Pathway to Japanese Literature

I I had been worn down by the gloomy weather of late and found myself unable to muster the will to write letters. Back when I lived in Kyoto, my pleura would worsen every year around this season, but since moving here, that had ceased to happen. One reason may have been that I had stopped drinking alcohol. Yet still my mind grew unhealthy. You might laugh and say it's admirable, but going to school had become truly burdensome. I took the train. The ride took forty minutes. Perhaps because my mood had turned passive, I constantly felt as though the person sitting before me was staring at my face. I knew full well this was my own solitary wrestling. To put it plainly—though I hadn't noticed this at first—the truth was that I myself had been seeking out such gazes. The very act of trying to make my eyes appear casual became the root of my torment.

Though it didn't quite amount to hostility, I harbored a prickly animus toward the people on the train. This too would sometimes have me oddly searching for flaws in people. Wide trousers that seemed to be in vogue among students, strangely tacky red shoes. And others. And others. What my weakened body couldn't endure was that vulgarity. If they had been doing it casually, I wouldn't have gotten angry. If they had been compelled by necessity, I could have even felt goodwill. But I could never bring myself to believe that was truly the case. It felt foolish.

Women’s hairstyles that I found unbearable had gradually increased in number.—Do you recall such an illustration existing in that monster book I lent you? It depicted a female monster. While her face appeared ordinary, the back of her head—that portion itself was monstrous—contained a ravenous mouth. Then came loosened hair ends morphing into tentacles that snatched sweets from a nearby pot and tried carrying them toward that maw. Yet whether she knew this or not, she kept facing forward with an unaffected expression.—When I saw this illustration, disgust washed over me. However, hairstyles these days contained elements reminding me precisely of it. The bun replicated that very mouth’s shape. My revulsion toward the drawing abruptly heightened after witnessing this coiffure.

If I kept noticing every little thing like this, it became unbearably stifling. Yet even when I tried thinking that way, there remained moments I couldn't escape. That was one pattern of discomfort. The more reflection seeped in, the more that stifling sensation turned awkward. One day came such an occurrence. Once again, the attire of the woman seated before me drew out my revulsion. I detested. I wanted to annihilate her decisively. And I sought words that could deliver effective humiliation. After some time, I succeeded in this. But it proved too potent a phrase. Not only would it destroy her—I felt it might leave that bustling woman steeped in profound misery. When discovering such words, I'd instantly imagine hurling them at her face, yet in this instance found myself unable. The woman—those words. Merely envisioning their collision already constituted cruelty. My vexed emotions gradually cooled. I told myself critiquing a woman's features was unmanly. I resolved to observe with warmer sympathy. Yet this harmonious mindset didn't endure. My solitary wrestling had gone too far.

When my eyes grazed over that woman once more, I suddenly sensed within that ugliness a health that perhaps surpassed my own. There exists an expression called "unwholesome vigor." In that sense, it was an unhealthily robust sensation. There grows a weed called railway creeper—that unstoppable thing. Might it resemble that very vigor? —Through contrast with this, my solitary wrestling gradually laid bare a nervous fragility.

Harboring an intense aversion to vulgarity had long been a habit of mine. And that was always a sign when my own mind was slackening. However, that was the first time I myself felt miserable. I realized the rainy season was weakening me.

Another nuisance when riding trains was how their clatter transformed into music. (You once mentioned having experienced something similar yourself.) I had tried harnessing that noise to hear decent melodies. Through such efforts, I'd unwittingly created adversaries that tormented me. Whenever I thought, "Let's try again," I'd immediately detect those compositions within the train's rattling and the city's din. Yet when thoroughly drained, they wouldn't sound in accurate pitch—which was tolerable. The true trouble was how this process had slipped beyond my command. That wasn't all. Before long, it started producing precisely the sort of music I found insufferable. The very type that woman from before might have danced to. Sometimes mockingly crude, sometimes deliberately vulgar. And it rang like their victory fanfare—though phrasing it so gives it undue coherence—but regardless proved excruciatingly unpleasant.

When I grew melancholy on the train, my face must surely have looked hideous. "If someone with discerning eyes saw it, they would never approve," I thought. I felt a formless "evil" settling over my melancholy. I wanted to flee from that "evil". But I couldn't very well stop riding trains. If both poison and plate were preordained, there was no need to shrink back. My solitary wrestling ended here. I resolved to grasp that sea with tangible feeling.

