Pathway to Japanese Literature

Narao was a dull-witted child by nature—nearsighted and clumsy at everything he did—but he had one talent: catching flies. When loneliness gripped his heart, he would catch them.
Flies, he would explain while demonstrating, could see sideways and upward but not straight ahead—all one needed was to approach them head-on. In an instant, he would slip one into his palm. This seemed to comfort his heart, and he secretly took pride in the deftness of it—a pride that only made Narao appear all the more like a dull, forlorn child.
Pitiable to behold—for when people indulged him by calling him a master, he would lose all self-awareness, continuing to catch flies even after nightfall; in the twilight, he constantly adjusted his glasses while glaring about, his tenacity taking on a sudden air of madness.

Before Keisuke could even find such a Narao pitiable, a bitter irritation crept up his molars and ground against them. He would return home every Saturday night only to vanish by Sunday morning—rarely showing his face except to deliver a litany of reproaches.

“Stop this foolishness and learn from Shuichi.”

At such times, his elder brother Shuichi would theatrically recite from textbooks and flaunt his role as class president. Observed closely—from his large head and caterpillar-thick eyebrows to how he twisted his mouth while speaking—every trait mirrored Father; these very traits seemed to endear him.

But compared to that, Narao’s eyebrows were thin and wispy from the very start, his entire face flat and smooth—so he gradually grew resentful, convinced that this was why Father disliked him.
And when he confronted [the situation] with this resolve, he still felt disliked, so he tried acting aloof—yet deep down, as a child, he ached with sorrow. Convinced that he was disliked because he was dim-witted and performed poorly at school, he studied diligently, yet still couldn’t catch up to his brother. Seeing how grotesquely his own head jutted out behind his brother’s, he would sigh repeatedly. Night after night, sighing himself to sleep, he dreamed of flying through the sky—only to wake at dawn from nightmares of cows gnawing at his skull—until finally, he turned thirteen.

One night—though he couldn't remember what nightmare had tormented him—he jolted awake to find both his futon and tatami gone, leaving him lying on bare floorboards. He suddenly leapt to his feet,

“Thief! Thief!”
“The tatami are gone.”

Shouting hoarsely in panic, he entered his parents’ bedroom downstairs and found the lamp still on,

“A thief…?”

And Father’s startled hand left Mother’s neck.

Mother too pulled her chest away from Father’s.

“What about the tatami?”
“Narao, pull yourself together.”

Spinning around to face the tokonoma alcove and screaming “Thief! Thief!” at the Daruma painting while forcing out a shrill, strained voice, Narao’s bizarre behavior finally struck even his mother Hisae as absurd.

“There’s not a single tatami mat left on the second floor.”
“The glasses were taken too!”

And Narao abruptly went out and entered the toilet,

“A tsunami came.”
“A huge tsunami came and swept away both the futon and tatami mats.”
“The loincloth’s cord comes flowing.”

After muttering nonsense and splattering urine across the wooden floorboards, he staggered upstairs and crawled back into his futon with a perfectly composed face, soon snoring loudly.
In the neighboring futon, Shuichi—now a second-year middle school student—hunched his neck like a turtle retracting into its shell, furtively smoking a cigarette while engrossed in a mimeographed book of dubious content; Narao didn’t so much as glance his way.

One snowy morning about a month later, while dawn had yet to break, the front doorbell suddenly clanged violently. Startled, Hisae went to check and found Narao standing there with a deathly pale face.
He should have been sleeping on the second floor, yet somehow he had changed into black trousers and a single knit shirt, now drenched and caked with snow.
It was immediately clear he had wandered through snowy streets; when she grabbed his shoulder and asked what was wrong, he didn’t answer, instead climbing to the second floor with a wheezy gait like a twisted corkscrew.
Immediately following him up, she saw that by the bedside, books pulled from the shelf were stacked high, with neatly folded sleepwear placed atop them and a chrysanthemum from the tokonoma alcove, a pencil, and a mandarin orange arranged on the sleepwear.

“Narao, what is the meaning of this?”

However, Narao had no way to answer. As he slept, an unknown force had suddenly assailed him—his own strength trying to defend against it proved too weak compared to the advancing power, and the collapse of equilibrium became unbearably terrifying. Desperate to maintain balance, he tried stacking books and cluttering objects haphazardly atop them, yet still couldn’t hold back. The circumstances that drove him to flee—how he couldn’t properly explain it even to himself, how he believed no understanding would come even if he tried—remained beyond articulation.

That evening, after hearing Hisae’s account, Keisuke bitterly concluded it was early-onset dementia.

In the summer of the year he entered middle school, his brother Shuichi—what had possessed him?—took Narao to the coast of Kōroen near their house. Peering intently into Narao’s face while declaring *“Since you’re a middle schooler now, I’ll tell you,”* he suddenly—

“We’re children of a concubine.”

he said.
His voice had abruptly turned hoarse—which should have made it sound more intimidating, Shuichi thought—but Narao merely muttered vacantly,

“What’s a concubine?”

Shuichi, who had deliberately chosen the twilight hour at the coast to maximize his revelation’s impact, found himself utterly deflated.

Shuichi had become aware of the world and gradually come to realize the truth.
The stamped-out regularity of Father’s weekend returns home—explained by Mother as due to his busy schedule managing a hospital in Ashiya while also working at Osaka University Hospital—seemed plausible enough, but Shuichi remained undeceived.
Though it took less than an hour to walk from their Kōroen home to Ashiya, he had never once been shown this supposed hospital of Father’s—moreover, scouring all of Ashiya revealed no hospital bearing the Murakoshi name.
During Father’s visits came furtive whispers thick with implication—Mother’s weeping, Father’s snarls—and when Shuichi pieced it together, realizing in a flash that Ashiya held the main household while their Kōroen home was the concubine residence, first came visceral disgust, then torment over his future plunging into darkness. Yet he found faint solace in anticipating how he’d seize his brother Narao and deliver this revelation like a bolt from the blue—a cruelty-edged comfort.

