and had graduated from university to become a doctor. Yet there had been a time when Gyou had regarded him with something like fraternal admiration.

When Gyou went out for walks nearby lately，he encountered hallucinations of his mother more frequently．“Mother!” When he thought this only to find a complete stranger’s face before him，he often had strange thoughts．——It seemed to shift seamlessly．Again，the vision of Mother already sitting in his room flickered before his eyes，making him turn back home．But what arrived was a letter．And the one who should have come was Tsue．Gyou’s hallucinations ceased．

When walking through the town, Gyou felt he had become a human leveling instrument. He gradually noticed his breathing growing more strained. And when he looked back, the road was sloping at an angle whose steepness he hadn’t known existed. He stopped and gasped violently, his shoulders heaving. Before a painful lump could descend through his chest, he inevitably had to endure once more that suffocating helplessness of not knowing what to do. When that subsided, Gyou started walking again.

What drove him? That was the sight of the sun sinking toward the distant horizon.

His day could no longer endure being drawn to the gray Western-style wooden house across the lowland, to the vanishing winter days that slipped away day after day. As the scenery outside his window gradually faded into the wan air, his heart would stir with a peculiar irritation at the realization that this was no longer mere shade but a shade now named night.

Ahh... I want to see a grand sunset.

He left the house and searched for a place offering a distant view. In the year-end town, the sound of rice cake pounding arose. In front of the flower shop, planters arranged with plum blossoms and adonis were lined up. Those scenes of daily life grew gradually more beautiful as the town began losing its bearings, unsure where or how to return. The path he had never before trodden—there, a woman polishing rice and children squabbling compelled him to halt. But wherever he sought a vantage point, there were shadow silhouettes of large roofs and clear treetops against the sunset sky. Each time, the concealed form of the sun sinking toward the distant horizon imprinted itself upon his anguished heart.

The air brimming with sunlight clung not the slightest bit apart from the earth. His unfulfilled longing would sometimes ascend to high rooftops and imagine a man reaching his hand toward the sky. The tips of the man’s fingers brushed against that very air. He imagined hydrogen-filled soap bubbles—lifting the pale people and city skyward—suddenly bursting forth in a prism of colors within that air.

In the crystal-clear blue sky, floating clouds burned away beautifully, one after another. Even to the embers of Gyou’s unfulfilled heart, that fire eventually spread.

"Why must such beautiful moments be so brief?"

At such times, he never felt more ephemeral. The burned clouds began turning one after another into dead ash. His legs could no longer move forward.

“I wonder where on Earth the shadow permeating that sky would fall.” “Unless I reach those clouds, I won’t get to see today’s sunlight either.”

Suddenly, a heavy fatigue pressed upon him. At an unfamiliar street corner in an unfamiliar town, Gyou’s heart would never brighten again.