One day, I was riding the train with my younger friend. He was a friend who had come to Tokyo a year after us this April. My friend found Tokyo disagreeable. And he kept talking about all the good things Kyoto had. I too had experienced at least something akin to that feeling. People who come flocking here only to immediately take a liking to Tokyo are unpleasant. However, I could not bring myself to agree with my friend's words. I said that Tokyo also had its own distinct merits. Even those who say such things are unpleasant. Such remarks could even be sensed in my friend’s tone. And we both fell completely silent. It was an unbearably awkward silence. My friend also told me that day that back when he was in Kyoto, during those moments when train windows passed each other, he would determine in his mind which-numbered window held the girl who would next become involved in his life—waiting for their passing as if listening to an oracle—and that there had indeed been times when he did such things. And that story left me numb. Even to such things, I myself had become fixated.

II

One day O came to visit me. O had a healthy-looking face. And proceeded to talk about all sorts of cheerful topics.—

O fixed his eyes on the paper that was on my desk. On many sheets of paper, the word “Waste” was written in rows. “What’s this? Did you get yourself a lover or something?” O teased.

At those words—"lover"—so unlike anything that would typically come from O’s mouth, I suddenly found myself recalling my own self from five or six years prior. It was a childlike yet intense passion of mine directed at a certain girl. That it ended in such extreme fruitlessness is something you must know at least a little about. —My father’s voice, thick with bitterness, declared the outcome of that disgraceful incident. I suddenly found the air stifling. Letting out a sound I didn’t recognize myself, I leapt from my bed. My brother followed afterward. I ran to my mother’s dressing table and saw my own pale face reflected there. It was hideously contorted. Why I had run there—even I couldn’t clearly say. Perhaps I had wanted to witness that anguish with my own eyes. There are times when looking in the mirror quiets the heart’s agitation. —My parents, brother, O, and another friend were those who had struggled with me at that time. And at home, even now, they do not speak that girl’s name in my presence. I had tried writing her name in extremely abbreviated characters on the edges of paper scraps. And there were times when I would erase it, then inevitably tear it to shreds. Yet on the paper O had teased me about, the word "Waste" was indeed lined up across every inch.

“What are you talking about? That’s completely off the mark,” I said. And I explained the reason.

The previous evening, I had again been tormented by melancholy. The rain fell in a sodden downpour. And its sound played that familiar music. Having no desire to read books, I had been doodling. Whether this character "Waste" was easy to write—you know how there are characters that flow naturally from an idle brush—it was one of those. I had been writing it over and over mindlessly. Gradually, my ears began to discern within it a steady rhythm like a loom weaving. This was because my hand movements had settled into a pattern. It was only natural I could hear it. From when I first noticed something audible until recognizing it as a charming rhythm, my state of mind remained too modest to be called either tension or joy. Yet it no longer held the weariness of an hour before. I became absorbed in that adorable rhythm—like the rustle of silk or a Lilliputian train. When even this grew tiresome, a new desire arose to mimic that sound with some words. As if listening for whether it had peaked like a cuckoo's call.—Yet in the end, I could not discover it. My preconception—that sibilant sounds must dominate—had hindered me. However, I did hear small fragmented words. And I realized these implied a language neither Tokyo's nor any other region's, but rather my hometown's—specifically, my family's distinct accent.—I must have been striving desperately then. I think it was that purity of heart which ultimately drove me to leave my hometown.

It felt as though my hometown—grown distant from my heart—and that utterly unexpected late hour were sitting knee to knee in quiet intimacy. I didn’t understand what truth it was, but I felt something true within it all. I had grown somewhat exhilarated.

However, I told O that perhaps this was hinting at truth in art—particularly poetic truth. O listened to this with a gentle smile. Sharpening my pencil to a fine point, I let O hear that sound too. O narrowed his eyes and said, “I hear, I hear.” “And if I tried changing the characters and paper quality myself,” he added, “that might prove interesting.” “The sound changes when your handling grows stiff.” He laughed, calling it “voice breaking.” “Since even my family says it resembles someone’s voice—likely my youngest brother’s,” he concluded.

There are times when I find imagining my brother’s voice breaking to be somehow cruel. The next story was also from this day’s conversation with O. And this is something I want to write down in the letter.