All the more, Narao’s attitude disappointed Shuichi.
Therefore, Shuichi’s account became even more exaggerated.
Even Narao suddenly turned pale.
When Shuichi abruptly peered at Narao’s bowed face, the depths of his glasses glinted—the effect proved precisely calculated.
Eventually, he removed his glasses and placed them in his jacket pocket, then wiped at the streaming tears with the tips of his short fingers, wiping and wiping.
Suddenly, Shuichi felt sorry for him,

“Don’t cry. Let’s live like the children of a concubine.”

Half-directing this at himself, he placed a hand on Narao’s shoulder. Narao, catching the sweaty stench of his elder brother’s body odor, felt an oddly feminine sense of reassurance. When he looked up, his brother’s thick eyebrows appeared dependably sturdy—yet somehow, they struck him as uncannily resembling their father’s.

When summer vacation ended and they attended the second term’s opening ceremony at their Osaka middle school, both brothers found their surname had suddenly been changed from Murakoshi to Nakanowari. Narao, not understanding why, snickered dryly at the absurd name they’d been saddled with, but Shuichi gave a bitter smile—wondering if their registration had finally been processed—and quickly devised an excuse to tell his friends they’d been adopted. However, even Shuichi had been flustered, thinking it strange for both brothers to be adopted together. When they returned home, red rice and grilled sea bream were served, and Mother was crying.

When Hisae worked as a nurse at a hospital in Okayama, she abruptly lost her lifelong hope of becoming a woman doctor because of Keisuke, who served as a physician at the same hospital.
She had been impregnated.
Keisuke maintained a conventional wife and children.
The child born from this was named Shuichi by Keisuke, signifying the primacy of scholarly pursuits.
Though Keisuke had indeed demonstrated such parental devotion, his recruitment by an Osaka hospital during that period—when rumors spread quickly in their small town—presented the perfect opportunity to abandon Hisae.
He did exactly that.
Hisae pursued him with Shuichi strapped to her back; when confronted, Keisuke reluctantly established a house for them in Kōroen.
Over a decade passed—during which Narao was born—yet Keisuke never registered either child in the family registry.
Claiming his legal wife wouldn’t consent—a half-truth—he had rejected Hisae’s demands all those years.
But Hisae refused to relent; she pressed Keisuke until this day’s joy was achieved.

And since such circumstances were never explained to her—herself being the eldest daughter and Father being the eldest son—Hisae concocted this lie about why the family registry had remained unresolved until today.

“Oh? Is that so?”

Taking it with a grain of salt, Shuichi shook his large head two or three times to the right and left, then went upstairs.
Narao remained behind; because he was in the midst of munching away—just as Father had always grumbled “You take too long with your meals”—he alone bore the full weight of Mother’s joy.

But even that was natural, Hisae thought—

“Setting aside your brother, you must deeply thank Father.”

As proof of this, she carelessly told the truth—that initially, Keisuke had been opposed to Narao’s registration.

“Thanks for the meal.”

After saying just that, Narao clattered up to the second floor and flailed the fly swatter around everywhere.
The next day, in his first-year Class F classroom, Narao was made to stand in the hallway on the charge of fiddling with a tremendous number of flies behind his textbook.

In Class 3-B’s classroom, Shuichi was reading Hata Eiji’s *Sexual Studies* behind his textbook.

It was during his third year that Narao had borrowed from Shuichi—with the urging to “read these”—books such as Hata Eiji’s *Sexual Studies*, Kunikida Doppo’s *The Honest Man*, Maupassant’s *A Woman’s Life*, and Morita Sōhei’s *Transmigration*.
Those books, thick with censored blocks, awakened the adult in Narao; on a certain night when his curiosity about women’s bodies had abruptly swollen, Shuichi—

“Hey, you want me to set you up with a dame too?”

As he said this and led Narao toward Kōroen Beach, all the while explaining along the way: “Truth is, I’ve gotten acquainted with this dame—a girl student—but she’s always got her maid tagging along. We’re supposed to meet at the beach tonight too, but that maid coming along’s a nuisance. So you handle the maid for me—keep her occupied—while I take care of business with the dame.”

“Do it right.”
“She’s just a maid.”
“She’ll gladly do whatever you say, right?”
“Go decadent.”

Although he didn't know what "decadent" meant, Narao had taken a liking to the word's jarring sound and had long been going around declaring, "I'm decadent!"

“Alright.”
“I’ll go full decadent.”
“Smoke!”

Before Narao could finish a single cigarette, a girl of seventeen or eighteen wearing a silk crepe kimono—perhaps concerned about the knot of her heko obi—kept pressing her hand to her hip as she approached silently with her maid in tow.
He had been watching the girl’s slightly cross-eyed gaze, thinking she looked rather ugly and full of vulnerabilities, but the maid had buckteeth, a rounded nose tip, and moreover, her complexion was dark.
Narao was disappointed, but when Shuichi—hunched over—soon began walking while leaning against the woman, Narao also hurriedly fell into step beside the maid and asked, "How old are you?"
He himself felt disgusted by how gentle his voice had become, but deep down, he somehow felt sorry for that bucktoothed maid.
At the pine grove, Shuichi glanced back briefly.
The moment he did, Narao grabbed the maid’s rough hand.
Her hand was instantly pulled back, but immediately clasped in return—just as his brother had said.
When he peered at her face, the maid was looking up at the sky with vacant eyes.

“Let’s go this way.”

Turning in the direction opposite Shuichi, they walked in silence for half a block before he finally spoke in a light voice.

“Hey!”

He yanked her hand to make her lean against him, then suddenly pulled her close and touched his mouth to hers.

His teeth clattered, and the maid trembled grotesquely.
While catching whiffs of fishy breath, he plopped her down right there.

“You cold?”