O said that the previous Sunday he had taken a relative’s child to a place called Hanazono in Tsurumi. He enthusiastically recounted the details to me. Hanazono seemed to have been something like a Paradise that once existed in Kyoto. He said that while there were many amusing things there, what delighted him most was the large slide they had installed. And he earnestly described the fun of sliding down it. It truly did seem to have been enjoyable. He told it in such a way that you felt even now some remnant of that delight lingered in his body. In the end, I found myself saying, “I’d really like to go see it.” It’s an odd phrasing, but this “I’d really like to go see it” balanced perfectly with O’s “The slide’s really fun!” And such balance stemmed from O’s very charm as a person. O was an honest man incapable of lying—what he said could be believed unreservedly. For someone as guarded as myself, this was at least a welcome thing.

And our conversation turned to the donkeys at that amusement park. They were donkeys that carried children around a fence—well-trained ones that would apparently complete a full circuit on their own once a child mounted them. I thought those animals were endearing. However, one of them supposedly stopped midway. O had apparently been watching. Then, they say, that halted creature simply began urinating right there. The child riding it—a girl, we were told—started fidgeting, her face growing steadily redder until she seemed ready to cry.—We laughed uproariously. The scene materialized vividly before my eyes. The good-natured donkey’s childish vulgarity, and that sweet bewilderment of the child fallen victim to its crudeness. It truly was an adorable sort of confusion. But even as I laughed, I found myself oddly unable to sustain it. From that scene so perfectly calibrated for laughter, only the girl’s emotions came flooding toward me. “To do something so ill-mannered.” “I’m embarrassed.”

I could no longer laugh. Due to my sleeplessness from the previous night, my mind had grown peculiarly susceptible to distraction and prone to fixation. I felt it. And for a time, the discomfort refused to lift. I should have simply told O about it. Had I only given voice to those feelings, I might have laughed them off as an endearing absurdity. Yet somehow I found myself unable to speak. And I envied O—O who never lost that balanced harmony of healthy emotions.

III

My room was a good room. If I were to point out a flaw, it would be that the construction was rather thin, making it sensitive to things like humidity. One window was close to trees and a cliff, and the other offered a view across lowlands such as Okutanizume to Iikura’s train tracks. Within that view was the old shii tree of the former Tokugawa residence. That tree, having passed who knows how many years, was by far the largest and most splendid sight within the view. Is it that shii trees turn their leaves red during the rainy season? At first, I wondered if it might be catching the sunset’s reflection or something of that sort. Such was its redness. However, even on rainy days, it remained the same. It was always the same. It was indeed the tree’s own phenomenon. I recalled, though some days had passed, the verse by poets of old: "Leaving rains behind—ah, Kōdō." And I coined the term "shii akane" and felt pleased to substitute it into the fifth line below. I felt as though I had come to see with new eyes that it was not the seventh line* that had been left by the rains, but rather that the rains themselves had left something behind.

Near the window facing the cliff grew a tree called kanahide within arm’s reach. It was said to be a type of magnolia. I thought that this flower was not unfitting within the May darkness. But above all else, the rainy season was unbearable. When the rain continued, my room became filled with dampness. When I saw things like the dampness around the windows, I grew utterly melancholy. I found myself oddly irritated. The sky simply hung heavy and oppressive.

“Tch. The bottom of a derelict ship.”

One day I tried cursing my room with those very words. And as I cursed, the way I did it became so amusing to myself that my mood shifted entirely. There are times when Mother comes scolding me with her nagging. And sometimes she ends up laughing at her own absurdly outrageous curses. It felt somewhat like that. My imagination took those words and had me lay tatami mats on the bottom of a derelict ship, journeying down a great river. I thought that precisely in such moments did even the rainy season's oppressive presence add a touch of interest.

IV

That too was an afternoon when rain had fallen. I set out for A’s house in Akasaka. The gatherings we had during our Kyoto days—you attended one of those meetings, if I recall—if you remember, A was there at that time.

This April, three more people who had been maintaining those gatherings after us struck out on their own and came to Tokyo. And given that there had already been plans, together with the five who had come to Tokyo earlier, our meetings in Tokyo began anew. And it was settled that we would publish a coterie magazine starting January of next year, and that we would set aside funds and manuscripts each month. The reason I went to A’s house was to deliver those accumulated funds.

Recently, A had been having a dispute with his family. It was a matter of marriage. Were A to follow the path he desired, it would mean abandoning his parents. At least, that was how his parents saw it. A's predicament demanded a stance from me, his own friend. Initially, I even contemplated treating him coldly. At the very least, I strove to avoid becoming someone who might inflame his passions. The more the conflict escalated in this manner, the more I felt compelled to do so. Yet whatever banner might be raised, he had gradually shown himself unmoved by any standard others might set. I now understood that human character—which in ordinary times remains indistinct—reveals its contours most sharply precisely in such moments. He too would likely deepen his nature through this trial. I found that beautiful.

When I arrived at A’s house, the group that had newly arrived in Tokyo happened to be present. They were debating the letter from the mediator who had intervened in A’s family dispute. A had left them behind and gone out shopping. That day too, my spirits felt completely stifled. Listening to their discussion, I withdrew into silence with a sense of isolation. Then at some prompting, I heard someone say: “If you claim to understand A’s feelings so well, why won’t you exert yourself for our side?” It was a remark delivered with harsh intensity. Needless to say, these words concerned the mediator.

My heart jolted inexplicably. The sheer force of living without any gap between knowing and doing weighed heavily upon me. Yet it wasn’t just that burden alone. Deep within, I had tacitly endorsed the mediator’s stance—or rather, because I’d convinced myself, “I understand where they’re coming from.” I couldn’t escape this self-reproach: claiming comprehension of both sides only proved my ignorance of either. An unspeakable revulsion gripped me as my supposed bedrock crumbled away. Even A’s parents, I feared, would now shun me entirely. But as my emotions veered toward one extreme, an instinctive resistance surged forth. By the time I left A’s house, I’d finally reclaimed some semblance of tranquil equilibrium. When A returned from his errand, our conversations turned wholly toward next year’s plans. They reveled repeatedly in the magazine name R had devised, laughing ruefully at their earlier agonies over choosing it. What struck me most was how our collective spirit—having first found form through that name—now drew fresh vigor and structure from the very title it had inspired.

We were treated to dinner with items sent from A’s country.

When I returned to my room, the flowers of the oak tree near the window filled the entire space with their heavy scent. A pointed out to me through that window the linden tree, which in my mind had existed separately as name and object. I also informed everyone that the tree on Iikura Street was a horse chestnut. A few days prior, R, A, and a few others had gone to see those beautiful flowers and were saying things like "Isn’t this a horse chestnut?" I had read that name from a sign that was attached to one of them, which said, "Let’s take good care of street trees."

While discussing the accumulated funds, I learned that one of them was earning the money for it entirely through his own work. He said he didn’t want to take it from his parents’ money.—Even now, I realized I was setting out with good companions. Since my feelings had settled into considerable harmony, I did not blame myself too much for this friend’s actions.

After a while, we left A’s house.

Outside was pleasantly clear after the rain. Through the town still early in the evening, I returned with one of my friends via Reinanzaka. He said he would stop by my place to borrow some books on his way home. He said we would look at the horse chestnut flowers while we were at it. Because this one friend had missed seeing them.

Along the way, I sang melodies difficult to sing at full volume and had that friend listen. It’s only when I’m in good spirits that I can sing them.

When we came near Gazenbo, we encountered an interesting incident. That was a man who had caught a firefly. “Is this a firefly?” he abruptly said and thrust the gap between his cupped hands right before our noses. The firefly was glowing with a beautiful light within them. “I caught it over there,” he explained without even being asked. My friend and I exchanged glances and formed odd smiles. After putting some distance between us, we burst into mutual laughter. “He must have gone and caught them all up,” I said. I thought I must have been unable to keep from saying something.

Iidabashi Street glowed with post-rain beauty. On the horse chestnut tree we looked up at together, beautiful flowers like decorative lanterns were in bloom. I was in a mood to look back on myself from five or six years ago. I thought it was precisely from that time that my eyes first began opening to natural beauty. The color of those leaf undersides visible through electric light had also existed in the small park near the house of the girl I used to feel tempted by at night. I had made it my routine to walk around that girl’s house and rest on the bench beneath it.

(Now that I can firmly believe my passion for beauty and my passion for that girl were twins sharing the same womb, I think there will be no trouble in confessing to you what my younger self ultimately committed—acts bordering on theft and equivalent to fraud.) Those things have indeed been the clouded shadows darkening my memories until today.)