He remembered up to saying that much, but after that he was lost in a frenzy, his curiosity and animalistic sensations numbing his body—but the maid stiffened her legs,

“Please, just spare me that—I beg you, young master—please, just spare me that.”
“Aah...”

Writhing, she shrieked in a shrill voice, her suddenly widened eyes stark white.
Narao snapped back to his senses. Using the strength in his hands planted on the grass to spring up, he fled without uttering a word or looking back—That was close—I nearly committed a crime! he screamed inwardly, his face deathly pale.
“Please—ah—young master—please spare me that.”
“Aah...”
Her “Aah…” lingered deep in Narao’s ears as he fled—the woman’s rigid posture, writhing in anguish, burned into his eyelids—and he ran as if pursued. But the moment he emerged from the pine grove onto the sandy shore, a thought struck his racing mind, prone as it was to extremes: Had becoming a concubine meant enduring that very torment?
When Narao ran back home,

“Mother, why did you become a concubine?”

“…………”

When he glared fixedly at Hisae’s face, which had stiffened into rigidity,

“Please give me twenty yen.”

Then, forcibly taking it from Mother’s hand, tears plopping from the gaps of his glasses, he bolted from the house—but upon realizing he had nowhere to go, his gait suddenly went slack, and his resolve to run away abruptly dulled.

However, when he reached Kōroen Station on the Hanshin Line, he abruptly encountered Shuichi walking from the coast direction with his expression stiffened like a mask.
Narao brusquely averted his face; seizing the moment when an Osaka-bound train entered the station, he suddenly boarded it, leaving behind Shuichi’s flustered voice calling “Hey, Narao!”
Shuichi stood gaping with an imbecilic expression as he watched dumbfounded.
Narao concluded he must run away from home precisely to shock his brother all the more.
Now that he had fled home, he resolved he must either plunge into utter depravity or perish in the streets—and as he vacillated between these boyishly extreme notions, swaying indecisively, the train arrived at Umeda.

He took the city tram to Shinsaibashi, bought a jacket at Aoki Clothing Store, and removed the uniform and cap he was wearing to leave them there. To live a life of degeneracy wouldn't be any fun in a middle school uniform, he thought. Wearing a brown jacket and black trousers with hands thrust in pockets—intending to pass as a full-fledged delinquent—when he reached Ebisubashi Bridge, a university student who seemed like a fraudster having tailed him from Aoki said, "Hey kid, come here for a sec," dragged him into Hozenji's precincts, forced him to strip off his uniform and cap before his eyes while scolding "Don't get too fancy," then extorted ten yen from him—a vivid humiliation.

His self-esteem had been so easily wounded. As he watched that fraudster's retreating figure—who'd left saying he'd be waiting at Aoki anytime for complaints—Narao thought: *If my first step into running away ends like this, I'm finished.* Whether to degenerate or die in the streets—he first had to beat that man—and with that resolve burning in his eyes.

After exiting Hozenji, he guzzled chilled syrup at Sakamachi's corner candy shop. Still unquenched, he drank Munasukashi—a gutrot brew—by Shorinji Temple's public toilet. *This swill proves my worthlessness,* he thought before entering the beer hall before Sennichimae tram stop.

He ordered a stein and fries, enduring suffocating agony while choking down a third of the beer. Letting out a *gack!* of a belch, he groaned red-faced—when suddenly his ear was yanked.

He turned around—ah! Stray Cat.

It was Teacher Miyagi, his homeroom instructor, though in that instant he couldn't recall the name and blurted the nickname instead. Stray Cat had clearly been drinking there too—face crimson, breath reeking of booze.

Dragged outside by his still-held ear, he was struck as someone barked: "How dare a mere student frequent this dump!" He thought it'd be hilarious to retort *How dare a mere teacher?*—but ah!—the wretched realization that his escape had failed overwhelmed him into silence.

The next day, he and his mother were summoned to the principal’s office.
Stray Cat claimed before the principal that he had caught him entering the beer hall after tailing him from Ebisubashi Bridge, while concealing the fact that he himself had been drinking there earlier.
Narao instantly despised Stray Cat.
Because he was told they wouldn’t tolerate lies, he blurted out everything he had done and hadn’t done.
He rattled off everything smoothly: smearing pepper on the science classroom’s microscope; experimenting during class to see how many imagawayaki pastries he could eat—though it varied by teacher, eight was generally safe; deliberately withholding a bus ticket only to have the female conductor shriek and chase him half a block; skipping his lunch bread for five days out of some vague conviction and giving it to the malnourished-looking dog at the principal’s residence, whose tail he swore still had cat repellent smeared on it—but about the Kōroen maid, he couldn’t bring himself to say a word.

When Hisae’s turn came，she suddenly became oddly animated，first recounting her painstaking efforts to cure Narao’s bedwetting—though it had now been cured—then explaining how he had taken to incessantly biting his nails and cracking his finger joints．“Principal，” she said，“Father must have been so terribly distressed by how unsightly it was．” She went on：“Even now，whenever he has a spare moment，he catches flies or mutters to himself．Lately，he seems obsessively absorbed in books on the I Ching…” Here，Hisae began weeping，and by then，the room had already grown dark．

“Talking to oneself shows there’s discontent in the heart—but what exactly do you mean by ‘books on the I Ching’?”

The principal turned toward Stray Cat.
Stray Cat—

“Ah—it’s entirely due to my own shortcomings.”

He pushed up his glasses with a handkerchief—then suddenly seized Narao’s arm.

“You—you—what have you done…”

When Stray Cat began weeping, even Narao felt a pang of remorse and gazed despondently at the twilight beyond the window—yet he couldn’t fathom why Stray Cat wept.

The scolding over, as he was about to exit the school gate, Shuichi—who seemed to have been waiting there all along—approached with a pale face and whispered, “Did my name come up?”
When he told him it was fine, Shuichi’s face relaxed as he said, “You should handle things more efficiently too.”
The moment he did, Shuichi incurred Narao’s contempt.