The trains running through the city appeared before my eyes with their distinct evening beauty. With its windows thrown open to the post-rain air, the train’s interior—neither overcrowded nor empty—passed before us who had come through dark streets. It was illuminated by a light that made one feel as though happiness itself were being carried there. The women aboard, too, seemed beautiful to us at a mere glance from the street. We watched many trains pass by. Among them, we also saw beautiful Westerners. My friend must have found that evening agreeable too.

“Inside trains it’s hard to see faces properly, but from the street or when passing by, you can watch them for quite some time,” he said. At my friend’s casually uttered words, I reconsidered with a beautifully vivid awareness how insensible I had been the day before.

V

This is what happened on the day I resolved to write this letter to you. For the first time in a while, I took a hand towel and went to the public bathhouse. It was indeed after the rain. The hedge's osmanthus was emitting a pungently pleasant scent.

In the public bathhouse, I would occasionally come across an old man and a girl who seemed to be his granddaughter. She was the sort of adorable child you'd want to take to Hanazonoen.

That day, while looking at the painted landscape hanging above the bathtub, I made a small discovery—"They must have meant this to look like a hot spring"—and found myself smiling. The water came from a hot spring, with an electric bath system having been installed as well. In the quiet midday bath, two young men were soaking. When I had joined them and warmed up somewhat, the device began buzzing rapidly.

“Hey, the power’s come on,” one of the young men said. “It ain’t the power,” the other answered. Having exited the bath, I took a seat near that girl. While washing myself, I occasionally glanced at her face. She had a cute face. The old man finished washing himself and turned to the child. He took the soapy hand towel she’d been fumbling with in her childish hands. As his face turned away, I stared fixedly at the girl’s face, anticipating her gaze would drift toward me. When she finally turned my way, I smiled at her. But the girl didn’t smile back. Yet when her neck was being washed—even struggling to look—she strained her eyes upward to see me. In the end, she went “Ugh...” while painfully keeping those upturned eyes fixed on my forced smile. That “Ugh...” looked utterly adorable.

“There we go,” The old man’s oblivious hands suddenly forced the child’s head down. After a while, the girl’s neck was relieved. I had been waiting for that. And this time, I showed her a deliberately comical face. And gradually contorted it more and more severely. “Grandpa” The girl finally said something. She did so while looking at my face. “Who’s this person here?” “That’s just some stranger, mister.” Without turning around, the old man continued diligently washing the child as before.

After an unusually long bath, I emerged feeling thoroughly refreshed. While soaking, I had found myself pondering a particular problem that left my mind strangely light and clear. The problem was this: Once, during a comparison of arm thickness, I had pointed out unhealthy wrinkles in a friend's skin. At which he vehemently declared, "There are times I think I should just die." He explained he couldn't tolerate having even the slightest physical imperfection. They were mere wrinkles. But what I'd noticed was their permanence. A trivial matter, really. Yet even then, I'd felt something within me grow weary. I recalled there being a time when I'd harbored similar thoughts myself. I'm certain it existed, though the memory eludes me. And with that realization came loneliness. This was what had surfaced in my bathwater reverie. Searching my past, I indeed found such moments. I can't recall my exact age—it was when I first became aware of my face's ugliness. Another instance came when bedbugs infested my house. How desperately I wanted to burn the whole structure down. Then there was the time I botched characters in a new notebook's first pages. The urge to discard it entirely nearly overwhelmed me.

After recalling such things, I thought that if the opportunity arose, I would like to tell my younger friend—for his own reflection—about the quiet dignity of old tools that had been used with care and well-mended. There had indeed been an instance where two people had praised a tea bowl with its cracks filled with lacquer.

On my flushed body, even the fine blood vessels were faintly swollen. I bent and stretched both arms, pressing and kneading my upper arms and shoulders to test their muscle tone. The me in the mirror was healthier than myself. I contorted my face into a comical expression, just as I had done before.

"Hysterica Passio"—with that said, I finally burst into laughter.

The most unpleasant period of the year for me was already about to pass. Looking back, even amidst those many days when my heart's movements had utterly stalled, there were moments like when I came to know the heady fragrance of honeysuckle in Minami Aoi Bunko's garden. There were evenings too when, from the scent of railway grass at Reinanzaka, I thought autumn—having outlasted summer—now drew near. Without debasing myself through delusion, wishing to fight only those opponents I must fight and find peace in the harmony that follows—it was this sentiment I took up my pen to convey.

—October 1925—