The return Hanshin train was crowded. Hisae’s white tabi socks were soiled when she recalled the face of Keisuke’s legal wife in Ashiya. Then, along the three-chō path from Kōroen Station to their house, she naturally found herself walking side by side with Shuichi. And while listening to Narao’s scuffling footsteps trailing behind her, she decided she would take him tomorrow to the psychiatrist who was an acquaintance of Keisuke’s.

Dr. Wakamori, despite being a psychiatrist, was both impatiently hasty in jumping to conclusions and fast-talking.
Upon hearing Hisae’s account, Wakamori immediately said, "Ah, th-that’s Oedipus complex tendencies! Loving his mother too much breeds hatred for his father," to which Hisae nodded with a cheerful smile despite not fully understanding.
Narao glowered sullenly as Wakamori—
“Kindly try writing down twenty words that have come to your mind on this paper, honestly.”

When he said that—in an instant—he tore up the paper.

"You have no right to examine my mind."
"For humans to experiment on humans is an insult!"

"Now, Narao, what are you saying?"

"You're just being Mother."
"Do you find it so amusing to watch your own child being experimented on like frogs?"
"To begin with, bringing me to a place like this is a mistake."

Seeing the intense whiteness of Narao's eyes glaring at Hisae, Wakamori suddenly felt his own words—all that talk about loving his mother too much—become unreliable.

Narao refused to visit Wakamori’s office after that no matter what anyone said, but Hisae seemed to have secretly gone there to receive various instructions—applying wooden pillows and ceramic pillows and recommending cold water rubs.
Moreover, unbeknownst to him, the cotton in the futon had turned into something hard.
There were signs that his diaries, notebooks, and textbooks had been secretly opened, and with his mother’s scrutinizing gaze eagerly closing in around him, Narao gradually grew to resent her.

The following year, Narao failed his promotion exam.
Hisae’s efforts were in vain after all.
In contrast, Shuichi passed the entrance exam for a Kyoto high school.
Keisuke attended Shuichi’s entrance ceremony in Kyoto and returned in high spirits, but when he saw Narao devouring the souvenir Shōgoin yatsuhashi, his face suddenly soured, and he once again lectured him about failing.
Narao, his mouth full at the time, remained silent for a while munching—but once he finally swallowed: *I’m already aware that I’m not smart without being told.* It’s precisely because I’m aware that I try as hard as I can.* But intelligence is innate and beyond my control.* When you think about it—how does genetics explain Brother being smart and me stupid despite sharing parents?* Could there be another reason I was born defective?* Now that you mention it—isn’t my leper-thin eyebrows strange?*

As Narao rattled off his words, Keisuke—"You idiot! Don’t get cocky! What’s this about genetics? Causes? Mysteries?"—suddenly grabbed Narao by the chest and dragged him into the garden. Snapping off a pine branch, he beat him relentlessly until blood dripped steadily from both Keisuke’s palm and Narao’s face. When Hisae tried to stop him, he shoved her aside, and Keisuke’s beating suddenly took on a deranged quality.

Narao stuffed paper into his nostrils and immediately considered running away from home, but Hisae stopped this; he went upstairs, opened the secretly hidden “fortune-telling guide,” confirmed that his Six White Venus Star and his father’s Nine Purple Mars Star were catastrophically incompatible, and found some grim satisfaction in this.

Incidentally, he realized that Mother’s Four Green Wood Star was also incompatible with the Six White Venus Star.

The lifelong fortune of the Six White Venus Star stated: “Those born in this year may appear calm on the surface, yet in truth are exceedingly short-tempered and prone to anger over trivial matters. Their tendency toward petty complaints often disrupts harmony in relationships.

Their bonds with parents and siblings are tenuous; many endure hardships among strangers from an early age.

Though they possess a conservative disposition that impedes efficiency in matters, they are innately endowed with endurance and perseverance; once resolved upon a course, they will carry it through to the end, achieving greatness late in life...”

Every single word came to mind; this passage provided Narao with slight comfort.
And by spending the entire night committing these phrases to memory, the bitter humiliation of being beaten by his father was momentarily dispelled.

From the next day onward—for reasons unclear even to himself—Narao became engrossed in reading a book titled *Shogi Strategies*.
According to the "fortune-telling guide," its author—an 8-dan master—had been born under the Six White Venus Star, reaching 3-dan only after middle age before achieving greatness late in life.
Narao read the book at school, read it on trains, read it at home; for strategies that resisted memorization, he crafted flashcards.
Three months passed before he finally internalized them all—just as summer vacation arrived and Shuichi returned home with grown-out hair. Narao promptly produced the shogi board only to suffer swift defeat without even delivering checkmate. Ah—he turned pale—still hopeless after all.

Shuichi went to the coast daily, still seemingly scouting for women, but Narao—declaring that women in swimsuits were obscene and he loathed even looking at them—shut himself in his room all day, making Hisae fret over whether he was truly becoming a misanthrope.
When she secretly peered in to see what he was doing confined there, it appeared he was engrossed in reading *The Brothers Karamazov* that Shuichi had brought home.
The book proved impenetrable for Narao, yet he convinced himself he understood Mitya and Ivan’s feelings toward their father. Peering into the mirror late at night, his expression seemed to take on an unsettling ferocity.
Perhaps it was because of his sparse eyebrows.
Then, attempting to make his face appear even more severe, he rolled his eyes and jutted out his lower lip—this time producing a truly bizarre expression.
Yet he found nothing particularly odd about it.
The sulky attitude imitating Ivan gradually manifested itself until one night Narao drank arsenic.

When Hisae awoke to a groan and went upstairs to check, Narao lay thrashing about with an ashen face, froth spewing from his mouth.
Shuichi had left home that evening and still hadn’t returned.
Hisae shoved her hand into Narao’s mouth to force him to vomit before rushing out toward a nearby doctor. But halfway there she changed her mind—consulting an outsider would invite scandal—and veered into a public phone booth to call Keisuke’s hospital in Ashiya.
Though Ashiya and Kōroen were practically neighbors, the call counted as long-distance and refused to connect no matter how she dialed.
Keisuke came driving his Datsun himself.
Thus Narao was saved.
As she clutched him close to induce vomiting, a pungent odor like body odor assaulted her—the long-forgotten scent of her own child.
After administering the injection, Hisae applied a bandage.
Keisuke abruptly looked at Hisae.
Hisae looked back.
Both were briefly haunted by memories of that incident at Okayama Hospital—years demanding remembrance.
While washing his hands, Keisuke studied Narao’s sleeping face with grave intensity.
The face—stripped of glasses, eyebrows sparse—resembled a death mask, yet he felt profound relief that life had been preserved.
But when Keisuke opened and finished reading the suicide note ostentatiously displayed on the desk, he roared “Idiot!” before he could stop himself.

The suicide note was written in a downward-sloping, clumsy hand—moreover in pencil and using katakana—which rendered its contents all the more lurid.

“Love is sacred.
Does God exist or not?
I am the owner of the tubercle bacillus, yet neither my current father nor mother has the tubercle bacillus.
Thus the theory that I am not the child of my current parents holds true.
Furthermore, my eyebrows and my skin have the possibility of becoming leprosy.
Therefore, the current parents do not have leprosy.
Tell me whose child I am.
I will die holding this question!!

I went to the Kitabatake Spiritualism Research Institute, paid ten yen, and had them perform a séance.
As a result, it was revealed that I am one half of a pair of twins.
The other half must now reside in the Karafuto coal mine.

The world of lies lay exposed.
"I will die clutching an eternal mystery like Ivan.
No one will weep even when I die.
'I tried to defile an innocent woman!!'"

Keisuke had lately found himself beset by dizzy spells and a dull roaring in his skull whenever agitated, necessitating utmost composure in confronting matters.
Thus resolving it foolish to grow heated over such deranged fantasies, he moved to light a cigarette—but his hand shook.
Hisae scrambled to strike a match.
In that instant, both flinched and turned away.
A deep furrow carved itself between Hisae's brows as visceral revulsion gripped her—this implicit challenge to her motherhood.
Yet inexplicably, Shuichi surfaced in her mind as steadfast anchor—though where might he be prowling now? Midnight approached, yet still he hadn't returned.

Two years passed.
Narao’s body swelled up bulkily, and he no longer looked like a man who had attempted suicide.
When he managed to pass the high school entrance exam and entered Takatsuki High Medical School, his physical examination results were of the highest grade.

When Keisuke returned home, he plopped down in the dimly lit downstairs room without letting anyone turn on the lights and remained motionless for hours, staring at the wall.
Even when Hisae called out to him, he did not respond, nor did he shift his gaze from the single spot he was fixated on.
Even Narao was left dumbfounded, standing rigidly behind Keisuke,

“What are you doing?”

He was shouted at from a backward-facing posture.
Hisae showed an unyielding stern face upon seeing Keisuke’s demeanor—as though she had steeled her resolve.

Keisuke rapidly descended into madness and died at Ashiya Hospital.

The one who rushed to his deathbed upon receiving the critical news was Shuichi alone—undoubtedly arranged by the legal wife.
Hisae and Narao, not permitted to witness Keisuke’s final moments, fidgeted restlessly in the Kōroen house, their anxious hearts seething with tense ferocity.
After several hours had passed, Narao suddenly,

“Come on, Mother, there’s no use in doing this. Why don’t we go see a movie?”

With that, he stood up.
Hisae was astonished, but in that instant she felt the mother-son bond connect, and thus made no move to scold.

Shuichi returned after attending the funeral and recounted the details of the deathbed scene.
Keisuke, in a strange moment of lucidity just before drawing his last breath, deliberately had Shuichi—alone among those gathered at his bedside—step forward and said, “You’re to look after Mother,” at which point the setting sun reflected in the window sank, it was said.

“So what did you answer?”
Hisae asked self-consciously, fidgeting,

“I said ‘Yes.’”

Shuichi answered coldly, and when he glanced at Hisae’s head,

“I received the will from Mrs. Ashiya.”
“Mother has properly received what she was entitled to, I see.”

Hisae was startled and felt caught off guard.
When Keisuke’s demeanor began turning strange, Hisae had taken steps to secure the inheritance share she was entitled to receive.
In the order of Hisae, Shuichi, and Narao—with Shuichi’s and Narao’s portions meant for educational expenses where naturally Shuichi’s was larger—yet Hisae’s amount far exceeded even Shuichi’s.
Her sister who had married into the Tanabe family had advised her: “Even if you say you’ll rely on the children, their family registry differs from yours. And even calling them your children—their mother might someday interfere, dismissing you as just a concubine.” Hisae had followed that counsel, but when she saw Shuichi’s cold eyes, a fragile relief that she’d acted rightly welled within her—and she suddenly recalled the letter from the woman who had recently come to see Shuichi.

“If reading this letter leaves you unmoved, then there is a defect somewhere in your spirit.”

It was a letter steeped in resentment.
What a terrible thing to do to someone else’s daughter—the cruelty she had seen in Shuichi back then was now being directed at her, Hisae thought.

Because maintaining the Kōroen house incurred heavy expenses, Hisae eventually had to find a modest rented house in Komiyacho, Osaka City and move there—but true to form, Shuichi fabricated the excuse of being busy studying for his Osaka University Medical School graduation exams and relocated alone to a boarding house in Shukugawa.
Hisae was somehow unable to stop that.
Narao had discerned that his elder brother had his reasons for being unable to leave the Kōroen neighborhood.
Shuichi had once told Narao that Itsuko Kitao, with whom he was currently involved, resided in a Hama-Koshien mansion with only her mother, had no dependents, and in exchange, her father’s inheritance exceeded 300,000 yen.

The household without Shuichi felt lonely to Hisae.
So when Shuichi showed his face in Komiyacho after about three months had passed, she welcomed him with eager haste—but before he could even drink tea, Shuichi abruptly—

“I’m going to be adopted into another family. Eventually, the other party will contact us—when that happens, I ask that you give a favorable response.”

he said.
The other party was, of course, the Kitao family.
Itsuko Kitao, being the eldest daughter, could not marry out; therefore, it had already been decided through discussions with Itsuko’s mother that Shuichi would enter as an adopted son-in-law.

“Even if I graduate, I can’t open a practice with the money Father gave me.”
“If I ultimately have no choice but to become a low-paid hospital assistant, then given our station in life, becoming an adopted son is the shortcut to success.”
“There’s Dr. Kiyama’s example, after all.”

Dr. Kiyama was a friend of Keisuke’s—a man who had been adopted twice before graduating university, once after graduating, and once more after earning his doctorate, changing households and wives four times total to advance his career.

“So you want to become like Dr. Kiyama?”

“I’ve been privately studying under Dr. Kiyama. I occasionally meet him to receive guidance on navigating life’s challenges.”

“Do you not care what becomes of Mother?”

“Well, if need be, I don’t mind having you come along to the Kitao household too, Mother.”

Thick eyebrows were now indispensable on his brother’s face—Narao thought fleetingly as he listened nearby—but he did not attempt to interject, and even when Hisae turned pleading eyes toward him, he maintained a blank expression and continued looking at the shogi column in the newspaper.

After about half a month had passed, a man around fifty arrived carrying what appeared to be a gift.
When she learned it was a messenger from the Kitao household in Hama-Koshien, Hisae turned pale.
Yet unexpectedly, this messenger had come to decline the marriage proposal, stating that from now on the Kitao family would sever relations with Mr. Shuichi and hoped there would be no ill will.
The messenger departed, overwhelmed by Hisae’s hospitality.

Shuichi vacated his Shukugawa boarding house and returned home, then took out his anger on Hisae, blaming the broken engagement on their status as children of a concubine.
He had conveniently chosen to ignore the fact that his usual conduct had been investigated by the Kitao household.
Seeing Shuichi’s demeanor that suggested he had completely lost confidence, Narao challenged him to a game of shogi, but still could not defeat him.

Narao attended the shogi instruction hall near his school in Takatsuki every day.
Every morning after getting off the Keihan train, he would turn his school-bound feet toward the instruction hall, exasperating Matsui Sandan who preferred sleeping in.
Narao engaged in drawn-out deliberations like a professional shogi player against Matsui Sandan.
When a disheartened Matsui asked what he was pondering, Narao didn’t so much as smile.

“I’m testing how long humans can endure concentrating on one thing.”

he replied.
Narao went to the instruction hall even on his promotion exam day and failed.

“Your money only has two years’ worth left, so if you get held back now, it’ll be a problem.”

When money entered Hisae’s nagging, Narao stiffened.
Shuichi remained silent with a face that said if he spoke up, his own money would decrease.
When Narao saw that face, he had already forgotten himself and was shouting.

“Then I’ll live in a boarding house. I’ll manage three years in a boarding house with two years’ worth of money. I won’t rely on your help or my brother’s.”

Once he said it, he did not back down. Using his stubborn disposition as a pretext, Hisae handed Narao the exact amount he demanded.

“However, Mother will set aside 1,000 yen for your marriage expenses.”

“Please give that money to my brother.”

The reduction of 1,000 yen only strengthened his resolve to become self-reliant.

“Then, Mother will give you ten yen each month from her own money.”

“I don’t need it.”
“If I can’t eat, I’ll work as a tutor.”

When he said that, Shuichi finally spoke up,
"A stupid fool like you could never manage to be a tutor,"
and sneered.

he sneered.
Narao even factored this mockery into his calculations.
He moved to a boarding house near the school.
While admonishing him to bring his laundry home weekly even while living apart, Hisae considered herself unfortunate.

After graduating, Shuichi became an assistant in the affiliated hospital’s obstetrics department.
The monthly pay fell short of one yen—initially making him suspect a daily wage error—yet he kept commuting with a sullen face.
Though costlier than his student uniform, the suit proved shoddy Western wear when worn.
While young women from good families appeared among patients, unmarried girls rarely visited gynecology.
He pocketed all earnings from occasional hospital side jobs, gave Hisae not a sen, while she shouldered all household expenses herself.
Thus Hisae privately grumbled to Tanabe’s sister about Shuichi’s undiminished funds, yet still felt lonely when he stayed away.
Using night shifts and business trips as pretexts, Shuichi vacated home half each month—likely dallying with nurses.
Hisae wrote urging Narao to visit during these absences.
Narao came—noting not the faint powder on Hisae’s face but her frizzled dry hair—then took her to Sennichimae for movies.
Seeing Narao’s gaunt profile—pallid and thin from stringent boarding house living—Hisae discreetly wiped tears; yet when his stay ended, he repaid her for meals consumed.
Hisae didn’t weep at this chilly formality—only pondered what fault merited such treatment, finding none.

Narao had resolved to smoke cut tobacco and not spend a single sen on wasteful expenses, but whenever he returned from Komiyacho he would always buy a bag of Dutch-style cheap candy at Tenma’s Keihan Market.
Ever since childhood he couldn’t study without having something in his mouth.
The cheap candies at Keihan Market were cheaper than buying elsewhere—he’d made it his regular spot—but another reason was his growing interest in a salesgirl there named Yukie.
She wore thick-rimmed glasses over her malnourished pale face and moved timidly about her work, yet whenever Narao visited she would blush down her neck and smile dimpled smiles.
One day when Narao arrived he found Yukie bright red after being jabbed between her shoulder blades by coworkers.
"Oh," he wondered—does she fancy me?—briefly recalling Shuichi’s face while,

“When’s your next day off?”

On that day off while riding a boat in Dōtonbori and asking about her circumstances, he learned Yukie’s father worked as a tinplate craftsman in Imamiya; at eighteen years old—told by her drunken father she should go work at Tobita Red-Light District out of filial piety—she had fled home through factory work and café jobs until landing at her current market position.
“However,” she answered honestly, “I send half my monthly salary back to my gambling-addict father.”
Her honesty about continuing remittances despite escaping home appealed to Narao—as did her refusal to dress gaudily like other clerks and her pitiable appearance in frayed rayon clothes. After inviting her repeatedly to his Takatsuki boarding house under casual pretenses, they eventually fell into an ordinary physical relationship.
The visceral rawness of their damp intimacy compelled Narao’s resolution—there remained no path forward except lifelong commitment to this woman.
Yet still—briefly—the specter of Kōroen’s maid flickered through his thoughts.

Shortly thereafter, using his graduation at the bottom of his class as a pretext, Narao moved to an apartment in Haginochaya and secretly began living with Yukie without his mother’s knowledge.
Through the school’s introduction, he began working at Momoyama Infectious Disease Hospital.
The money he had received from his mother had naturally been used up completely by graduation, so he was delighted with the fifty-yen monthly salary from the hospital and went to work diligently every day.
For one thing, I took a liking to it because working at a hospital for infectious diseases—something most people detest—was so typical of a “Decadent” like me.
However, it wasn’t as if the hospital was fond of Narao.
Because he didn’t have the money to have a suit made, when he commuted in his tattered student uniform, he was mistaken for an intern and received a sarcastic reprimand from the department head.
Even so, he kept wearing those clothes with a calm face, saying that clothes don’t cure illnesses anyway—perhaps they saw him as an obstinate man—and there were no further reprimands after that. However, unbeknownst to him, a discreet notice had somehow reached Hisae.

Hisae, surprised, came to the Haginochaya apartment.
The caretaker had been considerate enough to show her to the reception room, so their cohabitation remained undiscovered, and Narao let out a sigh of relief.
Hisae tried to hand him several bills, saying to use it for clothes, but Narao made no move to accept them.

“There should be no more money left for me to take.”

“No, I still have 1,000 yen of your money kept aside.”

“That was the money I gave to Elder Brother.”

“Then, Mother will give this to you.”

If that was acceptable, she forced it into his hand, and yet when his eyes met Hisae’s briefly, they seemed reluctantly pleased. However, as he was leaving, Hisae—
“You should stop being so stubborn forever and start thinking a little about social appearances.”
“If people were to say I’m a mother who can’t even put a suit on her own son, I don’t know how mortified I would feel.”
Because she had said that, Narao’s joy instantly vanished. Even so, to Yukie,

“Hey, I can get a suit made now!”
he resolved to make her happy.
But Yukie appeared somehow uneasy.

Sure enough, when he asked the caretaker, it turned out Hisae had thoroughly interrogated him about Narao and Yukie’s living situation. Narao turned bright red from shame and anger toward his mother, who had listened to their circumstances and then returned home pretending not to know. The next day, he moved to the Abeno Bridge apartment.

The relocation address had been kept secret, but whether she had heard of it through the hospital—on the fifth night after moving, Hisae came. Narao happened to be away on night duty at the hospital, but it seemed Hisae had deliberately chosen a time when he would be absent; as evidence of this, she grabbed Yukie and pleaded repeatedly with her to break up with Narao. Hisae was being Hisae, but Yukie was Yukie too; when she saw Hisae’s tears, she also began crying and promised to step aside for Mr. Narao’s happiness.

“You idiot! How dare you make such a promise behind my back?” Narao bellowed, showing her the Six White Venus Star section in the fortune-telling guide. “Once I make up my mind, I’m the kind of man who follows through to the end. As if I’d ever leave you! You better brace yourself too.”

The next day, he moved to the Kishinosato apartment. He kept his new address secret even from the hospital and wrote in his note: “I HAVE MY REASONS FOR LIVING AS I PLEASE. DO NOT INTERFERE. IF YOU TRY TO INVESTIGATE MY WHEREABOUTS, I WON’T HAVE IT.” He wrote and sent this postscript to his mother and elder brother, dated “2:00 a.m., September 10, Shōwa 12 (1937).”

However, on the third day after that, Aunt from Tanabe came to the hospital.

“The woman you’re living with is some tinplate craftsman’s daughter from Imamiya who used to work at a café—you’re a disgrace to the entire family.”
“And if she were even a looker, that’d be one thing, but…”

Having said that, what the aunt showed him—urging him to compare her with “the girl in this photo”—was a photo of an unknown girl intended for marriage meetings.
Narao raised his voice so loudly that people began gathering in the hallway and drove his aunt away.
And on the third day, he quit the hospital.
Of course, it was out of fear that his aunt would visit again, but to Yukie, he—

“Even if it is a contagious disease hospital, with such a high mortality rate, I couldn’t bear to keep working there out of shame.”

He said this, though it was only half true.

Upon quitting the hospital, he immediately found himself in financial straits, so through the school’s referral, he was hired as a substitute doctor for a town physician in Toyonaka.
The hours were from six to nine at night—three hours of work for sixty yen a month—so the terms weren’t bad, but in return he was made responsible for four departments: internal medicine, pediatrics, dermatology, and obstetrics/gynecology. For Narao, who lacked experience, it was almost miraculous that there were no misdiagnoses.
Those who had referred him were irresponsible, but he thought those who hired him were downright reckless.
However, more than anything, he had grown disgusted with himself for facing patients with such an indifferent expression.
The director obsessively prioritized lucrative injections, ordering even Narao to administer them—a man who seemed to believe illnesses could be cured by injections alone—which astonished him. Yet this disgust quickly turned inward: before making any self-righteous criticisms, he resolved to focus on research instead. Taking advantage of his free daytime hours from working nights, he began commuting daily to Kō Medical University’s bacteriology research laboratory.

Even there, research students wore expressions of assumed erudition. Narao declared, "Since I know nothing, I'll stick to what I do know," and spent his days doing nothing but washing test tubes. Cleaning glassware was universally detested work, normally left to janitors. That he used research funds for this daily drudgery made him an oddity—appreciated for his utility yet scorned for his peculiarity. Yet when returning home, Narao explained to Yukie that while scrubbing tubes clean with abrasive sand and soap might seem simple, preparing them for culture tests demanded both endurance and technique.

One summer day, on his way back from hunting for old medical books at Futatsui Well, as he walked through Dōtonbori, he spotted Shuichi paying at a café counter.
The eyes that had glanced his way wore a frail smile, and for a moment, nostalgia surged within him; however, he immediately realized that smile was directed at the young woman waiting for Shuichi to emerge from the café.
The woman was stout with squared shoulders and no beauty, but her attire resembled that of a respectable family’s daughter.
With a bitter smile at how Shuichi remained unchanged, he passed by without a word; yet even so, Shuichi had noticed Narao, and upon returning home,

“I saw Narao today. In this heat, he was wearing a heavy suit and tattered shoes, looking as shabby as an unemployed person.”

he told Hisae.
The mention of the heavy suit first pierced Hisae’s heart with a sharp sting, and she reproached Shuichi for his coldness—why hadn’t he at least asked the boy’s whereabouts during their brief encounter?

Hisae hired a private detective to tail Yukie, who worked at Keihan Market, and located Narao’s apartment.
She set out immediately, but the two were out. When she inquired with the building manager and neighbors, she learned that while their combined monthly income—including Yukie’s portion—amounted to ninety-five yen, twenty yen of that was sent to Yukie’s parents. The rest went toward research funds and the exorbitant cost of medical books he haphazardly purchased. After deducting rent and transportation fees, almost nothing remained—their life proved far more wretched than she had imagined.
They often skipped lunch.
When Hisae returned home, she arranged a money order and sent 100 yen for summer clothing expenses, but the money was immediately returned.

“Following people around, sneaking into neighboring rooms to badmouth me endlessly, spying on my life—you must absolutely stop these things from now on.”
“This spirit of mine will not be corrupted by money!”

A letter with these words had been attached. Hisae took that letter and rushed to Tanabe, where she wept before her younger sister. And when they went to the apartment together, Narao had already moved out.

Hisae visited relatives and acquaintances carrying Narao’s letter, showing it to them and weeping. Shuichi roared at her to stop such shameful behavior, and without a hint of embarrassment said that if she had time for that, she should find him a wife instead—he couldn’t get ahead in the world without one. Hisae enlisted Keisuke’s friends and finally found a marriage prospect for Shuichi, but at the matchmaking meeting, Shuichi was rejected. Shuichi cursed at Hisae, declaring that a concubine’s child was indeed worthless, and using that night’s absence as a pretext, he almost never returned home thereafter. On the rare occasions he did come back, he refused to speak. Hisae aged rapidly.

One night, as Narao was returning from Toyonaka and about to exit the Hankyu Umeda ticket gate, he spotted Hisae standing dejectedly with reading glasses. Realizing he was being ambushed, Narao suddenly broke into a run and dove into a nearby café. Burying his face in a coffee bowl as he drank, he repeated to himself: *I don’t hate Mother.* Though he’d only glimpsed her, his mother’s hair had gone stark white. She’d stopped wearing face powder altogether. Hisae watched Narao’s retreating figure—the worn-down heels of his shoes imprinting themselves on her vision—and considered sending him the thousand yen she’d been safeguarding. But no, she resolved to keep that money until he made a proper marriage; otherwise she’d never face the legal wife in Ashiya again. Boarding a near-empty late-night tram, she returned despondently to Komyachō. The following evening brought a special delivery letter from Narao: “Since I’m a man society shuns, I’ve resolved to work at a leprosy sanatorium society shuns. Cutting all ties is my path to survival. I’ll take my wife with me. No one can meddle with me anymore!”

Hisae kept urging Shuichi.
Shuichi, perhaps genuinely worried that if Narao went to a leprosy sanatorium his own social standing would suffer, spent the whole day frantically searching until he finally located Narao’s apartment and made a phone call.

“Hey, stop being stubborn. Break up with that woman and come back to Komyacho.”

Upon hearing Narao’s voice, he immediately said,

“Don’t make useless calls. It’s not like you.”

Perhaps because of the phone, his voice was shriller than usual.

“Let’s meet once.”

“There’s no need.”
“A waste of time.”

“Well then, let’s play a game of shogi once.”
“I have two favors you owe me!”

When he pricked his brother’s self-respect with this jab, it worked.

“If it’s shogi, I’ll play.”
“But I’ll say this upfront—not a single word about anything besides shogi.”
“Don’t you speak either.”
“If you swear to that, I’ll do it.”

On the appointed day, as Shuichi waited before Osaka Theater in Sennichimae, Narao arrived sluggishly wearing a yukata as dingy as a soiled rag.
His swarthy, haggard face bore a thickly grown beard, yet his eyebrows remained as sparse as ever.
Even Shuichi felt a pang of pity and suggested getting food, but—

“Do not speak of anything besides shogi.”

He shouted and briskly entered the basement shogi club of Osaka Theater.

And when he sat down at the shogi board,

“I’ve been studying shogi strategies every night without sleep since that phone call—my determination’s on a whole different plane from yours.”

he said, and suddenly—"Look at this"—took off his geta onto the concrete.
Looking closer, the geta had been carved into shogi piece shapes, each surface engraved with one of the characters for "Bishop" and "Dragon" respectively.
Shuichi gasped and stared at Narao’s face for a while, but eventually resigned himself to the futility of saying anything more to this man and began arranging the pieces with a "Come on then."

(Shōwa 21 [March 1946])